Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on May 22, 2003, 12:31:06 PM
-
Woof All:
The following from the always thoughtful www.Stratfor.com
Woof,
Crafty Dog
--------------------------
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
21 May 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
Al Qaeda Acts
Summary
As Stratfor predicted, al Qaeda has launched an offensive in the
wake of the Iraq war. Thus far, it has fallen far short of the
most extreme possibilities -- a strike in the United States that
is equivalent to or greater than the Sept. 11 attacks. Recent
actions have reaffirmed that al Qaeda continues to operate, but
have not yet established that the network retains its reach and
striking power. We suspect that its striking power has been
limited, but its reach still might be substantial. Further
operations are likely: We see Latin America in particular and, to
a lesser extent, Southeast Asia as ripe for attack.
Analysis
In our quarterly forecast, we wrote:
We regard the second quarter of 2003 as one of the highest-risk
periods for al Qaeda action against the United States. It is
unclear whether the group has the ability to act -- but if it
does, the pressure to strike at the United States is enormous.
The psychology of the Islamic world is such that unless al Qaeda
can act, it will be seen as having dragged the Islamic world into
a disaster. The organization must show that it has not been
defeated and that the United States is not invincible. It is
impossible to know what al Qaeda's capabilities are at this
point, but if it retains the ability to act, by sheer logic, this
is the quarter in which it should.
Obviously, we have seen at least the beginning of that
counteroffensive. The May 12 al Qaeda strikes in Riyadh were
followed by an attack in Casablanca on May 16. It is speculative
-- but not unreasonable -- to assume that two attacks in Chechnya
around the same time also were in some way coordinated with the
strikes in Saudi Arabia. Certainly, the coincidence of the timing
raises serious questions.
The following, therefore, have been established:
1. Al Qaeda remains operational.
2. The capabilities demonstrated thus far do not indicate that al
Qaeda retains the capabilities it showed on Sept. 11, 2001.
This means that al Qaeda has passed its first hurdle. There was
serious question in the Islamic world about whether the network
remained operational. Over time -- and not very much time -- a
quiescent al Qaeda would begin losing support personnel and
operatives who were detached from the main organization. Extended
silence and inaction would raise the possibility that the group
had been destroyed. This would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Logic would argue that al Qaeda would lead with its strongest
attack to prove its continued viability. The United States
lowered its security level after the Iraq war; after the initial
al Qaeda action, it would be expected that the United States and
other countries would raise their alert status while increasing
effective security as well. Therefore, the most ambitious attack
in a series ought to come first. Al Qaeda has shown a deep and
reasonable aversion to attacking hardened targets that are under
intensified security. Therefore, while nothing is ever certain
when it comes to reading al Qaeda, it would seem reasonable to
assume that its main attack would come first and that secondary
operations would take place only if the primary strike failed. Al
Qaeda clearly likes to maintain a slow tempo of operations, using
scarce resources sparingly.
If our reasoning has any validity -- and again, al Qaeda's
ability to surprise is not minor -- then it would mean that the
coordinated strikes in Riyadh were the main thrust of this cycle.
Taken together, this was not a trivial attack. There are those
who argue that anyone with some explosives would be able to carry
out the strike. That might be the case, but al Qaeda's
sophistication does not have to do with the munitions used, but
rather with its ability to evade security forces. For at least
nine people to mount an operation without being detected
sufficiently to prevent the attack represents a substantial
degree of sophistication. To be able to plan a campaign that
encompasses Saudi Arabia and Morocco -- as well as possibly
Chechnya -- represents an achievement in security practices. This
is where al Qaeda's sophistication lies. It is sometimes the
simplest sophistication -- allowing local groups to operate
independently.
It would appear from the outside that the United States has
improved its intelligence ability against al Qaeda to some
extent. If the U.S. claim is true, then Washington warned
officials in Riyadh about the possibility of al Qaeda attacks. If
the Saudis are telling the truth, then the U.S. report focused on
a particular compound where an attack was thwarted, rather than
on the other facilities that were bombed. However this plays out,
no one is denying that the United States had intelligence that an
attack in Saudi Arabia was in the offing; that alone represents a
substantial improvement in U.S. capabilities.
It is not, however, a perfect picture by any means. Washington
also said that it had intelligence of potential operations being
planned for Kenya and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Officials did not say
anything about Casablanca. Thus far, no post-Riyadh attacks have
come in the places where attacks were expected. An attack did
occur in a place where no forecast was made. Thus, it would seem
reasonable to say that the United States has increased its
insight into al Qaeda's operations. Increased insight does not
mean that Washington has achieved anything approaching
comprehensive intelligence: It knows more than it once did, but
not enough to consistently forecast -- let alone prevent -- al
Qaeda attacks.
On the other side of the equation, al Qaeda used 19 men to strike
the United States on Sept. 11. They used nine men to carry out an
operation in Riyadh that had a tiny fraction of the impact of the
Sept. 11 operation. Given al Qaeda's goals, we must assume that
it would wish to expend scarce resources in the most effective
manner possible. If this was the most effective operation
available, it represents a substantial decline in the group's
capabilities.
This is not to say that the May 12 strike was trivial. It had two
important effects, apart from demonstrating the network's ability
to act.
The first was to create a crisis of confidence in the expatriate
community in Saudi Arabia. This community is critical for the
operation of the Saudi economy, and the attacks raised serious
questions among the expats about their safety and that of their
families. A serious exodus of expatriates would be a crippling
blow. The strike has not achieved that yet, but if there are
follow-on attacks, that very well might occur.
Second, the attack drove a wedge between Washington and Riyadh --
a wedge we believe that al Qaeda's leadership fully understood.
The United States has been making two demands of the Saudi
government: First, that it step up internal operations against al
Qaeda and its supporters, and second, that U.S. intelligence and
security services be permitted to operate inside the kingdom.
Saudi leaders have claimed to be doing the best they could in the
first case, while claiming that formal Saudi sovereignty had to
be respected even though informal operational arrangement could
be made. For their part, officials in Washington did not believe
that the Saudis were doing all that they could, and felt that
their personnel were not being given sufficient access.
This was the case prior to the Iraq war. One of the purposes of
the war was to put Saudi Arabia in a position in which it felt
vulnerable to the United States. The Saudis walked a fine line,
permitting U.S. forces to use some of their facilities during the
war while almost immediately announcing -- with U.S. compliance -
- the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the kingdom. Washington's
expectation was that this would set the stage for more effective
and collaborative action against al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. The
expectation on the part of Saudi leaders -- more a hope, really -
- was that the withdrawal would buy them sufficient slack that
they could comply with U.S. demands to some degree.
The al Qaeda attacks in Riyadh struck at the very heart of this
complex arrangement. U.S. officials immediately claimed that the
Saudis had ignored their warnings -- raising the old charge that
the Saudis were unprepared to act against al Qaeda -- while Saudi
leaders denied any lack of initiative on their part. The United
States flew a team of FBI and CIA agents into the country very
publicly, demanding access to the investigation. The Saudis,
caught in a public challenge to their sovereignty, trapped
between the danger of increased al Qaeda operations and U.S.
pressure, could not find a firm standpoint from which to operate.
Both U.S.-Saudi relations and the image of the Saudi government
domestically and abroad were weakened.
Al Qaeda, which now clearly sees the Saudi regime as an American
collaborator, therefore achieved a political victory in creating
this crisis. This, in addition to simply showing it could act,
was an achievement. It was not, however, a definitive
achievement, nor was the network's apparent action in Casablanca.
This is al Qaeda's problem: As a result of Sept. 11, the Afghan
and Iraqi regimes have been toppled, U.S. military forces are
deployed in both countries as well as in other Islamic states and
U.S. intelligence has deeply penetrated the region. Al Qaeda has
not triggered a rising in the "Arab street," has not toppled any
governments and established Islamic regimes in their place and
has not managed to sustain an intense tempo of operations against
the United States. In other words, al Qaeda has not done
particularly well.
If, therefore, the operation in Riyadh is the strongest move that
al Qaeda has at this point, it would indicate to us that while
the United States might not be winning the war, al Qaeda might be
losing it. In other words, the direct effectiveness of the United
States against al Qaeda might be limited, but the internal
dynamic of al Qaeda might be undermining the group's ability to
act. We therefore doubt that the actions taken so far can halt
the unraveling of al Qaeda, even if they might slow the group. If
this attack is followed by another six months of relative
quiescence, the same doubts that surfaced in the past few months
will resurface with an intensified ferocity.
Obviously, al Qaeda leaders know this. Equally obviously, they
want to do something about it. The issue is whether they have the
resources to do so. Al Qaeda might be planning at this moment to
replicate the Sept. 11 strikes, in terms of magnitude, yet we
find that unlikely. We simply think that it would not have waited
until European and American security organizations were at their
highest level of alert, and have risked the capture of key
operatives in other countries that might have compromised a U.S.
or European operation, to strike. It's possible -- but it doesn't
make a whole lot of sense.
At the same time, it does not appear to us that al Qaeda can
avoid carrying out further attacks. This leads us to the
conclusion that the most likely scenario is one of other attacks,
probably against U.S. targets, in less expected countries. We are
particularly interested in the possibility of an attack in Latin
America -- which would be relatively unexpected, and where there
are substantial U.S. targets. Asian targets are also possible,
although the psychological affect of an attack in Latin America
would be more substantial. Al Qaeda and its sympathizers are well
placed in Latin America to carry out a strike: The tri-border
region of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina is rife with Hezbollah
members and associates, who are known to swap arms for drugs with
the FARC in Colombia. There also is a precedent for Islamic
violence in Latin America as well.
As with all things al Qaeda, this is speculation. However, if one
accepts the premise that al Qaeda does not like to attack hard
targets in the midst of security alerts -- and that it must
continue to act for the sake of its credibility -- we think
attacks on the flanks are most likely. Remembering that al Qaeda
does not have infinite personnel, these must be fairly
substantial operations.
...................................................................
STRATFOR SERVICES NOW AVAILABLE:
Join decision-makers around the world who read Stratfor for daily
intelligence briefs, in-depth analyses and forecasts on a wide
range of international security, political and economic affairs.
Stratfor Premium is our flagship product providing comprehensive
global intelligence including daily analyses, special reports,
intelligence alerts, premium analyses, situation reports, country
and regional net assessments as well as Stratfor's sought after
Annual and Quarterly Forecasts. Corporate or multi-user volume
discount packages available. Visit this web page for details:
http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=SUB&c=c
Stratfor Basic offers daily analysis, situation reports and ongoing
coverage of global events. Also available with this package is a
pay per view service for many of our premium reports. Visit this web
page for details: http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=SUB&c=d
EnergyCast is dedicated to delivering analysis, forecasts and briefings
on security-related issues affecting oil markets and the energy industry.
EnergyCast includes a blend of strategic forecasts and analysis, tactical
alerts, and email alerts for key triggers affecting this industry.
Visit theis web page for details:
http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=INT&c=d
Stratfor's Global Intelligence Report is authoritative analysis of the
world's latest political and economic developments that is emailed
directly to members Monday through Friday. Visit this web page for
details: http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=SUB&c=a
...................................................................
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Product inquiries, partnership, and sales: marketing@stratfor.com
Subscription and customer service issues: service@stratfor.com
Comments and/or information for analysis: analysis@stratfor.com
Media services and trade show requests: PR@stratfor.com
...................................................................
HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE:
If you wish to remove yourself from this mailing list,
send an email to <Majordomo@mail2.stratfor.com> with
the following command in the body of your email message:
unsubscribe weeklylist
...................................................................
http://www.stratfor.com
====================================================================
(c) 2003 Strategic Forecasting LLC. All rights reserved.
-
woof!
thanx Crafty for this informative update - i appreciate this analysis; its truth raises the bar above the mediocracy of our mass media.
peace.
-
FORBES
Current Events
Five Vital Lessons From Iraq
Paul Johnson, 03.17.03
The Iraq crisis has already pointed up a number of valuable lessons. So far
I have identified five:
? Lesson I. We have been reminded that France is not to be trusted at any
time, on any issue. The British have learned this over 1,000 years of
acrimonious history, but it still comes as a shock to see how badly the
French can behave, with their unique mixture of shortsighted selfishness,
long-term irresponsibility, impudent humbug and sheer malice. Americans are
still finding out--the hard way--that loyalty, gratitude, comradeship and
respect for treaty obligations are qualities never exhibited by French
governments. All they recognize are interests, real or imaginary. French
support always has to be bought. What the Americans and British now have to
decide is whether formal alliances that include France as a major partner
are worth anything at all, or if they are an actual encumbrance in times of
danger.
We also have to decide whether France should be allowed to remain as a
permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, with veto power, or whether
it should be replaced by a more suitable power, such as India. Linked to
this is the question of whether France can be trusted as a nuclear power.
The French have certainly sold nuclear technology to rogue states in the
past, Iraq among them. In view of France's attempts to sabotage America's
vigorous campaign to halt the spread of weapons of mass destruction, we need
to be sure that France is not planning to cover the cost of its flagging
nuclear weapons program by selling secrets to unruly states. Certainly
Anglo-American surveillance of French activities in this murky area must be
intensified.
? Lesson II. Germany is a different case. The Germans are capable of loyalty
and even gratitude. For many years Germany was one of the most dependable
members of NATO. But the country is now very depressed, both psychologically
and economically, with unemployment moving rapidly toward the 5 million mark
and no prospect of an early recovery. With a weak, unpopular and demoralized
government, Germany has been lured by France into a posture of hostility
toward the Anglosphere, a posture that corresponds neither to the instincts
nor the interests of the German people. Germany is a brand to be snatched
from the burning; we must make a positive and urgent effort to win it back
to the fold.
? Lesson III. The assumption, in many minds, seems to be that whereas
individual powers act on the world stage according to the brutal rules of
realpolitik, the U.N. represents legitimacy and projects an aura of
idealism. In fact, more than half a century of experience shows that the
U.N. is a theater of hypocrisy, a sink of corruption, a street market of
sordid bargains and a seminary of cynicism. It is a place where
mass-murdering heads of state can stand tall and sell their votes to the
highest bidder and where crimes against humanity are rewarded. For many
people the true nature of the U.N. was epitomized by the news that Libya, a
blood-soaked military dictatorship of the crudest kind, is to chair the U.N.
Commissionon Human Rights. It's people like Muammar Qaddafi who benefit from
the U.N., who are legitimized by its spurious respectability.
Looking back on the last year, it is clear the U.S. should not have accepted
Britain's argument that, on balance, the U.N. route was the safest road to a
regime change in Iraq. In fact, going this way has done a lot of damage to
U.S. (and British) interests and has given Russia, China and other powers
the opportunity to drive hard bargains. President Bush should soon make it
clear that, where his country's vital interests are concerned, the U.S.
reserves the right to act independently, together with such friends as share
those interests.
? Lesson IV. The split within NATO underscores the fact that in its present
form and composition NATO is out of date. There is no longer a frontier to
defend or to act as a trip wire; there is no longer a reason for the U.S. to
keep large forces in fixed bases on the European continent--at great cost to
the U.S.' balance of payments. These forces should be repatriated with all
deliberate speed. There is obviously a need to have bases, which can be
activated in an emergency, in states the U.S. feels can be trusted to honor
their obligations.
Britain, which is not so much an ally of America as it is a member of the
same family, will continue to serve as the geographical center of the
Anglosphere and as America's offshore island to the Eurasian landmass. Other
than that, the U.S. should put its trust in the seas and oceans, which offer
a home and a friendly environment to its forces and do not change with the
treacherous winds of opinion. The military lessons to be learned from the
lead-up to the Iraq operation are profound, and all point in the same
direction: America should always have the means to act alone, in any area of
the globe where danger threatens and with whatever force is necessary.
? Lesson V. This last lesson flows from the fourth. The U.S. must not merely
possess the means to act alone if necessary; it must alsocultivate the will.
Fate, or Divine Providence, has placed America at this time in the position
of sole superpower, with the consequent duty to uphold global order and to
punish, or prevent, the great crimes of the world. That is what America did
in Afghanistan, is in the process of doing in Iraq and will have to do
elsewhere.
It must continue to engage the task imposed upon it, not in any spirit of
hubris but in the full and certain knowledge that it is serving the best and
widest interests of humanity.
Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author, Lee Kuan Yew, senior
minister of Singapore, and Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico, in
addition to Forbes Chairman Caspar W. Weinberger, are now periodically
writing this column.
Back to top
LG Dog Russ
Guest
Posted: Fri May 30, 2003 2:44 pm Post subject: Response from Germany
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hilarious...., I later informed him that Paul Johnson is British!
"Hi Rus,
seldom a read more bull shit in a row!
Take care in this contry were some guys think, this is the place where all the
wisdom is held.
Frank"
Woof,
Dog Russ
-
FORBES
Paul Johnson
Current Events
P , 06.09.03, 12:00 AM ET
The U.S., Not the UN, Speaks for Humanity
I would not care to be an American President. The weight of responsibility is too heavy. The power is awesome. If the 20th was the American century, the 21st will be, too--only more so. Of course I'm working from projections that can be negated by events. But as of now they all indicate this. In the last quarter of the 20th century the U.S. added $5 trillion in real terms to its GDP. By the mid-21st century its wealth-creating capacity will be two to three times that of Europe and more than 25% of the non-U.S. global total. The U.S. takes in more educated immigrants than the rest of the world combined; figure in these people along with the U.S.' natural increase, and its population should exceed 400 million by 2050. By then the populations of Europe and Japan will be falling, as more than likely will be those of India and China.
The uniquely free climate that enterprise and inventiveness enjoy in America ensures that the U.S.' lead in most aspects of technology will widen. This will reinforce America's military and economic paramountcy. What will the U.S. do with all this power? America has a long tradition of geopolitical laissez-faire. When George Washington spoke of "the rising American empire," he surely meant what a later generation would call manifest destiny. When Thomas Jefferson called the U.S. an "empire of liberty," he was merely updating John Winthrop's image of the "city upon a hill."
U.S. foreign policy has been interventionist within its hemisphere but
generally inactive outside it. Indeed, the U.S. has reacted to world events
rather than caused them. President Woodrow Wilson entered WWI only when Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare became intolerable. It took Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Nazis' declaration of war to bring the U.S. into WWII. The Cold War was Joseph Stalin's doing, with Harry Truman's America a reluctant participant. And for eight years President Bill Clinton responded to terrorism in traditional U.S. fashion--by ignoring it and hoping it would go away. It was the colossal outrage of 9/11 that impelled George W. Bush to go to war.
But there are now signs of a historic change. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the comparative ease with which they could, in theory, be deployed against the U.S., as well as the hatred that America's wealth, power and paramountcy inspire have left the U.S. no alternative but to construct an active global strategy in its own defense. This has already led to a punitive war in Afghan-istan and a preventive war in Iraq. I have little doubt that a further one, against North Korea, is inevitable, probably next year.
When will it all end? Never. Or, rather, not until America's strength ebbs
and the duties it feels compelled to undertake pass to other hands. And that looks to be a long time from now. The truth is, once states evolve to the point of being committed to the rule of law and then develop democratic liberties that include free speech and, thus, a righteous public opinion, a Manichean world swiftly follows, in which vice and virtue struggle for supremacy.
The Greeks, the first constitutionalists, divided the world into two: the
oikoumene, where Greek civilization reigned; and chaos, the world of
pandemonium, beyond. The Romans thought in terms of Civitas
Romanorum--universal Roman law--and barbarism. The first global sea power, Britain, eventually tried to suppress slave trading and piracy everywhere, and in the 1850s and 1860s, under Prime Minister Palmerston's leadership, encouraged constitutional government all over the world. But Britain was a small offshore island in Europe, with limited resources, and never tried to push its global aims too far.
More Masterful Arbiter of Vice and Virtue
From its inception the U.S. has been a millenarian society, dedicated to
showing the rest of the world how to live. Its Presidents have always tended to use quasireligious rhetoric and to speak to a world congregation, as well as to its own. The U.S. feels it has almost limitless, God-given resources to carry out a noble mission on behalf of all mankind and in accordance with providential directives. President Ronald Reagan spoke of "the Evil Empire," and demolished it. President Bush has referred to "the Axis of Evil" and is dismantling it. This process may soon develop a momentum all its own.
Two things give America's actions legitimacy:
? The failure of the UN to be an effective peacekeeper, even in minor
conflicts. These conflicts will become far more serious if weapons of mass
destruction fall into the hands of aggressive dictators. If the UN cannot
impose order in an increasingly dangerous world, then America's duty is
plain.
? The U.S. is the nearest thing to a microcosm of world society, with every people represented in its vast democracy. This is why I regard
anti-Americanism as racism; it, in effect, amounts to a hatred of humanity itself. No nation has more right to speak, and act, on behalf of the human race than the U.S. Its armed forces are, by their very nature, multiracial. They are as diverse in origin as a UN force but have none of the baggage of natural antagonisms that makes the UN so feeble and corrupt. And the American military has the huge advantage of working under a single directive.
What is not yet clear, however, is whether the American people are ready to take on this global task, which will certainly be arduous and more than likely unpopular. The debate must begin so that America's national will can emerge.
Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author, Lee Kuan Yew, senior
minister of Singapore, and Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico, in
addition to Forbes Chairman Caspar W. Weinberger, are now periodically
writing this column.
-
A rant from VD Hanson:
---------------------------------
May 23, 2003 8:45 a.m.
Middle East Tragedies
Pressing ahead is our only choice.
The images are jarring, the hypocrisies appalling, the rhetoric repulsive.
Only in the Arab Middle East - and the Islamic world in general - are
suicide-murderers operating and indeed canonized, even blessed with cash bonuses. An inveterate liar like Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf is lauded for his defense of a mass killer like Saddam Hussein - and at last lampooned not on moral grounds, but because his yarns about thousands of dead Marines are finally exposed by the sound of American tanks rumbling his way. The last gassings in the modern world - Nasser's in Yemen and Saddam's in Kurdistan and Iran - were all Mideastern; so are promises of virgins in exchange for bombing women and children.
Pick up any newspaper and the day's bombings, killings, and terror are most likely to have occurred somewhere in the Islamic world. The big, silly lie - Jews caused 9/11, the U.S. used atomic weapons against Iraq, Americans bombed mosques - has been a staple of Middle East popular culture. The hatred of Jews is open, unapologetic, and mostly unrivaled on the world stage since the Third Reich.
I think the American street - and as we have learned in the case of anger
toward the French, there surely is such a thing - has finally thrown up its
hands with Arab ingratitude. Egyptian, Jordanian, and Palestinian recipients of billions of dollars in American aid routinely reply by trashing the United States, whether in the street, through government publications, or via public declarations in Arab and European capitals.
In embarrassed response, we are tossed the old bone by their corrupt leaders - "Ignore what we say publicly and look instead privately at what we do." Arab apologists claim that triangulating with and backing off from the only democracy in the region would win back their good graces; but we know that such perfidy toward Israel would only win us contempt, as we were shown to be not merely opportunistic, but weak and scared into the bargain as well.
Shiites, once murdered en masse by Saddam Hussein, now turn on the American and British liberators who alone in the world could do what they could not. Iraqis, freed by us from their own home-grown murderers, in thanks now blame us for not stopping them from robbing themselves. Our citizens are routinely blown to pieces in Saudi Arabia or shot down in Jordan, even as we are told that Americans - after losing 3,000 of their citizens to Islamist killers - are not being nice to Arab students and visitors because we require security checks on them and occasionally tail those with suspicious backgrounds. Egyptians march and shout threats to America and the West - and then whine that thousands in Cairo and Luxor are out of work because most over here take them seriously, and choose to pass on having such unhinged people escort them around the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings. Have all these people gone mad?
The world is watching all this, and it is not pretty. After talking to a
variety of foreigners who do not necessarily share the American point of
view, I conclude that South Americans, Europeans, Asians, and Africans don't much like what they see in the Middle East - and blame those over there, not us, for the old mess.
The general causes of these Middle Eastern pathologies have been well
diagnosed since September 11, ad nauseam. The Arab world has no real
consensual governments; statism and tribalism hamper market economics and ensure stagnation. Sexual apartheid, Islamic fundamentalism, the absence of an independent judiciary, and a censored press all do their part to ensure endemic poverty, rampant corruption, and rising resentment among an exploding population. Siesta for millions is a time not for napping between office hours, but for weaving conspiracies over backgammon.
Class, family, money, and connections - rarely merit - bring social
advancement and prized jobs. The trickle-down of oil money masks the generic failure for a while, but ultimately undermines diversification and sound development in the economy - as well as accentuating a crass inequality. Autocracies forge a devil's bargain with radical Islamists and their epigones of terrorist killers, from al Qaeda to Hezbollah, to deflect their efforts away from Arab regimes and onto Americans and Israelis. All the talk of a once-glorious Baghdad, an Arab Renaissance in the 13th century, or a few Aristotelian texts kept alive in Arabic still cannot hide the present dismal reality - and indeed is being forgotten because of it.
Millions in the Arab street now enjoy merely the patina of Western culture - everything from cell phones, the Internet, and videos - but without either the freedom or material security that create the conditions that produce these and thousands of other such appurtenances. The result is that appetites and frustrations alike arise faster than they can be satisfied with available wealth - or constrained by the strictures of traditional and ever-more-fanatical Islam. Americans now accept all this - and snicker at the old Marxist and neocolonialist exegeses that the British, the Americans, the French - or little green men on Mars - are responsible for the Middle East mess.
Illegitimate governments - whether Arab theocracies, monarchies,
dictatorships, or corrupt oligarchies - rely on state police and their
labyrinth of torture and random execution to stifle dissent. Filtered
popular frustration is directed toward Israel and the United States - as the martyrs of the West Bank are the salve for anger over everything from dirty water to expensive food. Millions of Muslims collectively murdered by Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, the Taliban, the Assads, Qaddafi, and an array of autocrats from Algeria to the Gulf seem to count as nothing. Persecuted and often stateless Muslims without a home in Kurdistan or Bosnia gain little sympathy - unless the Jews can be blamed. It is not who is killed, nor how many - but by whom: One protester in the West Bank mistakenly shot by the IDF earns more wrath in the Arab calculus than 10,000 butchered by Saddam Hussein or the elder Assad.
Before 9/11, the West in a variety of ways had been complicit in all this
tragedy, and either ignored the alarming symptoms - or, worse still, aided and abetted the disease. Oil companies and defense contractors winked at bribery and knew well enough that the weapons and toys they sold to despots only impoverished these sick nations and brought the dies irae ever closer. "If we don't, the French surely will" was the mantra when bribery, Israeli boycotts, and questionable weapons sales were requisite for megaprofits.
Paleolithic diplomats - as if the professed anti-Communism of the old Cold War still justified support for authoritarians - were quiet about almost everything from Saudi blackmail payments to terrorists and beheadings to mass jailings, random murder, and disfigurement of women. Political appeasement - from Reagan's failure to hit the Bekka Valley after the slaughter of U.S. Marines, to Clinton's pathetic responses to murdered diplomats, bombings, and the leveling of embassies - only emboldened Arab killers.
Judging magnanimity as decadence, the half-educated in al Qaeda embraced pseudo-Spenglerian theories of a soft and decadent West unable to tear itself away from thong-watching and Sunday football. Largess in the halls of power in New York and Washington played a contemptible role too - as ex-ambassadors, retired generals, and revolving-door lawyers created fancy names, titles, and institutes to conceal what was really Gulf money thrown on the table for American influence.
On the left, multiculturalists and postcolonial theorists were even worse,
promulgating the relativist argument that there was no real standard by
which to assess third-world criminality. And by mixing a cocktail of
colonial guilt and advocacy about the soi-disant "other," they helped to
create a politically-correct climate that left us ill-prepared for the
hatred of the madrassas. Arab monsters like Saddam Hussein sensed that there would always be useful idiots in the West to march on their behalf if it came to a choice between a third-world killer and a democratic United States. More fools in the universities alleged that oppression,
exploitation, and inequality alone caused Arab anger - even as well-off,
educated, and pampered momma's boys like Mohamed Atta pulled out their Korans, put on headbands, and then blew us and themselves to smithereens, still babbling about unclean women in the last hours before their rendezvous in Hell.
So the general symptomology, diagnosis, and bleak prognosis of this illness in the Middle East are now more or less agreed upon; the treatment, however, is not. Arab intellectuals - long corrupted by complicity with criminal regimes, and perennial critics of American foreign policy - now suddenly look askance at democracy, if jump-started by the United States. American academics, who once decried our support for the agents of oppression, now decry our efforts to remove them and allow something better.
What in God's name, then, are we to do with this nonsense?
We seek military action and democratic reform hand-in-glove to end Islamic rogue states and terrorist enclaves - not because such audacious measures are our first option (appeasement, neglect, and complicity in the past were preferable), but because they are the last. Go ahead and argue over the improbability of democracy in the Middle East. Reckon the horrendous costs and unending commitment. Cite the improper parallels with Germany and Japan until you are blue in the face. Stammer on that Baghdad will never be a New England town hall.
Maybe, maybe not. But at least consider the alternatives.
Hitting and then running? Did that in Iraq in 1991 - and Shiites and Kurds
hated us before dying in droves; Kuwaitis soon forgot our sacrifice, and we spent $30 billion and 350,000 air sorties to patrol the desert skies for 12 years. Afghans gave no praise for our help in routing the Soviets, but
plenty of blame for leaving when the threat was over.
Establish bases and forget nation-building? Did that too once, everywhere
from Libya to Saudi Arabia, and we still got a madman in Tripoli and 60,000 royal third cousins in Riyadh.
Turn the other cheek and say, "What's a few American volunteers killed in Lebanon or the Sudan when the stock market is booming and Starbucks is sprouting up everywhere?" Did that also, and we got 9/11.
Pour in money? Did that for a quarter-century; but I don't see that the
street in Amman or Cairo is much appreciative about freebies, from tons of American wheat to Abrams tanks.
Get tough with Israel? Taking 39 scuds, pulling out of Lebanon, offering 97 percent of the West Bank, and putting up with Oslo got them the Intifada and female suicide bombers.
The fact is that the only alternative after September 11 was the messy,
dirty, easily caricatured path that Mr. Bush has taken us down. For all the
reoccurring troubles in Afghanistan, for all the looting and lawlessness in
the month after the brilliant military victory in Iraq, and for all the
recent explosions in restaurants, synagogues, and hotels - we are still
making real progress.
Two years ago the most awful regimes since Hitler's Germany were the Taliban and the Hussein despotism. Both are now gone, and something better will yet emerge in their place. The American military has not proven merely lethal, but unpredictable and a little crazy into the bargain - as if our generals, when told to go to Baghdad or Kabul, nod yes and smile: "Hell, what are they going to do anyway, blow up the World Trade Center?"
Two years ago the world's most deadly agent was an Arab terrorist; now it is an American with a laptop and an F-18 circling above with a pod of GPS bombs.
Two years ago nuts in caves talked about Americans who were scared to fight; now the world is worried because we fight too quickly and too well. There are no more videos of Osama bin Laden strutting with his cell phone trailing sycophantic psychopaths. Yasser Arafat is no longer lord of the Lincoln bedroom, but shuffles around his own self-created moonscape.
Two years ago Syria and Lebanon were considered sacrosanct hideouts that we dared not enter - or so a sapling ophthalmologist from Syria threatened us. Today we tell the custodians of terror there to clean it up or we will - and assume that eventually we must.
Two years ago - and I speak from experience - faulting our corrupt
relationship with Saudi Arabia brought mostly abuse from hacks in suits and ties in Washington and New York; now defending that status quo is more likely to incur public odium.
Two years ago the Cassandra-like trio of Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, and Fouad Ajami were considered outcasts by disingenuous but influential Middle Eastern Studies departments; now they - not the poseurs in university lounges and academic conferences - are heeded by presidents and prime ministers.
No, we are making progress because we have sized up the problem, know the solution - and have the guts to press ahead. No one claimed all this would be easy or welcome. But like Roman senators of old with each hand on a fold of the toga, we offer choices. We hope that there are still enough people of good will and sobriety in the Middle East to rid themselves of the terrorist killers, and thus select a freely offered, Western-style democracy over the 1st Marine Division, a 1,000-plane sky, and some 30 acres of floating tarmac.
-
www.stratfor.com
STRATFOR'S MORNING INTELLIGENCE BRIEF
Geopolitical Diary: Tuesday, June 3, 2003
As U.S. President George W. Bush heads to the Middle East to begin a round of critical meetings, it is useful to pause and reflect on the driving force behind these meetings: al Qaeda. In early April, we stated that this quarter would represent the greatest risk for al Qaeda attacks since Sept. 11. We then saw a set of attacks -- the centerpiece of which were the multi-pronged attacks in Riyadh, with lesser attacks in Morocco. The question now is simply: Is that all there is? Because if it is, al Qaeda is indeed weakened.
To gauge this, we need to think about al Qaeda's strategic requirements
after the Iraq war. The militant network's credibility was on the line: Its
actions on Sept. 11 had led to the destruction of the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan and to that of the Baathist regime in Iraq. Rather than rallying the Islamic masses, al Qaeda had struck once, carried out some lesser operations and seemed to be sliding into impotence. In our view, the organization had to strike quickly and as hard as it could to revive its
credibility. It had to take its best shot.
Its best shot was sufficient to stun the Saudi government and create an
atmosphere in which Saudi officials were working intimately and fairly
publicly with the CIA and FBI inside the kingdom. The panic the attacks in
Riyadh initially created has abated, and we have reports of life returning
to normal among the expatriate community; Saudi leaders are attending the summit this week in Egypt. Thus, the Riyadh attack was enough to goad the Saudi government to move closer to the United States and too weak to generate a serious move against pro-American elements.
Perhaps more serious is the apparent shift in Hamas' position. At least to
this moment, Hamas has not launched a suicide bombing campaign against the Aqaba summit between Bush, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas -- nor has anyone else. It appears at this moment that Hamas has decided to allow the political process to go forward. There undoubtedly are many dimensions to this decision, which is easily reversible. Nevertheless, it represents a substantial shift in Hamas' thinking, and part of it undoubtedly is based on the sense that, for now, the politico-military realities in the region are moving against radical Islamic movements. With governments in the region scrambling to find some basis of accommodation with the United States, the strategic foundations of Palestinian resistance have weakened.
This is the exact opposite of what al Qaeda hoped for, and the process is
based in part on a perception within the region that al Qaeda has failed.
The recent campaign clearly has not reversed that perception but actually
has accelerated it. The problem is that events are now rolling over al
Qaeda, and structures are being put into place that will be difficult to
dislodge. What al Qaeda intended to do was to destabilize the region and
exploit the political opportunities created. However, what has happened thus far is that Washington has exploited the destabilization more effectively than has al Qaeda.
The militant network needs to show that it has the power to disrupt the
summits in Sharm el Sheikh and Aqaba. It would appear that it lacks that
ability. Its followers took their best shot in May, and that was not good
enough to change the course of events. Al Qaeda needs to do something badly, and it needs to be dramatic, either during or immediately after as a
response to the Aqaba meeting. For all we know, it has laid on just such an operation. However, from what we see -- and from the view in the region -- it simply doesn't have the capability at this time. If al Qaeda cannot do something significant by the end of June, its credibility -- and its hold on personnel -- increasingly will evaporate. It is our view that the
organization now is in serious trouble: The May offensive failed to achieve
its goals, and if that was al Qaeda's best shot, its best is no longer good
enough.
Obviously, counting al Qaeda out always is dangerous. However, at this
moment, forces other than al Qaeda are generating threats to American
interests. In Iraq, the threat is from Sunni, Baathist forces trying to wage
a guerrilla war and from Shiites, who under the influence of Iran could rise and destabilize the American positions. Iranian forces on Monday night captured a boat carrying U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors. They were released after a few hours, but Iran simultaneously is trying to reach accommodation with the United States and to flex its muscles. In Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, an Islamist party has imposed Sharia law, creating tensions between Islamabad and Washington.
All of these, along with a dozen other problems, represent challenges to the United States. But with June here, al Qaeda -- which has been the United States' most dominant nightmare for almost two years -- seems to be slipping into irrelevance. There is no question but that al Qaeda wants to correct this with a major operation; the question is whether it can mount one before it loses its credibility and operational infrastructure. Time is not on its side now. Al Qaeda's intentions are clear to us; it is its capabilities that are becoming dubious. Maybe that increases the danger it poses. Maybe it is the end of the beginning, to borrow Churchill's phrase. That is the question of the moment, and it is an historic one.
-
If the truth matters, then all should read the full text of President Bush's speech to the UN General Assembly on 12 September 2002. This speech began the overt and official US policy that culminated in the invasion of Iraq. For those who wish to read the complete speech, here is the text. I have posted the complete text here because excerpts have a way of reflecting the editor's bias.
As an example, consider the Wolfowicz quote in the Vanity Fair press release. That press release hyping the Vanity Fair article fails to include Wolfowicz's next sentence. That sentence reads, "But there have always been three fundamental concerns: One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism and the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people."
One thing is clear. The President's speech to the UN mentioned a lot more than just WMD's.
Rick
***********************************************************
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020912-1.html
"Mr. Secretary General, Mr. President, distinguished delegates, and ladies and gentlemen: We meet one year and one day after a terrorist attack brought grief to my country, and brought grief to many citizens of our world. Yesterday, we remembered the innocent lives taken that terrible morning. Today, we turn to the urgent duty of protecting other lives, without illusion and without fear.
We've accomplished much in the last year -- in Afghanistan and beyond. We have much yet to do -- in Afghanistan and beyond. Many nations represented here have joined in the fight against global terror, and the people of the United States are grateful.
The United Nations was born in the hope that survived a world war -- the hope of a world moving toward justice, escaping old patterns of conflict and fear. The founding members resolved that the peace of the world must never again be destroyed by the will and wickedness of any man. We created the United Nations Security Council, so that, unlike the League of Nations, our deliberations would be more than talk, our resolutions would be more than wishes. After generations of deceitful dictators and broken treaties and squandered lives, we dedicated ourselves to standards of human dignity shared by all, and to a system of security defended by all.
Today, these standards, and this security, are challenged. Our commitment to human dignity is challenged by persistent poverty and raging disease. The suffering is great, and our responsibilities are clear. The United States is joining with the world to supply aid where it reaches people and lifts up lives, to extend trade and the prosperity it brings, and to bring medical care where it is desperately needed.
As a symbol of our commitment to human dignity, the United States will return to UNESCO. (Applause.) This organization has been reformed and America will participate fully in its mission to advance human rights and tolerance and learning.
Our common security is challenged by regional conflicts -- ethnic and religious strife that is ancient, but not inevitable. In the Middle East, there can be no peace for either side without freedom for both sides. America stands committed to an independent and democratic Palestine, living side by side with Israel in peace and security. Like all other people, Palestinians deserve a government that serves their interests and listens to their voices. My nation will continue to encourage all parties to step up to their responsibilities as we seek a just and comprehensive settlement to the conflict.
Above all, our principles and our security are challenged today by outlaw groups and regimes that accept no law of morality and have no limit to their violent ambitions. In the attacks on America a year ago, we saw the destructive intentions of our enemies. This threat hides within many nations, including my own. In cells and camps, terrorists are plotting further destruction, and building new bases for their war against civilization. And our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale.
In one place -- in one regime -- we find all these dangers, in their most lethal and aggressive forms, exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront.
Twelve years ago, Iraq invaded Kuwait without provocation. And the regime's forces were poised to continue their march to seize other countries and their resources. Had Saddam Hussein been appeased instead of stopped, he would have endangered the peace and stability of the world. Yet this aggression was stopped -- by the might of coalition forces and the will of the United Nations.
To suspend hostilities, to spare himself, Iraq's dictator accepted a series of commitments. The terms were clear, to him and to all. And he agreed to prove he is complying with every one of those obligations.
He has proven instead only his contempt for the United Nations, and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge -- by his deceptions, and by his cruelties -- Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself.
In 1991, Security Council Resolution 688 demanded that the Iraqi regime cease at once the repression of its own people, including the systematic repression of minorities -- which the Council said, threatened international peace and security in the region. This demand goes ignored.
Last year, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights found that Iraq continues to commit extremely grave violations of human rights, and that the regime's repression is all pervasive. Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution, and torture by beating and burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation, and rape. Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents -- and all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state.
In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolutions 686 and 687, demanded that Iraq return all prisoners from Kuwait and other lands. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke its promise. Last year the Secretary General's high-level coordinator for this issue reported that Kuwait, Saudi, Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Bahraini, and Omani nationals remain unaccounted for -- more than 600 people. One American pilot is among them.
In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolution 687, demanded that Iraq renounce all involvement with terrorism, and permit no terrorist organizations to operate in Iraq. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke this promise. In violation of Security Council Resolution 1373, Iraq continues to shelter and support terrorist organizations that direct violence against Iran, Israel, and Western governments. Iraqi dissidents abroad are targeted for murder. In 1993, Iraq attempted to assassinate the Emir of Kuwait and a former American President. Iraq's government openly praised the attacks of September the 11th. And al Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq.
In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and to prove to the world it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections. Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge.
From 1991 to 1995, the Iraqi regime said it had no biological weapons. After a senior official in its weapons program defected and exposed this lie, the regime admitted to producing tens of thousands of liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents for use with Scud warheads, aerial bombs, and aircraft spray tanks. U.N. inspectors believe Iraq has produced two to four times the amount of biological agents it declared, and has failed to account for more than three metric tons of material that could be used to produce biological weapons. Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.
United Nations' inspections also revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons.
And in 1995, after four years of deception, Iraq finally admitted it had a crash nuclear weapons program prior to the Gulf War. We know now, were it not for that war, the regime in Iraq would likely have possessed a nuclear weapon no later than 1993.
Today, Iraq continues to withhold important information about its nuclear program -- weapons design, procurement logs, experiment data, an accounting of nuclear materials and documentation of foreign assistance. Iraq employs capable nuclear scientists and technicians. It retains physical infrastructure needed to build a nuclear weapon. Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year. And Iraq's state-controlled media has reported numerous meetings between Saddam Hussein and his nuclear scientists, leaving little doubt about his continued appetite for these weapons.
Iraq also possesses a force of Scud-type missiles with ranges beyond the 150 kilometers permitted by the U.N. Work at testing and production facilities shows that Iraq is building more long-range missiles that it can inflict mass death throughout the region.
In 1990, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the world imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. Those sanctions were maintained after the war to compel the regime's compliance with Security Council resolutions. In time, Iraq was allowed to use oil revenues to buy food. Saddam Hussein has subverted this program, working around the sanctions to buy missile technology and military materials. He blames the suffering of Iraq's people on the United Nations, even as he uses his oil wealth to build lavish palaces for himself, and to buy arms for his country. By refusing to comply with his own agreements, he bears full guilt for the hunger and misery of innocent Iraqi citizens.
In 1991, Iraq promised U.N. inspectors immediate and unrestricted access to verify Iraq's commitment to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles. Iraq broke this promise, spending seven years deceiving, evading, and harassing U.N. inspectors before ceasing cooperation entirely. Just months after the 1991 cease-fire, the Security Council twice renewed its demand that the Iraqi regime cooperate fully with inspectors, condemning Iraq's serious violations of its obligations. The Security Council again renewed that demand in 1994, and twice more in 1996, deploring Iraq's clear violations of its obligations. The Security Council renewed its demand three more times in 1997, citing flagrant violations; and three more times in 1998, calling Iraq's behavior totally unacceptable. And in 1999, the demand was renewed yet again.
As we meet today, it's been almost four years since the last U.N. inspectors set foot in Iraq, four years for the Iraqi regime to plan, and to build, and to test behind the cloak of secrecy.
We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country. Are we to assume that he stopped when they left? The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble. And this is a risk we must not take.
Delegates to the General Assembly, we have been more than patient. We've tried sanctions. We've tried the carrot of oil for food, and the stick of coalition military strikes. But Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has a -- nuclear weapons is when, God forbids, he uses one. We owe it to all our citizens to do everything in our power to prevent that day from coming.
The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?
The United States helped found the United Nations. We want the United Nations to be effective, and respectful, and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced. And right now those resolutions are being unilaterally subverted by the Iraqi regime. Our partnership of nations can meet the test before us, by making clear what we now expect of the Iraqi regime.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all support for terrorism and act to suppress it, as all states are required to do by U.N. Security Council resolutions.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shi'a, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans, and others, again as required by Security Council resolutions.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will release or account for all Gulf War personnel whose fate is still unknown. It will return the remains of any who are deceased, return stolen property, accept liability for losses resulting from the invasion of Kuwait, and fully cooperate with international efforts to resolve these issues, as required by Security Council resolutions.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. It will accept U.N. administration of funds from that program, to ensure that the money is used fairly and promptly for the benefit of the Iraqi people.
If all these steps are taken, it will signal a new openness and accountability in Iraq. And it could open the prospect of the United Nations helping to build a government that represents all Iraqis -- a government based on respect for human rights, economic liberty, and internationally supervised elections.
The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people; they've suffered too long in silent captivity. Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause, and a great strategic goal. The people of Iraq deserve it; the security of all nations requires it. Free societies do not intimidate through cruelty and conquest, and open societies do not threaten the world with mass murder. The United States supports political and economic liberty in a unified Iraq.
We can harbor no illusions -- and that's important today to remember. Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. He's fired ballistic missiles at Iran and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Israel. His regime once ordered the killing of every person between the ages of 15 and 70 in certain Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. He has gassed many Iranians, and 40 Iraqi villages.
My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge. If Iraq's regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account. We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions. But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced -- the just demands of peace and security will be met -- or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.
Events can turn in one of two ways: If we fail to act in the face of danger, the people of Iraq will continue to live in brutal submission. The regime will have new power to bully and dominate and conquer its neighbors, condemning the Middle East to more years of bloodshed and fear. The regime will remain unstable -- the region will remain unstable, with little hope of freedom, and isolated from the progress of our times. With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow. And if an emboldened regime were to supply these weapons to terrorist allies, then the attacks of September the 11th would be a prelude to far greater horrors.
If we meet our responsibilities, if we overcome this danger, we can arrive at a very different future. The people of Iraq can shake off their captivity. They can one day join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world. These nations can show by their example that honest government, and respect for women, and the great Islamic tradition of learning can triumph in the Middle East and beyond. And we will show that the promise of the United Nations can be fulfilled in our time.
Neither of these outcomes is certain. Both have been set before us. We must choose between a world of fear and a world of progress. We cannot stand by and do nothing while dangers gather. We must stand up for our security, and for the permanent rights and the hopes of mankind. By heritage and by choice, the United States of America will make that stand. And, delegates to the United Nations, you have the power to make that stand, as well.
Thank you very much."
Attachments:
-
Woof All:
Moving Dog Russ's post over to this thread.
Crafty
--------------------------
Is the real reason something to be ashamed of...or not?
June 4, 2003
Because We Could
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
he failure of the Bush team to produce any weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.'s) in Iraq is becoming a big, big story. But is it the real story we should be concerned with? No. It was the wrong issue before the war, and it's the wrong issue now.
Why? Because there were actually four reasons for this war: the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason.
The "real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Afghanistan wasn't enough because a terrorism bubble had built up over there ? a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured. This terrorism bubble said that plowing airplanes into the World Trade Center was O.K., having Muslim preachers say it was O.K. was O.K., having state-run newspapers call people who did such things "martyrs" was O.K. and allowing Muslim charities to raise money for such "martyrs" was O.K. Not only was all this seen as O.K., there was a feeling among radical Muslims that suicide bombing would level the balance of power between the Arab world and the West, because we had gone soft and their activists were ready to die.
The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world. And don't believe the nonsense that this had no effect. Every neighboring government ? and 98 percent of terrorism is about what governments let happen ? got the message. If you talk to U.S. soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was about.
The "right reason" for this war was the need to partner with Iraqis, post-Saddam, to build a progressive Arab regime. Because the real weapons of mass destruction that threaten us were never Saddam's missiles. The real weapons that threaten us are the growing number of angry, humiliated young Arabs and Muslims, who are produced by failed or failing Arab states ? young people who hate America more than they love life. Helping to build a decent Iraq as a model for others ? and solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ? are the necessary steps for defusing the ideas of mass destruction, which are what really threaten us.
The "moral reason" for the war was that Saddam's regime was an engine of mass destruction and genocide that had killed thousands of his own people, and neighbors, and needed to be stopped.
But because the Bush team never dared to spell out the real reason for the war, and (wrongly) felt that it could never win public or world support for the right reasons and the moral reasons, it opted for the stated reason: the notion that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that posed an immediate threat to America. I argued before the war that Saddam posed no such threat to America, and had no links with Al Qaeda, and that we couldn't take the nation to war "on the wings of a lie." I argued that Mr. Bush should fight this war for the right reasons and the moral reasons. But he stuck with this W.M.D. argument for P.R. reasons.
Once the war was over and I saw the mass graves and the true extent of Saddam's genocidal evil, my view was that Mr. Bush did not need to find any W.M.D.'s to justify the war for me. I still feel that way. But I have to admit that I've always been fighting my own war in Iraq. Mr. Bush took the country into his war. And if it turns out that he fabricated the evidence for his war (which I wouldn't conclude yet), that would badly damage America and be a very serious matter.
But my ultimate point is this: Finding Iraq's W.M.D.'s is necessary to preserve the credibility of the Bush team, the neocons, Tony Blair and the C.I.A. But rebuilding Iraq is necessary to win the war. I won't feel one whit more secure if we find Saddam's W.M.D.'s, because I never felt he would use them on us. But I will feel terribly insecure if we fail to put Iraq onto a progressive path. Because if that doesn't happen, the terrorism bubble will reinflate and bad things will follow. Mr. Bush's credibility rides on finding W.M.D.'s, but America's future, and the future of the Mideast, rides on our building a different Iraq. We must not forget that.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy
-
Putting the world back together again
Jun 5th 2003 | AQABA, CRACOW AND EVIAN-LES-BAINS
From The Economist print edition
American diplomacy is widely regarded as arrogant and selfish. The president's trip this week should refine that verdict
GEORGE BUSH began at Auschwitz. He laid wreaths at the wall of death, a place where prisoners were summarily shot, and at the unbearable ruins of Birkenau's gas ovens, a jumble of bricks that remain as they were found in 1945, half-destroyed by the retreating Nazis.
The sombre symbolism of the camps suited a week-long tour to the two most troublesome objects of American diplomacy. As the president said later that day, ?They remind us that evil is real and must be called by name and must be opposed.? That was aimed at critical Europeans. The camps also provide?though this remained unspoken?terrible reminders about Jewish insecurity. This was not irrelevant to the second half of the visit, to the Middle East.
Since September 11th 2001, the foreign policy of almost every other country has been driven by reaction to America's willingness to project its power unilaterally. Critics have argued that the Bush administration has too narrow a view of America's interests and uses its immense power disruptively. They have sought to restrain it, Gulliver-like, in a net of obligations. Supporters have tried to steer it, engaging in America's foreign-policy debates before decisions get made, and backing them afterwards. Arab states have hoped to attract its attention by persuading the president to commit himself to regional peacemaking.
This week they had their wish. Mr Bush made his first visit to the region, standing with the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers and the king of Jordan at Aqaba, in Jordan, to announce that they would take the first steps on the road map, supported the day before by Arab leaders at their summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, in Egypt. In Aqaba, Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers, recognised each other's right to have a state. Mr Abbas reiterated Israel's right to peace and security and vowed to end both the armed intifada and incitements to violence against Israel. Mr Sharon confirmed Israel's acceptance of the ?two-state solution?, allowed that a Palestinian state would have to be formed on contiguous territory to be viable, offered to ease the plight of Palestinians under occupation and said his government would begin to remove ?unauthorised outposts?. These declarations all follow the road map.
Several developments made this possible. Victory in Iraq has prompted America and Arab regimes to push anew for peace, as happened after the first Gulf war. A reformed Palestinian Authority?itself partly a product of American pressure?is a more acceptable and viable partner. As important, terrorist strikes, especially those in Saudi Arabia last month, have given Arab governments a bigger stake in settling the dispute, since it fuels violence that threatens them, too.
?We will continue to fight the scourge of terrorism,? said Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president, ?regardless of justifications and motive.? The lack of a qualification marks a shift. Arab regimes?though not Syria, which denounced the statement?now accept that terrorism by Palestinians is still terrorism. They promised to funnel their aid through the Palestinian Authority which, if done, might help dry up the outside money that fuels the militant groups.
At the summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, the five Arab participants unambiguously endorsed the road map and Mr Bush's role. The ?rejectionists? were marginalised?Syria was not invited?and the Arab regimes, in contrast to some previous peacemaking attempts, were properly involved. ?A good beginning,? said Mr Bush, as he flew off to visit American troops in Qatar.
Naturally, that guarantees nothing about the future. During the first phase of the road map, the Israeli army is also supposed to withdraw from areas it has occupied since September 2000. Mr Sharon made no mention of that. The hardest issues of all?Jewish settlements, Palestinians' ?right of return? and the status of Jerusalem?remain for the third phase. Meanwhile, the summit raised, but left unresolved, more immediate doubts.
Many Arabs still worry that the Americans will disengage when things go wrong
First, many Arabs still worry that the Americans will disengage when things go wrong, as things surely will. For the administration, this is a brief but passing period which is favourable to engagement, after the Iraq war and before the 2004 election campaign. But Mr Bush shows some signs of preparing to stick it out. The administration announced a new envoy to the region, John Wolf, a career diplomat who is associated with the neo-conservatives. He will head a team of Americans who will go to the region to monitor negotiations. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, has been named as Mr Bush's ?personal representative? on the topic, a clear sign of engagement by the White House.
Great to see you, Prince Abdullah, President Mubarak, my good friend Tony...
Second, what are the roles of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinians' new prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, their president? Mr Arafat was not invited, though Arab regimes have previously said peace will not be possible without him. Since last June, Mr Bush has said the opposite: peace will be impossible with him. The summits advanced America's aim of building up support for Mr Abbas as an alternative. Arab leaders gave his Palestinian government a ringing endorsement, and Mr Abbas himself seems to have increased his prestige with Mr Bush. By the end of their first meeting, said one observer, ?They were like pals from a long time ago.? But, as he also noted, Mr Abbas will need to show Palestinians proof that he can deliver benefits on the ground.
The hard road to trust
Politically, it is Mr Sharon who is in immediate trouble. According to Israeli defence sources, the government will start taking down some 15 ?unauthorised outposts? next week. There are dozens more outposts, built since March 2001, dotting the West Bank, which must be removed in this first phase of the road map. But if 15 go it will be a significant start, certainly in terms of domestic politics.
There have been intelligence warnings of violent or even armed resistance from settler extremists. The defence sources said that the army would act fast and firmly to dismantle the outposts, and to make sure that the evicted settlers did not return to them or set up new ones. Leaders of the mainstream settler movement, while dissociating themselves from threats of violence against the soldiers, intend to organise large-scale passive resistance against the dismantlement operation.
More than 40,000 people attended an anti-government rally organised by the settlers in Jerusalem, just hours after the summit ended. ?We won't allow a single inhabited spot to be removed,? declared one speaker. ?This road map goes straight to hell.?
?This road map goes straight to hell?
The looming clashes over the outposts could well grow into a terminal showdown between Mr Sharon and the two parties of the far right that sit in his cabinet. The National Union, with seven seats in the 120-seat Knesset, and the National Religious Party, with six, say they are staying in the government to keep the Labour Party out. But if Mr Sharon's words turn into deeds, they may have no choice but to leave. Labour promises Mr Sharon the support of its 19 Knesset members without necessarily joining the government?so long as he gets on with removing the outposts and freezing the rest of the settlements as required by the road map.
Mr Abbas faces a less immediate political embarrassment, but the challenge before him, if he is to translate his promise to end the armed intifada into reality, is enormous. He needs to achieve a ceasefire that includes the Islamic factions, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. He will be able to do so only if he can point to changes on the ground.
Sobered by the new American wind blowing right into their now closed offices in Damascus, the Islamists have been sounding conciliatory, vowing not to ?embarrass? Mr Abbas in his endeavours for peace. But their terms for a truce remain as hard as ever, demanding reciprocity from Israel. They want a ?guarantee? that Israel will withdraw from the Palestinian areas it has reoccupied, and end its policy of assassinating known Islamist fighters. They have ruled out disarmament. ?We will continue to defend ourselves,? said one Hamas man. Many in Mr Abbas's own Fatah movement hold the same view.
At Aqaba, the Palestinians' new security chief, Muhammad Dahlan, urged Israel to release more prisoners beyond the 100 or so freed as goodwill gestures in recent weeks. There are 6,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails, many of them Fatah activists, including the movement's West Bank leader, Marwan Barghouti. Mr Dahlan believes the release of these prisoners would give him the legitimacy and the personnel to build an effective police force that might one day take on Hamas.
This is his and Mr Abbas's cautious game plan: first a ceasefire, next policing and then, and only then, disarmament. Time, and reciprocal action by the Israelis, will be required for all three phases. The Palestinians believe that Mr Bush, eager to see the new leadership strengthened, is sympathetic to this approach.
Monitoring both Israeli and Palestinian compliance with the road map, monitored by a team of American supervisors under Mr Wolf, will begin next week. The team, said Mr Bush pointedly, would be ?stating clearly who is fulfilling their responsibilities?. The Israelis professed themselves pleased that only America, and not the other authors of the map?the UN, the EU and Russia?would be involved in this monitoring. The Palestinians were pleased that it would begin forthwith.
Israel was particularly gratified that Mr Bush had been persuaded at the last minute to add a reference in his Aqaba speech to Israel as ?the Jewish state?. Silvan Shalom, Israel's foreign minister, said that this was meant as a negation of the ?right of return? claimed by the Palestinian refugees. Israel initially had wanted Mr Abbas to make this point in his speech, but the Palestinians are not prepared to renounce the right of return at this early stage.
Europe's quicksands
In the glare of all this momentous activity, the earlier leg of Mr Bush's trip was almost forgotten by mid-week. But this, too, was a vital mission to repair damage and make peace. Europeans had long taken America's power and Europe's relative powerlessness for granted, until the build-up to the war in Iraq. At that point, France and Germany started talking about American power as something to be contained. Some Americans started dividing Europe into old and new, sceptics and allies. Mr Bush's trip attempted to reinstate the old close ties, but only on certain conditions.
?The United States is committed to a strong Atlantic alliance,? the president told a crowd in Cracow, in Poland. ?This is no time to stir up divisions in a great alliance.? He went out of his way to claim that, in the Middle East and in developing countries generally, ? we need the help, the advice and the wisdom of our European friends and allies.? This seemed good evidence?and the rash of joint policy agreements on trade and aid after the G8 summit at Evian-les-Bains produced more?that the administration is still committed to the transatlantic alliance as a whole, not just to a few select members of it.
In some areas, closer transatlantic co-operation is certainly on the cards. After the G8 summit, NATO's secretary-general, Lord Robertson, reiterated demands that the organisation do more to act as a peacekeeper outside its traditional area of operation. During the summit, America announced the extension of the so-called Global Partnership against nuclear proliferation. Set up at last year's summit, the project is concerned with such matters as destroying Russian chemical weapons. It has now been joined, for the first time, by a group of small European countries.
What is much less clear is whether the broader differences about the use of American power have been narrowed enough to improve ties across the board. Only strong assertions of mutual interest were likely to allay the deep distrust engendered by the Iraq war, and these were not forthcoming.
Mr Bush did not flinch from pointing out specific areas where the two sides disagree: on lending conditions for poor countries, for example, and on genetically modified food. Nor did he gloss over the ructions before the war. He told the Poles that ?you have not come all this way only to be told [by France] that you must now choose between Europe and America.?
Backstage, the talk was blunter. Miss Rice talked of her disappointment at the questioning of America's motives in Iraq and of her ?consternation? at French and German behaviour. ?There were times,? she said, ?that it appeared that American power was seen to be more dangerous than, perhaps, Saddam Hussein. I'll just put it very bluntly. We simply didn't understand it.? She added, at another point, ?That disappointment will, of course, not go easily.?
Jacques Chirac, France's president, was no less clear where he stood. ?I've no doubt whatsoever,? he said at Evian, ?that the multipolar vision of the world that I have defended for some time is certainly supported by a majority of countries throughout the world.? He turned the G8 meeting of rich industrial nations into virtually a global summit, inviting 13 leaders from developing countries. And he summarily rejected an American suggestion that the G8's resolution on Iran and North Korea implied that force could be used against countries that breach international rules against proliferation. ?This interpretation,? he said, ?seems to be extraordinarily daring.?
The contrast with Vladimir Putin was instructive. Russia, too, has worried about America's projection of unilateral power and has praised attempts to constrain it internationally. But Mr Putin gave Mr Bush almost everything he wanted. Before their meeting, at the 300th anniversary celebrations in Mr Putin's home city of St Petersburg, Russia's parliament ratified the treaty that pledges to reduce the two sides' nuclear arsenals by two-thirds over ten years (the treaty was signed last year, but the parliament had refused to ratify it during the Iraq war). Mr Putin said that Russian and American policies on Iran?one of the most contentious issues between them over the past few years?were closer than anyone thought, and that Russia did not want Iran to get hold of nuclear weapons. Their meeting ended in a bear-hug.
The difference lies partly in European and Russian attitudes. Russia has decided that it needs to work with America on strategic and nuclear matters, while Europe is divided about how close it wants transatlantic ties to be. It also lies partly in American attitudes. As Mr Bush's trip confirmed, his administration will not let allied reluctance slow down something that it perceives to be in its national interest. And when Europeans are split, America is quite prepared to cherry-pick among them. No better evidence for this can be seen than a new anti-nuclear proliferation measure announced at the G8 summit. Incensed by its inability legally to confiscate a weapons shipment from North Korea to Yemen that was intercepted at sea earlier this year, America decided to set up a new interdiction regime to crack down on such trade. The first countries it went to for support were Spain, Poland, Britain and Australia, the ones that sent troops to Iraq.
That may be understandable. When a country thinks its national security is threatened, it will hardly let even allies dictate its response. Yet the Bush administration also shows signs of cherry-picking here, seeing as its particular allies Britain, Spain, Italy and the new democracies of central Europe. To paraphrase Lord Acton, America may be seeking to create a New Europe in order to redress the balance of the Old.
FOTOS
Vladimir, let's hug again! After you, Jacques, you French bastard. This one's Polish, right?
This will not happen without a fight. The leaders of France and Germany frequently (though mistakenly) like to assert that nothing much happens in the EU unless they agree. Moreover, they do not seem seriously abashed by the outcome of the war in Iraq. True, both voted for the United Nations resolution to lift sanctions. But French officials do not think America has been vindicated by victory. On the contrary, they argue that military action has reaped a harvest of chaos in Iraq and more terrorism by al-Qaeda. If anything, they feel their opposition has been vindicated by the failure to find Mr Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
In short, American diplomacy, like Mr Bush's foreign travels, seems to come in two parts. In the Middle East, America showed that it is willing to use its power in ways that are neither arrogant nor selfish. But whether that will be enough to reassure European critics is another matter.
-
www.stratfor.com
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
5 June 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
WMD
Summary
The inability to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has
created a political crisis in the United States and Britain.
Within the two governments, there are recriminations and brutal
political infighting over responsibility. Stratfor warned in
February that the unwillingness of the U.S. government to
articulate its real, strategic reasons for the war -- choosing
instead to lean on WMD as the justification -- would lead to a
deep crisis at some point. That moment seems to be here.
Analysis
"Weapons of mass destruction" is promising to live up to its
name: The issue may well result in the mass destruction of senior
British and American officials who used concerns about WMD in
Iraq as the primary, public justification for going to war. The
simple fact is that no one has found any weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq and -- except for some vans which may have
been used for biological weapons -- no evidence that Iraq was
working to develop such weapons. Since finding WMD is a priority
for U.S. military forces, which have occupied Iraq for more than
a month, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction not only
has become an embarrassment, it also has the potential to
mushroom into a major political crisis in the United States and
Britain. Not only is the political opposition exploiting the
paucity of Iraqi WMD, but the various bureaucracies are using the
issue to try to discredit each other. It's a mess.
On Jan. 21, 2003, Stratfor published an analysis titled Smoke and
Mirrors: The United States, Iraq and Deception, which made the
following points:
1. The primary reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq was strategic
and not about weapons of mass destruction.
2. The United States was using the WMD argument primarily to
justify the attack to its coalition partners.
3. The use of WMD rather than strategy as the justification for
the war would ultimately create massive confusion as to the
nature of the war the United States was fighting.
As we put it:
"To have allowed the WMD issue to supplant U.S. strategic
interests as the justification for war has created a crisis in
U.S. strategy. Deception campaigns are designed to protect
strategies, not to trap them. Ultimately, the foundation of U.S.
grand strategy, coalitions and the need for clarity in military
strategy have collided. The discovery of weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq will not solve the problem, nor will a coup
in Baghdad. In a war [against Islamic extremists] that will last
for years, maintaining one's conceptual footing is critical. If
that footing cannot be maintained -- if the requirements of the
war and the requirements of strategic clarity are incompatible --
there are more serious issues involved than the future of Iraq."
The failure to enunciate the strategic reasons for the invasion
of Iraq--of cloaking it in an extraneous justification--has now
come home to roost. Having used WMD as the justification, the
inability to locate WMD in Iraq has undermined the credibility of
the United States and is tearing the government apart in an orgy
of finger-pointing.
To make sense of this impending chaos, it is important to start
at the beginning -- with al Qaeda. After the Sept. 11 attacks, al
Qaeda was regarded as an extraordinarily competent global
organization. Sheer logic argued that the network would want to
top the Sept. 11 strikes with something even more impressive.
This led to a very reasonable fear that al Qaeda possessed or was
in the process of obtaining WMD.
U.S. intelligence, shifting from its sub-sensitive to hyper-
sensitive mode, began putting together bits of intelligence that
tended to show that what appeared to be logical actually was
happening. The U.S. intelligence apparatus now was operating in a
worst-case scenario mode, as is reasonable when dealing with WMD.
Lower-grade intelligence was regarded as significant. Two things
resulted: The map of who was developing weapons of mass
destruction expanded, as did the probabilities assigned to al
Qaeda's ability to obtain WMD. The very public outcome -- along
with a range of less public events -- was the "axis of evil"
State of the Union speech, which identified three countries as
having WMD and likely to give it to al Qaeda. Iraq was one of
these countries.
If we regard chemical weapons as WMD, as has been U.S. policy,
then it is well known that Iraq had WMD, since it used them in
the past. It was a core assumption, therefore, that Iraq
continued to possess WMD. Moreover, U.S. intelligence officials
believed there was a parallel program in biological weapons, and
also that Iraqi leaders had the ability and the intent to restart
their nuclear program, if they had not already done so. Running
on the worst-case basis that was now hard-wired by al Qaeda into
U.S. intelligence, Iraq was identified as a country with WMD and
likely to pass them on to al Qaeda.
Iraq, of course, was not the only country in this class. There
are other sources of WMD in the world, even beyond the "axis of
evil" countries. Simply invading Iraq would not solve the
fundamental problem of the threat from al Qaeda. As Stratfor has
always argued, the invasion of Iraq served a psychological and
strategic purpose: Psychologically, it was designed to
demonstrate to the Islamic world the enormous power and ferocity
of the United States; strategically, it was designed to position
the United States to coerce countries such as Saudi Arabia, Syria
and Iran into changing their policies toward suppressing al Qaeda
operations in their countries. Both of these missions were
achieved.
WMD was always a side issue in terms of strategic planning. It
became, however, the publicly stated moral, legal and political
justification for the war. It was understood that countries like
France and Russia had no interest in collaborating with
Washington in a policy that would make the United States the
arbiter of the Middle East. Washington had to find a
justification for the war that these allies would find
irresistible.
That justification was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
From the standpoint of U.S. intelligence, this belief became a
given. Everyone knew that Iraq once had chemical weapons, and no
reasonable person believed that Saddam Hussein had unilaterally
destroyed them. So it appeared to planners within the Bush
administration that they were on safe ground. Moreover, it was
assumed that other major powers would regard WMD in Hussein's
hands as unacceptable and that therefore, everyone would accept
the idea of a war in which the stated goal -- and the real
outcome -- would be the destruction of Iraq's weapons.
This was the point on which Washington miscalculated. The public
justification for the war did not compel France, Germany or
Russia to endorse military action. They continued to resist
because they fully understood the outcome -- intended or not --
would be U.S. domination of the Middle East, and they did not
want to see that come about. Paris, Berlin and Moscow turned the
WMD issue on its head, arguing that if that was the real issue,
then inspections by the United Nations would be the way to solve
the problem. Interestingly, they never denied that Iraq had WMD;
what they did deny was that proof of WMD had been found. They
also argued that over time, as proof accumulated, the inspection
process would either force the Iraqis to destroy their WMD or
justify an invasion at that point. What is important here is that
French and Russian leaders shared with the United States the
conviction that Iraq had WMD. Like the Americans, they thought
weapons of mass destruction -- particularly if they were
primarily chemical -- was a side issue; the core issue was U.S.
power in the Middle East.
In short, all sides were working from the same set of
assumptions. There was not much dispute that the Baathist regime
probably had WMD. The issue between the United States and its
allies was strategic. After the war, the United States would
become the dominant power in the region, and it would use this
power to force regional governments to strike at al Qaeda.
Germany, France and Russia, fearing the growth of U.S. power,
opposed the war. Rather than clarifying the chasm in the
alliance, the Bush administration permitted the arguments over
WMD to supplant a discussion of strategy and left the American
public believing the administration's public statements -- smoke
and mirrors -- rather than its private view.
The Bush administration -- and France, for that matter -- all
assumed that this problem would disappear when the U.S. military
got into Iraq. WMD would be discovered, the public justification
would be vindicated, the secret goal would be achieved and no one
would be the wiser. What they did not count on -- what is
difficult to believe even now -- is that Hussein actually might
not have WMD or, weirder still, that he hid them or destroyed
them so efficiently that no one could find them. That was the
kicker the Bush administration never counted on.
The matter of whether Hussein had WMD is still open. Answers
could range to the extremes: He had no WMD or he still has WMD,
being held in reserve for his guerrilla war. But the point here
is that the WMD question was not the reason the United States
went to war. The war was waged in order to obtain a strategic
base from which to coerce countries such as Syria, Iran and Saudi
Arabia into using their resources to destroy al Qaeda within
their borders. From that standpoint, the strategy seems to be
working.
However, by using WMD as the justification for war, the United
States walked into a trap. The question of the location of WMD is
important. The question of whether it was the CIA or Defense
Department that skewed its reports about the location of Iraq's
WMD is also important. But these questions are ultimately trivial
compared to the use of smoke and mirrors to justify a war in
which Iraq was simply a single campaign. Ultimately, the problem
is that it created a situation in which the American public had
one perception of the reason for the war while the war's planners
had another. In a democratic society engaged in a war that will
last for many years, this is a dangerous situation to have
created.
...................................................................
STRATFOR SERVICES NOW AVAILABLE:
Join decision-makers around the world who read Stratfor for daily
intelligence briefs, in-depth analyses and forecasts on a wide
range of international security, political and economic affairs.
Stratfor Premium is our flagship product providing comprehensive
global intelligence including daily analyses, special reports,
intelligence alerts, premium analyses, situation reports, country
and regional net assessments as well as Stratfor's sought after
Annual and Quarterly Forecasts. Corporate or multi-user volume
discount packages available. Visit this web page for details:
http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=SUB&c=c
Stratfor Basic offers daily analysis, situation reports and ongoing
coverage of global events. Also available with this package is a
pay per view service for many of our premium reports. Visit this web
page for details: http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=SUB&c=d
EnergyCast is dedicated to delivering analysis, forecasts and briefings
on security-related issues affecting oil markets and the energy industry.
EnergyCast includes a blend of strategic forecasts and analysis, tactical
alerts, and email alerts for key triggers affecting this industry.
Visit theis web page for details:
http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=INT&c=d
Stratfor's Global Intelligence Report is authoritative analysis of the
world's latest political and economic developments that is emailed
directly to members Monday through Friday. Visit this web page for
details: http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=SUB&c=a
...................................................................
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Product inquiries, partnership, and sales: marketing@stratfor.com
Subscription and customer service issues: service@stratfor.com
Comments and/or information for analysis: analysis@stratfor.com
Media services and trade show requests: PR@stratfor.com
...................................................................
HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE:
If you wish to remove yourself from this mailing list,
send an email to <Majordomo@mail2.stratfor.com> with
the following command in the body of your email message:
unsubscribe weeklylist
...................................................................
http://www.stratfor.com
====================================================================
(c) 2003 Strategic Forecasting LLC. All rights reserved.
-
An internet friend for whom I have high regard in these matters writes:
"I agree that this administration made a definite decision to overthrow Saddam. However, I think that it was based upon two facts.
First, Saddam's government had grown increasingly cozy with terror groups like al Qaida. Reliable intelligence showed that many of these groups were seeking to acquire the ability to use CB (chem-bio) weapons and dirty nukes against the US. Iraq possessed the capability to manufacture and deliver CB weapons and had possessed a nuclear weapons program. When the US sought Iraqi assistance in the apprehension of two al Qaida fugitives from Afghanistan who played a role in 9-11, Saddam's government refused to assist; thus, providing de facto sanctuary to those terrorists.
Second, Saddam's government had refused to verify the disposition of a lot of CB stuff. This went back to the UNSCOM days of 1998 and continued into 2002. The US feared that Iraq would provide some of this unverified CB stuff to al Qaida or other groups.
When Iraq filed an incomplete declaration last December and failed to account for the old UNSCOM stuff, the US decided to go to war and oust Saddam. After that time, I agree with you, Bush's mind was made up.
But I think that he made it up based upon a comparison of risks. He could not afford to do nothing and have that policy result in subsequent CB or dirty nuke terror acts against the US. When Saddam refused to provide the needed assurances about his CB weapons, Bush decided to take him down.
I think that Bush considered the possibility that Saddam was bluffing. But Bush decided that he had to call him on it. When Saddam then refused to show his cards, Bush decided to end the game."
-
************************************************************************
Geopolitical Diary: Friday, June 13, 2003
U.S. forces carried out the first major counterinsurgency operation against Iraqi guerrillas. Operation Peninsula Strike included air and ground operations in the area north of Baghdad. An Apache helicopter was shot down during the operation. An F-16 also went down, although the cause has not been announced, and the cause could have been something other than hostile fire. Some 400 Iraqis were detained. A spokesman at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said the intelligence situation had improved enough that U.S. forces were able to target Iraqi forces, implying that Peninsula Strike was not a random sweep hoping to disrupt guerrilla operations but a focused mission with clear objectives.
Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, commander of North Vietnamese forces in both the war against France and the United States, divided guerrilla warfare into three stages:
Stage 1: Small-scale operations against enemy forces, designed to inflict
casualties, integrate guerrillas with the population and conduct political
education to create the framework for broader operations against the enemy. This stage is political and psychological. The goal is to drive a wedge between the enemy and the population by forcing the enemy into operations that harass and alienate the people.
Stage 2: A combination of small-scale operations combined with larger
units -- platoon to regimental formations that increase the tempo of
operations -- drawing enemy forces into ambushes by the use of superior
intelligence, mobility and stealth, creating areas where the enemy could not operate for military reasons. This stage is designed to exhaust the enemy by forcing him into endless offensive operations that simultaneously drain resources and generate hostility in the population.
Stage 3: The final stage in which large, conventional military formations
engage and defeat main enemy forces.
Giap pointed out that a guerrilla insurgency is based on three key
elements -- among many others. First, deny the enemy intelligence while
building their own intelligence, enabling them to know when the enemy was coming while the enemy never really knew the guerrillas' location. Second, use enemy operations to win the loyalty of the population. Third, erode support for the war in the home country by imposing unacceptable costs.
A successful counterinsurgency strategy is based on cutting the guerrilla
from popular support and destroying supporting infrastructure before the war reaches the second stage. To achieve this, superb intelligence is necessary.
If Operation Peninsula Strike was based on sound intelligence, the air
strikes destroyed an important Baath facility while the cordon operation
captured a large number of guerrillas without more than inconveniencing the rest of the population. That means that U.S. intelligence officers were in a position to distinguish guerrillas from non-guerrillas -- which is
extraordinarily important to do. It also is extraordinarily difficult to do,
particularly in a Stage 1 counterinsurgency operation, which generally is
characterized by relatively poor intelligence caused by the opacity of enemy operations.
What we are arguing is that the United States is in a Stage 1 guerrilla war
against an enemy that apparently has thought this through and has made
suitable plans. The enemy has fundamental weaknesses. The terrain makes it difficult to hide the movement of Stage 2 formations, and even if Syria or Iran were willing to provide sanctuary to the operations, terrain and technology make monitoring that border much easier than it was in Vietnam.
However, the United States is not yet in a Stage 2 situation, but in Stage
1. Here, the key is identifying and neutralizing guerrillas without
generating the popular hostility that generates more guerrillas.
That takes a degree of intelligence that is possible, but which we don't
think the United States has yet. One of the things you do to gather
intelligence is the kind of operation we saw today. But these operations
must be carefully balanced between the capture of prisoners for
interrogation and the wholesale alienation of the community. That is easier said than done.
A saying from Vietnam was "grab them by the balls; their hearts and minds will follow." That is not necessarily a bad strategy, but it requires a
surgical position, otherwise you can wind up grabbing every other body part and actually help the enemy move into and through the second stage by serving as the guerrillas' recruiting office. The U.S. problem is not the principle of more Peninsula Strikes, but executing these operations effectively. Military intelligence is combing through the results of this operation as we speak. It will not have captured the Holy Grail -- the names and addresses of guerrillas and their sympathizers. It will have acquired some intelligence. The speed at which that information accumulates will determine the success of the U.S. suppressing this movement.
-
www.stratfor.com
Geopolitical Diary: Monday, June 15, 2003
Tensions in Iran rose to significant levels over the weekend, as gunmen supportive of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei raided university dormitories in Tehran in actions clearly designed to intimidate pro-reform students. Motorists in the city responded by causing traffic jams and blowing their horns when pro-Khamenei paramilitaries were not in sight. The Iranians accused the United States of being behind the demonstrations and of exaggerating their significance. The Iranian Foreign Ministry said the United States was engaged in a "flagrant interference in Iran's internal
affairs." U.S. President George W. Bush said, "This is the beginning of people expressing themselves toward a free Iran, which I think is positive."
There is little doubt that the Iranian crisis has begun. The United States, directly or indirectly, is encouraging an insurrection not so much against the official Iranian government -- run by President Mohammed Khatami -- as
against the religious authority Khamenei controls. The internal pressure is being supplemented by the presence of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, which are in a position to carry out covert operations in Iran in support of anti-Khamenei forces. There are unconfirmed reports that such operations already are under way. It is not clear that the students in Tehran have decisive support either in the city or in the country. However, it is clear that the United States views them as having sufficient weight to destabilize
the regime or, at the very least, generate massive tensions between the Khatami government and the Khamenei faction.
All of this is in a very early state. U.S. pressure on the Iranians may or may not have a decisive effect on the Iranians. The U.S. goal is to pressure the Iranians into changing their behavior both toward al Qaeda and on the
question of nuclear weapons development. The internal pressures on Iraq are complicated by the fact that the Iranians themselves have critical cards to play against the United States. At this point, the United States is dealing
with a guerrilla war within the Sunni areas of Iraq, where the scope and outcome are unclear at this moment. The Iranians have the ability to destabilize the U.S. occupation of Iraq if they were to use their influence to generate massive anti-American demonstrations south of Baghdad, where
Shiites dominate. The United States is risking this as it presses the Iranians. Therefore, it is critical for Washington to bring guerrilla operations north and west of Baghdad in the Sunni community under control before there are any actions in the south.
Given this, the United States launched operation Desert Scorpion, which appears to focus on the town of Al Fallujah, 45 miles to the west of Baghdad. It also appeared to be the largest U.S. combat operation since Washington announced the cessation of major hostilities in early May. Desert
Scorpion combined search-and-seize operations designed to identify Baathist guerrillas with the distribution of food and other supplies, which were designed to win over the population. Desert Scorpion appears to be targeting
the core dilemma facing the U.S. command in Iraq. Operations designed to engage and destroy guerrilla forces also are likely to increase hostility toward the United States among the populace, in effect strengthening the guerrillas. Desert Scorpion is intended as a test of a model that will not
generate the counteraction the United States fears. Still, Iraqi guerrilla forces attacked a U.S convoy about 20 miles south of the town of Balad. A truck was destroyed, and there were reports of several American casualties.
Israel remained surprisingly and interestingly quiet over the weekend. There were no further suicide bombings by Hamas, and there were reports of an Israeli withdrawal from parts of Gaza. The United States has brought massive pressure in an attempt to re-establish the proposed peace plan. Bush on June 15 condemned Hamas, saying, "The free world and those who love freedom and peace must deal harshly with Hamas and the killers." U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, "Clearly, if
force is required ultimately to root out terrorism, it is possible there would be American participation." We doubt that he said this without consultations with the White House.
It is not clear to us what an American force in Gaza or the West Bank could achieve that the Israel Defense Forces couldn't, but practicality is not the point of Lugar's statement. The White House is trying to tell Hamas that if
it continues to oppose the peace plan, the United States will stop all attempts at restraining Israel, freeing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to do whatever he wants to destroy Hamas. Hamas considered a cease-fire only because -- in the words of its leaders -- the U.S. victory in Iraq clearly
is caught between what it regards as the unequal concessions of the peace plan and fear of Israel unrestrained. It is obvious that some negotiations have taken place over the weekend between the Palestine National Authority
(PNA) and Hamas, and Israel and the PNA.
The United States undoubtedly does not want to cast Sharon loose. At the same time, it understands that the peace plan is dead unless Hamas can be sufficiently intimidated. So, the United States has carried out four operations over the weekend. First, Washington is moving to re-establish its
credibility by trying to quickly defeat Baath guerrillas. Second, it is trying to expand its credibility by destabilizing the Iranian regime. Third, it is trying to use its credibility to intimidate Hamas. And fourth, it is trying to exploit its credibility by forcing Hamas to the negotiating table.
All of this requires that the United States is not bogged down in a war it can't win in Iraq. It is not fair to expect the U.S. military to solve the problem posed by the Baath insurrection in a week. Nevertheless, that is what is needed. The United States went into Iraq to establish its credibility and indeed, its irresistible ferocity. Stalemate in Iraq is not, as they say, an option for the United States, as it affects the situation
from the Himalayas to the Mediterranean. The Baath challenge is strategic, not tactical. A rapid resolution is needed to influence the region. Therefore, the pressure on the U.S. military is not fair -- but it is real.
-
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
18 June 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
Guerrilla War in Iraq
Summary
The United States is now clearly involved in a guerrilla war in
the Sunni regions of Iraq. As a result, U.S. forces are engaging
in counterinsurgency operations, which historically have proven
most difficult and trying -- for both American forces and
American politics. Suppressing a guerrilla operation without
alienating the indigenous population represents an extreme
challenge to the United States that at this point does not appear
avoidable -- and the seriousness of which does not appear to be
broadly understood.
Analysis
The United States currently is involved in an extended, low-
intensity conflict in Iraq. More precisely, it is involved in a
guerrilla war in the Sunni areas of the country, including much
of Baghdad proper as well an arc that runs from due west to the
north. The almost daily guerrilla attacks against U.S. forces
have resulted in nearly 50 deaths since U.S. President George W.
Bush declared the end of major military operations; they also
have tied down a substantial number of troops in
counterinsurgency operations, two of which (Operations Peninsula
Freedom and Desert Scorpion) have been launched already.
The war is not strategically insignificant, even though the level
of intensity is relatively low at this point. Guerrilla warfare
can have a disproportionate effect strategically, even when it
can be tactically and operationally managed.
There are two reasons for this. The first is that it violates the
principles of economy of force: The quantity of force required to
contain a guerrilla operation is inherently disproportionate
because the guerrilla force is dispersed over a large geographic
area, and its stealth and mobility requires a much larger force
to contain. Second, guerrilla war generates political realities
that affect the strategic level of war. Because of the nature of
counterinsurgency operations, guerrillas can generate a
simultaneous perception of weakness and brutality, regardless of
the intentions of the conventional forces. Since guerrillas
choose the time and place of their own attacks and use mobility
to evade counterattacks, the guerrilla appears to be outfighting
the regular forces. Even when they are merely holding their own
or even losing, their continued operation generates a sense of
power for the guerrillas and weakness for the counterguerrilla
force.
The nature of counterinsurgency requires that guerrillas be
distinguished from the general population. This is
extraordinarily difficult, particularly when the troops trying to
make the distinction are foreign, untrained in the local language
and therefore culturally incapable of making the subtle
distinctions needed for surgical identification. The result is
the processing of large numbers of noncombatants in the search
for a handful of guerrillas. Another result is the massive
intrusion of force into a civilian community that may start out
as neutral or even friendly, but which over time becomes hostile
-- not only because of the constant intrusions, but also because
of the inevitable mistakes committed by troops who are trying to
make sense of what appears to them an incoherent situation.
There is another level on which the guerrilla war intersects
strategy. The United States invaded Iraq in order to be perceived
as a decisive military power and to set the stage for military
operations elsewhere. Guerrilla warfare inevitably undermines the
regional perception of U.S. power -- justly or not -- while
creating the impression that the United States is limited in what
it can do in the region militarily.
Thus, the United States is in a tough spot. It cannot withdraw
from Iraq and therefore must fight. But it must fight in such a
way that avoids four things:
1. It cannot fight a war that alienates the general Iraqi
populace sufficiently to generate recruits for the guerrillas and
undermine the occupation.
2. It cannot lose control of the countryside; this could
destabilize the entire occupation.
3. It cannot allow the guerrilla operation to undermine its
ability to project forces elsewhere.
4. It cannot be allowed to extend the length of the conflict to
such an extent that the U.S. public determines that the cost is
not worth the prize. The longer the war, the clearer the
definition of the prize must be.
Therefore, the task for U.S. forces is:
1. Identify the enemy.
2. Isolate the enemy from his supplies and from the population.
3. Destroy him.
The dos and don'ts of guerrilla warfare are easy to write about,
but much more difficult to put into practice.
The centerpiece of guerrilla warfare, even more than other types
of war, is intelligence. Knowing who the enemy is, where he is
and what he plans to do is the key to stopping him. In Vietnam,
the North Vietnamese had much better intelligence about these
three things than the United States. Over time, despite material
weakness, they were able to turn this and a large pool of
manpower into victory by forcing the United States to do the four
things it should never have done.
Since intelligence is the key, we must consider the fact that
this war began in an intelligence failure. The core assumption of
U.S. intelligence was that once the Baath regime lost Baghdad, it
would simply disappear. Stratfor had speculated that Saddam
Hussein had a postwar plan for a national redoubt in the north
and northeast, but our analysis rejected the idea of a guerrilla
war on the basis that Iraq's terrain would not support one.
Nevertheless, it is the strategy the Baathists apparently have
chosen to follow. In retrospect, the strange capitulation of
Baghdad -- where large Iraqi formations simply melted away --
appears to have been calculated to some degree. In Afghanistan,
the Taliban forces were not defeated in the cities. They declined
combat, withdrawing and dispersing, then reorganizing and
returning to guerrilla warfare. Hussein appears to have taken a
page from that strategy. Certainly, most of his forces did not
carry out a strategic retreat to return as guerrilla fighters;
most went home. However, a cadre of troops -- first encountered
as Mujahideen fighters in Basra, An Nasiriyah and Karbala -- seem
to have withdrawn to fight as guerrillas.
What is important is that they have retained cohesion. That does
not necessarily mean that they are all being controlled from a
central location, although the tempo of operations -- daily
attacks in different locations -- seems to imply an element of
planning by someone. It does mean that the basic infrastructure
needed to support the operation was in place prior to the war:
1. Weapons and reserve weapons caches placed in locations known
to some level of the command.
2. A communications system, whether simply messengers or
communications gear, linking components together by some means.
3. Intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities designed to
identify targets and limit enemy intelligence from penetrating
their capabilities.
The central question is how they do this. First, how many and
what kind of weapons are stored, and where are they? Not only in
terms of conventional weapons, but also of weapons of mass
destruction. This is a critical question. We continue to suspect
that Hussein had chemical and possibly biological weapons before
the U.S.-led war. Where are the weapons now? Are they stored in
some way? Are they available for use, for example, against U.S.
base camps at some point?
Second, what is the command and control system? Are these
autonomous units operating without central control, are they
centrally controlled or is it a mixed system? Suddenly, the
question of Hussein's whereabouts ceases to be irrelevant. Are
Hussein and his lieutenants operating the war from a bunker
somewhere? How do they communicate with whatever command
authority might exist?
How can U.S. intelligence penetrate and disrupt the guerrilla
movement? The United States is best at electronic and image
intelligence. If the guerrillas stay away from electronic
communications except in extreme cases, electronic intelligence
will not work. As for image intelligence, it might be used to
find arms caches, but it is generally not particularly helpful in
a guerrilla war at this level.
Vo Nguyen Giap, who commanded communist forces against both
France and the United States in Vietnam, divided guerrilla war
into three stages:
1. Stage one: very small unit, hit-and-run actions without any
attempt to hold territory.
2. Stage two: continuation of stage one attacks combined with
larger units, regimental and below, engaging in more intense
attacks and taking and holding remote terrain as needed.
3. Stage three: conventional warfare against a weakened enemy who
is engaged and defeated.
Giap argued that the transition between stages is the key to
successful guerrilla operations: Too late or too early are the
issues. In Iraq, the guerrillas have a separate problem -- the
terrain makes the concentration of forces too risky. It is one
thing to mass several companies of light infantry in the
Vietnamese jungle. It is another thing to do the same in the
Iraqi desert. The Iraqi Achilles heel is that the transition from
the current level of operations is very difficult to achieve.
This is the same problem facing the U.S. forces. If a guerrilla
war is to be won, the second stage is the point at which it can
be won. During the first stage, the ratio between operational
costs and damage to the enemy is prohibitive. Carrying out
battalion-sized operations to capture or kill three guerrillas is
not only exhausting, it also undermines popular support for
counterinsurgency measures. In a stage two operation, the ratios
are more acceptable. But the Iraqis can't move to stage two
without playing into the hands of the Americans.
That seems to argue that the Iraqis intend to remain at this
level of operations for an extended period of time. How long
depends as much on their resources as on their intentions. How
many fighters they have, how secure their command system is,
where their weapons are located and how many they have will
determine the length of the fight.
From the U.S. point of view, fighting a retail guerrilla war is
the worst possible strategy. The key for the United States is the
destruction of the Iraqi guerrilla command and control system.
The North Vietnamese had a clearly defined command and control
system, but it was in the north and in Cambodia. There were
sanctuaries. At this moment, it would appear that the Iraqis have
no sanctuary. Therefore, the command centers are within political
reach of the United States. The question is where are they? Where
are Hussein, his sons and his other commanders? Gen. Abid Hamid
Mahmoud al-Tikriti, Hussein's No. 4 commander, was seized today,
which certainly represents a breakthrough for the United States.
What is not yet clear is whether this is the beginning of the
systematic collapse of the guerrilla command structure or whether
he was irrelevant to that.
Unless the United States is fortunate and this war comprises only
a handful of fighters who quickly will be used up, the only
strategy the United States has is to find and destroy the command
structure. Every army -- even a guerrilla army -- depends on
commanders, communications and supplies. Find and destroy the
commanders, and the army will not be able to resist a general
offensive. But first you have to find the commanders. Sweeping
after foot soldiers will only upset the population; going after
the generals is the key.
Therefore, the question of where Hussein, his sons and the rest
of the officials pictured on the deck of cards is not academic.
It has become the heart of the military equation.
...................................................................
STRATFOR SERVICES NOW AVAILABLE:
Join decision-makers around the world who read Stratfor for daily
intelligence briefs, in-depth analyses and forecasts on a wide
range of international security, political and economic affairs.
Stratfor Premium is our flagship product providing comprehensive
global intelligence including daily analyses, special reports,
intelligence alerts, premium analyses, situation reports, country
and regional net assessments as well as Stratfor's sought after
Annual and Quarterly Forecasts. Corporate or multi-user volume
discount packages available. Visit this web page for details:
http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=SUB&c=c
Stratfor Basic offers daily analysis, situation reports and ongoing
coverage of global events. Also available with this package is a
pay per view service for many of our premium reports. Visit this web
page for details: http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=SUB&c=d
...................................................................
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Product inquiries, partnership, and sales: marketing@stratfor.com
Subscription and customer service issues: service@stratfor.com
Comments and/or information for analysis: analysis@stratfor.com
Media services and trade show requests: PR@stratfor.com
...................................................................
HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE:
If you wish to remove yourself from this mailing list,
send an email to <Majordomo@mail2.stratfor.com> with
the following command in the body of your email message:
unsubscribe weeklylist
...................................................................
http://www.stratfor.com
====================================================================
(c) 2003 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
-
Geopolitical Diary: Friday, June 20, 2003
Jun 20, 2003
The war in Iraq continued today with more attacks and casualties. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell downplayed the significance of his visit to the Middle East, saying it was just another day. The United States continued to warn Iran about developing nuclear weapons while Iran continued to resist. They are the same stories, different day.
The situation in Britain is a much more interesting tale. British Prime Minister Tony Blair is now in trouble. Whether he faces a mortal blow or not is not clear, but we tend to believe that his ability to govern is in rapid decline, with little to reverse it. The issue is Iraq. Two former ministers who resigned from Blair's cabinet have made the claim that Blair bypassed the normal operations of the British cabinet in making the decision to go to war with Iraq. More damaging is the claim that intelligence reports that should have gone to the cabinet were suppressed, while laundered versions tilted to support the decision to go to war were distributed instead. According to the ministers, the United States and Britain decided last summer to invade Iraq, with the date set for February. The justification for the war came later.
Stratfor has regarded this as the decision-making process since last fall, so obviously, we tend to believe the ministers. What is interesting, however, is the manner in which Blair is being weakened. This is particularly interesting when compared to the way his American counterpart, U.S. President George W. Bush, is not being weakened, certainly not equally.
The issue here is duplicity in the making of foreign policy, in particular, carrying out certain policies with differing public and private justifications. Duplicity in foreign policy is an essential characteristic, much as it is in a good marriage. If your wife asks you if she looks as good as she did 30 years ago, what are you going to say? When former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was asked why he was aiding the Soviet Union, he had two potential answers. One was to say that he was aiding a blood thirsty dictator -- Joseph Stalin -- because he wanted the Red Army to bleed Nazi Germany dry, so that the United States could come in for the kill at the lowest possible cost. He certainly could have said it, but he took the second route. He avoided public justification for ignoring the nature of the Soviet regime, ignoring the cynical use of Soviet lives to ease the American way into Europe and simply emphasized the need to defeat Nazi leader Adolph Hitler. When asked about his true thoughts about Lend-Lease to Britain prior to the war, FDR simply tap danced around the question. His plans were crisp in his mind -- support Britain regardless of the Neutrality Act. His actions frequently went beyond the limits of the law. His speeches were designed to obscure reality.
When we look at the statecraft of a Roosevelt, we see that in a democratic society, politicians frequently lie about their true motives. Instead, they invent acceptable fabrications, so they don't have to state publicly what they think privately. This is not so much to fool the public, although FDR certainly intended to do that. Rather it is to avoid stating publicly to allies what your true intention is. Had FDR publicly stated that his strategy with the Soviets was to use them to bleed the Wehrmacht dry, it would have created an untenable situation for Stalin. Stalin was not exactly na?ve. He knew that the United States had him by the short hairs, and that the squeeze would be hard. He knew he had no choice. But it is one thing to understand that you are being hammered and another thing to admit it.
If the United States and Britain admitted publicly their real motives -- that they intended to squeeze the Saudis, Syrians and Iranians by occupying Iraq -- they would not have created a domestic political problem. However, without the domestic political problem, it would have been much more difficult for the Saudis, for example, to allow themselves to be squeezed. It is much easier to capitulate if you are permitted to keep your dignity than if you are going to be publicly humiliated.
And herein is the tale: As it becomes increasingly clear that the United States had complex geopolitical motives for invading Iraq and that WMD played only a small part in it, the U.S. public is relatively comfortable. The only ones getting excited are those who opposed the policy regardless of justification. There is no great shift in the polls over this issue. The American public appears to be more comfortable with both the underlying reason and the need to fabricate public justifications because, in the end, they simply supported the strategy.
Blair is in much bigger trouble, because the British public didn't support the general strategy and, more important, because Blair is from the Labor Party and his own party fragmented over the war. The WMD issue was more important to Blair because the Labor Party required a justification other than strategic requirements. This is because, in the end, Britain has somewhat different strategic requirements than does the United States. In particular, the Labor Party is uncomfortable with realpolitik and has been for a long time. The revelations have shown Blair to have been a cynical manipulator in the grand tradition, and that won't wash in the Labor Party. Nor are the Tories, who are more comfortable with this, likely to bail him out.
We suspect that in the end, Blair will execute a graceful exit. For Bush, the critical quesiton will not be whether he lied about WMD, but whether he can pacify Iraq and achieve his strategic goals in the region. For Blair, it is about what he did; for Bush, it is about what he will do. Since Blair can't change what he did, his enemies will bring him down. Bush is far from safe, but at least his fate is in his hands.
-
http://www.meib.org/articles/0305_irani.htm
-
Stop Blaming, Wise Up to Postwar Realities
A clever foe may have an 'occupation fatigue' strategy for victory
by Caleb Carr, Caleb Carr, a military historian and a novelist, is the author of "The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians" (Random House, updated 2003) and "The Alienist" (Random House, 1994).
Americans have a long tradition of blaming their own civilian and uniformed commanders for wartime setbacks instead of recognizing the success of an enemy's efforts. There's a very good chance that this tradition is alive, well and hard at work in Iraq today.
The occupation goes badly. The press, the media and members of Congress demand to know: Who is to blame? As perhaps befits the most narcissistic (along with the most advanced and generous) society in world history, we Americans don't like to believe that our fate is ever out of our own hands or that anyone else in the world can beat our best efforts. When we fail, it must be the fault of our own incompetence.
Take Little Big Horn, for example. Gen. George Armstrong Custer was an arrogant fool, runs the standard wisdom, who rode blindly into an obvious trap. Actually, the Sioux chieftains Sitting Bull and, especially, Crazy Horse were two of the greatest ? and cleverest ? unconventional warriors in modern history.
And Pearl Harbor? Americans were asleep, runs the same strain of thinking, insensible to the dangers around them. Actually, the American armed forces knew that such an attack was possible and had even war-gamed it; but no war game could prepare them for the precise planning and the truly astounding daring of one of the premier offensive geniuses of World War II, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto.
And what of the only war the United States ever lost (an arguable epithet), Vietnam? Didn't we go down in defeat because our people and politicians stabbed our commanders in their collective back after making them fight the war with one hand tied behind it? Actually, no. American soldiers were overwhelmingly well supplied and fought bravely; but their commanders ? often men who had acquitted themselves well in prior conflicts ? were simply outwitted by Ho Chi Minh and his creative and determined military right arm, Vo Nguyen Giap, both past masters of a variety of war with which we had little or no experience.
To put those experiences in terms that our plain-talking President Bush might understand, we got whupped; and right now, we may ? may ? be on our way to getting whupped in Iraq.
We like to believe that when Saddam Hussein spoke of dragging the United States into Armageddon, he meant a war involving weapons of mass destruction, and that we were simply too quick and overpowering to allow such a scenario to develop.
But what if the Iraqi dictator actually realized that we would be so overpowering? And what if, acting on this realization, he abandoned a biochemical campaign before the war started, destroying or hiding his weapons of mass destruction deep underground, in terrain controlled by his most ardent supporters, while stockpiling enough cash to bankroll a different kind of Armageddon?
I'm speaking here of a carefully planned effort to sow anarchy and thus a desire among the Iraqi people for the return of a strong hand, as well as a complementary effort to destroy American domestic will when it comes to sustaining a gruesome and grueling occupation.
If "occupation fatigue" is indeed taking root in the American consciousness, it is not the fault of failed or cooked intelligence ? the subjects that are getting the most attention from critics of the Iraq undertaking. We should remember, after all, that American leaders from the founding fathers to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and beyond have flat-out lied about war aims, threats and intelligence in order to get the American people ? who generally have no taste for war ? to fight.
The American Revolution did not, ultimately, fulfill its promise of making all or even most men, to say nothing of women, equal (although few would argue this was reason to abort the separation from Britain); and FDR told legendary lies about such things as the Greer incident (in which the U.S. Navy provoked a German submarine attack on the destroyer, after which Washington tried to spin the event as German aggression) and the Lend-Lease program (which saw American supply and weapons shipments reach Britain before Congress had approved their dispatch).
Even if the Bush administration exaggerated the immediacy of the threat of Iraqi WMDs, it did not create the fact of Hussein's addiction to such weapons, any more than FDR fabricated the danger that totalitarian states posed to the world when he misrepresented what was going on in the North Atlantic before Pearl Harbor.
This is not to say that the American intelligence community did not make grievous mistakes before and during the Iraq war. But analysts trying to determine why we're in such a mess in Iraq right now by deciding which American leader or agency got us there are ignoring the possibility that Hussein may have had this mess in mind all along. And if that is the case, then we're in even deeper trouble than we thought: Hussein has been planning and organizing his unconventional resistance for a considerable period, while we have only begun to figure out a way to counteract it.
The continuing violence means that Iraq is not yet ready for the Middle Eastern Marshall Plan we were once so convinced that the Iraqis wanted. Let's remember that in order to implement the Marshall Plan, we destroyed Germany and dealt with the German populace ruthlessly. Had anyone in the former Nazi Reich mounted the kind of violent dissatisfaction with the pace of our charitable intentions that we're seeing in Iraq, they would have been arrested or wiped out, no questions asked.
Do we now want to shift gears toward a similarly draconian preparation for reconstruction in Iraq? Perhaps not, but the war is clearly not over, despite what Bush said during his patently silly amateur theatrics on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.
The Pentagon must, however reluctantly, send in not only additional Special Forces units (the only troops we have that are capable of handling this situation without alienating the Iraqi people) to pick apart the resistance machine, but also police troops to meet the public safety emergency, as well as extra engineering units to restore services quickly.
We were all supposed to be happy friends in Iraq by now. But our antagonist may have proved, once again, to be a damnably clever opponent. Before we get entirely swept up with finding people on our own side to blame (there will be ample time for that later), we ought to be about the business of devising new schemes to neutralize our foe ? schemes even more imaginative than those admirable plans that brought us into Baghdad so quickly.
-
www.stratfor.com
Signing up highly recommended-Crafty
-------------------------
We suppose it does not constitute news to say the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan is in trouble, but it represents the primary event of the day. The reason is simple: If Israeli-Palestinian relations deteriorate to the levels of violence seen in the not-too-distant past, the implications will go
beyond Israel and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). The goal of U.S. President George W. Bush's administration, from the beginning, was to isolate this issue and quell tensions by reducing U.S. intrusion. Sept. 11, 2001, reduced that possibility dramatically, and the invasion of Iraq
eliminated the possibility. An element of diplomacy leading up to the war,
particularly in the Islamic world, was the guarantee of best efforts on the
part of the United States in creating a solution to the problem.
When the United States maneuvered to box Saudi Arabia into a measure of support for the war effort, a U.S.-supported peace plan for Israel and the PNA was part of the deal. Despite serious and justified misgivings on the part of the United States, having the example of the Camp David disaster in front of it, the United States made the guarantee. The peace plan's failure would have two results. First, Islamic governments that were relatively pro-Washington would face increased pressures from internal forces arguing that the United States betrayed its commitment to find a peaceful solution. Second, it could create a situation in which two insurrections are going on simultaneously -- one in Israel and one in Iraq -- which would be portrayed by many as a single conflict separated only by Jordan. Thus, keeping the lid on it has become, in spite of initial intentions, a fundamental interest for the United States, with failure carrying substantially potential penalties.
At the same time, the United States is seriously limited in the pressure it
can put on Israel. This is not because of the Jewish lobby's power in
Washington, which certainly is not trivial but also is not nearly as
decisive at this point as some would claim. Moreover, Jewish opinion is
hardly monochromatic anymore. Rather, the problem is symmetry. The United States is engaged in a war against Islamists believed to support terrorism. Israel is involved in a war against Islamists for the same reason. Washington is trying extremely hard to convince others to participate in the war, using the logic that radical Islamic forces equally threatened everyone. If the United States presses Israel to compromise with Hamas while at the same time pressuring everyone else -- such as Pakistan -- to take an uncompromising role on Islamic fundamentalism, inconsistency would be the least of its problems. It would have created a framework for compromise with Islamic fundamentalism that other countries would seize.
This is the basis of today's strange events, which included a statement by
senior Hamas leader Abu Shanab, who said, "What is the point in speaking in rhetoric? Let's be frank, we cannot destroy Israel. The practical solution is for us to have a state alongside Israel." Alongside this was a statement from Bush -- who might have been expected to latch onto Shanab's statement -- that "I urge the leaders in Europe and around the world to take swift, decisive action against terror groups such as Hamas, to cut off their funding and support, as the United States has done."
Shanab, considered a moderate, does not speak for Hamas, and some Hamas sources denied that he ever said that. This is the problem. A split appears to have developed within Hamas between a faction that essentially is prepared to shift to the stance taken by the PNA of accepting the existence of Israel, and a larger group that is unprepared to take that step. That split has kept Hamas from giving a definitive answer to the question of a cease-fire. Vastly conflicting signals have been given, leading to the expectation -- for days now -- that a cease-fire was near.
The problem has been that the only cease-fire Hamas can offer with any unity is one that doesn't commit Hamas to any time period, that doesn't guarantee long-term cessation of hostilities and certainly doesn't agree overtly to the existence of Israel. From Israel's point of view, this is the best of all outcomes. First, it shifts the burden of failure to Hamas, pushing the United States into confrontation with it. Second, it frees Israel from the burden of a cease-fire, which it regards simply as an opportunity for Palestinians to regroup under its protection. Israeli officials have no interest in a short-term cease-fire, don't think they can get a long-term cease-fire and want the blame for failure to rest on Hamas.
From Hamas' point of view, an explicit recognition of Israel would give away a critical bargaining chip and would, in addition, alienate its political
base, which might move toward another organization like Islamic Jihad or
simply split Hamas into two factions, with the pro-recognition faction
simply drifting into the PNA coalition. Nothing on the ground would change.
U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will be in the region this
weekend. Undoubtedly, any chance for a solution to this problem will have to wait for her arrival, since all factions on both sides now are posturing for the benefit of the United States. Bush has lashed out at Hamas in an apparent last-ditch attempt to frighten it into a compromise. After all, this entire process began when Hamas said the power of the United States had reached a level that made remaining outside the peace process untenable. Possibly the threat of a direct confrontation with the United States will sway Hamas' leaders to move toward Shanab's position. More likely, it will persuade Shanab to shift his position back to the main Hamas line.
There is not much left to this process, barring a major surprise from Hamas. Therefore, it is time to consider not whether there will be a cease-fire, but the level to which the next round of violence will rise. We expect this to depend on the rise in Iraq. If the violence can be sustained and the
United States perceived as unable to suppress it, the attraction of a double Intifada might be too much for Islamic forces to resist. If the United States can suppress the guerrilla movement, the perception of American power and relentlessness might cause Hamas to recalculate its position once again. Crises are blending together in the region. We suspect the Bush administration is acutely aware of this.
-
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
26 June 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
Summer Offensive
Summary
When we step back, the broader picture of the U.S.-al Qaeda war
becomes clearer. It appears to us that both sides are gearing up
for a summer offensive. Each, for its own reasons, is going to
try to engage in operations in a series of theaters, including in
the United States. This does not mean the offensives will be
successful. It does mean we can expect complex action from both
sides on a broad geographic scale. These need not be individual
large-scale operations, but collectively they will constitute
significant attempts to get an advantage in the war.
Analysis
The conquest of Iraq has created an interesting dynamic in the
war. Both sides are now under pressure to launch summer
offensives. Al Qaeda must demonstrate its continued viability.
The United States must exploit the victory in Iraq and disrupt al
Qaeda operations globally. This indicates to us that both sides
will carry out intense operations over the next few months.
If we look at the world through al Qaeda's eyes, the period since
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has consisted of a series of
significant reversals. First, a U.S. offensive dislodged the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Second, the hoped-for insurrection
among the Islamic masses did not materialize. The primary goal of
the Sept. 11 assault -- to prompt a rising in the Muslim world
designed to create an Islamic regime in at least one country, to
serve as al Qaeda's anchor -- did not take place. Finally, Iraq
was occupied. The Baathist regime was no friend of al Qaeda,
except in the sense that the two shared an enemy. Nevertheless,
it appears in the Islamic world that al Qaeda has cost Iraq its
freedom.
In short, al Qaeda has little to show for Sept. 11 except
significant losses and failure. If this trend continues, as we
argued in our second-quarter forecast, al Qaeda will begin an
irreversible disintegration process, with support personnel
concluding that the organization has ceased to be operational and
therefore beginning to fall away. It is insufficient for al
Qaeda's network to assert operational capability; it must
demonstrate this capability. Thus, during the past quarter al
Qaeda has conducted operations in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, and
possibly in Chechnya. Al Qaeda networks also have been disrupted
in Southeast Asia and Africa. The last few months were not
decisive; while they demonstrated that al Qaeda still was
functional, they did not demonstrate that the organization
remained fully effective.
Al Qaeda's challenge in the next few months will be intensified
over time -- we are moving toward the second anniversary of Sept.
11. Al Qaeda has developed an operational model in which it
launches major attacks about once every two years. The
organization's supporters could rationalize that the dearth of
major attacks over the past two years dealt more with operational
tempo than disruptions in the network. That excuse is going away
soon: Al Qaeda must demonstrate its ability to launch a single
major operation or, alternatively, a substantial cluster of
secondary operations.
While al Qaeda is under pressure to attack, the United States is
under the same pressure, deriving from a very different cause.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq was not an end in itself: It was
designed to set the stage for follow-on operations that would
shatter al Qaeda's infrastructure -- both by direct assaults on
al Qaeda and, indirectly, by pressuring regimes that have not
sufficiently controlled al Qaeda supporters. With that stage now
set, the primary value of the Iraq campaign will be Washington's
ability to rapidly exploit the advantage it has gained.
It follows from this, of course, that al Qaeda and its allies
must undermine the U.S. victory in Iraq. The current guerrilla
war has its origins in the Baathist desire to engage, attrite and
defeat the United States, but Islamists outside Iraq who have an
interest in limiting Washington's ability to exploit its victory
are supporting it directly. The guerrilla war serves a number of
functions, one of the most important of which is to tie down U.S.
forces and limit the bandwidth of U.S. command so it cannot
effectively exploit the Iraq victory.
As happens in war, therefore, events have combined to create a
sort of swirling engagement -- this time on a global scale. The
United States is attacking al Qaeda along multiple axes, and the
group is counterattacking. Each side has critical advantages, and
the outcome is unclear. Therefore, to gain conceptual control
over the operation, the United States -- with far greater
resources and therefore far greater opportunities for conceptual
confusion -- must build a system of theaters for organizing and
managing the war. This already has been done; now is the time
that the organization is being implemented operationally.
U.S. operational theaters can be divided this way:
1. Homeland: U.S. intelligence services appear to be moving from
surveillance to disruption mode. Both modes are necessary. In the
surveillance mode, the primary goal is to trace relationships to
map the full extent of the network. In the disruption mode,
security services attack the network -- either because they are
confident they have mapped its full extent, or because they feel
the risk of passive surveillance is too high. There are two risks
to be balanced: If the network is assaulted too early, large
segments might be left untouched; but if the surveillance
continues for too long, the network might be able to attack in
spite of surveillance. There is no science to this, and the art
generates many gray hairs since an error either way could be
disastrous. The exogenous factor driving decisions is the
perception of the imminence of attacks -- the greater the
perception of imminence, the greater the pressure to move from
the intelligence mode to the police mode and make arrests. Recent
actions, including the public arrest of an Ohio truck driver,
indicate that an offensive against known networks in the United
States is under way. Washington is shutting down known and
suspected networks to disrupt an al Qaeda offensive.
2. Afghan-Pakistan Theater: U.S. and allied forces continue to
come under attack in Afghanistan, despite the fact that they have
been playing a relatively passive role. There does not seem to be
a plan to launch a major counteroffensive against groups within
Afghanistan, but an offensive clearly is under way along the
country's border with Pakistan, in the north. The goal apparently
is to repeat the events of the winter 2001-2002 offensive in
Afghanistan: attack, disperse and disrupt al Qaeda command and
control facilities that appear to have redeployed to the remote
regions along the border. The offensive has been under way for a
while, but it clearly will intensify, which was one of the themes
of the Musharraf-Bush summit earlier this week. For Washington,
the capture or death of Osama bin Laden is a desirable end, but
not the principle end. The principle end is to destroy al Qaeda's
strategic command while undermining tactical and operational
capabilities in the United States.
3. Africa: Last week, a B-52 bomber on a training mission dropped
munitions that accidentally killed a U.S. Marine and wounded
several others near Djibouti. It struck us as interesting that
forces in Djibouti, which normally would be training for fairly
low-intensity conflict, would have been conducting exercises with
B-52s -- an expensive endeavor that is unlikely to be undertaken
without reason. The task force at Djibouti is responsible for the
Horn of Africa region as well as operations deeper in Africa. The
United States clearly has intense concerns over Kenya, where it
issued a major alert and closed its embassy for several days last
week. There also are indications of concern about al Qaeda in
Sudan. One example: A ship laden with explosives was captured
recently by Greek special forces. The ship was traced to Northern
Ireland, and Sudan claimed ownership of the explosives on board.
There have been concerns about al Qaeda using Sudan as a base of
operations in the past, rendering the ownership of the munitions
particularly interesting. A group of al Qaeda operatives were
captured in Malawi earlier this week and have been transferred to
U.S. control. Meanwhile, U.S. President George W. Bush will
travel to Africa in early July, with visits planned to Senegal,
South Africa, Botswana, Uganda and Nigeria. The visit to Uganda
is particularly interesting, since it is strategically placed in
relation to al Qaeda's area of operations. In our view, a
campaign against al Qaeda is intensifying in Africa and will
become more visible over the summer.
4. Iraq region: U.S. and British forces are under attack
throughout Iraq. If disorganized mobs are doing the attacking,
then so much the worse, since it is more difficult to shut down a
disorganized operation. However, our view is that there is a
substantial degree of control over many of the operations against
U.S. forces, and Washington is under pressure to deal with the
situation. Reconstruction and development are more difficult in
an insecure environment, and persistent attacks on pipelines will
undermine the U.S. ability to underwrite costs through the sale
of oil. Perhaps more important, the perception that the United
States is incapable of bringing operations in the region under
control will undermine Washington's ability to exert pressure on
Iran and Syria, and to maintain the current relationship with
Saudi Arabia. Therefore, U.S. officials are under substantial
pressure to manage the insurrection more effectively -- and that
will mean a summer offensive.
There are other areas, such as Southeast Asia and Latin America,
that are highly relevant, but where the United States might not
launch intense offensives -- either because the threat hasn't
matured, the networks are already disrupted or due to resource
constraints. What is clear is that the summer will bring overt
and covert operations for the United States in multiple theaters
of operation worldwide.
It also means that if the United States makes headway, al Qaeda
will have to come to life. First, if the United States is
effective, it will have to protect itself. Second, if the United
States is effective, al Qaeda will face a use-it-or-lose-it
situation. If its assets are being rolled up, there is little
incentive for the network to continue to patiently preserve those
assets. It is paradoxical, but in the short run, the more
effective the U.S. operation is, the greater the danger from al
Qaeda becomes. Finally, al Qaeda itself is under pressure due to
its own circumstances to demonstrate that it remains capable. A
recent videotape and communique from al Qaeda's head of training
both assert that an offensive is in the offing. On the whole, we
think that is true.
The bottom line is that both sides in the war -- al Qaeda and the
United States -- are looking at this summer and fall as critical
periods. The United States must make some decisive inroads
against both al Qaeda and the regimes that do not control its
members. Al Qaeda must demonstrate that, in spite of U.S.
pressure, it remains a viable organization. This demonstration
could involve a series of smaller-scale operations -- as in Saudi
Arabia -- or a major Sept. 11-level operation in the United
States. But it seems to us that both sides need to make a move
soon, and we are therefore looking for a summer offensive that
stretches into fall. It will be an intense, complex and dangerous
period.
...................................................................
STRATFOR SERVICES NOW AVAILABLE:
Join decision-makers around the world who read Stratfor for daily
intelligence briefs, in-depth analyses and forecasts on a wide
range of international security, political and economic affairs.
Stratfor Premium is our flagship product providing comprehensive
global intelligence including daily analyses, special reports,
intelligence alerts, premium analyses, situation reports, country
and regional net assessments as well as Stratfor's sought after
Annual and Quarterly Forecasts. Corporate or multi-user volume
discount packages available. Visit this web page for details:
http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=SUB&c=c
Stratfor Basic offers daily analysis, situation reports and ongoing
coverage of global events. Also available with this package is a
pay per view service for many of our premium reports. Visit this web
page for details: http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=SUB&c=d
...................................................................
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Product inquiries, partnership, and sales: marketing@stratfor.com
Subscription and customer service issues: service@stratfor.com
Comments and/or information for analysis: analysis@stratfor.com
Media services and trade show requests: PR@stratfor.com
...................................................................
HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE:
If you wish to remove yourself from this mailing list,
send an email to <Majordomo@mail2.stratfor.com> with
the following command in the body of your email message:
unsubscribe weeklylist
...................................................................
http://www.stratfor.com
====================================================================
(c) 2003 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
-
www.stratfor.com
Geopolitical Diary: Thursday, July 3, 2003
The change of command at CENTCOM is scheduled for July 7, the U.S.
Department of Defense announced today. That answers the question we posed on June 26, when we wrote, "Since our view is that Iraq is now in crisis and that the crisis is intensifying, it follows that an accelerated change of command is in order. If [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld grasps the magnitude of the challenge -- and by now he would have to be in a coma not to -- he will dramatically speed up the transition at CENTCOM." Clearly, Rumsfeld is not in a coma. We can speculate as to why he has chosen to speak about Iraq as he has, but that is no longer all that interesting. The fact is the change of command at CENTCOM will take place at the earliest possible moment, which means Rumsfeld fully understands the severity of the situation, regardless of what he says.
Obviously, it will be left to Gen. John Abiziad to craft the counterinsurgency strategy. However, the Philadelphia Enquirer reported that Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, is asking for a 33 percent increase in the number of troops in Iraq. Reuters quoted a "senior Pentagon official" -- also known as Rumsfeld (we never have figured out why Washington officials play these games, but they all do) -- as saying, "There has been no such request. There are still remnants that are going to try to do harm to our forces. And there are still going to be casualties. The other side is if you put more troops in, you put more targets in there." But you also increase the risk to the guerrillas. Either way, it is clear that a bottoms-up review of U.S. strategy will take place under Abiziad's control, and that review is under way now. Abiziad is in-theater now but will return next week for the change-of-command ceremony. We expect that he also will present his recommendations to Rumsfeld and U.S. President George W. Bush.
It should be noted that there appears to be a decrease in Iraqi guerrilla
operations in the past 24 hours, since Operation Sidewinder got into high
gear. Therefore, an argument can be made -- and we suspect it will be
made -- that more troops mean more Sidewinders, not that 24 hours means a whole lot.
As if Iraq and al Qaeda weren't enough, it looks fairly certain that the
United States will send nearly 1,000 Marines to Liberia. There has been an
ongoing civil war there, and the country is essentially in a state of chaos.
U.N. General-Secretary Kofi Annan asked the United States to send troops to Liberia. U.S. officials did not want to get involved there, but Annan was insistent and Washington was trapped. Having made the case for intervention in Iraq against Annan's wishes, U.S. officials were hard-pressed to reject Annan's call for intervention in Liberia. The logic is not crisp, but the public relations are. We suspect Annan enjoyed maneuvering the United States into an intervention. As of this hour, the intervention is not a done deal. Washington is hoping for any miracle that would keep it from sending troops into a situation that is both hopeless and not directly related to what the administration sees as core U.S. interests. But the probability is that the Marines will go in -- although the mission and exit strategy are not clear to us at all, and imaginative explanations is what we do for a living.
Japan buckled under U.S. pressure today. The Japanese were moving toward a deal worth $2 billion to develop the Azadegan oil field in Iran. The United States is putting intense pressure on Iran to curtail its nuclear
development program and one of the levers is to try to isolate Iran
economically. Japan's decision to reconsider its investment is a measure of the intensity of Washington's campaign. Japan imports all of the oil it
uses. It constantly is looking for long-term sources of oil as a matter of
core national policy. It also has a core national policy to maintain its
security relationship with the United States. The two cores collided, and
the United States won. The Japanese certainly are not happy to have been put in this position.
Making Japan unhappy is fairly gratuitous these days. What U.S. officials
really want to do is to make the Iranians unhappy. We suspect that they are quite unhappy with both the pressure and its effectiveness. What we continue to anticipate is the Iranian response. The student uprising in Iran has collapsed, but the Iranians continue to regard the rising as an American plot. It is very dangerous to make an enemy feel it is being crushed without actually crushing them. The heavier the pressure on the Iranians, without breaking them, the greater the pressure is for Iran to try to do something decisive -- like stir up the Iraqi Shiites. The United States is on a tightrope with Iran, which is why the faster Abiziad can get control of the situation in Iraq -- assuming he can get control -- the happier Washington is going to be.
-
More quality analysis from www.stratfor.com
--------------------------
U.S. Counterinsurgency Strategies in Iraq
Jul 07, 2003
Summary
The appointment of Gen. John Abizaid as head of U.S. Central Command opens a new phase in both the Iraq campaign and the war on al Qaeda. In order to wage follow-on operations against al Qaeda, an effective counterinsurgency operation must be launched against the Iraqi guerrillas. This is a politico-military imperative. Politically, the United States must demonstrate its effectiveness against the full spectrum of opponents. Militarily, the United States must show it can project forces from Iraq while the base of operations remains insecure. Directly suppressing an insurrection without indigenous support historically has been difficult, but Iraq has a built-in opposition to the guerrillas: the Shiites in the south. But their desire to dominate an Iraqi government -- and their ties to Iran -- runs counter to U.S. policy. This means Washington will have to make some difficult choices in Iraq, and in the end will give away some things it does not want to give away.
Analysis
U.S. Army Gen. John Abizaid will officially take over as head of Central Command during the week of July 7. His mission will be not only to stabilize the situation in Iraq, but also to command the main U.S. offensive against al Qaeda. The summer offensive that Stratfor has written about has begun, and Abizaid's mission will be to wage war, integrate the various operations into a coherent whole and achieve the goal of the offensive: to further undermine al Qaeda's ability to strike at the U.S. homeland.
In war, no plan unfolds as expected. This war began in a completely unexpected fashion on Sept. 11, 2001. As is inevitable, the course of the war has taken unexpected turns. The most recent and significant turn of this war has been the emergence of a guerrilla war in Iraq. To be more precise, it appears to us that in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, the fighters on the ground understood that they could not win a conventional war. Rather than engage in the sort of conflict at which the United States excels, they put up token conventional resistance, all the while planning to engage the United States in unconventional warfare over an extended period.
In other words, the Iraqi forces understood that they could not defeat the United States in conventional war. Instead, the Iraqi war plan consisted of declining conventional engagement and subsequently engaging U.S. forces in operations in which their advantages were minimized and their weaknesses were exposed.
This has left the United States with the following battle problem: It must wage the broader summer offensive while simultaneously containing, engaging and defeating the Iraqi guerrillas. This is not an easy task, not only because it spreads U.S. forces thinner than planned, but also because the challenge posed by the guerrillas has trans-military implications, politically and psychologically. Abizaid must not ignore these considerations and must integrate them into his war plan. This is neither easy nor optional.
It is useful to begin by recalling the overarching strategic purpose of all of these operations: the disruption of al Qaeda and potential follow-on groups to prevent further major attacks on the United States. The Iraq campaign was an element in this broader strategy, designed to achieve these three goals, in increasing importance:
1. The elimination of a regime that potentially could support al Qaeda operations.
2. The transformation of the psychological architecture of the Islamic world. The perception in the Islamic world, developed since the U.S. withdrawal from Beirut in 1983 and reaffirmed by events since then, was that the United States was incapable of resolute action. The United States was seen as powerful militarily, but as lacking the political will to use that power. U.S. forces withdrew after taking minimal casualties in Beirut and Somalia. In Afghanistan, the United States halted operations after seizing major cities, apparently because it was unwilling to engage in more extended conflict. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was designed to change the Islamic world's perception -- accepting anger at the United States in exchange for greater fear.
3. The creation of a base of operations that would allow the United States to bring political and military pressure to bear on a cluster of nations the U.S. administration sees as directly or indirectly sustaining al Qaeda operations -- in particular Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran. Riyadh began shifting its position prior to the Iraq invasion. Immediately after the end of the campaign, the United States turned its attention to follow-on operations against Syria and Iran. These operations have been primarily political since the end of the Iraq campaign, but the constant threat exists that they could move to a military phase at any point.
The guerrilla war in Iraq strikes directly at the second objective of the Iraqi campaign. It is what Stratfor has called a trans-military goal: It is rooted in a military operation but ultimately arrives at an issue that transcends the purely military -- namely the psychological perception of the United States and the credibility of U.S. military threats. As a secondary matter, it also complicates the logistics of follow-on operations after Iraq. At the moment, that is not the primary issue -- although it should be emphatically noted that an evolution in the conditions in Iraq very well could undermine the U.S. ability to use Iraq as a base of operations.
The problems that have arisen in Afghanistan and Iraq are rooted in U.S. strategy. The United States invaded both countries as a means toward other ends, rather than as ends in themselves. The invasion of Afghanistan was intended to disrupt al Qaeda's main operational base. The invasion of Iraq was intended to bring U.S. power to bear against al Qaeda's enablers in the region. In neither case did the United States have an intrinsic interest in either country -- including control of Iraq's oil.
The United States could achieve its primary purpose in each country without complete pacification. In Afghanistan, the U.S. administration accepted from the beginning that the complex tribal and ideological conflicts there would make pacification impossible. U.S. forces seized the major cities and a few strategic points, kept most forces in protected garrisons and conducted military operations as opportunities to combat al Qaeda arose. U.S. forces avoided any attempts at pacification projects, understanding that the level of force and effort required to achieve any degree of pacification far outstripped U.S. interests and probably U.S. resources. The United States had a limited mission in Afghanistan and ruthlessly focused on that, while publicly professing ambitious and complex goals.
The Iraq campaign took its primary bearings from the Afghan campaign. The goals were to shatter the Iraqi army and displace the Iraqi regime. These goals were achieved quickly. The United States then rapidly pivoted to use its psychological and military advantage to pressure Syria and Iran. As in Afghanistan, pacification was not a primary goal. Pacification was not essential to carrying on the follow-on mission. But the U.S. reading of the situation in Iraq diverged from that of Afghanistan. The U.S. administration always understood that the consequences of the invasion of Afghanistan would be the continuation and intensification of the chaos that preceded that invasion. The underlying assumption in Iraq was that the postwar Iraqi impulse would be toward stability. The U.S. administration assumed that the majority of the Iraqi public opposed Saddam Hussein, would welcome the fall of his regime, would not object to an American occupation and, therefore, would work harmoniously with the United States in pacification projects, easing the burden on the United States tremendously.
The U.S. administration expected the defeat of the Taliban to devolve into guerrilla warfare. The United States did not expect the defeat of the Baath regime to devolve into guerrilla warfare. It did not expect the Shiites to be as well-organized as they are, nor did they expect this level of Shiite opposition to a U.S. occupation. In other words, the strategic understanding of the Iraqi campaign took its bearings from the Afghan campaign -- and the United States had no interest in pacification -- but at the same time, the United States did not expect this level of difficulty and danger involved in pacifying Iraq, because U.S. intelligence misread the situation on the ground.
At its current level of operations, the guerrilla war does not represent a military challenge to the United States. Therefore, the first and third goals are for the moment achieved. The United States has displaced the Iraqi regime, limiting its ability to engage in strategic operations with the United States, and U.S. forces can conduct follow-on operations should they choose to. But the United States is in serious danger of failing to achieve its second goal: transforming the psychological perception of the United States as an irresistible military force.
It certainly is true that the guerrilla war does not represent a strategic threat to the United States. But on one level, the reality is irrelevant. Perception is everything. The image that the U.S. Army is constantly taking casualties and is unable to cripple the guerrillas undermines the perception that the United States wanted to generate with this war. The reality might be that the United States is overwhelmingly powerful and the guerrilla war is a minor nuisance. The perception in the Islamic world will be that the United States does not have the power to suppress Saddam Hussein's guerrillas. It will complicate the politico-military process that the United States wanted to put into motion with the invasion. It is therefore a situation that the United States will have to deal with.
The United States has, in essence, two strategic options:
1. Afghanistize the conflict. Move into secure base camps while allowing the political situation on the ground to play itself out. Allow the tension between Shiite and Sunni to explode into civil war, manipulating each side to the U.S. advantage, while focusing militarily on follow-on operations in Syria, Iran and elsewhere. In other words, insulate the U.S. military from the Iraqi reality, and carry on operations elsewhere.
2. Try to engage and defeat the guerrillas through counterinsurgency operations, including direct military attacks and political operations.
The dilemma facing the United States is this: From a strictly military perspective, Option 1 is most attractive. From a political and psychological perspective, Option 1 is unacceptable. It also creates a military risk: The insurgency, unless checked, ultimately could threaten the security of U.S. forces in Iraq no matter how well-defended they were in their secure facilities. On the other side of the equation, counterinsurgency operations always require disproportionate resources. The number of insurgents is unimportant. The number of places they might be and the number of locations they might attack dictate the amount of resources that must be devoted to them. Therefore, a relatively small group of guerrillas can tie down a much larger force. A sparse, dispersed and autonomous guerrilla force can draw off sufficient forces to make follow-on operations impossible.
The classical counterinsurgency dilemma now confronts the United States. The quantity of forces needed to defeat the guerrillas is disproportionate to the military advantage gained by defeating them. Failure to engage the guerrilla force could result in a dramatic upsurge in their numbers, allowing them to become unmanageable. The ineffective engagement of guerrillas could result in both the squandering of resources and the failure to contain them. The issue is not how large the guerrilla force is but how sustainable it is. At this stage of operations, the smaller the force the more difficult it is to suppress -- so long as it is large enough to carry out dispersed operations, has sufficient supplies and the ability to recruit new members as needed. At this point, the Iraqi guerrilla force is of indeterminate size, but it is certainly well-dispersed and has sufficient supplies to operate. Its ability to recruit will depend on arrangements made prior to the U.S. occupation and the evolution of the conflict. This sort of guerrilla warfare does not provide readily satisfactory solutions for the occupying power.
The classic solution of a guerrilla threat to an occupying power is to transfer the burden of fighting to an indigenous force. Not accidentally, the Iraqi guerrillas in recent days attacked and killed seven Iraqis being trained for this role. Inventing a counterinsurgency force beyond your own forces in the midst of conflict is not easy. Nevertheless, successful containment of a guerrilla force must involve either an indigenous force motivated to suppress the guerrillas or, alternatively, forces provided by a faction hostile to the guerrilla faction -- an ethnic or religious group that shares the occupier's interest in suppressing the guerrillas.
The greatest threat the United States faces in Iraq is not the guerrillas. It is the guerrillas combined with a rising among the Shiites south of Baghdad. If the guerrilla rising combines with an intifada -- a mass rising that might not use weapons beyond stones, but that could lead to a breakdown of U.S. controls in the south -- it would represent a most untenable situation. An intifada, apart from its intrinsic problems, could complicate logistics. Demonstrators likely would clog the supply routes from the south. Suppressing an intifada not only is difficult, it has political and psychological consequences as well.
It is imperative that the United States prevent a rising among the Shiites. It is also imperative that the United States find a native faction in Iraq that is prepared to take on some of the burden of suppressing the primarily Baathist guerrillas. The United States is afraid of a Shiite uprising, but could use the Shiites in suppressing the Baathists. The Shiites are the center of gravity of the situation.
Shiite leaders have made it clear that they want to dominate any new Iraqi government -- and that they expect the United States to create such a government. The United States has been concerned that Iran influences and even might control the Shiites and that handing over power to the Iraqi Shiites would, in effect, make Iran the dominant force in Iraq and ultimately in the Persian Gulf. That is a reasonable concern. Indeed, it violates the core U.S. strategy. The United States invaded Iraq, in part, to coerce Iran. To argue that the only way to stay in Iraq is to strengthen Iran makes little sense. On the other hand, if the United States continues to refuse to create a native government in Iraq, the probability of a Shiite rising is substantial.
The key to a U.S. strategy in Iraq, therefore, rests in Iran. If regime change in Iran could be rapidly achieved or a substantial accommodation with the Iranian government could be negotiated, then using the Iraqi Shiites to man an Iraqi government and bear the brunt of the counterinsurgency operation would be practical. The key is to reach an agreement with Iran that provides the United States with substantial assurances that the Iranian government would neither support nor allow Iranians to provide support to al Qaeda.
The regime in Tehran has no love for the Sunnis, nor do the Sunnis for the Shiites. The events in Pakistan show how deeply sectarian religious violence is rooted in the Islamic world. The United States cannot supplant Islamic fundamentalism. It can potentially manipulate the situation sufficiently to control the direct threat to the United States. In other words, if the United States can reach an understanding with Iran over al Qaeda and nuclear weapons, then the Shiites in Iraq could become a solution rather than a problem.
If there is to be an agreement with Iran, the United States must demonstrate to Iranian hardliners first that it has the ability to destabilize the Islamic Republic, and second that it is prepared not to do so in return for Shiite cooperation. Without this, any alliance with Iran over Iraq rapidly would spiral out of U.S. control, and Iran would become uncontrollable. The key for the United States is to demonstrate that it has leverage in Iran. The United States does not want to overthrow the Iranian government. It simply wants to demonstrate its ability to destabilize Iran if it chose to. If it can do that, then other things become possible.
It follows that the United States likely shortly will work to reignite the demonstrations in Iran -- in all probability in the next few days. The purpose will not be to overthrow the Iranian government -- that is beyond U.S. capabilities. Instead, it will be designed to persuade Iranian leaders -- including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- that some form of cooperation with the United States over issues that matter to the Americans is in their interest, and could result in something that the Iranians have longed dreamed of: a Shiite-dominated Iraq.
This strategy is extraordinarily convoluted and fraught with difficulties. But the prospect of fighting a counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, alone, without indigenous support, is equally fraught with danger. So too is attempting an Afghan solution -- packing forces into air bases and army camps and allowing the insurrection to evolve. There are few good choices in Iraq at the moment. Alliance with the Shiites is extremely difficult and risky, but the other choices are equally difficult. If the Iranian/Shiite play fails, then it will be time to choose between counterinsurgency and enclaves.
-
http://www.meib.org/articles/0306_s1.htm
-
WMD, Blame and Real Danger
Jul 14, 2003
Summary
The crisis du jour in Washington is a revelation that President George W. Bush quoted from a forged letter about Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger in his State of the Union address. Congress, as usual, is missing the point. Weapons of mass destruction were not the primary reason Bush went to war in Iraq, but he certainly thought they were there. Everyone thought they were there. The critical issue is: Where are Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons today? What the CIA did with the Niger letter is of no real importance. What the CIA knows and doesn't know about the current war in Iraq and whether guerrillas control chemical or biological weapons is the critical issue that everyone is avoiding.
Analysis
The United States -- or at least Washington -- has come down with a full-blown case of the WMD flu. The trigger was the White House admission that President George W. Bush quoted intelligence in his State of the Union message that was based upon a forged document. During the speech, Bush claimed British and U.S. intelligence had information that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger. The document upon which the statement was based later was found to be a forgery.
On July 10, the White House -- via National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice -- blamed the incident on the CIA. The agency had vetted and approved Bush's speech and had failed to detect the forgery in time. CIA Director George Tenet fell on his sword on July 11, accepting full responsibility. The Democrats in Congress smelled blood and demanded a full investigation. Sen. John McCain (R.-Ariz.) came out in favor of hearings, so they are likely to commence -- at least in the Senate. What their outcome will be, and whether they achieve anything, is another matter.
The issue here is not whether the CIA made a mistake about a document. Stratfor sorts through mounds of information every day trying to distinguish the real from the bogus; mistakes are inevitable. To avoid a major mishap, an intelligence organization must measure each piece of evidence against a net assessment. We derive our net assessment from a huge volume of information and inference that allows us to make a judgment based upon the weight of a large sample of evidence -- a judgment in which no single piece of information is decisive.
In the case of the Niger intelligence, the issue is not whether the CIA screwed up in its analysis of a single document, but whether its net assessment of Iraq was correct. If the net assessment was incorrect, then it is important to discover why the mistake occurred.
The first question is whether the CIA's net assessment included a determination that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction -- defined as chemical, biological and/or nuclear weapons. The second question is how the CIA came to this conclusion. If it determined that Iraq had WMD (and this is now a question), then the issue is how the agency reached that conclusion. Whether right or wrong is less important than whether the conclusion was based on a sound intelligence process -- a sound intelligence process can still make mistakes. Another possibility is that the White House or Defense Department pressured the CIA to certify that Iraq had WMD in order to justify the war.
Here is the first real set of issues. First and foremost: Did the Bush administration go to war with Iraq because it feared Iraqi WMD, or did it go to war with Iraq for other reasons and use the WMD argument as public justification? This issue must frame the debate over WMD and U.S. intelligence. Stratfor's view, since early 2002, has been that the primary motivation for invading Iraq had nothing to do with WMD. Even if Iraq had had no weapons at all, the United States still would have invaded because of the country's strategic position and for psychological reasons. For reference, please see The Iraq Obsession and Iraq: Is Peace an Option?
The U.S. administration chose not to express its true reasons for going to war, believing such an admission would have undermined the effectiveness of the strategy in the Islamic world. Saying that the United States was going to attack Iraq in order to intimidate other countries that were permitting al Qaeda to use their territory would have made it difficult for some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, to change their policies. Since it was not possible to conduct one public diplomacy campaign in the Middle East, another in the United States and yet another in Europe, the administration chose a public justification for the war that did not represent the real reasons, but that was expected to be plausible, persuasive and -- above all else -- true.
This is the key. The Bush administration did not go into Iraq because of WMD. To the extent that U.S. officials said that was the primary reason, they were lying. However, they fully believed that there were WMD in Iraq, which is why using that as justification was so seductive. It was not simply the CIA's view that Iraq had at least chemical weapons. Almost all other intelligence agencies -- including French and Russian -- that dealt with the matter also believed it was true. There was a net assessment within the global intelligence community that Hussein had chemical weapons and would have liked to develop nuclear weapons. This net assessment was not based upon any one document. It was based, among other things, on some very public information:
There is no doubt that Iraq had chemical weapons in the past: Hussein used them on Iraqi citizens. If he did not destroy his stockpile, then he still had them. At the very least, Hussein's scientists knew how to make WMD and had the necessary facilities.
Israel destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 because it said it was close to developing nuclear weapons. Iraq had made a large investment in nuclear technology. Surely Hussein did not simply drop it after 1981.
Several Iraqi scientists were known to be working on biological weapons. Hussein controlled and protected these scientists as though they were extremely valuable to the Iraqi regime.
The global net assessment was that Iraq had chemical weapons and could create biological weapons if motivated to do so, and had a program for developing nuclear weapons but wasn't there yet. This net assessment was non-speculative. It wasn't even based on secret intelligence. It simply assumed that the Iraqi regime had not destroyed the weapons it had. If that was true, then Hussein had chemical weapons at least.
Hussein's behavior from the beginning of the inspection process supported this net assessment. If he did not have weapons of mass destruction, then he would have had no reason to act as he did. For example, he would have had no reason to forbid his scientists from speaking to U.N. inspectors outside the country. All they would have done was confirm that there were no weapons. Hussein would have had no reason to complicate the physical inspection process if there was nothing to find. And finally, when he produced the massive document on Iraqi weapons, he could have included a video showing the destruction of chemical weapons. Put simply, if he really didn't have WMD of any sort, then Hussein's behavior from November to March 2003 could only be described as bizarre and self-destructive. Even if he thought that the United States would attack regardless of whether he had WMD, Hussein had every reason to disprove the allegations if he could in order to complicate the diplomatic and domestic difficulties of the U.S. administration. Either Hussein was insane or he had weapons of mass destruction.
This seems to be the current argument: the United States justified its invasion of Iraq based on Iraqi WMD. U.S. forces have found no WMD inside the country. Therefore, either the CIA made a mistake or the administration lied. The administration tried to shift the blame to the CIA, under this logic. The Democrats hope to demonstrate that the CIA did not lie, but instead that the administration deliberately misrepresented the intelligence and pressured the CIA to change its story.
There is another way to look at what happened. The United States had multiple reasons for going to war with Iraq. The least important was WMD, but it chose to use that excuse because it required the least effort to make. The administration would have gone to war with Iraq regardless of WMD, but it believed, based on reasonable evidence, that there were WMD. In other words, the Bush administration did not tell the whole truth about its motives for invading Iraq, but it did believe that there were WMD in the country.
The congressional investigation will probe what the administration knew and when they knew it, in typical, tedious Washington style. But they will miss the real story, which is far more complex than the one presented. The administration hid its motives for invading Iraq but did expect to find WMD there. From the administration's point of view, the complexity of its motives never would have become an issue had a single round of chemical weapons been found. Either the administration set itself up for a fall, or it is as surprised as anyone that no WMD have been found.
Misleading the U.S. public about foreign policy is hardly novel. Numerous books chronicle how former President John F. Kennedy cut a secret deal with the Soviets over Cuba. In the deal, the United States promised to withdraw its missiles from Turkey as long as the Soviets kept it secret from the public. Franklin D. Roosevelt was drawing up war plans with the British while publicly declaring that he had no intention of getting involved in World War II. Dwight Eisenhower lied about the U-2 incident, claiming it was a weather plane that had gone off course -- 2,000 miles off course! As far as lies go, Bush's was pretty tame. Unlike Roosevelt, he never lied about wanting to go to war. Unlike Kennedy, he never hid a secret deal. And unlike Eisenhower, he never denied the U-2s were where they were supposed to be. The most he can be accused of is lying about his reason for war.
Even that was unnecessary -- if he knew it was a lie. But there is every reason to believe from the evidence that Bush believed, as did most intelligence agencies around the world, that Hussein had WMD. Everything Hussein did after November simply confirmed this belief.
The question, therefore, is what happened to the weapons? There are three possible explanations:
1. They never existed
2. Hussein destroyed them but didn't tell anybody.
3. They still exist.
Sherlock Holmes said that when the impossible is eliminated, then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. We are in that situation now. It is impossible to believe Iraqi WMD never existed because it is an absolute fact that Hussein used chemical weapons on Iraqis. It is equally difficult to believe that he would have destroyed them without at least inviting former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix to the party. What could Hussein possibly gain from destroying them in secret? It makes no sense. Why did he behave as he did if he had no weapons? We find it impossible to believe that Hussein once had WMD but destroyed them in secret.
Therefore, the extraordinarily improbable must be true: Iraqi WMD still exist. There is, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld notwithstanding, a guerrilla war under way in Iraq. It appears Hussein is alive, possibly somewhere in Iraq. Chemical and biological weapons never have been used in a guerrilla war. That does not mean that they would not make excellent weapons used against U.S. troops. Chemical and biological weapons do not require huge containers. The bunkers that were built around Iraq over the years, not all of them identified by U.S. intelligence, could be hiding not only Hussein and his staff, but also the missing WMD.
Congress is about to begin an investigation into a forgery about Niger uranium, WMD and the rest. Congress is missing the point. The issue is not whether the administration invented the story of WMD. It is also not whether the administration went to war over WMD. The real issue is where the WMD went and why the CIA doesn't have a definitive answer to that. The WMD issue as Congress if framing it is about as interesting as finding out when Kennedy really knew about Cuban missiles and what secret deals he really made. It is interesting, but not relevant. The urgent issue is: Where are Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?
-
Today's Featured Analysis
Iraqi Governing Council: A Window of Opportunity for the U.S.?
Summary
The United States has always clearly opposed the possibility of a
theocratic state in postwar Iraq. Now the U.S. administration has
crafted a new 25-member Iraqi Governing Council, which includes
seven Islamists. It appears Washington is trying to craft an
Islamic democracy that could be used as a future model for the
Arab Middle East and possibly for the larger Muslim world.
Analysis
The United States has brought together Iraq's various political
forces -- with the exception of the Baath Party -- under the
banner of the new 25-member Iraqi Governing Council. The U.S.
interim administration crafted the body, which involves 25
individuals who are representative of most of the country's
various religious and ethnic groups.
The council's composition suggests that the United States is
trying to strike a balance between imposing a Western-style
democracy and thwarting the emergence of an Iranian-style
theocratic state in Iraq. If the U.S. administrators pull it off,
it could result in the emergence of an Islamic democracy that
could be used as a model for future governments in the region. It
will require careful calibration, however, to move from theory to
reality.
The ethnic, ideological and religious mix in the IGC highlights
the diversity that is the hallmark of Iraq, a nation-state
created by Britain 1921, following the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire.
The IGC has 25 members, but a few of them warrant individual
mention. Prominent among this group is Ahmed Chalabi, of the
Pentagon-supported Iraqi National Congress. There are familiar
faces also from Iraq's Kurdish groups: Massoud Barzani of the
Kurdistan Democratic Party; Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan; Salaheddine Bahaaeddin, leader of the Kurdistan
Islamic Union; and Mahmoud Othman, founder and leader of the
Kurdish Socialist Party. Hamid Majid Mousa represents the Iraqi
Communist Party; he has been its secretary since 1993.
Two members from the Shia Islamist Dawa Party also are among the
group: Dawa leader Ezzedine Salim and spokesman Ibrahim al-
Jaafari. Abdel-Karim Mahoud al-Mohammedawi represents Iraqi
Hezbollah.
Mohammed Bahr al-Ulloum, widely regarded as a liberal Shia, is
the only cleric on the council. Mohsen Abdel Hamid, secretary-
general of the Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood, represents Sunnis.
Abdel-Karim Mahoud al-Mohammedawi represents Iraqi Hezbollah.
In a sense, the U.S. administration has retained a member of the
old regime: Aquila al-Hashimi, a woman, was a Foreign Ministry
official and diplomat under Saddam Hussein. There are two other
women on the council: Raja Habib al-Khuzaai, a southern tribal
Shia leader; and Sondul Chapouk, representing the Turkmen
minority.
Iran also appears to have a say in the council. Abdel-Aziz al-
Hakim is the brother of Iranian-backed SCIRI leader Ayatollah
Mohammad Baqr al-Hakim. In all, 13 of the 25 members are Shia
Arabs -- which likely is an acknowledgement of Iraq's Shia
majority. The council also has five Sunni Arabs, five Sunni
Kurds, one Christian Arab and one Turkman.
The presence of seven Islamists on the council is consistent with
U.S. President George W. Bush's stated desire for the
establishment of an "Islamic democracy" in Iraq. Likely toward
this end, Bush appointed New York University law professor Noah
Feldman to head the committee and oversee the drafting of Iraq's
new constitution. Feldman has a doctorate in Islamic thought from
Oxford and wrote After Jihad: America and the Struggle for an
Islamic Democracy, published in 2003.
Following mounting resistance from militant Islamic clerics and
Arab nationalists -- and the ever-present threat of Iranian
interference -- Bush said April 24 that he was determined to see
an "Islamic democracy" built in Iraq. In other words, this was
the compromise the United States was willing to make in order to
avoid being seen as disregarding the Islamic sensibilities of the
Iraqi people, some of whom openly have called for an Islamic
state. The Bush administration's goal is for the government in
Baghdad not to threaten U.S. interests, nor to facilitate any
non-state actors who would wish to do so. Washington apparently
views the establishment of an Islamic democracy in Iraq as a
potential way of ensuring these goals.
The problem is that neither the United States nor the Iraqi
people have a model of Islamic democracy to emulate. Turkey and
Iran perhaps could be categorized as Islamic democracies-in-the-
making, but they won't get there anytime soon. Both appear to be
slowly moving toward some form of Islamic democracy -- albeit
from opposite directions.
If the task at hand in Iraq is to be accomplished, it will
require careful calibration on Washington's part. For the U.S.
administration, it will be important to show support for the
project without inadvertently discrediting ICG members,
especially the moderate Islamists, in the eyes of their domestic
audience. If the masses view the council as being a group of U.S.
lackeys, it will quickly lose the respect of the Iraqis, not to
mention the entire Arab world.
However, if the United States is able to strike this delicate
balance, it could have far-reaching consequences in terms of
redeeming the U.S. image in the Muslim world. An Islamic
democracy in Iraq might even be able to help stem the tide of
radical and militant forms of Islam.
Stratfor has argued that the war against Iraq was only part of a
campaign in the larger war on terrorism. The United States has
tried to avoid associating the war on terrorism with Islam, but
these efforts have proved futile. Recent Gallup, Pew Trust and
other polls suggest that an overwhelming majority of Muslims do
not trust U.S. foreign policy when it comes to their part of the
world.
In the case of Iraq, there is a widespread impression that the
United States effected regime change in order to secure its
energy interests. The new Iraqi council provides a window of
opportunity for the United States to practice damage control by
trying to transfer power to an elected Iraqi government -- but
that requires security. Daily attacks on U.S. forces offset the
possibility of a quick transfer of power.
The IGC is bound to face a crisis of legitimacy, since it is a
U.S.-appointed, not elected, body. In a sense, there is a window
of opportunity here for Washington to make great strides in its
broader war. A successful Islamic democracy in Iraq not only
would stabilize that country, but eventually could break support
for militant Islam on a global scale, and perhaps pave the way
for democratization in the greater Islamic world. This, however,
will acquire a great deal of effort and statesmanship from the
Bush administration.
-
www.Strafor.com
Geopolitical Diary: Thursday, July 17, 2003
Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, said July 16 that the United States is facing "what I would describe as a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us. It's a low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms, but it's war however you describe it." He also said, "We're seeing a cellular organization of six to eight people armed with (rocket-propelled grenades), machine guns, etc., attacking us at some times and places of their choosing, and other times we attack them at times and places of our choosing."
This statement is an extremely significant event. Washington has been in a state of denial as to what is happening in Iraq, with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld leading the charge to pretend that the obvious wasn't happening. Even if he knew privately what was going on --which we certainly would expect -- the public presentation reminded us of Baghdad Bob in his heyday. That, coupled with the obsession about forged letters and WMD, created a sense both at home and among troops in Iraq that the National Command Authority had lost track of reality in Iraq. Abizaid's statement tells us two things: First, he intends to wage a military campaign in Iraq, and second, he will define the reality in Iraq regardless of what the situation is in Washington.
This comes at a critical moment. U.S. newspapers were filled with reports on Wednesday of declining U.S. morale in Iraq. The decisions to delay the
return of forces to the United States obviously hit hard, as can be
imagined. The letdown from having been told that the war was won -- only to discover that it is just beginning -- also hit. But nothing frightens a
soldier more than the sense that the situation is out of control, no one is
in charge and no plans for waging war are in place. For more than two
months, U.S. forces have been involved in a guerrilla war with daily action, only to have Rumsfeld trivialize the problem -- that has to hurt.
How serious the war has become was driven home Wednesday when a
surface-to-air missile was fired at a C-130 near Baghdad International
Airport. It is not surprising that the guerrillas have surface-to-air
missiles; they had access to all weapons in the Iraqi arsenal, and weapons obviously were stored in anticipation of the war. C-130 pilots had been practicing evasion techniques for a while, executing maneuvers on approach and takeoff and occasionally dispensing flares designed to confuse infrared-guided missiles. Abizaid commented that a C-130 on which he was a passenger had executed such maneuvers. Obviously, commanders in Iraq are aware of the potential threats.
On the other hand, the attack failed. Indeed, the day of violence that was
predicted for July 16 did not occur -- or more precisely, the level of
violence did not rise above what has become normal, save for the attempt to bring down the plane. The questions raised by the C-130 incident are these: How many more missiles are in the Baathist arsenal, what other weapons are there, and how secure are the arms caches?
In the end, Abizaid's concession that there is a war on leads to the
question: What is the war plan? As we have noted in the past, suppressing
guerrilla forces with conventional forces is not an easy task. The
guerrillas clearly are embedded in the Sunni population. They are not
operating in isolated areas covered by terrain. This is urban and near-urban guerrilla warfare, reminiscent of the Battle of Algiers in the 1950s. It should be noted that the French won that battle, suppressing insurgent
forces in the city. They won through intense ruthlessness, coupled with a
large, friendly French population and an Arab population that was divided.
The French knew the city and had allies. It should be noted that in the end, they lost the war -- but they did win that battle.
The key problems in Iraq are that the United States does not have a large
American population on the ground, the troops don't know the terrain very well and, at the moment, U.S. allies among the Sunni community are few and under heavy American guard. Abizaid's strategy is not yet clear. Flailing away in search-and-seize missions based on poor intelligence is hardly the solution. Good intelligence is the solution, and that requires allies on the ground -- either to provide intelligence or to bear the burden of fighting or both.
Here is the problem now: Guerrilla war is political war, and it is not clear
that CINCENT (as we still call him) has the authority to make political
decisions, concerning alliances and so on. That seems to be in the hands of Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, and it is not clear how much strategic authority he has. This leads us to recall Saigon, where the
ambassador sometimes had one policy, the military another and the CIA a third -- it sort of didn't work. Unified command in a guerrilla war requires more than just military authority. Either Abizaid and Bremer have to be joined at the hip, or one of them has to have undisputed command authority. Right now, the issue is how much authority either of the leaders has to make the radical decisions that will be needed to fight a guerrilla war.
-
www.stratfor.com
Geopolitical Diary: Monday, July 21, 2003
Four U.S. soldiers were killed in action over the weekend -- including two
members of the 101st Airborne Division who were killed in an ambush west of Mosul that left another soldier injured. Sunday's ambush occurred near Tall Afar. The interesting thing about these attacks is that both took place outside the "Sunni Triangle" north and west of Baghdad, where attacks have been focused. The guerrillas appear to be expanding their operations deliberately, trying to unnerve U.S. troops and force their commanders to expand the combat arena -- and thereby stretch their resources even more. What is unclear is whether these were special operations at long distances by the Iraqis, or whether they indicated a sustained move into these regions -- and the answers to these questions will be critical.
U.S. officials have decided to raise an Iraqi army, designated as an Iraqi
"civil defense corps." Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, said the
force "will be made up of Iraqis who will be under American military command to help us basically with the armed part of the work we're doing." If they do nothing but help interpret both language and culture to the American troops, they will be beneficial. If they are not expected to engage in combat operations on their own, they can be spun up fairly rapidly."
The corps poses two challenges. The first is finding anyone willing to serve in it. There will be two classes of people volunteering: One class consists of criminals and down-and-outers who see a chance to come out on top in the new Iraqi order, with not much to lose if it fails; then there will be the people that Bremer wants: people rooted in the community with families -- people who in addition to serving in the force can also influence their communities. This is not an impossible idea by any means, but it does depend on one thing: being able to protect their families. The men will be safer on patrol with U.S. forces, but their families will not. If the United States can't protect them, the whole project fails. And protecting the families of troops always has been one of the nightmares of guerrilla warfare.
The second problem will be security. This force will be a treasure trove of
intelligence for the Baathists. If we were Baath commanders, our men would be standing in line to join up. Getting close up and personal with U.S. troops would provide tactical and operational intelligence. In Vietnam, the Viet Cong made it a point to place people in the Army of Vietnam (ARVN) slots where liaison with the Americans was heavy. It is unclear how you do a background check in Iraq, and we'd love to see the polygraphs. Keeping the force clean is going to be a nightmare -- that is, if Bremer plans to put up recruitment posters all over the country to create a force that "looks like Iraq," in former U.S. President Bill Clinton's old phrase. If, on the other hand, the bulk of the forces are to be raised from the Shiite regions -- where deals are being made -- and from the Kurdish regions, the security concerns might be less. Of course, the Kurds will engage in smuggling and the Shiites will report to Tehran, but they will be motivated to stop the Baath guerrillas, which is the item on the agenda.
If this is the case, then what is happening is that the United States will
recruit non-Sunni forces to share the burden of occupying the Sunni regions. As we have argued in the past, this is the only way to do it. It does not create a pro-American faction inside the Sunni regions, but it does increase the force available to engage and defeat the Baathists. Both the Kurds and Shiites have the interest to carry out the mission, but both will have to be induced to do so with political arrangements. In the case of the Shiites, those arrangements will be costly.
Since the idea of a general recruitment from the population strikes us as
self-defeating, we suspect that this proposal is the cover for the creation
of a combined U.S.-Shiite force for occupying Sunni areas. Whether we are right in this will be visible when the recruitment starts. Pay no attention to the first media reports on this, which will be staged carefully to show the diversity and motivation of the force. After the cameras leave, we will take a careful look at the force and see how many of their families live in the "Sunni Triangle."
-
www.stratfor.com maintains its standards of thoughtful analyis-- Crafty
----------------------------
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
21 July 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
U.S. Strategy: Perception vs. Deception
Summary
The Bush administration's continued unwillingness to enunciate a coherent picture of the strategy behind the war against al Qaeda -- which explains the war in Iraq -- could produce a dangerous domino effect. Lurking in the shadows is the not fully articulated perception that the Iraq war not only began in deception but that planning for the Iraq war was incompetent -- a perception driven by the realization that the United States is engaged in a long-term occupation and guerrilla war in Iraq, and the belief that the United States neither expected nor was prepared for this. Ultimately, this perception could erode Bush's support base, cost him the presidency and, most seriously, lead to defeat in the war against al Qaeda.
Analysis
We keep waiting for the moment when Iraq does not constitute the major global event of the week. We clearly are not there yet. In Iraq, the reality is fairly stable. The major offensive by the guerrillas forecast by both U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and what seemed to be a spokesman for al Qaeda last weekend did not materialize. The guerrillas tried to shoot down a C-130 coming into Baghdad International Airport, and that was a significant escalation, but they missed -- and it was only a single act. Casualties continue to mount, but with the dead
averaging at just more than 10 per week, it has not come close to reaching a decisive level.
The deterioration of support in Washington and London is not yet decisive. Support for U.S. President George W. Bush sank from a percentage in the high 70s in the wake of the war, to just more than 50 percent in the past 10 days. But as we read the successive polls, the slump that hit when the WMD issue came to the fore -- along with the realization that the United States was dealing with a guerrilla movement -- has not accelerated. It slumped and held. Meanwhile, London headlines have focused on the apparent suicide of weapons expert David Kelly, the probable
source for a BBC story about British Prime Minister Tony Blair's manipulation of intelligence data. It is unclear whether these reports have had an impact on public opinion.
However, the current issue is not public opinion. Lurking behind this issue is the not fully articulated perception that the Iraq war not only began in deception but that planning for the Iraq war was incompetent -- a perception driven by the realization that the United States is engaged in a long-term occupation and guerrilla war in Iraq, and the belief that the United States in particular was neither expecting nor prepared for this.
A cartoon republished in the New York Times News of the Week section by Mike Smith of the Las Vegas Sun sums up this perception. A general, holding a paper titled "Guerrilla War In Iraq," says to a table full of generals, "We need to switch to Plan B." Another general responds, "There was a Plan A?" The media loves the trivial and can't grasp the significant. If the United States fabricated evidence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as critics are claiming, the question is not whether it did so. The question is: Why did it do so? In other words, why was invading Iraq important enough to lie about -- if indeed it was a lie, which is far from clear. The emerging perception is that there was no Plan A and there is no Plan B -- that the decision to invade was arbitrary and that the lying was therefore gratuitous.
In other words, the Bush administration has a four-part public relations problem:
1. The perception that it lied about weapons of mass destruction
2. The perception that it had no strategic reason for invading
Iraq
3. The perception that it was unprepared for the guerrilla war
4. The perception that it is at a loss for what to do next
As we argued last week, lying in foreign policy does not bother the American public. From Woodrow Wilson's "too proud to fight" slogan in the 1916 presidential campaign, to Franklin D. Roosevelt's war planning with the British while publicly denying such plans, to John F. Kennedy claiming that the United States had nothing to do with the Bay of Pigs, what bothers the American public is the idea that the lying is not designed to hide the strategy, but to hide the fact that there is no strategy.
The media are clever. The public is smart. The media have the ability to generate intellectual mayhem within Washington. What should be troubling for Bush is that, as we review the local papers this past weekend, the deepest concern creeping into letters to the editor is that there is no underlying strategy, no point to it -- and no exit. Bush clearly retains a massive support base that is not, as we have said, continuing to erode. The media's fixation on "what did he know and when did he know it" will not erode it by itself, but the administration's continued unwillingness to reveal a strategy behind the war on al Qaeda likely will.
The core problem the United States has had in enunciating a
strategy rests on this: Since Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda has not carried out a strategic operation. It has carried out a series of tactical operations -- Bali, Mombassa, Riyadh, Casablanca and so on -- but it has not struck again at the United States in an operation of the magnitude of Sept. 11. The operations outside the United States are not, by themselves, sufficient to justify the global war the United States is waging. Preventing another Sept. 11 is worth the effort. However, as time passes, the perception -- if not the reality -- grows that Sept. 11 was al Qaeda's best and only shot at the United States. If that is true, then the level of effort we have seen on a global basis -- including the invasion of Iraq and certainly the continued occupation of Iraq in the face of insurrection -- simply isn't worth it. Or put differently, the United States is fighting an illusion and exhausting resources in the process.
The mere assertion of the threat will work if Bush and his
advisers have a pristine record of honesty with the public. At
the point where the public has reason to doubt the word of the president on anything concerning the war, it will affect his
ability to be authoritative on anything concerning the war.
Moreover, the president's basis for information on al Qaeda's
intentions and capabilities rests with confidence in the quality
of intelligence he is getting. The current crisis over who failed
to identify the forgery is trivial. However, it melds into two
other serious intelligence crises. First, did the intelligence
community fail in its analysis of Iraqi WMD? Second, and more serious in our view, did the intelligence community fail to understand former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's war plan and, therefore, fail to understand that the fall of Baghdad was not the end of the war but the beginning of the guerrilla phase?
Reasonable arguments can be made to justify each of these
failures. However, at the end of the day, if the CIA did not know about the forgery, did not understand the WMD situation in Iraq and did not anticipate the guerrilla war, then why should the public believe it regarding the on-going threat of al Qaeda? Pushing the argument further, if the intelligence community did in fact know about each of these things and the president chose to ignore them, then why should the public believe Bush when he talks about al Qaeda?
Bush cannot afford a crisis in the intelligence community or in
the public perception of his use of intelligence. More than any
of the other world wars in which the United States has
participated, this is an intelligence war. Al Qaeda does not have a geographical locus. It does not have a clean organizational chart. It is as much an idea as an organization. Everything that followed Sept. 11 has depended on the public's confidence in its intelligence community. If that confidence is destroyed, then everything else said about al Qaeda -- including that it is an ongoing threat that justifies a global war -- becomes subject to
debate.
If the CIA cannot be trusted, then the president can't be
trusted. If the president can't be trusted, then the urgency of
the war cannot be trusted. If the urgency of the war can't be
trusted, then the massive exertion being demanded of the U.S. military and public cannot be justified. Thus, having CIA
Director George Tenet fall on his sword and accept responsibility for the 16 words in the President's speech might make a lot of sense inside the beltway, but it is an act of breathtaking recklessness in the rest of the country. Even if he were responsible -- which we regard as pretty dubious --the White House does not seem to understand that desstroying the credibility of the CIA is the same thing as destroying the war effort. The entire war effort is based on the public's trust of the CIA's portrayal of the ongoing threat from al Qaeda. If the CIA isn't to be trusted, why should anyone believe that al Qaeda is a threat?
This self-destructive behavior by the Bush administration is not at all confined to undermining the credibility of the CIA.
Rumsfeld's incomprehensible behavior regarding the guerrilla war in Iraq was another axis of self-destruction. Back in May, any reasonable observer of the situation in Iraq -- including Stratfor -- saw that there was an organized guerrilla war under way. However, Rumsfeld, as late as June 30, not only continued to deny the obvious, but actually hurled contempt at anyone who said it was a guerrilla war. Rumsfeld's obstinate refusal to acknowledge what was obvious to everyone was the sort of behavior designed to undermine confidence in U.S. strategy by both the public and the troops in the field. Rumsfeld kept arguing that this was not Vietnam, which was certainly true, except in the sense that Rumsfeld was behaving like Robert McNamara. As in Vietnam -- and this is the only comparison there is between it and Iraq -- the behavior of the leadership made even supporters of the war and the troops in the field feel that there was no strategy.
Napoleon once said, "In battle, the morale is to the material as 2 is to 1." Maintaining the morale of one's forces depends on maintaining confidence in the military and political commanders. When forces are killing U.S. troops -- forces that the defense secretary dismisses -- the only conclusion the troops can draw is that either they are not very good soldiers, since they can't stop them, or that the defense secretary has taken leave of his senses. Either way, it undermines morale, increasing the need for the material. It is militarily inefficient to tell self-evident lies to troops.
Similarly, the United States is fighting a war against a barely visible force that cannot be seen by the naked eye, but only by the esoteric tools of the intelligence community. Making the head of that community appear to be a liar or a fool might make good sense in Washington, but it undermines trust in the one institution in which trust is essential if the war is to be prosecuted. It is not casualties that undermine public morale. It is the reasonable belief that if the CIA is incompetent, then neither the justification for the war nor the strategy driving the war can be trusted.
Bush has created a crisis. It is far from a fatal crisis, but it is a crisis that requires a radical readjustment in approach. The public explanation of the war and the reality of the war must come into alignment. Stratfor has extensively chronicled the underlying strategy of the war, and we will not repeat it here. That strategy has never been enunciated publicly. The connection between the war against al Qaeda, the Iraq campaign and future actions throughout the world never has been laid out in a conceptual framework. This is a complex war. It does not reduce itself to the simple dictum of Desert Storm enunciated by Secretary of State Colin Powell: First we will cut off the enemy, then we will surround the enemy, then we will kill the enemy. That was a good line and truly reflected the solution.
This war does not reduce to one-liners. However, there is a threat and there is a strategy. WMD make wonderful one-liners and they are not altogether irrelevant. But that is not what the war against Iraq was about, it is not the reason for fighting a guerrilla war and it is certainly only part of the broader war. The most dangerous thing Bush can do from his standpoint is to continue to play a bad hand rather than endure the pain of having to throw it in and reshuffle the deck. However, it will be easier to explain the real force driving U.S. strategy than to allow his presidency to degenerate into an argument of who forged a letter and whether he knew it.
The basic strategy behind a war always has been publicly
discussed. In World War II, after Dec. 7 and the German
declaration of war, the basic outlines of the war plan were
widely discussed in the media -- in spite of censorship. Everyone knew the Germany First strategy, the goal of landing in France at some point, the purpose of the bombing campaign, the nature of island hopping. No one expected to know the landing site in France or the next island to be invaded in the Pacific, but everyone understood the core strategy.
This is a much more complex war. That increases -- not decreases -- the need for strategic clarity among the public and the troops. The United States is not randomly in Iraq, and it is not there because Hussein was a butcher or because he might have had WMD. Those are good reasons, but not the real reason. The United States is in Iraq to force Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran to change their behavior toward al Qaeda and other Islamist groups. The United States already has overwhelmed the Saudis and is engaged in threatening Syria and Iran. This is visible to everyone who is watching. That is why the United States is in Iraq. It might or might not be good strategy, but it is a strategy that is much better than no strategy at all.
Admitting this undoubtedly will create a frenzy in the media
concerning the change in explanation. But there will be nothing to chew on, and the explanation will be too complex for the media to understand anyway. They will move on to the next juicy murder, leaving foreign policy to the government and the public. We suspect that before this is over, both Tenet and Rumsfeld will have to go, but that matters more to them than to the republic, which will endure their departure with its usual equanimity. Alternatively, Bush will continue to allow the battle to be fought over the question of "what did he know and when did he know it," which is a battle he cannot win. Bush has a strategic decision to make. He must align strategy with public perception or have his presidency ripped apart.
...................................................................
-
Geopolitical Diary: Thursday, July 24, 2003
After 82 postwar days of absorbing casualties in Iraq, the United States has inflicted two significant blows on the Iraqi resistance. Former Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein's two sons, Odai and Qusai, were confirmed killed in a six-hour raid in Mosul on July 22, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said at a news conference in Baghdad.
The demise of Odai and Qusai Hussein certainly will serve as a morale
booster for U.S. troops, who were unpleasantly surprised to find themselves embroiled in a guerrilla war when they expected to be bound for home following Operation Iraqi Freedom. For the troops, these deaths will serve as a light at the end of an unanticipated tunnel. They also could generate at least a temporary rebound in U.S. President George W. Bush's popularity ratings, which have fallen to their lowest levels since March.
The greater impact could be on Sunnis in Iraq -- both the resistance and the would-be U.S. collaborators.
Among their other roles in the ousted Iraqi government, Odai Hussein led the Saddam Fedayeen militia and Qusai Hussein the Special Security Organization and Republican Guard. Qusai Hussein was believed to control at least two of Iraq's intelligence services. These organizations are believed to be at the core of the Iraqi resistance. However, the degree to which the Hussein boys' deaths will directly impact the resistance remains unclear.
In spite of the deaths, the resistance will persist on the resources and
initiative of its individual operational cells -- at least for a while. But
before long, the degree to which the Hussein family controlled the
distribution of funds and coordinated guerrilla strategy will become
apparent.
The Baathist resistance in Iraq must be concerned about security. A "walk-in tip" reportedly clued the U.S. troops in on the villa in Mosul. The source might be the homeowner, who various reports say might have been Hussein's cousin. There have been other reports of betrayal within the Hussein family. Everyone from senior officers to family members to Hussein's personal bodyguards helped identify the bodies of Odai and Qusai Hussein.
Clearly, the intimidation tactics the resistance has directed at Sunni
collaborators are not working, and this, more than anything, will undermine the insurgents' continued ability to wage guerrilla war. Iraqi geography is not well-suited for a rural wasteland-based insurgency. Insurgents need to blend with the populace.
The recent captures and killings of senior Baathist commanders also could
answer these questions: How much of the Iraqi resistance comprises
unreformed Baathists and how many Jihadi volunteers does it contain? Some of Stratfor's sources say that foreign Islamist volunteers operate alongside the Baathists in Iraq. Despite the clash of ideologies, they apparently couldn't resist the opportunity to hunt American soldiers. Foreign mujahideen might be able to operate on leaner rations and draw support from outside the country, but they will stand out like sore thumbs if the Sunni community withdraws support for the resistance.
Sunnis who otherwise would cooperate with an interim government have been dissuaded by direct attacks from the resistance. They have lived in dread of a return of Hussein -- a fear the Baathists have played upon in their choice of "al Auda" (the Return) for the name of their insurgency. Until now, Hussein's return has not been unimaginable, and no one in their right mind would want to answer treason charges before the former dictator.
There now is real doubt for Hussein's future, although the resistance
undoubtedly will redouble its efforts to convince the Sunnis of al Auda.
About the only people outside the Sunni regions of Iraq who are likely to be uncomfortable with the deaths of Odai and Qusai Hussein are the leaders of Russia, China, France and Germany. It's not that they had any love for the Hussein brothers: Instead, U.S. success in Iraq will spoil what might have been a promising campaign to expand the role of the United Nations in Iraq -- at the expense of a unilateralist U.S. rule.
Leaders opposed to U.S. hegemony and unilateral action have looked on smugly as Washington's quick victory over the Iraqi military turned into a grinding guerrilla war. Stratfor's diplomatic sources say that they saw the United States as increasingly desperate over the loss of money and blood in Iraq. They took Washington's repeated and widespread requests for the deployment of international troops to Iraq as a clear sign of weakness, and with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on the ropes, they saw this as an opportune time to knock the United States back down to size.
When Washington ignored multilateral opposition and deftly dispatched the Iraqi regime, it reshaped the international system. The United States
demonstrated not only that it had the military force to achieve its goals on
its own (with a few willing allies in tow), but also that no constellation
of powers could coalesce to dissuade Washington from deploying that force. The United Nations could play cleanup, and allies could profit from the aftermath, but only at U.S. discretion.
Moscow, Beijing, Berlin and Paris are committed to rectifying the imbalance of global power, containing U.S. hegemonic action and reviving a multi-polar system with the United Nations at its core. Key to this is depriving the United States of the fruits of its conquest of Iraq, namely: 1. Use of Iraq as a strategic base from which to project power throughout the Middle East and 2. Control of Iraq's oil and the economic power it entails. Ideally, they also would like to teach the United States the folly of acting alone, but slapping Washington down would be enough to satisfy.
The U.N. Security Council meeting on July 22 was to have launched a new
phase in this campaign.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov told reporters before the meeting, "The situation in Iraq is continuing to deteriorate rapidly," requiring immediate action from the international community, which in turn requires a new resolution giving the U.N. a greater role in Iraq. China made a similar appeal on July 21. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan opened the council session echoing Ivanov's call for an early end to U.S. occupation of Iraq and transfer of power to an elected Iraqi government.
European Union foreign ministers issued a joint statement on July 22,
stating their willingness to participate in multilateral reconstruction
efforts in Iraq, but only under the auspices of the United Nations.
French President Jacques Chirac, accepting the inaugural Kuala Lumpur World Peace Award on July 22 for his opposition to the war against Iraq, chastised the United States for perpetuating "the law of the strongest. the law of the jungle." Chirac declared multilateralism the foundation for peace, and called the United Nations "unavoidable."
Stratfor's diplomatic sources say that representatives from Russia, China,
France and Germany, along with Annan, began the day with a plan for
adjusting relations with the United States. The core of that plan was
pushing through a U.N. resolution requiring the United States to hand over
supreme authority in Iraq first to the United Nations and then to an
Iraqi-elected government -- which they were convinced would contain none of the American "marionettes" in the current interim government.
The diplomats believed that the intensifying guerrilla war in Iraq and the
resulting billions of dollars in costs to the United States and dozens,
hundreds, or more U.S. deaths would convince Washington to accept a U.N. bailout -- and leash.
Moreover, Blair's political duress might be enough to cause him to break
ranks with the United States, further weakening Washington's position.
The Indian government, also holding out on providing military support to the United States in Iraq for lack of a U.N. mandate, announced July 22 that the preceding night, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had said Washington is examining the possibility of a new U.N. resolution for an expanded U.N. role in Iraq. The suggestion seemed to validate the multilateralists' hopes and plans.
Certainly they expected the United States either to: 1. Try to craft the new resolution in such a way that it handed the burden to U.N. troops while retaining Washington's autonomy and authority in Iraq, 2. Reject a stronger resolution or 3. Accept a stronger resolution, but twist or ignore it in practice.
The UNSC planned to veto the first, wait for the Iraqi quagmire to change
Washington's mind on the second and address the third through careful
crafting of the resolution and management of its implementation.
These plans all might have met their fate with the Hussein brothers in Mosul today. All calculations were based on the belief that Washington was nearing desperation with the situation in Iraq and would make any deal to extricate itself from the quagmire -- a questionable belief, but one firmly held nonetheless. They also were premised on the belief that the Iraqi people would assent to U.N. leadership much more easily than to U.S. occupation -- again, a questionable proposition, and one unlikely to be tested now.
The deaths of Odai and Qusai Hussein will stiffen the U.S. resolve in Iraq
and could weaken the Iraqi resistance as well. In the end, there could be a new U.N. resolution -- and a greater U.N. role in Iraq -- but it will come
on U.S. terms.
-
'This Was a Good Thing to Do'
Iraqis' greatest fear is that America will cut and run.
BY PAUL A. GIGOT
Monday, July 28, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
NAJAF, Iraq--Toppling a statue is easier than killing a dictator. Not the man himself, but the idea of his despotism, the legacy of his torture and the fear of his return. This kind of reconstruction takes time.
Just ask the 20-some members of the new city council in this holy city of Shiite Islam. Their chairs are arrayed in a circle to hear from Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, who invites questions. The first man to speak wants to know two things: There's a U.S. election next year, and if President Bush loses will the Americans go home? And second, are you secretly holding Saddam Hussein in custody as a way to intimidate us with the fear that he might return? Mr. Wolfowitz replies no to both points, with more conviction on the second than the first. But the question reveals the complicated anxiety of the post-Saddam Iraqi mind.
Most reporting from Iraq suggests that the U.S. "occupation" isn't welcome here. But following Mr. Wolfowitz around the country I found precisely the opposite to be true. The majority aren't worried that we'll stay too long; they're petrified we'll leave too soon. Traumatized by 35 years of Saddam's terror, they fear we'll lose our nerve as casualties mount and leave them once again to the Baath Party's merciless revenge.
That is certainly true in Najaf, which the press predicted in April would be the center of a pro-Iranian Shiite revolt. Only a week ago Sunday, Washington Post reporter Pamela Constable made Section A with a story titled "Rumors Spark Iraqi Protests as Pentagon Official Stops By." Interesting, if true.
But Ms. Constable hung her tale on the rant of a single Shiite cleric who wasn't chosen for the Najaf city council. Even granting that her details were accurate--there was a protest by this Shiite faction, though not when Mr. Wolfowitz was around--the story still gave a false impression of overall life in Najaf. On the same day, I saw Mr. Wolfowitz's caravan welcomed here and in nearby Karbala with waves and shouts of "Thank you, Bush."
The new Najaf council represents the city's ethnic mosaic, and its chairman is a Shiite cleric. Things improved dramatically once the Marines deposed a corrupt mayor who'd been installed by the CIA. Those same Marines have rebuilt schools and fired 80% of the police force. The city is now largely attack-free and Marines patrol without heavy armor and often without flak jackets. The entire south-central region is calm enough that the Marines will be turning over duty to Polish and Italian troops.
This is the larger story I saw in Iraq, the slow rebuilding and political progress that is occurring even amid the daily guerrilla attacks in Baghdad and the Sunni north. Admittedly we were in, or near, the Wolfowitz bubble. But reporters elsewhere are also in a bubble, one created by the inevitable limits of travel, sourcing and access. In five days we visited eight cities, and I spoke to hundreds of soldiers and Iraqis.
The Bush administration has made mistakes here since Saddam's statue fell on April 9. President Bush declared the war over much too soon, leaving Americans unprepared for the Baathist guerrilla campaign. (The Pentagon had to fight to get the word "major" inserted before "combat operations in Iraq have ended" in that famous May 1 "Mission Accomplished" speech.) But U.S. leaders, civilian and military, are learning from mistakes and making tangible progress.
One error was underestimating Saddam's damage, both physical and psychic. The degradation of this oil-rich country is astonishing to behold. Like the Soviets, the dictator put more than a third of his GDP into his military--and his own palaces. "The scale of military infrastructure here is staggering," says Maj. Gen. David Petraeus of the 101st Airborne. His troops found one new Iraqi base that is large enough to hold his entire 18,500-man division.
Everything else looks like it hasn't been replaced in at least 30 years. The General Electric turbine at one power plant hails from 1965, the boiler at one factory from 1952. Textile looms are vintage 1930s. Peter McPherson, the top U.S. economic adviser here, estimates that rebuilding infrastructure will cost $150 billion over 10 years.
All of this makes the reconstruction effort vulnerable to even small acts of sabotage. The night before we visited Basra, someone had blown up electrical transmission pylons, shutting down power to much of the city. That in turn triggered long gas lines on the mere rumor that the pumps wouldn't work. Rebuilding all of this will take longer than anyone thought.
Iraq's mental scars are even deeper. Nearly every Iraqi can tell a story about some Baath Party depredation. The dean of the new police academy in Baghdad spent a year in jail because his best friend turned him in when he'd said privately that "Saddam is no good." A "torture tree" behind that same academy contains the eerie indentations from rope marks where victims were tied. The new governor of Basra, a judge, was jailed for refusing to ignore corruption. Basra's white-and-blue secret police headquarters is called "the white lion," because Iraqis say it ate everyone who went inside.
"You have to understand it was a Stalinist state," says Iaian Pickard, one of the Brits helping to run Basra. "The structure of civic life has collapsed. It was run by the Baath Party and it simply went away. We're having to rebuild it from scratch."
This legacy is why the early U.S. failure to purge all ranking Baathists was a nearly fatal blunder. Officials at CIA and the State Department had advocated a strategy of political decapitation, purging only those closest to Saddam. State's Robin Raphel had even called de-Baathification "fascistic," a macabre irony to Iraqis who had to endure genuine fascism.
Muhyi AlKateeb is a slim, elegant Iraqi-American who fled the Iraqi foreign service in 1979 when Saddam took total control. (In the American way, he then bought a gas station in Northern Virginia.) But when he returned in May to rebuild the Foreign Ministry, "I saw all of the Baathists sitting in front of me. I couldn't stay if they did." He protested to U.S. officials, who only changed course after L. Paul Bremer arrived as the new administrator.
Mr. AlKateeb has since helped to purge the Foreign Ministry of 309 secret police members, and 151 Baathist diplomats. "It's an example of success," he says now, though he still believes "we are too nice. Iraqis have to see the agents of Saddam in handcuffs, on TV and humiliated, so people will know that Saddam really is gone." This is a theme one hears over and over: You Americans don't understand how ruthless the Baathists are. They'll fight to the death. You have to do the same, and let us help you do it.
Which brings up the other large American mistake: The failure to enlist Iraqi allies into the fight from the very start. Pentagon officials had wanted to do this for months, but they were trumped by the CIA, State and former Centcom chief Tommy Franks. The result has been too many GIs doing jobs they shouldn't have to do, such as guarding banks, and making easier targets for the Baathist-jihadi insurgency.
The new Centcom boss, Gen. John Abizaid, is now correcting that mistake by recruiting a 14,000-man Iraqi security force. He's helped by division commanders who are adapting their own tactics in order to win local support and eventually be able to turn power back over to Iraqis.
In Mosul in the north, Gen. Petraeus of the 101st Airborne runs the equivalent of a large Fortune 500 company. He's having to supply electricity, buy up the local wheat crop (everything here was bought by, or supplied by, Saddam's government), form a city council, as well as put down an insurgency. He's even run a Task Force Pothole to fix the local roads. It's no accident that an Iraqi turned the whereabouts of Uday and Qusay into the 101st Airborne. Like the Marines in Najaf, Gen. Petraeus's troops have made an effort to mingle with the population and develop intelligence sources.
In Kirkuk, Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno's Fourth Infantry Division has had similar success tapping Iraqi informers to map what he calls the "network of mid-level Baathists" who are running the insurgency. Late last week they raided a house near Tikrit after an Iraqi tip and captured several Saddam loyalists, including at least five of his personal bodyguards. Some have been reluctant to talk, but Gen. Odierno observes that "when you mention Guantanamo, they become a lot more compliant."
The U.S. media have focused on grumbling troops who want to go home, especially the Third Infantry Division near Baghdad. And having been in the region for some 260 days, the Third ID deserves a break. But among the troops I saw, morale remains remarkably high. To a soldier, they say the Iraqis want us here. They also explain their mission in a way that the American pundit class could stand to hear.
"I tell my troops every day that what we're doing is every bit as important as World War II," says one colonel, a brigade commander, in the 101st. "The chance to create a stable Iraq could help our security for the next 40 or 50 years." A one-star general in the same unit explains that his father served three tours in Vietnam and ultimately turned against that war. But what the 101st is doing "is a classic anti-insurgency campaign" to prevent something similar here.
These men are part of a younger Army officer corps that isn't traumatized by Vietnam or wedded to the Powell Doctrine. They understand what they are doing is vital to the success of the war on terror. They are candid in saying the hit-and-run attacks are likely to continue for months, but they are just as confident that they will inevitably break the Baathist network.
The struggle for Iraq will be difficult, but the coalition is winning. It has the support of most Iraqis, a creative, flexible military, and the resources to improve daily lives. The main question is whether America's politicians have the same patience and fortitude as its soldiers.
The one word I almost never heard in Iraq was "WMD." That isn't because the U.S. military doesn't want, or expect, to find it. The reason, I slowly began to understand, is that Iraqis and the Americans who are here don't think it matters all that much to their mission. The liberation of this country from Saddam's terror is justification enough for what they are doing, and the main chance now isn't refighting the case for war but making sure we win on the ground.
"So I see they're giving Bush a hard time about the WMD," volunteers a Marine colonel, at the breakfast mess in Hilla one morning. "They ought to come here and see what we do, and what Saddam did to these people. This was a good thing to do."
Mr. Gigot is The Wall Street Journal's editorial page editor.
-
Tribute to Matthew Baker
Stratfor is mourning the loss of its chief analyst, Matthew
Baker, who has been with the company since its inception in 1996.
Matthew, aged 33, was shot and killed at his home in Austin,
Texas, on the evening of July 24.
As chief analyst, Matthew helped keep Stratfor's analysis ahead
of the mainstream media coverage. He was interviewed frequently
by the press as a military expert, especially during the Kosovo
war and again during the recent Iraq war. Matthew has been quoted
by many media sources, including the Boston Herald, Sun Sentinel,
London Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, FoxNews.com, the
Washington Times, and by Stars & Stripes and other military
journals.
He also has been interviewed on numerous radio and TV stations as
a military expert.
Matthew will be greatly missed by his friends and colleagues at
Stratfor, and we pay tribute to his exceptional dedication to his
work and to this company. We want our subscribers to know that
although Matthew's death leaves a void in our hearts, the best
way we can honor him is to continue to uphold his example in
providing excellence to our audience and customers.
...................................................................
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
28 July 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
Iraq and the Broader War
Summary
The failure of the United States to achieve a decisive victory in
Iraq would have substantial consequences. The deaths of Qusai and
Odai Hussein last week reflect the American belief that
decapitating the guerrilla movement might be decisive. So far,
the tempo of operations by the guerrillas has not declined, but
that means nothing yet; it might take time for the effect of the
two deaths to ripple through the system. Nevertheless, it is
possible that the Hussein brothers were not critical to guerrilla
operations. Indeed, it is possible that those operations are
designed to continue without centralized leadership. Bringing the
guerrillas under control could be a daunting task, but the
current disarray within the Bush administration makes it much
harder to achieve.
Analysis
The Stratfor Weekly is supposed to focus on the most important
geopolitical issue of the week. The last six have been about
Iraq; this will make the seventh. Certainly, there are a great
many things happening in the world. However, our apparent
obsession with Iraq reflects our conviction that Iraq, right now,
is the pivot of the international geopolitical system. A global
war is under way between the United States and militant Islam.
That war is reshaping the international system. As with the Cold
War or World War II, a host of relationships in the international
system are aligning themselves along the axis defined by the war.
The Iraqi campaign is a subset of that global war; however, it is
a critical subset because the outcome of that campaign will
decisively shape the U.S.-Islamist conflict -- which in turn will
shape the international system.
The failure of the United States to achieve a decisive victory in
Iraq can have a massive effect on the global war. The United
States has now invaded two countries: Afghanistan and Iraq. In
both, the regime has been displaced and the strategic threat to
the United States eliminated. Yet in neither case has the United
States been able to impose a Pax Americanus. The inability to
reach a completely satisfactory outcome undermines the perception
the United States wanted to achieve -- relentless, irresistible
power. U.S. officials knew they could do nothing about anti-
Americanism in the Islamic world, so they moved to compensate by
increasing fear of the United States. The current situations in
Afghanistan and Iraq are, from this standpoint, unsatisfactory;
they undermine the intent of the war and represent a major crisis
in U.S. global strategy. Therefore, the next few weeks and months
are, in our mind, absolutely critical in defining the shape --
difficulty, length and outcome -- of not only the Iraq campaign
but the global war as well. We are at a defining moment.
There are four possible outcomes for the Iraq campaign:
1. The attacks against the Baath leadership will shatter the
Iraqi guerrillas, who will shortly fade away. This will set the
stage for the United States to exploit its Iraq victory by
redefining the dynamics of the Islamic world.
2. The guerrillas will be able to maintain the current tempo of
operations but not to increase it. This would represent a
strategic military victory for U.S. forces, but one with
potential political ramifications in the region and in the United
States.
3. The guerrillas increase their tempo of operations
dramatically, imposing higher casualties on American forces --not
threatening, in strictly military terms, the U.S. occupation of
strategic points of Iraq, but deeply undermining the intention
behind the invasion.
4. The guerrillas, coupled with a mass uprising of the
population, make the American presence in Iraq untenable --
forcing a withdrawal, shattering U.S. strategy in the broader
war.
There are variations on these themes, but these four general
outcomes are reasonably definitive categories.
Washington wants to limit the worst-case scenario to Case 2,
while working aggressively to achieve Case 1. The guerrilla
desire is to prevent their suppression, remaining in Case 2 while
working up the scale to Case 3 and, at some point, triggering a
massed uprising -- taking them to Case 4. For both sides, Case 2
is a barely tenable condition. U.S. forces do not want to be in a
guerrilla war tying down hundreds of thousands of troops,
creating an appearance of failure and preventing follow-on
operations. The guerrillas must show that they not only can
sustain the current level of operations but increase it, both for
internal morale reasons and political reasons.
We therefore have a situation that neither side wants to remain
static. However, the United States has a bigger problem than the
guerrillas: In the end, the longer the guerrillas can sustain the
current tempo of operations, the greater their credibility, their
ability to recruit and the greater their effect on the war as a
whole. The longer they can stay at this stage, the more likely
they are to move to Stage 3. The longer the United States stays
at Stage 3, the more difficult it will be to achieve Stage 1.
Therefore, while neither side wants the current status as an
outcome, the United States can afford it less. It must, if
possible, pacify the country.
This is why the deaths of Qusai and Odai Hussein are so
important. If the guerrilla war emanates primarily from the Baath
party, and if it is organized along the centralized lines the
party historically followed, then a decapitation strike against
the leadership is both a logical and deadly strategy. The deaths
of Odai and Qusai represent a major coup in two senses: First,
they mean that two of the movement's three key leaders have been
eliminated, and second, they demonstrate that U.S. intelligence
has successfully penetrated the Baath security system. This is of
potentially greater importance than the deaths -- the sense that
the United States has penetrated the guerrilla movement could
well destabilize it. Certainly, the insecurity of Saddam Hussein
increases dramatically, as does that of other guerrilla leaders.
There have been continued attacks since the deaths of Qusai and
Odai. Ten U.S. troops have been killed since the Hussein brothers
died, with additional casualties. Guerrilla operations have
intensified. The significance of this is ambiguous at this point,
but four explanations are possible:
1. The killings will take a while to seep through the system, as
will the security breach. Operations already planned are being
carried out and low-level planning for new operations is taking
place, but over time, the guerrilla movement will disintegrate.
This is the U.S. hope.
2. Odai and Qusai were not part of the military command and were
potentially estranged from the movement. Their security was
breached precisely because of their unimportance. The movement is
indeed a Baathist movement, but Odai and Qusai were not among its
leaders.
3. The movement is not modeled on traditional, centralized
guerrilla organizations but takes its bearings from al Qaeda,
with individual units free to operate independently and central
command offering only general guidance. Knocking out Saddam
Hussein and his sons won't affect the movement.
4. The guerrilla movement is not primarily Baathist, but either
is controlled by Jihadists from outside the country or is a
hybrid of Jihadists and well-trained remnants of the Iraqi army
who identify with the religious factions rather than with the
secular Baathists.
If Cases 2-4 are true, then killing Hussein himself will have
minimal effect on the guerrillas' ability to fight. Quite the
contrary, it would represent wasted effort -- a U.S. pursuit of
irrelevant figures that doesn't really hurt the guerrillas'
operations.
The fourth case is the most troubling possibility. Hussein was
deeply hated by many Iraqis, particularly Shiites in the south.
There are certainly tensions between Sunni and Shiite under any
circumstances, but if the Baathist element was to be eliminated,
the possibility of some sort of collaboration along Islamist
lines obviously increases. This is the concern of the U.S.
command in Iraq: Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, who commands U.S.
troops in Iraq, said July 27, "I think as long as we're present
here in Iraq, we will always have the threat of Islamic
fundamentalists and terrorists coming to try to kill American and
coalition soldiers, and that is something that we will have to
contend with."
The issue is the mix. If the center of gravity for the Iraqi
guerrillas was in fact the Hussein family and the Baathist
leadership, the events of the past week should shatter the
movement. If the center of gravity is the Jihadists plus local
allies -- or more precisely, if the movement is designed not to
have a vulnerable center of gravity -- then, from the U.S.
viewpoint, the situation is much more dangerous. One of the
things that Sanchez said was, "We have to understand that we have
a multiple-faceted conflict going on here in Iraq. We've got
terrorist activity, we've got former regime leadership, we have
criminals, and we have some hired assassins that are attacking
our soldiers on a daily basis." If the situation is as
multifaceted as Sanchez describes, it is difficult to see how
there will be a rapid termination of the conflict; there are
simply too many oars in the water.
Add to this the fact that over the past few days, tensions have
risen between U.S. troops and Shiites in the south. The United
States has been trying to win over the Shiites and at least
prevent their participation in the guerrilla war. But the
Shiites' price is extremely high: Essentially, they want to
supplant the U.S. occupation forces as the government of Iraq.
That is something Washington is not prepared to consider. At the
same time, the Shiites are showing the ability to bring large
numbers into the streets for demonstrations against U.S. troops.
Combine a guerrilla war with an intifada, and you have the worst-
case situation for the United States.
U.S. forces must, at the very least, achieve two objectives.
First, the guerrilla war must be contained at the current level;
second, there must not, under any circumstances, be a Shiite
rising in the south. An expanded guerrilla war in the north and a
rising in the south would move the U.S. situation to the worst-
case scenario.
Preventing this requires political rather than military
leadership. Washington must make core decisions about the future
of U.S. relations with Shiites in general and with Iran in
particular. Just as Nixon split the communist bloc by forming an
alliance with Mao, so too does the United States see the need to
divide the Islamic world, which it cannot face as a single bloc.
Complex and sophisticated political maneuvering is needed to
split the Islamic world and, more immediately, to co-opt Muslims
in Iraq. If the United States can't achieve this, it must fight a
war on all fronts simultaneously -- hardly an ideal situation,
and possibly not winnable. Therefore, containing the Shiites in
Iraq at an affordable price represents not only a key to Iraq,
but to the entire war.
It is for this reason that we regard the events in Iraq as
definitive. At the moment, our expectations are low. The Bush
administration is in such internal disarray that it is not clear
whether it can make strategic decisions at this time. Command
appears to be in the hands of U.S. officials in Baghdad, whose
perspective is limited to this campaign rather than to the war as
a whole. In the meantime, Washington officials are maneuvering
against each other as if who held what post were a matter of
national significance. Whether CIA Director GeorgeTenet, National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld or any of the rest are here a week from now is not
nearly as important as the fact that there is a war to fight.
In fairness, the political infighting in Washington is inevitable
at times when wars enter crisis phases. The problem is that at
this moment, the debate does not appear to be concerned with what
strategy is to be followed either in the Iraq campaign or in the
war in general. Rather, the fighting is over who committed what
intelligence failure when. The situation in Iraq is difficult
enough, but the real threat to U.S. warfighting is that the
president will allow the "inside the Beltway" nonsense to
continue. There is a crisis in the war; he can fire someone,
everyone or no one. But the president must command, and that
command must generate political and military strategy.
Therefore, we would argue that there can be no strategic solution
to Iraq or the war until political order is imposed in the
administration. Killing Odai and Qusai Hussein can't possibly
hurt the warfighting effort, but their deaths are hardly a
substitute for a coherent strategy in which the military and
political aspects mesh.
-
Another deep thoughtful one from www.stratfor.com
------------
Today's Featured Analysis
Iraq: U.S. Seeks Compromise With Iran?
Summary
U.S. President George W. Bush reportedly has considered calling
in the services of former Secretary of State James Baker in Iraq.
Washington appears to be seeking Iran's help in courting Iraq's
Shiite majority, which will require some tough negotiations.
Baker, viewed by many to be among the top U.S. political
negotiators, likely would be used to help forge an agreement with
Tehran in this regard. If a deal is made, it could catapult Iran
from isolation to the position of regional hegemon.
Analysis
U.S. President George W. Bush has considered calling in the
services of former Secretary of State James Baker to help work
alongside L. Paul Bremer, the administrator of Iraq -- the second
major change in three months to the team overseeing
reconstruction, the Washington Post reported July 26. Though
unnamed administration officials said Baker might not want to the
job, the White House would still look for a "Baker-like figure"
to assist Bremer, sources told the newspaper.
Washington likely is seeking a senior statesman who can help to
stabilize the situation in Iraq by forging a deal with Tehran.
The occupation of Iraq is not going well for the United States,
which faces daily attacks from a mainly Sunni resistance
movement. Since neither retreat nor the use of excess force are
acceptable options for dealing with the resistance, Washington is
left with one alternative: Seek an alliance involving Iraq's
Shiite majority to counter the guerrilla movement and to help
keep Shiites' own anti-U.S. sentiment from moving toward armed
resistance. But the United States cannot court Iraq's Shiites
without the indulgence of Iran.
Ultimately, a U.S.-Iranian compromise concerning Iraq could leave
Iran as the regional hegemon -- operating under the auspices of
the United States -- and thus alter the geopolitical landscape of
the Persian Gulf and/or the Middle East.
So far, the United States does not appear to be able to stamp out
the armed resistance in Iraq, and the steady flow of American
casualties can have negative consequences for reconstructions
efforts. This -- coupled with the controversy over pre-war
allegations concerning Iraq's WMD and the general perception that
Washington lacks a clear strategy for dealing with the Iraqi
resistance -- have prompted a 17 percent drop in Bush's approval
ratings, which now register at 53 percent, according to recent
polls. In essence, Washington is desperately seeking a solution
to the problems it faces in stabilizing Iraq as the presidential
election campaign season nears.
Given the quarter-century of antagonism in Iranian-American
relations, a deal between the two countries over the
stabilization of Iraq might seem implausible, but in realpolitik
there are no permanent enemies or friends. The United States has
a long history of forging alliances with unanticipated
counterparts to solve strategic problems -- including Stalin, Mao
and the Afghan mujahideen during the 1980s. Given that both Iran
and the United States are capable of stirring up trouble for each
other, the United States will find it difficult or impossible to
rebuild Iraq -- with its large Shiite majority -- without some
kind of compact with Tehran.
Iran has difficulties of its own concerning its nuclear program,
domestic dissent and allegations that it harbors members of al
Qaeda and other militant organizations. As a result of the war
against terrorism, Iran is now surrounded by U.S. military
forces, and Tehran is searching for a way out of its increasingly
uncomfortable position. Iran traditionally has been wary of
threats to its security from both the north and south, but it now
has an unprecedented opportunity to secure its western border. If
Tehran can gain a sphere of influence in Iraq, it could create a
buffer zone that gives the country strategic depth and help to
insulate it from potential security threats.
The challenges that both Washington and Tehran are facing have
opened a window of opportunity for both: Each understands the
other's dilemmas and realizes that they can help one another in
the search for solutions. The United States wants to align itself
with the Shiite majority of Iraq, over which Iran wields
influence. Iran, on the other hand, would like to secure itself
against the risk of regime change -- whether through internal
forces acting at the instigation of the United States or as the
result of a U.S. attack. And -- with Iraq no longer a major
power, Syria buckling under U.S. pressure and Saudi Arabia
struggling with internal and external problems -- Iran can work
with the United States in order to eventually assert itself as
the regional power in the Persian Gulf and/or the Middle East.
The actual nature of this regional hegemonic status would, of
course, be subject to the oversight of the global hegemon, the
United States.
Enter James Baker.
Baker, a senior counselor at the Carlyle Group -- an influential,
U.S.-based private equity firm with extensive ties to the Saudi
royal family -- is quite possibly the best negotiator the United
States has in its diplomatic arsenal. He has an impressive track
record in international negotiations, with involvement in issues
such as the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the creation of
an anti-Iraq coalition in the 1991 Gulf War.
Washington would like to gain Iran's help in dismantling al Qaeda
and for Tehran to refrain from developing nuclear weapons.
However, the Bush administration might be willing to allow Iran
to play a greater role in the political reconstruction of Iraq,
in return for guarantees that U.S. interests will not be
threatened. If Iran agrees to such an arrangement, it would be
presented with a unique opportunity to become the regional
hegemon.
Within Iran, such a deal likely would play well. Reformists would
see the alliance as a move closer to the West and, therefore, as
a chance for liberalization and increased trade. Devout Shiites
would be see it as a way of protecting Iran from the reemergence
of a Sunni Iraq and the fulfillment of Khomeini's dream. In a
region where everyone is perceived as collaborating with the
Americans, the Iranians at least would be seen as having attained
real value from collaboration. Tehran would pay a price where the
Sunni jihadists are concerned, but the agendas of the two
entities don't really converge anyhow.
The greatest fear of Iran's Islamist regime is that it will be
overthrown -- either by direct military intervention from the
United States or by U.S.-instigated insurrection. However, a
compromise with Washington concerning Iraq would secure both the
Islamic revolutionary regime and the country's western flank, and
would position Iran to dominate the region in the long term.
Ultimately, the entire deal could be covertly struck: The United
States creates a Shiite-dominated government in Iraq that cracks
down on the guerrilla resistance movement; Iran covertly
cooperates with the United States against al Qaeda and dials back
its nuclear program. This does not require grand pronouncements,
like those that characterized the U.S. detente with China during
the Nixon administration; it could be handled and contained
politically.
Washington would have to alleviate any security concerns by
Israel in order to strike such an agreement with Tehran, which
sponsors Palestinian militant groups. Apart from that, however,
the United States -- unlike Iran -- has few inherent obstacles to
overcome in order to strike a deal. In our view, if Washington
could forge agreement with China to diminish the threat from
Communism, it likely could do the same with Islamism by aligning
with Shiite Iran to counter the threat from Sunni jihadists.
This would not be easily achieved, however, given the limitations
on Iran's maneuvering room: The most crucial issue for Tehran is
to avoid the perception in the Muslim world that is has
somersaulted from an anti-American position to a pro-American
one. The fact that the vast majority of the Muslim world is Sunni
also poses a problem for Tehran, which has been desperately
pursuing a policy predicated upon Shia-Sunni unity. A U.S.-
Iranian understanding would trouble particularly trouble Saudi
Arabia. Riyadh is loathe to see a rival power emerging in the
region, and the kingdom's influential Wahhabist religious
establishment is equally opposed to the possibility of growing
Shiite influence.
-
Iran Closes In on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb
Tehran's reactor program masks strides toward weapons capability, a Times investigation finds. France warns against exports to Islamic Republic.
French Report on Iranian Nuclear Program (Acrobat file)
* Possible Uranium Enrichment Plant at Natanz
? Closeup of Natanz Facility
? Possible Heavy Water Production Plant at Arak
? Closeup of Arak Facility
Related Links
? International Atomic Energy Agency
? World Nuclear Assocation
? Excerpts of 12/01 Rafsanjani Speech on Using Nuclear Weapon Against Israel (MEMRI) (PDF)
? Carnegie Endowment for International Peace/ Non-Proliferation
? Institute for Science and International Security
? Center for Policy Studies in Russia
? International Institute for Strategic Studies London
? National Council of Resistance of Iran
? State Dept. Fact Sheet on Nuclear Supplier's Group
Iran Closes In on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb
Afghans on Edge of Chaos
There's No Business Like Camels
Israel Approves Release of Prisoners
more >
By Douglas Frantz, Times Staff Writer
VIENNA ? After more than a decade of working behind layers of front companies and in hidden laboratories, Iran appears to be in the late stages of developing the capacity to build a nuclear bomb.
Iran insists that like many countries it is only building commercial nuclear reactors to generate electricity for homes and factories. "Iran's efforts in the field of nuclear technology are focused on civilian application and nothing else," President Mohammad Khatami said on state television in February. "This is the legitimate right of the Iranian people."
But a three-month investigation by The Times ? drawing on previously secret reports, international officials, independent experts, Iranian exiles and intelligence sources in Europe and the Middle East ? uncovered strong evidence that Iran's commercial program masks a plan to become the world's next nuclear power. The country has been engaged in a pattern of clandestine activity that has concealed weapons work from international inspectors. Technology and scientists from Russia, China, North Korea and Pakistan have propelled Iran's nuclear program much closer to producing a bomb than Iraq ever was.
No one is certain when Iran might produce its first atomic weapon. Some experts said two or three years; others believe the government has probably not given a final go-ahead. But it is clear that Iran is moving purposefully and rapidly toward acquiring the capability.
Among the findings:
? A confidential report prepared by the French government in May concluded that Iran is surprisingly close to having enriched uranium or plutonium for a bomb. The French warned other governments to exercise "the most serious vigilance on their exports to Iran and Iranian front companies," according to a copy of the report provided by a foreign intelligence service.
? Samples of uranium taken by U.N. inspectors in Iran in June tested positive for enrichment levels high enough to be consistent with an attempt to build a nuclear weapon, according to a foreign intelligence officer and an American diplomat. The Reuters news service first reported the possibility that the material was weapons-grade last month.
? Iran is concealing several weapons research laboratories and evidence of past activity at a plant disguised as a watch-making factory in a Tehran suburb. In June, U.N. inspectors were refused access to two large rooms and barred from testing samples at the factory, called the Kalaye Electric Co.
? Tehran secretly imported 1.8 tons of nuclear material from China in 1991 and processed some of it to manufacture uranium metal, which would be of no use in Iran's commercial program but would be integral to weapons production.
? As early as 1989, Pakistani generals offered to sell Iran nuclear weapons technology. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear scientist regarded by the United States as a purveyor of nuclear secrets, has helped Iran for years. "Pakistan's role was bigger from the beginning than we thought," said a Middle Eastern intelligence official.
? North Korean military scientists recently were monitored entering Iranian nuclear facilities. They are assisting in the design of a nuclear warhead, according to people inside Iran and foreign intelligence officials. So many North Koreans are working on nuclear and missile projects in Iran that a resort on the Caspian coast is set aside for their exclusive use.
? Russian scientists, sometimes traveling to Iran under false identities and working without their government's approval, are helping to complete a special reactor that could produce weapons-grade plutonium. Moscow insists that it is providing only commercial technology for the civilian reactor under construction near the Persian Gulf port of Bushehr, an assertion disputed by Washington.
? In recent months, Iran has approached European companies to buy devices that can manipulate large volumes of radioactive material, technology to forge uranium metal and plutonium and switches that could trigger a nuclear weapon. European intelligence sources said Tehran's shopping list was a strong indication that Iran has moved to the late stages of weapons development.
Regional Impact
A nuclear-armed Iran would present the United States with a difficult political and military equation. Iran would be the first avowed enemy of Israel to possess a nuclear bomb. It also has been labeled by the Bush administration as a state sponsor of international terrorism.
Iranian nuclear weapons could shift the balance of power in the region, where Washington is trying to establish pro-American governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both of those nations border Iran and are places where Tehran wants to exert influence that could conflict with U.S. intentions, particularly in Iraq.
The Bush administration, which partly justified its war against Iraq by stressing concerns that Saddam Hussein had revived his nuclear weapons program, calls a nuclear-armed Iran unacceptable. At his news conference Wednesday, President Bush said he hopes international pressure will convince the Iranians that "development of a nuclear weapon is not in their interests," but he added that "all options remain on the table."
Foreign intelligence officials told The Times that the Central Intelligence Agency, which has long contended that Iran is building a bomb, has briefed them on a contingency plan for U.S. air and missile attacks against Iranian nuclear installations. "It would be foolish not to present the commander in chief with all of the options, including that one," said one of the officials.
A CIA spokeswoman declined to confirm or deny that such a plan has been drafted. "We wouldn't talk about anything like that," she said.
There is precedent for such a strike. Israeli fighter-bombers destroyed a French-built nuclear reactor outside Baghdad in 1981 shortly before it was to go online. The attack set back Iraq's nuclear program and drove it underground.
Taking out Iran's nuclear infrastructure would prove tougher, said Israeli military planners and outside analysts. For one thing, the facilities are spread around the country and small installations are still secret. At least one key facility is being built to withstand conventional airstrikes.
Contacts between Washington and Tehran are very limited, and analysts said U.S. decision-making is still dominated by a distrust of Iran rooted in the taking of American hostages during the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and an ideological aversion to negotiating with a regime regarded as extremist.
"The administration does not have a strategy because there is a fight in the administration over whether you should even deal with this government in Iran," said George Perkovich, a nuclear weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Inspections' Challenge
For now, the Bush administration is pinning much of its hopes of containing Iranian nuclear ambitions on the same international inspection apparatus that it blames for failing to locate weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
So far, the U.N.-affiliated International Atomic Energy Agency, based here in Vienna, has preferred negotiation to confrontation with Iran.
In a June 16 report to the 35 countries represented on the agency's board, its director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei, criticized Iran for concealing many of its nuclear activities. But he resisted U.S. pressure to declare Iran in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which was created in 1968 to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
Inspections are continuing along with Iranian roadblocks to a thorough examination, according to officials monitoring the progress. Still, IAEA officials hope to have a clearer picture of Iran's nuclear program by Sept. 8, when a follow-up report to the board is due.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry did not respond to telephone requests for interviews or to written questions for this article. Iran said last year that it plans to build six civilian reactors to generate electricity for its fast-growing population of 65 million. Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi has said that allegations that Iran is concealing a weapons program are "poisonous and disdainful rumors" spread by the United States.
Iran's civilian nuclear energy program started in 1974 and was interrupted by the Islamic Revolution. It got back on track in 1995, when Russia signed an $800-million contract to complete the commercial reactor at Bushehr, which is scheduled to come online next year.
Russia also promised to sell Iran the uranium fuel to power the reactor. But Iran maintains that it wants to develop its own nuclear fuel-making capability, a position that has roused international suspicions.
Typically, nations with civilian nuclear programs buy fuel from the countries that export the reactors because the fuel-making process is complicated and expensive. In the most common way to make the fuel, uranium ore is converted to a gas and pumped into centrifuges, where rotors spinning at twice the speed of sound separate isotopes. The process concentrates, or "enriches," the uranium to the point that fission can be sustained in a reactor, which pumps out heat to drive electrical turbines.
The same enrichment process can concentrate fissionable uranium at greater levels to produce material for a bomb.
Countries that try to enrich their own uranium or manufacture plutonium in special reactors are immediately suspected of trying to join the elite nuclear arms club. Israel, India and Pakistan developed their own plants for producing fissile material for bombs under the guise of commercial reactors.
Iran agreed not to produce nuclear weapons when it signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970, which opened the door for it to acquire civilian reactors. The treaty does not prohibit Iran from producing or possessing enriched uranium but requires it to submit its nuclear facilities to international monitoring to ensure that materials are not diverted to weapons use.
Iran has permitted inspections of its declared commercial nuclear facilities. But last year, an Iranian exile group pinpointed a secret underground enrichment plant outside Natanz, a small mountain town about 200 miles south of Tehran known for its bracing climate and fruit orchards.
In December, the Institute for Science and International Security, a small think tank in Washington, published satellite photos of Natanz from the archives of a commercial firm, DigitalGlobe. The photos showed large-scale construction inside the perimeter of a security fence. Among the buildings were a pilot centrifuge plant and two underground halls big enough for tens of thousands of centrifuges, the institute said.
Pressure mounted to allow international monitors into Natanz, and senior IAEA officials visited the plant in February. They found 160 assembled centrifuges and components for 1,000 more. Moreover, the equipment was to be housed in bunkers 75 feet deep, with walls 8 feet thick.
The level of centrifuge development at Natanz already reflects thousands of hours of testing and advanced technological work, experts said. By comparison, Iraq had tested a single centrifuge for about 100 hours when IAEA inspectors began dismantling Baghdad's nuclear weapons program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
"They are way ahead of where Iraq was in 1991," said a U.N. official who is familiar with both programs.
Once it is up and running, Natanz could make enough material for a bomb within a year and eventually enough for three to five bombs a year, experts said.
Nuclear Neighbors
The Iranian exile group also revealed a secret site near Arak, a city of 400,000 in western Iran known as a historic center for weaving fine Persian carpets. Under international pressure, Iran conceded in February that it plans to build a special type of reactor there that will generate plutonium for research. Plutonium is the radioactive material at the heart of some of the most powerful nuclear bombs.
The disclosures cast previous Iranian government statements in a new light.
Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of an influential government council and president of Iran from 1989 to 1997, gave a speech on Dec. 14, 2001, that has been interpreted widely as both a signal that Iran wants nuclear weapons and a threat to use them against Israel. Describing the establishment of the Jewish state as the worst event in history, Rafsanjani warned, "In due time the Islamic world will have a military nuclear device, and then the strategy of the West would reach a dead end, since one bomb is enough to destroy all Israel."
Rafsanjani has since stepped back in his rhetoric, noting in a sermon on Friday that "because of religious and moral beliefs and commitments that the Koran has created for us, we cannot and will not pursue such weapons that destroy humanity."
On July 20, Iran unveiled a missile based on a North Korean design that brings Israel within range and hailed the event as an important step in protecting the Palestinians. Experts said the new missile could be armed with a small nuclear warhead, and Iran is developing a version that will carry a heavier payload.
"Today our people and our armed forces are ready to defend their goals anywhere," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, said in a ceremony unveiling the missile.
Many outside experts as well as Iranians say that even reformers linked to Iranian President Khatami believe that Iran needs a deterrent against its nuclear neighbors ? Israel, Russia and Pakistan ? and possibly against the United States.
"These weapons would guarantee the territorial integrity and national security of Iran," Nasser Hadian, a professor at Tehran University who is aligned with the reformers, said in a telephone interview from New York, where he is teaching at Columbia University. "We feel that we cannot possibly rely on the world to provide security for us, and this is felt by all the factions."
At a symposium in Rome in early July, ElBaradei told the audience that stopping the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons depends greatly on eliminating the incentives for states to possess them. "It is instructive that the majority of the suspected efforts to acquire WMD are to be found in the Middle East, a hotbed of instability for over half a century," he said.
A senior U.N. official said he is not sure that Iran is developing a bomb. But the different fates of Iraq and North Korea, the other members of what Bush called the "axis of evil," demonstrate why countries out of favor with the United States might want a nuclear weapon, he added.
Iraq did not have a bomb and was easily invaded, he said, while North Korea claims to have a bomb and is trying to use it as a bargaining chip with the U.S. for security assurances and possibly increased aid. "If a regime has the feeling that it is not on the right wavelength with the United States, its position is to have a nuclear weapon," he said.
Iran faces numerous technological obstacles before it can produce a nuclear bomb, according to intelligence officials and independent experts. Once those problems are solved or close to being solved, some experts said they expect Iran to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty, as North Korea did, and close its doors to IAEA inspectors.
"They have made the decision to develop a breakout capability, which will give them the option to leave the treaty in the future and complete a nuclear weapon within six months or a year," said Gary Samore, director of nonproliferation programs at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies and a former Clinton administration security official. "I think the program is probably unstoppable through diplomatic means."
Others disagree.
"I don't believe they have passed the point of no return," said Perkovich, the nuclear weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment. "We should try to reverse Iran's direction by providing better, low-cost options to fuel the Bushehr electricity plant and by easing the security concerns that make Iranians, reformers and hard-liners, interested in getting a bomb."
Diplomacy has proved an imperfect solution in the past. The Clinton administration persuaded China not to sell nuclear items to Iran in the mid-1990s. Administration officials later used sanctions and negotiations to convince Russia to curb technology transfers to Iran's civilian program that U.S. intelligence believed were being diverted to weapons work.
But Russia is committed to the Bushehr reactor, which generates 20,000 jobs for its beleaguered nuclear industry. The project also allows hundreds of Iranians to train in Russia, raising concerns within the intelligence community that knowledge and hardware for weapons work will slip through.
Officials in Moscow, outside experts and foreign intelligence officials said economics are driving continuing Russian assistance to the Iranian weapons program and that it is probably occurring without government approval. They said thousands of Russian physicists, mathematicians and other scientists are unemployed or paid a pittance at home, pushing them to sell their expertise elsewhere.
"Russian scientists are freelancing, leading to a leakage of expertise, and you can't control that," said Bobo Lo, a former Australian diplomat and associate fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. "That's where it gets really messy with the Iranians."
Multiple Sites
"Iran has made tremendous progress during the last two years, and according to our estimates it could reach a technical capability to create a nuclear device by 2006," said Anton Khlopkov, a nuclear expert at Moscow's Center for Policy Studies in Russia. "The problem is neither Russia nor the U.S. nor the IAEA had a clear understanding about real Iranian achievements in the nuclear field."
U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell echoed the sentiment in March, saying on a CNN program, "It shows you how a determined nation that has the intent to develop a nuclear weapon can keep that development process secret from inspectors and outsiders, if they really are determined to do it."
Plants as large as Natanz are not necessary to build a bomb. Once the technology is developed, as few as 500 centrifuges can enrich enough uranium for a small weapon, experts said. Hiding that number would be easy, said an IAEA official, which is why intelligence officials are concerned about several smaller, still-secret plants throughout Iran.
For example, officers from two foreign intelligence agencies said weapons research is being conducted at a plant outside Kashan. One of the intelligence officials said the plant was involved in nuclear fuel production in two large halls constructed 25 feet underground.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran, the Paris-based exile group that revealed the Natanz and Arak sites, said in July that it had pinpointed two more weapons research locations in a rural area called Hashtgerd about 25 miles northwest of Tehran. The group is the political arm of the Moujahedeen Khalq, which is listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist group, but independent experts said its information from inside Iran has often been accurate. IAEA inspectors' requests to visit the Hashtgerd sites have been refused by Iranian authorities.
This spring, after considerable pressure from the IAEA, Iran reluctantly allowed inspectors to visit a nondescript cluster of two warehouses and smaller buildings tucked into an alley in the Tehran suburb of Ab-Ali. The place, called the Kalaye Electric Co., claimed to be a watch factory, but Iran conceded it had been an assembly point for centrifuges.
When the IAEA team arrived in March, they were refused access to the plant. A second trip in May was slightly more successful ? inspectors entered the buildings, but two large rooms were declared off limits, according to new information from U.N. officials.
On June 7, inspectors returned to Iran for four days of probes at various sites. This time authorities refused to let them near Kalaye, U.N. officials said. They also were barred from using sophisticated testing equipment the team had brought from Vienna.
Such tests could detect a particle of enriched uranium within a huge radius and determine whether its concentration exceeded the 2%-to-5% level generally used in civilian reactor fuel. One IAEA official compared the ability of a swipe to detect enriched particles to finding a four-leaf clover in a field of clover 6 miles long, 9 miles wide and 150 feet deep.
But during their trip in June, IAEA inspectors took samples from an undisclosed location in Iran that tested positive for enriched uranium at a level that could be used in weapons, according to diplomatic and intelligence sources. IAEA officials refused to comment on the report.
Chinese Uranium Ore
Officials from two foreign intelligence services said Iranian scientists used nuclear material from a secret shipment from China to help enrich uranium at Kalaye and elsewhere.
China had long denied rumors about transferring nuclear materials to Iran. Early this year, U.N. officials said in interviews, the Chinese admitted selling Iran 1.8 tons of uranium ore and chemical forms of uranium used in the enrichment process in 1991.
Faced with a letter describing China's admission, Iranian authorities acknowledged receipt of the material, said the officials. At the same time, Iran said some of the chemicals were used at Tehran's Jabr ibn Hayan laboratory to make uranium metal, which has no use in Iran's commercial program but is a key part of a nuclear weapon.
In addition to China and Russia, Pakistan and North Korea have played central roles in Iran's nuclear program, according to foreign intelligence officers and confidential reports prepared by the French government and a Middle Eastern intelligence service.
North Korean technicians worked for years helping Iran develop the Shahab-3 missile, unveiled last month in Tehran. A foreign intelligence official and a former Iranian intelligence officer said the Koreans are now working on a longer-range Shahab-4 and providing assistance on designs for a nuclear warhead.
The foreign intelligence official said high-ranking North Korean military personnel have been seen at some of Iran's nuclear installations. A hotel is reserved for North Koreans in Tehran and a resort on the Caspian Sea coast northwest of Tehran has been set aside for their use, according to one of the sources and a U.N. official.
The centrifuges seen by IAEA officials at Natanz in February were based on a Pakistani design, according to intelligence officials. The design and other new evidence point to Pakistan as a bigger supplier of nuclear weapons technology to Iran than initially thought, said foreign intelligence officers, Iranian exiles and independent experts.
While U.S. intelligence is aware of Pakistan's help to Iran, the Bush administration has not pushed the issue with Islamabad because of Pakistan's role as an ally in the battle against the Al Qaeda terrorist network and Afghanistan's Taliban, outside experts and foreign intelligence officials said.
Signs of Pakistani Aid
The most convincing sign of Pakistan's role in Iran comes from what several people described as the long involvement in Iran of Khan, the scientist regarded as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb.
The CIA concluded in a top-secret analysis last year that Khan shared critical technology on centrifuges and weapons-test data with North Korea in the late 1990s. The agency tracked at least 13 visits by Khan to North Korea over a span of several years, according to a January article in the New Yorker magazine.
Two former Iranian officials and American and foreign intelligence officials said Khan travels frequently to Tehran to share his expertise. Most recently, two of these people said, he has worked as a troubleshooter to iron out problems with the centrifuges and with weapons design.
Ali Akbar Omid Mehr, who was in charge of Pakistani affairs at Iran's Foreign Ministry in 1989 and 1990, said he came across Khan as he prepared what is known as a "green book" detailing contacts between Tehran and Islamabad.
"I saw that Mr. A. Q. Khan had been given a villa near the Caspian Sea for his help to Iran," Mehr said in an interview in Denmark, where he and his family live under assumed names since he defected in late 1995.
His account of the villa was supported by other Iranian exiles.
Khan might have played a role in a previously undisclosed offer from Pakistani military commanders to sell nuclear weapons technology to Iran in 1989, two former senior Pakistani officials said in separate interviews describing the episode.
According to their accounts, soon after Rafsanjani's election as president of Iran in 1989, he took Benazir Bhutto, then prime minister of Pakistan, aside at a reception in Tehran and told her about the proposal from her generals.
Rafsanjani was commander of Tehran's armed forces at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, and one of his goals as president was to reestablish his country as a regional power. He told Bhutto that the Pakistani generals wanted to transfer the technology secretly, on a military-to-military basis, but he wanted her to approve the transaction, the former Pakistani officials said.
Earlier that year, Bhutto had appeared before the U.S. Congress and promised that Pakistan would not export nuclear technology. Bhutto often bucked the generals, and the two officials said she blocked the transfer ? at least until she was ousted in 1996.
Current Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said in an interview with The Times that his country never provided nuclear assistance to Iran, before or after he took office in a military coup in October 1999. "Zero," the general insisted. "Never worked ? even before ? never worked with Iran. This is the first time this has been raised, ever."
Pressured by the United States, Musharraf removed Khan as head of Pakistan's nuclear program nearly two years ago. Since then, Musharraf said, Khan has been retired and his travel is not monitored.
Other intelligence officials and governments disputed Musharraf's denial.
"There are convincing indications about the origin of the technology ? it is of Pakistani type ? but Iran undoubtedly controls the manufacturing process of centrifuges and seems even able to improve it," said the French government report on Iran's nuclear program, which was delivered in May to the Nuclear Suppliers Group, an organization of governments with nuclear programs.
A growing body of evidence suggests that Iran is simultaneously pursuing another way to produce material for a bomb.
This alternative is a heavy-water reactor, which could breed weapons-grade plutonium. In the initial stage of the program, Iran is building a plant to distill heavy water near the Qareh Chay River, about 35 miles from Arak. Heavy water, which is processed to contain elevated concentrations of deuterium, allows the reactor to operate with natural uranium as its fuel and produce plutonium.
This type of reactor is used in some places to generate electricity, but it is better known as a means of producing plutonium for weapons that bypasses uranium enrichment and its many technical obstacles. As a result, the presence of a heavy-water reactor is often regarded as a sign that a country is trying to develop a weapon.
American spy satellites had detected construction at Natanz before its existence was made public last year. But the work near Arak had remained secret because the plant under construction looked like any other distillery or similar factory, according to intelligence officials and U.N. authorities.
After exiles revealed Arak's existence, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, the president of Iran's atomic energy organization, informed the IAEA that the planned reactor was strictly meant for research and producing radioisotopes for medical use.
To many experts, however, the project raises another red flag. "For Iran, there is no justification whatsoever to have a heavy-water plant," said Samore of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Echoing him, a senior U.N. official said, "The heavy-water plant sticks out like a sore thumb."
Iran first tried to buy heavy-water reactors as turnkey projects from China and India in the mid-1990s, according to a previously undisclosed dossier prepared by a foreign intelligence agency and provided to The Times. Blocked on that front by the United States, according to former U.S. officials, Iran decided to build its own and turned to two Russian institutes.
The United States learned of the cooperation through telephone intercepts and imposed sanctions on the Russian institutes in 1999. The sanctions remain in effect, but officials with foreign intelligence agencies and the CIA said there is evidence that Russian scientists are still providing expertise for the project.
Khlopkov, the Russian nuclear expert, said he thinks it is unlikely that Russian scientists are helping Iran with any of its weapons programs. Still, he said, the recent disclosures about the Iranian program surprised Moscow and might cause Russia to cancel a second planned reactor unless Iran agrees to stricter international inspections of its nuclear facilities.
'Industrial Scale'
Despite Iran's progress, most experts said it is unlikely to develop a weapon without more outside help, particularly in procuring specialty technology. That is why some said they were alarmed by Iran's recent attempts to buy critical dual-use technology, which has military and civilian applications.
In November, German authorities blocked an attempt by businessmen allegedly working on behalf of Iran to acquire high-voltage switches that could be used for both breaking up kidney stones and triggering a nuclear weapon.
French authorities reported that French firms with nuclear expertise have received a rising number of inquiries from suspected Iranian front companies for goods with military uses.
In a previously undisclosed incident, French authorities recently stopped a French company from selling 28 specialized remote manipulators for nuclear facilities to a company in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, that the authorities said was a front for Iran's nuclear program.
Because the manipulators were designed to handle heavy volumes of radioactive material, intelligence authorities suspected they were destined for a plant in which uranium or plutonium would be reprocessed on a large scale.
"Such intent is indicative of a willingness to move from a laboratory scale to an industrial scale," said a European intelligence official who is familiar with details of the attempt.
The pattern of attempted purchases and the discovery of previously secret nuclear installations led the French government to conclude in May that Iran is using its civilian nuclear program to conceal a military program.
"Iran appears ready to develop nuclear weapons within a few years," said the French report to the Nuclear Suppliers Group.
-
www.stratfor.com
Stratfor Weekly: The Wall of Sharon
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
4 August 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
The Wall of Sharon
Summary
Seeking to end the risk of Palestinian attacks, Israel is
building a barrier to separate Palestinians and Israelis. For the
wall to work, it must be more like an iron curtain than the U.S.-
Mexican border. It must be relatively impermeable: If there are
significant crossing points, militants will exploit them.
Therefore, the only meaningful strategy is to isolate Israelis
and Palestinians. That would lead to a Palestinian dependency on
Jordan that might, paradoxically, topple the Hashemite regime in
Amman. If that happens, Israel will have solved a painful
nuisance by creating the potential for a strategic nightmare.
Analysis
Israel, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, is in the process of
building a wall that ultimately will separate Israelis and
Palestinians along a line roughly -- but not at all precisely --
identical to the cease-fire lines that held from 1948 until 1967.
The wall is far from complete, but the logic for it is self-
evident: It represents Israel's attempt to impose a reality that
will both satisfy the Jewish state's fundamental security needs
and the minimal political demands of the Palestinians without
requiring Palestinian agreement or acquiescence. It is an
extraordinary attempt at applied geopolitics. The question is
whether it will work.
Let's begin with the technical aspect. It is possible, with
substantial effort, to create a barrier that not only stops
large-scale population movements but seriously inhibits small-
scale movements as well. The Iron Curtain was more than a
rhetorical term: We once walked along the Austro-Hungarian
border, seeing watch towers with machine guns and search lights;
concertina wire; wide, clear-cut killing fields where
infiltrators or exfiltrators could be observed day or night using
search lights and flares, and dense mine fields. The line ran
from the Baltic to the Yugoslav border. It did work -- there was
certainly some movement across, but only at great risk and
probable failure.
The purpose of the Iron Curtain was to prevent eastern Europeans
from moving to the west and away from Soviet occupation. It was
difficult to build and maintain, but it was built and it did work
quite well. It was built with World War II technology. The
Israeli project will involve more modern sensor technology, both
human and machine. Movement will not be spotted by the luck of
the flare, but with sound sensors, ground radar and unmanned
aerial vehicles. The point is that from a technical standpoint,
if the Iron Curtain could work, this can work. The challenge is
political and military, not technical.
From the Israeli standpoint, the driving force is desperation.
Suicide attacks have achieved what Palestinian planners hoped for
-- convincing the Israelis the status quo cannot be maintained.
The bombings have convinced Israeli leaders that the continued
physical occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip are not
an option. The problem the Israelis have had to confront is that
simply retreating and abandoning the occupation might not solve
their strategic problem. From the Israeli standpoint, the problem
of the Oslo accords is that they rested on a political decision
by the Palestinians, who had to guarantee that they would abandon
further claims -- and military operations -- against the state of
Israel in return for Israeli withdrawal.
The last two years convinced Israeli leaders of two things:
First, that any guarantee from a Palestinian government was
unstable and could not be regarded as permanent; and second, that
even if the Palestinian government was able to maintain its own
commitment to an agreement, it was incapable of guaranteeing that
all Palestinian factions would honor it. Israel observed the
ability of the Irish Republican Army, ETA and other groups to
continue operations without or against state sanctions. Since the
absolute minimum concession from the Palestinians had to be the
cessation of suicide bombings and related actions against Israel,
this posed an insuperable problem. On the one hand, the status
quo was untenable; on the other, a political foundation for
withdrawal appeared to be unattainable. Israel was trapped
between two impossible realities.
For Israel, the Camp David accords with Egypt provided the basic
model for negotiations with Arabs. Camp David consisted of three
parts:
1. Egyptian recognition that Israel could not be destroyed
through military action.
2. Israeli recognition that Egypt was capable -- as in 1973 -- of
carrying out military operations that were too costly for Israel.
3. Recognition that the Sinai desert could serve not only as
Israel's strategic depth in maneuver warfare, but equally well as
a demilitarized buffer zone large enough to prevent surprise
attack.
It was on this basis that Menachem Begin, Sharon's intellectual
and strategic mentor, reached agreement with Egypt to end
hostilities -- an agreement that remains the strategic foundation
of Israel's national security policy today. The crucial piece was
that the deal did not rely on Egypt's good will: The buffer was
sufficiently large that any Egyptian violation would be quickly
noticed and could be responded to militarily. In other words,
Israel could keep control of its fate without holding Egyptian
territory.
The Oslo agreement was an attempt to apply this same principle to
the Palestinian question. It was built on the Palestinian
recognition that Palestinians could not destroy Israel
militarily, and Israeli recognition that the cost of occupation
was greater than Israel could rationally bear. What was missing -
- and always has been -- was a third step. There has been no
possibility of disengagement. From the Israeli viewpoint, this
has meant that any settlement depended on both the continued
goodwill of the Palestinian state and the absence of dissident
anti-Israeli movements. Since neither could be guaranteed, no
solution was possible.
Hence, the fence. It should be noted that the creation of a fixed
barrier violates all Israeli military thinking. The state's
military doctrine is built around the concept of mobile warfare.
Israel's concern is with having sufficient strategic depth to
engage an enemy attack and destroy it, rather than depending on a
fixed barrier. From a purely military standpoint, Israel would
view this barrier as an accident waiting to happen. The view of
barriers (such as the Suez Canal) is that they can all be
breached using appropriate, massed military force.
This is the critical point. From the Israeli standpoint, the wall
is not a military solution. It is not a Maginot Line designed to
protect against enemy main force; it is designed to achieve a
very particular, very limited and very important paramilitary
goal. It is designed to stop the infiltration of Palestinian
paramilitaries into Israel without requiring either the direct
occupation of Palestinian territory -- something that has not
worked anyway -- nor precluding the creation of a Palestinian
state. It is not the Maginot Line, it is an Iron Curtain. And
this is where the conceptual problems start to crop up.
The Iron Curtain was a fairly impermeable barrier. Nothing moved
across it except at very clearly defined and limited checkpoints.
The traffic at these checkpoints was quite low during most of the
Cold War, and there was ample opportunity for inspection and
interrogation of traffic headed in either direction. Even so,
these checkpoints were used by Western intelligence both to
penetrate Warsaw Pact countries and to extract people. There were
other points along the frontier where more informal traffic
crossed, but what never took place -- particularly after the
Berlin Wall went up -- was mass, interzonal traffic on a
continual basis.
The Iron Curtain never looked like the U.S.-Mexican border, nor
can the U.S.-Mexican border become an Iron Curtain because
neither the United States nor Mexico wants that to happen. Trade
is continual, and the movement of illegal labor from Mexico to
the United States is informally viewed by the U.S. government as
necessary. The U.S.-Mexican border is therefore a barrier to
almost nothing -- virtually everything, legal and illegal, flows
across the barrier. As much as it is disliked, the flow is
needed.
For the Israeli security model to work, economic relations
between Israel and Palestine will have to be ruptured. The idea
of controlled movement of large numbers of workers, trucks and so
on across the border is incompatible with the idea of the fence
as a security barrier. Once movement is permitted, movement is
permitted. Along with that movement will come guerrillas, weapons
and whatever anyone wants to send across. You cannot be a little
bit pregnant on this: Either Israel seals its frontier, or the
fence is a waste of steel and manpower. If the wall is not
continual and impermeable, it may as well not be there.
The geopolitical idea underlying the fence is that that it will
not be permeable. If this goal is achieved, regardless of where
the final line of the fence will be, then economic and social
relations between Israel and Palestine will cease to exist except
through third-party transit. Forgetting the question of Jerusalem
-- for if Jerusalem is an open city, the fence may as well not be
built -- this poses a huge strategic challenge.
Palestinians historically have depended on Israel economically.
If Israel closes off its frontiers, the only contiguous economic
relationship will be with Jordan. In effect, Palestine would
become a Jordanian dependency. However, it will not be clear over
time which is the dog and which is the tail. Jordan already has a
large Palestinian population that has, in the past, threatened
the survival of the Hashemite Bedouin regime. By sealing off
Palestinian and Israeli territories, the Israelis would slam
Palestine and Jordan together. Over the not-so-long term, this
could mean the end of Hashemite Jordan and the creation of a
single Palestinian state on both sides of the Jordan River.
There are Israelis -- including Sharon, in our view -- who would
not object to this outcome. They have argued that the Hashemite
presence in Amman has long distorted the reality in the region.
The Hashemite regime was installed by Britain after World War I.
In the opinion of some Israelis, Jordan ought to be the real
Palestine. Therefore, if the fence results in the fall of the
Jordanian monarchy and the creation of a unitary Palestinian
state, these Israelis would find this a positive development.
Indeed, one argument goes that a Jordan with boundaries roughly
analogous to pre-1967 lines would undermine Palestinian radical
movements by creating a more stable, less aggressive Palestinian
nation-state.
Two other scenarios exist. In one, the Hashemites survive and
drive many of the Palestinians on the east bank of the Jordan
into the West Bank; the Israelis maintain their cordon sanitaire
and the Palestinian nation-state becomes an untenable disaster --
trapped between two enemies, Israel and Jordan. Israel would not
object to this, but the problem is that the level of desperation
achieved in Palestine might prove so chaotic that it either would
threaten Israeli national security or set into motion processes
in the Arab world -- and among Israel's Western allies -- that
would increase pressure on Israel. In other words, the Israelis
would wind up strategically where they started, with the non-
trivial exception of fewer or no suicide bombings.
The other scenario is that the Palestinians do merge with Jordan,
but -- given the dynamics of the Arab and Islamic worlds -- the
new nation-state does not moderate but instead generates, with
assistance from other Arabs, a major military strike force for
whom the fence represents at most a minor tactical barrier rather
than a strategic force. Under this scenario, the consequences
would be a return to the strategic situation of 1948-1967 (except
for Egypt's participation), with a potentially more powerful
enemy to the east. If Egypt were to change its policies, the
outcome could be strategically disastrous for Israel.
The problem with the fence, therefore, is this:
1. If it is to be effective as a barrier, it must be nearly
absolute; large-scale movement cannot be permitted.
2. If a Palestinian state is isolated, it would develop a
dependency on Jordan that could topple the Hashemite regime,
creating a potential strategic threat to Israel.
The fence strategy works only if the Palestinian-Jordanian
relationship yields a politically moderate Palestinian state.
That might happen, but there is no reason to be certain that it
will. The essential purpose of the fence is to give Israel
control of its security. The problem is that Israel can control
the construction of the fence, but not the evolution of events
after the fence is built. At some point in the process, Israel
becomes dependent on the actions of others.
This is Israel's core strategic dilemma. At some point, no matter
what it does, it becomes dependent on events that are not under
its control. In some scenarios, solving the problem of suicide
bombings leads into a massive deterioration of Israel's strategic
position. Israeli leaders obviously want to avoid that, but the
fence pushes out the strategic problem and paradoxically
intensifies it, rather than solving it. Israeli security
continues to depend on the decisions of the Palestinians. The
fence is an attempt to take control of Israel's future out of
Palestinian hands and place it securely in Israeli hands, but the
fact is that what the Palestinians do will continue to affect
Israel's security.
As is frequently the case in this world, Israel does not have
good choices. It has to make some bad ones work.
...................................................................
-
www.stratfor.com
Geopolitical Diary: Monday, Aug. 11, 2003
Over the weekend, major rioting broke out in the southern Iraqi city of
Basra. Basra is a Shiite city near the Iranian border and heavily influenced by Iran. If the rioting in Basra is not contained or -- more important -- if it spreads to the rest of Iran's Shiite regions, then the occupation of Iraq will have taken a dramatic turn, one that could define the future of the Anglo-American occupation. The events in Basra are of fundamental strategic importance.
To this point, the United States has faced a guerrilla war concentrated in
the Sunni regions of the country. The first assumption about this rising was that it represented a follow-on war plan of the Iraqi military, and that
militants reported to former President Saddam Hussein through his sons. His sons are dead, and if we are to believe the U.S. Defense Department, Hussein is on the run. That means that the first assumption about the guerrillas is wrong: Their operations are continuing, even with their supposed command structure shattered.
It follows that the Sunni insurrection is more deeply embedded and more
difficult to defeat than first surmised. The guerrillas appear to be the
remnants of parts of the Iraqi army -- more Islamist than Baathist, joined
with foreign Islamic operatives. They are increasing their operations and,
according to the U.S. military, becoming more effective. They have targeted not only U.S. troops but also Iraqis who are collaborating against the regime. They have proven a tough enemy so far.
Last week, the U.S. command in Iraq announced a shift in strategy, in which the number of intrusive sweeps into the Sunni community would be curtailed. Part of the reason for this decision is that these sweeps were proving ineffective. Another part is that the operations were fostering hostility against the United States and therefore increasing guerrilla capabilities. Essentially, this has left the United States searching for an effective strategy for dealing with the guerrillas.
Washington has two strategic options at this moment. The first is an enclave strategy, such as we have seen in Afghanistan; the second is to find an ally inside Iraq who is willing to share the burden. We have argued over the past weeks that the only force in Iraq that can take the burden away from the United States is the Iraqi Shiites. We have made two points about this: First, that their price will be the establishment of a Shiite-dominated government in Iraq, and second, that the path to an agreement with the Iraqi Shiites ultimately runs through Tehran, because the Iranians ultimately have the ability either to destabilize Shiite Iraq or to lead the Shiites into a coalition.
We have argued that intense, secret discussions in fact are taking place
between the United States and Iran in several venues, dealing with a range of issues that separate the two countries. Over the weekend, the U.S. Defense Department disclosed that an old figure in covert U.S.-Iranian relations who helped -- if that's the word -- organize parts of the
Iran-Contra relationship in the 1980s, Manucher Ghorbanifar, has been in
discussions with U.S. officials for about two years. Ghorbanifar undoubtedly is one of the lesser channels being used for these discussions. Newsday broke the story, and it is, in our opinion, merely the tip of the iceberg. The issue is not whether Ghorbanifar is a nice man -- which seemed the media's concern. The issue is what is being discussed between U.S. and Iranian officials.
Obviously, the topic of discussion is whether the United States will be able
to reach an accommodation with Tehran in particular and Shiites specifically to split the Islamic world and help put down the guerrilla war using Shiite forces. There are a host of subsidiary issues, such as exchanges of al Qaeda prisoners for Mujahideen e-Khalq militants, the structure of the Iraqi government, Iranian-U.S. intelligence-sharing, who will dominate Iraq's economy and how, and so on. The heart of the matter is whether Iran will deliver the Iraqi Shiites and, most important, if it will restrain them, keeping them both from joining the guerrillas or staging a massed uprising -- an intifada -- that will make the British position in the south untenable.
This brings us back to the urgent question of riots in Basra this weekend.
This is absolutely the worst thing that could happen to the United States in
Iraq: If the Shiites move to a general uprising and there is an unmanageable guerrilla war in the north, the entire purpose of the Iraqi invasion will be lost and the April victory will give way to defeat. The United States does not have the ability to govern Iraq if the Shiites rise up. If Pentagon officials assert otherwise, then it's time they take jobs in the food service industry. Containing a massed Shiite rising -- even including shooting protesters down in the streets -- is not going to happen.
Therefore, the burning question is, what happened in Basra? If this was a
spontaneous rising in response to an incident, then it's one thing. We are
not really big on coincidence. Thousands of demonstrators could be out there spontaneously protesting poor electrical service, but we strongly suspect that there was planned organization behind it. Anything more than a couple of hundred demonstrators don't just happen.
That brings us to the more significant question: Is this a move by Iranians
and Iraqi Shiite leaders to create a massive rising in the south, or is this
a reminder from Tehran, at a strategic moment in the negotiations with
Washington, that the Iranians are holding some very high cards in this poker game? We do not believe that Iran is ready to walk from the table quite yet. On the other hand, events within Iran indicate some sort of power struggle is under way, probably over relations with the United States, and an entity other than the government might be organizing demonstrations. Yet our best guess is that the negotiations are at a critical juncture and the Iranians decided to raise the ante.
There are, of course, a variety of Shiite factions in Iraq that don't draw
their inspiration from Iran. But in the past 20 years, it has been Iranian
intelligence that has worked with the Shiites in Iraq, and Iran that
provided refuge for many of their leaders. The Iranians might not hold all
the cards in Iraq, but they hold enough to be able to create chaos. Iran
seems to have signaled its willingness to create chaos to the United States; Washington is not going to be able to ignore it. At some point soon, U.S. officials either will have to decide on an effective military strategy in Iran and go it alone, or cut a deal. The Iranians are letting the United States know that they don't have all day -- and that the price will be high.
-
As They Were Saying . . .
By VIN WEBER
Critics of the war are back in business. The Bush administration, they say, decided to go to war regardless of the facts. Having made that decision, it then amassed as much evidence to support its case as it could, to the point of intentionally exaggerating (or worse) the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime. The charge is false -- demonstrably so.
The Bush case for going into Iraq was based largely on findings of U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency weapons inspectors, as well as those of other governments. The case for war was nearly identical to the one made by Democrats like President Clinton and Sens. Daschle and Kerry. In case the critics suffer from amnesia, here are just a few of their judgments that pre-date the Bush administration:
? When President Clinton addressed the nation on Dec. 16, 1998 -- after ordering a strike on military and security targets in Iraq -- he said: "[The] mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors. [The] purpose is to protect the national interest of the United States, and indeed the interests of people throughout the Middle East and around the world. Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons."
? On the same day, Vice President Gore made this statement: "If you allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons, how many people is he going to kill with such weapons? He's already demonstrated a willingness to use these weapons. He poison-gassed his own people. He used poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors. This man has no compunction about killing lots and lots of people. So this is a way to save lives and to save the stability and peace of a region of the world that is important to the peace and security of the entire world."
? Sen. Tom Daschle said a 1998 use-of-force resolution would "send as clear a message as possible that we are going to force, one way or another, diplomatically or militarily, Iraq to comply with international law." And he vigorously defended President Clinton's inclination to use military force in Iraq. Summing up the Clinton administration's argument, Mr. Daschle said, "We have exhausted virtually our diplomatic effort to get the Iraqis to comply with their own agreements and with international law. Given that, what other option is there but to force them to do so? That's what they're saying. This is the key question. And the answer is we don't have another option. We have got to force them to comply, and we are doing so militarily."
? On Feb. 23, 1998, Sen. John Kerry agreed. "If there is not unfettered, unrestricted, unlimited access per the U.N. resolution for inspections, and Unscom cannot in our judgment appropriately perform its functions, then we obviously reserve the rights to press that case internationally and to do what we need to do as a nation in order to be able to enforce those rights. . . . Saddam Hussein has already used these weapons and has made it clear that he has the intent to continue to try, by virtue of his duplicity and secrecy, to continue to do so. That is a threat to the stability of the Middle East. It is a threat with respect to the potential of terrorist activities on a global basis. It is a threat even to regions near but not exactly in the Middle East."
? Richard Butler, who headed the U.N. team investigating Iraq's weapons programs, said: "The fundamental problem with Iraq remains the nature of the regime itself: Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction." Mr. Butler also wrote in his book, "The Greatest Threat," "t would be foolish in the extreme not to assume that [Saddam] is developing long-range missile capabilities, at work again on building nuclear weapons; and adding to the chemical and biological warfare weapons he concealed during the UNSCOM inspection period."
? According to the New Yorker, in March 2002 August Hanning, the chief of German intelligence, said this: "It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years."
? Salman Yassin Zweir, a design engineer employed by the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission for 13 years, said that in August 1998 -- four months before U.N. weapons inspectors were expelled from Iraq -- Saddam ordered his scientists to resume work on a program aimed at making a nuclear bomb. When Mr. Zweir refused to rejoin the nuclear-weapons program, he was beaten with iron bars for three weeks. He fled to Jordan in October 1998. Saddam "is very proud of his nuclear team," according to Mr. Zweir. "He will never give up the dream of being the first Arab leader to have a nuclear bomb."
? In August 1995, Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel -- who had been in charge of Iraq's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons program -- defected to Jordan. (He was later killed on Saddam's orders.) He provided information to Unscom, IAEA, and foreign intelligence agencies about Iraq's chemical, biological, and nuclear capabilities. These revelations badly damaged Iraq's credibility and Iraqi officials eventually admitted to Unscom officials that their previously hidden arsenal included (according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies) more than 100,000 gallons of botulinum toxin; more than 22,000 gallons of anthrax; more than 900 gallons of gas gangrene; more than 500 gallons of aflatoxin; four metric tons of VX nerve gas; and 2.7 gallons of ricin.
? Last October the director of Central Intelligence issued a National Intelligence Estimate of Iraq's continuing programs of weapons of mass destruction. That document contained the consensus judgments of the intelligence community, based upon the best information available about the Iraqi threat. The NIE reported, "We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of UN Resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons, as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions. If left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."
The media has focused enormous attention on the State Department's dissent on whether Iraq pursued natural uranium in Africa. The department also said that "the Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research believes that Saddam continues to want nuclear weapons and that available evidence indicates that Baghdad is pursuing at least a limited effort to maintain and acquire nuclear weapon-related capabilities."
That Iraq posed a threat to America's security and world peace was a view shared by Democrats as well as Republicans; by the U.N. as well as the U.S.; by American intelligence agencies and by intelligence agencies of almost every nation that looked into this matter. Facts are stubborn things. Even the passage of time doesn't erode them.
Mr. Weber is a former Republican congressman from Minnesota.
Updated August 13, 2003
-
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
13 August 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
Military Doctrine, Guerrilla Warfare and Counter-Insurgency
Summary
The current situation in Iraq requires revisiting the basic
concepts behind counter-insurgency. Iraq now is an arena in which
counter-insurgency doctrine is being implemented. Historically,
counter-insurgency operations by large external powers have not
concluded positively. Vietnam and Afghanistan are the obvious
outcomes, although there have been cases where small-scale
insurgencies have been contained. The actual scale of the Iraqi
insurgency is not yet clear. What is clear is that it is a
problem in counter-insurgency, which is itself a doctrine with
problems.
Analysis
The current situations in Iraq, Chechnya and Afghanistan
demonstrates the central problem of modern warfare. Contemporary
warfare was forged during World War II, when the three dominant
elements of the modern battlefield reached maturity: the aircraft
carrier-submarine combination in naval warfare, the fighter and
bomber combination in aerial warfare and the armored fighting
vehicle/self-propelled artillery combination on land. Tied
together with electromagnetic communications and sensors, this
complex of systems has continued to dominate modern military
thinking.
It was not the weapons systems themselves that defined warfare.
Rather, it was the deeper concept -- the idea that technology was
decisive in war. The armed forces of all major combatants in the
20th century were organized to optimize the use of massed
technology. The neatly structured echelons in each sphere of
warfare were designed not only to manage and maintain the
equipment, but also to facilitate their orderly deployment on the
battlefield. Even the emergence of nuclear weapons did not change
the basic structure of warfare. It remained technically focused,
with the military organization built around the needs of the
technology.
The modern armored division, carrier battle group and fighter or
bomber wing represent the optimized organization built around a
technology designed to assault industrialized armies and
societies. They remain the basic structure of modern warfare, and
they carry out that function well. However, as the United States
discovered in Vietnam and the Soviet Union discovered in
Afghanistan, this force structure is not particularly effective
against guerrilla forces.
The essential problem is that the basic unit of guerrilla warfare
is the individual and the squad. They are frequently unarmed --
having hidden their weapons -- and when armed, they carry man-
portable weapons such as rifles, rocket-propelled grenades or
mortars. When unarmed, they cannot be easily distinguished from
the surrounding population. And they arm themselves at a time and
place of their choosing -- selected to minimize the probability
of detection and interception.
Guerrilla war, particularly in its early stages, is extremely
resistant to conventional military force because the massed
systems that dominate mainstream operations cannot engage the
guerrilla force. Indeed, even if collateral damage were not an
issue -- and it almost always is -- the mass annihilation or
deportation of a population does not, in itself, guarantee the
elimination of the guerilla force. So long as a single survivor
knows the location of the weapons caches, the guerrilla movement
can readily revive itself.
Therefore, in modern military thinking, a second, parallel
military structure has emerged: counter-insurgency forces.
Operating under various names, counter-insurgency troops try to
overcome the lack of surgical precision of conventional forces.
They carry out a number of functions:
1. Engage guerrilla forces on a symmetrical level, while having
access to technologically superior force as needed.
2. Collect intelligence on guerrilla concentrations for use by
larger formations.
3. Recruit and train indigenous forces to engage guerrilla
forces.
4. Organize operations designed to drive a wedge between the
guerrillas and population.
The basic units carrying out these counter-insurgency missions
have two components. First, there are Special Forces -- highly
trained and motivated light infantry -- intended to carry out the
primary missions. Second, there are more conventional forces,
either directly attached to the primary group or available on
request, designed to multiply the force when it becomes engaged.
During the first stages of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, counter-
insurgency units -- designated Special Forces or Green Berets --
carried out these operations.
Two fundamental and unavoidable weaknesses were built into the
strategy.
The number of trained counter-insurgency troops available was
insufficient. The measure to be used for sufficiency is not the
number of guerrillas operating. Rather, the question is the size
of the population -- regardless of political inclination -- that
must be sorted through and managed to get through to the
guerrillas. This means there is a massive imbalance between the
guerrilla force and the counter-insurgency force that is
intensified by the need for security. Guerrillas operate in a
target-rich environment. The need to provide static security
against attacks on critical targets generates an even greater
requirement for forces, although not necessarily of counter-
insurgency forces.
The huge commitment of forces needed to begin the suppression of
a guerrilla force cannot be managed by an external power. Unless
the target country is extremely small both in terms of population
and geography, the logistical costs of force projection for a
purely external force are prohibitive. That means that a
successful force must recruit and utilize an indigenous force
that serves two purposes. First, they serve as the backbone of
the main infantry force, both defending key targets and serving
as follow-on forces in major engagements.
Second, since the counter-insurgency force normally needs intense
cultural and political guidance to separate guerrillas from the
population, these forces provide essential support -- from
interpreters to intelligence -- for the counter-insurgency team.
This leads directly to the second problem. The guerrillas can
easily penetrate an indigenous force, particularly if that force
is being established after the guerrilla operation has commenced.
Recruiting a police and military force after the guerrillas are
established guarantees that guerrilla agents will be well
represented among the ranks. Since it is impossible to
distinguish between political views using technical means of
intelligence, there is no effective way to screen these out --
particularly if the first round of recruitment and organization
is being carried out by the external power.
This means that from the beginning of operations, the guerrillas
have a built-in advantage. Having penetrated the indigenous
military force, the guerrillas will have a great deal of
information on the tactical and operational level. At that point,
the very sparseness of the guerrilla movement starts to work to
its advantage. Hidden in terrain or population, armed with
information on operations, guerrillas can either decline combat
and disperse, or seize the element of surprise.
The reverse always has been the intention for counter-insurgency
forces, the idea being that they would mirror the guerrillas'
capability. This sometimes happened on a tactical level. However,
the ability of foreign forces to penetrate guerrilla movements on
the operational level was severely limited for obvious reasons.
It was tough for an American to masquerade as a Vietnamese. It
potentially could be done, but not on a decisive scale. That
means that penetration on the operational level -- knowing plans
and implementation -- depended on indigenous allies whose
reliability was often questionable. Therefore, the ability of the
counter-insurgency forces to mimic the guerrillas was
constrained. In neither Vietnam nor Afghanistan was the
operational intelligence of the counter-insurgency forces equal
to that of the guerrillas.
The normal counter to this was to use imprecise intelligence and
compensate for it with large-scale operations. So, one counter
for not having precise knowledge of the location of guerrillas
was to use large, mobile formations to move in and occupy a
region, in an attempt to identify, engage and destroy guerrilla
formations. This had two consequences. First, it meant a
violation of the rules of the economy of forces as battalions
were used to search for squads. In this case, massive superiority
in forces did not necessarily translate to strategic success. The
guerrillas, disaggregated in the smallest practicable unit, could
not be strategically crushed.
Second, the nature of the operation created inevitable political
problems. Operations of this sort were not dominated by
specialized counter-insurgency units, which were at least trained
in discriminatory warfare -- trying to distinguish guerrillas
from neutral or friendly population. By the nature of the
operation, regular troops were used to seize an area and search
for the guerrillas. Since the area was frequently populated and
since the attacking troops had little ability to discriminate, it
resulted frequently in the mishandling of civilian populations,
hostility against the attackers and sympathy for the guerrillas.
Then, counter-insurgency troops, already handicapped in their own
way, were brought in to pacify the region. The result was
unsatisfactory, to say the least.
This points to the essential problem of guerrilla war. At its
lowest level -- before it evolves into a stage where it has
complex logistical requirements supplied from secure areas in and
out of the country -- guerrilla war is political rather than
military in nature. The paradox of guerrilla war is that it is
easier to defeat militarily once the guerrilla force has matured
into a more advanced, and therefore more vulnerable, entity.
However, by the time it has evolved, the likelihood is that the
political situation has deteriorated sufficiently that even heavy
attrition will be overcome through massive recruitment within the
disaffected population.
The loss of the political war makes a war of attrition extremely
difficult. As both the Soviets and Americans discovered, the
ability of the outside force to absorb casualties is inferior to
that of the indigenous force, if the indigenous force is
politically motivated. Since the process of suppressing early-
stage guerrilla movements almost guarantees the generation of
massive political hostility, the later war -- which should be
favorable to the counter-insurgency forces -- turns out to be
impossible to win. Even extreme attrition ratios are overcome by
recruitment.
The dilemma facing the United States in Iraq is to surgically
remove the guerrilla force from the population without generating
a political backlash that will fuel a long-term insurgency
regardless of levels of attrition. This is much easier to say
than to do. The heart of the matter is intelligence -- to deny
the guerrillas intelligence about U.S. operations while gathering
massive intelligence about the guerrillas. The only way to win
the war is to reverse, at the earliest possible phase, the
intelligence equation. The guerrillas must be confused and
blinded; the Americans must maintain transparency of the
guerrillas.
That is clearly what the United States now is attempting to do.
It is limiting its search-and-seize operations while massively
increasing its intelligence capabilities. This is happening both
in terms of human intelligence and technical means of
intelligence. It is unclear whether this will work. Human
intelligence is political in nature and requires extreme
expertise with the culture, without dependency on indigenous
elements that might be unreliable. It is very difficult for
someone from Kansas, however gifted in the craft of intelligence,
to make sense of a tactical situation -- and at this point, the
guerrillas present only a tactical face.
It is nevertheless the key to any hope for success. It also is an
operation that will take an extended period of time. Washington's
hope obviously is that by curtailing the United States' own
large-scale operations and moving into an intense intelligence
phase, the guerrilla operations will alienate the population. It
is possible but difficult. It also will take time. But it is
clear that the United States is in the process of rewriting parts
of the counter-insurgency book and, therefore, is beginning to
write a new -- and as yet uncertain -- chapter in military
history.
-
www.stratfor.com
=================================================================
...................................................................
Iran: Could Cooperation With U.S. Put Tehran in Al Qaeda's
Crosshairs?
Summary
Iran's national security chief claims that country, like the
United States, has been a target of al Qaeda plots. Tehran may be
manipulating the facts, but if it steps up cooperation with the
United States against al Qaeda, it could in fact become a target
in the future.
Analysis
The secretary-general of Iran's Supreme National Security
Council, Hassan Rowhani, says Iran has foiled several al Qaeda
attacks, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported late
Aug. 17. The agency quoted Hassan as saying that Iran had been
battling al Qaeda for some time, and that Tehran had arrested
hundreds of suspected militants.
Rowhani's statements are a direct signal to the United States
that Iran is cooperating in the U.S. war against al Qaeda. Tehran
and Washington are currently in talks focused on two issues: the
situation in Iraq and Iran's harboring of al Qaeda members. In
reality, it is unclear if Tehran has ever been targeted by al
Qaeda, or if it will aid Washington's efforts to dismantle the
organization. The risk for Iran, however, is that its cooperation
with the United States could prompt al Qaeda to retaliate against
the country itself.
Iran's relationship with al Qaeda is of prime importance to the
United States. Washington believes one key to pre-empting further
attacks is to deny the group sanctuary, especially in countries
hostile to the United States. Washington also believes this will
be vital in preventing al Qaeda from regrouping.
Iran -- an Islamic state that is adjacent to Iraq, Afghanistan
and Pakistan, and shares some of al Qaeda's goals -- makes an
attractive host country for the group. Like Osama bin Laden's
network, Tehran wants to see the United States withdraw from the
Arabian Peninsula. Iran aspires to become the regional hegemon,
but it cannot do so as long as the U.S. military dominates the
area. Second, Iran sees instability stirred by al Qaeda in
countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen as advantageous
to its influence over these states.
There are, however, reasons for discord between Iran and al
Qaeda. For one thing, the militant group hopes to establish a
Sunni Islamic caliphate, but Iran is predominantly Shia.
Moreover, an al Qaeda-inspired regime in Riyadh ultimately would
rival Tehran's influence in the region. These issues are real,
though can perhaps be glossed over in the short term. In
addition, Iranian diplomats tell Stratfor that al Qaeda has long
plotted and carried out attacks against Iranian assets --
including its airliners -- inside the country.
Iranian officials are now in senior-level talks with the United
States, and recent events point to progress on the terms of
cooperation. On Aug. 17, IRNA reported that Iraq would reopen its
embassy in Tehran on Sept. 1, 2003 -- a move that suggests Iran
is willing to expand diplomatic ties with U.S.-occupied Iraq. It
also indicates an indirect acceptance of the U.S. rule in
Baghdad, as well as perhaps a new avenue for talks and
cooperation.
Two days earlier, the U.S. State Department announced that it
would close two of the Washington offices of the Mujahideen e-
Khalq (MKO), an Iranian opposition group. Tehran has been angered
by the U.S.-MKO alliance since U.S. military troops seized
Baghdad. Washington's attempts to distance itself from the group,
which is based in Iraq and has fought a decades-long war against
the clerical regime in Tehran, signal a concession to Tehran.
The U.S.-Iranian talks are intended to prevent a clash between
the two countries and to reduce U.S. anxiety about Tehran's
relationship with al Qaeda. During a meeting with Australian
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer in late May, Rowhani claimed
that Iran had been battling al Qaeda even before Sept. 11 --
arresting more than 500 members and deporting scores to other
countries. Australia is a close U.S. ally, and Rowhani's
statements were meant for Washington's ears as well as
Canberra's.
Rowhani's statement now that al Qaeda had planned to attack
inside Iran emerges at an interesting time -- at a point when the
U.S.-Iranian talks seem to be making progress. The claim might be
meant to demonstrate a shared concern with Washington, though the
plots themselves -- if they did in fact exist -- likely predated
the detente between Washington and Tehran.
In Rowhani's words, "Their [Al Qaeda's] plans for a wide range of
terrorist acts inside Iran were neutralized by our intelligence
organizations." This comment suggests a time frame that likely
would span the last several months, at the very least.
Intelligence agencies aren't known to operate with lightning
speed, and uncovering such plots can take weeks, months or even
years. In addition, Rowhani claimed in May -- when Tehran and
Washington were still doing more shadowboxing than secret talking
-- that his government had started the crackdown on al Qaeda
years ago.
Iran has reason to worry. Al Qaeda is no doubt unhappy with the
Khamanei-Khatami government's cooperation with the Bush
administration, nor will it appreciate Tehran's willingness to
extradite its members to other countries like Egypt, Kuwait or
Saudi Arabia, where members of the network would be tortured and
jailed, if not executed.
Various reports, rumors and flies on the wall have claimed that
several senior-level al Qaeda members are hiding out in Iran,
including Egyptians Ayman al Zawahiri and Seif al Adel, Kuwaiti
Sulaiman Abu Ghaith and Osama bin Laden's son, Saad. If Tehran
were to extradite these men, it would deal a crippling blow to al
Qaeda. A few small-scale attacks aimed at destabilizing Tehran
would not be an unexpected response.
-
www.stratfor.com
STRATFOR'S MORNING INTELLIGENCE BRIEF
SITUATION REPORTS - Aug. 28, 2003
, , , ,
Geopolitical Diary: Thursday, Aug. 28, 2003
Richard Perle, ex-chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, announced today that mistakes were made in Iraq. Perle no longer holds an official position in the U.S. administration, but he still has clout with the likes of U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Perle's admission, unofficial and deniable though it is, indicates that the Defense Department has not completely lost touched with reality -- although the statement reveals no more than the merely self-evident.
Perle's description of the error is interesting: "Our principal mistake, in
my opinion, was that we didn't manage to work closely with the Iraqis before the war, so that there was an Iraqi opposition capable of taking charge immediately. Today, the answer is to hand over power to the Iraqis as soon as possible." Turning over Iraq to the Iraqis is an excellent idea, save that he does not specify which Iraqis he has in mind. Obviously it isn't Saddam Hussein or the Baath Party. So the question is -- who, exactly?
Iraq is divided along many lines. There are distinctions between Kurdish,
Sunni and Shiite Iraq. Other groups have tribal distinctions; still others
have political ones. These differences are not trivial, at least not to the
people of Iraq. There are deep and serious divisions that have, over the
centuries, deepened into profound distrust. Under Hussein, a generation of brutality drove deep wedges between Sunni and Shiite and other groups. Referring to them as "the Iraqi people" creates a fiction. Their loyalty does not go to the nation-state so much as to other institutions --
religious, tribal and ethnic.
Therefore, admitting to the mistake of not turning Iraq over to the Iraqis
completely misses the point. Since Perle is a very smart man, he knows that. He isn't suggesting turning Iraq over to the Iraqis. That would lead to
partition, chaos and civil war, or the reinstitution of dictatorship. What
Perle means is that the United States should have turned Iraq over to the
administrative council it created, one containing representatives of some
groups but not others.
The problem with the administrative council is that it has no inherent
power -- no army, no police force, no ability to tax, no budget. The council is in no sense representative. The most that it can do is serve as cover for the United States -- and not very plausible cover at that. To the extent that this board can act, it must do so through the United States, which does have an army, controls the police and holds the purse strings. The administrative council presides over nothing.
Institutions do exist to which the United States can transfer power. For
example, among the Shiites in the south, divided though they are, dwell
leaders with legitimacy among the public. They could rule in their own
regions, at the very least. The problem with this, though, is that they
don't want what the United States wants them to want, namely, a secular
democratic society. What they do want is an Islamic society modeled to some extent on Iran. They're also interested in dominating all of Iraq.
So the problem with the desire to democratize Iraq is that the Iraqis, were they to vote, would neither come to a consensus on who should lead them, nor, more importantly, choose the kind of regime the United States prefers. Turning Iraq over to the Iraqis won't rectify mistakes unless the United States is prepared to make deals allowing people whom the United States fears -- like the Shiites -- to govern in a way Washington detests.
Accepting that U.S. interest in Iraq is not nation-building, but prosecuting
the war on al Qaeda, means that we can look at Perle's statement and
acknowledge this: If he meant by his statement that the United States should make deals with traditional leaders to let them govern in their own way, then turning Iraq over to the Iraqis might work. But if he believes that the current administrative structure can govern Iraq, then mistakes will continue.
This is the problem the Bush administration faces. Understanding that the
United States cannot simply rule Iraq, but must allow the Iraqis to do so,
means grasping the fact that Iraq is not Wisconsin. There's not an American inside of every Iraqi struggling to get out. The military mission in Iraq -- to pressure the surrounding states -- still can be carried out. Iraqi factions can even be co-opted. But until the U.S. administration accepts the fact that Iraq will not be remade into anything resembling the kind of regime it wants, progress is difficult to imagine.
This does not mean that the war cannot be prosecuted. It does mean that the prosecution requires subtlety.
-
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
02 September 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
An Unlikely Alliance
Summary
Though the recent death of SCIRI leader Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim would appear to be raising the level of turmoil within Iraq, it might in fact help to push the United States and Iran toward a powerful -- if seemingly unlikely -- alignment.
Analysis
The death of Shiite Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), appears to have exacerbated the turmoil in Iraq. In fact, it opens the door to some dramatic shifts that might help stabilize the U.S. position in Iran. Indeed, it might even lead to a fundamental redrawing of the geopolitical maps of the region -- as dramatic as the U.S.-Chinese alignment against the Soviet Union in the 1970s.
To understand what is happening, we must note two important aspects of the al-Hakim affair. First, though far from being pro-American, al-Hakim was engaged in limited cooperation with the United States, including -- through SCIRI -- participating in the U.S.-sponsored Iraq Governing Council. Second, upon his death, Iran announced a three-day mourning period in his honor. Al-Hakim, who had lived in exile in Iran during much of Saddam Hussein's rule in Baghdad, was an integral part of the Shiite governing apparatus -- admired and loved in Iran.
We therefore have two facts. First, al-Hakim was engaged in
limited but meaningful collaboration with the United States,
which appears to be why he was killed. Second, he was intimately connected to Iranian ruling circles, and not just to those circles that Americans like to call "reformers." If we stop and think about it, these two facts would appear incompatible, but in reality they reveal a growing movement toward alignment between the United States and Iran.
The United States has realized that it cannot pacify Iraq on its own. One proposal, floated by the State Department, calls for a United Nations force -- under U.S. command -- to take control of Iraq. This raises three questions. First, why would any sane country put its forces at risk -- under U.S. command, no less -- to solve America's problems if it doesn't have to? Second, what would additional outside forces, as unfamiliar with Iraq as U.S. forces are, add to the mix, save more confusion? Finally, what price would the United States have to pay for U.N. cooperation; for instance, would the U.N. presence place restrictions on U.S. operations against al Qaeda?
Another proposal, floated by Defense Advisory Board Chairman Richard Perle, suggests that the way out is to turn Iraq over to Iraqis as quickly as possible rather than prolonging a U.S. occupation. The problem with Perle's proposal is that it assumes a generic Iraq, unattached to any subgrouping -- religious, ethnic or ideological -- that not only is ready to take the reins, but is capable of governing. In other words, Perle's proposal would turn Iraq over to whom?
Putting the Kurdish issue aside, the fundamental fault line
running through Iraqi society is the division between Sunni and Shiite. The Shiite majority dominates the area south of Baghdad. The Sunni minority, which very much includes Hussein and most of the Baath Party's national apparatus, spent the past generation brutalizing the Shiites, and Hussein's group also spent that time making certain that Sunnis who were not part of their tribe were marginalized. Today, Iraq is a fragmented entity where the center of gravity, the Baath Party, has been shattered and there is no
substitute for it.
However, embedded in Perle's proposal is a simple fact. If there is a cohesive group in Iraq -- indeed a majority group -- it is the Shiites. Although ideologically and tribally fragmented, the Shiites of Iraq are far better organized than U.S. intelligence reports estimated before the war. This is due to the creation of a clandestine infrastructure, sponsored by Iranian intelligence, following the failure of U.S.-encouraged Shiite uprisings in the 1990s. While Washington was worried about the disintegration of Iraq and the growth of Iranian power, Tehran was preparing for the day that Hussein's regime would either collapse or be destroyed by the United States.
As a result, and somewhat to the surprise of U.S. intelligence, organizations were in place in Iraq's Shiite regions that were able to maintain order and exercise control after the war. British authorities realized this early on and tried to transfer power from British forces in Basra to local control, much to U.S. displeasure.
Initially, Washington viewed the Iranian-sponsored organization of the Shiite regions as a threat to its control of Iraq. The initial U.S. perception was that the Shiites, being bitterly anti-Hussein, would respond enthusiastically to their liberation by U.S. forces. In fact, the response was cautious and sullen. Officials in Washington also assumed that the collapse of the Iraqi army would mean the collapse of Sunni resistance. Under this theory, the United States would have an easy time in the Sunni regions -- it already had excellent relations in the Kurdish regions -- but would face a challenge from Iran in the south.
The game actually played out very differently. The United States did not have an easy time in the Sunni triangle. To the contrary: A clearly planned guerrilla war kicked off weeks after the conquest of Baghdad and has continued since. Had the rising spread to the Sunni regions, or had the Sunnis launched an intifada with massed demonstrations, the U.S. position in Iraq would have become enormously more difficult, if not untenable.
The Sunnis staged some protests to demonstrate their capabilities to the United States, but they did not rise en masse. In general, they have contented themselves with playing a waiting game -- intensifying their organization in the region, carrying out some internal factional struggles, but watching and waiting. Most interesting, rather than simply rejecting the U.S. occupation, they simultaneously called for its end while participating in it.
The key goes back to Iran and to the Sunni-Shiite split within
the Islamic world. Iran has a geopolitical problem, one it has
had for centuries: It faces a threat from the north, through the Caucasus, and a threat from the west, from whatever entity occupies the Tigris and Euphrates basin. When both threats are active, as they were for much of the Cold War, Iran must have outside support, and that support frequently turns into domination. Iran's dream is that it might be secure on both fronts. That rarely happens.
The end of the Cold War has created an unstable area in the
Caucasus that actually helps secure Iran's interests. The
Caucasus might be in chaos, but there is no great imperial power about to push down into Iran. Moreover, at about the same time, the threat posed by Iraq abated after the United States defeated it and neutralized its armed forces during Desert Storm. This created a period of unprecedented security for Iran that Tehran exploited by working to reconstruct its military and moving forward on nuclear weapons.
However, Iran's real interest is not simply Iraq's neutralization; that could easily change. Its real interest is in dominating Iraq. An Iranian-dominated Iraq would mean two things: First, the only threat to Iran would come from the north and Iran could concentrate on blocking that threat; second, it would make Iran the major native regional power in the Persian Gulf. Therefore, were Iranian-sponsored and sympathetic Shiite groups to come to power in Iraq, it would represent a massive geopolitical coup for the United States.
Initially, this was the opposite of anything the United States
wanted. One of the reasons for invading Iraq was to be able to control Iran and its nuclear capability. But the guerrilla war in the north has created a new strategic reality for Washington. The issue at the moment is not how to project power throughout the region, but how to simply pacify Iraq. The ambitions of April have given way to the realities of September.
The United States needs a native force in Iraq to carry the brunt of the pacification program. The Shiites, unlike the United Nations, already would deliver a fairly pacified south and probably would enjoy giving some payback to the Sunnis in the north. Certainly, they are both more likely to achieve success and more willing to bear the burden of pacification than is the United States, let alone any U.N. member willing to send troops. It is not, at the moment, a question of what the United States wants; it is a question of what it can have.
The initial idea was that the United States would sponsor a massive rising of disaffected youth in Iran. In fact, U.S. intelligence supported dissident university students in a plan to do just that. However, Iranian security forces crushed the rebellion effortlessly -- and with it any U.S. hopes of forcing regime change in Iran through internal means. If this were to
happen, it would not happen in a time frame relative to Washington's problems in Iraq or problems with al Qaeda. Therefore, the Iranian regime, such as it is, is the regime the United States must deal with. And that regime holds the key to the Iraqi Shiites.
The United States has been negotiating both overtly and covertly with Iran on a range of issues. There has been enough progress to keep southern Iraq quiet, but not enough to reach a definitive breakthrough. The issue has not been Iranian nuclear power. Certainly, the Iranians have been producing a nuclear weapon. They made certain that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency saw weapons-grade uranium during an inspection in recent days. It is an important bargaining chip.
But as with North Korea, Iranian leaders know that nuclear
weapons are more valuable as a bargaining chip than as a reality. Asymmetry leads to eradication of nuclear threats. Put less pretentiously, Tehran must assume that the United States -- or Israel -- will destroy any nuclear capability before it becomes a threat. Moreover, if it has nuclear capability, what would it do with it? Even as a deterrent, retaliation would lead to national annihilation. The value of nuclear weapons in this context is less real than apparent -- and therefore more valuable in negotiations than deployment.
Tehran has hinted several times that its nuclear program is
negotiable regarding weapons. Officials also have indicated by word and deed to the United States that they are prepared to encourage Iraqi Shiites to cooperate with the U.S. occupation. The issue on the table now is whether the Shiites will raise the level of cooperation from passive to active -- whether they will move from not doing harm to actively helping to suppress the Sunni rising.
This is the line that they are considering crossing -- and the
issue is not only whether they cross, but whether the United
States wants them to cross. Obviously, the United States needs help. On the other hand, the Iranian price is enormous.
Domination of Iraq means enormous power in the Gulf region. In the past, Saudi Arabia's sensibilities would have mattered; today, the Saudis matter less.
U.S. leaders understand that making such an agreement means problems down the road. On the other hand, the United States has some pretty major problems right now anyway. Moreover -- and this is critical -- the Sunni-Shiite fault line defines the Islamic world. Splitting Islam along those lines, fomenting conflict within that world, certainly would divert attention from the United States: Iran working against al Qaeda would have more than marginal value, but not, however, as much as Saudi Arabia pulling out the stops.
Against the background of the U.S.-Iranian negotiation is the
idea that the Saudis, terrified of a triumphant Iran, will panic
and begin crushing the extreme Wahhabis in the kingdom. This has delayed a U.S. decision, as has the legitimate fear that a deal with Iran would unleash the genie. But of course, the other fear is that if Iran loses patience, it will call the Shiite masses into the streets and there will be hell to pay in Iraq.
The death of SCIRI leader al-Hakim, therefore, represents a break point. Whether it was Shiite dissidents or Sunnis that killed him, his death costs the Iranians a key ally and drives home the risks they are running with delay. They are vulnerable in Iraq. This opens the door for Tehran to move forward in a deal with the United States. Washington needs to make something happen soon.
This deal might never be formalized. Neither Iranian nor American politics would easily swallow an overt alliance. On the other hand, there is plenty of precedent for U.S.-Iranian cooperation on a covert level. Of course, this would be fairly open and obvious cooperation -- a major mobilization of Shiite strength in Iraq on behalf of the United States -- regardless of the rhetoric.
Currently, this seems to be the most likely evolution of events: Washington gets Tehran's help in putting down the Sunnis. The United States gets a civil war in the Muslim world. The United States gets Iran to dial back its nuclear program. Iran gets to dominate Iraq. The United States gets all the benefits in the near term. Iran gets its historical dream. If Roosevelt could side with Stalin against Hitler, and Nixon with Mao against Brezhnev, this collaboration certainly is not without precedence in U.S. history. But boy, would it be a campaign issue -- in both countries.
-
www.stratfor.com
Two Years of War
Sep 09, 2003
Summary
Two years into the war that began on Sept. 11, 2001, the primary pressure is on al Qaeda to demonstrate its ability to achieve its goals. The events of Sept. 11 were primarily intended to change the internal dynamics of the Islamic world, but not a single regime fell as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks. However, the United States -- unable to decline action -- has taken a huge risk in its response. The outcome of the battle is now in doubt: Washington still holds the resources card and can militarily outman al Qaeda, but the militant network's ability to pull off massive and unpleasant surprises should not be dismissed.
Analysis
Old military communiqu?s used to read, "The battle has been joined but the outcome is in doubt." From Stratfor's viewpoint, that seems to be the best way to sum up the status of the war that began on Sept. 11, 2001, when al Qaeda operatives attacked U.S. political, military and economic targets.
Though the militants were devastatingly successful in destroying the World Trade Center and shutting down U.S. financial markets, al Qaeda did not achieve its primary goal: a massive uprising in the Islamic world. Its attack was a means toward an end and not an end in itself. Al Qaeda's primary goal was the radical transformation of the Islamic world as a preface for re-establishing the Caliphate -- a multinational Islamic empire that, at its height, stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans.
To achieve this end, al Qaeda knew that it had to first overthrow existing regimes in the Islamic world. These regimes were divided into two classes. One was made up of secular, socialist and military regimes, inspired by Gamel Abdul Nasser. This class included countries such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Libya. The second class comprised the formally Islamic states of the Arabian Peninsula, which Osama bin Laden referred to as "hypocrites" for policies that appeared Islamic but actually undermined the construction of the Caliphate. Finally, bin Laden had to deal with the problem of Shiite Iran, which had taken the lead in revolutionizing Islam but in which the Wahhabi and Sunni al Qaeda had little confidence.
Al Qaeda's political objective was to set into motion the process that would replace these governments with Islamist regimes. To achieve this, al Qaeda needed a popular uprising in at least some of these countries. But it reasoned that there could be no rising until the Islamic masses recognized that these governments were simply collaborators and puppets of the Christians, Jews and Hindus. Even more important, al Qaeda had to demonstrate that the United States was both militarily impotent and an active enemy of the Islamic world. The attacks would serve to convince the masses that the United States could be defeated. An ongoing war between the United States and the Islamic world would serve to convince the masses that the United States had to be defeated.
Al Qaeda had to stage an operation that would achieve these ends:
1. It had to show that the United States was vulnerable.
2. Its action had to be sufficiently severe that the United States could not avoid a counterattack.
3. The counterattack had to be, in turn, countered by al Qaeda, reinforcing the perception of U.S. weakness.
The events of Sept. 11 were intended primarily to change the internal dynamics of the Islamic world. The attacks were designed so that their significance could not be minimized in the Islamic world or in the United States -- as had been the case with prior al Qaeda strikes against U.S. interests. Al Qaeda also had to strike symbols of American power -- symbols so obvious that their significance would be understandable to the simplest Muslim. Thus, operatives struck at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and -- in a failed attack -- Congress.
As expected, the attacks riveted global attention and forced the United States to strike back, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. The United States could not decline combat: If it did so, al Qaeda's representation of the United States as an essentially weak power would have been emphatically confirmed. That was not an option. At the same time, optimal military targets were unavailable, so the United States was forced into suboptimal attacks.
The invasion of Afghanistan was the first of these. But the United States did not defeat the Taliban; Knowing it could not defeat U.S. troops in conventional combat -- the Taliban withdrew, dispersed and reorganized as a guerrilla force in the Afghan countryside. It is now carrying out counterattacks against entrenched U.S. and allied forces.
In Iraq, the Islamist forces appear to have followed a similar strategy within a much tighter time frame. Rather than continuing conventional resistance, the Iraqis essentially dispersed a small core of dedicated fighters -- joined by an international cadre of Islamists -- and transitioned into guerrilla warfare in a few short weeks after the cessation of major conventional combat operations.
However, al Qaeda did not achieve its primary mission -- Sept. 11 did not generate a mass uprising in the Islamic world. Not a single regime fell. To the contrary, the Taliban lost control of Afghanistan, and the regime of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein fell. Nevertheless, given its goals, al Qaeda was the net winner in this initial phase. First, the U.S. obsession about being attacked by al Qaeda constantly validated the militant network's power in the Islamic world and emphasized the vulnerability of the United States. Second, the United States threw itself into the Islamic world, adding credence to al Qaeda's claim that the country is the enemy of Islam. Finally, Washington drew a range of Islamic regimes into collaboration with its own war effort, demonstrating that these regimes -- from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan -- were in fact collaborating with the Christians rather than representing Islamic interests. Finally, by drawing the United States into the kind of war it is the least competent in waging --guerrilla war -- al Qaeda created the framework for a prolonged conflict that would work against the United States in the Islamic world and at home.
Therefore, on first reading it would appear that the war has thus far gone pretty much as al Qaeda hoped it would. That is true, except for the fact that al Qaeda has not achieved the goal toward which all of this was directed. It achieved the things that it saw as the means toward the end, and yet the end is nowhere in sight.
This is the most important fact of the war. Al Qaeda wins if the Islamic world transforms itself at least in part by establishing Islamist regimes. That simply hasn't happened, and there is no sign of it happening. Thus far, at least, whatever the stresses might have been in the Islamic world, existing regimes working in concert with the United States have managed to contain the threat quite effectively.
This might be simply a matter of time. However, after two years, the suspicion has to be raised that al Qaeda calculated everything perfectly -- except for the response. Given what has been said about the Islamic world's anger at the United States and its contempt for the corruption of many governments, the failure of a revolutionary movement to take hold anywhere raises the question of whether al Qaeda's core analysis of the Islamic world had any truth, or whether other factors are at play.
Now turn the question to the United States for a moment. The United States clearly understood al Qaeda's strategy. The government understood that al Qaeda was hoping for a massive counterattack in multiple countries and deep intrusions into other countries. Washington understood that it was playing into al Qaeda's plans; it nevertheless did so.
The U.S. analysis paralleled al Qaeda's analysis. Washington agreed that the issue was the Islamic perception of U.S. weakness. It understood, as President George W. Bush said in his Sept. 7 speech, that Beirut and Somalia -- as well as other events -- had persuaded the Islamic world that the country was indeed weak. Therefore, U.S. officials concluded that inaction would simply reinforce this perception and would hasten the unraveling of the region. Therefore, they realized that even if it played directly into al Qaeda's plan, the United States could not refuse to act.
Taking action carried with it a huge risk -- that of playing out al Qaeda's scenario. However, U.S. leaders made another bet: If an attack on the Islamic world could force or entice regimes in the area to act against al Qaeda inside their borders, then the threat could be turned around. Instead of al Qaeda trapping the United States, the United States could be trap al Qaeda. The central U.S. bet was that Washington could move the regimes in question in a suitable direction -- without their disintegration. If it succeeded, the tables could be turned.
The invasion of Iraq was intended to achieve this, and to a great extent it did. The Saudis moved against al Qaeda domestically. Syria changed its behavior. Most importantly, the Iranians shifted their view and actions. None of these regimes fell in the process. None of these actions were as thorough as the United States wanted, either -- and certainly none were definitive. Nevertheless, collaboration increased, and no regime fell.
But at this point, the battle is in doubt:
1. The United States must craft strategies for keeping both the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns at manageable levels. In particular, it must contain guerrilla activities at a level that will not be perceived by the Islamic world as a significant victory.
2. The United States must continue to force or induce nations to collaborate without bringing down any governments.
3. Al Qaeda must, at some point, bring down a government to maintain its own credibility. At this point, merely surviving is not enough.
Both sides now are caught in a battle. The United States holds the resource card: Despite insufficient planning for manpower requirements over the course of the war, the United States is still in a position to bring substantial power to bear in multiple theaters of operation. For al Qaeda, the card is another massive attack on the United States. In the short run, the network cannot do more than sustain the level of combat currently achieved. This level is insufficient to trigger the political events for which it hopes. Therefore, it has to up the ante.
The next months will give some indication of the direction the war is going. Logic tells us that the United States will contain the war in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, in Afghanistan. Logic also tells us that al Qaeda will attempt another massive attack in the United States to try to break the logjam in the Islamic world. What al Qaeda needs is a series of uprisings from the Pacific to the Atlantic that would topple existing regimes. What the United States needs is to demonstrate that it has the will and ability to contain the forces al Qaeda has unleashed.
At this moment, two years into the war, the primary pressure is on al Qaeda. It has not yet demonstrated its ability to achieve its goals; it has only achieved an ability to mobilize the means of doing so. That is not going to be enough. On the other hand, its ability to pull off massive and unpleasant surprises should not be underestimated.
-
All:
A different point of view , , ,
Crafty
----------------------------
The fourth world war
For two years, the U.S. has pursued the culprits behind the 9/11
atrocities with a vengeance that has shocked and awed ally and enemy
alike. But even the devastating attacks on the Afghan and Iraqi regimes
don`t illustrate the true scope of the campaign, DOUG SAUNDERS reports.
While everyone was preoccupied with the fireworks, Washington has
quietly deployed thousands of agents in a secretive struggle that may
last a lifetime
By DOUG SAUNDERS
If you happen to find yourself in Nouakchott, a dusty and rarely
visited city of three million on the far western edge of the Sahara, you
may be surprised to find an unlikely sort of character hanging around
government buildings and better hotels. These new strangers, whose ranks
have been growing steadily in recent months, are a species of
serious-looking American men who bear little resemblance to the oil
explorers and motorcycle adventurers who until recently were this city`s
only foreign visitors.
These men, the first Americans in decades to pay any attention to this
poor region, began to appear only in the past two years. With their grim
and purposeful presence, they bring a Graham Greene sort of mood to this
very remote outpost, but instead of seersucker suits and Panama hats,
they tend to wear floppy safari hats and sunglasses, the unofficial
uniform of the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Special Forces.
What are these quiet Americans doing in the capital of Mauritania, a
nation that has never made the front pages and sits a continent and a
half removed from the immediate interests of the United States? And what
are their colleagues in a dozen other far-flung regions doing, handing
out money and guns and hard-won secrets to governments and warlords and
military men in the southern islands of the Philippines, on the steppes
of Uzbekistan, in the dense jungle between Venezuela and Brazil?
The guys in the sunglasses have a name for this not-so-secret campaign.
They call it World War Four, an unofficial title that is now used
routinely by top officials and ground-level operatives in the U.S.
military and the CIA. It is a global war, one of the most expensive and
complex in world history. And it will mark its second anniversary this
week, on Sept. 11.
The White House would rather it be known as the war on terrorism. But in
its strategies, political risk and secrecy, it is more like the Cold
War, which the CIA types like to consider World War Three. Its central
battles, in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been traditional conflicts. But
while the public`s attention was focused on those big, controversial and
expensive campaigns, the United States was busy launching a broader war
whose battlefields have spread quietly to two dozen countries.
Iraq also was a distraction in another way: It was a shocking and
awesome display of conventional military might that is not at all
typical of the stealth, spy craft, diplomacy and dirty tricks being
employed in the wider war on terrorism. Likewise, "although Operation
Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan understandably captured the imagination
and attention of the press and public," said William Rosenau, a former
senior policy adviser in the State Department, "large-scale military
operations are arguably the smallest aspect of the counterterrorism
campaign. That campaign resembles an iceberg, with the military
component at the top, visible above the water."
Below the surface are dozens of operations, some secret and some simply
unnoticed, conducted by the CIA, the FBI, the diplomatic corps and
small, elite military squads. They have been aided by changes to U.S.
laws after Sept. 11 that allow Americans to do things once forbidden --
such as assassinating foreign figures.
And much of the war is being fought by foreign governments that are
willing and able to do things Americans wouldn`t or couldn`t. "We simply
don`t have the resources, or the inclination, to be everywhere the
terrorists and their supporters are, so we have no choice but to
co-operate with other countries and their security services," Mr.
Rosenau said during a panel discussion in Washington last week.
In some cases, that co-operation has led the United States to endorse
and enable activities that are deeply unsavoury, all in the name of
stomping out terrorism. "Counterterrorism is now 90 per cent law
enforcement and intelligence," said Jonathan Stevenson, a senior
strategist with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in
London. "Since Sept. 11, the only overt military actions have been the
Predator [missile] strike in Yemen, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
-- and I don`t think there will be many more. I think there`s a much
higher priority placed on law enforcement and intelligence now. It`s not
a traditional war."
Whether this is actually a world war, or a large-scale police action, or
(as both critics and some supporters say) the gestation of a new
American imperialism, there is no question that it has come to span the
globe. It has caused mammoth shifts in global allegiances, in the
positioning of U.S. military bases and CIA stations, in the flow of aid
dollars, soldiers and arms across distant borders, on a scale not seen
since the Cold War began.
Over the summer, while the world`s attention was focused on Iraq, the
Pentagon was busily preparing to shift hundreds of thousands of soldiers
to new real estate, in places most Westerners known little about, in
preparation for a world war that could last decades. "Everything is
going to move everywhere," Pentagon undersecretary Douglas Feith said.
"There is not going to be a place in the world where it`s going to be
the same as it used to be."
On Sept. 11, 2001, the world looked much as it had in the 1950s, even
though the Cold War had been over for a decade. Huge concentrations of
American soldiers were based in Germany, in Japan`s outlying islands,
and in South Korea.
It was around this time that Eliot Cohen, a military strategist and
historian, referred to "World War Four" in a Wall Street Journal article
that caught the eye of many Washington officials. James Woolsey, the
former CIA director, began to use the phrase last year in speeches
calling for a far wider sphere of covert activity.
The White House officially objected to the phrase as senseless, even
offensive: The first two world wars had real enemies and real victories,
and together killed 60 million soldiers and civilians. The Cold War
wasn`t a world war at all, but the avoidance of one. And this new
operation is a "war" against an improper noun, whose enemy was not a
nation nor even an ideology but a strategy, and its death toll,
including both its actual wars, remains in the thousands.
Still, it has caught on, both among the stern-faced guys on the ground
and in Washington`s hawkish policy circles. General Tommy Franks, head
of the U.S. Central Command, was in Addis Ababa this summer to announce
that Africa`s east coast had become a region of great strategic
importance. "We are in the midst of World War Four," he told his
audience, before imploring them to arrest local Islamist leaders in
exchange for $100-million in aid, "with an insidious web of
international terrorists."
As well, the general and his colleagues are acting as though it`s a
world war, or at least a global operation on the scale of the Cold War.
They are building a new kind of military, one that will be based in
lonely places we`ve never heard of, and doing things we won`t often hear
about.
"As we pursue the global war on terrorism, we`re going to have to go
where the terrorists are," explained Gen. James Jones, head of the U.S.
military`s European Command. "And we`re seeing some evidence, at least
preliminary, that more and more of these large uncontrolled, ungoverned
areas are going to be potential havens for that kind of activity."
So American soldiers and spooks are moving out of Germany and into
Africa -- the east now, and soon into the western Sahara and the
northern Mediterranean coast as well. They are moving out of Japan and
Korea and into Southeast Asia, which has the world`s largest Muslim
population and is believed to be the area at highest risk of al-Qaeda
outbreaks. This fall, large numbers of U.S. soldiers are expected to
land in the southern Philippines, whose Muslim terrorists are accused of
having links to al-Qaeda.
And the soldiers are also manning bases created in such central Asian
republics as Uzbekistan for the Afghan war, and on the Black Sea in
Bulgaria and Romania for the Iraq conflict, but now expected to become
permanent.
And even farther afield will be hundreds of new outposts that Gen. Jones
refers to as "warm bases," "lily pads" and "virtual bases" -- temporary,
stealthy or secret operations mounted with the help of local regimes.
This has led the United States into some highly unlikely allegiances,
which may or may not be directly related to the immediate threat of
Osama bin Laden`s circle. For example, it is conducting stealth
operations in South America -- in the "tri-border" jungle region between
Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, and on Venezuela`s exotic Margarita
Island, both of which are home to large populations of Saudi Arabian
expatriates. It is not clear whether there are actual terrorists here,
or simply people who have sent money to terrorists, or if accusations of
terrorism are being used to support local conflicts and to attract U.S.
aid.
"The downside," said Herman Cohen, former U.S. secretary of state for
Africa, "is that you can take on the agenda of local leaders."
To understand the astonishing scope and morally swampy ground of this
ever-expanding war, it is worth visiting three of its lesser-known
outposts.
The unlikely winner: Djibouti
Even American generals have to search for it on a map. It is a tiny,
barren speck of sand and lava rock on Africa`s upper right-hand corner,
a country with no tangible economy, no arable land, no tourism, no
reason to matter to anyone other than its 640,000 inhabitants.
That is, until the war on terrorism came along. During the two Iraq
wars, the United States used Djibouti`s conveniently empty desert for
training and war simulations. The generals were impressed with what they
found: a nearly vacant stretch of land right across the Red Sea from the
Persian Gulf nations, and right next to the eastern African nations
believed to be the "next Afghanistan" for their burgeoning community of
Islamist terrorists.
Even better, the government of Djibouti was a lot more amenable to
American soldiers than was Saudi Arabia, the traditional U.S. base in
the region. For only a few million dollars, the Americans could do
virtually anything they wanted -- and Djibouti would do almost anything
the Americans want.
In August, the United States turned its temporary station at Djibouti`s
Camp Lemonier into permanent headquarters for the war on terrorism,
setting up elaborate electronic listening posts and erecting a small
city of concrete buildings. More than 2,000 troops are now stationed
there, with more expected to arrive as the United States vacates Saudi
Arabia. They will spend years, maybe decades, keeping a close watch on
the unstable territories of Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen and Sudan.
"If I was a terrorist, I`d be going to places like Africa," Sergeant Jim
Lewis of the U.S. Army said recently at the Djibouti headquarters.
"That`s why we`re here. To seek them out, do whatever we can to find and
kill them."
But Djibouti is typical of the strange new alliances the United States
is willing to enter -- and of the abuses it is willing to tolerate in
order to achieve its goals. This year, it wrote cheques for $31-million
to the tiny country, making it one of the larger recipients of U.S. aid.
The cheques go to the government of President Ismael Omar Guelleh, whose
party won all the seats in January`s general election. Opposition leader
Daher Ahed Farah complained that his Democratic Renewal Party received
37 per cent of the vote but failed to win a seat. For his criticisms, he
was arrested in March and thrown into Djibouti`s notorious Gabode
prison. Other opposition leaders are forced to live in exile in France.
The State Department officially says Djibouti`s human-rights record has
"serious problems," but the Bush administration seems to see this as a
potential asset. Last week, Djibouti expelled 100,000 residents, or 15
per cent of its population, to neighbouring countries. One government
official explained that these foreign-born residents are "a threat to
the peace and security of the country . . . How do we know whether an
individual is a terrorist biding his time to cause harm, or not?" The
official denied reports that the United States had requested the
expulsions.
The poor human-rights record has not hurt Mr. Guelleh`s relations with
his allies. In late January, shortly after the questionable election, he
visited Washington and was personally f?ted by President George W. Bush,
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defence
Donald Rumsfeld -- a level of access beyond the reach of leaders such as
Prime Minister Jean Chr?tien.
When a powerful truck bomb destroyed the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta and
killed six people a month ago today, local police and military were
quick to spring into action. Within a week, they had arrested top
officials in Jemaah Islamiyah, the Indonesian branch of al-Qaeda.
And no wonder: They not only had the direct help of U.S. Special Forces
soldiers and CIA agents who had flooded into the region after Sept. 11;
they had just received a special $50-million U.S. war on terrorism
assistance package, half of which went to the police force.
But the bomb`s aftermath reminded many people of another explosive event
a dozen years earlier. In 1991, Indonesian soldiers had opened fire on
protesters demanding independence for East Timor. More than 200 were
slaughtered in an event that shocked the world. The Cold War had created
endless horrors in Indonesia, where the Americans supported both the
army and Islamist separatists, whom it saw as useful opponents to
Soviet-backed Communist independence movements.
After the slaughter, the United States began to back away, throwing
support to democracy movements throughout Southeast Asia. The one in
Indonesia flourished after the 1998 departure of strongman Suharto, and
a year later, the United States actually helped East Timor gain
independence, using its aid muscle to keep the Indonesian army on the
sidelines.
So now, the people of the world`s most populous Islamic nation are not
exactly happy to see themselves becoming pawns in yet another global
war. While the U.S. aid and attention are welcomed by many, they
threaten to set back the democracy movement, turn the military back into
lawless and dangerous forces, and bring back the old Cold War dynamics.
In exchange for participating in the war on terrorism, the Indonesian
government has said it wants U.S. help in fighting what it defines as
"terrorist" groups. Chief among these is the Free Aceh Movement,
generally recognized as a legitimate party calling for the independence
of a former archipelago nation now part of Indonesia. So far, Washington
has refused to co-operate, saying its list of terrorist groups includes
only those that threaten U.S. interests.
All across Southeast Asia, this pattern is being repeated: fragile
democracy movements, enjoying U.S. support after years of Cold War
suppression, are being menaced by armies and governments emboldened by
the war on terrorism. In Thailand, in Malaysia and in the Philippines,
the threat of Islamic terrorism is real -- but so is the threat created
by the war against it.
The paradox: Mauritania
To appreciate the strange new ecology of this war fully, it`s worth
visiting its most distant front, and taking a closer look at those
mysterious Americans hanging around that dusty capital on the western
edge of the Sahara.
For 19 years, the former French colony of Mauritania has been ruled by a
military strongman named Maaouyah Ould Sid Ahmed Taya, in what his
partisans describe as a democracy, one that opposition parties accuse of
bloodily repressing political dissent.
Until 2001, this was of no interest at all to the United States or any
other English-speaking country. The war on terrorism has changed
everything. In a nation with a per-capita income of a dollar a day, the
prospect of becoming a foreign client is hard to resist. When the United
States and its allies drove al-Qaeda and its supporters out of such
northern African nations as Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia shortly after
Sept. 11 (with the help of foreign-aid dollars, secret military
campaigns and a new willingness to overlook the countries` abuses), the
Mauritanians saw an opportunity.
"We acted because it was obvious to us that this was the thing to do,"
Mohamedou Ould Michel, the Mauritanian ambassador to the United States,
told the Washington Times recently. "In a world situation in which one
nation is dominant, it serves the interest of other nations to take this
into account."
The United States suspected al-Qaeda cells had moved south into the
ancient trade routes that span the Sahara from Sudan to Mauritania. This
isn`t at all certain -- even senior Pentagon and CIA officials have said
they don`t really know. But Mr. Taya, whose military regime faces a
popular Saudi-backed opposition in elections scheduled this fall, was
quick to claim that his country was under threat.
Mauritania has certainly benefited. It received a large share of a
$100-million (U.S.) military aid package for friendly West African
nations this summer. Starting this month, it will become the prime
beneficiary of the Pan-Sahelian Initiative, in which U.S. military
advisers provide weapons, vehicles and extensive military training to
special terror-fighting squads in Mali, Niger, Chad and Mauritania.
In exchange for this largesse, it has embraced the Americans,
acknowledged Israel`s existence, and cracked down hard on its Islamist
opposition parties, often with U.S. help. Those parties, whose leaders
have been driven into exile in Europe, argue that there never was any
al-Qaeda link; rather, they say, Mr. Taya has used the imprimatur of
terrorism to ban the opposition and has even tortured some leaders to
death in prison -- with full U.S. support.
His co-operation with Washington has yielded the Mauritanian leader even
greater fruit. In the predawn hours of June 8, a group of Islamists in
the military staged a violent coup d`?tat, driving tanks into the
capital and mounting a two-day gun battle. But in the end the uprising
was put down, reportedly with help from the leader`s new Western allies.
The Americans tend to view this as a victory. Most observers are frankly
amazed at how much support a few million dollars bought. "A little bit
of money sure goes a long way out there," laughs Steven Simon, a former
senior director of the U.S. National Security Council who now provides
private consulting to the Pentagon with the RAND Corporation.
Beyond the possibility of a vaporous enemy, these dubious new
allegiances pose another threat, Mr. Simon noted. What if the United
States, in its zeal to eliminate the tens of thousands of people trained
by al-Qaeda around the world, winds up providing aid and encouragement
to unpopular regimes that are doing things almost as bad?
"The risk here is one of the big paradoxes of the war on terrorism," he
said. "One of the main grievances these terrorist groups are trying to
draw attention to is that the United States is consorting with evil
regimes that repress their people. But if the United States is going to
try to eliminate these groups, it will need the help and co-operation of
these regimes and therefore could give credence to those complaints."
Mr. Simon is among a growing group of Washington hawks who worry that
the war on terrorism may indeed have become a little too much like World
War Four -- or, worse, too much like the Cold War.
"Look at the similarities: Here we have a globalized organization that
was competing for hearts and minds with the rest of the world -- like
the Cold War, the battle is being fought all over the place. And one
mistake of the Cold War was that the U.S. came to think that you have to
fight the enemy everywhere. That`s how we wound up in Vietnam, which was
a terrible mistake in every sense. We seem to be having a very similar
situation here, and making the same mistake, where you end up stuck in
one place. I`m concerned that that`s happened in Iraq, and that it could
happen elsewhere."
The Cold War at least had a tangible enemy to negotiate with. "The
difference is that here, the enemy cannot be deterred in the same way,"
Mr. Simon said. Unlike the spectre of a nuclear conflict, "there`s no
mutually assured destruction."
World War Four, if that is going to be its name, had a firm and definite
beginning, when the jetliner attacks shocked the United States back into
an international role two years ago. But there is no chance that it will
have a firm and definite end. There will be no V-T day.
"Since al-Qaeda is not an army, but an ideological, transnational
movement, there is no enemy military force physically to defeat," said
Bruce Hoffman, a Washington-based terrorism expert and military
consultant. "In fact, our enemies have defined this conflict, from their
perspective, as a war of attrition designed eventually to wear down our
resolve and will to resist."
We have become used to a "war" being something that lasts a few months
at most, possibly only days. This one could last a lifetime -- and there
is no question, given the enormous shifts in manpower and geographic
focus, that the United States is preparing for just that. "Our enemies
see this conflict as an epic struggle that will last years, if not
decades," Mr. Hoffman said. "The challenge therefore for the U.S. and
other countries enmeshed in this conflict is to maintain focus, and not
to become complacent about security or our prowess."
For the harried commanders in Washington, that will indeed be the
challenge. For the rest of the world, the far more difficult challenge
will be understanding what is really going on in this lifelong,
worldwide conflict -- what is right and what is wrong in this morally
and strategically fraught new world.
Doug Saunders writes on international affairs for The Globe and Mail.
-
BEHIND THE BOMBING
By RALPH PETERS
August 23, 2003 -- THE terrorist is the pundit's friend. Plant one seed of terror and a thousand opinions bloom in the media's heavily manured fields. In the wake of last week's bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, we heard, yet again, that the sky was falling, that our involvement in Iraq is damned and doomed. One online "intelligence" service even predicted a vast Arab uprising, from Morocco to the Iranian border, that would bury our soldiers beneath the desert sands.
Well, the Arab world can barely get out of bed in the morning, let alone rise up against America. Remember how the "Arab Street" was going to go on a rampage if our troops invaded Iraq, how our influence in the Middle East would be lost forever?
The more we listened to last week's debates about the U.N. bombing, the less we knew. Meanwhile, some remarkable facts about the lead-up to that attack and its aftermath have gone unreported. Why? Because the truth involved American heroes. Wouldn't want that sort of thing to get mixed in with the constant accusations of American incompetence from the hackademic legions of the left. (I'm waiting for Noam Chomsky, Radio Pacifica and Al-Jazeera to blame the U.N. bombing on the Israelis. Or on us.)
Here's the truth, relayed from within the U.N. compound:
In the weeks before the truck-bomb attack, the U.N.'s veteran security officer on site struggled, argued and begged for better protection. He knew the Canal Hotel was a vulnerable and likely target -- but the U.N. chain of command refused to acknowledge the dimensions of the threat.
The U.S. military did offer protection -- repeatedly. But U.N. bureaucrats turned it down. They didn't want to be associated with those wicked, imperialist, ill-mannered Americans. After all, everybody loves the United Nations, don't they?
Repeatedly stymied by prejudice and inertia, the U.N. security chief -- a retired U.S. Army Special Forces officer with a wealth of prior experience -- nonetheless managed to cajole his superiors into letting him build a wall around the hotel. That wall was made of reinforced concrete, almost 17 feet high and a foot thick. But U.N. officials refused to let the security officer push the wall very far out from the hotel. They didn't want to annoy anyone by limiting access to a public alley. Still, the security officer inched the wall as far out as he could.
The truck-bomber could not get inside the compound -- the security measures in place at least prevented that. But the truck was able to speed toward the wall's exterior, using the alley that "had" to be kept open. The driver knew exactly where he was going. He aimed his truck-bomb precisely to decapitate the U.N.'s in-country staff.
We all know what happened: Two dozen dead, including one of the U.N.'s most capable senior diplomats. Almost 150 wounded. A tragic day, indeed.
But without that wall and the security measures for which one American veteran fought, the hotel would have been leveled, with a death toll in the hundreds. The wall absorbed the initial force of three separate bombs packed into the truck.
And there is some justice in the world: Although his office disintegrated around him, the security officer walked out of the wreckage uninjured.
An active-duty U.S. Army officer, Lt.-Col. Jack Curran, was in charge of local medevac operations. Weeks before the truck-bomb attack, he, too, recognized the vulnerability of the hotel compound. Diplomatically, he asked if his pilots and medical personnel could "practice medevac ops" at the U.N. headquarters. "Just for training." With the security officer's help, he got permission.
As a result, there had just been two full, onsite rehearsals for what had to be done after the bombing. Thanks to this spirited, visionary officer, our helicopters and vehicles knew exactly how to get in, where best to upload casualties and where a triage station should be set up. With impressive speed, the U.S. Army medevaced 135 U.N. employees and Iraqi civilians from the scene, saving more lives than will ever be known for certain. U.S. Army Reserve engineers and Army mortuary personnel moved in to do the grisly, demanding work of rescuing any trapped survivors and processing the dead.
Now that the damage is done, the U.S. Army's welcome. A company of our 82nd Airborne Division took over external security for the site last week.
But what were the first complaints we heard from the media "experts"? That the U.S. Army was to blame, because it failed to provide adequate security. In fact, we offered the U.N. armored vehicles. They told us to take a hike. U.N. bureaucrats put more trust in the good will of terrorists and Ba'athist butchers than they did in GI Joe. But when the U.N.'s own people lay bleeding, they were glad enough for our help. As one U.N. employee, speaking from inside the Baghdad compound,
put it to me, "It was a proud day for the U.S. Army."
Of course, no one at U.N. headquarters had any public thanks to offer our soldiers. By the end of last week, the French delegation had already warned its U.N. colleagues not to be tricked into supporting American and British efforts to help the Iraqi people just because of a terror bombing. And our own media didn't give five seconds of coverage to the superbly
professional rescue efforts our military made after the bombing.
One is tempted to say, "Next time, let the French do it." But we're Americans, of course. We'll save your sorry backsides, even after you trash us.
If the United Nations won't say it, I will: "Thanks, GI."
Ralph Peters is a retired military officer and the author of "Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World."
-
STRATFOR'S MORNING INTELLIGENCE BRIEF
*****************************************
Geopolitical Diary: Friday, Sept. 12, 2003
A major battle erupted in the Iraqi town of Khaldiya on Thursday, Sept. 11. A U.S. Army truck broke down and was attacked while repairs were under way. Two U.S. tanks joined the fight, and heavy machine gun fire was exchanged. Two U.S. vehicles were destroyed and one soldier was wounded. The interesting thing is that the U.S. command could not confirm if any Iraqi guerrillas were wounded, saying simply, "They said the attackers fired two rocket-propelled grenades at soldiers working on the truck in the afternoon. Hopefully we gave as good as we got, but I do not have confirmation of that yet."
We take that to mean that the battle ended with the guerrillas leaving the
battlefield in fairly good order -- taking casualties, if any, with them.
That the guerrillas, while reducing the number of attacks, are increasing
the intensity of individual engagements. That the guerrillas continue to be
able to choose the time and place of engagements.
Another feature of this engagement, according to Reuters' account of it, is
that a crowd gathered after the battle and chanted, "We sacrifice our blood and souls for you, Saddam." That is interesting indeed. Islamic
fundamentalists certainly would not be chanting this. Regardless of who the combatants were, the crowd -- or at least whoever organized the crowd -- still stood with Saddam Hussein. Whether this represents a genuine fondness for the man or means that he has simply become a symbol of resistance remains unclear. However, the chanting does indicate that the political nature of the resistance is extremely complex, consisting of many contradictory strands that are potentially in conflict.
The challenge the U.S. command in Iraq must face is precisely how to take advantage of these fault lines. Hussein tried to play France and the United States against each other while he was in power. The United States is trying to play Sunni and Shiite against each other. But deep within the guerrilla movement, bound together by opposition to the United States, reside very different political visions and desires. The victory of the Islamists would be a defeat for the Baathists and vice versa. Therefore, it is logical to assume that at some point the United States must seek to break apart the now-allied factions.
This points to Washington's central problem. As Thursday's battle
demonstrates, the guerrillas remain at least minimally capable. They can
organize an attack rapidly, engage in relatively intense combat, and then
withdraw in reasonable order. Unless the United States seizes the military
initiative, which depends on the generation of superior intelligence, the
guerrillas pose a difficult military problem, at least at their current
level of operations.
Manipulating the fault lines within the guerrilla movement requires a
suppleness -- indeed, a Machiavellianism -- that will be difficult for the
United States to achieve. As hard as it is to cooperate with the Shiites
without appearing to be completely unprincipled, manipulating the guerrilla movement will be infinitely more difficult. Working with one faction to weaken the other sounds good in theory, but is extremely difficult to execute politically. On the other hand, allowing the guerrillas to strike -- at will -- whenever a truck breaks down is a bitter pill.
When trying to discern what the future holds, we continue to be struck by
Washington's three choices: defeat the guerrillas, accept and absorb the
costs of a certain level of guerrilla operations or make exquisitely painful
political deals. We do not think that defeat is likely in the foreseeable
future. We do not see how U.S. strategic aims and the appearance of
helplessness when confronted by guerrillas can be reconciled. Therefore, we continue to conclude that the third choice is the only potentially effective one -- make the deals, painful as they are.
Obviously, our conclusion depends on our perception that the guerrilla war cannot be controlled, and that ongoing low-intensity conflict cannot be
endured. The Bush administration may have a different calculus. They may have a plan to win the guerrilla war that isn't apparent to us, or they may think they can endure the war as it is. Right now, it appears that the
Shiites are being drawn into the war and that the administration will want
to turn the war over to them. But a piece is still missing -- a working
alliance of Baathists and Islamists is too complex to be stable. The
administration surely must be considering the possibilities here.
-
From STRATFOR'S MORNING INTELLIGENCE BRIEF
- Sept. 19, 2003
*****************************************************
Geopolitical Diary: Friday, Sept. 19, 2003
It was quite a day, and most of the media missed it. The Washington Post
published an interview with Jordan's King Abdullah II, and posted more on
its website in audio form. Abdullah said of Iran, "Iran was a very pleasant
surprise. They want to start a new page. At a minimum, the use of Jordan for terrorism is no longer an issue ... and also there are common grounds. The Wahhabi-Salafism is as much a threat to them as to the rest of us Muslims and the international community, and here's common ground that they want to work with all of us on." He continued, "They want to have a unified Iraq. They're terrified of Shia on Shia or Sunni on Shia conflict, so there's enough common ground here that has brought them closer to the way everyone else is thinking...."
That is quite a load for Abdullah to deliver publicly, before meeting U.S.
President George W. Bush. We have been tracking the growing relationship between the United States and Shiites and have been discussing possible back channels between Washington and Tehran. Abdullah is clearly one of them, and he came to Washington with a message from the Iranians: Iran is ready to settle with Washington.
Washington is obviously very interested. We have discussed various signs of growing cooperation on the ground between the United States and the Shiites, and it has been our view that this would not be happening without Tehran's sanction. Abdullah is now opening the door to a much broader, strategic entente between Washington and Tehran.
Abdullah is saying that the Iranians see the Wahhabis as a greater threat to Iran than to the United States. Translated, that means that Iran sees this as the moment to deal with the Saudis, establish itself as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf and enhance the Shiite position in the Islamic world. For this to happen, it has to dominate postwar Iraq.
The United States wants to extricate itself from daily combat in Iraq, while
retaining military bases there from which to threaten the Saudis and
Syrians. The Iranians have no problem with that. In fact, they like the idea of the United States pointing its guns at the Saudis. What Iran wants is a united, Shiite-dominated Iraq -- and a secure western flank.
The U.S. command in Iraq stated today that its goal is to withdraw from the cities of Iraq and turn over responsibility for security to Iraqis. It hopes to be out of Baghdad by December. If that is to be achieved, it will need to start turning over control of cities in the more secure areas soon. In other words, cities such as An Najaf and Basra -- Shiite cities -- will soon be turned over to Shiite authorities to patrol. By the end of the year, Iraqis also will patrol Baghdad -- but the U.S. command is not saying that it will be patrolled by Sunnis.
Naturally, the Saudis are going ballistic over this. They leaked a study
today saying that one of Saudi Arabia's options is to obtain nuclear
weapons. Another -- more practical -- option is to seek guarantees from a
nuclear power. That one is interesting since it clearly wouldn't be the
United States. Russia is a possibility, and Riyadh has been flirting
furiously with Moscow, but Moscow's nuclear arsenal offers little
protection. Then there's Pakistan, but under current circumstances, that's
not very practical. In fact, Saudi Arabia's problem is that it really
doesn't have many good choices -- leaking strategic studies is about its
best weapon at the moment.
In one sense, an alliance between the United States and Iran is the most
outlandish idea imaginable -- until we think of the U.S. relationships with
Stalin or Mao, both of which were improbable. An alliance makes strategic
sense for the United States in the short run, and Iran in the longer run,
since it would achieve an extraordinarily powerful position in the region.
The problem with the alliance for the United States is in the long run. The
Shiites comprise about 10 percent of the Islamic world, albeit a strategic
10 percent. Nevertheless, the United States is at war with a faction of the
Sunni world. Unless the alliance compels this faction to reach an
accommodation with the United States, the very real short-run benefits could eventually result in an Islamic civil war that pits Sunni against Shiite, with the United States betting on the much weaker party.
On the other hand, the United States has a very real problem right now in
Iraq and this is a very practical solution. The long run is a long way off,
and the short run is in Bush's face. Abdullah is dangling a short-term
solution right in front of him. It will be hard to resist unless the Saudis
and other Sunnis provide the United States with a better solution in Iraq
and against al Qaeda. The view in Washington is that the Saudis are so
afraid of their own radicals that they won't be able to act. That makes the
Wahhabi/Salafi faction -- in Abdullah's phrase -- the problem, not the
solution. Ergo, Iran is the answer.
We wonder what message Bush sent back to Tehran with Abdullah. We wonder what message the Saudis are sending Washington. We suspect the Iran deal is all but done. It will happen even if it is never announced. The Saudis inability or unwillingness to act decisively is creating an entirely new reality in the region. Abdullah does not speak casually about such things, certainly not on the way to Camp David.
-
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
29 September 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
The Unpredictability of War and Force Structure
Summary
In the United States' open-ended war against al Qaeda and
militant Islam, two factors are driving up requirements for the
size of the U.S. military. One is the unpredictability
surrounding the number of theaters in which this war will be
waged in the next two years, and the second is the type of
warfare in which the United States is compelled to engage, which
can swallow up huge numbers of troops in defensive operations.
However, for several reasons, U.S. defense personnel policies
have not yet adjusted to this reality.
Analysis
Prior to the beginning of the Iraq campaign, U.S. Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked how long the war would last.
His response was both wise and true: He said that he didn't know,
because the enemy got to vote. Much of the discussion about the
length, cost and requirements of U.S. military operations in Iraq
should be answered the same way -- there is no answer because the
other side gets to vote. The Iraqi command decided to abandon
conventional warfare and shift to guerrilla warfare. It is as
unreasonable to ask how long this will last and how much it will
cost as it would have been to ask Abraham Lincoln in 1862 when
the Civil War would end and how much it would cost. It is an
unanswerable question.
War is extremely predictable, with 20-20 hindsight. It is easy to
say now that the Soviets would defeat the Germans in World War
II. All of us know now that the North Vietnamese had the
advantage in Vietnam. We all know now that the Normandy invasion
would work. That's the easy part of military analysis; predicting
the future is the hard part. It is possible to glimpse the
outlines of the general forces that are engaged and to measure
their relative strength, but the finer the granularity sought,
the harder prediction is. The only certainty to be found is that
all wars end eventually, and that the war you are fighting is
only occasionally the war you expected to fight.
No one, therefore, knows the course of the U.S.-militant Islamist
war. The CIA has produced no secret papers nor uncovered any
hidden plans in the caves of Afghanistan that reveal the truth.
War is about the difference between plans and events: Nothing
goes according to plan, partly because of unexpected failures
among the planners and partly because the enemy gets a vote. Carl
von Clausewitz, the father of modern military theory, had a word
for that: friction. The friction of war creates an ever-widening
gap between plans and reality.
That means that the first and most important principle of
military planning is to plan for the worst. No general was ever
condemned for winning a war with too many troops. Many generals -
- and political leaders -- are reviled for not using enough
troops. Sometimes the manpower is simply not available;
demographics limit the number of troops available. But the lowest
ring of the military inferno must be reserved for leaders who
take a nation to war, having access to massive force but choosing
to mobilize the least numbers they think they can get by with,
rather than leaving a healthy -- even unreasonable -- margin to
make up for the friction of war. Calibrating force to expected
requirements is almost always going to lead to disaster, because
as we all know, everything comes in late and over-budget.
Washington is engaged with the question of what constitutes
sufficient force structure. As one might imagine, the debate cuts
to the heart of everything the United States is doing; the
availability of force will determine the success or failure of
its war. And here, it appears to us, the administration has
chosen a radical course -- one of maintaining a narrow margin of
error on force structure, based on plans that do not necessarily
take into account that al Qaeda gets to vote.
Last week, while speaking at the National Defense University,
Rumsfeld repeated his conviction that the United States had
deployed sufficient force in Iraq and that with additional
deployments it would be able to contain the situation there. Last
week, U.S. officials announced the mobilization of additional
reserve and National Guard units for 18 months of duty.
The reality is this: The United States went to war on Sept. 11,
2001, and since that date, it has not increased the aggregate
size of its armed forces in any strategically significant way. It
has raised the effectively available force by reaching into its
reserve and National Guard units. That short-term solution has
served well for the first two years of the war. However,
deployment requirements tend to increase over the course of a
war, so the needs in the first year were relatively light and
increased progressively as additional theaters of operation were
added.
The problem with this structure of forces is simple. People can
choose to leave the military and its reserve and National Guard
components -- and they will. Following extensive deployments, or
anticipating such deployments, many will leave the active force
as their terms expire or leave the reserve components when they
can. In order to replace these forces, the pipeline should be
full of recruits. This is not World War II. The requirements for
all specialties, including combat arms, will not be filled by
basic training and a quick advanced course. Even in the simplest
specialties, it will take nearly a year to develop the required
expertise -- not just to be deployed, but to be deployed and
effective. For more complex specialties, the timeline lengthens.
U.S. leaders appear to be giving some attention to maintaining
the force at its current size, although we think the expectations
on retention in all components are optimistic. But even if they
are dead on, the loss of personnel will be most devastating among
field-grade officers and senior noncommissioned officers -- who
form the backbone of the military. These are men and women in
their 30s and 40s who have families and mortgages -- none of
which might survive the stress of a manpower plan designed in a
way that imposes maximum unpredictability and disruption on
mature lives. The net result is that the military might keep its
current size but become thin-waisted: lots of young people, lots
of gray hair, not nearly enough in between.
The problem, however, is that keeping the force stable is not
enough by a long shot. The United States is involved in two
significant conflicts, in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is also
operating in smaller deployments throughout and on the periphery
of the Islamic world. Added to this are immediate and potential
requirements for homeland security, should al Qaeda strike again,
as the U.S. government consistently predicts is likely. When
these requirements are added up and compared to the kind of force
planning and expectations that were being discussed prior to
Sept. 11, it is obvious that the U.S. force is at its limit, even
assuming that the complexities of reserve units weren't added to
the mix.
The strategic problem is that there is absolutely no reason to
believe that the demands on the current force represent the
maximum. The force level is decided by the administration; the
force requirement is decided by a committee composed of senior
Pentagon officials, Congress and al Qaeda. And on this committee,
al Qaeda has the decisive vote.
Al Qaeda's strategy is to expand the conflict as broadly as
possible. It wants to disperse U.S. forces, but it also wants
U.S. forces to intrude as deeply into the Islamic world as
possible in order to trigger an uprising not only against the
United States, but also against governments allied with the
United States. There is a simple-minded answer to this, which is
to refuse to intervene. The flaw in that answer is that it would
serve al Qaeda's purpose just as well, by proving that the United
States is weak and vulnerable. Intervention carries the same cost
as non-intervention, but with the upside that it might produce
victories.
Therefore, the United States cannot easily decline combat when it
is offered. Al Qaeda intends to offer as much combat as possible.
From the Philippines to Morocco, from central Asia to central
Africa, the scope -- if not the tempo -- of operations remains in
al Qaeda's hands. Should Indonesia blow sky high or Egypt
destabilize, both of which are obviously among al Qaeda's hopes,
U.S. forces will be required to respond.
There is another aspect to this. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the
United States is engaged in guerrilla wars. The force required to
combat a guerrilla army is not determined by the size of the
guerrilla forces, but rather by defensive requirements. A very
small guerrilla force can menace a large number of targets, even
if it cannot hit them all. Those targets must be protected for
military or political reasons. Pacification cannot take place
when the population is exposed to guerrilla forces at the will of
the guerrillas. A narrow defensive posture, as has been adopted
in Afghanistan, cedes pacification. In Iraq, where ceding
pacification is not a political option, the size of the force is
determined not by the enemy's force, but by the target set that
must be protected.
Two factors, therefore, are driving up requirements for the size
of the U.S. armed forces. First, no one can define the number of
theaters in which the United States will be deployed over the
next two years. Second, the type of warfare in which the United
States is compelled to engage after the initial assault is
carried out is a force hog: It can swallow up huge numbers of
troops in duties that are both necessary and parasitic -- such as
patrolling 15 bridges, none of which might ever be attacked
during the war, but all of which must be defended.
Rumsfeld's reassurances that there are enough forces in Iraq miss
the key question: Are there enough troops available and in the
pipeline to deal with unexpected events in two years? Iraq might
be under control by then, or it might not. Rumsfeld doesn't know
that, Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi doesn't, Osama
bin Laden doesn't. No one knows whether that is true. Nor does
anyone know whether the United States will be engaged in three or
four other theaters of operations by that time. It is certainly
al Qaeda's intention to make that happen, and so far al Qaeda's
record in drawing the United States into difficult situations
should not be discounted.
The problem is that on the one hand, the Defense Department is in
the process of running off critically needed troops with
unpredictable and spasmodic call-ups. Second, the number of men
and women in the training pipeline has not taken a quantum leap
forward in the course of the war. The United States is engaged in
a global war, but its personnel policies have not adjusted to
that reality. This is the first major war in American history
that has not included a large expansion of the armed forces.
There are a number of reasons for this. At the beginning of the
war, the administration envisioned it as a primarily covert war
involving special forces and some air power. Officials did not
see this war as a division-level conflict. They were wrong. They
did not count on their enemy's ability to resort to effective
guerrilla warfare. They did not expect the old manpower hog to
raise its ugly head. In general, Rumsfeld believed that
technology could substitute for manpower, and that large
conventional formations were not necessary. He was right in every
case but one: large-scale guerrilla warfare. Or more precisely,
the one thing the United States didn't want to be involved in is
the one thing the enemy dealt up. When you think about it, that
makes sense.
The assumption on which this war began was that there was ample
U.S. force structure for the requirements. At this point, that is
true only if one assumes there are no further surprises pending.
Since this war has been all about surprises, any force structure
built on that assumption is completely irresponsible.
We suspect that Rumsfeld and his people are aware of this issue.
The problem is that the Bush administration is in an election
year, and increasing the force by 50 percent or doubling it is
not something officials want to do now. It cannot be done by
conscription. Not only are the mechanisms for large-scale
conscriptions missing, but a conscript army is the last thing
needed: The U.S. military requires a level of technical
proficiency and commitment that draftees don't bring to bear.
To keep the force at its current size, Congress must allocate a
large amount of money for personnel retention. A father of three
with a mortgage payment based on his civilian income cannot live
on military pay. Military pay must not be permitted to rise; it
must be forced to soar. This is not only to retain the current
force size but to increase it. In addition to bringing in raw
recruits and training them, this also means, as in World War II,
bringing back trained personnel who have left the service and --
something the military will gag over -- bringing in trained
professionals from outside, directly into the chain of command
and not just as civilian employees.
Thinking out of the box is something Washington always talks
about but usually does by putting a box of corn flakes on top of
their heads. That's all right in peacetime -- but this is war,
and war is a matter of life and death. In the end, this is the
problem: While American men and women fight and die on foreign
land, the Pentagon's personnel officers are acting like this is
peacetime. The fault lies with a series of unexpected events and
Rumsfeld's tendency to behave as if nothing comes as a surprise.
The defense secretary needs to understand that in war, being
surprised is not a failure -- it is the natural commission. The
measure of a good command is not that one anticipates everything,
but that one quickly adjusts and responds to the unexpected. No
one expected this type of guerrilla war in Iraq, although perhaps
in retrospect, everyone should have. But it is here, and next
year will bring even more surprises. The Army speaks of "A Force
of One." We prefer "The Force Ready for the Unexpected." The
current U.S. force is not.
============================
Geopolitical Diary: Monday, Sept. 29, 2003
One of the delights of our business is that we get to see surrealism without having to visit an art museum. Sometimes it's as if Salvador Dali painted a canvas just for us. It seemed that way today, when both U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice went on the Sunday news shows to reassert that the United States did have solid intelligence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Here's what happened. Members -- one Republican, one Democrat -- of a
congressional intelligence oversight committee went public with this claim
about the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraq's WMD: "The assessment that Iraq continued to pursue chemical and biological weapons remained constant and static over the past 10 years." Put simply, the intelligence community had arrived at a conclusion and didn't re-examine it.
Rice countered the congressmen by saying, "...it was very clear that this
(WMD development) continued and it was a gathering danger. Yes, I think I ould call it new information and it was certainly enriching the case in the same direction." Powell weighed in with, "There was every reason to believe -- and I still believe -- that there were weapons of mass
detruction and weapons programs to develop weapons of mass destruction." A CIA spokesman said, "The notion that our community does not challenge standing judgments is absurd."
What we have is this. Two congressmen have charged that the Bush
administration was wrong on Iraq's WMD program because it did not re-examine the intelligence. The administration and the CIA are deeply insulted. Their position is that they continually gathered the best intelligence that they could, and that this is the reason they were wrong. The great debate here is not whether the administration was wrong, but whether they were wrong because they either failed to challenge their old assumptions -- or the fresh intelligence they gathered was inaccurate.
This is not a trivial question. Understanding the origins of intelligence
failure is something every intelligence organization, including Stratfor,
has to do. It matters whether the failure was one of analysis, rooted in the Directorate of Intelligence, or of collection, rooted in the Directorate of Operations. If the White House overrode the intelligence, that matters even more. These things need to be understood. But the indignation with which the State Department, the National Security Council and the CIA are responding to congressional charges misses the point: Someone clearly screwed up, and if it wasn't a failure to challenge premises, then it was something else. Neither Powell nor Rice nor the CIA came close to offering an alternate explanation, as if one weren't needed.
Powell came closest of any to making sense when he said that getting rid of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was the important thing. At least that is a policy. Our view has always been that the invasion of Iraq was undertaken because of strategic considerations, not WMD -- that was just a basis for building a coalition with Europeans. However, the administration clearly thought it would find WMD -- otherwise it would have created another excuse.
This brings us back to the intelligence failure. One way or another, there
was either a massive intelligence failure, or the WMD are still out there
with the guerrillas. We think that to be marginally possible. But barring
that, the fact is, someone was dead wrong. We don't think anyone lied,
because that would be too stupid and unnecessary. Eventually they would wind up where they are now, and there was no need for that.
Therefore, there was an intelligence failure, and if the origins of that
failure were not in a fixed, unexamined set of assumptions, then it is time
for Powell, Rice and the intelligence community to cough up another
explanation. While they're at it, they might explain whether the CIA
predicted the guerrilla war that the United States currently has on its
hands, or whether this was another intelligence failure.
Intelligence failures happen. Alternatively, intelligence estimates are
sometimes overruled by customers who order up something more suitable to their political needs. All of this is understandable and part of the business. But the Bush administration's unending attempts to shoot down plausible explanations for intelligence failures without offering its own is bizarre.
If we are to believe the administration, the intelligence process worked
perfectly. The mere fact that it came up with the wrong answer should not be permitted to undermine the perfection of the process.
Gee, we wish we could get away with that.
-
A friend writes:
==================
The war IS against the radical islamists. Unfortunately, this radical islamic "nation" will not be pacified by pacifying Iraq alone (which we may or may not accomplish in either the short or long term). This radical islamic "nation", as I believe Dr. Friedman et al have pointed out earlier in Stratfor briefings, stirs across nation-state boundaries, and not just in islamic countries, but wherever muslims live, i.e. in every country.
This war is against those governments that use Islamist groups as a deniable front to foment unrest and instability in order to carry out their own hegemonic and/or monetary aims. Iran, Iraq and Syria have long sought to dominate the Middle East. All of them used and still use Islamist groups as a fifth column to fight their wars. Ba'athism is nothing more than socialist pan-Arabism. The Iranian mullahs seek Shi'a dominance through their version of the caliphate. Elements of the Saudi royal family seek to buy Wahabbism into dominance.
Al Qaida could not have existed without support from various governments. From 1991 - 1996, it received sanctuary in Sudan. From 1996-2001, Afghanistan gave it sanctuary. From 1991-2003, it received assistance (monetary and otherwise) from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and the PLO. Indirectly, it received assistance from Pakistan through the Taliban and Saudi Arabia through its funding of Wahabbi madrassas and charities.
By viewing Islamists as an independent grassroots movement, the US permitted its influence to grow throughout the Islamic world. Now, terror has influence in Southeast Asia because these government sponsored groups from the Middle East have linked up with indigenous Muslim rebels in places like the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. Since 1967, every major terror episode comning from the Islamic world - especially the Middle East - occurs because of government support. Initially, the USSR was the source of that support. Later, the former allies of the USSR, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, pre-Sadat Egypt, post Shah Iran, North Korea, Sudan all provided money and training to everyone from Abu Nidal to Usama bin Laden.
After 9-11, the US and its allies have reversed course. They have recognized that without the assistance of governments, these terror groups cannot flourish. Thus, the overthrow of Saddam is brilliant. Geopolitically, it cuts the old silk road in half. It isolates Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia with one stroke.
Ba'athist Iraq was a major supporter of al Qaida, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Why do you think that these groups have become much more openly vitriolic? Their sugar daddy is on the run and his two sons are dead. Nevertheless, these groups and a lot more permutations of them still have sufficient remaining resources to do damage for several years. And their penchant for patience and secrecy should not allow us to relax our guard.
The reason that pacifying Iraq alone will not pacify the "Islamic nation" is because Iran, Syria and other disrupters still exist. When we succeed in Iraq, their days will be numbered.
-
Message: http://slate.msn.com/id/2088886/
Inside the Islamic Mafia
Bernard-Henri L?vy exposes Daniel Pearl's killers.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Thursday, September 25, 2003, at 10:18 AM PT
I remember laughing out loud, in what was admittedly a mirthless fashion, when Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, one of Osama Bin Laden's most heavy-duty deputies, was arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Straining to think of an apt comparison, I fail badly. But what if, say, the Unabomber had been found hiding out in the environs of West Point or Fort Bragg? Rawalpindi is to the Pakistani military elite what Sandhurst is to the British, or St Cyr used to be to the French. It's not some boiling slum: It's the manicured and well-patrolled suburb of the officer class, very handy for the capital city of Islamabad if you want to mount a coup, and the site of Flashman's Hotel if you are one of those who enjoys the incomparable imperial adventure-stories of George MacDonald Fraser. Who, seeking to evade capture, would find a safe house in such a citadel?
Yet, in the general relief at the arrest of this outstanding thug, that aspect of the matter drew insufficient attention. Many words of praise were uttered, in official American circles, for the exemplary cooperation displayed by our gallant Pakistani allies. But what else do these allies have to trade, except al-Qaida and Taliban suspects, in return for the enormous stipend they receive from the U.S. treasury? Could it be that, every now and then, a small trade is made in order to keep the larger trade going?
One hesitates to utter thoughts like these, but they recur continually as one reads Bernard-Henri L?vy's latest book: Who Killed Daniel Pearl? Everybody remembers-don't they?- the ghastly video put out on the Web by Pearl's kidnappers and torturers. It's the only live-action footage we possess of the ritual slaughter of a Jew, preceded for effect by his coerced confession of his Jewishness. Pearl was lured into a trap by the promise of a meeting with a senior religious demagogue, who might or might not have shed light on the life of the notorious "shoe-bomber," because of whom millions of us must take off our footwear at American airports every day, as if performing the pieties required for entering a mosque.
What a sick joke all this is, if you study L?vy's book with care. If you ever suspected that the Pakistani ISI (or Interservices Intelligence) was in a shady relationship with the Taliban and al-Qaida forces, this book materializes the suspicion and makes the very strong suggestion that Pearl was murdered because he was doing his job too well, not because he was a naive idealist who got into the wrong car at the wrong time. His inquiries had at least the potential for exposing the Pakistani collusion and double-dealing with jihad forces, in much the same pattern the Saudi Arabian authorities have been shown to follow?by keeping two sets of books, in other words, and by exhibiting only one set to Americans.
Like a number of those who take a moral stand on this, Bernard-Henri L?vy was a strong defender of Bosnia's right to exist, at a time when that right was being menaced directly by Serbian and Croatian fascists. It was a simplification to say that Bosnia was "Muslim," but it would also have been a simplification to say that the Bosnians were not Muslims. The best resolution of this paradox was to assert that Bosnia-Herzegovina stood for ethnic and cultural pluralism, and to say that one could defend Islam from persecution while upholding some other important values at the same time. I agree with M. L?vy that it was a disgrace at the time, and a tragedy in retrospect, that so few Western governments took this opportunity.
But now we hear, from those who were indifferent to that massacre of Muslims, or who still protest the measures that were taken to stop the massacre, that it is above all necessary for the West to be aware of Islamic susceptibilities. This plea is not made on behalf of the pluralistic citizens of Sarajevo, but in mitigation of Hamas and Hezbollah and Saddam Hussein. One of the many pleasures of L?vy's book is the care he takes to show the utter cynicism of the godfathers of all this. He quotes by name a Saudi lawyer who specializes in financial transactions:
"Islamism is a business," he explains to me with a big smile. "I don't say that because it's my job, or because I see proof of it in my office ten times a day, but because it's a fact. People hide behind Islamism. They use it like a screen saying 'Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!' But we know that here. We see the deals and the movements behind the curtain. In one way or another, it all passes through our hands. We do the paperwork. We write the contracts. And I can tell you that most of them couldn't care less about Allah. They enter Islamism because it's nothing other than a source of power and wealth, especially in Pakistan. ? Take the young ones in the madrassas. They see the high rollers in their SUVs having five wives and sending their children to good schools, much better than the madrassas. They have your Pearl's killer, Omar Sheikh, right in front of their eyes. When he gets out of the Indian prisons and returns to Lahore, what do the neighbors see? He's very well-dressed. He has a Land Cruiser. He gets married and the city's big-shots come to his wedding."
Everything we know about al-Qaida's operations, as of those of Saddam Hussein, suggests that they combine the culture of a crime family or cartel with the worst habits of a bent multinational corporation. Yet the purist critics of "globalization" tend to assume that the spiritual or nationalistic claims of such forces still deserve to be taken at their own valuation, lest Western "insensitivity" be allowed to triumph.
And this in turn suggests another latent connection, which L?vy does not stress at all though he does dwell upon one of its obvious symptoms. The most toxic and devotional rhetoric of these Islamic gangsters is anti-Semitism. And what does anti-Semitism traditionally emphasize? Why, the moving of secret money between covert elites in order to achieve world domination! The crazed maps of future Muslim conquest that are pictured by the propaganda of jihad and that show the whole world falling to future Muslim conquest are drawn in shady finance-houses and hideaways of stolen gold and portable currency, in the capital cities of paranoid states, and are if anything emulations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion rather than negations of them. L?vy's reformulation of an old term?"neo-anti-Judaism" instead of the worn-out phrase "anti-Semitism"--is harder on the tongue but more accurate as regards the corrupt and vicious foe with which we are actually dealing. His book was finished before it became clear that the "resistance" in Iraq was also being financed by an extensive mafia, which offers different bonuses for different kamikaze tactics, as it was already doing in Palestine and Kashmir.
In a recent conversation, M. L?vy said to me carefully that he doubts the conventional wisdom of the Western liberal, who believes that a settlement in Palestine will remove the inflammation that produces jihad. A settlement in Palestine would be a good thing in itself, to be sure. But those who believe in its generally healing power, he said, have not been following events in Kashmir. Indeed, it is from the Pakistani-Saudi periphery that the core challenge comes. I don't think that anyone who follows L?vy's inquiry into corruption and fanaticism, and the intimate bond between them, will ever listen patiently to any facile argument again.
-
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
06 October 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
The Dangers of Overconfidence
Summary
The 1973 Arab-Israeli War redefined the Arab-Israeli conflict,
the shape of the Arab world and the international economic order -- given that the war triggered the Arab oil embargo. It was a significant event in 20th century history. Its origins were in Israel's victory in 1967 and its overconfidence about its ability to read the Arab mind. Like the Sept. 11 attacks, Oct. 6, 1973, began as a massive intelligence failure. Moreover, the Israeli intelligence failure shaped Arab thinking about the nature of war and the role of intelligence in it. They learned that managing the enemy's intelligence process compensated for military weakness. It is a lesson that is still very much with us.
Analysis
Oct. 6, 2003, marks the 30th anniversary of what the Israelis call the Yom Kippur War and the Arabs call the Ramadan War. That war represented the end of the first phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which we might call the era of conventional warfare. It opened up the second phase, which we might call the era of unconventional warfare. In one sense, the 1973 war changed everything by precluding the resumption of conventional warfare. In another sense, it changed nothing, leaving the fundamental issues unresolved. For 30 years the world has lived with the results of the 1973 war. As evidenced by the Israeli strike against a training camp in Syria on Oct. 5, the permanence of the post-1973 situation remains intact.
Everything in the Middle East must be understood in terms of what went before, but it's an infinite regression that always returns to the starting point: a deadlock. The same is true for the 1973 war. Israel carried out a full peripheral attack in June 1967. Whether the war was triggered by Egypt's expulsion of U.N. advisers, closing the Straits of Tirana and mobilization in the Sinai -- or whether it was hardwired into Israeli strategy from the beginning -- is one of those infinite regressions. Suffice that it did happen, and that Israel occupied the Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.
Israel assumed that its victory in 1967 had improved its national security. First, it provided Israel with strategic depth, which it never had before. An attack by its neighbors, particularly Egypt and Syria, would first be fought outside of Israel. That gave the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) room to retreat and maneuver. Second, the Israeli defeat of the Egyptian army was so devastating that analysts assumed it would take a generation for the Egyptians to recover. Israel came out of 1967 feeling that it had pushed the boundaries of space and time sufficiently to give Israel a generation of peace. Israel also believed, sincerely in our view, that 1967 would set the stage for negotiations that would trade land for peace -- how much land and how much peace were left undetermined.
The Arab perception of the defeat paralleled that of the
Israelis. They understood that they had suffered a humiliating
defeat, but they concluded that the humiliation made peace
impossible. For the Arabs, any peace built on the 1967 foundation would represent a permanent capitulation to helplessness. Therefore, when Arab leaders met in Khartoum shortly after the war, they did two things. First, they issued their famous "three no's" -- no negotiation, no recognition, no peace. Second, they formally acknowledged the existence of a Palestinian nation independent of Jordan or Syria and outside the conceptual confines of the Arab nation. Palestine became a nation in its own right.
Thus, the Palestine Liberation Organization, under Yasser Arafat, became the effective government of the Palestinian national movement, and that movement came to be seen in the Arab world as ultimately autonomous. The Arabs effectively decided that there had to be another war, the purpose of which would not be so much to reverse the geographical outcome of the 1967 war as to reverse
its psychological outcome. The decision was to validate a
Palestinian national movement -- the same that dominates the landscape today -- coupled with another conventional war.
The Israelis were driven by a basic view of the Arabs as
incapable of mounting modern military operations. There was no question about the bravery of individual Arab soldiers; the only ones who sneered at their courage had never fought them. But the complexities of mastering advanced technologies, and more important, the difficulties of mastering the enormous organizational challenges involved in mobile warfare, undermined the Arabs' ability to fight a conventional war. The IDF and most observers thought this was a permanent condition. Therefore, the decisions made in Khartoum were viewed as unfortunate, but subcritical. If the Arabs did not want to make peace in 1967, then the Israelis would occupy the conquered territories until they changed their mind. There was no question for the Israelis about whether the Arabs could reverse 1967 by force of arms.
The issue was this: No matter how dominant Israel was on the battlefield, geography and demography precluded a definitive defeat like the United States had dealt Japan. Israel could extend its borders, but it could not render the Arabs permanently incapable of resistance. Arab states did not have a problem obtaining weapons -- the Soviets were happy to provide them. Nor did they lack manpower. Their problem was cultural: training a largely peasant army to use modern technology within a contemporary military organization. Since the Israelis thought the latter impossible, the former did not bother them too much.
For the Arabs, therefore, demonstrating an ability to transform their military culture became the center of gravity of the problem. No political evolution was conceivable -- or permissible -- while the Arabs were militarily helpless. Therefore, the Egyptians in particular began a program not only to rearm their military, but also to reorganize it culturally, intellectually and morally. The goal was the regeneration of the Egyptian army and, therefore, the resurrection of Egyptian foreign policy.
From the Israeli point of view, the Egyptians were the only real issue. If the Egyptians did not or could not fight, the Israelis easily could manage Syria and Jordan, either militarily or politically. However, if Egypt did fight, and if Syria for
example joined the fight, then Israeli forces, on the defensive, would be in danger of being drawn into the one kind of war they could not win: a war of attrition. Israel's strategic doctrine was built around one thing: fighting pre-emptive wars to avoid having to fight simultaneously on multiple fronts at the time and choosing of their enemies.
The Egyptians understood the Israeli strategic problem and
defined a strategy to take advantage of it. Under superb security arrangements, they did not hide their preparations. They simply allowed Israeli intelligence to draw the wrong conclusions. Knowing that Israel had reached the conclusion that Egypt and Syria were incapable of mounting a complex, multidivision assault that involved multinational coordination, they took advantage of Israeli preconceptions to organize, practice and finally launch simultaneous assaults across the Suez Canal into the Sinai and on the Golan Heights.
In the end, the Israelis were able to contain the assaults,
although during the initial 24 hours it appeared that Israel was facing military catastrophe. It readied a nuclear option. After containment, Israel carried out counterattacks on both fronts that defeated Egypt and Syria militarily.
The military defeat, however, was coupled with a psychological triumph. First, Egypt and Syria had demonstrated that they were capable of modern warfare. Israel realized that it could not take Arab military incompetence for granted any longer. Israel retained military superiority, but could no longer assume that that superiority would be a permanent condition. More important, the Israelis realized that the foundation of their pre-emptive strategy depended on strategic intelligence. Pre-emption cannot
exist without foreknowledge of enemy intentions. The intelligence failure stunned the Israelis more than their military difficulties. If their intelligence could not recognize the
threat posed by hundreds of thousands of troops massed a few miles away, then Israel's first line of defense was an illusion, and Israeli national strategy was in jeopardy. The next time, the Egyptians might not halt under their SAM umbrella, but move forward.
It is at this point that Egyptian and Israeli grand strategy
converged. The Israelis could not reach a settlement over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The emergence of the PLO and other related groups had created a situation in which Israeli withdrawal became more difficult to imagine. Nor could Israel maintain the occupation while also preparing for and fighting high-intensity conflicts along its frontiers. If Egypt remained hostile, Israel's security problem became nearly unmanageable. Israel needed to take Egypt out of the equation, and it did not have an easy military option to do so. Israel needed a political solution.
Egypt also had reached the conclusion that it needed to revise its political situation. Its relationship with the Soviet Union had led to disaster. First, it had been excluded from the U.S.-dominated trading system, with devastating effects on its economy. Second, the abyss between Israel and the Soviet Union meant that the Soviets could not broker a settlement with Israel, leaving Egypt in a permanent state of war. Third, the 1973 oil embargo had shifted the balance of power in the Arab world away from the radicals and toward the oil-rich conservatives. The wind was blowing from the right, and Egypt wanted to tack with the wind.
The net result was the Camp David peace accords, which ended the state of war between Egypt and Israel and neutralized the Sinai desert, leaving a symbolic contingent of American peacekeepers in the center and creating a large buffer zone between the two armies. Most important, in taking Egypt out of the military equation, it ended the possibility of an Arab-initiated conventional war against Israel. That was no longer a possibility. Therefore, it ended any hope on the part of the Palestinians that conventional force from other Arab countries might liberate them. The Israeli-Egyptian treaty in essence abandoned the Palestinians to their fate.
The Palestinians at that point had two choices. One was to accept Israeli political terms, which over the years of Arab rejection had shifted from a simple land-for-peace formula to a more aggressive plan to retain the West Bank in particular while making limited autonomy possible for the Palestinians. In effect, the Israelis felt they were under no pressure to yield to Palestinian demands for an independent state -- nor did they want to yield. The creation of a Palestinian state was conceivable only if the Israeli-Egyptian peace was irreversible. Otherwise, a Palestinian state coupled with an Egyptian reversal would recreate the pre-1967 reality.
Worse, it would create the geographical reality in a new military context. The Israelis had discovered that easy assumptions about Arab military capabilities were not reasonable. The evolution of the Egyptian army from 1967 to 1973 was stunning; the assumption that it would evolve no further had no basis. Therefore, a Palestinian state followed by a new Egyptian policy could threaten Israel's survival. Since no one could guarantee the future, Israeli policy was to oppose a Palestinian state.
Since the Palestinians could not accept permanent domination by the Israelis, particularly one in which Israeli land policy in the territories became increasingly oriented toward settlements, the Palestinians chose a path of resistance, both on Israel's periphery, in the occupied territories and, ultimately, inside Israel itself. This was not a new strategy, but until Camp David, it was only one strand of a broader strategy. The 1978 agreement made resistance the Palestinians' only strategy.
The Palestinians had two problems with their only available
option. The first was how to escalate violence to the point that it would become intolerable to the Israelis, forcing them to make political accommodations. The second, which followed the first, was to master the arts of security, counterintelligence and intelligence to keep the Israelis from destroying their war-making capabilities. The Palestinians knew that whatever the Israelis could see, they could destroy. The foundation of their war was not the suicide bombers, but the ability to organize suicide bombing without Israeli intelligence knowing how it was organized.
This is the point at which the lessons of 1973 and the lessons of 2003 come together. Intelligence is the foundation of all warfare. However, in modern warfare -- both in 1973 and 2003 -- intelligence reaches a transcendent point. In 1973, the very survival of Israel was brought into question because of the failure of the Israeli intelligence community to recognize the threat. In 2003, the sanity, if not the survival, of Israel was put in jeopardy by its inability to overcome Palestinian defenses against Israeli intelligence.
The 1973 war taught the Arabs the value of security and the
limits of intelligence. The lessons of 1973 were indelibly marked on the Palestinian mind. They knew that Egyptian success depended on counterintelligence. They knew that their success depended on counterintelligence. They learned that military weakness can be compensated for by blinding the enemy.
This lesson was not lost on al Qaeda. Like the Egyptians and
Palestinians, it understood that its military force was a
fraction of the United States'. It understood that it had to
develop that force, but al Qaeda also knew that the real force multiplier was in blinding the Americans -- in cloaking al
Qaeda's actions from the eyes of the United States. This lesson has been continually pounded home ever since 1973 in the Arab world. It is the ability to blind the enemy's intelligence services that is the precondition for any operational capability. What the enemy can see, he can destroy. Therefore, in operating from a position of weakness, blinding the enemy is the key.
The teaching of Anwar Sadat was simple: The best way to blind the Israelis is to allow them to blind themselves. He used Israel's inability to take Egypt seriously as a military power to blind the Israelis to what was right in front of them. Israel's greatest weakness was contempt for its enemy and an overestimation of its ability to know what the enemy was
thinking. The Palestinians learned this lesson from the
Egyptians, and al Qaeda has learned from the Palestinians.
The greatest danger in war is underestimating the enemy and overestimating oneself.
-
www.stratfor.com
Geopolitical Diary, Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2003
The Turkish Parliament has voted to send troops to Iraq to support the U.S. occupation. Many of the details are blurry, particularly the timing of the insertion of troops. However, it appears that the Turks have agreed to send about 10,000 troops, nearly a division, that will deploy in the Sunni triangle -- the heart of the guerrilla war in Iraq.
Turkey's reversal of its noninvolvement policy is a major achievement for
the United States. In fact, it is the first major shift in the United
States' favor in a long while. The United States needs a cohesive force to
engage in operations in the Sunni region. That is to say, it does not really
need more international divisions whose various elements can't speak to each other. Moreover, the United States needs the active support of Islamic countries. The Turkish government is moderately Islamic, even if the regime is institutionally secular.
The Turks lend political cover to the United States -- globally and in the
Islamic world. The cover is hardly comprehensive, but it's more than the
United States had yesterday. The United States also needs troops to share the burden. Obviously, a price will have to be paid. Some of the cost is already visible, and some is not.
The visible cost is with the Kurds. Turkey vehemently opposes the creation of an independent Kurdish state, and doesn't particularly want to see Kurdish autonomy even in Iraq. The Kurds are one of the United States' firmest assets in Iraq. Kurdish forces are patrolling the Iraq-Iran
frontier, as well as conducting other operations in the northeast. Unless
the Kurds and Turks have accepted some sort of prior understanding, the
United States and the Kurds will have some real issues.
This also raises a question that we have been discussing for quite a
while -- the affect on the evolution of U.S. relations with the Shiites and
Iran. Clearly, the decision to keep the Turks in Sunni areas is conditioned
by military reality. It is also affected by political reality. The United
States is shifting responsibility in the south to the Shiite community. They
can probably live with the Turks in the north, so long as they don't come
south.
The real mystery is why Turkey shifted its position. Part of the answer
concerns geopolitical reality. For all the stress and strain, the reality is
that the United States occupies Iraq and is the dominant military power in
the region. Turkey has interests in Iraq and cannot afford to be frozen out
of U.S. planning for the region. Another part concerns internal politics.
The Turkish military is secular and pro-United States. The government is
Islamic and has mixed feelings about the United States. The military is
institutionally the guardian of the secular character of the regime. In
plain English, that means that the military can stage a coup if it wants. A
coup wasn't near, but any Turkish government tries to take military
sensibilities into account. Still, the United States promised something
beyond money to Turkey. Turkey's decision is a godsend to the United States and the Turks know it. There is a price, as yet undisclosed.
It should be noted that Syria had a really bad day today. The Israelis hit
it from the air and massed on the Lebanese border. The Americans probed along its eastern frontier. And apart from all this, the Turkey-U.S. deal creates a major threat from the north. Syrian-Turkish relations have not been the warmest, to say the least. Renewing cooperation with the United States puts Turkey into play to Syria's north. Apart from everything else, Damascus is feeling the heat.
In a way, this puts the U.S. core strategy back on track: first, occupy
Iraq; second, bring pressure to bear on surrounding countries. Turkey's
decision bolsters the U.S. position in Iraq. It also massively increases the
pressure on, and isolation of, Syria. It goes without saying that it also
increases the likelihood of al Qaeda striking Turkey at the first practical
opportunity.
-
One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to
develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line."
- President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998
"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."
- President Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998
"Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face."
- Madeline Albright, Feb 18, 1998
"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983." Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998
"[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs."
- Letter to President Clinton, signed by Sens. Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, and others Oct. 9, 1998
"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."
- Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998
"Hussein has ... chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies."
- Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999
"There is no doubt that ... Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons
programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf War status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies."
- Letter to President Bush, Signed by Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL,) and others, December 5, 2001
"We begin with the common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a
threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the
mandated of the United Nations and is building weapons of mass destructionand the means of delivering them."
- Sen. Carl Levin (D, MI), Sept. 19, 2002
"We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical
weapons throughout his country."
- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002
"Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to
deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."
- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002
"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."
- Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002
"The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are
confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to
build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence
reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons..."
- Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV), Oct. 3, 2002
"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority
to use force-- if necessary-- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe
that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."
- Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002
"There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years ... We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction."
- Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), Oct 10, 2002
"He has systematically violated, over the course of the past 11 years, every significant UN resolution that has demanded that he disarm and destroy his chemical and biological weapons, and any nuclear capacity. This he has refused to do" Rep.
- Henry Waxman (D, CA), Oct. 10, 2002
"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that
Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weap ons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members.. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."
- Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct 10, 2002
"We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam n bsp; Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction."
- Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL), Dec. 8, 2002
"Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal,
murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime ... He presents a
particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to
miscalculation ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction
... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real..."
- Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003
-
Many of those are out of context (http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/wmdquotes.asp).
-
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
--Hermann Goering (Nuremberg, 1946)
Gilbert, G.M. Nuremberg Diary. New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1947 (pp. 278-279)
http://www.snopes2.com/quotes/goering.htm
-
Geopolitical Diary: Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2003
Last week saw an interesting evolution in the U.S.-Islamist war, an
evolution that revealed itself over the past 48 hours. The initial purpose
of the Iraq campaign was to position the United States to bring pressure on the countries surrounding Iraq -- particularly Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the campaign, terrific pressure was brought on all three countries. The unexpected emergence of a guerrilla campaign in Iraq seemed to constrain the United States in projecting its power. As the reality of the guerrilla campaign set in, the United States focused inside Iraq, creating a situation in which the war in Iraq had no end beyond Iraq.
U.S. pressure was not without consequence. Saudi Arabia, in particular,
moved to comply with U.S. wishes concerning the destruction of al Qaeda
inside the kingdom. Iran proved willing to accommodate the United States, albeit at a price. However, Syria appeared to read the situation in Iraq as a quagmire that limited any threat from the United States. After initially seeming to move toward an accommodation with the United States, Syria shifted its policy by last summer, clearly calculating that the United States would be in no position to threaten Syria while the Iraqi campaign festered.
There is little question but that U.S. momentum in the war declined as the
guerrilla war set in. However, it appears to us that, over the past week or
so, the United States has moved toward regaining momentum and is reasserting pressure, particularly toward Syria, and to a lesser extent, Iran. Indeed, Syria currently finds itself locked in a massive crisis that it did not expect. Reports say that Syria is mobilizing its military, but -- mobilized or not -- it has few military options. It has been trapped by the sudden reversal of U.S. energy.
Essentially, the United States appears to have decided that the guerrilla
war won't be over for a while, so waiting until the war's end to exploit the
occupation of Iraq would mean waiting for a long time. Therefore, the United States has launched a strategic offensive while the guerrilla campaign continued unabated -- accepting the minimal risk the war posed to its rear.
Two pieces were put into place to squeeze the Iraqis. The first was
approving Israel's strike into Syria and using Israel's nuclear arsenal as a
threat to Syria -- and Iran. The second was reaching an agreement with
Turkey over the use of its troops in Iraq. This moved Turkey away from
neutrality and back toward its traditional pro-U.S. and pro-Israel stance.
With the United States on Syria's eastern frontier, Syria was trapped.
Seriously provoked by Israel's air raid, it has the choice of doing nothing,
or using Hezbollah to attack Israel -- triggering a massive response from
Israel. The pressure on Syria to shut down Palestinian and Islamist groups is intense. The internal political consequences of shutting them down also would be intense. Damascus is caught between a rock and a hard place -- right where Washington wants it.
Iran's case is much more complex. The United States and Iran share a common interest in preventing the victory of the Saddam Hussein-Islamist guerrilla force -- but that's not really a threat. The issue is not its victory but its defeat, and for this, the United States needs a highly motivated indigenous force. The Iraqi Shiite community -- so far, fairly quiet and tacitly accepting of U.S. occupation -- has been indispensable to that occupation. Without it, the U.S. position would be enormously more
difficult. Iran wants a sphere of influence in Iraq and the United States
might provide it -- depending on how badly the United States needs Iran. If Syria were to crumble, Iran's position would be far weaker -- and the price for its help lower.
At issue has been the price the United States would pay for Iran not
becoming a nuclear power. Over the weekend, the United States tried to
demonstrate -- with the reference to Israel's nuclear triad -- that Iran is
not going to become a nuclear power under any circumstance. The message to Iran was that it could either negotiate away its capability at a reasonable price, or lose that capability to an Israeli first strike. Israel cannot risk an Iranian nuclear device and will destroy it before it becomes
operational. Iran, of course, knows that. The United States has now told
Iran that it knows it, too. Iran is now trapped between two facts: First,
the device isn't operational -- and Israel won't let it become so. Second,
the United States won't stand in the way of Israel. That leaves Iran, like
Syria, with relatively few strategic options.
The interesting part of all this is that the United States increasingly
relies on partners to support its strategic maneuvers. The three countries
it now turns to are Israel, above all, but also Turkey and India. The United
States has depended on all three since the beginning of the war, but now its relationship with Israel is becoming much more open. This appears to be a strategic decision on the part of the United States. It needs to break out of the bind it finds itself in Iraq; it needs to make something happen to move the war along. The United States understands the price of playing the Israeli card. It also understands that it needs help where it can get it.
-
On Hating the Jews
by Natan Sharansky
November 2003
NO HATRED has as rich and as lethal a history as anti-Semitism?"the longest hatred," as the historian Robert Wistrich has dubbed it. Over the millennia, anti-Semitism has infected a multitude of peoples, religions, and civilizations, in the process inflicting a host of terrors on its Jewish victims. But while there is no disputing the impressive reach of the phenomenon, there is surprisingly little agreement about its cause or causes.
Indeed, finding a single cause would seem too daunting a task?the incidence of anti-Semitism is too frequent, the time span too broad, the locales too numerous, the circumstances too varied. No doubt that is why some scholars have come to regard every outbreak as essentially unique, denying that a straight line can be drawn from the anti-Semitism of the ancient world to that of today. Whether it is the attack on the Jews of Alexandria in 38 c.e. or the ones that took place 200 years earlier in ancient Jerusalem, whether it is the Dreyfus affair in 1890?s France or Kristallnacht in late-1930?s Germany?each incident is seen as the outcome of a distinctive mix of political, social, economic, cultural, and religious forces that preclude the possibility of a deeper or recurring cause.
A less extreme version of this same approach identifies certain patterns of anti-Semitism, but only within individual and discrete "eras." In particular, a distinction is drawn between the religiously based hatred of the Middle Ages and the racially based hatred of the modern era. Responsibility for the anti-Semitic waves that engulfed Europe from the age of Constantine to the dawn of the Enlightenment is laid largely at the foot of the Church and its offshoots, while the convulsions that erupted over the course of the next three centuries are viewed as the byproduct of the rise of virulent nationalism.
Obviously, separating out incidents or eras has its advantages, enabling researchers to focus more intensively on specific circumstances and to examine individual outbreaks from start to finish. But what such analyses may gain in local explanatory power they sacrifice in comprehensiveness. Besides, if every incident or era of anti-Semitism is largely distinct from every other, how to explain the cumulative ferocity of the phenomenon?
As if in response to this question, some scholars have attempted to offer more sweeping, trans-historical explanations. Perhaps the two best known are the "scapegoat" theory, according to which tensions within society are regulated and released by blaming a weaker group, often the Jews, for whatever is troubling the majority, and the "demonization" theory, according to which Jews have been cast into the role of the "other" by the seemingly perennial need to reject those who are ethnically, religiously, or racially different.
Clearly, in this sociological approach, anti-Semitism emerges as a Jewish phenomenon in name only. Rather, it is but one variant in a family of hatreds that include racism and xenophobia. Thus, the specifically anti-Jewish violence in Russia at the turn of the 20th century has as much in common with the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia at the turn of the 21st as it does with the massacres of Jews in the Ukraine in the mid-1600?s. Taken to its logical conclusion, this theory would redefine the Holocaust?at the hands of some scholars, it has redefined the Holocaust?as humanity?s most destructive act of racism rather than as the most murderous campaign ever directed against the Jews.
Reacting to such universalizing tendencies a half-century ago, Hannah Arendt cited a piece of dialogue from "a joke which was told after the first World War":
An anti-Semite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? asks the one. Why the Jews? asks the other.
George Orwell offered a similar observation in 1944: "However true the scapegoat theory may be in general terms, it does not explain why the Jews rather than some other minority group are picked on, nor does it make clear what they are the scapegoat for."
WHATEVER THE shortcomings of these approaches may be, I have to admit that my own track record as a theorist is no better.
Three decades ago, as a young dissident in the Soviet Union, I compiled underground reports on anti-Semitism for foreign journalists and Western diplomats. At the time, I firmly believed that the cause of the "disease" was totalitarianism, and that democracy was the way to cure it. Once the Soviet regime came to be replaced by democratic rule, I figured, anti-Semitism was bound to wither away. In the struggle toward that goal, the free world, which in the aftermath of the Holocaust appeared to have inoculated itself against a recurrence of murderous anti-Jewish hatred, was our natural ally, the one political entity with both the means and the will to combat the great evil.
Today I know better. This year, following publication of a report by an Israeli government forum charged with addressing the issue of anti-Semitism, I invited to my office the ambassadors of the two countries that have outpaced all others in the frequency and intensity of anti-Jewish attacks within their borders. The emissaries were from France and Belgium?two mature democracies in the heart of Western Europe. It was in these ostensible bastions of enlightenment and tolerance that Jewish cemeteries were being desecrated, children assaulted, synagogues scorched.
To be sure, the anti-Semitism now pervasive in Western Europe is very different from the anti-Semitism I encountered a generation ago in the Soviet Union. In the latter, it was nurtured by systematic, government-imposed discrimination against Jews. In the former, it has largely been condemned and opposed by governments (though far less vigilantly than it should be). But this only makes anti-Semitism in the democracies more disturbing, shattering the illusion?which was hardly mine alone?that representative governance is an infallible antidote to active hatred of Jews.
Another shattered illusion is even more pertinent to our search. Shocked by the visceral anti-Semitism he witnessed at the Dreyfus trial in supposedly enlightened France, Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, became convinced that the primary cause of anti-Semitism was the anomalous condition of the Jews: a people without a polity of its own. In his seminal work, The Jewish State (1896), published two years after the trial, Herzl envisioned the creation of such a Jewish polity and predicted that a mass emigration to it of European Jews would spell the end of anti-Semitism. Although his seemingly utopian political treatise would turn out to be one of the 20th century?s most prescient books, on this point history has not been kind to Herzl; no one would seriously argue today that anti-Semitism came to a halt with the founding of the state of Israel. To the contrary, this particular illusion has come full circle: while Herzl and most Zionists after him believed that the emergence of a Jewish state would end anti-Semitism, an increasing number of people today, including some Jews, are convinced that anti-Semitism will end only with the disappearance of the Jewish state.
I first encountered this idea quite a long time ago, in the Soviet Union. In the period before, during, and after the Six-Day war of June 1967?a time when I and many others were experiencing a heady reawakening of our Jewish identity?the Soviet press was filled with scathing attacks on Israel and Zionism, and a wave of official anti-Semitism was unleashed to accompany them. To quite a few Soviet Jews who had been trying their best to melt into Soviet life, Israel suddenly became a jarring reminder of their true status in the "workers? paradise": trapped in a world where they were free neither to live openly as Jews nor to escape the stigma of their Jewishness. To these Jews, Israel came to seem part of the problem, not (as it was for me and others) part of the solution. Expressing what was no doubt a shared sentiment, a distant relative of mine quipped: "If only Israel didn?t exist, everything would be all right."
In the decades since, and especially over the last three years, the notion that Israel is one of the primary causes of anti-Semitism, if not the primary cause, has gained much wider currency. The world, we are told by friend and foe alike, increasingly hates Jews because it increasingly hates Israel. Surely this is what the Belgian ambassador had in mind when he informed me during his visit that anti-Semitism in his country would cease once Belgians no longer had to watch pictures on television of Israeli Jews oppressing Palestinian Arabs.
OBVIOUSLY, THE state of Israel cannot be the cause of a phenomenon that predates it by over 2,000 years. But might it be properly regarded as the cause of contemporary anti-Semitism? What is certain is that, everywhere one looks, the Jewish state does appear to be at the center of the anti-Semitic storm?and nowhere more so, of course, than in the Middle East.
The rise in viciously anti-Semitic content disseminated through state-run Arab media is quite staggering, and has been thoroughly documented. Arab propagandists, journalists, and scholars now regularly employ the methods and the vocabulary used to demonize European Jews for centuries?calling Jews Christ-killers, charging them with poisoning non-Jews, fabricating blood libels, and the like. In a region where the Christian faith has few adherents, a lurid and time-worn Christian anti-Semitism boasts an enormous following.
To take only one example: this past February, the Egyptian government, formally at peace with Israel, saw fit to broadcast on its state-run television a 41-part series based on the infamous Czarist forgery about a global Jewish conspiracy to dominate humanity, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. To ensure the highest ratings, the show was first aired, in prime time, just as millions of families were breaking their traditional Ramadan fast; Arab satellite television then rebroadcast the series to tens of millions more throughout the Middle East.
In Europe, the connection between Israel and anti-Semitism is equally conspicuous. For one thing, the timing and nature of the attacks on European Jews, whether physical or verbal, have all revolved around Israel, and the anti-Semitic wave itself, which began soon after the Palestinians launched their terrorist campaign against the Jewish state in September 2000, reached a peak (so far) when Israel initiated Operation Defensive Shield at the end of March 2002, a month in which 125 Israelis had been killed by terrorists.
Though most of the physical attacks in Europe were perpetrated by Muslims, most of the verbal and cultural assaults came from European elites. Thus, the Italian newspaper La Stampa published a cartoon of an infant Jesus lying at the foot of an Israeli tank, pleading, "Don?t tell me they want to kill me again." The frequent comparisons of Ariel Sha ron to Adolf Hitler, of Israelis to Nazis, and of Palestinians to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were not the work of hooligans spray-painting graffiti on the wall of a synagogue but of university educators and sophisticated columnists. As the Nobel Prize-winning author JosE9 Saramago declared of Israel?s treatment of the Palestinians: "We can compare it with what happened at Auschwitz."
The centrality of Israel to the revival of a more generalized anti-Semitism is also evident in the international arena. Almost a year after the current round of Palestinian violence began, and after hundreds of Israelis had already been killed in buses, discos, and pizzerias, a so-called "World Conference against Racism" was held under the auspices of the United Nations in Durban, South Africa. It turned into an anti-Semitic circus, with the Jewish state being accused of everything from racism and apartheid to crimes against humanity and genocide. In this theater of the absurd, the Jews themselves were turned into perpetrators of anti-Semitism, as Israel was denounced for its "Zionist practices against Semitism"?the Semitism, that is to say, of the Palestinian Arabs.
Naturally, then, in searching for the "root cause" of anti-Semitism, the Jewish state would appear to be the prime suspect. But Israel, it should be clear, is not guilty. The Jewish state is no more the cause of anti-Semitism today than the absence of a Jewish state was its cause a century ago.
To see why, we must first appreciate that the always specious line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism has now become completely blurred: Israel has effectively become the world?s Jew. From Middle Eastern mosques, the bloodcurdling cry is not "Death to the Israelis," but "Death to the Jews." In more civilized circles, a columnist for the London Observer proudly announces that he does not read published letters in support of Israel that are signed by Jews. (That the complaints commission for the British press found nothing amiss in this statement only goes to show how far things have changed since Orwell wrote of Britain in 1945 that "it is not at present possible, indeed, that anti-Semitism should become respectable.") When discussion at fashionable European dinner parties turns to the Middle East, the air, we have been reliably informed, turns blue with old-fashioned anti-Semitism.
No less revealing is what might be called the mechanics of the discussion. For centuries, a clear sign of the anti-Semitic impulse at work has been the use of the double standard: social behavior that in others passes without comment or with the mildest questioning becomes, when exhibited by Jews, a pretext for wholesale group denunciation. Such double standards are applied just as recklessly today to the Jewish state. It is democratic Israel, not any of the dozens of tyrannies represented in the United Nations General Assembly, that that body singles out for condemnation in over two dozen resolutions each year; it is against Israel?not Cuba, North Korea, China, or Iran?that the UN human-rights commission, chaired recently by a lily-pure Libya, directs nearly a third of its official ire; it is Israel whose alleged misbehavior provoked the only joint session ever held by the signatories to the Geneva Convention; it is Israel, alone among nations, that has lately been targeted by Western campaigns of divestment; it is Israel?s Magen David Adom, alone among ambulance services in the world, that is denied membership in the International Red Cross; it is Israeli scholars, alone among academics in the world, who are denied grants and prevented from publishing articles in prestigious journals. The list goes on and on.
The idea that Israel has become the world?s Jew and that anti-Zionism is a substitute for anti-Semitism is certainly not new. Years ago, Norman Podhoretz observed that the Jewish state "has become the touchstone of attitudes toward the Jewish people, and anti-Zionism has become the most relevant form of anti-Semitism." And well before that, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was even more unequivocal:
You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely "anti-Zionist." And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God?s green earth; when people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews?this is God?s own truth.
But if Israel is indeed nothing more than the world?s Jew, then to say that the world increasingly hates Jews because the world increasingly hates Israel means as much, or as little, as saying that the world hates Jews because the world hates Jews. We still need to know: why?
THIS MAY be a good juncture to let the anti-Semites speak for themselves.
Here is the reasoning invoked by Haman, the infamous viceroy of Persia in the biblical book of Esther, to convince his king to order the annihilation of the Jews:
There is a certain people scattered and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of your kingdom, and their laws are different from those of other peoples, and the king?s laws they do not keep, so that it is of no benefit for the king to tolerate them. If it please the king, let it be written that they be destroyed. [emphasis added]
This is hardly the only ancient source pointing to the Jews? incorrigible separateness, or their rejection of the majority?s customs and moral concepts, as the reason for hostility toward them. Centuries after Hellenistic values had spread throughout and beyond the Mediterranean, the Roman historian Tacitus had this to say:
Among the Jews, all things are profane that we hold sacred; on the other hand, they regard as permissible what seems to us immoral. . . . The rest of the world they confront with the hatred reserved for enemies. They will not feed or intermarry with gentiles. . . . They have introduced circumcision to show that they are different from others. . . . It is a crime among them to kill any newly born infant.
Philostratus, a Greek writer who lived a century later, offered a similar analysis:
For the Jews have long been in revolt not only against the Romans, but against humanity; and a race that has made its own life apart and irreconcilable, that cannot share with the rest of mankind in the pleasures of the table, nor join in their libations or prayers or sacrifices, are separated from ourselves by a greater gulf than divides us from Sura or Bactra of the more distant Indies.
Did the Jews actually reject the values that were dominant in the ancient world, or was this simply a fantasy of their enemies? While many of the allegations leveled at Jews were spurious?they did not ritually slaughter non-Jews, as the Greek writer Apion claimed?some were obviously based on true facts. The Jews did oppose intermarriage. They did refuse to sacrifice to foreign gods. And they did emphatically consider killing a newborn infant to be a crime.
Some, perhaps many, individual Jews in those days opted to join the (alluring) Hellenist stream; most did not. Even more important, the Jews were the only people seriously to challenge the moral system of the Greeks. They were not an "other" in the ancient world; they were the "other"?an other, moreover, steadfast in the conviction that Judaism represented not only a different way of life but, in a word, the truth. Jewish tradition claims that Abraham was chosen as the patriarch of what was to become the Jewish nation only after he had smashed the idols in his father?s home. His descendants would continue to defy the pagan world around them, championing the idea of the one God and, unlike other peoples of antiquity, refusing to subordinate their beliefs to those of their conquerors.
THE (BY and large correct) perception of the Jews as rejecting the prevailing value system of the ancient world hardly justifies the anti-Semitism directed against them; but it does take anti-Semitism out of the realm of fantasy, turning it into a genuine clash of ideals and of values. With the arrival of Christianity on the world stage, that same clash, based once again on the charge of Jewish rejectionism, would intensify a thousandfold. The refusal of the people of the "old covenant" to accept the new came to be defined as a threat to the very legitimacy of Christianity, and one that required a mobilized response.
Branding the Jews "Christ killers" and "sons of devils," the Church launched a systematic campaign to denigrate Christianity?s parent religion and its adherents. Accusations of desecrating the host, ritual murder, and poisoning wells would be added over the centuries, creating an ever larger powder keg of hatred. With the growing power of the Church and the global spread of Christianity, these potentially explosive sentiments were carried to the far corners of the world, bringing anti-Semitism to places where no Jewish foot had ever trod.
According to some Christian thinkers, persecution of the powerless Jews was justified as a kind of divine payback for the Jewish rejection of Jesus. This heavenly stamp of approval would be invoked many times through the centuries, especially by those who had tried and failed to convince the Jews to acknowledge the superior truth of Christianity. The most famous case may be that of Martin Luther: at first extremely friendly toward Jews?as a young man he had complained about their mistreatment by the Church?Luther turned into one of their bitterest enemies as soon as he realized that his efforts to woo them to his new form of Christianity would never bear fruit.
Nor was this pattern unique to the Christian religion. Muhammad, too, had hoped to attract the Jewish communities of Arabia, and to this end he initially incorporated elements of Judaism into his new faith (directing prayer toward Jerusalem, fasting on Yom Kippur, and the like). When, however, the Jews refused to accept his code of law, Muhammad wheeled upon them with a vengeance, cursing them in words strikingly reminiscent of the early Church fathers: "Humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them, and they were visited with the wrath of Allah. That was because they disbelieved in Allah?s revelation and slew the prophets wrongfully."
IN THESE cases, too, we might ask whether the perception of Jewish rejectionism was accurate. Of course the Jews did not drain the blood of children, poison wells, attempt to mutilate the body of Christ, or commit any of the other wild crimes of which the Church accused them. Moreover, since many teachings of Christianity and Islam stemmed directly from Jewish ones, Jews could hardly be said to have denied them. But if rejecting the Christian or Islamic world meant rejecting the Christian or Islamic creed, then Jews who clung to their own separate faith and way of life were, certainly, rejectionist.
This brings us to an apparent point of difference between pre-modern and modern anti-Semitism. For many Jews over the course of two millennia, there was, in theory at least, a way out of institutionalized discrimination and persecution: the Greco-Roman, Christian, and Muslim worlds were only too happy to embrace converts to their way of life. In the modern era, this choice often proved illusory. Both assimilated and non-assimilated Jews, both religious and secular Jews, were equally victimized by pogroms, persecutions, and genocide. In fact, the terrors directed at the assimilated Jews of Western Europe have led some to conclude that far from ending anti-Semitism, assimilation actually contributed to arousing it.
What accounts for this? In the pre-modern world, Jews and Gentiles were largely in agreement as to what defined Jewish rejectionism, and therefore what would constitute a reprieve from it: it was mostly a matter of beliefs and moral concepts, and of the social behavior that flowed from them. In the modern world, although the question of whether a Jew ate the food or worshiped the God of his neighbors remained relevant, it was less relevant than before. Instead, the modern Jew was seen as being born into a Jewish nation or race whose collective values were deeply embedded in the very fabric of his being. Assimilation, with or without conversion to the majority faith, might succeed in masking this bedrock taint; it could not expunge it.
While such views were not entirely absent in earlier periods, the burden of proof faced by the modern Jew to convince others that he could transcend his "Jewishness" was much greater than the one faced by his forebears. Despite the increasing secularism and openness of European society, which should have smoothed the prospects of assimilation, many modern Jews would find it more difficult to become real Frenchmen or true Germans than their ancestors would have found it to become Greeks or Romans, Christians or Muslims.
The novelty of modern anti-Semitism is thus not that the Jews were seen as the enemies of mankind. Indeed, Hitler?s observation in Mein Kampf that "wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity" sounds no different from the one penned by Philostratus 1,700 years earlier. No, the novelty of modern anti-Semitism is only that it was far more difficult?and sometimes impossible?for the Jew to stop being an enemy of mankind.
ON CLOSER inspection, then, modern anti-Semitism begins to look quite continuous with pre-modern anti-Semitism, only worse. Modern Jews may not have believed they were rejecting the prevailing order around them, but that did not necessarily mean their enemies agreed with them. When it came to the Jews, indeed, European nationalism of the blood-and-soil variety only added another and even more murderous layer of hatred to the foundation built by age-old religious prejudice. Just as in the ancient world, the Jews in the modern world remained the other?inveterate rejectionists, no matter how separate, no matter how assimilated.
Was there any kernel of factual truth to this charge? It is demeaning to have to point out that, wherever and whenever they were given the chance, most modern Jews strove to become model citizens and showed, if anything, an exemplary talent for acculturation; the idea that by virtue of their birth, race, or religion they were implacable enemies of the state or nation was preposterous. So, too, with other modern libels directed against the Jews, which displayed about as much or as little truth content as ancient ones. The Jews did not and do not control the banks. They did not and do not control the media of communication. They did not and do not control governments. And they are not plotting to take over anything.
What some of them have indeed done, in various places and under specific circumstances, is to demonstrate?with an ardor and tenacity redolent perhaps of their long national experience?an attachment to great causes of one stripe or another, including, at times, the cause of their own people. This has had the effect (not everywhere, of course, but notably in highly stratified and/or intolerant societies) of putting them in a visibly adversary position to prevailing values or ideologies, and thereby awakening the never dormant dragon of anti-Semitism. Particularly instructive in this regard is the case of Soviet Jewry.
What makes the Soviet case instructive is, in no small measure, the fact that the professed purpose of Communism was to abolish all nations, peoples, and religions?those great engines of exclusion?on the road to the creation of a new world and a new man. As is well known, quite a few Jews, hoping to emancipate humanity and to "normalize" their own condition in the process, hitched their fates to this ideology and to the movements associated with it. After the Bolshevik revolution, these Jews proved to be among the most devoted servants of the Soviet regime.
Once again, however, the perception of ineradicable Jewish otherness proved as lethal as any reality. In the eyes of Stalin and his henchmen, the Jews, starting with the loyal Communists among them, were always suspect?"ideological immigrants," in the telling phrase. But the animosity went beyond Jewish Communists. The Soviet regime declared war on the over 100 nationalities and religions under its boot; whole peoples were deported, entire classes destroyed, millions starved to death, and tens of millions killed. Everybody suffered, not only Jews. But, decades later, long after Stalin?s repression had given way to Khrushchev?s "thaw," only one national language, Hebrew, was still banned in the Soviet Union; only one group, the Jews, was not permitted to establish schools for its children; only in the case of one group, the Jews, did the term "fifth line," referring to the space reserved for nationality on a Soviet citizen?s identification papers, become a code for licensed discrimination.
Clearly, then, Jews were suspect in the Soviet Union as were no other group. Try as they might to conform, it turned out that joining the mainstream of humanity through the medium of the great socialist cause in the East was no easier than joining the nation-state in the West. But that is not the whole story, either. To scant the rest of it is not only to do an injustice to Soviet Jews as historical actors in their own right but to miss something essential about anti-Semitism, which, even as it operates in accordance with its own twisted definitions and its own mad logic, proceeds almost always by reference to some genuine quality in its chosen victims.
As it happens, although Jews were disproportionately represented in the ranks of the early Bolsheviks, the majority of Russian Jews were far from being Bolsheviks, or even Bolshevik sympathizers. More importantly, Jews would also, in time, come to play a disproportionate role in Communism?s demise. In the middle of the 1960?s, by which time their overall share of the country?s population had dwindled dramatically, Soviet Jews made up a significant element in the "democratic opposition." A visitor to the Gulag in those years would have discovered that Jews were also prominent among political dissidents and those convicted of so-called "economic crimes." Even more revealing, in the 1970?s the Jews were the first to challenge the Soviet regime as a national group, and to do so publicly, en masse, with tens of thousands openly demanding to leave the totalitarian state.
To that degree, then, the claim of Soviet anti-Semites that "Jewish thoughts" and "Jewish values" were in opposition to prevailing norms was not entirely unfounded. And, to that degree, Soviet anti-Semitism partook of the essential characteristic of all anti-Semitism. This hardly makes its expression any the less monstrous; it merely, once again, takes it out of the realm of fantasy.
AND SO we arrive back at today, and at the hatred that takes as its focus the state of Israel. That state?the world?s Jew?has the distinction of challenging two separate political/moral orders simultaneously: the order of the Arab and Muslim Middle East, and the order that prevails in Western Europe. The Middle Eastern case is the easier to grasp; the Western European one may be the more ominous.
The values ascendant in today?s Middle East are shaped by two forces: Islamic fundamentalism and state authoritarianism. In the eyes of the former, any non-Muslim sovereign power in the region?for that matter, any secular Muslim power?is anathema. Particularly galling is Jewish sovereignty in an area delineated as dar al-Islam, the realm where Islam is destined to enjoy exclusive dominance. Such a violation cannot be compromised with; nothing will suffice but its extirpation.
In the eyes of the secular Arab regimes, the Jews of Israel are similarly an affront, but not so much on theological grounds as on account of the society they have built: free, productive, democratic, a living rebuke to the corrupt, autocratic regimes surrounding it. In short, the Jewish state is the ultimate freedom fighter?an embodiment of the subversive liberties that threaten Islamic civilization and autocratic Arab rule alike. It is for this reason that, in the state-controlled Arab media as in the mosques, Jews have been turned into a symbol of all that is menacing in the democratic, materialist West as a whole, and are confidently reputed to be the insidious force manipulating the United States into a confrontation with Islam.
The particular dynamic of anti-Semitism in the Middle East orbit today may help explain why?unlike, as we shall see, in Europe?there was no drop in the level of anti-Jewish incitement in the region after the inception of the Oslo peace process. Quite the contrary. And the reason is plain: to the degree that Oslo were to have succeeded in bringing about a real reconciliation with Israel or in facilitating the spread of political freedom, to that degree it would have frustrated the overarching aim of eradicating the Jewish "evil" from the heart of the Middle East and/or preserving the autocratic power of the Arab regimes.
And so, while in the 1990?s the democratic world, including the democratic society of Israel, was (deludedly, as it turned out) celebrating the promise of a new dawn in the Middle East, the schools in Gaza, the textbooks in Ramallah, the newspapers in Egypt, and the television channels in Saudi Arabia were projecting a truer picture of the state of feeling in the Arab world. It should come as no surprise that, in Egypt, pirated copies of Shimon Peres?s A New Middle East, a book heralding a messianic era of free markets and free ideas, were printed with an introduction in Arabic claiming that what this bible of Middle East peacemaking proved was the veracity of everything written in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion about a Jewish plot to rule the world.
As for Western Europe, there the reputation of Israel and of the Jews has undergone a number of ups and downs over the decades. Before 1967, the shadow of the Holocaust and the perception of Israel as a small state struggling for its existence in the face of Arab aggression combined to ensure, if not the favor of the European political classes, at least a certain dispensation from harsh criticism. But all this changed in June 1967, when the truncated Jewish state achieved a seemingly miraculous victory against its massed Arab enemies in the Six-Day war, and the erstwhile victim was overnight transformed into an aggressor. A possibly apocryphal story about Jean-Paul Sartre encapsulates the shift in the European mood. Before the war, as Israel lay diplomatically isolated and Arab leaders were already trumpeting its certain demise, the famous French philosopher signed a statement in support of the Jewish state. After the war, he reproached the man who had solicited his signature: "But you assured me they would lose."
Decades before "occupation" became a household word, the mood in European chancelleries and on the Left turned decidedly hostile. There were, to be sure, venal interests at stake, from the perceived need to curry favor with the oil-producing nations of the Arab world to, in later years, the perceived need to pander to the growing Muslim populations in Western Europe itself. But other currents were also at work, as anti-Western, anti-"imperialist," pacifist, and pro-liberationist sentiments, fanned and often subsidized by the USSR, took over the advanced political culture both of Europe and of international diplomacy. Behind the new hostility to Israel lay the new ideological orthodoxy, according to whose categories the Jewish state had emerged on the world scene as a certified "colonial" and "imperialist" power, a "hegemon," and an "oppressor."
Before 1967, anti-Zionist resolutions sponsored by the Arabs and their Soviet patrons in the United Nations garnered little or no support among the democracies. After 1967, more and more Western countries joined the chorus of castigation. By 1974, Yasir Arafat, whose organization openly embraced both terrorism and the destruction of a UN member state, was invited to address the General Assembly. The next year, that same body passed the infamous "Zionism-is-racism" resolution. In 1981, Israel?s strike against Iraq?s nuclear reactor was condemned by the entire world, including the United States.
Then, in the 1990?s, things began to change again. Despite the constant flow of biased UN resolutions, despite the continuing double standard, there were a number of positive developments as well: the Zionism-is-racism resolution was repealed, and over 65 member states either established or renewed diplomatic relations with Israel.
What had happened? Had Arab oil dried up? Had Muslims suddenly become a less potent political force on the European continent? Hardly. What changed was that, at Madrid and then at Oslo, Israel had agreed, first reluctantly and later with self-induced optimism, to conform to the ascendant ethos of international politics. Extending its hand to a terrorist organization still committed to its destruction, Israel agreed to the establishment of a dictatorial and repressive regime on its very doorstep, sustaining its commitment to the so-called peace process no matter how many innocent Jews were killed and wounded in its fraudulent name.
The rewards for thus conforming to the template of the world?s moralizers, cosmetic and temporary though they proved to be, flowed predictably not just to Israel but to the Jewish people as a whole. Sure enough, worldwide indices of anti-Semitismin the 1990?s dropped to their lowest point since the Holocaust. As the world?s Jews benefited from the increasing tolerance extended to the world?s Jew, Western organizations devoted to fighting the anti-Semitic scourge began cautiously to declare victory and to refocus their efforts on other parts of the Jewish communal agenda.
But of course it would not last. In the summer of 2000, at Camp David, Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians nearly everything their leadership was thought to be demanding. The offer was summarily rejected, Arafat started his "uprising," Israel undertook to defend itself?and Europe ceased to applaud. For many Jews at the time, this seemed utterly incomprehensible: had not Israel taken every last step for peace? But it was all too comprehensible. Europe was staying true to form; it was the world?s Jew, by refusing to accept its share of blame for the "cycle of violence," that was out of line. And so were the world?s Jews, who by definition, and whether they supported Israel or not, came rapidly to be associated with the Jewish state in its effrontery.
TO AMERICANS, the process I have been describing may sound eerily familiar. It should: Americans, too, have had numerous opportunities to see their nation in the dock of world opinion over recent years for the crime of rejecting the values of the so-called international community, and never more so than during the widespread hysteria that greeted President Bush?s announced plan to dismantle the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein. In dozens of countries, protesters streamed into the streets to voice their fury at this refusal of the United States to conform to what "everybody" knew to be required of it. To judge from the placards on display at these rallies, President Bush, the leader of the free world, was a worse enemy of mankind than the butcher of Baghdad.
At first glance, this too must have seemed incomprehensible. Saddam Hussein was one of the world?s most brutal dictators, a man who had gassed his own citizens, invaded his neighbors, defied Security Council resolutions, and was widely believed to possess weapons of mass destruction. But no matter: the protests were less about Iraqi virtue than about American vice, and the grievances aired by the assorted anti-capitalists, anti-globalists, radical environmentalists, self-styled anti-imperialists, and many others who assembled to decry the war had little to do with the possible drawbacks of a military operation in Iraq. They had to do, rather, with a genuine clash of values.
Insofar as the clash is between the United States and Europe?there is a large "European" body of opinion within the United States as well?it has been well diagnosed by Robert Kagan in his best-selling book, Of Paradise and Power. For our purposes, it is sufficient to remark on how quickly the initial "why-do-they-hate-us" debate in the wake of September 11, focusing on anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, came to be overtaken by a "why-do-they-hate-us" debate centered on anti-American sentiment in "Old Europe." Generally, the two hatreds have been seen to emanate from divergent impulses, in the one case a perception of the threat posed by Western freedoms to Islamic civilization, in the other a perception of the threat posed by a self-confident and powerful America to the postmodern European idea of a world regulated not by force but by reason, compromise, and nonjudgmentalism. In today?s Europe?professedly pacifist, postnationalist, anti-hegemonic?an expression like "axis of evil" wins few friends, and the idea of actually confronting the axis of evil still fewer.
Despite the differences between them, however, anti-Americanism in the Islamic world and anti-Americanism in Europe are in fact linked, and both bear an uncanny resemblance to anti-Semitism. It is, after all, with some reason that the United States is loathed and feared by the despots and fundamentalists of the Islamic world as well as by many Europeans. Like Israel, but in a much more powerful way, America embodies a different?a non-conforming?idea of the good, and refuses to aban don its moral clarity about the objective worth of that idea or of the free habits and institutions to which it has given birth. To the contrary, in undertaking their war against the evil of terrorism, the American people have demonstrated their determination not only to fight to preserve the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity, but to carry them to regions of the world that have proved most resistant to their benign influence.
IN THIS, positive sense as well, Israel and the Jewish people share something essential with the United States. The Jews, after all, have long held that they were chosen to play a special role in history, to be what their prophets called "a light unto the nations." What precisely is meant by that phrase has always been a matter of debate, and I would be the last to deny the mischief that has sometimes been done, including to the best interests of the Jews, by some who have raised it as their banner. Nevertheless, over four millennia, the universal vision and moral precepts of the Jews have not only worked to secure the survival of the Jewish people themselves but have constituted a powerful force for good in the world, inspiring myriads to fight for the right even as in others they have aroused rivalry, enmity, and unappeasable resentment.
It is similar with the United States?a nation that has long regarded itself as entrusted with a mission to be what John Winthrop in the 17th century called a "city on a hill" and Ronald Reagan in the 20th parsed as a "shining city on a hill." What precisely is meant by that phrase is likewise a matter of debate, but Americans who see their country in such terms certainly regard the advance of American values as central to American purpose. And, though the United States is still a very young nation, there can be no disputing that those values have likewise constituted an immense force for good in the world?even as they have earned America the enmity and resentment of many.
In resolving to face down enmity and hatred, an important source of strength is the lesson to be gained from contemplating the example of others. From Socrates to Churchill to Sakharov, there have been individuals whose voices and whose personal heroism have reinforced in others the resolve to stand firm for the good. But history has also been generous enough to offer, in the Jews, the example of an ancient people fired by the message of human freedom under God and, in the Americans, the example of a modern people who over the past century alone, acting in fidelity with their inmost beliefs, have confronted and defeated the greatest tyrannies ever known to man.
Fortunately for America, and fortunately for the world, the United States has been blessed by providence with the power to match its ideals. The Jewish state, by contrast, is a tiny island in an exceedingly dangerous sea, and its citizens will need every particle of strength they can muster for the trials ahead. It is their own people?s astounding perseverance, despite centuries of suffering at the hands of faiths, ideologies, peoples, and individuals who have hated them and set out to do them in, that inspires one with confidence that the Jews will once again outlast their enemies.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NATAN SHARANSKY, the former Soviet dissident and political prisoner, now serves in the government of Israel as minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs. This article draws in part on ideas presented at a conference on anti-Semitism in Paris in May and at the World Forum of the American Enterprise Institute in June. Mr. Sharansky thanks Ron Dermer for help in developing the arguments and in preparing the manuscript.
-
www.stratfor.com
Geopolitical Diary: Monday, Nov. 10, 2003
Al Qaeda operatives continued to expand the offensive that began in Iraq at the start of Ramadan. This time, the target was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. At the hour of this writing on Nov. 9, 11 people have been reported killed and 122 wounded in an attack on the Muhaya compound -- primarily housing non-Saudi Arabs. Reportedly, the attackers infiltrated the compound driving a police vehicle and dressed in Saudi security uniforms.
It's particularly interesting that a compound housing Americans or Europeans wasn't targeted. There are two possible explanations for this. First, security for such obvious targets has become so tight that mounting a successful operation has become too risky. Second, al Qaeda now regards itself in an all-out war with the Saudi government and is signaling other Arab nationals that continued collaboration with the Saudis is dangerous and should be terminated.
Both explanations are probably true, but on balance, we regard the second explanation as the most likely and significant. The Saudi government has begun aggressively attacking al Qaeda in the kingdom, thereby increasing collaboration with the United States. It has done so partly because it recognizes -- understanding the region well -- that current processes in Iraq likely will bring a Shiite government to power there. If Saudi Arabia opposes the United States, the royal family will face some very stiff historical winds. Resisting the rising Shiite tide and confronting the United States would not be easily survived. Accommodating the United States holds open the probability that the United States will limit Iranian expansionism. That isn't certain, but the Saudis know that if they don't make a serious down payment right now, they might not have an opportunity later. Hence, they have become substantially more aggressive toward al Qaeda.
This has set in motion two processes. First, there is a split within the
kingdom regarding the policy -- one that certainly cuts deep into the royal
family. Second, al Qaeda believes the Saudi royals have been hypocritical in their leadership -- saying the right things, but acting very differently. Now they can argue that the royals' true nature has been flushed out.
This means al Qaeda has a hard core of support in the kingdom, now that the opportunistic support of some of the royals has been forced to the other side. Al Qaeda needs to demonstrate that it can hit Saudi Arabia hard and as it chooses. It also must demonstrate to the rest of the Arab world that continued collaboration with the United States and Saudi Arabia itself will carry a heavy price.
The U.S. solution in Iraq and the complex relationship with the Shiites and
the Iranian government pose serious problems for al Qaeda in Iraq; but they also open opportunities for al Qaeda in the rest of the non-Shiite world. Al Qaeda can now argue that the issue is not solely the United States, nor the Christian-Hindu-Jewish alliance. Rather, the most fundamental threat is the internal enemy -- the Shias. Al Qaeda can exploit this very effectively, particularly in the Sunni Arab world -- where they delivered an important message Nov. 9.
It is interesting to note that this was the same day the Israeli Cabinet
authorized a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah. Too much should not be made of this. There are many obstacles to consummation and this, by itself, doesn't mean much. Nevertheless, Hezbollah is a creature of the Iranians and one of the outstanding questions has been the relationship between Iran and Israel under the new U.S.-Iran system of quiet collaboration. The pivot of that question is, of course, Hezbollah. Therefore, the evolution of the prisoner exchange program between Israel and Hezbollah is of great interest as part of the next steps.
-
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
12 November 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
The Iraq Dilemma: Frying Pan or Fire?
Summary
U.S. President George. W. Bush has hastily convened his war
council to decide strategies for the next phase of operations in Iraq. What first must be assessed are the nature, intent and capabilities of the Iraqi guerrilla forces. Imperfect
intelligence about this might force the Bush administration to
implement strategies based on worst-case-scenario assumptions.
Analysis
A war council convened in Washington on Nov. 11, appropriately the same day as the U.S. Veteran's Day holiday. The war council clearly was not planned -- the U.S. administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer was hurriedly recalled to Washington. The White House meeting included all the major decision makers concerning U.S. strategic policy, including Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. All the players were at the table; President Bush was dealing the cards.
Clearly, the strategic situation in Iraq was the driving issue.
Major guerrilla activity remains concentrated in the Sunni
triangle, north and west of Baghdad. In that sense, the
guerrilla's position has not improved. However, coinciding with the advent of Ramadan, the Iraqi guerrillas intensified their tempo of operations substantially, but not decisively. That is to say, the guerrilla activity increased, but its strategic
significance did not. The guerrillas are far from capable of
compelling a U.S. retreat from Iraq by force of arms. Indeed,
they are incapable of seizing and holding any territory, as their allies in Afghanistan are capable.
The military situation is relatively stable and, from a strictly
military standpoint, tolerable. However, the political situation
of the United States is not. There, the inability of the Bush
administration to either forecast the guerrilla war or
demonstrate a war-termination strategy has weakened the
administration, although far from decisively.
The most severe political damage the guerrillas have done has been in the Islamic world. In Iraq, the United States wanted to demonstrate its enormous and decisive military power to impose a sense of hopelessness on radical Islamists who were arguing that American power and will were vastly overrated. Whatever the reality of the guerrilla campaign, the perception that has been created in the Islamic world is precisely the opposite of the one the United States desired. Rather than imposing "shock and awe,"
the inability to suppress the guerrillas has confirmed to
Islamists their core perception -- that the United States can
defeat conventional forces but cannot deal with paramilitary and guerrilla forces. Therefore, the United States can be defeated over time if Islamists are prepared to be patient and absorb casualties.
This is not the message that the administration wants to send either to the Islamists or to Iowa. The administration's
assumption going into the war was that the collapse of Iraq's
conventional forces coupled with the fall of Baghdad would
terminate organized resistance. There was a core failure in U.S. intelligence that seemed not to realize that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had a follow-on strategy that he apparently learned from the Taliban.
Contrary to U.S. perception (more the media's than the
military's), the United States did not defeat the Taliban in the
winter of 2001-2002. The Taliban declined conventional combat in front of Afghanistan's cities and instead withdrew, dispersed and shifted to guerrilla operations. Hussein, realizing that he did not have the ability to defeat or even engage the United States with conventional forces, prepared a follow-on strategy. He prepared the ground in the Sunni triangle for extended guerrilla war. He hid supplies, created a command structure and detailed forces for extended resistance. Joined by foreign Islamists early in the campaign and reinforced later, this organization has managed to maintain operations against U.S. occupation forces,
increasing the tempo of operations in late October.
Intelligence failures are inevitable in war, but this failure has
created a serious dilemma for Bush's war council. The Ramadan offensive and its political consequences force the administration to craft a response. Standing pat is no longer an option. But there is a range of responses that might be made and choosing among them requires a clear intelligence estimate. At this point, no single, clear intelligence estimate is available. What is more, given the intelligence failure concerning the guerrillas, it isn't clear if the president can choose his course based on the intelligence given him.
The intelligence failure had its roots in a fundamental weakness in U.S. Iraqi intelligence that goes back to 1990s failures. Those weaknesses could not have been corrected in the past six months or so. Therefore, the president cannot regard the best estimate available as authoritative. Indeed, past record aside, the U.S. intelligence community has not clearly understood the guerrillas' command structure, their size and composition or the resources they have available. This is not to say that tactical intelligence improvements have not been made. It seems to us that piecemeal insights have been achieved concerning the operations of individual guerrilla units. But the fact is, on the broadest level, that U.S. intelligence seemingly lacks a clear, strategic sense of the enemy.
As best as we can tell, the guerrillas appear to consist of a
main body of Iraqi military trained for this mission and uniquely loyal. Its size is uncertain, but it doesn't seem to be
recruiting volunteers into the main group, although it is using
volunteers and paying others to carry out specific tasks. If the main force were recruiting, then matters would be simplified for the U.S. -- recruitment would provide opportunities for planting agents inside the guerrilla force.
The guerrillas understand this, which increases their opacity.
What augmentation they receive is coming from Islamists from outside Iraq. These Islamists cannot simply operate independently because they do not know the terrain sufficiently, but many are experienced fighters from other Islamist wars. Therefore, they seem to serve as a sort of special force, training and carrying out special operations like suicide attacks. If we assume 30 organized attacks a day, that each group can carry out one attack every three days, and that each unit contains about 20 men (based on the size of U.S. unit captures), then there would appear to be a main force of roughly 1,800 people and a few hundred foreign
operatives.
President Bush is now facing the classic problem of political
leaders in war. He must make military and political decisions
about Iraq based on his estimate of the situation, yet he cannot completely rely on the best estimate of his intelligence people. In general, there are three possible views of the Iraq situation.
1. The guerrillas have increased their operations on a permanent basis and this is a steady upward curve.
2. The guerrillas have temporarily surged their operations during Ramadan and it will return to lower levels in December.
3. The guerrillas are facing disaster and have launched a
desperation attack during Ramadan in a last ditch attempt to
unbalance the United States into a foolish action.
It's difficult to believe that the guerillas can continue to
increase the operational tempo indefinitely. This would require a substantial reserve force available in the villages -- already trained and recruited -- that could dramatically increase the size of the present force. This isn't really possible unless the guerrillas are willing to accept potential intelligence penetration by the United States. A large reserve cannot be discounted, but given the presence of U.S. forces throughout the region, some intelligence would have indicated this before now, unless the community were entirely sealed shut. We assume that primarily foreign recruits would augment the guerrilla force -- not an insignificant pool but not a quantum leap either, given
infiltration constraints.
We also tend to disbelieve that the guerrillas are facing
disaster and are engaged in an Islamic Hail Mary. There haven't been enough contacts between U.S. forces and guerrillas to significantly thin their ranks, nor have there been the mass defections that one would see if a force were in the process of disintegrating. Therefore, in our view, scenario three is unlikely.
That leaves scenario two -- a temporary surge. Unless our numbers are widely off base --and that is certainly a possibility -- it is difficult for us to imagine the guerrillas maintaining this operational tempo indefinitely. The campaign began with Ramadan. It has been more intense than what went before, but the intensity indicates a force working overtime, not a surprisingly larger force. Given the politics and symbolism, the surge in operations is certainly understandable. It would also indicate the probability of an explosive culmination at the end of Ramadan. But if we were to bet, we would bet that this is a temporary surge.
But we aren't the president -- it's easy for us to make bets. He is playing the game for real, while we have the luxury of no responsibility for the decision. If he cannot rely on U.S.
intelligence, he cannot rely on us. Under those circumstances, he is obligated to assume the worst-case scenario -- scenario one. That is, the Iraqi guerrillas have permanently increased their operational tempo and may well increase it more down the road.
If we are right, then his best course is to wait until early
December, and then, while the guerrillas regroup and rest, hit
them hard with an offensive. Then, turn to the Iraqi Governance Council and dictate the terms of a transfer of power to them. If we are wrong, and the guerrillas are gaining in strength, then waiting would be disastrous. The U.S. will never be given a clear shot at a counteroffensive; the guerrilla attacks would intensify and the U.S. political situation inside of Iraq would deteriorate. Under that scenario, the longer the U.S. waits, the harder it will be to get the IGC to cut a political deal.
Under any circumstance, the United States needs an indigenous force to bear the brunt of the fighting. The IGC has little real legitimacy in Iraq as an institution and less appetite for serving the U.S. cause -- particularly if military events appear to be moving against the United States. Therefore, the IGC seems unlikely to be prepared to solve the U.S. problem, even if it could, which is dubious in the extreme.
Hence, the war council. Bush must make a decision about what to believe is going on. Having been poorly served by intelligence, particularly the optimistic briefs he was given in April and May, it will be enormously difficult for him to go with scenario two and wait things out. However, he is also unlikely to gain the cooperation he is hoping for from the IGC, unless scenario two is the case. Therefore, the war council must consider the abysmal possibility that scenario one is in play and that the IGC will not be helpful.
If true, then there are components of the IGC that might be
valuable on their own -- namely, the Shiites. The Shiites are as opposed to the Sunni guerrillas as the United States. The last thing they want is Hussein's return or a Wahabi-influenced government in Baghdad. On the other hand, they are certainly not prepared to create an Iraqi army out of the Shiite community and hand it over to U.S. command. They are seeking a Shiite-dominated Iraq -- meaning one that excludes the U.S. from long-term presence as well. On the whole, their goal is an Islamic republic generally based on the Iranian Shiite model. It is the last thing the U.S. wanted in May, but, this is November and what the U.S. wants and what it can have are very different things.
It would seem to us that there are two strategies on the table:
1. Assume that scenario two is at work, wait until December and then deal with the IGC from a position of relative strength.
2. Assume that scenario one is at work and lock in a deal with the Shiites before the situation gets any worse and the Shiite -- and Iranian -- price gets any higher.
Each scenario carries substantial risks and no intelligence
guidance available is sufficiently authoritative. The temptation
to wait and hope for the best is strong, but a miscalculation
could lead to an impossible situation in which the Shiites have
the Americans by the throat while the guerrillas are hitting
other parts of the body. Paying the Shiite price now, if
unnecessary, creates a long-term problem -- the Shiites will be charging a high price for their services.
The administration has toyed with this Shiite-Iranian alignment for months now without coming to a definitive decision, constantly hoping that things would get better. Now, the choice is only between things remaining the same or getting worse. Given the intelligence problems, we suspect that Bush needs to work from the worst-case scenario. That means he will bypass the IGC and work directly with Shiite leaders to lock in a deal quickly.
And now it becomes a question of whether the Shiites are feeling lucky.
-
A friend forwarded me the following:
--------------------------------
Amir Taheri wrote a great little article about a book recently published by
one of al Qaeda's "deep thinkers". If this is representative of how the
extremist Islamists think (which I think it is), it puts to rest all the
theories claiming that if we "change" our Foreign policy in some way or
another, and learn to become somehow more "accomodating", we would no longer be hated and attacked.
It would certainly appear that we are being hated and attacked NOT for what we DID, but for what we ARE.
A.
AL QAEDA'S AGENDA FOR IRAQ
by Amir Taheri
NEW YORK POST
September 4, 2003
'IT is not the American war machine that should be of the utmost concern to Muslims. What threatens the future of Islam, in fact its very survival, is
American democracy." This is the message of a new book, just published by al Qaeda in several Arab countries.
The author of "The Future of Iraq and The Arabian Peninsula After The Fall of Baghdad" is Yussuf al-Ayyeri, one of Osama bin Laden's closest associates since the early '90s. A Saudi citizen also known by the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad, he was killed in a gun battle with security forces in Riyadh last June.
The book is published by The Centre for Islamic Research and Studies, a
company set up by bin Laden in 1995 with branches in New York and London (now closed). Over the past eight years, it has published more than 40 books by al Qaeda "thinkers and researchers" including militants such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's No. 2.
Al-Ayyeri first made his name in the mid '90s as a commander of the Farouq camp in eastern Afghanistan, where al Qaeda and the Taliban trained thousands of "volunteers for martyrdom."
Al-Ayyeri argues that the history of mankind is the story of "perpetual war between belief and unbelief." Over the millennia, both have appeared in different guises. As far as belief is concerned, the absolutely final version is represented by Islam, which "annuls all other religions and creeds." Thus, Muslims can have only one goal: converting all humanity to Islam and "effacing the final traces of all other religions, creeds and ideologies."
Unbelief (kufr) has come in numerous forms and shapes, but with a single objective: to destroy faith in God. In the West, unbelief has succeeded in making a majority of people forget God and worship the world. Islam, however, is resisting the trend because Allah means to give it final victory.
Al-Ayyeri then shows how various forms of unbelief attacked the world of
Islam in the past century or so, to be defeated in one way or another.
The first form of unbelief to attack was "modernism" (hidatha), which led to the caliphate's destruction and the emergence in the lands of Islam of
states based on ethnic identities and territorial dimensions rather than
religious faith.
The second was nationalism, which, imported from Europe, divided Muslims into Arabs, Persians, Turks and others. Al-Ayyeri claims that nationalism has now been crushed in almost all Muslim lands. He claims that a true Muslim is not loyal to any particular nation-state.
The third form of unbelief is socialism, which includes communism. That,
too, has been defeated and eliminated from the Muslim world, Al-Ayyeri
asserts. He presents Ba'athism, the Iraqi ruling party's ideology under
Saddam Hussein, as the fourth form of unbelief to afflict Muslims,
especially Arabs. Ba'athism (also the official ideology of the Syrian
regime) offers Arabs a mixture of pan-Arabism and socialism as an
alternative to Islam. Al-Ayyeri says Muslims "should welcome the destruction of Ba'athism in Iraq."
"The end of Ba'ath rule in Iraq is good for Islam and Muslims," he writes.
"Where the banner of Ba'ath has fallen, shall rise the banner of Islam."
The author notes as "a paradox" the fact that all the various forms of
unbelief that threatened Islam were defeated with the help of the Western powers, and more specifically the United States.
The "modernizing" movement in the Muslim world was ultimately discredited when European imperial powers forced their domination on Muslim lands, turning the Westernized elite into their "hired lackeys." The nationalists were defeated and discredited in wars led against them by various Western powers or, in the case of Nasserism in Egypt, by Israel.
The West also gave a hand in defeating socialism and communism in the Muslim world. The most dramatic example of this came when America helped the Afghan mujaheeden destroy the Soviet-backed communist regime in Kabul. And now the United States and its British allies have destroyed Ba'athism in Iraq and may have fatally undermined it in Syria as well.
What Al-Ayyeri sees now is a "clean battlefield" in which Islam faces a new form of unbelief. This, he labels "secularist democracy." This threat is "far more dangerous to Islam" than all its predecessors combined. The
reasons, he explains in a whole chapter, must be sought in democracy's
"seductive capacities."
This form of "unbelief" persuades the people that they are in charge of
their destiny and that, using their collective reasoning, they can shape
policies and pass laws as they see fit. That leads them into ignoring the
"unalterable laws" promulgated by God for the whole of mankind, and codified in the Islamic shariah (jurisprudence) until the end of time.
The goal of democracy, according to Al-Ayyeri, is to "make Muslims love this world, forget the next world and abandon jihad." If established in any
Muslim country for a reasonably long time, democracy could lead to economic prosperity, which, in turn, would make Muslims "reluctant to die in martyrdom" in defense of their faith.
He says that it is vital to prevent any normalization and stabilization in
Iraq. Muslim militants should make sure that the United States does not
succeed in holding elections in Iraq and creating a democratic government. "If democracy comes to Iraq, the next target [for democratization] would be the whole of the Muslim world," Al-Ayyeri writes.
The al Qaeda ideologist claims that the only Muslim country already affected by "the beginning of democratization" and thus in "mortal danger" is Turkey.
"Do we want what happened in Turkey to happen to all Muslim countries?" he asks. "Do we want Muslims to refuse taking part in jihad and submit to secularism, which is a Zionist-Crusader concoction?"
Al-Ayyeri says Iraq would become the graveyard of secular democracy, just as Afghanistan became the graveyard of communism. The idea is that the Americans, faced with mounting casualties in Iraq, will "just run away," as did the Soviets in Afghanistan. This is because the Americans love this world and are concerned about nothing but their own comfort, while Muslims dream of the pleasures that martyrdom offers in paradise.
"In Iraq today, there are only two sides," Al-Ayyeri asserts. "Here we have a clash of two visions of the world and the future of mankind. The side prepared to accept more sacrifices will win."
Al-Ayyeri's analysis may sound naive; he also gets most of his facts wrong. But he is right in reminding the world that what happens in Iraq could affect other Arab countries - in fact, the whole of the Muslim world.
-----------------------------------
The Philosopher of Islamic Terror (Part I)
By PAUL BERMAN
March 23, 2003
In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, many people anticipated a quick and satisfying American victory over Al Qaeda. The terrorist army was thought to be no bigger than a pirate ship, and the newly vigilant police forces of the entire world were going to sink the ship with swift arrests and dark maneuvers. Al Qaeda was driven from its bases in Afghanistan. Arrests and maneuvers duly occurred and are still occurring. Just this month, one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants was nabbed in Pakistan. Police agents, as I write, seem to be hot on the trail of bin Laden himself, or so reports suggest.
Yet Al Qaeda has seemed unfazed. Its popularity, which was hard to imagine at first, has turned out to be large and genuine in more than a few countries. Al Qaeda upholds a paranoid and apocalyptic worldview, according to which ''Crusaders and Zionists'' have been conspiring for centuries to destroy Islam. And this worldview turns out to be widely accepted in many places -- a worldview that allowed many millions of people to regard the Sept. 11 attacks as an Israeli conspiracy, or perhaps a C.I.A. conspiracy, to undo Islam. Bin Laden's soulful, bearded face peers out from T-shirts and posters in a number of countries, quite as if he were the new Che Guevara, the mythic righter of cosmic wrongs.
The vigilant police in many countries, applying themselves at last, have raided a number of Muslim charities and Islamic banks, which stand accused of subsidizing the terrorists. These raids have advanced the war on still another front, which has been good to see. But the raids have also shown that Al Qaeda is not only popular; it is also institutionally solid, with a worldwide network of clandestine resources. This is not the Symbionese Liberation Army. This is an organization with ties to the ruling elites in a number of countries; an organization that, were it given the chance to strike up an alliance with Saddam Hussein's Baath movement, would be doubly terrifying; an organization that, in any case, will surely survive the outcome in Iraq.
To anyone who has looked closely enough, Al Qaeda and its sister organizations plainly enjoy yet another strength, arguably the greatest strength of all, something truly imposing -- though in the Western press this final strength has received very little attention. Bin Laden is a Saudi plutocrat with Yemeni ancestors, and most of the suicide warriors of Sept. 11 were likewise Saudis, and the provenance of those people has focused everyone's attention on the Arabian peninsula. But Al Qaeda has broader roots. The organization was created in the late 1980's by an affiliation of three armed factions -- bin Laden's circle of ''Afghan'' Arabs, together with two factions from Egypt, the Islamic Group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the latter led by Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's top theoretician. The Egyptian factions emerged from an older current, a school of thought from within Egypt's fundamentalist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, in the 1950's and 60's. And at the heart of that single school of thought stood, until his execution in 1966, a philosopher named Sayyid Qutb -- the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into Al Qaeda, their Karl Marx (to put it that way), their guide.
Qutb (pronounced KUH-tahb) wrote a book called ''Milestones,'' and that book was cited at his trial, which gave it immense publicity, especially after its author was hanged. ''Milestones'' became a classic manifesto of the terrorist wing of Islamic fundamentalism. A number of journalists have dutifully turned the pages of ''Milestones,'' trying to decipher the otherwise inscrutable terrorist point of view.
I have been reading some of Qutb's other books, and I think that ''Milestones'' may have misled the journalists. ''Milestones'' is a fairly shallow book, judged in isolation. But ''Milestones'' was drawn from his vast commentary on the Koran called ''In the Shade of the Qur'an.'' One of the many volumes of this giant work was translated into English in the 1970's and published by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, an organization later widely suspected of participation in terrorist attacks -- and an organization whose Washington office was run by a brother of bin Laden's. In the last four years a big effort has been mounted by another organization, the Islamic Foundation in England, to bring out the rest, in what will eventually be an edition of 15 fat English-language volumes, handsomely ornamented with Arabic script from the Koran. Just in these past few weeks a number of new volumes in this edition have made their way into the Arab bookshops of Brooklyn, and I have gobbled them up. By now I have made my way through a little less than half of ''In the Shade of the Qur'an,'' which I think is all that exists so far in English, together with three other books by Qutb. And I have something to report.
Qutb is not shallow. Qutb is deep. ''In the Shade of the Qur'an'' is, in its fashion, a masterwork. Al Qaeda and its sister organizations are not merely popular, wealthy, global, well connected and institutionally sophisticated. These groups stand on a set of ideas too, and some of those ideas may be pathological, which is an old story in modern politics; yet even so, the ideas are powerful. We should have known that, of course. But we should have known many things.
Qutb's special ability as a writer came from the fact that, as a young boy, he received a traditional Muslim education -- he committed the Koran to memory by the age of 10 -- yet he went on, at a college in Cairo, to receive a modern, secular education. He was born in 1906, and in the 1920's and 30's he took up socialism and literature. He wrote novels, poems and a book that is still said to be well regarded called ''Literary Criticism: Its Principles and Methodology.'' His writings reflected -- here I quote one of his admirers and translators, Hamid Algar of the University of California at Berkeley -- a ''Western-tinged outlook on cultural and literary questions.'' Qutb displayed ''traces of individualism and existentialism.'' He even traveled to the United States in the late 1940's, enrolled at the Colorado State College of Education and earned a master's degree. In some of the accounts of Qutb's life, this trip to America is pictured as a ghastly trauma, mostly because of America's sexual freedoms, which sent him reeling back to Egypt in a mood of hatred and fear.
I am skeptical of that interpretation, though. His book from the 1940's, ''Social Justice and Islam,'' shows that, even before his voyage to America, he was pretty well set in his Islamic fundamentalism. It is true that, after his return to Egypt, he veered into ever more radical directions. But in the early 1950's, everyone in Egypt was veering in radical directions. Gamal Abdel Nasser and a group of nationalist army officers overthrew the old king in 1952 and launched a nationalist revolution on Pan-Arabist grounds. And, as the Pan-Arabists went about promoting their revolution, Sayyid Qutb went about promoting his own, somewhat different revolution. His idea was ''Islamist.'' He wanted to turn Islam into a political movement to create a new society, to be based on ancient Koranic principles. Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood, became the editor of its journal and established himself right away as Islamism's principal theoretician in the Arab world.
The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists tried to cooperate with one another in Egypt in those days, and there was some basis for doing so. Both movements dreamed of rescuing the Arab world from the legacies of European imperialism. Both groups dreamed of crushing Zionism and the brand-new Jewish state. Both groups dreamed of fashioning a new kind of modernity, which was not going to be liberal and freethinking in the Western style but, even so, was going to be up-to-date on economic and scientific issues. And both movements dreamed of doing all this by returning in some fashion to the glories of the Arab past. Both movements wanted to resurrect, in a modern version, the ancient Islamic caliphate of the seventh century, when the Arabs were conquering the world.
The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists could be compared, in these ambitions, with the Italian Fascists of Mussolini's time, who wanted to resurrect the Roman Empire, and to the Nazis, who likewise wanted to resurrect ancient Rome, except in a German version. The most radical of the Pan-Arabists openly admired the Nazis and pictured their proposed new caliphate as a racial victory of the Arabs over all other ethnic groups. Qutb and the Islamists, by way of contrast, pictured the resurrected caliphate as a theocracy, strictly enforcing shariah, the legal code of the Koran. The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists had their similarities then, and their differences. (And today those two movements still have their similarities and differences -- as shown by bin Laden's Qaeda, which represents the most violent wing of Islamism, and Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, which represents the most violent wing of Pan-Arabism.)
In 1952, in the days before staging his coup d'etat, Colonel Nasser is said to have paid a visit to Qutb at his home, presumably to get his backing. Some people expected that, after taking power, Nasser would appoint Qutb to be the new revolutionary minister of education. But once the Pan-Arabists had thrown out the old king, the differences between the two movements began to overwhelm the similarities, and Qutb was not appointed. Instead, Nasser cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, and after someone tried to assassinate him, he blamed the Brotherhood and cracked down even harder. Some of the Muslim Brotherhood's most distinguished intellectuals and theologians escaped into exile. Sayyid Qutb's brother, Muhammad Qutb, was one of those people. He fled to Saudi Arabia and ended up as a distinguished Saudi professor of Islamic Studies. Many years later, Osama bin Laden would be one of Muhammad Qutb's students.
But Sayyid Qutb stayed put and paid dearly for his stubbornness. Nasser jailed him in 1954, briefly released him, jailed him again for 10 years, released him for a few months and finally hanged him in 1966. Conditions during the first years of prison were especially bad. Qutb was tortured. Even in better times, according to his followers, he was locked in a ward with 40 people, most of them criminals, with a tape recorder broadcasting the speeches of Nasser 20 hours a day. Still, by smuggling papers in and out of jail, he managed to continue with his writings, no longer in the ''Western tinged'' vein of his early, literary days but now as a full-fledged Islamist revolutionary. And somehow, he produced his ''In the Shade of the Qur'an,'' this gigantic study, which must surely count as one of the most remarkable works of prison literature ever produced.
Readers without a Muslim education who try to make their way unaided through the Koran tend to find it, as I have, a little dry and forbidding. But Qutb's commentaries are not at all like that. He quotes passages from the chapters, or suras, of the Koran, and he pores over the quoted passages, observing the prosodic qualities of the text, the rhythm, tone and musicality of the words, sometimes the images. The suras lead him to discuss dietary regulations, the proper direction to pray, the rules of divorce, the question of when a man may propose marriage to a widow (four months and 10 days after the death of her husband, unless she is pregnant, in which case after delivery), the rules concerning a Muslim man who wishes to marry a Christian or a Jew (very complicated), the obligations of charity, the punishment for crimes and for breaking your word, the prohibition on liquor and intoxicants, the proper clothing to wear, the rules on usury, moneylending and a thousand other themes.
The Koran tells stories, and Qutb recounts some of these and remarks on their wisdom and significance. His tone is always lucid and plain. Yet the total effect of his writing is almost sensual in its measured pace. The very title ''In the Shade of the Qur'an'' conveys a vivid desert image, as if the Koran were a leafy palm tree, and we have only to open Qutb's pages to escape the hot sun and refresh ourselves in the shade. As he makes his way through the suras and proposes his other commentaries, he slowly constructs an enormous theological criticism of modern life, and not just in Egypt.
Qutb wrote that, all over the world, humans had reached a moment of unbearable crisis. The human race had lost touch with human nature. Man's inspiration, intelligence and morality were degenerating. Sexual relations were deteriorating ''to a level lower than the beasts.'' Man was miserable, anxious and skeptical, sinking into idiocy, insanity and crime. People were turning, in their unhappiness, to drugs, alcohol and existentialism. Qutb admired economic productivity and scientific knowledge. But he did not think that wealth and science were rescuing the human race. He figured that, on the contrary, the richest countries were the unhappiest of all. And what was the cause of this unhappiness -- this wretched split between man's truest nature and modern life?
A great many cultural critics in Europe and America asked this question in the middle years of the 20th century, and a great many of them, following Nietzsche and other philosophers, pointed to the origins of Western civilization in ancient Greece, where man was said to have made his fatal error. This error was philosophical. It consisted of placing an arrogant and deluded faith in the power of human reason -- an arrogant faith that, after many centuries, had created in modern times a tyranny of technology over life.
Qutb shared that analysis, somewhat. Only instead of locating the error in ancient Greece, he located it in ancient Jerusalem. In the Muslim fashion, Qutb looked on the teachings of Judaism as being divinely revealed by God to Moses and the other prophets. Judaism instructed man to worship one God and to forswear all others. Judaism instructed man on how to behave in every sphere of life -- how to live a worldly existence that was also a life at one with God. This could be done by obeying a system of divinely mandated laws, the code of Moses. In Qutb's view, however, Judaism withered into what he called ''a system of rigid and lifeless ritual.''
God sent another prophet, though. That prophet, in Qutb's Muslim way of thinking, was Jesus, who proposed a few useful reforms -- lifting some no-longer necessary restrictions in the Jewish dietary code, for example -- and also an admirable new spirituality. But something terrible occurred. The relation between Jesus' followers and the Jews took, in Qutb's view, ''a deplorable course.'' Jesus' followers squabbled with the old-line Jews, and amid the mutual recriminations, Jesus' message ended up being diluted and even perverted. Jesus' disciples and followers were persecuted, which meant that, in their sufferings, the disciples were never able to provide an adequate or systematic exposition of Jesus' message.
Who but Sayyid Qutb, from his miserable prison in Nasser's Egypt, could have zeroed in so plausibly on the difficulties encountered by Jesus' disciples in getting out the word? Qutb figured that, as a result, the Christian Gospels were badly garbled, and should not be regarded as accurate or reliable. The Gospels declared Jesus to be divine, but in Qutb's Muslim account, Jesus was a mere human -- a prophet of God, not a messiah. The larger catastrophe, however, was this: Jesus' disciples, owing to what Qutb called ''this unpleasant separation of the two parties,'' went too far in rejecting the Jewish teachings.
Jesus' disciples and followers, the Christians, emphasized Jesus' divine message of spirituality and love. But they rejected Judaism's legal system, the code of Moses, which regulated every jot and tittle of daily life. Instead, the early Christians imported into Christianity the philosophy of the Greeks -- the belief in a spiritual existence completely separate from physical life, a zone of pure spirit.
----------------------------------
The Philosopher of Islamic Terror (Part II)
By PAUL BERMAN
In the fourth century of the Christian era, Emperor Constantine converted the Roman Empire to Christianity. But Constantine, in Qutb's interpretation, did this in a spirit of pagan hypocrisy, dominated by scenes of wantonness, half-naked girls, gems and precious metals. Christianity, having abandoned the Mosaic code, could put up no defense. And so, in their horror at Roman morals, the Christians did as best they could and countered the imperial debaucheries with a cult of monastic asceticism.
But this was no good at all. Monastic asceticism stands at odds with the physical quality of human nature. In this manner, in Qutb's view, Christianity lost touch with the physical world. The old code of Moses, with its laws for diet, dress, marriage, sex and everything else, had enfolded the divine and the worldly into a single concept, which was the worship of God. But Christianity divided these things into two, the sacred and the secular. Christianity said, ''Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's.'' Christianity put the physical world in one corner and the spiritual world in another corner: Constantine's debauches over here, monastic renunciation over there. In Qutb's view there was a ''hideous schizophrenia'' in this approach to life. And things got worse.
A series of Christian religious councils adopted what Qutb thought to be irrational principles on Christianity's behalf -- principles regarding the nature of Jesus, the Eucharist, transubstantiation and other questions, all of which were, in Qutb's view, ''absolutely incomprehensible, inconceivable and incredible.'' Church teachings froze the irrational principles into dogma. And then the ultimate crisis struck.
Qutb's story now shifts to Arabia. In the seventh century, God delivered a new revelation to his prophet Muhammad, who established the correct, nondistorted relation to human nature that had always eluded the Christians. Muhammad dictated a strict new legal code, which put religion once more at ease in the physical world, except in a better way than ever before. Muhammad's prophecies, in the Koran, instructed man to be God's ''vice regent'' on earth -- to take charge of the physical world, and not simply to see it as something alien to spirituality or as a way station on the road to a Christian afterlife. Muslim scientists in the Middle Ages took this instruction seriously and went about inquiring into the nature of physical reality. And, in the Islamic universities of Andalusia and the East, the Muslim scientists, deepening their inquiry, hit upon the inductive or scientific method -- which opened the door to all further scientific and technological progress. In this and many other ways, Islam seized the leadership of mankind. Unfortunately, the Muslims came under attack from Crusaders, Mongols and other enemies. And, because the Muslims proved not faithful enough to Muhammad's revelations, they were unable to fend off these attacks. They were unable to capitalize on their brilliant discovery of the scientific method.
The Muslim discoveries were exported instead into Christian Europe. And there, in Europe in the 16th century, Islam's scientific method began to generate results, and modern science emerged. But Christianity, with its insistence on putting the physical world and the spiritual world in different corners, could not cope with scientific progress. And so Christianity's inability to acknowledge or respect the physical quality of daily life spread into the realm of culture and shaped society's attitude toward science.
As Qutb saw it, Europeans, under Christianity's influence, began to picture God on one side and science on the other. Religion over here; intellectual inquiry over there. On one side, the natural human yearning for God and for a divinely ordered life; on the other side, the natural human desire for knowledge of the physical universe. The church against science; the scientists against the church. Everything that Islam knew to be one, the Christian Church divided into two. And, under these terrible pressures, the European mind split finally asunder. The break became total. Christianity, over here; atheism, over there. It was the fateful divorce between the sacred and the secular.
Europe's scientific and technical achievements allowed the Europeans to dominate the world. And the Europeans inflicted their ''hideous schizophrenia'' on peoples and cultures in every corner of the globe. That was the origin of modern misery -- the anxiety in contemporary society, the sense of drift, the purposelessness, the craving for false pleasures. The crisis of modern life was felt by every thinking person in the Christian West. But then again, Europe's leadership of mankind inflicted that crisis on every thinking person in the Muslim world as well. Here Qutb was on to something original. The Christians of the West underwent the crisis of modern life as a consequence, he thought, of their own theological tradition -- a result of nearly 2,000 years of ecclesiastical error. But in Qutb's account, the Muslims had to undergo that same experience because it had been imposed on them by Christians from abroad, which could only make the experience doubly painful -- an alienation that was also a humiliation.
That was Qutb's analysis. In writing about modern life, he put his finger on something that every thinking person can recognize, if only vaguely -- the feeling that human nature and modern life are somehow at odds. But Qutb evoked this feeling in a specifically Muslim fashion. It is easy to imagine that, in expounding on these themes back in the 1950's and 60's, Qutb had already identified the kind of personal agony that Mohamed Atta and the suicide warriors of Sept. 11 must have experienced in our own time. It was the agony of inhabiting a modern world of liberal ideas and achievements while feeling that true life exists somewhere else. It was the agony of walking down a modern sidewalk while dreaming of a different universe altogether, located in the Koranic past -- the agony of being pulled this way and that. The present, the past. The secular, the sacred. The freely chosen, the religiously mandated -- a life of confusion unto madness brought on, Qutb ventured, by Christian error.
Sitting in a wretched Egyptian prison, surrounded by criminals and composing his Koranic commentaries with Nasser's speeches blaring in the background on the infuriating tape recorder, Qutb knew whom to blame. He blamed the early Christians. He blamed Christianity's modern legacy, which was the liberal idea that religion should stay in one corner and secular life in another corner. He blamed the Jews. In his interpretation, the Jews had shown themselves to be eternally ungrateful to God. Early in their history, during their Egyptian captivity (Qutb thought he knew a thing or two about Egyptian captivity), the Jews acquired a slavish character, he believed. As a result they became craven and unprincipled when powerless, and vicious and arrogant when powerful. And these traits were eternal. The Jews occupy huge portions of Qutb's Koranic commentary -- their perfidy, greed, hatefulness, diabolical impulses, never-ending conspiracies and plots against Muhammad and Islam. Qutb was relentless on these themes. He looked on Zionism as part of the eternal campaign by the Jews to destroy Islam.
And Qutb blamed one other party. He blamed the Muslims who had gone along with Christianity's errors -- the treacherous Muslims who had inflicted Christianity's ''schizophrenia'' on the world of Islam. And, because he was willing to blame, Qutb was able to recommend a course of action too -- a revolutionary program that was going to relieve the psychological pressure of modern life and was going to put man at ease with the natural world and with God.
Qutb's analysis was soulful and heartfelt. It was a theological analysis, but in its cultural emphases, it reflected the style of 20th-century philosophy. The analysis asked some genuinely perplexing questions -- about the division between mind and body in Western thought; about the difficulties in striking a balance between sensual experience and spiritual elevation; about the steely impersonality of modern power and technological innovation; about social injustice. But, though Qutb plainly followed some main trends of 20th-century Western social criticism and philosophy, he poured his ideas through a filter of Koranic commentary, and the filter gave his commentary a grainy new texture, authentically Muslim, which allowed him to make a series of points that no Western thinker was likely to propose.
One of those points had to do with women's role in society -- and these passages in his writings have been misinterpreted, I think, in some of the Western commentaries on Qutb. His attitude was prudish in the extreme, judged from a Western perspective of today. But prudishness was not his motivation. He understood quite clearly that, in a liberal society, women were free to consult their own hearts and to pursue careers in quest of material wealth. But from his point of view, this could only mean that women had shucked their responsibility to shape the human character, through child-rearing. The Western notion of women's freedom could only mean that God and the natural order of life had been set aside in favor of a belief in other sources of authority, like one's own heart.
But what did it mean to recognize the existence of more than one source of authority? It meant paganism -- a backward step, into the heathen primitivism of the past. It meant life without reference to God -- a life with no prospect of being satisfactory or fulfilling. And why had the liberal societies of the West lost sight of the natural harmony of gender roles and of women's place in the family and the home? This was because of the ''hideous schizophrenia'' of modern life -- the Western outlook that led people to picture God's domain in one place and the ordinary business of daily life in some other place.
Qutb wrote bitterly about European imperialism, which he regarded as nothing more than a continuation of the medieval Crusades against Islam. He denounced American foreign policy. He complained about America's decision in the time of Harry Truman to support the Zionists, a strange decision that he attributed, in part, to America's loss of moral values. But I must point out that, in Qutb's writings, at least in the many volumes that I have read, the complaints about American policy are relatively few and fleeting. International politics was simply not his main concern. Sometimes he complained about the hypocrisy in America's endless boasts about freedom and democracy. He mentioned America's extermination of its Indian population. He noted the racial prejudice against blacks. But those were not Qutb's themes, finally. American hypocrisy exercised him, but only slightly. His deepest quarrel was not with America's failure to uphold its principles. His quarrel was with the principles. He opposed the United States because it was a liberal society, not because the United States failed to be a liberal society.
The truly dangerous element in American life, in his estimation, was not capitalism or foreign policy or racism or the unfortunate cult of women's independence. The truly dangerous element lay in America's separation of church and state -- the modern political legacy of Christianity's ancient division between the sacred and the secular. This was not a political criticism. This was theological -- though Qutb, or perhaps his translators, preferred the word ''ideological.''
The conflict between the Western liberal countries and the world of Islam, he explained, ''remains in essence one of ideology, although over the years it has appeared in various guises and has grown more sophisticated and, at times, more insidious.'' The sophisticated and insidious disguises tended to be worldly -- a camouflage that was intended to make the conflict appear to be economic, political or military, and that was intended to make Muslims like himself who insisted on speaking about religion appear to be, in his words, ''fanatics'' and ''backward people.''
''But in reality,'' he explained, ''the confrontation is not over control of territory or economic resources, or for military domination. If we believed that, we would play into our enemies' hands and would have no one but ourselves to blame for the consequences.''
The true confrontation, the deepest confrontation of all, was over Islam and nothing but Islam. Religion was the issue. Qutb could hardly be clearer on this topic. The confrontation arose from the effort by Crusaders and world Zionism to annihilate Islam. The Crusaders and Zionists knew that Christianity and Judaism were inferior to Islam and had led to lives of misery. They needed to annihilate Islam in order to rescue their own doctrines from extinction. And so the Crusaders and Zionists went on the attack.
But this attack was not, at bottom, military. At least Qutb did not devote his energies to warning against such a danger. Nor did he spend much time worrying about the ins and outs of Israel's struggle with the Palestinians. Border disputes did not concern him. He was focused on something cosmically larger. He worried, instead, that people with liberal ideas were mounting a gigantic campaign against Islam -- ''an effort to confine Islam to the emotional and ritual circles, and to bar it from participating in the activity of life, and to check its complete predominance over every human secular activity, a pre-eminence it earns by virtue of its nature and function.''
He trembled with rage at that effort. And he cited good historical evidence for his trembling rage. Turkey, an authentic Muslim country, had embraced secular ideas back in 1924. Turkey's revolutionary leader at that time, Kemal Ataturk, abolished the institutional remnants of the ancient caliphate -- the caliphate that Qutb so fervently wanted to resurrect. The Turks in this fashion had tried to abolish the very idea and memory of an Islamic state. Qutb worried that, if secular reformers in other Muslim countries had any success, Islam was going to be pushed into a corner, separate from the state. True Islam was going to end up as partial Islam. But partial Islam, in his view, did not exist.
The secular reformers were already at work, throughout the Muslim world. They were mounting their offensive -- ''a final offensive which is actually taking place now in all the Muslim countries. . . . It is an effort to exterminate this religion as even a basic creed and to replace it with secular conceptions having their own implications, values, institutions and organizations.''
''To exterminate'' -- that was Qutb's phrase. Hysteria cried out from every syllable. But he did not want to be hysterical. He wanted to respond. How?
That one question dominated Qutb's life. It was a theological question, and he answered it with his volumes on the Koran. But he intended his theology to be practical too -- to offer a revolutionary program to save mankind. The first step was to open people's eyes. He wanted Muslims to recognize the nature of the danger -- to recognize that Islam had come under assault from outside the Muslim world and also from inside the Muslim world. The assault from outside was led by Crusaders and world Zionism (though sometimes he also mentioned Communism).
But the assault from inside was conducted by Muslims themselves -- that is, by people who called themselves Muslims but who polluted the Muslim world with incompatible ideas derived from elsewhere. These several enemies, internal and external, the false Muslims together with the Crusaders and Zionists, ruled the earth. But Qutb considered that Islam's strength was, even so, huger yet. ''We are certain,'' he wrote, ''that this religion of Islam is so intrinsically genuine, so colossal and deeply rooted that all such efforts and brutal concussions will avail nothing.''
Islam's apparent weakness was mere appearance. Islam's true champions seemed to be few, but numbers meant nothing. The few had to gather themselves together into what Qutb in ''Milestones'' called a vanguard -- a term that he must have borrowed from Lenin, though Qutb had in mind a tiny group animated by the spirit of Muhammad and his Companions from the dawn of Islam. This vanguard of true Muslims was going to undertake the renovation of Islam and of civilization all over the world. The vanguard was going to turn against the false Muslims and ''hypocrites'' and do as Muhammad had done, which was to found a new state, based on the Koran. And from there, the vanguard was going to resurrect the caliphate and take Islam to all the world, just as Muhammad had done.
Qutb's vanguard was going to reinstate shariah, the Muslim code, as the legal code for all of society. Shariah implied some fairly severe rules. Qutb cited the Koran on the punishments for killing or wounding: ''a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear.'' Fornication, too, was a serious crime because, in his words, ''it involves an attack on honor and a contempt for sanctity and an encouragement of profligacy in society.'' Shariah specified the punishments here as well. ''The penalty for this must be severe; for married men and women it is stoning to death; for unmarried men and women it is flogging, a hundred lashes, which in cases is fatal.'' False accusations were likewise serious. ''A punishment of 80 lashes is fixed for those who falsely accuse chaste women.'' As for those who threaten the general security of society, their punishment is to be put to death, to be crucified, to have their hands and feet cut off, or to be banished from the country.''
But Qutb refused to regard these punishments as barbarous or primitive. Shariah, in his view, meant liberation. Other societies, drawing on non-Koranic principles, forced people to obey haughty masters and man-made law. Those other societies forced people to worship their own rulers and to do as the rulers said -- even if the rulers were democratically chosen. Under shariah, no one was going to be forced to obey mere humans. Shariah, in Qutb's view, meant ''the abolition of man-made laws.'' In the resurrected caliphate, every person was going to be ''free from servitude to others.'' The true Islamic system meant ''the complete and true freedom of every person and the full dignity of every individual of the society. On the other hand, in a society in which some people are lords who legislate and some others are slaves who obey, then there is no freedom in the real sense, nor dignity for each and every individual.''
He insisted that shariah meant freedom of conscience -- though freedom of conscience, in his interpretation, meant freedom from false doctrines that failed to recognize God, freedom from the modern schizophrenia. Shariah, in a word, was utopia for Sayyid Qutb. It was perfection. It was the natural order in the universal. It was freedom, justice, humanity and divinity in a single system. It was a vision as grand or grander than Communism or any of the other totalitarian doctrines of the 20th century. It was, in his words, ''the total liberation of man from enslavement by others.'' It was an impossible vision -- a vision that was plainly going to require a total dictatorship in order to enforce: a vision that, by claiming not to rely on man-made laws, was going to have to rely, instead, on theocrats, who would interpret God's laws to the masses. The most extreme despotism was all too visible in Qutb's revolutionary program. That much should have been obvious to anyone who knew the history of the other grand totalitarian revolutionary projects of the 20th century, the projects of the Nazis, the Fascists and the Communists.
Still, for Qutb, utopia was not the main thing. Utopia was for the future, and Qutb was not a dreamer. Islam, in his interpretation, was a way of life. He wanted his Muslim vanguard to live according to pious Islamic principles in the here and now. He wanted the vanguard to observe the rules of Muslim charity and all the other rules of daily life. He wanted the true Muslims to engage in a lifelong study of the Koran -- the lifelong study that his own gigantic commentary was designed to enhance. But most of all, he wanted his vanguard to accept the obligations of ''jihad,'' which is to say, the struggle for Islam. And what would that mean, to engage in jihad in the present and not just in the sci-fi utopian future?
Qutb began Volume 1 of ''In the Shade of the Qur'an'' by saying: ''To live 'in the shade of the Qur'an' is a great blessing which can only be fully appreciated by those who experience it. It is a rich experience that gives meaning to life and makes it worth living. I am deeply thankful to God Almighty for blessing me with this uplifting experience for a considerable time, which was the happiest and most fruitful period of my life -- a privilege for which I am eternally grateful.''
He does not identify that happy and fruitful period of his life -- a period that lasted, as he says, a considerable time. Perhaps his brother and other intimates would have known exactly what he had in mind -- some very pleasant period, conceivably the childhood years when he was memorizing the Koran. But an ordinary reader who picks up Qutb's books can only imagine that he was writing about his years of torture and prison.
One of his Indian publishers has highlighted this point in a remarkably gruesome manner by attaching an unsigned preface to a 1998 edition of ''Milestones.'' The preface declares: ''The ultimate price for working to please God Almighty and to propagate his ways in this world is often one's own life. The author'' -- Qutb, that is -- ''tried to do it; he paid for it with his life. If you and I try to do it, there is every likelihood we will be called upon to do the same. But for those who truly believe in God, what other choice is there?''
You are meant to suppose that a true reader of Sayyid Qutb is someone who, in the degree that he properly digests Qutb's message, will act on what has been digested. And action may well bring on a martyr's death. To read is to glide forward toward death; and gliding toward death means you have understood what you are reading. Qutb's writings do vibrate to that morbid tone -- not always, but sometimes. The work that he left behind, his Koranic commentary, is vast, vividly written, wise, broad, indignant, sometimes demented, bristly with hatred, medieval, modern, tolerant, intolerant, paranoid, cruel, urgent, cranky, tranquil, grave, poetic, learned and analytic. Sometimes it is moving. It is a work large and solid enough to create its own shade, where Qutb's vanguard and other readers could repose and turn his pages, as he advised the students of the Koran to do, in the earnest spirit of loyal soldiers reading their daily bulletin. But there is, in this commentary, something otherworldly too -- an atmosphere of death. At the very least, it is impossible to read the work without remembering that, in 1966, Qutb, in the phrase of one of his biographers, ''kissed the gallows.''
Martyrdom was among his themes. He discusses passages in the Koran's sura ''The Cow,'' and he explains that death as a martyr is nothing to fear. Yes, some people will have to be sacrificed. ''Those who risk their lives and go out to fight, and who are prepared to lay down their lives for the cause of God are honorable people, pure of heart and blessed of soul. But the great surprise is that those among them who are killed in the struggle must not be considered or described as dead. They continue to live, as God Himself clearly states.''
Qutb wrote: ''To all intents and purposes, those people may very well appear lifeless, but life and death are not judged by superficial physical means alone. Life is chiefly characterized by activity, growth and persistence, while death is a state of total loss of function, of complete inertia and lifelessness. But the death of those who are killed for the cause of God gives more impetus to the cause, which continues to thrive on their blood. Their influence on those they leave behind also grows and spreads. Thus after their death they remain an active force in shaping the life of their community and giving it direction. It is in this sense that such people, having sacrificed their lives for the sake of God, retain their active existence in everyday life. . . .
''There is no real sense of loss in their death, since they continue to live.''
And so it was with Sayyid Qutb. In the period before his final arrest and execution, diplomats from Iraq and Libya offered him the chance to flee to safety in their countries. But he declined to go, on the ground that 3,000 young men and women in Egypt were his followers, and he did not want to undo a lifetime of teaching by refusing to give those 3,000 people an example of true martyrdom. And, in fact, some of those followers went on to form the Egyptian terrorist movement in the next decade, the 1970's -- the groups that massacred tourists and Coptic Christians and that assassinated Egypt's president, Anwar Sadat, after he made peace with Israel; the groups that, in still later years, ended up merging with bin Laden's group and supplying Al Qaeda with its fundamental doctrines. The people in those groups were not stupid or lacking in education.
On the contrary, we keep learning how well educated these people are, how many of them come from the upper class, how wealthy they are. And there is no reason for us to be surprised. These people are in possession of a powerful philosophy, which is Sayyid Qutb's. They are in possession of a gigantic work of literature, which is his ''In the Shade of the Qur'an.'' These people feel that, by consulting their own doctrines, they can explain the unhappiness of the world. They feel that, with an intense study of the Koran, as directed by Qutb and his fellow thinkers, they can make sense of thousands of years of theological error. They feel that, in Qutb's notion of shariah, they command the principles of a perfect society.
These people believe that, in the entire world, they alone are preserving Islam from extinction. They feel they are benefiting the world, even if they are committing random massacres. They are certainly not worried about death. Qutb gave these people a reason to yearn for death. Wisdom, piety, death and immortality are, in his vision of the world, the same. For a pious life is a life of struggle or jihad for Islam, and struggle means martyrdom. We may think: those are creepy ideas. And yes, the ideas are creepy. But there is, in Qutb's presentation, a weird allure in those ideas.
It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas -- it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse.
But who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemies of liberal ideas? Who will defend liberal principles in spite of liberal society's every failure? President George W. Bush, in his speech to Congress a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, announced that he was going to wage a war of ideas. He has done no such thing. He is not the man for that.
Philosophers and religious leaders will have to do this on their own. Are they doing so? Armies are in motion, but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion? There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding -- one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.
Paul Berman has written for the magazine about Vaclav Havel, Vicente Fox and other subjects. He is the author of the coming ''Terror and Liberalism'' (W.W. Norton), from which this essay is adapted.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/magazine/23GURU.html?pagew...
-
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
19 November 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
The Unnoticed Alignment: Iran and the United States in Iraq
Summary
Iranian President Mohammad Khatami has quietly announced his recognition of the Iraqi Governing Council and acceptance of the U.S. timeline on the transfer of power in Iraq. The announcement speaks to a partnership that will direct the future course of Iraq. The alliance is of direct short-term benefit to both countries: The United States gains a partner to help combat Sunni insurgents, and Iran will be able to mitigate the long-standing threat on its western border. What is most notable is that, though there has been no secrecy involved, the partnership has emerged completely below the global media's radar.
Analysis
Iranian President Mohammad Khatami did something very interesting
Nov. 17: He announced that Iran recognized the Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad. He said specifically, "We recognize the Iraqi Governing Council and we believe it is capable, with the Iraqi people, of managing the affairs of the country and taking measures leading toward independence." Khatami also commented on the agreement made by U.S. Administrator Paul Bremer and the IGC to transfer power to an Iraqi government by June: "The consecration of this accord will help with the reconstruction and security in Iraq,"
This is pretty extraordinary stuff. The IGC is an invention of
the United States. The president of Iran has now recognized the IGC as the legitimate government of Iraq, and he has also declared Iran's support for the timetable for transferring power to the IGC. In effect, the U.S. and Iranian positions on Iraq have now converged. The alignment is reminiscent of the Sino-U.S. relationship in the early 1970s: Despite absolute ideological differences on which neither side is prepared to compromise, common geopolitical interests have forced both sides to collaborate with one another. As with Sino-U.S. relations, alignment is a better word than alliance. These two countries are not friends, but history and geography have made them partners.
We would say that this is unexpected, save that Stratfor expected it. On Sept. 2, 2003, we published a weekly analysis titled An Unlikely Alliance, in which we argued that a U.S.-Iranian alignment was the only real solution for the United States in Iraq -- and would represent the fulfillment of an historical dream for Iran. What is interesting from our point of view (having suitably congratulated ourselves) is the exceptionally quiet response of the global media to what is, after all, a fairly extraordinary evolution of events.
The media focus on -- well, media events. When Nixon went to China, the visit was deliberately framed as a massive media event. Both China and the United States wanted to emphasize the shift in alignment, to both the Soviet Union and their own publics. In this case, neither the United States nor Iran wants attention focused on this event. For Washington, aligning with a charter member of the "axis of evil" poses significant political problems; for Tehran, aligning with the "Great Satan" poses similar problems. Both want alignment, but neither wants to make it formal at this time, and neither wants to draw significant attention to it. For the media, the lack of a photo op means that nothing has happened. Therefore, except for low-key reporting by
some wire services, Khatami's statement has been generally
ignored, which is fine by Washington and Tehran. In fact, on the same day that Khatami made the statement, the news about Iran focused on the country's nuclear weapons program. We christen thee, stealth geopolitics.
Let's review the bidding here. When the United States invaded Iraq, the expectation was that the destruction of Iraq's conventional forces and the fall of Baghdad would end resistance. It was expected that there would be random violence, some resistance and so forth, but there was no expectation that there would be an organized, sustained guerrilla war, pre-planned by the regime and launched almost immediately after the fall of Baghdad.
The United States felt that it had a free hand to shape and
govern Iraq as it saw fit. The great debate was over whether the Department of State or Defense would be in charge of Baghdad's water works. Washington was filled with all sorts of plans and planners who were going to redesign Iraq. The dream did not die easily or quickly: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was denying the existence of a guerrilla war in Iraq as late as early July, more than two months after it had begun. Essentially, Washington and reality diverged in May and June.
Fantasy was followed by a summer of paralysis. The United States had not prepared for a guerrilla war in Iraq, and it had no plan for fighting such a war. Search-and-destroy operations were attempted, but these never had a chance of working, since tactical intelligence against the guerrillas was virtually non-existent. All it did was stir up even more anti-American feeling than was already there. The fact was that the United States was not going to be in a position to put down a guerrilla war without allies: It had neither the manpower nor the intimate knowledge of the country and society needed to defeat even a small guerrilla
movement that was operating in its own, well-known terrain.
At the same time, for all its problems, the situation in Iraq was not nearly as desperate as it would appear. Most of the country was not involved in the guerrilla war. It was essentially confined to the Sunni Triangle -- a fraction of Iraq's territory -- and to the minority Sunni group. The majority of Iraqis, Shiites and Kurds, not only were not involved in the guerrilla movement but inherently opposed to it. Both communities had suffered greatly under the Baathist government, which was heavily Sunni. The last thing they wanted to see was a return of Saddam Hussein's rule.
However, being opposed to the guerrillas did not make the
Shiites, in particular, pro-American. They had their own
interests: The Shiites in Iraq wanted to control the post-Hussein government. Another era of Sunni control would have been disastrous for them. For the Shiites -- virtually regardless of faction -- taking control of Iraq was a priority.
It is not fair to say that Iran simply controlled the Iraqi
Shiites; there are historical tensions between the two groups. It is fair to say, however, that Iranian intelligence systematically penetrated and organized the Shiites during Hussein's rule and that Iran provided safe haven for many of Iraq's Shiite leaders. That means, obviously, that Tehran has tremendous and decisive influence in Iraq at this point - which means that the goals of Iraqi Shiites must coincide with Iranian national interests.
In this case, they do. Iran has a fundamental interest in a pro-
Iranian, or at least genuinely neutral, Iraq. The only way to
begin creating that is with a Shiite-controlled government. With a Shiite-controlled government, the traditional Iraqi threat disappears and Iran's national security is tremendously enhanced. But the logic goes further: Iraq is the natural balance to Iran -- and if Iraq is neutralized, Iran becomes the pre-eminent power in the Persian Gulf. Once the United States leaves the region -- and in due course, the United States will leave -- Iran will be in a position to dominate the region. No other power or combination of powers could block it without Iraqi support. Iran, therefore, has every reason to want to see an evolution that leads to a Shiite government in Iraq.
Washington now has an identical interest. The United States does not have the ability or appetite to suppress the Sunni rising in perpetuity, nor does it have an interest in doing so. The U.S. interest is in destroying al Qaeda. Washington therefore needs an ally that has an intrinsic interest in fighting the guerrilla war and the manpower to do it. That means the Iraqi Shiites -- and that means alignment with Iran.
Bremer's assignment is to speed the transfer of power to the IGC. In a formal sense, this is a genuine task, but in a practical sense, transferring power to the IGC means transferring it to the Shiites. Not only do they represent a majority within the IGC, but when it comes time to raise an Iraqi army to fight the guerrillas, that army is going to be predominantly Shiite. That is not only a demographic reality but a political one as well -- the Shiites will insist on dominating the new army. They are not going to permit a repeat of the Sunni domination. Therefore, Bremer's mission is to transfer sovereignty to the IGC, which means the transfer of sovereignty to the Shiites.
From this, the United States ultimately gets a force in Iraq to
fight the insurrection, the Iraqi Shiites get to run Iraq and the
Iranians secure their Western frontier. On a broader, strategic scale, the United States splits the Islamic world -- not down the middle, since Shiites are a minority -- but still splits it. Moreover, under these circumstances, the Iranians are motivated to fight al Qaeda (a movement they have never really liked anyway) and can lend their not-insignificant intelligence capabilities to the mix.
The last real outstanding issue is Iran's nuclear capability.
Iran obviously would love to be a nuclear power in addition to being a regional hegemon. That would be sweet. However, it isn't going to happen, and the Iranians know that. It won't happen because Israel cannot permit it to happen. Any country's politics are volatile, and Iran in ten years could wind up with a new government and with values that, from Israel's point of view, are dangerous. Combine that with nuclear weapons, and it could mean the annihilation of Israel. Therefore, Israel would destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities -- with nuclear strikes if necessary -- before they become operational.
To be more precise, Israel would threaten to destroy Iran's
capabilities, which would put the United States in a tough
position. An Israeli nuclear strike on Iran would be the last
thing Washington needs. Therefore, the United States would be forced to take out Iran's facilities with American assets in the region -- better a non-nuclear U.S. attack than an Israeli
nuclear attack. Thus, the United States is telling Iran that it
does not actually have the nuclear option it thinks it has. The
Iranians, for their part, are telling the United States that they
know Washington doesn't want a strike by either Israel or the U.S. forces.
That means that the Iranians are using their nuclear option to
extract maximum political concessions from the United States. It is in Tehran's interest to maximize the credibility of the country's nuclear program without crossing a line that would force an Israeli response and a pre-emptive move by the United States. The Iranians are doing that extremely skillfully. The United States, for its part, is managing the situation effectively as well. The nuclear issue is not the pivot.
The alignment represents a solution to both U.S. and Iranian
needs. However, in the long run, the Iranians are the major
winners. When it is all over, they get to dominate the Persian
Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula. That upsets the regional balance of power completely and is sending Saudi leaders into a panic. The worst-case scenario for Saudi Arabia is, of course, an Iranian-dominated region. It is also not a great outcome for the United States, since it has no interest in any one power dominating the region either.
But the future is the future, and now is now. "Now" means the existence of a guerrilla war that the United States cannot fight on its own. This alignment solves that dilemma. We should remember that the United States has a history of improbable alliances that caused problems later. Consider the alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II that laid the groundwork for the Cold War: It solved one problem, then created another. The United States historically has worked that way.
Thus, Washington is not going to worry about the long run until later. But in the short run, the U.S.-Iranian alignment is the most important news since the Sept. 11 attacks. It represents a triumph of geopolitics over principle on both sides, which is what makes it work: Since both sides are betraying fundamental principles, neither side is about to call the other on it. They are partners in this from beginning to end.
What is fascinating is that this is unfolding without any secrecy whatsoever, yet is not being noticed by anyone. Since neither country is particularly proud of the deal, neither country is advertising it. And since it is not being advertised, the media are taking no notice. Quite impressive.
.................................................................
STRATFOR SERVICES NOW AVAILABLE:
Join decision-makers around the world who read Stratfor for daily
intelligence briefs, in-depth analyses and forecasts on a wide
range of international security, political and economic affairs.
Stratfor Premium is our flagship product providing comprehensive
global intelligence including daily analyses, special reports,
intelligence alerts, premium analyses, situation reports, country
and regional net assessments as well as Stratfor's sought after
Annual and Quarterly Forecasts. Corporate or multi-user volume
discount packages available. Visit this web page for details:
http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=SUB&c=c
Stratfor Basic offers daily analysis, situation reports and
ongoing
coverage of global events. Also available with this package is a
pay per view service for many of our premium reports. Visit this
web
page for details:
http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=SUB&c=d
.................................................................
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Product inquiries, partnership, and sales: marketing@stratfor.com
Subscription and customer service issues: service@stratfor.com
Comments and/or information for analysis: analysis@stratfor.com
Media services and trade show requests: PR@stratfor.com
.................................................................
HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE:
If you wish to remove yourself from this mailing list,
send an email to <Majordomo@mail2.stratfor.com> with
the following command in the body of your email message:
unsubscribe weeklylist
.................................................................
http://www.stratfor.com
=================================================================
(c) 2003 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
-
Indications Saddam Was Not in Hiding But a Captive
Interesting take on things by Debka
DEBKAfile Special Report
December 14, 2003, 6:55 PM (GMT+02:00)
A number of questions are raised by the incredibly bedraggled, tired and
crushed condition of this once savage, dapper and pampered ruler who was discovered in a hole in the ground on Saturday, December 13:
1. The length and state of his hair indicated he had not seen a barber or
even had a shampoo for several weeks.
2. The wild state of his beard indicated he had not shaved for the same
period
3. The hole dug in the floor of a cellar in a farm compound near Tikrit was
primitive indeed - 6ft across and 8ft across with minimal sanitary
arrangements - a far cry from his opulent palaces.
4. Saddam looked beaten and hungry.
5. Detained with him were two unidentified men, two AK-47 assault guns and a pistol, none of which were used.
6. The hole had only one opening. It was not only camouflaged with mud and bricks - it was blocked. He could not have climbed out without someone on the outside removing the covering.
7. And most important, $750,000 in 100-dollar notes were found with him - but no communications equipment of any kind, whether cell phone or even a carrier pigeon for contacting the outside world.
According to DEBKAfile analysts, these seven anomalies point to one
conclusion: Saddam Hussein was not in hiding; he was a prisoner.
After his last audiotaped message was delivered and aired over al Arabiya TV on Sunday November 16, on the occasion of Ramadan, Saddam was seized, possibly with the connivance of his own men, and held in that hole in Adwar for three weeks or more, which would have accounted for his appearance and condition. Meanwhile, his captors bargained for the $25 m prize the Americans promised for information leading to his capture alive or dead. The negotiations were mediated by Jalal Talabani's Kurdish PUK militia.
These circumstances would explain the ex-ruler's docility - described by
Lt.Gen. Ricardo Sanchez as "resignation" - in the face of his capture by US forces. He must have regarded them as his rescuers and would have greeted them with relief.
From Gen. Sanchez's evasive answers to questions on the $25m bounty, it may be inferred that the Americans and Kurds took advantage of the negotiations with Saddam's abductors to move in close and capture him on their own account, for three reasons:
A. His capture had become a matter of national pride for the Americans. No kudos would have been attached to his handover by a local gang of
bounty-seekers or criminals. The country would have been swept anew with rumors that the big hero Saddam was again betrayed by the people he trusted, just as in the war.
B. It was vital to catch his kidnappers unawares so as to make sure Saddam was taken alive. They might well have killed him and demanded the prize for his body. But they made sure he had no means of taking his own life and may have kept him sedated.
C. During the weeks he is presumed to have been in captivity, guerrilla
activity declined markedly - especially in the Sunni Triangle towns of
Falluja, Ramadi and Balad - while surging outside this flashpoint region -
in Mosul in the north and Najef, Nasseriya and Hilla in the south. It was
important for the coalition to lay hands on him before the epicenter of the
violence turned back towards Baghdad and the center of the Sunni Triangle.
The next thing to watch now is not just where and when Saddam is brought to justice for countless crimes against his people and humanity - Sanchez said his interrogation will take "as long as it takes - but what happens to the insurgency. Will it escalate or gradually die down?
An answer to this, according to DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources, was
received in Washington nine days before Saddam reached US custody.
It came in the form of a disturbing piece of intelligence that the notorious
Lebanese terrorist and hostage-taker Imad Mughniyeh, who figures on the most wanted list of 22 men published by the FBI after 9/11, had arrived in southern Iraq and was organizing a new anti-US terror campaign to be launched in March-April 2004, marking the first year of the American invasion.
For the past 21 years, Mughniyeh has waged a war of terror against
Americans, whether on behalf of the Hizballah, the Iranian Shiite
fundamentalists, al Qaeda or for himself. The Lebanese arch-terrorist
represents for the anti-American forces in Iraq an ultimate weapon.
Saddam's capture will not turn this offensive aside; it may even bring it
forward.
For Israel, there are three lessons to be drawn from the dramatic turn of
events in Iraq:
First, An enemy must be pursued to the end and if necessary taken captive. The Sharon government's conduct of an uncertain, wavering war against the Palestinian terror chief Yasser Arafat stands in stark contrast to the way the Americans have fought Saddam and his cohorts in Iraq and which has brought them impressive gains.
Second, Israel must join the US in bracing for the decisive round of
violence under preparation by Mughniyeh, an old common enemy from the days of Beirut in the 1980s. Only three weeks ago, DEBKAfile's military sources reveal, the terrorist mastermind himself was seen in south Lebanon in surveillance of northern Israel in the company of Iranian military officers. With this peril still to be fought, it is meaningless for Israelis to dicker over the Geneva Accord, unilateral steps around the Middle East road map, or even the defensive barrier.
Certain Israeli pundits and even politicians, influenced by opinion in
Europe, declared frequently in recent weeks that the Americans had no hope of capturing Saddam Hussein and were therefore bogged down irretrievably in Iraq. The inference was that the Americans erred in embarking on an unwinnable war in Iraq.
This was wide of the mark even before Saddam was brought in. The Americans are in firm control - even though they face a tough new adversary - and the whole purpose of the defeatist argument heard in Israel was to persuade the Sharon government that its position in relation to the Palestinians and Yasser Arafat is as hopeless as that of the Americans in Iraq. Israel's only choice, according to this argument, is to knuckle under to Palestinian demands and give them what they want. Now that the Iraqi ruler is in American custody, they will have to think again.
-
December 16, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Dreams and Glory
By DAVID BROOKS
Howard Dean is the only guy who goes to the Beverly Hills area for a
gravitas implant. He went to the St. Regis Hotel, a mile from Rodeo Drive,
to deliver a major foreign policy speech, and suddenly Dr. Angry turned into the Rev. Dull and Worthy.
The guy who has been inveighing against the Iraq war as the second
coming of Vietnam spent his time talking about intelligence agency
coordination as if he had been suckled at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The guy who just a few days ago stood next to Al Gore as the former vice
president called Iraq the worst mistake in American history has suddenly
turned sober.
Sure, he did get off a classic Deanism. He conceded that the capture
of Saddam had made American soldiers safer, but, unwilling to venture near
graciousness, he continued, "But the capture of Saddam has not made America
safer."
Still, the speech was respectable and serious. Coming on the same day
as President Bush's hastily called news conference, it affords us the
opportunity to compare the two men's approaches to the war on terror.
And indeed, there is one big difference. George Bush fundamentally
sees the war on terror as a moral and ideological confrontation between the
forces of democracy and the forces of tyranny. Howard Dean fundamentally
sees the war on terror as a law and order issue. At the end of his press
conference, Bush uttered a most un-Deanlike sentiment:
"I believe, firmly believe ? and you've heard me say this a lot, and I
say it a lot because I truly believe it ? that freedom is the almighty God's
gift to every person ? every man and woman who lives in this world. That's
what I believe. And the arrest of Saddam Hussein changed the equation in
Iraq. Justice was being delivered to a man who defied that gift from the
Almighty to the people of Iraq."
Bush believes that God has endowed all human beings with certain
inalienable rights, the most important of which is liberty. Every time he is
called upon to utter an unrehearsed thought, he speaks of the war on terror
as a conflict between those who seek to advance liberty to realize justice,
and those who oppose the advance of liberty: radical Islamists who fear
religious liberty, dictators who fear political liberty and reactionaries
who fear liberty for women.
Furthermore, Bush believes the U.S. has a unique role to play in this
struggle to complete democracy's triumph over tyranny and so drain the swamp
of terror.
Judging by his speech yesterday, Dean does not believe the U.S. has an
exceptional role to play in world history. Dean did not argue that the U.S.
should aggressively promote democracy in the Middle East and around the
world.
Instead, he emphasized that the U.S. should strive to strengthen
global institutions. He argued that the war on terror would be won when
international alliances worked together to choke off funds for terrorists
and enforce a global arms control regime to keep nuclear, chemical and
biological materials away from terror groups.
Dean is not a modern-day Woodrow Wilson. He is not a mushy idealist
who dreams of a world government. Instead, he spoke of international
institutions as if they were big versions of the National Governors
Association, as places where pragmatic leaders can go to leverage their own
resources and solve problems.
The world Dean described is largely devoid of grand conflicts or
moral, cultural and ideological divides. It is a world without passionate
nationalism, a world in which Europe and the United States are not riven by
any serious cultural differences, in which sensible people from around the
globe would find common solutions, if only Bush weren't so unilateral.
At first, the Bush worldview seems far more airy-fairy and idealistic.
The man talks about God, and good versus evil. But in reality, Dean is the
more idealistic and na?ve one. Bush at least recognizes the existence of
intellectual and cultural conflict. He acknowledges that different value
systems are incompatible.
In the world Dean describes, people, other than a few bizarre
terrorists, would be working together if not for Bush. In the Dean
worldview, all problems are matters of technique and negotiation.
Dean tried yesterday to show how sober and serious he could be. In
fact, he has never appeared so much the dreamer, so clueless about the
intellectual and cultural divides that really do confront us and with which
real presidents have to grapple.
-
Stratfor Is Expanding!
See details at http://www.stratfor.com/corporate/jobs.neo
=================================================================
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
18 December 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
Saddam Hussein and the Dollar War
Summary
The capture of Saddam Hussein is an intelligence success for the
United States. It represents a massive effort to improve U.S.
intelligence capabilities in Iraq following a period of
intelligence failure. Hussein's capture, therefore, is important
not only in itself or in its implications for the guerrillas, but
also because it represents a massive and rapid improvement in
U.S. intelligence capabilities. It demonstrates that poor
intelligence is not inherent in U.S. guerrilla war-fighting; the
United States overcame it by identifying the central weaknesses
of its opponents. In this case, the central weakness was money --
and this was not only a financial weakness, but also a cultural
one.
Analysis
For once, the media have got it right. The capture of Saddam
Hussein is a major event in the war. Its importance does not rest
on whether he was in operational command of the guerrillas; he
wasn't. Nor does it hinge on whether his capture will destroy the
morale of the guerrillas; it won't. The importance of Hussein's
capture is that it happened at all: It signals a major
improvement in U.S. war-fighting capabilities in general and in
American intelligence in particular.
The greatest intelligence failure of the Iraq war did not concern
weapons of mass destruction. It concerned the failure of U.S.
intelligence to understand the Iraqi war plan, which in hindsight
was obvious. The Baathists knew the United States would rapidly
defeat Iraq's conventional forces. Therefore, they prepared a
follow-on plan that would begin after Baghdad was occupied. This
plan was a guerrilla war, manned by troops drawn from trusted
elite forces, with an installed infrastructure of arms caches,
safe houses and secure -- nonelectronic -- command and control
systems suitable for such a war.
The guerrilla war began within weeks of the fall of Baghdad in
April. U.S. intelligence about the war was so poor that until
late in June, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of
the administration were denying that the attacks on U.S. troops
were being staged by an organized force. They viewed them simply
as random attacks by unconnected dead-enders and criminals. It
was not until summer that the administration conceded that it was
facing a concerted guerrilla war.
Throughout the summer, the United States had trouble defining the
nature of the guerrilla force, let alone developing a coherent
picture of its order of battle or command structure. Therefore,
the United States, by definition, could neither engage nor defeat
the guerrillas. Washington remained in an entirely defensive
posture during this period; the guerrillas had the initiative.
There never was a danger that the guerrillas would actually
defeat the United States. Still, the continual drumbeat of
attacks and the U.S. forces' inability to launch effective
counterattacks created substantial political problems, as it was
intended to.
The problem for the United States was that the Iraqis understood
the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. intelligence. The United
States is extremely strong in technical means of intelligence,
including image and signal intelligence. The guerrillas avoided
electromagnetic communications and were difficult to distinguish
with aerial reconnaissance. They were essentially invisible to
the preferred U.S. intelligence methods.
Late in the summer, the United States began to increase its human
intelligence capability in Iraq substantially, particularly the
number of CIA officers on the ground. It began a systematic
program of penetrating the guerrillas. It was not an easy task:
Recruiting agents able to infiltrate the guerrilla ranks was hard
to do; getting them into the ranks was even harder. The
guerrillas understood that recruitment was a risk and relied upon
existing forces or recruited from well-known and reliable
reservoirs. The ranks of foreign jihadists who entered the
country also were difficult to penetrate. To add to the
complexity, they operated separately from the main force.
The guerrillas did have one major vulnerability: money. The
Baathist regime long ago lost its ideological -- and idealistic -
- foundations. It was an institution of self-interest in which
the leadership systematically enriched itself. It was a culture
of money and power, and that culture permeated the entire
structure of the Iraqi military, including the guerrilla forces
that continued to operate after the conventional force was
defeated. Indeed, the guerrillas substituted money for
recruitment. In many cases, they would pay people outside their
ranks to carry out attacks on U.S. troops as a supplement to
attacks by the main guerrilla force.
The culture of money made the guerrillas vulnerable in two ways.
First, they relied on support from an infrastructure fueled by
money. Whatever their ideology, they purchased cooperation with
money and intimidation. Second, much of the money the guerrillas
had was currency taken from Iraqi banks prior to the fall of
Baghdad. A great deal of it was in U.S. dollars, which continued
to have value, but most of it was in the currency of the old
regime. One of the earliest actions of the U.S. occupation forces
was to replace that currency. Over time, therefore, the resources
available to the guerrillas contracted.
The United States brought its financial resources into play,
purchasing information. As U.S. money surged into the system and
guerrilla money began to recede, the flow of information to the
United States increased dramatically. Obviously, much of the
information was useless or false, and it took U.S. intelligence
several months to tune the system sufficiently that operatives
could evaluate and act upon the intelligence. Over time, the very
corruption of the Baathist system was turned against it. Indeed,
it happened in a surprisingly short period, made possible by a
Baathist organization in which political loyalty and business
interests tied together so blatantly that reversals of loyalty
did not necessarily appear as betrayals.
This process was speeded up dramatically during the November
Ramadan offensive. This offensive, we now know, was a surge
operation rather than a sustained increase in operational tempo.
Two things happened during the Ramadan offensive: First, the
guerrillas increased their consumption of resources dramatically,
burning through men and money very quickly; second, the rapid
tempo of operations required the guerrillas to expose their
assets far more than in the past. Whereas previously a combat
team would attack, disperse and remain dispersed for an extended
period, the tempo of Ramadan required that the same team carry
out multiple attacks. This meant that they could not disperse and
therefore could be more readily identified. This led to a greater
number of prisoners and further opportunities to purchase
information.
The United States moved from being almost blind during the summer
to having substantially penetrated the guerrillas by the end of
November. By that time, Washington had a clearer idea of the
guerrilla order of battle and command structure. It had created a
network of informants that was prepared to provide intelligence
to the Americans in exchange for money, amnesty and future
considerations.
Hussein, therefore, was betrayed by the culture he created. He
was found with no radio -- no surprise, since the guerrillas
tried not to use them. Rather, he was found with his two most
important weapons: a pistol and $750,000 in cash. His pistol
could not possibly outfight the troops sent to capture him. He
did not have enough money to buy safety. The Americans had him
outgunned and outspent.
The importance of Hussein's capture is not only its symbolism --
although that certainly should not be underestimated. Its
importance is that it happened, that U.S. intelligence was able
to turn a debacle into a success by identifying the core weakness
of the enemy force and using it for the rapid penetration and
exploitation of the guerrilla infrastructure.
The guerrillas understand precisely what happened to Hussein:
Someone betrayed him for money. They also understand that even
though attacks on U.S. troops can be purchased for dollars, the
Americans have far more dollars than they do. That is why, in the
week prior to Hussein's capture, the guerrillas twice attacked
banks: They desperately needed to replenish their cash reserves.
In one case, they even went so far as to engage in a pitched
battle with U.S. armor, a battle they couldn't possibly win.
The threat to the guerrillas is snowballing betrayal. The
guerrillas must be increasingly paranoid. At the prices the
Americans are paying, the probability of betrayal is rising. As
this probability rises, paranoia not only eats away at the
guerrillas' effectiveness, it also raises the temptation to
betray. Better to betray than to be betrayed.
The guerrillas can arrest this process only by ruthlessly
punishing betrayers. If the people who betrayed Hussein can't be
identified -- or can't be publicly killed -- then the guerrillas'
impotence will become manifest and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Indeed, as other insurgencies have controlled betrayal by public
retribution, the guerrillas, unable to compete financially, would
have to respond with a wave of public executions. However, with
each public execution, they would expose themselves to capture
and revenge.
The capture of Hussein, regardless of whether he commanded anyone
or knows anything, is critically important. It is inconceivable
that the guerrillas would want him captured, since it inevitably
hurts their credibility. Like him or not, he was theirs to
protect. Their inability to protect Hussein creates a massive
crisis of confidence among the Baathist guerrillas.
This does not mean the guerrilla movement in Iraq is dying. It
means that the leadership of the movement is going to shift away
from the Baathists who launched the guerrilla war to the mostly
foreign jihadists, who joined the war for very different motives.
These guerrillas are not motivated by money and are unlikely to
betray each other for cash. They fight because they believe --
and that makes it more difficult to penetrate their ranks.
At the same time, most of them are foreigners. They do not know
the country as well as the Baathists, they don't have family and
tribal connections there, and they don't have their own
infrastructure. They were separate from the Baathists, but relied
upon them for their support structure. If the Baathists are taken
down, the jihadists will fight on. However, just as they are less
vulnerable to money, they are less invisible than the Baathists.
The capture of Hussein does not, in other words, end the war.
However, the process that led to his capture is broader and more
subversive than simply the capture of the former president. It is
eating away at the infrastructure of the Baathist guerrillas. It
is possible for them to reverse this, but as their financial
resources decline, they will have to respond with brutal
suppression to betrayers. That might not do the trick.
Still, the war is far from over. Washington now faces a more
substantial challenge -- one that has proven difficult to
overcome in the broader war. It must penetrate the jihadists in
Iraq. Given the experience with al Qaeda, this might well prove
difficult.
.................................................................
Stratfor is expanding!
Stratfor has an immediate opening for a Middle East analyst. In-
depth knowledge of state-to-state relations in the Middle East
and North Africa required. Language skills useful. This is not an
academic position, but a business position in which speed,
accuracy, insight, objectivity and service to the customer are
indispensable. Successful candidates will be sharp,
unconventional thinkers and self-starters who are eager to work
for a recognized and dynamic global intelligence company. Send
cover letter, resume and references to resumesme3@stratfor.com.
=================================================================
-
U.S. Goes After Middle Eastern Weapons
Summary
The United States is turning its military successes in Iraq into
leverage for pressuring uncooperative regimes in the region.
Washington has cut a deal with Libya, has Iran's cooperation --
if not capitulation -- and will likely box in Syria in the short
term.
Analysis
Middle Eastern states long opposed to the United States are now
restructuring the foundations of their foreign policy. The
capture of Saddam Hussein did more than score a political, and
possibly military, U.S. victory in Iraq. It also gave Washington
the freedom to pursue its next agenda item for reshaping the
Middle East more to its liking, namely by removing any and all
threats by nonallied states -- or their militant allies -- by
weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Within one week, Iran and Libya agreed to allow snap inspections
by the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA). At the same time, the U.S. Federal Bureau of
Investigation is reportedly interrogating a top Pakistani nuclear
scientist for links between the nuclear programs of Iran and
Pakistan. Syria -- another, lesser threat -- will likely be a
next target. Damascus is thought to have a chemical weapons
program only, but even that will be on the U.S. hit list.
Washington needs to ensure that none of the Muslim states it
still considers to be "states of concern" -- Iran, Libya and
Syria -- can or will provide al Qaeda with access to weapons of
mass destruction. Their promises not to aid al Qaeda will mean
little to Washington: Syrian President Bashar al Assad can pledge
cooperation until he is blue in the face, but the White House
cannot be sure that Assad will not topple through coup,
assassination or some other form of regime change, and therefore
it cannot accept verbal assurances. Instead, the United States
will now move to dismantle all WMD programs within these states.
Libya already has folded. Tripoli on Dec. 19 moved to pre-empt a
U.S. offensive by announcing that it would abandon its WMD
program and allow snap inspections. Libya knows what much of the
rest of the world is just now realizing -- the next phase in the
U.S. war against al Qaeda is ensuring that other potential
weapons aren't available for al Qaeda's taking.
Libya understood that if the United States were to gain control
over Iraq, the next goal would be to go after regional
governments that might ally with al Qaeda. Tripoli likely would
not side with the militant group at the risk of a fight with
Washington. From Washington's perspective, however, only complete
cooperation and full disclosure of the WMD program would be
acceptable evidence that Tripoli was not in cahoots with al
Qaeda.
In exchange for full cooperation, Libya will likely get several
cookies -- most importantly, a lifting of U.S. sanctions.
The Iran-Libya Sanctions Act prevents U.S. energy firms from
investing in Libya. For that matter, no U.S. company can do
business there. Libya's energy industry was built with U.S.
technology -- now decades outdated. Reviving links with U.S.
energy firms is a top priority. Moreover, Libya already has taken
several other steps, such as backing off its Machiavellian
machinations in central Africa and paying off the families of
those killed in the Lockerbie bombing.
Iran is still in the game, playing a close hand of cooperation --
allowing inspections and "suspending" rather than ceasing its
nuclear program. Tehran has some pretty good cards. First, its
influence in Iraq -- especially among the southern Shia -- gives
it leverage. It also has a functioning, oil-fed economy, a
professional and experienced military, savvy political leadership
and possibly some invaluable intelligence on the leadership and
operations of al Qaeda.
Washington cannot pressure Iran too directly, so it has taken an
indirect approach. The Israelis, likely at the behest of
Washington, are threatening to blow up Iranian nuclear
facilities, since senior military officials claim that Iran's WMD
program poses the single greatest threat to Israeli national
security.
Last week, Iran agreed to allow snap inspections by the IAEA.
Reports surfaced Dec. 22 that an instrumental figure in
developing Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, is
under house arrest. He is being interrogated, possibly by U.S.
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, for connections between
Pakistan's nuclear program and Iran's. Tehran reportedly has
named several Pakistani scientists as aiding Iran's nuclear
program. FBI interviews, along with Pakistani cooperation, might
provide important details the United States later can use to
contain Iran.
For its part, Syria cannot even afford the ante. Damascus is
thought to have chemical and possibly biological weapons, but
certainly no nuclear program. With a tiny economy, limited
resources, a decrepit military and few powerful allies, Syria
will find it impossible to resist U.S. pressure. The United
States doesn't really expect Damascus to form an alliance with al
Qaeda. At the same time, it cannot and will not simply take
Syria's word. Instead, officials will ask for complete
cooperation on a number of issues, including inspections of
Syrian WMD facilities.
Washington is not likely to stop until it has all three states'
WMD programs under lock and key. What comes next will be the
critical issue. Containment of their WMD programs will strengthen
Israel's regional position, giving it more freedom to maneuver
openly in regional political matters. It also will give Israel
more freedom to impose peace agreements -- whether formal or de
facto -- on Syria and the Palestinians.
The weakening of Iran, Libya and Syria -- along with the U.S.
seizure of Iraq -- will also reshape regional dynamics. Algeria,
Morocco and even Egypt will have less to fear from Libya. Jordan
will see Syria as emasculated and, therefore, as less of a long-
term threat. Saudi Arabia is so embroiled in its own domestic
conflict that it cannot fully relax, even as Iran adjusts itself
into fuller alignment with United States.
Reconfiguring Libyan, Iranian and Syrian military postures,
however, still will resonate throughout the region. The political
ramifications also will be felt. Libyan leader Col. Moammar
Gadhafi's reversal after more than a decade of anti-American
rhetoric might strike a sour note within some Libyan circles.
Nearly everyone already perceives Bashar al Assad as weak --
internally and externally -- and totally dependent upon his
father's Old Guard cronies. Whether he can survive an escalation
in diplomatic conflict with the United States is unclear. Whether
he can survive a restructuring of Syria's fundamental political
and military position in the Middle East is unlikely.
For the United States, it is imperative to reconfigure the region
in order to fit its ideal. Defeating al Qaeda means, in large
part, preventing al Qaeda from finding any powerful allies or
powerful weapons in the region. Al Qaeda typically operates on a
low-tech basis and isn't likely to seek weapons of mass
destruction any more advanced than a Boeing 767. Still,
Washington cannot, and is not, taking the chance.
-
Transcript: Latest Bin Laden Tape
Jan 05, 2004
The following is a transcript of a tape released Jan. 4,
purportedly by Osama bin Laden. The transcript was published by the BBC.
From Osama Bin Laden to his brothers and sisters in the entire
Islamic nation: May God's peace, mercy and blessings be upon you.
My message to you concerns inciting and continuing to urge for
jihad to repulse the grand plots that have been hatched against our nation, especially since some of them have appeared clearly, such as the occupation of the crusaders, with the help of the apostates, of Baghdad and the house of the caliphate [the succession of rulers of the Islamic nation], under the trick of weapons of mass destruction.
There is also the fierce attempt to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque
and destroy the jihad and the mujahideen in beloved Palestine by employing the trick of the roadmap and the Geneva peace initiative.
The Americans' intentions have also become clear in statements
about the need to change the beliefs, curricula and morals of the Muslims to
become more tolerant, as they put it.
In clearer terms, it is a religious-economic war.
The occupation of Iraq is a link in the Zionist-crusader chain
of evil.
Gulf states 'next'
Then comes the full occupation of the rest of the Gulf states to
set the stage for controlling and dominating the whole world.
For the big powers believe that the Gulf and the Gulf states are
the key to controlling the world due to the presence of the largest oil
reserves there.
O Muslims: The situation is serious and the misfortune is
momentous.
By God, I am keen on safeguarding your religion and your worldly life.
So, lend me your ears and open up your hearts to me so that we
may examine these pitch-black misfortunes and so that we may consider how we can find a way out of these adversities and calamities.
The West's occupation of our countries is old, yet new.
The struggle between us and them, the confrontation, and
clashing began centuries ago, and will continue because the ground rules
regarding the fight between right and falsehood will remain valid until
Judgment Day.
Take note of this ground rule regarding this fight. There can be
no dialogue with occupiers except through arms.
This is what we need today, and what we should seek. Islamic
countries in the past century were not liberated from the crusaders'
military occupation except through jihad in the cause of God.
Under the pretext of fighting terrorism, the West today is doing
its utmost to tarnish jihad and kill anyone seeking jihad.
The West is supported in this endeavor by hypocrites.
This is because they all know that jihad is the effective power
to foil all their conspiracies.
Jihad is the path, so seek it.
This is because if we seek to deter them with any means other
than Islam, we would be like the one who goes round in circles.
We would also be like our forefathers, the al-Ghasasinah [Arab
people who lived in a state historically located in the north-west of the
Persian empire].
The concern of their seniors was to be appointed officers for
the Romans and to be named kings in order to safeguard the interests of the Romans by killing their brothers of the peninsula's Arabs.
Such is the case of the new al-Ghasasinah; namely, Arab rulers.
Words of warning
Muslims: If you do not punish them for their sins in Jerusalem
and Iraq, they shall defeat you because of your failure.
They will also rob you of land of al-Haramain [Mecca and
Medina].
Today [they robbed you] of Baghdad and tomorrow they will rob
you of Riyadh and so forth unless God deems otherwise.
Sufficient unto us is God.
What then is the means to stop this tremendous onslaught?
In such hard times, some reformers maintain that all popular and
official forces should unite and that all government forces should unite
with all their peoples.
Everyone would do what is needed from him in order to ward off
this crusader-Zionist onslaught.
The question strongly raised is: Are the governments in the
Islamic world capable of pursuing this duty of defending the faith and
nation and renouncing allegiance to the United States?
The calls by some reformers are strange.
They say that the path to righteousness and defending the
country and people passes though the doors of those rulers.
I tell those reformers: If you have an excuse for not pursuing
jihad, it does not give you the right to depend on the unjust ones, thus
becoming responsible for your sins as well as the sins of those who you
misguide.
Fear God for your sake and for your nation's sake.
God does not need your flattery of dictators for the sake of
God's religion.
Arabs 'succumbed to US pressure'
The Gulf states proved their total inability to resist the Iraqi
forces.
They sought help from the crusaders, led by the United States,
as is well known.
How can these states stand up to the United States?
In short, these states came to America's help and backed it in
its attack against an Arab state which is bound to them with covenants of
joint defence agreements.
These covenants were reiterated at the Arab League just a few
days before the US attack, only to violate them in full.
This shows their positions on the nation's basic causes.
These regimes wavered too much before taking a stand on using
force and attacking Iraq.
At times they absolutely rejected participation and at other
times they linked this with UN agreement.
Then they went back to their first option.
In fact, the lack of participation was in line with the domestic
desire of these states.
However, they finally submitted and succumbed to US pressure and opened their air, land and sea bases to contribute toward the US campaign, despite the immense repercussions of this move.
Most important of these repercussions is that this is a sin
against one of the Islamic tenets.
Saddam arrest
Most important and dangerous in their view was that they feared
that the door would be open for bringing down dictatorial regimes by armed forces from abroad, especially after they had seen the arrest of their former comrade in treason and agentry to the United States when it ordered him to ignite the first Gulf war against Iran, which rebelled against it.
The war consumed everything and plunged the area in a maze from which they have not emerged to this day.
They are aware that their turn will come.
They do not have the will to make the difficult decision to
confront the aggression, in addition to their belief that they do not
possess the material resources for that.
Indeed, they were prevented from establishing a large military
force when they were forced to sign secret pledges and documents long ago.
In short, the ruler who believes in some of the above-mentioned
deeds cannot defend the country.
How can he do so if he believes in all of them and has done that
time and again?
Those who believe in the principle of supporting the infidels
over Muslims and leave the blood, honor and property of their brothers to be available to their enemy in order to remain safe, claiming that they love their brothers but are being forced to take such a path - of course this compulsion cannot be regarded as legitimate - are in fact qualified to take the same course against one another in the Gulf states.
Indeed, this principle is liable to be embraced within the same
state itself.
Those who read and understood the history of kings throughout
history know that they are capable of committing more than these
concessions, except those who enjoyed the mercy of God.
Indeed, the rulers have practically started to sell out the sons
of the land by pursuing and imprisoning them and by unjustly and wrongly
accusing them of becoming like the al-Khawarij sect who held Muslims to be infidels and by committing the excesses of killing them.
We hold them to be martyrs and God will judge them.
All of this happened before the Riyadh explosions in Rabi
al-Awwal of this year [around May, 2003].
This campaign came within a drive to implement the US orders in
the hope that they will win its blessings.
'Miserable situation'
Based on the above, the extent of the real danger, which the
region in general and the Arabian Peninsula in particular, is being exposed
to, has appeared.
It has become clear that the rulers are not qualified to apply
the religion and defend the Muslims.
In fact, they have provided evidence that they are implementing
the schemes of the enemies of the nation and religion and that they are
qualified to abandon the countries and peoples.
Now, after we have known the situation of the rulers, we should
examine the policy which they have been pursuing.
Anyone who examines the policy of those rulers will easily see
that they follow their whims and desires and their personal interests and
crusader loyalties.
Therefore, the flaw does not involve a secondary issue, such as
personal corruption that is confined to the palace of the ruler.
The flaw is in the very approach.
This happened when a malicious belief and destructive principle
spread in most walks of life, to the effect that absolute supremacy and
obedience were due to the ruler and not to the religion of God.
In other countries, they have used the guise of parliaments and
democracy.
Thus, the situation of all Arab countries suffers from great
deterioration in all walks of life, in religious and worldly matters.
We have reached this miserable situation because many of us lack the correct and comprehensive understanding of the religion of Islam.
Many of us understand Islam to mean performing some acts of
worship, such as prayer and fasting.
Despite the great importance of these rituals, the religion of
Islam encompasses all the affairs of life, including religious and worldly
affairs, such as economic, military and political affairs, as well as the
scales by which we weigh the actions of men - rulers, ulema and others - and how to deal with the ruler in line with the rules set by God for him and
which the ruler should not violate.
Therefore, it becomes clear to us that the solution lies in
adhering to the religion of God, by which God granted us pride in the past
centuries and installing a strong and faithful leadership that applies the
Koran among us and raises the true banner of jihad.
The honest people who are concerned about this situation, such
as the ulema, leaders who are obeyed among their people, dignitaries,
notables and merchants should get together and meet in a safe place away from the shadow of these suppressive regimes and form a council for Ahl al-Hall wa al-Aqd [literally those who loose and bind; reference to honest, wise and righteous people who can appoint or remove a ruler in Islamic tradition] to fill the vacuum caused by the religious invalidation of these regimes and their mental deficiency.
The right to appoint an imam [leader] is for the nation.
The nation also has the right to make him correct his course if
he deviates from it and to remove him if he does something that warrants
this, such as apostasy and treason.
This temporary council should be made up of the minimum number of available personnel, without [word indistinct] the rest of the nation, except what the religion allows in case of necessity, until the number is increased when the situation improves, God willing.
Their policy should be based on the book of God [the Koran] and
the Sunna [tradition] of his Prophet [Muhammad], God's peace and blessings be upon him.
They should start by directing the Muslims to the important
priorities at this critical stage and lead them to a safe haven, provided
that their top priority should be uniting opinions under the word of
monotheism and defending Islam and its people and countries and declaring a general mobilization in the nation to prepare for repulsing the raids of the Romans, which started in Iraq and no-one knows where they will end.
God suffices us and he is the best supporter.
Copyright 2003 Strategic Forecasting LLC. All rights reserved.
==============
Marc/Crafty: The following analysis from Stratfor. Signing up at www.stratfor.com is HIGHLY recommended.
Osama bin Laden purportedly has released a new tape via Al Jazeera, which the CIA rapidly and publicly affirmed to be authentic -- probably. It was an interesting tape. The tone was quite different from his other recordings: It focused much less on what al Qaeda would do to the United States and much more on the failure of Islamic states, particularly of Arab states in the Persian Gulf region, to resist the United States and rally to the Islamic cause.
The speaker claiming to be bin Laden said, " , , , "
The translation of this seems to be that even regimes that adhere to Islamic law -- like Saudi Arabia's -- miss the point when they focus only on ritual, important though that might be. They fail to focus on economic, military and political affairs, which are just as crucial for Islam. This is what has created the current miserable situation. Until there are changes in the Arabian Peninsula, the war that al Qaeda launched cannot be successful.
In many ways, this is an extraordinarily honest and revealing analysis of
the situation. Bin Laden knows that he has lost this round of the war. The
failure of the Islamic world to generate a genuine challenge to the United
States rests with the existing leadership of the Arab world and of the Gulf
States, all of whom ultimately collaborated with the United States. This has undermined all military actions in the region, particularly those in Iraq. There can be no progress until changes take place in the Arabian Peninsula.
If we take bin Laden's words seriously -- and they should always be taken
seriously -- it sounds as if he is saying that the war with the United
States must be put on hold, or severely limited, until after al Qaeda deals
with the political situation in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. Put
differently, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, triggered what al Qaeda hoped
for: a massive intervention in the Islamic world. However, that intervention did not trigger the next desired result: galvanizing the Islamic masses into forcing their governments to move into direct confrontation with the United States. To the contrary, after seeming to move in that direction, they reversed course and allied themselves with the United States. Now, al Qaeda must focus on changing the leadership in the Arabian Peninsula and the Arab world.
It follows from this that bin Laden is arguing that al Qaeda must back off
from its attempt to strike at the United States and focus its energies on
the more immediate task, the heart of which is overthrowing the Saudi
government. Two counterarguments can be made here. The first is that while this tape focused on the Arabian Peninsula, it did not explicitly abandon any threats made against the United States. Second, all of this may simply be cover for an attack on the United States.
On the other hand, bin Laden would be a fool not to realize that he is
losing this round and that there will be no second round unless he can force a change in the Arabian Peninsula. Drawing the United States into the Islamic world has had the opposite effect from what he was hoping; hitting the United States again would guarantee the permanent presence of U.S. power in the region, shoring up existing regimes. Hitting the United States again -- unless it was so hard that the United States would seek to withdraw -- would make very little sense.
Bin Laden's tapes tend to be fairly straightforward. In the past, he appears to have pretty much done what he said he was going to, and he does not seem to have used the publicly released recordings simply for disinformation. This tape could be different, but bin Laden knows two things: First, the United States is not going to change anything it is doing based on this tape, and second, the tape is going to have a very sobering effect on his followers and the Islamic world in general.
It is, therefore, hard to believe, but the conclusion that has to be drawn
is that al Qaeda does not think it can proceed without first fomenting a
revolution in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden also seems to be de-emphasizing
operations in the United States, since they cannot achieve al Qaeda's goals until after the situation in Saudi Arabia resolves itself. At the very
least, he is elevating operations on the Arabian Peninsula to the same level as in the United States -- assuming that al Qaeda has the resources to do both.
-
Geopolitical Diary: Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2004
Osama bin Laden purportedly has released a new tape via Al Jazeera, which
the CIA rapidly and publicly affirmed to be authentic -- probably. It was an
interesting tape. The tone was quite different from his other recordings: It
focused much less on what al Qaeda would do to the United States and much
more on the failure of Islamic states, particularly of Arab states in the
Persian Gulf region, to resist the United States and rally to the Islamic
cause.
The speaker claiming to be bin Laden said, "Thus, the situation of all Arab
countries suffers from great deterioration in all walks of life, in
religious and worldly matters. We have reached this miserable situation
because many of us lack the correct and comprehensive understanding of the
religion of Islam. Many of us understand Islam to mean performing some acts
of worship, such as prayer and fasting.
"Despite the great importance of these rituals, the religion of Islam
encompasses all the affairs of life, including religious and worldly
affairs, such as economic, military and political affairs, as well as the
scales by which we weigh the actions of men -- rulers, ulema and others --
and how to deal with the ruler in line with the rules set by God for him and
which the ruler should not violate. Therefore, it becomes clear to us that
the solution lies in adhering to the religion of God, by which God granted
us pride in the past centuries and installing a strong and faithful
leadership that applies the Koran among us and raises the true banner of
jihad."
The translation of this seems to be that even regimes that adhere to Islamic
law -- like Saudi Arabia's -- miss the point when they focus only on ritual,
important though that might be. They fail to focus on economic, military and
political affairs, which are just as crucial for Islam. This is what has
created the current miserable situation. Until there are changes in the
Arabian Peninsula, the war that al Qaeda launched cannot be successful.
In many ways, this is an extraordinarily honest and revealing analysis of
the situation. Bin Laden knows that he has lost this round of the war. The
failure of the Islamic world to generate a genuine challenge to the United
States rests with the existing leadership of the Arab world and of the Gulf
States, all of whom ultimately collaborated with the United States. This has
undermined all military actions in the region, particularly those in Iraq.
There can be no progress until changes take place in the Arabian Peninsula.
If we take bin Laden's words seriously -- and they should always be taken
seriously -- it sounds as if he is saying that the war with the United
States must be put on hold, or severely limited, until after al Qaeda deals
with the political situation in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. Put
differently, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, triggered what al Qaeda hoped
for: a massive intervention in the Islamic world. However, that intervention
did not trigger the next desired result: galvanizing the Islamic masses into
forcing their governments to move into direct confrontation with the United
States. To the contrary, after seeming to move in that direction, they
reversed course and allied themselves with the United States. Now, al Qaeda
must focus on changing the leadership in the Arabian Peninsula and the Arab
world.
It follows from this that bin Laden is arguing that al Qaeda must back off
from its attempt to strike at the United States and focus its energies on
the more immediate task, the heart of which is overthrowing the Saudi
government. Two counterarguments can be made here. The first is that while
this tape focused on the Arabian Peninsula, it did not explicitly abandon
any threats made against the United States. Second, all of this may simply
be cover for an attack on the United States.
On the other hand, bin Laden would be a fool not to realize that he is
losing this round and that there will be no second round unless he can force
a change in the Arabian Peninsula. Drawing the United States into the
Islamic world has had the opposite effect from what he was hoping; hitting
the United States again would guarantee the permanent presence of U.S. power
in the region, shoring up existing regimes. Hitting the United States
again -- unless it was so hard that the United States would seek to
withdraw -- would make very little sense.
Bin Laden's tapes tend to be fairly straightforward. In the past, he appears
to have pretty much done what he said he was going to, and he does not seem
to have used the publicly released recordings simply for disinformation.
This tape could be different, but bin Laden knows two things: First, the
United States is not going to change anything it is doing based on this
tape, and second, the tape is going to have a very sobering effect on his
followers and the Islamic world in general.
It is, therefore, hard to believe, but the conclusion that has to be drawn
is that al Qaeda does not think it can proceed without first fomenting a
revolution in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden also seems to be de-emphasizing
operations in the United States, since they cannot achieve al Qaeda's goals
until after the situation in Saudi Arabia resolves itself. At the very
least, he is elevating operations on the Arabian Peninsula to the same level
as in the United States -- assuming that al Qaeda has the resources to do
both.
-
all of you are morons
-
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
13 February 2004
www.stratfor.com
Pakistan Braces for the American Storm
Summary
Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has begun warning his
country that if it does not root out al Qaeda, the United States
will.
Analysis
As part of its self-declared "war on terrorism," the United
States has been involved in the Afghan theater of operations for
more than two years, since it succeeded in overthrowing the
Taliban government in late 2001 by employing a strategy heavily
dependent upon local allies. Since then, U.S. efforts have
followed a bifurcated path: maintaining some semblance of order
in Kabul -- where the "national" government resides -- and
bombing any concentrated pockets of resistance.
The strategy makes sense. Unlike the Soviet occupation of 1979-
1989, the United States is not attempting to control the entire
territory of Afghanistan. Split as it is by the Hindu Kush
mountains -- and a plethora of ethnic groups with little to no
sense of a shared history -- the country probably is not capable
of forming a unified state in the traditional sense. The least
violent existence that Afghanistan can hope for is probably to
have a very weak central government in which the various regional
capitals -- Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif -- exercise de facto
sovereign control.
The U.S. strategy, then, is geared toward maintaining the fiction
of a "united" Afghanistan, without providing any troops to
enforce central rule. The NATO-led International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF) patrols only Kabul and the immediate
surrounding area, while various regional militias rule their
respective territories.
The strategy is not exactly brilliant, but -- considering
Afghanistan's history and geography -- it is probably one of the
few that could work. As a side effect, it leaves al Qaeda and its
sympathizers free to prowl largely where they will and conduct
hit-and-run nuisance attacks.
For al Qaeda, this is far from a happy state of affairs.
Afghanistan can no longer be used as a major training facility,
and the network has been funneling most of its fighters into
Iraq. A smaller presence in Afghanistan is a more vulnerable one,
so al Qaeda has done what any business would do under similar
circumstances: move.
The mountainous border region of the Afghan-Pakistani border
region is porous, relatively unguarded and home to the Pushtun
ethnic group that straddles national boundaries. Al Qaeda,
unhobbled by state loyalties, has most likely moved its core
personnel into this region, where it is more complicated for U.S.
forces to operate.
But more complicated does not mean impossible.
The Bush administration is looking for the end game. Al Qaeda has
proven unable to mount a major strike on U.S. targets since Sept.
11, 2001. The attacks that have occurred -- Casablanca, Bali, An
Najaf, Riyadh, etc. -- have been far less ambitious in scope,
carried out by affiliate groups and, most importantly, have not
touched the U.S. mainland. The next major push from the United
States will be an attempt to roll up al Qaeda's prime senior
members themselves.
As with all other major policy pushes in 2004, the White House
has its eye on domestic politics as well. Melting down al Qaeda
into a commemorative coin set to present to the American voter
just in time for Nov. 4 would, of course, be a nice touch from a
White House perspective. Doing that, however, means rolling into
Pakistan with a lot more than a disposable State Department
officer with snazzy shoes and a sharply worded demarche. Unlike
Afghanistan, Pakistan is a real country with a real army -- and
real nuclear weapons. Hence, at the highest levels, Washington
has been tightening the screws on Islamabad -- most recently
regarding the indiscretions of its nuclear development team.
Musharraf has received the none-too-subtle message, and this week
began preparing his country for the inevitable onslaught -- and
spurring it into action so that the United States might not need
to come calling with a whole division of troops when it comes.
In a Feb. 10 interview with the New York Times, Musharraf made it
clear that the onus of responsibility for the nuclear technology
leaks was on the CIA, which he said had not provided any proof
about the nuclear proliferation until quite recently. While the
primary message of "don't blame me or push me around" came
through loud and clear, there was also a secondary, more subtle,
message: "Show me proof and I'll act."
The buzz in Pakistan this week, at least according to the Daily
Times, is that CIA Director George Tenet paid Islamabad a secret
visit on Feb. 11. In short, Musharraf was preparing the public
for what sort of terms would be necessary for him to cater to
Washington's wishes, and Washington just might have provided the
appropriate information about al Qaeda's new digs in Pakistan.
That brings us to a more recent statement by Musharraf concerning
militant activity. Speaking at Pakistan's National Defense
College in Rawalpindi on Feb. 12, Musharraf said, "Certainly
everything [within Afghanistan] is not happening from Pakistan,
but certainly something is happening from Pakistan. Let us not
bluff ourselves. Now, whatever is happening from Pakistan must be
stopped and that is what we are trying to do."
On Feb. 10, Musharraf outlined what Washington would need to do
to get him to move. On Feb. 12, he made it clear to other power
brokers within Pakistan what needed to be done. Stratfor expects
a third, more direct, statement to tumble from Musharraf's lips
in the near future.
The issue now is simply one of timing. The Afghan-Pakistani
border currently is difficult to navigate: Mountains plus winter
equals no tanks. Once spring arrives, however, the United States
can roll in and -- in theory -- nab all the appropriate
personalities, just in time for the Democratic National
Convention in July. If the Bush administration can pull it off,
more Democrats than Howard Dean will be screaming.
The plan is not quite as neat as it seems. Northern Pakistan is
rugged territory, but people actually live there and like it.
Most are none too pleased with what the United States has been
doing across the border in Afghanistan of late. This region,
dubbed the Northwest Frontier Territories, is heavily Pushtun and
is rife with al Qaeda supporters. Rolling into it would not be
pretty.
In the hopes of heading off what would likely be a bloody U.S.
intervention in Pakistan, Musharraf is trying to make the case
for a major Pakistani military offensive against al Qaeda and its
supporters in these tribal areas.
The Pakistani president is in quite an uncomfortable position,
attempting to balance his role as a trusted U.S. ally in the war
against militant Islamism, while leading a country where anti-
Americanism is at a fever pitch. Despite Musharraf's attempts to
proceed with caution, decisions resulting from the U.S. pressure
are critically injuring his domestic image.
Musharraf has long stressed that his government furnished the
United States with only minimal assistance in terms of logistical
support, intelligence-sharing and so forth, and that Pakistani
troops are not committed to campaigns outside the country. Both
Interior Minister Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat and Information
Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed routinely deny that U.S.
intelligence and military forces are engaged in any operations in
Pakistan against al Qaeda/Taliban suspects, particularly when
arrests are made or suspected militants are killed in shoot-outs.
Hayat and Ahmed have gone to lengths to underscore that Pakistani
forces are doing the actual work, while the United States is
merely providing intelligence and logistical support in the
background.
U.S. troops conducting a large-scale operation inside Pakistan
would take away the Pakistanis' we're-doing-it-ourselves factor
and could well fracture the Pakistani military, not to mention
prompt a backlash from the public.
But Musharraf has no illusions about where he falls on the U.S.
priority list. If destroying al Qaeda once and for all means
losing the Pakistani president, well, the United States has
survived Pakistani regime changes before. Therefore, Musharraf
issued an oblique warning to his country that it needs to do a
housecleaning -- before the rat-a-tat of U.S. M16s is heard
across the Northwest Frontier.
It is unclear just how Musharraf will be able to muster the
support necessary for this latest step his government has had to
make in the wake of Sept. 11. Initial signs are promising. So far
jirgas (councils) of the Utmanzai and North Waziristani tribes
have decided to set up militias to hunt down foreign militants.
It is far too early to evaluate the tribes' seriousness -- much
less their success -- in the matter, but it is obvious that the
political dialogue has been sparked.
Islamabad does not have much time to get results. Warmer weather
soon will set in, and the ISAF already is taking over policing
duties in Afghanistan from U.S. forces, which will free up even
more U.S. forces for a counterinsurgency offensive, should
Islamabad fail to get the job done.
.................................................................
STRATFOR SERVICES NOW AVAILABLE:
Join decision-makers around the world who read Stratfor for daily
intelligence briefs, in-depth analyses and forecasts on a wide
range of international security, political and economic affairs.
Stratfor Premium is our flagship product providing comprehensive
global intelligence including daily analyses, special reports,
intelligence alerts, premium analyses, situation reports, country
and regional net assessments as well as Stratfor's sought after
Annual and Quarterly Forecasts. Corporate or multi-user volume
discount packages available. Visit this web page for details:
http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=SUB&c=c
Stratfor Basic offers daily analysis, situation reports and
ongoing coverage of global events. Also available with this package is a
pay per view service for many of our premium reports. Visit this
web page for details:
http://www.stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=SUB&c=d
-
An Essential War
Ousting Saddam was the only option.
BY GEORGE P. SHULTZ
Monday, March 29, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
We have struggled with terrorism for a long time. In the Reagan administration, I was a hawk on the subject. I said terrorism is a big problem, a different problem, and we have to take forceful action against it. Fortunately, Ronald Reagan agreed with me, but not many others did. (Don Rumsfeld was an outspoken exception.)
In those days we focused on how to defend against terrorism. We reinforced our embassies and increased our intelligence effort. We thought we made some progress. We established the legal basis for holding states responsible for using terrorists to attack Americans anywhere. Through intelligence, we did abort many potential terrorist acts. But we didn't really understand what motivated the terrorists or what they were out to do.
In the 1990s, the problem began to appear even more menacing. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were well known, but the nature of the terrorist threat was not yet comprehended and our efforts to combat it were ineffective. Diplomacy without much force was tried. Terrorism was regarded as a law enforcement problem and terrorists as criminals. Some were arrested and put on trial. Early last year, a judge finally allowed the verdict to stand for one of those convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Ten years! Terrorism is not a matter that can be left to law enforcement, with its deliberative process, built-in delays, and safeguards that may let the prisoner go free on procedural grounds.
Today, looking back on the past quarter century of terrorism, we can see that it is the method of choice of an extensive, internationally connected ideological movement dedicated to the destruction of our international system of cooperation and progress. We can see that the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 2001 destruction of the Twin Towers, the bombs on the trains in Madrid, and scores of other terrorist attacks in between and in many countries, were carried out by one part or another of this movement. And the movement is connected to states that develop awesome weaponry, with some of it, or with expertise, for sale.
What should we do? First and foremost, shore up the state system.
The world has worked for three centuries with the sovereign state as the basic operating entity, presumably accountable to its citizens and responsible for their well-being. In this system, states also interact with each other--bilaterally or multilaterally--to accomplish ends that transcend their borders. They create international organizations to serve their ends, not govern them.
Increasingly, the state system has been eroding. Terrorists have exploited this weakness by burrowing into the state system in order to attack it. While the state system weakens, no replacement is in sight that can perform the essential functions of establishing an orderly and lawful society, protecting essential freedoms, providing a framework for fruitful economic activity, contributing to effective international cooperation, and providing for the common defense.
I see our great task as restoring the vitality of the state system within the framework of a world of opportunity, and with aspirations for a world of states that recognize accountability for human freedom and dignity.
All established states should stand up to their responsibilities in the fight against our common enemy, terror; be a helpful partner in economic and political development; and take care that international organizations work for their member states, not the other way around. When they do, they deserve respect and help to make them work successfully.
The civilized world has a common stake in defeating the terrorists. We now call this what it is: a War on Terrorism. In war, you have to act on both offense and defense. You have to hit the enemy before the enemy hits you. The diplomacy of incentives, containment, deterrence and prevention are all made more effective by the demonstrated possibility of forceful pre-emption. Strength and diplomacy go together. They are not alternatives; they are complements. You work diplomacy and strength together on a grand and strategic scale and on an operational and tactical level. But if you deny yourself the option of forceful pre-emption, you diminish the effectiveness of your diplomatic moves. And, with the consequences of a terrorist attack as hideous as they are--witness what just happened in Madrid--the U.S. must be ready to pre-empt identified threats. And not at the last moment, when an attack is imminent and more difficult to stop, but before the terrorist gets in position to do irreparable harm.
Over the last decade we have seen large areas of the world where there is no longer any state authority at all, an ideal environment for terrorists to plan and train. In the early 1990s we came to realize the significance of a "failed state." Earlier, people allowed themselves to think that, for example, an African colony could gain its independence, be admitted to the U.N. as a member state, and thereafter remain a sovereign state. Then came Somalia. All government disappeared. No more sovereignty, no more state. The same was true in Afghanistan. And who took over? Islamic extremists. They soon made it clear that they regarded the concept of the state as an abomination. To them, the very idea of "the state" was un-Islamic. They talked about reviving traditional forms of pan-Islamic rule with no place for the state. They were fundamentally, and violently, opposed to the way the world works, to the international state system.
The United States launched a military campaign to eliminate the Taliban and al Qaeda's rule over Afghanistan. Now we and our allies are trying to help Afghanistan become a real state again and a viable member of the international state system. Yet there are many other parts of the world where state authority has collapsed or, within some states, large areas where the state's authority does not run.
That's one area of danger: places where the state has vanished. A second area of danger is found in places where the state has been taken over by criminals or warlords. Saddam Hussein was one example. Kim Jong Il of North Korea is another.
They seize control of state power and use that power to enhance their wealth, consolidate their rule and develop their weaponry. As they do this, and as they violate the laws and principles of the international system, they at the same time claim its privileges and immunities, such as the principle of non-intervention into the internal affairs of a legitimate sovereign state. For decades these thugs have gotten away with it. And the leading nations of the world have let them get away with it.
This is why the case of Saddam Hussein and Iraq is so significant. After Saddam Hussein consolidated power, he started a war against one of his neighbors, Iran, and in the course of that war he committed war crimes including the use of chemical weapons, even against his own people.
About 10 years later he started another war against another one of his neighbors, Kuwait. In the course of doing so he committed war crimes. He took hostages. He launched missiles against a third and then a fourth country in the region.
That war was unique in modern times because Saddam totally eradicated another state, and turned it into "Province 19" of Iraq. The aggressors in wars might typically seize some territory, or occupy the defeated country, or install a puppet regime; but Saddam sought to wipe out the defeated state, to erase Kuwait from the map of the world.
That got the world's attention. That's why, at the U.N., the votes were wholly in favor of a U.S.-led military operation--Desert Storm--to throw Saddam out of Kuwait and to restore Kuwait to its place as a legitimate state in the international system. There was virtually universal recognition that those responsible for the international system of states could not let a state simply be rubbed out.
When Saddam was defeated, in 1991, a cease-fire was put in place. Then the U.N. Security Council decided that, in order to prevent him from continuing to start wars and commit crimes against his own people, he must give up his arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction."
Recall the way it was to work. If Saddam cooperated with U.N. inspectors and produced his weapons and facilitated their destruction, then the cease-fire would be transformed into a peace agreement ending the state of war between the international system and Iraq. But if Saddam did not cooperate, and materially breached his obligations regarding his weapons of mass destruction, then the original U.N. Security Council authorization for the use of "all necessary force" against Iraq--an authorization that at the end of Desert Storm had been suspended but not cancelled--would be reactivated and Saddam would face another round of the U.S.-led military action against him. Saddam agreed to this arrangement.
In the early 1990s, U.N. inspectors found plenty of materials in the category of weapons of mass destruction and they dismantled a lot of it. They kept on finding such weapons, but as the presence of force declined, Saddam's cooperation declined. He began to play games and to obstruct the inspection effort.
By 1998 the situation was untenable. Saddam had made inspections impossible. President Clinton, in February 1998, declared that Saddam would have to comply with the U.N. resolutions or face American military force. Kofi Annan flew to Baghdad and returned with a new promise of cooperation from Saddam. But Saddam did not cooperate. Congress then passed the Iraq Liberation Act by a vote of 360 to 38 in the House of Representatives; the Senate gave its unanimous consent. Signed into law on October 31, it supported the renewed use of force against Saddam with the objective of changing the regime. By this time, he had openly and utterly rejected the inspections and the U.N. resolutions.
In November 1998, the Security Council passed a resolution declaring Saddam to be in "flagrant violation" of all resolutions going back to 1991. That meant that the cease-fire was terminated and the original authorization for the use of force against Saddam was reactivated. President Clinton ordered American forces into action in December 1998.
But the U.S. military operation was called off after only four days--apparently because President Clinton did not feel able to lead the country in war at a time when he was facing impeachment.
So inspections stopped. The U.S. ceased to take the lead. But the inspectors reported that as of the end of 1998 Saddam possessed major quantities of WMDs across a range of categories, and particularly in chemical and biological weapons and the means of delivering them by missiles. All the intelligence services of the world agreed on this.
From that time until late last year, Saddam was left undisturbed to do what he wished with this arsenal of weapons. The international system had given up its ability to monitor and deal with this threat. All through the years between 1998 and 2002 Saddam continued to act and speak and to rule Iraq as a rogue state.
President Bush made it clear by 2002, and against the background of 9/11, that Saddam must be brought into compliance. It was obvious that the world could not leave this situation as it was. The U.S. made the decision to continue to work within the scope of the Security Council resolutions--a long line of them--to deal with Saddam. After an extended and excruciating diplomatic effort, the Security Council late in 2002 passed Resolution 1441, which gave Saddam one final chance to comply or face military force. When on December 8, 2002, Iraq produced its required report, it was clear that Saddam was continuing to play games and to reject his obligations under international law. His report, thousands of pages long, did not in any way account for the remaining weapons of mass destruction that the U.N. inspectors had reported to be in existence as of the end of 1998. That assessment was widely agreed upon.
That should have been that. But the debate at the U.N. went on--and on. And as it went on it deteriorated. Instead of the focus being kept on Iraq and Saddam, France induced others to regard the problem as one of restraining the U.S.--a position that seemed to emerge from France's aspirations for greater influence in Europe and elsewhere. By March of 2003 it was clear that French diplomacy had resulted in splitting NATO, the European Union, and the Security Council . . . and probably convincing Saddam that he would not face the use of force. The French position, in effect, was to say that Saddam had begun to show signs of cooperation with the U.N. resolutions because more than 200,000 American troops were poised on Iraq's borders ready to strike him; so the U.S. should just keep its troops poised there for an indeterminate time to come, until presumably France would instruct us that we could either withdraw or go into action. This of course was impossible militarily, politically, and financially.
Where do we stand now? These key points need to be understood:
? There has never been a clearer case of a rogue state using its privileges of statehood to advance its dictator's interests in ways that defy and endanger the international state system.
? The international legal case against Saddam--17 resolutions--was unprecedented.
? The intelligence services of all involved nations and the U.N. inspectors over more than a decade all agreed that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to international peace and security.
? Saddam had four undisturbed years to augment, conceal, disperse, or otherwise deal with his arsenal.
? He used every means to avoid cooperating or explaining what he has done with them. This refusal in itself was, under the U.N. resolutions, adequate grounds for resuming the military operation against him that had been put in abeyance in 1991 pending his compliance.
? President Bush, in ordering U.S. forces into action, stated that we were doing so under U.N. Security Council Resolutions 678 and 687, the original bases for military action against Saddam Hussein in 1991. Those who criticize the U.S. for unilateralism should recognize that no nation in the history of the United Nations has ever engaged in such a sustained and committed multilateral diplomatic effort to adhere to the principles of international law and international organization within the international system. In the end, it was the U.S. that upheld and acted in accordance with the U.N. resolutions on Iraq, not those on the Security Council who tried to stop us.
The question of weapons of mass destruction is just that: a question that remains to be answered, a mystery that must be solved. Just as we also must solve the mystery of how Libya and Iran developed menacing nuclear capability without detection, of how we were caught unaware of a large and flourishing black market in nuclear material--and of how we discovered these developments before they got completely out of hand and have put in place promising corrective processes. The question of Iraq's presumed stockpile of weapons will be answered, but that answer, however it comes out, will not affect the fully justifiable and necessary action that the coalition has undertaken to bring an end to Saddam Hussein's rule over Iraq. As Dr. David Kay put it in a Feb. 1 interview with Chris Wallace, "We know there were terrorist groups in state still seeking WMD capability. Iraq, although I found no weapons, had tremendous capabilities in this area. A marketplace phenomena was about to occur, if it did not occur; sellers meeting buyers. And I think that would have been very dangerous if the war had not intervened."
When asked by Mr. Wallace what the sellers could have sold if they didn't have actual weapons, Mr. Kay said: "The knowledge of how to make them, the knowledge of how to make small amounts, which is, after all, mostly what terrorists want. They don't want battlefield amounts of weapons. No, Iraq remained a very dangerous place in terms of WMD capabilities, even though we found no large stockpiles of weapons."
Above all, and in the long run, the most important aspect of the Iraq war will be what it means for the integrity of the international system and for the effort to deal effectively with terrorism. The stakes are huge and the terrorists know that as well as we do. That is the reason for their tactic of violence in Iraq. And that is why, for us and for our allies, failure is not an option. The message is that the U.S. and others in the world who recognize the need to sustain our international system will no longer quietly acquiesce in the take-over of states by lawless dictators who then carry on their depredations--including the development of awesome weapons for threats, use, or sale--behind the shield of protection that statehood provides. If you are one of these criminals in charge of a state, you no longer should expect to be allowed to be inside the system at the same time that you are a deadly enemy of it.
Sept. 11 forced us to comprehend the extent and danger of the challenge. We began to act before our enemy was able to extend and consolidate his network.
If we put this in terms of World War II, we are now sometime around 1937. In the 1930s, the world failed to do what it needed to do to head off a world war. Appeasement never works. Today we are in action. We must not flinch. With a powerful interplay of strength and diplomacy, we can win this war.
Mr. Shultz, a former secretary of state, is a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. This is adapted from his Kissinger Lecture, given recently at the Library of Congress.
-
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
08 April 2004
Gaming Out Iraq
Summary
The United States is involved in its greatest military crisis
since the fall of Baghdad a year ago. This is the convergence of
two separate processes. The first is the apparent re-emergence of
the Sunni guerrillas west of Baghdad; the second is a split in
the Shiite community and an internal struggle that has targeted
the United States. In the worst-case scenario, these events could
have a disastrous outcome for the United States, but there are
reasons to think that the worst case is not the most likely at
this point.
Analysis
The United States is experiencing its greatest military crisis in
Iraq since the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003. On the one hand,
the Sunni guerrillas that the United States appeared to have
defeated after the Ramadan offensive of October and November 2003
have not been destroyed. Although their role in triggering the
March 31 attack against U.S. civilian contractors in Al Fallujah
is an open question, they have benefited politically from the
U.S. cordon around the city and have taken shots at distracted
U.S. forces in the area, such as the U.S. Marines in Ar Ramadi.
On the other hand, a Shiite militia led by young cleric Moqtada
al-Sadr has launched an offensive in Baghdad and in a number of
cities in Iraq's south. U.S. intelligence expected none of this;
L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, had scheduled a
trip to Washington that he had to cancel hurriedly.
The offensives appear to challenge two fundamental strategic
assumptions that were made by U.S. planners. The first was that,
due to penetrations by U.S. intelligence, the Sunni insurgency
was deteriorating and would not restart. The second, much more
important assumption was that the United States had a strategic
understanding with the Shiite leadership that it would contain
anti-American military action south of Baghdad, and that -- and
this is critical -- they would under no circumstances collaborate
with the Sunnis.
It now appears that these basic premises are being rendered
false.
Obviously, the Sunni guerrillas are still around, at least in the
Al Fallujah-Ar Ramadi corridor. U.S. efforts in that area of the
Sunni Triangle are aimed at finding those responsible for the
deaths and subsequent public mutilation of four U.S. civilian
contractors March 31. Current U.S. operations might be in
offensive mode -- suggesting that the Baathist guerrillas have
yet to fully regroup -- but as the siege of Al Fallujah drags on,
the potential grows for the insurgency to acquire sympathetic
recruits. Equally obviously, some of the Shia have taken up arms
against the United States, spreading the war to the region south
of Iraq. Finally, there are some reports of Sunni-Shiite
collaboration in the Baghdad area.
We might add that the outbreak west of Baghdad and the uprising
in the south could have been coincidental, but if so, it was one
amazing coincidence. Not liking coincidences ourselves -- and
fully understanding the contingent events that led to al-Sadr's
decision to strike -- we have to wonder about the degree to which
the events of the past week or so were planned.
If current trends accelerate, the United States faces a serious
military challenge that could lead to disaster. The United States
does not have the forces necessary to put down a broad-based
Shiite rising and crush the Sunni rebellion as well. Even the
current geography of the rising is beyond the capabilities of
existing deployments or any practicable number of additional
forces that might be made available. The United States is already
withdrawing from some cities. The logical outcome of all of this
would be an enclave strategy, in which the United States
concentrates its forces -- in a series of fortified locations --
perhaps excluding Iraqi nationals -- and leaves the rest of the
country to the guerrillas. That, of course, would raise the
question of why the United States should bother to remain in
Iraq, since those forces would not be able to exert effective
force either inside the country or beyond its borders.
That would force a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. The consequences of
such a withdrawal would be catastrophic for the U.S. grand
strategy in the war against militant Islamists. One of the
purposes of the war was to disprove al Qaeda's assertion that the
United States was actually militarily weak and that it could not
engage in close combat in the Islamist world, certainly not in
the face of a mass uprising. An American withdrawal would prove
al Qaeda's claims and would energize Islamists not only with
hatred of the United States, but also -- and worse -- with
contempt for American power. It would create the worst of all
possible worlds for the United States.
It follows that the United States is going to do everything it
can to abort this process.
It also might well be that the process -- as we have laid it out
-- is faulty. The uprising in the Al Fallujah-Ar Ramadi corridor
might have peaked already. The al-Sadr rising perhaps does not
represent a reversal of Shiite strategic orientation, but is
primarily a self-contained, internal event about al-Sadr's
relationship with other Shiite clergy. The reports of
collaboration between Shia and Sunnis could be false or represent
a small set of cases.
These are the issues on which the conflict and the future of the
U.S. presence in Iraq turn. It is the hope of the guerrillas --
Sunni and Shiite -- to create a situation that compels a U.S.
withdrawal, either from the country or into fortified enclaves;
it is obviously the intention of the United States to prevent
this.
The Sunni Threat
The Sunni part of the equation is the least threatening. If Sunni
guerrillas have managed to regroup, it is disturbing that U.S.
intelligence was unable to prevent the reorganization. But there
is a very real silver lining in this: One of the ways the
guerrillas might have been able to regroup without being detected
was by doing it on a relatively small scale, limiting their
organization to hundreds or even dozens of members.
Certainly, they have many more sympathizers than that, but a
careful distinction must be drawn -- and is not being drawn by
the media -- between sympathizers and guerrillas. Sympathizers
can riot -- they can even generate an intifada -- but that is not
the same as conducting guerrilla war. Guerrillas need a degree of
training, weapons and organization.
The paradox of guerrilla war is that the more successful a
guerrilla offensive, the more it opens the guerrillas to
counteraction by the enemy. In order to attack, they must
communicate, come out of hiding and converge on the target. At
that moment, they can be destroyed and -- more important --
captured. Throwing a large percentage of a guerrilla force into
an attack either breaks the enemy or turns into a guerrilla
disaster.
The U.S. Marines west of Baghdad are not about to be broken.
Therefore, if our assumption about the relative size of the
guerrilla force and the high percentage that have been thrown
into this operation is correct, this force will not be able to
sustain the current level of operations much longer. If the
guerrilla force is large enough to sustain such operations, then
the U.S. intelligence failure is so huge as to be difficult to
comprehend. Protests and riots are problems and create a strain
on resources, but they do not fundamentally affect the ability of
the United States to remain engaged in Iraq.
The Shiite Threat
It is not the Sunni offensive that represents a threat, it is the
Shia. The question is simple: Does al-Sadr's rising represent a
fundamental shift in the Shiite community as a whole, or is it
simply a small faction of the Shia that has risen? The U.S.
command in Iraq has argued that al-Sadr represents a marginal
movement, at odds with the dominant Shiite leadership, lashing
out in a desperate attempt to change the internal dynamics of the
Shiite community.
For this analysis to be correct, a single fact must be true: Ali
al-Sistani, the grand ayatollah of the Iraqi Shia, is not only
opposed to al-Sadr, but also remains committed to carrying out
his basic bargain with the United States. If that is true, then
all will be well for the Americans in the end. If it is wrong,
then the worst-case scenarios have to be taken seriously.
The majority Iraqi Shiite population suffered greatly under the
regime of Saddam Hussein, which was dominated by the Sunni
minority. After the fall of Hussein, the Shia's primary interest
was in guaranteeing not only that a Sunni government would not
re-emerge, but also that the future of Iraq would be in the hands
of the Shia. This interest was shared by the Shia in Iran, who
also wanted to see a Shiite government emerge in order to secure
Iran's frontier from its historical enemy, Iraq.
The first U.S. impulse after the fall of Baghdad was that
Americans would govern Iraq indefinitely, on their terms -- and
without compromising with Iranian sympathizers. That plan was
blown out of the water by the unexpected emergence of a Sunni
guerrilla force. The United States needed indigenous help. Even
more than help, it needed guarantees that the Shia would not rise
up and render the U.S. presence in Iraq untenable.
The United States and the Shiite elites -- Iranian and Iraqi --
reached an accommodation: The United States guaranteed the Shia a
democratic government, which meant that the majority Shia would
dominate -- and the Shia maintained the peace in the south. They
did not so much collaborate with the Americans as maintain a
peace that permitted the United States to deal with the Sunnis.
The end state of all of this was to be a Shiite government that
would permit some level of U.S. forces to remain indefinitely in
Iraq.
As the Sunni rising subsided, the United States felt a decreased
dependency on the Shia. The transitional Iraqi government that is
slated to take power June 30 would not be an elected government,
but rather a complex coalition of groups -- including Shia, Kurds
and Sunnis, as well as small ethnic groups -- that would be
constituted so as to give all the players a say in the future. In
other words, the Shia would not get a Shiite-dominated government
June 30.
It was for this reason that al-Sistani began to agitate for
direct elections. He knew that the Shia would win that election
and that this was the surest path to direct Shiite power.
Washington argued there was not enough time for direct elections
-- a claim that was probably true -- but which the Shia saw as
the United States backpedaling on fundamental agreements. The
jury-rigged system the Americans wanted in place for a year would
give the Sunnis a chance to recover -- not the sort of recovery
the Shia wanted to see. Moreover, the Shia observed the quiet
romance between the United States and some key Sunni tribal
leaders after the capture of Hussein, and their distrust of long-
term U.S. motives grew.
Al-Sistani made it clear that he did not trust the transitional
plan and that he did not believe it protected Shiite interests or
represented American promises. The United States treated al-
Sistani with courtesy and respect but made it clear that it was
not planning to change its position.
In the meantime, a sea change had taken place in Iranian
politics, with a conservative government driving the would-be
reformers out of power. The conservatives did not object to the
deal with the United States, but they wanted to be certain that
the United States did not for a moment believe that the Iranians
were acting out of weakness. The continual hammering by the
United States on the nuclear issue with Iran convinced the
Iranians that the Washington did not fully appreciate the
position it was in.
As Iranian Expediency Council chief and former President Ali
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani bluntly put it Feb. 24: "They continue
to send us threatening messages and continue to raise the four
questions," referring to Washington's concerns about Iran's
nuclear program, opposition to the Middle East peace process,
alleged support of militant groups and human rights. "But they
are stuck in the mud in Iraq, and they know that if Iran wanted
to, it could make their problems even worse."
Al-Sistani did not want the June 30 transition to go forward on
U.S. terms. The Iranians did not want the United States to think
it had Iran on the defensive. A confrontation with the United
States under these circumstances was precisely what was in both
al-Sistani and Iran's interests. Both wanted to drive home to the
Americans that they held power in Iraq and that the United States
was there at the sufferance of the Shia. The United States had
forgotten its sense of desperation during the Sunni Ramadan
offensive, and the Shia needed to remind them -- but they needed
to do so without a rupture with Washington, which was, after all,
instrumental to their long-term plans.
Al-Sadr was the perfect instrument. He was dangerous, deniable
and manageable. U.S. officials have expressed surprise that al-
Sadr -- who they did not regard highly -- was able to create such
havoc. Obviously, al-Sistani could have dealt with al-Sadr if and
when he wished. But for the moment, al-Sistani didn't wish. He
wanted to show the Americans the abyss they faced if they
continued on the path to June 30 without modifying the plan.
The Americans have said al-Sistani has not been helpful in this
crisis. He is not ready to be helpful and won't be until a more
suitable understanding is reached with the United States. He will
act in due course because it is not in al-Sistani's interests to
allow al-Sadr to become too strong. Quite the contrary: Al-
Sistani runs the risk that the situation will get so far out of
hand that he will not be able to control it either. But al-
Sistani is too strong for al-Sadr to undermine, and al-Sadr is,
in fact, al-Sistani's pawn. Perhaps more precisely, al-Sadr is
al-Sistani's ace in the hole. Having played him, al-Sistani will
be as interested in liquidating al-Sadr's movement as the United
States is -- once Washington has modified its plans for a postwar
Iraq.
The worst-case scenario is not likely to happen. The Sunni
guerrillas are not a long-term threat. The Shia are a long-term
threat, but their interests are not in war with the United
States, but in achieving a Shiite-dominated Iraqi state as
quickly as possible -- without giving the United States an
opportunity to double-cross them. Al-Sistani demanded elections
and didn't get them. What he really wants is a different
transition process that gives the Shia more power. After the past
week, he is likely to get it. And Washington will not soon forget
who controls Iraq.
This will pass. But the strategic reality of the U.S. forces in
Iraq is permanent. Those forces are there because of the
sufferance of the Iraqi Shia. The Shia know it, and they want the
Americans to know it. With Washington planning an offensive in
Pakistan, the last thing it needs is to pump more forces into
Iraq. In due course, al-Sistani will become helpful, but the
price will be even higher than before.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
......................................................................
Geopolitical Diary: Tuesday, April 13, 2004
A tenuous cease-fire between U.S. forces and Sunni militants in Al Fallujah more or less held April 12, and Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army pulled out of police stations in An Najaf, Karbala and Kufa. The slight reduction in clashes resulted from a series of bilateral negotiations -- arranged by members of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and other civic and religious organizations -- between the coalition forces and various Sunni and Shiite factions in Iraq.
For the United States, the respite is welcome after a week of intense
clashes across the country that appeared to be headed toward plunging the U.S. Iraq strategy into an abyss. But short-term solutions to the recently intensified fighting could have longer-term repercussions for U.S.
strategy -- an uncertainty Washington appears more willing to live with than the near certainty of chaos that was evolving last week.
For Washington, sending a clear, strong message to the militants in Al
Fallujah took a back seat to dealing with the rising of Shiite forces under
the leadership of al-Sadr. U.S. Marines last week surrounded Al Fallujah and were prepared to hunt down and kill those responsible for the late March deaths and mutilations of four U.S. civilian contractors. The message was to be clear and unmistakable: Such actions were unacceptable and anyone participating in them -- or sheltering those who participated -- would be punished to the maximum.
Just before U.S. forces moved into the city, clashes erupted elsewhere in
Iraq between al-Sadr's Mehdi Army and coalition forces. While the Al
Fallujah operation began, it was with a wary eye toward the larger threat of an apparent uprising among the Shia. In both cases, the U.S. military -- restricted by existing troop deployments and rules of engagement calling for minimal civilian casualties -- decided to call cease-fires and negotiate.
As Stratfor mentioned previously, the negotiations with the Sunnis -- via a
member of the IGC -- were a new step for the coalition, which had treated the Sunni militants as loosely organized bands of thugs with some foreign jihadists thrown in, not as a cohesive political-military entity with which it could negotiate. Even with the start of negotiations, it is not clear
that there is a cohesive unit representing the Sunni militants, much less
all of Iraq's minority Sunni population.
The point of negotiations is not so much to end all fighting with Sunni
militants -- no one expects that to happen anytime soon -- as to bring a
pause in the current fighting and to give the coalition forces a chance to
reassess the situation, particularly regarding al-Sadr and Grand Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani. U.S. forces could not afford to face down the militants in
Al Fallujah and all of Iraq's Shia if they had risen up over the weekend.
The trickle of signs that Shiite and Sunni forces were joining -- at least
on a neighborhood level in some areas of the country -- presented a serious potential challenge to U.S. operations.
Although the short-term need to stem the fighting required negotiations with the Sunnis in Al Fallujah, the message it sends could be counterproductive in the long run. When the Marines began the operation in Al Fallujah, they used a strong show of force, calling in AC-130 gunships, helicopters and an air strike that employed 500-pound bombs. There was a systematic movement of Marines into areas of the city, sweeping buildings and hunting down anyone believed to be linked to militants.
Going partway in and then offering a pause -- for humanitarian or other
reasons -- is likely to be interpreted by foreign jihadists and local Sunni
militants as a sign of weakness on the part of the United States. The
negotiations under way now do not appear to have any element of requiring the people or leaders of Al Fallujah to give up those responsible for the March attack on the U.S. contractors -- one of the stated reasons for the current operation -- nor do they seem to require the surrender of all foreign jihadists.
The message is clear in the city: The United States might threaten and come in hard, but its aversion to civilian casualties -- and to taking casualties of its own -- will leave it weak in the end. As Sun Tzu said in "The Art of War," "One who is at first excessively brutal and then fears the masses is the pinnacle of stupidity." While Sun Tzu was talking about the command of troops, and the U.S. was not "excessively brutal" in its assault on Al Fallujah, the sense is clear. If you are going to make a show of strength, don't follow it with the appearance that you fear the consequences.
While the militants in Al Fallujah could calm down with the involvement of
IGC negotiators, ultimately, the underlying issue has not been resolved.
There is still a city that serves as a haven for anti-coalition forces, and
punishment has not been meted out -- leaving the militants convinced that
the harder they hit the U.S. forces, the more averse the United States will
be to engaging in urban warfare. This could come back to haunt coalition
efforts in the future.
When al-Sadr's forces rose up over the last week, it was clear that he was
counting on U.S. fear to press his case. In October 2003, when his followers clashed with coalition troops, it took only the threat of his arrest to calm him down. This time around, the threat of arrest was taken as a challenge and a rallying cry. There was little belief by al-Sadr and his top team that the U.S. forces would go through with it this time because they did not follow through last time.
Beyond the battlefield, the joint bilateral negotiations have one more
significant impact on U.S. plans for Iraq. The deals being offered to the
Sunni and Shiite factions are being made with a short-term goal in mind: to stem the current flare-up of violence. But when it comes to negotiating the makeup of the transitional government, Washington is unlikely to be able to keep whatever promises it has made to both the Shia and the Sunnis -- rivals for political control of Iraq. That will leave Washington once again in a position where it is unwilling and unable to satisfy all sides -- and a repeat of last week's violence could be in the offing.
-
Woof All:
This one is quite long. I recommend it highly.
Crafty
=================
The Fruits of Appeasement
Victor Davis Hanson
Imagine a different November 4, 1979, in Teheran. Shortly after Iranian terrorists storm the American embassy and take some 90 American hostages, President Jimmy Carter announces that Islamic fundamentalism is not a legitimate response to the excess of the Shah but a new and dangerous fascism that threatens all that liberal society holds dear. And then he issues an ultimatum to Teheran?s leaders: Release the captives or face a devastating military response.
When that demand is not met, instead of freezing Iran?s assets, stopping the importation of its oil, or seeking support at the UN, Carter orders an immediate blockade of the country, followed by promises to bomb, first, all of its major military assets, and then its main government buildings and residences of its ruling mullocracy. The Ayatollah Khomeini may well have called his bluff; we may well have tragically lost the hostages (151 fewer American lives than the Iranian-backed Hezbollah would take four years later in a single day in Lebanon). And there may well have been the sort of chaos in Teheran that we now witness in Baghdad. But we would have seen it all in 1979?and not in 2001, after almost a quarter-century of continuous Middle East terrorism, culminating in the mass murder of 3,000 Americans and the leveling of the World Trade Center.
The twentieth century should have taught the citizens of liberal democracies the catastrophic consequences of placating tyrants. British and French restraint over the occupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the absorption of the Czech Sudetenland, and the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia did not win gratitude but rather Hitler?s contempt for their weakness. Fifty million dead, the Holocaust, and the near destruction of European civilization were the wages of ?appeasement??a term that early-1930s liberals proudly embraced as far more enlightened than the old idea of ?deterrence? and ?military readiness.?
So too did Western excuses for the Russians? violation of guarantees of free elections in postwar Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia only embolden the Soviet Union. What eventually contained Stalinism was the Truman Doctrine, NATO, and nuclear deterrence?not the United Nations?and what destroyed its legacy was Ronald Reagan?s assertiveness, not Jimmy Carter?s accommodation or Richard Nixon?s d?tente.
As long ago as the fourth century b.c., Demosthenes warned how complacency and self-delusion among an affluent and free Athenian people allowed a Macedonian thug like Philip II to end some four centuries of Greek liberty?and in a mere 20 years of creeping aggrandizement down the Greek peninsula. Thereafter, these historical lessons should have been clear to citizens of any liberal society: we must neither presume that comfort and security are our birthrights and are guaranteed without constant sacrifice and vigilance, nor expect that peoples outside the purview of bourgeois liberalism share our commitment to reason, tolerance, and enlightened self-interest.
Most important, military deterrence and the willingness to use force against evil in its infancy usually end up, in the terrible arithmetic of war, saving more lives than they cost. All this can be a hard lesson to relearn each generation, especially now that we contend with the sirens of the mall, Oprah, and latte. Our affluence and leisure are as antithetical to the use of force as rural life and relative poverty once were catalysts for muscular action. The age-old lure of appeasement?perhaps they will cease with this latest concession, perhaps we provoked our enemies, perhaps demonstrations of our future good intentions will win their approval?was never more evident than in the recent Spanish elections, when an affluent European electorate, reeling from the horrific terrorist attack of 3/11, swept from power the pro-U.S. center-right government on the grounds that the mass murders were more the fault of the United States for dragging Spain into the effort to remove fascists and implant democracy in Iraq than of the primordial al-Qaidist culprits, who long ago promised the Western and Christian Iberians ruin for the Crusades and the Reconquista.
What went wrong with the West?and with the United States in particular?when not just the classical but especially the recent antecedents to September 11, from the Iranian hostage-taking to the attack on the USS Cole, were so clear? Though Americans in an election year, legitimately concerned about our war dead, may now be divided over the Iraqi occupation, polls nevertheless show a surprising consensus that the many precursors to the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings were acts of war, not police matters. Roll the tape backward from the USS Cole in 2000, through the bombing of the Khobar Towers and the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the destruction of the American embassy and annex in Beirut in 1983, the mass murder of 241 U.S. Marine peacekeepers asleep in their Lebanese barracks that same year, and assorted kidnappings and gruesome murders of American citizens and diplomats (including TWA Flight 800, Pan Am 103, William R. Higgins, Leon Klinghoffer, Robert Dean Stethem, and CIA operative William Francis Buckley), until we arrive at the Iranian hostage-taking of November 1979: that debacle is where we first saw the strange brew of Islamic fascism, autocracy, and Middle East state terrorism?and failed to grasp its menace, condemn it, and go to war against it.
That lapse, worth meditating upon in this 25th anniversary year of Khomeinism, then set the precedent that such aggression against the United States was better adjudicated as a matter of law than settled by war. Criminals were to be understood, not punished; and we, not our enemies, were at fault for our past behavior. Whether Carter?s impotence sprang from his deep-seated moral distrust of using American power unilaterally or from real remorse over past American actions in the cold war or even from his innate pessimism about the military capability of the United States mattered little to the hostage takers in Teheran, who for some 444 days humiliated the United States through a variety of public demands for changes in U.S. foreign policy, the return of the exiled Shah, and reparations.
But if we know how we failed to respond in the last three decades, do we yet grasp why we were so afraid to act decisively at these earlier junctures, which might have stopped the chain of events that would lead to the al-Qaida terrorist acts of September 11? Our failure was never due to a lack of the necessary wealth or military resources, but rather to a deeply ingrained assumption that we should not retaliate?a hesitancy al-Qaida perceives and plays upon.
Along that sad succession of provocations, we can look back and see particularly critical turning points that reflected this now-institutionalized state policy of worrying more about what the enemy was going to do to us than we to him, to paraphrase Grant?s dictum: not hammering back after the murder of the marines in Lebanon for fear of ending up like the Israelis in a Lebanese quagmire; not going to Baghdad in 1991 because of paranoia that the ?coalition? would collapse and we would polarize the Arabs; pulling abruptly out of Somalia once pictures of American bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu were broadcast around the world; or turning down offers in 1995 from Sudan to place Usama bin Ladin into our custody, for fear that U.S. diplomats or citizens might be murdered abroad.
Throughout this tragic quarter-century of appeasement, our response usually consisted of a stern lecture by a Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, or Bill Clinton about ?never giving in to terrorist blackmail? and ?not negotiating with terrorists.? Even Ronald Reagan?s saber-rattling ?You can run but not hide? did not preclude trading arms to the Iranian terrorists or abruptly abandoning Lebanon after the horrific Hezbollah attack.
Sometimes a half-baked failed rescue mission, or a battleship salvo, cruise missile, or air strike followed?but always accompanied by a weeklong debate by conservatives over ?exit strategies? and ?mission creep,? while liberals fretted about ?consultations with our allies and the United Nations.? And remember: these pathetic military responses were the hawkish actions that earned us the resignation of a furious Cyrus Vance, the abrogation of overflight rights by concerned ?allies? such as France, and a national debate about what we did to cause such animosity in the first place.
Our enemies and Middle Eastern ?friends? alike sneered at our self-flagellation. In 1991, at great risk, the United States freed Kuwait from Iraq and ended its status as the 19th satrapy of Saddam Hussein?only to watch the restored kingdom ethnically cleanse over a third of a million Palestinians. But after the murder of 3,000 Americans in 2001, Kuwaitis, in a February 2002 Gallup poll (and while they lobbied OPEC to reduce output and jack up prices), revealed an overwhelming distaste for Americans?indeed the highest levels of anti-Americanism in the Arab world. And these ethnic cleansers of Palestinians cited America?s purportedly unfair treatment of the Palestinians (recipients of accumulated billions in American aid) as a prime cause of their dislike of us.
In the face of such visceral anti-Americanism, the problem may not be real differences over the West Bank, much less that ?we are not getting the message out?; rather, in the decade since 1991 the Middle East saw us as a great power that neither could nor would use its strength to advance its ideas?that lacked even the intellectual confidence to argue for our civilization before the likes of a tenth-century monarchy. The autocratic Arab world neither respects nor fears a democratic United States, because it rightly senses that we often talk in principled terms but rarely are willing to invest the time, blood, and treasure to match such rhetoric with concrete action. That?s why it is crucial for us to stay in Iraq to finish the reconstruction and cement the achievement of our three-week victory over Saddam.
It is easy to cite post-Vietnam guilt and shame as the likely culprit for our paralysis. After all, Jimmy Carter came in when memories of capsizing boat people and of American helicopters lifting swarms of panicked diplomats off the roof of the Saigon embassy were fresh. In 1980, he exited in greater shame: his effusive protestations that Soviet communism wasn?t something to fear all that much won him the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, while his heralded ?human rights? campaign was answered by the Ortegas in Nicaragua and the creation of a murderous theocracy in Iran. Yet perhaps President Carter was not taking the American people anywhere they didn?t want to go. After over a decade of prior social unrest and national humiliation in Vietnam, many Americans believed that the United States either could not or should not do much about things beyond its shores.
As time wore on and the nightmare of Vietnam began to fade, fear of the Soviet Union kept us from crushing the terrorists who killed our diplomats and blew up our citizens. These were no idle fears, given the Russians? record of butchering 30 million of their own, stationing 300 divisions on Europe?s borders, and pointing 7,000 nukes at the United States. And fear of their malevolence made eminent sense in the volatile Middle East, where the Russians made direct threats to the Israelis in both the 1967 and 1973 wars, when the Syrian, Egyptian, and Iraqi militaries?trained, supplied, and advised by Russians?were on the verge of annihilation. Russian support for Nasser?s Pan-Arabism and for Baathism in Iraq and Syria rightly worried cold warriors, who sensed that the Soviets had their geopolitical eyes on Middle East oil and a stranglehold over Persian Gulf commerce.
Indeed, these twin pillars of the old American Middle East policy?worry over oil and fear of communists?reigned for nearly half a century, between 1945 and 1991. Such realism, however understandable, was counterproductive in the long run, since our tacit support for odious anti-communist governments in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and North Africa did not address the failure of such autocracies to provide prosperity and hope for exploding populations of increasingly poor and angry citizens. We kept Russians out of the oil fields and ensured safe exports of petroleum to Europe, Japan, and the United States?but at what proved to be the steep price of allowing awful regimes to deflect popular discontent against us.
Nor was realpolitik always effective. Such illegitimate Arab regimes as the Saudi royal family initiated several oil embargoes, after all. And meanwhile, such a policy did not deter the Soviets from busily selling high-tech weaponry to Libya, Syria, and Iraq, while the KGB helped to train and fund almost every Arab terrorist group. And indeed, immediately after the 1991 Iraqi takeover of Kuwait, U.S. intelligence officers discovered that Soviet-trained Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and Abu Ibrahim had flocked to Baghdad on the invitation of the Baathist Saddam Hussein: though the Soviet Union did not interrupt Western petroleum commerce, its well-supplied surrogates did their fair share of murdering.
Neither thirst for petroleum nor fear of communists, then, adequately explains our inaction for most of the tumultuous late 1980s and 1990s, when groups like Hezbollah and al-Qaida came on to the world scene. Gorbachev?s tottering empire had little inclination to object too strenuously when the United States hit Libya in 1986, recall, and thanks to the growing diversity and fungibility of the global oil supply, we haven?t had a full-fledged Arab embargo since 1979.
Instead, the primary cause for our surprising indifference to the events leading up to September 11 lies within ourselves. Westerners always have had a propensity for complacency because of our wealth and freedom; and Americans in particular have enjoyed a comfortable isolation in being separated from the rest of the world by two oceans. Yet during the last four presidential administrations, laxity about danger on the horizon seems to have become more ingrained than in the days when a more robust United States sought to thwart communist intrusion into Arabia, Asia, and Africa.
Americans never viewed terrorist outlaw states with the suspicion they once had toward Soviet communism; they put little pressure on their leaders to crack down on Middle Eastern autocracy and theocracy as a threat to security. At first this indifference was understandable, given the stealthy nature of our enemies and the post?cold war relief that, having toppled the Soviet Union and freed millions in Eastern Europe, we might be at the end of history. Even the bloodcurdling anti-American shouts from the Beirut street did not seem as scary as a procession of intercontinental missiles and tanks on an average May Day parade in Moscow.
Hezbollah, al-Qaida, and the PLO were more like fleas on a sleeping dog: bothersome rather than lethal; to be flicked away occasionally rather than systematically eradicated. Few paid attention to Usama bin Ladin?s infamous February 1998 fatwa: ?The rule to kill Americans and their allies?civilians and military?is a sacred duty for any Muslim.? Those who noticed thought it just impotent craziness, akin to Sartre?s fatuous quip during the Vietnam War that he wished for a nuclear strike against the United States to end its imperial aspirations. No one thought that a raving maniac in an Afghan cave could kill more Americans in a single day than the planes of the Japanese imperial fleet off Pearl Harbor.
But still, how did things as odious to liberal sensibilities as Pan-Arabism, Islamic fundamentalism, and Middle Eastern dictatorship?which squashed dissent, mocked religious tolerance, and treated women as chattel?become reinvented into ?alternate discourses? deserving a sympathetic pass from the righteous anger of the United States when Americans were murdered overseas? Was it that spokesmen for terrorist regimes mimicked the American Left?in everything from dress, vocabulary, and appearances on the lecture circuit?and so packaged their extremism in a manner palatable to Americans? Why, after all, were Americans patient with remonstrations from University of Virginia alumna Hanan Ashrawi, rather than asking precisely how such a wealthy Christian PLO apparatchik really felt about the Palestinian Authority?s endemic corruption, the spendthrift Parisian Mrs. Arafat, the terrorists around Arafat himself, the spate of ?honor killings? of women in the West Bank, the censorship of the Palestinian press, suicide murdering by Arafat affiliates, and the lynching of suspects by Palestinian police?
Rather than springing from realpolitik, sloth, or fear of oil cutoffs, much of our appeasement of Middle Eastern terrorists derived from a new sort of anti-Americanism that thrived in the growing therapeutic society of the 1980s and 1990s. Though the abrupt collapse of communism was a dilemma for the Left, it opened as many doors as it shut. To be sure, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, few Marxists could argue for a state-controlled economy or mouth the old romance about a workers? paradise?not with scenes of East German families crammed into smoking clunkers lumbering over potholed roads, like American pioneers of old on their way west. But if the creed of the socialist republics was impossible to take seriously in either economic or political terms, such a collapse of doctrinaire statism did not discredit the gospel of forced egalitarianism and resentment against prosperous capitalists. Far from it.
If Marx receded from economics departments, his spirit reemerged among our intelligentsia in the novel guises of post-structuralism, new historicism, multiculturalism, and all the other dogmas whose fundamental tenet was that white male capitalists had systematically oppressed women, minorities, and Third World people in countless insidious ways. The font of that collective oppression, both at home and abroad, was the rich, corporate, Republican, and white United States.
The fall of the Soviet Union enhanced these newer post-colonial and liberation fields of study by immunizing their promulgators from charges of fellow-traveling or being dupes of Russian expansionism. Communism?s demise likewise freed these trendy ideologies from having to offer some wooden, unworkable Marxist alternative to the West; thus they could happily remain entirely critical, sarcastic, and cynical without any obligation to suggest something better, as witness the nihilist signs at recent protest marches proclaiming: ?I Love Iraq, Bomb Texas.?
From writers like Arundhati Roy and Michel Foucault (who anointed Khomeini ?a kind of mystic saint? who would usher in a new ?political spirituality? that would ?transfigure? the world) and from old standbys like Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre (?to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time?), there filtered down a vague notion that the United States and the West in general were responsible for Third World misery in ways that transcended the dull old class struggle. Endemic racism and the legacy of colonialism, the oppressive multinational corporation and the humiliation and erosion of indigenous culture brought on by globalization and a smug, self-important cultural condescension?all this and more explained poverty and despair, whether in Damascus, Teheran, or Beirut.
There was victim status for everybody, from gender, race, and class at home to colonialism, imperialism, and hegemony abroad. Anyone could play in these ?area studies? that cobbled together the barrio, the West Bank, and the ?freedom fighter? into some sloppy global union of the oppressed?a far hipper enterprise than rehashing Das Kapital or listening to a six-hour harangue from Fidel.
Of course, pampered Western intellectuals since Diderot have always dreamed up a ?noble savage,? who lived in harmony with nature precisely because of his distance from the corruption of Western civilization. But now this fuzzy romanticism had an updated, political edge: the bearded killer and wild-eyed savage were not merely better than we because they lived apart in a pre-modern landscape. No: they had a right to strike back and kill modernizing Westerners who had intruded into and disrupted their better world?whether Jews on Temple Mount, women in Westernized dress in Teheran, Christian missionaries in Kabul, capitalist profiteers in Islamabad, whiskey-drinking oilmen in Riyadh, or miniskirted tourists in Cairo.
An Ayatollah Khomeini who turned back the clock on female emancipation in Iran, who murdered non-Muslims, and who refashioned Iranian state policy to hunt down, torture, and kill liberals nevertheless seemed to liberal Western eyes as preferable to the Shah?a Western-supported anti-communist, after all, who was engaged in the messy, often corrupt task of bringing Iran from the tenth to the twentieth century, down the arduous, dangerous path that, as in Taiwan or South Korea, might eventually lead to a consensual, capitalist society like our own.
Yet in the new world of utopian multiculturalism and knee-jerk anti-Americanism, in which a Noam Chomsky could proclaim Khomeini?s gulag to be ?independent nationalism,? reasoned argument was futile. Indeed, how could critical debate arise for those ?committed to social change,? when no universal standards were to be applied to those outside the West? Thanks to the doctrine of cultural relativism, ?oppressed? peoples either could not be judged by our biased and ?constructed? values (?false universals,? in Edward Said?s infamous term) or were seen as more pristine than ourselves, uncorrupted by the evils of Western capitalism.
Who were we to gainsay Khomeini?s butchery and oppression? We had no way of understanding the nuances of his new liberationist and ?nationalist? Islam. Now back in the hands of indigenous peoples, Iran might offer the world an alternate path, a different ?discourse? about how to organize a society that emphasized native values (of some sort) over mere profit.
So at precisely the time of these increasingly frequent terrorist attacks, the silly gospel of multiculturalism insisted that Westerners have neither earned the right to censure others, nor do they possess the intellectual tools to make judgments about the relative value of different cultures. And if the initial wave of multiculturalist relativism among the elites?coupled with the age-old romantic forbearance for Third World roguery?explained tolerance for early unpunished attacks on Americans, its spread to our popular culture only encouraged more.
This nonjudgmentalism?essentially a form of nihilism?deemed everything from Sudanese female circumcision to honor killings on the West Bank merely ?different? rather than odious. Anyone who has taught freshmen at a state university can sense the fuzzy thinking of our undergraduates: most come to us prepped in high schools not to make ?value judgments? about ?other? peoples who are often ?victims? of American ?oppression.? Thus, before female-hating psychopath Mohamed Atta piloted a jet into the World Trade Center, neither Western intellectuals nor their students would have taken him to task for what he said or condemned him as hypocritical for his parasitical existence on Western society. Instead, without logic but with plenty of romance, they would more likely have excused him as a victim of globalization or of the biases of American foreign policy. They would have deconstructed Atta?s promotion of anti-Semitic, misogynist, Western-hating thought, as well as his conspiracies with Third World criminals, as anything but a danger and a pathology to be remedied by deportation or incarceration.
It was not for nothing that on November 17, 1979?less than two weeks after the militants stormed the American embassy in Teheran?the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the release of 13 female and black hostages, singling them out as part of the brotherhood of those oppressed by the United States and cloaking his ongoing slaughter of Iranian opponents and attacks on United States sovereignty in a self-righteous anti-Americanism. Twenty-five years later, during the anti-war protests of last spring, a group called ?Act Now to Stop War and End Racism? sang the same foolish chorus in its call for demonstrations: ?Members of the Muslim Community, Antiwar Activists, Latin-American Solidarity Groups and People From All Over the United States Unite to Say: ?We Are All Palestinians!? ?
The new cult of romantic victimhood became gospel in most Middle East departments in American universities. Except for the courageous Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, and Fouad Ajami, few scholars offered any analysis that might confirm more astute Americans in their vague sense that in the Middle East, political autocracy, statism, tribalism, anti-intellectualism, and gender apartheid accounted for poverty and failure. And if few wished to take on Islamofascism in the 1990s?indeed, Steven Emerson?s chilling 1994 documentary Jihad in America set off a storm of protest from U.S. Muslim-rights groups and prompted death threats to the producer?almost no one but Samuel Huntington dared even to broach the taboo subject that there might be elements within doctrinaire Islam itself that could easily lead to intolerance and violence and were therefore at the root of any ?clash of civilizations.?
Instead, most experts explained why violent fanatics might have some half-legitimate grievance behind their deadly harvest each year of a few Americans in the wrong place at the wrong time. These experts cautioned that, instead of bombing and shooting killers abroad who otherwise would eventually reach us at home, Americans should take care not to disturb Iranian terrorists during Ramadan?rather than to remember that Muslims attacked Israel precisely during that holy period. Instead of condemning Wahhabis for the fascists that they were, we were instead apprised that such holy men of the desert and tent provided a rapidly changing and often Western-corrupted Saudi Arabia with a vital tether to the stability of its romantic nomadic past. Rather than recognizing that Yasser Arafat?s Tunisia-based Fatah organization was a crime syndicate, expert opinion persuaded us to empower it as an indigenous liberation movement on the West Bank?only to destroy nearly two decades? worth of steady Palestinian economic improvement.
Neither oil-concerned Republicans nor multicultural Democrats were ready to expose the corrupt American relationship with Saudi Arabia. No country is more culpable than that kingdom in funding extremist madrassas and subsidizing terror, or more antithetical to liberal American values from free speech to religious tolerance. But Saudi propagandists learned from the Palestinians the value of constructing their own victimhood as a long-oppressed colonial people. Call a Saudi fundamentalist mullah a fascist, and you can be sure you?ll be tarred as an Islamophobe.
Even when Middle Easterners regularly blew us up, the Clinton administration, unwilling to challenge the new myth of Muslim victimhood, transformed Middle Eastern terrorists bent on destroying America into wayward individual criminals who did not spring from a pathological culture. Thus, Clinton treated the first World Trade Center bombing as only a criminal justice matter?which of course allowed the United States to avoid confronting the issue and taking on the messy and increasingly unpopular business the Bush administration has been engaged in since September 11. Clinton dispatched FBI agents, not soldiers, to Yemen and Saudi Arabia after the attacks on the USS Cole and the Khobar Towers. Yasser Arafat, responsible in the 1970s for the murder of a U.S. diplomat in the Sudan, turned out to be the most frequent foreign visitor to the Clinton Oval Office.
If the Clintonian brand of appeasement reflected both a deep-seated tolerance for Middle Eastern extremism and a reluctance to wake comfortable Americans up to the danger of a looming war, he was not the only one naive about the threat of Islamic fascism. Especially culpable was the Democratic Party at large, whose post-Vietnam foreign policy could not sanction the use of American armed force to protect national interests but only to accomplish purely humanitarian ends as in the interventions in Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia.
Indeed, the recent Democratic primaries reveal just how far this disturbing trend has evolved: the foreign-policy positions of John Kerry and Howard Dean on Iraq and the Middle East were far closer to those of extremists like Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich than to current American policy under George W. Bush. Indeed, buffoons or conspiracy theorists like Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and Al Franken often turned up on the same stage as would-be presidents. When Moore, while endorsing Wesley Clark, called an American president at a time of war a ?deserter,? when the mendacious Sharpton lectured his smiling fellow candidates on the Bush administration?s ?lies? about Iraq, and when Al Gore labeled the president?s action in Iraq a ?betrayal? of America, the surrender of the mainstream Democrats to the sirens of extremism was complete. Again, past decorum and moderation go out the window when the pretext is saving indigenous peoples from American oppression.
The consensus for appeasement that led to September 11, albeit suppressed for nearly two years by outrage over the murder of 3,000, has reemerged in criticism over the ongoing reconstruction of Iraq and George Bush?s prosecution of the War on Terror.
The tired voices that predicted a litany of horrors in October 2001?the impassable peaks of Afghanistan, millions of refugees, endemic starvation, revolution in the Arab street, and violations of Ramadan?now complain, incorrectly, that 150,000 looted art treasures were the cost of guarding the Iraqi oil ministry, that Halliburton pipelines and refineries were the sole reason to remove Saddam Hussein, and that Christian fundamentalists and fifth-columnist neoconservatives have fomented a senseless revenge plot against Muslims and Arabs. Whether they complained before March 2003 that America faced death and ruin against Saddam?s Republican Guard, or two months later that in bullying fashion we had walked over a suddenly impotent enemy, or three months later still that, through incompetence, we were taking casualties and failing to get the power back on, leftist critics? only constant was their predictable dislike of America.
Military historians might argue that, given the enormity of our task in Iraq?liberating 26 million from a tyrant and implanting democracy in the region?the tragic loss of more than 500 Americans in a year?s war and peace was a remarkable sign of our care and expertise in minimizing deaths. Diplomats might argue that our past efforts at humanitarian reconstruction, with some idealistic commitment to consensual government, have a far better track record in Germany, Japan, Korea, Panama, and Serbia than our strategy of exiting Germany after World War I, of leaving Iraq to Saddam after 1991, of abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban once the Russians were stopped, of skipping out from Haiti or of fleeing Somalia. Realist students of arms control might argue that the recent confessions of Pakistan?s nuclear roguery, the surrender of the Libyan arsenal, and the invitation of the UN inspectors into Iran were the dividends of resolute American action in Iraq. Colonel Khadafy surely came clean not because of Jimmy Carter?s peace missions, UN resolutions, or EU diplomats.
But don?t expect any sober discussion of these contentions from the Left. Their gloom and doom about Iraq arises precisely from the anti-Americanism and romanticization of the Third World that once led to our appeasement and now seeks its return. When John Kerry talks of mysterious prominent Europeans he has met (but whose names he will not divulge) who, he says, pray for his election in hopes of ending George Bush?s Iraqi nightmare, perhaps he has in mind people like the Chamberlainesque European Commission president Romano Prodi, who said in the wake of the recent mass murder in Spain: ?Clearly, the conflict with the terrorists is not resolved with force alone.? Perhaps he has in mind, also, the Spanish electorate, which believes it can find security from al-Qaida terrorism by refuting all its past support for America?s role in the Middle East. But of course if the terrorists understand that, in lieu of resolve, they will find such appeasement a mere 48 hours after a terrorist attack, then all previously resolute Western democracies?Italy, Poland, Britain, and the United States?should expect the terrorists to murder their citizens on the election eve in hopes of achieving just such a Spanish-style capitulation.
In contrast, George W. Bush, impervious to such self-deception, has, in a mere two and a half years, reversed the perilous course of a quarter-century. Since September 11, he has removed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, begun to challenge the Middle East through support for consensual government, isolated Yasser Arafat, pressured the Europeans on everything from anti-Semitism to their largesse to Hamas, removed American troops from Saudi Arabia, shut down fascistic Islamic ?charities,? scattered al-Qaida, turned Pakistan from a de facto foe to a scrutinized neutral, rounded up terrorists in the United States, pressured Libya, Iran, and Pakistan to come clean on clandestine nuclear cheating, so far avoided another September 11?and promises that he is not nearly done yet. If the Spanish example presages further terrorist attacks on European democracies at election time, at least Mr. Bush has made it clear that America?alone if need be?will neither appease nor ignore such killers but in fact finish the terrible war that they started.
As Jimmy Carter also proved in November 1979, one man really can make a difference.
-
April 18, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Kicking Over the Chessboard
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
At first, I thought I'd write a column that just ripped President Bush
for declaring that the United States ? after decades of neutrality ? has
decided to oppose the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel as
part of any final peace settlement. Why is the president dragging America
into the middle of this most sensitive Israeli-Palestinian issue? You're
telling me that just because Ariel Sharon has to persuade the right-wing
lunatics in his cabinet to undo the lunatic settlement mess that Mr. Sharon
himself created, America has to pay for it with its own standing in the Arab
world?
And while I was at it, I also thought I'd write that it is an
abomination for Mr. Bush to say that Palestinians had to recognize "the new
realities on the ground" in the West Bank ? the massive Israeli settlement
blocks ? without even mentioning the fact that those "new realities" were
built in defiance of stated U.S. policy and they have been just devastating
to Palestinian civilians, who've seen their lands confiscated, olive groves
uprooted and community fragmented.
But then I thought I also had to write to the Arab leaders wailing
over the Bush statements and ask them a simple question: Where have you
been? Saudi Arabia's crown prince comes up with one peace plan, one time,
for one day. That was it. There's been no follow-up ? not a single
imaginative, or even pedestrian, Saudi, Arab or Palestinian initiative to
sell this peace plan to the Israeli people. And what did the Palestinians
think? That years of insane suicide bombing of Israelis wouldn't drive
Israel to act unilaterally?
But after I got all these prospective columns off my chest, I decided
what I really wanted to say was this: I'm fed up with the Middle East, or
more accurately, I'm fed up with the stalemate in the Middle East. All it
has produced is death, destruction and endless "he hit me first" debates on
cable television. Arabs, Israelis, Americans ? everyone is sick of it.
So now President Bush has stepped in and thrown the whole frozen
Middle East chessboard up in the air. I don't like his style, but it's done.
The status quo was no better. So, frankly, now I'm only interested in three
things:
First, will Mr. Sharon win the backing of his right-wing coalition for
his Gaza withdrawal plan ? which has set off the biggest ideological split
in the Jewish right since Camp David? If Mr. Sharon really does split his
party and manages to withdraw all Israeli settlements and forces from Gaza,
there will only be a far right in Israel and a far left, and a huge center ?
which is what stable, sane politics requires. That would be a sea change in
Israeli politics. Israelis will prove to themselves and to the Arabs that
they can, under the right conditions, break the grip of the settlers. The
Arabs will never again be able to say: "Why should we do anything? Israel
will never leave the settlements anyway." Moreover, Israel will very likely
have to form a national unity government ? of Labor and Likud ? to pull this
off, and only such a coalition could reach a negotiated final peace with the
Palestinians.
Second, will the Bush team make sure that Mr. Sharon, or his
successor, fully withdraws from Gaza as promised? The Bush folks are experts
at throwing up chessboards and then leaving the room, with the pieces
bouncing all over the floor, and not doing the follow-up (see Iraq) because
it interferes with their domestic political agenda. Having given up real
U.S. negotiating assets to get Mr. Sharon to move, if Mr. Bush turns a blind
eye to any Sharon stalling, U.S. interests will be badly damaged.
Finally, if Mr. Sharon does pull out of Gaza, the Palestinians will
have a chance to reposition themselves in the eyes of Israelis. They will
have a chance to build a decent ministate of their own in Gaza that will
prove to Israelis they can live in peace next to Israel. It will be hard and
they will need help. Gaza is dirt poor. But if the Palestinians show they
can build a decent state, it will do more to persuade Israelis to give up
more of the West Bank, or swap land there for parts of Israel, than any Bush
statements or Hamas terror. This is the best chance Palestinians have ever
had to run their own house without the Israelis around. I wish them well,
because if they do well, everything will be on the table.
This is a real crisis for all parties. And as Paul Romer, the Stanford
economist, remarked to me the other day about a different issue: "A crisis
is a terrible thing to waste."
NY TIMES ONLINE
-
I respect Friedman and enjoy reading his pieces, but in a couple of ways I found this one wide of the mark.
The "right of return" has been a non-starter for a long, long time and even more so now. With the murderous frenzy of the killer bombers, ever growing since Arafat rejected a fine peace offer and started the most recent Intifada, the Israelis would have to be insane to consider such a thing.
As for the settlements, the first thing to be noted is that when Egypt gave peace, it got the Sinai back. For a long time after the 1973 War, Israel wanted to do the same with the West Bank but, well, we see what they have been dealing with.
Question: Why is the West Bank no longer part of Jordan? Why do most people not even know that it was?
Marc
-
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
22 April 2004
The Al Fallujah Cease-Fire and the Three-Way Game
Summary
U.S. forces have reached a written cease-fire agreement with Sunni guerrillas operating in Al Fallujah. More than ending -- or at least suspending -- the battles in Al Fallujah, the cease-fire has turned the political situation in Iraq on its head, with the United States now positioned strategically between the majority Shia and the Sunni insurgents.
Analysis
The United States and the Sunni guerrillas in Iraq agreed to an extended cease-fire in Al Fallujah on April 19. Most media treated the news as important. It was, in fact, extraordinary. The fact that either force -- U.S. or Iraqi -- would have considered negotiating with the other represents an astounding evolution on both sides. For the first time in the guerrilla war, the United States and the guerrillas went down what a Marine general referred to as a "political track." That a political track has emerged between these two adversaries represents a stunning evolution. Even if it goes no further -- and even if the cease-fire in Al Fallujah collapses -- it represents a massive shift in policy on both sides.
To be precise, the document that was signed April 19 was between U.S. military forces and civilian leaders in the city. That distinction having been made, it is clear that the civilian leaders were authorized by the guerrillas to negotiate a cease- fire. The proof of that can be found in the fact that the leaders are still alive and were not executed by the guerrillas for betraying the purity of their cause. It is also clear that the Americans believe these leaders speak for the guerrillas in some definitive way; otherwise, there would have been no point to the negotiations. Thus the distinction between civilian and guerrilla in Al Fallujah is not entirely meaningful.
The willingness of the United States to negotiate with the guerrillas is the most significant evolution. If we recall the U.S. view of the guerrilla movement in May and June 2003, the official position was that there was no guerrilla movement, that there were only the uncoordinated remnants of the old regime, bandits and renegades. The idea of negotiating anything with this group was inconceivable for both ideological and practical reasons. A group as uncoordinated as Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld portrayed them could not negotiate -- or be negotiated with -- under any circumstances. We believed then that the Sunni guerrillas were an organized movement preplanned by the Iraqis, and we believe now -- obviously -- that their organization has improved over time. It has certainly become an army that can be addressed as a cohesive entity and negotiated with.
More important is the fact that both sides felt constrained -- at least in this limited circumstance -- to negotiate. In that sense, each side was defeated by the other. The United States conceded that it could not unilaterally impose its will on Al Fallujah. There are political and military reasons for this. Politically, the collateral damage of house-to-house fighting would have had significant political consequences for Iraq, the alliance and the United States. The guerrillas could not have been defeated without a significant number of civilian casualties. Militarily, the United States has no desire to engage in urban combat. Casualties among U.S. troops would have been high, and the forces doing the fighting would have been exhausted. At a time of substantial troop shortages, the level of effort needed to pacify Al Fallujah would have represented a substantial burden. The guerrillas had posed a politico-military problem that could not readily be solved unilaterally.
It was also a defeat for the guerrillas. Their political position has been unalterable opposition to the United States, and an uncompromising struggle to defeat the Americans. They have presented themselves not only as ready to die, but also as representing an Iraq that was ready to die with them. At the very least, it is clear that the citizens of Al Fallujah were ready neither to die nor to endure the siege the United States was prepared to impose. At most, the guerrillas themselves, trapped inside Al Fallujah, chose to negotiate an exit, even if it meant surrendering heavy weapons -- including machine guns -- and even if it meant that they could no longer use Al Fallujah as a battleground. Whether it was the civilians or the guerrillas that drove for settlement, someone settled -- and the settlement included the guerrillas.
The behavior of the guerrillas indicates to us that their numbers and resources are not as deep as it might appear. The guerrillas are not cowards. Cowards don't take on U.S. Marines. Forcing the United States into house-to-house fighting would have been logical -- unless the guerrillas in Al Fallujah represented a substantial proportion of the guerrilla fighting force and had to be retained. If that were the case, it would indicate that the guerrillas are afraid of battles of annihilation that they cannot recover from. Obviously, there is strong anti-American feeling in Iraq, but the difference between throwing a rock or a grenade and carrying out the effective, coordinated warfare of the professional guerrilla is training. Enthusiasm does not create soldiers. Training takes time and secure bases. It is likely that the guerrillas have neither, so -- with substantial forces trapped in Al Fallujah -- they had to negotiate their way out.
In short, both sides have hit a wall of reality. The American belief that there was no guerrilla force -- or that the guerrillas had been crushed in December 2003 -- is simply not true. If the United States wants to crush the guerrillas, U.S. troops will have to go into Al Fallujah and other towns and fight house to house. On the other hand, the guerrilla wish for a rising wave of unrest to break the American will simply has not come true. The forces around Al Fallujah were substantial, were not deterred by political moves and could come in and wipe them out. That was not an acceptable prospect.
Al Fallujah demonstrates three things: First, it demonstrates that under certain circumstances, a political agreement --however limited -- can be negotiated between the United States and the guerrillas. Second, it demonstrates that the United States is aware of the limits of its power and is now open, for the first time, to some sort of political resolution -- even if it means dealing with the guerrillas. Third, it demonstrates that the guerrillas are aware of the limits of their power, and are implicitly prepared for some solution short of complete, immediate victory. The question is where this all goes.
To begin with, it could go nowhere. First, the cease-fire could be a guerrilla trap. As U.S. forces begin the joint patrols with Iraqi police that were agreed to, the guerrillas could hit them, ending the cease-fire. Second, the cease-fire could break down because of a lack of coordination among the guerrillas, dissident groups, or a U.S. decision to use the cease-fire as a cover for penetrating the city and resuming operations. Third, the cease-fire could work in Al Fallujah but not be applied anywhere else. The whole thing could be a flash in the pan. On the other hand, if the Al Fallujah cease-fire holds, a precedent is set that could expand.
In 1973, after the cease-fire in the Arab-Israeli war, Israeli and Egyptian troops held positions too close to each other for comfort. A disengagement was necessary. In what was then an extraordinary event, Israeli and Egyptian military leaders met at a point in the road called Kilometer 101. In face-to-face negotiations, days after guns fell silent in a brutal war, the combatants -- not the politicians -- mediated by the United States, reached a limited technical agreement for disengaging forces in that particular instance, and only in that instance. In our view, the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt were framed at Kilometer 101. If disengagement could be negotiated, the logic held that other things could be negotiated as well.
There were powerful political forces driving toward a settlement as well, and the military imperative was simply the cutting edge. But there are also powerful political forces in Iraq. The United States clearly does not want an interminable civil war in Iraq. The jihadists -- the foreign Islamist militants -- obviously do want that. But the view of the Sunni guerrillas might be different. They have other enemies besides the Americans -- they have the Shia. The Sunnis have as little desire to be dominated by the Shia as the Shia have to be dominated by the Sunnis. In that aversion, there is political opportunity. Unlike the foreign jihadists, the native Sunni guerrillas are not ideologically opposed to negotiating with the Shia -- or the Americans.
The Role of the Shia
The United States has banked heavily on the cooperation of the Shia. It reached agreement with the Shia to allow them a Shiite-dominated government. After the December 2003 suppression of the Sunni guerrillas, Washington cooled a bit on the deal. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani demanded elections, which he knew the Shia would win. Washington insisted on a prefabricated government that limited Shiite power and would frame the new constitution, leading to elections. Al-Sistani suspected that the new constitution would be written so as to deny the Shia what the United States had promised.
Al-Sistani first demanded elections. The United States refused to budge. He then called huge demonstrations. The United States refused to budge. Then Muqtada al-Sadr -- who is either al-Sistani's mortal enemy, his tool or both -- rose up in the south. Al-Sistani was showing the United States that -- without him and the Shia -- the U.S. position in Iraq would become untenable. He made an exceptionally good case. The United States approached al-Sistani urgently to intercede, but -- outstanding negotiator that he is -- al-Sistani refused to budge for several days, during which it appeared that all of Iraq was exploding. Then, he quietly interceded and al-Sadr -- trapped with relatively limited forces, isolated from the Shiite main body and facing the United States -- began to look for a way out. Al-Sistani appeared to have proven his point to the United States: Without the Shia, the United States cannot remain in Iraq. Without al-Sistani, the Shia will become unmanageable.
From al-Sistani's point of view, there was a three-player game in Iraq -- fragments notwithstanding -- and the Shia were the swing players, with the Sunnis and Americans at each other's throats. In any three-player game, the swing player is in the strongest position. Al-Sistani, able to swing between the Americans and the Sunnis, was the most powerful figure in Iraq. So long as the Americans and Sunnis remained locked in that position, al-Sistani would win.
The Sunnis did not want to see a Shiite-dominated Iraq. So long as al-Sistani was talking to the Americans and they were not, the choice was between a long, difficult, uncertain war and capitulation. The Sunnis had to change the terms of the game. What they signaled to al-Sistani was that if he continued to negotiate with the United States and not throw in with the guerrillas, they would have no choice but to open a line of communication with the Americans as well. Al Fallujah proved not only that they would -- but more importantly -- that they could.
From the U.S. point of view, the hostility between Sunnis and Shia is the bedrock of the occupation. They cannot permit the two players to unite against them. Nor can they allow the Shia to become too powerful or for the Americans to become their prisoners. While al-Sistani was coolly playing his hand, it became clear to the Americans that they needed additional options. Otherwise, the only two outcomes they faced here were a Sunni-Shiite alliance against them or becoming the prisoner of the Shia.
By opening negotiations with the Sunnis, the Americans sent a stunning message to the Shia: The idea of negotiation with the Sunnis is not out of the question. In fact, by completing the cease-fire agreement before agreement was reached over al-Sadr's forces in An Najaf, the United States pointed out that it was, at the moment, easier to deal with the Sunnis than with the Shia. This increased pressure on al-Sistani, who saw for the first time a small indicator that his position was not as unassailably powerful as he thought.
The New Swing Player
The Al Fallujah cease-fire has started -- emphasis on "started" -- a process whereby the United States moves to become the swing player, balancing between Sunnis and Shia. Having reached out to the Sunnis to isolate the Americans and make them more forthcoming, the Shia now face the possibility of "arrangements" -- not agreements, not treaties, not a settlement -- between U.S. and Sunni forces that put realities in place, out of which broader understandings might gradually emerge.
In the end, the United States has limited interest in Iraq, but the Iraqis -- Sunnis and Shia alike -- are not going anywhere. They are going to have to deal with each other, although they do not trust each other -- and with good reason. Neither trusts the United States, but the United States will eventually leave. In the meantime, the United States could be exceedingly useful in cementing Sunni or Shiite power over each other. Neither side wants to wind up dominated by the other. Neither wants the Americans to stay in Iraq permanently, but the United States does not want to stay permanently either. A few years hardly makes a major difference in an area where history is measured in millennia.
The simple assumption is that most Iraqis want the Americans out. That is a true statement, but not a sufficient one. A truer statement is this: Most Iraqis want the Americans out, but are extremely interested in what happens after they leave. Given that, the proper statement is: Most Iraqis want the Americans out, but are prepared to use the Americans toward their ends while they are there, and want them to leave in a manner that will maximize their own interests in a postwar Iraqi world.
That is the lever that the Americans have, and that they seem to have been playing in the past year. It is a long step down from the days when the Department of Defense skirmished with the State Department about which of them would govern postwar Iraq, on the assumption that those were the only choices. Unpleasant political choices will have to be made in Iraq, but the United States now has a standpoint from which to manipulate the situation and remain in Iraq while it exerts pressure in the region. In the end -- grand ambitions notwithstanding -- that is what the United States came for in the first place.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
Al-Sadr and the Law of Diminishing Returns
April 29, 2004 1712 GMT
Summary
Muqtada al-Sadr's Iran-based mentor appears to be distancing himself from his prot?g?. Chronic chaos in Iraq is highly unpalatable from Iran's perspective, and this move could signal an agreement among Washington, Tehran and Iraqi Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani over the standoff in An Najaf.
Analysis
Muqtada al-Sadr's Iran-based mentor, Grand Ayatollah Kazem Hossein Haeri, no longer supports al-Sadr's uprising against U.S. forces in An Najaf. In an interview with AFP in Qom, Haeri's younger brother, Ayatollah Mohammed Hossein Haeri, said, "For us to approve of the activities of Muqtada al-Sadr, he would need to coordinate with our office in An Najaf, something he has not been doing. Neither Ayatollah Haeri nor any other Iraqi religious leader has declared jihad, so one cannot attack the occupation forces -- unless they attack Iraqis, then they have the right to defend themselves."
This is the first clear statement separating the mainstream Shiite leadership from the actions of al-Sadr, whose forces are engaged in a standoff with U.S. forces in An Najaf.
At its core, the statement signals that the Iranians still want to work with the United States in managing Iraq. This is no small achievement for Washington. Since Iraq's population is majority Shia, any permanent resolution in Iraq will be colored by U.S.-Iranian relations.
Second, the statement makes clear that the portion of the Islamic leadership most tightly affiliated with al-Sadr feels he is overstepping his religious and political bounds. Haeri's statement could mean Iran will try to rein in al-Sadr; if they fail, they will not interfere when the United States moves against him.
Finally, and more speculatively, it is possible that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is nearing an agreement with the United States to defuse the situation in An Najaf. The recent U.S. agreement with the Sunnis of Al Fallujah is likely a key factor pushing al-Sistani's negotiations with Washington. Al-Sistani will not be outflanked by the Sunnis if he can help it, which is exactly why Washington made the Al Fallujah deal in the first place. Iran wants an Iraq that is whole, at peace, Shiite-controlled and Iranian influenced -- not one that resembles the wrong side of the gates of hell. They do, after all, live next door.
The best way to make the 30-year-old al-Sadr simmer down is to send him a blunt message from his mentor -- the same mentor whose backing allowed al-Sadr to advance his position to its current level.
In short, this move demonstrates that Iran -- despite all posturing -- continues to work with the United States to attain its goals of a unified Iraq dominated by its Arab Shiite allies. While Iran and the Iraqi Shia might be able to achieve most of what they had hoped for, the real winner in this latest round is the United States. Sunnis are patrolling Sunnis in Al Fallujah, Iranian Shia are reining in Iraqi Shia, and for the first time in weeks, there is a serious possibility that no major combat will take place anywhere in the country.
=============
Al Fallujah: New Deal More Than a Cease-Fire?
April 29, 2004 1624 GMT
Summary
U.S. Marines announced an agreement to quell the fighting in Al Fallujah. This accord represents not only a cease-fire on the ground, but also a broader willingness by the United States to deal directly with the Sunni insurgents in Iraq at the expense of its alliance with the Shiite majority.
Analysis
U.S. military officials April 29 outlined an accord to end -- at least temporarily -- fighting in Al Fallujah. This is not the first time a cease-fire has been announced during the nearly month-old standoff with Sunni insurgents.
The last cease-fire occurred earlier in April and was the result of the first negotiations between U.S. forces and Sunni insurgents -- albeit through Al Fallujah city officials. Stratfor noted at the time that such talks amounted to the "Great Satan" sitting down and chatting with "terrorists," something that both sides repeatedly had sworn would never happen.
At that point, Stratfor raised the question: "If an agreement can be reached -- and enforced -- in Al Fallujah, then why not in the Sunni Triangle? Why not in Iraq? Why not elsewhere?" We also pointed out that the player who would be most upset -- and isolated -- by the cease-fire would be Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the de facto leader of Iraq's Shiite community. Until that cease-fire, al-Sistani's influence allowed him to play hardball with the United States. The cease-fire raised the possibility that the United States was just as capable of working with the Sunnis as it was with the Shia. If that were to be the case, al-Sistani's currency would plummet.
The United States essentially has agreed in the new accord to cede responsibility for Al Fallujah's security to an all-Iraqi force comprised of soldiers and policemen, and commanded by a former general identified only as "Gen. Salah" -- three generals by that name served under Saddam Hussein -- from the old Iraqi regime. This force, known as the Fallujah Protection Army (FPA), will be wholly responsible for patrolling and securing Al Falljuah, but will remain under the command of the U.S. 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.
The Marines will not wholly abandon Al Fallujah, but will withdraw from the city proper and not engage in cordoning it off. They will remain in the area. The pullout began today with Marines in the city's southern industrial district being told to pack up their gear and disengage. As of this writing, there were no new reports of fighting.
The terms of this deal represent a sea change in the U.S. attitude toward the Sunni insurgency. Not only did the United States not make any substantive demands -- at least publicly -- on the insurgents, but also they appear willing to entrust the fate of the city to an all-Iraqi force commanded by a man who served as a general for Saddam. The deal brings tentative stability to Al Fallujah, but on a much larger scale, it brings another element to the coalition's national strategy in Iraq.
From the U.S. point of view -- and more importantly, al-Sistani's -- this is much more than a cease-fire. This agreement with Sunni insurgents comes at a time when U.S. forces are poised to strike into An Najaf in order to root out rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
The Sunnis remain a force to be reckoned with, but a deal is done that has a strong prognosis. The only way it would seem it could break down in the next few days is if the Al Fallujah insurgents are feeling extremely frisky in large numbers -- and decide to charge across open ground to engage dug-in U.S. Marines.
The Shia, however, are faced with a United States that not only has freed a military hand to employ elsewhere, but also feels secure enough to trust a Sunni force to patrol a Sunni city that has displayed a tendency, even a desire, to kill Americans. Such a state of affairs forces al-Sistani to seriously reassess his position.
====================
Al Fallujah: New Deal More Than a Cease-Fire?
April 29, 2004 1624 GMT
Summary
U.S. Marines announced an agreement to quell the fighting in Al Fallujah. This accord represents not only a cease-fire on the ground, but also a broader willingness by the United States to deal directly with the Sunni insurgents in Iraq at the expense of its alliance with the Shiite majority.
Analysis
U.S. military officials April 29 outlined an accord to end -- at least temporarily -- fighting in Al Fallujah. This is not the first time a cease-fire has been announced during the nearly month-old standoff with Sunni insurgents.
The last cease-fire occurred earlier in April and was the result of the first negotiations between U.S. forces and Sunni insurgents -- albeit through Al Fallujah city officials. Stratfor noted at the time that such talks amounted to the "Great Satan" sitting down and chatting with "terrorists," something that both sides repeatedly had sworn would never happen.
At that point, Stratfor raised the question: "If an agreement can be reached -- and enforced -- in Al Fallujah, then why not in the Sunni Triangle? Why not in Iraq? Why not elsewhere?" We also pointed out that the player who would be most upset -- and isolated -- by the cease-fire would be Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the de facto leader of Iraq's Shiite community. Until that cease-fire, al-Sistani's influence allowed him to play hardball with the United States. The cease-fire raised the possibility that the United States was just as capable of working with the Sunnis as it was with the Shia. If that were to be the case, al-Sistani's currency would plummet.
The United States essentially has agreed in the new accord to cede responsibility for Al Fallujah's security to an all-Iraqi force comprised of soldiers and policemen, and commanded by a former general identified only as "Gen. Salah" -- three generals by that name served under Saddam Hussein -- from the old Iraqi regime. This force, known as the Fallujah Protection Army (FPA), will be wholly responsible for patrolling and securing Al Falljuah, but will remain under the command of the U.S. 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.
The Marines will not wholly abandon Al Fallujah, but will withdraw from the city proper and not engage in cordoning it off. They will remain in the area. The pullout began today with Marines in the city's southern industrial district being told to pack up their gear and disengage. As of this writing, there were no new reports of fighting.
The terms of this deal represent a sea change in the U.S. attitude toward the Sunni insurgency. Not only did the United States not make any substantive demands -- at least publicly -- on the insurgents, but also they appear willing to entrust the fate of the city to an all-Iraqi force commanded by a man who served as a general for Saddam. The deal brings tentative stability to Al Fallujah, but on a much larger scale, it brings another element to the coalition's national strategy in Iraq.
From the U.S. point of view -- and more importantly, al-Sistani's -- this is much more than a cease-fire. This agreement with Sunni insurgents comes at a time when U.S. forces are poised to strike into An Najaf in order to root out rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
The Sunnis remain a force to be reckoned with, but a deal is done that has a strong prognosis. The only way it would seem it could break down in the next few days is if the Al Fallujah insurgents are feeling extremely frisky in large numbers -- and decide to charge across open ground to engage dug-in U.S. Marines.
The Shia, however, are faced with a United States that not only has freed a military hand to employ elsewhere, but also feels secure enough to trust a Sunni force to patrol a Sunni city that has displayed a tendency, even a desire, to kill Americans. Such a state of affairs forces al-Sistani to seriously reassess his position.
-
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
11 May 2004
The Edge of the Razor
Summary
The strategy of the United States in its war with radical Islam is in a state
of crisis. The global strategic framework is in much better shape than the
tactical situation in the Iraq theater of operations -- but this is of only
limited comfort to Washington because massive tactical failure in Iraq could lead to strategic collapse. The situation is balanced on the razor's edge. The United States could recover from its tactical failures, or suffer a
massive defeat if it fails to do so. One thing is certain: The United States
cannot remain balanced on the razor's edge indefinitely.
Analysis
Most wars reach a moment of crisis, when the outcome hangs in the balance and in which weakness and errors, military or political, can shape victory or put it permanently out of reach. Sometimes these moments of crisis come suddenly and are purely military, such as the Battle of Midway. Sometimes they are a long time brewing and are primarily political in nature, like the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. These are moments when planning, judgment and luck can decide victors -- and when bad planning, lack of judgment and bad luck can undermine the best and brightest. It is the moment when history balances on the razor's edge. The U.S.-Islamist war is now, it seems to us, balanced on that edge.
There are some who argue that it is not reasonable to speak of the
confrontation between the United States and al Qaeda as a war. It certainly does not, in any way, resemble World War II. It is nevertheless very much a war. It consists of two sides that are each making plans, using violence and attempting to shape the political future of a major region of the globe -- the Muslim world. One side masses large forces, the other side disperses much smaller forces throughout the globe. But the goals are the goals of any war: to shape the political future. And the means are the same as in any war: to kill sufficient numbers of the enemy in order to break his will to fight and resist. It might not look like wars the United States has fought in the past, but it is most certainly a war -- and it is a war whose outcome is in doubt.
On a strategic level, the United States has been the victor since the Sept.
11 attacks. Yet strategic victories can be undermined by massive tactical
failures, and this is what the United States is facing now. Iraq is a single
campaign in a much broader war. However, as frequently occurs in wars,
unintended consequences dominate the battlefield. The United States intended to occupy Iraq and move on to other campaigns -- but failures in planning, underestimation of the enemy and command failures have turned strategic victory into a tactical nightmare. That tactical nightmare is now threatening to undermine not only the Iraqi theater of operations, but also the entire American war effort. It is threatening to reverse a series of al Qaeda defeats. If the current trend continues, the tactical situation will undermine U.S. strategy in Iraq, and the collapse of U.S. strategy in Iraq could unravel the entire U.S. strategy against al Qaeda and the Islamists. The question is whether the United States has the honesty to face the fact that it is a crisis, the imagination to craft a solution to the problems in Iraq and the luck that the enemy will give it the time it needs to regroup.
That is what war looks like on the razor's edge.
The Strategic Situation
In the midst of the noise over Iraq, it is essential to grasp the strategic
balance and to understand that on that level, the United States has done
relatively well. To be more precise, al Qaeda has done quite poorly. It is
one of the paradoxes of American war-fighting that, having failed to
articulate coherent goals, the Bush administration is incapable of pointing
to its real successes. But this is an excruciatingly great failure on the
part of the administration. It was Napoleon who said, "The moral is to the
physical as 3-1," by which he meant that how a nation or army views its
successes is more important than what its capabilities are. The failure to
tend to the morale of the nation, to articulate a strategy and demonstrate
progress, is not a marginal failure. It is the greatest possible failure of
political leadership in wartime.
Nevertheless al Qaeda has failed in its most fundamental goal. There has been no mass rising in the Islamic world, nor has a single Muslim government fallen. Nor, for that matter, has a single Islamic government shifted its position in support of al Qaeda. To the contrary, a series of Muslim governments -- the most important of which is Saudi Arabia -- have shifted their positions toward active and effective opposition to al Qaeda. The current attacks by al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia are a reflection of the shift in Saudi policy that has occurred since just before the invasion of Iraq.
Saudi Arabia is far from the only country to have shifted its strategy. Iran
-- for all of its bombast -- has, through complex back-channel negotiations
with the United States as well as a complex re-evaluation of its strategic
position, changed its behavior since January 2002. Syria, while still not
fully in control, has certainly become more circumspect in its behavior.
Prior to the Iraq war, these governments ranged from hostile to
uncooperative; they since have shifted to a spectrum ranging from minimally cooperative to fully cooperative.
Since the United States could not hunt down al Qaeda, cell by cell and
individual by individual, it devised an alternative strategy that is less
effective in the short run but more effective in the long run -- and the only
strategy available. Washington sought to change the behavior of enabling
countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, by making the potential threat from the United States greater than the potential threat from al Qaeda. By occupying Iraq and surrounding Saudi Arabia with military forces, the United States compelled a reluctant and truculent Riyadh to comply with American wishes.
In the long run, changes in the behavior of these governments -- and of other Muslim governments, from Islamabad to Tripoli -- represent the only way to defeat al Qaeda. To the simplistic American question of, "Are we safer today than we were a year ago?" the answer is, "Probably not." To the question of whether the United States is on a path that might make it safer in five years, the answer is "Probably yes," assuming the U.S. effort doesn't collapse under the weight of its pyramiding mistakes in Iraq.
We would argue that the political shifts in the Muslim world that have helped the United States were aided significantly by the invasion of Iraq. We would certainly agree that Islamic opposition to the United States solidified -- we doubt that there was much room for intensification -- but we would also argue that opinion is significant to the extent to which it turns into war-fighting capability. The Poles despised the Germans and the Japanese were not fond of the Americans, but neither could expel the occupier simply on the strength of public opinion. It is the shifts in government policy that contained radical Islamist tendencies that should be the focal point, and the invasion of Iraq served that purpose.
Tactical Failures?
It is at that point that things started to go wrong -- not with the grand
strategy of the United States, but with the Iraq strategy itself. A string of
intelligence failures, errors in judgment and command failures have conspired to undermine the U.S. position in Iraq and reverse the strategic benefits. These failures included:
* A failure to detect that preparations were under way
for a guerrilla war in the event that Baghdad fell.
* A failure to quickly recognize that a guerrilla war was under way in Iraq,
and a delay of months before the reality was recognized and a strategy
developed for dealing with it.
* A failure to understand that the United States did not have the resources
to govern Iraq if all Baathist personnel were excluded.
* A failure to understand the nature of the people the United States was
installing in the Iraqi Governing Council -- and in particular, the complex
loyalties of Ahmed Chalabi and his relationship to Iraq's Shia and the
Iranian government. The United States became highly dependent on individuals about whom it lacked sufficient intelligence.
* A failure to recognize that the Sunni guerrillas were regrouping in
February and March 2004, after their defeat in the Ramadan offensive.
* Completely underestimating the number of forces needed for the occupation of Iraq, and cavalierly dismissing accurate Army estimates in favor of lower estimates that rapidly became unsupportable.
* Failing to step up military recruiting in order to increase the total
number of U.S. ground forces available on a worldwide basis. Failing to
understand that the difference between defeating an army and occupying a country had to be made up with ground forces.
These are the particular failures. The general failures are a compendium of every imaginable military failing:
* Failing to focus on the objective. Rather than remembering why U.S. forces were in Iraq and focusing on that, the Bush administration wandered off into irrelevancies and impossibilities, such as building democracy and eliminating Baath party members. The administration forgot its mission.
* Underestimating the enemy and overestimating U.S. power. The enemy was intelligent, dedicated and brave. He was defending his country and his home. The United States was enormously powerful but not omnipotent. The casual dismissal of the Iraqi guerrillas led directly to the failure to anticipate and counter enemy action.
* Failure to rapidly identify errors and rectify them through changes of
plans, strategies and personnel. Error is common in war. The measure of a military force is how honestly errors are addressed and rectified. When a command structure begins denying that self- evident problems are facing them, all is lost. The administration's insistence over the past year that no fundamental errors were committed in Iraq has been a cancer eating through all layers of the command structure -- from the squad to the office of the president.
* Failing to understand the political dimension of the war and permitting
political support for the war in the United States to erode by failing to
express a clear, coherent war plan on the broadest level. Because of this
failure, other major failures -- ranging from the failure to find weapons of
mass destruction to the treatment of Iraqi prisoners -- have filled the space that strategy should have occupied. The persistent failure of the president to explain the linkage between Iraq and the broader war has been symptomatic of this systemic failure.
Remember the objective; respect the enemy; be your own worst critic; exercise leadership at all levels -- these are fundamental principles of warfare. They have all been violated during the Iraq campaign.
The strategic situation, as of March 2004, was rapidly improving for the
United States. There was serious, reasonable discussion of a final push into Pakistan to liquidate al Qaeda's leadership. Al Qaeda began a global
counterattack -- as in Spain -- that was neither unexpected nor as effective as it might have been. However, the counterattack in Iraq was both unexpected and destabilizing -- causing military and political processes in Iraq to separate out, and forcing the United States into negotiations with the Sunni guerrillas while simultaneously trying to manage a crisis in the Shiite areas. At the same time that the United States was struggling to stabilize its position in Iraq, the prison abuse issue emerged. It was devastating not only in its own right, but also because of the timing. It generated a sense that U.S. operations in Iraq were out of control. From Al Fallujah to An Najaf to Abu Ghraib, the question was whether anyone had the slightest idea what they were trying to achieve in Iraq.
Which brings us back to the razor's edge. If the United States rapidly
adjusts its Iraq operations to take realities in that country into account,
rather than engaging on ongoing wishful thinking, the situation in Iraq can
be saved and with it the gains made in the war on al Qaeda. On the other
hand, if the United States continues its unbalanced and ineffective
prosecution of the war against the guerrillas and continues to allow its
relations with the Shia to deteriorate, the United States will find itself in
an untenable position. If it is forced to withdraw from Iraq, or to so limit
its operations there as to be effectively withdrawn, the entire dynamic that
the United States has worked to create since the Sept. 11 attacks will
reverse itself, and the U.S. position in the Muslim world -- which was fairly
strong in January 2004 -- will deteriorate, and al Qaeda's influence will
increase dramatically.
The Political Crisis
It is not clear that the Bush administration understands the crisis it is
facing. The prison abuse pictures are symptomatic -- not only of persistent
command failure, but also of the administration's loss of credibility with
the public. Since no one really knows what the administration is doing, it is
not unreasonable to fill in the blanks with the least generous assumptions.
The issue is this: Iraq has not gone as planned by any stretch of the
imagination. If the failures of Iraq are not rectified quickly, the entire
U.S. strategic position could unravel. Speed is of the essence. There is no
longer time left.
The issue is one of responsibility. Who is responsible for the failures in
Iraq? The president appears to have assumed that if anyone were fired, it
would be admitting that something went wrong. At this point, there is no one who doesn't know that many things have gone wrong. If the president insists on retaining all of his senior staff, Cabinet members and field commanders, no one is going to draw the conclusion that everything is under control; rather they will conclude that it is the president himself who is responsible for the failures, and they will act accordingly.
The issue facing Bush is not merely the prison pictures. It is the series of
failures in the Iraq campaign that have revealed serious errors of judgment and temperament among senior Cabinet-level officials. We suspect that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is finished, and with him Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Vice President Dick Cheney said over the weekend that everyone should get off of Rumsfeld's case. What Cheney doesn't seem to grasp is that there is a war on and that at this moment, it isn't going very well. If the secretary of defense doesn't bear the burden of failures and misjudgments, who does? Or does the vice president suggest a no-fault policy when it comes to war? Or does he think that things are going well?
This is not asked polemically. It is our job to identify emerging trends, and
we have, frequently, been accused of everything from being owned by the
Republicans to being Iraq campaign apologists. In fact, we are making a non-partisan point: The administration is painting itself into a corner that will cost Bush the presidency if it does not deal with the fact that there is no one who doesn't know that Iraq has been mismanaged. The administration's only option for survival is to start managing it effectively, if that can be done at this point.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
-
News has been very glum of late. This is not.-- Crafty (in Bern, Switzerland)
--------------
Geopolitical Diary: Wednesday, May 12, 2004
The confrontation in An Najaf appears to be coming to an end, the tactical
outcome similar to Al Fallujah. Qais al-Khazali, chief aide to Muqtada
al-Sadr, said, "Agreement has been reached on all points of contention. This agreement represents all shades of the Shiite political spectrum." Under the agreement, the United States would hand over security in An Najaf to a locally based force that could include some members of al-Sadr's militia. Maj. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey-- who commands the 1st Armored Division, which has responsibility over An Najaf -- said inclusion of al-Sadr's brigades in the security force would be acceptable.
There are now two cases in which the U.S. solution to an Iraqi insurgency
has been to decline combat in the city, create an Iraqi security force with
an ambiguous relationship to the guerrillas and withdraw from responsibility for the city. One case is an event. Two cases make a policy. Having established this solution in both Sunni and Shiite areas, two things are obvious. The guerrillas can, if they choose, force similar arrangements in other cities simply by digging in and holding on. Second, the United States is not averse to giving control of Iraqi cities to Iraqis, regardless of their political persuasion.
In Al Fallujah and An Najaf, the politics of the situation were extremely
complicated. The insurgents had complex relationships with the residents and civilian leaders in the cities. No one wanted the Americans inside the
cities, but on the other hand, there was deep distrust of the guerrillas'
intentions and the consequences of continued fighting. By withdrawing from Al Fallujah and An Najaf, the United States unleashed forces that led to the containment of the guerrillas by indigenous political forces.
This makes sense. The United States has no interest in governing Iraq -- or logically should not. Iraq is a base of operations in the region. The idea
that the United States would reshape Iraqi political life was predicated
upon the assumption that after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq would be a blank page on which the United States could sketch whatever it wished. But Iraq is a complex nation -- and certainly not a blank page. Washington does not have the power to redefine its political culture.
Nor, for that matter, should Washington have been interested in doing so. In the final analysis, the United States has no national interest in Iraqi
life. It has an interest in destroying al Qaeda and therefore an interest in
being in a position to affect the behavior toward al Qaeda of countries in
the region. The United States wants its troops in Iraq. But the ultimate
form of mission creep was the move from invading and using Iraqi territory for follow-on operations to occupying and redefining the nature of Iraqi society. The United States is enormously powerful. It is not omnipotent.
What happens inside Iraqi society -- and therefore inside Iraq's cities --
is of interest to the United States in only two senses: first, whether Iraq
facilitates operations by al Qaeda and related groups; second, whether the
United States can influence events in surrounding countries. There is a
basis for a political settlement here. The Shia are not friends of the
Wahhabi-influenced al Qaeda. The United States has no interest in internal
Islamic affairs.
Iraq is a large country. Most of the population is located to the north and
east of the Euphrates River. To the south and west are lightly inhabited
regions bordering Syria and Saudi Arabia. There is a line of supply to
Kuwait, and another one can be established into Turkey. On this side of the river, you can see guerrillas coming. You can also see -- and be seen -- by the Saudis and Syrians, who are at this point far more significant than the Iraqis.
The An Najaf-Al Fallujah model should be seen as a model for a broader
settlement. The populated urban areas of Iraq, north and east of the
Euphrates, can be left to the Iraqis to deal with, using native security
forces mixed as the Iraqis see fit. U.S. forces can move out of this area to
the other side of the Euphrates, where they can use their presence to
influence events in surrounding countries without causing friction with the
Iraqis. Even if the guerrillas want to get to the U.S. forces, it will be a
lot harder. Moreover, the leadership of the Iraqi communities -- which are
not all that fond of Iraqi guerrillas, let alone foreign jihadists -- can be
left to deal with the situation, requesting help when they need it and
getting it if the United States wants to send it.
In this scenario, there need be no handover of sovereignty, no
constitutional convention, to complicate negotiations. There is an
established local leadership throughout Iraq. The United States announces
victory, turns over the keys and gets out of the way. This does not carry
the grandeur of building democracy in Iraq, but it has the virtue of
actually being possible.
This -- or something like it -- is where the United States is going to come
out. Washington is re-evaluating its Iraq strategy. It cannot simply leave.
It cannot remain in the urban areas. If we take An Najaf and Al Fallujah and turn them into a general model for Iraq, a solution emerges. It solves the core problem: No amount of troops can impose peace on Iraq. Peace is the Iraqis' problem. The U.S. problem is to assure that no nation state provides support for al Qaeda so that it can be slowly strangled.
-
May 13, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Dancing Alone
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
It is time to ask this question: Do we have any chance of succeeding
at regime change in Iraq without regime change here at home?
"Hey, Friedman, why are you bringing politics into this all of a
sudden? You're the guy who always said that producing a decent outcome in
Iraq was of such overriding importance to the country that it had to be kept
above politics."
Yes, that's true. I still believe that. My mistake was thinking that
the Bush team believed it, too. I thought the administration would have to
do the right things in Iraq ? from prewar planning and putting in enough
troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence ? because
surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country.
But I was wrong. There is something even more important to the Bush crowd
than getting Iraq right, and that's getting re-elected and staying loyal to
the conservative base to do so. It has always been more important for the
Bush folks to defeat liberals at home than Baathists abroad. That's why they
spent more time studying U.S. polls than Iraqi history. That is why, I'll
bet, Karl Rove has had more sway over this war than Assistant Secretary of
State for Near Eastern Affairs Bill Burns. Mr. Burns knew only what would
play in the Middle East. Mr. Rove knew what would play in the Middle West.
I admit, I'm a little slow. Because I tried to think about something
as deadly serious as Iraq, and the post- 9/11 world, in a nonpartisan
fashion ? as Joe Biden, John McCain and Dick Lugar did ? I assumed the Bush
officials were doing the same. I was wrong. They were always so slow to
change course because confronting their mistakes didn't just involve
confronting reality, but their own politics.
Why, in the face of rampant looting in the war's aftermath, which dug
us into such a deep and costly hole, wouldn't Mr. Rumsfeld put more troops
into Iraq? Politics. First of all, Rummy wanted to crush once and for all
the Powell doctrine, which says you fight a war like this only with
overwhelming force. I know this is hard to believe, but the Pentagon crew
hated Colin Powell, and wanted to see him humiliated 10 times more than
Saddam. Second, Rummy wanted to prove to all those U.S. generals whose Army
he was intent on downsizing that a small, mobile, high-tech force was all
you needed today to take over a country. Third, the White House always knew
this was a war of choice ? its choice ? so it made sure that average
Americans never had to pay any price or bear any burden. Thus, it couldn't
call up too many reservists, let alone have a draft. Yes, there was a
contradiction between the Bush war on taxes and the Bush war on terrorism.
But it was resolved: the Bush team decided to lower taxes rather than raise
troop levels.
Why, in the face of the Abu Ghraib travesty, wouldn't the
administration make some uniquely American gesture? Because these folks have
no clue how to export hope. They would never think of saying, "Let's close
this prison immediately and reopen it in a month as the Abu Ghraib Technical
College for Computer Training ? with all the equipment donated by Dell, H.P.
and Microsoft." Why didn't the administration ever use 9/11 as a spur to
launch a Manhattan project for energy independence and conservation, so we
could break out of our addiction to crude oil, slowly disengage from this
region and speak truth to fundamentalist regimes, such as Saudi Arabia?
(Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.) Because that might have
required a gas tax or a confrontation with the administration's oil
moneymen. Why did the administration always ? rightly ? bash Yasir Arafat,
but never lift a finger or utter a word to stop Ariel Sharon's massive
building of illegal settlements in the West Bank? Because while that might
have earned America credibility in the Middle East, it might have cost the
Bush campaign Jewish votes in Florida.
And, of course, why did the president praise Mr. Rumsfeld rather than
fire him? Because Karl Rove says to hold the conservative base, you must
always appear to be strong, decisive and loyal. It is more important that
the president appear to be true to his team than that America appear to be
true to its principles. (Here's the new Rummy Defense: "I am accountable.
But the little guys were responsible. I was just giving orders.")
Add it all up, and you see how we got so off track in Iraq, why we are
dancing alone in the world ? and why our president, who has a strong moral
vision, has no moral influence.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy |
Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top
-
Woof Russ:
The piece you post is not without power. To the list of shortcomings, I would add the drip drip drip of funds to work projects and the like. People getting paid fairly to build something their country needs are what we want and they needed and the top of the chain of command should have seen to it that this was happening instead of the usual bureaucratic SNAFU.
Marc
-
Please forward this Terrorism Intelligence Weekly to a friend or
colleague.
......................................................................
REFER A FRIEND TO STRATFOR
Please send this Terrorism Intelligence Weekly to a friend or
colleague.
Stratfor's Terrorism Intelligence Weekly is currently provided as
a courtesy to our subscribers. To refer a friend for a two-week
FREE trial of Stratfor's Premium Geopolitical Intelligence
Service, click here (www.stratfor.com/refer), or send this Terrorism
Intelligence Weekly directly to a friend or colleague by
forwarding this email. You can also find a link to the referral
form on www.stratfor.com.
......................................................................
Improvements in Western Intelligence
By Fred Burton
Western tensions over the safety of corporate assets in the
Middle East -- particularly in Saudi Arabia -- have ratcheted
higher during the past month amid a stream of government security
warnings and several deadly attacks and militant shootouts.
Though the concerns and the level of violence within Saudi Arabia
are hardly unprecedented, the credibility of alerts issued by the
United States and other Western governments is on the rise.
Consider the following examples:
* April 13: The United States issued a Warden Message cautioning
Westerners about threats against diplomatic and other official
facilities and neighborhoods in Riyadh. Two days later, a U.S.
travel warning "strongly urged" Americans to leave the kingdom.
On April 19 and 20, Saudi officials announced seizures of
vehicles carrying explosives. On April 21, a car bomb was
detonated in front of a Saudi intelligence facility in Riyadh,
killing several people.
* April 27: Jordanian officials claimed to have foiled an al
Qaeda chemical bomb plot targeting the country's intelligence
services. The plot allegedly involved trucks packed with 20 tons
of explosives.
* April 29: The U.S. State Department issued a worldwide
caution, warning of deep concerns over the safety of U.S.
interests abroad -- and noting that government officials have not
ruled out a nonconventional al Qaeda attacks in the United States
or elsewhere. On May 1, gunmen killed five Westerners --
including two Americans -- at the offices of Swiss oil contractor
ABB Lummus in Yanbu. The shooters later were praised in a
statement, purportedly from al Qaeda's top official in Saudi
Arabia, carried on the Islamist Web site Sawt al-Jihad.
* European security services recently have announced several
militant roundups and "foiled plots" against specific targets. On
April 21, British newspapers reported the discovery of a bombing
plot against a football stadium -- possibly the field used by
Manchester United -- and the arrest of 10 suspects. A well-placed
counterterrorism source later told Stratfor that the sweep -- the
second major roundup in Britain in less than a month -- was
conducted less to thwart a specific attack than as a very public
pre-emptive action to reassure citizens of their safety. On May
4, Turkish police said they detained 16 suspected members of the
al Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Islam, accused of planning bombing
attacks against the NATO summit that is scheduled to take place
in Istanbul in June.
The contrast with past intelligence warnings is stark: In
December 2003, the State Department authorized the voluntary
departure of diplomats' family members -- but more than a month
after the bombing of a Western housing compound in Riyadh killed
17 people. A similar communique, which ordered the departure of
nonessential U.S. personnel and their dependents, was issued May
13, 2003 -- a day after another housing compound bombing that
claimed 34 lives.
Taken together, the recent incidents indicate the United States
and its allies are armed with increasingly actionable
intelligence from their sources in the Middle East, Pakistan and
elsewhere. Although al Qaeda might remain, in the intelligence
community's words, a "ghost" or an elusive hydra, the community's
failures prior to the Sept. 11 attacks no longer can justify
ongoing complacency toward its warnings about the risks of
attacks. The government alerts also cannot be dismissed merely as
attempts to elicit "chatter" or otherwise improve officials' view
into the threat from radical Islam.
These events indicate that at least some parts of the U.S.
counterterrorism community have reached a crucial milestone in
their operational and analytical capabilities -- which aids their
ability to predict al Qaeda's next moves and other emerging
threats. It is in light of this assessment that threats issued
specifically against the domestic United States, in addition to
Western assets overseas, could be viewed as credible.
Security Cooperation: An Improving View
One of the first questions this assessment raises is whether this
same level of intelligence capability exists globally, or merely
in a few isolated regions?
While it is clear some weaknesses remain -- for example,
Washington had no warning prior to the March 11 train bombings in
Madrid -- it appears that U.S. counterterrorism collection has
improved greatly in the past few months. Sources in Washington
tell Stratfor that both human intelligence and technical
collection capabilities -- such as wiretaps and other methods --
significantly have increased in conjunction with coordinated
intelligence and law enforcement efforts around the world.
Western intelligence services and analytical think tanks -- such
as MI6, the Center for Strategic International Studies and the
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation -- along with the
services of "friendly" Middle Eastern nations such as Jordan,
specifically have aided Washington's tactical and strategic
capabilities and helped in interdicting attacks.
Moreover, foiled attacks and post-op investigations in other
countries, such as Britain and Spain, have yielded a flurry of
data: Pocket litter from detainees, phone numbers, forensic
evidence, fingerprints, travel documents and other items can be
shared with allied intelligence services to generate new leads
for counterterrorism officials to run down.
It is conceivable these achievements prompted the allegedly
planned or actual attacks against the allied intelligence
services in Riyadh and Amman in recent weeks.
The U.S. Risk Environment
For its part, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security also has
grown increasingly proactive in the wake of the March 11 attacks
in Spain, turning its passenger screening efforts to the nation's
rail system -- doubtless armed with intelligence that indicated
rail and bus lines were vulnerable to a Madrid-style strike.
Trusted law enforcement sources tell Stratfor they are watching
for threats to bomb buses during the summer travel season (likely
as the result of human intelligence reports or interrogation of
al Qaeda suspects), though some commercial bus lines still do not
employ luggage-screeners.
Stratfor previously predicted that a terrorist attack is
possible, if not likely, within the United States prior to the
November presidential elections. Logic reinforces this view from
both a geostrategic and tactical standpoint.
Though it has not achieved its goal of ousting any secular
governments within the Muslim world, al Qaeda learned in Spain
that it is possible, with a well-timed attack, to overturn a
sitting government in the Western Hemisphere; in its view, few
prizes could be greater than forcing U.S. President George W.
Bush out of office. U.S. government officials appear to support
this view: National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice recently
said the opportunity for terrorists to impact the presidential
election would "be too good to pass up," and the April 29 warning
issued by the State Department also concludes that al Qaeda might
attempt "a catastrophic attack" within the United States.
Where might such an attack occur?
In light of the recent plots targeting the Jordanian and Saudi
intelligence services, it would seem that CIA headquarters in
Langley, Va., or Britain's MI6 headquarters could be targets --
though they would not be easily struck. Langley, for example, has
an excellent standoff perimeter to protect it from Oklahoma City-
style truck bombings. Militants would need some way of getting
past those defenses -- such as a fuel-laden aircraft or a Jordan-
style tactical operation, using a designated team to eliminate
guards and move the truck bomb within striking distance of the
buildings.
Much more vulnerable targets, in our view, are likely to be found
in Washington, D.C. (a symbolic city, where the brain trust of
"Crusader" actions against the Middle East is found); New York
City (the nation's economic hub, and home to a large Jewish
population); and Texas -- Bush's backyard -- though visible
targets are more easily found in major cities such as Houston or
Dallas than in the capital city of Austin.
West Coast cities such as Los Angeles -- where several plots
reportedly have been foiled -- also cannot be discounted as
targets: Al Qaeda has shown a propensity in the past to return
time and again to favored fishing holes. Such cities also are
home to major corporations, which carry political, symbolic and
strategic value: Al Qaeda believes that if the U.S. economy
crashes, the war effort overseas could not continue. In one of
the most recent tape recordings attributed to him, Osama bin
Laden specifically mentioned some American corporations as likely
targets.
Though there is no hard evidence, logic argues that the next
major attack within the United States or allied countries could
just as easily be a "dirty bomb" -- a possibility noted in the
April 29 State Department warning as well as by foreign security
services -- as a Madrid-style transportation bombing. Trusted
U.S. government sources say this is a viable attack scenario; and
it is not inconceivable that some type of chemical agent could be
dispersed through the use of an improvised explosive device. The
Jordanian authorities and the alleged leader of the foiled plot
in Amman claimed that attack was to have a chemical component,
though that claim is questionable. At any rate, chemicals such as
ammonia, chlorine or sodium cyanide are easily obtained when
compared to radioactive material or even anthrax, with its proven
panic potential.
The "shock and awe" psychological effects of such an attack would
ripple throughout the country and resonate as a great success
with Islamist radicals around the world -- a credibility coup for
which al Qaeda has been searching in order to further its own
political goals in the Middle East.
The point is not that al Qaeda could have new means or motives to
launch a dirty bomb attack -- this has been a U.S. fear, and
perceived risk, since Sept. 11. Rather, it is that the U.S.
intelligence community's increasingly proactive track record --
combined with the specificity of targets mentioned in recent
warnings and growing consensus about the window of opportunity
for a fresh attack -- lend a new aura of credibility and urgency
to ongoing warnings.
In the war against militant Islam, it seems the United States no
longer is flying completely blind.
Counterterrorism and security expert Fred Burton recently joined
Stratfor's executive staff. Click here
(http://stratfor.com/corp/Corporate.neo?s=MED) for more details
about his background and new role with Stratfor.
-
Iraqi General Urges Support of U.S. Troops
Sun May 16, 2:54 PM ET Add Top Stories - AP to My Yahoo!
By KATARINA KRATOVAC, Associated Press Writer
FALLUJAH, Iraq - A former Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)-era general appointed by the Americans to lead an Iraqi security force in the rebellious Sunni stronghold of Fallujah urged tribal elders and sheiks Sunday to support U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq (news - web sites).
AP Photo
Reuters
Slideshow: Iraq
Retired Maj. Gen. Mohammed Abdul-Latif rose to prominence after nearly monthlong battles last month between the Marines monthlong battles in April between the Marines and insurgents hunkered down in Fallujah's neighborhoods.
"We can make them (Americans) use their rifles against us or we can make them build our country, it's your choice," Latif told a gathering of more than 40 sheiks, city council members and imams in an eastern Fallujah suburb.
The siege of this city of 200,000 people, located about 40 miles west of Baghdad, was lifted when top Marine officers announced the creation of the Fallujah Brigade ? a force made exclusively of former Iraqi army officers.
The Marines withdrew from Fallujah into the rural hinterland and far-flung suburbs, allowing the Iraqi force to take up positions and start patrols inside the city. The brigade is expected to number about 1,500 men, many of them conscripts or noncommissioned officers under Saddam.
They are expected to fight the guerrillas, although some of the same insurgents who fought the Marines last month will likely join the brigade.
On Sunday, Marines of the 1st Battalion, 5th Regiment provided security for the gathering in Kharma.
Latif, 66, a native of Baghdad, urged the elders to talk freely, citing the Muslim holy book, the Quran.
"The Quran says we should sit together, discuss and make a decision, but let it be the right decision," the silver-haired Latif ? a slim figure wearing a blue shirt and dark blue tie and pants ? told the sheiks.
The venue offered a rare insight into Latif's interactions and influence over Fallujah elders. As he spoke, many sheiks nodded in approval and listened with reverence to his words. Later, they clasped his hands and patted Latif on the back.
Latif, speaking in Arabic to the sheiks, defended the Marines and the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
"They were brought here by the acts of one coward who was hunted out of a rathole ? Saddam ? who disgraced us all," Latif said. "Let us tell our children that these men (U.S. troops) came here to protect us.
"As President Bush (news - web sites) said, they did not come here to occupy our land but to get rid of Saddam. We can help them leave by helping them do their job, or we can make them stay ten years and more by keeping fighting."
Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, the Marine battalion commander, said, "No truer words have been spoken here today than those by General Latif."
Latif also told the insurgents to "stop doing stupid things."
"Those bullets that are fired will not get the Americans out, let them finish their job here so that they can return to their country," Latif said.
"Our country is precious, stop allowing the bad guys to come from outside Iraq to destroy our country."
Latif, a former military intelligence officer said to have been imprisoned by Saddam and exiled, praised the former Iraqi army.
"The army used to be honest until Saddam made the men turn into beasts, take bribes, betray their own country," he said. "The real army is the army that works hard to serve its own citizens, with courage and strength."
After the meeting, Latif told The Associated Press that the situation in Fallujah has greatly improved, that "winds of peace" prevail in the city and the people that fled the fighting have returned. He would not elaborate on the size or current activities of the Fallujah Brigade.
"Let us speak about peace," Latif said in English. "Fallujah was an open wound, now it's healing."
------------------------------------------
posted by Tommy Paine
-
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
17 May 2004
Iraq: New Strategies
By George Friedman
Last week, Stratfor published an analysis, "The Edge of the
Razor," that sketched out the problems facing the United States
in Iraq. In an avalanche of responses, one important theme stood
out: Readers wanted to know what we would do, if we were in a
position to do anything. Put differently, it is easy to catalogue
problems, more difficult to provide solutions.
The point is not only absolutely true, but lies at the heart of
intelligence. Intelligence organizations should not give policy
suggestions. First, the craft of intelligence and state-craft are
very different things. Second, and far more important,
intelligence professionals should always resist the temptation to
become policy advocates because, being mostly human, intelligence
analysts want to be right -- and when they are advocates of a
strategy, they will be tempted to find evidence that proves that
policy to be correct and ignore evidence that might prove the
policy in error. Advocating policies impairs the critical
faculties. Besides, in a world in which opinions are commonplace,
there is a rare value in withholding opinions. Finally,
intelligence, as a profession, should be neutral. Now, we are far
from personally neutral in any affecting our country, but in our
professional -- as opposed to our personal lives -- our task is
look at the world through the eyes of all of the players.
Suggesting a strategy for defeating one side makes that obviously
difficult.
That said, extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.
We normally try to figure out what is going to happen, what other
people are going to do -- whether they know it or not -- and
explain the actions of others. At times, people confuse
Stratfor's analysis for our political position. This time -- this
once -- we will write for ourselves -- or more precisely, for
myself, since at Stratfor our views on the war range even wider
than those among the general public.
The Mission
The United States' invasion of Iraq was not a great idea. Its
only virtue was that it was the best available idea among a
series of even worse ideas. In the spring of 2003, the United
States had no way to engage or defeat al Qaeda. The only way to
achieve that was to force Saudi Arabia -- and lesser enabling
countries such as Iran and Syria -- to change their policies on
al Qaeda and crack down on its financial and logistical systems.
In order to do that, the United States needed two things. First,
it had to demonstrate its will and competence in waging war --
something seriously doubted by many in the Islamic world and
elsewhere. Second, it had to be in a position to threaten follow-
on actions in the region.
There were many drawbacks to the invasion, ranging from the need
to occupy a large and complex country to the difficulty of
gathering intelligence. Unlike many, we expected extended
resistance in Iraq, although we did not expect the complexity of
the guerrilla war that emerged. Moreover, we understood that the
invasion would generate hostility toward the United States within
the Islamic world, but we felt this would be compensated by
dramatic shifts in the behavior of governments in the region. All
of this has happened.
The essential point is that the invasion of Iraq was not and
never should have been thought of as an end in itself. Iraq's
only importance was its geographic location: It is the most
strategically located country between the Mediterranean and the
Hindu Kush. The United States needed it as a base of operations
and a lever against the Saudis and others, but it had no interest
-- or should have had no interest -- in the internal governance
of Iraq.
This is the critical point on which the mission became complex,
and the worst conceivable thing in a military operation took
place: mission creep. Rather than focus on the follow-on
operations that had to be undertaken against al Qaeda, the Bush
administration created a new goal: the occupation and
administration of Iraq by the United States, with most of the
burden falling on the U.S. military. More important, the United
States also dismantled the Iraqi government bureaucracy and
military under the principle that de-Baathification had to be
accomplished. Over time, this evolved to a new mission: the
creation of democracy in Iraq.
Under the best of circumstances, this was not something the
United States had the resources to achieve. Iraq is a complex and
multi-layered society with many competing interests. The idea
that the United States would be able to effectively preside over
this society, shepherding it to democracy, was difficult to
conceive even in the best of circumstances. Under the
circumstances that began to emerge only days after the fall of
Baghdad, it was an unachievable goal and an impossible mission.
The creation of a viable democracy in the midst of a civil war,
even if Iraqi society were amenable to copying American
institutions, was an impossibility. The one thing that should
have been learned in Vietnam was that the evolution of political
institutions in the midst of a sustained guerrilla war is
impossible.
The administration pursued this goal for a single reason: From
the beginning, it consistently underestimated the Iraqis'
capability to resist the United States. It underestimated the
tenacity, courage and cleverness of the Sunni guerrillas. It
underestimated the political sophistication of the Shiite
leadership. It underestimated the forms of military and political
resistance that would limit what the United States could achieve.
In my view, the underestimation of the enemy in Iraq is the
greatest failure of this administration, and the one for which
the media rarely hold it accountable.
This miscalculation drew the U.S. Army into the two types of
warfare for which it is least suited.
First, it drew the Army into the cities, where the work of
reconstruction -- physical and political -- had to be carried
out. Having dismantled Iraqi military and police institutions,
the Army found itself in the role of policing the cities. This
would have been difficult enough had there not been a guerrilla
war. With a guerrilla war -- much of it concentrated in heavily
urbanized areas and the roads connecting cities -- the Army found
itself trapped in low-intensity urban warfare in which its
technical advantages dissolved and the political consequences of
successful counterattacks outweighed the value of defeating the
guerrillas. Destroying three blocks of Baghdad to take out a
guerrilla squad made military sense, but no political sense. The
Army could neither act effectively nor withdraw.
Second, the Army was lured into counterinsurgency warfare. No
subject has been studied more extensively by the U.S. Army, and
no subject remains as opaque. The guerrilla seeks to embed
himself among the general population. Distinguishing him is
virtually impossible, particularly for a 20-year-old soldier or
Marine who speaks not a word of the language nor understands the
social cues that might guide him. In this circumstance, the
soldier is simply a target, a casualty waiting to happen.
The usual solution is to raise an indigenous force to fight the
guerrillas. The problem is that the most eager recruits for this
force are the guerrillas themselves: They not only get great
intelligence, but weapons, ammunition and three square meals a
day. Sometimes, pre-existing militias are used, via a political
arrangement. But these militias have very different agendas than
those of the occupying force, and frequently maneuver the
occupier into doing their job for them.
Strategies
The United States must begin by recognizing that it cannot
possibly pacify Iraq with the force available or, for that
matter, with a larger military force. It can continue to patrol,
it can continue to question people, it can continue to take
casualties. However, it can never permanently defeat the
guerrilla forces in the Sunni triangle using this strategy. It
certainly cannot displace the power and authority of the Shiite
leadership in the south. Urban warfare and counterinsurgency in
the Iraqi environment cannot be successful.
This means the goal of reshaping Iraqi society is beyond the
reach of the United States. Iraq is what it is. The United
States, having performed the service of removing Saddam Hussein
from power, cannot reshape a society that has millennia of
layers. The attempt to do so will generate resistance -- while
that resistance can be endured, it cannot be suppressed.
The United States must recall its original mission, which was to
occupy Iraq in order to prosecute the war against al Qaeda. If
that mission is remembered, and the mission creep of reshaping
Iraq forgotten, some obvious strategic solutions re-emerge. The
first, and most important, is that the United States has no
national interest in the nature of Iraqi government or society.
Except for not supporting al Qaeda, Iraq's government does not
matter. Since the Iraqi Shia have an inherent aversion to Wahabbi
al Qaeda, the political path on that is fairly clear.
The United States now cannot withdraw from Iraq. We can wonder
about the wisdom of the invasion, but a withdrawal under pressure
would be used by al Qaeda and radical Islamists as demonstration
of their core point: that the United States is inherently weak
and, like the Soviet Union, ripe for defeat. Having gone in,
withdrawal in the near term is not an option.
That does not mean U.S. forces must be positioned in and near
urban areas. There is a major repositioning under way to reduce
the size of the U.S. presence in the cities, but there is,
nevertheless, a more fundamental shift to be made. The United
States undertook responsibility for security in Iraq after its
invasion. It cannot carry out this mission. Therefore, it has to
abandon the mission. Some might argue this would leave a vacuum.
We would argue there already is a vacuum, filled only with
American and coalition targets. It is not a question of creating
anarchy; anarchy already exists. It is a question of whether the
United States wishes to lose soldiers in an anarchic situation.
The geography of Iraq provides a solution.
Click here to see Potential U.S. Basing Locations
http://www.stratfor.com/iraq_map.neo
The bulk of Iraq's population lives in the Tigris and Euphrates
valleys. To the south and west of the Euphrates River, there is a
vast and relatively uninhabited region of Iraq -- not very hospitable,
but with less shooting than on the other side. The western half of
Iraq borders Saudi Arabia and Syria, two of the countries about
which the United States harbors the most concern. A withdrawal
from the river basins would allow the United States to carry out
its primary mission -- maintaining regional pressure -- without
engaging in an impossible war. Moreover, in the Kurdish regions
of the northeast, where U.S. Special Forces have operated for a
very long time, U.S. forces could be based -- and supplied -- in
order to maintain a presence on the Iranian border.
Iraq should then be encouraged to develop a Shiite-dominated
government, the best guarantor against al Qaeda and the greatest
incentive for the Iranians not to destabilize the situation. The
fate of the Sunnis will rest in the deal they can negotiate with
the Shia and Kurds -- and, as they say, that is their problem.
The United States could supply the forces in western and southern
Iraq from Kuwait, without the fear that convoy routes would be
cut in urban areas. In the relatively uninhabited regions,
distinguishing guerrillas from rocks would be somewhat easier
than distinguishing them from innocent bystanders. The force
could, if it chose, execute a broad crescent around Iraq,
touching all the borders but not the populations.
The Iraqi government might demand at some point that the United
States withdraw, but they would have no way to impose their
demand, as they would if U.S. forces could continue to be picked
off with improvised explosive devices and sniper fire. The
geographical move would help to insulate U.S. forces from even
this demand, assuming political arrangements could not be made.
Certainly the land is inhospitable, and serious engineering and
logistical efforts would be required to accommodate basing for
large numbers of troops. However, large numbers of troops might
not be necessary -- and the engineering and logistical problems
certainly will not make headlines around the world.
Cutting Losses
Certainly, as a psychological matter, there is a retreat. The
United States would be cutting losses. But it has no choice. It
will not be able to defeat the insurgencies it faces without
heavy casualties and creating chaos in Iraqi society. Moreover, a
victory in this war would not provide the United States with
anything that is in its national interest. Unless you are an
ideologue -- which I am not -- who believes bringing American-
style democracy to the world is a holy mission, it follows that
the nature of the Iraqi government -- or chaos -- does not affect
me.
What does affect me is al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is trying to kill me.
Countries such as Saudi Arabia permitted al Qaeda to flourish.
The presence of a couple of U.S. armored divisions along the
kingdom's northern border has been a very sobering thought. That
pressure cannot be removed. Whatever chaos there is in Saudi
Arabia, that is the key to breaking al Qaeda -- not Baghdad.
The key to al Qaeda is in Riyadh and in Islamabad. The invasion
of Iraq was a stepping-stone toward policy change in Riyadh, and
it worked. The pressure must be maintained and now extended to
Islamabad. However, the war was never about Baghdad, and
certainly never about Al Fallujah and An Najaf. Muqtada al-Sadr's
relationship to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the makeup of
the elders in Al Fallujah are matters of utter and absolute
indifference to the United States. Getting drawn into those
fights is in fact the quagmire -- a word we use carefully and
deliberately.
But in the desert west and south of the Euphrates, the United
States can carry out the real mission for which it came. And if
the arc of responsibility extends along the Turkish frontier to
Kurdistan, that is a manageable mission creep. The United States
should not get out of Iraq. It must get out of Baghdad, Al
Fallujah, An Najaf and the other sinkholes into which the
administration's policies have thrown U.S. soldiers.
Again, this differs from our normal analysis in offering policy
prescriptions. This is, of course, a very high-level sketch of a
solution to an extraordinarily complex situation. Nevertheless,
sometimes the solution to complex situations is to simplify them.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
......................................................................
1158 GMT -- IRAN -- Iran dismissed May 20 the possibility of an Israeli
attack against its nuclear facilities. Iranian Minister of Defense Rear Adm.
Ali Shamkhani said, "Israel is too vulnerable to materialize its threat."
The remarks from Shamkhani come after recent reports that Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon during his trip to Washington last month discussed
with U.S. President George W. Bush possible Israeli plans to attack Iran's
nuclear facilities if Tehran gets close to developing a nuclear weapon.
......................................................................
Geopolitical Diary: Thursday, May 20, 2004
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz admitted today what everyone has known for months: The United States underestimated the determination of Saddam Hussein and his intelligence service to resist the occupation in Iraq. Wolfowitz said, "I would say of all the things that were underestimated, the one that almost no one that I know of predicted was to
properly estimate the resilience of the regime that had abused this country
for 35 years."
This is an extraordinarily important statement. Wolfowitz is one of the key
American strategists. Until Wolfowitz -- and by implication Rumsfeld --
publicly acknowledged their miscalculation of the regime's resilience, there
was no possibility of a serious adjustment of strategy. That and the
admission that the United States did not know how many troops would be
required and for how long set the two poles in place for a strategic
re-evaluation. Having been wrong about the enemy's capabilities and
intentions, prior strategic estimates are out the window. There is no valid
forecast at this point. In the world of strategy, the lack of a forecast on
something as basic as troop levels means there must be a comprehensive
review. No one can argue any longer that what the United States is doing is
working. That opens the door to the inevitable strategic re-evaluation.
While Wolfowitz's statement finally opens the door to the future, we will
permit ourselves one final look at the past. Wolfowitz said that almost no
one he knew "properly" estimated the level of resistance. That is certainly
true, if by "properly" you mean describing the nature of the guerrilla war.
But there were many -- Stratfor included -- who argued that the Hussein
regime was not going to go quietly into that good night if they had a
choice. We also argued that they had prepared for this moment for years, and certainly had a postwar plan.
The issue therefore is if the core question is whether others precisely
estimated the type of resistance, or whether they estimated that there would probably be substantial resistance. The criticism of the administration is not that it failed to anticipate the exact type of resistance, but that it dismissed the idea of significant resistance -- in the short and long term -- at all. Statements from the Department of Defense prior to the war were dismissive of the Iraqis in the extreme as a fighting force, and the kind of plans DOD made for the postwar world indicated it did not anticipate any serious problems.
There are two charges to be leveled at Wolfowitz. The first is that he
failed to allow for any resilience in the Iraqi resistance. The far more
serious charge is that he continued to deny the seriousness of the
resistance for months after it was a problem -- in fact, denying it publicly
up to this point. This directly led to a strategy that could not succeed
because it was based on a fundamental misreading of the situation.
With that said, let us now all agree that Wolfowitz has conceded the
obvious. The question therefore is: What will he do about it? Uncertainty is
embedded in war. The craft of the strategist, however, is to minimize
uncertainty using planning that begins with a precise estimate of the
situation on the ground and proceeds from that to a plan based on the
resources available. The uncertainty about troop levels is rooted at this
point in the fact that a precise appreciation of the situation is only now
developing, and that no strategy will emerge until that is in place.
The challenge is this. The appreciation of the situation must be developed
from U.S. intelligence services: CIA, Defense Intelligence and Army Military Intelligence. These are the same organizations that failed to provide an accurate appreciation of the situation in the first place. However blame is allocated among them, the collective outcome was unacceptable. The question that will have to be asked is this: In what way have these intelligence organizations changed their practices so that strategists can have confidence that their estimates are reliable? Or put differently, what changes is Wolfowitz making in his own staff to ensure, first, that the estimates are reliable, and second, that they are properly utilized?
We are now back where we began. What is the mission? What is the situation on the ground? What are the available resources? What is the strategy? Wolfowitz said that he did not expect the current troop levels in Iraq at this point. An honest answer, but incomplete. The complete answer is that he did not expect to be grappling with these questions a year later. Wolfowitz is a student of Thucydides. A careful reading of "The History of the Peloponnesian War" would be appropriate, not so much to understand what will happen, but to understand what can happen when expectations and reality diverge.
-
Season of Apologies
It?s time for reckless critics to own up.
Victor Hansen; National Review Online
President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld were both asked to apologize recently for the illegal and amoral behavior of a few miscreant soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. They did so without qualifications, despite the fact the military had itself uncovered the transgressions and already prepared a blistering indictment of such reprehensible acts. Media scrutiny was intense; a general has already been removed from command; court trials are scheduled; and more resignations, demotions, and jail time loom.
But since we are in the season of apologies, we might as well continue it to the bitter end. Here I do not mean the buffoons like Michael Moore whose remorse would be as spurious as the original slander was lunatic, but rather serious commentators and statesmen who have crossed the line and need to step back. So here it goes.
Ted Kennedy is the senior U.S. senator from Massachusetts. He wields enormous influence and has appointed himself as surrogate spokesman for the Democratic opposition. Yet here is how he recently weighed in about Abu Ghraib: "Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management ? U.S. management."
This slander is both untrue and dangerous at a time when thousands of Americans are under fire in the field from commandos and criminals without uniforms who often pose as innocent civilians. The slur, pompously and publicly aired, is a morally reprehensible pronouncement in almost every way imaginable inasmuch as Saddam murdered tens of thousands with the full sanction of the Iraqi state apparatus. In contrast, a few rogue U.S. soldiers may have tortured and sexually humiliated some Iraqi prisoners ? evoking audit and censure at the highest levels of "U.S. management" and inevitable court martial for those directly involved. There is no evidence that the "torture chambers" that disemboweled, shredded, and hung prisoners on meat hooks are now "reopened" for similar procedures on orders of the American government.
Mr. Kennedy should apologize. His reckless and feeble attempts at moral equivalence are wrong in matters of magnitude, government responsibility, and public disclosure, remorse, and accountability. Worse still, his silly comments ? printed around the Arab world ? suggest to the those on the battlefield that a high-ranking official of their own American government believes that his own soldiers are fighting for a cause no different from that which murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Thomas L. Friedman is the chief New York Times columnist now writing about foreign affairs. Millions at home and abroad read what he writes, and trust him to be both sober and judicious in his criticism. We have all read him with profit at times. But in a particularly angry opinion editorial on May 13 he leveled the following baffling charge: "I know this is hard to believe, but the Pentagon crew hated Colin Powell, and wanted to see him humiliated 10 times more than Saddam."
That charge is simply untrue, and is nearly as reckless as Mr. Kennedy's remarks. Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides do not "hate" Mr. Powell. No one has expressed such venom. But what is truly reprehensible is to imply that officials of the United States government wished far worse for their own decorated Secretary of State than they did for a mass murderer with whom they were then currently at war. Once more such a malicious remark will do untold damage abroad. If Mr. Friedman cannot produce a reputable source or direct quotation for such an unfortunate attribution that borders on character assassination, he should apologize for being both wrong and incendiary.
So far we know as much about the Oil-for-Food mess as we do the Abu Ghraib prisoner scandal. Other than the sensational pictorial evidence from the prisons, the only difference in the respective ongoing audits is that the U.S. military is fully investigating its own while the U.N. is stonewalling. But if dozens of Iraqis may have been humiliated and perhaps even tortured by renegade American soldiers, tens of thousands of women and children faced starvation while corrupt U.N. officials at the highest levels knew about billions of needed dollars in illegal kickbacks skimmed off hand-in-glove with a mass murderer.
So far Kofi Annan ? whose own son, Kojo, was at one time associated with the Swiss Cotecna consortium involved in the shameful profiteering ? has not apologized to the Iraqi people. He should. Again, his agency's wrongdoing did not result in humiliation for some, but probably cost the lives of thousands while under his watch.
What is going on? The months of April and May have been surreal ? scandals at Abu Ghraib, decapitations and desecrations of those killed from Gaza to Iraq, and insurrections in Fallujah and Najaf. The shock of the unexpected has led to hysteria and cheap TV moralizing by critics of the war, fueled by election-year politics at home, apparent embarrassment for some erstwhile supporters of the intervention who are angry that democracy in Iraq has not appeared fully-formed out of the head of Zeus, and a certain amnesia about the recent dark history of the United Nations.
Yet there are historical forces still in play that bode well for Iraq ? aid pouring in, oil revenues increasing, Iraqi autonomy nearing, and radical terrorists failing to win public support ? all of which we are ignoring amid the successive 24-hour media barrages. The combat deaths of 700 soldiers are tragic. We in our postwar confusion have also made a number of mistakes: not storming into the Sunni Triangle at war's end, not shooting the first 500 looters that started the mass rampage of theft, not keeping some of the Iraqi army units intact, not bulldozing down Saddam Hussein's notorious prisons, not immediately putting at war's end Iraqi officials into the public arena, not storming Fallujah, and not destroying al Sadr and his militias last spring.
Still, in just a year the worst mass murderer in recent history is gone and a consensual government is scheduled to assume power in his place in just a few weeks. Postwar Iraq is not a cratered Dresden or the rubble of Stalingrad ? it is seeing power, water, and fuel production at or above prewar levels. For all the recent mishaps, two truths still remain about Iraq ? each time the American military forcibly takes on the insurrectionists, it wins; and each time local elections are held, moderate Iraqis, not Islamic radicals, have won.
So let us calm down and let events play out. If it were not an election year, Mr. Kennedy would dare not say such reprehensible things. In two or three months when there is a legitimate Iraqi government in power, Mr. Friedman may not wish to level such absurd charges. And when the truth comes out about the U.N.'s past role in Iraq, both Iraqis and Americans may not be so ready to entrust the new democracy's future to an agency that has not only done little to save Bosnians or Rwandans, but over the past decade may well have done much to harm Iraqis.
But in the meantime, let these who have transgressed all join the president and the secretary of defense and say they are sorry for what they have recklessly said and the untold harm that they have done.
-
Geopolitical Diary: Friday, May 28, 2004
Muqtada al-Sadr has agreed to pull out of An Najaf without receiving any
official guarantee of amnesty on murder charges and without agreeing to
disband his militia. The withdrawal was not negotiated by the United States, but by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's representatives. This action
promotes the April rising that nearly wrecked U.S. strategy in Iraq toward
closure.
The rising -- both Sunni and Shia -- has created a new reality in Iraq. The
United States has refused to become deeply engaged in two cities: Al
Fallujah and An Najaf. In Al Fallujah, it has negotiated with the Sunnis,
allowing de facto control over the city and permitting guerrillas to
participate in governance. In An Najaf, a Shiite city, the United States has
refused to engage al-Sadr in any way that would damage Shiite shrines.
Instead, it has essentially created a situation where al-Sistani would
either take care of the matter or leave al-Sadr permanently in place. Now
that al-Sadr is withdrawing, we can expect forces under al-Sistani to take
control of the city.
The United States has created a similar situation on two occasions -- it is
no longer an isolated incident -- and is not prepared to take responsibility
for controlling urban areas in the face of sustained resistance. The United
States is prepared to allow local forces -- regardless of composition -- to
work out the political and security situation for themselves. Where there
are lower levels of resistance, the United States is prepared to take part
in patrolling, but it is no longer prepared to take responsibility for all
of Iraq under any and all circumstances.
This is a huge change in U.S. thinking about Iraq since this time last year.
This tactic also has become an inevitable change. There were no options. The United States was not in a position, politically or in terms of forces, to
engage in a massive urban counterinsurgency. The capitulation to reality -- which is precisely what this is -- relies on primary and practicable
missions, rather than on secondary and impossible missions. This shift
ultimately is far more important than any scheduled change in sovereignty June 30. The new Iraqi government will have no power over the situation on the ground; that will be in the hand of local forces.
The other change in strategy was al-Sistani's, who believed he had the
Americans in the bag when he stimulated the al-Sadr rising and then leaned back to watch Americans wipe him out. He was stunned when Americans refused to play their role in his drama, instead doing the unthinkable and negotiating a deal with the Sunni guerrillas. Al-Sistani's move caused the United States to completely reconsider its relationship with the Shia. The entire set of Iraqi National Congress official Ahmed Chalabi's revelations was designed to make it clear to al-Sistani that U.S. tolerance of his maneuvers had reached an end. Al-Sistani was left to clean up his own mess, with no better -- or no worse -- deal than the Sunnis received. But the core message was this: Al-Sistani will not have Iraq handed to him on a silver platter by the Americans. If he wants it, he will have to fight for it -- and not with the Americans.
We have seen two cycles in which attacks against the Americans surged and died away in Iraq. It is impossible to say that there will not be a third.
It is possible to say this cycle is being closed out. Given emerging
realities, the United States could reduce its exposure before the next wave can be organized.
Of potentially greater significance was the news that a top al Qaeda leader has called for an urban guerrilla war in Saudi Arabia, according to a statement on several jihadist Web sites. Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin offered a
detailed list of steps that militants should follow to succeed in a fight
against Riyadh. Depending on how this situation breaks in the coming months, the situation in Saudi Arabia could become far more important than the situation in Iraq.
......................................................................
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
My second post today:
==================
Overdoing Chalabi
By George Friedman
On Feb. 19, in a piece entitled "Ahmed Chalabi and His Iranian
Connection," Stratfor laid out the close relationship Chalabi had
with the Iranians, and the role that relationship played in the
flow of intelligence to Washington prior to the war. This week,
the story of Chalabi, accused of being an Iranian agent by U.S.
intelligence, was all over the front pages of the newspapers. The
media, having ignored Chalabi's Iranian connections for so long,
went to the other extreme -- substantially overstating its
significance.
The thrust of many of the stories was that the United States was
manipulated by Iran -- using Chalabi as a conduit -- into
invading Iraq. The implication was that the United States would
have chosen a different course, except for Chalabi's
disinformation campaign. We doubt that very much. First, the
United States had its own reasons for invading Iraq. Second, U.S.
and Iranian interests were not all that far apart in this case.
Chalabi was certainly, in our opinion, working actively on behalf
or Iranian interests -- as well as for himself -- but he was
merely a go-between in some complex geopolitical maneuvering.
Iran wanted the United States to invade Iraq. The Iranians hated
Saddam Hussein more than anyone did, and they feared him. Iran
and Iraq had fought a war in the 1980s that devastated a
generation of Iranians. More than Hussein, Iraq represented a
historical threat to Iran going back millennia. The destruction
of the Iraqi regime and army was at the heart of Iranian national
interest. The collapse of the Soviet Union had for the first time
in a century secured Iran's northern frontiers. The U.S. invasion
of Afghanistan secured the Shiite regions of Afghanistan as a
buffer. If the western frontier could be secured, Iran would
achieve a level of national security it had not known in
centuries.
What Iran Wanted
Iran knew it could not invade Iraq and win by itself. Another
power had to do it. The failure of the United States to invade
and occupy Iraq in 1991 was a tremendous disappointment to Iran.
Indeed, the primary reason the United States did not invade Iraq
was because it knew the destruction of the Iraqi army would leave
Iran the dominant power native to the Persian Gulf. Invading Iraq
would have destroyed the Iraq-Iran balance of power that was the
only basis for what passed for stability in the region.
The destruction of the Iraqi regime would not only have made Iran
secure, but also would have opened avenues for expansion. First,
the Persian Gulf region is full of Shia, many of them oriented
toward Iran for religious reasons. For example, the loading
facilities for Saudi oil is in a region dominated by the Shia.
Second, without the Iraqi army blocking Iran, there was no
military force in the region that could stop the Iranians. They
could have become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf, and
only the permanent stationing of U.S. troops in the region would
have counterbalanced Iran. The United States did not want that,
so the conquest of Kuwait was followed by the invasion -- but not
the conquest -- of Iraq. The United States kept Iraq in place to
block Iran.
Iran countered this policy by carefully and systematically
organizing the Shiite community of Iraq. After the United States
allowed a Shiite rising to fail after Desert Storm, Iranian
intelligence embarked on a massive program of covert organization
of the Iraqi Shia, in preparation for the time when the Hussein
regime would fall. Iranian intentions were to create a reality on
the ground so the fall of Iraq would inevitably lead to the rise
of a Shiite-dominated Iraq, allied with Iran.
What was not in place was the means of destroying Hussein.
Obviously, the Iranians wanted the invasion and Chalabi did
everything he could to make the case for invasion, not only
because of his relationship with Iran, but also because of his
ambitions to govern Iraq. Iran understood that an American
invasion of Iraq would place a massive U.S. Army on its western
frontier, but the Iranians also understood that the United States
had limited ambitions in the area. If the Iranians cooperated
with U.S. intelligence on al Qaeda and were not overly aggressive
with their nuclear program, the two major concerns of the United
States would be satisfied and the Americans would look elsewhere.
The United States would leave Iraq in the long run, and Iran
would be waiting patiently to reap the rewards. In the short run,
should the United States run into trouble in Iraq, it would
become extremely dependent on the Iranians and their Shiite
clients. If the Shiite south rose, the U.S. position would become
untenable. Therefore if there was trouble -- and Iranian
intelligence was pretty sure there would be -- Shiite influence
would rise well before the Americans left.
Chalabi's job was to give the Americans a reason to invade, which
he did with stories of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But he
had another job, which was to shield two critical pieces of
information from the Americans: First, he was to shield the
extent to which the Iranians had organized the Shiite south of
Iraq. Second, he was to shield any information about Hussein's
plans for a guerrilla campaign after the fall of Baghdad. These
were the critical things -- taken together, they would create the
dependency the Iranians badly wanted.
What the United States Wanted
The Americans were focused on another issue. The balance of power
in the Persian Gulf was not a trivial matter to them, but it had
taken on a new cast after Sept. 11. For the United States, the
central problem in the Persian Gulf -- and a matter of urgent
national security -- was the unwillingness of Saudi intelligence
and security services to move aggressively against al Qaeda
inside the kingdom. From the U.S. viewpoint, forcing Saudi Arabia
to change its behavior was the overriding consideration; without
that, no progress against al Qaeda was possible.
The United States did not see itself as having many levers for
manipulating the situation in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were
convinced that ultimately the United States would not be able to
take decisive action against the Saudis, and the Saudi government
was more concerned about the internal political consequences of a
crackdown on al Qaeda, than it was about the United States. It
felt confident it could manage the United States as it had in the
past.
The United States did not want to invade Saudi Arabia. The House
of Saud was the foundation of Saudi stability, and the United
States did not want it to fall. It wanted to change the Saudi
strategy. Invading Saudi Arabia could have led to global economic
disaster if oil shipments were disrupted. Finally, the invasion
of Saudi Arabia, given its size, terrain and U.S. resources, was
a difficult if not impossible task. The direct route would not
work. The United States would take an indirect route.
If you wanted to frighten Saudi Arabia into changing its behavior
without actually launching military operations against it, the
way to do that would be: (a) demonstrate your will by staging an
effective military campaign; and (b) wind up the campaign in a
position to actually invade and take Saudi oil fields if they did
not cooperate. The Saudis doubted U.S. will and military capacity
to do them harm (since Kuwait would never permit its territory to
be used to invade Saudi Arabia). The solution: an invasion of
Iraq.
The United States wanted to invade Iraq as an indirect route to
influence Saudi Arabia. As in any military operation, there were
also subsidiary political goals. The United States wanted to get
rid of Hussein's regime, not because it was complicit with al
Qaeda, but because it might later become complicit. Secondly, it
wanted to use Iraqi territory as a base to pressure Syria and
Iran as well.
Chalabi's claims about Iraqi WMD did not instigate the invasion,
because the United States did not invade Iraq to get rid of WMD.
An invasion would be the most dangerous route for doing that,
because the other side might actually surprise you and use the
weapons on your troops. You would use air strikes and special
operations troops. What Chalabi did by providing his intelligence
was, however, not insignificant. The administration had two
goals: the destruction of al Qaeda and protection of the United
States from WMD. By producing evidence of WMD in Iraq, Chalabi
gave Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz the tool they needed. By
introducing evidence of WMD, they triggered an automatic policy
against Iraq having them, which closed off an argument -- not
really a raging argument -- in the administration. It was
important, but not earth shattering.
There was a deeper dimension to this. The strategic planners in
the administration were old enough to remember when Richard Nixon
began the process that broke the back of the Soviet Union -- his
alliance with China against the Soviets. During World War II, the
United States allied with Stalin against Hitler, preventing a
potential peace agreement by Stalin. The United States had a
known policy of using fault lines among potential enemies to
split them apart, allying with the weaker against the stronger.
If the United States allying with Stalin or Mao was not
considered beyond the pale, then the Bush administration planners
had another alliance in mind.
The fault line in the Islamic world is between Sunni and Shia.
The Sunni are a much larger group than the Shia, but only if you
include countries such as Indonesia. Within the Persian Gulf
region, the two groups are highly competitive. Al Qaeda was a
Sunni movement. Following U.S. grand strategy, logic held that
the solution to the problem was entering into an alliance of
sorts with the Shia. The key to the Shia was the major Shiite
power -- Iran.
The United States worked with Iranian intelligence during the
invasion of Afghanistan, when the Iranians arranged relationships
with Shiite warlords like Ahmed Khan. The United States and Iran
had cooperated on a number of levels for years when it concerned
Iraq. Therefore there were channels open for collaboration.
The United States was interested not only in frightening Saudi
Arabia, but also in increasing its dependence on the United
States. The United States needed a lever strong enough to break
the gridlock in Riyadh. An invasion of Iraq would achieve the
goal of fear. An alliance with Iran would create the dependency
that was needed. The Saudis would do anything to keep the
Iranians out of their oil fields and their country. After the
invasion of Iraq, only the United States could stop them. The
Saudis were trapped by the United States.
What Chalabi Didn't Say
What is important to see here is how the Iranians were using the
Americans, and how the Americans were using the Iranians. Chalabi
was an important channel, but hardly the only one. It is almost
certain that his role was well known. Chalabi was probably left
in place to convince the Iranians that the United States was
naive enough to believe them, or he was there simply as a token
of good faith. But nothing he said triggered the invasion.
It was what he did not say that is significant. Chalabi had to
know that the Iranians controlled the Iraqi Shia. It is possible
that he even told the Pentagon that, since it wouldn't change
fundamental strategy much. But there is one thing that Chalabi
should have known that he certainly didn't tell the Americans:
that Hussein was going to wage a guerrilla war. On that point,
there is no question but that the Pentagon was surprised, and it
mattered a lot.
Chalabi did not share intelligence that the Iranians almost
certainly had because the Iranians wanted the Americans to get
bogged down in a guerrilla war. That would increase U.S.
dependence on the Shia and Iran, and would hasten the American
departure.
Iranian intelligence had penetrated deep into Iraq. The
preparations for the guerrilla war were extensive. Iran knew --
and so did Chalabi. The United States would still have invaded,
but would have been much better prepared, militarily and
politically. Chalabi did not tell the Pentagon what he knew and
that has made a huge difference in the war.
We suspect that the Pentagon intelligence offices and the CIA
both knew all about Chalabi's relation to Iranian intelligence.
The argument was not over that, but over whether this
disqualified his intelligence. The Pentagon had made up its mind
for strategic reasons to invade Iraq. Chalabi's intelligence was
of use in internal disputes in the administration, but decided
nothing in terms of policy. The CIA, understanding that Chalabi
was not really a source in the conventional sense but was a
geopolitical pawn, did not like the game, but didn't call the
Department of Defense on it until after DOD got into trouble in
Iraq -- and the CIA wanted to make certain that everyone knew it
wasn't their mistake.
Chalabi was a minor player in a dance between Iran and the United
States that began on Sept. 11 and is still under way. The United
States wants a close relationship with Iran in order to split the
Islamic world and force the Saudis to collaborate with the
Americans. The Iranians want to use the United States in order to
become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf. Each wants the
other to be its hammer. In all of this, Chalabi was only an actor
in a bit part.
The one place in which he was significant was negative -- he kept
the United States in the dark about the impending guerrilla war.
That was where he really helped Iran, because it was the
guerrilla war that locked the United States into a dependency on
the Iraqi Shia that went much farther than the United States
desired, and from which the United States is only now starting to
extricate itself. That is a major act of duplicity, but it is a
sin of omission, not commission.
In a way, the Americans and the Iranians used Chalabi for their
own purposes. The Iranians used him to screen information from
the Americans more than to give false information. The Americans
used him to try to convince the Iranians that they had a
sufficient degree of control over the situation that it was in
their interests to maintain stability in the Shiite regions. At
this point, it is honestly impossible to tell who got the better
of whom. But this much is certain. Chalabi, for all his
cleverness, is just another used up spook, trusted by no one,
trusting even fewer. Geopolitics trumps conspiracy every time.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
Hey Crafty Dog... I think people are smart enough to go to that website and read all about it themselves, rather then you post every single bit of information from that website here.
-
Wrong time of the month?
-
Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia
June 03, 2004 2217 GMT
By George Friedman
Summary
The United States has clearly entered a new phase of the Iraq campaign in which its relationship with the Iraqi Shia has been de-emphasized while relationships with Sunnis have been elevated. This has an international effect as well. It obviously affects Iranian ambitions. It also helps strengthen the weakening hand of the Saudi government by reducing the threat of a Shiite rising in strategic parts of the kingdom that could threaten the flow of oil. The United States is creating a much more dynamic and fluid situation, but it is also enormously more complicated and difficult to manage.
Analysis
The United States has fully entered the fourth phase of the Iraq campaign. The first phase consisted of the invasion of Iraq and the fall of Baghdad. The second was the phase in which the United States believed that it had a free hand in Iraq. It ended roughly July 1, 2003. The third phase was the period of commitment to control events in Iraq, intense combat with the Sunni guerrillas and collaboration with the Shia in Iraq and the Iranians. The fourth phase began in April with the negotiated settlement in Al Fallujah, and became official this week with the formation of the interim Iraqi government.
The new government represents the culmination of a process that began during the April uprising by Muqtada al-Sadr -- and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's unwillingness to intervene to stop the fighting and the kidnappings. Al-Sistani's behavior caused the Bush administration to reconsider a strategic principle that had governed U.S. strategy in Iraq since July 2003: the assumption that the United States could not afford to alienate al-Sistani and the Shiite community and remain in Iraq.
The problem was that the understanding the United States thought it had with the Shia was very different from the one the Shia thought they had with the United States. It would take a microscope to figure out how the disconnect occurred and how it widened into an abyss, but the basic outlines are obvious. Al-Sistani believed that by controlling the Shia during the Sunni Ramadan offensive of October-November 2003, the Shia had entered into an agreement with the United States that the sovereign government of Iraq would pass into Shiite hands as rapidly as possible.
Whether the United States had a different understanding -- or given its intelligence that the Sunni rebellion had been broken -- the fact was that by January, the United States was backing off the deal. In pressing for an interim government selected by the United States and containing heavy Sunni and Kurdish representation, and by putting off direct elections for at least a year, the United States let al-Sistani know that he was not getting what he wanted. Al-Sistani first transmitted his unhappiness through several channels, including Ahmed Chalabi. He then called for mass demonstrations. When that did not work, he maneuvered al-Sadr into rising against the Americans at the same time as the Sunnis launched an offensive west of Baghdad, particularly in Al Fallujah. Al-Sistani's goal was to demonstrate that the United States was utterly dependent on the Shia and that it had better change its thinking about the future Iraqi government.
Al-Sistani badly miscalculated. The United States did not conclude that it needed a deal with the Shia. It concluded instead that the Shia -- including Chalabi and al-Sistani -- were completely undependable allies. By striking at a moment of extreme vulnerability, the Shia crippled the U.S. Defense Department faction that had argued not only in favor of Chalabi but also in favor of alignment with the Shia. Instead, the CIA and State Department, which had argued that the Shiite alignment was a mistake, now argued -- convincingly -- that al-Sistani was maneuvering the United States into a position of complete dependency, and that the only outcome would be the surrender of power to the Shia, whose interests lay with Iran, not the United States. Following the al-Sadr rising, and al-Sistani's attempt to maneuver the United States into simultaneously protecting al-Sistani from al-Sadr and being condemned by al-Sistani for doing it, the defenders of the Shiite strategy were routed.
A fourth strategy emerged, in which the United States is trying to maintain balanced relationships with Sunnis and Shia, while currently tilting toward the Sunnis. Al Fallujah is the great symbol of this. The United States negotiated with its mortal enemy, the Sunnis, and conceded control of the city to them. What would have been utterly unthinkable during the third phase from July to March became logical and necessary in April and May. The United States is now speaking to virtually all Iraqi factions, save the foreign jihadists linked to al Qaeda. Al-Sistani has gone from being the pivot of U.S. policy in Iraq, to being a competitor for U.S. favor. It is no accident that Chalabi was publicly destroyed by the CIA over the past few weeks, or that the new Iraqi government gives no significant posts to al-Sistani supporters -- and that Shia are actually underrepresented.
The United States has recognized that it will not be able to defeat the Sunni insurgents in war without becoming utterly dependent on the Shia for stabilizing the south. Since the United States does not have sufficient force available in either place to suppress both a Sunni and a Shiite rising -- and since it has lost all confidence in the Shiite leadership -- logic has it that it needs to move toward ending the counterinsurgency. That is a political process requiring the United States to recognize the guerrillas linked to the Saddam Hussein military and intelligence service as a significant political force in Iraq, and to use that relationship as a lever with which to control the Shia. That is what happened in Al Fallujah; that is what is happening -- with much more subtlety -- in the interim government, and that is what will be playing out for the rest of the summer.
In essence, in order to gain control of the military situation, the United States has redefined the politics of Iraq. Rather than allowing the Shia to be the swing player in the three-man game, the United States is trying to maneuver itself into being the swingman. Suddenly, as the war becomes gridlocked, the politics have become extraordinarily fluid. Every ball is in the air -- and it is the United States that has become the wild card.
Changes and Consequences
The redefinition of the U.S. role in Iraq has major international consequences. The U.S. relationship with Iran reached its high point during the Bam earthquake in December 2003. The United States offered aid, and the Iranians accepted. The United States offered to send Elizabeth Dole (and a player to be named later), and this was rejected by Iran. Iran -- viewing the situation in Iraq and the U.S. relationship with the Shia, and realizing that the United States needed Iranian help against al Qaeda -- sought to rigorously define its relationship with the Americans on its own terms. It thought it had the whip hand and was using it. The United States struggled with its relationship with Iran from January until March, accepting its importance, but increasingly uneasy with the views being expressed by Tehran.
By April, the United States had another important consideration on its plate: the deteriorating situation in Saudi Arabia. The United States was the primary cause of that deterioration. It had forced the Saudi government to crack down on al Qaeda in the kingdom, and the radical Islamists were striking back at the regime. An incipient civil war was under way and intensifying. Contrary to myth, the United States did not intervene in Iraq over oil -- anyone looking at U.S. behavior over the past year can see the desultory efforts on behalf of the Iraqi oil industry -- but the United States had to be concerned about the security of oil shipments from Saudi Arabia. If those were disrupted, the global economy would go reeling. It was one thing to put pressure on the Saudis; it was another thing to accept a civil war as the price of that pressure. And it was yet another thing to think calmly about the fall of the House of Saud. But taking Saudi oil off the market was not acceptable.
The Saudis could not stop shipping oil voluntarily. They needed the income too badly. That was never a risk. However, for the first time since World War II, the disruption of Saudi oil supplies because of internal conflict or external force became conceivable. The fact was that Saudi Arabia had a large Shiite population that lived around the oil shipment points. If those shipment points were damaged or became inaccessible, all hell would break loose in the global economy.
The Iranians had a number of mutually supporting interests. First, they wanted a neutral or pro-Iranian Iraq in order to make another Iran-Iraq war impossible. For this, they needed a Shiite-dominated government. Second, they were interested in redressing the balance of power in the Islamic world between Sunnis and Shia, in particular with the Saudi Wahhabis. Finally, they wanted -- in the long run -- to become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf. Their relationship with the United States in Iraq was the linchpin for all of this.
The Saudis, having already felt the full force of American fury -- and now trapped between them and their own radicals -- faced another challenge. If the U.S. policy in Iraq remained on track, the power of Iran and the Shia would surge through the region. The Saudis had faced a challenge from the Shia right after the Khomeni revolution in Iran. They did not enjoy it, but they did have the full backing of the United States. Now they are in a position where they faced an even more intense challenge, and the United States might well stay neutral or, even worse, back the challenge. If the Shia in Saudi Arabia rose with the backing of Iran and a Shiite-dominated Iraq, the Saudi government would crumble.
From the Saudi point of view, they might be able to contain the radical Islamists using traditional tribal politics and payoffs, but facing the Wahhabis and the Shia at the same time would be impossible. The third-phase policy of entente between the United States and the Shiite-Iranian bloc seemed to guarantee a Shiite rising in Saudi Arabia in the not-too-distant future.
As U.S.-Iranian relations became increasingly strained during the winter, the Saudis increased their cooperation with the United States. They also made it clear to the Americans that they were in danger of losing their balance as the pressures on them mounted. The United States liked what it saw in the Saudi intensification of the war effort, even in the face of increased resistance. The United States did not like what it saw in Tehran, concerned that the relationship there was getting out of hand. Finally, in April, it became completely disenchanted with the Shiite leadership of Iraq.
There were therefore two layers to the U.S. policy shift. The first was internal to Iraq. The second had to do with increased concerns about the security of oil shipments from the kingdom if the Iranians encouraged a rising in Saudi Arabia. The United States did not lighten up at all on demanding full cooperation on al Qaeda. The Saudis supplied that. But the United States did not want oil shipments disrupted. In the end, the survival or demise of the House of Saud does not matter to the United States -- except to the degree that it affects the availability of oil.
The United States has to balance the pressure it puts on Saudi Arabia to fight al Qaeda against the threat of oil disruption. It cannot lighten up on either. From the American point of view, the right balance is a completely committed Saudi Arabia and freely flowing oil. The United States had moved much closer to the former, and it now needed to ensure the latter. Jerking the rug out from under the Iranians and the Shia was the U.S. answer.
Oil does not cost more than $40 a barrel because of China. It costs more than $40 a barrel because of fears that Saudi oil really could come off the market, and doubt that the complex U.S. maneuver can work. The obvious danger is an Iranian-underwritten rising in southern Iraq that spills over into Saudi Arabia. The United States has shut off its support for such an event, but the Iranians have an excellent intelligence organization with a strong covert capability. They are capable of answering in their own way.
The future at this moment is in the hands of Tehran and An Najaf. This is the point at which the degree of control the Iranians have over the Iraqi Shiite leadership will become clear. The Iranians obviously are not happy with the trends that have emerged over the past month. Their best lever is in Iraq. The Iraqi Shia are aware that the United States is increasingly limber and unpredictable -- and that it has more options than it had two months ago. The Iraqi Shia are in danger of being trapped between Washington and Tehran. It is extremely important to note that al-Sistani today tentatively endorsed the new government, clearly uneasy at the path events were taking. Therefore there are two questions: First, will the Iranians become more aggressive, abandoning their traditional caution? Second, can they get the Iraqi Shiite leaders to play their game, or will the old rift between Qom and An Najaf (the Iranian and Iraqi Shiite holy cities) emerge once again as the Shia scramble to get back into the American game.
The problem the Americans have is this: Wars are very complicated undertakings that require very simple politics. The more complicated the politics, the more difficult it is to prosecute a war. The politics of this war have become extraordinarily complicated. The complexity is almost mind-boggling. Fighting a war in this environment is tough at best -- and this is not the best. What the United States must achieve out of all of this maneuvering is a massive simplification of the war goals. This is getting way too complicated.
www.stratfor.com
-
This is an article from Life Magazine Jan 7 1946.
Title is "Americans Are Losing the Victory in Europe"
http://www.kultursmog.com/Life-Page01.htm
-
A quick comment: I am struck by Strat's lack of reference to the Iranian efforts to complete going nuke-- and by its comment about the US increasingly being seen as reacting to pressure instead of having a coherent plan.
......................................................................
Geopolitical Diary: Monday, June 7, 2004
The realignment in Iraq continues to have expected political repercussions
in the region, particularly in Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi events are
getting more notice in the media, but the events in Iran are both more
interesting and more ominous. Over the long run, they could pose a problem to the United States in this war that is substantially less manageable than events in Saudi Arabia -- which is saying quite a lot.
Despite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's reserved endorsement of the new
Iraqi government, Iran continues to leak ominous news. A few weeks ago, there was word that Iranian suicide squads were being trained to attack Western targets. That story went quiet for a while, but this weekend, the leaks began again. Agence France Presse moved a story on Sunday about a group called the Committee for the Commemoration of Martyrs of the World Islamic Movement -- citing an Iranian newspaper, Shargh, as the source. This time, the group had a spokesman, Mohammad Samadi, who reported that he has signed up 2,000 for the martyrs campaign. According to Samadi, "Suicide operations are the best way to fight the oppressors, and they have already shown their worth in Lebanon and during the war between Iran and Iraq."
Two things appear to be going on. First, the Iranians are letting the United
States know that al Qaeda is far from the only concern Washington will have if events continue along their current trend in Iraq. If Tehran is not going to get the deal leaders thought they had nailed down -- a neutral to
pro-Iranian government in Baghdad -- Iran will respond in exactly the way the United States doesn't want: opening a new front with suicide bombings.
Iran is also delivering a message to al Qaeda and Saudi fundamentalists.
These groups have criticized the Iranians and the Shia intensely for
collaborating with the United States, and Iran's radical credentials have
been tarnished. With these announcements, the Iranians are reasserting their claims as leaders of Islamic fundamentalism and reminding the Sunni Wahhabis that Iranians were carrying out such operations 20 years ago, while the Saudis were the ones collaborating with the Americans.
The leaks pose a difficult problem for the United States. If Washington
moves along the line of realignment with Sunnis in Iraq, it really could
wind up with another, even more dangerous version of al Qaeda. If the United States tries to placate the Iranians, it will have even more problems in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have been doing all the things the Americans have asked for, and they are now virtually in a civil war because of it. If the United States moves to placate the Iranian Shia, that would not only be another nail in the coffin of the Saudi government, but would increase the sense in the region that the United States is now simply responding to pressure and no longer has a serious plan.
Meanwhile, Fawaz bin Mohammed al-Nashmi, the leader of the Al Quds Brigade of the Arabian Peninsula, released a detailed description of the Khobar attacks that gave an interesting insight into the militants' thinking: "We were asking our brother Muslims, where are the Americans, and they showed us a building where companies have offices. We did find an American. I shot him in the head, [which] exploded. Then we found a South African and we shot him too. In our search for unbelievers, we had to exchange fire with the security forces."
It is important to note the use of the term "unbeliever." The primary
purpose of the attacks was an assault on Americans, but the mission extended to the execution of any nonbeliever. Al-Nashmi also discussed the killing of Philippine Roman Catholics and of Indians, referring to both as unbelievers. This is not new, but the intensity with which unbelievers are being targeted -- as opposed to Westerners or Americans -- is noteworthy. The language used matters.
If the view extends that al Qaeda's war is against all unbelievers, rather
than a war against American imperialism, and if it extends to include
Iranians and other Shia, things will get very interesting indeed. We are
getting the sense of a further radicalization in the Islamic world. We also
are sensing that this further radicalization might create non-Islamic
coalitions that do not currently exist. It is a process we will be watching
intensely.
......................................................................
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
Stratfor Morning Intelligence Brief -- June 15, 2004
......................................................................
REFER A FRIEND TO STRATFOR
To refer a friend for a two-week FREE trial of Stratfor's Premium
Geopolitical Intelligence Service, click here (www.stratfor.com/refer).
You can also find a link to the referral form on www.stratfor.com.
========
, , ,
1124 GMT -- IRAQ -- A purported letter from top jihadist Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was posted on Islamist Web sites June 15. The letter says that al-Zarqawi's ability to continue to
conduct operations is dwindling and warns that if his group is unable to
assume control of Iraq, it would have to move to another country or the
members would have to die as martyrs. The authenticity of the letter has not
yet been verified.
......................................................................
Geopolitical Diary: Tuesday, June 15, 2004
The situation with Iran continues to deteriorate, this time on the nuclear
axis. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported Monday that Iran is not fully cooperating with inspectors. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei noted that the particular problem was with Iran's nuclear enrichment activities, saying, "It is essential for the integrity and credibility of the inspection process that we are able to bring these issues to a close within the next few months and provide the international community with the assurances it urgently seeks regarding Iran's nuclear activities."
The nuclear situation in Iran has been on the table for years, although its
significance was reduced during the period of relative detente with the
United States over the past year. It was assumed that the nuclear issue --although never fully handled -- would not be permitted by either Iran or the United States to become a major block to the broader strategic relationship being forged over Iraq. The Iranians certainly didn't want a nuclear device more than they wanted a neutralized Iraq.
However, the world Iran inhabits this June is very different. The strategic
agreement with Washington has collapsed. Iraq is not heading the way it was heading a few months ago, and it is altogether conceivable that -- at the end of the day -- Baathists will play a leading role in Baghdad. Whoever governs Iraq, the dream of alliance or neutralization is gone. Iran now must calculate its place in a much more dangerous world.
Iran has the nuclear card to play. Tehran has observed Washington's behavior with North Korea, where the essential policy has been to find some means to placate Pyongyang while making occasional threats. North Korea has used its potential nuclear capability as a tool to guarantee regime survival. Iran sees its nuclear program in two ways: First, if successful, it is a tool that guarantees that no one will mess with Iran -- and second, even before it is successful, it becomes an important bargaining chip.
Iran has become more aggressive in positioning its nuclear policy precisely because its arrangements with the United States have slipped away. The threat of a confrontation with Iran is the last thing the Bush
administration needs. First, a crisis of nuclear weapons that Iran denies it
has, prior to the presidential election in November, would not play well
after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Second, the
administration does not need a new crisis with Iran at a time when it wants to portray the situation as quieting down. Therefore it is in Tehran's
interest to assert its nuclear plans -- by stonewalling the IAEA. The goal
is to improve its position for quiet bargaining with the United States over
Iraq. The United States wants to contain the situation; Iran can exploit it.
The danger is this: In order to make its position strong, Iran really needs
to have a nuclear program. Given U.S. intelligence failures, it is very
difficult to trust CIA evaluations. They may be right about Iran, but at
this point, who knows? If the Iranians are really pushing ahead with a
nuclear program, U.S. leaders have to assume the worst case. In the worst case, Iran is close to having a nuclear device or even a weapon. The United States could not tolerate a nuclear Iran, since that would represent a threat to fundamental American interests. It also could not be tolerated by Israel. Therefore there are two nuclear countries in whose interests it would be to take out Iran's capabilities before they become operational.
Tehran does not want this to happen, obviously. It is likely that Iran is
more interested in bluffing a nuclear capability than in having one, since
its use of a nuclear weapon would bring devastating retaliation. Iran is
playing a very carefully refined game.
This is where the weakness in U.S. intelligence becomes painful. Iranian
leaders must assume that the United States knows the status of Iran's
nuclear capability in order for the negotiating ploy not to get out of
control. The United States could well have a clear picture of Iran's
capabilities. However, U.S. policymakers cannot assume that the intelligence evaluation they receive from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency are accurate. They cannot play a refined game themselves. That makes the situation much more dangerous.
The Iranians view U.S. intelligence as extremely capable and assume that the recent failures were merely political covers for the real policies. It is not clear that they accept the notion that U.S. intelligence is not fully
trusted at this point. They may therefore push ahead, assuming that the
United States understands the limits of what Tehran is doing. If Washington instead goes with a worst-case scenario, a massive collision occurs.
The threat of a U.S.-Iranian confrontation is climbing continually. The fact
that the Iranians are forcing a confrontation over nuclear weapons is
ominous -- and the fact that the normal controls on the progression of the
crisis are not fully in place is what makes it really scary.
......................................................................
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
Stratfor Weekly: U.S. and Iran: Beneath the Roiled Surface
......................................................................
REFER A FRIEND TO STRATFOR
To refer a friend to Stratfor, send this Stratfor Weekly
directly to a friend or colleague by forwarding this email, or
by visiting:
http://www.stratfor.com/refer/?I=ST4WKLPW
You can also find a link to the referral form on:
http://www.stratfor.com/
......................................................................
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
23 June 2004
U.S. and Iran: Beneath the Roiled Surface
By George Friedman
We are in a pattern of escalating confrontation between Iran and the United States and its allies. Two issues have surfaced. There is the question of Iran's nuclear program. And there is the more urgent question of Iran's capture of three British patrol boats along the Iraq-Iran frontier. Neither of these surface issues is trivial, but the underlying issues are far more significant. The fact that they have surfaced indicates how serious the underlying questions are, and points to serious tensions between the Iranians and the United States.
Iran has historically faced two threats. Russia has pressed it from the
north; during and after World War II, the Soviets occupied a substantial part of Iran, as did the British. The other threat has come from the west -- from Iraq, from its predecessor states or from states that have occupied Iraq, including Britain. The collapse of the Soviet Union has gone a long way toward securing Iran's northern frontier. In fact, the instability to Iran's north has created opportunities for it to extend its influence in that direction.
Iraq, however, has remained a threat. Iraq's defeat in Desert Storm decreased the threat, with the weakening of Iraq's armed forces and constant patrolling of Iraqi skies by U.S. and British warplanes. But what Iran wanted most to see -- the collapse of the hated Saddam Hussein regime and its replacement by a government at least neutral toward Iran and preferably under Iranian influence -- did not materialize. One of the primary reasons the United States did not advance to Baghdad in 1991 was the fear that an Iraqi collapse would increase Iran's power and make it the dominant force in the Persian Gulf.
Iran Develops a Strategy
Subsequently, Iran's goals were simple: First, Iraq should never pose a
threat to Iran; it never wanted to be invaded again by Iraq. Second, Iran
should be in a position to shape Iraqi behavior in order to guarantee that it would not be a threat. Iran was not in a position to act on this goal itself. What it needed was to induce outside powers -- the United States in
particular -- to act in a manner that furthered Iranian national interests.
Put somewhat differently, Iran expected the United States to invade Iraq or topple Hussein by other means. It intended to position itself to achieve its primary national security goals when that happened.
From the end of Desert Storm to the fall of Baghdad, Iran systematically and patiently pursued its goal. Following Desert Storm, Iran began a program designed both to covertly weaken Hussein's regime and to strengthen Iranian influence in Iraq -- focusing on Iraq's Shiite population. If Hussein fell under his own weight, if he were overthrown in a U.S.-sponsored coup or if the United States invaded Iraq, Iran intended to be in a position to neutralize the Iraqi threat.
There were three parts to the Iranian strategy:
1. Do nothing to discourage the United States from taking action against
Iraq. In other words: Mitigate threats from Iran so the United States would not leave Hussein in place again because it feared the consequences of a power vacuum that Iran could fill.
2. Create an information environment that would persuade the United States to topple Hussein. The Iranians understood the analytic methods of U.S. policy makers and the intelligence processes of the Central Intelligence Agency. Iran created a program designed to strengthen the position of those in the United States who believed that Iraq was a primary threat, while providing the United States with intelligence that maximized the perception of Hussein as a threat. This program preceded the 2003 invasion and the Bush administration as well. Desert Fox -- the air campaign launched by the Clinton administration in December 1998 -- was shaped by the same information environment as the 2003 invasion. The Iranians understood the nature of the intelligence channels the United States used, and fed information through those that intensified the American threat perception.
3. Prepare for the fall of Hussein by creating an alternative force in Iraq
whose primary loyalty was to Iran. The Shiite community -- long oppressed by Hussein and sharing religious values with the Iranian government -- had many of the same interests as Iran. Iranian intelligence services had conducted a long, patient program to organize the Iraqi Shiite community and prepare the Shia to be the dominant political force after the fall of Hussein.
As it became increasingly apparent in 2002 that the United States was
searching for a follow-on strategy after Afghanistan, the Iranians recognized their opportunity. They knew they could not manipulate the United States into invading Iraq -- or provide justification for it -- but they also knew they could do two things. The first was to reduce the threat the United States felt from Iran. The second was to increase, to the extent possible, the intelligence available to those in the Bush administration who supported the invasion.
They accomplished the first with formal meetings in Geneva and back-channel discussions around the world. The message they sent was that Iran would do nothing to hinder a U.S. invasion, nor would it seek to take advantage of it on a direct state basis. The second process was facilitated by filling the channels between Iraqi Shiite exiles and the United States with apparently solid information -- much of it true -- about conditions in Iraq. This is where Ahmed Chalabi played a role.
In our opinion, Iranian intelligence knew two things that it left out of the
channels. The first was that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
programs had been abandoned. The United States did not invade Iraq because of WMD, but used them as a justification. The Iranians knew none would be found, but were pleased that the United States would use this as a justification. The second thing Iran kept from the United States was that Hussein and his key aides did not expect to defeat the United States in a conventional war, but had planned a guerrilla war to follow the fall of Baghdad.
The Iranians had a specific reason for leaving these things out. They knew the Americans would win the conventional war. They did not want the United States to have an easy time occupying Iraq. The failure to find WMD would create a crisis in the United States. The failure to anticipate a Baathist guerrilla war would create a crisis in Iraq. Iran wanted both to happen.
The worse the situation became in Iraq, the less the United States prepared for the real postwar environment -- and the more the credibility of President George W. Bush was questioned, the more eager the United States would be in seeking allies in Iraq. The only ally available -- apart from the marginal Kurds -- was the Shiite majority. As the situation deteriorated in the summer and fall of 2003, the United States urgently needed an accommodation with Iraq's Shia. The idea of a Shiite rising cutting lines of supply to Kuwait while there was a Sunni rising drove all U.S. thinking. It also pushed the United States toward an accommodation with the Shia -- and that meant an accommodation with Iran.
Such an accommodation was reached in the fall of 2003. The United States accepted that the government would be dominated by the Shia, and that the government would have substantial Iranian influence. During the Ramadan offensive, when the lid appeared to be flying off in Iraq, the United States was prepared to accommodate almost any proposal. The Iranians agreed to back-burner -- but not to shut down -- their nuclear proposal, and quiet exchanges of prisoners were carried out. Iran swapped al Qaeda prisoners for anti-Iranian prisoners held by the United States.
Things Fall Apart
Two things happened after the capture of Hussein in mid-December 2003. The first was that the Iranians started to make clear that they -- not the Americans -- were defining the depth of the relationship. When the United States offered to send representatives to Iran after an earthquake later in December, the Iranians rejected the offer, saying it was too early in the relationship. On many levels, the Iranians believed they had the Americans where they wanted them and slowly increased pressure for concessions.
Paradoxically, the United States started to suffer buyer's remorse on the
deal it made. As the guerrilla threat subsided in January and February, the Americans realized that the deal did not make nearly as much sense in January as it had in November. Rather than moving directly toward a Shiite government, the United States began talking to the Sunni sheikhs and thinking of an interim government in which Kurds or Sunnis would have veto power.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani -- who is an Iranian -- began to signal the
United States that trouble was brewing in Iraq. He staged major
demonstrations in January, calling for direct elections -- his code words for a Shiite government. The United States, no longer pressured and growing uneasy about the enormous power of the Iranians, did two things: They pressed ahead with plans for the interim government, and started leaking that they knew the game the Iranians were playing. The release of the news that Chalabi was an Iranian agent was part of this process.
The Iranians and al-Sistani -- seeing the situation slipping out of control
-- tried to convince the Americans that they were willing to send Iraq up in flames. During the Sunni rising in Al Fallujah, they permitted Muqtada
al-Sadr to rise as well. The United States went to al-Sistani for help, but
he refused to lift a finger for days. Al-Sistani figured the United States
would reverse its political plans and make concessions to buy Shiite support.
Just the opposite happened. The United States came to the conclusion that the Shia and Iran were completely unreliable -- and that they were no longer necessary. Rather than negotiate with the Shia, the Americans negotiated with the Sunni guerrillas in Al Fallujah and reached an agreement with them. The United States also pressed ahead with a political solution for the interim government that left the Shia on the margins.
The breakdown in U.S.-Iranian relations dates to this moment. The United
States essentially moved to reverse alliances. In addition, it made clear to
al-Sistani and others that they could be included in the coalition -- in a
favored position. In other words, the United States reversed the process by trying to drive a wedge between the Iranians and the Iraqi Shia. And it
appeared to be working, with al-Sistani and al-Sadr seeming to shift
positions so as not to be excluded.
Iran Roils the Surface
It was at that moment that the Iranians saw more than a decade of patient strategy going out the window. They took two steps. First, they created a crisis with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over nuclear weapons that was certain to draw U.S. attention. Second, they seized the British patrol boats. Their point? To let the United States know that it is on the verge of a major crisis with Iran.
The United States knows this, of course. Military planners are updating plans on Iran as we speak. The crisis is avoidable -- and we would expect it to wax and wane. But the fundamental question is this: Are American and Iranian national interests compatible and, if they are not, is either country in a position at this moment to engage in a crisis or a war? Iran is calculating that it can engage in a crisis more effectively than the United States. The United States does not want a crisis with Iran before the elections -- and certainly not over WMD.
But there is another problem. The Americans cannot let Iran get nuclear
weapons, and the Iranians know it. They assume that U.S. intelligence has a clear picture of how far weapons development has gone. But following the U.S. intelligence failure on WMD in Iraq -- ironically aided by Iran -- will any policy maker trust the judgment of U.S. intelligence on how far Iran's development has gone? Is the U.S. level of sensitivity much lower than Iran thinks? And since Israel is in the game -- and it certainly cannot accept an Iranian nuclear capability -- and threatens a pre-emptive strike with its ownnuclear weapons, will the United States be forced to act when it does not want to?
Like other major crises in history, the situation is not really under
anyone's control. It can rapidly spin out of control and -- even if it is in
control -- it can become a very nasty crisis. This is not a minor
misunderstanding, but a clash of fundamental national interests that will not be easy to reconcile.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
http://jihadwatch.org
-
CLINTON FIRST LINKED AL QAEDA TO SADDAM
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
-----------------------------------------------------------
The Clinton administration talked about firm evidence linking Saddam Hussein's regime to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network years before President Bush made the same statements.
The issue arose again this month after the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States reported there was no "collaborative relationship" between the old Iraqi regime and bin Laden.
Democrats have cited the staff report to accuse Mr. Bush of making inaccurate statements about a linkage. Commission members, including a Democrat and two Republicans, quickly came to the administration's defense by saying there had been such contacts.
In fact, during President Clinton's eight years in office, there were at least two official pronouncements of an alarming alliance between Baghdad and al Qaeda. One came from William S. Cohen, Mr. Clinton's defense secretary. He cited an al Qaeda-Baghdad link to justify the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.
Mr. Bush cited the linkage, in part, to justify invading Iraq and ousting Saddam. He said he could not take the risk of Iraq's weapons falling into bin Laden's hands.
The other pronouncement is contained in a Justice Department indictment on Nov. 4, 1998, charging bin Laden with murder in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
The indictment disclosed a close relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam's regime, which included specialists on chemical weapons and all types of bombs, including truck bombs, a favorite weapon of terrorists.
The 1998 indictment said: "Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. 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."
Shortly after the embassy bombings, Mr. Clinton ordered air strikes on al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and on the Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.
To justify the Sudanese plant as a target, Clinton aides said it was involved in the production of deadly VX nerve gas. Officials further determined that bin Laden owned a stake in the operation and that its manager had traveled to Baghdad to learn bomb-making techniques from Saddam's weapons scientists.
Mr. Cohen elaborated in March in testimony before the September 11 commission.
He testified that "bin Laden had been living [at the plant], that he had, in fact, money that he had put into this military industrial corporation, that the owner of the plant had traveled to Baghdad to meet with the father of the VX program."
He said that if the plant had been allowed to produce VX that was used to kill thousands of Americans, people would have asked him, " 'You had a manager that went to Baghdad; you had Osama bin Laden, who had funded, at least the corporation, and you had traces of [VX precursor] and you did what? And you did nothing?' Is that a responsible activity on the part of the secretary of defense?"
----------------------------------------------------------
This article was mailed from The Washington Times (http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20040624-112921-3401r.htm)
For more great articles, visit us at http://www.washingtontimes.com
Copyright (c) 2004 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
-
Geopolitical Diary: Tuesday, July 20, 2004
The U.S.-Iranian relationship deteriorated further on Monday, as reports
leaked from the 9-11 commission saying there had been contacts between Iran and the hijackers prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. In addition, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) issued a report saying that the hijackers passed through Iranian territory. Not to be outdone, the Iranians also said the hijackers had passed through their territory. And U.S. President George W. Bush declared, "If the Iranians would like to have better relations with the United States there are some things they must do," such as not supporting terrorism or building nuclear weapons.
The deterioration in relations has now tracked back to Iran's relationship
with al Qaeda. It is not clear that Monday's revelations were deliberately
orchestrated. However, the Bush administration knew what would be in the 9-11 commission's report, and it knew of the Council on Foreign Relations report. Administration officials therefore were positioned to use these revelations to increase pressure on Iran. Tehran tried to deflect the
pressure last week by handing over a close associate of Osama bin Laden's to Saudi Arabia. In retrospect, this was partly a move to defuse this week's accusations. Rather than deny them, Iran is acknowledging them but demonstrating that it has shifted its position dramatically. Tehran is trying to decline a confrontation with Washington over its relationship with al Qaeda. It is not clear at the moment whether the United States is equally interested in avoiding a confrontation.
There is little surprise that al Qaeda used Iranian territory and had
relationships with individuals -- some in very senior positions -- in Iran.
Al Qaeda had a policy of cooperating at some level with all Islamic regimes. On close investigation, we will find that al Qaeda operatives were present in virtually every Islamic country and aided by officials in each. This was al Qaeda's strategy: forge relationships with governments or officials in every country that might be of use without becoming dependent on any of them. Therefore, al Qaeda might have used Iran, but it never relied on Iran -- a Shiite power distrusted by al Qaeda's Sunnis.
Iran, for its part, had a policy of maintaining links with all radical
Islamist groups, providing aid where appropriate to Iranian national
interest. In the case of al Qaeda, Iran had built-in mistrust of its Sunni
beliefs. For Iran, there were two separate questions. First, could al Qaeda
pose problems for the United States that would divert it from trying to
dominate Iran? And second, would al Qaeda strengthen or weaken the House of Saud, the religious and commercial rival of Iran? The answer to the first question was yes; the answer to the second was far more complex and difficult to answer. For Tehran, the logical outcome of this calculus would be very limited and careful support to al Qaeda: Safe passage across Iranian territory, plus some other limited support, would just about do it.
It is our view, barring further evidence, that the Iran-al Qaeda
relationship was real, and continued after the Sept. 11 attacks, but that it
never approached a level of mutual dependency or trust. As events unfolded in Iraq, Tehran began to shut down relations with al Qaeda, focusing more on cooperating with the United States. Then, when the United States reversed its policy on Iran in April, Tehran rewarmed its relationship with al Qaeda and started its own suicide-bombing program. The United States did not back off its political reversal, but transmitted some serious threats to Iran in the event that it did not back away from al Qaeda. Last week, the Iranians started to back off. The Bush administration is now using the 9-11 report, the CFR report and Iran's own admissions to maintain the pressure on Iran.
The United States is in no position to fight a war with Iran, whatever it
says privately to Tehran. Regime change is not an option -- but policy
change is. With the old arrangement gone, the United States is trying to
redefine its relationship with Iran on terms much less favorable than
before. As in any very bad marriage -- and the U.S.-Iranian entente was a really rotten one -- there is always time to dredge up past betrayals and
throw them in each other's faces.
Still, it is not all that simple. Iran is neither rejecting the accusations
nor acting defiantly. It is sounding worried, as though officials feel the
need to come clean. We find that extremely interesting. U.S. officials must
have said some very interesting things to the Iranians over the past month. We can't imagine what could be said that would make them so cautious, but that might simply be a failure of our imagination.
Copyrights 2004 - Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
Geopolitical Intelligence Report: Naming the War
......................................................................
REFER A FRIEND TO STRATFOR
To refer a friend to Stratfor, send this Stratfor Weekly
directly to a friend or colleague by forwarding this email, or
by visiting:
http://web2.stratfor.com/refer/?I=ST4WKLPW
You can also find a link to the referral form on:
http://www.stratfor.com/
......................................................................
THE GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT
Naming the War
August 03, 2004
By George Friedman
Of the many things that were included in the 9/11 Commission's report,
perhaps none was more significant in the long run than its criticism of the
name the Bush administration has given the war that began on Sept. 11, 2001: the war on terrorism. The report argued that the idea of a struggle against an enemy called "terrorism" was too vague to be meaningful. It argued that the administration should shift away from fighting a "generic" evil and more precisely define the threat -- the threat from al Qaeda and a radical ideological movement in the Islamic world that "is gathering and will menace Americans and American interests long after" Osama bin Laden is gone.
The commission made two critical points. First, it asserted there was a war going on. There has been some doubt about this: Some have begun to argue that the Sept. 11 attacks were an isolated incident and that Americans should "get over it." Others have argued that it was primarily a criminal conspiracy and that the legal system should handle it. The commission made the unequivocal argument that it was a war and should be treated as such.
Wars are against enemies, and the commission makes the case that terrorism is not, by itself, a meaningful enemy. Rather, the enemy is -- according to the commission -- al Qaeda, and along with al Qaeda, radical Islam as an ideology. That means that, from the commission's viewpoint, this is a war between the United States and al Qaeda or, alternatively, a war between the United States and radical Islam. Given the gingerly way in which Americans have approached the question of the nature of the enemy, it is striking that the commission honed in on what has been one of the few aspects of delicacy in the Bush administration's approach to war -- completely rejecting the administration's attempt to subsume the war under the general rubric of
terrorism.
Terrorism is a military strategy: It is an attempt to defeat an enemy by
striking directly against its general population and thereby creating a sense of terror which, it is hoped, will lead the population to move against the government and force it to some sort of political acquiescence or accommodation. During World War II, for example, one of the primary uses of air power was to create terror among the population. The German bombardment of London, British nighttime area bombardment of German cities, American firebombing and atomic bombing of Japanese cities -- all were terror attacks. They were explicitly designed to put the population at risk, in efforts to prompt the enemy's capitulation. It did not work at all against the British; there is debate over what role, if any, it played against the Germans; and it certainly had a massive, if not decisive, effect in the case of the Japanese.
Terror, of course, was not confined to World War II. It has been a frequent feature of warfare.
Many countries have used terror attacks. So have individuals and non-state groups. Timothy McVeigh's attack against the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was intended to generate some sort of political change. The attacks by the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany during the 1970s or the bombings of the Weather Underground in the United States were similarly intended to generate political change. That McVeigh, Ulriche Meinhoff and Mark Rudd had not the slightest idea of what they were trying to achieve nor of the relationship between their attacks and their strategy -- such as it was -- speaks to their own serious limitations. It says nothing about the potential uses of terror attacks in warfare, nor to the fact that terror attacks can be effective, given a clear strategy, planning and execution. Governments can be forced to change strategy when their populations are placed at risk.
This is the conceptual problem with terrorism: Like any sort of warfare, it
can be successful or not, depending on circumstances. However, terrorism in some form or another is among the most accessible types of warfare. What we mean by this is that while it is difficult for a handful of ideologues to secure a navy and impose a blockade, it is not impossible for a handful of people to carry out some limited attacks against a population, if it is no greater than firing a bullet into someone's kneecap or hijacking a plane. Terrorism provides a unique opportunity for small, non-state groups to wage war.
Historically, most of these non-state groups have consisted either of mental or emotional defectives or of individuals whose cause was so hopeless the act of terrorism could at best be considered a form of bloody theater rather than as a serious threat. It is extremely difficult to take the Basque separatist group ETA seriously in the sense of expecting that their attacks against the population will lead to a desired political evolution. It was certainly impossible to imagine how Rudd, Meinhoff or McVeigh possibly could have thought any strategic goal could have been reached through the use of terror attacks.
The general use of terror attacks by non-state actors has involved people
like this. The concept of terrorism, as it developed since the 1960s, has
focused not on terror as a potentially viable military strategy, but as an
inherently non-state activity. This is a serious historical error. But a more
serious error followed from this: If terrorism is something non-state actors use, and non-state actors tend in general to be imbeciles, posturers or lost causes looking for attention, then terrorism is no longer a serious military tool in the hands of strategists. It is, instead, a form of social and personal dysfunction, and therefore need not be taken seriously.
It was the secular Palestinian movement after 1967 that adopted the use of isolated counterpopulation attacks most effectively. Apart from attacks
against Israel and Israelis, where no significant political shift was
expected, terrorism was directed against allies of Israel, such as the United States. The strategy there -- not unlike the strategy in Iraq today -- was to impose costs for Israeli allies that would surpass the benefits of alliance. In this case, terror attacks had a definite goal -- to change the
relationship between Israel and its allies. But the movement was hurt in
several ways. First, the Israelis struck back. Second, many Arab countries, including Jordan and Saudi Arabia, worked actively against the Palestinian radicals. Finally, the Palestinians were engaged in an ongoing struggle in which the terrorist attacks became more focused on defining the relations among competing Palestinian factions than on any strategic political goal.
Terrorism, therefore, seemed to be a tool in the hands of the strategically
helpless. Some began and ended in hopeless confusion, succeeding in shedding blood for no purpose. However, the Palestinians who took terrorism as a tactic to the global stage themselves lost their strategic bearings by the 1980s, when it was no longer clear what they were trying to accomplish with some of their operations. Terrorism ceased to be regarded as a military option for nation-states, and it never was quite taken seriously as an effective strategic option for non-state actors. It became a form of moral derangement in the hands of the hopelessly confused and the strategically handicapped. It became a tool of losers.
Al Qaeda uses terrorism. This group pursues counterpopulation operations
designed to generate political evolutions that benefit its goals. By calling
the war against al Qaeda a war on terrorism, the Bush administration
committed two massive mistakes.
First, it lumped al Qaeda in with Mark Rudd and ETA. The latter two are not serious; the former is very serious. Both use the same tactics, but one has a strategic mission. In using this label, it became much more difficult for the administration itself to take al Qaeda seriously. How can you take something seriously that is part of such a collection of dunderheads? The Bush administration underestimated its enemy -- always dangerous in war.
Second, it confused the question of who the enemy was. If the war is against terrorism, then everyone who uses terrorism is the enemy. That's a lot of groups -- including on occasion, the United States. If one is waging a war against terrorism, one is at war against a tactic, not a personifiable enemy. Alternatively, the war must be waged against hundreds or thousands of enemy groups. The concept of terrorism is a wonderful way to get lost.
The most important problem is that if al Qaeda is simply part of a broader
spectrum of groups using terror operations, then the unique strategic
interests of al Qaeda disappear. Al Qaeda has clear strategic goals: It wants to foment a rising in the Islamic world that will topple one or more
governments, and replace them with regimes around which the reborn caliphate can be based. The Sept. 11 attacks were designed to trigger that rising. That has not happened, but al Qaeda is still there.
By ignoring the strategic goals of the attacks -- and this is critically
important -- the Bush administration lost its ability to measure success in
the war. The issue is not merely whether al Qaeda has lost the ability to
carry out terrorist attacks; the more important question is whether al Qaeda has achieved its strategic goals through the use of terrorist attacks. The answer to that is an emphatic no. Al Qaeda not only has not come close to achieving its goal, but has actually moved to a weaker position since 9/11 -- having lost its Afghan base and having had Saudi Arabia turn against it. By focusing on the tactic -- terrorism -- rather than on the strategy, the Bush administration has actually managed to confuse the issue so much that its own successes are invisible. The terror tactics remain, but al Qaeda's strategic goal is as far away as ever.
The administration has confused not only the situation but itself at all
levels by focusing on terrorism in general. It not only lost its ability to
measure strategic progress in the war, but also failed to understand the
unique characteristics of al Qaeda. In fairness, this has been a failure
going back to the Clinton administration, but the hangover remains. The term "terrorism" reminds everyone of hippies running wild and Palestinians attacking Olympic Games. It loses the particular significance of al Qaeda -- its unique intellectual and strategic coherence. It makes al Qaeda appear dumber than it is and causes miscalculation on the part of the United States.
It is interesting to remember why the Bush administration chose the name for the war that it did. Part of it had to do, of course, with the tendency of terrorism experts to treat al Qaeda as part of their domain. But the more important part had to do with not wanting to think in terms of a war against Islam -- radical or otherwise. From the beginning, the administration has not wanted to emphasize the connection between al Qaeda and Islam. Rather, it has tried to treat al Qaeda as an Islamic aberration. It was easier to do so by linking it with terrorism in some generic sense than by linking it with Islam.
The administration needed Islamic countries to participate in its coalition.
It did not want to appear in any way to be at war with any brand or style of Islam. In fighting al Qaeda, it was much easier to be at war with terrorism than with Islam. Stated differently, the administration was afraid that it would lose control of the war's definition if it focused on al Qaeda's Islamic links rather than on its terrorist tactics. It did not want pogroms against Muslims in the United States, and it sought to manage it relations with Islamic states very carefully.
The selection of the term "war on terror" was, therefore, not accidental. It
has been merely very confusing. It is this very confusion that the 9/11
Commission has pointed out. You cannot be at war with a type of military
operation; you have to be at war with a military actor -- and in this case,
the actor has been an organization that is part of a broader element of
radical Islam -- which is, in turn, fighting for dominance in the Islamic
world in general. That makes it a more important war, a more dangerous war and a much more complex one than merely a war against terrorism.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
MISPLACED MERCY
By RALPH PETERS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
August 10, 2004 -- WHEN it comes to killing our enemies, Mom was right: Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. A year after he should have been removed from the Iraqi landscape, our troops are again engaged in combat with Muqtada al-Sadr's terrorist militia.
Intervening at the Iraqi government's request, the Marines fighting Sadr's thugs have been doing a superb job, killing at least 360 members of the renegade "Mahdi Army" and capturing hundreds more. Friendly casualties are almost nil. Our troops know how to do this work better than any other military in the world.
But the first question is: Will the Marines be called off before their quarry
is killed or locked in a cell, just as our Army was choked back by the
politicos two months ago ? when we had another chance to put an end to Sadr's antics?
The second question is: When will our nation's decision-makers, Republican or Democrat, figure out that there is no practical alternative to killing our deadly enemies?
Much has been made of the belligerence of the Pentagon's "chicken hawks," the neoconservatives who instigate wars so avidly, but dismiss the complexity and cost of restoring peace. Yet the most noteworthy aspect of the neocons' performance was how quickly they turned into little Bill Clintons (minus the charm) when the going got tough.
Unwilling to declare martial law after a brilliant battlefield performance by
our troops, unwilling to face down a budding Baathist insurgency, unwilling to remove Sadr from the scene, and even unwilling to live up to a public promise to crush resistance in Fallujah (who's credible now?), the Bush administration behaved like the high-school punk who provokes a fight then lets others do the bleeding.
This column has said it before and will doubtless say it yet again: If we're
unwilling to pay the butcher's bill up front, we'll pay it with compound
interest in the end.
The even-grimmer news is that Sen. John Kerry promises to be worse as
commander in chief than President Bush on his most indecisive day. If Kerry's convention speech can be trusted ? and trust is a fundamental issue with this man of a thousand faces ? he would commit us to a policy of never acting pre-emptively, of surrendering the initiative to our enemies.
Kerry's nonsense about never going to war until war is forced upon us means that we might as well hang a sign on the Statue of Liberty: "Go ahead, hit me first."
If only we could flush away the partisan slop of this election year, what
would amaze us isn't the difference between recent administrations, but the continuity. Yes, President Bush performed splendidly in the aftermath of 9/11 ? in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But as soon as Saddam's statue fell, the Bush administration seemed to run out of juice, as if it depended upon unchallenged success and couldn't adjust when faced with unpleasant surprises. The senior officials charged with Iraq's reconstruction proved every bit as resistant to reality as the Clinton administration ever was.
The neocons' unwillingness to go after Sadr early on, as soon as the cleric chose violence, was just a two-bit reprise of Bill Clinton's reluctance to kill Osama bin Laden when he had one chance after another.
We can still be optimistic about Iraq ? thanks to the incredible job done by our military ? but it's striking how the Bush administration's dithering,
make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach to the occupation in Iraq resembles the previous administration's amateur-hour performance in Somalia.
Our troops end up paying the bills. No matter which party is booking the
Lincoln bedroom. Doesn't anyone take strategy seriously?
We should never send our military on any mission we only intend to prosecute half-heartedly. When risking the lives of our troops, the object should always be to achieve a firm decision on the ground, whether the purpose is to raid a terrorist hide out or change a government. That means sufficient resolve to kill those who take up arms to frustrate our purposes (or to attack our homeland).
For now, good things are happening in Iraq, despite our sloppiness. Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, is proving to be a great deal tougher than the neocons (or the spectacularly unprincipled Sen. Kerry). Allawi knows that his country needs order and that the forces of terror and insurgency only respect strength. Thus far, he's the most decisive political figure of any nationality to emerge in post-war Iraq.
Of course, Allawi's playing double, triple and quadruple games. That's how you survive in the Middle East, where the locals play three-dimensional chess while we play front-porch checkers. The crucial question about Allawi is whether he'll go quietly if his backers are defeated at the polls ? if the polls are fair to begin with.
At least Allawi's starting to clean house, which the Bushies could never
summon the nerve to do. He's tried to give Moqtada Sadr a face-saving out, but clearly intends to break the power of the cleric's militia. And his government's going after the con who conned America, Ahmed Chalabi. Nor does Allawi resort to the standard Middle Eastern ploy of blaming each problem on Washington.
Among ourselves, we need to stop pretending that Iraq is a one-time deal. We'll be in the Middle East for decades to come, in unexpected locations. Our bitter enemies ? provoked by their civilization's utter failure ? will continue to present us with a straightforward choice: Either take the war to them or, per Sen. Kerry, wait until they bring the war to us.
We have to deal with the world in which we live, not the one we wish we
inhabited. Our tradition of passivity fostered the rise of a class of terrorists and thugs who would be delighted to slaughter every man, woman and child in America.
We need to kill them first.
-
REFER A FRIEND TO STRATFOR
To refer a friend to Stratfor, send this Stratfor Weekly
directly to a friend or colleague by forwarding this email, or
by visiting:
http://web2.stratfor.com/refer/?I=ST4WKLPW
You can also find a link to the referral form on:
http://www.stratfor.com/
THE GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT
Redeployment and the Strategic Miscalculation
August 18, 2004
By George Friedman
On Aug. 16, U.S. President George W. Bush announced a global
redeployment of U.S. military forces. Bush said: "More of our
troops will be stationed and deployed from here at home. We'll
move some of our troops and capabilities to new locations, so
they can surge quickly to deal with unexpected threats. We'll
take advantage of 21st-century military technologies to rapidly
deploy increased combat power. The new plan will help us fight
and win these wars of the 21st century." On the surface, the
redeployment is important. There is a global war under way and
any redeployment of forces at this time matters. However, there
are other reasons why the redeployment is significant.
There are 1,425,687 men and women on active duty in the U.S.
armed forces. The redeployment of roughly 70,000 troops over a
period of 10 years -- or even in one year -- really doesn't
matter, even if most of them came from the U.S. Army, which
currently consists of almost 500,000 troops. The shift affects
roughly 10 percent of the standing Army, which is not trivial.
Neither is it decisive.
There are some important geopolitical implications that go beyond
the numbers. Germany is clearly being downgraded as a reliable
ally. The possible shift of U.S. naval headquarters from the
United Kingdom to Italy tightens relations with Italy -- and
focuses the Navy on the Mediterranean and away from the Atlantic.
Deploying U.S. troops to Romania and Bulgaria increases the U.S.
presence in southeastern Europe and improves access to the Middle
East. The reduction of forces on the Korean Peninsula is a
reminder to South Koreans to be careful what they wish for --
they might get it. Moving forces into Australia clearly signifies
the growing importance of the U.S.-Australian relationship for
the Pacific. Permanent bases in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and
Uzbekistan confirm an already existing relationship and emphasize
a further decline of the Russian sphere of influence in the
former Soviet Union.
But all of these things are relative and incremental. There
simply aren't that many forces moving around to tilt geopolitical
relationships in any fundamental way. Nor do the shifts
necessarily make as much sense as it might seem. Certainly there
is no longer a reason to base troops in Germany, but troops need
to be based somewhere. The idea that the strategic reserve should
reside in the continental United States is a defensible notion,
but not an obvious one. The major theaters of operation for the
United States are currently between the Mediterranean and the
Hindu Kush. Germany is a lot closer than the United States.
Post-Cold War Notions
In order to understand the thinking going on here, it is
important to understand a discussion that has been going on in
the defense community since the end of the Cold War. As U.S.
forces were reduced, the number of individual commitments of
troops did not decline. During the Clinton years, operations
ranged from Haiti to Kosovo to Iraq. The United States had to
find a way for a smaller force to compensate for its size by
increasing its tempo of operations and effectiveness.
Les Aspin, Bill Clinton's first defense secretary, conducted
something called the "Bottom-Up Review" that focused on this
question: How could the United States intervene in the Eastern
Hemisphere, in unpredictable theaters of operation, in a timely
fashion, with an effective force? During Desert Storm, it took
six months to deploy a force large enough to invade Kuwait. That
was too long -- and it took too long because the Army needed too
many tanks, troops and supplies to wage war. The question became
how to reduce the amount of forces needed to achieve the same
goals.
The answer for Aspin was to reduce the forces needed by
increasing lethality through technology. Increased dependence on
air power and increased lethality for Army equipment were
supposed to reduce the size of the force. That meant the force
could get there faster. Aviation, special operations and light
infantry became the darlings of the Defense Department. Armor and
artillery became the problem.
Aspin focused speed and lethality, on how fast the force could
get there and on how quickly it could destroy the enemy force.
The question of the occupation of the target country was
addressed only in terms of a concept called "Operations Other
Than War." Some operations were to be primarily humanitarian in
nature. Other operations would become humanitarian as soon as the
projection of decisive force was achieved. After that, forces
would shift to another task: nation-building. Haiti was a case of
nation-building from the get-go. Kosovo was a case of nation-
building after military victory.
Neither of them is a poster child for the idea of using the
military in operations other than war, and Bush sharply
criticized the Clinton people for squandering military resources
on non-military goals. Bush's argument was that nation-building
was difficult at best, that the military was not well-suited for
the task and that nation-building, while nice, was not a
fundamental American national interest in most cases.
It was an interesting debate that in retrospect missed the key
point -- by ignoring the fact that the occupation of a hostile
nation was in fact a military problem. Clinton assumed that once
troops were deployed and the enemy defeated, the occupation would
cease to be a combat problem. Bush argued that wasting troops on
non-combat problems was a mistake. Both missed the point that
after power projection and high-intensity conflict, you did not
necessarily enter a non-military phase. You could be entering a
third phase of the war: the occupation of a hostile country.
Afghanistan and Iraq were both cases in which the United States
occupied hostile territory. It does not take an entire country to
make that country hostile; a relatively small force can create a
hostile combat environment. Arguing about how big the opposition
might be is irrelevant. It is big enough in both countries that
U.S. forces are at war. And this brings us to the central
problem.
Rumsfeld and Aspin agreed on the fundamental premise: a smaller,
more agile force is better. They were both right, so long as the
focus is on power projection and the destruction of conventional
enemy forces. But when you shift to the occupation of a hostile
country, smaller size works against you and agility diminishes
radically in importance. The occupation of a country can be
enhanced only marginally by technology. Occupation requires a
force large enough to gain control of the country while waging
counterinsurgency operations. That represents a lot of boots on
the ground -- and a lot of tank treads.
Counting On Occupation
Now, it might be argued that occupation and counterinsurgency are
bad ideas. We are prepared to entertain that notion. What cannot
be debated is that the United States is currently engaged in two
campaigns -- Afghanistan and Iraq -- in which the occupation of
hostile territory is the mission. It is also possible that in
coming years, there will be more such operations. The problem is
that U.S. forces are not configured for the mission. The
institutional hostility toward a large army that permeated the
Defense Department under both Clinton and Bush has now started to
move to a crisis level -- and the Bush administration still has
not responded to it.
The administration has pointed out that it has hit its targets in
recruiting and retaining personnel since the beginning of the
Iraq war. In 2001, the recruiting goal for the Army was 75,800;
the National Guard was 60,252; and the reserve was 34,910. In
2002, the numbers were 79,500; 54,087; and 48,461. In 2003, the
goals were 73,800; 62,000; and 26,400. In 2004, they are 71,739;
56,000; and 21,200. In other words, recruiting for the active
Army and reserve stayed basically unchanged, while goals for the
National Guard declined. The United States is in a global war in
which two countries are currently being occupied and there has
been only a 30,000-man increase authorized by Congress.
Attempting to occupy two countries without massively increasing
the size of the Army is an extraordinary decision. But it is
completely understandable in terms of the Aspin-Rumsfeld view of
the military problem. Occupation of a large territory in the face
of hostile forces was not perceived to be a fundamental military
requirement. In part, this was because it was assumed the United
States would avoid such environments. But both Afghanistan and
Iraq were precisely this kind of environment, and prudent
military planning required that careful thought be given to the
manpower-intense mission of occupation. By the end of 2003, it
should have been clear that, like it or not, the United States
was in the occupation business. But the thinking that went on
before Iraq -- that as in Japan or Germany in World War II,
resistance would halt once the capital fell -- simply did not go
away. The obvious was not absorbed as a fact.
Instead, the Defense Department has resorted to stop-loss
strategies: preventing people from leaving when their terms of
service are up, calling up the Individual Ready Reserve and
exhausting the reserve and National Guard. Most importantly, it
has resorted to the only real solution available: insufficient
forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. It has tried to fill the gap with
contractors, which works to some extent; but the job of
occupation -- if it is to be undertaken at all -- is a job for
the Army, and there simply are not enough soldiers available. The
1st Marine Expeditionary Force, for example, is currently the
lead occupying force in the Anbar province in Iraq -- hardly the
"tip of the spear" combat force that the Marines are supposed to
be.
It is in this context that the order to redeploy 70,000 troops
should be read. First, it is an attempt to reshuffle the same
deck, when what is needed are more cards. Second, the pace of the
redeployments -- measured in years rather than weeks -- indicates
that the administration knows there is no real solution here --
or it indicates that the administration still doesn't appreciate
the urgency of the situation.
That the Army -- other services as well, but the Army is the key
here -- is at its limits has been obvious for months. What is
interesting to us is that the president, in his speech, continued
to focus on the first two missions (projection and destruction of
enemy forces) and still has not focused on the centrality of
combat in occupation zones. We don't have much of a force to
project at this point, so increasing the capability is not really
germane.
It is not something he wants to tackle now, but whoever becomes
president will be doing so. There are two options: The draft,
which will not produce the kind of force needed, or massive
increases in the size of the volunteer force using economic
incentives. Gen. Douglas MacArthur said we should never fight a
land war in Asia after Korea. Vietnam sort of confirmed that.
Whether anyone has noticed, we are in another land war in Asia
and in Asian wars, technology is great, but riflemen and tanks
are the foundation.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
Thanks for the Stratfor posts, Crafty. Some of the most cogent analysis I've encountered. Any idea what the backstory of Stratfor is? I note they use "us" as their self referential pronoun; what kind of "us" are they? I suspect intelligence and realpolitik backgrounds, but am still somewhat mystified. Where does all this spot on analysis come from in this wishy washy age?
-
Woof Buz:
Please excuse for stating the obvious, but have you gone to their website and surfed around? :lol:
yip!
Crafty
PS: I too find them to be genuinely superior in their analysis and recommend signing up highly. There is much, much more than what is posted here.
-
Howdy Crafty:
I did surf around the site some, and was impressed by the methodology mentioned. Approaching issues via their zero-based analysis makes a lot of sense. Still, the background info available on the web site seems tailored to attract captains of industry; I don't get a sense of the players behind the scenes.
One of the interesting aspects of having Pat Tray as an instructor are the interesting characters who show up at his academy. Though you never hear anything overt from them, there is plenty that can be intuited. I was hoping to get the same kind of read on the Stratfor folks: who they are, where they come from, how close to the sharp end they've been, etc. My guess is they don't publish that info as it could impact their data collection, but if you know anything anecdotal, I'm interested.
Thanks,
Buz
-
Woof Buzwardo:
My sense of it is that they have not personally seen much action.
Anyway, here's this from today:
Crafty
================
Geopolitical Diary: Thursday, Aug. 26, 2004
Events in An Najaf are moving to their logical conclusion. Grand Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani has returned to Iraq and, in spite of recent heart treatment,
is showing remarkable resiliency -- and is leading a march on An Najaf
designed to bring a peaceful end to the rising of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi
Army. That is what will happen, if all goes according to script.
We assume there to be a script since: (a) al-Sistani chose to go to London
for non-emergency surgery when the U.S. attack began; (b) was permitted to leave London as things moved to their climax (his plane could have been found to have serious engine problems just before takeoff); and (c) was cleared to land in Kuwait and drive back into Iraq. We would think that if the United States and Britain expected problems, they would have found ways of delaying his return.
The script is therefore that he will march to An Najaf, accept the return of
the Imam Ali shrine from al-Sadr, make a speech suitably condemning the United States for occupying Iraq and demanding its withdrawal from An Najaf and other cities -- and proceed to implement a deal giving his followers prominent roles throughout the Iraqi government. Obviously, things could go wrong. Al-Sistani could decide not to play according to the script; al-Sadr might decide it would be healthier for him to hold on to the An Najaf mosque; or uncontrolled violence could suddenly break out without any real planning. All of this is possible, but the most likely outcome is an end to the standoff and al-Sistani moving into closer collaboration with the Americans.
This leaves the Iranians in as bad a shape as they can be in Iraq, with all
of their plans shot to pieces -- and even their control over Iraqi Shia
gone. The Iranians clearly need to do something. This was obviously on the mind of the U.S. Air Force that, according to the Iranians at least, sent
aircraft into Iranian air space. According to an Iranian News Agency (IRNA) report, five U.S. aircraft penetrated Iranian air space on the night of Aug. 19. They came in over the southwestern border and circled the city of Khorramshahr for a while, flying at about 30,000 feet
We tend to believe the report. First, the specificity lends credence to it.
Second, the political environment of the past few weeks would make
Washington want to send a signal to the Iranian government to accept events in Iraq, as well as to signal the Iranians that continued development of Iranian nuclear weapons would lead to decisive air action. The IRNA report referenced the capture and release of some British sailors and the U.S. undoubtedly wanted to signal mutual danger. It is difficult to imagine a military purpose for a flight of five aircraft -- presumably fighters -- at 30,000 feet. The U.S. has better reconnaissance platforms that would fly at different altitudes. As for testing air defenses: If the Iranians can't see five aircraft at 30,000 feet, they certainly can't build a nuclear weapon.
This was a political demonstration and we suspect there have been others. It is interesting that the Iranians decided to publicize it when it became clear that al-Sistani was returning to Iraq, but not before. Iranian
diplomats started to speculate publicly -- at about the same time -- that
war could be closer than might be thought. The Iranians appear to be
signaling Washington back that they are not intimidated.
The question will be whether their lack of intimidation will cause them to
raise the pot in Iraq, or whether their calmness in the face of provocation
means they are about to toss their hand in. Either way, the next move comes out of Tehran.
Copyrights 2004 - Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
A very long and thoughtful read:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/podhoretz.htm
-
August 29, 2004 The 9/11 Report: A Dissent
"But to layer another
official on top of the director of central intelligence, one who would be in
a constant turf war with the secretary of defense, is not an appealing
solution. Since all executive power emanates from the White House, the
national security adviser and his or her staff should be able to do the
necessary coordinating of the intelligence agencies. That is the traditional
pattern, and it is unlikely to be bettered by a radically new table of
organization.."
By RICHARD A. POSNER
Richard A. Posner is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for
the Seventh Circuit, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law
School and the author of the forthcoming book ''Catastrophe: Risk and
Response.''
THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT
The idea was sound: a politically balanced, generously financed
committee of prominent, experienced people would investigate the
government's failure to anticipate and prevent the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001. Had the investigation been left to the government, the
current administration would have concealed its own mistakes and blamed its
predecessors. This is not a criticism of the Bush White House; any
administration would have done the same.
And the execution was in one vital respect superb: the 9/11 commission
report is an uncommonly lucid, even riveting, narrative of the attacks,
their background and the response to them. (Norton has published the
authorized edition; another edition, including reprinted news articles by
reporters from The New York Times, has been published by St. Martin's, while
PublicAffairs has published the staff reports and some of the testimony.)
The prose is free from bureaucratese and, for a consensus statement,
the report is remarkably forthright. Though there could not have been a
single author, the style is uniform. The document is an improbable literary
triumph.
However, the commission's analysis and recommendations are
unimpressive. The delay in the commission's getting up to speed was not its
fault but that of the administration, which dragged its heels in turning
over documents; yet with completion of its investigation deferred to the
presidential election campaign season, the commission should have waited
until after the election to release its report. That would have given it
time to hone its analysis and advice.
The enormous public relations effort that the commission orchestrated
to win support for the report before it could be digested also invites
criticism -- though it was effective: in a poll conducted just after
publication, 61 percent of the respondents said the commission had done a
good job, though probably none of them had read the report. The
participation of the relatives of the terrorists' victims (described in the
report as the commission's ''partners'') lends an unserious note to the
project (as does the relentless self-promotion of several of the members).
One can feel for the families' loss, but being a victim's relative doesn't
qualify a person to advise on how the disaster might have been prevented.
Much more troublesome are the inclusion in the report of
recommendations (rather than just investigative findings) and the
commissioners' misplaced, though successful, quest for unanimity. Combining
an investigation of the attacks with proposals for preventing future attacks
is the same mistake as combining intelligence with policy. The way a problem
is described is bound to influence the choice of how to solve it. The
commission's contention that our intelligence structure is unsound
predisposed it to blame the structure for the failure to prevent the 9/11
attacks, whether it did or not. And pressure for unanimity encourages just
the kind of herd thinking now being blamed for that other recent
intelligence failure -- the belief that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of
mass destruction.
At least the commission was consistent. It believes in centralizing
intelligence, and people who prefer centralized, pyramidal governance
structures to diversity and competition deprecate dissent. But insistence on
unanimity, like central planning, deprives decision makers of a full range
of alternatives. For all one knows, the price of unanimity was adopting
recommendations that were the second choice of many of the commission's
members or were consequences of horse trading. The premium placed on
unanimity undermines the commission's conclusion that everybody in sight was
to blame for the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Given its political
composition (and it is evident from the questioning of witnesses by the
members that they had not forgotten which political party they belong to),
the commission could not have achieved unanimity without apportioning equal
blame to the Clinton and Bush administrations, whatever the members actually
believe.
The tale of how we were surprised by the 9/11 attacks is a product of
hindsight; it could not be otherwise. And with the aid of hindsight it is
easy to identify missed opportunities (though fewer than had been suspected)
to have prevented the attacks, and tempting to leap from that observation to
the conclusion that the failure to prevent them was the result not of bad
luck, the enemy's skill and ingenuity or the difficulty of defending against
suicide attacks or protecting an almost infinite array of potential targets,
but of systemic failures in the nation's intelligence and security apparatus
that can be corrected by changing the apparatus.
That is the leap the commission makes, and it is not sustained by the
report's narrative. The narrative points to something different, banal and
deeply disturbing: that it is almost impossible to take effective action to
prevent something that hasn't occurred previously. Once the 9/11 attacks did
occur, measures were taken that have reduced the likelihood of a recurrence.
But before the attacks, it was psychologically and politically impossible to
take those measures. The government knew that Al Qaeda had attacked United
States facilities and would do so again. But the idea that it would do so by
infiltrating operatives into this country to learn to fly commercial
aircraft and then crash such aircraft into buildings was so grotesque that
anyone who had proposed that we take costly measures to prevent such an
event would have been considered a candidate for commitment. No terrorist
had hijacked an American commercial aircraft anywhere in the world since
1986. Just months before the 9/11 attacks the director of the Defense
Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency wrote: ''We have, in fact,
solved a terrorist problem in the last 25 years. We have solved it so
successfully that we have forgotten about it; and that is a treat. The
problem was aircraft hijacking and bombing. We solved the problem. . . . The
system is not perfect, but it is good enough. . . . We have pretty much
nailed this thing.'' In such a climate of thought, efforts to beef up
airline security not only would have seemed gratuitous but would have been
greatly resented because of the cost and the increased airport congestion.
The problem isn't just that people find it extraordinarily difficult
to take novel risks seriously; it is also that there is no way the
government can survey the entire range of possible disasters and act to
prevent each and every one of them. As the commission observes,
''Historically, decisive security action took place only after a disaster
had occurred or a specific plot had been discovered.'' It has always been
thus, and probably always will be. For example, as the report explains, the
1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center led to extensive safety
improvements that markedly reduced the toll from the 9/11 attacks; in other
words, only to the slight extent that the 9/11 attacks had a precedent were
significant defensive steps taken in advance.
The commission's contention that ''the terrorists exploited deep
institutional failings within our government'' is overblown. By the
mid-1990's the government knew that Osama bin Laden was a dangerous enemy of
the United States. President Clinton and his national security adviser,
Samuel Berger, were so concerned that Clinton, though ''warned in the
strongest terms'' by the Secret Service and the C.I.A. that ''visiting
Pakistan would risk the president's life,'' did visit that country (flying
in on an unmarked plane, using decoys and remaining only six hours) and
tried unsuccessfully to enlist its cooperation against bin Laden. Clinton
authorized the assassination of bin Laden, and a variety of means were
considered for achieving this goal, but none seemed feasible. Invading
Afghanistan to pre-empt future attacks by Al Qaeda was considered but
rejected for diplomatic reasons, which President Bush accepted when he took
office and which look even more compelling after the trouble we've gotten
into with our pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. The complaint that Clinton was
merely ''swatting at flies,'' and the claim that Bush from the start was
determined to destroy Al Qaeda root and branch, are belied by the
commission's report. The Clinton administration envisaged a campaign of
attrition that would last three to five years, the Bush administration a
similar campaign that would last three years. With an invasion of
Afghanistan impracticable, nothing better was on offer. Almost four years
after Bush took office and almost three years after we wrested control of
Afghanistan from the Taliban, Al Qaeda still has not been destroyed.
It seems that by the time Bush took office, ''bin Laden fatigue'' had
set in; no one had practical suggestions for eliminating or even
substantially weakening Al Qaeda. The commission's statement that Clinton
and Bush had been offered only a ''narrow and unimaginative menu of options
for action'' is hindsight wisdom at its most fatuous. The options considered
were varied and imaginative; they included enlisting the Afghan Northern
Alliance or other potential tribal allies of the United States to help kill
or capture bin Laden, an attack by our Special Operations forces on his
compound, assassinating him by means of a Predator drone aircraft or
coercing or bribing the Taliban to extradite him. But for political or
operational reasons, none was feasible.
It thus is not surprising, perhaps not even a fair criticism, that the
new administration treaded water until the 9/11 attacks. But that's what it
did. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, ''demoted'' Richard
Clarke, the government's leading bin Laden hawk and foremost expert on Al
Qaeda. It wasn't technically a demotion, but merely a decision to exclude
him from meetings of the cabinet-level ''principals committee'' of the
National Security Council; he took it hard, however, and requested a
transfer from the bin Laden beat to cyberterrorism. The committee did not
discuss Al Qaeda until a week before the 9/11 attacks. The new
administration showed little interest in exploring military options for
dealing with Al Qaeda, and Donald Rumsfeld had not even gotten around to
appointing a successor to the Defense Department's chief counterterrorism
official (who had left the government in January) when the 9/11 attacks
occurred.
I suspect that one reason, not mentioned by the commission, for the
Bush administration's initially tepid response to the threat posed by Al
Qaeda is that a new administration is predisposed to reject the priorities
set by the one it's succeeding. No doubt the same would have been true had
Clinton been succeeding Bush as president rather than vice versa.
Before the commission's report was published, the impression was
widespread that the failure to prevent the attacks had been due to a failure
to collate bits of information possessed by different people in our security
services, mainly the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. And, indeed, had all these bits been collated, there would
have been a chance of preventing the attacks, though only a slight one; the
best bits were not obtained until late in August 2001, and it is unrealistic
to suppose they could have been integrated and understood in time to detect
the plot.
The narrative portion of the report ends at Page 338 and is followed
by 90 pages of analysis and recommendations. I paused at Page 338 and asked
myself what improvements in our defenses against terrorist groups like Al
Qaeda are implied by the commission's investigative findings (as distinct
from recommendations that the commission goes on to make in the last part of
the report). The list is short:
(1) Major buildings should have detailed evacuation plans and the
plans should be communicated to the occupants.
(2) Customs officers should be alert for altered travel documents of
Muslims entering the United States; some of the 9/11 hijackers might have
been excluded by more careful inspections of their papers. Biometric
screening (such as fingerprinting) should be instituted to facilitate the
creation of a comprehensive database of suspicious characters. In short, our
borders should be made less porous.
(3) Airline passengers and baggage should be screened carefully,
cockpit doors secured and override mechanisms installed in airliners to
enable a hijacked plane to be controlled from the ground.
(4) Any legal barriers to sharing information between the C.I.A. and
the F.B.I. should be eliminated.
(5) More Americans should be trained in Arabic, Farsi and other
languages in widespread use in the Muslim world. The commission remarks that
in 2002, only six students received undergraduate degrees in Arabic from
colleges in the United States.
(6) The thousands of federal agents assigned to the ''war on drugs,''
a war that is not only unwinnable but probably not worth winning, should be
reassigned to the war on international terrorism.
(7) The F.B.I. appears from the report to be incompetent to combat
terrorism; this is the one area in which a structural reform seems indicated
(though not recommended by the commission). The bureau, in excessive
reaction to J. Edgar Hoover's freewheeling ways, has become afflicted with a
legalistic mind-set that hinders its officials from thinking in preventive
rather than prosecutorial terms and predisposes them to devote greater
resources to drug and other conventional criminal investigations than to
antiterrorist activities. The bureau is habituated to the leisurely time
scale of criminal investigations and prosecutions. Information sharing
within the F.B.I., let alone with other agencies, is sluggish, in part
because the bureau's field offices have excessive autonomy and in part
because the agency is mysteriously unable to adopt a modern communications
system. The F.B.I. is an excellent police department, but that is all it is.
Of all the agencies involved in intelligence and counterterrorism, the
F.B.I. comes out worst in the commission's report.
Progress has been made on a number of items on my list. There have
been significant improvements in border control and aircraft safety. The
information ''wall'' was removed by the USA Patriot Act, passed shortly
after 9/11, although legislation may not have been necessary, since, as the
commission points out, before 9/11 the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. exaggerated the
degree to which they were forbidden to share information. This was a
managerial failure, not an institutional one. Efforts are under way on (5)
and (6), though powerful political forces limit progress on (6). Oddly, the
simplest reform -- better building-evacuation planning -- has lagged.
The only interesting item on my list is (7). The F.B.I.'s
counterterrorism performance before 9/11 was dismal indeed. Urged by one of
its field offices to seek a warrant to search the laptop of Zacarias
Moussaoui (a candidate hijacker-pilot), F.B.I. headquarters refused because
it thought the special court that authorizes foreign intelligence
surveillance would decline to issue a warrant -- a poor reason for not
requesting one. A prescient report from the Arizona field office on flight
training by Muslims was ignored by headquarters. There were only two
analysts on the bin Laden beat in the entire bureau. A notice by the
director, Louis J. Freeh, that the bureau focus its efforts on
counterterrorism was ignored.
So what to do? One possibility would be to appoint as director a
hard-nosed, thick-skinned manager with a clear mandate for change -- someone
of Donald Rumsfeld's caliber. (His judgment on Iraq has been questioned, but
no one questions his capacity to reform a hidebound government bureaucracy.)
Another would be to acknowledge the F.B.I.'s deep-rooted incapacity to deal
effectively with terrorism, and create a separate domestic intelligence
agency on the model of Britain's Security Service (M.I.5). The Security
Service has no power of arrest. That power is lodged in the Special Branch
of Scotland Yard, and if we had our own domestic intelligence service,
modeled on M.I.5, the power of arrest would be lodged in a branch of the
F.B.I. As far as I know, M.I.5 and M.I.6 (Britain's counterpart to the
C.I.A.) work well together. They have a common culture, as the C.I.A. and
the F.B.I. do not. They are intelligence agencies, operating by surveillance
rather than by prosecution. Critics who say that an American equivalent of
M.I.5 would be a Gestapo understand neither M.I.5 nor the Gestapo.
Which brings me to another failing of the 9/11 commission: American
provinciality. Just as we are handicapped in dealing with Islamist terrorism
by our ignorance of the languages, cultures and history of the Muslim world,
so we are handicapped in devising effective antiterrorist methods by our
reluctance to consider foreign models. We shouldn't be embarrassed to borrow
good ideas from nations with a longer experience of terrorism than our own.
The blows we have struck against Al Qaeda's centralized organization may
deflect Islamist terrorists from spectacular attacks like 9/11 to retail
forms like car and truck bombings, assassinations and sabotage. If so,
Islamist terrorism may come to resemble the kinds of terrorism practiced by
the Irish Republican Army and Hamas, with which foreign nations like Britain
and Israel have extensive experience. The United States remains readily
penetrable by Islamist terrorists who don't even look or sound Middle
Eastern, and there are Qaeda sleeper cells in this country. All this
underscores the need for a domestic intelligence agency that, unlike the
F.B.I., is effective.
Were all the steps that I have listed fully implemented, the
probability of another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 would be
reduced -- slightly. The measures adopted already, combined with our
operation in Afghanistan, have undoubtedly reduced that probability, and the
room for further reduction probably is small. We and other nations have been
victims of surprise attacks before; we will be again.
They follow a pattern. Think of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the Tet
offensive in Vietnam in 1968. It was known that the Japanese might attack
us. But that they would send their carrier fleet thousands of miles to
Hawaii, rather than just attack the nearby Philippines or the British and
Dutch possessions in Southeast Asia, was too novel and audacious a prospect
to be taken seriously. In 1968 the Vietnamese Communists were known to be
capable of attacking South Vietnam's cities. Indeed, such an assault was
anticipated, though not during Tet (the Communists had previously observed a
truce during the Tet festivities) and not on the scale it attained. In both
cases the strength and determination of the enemy were underestimated, along
with the direction of his main effort. In 2001 an attack by Al Qaeda was
anticipated, but it was anticipated to occur overseas, and the capability
and audacity of the enemy were underestimated. (Note in all three cases a
tendency to underestimate non-Western foes -- another aspect of
provinciality.)
Anyone who thinks this pattern can be changed should read those 90
pages of analysis and recommendations that conclude the commission's report;
they come to very little. Even the prose sags, as the reader is treated to a
barrage of bromides: ''the American people are entitled to expect their
government to do its very best,'' or ''we should reach out, listen to and
work with other countries that can help'' and ''be generous and caring to
our neighbors,'' or we should supply the Middle East with ''programs to
bridge the digital divide and increase Internet access'' -- the last an
ironic suggestion, given that encrypted e-mail is an effective medium of
clandestine communication. The ''hearts and minds'' campaign urged by the
commission is no more likely to succeed in the vast Muslim world today than
its prototype was in South Vietnam in the 1960's.
The commission wants criteria to be developed for picking out which
American cities are at greatest risk of terrorist attack, and defensive
resources allocated accordingly -- this to prevent every city from claiming
a proportional share of those resources when it is apparent that New York
and Washington are most at risk. Not only do we lack the information needed
to establish such criteria, but to make Washington and New York impregnable
so that terrorists can blow up Los Angeles or, for that matter, Kalamazoo
with impunity wouldn't do us any good.
The report states that the focus of our antiterrorist strategy should
not be ''just 'terrorism,' some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the
strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more
specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism.'' Is it? Who knows?
The menace of bin Laden was not widely recognized until just a few years
before the 9/11 attacks. For all anyone knows, a terrorist threat unrelated
to Islam is brewing somewhere (maybe right here at home -- remember the
Oklahoma City bombers and the Unabomber and the anthrax attack of October
2001) that, given the breathtakingly rapid advances in the technology of
destruction, will a few years hence pose a greater danger than Islamic
extremism. But if we listen to the 9/11 commission, we won't be looking out
for it because we've been told that Islamist terrorism is the thing to
concentrate on.
Illustrating the psychological and political difficulty of taking
novel threats seriously, the commission's recommendations are implicitly
concerned with preventing a more or less exact replay of 9/11. Apart from a
few sentences on the possibility of nuclear terrorism, and of threats to
other modes of transportation besides airplanes, the broader range of
potential threats, notably those of bioterrorism and cyberterrorism, is
ignored.
Many of the commission's specific recommendations are sensible, such
as that American citizens should be required to carry biometric passports.
But most are in the nature of more of the same -- more of the same measures
that were implemented in the wake of 9/11 and that are being refined, albeit
at the usual bureaucratic snail's pace. If the report can put spurs to these
efforts, all power to it. One excellent recommendation is reducing the
number of Congressional committees, at present in the dozens, that have
oversight responsibilities with regard to intelligence. The stated reason
for the recommendation is that the reduction will improve oversight. A
better reason is that with so many committees exercising oversight, our
senior intelligence and national security officials spend too much of their
time testifying.
The report's main proposal -- the one that has received the most
emphasis from the commissioners and has already been endorsed in some
version by both presidential candidates -- is for the appointment of a
national intelligence director who would knock heads together in an effort
to overcome the reluctance of the various intelligence agencies to share
information. Yet the report itself undermines this proposal, in a section
titled ''The Millennium Exception.'' ''In the period between December 1999
and early January 2000,'' we read, ''information about terrorism flowed
widely and abundantly.'' Why? Mainly ''because everyone was already on edge
with the millennium and possible computer programming glitches ('Y2K').''
Well, everyone is now on edge because of 9/11. Indeed, the report suggests
no current impediments to the flow of information within and among
intelligence agencies concerning Islamist terrorism. So sharing is not such
a problem after all. And since the tendency of a national intelligence
director would be to focus on the intelligence problem du jour, in this case
Islamist terrorism, centralization of the intelligence function could well
lead to overconcentration on a single risk.
The commission thinks the reason the bits of information that might
have been assembled into a mosaic spelling 9/11 never came together in one
place is that no one person was in charge of intelligence. That is not the
reason. The reason or, rather, the reasons are, first, that the volume of
information is so vast that even with the continued rapid advances in data
processing it cannot be collected, stored, retrieved and analyzed in a
single database or even network of linked databases. Second, legitimate
security concerns limit the degree to which confidential information can
safely be shared, especially given the ever-present threat of moles like the
infamous Aldrich Ames. And third, the different intelligence services and
the subunits of each service tend, because information is power, to hoard
it. Efforts to centralize the intelligence function are likely to lengthen
the time it takes for intelligence analyses to reach the president, reduce
diversity and competition in the gathering and analysis of intelligence
data, limit the number of threats given serious consideration and deprive
the president of a range of alternative interpretations of ambiguous and
incomplete data -- and intelligence data will usually be ambiguous and
incomplete.
The proposal begins to seem almost absurd when one considers the
variety of our intelligence services. One of them is concerned with
designing and launching spy satellites; another is the domestic intelligence
branch of the F.B.I.; others collect military intelligence for use in our
conflicts with state actors like North Korea. There are 15 in all. The
national intelligence director would be in continuous conflict with the
attorney general, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, the secretary of homeland security and the president's national
security adviser. He would have no time to supervise the organizational
reforms that the commission deems urgent.
The report bolsters its proposal with the claim that our intelligence
apparatus was designed for fighting the cold war and so can't be expected to
be adequate to fighting Islamist terrorism. The cold war is depicted as a
conventional military face-off between the United States and the Soviet
Union and hence a 20th-century relic (the 21st century is to be different,
as if the calendar drove history). That is not an accurate description. The
Soviet Union operated against the United States and our allies mainly
through subversion and sponsored insurgency, and it is not obvious why the
apparatus developed to deal with that conduct should be thought maladapted
for dealing with our new enemy.
The report notes the success of efforts to centralize command of the
armed forces, and to reduce the lethal rivalries among the military
services. But there is no suggestion that the national intelligence director
is to have command authority.
The central-planning bent of the commission is nowhere better
illustrated than by its proposal to shift the C.I.A.'s paramilitary
operations, despite their striking success in the Afghanistan campaign, to
the Defense Department. The report points out that ''the C.I.A. has a
reputation for agility in operations,'' whereas the reputation of the
military is ''for being methodical and cumbersome.'' Rather than conclude
that we are lucky to have both types of fighting capacity, the report
disparages ''redundant, overlapping capabilities'' and urges that ''the
C.I.A.'s experts should be integrated into the military's training,
exercises and planning.'' The effect of such integration is likely to be the
loss of the ''agility in operations'' that is the C.I.A.'s hallmark. The
claim that we ''cannot afford to build two separate capabilities for
carrying out secret military operations'' makes no sense. It is not a
question of building; we already have multiple such capabilities -- Delta
Force, Marine reconnaissance teams, Navy Seals, Army Rangers, the C.I.A.'s
Special Activities Division. Diversity of methods, personnel and
organizational culture is a strength in a system of national security; it
reduces risk and enhances flexibility.
What is true is that 15 agencies engaged in intelligence activities
require coordination, notably in budgetary allocations, to make sure that
all bases are covered. Since the Defense Department accounts for more than
80 percent of the nation's overall intelligence budget, the C.I.A., with its
relatively small budget (12 percent of the total), cannot be expected to
control the entire national intelligence budget. But to layer another
official on top of the director of central intelligence, one who would be in
a constant turf war with the secretary of defense, is not an appealing
solution. Since all executive power emanates from the White House, the
national security adviser and his or her staff should be able to do the
necessary coordinating of the intelligence agencies. That is the traditional
pattern, and it is unlikely to be bettered by a radically new table of
organization.
So the report ends on a flat note. But one can sympathize with the
commission's problem. To conclude after a protracted, expensive and much
ballyhooed investigation that there is really rather little that can be done
to reduce the likelihood of future terrorist attacks beyond what is being
done already, at least if the focus is on the sort of terrorist attacks that
have occurred in the past rather than on the newer threats of bioterrorism
and cyberterrorism, would be a real downer -- even a tad un-American.
Americans are not fatalists. When a person dies at the age of 95, his family
is apt to ascribe his death to a medical failure. When the nation
experiences a surprise attack, our instinctive reaction is not that we were
surprised by a clever adversary but that we had the wrong strategies or
structure and let's change them and then we'll be safe. Actually, the
strategies and structure weren't so bad; they've been improved; further
improvements are likely to have only a marginal effect; and greater dangers
may be gathering of which we are unaware and haven't a clue as to how to
prevent.
Richard A. Posner is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for
the Seventh Circuit, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law
School and the author of the forthcoming book ''Catastrophe: Risk and
Response.''
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
-
Thanks for that one Dog Russ.
Changing gears, here's this on North Korea.
=================================
FIRST OF A SERIES
By Robert Windrem
NBC News Investigative ProducerJan. 15, 2003 - In the far north of North Korea, in remote locations not far from the borders with China and Russia, a gulag not unlike the worst labor camps built by Mao and Stalin in the last century holds some 200,000 men, women and children accused of political crimes. A month-long investigation by NBC News, including interviews with former prisoners, guards and U.S. and South Korean officials, revealed the horrifying conditions these people must endure ? conditions that shock even those North Koreans accustomed to the near-famine conditions of Kim Jong Il?s realm.
?It's one of the worst, if not the worst situation ? human rights abuse situation ? in the world today,? said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., who held hearings on the camps last year. ?There are very few places that could compete with the level of depravity, the harshness of this regime in North Korea toward its own people.?
Satellite photos provided by DigitalGlobe, which first appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review, confirm the existence of the camps, and interviews with those who have been there and with U.S. officials who study the North suggest Brownback?s assessment may be conservative.
Among NBC News? findings:
At one camp, Camp 22 in Haengyong, some 50,000 prisoners toil each day in conditions that U.S. officials and former inmates say results in the death of 20 percent to 25 percent of the prison population every year.
Products made by prison laborers may wind up on U.S. store shelves, having been ?washed? first through Chinese companies that serve as intermediaries.
Entire families, including grandchildren, are incarcerated for even the most bland political statements.
Forced abortions are carried out on pregnant women so that another generation of political dissidents will be ?eradicated.?
Inmates are used as human guinea pigs for testing biological and chemical agents, according to both former inmates and U.S. officials.
Efforts by MSNBC.com to reach North Korean officials were unsuccessful. Messages left at the office of North Korea?s permanent representative to the United Nations went unanswered.
Eung Soo Han, a press officer at South Korea?s U.N. consulate, said: ?It is a very unfortunate situation, and our hearts go out to those who suffer. We hope North Korea will open up its country, and become more actively involved with the international community in order for the North Korean people to be lifted out of their difficult situation.?
Labor, death, abuse
NBC?s investigation revealed that North Korea?s State Security Agency maintains a dozen political prisons and about 30 forced labor and labor education camps, mainly in remote areas. The worst are in the country?s far Northeast. Some of them are gargantuan: At least two of the camps, Haengyong and Huaong, are larger in area than the District of Columbia, with Huaong being three times the size of the U.S. capital district.
Satellite photos provided by DigitalGlobe show several of the camps, including the notorious Haengyong, for the first time outside official circles. Plainly visible are acres upon acres of barracks, laid out in regimented military style. Surrounding each of them is 10-foot-high barbed-wire fencing along with land mines and man traps. There is even a battery of anti-aircraft guns to prevent a liberation by airborne troops.
Ahn Myong Chol, a guard at the camp (which is sometimes known as Hoeryong) from 1987 through 1994, examined the satellite photos of Camp 22 for NBC News. They were taken in April, eight years after he left. But he says little has changed. He was able to pick out the family quarters for prisoners, the work areas, the propaganda buildings.
Looking at the imagery, Ahn noted what happened in each building:
?This is the detention center,? he said. ?If someone goes inside this building, in three months he will be dead or disabled for life. In this corner they decided about the executions, who to execute and whether to make it public.
?This is the Kim Il Sung institute, a movie house for officers. Here is watchdog training. And guard training ground.?
Pointing to another spot, he said: ?This is the garbage pond where the two kids were killed when guard kicked them in pond.?
Another satellite photo shows a coal mine at the Chungbong camp where prisoners are worked to exhaustion in a giant pit.
?All of North Korea is a gulag,? said one senior U.S. official, noting that as many as 2 million people have died of starvation while Kim has amassed the world?s largest collection of Daffy Duck cartoons. ?It?s just that these people [in the camps] are treated the worst. No one knows for sure how many people are in the camps, but 200,000 is consistent with our best guess.
?We don?t have a breakdown, but there are large numbers of both women and children.?
Beyond the pale
It is the widespread jailing of political prisoners? families that makes North Korea unique, according to human rights advocates.
Under a directive issued by Kim?s father, North Korea?s founder, Kim Il Sung, three generations of a dissident?s family can be jailed simply on the basis of a denunciation.
NBC News interviewed two former prisoners and a former guard about conditions in the camps. The three spent their time at different camps. Their litany of camp brutalities is unmatched anywhere in the world, say human rights activists.
?Listening to their stories, it?s horrific,? said David Hawk, a veteran human rights campaigner and a consultant for the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Hawk has interviewed many former prisoners in Seoul.
?It?s hard to do more than one or two a day because they?re just so painful to hear: horrific mistreatment - all sorts of suffering, beatings to death, executions.?
Kang Chol-Hwan is now a journalist with Chosun Ilbo, South Korea?s most important newspaper. His recent book, ?The Aquariums of Pyongyang,? is the first memoir of a North Korean political prisoner. For nearly a decade, he was imprisoned because his grandfather had made complimentary statements about Japanese capitalism. He was a 9-year-old when he arrived at the Yodok camp. His grandfather was never seen again, and prison conditions killed his father.
?When I was 10 years old,? Kang recalled, ?We were put to work digging clay and constructing a building. And there were dozens of kids, and while digging the ground, it collapsed. And they died. And the bodies were crushed flat. And they buried the kids secretly, without showing their parents, even though the parents came.?
The system appears to draw no distinction between those accused of the crime and their family members.
Soon Ok Lee, imprisoned for seven years at a camp near Kaechon in Pyungbuk province, described how the female relatives of male prisoners were treated.
?I was in prison from 1987 till January 1993,? she told NBC News in Seoul, where she now lives. ?[The women] were forced to abort their children. They put salty water into the pregnant women?s womb with a large syringe, in order to kill the baby even when the woman was 8 months or 9 months pregnant.
?And then, from time to time there a living infant is delivered. And then if someone delivers a live infant, then the guards kick the bloody baby and kill it. And I saw an infant who was crying with pain. I have to express this in words, that I witnessed such an inhumane hell.?
Testing on humans
Soon also spoke about the use of prisoners as guinea pigs, which a senior U.S. official describes as ?very plausible. We have heard similar reports.?
?I saw so many poor victims,? she said. ?Hundreds of people became victims of biochemical testing. I was imprisoned in 1987 and during the years of 1988 through ?93, when I was released, I saw the research supervisors ? they were enjoying the effect of biochemical weapons, effective beyond their expectations ? they were saying they were successful.?
She tearfully described how in one instance about 50 inmates were taken to an auditorium and given a piece of boiled cabbage to eat. Within a half hour, they began vomiting blood and quickly died.
A shot of the enormous Chunbong camp from space.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
?I saw that in 20 or 30 minutes they died like this in that place. Looking at that scene, I lost my mind. Was this reality or a nightmare? And then I screamed and was sent out of the auditorium.?
Prison guard Ahn?s memories are, like the others?, nothing short of gruesome. Every day, he said there were beatings and deaths.
?I heard many times that eyeballs were taken out by beating,? he recalled. ?And I saw that by beating the person the muscle was damaged and the bone was exposed, outside, and they put salt on the wounded part. At the beginning I was frightened when I witnessed it, but it was repeated again and again, so my feelings were paralyzed.?
Moreover, said Ahn, beating and killing prisoners was not only tolerated, it was encouraged and even rewarded.
?They trained me not to treat the prisoners as human beings. If someone is against socialism, if someone tries to escape from prison, then kill him,? Ahn said. ?If there?s a record of killing any escapee then the guard will be entitled to study in the college. Because of that some guards kill innocent people.?
President Bush told author and Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward last year that he was well aware of the camps and the atrocities. That, officials say, partly explains why Bush insisted on North Korea?s inclusion in the ?axis of evil? in his 2002 State of the Union address.
?I loathe Kim Jong Il,? Bush told Woodward during an interview for the author?s book ?Bush at War.? ?I?ve got a visceral reaction to this guy because he is starving his people. And I have seen intelligence of these prison camps ? they?re huge ? that he uses to break up families and to torture people.?
Brownback, a senator with a reputation as a human rights advocate, thinks that the prison camps and abuses have for too long taken a back seat to nuclear arms and other Korean issues.
?It seems that what happened is that there got to be a complex set of issues, and people said, ?Well OK, it?s about our relationship with China, it?s about the Korean Peninsula, it?s about this militaristic regime in North Korea that we don?t want to press too much because they may march across the border into South Korea.?
Brownback says the North?s nuclear program, its missile tests and generally unpredictable behavior has blurred a critical issue:
?I think people just got paralyzed to really put a focus on the human face of this suffering,? he said.
Lisa Myers, Rich Gardella and Judy Augsberger of NBC News and Michael Moran of MSNBC.com contributed to this report.
-
In an earlier response about what we need to change concerning our war on terrorism:
(6) The thousands of federal agents assigned to the ''war on drugs,''
a war that is not only unwinnable but probably not worth winning, should be reassigned to the war on international terrorism.
I cannot agree with this more. The only reason we have a war on drugs is because we have drug addicts. It does absolutely no good to fight the producers and marketers.
We have to overcome ourselves.
-
I agree with your conclusion.
-
THE MUDDLE IN IRAQ
By RALPH PETERS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
September 17, 2004 -- FIGHTING terror is like fighting a fire. It's easiest in the early stages, before the flames spread. But if you sit idly by, hoping that the fire will burn itself out, you're likely to find yourself up against an inferno.
Confronted by global terror, the Clinton administration hoped the problem would go away by magic. Faced with incipient terror in Iraq last year, the Bush administration insisted that the magic of freedom would make it disappear.
But policies that rely on magic of any kind beg for disaster.
We don't yet face a disaster in Iraq ? thanks to the quality and commitment of our troops. And the Bush administration, despite its errors, has had a great stroke of luck in Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who has shown not only a solid grasp of the problems Iraq faces, but the will to solve them no matter what it takes.
At the moment, it's almost impossible to find a balanced view of Iraq in America. The partisans of both political parties are out in force, insisting either that Iraq's a magnificent place with a minor litter problem, or that it's an inferno where countless legions of terror are being forged.
The reality's in the middle, but still more hopeful than not. Despite the lurid media reports, more good things than bad are happening in Iraq. Progress is slow and painful. But it's still progress.
The media report an increase in violence, occasionally noting that the terrorists hope to influence the U.S. election. But there's much more to the carnage than Bush vs. Kerry.
Despite the impression created by intermittent attacks, the terrorists have shifted their priority away from attacking our troops. Every time they go after our soldiers or Marines, our enemies suffer disproportionate casualties. So they're concentrating on killing Iraqis ? government officials, the police, educators, doctors and businessmen.
This gains them short-term headlines and creates local chaos, but it's alienating the population. Bombing crowds of young men applying for jobs is not an effective way to win hearts and minds. The Iraqis may not want us to stay forever, but they do not want the terrorists in power.
And there's another, more significant reason why the violence has increased: Our troops are on the offensive again, reclaiming towns and cities where terrorists grabbed power after the Bush administration faltered in Fallujah this past spring.
Despite the frantic efforts of the Arab media to stop our destruction of the terrorists and insurgents, Prime Minister Allawi and the key members of his government are hanging tough. They know that Iraq doesn't have a chance unless terror is uprooted. They support our troops. In response, the Bush administration has been willing to apply military power again, as long as it doesn't create embarrassing headlines before November.
We're retaking one city after another. But the core problem remains Fallujah, where the administration's surrender ? despite the tactical success of our Marines ? allowed our enemies to create a terrorist city-state. The violence that seeped across central Iraq over the summer came from terror's safe haven in Fallujah.
Allawi wants Fallujah brought into line. Our military has the muscle. Operations will be harder now than they would have been four months ago, since our enemies have had time to prepare for a siege. But we can do it.
The delay is because the Bush administration wants to avoid serious combat until after our elections. The Bushies are using airstrikes against terrorist safe houses, but that won't retake the city.
The truth is that the terrorists are the lesser problem. The greater impediment to progress has been our presidential elections and the policy distortions they create.
The polarization, dishonesty and manipulation on both sides aids the terrorists. When John Kerry states categorically that he'll bring our troops home within four years, it promises the terrorists that they only have to hang on. When he declares our efforts a disaster, he encourages our enemies to believe they're winning. And when he promises a "more sensitive" war on terror, it's read as a pending declaration of surrender.
Kerry blathers. Bush delays. Iraq burns.
Meanwhile, our intelligence community has once again shown its weakness by covering its backside, instead of finding terrorists. A National Intelligence Council report revealed this week paints a bleak picture of the future of Iraq. Why? Because the intel bureaucrats don't want to be blamed if things go wrong. There's nothing safer than assuming failure.
I dealt with the NIC during my days as an intelligence officer. I always found it more interested in playing it safe than in serving our country. Clearly, nothing has changed.
October is going to be a bloody month ? it may appear to prove the pessimists right. But Iraq's future isn't tied to a 24/7 news cycle. The key event is going to be the election. Not our election, but the Iraqi vote scheduled for January.
Nobody else in the Middle East wants that election to take place. The U.N. is warning that security conditions may prevent voting ? giving the terrorists hope. But the Iraqi interim government is staying the course.
Fallujah is the military test of our resolve to secure the future of Iraq. But the January election is the strategic test. We must not let ourselves become discouraged. Those ballots are worth fighting for. No matter how bloody and flawed, an Iraqi vote held on schedule would be a tremendous victory for freedom.
Our enemies and fair-weather friends alike will try to disrupt the voting. Our response may decide the future of the entire Middle East.
Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace."
-
In the interests of thread coherency I move the following thread over to this one.-- Crafty
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Crafty--
I am that wayward student, living in Istanbul, Turkey, who trained with Dave and Arlan, back at Warrior-Priest Art (Pandorf) of Santa Fe, NM-- while studying at St. John's College.
Sorry to chime in our your WW3 posting-- but just wanted to add my two cents and, humbly, correct you-- technically World War III was popularily known as the "Cold-War" (see CollinGray's "The Geopolitics of Superpower).
Before I digress and lose myelf in a maze of semantics and pointless intellectual machinations-- technically the US and her Allies have embarked upon WWIV, but lack the "political will" in a classical sense declare it as such. The issue of political will being the "sticking point" of the issue.
As to your citing of Paul Johnson and its attached article-- I would ask anyone who enjoyed the article to pick up "Modern Times" by that same author at your local bookstore. This is a most enjoyable history and describes how the rise of "moral relativism" is interwoven with the violence of the 20th centry (Fascism, National Socialism, Marxism-Lenisim and Maosim) and of the 21st century (to date: Religiosity-Islamic Fundamentalism).
For all of you who have subsribed to STRATFOR, please also consider checking out Daniel Pipe's website and "free weekly" at www.danielpipes.org-- Mr. Pipes is one of the best thinkers on the subject of Islamic Fundamentalism, Terrorism and the Middle East-- a definite must read!
Hey whom amongst you only walks arround with only one weapon these days?
Sincerely,
Daniel (IstanbulBlue) the Aviation Consultant.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Woof Dave:
Glad for your imput and glad to hear from you. Pipes is excellent and I will look into your citiation.
I'm for bed shortly, but may I ask that you post this on the WW3 thread? Thread continuity, as versus starting lots of new threads, helps with the coherence of the Forum. With a forum as diverse as this one, every little bit helps.
Crafty Dog
PS: Concerning the name "WW3", I am aware that the Neocons consider the Cold War to have been WW3 and consider the current war to be WW4, but outside of their circle there are other definitions used.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Guro Crafty--
Sorry about the posting's position on the board-- I am not used to using it, yet. I will work out the kinks for the sake of consistency.
I will send you a personal message-- in regards to my training and some questions I had in regards to starting up a "study group" in the future, in Istanbul. Though, currently, it looks like I might be out of work and back in the US by Jan 2005. I might end up moving to Lebanon or Cairo to learn some Arabic-- but that's another story, another world (grad school).
As to your comment-- about NEOCONS-- heck, I thought I was playing my cards close to my chest. I guess the fact that one of my academic/personal mentors include Seth Cropsey-- Joseph Cropsey's son (Levi Strauss Chair professor at U Chicago).
Daniel
=========================
I have read some interesting things about Levi Strauss and his influence over those who became the Neocons. Some have accused him of saying, and the Neocons of believing, that the people need to be lied to sometimes to get them to go along with what must be done. Is this true in your opinion?
Crafty
-
Text of Bush's Speech to the U.N.
Sep 21, 1:43 PM (ET)
By The Associated Press
PRESIDENT BUSH:
Mr. Secretary General, Mr. President, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen: Thank you for the honor of addressing this General Assembly. The American people respect the idealism that gave life to this organization. And we respect the men and women of the U.N., who stand for peace and human rights in every part of the world. Welcome to New York City, and welcome to the United States of America.
During the past three years, I've addressed this General Assembly in a time of tragedy for my country, and in times of decision for all of us. Now we gather at a time of tremendous opportunity for the U.N. and for all peaceful nations. For decades, the circle of liberty and security and development has been expanding in our world. This progress has brought unity to Europe, self-government to Latin America and Asia, and new hope to Africa. Now we have the historic chance to widen the circle even further, to fight radicalism and terror with justice and dignity, to achieve a true peace, founded on human freedom.
The United Nations and my country share the deepest commitments. Both the American Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaim the equal value and dignity of every human life. That dignity is honored by the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, protection of private property, free speech, equal justice, and religious tolerance. That dignity is dishonored by oppression, corruption, tyranny, bigotry, terrorism and all violence against the innocent. And both of our founding documents affirm that this bright line between justice and injustice - between right and wrong - is the same in every age, and every culture, and every nation.
Wise governments also stand for these principles for very practical and realistic reasons. We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace. We know that oppressive governments support terror, while free governments fight the terrorists in their midst. We know that free peoples embrace progress and life, instead of becoming the recruits for murderous ideologies.
Every nation that wants peace will share the benefits of a freer world. And every nation that seeks peace has an obligation to help build that world. Eventually, there is no safe isolation from terror networks, or failed states that shelter them, or outlaw regimes, or weapons of mass destruction. Eventually, there is no safety in looking way, seeking the quiet life by ignoring the struggles and oppression of others.
In this young century, our world needs a new definition of security. Our security is not merely found in spheres of influence, or some balance of power. The security of our world is found in the advancing rights of mankind. These rights are advancing across the world - and across the world, the enemies of human rights are responding with violence.
Terrorists and their allies believe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the American Bill of Rights, and every charter of liberty ever written, are lies, to be burned and destroyed and forgotten. They believe that dictators should control every mind and tongue in the Middle East and beyond. They believe that suicide and torture and murder are fully justified to serve any goal they declare. And they act on their beliefs.
In the last year alone, terrorists have attacked police stations, and banks, and commuter trains, and synagogues - and a school filled with children. This month in Beslan we saw, once again, how the terrorists measure their success - in the death of the innocent, and in the pain of grieving families. Svetlana Dzebisov was held hostage, along with her son and her nephew - her nephew did not survive. She recently visited the cemetery, and saw what she called the "little graves." She said, "I understand that there is evil in the world. But what have these little creatures done?"
Members of the United Nations, the Russian children did nothing to deserve such awful suffering, and fright and death. The people of Madrid and Jerusalem and Istanbul and Baghdad have done nothing to deserve sudden and random murder. These acts violate the standards of justice in all cultures, and the principles of all religions. All civilized nations are in this struggle together, and all must fight the murderers.
We're determined to destroy terror networks wherever they operate, and the United States is grateful to every nation that is helping to seize terrorist assets, track down their operatives, and disrupt their plans. We're determined to end the state sponsorship of terror - and my nation is grateful to all that participated in the liberation of Afghanistan.
We're determined to prevent proliferation, and to enforce the demands of the world - and my nation is grateful to the soldiers of many nations who have helped to deliver the Iraqi people from an outlaw dictator. The dictator agreed in 1991, as a condition of a cease-fire, to fully comply with all Security Council resolutions - then ignored more than a decade of those resolutions.
Finally, the Security Council promised serious consequences for his defiance. And the commitments we make must have meaning. When we say "serious consequences," for the sake of peace, there must be serious consequences. And so a coalition of nations enforced the just demands of the world.
Defending our ideals is vital, but it is not enough. Our broader mission as U.N. members is to apply these ideals to the great issues of our time. Our wider goal is to promote hope and progress as the alternatives to hatred and violence. Our great purpose is to build a better world beyond the war on terror.
Because we believe in human dignity, America and many nations have established a global fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. In three years the contributing countries have funded projects in more than 90 countries, and pledged a total of $5.6 billion to these efforts. America has undertaken a $15 billion effort to provide prevention and treatment and humane care in nations afflicted by AIDS, placing a special focus on 15 countries where the need is most urgent. AIDS is the greatest health crisis of our time, and our unprecedented commitment will bring new hope to those who have walked too long in the shadow of death.
Because we believe in human dignity, America and many nations have joined together to confront the evil of trafficking in human beings. We're supporting organizations that rescue the victims, passing stronger anti-trafficking laws, and warning travelers that they will be held to account for supporting this modern form of slavery. Women and children should never be exploited for pleasure or greed, anywhere on Earth.
Because we believe in human dignity, we should take seriously the protection of life from exploitation under any pretext. In this session, the U.N. will consider a resolution sponsored by Costa Rica calling for a comprehensive ban on human cloning. I support that resolution and urge all governments to affirm a basic ethical principle: No human life should ever be produced or destroyed for the benefit of another.
Because we believe in human dignity, America and many nations have changed the way we fight poverty, curb corruption, and provide aid. In 2002 we created the Monterrey Consensus, a bold approach that links new aid from developed nations to real reform in developing ones. And through the Millennium Challenge Account, my nation is increasing our aid to developing nations that expand economic freedom and invest in the education and health of their own people.
Because we believe in human dignity, America and many nations have acted to lift the crushing burden of debt that limits the growth of developing economies, and holds millions of people in poverty. Since these efforts began in 1996, poor countries with the heaviest debt burdens have received more than $30 billion of relief. And to prevent the build-up of future debt, my country and other nations have agreed that international financial institutions should increasingly provide new aid in the form of grants, rather than loans.
Because we believe in human dignity, the world must have more effective means to stabilize regions in turmoil, and to halt religious violence and ethnic cleansing. We must create permanent capabilities to respond to future crises. The United States and Italy have proposed a Global Peace Operations Initiative. G-8 countries will train 75,000 peacekeepers, initially from Africa, so they can conduct operations on that continent and elsewhere. The countries of the G-8 will help this peacekeeping force with deployment and logistical needs.
At this hour, the world is witnessing terrible suffering and horrible crimes in the Darfur region of Sudan, crimes my government has concluded are genocide. The United States played a key role in efforts to broker a cease-fire, and we're providing humanitarian assistance to the Sudanese people. Rwanda and Nigeria have deployed forces in Sudan to help improve security so aid can be delivered. The Security Council adopted a new resolution that supports an expanded African Union force to help prevent further bloodshed, and urges the government of Sudan to stop flights by military aircraft in Darfur. We congratulate the members of the Council on this timely and necessary action. I call on the government of Sudan to honor the cease-fire it signed, and to stop the killing in Darfur.
Because we believe in human dignity, peaceful nations must stand for the advance of democracy. No other system of government has done more to protect minorities, to secure the rights of labor, to raise the status of women, or to channel human energy to the pursuits of peace. We've witnessed the rise of democratic governments in predominantly Hindu and Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish and Christian cultures. Democratic institutions have taken root in modern societies, and in traditional societies. When it comes to the desire for liberty and justice, there is no clash of civilizations. People everywhere are capable of freedom, and worthy of freedom.
Finding the full promise of representative government takes time, as America has found in two centuries of debate and struggle. Nor is there any - only one form of representative government - because democracies, by definition, take on the unique character of the peoples that create them. Yet this much we know with certainty: The desire for freedom resides in every human heart. And that desire cannot be contained forever by prison walls, or martial laws, or secret police. Over time, and across the Earth, freedom will find a way.
Freedom is finding a way in Iraq and Afghanistan - and we must continue to show our commitment to democracies in those nations. The liberty that many have won at a cost must be secured. As members of the United Nations, we all have a stake in the success of the world's newest democracies.
Not long ago, outlaw regimes in Baghdad and Kabul threatened the peace and sponsored terrorists. These regimes destabilized one of the world's most vital - and most volatile - regions. They brutalized their peoples, in defiance of all civilized norms. Today, the Iraqi and Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom. The governments that are rising will pose no threat to others. Instead of harboring terrorists, they're fighting terrorist groups. And this progress is good for the long-term security of us all.
The Afghan people are showing extraordinary courage under difficult conditions. They're fighting to defend their nation from Taliban holdouts, and helping to strike against the terrorists killers. They're reviving their economy. They've adopted a constitution that protects the rights of all, while honoring their nation's most cherished traditions. More than 10 million Afghan citizens - over 4 million of them women - are now registered to vote in next month's presidential election. To any who still would question whether Muslim societies can be democratic societies, the Afghan people are giving their answer.
Since the last meeting of this General Assembly, the people of Iraq have regained sovereignty. Today, in this hall, the Prime Minister of Iraq and his delegation represent a country that has rejoined the community of nations. The government of Prime Minister Allawi has earned the support of every nation that believes in self-determination and desires peace. And under Security Council resolutions 1511 and 1546, the world is providing that support. The U.N., and its member nations, must respond to Prime Minister Allawi's request, and do more to help build an Iraq that is secure, democratic, federal, and free.
A democratic Iraq has ruthless enemies, because terrorists know the stakes in that country. They know that a free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a decisive blow against their ambitions for that region. So a terrorists group associated with al Qaeda is now one of the main groups killing the innocent in Iraq today - conducting a campaign of bombings against civilians, and the beheadings of bound men. Coalition forces now serving in Iraq are confronting the terrorists and foreign fighters, so peaceful nations around the world will never have to face them within our own borders.
Our coalition is standing beside a growing Iraqi security force. The NATO Alliance is providing vital training to that force. More than 35 nations have contributed money and expertise to help rebuild Iraq's infrastructure. And as the Iraqi interim government moves toward national elections, officials from the United Nations are helping Iraqis build the infrastructure of democracy. These selfless people are doing heroic work, and are carrying on the great legacy of Sergio de Mello.
As we have seen in other countries, one of the main terrorist goals is to undermine, disrupt, and influence election outcomes. We can expect terrorist attacks to escalate as Afghanistan and Iraq approach national elections. The work ahead is demanding. But these difficulties will not shake our conviction that the future of Afghanistan and Iraq is a future of liberty. The proper response to difficulty is not to retreat, it is to prevail.
The advance of freedom always carries a cost, paid by the bravest among us. America mourns the losses to our nation, and to many others. And today, I assure every friend of Afghanistan and Iraq, and every enemy of liberty: We will stand with the people of Afghanistan and Iraq until their hopes of freedom and security are fulfilled.
These two nations will be a model for the broader Middle East, a region where millions have been denied basic human rights and simple justice. For too long, many nations, including my own, tolerated, even excused, oppression in the Middle East in the name of stability. Oppression became common, but stability never arrived. We must take a different approach. We must help the reformers of the Middle East as they work for freedom, and strive to build a community of peaceful, democratic nations.
This commitment to democratic reform is essential to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. Peace will not be achieved by Palestinian rulers who intimidate opposition, tolerate corruption, and maintain ties to terrorist groups. The long-suffering Palestinian people deserve better. They deserve true leaders capable of creating and governing a free and peaceful Palestinian state.
Even after the setbacks and frustrations of recent months, goodwill and hard effort can achieve the promise of the road map to peace. Those who would lead a new Palestinian state should adopt peaceful means to achieve the rights of their people, and create the reformed institutions of a stable democracy. Arab states should end incitement in their own media, cut off public and private funding for terrorism, and establish normal relations with Israel. Israel should impose a settlement freeze, dismantle unauthorized outposts, end the daily humiliation of the Palestinian people, and avoid any actions that prejudice final negotiations. And world leaders should withdraw all favor and support from any Palestinian ruler who fails his people and betrays their cause.
The democratic hopes we see growing in the Middle East are growing everywhere. In the words of the Burmese democracy advocate, Aung San Suu Kyi: "We do not accept the notion that democracy is a Western value. To the contrary; democracy simply means good government rooted in responsibility, transparency, and accountability." Here at the United Nations, you know this to be true. In recent years, this organization has helped create a new democracy in East Timor, and the U.N. has aided other nations in making the transition to self-rule.
Because I believe the advance of liberty is the path to both a safer and better world, today I propose establishing a Democracy Fund within the United Nations. This is a great calling for this great organization. The fund would help countries lay the foundations of democracy by instituting the rule of law and independent courts, a free press, political parties and trade unions. Money from the fund would also help set up voter precincts and polling places, and support the work of election monitors. To show our commitment to the new Democracy Fund, the United States will make an initial contribution. I urge other nations to contribute, as well.
Today, I've outlined a broad agenda to advance human dignity, and enhance the security of all of us. The defeat of terror, the protection of human rights, the spread of prosperity, the advance of democracy - these causes, these ideals, call us to great work in the world. Each of us alone can only do so much. Together, we can accomplish so much more.
History will honor the high ideals of this organization. The charter states them with clarity: "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,""to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights,""to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom."
Let history also record that our generation of leaders followed through on these ideals, even in adversity. Let history show that in a decisive decade, members of the United Nations did not grow weary in our duties, or waver in meeting them. I'm confident that this young century will be liberty's century. I believe we will rise to this moment, because I know the character of so many nations and leaders represented here today. And I have faith in the transforming power of freedom.
May God bless you. (Applause.)
-
Bush, in Shift, Taps Into Emergency Iraq Funds
Tue Sep 21, 9:09 PM ET
By Adam Entous
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon has begun tapping into its $25 billion emergency fund for the Iraq war to prepare for a major troop rotation and intense fighting this fall, administration officials said on Tuesday, despite the White House's initial insistence that it had enough money.
The Pentagon has already used more than $2 billion from what the White House dubbed its "contingency reserve" fund for Iraq. The money is being used to ramp up production of armored Humvees to support the troop rotation, as well as to buy body armor and bolster fuel supplies, the officials told Reuters.
The decision to use the $25 billion in Iraq reserves underscores concern within the administration about the rise in anti-American violence in Iraq.
The decision follows last week's announcement that President Bush plans to divert nearly $3.5 billion from Iraqi water, power and other reconstruction projects to improve security.
The White House had initially asserted it would not need additional war funding until January or February, 2005 -- well after the November presidential election.
Even after requesting the $25 billion reserve fund in May, White House officials insisted it was an "insurance policy" that they hoped not to tap, though they acknowledged that could change if violence flared up.
"As we've always said, our troops in the field will have what they need, when they need it," said Chad Kolton, spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget.
"In this case, making some of those resources available now ensures that our troops will have the equipment they need going into the fall (rotation)," Kolton added.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry accused Bush this week of hiding plans to call up more members of the part-time National Guard and Reserve after the election.
The Bush campaign called Kerry's assertion "false and ridiculous," and administration officials said the Pentagon decided to tap into the reserve fund because resources were running low as the fiscal year nears its Sept. 30 end.
ENOUGH FUNDING?
Congressional aides and defense analysts said the use of the reserve funds could be an early sign that the Pentagon will run out of money sooner than the White House had expected.
Bush has so far spent $120 billion in Iraq, not including the $25 billion contingency fund, and officials said he could seek another $50 billion in February.
With the rate of spending in Iraq already at more than $1 billion a week, the Pentagon may not have enough money to "get past Christmas," let alone wait until February, said John Pike, a defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org. He said the White House could need closer to $75 billion next year.
Steven Kosiak, a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the administration could shift funding around to fill any shortfall. He added that the decision to dip into the reserve fund so soon was further evidence "the war is costing more than the administration anticipated."
Critics have long accused Bush of understating war costs.
Before the invasion, then-White House budget director Mitch Daniels predicted Iraq would be "an affordable endeavor," and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz even assured Congress: "We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon."
Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, said tapping into emergency reserves was "another example of this administration saying one thing and doing another."
"This administration is riddled with flip-flops," Conrad added, echoing a charge Bush uses against Kerry.
-
Here's the text from In the Hat's (http://www.inthehat.blogspot.com) most recent post. A great weblog, so if you can, check it out.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
WAS THIS INEVITABLE?
One of my out of town readers just sent me an item from the Brownsville, Texas paper, The Herald. On September 3, Emma Perez-Trevino wrote about contacts between AL-QAIDA and the MARA SALVATRUCHA, a street gang with sets in Los Angeles, Texas, the US-MEXICO border and as far away as Virginia, New York and Boston. Just so you know, MS has a lot of sets, some of whom operate under the Sureno flag. Others don't. Look for the MS13 placa to determine if they're Sureno. Non-affiliates drop the 13.
The information on this possible alliance came from the U.S. House Select Committee on Homeland Security. According to a member of that committee, Rep. Solomon P. Ortiz, a Democrat from Texas, "We have been in contact wtih El Salvadoran officials and they have verified that Al-Qaida has been active in these gangs."
Ortiz, along with Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Rep. Jim Turner, both Texas Democrats, have asked for more cooperation between the Border Patrol, the FBI and the CIA. All three pols called the OTM policy (Other Than Mexican), "nothing more than a conduit for terrorists." Apparently, 80% to 90% of the 25,000 OTMs arrested on the U.S. side of the border are released on their own recognizance with nothing more than a promise to appear for a hearing. Guess how many actually show up.
For the complete story, a Google search for the Brownsville Herald will take you to the site. I don't do links.
The concept of streets gangs making alliances with foreign powers is not new. In 1987, four members of Chicago's El Rukn gang were convicted of accepting $2.5 million from Lybia to plan and execute terrorist attacks in the U.S. That same year, Jeff Fort, founder of the Blackstone Rangers traveled to Lybia where Muammar Qaddafi presented him with a rocket launcher. The FBI intercepted the weapon and arrested Fort. Louis Farrakhan made the introductions and accompanied Fort to Lybia. More recently, Jose Padilla, a Chicago street gangster was arrested for trying to organize a dirty bomb attack in the U.S.
On the other side of the coin, Italian mobster Lucky Luciano made a deal with the Government during the war. In exchange for his help in gathering intelligence and putting friends on the ground prior to the invasion of Sicily, Luciano was allowed to leave prison and deported at the end of the war. Even without the aid of the internet and satellite phones, Luciano had no trouble calling the shots to his New York crime family from his villa in Palermo.
We'll see what develops with the MS.
-
Very discouraging piece , , ,
Pulling Back the Curtain: What a Top Reporter in Baghdad Really Thinks About the War
Wall Street Journal correspondent Farnaz Fassihi confirms that she penned a scathing letter that calls the war in Iraq an outright "disaster." She also reveals that reporters in Baghdad are working under "virtual house arrest."
By Greg Mitchell
(September 29, 2004) -- Readers of any nailbiting story from Iraq in a major mainstream newspaper must often wonder what the dispassionate reporter really thinks about the chaotic situation there, and what he or she might be saying in private letters or in conversations with friends back home.
Now, at least in the case of Wall Street Journal correspondent Farnaz Fassihi, we know.
A lengthy letter from Baghdad she recently sent to friends "has rapidly become a global chain mail," Fassihi told Jim Romenesko on Wednesday after it was finally posted at the Poynter Institute's Web site. She confirmed writing the letter.
"Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for insecurity," Fassihi wrote (among much else) in the letter. "Guess what? They say they'd take security over freedom any day, even if it means having a dictator ruler." And: "Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come."
After she confirmed writing the letter on Wednesday, Paul Steiger, editor of the Wall Street Journal, stood up for her, telling the New York Post that her "private opinions have in no way distorted her coverage, which has been a model of intelligent and courageous reporting, and scrupulous accuracy and fairness."
Fassihi, 32, covered the 9/11 terror attacks in New York for the The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. and has also worked for the Providence Journal.
The reporter's letter opens with this revelation: "Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest. Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: a chance to see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could make a difference. Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those reasons.
"I am house bound.... There has been one too many close calls, including a car bomb so near our house that it blew out all the windows. So now my most pressing concern every day is not to write a kick-ass story but to stay alive and make sure our Iraqi employees stay alive. In Baghdad I am a security personnel first, a reporter second."
Fassihi observed that the insurgency had spread "from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq." The Iraqi government, he wrote, "doesn't control most Iraqi cities.... The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health--which was attempting an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers--has now stopped disclosing them. Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.
"A friend drove thru the Shiite slum of Sadr City yesterday. He said young men were openly placing improvised explosive devices into the ground. They melt a shallow hole into the asphalt, dig the explosive, cover it with dirt and put an old tire or plastic can over it to signal to the locals this is booby-trapped. He said on the main roads of Sadr City, there were a dozen landmines per every ten yards. His car snaked and swirled to avoid driving over them. Behind the walls sits an angry Iraqi ready to detonate them as soon as an American convoy gets near. This is in Shiite land, the population that was supposed to love America for liberating Iraq."
For journalists, Fassihi wrote, "the significant turning point came with the wave of abduction and kidnappings. Only two weeks ago we felt safe around Baghdad because foreigners were being abducted on the roads and highways between towns. Then came a frantic phone call from a journalist female friend at 11 p.m. telling me two Italian women had been abducted from their homes in broad daylight. Then the two Americans, who got beheaded this week and the Brit, were abducted from their homes in a residential neighborhood....
"The insurgency, we are told, is rampant with no signs of calming down. If any thing, it is growing stronger, organized and more sophisticated every day.
"I went to an emergency meeting for foreign correspondents with the military and embassy to discuss the kidnappings. We were somberly told our fate would largely depend on where we were in the kidnapping chain once it was determined we were missing. Here is how it goes: criminal gangs grab you and sell you up to Baathists in Fallujah, who will in turn sell you to Al Qaeda. In turn, cash and weapons flow the other way from Al Qaeda to the Baathists to the criminals. My friend Georges, the French journalist snatched on the road to Najaf, has been missing for a month with no word on release or whether he is still alive."
And what of America's "hope for a quick exit"? Fassihi noted that "cops are being murdered by the dozens every day, over 700 to date, and the insurgents are infiltrating their ranks. The problem is so serious that the U.S. military has allocated $6 million dollars to buy out 30,000 cops they just trained to get rid of them quietly....
"Who did this war exactly benefit? Was it worth it? Are we safer because Saddam is holed up and Al Qaeda is running around in Iraq?
"I heard an educated Iraqi say today that if Saddam Hussein were allowed to run for elections he would get the majority of the vote. This is truly sad...."
Making clear what can only, at best, appear between lines in her published dispatches, Fassihi concluded, "One could argue that Iraq is already lost beyond salvation. For those of us on the ground it's hard to imagine what if any thing could salvage it from its violent downward spiral. The genie of terrorism, chaos and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes and it can't be put back into a bottle."
-
AT WAR
Exhibition Killing
The Muslim "debate" on hostage-taking and beheading.
BY AMIR TAHERI - WSJ.com
Sunday, October 3, 2004 12:01 a.m.
Who are we allowed to seize as hostage? Who are we allowed to kill?
For the past few weeks these questions have prompted much debate throughout the Muslim world. The emerging answer to both questions is: Anyone you like!
Triggered by the atrocity at a school in Beslan, in southern Russia, last
month, the debate has been further fueled by kidnappings and "exhibition
killings" in Iraq. Non-Muslims may find it strange that such practices are
debated rather than condemned as despicable crimes. But the fact is that the seizure of hostages and "exhibition killing" go back to the early stages
of Islamic history.
In the Arabia of the seventh century, where Islam was born, seizing hostages was practiced by rival tribes, and "exhibition killing" was a weapon of psychological war. The Prophet codified those practices, ending freelance kidnappings and head-chopping. One principle of the new code was that Muslims could not be held hostage by Muslims. Nor could Muslims be subjected to "exhibition killing." Such methods were to be used solely against non-Muslims, and then only in the context of armed conflict.
Seized in combat, a non-Muslim would be treated as a war prisoner, and could win freedom by converting to Islam. He could also be ransomed or exchanged against a Muslim prisoner of war. Non-Muslim women and children captured in war would become the property of their Muslim captors. Female captives could be taken as concubines or given as gifts to Muslims. The children, brought up as Muslims, would enjoy Islamic rights.
Centuries later, the initial code was elaborated by Imam Jaafar Sadeq, a
descendant of the Prophet. He made two key rulings. Whoever entered Islam was instantly granted "full guarantee for his blood." And non-Muslims, as long as they paid their poll tax, or jiziyah, to the Islamic authority would be protected.
Recalling this background is important because what we witness in the Muslim world today is disregard of religious tradition in favor of political
considerations.
A survey of Muslim views over the past weeks shows overwhelming, though not unanimous, condemnation of the Beslan massacre. But in all cases the reasons given for the condemnation are political rather than religious. Muslim commentators assert that Russia, having supported "the Palestinian cause," did not deserve such treatment. Sheik Yussuf al-Qaradawi, a Sunni Muslim scholar based in Qatar, was among the first to condemn the Beslan massacre. At the same time, however, he
insists that a similar attack on Israeli schools would be justified because
Israeli schoolchildren, if not killed, could grow up to become soldiers.
(Sheik Qaradawi also justifies the killing of unborn Israelis because, if
born, they could become soldiers.)
That view is shared by Ayatollah Imami Kashani, a cleric working for the
Iranian government. He claims that, regardless of what it has done against the people of Chechnya, Russia must not be attacked because it has supported "the greater cause" of Palestine. In other words Chechen Muslims are less worthy of consideration than Palestinian ones. That view is shared by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a grouping of 57 Muslim countries. Its secretary-general, Abdelouahed Belkeziz, has issued a strong condemnation of Beslan. But he has not said a word about dozens of other terrorists attacks carried out by Islamists across the globe.
Implicit in all this is that killing innocent people in the lands of the
"infidel" is justified for as long as the victims are not citizens of
states sympathetic to "the Arab cause," whatever it happens to be at any given time. That position was highlighted in the Arab reaction to the kidnapping of two French journalists by Islamists in Iraq last month. Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa led the call for their release with these words: "France is a friend of the Arabs; we cannot treat friends this way."
This was echoed by Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, spiritual leader of
Hezbollah, who appealed for the release of the Frenchmen, something he has not done for any of the 140 foreigners who have been kidnapped in Iraq. Yasser Arafat has been more specific. "These journalists support the
Palestinian cause and the Iraqi cause," he said in a statement issued in
Ramallah. "We need guarantees for the security of friends who support us in battle."
In other words the Frenchmen must be freed because they support the Arabs, not because holding hostages is wrong.
The French authorities have reinforced that sentiment. Prime Minister
Jean-Pierre Raffarin speaks of the Iraqi insurgency as "la r?sistance."
And Foreign Minister Michel Barnier has announced that France would reject the international conference on Iraq, proposed by the Bush administration, unless "elements opposed to the occupation," meaning the terrorists, are invited.
Mr. Belkeziz, the OIC secretary-general has also promised to leave no stone unturned to ensure the release of the French hostages. The same Mr. Belkeziz has said nothing about hostages from some 30 other countries, including some members of his own organization. Nor has he been moved by the cold-blooded murder of 41 hostages, including Muslims, from 11 different nationalities.
Abbasi Madani, a former leader of the Front for Islamic Salvation, has
started a hunger strike "in solidarity with our French brethren." This
is rich coming from a man whose party and its allies caused the death of some 200,000 people in his native Algeria during the 1990s. Mr. Madani never missed a meal in solidarity with the countless Algerians, including women and children, that his fellow Islamists slaughtered.
Yet even more disturbing is the attitude of Muslim organizations in France
and Britain. Both have sent delegations to Iraq to contact the terrorists
and ask for the liberation of two French, and one British, hostages. The
French delegation, led by Mohamed Bechari, went out of its way to advertise France's "heroic opposition" to the Iraq war in 2003. "I am here
to defend France's Arab policy," Mr. Bechari told reporters. "In Iraq as well as in Palestine, France is for the Arabs."
The two British Muslim delegates made their case in a different way by
arguing that, although Britain participated in toppling Saddam Hussein, a
majority of the British were opposed to the war. Thus British hostage Ken
Bigley should be released not because hostage-taking is wrong but because such a move could strengthen anti-war sentiment in Britain.
By refusing to come out with a categorical rejection of terrorism, Muslim
leaders and opinion-makers are helping perpetuate a situation in which no
one is safe. The 9/11 attacks against the United States were based on the
claim, made by al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, that all citizens of
democratic countries could be murdered because, being actual or potential voters, they have a share of responsibility for the policies of their governments.
The assumption that only Americans and Israelis are targeted has proved
false as Islamists have murdered hundreds of peoples from all faiths,
including Islam, in a dozen countries in the past three years. Today, it is
enough for anyone to designate himself as an Islamic "mujahid," fighting
for Palestine and opposing the "occupation" in Iraq, to get carte blanche
from millions of Muslims, including many in authority, for kidnapping and
"exhibition killing."
That no one, Muslim or "infidel," is safe was made clearer by a statement
from Abu Anas al-Shami, the self-styled "mufti" of al Qaeda, who was
reportedly killed in Iraq in an American air attack last month. "There are
times when mujahedeen cannot waste time finding out who is who in the
battlefield," he wrote. "There are times when we have to assume that whoever is not on our side is the enemy."
Al-Shami's position echoes a fatwa of the late Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali,
one of the founders of the Islamic Republic in Iran. Ayatollah Khalkhali
wrote: "Among those we seize hostage or kill, some may be innocent. In that case, Allah will take them to his paradise. We do our job, He does His."
Mr. Taheri is an Iranian political commentator based in Paris.
Copyright ? 2004 Dow Jones & Company, I
-
Second post:
Jack Kelly: The desperation of the insurgents
In Iraq, as on Guadalcanal in WWII, we are grinding the enemy down
Sunday, October 03, 2004
John Kerry has changed positions on Iraq more often than some of his supporters have changed their underwear. But if he sticks with his current position for the rest of the campaign, Americans will have the debate on Iraq policy we deserve to have.
For Kerry and most of his fellow Democrats, every war is like Vietnam, an (in their view) American overreach that begins in hubris and ends in tragedy.
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Powl Smith, a counterterrorism expert on the staff of the MultiNational Forces in Baghdad, thinks Iraq is more like Guadalcanal.
Guadalcanal is an island in the Solomons chain uncomfortably close to Australia. It was the site of the first American counteroffensive against the Japanese in World War II.
The Marines seized the Japanese airstrip on the island in a surprise attack. But, as Lt. Col. Smith noted in an article in The Weekly Standard, "the Japanese recovered from our initial success, and began a long and brutal campaign to force us off Guadalcanal."
We held off the Japanese, and the tide in the Pacific was turned. Ever thereafter, the Japanese were on the defensive. But it took six months and 6,000 U.S. casualties (compared to 24,000 Japanese) to do it.
In Iraq as at Guadalcanal, we achieved stunning initial success. In Iraq as at Guadalcanal, the enemy has fought back ferociously, because they realize defeat would leave them in an untenable position. And in Iraq, as on Guadalcanal, we are grinding the enemy down.
American troops and Iraqi security forces have been killing terrorists in bunches. Maj. Gen. Gary Harrell, commander of Special Operations Forces in Central Command, told Bret Baier of Fox News that there are fewer than 10,000 enemy combatants in Iraq, and there may be fewer than 5,000.
The gruesome tactics of the terrorists in Iraq -- kidnappings and beheadings and suicide bombings -- have been cited by Democrats and journalists as signs that things are getting worse.
But to thoughtful observers, these seem more like signs of desperation.
Gilles Kepel, a French Arabist, thinks the followers of Osama bin Laden are losing, badly.
Not only have the Islamists failed to achieve their goal of seizing power in Muslim lands, they have suffered since Sept. 11, 2001, a string of major defeats, Kepel noted. The Taliban has been ousted in Afghanistan. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have turned towards the West. Islamists in Sudan and Libya are in retreat. The plight of the Palestinians has worsened. The Americans are in Baghdad.
"Kepel argues that the insurgents' brutal tactics in Iraq -- the kidnappings and beheadings, the car bombing massacres of young Iraqi police recruits -- are increasingly alienating the Muslim masses," wrote Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. "No sensible Muslim would want to live in Fallujah, which is now controlled by Taliban-style fanatics. Similarly, the Muslim masses can see that most of the dead from al-Qaida bombings in Turkey and Morocco were fellow Muslims."
Iraqis have noticed that they, and not the Americans, are now the chief targets: "Since Jan. 1 more than 700 Iraqi security force members have been killed, and hundreds of Iraqis seeking to volunteer for the police and military have been killed as well," said Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who is in charge of training the Iraqi security forces, in an article in The Washington Post Sept. 26.
But this hasn't discouraged them. There continue to be more volunteers for the Iraqi police, national guard and army than there are training slots available.
The level of violence in Iraq is likely to increase over the next few months as the terrorists try desperately to derail the Iraqi elections slated for January. They know that successful elections could be the final nail in their coffins.
In his Sept. 28 New York Times column, David Brooks noted the risks the people of El Salvador were willing to take to vote in elections in the midst of the civil country in the 1980s, and how just having those elections undermined the insurgency.
"As we saw in El Salvador and as Iraqi insurgents understand, elections suck the oxygen from a rebel army," Brooks said. "They refute the claim that violence is the best way to change things. Moreover, they produce democratic leaders who are better equipped to win an insurgency war."
Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476).
-
THE ARMY WINS
By RALPH PETERS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 5, 2004 -- IN a remarkable display of skill, elements of the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division and newly trained Iraqi national forces drove the terrorists from the city of Samarra last week. Killing over 100 of freedom's enemies and capturing many more, our troops lost a single soldier.
The two-day sweep through Samarra incorporated lessons learned on the ground over the past several months — especially the need to win swiftly in urban settings. Our soldiers performed flawlessly under difficult conditions. Iraqi commandos, backed by our Special Forces, liberated two key mosques before a hostile media could intervene on terror's behalf. The city's population is glad that their oppressors are gone.
Has Sen. Kerry acknowledged the performance of our troops? Has he thanked them? Of course not. The senator and his posse of defeatists resent American victories in the final weeks before our presidential election.
We're supposed to lose, you understand.
There's an enormous and troubling disconnect between the situation on the ground in Iraq and the portrait of disaster hawked by Kerry & Co. — abetted by the media. The victims of this disinformation campaign are our soldiers, the American people and the law-abiding citizens of Iraq.
Indeed, the Dems have declared defeat so loudly and insistently that they've convinced much of the world that freedom's cause is lost in the Middle East.
But let me tell you who isn't convinced: Our soldiers. Last week, I was privileged to speak to — and listen to — hundreds of U.S. Army officers and enlisted soldiers at the Land Combat Exposition in Heidelberg, Germany — the headquarters of our ground troops in Europe. Even I was surprised by the complete absence of griping. I did not hear a single criticism of our engagement in Iraq.
Now, soldiers complain. It's a hallowed tradition. Yet, not one of the troops with whom I spoke suggested we were losing in Iraq. Those soldiers, from generals down to the junior enlisted ranks, are the ones who pay the bills that come due in blood. And they were proud to have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many were getting ready to go back. They believed in what their country asked them to do.
But the most inspiring exchanges I had weren't with those in uniform. It was the military spouses, left behind while their loved ones went to war, who really got to me.
I recall two splendid young women whose husbands serve in the same infantry battalion — the most dangerous of assignments — in Iraq's Sunni triangle. They went out of their way to let me know that they supported their husbands proudly and without reservation
Yet who might be asked to pay a higher price? When protesters pretend to represent the best interests of our troops, how dare they speak for those young wives who risk so much because they, too, believe in our country and its calling?
I was fortunate to hear Maj.-Gen. Marty Dempsey, commander of our 1st Armored Division, share a rigorous analysis of the challenges faced by "Old Ironsides" during the unit's recent tour of duty in Iraq. There was no nonsense in that briefing, no self-glorification — just an appreciation of what American soldiers can achieve and a determination to do everything possible to help them.
Gen. B.B. Bell, our Army's senior commander in Europe, has the job of preparing his troops for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan — along with other wide-ranging strategic responsibilities. A charismatic leader, Bell is determined to capture the knowledge bought with blood on Iraq's battlefields so that our doctrine is worthy of our soldiers. What I saw, at every rank, was a level of professionalism and dedication that shames my own generation of Cold War-era soldiers.
We've never had better troops in our nation's history — and they're winning under very tough conditions.
What do we hear on the home front? A presidential candidate appears determined to provide aid and comfort to the enemy, while encouraging the terrorists to resist with all their might until he's elected.
Kerry and his acolytes revel in reciting casualty figures — even though Kerry realizes full well that our losses in Iraq, painful though they are, are lower than those from one minor Civil War battle. And the stakes in Iraq are higher by far than any of the senator's supporters can admit.
Our Army deserves better. As do our Marines, who are readying themselves for the job of retaking Fallujah in cooperation with revamped Iraqi forces. How on earth have we sunk so low that a man who would be president is willing to undercut those in uniform, while encouraging our enemies to believe — against all evidence — that they're winning?
As this column long has maintained, our troops can perform the mission in Iraq. All they need is stalwart support from our nation's leaders. President Bush has wavered now and then, but last week's win in Samarra suggests that the administration has regained its nerve.
What could our troops expect from a President Kerry? Must we accept that the lives and limbs lost have all been squandered in vain?
When terrorist bombs inevitably go off in the streets of Samarra again, the Kerry crowd will insist that the blasts mean that retaking the city was useless. But the senator, who has seen war firsthand, knows better. Military operations under such conditions are complex, often-lengthy affairs. There is no such thing as a flawless victory.
But there is such a thing as victory. Last week, in a superb lightning operation, Maj.-Gen. John R. S. Batiste and his Big Red One gave the Iraqi people and America a significant win.
Wouldn't it be lovely if Kerry could summon up the decency to thank them?
Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace."
-
Subject: What Dick Morris thinks Bush should say.
DEBATE TIPS FOR THE CHIEF
BY DICK MORRIS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 7, 2004 -- THE strategy required for coaching a President for a debate is the exact opposite of that you have to use to prep a challenger. Challengers need to learn as much as they can to prepare for all questions and become conversant with every area of policy. A president is already informed; the coach's job is to help him sift through what he knows and hone from it a coherent response to challenges from his adversary.
In a sense, a challenger needs to learn more. An incumbent needs to concentrate on what he has to say.
To this end, perhaps these ideas can help Camp Bush as they prepare to undo the massive damage of the first debate.
When Kerry says that homeland security is inadequate and that only 5 percent of the shipping containers are inspected or points out that thousands of pages of wire intercepts have not been translated . . .
. . . Bush should say: "It is very easy to pick on one aspect of our security approach and say it is flawed. But remember one basic fact: If I told you on Sept, 12, 2001 that there would be no further attacks on U.S. soil for the next three years, you'd have thought I was out of my mind. But there have been no attacks. If we're inspecting 5 percent of containers, it's the right 5 percent. Judge us on our record: We have kept America safe."
When Kerry says we shouldn't have attacked Saddam because he wasn't involved in the 9/11 conspiracy . . .
. . . Bush's answer ought to be: "Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Hitler had nothing to do with it. But FDR realized we needed to fight all fascism, not just the fascist regime that attacked us. Yes, Hitler made it easy on FDR by declaring war on us. But if he hadn't, does anyone doubt that Roosevelt would have gone to war with Germany anyway?"
When Kerry calls the war in Iraq a mistake and a diversion from the War on Terror . . .
. . . Bush should hit him between the eyes: "Al Qeada operatives are congregating in Iraq. We can kill them there before they can spread mayhem around the world. If we can hunt down those who would attack us in the caves of Pakistan and of Afghanistan and the streets of Fallujah and Baghdad, how is that a diversion from the War on Terror? It's not. It is fundamental to success in that war."
And when Kerry accuses Bush of neglecting our allies . . .
. . . The president must set the record straight: "We have the single most important ally in the fight against terror: Pakistan is helping us hunt down terrorists who have escaped from Afghanistan. As to France, Germany and Russia, the evidence of the Oil-for-Food scandal suggests that no amount of diplomacy would have induced them to abandon a regime that was paying them vast sums of money to stay loyal."
If Kerry says we let bin Ladin escape . . .
. . . Bush has to say: "It's easy to second-guess a specific military decision, but I leave those questions to the generals who are trained to make them. We may not have bin Laden, but he is running from cave to cave to cave and hasn't been able to strike at us. And we do have Saddam. And we did get Khadafy to flip and support us. And we have the terrorists on the run."
When Kerry criticizes any aspect of the war effort, like the shortage of body armor . . .
. . . The president should really let him have it. "It was not me, but you who voted against adequate intelligence funding, to abolish the CIA, to cut defense budgets and, ultimately, against the $87 billion for our efforts in Iraq. Those were your votes, not mine."
If the presidents works on his moves, he'll be back in the race.
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200410080826.asp
Sizing Up Iraq
Things are coming to a head in the Middle East.
Victor Davis Hanson
From the various insurgencies of the Peloponnesian War to the British victory over Communist guerrillas in Malaya, there remain constants across 2,500 years of time and space that presage victory or defeat. Drawing wisdom from that past, there are at least four critical issues that must always be addressed if we are to create a stable Iraq under the auspices of a broad-based consensual government. So far the occupation has been plagued by mistakes, false assumptions, and incompetence - and yet we find ourselves still with a good chance of success.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR
First, is the United States winning its engagements on the ground? The answer is an overwhelming yes - whether we look, most recently, at Samarra or at the thrashing of the Mahdists in Najaf. The combination of armor incursions, constant sniper attack, and GPS bombing in each case has led to decisive tactical defeat of the insurgents. Our only setback - the unfortunate pullback from Fallujah ? was entirely attributable to our wrongheaded constraint, as if we somehow felt that releasing the terrorists from our death grip would either placate the opposition, empower the Iraqi government, or win accolades from the international community. (See here, here, here, and here.)
In fact, our retreat achieved the opposite effect. Thus the withdrawal from Fallujah will be taught for decades as a textbook case of what not to do when suppressing insurgents. Nevertheless, we have reestablished the fact that we can crush all the opposition on the ground, our willingness to restart real hostilities dependent only on how much flak from our critics in the Middle East and Europe we are willing to take.
Let us hope that our planners have learned that whatever ephemeral public relations or humanitarianism they achieved by sparing the terrorists in Fallujah was vastly outweighed by the death and destruction they wrought and the greater number of lives that must now be sacrificed to defeat the emboldened killers for good. The foreign killers in Fallujah are just the sort of folk who trained in Afghanistan, would like to repeat 9/11, and are psychopathic killers of innocent reformers. Instead of worrying about how they got to Fallujah, we should see it as to our advantage that they are now conveniently collected in one central place and can be dealt with en masse. Because the 4th Infantry Division never came down from Turkey during the war into the Sunni Triangle, hundreds of Baathist killers who should have been crushed were not, and instead they melted away. It is now time to finish the job.
Second, are the terrorists - through their suicide bombing, car explosions, hostage-takings, and beheadings - winning widespread Iraqi support? Here I do not mean the anti-American braggadocio we see on spec when a CNN reporter sticks a microphone into the face of someone whose house has just been demolished. Rather, is there a large minority of Iraqis - perhaps four to five million? who are actively helping the terrorists and Islamicists? Again, so far the answer seems to be no; to the degree that civilians provide help and shelter to a Zarqawi and his thugs, it is predicated on self-interest: His men are ruthless and in the neighborhood, while the Americans are forgiving and distant. There is as yet no mass movement analogous to the Vietcong - one with a clear-cut and popular agenda to seize power and either restore Saddam or institute sharia. Indeed, the Iraqi democratic military has suffered as many battle casualties in its struggle against the terrorists as have the Americans.
Third, does fighting the terrorists lead to a political resolution that offers manifest advantages to the majority of Iraqis, and is it recognized as such? The answer is yes, with scheduled elections in January that could develop along the lines of those in Afghanistan. The increasing role of the Iraqi defense forces, the growing prominence of Mr. Allawi, and the preparations for voting in less than four months can all offer a political endgame that will soon lead to some sort of greater freedom and prosperity. That we have been inept in publicizing our achievements is regrettable; but still, most Iraqis grasp that American success leads to water, power, and jobs, and that Zarqawi's victory ensures heads rolling on the ground or spiked on fence posts.
Unlike the case of South Vietnam, the provisional democratic government is not flanked by a hostile nuclear China or Soviet Union, nor is it attacked by an organized conventional military fueled by the romance of a secular and global leftist utopianism. Not even French students march on behalf of Zarqawi's beheaders. So there is an opportunity for a political dynamic to emerge that terrifies al Qaeda: an oil-rich democratic Iraqi state, near a similarly consensual Turkey and Afghanistan, with nuclear India, Russia, and Pakistan - all hostile to Islamic fascists - nearby.
Indeed, the long-term strategic outlook for al Qaeda is far worse than its occasional macabre killings on the ground might suggest: Its victims are often Muslims, from all over the world, and are entirely innocent. So far the terrorists have not galvanized the Arab Street as much as dealt a crushing public-relations blow to Islam itself, succeeding in just a few years to make the young Arab Muslim male the most suspicious and scrutinized fellow on the planet. Indeed, in three years bin Laden and Zarqawi have done for the stereotyping of Arabs what Hitler did for Germans in 15 - and it will take decades to undo the damage to the reputations of millions in the Middle East not yet born.
Fourth, is there a mechanism for the United States to ease out of Iraq? More so than we think. In fact, the first step was eliminating Saddam Hussein. His departure meant that we did not need to keep tens of thousands of troops in the Gulf to box in a rogue Iraq. Thus, after the January elections, our goal should be redeployment rather than entirely new troop commitments: The 10,000 not needed in Saudi Arabia can be transferred to garrison duty to protect the Iraqi democracy, while we also draw down in the Gulf States and likewise shift those assets to bases in Iraq. In a larger sense, if 40,000 Americans who would be doing little in Germany are instead keeping the peace in Iraq, the overall cost to the American taxpayer is about the same.
A NEW POST-IRAQ MIDEAST POLICY
Our eventual aim should be perhaps around 50,000 American troops in the region - or not that many more present than when Saddam was in power. Even if the worst-case scenario were to transpire in January - an elected Islamist government ordering us to leave - we would still have plenty of alternatives. Beside not having to come through with the promised $87 billion in relief, we can also make it clear that an Islamist Iraq is subject to the same conditions as the mullocracy in Iran ? veritable ostracism from the world community, prohibition from acquiring nuclear weapons, and internal problems from imposing sharia on a restless youth.
And the next time the United States uses force in the Middle East, we shall not do nation-building but rather serious GPS-ing at 20,000 feet in punitive Roman fashion. Indeed, despite the glum punditry, the sacrifice of blood and treasure to bring freedom to the Iraqis has been a landmark event by virtue of the very attempt. For decades, a corrupt Arab League - now unconcerned that Arab Muslims have murdered 50,000 black Africans but never losing a chance to damn Israelis for killing 30 Palestinian militants - whined that neocolonialism, Cold War realpolitik, oil, and imperialism precluded Western support for democratic reform.
Well now, Arab League, here you have your long-sought-after dream: The United States spent its own blood to take out a fascist, committed billions in aid to jump start democracy, and lobbied the world to forgive Iraqi debt - only to find either silence from the region's dictators or their active help for the beheaders and car bombers seeking to inaugurate an 8th-century fascist caliphate. The point? The Iraqi people and the Arab Middle East will soon have to go on record either accepting or rejecting the chance for democracy. If they choose theocracy, anarchy, or autocracy, well, the United States can say at least it tried to offer them a way out of their self-induced misery - but the region turned out to prefer the Dark Ages after all and must be left alone to suffer the consequences of that decision.
If an aggregate $50 billion in aid to Egypt; billions more to the Palestinians and Jordanians; the removal of the bloodthirsty Saddam Hussein and the Taliban; $87 billion invested in Iraq and an attempt to relieve its international debt; saving the Kuwaitis; protecting the Saudis; stopping the genocide of Muslims in the Balkans; and keeping the Persian Gulf safe gets us sky-high cartel oil prices and poll data showing that 95 percent of the Middle East does not like America, it is time to try something else.
I could start with the modest suggestion of a gradual cutting off all aid to Egypt, halting most immigration to the United States from the Middle East (in the manner we once did with Communist Eastern Europe), and announcing a carrot-and-stick non-interventionist Bush Doctrine II. All future Middle East military and economic aid would be predicated on the recipient's having a democratic government, while evidence of either terrorist bases or weapons of mass destruction would earn sustained U.S. bombing. Finally, we need a serious energy policy beside the pie-in-the-sky "hydrogen car" or "wind and solar" panacea. If the windmills won't spin for the beach houses off the coast of Nantucket, then they won't spin for us in Fresno either.
We can start by a compromise to drill for oil in the United States while clamping down on gas-guzzling cars. Nuclear power, more hydroelectric damns, oil shale, and mass transit may require subsidies, but billions of U.S. petrodollars are already subsidizing a corrupt Middle East, transmogrifying the type of violence we see routinely in Africa or Asia into something that can literally end the world as we know it.
THE KERRY NON-ALTERNATIVE
Meanwhile, Senator Kerry offers neither a plan to stay nor one to leave Iraq, only something "secret." He thinks a country that defeated Japan, Italy, and Germany at the same time as a warm-up to keeping at bay a nuclear Soviet Union and China must fail if takes on Afghanistan and Iraq at onceHis trial balloons so far ? beg the Germans and French to come in and give the Iranians clean uranium ? have met with polite chuckles. We already know the effect that such warmed-over Carterism will have in Iraq: failure with the added wage of humiliation.
In fact, Kerry's only chance for honest intellectual criticism of the Bush administration might have come from the right: stern remonstrations over our tolerance of looting, inability to train Iraqis in real numbers, laxity in shutting off the borders, failure to control arms depots, tolerance for terrorist enclaves in Fallujah, and sloth in releasing aid money to grass-roots organizations. Yet by putting a tired Richard Holbrook or a whining Jamie Rubin on television, Kerry suggests that far from chastising Bush for doing too little, he believes that the president has already done too much.
The administration's gaffes all share a common theme of restraining our military power in fear of either Middle Eastern or European censure. But once one climbs into a cesspool like Iraq, one must either clean it up or go home, and that means suffering the 48-hour hysteria of the global media about collateral damage in exchange for killing the terrorists and freeing the country. Only that way can we impress the fencesitting Iraqis that we employ an iron fist in service to their own security and prosperity, and thus we - not the beheaders and kidnappers - are their only partners for peace.
Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
-
A Reuters story claiming a schism between radical and moderate Islamic rebels.
Philippine rebels strained by radical Islam
10 Oct 2004 03:16:53 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Stuart Grudgings
CAMP DARAPANAN, Philippines, Oct 10 (Reuters) - Several slouching Muslim rebels spring to attention as visitors approach the makeshift meeting room in a corner of their camp.
Inside, Al Haj Murad's bookish appearance and gentle voice belie his status as the head of the Philippines' largest Muslim militant group and one of the country's most powerful men.
"We are solid," he says during an interview with Reuters, expressing certainty that he has the full support of his at least 12,000 fighters.
Shows of unity are more important than ever for the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) as it returns to peace talks with the government after a three-year break and tries to shake off allegations that its camps are a training ground for militants.
But deepening divisions within the MILF between moderates and Middle-East influenced radicals could turn out to be one of the biggest obstacles to ending the 30-year-old conflict.
The risk is that the MILF may splinter if its leadership signs a peace deal that falls short of the long-cherished goal of independence for Muslim-majority areas, leaving southern Mindanao island stuck in conflict and poverty.
"I think the MILF is having a lot of trouble in their own ranks," said Zachary Abuza, a professor at Boston's Simmons College and an expert on the Mindanao conflict.
"There's growing radicalism within the MILF that's scaring the older generation. At the same time the general population -- their constituency -- is getting really war-weary."
Division in the MILF helps explain why it has found it so difficult to address international concerns about its links with militant groups such as Southeast Asia's Jemaah Islamiah.
Analysts say individual commanders may have kept links with the al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiah, blamed for a string of attacks in Southeast Asia, including the 2002 bombings of nightclubs on Indonesia's Bali island, without the leadership's permission.
Despite expressing confidence in his group's unity, Murad voiced concern that the older generation may not be able to control a younger, more radical breed of MILF fighter for much longer.
"What we are afraid of is that the younger generation will replace the older generation of leaders and because they are more involved in the war, the possibility of them turning radical is very, very high," he told Reuters on Saturday.
POWER STRUGGLE
Murad, 54, is deeply respected within the MILF, but is seen as more moderate than his predecessor, charismatic preacher Salamat Hashim who died of a heart attack last year.
The MILF may be paying the price for its entanglement with foreign militants, which stretches back to the Afghan war of the 1980s, and for bringing up a generation that only knows war.
Mursalin Ibrahim Jafar, a 42-year-old rebel guarding Murad, joined the MILF when he was 16 and has known nothing else.
Asked what he wanted to do after a peace deal was signed, he said: "I still want to be a mujahideen, a fighter."
One incident in August may provide insight into the MILF power struggle.
When the leader of the Philippines' infamous Pentagon kidnap gang was reported killed in a rocket attack by military helicopter gunships in a MILF-held area, it seemed like another step on the road to peace.
The common view was that the MILF had lived up to its pledge to help the military track down criminals and foreign militants taking refuge in its areas. The United States lists the Pentagon as a terrorist group.
But there is another version of events. Pentagon chief Alonto Tahir was a blood relation and close ally of Samir Hashim, the brother of Salamat Hashim and thought to be one of the main MILF opponents of a peace deal.
By leading the military to Tahir's lair, Murad may have been sending a powerful warning to Samir and other MILF radicals.
"This was less about Murad trying to reach out to the GRP (Philippine government), it was more sending a signal to Samir," said Abuza. "This was all about internal MILF dynamics."
-
Item Number:11
Date: 10/13/2004
IRAQ - FALLUJAH CAMPAIGN TAKES TOLL ON ZARQAWI (OCT 13/NYT)
NEW YORK TIMES -- The U.S. bombing campaign in Fallujah has killed about half of the foreign terrorist leadership in that Iraqi city in the last month, the New York Times reports.
Airstrikes in Fallujah have reportedly killed at least six senior members of the network led by Al-Qaida lieutenant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Military officials did not disclose how they have tracked casualties among Zarqawi's followers in Fallujah, but indicated they are relying on intercepted communications and information from informants.
"His network is hurting," said a senior Defense Depart. official.
"Everything I've seen suggests we're having a measurable impact on him. It's disrupting his operation, though he's still able to use Fallujah as a sanctuary, and that's a problem."
Item Number:12
Date: 10/13/2004
IRAQ - LOCAL INSURGENTS TURN AGAINST FOREIGN FIGHTERS (OCT 13/WP)
WASHINGTON POST -- Residents in Fallujah said local Iraqi insurgents are starting to turn against the foreign fighters who have been allies against the U.S. military and Iraqi interim government, the Washington Post reports.
Local insurgents are negotiating with the government in order to avoid a U.S.-led offensive in the city, but foreign fighters continue to press the attack.
At least five foreign fighters were killed in recent weeks after their dispute with Iraqis turned violent.
Local insurgent leaders say they want the foreign fighters to leave, particularly Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian who has strong ties to Al-Qaida.
"He is mentally deranged, has distorted the image of the resistance and defamed it. I believe his end is near," said Abu Abdalla Dulaimy, leader of an Iraqi insurgent group called the First Army of Mohammad.
-
All:
These two thoughtful articles came to my attention via a mailing group of which I am a member. I include the comments of one of the members at the end.
Marc
==========
Radical Islam appeals to the rootless
OLIVIER ROY
It often is assumed that the spread of Islamic radicalism is a consequence of conflicts within the Middle East and their natural spillover effect on the global Muslim population, specifically on Muslims living in western societies. "Re-Islamisation", the radicalisation of westernised Muslim populations, is seen as the reaction of Muslim societies to western political and cultural encroachments.
But why, then, do so many young, "born again" second-generation Muslims in the western world embrace various brands of neo-fundamentalist or salafi Islam? Why are so many converts joining them? Curiously, why does the radical fringe of the west's Muslim population opt for peripheral and exotic jihad - from Bosnia to Afghanistan, Kashmir and Chechnya - instead of heading to Iraq? Evidence suggests that few, if any, among the children of Europe's Muslim immigrants return to wage jihad in the land of their ancestors - Algeria or Morocco, for example - while foreigners fighting alongside Iraqi Sunni insurgents tend to be Saudi, Syrian or Jordanian neighbours, not volunteers coming from the west.
In fact the spread of new forms of Islamic fundamentalism or salafism as is not a translation of original Muslim cultures and traditions but a recasting of new identities under religious terms.
The neo-fundamentalist view reduces Islam to a literalist and normative reading of the Koran. It rejects cultural dimensions of religion and replaces them with a code of Islamic conduct to suit any situation, from Afghan deserts to US school campuses. Consequently its first target is not so much the west as what it sees as distorted Islam, sullied from early days by traditional Muslim cultures and arts, literature and philosophy. The prime target of the Taliban, for example, was traditional Afghan culture, not the west. Salafism, therefore, is a tool for uprooting traditional cultures, not for enhancing them. It acknowledges without nostalgia the loss of original culture and sees a positive opportunity to build a universal religious identity, unlinked from any specific culture including western society, which is perceived as corrupt and decadent.
Re-Islamisation means that Muslim identity, self-evident as long as it belonged to an inherited cultural legacy, must explicitly express itself in a non-Muslim or western context. The construction of a "deculturalised" Islam gives rise to a religious identity not linked to any specific culture and therefore able to fit with every culture or, more exactly, transcend the very notion of culture. Globalisation has blurred the connection between a religion, an original culture and a territory. In this respect, globalisation provides an opportunity to dissociate Islam from specific cultures and develop a universal model that can work beyond cultural confines.
Neo-fundamentalism reveals that it is just as much a product as an agent of cultural loss. Islam, as preached by the Taliban, the Saudi Wahhabis and Osama bin Laden's radicals, is hostile to traditional culture, even those of Muslim origin. Whether Muhammad's tomb, the Bamiyan statues of the Buddha, or the World Trade Center, destruction of such symbols expresses the same rejection of civilisation or culture. The surge of "fundamentalism" in the west (whether Islamic or even Christian) does not express a clash of civilisations, because it has already deprived cultures and civilisations of their content and meaning.
This sort of fundamentalism does not target actual communities but individuals in doubt of their faith and identity. It appeals to an uprooted, disaffected youth in search of an identity beyond the lost cultures of their parents and beyond the thwarted expecta tions of a better life in the west. They dream of a universal and virtual Islamic community that could give religious meaning to the globalisation process. Converts, whether school drop-outs, racial minorities or rebels without a cause, may find in this imaginary ummah - or universal community of Muslim believers - a chance to build a new and positive identity.
Neo-fundamentalists are succeeding in adding Islamic content to the global market. When they indulge in consumerism they promote halal McDonald's or Mecca-Cola (a registered brand-name) rather than the refined delicacies of Ottoman or Moroccan cuisine. When they go for jihad they do not identify with the nationalist struggles of the Middle East, where activists, whether secular (such as the Ba'athists) or religious (such as Hamas) fight first for a territory and a nation state. The ummah that the fundamentalists are fighting for is not based on a territory: it is a dream that finds on the internet its virtual existence. Websites and chatrooms compensate for the lack of real social roots.
This neo-fundamentalism is not necessarily violent or politically radical. But when it does turn violent, it targets the usual suspects of the old western extreme left: imperialism, capitalism and "dominant ideology". Al-Qaeda in the west has Islamised a space that was filled by anti-imperialism and other such movements. The radical European extreme left, if it still exists, is no longer active in university campuses, depressed housing estates and degraded inner cities. Islamist preachers have replaced far-left militants and social workers. Many young people in these campuses and neighbourhoods find in radical Islam a way to recast and rationalise their sense of alienation. But they are experiencing isolation from real society, as did the radical Marxist left in the 1970s in Europe. Such radicalisation is a transitional and generational phenomenon, increasingly decoupled from the world of mainstream western Muslims, who find their own way to deal with globalisation.
The writer, professor at Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, is author of the forthcoming Globalised Islam: the Search for a New Ummah (C. Hurst & Co./Columbia University Press); he will speak tomorrow at Chatham House, London
======================
The Arab Mind Revisited
by Norvell B. De Atkine
Editors' preface: In the spring of 2004, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal drove headlines in the United States and the Middle East. Journalist Seymour Hersh wrote a report in The New Yorker, entitled "The Gray Zone," describing the abuse of prisoners as the outcome of a deliberate policy. Hersh also made reference to a book, The Arab Mind, by the cultural anthropologist Raphael Patai (1910-96):
The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was The Arab Mind, a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression.? The Patai book, an academic told me, was "the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior." In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged?"one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation."[1]
This mention of Patai's book (on the sole authority of "an academic [who] told me") sent journalists scurrying to read it?and denounce it. Brian Whitaker, writing in The Guardian, called it a "classic case of orientalism which, by focusing on what Edward Said called the ?otherness' of Arab culture, sets up barriers that can then be exploited for political purposes." He quoted an academic as saying, "The best use for this volume, if any, is for a doorstop."[2] Ann Marlowe, in Salon.com, called it "a smear job masquerading under the merest veneer of civility."[3] Louis Werner, in Al-Ahram Weekly and elsewhere, embellished Hersh's account with a made-up detail: The Arab Mind, he wrote, "was apparently used as a field manual by U.S. Army Intelligence in Abu Ghraib prison."[4] (Hersh made no such claim.) Only Lee Smith, writing in Slate.com, suggested that critics had misread Patai, whom he described as "a keen and sympathetic observer of Arab society," a "popularizer of difficult ideas, and also a serious scholar."[5]
No one took the trouble to crosscheck Hersh's academic source on the supposed influence of Patai's book as the "frequently cited ? ?bible of the neocons.'" A more accurate description of The Arab Mind would be a prohibited book. Edward Said had denounced Patai twenty-five years earlier, in Orientalism;[6] in academe, The Arab Mind long ago entered the list of disapproved texts. It was easy to point an accusing finger at the book (again). Patai himself was also a convenient target. A Hungarian-born Jew and lifelong Zionist, he lived in British-mandated Palestine from 1933 to 1947, and in 1936, earned the first doctorate ever awarded by the Hebrew University. He edited Theodor Herzl's complete diaries and served as the first president of the American Friends of Tel Aviv University. For many antiwar conspiracy theorists, the idea of someone like Patai as intellectual father of the Abu Ghraib scandal proved irresistible.
The only concrete evidence for the book's use in any branch of government appeared in the foreword to the most recent reprint (2002) of The Arab Mind, by Col. (res.) Norvell B. De Atkine, an instructor in Middle East studies at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School. De Atkine wrote that he assigned the book to military personnel in his own courses because students found its cultural insights useful in explaining behavior they encountered on assignment.
While critics skimmed Patai's book for generalizing quotes, they skirted the book's premise, as restated by De Atkine: culture matters and cultures differ. The realization by Americans that culture counts explains the commercial success of several cultural handbooks, addressing the very issues that concerned Patai.[7] And while there is no reason to believe that The Arab Mind had the specific influence Hersh attributed to it, the resulting publicity has sent its sales soaring, further extending the life of the book. The following is De Atkine's foreword to The Arab Mind, reprinted here in full.
Incurable Romanticism
It is a particular pleasure to write a foreword to this much-needed reprint of Raphael Patai's classic analysis of Arab culture and society. In view of the events of 2001?including another bloody year of heightened conflict between Palestinians and Israelis and the horrendous terrorist assault on the United States on September 11?there is a critical need to bring this seminal study of the modal Arab personality to the attention of policymakers, scholars, and the general public.
In the wake of the September 11 attack, there was a torrent of commentary on "why" such an assault took place, and on the motivation and mindset of the terrorists. Much of this commentary was either ill-informed or agenda-driven. A number of U.S. Middle East scholars attributed the attack to a simple matter of imbalance in the American approach to the perennial Arab-Israeli conflict. This facile explanation did nothing to improve the credibility of the community of Middle East scholars in the United States, already much diminished by their misreading of the Arab world and their reaction to the U.S. response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
To begin a process of understanding the seemingly irrational hatred that motivated the World Trade Center attackers, one must understand the social and cultural environment in which they lived and the modal personality traits that make them susceptible to engaging in terrorist actions. This book does a great deal to further that understanding. In fact, it is essential reading. At the institution where I teach military officers, The Arab Mind forms the basis of my cultural instruction, complemented by my own experiences of some twenty-five years living in, studying, or teaching about the Middle East.
Raphael Patai prefaces his 1973 edition of The Arab Mind with the sentence, "When it comes to the Arabs, I must admit to an incurable romanticism." So it is with me. I first became interested in the Arab world in an elective course at the United States Military Academy many years ago, and my military career thereafter was divided between assignments with regular army artillery units and tours in the Middle East. It was during my preparatory study at the American University of Beirut that I was introduced to the writings of Raphael Patai. In a sociology class we used his book, Golden River to Golden Road: Society, Culture and Change in the Middle East.[8] Since that time, I have read a number of his books and admired his careful scholarship, lucid writing style, and empathetic approach to his subject matter.
Over the past twelve years, I have also briefed hundreds of military teams being deployed to the Middle East. When returning from the Middle East, my students, as well as the members of these teams, invariably comment on the paramount usefulness of the cultural instruction in their assignments. In doing so they validate the analysis and descriptions offered by Raphael Patai.
The officers returning from the Arab world describe the cultural barriers they encounter as by far the most difficult to navigate, far beyond those of political perceptions. Thinking back on it, I recall many occasions on which I was perplexed by actions or behavior on the part of my Arab hosts?actions and behavior that would have been perfectly understandable had I read The Arab Mind. I have hence emphasized to my students that there must be a combination of observation and study to begin a process of understanding another culture. Simply observing a culture through the prism of our own beliefs and cultural worldview leads to many misconceptions. More often than not, this results in a form of cultural shock that can be totally debilitating to a foreigner working with Arabs. Less common, but equally non-productive, is the soldier who becomes caught up in a culture he views as idyllic and "goes native." Inevitably there will come a time (usually during a political crisis) when the cultural chasm will force unpleasant reality to resurface.
Mines and Warts
In writing about a culture, one must tread a sensibility minefield, and none is more treacherous than that of the Middle East. In pursuit of intellectual honesty and a true-to-life depiction of a people, some less-than-appealing traits will surface. All cultures and peoples have their warts. One trait I have observed in Arab society?which has become more pronounced over the years?is an extreme sensitivity to any critical depiction of Arab culture, no matter how gently the adverse factors are presented. In his postscript to the 1983 edition of The Arab Mind, Patai mentions a spate of self-critical assessments of Arab society by Arab intellectuals in the wake of the "new Arab" said to have emerged after the 1973 war; but this tendency to self-criticize proved to be illusory. While we in the United States constantly criticize our society and leadership, similar introspection is rarely seen in the Arab world today. When criticism is voiced, it is usually in terms of a condemnation of Arab acceptance of some aspect of Western culture. Criticism also often emanates from outside the Arab region and, despite the so-called globalization of communication, only the elite have access to it. This is particularly true when political systems or ideology are discussed.
In no small way, this tendency has led to the current state of affairs in the Arab world. For this reason, as well as the fact that Patai was not an Arab, some scholars are dismissive of The Arab Mind, terming it stereotyped in its portrayal of Arab personality traits. In part, this stems from the postmodernist philosophy of a recent generation of scholars who have been inculcated with the currently fashionable idea of cultural and moral relativism. Much of the American political science writing on the Middle East today is jargon- and agenda-laden, bordering on the indecipherable. A fixation on race, class, and gender has had a destructive effect on Middle East scholarship. It is a real task to find suitable recent texts that are scholarly and sound in content, but also readable.
In fact, some of the best and most useful writing on the Arab world has been by outsiders, mostly Europeans, especially the French and British. Many of the best and most illuminating works were written decades ago. The idea that outsiders cannot assess another culture is patently foolish. The best study done on American society?to take one famous example?was written some 160 years ago by the French visitor, Alexis de Tocqueville, and it still holds mostly true today.
The empathy and warmth of Raphael Patai toward the Arab people are evident throughout this book. There is neither animus nor rancor nor condescension. Arabs are portrayed as people who, like all people, have virtues and vices. Patai's description of his relationship with the Jerusalem sheikh, Ahmad Fakhr al-Khatib, is indicative of the esteem in which he held his Arab friends. It is a lamentable fact that friendships such as this one would be almost impossible to conceive of at the present time.
Along with his empathy for and understanding of Arab culture, Patai has a powerfully keen faculty for observation. In a passage in his autobiographical Journeyman in Jerusalem,[9] he describes in minute detail an Arab date juice vendor and the way he dispenses his juice. It is this ability to observe and appreciate detail that enables Patai to grasp the significance of the gestures, nuances of speech, and behavior patterns of Arabs. To most Americans, the subtlety of Arab culture is bewildering and incomprehensible. Yet, if one is to work productively in the region, one must have an understanding of these cultural traits.
It might legitimately be asked how well Patai's analysis bears up in today's world. After all, it has been about thirty years since the majority of The Arab Mind was written. The short answer is that it has not aged at all. The analysis is just as prescient and on-the-mark now as on the day it was written. One could even make the argument that, in fact, many of the traits described have become more pronounced. For instance, Islamist demagogues have skillfully used the lure of the Arabic language, so carefully explained by Patai as a powerful motivator, to galvanize the streets in this era of the Islamic revival, in a way even the great orator Abdul Nasser could not achieve.
Blustery Arabic
Patai devoted a large portion of this book to the Arabic language, its powerful appeal, as well as its inhibiting effects. The proneness to exaggeration he describes was amply displayed in the Gulf war by the exhortations of Saddam Hussein to the Arabs in the "mother of all battles." This penchant for rhetoric and use of hyperbole were a feature of the Arab press during the war. The ferocity of the Arab depiction of Iraqi prowess had American experts convinced that there would be thousands of American casualties. Even when the war was turning into a humiliating rout, the "Arab street" was loath to accept this reality as fact.
More recently, the same pattern has been seen in the Arab adoption of Osama bin Laden as a new Saladin who, with insulting and derogatory language in his description of American martial qualities, conveyed a sense of invincibility and power that has subsequently been shown to be largely imaginary. Saddam Hussein used similar bluster prior to the 1990 Gulf war. Patai traces this custom, which continues to the present era, back to pre-Islamic days. It is also an apt example of the Arab tendency to substitute words for action and a desired outcome for a less palatable reality, or to indulge in wishful thinking?all of which are reflected in the numerous historical examples Patai provides. This tendency, combined with Arabs' predilection to idealize their own history, always in reference to some mythic or heroic era, has present-day implications. Thus the American incursion into the Gulf in 1990 became the seventh crusade and was frequently referred to as another Western and Christian attempt to occupy the Holy Land of Islam?a belief galvanizing the current crop of Middle Eastern terrorists. Meanwhile, Israel is frequently referred to as a "crusader state."
Patai's discussion of the duality of Arab society, and of the proclivity for intra-Arab conflict, continues to be revalidated in each decade. The Arab-against-Arab division in the 1990 Gulf war is but one example of a continuing Arab condition. Juxtaposed against the ideal of Arab unity is the present reality of twenty-two divided states, each with the self-interest of its ruling family or elite group paramount in policy decisions. In the 1960s, it was the "progressive states" versus the "reactionary states," which pitted Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Libya against Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Morocco. Today it is secular forces versus the Islamists, a conflict to one degree or another being played out in every Arab state.
Even when facing a common enemy?usually Israel in this era, but also Iran or Turkey?mutual distrust and intra-Arab hostility prevail. In the Iraqi-Iranian war, for example, Arab support was generally limited to financial help?with provisions for repayment, as the angry Saddam Hussein learned after the war. In [1998], when Turkey threatened Syria with armed conflict if the leader of the nationalistic Kurdish movement in Turkey continued to be supported by Syria, it was very clear that Syria would find itself standing alone. Thus the Asad regime was forced to make a humiliating submission to Turkish demands. Perhaps the most telling validation of Patai's insight into the conflictual nature of Arab society relates to the Palestinians. While their conflict with Israel has been a bloody one over the years, it cannot approach the level of death and destruction incurred in Palestinian wars against Lebanese, Syrians, and Jordanians. Despite this great violence, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict retains its place as the primary galvanizing issue for the "Arab street."
Sinister West
Perhaps the section of this book most relevant to today's political and social environment is the chapter on the psychology of Westernization. After centuries of certitude that their civilization was superior?a belief evolving from the very poor impression the European crusaders made on the Arabs and fully justified by the reality?the Arab self-image was rudely shattered by the easy French conquest of Egypt in 1798. A declining Middle East had been far surpassed by a revitalized Europe. The initial shock among the Arab elite was followed by a period of limited emulation, at least in the form of Western political and social values.
As the Western political hold on the Arabs receded, Western cultural influence increased, which in many ways was even more irritating to the Arab elite?particularly in terms of the technology invasion that at every level was a daily reminder of the inability of the Middle East to compete. Patai's assessment of the Arab view of technology has been amply supported over the last decades. Clearly enthusiastic users of technology, particularly in war weaponry, the Arabs nevertheless remain a lagging producer of technology. Partially, as Patai demonstrates, this is a reaction to the "jinn" (devil) of Western culture as it appears to the Arab of the twenty-first century. While recognizing the superiority of Western technology, the traditional Arab sees Western culture as destructive to his way of life; hence the ever-present battle between modernity and modernism: Can a society modernize without the secular lifestyle that appears to accompany the process? Adherents of the Islamist ideology, espousing a politicized, radical Islam, see no contradiction between a seventh-century theocracy and twenty-first century technology and would answer yes; however, history does not support such a view in the Middle Eastern context. As a Muslim coworker put it, "We want your TV sets but not your programs, your VCRs but not your movies." This will be the battleground of every Arab nation for the coming generation.
In his section on the "sinister West," Patai gets to the heart of the burning hatred that seems to drive brutal acts of terrorism against Americans. Despite its lack of a colonial past in the Middle East, America, as the most powerful representative of the "West," has inherited primary enemy status, in place of the French and British. Patai points out the Arabs' tendency to blame others for the problems evident in their political systems, quality of life, and economic power. The Arab media and Arab intellectuals, invoking the staple mantras against colonialism, Zionism, and imperialism, provide convenient outside culprits for every corrupt or dysfunctional system or event in the Arab world. Moreover, this is often magnified and supported by a number of the newer generation of Western scholars inculcated with Marxist teaching who, unwittingly perhaps, help Arab intellectuals to avoid ever having to come to grips with the very real domestic issues that must be confronted. The Arab world combines a rejection of Western values with a penchant for carrying around historical baggage of doubtful utility. At the same time, there is a simplistic, if understandable, yearning for return to a more glorious and pristine past that would enable the Arabs once again to confront the West on equal terms. This particular belief has found many Arab adherents in the past decade.
Patai also delves into the extremely sensitive issue of the nature of Islam in a particularly prescient manner. He views the fatalistic element inherit in Islam as an important factor in providing great strength to Muslims in times of stress or tragedy; in normal or better times, however, it acts as an impediment. Given their pervasive belief that God provides and disposes of all human activity, Muslims tend to reject the Western concept of man creating his own environment as an intrusion on God's realm. This includes any attempt to change God's plan for the fate of the individual. Certainly one can point to numerous exceptions. But, having worked for long periods with Arab military units, I can attest to their often cavalier attitude toward safety precautions, perhaps reflecting a Qur'anic saying, heard in various forms, that "death will overtake you even if you be inside a fortress." Just observing how few Arabs use seat belts in their automobiles can be a revelation. This manifestation of Arab fatalism is often misconstrued as a lesser value put on human life.
In the all-important area of Muslim relations with other religions, Patai sums up the differences between Christianity and Islam as being functional, not doctrinal. The proponents of fundamentalist Islam do not fear Christianity. They fear that Westernization will "bring about a reduction of the function of Islam to the modest level on which Christianity plays its role in the Western world." The quarrel is not so much with Christianity?which most Muslims see as a weak religion of diminishing importance?as with the secularism that has replaced it. Frequently in the Arab world one hears references to the [singer] "Madonna" culture and its manifestations of drugs and sexual promiscuity. Today, while Western military power has become much less of a threat, the inroads made by Western cultural values have become more of one.
My special area of interest has been the impact of culture on military structure, strategy, and operations,[10] and in this regard the assessments of Patai, although not aimed at this area, are particularly informative. As he wrote, "despite the adoption of Western weaponry, military methods, and war aims, both the leaders and the people have kept alive old Arab traditions." The observations and studies of military specialists continue to support his conclusion. The Arab military establishment's ineffectiveness in the past century has never been a matter of lack of courage or intelligence. Rather, it has been a consequence of a pervasive cultural and political environment that stifles the development of initiative, independent thinking, and innovation. This has been commented on by a number of Middle East specialists, both Arab and non-Arab, but none explains it as well as Patai, who suggests that Arabs conform not to an individualistic, inner-directed standard but rather to a standard established and maintained rigidly within Arab society. As I noticed among the officers with whom I worked, there was a real reluctance to "get out front." The distrust of the military's loyalty to the regime reinforces a military system in which a young, charismatic officer with innovative ideas will be identified as a future threat to be carefully monitored by the ubiquitous security agencies.
Family Cohesion
Patai also carefully illuminates the many virtues of Arab society. The hospitality, generosity, and depth of personal friendships common in the Arab world are rarely encountered in our more frenetic society. The Arab sense of honor and of obligation to the family?especially to the family's old and young members?can be contrasted to the frequently dysfunctional family life found in our own country. Within Arab culture, old people are seen as a foundation for family cohesion, and children are welcomed as gifts from God rather than as burdens. Daughters?who traditionally are valued less than sons?remain the responsibility of their families, carrying their honor even after marriage (and it is this sense of family cohesion and honor that, in its negative aspect, results in the restrictions and controls placed on women). The idea that the state should bear responsibility for the welfare of their family would be considered insulting to most Arabs.
Finally, in his 1983 edition, Patai takes an optimistic view of the future of the Arab world but adds a caveat to his prediction with the comment that this could happen "only if the Arabs can rid themselves of their obsession with and hatred of Zionism, Israel, and American imperialism." In the eighteen years since those words were written, none of these obsessions has been put to rest. In fact, they have increased. The imported 1960s and 1970s Western ideologies of Marxism and socialism have given way to Islamism, a synthesis of Western-style totalitarianism and superficial Islamic teachings, which has resurrected historical mythology and revitalized an amorphous but palpable hatred of the Western "jinns." Nevertheless, many astute observers of the Arab world see the so-called "Islamic revival" with its attendant pathologies as cresting and beginning to recede.
Ultimately, the Arabs, who are an immensely determined and adaptable people, will produce leadership capable of freeing them from ideological and political bondage, and this will allow them to achieve their rightful place in the world.
Col. Norvell B. De Atkine (ret.) served eight years in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt (in addition to extensive combat service in Vietnam). A West Pointer, he holds a graduate degree in Arab studies from the American University of Beirut. He teaches at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The opinions expressed here are strictly his own. Reprinted from The Arab Mind (Hatherleigh Press, 2002), by permission, all rights reserved.
[1] Seymour Hersh, "The Gray Zone," The New Yorker, May 24, 2004.
[2] The Guardian (London), May 24, 2004. This, despite the fact that Whitaker himself, a year earlier, had quoted an authoritative Arab source on "the Arab mind." As coalition forces encircled Baghdad, he wrote a piece on the "sense of humiliation" among Arabs and brought a quote from a Kuwaiti spokesman that could have come straight from Patai's book: "In the Arab world, there is a classical, traditional enemy. This traditional enemy has always been the west or the Americans. This is one vision that always existed in the Arab mind." The Guardian, Apr. 9, 2003.
[3] Ann Marlowe, "Sex, Violence, and ?The Arab Mind,'" Salon.com, at http://www.salonmag.com/books/feature/2004/06/08/arab_mind/index_np.html.
[4] Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), July 1-7, 2004.
[5] Lee Smith, "Inside the Arab Mind," Slate.com, at http://slate.msn.com/id/2101328/.
[6] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), pp. 308-9.
[7] Most notably, Margaret K. Nydell, Understanding Arabs: A Guide for Westerners (Yarmouth, Me.: Intercultural Press, 1996), reviewed in Middle East Quarterly, June 1997, p. 90.
[8] Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962, and subsequent editions.
[9] Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992.
[10] Norvell De Atkine, "Why Arabs Lose Wars," Middle East Quarterly, Dec. 1999, pp. 17-27
=============
Thanks, guys, for your comments. I have Friedman's book on order from Amazon, but I think I made the mistake of asking for the free delivery (along with some more books) - that takes longer.
<<<<you explains in understandable format how this is a civil war within the Muslim world, with OBL's intention to drag the US and the West into it.
..this one I figured out long ago. Have been saying since late 2001, I believe, that we are being dragged in into someone else's religious conflict. The entire issue becomes as clear as day when you read Qutb. He finds that the majority of Muslims are as bad as the infidels, and just as they, those Muslims are livnig in a state of "Jahiliya", which is a particularly bad, soulless kind of an ignorance.
Their most important task is to "enlighten" those unobservant Muslims. We - the West - are more or less simply means to that end, and the conflict with us is needed to help create tensions, and to help radicalize the Muslim masses. Later, once the extremists are no longer the extremists, but already the "mainstream" - after they political capture power and become the rulers - then they can simply kill or imprison those Muslims who do not agree with them.
....Sooner or later the "moderate" Muslims will understand that we are fighting a war - in effect - for them. They better understand this soon, because if they do not take over the struggle, the extremists will eventually succeed.
-
Saddam's Specialty Was Terror Weapons
October 19, 2004; Page A19
John Kerry may or may not have been quoted correctly (he says not) in an Oct. 10 New York Times Magazine article in which he envisioned reducing terrorism to a mere "nuisance" level. But if author Matt Bai got it anywhere near right, as seems likely, the comment implies that the senator still doesn't understand why the U.S. is at war. Or maybe he did understand but has forgotten.
"Nuisances," like muggings and prostitution, can be managed by cops. Foreign countries harboring and sponsoring terrorists have to be subdued with armies to root out the terrorists before they can strike. Even the most limited effort, say, a lone fanatic uncorking a poison-gas canister in a crowded railway terminal or sports arena, could hardly be described as a "nuisance."
Most Americans clearly understood after 9/11 the need to go after terrorists where they live before they can get to that train station or arena. President George W. Bush set about to do just that in 2001 with the full support of Congress. Sen. Kerry fully approved before reverting to the pacifist mindset that has guided his career.
It is of course fair in this election year to challenge how well the president has conducted the war on terror. More accurately it is a war against Islamic jihadists, or "holy warriors," so indoctrinated with hatred of "infidels" that some will give up their own lives in murderous attacks.
For one man's opinion, try former Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet, who said in New Orleans last week that the U.S. is winning the fight against al Qaeda. Three-quarters of its leaders are dead or detained and more than 3,000 terrorists have been "taken off the street," euphemistically speaking. The Afghan people were able to hold a presidential election Oct. 9 with little interference from either al Qaeda or the Taliban, who controlled most of the country three years ago. Clearly, both are now too weak to disrupt the movement toward democracy.
In Iraq, coalition and Iraqi troops are closing in on the foreign fighters in Fallujah who are believed to be led by Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an al Qaeda big shot. Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is trying to persuade the city fathers of Fallujah to surrender the city, give up the murderous Zarqawi and avoid further damage and bloodshed. Zarqawi is not a newcomer to Iraq. He was sheltered by Saddam Hussein, which disproves the now-frequent claim that Saddam had no ties to terrorism.
Which brings us to the issue now central to the U.S. political debate: whether the allied invasion of Iraq was justified. Mr. Kerry has now flip-flopped back to calling Iraq "the wrong war," etc. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has given the senator and other nouveau antiwarriors a debating point. They have quickly seized on the conclusion that there are no WMDs in Iraq from the 1,000-page postmortem completed last month for the CIA by Charles Duelfer.
That non-news in the Duelfer report got most of the press coverage, but a member of the study team wondered on these pages last week if anybody had bothered to read anything else the report had to say. Richard Spertzel, a former U.N. biological weapons specialist, had just returned from Iraq. He wrote: "While no facilities were found producing chemical or biological agents on a large scale, many clandestine laboratories operating under the Iraqi Intelligence Services were found to be engaged in small-scale production of chemical nerve agents, sulfur mustard, nitrogen mustard, ricin, aflatoxin, and other unspecified biological agents."
He noted the report's disclosure of plans to produce and weaponize nitrogen mustard in rifle grenades and to bottle sarin and sulfur mustard in perfume sprayers and medicine bottles for shipment to the U.S. and Europe: "Are we to believe this plan existed because they liked us? Or did they wish to do us harm? The major threat posed by Iraq, in my opinion, was the support it gave to terrorists in general, and its own terrorist activity."
In other words, while Saddam was playing hide-and-seek with the U.N. over whether he had WMDs, his stealthy little spooks were focusing their efforts on weapons specifically designed for use by terrorists. Could it thus be said that Saddam was himself plotting foreign terrorism? Or at least that his secret service had something going along those lines while he was busy corrupting the U.N. oil-for-food program and bribing French and Russian politicians to gain the protection and influence of two permanent members of the U.N. Security Council?
Surely it must have occurred to the Saddam gang that lethal poisons were a perfect tool for terrorism. After the 9/11 attack a few letters filled with anthrax powder routed the U.S. Senate and spread consternation elsewhere. No one knows to this day -- at least no one is saying -- who sent the letters. But we do now know from the Duelfer report that Saddam's men had for years been experimenting with poisons, and we knew he had used poison gas against Iranians and the Iraqi Kurds. Russia, a longtime supplier of Saddam's military needs, goes back even further in the field of military chemistry. It is widely believed to have supplied the "yellow rain" aflatoxins dumped from aircraft on rebel Laotian tribesmen some 20 years ago. Where would a terrorist go looking for weaponized anthrax if he wanted to try it out? Maybe Russia or Iraq?
And please don't forget that the terrorists who pulled off the 9/11 attacks had earlier taken a great interest in the art of flying crop-duster airplanes. What could that have been all about? Were they contemplating making a "nuisance" of themselves by gassing the population of Miami?
In short, the invasion of Iraq shut off a potential threat to America. Poisons were far more likely to be used than nuclear weapons because they can be secretly deployed. So wiping out a source in Iraq was a large achievement. Senator Mark Dayton, a Minnesota Democrat, last week shut down his Washington office until after the election, citing a terrorism briefing he had received. Would he be any less concerned if Saddam Hussein were still in power?
-
THE MYTH OF THE 'MISSING EXPLOSIVES': A SHAMELESS LIE
BY RALPH PETERS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 28, 2004 -- SHOULD the United Na tions decide who be comes our president? Sen. John Kerry wouldn't mind. He's shamelessly promoting the lies that the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency is telling about Iraq.
A devious IAEA report suggests that 400 tons of explosives were spirited away by our enemies under the noses of our Keystone-Cops troops after the fall of Baghdad. The document just happened to be released in the closing days of our presidential election. Purely a coincidence, of course. Brought to you by those selfless U.N. bureaucrats who failed in Iraq and are now failing in Iran.
Since Kerry's willing to blame our troops for a scandal invented by America-haters, let's look at the story the military way, by the numbers.
One: The IAEA claims its inspectors visited the ammo dump at Al-Qaqaa on March 9, 2003, and found the agency's seals intact on bunkers containing sensitive munitions. Unverifiable, but let's assume that much is true.
Two: Faced with an impending invasion, Saddam's forces did what any military would do. They began dispersing ammunition stocks from every storage site that might be a Coalition bombing target. If the Iraqis valued it, they tried to move it. Before the war.
Three: Members of our 3rd Infantry Division ? the heroes who led the march to Baghdad ? reached the site in question in early April. Despite the pressures of combat, they combed the dump. Nothing was found. Al-Qaqaa was a vast junkyard.
Four: Our 101st Airborne Division assumed responsibility for the sector as the 3ID closed on Baghdad. None of the Screaming Eagles found any IAEA markers ? even one would have been a red flag to be reported immediately.
Five: At the end of May, military teams searching for key Iraqi weapons scoured Al-Qaqaa. They found plenty of odds and ends ? the detritus of war ? but no IAEA seals. And no major stockpiles.
Six: Now, just before Election Day, the IAEA, a discredited organization embarrassed by the Bush administration's decision to call it on the carpet, suddenly realizes that 400 tons of phantom explosives went missing from the dump.
Seven: Even if repeated inspections by U.S. troops had somehow missed this deadly elephant on the front porch, and even if the otherwise-incompetent Iraqis had been so skilled and organized they were able to sneak into Al-Qaqaa and load up 400 tons of Saddam's love-powder, it would have taken a Teamsters' convention to get the job done.
Eight: If the Iraqis had used military transport vehicles of five-ton capacity, it would have required 80 trucks for one big lift, or, say, 20 trucks each making four trips. They would have needed special trolleys, forklifts, handling experts and skilled drivers (explosives aren't groceries). This operation could not have happened either during or after the war, while the Al-Qaqaa area was flooded with U.S. troops.
Nine: We owned the skies. And when you own the skies, you own the roads. We were watching for any sign of organized movement. A gaggle of non-Coalition vehicles driving in and out of an ammo dump would have attracted the attention of our surveillance systems immediately.
Ten: And you don't just drive high explosives cross-country, unless you want to hear a very loud bang. Besides, the Iraqis would have needed to hide those 400 tons of explosives somewhere else. Unless the uploaded trucks are still driving around Iraq.
Eleven: Even if the IAEA told the truth and the Iraqis were stealth-logistics geniuses who emptied the site's ammo bunkers under our noses, the entire issue misses a greater point: 400 tons of explosives amounted to a miniscule fraction of the stocks Saddam had built up. Coalition demolition experts spent months destroying more than 400,000 tons of Iraqi war-making materiel.
Our soldiers eliminated more than a thousand tons of packaged death for every ton the United Nations claims they missed. Does that sound like incompetence? Why hasn't our success been mentioned? Can't our troops get credit for anything?
Twelve: The bottom line is that, if the explosives were ever there, the Iraqis moved them before our troops arrived. There is no other plausible scenario.
Sen. Kerry knows this is a bogus issue. And he doesn't care. He's willing to accuse our troops of negligence and incompetence to further his political career. Of course, he did that once before.
Lt. Col (ret) Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace."
-
A very long, very literate, and very thoughtful piece-- Crafty Dog
==============================
Towards the close of the twentieth century a metaphor entered circulation that compared the United States to Lemuel Gulliver at the start of his visit to Lilliput. Gulliver in Swift?s satire was, you recall, an English sea doctor who, having sunk exhausted on a foreign beach after his ship was wrecked, woke up to discover miniscule Lilliputians had tied him down with slender threads and tiny pegs. In this telling, the international community?that comfortable euphemism for the U.N., the WTO, the ICC, other U.N. agencies, and the massed ranks of NGOs?sought to constrain America?s freedom of action in a web of international laws, regulations, and treaties, such as the Kyoto accords.
It is a passably accurate account of the international status quo a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That status quo looks somewhat different five years later. But the history of the intervening period is the story of how the United States and the international community continued to grapple with each other in the process of seeking to contain or defeat Islamist terrorism. It is the story of ?Gulliver?s Travails.?
Gulliver among the Tranzis
The first episode is the globalizing decade that ran from the final collapse of the Soviet Union to September 11th. This was a period in which trade walls were reduced, barriers to capital movements liberalized, and the factors of production loosened up to move around the world more freely than at any time since 1914. These economic changes brought political ones in their train. Governments had to introduce such reforms as market transparency and the rule of law in order to attract and keep the foreign investment they needed for sustained prosperity.
All this is well known. But two other global developments passed unnoticed under the radar of conventional politics.
The first was the spread of Islamist terrorism. In retrospect it is astounding that we failed to react more strongly to the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole. Maybe Americans were insulated from a sensible anxiety by their victory in the Cold War, their status as the sole remaining superpower, and the sedative effects of the long Reagan-Clinton prosperity. Whatever the reason, Islamist terrorism grew throughout the 1990s partly because it was ignored.
The second global development was the quiet revolution of transnationalism. Its exact lineaments are open to debate, but I would suggest that it consists of five overlapping developments:
First, the growing power and authority of international, transnational, and supranational organizations such as the U.N. and its various agencies, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization.
Second, the transformation of international law from the arbitration of disputes between sovereign states into laws that have a direct impact on individual citizens and private bodies through treaties and conventions that override domestic legislation.
Third, the dramatic increase in the number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs in the jargon) and their increasing influence on international politics both as pressure groups and as providers of services to governments and international agencies.
Fourth, the spread of economic, environmental, and social regulation from the national to the international level through laws, treaties, and ?standards? by, among other bodies, U.N. conferences on such topics as women?s rights and racism.
Finally, the emergence of common values, a common outlook, and even a class consciousness among the diplomats, lawyers, and bureaucrats in international organizations, NGOs, multinational corporations, and those academic centers that serve them.
Kenneth Minogue calls this structure of governance ?Acronymia? after the UNOs and NGOs that constitute it. He credits the present author with giving the name ?Olympians,? after the gods of Antiquity, to those who administer it. Ancient gods used to ?kill us for their sport,? but modern Olympians are content to regulate and preach at us. John Fonte has defined the common ideology they preach as ?transnational progressivism?: national sovereignty and the nation-state are disappearing in favor of a new structure of international organizations and rules that goes by the slippery name of ?global governance.? In domestic politics, it argues that liberal democracy?built upon majority rule, individual rights, and a common culture?is being replaced by ?post-democracy? that emphasizes group rights, multiculturalism, and politics as endless negotiations between ethnic groups. But the theory hardly distinguishes international from domestic politics and policy. The philosopher J?rgen Habermas coined the term ?global domestic policy? that erases a distinction hitherto important outside Germany.
As a term for those holding this ideology, ?transnational progressives? is too big a mouthful. Olympians is, well, too Olympian. A London lawyer, David Carr, of the libertarian blog Samizdata, compressed the former into ?the Tranzis,? now in common circulation.
The Tranzis had (and have) a very complicated relationship with Gulliver. Because of America?s overwhelming power, they hoped that the United States could be conscripted to serve the purposes of ?the international community? (i.e. themselves) in a series of humanitarian interventions. But they recognized dimly that the United States, as a constitutional liberal democracy, would never fit comfortably into the post-democratic structures of global governance they were constructing. Thus Jeremy Rabkin points out in Sovereignty that America stands out from almost all other advanced states in this regard:
Every state in the European Union now acknowledges that its constitution can be overturned by mere bureaucratic directives from the European Commission in Brussels; there is nothing like a fixed constitution to constrain the Commission itself. The arrangement is unthinkable in America but taken for granted in Europe.
Because the United States has a strong constitutional tradition, it regularly attaches a rider to treaties and U.N. conventions that forbids the overriding of the U.S. Constitution. These riders come under occasional attack from international lawyers and activist NGOs that would like, for instance, to override the First Amendment in order to outlaw ?hate speech.? These pressures are growing and, as Judge Robert Bork points out in his recent book Coercing Virtue, American judges have begun to cite foreign precedents in their legal reasoning.
Even so, the United States will always be an awkward irritant in post-democratic structures?just as the British, with their similar liberal tradition, are the awkward squad inside the E.U. And if the United States is going to be an irritant, then its superpower status would make it a very serious irritant indeed. Tranzis were busily wrapping it around with as many legal and regulatory threads as possible when Al Qaeda struck at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?and Gulliver woke up.
Gulliver Unbound
It is often said that September 11 changed the United States dramatically?as no other country understands. There is some truth in this. A direct attack on American soil served to unite, if briefly, the four American traditions in foreign policy identified by Walter Russell Mead in his Special Providence?moralistic Jeffersonians, commercial Hamiltonians, evangelical humanitarian Wilsonians, and vengeful Jacksonians?in favor of a strong response. Wilsonians saw the attack as a chance to bring democracy to similar breeds without the law; Hamiltonians judged that a short war would be a prudent disincentive to future attacks; Jacksonians wanted to punish Osama, Saddam, and anyone else who had trodden on the United States, and Jeffersonians (who overlap heavily with Tranzis) sought a strong response blessed by the international community.
Such unity could not last. After Afghanistan, Jeffersonians reverted to type and became more pacific. But even now many of them are significantly more hawkish than European social democrats with whom they usually find common ground. Britain?s participation in Iraq is a reminder that Mead?s four traditions have substantial roots in the four British ?folkways? that the historian David Hackett Fischer identifies as the principal currents in American culture. Blair, who comes from the Borders, should be a Jacksonian but is actually a muscular Wilsonian?in Britain a Gladstonian.
In addition to shocking America into a strong response, September 11 was also the confirmation of a foreign policy analysis and set of proposals that had been laid out well in advance of the attack?but that seemed too robust in the previous intellectual climate. For instance, in her 1996 reprise of Churchill?s Fulton Speech, Lady Thatcher argued that the combination of rogue states and weapons of mass destruction was sufficiently threatening to justify the military overthrow of regimes like Saddam Hussein?s. But since this was unlikely to happen in the prevailing climate of opinion, she argued, then we should adopt the second-best solution of missile defense. September 11 changed that intellectual climate. The set of foreign policy concepts that justified ousting Saddam was retrieved from the files. Gulliver was suddenly unbound.
What was the new strategy that the Bush administration adopted? It begins with Lady Thatcher?s analysis that there were two linked dangers: the spread of WMDs and the existence of rogue states like Saddam?s Iraq or Gadaffi?s Libya. September 11th added two more threats: Islamist terrorists who seemed impervious to the rational logic of deterrence and ?failing states? like Afghanistan, where terrorist groups could operate with little or no state supervision. It was plausible in this new world to imagine a terrorist group, answerable to no one but itself, either being given or seizing WMDs and using them against the West. That was too dangerous a threat to be dealt with by waiting for the terrorists to attack and then pursuing them through the courts.
The Bush administration accordingly built a new strategy on four concepts. The first was preemption. If the United States could not wait for New York harbor to be destroyed by a nuclear bomb in a container ship, then it had to attack the attacker and disable his weapon before he could act. This right of preemption has recently been discussed as if it were a novelty just invented by some Doctor Strangelove in the Pentagon. In fact it has been recognized in international law since the 1837 when, ironically enough, the British in Canada launched a preemptive strike against an American privateer that they rightly suspected was about to supply arms to Canadian rebels. Terrorists armed with WMDs or states with terrorist links acquiring WMDs are much more terrible threats and thus far stronger justification for preemptive action. The United States asserted its right to take preemptive action to avert them.
But would the international community agree? No matter: if necessary, the United States would defend its national security without the authorization of the U.N. It would generally seek such authorization but it would not be deterred from acting in its compelling interests by a vote in the Security Council that might turn on less significant political considerations.
If the United States were prepared to go ahead with military action not approved by the U.N., however, would any other nation go along with it? America?s traditional allies would be (and were) divided. So the United States dusted down a third concept that had been kicking around NATO for several years to deal with such crises?namely, ?coalitions of the willing.? Such a coalition is a group of states that agree on three things: the nature of a threat; the solution to it; and the need of all to contribute real resources to carry it out. Its great merit is its practicality: every state that joins such a coalition is a useful ally. The United States found such allies first for Afghanistan and later for Iraq.
Extirpating terrorist groups was, however, only half of the solution. The Bush doctrine also incorporated the highly ambitious, even hubristic, aim of fostering the circumstances in which young Arabs and Muslims would not become terrorists in the first place. Terrorism, it was argued, was the response of young and often well-educated people to the failure, injustice, and oppression of the authoritarian societies of the Middle East. To prevent these societies from sowing dragons? teeth indefinitely, we would need to bring liberty and justice to them. President Bush therefore embarked on a fourth concept?a serious long-term strategy of encouraging Arab and Muslim democracy and, in the short term, of using a liberated Iraq as the laboratory of such democratic reform.
These four concepts were bold in themselves, boldly stated, and boldly implemented. Both traditional conservatives and ?realists,? among others, became nervous. They saw the first three policies as likely to cause division in the Atlantic alliance and the fourth as an ambitious social engineering project that was unlikely to succeed. But Gulliver had shaken off these hesitations and uncertainties and, deaf to their warnings, went forging ahead. Others were discomfited by this display of muscular unilateralism. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, of course?but the Tranzis too.
For the Tranzis, September 11 had transformed the world in a very displeasing way. International organizations and NGOs were less important than before because they were not very helpful in fighting terrorists. Sovereign nation-states regained prestige because they had armies and intelligence services. At least three of the four concepts of foreign policy embraced by the Bush administration were in conflict with the international rules and codes of behavior laid down by the Tranzis in their courts, agencies, treaties, and NGO conferences. And the fourth?promoting democracy?was an intrusion on their turf.
These conflicts were relatively subdued over Afghanistan since the U.S. intervention was readily justifiable as self-defense under the U.N. Charter. But they burst forth violently when it became clear that President Bush intended to invade Iraq.
A minority of NATO governments opposed the intervention. Some genuinely felt it was an error that would damage America and the West. Many Europeans, especially in Germany, thought that concepts such as preemption were primitive ideas that a mature rule-driven Europe had left behind in its moral evolution. And French policy saw Iraq as an opportunity to rally Europeans against the U.S. ?hyper-power.? But these hostile reactions were countered by support for the United States from Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, and other European states?and there was no possibility of building a common European opposition to the United States. The U.N. Secretary General and his bureaucracy opposed intervention on the grounds that military action lacking U.N. approval was, ipso facto, illegitimate. This argument is a legal novelty, according to Robert Bork, but it was treated as authoritative and binding by most commentators. It was the opposition of NGOs that was the most extreme, however, presumably because it was less trammeled by diplomatic considerations. It was leveled, moreover, against the Afghan intervention as well as that in Iraq. Their argument consisted mainly of predictions that there would be major starvation and environmental and refugee crises as a result of the U.S. interventions. In fact, all these situations actually improved in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that weakened them still further.
The influence of the Tranzis after September 11 was almost negligible. And by April 2003, Gulliver was in Baghdad placing an American flag over the toppling statue of Saddam Hussein. Gulliver was not merely unbound; he seemed unstoppable.
Gulliver Agonistes
Even those who were supporters of the Iraqi liberation?as I was and remain?have to acknowledge that the war fell far short of our expectations. Large stockpiles of WMDs have not been found. Armed terrorist resistance has been stronger and more widespread than we anticipated. Popular feeling has turned against the American forces supporting the Coalition and the new Iraqi government?as a result of Abu Ghraib, and necessary military actions against the insurgents.
At the same time the intervention has had undeniably valuable benefits. The Iraqi people are free for the first time in almost fifty years. There is a free press, freedom of association, a multiplicity of political parties, and all the apparatus of a liberal democracy. Political prisoners have been freed from torture and captivity?an achievement that has received far less media coverage than the failure to find WMDs. And now an internationally recognized Iraqi government?not yet an elected one, but still the most representative government in the Arab world?has been established. If elections follow next January then the most important American promises will have been kept.
Of course, a final judgment on Iraq will not be possible for some years. If, in a decade, there is a flourishing democracy in Baghdad, then we will judge the U.S. intervention to be an unqualified success. We would even think it a worthwhile effort if, as Mark Steyn has speculated, the Iraqis end up with a moderate authoritarian regime that allows free speech, free markets and some kind of parliament?and that generally votes with Tunisia and Morocco at international forums. If Iraq has descended into a Lebanon-like chaos or a Taliban-like autocracy? either of which would provide a base for international terrorism directed against the United States?then the Iraqi intervention would have proved an actual setback in the war on terror. And that, alas, cannot be ruled out.
Gulliver in Iraq is Gulliver Agonistes, baffled that Iraq has not gone better, resentful that his good intentions are questioned, determined to keep the essence of his new strategy but willing to amend it in the light of experience, still very powerful but perhaps somewhat less blindly optimistic. He has to reassess four matters in particular in the light of his painful experiences?preemption, unilateralism, legitimacy, and democracy.
Preemption is as necessary as it ever was?which, given the linked threats of rogue or failed states, terrorism, and WMD proliferation, is very necessary indeed. Unfortunately, it is less credible as a policy option. Because Iraq has proved to be more troublesome than predicted, any future proposal for preemptive intervention will need to meet a far higher threshold of threat. The admitted intelligence failure over Iraqi WMDs has made it harder by discrediting an essential pillar of preemption. If we are likely to be wrong about the existence of such weapons, it is that much harder to make a convincing case for an intervention to disable them.
The most speedy and conclusive solution to the problem of a weakened case for preemption is one we must all hope to avoid: namely, a massively destructive attack on the U.S. Such a catastrophe would wipe away any emerging ?Iraq Syndrome.? Short of that, however, the United States has to establish the reasonableness of the preemptive approach. Outlining a credible threat and citing accurate legal precedents for preemption go a long way towards doing this. Improving intelligence should logically help too?though not with those who are opposed to intelligence services in the first place. But the United States may also need to soothe the anxieties both of the U.S. public and of those allies who see preemption as a mark of unilateralist arrogance. Earlier this year a blue-ribbon committee of the Council on Foreign Relations, chaired by Henry Kissinger, proposed that the United States should agree preemption is a last resort in return for European acceptance of its legitimacy on that basis. Since preemption is a last resort, that is a compromise well worth exploring. Whatever the diplomatic difficulties, however, the United States has to assert the principle that it is rightly entitled to strike at its enemies before they strike a near-mortal blow to it.
Unilateralism is a very different matter?the United States sustained serious wounds defending a policy it had never adopted. There was never a policy of ?going it alone? without allies. Indeed, most NATO and E.U. member states joined in the Iraq intervention. There was not even a policy of riding roughshod over international organizations such as the U.N.. In the Afghan and Iraq wars, the Bush administration strenuously sought the approval of the U.N. Security Council. One of its main arguments for intervention was that the U.N.?s authority would be undermined if its resolutions were flouted with impunity. And it justified its own eventual use of force as necessary to enforce those resolutions. (Doubtless such arguments cloaked decisions taken on other grounds of power politics. But so do almost all arguments at the U.N.)
All that unilateralism amounted to in reality was the assertion that the United States would defend its vital interests in the last resort by force if it could not win the approval of the U.N. Security Council for doing so. That assertion rests on a combination of national sovereignty and the right of self-defense under the U.N. Charter. It would be endorsed by most U.N. member-states. And its modest logic was established in a BBC radio debate between Richard Perle, the foremost neoconservative strategist, and Baroness Shirley Williams, a moderate social democratic peer. Perle argued that the liberation of Iraq was either right or wrong. If Baroness Williams thought it was wrong, she should oppose it. If she thought it was right, why would she subordinate her opinion to a Chinese, Russian, or French veto in the Security Council? The only riposte to Perle?s question is that a statesman might subordinate one aim to gain a larger one. But that cannot be a reason for subordinating one?s national interest to a Chinese or Russian veto in principle. Of course, for the Tranzis such subordination is the point. They see it as the central principle of global governance and treat the mildest resistance to it as ?unilateralism.?
Indeed, unilateralism had been originally placed in public debate by such critics of the Bush administration. In their lexicon, it was a wonderfully flexible term that transformed any expression of national sovereignty into a wholesale rejection of multilateral cooperation. Even the very limited unilateralism of the Bush doctrine (which repeatedly embraced multilateralism) was held to be sinful?the more so because it was explicit. If it had appeared in a footnote, a codicil, or the obscurity of an academic text rather than as one of the main arguments in an official document, it might have been seen as the qualification to multilateral diplomacy that it was. Instead it seemed to be a brash declaration of U.S. solipsism. And when the United States got into difficulties in Iraq, its enemies (including the Tranzis) could plausibly cite them as the inevitable fall that follows pride.
Here was where the Tranzis began to make a comeback from their slide into irrelevance after September 11. The rest of the world wanted to see the sole remaining superpower subject to some other authority when it intervened elsewhere. As a practical matter the United States was unable to confer legitimacy upon its own actions. But the Tranzis are partly in the business of conferring it on international actions from their various legal, charitable, and political perches in Acronymia. In revamping its Iraq policy, the United States bowed to this reality. Having initially excluded the U.N. from serious involvement in postwar Iraq, the United States brought the organization back in both to negotiate a new political order and to bestow international legitimacy on the new Iraqi government.
That may have been a reasonable accommodation to political necessity. But it raises a question: if the U.N. or other organization dominated by Tranzis either refuses to approve or vetos some vital American action, what should the United States then do?
For such eventualities Francis Fukuyama has proposed a strategy of ?overlapping multilateralism.? Recall that the intervention in Kosovo was undertaken without U.N. approval?indeed condemned as illegitimate by Kofi Annan. Yet it was accepted by the international community, including the Europeans, because it was endorsed by NATO. Other interventions have been similarly blessed by regional security organizations?the recent West African intervention by ECOWAS and the liberation of Grenada by the Organization of East Caribbean States. There are, of course, many other such bodies?and most of them are international bodies ultimately answerable to national governments rather than transnational or supranational bodies accountable largely to themselves. What international opinion asks is that the United States should pay a decent respect to the opinions of mankind. It recognizes that the U.N. is a very imperfect expression of that opinion since its membership contains despots, it treats states of very different sizes equally, and its decisions are sometimes distorted by the necessity of a great-power veto. So there is a willingness among serious nations to accept that other institutions might have the power to confer legitimacy to certain interventions.
Even if overlapping multilateralism is pursued it is likely to prove a very modest change in a largely unaccountable and?as the ?Oil for Food? scandal has demonstrated?very corrupt system. Some distinguished public figures propose an alternative organization that would exert moral authority within the international system by virtue of its democratic composition and liberal credentials. It would not have the full diplomatic role of the U.N., but it might pull the organization in the right direction, setting standards for good international behavior, encouraging states to meet them in order to qualify for membership, and itself conferring legitimacy on actions it deemed justified. In theory, the Community of Democracies, formed in Warsaw during the Clinton administration, might be such a body. In order for this to happen, however, the United States would have to put a great deal of diplomatic weight and energy behind it. There is no guarantee it would succeed?or that if it did, the Community would significantly improve matters.
That brings us to Bush?s project of spreading democracy. It has, of course, been much ridiculed in Europe. This ridicule is ignoble, but some of the criticisms it employs are not themselves unreasonable: Iraq, for instance, is the kind of ethnically and religiously divided society that has historically been difficult terrain for majority-rule government. Bringing democracy to the Arab and Islamic worlds is likely to be a long, difficult, and tortuous task. It is not certain to succeed. If it does, the Islamic democracy that would result will look very different from our Atlantic institutions. But it is in our interest to encourage the development of liberal, moderate, and decent governments in the Middle East that may become fully democratic over time. We would be well-advised to do so from outside?giving advice, technical assistance, and financial aid to sovereign states, and protecting friendly ones in extremis. In the case of Iraq, having taken over the country, we have to help establish a democratic government there?even if it later diverges from full democratic virtue in the interests of staying alive.
As these remarks show, I do not underestimate the difficulties of establishing democracy in the Middle East. But they are trivial compared to the difficulties of establishing post-democracy there. Yet as John Fonte points out, the Community of Democracies already shows signs of being bureaucratically captured by the ?Tranzis? who would seek to do just that. A conference of NGOs at Seoul in 2002, organized by the Community, proposed gender quotas to elect women in proportion to their numbers in the population. Not only are these ideas inconsistent with the bedrock democratic principle that the voters should have an unfettered choice of candidates, but they are also likely to outrage the traditional societies at which Bush?s democracy project is aimed.
If Gulliver is to foster democracy and to pursue the war against Islamist terrorism in the aftermath of the Iraq intervention without being frustrated by the Tranzis at every turn, he must set about dismantling the structure of transnational progressive power and demystifying its ideology. But a large baby seems to be blocking his way.
Gulliver Meets an Infant Brobdingnagian
It would be odd?and contrary to American interests?to focus entirely on spreading democracy in the Middle East and to ignore entirely the democratic deficit that exists across the transnational and supranational agencies of Minogue?s Acronymia. These bodies claim considerable powers over both national governments and the citizens of their countries. They issue directives with the force of law, fine corporations, prosecute individuals, and interrogate retired statesmen. The U.N. system in particular has spawned new treaties and conventions that propagate international norms on women?s rights, sustainable development, environmental standards, and so on?and U.N. monitoring bodies to ensure that national governments meet their supposed treaty obligations. These conferences set international political agendas that conscript governments, even when they have not ratified the treaties, and that make their way into domestic law via the courts citing customary international law. But they have not been elected by anyone. They are not accountable to any electorate. The laws and regulations they promulgate we cannot repeal or even amend. The U.N. conventions are often composed of special interest NGOs. And, almost comically, the monitoring bodies generally include inspectors drawn from the diplomatic services of despotic and authoritarian regimes.
The democratic deficit in these bodies is frequently admitted by the Tranzis running them, but their admission is then treated as a frank and manly acknowledgment that has solved the problem. In fact, they will not reform without firm pressure from outside. They have a class interest in maintaining their power. And they have ideological allies in most European political parties. Only the United States might lead the resistance to this growing nexus of unaccountable power, in part because its classical liberal U.S. Constitution forbids the Tranzi project of global governance and the loss of democratic sovereignty that it entails.
Like Lilliputians dealing with Gulliver, the Tranzis could not independently resist pressure from a determined United States. If, however, a giant inhabitant of Brobdingnag were to come to their assistance, Gulliver would be defeated. Can the Tranzis hope for similar assistance? Most rising powers?China, India, Japan, Indonesia, Brazil?have little sympathy with Tranzi ideology because it threatens the independent national power they are just beginning to enjoy. The exception is a rising power composed of declining ones?the European Union.
The E.U. sees itself, internally and externally, as the model of a new kind of postmodern superpower. In the accounts of its theorists such as Robert Cooper, the Eurocrat author of The Breaking of Nations, the world is divided like Gaul into three parts: premodern states like the failing despotisms of the Middle East; modern nation-states such as the United States that still exhibit the vital signs of democracy and patriotism, and postmodern polities that have moved into a future of overlapping jurisdictions, multiple national identities, and governance by treaty obligation. These features of the postmodern E.U. are not merely consistent with Tranzi ideology. They are Tranzi ideology, conforming to Fonte?s analsyis and exhibiting the aversion to clear lines of democratic accountability that are hallmarks of Tranzi institution-building.
In large measure the E.U. is a Tranzi project?though one still hobbled by scattered resistance from the voters and national governments. It has a missionary desire to export its distinctive postnational ideology to the rest of the world. It is increasingly driven by an ideological hostility to the United States as the classical liberal democratic alternative to its own post-democracy. And in particular it believes itself superior to the United States in dealing with premodern states and Islamist terrorism?preferring diplomacy to the war on terror and deferring to international bodies in principle.
If the United States is to defeat the terrorists in war or the Tranzis in international politics, it will have to take on the E.U. first. It is likely that this clash will occur most substantially over the war on terror. The United States and the leading E.U. powers have been drifting apart over how to conduct that war; it became an acute crisis over Iraq, and European skeptics have felt themselves vindicated, not wholly unreasonably, by the course of events since Baghdad fell. They will therefore want to conduct the war against Islamist terrorism on intelligence rather than military lines. They will be supported by Acronymia. But the United States?under Bush and probably under Kerry?will confirm the general lines of the Bush doctrine. And the clash will worsen.
Mark Steyn has argued in various venues that this process is likely to end in a complete breach. The NATO allies are inevitably drifting away from the United States and into a policy of appeasing Al Qaeda. Given Mr. Steyn?s fine record of prescience since September 11, only a rash man would gainsay him. But there is another possibility rooted in the fact that the first reactions of most people to a violent but distant revolution are generally appeasing?vide the reactions of almost everyone except Burke and Churchill to the French and Nazi revolutions respectively. Only when it becomes clear that the terrorists? aims are limitless and that nobody is safe does opinion turn harsher and more realistic: On both continents today opinion is divided between appeasers and resisters in proportions that reflect the fact that Americans know that they are the targets of Islamist terrorism while Europeans can think otherwise for a time. Madrid was not September 11 because Europeans still lack a common identity. For non-Spaniards it was a foreign affair. But with the murder of more than 300 Russian children in Beslan, the kidnapping of the two French journalists, and the bombing of the Australian embassy in Indonesia?all within a week of each other?it is plain that the Islamist terrorists have declared war on the entire non-Islamic world and apostate regimes in the Islamic world. Nobody is safe. And since such terrorism will continue to strike country after country, the political climate throughout Europe is likely to become harsher and more realistic?and so more receptive to the greater realism of American policy.
The recent poll on transatlantic attitudes conducted for the German Marshall Fund confirms both halves of this argument. It shows that Europeans increasingly reject American leadership and favor the rise of a European superpower?though not if it means spending more on defense. That certainly suggests an unrealistic mind set. But it also suggests that the divisions between the two continents are neither so virulent nor so clear as the debates between elites suggest. Thus, there are broad differences between European countries and America on such questions as the value of the war in Iraq and deference to international institutions. But divisions within Europe and America are important too. Majorities in some European countries, for instance, share the ?American? view that they would bypass the U.N. if their nations? vital interests were at stake. Perhaps the most significant finding may be that Democrats have an almost identical outlook to most Europeans. In other words, the division of opinion runs through every nation and both continents?and it is likely to react similarly to similar events: in this case, further attacks by Al Qaeda.
If that is so, then the value of the American alliance to European opinion will increase, not only because it is likely to share the views of most Americans (to become, so to speak, more Republican and less Tranzi), but also because in serious conflict any sane European wants to be on the American side. The war on Islamist terrorism would provide the solidarity once supplied by the Cold War; ?Europeanism? would decline, and Atlanticism revive. In those circumstances, the United States would be able to take a much more active role in alliance diplomacy. Until recently Washington has relied on Britain, Italy, Poland, and other Atlantic-minded powers to represent its interests in E.U. affairs. But Washington can no longer afford this passivity. That does not mean a Kerry-like anxiety to please the leading European states at the expense of our interests. Quite the contrary. We must intervene for such purposes in order to ensure that the proposed E.U. defense structure does not compromise NATO?s role as the monopoly supplier of European defense. Or to obstruct a common European foreign policy that seems likely to prevent old friends from joining the United States in some future coalition of the willing. Or, more broadly, to encourage the E.U. to develop along Atlanticist lines and away from any role as a ?counterweight? to the United States.
If that is to be accomplished conclusively, however, then the United States must also encourage those powers that share its distrust of postmodern structures?plainly Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, and less plainly the Baltic states and some East European countries?to seek more liberal constitutional arrangements within the E.U. Until now, it has consistently discouraged any such resistance to whatever was described by Brussels as ?integration.? Even a modest version of such reforms in the E.U. would be a major setback for the Tranzis?their Grenada?and have knock-on effects on their other projects such as the International Criminal Court. And, of course, the mere fact that the E.U. and the U.S. were fighting the war on terror on more American terms would tend, as after September 11, to reduce Tranzi power and influence throughout Acronymia?just as the current Iraqi troubles have helped them. Gulliver would give some Yahoo energy to the overrefined Houyhnhnms of Europe?and maybe get some patience and subtlety in return. That in turn would speed the defeat of the Islamists.
If, however, Mr. Steyn is right in his pessimism?and that?s the way to bet?then the United States will face a difficult future as a military superpower continually frustrated in middling matters by the resistance of international bodies. Europe and America will divide into two separate civilizations?the Anglosphere (minus England, plus India) and the Holy Secular Empire?uncomfortably housing a growing Muslim minority. Even in America, liberal democracy will be gradually transformed into a politically correct judicial oligarchy on Tranzi lines. The political atmosphere of both sides of the Atlantic will obstruct and delay the inevitable defeat of Islamist terrorism. And Gulliver, undefeated and undefeatable, will nonetheless apply for entry into the new euthanasia program brought in following a Supreme Court decision that cited judicial opinions from the International Human Rights Court in Harare.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John O?Sullivan is the editor of The National Interest.
-
Woof All:
This piece deals with more than WW3, but this seems the thread for it.
Marc/Crafty
==============
The Second Term
November 05, 2004 0503 GMT
By George Friedman
The election is over and the worst did not happen. The United States is not locked in endless litigation, with the legitimacy of the new government
challenged. George W. Bush has been re-elected in a clear victory. Depending on your point of view, this might have been the best imaginable outcome or the second-worst possible outcome. Possibly, for some, it is the worst outcome, with complete governmental meltdown being preferable to four more years of Bush. However, these arguments are now moot. Bush has been re-elected, and that is all there is to that.
This means that for slightly more than four years the United States will be
governed by a president who will never run for political office again. In
general, two-term presidents tend to be less interested in political process
than in their place in history. They tend to become more aggressive in trying to complete their perceived missions, and less cautious in the chances they take. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton all encountered serious problems in their second terms, most due to their handling of problems they experienced in their first terms. Nixon had Watergate, while Reagan was handling Central American issues and hostages. Clinton wound up impeached for his handling of matters in his second term.
Going further back in the century, Woodrow Wilson had the League of Nations fiasco in his second term, and Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court. Dwight Eisenhower alone, his place in history assured, did not suffer serious setbacks from misjudgments, unless you want to view Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin and the shooting down of the U-2 over Soviet air space as personal failures.
Second-term presidents tend to look at re-election as vindication of their
first-term policies and as a repudiation of their critics. They see
themselves as having fewer constraints placed on them, and they become less sensitive to political nuances.
Bush is an interesting case because he was not particularly sensitive to
political nuance in his first term. It is difficult to remember a president
in his first term who was less constrained by political considerations or
political consequences. For better or worse, Bush did not govern with one eye on public opinion polls. As we learned in the course of his term, he was not particularly flexible, even when he was running for re-election. We therefore need to imagine a George W. Bush who is not relatively, but completely, indifferent to political nuance.
Add to this that his legacy is far from assured. Bush's presidency will be
measured by one thing: Sept. 11 and his response to it. It is far from clear how history will judge him. There are many parts to the puzzle -- from Iraq, to homeland defense to Pakistan and so on. They are moving parts. For Bush to assure his legacy, he must bring the conflict to a successful conclusion -- not easy for a conflict in which success remains unclear.
We therefore have two forces at work. First, second-term presidents tend to feel much greater freedom of action than first-term presidents -- and tend to take greater risks. Second, Bush enters his second term with greater pressure on his legacy than most presidents have. Bush needs to make something happen, he needs to get the war under control, and he does not have all that much time to do it. If he is to complete his task before the end of his second term, he needs to start acting right now. It is our expectation that he will.
His re-election represents the first step. Globally, there was a perception
that Bush had blundered massively. There has also been a long-standing myth that the United States cannot stand its ground because casualties generate decisive antiwar movements. In spite of the fact that Nixon buried George McGovern in 1972, and followed with the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, global expectations have always been that events in Iraq would generate a massive antiwar movement that would force Bush from office.
This expectation was first shaken by Sen. John Kerry's campaign. For all his criticism, Kerry did not campaign against the war. He campaigned against Bush. This was explained in many circles as merely what Kerry had to say to get elected, and that after election his true colors would emerge. However, to more sensitive ears, the fact that Kerry had to campaign as he did in order to have a hope of election was jarring. The antiwar vote was too small for the theory. With Bush's victory, one of the fundamental assumptions about the United States went out the window. In spite of casualties and grievous errors, not only was there no antiwar candidate (save Ralph Nader), but Bush actually won the election.
This puts in motion two processes in the world. First, there is a major
rethinking of American staying power in the war going on. The assumption of a rapid conclusion of the Iraq campaign due to U.S. withdrawal is gone -- and it is surprising just how many non-Americans believed this to be a likely scenario. The reassessment of the United States is accompanied by the realization that the United States will not only maintain its pressure in Iraq, but on the region and the globe itself.
American pressure is not insubstantial. Virtually every country in the world wants something from the United States, from a trade agreement to support on a local conflict. They can do without an accommodation with the United States for months, but there is frequently serious pain associated with being at odds with the United States for years. Throughout the world, nations that have resisted U.S. actions in the war -- both within and outside of the region -- must now consider whether they can resist for years.
We can expect two things from Bush in general: relentlessness and linkage. Having won the election, Bush is not going to abandon his goal of crushing al Qaeda and pacifying Iraq and, indeed, the region. That is understood. Equally understood is that Bush will reward friends. Bush's test of friendship is simple: support for the United States and, in particular, support for the policies being pursued by his administration in the war. For Bush, active support for the war was a litmus test for good relations with the United States during the first term. The second term will make the first term look gentle.
Countries that made the decision not to support Bush did so with the
assumption that they could absorb the cost for a while. They must now
recalculate to see if they can absorb the cost for four more years -- and
even beyond, if Bush's successor pursues his policies. For many countries, what was a temporary disagreement is about to turn into a strategic misalignment with the United States. Some countries will continue on their path, others will reconsider. There will be a reshuffling of the global deck in the coming months.
The same analysis being made in the world is also being made in Iraq. There are the guerrillas, most of whom are committed to fighting the United States to the death. But the guerrillas are not a massive force, and they depend for their survival and operational capabilities on a supportive population. In Iraq, support comes from the top down. It is the tribal elders, the senior clergy and the village leaders who make the crucial decisions. They are the ones who decide whether there will be popular support or not.
There has been an assumption in Iraq -- as there has in the world -- that as the pressure builds up in Iraq, the United States will move to abandon the war. Bush's re-election clearly indicates that the United States will not be abandoning the war. They are therefore recalculating their positions in the same way that the rest of the world is. Holding out against the Americans and allowing their populations to aid the guerrillas made a great deal of sense if the United States was about to retreat from Iraq. It is quite another matter if the United States is actually going to be increasing pressure.
It is no accident that as Election Day approached, U.S. forces very publicly -- and very slowly -- massed around Al Fallujah. Al Fallujah was the town in which the United States signed its first accord with the guerrillas. As the election approached, the town went out of control. Now the election is over, the town is surrounded and Bush is president. It is a time for recalculation in Al Fallujah as well, as there can be no doubt but that Bush is free to attack and might well do it.
Throughout the Sunni areas of Iraq -- as well as Shiite regions -- elders are considering their positions, caught between the United States and the
guerrillas, in light of the new permanence of the Americans. The United
States will be aggressive, but in an interesting way. It will be using the
threat of American power as a lever to force the Sunni leadership into
reducing support for the guerrillas. Coupled with the carrot of enormous
bribes, the strategy could work. It might not eliminate the guerrilla war,
but could reduce it to a nuisance level.
The basic reality thus creates the strategy. The re-election of Bush creates a new reality at all levels in the international system. His intransigence, coupled with American power, forces players to think about whether they can hold their positions for at least four years, or whether they must adjust their positions in some way. As the players -- from sheikhs to prime ministers -- reconsider their positions, U.S. power increases, trying to pry them loose. It opens the possibility of negotiations and settlements in unexpected places.
It also opens the door to potential disaster. The danger is that Bush will
simultaneously overestimate his power and feel unbearable pressure to act quickly. This has led some previous presidents into massive errors of
judgment. Put differently, the pressures and opportunities of the second term caused them to execute policies that appeared to be solutions but that blew up in their faces. None of them knew they would blow up, but in their circumstances, no one was sufficiently cautious.
It is precisely Bush's lack of caution that now becomes his greatest
bargaining chip. But his greatest strength can also become his greatest
weakness. The struggle between these two poles will mark the first part of
his presidency. We will find out whether the second part will be the success of this strategy or his downfall. The book on George W. Bush will now be written.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
'In order to understand Arafat's life, it is essential to
understand the concept "Arab," and to understand its tension with
the concept "Muslim," at least as Arafat lived it out.'
THE GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT
The Death of Arafat
November 11, 2004 2359 GMT
By George Friedman
That Yasser Arafat's death marks the end of an era is so obvious
that it hardly bears saying. The nature of the era that is ending
and the nature of the era that is coming, on the other hand, do
bear discussing. That speaks not only to the Arab-Israeli
conflict but to the evolution of the Arab world in general.
In order to understand Arafat's life, it is essential to
understand the concept "Arab," and to understand its tension with
the concept "Muslim," at least as Arafat lived it out. In
general, ethnic Arabs populate North Africa and the area between
the Mediterranean and Iran, and between Yemen and Turkey. This is
the Arab world. It is a world that is generally -- but far from
exclusively -- Muslim, although the Muslim world stretches far
beyond the Arab world.
To understand Arafat's life, it is much more important to
understand the Arab impulse than to understand the Muslim
impulse. Arafat belonged to that generation of Arab who
visualized the emergence of a single Arab nation, encapsulating
all of the religious groups in the Arab world, and one that was
essentially secular in nature. This vision did not originate with
Arafat but with his primary patron, Gamal Abdul Nasser, the
founder of modern Egypt and of the idea of a United Arab
Republic. No sense can be made of Arafat's life without first
understanding Nasser's.
Nasser was born into an Egypt that was ruled by a weak and
corrupt monarchy and effectively dominated by Britain. He became
an officer in the Egyptian army and fought competently against
the Israelis in the 1948 war. He emerged from that war committed
to two principles: The first was recovering Egyptian independence
fully; the second was making Egypt a modern, industrial state.
Taking his bearing from Kamal Ataturk, who founded the modern
Turkish state, Nasser saw the military as the most modern
institution in Egypt, and therefore the instrument to achieve
both independence and modernization. This was the foundation of
the Egyptian revolution.
Nasser was personally a practicing Muslim of sorts -- he attended
mosque -- but he did not see himself as leading an Islamic
revolution at all. For example, he placed numerous Coptic
Christians in important government positions. For Arafat, the
overriding principle was not Islam, but Arabism. Nasser dreamed
of uniting the Arabs in a single entity, whose capital would be
Cairo. He believed that until there was a United Arab Republic,
the Arabs would remain the victims of foreign imperialism.
Nasser saw his prime antagonists as the traditional monarchies of
the Arab world. Throughout his rule, Nasser tried to foment
revolutions, led by the military, that would topple these
monarchies. Nasserite or near-Nasserite revolutions toppled
Iraqi, Syrian and Libyan monarchies. Throughout his rule, he
tried to bring down the Jordanian, Saudi and other Persian Gulf
regimes. This was the constant conflict that overlaid the Arab
world from the 1950s until the death of Nasser and the rise of
Anwar Sadat.
Geopolitics aligned Nasser's ambitions with the Soviet Union.
Nasser was a socialist but never a Marxist. Nevertheless, as he
confronted the United States and threatened American allies among
the conservative monarchies, he grew both vulnerable to the
United States and badly in need of a geopolitical patron. The
Soviets were also interested in limiting American power and saw
Nasser as a natural ally, particularly because of his
confrontation with the monarchies.
Nasser's view of Israel was that it represented the intrusion of
British imperialism into the Arab world, and that the
conservative monarchies, particularly Jordan, were complicit in
its creation. For Nasser, the destruction of Israel had several
uses. First, it was a unifying point for Arab nationalism.
Second, it provided a tool with which to prod and confront the
monarchies that tended to shy away from confrontation. Third, it
allowed for the further modernization of the Egyptian military --
and therefore of Egypt -- by enticing a flow of technology from
the Soviet Union to Egypt. Nasser both opposed the existence of
Israel and saw its existence as a useful tool in his general
project.
It is important to understand that for Nasser, Israel was not a
Palestinian problem but an Arab problem. In his view, the
particular Arab nationalisms were the problem, not the solution.
Adding another Arab nationalism -- Palestinian -- to the mix was
not in his interest. The Zionist injustice was against the Arab
nation and not against the Palestinians as a particular nation.
Nasser was not alone in this view. The Syrians saw Palestine as a
district of Syria, stolen by the British and French. They saw the
Zionists as oppressors, but against the Syrian nation. The
Jordanians, who held the West Bank, saw the West Bank as part of
the Jordanian nation and, by extension, the rest of Palestine as
a district of Jordan. Until the 1967 war, the Arab world was
publicly and formally united in opposing the existence of Israel,
but much less united on what would replace Israel after it was
destroyed. The least likely candidate was an independent
Palestinian state.
Prior to 1967, Nasser sponsored the creation of the Palestine
Liberation Organization under the leadership of Ahmed al
Shukairi. It was an entirely ineffective organization that
created a unit that fought under Egyptian command. Since 1967 was
a disaster for Nasser, "fought" is a very loose term. The PLO was
kept under tight control, careful avoiding the question of
nationhood and focusing on the destruction of Israel.
After the 1967 war, the young leader of the PLO's Fatah faction
took control of the organization. Yasser Arafat was a creature of
Nasser, politically and intellectually. He was an Arabist. He was
a modernizer. He was a secularist. He was aligned with the
Soviets. He was anti-American. Arafat faced two disparate
questions in 1967. First, it was clear that the Arabs would not
defeat Israel in a war, probably in his lifetime; what,
therefore, was to be done to destroy Israel? Second, if the only
goal was to destroy the Israelis, and if that was not to happen
anytime soon, then what was to become of the Palestinians? Arafat
posed the question more radically: Granted that Palestinians were
part of the Arab revolution, did they have a separate identity of
their own, as did Egyptians or Libyans? Were they simply Syrians
or Jordanians? Who were they?
Asserting Palestinian nationalism was not easy in 1967, because
of the Arabs themselves. The Syrians did not easily recognize
their independence and sponsored their own Palestinian group,
loyal to Syria. The Jordanians could not recognize the
Palestinians as separate, as their own claim to power even east
of the Jordan would be questionable, let alone their claims to
the West Bank. The Egyptians were uneasy with the rise of another
Arab nationalism.
Simultaneously, the growth of a radical and homeless Palestinian
movement terrified the monarchies. Arafat knew that no war would
defeat the Israelis. His view was that a two-tiered approach was
best. On one level, the PLO would make the claim on behalf of the
Palestinian people, for the right to statehood on the world
stage. On the other hand, the Palestinians would use small-scale
paramilitary operations against soft targets -- terrorism -- to
increase the cost throughout the world of ignoring the
Palestinians.
The Soviets were delighted with this strategy, and their national
intelligence services moved to facilitate it by providing
training and logistics. A terror campaign against Israel's
supporters would be a terror campaign against Europe and the
United States. The Soviets were delighted by anything that caused
pain and destabilized the West. The cost to the Soviets of
underwriting Palestinian operations, either directly or through
various Eastern European or Arab intelligence services, was
negligible. Arafat became a revolutionary aligned with the
Soviets.
There were two operational principles. The first was that Arafat
himself should appear as the political wing of the movement, able
to serve as an untainted spokesman for Palestinian rights. The
second was that the groups that carried out the covert operations
should remain complex and murky. Plausible deniability combined
with unpredictability was the key.
Arafat created an independent covert capability that allowed him
to make a radical assertion: that there was an independent
Palestinian people as distinct as any other Arab nation.
Terrorist operations gave Arafat the leverage to assert that
Palestine should take its place in the Arab world in its own
right.
If Palestine was a separate nation, then what was Jordan? The Ha-
shemite kingdom were Bedouins driven out of Arabia. The majority
of the population were not Bedouin, but had their roots in the
west - hence, they were Palestinians. If there was a Palestinian
nation, then why were they being ruled by Bedouins from Arabia?
In September 1970, Arafat made his move. Combining a series of
hijackings of Western airliners with a Palestinian rising in
Jordan, Arafat attempted to seize control of Jordan. He failed,
and thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered by Hashemite and
Pakistani mercenaries. (Coincidentally, the military unit
dispatched to Jordan was led by then-Brigadier Zia-ul-Haq, who
later ruled Pakistan from 1977 to 1988 as a military dictator.)
Arafat's logic was impeccable. His military capability was less
than perfect.
Arafat created a new group -- Black September -- that was
assigned the task of waging a covert war against the Israelis and
the West. The greatest action, the massacre of Israeli athletes
at the Munich Olympics in 1972, defined the next generation.
Israel launched a counter-operation to destroy Black September,
and the pattern of terrorism and counter-terrorism swirling
around the globe was set. The PLO was embedded in a network of
terrorist groups sponsored by the Soviets that ranged from Japan
to Italy. The Israelis became part of a multinational counter-
attack. Neither side could score a definitive victory.
But Arafat won the major victory. Nations are frequently born of
battle, and the battles that began in 1970 and raged until the
mid-1990s established an indelible principle -- there is now, if
there was not before, a nation called Palestine. This was
critical, because as Nasser died and his heritage was discarded
by Anwar Sadat, the principle of the Arab nation was lost. It was
only through the autonomous concept of Palestinian nationalism
that Arafat and the PLO could survive.
And this was Arafat's fatal crisis. He had established the
principle of Palestine, but what he had failed to define was what
that Palestinian nation meant and what it wanted. The latter was
the critical point. Arafat's strategy was to appear the statesman
restraining uncontrollable radicals. He understood that he needed
Western support to get a state, and he used this role superbly.
He appeared moderate and malleable in English, radical and
intractable in Arabic. This was his insoluble dilemma.
Arafat led a nation that had no common understanding of their
goal. There were those who wanted to recover a part of Palestine
and be content. There were those who wanted to recover part of
Palestine and use it as a base of operations to retake the rest.
There were those who would accept no intermediate deal but wanted
to destroy Israel. Arafat's fatal problem was that in the course
of creating the Palestinian nation, he had convinced all three
factions that he stood with them.
Like many politicians, Arafat had made too many deals. He had
successfully persuaded the West that (a) he genuinely wanted a
compromise and (b) that he could restrain terrorism. But he had
also persuaded Palestinians that any deal was merely temporary,
and others that he wouldn't accept any deal. By the time of the
Oslo accords, Arafat was so tied up in knots that he could not
longer speak for the nation he created. More precisely, the
Palestinians were so divided that no one could negotiate on their
behalf, confident in his authority. Arafat kept his position by
sacrificing his power.
By the 1990s, the space left by the demise of pan-Arabism had
been taken by the rise of Islamist religiosity. Hamas,
representing the view that there is a Palestinian nation but that
it should be understood as part of the Islamic world under
Islamic law, had become the most vibrant part of the Palestinian
polity. Nothing was more alien from Arafat's thinking than Hamas.
It ran counter to everything he had learned from Nasser.
However -- and this is Arafat's tragedy -- by the time Hamas
emerged as a power, he had lost the ability to believe in
anything but the concept of the Palestinians and his place as its
leader. As Hamas rose, Arafat became entirely tactical. His goal
was to retain position if not power, and toward that end, he
would do what was needed. A lifetime of tactics had destroyed all
strategy.
His death in Paris was a farce of family and courtiers. It fitted
the end he had created, because his last years were lived in a
round of clever maneuvers leading nowhere. The Palestinians are
left now without strategy, only tactics. There is no one who can
speak for the Palestinians and be listened to as authoritative.
He created the Palestinian nation and utterly disrupted the
Palestinian state. He left a clear concept on the one hand, a
chaos on the other.
It is interesting to wonder what would have happened if Arafat
had won in Jordan in 1970, while Nasser was still alive. But that
wasn't going to happen, because Arafat's fatal weakness was
visible even then. The concept was clear -- but instead of
meticulously planning a rising, Arafat improvised, playing
politics within the PLO when he should have been managing combat
operations. The chaos and failure that marked Black September
became emblematic of his life.
Arafat succeeded in one thing, and perhaps that is enough -- he
created the Palestinian nation against all enemies, Arab and non-
Arab. The rest was the endless failure of pure improvisation.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
From the Slate web site. Man, I wish I could write as well as Mr. Hitchens.
Bush's Secularist Triumph
The left apologizes for religious fanatics. The president fights them.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004, at 7:34 AM PT
Many are the cheap and easy laughs in which one could indulge at the extraordinary, pitiful hysteria of the defeated Democrats. "Kerry won," according to one e-mail I received from Greg Palast, to whom the Florida vote in 2000 is, and always will be, a combination of Gettysburg and Waterloo. According to Nikki Finke of the LA Weekly, the Fox News channel "called" Ohio for Bush for reasons too sinister to enumerate. Gregory Maniatis, whose last communication to me had predicted an annihilating Democratic landslide, kept quiet for only a day or so before forwarding the details on how to emigrate to Canada. Thus do the liberals build their bridge to the 20th century.
Who can care about this pathos? Not I. But I do take strong exception to one strain in the general moaning. It seems that anyone fool enough to favor the re-election of the president is by definition a God-bothering, pulpit-pounding Armageddon-artist, enslaved by ancient texts and prophecies and committed to theocratic rule. I was instructed in last week's New York Times that this was the case, and that the Enlightenment had come to an end, by no less an expert than Garry Wills, who makes at least one of his many livings by being an Augustinian Roman Catholic.
I step lightly over the ancient history of Wills' church (which was the originator of the counter-Enlightenment and then the patron of fascism in Europe) as well as over its more recent and local history (as the patron, protector, and financier of child-rape in the United States, and the sponsor of the cruel "annulment" of Joe Kennedy's and John Kerry's first marriages). As far as I know, all religions and all churches are equally demented in their belief in divine intervention, divine intercession, or even the existence of the divine in the first place.
But all faiths are not always equally demented in the same way, or at the same time. Islam, which was once a civilizing and creative force in many societies, is now undergoing a civil war. One faction in this civil war is explicitly totalitarian and wedded to a cult of death. We have seen it at work on the streets of our own cities, and most recently on the streets of Amsterdam. We know that the obscene butchery of filmmaker Theo van Gogh was only a warning of what is coming in Madrid, London, Rome, and Paris, let alone Baghdad and Basra.
So here is what I want to say on the absolutely crucial matter of secularism. Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. How can these people bear to reread their own propaganda? Suicide murderers in Palestine?disowned and denounced by the new leader of the PLO?described as the victims of "despair." The forces of al-Qaida and the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for antiglobalization. The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people than allow them to vote, pictured prettily as "insurgents" or even, by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. If this is liberal secularism, I'll take a modest, God-fearing, deer-hunting Baptist from Kentucky every time, as long as he didn't want to impose his principles on me (which our Constitution forbids him to do).
One probably should not rest too much on the similarity between Bin Laden's last video and the newly available DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11. I would only say that, if Bin Laden had issued a tape that with equal fealty followed the playbook of Karl Rove (and do please by all means cross yourself at the mention of this unholy name), it might have garnered some more attention. The Bearded One moved pedantically through Moore's bill of indictment, checking off the Florida vote-count in 2000, the "Pet Goat" episode on the day of hell, the violent intrusion into hitherto peaceful and Muslim Iraq, and the division between Bush and the much nicer Europeans. (For some reason, unknown to me at any rate, he did not attack the President for allowing the Bin Laden family to fly out of American airspace.)
George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he?and the U.S. armed forces?have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The "antiwar" faction even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the apparent corollary?that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?
Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL. I dare say that there will be a few domestic confrontations down the road, over everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to the display of Mosaic tablets in courtrooms and schools. I have spent all my life on the atheist side of this argument, and will brace for more of the same, but I somehow can't hear Robert Ingersoll* or Clarence Darrow being soft and cowardly and evasive if it came to a vicious theocratic challenge that daily threatens us from within and without.
-
..................
Geopolitical Diary: Monday, Nov. 15, 2004
November 15, 2004 0714 GMT
The last major stronghold in Al Fallujah appears to have fallen. That does
not mean that the fighting is over, however. Guerrillas remain in the city,
bypassed by the main body of U.S. troops. Operating in small teams, these guerrillas will strike at softer targets, such as supply vehicles and
isolated foot patrols. They will be difficult to find. The rubble provides
excellent cover. They will become visible when they launch attacks, so U.S. forces will now configure themselves so as to be able to rapidly reinforce troops that have come under guerrilla attack. The game of hide-and-seek can be a long and brutal experience. The guerrillas will have to be killed, induced to surrender, or manage to exfiltrate the city.
Nevertheless, the main battle is over, and more quickly than we expected. It was our expectation that the United States would draw out the assault as in An Najaf, in order to avoid major casualties and to permit the battle to serve as the backdrop for the critical negotiations taking place between Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and the United States on the one side and the Sunni leadership on the other. But that wasn't the way the United States played it out. The basic outline is in place, but the U.S. goal is clearly more ambitious than we thought.
As the battle in Al Fallujah quieted, U.S. leaders began publicly speaking
of dealing with other guerrilla strongholds in other cities. Rather than
using Al Fallujah as the backdrop for negotiations, the United States has
clearly decided on a much broader canvas. Officials are looking at the
entire Sunni triangle, and all the cities within it, as sequential targets
until the Sunni leadership turns on the guerrillas.
The picture the United States is now painting is of a broad sequential or
even simultaneous campaign directed against city after city until the
guerrilla movement has suffered overwhelming attrition and the Sunni
leadership capitulates to American political demands.
It has undoubtedly been noticed by the Sunnis that the attack on Al Fallujah has brought a very muted response in the United States. The Democratic left is so dispirited by the defeat of John Kerry that it has hardly been noticed, in spite of casualties in Al Fallujah. Equally interesting has been the quiet from Europe. France and Germany clearly don't want to tangle with President George W. Bush at this point. Equally important, the killing of a Dutch filmmaker who had criticized Muslims has had a chilling effect on Europeans in general. The broad public has been shocked and is rethinking its views on Muslims in Europe and, therefore, on the U.S. war effort in Iraq. Events in Amsterdam have caused the Europeans to view Iraq through a different prism.
More than at any point since the Iraq war began, the United States is free
from constraints. Neither U.S. public opinion nor European diplomacy is
shaping U.S. war plans. Based on Vietnam, there has been a belief among many that a guerrilla insurgency cannot be defeated. This thinking is true if by "defeated" you mean completely eradicated. If, however, what you mean is reducing the guerrillas so they no longer threaten the regime or basic stability, guerrilla movements can, in fact, be suppressed -- and have been.
In Vietnam, the communists deployed hundreds of thousands of troops, with secured sanctuaries in neighboring countries and a robust logistical
pipeline -- the Ho Chi Minh Trail -- supporting them. Iraq has thousands of guerrillas, probably less than 10,000. There is no sanctuary, and there is no robust supply line. They survive through the support of the population, and that support depends on the Sunni elders. At the moment the elders decide the price is too high, the insurgency will rapidly degrade.
The United States is trying to show the elders just how high the price will
be. We expected Al Fallujah to last for weeks. It has lasted for days, and
new operations are already being planned. The United States is now in a
position to carry out a ruthless campaign designed not only to root out the guerrillas, but to impose a massive cost on the Sunni communities. The United States is not constrained politically and has the necessary force to carry out this campaign. On the other hand, it cannot afford to take too long in carrying out this campaign.
In short, the United States is trying to back the guerrillas against the
wall by splitting them from the Sunni elders, and to do it much faster than we had expected it to happen. We now have an extremely dynamic situation developing in Iraq, where the most likely course is a re-evaluation by the Sunni elders of their prior position, and potentially, a civil war among the Sunnis as one result. The outcome is far from certain, but the war is certainly now taking a dramatic turn.
Copyrights 2004 - Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
Iraq: Turning Toward Mosul
November 15, 2004 2359 GMT
Summary
Even as U.S.-Iraqi forces battled insurgents in Al Fallujah, violence broke out elsewhere in Iraq. After a recent rash of insurgent activity and other conflicts in the city of Mosul, the U.S.-Iraqi forces sent a light armor brigade from Al Fallujah to Mosul to help maintain security in the strategically important and ethnically diverse city. If the situation deteriorates, commanders could decide in four to six weeks to send more U.S.-Iraqi troops to Mosul to help quell the insurgency.
Analysis
As the insurgency in Al Fallujah has dwindled to what officials have called "small pockets" of activity, violence has erupted elsewhere in Iraq -- including in the northern city of Mosul. Since Nov. 12, guerrilla actions reported in Mosul have included an uprising -- which resulted in local police forces fleeing their posts when militants stormed two police stations -- and an attempted strike against a U.S. military convoy with a vehicle-borne explosive device. In response to the recent violence, Kurdish Iraqi national guard troops have been sent to Mosul, and the U.S.-Iraqi force dispatched a U.S. light armor brigade from Al Fallujah to Mosul to help bolster security in the restive city.
The United States will wait to see if the light armor brigade is enough to shore up security in Mosul until the current wave of insurgent activity dies down. If more muscle is needed, U.S. military leaders likely will make a decision in four to six weeks about sending more troops to Mosul for a larger operation -- though a large-scale assault does not appear to be necessary.
Mosul is a special case -- it is strategically important for its proximity to the northern oil fields and refineries and for its nearness to Turkey, and it is one of the most racially mixed cities in Iraq. Baghdad has numerous ethnicities in its population, but in Mosul, the Kurdish, Turkoman and Sunni Arab ethnic groups are almost equally proportioned. Because of this balance, the environment in Mosul is always precarious. Saddam Hussein's "Arabization" campaign in northern Iraq, in which he tried to turn the mix into one that is predominately Sunni Arab, also has had lasting negative effects on ethnic relations in the region.
The ethnic tensions in Mosul touch upon the psychological component of controlling Mosul. The ethnic group controlling Mosul would not only find itself sitting neatly on top of one of Iraq's major oil arteries -- and near a major route into Turkey -- but would also feel it had overcome the other ethnic groups in the city.
The recent violence in Mosul, in fact, might not have just been caused by insurgents, though guerrillas from Al Fallujah have reportedly relocated there. A surge in public anger against the United States and the Interim Iraqi Government -- which the assault against Al Fallujah might have caused -- could have been a flash point for the ethnic groups to act out on existing frustrations, especially against Kurds, who are seen as U.S. allies.
This is nothing new to Iraq. Similar violence erupted in Baghdad and other cities during the first attack against Al Fallujah in April. Ethnic violence is not entirely a Sunni Arab phenomenon; violence erupted in certain sections of Baghdad when U.S. forces swept through An Najaf to try to capture militant Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr. Emotions seem to run high in Iraq; any large-profile military operation there is likely to precipitate agitation in other volatile areas throughout the country. A large-scale assault against Mosul would do no less. However, an attack against Mosul does not appear to be necessary.
Mosul has become a priority for the United States because controlling the insurgency is difficult enough without a civil war breaking out in a strategically valuable city. Not only does securing Mosul discourage the possibility of a war between the independence-seeking Kurds and the other ethnic groups, it also pre-empts ethnic violence that could destabilize the security situation in Iraq even further.
Given Mosul's relatively small size -- and the unavailability of additional troops who are fighting in other insurgent hot spots throughout the country -- U.S. military commanders will see what the light armor brigade can do before deciding on sending more troops to Mosul. The brigade will either be given a particular area of responsibility within the city or worked into various patrol and security rotations.
For now, the forces will focus on raids into enemy-held sections of town and then increase combat patrols to create the impression of securing the city. Though this will expose the U.S.-Iraqi forces to possible insurgent attacks, it will also give them the ability to hit back (since the brigade is coming from Al Fallujah, it is likely to have a more aggressive demeanor). It also is possible the local military command could take control and assign the troops to a holding pattern, or containment plan, until a larger operation can be planned out for the more troubled parts of the city.
Mosul is likely to be one of several cities U.S.-Iraqi forces will focus on next -- along with Ar Ramadi, which the U.S. military also considers a major target and which is strategically just as important as Mosul. Rather than launching a full-on assault, the U.S. command will see if the light armor brigade -- and the troops already in Mosul -- can hold down the fort. U.S.-Iraqi troops already are spread thin throughout Iraq; later, if needed, additional troops could be sent to Mosul for a larger operation -- but not of the same scale as Al Fallujah.
-
Daniel Pipes
One cannot emphasize too much the distinction between Islam-plain Islam-and its fundamentalist version. Islam is the religion of about one billion people and is a rapidly growing faith, particularly in Africa but also elsewhere in the world. The United States, for example, boasts almost a million converts to Islam (plus an even larger number of Muslim immigrants).
Islam's adherents find their faith immensely appealing, for the religion possesses an inner strength that is quite extraordinary. As a leading figure in the Islamic Republic of Iran maintains, "Any Westerner who really understands Islam will envy the lives of Muslims." Far from feeling embarrassed about its being temporally the last of the three major Middle Eastern monotheisms, Muslims believe that their faith improves on the earlier ones. In their telling, Judaism and Christianity are but defective variants of Islam, which is God's final, perfect religion.
Contributing to this internal confidence is the memory of outstanding achievements during Islam's first six or so centuries. Its culture was the most advanced, and Muslims enjoyed the best health, lived the longest, had the highest rates of literacy, sponsored the most advanced scientific and technical research, and deployed usually victorious armies. This pattern of success was evident from the beginning: in A.D. 622 the Prophet Muhammad fled Mecca as a refugee, only to return eight years later as its ruler. As early as the year 715, Muslim conquerors had assembled an empire that extended from Spain in the west to India in the east. To be a Muslim meant to belong to a winning civilization. Muslims, not surprisingly, came to assume a correlation between their faith and their worldly success, to assume that they were the favored of God in both spiritual and mundane matters.
And yet, in modern times battlefield victories and prosperity have been notably lacking. Indeed, as early as the thirteenth century, Islam's atrophy and Christendom's advances were already becoming discernible. But, for some five hundred years longer, Muslims remained largely oblivious to the extraordinary developments taking place to their north. Ibn Khaldun, the famous Muslim intellectual, wrote around the year 1400 about Europe, "I hear that many developments are taking place in the land of the Rum, but God only knows what happens there!"
Such willful ignorance rendered Muslims vulnerable when they could no longer ignore what was happening around them. Perhaps the most dramatic alert came in July 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte landed in Egypt-the center of the Muslim world-and conquered it with stunning ease. Other assaults followed over the next century and more, and before long most Muslims were living under European rule. As their power and influence waned, a sense of incomprehension spread among Muslims. What had gone wrong? Why had God seemingly abandoned them?
The trauma of modern Islam results from this sharp and unmistakable contrast between medieval successes and more recent tribulations. Put simply, Muslims have had an exceedingly hard time explaining what went wrong. Nor has the passage of time made this task any easier, for the same unhappy circumstances basically still exist. Whatever index one employs, Muslims can be found clustering toward the bottom-whether measured in terms of their military prowess, political stability, economic development, corruption, human rights, health, longevity or literacy. Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister of Malaysia who now languishes in jail, estimates in The Asian Renaissance (1997) that whereas Muslims make up just one-fifth of the world's total population, they constitute more than half of the 1.2 billion people living in abject poverty. There is thus a pervasive sense of debilitation and encroachment in the Islamic world today. As the imam of a mosque in Jerusalem put it not long ago, "Before, we were masters of the world and now we're not even masters of our own mosques."
Searching for explanations for their predicament, Muslims have devised three political responses to modernity-secularism, reformism and Islamism. The first of these holds that Muslims can only advance by emulating the West. Yes, the secularists concede, Islam is a valuable and esteemed legacy, but its public dimensions must be put aside. In particular, the sacred law of Islam (called the Shari'a)-which governs such matters as the judicial system, the manner in which Muslim states go to war, and the nature of social interactions between men and women-should be discarded in its entirety. The leading secular country is Turkey, where Kemal Atat?rk in the period 1923-38 reshaped and modernized an overwhelmingly Muslim society. Overall, though, secularism is a minority position among Muslims, and even in Turkey it is under siege.
Reformism, occupying a murky middle ground, offers a more popular response to modernity. Whereas secularism forthrightly calls for learning from the West, reformism selectively appropriates from it. The reformist says, "Look, Islam is basically compatible with Western ways. It's just that we lost track of our own achievements, which the West exploited. We must now go back to our own ways by adopting those of the West." To reach this conclusion, reformers reread the Islamic scriptures in a Western light. For example, the Koran permits a man to take up to four wives-on the condition that he treat them equitably. Traditionally, and quite logically, Muslims understood this verse as permission for a man to take four wives. But because a man is allowed only one in the West, the reformists performed a sleight of hand and interpreted the verse in a new way: the Koran, they claim, requires that a man must treat his wives equitably, which is clearly something no man can do if there is more than one of them. So, they conclude, Islam prohibits more than a single wife.
Reformists have applied this sort of reasoning across the board. To science, for example, they contend Muslims should have no objections, for science is in fact Muslim. They recall that the word algebra comes from the Arabic, al-jabr. Algebra being the essence of mathematics and mathematics being the essence of science, all of modern science and technology thereby stems from work done by Muslims. So there is no reason to resist Western science; it is rather a matter of reclaiming what the West took (or stole) in the first place. In case after case, and with varying degrees of credibility, reformists appropriate Western ways under the guise of drawing on their own heritage. The aim of the reformists, then, is to imitate the West without acknowledging as much. Though intellectually bankrupt, reformism functions well as a political strategy.
The Ideological Response
The third response to the modern trauma is Islamism, the subject of the remainder of this essay. Islamism has three main features: a devotion to the sacred law, a rejection of Western influences, and the transformation of faith into ideology.
Islamism holds that Muslims lag behind the West because they're not good Muslims. To regain lost glory requires a return to old ways, and that is achieved by living fully in accordance with the Shari'a. Were Muslims to do so, they would once again reside on top of the world, as they did a millennium ago. This, however, is no easy task, for the sacred law contains a vast body of regulations touching every aspect of life, many of them contrary to modern practices. (The Shari'a somewhat resembles Jewish law, but nothing comparable exists in Christianity.) Thus, it forbids usury or any taking of interest, which has deep and obvious implications for economic life. It calls for cutting off the hands of thieves, which runs contrary to all modern sensibilities, as do its mandatory covering of women and the separation of the sexes. Islamism not only calls for the application of these laws, but for a more rigorous application than ever before was the case. Before 1800, the interpreters of the Shari'a softened it somewhat. For instance, they devised a method by which to avoid the ban on interest. The fundamentalists reject such modifications, demanding instead that Muslims apply the Shari'a strictly and in its totality.
In their effort to build a way of life based purely on the Shar'i laws, Islamists strain to reject all aspects of Western influence-customs, philosophy, political institutions and values. Despite these efforts, they still absorb vast amounts from the West in endless ways. For one, they need modern technology, especially its military and medical applications. For another, they themselves tend to be modern individuals, and so are far more imbued with Western ways than they wish to be or will ever acknowledge. Thus, while the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was more traditional than most Islamists, attempted to found a government on the pure principles of Shiite Islam, he ended up with a republic based on a constitution that represents a nation via the decisions of a parliament, which is in turn chosen through popular elections-every one of these a Western concept. Another example of Western influence is that Friday, which in Islam is not a day of rest but a day of congregation, is now the Muslim equivalent of a sabbath. Similarly, the laws of Islam do not apply to everyone living within a geographical territory but only to Muslims; Islamists, however, understand them as territorial in nature (as an Italian priest living in Sudan found out long ago, when he was flogged for possessing alcohol). Islamism thereby stealthily appropriates from the West while denying that it is doing so.
Perhaps the most important of these borrowings is the emulation of Western ideologies. The word "Islamism" is a useful and accurate one, for it indicates that this phenomenon is an "ism" comparable to other ideologies of the twentieth century. In fact, Islamism represents an Islamic-flavored version of the radical utopian ideas of our time, following Marxism-Leninism and fascism. It infuses a vast array of Western political and economic ideas within the religion of Islam. As an Islamist, a Muslim Brother from Egypt, puts it, "We are neither socialist nor capitalist, but Muslims"; a Muslim of old would have said, "We are neither Jews nor Christians, but Muslims."
Islamists see their adherence to Islam primarily as a form of political allegiance; hence, though usually pious Muslims, they need not be. Plenty of Islamists seem in fact to be rather impious. For instance, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York, Ramzi Yousef, had a girlfriend while living in the Philippines and was "gallivanting around Manila's bars, strip-joints and karaoke clubs, flirting with women." From this and other suggestions of loose living, his biographer, Simon Reeve, finds "scant evidence to support any description of Yousef as a religious warrior." The FBI agent in charge of investigating Yousef concluded that, "He hid behind a cloak of Islam."
On a grander level, Ayatollah Khomeini hinted at the irrelevance of faith for Islamists in a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev early in 1989, as the Soviet Union was rapidly failing. The Iranian leader offered his own government as a model: "I openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system." Khomeini here seemed to be suggesting that the Soviets should turn to the Islamist ideology-converting to Islam would almost seem to be an afterthought.
Contrary to its reputation, Islamism is not a way back; as a contemporary ideology it offers not a means to return to some old-fashioned way of life but a way of navigating the shoals of modernization. With few exceptions (notably, the Taliban in Afghanistan), Islamists are city dwellers trying to cope with the problems of modern urban life-not people of the countryside. Thus, the challenges facing career women figure prominently in Islamist discussions. What, for example, can a woman who must travel by crowded public transportation do to protect herself from groping? The Islamists have a ready reply: she should cover herself, body and face, and signal through the wearing of Islamic clothes that she is not approachable. More broadly, they offer an inclusive and alternative way of life for modern persons, one that rejects the whole complex of popular culture, consumerism and individualism in favor of a faith-based totalitarianism.
Deviations From Tradition
While Islamism is often seen as a form of traditional Islam, it is something profoundly different. Traditional Islam seeks to teach humans how to live in accord with God's will, whereas Islamism aspires to create a new order. The first is self-confident, the second deeply defensive. The one emphasizes individuals, the latter communities. The former is a personal credo, the latter a political ideology.
The distinction becomes sharpest when one compares the two sets of leaders. Traditionalists go through a static and lengthy course of learning in which they study a huge corpus of information and imbibe the Islamic verities much as their ancestors did centuries earlier. Their faith reflects more than a millennium of debate among scholars, jurists and theologians. Islamist leaders, by contrast, tend to be well educated in the sciences but not in Islam; in their early adulthood, they confront problems for which their modern learning has failed to prepare them, so they turn to Islam. In doing so they ignore nearly the entire corpus of Islamic learning and interpret the Koran as they see fit. As autodidacts, they dismiss the traditions and apply their own (modern) sensibilities to the ancient texts, leading to an oddly Protestant version of Islam.
The modern world frustrates and stymies traditional figures who, educated in old-fashioned subjects, have not studied European languages, spent time in the West, or mastered its secrets. For example, traditionalists rarely know how to exploit the radio, television and the Internet to spread their message. In contrast, Islamist leaders usually speak Western languages, often have lived abroad, and tend to be well versed in technology. The Internet has hundreds of Islamist sites. Fran?ois Burgat and William Dowell note this contrast in their book, The Islamist Movement in North Africa (1993) :
The village elder, who is close to the religious establishment and knows little of Western culture (from which he refuses technology a priori) cannot be confused with the young science student who is more than able to deliver a criticism of Western values, with which he is familiar and from which he is able to appropriate certain dimensions. The traditionalist will reject television, afraid of the devastating modernism that it will bring; the Islamist calls for increasing the number of sets . . . once he has gained control of the broadcasts.
Most important from our perspective, traditionalists fear the West while Islamists are eager to challenge it. The late mufti of Saudi Arabia, 'Abd al-'Aziz Bin-Baz, exemplified the tremulous old guard. In the summer of 1995, he warned Saudi youth not to travel to the West for vacation because "there is a deadly poison in travelling to the land of the infidels and there are schemes by the enemies of Islam to lure Muslims away from their religion, to create doubts about their beliefs, and to spread sedition among them." He urged the young to spend their summers in the "safety" of the summer resorts in their own country.
Islamists are not completely impervious to the fear of these schemes and lures, but they have ambitions to tame the West, something they do not shy from announcing for the whole world to hear. The most crude simply want to kill Westerners. In a remarkable statement, a Tunisian convicted of setting off bombs in France in 1985-86, killing thirteen, told the judge handling his case, "I do not renounce my fight against the West which assassinated the Prophet Muhammad. . . . We Muslims should kill every last one of you [Westerners]." Others plan to expand Islam to Europe and America, using violence if necessary. An Amsterdam-based imam declared on a Turkish television program, "You must kill those who oppose Islam, the order of Islam or Allah, and His Prophet; hang or slaughter them after tying their hands and feet crosswise . . . as prescribed by the Shari'a." An Algerian terrorist group, the GIA, issued a communiqu? in 1995 that showed the Eiffel Tower exploding and bristled with threats:
We are continuing with all our strength our steps of jihad and military attacks, and this time in the heart of France and its largest cities. . . . It's a pledge that [the French] will have no more sleep and no more leisure and Islam will enter France whether they like it or not.
The more moderate Islamists plan to use non-violent means to transform their host countries into Islamic states. For them, conversion is the key. One leading American Muslim thinker, Isma'il R. Al-Faruqi, put this sentiment rather poetically: "Nothing could be greater than this youthful, vigorous and rich continent [of North America] turning away from its past evil and marching forward under the banner of Allahu Akbar [God is great]."
This contrast not only implies that Islamism threatens the West in a way that the traditional faith does not, but it also suggests why traditional Muslims, who are often the first victims of Islamism, express contempt for the ideology. Thus, Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt's Nobel Prize winner for literature, commented after being stabbed in the neck by an Islamist: "I pray to God to make the police victorious over terrorism and to purify Egypt from this evil, in defense of people, freedom, and Islam." Tujan Faysal, a female member of the Jordanian parliament, calls Islamism "one of the greatest dangers facing our society" and compares it to "a cancer" that "has to be surgically removed." ?evik Bir, one of the key figures in dispatching Turkey's Islamist government in 1997, flatly states that in his country, "Muslim fundamentalism remains public enemy number one." If Muslims feel this way, so can non-Muslims; being anti-Islamism in no way implies being anti-Islam.
Islamism in Practice
Like other radical ideologues, Islamists look to the state as the main vehicle for promoting their program. Indeed, given the impractical nature of their scheme, the levers of the state are critical to the realization of their aims. Toward this end, Islamists often lead political opposition parties (Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia) or have gained significant power (Lebanon, Pakistan, Malaysia). Their tactics are often murderous. In Algeria, an Islamist insurgency has led to some 70,000 deaths since 1992.
And when Islamists do take power, as in Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan, the result is invariably a disaster. Economic decline begins immediately. Iran, where for two decades the standard of living has almost relentlessly declined, offers the most striking example of this. Personal rights are disregarded, as spectacularly shown by the re-establishment of chattel slavery in Sudan. Repression of women is an absolute requirement, a practice most dramatically on display in Afghanistan, where they have been excluded from schools and jobs.
An Islamist state is, almost by definition, a rogue state, not playing by any rules except those of expediency and power, a ruthless institution that causes misery at home and abroad. Islamists in power means that conflicts proliferate, society is militarized, arsenals grow, and terrorism becomes an instrument of state. It is no accident that Iran was engaged in the longest conventional war of the twentieth century (1980-88, against Iraq) and that both Sudan and Afghanistan are in the throes of decades-long civil wars, with no end in sight. Islamists repress moderate Muslims and treat non-Muslims as inferior specimens. Its apologists like to see in Islamism a force for democracy, but this ignores the key pattern that, as Martin Kramer points out, "Islamists are more likely to reach less militant positions because of their exclusion from power. . . . Weakness moderates Islamists." Power has the opposite effect.
Islamism has now been on the ascendant for more than a quarter century. Its many successes should not be understood, however, as evidence that it has widespread support. A reasonable estimate might find 10 percent of Muslims following the Islamist approach. Instead, the power that Islamists wield reflects their status as a highly dedicated, capable and well-organized minority. A little bit like cadres of the Communist Party, they make up for numbers with activism and purpose.
Islamists espouse deep antagonism toward non-Muslims in general, and Jews and Christians in particular. They despise the West both because of its huge cultural influence and because it is a traditional opponent-the old rival, Christendom, in a new guise. Some of them have learned to moderate their views so as not to upset Western audiences, but the disguise is thin and should deceive no one.
-
We begin with 2 good examples of why signing up at www.stratfor.com is a good idea.
==================
THE GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT
Finding Russia's Limit
December 03, 2004 1910 GMT
By George Friedman
Most political crises have little meaning in the countries where they occur, let alone internationally or historically. On rare occasion, a crisis comes along that has profound significance far beyond what appears to be the case.
That is the case with the Ukrainian election. We do not like hyperbole and normally try to understate things, but the crisis over the Ukrainian election, and the manner in which it is resolved, can define the future of Eurasia -- and therefore the world -- for generations. This particular crisis might not be definitive, but the issue it presents about the Ukraine will be.
The issue in the election is relatively simple. There are two factions in Ukraine, defined to a great extent by geography. One faction, concentrated in the western Ukraine, favors closer ties between Ukraine and the West. This faction goes so far as to support Ukrainian membership in NATO. The other faction, concentrated in eastern Ukraine, favors closer ties with Russia and wants relations with the West to develop in the context of a primary
Russo-Ukrainian relationship. For many in this faction there is a desire to create a closer relationship, even some sort of federation, with Russia and Belarus.
An election was held for a new president that was, in effect, a referendum on the direction that Ukraine should go. The pro-Russian faction won the election, but it was immediately charged that it did so by fraud. The United
States and European countries supported the claim of fraud and demanded some unspecified solution that would allow the pro-Western faction to win. Russia argued that the pro-Russian faction had won fairly and demanded that the West
not interfere in Ukraine's internal affairs. It was a fairly typical election, save for the enormous interest that outside powers showed in the outcome.
In order to understand the excitement -- and to go beyond the idea that this is simply about helping democracy grow in Ukraine -- we need to consider the geopolitical implications of each side winning. In order to do this, we need to consider the geopolitical condition of the former Soviet Union. There are these essential questions:
1. Will the disintegration of the Soviet Union be followed by a disintegration of the Russian Federation?
2. To what extent will Russia have secure and defensible borders, and to what extent will it be able to claim a sphere of influence in surrounding countries?
3. To what extent will Western institutions, particularly NATO, incorporate former Soviet republics, and to what extent will Western -- and particularly U.S. -- military power intrude into the former Soviet Union?
A Decade of Western Moves
In the decade since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Western institutions -- especially NATO -- have intruded or shown intentions of intruding deep into the former Soviet empire. Some central European countries already are members of NATO, and others are lining up. Parts of the former
Soviet Union, like the Baltics, also have been included. In a parallel process, the United States has developed strategic military relations with countries in the Caucasus and in the Muslim states to Russia's south. This process has been accelerating since Sept. 11.
From the Russian viewpoint, these intrusions have gone far beyond the understandings Moscow thought Russia had with the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The idea of NATO coming into central Europe would have once seemed farfetched and the idea of it coming into the former Soviet Union preposterous. The Russians have reason to believe they had assurances from both the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations on the limits of Western and U.S. expansion. Whatever these understandings were, they have not been respected.
International relations do not deal in sentimentality, and Russian weakness and the need for economic relations with the West made it impossible for Russia to deter the expansion. On the other side, knowing that Russian weakness was not necessarily permanent, the United States saw an opportunity for redefining Eurasia in such a way that the reemergence of a Russian superpower would become impossible. Essentially, the temptation to expand into power vacuums created by Russian weakness has proven irresistible -- as a simple means of buying insurance against the future.
As deep as the intrusion has been, however, one country has thus far not been seriously on the table -- Ukraine. If Ukraine moves into the Russian sphere of influence, Russia has not in any way reversed its massive decline. However, if Ukraine were to join NATO, Russia would have entered an era in which its decline is not only irreversible, but in which the ability of the Russian Federation to survive becomes highly questionable.
Ukraine stretches from the Carpathian Mountains, at the point where Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania converge, east nearly to the Don River in the Russian heartland, a distance of more than 800 miles along the underbelly of
Belarus and Russia. It constitutes the northern coast of the Black Sea. Moscow is less than 300 miles from the Ukrainian frontier; Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, is less than 200 miles away.
If Ukraine were part of NATO, Russia would become indefensible. This does not mean NATO would have the intention of invading Russia. It would mean that if
NATO's intentions were to change -- and nations must always assume the worst about the intentions of others -- Russia would find itself fighting along nearly the lines of Adolf Hitler's deepest penetration into the country in World War II. And they would find themselves fighting on those lines on the first day of the war. They would lose the ability to defend themselves conventionally.
Looking at the map more closely, there is a solid NATO salient in the west, growing U.S. influence and presence in the Caucasus and a growing U.S. economic presence in Kazakhstan and the Muslim republics in the south. U.S.
troops already are in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Southern Russia to the Caucasus would be accessible to Moscow only through the 300 mile-wide Volgograd corridor. The ability of the Russians to project credible power into the Caucasus dramatically would decline. The Black Sea would be virtually surrounded by U.S. allies and become an American lake. There would be U.S. naval bases in Odessa and the Crimea. Russian ability to influence events in the Caucasus would evaporate.
Under these circumstances, the ability of Russia to resist centrifugal forces inside the federation would simply disintegrate. It would not be a matter of Chechnya alone. Secessionist movements in the Russian Pacific Maritime
Provinces, Karelia and in other regions would surge. Resistance could prove particularly robust in Russia's titular republics such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, which incidentally not only provide a sizable portion of
Russia's oil output, but also sit astride the only infrastructure that pumps Siberian oil to the rest of Russia and the rest of the world. Moscow -- and
President Vladimir Putin -- would find itself presiding over the second wave of disintegration. Serious force projection even inside Russia would become difficult, leaving Russia with a nuclear option and not much else. If Ukraine were to move decisively to the west and join NATO, we do not think it too extreme to raise the question of whether the Russian Federation could survive.
The Stakes in Ukraine
For the Russians, the outcome of the Ukrainian elections is a matter of fundamental national security. Russia can tolerate an independent Ukraine. It can tolerate a Ukraine with close economic ties to the West, but this election has posed a further possibility -- the idea of NATO expanding into Ukraine. The possibility was stated as a serious option and not rejected by the United States or Europe. Therefore, from the Russian viewpoint, the defeat of the pro-NATO opposition party was a matter of national necessity.
The United States and Europe responded exactly as the Russians feared they would. They demanded the election go to the pro-Western faction. This is not read in Moscow as simply the West's love of a fair election. Rather, it is
seen by the Russians as a concerted effort to take control of Ukraine and put Russia in an untenable position.
The central European viewpoint is that the historical opportunity to cripple Russia must not be lost. Countries that have drawn close to the United States -- such as Poland -- understand what is at stake and, after half a century of Soviet domination, want more than anything to cripple Russia. The United States would prefer to see Russia in one piece, but has no objection to crippling Russia, as it might give the United States a freer hand in central Asia to wage its war.
The problem is that in the Ukraine, the United States has encountered the Russian limit. The United States and Europe have pushed and probed at Russia for more than a decade without hitting a point the Russians simply cannot live with. With the Ukrainian election, the United States has found that point. It is not clear if the United States is aware it has hit this limit. The United States has become used to a passive Russia and the move into Ukraine seems to be simply another phase in a process that began in 1989. It
seems not to have a cost.
The Russians do not always respond in the region on which they are focused. We find remarks by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov warning the United States that its path in Afghanistan is unacceptable to the Russians because
it is too soft on the Taliban -- a statement made while visiting India and asking for renewed strategic relations -- to be a warning to the United States that Russia is capable of causing serious problems for the United States in its war on terrorism, to be an example of this. Russia announcing it was introducing a new class of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) is another example. There will be many more.
Putin cannot possibly give on this and he will not. The issue for Russia is not fair elections but national survival. That means the only way to defuse the Ukrainian crisis is for guarantees on the role of NATO in Ukraine. The
problem is that the West has made previous guarantees to the Russians on other NATO expansions that it did not heed. Credibility is not high.
Putin has begun domestically increasing his power. There is an assumption that he is eager to avoid a confrontation with the West, which is certainly true. He helped U.S. President George W. Bush win re-election by making a
number of supporting comments. He expects to be repaid. If the Bush administration presses hard on Ukraine, we suspect this will be the trigger of a fundamental re-evaluation by Russia of its strategy. Which means Washington needs to either back off or move very fast.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
=========================================
U.S., Russia: Setting Up the South Asian Chessboard?
Summary
Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived Dec. 3 on a visit to India, while Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf is making a stopover in Washington to meet with U.S. President George W. Bush. Moscow's moves to counter the possible loss of Ukraine to U.S. influence could affect the situation in southwest Asia and the Indo-Pakistani region. The Cold War chessboard could be resurrected if the United States and Russia seek to engage in a geopolitical game, and the regional actors will have a chance to advance their national interests.
Analysis
Two significant and related visits occurred Dec 3. Russian
President Vladimir Putin began a visit to India, while Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf made a weekend stopover in Washington, D.C., to meet with U.S. President George W. Bush. Musharraf is on his way from South America to Europe.
The two visits are coincidental and would normally be dismissed as such, but these are interesting times: Russia is preparing to respond to what increasingly looks like the alignment of Ukraine with the United States -- something the Kremlin cannot just accept, given Ukraine's geostrategic importance to Russia. One way in which Putin's government will try and counter growing U.S. influence in what used to be Russia's geopolitical sphere of influence is by creating problems for Washington in south and
southwest Asia.
The Kremlin understands the importance the Bush administration attaches to its military and political objectives with respect to Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Moscow will seek to balance U.S. political forays into Ukraine by using its influence on various regional state and non-state actors.
Russia already is involved in the Iranian nuclear program,
helping with the construction of the reactor at Bushehr. Thus far, Moscow has not finalized the deal on the completion of this project because it shares Washington's opinion that Iran should not be able to acquire nuclear weapons. This situation could change, given that Russia is feeling threatened so close to home. It could move Moscow to accelerate efforts to finalize the deal with Iran -- thereby signaling to Washington that it is not without options.
Moving eastward, India is ruled by a Congress-led coalition
government that is not as eager to accommodate the United States as its predecessor, the Bharatiya Janata Party. Instead, the Congress Party traditionally has sought to counter Pakistan's alignment with the United States by forging closer relations with Russia. This is yet another tool at the Russians' disposal -- they can get together with India, Iran, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to back Afghanistan's groups aligned against Islamabad, the
Pashtuns and Afghan President Hamid Karzai (and, by extension, the United States). Aiding these groups -- the ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara, Turkmen and others -- against Karzai and the Pashtuns would thwart the United States' plans for Afghanistan.
The time for this could not be better. U.S. Ambassador to
Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad has worked since late October to accelerate public efforts to co-opt "moderate" Taliban into the political process to strengthen Karzai's -- and, by default, the Pashtuns' -- position. Khalilzad also has been trying to get Pakistan's assistance in this effort -- something for which Islamabad is perfect. It is, however, sure to raise eyebrows with non-Pashtun Afghans and their regional backers in Tehran, Dushanbe, Tashkent and New Delhi -- a development Moscow can take advantage of.
Putin's visit to India might already have the Pakistanis worried, and it is sure to come up during the Musharraf-Bush meeting, where Islamabad will point to the Russian-Indian partnership and try to push for more military and economic assistance from Washington. The peace negotiations between India and Pakistan also have slowed down somewhat, especially on the question of Kashmir. Moreover, both India and Pakistan have in the past couple of weeks engaged in missile tests.
From the U.S. viewpoint, Moscow's movements in south and
southwest Asia could create problems for both the war against al Qaeda-led jihadists and the war in Iraq. This was something that Putin even directly mentioned upon his arrival in New Delhi. He called on the United States to learn from the lessons of the Iraq war in formulating its foreign policy, and added that the differences among the major international players over the Iraq war had adversely affected the war on terrorism.
In response, the United States also has options to offset Russian maneuvers. Washington has the Iraq card, which it can use to forestall Iran's closeness with the Kremlin. Iran will not align with Russia in a bid to advance its nuclear program at the cost of influence in Iraq. As for Afghanistan, the pace of events can continue, as the United States is not faced with an insurgency nor does it have too many troops on the ground. This leaves the Indo-Pak theater, which Washington needs to use toward
dismantling al Qaeda. Enhanced Russian relations with India can slow progress toward that objective.
Russia, shaken by the setback in Ukraine, is adopting an
aggressive political stance toward the United States. This
position not only has ramifications for the world's two leading military powers, but also for the southwest Asian proxies through which Moscow's response and Washington's counter-response will manifest themselves.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
=============
Today's Left Angeles Times, page one
Rivalry Brews in Russia's Backyard
Using its energy resources as leverage, Moscow is angling for influence in its former republics in the face of growing U.S. and NATO presence.
By Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writer
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan ? The Cold War may be over, but U.S. and Russian soldiers are expanding outposts in this mountainous former Soviet republic about 3,200 miles east of NATO headquarters in Brussels and nearly 2,000 miles from Moscow.
The U.S. opened its base three years ago as a launching pad for troops and cargo heading into Afghanistan. Two years later, with the Americans showing no signs of leaving, Russia opened its own base. Now, Moscow is quadrupling the number of its troops, while the American garrison is crawling with bulldozers and trucks, as Washington spends $10 million replacing tents with sturdier quarters.
Officially, Russia has welcomed the U.S. presence as a reflection of a new partnership against a common enemy: Islamic extremists. Washington, in turn, has praised Moscow for enhancing cooperative security efforts in this volatile corner of Central Asia.
But the cooperation is limited largely to words. The current U.S. base commander has never met his Russian counterpart, troops are mostly forbidden to venture outside their respective gateposts, and military flights are scrupulously segregated.
The bases here are symbols of a new rivalry between East and West for influence over the lands of Russia's old empire. More than a decade after it ended, the global Cold War standoff has been supplanted by competition for political and economic hegemony along Russia's vast frontier stretching from the Baltic Sea to China.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a weakened Russia initially turned inward and the West moved rapidly into the faded superpower's sphere of influence. But now, armed with $50-a-barrel oil and a determination to protect its interests, a newly confident Kremlin is reasserting centuries-old claims.
The competition extends far beyond Kyrgyzstan. The U.S. also has military bases in neighboring Uzbekistan and has sent military trainers to Georgia, where Russia has two bases. Moscow's Baltic Sea fleet sails from a sliver of Russian territory between two new North Atlantic Treaty Organization members, Poland and Lithuania; NATO planes now patrol the skies over former Soviet republics to Russia's west.
The Caspian Sea basin, with its more than 200 billion barrels of oil, is seen by both Russia and the U.S. as a zone of strategic interest. Russia is using its energy reserves to maintain influence in the small, newly independent countries of the Baltic and Caucasus regions.
And now, the struggle between pro-Moscow and pro-Western forces is playing out in the disputed presidential election in Ukraine, a territory that for centuries has been central to Russia's sense of itself as a great power.
"As a military man, I see that Russia is surrounded. And I can imagine the reaction of the U.S. if our country were all of a sudden to declare the Gulf of Mexico the zone of our vital interests. We're gritting our teeth," said Russian parliament deputy Viktor Alksnis, a former air force colonel.
"On the other hand, they are mistaken if they think Russia collapsed along with the Soviet Union in the 1990s," he said. "For all the 1,000 years of history of our state, Russia has been like a human heart. It squeezes and unsqueezes. And what we have seen recently is that people who should have looked to Russia as a partner in tackling global problems have instead seen a need to drive the Russian bear back into its den."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 2000, Boris N. Yeltsin handed over the Russian presidency to Vladimir V. Putin, a former KGB agent whose youth and aura of strength gave his demoralized and chaotic country a badly needed shot of confidence.
While Putin consolidated his political power, Russia also gained a windfall from rising global oil prices. Now, backed by its energy wealth, $100 billion in gold and foreign currency reserves (growing lately at a rate of $2 billion a week) and an upgraded arsenal of 7,800 nuclear warheads, Putin has broadly reasserted the power of the Russian state.
He has blocked the sale of Russia's biggest oil companies to Western conglomerates, sharply centralized government authority and driven democratic forces to the political margins.
And in the last year or two, it also has become clearer how Putin aims to position Russia in the world at large. Quietly, Russia is regaining a semblance of its historic empire.
By locking in energy contracts, controlling pipelines and buying up regional utilities, the Kremlin now holds a near-monopoly in much of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. Russian businessmen have bought up factories, steel mills and energy companies. Russian interests that back pro-Moscow candidates now represent a powerful political force in nearly every former Soviet republic.
"Until recently, everyone was concerned that Russia, weakened by its internal crisis, was becoming unpredictable," Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov said this year. "But now a different kind of Russia is feared: a country which has become stronger and more confident after several years of stability and economic growth."
To some in the West, the scenes now playing out in the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Baltics hark back to the czarist empire's conflicts with other European powers, including Peter the Great's parade through the Baltics; periodic invasions of Poland; and the "Great Game" with Britain for control of Central Asia.
"Some people say this is the new Cold War. It is not. It is much closer to 19th century or early 20th century behavior, where you basically had these feverish qualities sweeping Moscow, when they were off to do something thoroughly stupid and dangerous in Europe," said Bruce P. Jackson, a former Pentagon official who now heads the Project on Transitional Democracies, which has lobbied for democratic reform in the former Soviet republics.
But Russian officials say they are intent merely on protecting their country.
"Our main task is to ensure national security, first of all. It is the creation of a belt of security around our country, and a gradual expansion of our coordination with other states on key world issues. We have agreed to new forms of cooperation with NATO," Igor S. Ivanov, secretary of the National Security Council, said in an interview.
"But all of this does not mean that we have overcome our differences," the former foreign minister said. The U.S. and its allies must keep in mind that Russia is strong militarily and economically, that it retains a seat on the United Nations Security Council, and that it has worked for global stability, he said.
Besides investing heavily in upgrading their strategic nuclear arsenal, Russian officials have signaled that they will use it if necessary: a message that Moscow will not be cowed by the threat of NATO airstrikes.
Putin has tried to use the U.S. presence in the region for his own purposes. Recognizing that Islamic militancy on Russia's borders presents a great danger, he joined the Bush administration's war on terrorism. In his most crucial policy move, he used his influence in Central Asia to help the United States set up bases to attack the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Putin saw an opportunity to forge an alliance with President Bush that would enable him to paint Russia's war against Muslim separatists in Chechnya as part of a common fight against terrorism. The strategy appears to have paid off, to a large degree, as Washington has muted its criticism over allegations of torture and civilian slaughter by Russian troops.
Analysts say Russia also has used the U.S. presence in Central Asia to counter an interloper it fears even more: China.
China's 1.3 billion people and rapidly growing economy, sitting next to Russia's depopulated Far East, engender "vague horror scenarios" of Chinese expansion, said Dmitry Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.
Putin has made strides toward cooperation with China, concluding an economic and security pact in 2001 and signing a border agreement in November. Yet Putin also hedged his bets by facilitating a "temporary" U.S. presence, analysts say.
"The idea was, if the U.S. comes, it's a strong counterbalance to China. They don't have deep roots in the region, like China does. The U.S. will leave sooner, rather than later," said Ivan Safranchuk, director of the Moscow office of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information.
Russia may have miscalculated.
Officials at NATO, created in 1949 as a bulwark against the Soviet threat, say Russia is proving a reliable partner by participating in joint military exercises, helping halt illegal weapons shipments and sharing intelligence on terrorism and drug trafficking.
"There is discussion on all the most fundamental issues: theater missile defense, defense reform. We're discussing issues even where there's political sensitivity. We had an open discussion on Ukraine just a few days ago, and it was a frank discussion, a very frank discussion," said James Appathurai, NATO spokesman in Brussels. "Of course we do have differences of opinion on some issues."
But many in the West question whether Russia is committed to transparency in government, democratic elections and a free press. "That is, in a sense, where the true test of the long-term strength of the relationship will be," Appathurai said.
In an open letter to the European Union and NATO in September, more than 100 U.S. and European political leaders and academics, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former U.S. envoy Richard C. Holbrooke and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), warned that Russia was "breaking away from the core democratic values" of the U.S. and Europe.
"President Putin's foreign policy is increasingly marked by a threatening attitude towards Russia's neighbors and Europe's energy security, the return of rhetoric of militarism and empire, and by a refusal to comply with Russia's international treaty obligations," the letter said.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The main lines of new military, economic and political competition in the former Soviet republics, an area the Kremlin calls its "near abroad," form a tight circle around Russia.
Although Russia has reminded the U.S. of its pledge that bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are temporary, the pace of construction belies the idea that the U.S. will be leaving soon.
"It will all depend on what the Kyrgyz government will support," said Col. Bradley R. Pray, commander of the U.S. base in Bishkek. "Basically, we'll have semi-permanent buildings here."
U.S. officials scoff at the notion that Central Asian bases represent anything more than a steppingstone to Afghanistan. "In strategic terms, a base in Kyrgyzstan is a dagger in the heart of nowhere," said a diplomat in the region. "What are we going to use it to attack, if not Afghanistan?"
The Kyrgyz government, which faced a significant incursion by Islamic militants from Uzbekistan in 1999, has welcomed both the Russian and U.S. military. American aid to the country has reached $283 million over the last three years.
Kyrgyzstan's deputy defense minister, Col. Zamir Suerkulov, said the Russian base would provide air support to a multinational force to protect against regional Islamic insurgencies.
But some in the country also feel caught between forces beyond their control.
"When the U.S. base came, many people immediately began to accuse Kyrgyzstan of having betrayed Russia and its allies," said Orozbek Moldaliev, head of the SEDEP Research Center, a political think tank in Bishkek. "Then when the Russian base came in as well, some began to fear that a conflict between the Americans and Russians on the territory of Kyrgyzstan was inevitable."
But, he said, "In truth, it's not just a small profit, it's a huge benefit for us. Kyrgyzstan is milking not only two cows, it is also deriving a profit from China. So for most of us, the Cold War has gone from being 'either-or,' to 'and-and.' "
Earlier this year, thousands of miles to the west, NATO expanded into the three former Soviet Baltic republics ? Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia ? but said it did not intend to open bases there. Russian hard-liners are skeptical.
"NATO keeps talking about 'no intentions, no plans.' But we frankly view NATO as an aggressive organization, which is constantly building up its military capabilities and expanding its sphere of operation towards Russia," said Leonid D. Ivashov, a retired Russian general who formerly oversaw his nation's international military cooperation directorate.
The Caucasus, the Baltics, and Ukraine ? arenas of rivalry between East and West for centuries ? are also regions of economic competition in which Russia is wielding its main weapon: energy.
Governments that don't toe the Kremlin line risk steep price increases or having the tap turned off entirely ? as happened to Belarus this year after a tiff with Russia.
Supplies were abruptly halted to much of Azerbaijan and Lithuania as well. Moscow reportedly was concerned over Azerbaijan's increased military cooperation with the U.S.
Russia's state-owned gas company, Gazprom, has bought into several Lithuanian gas companies. In 2003, the state-controlled electricity monopoly, Unified Energy Systems, bought a controlling stake in the utility in Georgia's capital, Tbilisi. The firm already has expanded its stakes in half of Ukraine's local electricity providers and has its eye on the market throughout Eastern Europe.
UES chief Anatoly B. Chubais has said he dreams of a "liberal Russian empire" stretching across the territory of the former Soviet Union.
Russia canceled much of Armenia's $90-million-plus debt last year in exchange for the transfer of assets in several key factories, scientific research institutes and power facilities that produce the majority of the former Soviet republic's electricity.
The Russian steel giant, Severstal, has bought a controlling stake in Estonia's major oil terminal. And in Latvia, Russia abruptly cut off oil shipments to the port of Ventspils last year in what some Latvian officials complained was an attempt to starve the Baltic nation into selling the facility at a bargain-basement price.
Putin made it clear how important the energy lever was to Russia when he announced last year that it regarded the Soviet-era pipelines that carry its petroleum products to market to be its responsibility ? "even those parts of the system that are beyond Russia's borders."
"This is a huge claim, and frankly a colonial claim ? 'Even though the assets are on your soil, they belong to us,' " said Jackson, the former Pentagon official.
The political turmoil in Ukraine is the latest and largest example of the competition for political influence in the former Soviet republics.
In Georgia, the U.S. is supporting President Mikheil Saakashvili's attempts to regain control over the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia ? territories that Russia has used to maintain a foothold in the southern Caucasus and destabilize a key new transit route for Caspian Sea oil to the West. Russia has gone so far as to offer citizenship to residents of the two regions.
Lithuanian President Rolandas Paksas was removed from office in April, in large part because of his connections to a Russian businessman who contributed $400,000 to his campaign in 2003.
In Ukraine, the Kremlin poured more than $200 million into this fall's presidential election, in part to protect economic ties worth up to $10 billion a year. Putin made two trips to Ukraine before the election to boost the candidacy of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, and huge billboards around Moscow urged Ukrainian expatriates to support Putin's choice. His opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, is a strong advocate of Ukrainian membership in NATO and the European Union.
The reason for the interest is simple. As Vladimir I. Lenin once said, "If we lose Ukraine, we lose our head."
Ukraine, with a population of 48 million, is the second-largest country in Europe and transports 90% of Russian gas to Europe. Many of the decisive battles of European history have been fought on its fields, and a westward-tilting Ukraine could sever Russia's access to its Black Sea Fleet, which is currently under a lease agreement with Kiev.
Moreover, Ukraine is the key to Russia's hope of establishing an economic coalition of former Soviet nations as a front against Europe. Belarus and Kazakhstan are also part of a pact initialed this year.
For both East and West, Ukraine always has been a "pivotal state" in what former U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski describes as the "Grand Chessboard" of geopolitics. That is especially true for Moscow, he said.
"Its very existence as an independent country helps transform Russia," Brzezinski said. "Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire."
The dispute in Ukraine also could have implications for Putin's grip on power. The techniques that have enabled the Kremlin and its allies to determine election outcomes in Chechnya and Belarus are on the brink of failure in Ukraine. Most analysts say that would inevitably encourage Russia's own democracy advocates and threaten Moscow's elite.
The U.S. and its allies are reluctant to talk about Russia as a military adversary. "Nothing we know about Russia, nothing we see and feel in the cooperation that's going on, would suggest we should see Russia as anything but a partner of NATO," an alliance spokesman said.
But military planners, perhaps on both sides, remain prepared for the possibility that one day, a leader more aggressive than Putin will take the reins of a reinvigorated Russia. This is not unimaginable in a country in which polls show that the 1970s, when Leonid I. Brezhnev led the Soviet Union, are regarded as a golden era.
In an address to the Senate Intelligence Committee in February, former CIA Director George J. Tenet listed Russia, along with North Korea and China, as a "pivotal state."
"The Kremlin's increasing assertiveness is partly grounded in a growing confidence in its military capabilities," Tenet said, noting that although the Russian military remained at "a fraction" of its former strength, training rates and defense spending were increasing.
Russia's updated military doctrine makes it clear that the Kremlin, like Washington, is prepared to use preemptive strikes against other nations to protect itself, and also to resort to nuclear force if gravely threatened.
The installation of NATO military infrastructure in the Baltics would prompt Russia to "conduct its policy and military planning based on the principles of self-defense," Defense Minister Ivanov warned in a visit to Washington in April.
Russia's newly beefed-up nuclear weapons also provide the Kremlin with an important political tool.
"Clearly, nuclear weapons are a shield against potential U.S. sanctions, military or otherwise," said Trenin, the Carnegie official who has written a book on the Russian military. "The U.S. will not attack a nuclear power."
Both sides have thought through the logistics, if only theoretically.
In a report prepared by the Rand Corp. for the U.S. Army this year, one scenario explored the possibility of a conflict between Russia and NATO in the Baltics. The report referred to "an assumed decline in Russian-NATO relations in the period after 2007," and weighed how hard it would be for NATO to respond if Russian troops speedily overran the Baltics and dug in to wait for negotiations.
The report, analysts say, measures military capabilities; the chance of Russia invading the Baltics, most agree, is nearly zero.
Russia, for its part, conducted a military exercise in 1999 that envisioned "enemy" forces taking over Kaliningrad, the wedge of Russian territory between Poland and Lithuania that is the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet, and striking nuclear power plants and other targets inside Russia. As part of the exercise, a pair of Tupolev bombers simulated nuclear cruise missile strikes on the U.S. East Coast and Europe.
Nikolai Sokov, senior research associate at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, wrote in a report this year that Russia appeared to be using the possibility of limited nuclear strikes as a deterrent against political and military pressure.
But Russian officials say it is a mistake to confuse Moscow's assertion of legitimate interests with a return of empire-building.
"It is wrong to interpret any of this as Russia's attempts to impose its influence," said Igor S. Ivanov, the National Security Council secretary. "In these countries, all the generations of people, although they are people of different nationalities, lived in one state. They had common culture, common education, they worked together, they developed their economies together. If you please, common thinking was formed. Naturally, these are not some artificial ties, these are real ties that connect us."
At the same time, Russia's reemergence as a player is not to be discounted, they warn.
"Whereas American interests extend thousands of miles, and to many continents, let's accept that Russia has natural interests in the former Soviet states. Let's have a dialogue about this," former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said in an interview.
"I think we have a unique chance to create a new quality of relations with the West. But we don't want to be beggars. We don't want to be treated by the EU or by the United States like we are down; that is something we will not accept," he said. "Russia will not be scared. Russia will not be intimidated."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Coming Monday: Russia is increasingly relying on nuclear weapons to ensure its security.
-
Iraq: Familiarity Breeds Political Hope
December 10, 2004 2300 GMT
Summary
There are signs that certain Islamist Sunni groups that have acted as mediators between Baghdad and Sunni insurgents will be participating in scheduled Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. Apparently, Sunni principals are worried about being left out of the polls, which points to the possibility that a Sunni presence in both the militant and Baghdad camps could weaken the insurgency from within.
Analysis
The main moderate Sunni Islamist group in Iraq, the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), which had called for a delay in the Jan. 30 elections, submitted Dec. 9 a list of 275 candidates. Officials from the group told The Associated Press they wanted to reserve the right to vote if the election is not postponed.
Until the recent coalition assault against Al Fallujah, when it pulled out of the government in protest, the IIP was the only Sunni group represented in Iraq's two post-Hussein transitional administrations -- the now defunct Iraqi Governing Council and the current Interim Iraqi Government (IIG). The IIP, along with the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), also has played a mediator role in negotiations between the IIG and Sunni insurgents.
While the IIP and the AMS are the main Sunni organizations through which the two sides have negotiated, Sunni political power rests primarily with tribal leaders, who are maintaining a foot in both camps -- the militants and Baghdad. By participating in the political process, the IIP leadership would get a good taste of politics, which would percolate throughout the complex Sunni network and possibly weaken support for the insurgency. Initial cooperation between the two sides, even on a limited basis regarding relatively insignificant issues, can pave the way for greater level of cooperation on more thorny matters later on.
Thus far, Baghdad has been employing a combination of tactics in getting the Sunnis to end the insurgency and participate in the political process -- military operations concurrent with behind-the-scenes negotiations. The IIP's decision to participate in the elections likely is a result of Baghdad's recent decision to stop trying to appease the Sunnis. This sent the message that the IIG was going full speed ahead with the electoral process with or without the Sunnis.
The Sunni leadership could have perceived they faced a loss in political influence over the short term and that they could be shut out of the political process for years to come (at least until the next elections). Even if they entered at a later date, the political space already would be filled. The IIP and the AMS could be the first of many boycotting Sunni groups to come in from the cold.
Meanwhile, the continuation of the insurgency suggests that a schism could be forming among the Sunni tribal sheikhs who support the militants. Participation in democratic politics tends to have a moderating effect on radical groups. An example of this is the metamorphosis of Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl-ur-Rehman (JUI-F), the largest component of the Mutahiddah Majlis-i-Amal, a moderate Islamist alliance in Pakistan that was a major supporter of the Taliban and the Kashmiri militants. Winning control of two Pakistani provinces and becoming the largest opposition bloc in the Parliament, JUI-F has moderated its stance on both the Taliban and Kashmiri militants and is cutting deals with President Gen. Pervez Musharraf on more significant matters, such as Musharraf's dual portfolio.
By participating in the elections, the IIP would likely gain some positions within the new government and, as a result, a stake in the emerging political system. This would serve as a lesson to other Sunni leaders and insurgents that there are tangible benefits to be had from a participatory democracy. First, though, Sunnis must have confidence in the system. It is not just a stake that matters but the belief that the system can be a vehicle to achieve political goals. This is exactly what the jihadist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi alluded to months ago in his message to Osama bin Laden: Once this political process is set in motion, al-Zarqawi said, they will have to die fighting in Iraq or pack up and take their fight elsewhere.
There always will be Sunnis who are not willing to compromise. If enough can be brought into the system, however, the democratic process can move forward and the violence can be gradually contained -- a prospect not readily apparent in the current atmosphere.
-
America's counterproductive war on drugs is one of my biggest gripes with the government. Christopher Hitchens writes here about our efforts to export this failed policy, shooting ourselves in the foot in Afghanistan in the process.
Let the Afghan Poppies Bloom
How the drug war is undermining the war on terrorism.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Dec. 13, 2004, at 11:47 AM PT
Why should it be that the intervention in Afghanistan has apparently gone so much better than anyone would have predicted, while the intervention in Iraq has proved to be so much more arduous? There are a number of thinkable answers to this question. Afghanistan had already had the experience of theocracy and civil war, to the point where its citizenry was sickened and inured. The Taliban had only been in power for a fairly short time, while the Iraqi Baath Party had had more than three decades in which to debauch the country's treasury and accustom its citizens to fearful obedience. Most of Afghanistan's neighbors generally want the Karzai government to succeed, or at least to see some version of stability, while some of Iraq's neighbors short-sightedly believe that they might benefit from a discrediting of the Allawi government in Baghdad.
To these contrasting hypotheses one might add another variable, this time on the other side of the ledger. Coalition forces in Iraq do not come roaring into towns and villages to tell the local people to stop producing or consuming oil products. Nor do they roam the country blowing up oil-wells or drills. Picture how the situation in Iraq might be different if they did. Now picture something that you do not have to imagine?a determined effort by the liberators of Afghanistan to force the country back into warlordism and anarchy. Every day, soldiers acting in our name are burning or spraying Afghanistan's only viable crop.
Like many stories in the mainstream media, this dramatic piece of news can appear on the front page only if it is printed upside down. Thus we learned from the New York Times of Dec. 11, in a front-page article bylined by Eric Schmitt, that a secret "assessment" by Lt. Gen. David Barno, the senior American officer in the country, has concluded that poppy cultivation is the main threat to the creation of a decent society, and the main avenue by which former Taliban and al-Qaida forces can hope to return from their crushing defeat.
Any attentive reading of the report, however, shows that it is the campaign against poppy cultivation that constitutes the threat. This point was underlined, perhaps coincidentally, by an op-ed essay in the same edition of the Times, written by Afghanistan's tireless and talented finance minister, Ashraf Ghani. "Today," he wrote, "many Afghans believe that it is not drugs, but an ill-conceived war on drugs that threatens their economy and nascent democracy" (my italics). Ghani went on to point out that a third of Afghanistan's GDP depends on the crop and that "destroying that trade without offering our farmers a genuine alternative livelihood has the potential to undo the embryonic economic gains of the past three years." As he further emphasized, these highly undesirable consequences arise from the control of the trade by a "mafia" with links to Islamic nihilism.
Ghani's meticulous analysis promptly broke down with a non-sequitur: a call for more money and force to be spent in combating a "mafia" that, as he has already admitted, commands a decisive part of the rural economy. Nowhere is it even asked what would happen if the trade was legalized and taxed: a measure that would immediately remove it from mafia control and immediately enrich a vast number of Afghan cultivators who currently exist on the margin of survival.
Reporting from Afghanistan a few months ago (Vanity Fair, November 2004) I pointed out a few obvious facts. Twenty and more years ago, the country's main export was grapes and raisins. It was a vineyard culture. But many if not most of those vines have been dried up or cut down, or even uprooted and burned for firewood, in the course of the hideous depredations of the past decades. An Afghan who was optimistic enough to plant a vine today could expect to wait five years before seeing any return for it, whereas a quick planting of poppies will see pods flourishing in six months. What would you do, if your family or your village were on a knife-edge? The American officers I met, tasked with repressing this cultivation, were to a man convinced that they were wasting their time and abusing the welcome they had at first received in the countryside. It doesn't take much intelligence to understand the history of Prohibition, or to know that American consumer demand is strong enough to overcome any attempt to inhibit supply. In any case, we know this already from dire experience in Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico.
There is the further point that opium is good for us. Painkillers and anesthetics have to come from somewhere, and we have an arrangement with Turkey to grow and refine the stuff that we need. Why Turkey, an already over-indulged client state? Isn't it time to give the struggling Afghans a share of the business? We could simultaneously ensure a boost for Afghan agriculture, remove an essential commodity from terrorist and warlord control, and guarantee a steady supply of analgesics that would be free of impurities or additives.
In order to comprehend this point, there is no need to know much about Afghanistan. Do you know anyone who really believes in the "war on drugs" as it is supposedly waged in the United States? It is widely understood to be the main index of pointless and costly and unjust incarceration, a huge source of corruption in police departments, and a cause of crime in its own right as well as a source of tainted and "cut" narcotics. And that is before you even consider absurdities and cruelties like the denial of medical marijuana, or the diversion of personnel and resources from the war against more threatening gangsters. Our entire state policy, at home and abroad, is devoted not to stopping a trade that actually grows every year, but rather to ensuring that all its profitable means of production, distribution, and exchange remain the fiefdom of criminal elements. We consciously deny ourselves access to properly refined and labeled products and to the vast revenue that could accrue to the Treasury instead of to the mobsters here and overseas.
This demented legacy of the Nixon administration will have to be abandoned sooner or later, and I believe that the threatened sacrifice of Afghanistan to the dogma may be the "tipping point." There are numerous policy planners, prison officials, policemen, elected politicians, and scientific specialists, on the intelligent Right as well as the intelligent Left, who have concluded that decriminalization is an urgent necessity. It's hard to think of any other single reform that could make more difference in more areas. The idea offers a way out of the current sterile red state/blue state dichotomy. It ought to be the next big thing.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2110987/
-
Saudi Arabia Bombings: New Direction for Al Qaeda?
Summary
At least two major explosions shook the Saudi capital of Riyadh on Dec. 29, the location of the blasts suggesting that the targets were not Westerners but the al Saud regime itself. If this is the case, then al Qaeda jihadists in the kingdom have activated a major shift in their operations -- in keeping with threats announced by Osama bin Laden in his Dec. 16 message.
Analysis
Two separate bombs exploded near the Saudi Ministry of Interior (MOI)
building in Riyadh on Dec. 29, and at least one militant reportedly was
killed and two were arrested.
Although the facts are unclear at this point -- gunbattles continue to rage
in the vicinity -- Saudi diplomatic sources have told Stratfor that Islamist
militants launched a coordinated attack against the MOI building. The
attackers, according to these sources, apparently planned to blast the MOI building with two suicide car bombs, aiming to collapse the structure, which is in the form of an upside-down pyramid.
However, the sources said that Saudi government security forces managed to intercept some of the militants before they reached the ministry. During the firefight, the drivers of the car bombs detonated their vehicles as security forces began to surround them.
The sources said that several teams of attackers approached the MOI building armed with small arms, and ambushed the security forces there. Currently, the Saudi sources said, Saudi forces are attempting to encircle the area in the effort to eliminate as many attackers as possible. However, according to the sources, the attackers do not appear to be retreating, but are attempting to break through into the MOI building.
The fact that the blasts occurred near the MOI building -- which is close to
other government buildings, including the Ministry of Defense and Air
Aviation, the Ministry of Communication and Riyadh Palace -- suggests that the attack most likely was intended against the regime and not against a Western target.
If this is the case, then this represents a massive operational shift on the
part of al Qaeda, less than two weeks after al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden threatened to stage attacks against the al Saud regime unless it stepped down.
Other than the attack against the Saudi special forces counterterrorism
agency in April by a group calling itself the Brigades of the Two Holy
Mosques, the al Qaeda Organization in the Arabian Peninsula (the jihadist
network's chapter in the kingdom) has refrained from attacking the regime directly.
That the attack took place after hours, at 8:35 p.m. local time, indicates
that the jihadists continue to be cautious about causing Muslim casualties
and that they designed this attack as a warning shot to show that al Qaeda can make good on its threat -- and relatively quickly.
In any case, al Qaeda has shifted gears in Saudi Arabia by going after the al Saud regime directly. This does not mean that the network will not attack Western targets. Instead, it has upped the ante.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
-
THE GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT
Facing Realities in Iraq
December 30, 2004 1840 GMT
By George Friedman
On May 17, 2004, Stratfor published a piece entitled "Iraq: New Strategies." In a rare moment of advocacy ( http://www.stratfor.biz/Story.neo?storyId=232011 ),
we argued that the war in Iraq had evolved to a point where the United States was unlikely to be able to suppress the insurgency.
We argued then that, "The United States must begin by recognizing that it
cannot possibly pacify Iraq with the force available or, for that matter,
with a larger military force. It can continue to patrol, it can continue to
question people, it can continue to take casualties. However, it can never
permanently defeat the guerrilla forces in the Sunni triangle using this
strategy. It certainly cannot displace the power and authority of the Shiite
leadership in the south. Urban warfare and counterinsurgency in the Iraqi
environment cannot be successful."
We did not and do not agree with the view that the invasion of Iraq was a
mistake. It had a clear strategic purpose that it achieved: reshaping the
behavior of surrounding regimes, particularly of the Saudis. This helped
disrupt the al Qaeda network sufficiently that it has been unable to mount
follow-on attacks in the United States and has shifted its attention to the
Islamic world, primarily to the Saudis. None of this would have happened
without the invasion of Iraq.
As frequently happens in warfare, the primary strategic purpose of the war has been forgotten by the Bush administration. Mission creep, the nightmare of all military planners, has taken place. The United States has shifted its focus from coercing neighboring countries into collaborating with the United States against al Qaeda, to building democracy in Iraq. As we put it in May: "The United States must recall its original mission, which was to occupy Iraq in order to prosecute the war against al Qaeda. If that mission is remembered, and the mission creep of reshaping Iraq forgotten, some obvious strategic solutions re-emerge. The first, and most important, is that the United States has no national interest in the nature of Iraqi government or society. Except for not supporting al Qaeda, Iraq's government does not matter."
Most comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam are superficial and some are absurd, but one lesson is entirely relevant to Iraq. In Vietnam, the United States attempted to simultaneously re-engineer Vietnamese society and wage a counterinsurgency campaign. That proved impossible. The United States is attempting to do precisely that again in Iraq. It will fail again for the same reason: The goals are inherently contradictory.
Creating democracy in Iraq requires that democratic institutions be created. That is an abstract, bloodless way of putting it. The reality is that Iraqis must be recruited to serve in these institutions, from the army and police to social services. Obviously, these people become targets for the guerrillas and the level of intimidation is massive. These officials -- caught be tween the power of U.S. forces and the guerrillas -- are hardly in a position to engage in nation building. They are happy to survive, if they choose to remain at their posts.
Even this is not the central problem. In order to build these institutions,
Iraqis will have to be recruited. It is impossible to distinguish between
Iraqis committed to the American project, Iraqis who are opportunists and
Iraqis who are jihadists sent by guerrilla intelligence services to penetrate
the new institutions. Corruption aside, every one of the institutions is full
of jihadist agents, who are there to spy and disrupt.
This has a direct military consequence. The goal of the Untied States in
Vietnam was, and now in Iraq is, to shift the war-fighting burden -- in this
case from U.S. forces to the Iraqis. This can never happen. The Iraqi army, like the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, is filled with guerrilla
operatives. If the United States mounts joint operations with the Iraqis, the guerrillas will know about it during the planning stages. If the United
States fights alone, it will be more effective, but the Iraqi army will never
develop. For the United States, it is a question of heads you win, tails I
lose.
The United States cannot win the intelligence war on the ground level. Its
operations to penetrate the guerrillas depend on Iraqis working with the
United States and these operations will be quickly compromised. The
guerrillas on the other hand cannot be rooted out of the Iraqi military and
intelligence organs because they cannot be distinguished from other Iraqis. Some will be captured. Many might be captured. But all of them cannot be captured and therefore no effective allied force can be created in Iraq. This was the center of gravity of the problem in Vietnam, the problem that destroyed Vietnamization. It is the center of gravity of the problem in Iraq.
Missed Opportunities
There were two points where the problem could have been solved. Had the United States acted vigorously in May and June 2003, there is a chance that the guerrilla force would have been so disrupted it could never have been born. U.S. intelligence, however, failed to recognize the guerrilla threat and Donald Rumsfeld in particular was slow to react. By the summer of 2003, the situation was out of hand.
There was a second point where effective action might have been fruitful,
which was in the period after the Ramadan offensive of October-November 2003, when Saddam Hussein was captured, and the beginning of the April 2004 offensives in Al Fallujah and the Muqtada al-Sadr rising. Those four months were wasted in diffused action in several areas, rather than in a concerted effort to turn Sunni elders against the guerrillas.
It is interesting to note that the attempt to break the Sunni guerrillas in a
systematic way did not begin until November 2004, with the attack against Al Fallujah and an attempt to co-opt the Sunni elders. For a while it looked like it might just work. It didn't. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's jihadists had become too strong and too well organized. Whatever inroads were made among the Sunni elders was blocked by al-Zarqawi's ability to carry out reprisals. The Sunnis were locked into place.
The U.S. military is now carrying out an impossible mission. It is trying to
suppress a well-organized guerrilla force using primarily U.S. troops whose intelligence about the enemy is severely limited by language and cultural barriers that cannot be solved by recruiting Iraqis to serve as intelligence aides. The United States either operates blind or compromises its security.
Unless the Iraqi guerrillas are not only throwing all of their strength into
this offensive, but also using up their strength in a non-renewable fashion,
the Jan. 30 elections will not be the end of the guerrilla war. There will be
a lull in guerrilla operations -- guerrillas have to rest, recruit and
resupply like anyone else -- but after a few months, another offensive will
be launched. There is, therefore, no possibility that the Sunni guerrilla
movement will be suppressed unless there is a dramatic change in the
political landscape of the Sunni community.
There is one bit of good fortune that arises out of another of Rumsfeld's
failures. His failure to listen to Gen. Erik Shinseki's warnings about the
size of the force that would be needed in Iraq after the war meant that the U.S. force structure was never expanded appropriately. In most instances, this is a terrible failing. However, in this case, it has an unexpectedly positive consequence. We do not doubt for a moment that Rumsfeld would throw in more forces if he had them. They would not solve the problem in any way and would add additional targets for the guerrillas. But Rumsfeld doesn't have the needed forces, so he can't send them in.
Facing the Facts
The issue facing the Bush administration is simple. It can continue to fight
the war as it has, hoping that a miracle will bring successes in 2005 that
didn't happen in 2004. Alternatively, it can accept the reality that the
guerrilla force is now self-sustaining and sufficiently large not to flicker
out and face the fact that a U.S. conventional force of less than 150,000 is
not likely to suppress the guerrillas. More to the point, it can recognize
these facts:
1. The United States cannot re-engineer Iraq because the guerrillas will
infiltrate every institution it creates.
2. That the United States by itself lacks the intelligence capabilities to
fight an effective counterinsurgency.
3. That exposing U.S. forces to security responsibilities in this environment generates casualties without bringing the United States closer to the goal.
4. That the strain on the U.S. force is undermining its ability to react to
opportunities and threats in the rest of the region.
And that, therefore, this phase of the Iraq campaign must be halted as soon as possible.
This does not mean strategic defeat -- unless the strategic goal is the
current inflated one of creating a democratic Iraq. Under the original
strategic goal of changing the behavior of other countries in the region, the United States has already obtained strategic success. Indeed, to the extent that the United States is being drained and exhausted in Iraq, the strategic goal is actually being undermined.
We assert two principles:
1. The internal governance -- or non-governance -- of Iraq is neither a
fundamental American national interest nor is it something that can be shaped by the United States even if it were a national interest.
2. The United States does require a major presence in Iraq because of that country's strategic position in the region.
It is altogether possible for the United States to accept the first principle
yet pursue the second. The geography of Iraq -- the distribution of the
population -- is such that the United States can maintain a major presence in Iraq without, for the most part, being based in the populated regions and therefore without being responsible for the security of Iraq -- let alone responsible its form of government.
The withdrawal of U.S. forces west and south of the Euphrates and in an arc north to the Turkish border and into Kurdistan would provide the United States with the same leverage in the region, without the unsustainable cost of the guerrilla war. The Saudis, Syrians and Iranians would still have U.S. forces on their borders, this time not diluted by a hopeless pacification program.
Something like this will have to happen. After the January elections, there
will be a Shiite government in Baghdad. There will be, in all likelihood,
civil war between Sunnis and Shia. The United States cannot stop it and
cannot be trapped in the middle of it. It needs to withdraw.
Certainly, it would have been nice for the United States if it had been able
to dominate Iraq thoroughly. Somewhere between "the U.S. blew it" and "there was never a chance" that possibility is gone. It would have been nice if the United States had never tried to control the situation, because now the U.S. is going to have to accept a defeat, which will destabilize the region psychologically for a while. But what is is, and the facts speak for themselves.
We are not Walter Cronkite, and we are not saying that the war is lost. The war is with the jihadists around the world; Iraq was just one campaign, and the occupation of the Sunnis was just one phase of that campaign. That phase has been lost. The administration has allowed that phase to become the war as a whole in the public mind. That was a very bad move, but the administration is just going to have to bite the bullet and do the hard, painful and embarrassing work of cutting losses and getting on with the war.
If Bush has trouble doing this, he should conjure up Lyndon Johnson's ghost, wandering restlessly in the White House, and imagine how Johnson would have been remembered if he had told Robert McNamara to get lost in 1966.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
-
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The End of the Affair
This was the year when the civilized world's romance with terrorists ended.
WSJ
Friday, December 31, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
It is fitting that this was the year Yasser Arafat died. When the history of the war on terror is written, 2004 will be remembered as the moment when the romance of the terrorist finally faded away.
Arafat was the romantic terrorist par excellence, the man who was given the podium of the U.N. General Assembly in 1974, just months after Palestinian gunmen had murdered 26 Israeli schoolchildren in Ma'alot. For the next three decades, an ever-broadening patch of the West came to see Arafat and his associates as militants, not terrorists, worthy of Nobel Prizes and White House overnights and states to call their own.
Arafat's rejection of Israel's partition offer at the 2000 Camp David talks should have finished this romance, but it did not. Nor, really, did the attacks of September 11. For some people, terrorism directed against Israel or the U.S. will always have some justification, because Israel and the U.S. are ipso facto the world's original aggressors.
But what justification can be offered the killer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose sin was to have made a short movie about the mistreatment of women in Islamic societies? And where is the romance in slaughtering 500 children in Beslan, or 200 commuters in Madrid? Perhaps the latter atrocity could be explained as payback for Spain's support of the Bush Administration in Iraq. But then what about the kidnapping and execution of Margaret Hassan, the Irish-born Iraqi citizen who devoted her life to humanitarian relief and opposed the prewar sanctions as well as the invasion itself? Islamists, it turns out, issue no exemptions for the bien-pensant when drawing up their target lists.
In 2004, then, the world finally awoke to the fact that the only line worth taking against terrorists is a hard one, and this was reflected in political trends. In the U.S. and Australia, George W. Bush and John Howard decisively won contests framed as referendums on their handling of the war on terror. In Britain, Tony Blair survived every effort by the antiwar lobby to bring him down and looks set to win a third term in 2005. In France, the most popular politician today is Nicolas Sarkozy, who is outspokenly pro-American and pro-Israel. Only Spain proved an exception, and that now looks like the result of clumsy post-attack news management by the former conservative government, which might otherwise have held on to power.
All this has had knock-on effects, particularly in the Arab world. While al-Jazeera continues to propagandize on behalf of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, another line of Arab commentators began this year to ask some previously taboo questions. "It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims," Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the manager of the Al-Arabiya news channel, wrote last summer. "Does all this tell us something about ourselves, our societies and our culture?"
Last week, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas kicked off his presidential campaign by saying "the use of weapons is unacceptable because it has a negative impact on our image." It's an instructive choice of words: Mr. Abbas does not reject terrorism because it is immoral, but because it no longer sells the cause abroad. Still, even in Ramallah the message is getting through that terrorism is a self-defeating course of action. The romance, in other words, is gone.
There is another way in which 2004 witnessed the fading of the romance, and this has to do with the myth of terrorist invincibility. In March, Israel killed Hamas spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin, a measure immediately condemned as certain to incite Palestinians to new heights of retributive fury. Instead, Israel experienced the first sustained lull in suicide attacks since the intifada began, demonstrating that countries that take tough action against terrorism get results. The same went in Colombia under the leadership of President Alvaro Uribe, who rejected negotiations with the narco-terrorist FARC in favor of a military strategy, bringing terrorist incidents down to about 800 in 2004 from a high of 1,642 in 2002.
Now the lesson is being relearned by the Bush Administration as it fights battles from which it flinched in April for fear of provoking a wider Sunni uprising. In fact, the Administration's most provocative act in 2004 was in not taking action then, creating a perception of American irresolution that emboldened Sunni and Shia insurgents throughout the summer. Notably, when Fallujah was finally retaken in November, the only voice to be heard from the proverbial Arab street was that of Zarqawi himself. "You have let us down in the darkest circumstances," he berated Muslim clerics for their failure to raise an army to his cause. Both their failure and his remonstrance are a good indication that, in Iraq, things are gradually turning America's way.
Elsewhere in the world, the year's news in the war on terror tended to be good. A.Q. Khan's nuclear-proliferation network was rolled up. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is disbanding itself as democracy takes root. There will be more genuinely democratic elections in the Arab world next month than there have been in the past 40 years. Even the U.N. managed to propose (if not yet adopt) a commonsense definition of terrorism. The main worry is Iran, which continues to bankroll Hezbollah and harbor al Qaeda while moving toward a nuclear bomb. Here the Administration's failure to announce, much less conduct, a coherent policy is leading toward crisis.
In "Armageddon," British historian Max Hastings reminds us that the closing months of World War II were by far its bloodiest. Surely in this war there will be more awful surprises, and possibly reverses. But in 2004, it became clear that the civilized world would not soon again succumb to the fatal attractions of terror.
-
Sunday, December 26, 2004; Page B01
Achieving Real Victory Could Take Decades
By David Ignatius
Gen. John Abizaid probably commands the most potent military force in history. The troops of his Central Command are arrayed across the jagged crescent of the Middle East, from Egypt to Pakistan, in an overwhelming projection of U.S. power. He travels with his own mini-government: a top State Department officer to manage diplomacy; a senior CIA officer to oversee intelligence; a retinue of generals and admirals to supervise operations and logistics. If there is a modern Imperium Americanum, Abizaid is its field general.
I traveled this month with Abizaid as he visited Iraq and other areas of his command. Over several days, I heard him discuss his strategy for what he calls the "Long War" to contain Islamic extremism in Centcom's turbulent theater of operations. We talked about the current front in Iraq, and the longer-term process of change in the Middle East, which Abizaid views as the ultimate strategic challenge.
"We control the air, the sea and the ground militarily," Abizaid told one audience, and in conventional terms, he's unquestionably right. From its headquarters near the huge new U.S. airbase in Qatar, Centcom's military reach stretches in every direction: To the west, the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet has its base in Bahrain; to the north, the aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman and its task force are steaming on patrol in the Persian Gulf; to the east, more than 17,000 troops are working to stabilize postwar Afghanistan; to the south, about 1,000 troops are keeping a lid on the Horn of Africa. And to the northwest lies the bloody battlefield of Iraq, where nearly 150,000 of Abizaid's soldiers are fighting a determined insurgency.
For all of America's military might, the Long War that has begun in the Middle East poses some tough strategic questions. What is the nature of the enemy? If the United States is so powerful, why is it having such difficulty in Iraq? What will victory look like, in Iraq and elsewhere in the Islamic world? And how long will the conflict take?
The costs of war came home for America this past week. On Monday, President Bush conceded that the Iraq insurgents "are having an effect," and that U.S. efforts to train Iraqi security forces have had only "mixed" success. On Tuesday, a suicide bomber savaged a mess hall in Mosul in the deadliest single attack since the war began 21 months ago. On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried to fend off calls for his resignation because of setbacks in Iraq.
It was a week that focused attention on gut-level issues, reminiscent of the Vietnam War more than 30 years ago: Why are we in Iraq? What kind of conflict is the United States fighting there? How can we win it? Abizaid offers the best answers to these questions I've heard from any official in the U.S. government. In addition to being the military's top commander in the Middle East, he has an intellectual and emotional feel for the region. He's of Arab ancestry -- his forebears came to the United States from Lebanon in the 1870s -- and he learned to speak Arabic during a stint in Jordan 25 years ago. Like many of the best U.S. Army officers for generations, he's a well-read man who analyzes contemporary issues against the background of history.
Abizaid believes that the Long War is only in its early stages. Victory will be hard to measure, he says, because the enemy won't wave a white flag and surrender one day. Success will instead be an incremental process of modernization of the Islamic world, which will gradually find its own accommodation with the global economy and open political systems.
America's enemies in this Long War, he argues, are what he calls "Salafist jihadists." That's his term for the Muslim fundamentalists who use violent tactics to try to re-create what they imagine was the pure and perfect Islamic government of the era of the prophet Muhammad, who is sometimes called the "Salaf." Osama bin Laden is the best known of the Salafist extremists, but Abizaid argues that the movement is much broader and more diffuse than al Qaeda. It's a loose network of like-minded individuals who use 21st century-technology to spread their vision of a 7th-century paradise.
Salafist preachers see themselves as part of a vanguard whose mission is to radicalize other Muslims to overthrow their leaders. Abizaid likens them to Lenin, Trotsky and the other Bolshevik leaders. During a gathering of foreign-policy experts in Washington last October, he posed a haunting question: What would you have done in 1890 if you had known the ruin this Bolshevik vanguard would bring? At another point, he urged the audience to think of today's Islamic world, wracked by waves of violence, as akin to Europe in the revolutionary year of 1848. The Arab world's spasms of anarchy and terror, like those in Europe 150 years ago, are part of a process of social change -- in which an old order is crumbling, and a new one is struggling to be born.
Abizaid's historical analogies are helpful because they stretch our thinking. People tend to see current problems as unique and overwhelming, and that has been especially true for America in the traumatic years since Sept. 11, 2001. But through the long lens of history, contemporary problems come into better focus. The wealthy Saudi jihadist bin Laden begins to seem a bit like 19th-century anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin, who similarly wanted to use revolutionary violence to purge what he viewed as a corrupt order. On this broad canvas of historical change, the time horizon isn't years, but decades.
Abizaid didn't draw for me any specific lessons from this history, but several conclusions seem obvious: If the United States is fighting an ideological vanguard similar to the Bolsheviks -- whose leaders will never surrender or negotiate -- then it will have to capture or kill them. That suggests a dirty, drawn-out conflict in which each side tests the other's will and staying power. It's not the sort of war that democracies are usually good at fighting, but among Abizaid's team of advisers, you hear the same phrase repeated over and over: "A lot of bad guys are going to have to die."
Yet because the battlefield is society itself, the United States cannot think of the struggle in purely military terms. Centcom's 1,000 troops who are digging wells and performing other reconstruction tasks in the Horn of Africa may be a better model for success than the 150,000 soldiers hunkered down in Iraq. And because it is a war of transformation, comparable to Europe's hundred-year process of modernization in the 19th century, the United States must above all be patient.
Abizaid argues that this enemy is especially dangerous because it has fused an atavistic Salafist ideology with the most modern tools of technology. "The enemy has a virtual connectivity we haven't seen before with guerrilla groups," he says. "They use the Internet to pass along techniques, tactics, procedures, advice." He believes the jihadists have been clever in using the global media -- both to spread their message among followers and to intimidate adversaries. Indeed, the media are their best weapon.
The Salafist vanguard seeks victory through what Abizaid calls "weapons of mass effect" -- the 9/11 attacks, the suicide bombings in Baghdad, the gruesome beheadings in Fallujah -- which seek to destabilize the United States and its allies through the media. "We have nothing to fear from this enemy other than its ability to create panic," he argues. "This enemy is like water -- it seeks an unguarded path. They'll go for the place they can use a weapon of mass effect -- and gain a media victory."
Given the importance of the media front, Abizaid is frustrated that Arab journalists haven't provided a more critical picture of life in places where Islamic insurgents have gained control, such as Fallujah. He's convinced that if ordinary Arabs could see the cruelty and repression of these Taliban-style jihadists, they would reject them. Indeed, at several stops during our trip, he urged his listeners to push Arab media to report more about the insurgents' brutal tactics.
"They are the most despicable enemy I've ever seen," he told European and Arab leaders who gathered in Bahrain to talk about Persian Gulf security. "They operate from mosques, they behead people, they have killed far more Muslims than non-Muslims."
Abizaid believes the winning strategy, in Iraq and across the Islamic world, is to isolate the Salafist vanguard from ordinary Muslims who want the better, freer life that prosperity and connectedness can bring. That means breaching the gaps between rich nations and poor ones, and preventing terrorists from establishing bases of operations, in the way bin Laden did in Afghanistan. "The clear military lesson of Afghanistan is that we cannot allow the enemy to establish a safe haven anywhere," he says.
One of Abizaid's top deputies, Vice Adm. David Nichols, summarizes the nature of the Salafist threat. Nichols, who commands the 5th Fleet, asserts that the enemy is mounting "a cultural, not just a physical attack." For enemy leaders, the clash of civilizations is the organizing principle of life, Nichols argues. They tell Muslims that there are only two camps, and that "peaceful coexistence is not possible." The goal of America and its allies, says Nichols, must be to convince the average Muslim that the jihadists are wrong. It's not "us" vs. "them," but a connected world in which everyone will gain by isolating and destroying the extremist fringe.
This strategy of isolating the religious extremists has been embraced by Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi -- to the point of making contact with Baathists who were part of Saddam Hussein's regime and are now on the fringes of the insurgency. It reflects a judgment by Allawi -- one that Abizaid would certainly share -- that the Baathists in the long run will make an accommodation with America and the modern world. The Salafist extremists, in contrast, will never do so.
My travels with Abizaid ended with a stop in Mosul, at the same camp hit by a suicide bomber last week. Mosul is a case study in what America is facing in Iraq, and in the Long War. Over the past year, the city has gone from a model of stability to a new Fallujah, where insurgents have used terror tactics to halt collaboration with U.S. forces. The measure of success here will be the return of normal life. "It won't ever be over completely, where you wake up one morning and the enemy has surrendered," says Abizaid. "But one day you'll wake up and there will be more food, more security, more stability."
That's what victory would look like in Abizaid's Long War, too. In the broad arc of the world where Centcom operates, life would feel modern, connected, free, relaxed, ordinary. It would feel like a hand that is no longer clenched in a fist. It's a fight where the Muslims masses would win, without the United States losing. But this past week, those images of connectedness and success seemed a long, long way off.
-
U.S., Iran: Coming to Terms With Iraq and the Future?
Summary
There have been a number of statements from Washington, Tehran and Baghdad suggesting that the Bush administration, the clerical regime in Iran and the power brokers in Iraq's Shiite majority community have reached an understanding on the future of Iraq. Despite the Iranian nuclear issue -- which Washington does not deem an immediate threat -- it would appear that dealings on Iraq could pave the way for enhanced U.S.-Iranian bilateral relations.
Analysis
Iranian government spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh said Jan. 3 that Tehran had not yet decided on a third party to mediate in unspecified negotiations between Iran and the United States. The statement comes the day after U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said that a future Iraqi government dominated by the Shia and influenced by Iran will not be a threat to the United States or its interests. On the same day in Baghdad, the main Shiite-dominated electoral coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, said that if it came to power in the Jan. 30 elections, it would not be calling for the immediate withdrawal of U.S.-led coalition forces from the country.
These three statements along with other related developments suggest that Washington and Tehran have reached an understanding on how Iraq needs to be stabilized.
The likely deal comes close on the heels of the temporary end of the nuclear standoff involving Iran in November 2004. Iran decided to comply with the demands of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog -- at least for the time being -- in order to achieve its goal of gaining influence over Iraq through the installation of a Shiite-dominated Iraqi regime in the Jan. 30 polls.
Conversely, the United States also understands that Iraq's demographics -- particularly its 60-65 percent Shiite majority -- and the continuing insurgency leave little choice but to engage Iran on the issue of Iraq. Another reason Washington has come back to the Iranian/Shiite option is that at its current state of development the clerical regime's nuclear program does not constitute an immediate threat, and it can always contain Iran through the European Union. The United States does not expect Iran to pose a real nuclear threat anytime soon. Washington understands that Tehran currently is using the threat as a means of achieving other goals. Tehran manipulated the nuclear threat to get the United States to the table to talk about Iraq -- a goal that has been accomplished. Iran can return to the nuclear issue at a later date, and the Bush administration seems confident that it will have other ways and means to deal with the nuclear issue at the appropriate time. For now, however, the Bush administration has successfully isolated the two issues in its dealings with Iran, which likely will lead to improved relations between the two sides, especially if the issue of Iraq is resolved to their mutual satisfaction.
At the crux of the Iraqi issue is that neither Washington nor Tehran can
escape from the reality that they need each other to get what they want from Iraq. Washington needs to bring eventual closure to its policy of
regime-change in Iraq and scale back its troop levels. For Iran, Iraq is the
instrument through which it can break out of the Persian Gulf area and become a major regional player in the larger Middle East, especially at a time when there is no potential rival to thwart its ambitions. At the same time, Washington might be using the Shiite Persians to balance Sunni Arabs and keep the Middle East focused on regional squabbles in order to prevent them from unifying against the United States.
Given the last quarter of a century of bad relations, there seems no way: 1) for the two sides to openly conduct business, at least not immediately; 2) for each to be sure that the other will not renege on its commitments; and
3) for them to come to mutually acceptable terms. Now, however, the major points of disagreement seem to have either been set aside to be dealt with at a future date or perhaps resolved amicably.
The nuclear issue is in the first category. Washington appears at ease with
the issue being dealt with through its EU proxy and the logic of events in
Iraq necessitated that it stand down on the nuclear matter in order to pursue its goals vis-a-vis Baghdad. The other major sticking point was the continued presence of U.S. troops in Iraq.
Washington did not engage in a quid pro quo with Iran -- trading Iraq for
nuclear power. Instead, it recognized that the nuclear issue was a false
crisis at present and decided to deal with the real issue. Tehran stepped
back from the nuclear crisis, even though nuclear weapons remain a strategic interest of the Iranians -- and Washington is by no means oblivious to this.
Through both back channels and public statements, Washington appears to have finally convinced the Iranians that it is not going to try to effect regime change in Tehran. At the same time, the growing Sunni insurgency has made it easier for Iraq's Shia to accommodate U.S. and coalition forces remaining in Iraq after an all-but-certain Shiite ascent to power in Baghdad -- and avoid looking like collaborators.
Only Sunni nationalist guerrillas and transnational jihadists now threaten
the road to the Jan. 30 elections and beyond. This does not mean that all is settled between the Bush administration, Iran's clerical regime and the
Shiite Hawza in Iraq; nor does it mean that at some future point the Shia -- both Arab and Persian -- will not run into problems with Washington or vice-versa. At least the vote in Iraq can be held in some shape or form, and the war against al Qaeda can go on.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
-
Left Angeles Times, today
======================
Ex-Baathists Play Crucial Insurgent Role, U.S. Says
By John Hendren, Times Staff Writer
TIKRIT, Iraq ? U.S. military commanders say a new assessment of the Iraqi insurgency has led them to focus on 34 former Baath Party leaders who they believe are financing and directing attacks against American troops and their allies.
Army Gen. John P. Abizaid and other senior Defense officials interviewed in Iraq said much of the insurgent violence was being carried out by a network of regional cells that loosely coordinate their operations with former officials of Saddam Hussein's ruling party.
Insurgent leaders often operate out of Syria and Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, officials said.
"There is a level of tactical coordination and direction that still comes from the remnants of the Baath Party, and I believe a certain amount of this tactical coordination effort is orchestrated from Syria," said Abizaid, the Central Command chief who is directing the war in Iraq.
Military officials have conceded that they have limited information on the insurgency due to a lack of reliable intelligence reports. In some cases, unconfirmed tips have come from questionable sources. In others, the information is too dated to allow U.S. forces to track suspected insurgent leaders, officials said.
But military leaders said they had been receiving more tips on the insurgency and higher-quality reports in recent weeks.
"We have focused the intelligence system on these 34 guys in the belief that if there is an emerging leadership structure for the former regime element movement that these 34 guys will be holding the reins," said another senior military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The new information has allowed military strategists to better discern the face of the insurgency, officials said, and has painted a portrait of guerrillas led by former regime officials who are predominantly Sunni Muslim.
U.S. military officials say recent evidence suggested that former members of Hussein's elite fighting units have been involved in attacks on U.S. troops.
"We see that a lot of the attacks that are going on right now show evidence that they were planned and executed by those who had a military background," said Air Force Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel, a deputy to Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. "There are some former Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard that are involved in these attacks."
U.S. military officials say the insurgency appears to lack a central leader, although they believe that former Gen. Izzat Ibrahim, one of Hussein's top aides, has directed many attacks against the U.S.-led coalition in the Tikrit area.
"There are former regime element organizational meetings. But there is no sort of grand pooh-bah that sits atop of this thing. There's no Saddam-like figure to whom they have allegiance and who is in overall charge of the insurgency," a senior defense official said.
Citing intelligence reports, senior U.S. military officials said Ibrahim and other former Baath Party members met near the Syrian border in November to plan strategy.
Also present at that meeting, officials said, were Mahdi Nasr Ubeidi, who supervises financial dealings; Mohammed Younis, who has acted as Ibrahim's assistant from a base east of Baghdad; Ahmed Hassan Kaka, an insurgent leader in the northern city of Kirkuk; Ramadan Zaidan Jaburi, Kaka's assistant; Mohammed Rijab Haddushi Nasser, the leader of the group's operations in Tikrit and nearby Baiji; and Yassir Sabawi Ibrihim Hassan, a courier.
The Baathist leaders are believed to be financing the insurgency with billions of dollars that Hussein officials allegedly grabbed from government coffers in the final days before the government fell, officials said.
Abizaid and other military strategists believe that leaders of these groups also determine tactics to be used against coalition and Iraqi forces.
U.S. efforts to find insurgent leaders have been hampered by Syria, officials said.
"We have been very clear to the Syrians about our unhappiness about Baathist cells operating from Syria. They have access to money, and they have access to smuggling routes," Abizaid said.
The Bush administration has been sternly warning Syria to stop the movement of fighters and smugglers across its borders and crack down on militants using its territory. This month, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage visited the Syrian capital, Damascus, to deliver that message as well as other U.S. demands.
Congress has voted to impose sanctions on Syria, but the administration has so far picked the mildest penalty authorized by the law. The president has hinted at a tougher stance, but Armitage told U.S.-run Al Hurra television that Bush had not yet made a decision.
"He's waiting to see the outcome of Syrian behavior over a length of time and then will make a decision on what to do," Armitage said.
Syrian officials based in Washington could not be reached for comment but have said in response to earlier criticism that they have redoubled efforts to police their borders in response to concerns from the interim Iraqi government and the Bush administration.
It remains unclear exactly how closely the Baathist-led groups coordinate with foreign Islamic extremists such as Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian who has proclaimed himself the leader of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization in Iraq. But the two groups are believed to communicate and work together at least loosely in what officials describe as a temporary marriage of convenience.
"I think there is a level of coordination between Zarqawi and some of the Baathist cells," Abizaid said. "There is a certain amount of coordination at a rudimentary level that goes on within Iraq. And there is certainly an organizational network within the Zarqawi terrorist network that shows an ability to organize terrorist activities across a broad range of targets in Iraq."
Abizaid warned that former regime leaders who ally themselves with extremists will not be offered amnesty even if they surrendered their arms.
Most of the leaders are probably not capable of rehabilitation anyway, a senior military official said. "There are a number of people that are going to have to die," the official said. "Zarqawi is one of them. He's in the box. His name's on the list, and you only come off it one way."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times staff writer Sonni Efron in Washington contributed to this report.
-
Camp Bucca Turns 180 Degrees From Abu Ghraib
Commanders hope the model detention facility will improve the U.S. military's reputation, tarnished by the prison torture scandal in Iraq.
By Ashraf Khalil, Times Staff Writer
CAMP BUCCA, Iraq ? A winter fog rolled in off the Persian Gulf, coiling around searchlights and 12-foot-high fences rimmed with razor wire.
Dozens of listless Iraqi men lingered near the edges of one compound, wearing winter coats over dishdasha gowns and wool socks under plastic flip-flops. One sat wrapped in a plastic garbage bag as another prisoner trimmed his beard with an electric clipper.
It seems an unlikely setting for a hearts-and-minds campaign, but commanders at this fast-growing U.S. military prison camp near the Kuwaiti border describe it as just that. As the U.S. military shifts the bulk of its more than 7,000 Iraqi and foreign prisoners to Camp Bucca, commanders hope this model prison will bury the ghosts of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.
"We want [the prisoners] to say, 'The Americans treated me all right and they're good-hearted people,' " said Col. Jim Brown, commander of the 18th Military Police Brigade.
The driving force behind these changes is the lingering damage from what has become known among the guards simply as "Abu" ? a catchall term for the abuse and humiliation of detainees in the prison west of Baghdad.
"Our reputation was tarnished ? both as a military and as a nation," said Army Maj. Gen. William H. Brandenburg, the new commander in charge of prisons in Iraq.
During a recent visit to Camp Bucca, he told a collection of guards and commanders, "We've got to stay on the moral high ground and do the right thing all the time, even when nobody's looking."
The lessons of Abu Ghraib resonate in all corners of the 100-acre Bucca compound, which serves as both laboratory and showcase for the Army's new approach to detention facilities.
Master Sgt. Jimmy James, who will become Bucca's warden this month, calls the camp "kind of a new animal that evolved from this war."
The tent cities that housed Abu Ghraib prisoners have largely been replaced by climate-controlled prefab huts ? a change that improves both living conditions and safety, because the inmates can no longer use the tent poles and stakes to fashion weapons. Packaged military rations have given way to hot meals, delivered to the prisoners in large coolers filled with steaming rice, soup and stew. A new hospital is being built in a series of connected double-wide trailers.
Inmates run their own classes on literacy, English and religion and hold soccer games so raucous that the guards sometimes think a riot is in progress. Some prisoners are lobbying to play inter-compound matches on a communal field, but the guards are leery of that one.
Each of the 10 compounds, which hold between 600 and 800 prisoners apiece, elects its own "mayor" who is in charge of maintaining order and acting as a liaison with the guards ? if necessary, informing on impending escape attempts or culprits in a violent crime.
Cigarettes, tea and access to radios are used as incentives for good behavior or revoked as punishment. Visiting family members are treated deferentially and supplied with water and snacks in the hope that they'll leave with a good impression.
The base commander, Col. Tim Houser, speaks of educating prisoners, teaching them social guidelines and making them into productive members of society. Then he grins at how "painfully American" the idea sounds.
The Iraqi Human Rights Ministry maintains an office just outside the prison fence. Ministry representatives spend three days a week on site to mediate concerns between inmates and guards, work with families and serve on the camp's version of a parole board.
Saad Sultan, the ministry's point man for the U.S. prison camps, said he was pleased with the changes made so far but considered Bucca's medical facilities lacking until the new hospital was finished. One of the most common complaints from the prisoners, he said, wasn't abuse or mistreatment. It was that the Pakistani cooks didn't know how to make Iraqi food.
On the other side of the camp, efforts continue to create a pleasant environment for the guards, partially to head off anyone taking out their frustrations on the inmates.
Stressful living conditions at Abu Ghraib were one of the reasons cited for the abuses, along with insufficient oversight, unclear command structure and the still-murky role of intelligence agents in encouraging the softening-up of prisoners.
At Bucca, the soldiers live in comfortable trailers, and a large recreation center offers a library, board games, pingpong, an Internet cafe, karaoke and a first-class gym.
A massive antenna, a remnant of the government radio station that once occupied the site, still dominates the soldiers' side of the prison, which was used as a POW camp for a short time after the war. It was reopened as a prison in the summer of 2003 as the insurgency started in earnest.
For the guards and administrators, many of whom are rotating into Iraq for the first time, the camp has been a pleasant surprise.
"I expected to live in a tent for a year on a cot," said Capt. Diana Stumpf. "I'm afraid to tell my family what it's like because they'll stop feeling sorry for me."
Brandenburg's arrival in Iraq in early December heralded a literal changing of the guard for the U.S. detention system in Iraq. The command team brought in last spring by his predecessor, Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, is mostly rotating out, and detention operations are facing what one officer called "almost an entirely new chain of command."
There's a new superintendent for military police at both Abu Ghraib and Bucca and a new Bucca warden. In the coming months, three-fourths of the guards will be going home.
The new team faces a challenge fraught with all the traditional complexities of a long-term prison environment: violence, religious tension and shifting factional dynamics. They must deal with escape attempts that average two to three per month, often in fog so thick the tower guards can't see the ground and must shift to foot patrols to spot prisoners trying to breach the fence.
In mid-October, just as the new MP unit was arriving on duty, fighting broke out between Sunni and Shiite prisoners.
The dispute centered on differences over observance of Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month, and may have been fueled by general edginess among fasting prisoners craving caffeine and nicotine.
Commanders decided to separate the Shiites and Sunnis. But when Sultan threatened to pull his human rights team in protest, the separation was confined to the problematic compound.
Now Houser, the base commander, admits that they face a dilemma.
Religious separation doesn't quite mesh with the stated U.S. goal of fostering a unified Iraqi society. But reintegrating the Shiite prisoners into other compounds could cause further trouble.
"We're pretty sensitive to anything ? that could upset the dynamic," Houser said.
Brown, the MP commander and a Santa Monica native, recalls what he terms a "wannabe riot" in one of the compounds in early December. After two prisoners were sentenced to isolation for a failed escape attempt, their compound mates rose up in solidarity.
The compound had not yet had its huts built, and prisoners collapsed their tents to make spears from the poles and shanks from the stakes. They formed a shouting phalanx, using mattresses as shields and encouraging nearby compounds to follow suit.
The guards didn't fire a shot, instead putting on their own show of force, gathering in strength and patrolling the compound's perimeter with guard dogs. Finally, two firetrucks were brought out, and the prisoners dispersed around 3 a.m. before the hoses could be turned on them.
"Firetrucks," Brandenburg said with a laugh, "are a pretty good dampener on a cold night."
-
www.stratfor.com
After the Election
By George Friedman
It is now a week from the Iraqi elections. Apart from knowing the precise levels of violence the insurgency will be able to reach before the election, most of the rest of it is clear. The election will be held. In much of the Sunni region, the turnout will be extremely low -- low enough that the election might be suspended there. The Shia will win. The United States could choose to suspend the elections -- and there should be no mistake about who is making the decisions on this -- but the point for that has passed. If the elections were going to be postponed, one would think that Washington would have made that decision weeks ago.
The next decision that will have to be made is whether to certify the election. There is not much choice there either. Washington knows the vote in the Sunni region will be disrupted. To hold the election and then fail to certify it because of the guerrilla war makes no sense. The guerrilla war has been there for a long time now. If you are going to hold the election anyway, not certifying it would be an exercise in futility.
If the vote is certified, a government will be formed. The Shia will dominate that government. They would have dominated any government for simple demographic reasons. With the Sunni vote suppressed, they will dominate the government overwhelmingly. The United States has proposed in the past some artificial formula to guarantee Sunni representation in the government, a substitute for an election, but the Shia have rejected it. Moreover, if the United States allowed the Sunnis to take a full seat at the table in spite of their inability to suppress the insurrection, there would be zero incentive in the future for Sunni elders to take a chance. Undoubtedly, some sort of contrived Sunni presence will be inserted, but this will be a Shiite government.
Thus, at some point in February, a Shiite prime minister, governing through a predominantly Shiite Cabinet, will become the government of Iraq. The Shia have been waiting for this moment for decades. Although divided, the formation of a government that reflects -- or over-reflects -- Shiite power will be a moment of enormous triumph. The evolution of this government is unclear. It could evolve into an Iranian-style theocracy, although the Iraqi religious leaders seem to take a different view of this than the Iranians. It might be ruled by Islamic principles without the overtly theocratic elements. It could even be, for a time, formally pluralist or secular. Whatever it will be, it will be Shia, and it will be under the heavy control of the religious leaders.
The first problem the new government will face will be the Sunni uprising. Sunni guerrillas recently killed two of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's aides. They have been conducting a fairly one-sided assault against the Shia for months. The reasoning behind the attacks appears to have been to intimidate the Shiite leadership prior to its taking power. What they have done instead is infuriate the Shia. The Shia have suffered from suppression by the Sunni-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein -- Sunni by birth if not by religious principle. They have been the dispossessed. It is now their time.
The Shia understand they cannot simply remain in a defensive mode. They have been passive in the run-up to the election, but after the election their credibility as the government of Iraq will depend on how they deal with the guerrillas. They must either suppress the guerrillas or negotiate a deal with them. Since a deal is hard to imagine at this time, they will have to act to suppress them. If they don't, the government will either be destroyed by the insurgents or Iraq will split into two or three countries, an evolution unacceptable to the Shia or to Iran.
Therefore, the Shia will fight. The Shiite leadership has made it clear it wants the United States to remain in Iraq for the time being. This does not mean it wants a long-term American presence. It means it wants U.S. forces to carry the main battle against the Sunnis on its behalf. In the same way that al-Sistani wanted the Americans to deal with Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr during the An Najaf affair, he wants the Americans to carry the main burden now.
The United States is prepared to carry a burden, but it is not prepared to single-handedly deal with the Sunnis any longer. The Shia have substantial armed militias. It is these forces -- not the failed Iraqi army the United States has tried to invent -- that will be the mainstay of the regime. The Shia don't want this force ground up because it is the guarantor of their security. The United States is not going to protect the regime without these forces engaged.
At this point, something interesting happens. The Shia have a greater vested interest in the viability of this government than even the Americans. The Americans can leave. The Shia aren't going anywhere. For the first time, the United States has a potential ally with capabilities and motivation. Most important, it is an ally that is not blind on the ground. Its intelligence capability is not perfect among the Sunnis, but it is better than what the Americans have.
It is an opportunity for the Americans. It is hard to get excited any longer about opportunities. We have seen so many open up and either prove chimerical or be fumbled by the United States that we temper our enthusiasm in all things. Nevertheless, the Shia will be the government for the first time; they have been waiting for this; they owe the Sunnis a beating and they might, with the United States, have the means to deliver it.
In all of this, the role of Iran is the most complex. The Iranians supported the Shiite community throughout the post-Desert Storm period. During the first phase of the American occupation, the two Shiite communities were close. Since the events of April 2004, the long-term wariness between the two communities has returned. Iran might not be as enthusiastic as it once was to see a Shiite government in Iraq. Alternatively, Iran could use its ongoing influence to manipulate and control that government.
It is no accident, in our view, that Washington is beating the war drums against Iran in the weeks before the Iraqi election. It is not only about nuclear weapons or not even about them. It is warning the Iranians not to intrude into Iraqi affairs. The Iranians might listen, but it's unlikely. Iraq is a fundamental national interest of Iran, and the Iranians will be playing.
Thus, the election brings a new government with new interests and new crises. If the government is seated, and we can't see why it wouldn't be, the next thing to watch is what steps it takes with its militias against the insurgents. Certainly, the guerrillas will be hitting them hard, so passivity is not an option. The Iranians will be manipulating the government and the Americans will be squeezing it. But it is at this point that something might finally, if temporarily, break in favor of the United States. Certainly that is the bet Washington is making.
-
BREAKTHROUGHS
By RALPH PETERS
IN just two days, Iraq took two giant steps forward. The forces of freedom in Baghdad announced the earlier bust of the al Qaeda killer behind the wave of suicide bombings. And Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the No. 1 terrorist in Iraq, told the world what he thinks.
Under pressure, men and women reveal their true character. On the run and frantic, Zarqawi offered a perfect contrast to President Bush's inauguration speech supporting global freedom: Zarqawi announced that democracy is "an evil principle."
There you have the deepest fear of oppressors everywhere. Whether dictators or assassins, they dread the free choice of free people. Terrorists know they can't win elections. Nor will many people vote to impose religious law on themselves.
The only hope the terrorists have is the tyranny of the bomb, the gun and
the lash.
Even Moqtada al-Sadr, baby-faced bully of the Shi'a slums, realized that few of Iraq's Shi'as would vote for his con- game wrapped in religion. As a result, he's withdrawn his sup port for elections. The Iraqi response?
Nobody cared.
Even before the elections, democracy did what the guns could not: It downed another demagogue.
Meanwhile, Zarqawi, the deadliest thug in the country, has grown desperate. In the wake of terror's defeat in Fallujah, his key lieutenant got fitted for handcuffs - a triumph revealed only yesterday to avoid compromising the grab's intelligence value.
Zarqawi knew his goon was gone. His wet-the-pants response? Lecturing the enthusiastic voters of Iraq that democracy is evil, then calling the revered Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani "Satan" for supporting the elections.
This is not sound politics. A Sunni Muslim, Zarqawi can only mobilize the
Shi'a voters he fears by attacking their spiritual leader.
But then Zarqawi has made one blunder after another in the face of wide
spread support for Sunday's election. Indeed, while he and the other
terrorists have played checkers, the Shi'a majority has been playing chess.
For example, key Shi'a religious leaders wisely agreed that Iraq's first
free elections should not replicate Iran's mis take of putting mullahs atop
the government. That keeps the mullahs off the blame-line, should
governmental efforts falter, while still allowing reli gious leaders a voice
behind the scenes (an authority that men of God enjoy from Indiana to
India). It calms Western fears of a "second Iran" emerging in Iraq and so
reduces the chance of a confrontation between the Coalition and the mullahs.
This isn't deviousness. It's statesmanship. We may live to be disappointed
in them, but Iraq's Shi'as are confounding all the Western elitists who
insist that the yokels aren't ready for democracy.
Just let people vote. Then the left's prophets of doom who dismiss the deep human desire for freedom can read the results and squirm as they explain their faulty predictions.
What's really happening in Iraq? Contrary to media depictions, suicide
bombings and other attacks are going down, not up. The terrorists are
running short on resources. The bad boys are getting popped - not least
because Iraqis, sick of the violence, turn them in.
And the leading terrorist in Iraq just told the common people what he thinks of them: He should decide their future, not their ballots.
Think that's going to play well with the masses? Does anyone except The New York Times believe that a Jordanian- born, Sunni Muslim terrorist is going to convince Iraq's majority Shi'a Arabs or the Kurds to throw up their hands, stay home on Election Day and hand him power?
Rarely has the contrast been so clear between the forces of freedom and
those of oppression. Last Thursday, America's president offered the world a courageous vision for the future. Over the weekend, the top terrorist in Iraq insisted that the world should return to a cruel and savage past. There you have the basic conflict of the 21st century.
Iraq's election won't produce perfect results. But the issue is no longer
whether the people will vote, but how many millions of voters will risk
their lives to go to the polls.
Those who still warn that Iraq's elections are misguided are on the side of
the terrorists. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi thinks so. And he's right.
-
The Three-Power Game
By George Friedman
Now the question becomes Iran. But the Iran question is not the simplistic "next target" issue that has been framed by the media -- or the Bush administration for that matter. The Iran question is far more complex, subtle and defining. It divides into two questions. First, once Iraq holds elections, what will Iran's policy be toward Iraq's new Shiite government? Second, since the Shiite-Sunni split is fundamental to the Islamic world, how will the United States manage and manipulate that divide?
To approach these questions, we need to look at the world through Iran's eyes. Iran has a single, overwhelming national security interest: protecting itself from encroachments by foreign powers. After World War II, the primary threat came from the Soviet Union. Another threat, both ancient and continual, came from Iraq. Under both the shah and the ayatollahs, Iraq constituted what became Iran's major national security threat.
The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s had a devastating effect on Iran. There is hardly an Iranian family that did not suffer a loss in that war. Iraq came out ahead in the war militarily, but had it simply defeated Iran, the result would have been catastrophic. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Iraq has been Iran's nightmare.
This is why the Iranians did not seriously object to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. To the contrary, the Iranians did everything they could to encourage and entangle the Americans in the war -- including providing intelligence that triggered American responses. There was nothing more important for Iran than seeing Saddam Hussein's regime collapse.
For Iran, the best outcome of the war would be a pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad. The second best outcome would be chaos in Iraq. Both provide Iran with what it needs: a relatively secure frontier and an opportunity to shape events to the west. The third -- and least acceptable -- outcome would be a neutral Iraq. Neutrality is highly changeable.
It had been Iran's hope that the U.S. invasion would create a pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad. The United States certainly dangled this possibility in front of the Iranians. Ahmed Chalabi, the original fair-haired boy of the Pentagon, had a dual role to play. He was the conduit the Iranians used to pump intelligence into Washington that justified and required the invasion. He was also the channel used by the United States to convince the Iranians to keep the lid on the Iraqi Shia. Chalabi told Iran that the United States would give them what they wanted if the Shia remained quiet. Chalabi, like a figure in a Cold War espionage novel, was used and used up by both sides.
The Iranians will get a Shiite government in Baghdad after the election. It is not clear at all that it will be a puppet state. The Iraqi and Iranian Shia have diverging interests and somewhat different views of the kind of regime they want. Nevertheless, whatever the tensions, any Shiite regime is better than a Sunni regime as far as the Iranians are concerned. Even for this there will be a price. The new government will continue to control Shiite regions and probably have the cooperation of the Kurds. It will not control Sunni regions, where the insurgency is in place. There will not be a real Iraqi state unless the Sunni insurgency is defeated. The Shia -- with the Americans -- can potentially defeat the Sunnis, but Iranian cooperation is necessary. At the very least, the Iranians will have to avoid destabilizing the Shiite government by manipulating the Iraqi Shia to get more pro-Iranian officials in place. They will also have to share tactical intelligence on the Sunni insurgency with the Americans.
Alternatively, they can go with their second-best choice: chaos in Iraq. Under that scenario, the Shia in Iraq are pressured not to fight the Sunnis and the Iraqi regime becomes the government of Shiite Iraq and nothing more. At that point, Iraq, in effect, becomes divided into three states -- Shia, Sunni, Kurd.
This is a tempting proposition. The problem the Iranians have is that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If Iraq collapses and the Iranians dominate southern Iraq, then the road is open militarily to Kuwait and Saudi oil fields. The Iranians might not want to take advantage of this, but the Arabs cannot hope for the best as a foreign policy.
The Saudis cannot afford chaos in Iraq or for the road from Iran to be wide open. They will increase their dependence on the United States and will be forced to do whatever they can to reduce the rebellion in the Sunni region. A united Iraq under a Shiite-dominated coalition government will secure Iran's western frontiers, but will deny it the opportunity to dominate the region. A divided Iraq will give Iran secure borders, an opportunity for domination and serious responses from Arab states. It will drive the Arabs into the Americans' arms. Things could get dicey fast for the Iranians. The United States is letting them know -- via the convenient conduit of Seymour Hersh and The New Yorker magazine -- that it is ready to push back hard on Iran. U.S. President George W. Bush directly warned the Iranians on Jan. 26 to stay out of the Iraqi elections. The Iranians are signaling back that they are a nuclear power -- which is not true yet.
The Iranians have a fundamental strategic decision to make. They can work with the United States and secure their interests. They can undermine the United States and go for the big prize: domination of the Persian Gulf. The first is low risk, the second incredibly high risk.
Behind this all there is a complex three-power game. There is the United States, in a war with factions of the Sunni. There are the Sunnis themselves, divided and unsure of their direction. There are the Shia, maneuvering to shift the political balance with the Sunni without becoming American puppets. Within each of these communities -- including the American -- there are deep divides, complex contradictions and political tensions. Each side is trying to use these to its advantage.
How this relationship plays out is the real issue. The question of the Sunni insurrection in four provinces of Iraq is not unimportant, but it is not defining. It is simply the arena in which the basic strategic complexity is being played out. But the real game is: Three players, each trying to create an alliance that locks out the third without limiting its own freedom of action, with none of the players really in control of the situation. It reminds us a bit of the U.S.-Soviet-Chinese game in 1968-1970. But even there, although internal factionalism was rife in all three countries, the decision-making process was not that chaotic.
That's why, in the end, it does not boil down to the Shia as much as to Iran. Iran can opt to align with the United States and define the terms under which it will accept a united Iraq under a Shiite-led coalition government, or it can go for it all, undermine the Shiite leadership in Iraq and open the door to the division of Iraq into three parts, with southern Iraq in the Iranian sphere of influence and the road to the western littoral of the Persian Gulf wide open -- except for the United States.
Iran has a low-risk, low-reward choice and a high-risk, high-reward choice. How lucky is Iran feeling?
-
January 30, 2005
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
In Europe, the wise old foreign-policy ''realists'' scoff at today's
elections in Iraq -- Islam and democracy are completely incompatible,
old boy; everybody knows that, except these naive blundering Yanks who
just don't have our experience, frankly.
If that's true, it's a problem not for Iraq this weekend but, given
current demographic trends, for France and Belgium and Holland a year
or two down the line.
But, as it happens, it's not true. The Afghan election worked so well
that, there being insufficient bad news out of it, the doom-mongers in
the Western media pretended it never happened. They'll have a harder
job doing that with Iraq, so instead they'll have to play up every
roadside bomb and every dead poll worker. But it won't alter the basic
reality: that today's election will be imperfect but more than good
enough. OK, that's a bit vague by the standards of my usual
psephological predictions, so how about this? Turnout in the Kurdish
north and Shia south will be higher than in the last American, British
or Canadian elections. Legitimate enough for ya?
But look beyond the numbers. When you consider the behavior of the
Shia and Kurdish parties, they've been remarkably shrewd, restrained
and responsible. They don't want to blow their big rendezvous with
history and rejoin the rest of the Middle East in the fetid swamp of
stable despotism. The naysayers in the Democratic Party and the U.S.
media are so obsessed with Rumsfeld getting this wrong and Condi
getting that wrong and Bush getting everything wrong that they've
failed to notice just how surefooted both the Kurds and Shiites have
been -- which in the end is far more important. The latter, for
example, have adopted a moderate secular pitch entirely different from
their co-religionist mullahs over the border. In fact, as partisan
pols go, they sound a lot less loopy than, say, Barbara Boxer. Even on
the Sunni side of the street, there are signs the smarter fellows
understand their plans to destroy the election have flopped and it's
time to cut themselves into the picture. The IMF noted in November
that the Iraqi economy is already outperforming all its Arab
neighbors.
You might not have gained that impression from watching CNN or reading
the Los Angeles Times. The Western press are all holed up in the same
part of Baghdad, and the insurgents very conveniently set off bombs
visible from their hotel windows in perfect synchronization with the
U.S. TV news cycle. But, if they could look beyond the plumes of
smoke, they'd see that Iraq's going to be better than OK, that it will
be the economic powerhouse of the region, and that the various small
nods toward democracy going on in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and
elsewhere suggest that the Arab world has figured out what the foreign
policy ''realists'' haven't: that the trend is in the Bush direction.
When Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, warned that the
U.S. invasion of Iraq would ''destabilize'' the entire region, he was
right. That's why it was such a great idea.
The ''realpolitik'' types spent so long worshipping at the altar of
stability they were unable to see it was a cult for psychos. The
geopolitical scene is never stable, it's always dynamic. If the
Western world decides in 2005 that it can ''contain'' President Sy
Kottik of Wackistan indefinitely, that doesn't mean the relationship
between the two parties is set in aspic. Wackistan has a higher birth
rate than the West, so after 40 years of ''stability'' there are a lot
more Wackistanis and a lot fewer Frenchmen. And Wackistan has immense
oil reserves, and President Kottik has used the wealth of those oil
reserves to fund radical schools and mosques in hitherto moderate
parts of the Muslim world. And cheap air travel and the Internet and
ATM machines that take every bank card on the planet and the
freelancing of nuclear technology mean that Wackistan's problems are
no longer confined to Wackistan. For a few hundred bucks, they can be
outside the Empire State Building within seven hours. Nothing stands
still. ''Stability'' is a fancy term to dignify laziness and
complacency as sophistication.
If you want a good example of excessive deference to the established
order, look no further than Iraq. I'm often asked about the scale of
the insurgency and doesn't this prove we armchair warriors vastly
underestimated things, etc. I usually reply that, if you rummage
through the archives, you'll find that I wanted the liberation of Iraq
to occur before the end of August 2002. The bulk of the military were
already in place, sitting in the Kuwaiti desert twiddling their
thumbs. But Bush was prevailed upon to go ''the extra mile'' at the
United Nations mainly for the sake of Tony Blair, and thanks to the
machinations of Chirac, Schroeder and Co., the extra mile wound up
being the scenic route through six months of diplomatic gridlock while
Washington gamely auditioned any casus belli that might win the favor
of the president of Guinea's witch doctor. As we know, all that
happened during that period was that the hitherto fringe ''peace''
movement vastly expanded and annexed most of the Democratic Party.
Given all that went on in America, Britain, France, etc., during the
interminable ''extra mile,'' it would be idiotic to assume that, with
an almighty invasion force squatting on his borders for six months,
Saddam just sat there listening to his Sinatra LPs. He was very busy,
as were the Islamists, and Iran, and Syria.
The result is not only an insurgency far more virulent than it would
have been had Washington followed my advice rather than Tony's and
gone in in August 2002, but also a broader range of enemies that
learned a lot about how ''world'' -- i.e., European -- opinion could
be played off against Washington.
I don't believe Bush would make that mistake again. Which means he
wouldn't have spoken quite so loudly if the big stick weren't already
in place -- if plans weren't well advanced for dealing with Iran and
some of the low-hanging fruit elsewhere in the region. Bush won't
abolish all global tyranny by 2008 -- that might have to wait till
Condi's second term -- but he will abolish some of it, and today's
elections are as important in that struggle as any military victory.
-
Middle East: A New Coalition Forms?
By George Friedman
www.stratfor.com
It has been an eventful week in the Middle East, beginning with the massive Valentine's Day explosion that killed a former Lebanese prime minister in Beirut, continuing with the recall of the U.S. ambassador to Syria and feints over Iran's nuclear program, and culminating in the Feb. 16 announcement -- by Iran and Syria -- of a "common front" against the United States.
The renewal of this alliance, which dates back to the 1980s, appears on the surface to be a Coalition of the Trapped. The Syrians are surrounded by three enemies: Israel, Turkey and the United States. The Iranians are in a better position, but they also are fairly isolated militarily as well -- and of course, the U.S. presence in Iraq, squarely in the middle of the region, is a cause for discomfort at best. Forming an alliance, then, is the best move available to each, assuming they don't want to capitulate to the United States.
Syria's main interest, apart from regime survival, is to maintain its enormous influence in Lebanon. This is a financial as well as strategic issue: The Syrians make a load of money doing business in Lebanon, and they don't want to be replaced by foreign businessmen. To our minds, this might have been a significant factor in the Feb. 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. The universal suspicion is that the Syrians were behind the killing: They feared that al-Hariri, whose wealth made him one of the most powerful men in the nation, was trying to pry Lebanon loose from Syrian control. The thinking is that the Syrians took him out, possibly using the Iranian-controlled Hezbollah. We regard this as fairly sound thinking.
Iran also faces a fundamental challenge -- in this case, to its interests in Iraq. A neutral Iraq is important to Iran. The Iranians hate the Sunnis, but the regime is growing uneasy about the relationship between the Iraqi Shia and the United States. Like Damascus with Lebanon, Tehran has tried to pull Iraq into its orbit -- and like Damascus, it is beginning to wonder whether it will succeed. Quite apart from the issue of nuclear facilities, the Iranians are beginning to feel that the outcome of the Iraq war might leave them in worse shape than they imagined two years ago -- then at least, they faced a distinct and identifiable enemy on their frontier and were viewed as an important counterbalance by the United States.
Syria and Iran therefore are sensing the same force coming at them. As the United States starts getting traction in Iraq, it is moving in various ways to undermine the power of regimes it distrusts. The means here isn't military, it is covert and political. Washington is using its influence to wean Lebanon from Syria. It is doing the same to split the Iraqi and Iranian Shia. As a result, Syria and Iran are seeing their national interests start to evaporate.
Now, perceiving this and doing something about it are two very different things. Al-Hariri's killing could be read as a signal to the Lebanese that Syrian patience has its limits. Iran has not yet made a definitive move in Iraq, but it will have to do something pretty soon or bow out of the game. Both countries are under pressure to preserve core interests in the face of a common threat: the United States.
Militarily, there is little they can do. The Iranians are not only some time away from being nuclear-capable, but they can expect any capabilities to be destroyed by the Americans or the Israelis before they become operational. Iran will not go nuclear without a great deal of luck -- and even then, it will have just enough weapons to get into very deep trouble.
The American weak spot is not nuclear weapons. It is terrorism. The United States is simply not good at coping with sparse, global, covert networks. It has focused its attention on al Qaeda and has gotten somewhere, but it has been a long, hard, uncertain road.
Al Qaeda, a Sunni Wahhabi organization, is not the only competent covert force in the world. The other is Hezbollah -- al Qaeda's Shiite equivalent. Hezbollah rose to prominence in the 1980s as an Iranian-sponsored, Syrian-supported force operating out of Lebanon. It took part in Lebanon's civil war and has been active in campaigns against Israel. Hezbollah has been relatively quiet on a global scale, but it continues to exist and continues to operate in Lebanon.
Al-Hariri's murder and the resurrection of the Syrian-Iranian alliance have meaning only if Damascus and Tehran plan to unleash Hezbollah. At the very least, they are threatening to do so, in the hope of using it as a bargaining chip with the United States. However, if Washington bargains on those grounds, it will get rolled on a range of issues. The United States cannot afford to negotiate on those terms, and Hezbollah is the only card Syria and Iran can play effectively.
In other words, it may well be that another trained, experienced and dedicated organization is now being ramped up -- and it isn't al Qaeda. Hezbollah is a capable and deadly force. It is to be taken very seriously.
-
Keeping Score Against al Qaeda
by James Dunnigan
February 20, 2005
Discussion Board on this DLS topic
How can you tell if al Qaeda is winning, or losing, the war on terror?? How do you even tell who the major players are in al-Qaeda? Like baseball, one?s best bet is to use a scorecard. The scorecard for al-Qaeda (?The Base?) is pretty complex.?
Al-Qaeda was originally built like a large corporation. It has a board of directors of 24, with Osama bin Laden as the CEO (official title is Emir-General). Bin Laden also has 15 people in what could be described as his ?inner circle? of aides. Al-Qaeda also had training camps in six countries in September, 2001 (Afghanistan, Indonesia, Chechnya, Albania, Sudan, and the Philippines), with eight commanders. Al-Qaeda also maintained cells in numerous Arabian and European countries.
Since the? September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States and allies have been hunting down the leadership of al-Qaeda. Among the big fish (the ?Board of Directors?), seven are dead and ten are in custody. Four members of the ?inner circle? are also in custody. This is 53 percent of the senior leadership for al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden is still at large, along with Ayman al-Zawahiri (the deputy commander of al-Qaeda) and Abu Mohammed al-Masri (the planner of the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania). However, five out of the eight training camp commanders are dead or in custody.
Other statistics of note: Eighteen al-Qaeda financiers are dead or in custody. Among those still at large, though, are two of bin Laden?s sisters, two of his brothers-in-law, and a Swiss banker by the name of Ahmed Huber. Huber also has extensive connections with neo-Nazis in Europe. The real financial resource for al-Qaeda remains untouched ? the dozen or so Saudis who are called the ?Golden Chain.? All are at large, and all can still provide enough resources for bin Laden to regroup and strike again.
Al-Qaeda?s military committee has also been decimated. One is dead (killed by a CIA Predator firing Hellfire missiles), fourteen, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef, have been captured. These include the commanders in Singapore, Java, Southern Europe, and Japan. Several are at large, including the operations chiefs in Kosovo, Tunisia, and Somalia.
Subordinate networks in several countries have been rounded up or decimated. In Jordan, five out of the six major al-Qaeda figures are in custody; in Syria, only five major terrorist figures are still at large ? dozens of al-Qaeda members are currently incarcerated, but three major Hezbollah figures are still on the loose. Syria, however, remains a sponsor of Hezbollah. Egypt has rounded up all of the major al-Qaeda figures, as have Italy, Belgium, Germany. The United Kingdom, Spain, and France have rounded up many al-Qaeda figures as well. Many of the major al-Qaeda figures in Saudi Arabia are dead or apprehended, but a number of figures involved in the Khobar Towers bombing are still at large ? some with connections to Hizbollah. In Turkey, 75 percent of the big fish connected with al-Qaeda are dead or in custody. Most of the support structure for the 9/11attack, including Mukhabarat agent Ahmad Khalil Ibraham al-Ani (who the Czechs insist met hijacker Mohammed Atta in Prague), are in custody.?
But in some places, the network is pretty intact. Many major Taliban figures are still on the loose. So are all three members of al-Qaeda?s WMD Committee, and all of those involved in a Bolivian hijacking plot.
Short version, al-Qaeda is on the run throughout most of the globe. Even Abu Musab Zarqawi, in charge of all al-Qaeda elements in Iraq, is on the run ? as elements of his infrastructure are taken apart. Eight of Zarqawi?s top aides are dead. Twenty others have been captured. Zarqawi was unable to disrupt the elections on January 30, a serious loss for the terrorists. Al-Qaeda is still potent, as the attacks in Madrid proved, but they are clearly reacting to the multi-pronged offensive in the United States. ? Harold C. Hutchison (hchutch@ix.netcom.com)
http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/200522023.asp
-
March 02, 2005, 10:01 a.m.
Terror and the English Language
Making use of a chief weapon.
Deroy Murdock
The long, twilight struggle against Islamo-fascism requires Civilization to deploy numerous weapons against this implacable foe. As usual, these will include intelligence, covert operations, and high-tech armaments. But another vital tool is language. How Americans and our allies speak and write about this conflict will influence when and how victory will come.
We now face the most anti-Semitic enemy since Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels blew their brains out in Berlin in 1945.
Militant Islam is the most bloodthirsty ideology since the Khmer Rouge exterminated one-third of Cambodia's people. The big difference, of course, is that Pol Pot had the good manners to keep his killing fields within his own borders, as awful as that was.
Islamo-fascism, in contrast, is a worldwide phenomenon that already has touched this country and many of our allies. And yet Muslim extremists rarely have armies we can see, fighter jets we can knock from the sky, nor an easily identifiable headquarters, such as the Reich's Chancellery of the 1940s or the Kremlin of the Cold War.
While basketball players and their fans battle each other on TV, actresses suffer wardrobe malfunctions, and rap singers scream sweet nothings in our ears, it's very easy to forget that Islamic extremists plot daily to end all of that and more by killing as many of us as possible.
Language can lull Americans to sleep in this new war, or it can keep us on the offense and our enemies off balance.
Here are a few ways language can keep Americans alert to the danger Islamic terrorism poses to this country:
September 11 was an attack, not just a string of coincidental strokes and heart failures that eliminated thousands of victims at once.
Recall some of the words that soon followed the September 11 atrocity. Kinko's stores, for instance, installed placed with the Stars and Stripes emblazoned across the lower 48 states. That graphic included this regrettable caption:
"The Kinko's family extends our condolences and sympathies to all Americans who have been affected by the circumstances in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania."
Circumstances? That word describes an electrical blackout, not terrorist bloodshed.
Similarly, September 11 was tragic, but far more, too. "The September 11 tragedy" misses the point: Tornadoes cause tragedies, but they are not malicious, as America's enemies were that day, and still are.
Victims of terrorism do not "die," nor are they "lost." They are killed, murdered, and slaughtered.
Likewise, many say that people "died" in the Twin Towers and at the Pentagon. No, people "die" in hospitals, often surrounded by their loved ones while doctors and nurses offer them aid and comfort.
The innocent people at the World Trade Center, the Defense Department, and that field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, were killed in a carefully choreographed act of mass murder.
Specify the number of human beings who terrorists destroy.
? "3,000" killed on 9-11 sounds like an amorphous blob. The actual number ? 2,977 ? forces people to regard these individuals as men and women with faces, stories, and loved ones who miss them very much.
? The precise figures are 2,749 killed at the World Trade Center, 184 at the Pentagon, and 44 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
? Likewise, the Bali disco bombings killed 202 people, mainly Australians.
? The Madrid train bombings killed 191 men, women, and children.
Somehow, a total of 191 people killed by al Qaeda's Spanish franchisees seems more ominous and concrete than a smoothly rounded "200."
Terrorists do not simply "threaten" us, nor does homeland security merely shield Americans from "future attacks." These things are true, but it is more persuasive to acknowledge what these people have done and hope to do once more: Wipe us out.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R ., Wis.), said this on the November 28 NBC Nightly News:
"We need to tighten up our drivers license provisions and our immigration laws so that terrorists cannot take advantage of the present system to kill thousands of Americans again."
That is a perfect sound bite. There is no amorphous talk about "the terrorist threat" or "stopping further attacks." Sensenbrenner concisely explained exactly what is at risk, and what needs to be thwarted:
No more killing of Americans, by the thousands, again.
Quote Islamo-fascist leaders to remind people of their true intentions.
President Bush, Heritage Foundation chief Ed Feulner, or I could explain how deadly militant Islam is and how seriously we should consider this toxic philosophy. Far more impressive, however, is to let these extremists do the talking. And yet their words are nowhere as commonly known as they should be:
? As Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri said in their 1998 declaration of war on the United States:
"The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies ? civilian and military ? is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."
? As the late Iranian dictator, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, stated in 1980:
"Our struggle is not about land or water...It is about bringing, by force if necessary, the whole of mankind onto the right path."
? Khomeini, ever the comedian, said this in 1986: "Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious."
? Asked what he would say to the loved ones of the 202 people killed in the October 2002 Bali nightclub explosions, Abu Bakar Bashir, the al-Qaeda-tied leader of Indonesia's radical Jemaah Islamiyah, replied, "My message to the families is, please convert to Islam as soon as possible."
The phrase "Weapons of Mass Destruction" has been pounded into meaninglessness. It has been repeated ad infinitum. Fairly or unfairly, the absence of warehouses full of anthrax and nerve gas in Iraq has made the whole idea of "WMD" sound synonymous with "LIE."
America's enemies do not plot the "mass destruction" of empty office buildings or abandoned parking structures. Conversely, they want to see packed office buildings ablaze as their inhabitants scream for mercy. That's why I use the terms "Weapons of Mass Death" and "Weapons of Mass Murder."
When discussing those who are killed by terrorists, be specific, name them, and tell us about them. Humanize these individuals. They are more than just statistics or stick figures.
I have written 18 articles and produced a website, HUSSEINandTERROR.com, to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein did have ties to terrorism.
(By the way, I call him "Saddam Hussein" or "Hussein." I never call him "Saddam" any more than I call Joseph Stalin "Joseph" or Adolf Hitler "Adolf." "Saddam" also has a cute, one-name ring to it, like Cher, Gallagher, Liberace, or Sting. Saddam Hussein does not deserve such a term of endearment.)
To demonstrate that Saddam Hussein's support of terrorism cost American lives, I remind people about the aid and comfort he provided to terror master Abu Nidal.
Among Abu Nidal's victims in the 1985 bombing of Rome's airport was John Buonocore, a 20-year-old exchange student from Delaware. Palestinian terrorists fatally shot Buonocore in the back as he checked in for his flight. He was heading home after Christmas to celebrate his father's 50th birthday.
In another example, those killed by Palestinian homicide bombers subsidized by Saddam Hussein were not all Israeli, which would have been unacceptable enough. Among the 12 or more Americans killed by those Baathist-funded murderers was Abigail Litle, the 14-year-old daughter of a Baptist minister. She was blown away aboard a bus in Haifa on March 5, 2003.
Her killer's family got a check for $25,000 courtesy of Saddam Hussein as a bonus for their son's "martyrdom."
Is all of this designed to press emotional buttons? You bet it is!
Americans must remain committed ? intellectually and emotionally ? to this struggle. There are many ways to engage the American people.
No one should hesitate to remind Americans that terrorism kills our countrymen ? at home and abroad ? and that those who militant Islam demolishes include promising young people with bright futures, big smiles, and, now, six feet of soil between them and their dreams.
*Who are we fighting? Militants? Martyrs? Insurgents?
Melinda Bowman of Brief Hill, Pennsylvania, wrote this in a November 24 letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal:
"And, by the way, what is all this 'insurgent' nonsense? These people kidnap, behead, dismember and disembowel. They are terrorists." Nicely and accurately put, Ms. Bowman.
Is this a war on terror, per se? A war on terrorism? Or is really a war on Islamo-fascism? It's really the latter, and Americans should say so.
Daniel Pipes of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum believes terror is a tactic, not an enemy.
Calling today's conflict "a 'War on Terror' is like America in 1941, after Pearl Harbor, declaring a 'War on Surprise Attacks.' We really are engaged in a war on radical Islam."
Jim Guirard runs the TrueSpeak Institute in Washington, D.C. He has thought long and hard about terror and the English language.
He recently informed me, to my horror, that more than three years into the war on Islamo-fascism, the State Department and the CIA have not produced a glossary of the Arabic-language words that Middle Eastern Islamo-fascists use, as well as the antonyms for those words. Such a "Thesaurus of Terrorism" would help Civilization turn this war's words upside down.
Why, for instance, do we inadvertently praise our enemies by agreeing that they fight a jihad or "holy war?" Instead, we correctly should describe them as soldiers in a hirabah or "unholy war."
Guirard has many astute and valuable recommendations in this area. U.S. diplomats and national security officials promptly should implement his common-sense proposals.
America and the rest of civilization can and must win this showdown against these sadistic cavemen. We can and will crush them ? through espionage, high-tech force, statecraft, and public diplomacy. And, here at home, we can and will vanquish them through eternal vigilance.
One of our chief weapons should be something readily available to everyone who reads these words: The English language.
? Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Fairfax, Virginia. This article is adapted from a speech delivered at the Heritage Foundation.
http://nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock200503021001.asp
-
www.stratfor.com
=================
Iran: Coming Clean and Buying Time
March 08, 2005 2359 GMT
Summary
Several Iranian officials have acknowledged for the first time that Iran has had a secret nuclear program and has concealed nuclear facilities in the country. Iran is signaling to the United States that, short of an all-out assault against its nuclear sites, there is no way that it can be deterred from enriching uranium. Seemingly confident that Washington will not immediately exercise the military option, Tehran is trying to avoid having to backpedal on its declared right to enrich uranium and to buy time to deal with the situations in Iraq and the Levant.
Analysis
Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, on Croatian television March 8, threatened to break off talks with the EU3 if Iran was pressured to give up its right to "master nuclear technology." Khatami's remark comes a day after Ali Akbar Salehi, nuclear affairs adviser to Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi, acknowledged the existence of an underground nuclear facility that contained centrifuges used for the enrichment of uranium. The facility, at Natanz in central Iran, was constructed below the surface to protect against U.S. or Israeli airstrikes. This admission followed another by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a two-time former president and the current head of the Expediency Council, Iran's highest political arbitration body, that Iran had a secret but peaceful nuclear program prior to 2002. He said the program was necessary because of sanctions against Iran that prevented the Islamic republic from acquiring equipment needed for developing a nuclear program.
These statements, which validate U.S. concerns that Iran has secretly been trying to develop nuclear weapons, are Iran's way of trying to counter international pressure to stop enriching uranium. By coming forth and admitting it has had a clandestine program with underground facilities -- although insisting that it was civilian in nature -- and that it is not ready to accept a permanent freeze on nuclear activities, Iran is signaling that, short of a full-scale attack against its nuclear facilities, there is no way it can be thwarted from enriching uranium. Tehran hopes to reach a settlement whereby it can openly carry out its nuclear activities under the legitimacy of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and additional protocols it has signed since October 2003 (the NPT allows member states to pursue nonmilitary nuclear activities).
On the surface it appears that the statements from Tehran are an admission of guilt, which could strengthen the hand of the Bush administration as it pushes for tougher action against the clerical regime. Given that the ayatollahs, despite their ideological proclivities, are not irrational geopolitical actors, these statements likely were issued for a specific purpose. Negotiations with the EU3 are slowly moving to a point where Iran has to decide whether to accept economic incentives in exchange for a complete cessation of all activities related to uranium enrichment. This quid pro quo is not acceptable to the Iranians, and they have made this clear on several recent occasions.
Iran also can choose to pull out of the talks, though such a move would make it more vulnerable to international action. More important, it also would prevent Iran from gaining the recognition and security guarantees it is seeking from the United States. Iranians have threatened several times to pull out of the talks, moves that have been dismissed as mere posturing. In reality, Tehran wants to remain engaged with the international community -- it just does not want to be handicapped by this desire and forced to accept harsh conditions.
Therefore, the way out for the Iranians is to try and steer the negotiations in such a way that Iran is not boxed in and the opposing side has to choose between two difficult options.
Iran is signaling the West that it can either cut a deal allowing Tehran to openly carry out its nuclear activities after assuring the world of their peaceful purposes or it will have to wage a full-scale war against the regime to deny it the ability to enrich uranium.
This is where Tehran is displaying a great degree of confidence that, considering the situation in the Middle East, the United States and Israel are not in a position to launch an attack against Tehran's nuclear assets. Contributing to this confidence are recent statements by Bush administration officials that the West has just embarked on the diplomatic route to dealing with Iran and that military action -- though not off the table -- is not imminent. The Iranians also are not worried about the probability of U.N. Security Council sanctions; many major states have bilateral economic relations with Iran, which would complicate the passage of any resolution. While this may not be part of the Iranian perception of the situation, surgical strikes against its key facilities to push back its nuclear program a few years is a real possibility.
It remains to be seen whether the Iranians truly have been successful in tying the hands of the West. What is clear, though, is that they have bought time to focus on the new political dynamics of Iraq and the Levant, dynamics that seem to be working against the interests of Tehran. Or at least they think they have.
-
Had posted this address elsewhere. Thought that it sheds some light on the Foundation of what true Islam teaches.
http://www.prophetofdoom.net/
Islam rises and falls on Muhammad. He is the religion's sole prophet, Islam?s solitary example, Allah?s lone conduit. Without Muhammad, Allah, the Qur?an, and Islam would be unknown. Yet the picture the Islamic scriptures paint of this man is not flattering
According to the Qur?an and Hadith, Muhammad was a thief, rapist, and terrorist.
Muhammad, Allah, Mecca, and the formation of Islam are completely unknown to secular history. All we know of them is derived from the Qur?an and Hadith. The earliest and most important collection of Hadith is called the Sira, or Biography. Compiled by Ibn Ishaq, the Sira provides the only written account of this man, his god, place and religion within two centuries of his death. There is no other valid source from which Muhammad can be seen, or Islam can be interpreted, differently.
To write Prophet of Doom, I analyzed the Sira, the Ta?rikh, or History of al-Tabari... The result is bone chilling. The depiction of the prophet by the most revered Muslim sources reveals behavior that is immoral, criminal, and violent.
The five oldest and most trusted Islamic sources don't portray Muhammad as a great and godly man. They confirm that he was a thief, liar, assassin, mass murderer, terrorist, warmonger, and an unrestrained sexual pervert engaged in pedophilia, incest, and rape. He authorized deception, assassinations, torture, slavery, and genocide. He was a pirate, not a prophet.
According to the Hadith and the Qur'an, Muhammad and his henchmen plundered their way to power and prosperity. And by putting the Qur'an in chronological order and correlating it with the context of Muhammad's life, we find that Allah mirrored his prophet's character. Muhammad's god condoned immoral and criminal behavior. Allah boasts about being a terrorist. He claims to have deceived men, to have stolen their property, to have enslaved women and children, to having committed acts of murder, genocide, and sadistic tortures.
http://www.homestead.com/prosites-prs/index.html
Real AUDIO Major James Linzey
the threat from Mexican iIllegal Immigrants http://real2.thegospel.com:8080/ramgen/real2d/pclub/jan05/pclub022305.rm http://real2.thegospel.com:8080/ramgen/real2d/pclub/jan05/pclub012805. http://real2.thegospel.com:8080/ramgen/real2d/pclub/jan05/pclub013005.rm
http://www.prophecyclub.com/streaming_audio.htm
-
Hezbollah, The Party of God
March 15, 2005 23 12 GMT
By George Friedman
The "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon has encountered its antithesis, Hezbollah.
Comparisons have been drawn between what is happening in Lebanon and the anti-Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe or in Ukraine. These are poor analogies, however, since none of those revolutions encountered a force that was as hardened, as dedicated and as idealistic as they were -- nor one as well-armed. The closest one can come is the Romanian Revolution with its confrontation between demonstrators and the Securitate, the regime's secret police. The Securitate were fearsome, but in the end, isolated and hopeless. Not so Hezbollah.
Hezbollah originated in the Islamic revolution of Iran in the late 1970s. Until then, militant anti-Western forces in the Middle East were primarily Arabist and socialist. Their dream was not of a revival of Islamic religiosity, but rather the creation of a socialist, pan-Arab regime. Operationally, these Arabist militants were heavily dependent on secular Arab regimes such as Egypt, Syria or Libya, and on the support of Soviet-bloc intelligence services. In fact, apart from Israel, their primary targets were the religious Sunni monarchies of the Persian Gulf. The Saudis spent a great deal of money and collaborated closely with the United States to contain and defeat these movements.
Hezbollah, a militant successor of the secular Shiite political movement Amal, represented the international wing of Iran's Islamic Revolution. To some extent -- and this must not be overstated -- it was a creation of Iran's intelligence services. Certainly, Hezbollah members worked in close collaboration with Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and did not stray far from Iran's national goals. In the sense that the Iranian revolution was the institutionalization of Shiite Islam, Hezbollah was both an Iranian and a Shiite organization.
For Iran, Hezbollah was intended to serve four purposes:
1. To challenge the secular Arabist movements by providing a powerful Islamist alternative to Nasserism.
2. To provide Tehran with a tool to challenge American interests in the Middle East and, potentially, globally.
3. To pose a threat to conservative Sunni monarchies: Hezbollah could not be dismissed as a secular force, yet it challenged the legitimacy of Sunni regimes that were complicit with the United States.
4. To provide a challenge to Israel emanating from outside the Nasserite mode of thinking.
These were more than sufficient reasons for the Iranians to have helped create Hezbollah, but there was also a fifth. When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, it had the implicit support of the United States and the Arabian monarchies. Iran was strategically isolated. Its only potential ally was a dangerous one -- the Soviet Union. Officials in Tehran knew that dependency on the Soviets would, fairly quickly, lead to Soviet domination of Iran; thus, while they flirted with the Soviets, they were not prepared to go too far.
The only other regional power that shared Iran's anti-Iraqi interests was Syria. Though both Syria and Iraq were governed by Baathist parties, the bad blood between Damascus and Baghdad ran deep. The Syrians did not want to see Iran defeated in the war; Damascus feared a triumphant Iraq as much as it feared Israel. Geopolitically, there was a natural affinity between Syria and Iran.
There also was an ideological issue at work in the creation of Hezbollah. Because it viewed itself as the true heir to the old Ottoman province of Syria (which had encompassed Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan), Syria was highly ambivalent about the creation of a Palestinian state. Accepting the idea of such a state would have meant the repudiation of Damascus' dream of reclaiming for Syria what had been stolen from it in the Sykes-Picot Treaty, which divided the Ottoman Empire between France and Britain at the end of World War I, tearing the province of Syria in half.
Because Damascus viewed the Palestine Liberation Organization as an enemy, it sponsored its own Palestinian groups in opposition to Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement. Syria's own Palestinian movements supported the destruction of Israel, but saw Palestine as part of Syria. Hence, there was a great deal of bloodshed between Fatah and pro-Syrian Palestinian groups. It is essential to recall that when Syria first invaded Lebanon in the mid-1970s, it was to crush Fatah in southern Lebanon and support Christian and Shiite allies against that movement. One of the reasons Israel was so comfortable with the initial intervention was its interests in Lebanon and those of Syria coincided.
For Syria, Lebanon was the key. In the 1970s, it was the most successful, Westernized country in the region, and Beirut -- with its banks -- was a financial center. The reclamation of Lebanon was not only the fulfillment of an ideological dream, but a critical pillar of Syria's economic development. In order to dominate the state, Damascus depended on the complex relationships between the Alawites -- a religious minority in the region -- and other groups: Christian, Druze, Sunni and Shia. Like Sicily, Syria-Lebanon was a kaleidoscope of alliances, double-crosses and accommodations. The Syrians had an advantage in this -- their army -- and a patron, the Soviet Union. But in the clan politics of Lebanon, Syrian dominance was far from preordained.
The alignment between Damascus and Tehran over Iraq, then, along with Syria's own attempt to reabsorb Lebanon, generated a mutual interest in the creation of a force in Lebanon that could work toward Iran's goals while also serving Syrian interests in the unfolding Lebanese civil war. Hezbollah became that interest. It served Iran by challenging Israel and the United States, while also threatening the Arabian monarchies. It served Syrian interests by challenging Palestinian secularists while retaining sterling anti-Israeli credentials. And for both Syria and Iran, Hezbollah became a tool for projecting power through terrorist attacks in the region.
Given that this was the Middle East -- and especially given that it was Lebanon -- ideology quickly mixed with business. Throughout the civil war and thereafter, Hezbollah became enmeshed in the complex business arrangements that were the foundation of the al Assad family's power and wealth, and in which senior Iranian officials and clerics also were involved.
Two areas were of particular importance to them all. The first was Beirut itself, where the real estate boom in the 1990s generated billions for all concerned. The second was the Bekaa Valley, a traditional smuggling route where drugs had been processed and staged for movement, first to Sicily and later to the Balkans, for resale in Europe. There were more billions at stake here.
Like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Hezbollah became the guarantor for Iranian and Syrian -- and its own -- commercial interests in the region. The group's interest in drugs took it to Latin America and to Europe, where its ideology also could be practiced. The 1994 attack against a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for example, was ideological. Hezbollah's presence in Latin America had commercial drivers as well. It all fit neatly.
As the situation in Lebanon stands today, then, the withdrawal of the Syrian army is the least interesting aspect. Two much more interesting problems exist.
First, private Syrian and Iranian economic interests in Lebanon define and control that country's economy. The alliances exist both beneath and above ideology -- and run beyond the region. You will find money that eventually traces back to Russia, Germany, the United States and even Israel deeply entangled with Syrian and Iranian money, as well as local funds, throughout the Lebanese economy. On the drug side, everyone who deals in drugs -- and these are big players indeed -- has a stake in the Bekaa Valley. The Syrian army can leave, but Syria will always be there.
Second, Hezbollah is the guarantor of much of the drug trade and is a player in the more legitimate enterprises as well. The group is a military power, and it has nowhere to go. Hezbollah is also very good at what it does, having practiced its craft for a quarter-century. The Israelis show little appetite for tangling with Hezbollah. The United States might have more of an appetite, but it should be remembered that fighting a well-armed, well-trained, experienced force on its own turf, when it has nowhere to retreat, can be done -- but it will cost.
This is why the Bush administration floated a plan that would allow a disarmed Hezbollah to play a role in Lebanon. Put differently, the Bush administration has told Hezbollah it can keep its commercial interests so long as it ceases to be an independent military force. Hezbollah can't buy that for two reasons: First, everyone has independent militias in Lebanon because no one trusts the central government to protect their rights; and second, the most lucrative segment of Hezbollah's interests involves things that most central governments won't protect.
Ultimately, Hezbollah's fate lies in the hands of Syria and, even more, Iran. Hezbollah is wealthy and strong, but unlike al Qaeda, it is dependent on the will of nation-states. The problem is that Iran in particular views Hezbollah -- even more than its nuclear program -- as a tool for controlling the United States. It is precisely the global nature of Hezbollah that makes it so effective. For Iran, Hezbollah keeps the United States honest and also reminds the Sunnis that they are not the only ones with suicide bombers -- an important point in internal politics.
In other words, the United States has hit the hard place in its follow-on strategy. The withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon doesn't begin to deal with the reality of al Assad family power in the country, nor does it deal with the foundation of Iranian power there. Hezbollah is the center of gravity of the problem. The United States can choose to fight the militants -- and we note aircraft carriers heading to the region -- or it can find a modus vivendi.
It is rare to point to Israel as a moderating principle, but the Israelis tried to fight Hezbollah and did withdraw from Lebanon. If the United States now feels emboldened enough to pick up where the Israelis left off, then, it seems that things are indeed going well in the region and the anti-terrorism war.
A thought now comes to mind: "Easy does it."
-
This is the first time I've encountered this source--it looks like an organization seeking to compete with Stratfor--so can't vouch for its veracity. I note respected defense industry reporter Bill Gertz is bylined on the site, which is probably a good sign. Be that as it may, some interesting info that bodes future fun in the Bekaa Valley
Why Syria loves Lebanon: Billions in skimmed revenues, Bekaa Valley's drug paradise, top-secret WMD tunnels
3-18-05
http://www.geostrategy-direct.com
President Bashar Assad loves little Lebanon because he and his cronies have been sucking their neighbor dry for years. Lebanon feeds billions of dollars into Assad's coffers that allows him to resist Western sanctions and maintain power.
Assad inherited this revenue stream, U.S. officials said. His late father, Hafez, created the system.
First, Lebanon has been a drug paradise for the Assad regime. The Bekaa Valley, heavily guarded by Iranian and Syrian troops, contains one of the largest drug operations in the world. Laboratories in Baalbek and other towns in the Bekaa take opium from Afghanistan and convert it into heroin. From there, the cut-grade heroin is shipped to Europe and Africa.
Assad junior also runs one of the largest counterfeiting operations in the world. Want a fake dollar bill? The Bekaa makes the best $50 and $100 bills ? perfect for crime syndicates and governments that can't afford real U.S. currency.
Lebanon has also been the haven for Arab investment, particularly from Saudi Arabia. For the Saudis, Lebanon represents a summer haven where they can rest on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean and live a secret Western lifestyle. Assad provides the security for the Saudis and he is handsomely rewarded.
Assad takes a hefty cut of virtually every government project in Lebanon. The cut involves cash for government concessions as well as guarantees that Syrian labor will be used. Assad also obtains a cut of the salary of each of the more than 1 million Syrians working in Lebanon.
The Syrian president also rents space in Lebanon to Iran and terrorist groups. Those needing to train in Lebanon or Syria, of course, pay a fee to use Lebanon for exercises ? whether in southern Lebanon or the Bekaa Valley. The result is that everybody from Chechens, Algerians and even Al Qaida operatives use this terrorist resort.
The Bekaa Valley also contains the darkest of Syria's secrets, including Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. More than a few U.S. officials are convinced that Iraq brought convoys of medium-range missiles and WMD warheads to Syria at the end of 2002 and early 2003 ? on the eve of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
Some of the WMD stayed in Syria. Most was regarded as too hot to handle, even for Assad. The material was stored in tunnels in the Bekaa Valley.
Given this, it is clear why Syria wants advanced SA-18 anti-aircraft system from Russia. Syria wants low-signature surface-to-air missiles to prevent any Israeli or U.S. air raid over the Bekaa Valley. Damascus has heavy anti-aircraft systems for inside Syria. But to bring these Soviet-origin weapons into Lebanon would present a juicy target for any Western military.
-
www.stratfor.com
Iran: The Military Force 'On The Table'
March 16, 2005 21 28 GMT
Summary
U.S. President George W. Bush said January he would not rule out the use of military force against Iran if Tehran refuses to cooperate regarding its nuclear program. The military option is unlikely to be executed while talks between Tehran, Washington and the EU on the subject exist. Although not likely any time soon, if talks lead nowhere, the United States could set Iran's nuclear program back years -- or possibly even eliminate it -- via airstrikes. Potential Iranian responses will naturally factor in any U.S. decision to attack.
Analysis
While the Bush administration insists that a political solution to the issues surrounding Iran's nuclear program will be sought first and foremost, U.S. President George W. Bush said Jan. 17 that all options -- presumably including the military one -- remain "on the table."
So far, the United States remains committed to a nonmilitary solution. However, if the crisis drags on and no political settlement is reached, the United States possesses the means to inflict severe damage on Tehran's nuclear program. With U.S. forces spread thin around the world, should Washington decide to exercise the military option against Iran's nuclear program, such an action would consist of a limited campaign of airstrikes lasting a few days. The scope would probably be similar to the Desert Fox operation in 1998, when the United States attacked Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, and would not consist of an invasion like 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF).
One of the most likely Iranian targets will be the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. This facility is critical to the Iranian nuclear program because enriching uranium is the final step before production of nuclear weapons is possible. Despite being buried underground, the facility is still vulnerable to the types of "bunker buster" munitions that U.S. forces found effective in OIF. The loss of the enrichment facility would be the decisive, crippling blow to Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions. Additionally, the heavy water plant and plutonium reactor at Arak could be targeted. The reactor at Bushehr is not as critical to the nuclear program, but it is the most vulnerable facility, so it could be attacked for good measure.
In addition to hitting critical sites associated with nuclear weapons development, Iran's capacity to resist and retaliate after the attacks must also be targeted. This would entail strikes against air defense sites, Silkworm anti-missile sites along the coast, commando units capable of attacking oil terminals and shipping in the Persian Gulf, Revolutionary Guard Pasdaran units and missile units.
Iran reportedly has the Russian-made S-300 missile -- a capable surface-to-air missile system that will complicate U.S. air operations over Iran. If the United States is to conduct airstrikes against Iran, this threat must be dealt with initially. The United States can identify these missiles' locations with electronic intelligence and jam their radar, or target them using Stealth aircraft. Once this threat is neutralized, non-stealth aircraft such as the U.S. Air Force's F-15E and U.S. Navy's F/A-18 would be able to deliver their own precision-guided munitions.
U.S. assets used in an attack against Iran likely will include the strike group from the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, which is currently supporting operations in Iraq. The Truman is about to be joined in the Persian Gulf by the USS Carl Vinson , which will add an additional 85 aircrafts to the U.S. order of battle. The United States can use cruise missiles launched from submarines, as well as F-117s flying out of Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, and B-1 and B-2 bombers flying out of Diego Garcia and possibly Thumrait Air Base in Oman. The United States also operates aircraft from bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan that could be used to stage airstrikes into northern Iran. It is unlikely those Central Asian countries would give permission for the United States to attack Iran from their territory, so if necessary, the United States can operate out of Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
Before attacking Iran's nuclear program, more U.S. strike aircraft would have to be moved into the region to deliver an overwhelming blow. Since the end of major combat in OIF, the United States has redeployed much of its airpower, leaving relatively few strike and support aircraft in the region compared to 2003. Sufficient supplies already exist at several logistics hubs in the region to sustain the attack. Patriot batteries also will have to be in place to protect airbases, logistic hubs and -- possibly -- Iraqi cities from retaliatory Iranian missile strikes.
An Iranian response to a U.S. attack could include attacking Iraq with Scud missiles, Silkworm launches against shipping in the Persian Gulf and terrorist attacks against U.S. interests worldwide. Efforts should be made to mitigate these prior to any attack against Iran. Iran also could retaliate against U.S. allies in the region, notably Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Kuwait's significant U.S. troop presence means it can rely on the United States to augment Kuwait's own Patriot batteries used to defend Kuwaiti population centers and oil exporting facilities. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, will have to use its own Patriot batteries to protect its oil terminals and cities. British forces headquartered in Basra would, at the very least, provide a deterrent to any Iranian attempt to move across the Shatt al Arab into southern Iraq.
Much must happen between Tehran, the EU and Washington before the military option becomes more likely; but should the need arise, the United States can draw on a powerful arsenal to cause catastrophic damage to Iran's nuclear program.
-
www.stratfor.com
An End to War?
March 31, 2005 23 59 GMT
By Kamran Bokhari
Although it is a very unconventional war, the U.S. war against al Qaeda -- like any other war -- eventually must come to an end. But because of its very nature, questions that have been posed since the Sept. 11 attacks have revolved around how to gauge the United States' military progress against a non-state actor, how we will know when the war actually has ended and what peace and security will mean in the post-9/11 age.
These are not easy questions to answer. The dynamics of this war are unlike any other, and Washington cannot gauge its progress (or lack thereof) by territories held or other conventional means. Nor can the means of ending the war shape future relations between the main actors.
However, there is now a real and growing sense that the Bush administration is working to bring closure to this war by directly targeting al Qaeda's core leadership -- Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- and that Washington is beginning to turn its attention to other matters, while acknowledging that the battle against militant Islamism likely will continue at some level for a long time.
Unlike most other observers, we believe the war is going in the United States' favor. Other than the Madrid train bombings a year ago, al Qaeda has not been able to stage significant attacks in the West, and none at all in the United States, since Sept. 11, 2001. It has confined its actions largely to the Muslim world -- its home region, where operations are easiest to mount -- but even there we see a weakening of militancy. The frequency of attacks in Iraq and other areas should not be mistaken for a surge in militancy, particularly if the attacks do not cause much damage and do not manage to alter the flow of political events.
Al Qaeda leaders, seeking to lay low in southwest Asia, have seen their offensive capabilities reduced to issuing communiques via audio and videotapes and press releases. The counterterrorism offensives launched by Southeast Asian states have prevented any major strikes from taking place, and militant activity in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia is negligible, even though many members of jihadist groups remain in this area.
Even in the Arab Middle East, transnational Islamist militants do not seem to be operating very effectively. This trend is particularly noteworthy in Saudi Arabia, where -- despite al Qaeda's shift toward striking government targets late last year -- the group's ability to stage attacks has declined markedly. The Saudi intelligence and security apparatus not only appears to have contained the militant phenomenon, but recently has taken the offensive.
Moreover, the kingdom's religious establishment -- long viewed as having divided loyalties and some sympathies for al Qaeda -- recently has spoken out vocally against the "jihadist" movement. This has forced al Qaeda's Saudi branch to attempt strikes in Kuwait and Qatar instead. It is possible that the militants could pull off small- to medium-sized attacks in the United Arab Emirates or Oman, and a surge in activity could even take place in al Qaeda's former stomping ground, Yemen. All the same, widening the sphere of operations will not, by itself, compensate for a decline in the effectiveness of attacks.
The only place where al Qaeda has been able to act with relative success has been Iraq -- though even that has required co-opting an existing group, al-Zarqawi's organization, which established itself in the mayhem following the ouster of the Hussein regime. Signaling a growing sense of the original al Qaeda's impotence, bin Laden is believed to have recently called on al-Zarqawi to concentrate on expanding beyond Iraq -- and if possible, to attempt strikes in the continental United States. The message, intercepted by U.S. intelligence, indicates that al Qaeda prime considers Iraq to be a lost cause.
Even al-Zarqawi has acknowledged that he faces a crisis: In one of his initial communiques to bin Laden, early last year, he warned that his fighters were in a race against time. The Sunnis' nationalist insurgency may linger on for some time after the consolidation of the new Shiite-led government in Baghdad, but transnational militants -- who have contributed only a small fraction of the overall daily attacks -- will probably not last long once a new Iraqi Constitution is drafted and a democratically elected government is in power. Therefore, if the most robust of all its units now sees the clock ticking for its eventual annihilation, we feel it is safe to view al Qaeda as a largely spent force.
This view is strengthened by the fact that Muslim regimes -- in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and now Iraq -- are finding it necessary to combat suicide bombers and other jihadist operations, prompted not only by U.S. pressure but also the threat to the regimes' own survival. Ultimately, the physical space in which the jihadists can sustain their movement, plan operations and execute strikes is shrinking -- and the likelihood of their own deaths or captures is growing.
For instance, the new government in Iraq has accelerated its efforts to arrest al-Zarqawi, having already captured a number of his key aides, and Pakistani forces have released information that indicates they are making progress in attempts to locate bin Laden and his deputy, al-Zawahiri. These include a March 25 statement by Lt. Gen. Safdar Hussain, head of the XI Corps in Peshawar and commander of counterterrorism operations in the northwestern tribal regions, who said that bin Laden's security detail consists of nearly 50 men, arranged in concentric circles of security, for which Pakistani forces now are on the lookout.
There also are signs that the U.S. military is preparing to carry out a (possibly final) offensive against the al Qaeda leaders, who are believed to be hiding in northwestern Pakistan. Among these is Washington's long-awaited decision March 25 to sell F-16 fighter aircraft to Islamabad -- a move that will give President Gen. Pervez Musharraf the political capital he needs to launch a joint offensive with the United States on Pakistani soil. U.S. forces also have relocated from western Afghanistan to areas along its border with Pakistan.
The capture or death of any of the three militant leaders would pose a significant setback for lower echelons of the jihadist movement, which would lose direction and a source of morale. Jihadist operatives are fueled not only by constant doses of ideology, but also by tangible proof of their own progress or success. With tempos of operations at their lowest ebb since the Sept. 11 strikes, the elimination of all or even one of the top three leaders could erode al Qaeda's capabilities to the point that attacks are regarded as mere nuisances -- a level that, though undesirable, is manageable.
Another point to consider is that a certain combination of circumstances gave rise to al Qaeda and created an environment that allowed it to nourish and grow -- domestic conditions within Muslim nation-states; regional forces within the Middle East and South Asia; and the international situation within the context of the Cold War. Even within that environment, however, it took bin Laden and his followers some 15 to 20 years to establish al Qaeda as a significant geopolitical threat.
The conditions that fostered al Qaeda's growth no longer exist, and the current global fight against Islamist militant movements will make it nearly impossible for the next generation of jihadists -- which potentially could emerge, though it would likely take more than 15 to 20 years -- to replace al Qaeda on an equal scale, once the group has been squelched out. In short, we do not believe the world faces a long-term threat from current jihadist elements -- and we might in fact be entering another cycle of relative security, until another generation of Islamist extremists can revive transnational militancy.
Essentially, we are entering another age in which global relationships are defined by alliances and tensions between nation-states.
Now, some have suggested that the war in Iraq, like the Soviet conflict in Afghanistan, has become a breeding ground for the next generation of Islamist militants. Though there certainly are similarities -- both situations involve warfare, a convergence of Arab and Muslim fighters and the presence of Islamist extremists -- there are significant differences as well. Perhaps the most important is that in Afghanistan, the majority of the populace opposed Soviet efforts to prop up an Afghan Marxist regime, which came to be viewed as a godless oppressor and legitimate target of jihad. In Baghdad, the new, U.S.-backed government -- made up of Shia and Kurds -- actually has the support of most Iraqi voters. Furthermore, the political process in Iraq is undercutting the insurgency by co-opting many of its leaders -- and there is no rival foreign power with its own proxies, seeking to contain U.S. efforts.
Among the Sunni elements, there also are differences: The Iraq conflict has not attracted nearly as many foreign Muslim fighters as did the war in Afghanistan, nor do the majority of Iraqi Sunnis subscribe to al Qaeda's extremist Wahhabi ideology.
It could be further argued that the Bush administration's push for democratization -- especially in the Arab Middle East and wider Muslim world -- is another factor that will reduce the attractiveness of militantism in the long term. Because the people of the region have no love for the existing authoritarian political structures, external demands for democracy will mesh with internal desires for greater freedoms and self-determination.
However, fears linger in the West that a truly democratic protest could allow radical anti-U.S. groups to gain power in the Middle East.
These apprehensions bear examination. At least in Iraq and Afghanistan, where political liberalization already is under way, there is empirical evidence to the contrary: We see conservative and even Islamist forces, which wield much greater influence than the militants, moderating their stances as nation-building efforts take root. Similar phenomena have occurred in Turkey, Iran and Pakistan -- states where democratic politics exist, to varying degrees.
In other words, democratization in states where significant Islamist movements make respectable showings in elections has had a moderating effect on Islamist ideologues -- albeit most of these forces are relatively moderate to begin with, compared to those with extremist transnational agendas. It is important to note, as well, that radical and militant Islamists oppose democracy; therefore, notions that radicalism and militancy will only spread with the collapse of autocracies and the onset of democracy carry no water.
The wild card that could sustain jihadism lies in the Chechen situation, where the militants' ethnic makeup makes it hard to detect them. Moreover, they are not facing a dragnet of the same intensity as that directed against al Qaeda. A weakening Russia could provide the circumstances under which the Chechen militants go transnational. But for this to occur, one of two conditions must exist. Either remnants of al Qaeda will have to move to the Caucasus, or the Chechen militants will have to subscribe to an anti-American and pan-Islamist enterprise.
Since the chances of either are slim, the current jihadist movement seems to have passed its peak as a serious geopolitical force -- at least for the next generation.
-
THE GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT
The Push for Democracy: Ending the 'Karzai Effect'
April 06, 2005 1411 GMT
By Kamran Bokhari
As we recently noted, Washington has moved beyond the military stage of the U.S.-jihadist war and is now in the phase of negotiated settlements. Historically, there has been a problem with such accommodations -- particularly where Islamist forces are involved. This is something we often refer to as "the Karzai effect."
However, the second Bush administration, in its push for democracy around the world, appears to have found a way to achieve its ends without necessarily undermining its Arab/Muslim counterpart. Not only is Washington willing to gamble on the outcome of "messy" democratization, but it also is willing to go where it consciously has avoided going before -- facilitating the rise of Islamist (albeit relatively moderate) forces to power in Muslim states.
It should be remembered that during the first of the Bush administrations, in June 1992, an assistant secretary of state, Edward Djerejian, caveated Washington's support for the spread of democracy, noting somewhat ironically that the United States opposed systems characterized by "one man, one vote, one time." Djerejian was, of course, not referring to the time-honored "one man, one vote" tradition of the United States, but to the landslide victory of Algeria's Front Islamique du Salut (Islamic Salvation Front) in first-round elections there. His remark -- which expressed U.S. fears that an Islamist group would use legitimate elections to take power and then slam and lock the door shut behind it -- came to be viewed as the cornerstone of U.S. policy toward Islamism.
Like so many other notions, that was shattered by the events of Sept. 11,
2001. The transnational threat posed by militant Islamists prompted the
search for moderate voices within the Muslim world. Of those that emerged -- from secularists, regimes and traditionalists -- it is the Islamists the Bush administration has chosen to work with.
This can be seen in several examples from the Middle East: First, Islamist
(Shiite) forces in Iraq and in Iran were the United States' principal allies
in facilitating the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Second, Washington needed
political partners in Iraq who could deliver on a deal -- not secular
leaders who had no control over the street. Third, U.S. policymakers have begun to understand the factionalization within the Islamist movement and how to exploit it to advantage.
In stark contrast to the position voiced during his father's presidency,
President George W. Bush's administration is issuing bold statements. In
April 2003, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the Bush administration wanted to see an Islamic democracy emerge in Iraq -- pointing to Turkey's quasi-Islamist Justice and Development Party regime as a model. And in October 2004, Bush said that though it wasn't his first choice, Washington would accept an Islamic government, if democratically elected.
In Afghanistan, outgoing U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has been
overseeing the integration of "moderate" Taliban forces into the political
process to boost President Hamid Karzai's standing within his own majority Pushtun community.
Now, the Bush administration has upped the ante. Not only has Bush set the spread of democracy as the cornerstone of his second-term foreign policy agenda, but the president in the State of the Union address called directly for Egypt and Saudi Arabia -- two of the United States' closest allies in the Middle East -- to democratize their authoritarian governments.
There is no doubt that the U.S. preference for democratic political systems, at least as applied in the West, is motivated by philosophy and ideology, but the push for democracy in other regions is thwarted by a host of structural and functional problems. Moreover, as with any country, national interest trumps altruism. Thus, the U.S. push for greater democratization in the world in general and in Arab/Muslim countries in particular is motivated primarily by the need and desire to safeguard U.S. national interests and its superpower status around the globe.
Over the long term, democratic processes conceivably could bring order to chaos. Autocratic structures breed social, political and economic
instability, especially in times of political transition. Because of this,
it is also more difficult to predict political turnovers and successions,
since any cracks in the structure can give hidden opposition forces a chance to explode onto the scene. As the world's sole superpower, the United States finds this problematic, since these situations can force it to intervene politically, economically and, of course, militarily.
In the longer term, democracies provide much greater stability, while
authoritarian systems are far superior at controlling disruptions in the
short term. By pushing for democracy -- even in the Middle East -- the
United States is tacitly signaling that the security crisis touched off by
the Sept. 11 attacks is over and that Washington feels sufficiently secure
and in control to weather short-term disruptions in political systems
abroad.
In the case of the greater Middle East region, whose modern history is
replete with conflicts, Washington appears no longer interested in
short-term, patchwork solutions involving a strongman or proxy group. This is not to say the United States will be pulling its support from the
incumbent authoritarian regimes forthwith. Far from it. Washington is trying to strike a balance by pressuring current rulers to gradually open up the system and, meanwhile, to develop mechanisms whereby alternative and viable leadership can emerge as the autocrats depart the scene, avoiding chaos scenarios in which the United States must intervene on some level.
That explains the logic -- but what about the timing of this initiative? The
answer sheds important light on the future direction of the Middle East. We already have noted that the success in Afghanistan and even more so in Iraq has prompted the Bush administration to extend the democratic experiment to the entire region. Meanwhile, natural forces -- read, old age -- are making regime change inevitable in a number of Middle Eastern states in the near term.
This is most obvious in Egypt, where the failing health of President Hosni
Mubarak will force him to appoint a successor. Saudi King Fahd is monarch in name only; his half-brother, Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdel-Aziz, runs affairs in Riyadh. But between them, the crown prince and three immediate princes -- Defense Minister Sultan, Interior Minister Nayef and Riyadh Gov. Salman, who are full brothers of the king and the elite of the Sudairi Seven -- range in age from 69 to 75. It is likely that they, along with Abdullah, could die in quick succession, opening up a power contest between other factions of the House of Saud.
While democratization in the Saudi kingdom is at best a very long-term hope, given the conservative Wahhabist culture and the deeply entrenched monarchical system, other areas, such as Jordan, Syria, Libya and the Persian Gulf states, are in similar situations: The existing autocratic system could be swept away should a wave of democratic fervor strike the region -- as it did in Eastern Central Europe and select areas of the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and more recently in the last year in the Caucuses and Central Asia.
Meanwhile, Washington faces the prospect that it could be forced to have
dealings with Islamist militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. As the Palestinian state begins to take shape -- with the Israeli withdrawals and Palestinian Legislative Council elections in July -- Hamas will be playing a greater role in daily life. In fact, it is expected to make a significant showing in the summer elections.
Officials in Washington understand that at some point -- sooner rather than later -- the Palestinian authority and eventually the state will be based on a power-sharing arrangement between the secular Fatah and the Islamists. Nonetheless, Washington continues to push for democratization of the Palestinian political landscape. In Lebanon, the Bush administration has dropped hints that it is willing to deal with the Shiite militant Islamist movement Hezbollah.
These cases are both a bit complicated, since neither Hamas nor Hezbollah has yet made the shift from being an armed resistance organization to a fully respectable political group. But the very fact that the Bush administration is willing to give these Islamist actors some space on the political stage is quite significant.
It is not just that Washington needs to work with political groups who
command grassroots support; Hamas and Hezbollah exist by default and must be dealt with somehow. The theory is that those who demonstrate some semblance of willingness to play by the rules of democratic politics can be given a stake in the system, which will eventually moderate and temper their radicalism -- which is fueled by exclusion and the need to engage in the politics of protest from the outside.
If successful, this shift on Washington's part could be highly effective in
establishing a bulwark against al Qaeda or other transnational Islamist
militants. In other words, it is Islamist -- not secular -- forces that not
only can stem the tide of the al Qaeda phenomenon but act as a buffer
against a possible jihadist resurgence. Of course, the Bush administration
would not have dared the attempt if it was clear that democratization would bring jihadist groups into power -- Djerejian's principle still stands. It was only after realizing that al Qaeda has been unable to topple any Muslim regimes, and that it is growing increasingly weak, that Washington could safely announce the democracy initiative.
Even with the moderate Islamists, Washington is moving cautiously -- making sure Islamists do not end up dominating the system. In Iraq, this was apparent with the tinkering of the electoral laws and the Transitional
Administrative Law -- the country's interim constitution -- by U.S. civilian
administrator Paul Bremer to make a mixed government unavoidable.
On a final note, it is interesting that democratization could, in a
significant way, stem the tide of anti-American sentiments in other parts of the world. If political forces backed by the masses come to power as a
result of the Bush administration's push for democracy, this will over time
improve the U.S. image in foreign eyes.
For this to happen, the Bush administration knows it needs to extend olive branches, which it has done by appointing new officials at the Pentagon and State Department -- and most obviously by removing some of the most hawkish neoconservatives from policymaking positions. The reshuffle is Washington's way of trying to prepare the ground for the growth of democracy, without making any new governments appear to be puppets or otherwise engineered pro-U.S. regimes. The appointment of Bush confidante Karen Hughes to lead the public diplomacy drive in the Middle East/Muslim world further exemplifies this trend.
In essence, Washington understands that if deals are going to be cut, the
United States first must create an environment conducive to deal making.
This means U.S. proposals must not be viewed as immediate threats to the survival of Arab or Muslim regimes that have assisted its war against al Qaeda, and that anti-Americanism within the region must be contained within acceptable levels.
If democratization and engaging moderate Islamists works, Washington just might be able to rid itself, for good, of the Karzai effect.
(c) 2005 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
Perhaps this is misfiled; it's a review of a recent report on the state of US intelligence gathering. Think the most salient point the author raises here is that we'd be far better off greatly reducing the size of our intelligence community by dumping the dead weight and then rebuilding. As someone who has made a living over the years by walking into dysfunctional organizations and making them work--often times by firing all the boneheads first--I couldn't agree more.
April 07, 2005, 8:08 a.m.
Intelligence Failures
Virtues and sins of commission.
Michael Ledeen
Two cheers for the Silberman-Robb Commission Report, which for the first time raises some of the basic issues about the rot that has long festered within the intelligence community. Yes, it?s too long, (much too long), and unfortunately the authors are forever telling us ?we think, we recommend, we believe,? rather than just writing simple declarative English. But okay, that?s the way commissions work, and there is a lot here that makes it worth the heavy plowing to get through the 600 pages. Unfortunately, the entire argument ? one of the great merits of the enterprise is that there is actually a sustained and coherent argument from beginning to end ? rests on an unprovable assumption that is unnecessary and, alas, quite likely misleading.
The good things are very good, and the very best thing is that they recognize that intelligence is more an art than a science, and they therefore rightly insist that the success or failure of the intelligence community will ultimately depend on the quality of the people and how they are treated. I can?t remember the last time that was said in a public document, or even in the mounting pile of commentary on the report, and it?s really the most important thing. Silberman/Robb say it, say it often, and try to figure out how best to do it. They recognize that the culture of the community is rotten ? the results speak for themselves, after all ? and they suggest ways to retain talented people, ranging from attractive side benefits like travel, sabbaticals, and greater opportunities to mix with the outside intellectual world.
Changing the culture club
They recognize that the community will need both generalists and specialists, and they properly insist that there must be room for both. If an analyst wants to spend her career studying Yemen, and Yemen alone, it might be a good thing. If a case officer wants to spend decades in Central Asia, we should probably encourage him to do it. I agree entirely, but this requires a radical revision in the way promotions and awards are handed out, and it?s not going to be easy to find leaders with the confidence and courage necessary to do it. Which puts us back in front of the basic problem once again. How do you find good people, and how do you keep them once you?ve found them?
They are also alarmed at a recent brain drain that has left the community bottom-heavy with new arrivals, and they suggest the creation of an ?intelligence university? where the recruits can be properly trained. They hope that this, combined with their recommendations to make life in the community more attractive, will help solve the manpower problem. But here, too, the chickens and eggs often become indistinguishable from one another. We?re dealing with a failed culture, as the commission tells us over and over again. Who?s going to staff the university? If it?s the remaining ?experts? (that is, mostly the mediocre ones who didn?t or couldn?t join the brain drain), how can Intel U produce good graduates? It just becomes a method of perpetuating the failed culture, doesn?t it?
The commission vigorously endorses ?competitive analysis,? and is remarkably open-minded about the best way to accomplish this. I think they are right to recognize that this will often depends on the subject; sometimes it will be best to ask outside analysts to take a fresh look, other questions will be best addressed by ?Teams B? from inside the community. Their insistence on the urgency of intellectual conflict within the community is one of the most refreshing parts of the report, and one can only hope that Negroponte, Goss, and Jacoby take it to heart.
The report suffers from the community?s favorite conceit: that there is something called ?tradecraft? that distinguishes an intelligence analyst or case officer from every other scholar or investigator. In the case of analysis, this is nonsense; it?s one of the little clouds that intelligence officers use to dismiss conflicting views and criticism. Yes, those who analyze satellite images need special skills, but so does a sociologist analyzing urban turmoil. And the ?tradecraft? of the real spooks, the case officers and deep cover spies, has been perhaps the greatest community failure for at least a generation. Here, the commission identifies one of the prime reasons for that failure: The community rewards ?recruitments? rather than finding precious secrets from our enemies. This in turn puts a premium on getting ?assets? to accept money, so that the case officer can add a notch to his ?asset belt.? But there are many cases in which people with invaluable information won?t take money from CIA or DIA or the FBI; they?re willing to cooperate with us, but not work for us. Yet the community culture is famously bad at dealing with such people.
All of which leads to two conclusions that the commission could not reach, even though, reading between the lines, it seems pretty clear they would have if they could have: First, there must be accountability, and this means that lots of people should be fired (and should have been fired long since, especially after 9/11). And second, that, instead of expanding personnel ? as the president requested and Congress obliged after the terrorist attacks three and a half years ago, and as the president again requested and Congress again obliged following the dreadful recommendations of the 9/11 Commission just before last year?s elections ? we should drastically reduce manpower, and then, if necessary, slowly rebuild.
If talent and accountability are indeed the crucial issues ? and, to repeat, the great strength of the report is its recognition that these are the crux of the matter ? then it is impossible to get a good intelligence community by shuffling the failed bureaucrats around in new configurations, and then providing them with lots of new bodies to badly train and educate. It is a guaranteed formula for worse intelligence because it produces more and more bad analysts and ineffective case officers. The intelligence community needs a big-time purge, not a brainless expansion accompanied by a monster reshuffle of boxes, connections, and interagency groups.
The commission couldn?t say these things, because they were not part of its mandate. Instead, they occasionally hint at these conclusions ? I can?t imagine such a great talent as Larry Silberman (who should be sitting on the Supreme Court) submitting to total censorship on such an important matter ? and probably raised the matter, verbally, when they briefed the top congressional and executive-branch officials.
Dead Wrong?
Finally, the unprovable assumption I started with: that there were no WMDs in Iraq. The report says, over and over, that the assessment that Saddam had an active WMD program, and that there were significant quantities of WMDs, was ?dead wrong.? But we don?t know that. Indeed, we can not possibly know it. All we know, at the moment, is that we didn?t find any, and the current wisdom has it that we didn?t find them because they weren?t there in the first place.
To which one must ask: Were all the intelligence services of the world ?dead wrong?? Were the others as bad as we were? Did Brits, French, Germans, Russians, Israelis, Italians, Egyptians, Jordanians, and Spaniards, to name a few, all come to the same wrong conclusion? What are the odds on that? Why should anyone believe that? Aging readers of NRO may recall that, months before the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom, I wrote that WMDs were being smuggled to Iran and Syria. Others, including people on the ground, have said the same or similar things. On what basis are those hypotheses dismissed?
They are dismissed by constant reference to the Iraq Survey Group. Without putting too fine an edge on it, the ISG comes from the same intelligence community that the commission savages for hundreds of pages. Why should this particular group?s findings (actually non-findings) be taken as canonical? It makes no sense to me.
I don?t think it would have weakened the commission?s critique one iota to have said, ?We do not know whether Saddam actually had these things. We only know that none has been found. If there were none, it is one kind of intelligence failure. If there were WMDs but don?t seem to be there now, it?s another kind of failure. Either way, we failed.?
The great advantage of taking that position ? aside from its logical superiority to the unprovable assumption ? is that it reminds us that the war against the terror masters is not a war in a single country, but a life-and-death struggle over a vast region, in which our enemies help one another in many ways. And our failure to recognize that, and plan accordingly, is truly the greatest intelligence failure of them all.
? 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.
http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200504070808.asp
-
Geopolitical Intelligence Report: From Islamism to Post Islamism
.................................................................
THE GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT
From Islamism to Post-Islamism
April 18, 2005 1424 GMT
By Kamran Bokhari
Amid continuing efforts to resolve its post-Sept. 11 security crisis, the
United States and European countries increasingly are dealing with what once
would have been an unlikely array of political partners in the Muslim and
Arab worlds: Islamist groups.
Because they advocate the imposition of Islamic law in national politics,
Islamists -- or what Westerners formerly have referred to as Islamic
fundamentalists -- might at first glance seem to have little, if any, role
in the Bush administration's second-term push for democratization throughout
the world. But they are, in fact, among the United States' most potent
potential partners as Washington and others seek to conclude the jihadist
war and lay a foundation for relations with the Muslim world.
These efforts, which mark a significant shift in Washington's own
approach -- particularly in the Middle East -- will impact what has been a
long-running competition within political Islam: the struggle of moderate
Islamists of many varieties, who make up the bulk of the Muslim world, to
attain power without sacrificing their religious ideals or credentials.
As a political ideology, Islamism achieved its first major victory with the
Iranian revolution in 1979. At that time, in the context of the Cold War, it
was not perceived as the next great challenge for the United States or the
West. That perception emerged only with the Sept. 11 attacks and ensuing
war. For the past three and a half years, media attention to the issue has
created a perception -- correctly or otherwise -- that Islamism is
proliferating and poses a growing security threat.
Islamists make up a significant portion of the Muslim political landscape --
supported by believers who are concerned about the fate of Islamic values
and culture in the modern age, when Western and particularly American ideals
and culture seem to permeate the globe. Nevertheless, Islamist groups have
had little success in translating their popularity into votes and actual
political power.
But that is slowly beginning to change.
Mechanics of Moderation
Though logic dictates that some forms of radical and militant beliefs will
persist, Islamism on the whole increasingly is moving toward moderation.
This is evident in many areas -- including Lebanon and the Palestinian
territories, where groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas are bidding to play a
part in mainstream politics.
This shift has little to do with any external factors. Instead, it is part
of a natural evolution for groups that thus far have been unable to capture
the imagination of the masses sufficiently to take political power. Turkey
is the only Muslim state in which an Islamist group of sorts -- the Justice
and Development Party (AK) -- controls the government, but even the AK can
be considered an "Islamist-lite" party, since it is a more pragmatic and
increasingly moderate version of its predecessors, the Virtue, Welfare,
National Salvation, and National Order parties going as far back as 1970.
As democracies around the world have shown before, ideology is important to
voters, but not more important than the material interests of the people.
Politically, ideology is a medium that allows a people to secure their
interests; if it does not succeed in doing that, it will remain a peripheral
concern.
For example, in the Middle East, Fatah has become an acceptable partner for
the United States and Israel at the peace talks table, but support among the
Palestinians is splintered because the government has not been able to build
sufficient infrastructure. Conversely, Hamas commands a great deal of local
support because of the social services it provides; but in order to achieve
power within the mainstream, the militant group ultimately will have to
compromise its ideological stance on the existence of a Jewish state.
Defining Islamist Movements
Though its intellectual roots stretch back to the social, economic and
political upheavals of the late 19th century, Islamism emerged as a
political movement in 1928, when the Ikhwan al Muslimeen (Muslim
Brotherhood) was founded in Egypt, and spread from there to British India,
where Jamiat-i-Islami (Islamic Group/Association) was launched in 1941. By
the 1950s and 1960s, when most of the Muslim countries had gained
independence from their European colonial rulers, these organizations and
their counterparts in other states became serious political entities.
Islamist groups distinguished themselves from others -- which included
secular, nationalist and Marxist Muslim groups, to name a few -- by seeking
to establish or re-establish what they argued was an Islamic state in their
home countries. In other words, they wanted the state to implement Islamic
law. Beyond that, however, there is no agreement even today on exactly what
an Islamic state is or should be.
Not only are the reasons for this disagreement too vast to be explored here,
they also are less important than the means by which the various brands of
Islamists seek to achieve their goals. Though it is their attitudes toward
their religion and modernity that makes Islamists "moderate," "radical" or
"militant," it is their approach toward establishing their political goals
that defines their relationships with other Muslim and non-Muslim entities.
A vast majority of Islamists in almost all Muslim states are moderates: They
pursue the establishment of an Islamic polity through democratic means. At
the other end of the Islamist spectrum are the militant groups who want to
fight the incumbent regimes to attain power. During the 1990s, the militants
went transnational and began fighting the United States -- the main support
behind the existing Muslim regimes -- as a tactic toward this end goal. Al
Qaeda and its allies around the world represent the transnational jihadists.
In the middle are several groups that can be viewed as nonviolent but that
espouse a radical agenda. For example, Hizb al-Tahrir -- founded in 1952 by
Palestinians living in Jordan and now present in many parts of the world --
rejects the use of armed struggle but seeks to overturn the political
nation-state structure in order to re-establish the caliphate.
Intra-Islamist Contention
While the moderate, radical and militant labels refer to political
attitudes, the behavior of various Islamist groups can be classified as
either "integrationist," "isolationist" or "interactionist."
Moderate Islamists are integrationists, in the sense that they embrace the
existing structure and function of the state -- they are willing to work
within constitutional bounds to establish their Islamic government.
Moreover, they engage society by organizing themselves into various civil
society groups and reaching out to the public. The Muslim Brotherhood,
Jamiat-i-Islami and its counterparts in South Asia are key examples.
Radical Islamists are interactionists -- they interact with society to
foment popular revolution that would destroy the state power structure they
reject as illegitimate. They also seek out sympathetic elements within
existing state structures to support their efforts to oust those regimes.
But most radical groups reject both democratic and the existing autocratic
forms of government as un-Islamic, because they are secular systems. They
seek instead to restore the old caliphal/emiratic forms of governance --
though with some modifications to fit current realities. However, they also
reject the use of violence to further their political interests.
Militant Islamists -- most of whom are jihadists -- are isolationists. Not
only do they want to fight the state, but their operational needs for
secrecy preclude them from engaging the masses. Moreover, militant Islamists
subscribe to a top-down approach: The idea is to capture power and then
Islamize the state and society, Taliban-style.
Now, there are some exceptions to these rules. For example, both the
Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas and the Lebanese Shiite movement
Hezbollah maintain large militias and engage in violence, but they do not
direct their strikes at the Muslim state. Nor do they fit neatly into the
"jihadist" mold cast by al Qaeda, for various ideological, religious and
political reasons.
Their militant wings notwithstanding, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah seek to
establish an Islamic authority through armed struggle. They have routinely
acted as spoilers in the context of political developments from which they
were marginalized or excluded -- and as is now evident in the Middle East,
they seek to advance their position through electoral means.
Moderation Leading to Interface
Now, with the United States actively searching for political as well as
military solutions to its post-Sept.-11 security problems, the odds of
success for Islamists are greater than ever before. By adopting a more
democratic approach, it becomes possible for the Islamists not only to begin
working with other domestic groups, but to open up a channel of
communication with the United States as well. This already is occurring in
Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
The Bush administration's declarations that its war on terrorism does not
constitute a war against Islam or Muslims are much more than rhetoric.
Military action has been focused against transnational and local or regional
jihadists that have directly targeted the United States or its interests.
There is nothing in Bush doctrine per se that precludes Washington from
working with moderate Islamists -- but there are fears and uncertainty about
how to deal with nonviolent radical groups, which have evaded the spotlight
amid the manhunts for militants and political negotiations with others. The
fact that these radicals eschew violence but espouse revolutions that might
run counter to U.S. interests will complicate policymaking in this area for
some time.
Meanwhile, it is the moderate Islamists who present Washington's best option
for the future. As history has shown, non-Islamist moderates with whom the
United States initially thought to partner -- for example, Pakistani
President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and the Saudi monarchy -- do not necessarily
enjoy the support of the masses. Now, the strategy is to engage certain
types of Islamists in political dialogue, as Washington looks to use the
weight of the majority to counter the radical and militant fringes.
Toward a Post-Islamist Era?
Islamists always represented a small fraction of the more than 1 billion
Muslims worldwide, and militants are an even smaller subset. This situation
has been impacted, however, by the Sept. 11 attacks and subsequent events.
Now, militant Islamists are on the run, and the search for viable
alternatives -- as well as democracy movements -- is lending itself to
dialogue between moderate Islamist actors and Washington.
At the intellectual and ideological level, integrationists, interactionists
and isolationists are all locked in a struggle for supremacy. The
integrationists have the upper hand, since the militants are busy trying to
save their skins and the radicals -- though heavy on diagnosis and dogma --
offer no tangible solutions to existing political problems.
However, the outcome of the struggle will depend, to a great extent, on
Washington, which is fast moving away from an emphasis on military
operations to one on calibrated negotiations. The U.S. contact with the
moderates does risk delegitimizing them, but concrete political results and
social improvements in the Arab/Muslim world would be the antidote.
The marginalization of the isolationists and the interactionists will allow
the integrationists to gain the upper hand within the Islamist camp. But
that does not necessarily mean that in the end the Islamist agenda will win
the day. Once they have made the transition from opposition to dominance,
these groups -- as we are seeing in Iraq -- likely will not be able to push
their religious agendas too far.
As a practical matter, Islamists now are undergoing an ideological
transformation. The heretofore heavy and rigid emphasis on doctrine is
giving way under concerns about how best to turn doctrine into action.
When the dust settles, the Islamists likely will come to terms with the fact
that the Quran and the Sunnah merely provide broad normative principles,
which are applicable only through broad-based discussions, debates and
negotiations -- a process facilitated by a democratic framework.
As belief in a specific and timeless Islamic polity crumbles, an age of
post-Islamism likely will emerge. In other words, the Muslim world is on the
verge of embracing a version of modernity that is in keeping with its
Islamic ethos. This would differ markedly from the periods of secularism and
Islamism that followed the death of the caliphal age.
In this post-Islamist age, Islamist and non-Islamist Muslim powerbrokers
will mingle. And in this environment, pragmatism will temper ideology.
(c) 2005 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com
-
This is the first time I've encountered this blog so I'm hesitant to post this piece; for all I know this author should sport a tinfoil hat. Still, this is the best survey of DOD intelligence practices I've encountered, and all quotes are sourced (go to the URL at the end of the article; the original links to all citations).
The most compelling element here, IMO, is the argument for an intelligence apparatus that has both data gatherers and end users in the same chain of command. A simple conclusion, one, alas, that standard CIA practices prevent.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Spy Vs. Spy
Linda Robinson's compelling opening paragraph in US News and World Report is at once suggestive and accusatory. It is suggestive of what human intelligence gathering and analysis can achieve while subtly asking why it was not done before.
In the second week of December 2003, U.S. Special Forces captured an Iraqi man named Fawzi Rashid, a top insurgent leader in Baghdad. Rashid was carrying a letter from Saddam Hussein, U.S. News has learned, that was less than a week old. It would prove to be the key break in the 10-month manhunt for the Iraqi dictator. Military intelligence specialists, working with the Green Berets, persuaded Rashid to identify the courier who had delivered the letter. Two days later, the courier led U.S. forces to Saddam's grim spider hole. The lightning-fast sequence of events was the result of a decision to have intelligence analysts work side by side with soldiers, known in Pentagon-speak as "collectors." "Analysts were telling the collectors what they needed, and collectors were giving their collections right back to the analysts," says a senior Pentagon official, describing Saddam's capture. "What's new . . . is that you had analysts and collectors all under the same chain of command."
If the target in the story was Saddam Hussein, the target of the story was the Central Intelligence Agency. But the Washington Post describes the US military efforts to create a human intelligence gathering infrastructure in less glowing terms, depicting it as a Rumsfeldian dodge to conduct operations without Congressional oversight.
The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick, has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces. ... Pentagon officials emphasized their intention to remain accountable to Congress, but they also asserted that defense intelligence missions are subject to fewer legal constraints than Rumsfeld's predecessors believed. ... Under Title 10, for example, the Defense Department must report to Congress all "deployment orders," or formal instructions from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to position U.S. forces for combat. But guidelines issued this month by Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone state that special operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations . . . before publication" of a deployment order, rendering notification unnecessary. Pentagon lawyers also define the "war on terror" as ongoing, indefinite and global in scope. That analysis effectively discards the limitation of the defense secretary's war powers to times and places of imminent combat.
At a Department of Defense briefing, an unnamed senior Defense official flatly denied these charges, emphasizing that these Strategic Support Teams were in fact lineal descendants of earlier units called "Human Augmentation Teams"; that they would operate directly under senior commanders -- but not the Secretary of Defense -- and that the tasks of the teams were coordinated with the Director of Central Intelligence. That hardly mollified some critics. AP writer Robert Burns reports "Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and other Democrats called for hearings, but Republicans balked. According to The Washington Post, the Department of Defense is changing the guidelines with respect to oversight and notification of Congress by military intelligence. Is this true or false?" Feinstein wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld." One key difference, according to the IHT was that ""DOD is not looking to go develop strategic intelligence," said one senior adviser to Rumsfeld who has an intelligence background. "They're looking for information like, where's a good landing strip?"
It appears that they are looking for slightly more than that. Global Security reports that the Pentagon is building up a constellation of human intelligence support systems including:
J2X CONOPS -- a system for providing analytic support to HUMINT operations at the strategic, theater, and tactical echelons;
ROVER -- a geospatial Information System-Palmtop- Digital camera system;
FALCON, FORUM and SMINDS -- which are automatic translation systems enabling people of different languages to speak to each other simultaneously or interpet documents in foreign languages while in the field.
WMD1st and Digital RSTA -- WMD analysis and a targeting tool; and
a HUMINT laptop system to house all the relevant tools.
This looks very much like a closed-loop system in which intelligence leads can be prosecuted iteratively until they lead to action, with no discernible boundary in between. But it is not the philosophical abolition of the barrier between thought and deed that really rankles. It is also about turf. Linda Robinson asserts that the scale of the Pentagon effort effectively threatens the CIA monopoly on spying, whatever the Department of Defense says.
A key flashpoint has been the recruitment and handling of sources. For many years, all intelligence sources recruited by U.S. agencies, including the Pentagon, were registered and maintained through the CIA's InterSource Registry. Now the Pentagon has begun registering the human sources it uses for military purposes under a separate registry, called J2X.
Whether or not the Pentagon succeeds in its endeavors remains to be seen. What is less debatable is the need to improve human intelligence operations. Marc Ruel Gercht in a Weekly Standard article described the CIA's currently human intelligence system as seriously broken. He believed that as presently constituted the Agency had no chance of significantly penetrating the ranks of the terrorist enemy.
One can, however, grade intelligence services on whether they have established operational methods that would maximize the chances of success against less demanding targets--for example, against Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, which is by definition an ecumenical organization constantly searching for holy-warrior recruits. It is by this standard that ... the CIA will continue to fail, assuming it maintains its current practices. ... It was in great part structurally foreordained: Not only the promotion system but also the decision to deploy the vast majority of case officers overseas under official cover--posing as U.S. diplomats, military officers, and so on--set in motion a counterproductive psychology and methods of operation that still dominate the CIA today. ... And there is simply no way that case officers--who still today are overwhelmingly deployed overseas under official cover or, worse, at home in ever-larger task forces--can possibly meet, recruit, or neutralize the most dangerous targets in a sensible, sustainable way.
It is into that gaping breach that the CIA's rivals will sail.
posted by wretchard at 11:34 AM
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/
-
I just joined here after having been emailing with Marc for a couple of years with another group. It was your post that provided the impetus. I have read Belmont Club for a couple of years and it has tended to have very reliable analysis of the topics that he covers. The sources that he will quote are usually at the top of their game. Occasionally, he will also post from two State Dept overseas foreign service officer blogs who have very interesting takes on things. They tend to differ with the standard view of State, and more open to Condi.
-
April 22, 2005, 7:43 a.m.
Winning the War
But don?t forget the rules of this strange conflict!
Victor Davis Hanson
If we look back at the war that started on September 11, there have emerged some general rules that should guide us in the next treacherous round of the struggle against Islamic fascism, the autocracies that aid and abet it, and the method of terror that characterizes it.
1. Political promises must be kept. Had the United States postponed the scheduled January elections in Iraq ? once the hue and cry of Washington insiders ? the insurrection would have waxed rather than waned. Only the combination of U.S. arms, the training of indigenous forces, and real Iraqi sovereignty can eliminate the vestiges of hard-core jihadists and Saddamites.
Given our previous record ? allowing Saddam to survive in1991, restoring the Kuwaiti royals after the Gulf War, subsidies for the Mubbarak autocracy, and a moral pass given the Saudi royals ? we must bank carefully any good will that we accrue if support for democracy is going to be a credible alternative to the old realpolitik. Reformers with no power in Egypt or the Gulf, who oppose such ?moderate? autocracies, must, despite all the danger that such a policy entails, be seen in the same positive light as those dissidents in far more peril in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. Consistency and principle are the keys, and they will be worth more than a division or an air wing in bringing this war to a close.
2. Any warnings to use force ? much less unfortunate unguarded braggadocio ? should be credible and followed through. The efforts of the terrorists are aimed at the psychological humiliation and loss of face of American power, not its actual military defeat. Appearance is as often important as reality, especially for those who live in the eighth rather than the 21st century.
After the horrific butchery of Americans in Fallujah in late March 2004, we promised to hunt down the perpetrators, only to pull back in April and May, and allow the city a subsequent half-year of Islamic terror, before retaking it in November. The initial hesitation almost derailed the slated elections; the subsequent siege ensured their success. Nothing has been more deleterious in this war than the promise of hard force to come, followed by temporization. Either silence about our intent or bold military action is required, though a combination of both is preferable.
3. Diplomatic solutions follow, not precede, military reality. Had we failed in Afghanistan, Musharraf would be an Islamic nationalist today, for the sake of his own survival. Withdrawing from Iraq in defeat would have meant no progress in Lebanon. Some hope followed in the Middle East only because the Intifada was crushed and Arafat is in paradise. The Muslims scholars of Iraq talk differently now than a year ago because thousands of their sympathetic terrorists have been killed in the Sunni Triangle. The would-be Great Mahdi Moqtada Sadr is more buffoon than Khomeini reborn since his militia was crushed last year.
A quarter century, from the Iranian hostage-taking to 9/11, should have taught us the wages of thinking that an Arafat, bin Laden, assorted hostage-takers, an Iranian mullah, Saddam, or Mullah Omar might listen to a reasoned diplomat in striped pants. Our mistake was not so much that appeasement and empty threats made no impression on such cutthroats. The real tragedy instead was that onlookers who wished to ally with us shuddered that the United States either would talk to, or keep its hands off, almost any monster or mass murderer in the Middle East ? if such accommodation meant sort of a continuation of the not so bothersome status quo. In contrast, that bin Laden and Mullah Omar are in hiding, Saddam in chains, Dr. Khan exposed, the young Assad panicking, and Colonel Khadafi on better behavior will slowly teach others the wages of their killing and terrorism and that the United States is as unpredictable in using force as it is constant in supporting democratic reformers.
4. The worst attitude toward the Europeans and the U.N. is publicly to deprecate their impotent machinations while enlisting their aid in extremis. After being slurred by both, we then asked for their military help, peace-keepers, and political intervention ? winning no aid of consequence except contempt in addition to inaction.
Praise the U.N. and Europe to the skies. Yet under no circumstances pressure them to do what they really don?t want to, which only leads to their gratuitous embarrassment and the logical need to get even in the most petty and superficial ways. The U.N. efforts to retard the American removal of Saddam interrupted the timetable of invasion. Its immediate flight after having its headquarters bombed emboldened the terrorists. And a viable U.S. coalition was caricatured by its failed obsequious efforts to lure in France and Germany. We should look to the U.N. and Old Europe only in times of post-bellum calm when it is in the national interest of the United States to give credit for the favorable results of our own daring to opportunistic others ? occasions that are not as rare as we might think.
5. Do not look for logic and consistency in the Middle East where they are not to be found. It makes no sense to be frustrated that Arab intellectuals and reformers damn us for removing Saddam and simultaneously praise democratic rumblings that followed his fall. We should accept that the only palatable scenario for the Arab Street was one equally fanciful: Brave demonstrators took to the barricades, forced Saddam?s departure, created a constitution, held elections, and then invited other Arab reformers into Baghdad to spread such indigenous reform ? all resulting in a society as sophisticated, wealthy, free, and modern as the West, but felt to be morally superior because of its allegiance to Islam. That is the dream that is preferable to the reality that the Americans alone took out the monster of the Middle East and that any peaceful protest against Saddam would have ended in another genocide.
Ever since the departure of the colonials, the United States, due to its power and principled support for democratic Israel, has served a Middle Eastern psychological need to account for its own self-created impotence and misery, a pathology abetted by our own past realpolitik and nurtured by the very autocrats that we sought to accommodate.
After all these years, do not expect praise or gratitude for billions poured into Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, or Palestine or thanks for the liberation of Kuwait, protection of Saudi Arabia in 1990, or the removal of Saddam ? much less for American concern for Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Somalia, the Sudan, or Afghanistan. Our past sins always must be magnified as much as our more recent benefactions are slighted.
In response, American policy should be predicated not on friendship or the desire for appreciation, but on what is in our national interest and what is right ? whose symbiosis is possible only through the current policy of consistently promoting democracy. Constitutional government is not utopia ? only the proper antidote for the sickness in the Middle East, and the one medicine that hateful jihadists, dictators, kings, terrorists, and theocrats all agree that they alike hate.
The events that followed September 11 are the most complex in our history since the end of World War II, and require far more skill and intuition than even what American diplomats needed in the Cold War, when they contained a nuclear but far more predictable enemy. Since 9/11 we have endured a baffling array of shifting and expedient pronouncements and political alliances, both at home and abroad. So we now expect that most who profess support for democratization abroad do so only to the degree that ? and as long as ? the latest hourly news from Iraq is not too bad.
One of the most disheartening things about this war is the realization that on any given day, a number of once-stalwart supporters will suddenly hedge, demand someone?s resignation, or bail, citing all sorts of legitimate grievances without explaining that none of their complaints compares to past disappointments in prior successful wars ? and without worry that the only war in which America was defeated was lost more at home than abroad.
Yet if we get through all this with the extinction of Islamic-fascist terrorism and an end to the Middle East autocracy that spawned and nurtured it ? and I think we are making very good progress in doing just that and in less than four years ? it will only be because of the superb quality of the American military and the skilful diplomacy of those who have so temperately unleashed it.
? Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
-
Capture in Pakistan: Tightening the Squeeze on Al Qaeda
Summary
Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said May 4 that Islamabad captured Abu Farj al-Libi, one of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's closest associates. Al-Libi, a Libyan national, is accused of two assassination attempts against Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. His arrest deals a serious blow to al Qaeda's operational capability -- and likely will increase U.S. pressure on Islamabad to get the final job done.
Analysis
Pakistani security forces raiding a house in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier
Province have captured Abu Farj al-Libi and five other foreign al Qaeda
operatives, Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said May 4. Al-Libi, a Libyan national accused of having masterminded two assassination attempts against Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is believed to be al Qaeda's third in command.
The capture in the town of Mardan of one of Osama bin Laden's top military commanders -- al-Libi replaced Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the No. 3 post after the latter's capture in March 2003 -- likely puts al Qaeda's top leadership in a much more vulnerable position. Significantly, it also comes at a time when the global jihadist organization desperately needs to launch a major attack if it is to maintain its credibility, but is having trouble doing so.
Although Pakistani authorities appear to be closing in on the al Qaeda
leadership, al-Libi might be unable to divulge information on bin Laden's
location. Bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri -- seen in a
September 2003 al Qaeda videotape walking in a remote mountainous area -- would want to limit their travel to avoid capture. Bin Laden, in fact,
likely is hiding somewhere in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal
Areas, with the help of locals.
A leading operational chief such as al-Libi (the name is a nom de guerre)
would probably not have access to information regarding bin Laden's exact location, since his duty to carry out operations puts him at greater risk of being caught. Bin Laden likely communicates with his operational leaders through intermediaries -- he would keep his location secret from al-Libi in order to avoid being tracked.
Al-Libi's capture comes at a time when Pakistani-U.S. relations are heating up over a planned joint operation against al Qaeda in northwestern Pakistan. As Stratfor has said, the time is ripe for a final offensive to capture bin Laden and relieve U.S. forces in the region. Though the United States is eager to get the operation completed, Islamabad is doing all it can to delay it -- and to make it appear that Pakistani authorities have the situation under control. It is quite likely that U.S. forces played a significant role in al-Libi's capture, and allowed Islamabad to take credit for the operation to avoid upsetting local sensibilities.
Pakistan responded quickly after U.S. Lt. Gen. David Barno, former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, recently said Musharraf plans to launch an operation against al Qaeda in North Waziristan. Pakistani military spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan rejected Barno's statement, saying only the Pakistani government and army would decide when and where it should launch the operation.
As Pakistan experiences increasing domestic turmoil, Musharraf will push his claim that dialogue with tribal chieftains in the region is the safest way
to tame his domestic constituency -- and to weaken al Qaeda. This claim,
however, probably will not relieve U.S. pressure on him to act. Regardless
of whether Musharraf likes it, this significant capture will increase
Washington's determination to execute its military plans -- and finish off
al Qaeda.
-
Peace Process in Crisis: Abbas' Dilemma
By George Friedman
The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is now facing its first serious crisis since the death of Yasser Arafat. The process may not survive. The problem is the same that has plagued previous attempts at peace: Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas is not able to guarantee that all Palestinian factions will honor an agreement.
The problem exists on both sides, obviously. There are Israelis who oppose the peace process as well as Palestinians. The Israeli opposition, however, is unlikely to derail the peace process so long as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon remains committed to it. Sharon is a man of the Israeli Right, and in many ways, historically, has embodied it. Many of his fellow Rightists are appalled at what he is doing, but in the end, this can never be more than a relatively small faction. When you are as far to the right as Sharon, your right-wing opposition is going to be more noisy than significant. Sharon can deliver if he wants to.
Abbas has a different problem: There is no equivalent consensus among the Palestinians. Instead, they are divided into three factions.
First, there are those who are prepared to accept a Palestinian state as a permanent solution and are prepared both to recognize Israel's right to exist and to permanently abandon a military option against Israel.
Second, there is the faction that is prepared to accept a peace agreement as a temporary solution -- perhaps one lasting for several generations -- but not a permanent one. In other words, this faction sees peace in terms of an extended cease-fire rather than as a permanent solution.
Third, there is the faction that will not accept even an extended cease-fire. This faction intends to continue waging war against Israel until it achieves its political ends, which for most include the destruction of the state of Israel.
For Israel, accepting the existence of a Palestinian state rests on a single premise: that there will be a state structure in place that can impose an agreement with Israel on all factions of the Palestinians. Most important, the Israelis expect a Palestinian state to suppress the third faction, which intends to continue carrying out attacks against Israel regardless of any political settlements. For Israel, unless there is a cessation of violence, the creation of a Palestinian state has no validity.
Sharon has a problem with his right wing, but in the end, he can control them. Abbas has a problem with his militant wing, but it is not at all clear that he can control them. The question of control is not theoretical. It has a simple, essential characteristic: Abbas must be able to disarm the militants, and his security forces must be able to halt attacks against Israel without the presence of the Israeli army.
It is becoming clear that Abbas is in no position to disarm the militants. Earlier this week, he ordered security forces to use an "iron fist" in containing Palestinian militants, after two armed Hamas members who clashed with Palestinian police were detained in Gaza on May 2. According to a PNA Interior Ministry spokesman, the men had rockets that they planned to launch against Israeli targets. Hamas then successfully pressured the PNA, with the help of an Egyptian official in Gaza, to release the two militants on May 3.
On May 4, Abbas' Palestinian Authority stated that it had no intention of disarming militants. Rashid Abu Shbak, head of the PA's security service, told a news conference that "we have no intention of withdrawing arms of resistance." Now, this did not come from Abbas, but it came from his security chief. Abbas can back off, but the statement is pretty blunt.
The problem is not that Abbas doesn't want to disarm the militants; the problem is that he can't. He simply lacks the force within the Palestinian community to prevail. Pushing the issue would trigger a civil war, and it is not clear that Abbas would win. If Hamas gives up its weapons, it loses its leverage in Palestinian politics. That won't happen.
Which means that the Palestinians are back where they started. Abbas cannot negotiate with the Israelis, because he can't enforce any agreements. Since this is what Sharon's old friends on the Right said would happen, Sharon will now be under pressure to halt withdrawals from the occupied territories. That will suit Hamas just fine, as it will undermine Abbas. It will also suit the Israeli Right.
It comes down to this: There is no consensus among the Palestinians as to what should happen. There are three strands of thought -- all with some base of support, and all of which are mutually exclusive. Israel could live with some sort of deal that includes the "let's have peace for a generation and then start the war again" faction. A lot changes in a generation. But Israel cannot make peace with a government that can't disarm Hamas.
Things are getting dangerous again. Actually, they never really stopped being dangerous.
-
This piece is a lot to wade through, most may want to scroll down to to the Al-Qaida section. With that said, there is a lot to be gleaned here, and more can be found at the author's website:
http://www.ex.ac.uk/politics/pol_data/tandoc/
One thread I note is that the two terrorist organizations examined here, the IRA and Al-Qaida, are both tied to the construction business. It appears this can lead to multiple funding avenues: in Ireland, for instance, it's deduced that a pro-IRA tavern might be blown up by the IRA, insurance collected, a non-licensed "safe" drinking establishment set up to fill the market void (with the funds going to the terror organization and the informal tavern serving as a recruitment ground), while an IRA established construction firm rebuilds the bombed tavern.
Next time I hear about some edifice being blown up for murky reasons, I'll be looking at it through a new lens.
This piece is well sourced and appears to be peer reviewed.
THE BUSINESS OF TERRORISM
W.A.TUPMAN
Submitted for publication by the Centre for Strategic and Global Studies, Moscow.
Some of the argument is taken from an article previously published in the Journal of Money Laundering Control
Vol 1 No 4 pp.303-311
April 1998
And two short articles published in Intersec :
"The Business of Terrorism"
Intersec, The journal of International security Vol 12
no 1 Jan 2002 pp 6-8
"The Business of Terrorism Part 2"
Intersec The Journal of International Security Vol 12 no 6 June 2002 pp 186-8
This article explores such information as exists with regard to funding firstly in relation to the IRA, and then to activities associated with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. The purpose is to demonstrate the complexity of organizations that are called ?terrorist? and to examine whether it can be demonstrated that there is convergence with organized crime groups. It begins by discussing Gambetta?s work on organized crime as a business before recording the Financial Action Task Force?s statement on sources of terrorist financing. It then looks at the variety of funding mechanisms known to have been used, first by the IRA and secondly by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
Any study of a terrorist organisation raises questions about the legitimacy of the state and the morality of challenging it by violent means. Although individual terrorists are charged before the courts with individual criminal acts, there is an acceptance that the phenomenon is primarily a political one and that a debate is possible over the relationship between a just cause and the employment of illegal means to achieve it. There is little study of terrorism as an economic phenomenon and the methods by which organisations fund themselves. Elsewhere, this author has argued that successful terrorist groups survive by resorting to funding methods copied from organised crime [Tupman 1998].
This raises several interesting theoretical and practical questions. If funding follows the organised crime model, how much effect has this had on the structure of the organisations concerned? Gambetta and others have argued that organised crime is increasingly a business [Fiorenti and Peltzman 1995]. It follows the successful contemporary business model characterised by networks, or loose associations of individuals and groups. It is no longer dominated by centralised , hierarchical organisation. If a group such as the IRA has gone down the same road then how ?terrorist? is it? An organisation may be called ?terrorist? because it engages in acts of paramilitary violence. Those organisations that survive for a significant period of time, however, do so by engaging in many activities other than paramilitary violence. Funding has already been mentioned, but they also have to recruit; they have to train; they have to engage in peaceful political activity and so on. The individuals that engage in these latter activities are much more loosely organised than the individuals that engage in the paramilitary violence, yet are associated with them in a non-hierarchical relationship.
Organised crime has also converged to some degree with "terrorist" organisation, copying the cellular structure. Increasingly it consists of networks of people who may only come together for a specific operation and the rest of the time may be engaged in completely different organisations and completely different and even legal work, especially where these individuals are lawyers or accountants. The same individuals engaged collectively in illegal activity may also simultaneously be engaged collectively in legal activity. This is equally true of the IRA. Post 1968 terrorism was based on 5 man cells, or Active Service Units [ASUs] in the Northern Ireland context. These are operationally autonomous and may have been engaged in their own fund raising as well as other activities quite independently of the central Army Council, the body that allegedly ?runs? the IRA. We need to know the degree to which these operations were audited by a central body, or whether the IRA has followed organised crime in becoming what Van Duyne has described as ?non-organised?. [Van Duyne 1993 p10]. This would also provide those attempting to control money-laundering in this area with some clues as to where to look.
Gambetta has also argued that violence is itself a business; that it is a service that can be bought and sold. Terrorist organizations are well placed to sell violence and to replace the traditional purveyors of violence to organized crime. Terrorists also need weapons. In the process they have to set up smuggling services. They thus have a second business activity from which they can sell spare capacity. It is only a small step from that realization to the linked idea that it makes sense to smuggle small volume, high value goods in order to obtain the funds necessary for the weapons themselves. Drugs and high value raw materials such as diamonds and other precious and semi-precious stones are obvious commodities.
There is a third relevant aspect of Gambetta?s analysis which began with a study of the Sicilian Mafia. Where the state is weak, it is difficult for suppliers and purchasers of goods to enforce contracts. Those who can sell violence can, in effect, become contract insures and enforcers. It is only a short step to becoming licensers of business activities. Organised crime, too, has a problem of contract enforcement. It is no good taking someone to court for failure to pay for a consignment of illegal narcotics. Terrorist movements that survive over a period of years can move into this role, particularly where they have effective control of neighbourhoods or regions.
The FATF Statement on terrorist Financing
In 2001, the Financial Action Task Force identified the following major sources of terrorist funding:
Drug trafficking
Extortion and kidnapping
Robbery
Fraud
Gambling
Smuggling and trafficking in counterfeit goods
Direct sponsorship by states
Contributions and donations
Sale of publications [legal and illegal
Legitimate business activities
Their pre-September 11th discussions concluded that with the decline in state sponsorship of terrorism, terrorist groups increasingly resort to criminal activity to raise the funds required. The world moved on with the attack on the twin towers. Consequently, FATF decided to expand its mission to focus on combating terrorist financing as well as money-laundering.This makes redundant previous disagreement about funds raised by terrorist organisations from non-criminal activity and whether this could strictly be said to constitute money-laundering. There is still disagreement about the need for special legislation. Some of the FATF experts believed existing legislation adequate for dealing with terrorist money-laundering while others thought terrorist money-laundering to be a distinct variety of money-laundering that required special measures. The origin of terrorist funds is often quite legal, but the purposes to which they are put are not. They thus can behave differently from funds derived from illicit business in that they do not have to be moved around quite so quickly. They can be invested and accumulate before being diverted to illicit purposes. This has led to the growth of perfectly legal business enterprises that in effect wholly or partly belong to terrorist organisations.
When discussing terrorism, the definitional problem still remains central. What is a terrorist organisation and how is it to be distinguished from national liberation movements? It has become more acceptable to refer to ?the paramilitaries? in the context of the Northern Ireland peace process. This has the advantage of being value-neutral. The UN also continues to find this a political conundrum, especially where the Arab-israeli dispute is concerned. The US has followed British legal practice of listing proscribed movements and includes Hezbollah, Hamas and the PFLP, without whose consent a peace settlement in the Middle East is simply unachievable. Nevertheless executive order 13224 blocks their assets and property.
THE SURVIVORS
Only a small number of the hundreds of terrorist and paramilitary groups that have existed since the 1960s have survived into the third millennium. In Northern Ireland, there is the Irish Republican Army [IRA] and a number of Protestant paramilitaries: the Ulster Defence association [UDA] with which is associated the Ulster Freedom Fighters [UFF]; the Ulster Volunteer Force [UVF] and its breakaway movement, the Loyalist Volunteer Force [LVF]. Of these, the majority are supposed to be on cease-fire and involved in the ?peace process?, but all continue to maintain their organization and are alleged to be involved in various forms of violence.
In Spain, the Basque separatist movement, ETA [Euskadi ta Askatasuna ?Basque Fetherland and Liberty]
In Corsica, the FLNC [Front de Liberation Nationale de la Corse].
In Colombia, the FARC Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
In Asia, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka
In the Middle East, a number of paramilitary organizations associated with the PLO and Hezbollah.
And perhaps the first truly globalised group, the Afghan veterans association known to us as al Qaeda.
The article concentrates on the IRA and al Qaeda, because it is easier to document a variety of funding sources with which they have been involved. Later studies will examine the other groups.
IRA FUNDRAISING
Following the Gambetta school, I have attempted to produce an analysis of the finances of the IRA in the form of a business prospectus. Previous versions of the table that follows have appeared in the proceedings of International Symposium of Organised and Economic Crime and an analysis of the funding of all UK terrorist groups has been published elsewhere [Tupman 1998]. An updated version of the prospectus follows:
Table 1
IRA PLC
Company activities
A small international company providing executive and leisure services in the British Isles and North West Europe. Overseas offices in the United States and Australia. Courier services available to various parts of he world.
Subsidiary companies provide construction and demolition services. IRA PLC also franchises clubs and a ?get you home? service. Private security services also provided for housing estates. Insurance quotations against bomb damage can also be brokered.
The company has recently secured a niche in the import-export market, particularly of livestock and CDs.
Statement of income
?
Contributions from overseas subsidiaries 1,500,000
Shebeen subsidiaries: bar and machines 4,275,000
Import-export business 2,250,000
Fire and Bomb Damage Insurance [Protection plc] 6,150,000
Construction 5,000,000
Involuntary bank and post office contributions 1,250,000
Total Cash 20,425,000
Non-cash contributions
Demolition equipment and executive toys Too sporadic to quantify
Statement of expenditure
Executives in UK [4] Salaries 80,000
Warehouse and Support staff UK [20] Salaries 400,000
Transport and accommodation 200,000
sub-total 680,000
Executives in Northern Ireland 400,000
Warehouse and Support staff 600,000
sub-total 1,000,000
BALANCE 1,680,000
Pay-outs from executive family insurance fund 2,000,000
Semi-retired staff in Eire [50] 1,000,000
BALANCE 4,680,000
Demolition equipment and executive toys [depreciation] 1,500,000
BALANCE 6,180,000
Investments 13,500,000
BALANCE 19,680,000
Petty cash fund 745,000
TOTAL 20,425,000
In discussing the income and expenditure of the IRA one is immediately involved in propaganda. It clearly suits the security forces to portray the IRA as no more than another organised crime group. This is of course to paint a distorted picture of the IRA, who are not primarily in business for the purposes of making money but who need to have ways of making money in order to stay in business. Indeed, although ?IRA-PLC? is a catchy title, it would be more correct to talk of ?Republican Movement PLC?. Irish commentators prefer to use this latter term. The former title gives the impression that the IRA controls all branches of the Republican Movement and this cannot safely be asserted. Sinn Fein, the women?s movement, social clubs, Gaelic Sports associations, the Catholic ex-Servicemen?s Association, prisoners' support organisations and various businesses are all organisations within a broader movement. Who controls whom, who interacts with whom and how are not only matters for research but occasionally matters disputed before the courts. The money-making ventures alluded to in the prospectus may or may not be under the control of the Army Council, may or may not pay a percentage to the Army Council and may or may not take place in areas considered to be under Republican Movement ?control?.
Related problems must appear frequently on the agenda of IRA Army Council meetings. How far should they engage in fundraising and how far in armed operations? Should the same personnel be involved in both? Should they be kept totally separate? How can they be used against the movement as propaganda? The essence of every act of terrorism is propaganda. Terrorism could be said simply to be armed propaganda. So fundraising in itself presumably should be used as a weapon to undermine British state. Fraud committed against the northern Ireland Housing Department would be legitimate, as would fraud against the Ministry of Agriculture Food and Fisheries, customs duties evasion or similar. Fraud against domestic Irish credit unions would presumably be unacceptable.
Equally dealing drugs in the UK might be acceptable where dealing drugs in Belfast would not be. In Dublin, however there are strong suspicions that IRA personnel are involved in trafficking in soft drugs, if not in street dealing. Certainly the IRA has taken a leaf out of the pages of their Basque colleagues, ETA, in gaining popular support by kneecapping or placing orders of exile on well known drug dealers in Belfast, Derry city and elsewhere. Equally what the British security forces would call protection rackets the IRA would say are in the nature of a revolutionary tax, following the Basque model again.
Another problem in discussing this subject is the nature of the sources. Various officers of the RUC and Garda Siochana have briefed study groups led by the author in the past, but where documentary material has been shown, it has been on a confidential basis. The figures given above have had to be justified by reference to press sources, and these are often dubious. At one stage the stories were all about security forces' successes against the IRA's financial network. At another the IRA?s links with the US were exaggerated to bring pressure to bear on visiting US politicians. At all times stories are exaggerated in order to sell newspapers and the Sunday Times clearly thinks IRA scare stories keep its readers interested. Nevertheless, it has received a number of major security forces leaks over the years and devotes more space and depth to Northern Ireland than its broadsheet rivals. The problem of verifiability needs to be borne in mind constantly when considering the pseudo data of which the IRA-PLC prospectus consists.
Returning to the prospectus: post office and bank raids throughout Ireland are used as acceptable ways of blooding recruits and finding out how serious their commitment may be. Unattributable briefings given the author allege that 50% of post office and bank raids in the south have some form of IRA connection. The figure in the Table above reflects the total amount stolen in post office and bank raids in Ireland and 50% of that total has been calculated and entered in the Table as income.[Unattrib 1995]
The figure of contributions from overseas subsidiaries reflects published statements of the North American organisation Noraid which vary annually from $160,000 to $800,000. [Bishop and Mallie 1988 p297. See also McKinley pp203-218.] Added to this are contributions from the UK, Australia and Canada [McKinley pp201-3 analyses the Canada connection in some detail]. Early in the 1970s contributions were also made by Libya. [Bishop and Mallie p305, McKinley p196 gives a figure of ?5million by 1977] This is generally presented as being money raised for the welfare of prisoners? families and is balanced in the statement of expenditure by an estimate that money to prisoners? families costs the republican movement as a whole ?2million. This illustrates the problem of distinguishing between legal and illegal aspects of the business of the republican movement. Noraid would presumably claim that to support the families of prisoners is legitimate business and in no way relevant to the IRA as an armed illegal organisation. These categories remain in my statement of income and expenditure because there have long been allegations that funds raised for prisoners' families have been used for other purposes. [McKinley p208 alleges that up to $4million per annum was actually being remitted from the US to Ireland.]
Contributions from overseas obviously fluctuate. When the British security forces have carried out high profile operations such as the killings in Gibraltar contributions tend to rise significantly. Collections are regularly made in various public houses in English and Scottish cities as well as the more formal fundraising organisations in the United States, Canada and Australia. One and a half milllion pounds is probably on the low side for these contributions. The point needs to be made however that very little of this money would have anything to do with weaponry or bombmaking equipment in the 1980s and perhaps the 1970s because of the amount of munitions smuggled in from Libya during this period. [unattrib. 1996] Libya apparently admitted to shipping 130 tonnes of weaponry between 1985 and 1987, of which about half has been used or found by security forces.[ Sunday Times, 24 Dec 1995 journalist's claim supported by unattributable briefings.] Iran has also been accused of maintaining a ?20million slush fund in the mid to late 80s, of which some went to the IRA.[Sunday Times 21 Aug 1994]. Taking clandestine contributions from states together with declared and undeclared contributions through individual sympathisers, ?1,500,000 seems a fairly conservative figure.
"Shebeen subsidiaries" refers to one of the curious consequences of "the Troubles". During the early 70s many pubs were bombed. As a result shebeens or illegal unlicensed drinking clubs grew up as places where the community could drink safely. In the 1970s it was very difficult to tell to what degree these were actually ?owned? by the paramilitaries on both sides. Whoever "owned" them, they certainly provided opportunities for fundraising or for money laundering. In 1989 new regulations were brought in by the authorities to try to estimate the income of gambling machines and so on and compare that with figures returned by the legal accounts of these businesses for taxation purposes. [Sunday Times 1st Aug 1993] Again in discussing this it is difficult to decide where the Republican Movement ends and the IRA begins. Where these bars are run by committees from the community and everything is done in a legal fashion they may simply be involved in the payment of "protection" to the IRA rather than being wholly owned businesses.
The heading "Import- Export Business" covers the increasing allegations that the "IRA? is involved in the import of counterfeit computer software, videos and music CDs. The security forces apparently attribute this to their ?success? in clamping down on the drinking clubs, which they estimate cost the IRA ?7million per annum [Sunday Times 1st Aug 1993}. If this is true, the figure given in the table for income from clubs and gaming machines is an under-estimate pre-1989 and an overestimate for post-1989. When discussing illegal imports, the problem is two-fold: the degree to which the IRA shades into Northern and Southern Irish organised crime groups and the degree to which the reports in the Sunday Times are propaganda aimed at discrediting the movement with the community. On the other hand, the community is hardly going to be antagonised by the provision of the above commodities at cheap rates, so if this is propaganda, it can't be terribly effective! Nevertheless an early attempt to estimate income from these activities alleged ?1million per annum from fraud and extortion, ?2million from smuggled goods and video piracy, ?750,000 from the black taxis, ?500,000 from fruit machines , ?250,000 from charities ,and ?250,000 from overseas sympathisers [Sunday Times 12 March 1995
UCLAF, the fraud investigation unit of the European Commission, has alleged that the IRA is also involved in the movement of cattle across the northern-southern Irish border and back again in order to attract import subsidies and evade various forms of duty.[Fight Against Fraud 1995] If this is being carried out by individual members of families normally associated with IRA membership, it may not necessarily follow that these individuals consider the activity to be IRA activity as opposed to private enterprise. Again our friends in the Sunday Times and the Times linked the ?IRA? to a South African fraud of ?41million,[Times 20 May 1995], a US heist of $7million, [Times 15 Nov 1993], a London bond robbery of ?292 million, and a US bank fraud of ?150 million [Sunday Times 22 May 1994]. If all this is true, then the IRA could probably buy Executive Outcomes to do its job for it! The table above gives a more sober figure.
The Sunday Times also has the IRA smuggling ?2million a year in stolen antiques to dealers in the British Midlands, selling illegal growth promoters for cattle to farmers, selling counterfeit designer jeans, computer games and videos and engaging in major building -site fraud. [ Sunday Times 1st August 1993] Again, these activities may be taking place, but the IRA cannot have the time or the personnel to run them all. Much more likely is that, as with legal businesses, illegal businesses pay a ?licence fee? to the IRA to operate. This is one way of explaining the different signals coming from the security forces on drugs. Indeed, there are suggestions, that, in the case of drugs, some of this licensing was freelance. During the ceasefire, the IRA turned to attacking drug dealers to keep its activists battle-hardened, but it was possible to pay local commanders to prevent one's name being put forward for approval as a target by the Army Council [Sunday Times 31st Dec 1995].
"Fire and bomb damage insurance" refers to the allegation that various businesses pay money to the IRA to protect themselves from a bombing campaign. The Sunday Times alleged that a major bakery chain for example paid ?2million a year to the IRA through an international security consultancy to prevent its bakeries being destroyed. In fact it appears that this was not an annual payment but related to the kidnapping of Don Tidey, an executive.[Coogan 1987, p 659.] A one-off payment of ?2million for one large business suggests that a total of ?6milllion for all businesses to insure against kidnapping and bombing is not actually that high and the income in this area may indeed be higher. Again the same paper, the Sunday Times, in one of its colour supplements, quoted a meeting of ?black taxi? drivers as being called on to raise their weekly contribution to ?8. [Sunday Times 1996] That would give a figure of ?400 per driver per year, which needs to be multiplied by the number of drivers. Similar calculations need to be made for other individual small and large businesses, legal and illegal, around Northern Ireland. But as already mentioned above, elsewhere, the same newspaper has quoted security forces sources as calculating an income of ?750,000 per annum from taxis.
The heading "Construction" refers to fraud carried out against the Northern Ireland Housing Office during the reconstruction of bombed buildings. An estimate of ?15million lost has been given in newspapers. [Times] There have also been allegations of IRA involvement in social security fraud on the British mainland. Again the problem is that anything with an Irish connection is going to be called ?IRA?.
Turning to the expenditure statement, the category of ?executives in the UK? is based on the assumption that the IRA have moved away from the totally independent 5 man cell [ASU] as their basic unit. They now use surveillance and intelligence teams whose job it is to set up particular operations. These are represented by the category ?20 warehouse and support staff?. Operatives tend to operate in pairs when actually carrying out a bombing or shooting. These are the ?4 executives?. The table is based on the assumptions that full time personnel would be provided with an income of ?20,000 per year and that the whole team would have access to a budget for hiring cars as well as stealing them and for obtaining legitimate accommodation.
These figures may be high and on the Northern Ireland side have been halved on the assumption that the individuals concerned are drawing unemployment benefit or obtaining incomes from legitimate sources. The total assumed by the security forces of full time genuinely IRA units is about 100. [?If the politicians would only let us take 100 of them out, this nonsense would all be over?]. [unattrib.]This table doubles that assumption to err deliberately on the expensive side. 50 are allocated to the South of Ireland, 24 to the UK and 100 to Northern Ireland, 40 in the executive role and 60 in the warehouse and support role. This may be a complete misunderstanding of the way the IRA operates and the idea that there genuinely are 100 full time personnel is probably be a security forces fantasy. Such an assumption leads to the conclusion that all that has to be done in Northern Ireland is to lock up 100 people and everything will stop.
As long as the Republican Movement remains as multi-faceted as it is at present, this is clearly not the case and the notion that there is such a thing as a full time IRA operative is not borne out by such memoirs as have been produced from within the organisation.[Collins 1997 ] In fact a survey produced in New Society in the late 1970s argued that something like three quarters of all the personnel in prison for IRA membership in the north of Ireland had actually been in work at the time of their imprisonment. [New Society 1976] The notion that the IRA consists of unemployed personnel hanging around street corners waiting for a bombing to be suggested is a newspaper fantasy rather than a security forces one.
The obvious point to be deduced from the Table is that the IRA is actually quite a cheap organisation to run. As the Libyan weapons and explosives cache is exhausted this will of course change. The second point is that it is a profitable operation. Somewhere those profits have been invested. The figures given are of course purely speculative, and other, more official sources would put the figure at ?10 million profit per annum [unattrib 1995], whereas this table estimates it as closer to ?15 million. To reiterate a word of caution, these figures probably refer to the Republican Movement as a whole, and it may or may not be mistaken to leave the reader with the impression that the IRA runs the whole Republican Movement.
Who taught whom what? Studying in the universities of crime
The IRA has a long history of involvement with various forms of what we now call money laundering and fraud. Back in the 1916-22 period money was raised for the independence of Ireland and according to Tim Pat Coogan?s biography of Eamonn de Valera a large proportion of it was siphoned off by de Valera to found a newspaper under his own control. Not only did it remain under his own political control but also, as the majority share holder, it became his family?s business and this lasted right through into the early 1960s. [T.P.Coogan 1993 pp417-21] Tim Pat Coogan discusses the legality and morality of this. He also discusses the role of the famous American fundraiser Joe McGarrity who kept the IRA going during the 30s and 40s.[Coogan 1993 pp193-4] There is further discussion of the role of members of the Irish government in the setting up, funding and arming of the IRA after 1968 in another of Tim Pat Coogan?s books.[ Coogan 1987 ]
Certainly the leaders of the Provisional IRA had mostly been in prison during the 1956-62 campaign and mostly held in English jails because of a refusal to treat them as political prisoners. [ Coogan 1987 }Without reading their memoirs, if they ever come out, it is impossible to know to what extent they formed links with English and Scottish criminals during that period. Joe Cahill, allegedly the IRA?s financial expert, was in jail during this period. [Sunday Times 28 March 1993]. It is more certain however that the members of the IRA and other republican groups arrested during the mainland campaign after 1973 and held in British and Irish jails rather than the H-blocks would have had the opportunity to make links with organised crime circles and to learn their techniques. The criminal spirit of the 70s and 80s was certainly entrepreneurship . Research may eventually demonstrate that the real intermediaries were the cannabis dealers of the early 1970s who saw themselves as part of an ideological commitment to change society rather than as simply involved in the process of making money. Howard Marks? autobiography suggests that such thoughts did motivate people like himself and entrepreneurs in the cities of Cork, Limerick, Dublin would almost certainly have been motivated similarly. His autobiography also describes a network of connections between himself, Jim McCann of the IRA and Dutch interests in the early 1970s. [Marks 1996 pp77-107]
He actually claims to have pointed out to McCann that , if you can smuggle arms you can smuggle drugs. The principle was reversed when the last four shipments of arms from Libya were brought in by a professional smuggler, who was paid a ?100,000 fee for arranging shipment. [Unattrib. 1995] The US fiasco alluded to above also involved an arrangement with an alleged professional arms dealer. [Bishop and Mallie] The arms trade is thus another source of contacts between terrorism and organised crime.
Increasingly in Dublin, Limerick and to a lesser extent other towns in Ireland the IRA finds itself having to take policy decisions about its relationship with domestically based organised crime. The shooting of Martin Cahill ?the General? in Dublin in 1994 by the IRA was a clear warning to organised crime that the true holders of the monopoly of violence were neither the state nor the ?state within the state? of nonpolitical organised crime but the provisional IRA. [Independent 12 May 1996]
In addition, although it was found by the courts to be a case of CIA entrapment, during a US trial links were claimed between the American end of the Republican Movement and a figure ?close to the Mafia? in a conspiracy to supply arms to the IRA. The USA is thus another possible place where connections to organised crime might have been created. [Bishop and Mallie 1988 p 298]
The role of IRA members in the drugs business needs more research. Marks suggests that members of the IRA were involved in smuggling marijuana, an "acceptable" drug. It is alleged that the Provisionals did briefly lose a lot of street credibility in the 70s when they were identified with heroin dealing in Belfast ghettoes and very quickly had to remove themselves from the trade. [unattrib ] That they were involved in heroin suggests that they had been involved in other drugs previously and certainly it has been alleged that they remain involved in trafficking and wholesaling but not in retailing and street dealing both south and north of the border. This has equally been alleged of Protestant paramilitaries. There have been further allegations that in the drug trade all the paramilitaries actually work together and have the turf well divided up in northern Ireland.[unattrib ] Protestant paramilitary organisation would presumably also reach into the west of Scotland just as IRA organisation reaches down into the south of Ireland. If the intelligence organisations of the paramilitaries are as efficient as they are supposed to be, it is hard to believe that drugs can be sold in the areas under their control without their knowledge. The introduction of Ecstasy as a youth drug of choice has created new opportunities for profit, not only from selling the drug but by providing secure venues for ?raves? to take place. Ecstasy has broader ideological acceptance in the community. It is seen as being in the same category as marijuana rather than heroin.
More recently there is evidence of the emergence of a network of different individuals specialising in different roles. To that extent the structure of the IRA appears to be converging with the changing structure of organised crime. A network of specialists is coordinated by a central planner for a one-off purpose or for a more long term enterprise. Just as organised crime has its ?enforcers?, its specialists in violence, so too do the IRA. Equally organised crime has its smuggling or transportation specialists. Here the IRA either has its own or buys in a specialist from organised crime, as it did to move the consignment of arms and explosives from Libya. [unattrib 1995]. This might point to a centralised laundering operation via a financial specialist employed for the purpose either in the USA or Caribbean.
There is, thus, some evidence that the IRA has moved into contract enforcement and licensing for those involved in illicit businesses in both Northern and Southern Ireland. There is evidence of organizational change, but changes in the organization of ?terrorist? incidents have more to do with security requirements than with the impact of fund-raising activities. One of the most interesting aspects of the IRA is the way in which it has succeeded in maintaining its political priorities despite its ventures into a variety of questionable fund-raising areas. The mechanisms by which it preserves a high degree of integrity and thereby legitimacy with significant sections of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland, Southern Ireland and the United States require further study.
OSAMA BIN LADEN AND AL QAEDA
Al Qaida's funding and Osama bin Laden's business affairs are difficult to disentangle as they involve organizations which perform totally legitimate functions as well as being used as conduit for his activities. He has used the hawala system as well as Islamic banking. ?His? companies have made profits from legitimate business. Companies such as al Taqwa and al Barakat have been added to the list of proscribed organisations by the USA under suspicion that they are used by al Qaida for the movement of money and that they may even pay a proportion of their profits to bin-Laden?s central bankroll. Nevertheless, closing them down will harm their smaller customers, in particular the ability of the Somali overseas workforce to repatriate funds to their families.
Extortion from private individuals has taken place on a scale unimaginable in the West to the tune of over $1 million per individual. Wealthy individuals in the Islamic world now have to choose between risks: detection by the US or murder by al-Qaida. Equally charitable donations by governments to foundations which dole out money to Islamic causes will have to be more carefully monitored by the donors as will the performance of the charities themselves.
At first sight bin Laden has a complex track record. Honey traders, internet providers, hawala banking, cattle breeding, shrimp boats, construction, import-export, stock market trading and perhaps manipulation, even drug smuggling and other illegal businesses all had a place in his empire. He is alleged to have spent large sums on infrastructural projects for governments. Before his expulsion he carried out many philanthropic projects for the Sudanese government and more recently is alleged to have bankrolled the Taliban. He has run training camps and allegedly put armies into the field in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo as well as Afghanistan. Individual terrorist cells seem to have been kept on a shoestring, resorting to credit card and cheque fraud to stay operational. Cells even repatriated money to the Middle East, the reverse of what might have been expected. The other organisations associated with al-Qaida have still to be investigated financially and may present a different picture. If anyone emerges from the caves around Jalalabad and Kandahar to employ lawyers to fight the confiscation of assets around the world, it will be a truly fascinating case. The business of terrorism appears to have been raised to a new plateau.
Al-Qaida
Al Qaida was formed in 1988. In 1998 Osama Bin Laden formed an umbrella organisation called "The Islamic World Front for the struggle against the Jews and the Crusaders" [ Al-Jabhah al-Islamiyyah al-'Alamiyah li-Qital al-Yahud wal-Salibiyyin]. This organisation included the Egyptian groups al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya and al-Jihad, the Egyptian Armed Group, the Pakistan Scholars Society, the Partisans Movement in Kashmir, the Jihad movement in Bangladesh and the Afghan military wing of the "Advice and Reform" commission led by bin Laden himself. This represented a move from cooperation between organisations to a new level. A shura or consultative council was established led by Osama Bin Laden. An Arab security service has estimated that Al-Qaida has 2,830 members of which 594 are Egyptians, 410 Jordanians, 291 Yemenis, 255 Iraqis, 162 Syrians, 177 Algerians, 111 Sudanese, 63 Tunisians, 53 Moroccans and 32 Palestinians. The Centre for Non-proliferation Studies commenting on these figures says that they should be taken as an indication of the proportions of the origins of membership, not as an exact count. To these figures need to be added Pakistanis, Kashmiris, Chechens, and links with Bosnians, Albanians and Philipinos. Saudi Arabians are also absent. All in all a perfect network for laundering funds.
It needs to be borne in mind, therefore, that the wider structure of al-Qaida involves a number of pre-existing groups with their own sources of funding as well as Osama bin Laden's personal financial empire.
OSAMA BIN LADEN
In Saudi Arabia before Afghanistan
His family is rich. His father owned a major construction company. He is, however, only one of 52 siblings. The size of his personal fortune during the pre-Afghanistan period is a matter of dispute. Figures range from $30 million to $300 million.
In Afghanistan for the first time
He and his colleagues are alleged to have raised money both from his family and from other important Saudi families, and from others in the Gulf for the struggle against the USSR and the regime it had imposed after 1978. the Pakistan intelligence service was involved There are even alleged to have been donations from the US intelligence services. Funding from Islamic governments and charities continued into the 1990s with the war in Bosnia and in Chechnya and even Albania/Kosovo. Most of this money was channelled through either pre-existing Islamic humanitarian aid organisations or, one created specially for the purpose and controlled by himself and his associates. The struggle to create independent, and possibly Islamic states, from the states that succeeded Communism was seen by many as a legitimate cause.
He emerged from Afghanistan with an international network of veterans who had difficulty adapting to a peaceful existence.
In Saudi Arabia after Afghanistan and perhaps in Somalia
It was the American intervention in Somalia that turned bin Laden into an enemy of the USA. In Afghanistan, Chechnya and perhaps even Bosnia and Albania, his goals had been congruent either with mainstream US foreign policy or with that of individual American right-wingers. It is probably for this reason as well as the involvement of Gulf and other interests that it is fairly difficult to obtain hard information on funding before this period. Funding to the Balkans is alleged to have been funneled through the Albanian-Arab Islamic Bank and the Advisory and Reformation Committee, established London 1994.
In the Sudan 1991-6
The main source of information for this period is a tainted one: the supergrass Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl and the evidence he gave in the trial of bin Laden's associates in Manhattan in early 2001. It is tainted because he admits he had to flee al Qaida after he was discovered to have embezzled some of its funds. It also suffers the same problems as all defector testimony: the danger of repeating a story that his interrogators want to hear and the danger of exaggerating what he knows in order to increase his importance. Nevertheless, it is the most important published source for this period.
In 1991 bin Laden was expelled from Saudi Arabia. He is alleged to have received anywhere between $30 and $300 million before being cut off by the family. Subsequent investigation has failed to demonstrate any further financial link to his family. He moved to Sudan and invested in commercial enterprises and infrastructural projects. He was highly valued by the regime and is unusual for a terrorist in that both in the Sudan and in Afghanistan he has a track record of subsidising governments in their political and economic programmes. In this period he was associated with:
? A Construction company: el-Hijrah for Construction and Development Ltd.
? Wadi al-Aqiq co. an export-import company
? Taba Investment Co. Ltd. Which dealt in global stock markets
? Part-owner of the el-Shamal Islamic Bank
? He also ran several farms, raising peanuts sunflowers etc., which were also used as training camps for terrorists. In addition, there were:
? Laden International Import-Export Company
? a Bakery
? a Furniture company
? Bank of Zoological Resource cattle-breeding programme
? International al-Ikhlar Co. making honey and other sweets
Because of sanctions against Sudan, his financial committee had to learn how to disguise the origin of his products routing them through various countries, including Cyprus. He claimed to have lost $150 million on farming and construction projects while in the Sudan. Nevertheless, there is evidence of a world-wide empire: ostrich farms and shrimp boats in Kenya, forests in Turkey, diamond mining in Africa, agriculture in Tajikistan. The minor enterprises were themselves used as cover for terrorist operations. All enterprises in Sudan were supposedly liquidated when he left [expelled] in 1996.
The picture that emerges from this period is one of a large diversified enterprise with highly-paid specialists at the top. The central bureaucracy expanded faster than the income and this may be why subsequent organisation has appeared to be more penny-pinching. It is worth noting that a construction company is, by chance, central to the operation. His father had founded such a company, and bin Laden?s original expertise was in that area. Construction work was also related to the Republican movement, again presumably because so many Irishmen went to Britain to do casual work in the building trade. Their return during the early years of Thatcher, when infrastructural programmes were choked off to cut government spending may simply have created a need to institute a job-creation programme. If you can plant bombs that can destroy buildings, you can create construction opportunities. You can also create insurance fraud for proprietors who would like a refurbishment programme.
Bin Laden, however, was, during his time in the Sudan, trading skills in upgrading infrastructure for a sanctuary from which operations can be planned and fighters trained. It could be argued that these businesses would not have been a primary focus of interest for his group. Skills learnt, however, would become useful in unexpected ways. In a globalised political system, many things other than weapons need to be transported: money, information, orders and potential soldiers. These required new businesses and created new business opportunities.
In Afghanistan for the second time1996-2001
By the time bin-Laden left the Sudan, his money was supposed to be scattered around Europe and Arab world. For example, the Ottawa Sun on the 8th November 2001 announced that the investigation into the activities of al Barakaat and al Taqwa in Canada had discovered Internet Service Providers linked to US companies alleged to have provided al-Qaida terrorists with Internet service, secure telephone communications and other ways of sharing information. The crash in IT-related companies may have affected the total assets of Al Qaida, but it is worth noting that owning an ISP is an excellent way to guarantee the security of internal communication. Al Barakaat and al Taqwa have a number of variants in a number of countries, and al Taqa in Lugano had changed its name to Nada Management early in 2001.
Al Qaida and the other groups in the Front have continued to tap various Islamic charitable and relief organisations for funds. Funding for Chehchen fighters is alleged by Al Fadl to have been $1500 per head. The Wafa Humanitarian Organisation has been identified by the US Treasury as one of the organisations supporting terrorism.
Private individuals have continued to donate money, either because they believe in the cause or to avoid unpleasant consequences [ie protection money]. This may well be the single largest source of funding for the movement and needs to be addressed. Such individuals will need to be guaranteed protection if they are both to come forward and give an account of the moneys passed to al Qaida and to feel safe enough to discontinue paying. Some of these people are victims of extortion, not necessarily zealots.
As with the IRA, there have been continuous whispers of al Qaida association with drug trafficking, mostly opium from Afghanistan. Al Qaida militants are alleged to have acted as smugglers or smugglers escorts. It is not yet known as to how high a degree opium has been used as a funding source, but there was no ideological problem with the Canadian and North American cell resorting to petty crime such as credit card fraud to fund itself during 2000. Al Qaida morality seems to be extremely flexible when it comes to Western-regarding behaviour.
AFTER AFGHANISTAN AND THE FALL OF THE TALIBAN
We must beware of turning Osama bin Laden into a Superman. Successful terrorist organisations have had to solve the funding problem. Analysis of the Republican movement suggested that it was making a profit of ?10-15 million per annum durin the 1990s. ETA still extracts a 10% levy on income from its supporters. Given the personal funds with which bin Laden and his associates started, they will have been able to achieve more. They have been more successful at using new businesses as cover for their activities and, so far, at obtaining safe havens in individual states. Whoever succeeds both bin Laden and Al Qaida will develop these strategies further and will learn from organised crime in their turn.
The major problem in discussing this period is a lack of knowledge of al Qaeda's aims, who is running it on a day to day basis and whether the Afghanistan theatre needs to be distinguished from other theatres around the world. Without a clear notion of the enemy's goals, it is rather difficult to measure the effectiveness of the response.
Al Qaeda's complex goals
It has been argued that bin Laden may actually want the USA to have a military presence in Afghanistan, Kirgizia, Turkmenstan, Georgia and other former Soviet republics, because he wishes to refight the war against the USSR that he considers he and his brethren won. He, or whoever is in charge, be it Mullah Omar [if the resistance in Afghanistan is a matter for the Taliban, rather than al Qaeda] or others, still possess whatever funds were in the Afghan Government Treasury when the Taliban left. These have presumably passed through one of Afghanistan's neighbours since then. Finance will come from and through the tribal areas of Pakistan.
But in addition to funding a guerilla war in Central Asia, it must be assumed that the individual groups comprising al Qaeda continue to require funding for their domestic causes, be these in North Africa, East Africa, South East Asia the Caucasus, the Balkans or the Indian sub-continent. Arms, training and subsistence all cost money, although many were already in place at the fall of the Afghan cities. It is unclear how many al Qaeda veterans made their way home and how many have stayed to fight in Afghanistan. Individual soldiers in individual conflicts were funded through the charitable foundations and expansion of these numbers should have been disrupted by the steps taken after September 11th.
Next, it must be assumed that funding is required for the cells that remain in Western Europe and the USA. Western Europe still remains a recruitment target and perhaps a target for a spectacular atrocity, as does the USA. The problem is predicting the nature of the planned atrocity and the funding that might be required to achieve it. Previous operations suggest a diversity of modus operandi, including petty fraud and the use of businesses as cover.
Although the war on terrorism seeks to identify and confiscate the assets of al Qaeda, it does not appear to be Osama bin Laden's assets that have been successfully identified and seized so far. Concentration has been on routes along which funds have travelled. In the process of blocking these, many innocent people have found themselves with frozen accounts. There was a global emergency in September 2001 which justified harsh measures. But by the middle of 2002 we should have moved to more sophisticated instruments so as to reduce potential pools of recruitment for terrorism.
The US Treasury, May 3rd 2002, summarised the blocking of assets of 210 alleged Terrorist-related entities and individuals in the US as amounting to $34 million and by its international partners as $82 million, totalling $116 million worldwide. So far, 161 countries and jurisdictions have been involved in this campaign. The UN at the end of March, estimated that 144 countries had been involved in blocking $103.8 million in assets of which approximately half represents assets connected with Osama bin laden and Al-Qaida. The majority of these funds had been blocked by December 2001. If there are new leads, then they are being kept very quiet. This may be because it has been realised that money trails provide intelligence and help to identify possible sleepers and cells.
The Underground banking connection
A large amount of the assets blocked belong to al Barakaat and al Taqwa. Al Barakaat is a Somali banking and telecommunications group. It may well be that al Qaeda took advantage of its services, but its closure has created wider problems for Somalis overseas, who used it to send funds home and to communicate with relatives. According to the BBC [12th March 2002], the transitional Somali government has proposed that an American Bank should take it over in order to unfreeze the thousands of accounts of individuals who have no link to al-Qaeda. According to the US Treasury's own News Release of March 11th, "disruption to al Barakaat's worldwide cash flows could be as high as $300 to 400 million per year. Of that?$15 to $20 million per year would have gone to terrorist organisations." There are several articles disputing this in the media. Colin Powell has claimed that 5% of turnover was going to Al Qaeda, but this would have left very little operating profit. Al Barakaat may simply be unfortunate in its Somali connection.
Al- Barakaat appears to be a legitimate business that has been used by terrorists for money-laundering. Al Taqwa, according to Lucy Komisar in an article in Salon, March 2002
[ http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/15/al_taqwa/print.html ],
is a more murky organisation and has been under investigation by the Italian secret Service and others since the mid-1990s. Its shareholders, however, include prominent figures from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait. With headquarters in Lugano, Switzerland and renamed the Nada Management Organisation after its president, it is or was primarily a hawala operation. But it is alleged to have handled funds for the PLO, Hamas, the Algerian GIA, and the Egyptian Gama'a al-Islamiya as well as former Afghan Mujahedin with a connection to bin Laden. This information was originally published in 1995 in the Swiss newsweekly Facts.
Other assets blocked belong to charities; in December 2001, the assets of "the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development" were frozen. This was linked to Hamas, not to al-Qaeda. In March 2002 the Somali and Bosnia-Herzegovina branches of Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation were blocked jointly by the US and Saudi Arabia. These were linked, allegedly to al-Qaeda, the Somali group Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya and to the Egyptian group Al-Gama'at Al-Islamiyya. Suspicions were aroused from study of the accounts that money was being skimmed for the benefit of radical Islamic movements elsewhere.
The Benevolence International Foundation of Chicago has also been accused and is involved in a federal court case there with allegations of specific involvement in operations in Bosnia. Under Operation Green Quest a number of other organisations have been raided and evidence gathered that will result in a series of further prosecutions.
Commodity smuggling and money moving- the tanzanite saga
On November 16th the Wall Street Journal published a piece by Robert Block and Daniel Pearl ("Much-Smuggled Gem Called Tanzanite Helps Bin Laden Supporters)." It claimed that tanzanite, a rare gem that comes from a small area near the base of Mt. Kiliminjaro, has been used by operatives of the Bin Laden network as a means of raising funds. Its popularity stems from the fact that Kate Winslet wore a necklace of it in the film "Titanic". It is high value, and easily transportable, like diamonds or cocaine and can thus be used as a substitute currency to move purchasing power from one economy t another. It now has a $380 million annual market in the United States.
It is alleged, partly as a result of evidence from the diary of Wadi el Haga, on trial for the bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, that a group of fundamentalist Muslim middlemen have taken control of a considerable share of the trade in tanzanite stones, which they channel through free trade zones in places like Dubai and Hong Kong, setting aside the profits for Al Qaeda and other fundamentalist Islamic networks and projects. The jewellry industry hotly denies that this is the case, presumably because the market would be badly hit if wearing tanzanite turned out to involve an unpatriotic act. Small miners in Tanzania have accused the South African company AfGem of leaking the stories in order to corner the market by insisting that all gems are branded for identification purposes, using technology that only it possesses. Pearl, of course, was later murdered in Pakistan by an al Qaeda associate.
It is difficult to know how to take the tanzanite story. It has the same ability to arouse incredulity as the allegation that Al Qaeda had a monopoly on the honey market in East Africa and the Gulf, or at least skimmed a percentage off the profits. But the victims of the embargo on sales of tanzanite by Tiffanys and the other big gemstone outlets of the US are small miners not Osama bin Laden.
Despite the tales told by defectors and other individuals turned State's evidence, al Qaeda seemed to adopt a policy post-Sudan of making each operation self-financing. On 23rd May, a UN group of experts warned that al_Qaeda appeared "to have diversified the base and security of their finances by acquiring valuable commodities and using the Internet to move money." We need to anticipate their methods, not simply respond to what they did in the past. Generals tend to fight the last war, which is a guaranteed way of losing the present one.
:CONCLUSION
The IRA has had to follow the changing fashions of organised crime to continue raising money. At one time armed robbers were the aristocracy of organised crime and for a period the IRA obtained its funding by robberies. As mentioned above this still goes on, but like organised crime, the IRA flirted with drugs and now has followed organised crime into the much lower risk area of fraud, especially cross border fraud and the importing of counterfeit products. It has also been suggested that, in order to obtain guns, vehicles and forged documentation, IRA operatives on the British mainland have begun to pretend to be ?normal? criminals and have ?infiltrated the criminal infrastructure?. [Independent 4 Mar 1996] But an equal possibility is that organised crime has infiltrated the IRA. In a world of interpenetrating networks, it is difficult to know who controls whom. It will make an interesting court case.
On the other hand, the IRA has deliberately engaged in what it calls ?economic warfare? since the early 1970s. It may be that its ?profits? have been used to regenerate places like Derry and West Belfast and that ?one man?s construction fraud is another man?s job creation scheme. The relationship between business activities and organization is not a unideterminal one. The need to raise money can also produce opportunities to provide services where the state is failing. Contract reinforcement is not the only role played by the modern state. Security involves income now as well as freedom from violence. The picture is more complex than that of Nineteenth Century Italy.
Al Qaeda/ bin Laden has also made a virtue of economic necessity. For individual operations, companies have been set up to provide operational cover as well as income. Because the capital available has been greater, possibly more than any paramilitary group has ever had at its disposal, the businesses created have been more imaginative and wider-ranging in their technology and global scope. If the rumour of stock market movements ahead of 9/11 is true, then it may be possible to organize future operations, or even to threaten future operations, such as to make money out of the consequent movement in stock market prices. Just like the IRA, though, al Qaeda remains more than a business. Both are political organizations who require money but have managed to keep fund-raising subordinate to their political goals.
Such evidence as exists suggests that the form of organisation adopted by both organised crime and terrorism is also dictated by the nature of police response. The interest in cellular structure and network arrangements is partly to make prosecution on the basis of "shared purpose" difficult to prove. The nature of business will affect the organisational structures of organised crime as a whole, but only the fund-raising structures of terrorist-related movements. The structure of the coercive apparatus will be governed by the relationship between the number required to deliver a violent event and the requirements of internal security. The specialised nature of a paramilitary arm of a political movement may make it attractive for organised crime to employ such a group for the purpose of contract enforcement on an occasional basis. There is no evidence of this as yet, although there have occasionally been allegations that individuals have been used to provide armed escort for consignments. As well as violence, the IRA has available for hire a relatively large network of disciplined individuals who can launder small sums through a multitude of bank accounts without triggering the existing alert systems, which are oriented to noticing the movement of relatively large sums.
Obviously, a great deal of further research is required, and the information on which much of this article is based is both controversial and unreliable. That has not stopped the international law enforcement community responding to 9/11 with anti-terrorist legislation providing for the confiscation of assets related to terrorism. Where long-lived terrorist groups rely on wider popular movements to sustain and support them, a double duty of care lies upon a banker or accountant to assess the ultimate source of the funds passing through accounts. Relationships between the components of these groups, who may be families, associates or merely resident in the same area, are complex and non-hierarchical. Freezing and confiscating assets without distinguishing between the innocent user and the ?terrorist? will create more support for the terrorists in the long run.
A final area of interest for students of money-laundering is the question, how do the IRA and al Qaeda move their funds around? If they have set up independent systems are they available for use by other organisations, for a price. This is possibly yet another are where necessity has created another business opportunity. The lesson of Gambetta?s study of Sicily is that where the state cannot provide
-
TERRORISM BRIEF
Al Qaeda Arrests and the Hunt for Osama bin Laden
May 23, 2005 1852 GMT
The May 2 capture of senior al Qaeda leader Abu Farj al-Libi in Pakistan set off a chain reaction of militant arrests in the country -- suggesting the
net is closing in on al Qaeda's top leadership -- including Osama bin Laden.
Within days of al-Libi's arrest, Pakistani forces captured 14 other al Qaeda
suspects near the border with Afghanistan. Then, on May 18, Pakistani police in Lahore arrested Maulvi Mohammed Sadiq, who allegedly provided logistical and financial support for al Qaeda operations.
Meanwhile, as the al Qaeda network unravels in Pakistan, arrests also are
being made in the Middle East and Europe. Amar al-Zubaydi, also known as Abu Abbas, a key aid to al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was captured May 5 in Iraq. On May 18, authorities in northern Italy arrested three suspects with links to al Qaeda. Italian police said the suspects also are accused of dealing in false documents and drug trafficking.
Three days later, German police arrested a Palestinian living in Marburg.
The suspect, identified only as Ismail Abu S., reportedly is linked to al
Qaeda. He is the brother of Yasser Abu S., whose January arrest allegedly
foiled a plan for Yasser to fake his death in Germany and then travel to
Iraq to carry out a suicide attack against U.S. troops there. The insurance
payoff for the faked death was to be used to fund further al Qaeda
activities, according to German police.
Fraud investigations in the United States, Europe and Asia have led to the
arrest of several other al Qaeda members who allegedly have been using money laundering and document fraud to finance the network.
Several factors are working against al Qaeda at the moment. First, the close interpersonal relationships among the leadership -- which until now had spawned a loyalty that ensured operational security and personal protection-- are now becoming a detriment, as captured militants reveal details about others, as in al-Libi case has shown. Second, Pakistani intelligence officials cite a rift between al Qaeda's Arab and non-Arab members as a factor in many of the recent arrests. Captured Chechen, Uzbek and Tajik militants, officials say, have been giving up information about their Arab colleagues, which has enabled U.S. and Pakistani counterterrorism forces to close in on them.
Also, Pakistan has been changing its tone about bin Laden. Some officials
are openly saying his capture is imminent -- and even are acknowledging
cooperating with the United States in hunting him. Pakistani military
spokesperson Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said May 22 on Dubai-based ARY
television that projectiles fired by the U.S. military in Afghanistan during
offensive operations against militants had landed in Pakistani territory.
Sultan clarified that the U.S. military command in Afghanistan had notified
Islamabad in advance of the operation and of the possibility that the
projectiles would end up on Pakistani soil. In the not-so-distant past,
Islamabad would have been reluctant to acknowledge the extent of its
cooperation with Washington for fear of agitating the sizable segment of its
population that sympathizes with al Qaeda.
Perhaps most significant in the hunt for bin Laden is the U.S. State
Department program Rewards for Justice. Many of the biggest names in
international terrorism have been arrested after being informed on under
this program. Bin Laden's capture likely will be a direct result of this
program, as more high-value targets are arrested and the concentric circles of confidants around him shrink.
-
Time to start a WWIV thread?
China ready to counter US space plans
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-05-23 09:56
China takes U.S. plans to boost its space military capabilities very seriously and is likely to respond with energetic counter-measures of her own, a leading expert on the Chinese space program told United Press International.
Chinese experts and leaders fear if the United States achieves absolute military and strategic superiority in space it could be used to intervene in China's affairs, such as the Taiwan issue, Hui Zhang, an expert on space weaponization and China's nuclear policy at the John F, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University told UPI.
He was discussing issues he had presented earlier this week in a paper to a conference on space weaponization at Airlie, Va., organized by the Washington-based Nuclear Policy Research Institute.
Chinese leaders have noted that the Taiwan issue was included as a hypothetical threat in the 2001 Rumsfeld Commission report on space weaponization. Also, in a January 2001 U.S. war-gaming exercise China was taken as an assumed enemy, Zhang said.
Hu Xiaodi, China's veteran senior negotiator on space weaponization, expressed Beijing's fears at a Committee on Peace and Disarmament panel on October 11, 2001.
"It is rather the attempt toward the domination of outer space, which is expected to serve to turn the absolute security and perpetual authority (many people call this hegemony) of one country on earth," he said. "The unilateralism and exceptionalism that are on the rise in recent months also mutually reinforce this."
Chinese strategists believe that U.S. missile-defense plans pose a great threat to China's national security, Zhang said. They believe such defenses could be used to neutralize China's nuclear deterrent and give the United States more freedom to encroach on China's sovereignty, including on Taiwan-related issues, he said.
Washington's readiness to conclude an agreement on cooperative research and the development of advanced Theater Missile Defense with Japan has fed such fears, he said.
The Chinese were also concerned about the Bush administration's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review that called for the United States to develop the ability to target mobile missiles. "A U.S. demonstration of the linkage between long-range precision strike weapons and real-time intelligence systems may dissuade a potential adversary from investing heavily in mobile ballistic missiles," it said.
Zhang said such weapons would pose a huge threat to China's future mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles.
But China would not stand passively by and do nothing if the United States pushed ahead with its ambitious plans to develop new weapons for force projection from and through space, Zhang said.
"Historically, China's sole purpose for developing its nuclear weapons was to guard itself against the threat of nuclear blackmail," he said.
"China first (intends to) pursue an arms control agreement to ban space weaponization, as it is advocating now," Zhang said. However, "If this effort fails, and if what China perceives as its legitimate security concerns are ignored, China would very likely develop responses to neutralize such a threat."
These responses would depend on the specific infrastructure of the U.S. missile defense and space weaponization programs, Zhang said. But they could include producing as many as 14 or 15 times as many ICBMs with a range of more than 7,800 miles that are able to threaten the United States, he said.
Currently, China has about 20 liquid-fueled, silo-based ICBMs with single warheads. But if the United States deployed a Ground-Based Missile Defense system with 100 to 250 ground-based interceptor rockets, China would probably be willing to build and deploy anything from 100 to almost 300 more warheads and the missiles necessary to carry them, Zhang said.
Chinese scientists and engineers would also work on passive countermeasures against missile defense, Zhang said. These could include deploying decoys and anti-simulations and reducing the radar and infrared signatures of nuclear warheads during the midcourse phase of their flights.
"These cheaper and effective countermeasures are accessible to China," Zhang said.
China also had options to protect its ICBMs from interception and destruction during their first and most vulnerable boost phase of their flights, Zhang said. These include deploying fast-burn boosters, lofting or depressing the ICBM trajectories and spoofing the interceptor missiles' tracking sensors, he said.
China could also react to boost-phase interceptors by seeking to overwhelm them through the tactic of simultaneously launching several ICBMs from a compact area, Zhang said.
Another option would be to protect the missile's body with reflective or ablative coatings. Or the missile could also be rotated in flight, he said.
"Given the inherent vulnerability of space-based weapons systems (such as space-based interceptors or space-based lasers) to more cost-effective anti-satellite, or ASAT, attacks, China could resort to ASAT weapons as an asymmetrical (defense) measure," Zhang said.
Another option would be to develop ground-based kinetic-energy weapons such as miniature homing vehicles or pellet clouds," he said.
"China should be able to develop these low-cost and relatively low-technology ASATs," he said.
However, Zhang emphasized that China would only adopt these more aggressive counter-measures if the United States pushed ahead with its own ambitious missile defense and space weaponization plans first.
Beijing still adhered to the policy set out in its 2000 national defense white paper that continued nuclear disarmament and the prevention of an arms race in outer space were preferable strategic options for both China and the United States, he said.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-05/23/content_444886.htm
-
I don't see this one as a matter of WW3 or WW4 for that matter-- geopolitical matters certainly, but not war.
The amount of business between the US and China increases dramatically on a daily basis and I suspect that there will be a lot of people on BOTH sides of the Pacific who would regard war between us as a helluva silly way to screw up making money.
Not that this doesn't bear watching, but I am certainly not feeling apocalyptic about this one yet.
-
I'm not feeling particularly apocalyptic either, though various scents I'm picking up suggests the US military is looking at space as a tactical arena very seriously, my guess being that space warfare technology is at a place where stealth warfare technology was in the late '80s. The fact China's official news organ is taking notice suggests China is concerned about ceding the strategic high ground, though I doubt there is much they can currently do about it besides bang the gong and hope to stir up arms race fears ala the ?Star Wars? hand-wringing of the ?90s.
-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'No god but God': The War Within Islam
By MAX RODENBECK
THESE are rough times for Islam. It is not simply that frictions have intensified lately between Muslims and followers of other faiths. There is trouble, and perhaps even greater trouble, brewing inside the Abode of Peace itself, the notional Islamic ummah or nation that comprises a fifth of humanity.
News reports reveal glimpses of such trouble -- for instance, in the form of flaring strife between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in places like Iraq and Pakistan. Yet the greater tensions, while similarly rooted in the distant past, are less visible to the wider world. The rapid expansion of literacy among Muslims in the past half-century, and of access to new means of communication in the last decade, have created a tremendous momentum for change. Furious debates rage on the Internet, for example, about issues like the true meaning of jihad, or how to interpret and apply Islamic law, or how Muslim minorities should engage with the societies they live in.
What is unfolding, Reza Aslan argues in his wise and passionate book, ''No god but God,'' is nothing less than a struggle over who will ultimately define the sweeping ''Islamic Reformation'' that he believes is already well under way across much of the Muslim world. The West, he says, is ''merely a bystander -- an unwary yet complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the next chapter in its story.''
Amid the surge of Western interest in Islam since 9/11, other quiet voices have argued similarly that the historical process we are witnessing is less a clash of civilizations than a working out of suppressed internal conflicts. Aslan's contribution to this line of thought is threefold. He traces the dogmatic splits in Islam to their historical origins. He provides a speculative but well-reasoned look at how Muslim beliefs are likely to evolve. And he does all this beautifully, in a book that manages to be both an incisive, scholarly primer in Muslim history and an engaging personal exploration.
Aslan does not shy from controversy. Conservative Muslims will certainly challenge some of his bold assertions -- among them, that there is scant support in authentic Islamic tradition for the veiling of women; that laws are created by people, not God; and that, as he puts it, ''the notion that historical context should play no role in the interpretation of the Koran -- that what applied to Muhammad's community applies to all Muslim communities for all time -- is simply an untenable position in every sense.''
Yet even the most hidebound traditionalists would find it hard to refute the main thrust of his argument, which is that the original message of Islam, egalitarian, inclusive, progressive and liberating, has been twisted and diminished over time. Aslan is at his best in trying to explain and recapture what was initially inspiring about Islam and what remains powerful -- things that can be hard for outsiders to see these days because of what some do in the name of their faith.
By carefully drawing in the social and political setting from which Islam emerged, Aslan presents a persuasive case for viewing the religion as very much a product of its age. He notes the appearance in the region of Mecca, during the prophet's youth, of religious fashions like iconoclasm and the fusing of faiths into one embracing doctrine, ideas that were to become central to Muhammad's message. Not just outsiders but Muslims themselves need reminding that during Islam's first centuries, the Torah was often read alongside the Koran. Both Muslims and their detractors also often forget that the Koran calls specifically on Jews, Christians and Muslims to ''come to an agreement on the things we hold in common.''
Aslan's wish to emphasize the tolerant, merciful side of Islam can lead to pitfalls. It is not particularly comforting to learn that when the prophet triumphantly returned to Mecca, the city of his birth that had rejected him, there were no forced conversions and ''only'' six men and four women were put to the sword. The killing and enslavement of Jewish tribes at Medina receives a similarly light gloss, although Aslan may be right to point out that their ''Jewishness'' may have been rather vaguely defined.
Whatever the case, he is clearly correct in stating that the more damaging influences on the faith were yet to come. Over the 14 centuries that followed Muhammad's 22 years of revelation, Muslim kings and scholars distorted its tenets to serve their own narrow interests, and then cast these accretions in stone. Not only were the words of the Koran reinterpreted, but so were the hundreds of thousands of traditions and sayings collected by the prophet's contemporaries. As one example, Muhammad's comment that the ''feebleminded'' should not inherit was taken by some to mean that women should be excluded from inheritance, despite the clear Koranic injunction to grant women half the portion of male inheritors.
Immediately after Islam's glorious early years of expansion, a great intellectual clash pitted rigid literalists against more rationalist interpreters. That the rationalists essentially lost is a subject of lament for Muslim modernists, particularly Western-educated intellectuals like Aslan, an Iranian-American scholar of comparative religion. His arguments for reintroducing rationalism, for accepting the utility of secularization and for contextualizing the historical understanding of the faith all put him in distinguished company among contemporary Muslims.
The Syrian reformist Muhammad Shahrour, for instance, proposes an elegant solution to the question of how to apply the controversial corporal punishments specified by most understandings of Islamic law, or Shariah. Instead of taking what some see as God's rules literally, he suggests that things like hand-chopping should be viewed as the maximum possible penalty. Anything more severe would contravene Islam, but it would be up to a secular, elected legislature to determine what lesser level of severity to apply.
Sadly, the dominant voices in Islam are still those that see the faith not simply as a path of moral guidance but as a rigidly prescriptive and exclusive rule book. Ferment is certainly in the air. If the Osama bin Ladens of the world have achieved one thing, it is to force Muslims to confront some of their demons. Even archconservative Saudi Arabia is slowly evolving. In April, its top religious authority declared that forcing a woman to marry against her will was an imprisonable offense. A full-blown ''reformation'' in the heartlands of Islam, however, is still a long way off.
Max Rodenbeck is the Middle East correspondent for The Economist.
-
Morning Intelligence Brief
Stratfor Morning Intelligence Brief - June 16, 2005
, , ,
Geopolitical Diary: Thursday, June 16, 2005
Media have been filled with stories that the United States is seriously considering an amnesty offer to Iraqi guerrillas. The media reports appear to have originated in Baghdad with Iraqi government officials and have not been denied by Washington, although there has been ample time for the White House to do so. The Iraqis have floated the idea of an amnesty in the past, stretching back to former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi in August 2004. However, in each case, the United States moved quickly to squelch the idea -- indicating that Washington now is seriously considering the move and is floating the idea to see how it plays politically in the United States and Iraq. The likely venue for the offer -- if one is made at all -- will be a conference on Iraq slated for June 22 in Brussels.
The origin of this particular offer appears to have been a Sunni politician, Ayham al-Samarie, who was previously Iraq's electricity minister. He said on June 7 that he had been in contact with the political leaders of major insurgent groups like the Mujahideen Army and Islamic Army, and had been told that they were ready to begin political talks with the Iraqi government.
Al-Samarie's claim is not outrageous. Sunni and government leaders have had public discussions over Sunni representation in the constitutional process. It has to be assumed, since the Sunni leaders have not been killed, that their actions are welcomed at least to some extent by the guerrillas. Al-Samarie's claim raises interesting questions as to whether some of the Sunni leaders involved in public negotiations might not also be covert leaders of the insurrection. If so, that would actually be good news for Washington -- or at least not the worst news heard out of Iraq in the past couple of years.
The insurgency will not end until the Sunnis reach a political accommodation with the government. What the Sunnis want is either a disproportionate voice in Iraqi politics or a constitution that gives them some sort of veto power. The insurgency gives the Sunni leaders leverage. Without it, they have nothing with which to bargain.
The insurgency is divided into two main strands. There are those who are fighting as a matter of principle, be it religious, patriotic or ornery. And there are those fighting for more immediate political reasons: They do not want to be a helpless minority in the new Iraq, subject to the power of their enemies -- the Shia and Kurds. They feel that if they don't fight, they face generations of oppression, which is what they dealt out when they had the chance.
The politicians are negotiating. But the key -- as in any civil war -- is amnesty. If the fighting forces are not given guarantees of safety, they will not stop fighting. That means that the agreements signed by the politicians are worthless, both because the agreements can't deliver the guerrillas and because the politicians who signed them are likely to be killed by the guerrillas.
Therefore, any serious political discussion must include an amnesty offer. This will stick in the craw of a lot of people on both sides, but there is no possibility of the situation ameliorating without one. That's why the proposal is now being floated seriously. It is a sign that the political negotiations have matured to such a degree that the blowback on the idea -- in the United States, among the guerrillas, among non-Sunni Iraqis -- has to be risked and endured. The administration would clearly rather endure the blowback now, and measure resistance, than to make a formal proposal only to have it explode. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and foreign jihadists were carefully excluded from the plan -- both to make it more palatable and to split the insurgents -- but the deal that is being explored still involves political co ncessions to the Sunnis in return for peace. That is how wars end.
Obviously, this will not end the war under the best of circumstances. Even if major groups accept the plan, there will be die-hards who will resist until the end, and that goes beyond al-Zarqawi's forces. But there will be a qualitative decline in the level of violence if the main forces make a deal. That is what appears to be the bet. There is, if one considers it, little to be lost with the offer. Even if it is accepted and most guerrillas fight on, the situation doesn't really get much worse.
-
There are a lot of folks out there who don't have a lot of use for Marcinko's showboating, but he usually has something interesting to say. I think his comments about how American and terrorist clocks ticking differently are well worth noting.
Beyond the DropZone
A biweekly column by W. Thomas Smith Jr.
posted 16 June 05
"Sharkman of the Delta"
An exclusive interview with retired Navy SEAL Commander Richard "Rogue Warrior" Marcinko
Commander Richard Marcinko (U.S. Navy ? ret.) is a mythical figure in Naval and military circles. Ask any sailor in the American Navy - or any special operations commando from any branch of service - and they will readily admit that Marcinko is one of the most influential SpecOps officers to have ever worn the uniform. Affectionately referred to as "the Sharkman of the Delta" (a throwback moniker to his days as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam), Marcinko is the founder and first commanding officer of two of the Navy's premier special operations units: SEAL Team Six (arguably the world's best-trained counterterrorist force, which has been reconstituted as Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU) and RED CELL (a SEAL unit tasked with testing Navy and Marine Corps security forces throughout the world).
Marcinko, who retired after 30-years of service, is today a security consultant and CEO of SOS Temps, a private security firm that provides services to governments and corporations around the world. He has trained mercenaries, many of whom are currently contracted and serving around the globe. And when asked (during one of my previous interviews with him) if he himself had ever worked as a merc, he hesitated then laughingly replied, "I can't answer that."
As a pop culture figure, Marcinko is best known as the author of numerous fiction and non-fiction books, including The New York Times' bestseller, Rogue Warrior, and his latest work, Vengeance, said to be "a thriller ripped from tomorrow's headlines."
In an exclusive interview, Marcinko discusses his new book, the war in Iraq, current missions for special operations forces, weaknesses in Homeland Security, and the future of America's war on terror.
W. THOMAS SMITH JR: From a special operations standpoint, what are we doing right and what could we be doing better in Iraq?
RICHARD MARCINKO: Well, it's a new way of fighting for us. Basic training used to be focused on stopping or fighting a conventional war. This urban warfare we're now facing ? where the enemy wears no uniform and flies no flag ? is just nasty. Then, on top of being in combat, our soldiers have to be politically correct. That is just a complication that is not a normal thing in fighting a war. In a normal situation, there are good guys and bad guys, and you kick ass and survive. Now, we have to basically fight with one hand tied behind our backs, and that's a complication of urban warfare.
Look, we are taking 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds and telling them they can't go all out in a fight. Instead, they have to be as much a diplomat as [career diplomat, now Director of National Intelligence John D.] Negroponte was, and that they have to win the hearts and minds. That's a lot to put on a kid.
On the other hand, our special operations teams are comprised of older kids. Those are the ones who used to concern themselves with winning hearts and minds, because they had already found themselves.
So the youngsters today are finding themselves ? until the first bullet goes by with their name on it ? trying to identify who the hell the bad guys are, taking the risk everyday, and having to be mature enough to win the hearts and minds.
SMITH: So perhaps we should focus less on hearts and minds, and put more fight into it? What specifically, strategically, do we need to be doing better?
MARCINKO: We need to get out more on the borders. We need to keep a nucleus ? much like we did with the A Teams, B Teams, and C Teams of the Vietnam era ? in the cities in with the people, and stay there. Don't shift from city to city. But establish a rapport, and work on the hearts and minds in the inner city, and use the Iraqis to do the purging. They speak the language better, and they should clean up their own mess, because they are the ones who are going to have to live with it. That way, we'll truly end up as advisors, helping them and giving them the high-tech and the how-to, and providing the on-call fire support that they don't have.
SMITH: Aren't we essentially doing that now?
MARCINKO: Well, yeah, but we're doing it with line companies, not with the more senior, experienced guys. The problem is, Priority One is to stay alive. Winning hearts and minds is not. It is hard to send someone down the street and tell them to give gum and candy to kids and yet not be sure that they're not being lured out there by that kid for a sniper.
Insurgents are even now using suicide dogs, bombs strapped to dogs. They've been using [animal] carcasses to infiltrate tubes and rockets into cities. It's the old Trojan Horse thing.
Beyond that, you've got the fact that [Al Queda strongman Abu Musab al] Zarqawi can be wounded, receive treatment in town, then cross the border for more serious treatment.
All this means is that we need to get out there, seal up the borders, and simply raise havoc on the insurgent routes of egress and ingress. Nail them in the open. There you can be brutal. Take the Marines ? like we've done on the western sector and along the Syrian border ? and say, okay, have at it!
SMITH: You mention Zarqawi: With all of our technology and commandos like our SEALs and other SpecOps guys in the country, why haven't we been able to take out Zarqawi?
MARCINKO: Well, remember, we found Saddam in a hole. So, you need someone local who will trust you enough to tell you, hey, they're here. And that's hard, particularly when you are operating in an area where the locals' way of life has not really improved in all the time you've been there. So, we don't always, necessarily look like the winning ticket. And remember the last time we left the Shiites, Saddam took care of tens-of-thousands of them. They're not going to be very trusting of us, not to mention the fact that they know there is the potential of a civil war erupting among themselves.
SMITH: Americans have a perception of the training and missions of special operations forces that is formed mostly by what they see in pop culture kinds of things: Books, TV, movies. What about reality? Where else ? besides Iraq and Afghanistan ? are our special ops forces operating throughout the world, and what types of missions are they performing?
MARCINKO: Many of them are still heavy into training. They always are. Many are in the old satellite nations of the old Soviet Union, doing the old force-multiplier thing. They build a cadre. That cadre builds a cadre. They're in all the "stans" ? Pakistan, Uzbekistan, you name it. They're in those mountain passes. They're establishing forces in those areas, because there is still a lot of illicit trade ? drugs and weapons ? in those areas that will fuel any insurgency.
The issue between Pakistan and India is very dangerous. Both now have nuclear capabilities, and there is a history of friction between the two. Consequently, there are problem areas along the border. Now, of course, Iran is upset with Pakistan over recent statements about Iran's nuclear development. So there is hate-hate there.
Then take someone like Osama bin Laden: He's always operated in a small transit group. They move constantly. The group protects him. I know, he's only symbolic, but we would like to get him, kill him, and let everyone know we can. We don't want him to be the ghost who thumbs his nose at us every time.
But these places are rugged and vast and difficult to operate in. Look at Afghanistan, for instance: There are only two kinds of fields there ? minefields and poppy fields ? and until you can develop roads and create access for the general population, that's all they have to live with. No major world power has ever won in Afghanistan. The tribal warlords have simply worn out the invaders. Our clock and their clock simply tick differently. They're willing to wait, wait, wait. Whereas, we always want instant results.
So, this is not simply a military thing. It is very complex, and that's why our special operations forces are in these regions.
SMITH: Overall, what does the future hold for us and our deployed military forces?
MARCINKO: Our troops are certainly seasoned. We have a very experienced armed force, today, at least in terms of finding themselves. Now, they've got to find the enemy and nail him. And in Iraq, if we don't get some restoration there soon, that country is going to end up in a civil war that no one can control.
I can see us there in 2010 ? just for conversation's sake ? with two major installations that would basically be USA fortresses with infirmaries and Mickey D's and those kinds of things. And those fortresses would be built on something like ? in our language ? a Mason-Dixon line, and we would not allow certain groups to cross that line. And I don't long how long American taxpayers would be comfortable with that.
Iraq is certainly going to be a drumbeat for the 2008 elections. So we really need to get off our ass, focus, and get a lot done in a short time.
SMITH: You often talk about soldiers and sailors "finding themselves."
MARCINKO: Yes, for instance, SEAL training is intensive training. So a SEAL will come out of that and say, 'Okay, now I know I can do anything.' But that's training. You really don't know how you are going to respond in combat until that first bullet zings past your head. I've seen people who in training were taggers, but were pussies in war. I've also seen people who I wasn't sure why I was taking them to war, but when we got there, it was hard for me to keep them under control. It's the human factor.
After my first tour in Vietnam, the Navy behavioral sciences laboratory asked me to come in and tell them what makes a good SEAL. What is the prototype? Is it a broken home? Does he have brown hair? Is he six feet tall? Five foot eight? Anything that would give them a template to make screening for SEALs a lot easier. But that's not how it works.
I like to say, SEALs are basically a bunch of social misfits who make music together. They challenge systems. They've got to be challenged, or they get in trouble.
SMITH: Can we win the war on terror?
MARCINKO: It's not about winning or losing. It's about whether or nor we can survive the war. It's not something that's going to go away.
There was a recent piece in The Washington Post about reassessment and where-are-we-going. My take? Quit studying the damned problem, and let's attack it! Al Queda is a franchise organization. Yes, Osama bin Laden is a figurehead. He can raise money. But the real problem is the fact that we have these little monsters popping their heads out of caves around the world, and we'll be hunting them down forever. Right after 9-11, we said that Al Queda trainees were in 60 countries, worldwide. Now we know they are in far more. They're all dirty warriors. They don't wear uniforms. They don't fly flags. They can blend in wherever they are. They can outwait us. So this war is not something we can write an exit strategy on, or predict that in 2009 the last pistol shot will be fired.
SMITH: Let's look at your latest book for a moment: Is Vengeance a reflection of just how many holes or flaws can be found in our homeland defense? And if so, what can the ordinary American do?
MARCINKO: The whole series is to make people aware of what terrorists could do, would do, and might do. So you read the book and you start looking around your neighborhood and say, could it happen here? It's educating you to extend the neighborhood watch programs so that at least you are aware. After 9-11, people are less hesitant to call the police and say, 'Hey, I saw something odd down the street.' This book reinforces that.
Vengeance is certainly a play on demonstrating the holes that are apparent in homeland security. Now, is it fiction or prediction? I've predicted things that have happened in the past, including an airplane-run way ahead of 9-11. How? Because I know the terrorist mind. I think like a bad guy.
This new book does look at vulnerabilities. It does embarrass the bureaucratic system, but not the people in the field who are either not trained or not equipped.
In real terms, we've just now accepted the profiling of Middle Eastern men as possible terrorists. In Vengeance we have Bosnians who are round-eyed and look like you and me, but they are still Muslim. That's the wrinkle of reality. They can hate us just as much. They read the same Koran. They can be just as much a terrorist as a Middle Easterner, so we've get to stop putting our head in the sand.
SMITH: So, you're not satisfied with our current homeland defense.
MARCINKO: No. I'm not at all happy with homeland defense. I've talked with academia about this, and the fact that we don't have a good anti-terrorism program, which means informing the people.
SMITH: How do we do that?
MARCINKO: I've proposed an idea to several major universities ? near where I train other [institutions or companies] nearby. I'd like to see a two-hour block of instruction in every academically functional area where I will 'red cell' the learning curve. So, for instance, with engineering students, I could explain to them how, as a bad guy, I would break something. Then take them to the field and show them how I would do it. We would look at subways, and I would show them how I could turn that into something really nasty; and powergrids, where I would show them how I could shut those down. They would then go back and say, 'Okay, how might I design this system better?' More importantly, they would become aware of how easy it is to breakdown our infrastructure.
SMITH: Is [the department of] Homeland Security listening to you on this?
MARCINKO: I talk to the troops and the people I know who work in Homeland Security, but, officially, Homeland Security doesn't talk to me, so I don't know if they are listening.
Over a year ago, they hired some writers to think out of the box, to come up with funny scenarios so they could study them. Why hire them? They could have gotten the Rogue Warrior series of books out of the library and there would've been enough there to keep them busy for three years.
We're simply not focusing our efforts in the right direction. We're pouring money into things that are not effective. All they're doing is writing policy, then going to industry to implement it. Then it has to go to the board-of-directors and the stockholders, and, frankly, if there's no profit margin in it, there's no impetus to do it.
For instance, the aviation industry has been told to rig civilian airliners to defend against surface-to-air missiles, just like we do with our military. Well, they finally have one bird that is being so-configured, and they'll test it. But the industry is saying it will be 2007 before they can get anything up and ready, and it'll probably cost close to $1 million per plane. There's already no profit in the airline industry, so who's going to pick up that expense? And the bad guys are still going to come and get us, because 70 percent of our airports are still under construction, and not everyone working on those sites has a green card.
SMITH: Why aren't these problems taken more seriously?
MARCINKO: We have no staying power. 9-11 was a long time ago, and people are saying, 'They [the terrorists] are not coming.' So, all Homeland Security has been doing is color-coding alert systems, building command centers, and shifting assets. Now there are all these people working at Homeland Security, but the FBI's database is not up to speed. Immigration is not really working. I could go on and on.
What makes it worse, I don't even have to bring a weapons system into the United States. I can just break into someplace and steal something. It's simply the price we pay for being free.
SMITH: Thanks for your time, Dick.
MARCINKO: Thank you.
A former U.S. Marine infantry leader and paratrooper, W. Thomas Smith Jr. writes about military issues and has covered conflict in the Balkans and on the West Bank. He is the author of four books, and his articles have appeared in USA Today, George, U.S. News & World Report, BusinessWeek, and National Review Online.
W. Thomas Smith Jr. can be reached at wtsjr@militaryweek.com.
-
The Downing Street Memo
By George Friedman
The "Downing Street Memo" of July 23, 2002, has become the controversy du jour in Washington and London. The memo clearly shows that the White House, in July 2002, was considering an invasion of Iraq. Given that many members of the Bush administration were discussing such an invasion publicly by the summer, we find the shock over the memorandum interesting but hardly enlightening. We recall that in August, only a month after the memo was issued, senior administration members -- including Vice President Dick Cheney -- were very publicly discussing the need for the invasion and were being publicly attacked by opponents of the war. What this memo shows was that London was privy to the thinking in Washington about a month before the Bush administration launched an intense public campaign.
The memorandum is not startling. It is extremely interesting, but far more for what it does not contain than what it does. Consider the following two, separate excerpts:
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.
Two points are present in both excerpts: first, that U.S. President George W. Bush had made up his mind to invade Iraq by the time the memo was written, and second, that links to terrorism and -- far more important -- the existence of a program to develop weapons of mass destruction would be the justification for the invasion. It is clear that British intelligence did not believe that the Iraqi program was as advanced as those of other countries; nevertheless, this was to be the justification for the war.
What is missing from this memo, the glaring omission, is why Bush was so eager to invade Iraq. Matthew Rycroft, the foreign policy aide who wrote this memo, demonstrates a remarkable lack of curiosity about this. C, the moniker hung on the head of British foreign intelligence, had visited the United States for routine consultations. It is extremely important to note that C is asserting that this -- invading Iraq -- is Bush's policy. Indeed, the second paragraph above quotes the British foreign minister as saying that it is Bush's policy. There is no mention here of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz or any of the others who analysts had thought were the real drivers behind the policy. So much for the belief that a cabal of neo-cons had taken control of the president's brain.
To the contrary, British intelligence is clearly reporting to the prime minister that it is George W. Bush who is making the decisions. The only other name mentioned in this memo is that of Colin Powell. Rumsfeld is mentioned only in the context of being briefed on the war plan, not on instigating it. That appears to us the single most important revelation in the document. Bush was president all along, and all the Washington gossips were wrong. The only other explanation is that C didn't know what he was talking about, or that he gave a superficial report. We doubt that either was the case.
If the document makes it clear that Bush was in control of U.S. decision-making, there is a glaring omission: Why did Bush want to invade Iraq? Our readers know that Stratfor began arguing by the summer of 2002 that an invasion of Iraq was inevitable, and I analyzed it in America's Secret War. Those arguments can be reviewed at the links below; we will summarize here simply by saying that there were no other options.
War Diary: Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2002
War Diary: Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2002
Smoke and Mirrors: The United States, Iraq and Deception
Bush's Crisis: Articulating a Strategy in Iraq and the Wider War
The Edge of the Razor
September 11: Three Years Later
Facing Realities in Iraq
U.S. officials believed at the time that al Qaeda was planning another strike, larger than the 9/11 strikes. The United States could not stop al Qaeda on the strength of its own intelligence; it needed the cooperation of intelligence services in the Muslim world. These services were reluctant to cooperate because their view of the United States -- after having watched 20 years of weak responses in warfare --was that it was unable to absorb the risks and casualties of war. Leaders in crucial parts of the Muslim world feared al Qaeda more than the United States. Since a covert strike against al Qaeda was not possible, the United States had no good options. Bush chose the best of a bad lot. He hoped for a change in Arab perception of the United States, from hatred and contempt to hatred and fear. He also wanted to occupy the most strategic territory in the Middle East, bringing pressure to bear on the Saudis.
The decision to justify the war by recourse to the weapons of mass destruction argument was conditioned by three things:
1. It was a persuasive justification. If Saddam Hussein was developing serious WMD, there would be support for a war.
2. The British clearly wanted a legal justification for the war, and the United States wanted the British in. One way to get that justification was a U.N. resolution, and one way to get that resolution was to convince the U.N. that the Iraqis had WMD.
3. The United States and Britain believed Hussein had these weapons. They knew Iraq's was an undeveloped program, but the United States believed that it was sufficiently developed to serve as casus belli for the war.
It was a bad decision. This was not because it was simply a lie -- it wasn't. The memo makes it clear that the British thought Iraq had a WMD program, less developed than those of other countries, but a program nonetheless. Indeed, in the section on military plans, the memo raises the concern about the Iraqis using WMD during the first phase of the war:
For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.
Contrary to what others have said after the memo, what it shows was that British intelligence -- and therefore U.S. intelligence -- really did believe the Iraqis might have had some serious capabilities.
Obviously, the fact that there were no WMD in Iraq -- theories that the weapons had been spirited away to Syria notwithstanding -- show retrospectively that this was a bad justification. But even if there had been WMD in Iraq, it was a bad justification even at that time. There was a sound, but complex, justification for the war that could have been provided, consisting of the following pieces:
1. Saddam Hussein might not have aided al Qaeda prior to 9/11, but given his attitude toward the United States, given his past record and given the risks involved, disposing of Hussein is a prudent and necessary action.
2. The Muslim world does not take American military power seriously. It does not think the United States has the will to fight. The United States cannot win the war unless that myth is destroyed by decisive action. If, in the course of that action, Saddam Hussein is destroyed, so much the better. It should be noted here that the United States' decision to fight in Korea, for example, was explicitly based on the theory that the Communists were testing American will - and that unless the United States demonstrated its will to fight, the Communists would take it as a sign of weakness and increase their pressure. There are worse reasons for fighting, and this one has precedent.
3. Iraq is a strategic country whose occupation would permit the United States to place pressure on regimes like Iran or Syria directly.
The mystery in the document, and the mystery since the summer of 2002, is why Bush almost never used these justifications but clung instead to the weapons of mass destruction rationale. Since it is clear that WMD was not his primary motivator, why did he not come forward with a clear explanation?
The obvious answer is that he did not have a better explanation. That would mean that he had no good reason for invading Iraq -- he simply wanted to do so and did. You can pile onto this theories that he wanted to avenge the attempted murder of his father by Iraqi agents, that he is a stupid man who doesn't think much, or that black helicopters took control of his brain. All of this may be possible. But in looking at Bush and reading this memo, there nowhere emerges an image of a man who thinks like this. There is a willful, unbending man. There is a decisive man who can make substantial mistakes and refuse to concede error. But it is hard to locate the stupid man of myth.
So why doesn't Bush come plain with his reasoning? Better still, why doesn't this memo -- which cries out for a paragraph in which C explains Bush's reasoning -- contain a word on that? Why isn't there even a mention that it is not clear what Bush is up to? Everyone in the room knows that WMD is a pretext for war, but the obvious next paragraph -- an analysis of Bush's real reasoning -- simply isn't there.
And not only isn't that discussion there, but no one in the room seemed to be even curious about it. Either they had the least curiosity of any group of men on earth, or they knew the answer.
We continue to believe the answer is Saudi Arabia. It was the elephant in the room. It was the world's largest oil producer, a close ally of both the United States and Britain, willfully uncooperative in the war against al Qaeda. We understand why the United States or Britain would not want to make this a public matter. Humiliating the Saudis was not in anyone's interest. But in the end, Bush and Tony Blair continue to pay the price of the great mistake of the war. They still haven't come up with a good justification for the invasion of Iraq, despite the fact that even we can think of several.
================
Here is a referenced prior piece from Strat:
=============
Home ? About Us ? Services ? Products ? Subscribe ? Clients ? Contact Us
PREMIUM ANALYSIS WORLD TERRORISM REPORT SPECIAL OFFERS MY ACCOUNT
Logged in as:
Marc Denny
Subscription is Premium
Summary
In any war, deception is a strategic necessity. However, the "bodyguard of lies" surrounding plans for a U.S. attack on Iraq -- vital to building an international coalition of support -- could be confusing the American public and endangering political support for the war effort. The operational and tactical levels of the war now appear to be clearer than the ultimate goal. That is because baldly stating the strategic necessity for an attack on Iraq -- the ability to station U.S. forces in the heart of the Middle East -- undoubtedly would endanger the fragile war coalition.
Analysis
Surprise is essential to war, and deception is the foundation of surprise. During World War II, Allied planning was protected by what Winston Churchill referred to as "a bodyguard of lies."
Those lies, it could be persuasively argued, were what made Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, successful. That bodyguard of lies hid the basic operational plan from German eyes. The strategy was known to everyone: At some point, the Allies would carry out an amphibious assault on the French coast. The Germans also knew that an invasion could be expected at any time. What they did not know -- due to a plan called Operation Fortitude -- was that plans for a U.S. 3rd army attack at Pas de Calais were fictional. The real invasion was to take place at Normandy, involving other forces. Because of Operation Fortitude, the Germans knew that an invasion was coming and roughly when the invasion would occur -- but they were so wrong about where it would take place that they held their armor in reserve to protect the Pas de Calais, rather than hurl it at the attackers in Normandy.
Operation Fortitude offers two lessons. The first is to use all means necessary to confuse your enemy. The second, not nearly as frequently discussed, is that commanders must never allow themselves to become confused as to what the real plan is and -- just as important -- that the deception not extend so deeply and broadly that neither the troops nor the home audience is genuinely confused as to what is going on. At the broadest level, there was no confusion among the Allied troops and public as to the goal: unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. Many have criticized this goal, and others have said it was an unfortunate necessity designed to ensure Allied unity. It is frequently forgotten that the simplicity and the elegance of the goal kept Allied troops and the public from falling into cynical doubts about their leaders' true intentions. It was understood that the goal was unconditional surrender; the means were an invasion of France, an alliance with the Soviet Union and a strategic bombing campaign, and that the rest was best not discussed.
In Iraq, a very different "bodyguard of lies" has taken control of war planning. The operational and tactical levels of the war appear to be clearer than the war's strategic shape or even its purpose. It is unclear precisely why the war is being fought and what outcome is desired. There are two possible reasons for this confusion. The first is that the leaders might in fact be confused, but that is difficult to believe. The team around U.S. President George W. Bush not only is seasoned and skilled, but is haunted by Vietnam -- a war in which the strategic goal never was clearly defined. It is hard to believe that the Bush team would commit the error of the Johnson administration -- lack of clarity on strategic goals and, thus, inability to create operational congruence.
The second reason is more persuasive. The United States always has operated in the context of coalition warfare. In World War II, the coalition was strengthened by strategic clarity and the simplification of goals. At root, the one thing the Allies could agree on was the destruction of the Nazi regime and the occupation of Germany. U.S. grand strategy still is built on the idea of coalition warfare -- of burden sharing -- but the coalition the United States would like to construct for the upcoming war, something like what existed during Desert Storm, has such diverse and contradictory interests that there is no simple declaration of strategic goals that would unite the alliance. Quite the contrary, any such statement of goals would divide the allies dramatically -- indeed, it would make alliance impossible. Therefore, the United States is searching for a justification that is persuasive, not true. In the process, Washington is neither building the coalition nor maintaining popular and political support for the war at home.
In a strategic sense, there is a very good and clear explanation for the war: Al Qaeda attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. There is no reason to believe there will not be additional and more intense attacks in the future. Fighting al Qaeda on a tactical level -- hunting down the network on its own turf, team by team -- is not only inefficient, it is probably ineffective. Certainly, given the geography of the Islamic world, even reaching in to the militants' networks has been impossible.
However, attacking and occupying Iraq achieves three things:
1. It takes out of the picture a potential ally for al Qaeda, one with sufficient resources to multiply the militant group's threat. Whether Iraq has been an ally in the past is immaterial -- it is the future that counts.
2. It places U.S. forces in the strategic heart of the Middle East, capable of striking al Qaeda forces whenever U.S. intelligence identifies them.
3. Most important, it allows the United States to bring its strength --conventional forces -- to bear on nation-states that are enablers or potential enablers of al Qaeda. This would undermine strategically one of the pillars of al Qaeda's capabilities: the willingness of established regimes to ignore al Qaeda operations within their borders.
From a U.S. standpoint, this is the strategic rationale for a war with Iraq. Or, to be more precise, if this is not the rationale, the purpose is the one thing a war's strategic goals should never be -- a baffling secret.
This is not the explanation that has been given for the war's strategy. The Bush administration's central problem has been that it has not been able to tie its Iraq strategy in with its al Qaeda strategy. At first, the United States tried to make the case that there had been collaboration between al Qaeda and Iraq in the past, as if trying to prove that a crime had been committed that justified war. The justification, of course, was strategic -- not what might have happened, but to prevent what might happen in the future. The administration then settled into a justification concerning weapons of mass destruction, creating the current uproar over whether an empty rocket could be construed as a justification for war.
From the beginning, the administration fell into the trap of treating a war as a criminal investigation. Imagine that after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had made a speech declaring that he would hunt down every pilot who had attacked Pearl Harbor without warning and bring him to justice. In the ensuing insanity, the emphasis would have been on avoiding harm to innocent Japanese and others and implementing judicial procedures to make sure that only those directly involved in the attack were punished. When the United States made plans to land on Guadalcanal, it would be pointed out that the innocent people on Guadalcanal had done nothing to deserve the death and destruction that would rain down on them. Washington, rather than explaining the strategic rationale for the Guadalcanal operation, would charge the islanders with aiding the Japanese and then photograph a meeting between an islander and a Japanese agent in Prague. Officials then would claim that Guadalcanal possessed weapons that threatened the United States, and an inspection regime would be put in place.
The Guadalcanal islanders were infinitely less deserving of punishment than Saddam Hussein or the country he rules, but that completely misses the point. Wars are not about punishment; they are not legal proceedings. They are actions by nations against other nations designed to achieve national goals. The virtue of the Guadalcanal islanders was not the issue, nor the guilt of individual pilots at Pearl Harbor. Nor, indeed, was the war about whether the Japanese were the aggressors or, as they claimed, the victims of aggression. War is war, and is carried out by its own logic.
The Bush administration knows this, and it has excellent strategic reasons for wanting to conquer Iraq. The government has chosen not to enunciate those motives for a simple reason: If it did, many of the United States' allies would oppose the war. Washington's goal -- the occupation of Iraq -- would strengthen the United States enormously, and this is something that many inside Washington's coalition don't want to see happen. Therefore, rather than crisply stating the strategic goal, the government has tried to ensnare its allies in a web of pseudo-legalism. Rather than simply stating that Iraq, like Guadalcanal, is a strategic prize whose occupation will facilitate the war, it has tried to demonstrate that Hussein has violated some resolution or another. Hussein, no fool, has succeeded in confusing the issue endlessly. The point -- that invading Iraq is in the U.S. national interest regardless of whether Hussein has a single weapon of mass destruction, is lost. This is about strategy, not guilt or innocence.
This has led the United States to deal with the current problem: What if Hussein leaves under his own steam? As Washington has allowed the issue to be defined, that should go a long way toward satisfying U.S. goals. From a strategic standpoint, of course, it would achieve nothing unless the United States was allowed to enter Iraq and base substantial forces there under its own control, to be used as it wishes.
The downside of all of this for the United States is that American public opinion, rather than buying into a strategic vision that has not been expressed, has accepted the public justification offered by the Bush administration. As recent polls have shown, the overwhelming majority of the public opposes a war if weapons of mass destruction are not found in Iraq. That, obviously, can change, but the price of building a coalition on a legal foundation is that it makes public support conditional as well.
There is an upside as well: The confusion over motives and intentions must baffle Iraq, too. Consider one example: The United States has indicated some interest in a settlement based on Hussein's resignation -- what else could Washington say? This also would indicate something that Hussein fundamentally believes -- that the United States is not eager for war. The more interest Washington shows in a deal, the less interested Baghdad will be, although he certainly will play it out for as long as possible.
Consider other examples from the operational level. U.S. officials said last week that they wanted five carriers in the Persian Gulf before beginning the war, yet only two are there now and it will take up to a month for the rest to arrive. British officials said recently that that the British 7 Brigade -- the Desert Rats -- would not be ready to participate in the war on time, although Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon later announced that nearly 30,000 troops, including the Desert Rats, would be deployed "over the days and weeks ahead." The United States is trying to survey Turkish air bases with which it already is familiar. From where we sit, the United States appears to be nowhere near ready to go to war. In fact, the entire buildup seems completely uncoordinated.
From Baghdad, Hussein sees all of this and might conclude that he has time -- time to delay, time to move forces back into Baghdad, time to launch pre-emptive chemical attacks. From where he sits, it might look as if U.S. strategy is not genuinely committed to war and U.S. operational capabilities are so out of kilter that a war cannot be launched before summer.
The deception campaign at the operational level well could be working perfectly. Hitler thought he knew where the attack was coming from but was utterly wrong. Hussein might think that he knows where the attack is coming, but it might be that he thinks he has more time than he has. Deception on the operational level is a vital weapon.
However, deception on the strategic level is a double-edged sword. Particularly in a democracy, where the von Metternichs must consult the public as well as the emperor, strategic deception can confuse the public as much as it confuses the enemy. Moreover, in coalition warfare, the inability to clearly state war goals because coalition partners don't share them might mean that the coalition is the problem, not the solution. Indeed, in creating illusory justification, the Bush administration might be denying the fundamental reality -- that the U.S. goal and those of the allies are incompatible, and that decisions need to be made.
If Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the only rational solution is the one the Israelis used in 1981 -- destroy them. To allow officials in Baghdad time during an inspection crisis to possibly complete their fabrication makes no sense. To have allowed the WMD issue to supplant U.S. strategic interests as the justification for war has created a crisis in U.S. strategy. Deception campaigns are designed to protect strategies, not to trap them. Ultimately, the foundation of U.S. grand strategy, coalitions and the need for clarity in military strategy have collided.
The discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq will not solve the problem, nor will a coup in Baghdad. In a war that will last for years, maintaining one's conceptual footing is critical. If that footing cannot be maintained -- if the requirements of the war and the requirements of strategic clarity are incompatible -- there are more serious issues involved than the future of Iraq.
? Copyright 2005 Strategic Forecasting Inc. All rights reserved.
Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | Site Map
-
www.stratfor.com
Geopolitical Diary: Tuesday, June 28, 2005
On June 26, Donald Rumsfeld said two important things. The first was that the war in Iraq could last another 12 years. The second was that the United States had engaged in negotiations with Iraqi insurgents. Of the two announcements, the one concerning negotiations was by far the most important, although the two were linked in certain ways.
We have asserted for a while that the United States was engaged in discussions with the Sunni leadership in Iraq. By the end of last year, the United States had faced the reality that it was not going to defeat the guerrillas in the Sunni Triangle. The guerrillas had to face the fact that their insurrection was not going to spread into the Shiite community. A stalemate had materialized. Neither side could knock out the other.
This was a classic situation for negotiations. Both logic and intelligence led us to conclude that discussions were under way. The discussions were fueled by another factor: The failure of the guerrillas to disrupt the elections and the government had left the Sunnis in a position where they were in danger of being permanently marginalized. Having boycotted the elections, the Sunnis had virtually no presence in the new government. Unless they made a deal with the Shiite-dominated government, the Sunni's historical enemies would dominate in controlling the levers of government.
The Sunni elders, who were the enablers of much of the insurrection, were trapped between two forces. On the one side, the Shia -- and the Americans -- were pressing them. On the other side, the jihadists, many of them from outside Iraq, were pressing them. They were in a trap from which they had to extricate themselves. On the one hand, they supported the insurrection. On the other hand, they opened lines of communication to the Americans, whom they paradoxically regarded as an honest broker with the mistrusted Shia.
The American reason for the negotiation was simple. It could not indefinitely fight a counterinsurgency among the Sunnis without some allies. The Shia could keep the lid on the majority of the country, but within the Sunni Triangle, they needed Sunnis. The insurrection had two major strands. One was jihadist, taking its bearings from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The other was more nationalist and Baathist. The United States started talking to the second strand.
The problem then became the Shia. The Sunni price was not merely a time line of American withdrawal. It was a constitution that would give the Sunnis veto power over Shiite decisions. The Sunnis could live with the Americans more easily than they could with majority rule. The Americans were prepared to give the Sunnis that sort of power. In the end, the government of Iraq is not a pressing concern for the United States. In fact, they liked a veto because it would limit Shiite power, creating an internal balance of power and limiting the Iranian influence in Iraq.
It was the Shia who would be the big losers in this deal. That is why Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari was in Washington last week. The Bush administration was leaning heavily on them with two choices: Either reach an accommodation with the Sunnis or take responsibility for the counterinsurgency. In effect, make the peace or fight a civil war. In either case, leave the United States out of it. The key was to convince the Shia that the Americans meant it when they privately threatened to abandon providing security in Iraq.
That is why Rumsfeld said that the war might last 12 years, but not for the United States. He was driving home the fact that the war was the Shia's war, not the Americans'. He was also pointing out that peace with the dominant strand in the Sunni community would reduce the level of violence dramatically. Better to face foreign jihadists than the entire Sunni Triangle.
The issue is now in the hands of the Shia and to a lesser extent the Kurds. The Shia want to dominate the new Iraq. They can have that if they are prepared to carry the burden of security in the Sunni Triangle. If they don't want that burden, they will have to make a political arrangement that the United States is prepared to broker. The fighting might last 12 years -- although where Rumsfeld got that exact number is not clear to us -- but the level of fighting is variable.
In any case, the United States is negotiating, if not an exit strategy, at least a mitigation strategy.
-
My second post today.
This strikes me as a deep, serious, sober and fair assessment of the current situation.
==========================
www.stratfor.com
Signing up recommended in the highest terms!
===========
GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT06.28.2005
Reading Iraq
By George Friedman
U.S. President George W. Bush made a prime-time, nationally televised speech June 28, maintaining the position he has taken from the beginning: The invasion of Iraq was essential to U.S. interests. Though the publicly stated rationale has shifted, the commitment has remained constant. Bush's speech -- and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's revelation earlier this week that the United States has been negotiating with insurgents -- represent an important milestone in the history of the war and require a consideration of the strategic situation.
The issue of why the United States got into Iraq is not trivial by any means. The reasons for its involvement are an indicator of the end-state the United States wishes to achieve. Understanding the goal, in turn, allows us to measure whether the United States is succeeding and how the various forces in Iraq might want to accommodate to that policy or act to thwart it. In other words, if you don't understand why the United States decided to go into Iraq, you cannot figure out how it is faring there at any given stage.
Last week, this column addressed the "Downing Street memo" from the standpoint of what it reveals about U.S. motivations. The memorandum confirms that the United States was not interested in WMD and was using the argument that Saddam Hussein was developing WMD as a covering justification for invasion. It does not address the question of why the United States did invade -- an omission that opens the door to speculation, ranging from the belief that George W. Bush was just being mean, to others involving complex strategies.
Readers familiar with our analysis know that we tend toward the strategic view. The United States invaded Iraq for two reasons, in our view:
1. Seize the single most strategic country in the region in order to pressure neighboring countries to provide intelligence on al Qaeda.
2. Demonstrate American military might -- and will -- for a region that held the latter in particularly low regard.
From our point of view, given the options at the time, the strategy was understandable and defensible. Washington, however, committed a series of fundamental mistakes, which we discussed at the time:
1. The Bush administration failed to provide a coherent explanation for the war.
2. The administration planned for virtually no opposition from Iraqi forces, either during the conventional war or afterward.
3. Given the failure of planning, the United States did not create a force in Iraq appropriate to the mission. The force was not only too small, but inappropriately configured for counterinsurgency operations.
4. The United States did not restructure its military force as a whole to take into account the need for a long-term occupation in the face of resistance. As a result, the U.S. Army in particular not only is being strained, but has limited operational flexibility should other theaters of operation become active.
Because of these failures, the United States has not decisively achieved its strategic goals in invading Iraq. We say "decisively" because some of these goals, such as shifts in Saudi Arabia's policy, have occurred. But because of the inconclusive situation in Iraq, the full value of occupying Iraq and the full psychological effect have evaded the United States. This, combined with consistent inability to provide clear explanations for the administration's goals, has raised the price of establishing a U.S. presence in Iraq while diminishing the value.
The Current Situation
In December 2004, Stratfor argued that the United States had lost the war against the guerrillas in the Sunni Triangle -- that it would be impossible to defeat the guerrillas with the force the United States could bring to bear. At the same time, we have argued that the situation is evolving toward a satisfactory outcome for the United States.
These appear to be contradictory statements. They are not. But they do point out the central difficulty of understanding the war.
The guerrillas have failed in their two strategic goals:
1. They have not been able to spread the rising beyond the Sunni population and area. That means that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi population are not engaged in the rising. Indeed, they are actively hostile to it.
2. The guerrillas have not been able to prevent the initiation of a political process leading to the establishment of an Iraqi government. Forces representing the Shia and the Kurds -- together, about 80 percent of the Iraqi population -- have engaged in regime-building within the general boundaries created by the U.S. occupying forces. At least, for now.
At the same time, the United States has failed to suppress militarily the guerrilla rising within the Sunni region. Within that region, the guerrilla forces have cyclically maintained their tempo of operations. They have occasionally slowed the operational tempo, but consistently returned to levels equal to or higher than before. In spite of the fact that the United States has thrown two excellent divisions at a time against the guerrillas, the insurrection has continued unabated. The involvement of jihadists, who do not share the political goals of Sunni guerrillas, has only added to the noise, the violence and the perceptions of U.S. failure.
Neither side has achieved its goals. The United States has not defeated the guerrillas. The guerrillas have not triggered a general rising. But the situation is not equal, because this is not simply a war that pits the Sunni guerrillas against the United States. Rather, it pits the Sunni guerrillas against the United States and against the Shiite and Kurdish majority. It is this political reality that continues to give the United States a massive advantage in the war.
It must be remembered that the guerrillas' primary target has not been American forces, but the forces and leaders of the Iraqi government. The primary strategy has been to attack the emerging government and infrastructure -- both to intimidate participants and to disrupt the process. However, what many observers systematically ignore is that it is a misnomer to speak of an "Iraqi" government or army. Both of those represent a coalition of Shia and Kurds. Therefore, the guerrillas are engaged in a strategy of attacks against the Shiite and Kurdish communities.
This is what puts the guerrillas at a massive disadvantage, and what makes their strategic failure so much more serious than that of the Americans. Were the guerrillas to defeat the United States, in the sense that the United States chose to withdraw from Iraq, it would create an historic catastrophe for the Iraqi Sunnis, whom the guerrillas represent. Iraq's Shiite and Kurdish communities were the historical victims of the Sunni-dominated Baathist regime, particularly when Saddam Hussein was in control of it. If the United States were to withdraw, the Sunnis, Shia and Kurds would have to make their own peace without outside arbitration. One of the very real outcomes of this would be a bloodbath within the Sunni community -- with Shia and Kurds both repaying the Sunnis for their own previous bloodbaths and protecting themselves from the re-emergence of Sunni power.
There is, therefore, a fundamental ambivalence within the Sunni community. Certainly, the Sunnis are overwhelmingly anti-American -- as indeed are the Shia. The jihadist fighters -- who, after all, celebrate suicide tactics -- are also indifferent to the potential catastrophes. In some ways, they would find a bloodbath by Shia and Kurds helpful in clarifying the situation. But the jihadist fighters -- many of them Sunnis from outside of Iraq -- do not represent the Iraqi Sunnis. The Iraqi Sunnis are represented by the elders from towns and villages, who are certainly not indifferent to a blood bath.
This is the key group, the real battleground in Iraq.
The Political Calculus
The Sunni leadership is aware that the current course is not in their interest. If U.S. forces remain in Iraq, the Sunnis will be excluded from the government and marginalized. If the United States leaves, they will be the victims of repression by the Shia and Kurds. The failure of the guerrillas to disrupt the political process in Iraq puts the Sunni leadership in a difficult position. They supported the insurrection based on expectations that have not borne fruit -- the political process was not aborted. They now must adjust to a reality they did not anticipate. In effect, they bet on the guerrillas, and they lost. The guerrillas have not been defeated, but they have not won. More to the point, there is no scenario now under which the guerrillas can do more than hold in the Sunni regions. The rising cannot turn into a national rising, because there is no Kurdish or Shiite force even flirting with that possibility anymore. The guerrillas' failure to win has forced a choice on the Sunnis.
That choice is whether to pull the insurgents' base of support out from underneath them. The guerrillas are able to operate because the Sunni elders have permitted them to do so. Guerrillas do not float in the air. As Mao and Giap taught, a guerrilla force must have a base among the people. In the Sunni regions of Iraq, the key to the people are the elders. If the elders decide to withhold support, the guerrillas cannot operate. They can operate by intimidation, but that is not a sufficient basis for guerrilla operations.
The United States is trying now to exploit this potential breach. The elders find the guerrillas useful: They are the Sunnis' only bargaining chip. But they are a dangerous chip. The guerrillas are not fighting and dying simply to be a bargaining chip in the hands of the Sunni leaders.
For their part, neither the Shia nor the Kurds have wanted to give the Sunnis guarantees of any sort. They distrust the Sunnis and want to keep them weak and on the defensive. The United States, therefore, has had to play a two-sided game. On the one hand, the Americans have had to assure the Sunnis that they would have a significant place in any Iraqi government. To achieve this, the United States must convince the Shia of two things: First, that an Iraqi regime including the Sunnis is a better alternative to an ongoing civil war, and second, that the United States is, in the final analysis, prepared to abandon Iraq -- leaving it to the Shia and Kurds to deal with Iranian demands and Sunni violence.
Thus, Washington has a very complicated negotiating position. On the one hand, it is negotiating and making promises to the Sunnis and some guerrillas. On the other hand, U.S. officials are projecting a sense of weariness to the Shia, increasing the pressure on them to make concessions. Donald Rumsfeld's statements on Sunday -- confirming meetings between U.S. and Iraqi Shiite leaders with insurgent groups -- were designed to try to hit the right notes, a difficult task. So too were recent offers of amnesty for the insurgents.
But in fact, it is not negotiations but the reality on the ground that drives these moves. The Shia have shown no appetite for a civil war with the Sunnis. That might change, which is a concern for the Sunnis, but they are in a bargaining mode. The Sunnis understand that even were the United States defeated, they would have to deal with the Shia, who outnumber them and are not likely to knuckle under. Simply defeating the United States is in the interests of the jihadists -- particularly the foreigners -- but those who live in Iraq face a more complex reality: An American withdrawal would open the door to disaster, not pave the way for victory. This is not Saigon in 1975. Defeating the United States is not the same thing as winning the war -- not by a long shot. The Sunni leaders know that they can defeat the United States and still be massacred by their real enemies.
Therefore, an American departure is not in the interest of any of the combatants -- except for the jihadists -- at this moment. This is an odd thing to assert, since the insurgents have placed U.S. withdrawal from Iraq as a primary agenda item. Nevertheless, the internal political configuration makes the United States useful, for the moment, to most players. The non-jihadist insurgents want the United States as not only a target, but also as a buffer. The Iraqi Shia, concerned about domination by the Iranians, use the Americans as a counterweight. The Kurds are dependent on U.S. patronage on a more permanent basis. The paradox is this: Everyone in Iraq hates the Americans. Everybody wants the Americans to leave, but not until they achieve their own political goals. This should not be considered support for U.S. domination of Iraq; it is simply the calculus of the moment. But it opens a window of opportunity for the United States to pursue a new strategy.
The United States cannot defeat the guerrillas in combat. It could, however, potentially split the guerrilla movement, dividing the guerrillas controlled by the Sunni leadership from the hard-core jihadists -- whom Bush designated in his June 28 speech as the true enemy in Iraq. If that were to happen, the insurrection would not disappear, but it would decline. Even if the Sunnis were not prepared to engage the jihadists directly, the simple withdrawal of a degree of sanctuary would undermine their operations. The violence would continue, but not at its current level.
From the jihadists' standpoint, this would be an intolerable outcome. They must do everything possible to keep this from happening. Therefore, they must make a maximum effort to deflect the Sunni leadership from its course, harden the position of the Shia, and deny the United States both room to maneuver in Iraq and credibility at home. An increase of violence is, in fact, built into this scenario, and the United States cannot defeat it. Violence frequently increases as a war moves into its political phase.
For this reason, then, our view is that (a) the United States has lost control of the military situation and (b) that the political situation in Iraq remains promising. That would appear to be a paradoxical statement, but in fact, it points to the reality of this war: Massive failures by the administration have led it into a situation where there is no military solution; nevertheless, the configuration of forces in Iraq provide the United States with a very real political solution. All evidence is that the United States is in the process of attempting to move on this political plan. It will not eliminate violence in Iraq. It can, however, reduce the scope.
But before that is possible, the violence will continue to rise.
-
A friend writes:
=======================
In 2002, after 9/11 and the fear engendered by the anthrax-in-the-mail
letters, this administration decided to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime
because the risk of permitting him to continue in power outweighed the risk
of expelling him.
What was that risk?
-- SH gives secretly to Islamist terrorists chemical, biological or dirty
nuclear weapons for use against the US and other countries in the West.
Why was that risk real?
-- SH had them in the past and had used them.
-- SH expelled UNSCOM inspectors in 1998 before they could verify the
absence of ALL of those weapons.
-- After Gulf War I, SH falsely denied that he did not have biological
weapons. This deception was discovered only after the defection of his
sons-in-law to Jordan in 1995.
-- The consensus analysis of all major intelligence agencies was that SH
still was concealing large quantities of the components of chem-bio weapons
and that he was attempting to restart his nuclear program.
-- Iraqi intelligence had regular contacts with members of al Qaida and
other Islamist terror groups.
What were our options?
-- Do nothing and trust that Iraqi intelligence operatives will not assist
al Qaida and other terror groups in the construction and use of small WMD's.
-- Eliminate the risk by overthrowing SH and severing the connections
between the terrorists and Iraqi intelligence controlled by SH.
What did we discover about WMD's after we overthrew SH?
-- That SH did not have any large stockpiles of militarized WMD's in Iraq
when he was overthrown.
-- That Iraqi intelligence had maintained a small, covert biological weapons
program up to the overthrow.
-- That SH had not reconstituted his chemical weapons program after 1998,
but had planned to do so after lifting of the UN sanctions.
-- That SH had not reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, but intended
to do so after the lifting of the UN sanctions.
-- That Iraqi intelligence under SH maintained regular liason and contact
with al Qaida and other Islamist terror groups including sponsoring and
funding Ansar al Islam, now known as "Al Qaida in Iraq."
Were there other probable benefits to overthrowing SH?
-- Geopolitically, a pro-US Iraq would occupy the center of the Middle East
from which the US could inlfuence and contain Iran and Syria. Also, the US
could exercise more direct influence over Saudi Arabia.
-- Geographically, the US could induce many Islamist terrorists to fight the
US armed forces in Iraq istead of committing terrorist acts on US soil.
Has the US made mistakes in the conduct of this war?
-- Yes. What President has presided over a mistake-free war? FDR? Truman?
JFK? LBJ? Wilson? Lincoln? Madison? Jefferson? Polk? Cleveland?
Was it worth it?
Yes.
-
One way to keep the kidnappers looking over their shoulders. . . .
6/29/2005
Two down?
Filed under:
Sweden
Iraq
- Billy (Stockholm, Sweden)@ 8:24 pm
Yesterday we noted that Ulf Hjertstr?m, the sexagenarian Swede who survived a 67-day kidnapping ordeal in Baghdad, reportedly was paying professional bounty hunters a handsome fee to track down his erstwhile captors. Expressen, a Swedish tabloid, picked up the story and got in touch with Hjertstr?m to get the lowdown.
Hjertstr?m, an oil broker whose career took him to Iraq 25 years ago, makes no bones about the decision to exact revenge on his abductors. ?I?ve lived [in Iraq] for a long time. This is how things are done there. It?s nothing new to me,? he says.
Hearty Hjertstr?m ?doesn?t want to go into detail? about the bounty hunters, but assures Expressen that they are ?the best money can buy.?
?They?re not twiddling their thumbs,? declares Hjertstr?m, revealing that he has ?received confirmation that two of [the kidnappers] have already been taken care of.? When asked to elaborate on the fate of the purportedly captured men, the Swede says he ?hasn?t inquired? but has his ?suspicions.?
Many in Sweden have expressed shock and dismay at Hjertstr?m?s eye-for-an-eye approach. But the plucky pensioner claims that revenge is not his primary motive. ?I just want the people of Baghdad to feel safe on the streets.?
Giuliana Sgrena could not be reached for comment.
- Billy McCormac
-
http://counterterror.typepad.com/th...t_radical_.html
Report: Radical Kuwaiti Imams Drowned Out in Pro-American Protests by Local Worshippers
From the Al-Siyasah newspaper (received June 6):
"The Imam of al-Jabiriyah preached against the Americans and the Worshippers shouted 'O' Allah, make America stronger!"
"The Al-Siyasah newspaper has received news that several mosques in Kuwait have begun to exhibit a new phenomenon manifested in the rejection by worshippers of extremist prayers expressed by some of the Imams during their Khutbah [friday prayer]. These prayers included invitations to fight the Americans and to become more hostile towards them. An example of this [phenomenon] was when Nabil al-Awadi, who is an Imam at one of the mosques in the southern region of Al-Surrah, began preaching against the Americans in his last Friday Khutbah. As a result, the people at prayer cut off his speech and demanded that he stop talking. Additionally, the worshippers at the mosque of Aisha Shabib in the Al-Jabiriyah neighborhood shouted, 'O' Allah, make Islam and America stronger' in response to what the Imam of that mosque had said during friday prayer about America and the current war [in Iraq]."
-
July 12, 2005
The Iraqi Wars
Our 15-year conflict with Iraq.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
Iraq is a blur now. Everyone from Norman Schwarzkopf and General Zinni to Tommy Franks and General Abezaid is mixed up in our memories. The public can't quite separate Baathists from jihadists, Shiite from Sunni, or one coalition from another. Mostly the confusion arises because we have compressed four separate wars of two decades into some vague continuum.
War I (January 17 to March 3, 1991)
The First Iraqi War ("The Gulf War," "Persian Gulf War," "Gulf War I," "The Four-Day War," or "Iraqi-Kuwaiti War") started over Saddam Hussein's August 2, 1990, invasion of Kuwait. His occupation precipitated the American-led coalition's efforts to reclaim Kuwait through land and air attacks. Saddam's complete capitulation was seen as satisfying the war's professed claim of restoring the sovereignty of Kuwait.
But despite retreating from Kuwait and suffering terrible damage to his armed forces, Saddam, like the Germans in 1918, claimed that his armies had been repelled while on the offensive. So he passed off a setback as a draw against the world's superpower ? and thus a win by virtue of his own survival against overwhelming odds.
In any case, we called off our forces before the destruction of the Republican Guard. We also refused to go to Baghdad; we let rebellious Shiites and Kurds be tragically butchered; and we failed to enforce all the surrender agreements. Apparently the U.S. wished to bow to the U.N. mandates only to expel Saddam from Kuwait, or was worried about our Sunni partners who wanted a lid on Kurdish tribalism and Shiite fervor inside Iraq.
War I was a response to years of appeasement of Iraq, American mixed signals during the Iran-Iraq War, and clumsy diplomacy. All may have given Saddam the message that his invasion of Kuwait was outside the realm of American interest.
War II (March 1991 to March 2003)
A rather different 13-year Second Iraqi War followed. Despite its length, the nebulous effort was not a mere "cold war."
Indeed, there was far more direct engagement with our adversary than was true during our half-century conflict with the Soviet Union. For example, after the December 1998 "Desert Fox" campaign ? aimed at suspected WMD depots following Saddam's expulsion of the U.N. inspectors ? General Zinni speculated that perhaps thousands of Iraqi soldiers had been killed in a few hours.
So-called "no-fly zones" took away two-thirds of Iraq's airspace, requiring more than a third of a million allied air sorties. In many years, about every third day, allied aircraft fired missiles or conducted bomb attacks against Iraqi planes or batteries.
A U.N. trade embargo, coupled with the scandalous Oil-for-Food program, starved thousands of Iraqi civilians. Saddam, with foreign help, siphoned off cash and food for his own Baathist cronies.
Despite U.N. inspectors, bombs, cruise missiles, embargos, and boycotts, the second war, like the first, ended with Saddam still in power. He remained defiant, insisting that he had taken on the world and survived every conceivable coercive measure with his petrodollar income and rigid control over the country intact.
War II was a response to the failure to remove Saddam in War I.
War III (March 20 to April 9, 2003)
The Third Iraqi War ? variously known as "Gulf War II" or "The Three-Week War" ? was a conventional conflict. It began with the bombing of Baghdad and ended with the toppling of Saddam's statue. Its purpose, unlike Wars I and II, was the removal of Saddam and his Baathist regime, with replacement by a consensual government.
Controversy surrounds this third war's aims and causes, given the administration's fixation with weapons of mass destruction. Yet the U.S. Senate in October 2002 wisely listed 23 writs for regime change, ranging from fears of WMD, past violations of armistice and U.N. agreements, genocide, attacks on neighboring countries, and attempts to assassinate a former president of the United States.
War III was a response to the failure to remove Saddam in War II.
War IV. (April 2003 to present)
The Fourth Iraqi War ("The Insurrection," "The Occupation") began immediately after the end of the conventional fighting and continues today. It was framed by the fact that the United States would not simply leave after toppling Saddam yet had never really gone into the Sunni Triangle in force during the three-week victory. War IV was waged by a loose alliance of Wahhabi fundamentalists, foreign jihadists, and former Baathists against the American efforts to fashion an indigenous Iraqi democratic government.
So far this fourth war has taken more American lives (roughly 1750 combat dead) than Wars I-III combined, though probably not as many Iraqis have been killed as the tens of thousands lost in the first three conflicts. The aim of the terrorists was either the expulsion of the American occupying forces, the restoration of Saddam Hussein's Baathists, the creation of a Sunni Islamic theocracy, or at least a return to the subjugation of the Kurdish-Shiite majority.
In response, the United States is conducting a multifaceted war to isolate the terrorists in Iraq: empower the Kurds and Shiites; warn Iraqi Sunnis that theirs is a choice between legitimate politics and endless violence and defeat; and promote democracy from the Gulf to Egypt and Lebanon in order to dry up the fonts of al Qaeda that flow into Iraq.
War IV was an effort to ensure there would not be another Saddam and thus more wars like I-III.
Lessons
What lessons can we learn, other than that Iraq is a Westerner's nightmare ? in the heart of the ancient caliphate, next door to lunocracies in Syria and Iran, with petrodollars to spare for sophisticated weaponry, and with a history of dictatorship as the only alternative to tribal and religious bloodletting?
For all the pundits' talk of "clearly defined objectives" and "exit strategies," in the first three wars we articulated concrete methods and achieved limited aims. Saddam got out of Kuwait (I); Saddam was not able subsequently to attack his neighbors (II); and Saddam was removed (III).
The fourth war is not over, so we are not sure of the eventual outcome of its most ambitious goal, the establishment of democracy. Still, contrary to popular opinion, there have always been clear-cut intentions in these wars, which have been spelled out in advance and until now have been met.
Indeed, the problem has not been meeting the objective, but the objective itself. War I was unfortunately limited to the restoration of Kuwait. Yet the real crux was Saddam's regime itself, which invaded Kuwait, attacked Israel and Saudi Arabia, and threatened to restart banned weapons programs.
War II, in some ways the longest and most costly of the four conflicts in terms of human misery on the ground, likewise failed to address the real issue. The nature of Saddam's despotism ? not just broken agreements, mockery of the U.N., or subsequent plots ? was the source of the problem.
War III sought to remedy the failings of Wars I and II, and did so in the sense of removing Saddam and his Baathist regime. But it too was na?ve in thinking Saddam's rule was limited to a few Baathist henchmen rather than being composed of a large fascist infrastructure ? with alliances of convenience with jihadist terrorists ? that suffered comparatively little during the three weeks of fighting other than worry over a loss of its pride.
If we are victorious in War IV, Iraq will be analogous to a Germany, Japan, or Panama and pose no further problem. If we fail, it will be similar to Vietnam or Lebanon. In our defeat we will give up, go home, and probably not return.
There were always problems with public support that limited American options in these four wars and thus explained why we didn't go to Baghdad, turned to a cold war, and are now facing insurgents from Syria and Iran after a relatively quick conventional victory that mostly bypassed the Sunni Triangle.
During War I, the U.S. Senate almost voted to cut off funding while troops were stationed on the front lines. In the latter stages of War II, President Clinton's critics alleged its hot phases were a planned distraction from his impeachment, while our allies undermined sanctions and embargoes, leaving the U.S. and Britain alone to enforce the no-fly zones. The country was torn apart over the March 2003 start of War III, and has been even more divided over War IV. Critics either said we were na?ve in our half-hearted efforts or too bloodthirsty in unleashing violence against the blameless "Iraqi people."
War IV is now unpopular, but that is understandable because it is the costliest in terms of American lives ? and the only one of the four that was not just punitive and thus not fought in a solely conventional manner.
Creating consensual government has proven much harder than freeing Kuwait, taking over Saddam's skies, and toppling his regime ? especially since all of those previous efforts did not really defeat and humble the fascists, and were confined only to our forte of conventional fighting.
In sum, after 15 years we are nearing a showdown with Iraq, since we finally chose to confront the real problem of a fascist autocracy ? the result of Soviet-style Baathism imposed on a tribal society ? recycling petrodollars to wage modern war at the heart of the world's oil reserves and international terrorism.
Just as there was no third war with Germany or second war with Vietnam, there will probably be no fifth war with Iraq. We have finally learned our lesson: Victory or defeat and a change of circumstances ? not breathing spells with dictators, U.N. resolutions, realpolitik truces, no-fly zones, or cruise missiles ? finally end most wars.
Either the conditions that start a war ? in the modern era usually some sort of autocracy that creates mythical grievances and is appeased in its desire for cheap victory ? are resolved or they are not. Iraq War IV will prove that there will be no more Saddams ? or that there will be plenty of them and the United States can't do much about it.
But at least this final war in its ambitious goal to end the cycle is honest, and so will be decisive in the way the other three were not. If War IV is now the costliest for the U.S. and the most controversial of the series, it is because it is for all the marbles and offers a lasting and humane solution ? and every enemy of the United States in the Middle East seems to grasp that far better than we do.
?2005 Victor Davis Hanson
-
Comments?
========================
The Mail Memo: A Glimpse into U.S. Strategic Thinking
By George Friedman
The Mail on Sunday, a British newspaper, recently published a memo that
editors claimed had been leaked by a British official. The document, titled
"Options for future UK force posture in Iraq" is dated 9 July 2005 and is
marked "Secret-UK Eyes Only." The document was a working paper prepared for
the Cabinet. What makes the memo extraordinarily important is that it
contains a discussion of a substantial drawdown of British and American
troops in Iraq, beginning in early 2006. Given the July 7 bombings in
London, the memo has not attracted as much notice as normally would be
expected. That is unfortunate because, if genuine, it provides a glimpse
into U.S. strategic thinking and indicates a break point in the war.
It is always difficult to know whether documents such as this are genuine.
In Britain, a steady trickle of classified documents has been leaked to the
press during the past month, all of which appear to have been validated as
authentic. That means that the idea of a classified document on this subject
being leaked to the press is far from unprecedented. There has been ample
time for Prime Minister Tony Blair or his government to deny the story, but
they haven't. Finally, the document coheres with our analysis of the current
situation on the ground in Iraq and the thinking in Washington. It makes
sense. That's certainly the most dangerous way to validate a document;
nevertheless, with the other indicators, we are comfortable with its
authenticity.
The document printed by the Mail contains the following lines:
a.. Emerging US plans assume that 14 out of 18 provinces could be handed
over to Iraqi control by early 2006, allowing a reduction in overall MNF-I
from 176,000 down to 66,000.
b.. There is, however, a debate between the Pentagon/Centcom who favour a
relatively bold reduction in force numbers, and MNF-I whose approach is more
cautious.
c.. The next MNF-I review of campaign progress due in late June may help
clarify thinking and provide an agreed framework for the way ahead.
According to this document, the strategic view of the United States is that
the insurrection in Iraq either never existed or has been brought under
control in most of the country. Therefore, security in these areas can be
turned over to Iraqis -- and, in some cases, already has been turned over.
The memo states that the insurrection has not been brought under control in
four provinces -- obviously, the hard-core Sunni provinces in central Iraq.
Given this strategic reality, the MNF-I (Multinational Force-Iraq) could be
reduced from 176,000 to 66,000. The implication here is that the reductions
would begin in early 2006 and proceed through the year.
The memo also says there is a debate going on between the Pentagon and
Central Command on the one side, and the command in Iraq on the other. The
Iraq command feels that withdrawal would be premature. They logically want
more boots on the ground for a longer period of time, because they are
responsible for the reality in Iraq. The Pentagon, CENTCOM and, by
implication, the White House, see, from a distance, a more hopeful
situation. Therefore, a debate has broken out between the most senior
command and the theater command. The report appears to have been written in
the spring, as it speaks of a review by MNF-I in June. Certainly, no
fundamental shift in the reality has taken place since then, and it would be
reasonable to assume that the same intentions hold -- and that the command
in Iraq still has serious reservations but that the president and secretary
of defense probably have a good chance of prevailing.
It has been our view that the White House is not kidding when officials say
they are optimistic about the situation in Iraq. What they see is a
containment of the insurgency to a relatively small area of Iraq. They also
see the guerrillas as split by inducements to the Sunni leadership to join
the political process. The White House does not believe it has the situation
under control in the four provinces, and the memo is quite frank in saying
that Iraqi forces will not be able to take over security there.
Nevertheless, the total number of troops needed to attempt to control the
insurrection in those provinces is a small subset of the total number of
forces deployed right now.
Behind this optimistic forecast, which appears reasonable to us, there lurks
a more gloomy reality. The United States simply doesn't have the troops to
maintain this level of commitment. The United States is rotating divisions
in on a one-year-on, one-year-off basis. The ranks of the National Guard and
reserves -- which, by the way, make up an increasingly large proportion of
the active force -- are particularly thin, as commitments run out and older
men and women with families choose not to re-enlist. Another couple of years
of this, and the ranks of the regular forces would start emptying out.
Even more serious, the United States does not have the ability to deal with
other crises. Within the geopolitical system, Washington reacts to crises.
But should another theater of operations open up, the country would not have
forces needed to deploy. Washington has acknowledged this by dropping the
two-war doctrine, which argues that the United States should be able to
fight two Iraq-size wars simultaneously. That doctrine has been fiction for
a long time, but this is more than just a Pentagon debate over the obvious.
No one would have imagined in the summer of 2001 that U.S. forces would be
fighting a war in Afghanistan, and be deployed in Tajikistan or Uzbekistan.
The United States fights not only with the army it has, but in the theaters
that geopolitics gives it.
The fact is that the United States bit off more than it could chew
militarily in Iraq. The administration did not anticipate the length and
size of the deployment and took no steps to expand the force. That means
that at the current level of commitment, the United States would be wide
open elsewhere if a major war were to break out. The problem is not only
troops -- although that isn't a trivial problem. The problem is the
logistical support system, which has been strained to the limits supporting
forces in Iraq. Many of the anecdotal failures, such as the lack of armoring
for Hummers, happen in all wars. But the frequency of the problems and the
length of time it took to fix them point out the fact that the pipe from the
factory to the battlefield in Iraq was not sufficiently robust. Supporting
two widely separated, large-scale operations would have been beyond U.S.
ability.
That fact is of overriding concern to the United States. U.S. grand strategy
assumes that the United States is capable of projecting force into Eurasia,
as a deterrent to regional hegemons. At this point, that capability simply
doesn't exist. The United States can sustain operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and maybe squeeze out a few brigades for operations
elsewhere -- but that's all she wrote.
That puts the United States in the most dangerous position it has been in
since before World War II. During Korea and Vietnam, the United States was
able to deploy a substantial force in Europe as well as capabilities in the
continental United States. Iraq, a smaller war than Vietnam, has, along with
Afghanistan, essentially absorbed U.S. force projection capability. It
cannot deploy a multi-divisional force elsewhere should it be needed. Should
the unexpected happen in Asia or Europe, the United States would lack
military and therefore diplomatic options.
The reason for this is not solely the Bush administration. The forces
created during the 1990s were predicated on assumptions that proved not to
be true. It was assumed that operations other than war, or peacekeeping
operations, would be the dominant type of action. Multi-divisional,
multi-theater operations were not anticipated. The force was shaped to
reflect this belief.
The manner in which Bush chose to fight the war against the jihadists
involved the invasion of Iraq using a conventional, multi-divisional thrust.
The Bush administration took a calculated risk that this concentration of
force could deal with the Iraq situation before another theater opened up.
So far, the administration has been lucky. Despite having miscalculated the
length of time of the war, no other theater except Afghanistan has become
active enough to require forces to deploy.
But a lucky gambler should not stay at the table indefinitely. What the Mail
memo is saying is that the administration is going to take some chips off
the table in 2006 -- more than 100,000 chips. The importance of the drawdown
is that it will allow the force some rest. But it still assumes that there
will be no threats in Eurasia that the United States would have to respond
to until 2007 at the earliest, and ideally not before 2008. That may be
true, but given the history of the second half of the twentieth century, it
is pushing the odds.
The strategic analysis about Iraq may well be sound. However, the MNF-I is
fighting the drawdowns because it knows how fragile the political situation
behind this analysis is. The debate will be framed in terms of the
conditions in Iraq. But that is not, in our view, the primary driver behind
plans for withdrawal. The driver is this: The United States simply cannot
sustain the level of commitment it has made in Iraq without stripping itself
of force-projection capabilities.
Given the fact that it is now obvious that the Bush administration is not
going to undertake a substantial military buildup, it really has only two
choices: Maintain its current posture and hope for the best, or draw down
the forces in Iraq and hope for the best. The Iraq command, viewing Iraq,
has chosen the first course. The Pentagon, looking at the world, is looking
at the second. There are dangers inherent in both, but at this point, Iraq
is becoming the lesser threat.
-
The Web: Silencing jihadi Web sites
By Gene J. Koprowski
Published 8/3/2005 7:40 AM
CHICAGO, Aug. 3 (UPI) -- The online communications channel between al-Qaida's shadowy leaders and its terrorist operatives has been severely disrupted in recent weeks -- since the July 7, 2005, jihadi attacks on London -- apparently by British intelligence.
Though the Internet is a recent and universal resource, legal and military experts told UPI's The Web there is ample precedent for a government, in time of war, to attempt to deny the enemy the ability to communicate.
Recent reports in the foreign press, including the Sunday Times of London, indicate a number of jihadi sites, such as mojihedun.com in Pakistan -- which apparently contained detailed plans for terrorists on how to strike a European city and "tens" of other sites and provided information on making weapons, including biologicals -- have been stealthily shuttered.
Intelligence agents are thought to be working with Internet service providers to disable the inflammatory Web sites, experts said.
"There is technology that allows you to 'spider' Web sites for content -- that is a tool being used by ISPs," said Chris Boring, vice president of marketing at Aplus.Net, a Web-hosting and content development firm in San Diego. "It is similar to a Google search. You use it to red-flag content. Since the content sometimes changes continuously, it is a daunting task to monitor these sites."
Aplus.Net and other service providers have been working with law enforcement and other government agencies to track thousands of sites. Whenever terrorist or criminal content is located, the government is alerted. If the content is deemed risky, the online link can be quickly disabled by an ISP.
Every Web-site producer that posts content on the Internet via a commercial Internet Service Provider signs an agreement to abide by the terms of service of the ISP. Most of these contracts contain provisions that indicate the posting of criminal or terrorist content is prohibited, so removing the content is well within the contractual rights of the ISPs.
"They have agreed not to post offensive content," said Boring.
The pursuit of these sites also is well within the law for the government.
"I think the British actions against the terrorist Web sites are entirely legitimate," said Dave Kopel, an associate policy analyst at the Cato Institute, the think tank in Washington, D.C.
During the American Civil War in the 1860s, President Abraham Lincoln ordered that newspapers that sympathized with the rebel cause be shut down.
"Controversial as such measures against domestic dissent may rightly be in a constitutional democracy, however, they are not the yardstick by which acts taken to silence an enemy's voice should be measured in wartime," said Joseph A. Morris, partner in the law firm of Morris & De La Rosa, with offices in London and Chicago. "Although the fanatic Islamist jihadists of the 21st Century generally are not nation states or government belligerents in the traditional understanding of international law, they are belligerents nonetheless, waging war on peoples who have legally recognized rights of self-defense. The right of self-defense unquestionably extends to interdiction of the enemy's channels of public and clandestine communication."
Morris also served as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, and is a former director of the U.S. Department of Justice's office of liaison services, in charge of international affairs for the attorney general.
"Whether al-Qaida Web sites are being used to stir up terror's supporters, demoralize its enemies, or give instructions to its 'soldiers,' the allies have every right to shut them down," he added.
The Web sites might expect some free speech protection, were they not thought to be part of a coordinated campaign of terror, experts said. The same could be said of U.S. Internet publishers.
"To the extent that a U.S. publisher intended to promote actual terrorism, he could be criminally prosecuted," Kopel said.
At present, ISPs and law enforcement and intelligence agents are mostly reacting to terrorist content found online. Though technologies exist to scan for inflammatory materials, many actions are initiated "usually when someone calls to complain," Boring said. His firm is working on a new technology, in the conceptual stage, which could more efficiently scan Web sites for terror content, and place the government in a "proactive, rather than reactive mode" in fighting online terror, he said.
--
Gene Koprowski is a 2005 Lilly Endowment Award Winner for his columns for United Press International. He covers networking and telecommunications for UPI Science News. E-mail: sciencemail@upi.com
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20050803-060825-3448r
-
Thursday, August 11, 2005
The Unstoppable IED
Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are more than physical objects, they are symbols of asymmetrical warfare, along with the suicide bomb and the sniper. They are exemplars of 'insoluble' threats against which resistance is supposedly futile and to which surrender is the only viable response. In times past, the submarine and bombing aircraft occupied the same psychological space. In the late 19th century, Alfred Thayer Mahan theorized that sea control, exercised through battlefleets, would be the arbiters of maritime power. But rival theorists believed weaker nations using motor torpedo boats and above all, the submarine, could neutralize battlefleets. The way to checkmate global superpower Britain, so the theory went, was through asymmetrical naval warfare.
In the early days of World War 1, three British armored cruisers HMS Aboukir, HMS Hogue and HMS Cressy were patrolling the North Sea making no attempt to zigzag. The German U-9 fired a single torpedo into the Aboukir which promptly sank. HMS Hogue gallantly raced up to rescue survivors, believing the Aboukir was mined and came right into the U-9's sights. She was sunk in turn. The HMS Cressy, believing both were mined, sped like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery into another one of the U-9s torpedoes. In under an hour the asymmetrical weapon had killed 1,459 British sailors and sunk three cruisers.
In the 1930s the bomber airplane took the place of the U-boat as the unstoppable weapon in the public's imagination. Fired by the concepts of Italian airpower theorist Giulio Douhet, many interwar policymakers believed that bomber aircraft alone could bring a nation to its knees. The destructive capacity ascribed to the biplane bombers of the day approached that later attributed to nuclear weapons during the Cold War and so terrified politicians that it fueled the policy of appeasement. According to Wikipedia:
The calculations which were performed on the number of dead to the weight of bombs dropped would have a profound effect on the attitudes of the British authorities and population in the interwar years, because as bombers became larger it was fully expected that deaths from aerial bombardment would approach those anticipated in the Cold War from the use of nuclear weapons. The fear of aerial attack on such a scale was one of the fundamental driving forces of British appeasement in the 1930s.
Stanley Baldwin told the House of Commons in words calculated to convey the futility of war that "the bomber will always get through. The only defense is in offense, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves." From there, as with those who ascribe the same irresistibility to the suicide bomber, it was natural to turn to appeasement. And that was what Baldwin did. Yet in an ironic twist of history, it was not the 'weaker' nations which successfully turned the submarine and the bombing airplane into decisive weapons but their intended victims. The USN presided over the only ultimately triumphant submarine blockade in history against Japan, while the Army Air Corps fielded the Enola Gay over Hiroshima. One possible reason for this reversal of fortunes is that neither the submarine nor the bombing aircraft existed in a state of ultimate perfection, invincible per se. Rather, they were effective relative to the countermeasures that could be deployed against them. They were one thread of an arms race spiral and their advocates found these weapons neutralized and ultimately turned against them by the very nations they sought to destroy.
IEDs have grown from relatively weak and simple devices into sophisticated demolitions weighing several hundred pounds in response to American countermeasures which began with uparmoring vehicles to monitoring patrol routes for disturbances in the roadway. As American countermeasures have improved, so has the IED, but not to the same degree. Brig. Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Task Force said that while the incident rate of IED attacks has gone up, the probability of death per attack has declined from 50% in 2003 to about 18% in early 2005. The Iraqi insurgency may be detonating more IEDs than ever but their yield per attack is not what it used to be. USA Today reported: "While IED attacks have increased, U.S. casualties from them have gone down. From April 2004 to April 2005, task force spokesman Dick Bridges said, the number of casualties from IED attacks had decreased 45%."
To regain effectiveness, the enemy has turned bigger explosives and better triggering devices and aimed them at more lucrative targets. David Cloud of the New York Times describes what this means.
The explosion that killed 14 Marines in Haditha, Iraq, on Wednesday was powerful enough to flip the 25-ton amphibious assault vehicle they were riding in, in keeping with an increasingly deadly trend, American military officers said. ... on July 23 ... a huge bomb buried on a road southwest of Baghdad Airport detonated an hour before dark underneath a Humvee carrying four American soldiers. The explosive device was constructed from a bomb weighing 500 pounds or more that was meant to be dropped from an aircraft, according to military explosives experts, and was probably Russian in origin. The blast left a crater 6 feet deep and nearly 17 feet wide. All that remained of the armored vehicle afterward was the twisted wreckage of the front end, a photograph taken by American officers at the scene showed. The four soldiers were killed.
In response, USA Today reports the deployment of more (and presumably better) electronic jammers and new directed energy weapons.
The Pentagon now has about 4,200 portable electronic jamming devices in Iraq and more are on the way, Bridges said. The military is about to test a new device at its Yuma, Ariz., proving ground that is capable of exploding bombs by sending an electrical charge through the ground. That device, called a Joint Improvised Explosive Device Neutralizer (JIN), could be deployed to Iraq sometime this year if tests prove successful, Bridges said.
Many bomb jammers work by preventing the triggerman from sending his detonation signal to the explosive device. Other equipment relies on detecting the electronic components of bombs, which echo a signal from a sniffer. The JIN neutralizer, now being test fielded to Iraq is an interesting application of directed energy weaponry. It works by using lasers to create a momentary pathway through which an electrical charge can travel and sending a literal bolt of lightning along the channel. A link to a Fox News video report on the manufacturer's website shows a vehicle equipped with a strange-looking rod detonating hidden charges at varying distances, some out to quite a ways.
Just as the enemy has resorted to bigger bombs to defeat better armor, so too will they seek ways to defeat the new American countermeasures. Yet it seems clear that the IED, like the submarine and bombing airplane before it, is not some mystically invincible device, but simply a weapon like any other caught up in a technological race with countermeasures arrayed against it. One consequence of this development is that while the enemy may employ larger numbers of IEDs against Americans, the number of effective IEDs -- the bigger and better ones -- available to them may actually have declined. The penalty for raising weaponry to a higher standard is making existing stock somewhat obsolete.
Yet a more fundamental problem may be in store for the enemy. By engaging America in a technological arms race of sorts they are playing to its strengths. The relative decline in IED effectivity suggests the enemy, while improving, has not kept up. The move to bigger bombs may temporarily restore his lost combat power, but the advent of new American countermeasures plus increasing pressure on the bombmakers, means he must improve yet again. It is far from clear whether the insurgents can stay in the battle for innovation indefinitely. The logic of asymmetric warfare suggests the enemy will at some point abandon the direct technological weapons race and find a new paradigm of attack entirely. That is essentially what they did when they abandoned the Republican Guard tank formation in favor of the roadside bomb in the first place.
One way to achieve this (and they have been perfecting their skills by attacks against Iraqi civilians) is to switch to other targets. In this way, they can find employment for weapons and skills which are no longer effective against American combat forces. The other is to invent some other surpassingly vicious method of attack; to create the successor to the IED. Whatever that new paradigm turns out to be, it will be probably be regarded as an unanswerable weapon, like the biplane bombers of the 1930s.
http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2005/08/unstoppable-ied.html
-
A very long, very telling interview with a self-proffessed "British jihadist."
Issue 113 / August 2005
A British jihadist
Hassan Butt, a 25 year old from Manchester, helped recruit Muslims to fight in Afghanistan. Like most of the London bombers, he is a British Pakistani who journeyed from rootlessness to radical Islam
Aatish Taseer
Aatish Taseer is a former "Time" reporter. He is now a freelance journalist
It is not hard to imagine what the Leeds suburb of Beeston was like before it became known that three of London's tube bombers worked or lived there. For someone like me? a Punjabi with parents from each side of the India/Pakistan border?the streets of Beeston reveal a pre-partition mixture of Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs. Despite the commotion caused by half the world's media, men in shalwar kurta (traditional dress from the subcontinent) stand around on street corners chatting as if in a bazaar in Lahore. They oppose Britain's involvement in the Iraq war, they "hate" America, they might even think that the west has united in a fight against Muslims, but these are not the faces of extremism. Their involvement in 7/7 is a generational one: they have raised the people who are the genus of Islamic extremism in this country?the second-generation British Pakistanis.
One appears next to his father on the street corner. Unlike his father, there is nothing about his appearance that indicates he is a Punjabi Muslim. He is wearing long Arab robes and keeps a beard cut to Islamic specifications. I ask him why he is dressed the way he is. "It's my traditional dress," he says in English. "Isn't your father in traditional dress?" I ask. "Yes, but this is Islamic dress," he clarifies. His father looks embarrassed. A man standing next to me jokes of how he complained to his neighbour that his son never did any work, and the neighbour said, "You think that's bad, mine's grown a beard and become a bloody maulvi [priest]."
As a half-Indian, half-Pakistani with a strong connection to this country, I have observed the gulf between what it means to be British Pakistani and British Indian. To be Indian is to come from a safe, ancient country and, more recently, from an emerging power. In contrast, to be Pakistani is to begin with a depleted idea of nationhood. In the 55 years that Pakistan has been a country, it has been a dangerous, violent place, defined by hatred of the other?India.
For young British Muslims, if Pakistan was not the place to look for an identity, being second-generation British was still less inspiring. While their parents were pioneers, leaving Pakistan in search of economic opportunities, enduring the initial challenges of a strange land, the second generation's experience has been one of drudgery and confusion. Mohammad, who owns a convenience store on Stratford Street in Beeston and who knew all the local bombers, says, "They were born and raised here, we did the work? and these kids grew up and they haven't had a day's worry. They're bored, they don't do any work, they have no sense of honour or belonging."
Britishness is the most nominal aspect of identity to many young British Pakistanis. The thinking in Britain's political class has at last begun to move on this front, but when our tube bombers were growing up, any notion that an idea of Britishness should be imposed on minorities was seen as offensive. Britons themselves were having a hard time believing in Britishness. If you denigrate your own culture you face the risk of your newer arrivals looking for one elsewhere. So far afield in this case, that for many second-generation British Pakistanis, the desert culture of the Arabs held more appeal than either British or subcontinental culture. Three times removed from a durable sense of identity, the energised extra-national worldview of radical Islam became one available identity for second-generation Pakistanis. The few who took it did so with the convert's zeal: plus Arabe que les Arabes.
The older generation of Beeston is mystified as to where some of their children found this identity. By all accounts it was not in the mosque. I met Maulana Munir of the Stratford Street mosque, which, according to some newspapers, was attended by some of the London bombers. Munir, a small, soft-spoken man, said he had never known them. "This younger generation," he says, "are owners of their own will, they come when they like, they don't when they don't like. The mosque is not responsible for these people." Munir, like the others of the older generation, is a man cut off from the youth movements around him. He has not faced their loss of identity and meaning.
Hassan Butt, the young British Pakistani who was a spokesman for the extremist group al-Muhajiroun, and active in recruiting people to fight against the coalition forces in Afghanistan, embodies this journey from frustration and rootlessness to radical Islam. The world he describes before he was first approached, aged 17, by members of the Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), was a disordered one. When I interviewed him last year, he described HT as showing him an Islam that could bring order to his life. Accepting Islam meant the creation of a social equilibrium that had been absent before. Islam was playing the role it had in 7th-century Arabia of bringing law and structure to decaying communities.
Butt parted ways with al-Muhajiroun (itself a breakaway from HT) and its founder Omar Sheikh Bakri because they supported the Islamic idea of a "covenant of security," by which Muslims in Britain are forbidden from any type of military action in Britain. Butt believed that military action against Britain would be unwise for the practical reason that it would jeopardise the protection "Londonistan" was offering radical Muslims, but he could not tolerate the position that such action was un-Islamic.
I was reminded of Butt's cold hatred for Britain when a colleague of mine said that Beeston's younger generation were saying to her, a week after the London bombs, "Well what's the difference between al Qaeda and MI5 anyway?" and "It's sad people died, but what about the ones who died in Iraq?"
There it is again, the extra-national sentiment, in which no nation matters save the Islamic nation and its Arab culture. Butt spoke passionately about Arabia and wants to go there. "I believe the Arabic language will give me that key to have access to those things I don't have access to at the moment." Again, that yearning for Islam to fill the gaps in his own identity.
And yet, on the one occasion he came close to having a national identity, he seemed to love it. From the way he described his two years in Lahore, it sounded like the only place he ever felt a sense of belonging. "I've never had a better two years in my life. I see Pakistan as the only country having the potential to lead the Muslim world out of the disarray it is in."
Butt is an ardent supporter of "martyrdom actions." Whether he will achieve the martyrdom he desires remains to be seen. But during our interview, he did say something very interesting in the light of the London bombs. "If someone were to attack Britain, they would be a completely and utterly loose cannon. It would be someone who wasn't involved in the network." What worried me when I went to Beeston and met some of its youth, many as full of vitriol as Butt, was that maybe the London bombings had been such a "loose cannon" operation. The bombers certainly had outside support, but there seemed to be a frighteningly independent quality about the operation, a cottage-industry terrorism growing in Hamara youth centres.
Radical Islam draws recruits from many walks of life, but in Britain its agents are of a type?second-generation British Pakistanis. Somehow they have been worst hit by the populations shifts of the last 50 years and the alienation that came with them. A few have rallied under a banner which brings an intense sense of grievance. And when they are done chasing absurd dreams of caliphates, there is always martyrdom. "For me there's nothing bigger," said Butt. I met many in Beeston with his makings: small, rootless lives, seeking bigger things.
Butt briefly became a minor celebrity of British Muslim extremism when he returned from his recruitment activities in Lahore in December 2002. He was arrested, had his passport revoked, and remains under surveillance. This interview took place last year in his home town, Manchester. Butt is short but powerfully built and was wearing robes. He has an Islamic beard and a pleasant, friendly face. He collected me at the station and we went to Sanam, a restaurant in Manchester's curry mile which does not serve alcohol. Everyone there knew him and greeted him like a celebrity.
Butt: I used to be part of al-Muhajiroun, but we parted because of differences? They have this idea?derived from the Koran, a valid Islamic opinion but not one I believe is applicable to British citizens?of a ?covenant of security.? This means Muslims in Britain are forbidden from any military action in Britain. Now, I am not in favour of military action in Britain, but if somebody did do it who was British, I would not have any trouble with that either. Islamically, it would be my duty to support and praise their action. It wouldn?t necessarily be the wisest thing to do, but it wouldn't be un-Islamic, as al-Muhajiroun said.
This, I believe, is a compromise when it comes to representing certain key concepts of Islam. I've always had a policy that if you're going to come to the media, either speak the truth or don't speak at all. Don't come to the media if the heat is too hot for you.
Taseer: Where do you think the covenant of security idea comes from? I spoke to an imam who said that you cannot strike against your host country. If you want to support Iraqis, go there and support them.
Butt: Most imams, as you know, have come here not as British citizens. There is a difference between a citizen who is born in a country and someone who is here on a visa or a permit. Islamically, I agree that someone who runs from the middle east?where people like me are persecuted?and says, ?Britain, I want you to protect me? has entered a covenant of security. They say, ?Look, protect my life and as a result I won't do any harm to you.? That I agree with 100 per cent, but most of our people, especially the youth, are British citizens. They owe nothing to the government. They did not ask to be born here; neither did they ask to be protected by Britain.
Taseer: So they've entered no covenant?
Butt: They have no covenant. As far as I'm concerned, the Islamic hukum (order) that I follow, says that a person has no covenant whatsoever with the country in which they were born.
Taseer: Do they have an allegiance to the country?
Butt: No, none whatsoever. Even the person who has a covenant has no allegiance, he just agrees not to threaten the life, honour, wealth, property, mind, and so on, of the citizens around him.
Taseer: Your argument is based on these people being ?British,? so don't they necessarily have some loyalty to Britain?
Butt: No, that's what I'm saying. They have no loyalty whatsoever; they have no allegiance to the government.
Taseer: Perhaps not the government, but to the country?
Butt: To the country, no.
Taseer: Do you feel some?
Butt: I feel absolutely nothing for this country. I have no problem with the British people? but if someone attacks them, I have no problem with that either.
Taseer: Who do you have allegiance to?
Butt: My allegiance is to Allah, his Shari?a, his way of life. Whatever he dictates as good is good, whatever as bad is bad.
Taseer: Has it always been this way for you?
Butt: Always? No. I grew up in a very open-minded family; there are only four of us. My parents never made us pray, never sent us to the mosque, which was very different from your average Pakistani family who would make sure that the child learned something. I learned absolutely nothing.
Taseer: So how did you discover Islam, or rediscover it?
Butt: Well, being Kashmiri, I'm hot-headed by nature, and so are my brothers. Even before I was a practising Muslim, I was very hot-headed. That hot-headedness was leading us down a path of destruction. A lot of the people I grew up among were on drugs, were involved in crime, prostitution, at very young ages. I remember when I came across the first Muslim who talked to me about Islam in a language I understood. He pointed out that I had a lot of anger and frustration that I should direct in a more productive manner. It was from there that I got discussing Islam seriously?even though we were hotheads, me and my brothers always had brains, we weren't thugs. We were still excelling in our studies and getting top grades in our exams.
Taseer: How old were you when you changed?
Butt: I was 17 when I really started practising.
Taseer: Was it through a mosque?
Butt: No. It was through individuals whom I met, who started speaking a language that I understood, who went beyond just the prayer. I understand the huge importance of that.
Taseer: How did they approach you?
Butt: My elder brother was in college, I was still at secondary school. The college being a bit more open to Islamic activities than high school, we met some members of Hizb ut-Tahrir inside a masjid (mosque) and got talking. At that time the masjid was full anyway, since it was Ramadan. They showed me that beyond the recitation of the Koran, the praying, the fasting, the hajj?that Islam is a complete system, a complete way of life, and how that applied to us and our place in society.
Taseer: What is the philosophy of Hizb ut-Tahrir?
Butt: The idea is that Muslims in Britain need to keep to their Islamic identity and work for the re-establishment of an Islamic caliphate, or khalifah as they would say, based upon the first four caliphates of Islam.
Taseer: Where?
Butt: In the Muslim countries. That is one of the differences I had with them.
Taseer: You would like to see the caliphate here too?
Butt: Absolutely. How could we restrict something that initially started in Medina but then spread through the entire Muslim world?
Taseer: Would everyone have to be a Muslim, or would it work within our existing society?
Butt: No, it?s a structure of law and order?
Taseer: A central authority?
Butt: A central Islamic authority. Whether the people are Muslim or not is irrelevant. But even orientalist authors like Gilles Keppel agree that Islam was so powerful that it was the only way of life that both the conquered and the conqueror embraced. When the Mongols attacked Islam, they became Muslims; the same happened with the Turks. Even the people Islam conquered, they themselves embraced the way of life. People say it was forced by the sword, but if so, when the sword was removed, why did these people not revert back? Simply because it was never actually forced upon them. The inherent beauty of Islam made people want to embrace it.
Taseer: There are places it didn't happen, like India.
Butt: For me, the subcontinent was a tragedy; it never had the Islam that was introduced in Spain, for example, or north Africa. Very early on, the Mughals took power and India distanced itself from central Islam. The Arab Muslims never concentrated on these people enough, which is why the majority of Muslims there never embraced it.
Taseer: You said that you were once hot-headed; are you calmer today?
Butt: I find myself just as emotional as I was then, but more able to express that emotion in an Islamic manner. I would hate to be an emotionless person. You hear this a lot in the Muslim world today, from certain intellectuals: ?Don't be emotional about it, think rationally, think logically.? I guess it's an imperial complex from being under British rule for so long. British people are seen as being very cool-headed, calm and collected, but if your sister has been raped, your mother tortured and your father is being brutalised, how could you stay without emotion? Having no emotion is like being a brick. Now I can channel my emotion in an Islamic way rather than an un-Islamic way.
Taseer: Tell me a bit about your daily life. Do you read books and see movies?
Butt: No, no, no. (He laughs)
Taseer: How do you pass the day?
Butt: Daily routine would be getting up to pray the fajr without failure, staying awake for as long as I can, for at least an hour, an hour and a half, reciting the Koran, purely in Arabic?
Taseer: Is your Arabic good?
Butt: My Arabic, unfortunately, is not the best and I guess I have my parents to blame for that. But I do plan, once they give me back my passport, to go to an Arab country. I think it's the key to everything.
Taseer: Do you work?
Butt: I don't want to go into specifics. I do have business partners, but they don't like me coming out publicly and saying that they're affiliated with me. I do various different trading things. I don't have a normal nine-to-five type of job. Whenever I have applied for a job in the past, they have found out who I am and the views I hold, and as a result they don?t want me. But wherever I go, I will always be involved in Islamic work.
Taseer: At work?
Butt: Even at work. I?m always trying to help my colleagues, as Muslims, to have a more Islamic way of life.
Taseer: How would you describe yourself as a Muslim, given that there are so many labels bring thrown about??moderate,? ?extremist? and so on?
Butt: I would agree to being called a radical and one day I may even be called a terrorist, if Allah permits me. That is something it would be an honour to be called.
Taseer: Surely, even in an Islamic context, that can't be a positive label?
Butt: There is a speech by the Prophet in which he says: Allah gave me five things. One of them was the power to strike fear, to strike terror into the heart of the enemy from a mile's distance, and this was a reference to a battle he had commenced. The way the warriors had prepared themselves was so terrifying that the enemy didn?t even turn up to the battle. Besides that, in the Koran the word irhab is the root word for terror in Islam, and irhabiyun is the word for terrorist. Allah mentions the word in the Koran many times?the one who strikes terror into their hearts is an irhabiyun. If I could have that title Islamically then I would be more than happy to take it and be proud of it. But unfortunately, I haven't reached that level yet.
Taseer: Why not?
Butt: Because I am stuck in this country. It would be unwise to carry out military operations here.
Taseer: Why?
Butt: It would harm a lot of people. Britain is a very liberal country in comparison to America where Muslims don't have many rights. This is the type of country where you do have a lot more rights. Now with Afghanistan gone, the Muslims don't really have a place where they can come back to and regroup, have time to think and relax, without the authorities breathing down your neck.
Taseer: Was it difficult growing up here as a Muslim? Did you sense an anti-Islamic feeling?
Butt: The British establishment has always hated Islam. Look at the crusades. I watched that programme on the BBC, The Secret Policeman (an undercover report on trainee policemen) and one of the police officers had the honesty to admit what he felt: he said he would kill a Muslim if he could get away with it. What he said briefly is that he represents the majority, the only difference being that he has the courage to articulate it. And I do believe in my heart of hearts that the majority of British people?the majority being outside of London?would do that if they had the opportunity. Historically speaking, there has always been an enmity. I experienced it as I was growing up, going into majority white schools and having a problem trying to be a Muslim.
Taseer: Would you try to leave?
Butt: If they give me my passport, I will fly straight out of here. I won?t be here a day longer than I have to.
Taseer: And never come back?
Butt: And never come back unless absolutely necessary.
Taseer: Until they give you your passport back, you can?t leave?
Butt: There's no point in my leaving. I could leave if I wanted to, but it would be illegal and it wouldn't be very hard for them to start taking criminal proceedings against me.
Taseer: In the past you have demonstrated the failures of British security. Has it improved?
Butt: It's funny you asked me that. I have been reading a book?Jihad by Gilles Keppel?not for the sake of learning anything, but to see whether these people have understood us. In the past, and I'm talking 100, 200 years ago, the reason the British were successful in destroying Islamic government or the Ottoman caliph is that they actually lived among them and they made an effort to understand what they wanted to destroy. Now they're trying to understand something that is a theory. It's in my mind, it's in peoples' minds, but it's not a practical manifestation of the system that we aspire towards, so it's very hard for them to contain it. As a result of that, the security services have lost their ability to analyse how Muslims think?I mean real Muslims, the ones who are not ashamed to talk about their opinions and to express them in public. That is why they will lose this war on terror, because guys like Keppel don?t understand us.
Taseer: Do many Muslims in Britain feel like you do?
Butt: I would say the majority of Muslims in this country care about neither moderate nor radical Islam; they care about living their day-to-day life. They're happy with that. But of those people who are practising, the majority of them hold my views. The difference is that some people come out publicly and others keep quiet.
Taseer: What would you say the size of this latter group is?
Butt: Official figures say there are 3m Muslims here. [There are in fact 1.6m.] Out of that, I would say there are 750,000 who have an interest in Islam and about 80 per cent of those were over the moon about 9/11.
Taseer: Why?
Butt: The motivation is the pleasure of Allah, first and foremost. Allah says in the Koran ?We have sent you,??the Muslims??the best nation in the world, to mankind.? But there are conditions attached to that because you must enjoy goodness and forbid evil. As long as Muslims do this, they will see themselves as the best nation. And the reason why the majority of Muslims feel this inspiration is because we understand that Islam is by its nature beautiful; it is not a backward, medieval-type way of life as a lot of westerners believe. That's why, historically, even after Islam had left these areas as a political force, people still held on to its way of life. Even in the crusades you had Muslims and Jews fighting alongside one another in order avoid Roman rule because they said Islam was just towards them; Islam gave them rights. In the 15th century, during the Spanish inquisition, where did the Jews run to? To the Ottoman caliphate, Islam was an inspiration. All human rights are based on Islam, to ensure peace and security in the world.
Taseer: So given the situation in the world today, what is the duty of the Muslim?
Butt: Every Muslim must work for the Shari?a to be implemented as a political way of life. They can do that physically, by involving themselves in revolutionary coups, or through political means. As long as they don't attack or compromise other Muslims who are doing something different from them, I have no problem with any of these ways of establishing the Shari?a.
Taseer: Is it going to be possible for Muslims to live alongside non-Muslims?
Butt: We did it in the past, why can't we do it now?
Taseer: Would it have to be a Muslim polity?
Butt: Yes.
Taseer: Or could it be like England?
Butt: No, it couldn't be like England. The so-called liberal countries in the world, France for example, boast about liberty and their so-called revolution, but they are banning headscarves. Where have the rights of the Muslims gone there? Where are the rights of Muslims in Britain to be able to support their brothers who are being attacked in Kashmir? So many of the organisations proscribed by the British government are Kashmiri freedom fighters, or terrorists as you would call them.
Taseer: Why is it that an attack on Muslims in another part of the world affects British Muslims?
Butt: Because Allah is the way of love. Racism has infiltrated Christianity and Judaism. It is inbred in the people. Christians never see themselves as one brotherhood, but rather many dominions, whereas Muslims, no matter what colour they are, no matter what race they are, no matter what nationality they are, see themselves as one brotherhood. Ultimately this is what Islam teaches; that black, white, brown, red, green?if there were aliens in Mars?these people are brothers. Poor or rich, it has no effect on how we should treat one another. It doesn't mean that we should divide. And that is why when Muslims are being attacked, the majority of Muslims kick up a fuss, because these are their brothers and sisters. Unfortunately, there are Muslims today whose only reason to pick up a cause is for political support or their personal ambitions. Ultimately, if your brothers and sisters were being killed in any part of the world, you would make your utmost effort to try to help them.
Taseer: Where do you see Muslims under attack?
Butt: Everywhere. It's not limited to just one place. Wherever Muslims are they are under attack and until they start viewing themselves like that, they will always remain an inferior nation.
Taseer: And why are they under attack?
Butt: If they're not being attacked physically, they are being attacked mentally. They are being told that their way of life is backward, they?re being told that for women to cover themselves is against human rights, they're being told that to cut the hand of the thief, which Allah ordains in the Koran, is outdated. They're being told that their way of life is inferior and bad and should not be followed. And they're often stripped of their identity, as they were in Bosnia: Muslim by name only, no culture whatsoever. That is still a war as a far as I'm concerned.
Taseer: Why is there a "Muslim problem? today? Ten or 15 years ago there wasn't the sort of movement you see today. What changed?
Butt: I don't agree with you. Ten to 15 years ago the Muslims had just experienced their first victory of the 20th century, against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The belief that this was due to American support is ridiculous. Muslims, especially from the middle east, financed the jihad just as much, if not more. This is well documented. With that victory under their belt, the Muslims began to realise that they could control their own political destiny, whether by revolution or other violent means. To be honest with you, I don't think the Americans, British or French are the best lecturers on how to change a society, simply because they have themselves experienced revolution to attain the way of life they believe in. So why, when we do it, are we so different from them? Muslims woke up. You then had Iraq being attacked, you had Chechnya, Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia, Algeria, you had all these Muslim areas being attacked and you had Muslims waking up and saying, ?Hang on, this isn't a coincidence.?
Taseer: Why do you think that is?
Butt: Because after the fall of communism, America began to realise that Islam was a threat.
Taseer: The larger fall of communism wasn't the result of Islam even if you think that that may be the case in Afghanistan...
Butt: That's what I'm saying; it was a catalyst for collapse in Afghanistan.
Taseer: Why?
Butt: Because Islam is a way of life, a way of life superior to communism and capitalism. Christianity is a mere religion and can?t cater for people?s way of life, but Islam can. With the fall of the Soviet Union, people started turning to Islam as a way of life, whereas America wanted to spread capitalism across the world. That's why Islam became the enemy.
Taseer: Yes, but why are Muslims the only enemy? Are they the only ones fighting American colonialism?
Butt: No, you have your South American states that are involved in the struggle. But with the exception of them and a few African nations, the majority of the people fighting against American colonialism are not Muslim nations, but Muslim people. Muslim governments are more than happy to embrace the other way of life in order to stay powerful.
Taseer: Do you consider yourself a religious teacher of sorts? Do you speak to people in the community?
Butt: I speak to a lot of people in the community. I have a gym in my house where I invite people to come back and exercise and we have regular study circles at my house.
Taseer: What sort of people are these?
Butt: A lot of them are youth because I believe that when Islam is being practised by youth, Islam will be alive. If it's practised by the older generation, it will always remain old, slow.
Taseer: Are they receptive to your views or do they resist and say, ?No, we want to go out with girls and drink? and so on?
Butt: A lot of people will say that to me, but when it comes to their absolute happiness, a lot of people realise that Islam is their way of life.
Taseer: What do you say to them?
Butt: One of the first questions I ask them is: why do you celebrate Eid? If you like their way of life, celebrate Christmas. That provokes thought in their head that the reason they celebrate Eid is because they are different. It's not just Eid or Christmas, it's their whole way of life being different. How they speak to their people, how they speak to their fellow brothers and sisters, how they speak to their teachers, how they progress in their education: they have different ways. Ultimately, if someone believes in Allah and his messenger, he will always have at the back of his mind the notion that he?ll go back to Allah when he dies. And I'll ask people, ?Don't lie for the sake of me, you don't have to say something to please me, but do you believe in Allah? Ask yourself that question, do you really, really believe in Allah? Do you really believe that there is hellfire, do you really believe that there is heaven and hell, or not?? And if someone believes that, there is no reason why they won't realise that, ?Yes, our life does belong to us.? And from there, we'll go further. To those brothers who say, ?I pray all the time,? I reply, ?That's not enough: give your life for Allah, that's what he wants, he wants you to live and die for him, that is the ultimate sacrifice, he gave you that life, give it back to him.?
Taseer: Given that the Koran is incontestable to the letter, and that it is unique because there is no another religion in which there is a text so pure, handed down from God to man, can there be a moderate Muslim?
Butt: No. You've hit the nail on the head. If someone believes that it's the incontestable word of Allah, how can he take a moderate view? We must fight if it is the will of Allah. I don?t want to say that Muslims don?t believe in Allah, but what I will say is that their faith in Allah is weak. They fear man the same way that the Jews feared the pharaoh, who they feared more than Allah and that's why they were afraid to do anything against him, until Moses came and liberated them. The lack of leadership in the Muslim community is simply because they are too afraid to stand up against this so-called undefeatable giant of the United States.
Taseer: Coming back to the youth, are they angry?
Butt: Many are from quite wealthy families, as I am.
Taseer: So you don't see this rise of extremism among British Muslims as rooted in economic disadvantage?
Butt: I think that's a myth, pushed forward by so-called moderate Muslims. If you look at the 19 hijackers on 9/11, which one of them didn't have a degree? Muhammad Atta was an engineer [he was actually an architect and town planner] at the highest level. His Hamburg lecturer said, ?I didn't have a student like him.? These people are not deprived or uneducated; they are the peak of society. They've seen everything there is to see and they are rejecting it outright because there is nothing for them. Most of the people I sit with are in fact university students, they come from wealthy families. Islam caters for everybody: the economically deprived and the most educated person. It doesn't make any difference: the message will still be the same. But this myth?that the only reason these people go for Islam is because they have nothing else to do?is a lie and a fabrication. People who say that should be very careful. Even Osama himself, Sheikh Osama, came from wealth that I could never dream of and he gave it all up because it had no value to him. Who can say he came from an economically deprived condition? It's rubbish.
Taseer: Clearly you have a sense of an enemy. What is the face of this enemy? Is it America?
Butt: At the moment, America.
Taseer: Who else is part of it?
Butt: You have an apparent enemy and a hidden enemy.
Taseer: The apparent enemy?
Butt: The American enemy. As far as I'm concerned, you have America spearheading the attack, followed by Britain, France, the EU, the UN, the World Bank, the IMF?
Taseer: India?
Butt: India.
Taseer: Thailand?
Butt: Thailand, especially after what happened recently. [Attacks on Muslim rebels in the south of the country]
Taseer: What does it take to join the enemy?
Butt: To support them. The Japanese only have 500 troops in Iraq; as a result they've declared war on Islam. China from day one has been testing its nuclear missiles in the Xinjiang province; it's a Muslim province, so China is another enemy of Islam. As far as we're concerned, until an Islamic government makes treaties with these people, the world, for me, is an enemy. But there will be people who we prioritise, so I won't start attacking the South American states. I have bigger and more important enemies to deal with, those who are having direct influence in the Muslim world, like America.
Taseer: In your capacity as a teacher and leader, what is your wish for the British Muslim?
Butt: I would say every Muslim needs to be proud of Islam, without feeling inferior, and to read a book by Mohammad Assad, a convert from Germany in the 1930s. As far as I'm concerned, the British are still ruling the subcontinent, and the way they're doing that is by the inferiority complex. They instil this idea that people have to follow the western design in order for them to progress. It was such a clever ploy by the British. 100 or 200 years ago, their security services were much more intelligent than they are today. My advice to Muslims is start to get out of this inferiority complex, start to realise that Islam is beautiful, don't be ashamed of it. If someone says jihad, don't be ashamed; if someone says hijab, don't be ashamed. What Allah says is good is good, what he says is bad is bad, don't be ashamed of saying what is good and bad. This is my advice, be proud of being a Muslim, not only be proud, be loud about that. If you watch a really good movie, you'll go out and tell the whole world: ?That movie was just so brilliant, you've got to watch that movie, you've got to see it.? It?s the same way with Islam. If you believe it is the truth, if you believe it is the most beautiful way of life, if you believe it is the divine word of Allah, don't keep it to yourself, tell the whole world about it and don't be ashamed of it. British Muslims, especially, have this platform, because something said in London or Britain can reach the whole world. The Muslims in the middle east don't have that benefit or the liberty we have. We must take advantage of it.
Taseer: Is military action part of the plan?
Butt: If someone wants to go into military action, I would encourage them, because Allah says in Surah Taubah, ?From the believers I ask for their wealth and their life and the best among you are the ones who fight and kill and be killed for me.? This is the promise that Allah makes. These people are the ones that gain the supreme success. For me there is nothing bigger if somebody goes out there and kills for the sake of Allah or is killed for the sake of Allah.
Taseer: Why suicide bombing?
Butt: There is a difference between suicide and martyrdom. Suicide is about unhappiness, depression. That's not what these people are. These people have an urge to be with Allah, to be with the Prophet, live among him, to be close to him. They are happy before committing these actions. They are probably at the highest level any human being can be before doing this. They are the most peaceful and content. There is a complete and utter difference between martyrdom operations and suicide operations: with the former, you want to do it not because you are fed up, but because you are happy to enter the next step of life, which is the afterlife. With the latter, you are completely and utterly fed up with life.
Taseer: You've claimed in the past to recruit British people for martyrdom operations. Who are they?
Butt: The majority of people who, after 9/11, went to Afghanistan like myself were educated. They understood the reality of this war, and many came from secure family backgrounds. They had wives, children; they had no reason to leave. But they had a call within themselves that was urging them to go forward.
Taseer: What?s the position of the radical Islamic movement in Britain today? Is it growing or declining?
Butt: I do believe that support is growing. In the public eye it seems as though only a tiny number of Muslims are making this noise, but the fact is that only a tiny number have the courage to speak out. The rest won't, simply because they're worried about being persecuted by the government.
Taseer: What about the imams? Are they helping?
Butt: There are many brilliant imams in this country, and then a lot who are not so brilliant. My main grievance with the imams is that they are not public enough. Maybe they know better than me because they're older and more experienced. But I?ll give you an example: the letter that was sent out publicly by the Muslim Council of Britain to the mosques saying that we should be spying on one another. I spoke to ten different imams?from London, Birmingham and London?in ten different masjids; all ten disagreed with the letter, but they never publicly said so. The letter said that you should spy on Muslims and report them if they were involved in any Islamic activities. Even when the IRA was being attacked in Britain, many priests had their anonymity protected by law because they were religious people. They were under no obligation to inform the police about any potential terrorist attacks by the IRA. So why the hell would we as Muslims go around spying on one another?
If the MCB letter had been a private thing then fine, but this was public and these people need to be corrected publicly. In Islam, for example, if somebody is a homosexual under an Islamic government, but practices it within his own home, Islamically he won't be punishable because he's not coming out with it publicly. So in that sense homosexuality is fine for him. The moment he comes out publicly with it, it becomes an issue for the public. My grievance with these imams is that they aren't saying these things publicly?why does it take someone like me, who is 24 years old, who has no Islamic credentials except with the youth I speak to who look up to me? Why are you imams, you people who have gone through the Islamic disciplines, not coming out and saying that this is haram? This is completely and utterly unacceptable in Islam.
Taseer: What about your future?
Butt: I believe I have a bigger and bigger role to play. Yesterday I was talking to five or six senior brothers about our different roles. I was saying that if I had a passport, I wouldn't be in this country, and I kept saying to these guys, you've all got passports, you don't have any problem, why are you not leaving the country? But then one of the brothers made a very beautiful point. He said, ?Every decade or century Allah makes somebody different, so initially you had political thinkers like Hassan al-Banna, Maududi, Sayeed Qutb. But now we have reached the more militant side of Islam, so you have Osama, Zawahiri, and Emir Khatab and Baseyev in Chechnya. Throughout time, each will have their own role to play.? And I do believe that I've got a bigger role to play and when that time comes, I will make my preparations to play that role.
Taseer: It's martyrdom, isn't it?
Butt: Absolutely. It's something that makes me really depressed being stuck in this country because I know I'm so far away from it. I know that if I was to pass away in my sleep, then I would not have the mercy of Allah upon me because I have been such a bad person. And I don't see myself in any way as getting into heaven that easily, except through martyrdom.
Taseer: Where would you go if you got your passport back?
Butt: Probably Yemen and Syria initially, because at the moment I?m wanted in Pakistan for supposed involvement in an assassination plot on Musharraf,
Taseer: After Yemen and Syria? The enemy that you would finally confront would be the US, right?
Butt: Yes. Maybe America will be destroyed in my time, maybe I'll have something completely different to do. But I need to learn Arabic. As an English/Urdu-speaking person, I can see the beauty of Islam from the outside, but I really can't have access without Arabic. It's like having a beautiful house and only being able to see through the windows how beautiful it is inside. That is how I view Arabic. I believe the Arabic language will give me that key to access those things I don't have access to at the moment. Once I learn Arabic, inshallah, I will get myself militarily trained. It's like the Jews in Israel: conscription is incumbent upon every male and female.
Taseer: Why do you see it as something that ends in death? There are a lot of soldiers who don?t see their fight as necessarily ending in death.
Butt: Because death for us signifies the next stage of life. It signifies the beginning of eternal life. That's something we cannot understand, comprehend or really appreciate. For me, it's like when you say to a child, ?Don't open the cupboard? and curiosity gets the better of him and he wants to know what's there. Only this time it's not curiosity; I'm sure that the next stage of life is going to far exceed the pleasure of this life.
Taseer: You're looking forward to death?
Butt: Absolutely. As long as it's done properly. I'm terrified of dying normally, growing old, grey.
Taseer: You don't see that as a selfish impulse, to care for nothing but your own salvation?
Butt: Ultimately, that's everybody's. The mother loves the child more than anybody. But even she, on the day of reckoning, will not look at the child; Allah says she will think of herself, solely of herself. Ultimately, that is what it's about: I'm going into my grave, you're going into your grave, everyone is ultimately going into their grave. In this duniya (world), we have as much as we can want, but ultimately it is for the benefit of your soul. It is the only point in Islam where an individual is actually allowed to be selfish.
Taseer: You've asked for martyrdom in Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya: what do these causes have in common?
Butt: They're all just causes in which Muslims are being attacked by a foreign occupier.
Taseer: But why isn't an un-Islamic government just as much a problem, Pakistan for instance?
Butt: Absolutely. I pray that Allah accepts the man who made the second attempt on Musharraf?s life a few months ago. He did it as a martyr. The common thing for everyone around the world is jihad but the places you talked about?Chechnya, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan?are occupied. Then you've got unoccupied ones: Riyadh, Bali?
Taseer: What kind of psychological strength or make-up do you need to be a martyr?
Butt: It takes a hell of a lot. You have to be at peace with yourself and have that comprehension. It is such a difficult thing to actually do. It's a level I'm not at, at the moment, without a shadow of doubt. Omar Sheikh [The LSE-educated killer of Daniel Pearl] is the only British Muslim I've met who is at that level? I think Mohammad Hanif and Omar Sharif [the two British Muslims who travelled to Israel as suicide bombers in 2003] were at that level too. Did you watch the video Hamas released of them? They looked so happy, and here I am, sitting here depressed, aggravated, frustrated and I look at them looking so happy and so at peace with what they're going to do, that I can only begin to imagine what kind of piety they are at to be able to say, ?Allah here I am. This is what you've given me and this is what I'm giving back in return.? That's what the spiritual side of the training is there for, and many of the camps?which have now been dismantled?concentrated on that spiritual aspect, on making sure you know why you're doing this. Like I said, it can't be curiosity: you have to know that you will get to heaven.
Taseer: Do you think killing Daniel Pearl was part of Omar Sheikh?s fight for Islam?
Butt: Whether he killed Daniel Pearl or not, I don't know to be honest with you.
Taseer: If he did?
Butt: If he did, I'm sure Islamically he knew what he was doing.
Taseer: Would you approve of it if he did?
Butt: Absolutely?journalists have always been used as spies. Even Lawrence of Arabia, who was a spy, was initially a journalist. I believe Pearl was a spy: he deserved everything he got.
Taseer: What about Kashmir, have you been involved in the fight there?
Butt: I have lectured there twice to English students in the Pakistani-controlled area. I lectured in Islamabad in one of the hotels, with someone from Kashmir, I can't remember the brother's name now. He then invited me to give two separate lectures in English, to English students about how I think they should be focusing their lives. It was very productive. Kashmir is a place that has been forgotten by the world media. It's a shame. Personally I'm not the biggest supporter of the Kashmiri jihad, because I believe a lot of it is political gaming rather than pure jihad. I see a lot of innocent lives being wasted for political motives.
Taseer: For the motives of the Pakistani government?
Butt: Yes, forcing the Indian government to keep 750,000 troops in such a small area places it under massive economic pressure.
Taseer: Is Lashkar doing good work?
Butt: I'm not a supporter of Lashkar-e-Toiba, I see them as very government-backed. I think this is a general problem in the Pakistani organisations. The minute they start attacking the government, they fear losing everything they have built up and that is a weakness in every group I see. For me, the key concept of being a separatist is that if I ask you to sacrifice your life, your wealth, your health, then you do. Ultimately, the aim is to achieve what I would say is the goal for Islam, for example to liberate Kashmir. I think Kashmir has always been a proxy war for Pakistan, and they've never really wanted to liberate it. I even remember speaking to General Zahir Abbassi and Hamid Gul: both of them said, ?Really, if we want to liberate Kashmir, we could do so very easily.? Lashkar has 200,000 followers, we only allow in 8,000 mujahedin at a time in that area. Why? Because if we sent everyone in there it would become unoccupied, and India wouldn?t have the economic burden of having to station 750,000 troops there. It's really disappointing.
Taseer: Why have the predicted terrorist attacks on the US and Britain following the Iraq war not happened?
Butt: If someone was to attack Britain, they would be a completely and utterly loose cannon. It would be someone who wasn't involved in the network? I mean the jihad network. A bomb in London would be strategically damaging to Muslims here. Immigration is lax in Britain?you know as well as I do that London has more radical Muslims than anywhere in the Muslim world. A bomb would jeopardise everyone?s position. There has to be a place we can come.
Taseer: So there is general agreement among the different groups not to attack Britain for strategic reasons?
Butt: Definitely, there is a central sense that we will not damage something for a bigger picture, but we will concentrate on our own areas.
Taseer: Why not more attacks in America?
Butt: America is much more difficult to get into than Britain?it's so far from the rest of the world.
Taseer: Do you see future attacks there?
Butt: Definitely, I can't see it stopping. As they say, cut the devil's head off. I believe that the head is America, and one of the arms is Britain. Cutting the arm off won't have an effect; cutting the head off will, so that's why I say attacks look more likely in America.
Taseer: What does it take to get past the various screenings that you have in your own group?
Butt: It's very hard, especially in Britain, where all of a sudden you've got the MI5 openly saying they are recruiting?
Taseer: Trying to infiltrate the groups?
Butt: Yeah, it's very difficult. For all you know I could be working for them. Things are working a hell of a lot slower than they used to. I'm of the philosophy more of Ramzi Yousef: take precautions, but keep them to a minimum because otherwise you're not going to get anywhere. I'm of the opinion that if somebody's a spy, he?s a spy, and he can only do what Allah has planned for them. So I'm not really going to be concerned for myself. I will carry out the very minimum checks.
Taseer: What kind of checks?
Butt: If it's somebody I brought in myself, I would get to know them and culture them. I would hope that, even if he were a spy, by the end of his time with me he would be converted anyway. He'd say, ?I can't do this.? Assuming he is not a spy, I'd make sure I know where he's come from, who he knows. If he knew nobody, he would start right at the bottom and we would have to go through all of the procedures. But if he says I'm affiliated with X, Y and Z, I could take up references with those people, I'd make sure he'd done the things he'd claimed to have done. You always have references in the radical Muslim world, that?s how it works. You can go to Pakistan and reference me from such and such a place and they'd say yeah, we know him. Then I'd go back to the person and ask if he'd gone under a different name than the one he's giving me, and if there's a slip halfway down the line, I'd say I'm sorry we can't help you, inshallah there's somebody else who can.
Taseer: So there are very few who come in clean with no record?
Butt: No, very few. On Saturday evenings on this very road, we used to have Islamic stalls and we would actually recruit people from the stalls, take their contact details, and start building up a relationship with them, meeting them, and giving them the necessary Islamic culture for them to have the Islamic identity. But I would not push anyone to do anything unless they came to me. I would never tell anyone, ?I think you should do military training.? I will never say that to anybody because it's something that has to come from the person's heart.
Taseer: Are there a disproportionate number of Pakistanis who want to take part in this sort of thing?
Butt: In Britain, the majority I know are of Pakistani descent and really are fed up with the British way of life, British standards; they are even fed up with un-Islamic Pakistani culture and traditions.
Taseer: Like what?
Butt: This issue of obeying your elders even if they're wrong, remaining silent at their mistakes. Forcing women to cook and clean and do nothing else. They're fed up with these stigmas.
Taseer: So would women have a stronger role in an Islamic society?
Butt: Oh yeah, I believe that women are the forefront of this war. If our women were correct in their minds, my job would not be necessary. If our sisters were teaching the children from a very young age to love jihad, to love Allah, to live for Allah, to die for Allah? I think they have the biggest the role to play.
Taseer: And it's not the economic conditions of the Pakistanis that make them well suited.
Butt: Not any more. The majority of the Pakistanis here are well established, they own their own homes, they're not on mortgages any more, many have gone to university, they don't have any problems, The Muslims who have the problems are the Somalis and the Bangladeshis, these are the economically deprived ones. But the Pakistanis have really got to grips with why they came here. Initially it was for economic reasons. I guess that's why the youth is a lot more responsive. The elders came here for economic benefit, so they were a lot less willing to come out publicly with their opinions, whereas the youth now are more disillusioned with what's going on around them. They've had everything they needed and they're rejecting it.
Taseer: You've had your passport revoked, right? What has the government told you?
Butt: Yeah, the official answer is that I am under investigation for links to terrorist activities and organisations and until these are cleared my passport is being held so that I don?t leave the country. They told my solicitor that the moment I leave this country I will be considered a threat to national security; as a result they bind me to Britain. This is now becoming a breach of my human rights. I am supposed to be able to travel freely to any country I want.
Taseer: Are you under constant surveillance?
Butt: As far as I understand, yes.
Taseer: Do you think they're watching our interview now?
Butt: I wouldn't be surprised if they knew about it, but whether they were watching it, I have no idea. I know my phones are most likely tapped. That's why I was quite surprised when you rang me because that number is very private, and only very few individuals have it. The other numbers keep changing, but that one I keep.
Taseer: When you were arrested, why couldn't they build a case?
Butt: They had nothing. The whole basis for my arrest was probably the information that you gathered off the internet. That's what made me realise at that point that I'd never been under observation until that day.
Taseer: Do you feel any guilt about using a country's freedoms to strike against it? If you were in any of the Muslim countries, you would be in jail.
Butt: I guess it's the British blood inside me. The British have been known for centuries to abuse everyone's resources. When they took over my father's homeland, the subcontinent, they reaped the resources, they raped the lands, even now the Queen's crown is made from jewels that don't belong to Britain. I'll hold my Islamic beliefs. I'm just continuing a trait of the British people.
Taseer: A tradition of deceit?
Butt: Yes
Taseer: You do see it as deceit?
Butt: Yeah, war is deceit.
Taseer: This is a war isn't it?
Butt: I don't see it any other way.
Taseer: Then how do you feel about a group like al-Muhajiroun which seems to say it's a war, but refuses to recruit?
Butt: It's their get-out-of-jail card. And this was one of my biggest concerns. I can understand they see war as deceit and they say it's not the aim behind the organisation and perhaps they do it behind closed doors, but I say you shouldn't be such big articulators of the war if you aren't willing to carry it out. This was our big difference. I'm not saying what they're doing is un-Islamic, but it's something I was feeling uneasy about as a Muslim. I could do it no longer, I was feeling hypocritical.
Taseer: If it's a war, you need soldiers, right?
Butt: Yeah. I'm not a soldier. My role is someone who tries to use the western media to get our message across. I remember speaking to one maulana (master) who I look up to a lot. At that point I was saying, ?I really want to go and fight.? And he said, ?Look, you have access to many things we don't. Go and utilise it, the war has many different fronts. We can't come to Britain. You think we have a lack of mujahedin waiting there? We've got hundreds and thousands of them. You're from Britain, you can use the media, you speak their language, you're an educated person, you have the passport, go there and utilise it. When the time comes for you to fight, if Allah wants that, you're going to do that. Don't worry about it.? So the war has many different fronts, and in the meantime that selfishness you were originally talking about is suspended until I get to an age where I can say: ?I've done my best now, I have to think of my individual soul,? and then, inshallah, I will go and fight.
Taseer: And Omar Sheikh Bakri?
Butt: I have respect for him. He's an aalim (scholar), and he's much older than me, but I have my differences with him as well. It came to a point where I could no longer keep myself affiliated with his group, not because I disrespect them in any way, but because it would have been hypocritical to be with them and hold these views. I need to break loose because the views I was going to give would not be the views of the organisation al-Muhajiroun.
Taseer: Was the parting peaceable?
Butt: With any organisation I've been with, the parting is like a divorce. It's quite messy. But we're Islamic-minded people and we're still in contact, and I have a lot of respect for them. They're still more vocal than the majority of the Muslims in this country.
Taseer: What was the route to Afghanistan?
Butt: Just through Pakistan. It really amazed me that anyone could do it. You could get anything you like across the border and at that time with the Pakistani government being very friendly, it was never guarded as it is today.
Taseer: That fight still continues?
Butt: Yes?the sad thing is that while the world media focuses on Iraq, a lot is happening in Afghanistan.
Taseer: Are people still going?
Butt: Yes, though not as many from Britain. The doors have been closed. They need people who are already trained. They don't have time to start training people and sending them over.
Taseer: What was your university experience like?
Butt: Until we got there [Wolverhampton], there had never been any Islamic activity. There was a group of 15 of us and we all decided to go to the same university and we recruited another ten to 15 in the next couple of months and we came out very explosively. We had Islamic awareness weeks, we demanded a prayer room, washing facilities.
Taseer: Was it radical?
Butt: It was absolutely radical and I think the university authorities felt really, really threatened. I even remember having visits from the so-called community leaders of the Muslims asking, ?What are you doing?? Wolverhampton is only a small city, but we were sticking posters all over it. It was a really good experience, we radicalised the university a lot.
Taseer: You were expelled. What for?
Butt: I was accused of getting Muslims to assault a homosexual student. Now I don't hide my views about homosexuality: in Islam it's forbidden. If someone wants to do it privately, go ahead and do it privately, don't come out publicly with it. At the time, we were the largest society on campus because all the Muslims had joined us. Our grant was ?500 and there was another society, I think the music society, which had fewer than 100 members and they had ?5,000-6,000. I was really pushing this; I went to the racial equality person. I wasn't as radical as I am today, but just as active and aggressive. But I got rejected. I realised that the racial equality board didn't see Muslims as a race, hence we didn't have equal rights.
Anyway, with the assault case, they eventually got some ?witnesses? to come forward. It was the most bizarre case?here I was in my final six months of university. I had spent two and a half years studying for a law and politics degree, and they were refusing to give not only the names of these witnesses, but not even their statements.
Taseer: But you didn't do it?
Butt: No, I did not do that at all. If I had done it, I would have come out openly. I would have acknowledged it. At that time, I believed more in political Islam, arguing, debating, having dialogues?this militant side of Islam came later. I was so surprised by the case. I wanted to say, ?How do I know you haven't just made this whole thing up?? Fair enough, the witnesses couldn't be present, but at least give us their statements, their names, just so we know they are not made-up people. By the time we got the solicitor involved, my year had collapsed and it would have taken me another two years to graduate. It was enough for me.
Taseer: Did you like being in Pakistan?
Butt: I loved it, I've never had a better two years in my life. I see Pakistan as the only country having the potential to lead the Muslims out of the disarray they are in today. I see Pakistan as that nation.
Taseer: But the government isn't to your taste?
Butt: Obviously the government is the problem. I think the people are the most amazing I have seen in my life: people who experience hardship every day, and still have faith that Allah will give them something. The problem is that you have this very tiny minority that is always portrayed as the majority of the opinion in Pakistan.
Taseer: Who rules Pakistan?
Butt: The elite, you know how it is.
Taseer: I know it's a big question, but what's your wish for the global order, how would you like to see it readjusted?
Butt: I don't see it happening in my lifetime. 1,400 years ago you had a small city-state in Medina, and within ten years of the Prophet (peace be upon him), Islam had spread to Egypt and all the way into Persia. I don't see why the rest of the world, the White House, 10 Downing Street, shouldn't come under the banner of Islam. And
-
Quite a remarkable read-- thank you.
-
MORNING INTELLIGENCE BRIEF08.22.2005
www.stratfor.com
............................................................................................
Geopolitical Diary: Monday, Aug. 22, 2005
Monday, Aug. 22, is the current deadline for the Iraqis to reach agreement on a new constitution. As one would expect with the deadline looming, it appears that the likelihood of any agreement is declining. And as in any good negotiation, the final gut-check is under way: Each side is trying to determine whether it has miscalculated and left something on the table that it could have taken. The problem with this final phase is, of course, that everyone starts reading the other side the wrong way and the entire negotiation runs the risk of collapsing -- or, in this case, getting extended yet again.
The latest issue involves the Kurds and the Shia. The formal issue was the extent to which Sharia, or Islamic law, would serve as the fundamental law of Iraq -- the basis from which all other law would derive. The Sunnis and Shia are in agreement here, but the Sharia issue intersects with one of the Kurds' core interests: federalism. If Iraq were to have a central, transcendent principle of any kind, federal autonomy would be undermined. The Kurds have one interest in this negotiation -- maximizing the amount of autonomy they will have. If Baghdad determines the basis of law, then it follows that there must be legal authorities in Baghdad to define, at least at some level, what the law is. The Shia have another interest: maximizing Shiite control over the state apparatus. They want Islamic law but also wiggle room on how much and how to apply it.
The signs at the moment are that the Kurds and Shia will work out their problems. The Kurds will accept the primacy of Sharia in principle -- and in practice, the Shia will limit the scope of its application to certain areas, such as family law, and will not create a central, Shiite bureaucracy for administering it. There will be, if you will, a federally administered Sharia. This has been the focus of negotiations for the past few days.
It is not, however, the final phase of the negotiations. Now the Sunnis have to buy into this. In a purely technical sense, the Shia and Kurds have the ability to jam through the new constitution without Sunni support, at least at this stage. However, ultimately, the Sunnis can block the constitution under the current rules -- and, more important, excluding the Sunnis will solve nothing. There has always been Shiite-Kurdish cooperation. The entire problem is finding a mode for including the Sunnis.
The United States is particularly urgent on this score and has, in effect, become the advocate for the Sunnis. The U.S. hope is that a commitment by the Sunni leadership to the constitution will rein in the nationalist Sunni guerrillas and undermine the jihadists. If the Sunnis are left out in the cold, the entire exercise becomes pointless. That is why the U.S. ambassador to Iraq said this weekend that the United States accepts the idea of an Islamic state in Iraq. Washington urgently wants to give the Shia what they want on this issue -- or as much as the Kurds will permit -- so that the Shia will move on to a final deal with the Sunnis.
In effect, the United States punted one of the ideological aims of the war in favor of U.S. national interest -- keeping U.S. troops in a relatively peaceful Iraq. Hence the recent announcement by the U.S. Army that it was prepared to stay in Iraq for up to nine years.
And now we come down to the moment of truth: Do the Shia want a united Iraq, or do they prefer to have control over the Shiite regions and the United States bogged down in a guerrilla war in the Sunni regions? Are the Sunnis really prepared to endure attacks by jihadists -- targeting negotiators personally -- in exchange for a role in an Iraqi government?
We think the answer to both of these questions is "yes." We think there may be one more extension on the deadline to achieve it -- but the entire process is really out of time, and we are at the point where it really doesn't matter what anyone thinks. The Shia and Sunnis must now make their decisions, and the United States must now decide how to live -- or not -- with those decisions. It's down to the short hairs. served.
-
Found an interesting article about finding terrorists and creating structures for doing so. One of the arguments made is that there currently is not a consistent or comprehensive structure for finding the bad guys. The piece can be found at:
http://www.blackwaterusa.com/btw2005/articles/manhunting.pdf
I've recently subscribed to the free newletter Blackwater publishes. A private training and security company working in Iraq among other places, their newsletter contains a lot of nuggets. You can subscribe from their homepage at:
http://blackwaterusa.com/
-
A friend writes:
==================
Message: 1. Before 1991, we underestimated the extent of Iraq's nuclear program. At the time of its eviction from Kuwait, the SH regime was a couple of years away from a workable nuclear warhead.
2. After the truce, we failed to discover any evidence of Iraq's bio weapons program until after Saddam's soon to be ex-sons-in-law defected to Jordan in 1995.
3. Between 1991 and 1998, UNSCOM overestimated the amount of usable chemicals available for weaponized chemical warheads.
4. During the same time period, the same UN group overestimated the amount of unaccounted-for biological material and failed to realize that the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) was in charge of the biological weapons program.
The anti-war advocates also have made their own intelligence blunders particularly on the issue of IIS-al Qaida liasons.
A. The Duelfer Report found that up to the time of the 2003 invasion, the IIS maintained a small biological weapons program.
B. Between 1991 and 9-11, the IIS had numerous meetings with al Qaida in the Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some of these are detailed in the indictment of Usama bin Laden for the 1998 embassy bombings. (Indictment S(6), 98 Cr. 1023, (LBS), p.18)
C. Iraq likely assisted the al Qaida cell that carried out the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
1) The 1993 WTC bombed contained deliberately implanted cyanide gas that was designed to be dispersed by the explosion. New York Times, Jan 21, 1994. Statement of Judge Duffy at sentencing in US vs Salameh et al, May 24, 1994.
2) Ramzi Yousef escaped the US on an Iraqi passport under the name of Abdul Basit, a Pakistani allegedly living in Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation. See Government Exhibits 614 and 739A in the case of US vs Salameh.
3) Abdul Rahman Yasin, who was indicted in New York for mixing the cyanide gas into the 1993 WTC bomb, was given sanctuary in Iraq by the Saddam Hussein regime after fleeing to Jordan on March 5, 1993 while traveling on a US passport. (Ralph Blumenthal, "Missing bombing Case Figure Reported To Be Staying In Iraq", New York Times, June 10, 1993) He was given a job by the Iraqi government. (ABC News Broadcast, June 1994). In 1994, via Jordan, the US requested Yasin's return to face the indictment, but the request was denied by Iraq. (New York Times, August 1, 1994)
4) The gas used in the 1993 bomb was the same type that was discovered to have been smuggled into Iraq in the late 1980's by various Iraqi agents posing as businessmen in the US and Europe. (ABC News Nightline, July 2, 1991. Financial Times, July 3, 1991)
5) Former Secretary of Defense William Cohen acknowledged this poison gas evidence as a new threat. ("Preparing for a Grave New World", Washington Post, July 26, 1999.)
To summarize, although there is no evidence that Iraq directly assisted al Qaida's 9-11 plot, there is evidence that Iraq provided assistance before and after the 1993 WTC bombing to that al Qaida cell. Iraq maintained its communication with al Qaida after 9-11 directly through the IIS and indirectly through the IIS surrogate, Ansar al Islam, now known as al Qaida of Iraq. This is the terror cell managed by Zarqawi originally placed in northern Iraq by the IIS to disrupt Kurdish ambitions.
In conclusion, after 9-11 and after we recovered a lot of intelligence about al Qaida's ambitions to execute small WMD attacks, the Iraqi-al Qaida liason was no longer tolerable. We had reason to suspect direct Iraqi assistance in the 1993 WTC bombing. Our intelligence about Iraq's WMD capabilities still lacked precision and was complicated by the SH regime's post-Gulf War I deceptions. Under these circumstances, the SH regime no longer deserved the benefit of any doubt. It was never an overt threat to our nation; but it remained a real threat to provide covert assistance to al Qaida.
-
The Crisis in U.S.-Pakistani Relations
By George Friedman and Kamran Bokhari
Though the governments of the United States and Pakistan appear to be in sync with one another on the hunt for Osama bin Laden and militant Islamists, a crisis of relations is brewing just beneath the surface. Despite expressions of unity in the war against al Qaeda, cooperation at the operational and tactical levels is nearly nonexistent -- and calculated interference by Pakistani intelligence and security elements is hindering U.S. operations in the country.
This situation is further complicated by ongoing rivalries between government agencies, poor communications and general lack of cooperation by U.S. intelligence and security agencies. All of which leaves counterterrorism operations in Pakistan -- or, more precisely, U.S. efforts to capture or kill bin Laden and other top al Qaeda leaders -- stagnant.
At the broad political level, Washington and Islamabad are presenting a relatively unified front in the battle. Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who must balance his domestic political concerns against U.S. pressure, continues to walk a fine line -- between cooperation with Washington (or with opposition forces within Pakistan), and capitulation.
On the surface, Musharraf and U.S. President George W. Bush are in a state of cautious compromise -- with Washington continuing to express confidence in Musharraf's government and offering increased military assistance to Pakistan. For its part, Islamabad has been paying lip service to counterterrorism cooperation with the United States, while still professing its ability to carry out sweeps and all other anti-jihadist operations on its own. The Musharraf government's attitude has been that it is doing all it can to get rid of terrorist sanctuaries, but it will not allow foreign forces to conduct operations on Pakistani soil. As Musharraf told U.S. media earlier this year, "We are capable of" capturing bin Laden, and "if we get intelligence, we will do it ourselves."
Islamabad recognizes that U.S. forces will operate in Pakistani territory -- with or without government permission -- and thus has struck a compromise so that U.S. operations will be kept as low-key as possible by both sides. The Pakistanis have acknowledged the involvement of foreign forces in the counterterrorism offensive but claim joint efforts are limited to intelligence-sharing and logistics cooperation. In this way, Islamabad seeks to defuse both U.S. pressure to act -- and domestic pressure to avoid acting.
But despite the political niceties, two key issues continue to impede efforts to dismantle al Qaeda's structure in Pakistan. The first is the professional rivalry between the CIA, Department of Defense and FBI, as well as other security and intelligence agencies, which continues to dog the post-Sept. 11 efforts to streamline intelligence-sharing. The second is the dismal performance by the Pakistani security and intelligence organizations.
It is true that a number of key al Qaeda operatives and leaders have been arrested by Pakistani authorities since their exodus from Afghanistan in late 2001. In March 2002, Abu Zubaydah, a senior al Qaeda member, was captured in Faisalabad. Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a deputy leader of the task force that coordinated the Sept. 11 attacks, was captured in Karachi in September 2002. And in March 2003, another task force leader, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was picked up in Rawalpindi. Other prominent captures include those of communications expert Naeem Noor Khan, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (linked to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa), and Abu Farj al-Libi, believed to be the head of al Qaeda operations in Pakistan.
Nevertheless, the progress made against the core leadership of al Qaeda remains an open question. First, how is it that al Qaeda's mostly Arab leadership is able to evade detection in a country with very few Arabs? More important, how can a foreign non-state actor evade detection -- when he is known to be in a certain region, with massive global search-and-destroy operations hunting him -- unless he is granted succor or protection from some members of the local security and intelligence organizations closest to the front?
While those at the topmost levels of U.S. authority have been praising the Musharraf government as a crucial ally in the war against al Qaeda, certain U.S. officials lately have been making a public issue of Islamabad's non-cooperation. Among these is CIA Director Porter Goss, who insinuated a few months ago that bin Laden is known to be in Pakistan and said outright that in order for him to be captured, certain "weak links" -- i.e., Pakistan -- must be strengthened.
Goss's comments are clearly echoed by U.S. intelligence and defense officials now active in Pakistan and working with Islamabad. There is an ingrained distrust of U.S. and other foreign services within Pakistan's intelligence community -- stemming from nationalistic instincts, a desire to hide links between intelligence services and jihadists and their supporters, and sympathies on multiple levels with the jihadists.
One very senior Pakistani intelligence source engaged in a frank discussion about this atmosphere of distrust -- which is pervasive throughout the country's security organizations, even though most of Pakistan's law enforcement personnel are not personally Islamists. Some simply don't like the idea of U.S. pressure against their government, while others dislike being told how to do their jobs. Still others see the United States as arrogantly pursuing its own interests at Pakistan's expense. We are told there is a great deal of resentment -- from the highest echelons down through the rank-and-file -- over what the Pakistanis perceive as Washington's failure to recognize the efforts, sacrifices, and cooperation they are providing.
And, not insignificantly, there are some who perceive that the jihadists Washington is now pursuing were created by the United States' proxy war in 1980s Afghanistan -- and who believe that the U.S. government, having abandoned Afghanistan after meeting its objectives there, will abandon Pakistan in similar fashion.
Resistance to U.S. influence, therefore, has been both passive and active, with intelligence operatives telling local police and village chiefs directly not to cooperate with U.S. operations on the ground. Sources in Pakistan tell us that the Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence agencies debrief all private Pakistani citizens who come into contact with U.S. government, media and think tanks -- both before and after the interface -- in attempts to restrict contact between the two countries to official channels. Additionally, certain high-level leaders of Pakistani militant Islamist movements have been declared off-limits as targets for security forces, thus leaving key segments of the international militant network unmolested. The United States is providing large amounts of supplies, money and training for Pakistani forces, but with few results.
Clearly, cooperation from the country's intelligence and security apparatus -- a major cog in the machine built to hunt down al Qaeda in Pakistan -- is not happening. There are four reasons for this:
1. The insistence by top leadership that U.S. forces cannot operate any more prominently on Pakistani soil than they already are. Though there are many reasons behind this, as mentioned earlier, they boil down for some key government officials to mere survival: Islamist militants have made several attempts on Musharraf's life and others within the regime, at al Qaeda's behest. Nationalist sentiments and political opposition to Musharraf's government are considerations as well.
2. Calculated moves by influential figures at the middle and lower levels of Pakistan's intelligence and security apparatus to thwart offensives against the militants. Some of this reflects countermoves by Islamabad against American attempts to push the limits of tacit security agreements with the Pakistanis. However, it is also a sign that the Musharraf regime does not have tight control over its own intelligence and security services -- and of this, Islamabad is keenly and nervously aware.
3. The Pakistani military's desire to hide its past links with the militants and its current ties to certain Islamist groups -- which it views as assets of the state to be used in pursuit of Islamabad's geopolitical goals. For Islamabad, the jihadists have long been both an internal threat to military/civilian rule and a useful form of leverage in its geopolitical maneuvers -- for example, gaining strategic depth with regard to Afghanistan and waging its proxy war against India in Kashmir. Pakistan is not willing to surrender this leverage lightly -- and, because the lines between those "useful" militant groups and al Qaeda members can be blurry, many on Islamabad's preservation list fall into both categories.
4. Recognition within Islamabad that Pakistan's importance as a U.S. ally likely will dissolve if bin Laden is captured or killed. Washington has been attempting to strengthen its ties with India and is even attempting tentative negotiations with Iran, with the eventual goal of warmer relations. Should these efforts bear fruit, the Musharraf regime's geopolitical importance to the United States will diminish -- leaving Islamabad as a potential member of the "outposts of tyranny" rather than a close anti-terrorism ally.
Given these factors -- coupled with the potential for ineptitude and rivalries among the Pakistani and U.S. security and intelligence agencies -- there is a crisis that has brought the search for al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan to a virtual halt. This situation cannot last indefinitely -- the breaking point will come either with a misstep by Musharraf that destroys the political balance he has tried to maintain within Pakistan, or a decision by Washington that delay, obfuscation and overt obstructionism will no longer be tolerated. If Islamabad doesn't act -- and it is questionable whether another pre-packaged capture of a mid-level al Qaeda operative by Pakistani forces will satisfy the Bush administration -- Washington will be left with little choice but to move on its own.
Islamabad's response to the pressure is predicated on one unanswered question: Is Musharraf lying to the United States, or is he being lied to by his own people? In other words, is he in control of the obstructionism, or is he a victim of it? We believe the reality is somewhere in the middle. Nevertheless, the outlook is troubling.
www.stratfor.com
Signing up highly recommended!
-
http://www.mikeyonopenforum.blogspot.com/?BMIDS=17137839-4e534328-78899
-
U.S.: Suicide Bomber Says He Was Kidnapped
September 19th, 2005 @ 4:22am
By TAREK EL-TABLAWY
Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A suicide bomber captured before he could blow himself up in a Shiite mosque claimed he was kidnapped, beaten and drugged by insurgents who forced him to take on the mission. The U.S. military said its medical tests indicated the man was telling the truth.
Mohammed Ali, who claimed to be Saudi-born and appeared to be in his 20s, said he managed to flee after another suicide attacker set off his bomb, killing at least 12 worshippers Friday as they left a mosque in the northern city of Tuz Khormato.
In confession broadcast on state television later that day, Ali told Iraqi interrogators he did not want to bomb the mosque and hoped to go home.
Results from medical tests on Ali were "consistent with his story and characterization of his treatment," Col. Billy J. Buckner, a U.S. military spokesman said Sunday.
Ali said insurgents kidnapped him from a field near his home earlier this month, then drugged and beat him.
His story was similar to those recounted by other captured militants. The captives routinely claim they were either coerced or fooled by insurgent leaders who promised them a role in the holy war against the U.S. military, only to find themselves as would-be suicide bombers sent to attack civilians.
Musab Aqil al-Khayal, a 19-year-old Syrian, was shown on state television Saturday confessing to his aborted involvement in a bombing earlier in the week in which a companion exploded his car bomb in the midst of day laborers assembled to find work. The Wednesday attack killed 112 people and wounded 250. Al-Khayal said handlers from the al-Qaida in Iraq terror group had duped him.
"Those dogs fooled me," he told Iraqi interrogators.
Televised interrogations and confessions are becoming increasingly common as Iraqi and American officials capture more militants and use their confessions in an attempt to undercut support for militants.
Ali, who also holds Iraqi citizenship, said he strapped on a crude suicide vest and was led to a second mosque in Tuz Khormato, about 130 miles north of Baghdad, "where he was told he would become a good Muslim and go to heaven if he carried out the attack," the U.S. military statement said.
Forced to enter the mosque, he waited until the others were distracted, ran out of the building and was arrested just minutes after the first attack, the statement said.
The kidnapping demonstrates the desperation of al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his ability to execute his strategy," said Buckner.
"He knows that he can't win against Iraqi security and coalition forces, and is therefore willing to use innocent Iraqi citizens to further his cause to disrupt the election process and prevent a free and democratic Iraq," he said.
http://www.620ktar.com/?nid=46&sid=77473
-
September 25, 2005
The Sunday Times
SAS in secret war against Iranian agents
Michael Smith and Ali Rifat, Basra
TWO SAS soldiers rescued last week after being arrested by Iraqi police and handed over to a militia were engaged in a ?secret war? against insurgents bringing sophisticated bombs into the country from Iran.
The men had left their base near the southern Iraqi city of Basra to carry out reconnaissance and supply a second patrol with ?more tools and fire power?, said a source with knowledge of their activities.
They had been in Basra for seven weeks on an operation prompted by intelligence that a new type of roadside bomb which has been used against British troops was among weapons being smuggled over the Iranian border.
The bombs, designed to pierce the armour beneath coalition vehicles, are similar to ones supplied by Iran to Hezbollah, the Islamic militant group.
?Since the increase in attacks against UK forces two months ago, a 24-strong SAS team has been working out of Basra to provide a safety net to stop the bombers getting into the city from Iran,? said one source. ?The aim is to identify routes used by insurgents and either capture or kill them.?
The forces have tried to seal the notoriously porous border using high-technology sensors that monitor movement by night. They report to a major based in Baghdad in an unmarked building known as the ?station house?.
Special forces commanders believe that a tip-off from a local worker at their base may have led to the men?s capture last Monday after a car chase by police, who later handed them to the Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the maverick Shi?ite cleric. They were freed from a nearby house.
The disclosure that the SAS has targeted the Iranian border coincides with claims by a former Iraqi defence minister that parts of Iraq have fallen under Tehran?s control.
Hazim Shalan, who left office last May amid a scandal over huge sums of missing money, claimed that 460 Iranian agents had been apprehended in the past two years. He accused Iranian officials of bringing weapons and drugs into Iraq and of paying voters to back their chosen candidates.
An inquiry into the capture of the SAS team and clashes that followed between British forces and an Iraqi mob was being carried out by the Royal Military Police Special Investigation Branch.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said this would focus on how the soldiers had been compromised but it was also expected to address claims that they had shot an Iraqi police officer.
The officer, Quteeb Rasheed Abdul Hameed, alleged that he had been wounded in the leg when the soldiers opened fire as police approached their unmarked car to question them.
A judge said yesterday that he had issued warrants for the arrest of the SAS men over the shooting and the alleged killing of a second man shot in the car chase. Judge Ragheb Mohamad Hassan al-Muthafar told The Sunday Times in an exclusive interview that the soldiers were ?suspects who attempted to commit a wilful act of murder?.
He added: ?Whatever their mission they have no right to fire intentionally on anyone, let alone a security man whose job is to protect this country.?
According to the judge, nine people were killed and 14 injured, including two boys aged 13 and 14, when the mob attacked British forces surrounding the police station where the men were detained.
The MoD declined to comment on the toll but said the warrants had no legal basis. ?All British troops in Iraq come under the jurisdiction of Britain,? a spokesman said.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1796566,00.html
-
Heart of Darkness
From Zarqawi to the man on the street, Sunni Arabs fear Shiite emancipation.
BY FOUAD AJAMI
Wednesday, September 28, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
The remarkable thing about the terror in Iraq is the silence with which it is greeted in other Arab lands. Grant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi his due: He has been skilled at exposing the pitilessness on the loose in that fabled Arab street and the moral emptiness of so much of official Arab life. The extremist is never just a man of the fringe: He always works at the outer edges of mainstream life, playing out the hidden yearnings and defects of the dominant culture. Zarqawi is a bigot and a killer, but he did not descend from the sky. He emerged out of the Arab world's sins of omission and commission; in the way he rails against the Shiites (and the Kurds) he expresses that fatal Arab inability to take in "the other." A terrible condition afflicts the Arabs, and Zarqawi puts it on lethal display: an addiction to failure, and a desire to see this American project in Iraq come to a bloody end.
Zarqawi's war, it has to be conceded, is not his alone; he kills and maims, he labels the Shiites rafida (rejecters of Islam), he charges them with treason as "collaborators of the occupiers and the crusaders," but he can be forgiven the sense that he is a holy warrior on behalf of a wider Arab world that has averted its gaze from his crimes, that has given him its silent approval. He and the band of killers arrayed around him must know the meaning of this great Arab silence.
There is a clich? that distinguishes between cultures of shame and cultures of guilt, and by that crude distinction, it has always been said that the Arab world is a "shame culture." But in truth there is precious little shame in Arab life about the role of the Arabs in the great struggle for and within Iraq. What is one to make of the Damascus-based Union of Arab Writers that has refused to grant membership in its ranks to Iraqi authors? The pretext that Iraqi writers can't be "accredited" because their country is under American occupation is as good an illustration as it gets of the sordid condition of Arab culture. For more than three decades, Iraq's life was sheer and limitless terror, and the Union of Arab Writers never uttered a word. Through these terrible decades, Iraqis suffered alone, and still their poetry and literature adorn Arabic letters. They need no acknowledgment of their pain, or of their genius, from a literary union based in a city in the grip of a deadening autocracy.
A culture of shame would surely see into the shame of an Arab official class with no tradition of accountability granting itself the right to hack away at Iraq's constitution, dismissing it as the handiwork of the American regency. Unreason, an indifference to the most basic of facts, and a spirit of belligerence have settled upon the Arab world. Those who, in Arab lands beyond Iraq, have taken to describing the Iraqi constitution as an "American-Iranian constitution," give voice to a debilitating incoherence. At the heart of this incoherence lies an adamant determination to deny the Shiites of Iraq a claim to their rightful place in their country's political order.
The drumbeats against Iraq that originate from the League of Arab States and its Egyptian apparatchiks betray the panic of an old Arab political class afraid that there is something new unfolding in Iraq--a different understanding of political power and citizenship, a possible break with the culture of tyranny and the cult of Big Men disposing of the affairs--and the treasure--of nations. It is pitiable that an Egyptian political class that has abdicated its own dream of modernity and bent to the will of a pharaonic regime is obsessed with the doings in Iraq. But this is the political space left open by the master of the realm. To be sure, there is terror in the streets of Iraq; there is plenty there for the custodians of a stagnant regime in Cairo to point to as a cautionary tale of what awaits societies that break with "secure" ways. But the Egyptian autocracy knows the stakes. An Iraqi polity with a modern social contract would be a rebuke to all that Egypt stands for, a cruel reminder of the heartbreak of Egyptians in recent years. We must not fall for Cairo's claims of primacy in Arab politics; these are hollow, and Iraq will further expose the rot that has settled upon the political life of Egypt.
Nor ought we be taken in by warnings from Jordan, made by King Abdullah II, of a "Shia crescent" spanning Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. This is a piece of bigotry and simplification unworthy of a Hashemite ruler, for in the scheme of Arab history the Hashemites have been possessed of moderation and tolerance. Of all Sunni Arab rulers, the Hashemites have been particularly close to the Shiites, but popular opinion in Jordan has been thoroughly infatuated with Saddam Hussein, and Saddamism, and an inexperienced ruler must have reasoned that the Shiite bogey would play well at home.
The truth of Jordan today is official moderation coupled with a civic culture given to anti-Americanism, and hijacked by the Islamists. In that standoff, the country's political life is off-limits, but the street has its way on Iraq. Verse is still read in Saddam's praise at poetry readings in Amman, and the lawyers' syndicate is packed with those eager to join the legal defense teams of Saddam Hussein and his principal lieutenants. Saddam's two daughters reside in Jordan with no apologies to offer, and no second thoughts about the great crimes committed under the Baath tyranny. Those who know the ways of Jordan speak of cities where religious radicalism and bigotry blow with abandon. Zarqa, the hometown of Abu Musab, is one such place; Salt, the birthplace of a notorious suicide bomber, Raad al-Banna, who last winter brought great tragedy to the Iraqi town of Hilla, killing no fewer than 125 of its people, is another. For a funeral, Banna's family gave him a "martyr's wedding," and the affair became an embarrassment to the regime and the political class. Jordan is yet to make its peace with the new Iraq. (King Abdullah's "crescent" breaks at any rate: Syria has no Shiites to speak of, and its Alawite rulers are undermining the Shiites of Iraq, feeding a jihadist breed of Sunni warriors for whom the Alawites are children of darkness.)
It was the luck of the imperial draw that the American project in Iraq came to the rescue of the Shiites--and of the Kurds. We may not fully appreciate the historical change we unleashed on the Arab world, but we have given liberty to the stepchildren of the Arab world. We have overturned an edifice of material and moral power that dates back centuries. The Arabs railing against U.S. imperialism and arrogance in Iraq will never let us in on the real sources of their resentments. In the way of "modern" men and women with some familiarity with the doctrines of political correctness, they can't tell us that they are aggrieved that we have given a measure of self-worth to the seminarians of Najaf and the highlanders of Kurdistan. But that is precisely what gnaws at them.
An edifice of Arab nationalism built by strange bedfellows--the Sunni political and bureaucratic elites, and the Christian Arab pundits who abetted them in the idle hope that they would be spared the wrath of the street and of the mob--was overturned in Iraq. And America, at times ambivalent about its mission, brought along with its military gear a suspicion of the Shiites, a belief that the Iraqi Shiites were an extension of Iran, a community destined to build a sister-republic of the Iranian theocracy. Washington has its cadre of Arabists reared on Arab nationalist historiography. This camp had a seat at the table, but the very scale of what was at play in Iraq, and the redemptionism at the heart of George Bush's ideology, dwarfed them.
For the Arab enemies of this project of rescue, this new war in Iraq was a replay of an old drama: the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258. In the received history, the great city of learning, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, had fallen to savages, and an age of greatness had drawn to a close. In the legend of that tale, the Mongols sacked the metropolis, put its people to the sword, dumped the books of its libraries in the Tigris. That river, chroniclers insist, flowed, alternately, with the blood of the victims and the ink of the books. It is a tale of betrayal, the selective history maintains. A minister of the caliph, a Shiite by the name of Ibn Alqami, opened the gates of Baghdad to the Mongols. History never rests here, and telescopes easily: In his call for a new holy war against the Shiites, Zarqawi dredges up that history, dismisses the Shiite-led government as "the government of Ibn Alqami's descendants." Zarqawi knows the power of this symbolism, and its dark appeal to Sunni Arabs within Iraq.
Zarqawi's jihadists have sown ruin in Iraq, but they are strangers to that country, and they have needed the harbor given them in the Sunni triangle and the indulgence of the old Baathists. For the diehards, Iraq is now a "stolen country" delivered into the hands of subject communities unfit to rule. Though a decided minority, the Sunni Arabs have a majoritarian mindset and a conviction that political dominion is their birthright. Instead of encouraging a break with the old Manichaean ideologies, the Arab world beyond Iraq feeds this deep-seated sense of historical entitlement. No one is under any illusions as to what the Sunni Arabs would have done had oil been located in their provinces. They would have disowned both north and south and opted for a smaller world of their own and defended it with the sword. But this was not to be, and their war is the panic of a community that fears that it could be left with a realm of "gravel and sand."
In the aftermath of Katrina, the project of reforming a faraway region and ridding it of its malignancies is harder to sustain and defend. We are face-to-face with the trade-off between duties beyond borders and duties within. At home, for the critics of the war, Katrina is a rod to wave in the face of the Bush administration. To be sure, we did not acquit ourselves well in the aftermath of the storm; we left ourselves open to the gloatings of those eager to see America get its comeuppance. Even Zarqawi weighed in on Katrina, depicting a raid on the northern town of Tal Afar by a joint Iraqi-American force as an attempt on the part of "Bush, the enemy of God" to cover up the great "scandal in facing up to the storm which exposed to the entire world what had happened to the American military due to the wars of attrition it had suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Those duties within have to be redeemed in the manner that this country has always assumed redemptive projects. But that other project, in the burning grounds of the Arab-Muslim world, remains, and we must remember its genesis. It arose out of a calamity on 9/11, which rid us rudely of the illusions of the '90s. That era had been a fools' paradise; Nasdaq had not brought about history's end. In Kabul and Baghdad, we cut down two terrible regimes; in the neighborhood beyond, there are chameleons in the shadows whose ways are harder to extirpate.
We have not always been brilliant in the war we have waged, for these are lands we did not fully know. But our work has been noble and necessary, and we can't call a halt to it in midstream. We bought time for reform to take root in several Arab and Muslim realms. Leave aside the rescue of Afghanistan, Kuwait and Qatar have done well by our protection, and Lebanon has retrieved much of its freedom. The three larger realms of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria are more difficult settings, but there, too, the established orders of power will have to accommodate the yearnings for change. A Kuwaiti businessman with an unerring feel for the ways of the Arab world put it thus to me: "Iraq, the Internet, and American power are undermining the old order in the Arab world. There are gains by the day." The rage against our work in Iraq, all the way from the "chat rooms" of Arabia to the bigots of Finsbury Park in London, is located within this broader struggle.
In that Iraqi battleground, we can't yet say that the insurgency is in its death throes. But that call to war by Zarqawi, we must know, came after the stunning military operation in Tal Afar dealt the jihadists a terrible blow. An Iraqi-led force, supported by American tanks, armored vehicles and air cover, had stormed that stronghold. This had been a transit point for jihadists coming in from Syria. This time, at Tal Afar, Iraq security forces were there to stay, and a Sunni Arab defense minister with the most impeccable tribal credentials, Saadoun Dulaimi, issued a challenge to Iraq's enemy, a message that his soldiers would fight for their country.
The claim that our war in Iraq, after the sacrifices, will have hatched a Shiite theocracy is a smear on the war, a misreading of the Shiite world of Iraq. In the holy city of Najaf, at its apex, there is a dread of political furies and an attachment to sobriety. I went to Najaf in July; no one of consequence there spoke of a theocratic state. Najaf's jurists lived through a time of terror, when informers and assassins had the run of the place. They have been delivered from that time. The new order shall give them what they want: a place in Iraq's cultural and moral order, and a decent separation between religion and the compromises of political life.
Over the horizon looms a referendum to ratify the country's constitution. Sunni Arabs are registering in droves, keen not to repeat the error they committed when they boycotted the national elections earlier this year. In their pride, and out of fear of the insurgents and their terror, the Sunni Arabs say that they are registering to vote in order to thwart this "illegitimate constitution." This kind of saving ambiguity ought to be welcomed, for there are indications that the Sunni Arabs may have begun to understand terror's blindness and terror's ruin. Zarqawi holds out but one fate for them; other doors beckon, and there have stepped forth from their ranks leaders eager to partake of the new order. It is up to them, and to the Arab street and the Arab chancelleries that wink at them, to bring an end to the terror. It has not been easy, this expedition to Iraq, and for America in Iraq there has been heartbreak aplenty. But we ought to remember the furies that took us there, and we ought to be consoled by the thought that the fight for Iraq is a fight to ward off Arab dangers and troubles that came our way on a clear September morning, four years ago.
Mr. Ajami teaches International Relations at Johns Hopkins University.
-
............................................................................................
Geopolitical Diary: Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005
Two streams of intelligence, both touching on Syria, cropped up on Tuesday. First, sources close to deliberations within the Bush administration said the National Security Council is discussing the idea of bombing certain Syrian villages, along the infiltration routes used by jihadists staging attacks in Iraq. And second, sources within Syria said U.S. Special Forces are conducting cross-border operations on Syrian territory.
These reports follow a day after Israeli daily Haaretz, citing unnamed sources, said senior U.S. officials wanted Israel's assessments of possible successors for Syrian President Bashar al Assad. According to Haaretz, officials were asking who might be able to replace him, assuming he were ousted, while still maintaining the stability of the country. The report went on to say that the Sharon government is interested in weakening the Alawite-Baathist regime, but beyond that, it prefers the status quo in Damascus.
It is possible that all of these reports and leaks are a way for Washington to pressure Damascus, which long has been viewed as enabling the cross-border flow of militants into Iraq. The United States has just embarked on a fresh counterterrorism offensive in Iraq, with two simultaneous campaigns: Operation Iron Fist near the Syrian border, and Operation River Gate closer to Al Fallujah. By placing pressure on both ends of the ant line, troops would make it more difficult for insurgents to take shelter in Syria and then reappear in Iraqi towns and cities soon after. The RUMINT concerning a diplomatic offensive against al Assad would add impetus to this effort as well.
However, Damascus already has been making concessions to Washington -- mainly in efforts to keep al Assad and his top aides from being implicated in the investigation of the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. Not only has al Assad abandoned his most trusted ally in Lebanon, President Emile Lahoud, but he also has sacrificed his own interior minister, Ghazi Kanaan; the ex-chief of Lebanese military intelligence, Gen. Rustom Ghazaleh; and the chief of general headquarters in Syria, Lt. Gen. Bahjat Suleiman.
Thus, it would seem there is more to the RUMINT than merely efforts to raise the pressure. But this doesn't necessarily mean Washington truly seeks to topple al Assad. For one thing, the Bush administration doesn't have the bandwidth for such an undertaking at the moment.
There are several other possible explanations for the leaks. First, the United States always has contingency plans in place, even if there are no plans for immediate execution -- which would explain the discussions between U.S and Israeli officials about an alternative to al Assad. Second, it is highly likely that, as they are along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, U.S. forces are indeed making forays onto Syrian soil while in hot pursuit of jihadists. This is underscored by the fact that U.S. and Iraqi forces are more focused on taking out the al Qaeda-linked transnational jihadists than the Sunni nationalist insurgents.
All of this leaves us wondering, just what is Syria doing in the face of these incursions? In all likelihood, Damascus has relocated its troops a safe distance away from the Iraq border. Doing so would serve three purposes:
1. It reduces chances of a firefight between U.S. and Syrian forces, which would complicate matters horribly for Damascus;
2. By not having an official presence in the area, the Syrian regime can deny that U.S. operations are even taking place on its soil -- thus mitigating further backlash from the public or government officials (who could be expected to be disgruntled that al Assad has sacrificed three top lieutenants to Washington already);
3. It allows the Syrians to signal their willingness to play ball with Washington, so long as everyone remains suitably discreet.
Much as with Iran, it is not in the Bush administration's interest to be open about dealings with Damascus. Doing so could upset the geopolitical calculus in the region, which already is seething with anti-American sentiment, and add to the growing problems for the president on the home front. Therefore, Washington will not be the one rushing to go public with its moves. The Bush administration knows that many states in the region already are trying to break free of the U.S. pressure that was applied following the Sept. 11 attacks, and they are looking for an opening to make their moves -- especially knowing that Bush is in a weakened position at home.
The wild card to watch now is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al Qaeda's leader in Iraq -- whose group stands to lose the most in all of this. It's conceivable that he might eventually issue a statement, commenting on the whole U.S.-Syria dynamic. Al-Zarqawi, who is a hunted man, would want to upset the U.S. calculus so as to save himself. His goal would be to destabilize the Syrian regime from within -- creating chaos that would lend itself to another jihadic pasture. Moreover, he could create problems for the United States at the strategic level by spreading rumors that U.S. forces were invading Syria at will. This in turn would create a major dilemma for other governments in the region, which would be forced to condemn the move.
-
Pretty inspiring stuff!
"I have prepared an important dispatch entitled " Battle for Mosul IV." This is a very interesting and important dispatch with many photos, and is just now posted www.michaelyon.blogspot.com."
-
As always, VDH lends perspective.
October 07, 2005, 7:58 a.m.
The Quiet Consensus on Iraq
The more they argue, the more they sound the same.
Victor Davis Hanson
Some 30 months after the removal of Saddam Hussein, an unspoken consensus is emerging about Iraq. The Howard Dean/Michael Moore/Cindy Sheehan fringe of the Democratic party so far has made almost no inroads into mainstream party thinking. Perhaps this new Copperhead movement to find political resonance has failed because most Democratic stalwarts ? senators Kerry, Clinton, and Biden ? themselves voted to remove Saddam. And these erstwhile supporters of the war can offer nothing much different on Iraq now except to harangue about the need for more allies or more multilateral/U.N. help.
True, most Americans are tired of Iraq; but they wish to win rather than withdraw immediately and lose the country to the terrorists. The odd thing is that the more the rhetoric heats up, the more both sides sound about the same.
More troops?
The ostensible military advantage of having a larger U.S. troop presence to pacify Sunni hotspots was always outweighed by a number of other, though less immediately apparent, disadvantages.
The key to stabilizing Iraq has been to promote the autonomy of Iraqi security forces ? impossible if they are ensured that 300,000 or so American combat troops will do their fighting for them. And in this type of socio-cultural war, a smaller foreign footprint is critical, since the last thing we wish is an enormous ostentatious American military bureaucracy in Baghdad.
The shortcoming was never the number of U.S troops per se, but our self-imposed straightjacket on rules of engagement that apparently discouraged the vital sorts of offensive operations that we have at last seen the last two months.
The lesson of Vietnam is that the south was more secure in 1973 without almost any American ground troops than with over 500,000 present in 1968. Promises of air power to support ARVN forces between 1971-3 proved about as viable as thousands of prior search-and-destroy patrols by American soldiers. It also never made sense to tie down nearly half of available American combat manpower in Iraq, at a time when vigilance was necessary in Korea, near China, and in other spots in the Middle East.
That the United States needs at least 4-5 more combat-ready divisions is not the same question as the wisdom of putting more American personnel into Iraq.
Departure?
Even the Democratic leadership has made no move to demand a scheduled timetable of withdrawal, much less, Vietnam-style, to cut off funds for general military operations in Iraq.
Yet most supporters of the war do not want an open-ended commitment to Iraq either, with large permanent basing and perpetual subsidies to such an oil-rich state. So here too there is general agreement emerging about our goals as outlined by most of the military's top brass: in a year or two begin to downsize our presence in Iraq, ideally leaving behind special forces and elite units embedded within Iraqi units, backed up by instantaneous air support.
In the larger sense, with Saddam gone ? he was the reason for America's 1991 build up in the region in the first place ? our total regional troop strength could decline, contingent on the degree to which Al Qaeda poses less of a conventional threat than Saddam Hussein once did in this critical area. The departure from Saudi Arabia was long overdue, and few Americans wish troops to return there. Again, no mainstream figure is demanding either an immediate withdrawal from Iraq or an imperial build-up.
Democracy?
It is now popular to caricature the effort to prompt democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to encourage them elsewhere in the Gulf, Lebanon, and Egypt. We all know the homilies ? "You can't implant democracy by force" or "There is no history of democracy in that part of the world."
Yet few leftist critics of the administration have advised not to pressure Syria to leave Lebanon, not to encourage elections in Beirut, not to hector Mubarak in Egypt about allowing fair voting, or not to engage in the messy work of consensual government in Iraq and Afghanistan. No Democrats are calling for a strongman in Iraq, or endorsing the general status quo in the Middle East. If anything, we hear the Orwellian refrain, "We should not be supporting dictators" ? at precisely the time in recent memory that we are beginning not to!
There is a quiet but growing assumption that there is really not much of a choice other than to come down on the right side of history and support the democratizing efforts now under way. Freedom and the rule of law offer the best hope of undermining Islamic fundamentalism faster than it can subvert consensual government. Far from being a Puritanical, messianic vision of forcing Islamic cultures to follow a cookie-cutter American model, our policy of post-September 11 arises because most Americans are tired of giving their money to dictatorships in Egypt, or lining up with monarchies in the Gulf, or having autocracies harbor and bribe terrorists to turn their wrath against the United States.
To their credit, in past years Democrats were more likely to object to realpolitik in the first place, so it makes absolutely no sense now for them to criticize George Bush for doing more to end the old cynicism than Bill Clinton ever did.
Iraq and the war on terrorism?
The old debate whether Saddam Hussein was involved with al Qaeda is now calcified. Liberal conventional wisdom denies any such linkage since there is no firm evidence that Saddam knew of, or was involved in, the September 11 attacks. Thus most on the left ignore entirely that Ansar al-Islam was doing Saddam's dirty work in fighting the Kurds, that Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas resided in Baghdad, that Saddam openly harbored Abdul Rahman Yasin and Ahmed Hikmat Shakir who were connected to the effort in 1993 to blow up the World Trade Center and various anti-American plots, and that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi fled Afghanistan to the sanctuary of Iraq.
No matter. That was then, this is now ? and there is no denying that al-Zarqawi is conducting al-Qaedist operations in Iraq, or that the sort of people who attacked us on September 11 are the sort of people now flocking to the Sunni Triangle and often dying at the hands of U.S. military forces. Everyone can agree on that.
The "flypaper" exegesis ? that Iraq has become a magnetized burial ground pulling in wannabe al Qaedists ? is widely dismissed as unsophisticated and yokelish. But we saw the same phenomenon on the Afghan border in late 2001 where the Pakistani madrassas thinned out as jihadists went over the mountains to the Taliban's aid ? only to be bombed to smithereens, the survivors limping back to warn others to give up such a holy trek.
In one of the strangest developments of this entire war, the Western world hears almost nothing about the aggregate number of jihadists killed by coalition forces in Iraq, even though we suspect it may have been several thousand ? 10,000, 20,000, 50,000? Surely this has had both a concrete and a spiritual effect on hundreds of thousands of angry young Islamists, who are beginning to realize that a trip to Iraq may be lethal ? and unwelcomed by most Iraqis who just wish to be left alone to form their own new government. Whatever one thought about the nexus of Iraq and terror before, no one now denies that our jihadist enemies are in Iraq and are being fought and defeated there each day.
Ideology
For nearly four years, debates raged in the West over the Patriot Act, supposed Islamophobia, and the sense that the war was never a war at all, but a cooked-up overreaction by Bush-Cheney/Halliburton/Fox News (take your pick) to further a corporate imperial agenda.
But after bombings and assassinations in the United Kingdom, Spain, and the Netherlands, the almost weekly arrests of Middle Eastern suspects from New Jersey to Lodi, California, few now deny that we are in a war with real jihadists, who are energized by an Islamo-fascistic creed that flares up from Bali to Pakistan.
Saddam is ancient history. The real war in Iraq is against al-Qaedists who behead, murder, and seek to turn any village they get their hands on into an 8th-century nightmare. Democrats may groan about the Patriot Act; ACLU liberals will occasionally cry bigotry against Muslims; but there is no longer any real debate that one of the tools of the jihadists is to repeat a September 11 on a larger scale through the stealthy terrorism of infiltrators from the Middle East. Better then to draw them out and hit them abroad than just play defense at home.
Optimism?
It is easy to be pessimistic about Iraq, given the media's constant barrage of bad news. But why then are there not millions in the street as in the fashion of Vietnam-era moratoria? Why doesn't the Senate move to cut off funds? Why don't the Democrats bring forth another George McGovern?
Moveon.org, Cindy Sheehan, or Michael Moore in the short-term may be useful stilettos to the Democrats. But most keep their safe distance from such blood-stained rapiers, since few know how Iraq will turn out ? or what such razor-sharp groups and firebrands will say or do next.
If Iraq is a more lethal theater than Afghanistan, and appears the more unstable, then we should remember that Saddam Hussein was sui generis, and his warped country the linchpin of the Arab Middle East. Who knows what Iraq will look like in, say, 15 months, given that its liberation had about that much lag time after the fall of the Taliban?
On the horizon there are a number of events whose public repercussions are impossible to predict, although they may well enhance the efforts of democratic reformers. The elections of October will be followed by even more voting in December. For all the predictions of Sunni boycotts and subversion, at some point the wiser ones will participate ? understanding that the insurgents are losing, destroying not the Americans, but their own country in the process, and that a constitution moves onward, with or without them.
Soon there will be a globally televised trial of Saddam Hussein that may well shock the Arab autocracies ? especially when their unfree populations gaze on the most well-known and thuggish of the Arab illegitimate leaders, chained in the docket and demurring to a constitutionally-appointed judge.
Yes, America is divided about Left/Right politics and over occasional antiwar street theater. But on the major issue of the war on terror and Iraq, most critics have very few ideas of doing anything other than what we are doing right now. The result is a strange consensus that few speak about ? but fewer still wish to undo.
? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His book A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (Random House) appears this month.
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200510070758.asp
-
October 17, 2005
Exploit Rifts in The Insurgency
The next two weeks are crucial. Washington and the Iraqi government should put forward a bold program of "national reconciliation"
By Fareed Zakaria
Amid all the problems in Iraq, I see one encouraging sign. Sunnis are organizing to defeat the referendum on Iraq's draft constitution. This is good news because it places the Sunnis in direct opposition to the jihadi insurgents in Iraq. The latter, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, have been threatening to kill anyone who votes. The vast majority of Sunni organizations in Iraq?including several insurgent groups-have called on Sunnis to mobilize and vote to defeat the constitution, which they view as anti-Sunni. This is the most important positive development in Iraq?a growing split between the radical jihadists and the other insurgents, who are mostly Baathists. It provides the United States with an opportunity, even at this late date, for some success. Drive this split wider and isolate the jihadis. Or as the British motto goes, divide and conquer.
Rifts are emerging on other issues. Recently Zarqawi urged a "total war" against the Shiites in Iraq. But five Sunni insurgent groups rejected the argument and emphasized that they do not target civilians, whether Sunni or Shia. The Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni group that supports the insurgency, issued a more elaborate denunciation. Days later, Zarqawi issued a correction, explaining that "not all Shiites are targets," and exempting those who opposed the occupation, such as the followers of the rebel cleric Muqtada al Sadr. This led Sadr's group to issue a statement rejecting Zarqawi's embrace and making clear that "for our movement Zarqawi is nothing but an enemy and if he falls into the hands of our militia he will be torn apart."
Most recently comes news that Ayman al-Zawahiri sent a letter to Zarqawi telling him his goals and means were causing a loss of support for Al Qaeda. For months now there have been signs that the Baathist insurgency wants to end its uprising. Last week, there was one more such signal. Saleh al Mutlak, a prominent Sunni politician whom many believe has ties to the insurgency, publicly proposed a ceasefire. "The fighting should stop," Mutlak told Reuters. "We have fought for two and a half years and the problem is, it doesn't work."
Within the next week, several Sunni groups will gather to put together a formal set of proposals for the United States to consider. "We must find a political solution," he said. A ceasefire during Ramadan, which began last week, "should be a start for direct negotiations between the two sides."
Until recently, the United States has been opposed to negotiating with the insurgents, but that line is weakening. The new U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, has begun meeting with people who are close to the insurgents. But, according to a senior diplomat who spoke on background so as not to interfere with the negotiations, Khalil-zad has not yet met the people with power, who are actually running the insurgency.
From the start, the United States has misunderstood how to handle Iraq's Sunnis, sending the signal that it viewed them all as Baathists. In fact, Saddam's regime was run by a small group of tribal Sunnis, mostly from Tikrit and adjoining areas. He displaced the secular, urban Sunnis, who were Iraq's traditional elite. Some of the latter were left in government bureaucracies and educational establishments, but with little power. Then came de-Baathification and the disbanding of the Army. All of a sudden, tens of thousands of people, nominally members of the Baath Party, lost jobs as engineers, schoolteachers and officials. The result was chaos and an embittered Sunni population.
For the last year, Washington has been trying to reverse these errors. But the Shiite-dominated government has been unwilling to make many compromises. This is understandable. The Shiites suffered greatly under Saddam and the Baath Party. But that perspective might blind them to what is in Iraq's long-term interest. Only a balance of power between the Shia, the Sunni and the Kurds will keep Iraq stable.
The next two weeks are crucial. In all likelihood, the Sunnis will not be able to defeat the constitution, which means they will be further embittered. Washington and the Iraqi government should then put forward a bold program of "national reconciliation" that includes talks with some of the insurgent groups to draw the Sunnis into the political mainstream. Otherwise the dangers grow for Iraq, and for others as well. Iraq's Interior minister, Bayan Jabr, said last week that while Zarqawi had been weakened in recent months, other smaller jihadi groups were getting stronger. And, he added, they were beginning to move men and arms outside of Iraq. "You will see insurgencies in other countries," he warned. There's a dark cloud forming in the Middle East, and it may burst if we don't act soon.
-
Iran's killer bombs found
Bombs seized ... where
cargo was found
From TOM NEWTON-DUNN
Defence Editor, in Al Amarah, Iraq
A HUGE cache of hi-tech bomb-making kit has been seized from terrorist smugglers crossing from Iran into Iraq.
The find included detonators, military-style charges and a whopping 100kg of plastic explosives ? enough to flatten a tower block.
Exactly the same technology was used in five devastating roadside bombs that killed eight British soldiers recently.
Iraqi forces seized the cargo in a sparsely-populated border area in desolate Maysan province, which is largely scrub and marshland.
This is the first hard proof of Iran?s highly controversial sponsorship of terrorism against Our Boys in southern Iraq.
Military sources said the leadership in Tehran must have authorised the moving of such a large and lethal consignment.
Last night one said: ?It?s inconceivable this sort of highly sophisticated material can cross the border without some very important people in Iran knowing about it.
Foiled ... Iraqi officers capture insurgent with cache this week
?We cannot publicly accuse Tehran yet ? but this is as close as it comes to catching the Iranians red-handed ? without actually seeing them pull the trigger.?
The seizure happened in July but was kept secret before being confirmed for the first time yesterday by British military in Basra. It cranks up tensions further between Iran?s Ayatollahs and furious politicians in London.
PM Tony Blair has already accused elite troops from Iran?s Revolutionary Guards of giving insurgents the deadly new bombs to kill British soldiers. Earlier this week defence sources in Iraq piled on the pressure by insisting the Iranians were also running training camps in Iran.
And yesterday Captain Will Blackhurst of the Staffordshire Regiment Battle Group based in Camp abu Naji ? which has lost five members to the new bombs ? hinted the terrorists? tactics have evolved recently. He said: ?The enemy is fighting a far cleverer war than he did last year and his skills and tactics have improved greatly.?
Last night a spokesman for British forces in Iraq said: ?We can confirm that there was a large find reported by the Iraqi Department for Border Enforcement.
?It was a great success for everyone in Iraq as it has taken a large amount of weaponry out of the insurgents? hands.?
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2005470753,00.html
-
www.stratfor.com
Iraq, the Constitution and the Fate of a President
By George Friedman
The elections scheduled in Iraq for Dec. 15 have generated what is becoming a permanent feature of Iraqi politics. The process of establishing a constitution has become the battleground among the three major ethnic factions over the nature of political arrangements in Iraq, the distribution of power, the character of the regime and, of course, how oil revenues will be shared. Each milestone on the road to a constitution has become an occasion for intensifying both the negotiating and military process, with no milestone becoming definitive. Thus, the Oct. 15 referendum will give way to December's general elections, and today's negotiations set the stage for the next round of negotiations.
All of this can be taken two ways. One way to view it is that the Iraqi situation is fundamentally insoluble, that the various parties cannot achieve a permanent resolution to the problem. Another way of looking at it is that this process is the permanent solution: Iraq will be an endless reshuffling of a finite political deck, with no end in sight. There are other countries that live this way, and the solution is that they muddle through: politics and the state are devalued, while the rest of society -- clans, families, corporations, organized crime -- are emphasized. An Iraq with eternally shifting politics is not incompatible with the notion of a functioning society.
This assessment, of course, ignores a number of things. First, Iraq is occupied by U.S. troops. Second, there is a war going on in which the Sunnis are fighting the occupation. The Iranians are in the wings -- actually, on the stage -- trying to dominate Iraq as much as possible. A border war is raging along the Syrian frontier. A broader war involving the United States and jihadists is still sputtering along. Therefore, any hope has to be viewed through the prism of this violence, and the question is simple: can the emerging political process ultimately reduce -- "eliminate" is too much to ask -- the level of violence? Put another way, from the U.S. side, can the present political process solve the problems of occupation while yielding the political goals Washington wanted? From the jihadist side, can the uncertainty of the political process be exploited to create the conditions for what Ayman al-Zawahiri described in a recent letter: the jihadist domination of Iraq? Or, will the conflict between political goals undermine the process and create permanent war instead of permanent instability?
The core difference between this milestone and the last -- the generation of a proposed constitution for consideration by the legislature and, through this referendum, the public -- is that, whereas the last round of negotiations ended in an inability of the Shia and Kurds to reach an agreement with the Sunnis, this one has ended in an agreement of sorts. That agreement frames the situation, inasmuch as it is less an agreement than a framework for ongoing negotiations.
Some Sunni leaders have opposed any agreement or participation in the constitutional referendum; others have supported participation with a "no" vote. What appears to have been crafted between the Shia and negotiating Sunni groups is this:
If the constitution is approved, it will be a temporary, not permanent, constitution.
After a general election on Dec. 15 that would be based on this constitution, a committee of the National Assembly would review the document once again.
The new parliament would have four months to complete changes to the document.
A new vote would be held to ratify that final constitution.
In other words, the agreement that has been reached here between the Sunnis, Shia and Kurds is simply that all sides will focus on the constitutional negotiations.
That's not a bad deal, if the negotiations can encompass a large enough spectrum of each group's leadership and if everyone agrees to put other issues on hold. You can spend a lot of time debating the rules under which you will debate the issues, and you can defuse other issues if that is what everyone wants to do. The problem here is that it is not clear that this is what everyone wants.
A major Sunni organization -- the Iraqi Islamic Party -- has agreed to these rules. Other groups, at least as or more important than the Iraqi Islamic Party, have not. Neither the Association of Muslim Scholars nor the Iraqi General Conference appear at this moment to have changed their position, which is that Sunni voters should reject the new constitution. That in itself is not as alarming as it appears. The Sunnis, and other factions, are represented by several groups, and these groups sometimes play "good cop, bad cop" very effectively. The signal the Sunnis are giving is that they are not rejecting the constitutional process out of hand, but that they will need serious coaxing before the vote comes about. They are taking it down to the wire, which is the rational thing to do under the circumstances.
Three serious pressures are converging on the Sunnis. First, simply refraining from participating in the Oct. 15 referendum could free the Shia and Kurds to set up a regional federal system that would leave the Sunnis as the weakest player -- and the one with least access to future oil revenues. At the same time, the traditional Sunni leadership, deeply complicit in the Baath dictatorship, has substantial reason to fear the jihadists. The jihadists are not part of the traditional leadership and are, in fact, ideological enemies of Baathism. If the jihadists grow in strength, the traditional leadership might find itself displaced by them over time. On the other hand, agreeing to participate in the country's political process would open the Sunni leadership up to charges of being, not only lackeys of the United States, but also stooges to the hated Shia. More than any other group in Iraq, the Sunnis need for the jihadists to be defeated. On the other hand, they know they can't count on the Americans to deliver this defeat. They are under pressure to find a political solution, but also under powerful pressure not to find one. So, they churn around, generally heading toward a solution but never quite getting there.
The position of the Shia is simpler, and they have more ways of winning. If the constitution leads to a simple federalist government, the Shia will dominate southern Iraq and can deal with the Sunnis at their leisure. If a centralized government is created, the Shia will be -- with the Kurds -- the majority. The only thing the Shia can't live with is the one thing the Sunnis want: a constitution so contrived that the Sunnis can block major initiatives by the Shia.
The Kurds can live with a lot of solutions and can create informal realities based on geography and their own military strength and American backing. Their interest is less institutional than geopolitical -- they want Mosul and Kirkuk. More precisely, they want to dominate the northern oil fields and trade, and to exclude the Sunnis as far as possible from these interests. Whether that is accomplished through constitutional or business means is of less interest to them than that it be done.
The form of the constitution, therefore, matters most to the Sunnis. They need it to be written a certain way, and then to have guarantees that its provisions will be respected. At the moment, this coincides with the American interest. A radical federalism that creates a de facto Shiite state in the south is not at all in the American interest: It would have the potential to expand Iranian power in ways far more significant that a nuclear weapons program, by bringing a Shiite force -- perhaps Iraqi, or perhaps Iraqi and Iranian -- to the borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The specter of a Shiite force inciting Shiite populations in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia has always been a fear, but the possibility of the Iranian army taking up positions on the frontier would change the balance of power in the region decisively.
The countries in the Saudi peninsula are no match for the Iranians. Add in the Syrians, who long have been allies of sorts to Iran, and you get a situation in which the United States would have to retain a presence in order to protect the regional balance of power. The Saudis do not want U.S. forces in the kingdom, to say the least, and the United States does not want to be there -- it would generate even more jihadist threats. Therefore, Washington does not want to see the federal solutions favoring the Shia come into being, nor does it want to see a centralized government dominated by the Shia. Having used the Shia to contain the insurrection in the Sunni regions, the United States now finds itself aligned with the Sunnis and with the former Baath Party.
These things happen in war and geopolitics. But there are two problems here. First, the United States has made it very clear that it will be withdrawing its forces -- at least some of them -- from Iraq in 2006. Second, everyone reads U.S. polls. President George W. Bush is in political trouble in the United States and, now, within the Republican Party itself. As with Nixon and Ford found in Vietnam, following Watergate, the threat posed by the United States declines as the president's political weakness grows. And with the decline of the U.S. military threat, there is a decline of U.S. influence. Last week's discussion of air strikes inside Syria -- and the leak that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice opposed such strikes -- is an example of the problem. Where the administration had had credibility for action before, that credibility has now decreased.
The administration's political weakness does not seem to be reversing. Should Karl Rove be indicted in the Valerie Plame affair -- and at the moment, the rumors in Washington say that he will be -- the president will have lost his chief aide, and the administration will have been struck another blow.
At this moment, it is possible to make the constitutional process into a container for diverse Iraqi interests. It is also possible to see a point where the Sunni Baathists would turn on the jihadists in order to protect their political position. But all of this hinges on the guarantees that are provided by each side, and the ability and willingness of the United States to compel compliance with those guarantees. The paradox is that the most likely path to a successful withdrawal from Iraq is the perception that the United States is going to stay there forever -- and can do it. But as Bush weakens in Washington, the ability of various Iraqi factions to rely on U.S. guarantees declines.
Geopolitics teaches the interconnectedness of events. The current American strategy requires sufficient stability to be generated in Iraq to permit a U.S. military withdrawal. That requires that the United States must be taken seriously as a military force. But the weaker Bush is -- for whatever reason, fair or not -- the less credible becomes his pledge to stay the course. There are few parallels between Iraq and Vietnam save this: the political climate in Washington determines the seriousness with which American power is taken on the battlefield.
It would seem, then, that Bush has two problems. The first is whether he can stabilize and increase his power in the United States. The second is whether he can extract a clear strategy from the complexity of Iraq. The answer to the second question rests in the answer to the first. At the moment, the Iraqi constitutional talks seem to be saying, "Bush is not broken, but we aren't committing to anything until we see the polls in December."
-
October 14, 2005, 8:10 a.m.
An American ?Debacle??
More unjustified negativity on the war in Iraq.
Victor Davis Hanson
In a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed entitled ?American Debacle? Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national-security adviser to President Carter, begins with:
Some 60 years ago Arnold Toynbee concluded, in his monumental ?Study of History,? that the ultimate cause of imperial collapse was ?suicidal statecraft.? Sadly for George W. Bush's place in history and ? much more important ? ominously for America's future, that adroit phrase increasingly seems applicable to the policies pursued by the United States since the cataclysm of 9/11.
Brzezinski soon adds, ?In a very real sense, during the last four years the Bush team has dangerously undercut America's seemingly secure perch on top of the global totem pole by transforming a manageable, though serious, challenge largely of regional origin into an international debacle.?
What are we to make of all this, when a former national-security adviser writes that the war that began when Middle Eastern terrorists struck at the heart of the continental United States in New York and Washington ? something that neither the Nazis, Japanese militarists, nor Soviets ever accomplished ? was merely a ?challenge largely of regional origin??
Some ?region? ? downtown Manhattan and the nerve center of the American military.
Aside from the unintended irony that the classical historian Arnold Toynbee himself was not always ?adroit,? but wrong in most of his determinist conclusions, and that such criticism comes from a high official of an administration that witnessed on its watch the Iranian-hostage debacle, the disastrous rescue mission, the tragicomic odyssey of the terminally ill shah, the first and last Western Olympic boycott, oil hikes even higher in real dollars than the present spikes, Communist infiltration into Central America, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Cambodian holocaust, a gloomy acceptance that perpetual parity with the Soviet Union was the hope of the day, the realism that cemented our ties with corrupt autocracies in the Middle East (Orwellian sales of F-15 warplanes to the Saudis minus their extras), and the hard-to-achieve simultaneous high unemployment, high inflation, and high interest rates, Mr. Brzezinski is at least a valuable barometer of the current pessimism over events such as September 11.
Such gloom seems to be the fashion of the day. Iraq is now routinely dismissed as a quagmire or ?lost.? Osama bin laden is assumed to be still active, while we are beginning the fifth year of the war that is ?longer than World War II.? Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo purportedly are proof of our brutality and have lost us hearts and minds, while gas prices spiral out of control. The U.S. military is supposedly ?overextended? if not ?wrecked? by Iraq, while the war in Afghanistan ?drags on.? Meanwhile, it is ?only a matter of time? until we are hit with another terrorist strike of the magnitude of September 11. To cap it off, the United States is now ?disliked? abroad, by those who abhor our ?unilateralism? and ?preemptive? war.
All that is a fair summation of the current glumness.
But how accurate are such charges? If one were to assess them from the view of the Islamic fundamentalists, they would hardly resemble reality.
Many of al-Zarqawi or Dr. Zawahiri?s intercepted letters and communiqu?s reveal paranoid fears that Iraq is indeed becoming lost ? but to the terrorists. The enemy speaks of constantly shifting tactics ? try beheading contractors; no, turn to slaughtering Shiites; no, butcher teachers and school kids; no, go back to try to blow up American convoys. In contrast, we are consistent in our strategy ? go after jihadists, train Iraqi security forces, promote consensual government so Iraq becomes an autonomous republic free to determine its own future. We will leave anytime the elected government of Iraq asks us to; the terrorists won?t cease until they have rammed, Taliban-style, an 8th-century theocracy down the throats of unwilling Iraqis.
Bin Laden is in theory ?loose,? but can?t go anywhere except the wild Afghan-Pakistan border or perhaps the frontiers of Kashmir. His terrorist hierarchy is scattered, and many of his top operatives are either dead or, like him, in hiding. For all the legitimate worry over the triangulation of Pakistan, it is still safer for Americans openly to walk down the streets of Islamabad than for bin Laden. In any case, at least the former try it and the latter does not. How much food and medical supplies will bin Laden airlift in to his fellow Muslims reeling from the earthquake?
Note how al Qaeda has dropped much of its vaunted boasts to restore the caliphate over the infidel, and now excuses its violence with the plea of victimhood: ?After all this, does the prey not have the right, when bound and dragged to its slaughter, to escape? Does it not have the right, while being slaughtered, to lash out with its paw? Does it not have the right, after being slaughtered, to attack its slaughterer with its blood??
The war against the terrorists may be entering the fifth year, but despite over 2,000 combat fatalities, we have still only lost a little over 2/3s of those killed on the very first day of the war, almost 50 months ago ? quite a contrast with the over 400,000 American dead at the end of World War II. And a wrecked Japan and Germany were not on a secure path to democracy until six years after America entered the war, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan that were defeated without killing millions and already have held plebiscites on new constitutions.
Westerners, it is true, sensationalize the abuses of Abu Ghraib and perceived grievances of Guantanamo far more than they do the abject slaughtering and beheading by the enemy. Nor do Americans write much about the heroics of their own U.S. Marines in retaking Fallujah or their brave Army battalions in providing security for civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq to vote.
But our enemies still are not impressed by such a self-critical mentality, and know that a trip to Abu Ghraib does not mean either a Saddam-like torture chamber or an al Qaeda beheading, but rather far better conditions than they ever would extend to others, and often a rest of sorts between attacking Americans. As for Guantanamo, it is humane compared to any jail in the Middle East, and fundamentalists only harp on its perceived brutality since they think such invective resonates with Western opponents of America?s current policy.
Oil is the weirdest theme of the debate over the war. Opponents claim that we went there to steal or control it. But after we arrived, as in the case of 1991 when we had the entire mega-reserves of Kuwait in our grasp, we turned it back over to the local owners, ensuring that for the first time in decades a transparent Iraqi government ? not the French, not the Russians, not the Baathists, not the Saddam kleptocracy ? now controls its own petroleum. The more the terrorists talk about Western theft of their national heritage, the more OPEC gouges the industrialized world and sends its billions in petrodollars abroad to foreign banks.
The story of the war since September 11 is that the United States military has not lost a single battle, has removed two dictatorships, and has birthed democracy in the Middle East. During Katrina, critics suggested troops in Iraq should have been in New Orleans, but that was a political, not a realistic complaint: few charged that there were too many thousands abroad in Germany, Italy, the U.K., Korea, or Japan when they should have been in Louisiana.
Afghanistan is nearing the status of the Balkans ? after nearly four, not eight years of peacekeeping to keep down the remnants of fascism while democracy takes root. And Afghanistan was a war (like Iraq) approved by the U.S. Senate and House ? unlike Mr. Clinton?s bombing of Serbia.
The enemy seems frustrated that it cannot repeat September 11 here in the United States. Hundreds of terrorists have been arrested, and direction from a central al Qaeda leadership has been lost. Killing jihadists in Afghanistan and Iraq has, as their communiqu?s show, put terrorists on the defensive ? understandable after losing sympathetic governments like the Taliban.
We have made plenty of mistakes since September 11, often failed to articulate our goals and values, and turned on each other in perpetual acrimony. Federal spending is out of control, and our present energy policy won?t wean us off Middle Eastern petroleum for years. But still lost in all this conundrum is that the old appeasement of the 1990s is over, the terrorists are losing both tactically and strategically, and, as Tony Blair said of the evolving Western mentality, ?The rules of the game are changing.?
Finally, we need to be systematic in our appraisal of the course of this war, asking not just whether the United States is more popular and better liked, but rather whether Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, and Egypt are moving in the right or wrong direction. Is Europe more or less attuned to the dangers of radical Islam, and more or less likely to work with the United States? Is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute getting worse or stabilizing? Is our security at home getting better, and do we understand radical Islam more or less perfectly? Are Middle East neutrals like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan more or less helpful in the war against the terrorists? Are global powers like India and Japan more or less inclined to America? And are clear-cut enemies such as Iran and Syria becoming more or less emboldened or facing ostracism?
If we look at all these questions dispassionately, and tune out the angry rhetoric on the extreme Left and Right, then we can see things are becoming better rather than worse ? even as the media and now the public itself believes that a successful strategy is failing.
And as for Mr. Brzezinski?s indictment ? most of us still would prefer the United States of 2005 to the chaotic America of 1977-80 under an administration that did little to confront the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, which began in earnest on its watch with the real debacle in Tehran.
? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His book A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War appears this month.
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200510140810.asp
-
October 13, 2005
An Honest Missive
Zawahiri boasts strategy for "victory of Islam."
by Bruce Thornton
Private Papers
The website of the Director of National Intelligence just published a letter from Al Qaeda?s number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head-terrorist in Iraq. This document repays careful reading, for it explodes much of the received wisdom many people rely on in making sense of jihadist terror.
According to this standard interpretation, Islamic terror is the handiwork of a fanatic minority that has ?highjacked? and distorted Islamic doctrine. These medieval throwbacks gain traction from the political autocracy and oppression that dominate the Muslim governments in the Middle East, regimes that cannot provide the freedom and prosperity that would eliminate the frustration and despair breeding terrorist violence. The leftist variation of this analysis lays the blame on Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, and Western, particularly American, imperialist and colonialist misdeeds in the region. Either way, the underlying assumption is that jihadist terror is a sort of cultural neurosis arising in reaction to political or material circumstances. Thus the cure for the terrorist ?disease? must be found in improving those circumstances: installing democratic governments or compelling Israel to surrender Judea and Samaria (aka the ?occupied West Bank?) so that a Palestinian state can be created.
Zawahiri?s letter, however, offers little that squares with this received wisdom. Its shrewd analysis and careful argument are the signs not of a wild-eyed religious fanatic but of a thinker shaped by his religion?s history and spiritual imperatives. Indeed, Zawahiri is very clear about the traditional jihadist motivation, one that is not a mere reaction to Western misdeeds or a distortion of Islam, but rather squarely in its history and traditional values: the eventual triumph of the true faith over ?atheism? and ?polytheism,? the latter term code for Christianity. Thus the struggle in Iraq is the site of ?the greatest battle of Islam in this era,? another in a long series of ?epic battles between Islam and atheism.? However, in Zawahiri?s analysis, ?the victory of Islam will never take place until a Muslim state is established in the manner of the Prophet in the heart of the Islamic world.? For only then can the caliphate ultimately be reestablished: ?The goal in this age,? Zawahiri writes, ?is the establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet.? The terror of the insurgents in Iraq is a ?large step directly towards that goal.?
Rather than a localized response to American-Zionist imperial adventurism, then, the insurgency in Iraq according to Zawahiri is merely the means to achieving the first of several ?incremental goals? aimed at the eventual establishment of the caliphate throughout the ?heart of the Islamic world,? that is the whole Middle East. The first ?goal? is to ?expel the Americans from Iraq? as a necessary precondition to creating ?an Islamic authority or amirate [province],? one that will have no truck with infidel Western notions of secular democracy or human rights. Note well: the insurgents are murdering and maiming not in reaction to Abu Graib, not to forestall Western control over oil reserves, not out of frustration with Israel?s defensive wall, not for any of the reasons we in the West cook up out of our own materialist prejudices, but for a spiritual goal: the fulfillment of Allah?s will that the traditional lands once conquered by his armies and subjected to Islam be restored to rule by adherents of the true faith.
After this goal is achieved, the ?third stage? will involve expanding ?the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq.? And then will come the final stage: ?the clash with Israel.? Zawahiri?s references to Israel are significant, and make clear that despite years of propaganda in which Palestinian frustrated ?nationalist aspirations? are trotted out as excuses for murder, it is Israel?s very existence, no matter what it does, that makes its elimination necessary. As Zawahiri puts it, Palestine is the ?heart? of a ?bird? whose wings are Syria and Egypt. The Western powers understood the strategic importance of this location for destroying the unity of the Muslim-Arab world; hence, ?they did not establish Israel in this triangle surrounded by Egypt and Syria and overlooking the Hijaz [western Saudi Arabia containing Mecca and Medina] except for their own interests.?
In other words, Israel is simply a weapon in the war of the infidel against Islam, an outpost of the West as much as were the medieval Crusader kingdoms, a state ?established only to challenge any new Islamic entity.? That is why Israel must go, not because it has prevented the Palestinians from creating a state. Indeed, Zawahiri implicitly rejects the ?nationalist? interpretation of the struggle against Israel: ?It is strange that the Arab nationalists also have, despite their avoidance of Islamic practice, come to comprehend the great importance of this province [Palestine] . . . They have come to comprehend the goal of planting Israel in this region, and they are not misled in this, rather they have admitted their ignorance of the religious nature of this conflict.?
Nor is this interpretation the idiosyncratic obsession of a crank, as the existence of numerous Palestinian jihadist terror organizations attests. The West?s failure to recognize that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an episode in the centuries-long spiritual struggle between Islam and the ?infidels? continues to this day, as we see with the vast hopes pinned on Mahmoud Abbas and democratic elections, all the while organizations like Hamas, committed like Zawahiri to the destruction of Israel, continue to enjoy significant support among Palestinian Arabs and to function as an autonomous state-within-a-state. The creation of a Palestinian state, then, is merely a stage towards that eventual ?clash with Israel? Zawahiri speaks of. Until we recognize this spiritual motivation and compel the presumed ?moderates? who sincerely reject it to act on their beliefs ?? more bluntly, to destroy the armed terrorists?? there will be no solution to that crisis that does not leave Israel vulnerable.
Zawahiri understands that the pursuit of this traditional Islamic goal must take place in a modern world in which the infidels have an overwhelming military superiority. This means that the struggle must be carried on at the psychological and perceptual level as well. He understands that ?half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media? in a ?race for the hearts and minds of our Umma [the whole Muslim community].? Suicide attacks on Shiites in Iraq, then, are condemned not on moral or religious grounds, but as tactical errors in the battle for ?hearts and minds.? Why a gory beheading when ?we can kill the captives by a bullet. That would achieve that which is sought after without exposing ourselves to the questions and answering to doubts.? As we have seen repeatedly in Israel, terrorist murder is condemned on tactical, not moral, grounds. Always the larger goal, the restoration of Islamic dominance, is the only standard by which to judge any action.
Finally, Zawahiri makes it clear that the Islamic arrogant assurance of its spiritual superiority and righteousness is validated by the corresponding spiritual dysfunction of an American society that puts material comfort and security ahead of everything else. Zawahiri?s confidence that the ?Americans will exit soon,? as he puts it, and so planning should commence for the political order that will arise upon their departure, is confirmed for him historically by Vietnam: ?The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam ?? and how they ran and left their agents ?? is noteworthy.? Indeed it is, but not for the false ?quagmire? analogy trotted out periodically by those opposed to the war in Iraq. Rather, the significance of Vietnam lies in how the United States, as a South Vietnamese defense minister put it, ?snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.?
In other words, military power may have succeeded in turning back the North Vietnamese, but political and moral weakness undid all the gains earned by the sacrifice of 60,000 American lives and millions of Vietnamese. As Zawahiri indicates, the lesson was learned by our enemies: make enough Americans uncomfortable, disturb their leisure and sensibilities with enough grisly images helpfully broadcast by their own media, and eventually they will cut and run. And indeed, if we were to abandon Iraq after suffering there about the same number of deaths as we did in two months in Vietnam, such abandonment would confirm for the jihadists their estimation of our spiritual corruption.
Over and over the jihadist enemy tells us why he wants to kill us, and over and over we dismiss his words or reduce them to our own categories. Paralyzed by our fear of being ?insensitive? to cultural differences, and deluded by our materialist preconceptions that reduce religion to an expression of some more ?real? cause, we refuse to name clearly the enemy: an Islamic faith that for centuries has killed, enslaved, plundered, ravaged, and conquered in the service of its arrogant assurance of its spiritual superiority.
http://victorhanson.com/articles/thornton101305.html
-
Nalchik: The 9/11 That Wasn't
October 19, 2005 22 59 GMT
By Fred Burton
Russian military forces are continuing mop-up operations in Nalchik, a city in the Caucasus region where Islamist militants last week staged a series of coordinated attacks -- signaling attempts to widen the Chechen conflict to other parts of Russia. The incident, which burst into the international news Oct. 13, is significant on several levels -- not least of which was the much-improved counterterrorism response by Russian forces, without which the raids conceivably might have expanded into something approaching the Sept. 11 attacks in terms of geopolitical impact.
As it happens, the events that took place involved some 100 to 150 armed militants, who attempted to seize control of the airport at Nalchik while also assaulting police stations, government offices and the regional headquarters of the Russian prison system, among other targets. All told, about 100 people were killed -- more than 60 of them militants, and roughly equal numbers of security forces and civilians. That's hardly what anyone would term a "minor incident," but compared to other attacks by Chechen militants -- such as the school hostage crisis in Beslan in 2004 or a similar event at a Moscow theater in 2002 -- the Russian response was swifter and the outcome much better.
This is not due to dumb luck: The response logically stems from drastically improved intelligence-gathering and targeting priorities in Russian counterterrorism strategies, which underwent a sea change following the Beslan incident. In fact, there is reason to believe that the militants who planned the attacks in Nalchik (an operation that has been claimed by Moscow's arch-enemy, Shamil Basayev) actually were forced into carrying out their operation prematurely, after Russian intelligence got wind of a much larger and more chilling plot -- one combining all the most deadly tactics of both Sept. 11 and Beslan.
Russian military contacts and other sources have told us that the events in Nalchik apparently were supposed to be only the first phase of a plan that ultimately was to include flying explosives-laden aircraft into high-profile targets elsewhere in Russia. Though the exact targets have not been confirmed, sources say possible targets included the Kremlin, a military district headquarters and railway hub in Rostov-on-Don, a nuclear plant in the vicinity of Saratov, and a hydroelectric plant or dam on the Volga. Sources also say the militants had a back-up plan that would have involved mining important government buildings and taking hostages -- tactics the Chechens have used in other headline-grabbing attacks.
Intelligence from human sources is rarely golden: Analysts always must play the skeptic and filter out the sources' own motives for providing the information -- and in this case, the Russian military certainly has reason to want to appear to have pre-empted a catastrophe. In this case, the list of possible targets reads like a laundry list of nightmare scenarios that have been widely discussed, in the U.S. context, since Sept. 11 -- so, admittedly, it is not much of a stretch to assume such assets also could be targeted in Russia. That said, the Nalchik incident fits into wider trend that we have been following in the Chechen/Islamist insurgency for more than a year, and the target sets make sense for what is becoming an increasingly Wahhabist-dominated campaign in Russian territory.
The events on the ground also seem to bear out the sourced intelligence: The militants opened their attack with attempts to seize the airport in Nalchik, where -- had they not been beaten back by Russian forces already guarding the target -- they would have been able to commandeer the aircraft needed for follow-on operations. The incidents in other parts of the city, which were closely time-coordinated but appear to have involved poorly trained recruits, are believed to have been intended as distractions -- drawing attention and Russian security forces away from the strategically crucial airport.
The fact that the follow-on attacks were more or less quickly put down, with (relatively) small loss of life, also fits the notion of a busted operation. Reportedly, the grand plot was to have been carried out on Oct. 17, with a force of about 700 militants -- most of whom had not yet moved into Nalchik when the Russians began taking action. The entire plan apparently started to unravel nearly 10 days in advance: Acting on tips from local residents, Russian forces arrested two suspected militants -- who reportedly confessed to planning attacks -- as early as Oct. 8.
Accepting, then, that the intelligence concerning the shape of the plot is credible, we have an operation that, if carried to fruition, would have mirrored Sept. 11 in many respects -- opening up a new front in the global jihadist war and, conceivably, could have reinvigorated the organized Islamist militancy in other parts of the world.
Considering Basayev's claims of responsibility for the Nalchik plot, that clearly seems to have been the intent. Basayev, it must be remembered, is the Chechen commander who has authored many of the most horrific terrorist incidents in Russia. Attacks like those at Beslan and the Moscow theater, and hostage-takings at hospitals and other soft targets typically have resulted in hundreds of deaths at a time -- both before and during the bloody responses by Russian security forces. To say that Basayev has a penchant for grand, showy schemes would be something of an understatement.
Operationally speaking, that trait seems to undermine his effectiveness as a militant leader -- and, in fact, eventually could be his undoing. The fact that that has not yet happened points more toward particular aspects of the political conflict between the Chechen/Islamist insurgents and Moscow than to best practices taught in Terrorism 101.
Under those principles, the most effective forms of attack are those that are simple yet ruthless: They require few resources, and operatives practice airtight "need-to-know" communications. The fewer people who know about a plan -- or have access to more details than they need in order to carry out their own part -- the less likely the plan is to leak out and be pre-empted. Except for the fact that Basayev has, for the most part, operated in territory where locals have supported at least some aspects of the militant campaign against Russian rule, it is nothing short of amazing that he and his cast of thousands have succeeded to the degree that they have.
But the amount of local support Basayev still is able to command has become something of a question mark, as Chechens themselves have grown weary of the death and destruction in their war. It is said that, partly because of this, Basayev increasingly has surrounded himself with Wahhabi militants -- including some Saudi commanders -- and is seeking ways to export the campaign from the Muslim-dominated Caucasus republics into Russia proper.
All of this seems logical: Judging from details of the Nalchik plot and others within the past year, Basayev appears intent on mimicking elements of the Sept. 11 attacks -- indicating that he at least is studying and learning from al Qaeda, even if he is not intimately linked to it. At the very least, his emerging fixation with air assets is reminiscent of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- another tactical genius with a penchant for spectacular strikes.
Both the Nalchik operation and the wider plot, had it been carried out, would have mirrored Sept. 11 in other ways as well: Multiple targets, representing a mix of both hard (government installations) and soft (civilian infrastructure) nodes, might have been struck -- maximizing the political, economic and sheer terror value of the strikes. The plot shows high degrees of strategic planning and, as a result, could have been designed to inspire audiences in the Muslim world -- whether that world is defined to include Russia's Muslim-majority provinces or other regions.
It is important to note here that, though Sept. 11 has become the gold standard for "effective" terrorist attacks, we and others believe that even al Qaeda likely was stunned by its success. The plot was redundant in most aspects: two economic facilities (the World Trade Center towers) and two government facilities (the Pentagon and, it is believed, the Capitol) were targeted, building in a margin of error for planners who likely never expected three of the four aircraft to strike their targets. Similarly, Basayev appears to be hatching redundant plots, so that operations can still be politically and economically effective even if some aspects of the mission fail.
But at Nalchik, almost the entire operation failed before it could get off the ground. The points of failure appear to rest in two areas.
First, there is evidence that Basayev used some and ill-prepared operatives in Nalchik -- rather than highly trained and ruthlessly efficient cells, like those that carried out the 9/11 attacks. The assailants acted in groups of five men. Typical al Qaeda operations use four-man cells, in which each member plays a specific and crucial role. Larger cells appear to be the norm in Chechen operations -- partly because this allows commanders to play a greater role on the ground, but also perhaps because strikes often include local militants who have been poorly trained. This can be a mixed blessing. For instance, we saw in Beslan would-be suicide bombers who ran away; in Nalchik, some of the fighters -- many of whom were well-equipped -- fired their weapons while running toward their targets (a tactic very likely to draw return fire and get them killed). The use of larger cells allows for this kind of attrition without endangering the mission, but it also brings into the mix local operatives who have supreme area knowledge -- and thus are able to identify launching points and escape routes with lower operational overhead.
Second, and crucially, there was poor operational security in Nalchik. In short, someone snitched, and the op was blown. The snitch could have been someone motivated by the bounties Moscow now is offering for intelligence targeting Chechen commanders, or a mole who has infiltrated the militants' ranks, or perhaps a local parent who overhead a conversation between teenagers -- or all of the above. Given the hundreds of people who, according to sources, ultimately would have taken part in the plot, anything is possible. The point is, a lot of people were in the know, and COMSEC -- communications security -- was next to impossible.
At this point, the Russians have to be feeling both relieved and shaken, asking the inevitable "What if?" Basayev certainly has the means and ability to hatch grandiose plots that, if effectively executed, would have serious geopolitical implications -- and, of course, he is alive and free to fight another day. On the other hand, his soaring ambition -- combined with the obviously improved intelligence capabilities and response strategies of the Russian forces -- could be his undoing.
-
The Al-Zawahiri Letter and the Coming Jihadist Fracture
Editor's Note: This is the final report in a three-part analysis of the controversial Ayman al-Zawahiri letter.
The controversial letter from Ayman al-Zawahiri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- which we believe is authentic despite certain apparent discrepancies -- not only provides insights into the inner workings of the global jihadist movement, but also suggests that it is fast reaching an impasse. As a result, the bulk of the movement will either continue to seek guidance and leadership from Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri or it will attempt to assume a more political face. Should politics prevail, al-Zarqawi's proven ability to lead successful attacks will catapult him into a leadership role -- and make him a rival to his current brothers-in-arms. It is too early to say which way the pendulum will swing, but one is thing is certain: The jihadist ranks have begun to fracture.
The U.S. war against jihadism, both its military and political components, is responsible for the jihadists' current situation -- they realize that they cannot continue much longer on the path they have taken since before Sept. 11, 2001. Until the attacks, Western governments, especially the United States, viewed the jihadists as a low-intensity regional terrorist phenomenon that could be handled by law enforcement. Meanwhile, even as some governments in the Muslim world were colluding with jihadists because of their own foreign and domestic policy needs, the Muslim masses were ignoring them or, in some cases, flirting with them -- not realizing that these transnational Islamist militants posed a security threat for Muslims as well.
All of this allowed al Qaeda and its jihadist allies to flourish, while no outside factor required them to re-evaluate their course of action. Furthermore, their clear objectives and ability to move ahead with their plans created a general harmony within the ranks as regards their ideology, objectives and policies.
That situation no longer exists. Not only have the jihadists suffered physical losses in terms of men, money and infrastructure, but they also have been challenged at the intellectual and ideological level -- even from within. Like any political actor faced with both external and internal threats, they are being forced to deal with issues of credibility, relevance and the survivability of their organization and its cause.
Subjected to a rude awakening, the Muslim world also is taking stock -- albeit gradually -- of the problems the jihadists have created. The Muslim masses, which never supported the jihadists even before Sept. 11, are now less and less willing to ignore them or try to use them to their advantage. Meanwhile, moderate Muslims have started coming to the fore, shrinking the jihadists' potential pool of support. This has caused al Qaeda to take a hard look at its ideology as well as its methods -- and to realize that it is way behind the curve when it comes to politics.
In other words, the leadership understands that the network's military accomplishments have not translated into political support from the masses -- even though they are desperately trying to pull Muslim public opinion toward their cause. The mainstream Muslim world, however, has become far too nuanced to accept their manifesto.
This is why we see al-Zawahiri, in his letter, trying to convince al-Zarqawi of the need for a more savvy political approach rather than the sole reliance on attacks. He is saying that, if al Qaeda is to become a competitive player, it needs to gain popular support, tolerate the Shia, use the ideology card judiciously and understand that the bulk of Muslims (especially the ulema) do not share the Wahhabi ideology.
Al-Zawahiri also urges al-Zarqawi to moderate his Wahhabi views in order to placate the non-Wahhabi Sunni majority in Iraq and the larger Muslim world. In this regard, he urges al-Zarqawi against alienating the religious scholars who may not share al Qaeda's doctrinal and juristic positions.
Al-Zawahiri points to the example of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, saying that he has been a steadfast supporter of the cause despite his "Hanafi adherence, Matridi doctrine." He also reminds al-Zarqawi of the fate of the lone Wahhabi/Salafi Afghan group that fought the Soviets in the late 1980s, and its leader, Jamil-ur-Rehman, who sought to establish his emirate based on strict Wahhabi ideas in Afghanistan's Kunar province. In the end, stronger non-Wahhabi Afghan Islamist forces killed Jamil-ur-Rehman -- and his organization crumbled.
He also urges al-Zarqawi against appearing the cruel terrorist by carrying out and broadcasting hostage executions. "Among the things which the feelings of the Muslim populace who love and support you will never find palatable . . . are the scenes of slaughtering the hostages," he writes. "You shouldn't be deceived by the praise of some of the zealous young men and their description of you as the sheikh of the slaughterers, etc. They do not express the general view of the admirer and the supporter of the resistance in Iraq, and of you in particular."
Al-Zawahiri also tries to dissuade al-Zarqawi from interpreting too literally the Koran verses that ask Muslims to strike terror in the hearts of non-Muslims. He then refers to the death of his wife and daughter in the battle of Tora Bora as "American brutality." This is an attempt to pre-empt any misconception on al-Zarqawi's part that the jihadist leadership has gone soft, and also to point out that he has suffered personally.
Quickly he turns to a discussion of the importance of good public relations, reminding al-Zarqawi that "more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media . . . we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our ummah" (global Muslim nation). He also acknowledges the asymmetry in public relations capabilities between the jihadists and those they battle. Al-Zawahiri says, ". . . however far our capabilities reach, they will never be equal to one-thousandth of the capabilities of the kingdom of Satan that is waging war on us."
And realizing that Muslims primarily identify with a nation-state -- as opposed to the notion of an Islamic ummah -- al-Zawahiri carefully tries to get the Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi to accept that it would be better for an Iraqi to serve as a figurehead and for al-Zarqawi to control his movement from behind the scenes. He warns that "the assumption of leadership for the mujahideen ? by non-Iraqis" could "stir up sensitivity for some people," and he asks al-Zarqawi to consider how that sensitivity might be overcome "while preserving the commitment of the jihadist work and without exposing it to any shocks."
The letter suggests that al-Zawahiri wishes for continued U.S. actions against Muslims -- which would sustain the anti-American sentiment within the Muslim world and thus allow the jihadists to be seen as the only force "defending" the Muslims. In this way, he believes, the jihadists can try to regain lost ground. He also expresses surprise that secular nationalist forces have begun to view the occupation of Iraq as troublesome and are beginning to feel the need for action against the U.S. military.
Above all, the al-Zawahiri letter is an acknowledgement of significant internal stress within the jihadist movement and the need to re-evaluate the gravity of the situation with an eye toward taking a more rational approach to ideology, objectives and policies. The movement, then, is set to splinter -- and some within it could even take more moderate stances (as many of the Gamaa al-Islamiyah jihadists of Egypt did in the late 1990s and early 2000s). Depending on how the United States executes its war on terrorism, the changes to come eventually could take the sting out of the jihadist threat.
-
Kissinger:
At some point in Washington the most important decision will have
to be taken. The question is who will get the upper hand: those who believe in regime change or those who favor negotiations? But let me make one important point: I was involved in decision-making processes when there were two superpowers. At that time one could be pretty sure that both sides would exert the same amount of restraint before starting an atomic war. And on top of that just imagine what complicated thought processes both went through trying to work out the opponent's possible behavior. The whole system of international relations is going to have to change. We have to bear this in mind when looking at Iran. The democratic countries have to keep an eye on the consequences of the spread of nuclear weapons and ask themselves what they would have done if the Madrid bombs had been nuclear. Or if the attackers in New York had used nuclear weapons, or if 50,000 people had died in New Orleans in a nuclear attack. The world would look very different than
it does today. So we have to ask ourselves how much energy we want to put into fighting the problem of further proliferation of nuclear weapons.
-
Syria, Iran and the Power Plays over Iraq
By George Friedman
In assessing the current phase of events in the Middle East, it is essential to link events in Syria with events in Iran. These, in turn, must be linked to the state of the war in Iraq and conditions in the Arabian Peninsula. The region is of one fabric, to say the least, and it is impossible to understand unfolding events -- the pressure against Syria involving the murder of a former Lebanese prime minister; feints and thrusts with Iran and talk of direct political engagement with the United States; the emergence of a new government in Baghdad, or obstacles to one -- without viewing them as one package.
Let's begin with two facts. Since the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Tehran has had close collaborative ties with Damascus. These have not been constant, nor have they been without strains and duplicity. Nevertheless, the entente between Iran and Syria has been a key element. Second, one of the many goals behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq was to position U.S. forces in such a way as to change a series of relationships between Islamic countries, not the least of which was the Iranian-Syrian relationship. Therefore, to understand what is going on, we must look at this as a "key player" game (Syria, Iran and the United States), with a serious of interested onlookers (Europe, China, Russia, Israel), and a series of extremely anxious onlookers (the states on the Arabian peninsula in particular).
The Roots of Alliance
Let's begin with the issue of what bound the Iranians and Syrians together. One part was ideological: Syria is ruled by a minority of Alawites, a Shiite offshoot that is at odds with Sunni Islam. Iran, a Shiite state, also confronts the Sunnis. Therefore, in religious terms, Syria under the Assads had a common interest with Iran. Second, both states were anti-Zionists. Syria, as a front-line state, confronted Israel alone after Egypt's Anwar Sadat signed the accords at Camp David. Iran, ideologically, saw itself as a committed enemy of Israel. Syria looked to Iran for support against Israel, and Iran used that support to validate its credential among other states -- Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia -- that were either collaborationist or merely symbolic in their opposition to Israel's existence. Syria and Iran could help each other, in other words, to position themselves both against Israel and within the Islamic world.
But ideology was not the glue that held them together: that was Saddam Hussein. Syria's Assad and Iraq's Saddam grew out of the same ideological soil -- that of Baath socialism, a doctrine that drew together pan-Arabism with economies dominated by the state. But rather than forming a solid front stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, the Iraqi and Syrian brands of Baathism split into two bitterly opposed movements. That difference had less to do with interest than with distrust between two dynastic presidents. Syria and Iraq had few common interests and were competing with each other economically. The relationship was, to say the least, murderous -- if not on a national level, then on a personal one. It never broke into open war because neither side had much to gain from a war. It was hatred short of war.
Not so between Iraq and Iran. When Iraq invaded Iran following the Islamic Revolution, a war lasting nearly a decade ensued. It was a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives -- making it, for the size of the nations involved, one of the most brutal wars of the 20th century, and that is saying something. The issue here was fundamental. Iran and Iraq historically were rivals for domination of the Persian Gulf. The other countries of the Arabian Peninsula could not match either in military strength. Thus, each had an interest in becoming the dominant Persian Gulf power -- not only to control the oil, but to check the political power that Saudi Arabia had as a result of oil. So long as both were viable, the balance of power prevented domination by either. Should either win the war, there would be no native power to resist them. Thus, each side not only feared the other, but also had a great deal to gain through victory.
The Iranians badly wanted the Syrians to join in the war, creating a two-front conflict. Syria didn't. It was confronted by Israel on the one side and Turkey, another tense rival, on the other. Should its forces get bogged down fighting the Iraqis, the results could be catastrophic. Besides, while the Syrians had serious issues with Iraq, their true interests rested in Lebanon. The Syrians have always argued, with some justification, that Lebanon was torn from Syrian territory by the Sykes-Picot agreements between France and Britain following World War II. Nationalism aside, the Syrian leadership had close -- indeed, intimate -- economic relationships in Lebanon. It is important to recall that when Syria invaded Lebanon in 1975, it was in opposition to the Palestinians and in favor of Maronite Christian families, with whom the Alawites had critical business and political relations. It was -- and is -- impossible to think of Lebanon except in the context of Syria.
A Delicate Web of Relations
It was Damascus' fundamental interest for Lebanon to be informally absorbed into a greater Syria. Damascus used many tools, many relationships, many threats, many opportunities to weave a relationship with Lebanon and extend Syrian influence throughout the state. One of those tools was Hezbollah, an Islamist Shiite militia heavily funded and supported by Iran. From the Syrian point of view, Hezbollah had many uses. For one thing, it put a more secular Shiite group, the Amal movement under Nabih Berri, on the defensive. For another, it helped to put the Bekaa Valley, a major smuggling route for drugs and other commodities, under Syrian domination. Finally, it allowed Syria to pose a surrogate threat to Israel, retaining its anti-Zionist credentials without directly confronting Israel and incurring the risk of retaliation.
For Iran, Hezbollah was a means for asserting its claim on leadership of radical Islam while putting orthodox Sunnis, like the Saudis, in an uncomfortable position. Iran was fighting Israel via Hezbollah and building structures for a revolutionary Islam, while the dominant Sunnis were collaborating with the supporters of Israel, the United States. Hezbollah was, for the Iranians, a low-risk, high-payoff investment. In addition, it opened the door for financial benefits in the Wild West of Lebanon.
Both Iran and Syria maintained complex relations with both the United States and Israel. For example, Syria and Israel -- formally at war -- developed during the 1980s and 1990s complex protocols for preventing confrontation. Neither wanted a war with the other. The Syrians helped keep Hezbollah operations within limits and maintained security structures in such a way that Israel did not have to wage a major conventional war against Syria after 1982. There was far more intelligence-sharing and business deal-making than either Jerusalem or Damascus would want to admit. Lebanon recovered from its civil war and prospered -- as did Syrian and Israeli businessmen.
Iran also had complex relations with Washington. During the Iran-Iraq war, the United States found it in its interests to maintain a balance of power between Baghdad and Tehran. It did not want either to win. Toward this end, as Iran weakened, the United States arranged to provide military aid to Tehran -- not surprisingly, through Israel. Israel had maintained close relations with the Iranian military during the Shah's rule, and not really surprisingly, those endured under the Ayatollah Khomeini as well. Khomeini wanted to defeat Saddam Hussein more than anything. His military needed everything from missiles to spare parts, and the United States was prepared to use Israeli channels to supply them. It must always be remembered that the Iran-contra affair was not only about Central America. It was also -- and far more significantly -- about selling weapons to Iran via the Israelis.
Intersection: Iraq
Now, if we go back up to 50,000 feet, we will see the connecting tissue in all these relationships: Iraq. There were plenty of side issues. But the central issue was that everyone hated Iraq. No one wanted Iraq to get nuclear weapons. We have always wondered about Iran's role in Israel's destruction of the Osirak reactor in 1981; but no matter here. The point is that the containment of Iraq was in everyone's interest. Indeed, the United States merely wanted to contain Iraq, whereas Iran, Syria and Israel all had an interest in destroying it.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq was in the direct interest of two countries, in addition to the United States: Iran and Israel. Other countries had a more ambiguous response. The Saudis, for example, were as terrified of Iran as of Iraq. They, more than anyone, wanted to see the balance of power maintained and viewed the American invasion as threatening to their interests.
Syria's position was the most complex.
Syria had joined the coalition fighting Saddam Hussein during Desert Storm -- at least symbolically. The Syrians had complex motives, but they did not want the United States interfering with their interests in Lebanon and saw throwing in with the coalition as a means of assuring a benign U.S. policy. At the same time, Syria was in the most precarious strategic position of any country in the region. Sandwiched between Israel, Turkey and Iraq, it lived on the lip of a volcano. The outcome of Desert Storm was perfect for the Syrians: It castrated Iraq without destroying it. Thus, Damascus needed to deal with only two threats: Israel, which had grown comfortable with its position in Lebanon, and Turkey, which was busy worrying about its Kurdish problem. In general, with some exceptions, the 1990s were as good as it got for Syria.
The U.S. invasion in 2003 upset the equation. Now Syria was surrounded by enemies on all sides again, but this time one of the enemies was the United States -- and immediately at the end of conventional military operations, the United States rushed forces to the Iraq-Syria border, threatening hot pursuit of the fleeing Baathists. The Syrians had not calculated the American intervention, having believed claims by Saudi Arabia and France that the United States would not invade without their approval. Now Syria was in trouble.
Syria and Iran: A Parallel Play
For the Iranians, this was the golden moment. Their dream was of a pro-Iranian Iraq -- or, alternatively, for Iraq's Shiite region to be independent and pro-Iranian, or at least to have a neutral Iraq. The Sunni rising put the Iranians in a perfect position: Using their influence among the Shia, they held the cards that the Americans had dealt them. They adopted a strategy of waiting and spinning complex webs.
The Syrians saw themselves in a much less advantageous position. They were in their worst-case scenario. They could not engage the United States directly, of course. But the only satisfactory outcome to their dilemma was to divert U.S. attention from them or, barring that, so complicate the Americans' position that they would be prevented from making any aggressive moves toward Syria. What Damascus needed was a strong guerrilla war to tie the Americans down.
The Syrians hated the Iraqi Baathists, but they now had two interests in common: First, a guerrilla war in Iraq would help to protect Syria as well as the Baathists' interests; and second, the Iraqis were paying cash for Syrian support -- and the Syrians like cash. They had been selling services to the Iraqis during the run-up to the war, and once the war was over, they continued to do so. The strategy proved rational: Syrian support for the Sunni guerrillas and jihadists was important in bogging the Americans down.
The Iranians liked it too. The more bogged down the Americans were in the Sunni region, the more dependent they were on the Shia. At the very least, they urgently needed Iraq's Shia not to rise up. At most, they wanted the Shia to form the core of a new government. From the Iranian point of view, the Sunni guerrillas were despicable as the enemies of Shiite Iran and yet were the perfect tool to increase their control over the Americans.
Thus, as before, Syria and Iran were engaged in parallel play. They shared a natural interest in a weak Iraq. If the United States was the dominant power in Iraq, then they wanted the United States to be the weak power. For a very long time, the United States was unable to get out of the way of the complexities it had created. It used the Iranian Shia and then, when trying to pull away from them, would stumble and return to dependence. And while Iraqi and Iranian Shia are not the same by any means, in this particular case, both had the same interest: increased leverage over the Americans.
The United States had two possible strategies. The key to controlling Iraq lay in ending the guerrilla war. One part of the guerrilla war -- not all -- was in Syria. The United States could invade Syria -- not a good idea, given available forces. It could ask Israel to do it -- which would be a bad move politically, nor was it clear that Israel wanted to do this. Or, it could use a strategy of indirection.
The Situation at Hand
The thing that Syria wants more than anything is Lebanon. The United States has set in motion policies designed to force Syria out of Lebanon. It is not that the United States really cares who dominates Lebanon -- in fact, its Israeli allies rather like the control that Syria has introduced there. Nevertheless, by threatening its core interests, the United States could, leaders thought, begin to leverage Syria.
The Syrians were obviously not going to go quietly into that good night -- not with billions at stake. The assassination of Rafik al-Hariri was the answer. Even when Syria drew its overt military forces out of Lebanon, covert force remained there perpetually. The result of the assassination, however, was overwhelming pressure on Syria -- coupled with a not-too-convincing threat of the use of force by the United States.
For Iran, the fate of Syria is not a major national interest. The future of Iraq is. Iran's view of events in Iraq is divided into three parts: First, a belief that Syria is an important but not decisive source of support for the Sunni guerillas; second, the view that the United States has already maneuvered itself into a de facto alliance with a faction of Iraq's Sunnis; and finally, the belief that Iran's interests in Iraq were not endangered by evolving politics in Lebanon.
The most important feature of the landscape at this moment is the decision by Iran that it is time to move toward direct discussions with the United States. To be sure, the United States and Iran have been talking informally for years about a variety of things, including Iraq. But this week, the Iranian foreign minister did two things. First, he stated that the time was not yet right for talks with the United States -- while acknowledging that talks through intermediaries had taken place. And second, he described the conditions under which discussions might occur. In short, he set the stage for talks between Washington and Tehran to move into the public eye.
It appears at this point that Iran has taken note of the U.S. pressure against Syria and is adjusting for it. However, what is holding up progress on public talks between the United States and Iran are not the reasons stated by the foreign minister -- doubts about Washington's integrity and unclarity about its goals -- but rather, the status of the presidency in Washington. Support for President George W. Bush is running at 39 percent in the polls. He still hasn't bounced upward, and he still hasn't collapsed. He is balanced on the thin edge of the knife. Indictments in the Plame investigation might come this week, which would be pivotal. If Bush collapses, there is no point in talks for Tehran.
Thus, the Iranians are waiting to see two things: Does the United States really have the weight to back the Syrians into a corner? And can Bush survive the greatest crisis of his presidency?
The Middle East is not a simple place, but it is a predictable one. Power talks, and you-know-what walks.
-
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
-
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
-
The New Bolsheviks Print Mail
Understanding Al Qaeda
By Frederick W. Kagan
Posted: Wednesday, November 16, 2005
NATIONAL SECURITY OUTLOOK
AEI Online
Publication Date: November 16, 2005
This essay is available here as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.
November 2005
Victory in war, and particularly in counterinsurgency wars, requires knowing one?s enemy. This simple truth, first stated by Sun Tsu more than two millennia ago, is no less important in the war on terrorism today. It has become almost common wisdom, however, that America today faces an enemy of a new kind, using unprecedented techniques and pursuing incomprehensible goals. But this enemy is not novel. Once the peculiar rhetoric is stripped away, the enemy America faces is a familiar one indeed. The revolutionary vision that undergirds al Qaeda?s ideology, the strategy it is pursuing, and the strategic debates occurring within that organization are similar to those of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism at various periods. What?s more, the methods that led to the defeat of that ideology can be adapted and successfully used against this religious revival of it.
Certain strands of Islamist ideology are so similar in structure to basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism that the comparison is unavoidable. The similarities are most apparent in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Islamist and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood executed in 1966. Qutb, who produced a pamphlet called Milestones that summarized much of his work, has powerfully influenced the modern jihadist movement, especially Ayman al-Zawahiri--Osama bin Laden?s deputy and the ideologue of al Qaeda--and Abdul Musab al-Zarqawi, ?emir? of the al Qaeda organization in Iraq.
The Influence of Marx and Lenin
Milestones--like Vladimir Lenin?s famous pamphlet What Is to Be Done?--sums up not merely the ideological foundations of the movement, but also the strategy and tactics that must be pursued to achieve success. Before considering Qutb?s program, however, it is worthwhile to recall the essential tenets of Marxism-Leninism to which Qutb?s jihadism bears such noteworthy resemblance.
Briefly put, Karl Marx argued that the world of his day was corrupt, riddled with oppression, and spawning endless violence and war because of fundamental flaws in the human structures and within human beings themselves. One manifestation of this oppression was the nation-state, which the exploitative capitalist classes had falsely erected in order to suppress proletarians and lower orders. Marx claimed to have applied scientific principles to the study of history and to have discovered its secrets: all history consisted of class struggle, and that struggle moved inevitably to the ultimate triumph of the proletariat.
That triumph once achieved, Marx argued, a period of ?socialism? would begin in which human nature would be transformed. People would live in harmony according to the principle ?From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.? All of the false encrustations of oppressive capitalist society, such as money, mass production, police, religion, private property, would vanish. The state would ?wither away,? whereupon the period of true communism would begin, stateless and utterly and eternally peaceful.
Marx?s disciples accepted his vision with little argument. The best strategy for achieving it, however, became a serious source of discord within the socialist movement, persisting even to the final collapse of the Bolshevik experiment in 1991. Marx argued for different approaches at different times. The early Marx argued that the proletariat could come to power only through a violent revolution, while he wrote in Das Kapital that the process might be more peaceful and gradual. Revolutionaries like Lenin and Mao sought violent confrontation and the cataclysmic revolution that the early Marx had promised. Western European socialists tended to prefer the later Marx, eschewing violence and direct confrontation and relying on the engine of history. All of them generally agreed that the ?contradictions? of capitalism would contribute to communism?s triumph through capitalism?s inevitable collapse.
Lenin?s belief in the necessity of violent revolution emerged in part from the condition of his native land. In late-nineteenth-century Russia proletarians were a small minority and unable by themselves to take power, even had they wholeheartedly supported the Bolshevik movement, which they did not. Lenin therefore saw that his only hope of success in Russia was to entrammel the peasant along with the worker in a revolutionary movement aimed first at seizing power on behalf of the socialist movement. There would then be plenty of time, he reasoned, to reeducate the peasants as necessary. The key to this movement, he believed, was a revolutionary party, what he came to call the ?vanguard of the proletariat.? This party, comprised largely of intellectuals, was alone capable of really understanding Marxism and developing and executing the strategies needed to bring about its triumph. Once the vanguard had seized power in the name of the proletariat, establishing what Lenin called the ?dictatorship of the proletariat,? it would then proceed to empower those elements of the proletariat, and other classes if there were any, that understood and supported the true principles of Marxism-Leninism. It was not necessary, therefore, that all or even a majority of proletarians supported the revolution or believed in Marxism. The only thing that mattered was that the revolutionary vanguard was capable of seizing and holding power. Education and transformation would then do the rest.
The Bolsheviks? seizure of power in Russia in 1917 raised yet another issue that promptly split the revolutionary movement into two camps. Should the new Bolshevik state seek at once to spread revolution around the world, or should it focus instead on perfecting what Joseph Stalin called ?communism in one country? in order to establish a beacon, a model, and a bastion of successful communism to sustain and inspire revolution elsewhere? Stalin favored the latter course, Leon Trotsky the former. Stalin?s triumph enshrined this approach in Soviet grand strategy, although it is not clear that Trotsky would have acted very differently had he ever held supreme power. The ideological split was nevertheless bitter and central to the subsequent development of communist thought.
Qutb?s Vision
Qutb also viewed the world of his day as decadent, violent, oppressive, and riddled with contradictions. Writing in the 1950s, he condemned Western capitalism, Western socialism, Eastern despotism, and Marxism itself as ?unable to present any healthy values for the guidance of mankind.?[1] Like Marx, Qutb was familiar with the society he was condemning, for he had spent two years in the United States and had been profoundly impressed by its godlessness and hedonism. It was not necessary, he argued, for Islam to vie with West or East in the matter of material prosperity and inventiveness, although he did not despise such capabilities. The role of Islam, rather, was to provide the moral and spiritual leadership the world so badly needed, to fulfill ?the basic human needs on the same level of excellence as technology has fulfilled them in the sphere of material comfort.?[2]
Qutb argued that the basic problem afflicting the human race was the subordination of human beings to one another. Only God, he wrote, could exercise just sovereignty, and only God?s laws are truly laws. For many centuries, however, man had established his own laws and governments, with individuals usurping God?s sovereignty and thereby elevating themselves as false idols and dictators. Even within the Muslim world, the Umma, he noted, state structures had been established and the leaders of those structures legislated and established laws of their own, distinct from the laws of sharia, which were of God.
This argument was central to Qutb?s thought, for it justified his claim that the world of his day, including most of the so-called Muslim world of that time, existed in a state of jahiliyya, or ignorance of God. Traditionally, this term is applied to the period before Mohammed, but Qutb applied it to most of history following Mohammed?s revelations on the ground that people to whom the words of the Prophet had been presented, but who had rejected those words and were living by their own codes, were no less ignorant than those who lived before the Prophet arrived on earth. Worse still, by ?worshipping? other human beings in the process of according them the honors due to the sovereignty they had usurped from God, these people were guilty of polytheism, just as the early Arabs were whom Mohammed chastened, defeated, and then converted.
Qutb was arguing that all human state structures are inherently evil and should be destroyed. He recognized that most of the non-Muslim world, and even most of the Umma, was not yet ready to live in accord with the only true and just laws, the sharia, and so he proposed a period of careful education and training to transform humanity so that it would reject the false teachings and turn toward the true. He described in great detail the manner in which the Koran was to be transmitted, verse by verse over thirteen years, according to Qutb, so that those who received it would be educated gradually and transformed. The clear implication was that once humanity has been reformed and reeducated as Qutb describes, state structures will collapse and vanish, and people will live in peace and harmony under the laws of God and not under their own, as he claimed the first generation of Muslims did.
Like Lenin, Qutb knew that his view was not shared by the majority of the people on whose behalf he proposed to operate. He was untroubled by this difficulty, since he adopted the same solution Lenin had proposed: ?How is it possible to start the task of reviving Islam?? he asked. ?It is necessary that there should be a vanguard which sets out with this determination and then keeps walking on the path.? Milestones would serve as the guide for the vanguard in this fight.[3]
Qutb also considered the problem aired during the Stalin-Trotsky dispute following the Bolshevik victory--should the vanguard aim to win throughout the world all at once or in one place first? He chose the Stalinist approach, arguing that the vanguard should work first to seize power in a single state: ?The beauty of this new system cannot be appreciated unless it takes a concrete form. Hence it is essential that a community arrange its affairs according to it and show it to the world. In order to bring this about, we need to initiate the movement of Islamic revival in some Muslim country. Only such a revivalist movement will eventually attain to the status of world leadership.?[4]
Here, then, in a nutshell is the basic structure of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism reproduced in a religious context: the corruption and illegitimacy of current state structures; the inadmissibility of any state structures in a justly ordered world; the need to transform humanity before entering into that world; the need to begin by seizing power in a single state, but with the aim of ultimately destroying all states; the error of having any human or group of humans holding sovereignty over any other; and the critical role of a vanguard revolutionary group in the process. Qutb was in no way a Marxist, but the basic structure of his argument certainly was akin to that of Marx and his disciples.
Ideologically, the emphasis on the illegitimacy and need for the destruction of all state structures is a peculiarly Marxist approach--non-Marxist revolutionaries generally argue that they will improve upon failed state structures, not that they aim at destroying them all. The assertion that human nature must be transformed in order to pave the way for a glorious this-worldly paradise is also peculiarly Marxist--it gives Marxism an air of pseudo-religiosity. Qutb?s religiosity is not false in any way, of course, but this philosophical premise fits at least as well with Marx as with Mohammed.
One important difference between Qutb and Marxism deserves to be noted, however. Whereas Marxists operated in a world in which few proletarians, let alone peasants or capitalists, had even read or understood the touchstone works of their movements, Qutb and his disciples can rely on more than a billion people to be intimately familiar with the Koran, the sharia, and the life of the Prophet. But this apparent difference is really another point of similarity. Marxists constantly worried about how to raise the ?class consciousness? of the proletariat, by which they meant teaching the workers to understand the true oppressive meaning of their situation and the real power at their disposal. Qutb and his followers have the same problem. All Muslims are familiar with the Koran; relatively few know of Qutb?s writings. The Koran does not teach that a revolutionary vanguard should seize a decrepit Muslim state and establish a new order there, transforming human nature as it goes, to serve as a beacon for the global revolution. If the jihadists cannot persuade their fellow Muslims that this is the right course to follow, then the familiarity of those Muslims with the Koran is of no more significance than the fact that proletarians without adequate ?class consciousness? continued to work in factories. In both cases, the raw material for supporting the revolution is, in theory, there--the question is whether or not the vanguard can mobilize it when the time comes.
Al Qaeda--The Vanguard of Today
One important difference between Marxism-Leninism and jihadism is that, whereas Lenin was a shrewder and more talented theorist than Marx, the ideologues of the current struggle are far less eloquent and coherent than Qutb. Ayman al-Zawahiri is one of the most thoughtful of al Qaeda?s ideologists, and he has published numerous books and tracts describing the intellectual basis of the program al Qaeda is pursuing. Of particular interest is a manuscript he completed in 2001, Knights under the Banner of the Prophet,[5] which some have called his autobiography, others his ?last will and testament,? since it was apparently completed before the expected American attack on Afghanistan and in the expectation of his possible death in that struggle.
Zawahiri makes clear his intellectual debt to Qutb. He explains that Qutb ?affirmed that the issue of unification in Islam is important and that the battle between Islam and its enemies is primarily an ideological one over the issue of unification. It is also a battle over to whom authority and power should belong--to God?s course and sharia, to man-made laws and material principles, or to those who claim to be intermediaries between the Creator and mankind.? He continues, ?This affirmation greatly helped the Islamic movement to know and define its enemies. It also helped it to realize that the internal enemy was not less dangerous than the external enemy was and that the internal enemy was a tool used by the external enemy and a screen behind which it hid to launch its war on Islam.?[6] He identified Qutb?s execution by Nassar as the spark that set alight the Islamic revolution and formed the nucleus of the revolutionary movement of which Zawahiri was a part. Although Zawahiri almost certainly intended no such reference, it is hard to resist noting that the name of Lenin?s revolutionary paper was Iskra--?the spark.?
In good Leninist fashion, the bulk of Zawahiri?s writing in Knights under the Banner of the Prophet does not address the basic principles that underlie the movement, although numerous references and obvious assumptions make it clear that he accepted Qutb?s arguments fully. Zawahiri focuses instead on arguing with other Islamists about strategies and tactics, in a manner eerily familiar to anyone who has ever perused Lenin?s pre-revolutionary writings.
Like the Bolsheviks before them, the Islamists--from Zawahiri?s perspective--are split into at least two major camps. There are those who believe in working non-violently toward improving the lot of Muslims within Muslim countries, hoping to establish the rule of sharia but unwilling to use violence to do so. He was particularly bitter toward the members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt who issued a unilateral declaration that they would renounce violence in the hope of securing the release of thousands of their members then incarcerated in Egyptian jails and subjected, so they said, to extreme tortures. Zawahiri dismissed this approach contemptuously, noting that it had borne no fruit and would never bear any. The Egyptian regime, he declared, was bound hand and foot to the service of its American masters, who were working with desperate strength to eradicate Islamism throughout the world. The only way of reversing this situation, he declared, is through violent jihad--compromise would only play into the hands of the oppressors.
This sort of debate is common in revolutionary movements. The radicals who prefer violence and refuse to moderate their demands frequently resent those who would compromise, thereby reducing the grievances of the population the radicals hope to inflame. The Bolsheviks were among the first to denounce compromisers with such bitterness, and the vision of a corrupt Egyptian regime playing the cat?s-paw to the international efforts of godless atheism to destroy Islamism are almost perfectly analogous to the Bolsheviks? descriptions of bumbling Russian capitalists and tsarist officials serving the cause of international capitalism.
The same tension between attacking the cat?s-paw and attacking the master evident in the Stalin-Trotsky debate enlivens Zawahiri?s thinking. He comes, however, to a middle position. He entirely agrees with Qutb that it is essential to seize a territorial base in the Muslim heartland, to take power in a Muslim country. But he also believes that the fight must be brought home to the Americans and their international allies. This belief is based on a calculation of relative forces. Zawahiri believes that al Qaeda might be able to defeat one or more of the Muslim states if those states were not supported. But his evaluation of the international situation suggests that the United States is throwing all of its weight behind those regimes in its determination to prevent jihadists from seizing power in any of them. The purpose of the attacks on the United States was, therefore, to divide it from its regional allies by showing them to be incapable of controlling the jihadists. The Americans would then, Zawahiri argues, either quarrel with those allies--presumably giving the jihadists the opportunity to strike them--or push the allies aside and intervene directly in the struggle within the Muslim world. In that case, he argues, the struggle will turn into ?clear-cut jihad against infidels,? which the Muslims, presumably, will win.
In yet another intriguing parallel to the Bolsheviks, Zawahiri found himself isolated and far from the main theater of action following the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. While Zawahiri and bin Laden apparently ran from cave to cave along the Afghan-Pakistani border, other jihadist leaders came to the fore in Iraq, particularly Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born jihadist who had a complicated relationship with al Qaeda. Zarqawi had been present in Afghanistan under the Taliban, but had refused to acknowledge bin Laden?s leadership. The Taliban unusually allowed him to set up and control his own bases near Herat. He was apparently in Iraq at the time of the U.S. attack, and began rapidly establishing his own network to resist the occupation.[7]
Zawahiri has therefore been playing the role of Lenin to Zarqawi?s Stalin. When revolution destroyed the tsarist regime in March 1917, Lenin was in exile in Switzerland, and the Bolshevik machine within Russia was in ruins. Stalin and another famous revolutionary, Lev Kamenev, had been imprisoned by the tsarist regime but now escaped and took over the primitive Bolshevik organization that existed. Lenin watched from Zurich with dismay as Stalin and Kamenev undertook a series of initiatives with which Lenin disagreed. The matter might have remained in such tension--and the Bolshevik Revolution might never have followed in November 1917, had the German government not sent Lenin clandestinely from Switzerland back to Russia to take up the reins of power.
Al Qaeda similarly had but a small base in Saddam Hussein?s Iraq, and Zawahiri and others were surprised and disturbed by the quick and complete American victory in April 2003. Zarqawi stepped quickly into the void and persuaded Osama bin Laden to recognize his group as the al Qaeda branch organization within Iraq. Since then, Zarqawi and Zawahiri have conducted a fitful correspondence about revolutionary strategy that bears careful examination.
Before turning to that examination, we must address one major difference between the present situation and that of the Bolsheviks. Before 1917, Lenin?s most important role was as a revolutionary theorist and, secondarily, organizer. The Bolsheviks in that period carried out few operations of their own. Lenin focused his attention on developing the strategy for the vanguard of the proletariat, rather than on writing propaganda to be distributed to the masses.
Zarqawi, Zawahiri, bin Laden, and their followers face a different set of circumstances today. They have been conducting significant operations since the early 1990s and have been pursuing an offensive revolutionary strategy even as they have worked to establish safe havens and to protect their organization from attacks and counterattacks. Zawahiri and bin Laden, are also far more concerned with the reception of their message by the Muslim population at large than Lenin ever was. The great bulk of their available writing, therefore, is aimed at the mass audience and designed to achieve purposes that the Bolsheviks would have regarded as simple agitation rather than revolutionary theory. It is very difficult to extract a meaningful view of the development of jihadist ideology from such documents.
The captured letters between Zarqawi and Zawahiri tell another story entirely, however, and are much more useful for this purpose. In this exchange, Zarqawi has revealed that, although he shares with Stalin a certain bloodthirstiness and brutality, he is superior to Stalin in his ability to develop an independent ideological vision. Like Stalin, Zarqawi focuses primarily on revolutionary success within a single state rather than on the success of the revolutionary movement globally. He nevertheless accepts the basic tenets of Qutb?s teachings. ?All that we hope,? he writes, ?is that we will be the spearhead, the enabling vanguard, and the bridge on which the [Islamic] nation crosses over to the victory that is promised and the tomorrow to which we aspire.?[8] The struggle for power in Iraq is to be accompanied by a large-scale media effort to ?explain the rules of sharia through tapes, printed materials, study, and courses of learning [meant] to expand awareness, anchor the doctrine of the unity of God, prepare the infrastructure, and meet [our] obligation.? The seizure of power in Iraq is, finally, merely the starting-point for Zarqawi, after which ?the mujahidin will have assured themselves land from which to set forth in striking the Shia in their heartland, along with a clear media orientation and the creation of strategic depth and reach among the brothers outside [Iraq] and the mujahidin within.?
The practical revolutionary program that Zarqawi laid out focused on attacking Iraq?s Shiite population first and foremost. Zarqawi believed that the Shia were the worst foes of the revolution. They were, from his perspective, apostates, heretics, and historically collaborators with the enemies of Islam--by which Zarqawi always means Sunni Islam. In the current struggle, Zarqawi sees the Shiites as the most dangerous allies of the Americans, since they were eager to seize power, to crush the Arab Sunnis, and to destroy true Islam--and they could accomplish all of those goals while putting a pseudo-Islamic face on Iraq that might deceive the rest of the world.
Zarqawi also labored, at least in early 2004, with several other problems that Lenin would have found familiar. The revolutionary groups within Iraq were scattered and ill-organized. They had few followers and even fewer experienced members. The influx of new recruits was both helpful and a burden, since the organization hardly had the capability to train them adequately and still accomplish its mission. Like the good Stalinist that he is, Zarqawi made it clear that he intended to use the first several months of 2004 to establish a solid organizational basis for the revolution in Iraq.
The goal of his attacks on the Shiites was not simply fomenting religious strife, however. It was also revolutionary strategy. Zarqawi was clearly disappointed with the apathy of the majority of the Sunni Arabs in Iraq and sought to raise their revolutionary consciousness by baiting the Shiites into attacking them. He was eager to accomplish this goal before the Sunnis fell into the trap of longing for material and even political advantages that might flow from the nascent democracy in Iraq and of deciding to abandon jihad.
Zawahiri, for his part, found Zarqawi?s strategy and actions as disturbing as Lenin found Stalin?s. Zawahiri has always been concerned with the way the Muslim masses perceived al Qaeda and its message. In Knights under the Banner of the Prophet, he wrote,
The jihad movement must dedicate one of its wings to work with the masses, preach, provide services for the Muslim people, and share their concerns through all available avenues for charity and educational work. We must not leave a single area unoccupied. We must win the people?s confidence, respect, and affection. The people will not love us unless they felt that we love them, care about them, and are ready to defend them.[9]
His recent declaration that the jihadists and all other Muslims should offer such aid as they can to suffering Pakistanis despite the evil of Musharraf?s government is another example of his determination to secure a positive image of his movement in the eyes of the masses.
Zawahiri made this point explicitly in his letter to Zarqawi:
If we are in agreement that the victory of Islam and the establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet will not be achieved except through jihad against the apostate rulers and their removal, then this goal will not be accomplished by the mujahed movement while it is cut off from public support, even if the Jihadist movement pursues the method of sudden overthrow. This is because such an overthrow would not take place without some minimum of popular support and some condition of public discontent which offers the mujahed movement what it needs in terms of capabilities in the quickest fashion. . . . In the absence of this popular support, the Islamic mujahed movement would be crushed in the shadows.[10]
In accord with this desire to gain mass support within the Umma, Zawahiri has not proposed attacks against the Shia. His emphasis is always upon unifying against the common enemy, in which he regards jahiliyya as being more dangerous than apostasy. Zawahiri was, therefore, apparently deeply disturbed by Zarqawi?s decision to turn on the Shia first, as a way of attacking the Americans and as a way of mobilizing the Sunni Arabs within Iraq. Zawahiri makes clear that he shares Zarqawi?s opinion of the Shia: ?People of discernment and knowledge among Muslims know the extent of danger to Islam of the Twelve?er school of Shiism. It is a religious school based on excess and falsehood.? He continues, however, ?We must repeat . . . that the majority of Muslims don?t comprehend this and possibly could not even imagine it. For that reason, many of your Muslim admirers amongst the common folk are wondering about your attacks on the Shia.? Zarqawi?s attacks on Shiite mosques, he added, increase this unease. ?My opinion is that this matter won?t be acceptable to the Muslim populace however much you have tried to explain it, and aversion to this will continue.? Speaking indirectly, but clearly for himself as well, Zawahiri muses, ?Is the opening of another front now in addition to the front against the Americans and the government a wise decision??
Zawahiri repeatedly acknowledges, with infinitely more apparent humility than Lenin ever showed Stalin and Kamenev (or anyone else, for that matter), that he is far from the theater of action and only Zarqawi has the true picture of events in Iraq. He adds, ?however, monitoring from afar has the advantage of providing the total picture and observing the general line without getting submerged in the details . . . One of the most important factors of success is that you don?t let your eyes lose sight of the target, and that it should stand before you always. Otherwise you deviate from the general line through a policy of reaction.? These are the harsh words of the ideologue attempting to bring the overzealous local commander to heel. Stalin would certainly have cringed on receiving such a missive from Lenin. It is unclear what Zarqawi?s reaction was.
That is partly because the power relationship between Zarqawi and Zawahiri is quite different from that between Stalin and Lenin. Bin Laden is famous throughout the Muslim world, and Zawahiri is known as his loyal deputy and brilliant ideologue. But Zarqawi is developing a significant aura all his own from his ability to elude and hurt the Americans, if from nothing else. Should Zarqawi succeed in Iraq, it is quite likely that he would push bin Laden and Zawahiri aside in the leadership of al Qaeda and the jihadist movement. It is extremely unlikely, on the other hand, that Zawahiri will travel to Iraq, take control of the situation, impose his brilliant ideological vision, and achieve Lenin?s victory.
What?s at Stake in the War on Terror
For all the obvious and subtle differences between the current situation and that of the Bolsheviks, the analogy can nevertheless inform our thinking in important ways. It helps to strip away the confusion resulting from the jihadists? abuse of Islamic theology and cut through the tangle of arguments about 1,400-year old events and personalities to reveal the true stakes of the struggle. This is not a war of the West against Islam, of wealthy nations against the poor, of the agents of globalization against their victims. It is an ideological struggle in which the heirs of Qutb are attempting to seize power so as to establish a forcible dictatorship that can impose their desired moral, political, economic, judicial, and social system upon a growing mass--and ultimately, the whole--of the human race.
They are using the tried-and-true methods of the Bolsheviks, and the many revolutionaries who have followed in their wake, as they attempt to accomplish this mission. A small group of professional revolutionaries works simultaneously to expand its reach in the populace and to perfect its own organization. At the right historical moment, it strikes a weak state and seizes power. It then uses that state for two purposes. First, it builds a model, a showpiece of the excellence of its ideological program to encourage other groups to imitate it, creating similar states which it can then absorb. Second, it develops the resources of that state to place them at the disposal of the revolutionary movement, dramatically increasing its reach and capabilities. It is essential to recall in this regard that, although the jihadists write like seventh-century poets and advocate a ?return? to an idealized version of ?traditional Islam,? they have no quarrel with technology. Qutb made that explicit in Milestones, and the jihadists have made it clear with word and deed that they accept the premise that this idealized Islam is not at odds with advanced technology.
The movement is now quarreling in numerous fora about strategy: to attack the Shia or not, to attack the Saudi government or leave it alone, to strike the Americans or their regional allies--all arguments similar in nature to those that animated Bolshevik discussions before and after the Great October Socialist Revolution.
We must be attentive to how these quarrels are resolved. It is quite possible that the ?central? al Qaeda organization, if we may so designate the group immediately responsive to bin Laden and Zawahiri, has not staged another September 11th-style attack on the United States not so much because they are incapable of it, but because they have concluded that it is counterproductive at the current moment. September 11th certainly did not produce the result they desired: the United States did not turn on its regional allies, nor did America?s direct intervention in the Muslim world lead to a dramatic explosion of spontaneous jihad.
Judging from the increasingly desperate tone of the internal jihadist correspondence, in fact, it seems clear that they do not feel that they are winning this struggle. Zawahiri appears to be focusing on building an organization and a new base in the Muslim community, and to be quarrelling with Zarqawi about the latter?s policies that are complicating that effort. Zarqawi has been throwing his might into igniting a Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq. So far, that has not occurred, but Zawahiri?s injunctions to abandon that line of effort offer little in the way of alternatives.
One of the greatest dangers facing the West today, therefore, is the danger of growing complacent. If the terrorists are directing their attacks away from America?s shores now for strategic reasons of their own, they may revise that decision at any moment. More importantly, the Bolshevik example provides cause for fear of another sort. In March 1917, as we have noted, the Bolsheviks were utterly irrelevant in the Russian political scene. The collapse of the tsarist government did not bring them to power, but it created a chaos in which they could reform and reorganize to strike. The failure of the Kerensky government, which resulted largely from its ill-advised determination to keep fighting an unpopular war, offered the revitalized Bolsheviks the opportunity to seize power. Even then, it required a vicious three-year civil war to consolidate the victory, a victory made possible largely because of the war-weariness and distraction of ?international capitalism,? meaning the United States, Britain, France, Japan, and their allies.
The struggle to establish stability in Iraq and Afghanistan is thus at the very heart of any war against jihadism. Zarqawi, bin Laden, Zawahiri, and many others repeat over and over again that this is their view. They are right. If they could ever take advantage of a significant period of chaos in either of those states, they could establish themselves anew and reverse the current disarray of their movement, probably very quickly. It took the Bolsheviks, after all, eight months to go from a position in which almost every Bolshevik leader was in jail or in exile to holding the seat of power in Russia with a mass following. Collapse and reorder can come very rapidly with a thoughtful, organized, and intellectually prepared revolutionary group.
And that is precisely what we face in al Qaeda. For too long, we have been transfixed with concerns about anti-Americanism within the Muslim community and the sense that this struggle is amorphous and difficult to comprehend. The truth is that anti-Americanism in any community is only dangerous if there is a group within that community that can organize and channel that sentiment into an intelligently conceived strategy. Destroying such groups is the highest priority, but it is extremely difficult. Preventing them from establishing themselves in power in a sovereign state comes next, and that is much more feasible, if still costly and difficult.
But Marxism did not fall, in the end, simply because of the collapse of Soviet power. It fell simultaneously with that collapse, as the majority of the ?communist? world decided that it was intellectually bankrupt and offered a less attractive vision of the future than its nemesis--democracy and capitalism. If we kill bin Laden, Zawahiri, or Zarqawi tomorrow, the doctrines of Qutb and his heirs will continue to offer the blueprint for similar revolutionary organizations in the future. We must recall that Zarqawi, Zawahiri, and bin Laden all developed their ideologies and even their movements independently of one another before merging. Real victory can only come by persuading the overwhelming majority of the Muslim people that this apocalyptic vision is unattractive.
Western insouciance and the incompetence of Russian liberals ensured that it took seven decades of horrible suffering and terrible danger to prove that point about Marxism. We are fortunate now to be able to contest this ideology much earlier in its developmental cycle. Establishing viable, peaceful, stable democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan should therefore be fully as central to our war on terror as the goal of establishing jihadist dictatorships in those countries is to the terrorists? war against us. The war in Iraq is not a distraction from the war on terror. It is, on the contrary, far and away the most important battle yet fought in that war, and a battle that the West dare not lose.
Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at AEI. The author is grateful to Frank Sobchak for his invaluable help framing, understanding, and exploring this complex issue.
Notes
1. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Damascus: Dar al-Ilm, n.d.), 7. For a brief discussion of Qutb?s ideology, see also Ahmad Moussalli, Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Ideological and Political Discourse of Sayyid Qutb (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1992).
2. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, 10.
3. Ibid., 12.
4. Ibid., 11?12.
5. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Knights under the Prophet?s Banner (2001), serialized in Al-Sharq al-Awsat, a London-based Saudi-owned daily newspaper.
6. Ibid., part III.
7. Dr. Nimrod Raphaeli, ??The Sheikh of the Slaughterers?: Abu Mus?ab Al-Zarqawi and the Al-Qa?ida Connection,? The Middle East Media Research Institute, Inquiry and Analysis Series 231 (July 1, 2005).
8. ?Text from Abu Mus?ab al-Zarqawi Letter,? released on February 12, 2004, available at http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/iraq/2004/02/040212-al-zarqawi.htm.
9. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Knights under the Prophet?s Banner, section 12.
10. Zawahiri to Zarqawi, July 9, 2005 (released on October 11, 2005), available at http://www.dni.gov/release_letter_101105.html.
Related Links
Listing of All National Security Outlooks
-
This source is new to me so I can't vouch for it. With that said, the Marine's comments, quoted below, have a ring of truth.
ALLAH?S WAITING ROOM
Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
Thursday, 17 November 2005
In the Military Alphabet, AWR is Alpha Whiskey Romeo. In Iraq today, it?s a code term of American soldiers. Whenever they use ?AWR? or ?Alpha Whiskey Romeo? in their communications, everyone knows what it really stands for: Allah?s Waiting Room. That?s what our soldiers have turned Iraq into for the terrorists, and that?s why our soldiers know they are winning this war.
That?s also why our soldiers have more contempt for MSM journalists and Democrat politicians than the Jihadi terrorists ? for at least the terrorists are honest about being an enemy, instead of pretending they?re on your side while stabbing you in the back.
The Democrat distortion of the War in Iraq has become flat-out deranged. Yet for all the ?alternate media?s? attempts to tell the truth, Johnny and Suzie Lunchbucket still get most of their news through the MSM, which is why a majority of the Lunchbuckets, according to polls, believe ?Bush lied? to get us into the war, and that it is a war we are losing.
Both are lies, which any Democrat on Capitol Hill privy to basic intel reports knows, yet the Big Lie is a proven propaganda tool, and it?s working on the American public right now.
But not among our guys on the ground in Iraq. Let?s start with two basic ways they are winning.
First is snipers. Marine snipers. Navy SEAL snipers. Army Ranger snipers. There are lots and lots of them in Iraq, they are unbelievably good at their work, which they do quietly, efficiently, and all by themselves with no press coverage. They are taking out Jihadis one by one, a silent pop from nowhere and goodbye, all over Iraq.
One single Marine sniper currently on his third tour has personally racked up well over a hundred confirmed kills. The total number of Jihadis taken down by snipers is classified, but it?s certainly many thousands by now.
Second is the fifty battalions of Iraqi soldiers who are completing their training and will soon be loosed upon the Jihadis. These folks are fighting for their own country and will be ruthless in doing so. Couple this with the increasingly good intel from Iraqis on the street, Sunnis and Shias, who are cooperating with Coalition Forces and the emerging Iraqi military because they are totally fed up with the Jihadis.
As the evidence mounts that the Jihadis are losing in Iraq, the more desperate the Democrats? and the media?s attempts to suppress and deny the evidence.
So I thought I would provide you with some direct evidence of how things are really going in Mesopotamia. This is an unvarnished, personal SitRep ? situation report ? from a Marine who just spent seven months at ?Camp Blue Diamond? near Ramadi, Iraq, deep in Apache country.
We?ll call him Jay. What follows is notes taken by his father while at home on leave. It?s an assessment, negative and positive, of the tactics, weapons, equipment, and overall situation of both the good guys and the bad guys. It is both chilling and thrilling.
Particularly his ?Bottom Line? conclusion. The heroism of American soldiers like Jay makes an astounding contrast to the refusal of the American media to tell the truth about them. Jay has re-enlisted for another four years in the Marines and will be returning for a second tour in Iraq this coming January. He says he can hardly wait.
Weapons
M-16 rifle : Thumbs down. Chronic jamming problems with the talcum powder sand. The sand is everywhere. You feel filthy 2 minutes after coming out of the shower. The M-4 carbine version is more popular because it's lighter and shorter, but it has jamming problems also. Marines like the ability to mount the various optical gunsights and weapons lights on the picatinny rails, but the weapon itself is not great in a desert environment. Everyone hates the 5.56mm (.223) round. Poor penetration on the cinderblock structure common over there and even torso hits can?t be reliably counted on to put the enemy down.
Fun fact: Random autopsies on dead insurgents shows a high level of opiate use.
M243 SAW (squad assault weapon): .223 cal. drum-fed light machine gun. Big thumbs down. Universally considered a piece of junk. Chronic jamming problems, most of which require partial disassembly ? real fun in the middle of a firefight.
M9 Beretta 9mm: Mixed bag. Good gun, performs well in desert environment; but Marines hate the 9mm cartridge. The use of handguns for self-defense is actually fairly common. Same old story on the 9mm: Bad guys hit multiple times and still in the fight.
Mossberg 12ga. military shotgun: Works well, used frequently for clearing houses to good effect.
M240 machine gun: 7.62 Nato (.308) cal. belt-fed machine gun, developed to replace the old M-60. Thumbs up. Accurate, reliable, and the 7.62 round puts 'em down. Originally developed as a vehicle-mounted weapon, more and more are being dismounted and taken into the field by infantry. The 7.62 round chews up the structure.
M2 .50 cal. heavy machine gun: Thumbs way, way up. ?Ma deuce? is still worth her considerable weight in gold. The ultimate fight stopper, puts their dicks in the dirt every time. The most coveted weapon in-theater.
.45 pistol: Thumbs up. Still the best pistol round out there. Everybody authorized to carry a sidearm is trying to get their hands on one. With few exceptions, can reliably be expected to put 'em down with a torso hit. The special ops guys (who are doing most of the pistol work) use the HK military model and love it. The old government model .45's are being re-issued en masse.
M-14: Thumbs up. They are being re-issued in bulk, mostly in a modified version to special ops guys. Modifications include lightweight Kevlar stocks and low power red dot or ACOG sights. Very reliable in the sandy environment, and welove the 7.62 round.
Barrett .50 cal. sniper rifle: Thumbs way up. Spectacular range and accuracy and hits like a freight train. Used frequently to take out vehicle suicide bombers ( we actually stop a lot of them) and barricaded enemy. Definitely here to stay.
M24 sniper rifle: Thumbs up. Mostly in .308 but some in .300 win mag. Heavily modified Remington 700's. Great performance. Snipers have been used heavily to great effect. A Marine sniper on his third tour in Anbar province has now exceeded the famous record for confirmed kills (93 official, many more unofficial) of Long Trang (White Feather) himself, Marine Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock in Vietnam.
Equipment
The new body armor: Thumbs up. Relatively light at about 6 lbs. and can reliably be expected to soak up small shrapnel and even will stop an AK-47 round. The bad news: Hot as hell to wear, almost unbearable in the summer heat (which averages over 120 degrees). Also, the enemy now goes for head shots whenever possible. All the media garbage about the ?old? body armor making our guys vulnerable to the IED's was a non-starter. The IED explosions are enormous and body armor doesn't make any difference at all in most cases.
Night Vision and Infrared Equipment: Thumbs way up. Spectacular performance. Our guys see in the dark and own the night, period. Very little enemy action after evening prayers. More and more enemy being whacked at night during movement by our hunter-killer teams. We've all seen the videos.
Bad Guy Weapons
Mostly AK47?s. The entire country is an arsenal. The Kalashnikov works better in the desert than the M16 and the .308 Russian round kills reliably. PKM belt-fed light machine guns are also common and effective. Luckily, the enemy mostly shoots with undisciplined ?spray and pray? type fire. However, they are using more and more precision weapons, especially sniper rifles provided by Iran.
Fun fact: Captured enemy marvel at the marksmanship of our guys and how hard they fight. They are apparently told in Jihad school that the Americans rely solely on technology, and can be easily beaten in close quarters combat for their lack of toughness. Let's just say they know better now.
RPG, rocket-propelled grenade launcher: Probably the infantry weapon most feared by our guys. Simple, reliable and as common as AK?s. The enemy responded to our up-armored Humvees by aiming at the windshields, often at point blank range. Still killing a lot of our guys.
The IED, improvised explosive device: The biggest killer of all. Can be anything from old Soviet anti-armor mines to jerry-rigged artillery shells. A lot found in Ramadi were in abandoned cars. The enemy would take 2 or 3 155mm artillery shells and wire them together. Most were detonated by cell phone, and the explosions are enormous. You're not safe in any vehicle, even an M1 tank.
Driving is by far the most dangerous thing our guys do. Lately, there are much more sophisticated Iran-supplied ?shape charges? specifically designed to penetrate armor. Most of the ready made IED's are now supplied by Iran, which is also providing terrorists (Hezbollah types) to train the insurgents in their use and tactics.
That's why the attacks have been so deadly lately. Their concealment methods are ingenious, the latest being shape charges in styrofoam containers spray-painted to look like the cinderblocks that litter all Iraqi roads. We find about 40% before they detonate, and the bomb disposal guys are unsung heroes of this war.
Mortars and rockets: Very prevalent. The Soviet-era 122mm rockets (with an 18km range) are becoming more prevalent. One of my NCO?s lost a leg to one. These weapons cause a lot of damage ?inside the wire? ofour bases. Mine in Ramadi was hit almost daily by mortar and rocket fire, often at night to disrupt sleep patterns and cause fatigue (which it did). More of a psychological weapon than anything else. The enemy mortar teams would jump out of vehicles, fire a few rounds, and then scoot in a matter of seconds.
Bad guy technology: Most communication is by cell and satellite phones, and also by email on laptops. They use handheld GPS units for navigation and ?Google Earth? for overhead views of our positions. Their weapons are good, if not fancy, and prevalent. Their explosives and bomb technology is top of the line. Night vision is rare. They are very careless with their equipment and the GPS units and laptops are treasure troves of intel when captured.
Who Are The Bad Guys?
Most of the carnage is caused by the Zarqawi Al Qaeda group. They operate mostly in Anbar province (Fallujah and Ramadi). These are mostly ?foreigners,? non-Iraqi Sunni Arab Jihadis from all over the Moslem world and Europe. Most enter Iraq through Syria with the knowledge and complicity of the Syrian government, and then travel down the ?rat line? which is the trail of towns along the Euphrates River that we've been hitting hard for the last few months.
Some are virtually untrained young Jihadis that often end up as suicide bombers or in ?sacrifice squads.? Most, however, are hard core terrorists from all the usual suspects (Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.) These are the guys running around murdering civilians en masse and cutting heads off. The Chechens are supposedly the most ruthless and the best fighters, as they have been fighting the Russians for years.
In the Baghdad area and south, most of the insurgents are Iranian inspired (and led) Iraqi Shiites. The Iranian Shiia have been very adept at infiltrating the Iraqi local governments, police forces and military. The have had a massive spy and agitator network there since the Iran-Iraq war in the early 80's. Most of the Saddam ?Baathist? loyalists were killed, captured or gave up long ago.
Bad Guy Tactics
When they are engaged on an infantry level, they get their butts kicked every time. Brave but stupid. Suicidal Banzai-type charges were very common earlier in the war and still occur. They will literally sacrifice 8-10 man teams in suicide squads by sending them screaming and firing AK?s and RPG?s directly at our bases just to probe the defenses. They get mowed down like grass every time.
Our base was hit like this often. When engaged, they have a tendency to all flee to the same building, probably for what they think will be a glorious last stand. Instead, we call in air and that?s the end of that. The building becomes another Alpha Whiskey Romeo, as we have the laser guided ground-air thing down to a science.
The fast movers, mostly Marine F-18?s, are taking an ever-increasing toll on the enemy. When caught out in the open, the helicopter gunships and AC-130 Spectre gunships cut them to ribbons with cannon and rocket fire, especially at night. Interestingly, artillery is hardly used at all.
The insurgent tactic most frustrating is their use of civilian non-combatants as cover. They know we do all we can to avoid civilian casualties and therefore schools, hospitals and (especially) mosques are locations where they meet, stage for attacks, cache weapons and ammo and flee to when engaged.
The terrorists have absolutely no regard whatsoever for civilian casualties. They will terrorize locals and murder without hesitation anyone believed to be sympathetic to the Americans or the new Iraqi government. Kidnapping of family members (especially children) is common to influence people they can?t reach, such as local officials, clerics, and tribal leaders.
Bottom Line
The first thing we are told is ?don't get captured.? We know that if captured we will be tortured and beheaded on the Internet. Zarqawi openly offers bounties for anyone who brings him a live American serviceman. This motivates the criminal element who otherwise could care less about the war. A lot of the beheading victims were actually kidnapped by common criminals and sold to Zarqawi.
As such, for our guys, every fight is to the death. The infantry fighting is frequent, up close and brutal. No quarter is given or shown. Surrender is not an option.
The Iraqi soldiers are a mixed bag. Some fight well, others are hopeless. Most do okay with American support. Finding leaders is hard, but they are getting better. It is widely viewed that Zarqawi?s use of suicide bombers against the civilian population was a serious tactical mistake. Many Iraqis were galvanized and the caliber of recruits in the Army and the police forces went up, along with their motivation. It also led to an exponential increase in good intel because the Iraqis are sick of the insurgent attacks against civilians. The Kurds are solidly pro-American and fearless fighters.
Morale among our guys is very high. We not only believe we are winning, but that we are winning decisively.
Our guys are stunned and dismayed by what they see in the American press, whom they almost universally view as against them. The embedded reporters are despised and distrusted. We are inflicting casualties at a rate of 25-1 and then see garbage like ?Are we losing in Iraq?? on TV and the print media.
For the most part, our guys are satisfied with their equipment, food and leadership. Bottom line though, and they all say this, there are not enough of us in Iraq to drive the final stake through the heart of the insurgency, primarily because there aren't enough troops in-theater to shut down the borders with Iran and Syria. The Iranians and the Syrians just can?t stand the thought of Iraq being an American ally ? with, of course, permanent US bases there.
The ultimate bottom line is the enemy death toll. So far we have killed around 50,000. From all over the Moslem world, terrorists are coming to Iraq so we can kill them. That?s why we call it Allah?s Waiting Room.
Last Updated ( Thursday, 17 November 2005 )
http://www.ivanyi-consultants.com/articles/awr.html
-
Iraq: The Battle in the Beltway
Editor's Note: We are resending today's Geopolitical Intelligence Report to correct an error that initially appeared in the first paragraph of the piece.
By George Friedman
With President George W. Bush's poll ratings still in the doldrums, the debate in Washington has become predictably rancorous. For their part, the Democrats continue to insist that Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq, despite the fact that Bill Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox in 1998 on the basis of similar intelligence. The Bush administration didn't manufacture evidence on WMD: If evidence was manufactured, it was manufactured during Clinton's administration -- and the Democrats know this. On the other hand, the Bush administration has slammed the Democrats' criticism of the war, with one congresswoman charging a Democratic congressman -- a congressman who served for 37 years in the Marine Corps and was awarded the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts while in Vietnam -- with cowardice for advocating a withdrawal. Republicans know better.
The current debate is making both sides look stupid. But lest we despair about the fate of the republic, it should be remembered that political debate in the United States has rarely been edifying and, during times of serious tension, has been downright incoherent. What is important about the current debate is not so much its content -- there is precious little of that -- as the fact that it serves as a barometer of the current situation in Washington as well as in Iraq. What the debate is telling us is that we have come to a defining moment in the war and in U.S. policy toward the war. That means that it is time to step back and try to define the root issues.
Intelligence Failures and Guerrilla War
Whatever the origin of the war -- and Stratfor readers are aware of our views on why the war was begun -- we can pinpoint the moment at which the Bush strategy first ran into trouble. In mid-April 2003, just a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad, guerrilla attacks in the form of small bombings began to take place. By May 2003, attacks were occurring daily. It started to become clear that a guerrilla war had been launched.
When people talk about intelligence failures, they inevitably speak about the WMD issue. That was trivial, however, compared to the failure of the U.S. intelligence community to discover that the Baathists had planned for continued warfare after the fall of Baghdad. Indeed, they did not even resist in Baghdad. Understanding that defeating the United States conventionally was impossible, they focused on mounting a guerrilla war after U.S. forces had occupied the country.
The guerrilla campaign was not spontaneous. It came together much too quickly and escalated far too efficiently for that to be the case. The guerrillas clearly had access to weapons caches, possessed a rudimentary command, control and communications system, and had worked out some baseline tactics. They were too widely dispersed in their operations to be simply a pick-up game. Somebody had set these things in place. That meant that someone should have detected the plans.
There were two reasons for this intelligence failure. First, detecting the kinds of preparations being made is not easy. The United States was heavily dependent on networks created by the Shiite leader Ahmed Chalabi, and the guerrillas were Sunnis. We suspect that the sourcing prior to the war blinded the United States to preparations being made in Sunni territory. Second, and more important, Washington had a predetermined concept about Iraq and Iraqi resistance, which many shared.
The United States had fought the Iraqis during Desert Storm, and emerged with a complete lack of respect for the Iraqi forces. Just as the Israelis had developed a concept of the capabilities of the Egyptian forces in the 1967 war -- a concept that proved to be disastrously incorrect by the 1973 war -- so the Americans had reached a set conclusion about Iraqi forces. Moreover, they had drawn political conclusions: Saddam Hussein's regime was unpopular and its fall would be greeted with emotions ranging from indifference to joy. Thus, the Americans focused on what they expected to be a conventional military campaign that would create a blank slate on which the United States could draw a new political map.
There was another side to this. The American experience in guerrilla warfare was fixed in Vietnam. The lesson of Vietnam was that the United States was defeated by two things: first, sanctuaries for the guerrillas that the United States could not attack -- including a complex logistical system, the Ho Chi Minh Trail -- and second, the terrain and vegetation of Vietnam, which prevented effective aerial reconnaissance and placed U.S. forces at a tactical disadvantage. Iraq's topography did not offer sanctuary or cover. Therefore, a full-scale insurgency would be impossible to mount.
The United States had failed to learn important lessons from the Israeli situation, in which guerrilla warfare -- incorporating wildly unconventional means such as suicide bombers -- was waged without benefit of sanctuary or clear supply lines. But more importantly, the Americans had failed to take into account that while Iraq could not field a large, effective conventional force, guerrilla warfare requires a much smaller number of troops. Moreover, they failed to consider that the behavior of forces defending Iraq's seizure of Kuwait during Desert Storm might be different than the behavior of forces resisting American occupation of Iraq proper.
Intelligence failures occur in every war, and this one was certainly much less significant than, for instance, the failure at Pearl Harbor. But this failure was conjoined with the administration's assumption that, given the character of the Iraqi soldier and the nature of Iraqi society, Iraqi resistance would not be sustained. That error, coupled with the intelligence failure, generated today's crisis. The problem is an intelligence failure overlaid by a misconception.
Insurgency and Inertia
If intelligence failures are a constant reality in war, the measure of a military force is how rapidly it recognizes that a failure has occurred and how quickly it adjusts strategy and tactics. In this case, the administration's concept about Iraq blocked the adjustment: The Bush administration's position, as pronounced by Donald Rumsfeld, was that the guerrillas did not constitute an organized force and that they were merely the "dead-enders" of the Baathist government. This remained the administration's position until July 2003.
That meant that for about three months, as the guerrillas gained increasing traction, there was no change in U.S. strategy or tactics. Strategically, Washington continued to view Iraq as a pacified country on which the United States could impose a political and social system, much as it did with Japan and Germany after World War II. This had a specific meaning: The Baathists had been the ruling party in Iraq; therefore, driving former Baathists out of public life, a process that mirrored what happened in Germany and Japan, was the strategy. Tactically, since there were no guerrillas -- only criminals and remnants of the former regime -- no military action had to be taken. U.S. forces remained in an essentially defensive posture against a trivial threat.
The decision to force the Baathists out of public life had two effects. First, it drove the Baathists closer to the guerrillas. They had nowhere else to go. Second, it stripped Iraq of what technocrats it had. After a generation of Baath rule, anyone with technical competence was a member of the Baath party. That meant that the United States had to bring in contractors to operate Iraq's infrastructure. But if we assume that the Baathists over time could be replaced by other Iraqis with sufficient training, then this was a rational policy.
The administration realized its error in June and July 2003. It replaced CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks earlier than scheduled with Gen. John Abizaid. The problem was that the insurrection, by then, had taken root. It is not clear that there was ever a point when the insurrection could have been stopped, but certainly, the three-month lag between the opening of the guerrilla war and the beginning of an American response had made it impossible to simply stop the insurrection.
At the same time, the insurrection had a basic weakness: It was not an Iraqi insurrection, but a Sunni insurrection. To underscore a point that most Americans seem unable to grasp, most of Iraq never rose against the Americans. The insurrection was confined to the Sunni regions and -- despite some attempts to expand it -- the Shia and Kurds were not only indifferent, but completely hostile, to the aspirations of the Sunnis. If the American Achilles' heel was its inability to force a military solution to the insurrection, the weakness of the Sunnis was their inability to broaden the base of the insurrection.
However, once it was established that the insurrection was under way, the American conception collapsed.
Reaction: Negotiations
First, the view of the Iraqis as essentially passive following the war gave way to a very different picture: The Sunnis were in rebellion, and the Shia were confidently preparing the way for a government they would dominate. Iraq was not Japan. It was not a canvas on which a contemporary MacArthur could overlay a regime. It was not even an entity that could be governed.
This led to the second shift. The United States could not unilaterally shape Iraq. The other side of this coin was that the United States had to make deals with a variety of Iraqi factions -- and this meant not only the Shia, Sunnis and Kurds, but also factions within each of these groups. Indeed, the United States had to deal not only with the Iraqi Shia, but also with the Iranians, who had real influence among them. The United States had to try to split that community -- which in turn meant dealing with former Baathist officials who were supporting the fight against the United States. In other words, the United States had to deal with its enemies.
When you don't win a war, you can end it only through negotiations, and those negotiations will take place with the people you are fighting -- your enemies. At the first battle of Al Fallujah, the Americans made their first public deal with the Baathists. Indeed, the American strategy turned into a political one: U.S. forces were fighting a holding battle with the guerrillas while negotiating intensely with a dizzying array of people that, prior to July 2003, the United States would have had arrested.
The American concept about Iraq is long gone. The failure to identify the intentions of the Baathists after the war is now history. But the essential problem remains in Washington's public posture:
1. The administration cannot admit what is self-evident: it does not have the ability, by itself, to break the back of the Sunni insurrection. To achieve this, the United States needs help from non-jihadist Sunnis -- Baathists -- as well as the Shia. U.S. troops cannot achieve the mission alone.
2. In order to get this help, the United States is going to have to make -- and is, in fact, making -- a variety of deals with players it would have regarded as enemies two years ago, and must make concessions that would seem to be unthinkable.
These negotiations are constant. The United States is doing everything it can to get former Baathists into the political process -- people who were close to Hussein. It is working intently with people like Ahmed Chalabi who were close -- some say very close -- to the Iranians. It is cutting deals left and right like a Chicago ward boss.
This is, of course, precisely what the United States must do. Its best chance at a reasonable outcome in Iraq is to split the Sunni community between jihadist and Baathist, and then use the Baathists to counterbalance the Shia -- without alienating the Shia. It takes the skill of an acrobat, and the fact is that Bush has not been too bad at it. The war itself has become a side show. U.S. troops are not in Iraq to win a war. They are there to represent U.S. will and to act as a counterweight in the political wheeling and dealing. War is politics by other means, so being shocked by this makes little sense. Still, the numbers of U.S. troops are irrelevant to the real issue. Doubling them wouldn't help, and cutting them in half wouldn't hurt. The time for a military solution is long past.
Battle in the Beltway
The problem with the hysteria in Washington is this: In all the negotiations, in all the promises, bribes and threats, the one currency that counts is the American ability to deliver. The ability to craft a deal depends on the ability of Bush to threaten various factions, and to make guarantees that can be delivered on. There is a pretty good chance that some sort of reasonable settlement can be achieved -- not ending all violence, but reducing it substantially -- if the United States has the credibility it needs to make the deals.
The problem the Bush administration has -- and it is a problem that dates back to the beginning of the war -- is its inability to articulate the reality. The United States is not staying the course. It has not been on course -- if by "course" you mean what was planned in February 2003 -- for two years. The course the United States has been on has been winding, shifting and surprising. The fact is that the administration has done a fairly good job of riding the whirlwind. But the course has shifted so many times that no one can stay it, because it disappeared long ago.
Having committed the fundamental error -- and that wasn't WMD -- the Administration has done a sufficiently good job that some sort of working government might well be created in Iraq in 2006, and U.S. forces will certainly be withdrawn. What threatens this outcome is the administration's singular inability to simply state the obvious. As a result, the Democrats -- doing what opposition parties do -- has made it appear that the Bush administration is the most stupid, inept and incompetent administration in history. And the administration has been reduced to calling its critics cowards.
The administration's position in Iraq is complex but not hopeless. Its greatest challenge is in Washington, where Bush's Republican base of support is collapsing. If it collapses, then all bets will be off in Iraq. Bush's challenge is to stabilize Washington. In fact, from his point of view, Baghdad is more stable than Washington right now. The situation inside the Beltway has now become a geopolitical problem. If Bush can't pull it together, the situation in Iraq will come apart. But to forge the stability he needs in Washington, the president will have to explain what he is doing in Iraq. And he is loath to admit, from his own mouth, that he is making deals with the enemy.
-
A friend forwards this piece from the Economist with a comment:
=========================
Marc
The Economist likes the changes in Iraq and in the Middle East... but there
isn't a single mention that Americans had anything to do with causing those changes. How fast things change. It seems, only a few weeks ago the only talk was about the "quagmire".
A.
============================
Arab world, Iraq and al-Qaeda
Unfamiliar questions in the Arab air
Nov 24th 2005 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition
As al-Qaeda scores own-goals in its backyard, many Arabs, including some Iraqis, are beginning to rethink their position on violence in the name of resistance
OF ALL the films to extol the fight for freedom from imperialism, one of the most cheering to Arab hearts is the rousing 1981 epic, ?Lion of the Desert?. A richly bearded Anthony Quinn plays the role of Omar Mukhtar, the simple Koran teacher who became a guerrilla hero, and for 20 years, from 1911-31, harassed the Italian forces bent on subduing Libya. In one memorable scene his Bedouin warriors, armed only with old rifles, hobble their own feet to ensure martyrdom as Mussolini's tanks roll inexorably towards them.
Such imagery, mixed with big doses of schoolbook nationalism and more recent real-life pictures of stone-throwing children facing Israeli guns, has
bolstered a common Arab perception of ?resistance? as an act that is just
and noble. The romanticism is understandable, and not much different from how, say, the French view their own underground in the second world war. Yet the morphing in recent years of resistance into terrorism, and the confusion in Iraq, where a humiliating foreign occupation also brought liberation from Baathist tyranny, has increasingly called this iconography into question.
The undermining of entrenched myths is a slow and halting process. But it is subject to sudden, shattering jolts, such as the November 9th suicide
bombing of three hotels in the Jordanian capital, Amman. In the minds of the killers, American-allied Jordan had become a rear base for the ?crusader? invaders of Iraq, and so its hotels, the sort of places where crusaders and their minions congregate, were legitimate targets for the resistance.
Yet it is perhaps more than incidentally ironic that among the 60 people
they killed was Mustapha Akkad, the Syrian-born director who created ?Lion of the Desert?. His film, glorifying the bravery of Muslim resistance fighters, happened to be one of the few productions explicitly endorsed on jihadist websites, albeit in a version that replaced the musical soundtrack with religious chants, and cut out all scenes showing women.
The global al-Qaeda franchise, whose Iraqi branch claimed responsibility for the Amman atrocity, has scored many own-goals over the years. The carnage in such Muslim cities as Istanbul, Casablanca, Sharm el-Sheikh and Riyadh has alienated the very Muslim masses the jihadists claim to be serving. By bringing home the human cost of such violence, they have even stripped away the shameful complacency with which the Sunni Muslim majority in other Arab countries has tended to regard attacks by Iraq's Sunni insurgent ?heroes? against ?collaborationist? Shia mosque congregations, funeral processions and police stations.
In Amman, al-Qaeda's victims included not only Mr Akkad and his daughter Rima, a mother of two, but also dozens of guests at a Palestinian wedding. The slaughter of so many innocents, nearly all of them Sunni Muslims, in the heart of a peaceful Arab capital, inspired a region-wide wave of revulsion. Far from being perceived now as a sort of Muslim Braveheart, the man who planned the attack, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, may be the most reviled person in Jordan, the country of his birth. His own tribe, which had previously taken some pride in its association with the Iraqi resistance, has publicly disowned him. Tens of thousands of Jordanians have taken to the streets of Amman to denounce terrorism. Opinion polls, which had previously shown Jordanians to be at best ambivalent about jihadist violence, now show overwhelming distaste for it (see tables).
Similar changes in attitude have overtaken other Arab societies. Some
150,000 Moroccans marched in Casablanca earlier this month to protest
against al-Qaeda's threat to kill two junior Moroccan diplomats kidnapped on the road to Baghdad. The execution by Mr Zarqawi's men of two Algerian diplomats and the Egyptian charg? d'affaires in Iraq earlier this year aroused similar indignation in their home countries. Two years of bloody jihadist attacks in Saudi Arabia have rudely shaken the once-considerable sympathy for radical Islamism in the conservative kingdom. A top Saudi security source reckons that 80% of the country's success in staunching violence is due to such shifts in public feeling, and only 20% to police work.
The enemies of life and joy
The direct impact of tragedy has not been the only impetus for change. Arab governments used to treat local terrorism as something that dented their prestige and should be covered up. Now they eagerly exploit the images of suffering to justify their policies. The way such events are reported in the press no longer hints at a reflexive blaming of external forces. The Arab commentariat, much of which had promoted sympathy with the Iraqi insurgency, and focused on perceived western hostility to Islam as the cause of global jihadism, has grown vocal in condemning violence. Jihad al-Khazen, the editor of al-Hayat, a highbrow Saudi daily, is a frequent and mordant critic of western policy. Yet his response to the Amman tragedy was an unequivocal call for global co-operation to combat what he blasted as the enemies of life, of joy, and of the light of day.
Popular culture, too, has begun to reflect such shifts in attitude.
Recently, during the peak television season of Ramadan, satellite channels watched by millions across the region broadcast several serials dramatising the human toll of jihadist violence. One of these contrasted the lives of ordinary Arab families, living in a housing compound in Riyadh, with a cartoonish view of the terrorists who eventually attack them. Another serial focused, with eerie foresight, on a group of jihadist assassins in Amman. Their plot to murder a television producer who is critical of their methods goes awry, killing three children instead. Unusually for an Arabic-language serial, even the villains are presented as conflicted souls, alienated from society and misled by dreams of glory and heavenly reward.
Religious leaders have chipped in. Moderate Muslim clerics have grown
increasingly concerned at the abuse of religion to justify killing. In Saudi
Arabia, numerous preachers once famed for their fighting words now advise tolerance and restraint. Even so rigid a defender of suicide attacks against Israel (on the grounds that all of Israeli society is militarised) as Yusuf Qaradawi, the star preacher of the popular al-Jazeera satellite channel, denounces bombings elsewhere and calls on the perpetrators to repent.
In Jordan, Mr Zarqawi's former cell-mate and mentor, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, long a firebrand proponent of widening holy war, has publicly given warning that excesses in Iraq have ?defiled the image? of jihad. Another mentor, al-Qaeda's overall second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is believed to have written a letter of advice to Mr Zarqawi that suggests he should desist from such provocatively grisly acts as sawing off captives' heads when a simple bullet would do.
Noteworthy in all these subtle shifts is the fact that they are, by and
large, internally generated. Few of them have come about as a result of
prodding or policy initiatives from the West. On the contrary, the intrusion
of foreign armies into Iraq, the consequent ugly spectacle of civilian
casualties and torture, and the continuing agony of Palestine, have clearly
slowed down the Arab public's response to the dangers posed by jihadism.
Now, or so it seems, it is the cooling of the Palestinian intifada, a slight
lowering of the volume of imagery featuring ugly Americans in Iraq, and a
general weariness with jihadist hysteria that have allowed attention to
refocus on the costs, rather than the hoped-for rewards, of ?resistance?. At the same time, the rising tide of American domestic opposition to the war has begun to reassure deeply sceptical Arabs that the superpower may not, after all, be keen to linger on Arab soil for ever.
Is a shift in attitudes on the fabled Arab street important? The answer is,
very much so. It surely affects, for example, the scale of private funding
directed to the Iraqi insurgents. The volume of those very secret sums is
impossible to determine, though the enthusiasm among, say, rich and
conservative Sunni Saudis for thwarting both an infidel superpower and the perceived influence of Shia Iran in Iraq must be pretty strong. Even a
trickle of cash translates quite directly into damage. And if it can be
assumed that for each of the 700-2,000 foreign fighters in Iraq (the current estimate of the Brookings Institution), there are many others who prefer to play jihad with their cheque books, there has been much more than a trickle.
Governments follow the street
A more tangible measure of change is the behaviour of Arab states.
Undemocratic though they may be, shaky Arab governments in many cases owe their baseline legitimacy to their own historical record of perceived resistance to foreign hegemony. The deeply unpopular invasion of Iraq placed them in a quandary. Any gesture towards aiding the success of this ?American project? risked a fierce popular backlash. That equation has now altered, and the results are already evident.
The two Arab heavyweights, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have lately begun to lend their diplomatic clout to resolving Iraq's troubles. The sudden urgency to do something, after years of fence-sitting, is prompted by several fears. One of these, seemingly justified by the Amman bombing, is that Iraq has turned from being a sponge for jihadist violence into a fountainhead that threatens the region.
Another is that Iraq's Sunni minority, by backing the insurgents, has
isolated itself and paved the way for Iran, whose government is now in the hands of revolutionary Shia radicals, to expand its influence. Since the
Iraqi elections scheduled for December 15th will create, for the first time,
not an interim government but one with a four-year term, it has dawned on many fellow Sunni Arabs that Iraq's Sunnis must stake a role in their
country's future or face further marginalisation.
Egyptian and Saudi efforts bore first fruits at a conference held in Cairo
this week in a bid to reconcile Iraqi factions. The decisions reached were
neither binding nor dramatic, and the whole event was pitched as preliminary to a broader meeting to be held in three months' time. Even so, the gathering of some 100 politicians of different stripes marked a big step in the crucial process of coaxing Sunnis back into the political game. The hosting of the event by the Arab League, an organisation that had previously kept aloof from Iraq's troubles, encouraged groups such as the Muslim Scholars' Association, which contests the legitimacy of Iraq's
Shia-dominated government and has so far boycotted the political process, to join in. Although neither senior Baathists nor active leaders of the insurgency were present, several of the Sunni delegates are known to be close to these factions.
Military v political resistance
Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, who is a pro-American Kurd, set the tone
by saying that he would personally be happy to meet with active fighters in the resistance. Further gestures to appease the Sunnis came in the final
communiqu?, which asserted the right of ?all peoples? to resist occupation, and called for a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops.
Significantly, these clauses had been watered down, after heated debate with Sunni leaders who initially insisted on a direct endorsement of resistance action ?against occupation forces?. The resolution also expressly declared that terrorism cannot be considered a form of resistance, and appeased Shia feelings further by rejecting the Sunni jihadists' contention that Shi'ism is a heretical sect.
Obviously, the vague wording over the key issue of ?resistance? is open to interpretation. Shia parties, such as the Islamist-oriented United Iraqi
Alliance, led by Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, have long
insisted that they are engaged in ?political resistance?; the fastest way to
end the occupation, they argue, is to achieve the security that will enable
the troops to leave.
For their part, pro-resistance Sunni parties contend that they, too, have
been subject to terrorism. They point to incidents such as the recent
exposure, by American forces, of a secret jail, run by the Shia-controlled
police, where hundreds of Sunni captives were mistreated. Attacks on foreign soldiers remain legitimate in their eyes. As for political resistance, a senior member of the Muslim Scholars' Association, Abd al-Salam al-Kubaisi, acidly remarked that its strongest proponents seem to be the American public, ?since they are calling daily for the troops to leave.?
Hardline insurgent leaders remain even more adamant. Baathist websites
denounce Iraq's government as ?spies and agents?. A statement from Mr
Zarqawi denounced the Cairo conference as an American ploy ?to make Sunni Muslims accept the dirty political game?. The only dialogue permissible, he said, was ?by the sword and seas of blood?.
Yet despite such verbal sparring and the vicious bloodletting on the ground, a degree of convergence can be detected. A huge majority of Iraqis want the occupation to end?some 82% according to a poll conducted by the British Ministry of Defence in August. The argument is over how to go about it. Most Iraqis also shun jihadist zeal, including many members of the broader Sunni resistance who feel that the radicals tarnish their cause. Despite deep mistrust of political institutions that have failed to provide security and a decent infrastructure, and despite the heightening of sectarian loyalty generated by two years of fear and chaos, the weary Iraqi public does not appear to have lost faith in the possibility of a political solution.
The two largest forces in the fragmented Sunni spectrum, the Iraqi Islamist Party and the Iraqi National Front, a more secular grouping that includes former Baathist officers, are actively rallying Sunnis to turn out to vote. Other Sunni politicians report a growing willingness among the non-jihadist groups, which make up the bulk of the insurgency, to consider a deal to wind down the fighting.
Moroccans, after their diplomats were seized in Baghdad, convey a new
message
Their main stated demands so far have been an immediate pullback of foreign troops from Iraqi cities and a timetable for full withdrawal. With even the Pentagon now hinting at plans to draw down troop levels significantly next year, and with Congress pushing for a phased withdrawal, such demands no longer look beyond possibility. Iraq's own, much-maligned security forces, meanwhile, are slowly getting fitter. Troop strength in the reconstituted army recently passed 100,000, nearing the targeted level of 135,000. The quiet re-enlistment of Baathist officers, who had been sacked wholesale early in the occupation, has also worked to restore a measure of Sunni confidence?though there are few Iraqi units where the insurgency is fiercest.
At the same time, subtle realignments are changing the shape of Shia
politics. The party of Muqtada al-Sadr, the young cleric whose fiery attacks on the occupation proved hugely popular with the urban poor, has joined the governing United Iraqi Alliance, a broad group dominated by two pro-Iranian Islamist parties. Meanwhile, prominent secularists have abandoned the alliance, leaving it a straightforward representative of activist Shia Islamism. Since many Iraqi Shias feel uncomfortable mixing religion and politics, and associate the alliance with the perceived weakness of the government, this might strengthen the nationalist centre.
Growing weary of war
The fact remains that Iraq is a nasty and dangerous place, where even a
widening commitment to political solutions may not prevent disintegration
into civil war. Recent revelations about police death-squads targeting
Sunnis, and the bombing of Shia mosques, have intensified sectarian
animosities. The vexed questions of federalism and how to share oil revenues remain to be settled. The secret objectives of Iran?whether it just wants to burn American fingers or to install a look-alike theocratic state?are unknown. The jihadists who have made Iraq their playground may have lost their wider appeal, but they are not going to disappear.
Yet there appears to be a growing consensus, within Iraq and outside, that the time has come to settle down and get on with life. A columnist in a Saudi daily, al-Sharq al-Awsat, Mashari Zaydi, suggests that Arabs have been torn by a struggle between two world-views, one hard, absolutist and aspirational, the other realist, compromising and practical. While the
realist approach, he says, may not win all you want, the absolutist one
risks losing everything you have.
Copyright ? 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
-
Our Troops Must Stay
By JOE LIEBERMAN
November 29, 2005; Page A18
I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months and can report real progress there. More work needs to be done, of course, but the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood -- unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn.
Progress is visible and practical. In the Kurdish North, there is continuing security and growing prosperity. The primarily Shiite South remains largely free of terrorism, receives much more electric power and other public services than it did under Saddam, and is experiencing greater economic activity. The Sunni triangle, geographically defined by Baghdad to the east, Tikrit to the north and Ramadi to the west, is where most of the terrorist enemy attacks occur. And yet here, too, there is progress.
There are many more cars on the streets, satellite television dishes on the roofs, and literally millions more cell phones in Iraqi hands than before. All of that says the Iraqi economy is growing. And Sunni candidates are actively campaigning for seats in the National Assembly. People are working their way toward a functioning society and economy in the midst of a very brutal, inhumane, sustained terrorist war against the civilian population and the Iraqi and American military there to protect it.
It is a war between 27 million and 10,000; 27 million Iraqis who want to live lives of freedom, opportunity and prosperity and roughly 10,000 terrorists who are either Saddam revanchists, Iraqi Islamic extremists or al Qaeda foreign fighters who know their wretched causes will be set back if Iraq becomes free and modern. The terrorists are intent on stopping this by instigating a civil war to produce the chaos that will allow Iraq to replace Afghanistan as the base for their fanatical war-making. We are fighting on the side of the 27 million because the outcome of this war is critically important to the security and freedom of America. If the terrorists win, they will be emboldened to strike us directly again and to further undermine the growing stability and progress in the Middle East, which has long been a major American national and economic security priority.
* * *
Before going to Iraq last week, I visited Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Israel has been the only genuine democracy in the region, but it is now getting some welcome company from the Iraqis and Palestinians who are in the midst of robust national legislative election campaigns, the Lebanese who have risen up in proud self-determination after the Hariri assassination to eject their Syrian occupiers (the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hezbollah militias should be next), and the Kuwaitis, Egyptians and Saudis who have taken steps to open up their governments more broadly to their people. In my meeting with the thoughtful prime minister of Iraq, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, he declared with justifiable pride that his country now has the most open, democratic political system in the Arab world. He is right.
In the face of terrorist threats and escalating violence, eight million Iraqis voted for their interim national government in January, almost 10 million participated in the referendum on their new constitution in October, and even more than that are expected to vote in the elections for a full-term government on Dec. 15. Every time the 27 million Iraqis have been given the chance since Saddam was overthrown, they have voted for self-government and hope over the violence and hatred the 10,000 terrorists offer them. Most encouraging has been the behavior of the Sunni community, which, when disappointed by the proposed constitution, registered to vote and went to the polls instead of taking up arms and going to the streets. Last week, I was thrilled to see a vigorous political campaign, and a large number of independent television stations and newspapers covering it.
None of these remarkable changes would have happened without the coalition forces led by the U.S. And, I am convinced, almost all of the progress in Iraq and throughout the Middle East will be lost if those forces are withdrawn faster than the Iraqi military is capable of securing the country.
The leaders of Iraq's duly elected government understand this, and they asked me for reassurance about America's commitment. The question is whether the American people and enough of their representatives in Congress from both parties understand this. I am disappointed by Democrats who are more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq almost three years ago, and by Republicans who are more worried about whether the war will bring them down in next November's elections, than they are concerned about how we continue the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead.
Here is an ironic finding I brought back from Iraq. While U.S. public opinion polls show serious declines in support for the war and increasing pessimism about how it will end, polls conducted by Iraqis for Iraqi universities show increasing optimism. Two-thirds say they are better off than they were under Saddam, and a resounding 82% are confident their lives in Iraq will be better a year from now than they are today. What a colossal mistake it would be for America's bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory.
The leaders of America's military and diplomatic forces in Iraq, Gen. George Casey and Ambassador Zal Khalilzad, have a clear and compelling vision of our mission there. It is to create the environment in which Iraqi democracy, security and prosperity can take hold and the Iraqis themselves can defend their political progress against those 10,000 terrorists who would take it from them.
* * *
Does America have a good plan for doing this, a strategy for victory in Iraq? Yes we do. And it is important to make it clear to the American people that the plan has not remained stubbornly still but has changed over the years. Mistakes, some of them big, were made after Saddam was removed, and no one who supports the war should hesitate to admit that; but we have learned from those mistakes and, in characteristic American fashion, from what has worked and not worked on the ground. The administration's recent use of the banner "clear, hold and build" accurately describes the strategy as I saw it being implemented last week.
We are now embedding a core of coalition forces in every Iraqi fighting unit, which makes each unit more effective and acts as a multiplier of our forces. Progress in "clearing" and "holding" is being made. The Sixth Infantry Division of the Iraqi Security Forces now controls and polices more than one-third of Baghdad on its own. Coalition and Iraqi forces have together cleared the previously terrorist-controlled cities of Fallujah, Mosul and Tal Afar, and most of the border with Syria. Those areas are now being "held" secure by the Iraqi military themselves. Iraqi and coalition forces are jointly carrying out a mission to clear Ramadi, now the most dangerous city in Al-Anbar province at the west end of the Sunni Triangle.
Nationwide, American military leaders estimate that about one-third of the approximately 100,000 members of the Iraqi military are able to "lead the fight" themselves with logistical support from the U.S., and that that number should double by next year. If that happens, American military forces could begin a drawdown in numbers proportional to the increasing self-sufficiency of the Iraqi forces in 2006. If all goes well, I believe we can have a much smaller American military presence there by the end of 2006 or in 2007, but it is also likely that our presence will need to be significant in Iraq or nearby for years to come.
The economic reconstruction of Iraq has gone slower than it should have, and too much money has been wasted or stolen. Ambassador Khalilzad is now implementing reform that has worked in Afghanistan -- Provincial Reconstruction Teams, composed of American economic and political experts, working in partnership in each of Iraq's 18 provinces with its elected leadership, civil service and the private sector. That is the "build" part of the "clear, hold and build" strategy, and so is the work American and international teams are doing to professionalize national and provincial governmental agencies in Iraq.
These are new ideas that are working and changing the reality on the ground, which is undoubtedly why the Iraqi people are optimistic about their future -- and why the American people should be, too.
* * *
I cannot say enough about the U.S. Army and Marines who are carrying most of the fight for us in Iraq. They are courageous, smart, effective, innovative, very honorable and very proud. After a Thanksgiving meal with a great group of Marines at Camp Fallujah in western Iraq, I asked their commander whether the morale of his troops had been hurt by the growing public dissent in America over the war in Iraq. His answer was insightful, instructive and inspirational: "I would guess that if the opposition and division at home go on a lot longer and get a lot deeper it might have some effect, but, Senator, my Marines are motivated by their devotion to each other and the cause, not by political debates."
Thank you, General. That is a powerful, needed message for the rest of America and its political leadership at this critical moment in our nation's history. Semper Fi.
Mr. Lieberman is a Democratic senator from Connecticut
-
Geopolitical Diary: Thursday, Dec. 1, 2005
U.S. President George W. Bush made his speech. It was fascinating in two respects. On the surface, he held hard to the basic theme that he has stayed with for the past two years: that the primary path forward rests on a military solution to the insurgency. When looked at a bit deeper, it was a much more nuanced speech than he normally makes.
The main theme was that the primary solution to the American problem in Iraq is turning over responsibility for security and prosecution of the war against the insurgents to an Iraqi army. A good deal of the speech was devoted to a discussion of the process of training the Iraqi army and the lessons that have been learned in the process of doing so.
What was important here was the implication that the variable determining U.S. participation in Iraq is not the state of the insurgency, but the state of the Iraqi army. At one point he said that this war would not end with a ceremony on the deck of a battleship. In other words, there will not be a sudden, formal end to the war. He has therefore divided the war into two parts. The first is the phase in which the United States carried the primary responsibility of defeating the insurrection. The second phase would be the one in which the Iraqi army carries the primary burden. For the United States, the war could be reduced or ended prior to a complete defeat of the insurgents.
The more interesting dimension of the speech was his careful parsing of the insurgency. First, he identified the insurgency as Sunni. Then, he divided the insurgents into three groups:
1. Rejectionists: Those Sunnis who reject an Iraq in which they no longer hold a privileged position.
2. Saddamites: Those who want to return the dictatorship to power.
3. Terrorists: People around militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who are committed to continuing the struggle at all costs.
He went on to say that, "We're working with the Iraqis to help them engage those who can be persuaded to join the new Iraq -- and to marginalize those who never will." And that is the heart of the strategy.
What Bush said in this line is that it is the Iraqis themselves -- or more precisely, Shia and Kurds in the political process, as well as Sunnis -- who are already engaged in finding a political solution. Bush has named two groups that are beyond the pale (Saddamites -- you have to love that name -- and terrorists) and one group, the rejectionists, that is in play. Bush said he wants to isolate the insurgents by engaging those who will engage. That obviously means the rejectionists.
The rejectionists' requirements are purely political. This group is interested in its own role in Iraq, not in restoring Saddam Hussein or in supporting foreign jihadists. If its members can be induced to stop fighting and isolate the other two groups, some sort of stability can be achieved. This requires a political process. Note that Bush said that the Iraqis would carry out the political process with U.S. assistance. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad said that he was going to engage in negotiations with them himself, as well as with the Iranians. If what Bush said is taken seriously, that means that the United States, in negotiating on behalf of and in support of the Iraqi government, is doing so from the Shiite platform. In other words, the rejectionists are being threatened with their worst nightmare -- complete marginalization under Shiite rule.
If this appears to be reading much into the speech, it may be. But if we assume that Khalilzad did not make his statements earlier in the week without authorization -- and he certainly did not -- then this speech has to be read in the context of Khalilzad's statements. And the only way that makes sense is to read Bush's analysis of the insurgency as a broad blueprint of the negotiating terrain.
Interestingly, he did not mention negotiations. He seemed to be speaking purely in military terms. Yet, at a crucial point, he drew a complex map of the enemy, and located the group that would be engaged and on whose behalf this would happen. In other words, Bush confirmed Khalilzad's statement without even slightly seeming to change U.S. strategy.
But by mid-week we know this: The United States no longer expects to suppress the insurgency by itself, but expects to transfer responsibility to an Iraqi -- read Shiite and Kurdish -- force. It does not intend to isolate the insurgents, but to engage and divide them. And that means that a purely military strategy will now be supplemented by negotiations. Bush never once mentioned Khalilzad. He never once said anything that undermined his position.
But so much for our dubious sources. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was right there, being praised again.
-
An interesting primary source. Note how the recruit in question made transit from Afghanistan to Iran to Iraq.
Saudi TV: New weapon against extremism
Monday 05 December 2005
Saudi state-run Channel One TV broadcasted the first episode of a new series aimed at dissuading young Saudis from following in the footsteps of many of their contemporaries to join the jihad (holy war) earlier this week. ?Jihad Experiences, the Deceit? is a five part series which will tell the stories of several young Saudis who left to Iraq to fight alongside Abu Musab al Zarqawi.
Zayd Asfan, Abdullah Khoja and Walid Khan narrated their journey from ordinary Saudi youth to mujahideen and discussed the recruitment and brainwashing techniques used by al Qaeda.
At the end of the program, Channel One also broadcast a talk show on the subject of terrorism and recruitment featuring experts in the studio.
Each former militant discussed the religious, social and psychological motives behind their transformation. The men examined their intellectual, social and psychological condition before embracing extreme ideologies, the impact of irrational emotions, the lack of knowledge of Islamic Shariaa (law) and the consequences of extremist ideologies on the individual, his family and society. They also spoke of the positive role the environment (family, peers and the public) can play in restricting the flow of extremist ideas and thoughts. In addition, the men discussed the role of social institutions in facing-off to militant ideologies and the plans to contain returning fighters as well as the particular personality traits and psychological mechanisms which are used to persuade young men.
Walid Khan spoke first and told the viewers how he was introduced to extremism, emphasizing that young men like him were driven by factors outside of religion such as psychological pressure and the desire to rebel. For example, Walid said he did not believe in the principle of takfir (judging other Muslims as infidel). Instead, he sought answers to the numerous questions that crowded his thoughts. He was told, ?Embark on jihad and you will obtain all the answers.? The problem, as he put it was, ?You never get any answers through jihad.?
For his part, Koja recounted how a meeting with an Islamist militant from Afghanistan changed his life. ?I heard that an Uzbek mujahideen leader in Afghanistan, Taher Jan was in the city of Taif where I was working. I wanted to meet him very much and was lucky to be able to. I shared with him my desire to join the mujahideen in Afghanistan or any other part of the world where true jihad for the sake of Allah was being waged. He replied that I may not be able to tolerate the life of a mujahid in Afghanistan given the comfortable standard of living in Saudi Arabia. I assured him I will be patient.?
Walid also remembered how unfamiliar he was with ideological discussions on takfir before joining the extremists. ?Afterwards, when I found myself in direct contact with people who believe in takfir and spoke constantly about it, I began listening to their arguments. When asked why takfir, they would answer with religious evidence we were unable to counter. This is how we complied.? In the beginning, Walid added, ?I was motivated primarily by enthusiasm. My brother had told me of a friend who became a mujahid. I wondered how someone could leave everything behind. I thought his motives must have been very strong. I then read religious fatwas (edicts) and texts and rousing poems. My eagerness motivated me.?
The recruitment was not complete until the men received military training and learned how to handle explosives and a range of weapons. Ziad Asfan told the viewers of his return to Afghanistan after an initial visit. This time, ?I joined a number of training camps. The first was al Siddiq camp where, for two weeks, I was taught how to use light weapons. As you probably know, the camp resembled other training grounds in that we listened to religious songs and fiery sermons that exposed Christian and Jewish conspiracies against the land of Islam and our biggest grievance, Palestine.?
For his part, Koja described how he crossed the border into Afghanistan on foot. ?I was dressed as an Afghan since we were keen to conceal our Arab identity. I asked about the camp and what would happen next. I was told to remain in the camp and follow training. I was also told to be patient and not ask many questions.?
Khan provided additional detail on his illegal journey. ?At night, we arrived at a small Iranian village called Sanandaj. We took a taxi to the village of Dezli on the Iran-Iraq border. We had an appointment at midnight with a man who was going to smuggle us into Iraq. Of course, this was a totally new experience to men. I was used to a peaceful and ordinary life that revolved around my family and university. I was afraid. We were received in Iraq by a member of Ansar al Islam. He took us to Khormana where we stayed for a long time in a totally alien environment.?
Discussing relations between new recruits, Khoja revealed, ?Young mujahideen were constantly suspicious. I met a young man I felt very comfortable with. I asked which city he came from and who he knew. He was very reluctant to answer. I was always told not to ask too many questions and focus on my own affairs. The explanation given was that militants were afraid of spies.?
Patience, Asfan indicated, was necessary at every undertaking. ?We were told to be patient. I heard this when climbing a mountain, walking in valleys and training. They told us your pure intentions will help prepare the men who will form the core of the Islamic state and the army which will march from Kabul to Palestine.?
Not all extremists were absorbed in ideology or focused on military training, according to Khan. ?There are many simple people amongst the ranks. They know nothing about [Osama] bin Laden or the Taliban. Their sole task is to keep guard. These laymen have no vision or goal.?
Fighters loyal to al Qaeda came from around the world. Khoja told the viewers how he met ?several Arab and non-Arab fighters, from Daghestan, France, Britain, Germany, and the U.S.A? all Muslims. I loved them all. I stayed with Pakistanis, Africans and Indonesians.?
The majority of Arab fighters ?were Jordanian followers of [Abu Musab] al Zarqawi. Originally, all of them had sworn allegiance to Sheikh Mohammad al Maqdisi and followers of Bayat al Imam in Jordan. In 1995 they were sentenced for 15 years in prison but were released five years later under a general amnesty. After their release, they traveled to Afghanistan where their ideas took shape. Of course, they believed that all Arab governments, armies and police were infidels.?
Islamist militants however were not a monolithic bloc. ?I understood that there were a number of disputes between them and bin Laden?s followers; they agreed on some issues and differed on others. We didn?t realize these intricate details until much later.?
?As soon as al Zarqawi and his followers arrived at the camp, the mood changed. Some mujahideen opposed al Zarqawi but they lacked funds and were willing to do anything for money. At that point, anyone with the required resources could have controlled the camp. Al Zarqawi joined us when the group was considering a truce with the Taliban. He appointed a close follower, Abu Mohammad to supervise us and sent half a million dollars five months later. The group now owed everything to al Zarqawi. He became the dominant figure and was able to impose his perspective. In order to control a group of mujahideen, all you need to do is become its main financier.?
Discussing extremist ideologies and recalling their indoctrination, the three men spoke in turn with Khoja explaining his unease at some of the notions he was being taught.
?One day, a Yemeni told me, ?God willing, we will conquer Riyadh?. I asked him why he regarded Riyadh as an enemy city when our brothers and sisters lived there. He said I didn?t know what I was talking about. Another Algerian brother also expressed similar reckless views. I was very saddened by what I heard and shared my concerns with the camp leader who was from Eritrea. This was at [al Qaeda?s] Khalden camp in Afghanistan.?
?Egyptians, Algerians, Tunisians, Libyans, Moroccans, Saudis, Yemenis, Chechens all stayed in the same camp along side men from Daghestan and The Netherlands. I remember Abu Khaled who was French of African descent. He spoke in classical Arabic. They all disagreed with the majority of Saudi and Muslim scholars and insulted them?, he added.
Asfan was more analytical in his intervention. ?They tried to convince us that the victory of Islam would not happen unless governments collapsed. They believed current regimes protected the Jews and Christians. They would always say that God had revealed a certain state was the most evil and dangerous.? Khan confirmed this religious and intellectual muddling and added, ?Almost 90% of the men I met in training camps questioned the authority of the Grand Mufti and other Islamic scholars.?
Khoja concurs. ?I used to tell others about Abu Bakr al Jezairi, a prominent sheikh from Medina. They attacked him as a scholar ?sitting under the air-conditioning unit? and said he never cared much about the fate of the ummah (Islamic state). I was really shocked when I heard this and similar opinions when I quoted Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Baz and Sheikh Muhammad ibn Uthaymeen. To my utter dismay, I was told neither scholar had waged jihad and were unaware of the state of the ummah. At the time, my knowledge was weak and I was overwhelmed by their claims.?
Commenting on the military training they received in Afghanistan, Asfan indicated that other militants ?always urged us to be patient. They always drew an analogy with how Arab armies prepare before going to war and force their soldiers to be patient. Because our cause was nobler, we had to be even more cautious!?
Khan interjected and revealed how militant groups recruited new gullible men. ?You would come to them with many unanswered questions and they would respond to you and attract you to their ways. The problem lies in that their ideology is solely about rebelling against government.?
http://www.asharqalawsat.com/english/news.asp?id=2916§ion=3
-
Military Lessons Learned in Iraq and Strategic Implications
By George Friedman
Among the things that emerge from every war, won or lost, are "lessons learned." Each war teaches the military on both sides strategic, operational, tactical and technical lessons that apply in future wars. Many of these lessons are useful. Some can be devastating. The old adage that "generals are always fighting the last war" derives from the failure to learn appropriate lessons or the failure to apply lessons properly. For example, the lessons learned from the First World War, applied to the Second, led to the Maginot Line. They also led to the blitzkrieg. "Lessons learned" cuts both ways.
Sometimes lessons must be learned in the middle of a war. During World War II, for example, the United States learned and applied lessons concerning the use of aircraft carriers, the proper employment of armor and the execution of amphibious operations. The Germans, when put on the defensive, did not rapidly learn the lessons of defensive warfare on a strategic level. The Allies won. The Germans lost. There were certainly other factors at work in that war, but the speed at which lessons are assimilated and applied is a critical factor in determining the outcomes of wars. It has been said that success in war is rooted in the element of surprise; it follows that overcoming surprise is the corollary of this principle.
Lessons are learned and applied most quickly at the tactical level. Squads, platoons and companies, which are most closely in contact with the enemy and have the most immediate thing at stake -- their very lives -- tend to learn and adapt the most quickly. One measure of morale is the speed at which troops in contact with the enemy learn and change. One measure of command flexibility is the extent to which these changes are incorporated into doctrine. In addition, a measure of command effectiveness is the speed at which the operational and strategic lessons are learned and implemented. It usually takes longer for generals to understand what they are doing than it does sergeants. But in the end, the sergeants cannot compensate for the generals, or the politicians.
In the Iraq war, both sides have experienced pleasant and unpleasant surprises. For instance, the Americans were pleasantly surprised when their worst-case scenario did not materialize: The Iraqi army did not attempt to make a stand in Baghdad, forcing the U.S. military into urban attritional warfare. And the Iraqi insurgents were pleasantly surprised at the length of time it took the Americans to realize that they were facing guerrilla warfare, and the resulting slowness with which the U.S. military responded to the attacks.
On the other hand, the Americans were surprised by the tenacity of the insurgency -- both the guerrillas' ability to absorb casualties and the diffusion of their command structure, which provided autonomy to small units yet at the same time gave the guerrillas the ability to surge attacks at politically sensitive points. And the insurgents had to have been surprised by the rapid tactical learning curve that took place on the U.S. side, imposing a high cost on guerrilla operations, as well as the political acumen that allowed the Americans and others to contain the insurgency to the Sunni regions.
In a strategic sense, the Iraqi insurgents had the simpler battle problem. Insurgency has fewer options. An insurgency must:
1. Maintain relations with a host population that permits for regrouping, recruitment and re-supply. While this can be coerced, the primary problem is political, in the need to align the insurgency with the interests of local leaders.
2. Deny intelligence to the enemy by using the general population to camouflage its operations -- thus forcing the enemy to mount operations that simultaneously fail to make contact with insurgents and also alienate the general populace. Alternatively, if the enemy refuses to attack the population, this must be used to improve the insurgents' security position.
3. Use the target-rich environment of enemy deployments and administrative centers to execute unpredictable attacks, thereby increasing the enemy's insecurity and striking at his morale.
The guerrillas' purpose is to engender a sense of psychological helplessness in their conventional enemy, with the goal of forcing that enemy to abandon the fight or else to engage in negotiations as a means of defense.
The guerrilla does not have to win militarily. His goal is not to lose. The essence of asymmetric warfare is not merely the different means used to fight the war, but the different interests in waging the war. In Vietnam, the fundamental difference between the two sides was this: The North Vietnamese had a transcendent interest in the outcome of the war -- nothing mattered more than winning -- whereas for the Americans, Vietnam was simply one interest among a range of interests; it was not of transcendent importance. Thus, the North Vietnamese could lose more forces without losing their psychological balance. The Americans, faced with much lower losses but a greater sense of helplessness and uncertainty, sought an exit from a war that the North Vietnamese had neither an interest nor a means of exiting.
Now, Vietnam was more of a conventional war than people think. The first principle of insurgency -- drawing sustenance and cover from a local population -- was a major factor before the intervention of main-line North Vietnamese units. After that, these units relied more on the Ho Chi Minh Trail than on the local populace for supplies, and on terrain and vegetation more than on the public for cover. It was at times less a guerrilla war than a conventional war waged on discontinuous fronts. Nevertheless, the principle of asymmetric interest still governed absolutely: The North Vietnamese were prepared to pay a higher price than the Americans in waging the war, since they had greater interests at stake.
The United States fought a counterinsurgency in Vietnam. It should have tried to reformulate the conflict as a conventional war. First, the Ho Chi Minh Trail was the strategic center of gravity of the war, and cutting that line would have been a conventional move. Second, operating in a counterinsurgency mode almost guaranteed defeat. Some have argued that the U.S. difficulty with counterinsurgency warfare is its unwillingness to be utterly ruthless. That is not a tenable explanation. Neither the Nazis nor the Soviets could be faulted with insufficient ruthlessness; nevertheless, the Yugoslav Partisan detachments drained the Nazis throughout their occupation, and the Afghan guerrillas did the same to the Soviets. Counterinsurgency warfare is strategically and tactically difficult.
The problem for occupying forces is that -- unlike the insurgents, who merely must not lose -- the counterinsurgents must win. And because of asymmetric interests, time is never on their side. The single most important strategic error the Americans made in Vietnam was in assuming that since they could not be defeated militarily, they might not win the war, but it was impossible that they could lose it. They failed to understand the principle of asymmetry: Unless the United States won the war in a reasonable period of time, continuing to wage the war would become irrational. Time is on the side of guerrillas who have a sustainable force.
The United States did not expect a guerrilla war in Iraq. It was not part of the war plan. When the guerrilla war began, it took U.S. leaders months to understand what was happening. When they did understand what was happening, they assumed that time was at the very least a neutral issue. Having launched the war in the context of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Americans assumed that they had interests in Iraq that were as great as those of the insurgents.
But as in other guerrilla wars, the occupying power has shown itself to have less interest in occupying the country than the resistance has in resisting. It is not the absolute cost in casualties, but rather the perception of helplessness and frustration the insurgent creates, that eats away at both the occupying force and the public of the occupying country. By not losing -- by demonstrating that he will survive intense counterinsurgency operations without his offensive capabilities being diminished -- the insurgent forces the occupier to consider the war in the context of broader strategic interests.
One of two things happens here: The occupier can launch more intense military operations, further alienating the general populace while increasing cover for the insurgents -- or, alternatively, attempt to create a native force to wage the war. "Vietnamization" was an attempt by the United States to shift the burden of the war to the Vietnamese, under the assumption that defeating the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong was more in the interests of the South Vietnamese than in the interests of the Americans. In Iraq, the Americans are training the Iraqi army.
The U.S. option in Vietnam was to impose a conventional model of warfare -- much as the United States did in Korea, when it ignored the guerrillas and forced the war into a battle of conventional forces. It is even more difficult to impose a conventional war in Iraq than it might have been in Vietnam under an alternative American strategy. Here, attacking the insurgents' line of supply is a tenuous strategy -- not because the line does not exist, but because the dependency on it is less. The insurgents in Iraq operate at lower levels of intensity than did the Vietnamese. The ratio of supplies they need to bring into their battle box, relative to the supplies they can procure within their battle box, is low. They can live off the Sunni community for extended periods of time. They can survive -- and therefore, in the classic formulation, win -- even if lines of supply are cut.
The Sunni guerrillas in Iraq have all of the classic advantages that apply to insurgency, save one: There are indigenous forces in Iraq that are prepared to move against them and that can be effective. The Shiite and Kurdish forces are relatively well-trained (in the Iraqi context) and are highly motivated. They are not occupiers of Iraq, but co-inhabitants. Unlike the Americans, they are not going anywhere. They have as much stake in the outcome of the war and the future of their country as the guerrillas. That changes the equation radically.
All wars end either in the annihilation of the enemy force or in a negotiated settlement. World War II was a case of annihilation. Most other wars are negotiated. For the United States, Vietnam was a defeat under cover of negotiation. That is usually the case where insurgencies are waged: By the time the occupation force moves to negotiations, it is too late. Iraq has this difference, and it is massive: Other parties are present who are capable and motivated -- parties other than the main adversaries.
The logic here, therefore, runs to a negotiated settlement. The Bush administration has stated that these negotiations are under way. The key to the negotiations is the threat of civil war -- the potential that the Shia, the main component of a native Iraqi force, will crush the minority Sunnis. There is more to this, of course: The very perception of this possibility has driven a number of Sunnis to cooperate in efforts to put down the insurgency, looking to secure their future in a post-occupation Iraq. But it is the volatility of relations between the ethnic groups underlying the negotiations that can shift the outcome in this case for the United States.
All war is political in nature. It is shaped by politics and has a political end. In World War II, the nature of the combatants and the rapid learning curve of the Allies allowed for a rare victory, in which the outcome was the absolute capitulation of the enemy. In Vietnam, the nature of the war and the failure of the American side to learn and evolve strategy led to a political process that culminated in North Vietnam achieving its political goals. In Iraq, the question is whether, given the combatants, the complete defeat of either side appears likely. Even if the United States withdraws, a civil war could continue. Therefore, the issue is whether the conflict has matured sufficiently to permit a political resolution that is acceptable to both sides. As each learns the capabilities of the other and assimilates their own lessons of the war, we suspect that a political settlement will be the most likely outcome.
-
Al Qaeda: Targeting Guidance and Timing
December 09, 2005 01 25 GMT
By Fred Burton
Previously unpublicized segments of an al Qaeda videotape made in September hit the news media early Dec. 7, when the tape (featuring Ayman al-Zawahiri) was posted in its entirety on a jihadist Web site. The statements being aired struck an industrial nerve center: For the first time, a senior al Qaeda leader was heard to be calling specifically -- and offering ideological justification -- for strikes against energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf region. Because the region's oil wealth is considered to be the patrimony of the Muslim world, it long has been believed that attacks of this sort would be anathema to al Qaeda and its long-term political goals in the region. The group's leaders, including Osama bin Laden, have made remarks about the need to halt the theft of Muslim oil many times in the past, but no one of al-Zawahiri's stature before has been known to discuss so directly the value of striking at energy targets in the Middle East.
The rationale for doing so is clear enough. As al-Zawahiri says in the tape: "I call on mujahideen to concentrate their attacks on Muslims' stolen oil, from which most of the revenues go to the enemies of Islam, while most of what they leave is seized by the thieves who rule our countries."
It is important to note the audience for this statement: Al-Zawahiri is not issuing a warning to the oil industry or the West, but rather is giving targeting guidance to al Qaeda's supporters in the Middle East. In other portions of the 40-minute videotape, he emphasizes that bin Laden is alive and continues to lead the jihadist war, claims credit in al Qaeda's name for the July 7 train bombings in London and rails against Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. It is, if you will, a motivational speech al-Zawahiri is making -- but the strategy he espouses is one with inherent risks.
Considering that oil is viewed by al Qaeda as the blessing of Allah upon Arabs and Muslims, the jihadist leadership does not seem to be in any danger of committing ideological cannibalism, provided attacks are staged in a way that cripples export infrastructure and the economies of specific countries -- rather than, for example, setting fire to oil wells -- since the oil would remain in Muslim hands under the strategy being urged. Al-Zawahiri's statement plays on long-standing divisions within the Arab world, where those from non-oil states might refer to the wealthy Gulf countries (and their frequently well-off citizens) as "Khaleejis" -- a word that technically means "from the Gulf" but has come to connote, in common slang, something more along the lines of "rich, lazy and spoiled." And any attacks that cause instability in countries with hated regimes, like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, are in al Qaeda's interest.
The problem is that, if there should be follow-through, the effects of such strikes might not be easily contained. Poor Arab countries like Yemen and Jordan could feel the pinch long before the United States did -- and while that still might bring about the sought-after political instability, it also could hurt al Qaeda's standing among the masses, as other attacks waged on Arab soil have before. That is no small consideration; al-Zawahiri himself has urged other leaders, notably Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, to avoid operations that would needlessly alienate other members of the ummah (such as the Shia). Clearly, the leadership is well aware of the risks involved -- but given the way al-Zawahiri's statement came to light this week, it seems equally clear that al Qaeda places a great deal of emphasis on ensuring this guidance is heard and heeded.
The issue of how the statements came to light made news itself, since initial reports from wire services and broadcast agencies on Dec. 6 mistakenly said the al Qaeda tape was new. It was, in fact, recorded and released in mid-September, marking the fourth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. Arab satellite television broadcaster Al Jazeera was the first to receive the tape, and aired segments of it on Sept. 19. But it was not until another Web site, one known to be used by Islamist militants, made the video available Dec. 7 that the targeting guidance -- among the final statements made in the 40-minute recording -- was picked up by world media (including, in a circular fashion, Al Jazeera).
In explaining the discrepancy, Al Jazeera said it had aired all the portions of the tape the editorial staff believed to be significant upon its receipt in September -- having judged statements about the oil sector "not newsworthy" at the time. Though perfectly logical, this explanation raises more questions than answers. For one thing, the video was released shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck in the United States and world attention was focused on record-high energy prices -- something that would tend to raise the news value of any threats to Persian Gulf oil assets. Moreover, Al Jazeera is known worldwide as the primary distribution point for key al Qaeda statements; we would not expect any statements made in a videotape of this sort to be considered lightly. That said, of course, the news media are peopled with humans, and human error -- a lapse of news judgment or an editorial oversight -- is always a possibility.
Another explanation is that Al Jazeera's editorial decision-makers indeed were aware of the call to action but chose not to broadcast it, having weighed several issues of which news value is merely one. Several factors, including ethics and politics, play into the editorial process.
It must be remembered that the Qatar-based satellite channel's privileged source-media relationship with al Qaeda has given Al Jazeera considerable cachet in the media industry. It also has made Al Jazeera an object of interest for intelligence agencies hoping to trace the locations of al Qaeda leaders or gather forensic evidence, such as fingerprints, from the tapes themselves. And it has brought considerable political pressure to bear on some editorial decisions, such as whether to broadcast graphic footage of beheadings and other material that -- in addition to being newsworthy -- was viewed as fueling the risks of violence to Westerners or otherwise aiding al Qaeda's cause. At each juncture, there were ethical issues at stake and nuanced business decisions to be made.
But while it is one thing to air sensational footage of violence that already has been carried out against foreigners or to broadcast statements warning of possible attacks abroad, it can be quite another to carry the rallying cry that urges attacks against the economic backbone of one's own country, region or primary commercial market. For an editorial decision-maker serving a certain geographic market, the political and economic consequences could make this a very different decision indeed.
Whatever led to it, the situation at the end of the day is this: Al Jazeera had an opportunity to air al-Zawahiri's targeting guidance in September, and did not -- nor was the message made widely known through other venues. An alternative Web site believed to be used by Islamist militant groups -- which could thus be surmised to have links to al Qaeda and access to its materials -- brought matters to a head after a significant time lag. The targeting call then was covered almost as a matter of routine by other media outlets in response, and oil markets spasmed predictably.
In the classic whodunit sense, it seems that someone was keenly interested in making sure the targeting guidance was distributed -- and the list of suspects is extremely short. Since Al Jazeera did not oblige by broadcasting the statement initially, al Qaeda chose another outlet -- and possibly the timing of the release as well. The key question is why.
It has been noted that the scare to the oil markets came only days before an OPEC meeting, scheduled to take place Dec. 12 -- enough time for cartel members to consider the threat and adjust production strategies accordingly. Al Qaeda is well aware of the economic repercussions of its statements and actions, and oil prices recently have dropped again. Making sure the threats were made public at this juncture -- when cold weather and heating fuel are also concerns for Western buyers -- theoretically would be one way of reinflating prices and thus harming al Qaeda's main enemies.
Upon closer examination, however, there are deeper implications to al-Zawahiri's exhortations.
Al Qaeda in the past has made only vague references to striking at oil infrastructure; with al-Zawahiri's statements, that changed. There have been indications that al Qaeda is in financial difficulties -- to the point that the leadership might be having to divert funds from some areas to sustain key operations in others. Historically, the bulk of al Qaeda's funding is believed to have come from Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The financial downturn could be the result of donor fatigue or other factors; however, not striking at oil infrastructure in the region has been a way of protecting major donors' interests.
Thus, the shift in al Qaeda's rhetoric -- which has been hinted for some time but takes on an emphatic note when clearly stated by a top strategist -- might be a way to either punish former donors for their laxity, or otherwise achieve significant goals. It is in the areas where financial support for the group has been greatest that ideological sympathies also tend to run quite high -- even from those without the means to contribute funds -- so al-Zawahiri in essence could be calling on core supporters to "act locally" under the operational guidance.
And this underscores yet another significant implication: If al Qaeda's leadership knows it retains a serious ability to strike within the United States or other Western countries, logic dictates that it would marshal those forces and draw attention to key targets in those places. With the Sept. 11 attacks, al Qaeda took its war against "crusaders" into the enemy camp -- a strategy intended to demonstrate its strength and build support and morale among the oppressed Muslim masses. Ordering strikes against the patrimony of the Muslim world -- even as a way of crippling the West and wounding the "apostate" regimes that al Qaeda opposes in the Middle East -- is doing almost the exact opposite, and is so controversial that even sympathizers might be expected to balk.
In all likelihood, that is why al Qaeda statements have only hit around the edges of this issue up to this point. The guidance is tactically efficient, in the sense that it is viable guidance concerning a region where both high-value targets and al Qaeda supporters are numerous -- but strategically and politically, this is an option of last resort.
-
The Iraqi Election's Effects, from Washington to Tehran
Note: The Geopolitical Intelligence Report will resume Jan. 3.
By George Friedman
Let's begin with two facts. First, the Iraqi elections were held Dec. 15. That is the important news: They were held. The Sunni population, along with Shia and Kurds, participated. Second, U.S. President George W. Bush did not break below 37 percent popularity. In fact, he bounced to about 47 percent.
The first fact indicates that the Iraqi situation did not collapse into utter chaos. The second fact indicates that the Bush presidency did not collapse into impotence. These two facts are obviously connected. They do not end the story by any means, but they do open a new chapter.
In September and October, as Bush sank below 40 percent in the polls, we argued that he was reaching a critical point: As presidents fall below about 35-37 percent, they start losing their core constituency -- an event from which recovery is extremely difficult. Bush's presidency was at its red line. We also argued that the crisis' cause was not just Hurricane Katrina -- although it certainly hurt -- but also that Bush couldn't seem to pull the situation together in Iraq. But even though Bush's political base shuddered, it did not break. And that bought him time to see Iraq develop a sense of order with the Dec. 15 election.
Looked at in reverse, if Bush had been flattened completely by plummeting popularity figures, pulling things together Dec. 15 would have been impossible. The Sunnis were looking to Washington to guarantee their interests as they entered the political process. If Bush had collapsed completely, those guarantees would have been of little value, and the Sunnis might well have pursued a different course. However, Bush did not collapse, and the Sunnis entered the political process. Thus the two political processes became intimately bound up together.
The Baathist and traditional Sunni leadership's decision to participate in the elections was conditioned by two considerations. First, and most important, had they not participated they would have been completely excluded from the regime the Shia and Kurds were crafting. The Sunnis realized the insurrection was not spreading beyond their own region. They could sustain their resistance, but the political process was under way in the rest of Iraq -- the larger part of Iraq -- and they would be left with chaos in their own region, isolation from the rest of the country and no political power. Moreover, if they succeeded in driving out the Americans, they would have been left to the tender mercies of their historical enemies. So, if they failed to drive out the Americans, they would be in chaotic isolation; if they did drive out the Americans, they would face much harsher treatment at the hands of the Shia. The revelation of conditions in Shiite prisons for Sunnis just before the elections helped drive that point home neatly.
Secondly, the native Sunni leadership was not happy with the inroads foreign jihadists were making into the Sunni community. The Baathists are secular, and the rest of the Sunni community is far from Wahhabi jihadists. That the jihadists were effective in fighting the Americans did not necessarily thrill the Sunni leadership, who did not want to see their sons come under the radicals' influence. Jihadist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- useful while the Sunnis were trying to force a military solution to their situation -- posed an increasing danger to the traditional leadership. As foreigners and jihadists, al-Zarqawi and his followers in all likelihood could not supplant the local leadership. Nevertheless, they posed a challenge that would only increase as the insurrection continued. Also, the Iraqi Sunnis were not exactly thrilled about Sunnis regularly dying at the hands of jihadists -- whether as collateral damage or due to "collaboration." In the Sunni mind there is a difference between killing Americans (resistance) and killing Sunnis (terrorism). The jihadists were a useful tool, but only when they could be controlled.
For the United States, splitting the Sunnis between the jihadist and Baathist/traditional faction had been a fundamental strategy. Following the miscalculations of 2003, the first U.S. strategy had been to play the Shia against the Sunnis in order to contain the insurrection in the Sunni region. That having succeeded, the United States now wanted to split the Sunnis among themselves, and especially isolate the al-Zarqawi faction.
U.S. efforts were much more sophisticated than just pitting Sunni nationalists against jihadists. Washington also worked to exploit internal Sunni nationalist differences between Baathists and Islamists, between different tribes, within tribes and even within other groups such as the religious scholarly body. In other words, it was the ability of the Bush administration to take advantage of multiple fault lines that led to the split within the Sunnis -- which, in turn, allowed the constitution to pass in the Oct. 15 referendum and forced most Sunnis to take part in the Dec. 15 polls.
American thinking was that if the native Sunnis could be brought (forced) into the political process, the foreign jihadists -- alien to Iraq -- would have to either start a civil war among the Sunnis that they couldn't win, or reduce the violence to a level which the Sunnis could tolerate in their political mode. There was no expectation that the violence would simply end -- only that in due course it would subside.
From the Sunnis' standpoint, the election represented a turning point, but not an irreversible one. Put differently, the Sunnis got to where they were by waging an insurrection and appearing willing to wage it indefinitely. Hated by the Shia and Kurds for their role in Saddam Hussein's regime, the Sunnis understood that, other things being equal, it was their turn to be oppressed and the United States wouldn't lift a finger to help them.
Therefore, launching an insurrection created a situation in which they would be neither simply ignored nor reduced to victim status. The insurrection was the Sunnis' bargaining chip. Indeed, the jihadists, with their willingness to go to any length to fight the Americans -- and Shia -- were the Sunnis' ultimate weapon. No one could control them but the Sunnis -- and that only delicately. Using the insurgency and the jihadists, the Sunnis maneuvered the Americans into a position in which their relationship with the Shia and Kurds would not provide a sufficient base for managing Iraq. They created a situation in which the Americans needed the Sunnis in order to pacify Iraq -- and therefore were willing to protect Sunni interests against the Shia.
Truth be known, the Americans were not all that unhappy being forced into this position. The Americans had developed a complex dependency on the Shia in the fall of 2003 and urgently wanted Shiite acquiescence. Had the Shia risen, the U.S. position would have been untenable. Needing Shiite support, Washington had effectively guaranteed the Shia control of Iraq -- a price it was not happy to pay. The American concern was not the Shia per se, but their Iranian allies.
Washington's fear was that containment of the Sunni uprising would create an Iranian satellite in Iraq. That would have had massive repercussions throughout the region -- particularly for Saudi Arabia, which fears growing Iranian power. Now, it should be remembered that the Iraqi Arab Shia are not identical to Iranian Shia. There are serious tensions between the two groups, which are ethnically, theologically, culturally and linguistically distinct. So a Shiite government in Iraq is not simply an Iranian satellite. However, it could well be an Iranian ally, and that was not the outcome the United States wanted.
Of course, the United States was also concerned about Shiite ambitions to transform Iraq from a secular state to an Islamic one -- the last thing Washington needed was another Iran. So the United States needed to almost double-cross the Shia without actually doing so -- and cooperating with the Sunnis gave Washington the opportunity to do just that.
Thus, as much as the United States -- and the Bush presidency -- was hurt by the Sunni insurrection, the insurgency carried with it a silver lining. The United States demonstrably had to contain the Sunnis, and the only option it had was political: championing Sunni interests against the Shia. The most glaring example of this was Bush phoning the leader of Iraq's Islamist Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) and urging him to make concessions to Sunni demands in order to break the deadlock in the constitutional negotiations. Ali al-Adeeb, a Shiite member of the constitutional committee, said Aug. 26 that Bush asked Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, to accept compromises that deal with purging the Baath party from public life. While the United States could not be accused of simply double-crossing the Shia, it could use the Sunnis' demands as a platform from which to try to reshape the new regime so that it had a built-in degree of complexity that would prevent outright Shiite control. That, in turn, would prevent outright Iranian domination.
The Sunnis still see the insurgency as their only bargaining chip. They want to demonstrate that they can moderate it, but they do not -- at this point -- want it to fade. The more al-Zarqawi does, the greater the U.S. dependency on the Sunnis. They don't want al-Zarqawi to get out of control -- as stated, he could threaten their own interests -- but they don't quite want him to go away. The Sunnis will walk a fine line until they reach an acceptable political settlement with the Shia that can be guaranteed in some way.
So, the Shia become the dominant power in Iraqi politics. The Kurdish position is protected. The Sunnis get their piece of the government, and al-Zarqawi loses his base of operations as Sunni confidence rises. There is, however one huge loser in this scenario: Iran. Iran should be going wild over what is happening in Iraq, and indeed it is. We must never forget Iran's war with Iraq and the trauma it created in Iran. Iran is obsessed with the ideal of a neutral or pro-Iranian Iraq. The U.S. maneuverings with former Baathists terrify the Iranians. They have minimal confidence in the political cleverness of Iraqi Shia, given the historical record. A coalition of Americans and Baathists is Tehran's worst nightmare. Depending on Iraqi Shia to protect their interests in the face of this coalition -- interests the Shia in Iraq don't always share -- is not something they can do.
It is therefore not an accident that, as their primary national security interests have been torn to shreds, the Iranians have tried to raise the ante. In ranting about the Jews and the Holocaust and moving Israel to Alaska, the Iranians are trying to play the North Korea game. The North Koreans maximize their leverage by appearing to be nearly a nuclear power and more than a little nuts. This brings the U.S. -- and a bunch of other nations -- to the table to negotiate with them and give them money or grain or other little gifts.
The Iranians have deliberately made it clear that they are going to get nuclear weapons and have hinted that they might already have them. Then, Iran's president started playing the role of Kim Jong Il, making it clear that he is crazy enough to use nuclear weapons.
One of the unremarkable constants in the Middle East of late is how hands-off a position the Israelis have been taking on everything. Threatening not-so-subtly to take action against Israel is old hat, but doing so against the background of increasingly touchy nuclear negotiations is another issue entirely. When the Iranian president began saying that Israel should be wiped off the map -- or at least moved to Alaska -- the Israelis obediently perked up and began dusting off battle plans to neutralize (read: nuke) Iran, with March bandied about as a realistic timeframe.
There are many things that could complicate U.S. goals in the Middle East, but none would do so more efficiently than Israeli missiles striking Iran. Since the last thing the United States needs is an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran, and the second-to-last thing the United States wants is a new war in Iran, the Iranians are betting that the Americans will try to placate them as Washington does with North Korea.
What the Iranians want, of course, are guarantees on future Iraqi policy. They also want to make certain that their Baathist enemies are never again in a position to return to power. And they are expecting the United States to guarantee all these things. Of course the Sunnis are expecting the United States to guarantee their interests. The Kurds have always relied on the United States. And the Israelis want to make sure that the Iranian nuclear threat is not left to them to handle. Each has its own threat. The Sunnis can crank up the insurgency. The Shia can invite in more Iranians. The Kurds can try to instigate an uprising in Turkey (or Iraq, Iran or Syria). The Iranians can threaten Israel with nuclear weapons, and the Israelis can threaten a preemptive strike.
Washington does not want any of these things. That means the United States must juggle a series of nearly incompatible interests to get a situation where it can draw down its troops. On the other hand, the Shia need the Americans to protect them from the Sunnis and the Iranians. The Sunnis need the Americans to protect them from the Shia. The Kurds need the Americans to protect them from the Turks (and the Sunnis). The Iranians need the Americans to protect them from the Israelis. And the Israelis generally need the Americans.
So, there is enough symmetry in the situation that the Bush administration might just be able to pull it off. What "it" consists of is less clear and less important than the balancing act that precedes it. It is in that balancing act that the United States reduces its forces, pushes al-Zarqawi to the wall, plays Iraqi and Iranian Shia against each other and gives the Iranians enough to keep them from going nuclear before Washington is ready to deal with the issue on its terms. It is dizzying, but that's what happens when war plans don't work out on the field the way they did in the computer -- which is usually. The administration has actually crafted something resembling a solution, or a solution has presented itself. Between that and polls that are a bit above awful, there is a chance the situation could work out in the administration's favor.
However, as all of this suggests, a final agreement is not only nowhere in sight, but not even in mind. Any conclusive agreement that would be acceptable to one group would be unacceptable to at least one other. In fact, the only thing that all of the domestic players agree on is that Washington has a role to play as the ultimate guarantor of any new government. The United States has no problem with this save one condition: that Washington is not responsible for day-to-day security. That in turn requires one item: a functional, united Iraqi army. That too has a precondition: a united army must include the Sunnis. Again, there is a follow on: the only Sunnis with military expertise are the Baathists.
Of all the possible Iraqi arrangements, the one that terrifies Iran is the one that is actually happening: a political agreement, with the support of all the local players, that involves a united, functional military complete with unrepentant Baathist elements. Memories of the 1980-1988 war are suddenly running a lot closer to the surface. Iran's biggest problem in challenging this scenario is that it does not have an effective lever. All of the Iraqi power brokers have signed on for their own reasons, and no one -- even the Iraqi Shia leadership -- believes Tehran would offer a better deal.
Which means that the only power Tehran can talk to is the one player that has no interest in talking to it if Iraq is about to be settled: the United States.
Since Washington is trying to avoid an Israeli preemptive strike against Tehran, the United States suddenly has an interest in making Israel feel better. To do that, it needs to get the Iranians under control. To do that, it needs to talk to the Iranians. And now we have Iran with something the United States wants (an Israel that is not about to go ballistic) and the United States with something Iran wants (an Iraq that Iran can tolerate).
The United States is not going to hand Iraq over to Iran, but should Tehran choose to complicate matters, neither is the United States going to be able to withdraw its forces.
Within that imbroglio there is room for compromise: have the United States -- via a permanent occupation -- guarantee Iraqi neutrality. An Iraq with 165,000 U.S. troops is in neither Iran's nor the United States' interest, but an Iraq with 40,000 troops at bases in the western Iraqi desert is. It is enough of a force to prevent unsavory governments from arising, but not enough to make Iran fear that Tehran could be flying the Stars and Stripes after a hectic weekend.
-
http://www.michaelyon.blogspot.com/
-
Note the author of this piece!
======================
Right Islam vs. Wrong Islam
Muslims and non-Muslims must unite to defeat the Wahhabi ideology.
BY ABDURRAHMAN WAHID
Friday, December 30, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
JAKARTA--News organizations report that Osama bin Laden has obtained a religious edict from a misguided Saudi cleric, justifying the use of nuclear weapons against America and the infliction of mass casualties. It requires great emotional strength to confront the potential ramifications of this fact. Yet can anyone doubt that those who joyfully incinerate the occupants of office buildings, commuter trains, hotels and nightclubs would leap at the chance to magnify their damage a thousandfold?
Imagine the impact of a single nuclear bomb detonated in New York, London, Paris, Sydney or L.A.! What about two or three? The entire edifice of modern civilization is built on economic and technological foundations that terrorists hope to collapse with nuclear attacks like so many fishing huts in the wake of a tsunami.
Just two small, well-placed bombs devastated Bali's tourist economy in 2002 and sent much of its population back to the rice fields and out to sea, to fill their empty bellies. What would be the effect of a global economic crisis in the wake of attacks far more devastating than those of Bali or 9/11?
It is time for people of good will from every faith and nation to recognize that a terrible danger threatens humanity. We cannot afford to continue "business as usual" in the face of this existential threat. Rather, we must set aside our international and partisan bickering, and join to confront the danger that lies before us.
An extreme and perverse ideology in the minds of fanatics is what directly threatens us (specifically, Wahhabi/Salafi ideology--a minority fundamentalist religious cult fueled by petrodollars). Yet underlying, enabling and exacerbating this threat of religious extremism is a global crisis of misunderstanding.
All too many Muslims fail to grasp Islam, which teaches one to be lenient towards others and to understand their value systems, knowing that these are tolerated by Islam as a religion. The essence of Islam is encapsulated in the words of the Quran, "For you, your religion; for me, my religion." That is the essence of tolerance. Religious fanatics--either purposely or out of ignorance--pervert Islam into a dogma of intolerance, hatred and bloodshed. They justify their brutality with slogans such as "Islam is above everything else." They seek to intimidate and subdue anyone who does not share their extremist views, regardless of nationality or religion. While a few are quick to shed blood themselves, countless millions of others sympathize with their violent actions, or join in the complicity of silence.
This crisis of misunderstanding--of Islam by Muslims themselves--is compounded by the failure of governments, people of other faiths, and the majority of well-intentioned Muslims to resist, isolate and discredit this dangerous ideology. The crisis thus afflicts Muslims and non-Muslims alike, with tragic consequences. Failure to understand the true nature of Islam permits the continued radicalization of Muslims world-wide, while blinding the rest of humanity to a solution which hides in plain sight.
The most effective way to overcome Islamist extremism is to explain what Islam truly is to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Without that explanation, people will tend to accept the unrefuted extremist view--further radicalizing Muslims, and turning the rest of the world against Islam itself.
Accomplishing this task will be neither quick nor easy. In recent decades, Wahhabi/Salafi ideology has made substantial inroads throughout the Muslim world. Islamic fundamentalism has become a well-financed, multifaceted global movement that operates like a juggernaut in much of the developing world, and even among immigrant Muslim communities in the West. To neutralize the virulent ideology that underlies fundamentalist terrorism and threatens the very foundations of modern civilization, we must identify its advocates, understand their goals and strategies, evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and effectively counter their every move. What we are talking about is nothing less than a global struggle for the soul of Islam.
The Sunni (as opposed to Shiite) fundamentalists' goals generally include: claiming to restore the perfection of the early Islam practiced by Muhammad and his companions, who are known in Arabic as al-Salaf al-Salih, "the Righteous Ancestors"; establishing a utopian society based on these Salafi principles, by imposing their interpretation of Islamic law on all members of society; annihilating local variants of Islam in the name of authenticity and purity; transforming Islam from a personal faith into an authoritarian political system; establishing a pan-Islamic caliphate governed according to the strict tenets of Salafi Islam, and often conceived as stretching from Morocco to Indonesia and the Philippines; and, ultimately, bringing the entire world under the sway of their extremist ideology.
Fundamentalist strategy is often simple as well as brilliant. Extremists are quick to drape themselves in the mantle of Islam and declare their opponents kafir, or infidels, and thus smooth the way for slaughtering nonfundamentalist Muslims. Their theology rests upon a simplistic, literal and highly selective reading of the Quran and Sunnah (prophetic traditions), through which they seek to entrap the world-wide Muslim community in the confines of their narrow ideological grasp. Expansionist by nature, most fundamentalist groups constantly probe for weakness and an opportunity to strike, at any time or place, to further their authoritarian goals.
The armed ghazis (Islamic warriors) raiding from New York to Jakarta, Istanbul, Baghdad, London and Madrid are only the tip of the iceberg, forerunners of a vast and growing population that shares their radical views and ultimate objectives. The formidable strengths of this worldwide fundamentalist movement include:
1) An aggressive program with clear ideological and political goals; 2) immense funding from oil-rich Wahhabi sponsors; 3) the ability to distribute funds in impoverished areas to buy loyalty and power; 4) a claim to and aura of religious authenticity and Arab prestige; 5) an appeal to Islamic identity, pride and history; 6) an ability to blend into the much larger traditionalist masses and blur the distinction between moderate Islam and their brand of religious extremism; 7) full-time commitment by its agents/leadership; 8) networks of Islamic schools that propagate extremism; 9) the absence of organized opposition in the Islamic world; 10) a global network of fundamentalist imams who guide their flocks to extremism; 11) a well-oiled "machine" established to translate, publish and distribute Wahhabi/Salafi propaganda and disseminate its ideology throughout the world; 12) scholarships for locals to study in Saudi Arabia and return with degrees and indoctrination, to serve as future leaders; 13) the ability to cross national and cultural borders in the name of religion; 14) Internet communication; and 15) the reluctance of many national governments to supervise or control this entire process.
We must employ effective strategies to counter each of these fundamentalist strengths. This can be accomplished only by bringing the combined weight of the vast majority of peace-loving Muslims, and the non-Muslim world, to bear in a coordinated global campaign whose goal is to resolve the crisis of misunderstanding that threatens to engulf our entire world.
An effective counterstrategy must be based upon a realistic assessment of our own strengths and weaknesses in the face of religious extremism and terror. Disunity, of course, has proved fatal to countless human societies faced with a similar existential threat. A lack of seriousness in confronting the imminent danger is likewise often fatal. Those who seek to promote a peaceful and tolerant understanding of Islam must overcome the paralyzing effects of inertia, and harness a number of actual or potential strengths, which can play a key role in neutralizing fundamentalist ideology. These strengths not only are assets in the struggle with religious extremism, but in their mirror form they point to the weakness at the heart of fundamentalist ideology. They are:
1) Human dignity, which demands freedom of conscience and rejects the forced imposition of religious views; 2) the ability to mobilize immense resources to bring to bear on this problem, once it is identified and a global commitment is made to solve it; 3) the ability to leverage resources by supporting individuals and organizations that truly embrace a peaceful and tolerant Islam; 4) nearly 1,400 years of Islamic traditions and spirituality, which are inimical to fundamentalist ideology; 5) appeals to local and national--as well as Islamic--culture/traditions/pride; 6) the power of the feminine spirit, and the fact that half of humanity consists of women, who have an inherent stake in the outcome of this struggle; 7) traditional and Sufi leadership and masses, who are not yet radicalized (strong numeric advantage: 85% to 90% of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims); 8) the ability to harness networks of Islamic schools to propagate a peaceful and tolerant Islam; 9) the natural tendency of like-minded people to work together when alerted to a common danger; 10) the ability to form a global network of like-minded individuals, organizations and opinion leaders to promote moderate and progressive ideas throughout the Muslim world; 11) the existence of a counterideology, in the form of traditional, Sufi and modern Islamic teachings, and the ability to translate such works into key languages; 12) the benefits of modernity, for all its flaws, and the widespread appeal of popular culture; 13) the ability to cross national and cultural borders in the name of religion; 14) Internet communications, to disseminate progressive views--linking and inspiring like-minded individuals and organizations throughout the world; 15) the nation-state; and 16) the universal human desire for freedom, justice and a better life for oneself and loved ones.
Though potentially decisive, most of these advantages remain latent or diffuse, and require mobilization to be effective in confronting fundamentalist ideology. In addition, no effort to defeat religious extremism can succeed without ultimately cutting off the flow of petrodollars used to finance that extremism, from Leeds to Jakarta.
Only by recognizing the problem, putting an end to the bickering within and between nation-states, and adopting a coherent long-term plan (executed with international leadership and commitment) can we begin to apply the brakes to the rampant spread of extremist ideas and hope to resolve the world's crisis of misunderstanding before the global economy and modern civilization itself begin to crumble in the face of truly devastating attacks.
Muslims themselves can and must propagate an understanding of the "right" Islam, and thereby discredit extremist ideology. Yet to accomplish this task requires the understanding and support of like-minded individuals, organizations and governments throughout the world. Our goal must be to illuminate the hearts and minds of humanity, and offer a compelling alternate vision of Islam, one that banishes the fanatical ideology of hatred to the darkness from which it emerged.
Mr. Wahid, former president of Indonesia, is patron and senior advisor to the LibForAll Foundation (www.libforall.org), an Indonesian and U.S.-based nonprofit that works to reduce religious extremism and discredit the use of terrorism
-
Imperial Grunts
With the Army Special Forces in the Philippines and Afghanistan?laboratories of counterinsurgency
by Robert D. Kaplan
.....
America is waging a counterinsurgency campaign not just in Iraq but against Islamic terror groups throughout the world. Counterinsurgency falls into two categories: unconventional war (UW in Special Operations lingo) and direct action (DA). Unconventional war, though it sounds sinister, actually represents the soft, humanitarian side of counterinsurgency: how to win without firing a shot. For example, it may include relief activities that generate good will among indigenous populations, which in turn produces actionable intelligence. Direct action represents more-traditional military operations. In 2003 I spent a summer in the southern Philippines and an autumn in eastern and southern Afghanistan, observing how the U.S. military was conducting these two types of counterinsurgency.
The philippines
The inability of a democratic and Christian Filipino government to rule large areas of its own Muslim south?with al-Qaeda-related activity the result?became a principal concern of the United States in the wake of September 11, 2001. Operation Enduring Freedom, which focused primarily on removing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, also had an important Philippine component. In the aftermath of 9/11 U.S. troops entered the Muslim south of the Philippines for the first time since World War II.
In Afghanistan, Enduring Freedom combined conventional military elements with Special Operations forces and a militarized CIA. In the Philippines the effort was almost exclusively a Special Forces affair. The base of operations was Zamboanga, the center of the Spanish colonial administration in Mindanao and of the American effort against the Moros a century ago.
By the time I arrived in the Philippines, a number of leaders of the radical Islamic group Abu Sayyaf had been killed, and the group had scattered to smaller islands. Yet the American Joint Special Operations Task Force, or jsotf (pronounced Jay-so-tef), was still in place when I got to Zamboanga, and various Special Forces A teams were still training Filipino units nearby and on the main island of Luzon.
One morning soon after my arrival I found myself on a broken chair in a vast iron shed by the ferry dock in Zamboanga, in rotting heat and humidity. The water was a tableau of fishing nets and banca boats with bamboo outrigging. The floor in front of me was crowded with garbage and sleeping street people. Next to me were two new traveling companions from the jsotf: Special Forces Master Sergeant Doug Kealoha, of the Big Island of Hawaii, and Air Force Master Sergeant Carlos Duenas Jr., of San Diego. They would accompany me to the island of Basilan?"Injun Country" in the view of the jsotf, though Abu Sayyaf guerrillas had largely been routed.
I felt the familiar excitement of early-morning sea travel. From here in Zamboanga you could hop cheap and broken-down ferries all the way south along the Sulu chain to Malaysia and Indonesia. Had I been by myself, I might have been tempted to do it. I would certainly have had no qualms about going to Basilan alone. But being embedded with the U.S. military, as I was, meant giving up some freedom in return for access. I rode to the dock in a darkened van with three soldiers in full kit, along with Kealoha and Duenas, who, although they were in civilian clothes, carried Berettas under their loose shirts. Troops of the 103rd Brigade of the Filipino army would meet us at the dock in Isabela, the capital of Basilan.
pacom (the U.S. Pacific Command) had in 2002 decided to focus on Basilan because it was the northernmost and most populous island in the Sulu chain?the link between the southern islands and the larger island of Mindanao. Were Abu Sayyaf and other Muslim guerrilla groups to be ejected from Basilan, they would be instantly marginalized, it was thought. Basilan, with a population of 360,000, was important enough to matter, yet small enough to allow the United States a decisive victory in a short amount of time.
The first thing Special Forces had done about Basilan was conduct a series of population surveys. SF surveys were a bit like those conducted by university academics; indeed, many an SF officer had an advanced degree. But there was a difference. Because the motive behind these surveys was operational rather than intellectual, there was a practical, cut-to-the-chase quality about them that is uncommon in academia. Months were not needed to reach conclusions. Nobody was afraid to generalize in the bluntest terms; thus conclusions did not become entangled in exquisite subtleties. Intellectuals reward complexity and refinement; the military rewards simplicity and bottom-line assessments. For Army Special Forces?also called Green Berets?there was only one important question: What did they need to know about the people of Basilan in order to kill or drive out the guerrillas?
Special Forces officers teamed up with their counterparts in the Filipino army to question the local chiefs and their constituents in the island's forty barangays, or parishes. They conducted demographic studies with the help of satellite imagery. They found that the Christian population was heaviest in the northern part of Basilan, particularly in Isabela. Abu Sayyaf's strongest support was in the south and east of the island, where government services were, not surprisingly, the weakest. The islanders' biggest concerns were clean water, basic security, medical care, education, and good roads?in that order. Democracy or self-rule was not especially critical to the Muslim population. It had already had elections, many of them, which had achieved little for the average person: the government was elected but did not rule the group. Abu Sayyaf activities had shut down the schools and hospitals, and the guerrillas had kidnapped and executed teachers and nurses. The surveys demonstrated that the most basic human right is not freedom in the Western sense but physical security.
Next, under the auspices of Operation Enduring Freedom?Philippines, the Joint Task Force dispatched twelve Green Beret A teams to Basilan, backed up by three administrative B teams. Their mission was to train the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) units, which would then conduct operations against Abu Sayyaf. Doing that meant digging wells for American troops and building roads so that they could move around the countryside. The Americans also built piers and an airstrip for their operations. The Green Berets knew that all this infrastructure would be left behind for the benefit of the civilian population: that was very much to the point.
It was precisely in the Abu Sayyaf strongholds where the Green Beret detachments chose to be located. That in itself encouraged the guerrillas to scatter and leave the island. And by guaranteeing security, the U.S. military was able to lure international relief agencies to Basilan, and also some of the teachers and medical personnel who had previously fled. The American firm Kellogg, Brown & Root built and repaired schools and water systems. SF medics conducted medical and dental civic-action projects (medcaps and dentcaps, in military parlance) at which villagers volunteered information about the guerrillas while their children were being treated for scabies, malaria, and meningitis.
The objective was always to further legitimize the AFP among the islanders. The Americans went nowhere and did nothing without Filipino troops present to take the credit. When ribbons were cut to open new roads or schools, the Americans made sure to stay in the background.
With discretionary funds the Americans also built several small neighborhood mosques. "We hired locally and bought locally," a Green Beret officer told me, referring to the labor and materials for each project. The policy was deliberately carried to the extreme. Repairing roads meant clearing boulders off them; when the Green Berets saw peasants chipping away at these boulders to make smaller rocks, they bought the "aggregate" from the peasants and used it to lay the new roads.
The ostensible mission was to help Filipino troops kill or capture international terrorists. That was accomplished by orchestrating a humanitarian assistance campaign, which severed the link between the terrorists and the rest of the Muslim population: exactly what successful middle-level U.S. commanders had done in the Philippines a hundred years before. "We changed the way we were perceived," a Green Beret told me. "When we arrived in Basilan, Muslim kids made throat-slashing gestures at us. By the time we left, they were our friends. That led them to question everything the guerrillas had told them about Americans."
When I arrived in Basilan, the Americans had been gone for almost a year. Were their accomplishments long-lasting?
Before Enduring Freedom the hospital in Isabela had had twenty-five beds, and the staff had largely deserted to Zamboanga. Now there were 110 beds plus a women's clinic. The facility was being kept clean and orderly, with good water and electricity. The grounds were in the midst of landscaping. "Tell the American people that it is a miracle what took place here in 2002," Nilo Barandino, the hospital's director, told me. "And what was given to us by the American people, we will do our best to maintain and build upon. But there is still a shortage of penicillin. We get little help from Manila." Barandino said that Basilan used to be a "paradise for kidnappers," but since the American intervention kidnapping had stopped and the inhabitants of Isabela had begun going out at night again. A decade earlier he himself had been kidnapped.
From Isabela I headed southwest with Kealoha and Duenas, in a Humvee. Everywhere we saw portable bridges and sections of new road. If one island paradise on earth surpassed all others, I thought, it was here, with rubber-tree plantations and pristine palm jungles adorned with breadfruit, mahogany, mango, and banana trees under a glittering sun.
In Maluso, a predominantly Muslim area on Basilan's southwestern tip, facing the Sulu Sea, I met a water engineer, Salie Francisco. He jumped into the Humvee with us and took us deep into the jungle to follow the trail of a pipeline constructed by Kellogg, Brown & Root. It led to a dam, a water-filtration plant, and a school, all recently built by the United States Agency for International Development. The area used to be an Abu Sayyaf lair. The terrorists were gone. But, as Francisco told me, there were no jobs, no communications facilities, and no tourism, despite expectations raised by the Americans.
I saw poor and remote villages of the kind that I had seen all over the world, liberated from fear, and with a new class of Westernized activists beginning to trickle in. "The Filipino military is less and less doing its job here," Francisco told me. "We are afraid that Abu Sayyaf will return. No one trusts the government to finish building the roads that the Americans started." He went on: "The Americans were sincere. They did nothing wrong. We will always be grateful to their soldiers. But why did they leave? Please tell me. We are very disappointed that they did so."
As I continued around the island over the next few days, especially in the Muslim region of Tipo-Tipo, to the southeast, local Muslim officials were openly grateful toward the U.S. military for the wells, schools, and clinics that had been built, but critical of their own government in Manila for corruption and for not providing funds for development. True or not, this was the perception.
In southern Basilan the material intensity of Islamic culture became overpowering for the first time on my journey south, with a profusion of headscarves, prayer beads, signs for halal food, and a grand new mosque in Tipo-Tipo, paid for, it was said, by Arabian Gulf countries. I had entered an Islamic continuum, in which the Indonesian islands of Java, Borneo, and Sumatra seemed closer than Luzon.
Though I would learn more about Operation Enduring Freedom, one thing was already obvious: America could not change the vast forces of history and culture that had placed a poor Muslim region at the southern edge of a badly governed, Christian-run archipelago nation. All America could do was insert its armed forces here and there, as unobtrusively as possible, to alleviate perceived threats to its own security when they became particularly acute. And because such insertions were often in fragile Third World democracies, with colonial pasts and prickly senses of national pride, U.S. forces had to operate under very restrictive rules of engagement.
Humanitarian assistance may not be the weapon of choice for Pentagon hardliners, who prefer to hunt down and kill "bad guys" through direct action rather than dig wells and build schools?projects that in any case are possibly unsustainable, because national governments like that of the Philippines lack the resolve to pick up where the United States leaves off. I had the distinct sense that the work of Special Forces on Basilan had merely raised expectations?ones the government in Manila would be unable to meet. But nineteenth-century-style colonialism is simply impractical, and the very spread of democracy for which America struggles means that it can no longer operate without license. An approach that informally combines humanitarianism with intelligence gathering in order to achieve low-cost partial victories is what imperialism in the early twenty-first century demands.
The Basilan operation was a case of American troops' applying lessons and techniques learned from their experience of occupation in the Philippines a hundred years before. Although the invasion and conquest of the Philippine Islands from 1898 to 1913 became infamous to posterity for its human-rights violations, those violations were but one aspect of a larger military situation that featured individual garrison commanders pacifying remote rural areas with civil-affairs projects that separated the local population from the insurgents. It is that second legacy of which the U.S. military rightly remains proud, and from which it draws lessons in this new imperial age of small wars.
The most crucial tactical lesson of the Philippines war is that the smaller the unit, and the farther forward it is deployed among the indigenous population, the more it can accomplish. This is a lesson that turns imperial overstretch on its head. Though one big deployment like that in Iraq can overstretch our military, deployments in many dozens of countries involving relatively small numbers of highly trained people will not.
But the Basilan intervention is more pertinent as a model for future operations elsewhere than for what it finally achieved. For example, if the United States and Pakistan are ever to pacify the radicalized tribal agencies of the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands, it will have to be through a variation on how Special Forces operated in Basilan; direct action alone will not be enough.
Moreover, as free societies gain ground around the world, the U.S. military is going to be increasingly restricted in terms of how it operates. An age of democracy means an age of frustratingly narrow rules of engagement. That is because fledgling democratic governments, besieged by young and aggressive local media, will find it politically difficult?if not impossible?to allow American troops on their soil to engage in direct action.
Iraq and Afghanistan are rare examples where restrictive rules of engagement do not apply. But in most other cases U.S. troops will be deployed to bolster democratic governments rather than to topple authoritarian ones. Therefore unconventional warfare in the Philippines provides a better guidepost for our military than direct action in Iraq and Afghanistan.
AFGHANISTAN
By the time I left the Philippines, the postwar consolidations of Iraq and Afghanistan were in jeopardy. Both the Pentagon and the American public had thought in terms of a decisive victory. Yet the fact that more U.S. soldiers had been killed by shadowy Iraqi gunmen after the dismantling of Saddam Hussein's regime than during the war itself indicated that the real war over Iraq's future was being fought now, and Operation Iraqi Freedom of 2003 had merely shaped the battle space for it.
In Afghanistan, too, a rapid and seemingly decisive military victory had been followed by a dirty and bloody peace. Small-scale eruptions of combat, with few enemy troops visible, were now a permanent feature of the landscape. They were something the United States would have to get used to, whichever party occupied the White House.
Warlordism, always strong in Afghanistan, had been bolstered in recent decades by the diffuse nature of the mujahideen rebellion against the Soviets, the destruction wrought by fighting among the mujahideen following the Soviet departure, and the bureaucratic incompetence of the Taliban itself, which was more an ideological movement than a governing apparatus. An Afghan state barely existed even before the U.S. invasion of October 2001. Thus, barring some catastrophe such as the fall of a major town to a reconstituted Taliban, or the assassination of President Hamid Karzai, discerning success or failure would be a subtler enterprise in Afghanistan than in Iraq. The continued turmoil in the greater Middle East, and my desire to observe Army Special Forces in a more varied role than what I saw in the Philippines, led me on a two-month journey to Afghanistan in the fall of 2003.
The American invasion of Afghanistan a month after 9/11 was greeted with a chorus of dire, historically based predictions from the media and academia. American soldiers, it was said, would fail to defeat the rugged, unruly Afghans, just as the Soviets and the nineteenth-century British had. The Afghans had never been defeated by outsiders; nor would they ever be. After only a few weeks of American bombing, however, the Taliban fled the Afghan capital of Kabul in disarray. To say that the Americans succeeded because of their incomparable technology would be a narrow version of the truth. America's initial success rested on deftly combining high technology with low-tech field tactics. It took fewer than 200 men on the ground from the Army's 5th Special Forces Group, in addition to CIA troops and Air Force Special Ops embeds, helped by the Afghan Northern Alliance and friendly Pashtoons, to topple the Taliban regime.
If history could have stopped at that point, it would be an American success story. But history does not stop. By the fall of 2003 the Taliban had regrouped to fight a guerrilla struggle against the U.S.-led international coalition?similar to the struggle that the mujahideen had waged against the Soviets. With hit-and-run attacks across a dispersed and mountainous battlefield, and a new national army that needed to be trained and equipped, Afghanistan constituted a challenge better suited to Special Operations forces than to the conventional military.
With troops jammed elbow-to-elbow along the sides, divided by a high wall of Tuff bins, mailbags, and rucksacks, the C-47 Chinook, followed by its Apache escort, lifted off the pierced steel planking that the Soviets had left behind at Bagram Air Force Base. The rear hatch was left open where an M-60 7.62mm mounted gun was manned by a soldier strapped to the edge. Beyond the gun the landscape of Afghanistan fell away before me: mud-walled castles and green terraced fields of rice, alfalfa, and cannabis on an otherwise gnarled and naked sandpaper vastness, marked by steep canyons and volcanic slag heaps. The rusty, dried-blood hue of some of the hills indicated iron-ore deposits, the drab greens copper. Because of the noise of the engine, everyone wore earplugs. Nobody talked. Soon, like everyone else, I fell asleep.
An hour later the Chinook descended steeply amid twisted, cindery peaks. Hitting the ground, those of us who were headed for the firebase grabbed our rucksacks and ran off through the wind and dust generated by the rotors. At the same time, another group of soldiers, waiting on the ground, ran inside. The crew threw off the mailbags and Tuff bins. Then two soldiers on the ground led a hooded figure, his hands tied in flex cuffs and a number scrawled on his back, to the helicopter. In less than five minutes the Chinook roared back up into the sky.
The handcuffed man was a puc: "person under control"?what the U.S. military calls its temporary detainees in the war on terrorism. It has become a verb; to take someone into custody is to "puc him." The men who had put the puc in the Chinook?en route to Bagram, where he would be interrogated?were members of an Army Special Forces A team based at an Afghan firebase in Gardez. But they didn't look like any of the Green Berets I had so far encountered in my travels. These Green Berets had thick beards and wore traditional Afghan kerchiefs, called deshmals, around their necks and over their mouths, Lone Ranger?style, as protection against the dust. On their heads were either flat woolen Afghan pakols or ball caps. Except for their camouflage pants, M-4s, and Berettas, there was nothing to identify them with the U.S. military. They brought to mind the 2001 photos of Special Forces troops on horseback in Afghanistan that had mesmerized the American public and horrified the old guard at the Pentagon. All were covered with dust, like sugar-coated cookies.
I threw my rucksack in the back of one of their Toyota pickups and we drove to the firebase, a few minutes away. There was a science-fiction quality to the landscape, which seemed devoid of all life forms. Near the fort were two distinctive hills that the driver referred to as "the two tits."
Firebase Gardez is a traditional yellow, mud-walled fort; the flags of the United States, the State of Texas, and the Florida Gators football team were flying from its ramparts. Surrounded by barren hills on a tableland 7,600 feet above sea level, the fort looks like a cross between the Alamo and a French Foreign Legion outpost.
An armed Afghan militiaman opened the creaky gate. Inside, caked and matted with "moondust," as everyone called it, stood double rows of armored Humvees, armed GMVs (ground mobility vehicles), and Toyota Land Cruisers?the essential elements of a new kind of convoy warfare, in which Special Ops was adapting tactics more from the Mad Max style of the Eritrean and Chadian guerrillas of recent decades than from the lumbering tank armies of the passing Industrial Age.
Hidden behind the vehicles and veils of swirling dust were canvas tents, a latrine, a crude shower facility, and the perennial Special Forces standby?a weight room. Almost everyone here was either a muscular Latino or a white guy dressed like an Afghan-cum-convict-cum-soldier. Half of them smoked. They put Tabasco sauce on everything. Back at home most owned firearms. They bore an uncanny resemblance to the freelance journalists who had covered the mujahideen war against the Soviets two decades earlier.
"Welcome to the Hotel Gardez," said a smiling and bearded major, Kevin Holiday, of Tampa, Florida. Major Holiday was the commander of this firebase and of another in Zurmat, two hours south by dirt road. "Within these walls we have ODB-2070 and two A teams, 2091 and 2093," he told me in rapid-fire fashion. "Next door, living with an ANA [Afghan National Army] unit, is 2076. Down at Zurmat is 2074. Most of us are 20th Group guardsmen from Florida and Texas, here for nine months, except for a tent full of active-duty 7th Group guys on a ninety-day deployment"?the Latinos. "We're the damn Spartans." Holiday smiled again. "Physical warriors with college degrees."
From Firebase Gardez, Major Holiday's "Spartans" launched sweeps across Paktia Province, trying to snatch radical infiltrators from Pakistan. "All the bad guys are coming from Waziristan," Holiday said, referring to a Pakistani tribal agency. "Because of the threat from Pakistan, there is not much civil-affairs stuff going on here." Officially, the Pakistani government of President Pervez Musharraf was an ally of the United States. But like his predecessors, and like the British before them, Musharraf had insufficient control over the unruly tribal areas. "Pakistan is the real enemy" was something I quickly got used to hearing.
"Who was the puc put on the Chinook when I arrived?" I asked Holiday.
"We hit a compound. It had zero-time grenades, seven RPGs, Saudi passports, and books on jihad. The Puc lived there. We've got more people to round up from that hit."
"Everything we do," he went on, repeating a phrase I had heard often already, "is 'by,' 'through,' 'with' the indigs. The ANA comes along on our hits. Though the AMF [the tribally based Afghan Militia Forces] are the real standup guys. They see themselves as our personal security element. Yeah, every time we go out on a mission, we try to pick up hitchhikers?any Afghan who wants to be associated with what we do. Give the ANA and AMF the credit, put them forward in the eyes of the locals. We have to build up the ANA?it's the only way a real Afghan state will come about. But it's naive to think you can simply disband the militias."
The mud-walled fort was, in Major Holiday's words, a "battle lab" for Special Forces. One of the goals was to implement the El Salvador model: build up a national army while at the same time employing more-lethal paramilitaries, and then make the latter gradually and quietly disappear into the former. The process would take years?a prospect Holiday relished. I was reminded of what another Special Forces officer, Lieutenant Colonel David Maxwell, had told me: counterinsurgency always requires the three Ps?"presence, patience, and persistence."
Holiday, who had just turned forty, seemed the most clean-cut of the fort's inhabitants. A civil engineer with a master's degree from the University of South Florida, and the father of three small children, he was chatty, well-spoken, and intense. "God has put me here," he told me matter-of-factly. "I'm a Christian"?he meant an evangelical. "The best kind of moral leader is one who is invisible. I believe character is more important than education. I have noticed that people who are highly educated and sophisticated do not like to take risks. But God can help someone who is highly educated to take big risks."
Holiday had served in the 82nd Airborne before returning to civilian life and then joining Special Forces as a Florida National Guardsman. His long months of Guard duty did not please his private employer, so he left his job and went to work as a civil engineer for the state. "You see all this around you?" he asked, eyeing the dust, engine grease, and mud-brick walls. "Well, it's the high point of my military life and of everyone else here."
"What about the beards?" I asked.
Holiday smiled, deliberately rubbing his chin. "The other day I had a meeting at the provincial governor's office. All these notables came in and rubbed their beards against mine, a sign of endearment and respect. I simply could not get my message across in these meetings unless I made some accommodations with the local culture and values. Afghanistan is not like other countries. It's a throwback. You've got to compromise and go native a little."
"Another thing," he went on. "Ever since 5th Group was here, in '01, Afghans have learned not to tangle with the bearded Americans. Afghanistan needs more SF, less conventional troops, but it's not that easy, because SF is already overstretched in its deployments."
Holiday disappeared into the Operations Center, or ops cen, where I was not permitted because I lacked the security clearance. He had a tough, lonely job, I learned, being the middleman between the firebase and the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force?cjsotf. The higher-ups wanted no beards, no alcohol, no porn, no pets, and very safe, well-thought-out missions. The guys here wanted to go a bit wild and crazy, breaking rules as 5th Group had done in the early days of the war on terrorism, before "Big Army" entered the picture, with its love of regulations and hatred of dynamic risk. A monastic existence of sorts had evolved here, with its own code of conduct.
Holiday had to sell the missions and plead understanding for the beards and ball caps with the cjsotf, which, in turn, was under pressure from the Combined Joint Task Force-180 at Bagram. On one occasion, when the guys were watching a particularly raunchy Italian porn movie during chow, Holiday came in and turned it off, saying, "That's enough of that; keep that stuff hidden, please." An angry silence ensued, but the major got his way. Holiday, though an evangelical Christian, is no prude. He was only being sensible. If we are going to flout the rules, he seemed to be saying, we have to at least be low-key about it.
''The area where I'm from we call the Redneck Riviera," Lieutenant Colonel Marcus Custer, of Mobile, Alabama, told me as we returned to Gardez one evening. "Now, I know what you're thinking." He laughed. "Yeah, I've got relatives who live in trailers, who've never been thirty miles from their home. I eat grits." In fact Custer is an ethnic Cuban who had been separated from his family because of Fidel Castro, and was adopted by southerners. "So I'm not really related to the General Custer."
After he had arrived on a short visit, Custer and I moved into my tent, where we had many late-night conversations. He was a 19th Group National Guardsman, and a Customs officer in civilian life. Like the other Guardsmen, he had a lack of ambition that made him doubly honest. One night, while cleaning an old Lee Enfield rifle on a Bukharan carpet, Custer gave me his theory on the problem with the war on terrorism as it was being waged in Afghanistan. I later checked his theory with numerous other sources on the front lines, and it panned out perfectly: This wasn't his theory so much as everyone's, when people were being honest with one another. Sadly, it was a typical American scenario. I will put into my own words what he and many others explained to me.
The essence of military "transformation"?the Washington buzzword of recent years?is not new tactics or even weapons systems but bureaucratic reorganization. In fact, such reorganization was achieved in the weeks following 9/11 by the 5th Special Forces Group, based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, whose handful of A teams (with help from the CIA, Air Force Special Ops embeds, and others) conquered Afghanistan.
The relationship between 5th Group and the highest levels of Pentagon officialdom had, in those precious, historic weeks of the fall of 2001, evinced the organizational structure that distinguished al-Qaeda and also the most innovative global corporations. It was an arrangement with which the finest business schools and management consultants would have been impressed. The captains and team sergeants of the various 5th Group A teams did not communicate with the top brass through an extended, vertical chain of command. They weren't even given specific instructions. They were just told to link up with the indigs?the Northern Alliance and also friendly Pashtoons?and help them defeat the Taliban. And to figure out the details as they went along.
The result was the empowerment of master sergeants to call in B-52 strikes. Fifth Group was no longer a small part of an enormous defense bureaucracy. It became a veritable corporate spinoff, commissioned to do a specific job its very own way, in the manner of a top consultant. But as time went on, that operating procedure came to an end. Now what had previously been approved orally within minutes took three days of paperwork, with bureaucratic layers of lieutenant colonels and senior officers delaying operations and diluting them of risk. When hits finally took place, they more than likely turned up dry holes. One of the basic laws of counterinsurgency warfare, established in the Marines' Small Wars Manual (1940) and the British Colonel C. E. Callwell's Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (1896), was being ignored: Get out of the compound and out among the local people, preferably in small numbers. Yet the CJTF-180 in Bagram, by demanding forms and orders for almost every excursion outside the firebase, acted as a restraint on its Special Forces troops, whose whole purpose was to fight unconventionally in "small wars" style.
There was no scandal here, no one specifically to blame. It was just the way Big Army?that is, big government, that is, Washington?always did things. It was standard Washington "pile on." Every part of the military wanted a piece of Afghanistan, and that led to bureaucratic overkill.
"Big Army just doesn't get it," Custer said, like a persevering parent dealing with the antics of a child. "It doesn't get the beards, the ball caps, the windows rolled down so that we can shake hands with the hajis and hand out PowerBars to the kids. Big Army has regulations against all of that. Big Army doesn't understand that before you can subvert a people you've got to love them, and love their culture." (In fact, one reason that some high-ranking officers in the regular Army hated the beards was that they brought back bad memories of the indiscipline of the Vietnam-era Army.)
"Army people are systems people," he went on. "They think the system is going to protect them. Green Berets don't trust the system. We know the Kevlar helmets may not stop a 7.62mm round. So we wear ball caps?they're more comfortable. When you see a gunner atop an up-armor, bouncing up and down in the dust, breaking his vertebrae almost, let him wear a ball cap and he's happy. His morale is high because simply by wearing that ball cap he's convinced himself that he's fucking the system.
"Maybe in the future we'll be incorporated into a new and reformed CIA, rather than into Big Army. Any bureaucracy that is interested in results more than in regulations will be an improvement. You see, I can say these things?I'm a Guardsman."
During my time at Firebase Gardez, I went out regularly on "presence patrols" throughout the countryside. On one occasion the convoy descended from the mountains through cannabis fields and newly tilled poppy plantations. A massive mud-walled fort with Turkic-style towers loomed in the distance, marijuana leaves drying on its ramparts. I thought of the poppy fields on the way to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.
We halted in the middle of the road at the sight of what looked like a landmine. It wasn't. But by a turn of events the halt led to a local Afghan intelligence officer's inviting a counterintelligence guy, two other Green Berets, and me into his house for tea, while the rest of the convoy stood guard outside. He served the tea in a carpeted room heated by a dung-fired stove, with aspen beams overhead. I stared at the dust drifting into the tea.
Our host eventually discussed a certain Maulvi Jalani, who had entered into an informal alliance with Jalalludin Haqqani, the former mujahideen leader in Paktia and Khost, and a man associated with Saudi Wahhabi extremists like Osama bin Laden. He explained how opium profits were funding the Islamic opposition to Karzai. He believed that the Taliban would not return to power. More likely was the coalescing of an Iranian-brokered coalition of anti-American and anti-Karzai forces, to include Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and other of the more radical ex-mujahideen leaders, along with disaffected elements of the Northern Alliance, some remnants of the Taliban, and al-Qaeda.
The intelligence officer wanted us to stay for a meal, but we politely declined, since we had hours of traveling ahead. As usual, the map was useless. The dendritic pattern of dirt roads dissolved into incomprehensibility. The idea that a command post far away at Bagram could determine, as it had tried to, what roads we turned down, in a land where roads were virtually nonexistent, suddenly struck me as ludicrous. Twenty-first-century communications technology worked toward the centralization of command, and thus toward micro-management. But the war on terrorism would be won only by adapting the garrison tactics of the nineteenth century, in which lower-level officers in the field forged policy as they saw fit.
A few days later approval came for a hit near Gardez. Rather than wait, an eleven-vehicle convoy was imme- diately stood up, and around 9:00 p.m. we were off. By now I had been on enough compound hits to know the drill, so after we arrived I drifted away in the dark from my assigned vehicle and, after a while, proceeded inside the compound by myself, to see how the search was progressing.
Green Berets were probing with flashlights for two unexploded grenades that one of the occupants had just thrown at them. "Watch where you walk," I was warned. Along the courtyard were darkened rooms, illuminated by blue chemlights that the Green Berets had left behind to indicate that the rooms had already been cleared. Inside the house I peeked into a room where two Green Berets were kneeling on a carpet. They were using a flashlight to go over a pile of documents they had found, being careful not to wake two children who, miraculously, were sleeping through this mayhem.
As I left the compound, I noticed a counterintelligence officer interrogating one of the male inhabitants. They were both squatting against a section of mud wall, illuminated by flashlights attached to the M-4s held by other Green Berets, who had formed a semi-circle. The Afghan had a long white beard and a brown hood over his pakol. He looked stoic, unafraid. The counterintelligence officer was asking him simple stock questions in English: Had he seen anything suspicious? Who were his friends?
Each question elicited a long conversation between the man and the interpreter. It was clear that the counterintelligence guy was missing a lot. He didn't speak Pashto beyond a few phrases. Here was where the American Empire, such as it existed, was weakest.
Finally, all the counterintelligence officer could say to the man was "If you ever have a problem, come and see me at the firebase." Yes, this is what the man would surely do: forsake his kinsmen, and trust this most recent band of invaders passing through his land, invaders who could not even speak his tongue.
It wasn't the counterintelligence officer's fault that he hadn't been given the proper language training. Several years into the war on terrorism, one would think that Pashto would be commonly spoken, at least on a basic level, by American troops in these borderlands. It isn't. Nor are Farsi and Urdu?the languages of Iran and the tribal agencies of Pakistan, where U.S. Special Operations forces are likely to be active, in one way or another, over the coming decade. Like Big Army's aversion to beards, the lack of linguistic preparedness demonstrates that the Pentagon bureaucracy pays too little attention to the most basic tool of counterinsurgency: adaptation to the cultural terrain. It is such adaptation?more than new weapons systems or an ideological commitment to Western democracy?that will deliver us from quagmires.
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200510/kaplan-us-special-forces
-
Having recently dealt with several of the western pathologies noted herein, this piece has a particular resonance for me.
After the suicide of the West
By Roger Kimball
?It looks as if Islam had a bigger hand in the thing than we thought? . Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other.?
?Richard Hannay in John Buchan?s Greenmantle
Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.
?James Burnham, Suicide of the West
It seemed fitting that a symposium devoted to the subject of ?Threats to Democracy? should convene on the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. Not only was it one of the greatest sea battles in history, but it was also a battle greatly pertinent to the questions that guided our deliberations: What is the nature of the threats to democracy, to the culture and civilization of the West, and how can we best respond to those threats?
Let me say at the outset that I believe that Lord Nelson had the right idea?sail boldly in among your enemy?s ships, start firing, and don?t stop until you?ve reduced them to a shambles. It was good for England and for the rest of Europe that the Duke of Wellington proved himself to be of like mind a few years later. ?Hard pounding, gentlemen,? he said at Waterloo. ?We?ll see who pounds longest.?
Today, I believe, there is a widely shared understanding that our culture?not just the political system of democracy but our entire western way of life?is at a crossroads. That perception is not always on the surface. Absent the unignorable importunity of attack, absorption in the tasks of everyday life tends to blunt the perception of the threats facing us. But we all know that the future of the West, seemingly so assured even a decade ago, is suddenly negotiable in the most fundamental way. The essays that follow highlight some of the principle features of those negotiations. In this introduction, I want simply to review some of the moral terrain over which we are traveling.
I believe that Irving Kristol got it right when, in the early 1990s, he responded to the euphoria and na?vet? that greeted the fall of the Soviet Union. Many commentators announced the imminent arrival of a new era of peace, brotherhood, international comity, and enlightenment. Kristol was not so sanguine. In an essay called ?My Cold War,? he wrote that
There is no ?after the Cold War? for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers.
The oft-noted linguistic irony about the ?liberal ethos? that Kristol fears is that it has very little to do with genuine liberty and everything to do with the servitude of statist ideology.
That ideology comes in a range of flavors and a wide variety of wrappings. But the essential issue is one that Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, anatomized as ?democratic despotism? and that Friedrich Hayek, harkening back explicitly to Tocqueville, laid out with clinical brilliance in The Road to Serfdom. Quoting Tocqueville on the ?enervating? effect of paternalistic democracy, Hayek notes that ?the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of a people.?
One of the most penetrating meditations on the nature of that alteration is James Burnham?s book Suicide of the West. Written in 1964, that book, like its author, is largely and unfairly forgotten today. Burnham?s was a first-rate political intelligence, and Suicide of the West is one of his most accomplished pieces of polemic. ?The primary issue before Western civilization today, and before its member nations, is survival.? Suicide of the West is very much a product of the Cold War. Many of the examples are dated. But as with Irving Kristol?s Cold War, so with Burnham?s. The field of battle may have changed; the armies have adopted new tactics; but the war isn?t over: it is merely transmogrified. In the subtitle to his book, Burnham promises ?the definitive analysis of the pathology of liberalism.? At the center of that pathology is an awful failure of understanding which is also a failure of nerve, a failure of ?the will to survive.? Liberalism, Burnham concludes, is ?an ideology of suicide.? He admits that such a description may sound hyperbolic. ??Suicide,? it is objected, is too emotive a term, too negative and ?bad.?? But it is part of the pathology that Burnham describes that such objections are ?most often made most hotly by Westerners who hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough, to pulling it down.?
By way of illustration, let me return for a moment to Lord Nelson and Trafalgar. For anyone concerned with the fate of our culture, our civilization, the anniversary of Trafalgar was full of lessons. I wonder, for example, what Nelson would have thought of the Royal Navy?s decision last summer to reenact the battle not as a conflict between the English on one side and the French and the Spanish on the other but, out of sensitivity to the feelings of the French, as a contest between a Red Team and a Blue Team. Today, I suppose, Nelson, instead of broadcasting his famous message about duty, would have had to hoist the signal that ?England Expects or at Least Suggests That Every Person No Matter What Gender, Race, Class, Sexual Orientation, or National Origin Will Be Politically Correct.? Hard work on the flag officer, of course, but preserving the emotion of virtue is not without cost.
Trafalgar is full of lessons. When my wife and I visited London last September, we took our young son, a fervent admirer of Nelson, to Trafalgar Square to see Nelson?s column. We were surprised to see that it had company. On one of the plinths behind the famous memorial sat a huge sculpture of white marble. This, I knew, was one of the benefactions that Ken Livingstone, the Communist mayor of London, had bestowed on his grateful constituency: public art on Trafalgar Square that was more in keeping with cool Britannia?s new image than statues of warriors. From a distance, the white blob looked liked a gigantic marshmallow in need of an air pump. But on closer inspection, it turned out to be a sculpture of an armless and mostly legless woman, with swollen breasts and distended belly. In fact, it was a sculpture by Marc Quinn of one Alison Lapper, made when she was eight months pregnant. Ms. Lapper, who was born with those horrible handicaps, is herself an artist. Asked how she felt about the sculpture, Ms. Lapper said that she was glad that at last Trafalgar Square recognized someone who was not a white male murderer. It is worth noting, as one journalist pointed out, that the architects of Trafalgar Square were ahead of their time in at least one sense, for the sculpture of Ms. Lapper represented the second commemoration of a seriously disabled person. After all, there is Nelson on his column, missing his right arm and an eye.
How England chose to commemorate the Battle of Trafalgar and to respect its most public acknowledgment of Lord Nelson?s service to his country should give us pause. The union of sentimentality, political correctness, and multicultural piety is a disturbing ambassador to the future. It is a perfect example?one of many?of the ?liberal ethos? whose progress Irving Kristol mournfully observed and whose essential character Burnham delineated.
What are the stakes? The terrorist attacks of 9/11 gave us a vivid reminder?but one, alas, that seems to have faded from the attention of many Western commentators who seem more concerned about recreational facilities at Guantanamo Bay than the future of their towns and cities. For myself, ever since 9/11, when I think about threats to democracy, I recall a statement by one Hussein Massawi, a former Hezbollah leader, which I believe I first read in one of Mark Steyn?s columns. ?We are not fighting,? Mr. Massawi said, ?so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.?
It is worth pausing to reflect on that statement. The thing I admire most about it is its pristine clarity. You know where you are with Mr. Massawi. It requires no special hermeneutic ingenuity to construe his meaning. And you also know that he wasn?t speaking idly. He was a man of his word, as the events of 9/11 and the names Bali, Madrid, and?just last summer?London remind us.
Or so one would have thought. Mr. Massawi speaks clearly, but who is listening? Our colleges and universities have been preaching the creed of multiculturalism for the last few decades. Politicians, pundits, and the so-called cultural elite have assiduously absorbed the catechism, which they accept less as an argument about the way the world should be as an affirmation of the essential virtue of their own feelings. We are now beginning to reap the fruit of that liberal experiment with multiculturalism. The chief existential symptom is moral paralysis, expressed, for example, in the inability to discriminate effectively between good and evil. The New York Times runs full-page advertisements, signed by all manner of eminent personages, that compare President Bush to Adolf Hitler. Meanwhile, the pop singer Michael Jackson spends an unspecified number of millions to finance the construction of a mosque in Bahrain ?designated for learning the principles and teachings of Islam.? Thanks, Michael.
Over the years, The New Criterion has commented often on ?the culture wars,? the vast smorgasbord of intellectual, political, and moral havoc bequeathed to us by the 1960s. What we see now is a darker face of those conflicts. On the one hand, you have people like Mr. Massawi, and their name is legion. If American Airlines will lend them a 767, they will happily plow it into the most convenient skyscraper. Should they somehow get hold of a vial of anthrax or smallpox or an atomic weapon, we can be sure they would have not the least hesitation about obliterating whatever seat of Western decadence was most ready to hand?an American target would be best, of course, but failing that almost any other city would do. So far, Mr. Massawi and his pals have had to do without atomic or biological weapons, but they have kept themselves busy with semtex, car bombs, and the occasional televised beheading.
All this violence is not aimless. It has a clear goal, not only to push the West out of Saudia Arabia and other parts of the Middle East but also to establish the rule of Sharia, of Islamic law, wherever Muslims in any number have congregated. This is the condition that the Egyptian historian Bat Ye?or has called dhimmitude: the state of the dhimmis, the ?protected? or ?guilty? non-Muslim people in a Muslim world. Dhimmitude outlines the official status of a conquered, spiritually cowed people, people, as the Koran puts it, who are allowed to live unmolested as second-class citizens so long as they ?feel themselves subdued.?
I think we know where we are with the Mr. Massawis of the world. But how do we react? Well, the U.S. and British armed forces act in one way.
Our intellectual and cultural leaders, by and large, act in quite another. Our reaction?or lack of reaction?is just as much of a threat as the overt belligerence of Massawi & Co. A few days after 9/11, I was talking with a friend who teaches at Williams College. The response on campus there, as on so many campuses across the country, was shock, dismay, and outrage?partly at what had happened at Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania, but even more at what has come to be called Islamophobia. At Williams, my friend told me, one distraught colleague insisted that the college air movies about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as a warning about the Great Backlash Against Muslims that was just about to sweep the country.
Not just this country, either. This past summer, BBC was preparing a film version of John Buchan?s great ?shocker? Greenmantle, whose plot turns on supposed German efforts to stir Turkish Muslims to jihad during the First World War. All was going along swimmingly until July 7, when some real-life British Muslims detonated themselves on the London transport system. Reaction at the BBC? They canceled the show for fear of wounding the feelings of Muslims.
While we are waiting for that backlash, and humming ?Let?s Not Be Beastly to the Muslims,? it is worth noting the word ?Islamophobia? is a misnomer. A phobia describes an irrational fear, and it is axiomatic that fearing the effects of radical Islam is not irrational, but on the contrary very well-founded indeed, so that if you want to speak of a legitimate phobia?it?s a phobia I experience frequently?we should speak instead of Islamophobia-phobia, the fear of and revulsion towards Islamophobia.
Now that fear is very well founded, and it extends into the nooks and crannies of daily life. A couple of months ago, for example, I read in a London paper that ?Workers in the benefits department at Dudley Council, West Midlands, were told to remove or cover up all pig-related items, including toys, porcelain figures, calendars and even a tissue box featuring Winnie the Pooh and Piglet? because the presence of images of our porcine friends offended Muslims. A councillor called Mahbubur Rahman told the paper that he backed the ban because it represented ?tolerance of people?s beliefs.? In other words, Piglet really did meet a Heffalump, and it turns out he was wearing a kaffiyeh.
The observation?often, though apparently inaccurately, attributed to George Orwell?that the triumph of evil requires only that good men stand by and do nothing has special relevance at a time, like now, that is inflected by terrorism. I have several friends?thoughtful, well-intentioned people?who believe the United States should never have intervened in Afghanistan, who believe even more staunchly that the United States should never have intervened in Iraq, and, moreover, that we should get out forthwith. ?We should,? they believe, ?keep to ourselves. We have no business meddling with the rest of the world. We cannot be the world?s constabulary, nor should we aspire to be. It is not in our interest?for it breeds resentment?and it is not in the interest of those we profess to help, since they should be allowed to govern themselves?or not, as the case may be.?
Whatever the wisdom of the position in the abstract (and I have my doubts about it), the resurgence of international terrorism, fueled by hate and devoted to death, renders it otiose. Last summer?s bombings in London were, as these things go, relatively low in casualties. But they were high in indiscriminateness. The people on those buses and subway cars were as innocent as innocent can be: just folks, moms and dads and children on their way to work or school or play, as uninterested, most of them, in politics or Islam as it is possible to be. And yet those home-grown Islamicists were happy to blow them to bits.
Here is the novelty: Our new enemies are not political enemies in any traditional sense, belligerent in the service of certain interests of their own. Their belligerence is focused rather on the very existence of an alternative to their vision of beatitude, namely on Western democracy and its commitment to individual freedom and economic prosperity. I return to Hussein Massawi: ?We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.?
In fact, the situation is even grimmer than Mr. Massawi suggests. For our new enemies are not simply bent on our destruction: they are pleased to compass their own destruction as a collateral benefit. This is one of those things that makes Islamofascism a particularly toxic form of totalitarianism. At least most Communists had some rudimentary attachment to the principle of self-preservation. In the face of such death-embracing fanaticism our only option is unremitting combat.
The large issue here is one that has bedeviled liberal societies ever since there were liberal societies: namely, that in attempting to create the maximally tolerant society, we also give scope to those who would prefer to create the maximally intolerant society.
In these pages last June, I wrote about the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. Let me conclude by returning to what I said there. In an essay called ?The Self-Poisoning of the Open Society,? Kolakowski dilates on this basic antinomy of liberalism. Liberalism implies openness to other points of view, even (it would seem) those points of view whose success would destroy liberalism. But tolerance to those points of view is a prescription for suicide. Intolerance betrays the fundamental premise of liberalism, i.e., openness. As Robert Frost once put it, a liberal is someone who refuses to take his own part in an argument.
Kolakowski is surely right that our liberal, pluralist democracy depends for its survival not only on the continued existence of its institutions, but also ?on a belief in their value and a widespread will to defend them.? The question is: Do we, as a society, still enjoy that belief? Do we possess the requisite will? Or was Fran?ois Revel right when he said that ?Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it?? The jury is still out on those questions. A good test is the extent to which we can resolve the antinomy of liberalism. And a good start on that problem is the extent to which we realize that the antinomy is, in the business of everyday life, illusory.
The ?openness? that liberal society rightly cherishes is not a vacuous openness to all points of view: it is not ?value neutral.? It need not, indeed it cannot, say Yes to all comers, to the Islamofascist who after all has his point of view, just as much as the soccer mom, who has hers. American democracy, for example, affords its citizens great latitude, but great latitude is not synonymous with the proposition that ?anything goes.? Our society, like every society, is founded on particular positive values?the rule of law, for example, respect for the individual, religious freedom, the separation of church and state. Western democratic society, that is to say, is rooted in what Kolakowski calls a ?vision of the world.? Part of that vision is a commitment to openness, but openness is not the same as indifference.
The problem is that large portions of Western society, especially those portions entrusted with perpetuating its political and cultural capital, have lost sight of that vision. In part, I believe, this is a religious problem?more to the point, it is a problem consequent upon the failure of religion. In his essay ?Targeted Jihad? below, Douglas Murray summarizes this point well.
It may be no sin?may indeed be one of our society?s most appealing traits?that we love life. But the scales, as in so many things, have tipped to an extreme. From seeing so much for which we would live, people in our society now see fewer and fewer causes for which they would die. We have passed to a point where prolongation is all. We have become like the parents of Admetos in Euripides? Alcestis??walking cadavers,? unwilling to give up the few remaining days (in Europe?s case, of its peace dividend) even if only by doing so can any generational future be assured. Even the interventionist wars of the West only seem possible when we can ensure that our troops kill but do not die for the cause in hand. wrong.
In fact, I believe that Mr. Murray may overstate the extent to which we in the West ?love life.? We love our pleasures, which isn?t quite the same thing. But his main point, about there being fewer and fewer things for which we would be willing to risk our lives, is exactly right. James Burnham made a similar point about facing down the juggernaut of Communism: ?just possibly we shall not have to die in large numbers to stop them: but we shall certainly have to be willing to die.? The issue, Burnham saw, is that modern liberalism has equipped us with an ethic too abstract and empty to inspire real commitment. Modern liberalism, he writes,
does not offer ordinary men compelling motives for personal suffering, sacrifice, and death. There is no tragic dimension in its picture of the good life. Men become willing to endure, sacrifice, and die for God, for family, king, honor, country, from a sense of absolute duty or an exalted vision of the meaning of history? . And it is precisely these ideas and institutions that liberalism has criticized, attacked, and in part overthrown as superstitious, archaic, reactionary, and irrational. In their place liberalism proposes a set of pale and bloodless abstractions?pale and bloodless for the very reason that they have no roots in the past, in deep feeling and in suffering. Except for mercenaries, saints, and neurotics, no one is willing to sacrifice and die for progressive education, medicare, humanity in the abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in Social Security payments.
The Islamofascists have a fanatical belief that theirs is a holy mission, that incinerating infidels is their bounden duty. For them suicide is a gateway to paradise. For us suicide is just that: suicide. Although we began by calling this symposium ?Threats to Democracy,? it became clear in the course of our proceedings that the threat was larger, more encompassing than that title suggests. As the succeeding essays make clear, what we are dealing with is the real culture war?a war, as Burnham said, ?for survival.? In ?It?s the demography, stupid,? Mark Steyn writes about the West?s survival in the most elemental sense:
much of what could once upon a time have been called Christian Europe is simply failing to reproduce itself. ?A society that has no children,? he notes, ?has no future.? But the demographic timebomb, as Douglas Murray, Roger Scruton, and Keith Windshuttle note, is only part of the story. As Scruton puts it, a kind of ?moral obesity? cripples much of Western culture, ?to the point where ideals and long-term goals induce in them nothing more than a flummoxed breathlessness.?
The question is whether we believe anything with sufficient vigor to jettison the torpor of our barren self-satisfaction. There are signs that the answer is Yes, but you won?t see them on CNN or read about them in The New York Times. The people presiding over such institutions would rather die than acknowledge that someone like James Burnham (to say nothing of George W. Bush) was right. It just may come to that.
Notes
Go to the top of the document.
?Threats to Democracy: Then and Now,? a symposium organized jointly by The New Criterion and London?s Social Affairs Unit, took place on October 21, 2005 at the Union League Club in New York City. Participants were Max Boot, Robert H. Bork, Michael W. Gleba, Anthony Glees, Roger Kimball, Herbert I. London, Kenneth Minogue, Michael Mosbacher, Douglas Murray, James Piereson, Daniel Pipes, Roger Scruton, Mark Steyn, and Keith Windschuttle. Discussion revolved largely around earlier versions of the essays printed in this special section. Go back to the text.
This article originally appeared in
The New Criterion, Volume 24, January 2006,
www.newcriterion.com
The URL for this article is:
/archives/24/01/after-the-suicide/
-
THE CENTURY AHEAD
It's the Demography, Stupid
The real reason the West is in danger of extinction.
BY MARK STEYN
Wednesday, January 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.
One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the West are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society--government health care, government day care (which Canada's thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain's just introduced). We've prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity--"Go forth and multiply," because if you don't you won't be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare.
Americans sometimes don't understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don't think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health and Human Services.
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.
Speaking of which, if we are at war--and half the American people and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada and Europe don't accept that proposition--than what exactly is the war about?
We know it's not really a "war on terror." Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.
Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this thing's about. Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.
That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder"--as can be seen throughout much of "the Western world" right now. The progressive agenda--lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism--is collectively the real suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism. The great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures--the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched native dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society. It's a quintessential piece of progressive humbug.
Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about every prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, the prince of Wales did, the prime minister of the United Kingdom did, the prime minister of Canada did . . . The premier of Ontario didn't, and so 20 Muslim community leaders had a big summit to denounce him for failing to visit a mosque. I don't know why he didn't. Maybe there was a big backlog, it was mosque drive time, prime ministers in gridlock up and down the freeway trying to get to the Sword of the Infidel-Slayer Mosque on Elm Street. But for whatever reason he couldn't fit it into his hectic schedule. Ontario's citizenship minister did show up at a mosque, but the imams took that as a great insult, like the Queen sending Fergie to open the Commonwealth Games. So the premier of Ontario had to hold a big meeting with the aggrieved imams to apologize for not going to a mosque and, as the Toronto Star's reported it, "to provide them with reassurance that the provincial government does not see them as the enemy."
Anyway, the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died down, but it set the tone for our general approach to these atrocities. The old definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press release from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against Muslims. In most circumstances, it would be considered appallingly bad taste to deflect attention from an actual "hate crime" by scaremongering about a purely hypothetical one. Needless to say, there is no campaign of Islamophobic hate crimes. If anything, the West is awash in an epidemic of self-hate crimes. A commenter on Tim Blair's Web site in Australia summed it up in a note-perfect parody of a Guardian headline: "Muslim Community Leaders Warn of Backlash from Tomorrow Morning's Terrorist Attack." Those community leaders have the measure of us.
Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along. In "The Survival of Culture," I quoted the eminent British barrister Helena Kennedy, Queen's Counsel. Shortly after September 11, Baroness Kennedy argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic fundamentalists." "We as Western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves," she complained. "We don't look at our own fundamentalisms."
Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those Western liberal fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true."
Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you're nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words, just as the AIDS pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to the gay agenda, so 9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the most extreme aspects of the multicultural agenda.
For example, one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians returned home, to Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They were the son and widow of a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the Pakistani-Afghan frontier was known as "al-Kanadi." Why? Because he was the highest-ranking Canadian in al Qaeda--plenty of other Canucks in al Qaeda, but he was the Numero Uno. In fact, one could argue that the Khadr family is Canada's principal contribution to the war on terror. Granted they're on the wrong side (if you'll forgive my being judgmental) but no can argue that they aren't in the thick of things. One of Mr. Khadr's sons was captured in Afghanistan after killing a U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured and held at Guantanamo. A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier in Kabul. Pa Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shootout with Pakistani forces in early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren't doing our bit in this war!
In the course of the fatal shootout of al-Kanadi, his youngest son was paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior didn't fancy a prison hospital in Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy returned to Toronto so he could enjoy the benefits of Ontario government health care. "I'm Canadian, and I'm not begging for my rights," declared the widow Khadr. "I'm demanding my rights."
As they always say, treason's hard to prove in court, but given the circumstances of Mr. Khadr's death it seems clear that not only was he providing "aid and comfort to the Queen's enemies" but that he was, in fact, the Queen's enemy. The Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, the Royal 22nd Regiment and other Canucks have been participating in Afghanistan, on one side of the conflict, and the Khadr family had been over there participating on the other side. Nonetheless, the prime minister of Canada thought Boy Khadr's claims on the public health system was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate his own deep personal commitment to "diversity." Asked about the Khadrs' return to Toronto, he said, "I believe that once you are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to disagree."
That's the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: You can choose which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just tick "home team" or "enemy," according to taste. The Canadian prime minister is a typical late-stage Western politician: He could have said, well, these are contemptible people and I know many of us are disgusted at the idea of our tax dollars being used to provide health care for a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more than a flag of convenience, but unfortunately that's the law and, while we can try to tighten it, it looks like this lowlife's got away with it. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of the multicultural state. Like many enlightened Western leaders, the Canadian prime minister will be congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume him.
That, by the way, is the one point of similarity between the jihad and conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: The IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: They want it, and they've calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off.
We spend a lot of time at The New Criterion attacking the elites, and we're right to do so. The commanding heights of the culture have behaved disgracefully for the last several decades. But if it were just a problem with the elites, it wouldn't be that serious: The mob could rise up and hang 'em from lampposts--a scenario that's not unlikely in certain Continental countries. But the problem now goes way beyond the ruling establishment. The annexation by government of most of the key responsibilities of life--child-raising, taking care of your elderly parents--has profoundly changed the relationship between the citizen and the state. At some point--I would say socialized health care is a good marker--you cross a line, and it's very hard then to persuade a citizenry enjoying that much government largesse to cross back. In National Review recently, I took issue with that line Gerald Ford always uses to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." Actually, you run into trouble long before that point: A government big enough to give you everything you want still isn't big enough to get you to give anything back. That's what the French and German political classes are discovering.
Go back to that list of local conflicts I mentioned. The jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy about taking on the Israelis, the Russians, the Indians and the Nigerians, why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Danes and New Zealanders?
So the jihadists are for the most part doing no more than giving us a prod in the rear as we sleepwalk to the cliff. When I say "sleepwalk," it's not because we're a blas? culture. On the contrary, one of the clearest signs of our decline is the way we expend so much energy worrying about the wrong things. If you've read Jared Diamond's bestselling book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," you'll know it goes into a lot of detail about Easter Island going belly up because they chopped down all their trees. Apparently that's why they're not a G-8 member or on the U.N. Security Council. Same with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond's other curious choices of "societies." Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society collapses because it chops down its trees.
Poor old Diamond can't see the forest because of his obsession with the trees. (Russia's collapsing even as it's undergoing reforestation.) One way "societies choose to fail or succeed" is by choosing what to worry about. The Western world has delivered more wealth and more comfort to more of its citizens than any other civilization in history, and in return we've developed a great cult of worrying. You know the classics of the genre: In 1968, in his bestselling book "The Population Bomb," the eminent scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." In 1972, in their landmark study "The Limits to Growth," the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and gas by 1993.
None of these things happened. In fact, quite the opposite is happening. We're pretty much awash in resources, but we're running out of people--the one truly indispensable resource, without which none of the others matter. Russia's the most obvious example: it's the largest country on earth, it's full of natural resources, and yet it's dying--its population is falling calamitously.
The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens--from terrorism to tsunamis--can be understood only as deriving from the perniciousness of Western civilization. As Jean-Francois Revel wrote, "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."
And even though none of the prognostications of the eco-doom blockbusters of the 1970s came to pass, all that means is that 30 years on, the end of the world has to be rescheduled. The amended estimated time of arrival is now 2032. That's to say, in 2002, the United Nations Global Environmental Outlook predicted "the destruction of 70 percent of the natural world in thirty years, mass extinction of species. . . . More than half the world will be afflicted by water shortages, with 95 percent of people in the Middle East with severe problems . . . 25 percent of all species of mammals and 10 percent of birds will be extinct . . ."
Etc., etc., for 450 pages. Or to cut to the chase, as the Guardian headlined it, "Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster."
Well, here's my prediction for 2032: unless we change our ways the world faces a future . . . where the environment will look pretty darn good. If you're a tree or a rock, you'll be living in clover. It's the Italians and the Swedes who'll be facing extinction and the loss of their natural habitat.
There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide emissions, deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying about. What's worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about things that aren't worth worrying about that we don't worry about the things we should be worrying about. For 30 years, we've had endless wake-up calls for things that aren't worth waking up for. But for the very real, remorseless shifts in our society--the ones truly jeopardizing our future--we're sound asleep. The world is changing dramatically right now, and hysterical experts twitter about a hypothetical decrease in the Antarctic krill that might conceivably possibly happen so far down the road there are unlikely to be any Italian or Japanese enviro-worriers left alive to be devastated by it.
In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry about First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as "globalization" is a threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite--that the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World. Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural China--and next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is killing people in Toronto, just because someone got on a plane. That's the way to look at Islamism: We fret about McDonald's and Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo . . .
What's the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria's by 36%, Estonia's by 52%. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans--and mostly red-state Americans.
As fertility shrivels, societies get older--and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business--unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election results--most recently in Germany--it's hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they're unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It's presently 60, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that's somebody else's problem. The average German worker now puts in 22% fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.
This isn't a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it's a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington's problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a postmodern military alliance? The "free world," as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it's hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to reshoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening of large sections of the West makes them ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.
There is no "population bomb." There never was. Birthrates are declining all over the world--eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called population explosion was really a massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26%. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over 20%, the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%.
Nineteen seventy doesn't seem that long ago. If you're the age many of the chaps running the Western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair's less groovy, but the landscape of your life--the look of your house, the layout of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge--isn't significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the cell phone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.
And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20%.
And by 2020?
So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less "Western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)--or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.
Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.
What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the one hand, there's something to be said for the notion that America will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than M. Chirac, Herr Schroeder & Co. On the other hand, given Europe's track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple America. But unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and, given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they're flying planes into buildings for they're likely to wind up with just by waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock 'em over?
The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You don't notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually there's a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly, self-deluding slogan--like Bill Clinton's "It's about the future of all our children." We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking Mr. Clinton's tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the West can't even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no children has no future.
Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German and Turkish empires would be gone within half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan as an "amiable dunce" (in Clark Clifford's phrase) assured us the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts' position was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact and the USSR itself.
Yet, even by the minimal standards of these wretched precedents, so-called post-Christian civilizations--as a prominent EU official described his continent to me--are more prone than traditional societies to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature. Religious cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future, as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining "the great majority" in "the unseen world." But if secularism's starting point is that this is all there is, it's no surprise that, consciously or not, they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than it's ever had. The idea that progressive Euro-welfarism is the permanent resting place of human development was always foolish; we now know that it's suicidally so.
To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA's got pretty much everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop spook is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU collapse is rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way, and that by 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on American network news every night. Even if they avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans, and what's left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. Japan faces the same problem: Its population is already in absolute decline, the first gentle slope of a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it's populated by Koreans and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it's populated by Algerians? That's a trickier proposition.
Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax rates.
Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner--and we're already seeing a drift in that direction.
In July 2003, speaking to the U.S. Congress, Tony Blair remarked: "As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?"
Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic inheritance endures, to one degree or another, in many of the key regional players in the world today--Australia, India, South Africa--and in dozens of island statelets from the Caribbean to the Pacific. If China ever takes its place as an advanced nation, it will be because the People's Republic learns more from British Hong Kong than Hong Kong learns from the Little Red Book. And of course the dominant power of our time derives its political character from 18th-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go.
A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind?" question is more urgent than most of us expected. "The West," as a concept, is dead, and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.
What will London--or Paris, or Amsterdam--be like in the mid-'30s? If European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the populace off their unsustainable 35-hour weeks, retirement at 60, etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?
This ought to be the left's issue. I'm a conservative--I'm not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I'm with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the West's collapsed birthrates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by "a woman's right to choose," in any sense.
I watched that big abortion rally in Washington in 2004, where Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving "Keep your Bush off my bush" placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a "woman's right to choose," Western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women marching for their "reproductive rights" still have babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of 40, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting "Hands off my bush!"
Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political analyst Cameron Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake:
"Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies. . . . If you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body," she advised Oprah's viewers, "then you should vote."
Poor Cameron. A couple of weeks later, the scary people won. She lost all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she couldn't even move to France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.
But, after framing the 2004 presidential election as a referendum on the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested to know that men enjoy that right under many Islamic legal codes around the world. In his book "The Empty Cradle," Philip Longman asks: "So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism--a new Dark Ages."
Bottom line for Cameron Diaz: There are worse things than John Ashcroft out there.
Mr. Longman's point is well taken. The refined antennae of Western liberals mean that whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, "Racism!" To fret about what proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and inappropriate. But it's not about race, it's about culture. If 100% of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn't matter whether 70% of them are "white" or only 5% are. But if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn't, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90% of the population or only 60%, 50%, 45%.
Since the president unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine--the plan to promote liberty throughout the Arab world--innumerable "progressives" have routinely asserted that there's no evidence Muslims want liberty and, indeed, that Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that's true, it's a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day after tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60% of British Muslims want to live under Shariah--in the United Kingdom. If a population "at odds with the modern world" is the fastest-breeding group on the planet--if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions--how safe a bet is the survival of the "modern world"?
Not good.
"What do you leave behind?" asked Tony Blair. There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It's the demography, stupid. And, if they can't muster the will to change course, then "What do you leave behind?" is the only question that matters.
Mr. Steyn is a syndicated columnist and theater critic for The New Criterion, in whose January issue this article appears.
-
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/others/islamism-fascism-terrorism.html
====================
Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 1)
By Marc Erikson
[Editor's note: As distinct from the world religion of Islam, Islamism - as in part contextually defined below - is a political ideology that adherents would apply to contemporary governance and politics, and which they propagate through political and social activism.]
On November 7, 2001, on the request of the US government, the Swiss Federal Prosecutor's Office froze the bank accounts of Nada Management, a Lugano-based financial services and consulting firm, and ordered a search and seizure raid on the firm's offices. Police pulled in several of the company's principals for questioning. Nada Management, part of the international al-Taqwa ("fear of God") group, is accused by US Treasury Department investigators of having acted for years as advisers and a funding conduit for Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda.
Among those interrogated by police was a certain Albert Friedrich Armand (aka Ahmed) Huber, 74, a Swiss convert to Islam and retired journalist who sits on the Nada board of directors. Nothing too unusual perhaps, except for the fact that Huber is also a high-profile neo-Nazi who tirelessly travels the far-right circuit in Europe and the United States. He sees himself as a mediator between radical Islam and what he calls the New Right. Since September 11, a picture of Osama bin Laden hangs next to one of Adolf Hitler on the wall of his study in Muri just outside the Swiss capital of Bern. September 11, says Huber, brought the radical Islam-New Right alliance together.
On that, as his own career amply demonstrates, he is largely wrong. Last year's horrific terrorist acts were gleefully celebrated by Islamists and neo-Nazis alike (Huber boozed it up with young followers in a Bern bar) and may have produced closer links. But Islamism and fascism have a long, over 80-year history of collaboration based on shared ideas, practices and perceived common enemies. They abhor "Western decadence" (political liberalism, capitalism), fight holy wars - if needs be suicidal ones - by indiscriminate means, and are bent on the destruction of the Jews and of America and its allies.
Horst Mahler - once a lawyer for, later a member of, the 1960s/'70s German ultra-left terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang, and now a leading neo-Nazi - summed up convergent radical Islamic and far-right views and hopes in a September 21, 2001 letter: "The USA - or, to be more exact, the World Police - has shown itself to be vulnerable ... The foreseeable reaction of the East Coast [= the Jewish controllers and their gentile allies = the US Establishment] can be the spark that falls into a powder keg. For decades, the jihad - the Holy War - has been the agenda of the Islamic world against the 'Western value system.' This time it could break out in earnest ... It would be world war, that is won with the dagger ... The Anglo-American and European employees of the 'global players,' dispersed throughout the entire world, are - as Osama bin Laden proclaimed a long while ago - military targets. These would be attacked by dagger, where they least expected an attack. Only a few need be liquidated in this manner; the survivors will run off like hares into their respective home countries, where they belong."
Such convergence of views, methods and goals goes back to the 1920s when both Islamism and fascism, ideologically pre-shaped in the late 19th century, emerged as organized political movements with the ultimate aim of seizing state power and imposing their ideological and social policy precepts (in which aims fascism, of course, succeeded in the early '20s and '30s in Italy and Germany, respectively; Islamism only in 1979 in Iran; then in Sudan and Afghanistan). Both movements claim to be the true representatives of some arcane, idealized religious or ethnically pure communities of days long past - in the case of Islamism, the period of the four "righteous caliphs" (632-662), notably the rule of Umar bin al-Khattab (634-44) which allegedly exemplifies "din wa dawla", the unity of religion and state; in the case of the Nazis, the even more obscure Aryan "Volksgemeinschaft", with no historical reference point at all. But both are in reality - as historian Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, puts it - 20th century outgrowths, radical movements, utopian and totalitarian in their outlook. The Iranian scholars Ladan and Roya Boroumand have made the same point.
The Nazi ("national socialist") movement was formed in reaction to the World War I destruction of the "Second Reich", the "unequal and treasonous" Versailles Treaty and the mass social dislocation that followed, its racialist, corporatist ideology laid out in Hitler's Mein Kampf (My Struggle). The Muslim Brotherhood (Al Ikhwan Al Muslimun), parent organization of numerous Islamist terrorist outfits, was formed in 1928 in reaction to the 1924 abolition of the caliphate by Turkish reformer Kemal Ataturk, drawing the consequences of the World War I demise of the Ottoman Empire. Ikhwan founder Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian school teacher, wrote at the time that it was endless contemplation of "the sickness that has reduced the ummah (Muslim community) to its present state" which prompted him and five like-minded followers - all of them in their early twenties - to set up the organization to rectify it.
Fascist Nazi history need not be dwelt on further here. It led to the horrors and destruction of World War II and the Holocaust. Neo-Nazism, whether in Europe or the US, remains a terrorist threat and - as the French Le Pen version demonstrated in parliamentary elections this year - retains a measure of political clout. It is nonetheless a boxed-in niche force with little capability for break-out. Its ideological twin, Islamism, by sharp contrast, has every chance for wreaking escalating world-wide havoc based on its fast-growing influence among the world's more than one billion Muslims. Immediately following September 11 last year, US President George W Bush declared war on terrorism. It's a catchy phrase, but a serious misnomer all the same. Terrorism is a method of warfare, not the enemy. The enemy is Islamism.
Al-Banna's brotherhood, initially limiting itself to spiritual and moral reform, grew at astonishing speed in the 1930s and '40s after embracing wider political goals and by the end of World War II had around 500,000 members in Egypt alone and branches throughout the Middle East. Event background, ideology, and method of organizing all account for its improbable success. As the war drew to a close, the time was ripe for an end to British and French colonial rule and the Ikhwan was ready with the persuasive, religiously-buttressed answer: Free the Islamic homeland from foreign, infidel (kafir) control; establish a unified Islamic state. And al-Banna had built a formidable organization to accomplish just that: it featured sophisticated governance structures, sections in charge of different segments of society (peasants, workers, professionals), units entrusted with key functions (propaganda, press relations, translation, liaison with the Islamic world), and specialized committees for finances and legal affairs - all built on existing social networks, in particular those around mosques and Islamic welfare associations. Weaving of traditional ties into a distinctly modern political structure was at the root of al-Banna's success..
But the "Supreme Guide" of the brethren knew that faith, good works and numbers alone do not a political victory make. Thus, modeled on Mussolini's blackshirts (al-Banna much admired "Il Duce" and soul brother "Fuehrer" Adolf Hitler), he set up a paramilitary wing (slogan: "action, obedience, silence", quite superior to the blackshirts' "believe, obey, fight") and a "secret apparatus" (al-jihaz al-sirri) and intelligence arm of al-Ikhwan to handle the dirtier side - terrorist attacks, assassinations, and so on - of the struggle for power.
In 1948, after the brotherhood had played a pivotal role in mobilizing volunteers to fight in the war against "the Zionists" in Palestine to prevent establishment of a Jewish state, it considered itself to have the credibility, political clout, and military might to launch a coup d'etat against the Egyptian monarchy. But that wasn't to be. On December 8, 1948, a watchful Prime Minister Nuqrashi Pasha disbanded it. He wasn't watchful enough. Less than three weeks later, the brethren retaliated by assassinating the prime minister - in turn prompting the assassination of al-Banna by government agents on February 12, 1949.
That didn't end it. Under a new, more radical leader, Sayyid Qutb, the al-Ikhwan fight for state power continued and escalated. A mid-1960s recruit was Ayman al-Zawahiri, present number two man of al-Qaeda and the brains of the organization.
(?2002 Asia Times Online Co Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
Next, Part 2: The World War II Nazi connections of the Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological precursors of Islamism, and its present-day exponents and financiers.
========================
Middle East
Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 2)
By Marc Erikson
Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 1) (Nov 5, '02)
Osama bin Laden has the money, proven organizational skills, combat experience, and the charisma that can confer the air of wisdom and profundity even on inchoate or trivial utterances and let what's unfathomable appear to be deep in the eyes of his followers. But he's no intellectual. The brains of al-Qaeda and its chief ideologue by most accounts is Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, 51, the organization's number two man and former head of the Egyptian al-Jihad, which was merged with bin Laden's outfit in February 1998 to form the "International Front for Fighting Jews and Crusaders".
Al-Zawahiri hails from an elite Egyptian family. His father was a professor at Cairo University's medical school from which Ayman graduated in 1974. His paternal grandfather was the Grand Imam at the al-Azhar Institute, Sunni Islam's paramount seat of learning. His great-uncle, Abdel-Rahman Azzam, was the first secretary-general of the Arab League.
Such family background notwithstanding, perhaps because of it, al-Zawahiri joined the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) as a young boy and was for the first time arrested in 1966 at age 15, when the secular government of President Gamal Abdel Nasser rounded up thousands of al-Ikhwan members and executed its top leaders in retribution for repeated assassination attempts on the president. One of those executed by hanging was chief ideologue Sayyid Qutb. Al-Zawahiri is Qutb's intellectual heir; he has further developed his message, and is putting it into practise.
But without Qutb, present-day Islamism as a noxious amalgam of fascist totalitarianism and extremes of Islamic fundamentalism would not exist. His principal "accomplishment" was to articulate the social and political practices of the Muslim Brotherhood from the 1930s through the 1950s - including collaboration with fascist regimes and organizations, involvement in anti-colonial, anti-Western and anti-Israeli actions, and the struggle for state power in Egypt - in demagogically persuasive fashion, buttressed by tendentious references to Islamic law and scriptures to deceive the faithful. Qutb, a one-time literary critic, was not a religious fundamentalist, but a Goebbels-style propagandist for a new totalitarianism to stand side-by-side with fascism and communism.
Hitler's early 1933 accession to power in Germany was widely cheered by Arabs of all different political persuasions. When the "Third Reich" spook and horrors were over 12 years later, a favorite excuse among those who felt the need for one was that the Nazis had been allies against the colonial oppressors and "Zionist intruders". Many felt no need for an excuse at all and simply bemoaned the fact that the Nazis' "final solution" to the "Jewish problem" had not proved final enough. But affinities with fascism on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood and other segments of Arab and Muslim society went much deeper than collaboration with the enemy of one's enemies, and collaboration itself took some extreme forms.
Substitute religious for racial purity, the idealized ummah of the rule of the four righteous caliphs of the mid-7th century for the mythical Aryan "Volksgemeinschaft", and most ideological and organizational precepts of Nazism laid out by chief theoretician Alfred Rosenberg in his work The Myth of the 20th Century and by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, and later put into practice, are in all essential respects identical to the precepts of the Muslim Brotherhood after its initial phase as a group promoting spiritual and moral reform. This ranges from radical rejection of "decadent" Western political and economic liberalism (instead embracing the "leadership principle" and corporatist organization of the economy) to endorsement of the use of terror and assassinations to seize and hold state power, and all the way to concoction of fantastical anti-Semitic conspiracy theories linking international plutocratic finance to Freemasonry, Zionism and all-encompassing Jewish world control.
Not surprisingly then, as Italian and German fascism sought greater stakes in the Middle East in the 1930s and '40s to counter British and French controlling power, close collaboration between fascist agents and Islamist leaders ensued. During the 1936-39 Arab Revolt, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military intelligence, sent agents and money to support the Palestine uprising against the British, as did Muslim Brotherhood founder and "supreme guide" Hassan al-Banna. A key individual in the fascist-Islamist nexus and go-between for the Nazis and al-Banna became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini - incidentally the later mentor (from 1946 onward) of a young firebrand by the name of Yasser Arafat.
Having fled from Palestine to Iraq, el-Husseini assisted there in the short-lived April 1941 Nazi-inspired and financed anti-British coup. By June 1941, British forces had reasserted control in Baghdad and the mufti was on the run again, this time via Tehran and Rome to Berlin, to a hero's welcome. He remained in Germany as an honored guest and valuable intelligence and propaganda asset through most of the war, met with Hitler on several occasions, and personally recruited leading members of the Bosnian-Muslim "Hanjar" (saber) division of the Waffen SS.
Another valued World War II Nazi collaborator was Youssef Nada, current board chairman of al-Taqwa (Nada Management), the Lugano, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Bahamas-based financial services outfit accused by the US Treasury Department of money laundering for and financing of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda. As a young man, he had joined the armed branch of the "secret apparatus" (al-jihaz al-sirri) of the Muslim Brotherhood and then was recruited by German military intelligence. When Grand Mufti el-Husseini had to flee Germany in 1945 as the Nazi defeat loomed, Nada reportedly was instrumental in arranging the escape via Switzerland back to Egypt and eventually Palestine, where el-Husseini resurfaced in 1946.
==================================================================
Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 3)
By Marc Erikson
Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 1)
Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 2)
Islamism, or fascism with an Islamic face, was born with and of the Muslim Brotherhood. It proved (and improved) its fascist core convictions and practices through collaboration with the Nazis in the run-up to and during World War II. It proved it during the same period through its collaboration with the overtly fascist "Young Egypt" (Misr al-Fatah) movement, founded in October 1933 by lawyer Ahmed Hussein and modeled directly on the Hitler party, complete with paramilitary Green Shirts aping the Nazi Brown Shirts, Nazi salute and literal translations of Nazi slogans. Among its members, Young Egypt counted two promising youngsters and later presidents, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar El-Sadat.
In later years, the Brotherhood had serious fallings-out with Nasser, whom it attempted to assassinate on several different occasions, and with Sadat, whom it did assassinate in 1981. But up until at least the time of Nasser's 1952 coup d'etat, all was sweetness and light between Hassan al-Banna's brethren and Nasser's "free officers". In his personal diary, Sadat wrote in the summer of 1940:
"One day I invited Hassan al-Banna, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, to the army camp where I served, in the Egyptian Communication Corps, so that he might lecture before my soldiers on various religious topics. A few days before his scheduled appearance it was reported to me from army Intelligence that his coming was forbidden and canceled by the order of General Headquarters, and I myself was summoned for interrogation. After a short while I went secretly to El Bana's office and participated in a few seminars he organized. I like the man and admired him."
Whether al-Banna, who had already been in contact with German agents since the 1936-39 Palestine uprising against the British, or someone else introduced Sadat and his free officer comrades to German military intelligence is not known. But in the summer of 1942, when Rommel's Afrikakorps stood just over 100 kilometers from Alexandria and were poised to march into Cairo, Sadat, Nasser and their buddies were in close touch with the German attacking force and - with Brotherhood help - preparing an anti-British uprising in Egypt's capital. A treaty with Germany including provisions for German recognition of an independent, but pro-Axis Egypt had been drafted by Sadat, guaranteeing that "no British soldier would leave Cairo alive". When Rommel's push east failed at El Alamein in the fall of 1942, Sadat and several of his co-conspirators were arrested by the British and sat out much of the remainder of the war in jail.
Islamist-fascist collaboration did not cease with war's end. King Farouk brought large numbers of German military and intelligence personnel as well as ranking (ex-) Nazis into Egypt as advisors. It was a bad move. Several of the Germans, recognizing Farouk's political weakness, soon began conspiring with Nasser and his free officers (who, in turn, were working closely with the Brotherhood) to overthrow the king. On July 23, 1952, the deed was done and Newsweek marveled that, "The most intriguing aspect [of] the revolt ... was the role played in the coup by the large group of German advisors serving with the Egyptian army ... The young officers who did the actual planning consulted the German advisors as to 'tactics' ... This accounted for the smoothness of the operation."
And yet another player fond of playing all sides against the middle had entered the game prior to Farouk's ouster: In 1951, the CIA's Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of president Teddy, who in 1953 would organize the overthrow of elected Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh and install Reza Pahlavi as Shah) opened secret negotiations with Nasser. Agreement was soon reached that the US, post-coup, would assist in building up Egypt's intelligence and security forces - in the obvious manner, by reinforcing Nasser's existing Germans with additional, "more capable", ones. For that, CIA head Allen Dulles turned to Reinhard Gehlen, one-time head of eastern front German military intelligence and by the early 1950s in charge of developing a new German foreign intelligence service. Gehlen hired the best man he knew for the job - former SS colonel Otto Skorzeny, who at the end of the war had organized the infamous ODESSA network to facilitate the escape of high-ranking Nazis to Latin America (mainly Peron's Argentina) and Egypt. With Skorzeny now on the job of assisting Nasser, Egypt became a safe haven for Nazi war criminals galore. The CIA officer in charge of the Egypt assistance program was Miles Copeland, soon a Nasser intimate.
And then things got truly complicated and messy. Having played a large role in Nasser's power grab, the Muslim Brotherhood, after the 1949 assassination of Hassan al-Banna by government agents [see part 1] under new leadership and (since 1951) under the radical ideological guidance of Sayyid Qutb, demanded its due - imposition of Sharia (Islamic religious) law. When Nasser demurred, he became a Brotherhood assassination target, but with CIA and the German mercenaries' help he prevailed. In February 1954, the Brotherhood was banned. An October 1954 assassination attempt failed. Four thousand brothers were arrested, six were executed, and thousands fled to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lebanon.
Within short order, things got more tangled still: As Nasser in his brewing fight with Britain and France over control of the Suez Canal turned to the Soviet Union for assistance and arms purchases, the CIA approached and began collaboration with the Brotherhood against their ex-ally, the now pro-Soviet Nasser.
We leave that twisted tale at this stage. A leading Brotherhood member arrested in 1954 was Sayyid Qutb. He spent the next 10 years in Jarah prison near Cairo and there wrote the tracts that subsequently became (and till this day remain) must-reading and guidance for Islamists everywhere. (The main translations into Farsi were made by the Rahbar of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.) But while brother number one went to jail, other leading members who had escaped were given jobs in Saudi universities and provided with royal funding. They included Sayyid's brother Muhammad and Abdullah al-Azzam, the radical Palestinian preacher (the "Emir of Jihad") who later in Peshawar, Pakistan, founded the Maktab al-Khidamat, or Office of Services, which became the core of the al-Qaeda network. As a student at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Osama bin Laden, son of Muhammad bin Laden, the kingdom's wealthiest contractor and close friend of King Faisal, became a disciple of Muhammad Qutb and al-Azzam.
Sayyid Qutb was born in 1906 in a small village in Upper Egypt, was educated at a secular college, and subsequently worked as an inspector of schools for the ministry of education. In the 1930s and 1940s, nothing pointed to his later role. He wrote literary criticism, hung out in coffee houses, and published a novel which flopped. His conversion to radical Islam came during two-and-a-half years of graduate studies in education in the United States (1948-51). He came to hate everything American, described churches as "entertainment centers and sexual playgrounds", was shocked by the freedom allowed to women, and immediately upon his return to Egypt joined the Muslim Brotherhood and assumed the position of editor-in-chief of the organization's newspaper.
While in jail, Qutb wrote a 30-volume (!) commentary on the Koran; but his most influential book, published in 1965 after his 1964 release from prison for health reasons, was Ma'alim fi'l-tariq ("Signposts on the Road", also translated as "Milestones"). In it, he revised Hassan al-Banna's concept of establishing an Islamic state in Egypt after the nation was thoroughly Islamized, advocating instead - fascist or Bolshevik-style - that a revolutionary vanguard should first seize state power and then impose Islamization from above. Trouble is, this recipe went against the unambiguous Muslim prohibition against overthrowing a Muslim ruler.
Qutb found his clue to resolving the dilemma in the writings of his Pakistani contemporary, Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903-79), founder in 1941 of the Jamaat-i-Islami, who had denounced the existing political order in Muslim societies as partial jahiliyyah - resembling the state of unenlightened savagery, ignorance and idolatry of pre-Islamic Arab societies. There was nothing "partial" about the jahiliyyah of the existing order, nothing that could be redeemed, pronounced Qutb: "... a society whose legislation does not rest on divine law ... is not Muslim, however ardently its individuals may proclaim themselves Muslim, even if they pray, fast and make the pilgrimage ... jahiliyyah ... takes the form of claiming the right to create values, to legislate rules of collective behavior and to choose any way of life that rests with me, without regard to what God has prescribed."
Only uncompromising restoration of the ideal of the union of religion and state as evidenced during the 7th century reign of the "righteous caliphs" would do. Islam was a complete system of life not in need of man-made additions. Any ruler, Muslim or otherwise, standing in the way could be justifiably removed - by any means.
This, naturally, applied to Nasser, and another attempt on his life was made in 1965. Qutb was rearrested, tortured and tried for treason. On August 29, 1966, he was hanged. The charge against him of plotting to establish a Marxist regime in Egypt was ludicrous. Nasser and his minions knew full well that the real danger to the regime stemmed from Qutb's denunciation of it as jahiliyyah, and not from those clauses of his Ma'alim fi'l-tariq which speak of a classless society in which the "selfish individual" and the "exploitation of man by man" would be abolished, which the prosecution cited as evidence against him.
The martyred Qutb's writings rapidly acquired wide acceptance in the Arab world, especially after the ignominious defeat of the Arabs in the June 1967 "Six Day War" with Israel, taken as proof of the depth of depravity to which the regimes in the Muslim realm had sunk.
To come: Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 4)
==========================================================================
Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 4)
By Marc Erikson
Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 1)
Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 2)
Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 3)
An early convert to Sayyid Qutb's new-fangled fascist Islamism which condones, indeed commands, terrorism and murder was the alleged number two man of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. [see part 2]. Having joined the Muslim Brotherhood at age 15, he was caught in the Nasser dragnet after the 1965 assassination attempt on the Egyptian leader and - young age and elite family background notwithstanding - was thrown in jail. An April 1968 amnesty freed most of the brethren, and Ayman, in that regard following in his father's footsteps, went on to Cairo University to become a physician. He obtained his degree in 1974 and practiced medicine for several years.
His profession, however, was not his calling. By the late 1970s, he was back full-time in the Islamist revolution business agitating against the Egypt-Israel peace treaty (concluded in 1979). In 1980, on the introduction by military intelligence officer Abbud al-Zumar, he became a leading member of the Jama'at al-Jihad of Muhammad Abd-al-Salam Faraj which on October 6, 1981, assassinated President Anwar El Sadat while he was reviewing a military parade.
Faraj, like al-Zawahiri, had been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but became disenchanted with its passivity. In 1979, he penned a short pamphlet titled "The Neglected Obligation" (al-Farida al-Gha'ibah), which relied heavily on the ideas of Sayyid Qutb. It became the founding document of al-Jihad, arguing along the familiar lines that acceptance of a government was only possible and legitimate when that government fully implemented Sharia, or Islamic law. Contemporary Egypt had not done so, and was thus suffering from jahiliyya. Jihad to rectify this, wrote Faraj, was not only the "neglected obligation" of Muslims, but in fact their most important duty.
Following the Sadat assassination, al-Zawahiri was arrested on a minor weapons possession charge and spent three years in jail. In 1985 he left Egypt for Saudi Arabia and later Peshawar, Pakistan, where he was joined by Muhammad al-Islambuli, the brother of one of Sadat's five assassins, 24-year-old artillery lieutenant Khalid Ahmed Shawki al-Islambuli. There, connections were made with the groups of Palestinian Islamist Abdullah Azzam and the latter's one-time student Osama bin Laden, by then fully engaged (with well-known CIA support) in assisting the mujahideen struggle against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Al-Zawahiri's al-Jihad was in many respects better organized and better trained than other groups in the Afghanistan theater. Prior to the murder of Sadat, it had succeeded in recruiting members of the presidential guard, military intelligence and the civil bureaucracy. Most importantly, it was in possession of a cogent and comprehensive ideology pointing beyond the Afghan struggle against the Soviet occupiers. "Afghanistan should be a platform for the liberation of the entire Muslim world," was the distinguishing creed of al-Jihad.
Al-Zawahiri wrote several books on Islamic movements, the best known of which is The Bitter Harvest (1991/92), a critical assessment of the failings of the Muslim Brotherhood. In it, he draws not only on the writings of Sayyid Qutb to justify murder and terrorism, but prominently references Pakistani Jamaat-i-Islami founder and ideologue Mawdudi on the global mission of Islamic jihad.
Mawdudi had written, "Islam wants the whole earth and does not content itself with only a part thereof. It wants and requires the entire inhabited world. It does not want this in order that one nation dominates the earth and monopolizes its sources of wealth, after having taken them away from one or more other nations. No, Islam wants and requires the earth in order that the human race altogether can enjoy the concept and practical program of human happiness, by means of which God has honored Islam and put it above the other religions and laws. In order to realize this lofty desire, Islam wants to employ all forces and means that can be employed for bringing about a universal all-embracing revolution. It will spare no effort for the achievement of this supreme objective. This far-reaching struggle that continuously exhausts all forces and this employment of all possible means are called jihad."
And further, "Islam is a revolutionary doctrine and system that overturns governments. It seeks to overturn the whole universal social order ... and establish its structure anew ... Islam seeks the world. It is not satisfied by a piece of land but demands the whole universe ... Islamic jihad is at the same time offensive and defensive ... The Islamic party does not hesitate to utilize the means of war to implement its goal."
Not just or even principally the expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan or the removal of any one godless Muslim regime, but global jihad as Mawdudi had prescribed, became al-Zawahiri's obsession. And he acted as he had read and written. After several years in Afghanistan and Pakistan, constructing there the platform from which to launch broader pursuits, Zawahiri traveled extensively on Swiss, French and Dutch passports in Western Europe and even the United States on fund-raising, recruiting and reconnaissance missions. Then came initial implementation of the offensive.
It is not known whether he had a hand in the 1993 bombing of the New York World Trade Center. But he had close connections to Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the spiritual leader of the group that carried out the attack. Then, in 1995, he was behind the truck bomb attack on the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan; in November 1997, he led the Vanguards of Conquest group responsible for the Luxor (Egypt) massacre in which 60 foreign tourists were systematically murdered and mutilated; in August 1998, he organized the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and probably, in 2000, the speed-boat bomb attack on the USS Cole in Aden. Israeli intelligence considers him the "operational brains" behind September 11; the fact, in any case, is that the Egyptian Mohammed Atta, principal of the Hamburg, Germany, al-Qaeda cell that was instrumental to the World Trade Center destruction, was a member of Zawahiri's al-Jihad.
Osama bin Laden, as we wrote earlier, had the money, some of the connections, and perhaps the charisma to function as the leader of the al-Qaeda global jihad. But it was not until Zawahiri's al-Jihad in February 1998 formally joined forces with bin Laden that the present global Islamist terrorist threat truly emerged. With his long experience in the Muslim Brotherhood, his critical assessment of its failures, his cunning - albeit highly eclectic - fashioning of a fascist ideology drawing on Islamic religious elements, and his organizational and operational skills, al-Zawahiri is the key personality of global jihad. The key point to understand is that Zawahiri fascist Islamism has seized the ideological initiative in the Muslim world against which traditional Islam has so far proved an impotent, indeed often unwilling, opponent. Young Muslims everywhere are captivated by Zawahiri Islamism and jihad to which they attribute selfless idealism and in which they admire ruthless determination. It will be a long war.
And make no mistake: In this war against a new, ideologically vigorous fascism, collateral assets of the Islamists, the neo-Nazis of the Ahmed Huber variety which we described in part 1 of this series, or - for that matter - Saudi financiers wittingly pushing narrow sectarian Wahhabism upon youths in madrassas worldwide, are key forces in the enemy camp. Islamism as we have portrayed it in its historical and present dimension is a form of fascist madness - the same type of madness which one of Hitler's closest confidants, convicted war criminal Albert Speer, saw during the Fuehrer's final days. In his Spandau prison diary entry for November 18, 1947, Speer recollects:
"I recall how [Hitler] would have films shown in the Reich Chancellory about London burning, about the sea of fire over Warsaw, about exploding convoys, and the kind of ravenous joy that would then seize him every time. But I never saw him so beside himself as when, in a delirium, he pictured New York going down in flames. He described how the skyscrapers would be transformed into gigantic burning torches, how they would collapse in confusion, how the bursting city's reflection would stand against the dark sky."
-
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
-
Coming Soon: Nuclear Theocrats?
How to head off the imam bomb.
by Reuel Marc Gerecht
01/30/2006, Volume 011, Issue 19
LET US STATE THE OBVIOUS: The new president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a godsend. The Americans, the Europeans, and even the Russians are now treating clerical Iran's 20-year quest to develop nuclear weapons more seriously. Ahmadinejad's inflamed rhetoric against America, Israel, and the Jews, which is in keeping with the style and substance of the president's former comrades in the praetorian Revolutionary Guard Corps, combined with the clerical regime's decision to restart uranium enrichment, has returned some sense of urgency to efforts to thwart Tehran.
Whatever their merits, the EU-3 negotiations with Tehran--which began in 2003 after an Iranian opposition group publicly broadcast information about Tehran's clandestine nuclear-research program--diminished American attention to Iran's wannabe nuclear theocrats. What had been rapidly becoming a white-hot topic cooled, which was an objective of an administration taxed severely by Iraq and fearful of another row with the Western Europeans. Washington seriously wanted the Europeans to become more supportive in Mesopotamia; they were becoming more engaged on the ground in Afghanistan. We needed the French, Germans, and Brits to "own" our Iran policy, which would, so the sincere proponents of this policy argued, form a united Western front against the Islamic Republic. Ownership would produce responsibility--something the commercially driven Europeans had rarely shown toward the clerical regime, which in the 1980s and 1990s had directly or through its Lebanese proxies frequently assassinated Iranian dissidents in
Europe and even occasionally blown up the natives (the Paris bombings of 1986) without European governments' making much of a fuss. With the Europeans in the lead, nonpetroleum sanctions that might actually have a bite in Tehran would become possible.
The State Department diplomats who devised this strategy probably knew in their hearts that they were seeing possibilities in the Europeans that did not exist. Foreign-service officers working France, Germany, and NATO in 2003 and 2004 knew the depth of the anti-Americanism in Berlin and the cynicism about a nuclear Iran in Paris. But nobody wanted to replace hope with reality, which would lead one to the inexorable conclusion that preventive military strikes were the only way of significantly delaying or derailing Tehran's nuclear program. It's a very good bet that the U.S. officials now running America's Iran policy would rather see the clerics go nuclear than deal with the world the day after Washington begins bombing Iran's atomic-weapons and ballistic-missile facilities.
The unexpected election this past June of President Ahmadinejad, whom the Europeans didn't see coming (neither did the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency), annihilated the essential cosmetics of the EU-3 dialogue with Iran. On the issue of Israel and the iniquity of the Jews, or in his hatred of the United States and its "imperialistic, anti-Islamic, morally destructive culture," Ahmadinejad is, of course, on the same page as Iran's two preeminent mullahs, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the cleric who really got the Islamic Republic's nuclear program rolling in 1989-90, and the country's leader, Ali Khamenei. Anyone who has ever read and remembered Rafsanjani's and Khamenei's speeches since 1979 knows well that both clerics--but especially Khamenei--would have had warm and loquacious evenings with Austrian anti-Semites of yesteryear.
Where Ahmadinejad differs with his two colleagues and with Iran's former "reformist" president Mohammad Khatami (who also can sound like a faithful child of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini when talking about Zion, the Jews, and the destructiveness of American civilization) is that he never really practices taqqiyah, the very Iranian-Shiite art of dissimulation, which historically grew from the trials and tribulations that Shiites have endured in the much larger, often unkind Sunni Muslim world. Khamenei, Khatami, and Rafsanjani, all raised in a prerevolutionary culture accentuated by clerical training, seem to have a much easier time lying. They can shamelessly weave, dodge, and prevaricate. They can in their (usually small) inconsistencies give you hope. (Rafsanjani, the most refined and intelligent of the three, wins the award for being the boldest liar.) In Iran, the very Anglo-American understanding of "truth and consequences," where mendacity leads to pain, is reversed: Honesty, especially with strangers, is
likely to cause trouble.
Ahmadinejad, a child of the Iran-Iraq war's volunteer force of die-hard believers, the Basij, and the more elite but no less determined Revolutionary Guards Corps, who have become a state within a state as the Islamic Republic has aged, has very little of the old-school mendacity. In my experience, Revolutionary Guards actually don't like to lie. Their raison d'?tre is at odds with the historical weakness and fear that underlie taqqiyah or, as it is also often known in Persian, ketman. Unvarnished, unsophisticated, hardened, and usually embittered by one of the most merciless wars of the twentieth century, and contemptuous of sinful, colorful, traditional culture, they are often men of sincere faith. They are pure as only men who've been scorched by war can be. They often cannot hear, let alone analyze, the outside world.
Even if Ahmadinejad understands, as Rafsanjani does, the tactical advantages of trying to drag out negotiations with the Europeans--stall and try to advance as much as possible all aspects of the nuclear-weapons program not under seal by United Nations inspectors--he must find the whole process morally revolting. These are men whom Western secularists, especially spiritually inert "realists," barely understand. Western foreign-policy experts hunt for rational calculations and geostrategic designs where what is staring them in the face is faith, defining, for warriors like Ahmadinejad, both right and wrong and the decisive contours of politics and strategic maps. Westerners firmly believe that corruption, omnipresent in Iran, means a loss of religious virtue and zeal. In fact, in clerical Iran there is relatively little friction between violent faith and graft.
For the Europeans, Ahmadinejad has made it difficult--certainly unseemly--to offer Tehran more carrots to halt its fuel-cycle research. That had been the European approach since France, Germany, and Great Britain became engaged in dissuading the clerical regime from developing the capacity to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium. Trade deals, World Bank loans, membership in the World Trade Organization, a bit of sympathetic anti-American rhetoric from the French and Germans, and other incentives were meant to stimulate in Tehran rational self-interest. The Europeans, particularly those with a large, active commercial presence in Iran, had been assuring the Americans this was in ascendance. It is by no means clear whether the EU-3 ever really thought their approach could slow down, let alone halt, the Iranian nuclear-weapons program. (In 2003, the French and the Germans were at least as concerned about diplomatically neutralizing George W. Bush's perceived bellicosity towards one more axis of evil.) But the
Europeans certainly wanted to try to bribe the clerical regime, and they wanted the Americans to be prepared to offer some lucrative and strategically appealing "grand bargain."
This "realist," incentive-fond sentiment has been powerfully present in Foggy Bottom, which now dominates foreign policy--particularly Iran policy--in the Bush administration. Truth be told, the important voices at the State Department on Iran, which comprise now and then the Near East Bureau diplomats but especially the Europeanists riding high under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, would have preferred to adopt a strategy geared more toward carrots than sticks. Engagement is a reflex at State: If diplomacy is seen essentially as a substitute for, not an intimately intertwined complement to, the threat and use of force, this disposition is unavoidable.
Past experience ought to countervail, but it does not. Each time the United States has tried to engage revolutionary Iran--Zbigniew Brzezinski's mission to Algeria in 1979, Robert McFarlane's Iran-contra trip to Tehran in 1986, and President Bill Clinton's and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's forgive-the-West apologias to Iranian president Mohammad Khatami in 2000--the effort has been either a disaster (Brzezinski and McFarlane) or an embarrassing flop (Clinton-Albright). This Bush administration tried in December 2003, as did the administration of Bush p?re in June 1990, to reach out to Tehran after terrible earthquakes. Both times, during periods of relative political moderation in the Islamic Republic, American aid was rejected.
Yet it's not hard to find State Department and CIA officials who still believe that the "reformers," "clerical leftists," and "conservative pragmatists" (labeling the Iranian elite is a tricky, protean affair) would possibly cut a deal with the United States if they didn't have to contend with the "hardliners" in their midst. (The fact that the Islamic Republic probably made its most profound clandestine nuclear strides during the presidency of the "clerical leftist reformer" Mohammad Khatami and the overlordship of the "conservative pragmatists" Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Khamenei doesn't seem to get in the way of this reasoning.) A variation of this theme runs through the often-heard queries from scholars, journalists, and U.S. and European officials about whether Iran's current president really has much influence over Iran's nuclear program. In other words, Can't we please go back to the attitude we had under Khatami, Rafsanjani, and Khamenei, when we could more easily deceive ourselves about the
enormous nuclear progress the Iranians were making?
Though the administration, with the State Department in the lead, is probably going to make a valiant attempt to moderate our response to clerical Iran's decision to remove the United Nations seals on its enrichment facility at Natanz--the CIA did say, after all, in August 2005, that we might have as much as 10 years before Iran goes nuclear--we might well be at the defining moment: Will we really try to confront the mullahs' quest for nukes? The odds are decent that the Iranians, who are now controlling the calendar, will force our hand. It is quite possible the clerical regime has chosen to confront the EU-3, the United States, and the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency now because all that is lacking in its weapons program is to complete the fuel cycle--Iran has the missiles and reliable, Pakistani-tested weapons designs. Khamenei and Rafsanjani, let alone Ahmadinejad, are simply no longer willing to delay the program that they have nourished since the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
EITHER WE ARE GOING TO HAVE a serious policy incorporating but going beyond the European approach, where we put down trip-wires that will signal loudly that we are failing, or we will descend into a surreal process of tepid, ineffective sanctions, orchestrated through the U.N. Security Council or, given a Russian or Chinese veto, through a U.S.-EU-3 alliance (assuming the Europeans can bring themselves to implement the most minimal sanctions that would not affect their trade balance or the new-age Kantian hope that it's never too late to have more negotiations). Either the Bush administration makes a serious attempt at democracy promotion inside Iran--which has the most advanced democratic culture struggling against tyranny anywhere in the Middle East--or it runs the serious risk of having its "transformational diplomacy" agenda, which the upper reaches of the State Department, not to mention the president of the United States, seem to believe in sincerely, implode from an overdose of hypocrisy.
Even the most successful foreign policies will have a wide range of pretty glaring contradictions. However, there are limits. It is one thing for the Bush administration to downplay or ignore democracy in Pakistan, a front-line state against al Qaeda's surviving leadership, or in Azerbaijan, an oil-rich little land along the Caspian Sea, or in Libya, an underpopulated, undeveloped country that has had little luck since the fall of Carthage. It's something else entirely to do so in Egypt, still the lodestone in the Arab world, or in clerical Iran, the most powerful and nefarious state in the Middle East, which happens to have also the most pro-American Muslim population in the region. Sustained insincerity toward either will desiccate the democratic spirit within the American government, especially within the State Department, where those officials who truly want to support the expansion of democracy among Muslims fight a constant campaign against the Near East Bureau's professionals, who oppose changing the s
tatus quo in the region. Needless to say, the positive ramifications of one of the Muslim world's two dictatorial, missionary Islamist states (Saudia Arabia is the other) collapsing into a democracy would be enormous.
A more serious American-European approach to clerical Iran's quest for nuclear weapons would cast the administration more conspicuously as the bad cop. The entire EU-3 approach to Tehran, more thoughtful European diplomats will tell you, is premised on Washington's playing the imperfectly restrained cowboy: The Iranians need to know that over the horizon waits George W. Bush, the mad bomber. More often, senior American officials, and especially the president, need to remind Iran's ruling clergy, connoisseurs of machtpolitik--and the Europeans who are ever ready to appease them--that the United States is quite capable of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and simultaneously, if need be, launching airstrikes against the clerics' nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile facilities. The Iranians and the Europeans both thought the Americans were capable of such actions in 2003; the president and the vice president are surely capable, since many abroad view them as fundamentally unstable, of sending the signal that if t
he will exists, the United States will find the means. The objective is not to sound crudely bellicose, but to underscore that American patience is finite. The president used just the right language in his recent comments that the Islamic Republic's uranium enrichment program is "intolerable" and a "grave threat." Senior administration officials, and American ambassadors in the Middle East, should use such words more often, especially when any member of the ruling elite in Iran starts to thump his chest, envisioning Armageddon for Jews or anyone else.
The Bush administration should insist on adding benchmarks, with consequences, to the EU-3 and United Nations approaches. The administration has worked up a whole series of possible nonpetroleum sanction measures against Iran. The French, who are usually intellectually serious even when they are politically and strategically cynical and frivolous, have done likewise. Paris has concluded that Tehran, even with oil over $60 a barrel, may be more sensitive to sanctions pain than it realizes. The State Department should have already pushed aggressively, starting in Paris, to get the French, Germans, and British to agree to small-scale sanction trip-wires that would operate independently and in advance of any referral to the Security Council.
For example, the gradual revocation of visas to Iranian students on government stipends studying the hard sciences in EU-3 countries and the cancellation of all science-related exchange programs would have been a good place to begin, especially since such actions in the past have been discussed in Europe in response to earlier Iranian sins. It is entirely possible, if not probable, that the Europeans would have refused, but such efforts would have at least set the stage for where we will likely soon be: either a defeat in the Security Council on implementing even the weakest of sanctions or a token victory which is actually a defeat, that is, a temporary sanctions regime that has no bite and no clear timetable for a rapid escalation to more serious measures.
If the Europeans are unwilling to use any big, highly visible sticks unilaterally--for the French and Germans this would mean halting major industrial projects in Iran--then it's simply impossible for the West to generate an intimidating image. One hears often that senior State Department officials envisage isolating Iran as the West once isolated South Africa. It's an odd comparison since South Africa's economy was more diversified and globalized--thus more subject to pain--than Iran's oil-based economy operating in a market where small dips in supply can cause significant spikes in price. And the ruling whites in South Africa were Western and among themselves democratic, and thus much more subject to the ethical and spiritual pressure from being ostracized by the rest of Western civilization. The ruling elite in Iran suffers no similar angst. Distaste for white racism is vastly more galvanizing in Western Europe than fear of Iranian nukes. In Europe's postwar ethics, the sanctions against South Africa were
a chic expression of soft power, any serious sanctions against Iran a crude Americanesque expression of hard power against a third-world country.
Ideally, what the United States needs is to replicate the economy-crushing sanctions the West threw at Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh after he nationalized British petroleum in Iran in 1951. There are many reasons why Mossadegh fell to a very lamely executed and inexpensive coup in 1953, but among the most important was the effective oil embargo, which helped turn a popular prime minister into an unpopular one in less than a year. Such an embargo is unlikely today, when all in the West fear the possible economic shock from higher energy costs. But if there is such a thing as a non-oil-related intimidating sanction against the Islamic Republic--and there might possibly be, depending on how much the ruling Iranian elite fears that the country's precarious economic state could be significantly hurt by European sanctions--the doom and gloom need to be convincing from the start. Dribbling out little sanctions--the likely product of three years of US-EU-3 cooperation--won't do it.
Indeed, that approach would surely embolden the clerical regime, at home and abroad. We would have shown ourselves, to the Iranians and everyone else in the Middle East, to be, once again, paper tigers. Contrary to the usual commentary, it is American weakness on the Iranian nuclear question, not firm resolve, that is likely to embolden the mullahs in Iraq, Lebanon, the West Bank, and elsewhere. If you're the mullahs, which seems more like a propitious signal from God: a functioning Iranian nuke, acquired against the will of the Great Satan, or a barrage of American bombs and missiles destroying the atomic core of clerical prestige and awe?
Using the EU-3-United Nations approach against Iran wasn't a bad idea in 2003--so long as the Bush administration doesn't now get addicted to the process, an occupational hazard of allowing foreign-service officers to take the lead in developing policy. It should be said that Nicholas Burns, the lead official on Iran policy, appears to be the only senior official with the energy and desire to keep dealing with this ugly issue, which is going to hit this administration like a freight train. Right or wrong in his decisions, he seems to be operating in a policy vacuum. The administration needs a resolute and farsighted policy that will break from this diplomatic process--assuming the Iranians don't do it for us--when further dithering becomes clearly counterproductive. In other words, when we become weaker, not stronger, in the eyes of the clerics. We are just about there.
Eventually, assuming the State Department's European strategy falls apart because the Europeans will not play, we will have to make up our minds whether nukes in the hands of Khamenei, Rafsanjani, and Ahmadinejad are "intolerable" or not. If so, then we will have to prepare to bomb. (The other good thing about the EU-3 process with Iran is that it is actually rhetorically and morally preparing the arguments and language for a preventive military strike, if we must go in that direction. The astute European participants in this process know this, which provokes both considerable anxiety and, in some, relief.)
AND SOONER, not later, we need to decide whether we are serious about promoting democracy in Iran, whether we will continue to hold democracy-promotion hostage to these quite possibly never ending discussions. (The administration may try to deny that it has done so, but when the government steers NGOs and think tanks away from developing dissident-support programs for Iranians, suggesting that money is more likely to be forthcoming for dissident-support in Syria, then the administration is in sync, if not full agreement, with many Western Europeans, who see democracy advocacy in Iran, and elsewhere in the Middle East, as a synonym for unwanted regime change.) In fact, we were never going to lose the EU-3 approach because of greater American support for dissidents and democracy in Iran. The State Department didn't need to preempt itself in preparation for a "grand bargain" that astute minds at State and in the White House knew was never going to happen. It is worthwhile to recall the commentary of Ken Pollack,
who was one of the promoters of U.S.-Iranian d?tente in the Clinton administration's National Security Council:
I felt that we had come very close to making a major breakthrough with Iran that if only we had done a few things differently. . . . We might have been able to make it happen. Over the years, however, I have come to the conclusion that I was wrong in this assessment. . . . Iran was ruled by a regime in which the lion's share of power--and everything that really mattered--was in the hands of people who were not ready or interested in improving ties with the United States.
No one seriously believes the Iranian regime is better now.
So is there any reason Condoleezza Rice, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Burns, the NSC boss on the Middle East Elliott Abrams, and the public diplomacy czarina Karen Hughes can't regularly give speeches defending dissidents in Iran--let's name them--and the institutions of free speech? The Persian service of Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty has been completely neutered. Is there a reason--other than the "grand bargain"--the United States doesn't have a surrogate radio service for a country President Bush calls one of the gravest threats we face in the world? Don't we want RFE-RL to develop an in-country network of sources (yes, it's dangerous) that can tell the Iranian people things the regime will not allow into the Iranian press? If the Iranian people deserve to live in freedom, and President Bush and Secretary of State Rice have both said that they do, why can't we fund and develop radio and television programs that continually reveal the ugly, corrupt, and violent side of clerical rule?
The regime in Tehran constantly tells us what it fears most: clerical dissent. Why can't American officials give speeches defending religious freedom in Iran? Ali Khamenei's Achilles' heel is that he is a politicized, pathetic religious "scholar" ruling over a theocratic state where accomplished clerics, who don't believe at all in the political rule of religious jurisconsults, are silenced. This is the issue between Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq, and the school of Najaf behind him, and the clerical regime in Iran. The Clerical Court in Tehran is often a busy place because there have been a lot of refractory mullahs who think the regime is ruining the clergy and Islam. Hammer the point. Understandably, internal clerical politics may be a hard thing for nonspecialist senior officials to wrap a policy around. But it is critical to play on this if we intend to bring real pressure.
Remember: It's not what we think that is crucial. Our objective is to generate internal debate, which inevitably happens when the United States government decides to focus its attention inside Iran. Iranian society is quite open to the power of the American bully pulpit. Iranians may not have a very good idea at all about what is going on in Afghanistan, but they follow the United States. Given our advantages and their weakness, the overt side of American diplomacy is astonishingly weak.
And is there any reason American covert action against clerical Iran essentially doesn't exist? According to intelligence officials, Langley has a little under 200 officers on its operational Iran desk and around 40 analysts working full-time on the Islamic Republic. What in the world are they doing? According to CIA officers in the Near East Division, the agency had more Iranian assets 20 years ago than it does today, and it used far fewer officers. (And I can say from firsthand experience, the Iran operational units then were bloated.) The CIA is, without a doubt, the most overstuffed national-security bureaucracy in Washington. Somebody in the White House and Congress really ought to take CIA director Porter Goss aside and do a bang-for-the-buck audit of what Langley is doing against Iran. According to one CIA case officer in the Near East Division, there's not even a presidential covert-action finding "that would allow us to sh--in the country." The agency will never again become okay at covert action unl
ess it tries. CA work is like a muscle. With exercise, it gains definition, endurance, and strength.
Since overt American activity and meaningful political NGO work inside Iran are excruciatingly difficult--the regime is likely to imprison or kill those who take any U.S. aid, directly or indirectly--pro-democracy covert-action programs are really the only means to confront the clerics inside Iran. Just using Cold War parallels from the Soviet Union, or past activities in Iran, there is a long laundry list of things we could be doing. Is there any ethical or strategic reason Iranians who want clandestine U.S. support for pro-democratic activities deserve it less than did Poles in the 1980s? Why don't we let Iranians themselves judge whether they want to work clandestinely with the United States? It is for them, not us, to decide whether helping dissidents stay afloat and organize unions is worthwhile. If serious Iranians don't want to do these things, then such efforts will go nowhere. Covert action is a means of encouraging voluntary activity where the proof is always in the pudding.
Such clandestine action is unlikely to be a panacea for the current nuclear problem, but it would at least move the United States from the status quo, which certainly isn't advancing the democratic cause inside the Islamic Republic. What do we have to lose that we haven't lost already? Rebuilding CIA capacity won't be quick--odds are good the Iranians will get the bomb first. We should have restarted this undertaking in the Clinton administration when it became clear to the deaf, dumb, and blind that Khatami was not going to challenge the clerical order. The sooner we start this process, the more alternatives we will have to aid Iranians who are trying to build the institutions undergirding a civil, democratic society.
Remember: Ahmadinejad is heaven sent. Unfortunately, things in Iran are probably going to have to get a lot worse before they can get better. He and his supporters may ruin the economy and galvanize a much broader and braver base of internal opposition to the regime. He may add jet fuel to internal clerical dissent and open up lethal fissures in the ruling elite. No doubt, he will do all that he can to convulse and purify his society. Will we be ready to handle the challenge and the opportunity?
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
? Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
-
Facts vs. Fiction: A Report from the Front
By Karl Zinsmeister
Your editor has just returned from another month in Iraq?my fourth extended tour in the last two and a half years. During November and December I joined numerous American combat operations, including the largest air assault since the beginning of the war, walked miles of streets and roads, entered scores of homes, listened to hundreds of Iraqis, observed voting at a dozen different polling sites, and endured my third roadside ambush. With this latest firsthand experience, here are answers to some common queries about how the war is faring.
Has the Iraq war been too costly?
Well, nearly every war is riddled with disappointment and pain, Iraq certainly included. But judged fairly, Iraq has been much less costly and debacle-ridden than the Civil War, World War II, Korea, and the Cold War?each considered in retrospect to have been noble successes.
President Lincoln had to try five different commanders before settling on Ulysses Grant, and even Grant stumbled many times on the way to victory. The Union Army suffered 390,000 dead in four years, with fully 29 percent of the men who served being killed or wounded in what some critics claimed was ?an unnecessary war.?
World War II was a serial bloodbath. Battles like Iwo Jima, Anzio, Ardennes, and Okinawa each killed, in a matter of days and weeks, several times the number of soldiers we have lost in Iraq. Intelligence was wrong. Planning failed. Brutal collateral damage was done to civilian non-combatants. Soldiers were killed by friendly fire. POWs were sometimes executed. Military and civilian leaders miscalculated repeatedly. During WWII, 7 percent of our G.I.s were killed or wounded.
Korea was first lost before it could be re-taken, at great cost, and thanks to political interference the war ended in a fruitless stalemate. Fully 8 percent of the American soldiers who fought on the Korean peninsula were killed or wounded.
The Cold War spawned by President Roosevelt?s expedient alliance with Stalin and other communists brought totalitarian bleakness and death to millions, endless proxy wars that consumed hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American and allied lives, and a near-nuclear exchange during President Kennedy?s watch.
Yet ugly as they were, each of the wars above eventually made the world a less bloody place by removing tyrants and transforming cultures. Those same goals drive our war against Middle Eastern extremism that is now centered in Iraq.
In Iraq, 4 percent of our soldiers have been killed or wounded. Those losses are lower than we suffered in nine previous wars. The Civil War, Mexican War, War of Independence, Korean War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, and Philippine War were all half-again or more as costly as Iraq has been.
But aren?t our losses mounting?
In the last ten months of 2003, Iraq hostilities claimed 324 U.S. service members. In 2004, 710 were lost. In 2005, total fatalities were 712. Troops wounded in action are down from 7,920 in 2004 to 5,961 in 2005.
Deaths of foreign civilians in Iraq have also tumbled: In 2004, 196 were killed. In 2005 the toll was 104.
Economic losses are also moderating. Attacks carried out on oil and gas facilities in Iraq can serve as an indicator of this. There were 146 such attacks in 2004, versus 101 in 2005.
Meanwhile, the estimated number of terrorists killed or detained in Iraq was 24,470 in 2004, and 26,500 in 2005.
How is the morale of our soldiers holding up?
Accepting the possibility of being hurt is a part of security work. It?s easy to overlook the reality that 800 public safety officers have been killed in the line of duty right here on our own home shores since the beginning of the Iraq war. This summer, the U.S. general in charge of our National Guard put his Iraq casualties in some perspective: ?I lose, unfortunately, more people through private automobile accidents and motorcycle accidents over the same period of time.?
While always wrenching, the risks in Iraq have been overblown. And the morale of soldiers, in my experience, is much higher than one might expect. Other journalists who have spent weeks and weeks with soldiers, like Robert Kaplan, have similarly observed that our G.I.s are generally not disenchanted, but remain very spirited.
The proof of the pudding: Individuals who have actually served in Iraq and Afghanistan are signing up again at record rates. Re-enlistment totals in the active Army over the last three years are more than 6 percent above targets. Over a third of Army re-enlistments now take place in combat zones.
Today?s supposed hemorrhaging in military manpower is mostly a fiction manufactured by the media. Moderate shortfalls in recruiting new bodies have hit reserve and National Guard units. The latest Army Reserve recruiting class, for instance, totaled only 96 percent of the goal.
All active duty branches, however, are exceeding their recruiting requirements in the latest monthly figures from the Department of Defense (released in December). The Army and Marine Corps (who are doing most of the hard service in Iraq) were each at 105 percent of their quotas. After a dip early in 2005, the Army has met or exceeded its goals for new recruits in every month since June. One source of pressure on the active-duty Army is the process of expanding from 482,000 soldiers to 512,000, as a dozen new combat brigades are added to the force.
We are at war, and our Army and Marines are being used hard. But there is no crisis of alienated servicemen.
But don?t American combat losses fall disproportionately on minorities and the poor?
That?s another myth. Though blacks and Hispanics make up 15 percent and 18 percent of America?s young-adult population respectively, they have each represented less than 11 percent of the fatalities in Iraq. Fully 75 percent of the soldiers killed in Iraq have been whites (who make up 61 percent of our military-age population).
Demographic data show, furthermore, that U.S. service-members come from a cross-section of American society, and basically match the wider population in family educational and socioeconomic status.
If there is an imbalance in who is carrying the military load in Iraq it is between Red and Blue America. In two years of fighting in Iraq, 33 percent of U.S. military fatalities came from rural areas, though only 20 percent of the U.S. population is rural. Both city dwellers (29 percent of the U.S. population, 26 percent of Iraq fatalities) and suburbanites (51 percent of the population, 41 percent of the dead) are underrepresented among today?s war casualties.
John Kerry recently claimed U.S. soldiers are ?terrorizing? Iraqis. The #2 Democrat in the Senate, Richard Durbin, compared American fighters to ?Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime?Pol Pot or others?that had no concern for human beings.? Ted Kennedy suggested G.I.s torture like Saddam Hussein. What have you observed?
None of the above. I mostly see soldiers fighting with startling care and commitment. Take, for instance, Staff Sergeant Jamie McIntyre of Queens, New York, who recently had this to say:
?I look at faces and see fellow human beings, and I say, ?O.K. This is the sacrifice I have to make to bring them freedom.? That?s why I joined the military. Not for the college money, for doing what?s right. Fighting under our flag. That?s what our flag stands for. I believe in that stuff. Yeah, we might lose American soldiers, but they are going to lose a society, lose a people. You?ve got to look at the bigger picture. I?ve lost friends, and it hurts. It definitely hurts. But that?s even more reason why I say stay. It?s something that has to be done. If we don?t do it, who will??
An e-mail I received on December 26 from a friend serving in Baghdad provides two good examples of the sort of disciplined dedication one sees regularly in Iraq:
?We lost a young soldier?. This soldier didn?t have to be here and he didn?t have to die on Christmas Day. He was wounded in action in April and evacuated to the States for recovery. After three months on the mend, he requested to come back to rejoin his team. His name was Specialist Sergio Gudino.
?Also on Christmas Day, a newly hired Iraqi interpreter pulled a gun on one of our soldiers who works with sensitive intelligence. The Iraqi spy made Specialist Steven Clark bring him to his work space so he could look at his computer work station. The interpreter briefly turned his back to Clark and our guy immediately pulled his 9mm pistol and emptied his magazine into the Iraqi. The interpreter also got six shots off, one of which hit the soldier in his left breast pocket, but a notebook and ID card stopped the bullet. When I talked to Clark he said, ?I thought I was going to die and couldn?t believe it when the guy turned his back to me.? Interesting detail: this soldier has been awarded the Purple Heart FOUR times. He?s another one who doesn?t have to be here. Message to all the naysayers back home: If you think these kids aren?t committed to this mission, and don?t believe in what they are doing, guess again.?
?The idea that we?re going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong,? opined Democratic chairman Howard Dean in December. Who agrees with him?
Well, most academics and journalists seem to. Military leaders, however, do not.
In September and October 2005, Princeton Survey Research asked various American leadership groups whether they believe the U.S. will succeed or fail in establishing a stable democratic government in Iraq. Most academics agree with Howard Dean: only a quarter say we will ?succeed.? Most journalists agree with Dean: Only one third answer ?succeed.? Among military officers, however, two thirds say the U.S. will succeed in Iraq.
Progress does seem dreadfully slow.
It is. Defanging the Middle East is a vast undertaking. But again, wars have never been easy or antiseptic. Even after the hostilities of World War II were over, the U.S. occupied Japan for seven years of stabilization and reconstruction, and West Germany for four years (the first year, the Germans nearly starved).
And a guerilla war like we face in Iraq generally requires even more stamina. Eliminating a terror insurgency has historically taken a decade or two. It?s like eradicating smallpox; you must squeeze and squeeze and squeeze, and show great patience. Our occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War is a closer example of what we face in Iraq; we fought an extensive insurgency there for years, then remained in the country for nearly a century, with very positive eventual results.
Interestingly, our soldiers appear to better understand the incremental nature of this war than many reporters, pundits, and politicians. ?Americans seem to kind of want this McDonald?s war, where you drive up, you order it, you pay for it, you go to the next window and get a democracy. That?s not the way it works,? cautioned Army reservist Scott Southworth recently. ?It takes a lot of effort; it takes a lot of time.?
Morass or not, this war seems to be especially unpopular on the homefront.
Actually, a substantial minority has opposed almost every war prosecuted by our nation. This was true right from the American Revolution?which a large proportion of Tory elites (including most New York City residents) insisted was an ill-considered and quixotic mistake.
Only in 20/20 hindsight have our wars been reinterpreted as righteous and widely supported by a unified nation. Even World War II, the ultimate ?good? war fought by the ?greatest? generation, was deeply controversial at the time. Fully 6,000 Americans went to prison as war resisters during the years our troops were conquering fascism in Europe and Japan.
There?s no reason to think of the Iraq war as more unpopular than any other U.S. war. If it is prosecuted to success, there?s little doubt that the war against terror in Iraq will in retrospect look just as wise and worthy as previous sacrifices. But there is a wild card: Would the nation have retained the nerve to finish previous successful wars if there had been contemporary-style news coverage of battles like Camden, the Wilderness, or Tarawa?
Where is some evidence that we?re making headway?
In December, Iraqis filed a record number of tips informing on insurgents. That shows growing political and social cooperation. Iraq is also beginning to recover economically. Over the last generation, this was one of the globe?s worst-governed nations, and recovering from the long neglect of plants, factories, utility lines, canals, roads, schools, houses, and commercial districts will take decades. Every time I walk Iraq?s streets and farmyards I am stunned by the raggedness of its physical and social fabric.
But despite the best efforts of terrorists to further damage economic infrastructure, a rebound has begun. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund estimate that Iraqi national income per capita exceeded $1,050 in 2005?up more than 30 percent from the year before the war began ($802 in 2002). One consumer survey by British researchers found that average household income rose 60 percent from February 2004 to November 2005. The IMF projects that Iraq?s gross domestic product will grow 17 percent in 2006 after inflation.
Evidence of growth can be seen in the jump in car usage. The number of registered autos has more than doubled, and traffic is estimated to be five times as heavy as before the war. Purchases of nearly all consumer goods?air conditioners, refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, farm machinery, computers?are soaring. Cell phone ownership has jumped from 6 percent in early 2004 to over 65 percent today.
TV satellite dishes are as ubiquitous as mobile phones, and now sprout from even the rudest abodes in Iraq?s most out-of-the-way corners. Fully 86 percent of Iraqi households reported having satellite TV at the end of 2005. The number of Iraqi commercial TV stations is now 44, and there are 72 commercial radio stations (there were none of either prior to 2003). The number of newspapers exceeds 100.
After two decades of classroom deterioration, Iraqi children are now flooding back to school. Making this possible is a jump in teacher salaries from just a few dollars per month under Saddam to an average of $100 per month today. Parents are delighted: the proportion saying their locals schools are good has risen to 74 percent. By 3:1 they say local education is better than before the war.
Then why do Iraqis seem so dissatisfied?
Make no mistake: Iraq is broken. Most residents have never known proper sewage service, 24 hour electricity, or decent health care.
And improvement could be faster. Both terror attacks and the Arab tradition of endemic corruption are making today?s economic recovery less booming than it would otherwise be. Another damper has been the failure of our Western allies to make good on their promises of Iraq aid: Of the $13.6 billion European and other nations pledged to help rebuild Iraq, only a couple billion has so far been delivered.
All the same, progress is visible in Iraq, not just to observers like me but to Iraqis themselves. There is ample proof of this in the latest scientific poll of the Iraqi public, released December 12 by Oxford Research International. Asked how things are going for them personally, 71 percent of Iraqis now say life is ?good,? compared to 29 percent who say ?bad.? A majority insist that despite the war, life is already better for them than it was under Saddam Hussein. By 5:1 they expect their lives will be even better one year from now. Seven out of ten Iraqis think their country as a whole will be a better place in one year.
Iraqis are particularly pleased about trends in security. By 61 to 38 percent, they say security where they live is now ?good? rather than ?bad.? Back at the beginning of 2004 those numbers were reversed (49 percent good, 50 percent bad). On a vast range of specific subjects?from the availability of clean water and medical care to their ability to buy household basics?Iraqis say things are good and getting better. Fully 70 percent say ?my family?s economic situation is good,? and 78 percent rate their new freedom of speech as ?good.?
The Iraqis don?t seem to be doing much for themselves.
Actually, the ranks of Iraqi security forces passed the number of U.S. soldiers in the country back in March 2005. At present, their total exceeds 200,000 men. Iraqi soldiers, police, and guards were much more in evidence, and more competent, when I accompanied them on raids and searches in late 2005 than they were during my earlier reporting visits in 2003-2005. As of December 2005, one quarter of all military operations conducted in Iraq were carried out exclusively by Iraqi units. Another half were carried out by joint Iraqi-U.S. forces.
Despite many cruel suicide attacks, Iraqis continue to sign up in droves to become soldiers and police, and they are fighting. In 2003 and 2004, Iraqi soldiers and police frequently turned tail when engaged. Since the January 2005 election, however, not a single Iraqi army unit has been defeated in battle, and not one police station has been abandoned.
?Every police station here has a dozen or more memorials for officers that were murdered,? notes Sergeant Walter Rausch of the 101st Airborne. ?These are husbands, fathers, and sons killed every day. The media never reports the heroism I witness every day in Iraqis.?
The Iraqi public, however, is noticing. In November 2005, 67 percent expressed confidence in the new Iraqi army (up from 39 percent two years earlier); 68 percent say they have confidence in the police (up from 45 percent).
Iraqi units still depend upon American counterparts for transport, planning, training, heavy weaponry, and leadership, but in most combat operations I accompanied this winter, and nearly all traffic control points and perimeter guard posts, Iraqis were the lead elements. After bearing the brunt of daily casualties over the last year, the number of Iraqi security forces killed is now declining. Monthly deaths of Iraqi soldiers and police climbed steadily to a peak of 304 in July 2005, then fell just as steadily to 193 by December 2005.
Are there signs of the Iraqis weaning themselves from dependence on the U.S.?
In the first two years after the U.S. arrived, nearly every conversation between Iraqis and Americans that I witnessed ended with a wish list. Can you do this? We need that. What will you give me?
That has largely changed. Vast swathes of the country are now policed and administered solely by Iraqis. And residents are beginning to look to their own government, ministries, security forces, and internal leaders for solutions they used to beg Americans to provide.
Late in 2005, American journalist Hart Seely described a meeting he monitored between reporters from Iraq?s brand new independent press and leaders of Iraq?s brand new army. No open dialogue like that had ever taken place before in Iraq, and it was tentative and halting. But ?it was the Iraqi media pulling information from Iraqi generals?not looking to the Americans for answers.? That?s progress.
Do average Iraqis support the insurgents?
Those carrying out terror in Iraq, never more than a small fraction of the population, are now deeply resented by most residents. Though Americans are the outsiders who come from furthest away, physically and culturally, in most of Iraq it?s now the insurgents who are viewed as the most threatening alien invaders.
It is a fact almost never reported in the U.S. that a significant number of the suicide bombers who carry out the most horrendous attacks in Iraq are coerced or manipulated into doing so. Naked deception plus religious, economic, strong-arm, and pharmacological pressures are commonly used to enlist foreign and Iraqi triggermen.
At one base where I was embedded for a time, a car loaded with explosives pulled up to the front gate and detonated. Construction of the bomb was botched, however, and the badly burned driver survived long enough to talk to guards at the entrance. It turned out the wife and children of the driver (who was handcuffed to the steering wheel) had been kidnapped, and he was informed they would be killed if he didn?t drive the car as instructed. A triggerman in a following vehicle actually initiated the blast, wirelessly, then fled.
Sometimes the drivers of car bombs do not even know what they are carrying. In addition, many fighters have been found, when wounded or killed, to be full of drugs. (TAE first reported this after the battle of Fallujah, in our J/F 2005 issue.)
Western reporters have emphasized the many ethnic and religious schisms that divide Iraqis. They rarely note that there are also some countervailing common interests, social forces, and leaders who pull Iraqis together. An observation passed to me by a U.S. commander after the December 15 election illustrates some of these positive forces:
?The highlight of my day was in Mahmoudiyah (south Baghdad) where there were no polling stations in the January election, and where many Sunnis refused to vote in October. I watched as two affluent local sheiks walked into the polling station together holding hands (a big sign of respect here). One sheik was Shia, the other Sunni. I stopped them and offered my congratulations on a great day for the people and country of Iraq. They both told me how much they appreciated what the United States had done for them, and that they could never repay us. I told them we neither needed nor expected repayment, but if they wanted to show their appreciation they needed to ensure that the move toward democracy continued and that Sunni and Shia come together to live in peace. The Sunni sheik said, ?We are tired of violence and fighting that destroys our people and our country.? These two guys got it.?
But in the wider Muslim world, hasn?t the Iraq war done irreparable damage to America?s image?
As terrorists? attacks have shed light on their goals and principles, and as the U.S. has shown it is serious about promoting democracy in Iraq and then going home, new views of America are evolving in Islamic countries. According to surveys in 17 nations carried out in 2005 by an organization chaired by Madeleine Albright, support for terrorism in defense of Islam has ?declined dramatically? in the last couple years?from 73 percent to 26 percent in Lebanon, from 40 percent down to 13 percent in Morocco, from 41 percent to 25 percent in Pakistan.
Support for Osama bin Laden has plummeted in nearly every Islamic nation. Rationalizing suicide bombing and violence against civilian targets is way down. A majority of Muslims in many nations now ?see Islamic extremism as a threat to their countries.? And majorities of Muslims in many countries now believe that ?the U.S. favors democracy in their country??and rather like the idea. The upshot: positive views of the U.S. are rising?up 23 percentage points in Indonesia, up 15 points in Lebanon, up 16 in Jordan.
Isn?t it a pipe dream to think we can introduce democracy to the Middle East?so long dominated by strongmen?
That?s the $64,000 question, and no one knows the answer for sure. But there are signs in Iraq that a surprisingly patient representative politics may be breaking out for the first time ever. To begin, 8 million Iraqis voted for an interim government in January 2005, and almost 10 million voted on the constitution. Then (in a nation with just 14 million adults) 11 million voted in December 2005 for the first permanent parliament.
At this point, all of Iraq?s major factions, including the disaffected Sunnis, are participating in the political process, and many barriers have been breached for the first time. For instance, 31 percent of the legislators elected to the interim parliament were female?which is not only unprecedented for the Middle East but higher than the fraction of women in the U.S. Congress. Power in Iraq?s new National Assembly is reasonably balanced, with no one faction holding a whip hand against the others, and compromise is the requirement of the day.
The new Iraqi constitution guarantees freedom of religion and conscience, and provides forms of due process unknown in any other Middle Eastern country. How scrupulously these will be defended remains to be seen. But there is a framework for basic decencies and liberties that no other Arab nations even pretend to honor. As Christopher Hitchens has put it, ?in a country that was dying on its feet and poisoning the region a couple of years ago, there is now a real political process that has serious implications for adjacent countries.?
Noting what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, more and more Muslims are now saying they are ready to live under selfrule. In the 2005 survey in 17 countries I mentioned above, the proportion saying democracy is not just for the West but could work well in their own country exceeded 80 percent in places like Morocco, Lebanon, and Jordan. Even in problematic countries like Pakistan, the portion of the public favoring multiparty democracy has become larger than any other faction.
Why do I never hear any of this in most reporting?
A good question. More than perhaps any news event in a generation, coverage of the Iraq war has been unbalanced and incomplete. The dangers that keep most Western reporters completely cloistered in the artificial bubble of a few heavily guarded hotels create many distortions. But the disdain of the press corps for this war is also crystal clear in the overall reporting.
One media critic (Arthur Chrenkoff) did a content analysis of a typical day (January 21, 2005), and counted this breakout of freshly published stories on Iraq:
? 1,992 covering terrorist attacks
? 887 essays alleging prisoner abuse by the British
? 289 about American casualties or civilian deaths in Iraq
? 27 mentions of oil pipeline sabotage
? 761 reports on public statements of terrorists
? 357 on U.S. anti-war protestors
? 121 speculations on a possible American pullout
? 118 articles about strains with European nations
? 217 stories worrying over the validity of the upcoming January 30 Iraqi election
? 216 tales of hostages in Iraq
? 123 quoting Vice President Cheney saying he had underestimated reconstruction needs
? 2,642 items on a Senate grilling of Condoleezza Rice over Iraq policy
Balanced against these negative stories, Chrenkoff ?s computer search found a grand total of 96 comparatively positive reports related to Iraq:
? 16 reports on successful operations against insurgents
? 7 hopeful stories about Iraqi elections
? 73 describing the return of missing Iraqi antiquities
Tendentious reporting is clouding understanding and spawning inaccuracies. In January 2005, for instance, the New York Times editorial board had become convinced that civil war was just around the corner in Iraq and suggested ?it?s time to talk about postponing [Iraq?s first] elections.? Less than two weeks later came the popular outpouring that inspired observers around the globe. Snookered yet again by over-gloomy reporting, the Times insisted on October 7 that Iraqis were ?going through the motions of democracy only as long as their side wins.? Just days after, the minority Sunnis announced they were joining the political process, and turned out in force to vote on the constitution, and then in Iraq?s historic parliamentary election.
Many other establishment media organs have been equally out of line. When Iraq?s unprecedented new constitution was ratified by 79 percent of voters (in a turnout heavier than any American election), the Washington Post buried that story on page 13, and put this downbeat headline on it: ?Sunnis Failed to Defeat Iraq Constitution: Arab Minority Came Close.? The four top headlines on the front page of the Post that same day: ?Military Has Lost 2,000 in Iraq,? ?The Toll: 2,000,? ?Bigger, Stronger, Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of U.S. Deaths,? and ?Bush Aides Brace for Charges.?
Well, even if Iraq is a democracy, it?s a very partial and imperfect one.
There is no reason to be Pollyannish about Iraq. Like nearly every Arab nation, it is not a competent society at present. Trade, manufacturing, and farming have been suffocated by bad governance. Public servants routinely skim funds. Trash is not picked up, property rights are not respected, rules are not enforced, altruism is non-existent.
Having been one of the most brutalized societies on earth over the last generation, it would be absurd to expect prone Iraq to jump to its feet at this critical transition and dance a jig. Newborn representative governments are always imperfect, inept, even dirty at times?witness El Salvador, Russia, Taiwan, South Africa.
Yet, a quiet tide is rippling up the Tigris and Euphrates. The November 2005 study by Oxford Research found that when Iraqis are asked what form of political system will work best in their nation for the future, 64 percent now say ?a democratic government with a chance for the leader to be replaced from time to time.? Only 18 percent choose ?a government headed by one strong leader for life,? and just 12 percent pick ?an Islamic state where politicians rule according to religious principles.? This surge toward representative toleration?which did not enjoy majority support in Iraq as recently as early 2004?ought not to be taken for granted. It is an historic groundswell.
Iraq is now creeping away from murderous authoritarianism to face the more normal messes of a creaky Third World nation: corruption, poverty, health problems, miserable public services. And that is vastly preferable to what came before.
Karl Zinsmeister is editor in chief of TAE.
Published in Leaving Iraq: The Right End Game March 2006
This information was found online at:
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.18977/article_detail.asp
-
File this one under "know your enemy."
2/3/2005 Clip No. 1024
Hamas Leader Khaled Mash'al at a Damascus Mosque: The Nation of Islam Will Sit at the Throne of the World and the West Will Be Full of Remorse When It Is Too Late
Following are excerpts from an address given by Hamas leader Khaled Mash'al at the Al-Murabit Mosque in Damascus. The address was delivered following the Friday sermon at the mosque and was aired on Al-Jazeera TV on February 3, 2006.
Khaled Mash'al: We apologize to our Prophet Muhammad, but we say to him: Oh Prophet of Allah, do not be saddened, your nation will be victorious.
We say to this West, which does not act reasonably, and does not learn its lessons: By Allah, you will be defeated. You will be defeated in Palestine, and your defeat there has already begun. True, it is Israel that is being defeated there, but when Israel is defeated, its path is defeated, those who call to support it are defeated, and the cowards who hide behind it and support it are defeated. Israel will be defeated, and so will whoever supported or supports it.
America will be defeated in Iraq. Wherever the [Islamic] nation is targeted, its enemies will be defeated, Allah willing. The nation of Muhammad is gaining victory in Palestine. The nation of Muhammad is gaining victory in Iraq, and it will be victorious in all Arab and Muslim lands. "Their multitudes will be defeated and turn their backs [and flee]." These fools will be defeated, the wheel of time will turn, and times of victory and glory will be upon our nation, and the West will be full of remorse, when it is too late.
They think that history has ended with them. They do not know that the law of Allah cannot be changed or replaced. "You shall not find a substitute for the law of Allah. You shall not find any change to the law of Allah." Today, the Arab and Islamic nation is rising and awakening, and it will reach its peak, Allah willing. It will be victorious. It will link the present to the past. It will open up the horizons of the future. It will regain the leadership of the world. Allah willing, the day is not far off.
Don't you see that every act of deceit they contrive is being turned against them by Allah? Don't you see that they make every effort to defeat us militarily, but fail to do so? Israel and the occupation forces in Iraq are supplied with the entire Western military arsenal, yet they fail and are defeated.
Don't you see that they believe they are capable of using democracy to deceive the people, but then democracy is turned against them? Don't you see that they are spending their money in efforts to block the way of Allah, to thwart Hamas, to defeat it, and to help those whom they want, but [this plot] is turned against them? They are not acting reasonably.
They do not understand the Arab or Muslim mentality, which rejects the foreigner. Our Arab forefathers, before the advent of Islam, rejected the aggressors and the foreigners.
[...]
I bring good tidings to our beloved Prophet Muhammad: Allah's promise and the Prophet's prophecy of our victory in Palestine over the Jews and over the oppressive Zionists has begun to come true.
[...]
I say to the [European countries]: Hurry up and apologize to our nation, because if you do not, you will regret it. This is because our nation is progressing and is victorious. Do not leave a black mark in the collective memory of the nation, because our nation will not forgive you.
Tomorrow, our nation will sit on the throne of the world. This is not a figment of the imagination, but a fact. Tomorrow we will lead the world, Allah willing. Apologize today, before remorse will do you no good. Our nation is moving forwards, and it is in your interest to respect a victorious nation.
[...]
Our nation will be victorious. When it reaches the leadership of the world, and controls its own will decisions, then it will prevent this overt interference [in our affairs], and its pillaging of natural resources, and will prevent these recurring offenses against our land, against our nation, and against our holy places ? then you will regret it.
The Western countries must stop the fools. Are these reasonable people? They allow offenses against Allah and the prophets. They are not offending only Muhammad, but all the prophets. But when an historian among them talks about the Holocaust, it is the sin of all sins. If anybody criticizes the Jews, this constitutes anti-Semitism. By law, they hold their own people accountable [for that]. The West, which waved the slogans of liberty after the French Revolution, three centuries ago, does not respect its own principles or slogans today. It violates them.
This victory, which was clearly evident in the elections, conveys a message to Israel, to America, and to all the oppressors around the world: You have no way of overcoming us. If you want war, we are ready. If you want democracy, we are ready. Whatever you want ? we are ready. You will not defeat us. The time of defeat is over. Defeat within six days, defeat within hours, the defeat of armies ? all this is over.
Today, you are fighting the army of Allah. You are fighting against peoples, for whom death for the sake of Allah, and for the sake of honor and glory, is preferable to life. You are fighting a nation that doest not tire, even after a 1,000 years of fighting. Today, you are facing peoples filled with faith, with the love of Allah, the love of Allah's Prophet, with bravery, glory, and pride ? a nation that knows its way, a nation that knows what it is, a nation that respects itself. How can you possibly defeat us?
There is a chasm between you and our defeat. You will be the ones to be defeated, Allah willing. The time of defeat is gone, and the day of victory has come, Allah willing. Wherever you turn, you will fail.
Crowd: Death to Israel. Death to Israel. Death to America.
Khaled Mash'al: Before Israel dies, it must be humiliated and degraded. Allah willing, before they die, they will experience humiliation and degradation every day. America will be of no avail to them. Their generals will be of no avail to them. The last of their generals has been forgotten. Allah has made him disappear. He's over. Gone is that Sharon, behind whose back they would hide and find shelter, and with whom they would feel relatively secure. Today they have frail leaders, who don't even know where our Lord placed them.
Allah willing, we will make them lose their eyesight, we will make them lose their brains.
[...]
Their weapons will be of no avail to them. Their nuclear weapons will be of no use to them. They thought that they had hegemony over the region with their nuclear weapons, but suddenly Pakistan popped up with Islamic nuclear weapons, and they are afraid of Iran and several Arab countries have some chemical weapons.
Israel has begun to sense that its superiority has come to an end. Its army, which has superior conventional weapons ? the air force, the armored corps, and the missiles ? there are no longer wars in which these are used.
The Arabs have said: We don't want [conventional] wars, thank you very much. Leave the war to the peoples. Today, the Israeli weapons are of no use against the peoples. We have imposed a new equation in the war. In this equation, our tools are stronger. That is why we will defeat them, Allah willing.
[...]
"If you fight them, they will turn their backs on you, and will not be victorious." But the problem is that we need to fight them first. If we sleep at home, how are we to beat them?! "If you fight them..." ? that is a divine promise... "If" ? It is conditional: "If you fight them, they will turn their backs on you and will not be victorious." And indeed, when we began to fight, and we armed ourselves with a will to fight, we defeated them.
[...]
That is why Allah Akbar [Allah is greater]. We say that every day ? Allah Akbar. Yes, Allah is greater than America. Allah is greater than the oppressors. Allah is greater than the superpowers. Allah is greater than the tyranny of the oppressing world, and Allah is greater than Israel. Since Allah is greater, and He supports us, we will be victorious.
[...]
By Allah, I know that all Arab leaders ? and I have met many of them ? deep inside want the resistance in Palestine to be victorious, and want Palestine to be liberated. Perhaps the need for flattery and for diplomacy, and the American hegemony force other things on them, but in their hearts they are happy when we are victorious.
[...]
If before the Hamas victory, there were several military wings, each with a few hundred or a few thousand fighters, under the rule of Hamas, if you continue to besiege us, to starve our people, to ignore our rights, and if you continue your occupation, your aggression, and your assassinations, we, the Hamas, will declare a general call to arms. We will place the entire Palestinian people at the disposal of the resistance and its weapons.
Crowd: Allah akbar, Allah be praised. Allah akbar, Allah be praised. Allah akbar, Allah be praised. Allah akbar, Allah be praised. Allah akbar, Allah be praised. Allah akbar, Allah be praised.
Khaled Mash'al: Be careful not to drive our people into a corner - Occupation, aggression, assassinations, 9,000 male and female prisoners, preventing aid, imposing a siege, causing starvation ? and on top of all this, you don't want to recognize democracy and its results.
The German [Chancellor Angela] Merkel pops up and says: Democracy and success in the elections are not sufficient for Hamas to gain legitimacy. To hell with you all. How are we supposed to gain legitimacy? When you said we had the legitimacy of resistance, you called it terrorism. Now, we say we have the legitimacy of democracy, but you deny it. In that case, you yourself are not legitimate, because you emerged through democracy. This is the logic of a frail and defeatist person.
Brothers and sister, there is confusion in the Western world, and in the American administration. Allah has come to them from where they did not expect him. That is the grace of Allah. That is why we do not fear them. We do not fear their threats.
Today they give us an ultimatum: Recognize Israel. Wonderful! The murderer is not required by anyone to recognize the rights of his victim, but the victim is required to recognize the rights of his murderer, and to sing his praises.
[...]
Hamas has a vision. Hamas has a plan. Hamas can manage the political battle, just like it managed the military battle, but in a different language, with different tools, and recognizing Israel is not one of them. Nor is giving up the rights, giving up the right to resistance, and nor is giving up the weapons of the resistance.
Nevertheless, we want to deal with politics, but there is a difference between the politics of the weak and defeatists, which we will constantly repeat ? the kind of politics that does not impress the enemy and so it does nothing, because, like in the market, products that are praised too much become cheap. If we continue to praise our products, constantly saying: "We love peace," "We have given up the option of war," "Peace is our strategic option," "For God's sake, Israel, give us a few scraps of land" ? By Allah, we will be degraded in the eyes of our enemies.
We will conduct our politics in the language of victory. We will conduct our policy in a confident language. We will conduct our politics in the language of those who are steadfast and sure of themselves. Besides, by Allah, after the people has elected us, and has bestowed upon us all this power, we will disrespect its rights?
[...]
The people has given us a deposit, and has empowered us to liberate its land, to restore Jerusalem and its holy places. It has empowered us to release 9,000 male and female prisoners. It has empowered us to stop the aggression, to liberate the land, and to restore its rights. The people has empowered us to bring back 5.5 million Palestinian refugees and displaced people to their homeland. After all this, Hamas ? in order to please America and the European Union, and in order for the pressure on us to stop, and in order for their highnesses to allow us to establish a government... We are not trying to please them.
[...]
I say to America, Europe, and the West: It is in your interests to change your relations and policies regarding the Arab and Islamic nation and the Palestinian cause. Because we are winning, it is in your interests to deal with the victors, not the losers.
Israel will be defeated and will be of no use to you. The Arabs will be victorious. The Muslims will be victorious. Palestine will be victorious. Change your policy soon, if you want to protect your interests, and maintain healthy relations with the East.
http://www.memritv.org/Search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=1024.
-
THE CARTOONESQUE JIHAD?
Walid Phares
- PART TWO -
Brussels, the European Parliament, London, the House of Commons.
This piece was authored in conjunction with the presentation of my new book at the European institutions. link
?Cartoon Jihad? was the title of a piece by American leading cartoonist Daryl Cagle posted on January 10, in which he warned about the explosion to come link . The term was coined since around the world, especially in a series of investigations by German daily Der Spiegel. The term itself is a reverse of the campaign mobilized by the critics of the cartoons. While Islamic groups and governments have escalated their protests, many of which in violent forms, and accused the ?caricaturists-perpetrators? of waging a cultural war against Islam, artists and their supporters responded by disseminating the initial drawings and drawing more. The latter claimed a political war is being waged by the Islamists against cultural democracy and Jihadi terror is being staged against media. On al Jazeera, commentators and guests are now accusing the whole West of launching an all out ?crusade? against everything Islamic, while in return, Jihad-critics are accusing the ideological movement worldwide of being behind all urban intifadas against the West not just the Denmark cartoon violence. In the Italian press and across the continent, dots are being connected between the Hijab uprising in France, the Van Goh assassination in Holland, the French so-called youth intifada, the Australian beach clashes, and other ?moves? within the West. By the day fault lines are emerging between the two camps and unspoken sentences are piling up. Historians may well realize few years from now, that the Denmark?s drawings were only the straw that broke the camel?s back between the two ideological worlds: Pluralist Democracy and Islamic Fundamentalism.
But as Europe and the World are witnessing the widening of the Cartoon Jihad and its mutation into multiple levels of diplomatic, political, intellectual, militants and terror actions and activities, the investigation of the core issue is still in progress: What did the Danish cartoonists really breach? Where is the red line within Islam and under whose responsibility the protest fall? What is the real aim of the ?protesters? and are they one group or more? Is the West responding right and is it really unified in this matter? Multiple questions I will attempt to address, as I continue to interact with European legislators, experts, think tanks in Vienna, Brussels, London and Paris. The bottom line now is the bigger picture not those little drawings. The consensus cannot be clearer with regards the grand principles: Freedom of speech cannot be reversed by any ideology that doesn?t believe in the latter?s value. And at the same time, hurting the core feelings of any religion, including Islam, is acceptable by coexistence standards. But the question is this: Is it really about the drawings themselves or between the drawers of cartoons and the drawers of fatwa? Let?s examine this..
The theological question
According to Sharia, Islam?s holy laws, neither Allah nor his Messenger Prophet Mohammed can be drawn by Muslims (al Rassm). It is part of the anti-idolatry (ibadat al asnaam) restriction by Islam. A strict application of this requirement means that no picturing (and therefore photos or computer simulation) is permissible. From this injunction three issues had to be addressed: One, modern inventions: If Muslim hands from the seventh century were forbidden from drawing the divine and its envoy directly, can computers from the 21 century simulate the drawings? Theologians ruled against it, and the doors are still closed. Two, are there sanctions against Muslims who engage in drawings of Allah or Mohammed? Apparently, it depends on the discretion of the clerics. As for any other matter of religion, and in the absence of a Caliphate, the highest authority of the Islamic state, scholars (al Ulama?a) will rule and fatwa is their instrument. So according to one and two, it is strictly forbidden to Muslims to draw images of Allah and all Prophets, not only Mohammed. And it is upon the Sheikhs to decide on the sanctions.
The third question is of direct interest to the Euro-Islamic crisis. Do the above rulings apply to non-Muslims? Any answer could make or break international relations as we know it. And this has been the least known matter to both Western and Muslim publics. Both ignored the two ends of the equation. To all Westerners, it is natural that Muslim laws should not apply to them, inside their own countries. To most Muslims, the matter is foggy. While mainstream Muslim governments and moderate scholars assert that they abide by international law first and by Sharia second, Islamist leaders declare otherwise: To Sunni Salafists and Shiia Khumeinists the world is divided in two: dar el Islam where the Islamic state rules and dar el Harb, where the Caliphate is off the public sphere. Hence, the Islamic fundamentalists knows well that Sharia law cannot be implemented in dar el Harb, including in Denmark, France, Britain or Germany, to name a few. So, arguably, if non-Muslims ?living in a non-Muslim country draw or sculpt a figure from Islam?s forbidden list, without any offensive character will there be a ground for Islamic authorities to counter act and sanction? The matter is not easy or simple.
For in principle, if non-Muslims breach the Sharia inside dar al Islam, they fall under Islamic law and sanctions: Copts of Egypt, Christians in Syria, Hindus in Afghanistan, ChaldoAssyrians in Iraq, Nubians in Sudan etc. But if non-Muslims do not follow the restrictions inside the dar al Harb world, there is no Islamic authority to strike the ?offense? down. Hence, it would fall under the spectrum of the relationship with that infidel power. It becomes wholly political: The authorities representing the Muslim Umma (nation) will have to take the matter under their auspices. Would the Ottoman Empire intervene with European monarchies to eliminate drawings of sculptures produced by their own citizens? And would today?s Arab League and Organization of Muslim states do the same with world democracies? Again, while theologically forbidden, and because they are not being perpetrated in the sphere of a Muslim state, these breaches and their resolution can only be addressed politically: Which means that offenses made to Islam in the West cannot be under Islamic law but Muslims within the West, and under the legal system of that particular country can and naturally should seize the authorities of their host country. There is no legal international body in Islam today that can seize a higher level than international and national law to deal with Islamic matters. Moderate Muslims understand that.
But two other matters arise: The obligation of Western Muslims and the role of Islamic Fundamentalists in this regard.
Muslims in the West
Muslims living in the West or the non-Muslim world, immigrants and converts alike are challenged by the theoretical choice of legal affiliation. The realist and mainstream practice, the one accepted by most Muslim Governments in public has been to encourage their subjects to accept the set of rules existing in the non-Muslim countries based on reciprocity in international relations. But the Islamic Fundamentalists of all schools have been putting pressures on Muslims in ?infidel lands? to confront a difficult choice. In many sessions of the al Jazeera show al Sharia wal Hayat (Islamic Code and Life) in 2002-2005, Sheikh Yussuf al Qaradawi clearly stated that ?Muslims living outside Islamic lands, must either return to their homelands when their journey, job, or mission is accomplished or strive to remain as citizens and spread religion.? The leader of the World Ulema?s Union hence put Muslims living in the West and in Europe under tremendous pressures. A permanent status of ?diminished Islamic life? is forbidden according to his views. ?Muslims in the West and in other areas must strife to spread religion and insert it in the national legal, political and economic space.? He, and others adds that these communities have a ?special mission,? that is Iqamatu el dine, the establishment of religion. ?It is not a choice that they have, it is a home work.? Hence the exiled, expatriate and convert communities hear one dominant voice constantly, although they live as mainstream citizens worldwide. That ?dominant? voice, carried by preaches, airwaves, online and in print is also expressed by a rising wave of organizations which hurdle the crowd into campaigns to ?insure better representation of culture and religion in the Western system.? At first glance, the ?activism? required by these ?vigorous and dominant militants? would be natural, especially in multicultural societies. But that is not the objective of the radicals.
Islamic Fundamentalists
The various currents of Islamists, Salafists, Wahabis, Khumeinists and others, converge into one wave when it comes to mobilize Muslims in the West in general and in Europe in particular: Find and identify areas of ?claims? and transform them into ?struggle.? Absent the Islamists? ?activation of these ?cases? the natural interaction between civil society and Muslim communities would gradually absorb and solve these matters. But the Islamists deliberately chose these particular issues and transform them into crisis. In other words, they live off these ?burning issues.? Because of them they mutate into the leadership of the communities, becomes the negotiators on their behalf with Governments, and end up the ?Partners? of the public powers in these countries. This strategy is simple to understand: The Islamists (and the Jihadists in their midst) pushes the community into a clash with a segment of the society or with the Government. Widen the clash nationwide, and worldwide, drag in the Muslim Governments and present themselves (the Islamists) as the providers of the solution. The final objectives are easy to guess:
1. Push the level of the social and political ?isolation? of the community at a high as possible. Hence prepare it for a next stage in the ?struggle.?
2. And at the same time, push away the moderate element of the community and further control its leadership.
3. Establish an intimidation-based consulting with Governments, allowing them to influence future policies, both domestic and foreign.
One would wonder at first reading, if the ?spontaneous reactions? towards ?sensitive core issues? are really ?organized.? In fact, the popular emotions in each one of these issues are real. But the manipulation of the timing, the agenda and the final outcome are simply political and held firmly in the hands of the Islamists.
Precedents
In the United States, two cases are to be noted. One was raised by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) two years ago when the lobby group called for action to remove the representative face of Prophet Mohammed from the entrance to the US Supreme Court. The Muslim Prophet, along with a dozen other world inspirers of legislations was honored in sculpture by American standard. The CAIR claim wasn?t about the fact that the expression was ?offensive? (as in the Denmark cartoon case) but that the principle is not accepted. The US courts rejected the claim at the time. A year later Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Doug Marlette of the Tallahassee Democrat was pressure by CAIR for drawing a cartoon with the caption ?What Would Muhammad drive?? Unlike the US Supreme Court matter, the picture (evidently causing stress among pious Muslims) had to do with a popular culture in America (and now in Europe) that is struggling with its understanding of the relationship between Terrorism and Islamic ideologies that preach it. The outcome of this mental struggle manifest itself in cartoons, but the roots of the intellectual crisis resides in the confusion created by the Islamic Fundamentalists. Here is why:
The core of the problem
Western public opinion doesn?t know Islam well neither as a religion nor as politics. And what makes the issue more complicated is the fact that in Islam religion and state are one: deen wal dawla wahid. Hence, it is up to either Western instructors or Muslim representatives to shape up the Western perception of the Islamic phenomenon. For instance, Christians in the Middle East or living under Islamic regimes in Africa and Asia have a better understanding of it, (sometimes with a high price) and hence rarely engage in ?theological offenses.? They know what are the various limits both those that are purely religious and those limits that can be created then breached by the Jihadists. (See interview in Belgian Der Standaard link) So the core of the problem is in two folds: Western academic elite has done a bad job in educating its public about the threat of Jihadism, and the Muslim public was left with little choices other than the Islamists and Jihadists to represent them and lead in these issues. When Denmark Prime Minister Anders Rasmussen stated lately that ?extremists were obstructing the stabilization of the crisis, US Secretary of State declared recently that ?Syria and Iran are inflaming the sentiments? and Lebanon?s Muslim Prime Minister accused the Syrian regime ?and indirectly Hezbollah- of ?using the issue to aggress Lebanon via violent demonstrations,? the equation clarified itself:
There is no cultural intention in the West to harm the feelings of Muslims. But there is confusion among Western public about who the Jihadists are. On the other hand, there is a general perception among the Muslim public that the West is on a path of war against Islam, a perception fed by the Jihadists.
Conclusion:
? The Western public was deprived from real knowledge about Islam?s religion on the one hand, opening the windows for drawings and possibly more scratching of Muslim sensibilities. But on the other hand this public was denied the information about the nature of the Jihadist movement and its various tactics. So, while aiming subconsciously at protesting against the Jihadists because of their terror, the liberal artists hit the nerve of pious Muslims, opening the path for the Islamists to wage their campaign.
? The Muslim masses, or their majority, were kept under the pressures of Madrassas, the web sites, the Islamist networks and subject to al Jazeera and al Manar point of view for years. When the Denmark cartoon crisis exploded, the radicals were in the street steering the protests into violence.
? Western Governments took time before uniting against the ongoing Jihadi violence. Each Executive branch wished to ?get political mileage? for its own relations with the Arab Muslim world, before it realizes by the day that the ?offensive? Cartoons are becoming an all out offensive by the radicals.
? Arab and Muslim Governments divided in two groups: Those who were led by the demonstrations to ?stick with the mood on the street,? while realizing that this ?radical-inspired? mood will soon get back at them. And those other regimes, such as Syria and Iran, who fueled the anti-Danish protest attempting to mutate it into an all out anti-Western Jihad.
Meanwhile, and one more time, the Islamists and Jihadists are adventuring themselves into another clash of civilization of great disservice to the Muslim world. While the crisis of the cartoons could have been addressed and solved within the Danish borders via dialogue and within the legal system, the radicals took it beyond the sovereignty of that small secular, liberal and humanist nation. Had the moderate community leaders kept the issue Danish, they would have most probably won growing sympathy among Danes. But the ?networks? took the matter to the wider Arab and Muslim world. In response, the Euro Cartoonists took the matter to the continental level. The Jihadists hijacked the Muslim claim to different continents. In return, many around the world identified with the Danes. Tehran and Damascus hoped the ?opportunity? will deflect international consensus from their entanglement with Terror and nuclear threat. (From interviews on BBC on February 7 and 9, 2006 link)
But at the end of the day, the radicals are not growing in numbers in the Muslim world as some believe, but they are growing their designs. The moderates and democrats are paying the price. They are witnessing how the wider world is watching the scenes of burning and destruction and reading carefully the signs carried by extremists from London to Jakarta. It is going to take a significant effort to inform the Western public about what they know less, so that their understanding of Islam becomes more complex. And it is going to take a greater effort to educate the Muslim public as to the objectives of those who claim representing them in war and peace, and especially in the defense of their religion.
The Denmark cartoon crisis has generated violence both material and physical, but it may well contribute to an acceleration of outreach between the forces of change on both sides.
*****
Dr Walid Phares is a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington on a European tour at the invitation of European legislators and Think Tanks. He is the author of Future Jihad.
-
A friend sends me the following:
--------------------------------------------
Marc, to go along with your post, from the www.AmericanThinker.com Wonder how this will be reported in either of the Times/Slimes papers?
A second Iraqi former commander confirms WMDs
Slowly, very slowly, we are beginning to discover what happened to the WMDs of Saddam. The left and the antique media have made it an article of faith that there never were any WMDs, and that ?Bush lied.? So deep is their investment in a political position premised on this conclusion that they will pay no attention to contrary evidence.
Via Peter Glover?s website Wires from the bunker, we learn of an interview between Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti, a southern regional commander for Saddam Hussein?s Fedayeen militia in the late 1980s and a personal friend of the dictator and Ryan Mauro of Worldthreats.com.
Only two weeks ago, General Sada, formerly Sadaam?s no 2 Air Force Commander, told the New York Sun that Sadaam?s WMD was moved to Syria just six weeks before the US-led invasion. Now Ali Ibrahim confirms this and explains the underlying strategy of Saddam:
I know Saddam?s weapons are in Syria due to certain military deals that were made going as far back as the late 1980?s that dealt with the event that either capitols were threatened with being overrun by an enemy nation. Not to mention I have discussed this in-depth with various contacts of mine who have confirmed what I already knew. At this point Saddam knew that the United States were eventually going to come for his weapons and the United States wasn?t going to just let this go like they did in the original Gulf War. He knew that he had lied for this many years and wanted to maintain legitimacy with the pan Arab nationalists. He also has wanted since he took power to embarrass the West and this was the perfect opportunity to do so. After Saddam denied he had such weapons why would he use them or leave them readily available to be found? That would only legitimize President Bush, who he has a personal grudge against. What we are witnessing now is many who opposed the war to begin with are rallying around Saddam saying we overthrew a sovereign leader based on a lie about WMD. This is exactly what Saddam wanted and predicted.
Moreover, Ali Ibrahim debunks other shibboleths of the left, including the allegation of no ties between al Qaeda terror and Saddam:
As far as Al-Qaeda is concerned this support was limited for a long time, mainly due to the fact that Al-Qaeda had the hopes of creating an Islamic empire while Saddam wanted a secular Arab nationalist empire. They only really came to terms in the mid-90?s due to the fact that both knew they shared the same short term enemy. Once they came to terms on this Saddam provided Al-Qaeda with intelligence support and whatever money or munitions they could provide. Saddam has had very long standing contacts in the black market as well as with Moscow and would provide whatever munitions he could through these contacts.
He also addresses the claim that the US bears responsibility for bringing Saddam to power and for armning him with WMDs:
This is absolutely ludicrous. I was in the Ba?athist Revolution who received support from the Soviet Union because of the socialist ideology behind it. The Soviet Union openly supported and backed the Ba?athist revolution in Iraq at the time and I am sure you can find news articles about it in European press agencies and others at the time. I was there helping with the revolution and worked on two occasions with Soviet KGB officials to help train us, much like the United States did with the Taliban during the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan. The United States never directly gave us any WMDs but rather ingredients. They were not mixed and these ?ingredients? could have been easily used for commercial use but were rather used to build low life chemical weapons.
The tape recordings of Saddam discussing WMDs are said by Ryan Mauro of Worldthreats.com to be a ?smoking cannon.? If all of this information proves out, the left in the US and UK are going to face an awful reckoning. As usual, it will take some time for the new information to travel from the blogosphere to the alternative media, and finally into the antique media.
Thomas Lifson 2 15 06
UPDATE: Reader David Bell writes:
In debunking the myth that the U.S. funded, armed and equipped Saddam and therefore is somehow responsible for him, Gen. Sada, unfortunately, perpetuates another. Namely, that the U.S. ?trained? the Taliban. He says the Soviets trained the Iraqis ?much like the U.S. did with the Taliban during the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan.? The U.S. had a role in equipping and training some anti-SovietAfghan forces in northern Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, but these people later become the Northern Alliance that fought against the Taliban, which was a largely Arab-led movement. The U.S. never trained or in any other wat supported the Taliban or forces that later turned into the Taliban. This is just as big a myth of the Left as the story that the U.S. trained and equipped Saddam.
I can?t indpendently confirm this, but it sounds consistent with my vague memories.
-
I believe you will enjoy this review, if not the book (in question) itself?
David
Pictures Worth a Thousand Lives
A review of The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy by Stephanie Gutmann
Stephanie Gutmann is a talented American journalist who has covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a variety of publications. The Other War is a carefully researched, on-the-ground account of the media skirmishes that take place each day and collectively determine how that conflict is portrayed to the world. Her book, detailed and convincing, is written with a wry wit that makes it a pleasure to read, despite the gravity of her subject.
The first half of The Other War is a series of vivid reconstructions of the major incidents in the Second Intifada, which the late Yasser Arafat launched in fall 2000. Parallel to the "actual ground war in which people died," she writes, "there was a war of competing narratives played out in the mass media." Her argument is that this war of narratives is often the more consequential of the two. Of course, propaganda wars in concert with real wars have been in fashion since Moses said some things about the Amalekites, and on the same territory no less. But after 35 centuries, something changed. "[T]he first Gulf War happened and television producers discovered world conflict as a riveting form of 'reality programming.'" Technology was the enabling factor: "Satellites, digital cameras and the internet made transmission of text and visual content nearly instantaneous." Today's media war is driven by the same ancient impulses, but now, like the technology on which it relies, it is instant and infinite.
Gutmann believes that Israel has been steadily defeated on the media front, and with deadly consequences. In March 2002, for instance, Israeli army planners were preparing a full-scale assault against West Bank terrorist networks. But they recalled the public-relations pummeling the country had endured during the previous two years, in which the United Nations, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights, and others routinely condemned Israel for "excessive force." And so, instead of lightning air strikes, Operation Defensive Shield relied on door-to-door raids, resulting in the deaths of 23 Israeli soldiers. Military superiority over its enemies is no advantage if Israel is continually dissuaded from using it.
In the media war, Israel has three disadvantages. The first is an open society, which allows reporters (and filmmakers and activists and human-rights observers) the freedom to roam, record, and interview in first-world comfort. This has saddled Israel with what may be the world's highest per capita concentration of reporters. Jerusalem is host to 350 permanent foreign news bureaus, as many as New York, London, or Moscow; the volume of reportage on Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank is 75 times greater than on any other area of comparable population. This obsessive attention necessarily distorts, by casting the Israel-Palestinian war in a theatric, world-historical light.
In the last decade, around 4,500 Israeli and Palestinian lives have been lost to the fighting. The Russo-Chechen war has killed 50,000 (11 times as many), the Darfur crisis has killed 180,000 (40 times as many), and the Congolese civil war has killed 3.5 million (778 times as many). But very few Americans can call to mind images of the ghastly violence in Chechnya, Sudan, or Congo?or even identify the warring parties?because these are places so dangerous that the New York Times simply cannot responsibly send a reporter there, much less a bureau.
* * *
If freedom is disadvantageous, this goes double when you happen to abut a shameless, propagandizing Arab dictatorship. According to Gutmann, the Palestinian Authority under Arafat used "the combat theatre (the West Bank, Gaza, and inside Israel) as a kind of soundstage." Those famous scenes of Palestinian boys with rocks confronting soldiers, for example, are usually choreographed. Palestinian youths, exhorted by parents, teachers, and their televisions to pelt Israeli soldiers, are so conscious of the media presence themselves that they often don't start in with the stones until photographers arrive. Israeli soldiers are actually forewarned of clashes when film crews suddenly materialize. (Coalition forces have experienced the same phenomenon in Iraq.)
How do these reporters or photographers, on a quest for dramatic stories and footage, know where the "spontaneous" violence is to "erupt"? One or another foot soldier in their "small army of Palestinian fixers" is tipped off by the attackers. The Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Press (which together supply 80% of news images to the world media) require the assistance of natives who speak the local language, know who's who, and can get things done. These hired locals, in turn, make decisions about where to drive and what to translate (or leave un-translated).
The Palestinian regime isn't brutal in the way of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but its operatives are trained in the same school of media manipulation. On September 12, 2001, as the Middle East awoke to the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., Palestinians in several cities took to the streets. The celebration in Nablus, estimated at 3,000 people, was filmed by an A.P. photographer who forwarded the footage to his bureau in Jerusalem. Before it hit the wire, the photographer called his bureau again, this time sitting in the Nablus governor's office with guns to his head. The reporter lived, but the truth did not. The A.P. was told by the Palestinian Authority that it "could not guarantee their safety" in the future unless the A.P. learned to be "more careful."
Regime propaganda is pervasive. TV spots feature inspirational poetry like "how beautiful is the scent of the land, which is fed from the waterfall of blood, springing from an angry body." In April 2002, an Israeli drone flying above a funeral procession in the city of Jenin caught on tape a Palestinian corpse falling off his bier, reproving his handlers, then hopping back on. It happened again in the midst of a crowd, sending bystanders fleeing in terror. It was part of an effort to inflate both the body count and the number of photo-ops.
Israel's third disadvantage is media convention itself. Gutmann reminds us that all news is constructed: "Behind every picture there is a long story and a regiment of people who brought that particular picture, of all possible pictures, to you." And construction is rarely better than its architects: "producers sitting in carpeted, climate-controlled studios in New York and London are making war their subject?. [A]nd journalists, dumped on the ground with little prior knowledge, are forced to condense and 'package' terribly complex and crucial events." The general leftism in the news media gives reporters and producers many ways of introducing their bias into the simplified narrative: "David and Goliath, Poor versus Rich, the Third World versus Western Colonialism, Man versus Machine, even you-in-third-grade versus those-guys-who-always-beat-you-up after school." With Israel and the Palestinians, the overall result is "Large Mechanized Brutes versus Small Vulnerable Brown People."
* * *
The second half of The Other War is a series of introductions to the cast of characters in this Middle East media drama, among them na?ve and flamboyant journalists, venturesome photographers, spin doctors, soldiers and terrorists, and Gutmann's personal "fixer," renamed for his protection. Her interview with the Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh, probably the most famous Palestinian journalist, is particularly trenchant, not least because unlike any other Palestinian working within reach of the Palestinian regime, Toameh seems uniquely able to say whatever he pleases. (Gutmann says he is protected from on high by Israelis.)
Two of Gutmann's "case studies" from the beginning of the Second Intifada illustrate the character of this media war and the obstacles that Israel faces: the shooting death of a young Palestinian, and the lynching of two Israelis. According to CBS News's Richard Roth, these two episodes became "defining symbols of the conflict for those on each side."
On September 30, 2000, film footage became available to the world showing a Palestinian boy, Mohammed al-Dura, who, cradled in his father's arms, is shot by Israeli soldiers. Or so it seemed. Subsequent analysis, based especially on firing angles and ballistics examinations, called the story into doubt. Israel, in fact, was probably not responsible for the shooting. But by the time the Israeli army released the findings about its unlikely guilt, the Piet?-like image had zipped around the world, eventually appearing on a Belgian postage stamp, inspiring renamed streets and squares across the Arab world, and co-starring in the propaganda film extolling the execution of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
On October 12, 2000, less than two weeks after the al-Dura incident, two Israeli reservists took a wrong turn while driving home and were arrested by Palestinian police, taken to the local station, and lynched by a mob. One photographer happened onto the scene:
Within moments [the crowd was] in front of me and, to my horror, I saw that it was a body, a man they were dragging by the feet. The lower part of his body was on fire and the upper part had been shot at, and the head beaten so badly that it was a pulp, like red jelly?. My God, I thought, they've killed this guy. He was dead, he must have been dead, but they were still beating him, madly, kicking his head. They were like animals.
The crowd tore the photographer's camera from him and smashed it. But a colleague managed to capture the infamous image of one of the murderers holding up his bloody hands for a cheering crowd.
The two scenes provided visual scripture from which reporters sermonized about symmetry, suffering on both sides, and cycles of violence. But Gutmann discerns the tragedy, for Israel, precisely in the asymmetry:
The images were frequently paired?by the news media. But it was a forced symmetry, created by the media for its convenience and because it was more soothing and less complicated to represent the situations as the same. Consider just the two pieces of videotape by themselves, which was all anyone had to work with at this time: In 'Ramallah' we actually see perpetrators at work?men hoisting a body to a window ledge, then shoving it off the ledge to a crowd below, whom we then see all too clearly stomping and stabbing it. In 'al-Dura,' however, we see a boy collapsing, apparently shot. That is all. In one story, most of the who, what, where and why is answered. But in 'al-Dura,' virtually everything, except that two people were shot at in front of a wall, is essentially a mystery.
Less of a mystery is that the "al-Dura" cameraman became a minor celebrity, treated to interviews at European media conferences. The "Ramallah" cameraman, on the other hand, remains unknown, while death threats forced his bureau chief to flee the region.
* * *
Towards the end of her book, Gutmann details some of Israel's long-overdue?and successful?efforts to reverse the tide in the media war. Because her observations throughout are so scrupulous and clear-eyed, her belief that things are taking a turn for the better is encouraging, even if it remains a little hard to believe.
As Gutmann says, nearly every evil of the last three centuries?racism, apartheid, militarism, colonialism, fascism, ethnic cleansing, genocide?is routinely invoked against Israel. These are not so much criticisms of policy, mind you, but of Israel's existence, for it is understood that regimes dedicated to such evil deserve to be eliminated, not reformed. Are such criticisms confined to the political fringes? If they were, Gutmann wouldn't be able to cite a 2004 poll in which 68% of Germans agreed that Israel now conducts a "war of extermination" against Palestinians. There are ten times as many Palestinians today as in 1920, I might point out to the Germans, but fewer Jews.
At the close of The Other War, Gutmann writes: "Looking at the virulent, vituperative tone of European coverage, and particularly at how openly jeering it grows when Israel tries to defend itself in the media war, it is hard to imagine that any Israeli public relations staff with any amount of resources at its disposal could have an impact on Europe." She's right; there must be something more to it, and she alludes, briefly, to anti-Semitism. Earlier in the book, she mentions the hard Left's fixation with Israel and the brutality of Arab propaganda. But each receives only glancing notice. The logical next step?accounting for the forces behind and beyond the media?is outside the scope of her important book, but nevertheless essential to the whole truth about "the other war."
-
Two NRO pieces:
February 17, 2006, 9:51 a.m.
A Mullah?s-Eye View of the World
Iran is acting on its assessment of the West?s strength and resolve.
Michael Ledeen
Sometime in late November or early December, Iran?s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gathered his top advisers for an overall strategic review. The atmosphere was highly charged, because Khamenei?s doctors have diagnosed a serious cancer, and do not expect the Supreme Leader to live much more than a year. A succession struggle is already under way, with the apparently unsinkable Hashemi Rafsanjani in the thick of it, even though Khamenei, and his increasingly powerful son Mushtaba, is opposed to the perennial candidate-for-whatever.
Despite this disquieting news, the overall tone of the conversation was upbeat, because the Iranians believe they see many positive developments, above all, the declaration that "it has been promised that by 8 April, we will be in a position to show the entire world that 'we are members of the club.'" This presumably refers to nuclear weapons. Against this cheery background, the assessment of the Iranian leaders continued:
The weakness of the Bush administration is notable. Recent public opinion polls show the country seriously divided, and the top Iranian experts on North America have concluded that the president is paralyzed, unable to make any tough decision (and hence unable to order an attack against Iran);
2006 is an election year, and even some Republicans are distancing themselves from Bush, weakening the White House even further;
Israel is facing the darkest moment in its history (remember that this conversation took place before Sharon?s stroke). Likud is divided, Netanyahu is openly against Sharon, and the Labor party has lost its old guard. No strong government is possible (and hence Israel is similarly unable to order an attack against Iran). Therefore this is a moment for Iran to take maximum advantage;
Iranian power and prestige is at an all-time high among the Palestinian terrorist groups, from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah, to secular, even Communist groups. Terrorists who in the past had rejected Iranian approaches now travel to Tehran for support;
The Syrians have given Iran final say over the activities of Sunni terrorist groups in their country;
Iran now exercises effective control over groups ranging from Hezbollah, Ansar al-Islam, al Qaeda, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Jaish-e-Mahdi, and Jaish-e-Huti (Yemen) to the Joint Shi?ite Army of Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, and part of Saudi Arabia, as well as Islamic movements in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia;
In the four and a half months since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has become president, he has brought the extremist group led by Mezbah Yazdi under control, and, notably, he has forced Syria to resist all pressure from the United States;
The Europeans are no longer necessary for the Iranian strategy, and can now be "thrown out of our game." They are in no position to do any damage because they are too busy fighting with one another;
Khamenei called for two urgent missions. The first was to do everything possible to drive up oil prices by an additional 30 percent by the first week in April. The second was to intensify the propaganda war against the West in the same period. He stressed that it was important to compel the United States to face at least three crises by the April 8.
In short, the Iranians at the highest levels of the regime believe they have good reason for behaving quite feisty, and if you look at the events that have taken place since then, you will see that the mullahs are acting consistently with the analysis presented to (and in part by) Khamenei. The propaganda war ? lately and dramatically in the form of the cartoon crusades ? has indeed been intensified. The Europeans have been systematically dissed, and more: their embassies in Tehran have been stoned, Iranian diplomats have insulted them with regularity, and the regime slapped a trade embargo on all goods coming from the infidel Europeans. When the French announced that the Iranian nuclear program was undoubtedly designed to produce weapons, Tehran demanded an apology. Above all, there is no longer any pretense of cooperation with the Big Three negotiators on the nuclear program.
This suggests that the mullahs do indeed believe they have acquired nuclear weapons, and there is no longer any need to play stalling games with the Germans, French, and Brits. Nor is there any reason to feign humanity in the treatment of their own people. The repression of any and all groups which might conceivably organize an anti-mullah revolution looks to reach the historic levels of the immediate post-revolutionary period, when hanging judges routinely ordered the execution of thousands of citizens for often-fabricated crimes. Of late, the regime has beaten, tortured, and incarcerated thousands of Tehran bus drivers, Bahais, Sufis, and Ahwaz Arabs, and they have even threatened the families of political prisoners, saying that the whole lot of dissidents will be killed if the U.N. votes for sanctions.
This brutal and open use of the mailed fist bespeaks utter contempt for the West; Khamenei & Co. do not think we will respond, do not fear Western action, and believe this is a historic movement for the advance of their vision of clerical fascism. But it also bespeaks a chilling recognition of their nemesis: the Iranian people. President Ahmadinejad recently canceled most foreign travel by regime officials, for example, which is not the sign of a confident mullahcracy; quite the contrary, in their heart of hearts, they know that they are walking a fragile tightrope, and their incessant preventive actions against normal Iranians look very much like Mickey Mouse in , racing frantically to stop an army of bucket-carrying brooms from drowning him.
Moreover, the runaway optimism (which in many clerical minds goes hand in hand with the conviction that the Shiite Messiah, the 12th Imam, is about to reappear, thereby ushering in the End of Days) is not as solidly grounded as the mullahs might wish. For starters, oil prices are headed south, not toward the 30-percent increase ordered by the supreme leader. And the analysis of the perceived ?paralysis? of the United States is nothing more than a replay of the usual blunder committed by our enemies, who look at us and see fractious politics, widespread self-indulgence, and an unwillingness or inability to face up to real war. In this, as in so many other ways, the mullahs of the Islamic Republic are emulating failed tyrants, from the German Kaiser and F?hrer to the Italian Duce, the Iraqi dictator, and the Soviet Communist first secretaries, all of whom learned, to their ruin, that free societies are quite capable of turning on a dime and defending their interests and values with unanticipated ferocity.
And indeed, after years of dithering, we now have the first encouraging signs that this administration is inclined to support revolution in Iran. Secretary of State Rice, after her laudable reform of the Foreign Service, has now asked Congress for an additional $75 million to advance the cause of freedom in Iran. This is good news indeed, especially since there were hints in her testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday that we have already begun supporting Iranian trade unions, and even training some of their leaders. To be sure, the bulk of the money ? $50 million ? will go to the bureaucratic, and thus far utterly uninspiring, group running radio and TV Farda for the State Department, and the profoundly disappointing and feckless National Endowment for Democracy and the Democratic and Republic Institutes, but at least some money is promised for independent Farsi language broadcasters. Even with these shortcomings, we should celebrate Rice?s embrace of the cause of Iranian freedom so concretely.
On the other hand, there is no reason for joy at the news that assistant secretary Steve Rademacher seems to have gratuitously and foolishly promised that we will not use military power against Iran?s nuclear facilities. There is every reason to leave such stratagems in the haze of uncertainty, even if ? as I have long argued ? you believe it would not be a good idea, at least at this moment. Such declarations will reinforce the mullahs? conviction that they have nothing to fear from us, and encourage them to race ahead with their murderous actions.
Even the world at large is beginning to bestir itself. Wednesday was a day of support for the Iranian bus drivers all across the civilized world. The AFL-CIO, driven by Teamsters? President James Hoffa, in tandem with Senator Rick Santorum, has been leading the charge, now joined by unions in France, Britain, Spain, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Canada, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and Bermuda. The appeasers in the Italian trade unions, like their opportunistic bosses, sat it out. Still, it?s an impressive list.
It?s a small and long overdue step forward, to be sure, but great journeys sometimes begin slowly and uncertainly. The great thing is that, after years of empty rhetoric, stalled internal debates, and the paralysis so dear to Khamenei?s heart, we have finally gotten started. Will it succeed? Do the tens of millions of Iranians who rightly hate their rulers have the stomach, the imagination, and the discipline to organize the downfall of the regime?
Nobody knows, perhaps not even the revolutionaries themselves. But America has moved, and when America moves, even gingerly, there will be ripples throughout Iran and throughout the region. The key imperative is that, now that we are in, we must persist and prevail. So far, so good: in the State of the Union the president spoke eloquently of our respect for the Iranian people and our determination to help them if they show the will and the capacity to act effectively. That was exactly the right note. And the secretary of State was similarly and appropriately modest in her rhetoric, speaking of our desire to support freedom ? not announcing a national crusade, and not threatening dramatic action. It is for the Iranians to liberate their country. If they are willing to fight for freedom, we should stand with them.
Now, finally, they know we will. And the cry of "faster, please" must quickly go out to them.
? 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
http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200602170951.asp
February 17, 2006, 8:27 a.m.
Why No Nukes for Iran?
The rules of the game.
Victor Davis Hanson
How many times have we heard the following whining and yet received no specific answers from our leaders?
"Israel has nuclear weapons, so why single out Iran?"
"Pakistan got nukes and we lived with it."
"Who is to say the United States or Russia should have the bomb and not other countries?"
"Iran has promised to use its reactors for peaceful purposes, so why demonize the regime?"
In fact, the United States has a perfectly sound rationale for singling out Iran to halt its nuclear proliferation. At least six good reasons come to mind, not counting the more obvious objection over Iran's violation of U.N. non-proliferation protocols. It is past time that we spell them out to the world at large.
First, we cannot excuse Iran by acknowledging that the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, and Pakistan obtained nuclear weapons. In each case of acquisition, Western foreign-policy makers went into a crisis mode, as anti-liberal regimes gained stature and advantage by the ability to destroy Western cities.
A tragic lapse is not corrected by yet another similar mistake, especially since one should learn from the errors of the past. The logic of "They did it, so why can't I?" would lead to a nuclearized globe in which our daily multifarious wars, from Darfur to the Middle East, would all assume the potential to go nuclear. In contrast, the fewer the nuclear players, the more likely deterrence can play some role. There is no such thing as abstract hypocrisy when it is a matter of Armageddon.
Second, it is a fact that full-fledged democracies are less likely to attack one another. Although they are prone to fighting ? imperial Athens and republican Venice both were in some sort of war about three out of four years during the 5th century B.C. and the 16th century respectively ? consensual governments are not so ready to fight like kind. In contemporary terms that means that there is no chance whatsoever that an anti-American France and an increasingly anti-French America would, as nuclear democracies, attack each other. Russia, following the fall of Communism, and its partial evolution to democracy, poses less threat to the United States than when it was a totalitarian state.
It would be regrettable should Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, or Germany go nuclear ? but not the catastrophe of a nuclear Pakistan that, with impunity de facto, offers sanctuary to bin Laden and the planners of 9/11. The former governments operate under a free press, open elections, and free speech, and thus their war-making is subject to a series of checks and balances. Pakistan is a strongman's heartbeat away from an Islamic theocracy. And while India has volatile relations with its Islamic neighbor, the world is not nearly as worried about its arsenal as it is about autocratic Pakistan's.
Third, there are a number of rogue regimes that belong in a special category: North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Cuba, unfree states whose leaders have sought global attention and stature through sponsoring insurrection and terrorism beyond their borders. If it is scary that Russia, China, and Pakistan are now nuclear, it is terrifying that Kim Jong Il has the bomb, or that President Ahmadinejad might. Islamic fundamentalism or North Korean Stalinism might be antithetical to scientific advancement, but it is actually conducive to nuclear politics. When such renegade regimes go nuclear they gain the added lunatic edge: "We are either crazy or have nothing to lose or both ? but you aren't." In nuclear poker, the appearance of derangement is an apparent advantage.
Fourth, there are all sorts of scary combinations ? petrodollars, nukes, terrorism, and fanaticism. But Iran is a uniquely fivefold danger. It has enough cash to buy influence and exemption; nuclear weapons to threaten civilization; oil reserves to blackmail a petroleum hungry world; terrorists to either find sanctuary under a nuclear umbrella or to be armed with dirty bombs; and it has a leader who wishes either to take his entire country into paradise, or at least back to the eighth century amid the ashes of the Middle East.
Just imagine the present controversy over the cartoons in the context of President Ahmadinejad with his finger on a half-dozen nuclear missiles pointed at Copenhagen.
Fifth, any country that seeks "peaceful" nuclear power and is completely self-sufficient in energy production is de facto suspect. Iran has enough natural gas to meet its clean electrical generation needs for centuries. The only possible rationale for its multi-billion-dollar program of building nuclear reactors, and spending billions more to hide and decentralize them, is to obtain weapons, and thus to gain clout and attention in a manner that otherwise is not warranted by either Iranian conventional forces, cultural influence, or economic achievement.
Sixth, the West is right to take on a certain responsibility to discourage nuclear proliferation. The technology for such weapons grew entirely out of Western science and technology. In fact, the story of nuclear proliferation is exclusively one of espionage, stealthy commerce, or American and European-trained native engineers using their foreign-acquired expertise. Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran have no ability themselves to create such weapons, in the same manner that Russia, China, and India learned or stole a craft established only from the knowledge of European-American physics and industrial engineering. Any country that cannot itself create such weapons is probably not going to ensure the necessary protocols to guard against their misuse or theft.
We can argue all we want over the solution ? it is either immoral to use military force or immoral not to use it; air strikes are feasible or will be an operational disaster; dissidents will rise up or have already mostly been killed or exiled; Russia and China will help solve or will instead enjoy our dilemma; Europe is now on board or is already triangulating; the U.N. will at last step in, or is more likely to damn the United States than Teheran.
Yet where all parties agree is that a poker-faced United States seems hesitant to act until moments before the missiles are armed, and is certainly not behaving like the hegemon or imperialist power so caricatured by Michael Moore and an array of post-September 11 university-press books. Until there is firm evidence that Iran has the warheads ready, the administration apparently does not wish to relive the nightmare of the past three years in which striking Iran will conjure up all the old Iraqi-style hysteria about unilateralism, preemption, incomplete or cooked intelligence, imperialism, and purported hostility toward a Muslim country.
In the greatest irony of all, the Left (who must understand well the nightmarish scenario of a fascist Iran with nuclear weapons) is suddenly bewildered by George Bush's apparent multilateral caution. The Senate Democrats don't know whether to attack the administration now for its nonchalance or to wait and second-guess them once the bombs begin to fall.
Either way, no one should doubt that a nuclear Iran would end the entire notion of global adjudication of nuclear proliferation ? as well as remain a recurrent nightmare to civilization itself.
? 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/hanson200602170827.asp
-
The Silent Treatment
By ROBERT WRIGHT
THE American left and right don't agree on much, but weeks of demonstrations and embassy burnings have pushed them toward convergence on one point: there is, if not a clash of civilizations, at least a very big gap between the "Western world" and the "Muslim world." When you get beyond this consensus ? the cultural chasm consensus ? and ask what to do about the problem, there is less agreement. After all, chasms are hard to bridge.
Fortunately, this chasm's size is being exaggerated. The Muslim uproar over those Danish cartoons isn't as alien to American culture as we like to think. Once you see this, a benign and quintessentially American response comes into view.
Even many Americans who condemn the cartoon's publication accept the premise that the now-famous Danish newspaper editor set out to demonstrate: in the West we don't generally let interest groups intimidate us into what he called "self-censorship."
What nonsense. Editors at mainstream American media outlets delete lots of words, sentences and images to avoid offending interest groups, especially ethnic and religious ones. It's hard to cite examples since, by definition, they don't appear. But use your imagination.
Hugh Hewitt, a conservative blogger and evangelical Christian, came up with an apt comparison to the Muhammad cartoon: "a cartoon of Christ's crown of thorns transformed into sticks of TNT after an abortion clinic bombing." As Mr. Hewitt noted, that cartoon would offend many American Christians. That's one reason you haven't seen its like in a mainstream American newspaper.
Or, apparently, in many mainstream Danish newspapers. The paper that published the Muhammad cartoon, it turns out, had earlier rejected cartoons of Christ because, as the Sunday editor explained in an e-mail to the cartoonist who submitted them, they would provoke an outcry.
Defenders of the "chasm" thesis might reply that Western editors practice self-censorship to avoid cancelled subscriptions, picket lines or advertising boycotts, not death. Indeed, what forged the chasm consensus, convincing many Americans that the "Muslim world" might as well be another planet, is the image of hair-trigger violence: a few irreverent drawings appear and embassies go up in flames.
But the more we learn about this episode, the less it looks like spontaneous combustion. The initial Muslim response to the cartoons was not violence, but small demonstrations in Denmark along with a lobbying campaign by Danish Muslims that cranked on for months without making it onto the world's radar screen.
Only after these activists were snubbed by Danish politicians and found synergy with powerful politicians in Muslim states did big demonstrations ensue. Some of the demonstrations turned violent, but much of the violence seems to have been orchestrated by state governments, terrorist groups and other cynical political actors.
Besides, who said there's no American tradition of using violence to make a point? Remember the urban riots of the 1960's, starting with the Watts riot of 1965, in which 34 people were killed? The St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson, in his 1968 book "From Ghetto to Glory," compared the riots to a "brushback pitch" ? a pitch thrown near a batter's head to keep him from crowding the plate, a way of conveying that the pitcher needs more space.
In the wake of the rioting, blacks got more space. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been protesting broadcast of the "Amos 'n' Andy" show, with its cast of shiftless and conniving blacks, since the 1950's, but only in 1966 did CBS withdraw reruns from distribution. There's no way to establish a causal link, but there's little doubt that the riots of the 1960's heightened sensitivity to grievances about the portrayal of blacks in the media. (Translation: heightened self-censorship.)
Amid the cartoon protests, some conservative blogs have warned that addressing grievances expressed violently is a form of "appeasement," and will only bring more violence and weaken Western values. But "appeasement" didn't work that way in the 1960's. The Kerner Commission, set up by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 to study the riots, recommended increased attention to the problems of poverty, job and housing discrimination, and unequal education ? attention that was forthcoming and that didn't exactly spawn decades of race riots.
The commission recognized the difference between what triggers an uproar (how police handle a traffic stop in Watts) and what fuels it (discrimination, poverty, etc.). This recognition has been sparse amid the cartoon uproar, as Americans fixate on the question of how a single drawing could inflame millions.
Answer: depends on which million you're talking about. In Gaza much of the actual fuel came from tensions with Israelis, in Iran some fundamentalists nursed longstanding anti-Americanism, in Pakistan opposition to the pro-Western ruling regime played a role, and so on.
This diversity of rage, and of underlying grievance, complicates the challenge. Apparently refraining from obvious offense to religious sensibilities won't be enough. Still, the offense in question is a crystalline symbol of the overall challenge, because so many of the grievances coalesce in a sense that Muslims aren't respected by the affluent, powerful West (just as rioting American blacks felt they weren't respected by affluent, powerful whites). A cartoon that disrespects Islam by ridiculing Muhammad is both trigger and extremely high-octane fuel.
None of this is to say that there aren't big differences between American culture and culture in many Muslim parts of the world. In a way, that's the point: some differences are so big, and the job of shrinking them so daunting, that we can't afford to be unclear on what the biggest differences are.
What isn't a big difference is the Muslim demand for self-censorship by major media outlets. That kind of self-censorship is not just an American tradition, but a tradition that has helped make America one of the most harmonious multiethnic and multireligious societies in the history of the world.
So why not take the model that has worked in America and apply it globally? Namely: Yes, you are legally free to publish just about anything, but if you publish things that gratuitously offend ethnic or religious groups, you will earn the scorn of enlightened people everywhere. With freedom comes responsibility.
Of course, it's a two-way street. As Westerners try to attune themselves to the sensitivities of Muslims, Muslims need to respect the sensitivities of, for example, Jews. But it's going to be hard for Westerners to sell Muslims on this symmetrical principle while flagrantly violating it themselves. That Danish newspaper editor, along with his American defenders, is complicating the fight against anti-Semitism.
Some Westerners say there's no symmetry here ? that cartoons about the Holocaust are more offensive than cartoons about Muhammad. And, indeed, to us secularists it may seem clear that joking about the murder of millions of people is worse than mocking a God whose existence is disputed.
BUT one key to the American formula for peaceful coexistence is to avoid such arguments ? to let each group decide what it finds most offensive, so long as the implied taboo isn't too onerous. We ask only that the offended group in turn respect the verdicts of other groups about what they find most offensive. Obviously, anti-Semitic and other hateful cartoons won't be eliminated overnight. (In the age of the Internet, no form of hate speech will be eliminated, period; the argument is about what appears in mainstream outlets that are granted legitimacy by nations and peoples.)
But the American experience suggests that steadfast self-restraint can bring progress. In the 1960's, the Nation of Islam was gaining momentum as its leader, Elijah Muhammad, called whites "blue-eyed devils" who were about to be exterminated in keeping with Allah's will. The Nation of Islam has since dropped in prominence and, anyway, has dropped that doctrine from its talking points. Peace prevails in America, and one thing that keeps it is strict self-censorship.
And not just by media outlets. Most Americans tread lightly in discussing ethnicity and religion, and we do it so habitually that it's nearly unconscious. Some might call this dishonest, and maybe it is, but it also holds moral truth: until you've walked in the shoes of other people, you can't really grasp their frustrations and resentments, and you can't really know what would and wouldn't offend you if you were part of their crowd.
The Danish editor's confusion was to conflate censorship and self-censorship. Not only are they not the same thing ? the latter is what allows us to live in a spectacularly diverse society without the former; to keep censorship out of the legal realm, we practice it in the moral realm. Sometimes it feels uncomfortable, but worse things are imaginable.
Robert Wright, the author of "The Moral Animal," is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
-
Wright's "Moral Animal" and "Non-Zero Sum; the logic of human destiny" are both profound books in the field of evolutionary pyschology and hold honored places on my bookshelf. I recommend either or both highly.
That said, this piece for me is rather wooly-headed.
"Even many Americans who condemn the cartoon's publication accept the premise that the now-famous Danish newspaper editor set out to demonstrate: in the West we don't generally let interest groups intimidate us into what he called "self-censorship."
"What nonsense. Editors at mainstream American media outlets delete lots of words, sentences and images to avoid offending interest groups, especially ethnic and religious ones. It's hard to cite examples since, by definition, they don't appear. But use your imagination."
True enough--and fatuous. Campaigns of letters to the editor do no equate to mobs killing people who had nothing to do with the deed and burning down embassies, etc. Where are the mobs of Jews in NYC going on a rampage killing Arabs and burning their shops because of any of the ongoing flood of vicious anti-semitic cartoons in the mid-east?
"Apparently refraining from obvious offense to religious sensibilities won't be enough. Still, the offense in question is a crystalline symbol of the overall challenge, because so many of the grievances coalesce in a sense that Muslims aren't respected by the affluent, powerful West (just as rioting American blacks felt they weren't respected by affluent, powerful whites). A cartoon that disrespects Islam by ridiculing Muhammad is both trigger and extremely high-octane fuel. , , ,What isn't a big difference is the Muslim demand for self-censorship by major media outlets. That kind of self-censorship is not just an American tradition, but a tradition that has helped make America one of the most harmonious multiethnic and multireligious societies in the history of the world."
You want respect you give respect. Islamic fascism is a fact. These are the people who dynamited the Buddist statues in Afghanistan that had stood for centuries. These are the people who issue death sentences for books (Rushdie and sundry others). These are the people who state (e.g. Saudi, Syrian, etc state controlled media) as fact that Jews drain blood from Arabs to complete religious ceremonies.
And now they are in a snit about some cartoons in Denmark and Wright conflates this to agreement that major media outlets need to be more careful than they already are?
Oy vey.
"
-
Geopolitical Diary: Hamas Pushes the Envelope
February 20, 2006 03 03 GMT
The Israeli Cabinet voted Sunday to freeze the transfer of $50 million in monthly tax revenues to the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) beginning in March, and urged the international community to halt all but humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who recommended freezing the tax transfers, said the new Hamas-led government would soon become "a terrorist authority."
The amount in question accounts for about half of the PNA's total revenues, and its loss would immediately impact the stability of the Palestinian territories. Among Palestinians who are employed, fully one-third work for the PNA, and half of those are in the security forces.
The loss of the tax revenues would be a serious issue, even assuming that all other sources of funding are secure. They are not. Western states -- most directly Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States -- have been threatening to cut off funds as well. Hamas has responded to these threats with bravado, saying the money could simply be replaced with funds from Arab sources. But that may be easier said than done. For one thing, Arab states have a tendency to renege on financial commitments to the Palestinians. And for another, it's difficult to imagine Israel -- or any state -- allowing a hostile entity supported by foreign funds to exist in territory it claims, provided it has a choice in such a matter. And as the dominant economic and military power in the region, Israel does have a choice.
At issue, of course, is the question of Israeli security. The Western states (and Israel of course) want Hamas to formally renounce its charter vow to burn Israel from the earth, pledge itself to the Oslo peace process and give up violence. Hamas made it clear on Feb. 18 that it would retain its weapons, that violence is still an option and that it remains committed to its organizational charter -- although in what passes for compromise on the issue, Hamas did note that it could consider a cease-fire if Israel withdrew to its 1967 borders.
The ball is firmly in Hamas' court. Its actions toward Israel will determine whether there is a PNA for it to take control of.
In some ways, Hamas has exhibited a dramatic level of foresight in its ability to successfully rein in nearly all suicide bombings -- despite Israel's continued attacks against non-Hamas Palestinian militants. But in others -- its defiant Feb. 18 statement, for example -- it has portrayed itself as stubbornly obtuse.
Hamas walks a fine line: It is a populist movement with a militant arm. Should it move into the peacemaking "mainstream," it will have alienated its core supporters and fallen into the trap that Yasser Arafat's Fatah did. Should it (literally) keep to its guns, it will quickly discover that while public opinion in the region may favor the Palestinians, it is Israel that has the funds, might and will to decide whether the Palestinians have a government of their own or not.
While there is little doubt that Israel and Hamas are having quiet dealings behind the scenes, Hamas' margin for error is dangerously thin. Without the approval of the Israeli government, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip might have no access to the outside world whatsoever; a total blockade is well within Israeli capabilities.
And time is also against the Palestinian movement. Israel is currently in a heated election campaign that is putting Hamas' actions under intense scrutiny. If Hamas cannot reach some kind of agreement for a modus operandi with the caretaker Israeli administration before elections, it risks having a "solution" imposed by the soon-to-be-new Israeli government. After all, that is precisely what Ariel Sharon had planned before health issues removed him from politics.
Intifadas, suicide bombings and rocket attacks may be cards that Hamas can play, but they are extremely weak cards in comparison to border sealings, occupation, financial cutoffs and the Israeli Defense Forces. If Hamas wants to capitalize on its political gains of the past decade and have a say in how the territories are run, it will need to start playing ball -- and soon.
-
man, so much information in this thread. its hard 2 take it all in. i wish i had time 2 read through all of this, but i dont want 2 spend so much time online.
can anyone recommend a book or 2, to help me get a handle on all of this?
-
I recommend in the highest terms
George Friedman: The Secret War.
GF is the founder/head of www.stratfor.com If you have the money, subscribing to Strat is HIGHLY recommended. You can get a one week trial subscription free at the site.
And now, here's this:
================
Do we have a smoking gun here?
--------
From www.americanthinker.com The author was a part of the ISG in Iraq and gives his perspective to some documents published that were purported to be "the real thing". These documents detail AQ and SH. He personally has seen the original of one document and can verify that at the least, the published one is for real.
Am I preaching to just the choir again?
Saddam and al-Qaeda
February 20th, 2006
The proof has been right in front of you the entire time. Documents available on the internet, which pass the smell test and are probably genuine, show the link between Saddam and al Qaeda.
On October 11th, 2004 an online news service called CNSnews published 42 documents that they claimed came from the Iraq Survey Group. The documents supposedly came from an ISG official who claimed they were captured in Iraq. CNSnews provided this information along with testimony from experts who authenticated the documents to the best of their ability. The story can be found here.
I have no connection to CNSnews. I did not release these documents to anybody while working with ISG or at any other time. But I will now add my name to the list of those who authenticate the documents. I know there is a good chance that these documents are real for three reasons.
The first reason is that I saw thousands of these documents while with ISG, and these look right.
But more than that, I saw the original of one of these documents at the Combined Media Processing Center in Qatar. I can therefore validate one document as having been captured in Iraq ? which increases the likelihood that they are all real.
The third reason is that I witnessed an investigation into who released these documents conducted at the CPMC by ISG. If these document were not authentic, why would an investigation have been conducted into who released them?
So what do the documents tell us?
I recommend that you review them, as they contain such interesting nuggets as a program by the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) to hunt down and kill Americans throughout the Middle East and Africa.
But how does this connect Saddam to al-Qaeda?
Look at document 14.
Here is the condensed version. The document is from the IIS and details plans to meet with an official from the ?Egyptian Al-Jehad? via a Sudanese official named Ali Othman Taha. He is called the Vice Chairman of the Islamic Front in Sudan in the memo.
I looked up Ali Othman Taha on wikipedia and it says that he is the Vice President of Sudan.
Who or what is the Egyptian al-Jehad (jihad)?
This from globalsecurity.org:
al-Jihad
Jihad Group
Islamic Jihad
Egyptian Islamic Jihad
New Jihad Group
Vanguards of Conquest
Talaa? al-Fateh
Description:
Egyptian Islamic extremist group active since the late 1970s. Merged with Bin Ladin?s al-Qaida organization in June 2001, but may retain some capability to conduct independent operations. Continues to suffer setbacks worldwide, especially after 11 September attacks. Primary goals are to overthrow the Egyptian Government and replace it with an Islamic state and attack US and Israeli interests in Egypt and abroad.
Okay now we know the Egyptian al Jihad is also known as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a name you may have heard in connection to its leader:
Al-Sharif passed the Jihad leadership to Ayman al-Zawahri amid dissent within the movement in the mid 1980?s. The al-Zawahri faction subsequently formed an alliance with Al-Qaeda leading over time to the effective merger of the two groups operations inside Afghanistan.
Although al-Zawahri is frequently refered to as a ?lieutenant? or ?second in command? of Al Qaeda this description is misleading as it implies a hierarchical relationship. The modern Al Qaeda organization is the combination of Bin Laden?s financial resources with al-Zawahri?s ideological and operational leadership. ? wikipedia
That?s right, Ayman al-Zawahri, one of the talking heads of al-Qaeda who treated us to a new video not so long ago. The Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization combined with Osama Bin Ladin?s supporters to form al-Qaeda.
The EIJ is neck deep in al-Qaeda. And this documents shows an EIJ official to be escorted to Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein in 1993.
The Institute for Counterterrorism says this about the EIJ:
Since 1993 the group has not conducted an attack inside Egypt. However there have been repeated threats to retaliate against the United States, for its incarceration of Sheikh Umar Abd al-Rahman and, more recently, for the arrests of its members in Albania, Azerbaijan, and the United Kingdom.
In 1993, Sheikh Umar Abd al-Rahman directed the bombing of the world trade center. He is now imprisoned in the U.S.
Now look at document 28.
This document is a continuation of document 27 and in general talks about overturning the Egyptian government and ?providing technical support? presumably to the EIJ in efforts against the Egyptian government and American non-military interests.
So let ?s put this in context. Here?s what the documents tell us:
On February 26th, 1993 the first world trade center was attacked by al-Qaeda and the EIJ (really two organizations that cooperated in 1993 and eventually merged).
A month later an official from EIJ was meeting with Saddam in Baghdad.
We have a document showing Saddam authorizing the IIS to ?provide technical support? to the EIJ, and by extension, al-Qaeda.
And then al-Qaeda and the EIJ attacked the U.S. on September 11th, 2001 led by an Egyptian Jihadist, Mohammed Atta.
Now you have proof Saddam provided support to the EIJ and by extension al-Qaeda, both of which attacked us on 9/11.
Ray Robison is a Sr. Military Operations Research Analyst with a defense contractor at the Aviation and Missile, Research, Development, Engineering Command in Huntsville, Alabama. His background includes over ten years of military service as an officer and enlisted soldier including the Gulf War and Kosovo operations. Most recently he worked as a contractor for DIA with the Iraqi Survey Group. He holds a B.S. degree in Biology, Pre-med from the University of Tampa and is a graduate of the Combined Arms and Services Staff School.
-
http://austinbay.net/blog/?p=937
2/20/2006
Another declassified Al Qaeda document: The failed jihad in Syria
Filed under:
General
? site admin @ 9:25 am
Al Qaeda assesses its mistakes. (And please see this recent post for background on other Al Qaeda documents.)
Consider ?Lessons learned from the armed jihad ordeal in Syria.?
This is a long analysis (45 pages in pdf) of the Muslim Brotherhood?s war against Syria?s Assad regime, and focuses on the early 1980s.
Al Qaeda wants to learn from:
?the jihad ordeal in the past period, we should point out ?as we see it from our own perspective? important and essential points that form the basis of our analysis, the methodology we used and the objectives we seek:
On Page 6:
?Obviously the most essential element of any revolutionary organization is putting forward a series of goals and slogans that attract the masses, and presenting itself as a revolutionary pioneering organization with crystal clear objectives. The true mujahideen failed to put forward their ideology, slogans and objectives via a well crafted media campaign. The majority of people were not aware of what was going on and those who followed the news knew that some Moslems youths are fighting the regime and plan on establishing ?Moslem rule?, they did not explain to the people the nature and form of this ?Moslem rule?, they did not explain why people should join in the fight and why they should die for that cause. The mujahideen failed to define their identity, their intentions and motivations; such an explanation was and still is the main pillar for attracting the masses and mobilizing the base members on an intellectual and ideological level to partake in this dangerous work (i.e. Jihad).
Media, revolt, ?pioneering organization.? Al Qaeda paid attention to the Soviet Union?s Cold War methods for seeding and encouraging anti-Western rebels. (The document often focuses on the methods and operations of ?Attalieaa? -The Vanguards- in the anti-Assad revolt.)
On page 10? a lack of OPSEC (operatonal security) and ?strike back? capability hindered the Syrian movement:
The hosting regimes infiltrated our organizations, monitored all our activities, restricted and chocked us, and in some cases arrested or killed our members and representatives. It is true the battle was in Syria; nevertheless we needed to have military deterrence capabilities on the outside; to help us fend off an enemy able to trace and monitor our movements in our new homes.
Many Arab and Moslem regimes ganged up on us by aiding and abetting the enemy, it is enough to mention that while we were suffering from death, destruction and a daunting war; Arab oil money was flowing to the ?Alawite? Hafez Assad to pay for the bullets killing our Moslem youth, and for building prisons to incarcerate and torture our brethren. Most of the Arab Moslem gulf countries considered Hafez Assad and his regime as apostate blasphemers yet for political interests and for the purpose of maintaining balance of power; they flooded his ?Alawite occupying? regime with billions of dollars. In short the lack of military operations on the outside prevented us from deterring the enemy and his friends and supporters.
On page 11 ? the failure of Muslim organizations to instill genuine ?hard militancy.? This puts the Cartoon Wars in a new light. Al Qaeda has had ten to fifteen years to ?harden? these organizations.
Inability to transform civilian Islamic missionary groups into military organizations capable of resistance and self defense:
This could be the most valuable lesson relating to the Islamic missionary groups in the Arab & Moslem countries. The battle may have erupted unexpectedly; however a large sector of the Moslems (Especially the leaders) knew that it was inevitable, those leaders did not prepare nor plan. Those missionary groups brought their peaceful missionary style and methods to the fight, the sheik failed miserably when he wore the general?s hat. It is astonishing to see and hear leaders of Moslem organizations preaching jihad and claiming that dieing for ?Allah? is their ultimate wish, yet they fail for tens of years to instruct religiously and train militarily for that fight, they could not produce documents for emergency (e.g. passports), or save money for tough times. They were unable to mobilize effectively and in a hurry, those organizations were ineffective and eventually collapsed.
But to Al Qaeda?s strategists, Syria proved to them that some form of Islamist revolution would work.
Events proved that mobilizing armed Moslem masses in the cause of an Islamic jihad revolution is possible; provided that the leaders prove their ability to fight oppression and set a good example in daring and sacrifice. The 18 months of military jihad -with all its shortcomings- brought hundreds of thousands of Moslems to the streets chanting: down with oppression, down with the regime, long live jihad, give us arms to fight with honor, the city of Hamah experience proved that thousands of Moslems answered the call and fought side by side with our mujahideen. Events proved how giving our people are, leaders sprouted from within and produced magnificent military cadres both in leadership and discipline.
BUsh and Rumsfeld weren?t the first to apply the term ?long war? to this struggle. Al Qaeda used it. On page 19:
The struggle for the sake and path of ?Allah? is not called:?Jihad? for nothing, the term ?Jihad? literally means: ?exerting a tiring effort to set up?. The enemy is strong and powerful, we are weak and poor, the war duration is going to be long and the best way to fight it is in a revolutionary jihad way for the sake of ?Allah?. The preparations better be deliberate, comprehensive, and properly planed, taking into account past experiences and lessons.
Centralization of planning but a ?high degree? of field autonomy isn?t an accident.
Page 20:
Decentralization in the management of the military operations:
To yield high dividends; the military high command managing this type of battles must have centralized planning and strategy, they could heat up an area or cool another to affect the flow of the war, they should be able to maintain harmony among the forces and ranks, distribute and move weaponry, supplies, personnel to different locations according to need. From this perspective centralization is essential; on the other hand the nature of this type of war requires that the regional and field commanders be awarded a high level of autonomy in planning and managing their own affairs. The experiences of gang warfare around the world ?whether ancient or contemporary? has proven that this style is necessary and very effectiveness.
The war is also expensive. From page 21:
Experiences teach us that a mujahid revolutionary movement that utilizes a gang warfare will be very expensive, costing millions per day ranging from weaponry, armaments and munitions, supporting the mujahideen, providing them with shelter and aiding their families, providing documentation, and paying for the battle expenses. Now we understand why the holy Koran and the speeches of the prophet tied the physical jihad to financial jihad. Money plays an influential role in this war; it can not be planed for, nor initiated prior to finding a solution to this conundrum. Our experiences as well as the experiences of other nations where gang warfare took place teach us that for the revolutionary leadership to be in control of its decisions, capabilities and destiny, and for this war to succeed it should be self sufficient and financed from within. However the primary source of financing for this war should be obtained through raiding resources of the enemy (Its budget, weapons, resources and money), otherwise the leadership of the jihad movement will be subject to the control, demands and interests of the financers.
Al Qaeda antiticpated a US-led ?financial squeeze.? How successful it?s been in maintaining ?internal funding? is another issue. However, Iraqis told me in 2004 that their police suspected much of the kidnapping of Iraqi citizens was done by criminal organizations hired by either ?former regime elements? (Saddam) or Al Qaeda, with the purpose of generating funds to feed their respective operations.
The section on communication is a must read. An excerpt:
These days communication is the nerve of all modern armies in the world, and revolutionary gang warfare organizations are no exception, it may not be as vital to them as it is to conventional armies but it is still very important nevertheless. Communications could be the weak link and expose the mujahideen to the enemy. In our Syrian experience communications at all levels were carried out via courier, or through pre arranged meetings, wireless communication was not utilized till later in the battle, coordination with the leaderships and supporters out side Syria was conducted via courier too, Towards the end of the war the ?Moslem Brotherhood? resorted to airing coded messages to the inside on their radio station in Iraq.
Pages 28 and 29 discuss intelligence gathering and organizational structure. ?Pyramid? and ?thread? organizational structures are both analyzed. An excerpt:
Some times a combination of both structures (the pyramid hierarchy and the thread connection) yields great results because it provides the leadership with the ability to maneuver, this of course depends on the situation. Many European gang organizations were able through experience to develop very accurate and durable methods that helped it withstand the onslaught of very advanced and powerful security organizations; (e.g. the red brigades of Italy, Badder Meinhoff of Germany and the Spanish separatist organization ETA). Our experience taught us that security and strength of an organization could be contradictory to its growth or ease of management.
The pyramid: ?The most popular form of secretive organizations is the pyramid hierarchy structure, where information and command goes up or down effectively and in a speedy manner??
The thread (incorrect spellings are from the translated text): ?A leadership member ?Tip of the thread? is connected to a series of clusters, those clusters are not connected to each other and are usually composed of one or two individuals, this burdens the ?tip of the thread? with a lot of responsibilities and requires dedicated effort on his part. If a member is arrested he does not cause a major threat to the entire organization because he does not know much. This system though secure, is week, because if the ?tip of the tread? is captured, all the clusters are compromised??
On page 34 we hear an echo of von Clausewitz:
The Jihad revolutionary war just like any other war is political at heart; it is politically and ideologically motivated, the military activity is merely the tool or means to achieve that objective. (Without military activity the revolution will loose its impact and have no chance of success). The military operations could be extremely successful yet if that capital is not expended in accordance with a clear political vision and strategy, and a well crafted public relations campaign we will only gain titles for our martyrs and tears for their blood. We have to stress (and make sure we do not forget) that the battle is political at the core; the political effort should receive the same attention and be treated as importantly as the military effort is.
16 Comments ?
The URI to TrackBack this entry is: http://austinbay.net/blog/wp-trackback.php?p=937
[?] olitics, Middle East/Terrorism at 9:18 am by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
Courtesy of Austin Bay: Al Qaeda assesses its mistakes. (And please see this recent post for background on other Al Qaeda d [?]
Pingback by NoisyRoom.net ? Another declassified Al Qaeda document: The failed jihad in Syria ? 2/20/2006 @ 11:17 am
William Kristol (Weekly Standard) was interviewed on Fox News this AM stating that the administration had given up on the concept of releaseing this material to the public or making a big show of doing so. According to Kristol people in the White House thought it was a lost cause and no use trying to bring this information to light. If Kristol is right, it shows some serious problems in the thinking in the White House. Either that, or they are going to sit on it till right before the 06 election to play a big ?I told you so? game and drop the national secutiry card in an attempt to influence the election. I don?t know but my sense is that is is not the later.
Comment by Bill Gross ? 2/20/2006 @ 11:34 am
Very good read.
Al Qaeda clearly knows that the media battle is as important as the military battle.
They speak to two audiences, potential Islamic recruits and people in the West whose will to resist can be broken.
The media and politicos in the West are serving to aid and abet Al Qaeda in this media battle.
Comment by Rob ? 2/20/2006 @ 12:21 pm
[?] by a relatively unorganized group of radical imams, with Al Qaeda merely an anomaly. Now Austin Bay brings us another perspective on Al Qaeda, and it?s disturbing. It suggests th [?]
Pingback by sifted truth ? Blog Archive ? The Two Faces of Jihad ? 2/20/2006 @ 6:26 pm
There is quite a bit of hard ball politics going on in the USA and especially around the ?beltway?. The conduit to release this real information is blocked because the main stream media is infested with liberals who would either spike this news or discredit it. If it were released to Fox news or the Washington Times, it would not be taken seriously either. Lose-lose. We are in a war, and many in our country either don?t know it or don?t believe it, or are on the other side.
Comment by Chief RZ ? 2/20/2006 @ 6:39 pm
One major shortcoming in the way Americans wage war is that they can?t seem to see military operations as linked to, or an extension of, political actions. Clausewitz?s wisdom seems so often to have been wasted on both the American body politic, and its institutional military. Obviously, as we?ve learned to our sorrow, the Vietnamese understood this. It seems the Islamic jihadists do also. How many ?hits? are we going to take before the lesson is learned?
Comment by Steve ? 2/20/2006 @ 7:14 pm
Isn?t it interesting that MSM has no interest in these documents. Do you doubt their reaction would be completely opposite if these documents were composed by the Bush administration and dealing with an analysis of pre-war intelligence?
Comment by Jason ? 2/20/2006 @ 8:54 pm
History lesson
Austin Bay has the breakdown of some newly released documents seized in Afghanistan and Iraq. What I think we will all find out soon is that the bad guys (al-qaeda, Saddam, etc.) are meticulous record keepers, just like the nazi?s in WWII. Reams and r?
Trackback by GZ Expat, Part II ? 2/20/2006 @ 9:43 pm
As Rep. Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, noted: There are still 35,000 unreviewed and untranslated boxes of documents and tapes. Along with the Feb. 2nd report on CNSNews.com concerning former Iraqi General Georges Sada who said that Saddam moved WMD into Syria in retrofitted commerical jets in 2002, the Iraq-Syria connection vis a vis WMD may well become major news this year. See my full review of this at www.clearcommentary.com.
Comment by Phil Mella ? 2/20/2006 @ 10:53 pm
Thank you for printing these. This information underscores the value of the strategy of releasing these documents to the blogs and letting the blogs translate and distribute the information. The best disinfectant is the light of the sun. Let?s expose these terrorists.
Comment by JoeS ? 2/21/2006 @ 7:39 am
Please keep the pressure on the political powers that be?when they gets their spine and groove back and hammer at what the Al Queda operatives say and then DO, the MSM will have to start treating it as an valid insight for all to learn about and to ponder and to gather their wits in supporting this clash of freedom with Islamic fanatics who play the game of facism just as well as Hitler and his minions ever did. And all the time, we must continue to point out that the vast majority of moderate Muslims?and they are legion?need our support so they can become braver and braver in denouncing these thugs who have hijacked their religion and the true teachings of their Prophet.
Comment by marlowe anderson ? 2/21/2006 @ 12:13 pm
This is great; thanks, Austin.
When will Bush focus more efforts on translation, and especially machine aided OCR and machine initial Arabic > English? It?s ridiculous that they don?t have more programs working on this problem for a technical fix ? as well as increasing the AI tech capabilities.
Farming it out to bloggers, and the internet, is also not a bad idea.
Comment by Tom Grey - Liberty Dad ? 2/21/2006 @ 12:45 pm
Not Surprising in the Least
Michelle Malkin?s blog directed me to the Counterterrorism Blog?s follow-up of a story from the Buckeye State. I must say I don?t find this the least bit surprising given the press that?s been coming from northwest Ohio for awhile as
Trackback by Most Certainly Not ? 2/21/2006 @ 12:56 pm
Stunning - not. The revolutionaries have been working on their doctrine for a number of years. Their detailed analysis of their weaknesses and operational needs should be a reinforcing wake-up call that we are ill equipped for this radical, assymetric conflict. Boots on the ground can establish safe zones to disarm and undermine popular support for these groups, but the recent arrests in Ohio indicate that adherents are potentially everywhere.
Comment by Citizen Deux ? 2/21/2006 @ 2:15 pm
The Muslim Brotherhood had a radio station in Iraq? Gosh, I thought Saddam was opposed to the religious jihadi?s. That?s the CIA?s deep, expensively researched insight, isn?t it? Makes me wonder just how much other cooperation might have been going on?
Comment by Patrick ? 2/21/2006 @ 3:49 pm
How very fascinating that the history of political struggle reveals that the more things change-the more they stay the same. These operational notes could have come out of the playbook for every ?revolutionary? struggle enacted in the 20th century. Just replace ?Allah? with the ?Party?, ?jihad? with ?struggle? and we are in the middle of your basic communist guerilla war with a few high tech updates for the times we live in. The only question left is how do we turn the 5th column of the msm into a weapon for our side.
Comment by dgree3 ? 2/21/2006 @ 7:01 pm
-
Perhaps misfiled, but fairly spooky none the less.
HOMELAND INSECURITY
Probe finds terrorists in U.S. 'training for war'
Neighbors of Muslim encampment fear retaliation if they report to police
Posted: February 17, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern
The Pakistani terrorist group Jamaat ul Fuqra is using Islamic schools in the United States as training facilities, confirms a joint investigative report by an intelligence think tank and an independent reporter.
A covert visit to an encampment in the Catskill Mountains near Hancock, N.Y., called "Islamberg" found neighboring residents deeply concerned about military-style training taking place there but frustrated by the lack of attention from federal authorities, said the report by the Northeast Intelligence Network, which worked with an Internet blogger, "CP," to publish an interim report.
The neighbors interviewed, who asked not to be identified, said they feared retaliation if they were to make a report to law enforcement officials.
"We see children ? small children run around over there when they should be in school," one neighbor said. "We hear bursts of gunfire all of the time, and we know that there is military-like training going on there. Those people are armed and dangerous."
The resident said his household gets "nothing but menacing looks from the people who go in and out of the camp, and sometimes they yell at us to mind our own business when we are just driving by."
"We don't even dare to slow down when we drive by," the resident said. "They own this mountain and they know it, and there is nothing we can do about it but move, and we can't even do that. Who wants to buy property next to that?"
Jamaat ul-Fuqra, or "community of the impoverished," was formed by Pakistani cleric Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani in New York in 1980. Gilani, who refers to himself as "the sixth Sultan Ul Faqr," has stated his objective is to "purify" Islam through violence.
Gilani also is the founder of a village in South Carolina called "Holy Islamville."
The encampment in Hancock, N.Y., is run by a front for Jamaat ul-Fuqra called Muslims of the Americas Inc., which operates a school known as the International Quranic Open University Inc.
The facility is on 70 acres of remote land on the western edge of the Catskill Mountains, about 40 miles southeast of Binghamton, N.Y. A sign at the entrance identifies the place as "Islamberg." The other side of the sign says "International Quranic Open University" and "Muslims of the Americas Inc."
Every one of the neighboring residents interviewed expressed disappointment and additional concern that federal law enforcement is not investigating the activities, the report said.
"These people need to be investigated," a resident said. "They are training for war, either for war here in this country or against our troops. Who in the h--- is allowing this stuff to happen right here in our own backyard, and why?"
Headquarters in the USA
Though primarily based in Lahore, Pakistan, Jamaat ul-Fuqra has operational headquarters in the U.S.
The group seeks to counter "excessive Western influence on Islam" through any means necessary, publicly embracing the ideology that violence is a significant part of its quest to purify Islam. The enemies of Islam, the group says, are all non-Muslims and any Muslim who does not follow the tenets of fundamentalist Islam as detailed in the Quran.
Jamaat ul-Fuqra openly recruits through various social service organizations in the U.S., including the prison system. Members live in compounds where they agree to abide by the laws of Jamaat ul-Fuqra, which are considered to be above local, state and federal authority.
According to the report, there appear to be more than two dozen "Jamaats," or private communities, loosely connected and scattered throughout the U.S. with an estimated 5,000 members.
An investigation of the group by the Colorado Attorney General's office in the early 1980s found several of the communities operate covert paramilitary training compounds, including one in a mountainous area near Buena Vista, Colo.
Muslims of the Americas Inc., a tax-exempt organization formed in 1980 by Gilani, has been directly linked by court documents to Jamaat ul-Fuqra. The organization operates communes of primarily black, American-born Muslims throughout the U.S. The investigation confirmed members commonly use aliases and intentional spelling variations of their names and routinely deny the existence of Jamaat ul-Fuqra.
Members have been known to go to Pakistan for paramilitary training, but the investigation found evidence the U.S. encampments offer such training so members don't need to risk traveling abroad amid increased scrutiny following the 9-11 attacks.
The report says Jamaat ul-Fuqra members have "purchased isolated rural properties in North America to live as a community, practice their faith, and insulate themselves from Western culture. The group has established rural encampments that U.S. authorities allege are linked to murder, bombings and other felonies throughout North America."
U.S. authorities have probed the group for charges ranging from links to al-Qaida to laundering and funneling money into Pakistan for terrorist activities. The organization supports various terrorist groups operating in Pakistan and Kashmir, and Gilani himself is linked directly to Hamas and Hezbollah. Throughout the 1980s, JF was responsible for a number of terrorist acts across the United States, including numerous fire-bombings.
Gilani was at one time in Pakistani custody for the abduction of American journalist Daniel Pearl. Intelligence sources have determined Pearl was attempting to meet with Gilani in the days before he disappeared in Karachi. Intelligence sources also suggest a link between Jamaat ul Fuqra and Richard Reid, the infamous "shoe bomber" who attempted to ignite explosives aboard a Paris-to-Miami passenger flight Dec. 22, 2001.
Field investigation
Douglas J. Hagmann, director of the Northeast Intelligence Network and multi-state licensed private investigator, and others conducted their covert field investigation Feb. 8 and 9 at the Hancock encampment connected to the terrorist group.
Primary access to the compound is an unmarked road ? labeled on county and state maps as "Moslem Road"
Two structures with capacities of up to 100 each appear to be used for religious training, education and meeting purposes, according to local sources. Investigators found a weapons firing range that is not visible from the road or any other publicly accessible vantage position. It appeared to have been recently used.
Near the eastern perimeter of the property ? on a hillside ? appears to be a military-style training area, including ropes hung from tree limbs, an obstacle course, wooden fences for scaling and other items and structures one would expect to find in a "boot-camp" setting. The area also appeared to have been used recently.
The report noted the property is near the Cannonsville Reservoir and Watershed Area, one of several water supply sources servicing New York City and adjacent areas.
The investigators noted men appeared to be designated to provide security for the compound, with some posted at guard shacks.
"Although no activity of extreme significance was observed (the presence of armed sentries guarding the perimeter of the compound excluded) during this period of surveillance, it was obvious that measures to insure that the activities taking place at this location were well insulated from public view," the report said.
Investigators interviewed six area residents, who each requested anonymity for the report, and found them to be consistent. The report summarized the information:
The encampment has been in operation for at least 20 years and appears to maintain a steady level of occupancy. Each source confirmed the existence of at least one armed guard at the main entrance, especially during "special events" that result in a significant number of visitors by vehicle. The events appear to be meetings or religious services held within the compound.
Nearly every weekend, sound of gunfire can be heard from the camp. According to one neighbor who stated he's a combat veteran of the Vietnam War, some of the weapons obviously are "automatic" and large-caliber. On at least two occasions last summer, area residents heard small explosions.
The occupants won't allow anyone not affiliated with their organization to enter the encampment. All of the residents stated they've never observed a marked law enforcement vehicle enter the compound at any time.
Visitors to the compound are numerous and frequent. All visitors appear to be black males operating late model vehicles, mostly SUVs, and many possess license plates from Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina and Tennessee.
At least once each week, private deliveries of unknown items are made to the camp by unmarked box-style trucks. The trucks, usually at the compound for two to three hours at a time, are operated by black males or men who appear to be of Middle Eastern origin.
Men of Middle Eastern origin appear to be "frequent guests" of the encampment, many in traditional Islamic attire. Some appear to stay at the encampment for three to four days or longer. During the visits, activity and security at the compound is heightened noticeably.
The report also says it found that a number of the residents of the compound work for the New York State Thruway, as tollbooth operators in the New York City area or are employed at a nearby center that processes credit card transactions and maintains vital confidential financial records.
The report concludes additional investigation by law enforcement authorities is required.
"The appropriate action must be taken now to insure the safety and security of the United States, or it is certain that we will be forced to deal with the consequences. ?"
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48868
-
Buz:
Its OK here, but best would be the Homeland Security thread.
Anyway, here's this:
=====================
Iran: The Regime's Strategic Moderation
Summary
Former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami criticized his successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for his remarks regarding the Holocaust, while a centrist daily said Ahmadinejad's statements toward Israel only have added to Iran's problems. That Khatami and a newspaper were allowed to criticize Ahmadinejad publicly means Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei probably approved out of a desire to tame the ultraconservatives. These moderating statements will prove helpful to Tehran in the negotiations over the nuclear crisis, and come at a time when Iran is at crossroads both internationally and domestically.
Analysis
Without naming him, former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami criticized his successor, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on March 1 by contradicting the latter's claims denying the Holocaust. In remarks published in the Iranian press, Khatami referred to the Holocaust as a "historical reality." The moderate cleric also said, "We should speak out if even a single Jew is killed. Don't forget that one of the crimes of Hitler, Nazism and German national socialism was the massacre of innocent people, among them many Jews."
The same day, the well-known centrist newspaper Shargh also criticized the president for his anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli comments. The paper wrote, "The Holocaust has, as wished for by the president, become a topic of our foreign policy." The publication then posed the question: "Don't we have enough with the nuclear question, human rights, free elections and political in-fighting, so do we need to add another problem?" Shargh added that Tehran should focus its energies on the creation of a Palestinian state rather than on Israel's destruction.
Neither criticism could have been published without prior approval from the highest echelons of power. Khatami's remarks and Shargh's commentary against the maverick Iranian president likely were sanctioned by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They serve two purposes, one at the international level and the other at the domestic level.
On the foreign policy front, these remarks are part of the regime's efforts to project alternating images of the Islamic republic to extract concessions in back-channel talks with Washington on Iraq. These moderating comments also allow Khamenei to strike a balance between the two main factions within the conservative clerical establishment, the ultraconservatives and the pragmatic conservatives.
By allowing different voices to air their opinions at different times, or at least by giving that impression, Khamenei and his top associates are able to manipulate the international situation depending on Tehran's needs. When it wants to gain U.S. attention, Tehran has Ahmadinejad make provocative comments against Israel to increase tensions. And when Tehran needs to contain a crisis, it has figures like Khatami contradict the president. By giving the sense of having radicals like the current president and moderates like the former president, Iran can portray itself as unpredictable, and therefore dangerous, not unlike North Korea. This creates the impression that if negotiations proceed just a little longer, something could be resolved. In other words, the presence of voices of reason inside Iran makes the Islamic republic seem like a less desirable target to attack. Hence, the West and Iran have remained locked in an almost perpetual state of negotiations.
Tehran has successfully employed this technique on the foreign policy front because the various factions of the Iranian regime, despite differences in their preferred approaches, maintain a consensus on the state's core objectives. The drawback of this approach, however, is that it allows each faction to seek an advantage on the domestic front over its competitors.
Such a tussle has an unsettling effect on the movers and shakers' position in the political system given their ties to the various factions. Furthermore, Khamenei has long sided with the pragmatists within the regime. With the resurgence of the ultraconservatives after Ahmadinejad's election, this balancing act has become more cumbersome.
What has Khamenei and the Iranian power brokers worried are the upcoming elections to the Assembly of Experts, scheduled for late summer or early fall. One of many organs of Iran's complex political system, the Assembly of Experts has the authority to appoint and remove the supreme leader. The ideologues behind Ahmadinejad -- such as those around his key ideological mentor, Ayatollah Mohammed Taqi Misbah Yazdi -- are trying to gain entry into the assembly to extend their leverage beyond the regime's elected figurehead, Ahmadinejad, to Iran's unelected apex position.
By allowing criticism of Ahmadinejad by a leading voice of the rival faction, Khamenei is trying to contain the ultraconservatives' advance. Ironically, it was Khamenei who came out a year ago to Ahmadinejad's rescue, calling for patience with the new president, which allowed Ahmadinejad the time and space to better run his administration.
The situation in Iran is far more nuanced than the prevailing discourse on Iranian politics, which simplifies Iran's domestic situation as a tussle between reformists and hard-liners. This misperception increases the regime's freedom to navigate on the international scene.
-
http://switch3.castup.net/cunet/gm.asp?ai=214&ar=1050wmv&ak=null
This is pretty special.
-
:shock:
wow! why are there not morearabic people speaking out like this woman!?!? she has got 2 B the bravest woman on the planet. my girlfriend and i watched that 2gether and we couldnt help but wonder how much longer that womoan will B alive. ( who is she? i missed it)
so much of what she said was true, i just hope the right people will hear her. i am certain that her voice wont reach those that R commited 2 violence and terror, but maybe one child or one student or one mother......
wow.....
-
Must see photos at this Arabic website to appreciate the size of this demonstration against terrorism in Bahrain. -
http://www.montadayat.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=11035
comments (in English) from:
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/03/massive-muslim-protest-in-bahrain.html
-
March 06, 2006, 8:33 a.m.
The Strip Club
Al Qaeda and Hamas in Gaza.
James Robbins
An interesting war of words has broken out in the Palestinian Authority. In an interview published March 2, Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas stated that he has intelligence information that al Qaeda has set up shop on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. He calls the information very serious and troubling, and the implication is that al Qaeda was allowed to enter the PA by the local security forces, particularly in Gaza, which the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) controls. Hamas quickly denied that al Qaeda is present in Gaza, but added that if in fact they are there, it is Israel?s fault. Also, they stated that if their group is not treated favorably by the U.S., al Qaeda may just as well be there, to teach us a lesson. Not exactly an unequivocal rejection.
To complicate matters further, as this exchange was taking place al Jazeera ran excerpts from a new videotape from al Qaeda number-two Ayman al Zawahiri, urging Hamas to stick to the radical program. The group should hold firm against U.S. threats of withholding aid until they recognize Israel?s right to exist. Zawahiri counseled instead taking a hard line, rejecting calls for a coalition government and renouncing the ?Madrid and Oslo accords, the road map, and other agreements of surrender that violate, and even clash with the Shar'iah [Muslim law].? Zawahiri chastised those in Hamas who might seek compromise for political gain, even if the compromise is only temporary. His alternative? ?Well,? he said, ?it is the path of the prophets and messengers, the path of da'wah [Islamic call] and jihad; da'wah for the pure faith and jihad in its name until the land is liberated and the Muslim caliphate emerges, God willing.? Meanwhile leaflets were scattered across southern Gaza by ?The Army of Jihad and Preventing Corruption? that praised Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al Zarqawi.
Reports of an al Qaeda presence in Gaza began circulating shortly after the Israeli pullout last August. A group styling itself the Al Qaeda Organization Jihad in Palestine announced its formation on a radical Islamist website in October 2005. The official Hamas Palestinian Forum website also carried the announcement. During Ramadan, the new group published and distributed religious booklets in various Strip mosques. Other reports have al Qaeda recruiting rigorously from disheartened members of the Gaza branch of the Fatah-affiliated al Aqsa Martyr?s Brigade, as well as among Hamas members stewing in Israeli prisons.
Making for Gaza is a natural move for al Qaeda, which has been seeking an Afghanistan-style base of operations since the fall of the Taliban. A sub-sovereign zone like the Strip, run by aggressive radicals, tolerant of criminality, and protected by international agreements, is the perfect outpost to pursue the violent task of erecting God?s Kingdom on Earth. In addition, it will place al Qaeda on the frontlines of the struggle with Israel, the last cause that can generate any significant unity among the Muslim (and especially Arab) world.
In the past, al Qaeda was decidedly unwelcome on that particular front. There were ideological differences; the mainstream Palestinian terror outfits were more nationalist than sectarian. Al Qaeda?s Palestinian co-founder Abdulla Azzam split from the PLO in the early 1970s for that very reason, and his influential work ?Defense of Muslim Lands? lays out a no-negotiation, no-compromise program with Israel, the U.S., or anyone else. (Azzam also helped found Hamas before his death from complications of a car bombing in 1989.) But beyond the ideological divide there was also an ego conflict, the clash of the terror divas. Yasser Arafat was synonymous with terrorism for decades. Palestine was his show; no room for a kid from Saudi on that stage.
Bin Laden?s scorn for Arafat was evident in his January 1999 interview with Time magazine, in which he denounced ?those who sympathize with the infidels ? such as the PLO in Palestine, or the so-called Palestinian Authority ? have been trying for tens of years to get back some of their rights. They laid down arms and abandoned what is called ?violence? and tried peaceful bargaining.? To no avail, in bin Laden?s opinion. After that, al Qaeda sent annual messages of support to the Palestinians, for example in 2003 stating, ?We will continue in the path of jihad; we are still with you; your blood is our blood, your honor is our honor, and your sons are our sons. Your blood will not be wasted; I swear that we will support you until Palestine is Islamic again.? With Arafat gone, Israel withdrawn from Gaza and Hamas in control, means, motive, and opportunity are in perfect alignment.
Some analysts observe that it is in Fatah?s interest, as well as Israel?s, to associate Hamas with al Qaeda, in order to discredit them; they thus seek to discount the potential links, or even al Qaeda presence, as propaganda. But the evidence is slowly mounting that al Qaeda is active in the Palestinian Authority, doing what they have been promising to do for years. It is odd indeed to be arguing which of three terrorist organizations is the most extreme, and how that reflects on the others. Would we somehow think less of Hamas if they were consorting with al Qaeda? The two groups have virtually identical worldviews, programs, and propensities to kill the innocent. We should not think much of Hamas in any case. However, the possibility that the Islamic Resistance Movement is aligning with our principle enemy in the global war on terrorism should give pause to those who, in this country and elsewhere, seek to secure millions of dollars in aid money for the PA. The U.S. and its Coalition partners have spent years developing the tools necessary to disrupt terrorist financing; we should not indirectly become the terrorists? new state sponsors.
? James S. Robbins is senior fellow in national-security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council, a trustee for the Leaders for Liberty Foundation, and author of the forthcoming Last in Their Class: Custer, Picket and the Goats of West Point. Robbins is also an NRO contributor.
http://www.nationalreview.com/robbins/robbins200603060833.asp
-
Special Dispatch Series - No. 1107
March 7, 2006 No.1107
Attacks on Arab-American Psychologist Wafa Sultan: Islamist Sheikh on Al-Jazeera Calls Her Heretic; Syrian Sermon Calls Her Infidel
On February 21, 2006, MEMRITV released a clip featuring an interview with Arab-American psychologist Wafa Sultan on Al-Jazeera TV. During the interview, Dr.Ibrahim Al-Khouli accused Sultan of being a "heretic" for attacking current aspects of Islamic society.
THE CLIP HAS NOW BEEN VIEWED OVER ONE MILLION TIMES ON MEMRITV.ORG.
Following the release of this clip, Bassam Darwish, editor of the reformist website www.annaqed.com, posted a February 28, 2006 report by AFP stating that a Friday sermon in Damascus had harshly criticized her appearance on Al-Jazeera: "[Syrian human rights activist Anwar] Al-Bouni reports that one of the sheikhs described Wafa Sultan as 'an infidel,' accusing her of 'harming Islam more than it was harmed by the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, recently published in European newspapers.'
"According to Al-Bouni, 'the Syrian authorities began to use the weapon of the official religion as a new tool to oppress society... It is no longer enough for them to arrest activists, to terrorize them, and to prevent them from traveling, but now they recruit against them the pulpits of takfir [accusing other Muslims of heresy] and takhwin [accusing Muslims of treachery].' He described this policy as dangerous and destructive." [1]
The following are excerpts from an interview with Wafa Sultan that aired on Al-Jazeera TV on February 21, 2006. It is followed by excerpts from a debate in which she participated, in a talk show that aired on Al-Jazeera TV on July 26, 2005.
In the past, MEMRI has reported on Islamist threats to reformists, see for example:
Saudi Doctorate Encourages the Murder of Arab Intellectuals, January 12, 2006, Special Dispatch Series - No. 1070, http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Area=reform&ID=SP107006 .
Arab Intellectuals: Under Threat by Islamists, November, 23, 2005, Inquiry and Analysis Series - No. 254,
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Area=reform&ID=IA25405.
Accusing Muslim Intellectuals of Apostasy, February 18, 2005, Inquiry and Analysis - No. 208,
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=ia&ID=IA20805.
February 21, 2006
TO VIEW THIS CLIP, VISIT: http://www.memritv.org/search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=1050 .
Wafa Sultan: "The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete."
[...]
Host: "I understand from your words that what is happening today is a clash between the culture of the West, and the backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims?"
Wafa Sultan: "Yes, that is what I mean."
[...]
Host: "Who came up with the concept of a clash of civilizations? Was it not Samuel Huntington? It was not bin Laden. I would like to discuss this issue, if you don't mind..."
Wafa Sultan: "The Muslims are the ones who began using this expression. The Muslims are the ones who began the clash of civilizations. The Prophet of Islam said: 'I was ordered to fight the people until they believe in Allah and His Messenger.' When the Muslims divided the people into Muslims and non-Muslims, and called to fight the others until they believe in what they themselves believe, they started this clash, and began this war. In order to start this war, they must reexamine their Islamic books and curricula, which are full of calls for takfir and fighting the infidels.
"My colleague has said that he never offends other people's beliefs. What civilization on the face of this earth allows him to call other people by names that they did not choose for themselves? Once, he calls them Ahl Al-Dhimma; another time he calls them the 'People of the Book'; and yet another time he compares them to apes and pigs, or he calls the Christians 'those who incur Allah's wrath.' Who told you that they are 'People of the Book?' They are not the People of the Book, they are people of many books. All the useful scientific books that you have today are theirs, the fruit of their free and creative thinking. What gives you the right to call them 'those who incur Allah's wrath,' or 'those who have gone astray,' and then come here and say that your religion commands you to refrain from offending the beliefs of others?"
[?]
"I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. I am a secular human being. I do not believe in the supernatural, but I respect others' right to believe in it."
Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: "Are you a heretic?"
Wafa Sultan: "You can say whatever you like. I am a secular human being who does not believe in the supernatural..."
Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: "If you are a heretic, there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran..."
Wafa Sultan: "These are personal matters that do not concern you."
[...]
"Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don't throw them at me. You are free to worship whoever you want, but other people's beliefs are not your concern, whether they believe that the Messiah is God, son of Mary, or that Satan is God, son of Mary. Let people have their beliefs."
[...]
"The Jews have come from the tragedy [of the Holocaust], and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling. Humanity owes most of the discoveries and science of the 19th and 20th centuries to Jewish scientists. Fifteen million people, scattered throughout the world, united and won their rights through work and knowledge. We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."
July 26, 2005
TO VIEW THIS CLIP, VISIT: http://www.memritv.org/search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=783 .
Wafa Sultan: "Why does a young Muslim man, in the prime of life, with a full life ahead, go and blow himself up? How and why does he blow himself up in a bus full of innocent passengers?
"In our countries, religion is the sole source of education, and is the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was quenched. He was not born a terrorist, and did not become a terrorist overnight. Islamic teachings played a role in weaving his ideological fabric, thread by thread, and did not allow other sources - I am referring to scientific sources - to play a role. It was these teachings that distorted this terrorist and killed his humanity. It was not [the terrorist] who distorted the religious teachings and misunderstood them, as some ignorant people claim.
"When you recite to a child still in his early years the verse 'They will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off,' - regardless of this verse's interpretation, and regardless of the reasons it was conveyed or its time - you have made the first step towards creating a great terrorist..."
[?]
Bin Muhammad: "The guest from America asked how a young man could blow up a bus. If only she had asked how a president could blow up a peaceful nation in Iraq. How does a president help the arch-killer of occupied Palestine? Why doesn't she ask where Hitler was brought up - Hitler, who murdered 50 million innocent people? Why doesn't she ask where the people who dropped two atom bombs on Japan were educated? Who killed three million innocent Vietnamese? Who annihilated the Indians? Who has maintained imperialism to this day? Who waged the Spanish civil war, which exacted a toll of 600,000 in 36 months? Why don't we ask these questions? Who has over 15,000 nuclear warheads - Muslims or the non-Muslims? The Muslims or the Americans? The Muslims or the Europeans? We want an answer. Where was Bush educated - if education is really what makes a person a criminal?..."
[?]
Wafa Sultan: "Murder is terrorism regardless of time or place, but when it is committed as a decree from Allah, this is another matter..."
[?]
"The Crusader wars about which the professor is talking - these wars came after the Islamic religious teachings, and as a response to these teachings. This is the law of action and reaction. The Islamic religious teachings have incited to the rejection of the other, to the denial of the other, and to the killing of the other. Have they not incited to the killing of Jews and Christians? If we had heard that a tribe in a distant corner of China has a holy book and religious teachings calling to kill Muslims - would the Muslims stand idly by in the face of such teachings?
"The Crusader wars came after these Islamic religious teachings. When these Islamic teachings were delivered, America did not exist on the face of the earth, nor was Israel in Palestine...
"Why doesn't he talk about the Muslim conquests that preceded all the wars he is talking about? Why doesn't he mention that when Tariq bin Ziyyad entered Andalusia with his armies, he said to his people: 'The sea is behind you, and the enemy is in front?' How can you storm a peaceful country, and consider all its peaceful inhabitants to be your enemies, merely because you have the right to spread your religion? Should the religion be spread by the sword and through fighting?..."
[?]
Bin Muhammad: "Who invented slavery in recent centuries? Who colonized the other - us or them? Did Algeria colonize France, or vice versa? Did Egypt colonize England, or vice versa? We are the victims..."
[?]
"I am not saying that killing innocent people is nice. I say that all innocent people should be protected. But at the same time, we must start with the innocent among the Muslims. There are millions of innocent people among us, while the innocent among you - and innocent they are - number only dozens, hundreds, or thousands, at the most..."
[?]
Wafa Sultan: "Can you explain to me the killing of 100,000 children, women, and men in Algeria, using the most abominable killing methods? Can you explain to me the killing of 15,000 Syrian civilians? Can you explain to me the abominable crime in the military artillery school in Aleppo? Can you explain the crime in Al-Asbaqiya neighborhood of Damascus, Syria? Can you explain the attack of the terrorists on the peaceful village of Al-Kisheh in Upper Egypt, and the massacre of 21 Coptic peasants? Can you explain to me what is going on in Indonesia, Turkey, and Egypt, even though these are Islamic countries which opposed the American intervention in Iraq, and which don't have armies in Iraq, yet were not spared by the terrorists? Can you explain these phenomena, which took place in Arab countries? Was all this revenge on America or Israel? Or were they merely to satisfy bestial wild instincts aroused in them by religious teachings, which incite to rejection of the other, to the killing of the other, and to the denial of the other. When Saddam Hussein buried 300,000 Shi'ites and Kurds alive, we did not hear a single Muslim protesting. Your silence served to acknowledge the legitimacy of these killings, didn't it?..."
[?]
"What do you want from me? To speak evil of American society? I've never said that America is the eternal city of Plato, but I did say it was the eternal city of Wafa Sultan. The idealism of American society was enough to allow me to realize my humanity. I came to this country with fear."
Bin Muhammad: "Along with the Indians? Along with the Indians? What was left of the Indians? What do you have to say about the Indians?"
Wafa Sultan: "Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492. America was founded in 1776, approximately 300 years later. You cannot blame America - as a constitution, a regime, and a state - for killing the Indians."
-
The United States and Iran: Intelligence Wars
March 08, 2006 23 59 GMT
By Fred Burton
There has been a clear uptick in tensions between the United States and Iran recently. The most obvious aspect of this -- but the least interesting, in our view -- has been the escalation of rhetoric concerning Iran's nuclear program. Much more intriguing, from an intelligence perspective, is a series of lower-level events -- including the continuation of a spate of bombings in Khuzestan province, some creative blame-throwing by Iranian leaders over those bombings and over the recent explosion at the Golden Mosque in As Samarra, and the creation of a new Iran office at the U.S. State Department that will place special emphasis on a democratic transition in Tehran.
The public rhetoric is only one part of a much larger game that is always being played, and in which much of the action occurs in the shadows. It long has been our view that the nuclear program is not an end in itself for Iran; if Tehran really wanted to develop nuclear weapons, it would do so with utter secrecy. Rather, it is a mechanism that can be used as political leverage as Tehran pursues other goals. Like North Korea, Iran has found discussion of its nuclear program useful for cranking up or turning down tensions with West, and, in this case, for managing the way it is perceived within the Muslim world. To the extent that the matter is publicly discussed, the nuclear issue is basically a sideshow.
But Iran, like all nation-states, has other tools as well -- and its intelligence apparatus is an important one. Whether friends or enemies, states are constantly collecting intelligence against each other. Given certain geopolitical realities -- including the situation in Baghdad, where Iranian influence is strong but certainly not as strong as Tehran has dreamed it might become, and Iran's support for Hezbollah -- there is every reason to believe at this juncture that intelligence collection is being stepped up on both sides. What is intriguing about Tehran's reactions to the mosque bombing in Iraq, the attacks in Khuzestan and other events is that its statements on these events convey the mindset of the regime -- both its fears and what it sees as its options -- more clearly than the highly public and carefully orchestrated exchanges over the nuclear program.
In short, it appears the stage is being set on the tactical side for a covert intelligence war. If history serves as any guide, the implications of such a shift could be far-reaching: Following the 1979 revolution, Iran engaged in an assassination campaign that targeted Iranian dissidents around the world as well as Western and Jewish diplomats and businessmen, sometimes in retaliation for what it viewed as strikes against Iranian interests by Western intelligence agents. Certainly the rules of the game have changed significantly for the post-9/11 world, but a covert campaign, particularly of the sort that has been successful in the past, well could remain a viable option if an embattled Tehran feels the need to start pushing back at the West.
A History of Covert Campaigns
Western intelligence agencies first became aware of Tehran's covert campaign against its enemies soon after the revolution. The first targets were Iranian monarchists in exile, who were trying to foment a counterrevolution in Iran. Later, after many of these opponents had been eliminated and the threat brought under control, the Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS) shifted its sights to target exiled dissidents and other opponents of the regime. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, influential leaders of these groups were targeted and assassinated in a sophisticated campaign that spanned the globe.
It is interesting to note the tactics that were used in these strikes. Although Hezbollah pioneered the use of suicide bombings during the 1980s, and certainly was acting for Iran's interests at that time, there was a very different signature to MOIS assassinations. These frequently employed stealth and deception to get the assassins within close range of their targets -- close enough to kill them with pistols or knives, often in the target's home. Though many Iranian agents were caught in time, most escaped serious consequences. Meanwhile, dozens of the ayatollahs' political opponents were killed or injured in France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and other places.
Iranian agents also engaged in more overt attacks, including kidnappings, highly public shootings and grenade attacks in public places, and bombings. Hezbollah was quite active on this front; notable actions included the abductions of CIA station chief William F. Buckley in 1984 and U.S. Marine Lt. Col. William R. Higgins in 1988 (both men died in captivity) and the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. That strike was in retaliation for the death of a Hezbollah leader, Abbas Musawi, who was killed by Israeli forces in an ambush.
Another significant action, never publicly linked to the Iranians, was a well-planned strike in 1995 against U.S. consulate employees in Karachi, Pakistan. A van shuttling the employees to the consulate was ambushed and blockaded by three vehicles: a "blocking car" that cut the van off in traffic, another that boxed it in from behind, and a command-and-control vehicle from which observers never emerged. Gunmen from the first two cars slowly and methodically paced the sides of the consulate van, taking careful aim at the passengers before opening fire with their assault rifles. Two consulate employees were killed, and a third was wounded. It is believed that the MOIS staged the Karachi attack in response to the killing of an Iranian agent, for which the United States was blamed.
Covert campaigns of this sort are an important tool for a country like Iran, which has a sophisticated and highly disciplined intelligence service but which could not afford to risk an overwhelming military strike by the United States. Kidnappings and assassinations, carried out with sufficient deniability, have proved an effective way of eliminating enemies and leveraging the country's geopolitical position without incurring unacceptable risk.
Intelligence Tactics
This history of operations has had significant implications for intelligence missions on both sides of the fence.
For the United States, intelligence efforts would include maintaining databases on every known Iranian diplomat around the world, seeking to identify which ones are also MOIS agents. These files would be continually updated with information about the officials' personal lives, travel patterns and meeting partners. The nuclear program and potential links between Iran and militant groups in other countries also would be areas of focus. The United States could expect assistance with collections from Israel's Mossad, which has always had a robust collection operation on Iran, and from friendly Arab services such as the Jordanians and Egyptians.
Technical means of collection also would be brought to bear: satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles and communication intercepts. All U.S. national assets, including signals intelligence (sigint), imagery intelligence (imint) and human intelligence sources (humint), would be used to correlate information flowing in, in order to form as complete a picture as possible of what the Iranians are doing and what they are likely to do next.
Given its connections to militant groups like Hezbollah, Iran has shaped its collection efforts in the past toward gathering information on potential targets and planning possible retaliatory attacks. In today's setting, collections likely would be conducted by MOIS as well as by Hezbollah agents and Iranian proxies active in Iraq. If strikes were to be carried out, they likely would consist of easily deniable one-off hits and possibly attacks against the assets of governments allied with Washington or American proxies in the region. Strikes against U.S. and British troops in Iraq also would be a possibility. Target selection would be tied to what types of attacks would send the most appropriate signal to the West. It would be imperative that Iran's involvement in the action was not immediately obvious, but could be revealed to or discovered by Western intelligence after the fact.
The Game Today
All of which brings us back to recent developments and what it is that Iran seems to be thinking.
First, there was the Feb. 22 bombing of the Golden Mosque in As Samarra, a highly significant Shiite shrine. One of the interesting things about the attack was that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei very quickly, and very publicly, blamed the United States and Israel for the bombing, while urging Iraqi Shia not to retaliate against their Sunni countrymen. The statement was attention-getting, considering the degree to which the United States and Iran were cooperating on Iraqi matters prior to the Iraqi elections in December 2005. Khamenei clearly was reiterating to Washington something that has been said before: Iran, with its influence over the Shiite majority, has the means to create considerable problems for the United States in Iraq if that should become necessary. The fact that others have said this as well -- notably senior diplomat and former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani -- signals the level of unease that Tehran has in its dealings with Washington.
Iran also has continued to blame "foreigners" for a continuing string of bombings in Khuzestan province, in the oil-producing southwestern region just across the Shatt al Arab from Iraq. The attacks began last summer, around the time of Iran's presidential elections, and ethnic Arab separatists -- the majority group in the province -- have claimed responsibility for some of the bombings. Given Khuzestan's economic significance to Iran, Tehran is particularly sensitive to any instability there. And at least partly because of Khuzestan's proximity to the part of Iraq occupied by British forces, Tehran suspects that dissidents in the province are receiving covert support from MI6 -- which, from an intelligence perspective, is virtually synonymous with the CIA.
In recent weeks, Tehran has shown itself capable of some truly spectacular contortions in its claims about the activities of Western intelligence units. Among other statements, Iran's interior minister recently claimed that Tehran had "specific intelligence" proving that U.S. agents have infiltrated al Qaeda and now are ordering terrorist attacks as part of their attempts to prove their bona fides. During the same speech, the minister -- Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, who had a long career with Iran's secret police and intelligence agencies -- said that large amounts of explosives found in one of Khuzestan's cities indicated that "there was an extensive plan to deal a blow to the Islamic Republic." Though he did not supply details, the statement itself would seem to indicate that Tehran fears -- or wants to generate fears of -- an escalation in what has been a relatively low-level bombing campaign up to this point.
Iranian media also have carried several claims during the past year that Western agents have been caught spying inside Iran, that U.S. reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles and manned aircraft have overflown its airspace, and even that the British have erected towers on the Fao Peninsula to collect sigint from Khuzestan province.
The claims, or at least the fears behind them, are not illogical. Certainly, Tehran is not deriving any comfort from the fact that the U.S. State Department is now creating an Office of Iran Affairs and publicly has stated that one of its purposes will be to promote a democratic transition in Tehran. Up to this point, the State Department has treated Iran as part of a larger bloc of Persian Gulf states; there are only a small number -- less than a dozen -- countries that have their own regional "office" in this sense. The move reflects the importance the Bush administration is placing on Iran as a long-term priority. Or, from Tehran's viewpoint, Washington is stepping up the pressure as well.
With this in mind, it is noteworthy that there have been reports of more executions in Iran of late. According to Amnesty International, Tehran carried out 29 executions in January and February -- nearly one-third of the total (94) in the entirety of 2005. By itself, of course, this statistic means little; Amnesty's reporting could be wrong, or the rate of executions might drop off later in the year, and so forth. And, of course, executions in Iran can be carried out for a wide variety of crimes, and the number of political dissidents among the total is not known.
Nonetheless, this is an indicator worth monitoring. As history has shown, political dissidents are among the first to be targeted when the Iranian regime feels threatened. That is no accident, as it is members of dissident groups who are most likely in Tehran's eyes to be working with foreign intelligence agents seeking to destabilize the regime.
Should Iran's true level of tensions with the West continue to escalate, it is possible that Tehran might return to tactics it has used successfully in the past to safeguard its interests. The movement, then, would not come in the public sphere of nuclear discussions and rhetoric, but in other, much quieter ways around the globe.
-
Geopolitical Diary: The Beginning of the End Game
It appears that the United States and Iran are now going to begin public talks on Iraq. The Iranian News Agency reported Thursday that Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told a closed session of the Majlis that Iran had agreed to a request by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq to negotiate with Washington on Iraq. Also on Thursday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the United States is open to holding talks with Iran about Iraq. He emphasized that such talks must be confined to Iraq and not involve nuclear issues.
Barring one tremendous coincidence, the near-simultaneous announcements from Washington and Tehran clearly mean that there have been prior consultations. We long have felt that such back-channel conversations were under way. Indeed, it would be incredible if they weren't. The United States and Iran both have deep interests in Iraq, some of which coincide and some of which collide. The two countries have a history of secret diplomacy dating back to the birth of the Islamic Republic. Clearly, they have been talking and now have decided to make the talks public.
The White House emphasized that nuclear weapons would not be discussed, making it appear that it was Washington that was taking this off the table. The nuclear issue, however, is off the table because it is not the point. Iraq is and always was the key issue between the United States and Iran; nuclear weapons have been an Iranian lever to get Washington to take it more seriously. That has clearly happened.
If there is ever going to be an end game in Iraq, we are now in it. Operation Swarmer, launched Thursday, seemed designed to attack jihadists in the Sunni regions. The key to the U.S.-Sunni conversation has been getting the Sunnis into the political process and, as a result, getting the Sunnis to help liquidate the jihadists. If Swarmer was launched on the basis of Sunni intelligence, and if that intelligence turns out to be accurate, it will be a key event in recent Iraqi history. Those are big "ifs," of course. At the same time, if the Sunnis are joining the political process, then it is time for Iran to negotiate its final price on Iraq, and that appears now to be happening. Taken together, this is not the end, but the beginning of the end game, and success is not guaranteed.
The Iranians want a pro-Tehran government in Iraq. If the Sunnis are in the mix, that is not going to happen. The fallback, and essential position of Iran, is that Iraq should be completely neutral. This will hinge not only on the shape of the Baghdad government, but on certain guarantees concerning the size and armament of the Iraqi military. The last thing Tehran wants is the resurrection of a massive Iraqi military force that could threaten Iran, under a government in which Shiite domination is not permanently guaranteed.
The United States wants to build an Iraqi army to fight the jihadists. That's fine with the Iranians, but in their view that military force must be calibrated so that it is sufficient for internal missions and insufficient to threaten Iran. Whatever the structure of Iraq's new government, no on can guarantee its future. But there can be controls over the types of equipment the Iraqis can acquire. So the United States will want enough for counterinsurgency operations and will happily accept limitations on the military's size so that it cannot threaten Iran.
On the other hand, the United States -- prodded by Saudi Arabia -- does want the force to be large enough to limit Iran's ability to invade and dominate Iraq. Washington wants the balance of power in the region to re-establish itself. At the same time, the United States wants to make certain that the Iraqi government is not simply and unilaterally in the hands of the Shia, and that Sunni and Kurdish interests are protected.
If those things are achieved, then the nuclear issue will be mooted on both sides. But what is easy to write is more difficult to negotiate. Can and will the Sunnis turn on the jihadists? Can there be agreement on the size of the Iraqi military that will satisfy both Iranian concerns and America needs? How can these agreements be enforced over the long haul? Will the Iranians see President George W. Bush's political weakness as too great for credibility? Will the Americans trust that the Iranian negotiators are not setting them up? Endless questions arise.
Whether agreement can be reached is not clear. Only the basic issue is now clear. Nuclear weapons, democracy in Iraq and all the other peripheral issues will now take a backseat to the core issue: The future of Iraq being negotiated by Washington and Tehran, with the Iraqi parties arraying themselves around these discussions.
-
The Stone Face of Zarqawi
Iraq is no "distraction" from al Qaeda.
BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Tuesday, March 21, 2006 12:01 a.m.
In February 2004, our Kurdish comrades in northern Iraq intercepted a courier who was bearing a long message from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to his religious guru Osama bin Laden. The letter contained a deranged analysis of the motives of the coalition intervention ("to create the State of Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates" and "accelerate the emergence of the Messiah"), but also a lethally ingenious scheme to combat it. After a lengthy and hate-filled diatribe against what he considers the vile heresy of Shiism, Zarqawi wrote of Iraq's largest confessional group that: "These in our opinion are the key to change. I mean that targeting and hitting them in their religious, political and military depth will provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies . . . and bare the teeth of the hidden rancor working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger."
Some of us wrote about this at the time, to warn of the sheer evil that was about to be unleashed. Knowing that their own position was a tenuous one (a fact fully admitted by Zarqawi in his report) the cadres of "al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" understood that their main chance was the deliberate stoking of a civil war. And, now that this threat has become more imminent and menacing, it is somehow blamed on the Bush administration. "Civil war" has replaced "the insurgency" as the proof that the war is "unwinnable." But in plain truth, the "civil war" is and always was the chief tactic of the "insurgency."
Since February 2004, there have been numberless attacks on Shiite religious processions and precincts. Somewhat more insulting to Islam (one might think) than a caricature in Copenhagen, these desecrations did not immediately produce the desired effect. Grand Ayatollah Sistani even stated that, if he himself fell victim, he forgave his murderers in advance and forbade retaliation in his name. This extraordinary forbearance meant that many Shiites--and Sunnis, too--refused to play Zarqawi's game. But the grim fact is, as we know from Cyprus and Bosnia and Lebanon and India, that a handful of determined psychopaths can erode in a year the sort of intercommunal fraternity that has taken centuries to evolve. If you keep pressing on the nerve of tribalism and sectarianism, you will eventually get a response. And then came the near-incredible barbarism in Samarra, and the laying waste of the golden dome.
It is not merely civil strife that is partly innate in the very make-up of Iraq. There could be an even worse war, of the sort that Thomas Hobbes pictured: a "war of all against all" in which localized gangs and mafias would become rulers of their own stretch of turf. This is what happened in Lebanon after the American withdrawal: The distinctions between Maronite and Druze and Palestinian and Shiite became blurred by a descent into minor warlordism. In Iraq, things are even more fissile. Even the "insurgents" are fighting among themselves, with local elements taking aim at imported riffraff and vice-versa. Saddam's vicious tactic, of emptying the jails on the eve of the intervention and freeing his natural constituency of thugs and bandits and rapists, was exactly designed to exacerbate an already unstable situation and make the implicit case for one-man "law and order." There is strong disagreement among and between the Shiites and the Sunnis, and between them and the Kurds, only the latter having taken steps to resolve their own internal party and regional quarrels.
America's mistake in Lebanon was first to intervene in a way that placed us on one minority side--that of the Maronites and their Israeli patrons--and then to scuttle and give Hobbes his mandate for the next 10 years. At least it can be said for the present mission in Iraq that it proposes the only alternative to civil war, dictatorship, partition or some toxic combination of all three. Absent federal democracy and power-sharing, there will not just be anarchy and fragmentation and thus a moral victory for jihadism, but opportunist interventions from Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. (That vortex, by the way, is what was waiting to engulf Iraq if the coalition had not intervened, and would have necessitated an intervention later but under even worse conditions.) There are signs that many Iraqi factions do appreciate the danger of this, even if some of them have come to the realization somewhat late. The willingness of the Kurdish leadership in particular, to sacrifice for a country that was gassing its people until quite recently, is beyond praise.
Everybody now has their own scenario for the war that should have been fought three years ago. The important revelations in "Cobra II," by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, about the underestimated reserve strength of the Fedayeen Saddam, give us an excellent picture of what the successor regime to the Baath Party was shaping up to be: an Islamized para-state militia ruling by means of vicious divide-and-rule as between the country's peoples. No responsible American government could possibly have allowed such a contingency to become more likely. We would then have had to intervene in a ruined rogue jihadist-hosting state that was already in a Beirut-like nightmare.
I could not help noticing, when the secret prisons of the Shiite-run "Interior Ministry" were exposed a few weeks ago, that all those wishing to complain ran straight to the nearest American base, from which help was available. For the moment, the coalition forces act as the militia for the majority of Iraqis--the inked-fingered Iraqis--who have no militia of their own. Honorable as this role may be, it is not enough in the long run. In Iraq we have made some good friends and some very, very bad enemies. (How can anyone, looking down the gun-barrel into the stone face of Zarqawi, say that fighting him is a "distraction" from fighting al Qaeda?) Over the medium term, if our apparent domestic demoralization continues, the options could come down to two. First, we might use our latent power and threaten to withdraw, implicitly asking Iraqis and their neighbors if that is really what they want, and concentrating their minds. This still runs the risk of allowing the diseased spokesmen of al Qaeda to claim victory. Second, we can demand to know, of the wider international community, if it could afford to view an imploded Iraq as a spectator. Three years ago, the smug answer to that, from most U.N. members, was "yes." This is not an irresponsibility that we can afford, either morally or practically, and even if our intervention was much too little and way too late, it has kindled in many Arab and Kurdish minds an idea of a different future. There is a war within the war, as there always is when a serious struggle is under way, but justice and necessity still combine to say that the task cannot be given up.
Mr. Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair, is the author of "A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq" (Penguin, 2003).
-
Second post of the day:
Appalling?But Not Hopeless
You see lots of rough politics and jockeying for power in Baghdad. But when facing the abyss, you also see glimpses of leadership.
By Fareed Zakaria
Three years ago this week, I watched the invasion of Iraq apprehensively. I had supported military intervention to rid the country of Saddam's tyranny, but I had also been appalled by the crude and unilateral manner in which the Bush administration handled the issue. In the first weeks after the invasion, I was very critical of several of the administration's decisions?crucially, invading with a light force and dismantling the governing structures of Iraq (including the bureaucracy and Army). My criticisms grew over the first 18 months of the invasion, a period that offered a truly depressing display of American weakness and incompetence. And yet, for all my misgivings about the way the administration has handled this policy, I've never been able to join the antiwar crowd. Nor am I convinced that Iraq is a hopeless cause that should be abandoned.
Let's remember that in 2002 and early 2003, U.S. policy toward Iraq was collapsing. The sanctions regime was becoming completely ineffective against Saddam?he had gotten quite good at cheating and smuggling?and it was simultaneously impoverishing the Iraqi people. Regular reconnaissance and bombing missions over Iraq were done through no-flight zones, which required a large U.S. and British presence in Saudi Arabia and Turkey. These circumstances were fueling a poisonous anti-Americanism throughout the Muslim world.
In his fatwa of 1998, Osama bin Laden's first two charges against the United States were that it was "occupying" Saudi Arabia and starving Iraqi women and children. The Palestinian cause was a distant third. Meanwhile Saddam had a 30-year history of attempting to build nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
The other reality by 2003 was that the United States and the international community had developed a reasonably effective process for military interventions like Iraq. The RAND Corporation released a thorough study just before the invasion pointing out that the central lesson of the 1990s was that if you went in with few troops (Haiti, Somalia), chaos prevailed, but if you went in with robust forces (Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor), it was possible to succeed.
Consider what the administration itself did in Afghanistan. It allied with local forces on the ground so that order would be maintained. It upheld the traditional structure of power and governance in the country?that is, it accepted the reality of the warlords?while working very slowly and quietly to weaken them. To deflect anti-Americanism, the military turned over the political process to the United Nations right after Kabul fell. (Most people forget that it was the U.N. that created the assembly that picked Hamid Karzai as president.) The United States gave NATO and the European Union starring roles in the country?and real power?which led them to accept real burden-sharing. The European Union actually spends more in Afghanistan than the United States does.
But Iraq turned out to be a playground for all kinds of ideological theories that the Bush administration had about the Middle East, democracy, the United Nations and the Clinton administration. It also became a playground for a series of all-consuming turf wars and policy battles between various departments and policymakers in the administration. A good part of the chaos and confusion in Washington has abated, but the chaos in Iraq has proved much harder to reverse. It is much easier to undo a longstanding social and political order than it is to put it back together again.
So why have I not given up hope? Partly it's because I have been to Iraq, met the people who are engaged in the struggle to build their country and cannot bring myself to abandon them. Iraq has no Nelson Mandelas, but many of its leaders have shown remarkable patience, courage and statesmanship. Consider the wisdom and authority of Ayatollah Sistani, or the fair-minded and effective role of the Kurds, or the persistent pleas for secularism and tolerance from men like Ayad Allawi. You see lots of rough politics and jockeying for power in Baghdad. But when the stakes get high, when the violence escalates, when facing the abyss, you also see glimpses of leadership.
There is no doubt today that the costs of the invasion have far outweighed the benefits. But in the long view of history, will that always be true? If, after all this chaos, a new and different kind of Iraqi politics emerges, it will make a difference in the region. Even now, amid the violence, one can see that. The old order in Iraq was built on fear and terror. One group dominated the land, oppressing the others. Now representatives of all three communities?Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds?are sitting down at the table, trying to construct a workable bargain they can all live with.
These sectarian power struggles can get extremely messy, and violent parties have taken advantage of every crack and cleavage. But this might be inevitable in a country coming to terms with very real divisions and disagreements. Iraq might be stumbling toward nation-building by consent, not brutality. And that is a model for the Middle East.
-
Putting Cards on the Table in Iraq
By George Friedman
The clouds couldn't have been darker last week. Everyone was talking about civil war in Iraq. Smart and informed people were talking about the real possibility of an American airstrike against Iran's nuclear capabilities. The Iranians were hurling defiance in every direction on the compass. U.S. President George W. Bush seemed to be politically on the ropes, unable to control his own party. And then seemingly out of nowhere, the Iranians offered to hold talks with the Americans on Iraq, and only Iraq. With the kind of lightning speed not seen from the White House for a while, the United States accepted. Suddenly, the two countries with the greatest stake in Iraq -- and the deepest hostility toward each other -- had agreed publicly to negotiate on Iraq.
To understand this development, we must understand that Iran and the United States have been holding quiet, secret, back-channel and off-the-record discussions for years -- but the discussions were no less important for all of that. The Iran-Contra affair, for example, could not have taken place had the Reagan administration not been talking to the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini's representatives. There is nothing new about Americans and Iranians talking; they have been doing it for years. Each side, for their own domestic reasons, has tried to hide the talks from public view, even when they were quite public, such as the Geneva discussions over Afghanistan prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.
What is dramatically new is the public nature of these talks now, and the subject matter: Iraq.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the real players in Iraq are now going to sit down and see if they can reach some decisions about the country's future. They are going to do this over the heads of their various clients. Obviously, the needs of those clients will have to be satisfied, but in the end, the Iraq war is at least partly about U.S.-Iranian relations, and it is clear that both sides have now decided that it is time to explore a deal -- not in a quiet Georgetown restaurant, but in full view of the world. In other words, it is time to get serious.
The offer of public talks actually was not made by Iran. The first public proposal for talks came from U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, who several months ago reported that he had been authorized by Bush to open two lines of discussion: One was with the non-jihadist Sunni leadership in Iraq; the other was with Iran. Interestingly, Khalilzad had emphasized that he was authorized to speak with the Iranians only about Iraq and not about other subjects. In other words, discussion of Iran's nuclear program was not going to take place. What happened last week was that the Iranians finally gave Khalilzad an answer: yes.
Iran's Slow Play
As we have discussed many times, Iraq has been Iran's obsession. It is an obsession rooted in ancient history; the Bible speaks of the struggle between Babylon and Persia for regional hegemony. It has some of its roots in more recent history as well: Iran lost about 300,000 people, with about 1 million more wounded and captured, in its 1980-88 war with Iraq. That would be the equivalent of more than 1 million dead Americans and an additional 4 million wounded and captured. It is a staggering number. Nothing can be understood about Iran until the impact of this war is understood. The Iranians, then, came out of the war with two things: an utter hatred of Saddam Hussein and his regime, and determination that this sort of devastation should never happen again.
After the United States decided, in Desert Storm, not to move on to Baghdad and overthrow the Hussein regime -- and after the catastrophic failure of the Shiite rising in southern Iraq -- the Iranians established a program of covert operations that was designed to increase their control of the Shiite population in the south. The Iranians were unable to wage war against Hussein but were content, after Desert Storm, that he could not attack Iran. So they focused on increasing their influence in the south and bided their time. They could not take out Hussein, but they still wanted someone to do so. That someone was the Americans.
Iran responded to the 9/11 attacks in a predictable manner. First, Iran was as concerned by al Qaeda as the United States was. The Iranians saw themselves as the vanguard of revolutionary Islam, and they did not want to see their place usurped by Wahhabis, whom they viewed as the tool of another regional rival, Saudi Arabia. Thus, Tehran immediately offered U.S. forces the right to land, at Iranian airbases, aircraft that were damaged during operations in Afghanistan. Far more important, the Iranians used their substantial influence in western and northern Afghanistan to secure allies for the United States. They wanted the Taliban gone. This is not to say that some al Qaeda operatives, having paid or otherwise induced regional Iranian commanders, didn't receive some sanctuary in Iran; the Iranians would have given sanctuary to Osama bin Laden if that would have neutralized him. But Tehran's policy was to oppose al Qaeda and the Taliban, and to quietly support the United States in its war against them. This was no stranger, really, than the Americans giving anti-tank missiles to Khomeini in the 1980s.
But the main chance that Iran saw was getting the Americans to invade Iraq and depose their true enemy, Saddam Hussein. The United States was not led to invade Iraq by the Iranians -- that would be too simple a model. However, the Iranians, with their excellent intelligence network in Iraq, helped to smooth the way for the American decision. Apart from providing useful tactical information, the Iranians led the Americans to believe three things:
1. That Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction programs.
2. That the Iraqis would not resist U.S. operations and would greet the Americans as liberators.
3. By omission, that there would be no post-war resistance in Iraq.
Again, this was not decisive, but it formed an important part of the analytical framework through which the Americans viewed Iraq.
The Iranians wanted the United States to defeat Hussein. They wanted the United States to bear the burden of pacifying the Sunni regions of Iraq. They wanted U.S. forces to bog down in Iraq so that, in due course, the Americans would withdraw -- but only after the Sunnis were broken -- leaving behind a Shiite government that would be heavily influenced by Iran. The Iranians did everything they could to encourage the initial engagement and then stood by as the United States fought the Sunnis. They were getting what they wanted.
Counterplays and Timing
What they did not count on was American flexibility. From the first battle of Al Fallujah onward, the United States engaged in negotiations with the Sunni leadership. The United States had two goals: one, to use the Sunni presence in a new Iraqi government to block Iranian ambitions; and two, to split the Sunnis from the jihadists. It was the very success of this strategy, evident in the December 2005 elections, that caused Iraqi Shia to move away from the Iranians a bit, and, more important, caused the jihadists to launch an anti-Shiite rampage. The jihadists' goal was to force a civil war in Iraq and drive the Sunnis back into an unbreakable alliance with them.
In other words, the war was not going in favor of either the United States or Iran. The Americans were bogged down in a war that could not be won with available manpower, if by "victory" we mean breaking the Sunni-jihadist will to resist. The Iranians envisioned the re-emergence of their former Baathist enemies. Not altogether certain of the political commitments or even the political savvy of their Shiite allies in Iraq, they could now picture their worst nightmare: a coalition government in which the Sunnis, maneuvering with the Kurds and Americans, would dominate an Iraqi government. They saw Tehran's own years of maneuvering as being in jeopardy. Neither side could any longer be certain of the outcome.
In response, each side attempted, first, to rattle the other. Iran's nuclear maneuver was designed to render the Americans more forthcoming; the assumption was that a nuclear Iran would be more frightening, from the American point of view, than a Shiite Iraq. The Americans held off responding and then, a few weeks ago, began letting it be known that not only were airstrikes against Iran possible, but that in fact they were being seriously considered and that deadlines were being drawn up.
This wasn't about nuclear weapons but about Iraq, as both sides made clear when the talks were announced. Both players now have all their cards on the table. Iran bluffed nukes, the United States called the bluff and seemed about to raise. Khalilzad's request for talks was still on the table. The Iranians took it. This was not really done in order to forestall airstrikes -- the Iranians were worried about that only on the margins. What Iran had was a deep concern and an interesting opportunity.
The concern was that the situation in Iraq was spinning out of its control. The United States was no longer predictable, the Sunnis were no longer predictable, and even the Iranians' Shiite allies were not playing their proper role. The Iranians were playing for huge stakes in Iraq and there were suddenly too many moving pieces, too many things that could go wrong.
The Iranians also saw an opportunity. Bush's political position in the United States had deteriorated dramatically. As it deteriorated, his room for maneuver declined. The British had made it clear that they were planning to leave Iraq. Bush had really not been isolated before, as his critics always charged, but now he was becoming isolated -- domestically as well as internationally. Bush needed badly to break out of the political bind he was in. The administration had resisted pressure to withdraw troops under a timetable, but it no longer was clear whether Congress would permit Bush to continue to resist. The president did not want his hands tied by Congress, but it seemed to the Iranians that was exactly what was happening.
From the Iranian point of view, if ever a man has needed a deal, it is Bush. If there are going to be any negotiations, they are to happen now. From Bush's point of view, he does need a deal, but so do the Iranians -- things are ratcheting out of control from Tehran's point of view as well. For domestic Iraqi players, the room to maneuver is increasing, while the room to maneuver for foreign players is decreasing. In other words, the United States and Iran have, for the moment, the unified interest of managing Iraq, rather than seeing a civil war or a purely domestic solution.
The Next Phase of the Game
The Iranians want at least to Finlandize Iraq. During the Cold War, the Soviets did not turn Finland into a satellite, but they did have the right to veto members of its government, to influence the size and composition of its military and to require a neutral foreign policy. The Iranians wanted more, but they will settle for keeping the worst of the Baathists out of the government and for controls over Iraq's international behavior. The Americans want a coalition government within the limits of a Finlandic solution. They do not want a purely Shiite government; they want the Sunnis to deal with the jihadists, in return for guaranteed Sunni rights in Iraq. Finally, the United States wants the right to place a force in Iraq -- aircraft and perhaps 40,000 troops -- outside the urban areas, in the west. The Iranians do not really want U.S. troops so close, so they will probably argue about the number and the type. They do not want to see heavy armored units but can live with lighter units stationed to the west.
Now obviously, in this negotiation, each side will express distrust and indifference. The White House won the raise by expressing doubts as to Tehran's seriousness; the implication was that the Iranians were buying time to work on their nukes. Perhaps. But the fact is that Tehran will work on nukes as and when it wants, and Washington will destroy the nukes as and when it wants. The nukes are non-issues in the real negotiations.
There are three problems now with negotiations. One is Bush's ability to keep his coalition intact while he negotiates with a member of the "axis of evil." Another is Iran's ability to keep its coalition together while it negotiates with the "Great Satan." And third is the ability of either to impose their collective will on an increasingly self-reliant Iraqi polity. The two major powers are now ready to talk. What is not clear is whether, even together, they will be in a position to impose their will on the Iraqis. The coalitions will probably hold, and the Iraqis will probably submit. But those are three "probablies." Not good.
All wars end in negotiations. Clearly, the United States and Iran have been talking quietly for a long time. They now have decided it is time to make their talks public. That decision by itself indicates how seriously they both take these conversations now.
3/21/06
www.stratfor.com
-
Wow. Thanks for posting, Crafty.
-
Woof All
Stratfor continuously blows me away with the level of its analysis and intel. I'm really glad that my price for my premium subscription is grandfathered, but even at the current price I would pay it (Shhh! Don't tell them!) An awesome product which I recommend in the highest terms possible.
Crafty Dog
-
Geopolitical Diary: Exploiting Sectarian Fault Lines
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said over the weekend that civil war "has almost started" in Iraq and warned against a U.S. withdrawal. During an hour-long interview with Al Arabiyah television, he also said that most of the Shia in the Middle East "are loyal to Iran, and not to the countries they are living in" -- a statement that drew angry reactions from Shia leaders throughout the region on Sunday.
In Iraq, the three highest-ranking Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni leaders -- President Jalal Talabani, Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and Parliament Speaker Adnan Pachachi -- issued a joint statement saying Mubarak had taken "a stab" at Shiite Iraqis' "patriotism and civilization."
In Kuwait, Shiite members of parliament demanded an apology from Mubarak, with Hassan Jowhar saying, "We are not begging for certificates of loyalty to our countries from Mubarak or others." In Lebanon, senior Hezbollah leader Sheikh Mohammed Yazbek labeled Mubarak's comments as "dangerous" lies that betray "fanaticism and sectarianism." He also insisted that the Shia in Lebanon are agents of no one -- saying they are loyal to their country but also support Tehran and Damascus.
The mildest of all the reactions came from Iran itself, where Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi acknowledged that Iran wields immense influence in Iraq, but said it is "spiritual" in nature and that Tehran uses this influence in efforts to bring stability to the country.
Assuming, for the moment, that Mubarak hopes to keep the Sunni-Shiite tensions now riddling Iraq from spreading to other parts of the Middle East, it would appear that his words had rather the opposite of the intended effect.
Correctly or otherwise, Egypt and other Sunni Arab states have adopted the view that the public talks between the United States and Iran, concerning Iraq, are a sign that the Sunnis of Iraq no longer will be enough to contain Iran's influence. Instead, they are bracing for the implications of an "American-Iranian deal." The Associated Press recently reported that the intelligence chiefs of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey held a series of secret meetings last month in order to prepare for the outbreak of civil war in Iraq.
Of course, these concerns are not new. King Abdullah of Jordan warned in January 2005 about the emergence of a Shiite crescent in the Middle East. Eight months later, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said U.S. policy had thrown Iraq to the Iranians. And it is no secret that the Persian Gulf emirates see the rise of Iranian power -- absent the counterbalance that was provided by Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq -- as a major security threat. The bulwark that Baghdad once provided against Iranian expansionism is no more.
Moreover, there is no single Arab state that is as strong as Iran -- and quarrels between these states are too numerous to permit one to emerge.
It is difficult to accuse the Arab states of irrational fear. Iran has stated its objectives quite clearly. Last week, Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, commander of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said during war games Iran staged in the Persian Gulf that the United States should accept Tehran as the regional hegemon.
Since the fall of the Hussein regime until quite recently, the Arab states had hoped that Iraq's Sunnis, sufficiently plugged into the political process in Baghdad, would be useful in checking Iran's hegemonic ambitions. It now appears, however, that continued instability in Iraq -- civil war -- is the Arab states' best hope.
This is a risky proposition. Instability in Iraq gives jihadist groups like al Qaeda an opportunity to find shelter and grow, which in itself endangers the security of these states. But given a choice between Iran becoming the regional power center and facing down threats posed by Islamist militants, the Arab states would view al Qaeda as the lesser of the two evils.
-
Wowie Zahawie
Sorry everyone, but Iraq did go uranium shopping in Niger.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, April 10, 2006, at 4:43 PM ET
In the late 1980s, the Iraqi representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency?Iraq's senior public envoy for nuclear matters, in effect?was a man named Wissam al-Zahawie. After the Kuwait war in 1991, when Rolf Ekeus arrived in Baghdad to begin the inspection and disarmament work of UNSCOM, he was greeted by Zahawie, who told him in a bitter manner that "now that you have come to take away our assets," the two men could no longer be friends. (They had known each other in earlier incarnations at the United Nations in New York.)
At a later 1995 U.N. special session on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Zahawie was the Iraqi delegate and spoke heatedly about the urgent need to counterbalance Israel's nuclear capacity. At the time, most democratic countries did not have full diplomatic relations with Saddam's regime, and there were few fully accredited Iraqi ambassadors overseas, Iraq's interests often being represented by the genocidal Islamist government of Sudan (incidentally, yet another example of collusion between "secular" Baathists and the fundamentalists who were sheltering Osama Bin Laden). There was one exception?an Iraqi "window" into the world of open diplomacy?namely the mutual recognition between the Baathist regime and the Vatican. To this very important and sensitive post in Rome, Zahawie was appointed in 1997, holding the job of Saddam's ambassador to the Holy See until 2000. Those who knew him at that time remember a man much given to anti-Jewish tirades, with a standing ticket for Wagner performances at Bayreuth. (Actually, as a fan of Das Rheingold and G?tterd?mmerung in particular, I find I can live with this. Hitler secretly preferred sickly kitsch like Franz Lehar.)
In February 1999, Zahawie left his Vatican office for a few days and paid an official visit to Niger, a country known for absolutely nothing except its vast deposits of uranium ore. It was from Niger that Iraq had originally acquired uranium in 1981, as confirmed in the Duelfer Report. In order to take the Joseph Wilson view of this Baathist ambassadorial initiative, you have to be able to believe that Saddam Hussein's long-term main man on nuclear issues was in Niger to talk about something other than the obvious. Italian intelligence (which first noticed the Zahawie trip from Rome) found it difficult to take this view and alerted French intelligence (which has better contacts in West Africa and a stronger interest in nuclear questions). In due time, the French tipped off the British, who in their cousinly way conveyed the suggestive information to Washington. As everyone now knows, the disclosure appeared in watered-down and secondhand form in the president's State of the Union address in January 2003.
If the above was all that was known, it would surely be universally agreed that no responsible American administration could have overlooked such an amazingly sinister pattern. Given the past Iraqi record of surreptitious dealing, cheating of inspectors, concealment of sites and caches, and declared ambition to equip the technicians referred to openly in the Baathist press as "nuclear mujahideen," one could scarcely operate on the presumption of innocence.
However, the waters have since become muddied, to say the least. For a start, someone produced a fake document, dated July 6, 2000, which purports to show Zahawie's signature and diplomatic seal on an actual agreement for an Iraqi uranium transaction with Niger. Almost everything was wrong with this crude forgery?it had important dates scrambled, and it misstated the offices of Niger politicians. In consequence, IAEA Chairman Mohammed ElBaradei later reported to the U.N. Security Council that the papers alleging an Iraq-Niger uranium connection had been demonstrated to be fraudulent.
But this doesn't alter the plain set of established facts in my first three paragraphs above. The European intelligence services, and the Bush administration, only ever asserted that the Iraqi regime had apparently tried to open (or rather, reopen) a yellowcake trade "in Africa." It has never been claimed that an agreement was actually reached. What motive could there be for a forgery that could be instantly detected upon cursory examination?
There seem to be only three possibilities here. Either a) American intelligence concocted the note; b) someone in Italy did so in the hope of gain; or c) it was the product of disinformation, intended to protect Niger and discredit any attention paid to the actual, real-time Zahawie visit. The CIA is certainly incompetent enough to have fouled up this badly. (I like Edward Luttwak's formulation in the March 22 Times Literary Supplement, where he writes that "there have been only two kinds of CIA secret operations: the ones that are widely known to have failed?usually because of almost unbelievably crude errors?and the ones that are not yet widely known to have failed.") Still, it almost passes belief that any American agency would fake a document that purportedly proved far more than the administration had asked and then get every important name and date wrapped round the axle. Forgery for gain is easy to understand, especially when it is borne in mind that nobody wastes time counterfeiting a bankrupt currency. Forgery for disinformation, if that is what it was, appears at least to have worked. Almost everybody in the world now affects to believe that Saddam Hussein was framed on the Niger rap.
According to the London Sunday Times of April 9, the truth appears to be some combination of b) and c). A NATO investigation has identified two named employees of the Niger Embassy in Rome who, having sold a genuine document about Zahawie to Italian and French intelligence agents, then added a forged paper in the hope of turning a further profit. The real stuff went by one route to Washington, and the fakery, via an Italian journalist and the U.S. Embassy in Rome, by another. The upshot was?follow me closely here?that a phony paper alleging a deal was used to shoot down a genuine document suggesting a connection.
Zahawie's name and IAEA connection were never mentioned by ElBaradei in his report to the United Nations, and his past career has never surfaced in print. Looking up the press of the time causes one's jaw to slump in sheer astonishment. Here, typically, is a Time magazine "exclusive" about Zahawie, written by Hassan Fattah on Oct. 1, 2003:
The veteran diplomat has spent the eight months since President Bush's speech trying to set the record straight and clear his name. In a rare interview with Time, al-Zahawie outlined how forgery and circumstantial evidence was used to talk up Iraq's nuclear weapons threat, and leave him holding the smoking gun.
A few paragraphs later appear, the wonderful and unchallenged words from Zahawie: "Frankly, I didn't know that Niger produced uranium at all." Well, sorry for the inconvenience of the questions, then, my old IAEA and NPT "veteran" (whose nuclear qualifications go unmentioned in the Time article). Instead, we are told that Zahawie visited Niger and other West African countries to encourage them to break the embargo on flights to Baghdad, as they had broken the sanctions on Qaddafi's Libya. A bit of a lowly mission, one might think, for one of the Iraqi regime's most senior and specialized envoys.
The Duelfer Report also cites "a second contact between Iraq and Niger," which occurred in 2001, when a Niger minister visited Baghdad "to request assistance in obtaining petroleum products to alleviate Niger's economic problems." According to the deposition of Ja'far Diya' Ja'far (the head of Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear weapons program), these negotiations involved no offer of uranium ore but only "cash in exchange for petroleum." West Africa is awash in petroleum, and Niger is poor in cash. Iraq in 2001 was cash-rich through the oil-for-food racket, but you may if you wish choose to believe that a near-bankrupt African delegation from a uranium-based country traveled across a continent and a half with nothing on its mind but shopping for oil.
Interagency feuding has ruined the Bush administration's capacity to make its case in public, and a high-level preference for deniable leaking has further compounded the problem. But please read my first three paragraphs again and tell me if the original story still seems innocuous to you.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2139609/
-
Wowie Zahawie
Sorry everyone, but Iraq did go uranium shopping in Niger.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, April 10, 2006, at 4:43 PM ET
In the late 1980s, the Iraqi representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency?Iraq's senior public envoy for nuclear matters, in effect?was a man named Wissam al-Zahawie. After the Kuwait war in 1991, when Rolf Ekeus arrived in Baghdad to begin the inspection and disarmament work of UNSCOM, he was greeted by Zahawie, who told him in a bitter manner that "now that you have come to take away our assets," the two men could no longer be friends. (They had known each other in earlier incarnations at the United Nations in New York.)
At a later 1995 U.N. special session on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Zahawie was the Iraqi delegate and spoke heatedly about the urgent need to counterbalance Israel's nuclear capacity. At the time, most democratic countries did not have full diplomatic relations with Saddam's regime, and there were few fully accredited Iraqi ambassadors overseas, Iraq's interests often being represented by the genocidal Islamist government of Sudan (incidentally, yet another example of collusion between "secular" Baathists and the fundamentalists who were sheltering Osama Bin Laden). There was one exception?an Iraqi "window" into the world of open diplomacy?namely the mutual recognition between the Baathist regime and the Vatican. To this very important and sensitive post in Rome, Zahawie was appointed in 1997, holding the job of Saddam's ambassador to the Holy See until 2000. Those who knew him at that time remember a man much given to anti-Jewish tirades, with a standing ticket for Wagner performances at Bayreuth. (Actually, as a fan of Das Rheingold and G?tterd?mmerung in particular, I find I can live with this. Hitler secretly preferred sickly kitsch like Franz Lehar.)
In February 1999, Zahawie left his Vatican office for a few days and paid an official visit to Niger, a country known for absolutely nothing except its vast deposits of uranium ore. It was from Niger that Iraq had originally acquired uranium in 1981, as confirmed in the Duelfer Report. In order to take the Joseph Wilson view of this Baathist ambassadorial initiative, you have to be able to believe that Saddam Hussein's long-term main man on nuclear issues was in Niger to talk about something other than the obvious. Italian intelligence (which first noticed the Zahawie trip from Rome) found it difficult to take this view and alerted French intelligence (which has better contacts in West Africa and a stronger interest in nuclear questions). In due time, the French tipped off the British, who in their cousinly way conveyed the suggestive information to Washington. As everyone now knows, the disclosure appeared in watered-down and secondhand form in the president's State of the Union address in January 2003.
If the above was all that was known, it would surely be universally agreed that no responsible American administration could have overlooked such an amazingly sinister pattern. Given the past Iraqi record of surreptitious dealing, cheating of inspectors, concealment of sites and caches, and declared ambition to equip the technicians referred to openly in the Baathist press as "nuclear mujahideen," one could scarcely operate on the presumption of innocence.
However, the waters have since become muddied, to say the least. For a start, someone produced a fake document, dated July 6, 2000, which purports to show Zahawie's signature and diplomatic seal on an actual agreement for an Iraqi uranium transaction with Niger. Almost everything was wrong with this crude forgery?it had important dates scrambled, and it misstated the offices of Niger politicians. In consequence, IAEA Chairman Mohammed ElBaradei later reported to the U.N. Security Council that the papers alleging an Iraq-Niger uranium connection had been demonstrated to be fraudulent.
But this doesn't alter the plain set of established facts in my first three paragraphs above. The European intelligence services, and the Bush administration, only ever asserted that the Iraqi regime had apparently tried to open (or rather, reopen) a yellowcake trade "in Africa." It has never been claimed that an agreement was actually reached. What motive could there be for a forgery that could be instantly detected upon cursory examination?
There seem to be only three possibilities here. Either a) American intelligence concocted the note; b) someone in Italy did so in the hope of gain; or c) it was the product of disinformation, intended to protect Niger and discredit any attention paid to the actual, real-time Zahawie visit. The CIA is certainly incompetent enough to have fouled up this badly. (I like Edward Luttwak's formulation in the March 22 Times Literary Supplement, where he writes that "there have been only two kinds of CIA secret operations: the ones that are widely known to have failed?usually because of almost unbelievably crude errors?and the ones that are not yet widely known to have failed.") Still, it almost passes belief that any American agency would fake a document that purportedly proved far more than the administration had asked and then get every important name and date wrapped round the axle. Forgery for gain is easy to understand, especially when it is borne in mind that nobody wastes time counterfeiting a bankrupt currency. Forgery for disinformation, if that is what it was, appears at least to have worked. Almost everybody in the world now affects to believe that Saddam Hussein was framed on the Niger rap.
According to the London Sunday Times of April 9, the truth appears to be some combination of b) and c). A NATO investigation has identified two named employees of the Niger Embassy in Rome who, having sold a genuine document about Zahawie to Italian and French intelligence agents, then added a forged paper in the hope of turning a further profit. The real stuff went by one route to Washington, and the fakery, via an Italian journalist and the U.S. Embassy in Rome, by another. The upshot was?follow me closely here?that a phony paper alleging a deal was used to shoot down a genuine document suggesting a connection.
Zahawie's name and IAEA connection were never mentioned by ElBaradei in his report to the United Nations, and his past career has never surfaced in print. Looking up the press of the time causes one's jaw to slump in sheer astonishment. Here, typically, is a Time magazine "exclusive" about Zahawie, written by Hassan Fattah on Oct. 1, 2003:
The veteran diplomat has spent the eight months since President Bush's speech trying to set the record straight and clear his name. In a rare interview with Time, al-Zahawie outlined how forgery and circumstantial evidence was used to talk up Iraq's nuclear weapons threat, and leave him holding the smoking gun.
A few paragraphs later appear, the wonderful and unchallenged words from Zahawie: "Frankly, I didn't know that Niger produced uranium at all." Well, sorry for the inconvenience of the questions, then, my old IAEA and NPT "veteran" (whose nuclear qualifications go unmentioned in the Time article). Instead, we are told that Zahawie visited Niger and other West African countries to encourage them to break the embargo on flights to Baghdad, as they had broken the sanctions on Qaddafi's Libya. A bit of a lowly mission, one might think, for one of the Iraqi regime's most senior and specialized envoys.
The Duelfer Report also cites "a second contact between Iraq and Niger," which occurred in 2001, when a Niger minister visited Baghdad "to request assistance in obtaining petroleum products to alleviate Niger's economic problems." According to the deposition of Ja'far Diya' Ja'far (the head of Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear weapons program), these negotiations involved no offer of uranium ore but only "cash in exchange for petroleum." West Africa is awash in petroleum, and Niger is poor in cash. Iraq in 2001 was cash-rich through the oil-for-food racket, but you may if you wish choose to believe that a near-bankrupt African delegation from a uranium-based country traveled across a continent and a half with nothing on its mind but shopping for oil.
Interagency feuding has ruined the Bush administration's capacity to make its case in public, and a high-level preference for deniable leaking has further compounded the problem. But please read my first three paragraphs again and tell me if the original story still seems innocuous to you.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2139609/
-
Facing Down Iran
Our lives depend on it.
Mark Steyn
Most Westerners read the map of the world like a Broadway marquee: north is top of the bill?America, Britain, Europe, Russia?and the rest dribbles away into a mass of supporting players punctuated by occasional Star Guests: India, China, Australia. Everyone else gets rounded up into groups: ?Africa,? ?Asia,? ?Latin America.?
But if you?re one of the down-page crowd, the center of the world is wherever you happen to be. Take Iran: it doesn?t fit into any of the groups. Indeed, it?s a buffer zone between most of the important ones: to the west, it borders the Arab world; to the northwest, it borders NATO (and, if Turkey ever passes its endless audition, the European Union); to the north, the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation?s turbulent Caucasus; to the northeast, the Stans?the newly independent states of central Asia; to the east, the old British India, now bifurcated into a Muslim-Hindu nuclear standoff. And its southern shore sits on the central artery that feeds the global economy.
If you divide the world into geographical regions, then, Iran?s neither here nor there. But if you divide it ideologically, the mullahs are ideally positioned at the center of the various provinces of Islam?the Arabs, the Turks, the Stans, and the south Asians. Who better to unite the Muslim world under one inspiring, courageous leadership? If there?s going to be an Islamic superpower, Tehran would seem to be the obvious candidate.
That moment of ascendancy is now upon us. Or as the Daily Telegraph in London reported: ?Iran?s hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.? Hmm. I?m not a professional mullah, so I can?t speak to the theological soundness of the argument, but it seems a religious school in the Holy City of Qom has ruled that ?the use of nuclear weapons may not constitute a problem, according to sharia.? Well, there?s a surprise. How do you solve a problem? Like, sharia! It?s the one-stop shop for justifying all your geopolitical objectives.
The bad cop/worse cop routine the mullahs and their hothead President Ahmadinejad are playing in this period of alleged negotiation over Iran?s nuclear program is the best indication of how all negotiations with Iran will go once they?re ready to fly. This is the nuclear version of the NRA bumper sticker: ?Guns Don?t Kill People. People Kill People.? Nukes don?t nuke nations. Nations nuke nations. When the Argentine junta seized British sovereign territory in the Falklands, the generals knew that the United Kingdom was a nuclear power, but they also knew that under no conceivable scenario would Her Majesty?s Government drop the big one on Buenos Aires. The Argie generals were able to assume decency on the part of the enemy, which is a useful thing to be able to do.
But in any contretemps with Iran the other party would be foolish to make a similar assumption. That will mean the contretemps will generally be resolved in Iran?s favor. In fact, if one were a Machiavellian mullah, the first thing one would do after acquiring nukes would be to hire some obvious loon like President Ahmaddamatree to front the program. He?s the equivalent of the yobbo in the English pub who says, ?Oy, mate, you lookin? at my bird?? You haven?t given her a glance, or him; you?re at the other end of the bar head down in the Daily Mirror, trying not to catch his eye. You don?t know whether he?s longing to nut you in the face or whether he just gets a kick out of terrifying you into thinking he wants to. But, either way, you just want to get out of the room in one piece. Kooks with nukes is one-way deterrence squared.
If Belgium becomes a nuclear power, the Dutch have no reason to believe it would be a factor in, say, negotiations over a joint highway project. But Iran?s nukes will be a factor in everything. If you think, for example, the European Union and others have been fairly craven over those Danish cartoons, imagine what they?d be like if a nuclear Tehran had demanded a formal apology, a suitable punishment for the newspaper, and blasphemy laws specifically outlawing representations of the Prophet. Iran with nukes will be a suicide bomber with a radioactive waist.
If we?d understood Iran back in 1979, we?d understand better the challenges we face today. Come to that, we might not even be facing them. But, with hindsight, what strikes you about the birth of the Islamic Republic is the near total lack of interest by analysts in that adjective: Islamic. Iran was only the second Islamist state, after Saudi Arabia?and, in selecting as their own qualifying adjective the family name, the House of Saud at least indicated a conventional sense of priorities, as the legions of Saudi princes whoring and gambling in the fleshpots of the West have demonstrated exhaustively. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue?though, as the Royal Family has belatedly discovered vis-?-vis the Islamists, they?re somewhat overdrawn on that front. The difference in Iran is simple: with the mullahs, there are no London escort agencies on retainer to supply blondes only. When they say ?Islamic Republic,? they mean it. And refusing to take their words at face value has bedeviled Western strategists for three decades.
Twenty-seven years ago, because Islam didn?t fit into the old cold war template, analysts mostly discounted it. We looked at the map like that Broadway marquee: West and East, the old double act. As with most of the down-page turf, Iran?s significance lay in which half of the act she?d sign on with. To the Left, the shah was a high-profile example of an unsavory U.S. client propped up on traditional he-may-be-a-sonofabitch-but-he?s-our-sonofabitch grounds: in those heady days SAVAK, his secret police, were a household name among Western progressives, and insofar as they took the stern-faced man in the turban seriously, they assured themselves he was a kind of novelty front for the urbane Paris ?migr? socialists who accompanied him back to Tehran. To the realpolitik Right, the issue was Soviet containment: the shah may be our sonofabitch, but he?d outlived his usefulness, and a weak Iran could prove too tempting an invitation to Moscow to fulfill the oldest of czarist dreams?a warm-water port, not to mention control of the Straits of Hormuz. Very few of us considered the strategic implications of an Islamist victory on its own terms?the notion that Iran was checking the neither-of-the-above box and that that box would prove a far greater threat to the Freeish World than Communism.
But that was always Iran?s plan. In 1989, with the Warsaw Pact disintegrating before his eyes, poor beleaguered Mikhail Gorbachev received a helpful bit of advice from the cocky young upstart on the block: ?I strongly urge that in breaking down the walls of Marxist fantasies you do not fall into the prison of the West and the Great Satan,? Ayatollah Khomeini wrote to Moscow. ?I openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system.?
Today many people in the West don?t take that any more seriously than Gorbachev did. But it?s pretty much come to pass. As Communism retreated, radical Islam seeped into Africa and south Asia and the Balkans. Crazy guys holed up in Philippine jungles and the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay who?d have been ?Marxist fantasists? a generation or two back are now Islamists: it?s the ideology du jour. At the point of expiry of the Soviet Union in 1991, the peoples of the central Asian republics were for the most part unaware that Iran had even had an ?Islamic revolution?; 15 years on, following the proselytizing of thousands of mullahs dispatched to the region by a specially created Iranian government agency, the Stans? traditionally moderate and in many cases alcoholically lubricated form of Islam is yielding in all but the most remote areas to a fiercer form imported from the south. As the Pentagon has begun to notice, in Iraq Tehran has been quietly duplicating the strategy that delivered southern Lebanon into its control 20 years ago. The degeneration of Baby Assad?s supposedly ?secular? Baathist tyranny into full-blown client status and the replacement of Arafat?s depraved ?secular? kleptocrat terrorists by Hamas?s even more depraved Islamist terrorists can also be seen as symptoms of Iranification.
So as a geopolitical analyst the ayatollah is not to be disdained. Our failure to understand Iran in the seventies foreshadowed our failure to understand the broader struggle today. As clashes of civilizations go, this one?s between two extremes: on the one hand, a world that has everything it needs to wage decisive war?wealth, armies, industry, technology; on the other, a world that has nothing but pure ideology and plenty of believers. (Its sole resource, oil, would stay in the ground were it not for foreign technology, foreign manpower, and a Western fetishization of domestic environmental aesthetics.)
For this to be a mortal struggle, as the cold war was, the question is: Are they a credible enemy to us?
For a projection of the likely outcome, the question is: Are we a credible enemy to them?
Four years into the ?war on terror,? the Bush administration has begun promoting a new formulation: ?the long war.? Not a reassuring name. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs?our strengths. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower?their strengths, and our great weakness. Even a loser can win when he?s up against a defeatist. A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it?s dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us? If you add to the advantages of will and manpower a nuclear capability, the odds shift dramatically.
What, after all, is the issue underpinning every little goofy incident in the news, from those Danish cartoons of Mohammed to recommendations for polygamy by official commissions in Canada to the banning of the English flag in English prisons because it?s an insensitive ?crusader? emblem to the introduction of gender-segregated swimming sessions in municipal pools in Puget Sound? In a word, sovereignty. There is no god but Allah, and thus there is no jurisdiction but Allah?s. Ayatollah Khomeini saw himself not as the leader of a geographical polity but as a leader of a communal one: Islam. Once those urbane socialist ?migr?s were either dead or on the plane back to Paris, Iran?s nominally ?temporal? government took the same view, too: its role is not merely to run national highway departments and education ministries but to advance the cause of Islam worldwide.
If you dust off the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, Article One reads: ?The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.? Iran fails to meet qualification (d), and has never accepted it. The signature act of the new regime was not the usual post-coup bloodletting and summary execution of the shah?s mid-ranking officials but the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by ?students? acting with Khomeini?s blessing. Diplomatic missions are recognized as the sovereign territory of that state, and the violation thereof is an act of war. No one in Washington has to fret that Fidel Castro will bomb the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Even in the event of an actual war, the diplomatic staff of both countries would be allowed to depart.
Yet Iran seized protected persons on U.S. soil and held them prisoner for over a year?ostensibly because Washington was planning to restore the shah. But the shah died and the hostages remained. And, when the deal was eventually done and the hostages were released, the sovereign territory of the United States remained in the hands of the gangster regime. Granted that during the Carter administration the Soviets were gobbling up real estate from Afghanistan to Grenada, it?s significant that in this wretched era the only loss of actual U.S. territory was to the Islamists.
Yet Iran paid no price. They got away with it. For the purposes of comparison, in 1980, when the U.S. hostages in Tehran were in their sixth month of captivity, Iranians opposed to the mullahs seized the Islamic Republic?s embassy in London. After six days of negotiation, Her Majesty?s Government sent SAS commandos into the building and restored it to the control of the regime. In refusing to do the same with the ?students? occupying the U.S. embassy, the Islamic Republic was explicitly declaring that it was not as other states.
We expect multilateral human-rights Democrats to be unsatisfactory on assertive nationalism, but if they won?t even stand up for international law, what?s the point? Jimmy Carter should have demanded the same service as Tehran got from the British?the swift resolution of the situation by the host government?and, if none was forthcoming, Washington should have reversed the affront to international order quickly, decisively, and in a sufficiently punitive manner. At hinge moments of history, there are never good and bad options, only bad and much much worse. Our options today are significantly worse because we didn?t take the bad one back then.
With the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a British subject, Tehran extended its contempt for sovereignty to claiming jurisdiction over the nationals of foreign states, passing sentence on them, and conscripting citizens of other countries to carry it out. Iran?s supreme leader instructed Muslims around the world to serve as executioners of the Islamic Republic?and they did, killing not Rushdie himself but his Japanese translator, and stabbing the Italian translator, and shooting the Italian publisher, and killing three dozen persons with no connection to the book when a mob burned down a hotel because of the presence of the novelist?s Turkish translator.
Iran?s de facto head of state offered a multimillion-dollar bounty for a whack job on an obscure English novelist. And, as with the embassy siege, he got away with it.
In the latest variation on Marx?s dictum, history repeats itself: first, the unreadable London literary novel; then, the Danish funny pages. But in the 17 years between the Rushdie fatwa and the cartoon jihad, what was supposedly a freakish one-off collision between Islam and the modern world has become routine. We now think it perfectly normal for Muslims to demand the tenets of their religion be applied to society at large: the government of Sweden, for example, has been zealously closing down websites that republish those Danish cartoons. As Khomeini?s successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, has said, ?It is in our revolution?s interest, and an essential principle, that when we speak of Islamic objectives, we address all the Muslims of the world.? Or as a female Muslim demonstrator in Toronto put it: ?We won?t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.?
If that?s a little too ferocious, Kofi Annan framed it rather more soothingly: ?The offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were first published in a European country which has recently acquired a significant Muslim population, and is not yet sure how to adjust to it.?
If you?ve also ?recently acquired? a significant Muslim population and you?re not sure how to ?adjust? to it, well, here?s the difference: back when my Belgian grandparents emigrated to Canada, the idea was that the immigrants assimilated to the host country. As Kofi and Co. see it, today the host country has to assimilate to the immigrants: if Islamic law forbids representations of the Prophet, then so must Danish law, and French law, and American law. Iran was the progenitor of this rapacious extraterritoriality, and, if we had understood it more clearly a generation ago, we might be in less danger of seeing large tracts of the developed world being subsumed by it today.
Yet instead the West somehow came to believe that, in a region of authoritarian monarchs and kleptocrat dictators, Iran was a comparative beacon of liberty. The British foreign secretary goes to Tehran and hangs with the mullahs and, even though he?s not a practicing Muslim (yet), ostentatiously does that ?peace be upon him? thing whenever he mentions the Prophet Mohammed. And where does the kissy-face with the A-list imams get him? Ayatollah Khamenei renewed the fatwa on Rushdie only last year. True, President Bush identified Iran as a member of the axis of evil, but a year later the country was being hailed as a ?democracy? by then-deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage and a nation that has seen a ?democratic flowering,? as State Department spokesman Richard Boucher put it.
And let?s not forget Bill Clinton?s extraordinary remarks at Davos last year: ?Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency. It is there that the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority.? That?s true in the very narrow sense that there?s a certain similarity between his legal strategy and sharia when it comes to adultery and setting up the gals as the fall guys. But it seems Clinton apparently had a more general commonality in mind: ?In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.? America?s first black President is beginning to sound like America?s first Islamist ex-president.
Those remarks are as nutty as Gerald Ford?s denial of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. Iran has an impressive three-decade record of talking the talk and walking the walk?either directly or through client groups like Hezbollah. In 1994, the Argentine Israel Mutual Association was bombed in Buenos Aires. Nearly 100 people died and 250 were injured?the worst massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. An Argentine court eventually issued warrants for two Iranian diplomats plus Ali Fallahian, former intelligence minister, and Ali Akbar Parvaresh, former education minister and deputy speaker of the Majlis.
Why blow up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires? Because it?s there. Unlike the Iranian infiltration into Bosnia and Croatia, which helped radicalize not just the local populations but Muslim supporters from Britain and Western Europe, the random slaughter in the Argentine has no strategic value except as a demonstration of muscle and reach.
Anyone who spends half an hour looking at Iranian foreign policy over the last 27 years sees five things:
contempt for the most basic international conventions;
long-reach extraterritoriality;
effective promotion of radical Pan-Islamism;
a willingness to go the extra mile for Jew-killing (unlike, say, Osama);
an all-but-total synchronization between rhetoric and action.
Yet the Europeans remain in denial. Iran was supposedly the Middle Eastern state they could work with. And the chancellors and foreign ministers jetted in to court the mullahs so assiduously that they?re reluctant to give up on the strategy just because a relatively peripheral figure like the, er, head of state is sounding off about Armageddon.
Instead, Western analysts tend to go all Kremlinological. There are, after all, many factions within Iran?s ruling class. What the country?s quick-on-the-nuke president says may not be the final word on the regime?s position. Likewise, what the school of nuclear theologians in Qom says. Likewise, what former president Khatami says. Likewise, what Iran?s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, says.
But, given that they?re all in favor of the country having nukes, the point seems somewhat moot. The question then arises, what do they want them for?
By way of illustration, consider the country?s last presidential election. The final round offered a choice between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an alumnus of the U.S. Embassy siege a quarter-century ago, and Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of the Expediency Council, which sounds like an EU foreign policy agency but is, in fact, the body that arbitrates between Iran?s political and religious leaderships. Ahmadinejad is a notorious shoot-from-the-lip apocalyptic hothead who believes in the return of the Twelfth (hidden) Imam and quite possibly that he personally is his designated deputy, and he?s also claimed that when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly last year a mystical halo appeared and bathed him in its aura. Ayatollah Rafsanjani, on the other hand, is one of those famous ?moderates.?
What?s the difference between a hothead and a moderate? Well, the extremist Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be ?wiped off the map,? while the moderate Rafsanjani has declared that Israel is ?the most hideous occurrence in history,? which the Muslim world ?will vomit out from its midst? in one blast, because ?a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.? Evidently wiping Israel off the map seems to be one of those rare points of bipartisan consensus in Tehran, the Iranian equivalent of a prescription drug plan for seniors: we?re just arguing over the details.
So the question is: Will they do it?
And the minute you have to ask, you know the answer. If, say, Norway or Ireland acquired nuclear weapons, we might regret the ?proliferation,? but we wouldn?t have to contemplate mushroom clouds over neighboring states. In that sense, the civilized world has already lost: to enter into negotiations with a jurisdiction headed by a Holocaust-denying millenarian nut job is, in itself, an act of profound weakness?the first concession, regardless of what weaselly settlement might eventually emerge.
Conversely, a key reason to stop Iran is to demonstrate that we can still muster the will to do so. Instead, the striking characteristic of the long diplomatic dance that brought us to this moment is how September 10th it?s all been. The free world?s delegated negotiators (the European Union) and transnational institutions (the IAEA) have continually given the impression that they?d be content just to boot it down the road to next year or the year after or find some arrangement?this decade?s Oil-for-Food or North Korean deal?that would get them off the hook. If you talk to EU foreign ministers, they?ve already psychologically accepted a nuclear Iran. Indeed, the chief characteristic of the West?s reaction to Iran?s nuclearization has been an enervated fatalism.
Back when nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, your average Western progressive was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute. The mushroom cloud was one of the most familiar images in the culture, a recurring feature of novels and album covers and movie posters. There were bestselling dystopian picture books for children, in which the handful of survivors spent their last days walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now a state openly committed to the annihilation of a neighboring nation has nukes, and we shrug: Can?t be helped. Just the way things are. One hears sophisticated arguments that perhaps the best thing is to let everyone get ?em, and then no one will use them. And if Iran?s head of state happens to threaten to wipe Israel off the map, we should understand that this is a rhetorical stylistic device that?s part of the Persian oral narrative tradition, and it would be a grossly Eurocentric misinterpretation to take it literally.
The fatalists have a point. We may well be headed for a world in which anybody with a few thousand bucks and the right unlisted Asian phone numbers in his Rolodex can get a nuke. But, even so, there are compelling reasons for preventing Iran in particular from going nuclear. Back in his student days at the U.S. embassy, young Mr. Ahmadinejad seized American sovereign territory, and the Americans did nothing. And I would wager that?s still how he looks at the world. And, like Rafsanjani, he would regard, say, Muslim deaths in an obliterated Jerusalem as worthy collateral damage in promoting the greater good of a Jew-free Middle East. The Palestinians and their ?right of return? have never been more than a weapon of convenience with which to chastise the West. To assume Tehran would never nuke Israel because a shift in wind direction would contaminate Ramallah is to be as ignorant of history as most Palestinians are: from Yasser Arafat?s uncle, the pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, to the insurgents in Iraq today, Islamists have never been shy about slaughtering Muslims in pursuit of their strategic goals.
But it doesn?t have to come to that. Go back to that Argentine bombing. It was, in fact, the second major Iranian-sponsored attack in Buenos Aires. The year before, 1993, a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed 29 people and injured hundreds more in an attack on the Israeli Embassy. In the case of the community center bombing, the killer had flown from Lebanon a few days earlier and entered Latin America through the porous tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Suppose Iran had had a ?dirty nuke? shipped to Hezbollah, or even the full-blown thing: Would it have been any less easy to get it into the country? And, if a significant chunk of downtown Buenos Aires were rendered uninhabitable, what would the Argentine government do? Iran can project itself to South America effortlessly, but Argentina can?t project itself to the Middle East at all. It can?t nuke Tehran, and it can?t attack Iran in conventional ways.
So any retaliation would be down to others. Would Washington act? It depends how clear the fingerprints were. If the links back to the mullahs were just a teensy-weensy bit tenuous and murky, how eager would the U.S. be to reciprocate? Bush and Rumsfeld might?but an administration of a more Clinto-Powellite bent? How much pressure would there be for investigations under UN auspices? Perhaps Hans Blix could come out of retirement, and we could have a six-month dance through Security-Council coalition-building, with the secretary of state making a last-minute flight to Khartoum to try to persuade Sudan to switch its vote.
Perhaps it?s unduly pessimistic to write the civilized world automatically into what Osama bin Laden called the ?weak horse? role (Islam being the ?strong horse?). But, if you were an Iranian ?moderate? and you?d watched the West?s reaction to the embassy seizure and the Rushdie murders and Hezbollah terrorism, wouldn?t you be thinking along those lines? I don?t suppose Buenos Aires Jews expect to have their institutions nuked any more than 12 years ago they expected to be blown up in their own city by Iranian-backed suicide bombers. Nukes have gone freelance, and there?s nothing much we can do about that, and sooner or later we?ll see the consequences?in Vancouver or Rotterdam, Glasgow or Atlanta. But, that being so, we owe it to ourselves to take the minimal precautionary step of ending the one regime whose political establishment is explicitly pledged to the nuclear annihilation of neighboring states.
Once again, we face a choice between bad and worse options. There can be no ?surgical? strike in any meaningful sense: Iran?s clients on the ground will retaliate in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Europe. Nor should we put much stock in the country?s allegedly ?pro-American? youth. This shouldn?t be a touchy-feely nation-building exercise: rehabilitation may be a bonus, but the primary objective should be punishment?and incarceration. It?s up to the Iranian people how nutty a government they want to live with, but extraterritorial nuttiness has to be shown not to pay. That means swift, massive, devastating force that decapitates the regime?but no occupation.
The cost of de-nuking Iran will be high now but significantly higher with every year it?s postponed. The lesson of the Danish cartoons is the clearest reminder that what is at stake here is the credibility of our civilization. Whether or not we end the nuclearization of the Islamic Republic will be an act that defines our time.
A quarter-century ago, there was a minor British pop hit called ?Ayatollah, Don?t Khomeini Closer.? If you?re a U.S. diplomat or a British novelist, a Croat Christian or an Argentine Jew, he?s already come way too close. How much closer do you want him to get?
-
The New Republic Online
A CHILD OF THE REVOLUTION TAKES OVER.
Ahmadinejad's Demons
by Matthias K?ntzel
Post date: 04.14.06
Issue date: 04.24.06
During the Iran-Iraq War, the Ayatollah Khomeini imported 500,000 small
plastic keys from Taiwan. The trinkets were meant to be inspirational. After Iraq invaded in September 1980, it had quickly become clear that Iran's forces were no match for Saddam Hussein's professional, well-armed military. To compensate for their disadvantage, Khomeini sent Iranian children, some as young as twelve years old, to the front lines. There, they marched in formation across minefields toward the enemy, clearing a path with their bodies. Before every mission, one of the Taiwanese keys would be hung around each child's neck. It was supposed to open the gates to paradise for them.
At one point, however, the earthly gore became a matter of concern. "In the
past," wrote the semi-official Iranian daily Ettelaat as the war raged on,
"we had child-volunteers: 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds. They went into the
minefields. Their eyes saw nothing. Their ears heard nothing. And then, a
few moments later, one saw clouds of dust. When the dust had settled again,
there was nothing more to be seen of them. Somewhere, widely scattered in
the landscape, there lay scraps of burnt flesh and pieces of bone." Such
scenes would henceforth be avoided, Ettelaat assured its readers. "Before
entering the minefields, the children [now] wrap themselves in blankets and
they roll on the ground, so that their body parts stay together after the
explosion of the mines and one can carry them to the graves."
These children who rolled to their deaths were part of the Basiji, a mass
movement created by Khomeini in 1979 and militarized after the war started
in order to supplement his beleaguered army.The Basij Mostazafan--or
"mobilization of the oppressed"--was essentially a volunteer militia, most
of whose members were not yet 18. They went enthusiastically, and by the
thousands, to their own destruction. "The young men cleared the mines with
their own bodies," one veteran of the Iran-Iraq War recalled in 2002 to the
German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine. "It was sometimes like a race. Even
without the commander's orders, everyone wanted to be first."
The sacrifice of the Basiji was ghastly. And yet, today, it is a source not
of national shame, but of growing pride. Since the end of hostilities
against Iraq in 1988, the Basiji have grown both in numbers and influence.
They have been deployed, above all, as a vice squad to enforce religious law
in Iran, and their elite "special units" have been used as shock troops
against anti-government forces. In both 1999 and 2003, for instance, the
Basiji were used to suppress student unrest. And, last year, they formed the
potent core of the political base that propelled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--a man
who reportedly served as a Basij instructor during the Iran-Iraq War--to the
presidency.
Ahmadinejad revels in his alliance with the Basiji. He regularly appears in
public wearing a black-and-white Basij scarf, and, in his speeches, he
routinely praises "Basij culture" and "Basij power," with which he says
"Iran today makes its presence felt on the international and diplomatic
stage." Ahmadinejad's ascendance on the shoulders of the Basiji means that
the Iranian Revolution, launched almost three decades ago, has entered a new
and disturbing phase. A younger generation of Iranians, whose worldviews
were forged in the atrocities of the Iran-Iraq War, have come to power,
wielding a more fervently ideological approach to politics than their
predecessors. The children of the Revolution are now its leaders.
In 1980, the Ayatollah Khomeini called the Iraqi invasion of Iran a "divine
blessing," because the war provided him the perfect opportunity to Islamize
both Iranian society and the institutions of the Iranian state. As Saddam's
troops pushed into Iran, Khomeini's fanatically devoted Revolutionary Guard
moved rapidly to mobilize and prepare their air and sea forces. At the same
time, the regime hastened to develop the Basiji as a popular militia.
Whereas the Revolutionary Guard consisted of professionally trained adult
soldiers, the Basiji was essentially composed of boys between twelve and 17
and men over 45. Photo by Reuters/NewscomThey received only a few weeks of
training--less in weapons and tactics than in theology. Most Basiji came
from the countryside and were often illiterate. When their training was
done, each Basiji received a blood-red headband that designated him a
volunteer for martyrdom. According to Sepehr Zabih's The Iranian Military in
Revolution and War, such volunteers made up nearly one-third of the Iranian
army--and the majority of its infantry.
The chief combat tactic employed by the Basiji was the human wave attack,
whereby barely armed children and teenagers would move continuously toward
the enemy in perfectly straight rows. It did not matter whether they fell to
enemy fire or detonated the mines with their bodies: The important thing was
that the Basiji continue to move forward over the torn and mutilated remains
of their fallen comrades, going to their deaths in wave after wave. Once a
path to the Iraqi forces had been opened up, Iranian commanders would send
in their more valuable and skilled Revolutionary Guard troops.
This approach produced some undeniable successes. "They come toward our
positions in huge hordes with their fists swinging," one Iraqi officer
complained in the summer of 1982. "You can shoot down the first wave and
then the second. But at some point the corpses are piling up in front of
you, and all you want to do is scream and throw away your weapon. Those are
human beings, after all!" By the spring of 1983, some 450,000 Basiji had
been sent to the front. After three months, those who survived deployment
were sent back to their schools or workplaces.
But three months was a long time on the front lines. In 1982, during the
retaking of the city of Khorramshahr, 10,000 Iranians died. Following
"Operation Kheiber," in February 1984, the corpses of some 20,000 fallen
Iranians were left on the battlefield. The "Karbala Four" offensive in 1986
cost the lives of more than 10,000 Iranians. All told, some 100,000 men and
boys are said to have been killed during Basiji operations. Why did the
Basiji volunteer for such duty?
Most of them were recruited by members of the Revolutionary Guards, which
commanded the Basiji. These "special educators" would visit schools and
handpick their martyrs from the paramilitary exercises in which all Iranian
youth were required to participate. Propaganda films--like the 1986 TV film
A Contribution to the War--praised this alliance between students and the
regime and undermined those parents who tried to save their children's
lives. (At the time, Iranian law allowed children to serve even if their
families objected.) Some parents, however, were lured by incentives. In a
campaign called "Sacrifice a Child for the Imam," every family that lost a
child on the battlefield was offered interest-free credit and other generous
benefits. Moreover, enrollment in the Basiji gave the poorest of the poor a
chance for social advancement.
Still others were coerced into "volunteering." In 1982, the German weekly
Der Spiegel documented the story of a twelve-year-old boy named Hossein, who
enlisted with the Basiji despite having polio:
One day, some unknown imams turned up in the village. They called the
whole population to the plaza in front of the police station, and they
announced that they came with good news from Imam Khomeini: The Islamic Army
of Iran had been chosen to liberate the holy city Al Quds--Jerusalem--from
the infidels. ... The local mullah had decided that every family with
children would have to furnish one soldier of God. Because Hossein was the
most easily expendable for his family, and because, in light of his illness,
he could in any case not expect much happiness in this life, he was chosen
by his father to represent the family in the struggle against the infidel
devils.
Of the 20 children that went into battle with Hossein, only he and two
others survived.
But, if such methods explained some of why they volunteered, it did not
explain the fervor with which they rushed to their destruction. That can
only be elucidated by the Iranian Revolution's peculiar brand of Islam.
At the beginning of the war, Iran's ruling mullahs did not send human beings
into the minefields, but rather animals: donkeys, horses, and dogs. But the
tactic proved useless: Photo by Gamma Presse/Newscom"After a few donkeys had
been blown up, the rest ran off in terror," Mostafa Arki reports in his book
Eight Years of War in the Middle East. The donkeys reacted normally--fear of
death is natural. The Basiji, on the other hand, marched fearlessly and
without complaint to their deaths. The curious slogans that they chanted
while entering the battlefields are of note: "Against the Yazid of our
time!"; "Hussein's caravan is moving on!"; "A new Karbala awaits us!"
Yazid, Hussein, Karbala--these are all references to the founding myth of
Shia Islam. In the late seventh century, Islam was split between those loyal
to the Caliph Yazid--the predecessors of Sunni Islam--and the founders of
Shia Islam, who thought that the Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet
Muhammad, should govern the Muslims. In 680, Hussein led an uprising against
the "illegitimate" caliph, but he was betrayed. On the plain of Karbala, on
the tenth day of the month of Muharram, Yazid's forces attacked Hussein and
his entourage and killed them. Hussein's corpse bore the marks of 33 lance
punctures and 34 blows of the sword.
His head was cut off and his body was trampled by horses. Ever since, the
martyrdom of Hussein has formed the core of Shia theology, and the Ashura
Festival that commemorates his death is Shiism's holiest day. On that day,
men beat themselves with their fists or flagellate themselves with iron
chains to approximate Hussein's sufferings. At times throughout the
centuries, the ritual has grown obscenely violent. In his study Crowds and
Power, Elias Canetti recounts a firsthand report of the Ashura Festival as
it occurred in mid-nineteenth-century Tehran:
500,000 people, in the grip of delirium, cover their heads with ashes
and beat their foreheads against the ground. They want to subject themselves
voluntarily to torments: to commit suicide en masse, to mutilate themselves
with refinement. ... Hundreds of men in white shirts come by, their faces
ecstatically raised toward the sky. Of these, several will be dead this
evening, many will be maimed and mutilated, and the white shirts, dyed red,
will be burial shrouds. ... There is no more beautiful destiny than to die
on the Festival of Ashura. The gates of the eight Paradises are wide open
for the holy and everyone tries to get through them.
Bloody excesses of this sort are prohibited in contemporary Iran, but,
during the Iran-Iraq War, Khomeini appropriated the essence of the ritual as
a symbolic act and politicized it. He took the inward-directed fervor and
channeled it toward the external enemy. He transformed the passive
lamentation into active protest. He made the Battle of Karbala the prototype
of any fight against tyranny. Indeed, this technique had been used during
political demonstrations in 1978, when many Iranian protestors wore funeral
shrouds in order to tie the battle of 680 to the contemporary struggle
against the shah. In the war against Iraq, the allusions to Karbala were
given still greater significance: On the one hand, the scoundrel Yazid, now
in the form of Saddam Hussein; on the other, the Prophet's grandson,
Hussein, for whose suffering the time of Shia revenge had finally come.
The power of this story was further reinforced by a theological twist that
Khomeini gave it. According to Khomeini, life is worthless and death is the
beginning of genuine existence. "The natural world," he explained in October
1980, "is the lowest element, the scum of creation. "What is decisive is the
beyond: The "divine world, that is eternal." This latter world is accessible
to martyrs. Their death is no death, but merely the transition from this
world to the world beyond, where they will live on eternally and in
splendor. Whether the warrior wins the battle or loses it and dies a
Martyr--in both cases, his victory is assured: either a mundane or a
spiritual one.
This attitude had a fatal implication for the Basiji: Whether they survived
or not was irrelevant. Not even the tactical utility of their sacrifice
mattered. Military victories are secondary, Khomeini explained in September
1980.The Basiji must "understand that he is a 'soldier of God' for whom it
is not so much the outcome of the conflict as the mere participation in it
that provides fulfillment and gratification." Could Khomeini's antipathy for
life have had as much effect in the war against Iraq without the Karbala
myth? Probably not.With the word "Karbala" on their lips, the Basiji went
elatedly into battle.
For those whose courage still waned in the face of death, the regime put on
a show. A mysterious horseman on a magnificent steed would suddenly appear
on the front lines. His face--covered in phosphorous--would shine. His
costume was that of a medieval prince. A child soldier, Reza Behrouzi, whose
story was documented in 1985 by French writer Freidoune Sehabjam, reported
that the soldiers reacted with a mixture of panic and rapture.
Everyone wanted to run toward the horseman. But he drove them away.
"Don't come to me!" he shouted, "Charge into battle against the infidels!
... Revenge the death of our Imam Hussein and strike down the progeny of
Yazid!" As the figure disappears, the soldiers cry: "Oh, Imam Zaman, where
are you?" They throw themselves on their knees, and pray and wail. When the
figure appears again, they get to their feet as a single man. Those whose
forces are not yet exhausted charge the enemy lines.
The mysterious apparition who was able to trigger such emotions is the
"hidden imam," a mythical figure who influences the thought and action of
Ahmadinejad to this day. The Shia call all the male descendants of the
Prophet Muhammad "imams" and ascribe to them a quasidivine status. Hussein,
who was killed at Karbala by Yazid, was the third Imam. His son and grandson
were the fourth and fifth. At the end of this line, there is the "Twelfth
Imam," who is named Muhammad. Some call him the Mahdi (the "divinely guided
one"), though others say imam Zaman (from sahib-e zaman: "the ruler of
time"). He was born in 869, the only son of the eleventh Imam. In 874, he
disappeared without a trace, thereby bringing Muhammad's lineage to a close.
In Shia mythology, however, the Twelfth Imam survived. The Shia believe that
he merely withdrew from public view when he was five and that he will sooner
or later emerge from his "occultation" in order to liberate the world from
evil.
Writing in the early '80s, V. S. Naipaul showed how deeply rooted the belief
in the coming of the Shia messiah is among the Iranian population. In Among
the Believers: An Islamic Journey, he described seeing posters in
post-Revolutionary Tehran bearing motifs similar to those of Maoist China:
crowds, for instance, with rifles and machine guns raised in the air as if
in greeting. The posters always bore the same phrase: twelfth imam, we are
waiting for you. Naipaul writes that he could grasp intellectually the
veneration for Khomeini. "But the idea of the revolution as something more,
as an offering to the Twelfth Imam, the man who had vanished ... and
remained 'in occultation,' was harder to seize." According to Shia
tradition, legitimate Islamic rule can only be established following the
reappearance of the Twelfth Imam. Until that time, the Shia have only to
wait, to keep their peace with illegitimate rule, and to remember the
Prophet's grandson, Hussein, in sorrow. Khomeini, however, had no intention
of waiting. He vested the myth with an entirely new sense: The Twelfth Imam
will only emerge when the believers have vanquished evil. To speed up the
Mahdi's return, Muslims had to shake off their torpor and fight.
This activism had more in common with the revolutionary ideas of Egypt's
Muslim Brotherhood than with Shia traditions. Khomeini had been familiar
with the texts of the Muslim Brothers since the 1930s, and he agreed with
the Brothers' conception of what had to be considered "evil": namely, all
the achievements of modernity that replaced divine providence with
individual self-determination, blind faith with doubt, and the stern
morality of sharia with sensual pleasures. According to legend, Yazid was
the embodiment of everything that was forbidden: He drank wine, enjoyed
music and song, and played with dogs and monkeys. And was not Saddam just
the same? In the war against Iraq, "evil" was clearly defined, and
vanquishing evil was the precondition for hastening the return of the
beloved Twelfth Imam. When he let himself be seen for a few minutes riding
his white steed, the readiness to die a martyr's death increased
considerably.
It was this culture that nurtured Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's worldview. Born
outside Tehran in 1956, the son of blacksmith, he trained as a civil
engineer, and, during the Iran-Iraq War, he joined the Revolutionary Guards.
His biography remains strangely elliptical. Did he play a role in the 1979
takeover of the U.S. Embassy, as some charge? What exactly did he do during
the war? These are questions for which we have no definite answers. His
presidential website says simply that he was "on active service as a Basij
volunteer up to the end of the holy defense [the war against Iraq] and
served as a combat engineer in different spheres of duty."
We do know that, after the war's end, he served as the governor of Ardebil
Province and as an organizer of Ansar-e Hezbollah, a radical gang of violent
Islamic vigilantes. After becoming mayor of Tehran in April 2003,
Ahmadinejad used his position to build up a strong network of radical
Islamic fundamentalists known as Abadgaran-e Iran-e Islami, or Developers of
an Islamic Iran. It was in that role that he won his reputation--and
popularity--as a hardliner devoted to rolling back the liberal reforms of
then-President Muhammad Khatami. Ahmadinejad positioned himself as the
leader of a "second revolution" to eradicate corruption and Western
influences from Iranian society. And the Basiji, whose numbers had grown
dramatically since the end of the Iran-Iraq War, embraced him. Recruited
from the more conservative and impoverished parts of the population, the
Basiji fall under the direction of--and swear absolute loyalty to--the
Supreme Leader Ali Khameini, Khomeini's successor. During Ahmadinejad's run
for the presidency in 2005, the millions of Basiji--in every Iranian town,
neighborhood, and mosque--became his unofficial campaign workers.
Since Ahmadinejad became president, the influence of the Basiji has grown.
In November, the new Iranian president opened the annual "Basiji Week,"
which commemorates the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War. According to a report
in Kayan, a publication loyal to Khameini, some nine million Basiji--12
percent of the Iranian population--turned out to demonstrate in favor of
Ahmadinejad's anti-liberal platform. The article claimed that the
demonstrators "form[ed] a human chain some 8,700 kilometers long. ... In
Tehran alone, some 1,250,000 people turned out." Barely noticed by the
Western media, this mobilization attests to Ahmadinejad's determination to
impose his "second revolution" and to extinguish the few sparks of freedom
in Iran.
At the end of July 2005, the Basij movement announced plans to increase its
membership from ten million to 15 million by 2010. The elite special units
are supposed to comprise some 150,000 people by then. Accordingly, the
Basiji have received new powers in their function as an unofficial division
of the police. What this means in practice became clear in February 2006,
when the Basiji attacked the leader of the bus-drivers' union, Massoud
Osanlou. They held Osanlou prisoner in his apartment, and they cut off the
tip of his tongue in order to convince him to keep quiet. No Basiji needs to
fear prosecution for such terrorists tactics before a court of law.
As Basij ideology and influence enjoy a renaissance under Ahmadinejad, the
movement's belief in the virtues of violent self-sacrifice remains intact.
There is no "truth commission" in Iran to investigate the state-planned
collective suicide that took place from 1980 to 1988. Instead, every Iranian
is taught the virtues of martyrdom from childhood. Obviously, many of them
reject the Basij teachings. Still, everyone knows the name of Hossein
Fahmideh, who, as a 13-year-old boy during the war, blew himself up in front
of an Iraqi tank. His image follows Iranians throughout their day: whether
on postage stamps or the currency. If you hold up a 500 Rial bill to the
light, it is his face you will see in the watermark. The self-destruction of
Fahmideh is depicted as a model of profound faith by the Iranian press. It
has been the subject of both an animated film and an episode of the TV
series "Children of Paradise." As a symbol of their readiness to die for the
Revolution, Basij groups wear white funeral shrouds over their uniforms
during public appearances.
During this year's Ashura Festival, school classes were taken on excursions
to a "Martyrs' Cemetery." "They wear headbands painted with the name
Hussein," The New York Times reported, "and march beneath banners that read:
'Remembering the Martyrs today is as important as becoming a Martyr' and
'The Nation for whom Martyrdom means happiness, will always be Victorious.'
" Since 2004, the mobilization of Iranians for suicide brigades has
intensified, with recruits being trained for foreign missions. Thus, a
special military unit has been created bearing the name "Commando of
Voluntary Martyrs. "According to its own statistics, this force has so far
recruited some 52,000 Iranians to the suicidal cause. It aims to form a
"martyrdom unit" in every Iranian province.
The Basiji's cult of self-destruction would be chilling in any country. In
the context of the Iranian nuclear program, however, its obsession with
martyrdom amounts to a lit fuse. Nowadays, Basiji are sent not into the
desert, but rather into the laboratory. Basij students are encouraged to
enroll in technical and scientific disciplines. According to a spokesperson
for the Revolutionary Guard, the aim is to use the "technical factor" in
order to augment "national security."
What exactly does that mean? Consider that, in December 2001, former Iranian
President Hashemi Rafsanjani explained that "the use of even one nuclear
bomb inside Israel will destroy everything." On the other hand, if Israel
responded with its own nuclear weapons, it "will only harm the Islamic
world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality." Rafsanjani
thus spelled out a macabre cost-benefit analysis. It might not be possible
to destroy Israel without suffering retaliation. But, for Islam, the level
of damage Israel could inflict is bearable--only 100,000 or so additional
martyrs for Islam.
And Rafsanjani is a member of the moderate, pragmatic wing of the Iranian
Revolution; he believes that any conflict ought to have a "worthwhile"
outcome. Ahmadinejad, by contrast, is predisposed toward apocalyptic
thinking. In one of his first TV interviews after being elected president,
he enthused: "Is there an art that is more beautiful, more divine, more
eternal than the art of the martyr's death?" In September 2005, he concluded
his first speech before the United Nations by imploring God to bring about
the return of the Twelfth Imam. He finances a research institute in Tehran
whose sole purpose is to study, and, if possible, accelerate the coming of
the imam. And, at a theology conference in November 2005, he stressed, "The
most important task of our Revolution is to prepare the way for the return
of the Twelfth Imam."
A politics pursued in alliance with a supernatural force is necessarily
unpredictable.Why should an Iranian president engage in pragmatic politics
when his assumption is that, in three or four years, the savior will appear?
If the messiah is coming, why compromise? That is why, up to now,
Ahmadinejad has pursued confrontational policies with evident pleasure.
The history of the Basiji shows that we must expect monstrosities from the
current Iranian regime. Already, what began in the early '80s with the
clearing of minefields by human detonators has spread throughout the Middle East, as suicide bombing has become the terrorist tactic of choice. The motivational shows in the desert--with hired actors in the role of the
hidden imam--have evolved into a showdown between a zealous Iranian
president and the Western world. And the Basiji who once upon a time
wandered the desert armed only with a walking stick is today working as a
chemist in a uranium enrichment facility.
Matthias K?ntzel is a political scientist in Hamburg, Germany, and author of Djihad und Judenhass (or Jihad and Jew-Hatred).
-
May 3, 2006
A funny thing happened on the way to the Iranian bomb: The more alarming the mullahs' behavior, the more nonchalant the rest of the world seems to be about it. But one development may give even the most adamant pooh-poohers pause.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last month announced that Iran had enriched uranium to reactor-grade levels in a 164-centrifuge cascade, a major technical achievement that puts Iran within hopping distance of an actual bomb. Mr. Ahmadinejad followed this up by announcing that Iran was working on an advanced centrifuge of Pakistani design, the possession of which Iran had previously denied to inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Next, Iran rebuffed IAEA requests to inspect the new centrifuges, a violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to which Iran is a signatory. Iran then threatened to withdraw from the NPT altogether if the United Nations imposed sanctions for its violations thereof. Iran ignored Friday's deadline from the U.N. Security Council to stop enriching uranium. Instead Tehran simply repeated a long-standing offer to allow additional inspections if the Security Council drops the issue.
Israeli intelligence also reports last week that Iran has purchased an upgraded version of the Soviet SS-6 ballistic missile from North Korea, which is capable of carrying a nuclear payload and has a range of about 1,600 miles, putting parts of Europe well within range.
And the international community's response? Russia and China, both veto-wielding members of the Security Council, are adamantly opposed to U.N. sanctions on Iran. Their view is mainly shared by Richard Lugar, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Committee, who thinks President Bush "ought to cool this one" by negotiating directly with Tehran.
In Europe, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw has reportedly told Cabinet colleagues that it would be "illegal" for Britain to participate in any prospective military action against Iran. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier agrees: "We will not stop Iran with war," he recently told the news weekly Der Spiegel.
Which brings us to Iran's latest. Last week, the Associated Press reported that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, offered to share the nuclear genie with Sudan. "The Islamic Republic of Iran is prepared to transfer the experience, knowledge and technology of its scientists," Mr. Khamenei told visiting Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Mr. Bashir, whose government abets the massacre of Darfuris, says Sudan could use a nuclear reactor to generate electricity. Uh huh.
How so many apparently thoughtful people can face the idea of an Iranian bomb with relative equanimity remains a mystery to us. Whether they are as "cool" with the idea of fissile material in Mr. Bashir's hands is another matter. Whatever the case, they should consider that acquiescing to a bomb for Iran may also mean agreeing to one for many more of the world's worst actors.
-
Iraq: If Not Now, When?
By George Friedman
If there is an endgame to the American presence in Iraq, it is now. The Iraqis have reached a general compromise on the composition of a new government. The agreement was blessed by the joint visit to Baghdad of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. There also have been statements -- though later retracted -- by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani that U.S. and Iranian officials have held meetings in Dokan, a city in the northern Kurdish region. Talabani also has said that he and American officials had met with the leaders of seven separate Sunni guerrilla groups and that he expected to meet with others who had taken up arms against the occupation.
The formation of the government was preceded and succeeded by a complex series of negotiations in which there are at least five sides, each of which (including the United States at this point) is factionalized. There are the three main Iraqi players -- Shia, Kurds and Sunnis -- plus the United States and Iran. That makes for a complex negotiation and one that can readily fail. The endgame could turn into the beginning of an entirely new round of warfare and chaos. But this much can be said: If no agreement can be reached now, it is hard to imagine how an agreement will be reached in the future. If not now, when? The times will not be more propitious than they are now.
Each party has an interest in a settlement. Each side could lose as much as it might gain in the future. The three internal factions -- Shia, Sunnis and Kurds -- are all getting substantially less than they wanted, but each could possibly lose even more if the fighting continues. The external powers, the United States and Iran, face similar circumstances. Certainly, everyone wants to explore what a settlement would look like, hence the flurry of very quiet and highly deniable meetings and discussions. It may work or it may fall apart, but it would seem to be the time to examine each side's bargaining position and what they are likely to settle for.
United States
The Americans came in with the goal of occupying Iraq, reshaping its society to suit them and using Iraq as a base from which to project power and influence throughout the region. However, the war did not go as they hoped or expected. The United States defeated the Iraqi army but found itself facing a Sunni insurgency and complex Shiite political maneuvers. The goal of reshaping Iraqi society is gone; the possibility of influencing the future structure and policy of any emerging Iraqi government remains. Iraq has not served as a platform from which to project power. Rather, it has served as a magnet that attracted outside forces. However, the possibility of some agreement that would allow the United States to base forces in Iraq is not out of the question.
At this point, however, the primary American goal is to hand off responsibility for providing security in Iraq. The U.S. military has not been able to provide security under any circumstances. It clearly cannot suppress the Sunni insurgency -- but in its current posture, the United States continues to carry the burden of counterinsurgency operations without any real expectation of success. Leaving aside the fact that the United States continues to absorb casualties, there are now more than 100,000 troops in Iraq -- a number that is obviously insufficient for the mission, but which drains U.S. logistical and manpower resources to a degree that dealing with unexpected crises elsewhere in the world would be difficult.
Since this position is untenable, the United States must make a move.
One option would be to surge additional force into Iraq. The current political configuration in the United States does not make that an option for the Bush administration, even if this was wished, and even if a surge of troops would suppress the Sunni insurrection. Therefore, the United States has two pressing goals. First, it must abandon the mission of counterinsurgency, transferring it in some way to Iraqi forces. Second, it needs to withdraw its forces from Iraq. Ideally, the United States would not withdraw all forces but would leave behind enough to serve as a rapid-reaction force in the region. This force would be based outside of populated areas. However, the basing issue is secondary to the withdrawal issue.
In addition, and of great strategic importance to the United States, the government of Iraq must not become a client of Iran. Given the size of the Shiite population in Iraq, guaranteeing this outcome will not be easy, but it is clearly the focus of U.S. negotiations at this time. If Iraq were to become a client of the Shiite regime in Tehran, then the entire balance of power in the region would tilt in favor of Iran, putting the Arabian Peninsula at risk. That is something that the United States (not to mention others, like Saudi Arabia) would find intolerable. Faced with a choice of continued inconclusive warfare and an Iran-dominated Iraq, the United States would likely choose warfare. That is how high the stakes would be. Therefore, the key negotiating strategy for the United States is to find a way to withdraw its forces from Iraq -- possibly leaving a residual force behind -- after creating a government in Baghdad that would be able to balance or buffer Iran.
In other words, at this point, American policy in Iraq is to restore the status quo prior to 2003, with a different regime in Baghdad and the possibility of an ongoing, noninvolved American military presence in the country.
Iran
In Iran's ideal scenario, Iraq would become a satellite state. This would involve the installation of a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad so beholden to Iran that Iraq essentially would be an extension of Iran. If that were to happen, Iran would have achieved the geopolitical goal of major-power status: It would be the unchallenged native power in the Persian Gulf. Given the existence of indigenous Shiite populations throughout the Arabian Peninsula, Iran not only would be in a position to influence events in other countries, but would have the opportunity to use direct force against them.
The prize would be Saudi Arabia. If Iraq fell under Iranian control, the road to the oil fields of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states would be wide open. Other than the United States, there would be no power in a position to block the Iranians.
For Iran, this would be more than a matter of oil. If Iraq belonged to Iran and no outside power intervened, Shiite power could be amplified in the region. Sunnis, of course, vastly outnumber Shia within the Muslim world -- a structural impediment that, realistically, constrains Iran's ability to project itself as the leader of the Islamic world. Nonetheless, Iran has a need to burnish its credentials in this area and to be viewed as a regional hegemon. Control of Gulf oil would make Iran a regional power, but a rebalancing of Sunni and Shiite influence within the region would be heady stuff indeed.
In order for Iran to achieve this goal, the United States would have to withdraw from Iraq without having created a force that could block Iranian ambitions. Having the United States invade Iraq was in the Iranian interest because it got rid of Saddam Hussein. Having the Americans bog down in an endless war was in the Iranian interest because it offered the best chance of achieving Tehran's ultimate ambition. Iran has, therefore, been torn between two realities: On the one hand, in order to achieve its ambition, Iran needed a strong Sunni insurgency in Iraq -- but on the other, if a strong Sunni insurgency existed, Tehran's desire for the complete domination of Iraq could be thwarted.
Iran wound up with its own worst-case scenario. First, the Sunni insurgency swelled, creating a force that could not easily be controlled by the Shia. Second, the United States showed more endurance than the Iranians had hoped. In due course, the Iranian threat actually created a bizarre circumstance in which the United States and the Sunnis were simultaneously fighting and working together to block Iranian aspirations -- the Sunnis by demanding participation in the Iraqi government, and the United States by supporting their demands. Out of this came a third undesirable outcome: The Iraqi Shia, seeing themselves trapped between Iranian geopolitical ambitions and the threat of civil war without American protection, moved away from dependency on Iran and toward a much more complex position.
Unless the Sunnis were suddenly to collapse and the Americans were simply to withdraw, Iran no longer can expect to create a protectorate in Iraq. Its current goal must be much more modest: It must have an Iraq that is no threat to Iran. To this end, the Iranians need several things:
1. Guarantees as to the size and armament of the future Iraqi armed forces; they can be sufficient for internal security and defense but must not have offensive capability.
2. A degree of control over the makeup of the Iraqi government -- in particular, the right to block any appointment that is too close to the former Baathist elite and would have too much control over the defense or intelligence establishments.
3. Strict limits on Kurdish autonomy in order to guarantee that Kurdish separatism does not spill over into Iran. In this, the Iranians have an ally in Turkey.
4. A tight timeline for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces.
In the back of their minds, the Iranians will accept these conditions as a major improvement over the status quo of 2003, but they will always see this as a springboard for their deeper ambitions. They will take a deal that keeps Iraq weak and gets the Americans out.
The Shia
As we have noted previously, the Shia are fragmented and have a complex bargaining position as a result. However, two irreducible elements are present. First, the Shia do not want the Sunnis to return to a dominant political position in Iraq. This is essential and non-negotiable. Second, they want to be in a position to control Iraq's oil economy and the various industries that support it. In other words, the Shia want to control Iraq's government.
Until the first battle of Al Fallujah, it appeared that Washington would give them that prize -- but when the Americans entered into negotiations with the Sunni insurgents, it became clear that the United States was not going to simply play that role. The Shia then counted on Sunni intransigence -- which evaporated in December 2005, when the Sunnis participated in elections. The vigor of the Sunni rising eliminated the likelihood that it could be suppressed, except at a price to the Shia that they were unwilling to pay. The Shia, therefore, had to face either perpetual and uncertain civil war or accept the idea of Sunni participation in the government.
They had already abandoned the idea of complete control of Iraq's oil when they entered into an alliance with the Kurds. It was not clear who would control the northern oil regions, but it was not going to be the Shia. With the entry of the Sunnis into the government, the Shia accepted the idea that they would lead but not control the Iraqi government. Therefore, their position on oil became a regional rather than national position. For the Shia, the key now is to guarantee that a substantial portion of southern oil wealth remains under Shiite control and is not simply controlled by the government.
The Iraqi Shia remain heavily influenced by Iran, but they understand that playing Iran's game could decimate them. They will settle for control of the key ministries in Baghdad and a large piece of the southern oil economy. When the Americans leave, and in what sequence, is of far less interest to them than the control of the economy.
The Sunnis
The Sunnis have gone from being the dominant power in Iraq to being a minority ethnic group, and the only one of the three with no oil clearly in their territory. At the same time, their insurgency has achieved what it was designed to do: The Sunnis have not become an irrelevant force in Iraq. The ability to sustain an insurrection against the Americans as well as to strike against the Shia established that it would be better to include them in a political settlement than to exclude them. Their skillful use of the jihadist threat particularly drove home the fact that they could not simply be ignored. By portraying the jihadists as an uncontrollable outside force, the Sunnis set themselves up as the only force that could control the jihadists. That was their key bargaining chip, and they used it well.
The interests of the Sunnis are relatively simple. First, they want to participate in the Iraqi government. Second, they want a share of Iraq's oil income and a degree of control over the northern oil fields. Third -- and this will complicate attempts to convince insurgents to give up weapons -- they want American forces to remain in-country in order to guarantee that the Shia don't attack them, that Iran does not intervene and that the Iraqi government does not fall under Iranian control. The Sunnis may dream of regaining the power and privilege they enjoyed in Baathist Iraq, but in practical terms, they have shed a huge amount of blood simply in order not to be dismissed while Iraq's future is shaped.
The Kurds
The Kurds want, ideally, an independent nation. That means going to war with Iran, Turkey and Syria -- therefore, they will not get an independent nation. They can gain a degree of autonomy in Iraq, but the degree will depend less on the Sunnis and Shia, who have other issues to worry about, than it will on Tehran, Ankara and Damascus, none of whom want the Kurds to have too much autonomy. The Americans have been the guarantors of autonomy for the Kurds in Iraq since 1991. However, the Americans also want to get out of the business of guaranteeing things in Iraq. The Turks and Iranians both have leverage with the Americans. Therefore, the United States, as part of its exit strategy, might well become the force to contain the Kurds.
The second issue for the Kurds is oil. They are the dominant population in the north, where some of Iraq's significant oil fields are located, and they want to consolidate their hold. Some Shia are amenable to this, but the Sunnis want a share in Kurdish oil. The Sunnis ultimately will not participate in an arrangement in which the Shia and Kurds draw oil wealth directly but in which the Sunnis have access to it only after it is disbursed through the central government. Had the Sunnis not fought so tenaciously, they perhaps could have been ignored. Ignoring them now is dangerous. Therefore, the issue for the Kurds is precisely how much they will have to give the Sunnis directly. This is a matter of money and, in the end, money matters are negotiable.
The Kurds know they will not get a Kurdish state that incorporates Iranian and Turkish Kurds at this time. They also believe that if they gain a degree of autonomy and oil wealth, they will be in a position to take advantage of other opportunities later. If not, there is still the oil wealth.
Conclusion
There is a basic understanding of what is possible currently in Iraq. Everyone has their plans for the future, but right now, the idea of a coalition government is a given. But two issues remain outstanding.
The first is the status of U.S. forces in Iraq. The United States will not permit its forces to remain as targets for guerrillas, although the Sunnis and Shia might find this useful. Therefore, there will be a withdrawal, with a substantial drawdown this year. However, the Sunnis and Kurds both want an American force to remain, and the Americans want that, too. The Iranians and Iraqi Shia want the Americans out earlier. So the timing is one issue to negotiate.
The other issue is oil -- how the revenues and resources are divided up among the three ethnic communities. As we have said, that is about money and, when it gets down to that, compromise is possible. However, the Sunnis and Kurds are afraid of Shiite strength, which means they want the Americans to remain in place. The Shia can charge for that in terms of oil revenues. Treaties have been based on less.
The problem with the endgame in Iraq is not so much the divergence of interests among the players -- they tend to converge now more than to diverge. The problem is that there are so many parties to the negotiations and that these parties are themselves divided, the Americans not least among them. In other words, there are too many players to create a stable basis for negotiations. On the one side, reality pulls them together; on the other side, the sheer mechanics of the negotiation are mind-boggling.
We think that something will be worked out, simply because the logic of each player requires a settlement. It will result in a diminishment of violence, not its elimination. That is the best that can be hoped for. But we also believe that the train is leaving the station. If an agreement cannot be reached now that allows for a phased and managed withdrawal of U.S. forces, then the only remaining options for the United States will be to continue to fight a counterinsurgency indefinitely, with insufficient force, or a unilateral withdrawal.
-
Never Again?
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 5, 2006
When something happens for the first time in 1,871 years, it is worth
noting. In A.D. 70, and again in 135, the Roman Empire brutally put down
Jewish revolts in Judea, destroying Jerusalem, killing hundreds of thousands
of Jews and sending hundreds of thousands more into slavery and exile. For
nearly two millennia, the Jews wandered the world. And now, in 2006, for the
first time since then, there are once again more Jews living in Israel --
the successor state to Judea -- than in any other place on Earth.
Israel's Jewish population has just passed 5.6 million. America's Jewish
population was about 5.5 million in 1990, dropped to about 5.2 million 10
years later and is in a precipitous decline that, because of low fertility
rates and high levels of assimilation, will cut that number in half by
mid-century.
When 6 million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust, only two main
centers of Jewish life remained: America and Israel. That binary star system
remains today, but a tipping point has just been reached. With every year,
as the Jewish population continues to rise in Israel and decline in America
(and in the rest of the Diaspora), Israel increasingly becomes, as it was at
the time of Jesus, the center of the Jewish world.
An epic restoration, and one of the most improbable. To take just one of the
remarkable achievements of the return: Hebrew is the only "dead" language in
recorded history to have been brought back to daily use as the living
language of a nation. But there is a price and a danger to this
transformation. It radically alters the prospects for Jewish survival.
For 2,000 years, Jews found protection in dispersion -- protection not for
individual communities, which were routinely persecuted and massacred, but
protection for the Jewish people as a whole. Decimated here, they could
survive there. They could be persecuted in Spain and find refuge in
Constantinople. They could be massacred in the Rhineland during the Crusades
or in the Ukraine during the Khmelnytsky Insurrection of 1648-49 and yet
survive in the rest of Europe.
Hitler put an end to that illusion. He demonstrated that modern
anti-Semitism married to modern technology -- railroads, disciplined
bureaucracies, gas chambers that kill with industrial efficiency -- could
take a scattered people and "concentrate" them for annihilation.
The establishment of Israel was a Jewish declaration to a world that had
allowed the Holocaust to happen -- after Hitler had made his intentions
perfectly clear -- that the Jews would henceforth resort to self-protection
and self-reliance. And so they have, building a Jewish army, the first in
2,000 years, that prevailed in three great wars of survival (1948-49, 1967
and 1973).
But in a cruel historical irony, doing so required concentration -- putting
all the eggs back in one basket, a tiny territory hard by the Mediterranean,
eight miles wide at its waist. A tempting target for those who would finish
Hitler's work.
His successors now reside in Tehran. The world has paid ample attention to
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's declaration that Israel must be destroyed.
Less attention has been paid to Iranian leaders' pronouncements on exactly
how Israel would be "eliminated by one storm," as Ahmadinejad has promised.
Former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the presumed moderate of this
gang, has explained that "the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave
nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam." The
logic is impeccable, the intention clear: A nuclear attack would effectively
destroy tiny Israel, while any retaliation launched by a dying Israel would
have no major effect on an Islamic civilization of a billion people
stretching from Mauritania to Indonesia.
As it races to acquire nuclear weapons, Iran makes clear that if there is
any trouble, the Jews will be the first to suffer. "We have announced that
wherever [in Iran] America does make any mischief, the first place we target
will be Israel," said Gen. Mohammad Ebrahim Dehghani, a top Revolutionary
Guards commander. Hitler was only slightly more direct when he announced
seven months before invading Poland that, if there was another war, "the
result will be . . . the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."
Last week Bernard Lewis, America's dean of Islamic studies, who just turned
90 and remembers the 20th century well, confessed that for the first time he
feels it is 1938 again. He did not need to add that in 1938, in the face of
the gathering storm -- a fanatical, aggressive, openly declared enemy of the
West, and most determinedly of the Jews -- the world did nothing.
When Iran's mullahs acquire their coveted nukes in the next few years, the
number of Jews in Israel will just be reaching 6 million. Never again?
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
? 2006 The Washington Post Company
-
Austin Bay: The Multi-Administration War. From cold war containment to a forward strategy of freedom
TCS Daily ^ | June 8, 2006 | Austin Bay
President George W. Bush's May 27 commencement address to the 2006 West Point graduating class made it clear he knows the War on Terror will grind on for years.
Last year, I criticized the Bush administration for neglecting -- at least in public -- the "multi-administration" character of the War on Terror. In the July 25, 2005, issue of The Weekly Standard, I wrote:
"Al-Qaida's jihadists plotted a multigenerational war. In the early 1990s, our enemies began proselytizing London and New York mosques and, in doing so, began planting cadres throughout the world. Even if Washington leads a successful global counter-terror war, many of these cadres will unfortunately turn gray before it's over. That means a multi-administration war. ... The Bush administration has not done that -- at least, not in any focused and sustained fashion."
Bush's speech indicates he intends to build a multi-administration policy framework to fight a long war of ideological and political attrition -- a strategic vision that will survive the whipsaw of the U.S. presidential political cycle.
Harry Truman prepared America for the Cold War -- and at West Point, Bush compared our moment in time to that of Truman, circa 1950. Bush pointed out that "Truman laid the foundation for freedom's victory in the Cold War." Then he said his own administration is "laying the foundation for victory" in our new long war.
The Cold War analogy only goes so far. Bush noted that while "mutually assured destruction" (with nuclear weapons) worked on the Soviet Union, it won't work on Islamist terrorist, though there are "important similarities. ... Like the Cold War, we are fighting the followers of a murderous ideology."
Strategic "containment" stopped the Soviets' murderous ideology because the Soviets -- as Russians -- had a nation-state to lose. Al-Qaida's Salafist (Islamo-fascist) ideology presents a different problem. The Arab Muslim world's long-term political and economic failure seeds the discontent on which al-Qaida-type terrorists thrive. Salafism frees its faithful from responsibility by blaming everyone else for eight centuries of decline.
Bush believes Muslim nations -- and everyone else -- can make modernity work. At West Point, Bush dubbed America's new strategy as "a forward strategy of freedom." Bush argued American security depends "on the advance of freedom" in other nations and pointed out that "accommodation" in the Middle East "did nothing to make us safe."
A "forward strategy of freedom" means fostering the development of states where the consent of the governed creates legitimacy and where terrorists are prosecuted, not promoted. Implementing that strategy means nation-building. Since the 2000 presidential campaign, the Bush administration has done a necessary 180 on nation-building. Bush entered office disdaining it. Sept. 11 changed that calculus.
Sept. 11 made it clear that economic and political development -- the expansion of the sphere of economically and politically liberal states -- is key to America's 21st century security. What Al Toffler called the "slow" and "fast" worlds became the Pentagon's world of "gaps" and "cores." "Gaps" with Muslim populations were the most critical, but every "gap" dictatorship can also provide haven to terrorists in exchange for cash.
Iraq and Afghanistan are examples of "heavy-lifting" nation-building. These "first efforts" may prove to be the most difficult. Every major war has a bitter learning curve.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's "transformational diplomacy" is another tool for implementing a "liberation" strategy. Rice intends to pursue "proactive" diplomacy, where on-the-ground diplomats identify emerging social and political currents, economic prospects and new leaders so that they can better shape future circumstances. Rice's diplomacy is more "people-to-people" than "elite-to-elite." With instant communications a strategic fact, this diplomatic focus is critical.
In April 1950, the "unpopular" Truman administration produced NSC-68, a strategic study that shaped U.S. foreign policy for five decades. In 1953, the Eisenhower administration "tested" NSC-68 with a secret analysis commissioned by President Eisenhower (the Solarium project). Ike's group ratified NSC-68's basic strategy of containment.
Ike understood defeating the Soviets required sustained and steady U.S. leadership. The United States was the only free nation capable of organizing, facilitating and coordinating a global campaign against aggressive, imperial communist tyranny.
In the 21st century, defeating Islamo-fascism -- another imperial tyranny and utopian ideology -- will require the same sustained effort.
Austin Bay is a syndicated columnist and TCS Daily contributing writer.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=060806E
-
A Dying Al-Zarqawi Tried to Get Away
Jun 9, 6:50 PM (ET)
By PATRICK QUINN
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi could barely speak, but he struggled and tried to get away from American soldiers as he lay dying on a stretcher in the ruins of his hideout.
The U.S. forces recognized his face, and knew they had the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq.
Initially, the U.S. military had said al-Zarqawi was killed outright. But Friday new details emerged of his final moments.
For three years, al-Zarqawi orchestrated horrific acts of violence guided by his extremist vision of jihad, or holy war - first against the U.S. soldiers he considered occupiers of Arab lands, then against the Shiites he considered infidels.
On Wednesday, the U.S. military tracked him to a house northwest of Baghdad, and blew it up with two 500-pound bombs.
Al-Zarqawi somehow managed to survive the impact of the bombs, weapons so powerful they tore a huge crater in the date palm forest where the house was nestled just outside the town of Baqouba.
Iraqi police reached the scene first, and found the 39-year-old al-Zarqawi alive.
"He mumbled something, but it was indistinguishable and it was very short," Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, spokesman for U.S.-led forces in Iraq, said Friday of the Jordanian-born terrorist's last words.
Iraqi police pulled him from the flattened home and placed him on a makeshift stretcher. U.S. troops arrived, saw that al-Zarqawi was conscious, and tried to provide medical treatment, the spokesman said.
"He obviously had some kind of visual recognition of who they were because he attempted to roll off the stretcher, as I am told, and get away, realizing it was the U.S. military," Caldwell told Pentagon reporters via videoconference from Baghdad.
Al-Zarqawi "attempted to, sort of, turn away off the stretcher," he said. "Everybody re-secured him back onto the stretcher, but he died almost immediately thereafter from the wounds he'd received from this airstrike."
So much blood covered al-Zarqawi's body that U.S. forces cleaned him up before taking photographs. "Despite the fact that this person actually had no regard for human life, we were not going to treat him in the same manner," Caldwell said.
The airstrike killed two other men and three women who were in the house, but only al-Zarqawi and his spiritual adviser have been positively identified, he said.
Caldwell also said experts told him it is not unheard of for people to survive a blast of that magnitude.
"There are cases when people, in fact, can survive even an attack like that on a building structure. Obviously, the other five in the building did not, but he did for some reason," Caldwell said.
He said he did not know if al-Zarqawi was inside or outside the house when the bombs struck.
"Well, what we had found, as with anything, first reports are not always fully accurate as we continue the debriefings. But we were not aware yesterday that, in fact, Zarqawi was alive when U.S. forces arrived on the site," Caldwell said.
His recounting of the aftermath of the airstrike could not be independently verified. The Iraqi government confirmed only that Iraqi forces were first on the scene, followed by the Americans.
An aide to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said he saw Caldwell's news briefing but could neither confirm nor deny that al-Zarqawi briefly survived the blast.
"Well, I think it's clear: The Americans said he was seriously wounded and he died," the aide said.
-
al-Qaida in Iraq Names New Leader
Jun 12, 9:48 PM (ET)
By NADIA ABOU EL-MAGD
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Al-Qaida in Iraq named a successor Monday to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and said he would stick to the slain leader's path - attacks on Shiites as well as on U.S. and Iraqi forces.
The new leader, identified by the nom de guerre Abu Hamza al-Muhajer in a statement posted on the Web, appeared to be a foreign Arab, like his predecessor.
But otherwise he is an unknown. The name has not appeared in previous al-Qaida in Iraq propaganda or on U.S. lists of terrorists with rewards on their heads, suggesting he is a lower-level figure or someone more prominent who has taken a new pseudonym.
President Bush said Monday that al-Muhajer would join the ranks of those sought by the U.S. "I think the successor to Zarqawi is going to be on our list to bring to justice," Bush said.
The lack of detail appeared to reflect a new emphasis on secrecy by the group. U.S. forces have launched a series of raids against al-Qaida in Iraq based on intelligence found in the safehouse where al-Zarqawi was killed by an American airstrike Wednesday. The group may fear infiltration or that al-Zarqawi's public stance led to his downfall.
"Al-Qaida in Iraq's council has agreed on Sheik Abu Hamza al-Muhajer to be the successor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the leadership of the organization," the group said.
The authenticity of the statement could not be independently confirmed. It was posted on an Islamic militant Web forum where al-Qaida in Iraq often posts messages.
The posting said al-Muhajer was "a beloved brother with jihadi (holy war) experience and a strong footing in knowledge.
"We ask Almighty God to strengthen him that he may accomplish what Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, God have mercy on his soul, began," it said.
That could mean he will continue the strategy the Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi followed: a campaign of brutal attacks on Shiite civilians, aimed at sparking a Sunni-Shiite civil war.
The attacks sparked tensions between al-Zarqawi's group and some Iraqi insurgents who felt the bloodshed hurt the image of their resistance against U.S. forces. They wanted to focus attacks on American and Iraqi troops.
Iraqi insurgents loyal to Saddam Hussein made a rare public acknowledgment of disputes with al-Zarqawi in a condolence letter posted on the same Web site.
"Although there were many matters we differed with him on and him with us, ... what united us was something greater," said the statement by the Fedayeen Saddam. It said the group had "the honor" of fighting alongside al-Zarqawi and that "our determination is only increased for waging jihad."
Al-Zarqawi's death raised speculation the group might turn to an Iraqi leader to smooth over the differences with Iraqis. Al-Zarqawi's deputy is an Iraqi known as Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi. The U.S. military told The Associated Press on Monday that he was not a man identified as "Abdul-Rahman" who was killed with al-Zarqawi.
The name al-Muhajer, Arabic for "immigrant," suggested the new leader was not Iraqi. The name is often used by foreign Arab militants, referring to the "muhajereen," Islam's early converts who fled persecution in Mecca to join the Prophet Muhammad in Medina.
Rohan Gunaratna, a terror expert at Singapore's Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies, said the choice of a non-Iraqi means the group is "likely to continue the foreign operations."
Al-Zarqawi had sought to expand his campaign beyond Iraq, including a triple suicide bombing against hotels in Jordan last November that killed 60 people.
Al-Zarqawi also had links to al-Qaida's branch in Saudi Arabia, which in a statement Monday thanked him for helping its fight against the kingdom's rulers. "We will not forget his favors to jihad and the mujahedeen in the prophet's peninsula," the group said.
The U.S. military had predicted a militant named Abu Ayyub al-Masri would become al-Qaida in Iraq's leader. Al-Masri, an Egyptian associate of al-Zarqawi, has a $50,000 reward on his head.
Militants usually adopt a pseudonym made up of a nickname called a "kunya" in Arabic - "Abu," meaning "father of," plus a name that sometimes refers to an actual child of the militant. The second part of the pseudonym is usually an adjective denoting the militant's nationality.
Al-Zarqawi was born Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalayleh, but took a pseudonym from Zarqa, his hometown in Jordan. He had a child named Musab, so took the kunya of "Abu Musab."
The secrecy surrounding the new leader could hurt the group's ability to carry out attacks, said Egyptian analyst Diaa Rashwan. Al-Zarqawi built a reputation as a holy warrior, helping draw foreign militants to carry out suicide bombings.
"Al-Zarqawi's charisma was very important factor for many to join his organization," Rashwan said. "All al-Zarqawi had was car bombs and people ready to blow themselves up."
"My feeling is that they are going to have establish a persona for him," said Evan Kohlmann, a New York-based terror consultant and founder of globalterroralert.com. "They're going to have to introduce this fellow to the world."
-
Abu Baker Bashir of Bali Bombing fame, has been released from Prison today from a sentence that got shorter and shorter each time it was mentioned. He is heading back to continue his teachings which ispired the Bali bombings and the way inwhich the whole situation has been handled by indonesia sound very similar to lack of regard that iran has for anyone else.
Jason
Australia
From Ninemsn
World News
Abu Bakar Bashir, the firebrand Islamic cleric accused of inspiring the first Bali bombings, has walked free from Jakarta's main prison and into the arms of hundreds of jubilant militant supporters.
Lifting his hands in the air an otherwise subdued Bashir muttered "I thank Allah" as he was mobbed by adoring fans, many in black "mujahidin" jackets.
Wearing a white skull cap, grey suit and red checked headscarf, the bespectacled 68-year-old made no mention of the 2002 Bali bombings, in which 88 Australians were killed, or a subsequent string of deadly terrorist attacks in Indonesia.
"To the lawyers who have enthusiastically defended me during the trial we will keep on fighting to uphold sharia," he said in a brief speech targeting moderate opponents.
"Upholding sharia is full of struggle," he added, before being whisked away with his son Rachim in a black van to begin a road trip to Solo, an ancient royal city in central Java where he teaches his radical brand of Islam at the Ngruki boarding school, dubbed the "Ivy League" of militant academies.
During his road trip he planned to visit earthquake survivors around nearby Yogyakarta.
Security was tight outside the prison with scores of police keeping watch.
Scores of supporters were bused in to cheer Bashir. But three were killed in a car accident on their way from Solo.
Many in the crowd wore headbands and carried copies of Bashir's new book, I Was Falsely Accused, The Days of Abu Bakar Bashir in Prison.
On its pages, the cleric denounces Prime Minister John Howard as "an infidel" and "enemy of Allah".
He also accuses Foreign Minister Alexander Downer of pressuring Indonesia to keep him in prison following an earlier 18-month jail sentence for minor immigration offences.
The Malaysian-born Bashir denied allegations by western nations that he is the "emir", or spiritual head, of the Jemaah Islamiah terrorist network.
He has called on all Indonesian Muslims to defend the nation "against violence".
"We must believe that this country will be safe from all darkness under Islamic sharia," he said.
Bashir was released 15 minutes ahead of schedule and his chaotic departure from Jakarta's Cipinang Prison took his legal team by surprise.
One of Bashir's lawyers, Adnan Wirawan, said plans for the journey to Solo had been thrown into disarray by a small band of supporters who bundled him into a van.
"This is not the plan and right now we don't know where he is," Adnan told AAP.
"All the plans that we have set up for him, it has been deviated. We have to find him so we can take him to Solo."
Australia's government has called on Indonesia to place Bashir under close surveillance amid warnings by some terrorist analysts that his release could inspire more terror attacks.
The United States said it was deeply disappointed with Bashir's release from what Washington believed had been a light 25-month sentence for giving blessings to the first Bali attacks.
Asked about possible police surveillance of his father, Rachim said he was unafraid.
"I don't care about it. If they want to watch, go ahead," he said.
Lawyer Adnan said any move to place Bashir under surveillance would be a violation of his rights.
"I expect that there will be a discrimination surveillance of him and that would be unconstitutional, because he is as free as everyone else in the country," he said.
Accusations Bashir had been the leader of JI would be proven wrong, Adnan said.
"That is a paranoid version of the western media. He has never been a man of violence," he said.
"What is to be afraid of? He has never been proven to kill a fly, an animal, he has never been proven to kill anyone."
The massive show of support for Bashir outside the prison proved he was innocent, Adnan said.
"People will not worship someone who is evil, who is a criminal, and if a lot of people still worship him it proves that he is an innocent man," he said.
Before Bashir's release, Indonesia's State Intelligence Agency chief, Syamsir Siregar, said he hoped Bashir would not cause any trouble.
"We hope Bashir, after he has been jailed, will regain his self-awareness and be willing to cooperate with us," Siregar told politicians earlier this week.
Jemaah Islamiah is accused of carrying out church bombings across Indonesia in 2000, the Bali bombings in 2002, attacks in the Indonesian capital in 2003 and 2004, and a triple suicide bombing on Bali last October. The attacks together killed more than 260 people.
Bashir has little active support in Indonesia, where most Muslims follow a moderate form of the faith.
On his road trip Bashir criticised the United States.
"The United States is a state terrorist because it is waging war against Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan," he told reporters when asked about US accusations he was a terror leader.
Bashir made the remark after he stopped for midday prayers in the town of Tegal, 300km east of Jakarta.
-
The Real Iraq
Amir Taheri
Spending time in the United States after a tour of Iraq can be a
disorienting experience these days. Within hours of arriving here, as I can
attest from a recent visit, one is confronted with an image of Iraq that is
unrecognizable. It is created in several overlapping ways: through
television footage showing the charred remains of vehicles used in suicide
attacks, surrounded by wailing women in black and grim-looking men carrying
coffins; by armchair strategists and political gurus predicting further doom
or pontificating about how the war should have been fought in the first
place; by authors of instant-history books making their rounds to dissect
the various "fundamental mistakes" committed by the Bush administration; and
by reporters, cocooned in hotels in Baghdad, explaining the "carnage" and
"chaos" in the streets as signs of the country's "impending" or "undeclared"
civil war. Add to all this the day's alleged scandal or revelation-an outed
CIA operative, a reportedly doctored intelligence report, a leaked
pessimistic assessment-and it is no wonder the American public registers
disillusion with Iraq and everyone who embroiled the U.S. in its troubles.
It would be hard indeed for the average interested citizen to find out on
his own just how grossly this image distorts the realities of present-day
Iraq. Part of the problem, faced by even the most well-meaning news
organizations, is the difficulty of covering so large and complex a subject;
naturally, in such circumstances, sensational items rise to the top. But
even ostensibly more objective efforts, like the Brookings Institution's
much-cited Iraq Index with its constantly updated array of security,
economic, and public-opinion indicators, tell us little about the actual
feel of the country on the ground.
To make matters worse, many of the newsmen, pundits, and commentators on
whom American viewers and readers rely to describe the situation have been
contaminated by the increasing bitterness of American politics. Clearly
there are those in the media and the think tanks who wish the Iraq
enterprise to end in tragedy, as a just comeuppance for George W. Bush.
Others, prompted by noble sentiment, so abhor the idea of war that they
would banish it from human discourse before admitting that, in some
circumstances, military power can be used in support of a good cause. But
whatever the reason, the half-truths and outright misinformation that now
function as conventional wisdom have gravely disserved the American people.
For someone like myself who has spent considerable time in Iraq-a country I
first visited in 1968-current reality there is, nevertheless, very different
from this conventional wisdom, and so are the prospects for Iraq's future.
It helps to know where to look, what sources to trust, and how to evaluate
the present moment against the background of Iraqi and Middle Eastern
history.
Since my first encounter with Iraq almost 40 years ago, I have relied on
several broad measures of social and economic health to assess the country's
condition. Through good times and bad, these signs have proved remarkably
accurate-as accurate, that is, as is possible in human affairs. For some
time now, all have been pointing in an unequivocally positive direction.
The first sign is refugees. When things have been truly desperate in Iraq-in
1959, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1980, 1988, and 1990-long queues of Iraqis have
formed at the Turkish and Iranian frontiers, hoping to escape. In 1973, for
example, when Saddam Hussein decided to expel all those whose ancestors had
not been Ottoman citizens before Iraq's creation as a state, some 1.2
million Iraqis left their homes in the space of just six weeks. This was not
the temporary exile of a small group of middle-class professionals and
intellectuals, which is a common enough phenomenon in most Arab countries.
Rather, it was a departure en masse, affecting people both in small villages
and in big cities, and it was a scene regularly repeated under Saddam
Hussein.
Since the toppling of Saddam in 2003, this is one highly damaging image we
have not seen on our television sets-and we can be sure that we would be
seeing it if it were there to be shown. To the contrary, Iraqis, far from
fleeing, have been returning home. By the end of 2005, in the most
conservative estimate, the number of returnees topped the 1.2-million mark.
Many of the camps set up for fleeing Iraqis in Turkey, Iran, and Saudi
Arabia since 1959 have now closed down. The oldest such center, at
Ashrafiayh in southwest Iran, was formally shut when its last Iraqi guests
returned home in 2004.
A second dependable sign likewise concerns human movement, but of a
different kind. This is the flow of religious pilgrims to the Shiite shrines
in Karbala and Najaf. Whenever things start to go badly in Iraq, this stream
is reduced to a trickle and then it dries up completely. From 1991 (when
Saddam Hussein massacred Shiites involved in a revolt against him) to 2003,
there were scarcely any pilgrims to these cities. Since Saddam's fall, they
have been flooded with visitors. In 2005, the holy sites received an
estimated 12 million pilgrims, making them the most visited spots in the
entire Muslim world, ahead of both Mecca and Medina.
Over 3,000 Iraqi clerics have also returned from exile, and Shiite
seminaries, which just a few years ago held no more than a few dozen pupils,
now boast over 15,000 from 40 different countries. This is because Najaf,
the oldest center of Shiite scholarship, is once again able to offer an
alternative to Qom, the Iranian "holy city" where a radical and highly
politicized version of Shiism is taught. Those wishing to pursue the study
of more traditional and quietist forms of Shiism now go to Iraq where,
unlike in Iran, the seminaries are not controlled by the government and its
secret police.
A third sign, this one of the hard economic variety, is the value of the
Iraqi dinar, especially as compared with the region's other major
currencies. In the final years of Saddam Hussein's rule, the Iraqi dinar was
in free fall; after 1995, it was no longer even traded in Iran and Kuwait.
By contrast, the new dinar, introduced early in 2004, is doing well against
both the Kuwaiti dinar and the Iranian rial, having risen by 17 percent
against the former and by 23 percent against the latter. Although it is
still impossible to fix its value against a basket of international
currencies, the new Iraqi dinar has done well against the U.S. dollar,
increasing in value by almost 18 percent between August 2004 and August
2005. The overwhelming majority of Iraqis, and millions of Iranians and
Kuwaitis, now treat it as a safe and solid medium of exchange
My fourth time-tested sign is the level of activity by small and
medium-sized businesses. In the past, whenever things have gone downhill in
Iraq, large numbers of such enterprises have simply closed down, with the
country's most capable entrepreneurs decamping to Jordan, Syria, Saudi
Arabia, the Persian Gulf states, Turkey, Iran, and even Europe and North
America. Since liberation, however, Iraq has witnessed a private-sector
boom, especially among small and medium-sized businesses.
According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, as
well as numerous private studies, the Iraqi economy has been doing better
than any other in the region. The country's gross domestic product rose to
almost $90 billion in 2004 (the latest year for which figures are
available), more than double the output for 2003, and its real growth rate,
as estimated by the IMF, was 52.3 per cent. In that same period, exports
increased by more than $3 billion, while the inflation rate fell to 25.4
percent, down from 70 percent in 2002. The unemployment rate was halved,
from 60 percent to 30 percent.
Related to this is the level of agricultural activity. Between 1991 and
2003, the country's farm sector experienced unprecedented decline, in the
end leaving almost the entire nation dependent on rations distributed by the
United Nations under Oil-for-Food. In the past two years, by contrast, Iraqi
agriculture has undergone an equally unprecedented revival. Iraq now exports
foodstuffs to neighboring countries, something that has not happened since
the 1950's. Much of the upturn is due to smallholders who, shaking off the
collectivist system imposed by the Baathists, have retaken control of land
that was confiscated decades ago by the state.
Finally, one of the surest indices of the health of Iraqi society has always
been its readiness to talk to the outside world. Iraqis are a verbalizing
people; when they fall silent, life is incontrovertibly becoming hard for
them. There have been times, indeed, when one could find scarcely a single
Iraqi, whether in Iraq or abroad, prepared to express an opinion on anything
remotely political. This is what Kanan Makiya meant when he described Saddam
Hussein's regime as a "republic of fear."
Today, again by way of dramatic contrast, Iraqis are voluble to a fault.
Talk radio, television talk-shows, and Internet blogs are all the rage,
while heated debate is the order of the day in shops, tea-houses, bazaars,
mosques, offices, and private homes. A "catharsis" is how Luay Abdulilah,
the Iraqi short-story writer and diarist, describes it. "This is one way of
taking revenge against decades of deadly silence." Moreover, a vast network
of independent media has emerged in Iraq, including over 100 privately-owned
newspapers and magazines and more than two dozen radio and television
stations. To anyone familiar with the state of the media in the Arab world,
it is a truism that Iraq today is the place where freedom of expression is
most effectively exercised.
That an experienced observer of Iraq with a sense of history can point to so
many positive factors in the country's present condition will not do much,
of course, to sway the more determined critics of the U.S. intervention
there. They might even agree that the images fed to the American public show
only part of the picture, and that the news from Iraq is not uniformly bad.
But the root of their opposition runs deeper, to political fundamentals.
Their critique can be summarized in the aphorism that "democracy cannot be
imposed by force." It is a view that can be found among the more
sophisticated elements on the Left and, increasingly, among dissenters on
the Right, from Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska to the ex-neoconservative
Francis Fukuyama. As Senator Hagel puts it, "You cannot in my opinion just
impose a democratic form of government on a country with no history and no
culture and no tradition of democracy."
I would tend to agree. But is Iraq such a place? In point of fact, before
the 1958 pro-Soviet military coup d'etat that established a leftist
dictatorship, Iraq did have its modest but nevertheless significant share of
democratic history, culture, and tradition. The country came into being
through a popular referendum held in 1921. A constitutional monarchy modeled
on the United Kingdom, it had a bicameral parliament, several political
parties (including the Baath and the Communists), and periodic elections
that led to changes of policy and government. At the time, Iraq also enjoyed
the freest press in the Arab world, plus the widest space for debate and
dissent in the Muslim Middle East.
To be sure, Baghdad in those days was no Westminster, and, as the 1958 coup
proved, Iraqi democracy was fragile. But every serious student of
contemporary Iraq knows that substantial segments of the population, from
all ethnic and religious communities, had more than a taste of the modern
world's democratic aspirations. As evidence, one need only consult the
immense literary and artistic production of Iraqis both before and after the
1958 coup. Under successor dictatorial regimes, it is true, the conviction
took hold that democratic principles had no future in Iraq-a conviction that
was responsible in large part for driving almost five million Iraqis, a
quarter of the population, into exile between 1958 and 2003, just as the
opposite conviction is attracting so many of them and their children back to
Iraq today.
A related argument used to condemn Iraq's democratic prospects is that it is
an "artificial" country, one that can be held together only by a dictator.
But did any nation-state fall from the heavens wholly made? All are to some
extent artificial creations, and the U.S. is preeminently so. The truth is
that Iraq-one of the 53 founding countries of the United Nations-is older
than a majority of that organization's current 198 member states. Within the
Arab League, and setting aside Oman and Yemen, none of the 22 members is
older. Two-thirds of the 122 countries regarded as democracies by Freedom
House came into being after Iraq's appearance on the map.
Critics of the democratic project in Iraq also claim that, because it is a
multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state, the country is doomed to
despotism, civil war, or disintegration. But the same could be said of
virtually all Middle Eastern states, most of which are neither multi-ethnic
nor multi-confessional. More important, all Iraqis, regardless of their
ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian differences, share a sense of national
identity-uruqa ("Iraqi-ness")-that has developed over the past eight
decades. A unified, federal state may still come to grief in Iraq-history is
not written in advance-but even should a divorce become inevitable at some
point, a democratic Iraq would be in a better position to manage it.
What all of this demonstrates is that, contrary to received opinion,
Operation Iraqi Freedom was not an attempt to impose democracy by force.
Rather, it was an effort to use force to remove impediments to
democratization, primarily by deposing a tyrant who had utterly suppressed a
well-established aspect of the country's identity. It may take years before
we know for certain whether or not post-liberation Iraq has definitely
chosen democracy. But one thing is certain: without the use of force to
remove the Baathist regime, the people of Iraq would not have had the
opportunity even to contemplate a democratic future.
Assessing the progress of that democratic project is no simple matter. But,
by any reasonable standard, Iraqis have made extraordinary strides. In a
series of municipal polls and two general elections in the past three years,
up to 70 percent of eligible Iraqis have voted. This new orientation is
supported by more than 60 political parties and organizations, the first
genuinely free-trade unions in the Arab world, a growing number of
professional associations acting independently of the state, and more than
400 nongovernmental organizations representing diverse segments of civil
society. A new constitution, written by Iraqis representing the full
spectrum of political, ethnic, and religious sensibilities was
overwhelmingly approved by the electorate in a referendum last October.
Iraq's new democratic reality is also reflected in the vocabulary of
politics used at every level of society. Many new words-accountability,
transparency, pluralism, dissent-have entered political discourse in Iraq
for the first time. More remarkably, perhaps, all parties and personalities
currently engaged in the democratic process have committed themselves to the
principle that power should be sought, won, and lost only through free and
fair elections.
These democratic achievements are especially impressive when set side by
side with the declared aims of the enemies of the new Iraq, who have put up
a determined fight against it. Since the country's liberation, the jihadists
and residual Baathists have killed an estimated 23,000 Iraqis, mostly
civilians, in scores of random attacks and suicide operations. Indirectly,
they have caused the death of thousands more, by sabotaging water and
electricity services and by provoking sectarian revenge attacks.
But they have failed to translate their talent for mayhem and murder into
political success. Their campaign has not succeeded in appreciably slowing
down, let alone stopping, the country's democratization. Indeed, at each
step along the way, the jihadists and Baathists have seen their
self-declared objectives thwarted.
After the invasion, they tried at first to prevent the formation of a
Governing Council, the expression of Iraq's continued existence as a
sovereign nation-state. They managed to murder several members of the
council, including its president in 2003, but failed to prevent its
formation or to keep it from performing its task in the interim period. The
next aim of the insurgents was to stop municipal elections. Their message
was simple: candidates and voters would be killed. But, once again, they
failed: thousands of men and women came forward as candidates and more than
1.5 million Iraqis voted in the localities where elections were held.
The insurgency made similar threats in the lead-up to the first general
election, and the result was the same. Despite killing 36 candidates and 148
voters, they failed to derail the balloting, in which the number of voters
rose to more than 8 million. Nor could the insurgency prevent the writing of
the new democratic constitution, despite a campaign of assassination against
its drafters. The text was ready in time and was submitted to and approved
by a referendum, exactly as planned. The number of voters rose yet again, to
more than 9 million.
What of relations among the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds-the focus of so much
attention of late? For almost three years, the insurgency worked hard to
keep the Arab Sunni community, which accounts for some 15 percent of the
population, out of the political process. But that campaign collapsed when
millions of Sunnis turned out to vote in the constitutional referendum and
in the second general election, which saw almost 11 million Iraqis go to the
polls. As I write, all political parties representing the Arab Sunni
minority have joined the political process and have strong representation in
the new parliament. With the convening of that parliament, and the
nomination in April of a new prime minister and a three-man presidential
council, the way is open for the formation of a broad-based government of
national unity to lead Iraq over the next four years.
As for the insurgency's effort to foment sectarian violence-a strategy first
launched in earnest toward the end of 2005-this too has run aground. The
hope here was to provoke a full-scale war between the Arab Sunni minority
and the Arab Shiites who account for some 60 percent of the population. The
new strategy, like the ones previously tried, has certainly produced many
deaths. But despite countless cases of sectarian killings by so-called
militias, there is still no sign that the Shiites as a whole will acquiesce
in the role assigned them by the insurgency and organize a concerted
campaign of nationwide retaliation.
Finally, despite the impression created by relentlessly dire reporting in
the West, the insurgency has proved unable to shut down essential government
services. Hundreds of teachers and schoolchildren have been killed in
incidents including the beheading of two teachers in their classrooms this
April and horrific suicide attacks against school buses. But by September
2004, most schools across Iraq and virtually all universities were open and
functioning. By September 2005, more than 8.5 million Iraqi children and
young people were attending school or university-an all-time record in the
nation's history.
A similar story applies to Iraq's clinics and hospitals. Between October
2003 and January 2006, more than 80 medical doctors and over 400 nurses and
medical auxiliaries were murdered by the insurgents. The jihadists also
raided several hospitals, killing ordinary patients in their beds. But, once
again, they failed in their objectives. By January 2006, all of Iraq's 600
state-owned hospitals and clinics were in full operation, along with dozens
of new ones set up by the private sector since liberation.
Another of the insurgency's strategic goals was to bring the Iraqi oil
industry to a halt and to disrupt the export of crude. Since July 2003, Iraq
's oil infrastructure has been the target of more than 3,000 attacks and
attempts at sabotage. But once more the insurgency has failed to achieve its
goals. Iraq has resumed its membership in the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC) and has returned to world markets as a major oil
exporter. According to projections, by the end of 2006 it will be producing
its full OPEC quota of 2.8 million barrels a day.
The Baathist remnant and its jihadist allies resemble a gambler who wins a
heap of chips at a roulette table only to discover that he cannot exchange
them for real money at the front desk. The enemies of the new Iraq have
succeeded in ruining the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis, but over the
past three years they have advanced their overarching goals, such as they
are, very little. Instead, they have been militarily contained and
politically defeated again and again, and the beneficiary has been Iraqi
democracy.
None of this means that the new Iraq is out of the woods. Far from it.
Democratic success still requires a great deal of patience, determination,
and luck. The U.S.-led coalition, its allies, and partners have achieved
most of their major political objectives, but that achievement remains under
threat and could be endangered if the U.S., for whatever reason, should
decide to snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory.
The current mandate of the U.S.-led coalition runs out at the end of this
year, and it is unlikely that Washington and its allies will want to
maintain their military presence at current levels. In the past few months,
more than half of the 103 bases used by the coalition have been transferred
to the new Iraqi army. The best guess is that the number of U.S. and
coalition troops could be cut from 140,000 to 25,000 or 30,000 by the end of
2007.
One might wonder why, if the military mission has been so successful, the
U.S. still needs to maintain a military presence in Iraq for at least
another two years. There are three reasons for this.
The first is to discourage Iraq's predatory neighbors, notably Iran and
Syria, which might wish to pursue their own agendas against the new
government in Baghdad. Iran has already revived some claims under the
Treaties of Erzerum (1846), according to which Tehran would enjoy a droit de
regard over Shiite shrines in Iraq. In Syria, some in that country's ruling
circles have invoked the possibility of annexing the area known as Jazirah,
the so-called Sunni triangle, in the name of Arab unity. For its part,
Turkey is making noises about the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which gave it a
claim to the oilfields of northern Iraq. All of these pretensions need to be
rebuffed.
The second reason for extending America's military presence is political.
The U.S. is acting as an arbiter among Iraq's various ethnic and religious
communities and political factions. It is, in a sense, a traffic cop, giving
Iraqis a green or red light when and if needed. It is important that the
U.S. continue performing this role for the first year or two of the newly
elected parliament and government.
Finally, the U.S. and its allies have a key role to play in training and
testing Iraq's new army and police. Impressive success has already been
achieved in that field. Nevertheless, the new Iraqi army needs at least
another year or two before it will have developed adequate logistical
capacities and learned to organize and conduct operations involving its
various branches.
But will the U.S. stay the course? Many are betting against it. The
Baathists and jihadists, their prior efforts to derail Iraqi democracy
having come to naught, have now pinned their hopes on creating enough chaos
and death to persuade Washington of the futility of its endeavors. In this,
they have the tacit support not only of local Arab and Muslim despots
rightly fearful of the democratic genie but of all those in the West whose
own incessant theme has been the certainty of American failure. Among
Bush-haters in the U.S., just as among anti-Americans around the world,
predictions of civil war in Iraq, of spreading regional hostilities, and of
a revived global terrorism are not about to cease any time soon.
But more sober observers should understand the real balance sheet in Iraq.
Democracy is succeeding. Moreover, thanks to its success in Iraq, there are
stirrings elsewhere in the region. Beyond the much-publicized electoral
concessions wrung from authoritarian rulers in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, there
is a new democratic discourse to be heard. Nationalism and pan-Arabism,
yesterday's hollow rallying cries, have given way to a "big idea" of a very
different kind. Debate and dissent are in the air where there was none
before-a development owing, in significant measure, to the U.S. campaign in
Iraq and the brilliant if still checkered Iraqi response.
The stakes, in short, could not be higher. This is all the more reason to
celebrate, to build on, and to consolidate what has already been
accomplished. Instead of railing against the Bush administration, America's
elites would do better, and incidentally display greater self-respect, to
direct their wrath where it properly belongs: at those violent and
unrestrained enemies of democracy in Iraq who are, in truth, the enemies of
democracy in America as well, and of everything America has ever stood for.
Is Iraq a quagmire, a disaster, a failure? Certainly not; none of the above.
Of all the adjectives used by skeptics and critics to describe today's Iraq,
the only one that has a ring of truth is "messy." Yes, the situation in Iraq
today is messy. Births always are. Since when is that a reason to declare a
baby unworthy of life?
Amir Taheri, formerly the executive editor of Kayhan, Iran's largest daily
newspaper, is the author of ten books and a frequent contributor to numerous
publications in the Middle East and Europe. His work appears regularly in
the New York Post.
-
BITING THE HAND THAT FED THEM:
KURDISH INSURGENCY TESTS IRANIAN CONVENTIONAL MILITARY POWER
Ali M. Koknar*
April 26, 2006
??I wanna bite the hand that feeds me.
I wanna bite that hand so badly.
I want to make them wish they'd never seen me??
Radio Radio
from the album: This Year's Model
By Elvis Costello
1978
There is much speculation in Washington these days about whether Iran will respond to a
preemptive strike by the United States and/or Israel in order to damage or destroy its nuclear
weapons program. The deficiencies in the human intelligence collection and analysis capability of
the United States resulting in the confusion about Iran?s war fighting ability is a major factor in
this current speculation. American experts are finding it hard to gauge Iran?s military strength and
effectiveness. One way to measure Iran?s might with some degree of accuracy is to study how it
has been fighting recently. Iran has not fought a conventional campaign since the end of the Iran-
Iraq War in 1988, almost two decades ago. Since then, Iran?s military industrial complex and
manpower evolved significantly. Some of this new technology and training has been put into
action by the Tehran regime in a limited extent at Iran?s periphery, which offers a window to
peek at the Iranian military under actual combat conditions. Except for the two proxy campaigns
in Lebanon and Iraq which Iranian military and intelligence are engaged in, Iran?s only direct
military action on its enemies has materialized in the form of a few surface-to-surface missile
attacks on Mojahedin-e-Khalq camps in Iraq in the late 1990s and its ongoing conflict with the
Kurdish terrorist organization PKK (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan-Workers? Party of Kurdistan)
inside Iran and in Northern Iraq at present, which this analysis is about.
Starting in 1979, the Islamic regime continued the Shah?s policy of attacking the armed
ethnic Kurds (as represented by the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan and Komala, the
Marxists) with conventional military forces. These clashes continued during the Iran-Iraq War,
until the mid 1990s and resulted in the deaths of around 10 thousand Kurdish insurgents, 50
thousand Kurdish civilians and thousands of troops from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
(IRGC-Pasdaran). A de facto cease-fire came into effect in 1995. Paradoxically, the Islamic
regime in Tehran harbored and supported the Maoist PKK against Turkey in the 1980s but
especially after the removal of PKK?s leader from Syria in 1998. The Iranian intelligence service
(Ettelaat-SAVAMA) managed the PKK presence inside Iran and the infiltration of PKK terrorists
into Turkey. Interestingly enough, during the same period of time Ettelaat supported the activities
of the Islamist Turkish Hezbollah, an ethnically Kurdish organization which organized itself in
* Ali M. Koknar, a private security consultant in Washington, DC, specializing in counterterrorism and international
organized crime, is an Associate of the Terrorism Research Center. His e-mail is akoknar@aol.com
the 1980s to oppose the PKK in southeast Turkey. In fact, the Turkish intelligence services
believe that the Ettelaat engineered a truce between the PKK and the Turkish-Kurdish Hezbollah
in the late 1990s. At the peak of its relations with the Iranian regime in 1995, the PKK maintained
about 1,200 of its members at around 50 locations in Iran. The Ettelaat even used the PKK
against other Kurdish groups in Iran such as Komala, eight leaders of which the PKK ambushed
and killed in June 1998. Fed up with Iran?s harboring the PKK, Turkey sent a direct message to
Tehran in July 1999, when Turkish F16s attacking a PKK camp in Iran, accidentally bombed a
Pasdaran base, killing a Pasdar officer and four Pasdaran troops and wounding ten. A new
Turkish government elected at the end of 2002, developed a d?tente with Tehran in 2003, making
it possible for Ankara to press Tehran into cutting off its support to the PKK.
With its charismatic leader, Abdullah Ocalan captured by Turkey in 1999, the PKK
withdrew about 3,000 of its 4,000 field cadres from Turkey and Iran to its dozen or so camps
strewn along the Qandil mountain range which straddles the Iran-Iraq border across from Turkey.
The PKK used the period between 1999 and 2003 to reorganize its command structure, recruit
new members and especially after Saddam?s quick defeat in April 2003, to acquire ex-Iraqi Army
weapons and explosives. They also set up a front, Part?ya J?yane Azad?ya Kurdistan (Kurdistan
Free Life Party-PJAK) in Iran (heretofore referred to as simply ?PKK? for practicality). Despite
sporting its own leader, Haji Ahmedi, its operations are conducted under orders from PKK?s
strongman, Murat Karayilan, and like other PKK teams operating in Turkey, its armed cadres are
ethnic Kurds recruited from Iran, Iraq and Turkey. The PKK operates camps housing about 500
of these on Mount Asos, which is on the Iranian side of the Qandil Range.
In 2004, from their Asos bases the PKK terrorist started operating in northwestern Iran,
near the Iranian towns of Selmas, Mahabad, Serdest, Bane, P?ranshahr, Mer?wan, Sine, and
Hewraman. By July that year, the Pasdaran started mounting battalion-level operations in the area
against the PKK, to total about eight such operations by the end of the year. In 2004, the PKK
claimed killing about 20 Pasdaran troops, but did not admit its own casualties as a result of a
brigade-level Pasdaran operation near Xoye/Urumiyeh in October, during which the Pasdaran
deployed Katyusha artillery rockets.
A Pasdaran brigade, accompanied by hundreds of Basej paramilitaries, conducted sweep
operations in the sector between the Iraqi border and the town of Piranshahr in late May and early
June 2005 using AH-1J Cobra attack helicopters, but did not report any PKK terrorists killed or
captured. As they did in Turkey, the PKK made attempts to foment a Kurdish uprising in Iran in
2005 to affect the outcome of the presidential elections. As if in response to the Pasdaran/Basej
sweep a month earlier, in July, these attempts materialized in the ethnically Kurdish populated
Mahabad and clashes between armed PKK terrorists, their civilian Kurdish supporters and the
Pasdaran and Basej resulted in the declaration of martial law and curfew. The PKK claimed that
they had killed 16 Pasdaran and Basej for a loss of four of their own during the July clashes.
The seasonal nature of contacts between the PKK and Iranian security forces was
somewhat altered in 2006 as the PKK mounted attacks in Iran during the snowy winter months
just as they did inside Turkey. In February, there were about a dozen PKK and Pasdaran on each
side killed in action and at least a dozen wounded. In March the Pasdaran staged heliborne
assaults killing at least 2 PKK terrorists. The PKK claimed they killed seven Pasdaran.
As the weather improved in April, the Pasdaran launched a division-level operation against the PKK for
the first time, deploying towed howitzers. The PKK also claimed that the Iranian Air Force
fighters bombed one of its camps near Xinira next to the Haji Umran Iran-Iraq border crossing.
The Pasdaran also hit a PKK camp near Sidakan, about 50 miles north of the Iraqi city of Arbil
and about 6 miles from the Iranian border, with Katyusha artillery rockets. These attacks killed at
least three PKK terrorists (as admitted by them) and probably up to a dozen more. The PKK
claimed that they engaged the Pasdaran along the border and killed six and wounded eight, which
the Pasdaran did not admit. The Pasdaran did admit however, that they lost 100 troops between
2003 and 2006 in contacts with the PKK. The PKK admits losing no less than 50 terrorists in
contacts with the Pasdaran between July 2005 and March 2006.
The cyclical nature of the PKK operations to date in Iran suggest that the coming months
will bring more contacts with Iranian security forces. Based on the escalation of the conflict in the
last three years, it is plausible that the size of the Iranian troop movements will be large (from
battalion-level in 2004 to division-level in 2006) and will involve heavy weapons such as artillery
pieces and may also be conducted as combined-arms operations with the participation of regular
Iranian Army units in addition to the Pasdaran. These developments will offer a unique
opportunity to observe the Iranian military in action using its inventory against a real enemy, as
opposed to the recent war games they conducted in the Persian Gulf during which reverse-
engineered Russian weapons systems were showcased. Iran?s success or failure against an
insurgent force of no more than a battalion or two will be indicative of its conventional
warfighting ability against a larger opposing force, such as the United States Army or Marines.
-
http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/ Mohammed has an interesting viewpoint on
the Insurgency and Intelligence. We know what makes up the Insurgents.
This take on Intelligence I had not really considered. Hope you can use it.
Sir, would you please fill out this form?
Now and after a week since operation forward together was launched in
Baghdad let's try to evaluate this operation through the people's reactions
and through the authorities' announcements.
First we will see that the operation brought high hopes and was found
largely promising by the people of Baghdad as it reflected the level of the
government's determination to provide Baghdadis with their number one need,
which is security.
What happened in the first two days made people feel that there was a good
chance for the government bring calm to the capital but two days later the
insurgents we again able to find a way to disrupt peace and renew their
attacks against Iraqi civilians and ISF.
Yesterday the Iraqi minister of national security admitted that insurgents
are a step ahead of the government when it comes to intelligence. As bleak
as this confession may sound I think it's admirable of the government to
admit such a fact because the first step in solving a problem is through
recognizing it and never through denying it or speaking big empty words.
In fact the minister's statement was pretty close to what we wrote in our
earlier post, both accounts define the weakness point of this particular
operation and that of the government's efforts to fight the insurgency in
general which is intelligence.
To discuss this point we should go back few years in time to know the
intelligence system worked in Iraq and why we still be behind the insurgents
in this regard if we did not take the right measures.
As we all know, the bulk of the insurgency is made up mostly of the security
corps of the past regime, mainly the secret service, special republican
guards, military intelligence and former ba'athists and these corps
collectively were the ones in charge of collecting and analyzing
intelligence for the regime and over years, these corps were able to build a
massive database that contained lots of information about every single
citizen in Iraq.
I recall those years when everyone had to fill countless inquiries (general
information forms) every now and then; for example if I moved from one city
to another, applied for a job, moved from one school to another, rented a
house or a shop, started a new business or even signed up for a phone line I
would be asked to fill many of these forms to many entities. Not to mention
the inquiries every citizen had to routinely fill and these inquiries would
come from the police station, local ba'ath HQ, the district council and
every other authority you can think of.
these inquiries in addition to asking regular questions like number of
family members, their jobs, working places etc, etc, they also went as far
as asking detailed questions about relatives as far as of the 6th degree,
like "do you have any relatives that had been executed?" or "do you have any
relatives living abroad? And why?".
The data collected in this manner were used to keep track of citizens and
determine how this or that one should be treated (given or denied a job,
admitted to college or not, promoted or not).
You can imagine now how much information the past regime had about the
people of Iraq, and where did that huge database go?
It was kept by the same people who were in charge of it before, hard disks
and box files were all taken home and the rest was burned and soon many of
those personnel became the core of the local insurgency so it's somewhat
correct to say that those intelligence collectors did not lose power because
they retained one of the most powerful weapons in the kind of warfare we're
fighting here.
The regime was toppled and places were switched; the jobless former officers
became in control of a huge information treasure while the new
administration was left with office drawers void of files!
So this imbalanced possession of information needs to change, and to change
soon and a plan to build a new database should go simultaneously with the
plan to collect weapons. We need to do this because the insurgents are
hiding amongst us, they look and dress like normal civilians, they drive
civilian vehicles, not tanks and they operate from normal houses, not
military bases.
Building a new database can be done through reasonably simple procedures and
from the base up by a simple campaign coordinated the authorities, the
district councils (Mukhtars) and food ration distribution points.
Of course this should not be done in the same totalitarian demeaning manner
that Saddam adopted; just decently detailed records of who lives where and
who works where will be enough and can be of great help to our
counterterrorism efforts.
-
U.S.: New bomb plot aimed to 'kill all the devils'
Court documents: Black Muslim group thought informant was with al-Qaida
Charles Rex Arbogast / AP file
Chicago's Sears Tower, the tallest highrise on the city's skyline, was allegedly the focus of a bomb plot, officials said Thursday after seven men were arrested in Miami.
MIAMI - Following a warehouse raid and their arrests a day earlier, seven young men were charged Friday with conspiring to work with al-Qaida to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower and federal buildings. Court documents obtained by NBC News said the ringleader boasted of wanting to "kill all the devils we can" in a mission "just as good or greater than 9/11."
The seven individuals indicted by a federal grand jury were taken into custody Thursday when authorities swarmed a Miami warehouse that had been used by a Black Muslim group.
According to the court documents, a man identified as Narseal Batiste was the recruiter who wanted to organize "soldiers" to build an Islamic army to wage holy war.
The others were identified as Patrick Abraham, Stanley Grant Phanor, Naudimar Herrera, Burson Augustin, Lyglenson Lemorin, and Rotschild Augustine.
Batiste allegedly met last December in a hotel room with someone posing as a representative of al-Qaida ? someone law enforcement officials say was actually an agent of a country friendly to the United States.
The indictment described the alleged scheme this way:
Batiste initially asked for "boots, uniforms, machine guns, radios, and vehicles," as well as $50,000 in cash, to help him build an "Islamic Army to wage jihad.?
'Good or greater than 9/11'
In February, Batiste told the foreign agent that he wanted him and his men to attend an al-Qaida training camp so as to "kill all the devils we can" in a mission he said "would be just as good or greater than 9/11" ? beginning with the destruction of the Sears Tower.
At a meeting on March 16 at a warehouse in the Miami area, the seven defendants discussed a plot to bomb FBI buildings in five cities, and each swore an oath of loyalty to al-Qaida before the purported al-Qaida representative.
The person they believed to be an al-Qaida representative gave Batiste a video camera, which Batiste said he would use to film the North Miami Beach FBI building, the indictment said. At a March 26 meeting, Batiste and Augustin provided the foreign agent with photographs of the FBI building, as well as video of other Miami government buildings, and discussed the plot to bomb the FBI building.
But on May 24, the indictment said, Batiste told the foreign agent that he was experiencing delays ?because of various problems within his organization.? Batiste said he wanted to continue his mission and his relationship with al-Qaida nonetheless, the document said.
The informant's ability to track the group from its early stages had neutralized the threat.
?There is no imminent threat to Miami or any other area because of these operations,? said Richard Kolko, spokesman for FBI headquarters in Washington. He declined further comment.
One source said the suspects had been trying to buy weapons and other things needed to carry out attacks. Ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer compound that can also be used as an explosive, was reportedly among the items.
U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is scheduled to hold a news conference Friday to discuss the arrests. A news conference also will be held in Miami.
'Like military boot camp'
Neighbors who lived nearby said young men, who appeared to be in their teens and 20s, slept in the warehouse, running what looked like a militaristic group. They appeared brainwashed, some said.
?They would come out late at night and exercise,? said Tashawn Rose. ?It seemed like a military boot camp that they were working on there. They would come out and stand guard.?
Residents living near the warehouse said the men taken into custody described themselves as Muslims and had tried to recruit young people to join their group. Rose said they tried to recruit her younger brother and nephew for a karate class.
She said she talked to one of the men about a month ago. ?They seemed brainwashed,? she said. ?They said they had given their lives to Allah.?
Residents said FBI agents spent several hours in the neighborhood showing photos of the suspects and seeking information. They said the men had lived in the area for about a year.
Benjamin Williams, 17, said the group sometimes had young children with them. At times, he added, the men ?would cover their faces. Sometimes they would wear things on their heads, like turbans.?
A man who called himself Brother Corey and claimed to be a member of the group told CNN late Thursday that the individuals worship at the building and call themselves the ?Seas of David.?
He dismissed any suggestion that the men were contemplating violence. ?We are peaceful,? he said. He added that the group has ?soldiers? in Chicago but is not a terrorist organization.
Xavier Smith, who attends the nearby United Christian Outreach, said the men would often come by the church and ask for water.
?They were very private,? said Smith.
Sears Tower
Managers of the Sears Tower, the nation?s tallest building, said in a statement they speak regularly with the FBI and local law enforcement about terror threats and that Thursday ?was no exception.?
Security at the 110-floor Sears Tower, a Chicago landmark, was ramped up after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the 103rd-floor skydeck was closed for about a month and a half.
?Law enforcement continues to tell us that they have never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that has gone beyond criminal discussions,? the statement said.
The warehouse owner declined comment. ?I heard the news just like you guys,? George F. Mobassaleh told the AP. ?I can?t talk to you.?
South Florida has been linked to several terrorism investigations in the past. Several of the Sept. 11 hijackers lived and trained in the area, including ringleader Mohamed Atta and several plots by Cuban Americans against the government of Fidel Castro have also been based in Miami.
Jose Padilla, a former resident once accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive bomb in the country, is charged in Miami with being part of a North American terror support cell to al-Qaida and other violent Islamic extremist organizations. He has been in federal custody since 2002 and is scheduled for trial in September.
Padilla was originally designated an "enemy combatant" and held for three years without charge by the Bush administration shortly after his May 2002 arrest at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.
NBC News? Pete Williams, Jim Popkin, Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
-
I'm of the opinion that much of the strife found in sorry sections of the planet are caused by people imposing simple perspectives on complex problems. The Middle East is a good case in point, where Zionists/Israel/America are blamed for all manner of ills that in fact have much messier causes. This piece explores a similar thesis.
Sects and Death in the Middle East
Lee Smith
Mon Jun 19, 6:39 AM ET
Beirut
It's unclear how damaging the death of Abu Musab al Zarqawi will be to the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. But the admiration of sympathizers like Hamas, which called him a "brother-fighter," reminds us that he was not just a blood-drenched killer and lowlife. He was also the product of his region. The impact of his career on his extremist peers and the Middle East's Sunni mainstream will therefore bear close watching.
Even happier than the White House at his demise are Middle Eastern minorities, especially the Shiites, for they, rather than the Americans, were at the core of his exterminationist program. For Sunnis, the Shiites have always been barely tolerable heretics, but Zarqawi took this traditional loathing to new heights. Shortly before his death, he called Lebanon's fanatical Islamist militia Hezbollah a cover for Israel--because, after all, they were Shiites who stood between the Zionists and the wrath of the Sunni resistance.
Hezbollah general secretary Hassan Nasrallah and supporters were most certainly appalled and quite possibly terrified. After all, one reason for waging the "resistance" against Israel is to prove that the minority Shiites are Arabs in good standing just as much as the majority Sunnis. Indeed, since the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah has been bragging that it was the first Arab group to make the Zionists taste defeat, and thus that the Shiites had managed to out-Sunni the Sunnis.
In effect, Zarqawi said he saw through the charade, and that Hezbollah should disarm--a demand that reminds us why it is probably going to be impossible to convince Nasrallah to give up his weapons peacefully. Hezbollah may well believe its own rhetoric--that only its militia can protect Lebanon from Israel. But the Shiites also have to worry that, if they put down their guns, they are vulnerable to Sunni violence, a threat that Zarqawi's spectacular Iraq campaign made very real to Shiites across the region. Thus, in response to the insult that he was doing the work of the Zionists, Nasrallah described Zarqawi in similar terms: "The killers in Iraq, no matter what sect they belong to, are Americans and Zionists and CIA and Mossad agents."
This Arab habit of blaming everything on the United States, or Israel, or the West in general, strikes many observers as evidence of faulty logical processes, or an abdication of basic political responsibility. But it is also part of an unspoken ceasefire pact--a reminder among Arabs that they have agreed not to attack each other and will focus their energies on external enemies in order to keep the peace at home.
For over half a century, Arab leaders from Nasser to Nasrallah have all sounded the same note--we Arabs are in a battle to the death against Israel, the United States, the West, colonialism, etc. Zarqawi broke that pact. We Sunnis are Arabs, said Zarqawi, but you lot are Shia and we will kill you.
And so Ayman al-Zawahiri's letter last year urging Zarqawi to leave the Shiites alone and focus on the Americans indicates that, at least compared with the late leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, the al Qaeda home office is staffed by rather mainstream Arab demagogues. Many Arabs believe that Israel would be lost without U.S. support. The same holds true in the bin Laden-Zawahiri worldview, where Washington is the only thing protecting weak Arab regimes from jihadist takeovers. Zarqawi believed, for whatever combination of religious, political, criminal, and sociopathic rationales, that to truly set the region in flames and bring down the established order, you get the people to fight each other.
Zarqawi tapped into the id of the region, the violent subterranean intra-Arab hatreds that no one wants to look at very closely, neither locals nor foreigners, because the picture it paints is so dauntingly gruesome that it suggests the Middle East will be a basket case for decades to come.
A RECENT ZOGBY POLL on Arab TV-watching habits explained that Al Jazeera remains the most watched station in the region for foreign news. Curiously, the poll ignored Iraq, where 80 percent of the population, Shiites and Kurds, are not apt to patronize a media outlet that regards them as little more than fodder for the heroic Sunni struggle against the Americans and Zionists.
That other 20 percent of Iraq was Zarqawi's target constituency, his Sunni base, and it is a much, much larger number outside of Iraq. It includes not just takfiris like himself--extremists who believe in murdering infidels and heretics. It comprises a mournful Hamas government, elected by a majority of Palestinians, and "moderate" Islamists like the four parliamentarians from Jordan's Islamic Action Front now facing prosecution for openly lamenting the death of a man who had repeatedly targeted the Royal Hashemite Kingdom. Certainly not all Sunni Arabs approved of Zarqawi's tactics, but many agreed that someone had to put the Shiites back in their place lest they misunderstand what is in store for them once the Americans leave.
Last year, Jordan's King Abdullah famously warned of a Shiite crescent--a sphere of influence running from Iran to Lebanon--and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has accused Shiites of being more loyal to Iran than the countries they live in. And these are the heads of the two major Arab states that are almost devoid of Shiites. Feelings run even higher elsewhere in the region.
In Saudi Arabia, the mere existence of Shiites in the Eastern Province threatens not only the kingdom's primary source of income, oil, but also the very legitimacy of Wahhabi rule. After all, as true Wahhabis, shouldn't they be converting or killing Shiites, as the founder of the country, Ibn Saud, once insisted? Further west in Syria, the Sunni majority has been grating for more than 40 years under the rule of a Shia sect, the Alawites, who have now cost the Sunni merchant class in both money and prestige. The Assad regime has so isolated Syria from the rest of the international community that its only ally is the Islamist Republic of Iran. And then there is Lebanon, where Hezbollah has effectively usurped the mantle of Arab militancy from the Sunnis.
To your average Joe Sunni, then, it's good that Osama bin Laden kills Americans. And it's wonderful that the Palestinian groups kill Israelis. But Zarqawi was the man in the trenches who went after the heretics that Sunni Arabs all actually have to live with every day, and have successfully kept in their place for a millennium now, and don't ever want overturning the scales.
THE SECTARIANISM OF IRAQ has been topic A in Washington ever since the war began. And yet it is not merely a temporary eruption at a time of crisis, but rather a permanent and defining feature of every Arab society, and you don't have to scratch beneath the surface of things to find it. Sometimes, it's just gossip and banter, as in Lebanon, where I've heard Sunni women talk about the disgusting way that Shiites hang their laundry. A Christian friend married to a Shiite confided his concern that their daughter's fashion sense was becoming gaudily Shiite. The Sunnis say, eat with a Druze but sleep with a Christian--meaning the Christians are filthy but the Druze are untrustworthy and will slaughter you in your bed. Some exchange Jew for Druze.
Other times, the gossip turns to folk wisdom. Some Sunnis really believe that Shiites have little tails. And there are scores of volumes of age-old Shiite propaganda about the bizarre sexual practices of Sunnis. Much of the sectarian enmity, in fact, partakes of sexual loathing and envy. Sunni women, for instance, are famously believed by their detractors to relish anal sex. Recently, Hezbollah supporters surrounded a Sunni neighborhood in Beirut, where they insulted deputy Saad al-Hariri, chanting "the c--of his sister, the c--of his mother."
Many Arabs believe that Syria's Alawites engage in pagan orgies where men sleep with each other's wives, or with their daughters, or with each other. Osama bin Laden's mother, as it happens, is an Alawite, which is strange only in that the 14th-century jurist and father of modern jihad Ibn Taymiyya, one of bin Laden's role models, thought the Alawites were "more infidel than Jews or Christians, even more infidel than many pagans." He wrote, "War and punishment in accordance with Islamic law against them are among the greatest of pious deeds and the most important obligation."
Of course, most people don't speak about sectarian hatreds publicly. In Syria, the Alawite government has made it very dangerous to talk about sects. In Lebanon, people are too polite to ask you directly what you are, and so to find out, they will ask you your last name, your neighborhood, your school, your father's name, his hometown. The well-educated Arab classes are especially careful about speaking in sectarian terms in front of Westerners, because, as elites talking to elites, they believe that Westerners think religious faith is bizarre to begin with and sectarianism evidence of a primitive society. To hear many Iraqi officials and journalists describe their country, there is so much intermarriage between the sects and tribes that their Iraq, the non-Zarqawi Iraq, actually looks something like a page out of the New York Times wedding announcements. And to be fair, a case can be made that 20th-century Iraq was at times among the most cosmopolitan of Arab societies.
But to downplay sectarian issues is to risk misunderstanding the real problems in Iraq. There are already scores of books and articles detailing how the Bush team screwed up the war or the postwar occupation, some written by former administration employees, others the mea culpas of self-described onetime true believers. But the biggest problem in Iraq isn't really the stupidity or arrogance or incompetence of the Bush administration. The real stumbling block isn't getting Iraq's electricity or water on full blast. Police and army recruits aren't bound and tortured before they are decapitated or shot in the head because of premature or insufficient de-Baathification, or because the State Department and the Pentagon were fighting over the role of Ahmad Chalabi. Americans should have provided better security, and more overwhelming force. But the political and religious cover so amply offered to the assassins of ordinary Iraqis did not issue from the office of the Coalition Provisional Authority or the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. No American exhorted Sunni or Shiite gangs to butcher their neighbors. The American arguments over Iraq sometimes achieve truly astonishing levels of parochialism and self-obsession. The problem in Iraq is Iraq. More broadly speaking, it is the problem of Arab society. Intolerance of the other, fear of the other, is always there.
OSAMA BIN LADEN, some Middle Eastern wags like to joke, is the father of Arab democracy, for without September 11, the United States would have gone on ignoring the region. But Zarqawi is the real radical, for he exploited and illuminated the region's oldest and deepest hatreds. And he stayed on message until it was very difficult to argue that the root causes of violence in the Middle East are colonialism, imperialism, and Zionism.
Zarqawi made it clear, if it wasn't already, that a more "even-handed approach" toward the Israeli-Palestinian crisis will not really defuse tensions in the Middle East. That particular problem, at least in its political dimensions, goes back at most only to 1860; the Sunni-Shiite split begins with the death of the prophet Muhammad. Zarqawi also made it clear, if it wasn't already, that getting U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia will not really calm jihadi fervor, because the American military is just one among the many valuable targets the jihadists see in the greater Middle East.
The world looks like a different place thanks to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, for without him the obtuse, the partisan, and the dishonest would still have room to talk about root causes and such stuff and reason away mass murder and sectarian fear and loathing. Zarqawi clarified things. If his death turns out to be a turning point in the war or the political development of Iraq, we will not know for many years, maybe decades. But it will only be a turning point if, having held up a mirror to the people who quietly cheered him on, they recoil from what he showed them.
Lee Smith, a Hudson Institute visiting fellow based in Beirut, is writing a book on Arab culture.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/weeklystandard/20060619/cm_weeklystandard/sectsanddeathinthemiddleeast
-
A North Korean Missile Test: Implications for the U.S. and the Region
by Balbina Y. Hwang, Ph.D.
WebMemo #1134
June 20, 2006 | |
According to international intelligence reports, for the last five weeks, North Korea has been steadily moving towards a test launch of the Taepodong 2, an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with a range up to 6,000 kilometers ? enough to reach Alaska. Satellite intelligence reveals that Pyongyang has loaded booster rockets onto a launch pad in Musuduan-ri, in the North Hamkyong Province of northeastern North Korea, and moved fuel tanks in preparation for fueling. This action is in violation of North Korea?s international agreements and appears designed to goad the United States into direct bilateral talks. The U.S. must not take the bait. No good will come from rewarding North Korea for its belligerent behavior.
A missile test is problematic for the region and the United States because it would end North Korea?s 1999 self-imposed moratorium on long-range missile tests ? a moratorium that was reiterated in the Pyongyang Declaration when Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in September 2002. The test would spell further trouble for the stalled Six-Party negotiations over the North?s nuclear ambitions. More broadly, a test would raise questions about the future stability and security of the region and North Korea?s enduring role as the region?s troublemaker.
If the missile test does occur, the Bush Administration must not succumb to pressure to enter into in bilateral talks with North Korea. The United States has been clear that all diplomatic negotiations must go through the Six-Party framework involving North Korea, the United States, South Korea, Russia, Japan, and China. The Bush Administration should make clear that aggressive behavior by the North Koreans will not cause the United States to alter its position.
Why Test?
North Korea last tested a long-range missile in August 1998, when it fired a Taepodong 1, with a range of 2,000 km, over northern Japan. That test took many by surprise and confirmed that North Korean capabilities had progressed beyond previous estimates. A launch of the Taepodong 2 would put North?s Korea?s military efforts back into the spotlight and demonstrate that it now has a missile with the range to reach the U.S. mainland.
Knowledge of the Taepodong 2 is limited, in part because the system has never been tested. A 2001 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate forecast that a three-stage version of the missile could reach North America carrying a sizable payload. It could be fitted with a chemical or biological warhead but probably not a nuclear payload, because North Korea has likely not yet developed the capability to miniaturize a nuclear weapon.
The United States ? along with Japan, South Korea, and Australia ? has urged North Korea to abandon its plans to test the missile, stating clearly that a launch would be dangerous and provocative and damaging to North Korean interests. But Pyongyang may have reached the opposite conclusion. From a North Korean standpoint, a missile test launch would further three goals:
Pyongyang?s strategic objective is to raise the stakes for the Six-Party talks, which have stalled since North Korea?s refusal to return to the table last November. With little incentive for Washington to relent on its long-standing insistence that Pyongyang must first agree to return to the talks without preconditions and the global perception that Iran has become Washington?s top priority, a missile test would raise the level of tension and bring focus back to North Korea. Further, a test launch would put yet another issue on the negotiating table and, Pyongyang hopes, distract attention from the core issue of its nuclear weapons program.
North Korea wants to test years of investment in missile research and development. Ultimately, the only way to prove that a missile works is to test it. A test would not only serve as a stern warning to the region about the strength of North Korea?s ballistic missile capabilities, but also would enhance the legitimacy of North Korean missiles in the weapons proliferation marketplace. In part due to the U.S. crackdown on North Korea?s illicit financial activities, a major source of income of the Kim Jong Il regime, Pyongyang may turn its attention elsewhere, such as the lucrative weapons and missile markets. The missile test preparations are being conducted in open view of foreign satellites; Pyongyang is clearly showing off.
Domestic pressure may also be at play. A missile test would demonstrate the military?s supremacy in national policymaking. A launch could also be a tremendous morale boost for the North Korean public. The regime has been testing engines for a new missile since at least 2002, and a successful test would bolster Kim?s claims that he is developing advanced technology for his people. This would have the added benefit of boosting nationalism as a counterweight to increased international pressures on the regime.
Regional Response
Is Pyongyang fully prepared for the negative repercussions of a launch? Japan is deeply concerned about a launch that it would consider a direct threat to its security. North Korea?s Taepodong 1 test over Japan in 1998 was a wake-up call that led Tokyo to cooperate with Washington on a missile defense system. A new launch would not only bolster Japanese efforts to erect defensive capabilities against North Korea but would also likely spur the U.S. Congress to increase its support for missile defense efforts. Furthermore, such aggression from North Korea could play a role in selecting the future leadership of Japan. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is preparing to step down in September, and polls indicate that Shinzo Abe, who has taken a strong stance against North Korea and China, trails moderate candidate Yasuo Fukuda. A North Korean missile test could aid Abe?s campaign, reducing the possibility of a diplomatic reconciliation between North Korea and Japan.
Seoul?s reaction is more uncertain. A North Korean missile test would further undermine President Roh Moo Hyun?s policy of engagement with Pyongyang, which is already under pressure due to the North?s lack of reciprocity. A test launch would attract criticism both domestically and internationally. Former President and Nobel laureate Kim Dae-Jung would have to cancel his scheduled trip to Pyongyang on June 27th. Yet, it is unclear if a missile launch would be enough to turn public opinion against engagement with the North. While critical voices will grow stronger, a new missile test will be perceived much the same as the previous one was in 1998: an abstract concern that does not directly threaten South Koreans.
North Korea may hope that South Koreans will focus on strongly negative U.S. and Japanese reactions rather than the North Korean threat, thereby driving a wedge between Seoul and Washington. There is precedent: The 1998 missile launch did not slow down Kim Dae Jung?s ?Sunshine Policy.?
Options
Unfortunately, the range of policy options for the international community should Pyongyang proceed with its test are limited. Washington and Tokyo already have strict economic sanctions in place, and there is little additional economic leverage they could exercise. They can, and likely will, continue to pressure the North Korean regime by aggressively targeting its illicit activities, but unless China and South Korea decide to halt their economic assistance to the North, this will have limited effect. A military option ? such as shooting down the North Korean missile with responding interceptors ? should be kept on the table. In the event of a launch, the U.S. should bring North Korea?s aggression before the United Nations Security Council. While UN sanctions would have minimal practical impact, they would carry important symbolic value.
The United States and its partners in the Six-Party process must not succumb to North Korea?s manipulation and brinksmanship. Undoubtedly, one of Pyongyang?s goals is to put pressure on Washington to re-engage in direct bilateral talks to resolve not only the missile issue, but its nuclear programs. North Korea has some reason to believe this will work: After its missile launch in 1998, the Clinton Administration engaged in concerted high-level bilateral efforts with Pyongyang over its missile programs ? to no avail. The Bush Administration, therefore, should continue to insist that the diplomatic process must occur within the context of the established multilateral format. It should not allow aggressive North Korean actions to alter this.
The five parties engaging with North Korea agree that a North Korean missile test would be a dangerous act and only isolate Pyongyang further from the rest of the international community. Ironically, such isolation is an important step towards successful conclusion of the Six-Party process.
Balbina Y. Hwang, Ph.D., is Senior Policy Analyst for Northeast Asia in the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.
-
Hundreds of chemical weapons found in Iraq: US intelligence by Charlotte Raab
Thu Jun 22, 6:39 AM ET
US-led coalition forces in Iraq have found some 500 chemical weapons since the March 2003 invasion, Republican lawmakers said, citing an intelligence report.
"Since 2003, Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent," said an overview of the report unveiled by Senator Rick Santorum and Peter Hoekstra, head of the intelligence committee of the House of Representatives.
"Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf war chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf war chemical munitions are assessed to still exist," it says.
The lawmakers cited the report as validation of the US rationale for the war, and stressed the ongoing danger they pose.
"This is an incredibly -- in my mind -- significant finding. The idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction, is in fact false," Santorum said.
A Pentagon official who confirmed the findings said that all the weapons were pre-1991 vintage munitions "in such a degraded state they couldn't be used for what they are designed for."
The official, who asked not to be identified, said most were 155 millimeter artillery projectiles with mustard gas or sarin of varying degrees of potency.
"We're destroying them where we find them in the normal manner," the official said.
In 2004, the US army said it had found a shell containing sarin gas and another shell containing mustard gas, and a Pentagon official said at the time the discovery showed there were likely more.
The intelligence overview published Wednesday stressed that the pre-Gulf War Iraqi chemical weapons could be sold on the black market.
"Use of these weapons by terrorists or insurgent groups would have implications for coalition forces in Iraq. The possibility of use outside Iraq cannot be ruled out," it said.
Santorum said the two-month-old report was prepared by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a military intelligence agency that started looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when the Iraq Survey Group stopped doing so in late 2004.
Last year the head of Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, said that insurgents in Iraq had already used old chemical weapons in their attacks.
Nevertheless, "the impression that the Iraqi Survey Group left with the American people was they didn't find anything," Hoekstra said.
"But this says: Weapons have been discovered; more weapons exist. And they state that Iraq was not a WMD-free zone, that there are continuing threats from the materials that are or may still be in Iraq," he said.
Asked just how dangerous the weapons are, Hoekstra said: "One or two of these shells, the materials inside of these, transferred outside of the country, can be very, very deadly."
The report said that the purity of the chemical agents -- and thus their potency -- depends on "many factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives, and environmental storage conditions."
"While agents degrade over time, chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal," it said.
Reporters questioned the lawmakers as to why the Bush administration had not played up the report to boost their case for continued warfare in Iraq.
"The administration has been very clear that they want to look forward," Santorum said. "They felt it was not their role to go back and fight previous discussions."
Fear that Saddam Hussein might use his alleged arsenal of chemical and biological weapons was a reason US officials gave for launching the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
-
Iraq: An Offer of Amnesty in a Complex Landscape
Summary
Sunni leaders criticized a reconciliation plan put forth by the Iraqi government, saying it falls short of the minority Arab community's expectations. The Sunni reaction offers insights into the makeup of the Sunni political landscape in Iraq and underscores its complexity, further challenging efforts to scale back the insurgency and disband the militias.
Analysis
Iraqi Vice President Tareq al-Hashmi, a Sunni, warned June 26 that there will be no letup in the insurgency unless the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki negotiates with insurgent groups dominated by former Baathists -- and until there is a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S.-led coalition forces from the country.
Earlier, Hassan al-Sunaid, a lawmaker and member of the political bureau of al-Maliki's Hizb al-Dawah party, claimed that seven Sunni insurgent groups had responded positively to a national reconciliation plan presented by the al-Maliki administration. Al-Sunaid named six of the seven groups: the al-Ashreen Brigades, the Mohammed Army, Abtal al-Iraq (Heroes of Iraq), the 9th of April Group, al-Fatah Brigades and the Brigades of the General Command of the Armed Forces.
Meanwhile, Iyad al-Samarrai, a legislator from al-Hashmi's Iraqi Islamic Party, questioned whether the favorable response came from bona fide insurgent leaders. "The problem comes from people who say they represent this or that group," Al-Samarrai said. "Do they really represent them? Does he represent the leadership or a branch? This is something that needs investigating."
Apart from the Mohammed Army and the al-Ashreen Brigades (aka the 1920 Revolution Brigades), the others are quite insignificant. None is a first-tier Sunni nationalist group, a category that would include organizations such as the Islamic Army in Iraq and the Islamic Front of the Iraqi Resistance. Therefore, it is likely that the seven groups that contacted the government in response to the reconciliation plan are part of a Sunni approach that involves groups coming forward in increments. Sunnis do not want to surrender all their communal military assets until the Shia are willing to do the same.
That some insurgents groups are reportedly ready to lay down their weapons while Sunni political leaders remain critical of the government's opposition to dealing with Baathists underscores a complex political structure that has evolved over the last three years. The locus of power in Iraq's Sunni areas is shared by political, religious, tribal and military leaders. This means that, despite a general Sunni consensus toward seeking a political settlement with the Shia, the negotiating process will be excruciatingly lengthy and bloody. Moreover, the difficulties that the Shiite-dominated al-Maliki government faces regarding the Sunni demand for disbanding the militias will further complicate matters.
Maverick Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr's response to the reconciliation plan is quite telling. Sahib al-Amery, an aide to al-Sadr, was quoted June 26 in An Najaf as saying that the al-Sadrite bloc welcomes the 24-point plan but sees it as not being tough enough to keep Baathists out of the political system, and believes it must address the issue of releasing jailed leaders of al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militia.
Al-Maliki's plan would extend amnesty to all those insurgents who are not jihadists or Saddamists/Baathists. In effect, this plan is the Shiite response to the Sunnis moving away from the jihadists, and the Shia deliberately excluded members of the former government from the amnesty offer. The Shia will likely bargain on the issue of the Baathists as part of any settlement on the Shiite militias.
By coughing up al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Sunnis showed a united front and exploited intra-Shiite differences when they demanded that the Shia reciprocate by disbanding the militias. This time around, the Shia are trying to take advantage of the splits among the Sunnis by linking the matter of the militias to a deal on the Baathists.
But the Sunni fragmentation is not as severe as that of the Shia, which was obvious when those Sunnis who are part and parcel of the system came out saying that any national reconciliation plan that failed to engage the Baathists was destined to fail. The Sunni political leadership is skillfully trying to leverage the complex structure of their community to their advantage.
On one hand are Sunni political groups such as the Tawafoq Iraqi Front and the Hewar National Iraqi Front, which together control 55 seats in Parliament. On the other hand are the sundry array of armed Sunni guerilla groups. Unlike the classical political-military wing model, the Sunni political and military leadership is connected through the pivot of tribal leaders, who are the ones with the most leverage over the armed groups and who act through the political forces within the two Sunni coalitions. Sunni religious scholars also exercise influence over political leaders and military commanders but they, too, are dependent upon the tribal shayukh for their power.
It is this structure that has allowed the Sunnis to mitigate internal differences and adroitly maneuver in their political dealings with the Shia, Kurds and Americans. More important, this structure will continue to allow the Sunnis to engage in tough negotiations with the Shia and to exploit their growing internal rifts, especially as the government moves forward on the issue of dismantling the Shiite militias.
-
Geopolitical Diary: Signs of an Approaching U.S.-Iranian Deal
Supreme Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Tuesday that Iran does not need to talk with the United States about its nuclear program because there is nothing to be gained from the negotiations. State television quoted Khamenei as saying, "We do not negotiate with anybody on achieving and exploiting nuclear technology ... But if they recognize our nuclear rights, we are ready to negotiate about controls, supervisions and international guarantees."
Western media jumped on Khamenei's remark and began flooding the airwaves with reports that Iran had categorically rejected talks with the United States, feeding the popular perception that the world is headed toward a major crisis on the Iranian nuclear issue. But the reality is the opposite. Khamenei's remarks are to be expected: Iran has intensified its preparations on the home front as well as on the international level to move toward public dialogue with the United States.
One of the most glaring examples of such developments is the report from the Iranian news agency Fars that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will soon make a trip to Baghdad. This would not be happening if Iran was not close to consolidating its geopolitical interests in Iraq. What's more, the U.S. State Department gave a cautious nod of approval to this visit.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Shiite leaders have been traveling to Iran, as did Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul over the weekend. Syrian President Bashar al Assad, in an interview published June 26 in the Arabic-language daily al-Hayat, said that Syrian interests would be best served through an understanding between the United States and Iran, and that he finds Arab fears over Iran's growing role in the region irrational.
The Iranians have also been engaged in some significant changes internally, trying to get all the factions of the clerical-led conservative establishment on the same page in order to move toward a dialogue with the Bush administration. The most important event in this regard is the creation of a new body that will be shaping Iranian foreign policy: the Strategic Council for Foreign Affairs (SCFA), meant to serve as an advisory group to improve the country's capabilities in making major foreign policy decisions. It is not an executive body and is not supposed to interfere with the function of the Foreign Ministry or the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC). The creation of the SCFA is part of Khamenei's effort to have greater oversight over the foreign-policymaking process in the hawkish Ahmedinejad administration.
It should be noted that this move follows several similar initiatives by the supreme leader. What Khamenei has done is retain key pragmatic conservatives from the previous government in positions that allow him to exercise greater control over the ultraconservatives who emerged with the election of Ahmadinejad. Senior officials of the three branches of the Iranian government called June 25 for the need to show greater solidarity and cooperation in order to achieve the aspirations of the Islamic Revolution and the supreme leader.
Signs of progress are also visible inside Iraq. Deputy Prime Minister Salam Zikam Ali al-Zubaie held meetings over the weekend with several tribal leaders from Anbar province, where the insurgency has been strong, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki unveiled a 24-point national reconciliation plan early this week. It is quite possible the seven groups that responded favorably to the government's amnesty offer came forward as a result of these meetings. Under the amnesty plan, several hundred Sunni prisoners were released on Tuesday. As a result of all this, there was a noticeable drop in violence.
All of these developments indicate that Tehran and Washington are moving to finalize their deal on Iraq. What remains to be seen is how this will filter into Tehran's role in Lebanon and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- and, of course, the nuclear issue.
-
51 AM
Vladimir Radyuhin
MOSCOW: Ukraine sold banned long-range missiles to China and Iran in a gross breach of its non-proliferation obligations, the Russian defence chief has said.
Russia's Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said Ukraine's state-owned defence exporter through its subsidiary supplied 12 nuclear-capable cruise missiles to China and Iran.
Mr. Ivanov, who is also a Deputy Prime Minister, told a news conference here on Friday that Progress, a daughter firm of Ukraine's arms export monopoly Ukrspetseksport, in 2000-2001 sold six Soviet Kh-55 Granat missiles to China and another six missiles to Iran.
"This is the grossest violation of the missile technologies control regime," Mr. Ivanov said at a presentation of a Russian White Book on proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
The Russian Minister said this was the sole violation of the non-proliferation regime in the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States. International authorities had been informed of the Ukrainian deal and investigation was underway, he said.
Ukrainian officials earlier said the missiles had been sold without nuclear warheads.
Out of 1000 Granat missiles Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Union, half were to be sold back to Russia and half were to be destroyed.
Media reports said Iran had used the Ukrainian missiles to copycat the technology and launch its own production of similar missiles.
-
June 28, 2006:
Saudi Arabia detains 43 suspected militants (back to list)
International Analysis Alert Level: High
Saudi Arabia
Saudi security forces have detained 43 suspected Islamist militants, including two Somalis, an Ethiopian and an Iraqi, the interior ministry said Saturday after a deadly gunbattle in the capital. The ministry said the arrests had been made in different parts of the oil-rich kingdom since May 9. Two arrests followed a firefight in Riyadh Friday in which six suspected Al-Qaeda militants and a policeman were killed. Full Story
TRC Analysis:
The recent arrests and killings of more than 40 militants in Saudi Arabia (Country Profile) is continuing testament of the capabilities of the Saudi security forces, who have hunted, pursued, killed, and captured militants in the Kingdom with such a dogged persistence that the once fearsome al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Group Profile) has been unable to pull off a major attack in almost two years. At the same time, the repetitive emergence of new militants in the country shows that Saudi Arabia still has much reform to do of its educational, cultural, and religious environment. The existence of more than 40 people in the Kingdom who were planning terrorist attacks also demonstrates that the country is still very much at risk of another terrorist attack. In addition to the militants themselves, Saudi security secured weapons, documents, and money being prepared to carry out an attack.
The presence of foreigners in these militant networks in Saudi Arabia demonstrates the extent to which the Kingdom is seen as a legitimate target of the international Jihad, not just a target for local dissidents. The absorption of foreigners into militant networks is dangerous for Saudi Arabia, as foreigners are more difficult to identify and intercept in terror networks in other countries. The vast traffic of Muslim foreigners into Saudi Arabia, not only during the pilgrimage season but for jobs that Saudi citizens refuse to work, makes the population difficult to police, and their ill treatment by the Saudi government can fuel tendencies toward militancy and the desire for revenge.
Also notable of those arrested in this recent campaign is that they have not been characterized as part of the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula organization. They seem to have been examples of distinct, spontaneously emerging terrorist cells that were not recruited by the existing, prevailing terrorist organization in the Kingdom. While the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula organization is thought to have been severely weakened by the campaign against it, the emergence of new, separate terrorist groups or cells demonstrates that Saudi Arabia will continue to suffer from terrorist threats even if the al-Qaeda organization within the Kingdom is eradicated.
A parallel of this dynamic has occurred recently with the media wing of the Mujahideen in Saudi Arabia. The "Sawt al-Jihad" media arm of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has nearly ceased all production, but recently a new media company, called "al-Bisha'ir," has announced its existence and put out its first two productions. Al-Bisha'ir has announced that it is not part of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula but is concerned with the plight of the Mujahideen in the Kingdom generally.
By Rebecca Givner-Forbes, TRC Staff
-
Iraqis say US exit plan should await security By Scott Peterson and Awadh al-Taee
Tue Jun 27, 4:00 AM ET
News of a possible US military reduction in Iraq, beginning as early as this fall, is being met in Baghdad with the deep skepticism of a war-weary people who have witnessed many other American exit plans go unfulfilled.
Most Iraqis want an end to the 127,000-strong US presence, which they consider an occupation. But they are concerned, too, that Iraqi forces, while growing in size and capability, still can't cope with the insurgency and sectarian killings that have killed tens of thousands of Iraqis.
"I want the Americans to leave as soon as possible, so the reason to attack Iraqi troops will end, because insurgents are always accusing us of being agents and supporting these foreign troops," a first lieutenant of Iraq's Interior Ministry said Monday, while commanding a checkpoint on Baghdad's airport road.
"Before they leave, they should destroy the [sectarian] militias and make sure the security elements are strong," says the officer. "I don't want them to leave completely; they should stay in bases. But if they don't lower their numbers, we will pressure them to do so."
The apparent plan, initially reported by The New York Times on Sunday, projects that US combat brigades in Iraq, of 3,500 troops each, would be cut from 14 to five or six by the end of next year. An initial two brigades now slated to go home this September would not be replaced, according to the Times.
But, says Ismael Zayer, editor of Baghdad's Sabah al-Jadiid newspaper, "We need to face the fact that if security ... does not improve in a very crucial way, there is nothing to talk about.
"We have the impression that a battle of Baghdad has begun already now," says Mr. Zayer. "Pulling out small troops or something bigger is good, it's welcome, but it has to be part of a ... genuine plan; not propaganda."
US officials have "emphasized that any withdrawals would depend on continued progress" and strength of Iraqi units ? the same caveat that has undermined every previous pullout plan ? and that the newly formed Iraqi government had yet to be consulted, the Times noted.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Sunday unveiled a 24-point plan for national reconciliation, and called on Iraqi forces to take control of growing slices of Iraq, to enable US-led coalition troops to leave. He gave no timeline for a US pullout.
"When they finish supplying us Humvees, tanks, cannons, and airplanes like their army, [US forces] should leave today, before tomorrow," says Captain Mohammad, of the Iraqi Army, who would not give his full name. "We originally did not even want to smell their perfume, or [for them to] leave any footprint in Iraq."
US forces are "not more courageous than us, and they do not care more about our homes than we do," asserts Mohammad, though newly trained Iraqi units have disintegrated in past years when ordered to quell uprisings.
Poll results in late March from the US-funded International Republican Institute (IRI) indicate that, at least relative to security, withdrawal of US troops is not a top demand. When asked to list priorities for the new government, 48 percent said security should rank first; more than 85 percent listed security as one of the top three most important issues.
Among more than 2,800 Iraqis polled, withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq ranked a distant third, the top priority of just 9 percent of Iraqis. In the IRI poll, withdrawal was 1 point ahead of fixing the economy and job creation.
In some cases, US lawmakers have been as skeptical as Iraqis. Democrats in Congress were criticized for trying to vote on an exit timeline for Iraq last week, during heated debate in both houses.
"The [Defense] Department's drawn up plans at all times, but I think it would be wrong now to say that this is the plan we are going to operate under," Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record) (R) of Virginia said on FOX News Sunday, when asked about US General George Casey's reported plan.
Monday, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said, "I would caution very strongly against everybody thinking, 'Well, they're going to pull two brigades out.'
"Maybe they will, maybe they won't," he said. "It really does depend upon a whole series of things that we cannot at this juncture predict. I would characterize this more in terms of scenario building and we'll see how it proceeds."
According to the Associated Press, Mr. Snow said the general has "a number of scenarios in mind for differing situations on the ground," that would depend on conditions on the ground.
Regardless of any pullout strategy, US Marine units in Iraq's western Anbar Province ? where, along with Baghdad and central Iraq, the insurgency has been most violent and widespread ? have no plans to reduce numbers, the Times reported on Monday.
Lt. Gen. John Sattler, who commands Marines across the Middle East, told The New York Times Monday that he could foresee "no reductions" in US troop strength in Anbar "at least through next summer, because of the restiveness there. Al Anbar is going to be one of the last provinces to be stabilized."
In fact, US commanders in late May ordered a reserve force of 1,500 from Kuwait to Anbar for a short tour of perhaps four months to deal with the "challenge" in that province. Already, one-fifth of all US troops in Iraq are deployed in Anbar.
"When the Americans leave, the militias will eat us," predicts Khalil Mohammad, an air conditioning specialist in Baghdad. "The hands that came here to help us ? the Americans ? should finish their work and leave.... They should increase the power of the law, and should not leave completely but stay in bases."
One US military assessment last April predicted that it would take two to five years of continual US backup before Iraqi security forces could stand on their own. One senior Iraqi official spoke in April about an understanding with US officials that troop numbers might dip below 100,000 by the end of 2006, with an eventual total pullout by mid-2008.
But sectarian killing and a six-month security vacuum between mid-December elections and formation of new government last month has complicated efforts to build up Iraqi units. According to the Brooking Institution's Iraq Index, the total number of security forces is 265,600.
"The situation steadily deteriorated more quickly than Iraqi forces could be brought online. Ethnic and sectarian fighting vastly broadened that area where security was a major problem," writes Anthony Cordesman, a veteran defense and Iraq analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, in a draft assessment made public last week.
"These issues were not addressed in coalition and Iraqi reporting. Claims that Iraqi forces could take control of large areas of battle space in Iraq had never been honest or realistic," writes Mr. Cordesman. "Performance was so mixed that US forces had to constantly intervene, embedded advisors were often critical to Iraqi success, and Iraqi forces remained heavily dependent on US [firepower]."
The results are felt on the ground in Baghdad, where a two-week-old security clampdown has barely dented insurgent attacks. Gunmen took on a checkpoint during a curfew Friday, sparking street battles.
"We are not sure that the development of Iraqi security forces will be strong or sufficient enough in the future, because the indicators are almost all negative," says editor Zayer, comparing the sectarian divisions in Iraq to those that defined civil war in Lebanon for 15 years, from the mid-1970s. "If the Americans don't manage to find a solution, and remedies for this deterioration, then there is no hope."
"I am afraid there is a trend we notice in the American media ... with the position of the administration, the White House, the Pentagon, which tries to put a rosy view of the situation which is not fact, not honest, [and] not the reality we have now," adds Zayer, about reports of US withdrawal. "There is a sort of propaganda-like line; I don't like it. It doesn't mean anything."
-
In a related vein, the following:
=======================
http://boredsoldier.blogspot.com/2006/07/interview-with-iraqi-general.html
Interview With An Iraqi General
I wrote a story for Michael Yon?s Frontline Forum a week ago about the town I am stationed in right now named Qayyarah. Qayyarah is a model for other Iraqi cities because it was once a haven for terrorists but is now safe enough for anyone to travel around in without fear of terrorists. The main reason for the safety of Qayyarah lies with one man: General Ali. He is a myth-like figure around our base and everyone knows his name. He is a strict military man but is the type of man Iraq needs so desperately right now. I hope people the world over will read this interview and learn just what kind of men are in Iraq right now willing to take control of their own country. What follows is the truth. It comes directly from the mouth of a man who knows intimately what is going on in Iraq and knows where Iraq has come from and where it needs to go. I intend to post the interview in two installments due to the length and urge everyone to bookmark this page and come back for the rest of the interview.
General Ali in his office
How long have you been in the military?
General Ali: I first went to the army in 1976, I became a staff brigade general in 1997. In 2001 I left the army because there were many problems between my tribe and Saddam?s regime. He fired many of the officers and put some of them in jail. I am one of the officers who was put in jail for ten months and afterwards I was put out of the army. When the coalition forces came to Iraq in 2003 I worked with the 101st (Airborne American army unit) in Qayyarah (*the town I am in now and where he lives) as an advisor. In 2004 the terrorists destroyed all of the Iraqi police stations and in that time the terrorists controlled all of this area. They controlled Mosul, south Mosul, and 40 km from where we are now. In that time no one came to help. All of the people and soldiers were scared and went home. I came to help and the Americans invited me to come command this battalion. The name of this battalion was the 102nd ING before they changed the name to the 1st battalion 3 brigade Iraqi army. At that time I only had eight soldiers with my battalion. They could not go out in their uniforms because they were scared of the terrorists. If they went out on a mission with the coalition they wore facemasks because if the terrorists saw them they would kill them. First time I started training my soldiers I made 1000 soldiers in my unit. After one month I went out on a mission with them and captured all of the terrorists leaders.
At this point I asked kind of jokingly, kind of seriously ?Really, on the first time out?? He replied in all seriousness:
Yes the first time.
I worked day and night, 24 hours 7 days a week to clean my area because my area at that time was very dangerous. No one could move at that time, no market, no police, no Iraqi army. We continue to work with the Americans, we captured many bad guys, more than 800. We found caches we found mortars, many weapons. They attacked my house many times. They did not send messages to me but instead sent car bombs and mortars to my family. But I did not stop my mission. I encouraged my family but I did not go home. For three months I did not see my family, I stayed with the coalition to serve my country because my country needed me.
I was in this same position as battalion commander in 1987 during the war between Iraq and Iran which started in 1980-88. In that war I was injured 7 times and have 17 medals for courage. I did not go to Kuwait in 1991 because I did not believe in the old regime and also my tribe did not believe the old regime. He killed many people in my tribe from the military. But now that all the people believe me they work with me and help me.
As two local Sheiks sit across the room from us listening in on our conversation General Ali turns the conversation to them for a minute.
You see those two sheiks? They came to thank me because I made their area secure. They are very happy when they see the work being done in their area. When they see people working at night, people driving. Basra and Baghdad are dangerous but my area now is very safe. In my area the security is excellent. Now I can guarantee that you can go by yourself in your uniform with no armor, no helmet, no weapon, and I?ll give you my vehicle so that you can go to Qayyarah to shop in the market and come back to here and you will be safe. This happened because before the terrorists were in control there was no trust between the Iraqi army and the people. They just believed the terrorists but when I came I controlled this area and I had a meeting with all the sheiks and all the people and all the doctors and I made clear to them that all the terrorists and all the criminals were killers against Islam and they believed me and helped me. They gave me information and even caught terrorists and brought them to me. This is excellent. I told them that it was their job, that it was their country. All Iraqi people must fight the terrorists because it was not just the job of the Iraqi army. The terrorists were killing civilians and because of it the people believed me and they came to work with me.
How did Saddam treat you since you were in a different tribe than him?
General Ali: He was a bad guy against all of the Iraqi people not just my tribe.
Have you liked working with the American soldiers?
General Ali: Yes, yes, yes. They believe me and I believe them. All the soldiers that have worked here know General Ali. I invite them to my house to eat with me and to train with me. I know they came to help the Iraqi people. That is why I work with them, that is why I tell my people the truth about the coalition. Before they might have disliked the US army because they did not have the real picture of the soldiers. I told the people though how the US army fought for us and also how they did projects for us. They fixed the schools, made roads, and made many things for the people of Iraq. The people see how we caught the terrorists, how we made it safe, they see that is more comfortable then under Saddam?s regime.
Do you have a different picture of Americans now then before we came?
General Ali: It is the same for me because I know exactly why the soldiers came to Iraq. I am not a small officer (*Just incase: Brigadier General is a high rank in any army). I work with the soldiers day and night. If you work with people for three years you get to know them. You see them more than your family. You work with them more than your brother. I believe and like the soldiers. If they make mistakes I tell them because they are my friends. If they don?t know about the Iraqi people I tell them. I am a soldier and an advisor. Sometimes the soldiers did not know about the Iraqi people. I also told my friends about the soldiers: how they speak, how they shake hands, how they sit down with them. Which subject they speak on because I know the US army soldiers read before they came over here. When they came to help though they needed advisors. If there were other good advisors like me then there wouldn?t be terrorists. My people help me because they believe in me and like me. And when the terrorists came they did not believe the terrorists, they fought against the terrorists. When the terrorists came from Mosul, Ramadi, and from any other town the people would call me on my cell phone and tell me about them.
At this time in the conversation I mentioned to General Ali about the day before when I saw him coming in the main gate to our base with three terrorists in the back of a truck. He laughed and told me he received a tip from some locals and he and his men dropped everything they were doing and went out to catch the men. They were assisted by an American helicopter in the capture, which made it a combined effort. He explained to me that those same sequences of events happen often and exuded confidence in the efforts of his men and of his fellow townspeople.
The rest of the interview will be posted on Wednesday. In the second part of the interview General Ali shares his feelings about the American media, the future of the Iraqi army, and shares some words for the American people. Please spread the word about this interview. I believe what General Ali has to say needs to be heard by the whole world.
-
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=106893
Ahmadinejad: Conditions for Removal of Israel Are at Hand
20:16 Jul 09, '06 / 13 Tammuz 5766
by Ezra HaLevi
Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, clearing up any ambiguity in previous calls to ?wipe Israel off the map,? now used an Arabic word for the removal of body hair to describe his plans for Israel.
?All the conditions for the removal of the Zionist regime are at hand,? Ahmadinejad told an Arab Conference of Iraqi Neighbors meeting Saturday. For the first time, he employed the Arabic word ezaleh, which is used to describe the irreversible removal of body hairs or a woman?s virginity.
?Nations in the region will be more furious every day. It won?t take long before the wrath of the people turns into a terrible explosion that will wipe the Zionist entity off the map,? Ahmadinejad told the foreign ministers of Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Bahrain and Egypt. The heads of the Arab League and the Islamic Conference were also present, in addition to a special United Nations representative.
None of the foreign ministers present, including Jordan, Egypt or Turkey ? commonly regarded as Israel?s friends in the Arab/Muslim world - objected to the call for annihilation. Instead, the following statement was issued: ?The Arab foreign ministers participating in today's Tehran meeting expressed their strong condemnation of this continuing and increasing aggression against the Palestinian people."
The Iranian president went on to blame all of the region?s troubles on the Jewish state. ?"The basic problem in the Islamic world is the existence of the Zionist regime, and the Islamic world and the region must mobilize to remove this problem. It is a usurper that our enemies made and imposed on the Muslim world, a regime that prevented the progress of the region?s nations, a regime that all Muslims must join hands in isolating worldwide.?
He ended with a call on all nations to cease their support of Israel. ?[All nations] should realize that their support for the illegitimate, usurper, Zionist regime is a mistake. The waves of fury of Muslim nations will not be confined within the boundaries of the region, and the people who close their ears to the cries of the Palestinians and blindly support this regime will be responsible for the consequences.? "I tell them to dissociate themselves or face the terrible consequences.?
Since Ahmadinejad?s call to ?wipe Israel off the map? last October, some academics have claimed the Iranian leader was mistranslated or misunderstood.
"Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map, because no such idiom exists in Persian," left-wing University of Michigan professor Juan Cole told the New York Times. "He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse?Since Iran has not attacked another country aggressively for over a century, I smell the whiff of war propaganda."
Jonathan Steele of the British Guardian newspaper also told the Time: "The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that 'this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,' just as the shah's regime in Iran had vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The 'page of time' phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon."
Neither of the two have responded to Ahmadinejad?s latest clarification and call to action, which were translated and distributed by the Iranian state-run IRNA news agency.
The Iranian leader's threats are particularly significant as the Islamic Republic continues to pursue nuclear technology and world bodies continue to pursue diplomatic means of inducing Iran to give up its nuclear aspirations.
-
Geopolitical Diary: Al-Sadr Sends a Message
Baghdad has been embroiled in sectarian violence in recent days. Gunfights broke out between Sunni and Shiite fighters in the predominantly Sunni district of Ghazaliya in western Baghdad on Monday, and these clashes follow a particularly bloody weekend of reprisal attacks.
Following the bombing of a Shiite mosque July 8, masked Shiite gunmen in black set up fake checkpoints in a Sunni-populated neighborhood in western Baghdad. When cars drove up to the checkpoints along the main road to the Baghdad International Airport, the gunmen reportedly shot dead any drivers and passengers with Sunni names after they showed their identification cards. The bodies of several Sunni residents were also found scattered throughout the neighborhood (which, ironically enough, is named Jihad) after being abducted by roaming Shiite gunmen. A few hours later, two car bombs exploded next to a Shiite mosque in the Kasra neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad.
The escalation in attacks between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq naturally reintroduces fears of a full-blown civil war in the country. What it actually reveals, however, is that the ongoing political negotiations in Baghdad between the country's main factions have reached a resounding crescendo.
Following the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, we laid out the blueprint of a political deal in the making between the Sunni and Shiite political groups. Once al-Zarqawi was sacrificed by Sunni leaders with jihadist ties, and once the Defense Ministry was awarded to the Sunnis, the next order of business was for the Shia to reciprocate by reining in their militias. The Herculean task that fell to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- to dissolve the Shiite militias while the Sunni insurgency rages on -- is, without a doubt, a thoroughly complicated affair.
Muqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shiite leader of the militia known as the Mehdi Army, knows full well that this critical step in the political process is where his interests could be severely undercut. The last thing al-Sadr wants is for his movement to be forced into disarming while the other main Shiite militia -- the Badr Brigades, owned by the dominant Shiite faction, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq -- gets integrated into the Iraqi army. When the time comes to seal a political deal in Baghdad and the question of dividing oil revenues becomes Iraq's biggest preoccupation, al-Sadr wants to ensure that his faction receives its fair share -- both politically and financially -- but without his guns, he loses his most effective negotiating tool.
Though al-Sadr has denied his movement has anything to do with the recent sectarian attacks against Sunnis, he is simply trying to hold on to his plausible deniability card. The principals behind the attacks can keep their distance from the abundance of thugs and vigilante groups that carry out retaliatory rampages against Sunnis; but these gunmen are delivering a potent message on behalf of al-Sadr to ensure a space is reserved for him at the negotiating table.
Time may be dwindling for al-Sadr to make his demands heard. U.S. forces have been stepping up operations to detain Shiite guerrilla leaders in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood, who have allegedly been driving the Shiite death squads to ratchet up the Sunni body-count in Iraq. This type of operation needs the implicit approval of the dominant Shiite factions involved in the political process -- as members of the Sunni-controlled Defense Ministry have been happy to point out, though the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry quickly denied these claims. The Sunni political leaders will use any opportunity at their disposal to exacerbate rifts within the Shiite community, and bringing to light any political dealings the Shia make with Washington to contain a renegade leader like al-Sadr certainly gets the job done.
As a result, al-Sadr needs to get himself quickly into a position where he can negotiate effectively. Sending gunmen into the streets -- to snatch and kill Sunnis and seriously aggravate sectarian tensions -- demonstrates his capability to wreck any political deal that is struck in Baghdad.
The person to keep an eye on now will be Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the kingmaker of the Iraqi Shia, who will have the final say in what concessions are given to al-Sadr. As we watch for al-Sistani to speak up and bring Shiite militant activity under control, we imagine real estate in the Jihad neighborhood must be getting pretty cheap.
-
Israelis attack just 10 miles from Beirut
AP - 46 minutes ago
BEIRUT, Lebanon - Israeli warplanes and gunboats struck a Palestinian guerrilla base 10 miles south of Beirut late Wednesday, Lebanese security officials said, in the closest raid to the Lebanese capital since fighting erupted in southern Lebanon after guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers. Warplanes flew over the Naameh base in the hills overlooking the Mediterranean, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of Beirut. Gunboats sailed facing the position, and explosions rang out across the area.
-
Analysis: Nasrallah's gamble
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
yoav appel, THE JERUSALEM POST Jul. 12, 2006
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In killing seven soldiers, kidnapping two more and re-igniting Israel's northern border with Lebanon Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah has taken a gamble that violence will quickly dissipate and negotiations on a prisoner exchange will soon begin, an expert on Lebanon said Wednesday.
Attacks against Israel, in particular kidnappings of Israelis that could lead to prisoner exchanges, boost Hizbullah's popularity in the Middle East, especially at a time that the militia group is under regional and international pressure to disarm, said Eyal Zisser of Tel Aviv University's Dayan Center.
But in the eyes of many groups, some within Lebanon, who call the group a "danger to stability," Wednesday's activities may just prove them right, Zisser said.
"It's good for their prestige," Zisser said, referring to Hizbullah. Based on previous incidents, the militia group was gambling that Israel's response to Wednesday's attack would be restrained, he said.
Hizbullah forces took control of southern Lebanon when Israel withdrew from its "security zone" leaving a vacuum there in 2000. The group's leaders say they are defending Lebanon from Israel. The group also claims Lebanese sovereignty over the Shebaa Farms area, a small parcel of land Israel captured from Syria in 1967, and have said they will continue to attack Israel until the area is liberated.
But a wide-scale outbreak of violence could backfire for the group, especially if Lebanese citizens feel Hizbullah is to blame.
"These operations reinforce [Nasrallah's] position. It's an issue of image," Zisser said. Nasrallah "is a gambler. He is hoping he will benefit from these actions."
Hizbullah gained much recognition in the Arab world in 2004 when it won the release of hundreds of prisoners in Israeli jails in exchange for the bodies of three IDF soldiers it captured and one Israeli businessman. It is also widely seen as responsible for Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon after an 18-year occupation.
Zisser said from Hizbullah's perspective, it's actions Wednesday were not an escalation, because it had both attempted and carried out similar operations in the past. "They don't see this as a step up, this is a step they've taken before," he said. "Hizbullah has an interest that this will end and they will begin negotiations," he added.
The group was taking into account Israel's muted responses to previous Hizbullah provocations, he said.
Within Lebanon, "Hizbullah is under a lot of pressure because ... of the many groups that want it to disarm, who say that it is a danger to stability," Zisser said.
But Iran and Syria, both considered to be enthusiastic sponsors of Hizbullah's activities, would not come to the group's aid if Israel begins wide-scale operations inside Lebanon.
The next steps in the conflict would be up to Israel, he said, which would have no choice but to respond.
Israeli military operations in Lebanon would probably work on two levels, one aimed at isolating the area near the initial attack and returning the kidnapped soldiers, and a second that would exact a high price from Lebanon for a military action initiated from within its territory, said Maj. Gen Danny Rothschild, President of the Council of Peace and Security.
An operation to return the kidnapped soldiers would involve bombing bridges and attempting to contain the area around where the abduction took place, although only within a very limited timeframe, Rothschild said. "In that sense you have a window of operation which is closing every minute," he said.
"The other layer of operation is a signal to Lebanon that there is a price," Rothschild said, adding that could be via military or political pressure. Politically, Israel could request foreign governments including the US and the European Union to pressure Lebanon for the release of the soldiers, he said.
Military options would include bombing Hizbullah's headquarters in Beirut and destroying infrastructure, he said.
Another concern is Hizbullah's military arsenal, which is said to contain around 11,000 short to mid-length missiles, some capable of reaching as far south as Hadera, about 30 miles from Tel Aviv. The missiles pose "a serious threat to civilians in Israel," Rothschild said, pointing out that the missiles are spread in a range that covers most of northern Israel.
And "nobody knows," how long an operation inside Lebanon might last, he said, acknowledging the possibility existed that Israeli forces could still be operating in southern Lebanon months from now.
-
Middle East Crisis: Backgrounder
Israel lives with three realities: geographic, demographic and cultural. Geographically, it is at a permanent disadvantage, lacking strategic depth. It does enjoy the advantage of interior lines -- the ability to move forces rapidly from one front to another. Demographically, it is on the whole outnumbered, although it can achieve local superiority in numbers by choosing the time and place of war. Its greatest advantage is cultural. It has a far greater mastery of the technology and culture of war than its neighbors.
Two of the realities cannot be changed. Nothing can be done about geography or demography. Culture can be changed. It is not inherently the case that Israel will have a technological or operational advantage over its neighbors. The great inherent fear of Israel is that the Arabs will equal or surpass Israeli prowess culturally and therefore militarily. If that were to happen, then all three realities would turn against Israel and Israel might well be at risk.
That is why the capture of Israeli troops, first one in the south, then two in the north, has galvanized Israel. The kidnappings represent a level of Arab tactical prowess that previously was the Israeli domain. They also represent a level of tactical slackness on the Israeli side that was previously the Arab domain. These events hardly represent a fundamental shift in the balance of power. Nevertheless, for a country that depends on its cultural superiority, any tremor in this variable reverberates dramatically. Hamas and Hezbollah have struck the core Israeli nerve. Israel cannot ignore it.
Embedded in Israel's demographic problem is this: Israel has national security requirements that outstrip its manpower base. It can field a sufficient army, but its industrial base cannot supply all of the weapons needed to fight high-intensity conflicts. This means it is always dependent on an outside source for its industrial base and must align its policies with that source. At first this was the Soviets, then France and finally the United States. Israel broke with the Soviets and France when their political demands became too intense. It was after 1967 that it entered into a patron-client relationship with the United States. This relationship is its strength and its weakness. It gives the Israelis the systems they need for national security, but since U.S. and Israeli interests diverge, the relationship constrains Israel's range of action.
During the Cold War, the United States relied on Israel for a critical geopolitical function. The fundamental U.S. interest was Turkey, which controlled the Bosporus and kept the Soviet fleet under control in the Mediterranean. The emergence of Soviet influence in Syria and Iraq -- which was not driven by U.S. support for Israel since the United States did not provide all that much support compared to France -- threatened Turkey with attack from two directions, north and south. Turkey could not survive this. Israel drew Syrian attention away from Turkey by threatening Damascus and drawing forces and Soviet equipment away from the Turkish frontier. Israel helped secure Turkey and turned a Soviet investment into a dry hole.
Once Egypt signed a treaty with Israel and Sinai became a buffer zone, Israel became safe from a full peripheral war -- everyone attacking at the same time. Jordan was not going to launch an attack and Syria by itself could not strike. The danger to Israel became Palestinian operations inside of Israel and the occupied territories and the threat posed from Lebanon by the Syrian-sponsored group Hezbollah.
In 1982, Israel responded to this threat by invading Lebanon. It moved as far north as Beirut and the mountains east and northeast of it. Israel did not invade Beirut proper, since Israeli forces do not like urban warfare as it imposes too high a rate of attrition. But what the Israelis found was low-rate attrition. Throughout their occupation of Lebanon, they were constantly experiencing guerrilla attacks, particularly from Hezbollah.
Hezbollah has two patrons: Syria and Iran. The Syrians have used Hezbollah to pursue their political and business interests in Lebanon. Iran has used Hezbollah for business and ideological reasons. Business interests were the overlapping element. In the interest of business, it became important to Hezbollah, Syria and Iran that an accommodation be reached with Israel. Israel wanted to withdraw from Lebanon in order to end the constant low-level combat and losses.
Israel withdrew in 1988, having reached quiet understandings with Syria that Damascus would take responsibility for Hezbollah, in return for which Israel would not object to Syrian domination of Lebanon. Iran, deep in its war with Iraq, was not in a position to object if it had wanted to. Israel returned to its borders in the north, maintaining a security presence in the south of Lebanon that lasted for several years.
As Lebanon blossomed and Syria's hold on it loosened, Iran also began to increase its regional influence. Its hold on some elements of Hezbollah strengthened, and in recent months, Hezbollah -- aligning itself with Iranian Shiite ideology -- has become more aggressive. Iranian weapons were provided to Hezbollah, and tensions grew along the frontier. This culminated in the capture of two soldiers in the north and the current crisis.
It is difficult to overestimate the impact of the soldier kidnappings on the Israeli psyche. First, while the Israeli military is extremely highly trained, Israel is also a country with mass conscription. Having a soldier kidnapped by Arabs hits every family in the country. The older generation is shocked and outraged that members of the younger generation have been captured and worried that they allowed themselves to be captured; therefore, the younger generation needs to prove it too can defeat the Arabs. This is not a primary driver, but it is a dimension.
The more fundamental issue is this: Israel withdrew from Lebanon in order to escape low-intensity conflict. If Hezbollah is now going to impose low-intensity conflict on Israel's border, the rationale for withdrawal disappears. It is better for Israel to fight deep in Lebanon than inside Israel. If the rockets are going to fall in Israel proper, then moving into a forward posture has no cost to Israel.
From an international standpoint, the Israelis expect to be condemned. These international condemnations, however, are now having the opposite effect of what is intended. The Israeli view is that they will be condemned regardless of what they do. The differential between the condemnation of reprisal attacks and condemnation of a full invasion is not enough to deter more extreme action. If Israel is going to be attacked anyway, it might as well achieve its goals.
Moreover, an invasion of Hezbollah-held territory aligns Israel with the United States. U.S. intelligence has been extremely concerned about the growing activity of Hezbollah, and U.S. relations with Iran are not good. Lebanon is the center of gravity of Hezbollah, and the destruction of Hezbollah capabilities in Lebanon, particularly the command structure, would cripple Hezbollah operations globally in the near future. The United States would very much like to see that happen, but cannot do it itself. Moreover, an Israeli action would enrage the Islamic world, but it would also drive home the limits of Iranian power. Once again, Iran would have dropped Lebanon in the grease, and not been hurt itself. The lesson of Hezbollah would not be lost on the Iraqi Shia -- or so the Bush administration would hope.
Therefore, this is one Israeli action that benefits the United States, and thus helps the immediate situation as well as long-term geopolitical alignments. It realigns the United States and Israel. This also argues that any invasion must be devastating to Hezbollah. It must go deep. It must occupy temporarily. It must shatter Hezbollah.
At this point, the Israelis appear to be unrolling a war plan in this direction. They have blockaded the Lebanese coast. Israeli aircraft are attacking what air power there is in Lebanon, and have attacked Hezbollah and other key command-and-control infrastructure. It would follow that the Israelis will now concentrate on destroying Hezbollah -- and Lebanese -- communications capabilities and attacking munitions dumps, vehicle sites, rocket-storage areas and so forth.
Most important, Israel is calling up its reserves. This is never a symbolic gesture in Israel. All Israelis below middle age are in the reserves and mobilization is costly in every sense of the word. If the Israelis were planning a routine reprisal, they would not be mobilizing. But they are, which means they are planning to do substantially more than retributive airstrikes. The question is what their plan is.
Given the blockade and what appears to be the shape of the airstrikes, it seems to us at the moment the Israelis are planning to go fairly deep into Lebanon. The logical first step is a move to the Litani River in southern Lebanon. But given the missile attacks on Haifa, they will go farther, not only to attack launcher sites, but to get rid of weapons caches. This means a move deep into the Bekaa Valley, the seat of Hezbollah power and the location of plants and facilities. Such a penetration would leave Israeli forces' left flank open, so a move into Bekaa would likely be accompanied by attacks to the west. It would bring the Israelis close to Beirut again.
This leaves Israel's right flank exposed, and that exposure is to Syria. The Israeli doctrine is that leaving Syrian airpower intact while operating in Lebanon is dangerous. Therefore, Israel must at least be considering using its air force to attack Syrian facilities, unless it gets ironclad assurances the Syrians will not intervene in any way. Conversations are going on between Egypt and Syria, and we suspect this is the subject. But Israel would not necessarily object to the opportunity of eliminating Syrian air power as part of its operation, or if Syria chooses, going even further.
At the same time, Israel does not intend to get bogged down in Lebanon again. It will want to go in, wreak havoc, withdraw. That means it will go deeper and faster, and be more devastating, than if it were planning a long-term occupation. It will go in to liquidate Hezbollah and then leave. True, this is no final solution, but for the Israelis, there are no final solutions.
Israeli forces are already in Lebanon. Its special forces are inside identifying targets for airstrikes. We expect numerous air attacks over the next 48 hours, as well as reports of firefights in southern Lebanon. We also expect more rocket attacks on Israel.
It will take several days to mount a full invasion of Lebanon. We would not expect major operations before the weekend at the earliest. If the rocket attacks are taking place, however, Israel might send several brigades to the Litani River almost immediately in order to move the rockets out of range of Haifa. Therefore, we would expect a rapid operation in the next 24-48 hours followed by a larger force later.
At this point, the only thing that can prevent this would be a major intervention by Syria with real guarantees that it would restrain Hezbollah and indications such operations are under way. Syria is the key to a peaceful resolution. Syria must calculate the relative risks, and we expect them to be unwilling to act decisively.
Therefore:
1. Israel cannot tolerate an insurgency on its northern frontier; if there is one, it wants it farther north.
2. It cannot tolerate attacks on Haifa.
3. It cannot endure a crisis of confidence in its military
4. Hezbollah cannot back off of its engagement with Israel.
5. Syria can stop this, but the cost to it stopping it is higher than the cost of letting it go on.
It would appear Israel will invade Lebanon. The global response will be noisy. There will be no substantial international action against Israel. Beirut's tourism and transportation industry, as well as its financial sectors, are very much at risk.
-
Syria, Iran stand to the side, watching
Mideast powers seen as behind kidnapping, using clash to their advantage
The Associated Press
Updated: 1:24 p.m. CT July 14, 2006
BEIRUT, Lebanon - Iran?s warning against any Israeli retaliation on Syria and its taunts that Israel can?t hurt Iran highlight what many see as the real hand behind Hezbollah?s capture of two Israeli soldiers.
At the White House and in Arab capitals, the belief is strong that the Mideast?s top two hard-line states, Iran and Syria, are playing a dangerous game to increase their influence. However, analysts say it could backfire and weaken Hezbollah, and by extension its two patrons.
?We would be idiots if we believed it was only about the Israeli captives,? Hazem Saghieh, a senior Lebanese columnist with the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat, told The Associated Press.
?The issue, at the end of the day, is all about Syria and Iran, and Hezbollah is just giving them more trump cards,? Saghieh said.
Wednesday?s seizure of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah guerrillas came at a time of mounting tensions between the two Mideast powers and the West.
Iran is embroiled in a diplomatic fight with Europe and the U.S. over its nuclear program. Washington accuses Syria of sending insurgents to Iraq, interfering in Lebanon and hosting the Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Syria is also believed to have been behind the collapse of a deal that would have led to the release of an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas militants along Israel?s frontier with Gaza on June 25.
Iran and Syria, analysts say, believe the intensified violence will help strengthen their positions in their conflicts with the West and show they hold the key to a settlement of the Arab-Israeli issue.
The White House said Wednesday, hours after Hezbollah took the two Israelis, that it holds Iran and Syria responsible.
On Friday, French President Jacques Chirac implicitly suggested the two states might have a role in the expanding crisis, saying he has ?the feeling, if not the conviction, that Hamas and Hezbollah wouldn?t have taken the initiatives alone.?
Moderate Arab governments like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia appear to have the same belief ? though they haven?t said so outright because of a reluctance to show splits with fellow Muslim nations. Instead, it?s reflected in their mild criticisms of Israel?s air campaign in Lebanon and their indirect denunciations of Hezbollah.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Friday that Israel couldn?t hurt Iran in its campaign, declaring Israel and its Western supporters ?do not even have the power to give Iran a nasty look.?
Earlier, he called Syrian President Bashar Assad and assured him that if Israel attacks Syria ?it will be equivalent to an attack on the whole Islamic world and the regime (Israel) will face a crushing response.?
Ahmadinejad has often fanned anti-Israeli sentiment to bolster his image as a fierce opponent of the West, saying Israel should be ?wiped off the map? and casting doubt on the Nazi Holocaust.
The Iranians ?have an interest in fomenting as much trouble here as they can and think that it will benefit them somehow in terms of their ambitions in the region and ultimately how they resolve the nuclear question,? said Dennis Ross, a former U.S. Mideast envoy.
?In the case of Syria ... they feel this makes them a factor, that people have to pay attention to them,? he said.
But they may have miscalculated.
In Lebanon, there is mounting resentment against the Hezbollah action, which has killed a tourism season many had expected to be one of Lebanon?s best.
If Hezbollah fails to win a prisoner swap for the soldiers and if Israel carries out its threat to push Hezbollah away from its border, the group will be blamed for the damage to Lebanon.
?Hezbollah will definitely emerge as a loser,? said Saghieh, the columnist for Al-Hayat. ?It?s hijacked the country and is demanding the Lebanese pay with their lives for its actions.?
?The people and other political parties are going to demand that Hezbollah account for its actions since it has always claimed that its resistance offered us protection,? he said.
Paul Salem, director of the Middle East Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Hezbollah?s military presence in the south was seen by many Lebanese as a deterrent against any Israeli attack on Lebanon and even on Iran.
?But if you use your military power, you lose it,? said Salem. ?It will no longer be a deterrent.?
While Iran doesn?t have a stake in seeing the violence end, Syria might ?if they decide that it?s becoming more costly to them,? Ross said.
?That?s where the Saudis could play a major role,? by pressuring Damascus, he said.
Saudi Arabia has harshly criticized Hezbollah, without naming it directly, for escalating the situation, saying ?uncalculated adventures? could precipitate a new Middle East crisis.
-
With this new hot front of WW3, the tempo of posts on this thread is increasing.
===========
Red Alert: Hezbollah's Motives
Hezbollah's decision to increase operations against Israel was not taken lightly. The leadership of Hezbollah has not so much moderated over the years as it has aged. The group's leaders have also, with age, become comfortable and in many cases wealthy. They are at least part of the Lebanese political process, and in some real sense part of the Lebanese establishment. These are men with a radical past and of radical mind-set, but they are older, comfortable and less adventurous than 20 years ago. Therefore, the question is: Why are they increasing tensions with Israel and inviting an invasion that threatens their very lives? There are three things to look at: the situation among the Palestinians, the situation in Lebanon and the situation in the Islamic world. But first we must consider the situation in Hezbollah itself.
There is a generation gap in Hezbollah. Hezbollah began as a Shiite radical group inspired by the Iranian Islamic Revolution. In that context, Hezbollah represented a militant, nonsecular alternative to the Nasserite Fatah, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other groups that took their bearing from Pan-Arabism rather than Islam. Hezbollah split the Shiite community in Lebanon -- which was against Sunnis and Christians -- but most of all, engaged the Israelis. It made a powerful claim that the Palestinian movement had no future while it remained fundamentally secular and while its religious alternatives derived from the conservative Arab monarchies. More than anyone, it was Hezbollah that introduced Islamist suicide bombings.
Hezbollah had a split personality, however; it was supported by two very different states. Iran was radically Islamist. Syria, much closer and a major power in Lebanon, was secular and socialist. They shared an anti-Zionist ideology, but beyond that, not much. Moreover, the Syrians viewed the Palestinian claim for a state with a jaundiced eye. Palestine was, from their point of view, part of the Ottoman Empire's Syrian province, divided by the British and French. Syria wanted to destroy Israel, but not necessarily to create a Palestinian state.
From Syria's point of view, the real issue was the future of Lebanon, which it wanted to reabsorb into Syria, or at the very least economically exploit. The Syrians intervened in Lebanon against the Palestine Liberation Organization and on the side of some Christian elements. Their goal was much less ideological than political and economic. They saw Hezbollah as a tool in their fight with Yasser Arafat and for domination of Syria.
Hezbollah strategically was aligned with Iran. Tactically, it had to align itself with Syria, since the Syrians dominated Lebanon. That meant that when Syria wanted tension with Israel, Hezbollah provided it, and when Syria wanted things to quiet down, Hezbollah cooled it. Meanwhile the leadership of Hezbollah, aligned with the Syrians, was in a position to prosper, particular after the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.
That withdrawal involved a basic, quiet agreement between Syria and Israel. Israel accepted Syrian domination of Lebanon. In return, Syria was expected to maintain a security regime that controlled Hezbollah. Attacks against Israel had to be kept within certain acceptable limits. Syria, having far less interest in Israel than in Lebanon, saw this as an opportunity to achieve its ends. Israel saw Syrian domination under these terms as a stabilizing force.
Destabilization
Two things converged to destabilize this situation. The emergence of Hamas as a major force among the Palestinians meant the Palestinian polity was being redefined. Even before the elections catapulted Hamas into a leadership role, it was clear that the Fatah-dominated government of Arafat was collapsing. Everything was up for grabs. That meant that either Hezbollah made a move or would be permanently a Lebanese organization. It had to show it was willing to take risks and be effective. In fact, it had to show that it was the most effective of all the groups. The leadership might have been reluctant, but the younger members saw this as their moment, and frankly, the old juices might have been running in the older leadership. They moved.
The second part of this occurred in Lebanon itself. After the death of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, outside pressure, primarily from the United States, forced a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. Now, do not overestimate the extent of the withdrawal. Syrian influence in Lebanon is still enormous. But it did relieve Syria of the burden of controlling Hezbollah. Indeed, Israel was not overly enthusiastic about Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon for just that reason.
Syria could now claim to have no influence or obligation concerning Hezbollah. Hezbollah's leadership lost the cover of being able to tell the young Turks that they would be more aggressive, but that the Syrians would not let them. As the Syrian withdrawal loosened up Lebanese politics, Hezbollah was neither restrained nor could it pretend to be restrained. Whatever the mixed feelings might have been, the mission was the mission, Syrian withdrawal opened the door and Hezbollah could not resist walking through it, and many members urgently wanted to walk through it.
At the same time the Iranians were deeply involved in negotiations in Iraq and over Tehran's nuclear program. They wanted as many levers as they could find to use in negotiations against the United States. They already had the ability to destabilize Iraq. They had a nuclear program the United States wanted to get rid of. Reactivating a global network that directly threatened American interests was another chip on the bargaining table. Not attacking U.S. interests but attacking Israel demonstrated Hezbollah's vibrancy without directly threatening the United States. Moreover, activities around the world, not carefully shielded in some cases, gave Iran further leverage.
In addition, it allowed Iran to reclaim its place as the leader of Islamic radical resurgence. Al Qaeda, a Sunni group, had supplanted Iran in the Islamic world. Indeed, Iran's collaboration with the West allowed Tehran to be pictured among the "hypocrites" Osama bin Laden condemned. Iran wants to become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf, and one part of that is to take away the mantle of Islamic radicalism from al Qaeda. Since al Qaeda is a damaged organization at best, and since Hezbollah pioneered Islamist terrorism on a global basis, reactivating Hezbollah made a great deal of sense to the Iranians.
Hezbollah's Position
Syria benefited by showing how badly it was needed in Lebanon. Iran picked up additional leverage against the United States. Hezbollah claimed a major place at the negotiations shaping the future of Palestinian politics. It all made a great deal of sense.
Of course, it was also obvious that Israel would respond. From Syria's point of view, that was fine. Israel would bog down again. It would turn to Syria to relieve it of its burdens. Israel would not want an Islamic regime in Damascus. Syria gets regime preservation and the opportunity to reclaim Lebanon. Iran gets a war hundreds of miles away from it, letting others fight its battles. It can claim it is the real enemy of Israel in the Islamic world. The United States might bargain away interests in Iraq in order to control Hezbollah. An Israeli invasion opens up possibilities without creating much risk.
It is Hezbollah that takes it on the chin. But Hezbollah, by its nature and its relationships, really did not have much choice. It had to act or become irrelevant. So now the question is: What does Hezbollah do when the Israelis come? They can resist. They have anti-tank weapons and other systems from Iran. They can inflict casualties. They can impose a counterinsurgency. Syria may think Israel will have to stay, but Israel plans to crush Hezbollah's infrastructure and leave, forcing Hezbollah to take years to recover. Everyone else in Lebanon is furious at Hezbollah for disrupting the recovery. What does Hezbollah do?
In the 1980s, what Hezbollah did was take Western hostages. The United States is enormously sensitive to hostage situations. It led Ronald Reagan to Iran-Contra. Politically, the United States has trouble handling hostages. This is the one thing Hezbollah learned in the 1980s that the leaders remember. A portfolio of hostages is life insurance. Hezbollah could go back to its old habits. It makes sense to do so.
It will not do this while there is a chance of averting an invasion. But once it is crystal clear it is coming, grabbing hostages makes sense. Assuming the invasion is going to occur early next week -- or a political settlement is going to take place -- Western powers now have no more than 72 hours to get their nationals out of Beirut or into places of safety. That probably cannot be done. There are thousands of Westerners in Beirut. But the next few days will focus on ascertaining Israeli intensions and timelines, and executing plans to withdraw citizens. The Israelis might well shift their timeline to facilitate this. But all things considered, if Hezbollah returns to its roots, it should return to its first operational model: hostages.
-
Lebanon, Israel: Potential Attack on Tel Aviv
July 14, 2006 21 18 GMT
Summary
Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said July 14 in a speech broadcast on Hezbollah media outlets that his group will strike "beyond Haifa and what is beyond, beyond Haifa." Hezbollah has the capability to launch an attack on Tel Aviv, Israel, from southern Lebanon.
Analysis
Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah declared July 14 that Hezbollah would strike "beyond Haifa and what is beyond, beyond Haifa" in an all-out war against Israel. Nasrallah's speech was broadcast live on Hezbollah media outlets.
Hezbollah already demonstrated its capability to strike Haifa with what were likely Iranian-made Fajr-3 rockets that have a range of 28 miles. "Beyond, beyond" Haifa, however, lies Tel Aviv, Israel's most densely populated and industrialized city. Sources in Lebanon whose reliability is unconfirmed reveal that Tel Aviv may very well become Hezbollah's next big target, and Hezbollah is believed to possess the capabilities to carry out such an attack from southern Lebanon. According to Israeli intelligence, Hezbollah has as many as 30 Zelzal-2 rockets, a 610 mm heavy artillery rocket that can deliver a warhead of more than 1,000 pounds to a range of approximately 130 miles, giving it the ability to hit the northern outskirts of Tel Aviv from the Israeli-Lebanese border. The Zelzal-2 is a solid fueled rocket, which means it can be launched with very little preparation.
Faced with destruction, Hezbollah will use all the long-range missiles it has in its arsenal. The plan to launch a ground invasion into Lebanon was likely hardwired into the Israeli military strategy following the Haifa attack. Israel will precede any major ground offensive with a preemptive strike on Hezbollah's offensive capability -- namely, the rocket sites in the Bekaa Valley in southern Lebanon.
-
Here is an interesting post from a former State Department official who was posted in the Near Abroad. His views on the current situation.
BTW, I wonder if anyone knows the current status of US Naval forces in the Mideast and deployments. Also USAF deployments. It seems to me that we should be moving assets back into the region.
Why?
The thing with Israel is going to escalate. Hamas and Hiz'ballah are going to get their tails whopped. Israel has sealed Hiz' in Lebanon and can go fully offensive at any time to eliminate the threat. Iran and Syria cannot allow this to happen, so it is reasonable that Iran will attempt something. Israel retaliates and the US should have the forces ready to take out Iranian nuke sites and also military command and control structures. Maybe some wacko Islamist heads of government.
We may be in the beginning stages of eliminating those states that truly sponsor terrorism.
pat
http://newsisyphus.blogspot.com/
Update From Israel
I had planned to write more today about what I learned last night about the current situation in Israel on various blogs, sharing comments and posts with people in Europe, Australia, the U.S., Canada and, of course, Israel itself. Then, this morning, I was pointed to an update at The New Republic's website by their Israeli correspondent Yossi Klein Halevi. Halevi is clearly the best writer on Israeli affairs writing in English today. Rather than subject you to my paragraphs, I direct you to his:
The next Middle East war--Israel against genocidal Islamism--has begun. The first stage of the war started two weeks ago, with the Israeli incursion into Gaza in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier and the ongoing shelling of Israeli towns and kibbutzim; now, with Hezbollah's latest attack, the war has spread to southern Lebanon. Ultimately, though, Israel's antagonists won't be Hamas and Hezbollah but their patrons, Iran and Syria. The war will go on for months, perhaps several years. There may be lulls in the fighting, perhaps even temporary agreements and prisoner exchanges. But those periods of calm will be mere respites.
The goals of the war should be the destruction of the Hamas regime and the dismantling of the Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon. Israel cannot coexist with Iranian proxies pressing in on its borders. In particular, allowing Hamas to remain in power--and to run the Palestinian educational system--will mean the end of hopes for Arab-Israeli reconciliation not only in this generation but in the next one too.
For the Israeli right, this is the moment of "We told you so." The fact that the kidnappings and missile attacks have come from southern Lebanon and Gaza--precisely the areas from which Israel has unilaterally withdrawn--is proof, for right-wingers, of the bankruptcy of unilateralism. Yet the right has always misunderstood the meaning of unilateral withdrawal. Those of us who have supported unilateralism didn't expect a quiet border in return for our withdrawal but simply the creation of a border from which we could more vigorously defend ourselves, with greater domestic consensus and international understanding. The anticipated outcome, then, wasn't an illusory peace but a more effective way to fight the war. The question wasn't whether Hamas or Hezbollah would forswear aggression but whether Israel would act with appropriate vigor to their continued aggression.
So it wasn't the rocket attacks that were a blow to the unilateralist camp, but rather Israel's tepid responses to those attacks. If unilateralists made a mistake, it was in believing our political leaders--including Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert--when they promised a policy of zero tolerance against any attacks emanating from Gaza after Israel's withdrawal. That policy was not implemented--until two weeks ago. Now, belatedly, the Olmert government is trying to regain something of its lost credibility, and that is the real meaning of this initial phase of the war, both in Gaza and in Lebanon.
Still, many in Israel believe that, even now, the government is acting with excessive restraint. One centrist friend of mine, an Olmert voter, said to me, "If we had assassinated [Hamas leader] Haniyeh after the first kidnapping, [Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah would have thought twice about ordering another kidnapping." Israel, then, isn't paying for the failure of unilateral withdrawal, but for the failure to fulfill its promise to seriously respond to provocations after withdrawal.
Absurdly, despite Israel's withdrawal to the international borders with Lebanon and Gaza, much of the international community still sees the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers as a legitimate act of war: Just as Israel holds Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, so Hamas and Hezbollah now hold Israeli prisoners. One difference, though, is that inmates in Israeli jails receive visits from family and Red Cross representatives, while Israeli prisoners in Gaza and Lebanon disappear into oblivion. Like Israeli pilot Ron Arad, who was captured by Hezbollah 20 years ago, then sold to Iran, and whose fate has never been determined. That is one reason why Israelis are so maddened by the kidnapping of their soldiers.
Another reason is the nature of the crimes committed by the prisoners whose release is being demanded by Hezbollah and Hamas. One of them is Samir Kuntar, a PLO terrorist who in 1979 broke into an apartment in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, took a father and child hostage, and smashed the child's head against a rock. In the Palestinian Authority, Kuntar is considered a hero, a role model for Palestinian children.
The ultimate threat, though, isn't Hezbollah or Hamas but Iran. And as Iran draws closer to nuclear capability--which the Israeli intelligence community believes could happen this year--an Israeli-Iranian showdown becomes increasingly likely. According to a very senior military source with whom I've spoken, Israel is still hoping that an international effort will stop a nuclear Iran; if that fails, then Israel is hoping for an American attack. But if the Bush administration is too weakened to take on Iran, then, as a last resort, Israel will have to act unilaterally. And, added the source, Israel has the operational capability to do so.
For Israelis, that is the worst scenario of all. Except, of course, the scenario of nuclear weapons in the hands of the patron state of Hezbollah and Hamas.
-
Something I found in the New York Post
Myke
KILL, DON'T CAPTURE
By RALPH PETERS
July 10, 2006 -- THE British military defines experience as the ability to recognize a mistake the second time you make it. By that standard, we should be very experienced in dealing with captured terrorists, since we've made the same mistake again and again.
Violent Islamist extremists must be killed on the battlefield. Only in the rarest cases should they be taken prisoner. Few have serious intelligence value. And, once captured, there's no way to dispose of them.
Killing terrorists during a conflict isn't barbaric or immoral - or even illegal. We've imposed rules upon ourselves that have no historical or judicial precedent. We haven't been stymied by others, but by ourselves.
The oft-cited, seldom-read Geneva and Hague Conventions define legal combatants as those who visibly identify themselves by wearing uniforms or distinguishing insignia (the latter provision covers honorable partisans - but no badges or armbands, no protection). Those who wear civilian clothes to ambush soldiers or collect intelligence are assassins and spies - beyond the pale of law.
Traditionally, those who masquerade as civilians in order to kill legal combatants have been executed promptly, without trial. Severity, not sloppy leftist pandering, kept warfare within some decent bounds at least part of the time. But we have reached a point at which the rules apply only to us, while our enemies are permitted unrestricted freedom.
The present situation encourages our enemies to behave wantonly, while crippling our attempts to deal with terror.
Consider today's norm: A terrorist in civilian clothes can explode an IED, killing and maiming American troops or innocent civilians, then demand humane treatment if captured - and the media will step in as his champion. A disguised insurgent can shoot his rockets, throw his grenades, empty his magazines, kill and wound our troops, then, out of ammo, raise his hands and demand three hots and a cot while he invents tales of abuse.
Conferring unprecedented legal status upon these murderous transnational outlaws is unnecessary, unwise and ultimately suicidal. It exalts monsters. And it provides the anti-American pack with living vermin to anoint as victims, if not heroes.
Isn't it time we gave our critics what they're asking for? Let's solve the "unjust" imprisonment problem, once and for all. No more Guantanamos! Every terrorist mission should be a suicide mission. With our help.
We need to clarify the rules of conflict. But integrity and courage have fled Washington. Nobody will state bluntly that we're in a fight for our lives, that war is hell, and that we must do what it takes to win.
Our enemies will remind us of what's necessary, though. When we've been punished horribly enough, we'll come to our senses and do what must be done.
This isn't an argument for a murderous rampage, but its opposite. We must kill our enemies with discrimination. But we do need to kill them. A corpse is a corpse: The media's rage dissipates with the stench. But an imprisoned terrorist is a strategic liability.
Nor should we ever mistreat captured soldiers or insurgents who adhere to standing conventions. On the contrary, we should enforce policies that encourage our enemies to identify themselves according to the laws of war. Ambiguity works to their advantage, never to ours.
Our policy toward terrorists and insurgents in civilian clothing should be straightforward and public: Surrender before firing a shot or taking hostile action toward our troops, and we'll regard you as a legal prisoner. But once you've pulled a trigger, thrown a grenade or detonated a bomb, you will be killed. On the battlefield and on the spot.
Isn't that common sense? It also happens to conform to the traditional conduct of war between civilized nations. Ignorant of history, we've talked ourselves into folly.
And by the way: How have the terrorists treated the uniformed American soldiers they've captured? According to the Geneva Convention?
Sadly, even our military has been infected by political correctness. Some of my former peers will wring their hands and babble about "winning hearts and minds." But we'll never win the hearts and minds of terrorists. And if we hope to win the minds, if not the hearts, of foreign populations, we must be willing to kill the violent, lawless fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population determined to terrorize the rest.
Ravaged societies crave and need strict order. Soft policies may appear to work in the short term, but they fail overwhelmingly in the longer term. Wherever we've tried sweetness and light in Iraq, it has only worked as long as our troops were present - after which the terrorists returned and slaughtered the beneficiaries of our good intentions. If you wish to defend the many, you must be willing to kill the few.
For now, we're stuck with a situation in which the hardcore terrorists in Guantanamo are "innocent victims" even to our fair-weather allies. In Iraq, our troops capture bomb-makers only to learn they've been dumped back on the block.
It is not humane to spare fanatical murderers. It is not humane to play into our enemy's hands. And it is not humane to endanger our troops out of political correctness.
Instead of worrying over trumped-up atrocities in Iraq (the media give credence to any claim made by terrorists), we should stop apologizing and take a stand. That means firm rules for the battlefield, not Gumby-speak intended to please critics who'll never be satisfied by anything America does.
The ultimate act of humanity in the War on Terror is to win. To do so, we must kill our enemies wherever we encounter them. He who commits an act of terror forfeits every right he once possessed.
Ralph Peters' new book, "Never Quit the Fight," hits stores today.
-
Peters always has an interesting take on things, like his most current article below. I agree with much, but disagree quite often. As so it is with these two articles.
Peters suggests just killing all terrorists immediately as a blanket policy. It sounds great, but the "legal and moral" complications are immeasurable. Yes, terrorists are not covered by the Geneva Accords, but if a terrorist is captured and immediately executed, does this not create a p.r. nightmare, if not legal or moral complications? The world outcry against such actions would be unbearable. In addition, can one imagine the number of our troops who would be subjected to "investigations" for killing "civilians" and not terrorists?
In the below article, Peters offers disjointed thinking, which he does quite often. Hezbollah does the kidnappings on its own. Lebanon cannot do anything about it so hit Syria instead. Yet he also claims that Syria had no imput into the action in the first place. So his advice is to hit Syria. Huh?
The reality is that Syria still controls Lebanon. Syrian supporters still control the military. The majority of the population of Lebanon support Hezbollah. Hitting Syria would draw them into the fight before Israel was ready to take them on. Finish one enemy first before going after the next. Who needs a three front war when they already have a two front war?
Of course, Syria does not want to be drawn into the conflict without Iranian participation either. Syria would get blasted again like in the 80's. Their pitiful Air Force would suffer disasterous defeat again. So the hope fkor Syria is that if they were hit, Iran would join in. And that may be wishful thinking.
Also, he claims that Hezbollah is not being directed by Iran. This is a large stretch of the imagination. Iran has always armed and directed Hezbollah. Why should it be different this time?
pat
TRAGEDY OF ERRORS
By RALPH PETERS
July 16, 2006 -- THE violence that scorched the Middle East this time didn't result from a sly Iranian plot. It was the product of emotion, miscalculation, impulsiveness and folly. On all sides.
Here's a sound rule in analyzing problems anywhere between Cairo and Karachi: Never ascribe to a calculated strategy what can be blamed on passionate incompetence.
Another iron rule that applies to this and every Israeli attempt to strike back at Islamist terrorists is that, just when the Israeli Defense Forces really start to hurt the enemy, the world community - including the United States - intervenes to save the terrorists from destruction.
Europeans have more sympathy with Iran's nuclear program than they do with Israel's attempts at self-defense. But, then, the only thing continental Europeans regret about the Holocaust is that they didn't get to finish the job. Even as Europe suffers its own attacks by Islamist terrorists, Europeans defend the selfsame terrorists against Israeli retribution.
Meanwhile, the flare-up that began last week resulted from bad judgment on the part of every organization and state involved - as well as producing some spectacularly bad analysis by our herd-like media.
AS soon as Hezbollah commandos snatched two Israeli soldiers from northern Israeli, we were told Iran was behind it. Utterly wrong. That raid was a Hezbollah-conceived copy-cat operation launched impulsively to piggyback on the Hamas seizure of an Israeli soldier in Gaza the week before. The Iranian government was as surprised as anyone.
Iran was dragged into the mess thereafter. But - while President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is always delighted to give we-will-bury you speeches - Iran's best interests just now are served by avoiding violent confrontations with Israel while Tehran tries to persuade the world that its nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes. Iran's fanatics don't just want to capture or kill six Israeli soldiers. They want to kill 6 million Jews.
The Iranians were blindsided, but had to back their clients (as Germany had to back Austria in 1914).
Because it offers an easy sound-bite explanation, journalists consistently misrepresent Iran's degree of control over Hezbollah, insisting that Tehran pulls all the strings. Just not true. Iran's relationship with Hezbollah is a dark mirror image of our own relationship with Israel: We support Israel, providing funds and weapons, and we can influence Israel. But we don't control Israel. Sometimes Israel surprises us - and not always happily.
Iran's in the same situation with Hezbollah.
Despite drawing vital support from Iran and Syria, Hezbollah has its own goals, tactics and internal dynamics. And since it was allowed to defy U.N. resolutions calling for it to disarm in the wake of Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Hezbollah has been able to build the most-effective and best-motivated Arab military, man-for-man.
BUT Hezbollah got this one wrong. Whoever green- lighted the raid on Israel didn't anticipate the ferocity or scale of the Israeli reaction.
Then the Israelis began to miscalculate - reacting impulsively and emotionally themselves. Attacking Hezbollah was fully justified and necessary, but Israel's frustration with the Lebanese government's toleration of terrorists boiled over into folly. Israeli aircraft attacked Beirut's international airport and other targets around the city, doing both Israel and Lebanon's fragile democracy far more harm than good.
Israel hopes to pressure the Lebanese government into taking action against Hezbollah. But Lebanon's leaders can't do that. If they ordered their work-in-progress military to attack and disarm Hezbollah, some Lebanese Armed Forces units would mutiny, others would disintegrate - and any outfits that attempted to take on Hezbollah would be badly and swiftly defeated. And the action would reignite the country's dormant civil war.
After the Israeli strikes in Beirut, Hezbollah then raised the stakes again by raining rockets down on Israeli cities - making it impossible for Israel to limit its offensive. The global media nonetheless portrayed Israel as the aggressor, highlighting Lebanese casualties, rather than the suffering in Israel.
FOR its part, Israel picked the wrong fight by striking Beirut's infrastructure while its deadly enemies sat comfortably in Damascus.
Israel should've hit Syria. It had nothing to lose and far more to gain. No matter what Israel does and no matter how many concessions Israeli governments make, its enemies prove implacable and the "global community" will condemn it.
Returning Gaza to Palestinian control was a noble attempt at making peace. Fanatics made sure it failed. Likewise, withdrawing from southern Lebanon was a risky attempt at compromise and international cooperation. We've seen the rewards. The heart of the problem beats in Damascus, not Beirut. Israel should've gone for it.
As for world opinion, it's saved the terrorists, time and again. Does any reader believe that the United Nations or more than a handful of its member states would act to save Israel? Israel's in a ceaseless fight for its life, and we, at least, have to stop intervening to save its enemies.
THE situation in the Middle East has no good or clear solution. The struggle will continue beyond our lifetimes (unless, of course, the Iranians get their nukes). This is just the latest round, if a particularly ugly one. The ultimate amount of blood that will be shed is unknowable. But we can be certain that Israel's genocidal enemies will always be saved by the bell.
Ralph Peters' latest book, "Never Quit the Fight," was published last week.
-
Eradication First
Before diplomacy.
By Michael Rubin
As bombs continue to drop on Lebanon and rockets on Israel, the West has begun to lose its resolve. On July 14, French president Jacques Chirac condemned Israel?s military action as ?completely disproportionate.? Russian President Vladimir Putin called Israel?s ?use of full-scale force? unacceptable. While President George W. Bush stood firm in his moral clarity, the State Department was more cautious. ?It is extremely important that Israel exercise restraint in its acts of self defense,? Condoleezza Rice told reporters on July 13.
Some U.S. politicians sought to capitalize on the latest violence for political gain. Senator Hillary Clinton blamed the Bush administration for the outburst of violence. ?We?ve had five and a half years of a failed experiment in tough talk absent diplomacy and engagement. I think it?s time to go back to what works, and what has historically worked and what can work again.?
Clinton should go back and reread her history. Premature recourse to diplomacy backfires. Bill Clinton?s diplomatic efforts were well-intentioned but they resulted not in peace, but in a far more violent conflict. The fault for this does not lie with Clinton, but rather with an Iranian and Arab leadership that had not abandoned violence as a mechanism to achieve their goals.
Still, the Clinton administration trusted Arafat as a partner far longer than the evidence warranted. They were not alone. Often in Washington, politicians become so wedded to the success of their policy initiatives, that they ignore the reality of its failure.
The Bush administration was not as willing to accept Yasser Arafat?s duplicity. While in December 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell held out hope that Arafat?s call to end armed struggle against Israel was sincere, his decision to withhold judgment was wise. As Arafat won European praise for his ceasefire, Iranian and Hezbollah officials were loading 50 tons of weaponry onto the Karine-A, destination: Gaza. Throughout the intifada, Arafat?s diplomacy was insincere. He, like other terrorists and rogue leaders, ran to diplomats and the United Nations when he feared retaliation, the playground equivalent of sucker-punching a classmate when the teacher?s back is turned, and then crying for intercession as the victim fights back.
Arafat and many Hamas leaders paid the price for their strategy: It was not diplomacy which ended the intifada. Rather, the U.S. and Israeli quarantine of Arafat and Israel?s targeted assassination campaign against other terrorist leaders created accountability and broke the back of the terrorist campaign.
It was at this point, though, that both Ariel Sharon and George Bush snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Politicians should never reward violence and non-compliance. The second intifada which followed Ehud Barak?s May 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon made the violence which engulfed Gaza after Sharon?s unilateral disengagement predictable. Bush?s mistake was rewarding Iran?s noncompliance. Just days after he reversed his policy and rewarded Iran, Iranian Supreme Leader ridiculed U.S. weakness. ?In Iraq, you failed. You say you have spent 300 billion dollars to bring a government in office that obeys you. But it did not happen. In Palestine, you made all attempts to prevent Hamas from coming to power and again you failed. Why don?t you admit that you are weak and your razor is blunt?? he declared on June 4, 2006.
The problem with the West?s policy in the Middle East is not lack of diplomacy, but rather failure to allow retaliatory violence and impose accountability. During the Clinton years, terrorists believed they could strike U.S. interests with near impunity. In 1996, Clinton failed to respond to Iranian planning, training, and supply for the terrorists which struck the Khobar towers, in 1998, U.S. retaliation in response to al Qaeda?s East Africa embassy bombings was weakwristed, and in 2000, the response to the U.S.S. Cole bombing was nonexistent. Israel too suffered from and erosion of its deterrence.
Not only is vengeance against terrorism sometimes necessary, but it is more likely to bring peace if it is disproportionate. The Bush administration?s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks was not to bring down a couple buildings in Kabul or Qandahar, nor shoot missiles at empty buildings or training camps, but rather to launch war on al Qaeda and bring the Taliban government to its knees.
For the West, moral equivalency is also a handicap. True, terrorists may also argue that the way to alter Western policy is through violence. But that is all the more reason why the West must ensure its own victory first.
When academics and commentators decry disproportionate force as an obstacle to peace, they replace analysis with platitude. Lasting peace is seldom made between equals, but rather between strong and weak. The United States ended World War II precisely because it was willing to use disproportionate force. In doing so, it allowed Japan to rebuild and thrive. England and France did not pull back from Germany and allow the Nazi regime to re-arm and try again. Wars are fought until they are won. Among Israel?s neighbors, only Egypt and Jordan have accepted peace with the Jewish state. In 1977, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat sought peace only after a disastrous attempt at war. King Hussein of Jordan also accepted peace ? not as formally at first ? after understanding the price of war. Negotiations between Jerusalem, Cairo, and Amman succeeded because they accepted that violence could not achieve their aims, an epiphany still lost upon many in the Arab world and Iran. The irony of the Oslo Accords was that those that fought the first intifada were not those handed the reins of leadership. Both U.S. and Israeli leaders enabled the Tunisia-based faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization to take control. Arafat viewed his chairmanship over the Palestinian Authority as an entitlement, without understanding his responsibility.
Diplomacy that preserves a status quo in which terrorists win concession through violence ensures future bloodshed. Hezbollah is not a movement whose existence diplomats should intercede to preserve. While world leaders condemned Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad?s Holocaust denial and threats to eradicate Israel from the map, they ignore that on April 9, 2000, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah declared, ?The Jews invented the legend of the Nazi atrocities,? and argued, ?Anyone who reads the Koran and the holy writings of the monotheistic religions sees what they did to the prophets, and what acts of madness and slaughter the Jews carried out throughout history... Anyone who reads these texts cannot think of co-existence with them, of peace with them, or about accepting their presence, not only in Palestine of 1948 but even in a small village in Palestine, because they are a cancer which is liable to spread again at any moment.? Nasrallah has made his aims clear. That anyone would intercede to enable someone whose goal is genocide to continue is irresponsible, if not hateful. Nasrallah later provided an answer to those progressive tempted to argue the problem to be Israel?s existence. To the Hezbollah leader, Israel is just one part of the fight. On October 22, 2002, Hassan Nasrallah told Lebanon?s Daily Star, ?If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them world wide.?
There will be a role for diplomacy in the Middle East, but it will only be successful if it commences both after the eradication of Hezbollah and Hamas, and after their paymasters pay a terrible cost for their support. This does not mean that Israel is without blame. Lebanese politicians may have been cowardly in their failure to exert sovereignty following Israel?s May 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon. The State Department and European foreign ministries were negligent in their failure to keep up the pressure on Hezbollah, Damascus, and Tehran following the Cedar Revolution. But there will never be peace if Syria and Iran are allowed to use Lebanon as a proxy battlefield safe and secure in the knowledge that they will not pay directly. If the peace is the aim, it is imperative to punish the Syrian and Iranian leadership. Most Lebanese are victims, too.
? Michael Rubin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor of Middle East Quarterly.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDZmY2E1YjY3YTRlOGYwN2IzNGEzODU2ZDNiMmJiM2I=
-
If Hezbollah bombs Tel Aviv. The gloves will come off and no one will be able to control Israel.
Israel has been looking for a reason to attack Iran. Due to the Iranian nuclear sword rattling and the Israeli view that the rest of the world is dragging their feet to prevent Iran. They also feel Bush is weak and unable to drum up support to help Israel.
So if Tel Aviv is lite up watch for Iran, Lebanon and maybe Syria to pay the price.
Myke
-
Why the F are you not in Iraq yourself if you feel so strongly about it ?
How unfortunate that I now feel like slapping your ears for your warlike lunacy when I actually respect your fighting philosophy
:idea:
-
Woof Bowswer:
Is this how you talk to people in face to face political conversations?
CD
-
Michael Yon's latest dispatch on the WOT
Sunday, July 16th, 2006
Jihad
The lust for self-destruction and someone to blame
The cauldron of the Israeli conflict is flaring, scalding the surrounding desert. The hands stoking the fire underneath belong to militant Islam. Jihad has different meanings, but the only meaning that concerns us today is ?Holy War.?
In the words of esteemed Pakistani writer, Ahmed Rashid:
These new Islamic fundamentalists are not interested in transforming a corrupt society into a just one, nor do they care about providing jobs, education, or social benefits to their followers or creating harmony between the various ethnic groups that inhabit many Muslim countries. The new jihadi groups have no economic manifesto, no plan for better governance and the building of political institutions, and no blue-print for creating democratic participation in the decision-making process of the future Islamic states. They depend on a single charismatic leader, an amir, rather than a more democratically constituted organization or party for governance. They believe that the character, piety, and purity of their leader rather than his political abilities, education, or experience will enable him to lead the new society. Thus has emerged the phenomenon of the cults of Mullah Muhammad Omar of the Taliban, Osama bin Laden of Al Qaeda, and Juma Namangani of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.
[Ahmed Rashid in JIHAD, The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia.]
Although Israel is the center of world attention today, she is only one of many targets for militant Islam. A quick trip around the world to inventory a trail of strife and death shows that Israel is only a face in the targeted-crowd.
Nighttime on the ghats in Varanasi, India; another place where Hindus, Christians and Muslims suffer at the hands of militant Muslims.
Last week, about 200 people were killed and 700 wounded by simultaneous terrorist bombings in Mumbai. India is the most unlikely democracy in the world, with its amalgam of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs and others. During each of my long excursions there, I was amazed at how the peace holds together. But it does, mostly, and India, despite many obstacles, continues to develop its place in the global new world. Yet our Indian friends have long suffered at the hands of militant Islam, demonstrating this week again the often overlooked fact that nobody suffers worse at the hands of militant Muslims than other Muslims.
India is overwhelmingly Hindu, though about 150 million Muslims live there, which equals nearly the entire population of Pakistan. Most of these Indian Muslims are peaceful, yet clusters of militants in Pakistan, Kashmir and India keep picking, picking, picking. The subcontinent is one of the most dangerous places on Earth for festering wounds because India and Pakistan both possess nuclear weapons. We don?t have to worry about India, but only a weak thread keeps those weapons out of dangerous hands in Pakistan. One thing is certain: Jews in Israel are not to blame for the murderous rage of militant Muslims in India, and India is at this hour blaming Pakistan.
Sheep lungs and other organs hang by their tracheas on a hook in Srinagar, Kashmir; another bastion of militant Islam.
The Russians regularly bleed at the hands of Islamic militants. Terrorists invaded a school in Beslan, holding more than a thousand students, teachers and staff hostage. When the shooting and explosions ended, more than 350 were dead and more than 700 wounded; most of the victims were children. The terrorists may have been addicted to heroin or morphine; the Russians say drugs were found in their blood. That many terrorists are heavy drug users, particularly as they approach the date with their own planned death, is not widely known, but our troops in Iraq have found drug use to be part of the fact pattern of homicide bomb attacks. Whether any narcotic substance was used to grease the slope to slaughtering children, the Jews in Israel had no connection to these attacks.
Even China has a cluster of militant Muslims who have left bomb craters for footprints. The Euro-rhetoric that claims our foreign policy is to blame for the rise in terrorism cannot account for the problems in China.
Thailand, in the southern region, finds peaceful Buddhists suffering from the bombs of militant Islam.
The Jews in Israel cannot be blamed for the bombing in Bali, Indonesia that killed about 200 tourists, including my friend Beata Pawlak, in one attack.
Over in the Philippines: much trouble, more bombs, and corpses and crime scenes smeared with the bloody rhetoric of militant Islam. The Jews in Israel or our support for them did not cause any of this.
Bold leap to Canada, one of the most peaceful and tolerant nations, but hardly a second home for the world Jews; attacks were narrowly averted recently. Down to New York, which might qualify for that homeland claim, buildings collapse. Pennsylvania, people crater into the earth. Washington D.C., hijacked bodies slam into the Pentagon. Bin Laden has been on the record saying he murders because infidels occupy holy land. Al-Qaeda mentions Israel as an afterthought, when reaction to their attacks in the world seems for a brief moment almost unified and resolved. But television cameras captured the footage of militant Palestinian Muslims cheering the news of the attacks and chanting victoriously in the streets.
Across the Atlantic, our friends in Europe are frequent victims. In the south: BOOM! Madrid, another metro hit, like in India. London: BOOM! Metro and bus attacks: similar to India, similar to Israel, similar to France.
Germany and France have been hit again and again. Paris may not have been burning but most of France recently cowered in the face of the flames of militant Muslim youth.
Danish people, who pride themselves on tolerance, were burned out of embassies because a cartoonist depicted Mohammed in ways intended to be comical, if cynical. The results were bloody. American flags were burned over Danish cartoons, and many people could not help mentioning ?foreign policy? and Israel to excuse barbaric behavior, though the cause of the riots and deaths was militant reaction to a cartoon from Europe.
In peaceful Holland, a Dutch filmmaker dared raise a questioning hand, with the following result:
On the morning of Nov. 2 in a busy street in east Amsterdam, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri pulled out a gun and shot controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was riding a bike to his office. Van Gogh hit the ground and stumbled across the street to a nearby building. He didn?t make it. As the Moroccan strode toward him, van Gogh shouted, ?We can still talk about it! Don?t do it! Don?t do it.? But the Moroccan didn?t stop. He shot him again, slit van Gogh?s throat and stuck a letter to his chest with a knife. He was slaughtered like an animal, witnesses said. ?Cut like a tire,? said one. Van Gogh, the Dutch master?s great-grand-nephew, was 47 years old.
[Salon.com?The silencing of Theo van Gogh]
Unfortunately, Mr. van Gogh did not grasp the nature of this philosophy: ?We can still talk about it! Don?t do it! Don?t do it.? Only bad math would attribute US foreign policy toward Israel into van Gogh?s murder.
East, over to Iran, is an insane President who states that the Holocaust never occurred. He would like to make a Holocaust today by destroying Israel, and his scientists and engineers are working on the nuclear bombs to do it. At the current rate, this is scheduled to be the first national-suicide attack, where an entire nation straps a nuclear weapon(s) onto its body and then slams into Israel. If this day comes to pass, countries like Syria and Iran will suddenly cease to exist.
Consider now the question of Israel. Islamic terrorists often cite US support for Israel as the cause of their anger. They are lying. They don?t care about the Palestinians. The Palestinians are pawns and excuses. Saddam Hussein ?cared? about Palestinians, and he focused his charity by giving bonuses to the families of homicide bombers. His sponsorship of terrorism welled up from ancient land disputes between Arabs and Jews. But he used Palestinian pawns to attack Jews in a desperate ploy to curry favor with Hamas leaders, lest they begin to concern themselves with all their Shia brethren piled into mass graves in the Iraq desert.
Attacking Israel while crying crocodile tears for Palestinians has been an effective drill for tapping into wells of anti-Semitism, for polarizing the United Nations, NATO and the EU, which then become embroiled in impassable stalemates that render these organizations inert. This lesson was not lost on Saddam?s closest neighbor and worst enemy: Iran.
When Israel defends itself, the world denounces it and cries the same crocodile tears for the Palestinians. The phrase ?Never again? has special meaning to a people who have been repeated targets for genocide. But the fact is, like the Iraqi Kurds who have seized on their new peace and run fast with it, if people stop shooting at Israelis, they will stop shooting back. This current situation looks like an endless cycle of attack and reciprocation, but the Israelis will stop if the other sides will stop. But Hezbollah, Hamas and others will not stop. These recent attacks and kidnappings were unprovoked. By Israel, that is.
The only common thread to all the violence described in this dispatch is militant Islam. Not Islam. Militant Islam. Militant Muslims around the globe are waging war against anything different, be it the Buddhists? carvings destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Hindus burned alive on trains in India, or Sunni against Shia in Iraq. This is not about Islam; this is not rooted in even a most fundamentalist reading of the Quran.
The pattern is clear, says Dr. Wafa Sultan [video]:
The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.
[Excerpted from an interview with Arab-American psychiatrist Wafa Sultan. The interview was aired on Al-Jazeera TV on February 21, 2006.]
-
Bowser,
I think that Crafty has done more for our men in uniform through efforts he will not mention than he could ever do in Iraq personally.
We try to be respectful in Cd's house.
pat
-
Witnessing the random violence of war
Hezbollah rockets strike without warning, with devastating effect
By Martin Fletcher
Correspondent
NBC News
Updated: 6:48 p.m. CT July 18, 2006
HAIFA, Israel - We started our day in a bomb shelter in the northern town of Nahariya, Israel. I asked the kids in the shelter, "Do you understand why you're here?"
"Hezbollah," they reply.
"They are bad people. They want to kill us," adds 11-year-old Tal.
His sister Michel feels safe here.
But as we leave: Panic. New rocket attacks around us.
"Katyushas," shouts one woman, then, "a bomb!" "Where are my children?" she cries.
A man points to the smoke, and we run there. Half a mile. Past another bomb shelter, more frightened people pointing the way. When we get there, cars are destroyed, gasoline flowing down the street, burning embers. Live electric cables on the ground, water mains broken. Deadly combinations.
A man is in shock. The Katyusha rocket, with its 50-pound warhead, made only a small hole in the ground. But it spread terror.
Close by, a second hit. But nobody was wounded in either attack.
One house was hit by a rocket, but everybody was inside the bomb shelter.
Then, a third rocket. Terror on the homefront. We run another half mile. A quick response can save lives. But for all three bombs, we got there before the ambulances.
One man we saw had no chance. A direct hit.
?Where are you??
People are just waiting for the ambulance to arrive. Yet again, it happened right next to a bomb shelter. Most people were inside, and that's how they stayed safe. The man we saw was clearly in the wrong place at the wrong time.
At the shelter, one lady is desperate. "Where are you? Where are you?" she cries.
A man says, "She's lost her husband."
The woman calls him.
Everybody hears a phone ring.
It's by the dead body.
Randomness sparks fear
This is just one example of the suffering Israelis and Lebanese people are feeling since fighting began with Hezbollah seven days ago.
Hezbollah fired several missiles at northern Israel Tuesday, killing the man in Nahariya and wounding several others, Israeli officials said.
Twenty-five Israelis and more than 237 Lebanese people have died so far in the conflict. The violence has displaced an estimated 500,000.
Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets at northern Israeli towns from the Lebanese border, forcing hundreds of thousands of Israelis to take cover in underground shelters or flee to the south.
The randomness of the missiles has substantially increased the fear in Israel. There is no forewarning. It could happen anytime. The bomb just falls out of the sky.
Because Nahariya is so close to the border, there is no siren warning citizens before a missile strikes. There?s nowhere to run or hide. Peple stay close to bomb shelters to stay safe.
Israeli army air strikes continue
The Israeli air force kept up its strikes across southern Lebanon on Tuesday, hitting a military base at Kfar Chima as soldiers rushed to their bomb shelters, the Lebanese military said. At least 11 soldiers were killed in an engineering unit and 35 were wounded, it said. The base is adjacent to Hezbollah strongholds often targeted by recent Israeli strikes.
Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr denounced the strike as a ?massacre,? saying the regiment?s main job was to help rebuild infrastructure. The Lebanese army has largely stayed out of the fighting, confining itself to firing anti-aircraft guns at Israeli planes. But Israeli jets have struck Lebanese army positions.
Israel did not give a reason for the strike on the base.
Nine members of the same family were killed when a bomb hit their house in the village of Aitaroun, near the border, Lebanon?s state-run news agency said, citing the police. Israeli warplanes also struck southern Beirut, and hit four trucks that Israeli officials said were bringing in weapons.
?That is intolerable terrorist activity,? said Capt. Jacob Dallal, an Israeli army spokesman. In total, Israel?s attacks Tuesday killed 27 people.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
-
Editorial: Self-defence is a universal right
The Australian
July 20, 2006
Israel's critics are too often guilty of selective outrage
THE tyranny of distance still afflicts Australia, or at least certain segments of the Australian commentariat. For from a distance of nearly 15,000km, many local media outlets look at the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and see a decidedly one-sided affair. Last week, The Sydney Morning Herald headlined a front-page story declaring Lebanon "UNDER SIEGE" by what its correspondent called "Israeli attacks causing soaring civilian death tolls in Gaza and Lebanon", setting the tone for the paper's coverage of the conflict. Meanwhile, at the ABC on Tuesday night, Tony Jones badgered former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak over Israel's refusal to call a ceasefire, while the UK Independent's Robert Fisk regularly rants against Israel on the nation's broadcaster. Yet the closer one gets to the front lines, the less Israel cops the blame. In the Middle East, the normally anti-Israeli Saudi Arabian Government has said Hezbollah bears "full responsibility for . . . ending the crisis". In Lebanon, there is even more support for Israel's actions. On Tuesday night's 7:30 Report, of all places, several Lebanese officials placed blame for the current conflict on Hezbollah ? not Israel. The question that comes to mind, then, is whether those who effectively suggest Israel should meekly accept its neighbours' attacks actually support the Jewish state's right to exist?
It's a legitimate question. Certainly Israel should not be immune to criticism. But if Israel's right to exist is accepted, then the exercise of its corresponding right to protect itself should not be treated with such outrage. Since Israel pulled out of Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah has become more powerful in southern Lebanon, thanks to its friends in Iran and Syria. During this time it has also subjected Israel to regular harassment ? even as Israel has, until the kidnapping of two of its soldiers last week, been restrained in retaliation. One wonders how those who criticise Israel's response to Hezbollah would urge the Howard Government to respond were a foreign enemy seizing cops and dropping artillery shells into Balmain in Sydney or Fitzroy in Melbourne. Those who condemn images of Israeli girls writing messages on artillery shells are rarely if ever heard denouncing the relentless propaganda that brainwashes Palestinian children to hate their Jewish neighbours and celebrate the deeds of suicide bombers. Meanwhile, the ancient idea of proportionate response has lately become a rhetorical cudgel for those who would hobble Israel. Yet in taking the possibility of overwhelming retaliation off the table, the doctrine encourages bad behaviour on the part of Israel's enemies who know they would never be called to account.
In retaliating against Lebanon and evicting that country's Shia interlopers, Israel is simply behaving as a rational actor. And in doing so it strikes a blow for the principle that all states should be treated similarly. This is the only way forward for Israel in dealing with the Palestinians: if Hamas wants to be recognised as the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, then the world should go along with this and no longer accept "rogue state" claims that Qassam rockets and suicide terrorist missions launched from its territory are not its responsibility. Violent internal politics or historic grievances about dispossession and occupation do not excuse bad behaviour. The situation is still fluid in the Middle East. And any attack on Tel Aviv by Hezbollah would radically change the equation. But the quick defeat of Hezbollah ? and by extension its mad backers in Tehran ? would not just be a win for Israel but for Lebanon and the region as well.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19847517-601,00.html
-
Bowser,
After reading your post I myself felt like swatting your nose with a rolled newspaper for the blatant disrespect.
I maybe wrong but I feel you are against this war. Many people in this "tribe" share your feelings. Instead of throwing out insults why not share why you are against this action.
Since I have started my training with Marc I have been to the Middle East/Southwest Asia and the Horn of Africa more times than I want to count. I am extremely gratful that Marc has taken his time and shared his personel knowledge in warcraft. More than once it has saved my backside.
Have you been to Iraq? If not, why not?
Myke Willis
Tulsa OK
-
Bowser,
After reading your post I myself felt like swatting your nose with a rolled newspaper for the blatant disrespect.
Hi Mike
The only problem we have there is one of distance, I am in New Zealand.
I maybe wrong but I feel you are against this war. Many people in this "tribe" share your feelings. Instead of throwing out insults why not share why you are against this action.
My inner watcher does not allow me to support this war.
If your watcher does, then so be it. . .
Have you been to Iraq? If not, why not?
Currently my territory is about a third of an acre, and it isn't in Iraq.
The military purpose of a dog (IMO) is to defend its territory, which is what I do.
Regards,
Bowser
-
Bowser:
"Bowser,
After reading your post I myself felt like swatting your nose with a rolled newspaper for the blatant disrespect."
"Hi Mike
The only problem we have there is one of distance, I am in New Zealand."
Well, it seems like we have an answer to my question as to whether you conduct yoursefl thusly in face-to-face conversation.
Anyway, enough of this banter. Forward.
-----------
As for defending territory, that is what we seek to do. 911 was an effort to take out the White House (the Pentagon was a Plan B target after that plane missed the WH) and either the Congress or Three Mile Island (Flight 93, which was taken down by the Unorganized Militia passengers). Taking out Congress would have been one thing, but TMI would have left a goodly chunk of America glowing for quite some time.
"If only we had stayed home" thinking seems to assume that all would be well now. We can never know the results of courses of actions not taken, but it seems quite plausible to me to think the following:
1) The UN embargo would have broken down, SH would still be in power with the prestige of having outlasted the West's efforts to bring him to heel. He would be ramping up WMD efforts.
2) US troops would still be in Saudi Arabia and the House of Saud would still be in a position to be placating/buying off AQ instead of seeking to crush it in its homeland.
3) Libya's undetected nuke program would still be undetected and would be headed towards completion.
4) Pakistan's nuke program would not be leashed
5) Encouraged by the lack of consequences for 911, more attacks on the US homeland would be taking place.
6) etc.
We are in a very, very tough war. Its outcome is not yet determined in my opinion.
Indeed, the following piece, if correct, suggests that Israel's very existence is in question.
=====
July 21, 2006
Worst Case Scenario: Hezbollah's Conventional Forces
By Bill Roggio
The Israeli Defense Forces and Hezbollah have fought pitched battles over
the past two days in the region around Avivim. Ynet News reports nine
Israeli soldiers were wounded during the fighting, and two were killed in
the nearby town of Maroun al-Ras. "Attempts to rescue some of the injured
were carried out under relentless fire," according to the Ynet News report.
Six Hezbollah cells were engaged during the attack. Israeli forces have
withdrawn from the area.
Al Manar, Hezbollah's mouthpiece, states "nine Israeli soldiers were
reported killed in a Hizbullah ambush while advancing into Lebanon," and
"aired footage of Israeli Army equipment seized by Hizbullah fighters in the
clashes." While Al Manar inflates, distorts or outright lies quite often
when it comes to casualty figures and other information, the fact that the
claim on Al Manar must be considered is disquieting. An irregular force such
as Hezbollah should not be fighting a professional military to a standstill.
Hezbollah also has built an extensive underground networks, including
"fortified underground bunkers some 40 meters (roughly 120 feet)
underground, along with mass weapons caches" and communications systems. All
of this was built under the nose of the Israeli military and intelligence
services, as well as the peacekeeping forces of the United Nations Interim
Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
The successful Hezbollah raid on the Israeli outpost that started the
conflict, followed by the firing of rockets into Haifa and beyond, anti-ship
cruise missiles which disabled an Israeli warship and sunk a civilian
freighter, and the construction and presence of a fortified bunker network
along the border have caught the Israeli intelligence community (Aman and
Mossad) flat footed. In the words of an American military officer, "If we
didn't know this about Hezbollah's capabilities, just think of what we don't
know about Iran's capabilities."
The Hezbollah fighters are well trained, and according to an anonymous
senior military source, using ammunition and equipment such as armor
piercing rounds, body armor, night vision gear and laser sights. Hezbollah
also possesses mortars, RPGs, anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, anti-tank
missiles and possibly surface to air missiles to accompany their arsenal of
short and medium range missiles capable of striking into the heart of
Israeli territory. Hezbollah is using infantry tactics and fighting at the
squad and platoon level.
This isn't a garden variety militia, but a well trained fighting force, the
Iranian version of the Foreign Legion. This is highlighted by Olivier
Guitta, who points out some interesting facts from the Arabic version of an
Asharq Al-Awsat article which explained the Iranian's involvement in
training Hezbollah and supplying the group with its rocket arsenal:
200 Iranian Revolutionary Guards have been stationed in Lebanon since
1990. They have married Shia Lebanese women, mostly "Hezbollah widows" and
have changed their names to Lebanese names. They installed over twenty fixed
rocket bases in the Bekaa Valley and provided Hezbollah with mobile bases to
launch rockets. Furthermore a secret elite force of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard composed of about twenty men is watching the Israel
Defense Forces' every move with very sophisticated high-tech material and
then deciding on the targets to hit inside Israel.
What we are seeing today is the direct result of the state sponsorship of a
terrorist entity after it has gone unchecked for over two decades. Hezbollah
has evolved from a terrorist, paramilitary group into the most effective
fighting force in Lebanon, capable of conducting professional operations and
using sophisticated weapons. The training camps in the Bekaa Valley are not
only churning out fighters for Hezbollah, but train other terrorist
organizations, exporting the dangerous tactics being used today in Lebanon,
much like the training camps in Afghanistan served as a breeding grounds of
today's crop of terrorists.
While Israel can degrade Hezbollah via air strikes, naval bombardments and
limited raids, the Iranian proxy force cannot be defeated without putting
boots on the ground in southern Lebanon and deep into the Bekaa Valley.
Hezbollah fighters must be engaged on the ground to be defeated. Anything
short of that - a buffer zone or negotiated settlement, both of which
members of the Israel government and military has indicated it would accept
- is a victory for Hezbollah and Iran. Hezbollah would have struck at
Israeli cities and stood up the invincible Israeli army, while weakening the
nascent Lebanese democracy and asserting itself as the true military power
in the country. This would far exceed Hezbollah's victory of the Israeli
withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.
The surprise and uncertainty of Hezbollah's military capabilities may in
fact be the reason for pausing a massive invasion of Lebanon. Israel has yet
to give up the option of a major ground strike, but there is resistance to
moving into Southern Lebanon. The Jerusalem Post reports "IDF Chief of Staff
Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz is known to be opposed to a ground incursion into
Lebanon, which he has said would only be carried out as a last resort." The
deputy prime minister and the minister of defense have also signaled a large
scale ground incursion is not desired.
This attitude will need to change if Israel wishes to eliminate the threat
on the northern border.
http://www.counterterrorismblog.org/
-------------
Geopolitical Diary: Iran's Motives in Lebanon
While Hezbollah forces are busy dodging Israeli missiles, their backers in Iran are throwing out words of support in their defense -- and not much else. Iran is watching as its most prized militant asset in the region gets clobbered by Israeli forces, which raises the question of why Tehran played a part in orchestrating this flare-up in the first place.
To begin delving into the psyche of the Iranian regime, we must step back a few days to July 10, the day before the Hezbollah attack in which two Israeli soldiers were abducted in the disputed Shebaa Farms area. The international community at that time was screaming about North Korea's provocative long-range missile test, and the threat of a nuclear-armed Pyongyang dominated the headlines for weeks.
The Iranians and North Koreans regularly play off each other's carefully timed nuclear "crises" -- to the extent that Iranians were reportedly present at North Korea's July 5 missile tests. With North Korea grabbing the world's attention, Tehran had considerable room to maneuver with its own nuclear agenda and skillfully evaded a U.N. Security Council demand for Iran to respond to a package of incentives designed to curb the Iranian nuclear program. The door was open for some adventurism in other areas where Iran possessed assets.
Next door in Iraq, sectarian violence was soaring to unprecedented levels -- Sunni guerrillas continued their attacks, and Shiite death squads roamed relatively freely on the streets, pulling Sunnis out of their homes and cars and shooting them to death. The rapidly deteriorating situation in Iraq was driving the U.S. exit strategy even further into the ground, as Shiite political leaders with close links to Iran refrained from taking any action to rein in the Shiite militias.
Meanwhile, Israel already was heavily engaged in a military offensive in the Palestinian territories following the abduction of an Israeli soldier. The banner to resist Israeli aggression had been raised and Hezbollah was itching at the chance to re-legitimize itself as the leading resistance movement and expose the impotence of the Arab states that quickly ducked under cover when the conflict erupted.
With all these cards in place, Iran likely calculated that it would be an opportune time to ignite Hezbollah and enhance its own position as the true vanguard of the Islamic world. Being a Shiite power, Iran faces serious obstacles in crossing the Sunni divide to achieve its desired status in the region. By provoking Israel into a major military offensive in which Israeli airstrikes killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians and destroyed Lebanon's core infrastructure, the Iranians could have very well intended to incite an uprising throughout the region in protest against Israel's aggressive military campaign.
This assumption, however, may have been a miscalculation on Iran's part. Israel's war against Hezbollah has exposed glaring rifts between the Sunni and Shiite populations. The Sunni Arab regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan are staunchly protesting Hezbollah's provocations while Shiite communities in Lebanon, Syria, Kuwait and other areas are vehemently criticizing the Arab states for standing back from the conflict. It has come to a point where the Arabs have become as distrustful of Iran as they are of the United States and Israel.
Israel is not going to back down from its military campaign until it paralyzes Hezbollah's militant wing. This is evidently a major sacrifice for Iran to make -- but Israel's current offensive will by no means eradicate Hezbollah as a thriving Shiite resistance movement with the tenacity and will to build itself back up.
Because Iran does not share a border with Lebanon, it conveniently lacks the means to intervene militarily in the conflict. Instead, the Iranian government can call for boycotts and rally the region against Israeli aggression, while it positions itself for the United States and Israel to come to Tehran to negotiate an end to the crisis. According to the Iranian view, Tehran can then promote the idea that it has reached an autonomous role in the region, having stepped in where the seemingly ineffective Arab states could not. Moreover, Iran will have the assurance that the United States and Israel are not willing to engage it militarily, even when it sparks a regional crisis through its militant surrogate in Lebanon.
-
My second post of the morning:
Lebanon: Israel Launches Ground Invasion
July 21, 2006 12 50 GMT
Summary
Israel launched ground operations into southern Lebanon overnight July 20-21, deploying at least five brigades, including paratroopers, commando forces and a tank brigade. These forces are encountering heavy resistance from Hezbollah. Israel's ground campaign, however, cannot stop at southern Lebanon. The move to the Litani River is only the first phase of the operation.
Analysis
Israel has launched ground operations into southern Lebanon, deploying at least five brigades overnight July 20-21, including paratroopers, commando forces and a tank brigade. These troops are encountering heavy resistance from Hezbollah forces, who are armed with anti-tank missiles for use against Israel's Merkava tanks. The Hezbollah forces also are holed up in underground shelters, bunkers and tunnels -- all well-defensible positions.
For Israel, the ground campaign cannot simply be into southern Lebanon. Though an initial push up to the Litani River will re-create a buffer zone to the north of Israel, Hezbollah has demonstrated a longer-range missile capability, making the buffer zone less effective. In addition, now that Israel has made the final political and military decision to move into Lebanon, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) or the Israeli government cannot stop short of inflicting severe damage on Hezbollah capabilities. This means the move to the Litani is only the first phase of the operation. IDF will next move into the Bekaa Valley, where heavy casualties are expected on both sides.
For Hezbollah, whose leader Hassan Nasrallah has shown he is very much still alive despite Israeli airstrikes, the question is how best to counter the Israeli ground invasion. There are two main options. First, Hezbollah could remain in its defensive positions and inflict as many casualties on the invading Israeli forces as possible. Second, it could fade into the villages and hills, allow the Israeli forces to move in, and then begin a guerrilla war against the occupying forces.
Given the current intensity of fighting, it appears Hezbollah is choosing the former. Israel has little intent to remain a long-term occupier in Lebanon; it is not in the country for nation-building. It has a clear military and political objective, and wants to move quickly, employ overwhelming force and withdraw. If Hezbollah decides to lay low, it might not get the opportunity to launch a sustained guerrilla offensive, as Israeli forces will not remain in Lebanon.
However, putting up a stiff resistance -- taking out some of Israel's Merkava tanks and weakening the image of the Israeli military -- will demonstrate the strength and will of Hezbollah and slow the Israeli advances. And the longer Israel is in the ground phase, the more opportunities Hezbollah forces have to employ the modern weaponry they now possess.
In the midst of all of this, the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region is to take place sometime next week. Washington is using the promise of the visit to block other diplomatic missions. Rice will go when Israel is near its objectives. If her visit takes place some time mid- to late next week, it would be in keeping with Israeli expectations -- though not necessarily with reality. Israeli sources are not brimming with confidence in terms of the immediate outcome of the ground offensive -- Hezbollah has surprised Israel with capabilities and discipline.
From Tehran's perspective, it both weakens Israel's image of invulnerability and, in tying down the Israeli forces in intense combat, creates a situation in which international diplomatic pressure on Israel can rise quickly. Though Tehran could lose much of Hezbollah's fighting capability to Israeli forces, it hopes to gain political strength regionally, reshape the impression of Israeli military might, and create tensions or rifts in relations between western nations and Israel.
From the Iranian/Hezbollah point of view, the fighting capabilities of the Lebanese Shiite guerrilla movement can be rebuilt as has been the case in the past. In a way, the question is whether Hezbollah's military capabilities are destroyed before the diplomatic process kicks in, or whether it will be the other way around. It should be noted that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reportedly has said the war against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon would continue until it no longer is "worth the price."
The Iranians also have placed the Sunni Arab states in a bind, forcing them to balance their desire to counter Iranian/Shiite moves with the need to oppose Israeli actions in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. This dynamic also could widen the Shiite-Sunni rift in the region -- possibly spreading the sectarian conflict beyond Iraq.
-
Back to Story - Help
Hezbollah 'heroes' hailed in Iran for their 'great job' by Hiedeh Farmani
Fri Jul 21, 8:06 AM ET
Top Iranian cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has hailed Lebanon's Hezbollah as "heroes", but rejected mounting allegations that Iran and Syria were behind the Shiite movement's conflict with Israel.
"The Hezbollah forces have done a great job and have resisted well. They and their leader, our dear brother Hassan Nasrallah, are heroes," the influential cleric and former president said in his Friday prayer sermon in Tehran.
Iran has been accused of financing Hezbollah, although the Islamic regime insists it only gives "moral" support to its fellow hardline Shiites.
"It is misleading to say that Iran and Syria are carrying this out," Rafsanjani said of Hezbollah's fight against the Jewish state. "These are careless statements."
Israel launched its offensive against Lebanon on July 12 after Hezbollah seized two Israeli soldiers.
"Destroying a country is not proportionate to capturing two hostages," Rafsanjani said, attributing the ongoing Israeli assault against Lebanon as "part of an evil US plot for the Greater Middle East".
"The United States and Britain do not allow the Security Council to order a ceasefire. The UN Secretary General (Kofi Annan) makes proposals favoured by Israel," Rafsanjani added.
But he said that "most deplorable of all" were fellow Muslim nations.
"Arab and Islamic countries... do not even bother to condemn the fact that Muslims are being butchered by non-believers. This is a historic catastrophe," he fumed.
According to state television, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also telephoned Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to call for an emergency meeting of the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the "activation of the Islamic world to stop these Zionist crimes".
Ahmadinejad has previously described Israel as a "tumour", and has said it should "wiped off the map" or moved as far away as Alaska.
On Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert accused Iran of helping to coordinate Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers in a bid to distract attention from the controversial Iranian nuclear programme.
"The moment for the abduction owed nothing to chance, it was determined with Iran to distract the attention of the international community from the Iranian nuclear programme," Olmert said, according to army radio.
"Hezbollah is supported by Iran and Syria," British Prime Minister Tony Blair also said on Tuesday.
It is supported "by the former in weapons -- weapons, incidentally, very similar if not identical to those used against British troops in Basra -- and by the latter in many different ways and by both of them financially."
-
Last update - 18:05 15/07/2006
IDF officer: Israel has no plans to attack Syria
By Yoav Stern, Haaretz Correspondent, and News Agencies
Responding to a report in a pan-Arab daily newspaper that Israel presented Damascus with an ultimatum, an Israel Defense Forces officer said Saturday that targeting Syria is currently not on Israel's agenda.
"We're not a gang that shoots in every direction," the officer said. "It won't be right to bring Syria into the campaign."
The London-based Al-Hayat newspaper reported Saturday that Israel issued an ultimatum to Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to which a regional war would erupt within 72 hours if Damascus does not prevent Hezbollah attacks.
According to the report, a Pentagon source said that if Syria does not try to influence Hezbollah, Israel could bomb essential installations in Syria. The source neither confirmed nor denied rumors that Israel had given Damascus 72 hours to comply with international demands.
The IDF officer emphasized that the Golan Heights frontier has been quiet since 1974, a factor which Israeli views as a vital security asset. The officer said that the Syrian air force as well as additional units are on high alert, a fact which hasn't escaped Israel's attention.
The source added that even though Syria is playing a negative role in the latest crisis, he believes that it had no direct role in the outbreak of fighting.
"Syria is a negative factor, but it is not strong enough in order to instigate all these events," the source said.
U.S. President George W. Bush called on Syria on Saturday to exert its influence to persuade Hezbollah to stop attacks against Israel.
At a joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bush laid the blame for the upsurge in Middle East violence on Hezbollah.
"The best way to stop the violence is for Hezbollah to lay down its arms and to stop attacking. And therefore I call upon Syria to exert influence over Hezbollah."
In recent days, senior U.S. administration officials, led Bush blamed Syria for the escalation of violence in the region. Syria's ambassador to the U.S. regarded U.S. policy in the region as favoring Israel, which he said was not helping the situation.
According to analysts and senior officials in Syria, Damascus is aware of the threat of an Israeli strike. In recent days, senior officials warned Israel against attacking. Lawmaker Muhammad Habash stated that if Damascus is attacked, another front would open on the Golan Heights. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has warned Israel against attacking Syria.
Syria's ambassador to London said Friday that Damascus wants to remain outside the conflict in Lebanon. He went on to say that Syria demanded that Hezbollah stop launching Katyusha rockets at Israel.
On Friday, the ruling Baath Party said Syria will support Hezbollah and Lebanon against Israel's attacks on the country.
"The Syrian people are ready to extend full support to the Lebanese people and their heroic resistance to remain steadfast and confront the barbaric Israeli aggression and its crimes," said a communique from the party's national command issued after a meeting.
It said Israel and the U.S. "are trying to wipe out Arab resistance in every land under occupation" and that Assad was aware of the seriousness of the situation in the region.
The national command is the highest echelon of the Baath Party, which has been in power since 1963.
Assad, who has resisted Israeli and American pressure to abandon support for Hezbollah, was not at the meeting.
Hezbollah's capture of two Israel Defense Forces soldiers and barrage of rocket attacks incited major Israeli military action against Lebanese targets for the first time since it withdrew from south Lebanon in 2000 after a 22-year occupation.
Ahmadinejad: Israel would not dare to move against Iran
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Friday that Israel would not dare to move against the Islamic republic, state television reported.
Iran has denied Israeli suggestions that Hezbollah guerrillas could take the captured soldiers to Iran.
"The Zionist regime does not dare to cast a look with bad intentions at Iran," the president was quoted as saying by state television.
On Thursday, Ahmadinejad said an Israeli strike on Syria would be considered an attack on the whole Islamic world that would bring a "fierce response", state television reported.
"If the Zionist regime commits another stupid move and attacks Syria, this will be considered like attacking the whole Islamic world and this regime will receive a very fierce response," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying in a telephone conversation with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The president made the comments after Israel struck Beirut airport and military airbases and blockaded Lebanese ports in reprisals that have killed 55 civilians in Lebanon since Hezbollah gunmen captured two Israeli soldiers a day earlier.
"He (Ahmadinejad) also said it was a must for the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to become more active regarding the new crisis created by the Zionist regime," state television reported.
Arab governments have agreed to send their foreign ministers to Cairo for an emergency meeting on Saturday to discuss the Israeli attacks on Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.
But the 22-member League has not yet seen specific proposals for a joint Arab response to the Israeli attacks.
Major Arab governments other than Syria are not expected to give unqualified backing Hezbollah, or the Palestinian militant group Hamas which is holding an Israeli soldier hostage.
-
Last update - 02:17 17/07/2006
ANALYSIS: Israel-Hezbollah fighting yet to reach its zenith
By Ze'ev Schiff, Haaretz Correspondent
The fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah, which is backed by Syria and Iran, has still not reached its zenith. The Israel Defense Forces' operational plans against the Shi'ite organizations have not yet been carried out. The next two days are the most critical and a lot depends on whether Tehran decides to take a chance and authorize Hezbollah to launch long-range missiles with more powerful warheads. This is a capability Hezbollah still retains, despite the heavy blows it has suffered in the IDF air strikes.
On Sunday, Israel bore witness to the use of more powerful rockets against Haifa, which killed eight people and injured dozens more. The Syrian-made 220 mm rocket has a warhead weighing more than 50 kilograms. Hezbollah was supplied with these rockets as the Syrian armed forces were receiving them off the production lines. The decision to give Hezbollah the rockets was made when it was concluded that the group would be considered part of the Syrian army's overall emergency preparedness.
The risk to Iran is not military, but rather that Hezbollah would suffer such damage that it would no longer be counted as the sole external element of Iran's Islamic Revolution. It is difficult to assess what the Iranian leadership will decide. If it does opt for aggravating the situation, it will certainly encourage the Syrians to become involved in the confrontation, but all indications suggest that Damascus is not eager to get dragged into war.
Israel is also not interested in a third front, so long as Syria does not intervene in the fighting on the side of Hezbollah.
Another option is that Iran will decide that it is not advantageous for Hezbollah to launch "one too many" rockets at Israel's civilians. In the past 24 hours, there has been a slowing in the air strikes against Lebanese national infrastructure. Now attention is focused on
Hezbollah infrastructure, including rockets, positions and bunkers, in southern Lebanon, the Beka'a and Beirut.
From a military standpoint, the mobile Fajr rockets pose a special problem because they are more difficult to locate and destroy. On Sunday, the air force concentrated on attacks against regular Katyusha rockets whose range is shorter and many of which have already been launched against towns in the Galilee. But the presence of some 600 Hezbollah storage bunkers, a third of which were prepared for the longer range rockets, makes the task difficult.
Israel will also try to target the 12 most senior members of Hezbollah, who are hiding in bunkers deep in the Dahiya quarter in southern Beirut. These men are strategic targets and they include Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, Ibrahim Akil, Imad Mughniye and others. These senior figures constitute the group's equivalent of a General Staff and its political-diplomatic cabinet.
One of the reasons for the repeated attacks against Dahiya is that the Hezbollah's top headquarters are situated there. The area is described by IDF as a "terrorist center" and although the aim is not to harm civilians, the IDF hopes that the permanent residents will leave their homes so that they will not be hurt. A total of 40 targets have been marked in Dahiya, some linked by underground tunnels; one of them is a subterranean factory for special types of ammunition.
-
"Arab and Islamic countries... do not even bother to condemn the fact that Muslims are being butchered by non-believers. This is a historic catastrophe," he fumed.
Right, only believers are allowed to butcher Muslims as is patently evident in what is happening now and in the past in Iraq and many other Muslin nations. And, of course, Muslims are allowed to butcher non-Muslims anywhere in the world as was evident in 9/11, USS Cole, Argentina, the US Embassy in Beirut, India, Indonesia, Russia, London, Madrid, and very specially in Israel.
The Sunni rejection of Hezbollah clearly shows how dangerous they think the Iranian backed militia is for them, not just for infidels. As often happens in politics, we are seeing strange bedfellows, Sunnis backing Israel against the Shia Heizbollah.
-
Q&A: Somali Islamist advance
A militia run by Islamic courts is in control of 99% of the Somali capital, Mogadishu, raising fears in the west that they could provide a safe haven for Islamic radicals from al-Qaeda.
But many Mogadishu residents are glad that the city has been reunited, after being fought over by various warlords for the past 15 years. Almost all Somalis are Muslim and have no problem with the idea of being governed according to Islamic law.
What is the Union of Islamic Courts?
A network of 11 Islamic courts has been set in recent years in Mogadishu, funded by businessmen who preferred any semblance of law and order to complete anarchy.
The courts' stated goal is to restore a system of Sharia law in the city and put an end to impunity and fighting on the streets.
Whilst they are widely credited by some residents in Mogadishu as having clamped down on criminal activity in the city before the recent upsurge in violence, there are elements within the Islamist militia pushing for an Islamic state.
The militias became increasingly powerful as a military force after Mogadishu's main warlords formed the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism this year.
The alliance - widely believed to have been backed by the US - said it wished to root out al-Qaeda members being sheltered by the courts.
Who supports them?
As a grassroots movement they have become increasingly popular among city residents and the business community desperate to see an end to the rule of the gun.
Where the Islamic courts militia has obtained its substantial weaponry and financing is unclear though.
A United Nations report, which called for a tighter arms embargo on Somalia, said that Ethiopia was supplying weapons to the interim government while Eritrea was arming the Islamic courts.
Some fingers have been pointed towards Saudi Arabia and others to wealthy foreign supporters of Islamic militancy.
They are not reported to be seeking money from Somalis at their checkpoints in the city, as militias loyal to warlords did.
What about the al-Qaeda links?
The main source of concern for the United States is al-Qaeda involvement.
The Islamic courts deny any links, or that there are terror training camps in Somalia.
But diplomats believe that small groups of al-Qaeda militants, including foreigners, are operating in the country.
There have been at least four attacks on US and Israeli targets in east Africa - all linked in some way to Somalia.
Has life changed in Mogadishu?
Not much - for the moment.
The Islamic courts have stressed that they will not set up a Taleban-style government and the courts themselves have not changed much.
There are fewer check-points where gunmen working for the warlords used to stop vehicles and demand money.
And life is obviously much better now than for much of this year when the Islamists were battling the warlords, leading to hundreds of deaths - mostly civilians.
But life for most Mogadishu residents remains extremely tough.
There are very few jobs - many depend on money sent home by relatives abroad.
The city is home to many people who have fled fighting in other parts of the country over the past 15 years.
Many live in abandoned buildings or shelters cobbled together from whatever they can find - branches, pieces of material or cardboard.
However, it remains far too dangerous for all but the very bravest aid workers to operate in Mogadishu - as well as the interim government which is based some 250km (158 miles) away in Baidoa.
What has happened to the alliance of warlords?
Most of them have fled Mogadishu.
WHERE ARE THE WARLORDS?
Ex-Jowhar
Mohamed Dhere : exiled in Ethiopia, believed to be very ill
Ex-Mogadishu
Abdirashid Shire Ilgayte : exiled in Dubai after Kenya deported him
Mohamed Afrah Qanyare : in his home-town of El Bur
Muse Sudi Yalahow : with Qanyare in El Bur
Bashir Ragge : with Qanyare in El Bur
Omar Finish : changed allegiance to the courts, believed to be in the capital
Abdi Hassan Awale Qeybdid : defeated by Islamists, probably fled
Only Abdi Hassan Awale Qeybdid, one-time commander of troops loyal to the late warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed who fought US peacekeepers in Mogadishu in the early 1990s, was the last warlord to remain in the capital, but went missing after his forces were defeated in a two day clash in July.
Omar Finish is believed to be still in Mogadishu and says he will now support the Islamic courts.
Abdirashid Shire Ilgayte, owner of Mogadishu's Salafi Hotel, was deported from Nairobi after the Kenyan authorities said they would no longer host those responsible for destabilising Somalia.
He is now in exile in Dubai.
Mohamed Afrah Qanyare has returned to his home-town of El Bur in central Somalia.
He has been joined there by Muse Sudi Yalahow and Bashir Ragge, who are reported to be seeking US help to find refuge outside Somalia.
Jowhar's former warlord Mohamed Dhere has fled to Ethiopia, where he is believed to be very ill.
So will peace now prevail?
The key issue now, with the power of the Mogadishu warlords eroded, will be how the Union of Islamic Courts gets on with President Yusuf's interim government.
Mr Yusuf was elected by MPs in 2004 as part of a peace process based in neighbouring Kenya.
He controls only a very small part of the country.
Some had argued that the unification of Mogadishu for the first time in 15 years could make peace easier to achieve - as the government would only have one group to talk to.
His government at first welcomed the Islamists and talks were started but they have since fallen out over the question of whether foreign peacekeepers are needed in Somalia. It is unclear if they will resume.
The Islamic courts say they can guarantee security but the government does not seem convinced and has asked for African peacekeepers.
Mr Yusuf also insists that the courts recognise his authority before any more talks.
Even more worryingly, the Islamic courts say that Ethiopian troops have crossed the border.
Ethiopia has denied this but it has supported Mr Yusuf against Islamic groups in the past and it raise the possibility of a regional conflict.
If Baidoa were attacked by the Courts, the Ethiopians might intervene.
Securing a lasting peace is not easy in Somalia.
-
A Strange War
Israel is at last being given an opportunity to unload on jihadists.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Sum up the declarations of Hezbollah?s leaders, Syrian diplomats, Iranian nuts, West Bank terrorists, and Arab commentators ? and this latest Middle East war seems one of the strangest in a long history of strange conflicts. For example, have we ever witnessed a conflict in which one of the belligerents ? Iran ? that shipped thousands of rockets into Lebanon, and promises that it will soon destroy Israel, vehemently denies that its own missile technicians are on the ground in the Bekka Valley. Wouldn?t it wish to brag of such solidarity?
Or why, after boasting of the new targets that his lethal missiles will hit in Israel, does Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (?We are ready for it ? war, war on every level?) now harp that Israel is hitting too deep into Lebanon? Don?t enemies expect one another to hit deep? Isn?t that what ?war on every level? is all about?
Meanwhile, why do the G-8 or the United Nations even talk of putting more peacekeeping troops into southern Lebanon, when in the past such rent-a-cops and uniformed bystanders have never stopped hostilities? Does anyone remember that it was Hezbollah who blew up French and American troops who last tried to provide ?stability? between the warring parties?
Why do not Iran and Syria ? or for that matter other Arab states ? now attack Israel to join the terrorists that they have armed? Surely the two-front attack by Hamas and Hezbollah could be helped by at least one conventional Islamic military. After promising us all year that he was going to ?wipe out? Israel, is not this the moment for Mr. Ahmadinejad to strike?
And why ? when Hezbollah rockets are hidden in apartment basements, then brought out of private homes to target civilians in Israel ? would terrorists who exist to murder noncombatants complain that some ?civilians? have been hit? Would not they prefer to lionize ?martyrs? who helped to store their arms?
We can answer these absurdities by summing up the war very briefly. Iran and Syria feel the noose tightening around their necks ? especially the ring of democracies in nearby Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, and perhaps Lebanon. Even the toothless U.N. finally is forced to focus on Iranian nukes and Syrian murder plots. And neither Syria can overturn the Lebanese government nor can Iran the Iraqi democracy. Instead, both are afraid that their rhetoric may soon earn some hard bombing, since their ?air defenses? are hardly defenses at all.
So they tell Hamas and Hezbollah to tap their missile caches, kidnap a few soldiers, and generally try to turn the world?s attention to the collateral damage inflicted on ?refugees? by a stirred-up Zionist enemy.
For their part, the terrorist killers hope to kidnap, ransom, and send off missiles, and then, when caught and hit, play the usual victim card of racism, colonialism, Zionism, and about every other -ism that they think will win a bailout from some guilt-ridden, terrorist-frightened, Jew-hating, or otherwise oil-hungry Western nation.
The only difference from the usual scripted Middle East war is that this time, privately at least, most of the West, and perhaps some in the Arab world as well, want Israel to wipe out Hezbollah, and perhaps hit Syria or Iran. The terrorists and their sponsors know this, and rage accordingly when their military impotence is revealed to a global audience ? especially after no reprieve is forthcoming to save their ?pride? and ?honor.?
After all, for every one Israeli Hezbollah kills, they lose ten. You are not winning when ?victory? is assessed in terms of a single hit on an Israeli warship. Their ace-in-the-hole strategy ? emblematic of the entire pathetic Islamist way of war ? is that they can disrupt the good Western life of their enemies that they are both attracted to and thus also hate. But, as Israel has shown, a Western public can be quite willing to endure shelling if it knows that such strikes will lead to a devastating counter-response.
What should the United States do? If it really cares about human life and future peace, then we should talk ad nauseam about ?restraint? and ?proportionality? while privately assuring Israel the leeway to smash both Hamas and Hezbollah ? and humiliate Syria and Iran, who may well come off very poorly from their longed-for but bizarre war.
Only then will Israel restore some semblance of deterrence and strengthen nascent democratic movements in both Lebanon and even the West Bank. This is the truth that everyone from London to Cairo knows, but dares not speak. So for now, let us pray that the brave pilots and ground commanders of the IDF can teach these primordial tribesmen a lesson that they will not soon forget ? and thus do civilization?s dirty work on the other side of the proverbial Rhine.
In this regard, it is time to stop the silly slurs that American policy in the Middle East is either in shambles or culpable for the present war. In fact, if we keep our cool, the Bush doctrine is working. Both Afghans and Iraqis each day fight and kill Islamist terrorists; neither was doing so before 9/11. Syria and Iran have never been more isolated; neither was isolated when Bill Clinton praised the ?democracy? in Tehran or when an American secretary of State sat on the tarmac in Damascus for hours to pay homage to Syria?s gangsters. Israel is at last being given an opportunity to unload on jihadists; that was impossible during the Arafat fraud that grew out of the Oslo debacle. Europe is waking up to the dangers of radical Islamism; in the past, it bragged of its aid and arms sales to terrorist governments from the West Bank to Baghdad.
Some final observations on Hezbollah and Hamas. There is no longer a Soviet deterrent to bail out a failed Arab offensive. There is no longer empathy for poor Islamist ?freedom fighters.? The truth is that it is an open question as to which regime ? Iran or Syria ? is the greater international pariah. After a recent trip to the Middle East, I noticed that the unfortunate prejudicial stares given to a passenger with an Iranian passport were surpassed only by those accorded another on his way to Damascus.
So after 9/11, the London bombings, the Madrid murders, the French riots, the Beslan atrocities, the killings in India, the Danish cartoon debacle, Theo Van Gogh, and the daily arrests of Islamic terrorists trying to blow up, behead, or shoot innocent people around the globe, the world is sick of the jihadist ilk. And for all the efforts of the BBC, Reuters, Western academics, and the horde of appeasers and apologists that usually bail these terrorist killers out when their rhetoric finally outruns their muscle, this time they can?t.
Instead, a disgusted world secretly wants these terrorists to get what they deserve. And who knows: This time they just might.
? 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.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MmE1ODk2ZDQwNWFjNzZhNmFjMTBkNDQ2N2ZmMjQ5MmM=
-
Onward
By David Warren
Traditionally, at this point in her response to terror attacks, the world diplomatic community persuades Israel to agree a ceasefire, and the terrorists are saved to fight another day. This is what happened in 1982. The Israelis were in a position to annihilate Yasser Arafat's PLO, whom they had surrounded in Beirut. Instead, they agreed to let them escape to Tunisia. The rest is history: recurring again and again.
Kofi Annan is trying to do the same thing over: to save Hezbollah (this time) with a ceasefire, by promising Israel that a large force of international "peacekeepers" will take their place. But a U.N. force is no likelier to disarm Hezbollah than the Lebanese army was (when Lebanon agreed to disarm Hezbollah, most recently in 2004). After a brief lull in the shooting, and a chance to regroup and rebuild, Hezbollah would be back at Israel's throat.
The Israelis know this, now, from hard experience. There is overwhelming popular support for the course Prime Minister Olmert has set out. The Israelis will not be taking advice, from such as Russia and France. The Americans, even the State Department under Condoleezza Rice, show signs of having seriously absorbed their own lessons from recent history. John Bolton is sitting squarely in the Security Council, prepared to veto every effort to force the Israelis to desist. This time -- with or without the world's permission -- the Israelis are going to finish the job.
This is evident from events in Lebanon, through the last week. The Israeli air force has been doing classic battlefield prep, along the lines of the allied Operation Hail Mary against the Iraqis occupying Kuwait in 1991. You will recall Gen. Colin Powell's memorable phrase: "First we're going to cut them off, then we're going to kill them." The Israeli air strikes on Lebanese airports, harbours, roads and bridges is the "cut them off" part. The "kill them" part is coming.
There have been four call-ups of Israeli reserves. This is never done for show in Israel. Reserves are systematically replacing regulars in West Bank positions; regulars from there and elsewhere are assembling for the trudge north.
It will not be a walkover, as the Israelis know. They will take plenty of casualties. Hezbollah have had years to dig in deep, and the Iranians and Syrians have been very generous in arming and training them. The Israeli command is aware of at least 600 underground missile caches, each one of which will be well-defended. Nearly 200 of those contain missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv.
The air strikes have only been able to hit launching pads at surface level. The array of Hezbollah anti-tank defences just inside Lebanon's southern border is formidable. The Israelis won't be crossing it for small stakes. Some time in the next few days, the serious fighting will begin.
That none of Hezbollah's longest-range missiles have been used yet (despite Hezbollah boasts and threats), is an indication that Iranian permission is not forthcoming. For the use of such powerful Iranian ordnance against Israeli population centres, even if shot from Lebanese territory, would bring Israeli retaliation against Iran itself. And it is fairly clear from the diplomatic gestures they have been making, and the purely defensive postures the Syrian military has been assuming, that both countries want out of the line of fire.
My sense is that the ayatollahs are already resigning themselves to the loss of Hezbollah, and don't wish to lose Syria, too. The Israeli air force alone is capable of triggering a regime change in Damascus, by decapitating Syria's Alawite leadership. Moreover, an Iran that itself attacks Israel is -- I should think in the certain knowledge of its leaders -- an Iran that will be attacked by the United States.
And so, to the long-term (though obviously not the short-term) benefit of Lebanon, the war will be confined to Lebanon (and Gaza). The long-term benefit is that Hezbollah prevents the emergence of a Lebanon free of Syrian interference, and therefore of Israeli threats. Even some of the Shia realize that Lebanon would be better off, without a private militia much larger than the country's armed forces. Lebanon has a prosperous future in alliance with Israel and the United States. It has no other prosperous future. The idea appears to be seeping into the Lebanese ruling classes. Even the once radical Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, seems to get this.
For Israel, there is no turning back. It is a categorical imperative: for if the Israeli military isn't facing Hezbollah and Hamas, then Israel's civilians have to face them.
In a strange way, perhaps a way he anticipated, Ariel Sharon's bold decision to remove the Jewish settlements from Gaza, and turn the territory over to Palestinian self-government, clinched the issue. If the subsequent rocket attacks from Gaza, then Lebanon, could be predicted by me, they would have been predicted by him.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/07/onward.html
-
Red Alert: The Battle Joined
The ground war has begun. Several Israeli brigades now appear to be operating between the Lebanese border and the Litani River. According to reports, Hezbollah forces are dispersed in multiple bunker complexes and are launching rockets from these and other locations.
Hezbollah's strategy appears to be threefold. First, force Israel into costly attacks against prepared fortifications. Second, draw Israeli troops as deeply into Lebanon as possible, forcing them to fight on extended supply lines. Third, move into an Iraqi-style insurgency from which Israel -- out of fear of a resumption of rocket attacks -- cannot withdraw, but which the Israelis also cannot endure because of extended long-term casualties. This appears to have been a carefully planned strategy, built around a threat to Israeli cities that Israel can't afford. The war has begun at Hezbollah's time and choosing.
Israel is caught between three strategic imperatives. First, it must end the threat to Israeli cities, which must involve the destruction of Hezbollah's launch capabilities south of the Litani River. Second, it must try to destroy Hezbollah's infrastructure, which means it must move into the Bekaa Valley and as far as the southern suburbs of Beirut. Third, it must do so in such a way that it is not dragged into a long-term, unsustainable occupation against a capable insurgency.
Hezbollah has implemented its strategy by turning southern Lebanon into a military stronghold, consisting of well-designed bunkers that serve both as fire bases and launch facilities for rockets. The militants appear to be armed with anti-tank weapons and probably anti-aircraft weapons, some of which appear to be of American origin, raising the question of how they were acquired. Hezbollah wants to draw Israel into protracted fighting in this area in order to inflict maximum casualties and to change the psychological equation for both military and political reasons.
Israelis historically do not like to fight positional warfare. Their tendency has been to bypass fortified areas, pushing the fight to the rear in order to disrupt logistics, isolate fortifications and wait for capitulation. This has worked in the past. It is not clear that it will work here. The great unknown is the resilience of Hezbollah's fighters. To this point, there is no reason to doubt it. Israel could be fighting the most resilient and well-motivated opposition force in its history. But the truth is that neither Israel nor Hezbollah really knows what performance will be like under pressure.
Simply occupying the border-Litani area will not achieve any of Israel's strategic goals. Hezbollah still would be able to use rockets against Israel. And even if, for Hezbollah, this area is lost, its capabilities in the Bekaa Valley and southern Beirut will remain intact. Therefore, a battle that focuses solely on the south is not an option for Israel, unless the Israelis feel a defeat here will sap Hezbollah's will to resist. We doubt this to be the case.
The key to the campaign is to understand that Hezbollah has made its strategic decisions. It will not be fighting a mobile war. Israel has lost the strategic initiative: It must fight when Hezbollah has chosen and deal with Hezbollah's challenge. However, given this, Israel does have an operational choice. It can move in a sequential fashion, dealing first with southern Lebanon and then with other issues. It can bypass southern Lebanon and move into the rear areas, returning to southern Lebanon when it is ready. It can attempt to deal with southern Lebanon in detail, while mounting mobile operations in the Bekaa Valley, in the coastal regions and toward south Beirut, or both at the same time.
There are resource and logistical issues involved. Moving simultaneously on all three fronts will put substantial strains on Israel's logistical capability. An encirclement westward on the north side of the Litani, followed by a move toward Beirut while the southern side of the Litani is not secured, poses a serious challenge in re-supply. Moving into the Bekaa means leaving a flank open to the Syrians. We doubt Syria will hit that flank, but then, we don't have to live with the consequences of an intelligence failure. Israel will be sending a lot of force on that line if it chooses that method. Again, since many roads in south Lebanon will not be secure, that limits logistics.
Israel is caught on the horns of a dilemma. Hezbollah has created a situation in which Israel must fight the kind of war it likes the least -- attritional, tactical operations against prepared forces -- or go to the war it prefers, mobile operations, with logistical constraints that make these operations more difficult and dangerous. Moreover, if it does this, it increases the time during which Israeli cities remain under threat. Given clear failures in appreciating Hezbollah's capabilities, Israel must take seriously the possibility that Hezbollah has longer-ranged, anti-personnel rockets that it will use while under attack.
Israel has been trying to break the back of Hezbollah resistance in the south through air attack, special operations and probing attacks. This clearly hasn't worked thus far. That does not mean it won't work, as Israel applies more force to the problem and starts to master the architecture of Hezbollah's tactical and operational structure; however, Israel can't count on a rapid resolution of that problem.
The Israelis have by now thought the problem through. They don't like operational compromises -- preferring highly focused solutions at the center of gravity of an enemy. Hezbollah has tried to deny Israel a center of gravity and may have succeeded, forcing Israel into a compromise position. Repeated assaults against prepared positions are simply not something the Israelis can do, because they cannot afford casualties. They always have preferred mobile encirclement or attacks at the center of gravity of a defensive position. But at this moment, viewed from the outside, this is not an option.
An extended engagement in southern Lebanon is the least likely path, in our opinion. More likely -- and this is a guess -- is a five-part strategy:
1. Insert airmobile and airborne forces north of the Litani to seal the rear of Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon. Apply air power and engineering forces to reduce the fortifications, and infantry to attack forces not in fortified positions. Bottle them up, and systematically reduce the force with limited exposure to the attackers.
2. Secure roads along the eastern flank for an armored thrust deep into the Bekaa Valley to engage the main Hezbollah force and infrastructure there. This would involve a move from Qiryat Shimona north into the Bekaa, bypassing the Litani to the west, and would probably require sending airmobile and special forces to secure the high ground. It also would leave the right flank exposed to Syria.
3. Use air power and special forces to undermine Hezbollah capabilities in the southern Beirut area. The Israelis would consider a move into this area after roads through southern Lebanon are cleared and Bekaa relatively secured, moving into the area, only if absolutely necessary, on two axes of attack.
4. Having defeated Hezbollah in detail, withdraw under a political settlement shifting defense responsibility to the Lebanese government.
5. Do all of this while the United States is still able to provide top cover against diplomatic initiatives that will create an increasingly difficult international environment.
There can be many variations on this theme, but these elements are inevitable:
1. Hezbollah cannot be defeated without entering the Bekaa Valley, at the very least.
2. At some point, resistance in southern Lebanon must be dealt with, regardless of the cost.
3. Rocket attacks against northern Israel and even Tel Aviv must be accepted while the campaign unfolds.
4. The real challenge will come when Israel tries to withdraw.
No. 4 is the real challenge. Destruction of Hezbollah's infrastructure does not mean annihilation of the force. If Israel withdraws, Hezbollah or a successor organization will regroup. If Israel remains, it can wind up in the position the United States is in Iraq. This is exactly what Hezbollah wants. So, Israel can buy time, or Israel can occupy and pay the cost. One or the other.
The other solution is to shift the occupational burden to another power that is motivated to prevent the re-emergence of an anti-Israeli military force -- as that is what Hezbollah has become. The Lebanese government is the only possible alternative, but not a particularly capable one, reflecting the deep rifts in Lebanon.
Israel has one other choice, which is to extend the campaign to defeat Syria as well. Israel can do this, but the successor regime to Syrian President Bashar al Assad likely would be much worse for Israel than al Assad has been. Israel can imagine occupying Syria; it can't do it. Syria is too big and the Arabs have learned from the Iraqis how to deal with an occupation. Israel cannot live with a successor to al Assad and it cannot take control of Syria. It will have to live with al Assad. And that means an occupation of Lebanon would always be hostage to Syrian support for insurgents.
Hezbollah has dealt Israel a difficult hand. It has thought through the battle problem as well as the political dimension carefully. Somewhere in this, there has been either an Israeli intelligence failure or a political failure to listen to intelligence. Hezbollah's capabilities have posed a problem for Israel that allowed Hezbollah to start a war at a time and in a way of its choosing. The inquest will come later in Israel. And Hezbollah will likely be shattered regardless of its planning. The correlation of forces does not favor it. But if it forces Israel not only to defeat its main force but also to occupy, Hezbollah will have achieved its goals.
Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.
-
Extrapolating your righteous duty to deveop your fighting qualities into support for a mass market global military war is evidence in my opinion that your fighting nature is not completely grounded in morality and that your watcher is asleep or wearing blinkers.
Let's hope that the war does not extend to the Phillipines.
:!:
Growl
Bowser
-
Bowser,
I am trying to understand what you expect or are suggesting. I take it that you disagree with not just Iraq but also with what Israel is doing in Lebanon. What would you suggest to be done?
I don't do MA so I do not understand the watcher bit, nor the morality bit. All war is immoral from the standpoint of death and destruction, but some wars are moral in nature to stop the same. A la Thomas Aquinas.
-
Extrapolating your righteous duty to deveop (sic) your fighting qualities into support for a mass market global military war is evidence in my opinion that your fighting nature is not completely grounded in morality and that your watcher is asleep or wearing blinkers.
Jeepers that sounds bad. What does it mean when you combine mass market global military extrapolations with non-sequiturs and pompous gibberish?
Snipe away if that's what floats your boat, but how 'bout trying to make a semblance of sense along the way? And if you take that advice I'll go pick up a lotto ticket as I've yet to encounter a troll interested in informed debate.
-
Back to Story - Help
Israel seizes Hizbollah base: army By Lin Noueihed
40 minutes ago
Israel ousted Hizbollah guerrillas from a stronghold just inside Lebanon on Saturday after several days of fierce fighting, the army said, as it bombarded targets across the south of the country.
Ground forces commander Major-General Benny Gantz said Israeli soldiers took the hilltop village of Maroun al-Ras, where six Israeli commandos have been killed this week, inflicting dozens of casualties on Hizbollah.
Israel said it planned no full-scale invasion of Lebanon for now, but warned villagers near the border to leave.
In the town of Marjayoun, about five miles from the border, cars packed with people waving white flags fled north fearing Israel will step up an 11-day-old war which has killed 351 people, mostly civilians.
There was no immediate comment from the Shi'ite Muslim guerrilla group, which had said in an earlier statement its fighters had inflicted casualties on the Israeli side.
An Israeli army spokesman had said troops backed by around a dozen tanks and armored vehicles had been fighting in Maroun al-Ras, about two km (one mile) inside Lebanese territory, and found Hizbollah bunkers and weapons stores.
He said Israel might widen its military action, but was still looking at "limited operations." "We're not talking about massive forces going inside at this point."
Resisting growing calls for a ceasefire, the United States stressed the need to tackle what it sees as the root cause of the conflict -- Hizbollah's armed presence on Israel's border and the role of its allies, Syria and Iran.
"Resolving the crisis demands confronting the terrorist group that launched the attacks and the nations that support it," U.S President George W. Bush said on Saturday, a day before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was to head to Israel.
Israeli forces had urged residents of 14 villages in south Lebanon to leave by 4 p.m. (1300 GMT) ahead of more air raids.
TROOP BUILD UP
Israel has built up its forces at the border and called up 3,000 reserves. Defense Minister Amir Peretz has spoken of a possible land offensive to halt rocket attacks that have killed 15 Israeli civilians in the past 11 days.
But Israel is wary of mounting another invasion, only six years after it ended a costly 22-year occupation of the south. Already, 19 soldiers have been killed in the latest conflict.
Israeli air raids hit transmission stations used by several Lebanese television channels and a mobile telephone mast north of Beirut, cutting mobile phone services in northern Lebanon.
The official in charge of the station transmitting LBC programs was killed, the channel said. A nun at a nearby church said two French nationals were also lightly wounded.
Israel's army said it hit a Hizbollah radio and TV transmitter and an antenna for frequencies "used by Hizbollah." Hizbollah's al-Manar television was still broadcasting after the strikes.
Israeli medics and the army said at least 10 Hizbollah rockets hit towns in northern Israel, wounding 10 people.
Across south Lebanon, families piled into cars and trucks -- flying white sheets they hoped would ward off attack -- and clogged roads north after Israel warned residents to flee for safety beyond the Litani river, about 12 miles from the border.
But witnesses said an Israeli air strike hit one of the few remaining crossings over the river early on Saturday.
The war started when Hizbollah captured two soldiers and killed eight in a July 12 raid into Israel, which had already launched an offensive in the Gaza Strip to try to recover another soldier seized by Palestinian militants on June 25.
Washington supports proposals for an expanded international force on the Israel-Lebanon border but details were not fixed, a senior U.S. official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. A 2,000-strong U.N. force monitors the border at present.
Amid growing concern about the plight of civilians in Lebanon, Israel said it would ease humanitarian access.
U.N. relief agencies have called for safe passage to take in food and medical supplies. An estimated half million people have fled their homes.
Foreigners have also flooded out of the country. Ships and aircraft worked through the night scooping more tired and scared people from Lebanon and taking them to Cyprus and Turkey.
(Additional reporting by Jerusalem, Nicosia, Washington bureaux)
-
Report: U.S. rushes precision-guided bombs to Israel
By Reuters
The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
Citing U.S. officials who spoke on Friday on condition of anonymity, the Times said the decision to ship the weapons quickly came after relatively little debate within the administration, and noted in its report that its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others who could perceive Washington as aiding Israel in the manner that Iran has armed Hezbollah.
The munitions are actually part of a multimillion-dollar arms-sale package approved last year which Israel is able to tap when it needs to, the officials told the Times. But some military officers said the request for expedited delivery was unusual and indicated that Israel has many targets it plans to hit in Lebanon.
The arms shipment has not been announced publicly. The officials who described the administration's decision to rush the munitions included employees of two government agencies, one of whom described the shipment as just one example of a broad array of armaments that the United States has long provided Israel, the Times said.
Pentagon and military officials declined to describe in detail the size and contents of the shipment to Israel, the newspaper said, and they would not say whether the munitions were being shipped by cargo aircraft or some other means. But one U.S. official said the shipment should not be compared to the kind of an "emergency resupply" of dwindling Israeli stockpiles that was provided during the Yom Kippur War, according to the Times report.
A spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington told the Times: "We have been using precision-guided munitions in order to neutralize the military capabilities of Hezbollah and to minimize harm to civilians. As a rule, however, we do not comment on Israel's defense acquisitions."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/741392.html
-
Extrapolating your righteous duty to deveop (sic) your fighting qualities into support for a mass market global military war is evidence in my opinion that your fighting nature is not completely grounded in morality and that your watcher is asleep or wearing blinkers.
Jeepers that sounds bad. What does it mean when you combine mass market global military extrapolations with non-sequiturs and pompous gibberish?
Snipe away if that's what floats your boat, but how 'bout trying to make a semblance of sense along the way? And if you take that advice I'll go pick up a lotto ticket as I've yet to encounter a troll interested in informed debate.
Looks like you missed the 'higher consciousness' goal of the Dog Brothers
I am not a troll, I practice Balintawak and am expressing my sincere opinion. . .
I fail to find a non sequiteur in my post, please explain why you suggested that there is one.
.
-
What is a "mass market global military war" anyway? :?:
Do you consider Israel's current defensive action a "mass market global military war?"
I don't think so, it is a legitimate self defense action.
For the record, I'm not a practitioner of martial arts.
-
What is Balintawak?
And what do you believe in regards to Iraq and Israel with Lebanon? It will clarify things for us here.
A higher consciousness when it comes to the War on Terror means nothing to me. Unless it is the recognition that we are in the fight of our live and for our lives.
-
A very long piece written in 2002.
=================================
IN THE PARTY OF GOD
by JEFFREY GOLDBERG
Are terrorists in Lebanon preparing for a larger war?
Issue of 2002-10-14 and 21
Posted 2002-10-07
1?THE MEETING
The village of Ras al-Ein, which is situated in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, falls under the overlapping control of the Syrian Army, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah, or Party of God. The village is seedy and brown, and is decorated with posters of martyrs and potentates?Ayatollah Khomeini is especially popular?and with billboards that celebrate bloodshed and sacrifice.
I visited Ras al-Ein this summer to interview the leader of a Hezbollah faction, a man named Hussayn al-Mussawi, who, twenty years ago, was involved in kidnapping Americans. Many of those kidnapped were held in Ras al-Ein; they were kept blindfolded, and chained to beds and radiators. It is thought that Ras al-Ein is where William Buckley, the Beirut station chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, was held for a time before he was killed by Hezbollah, in 1985.
When I arrived, it was midday; the air was still and the heat smothering, and the streets were mostly empty. A man was selling ice cream in a park at the center of town. Slides and swing sets, their paint peeling, dot the park; in the middle is a pond covered by a skin of algae. Several women and children were there. The women wore gray chadors, and their heads were covered by scarves, pinned high and tight under the left ear, so that no strand of hair could escape.
Like the rest of the town, the park was crowded with ferocious Hezbollah art. One poster showed an American flag whose field of stars had been replaced by a single Star of David. Another portrayed the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim shrine in Jerusalem, cupped in the bony hand of a figure with a grotesquely hooked nose. A third poster, extolling the bravery of Shiite martyrs, showed a Muslim fighter standing on a pile of dead soldiers whose uniforms were marked with Stars of David. The yellow flag of Hezbollah could be seen everywhere; across the top is a quotation from the Koran, from which Hezbollah took its name?"Verily the party of God shall be victorious"?and at the center is an AK-47 in silhouette, in the hand of the Shiite martyr Husayn, a cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. In the background is a depiction of the globe, suggesting Hezbollah's role in the worldwide umma, or community of Muslims. Along the bottom of the Hezbollah flag is written "The Islamic Revolution in Lebanon." I did not see the red-green-and-white flag of Lebanon anywhere in Ras al-Ein.
I had taken a taxi from Ashrafieh, the prosperous Christian neighborhood in Beirut, to Ras al-Ein, a two-hour trip over potholed roads and through a modest number of roadblocks. The soft Mediterranean air soon gave way to the dry-bones heat of the Bekaa. The taxi-driver, an elderly Christian, had been hesitant about the trip (Lebanon's Christian minority is fearful of Shiite gunmen), but he smoothly negotiated the passage through two Syrian Army checkpoints. At one, a sergeant of about thirty, who carried a side arm and wore a round helmet covered in black mesh, inspected my American passport, handed it back to me, and said, enigmatically, "Osama bin Laden."
We had by then reached the outskirts of Baalbek, the main Bekaa town. Baalbek is famous for three well-preserved Roman temples, of Jupiter, Venus, and Bacchus. (A statue of Hafez al-Assad, the late dictator of Syria and the father of the current dictator, stands at the entrance to the town.) The temples, which are enormous?the two main temples are larger than the Parthenon?are the site of an annual international cultural festival that draws the ?lite of Beirut, and Lebanese officials like to point to it as proof of Lebanon's normalcy. This year, the festival featured a performance of Michael Flatley's "Lord of the Dance." Ras al-Ein is a couple of miles from the temples, and we soon arrived at the Nawras Restaurant, next to the park, where I was to meet Mussawi. I sat at a table outside, with a view of the street. Two men nearby were smoking hookahs. I ordered a Pepsi and waited.
Shiism arose as a protest movement, whose followers believed that Islam should be ruled by descendants of the Prophet Muhammad's cousin Ali, and not by the caliphs who seized control after the Prophet's death. The roots of Shiite anger lie in the martyrdom of Ali's son Husayn, who died in battle against the Caliph Yezid in what is today southern Iraq. (I have heard both Shiites from southern Iraq and Iranian Shiites refer to their enemy Saddam Hussein as a modern-day Yezid.) At times, Shiism has been a quietist movement; Shiites built houses of mourn-ing and study, called Husaynias, where they recalled the glory of Husayn's martyrdom.
In Lebanon in the nineteen-sixties, the Shiites began to be drawn to the outside world. Some joined revolutionary Palestinian movements; others fell into the orbit of a populist cleric, Musa Sadr, who founded a group called the Movement of the Deprived and, later, the Shiite Amal militia. Hezbollah was formed, in 1982, by a group of young, dispossessed Shiites who coalesced around a cleric and poet named Muhammad Hussayn Fadlallah. They were impelled by a number of disparate forces, including the oppression of their community in Lebanon by the country's Sunni and Christian ?lites, and the rapture they felt in 1979 as Iran came under the power of "pure" Islam. A crucial event, though, was Israel's invasion of Lebanon in June of 1982.
Fatah, which is part of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had been firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel from Lebanon, where it had its main base, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin, on the advice of his defense minister, Ariel Sharon, ordered Israeli forces into Lebanon. The stated purpose was to conquer what had come to be known as Fatahland, the strip of South Lebanon under Yasir Arafat's control, and to evict the P.L.O.'s forces. Sharon, though, had grander designs: to secure a friendly Christian government in Beirut and to destroy the P.L.O. It was not so much the invasion that inspired the Shiites, who were happy to see the South free of Arafat and Fatah. The Shiites took up arms when they realized that Sharon, like Arafat, had no intention of leaving Lebanon.
Hezbollah, with bases in the Bekaa and in Beirut's southern suburbs, quickly became the most successful terrorist organization in modern history. It has served as a role model for terror groups around the world; Magnus Ranstorp, the director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, says that Al Qaeda learned the value of choreographed violence from Hezbollah. The organization virtually invented the multipronged terror attack when, early on the morning of October 23, 1983, it synchronized the suicide bombings, in Beirut, of the United States Marine barracks and an apartment building housing a contingent of French peacekeepers. Those attacks occurred just twenty seconds apart; a third part of the plan, to destroy the compound of the Italian peacekeeping contingent, is said to have been jettisoned when the planners learned that the Italians were sleeping in tents, not in a high-rise building.
Until September 11th of last year, Hezbollah had murdered more Americans than any other terrorist group?two hundred and forty-one in the Marine-barracks attack alone. Through terror tactics, Hezbollah forced the American and French governments to withdraw their peacekeeping forces from Lebanon. And, two years ago, it became the first military force, guerrilla or otherwise, to drive Israel out of Arab territory when Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew his forces from South Lebanon.
Using various names, including the Islamic Jihad Organization and the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth, Hezbollah remained underground until 1985, when it published a manifesto condemning the West, and proclaiming, "Every one of us is a fighting soldier when a call for jihad arises and each one of us carries out his mission in battle on the basis of his legal obligations. For Allah is behind us supporting and protecting us while instilling fear in the hearts of our enemies."
Another phase began in earnest in 1991, when, at the close of Lebanon's sixteen-year civil war, the country's many militias agreed to disarm. Nominally, Lebanon is governed from Beirut by an administration whose senior portfolios have been carefully divided among the country's various religious factions?Maronite and Greek Orthodox Christians, Sunnis and Shiites and Druze. But in fact Lebanon is under the control of Syria; and the Syrians, with encouragement from Iran, have allowed Hezbollah to maintain its arsenal, and even to expand it, in the interest of fighting Israel as Syria's proxy. The Syrians also allowed Hezbollah to control the Shiite ghettos of southern Beirut, much of the Bekaa Valley, and most of South Lebanon, along the border with Israel.
Hezbollah's current leader, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, is as important a figure in Lebanon as the country's ruling politicians and the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad. Hezbollah officials run for office in Lebanon and win?the group now holds eleven seats in the hundred-and-twenty-eight-seat Lebanese parliament. But within Hezbollah there is little pretense of fealty to the President of Lebanon, ?mile Lahoud, who is a Christian, and certainly none to the Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri, who is a Sunni Muslim. The only portraits one sees in Hezbollah offices are of Khomeini and of Ayatollah Khamenei, the current ruler of Iran.
Hezbollah has an annual budget of more than a hundred million dollars, which is supplied by the Iranian government directly and by a complex system of finance cells scattered around the world, from Bangkok and Paraguay to Michigan and North Carolina. Like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah operates successfully in public spheres that are closed off to most terrorist groups. It runs a vast and effective social-services network. It publishes newspapers and magazines and owns a satellite television station that is said to be watched by ten million people a day in the Middle East and Europe. The station, called Al Manar, or the Lighthouse, broadcasts anti-American programming, but its main purpose is to encourage Palestinians to become suicide bombers.
Along with this public work, Hez bollah continues to increase its terrorist and guerrilla capabilities. Magnus Ranstorp says that Hezbollah can be active on four tracks simultaneously?the political, the social, the guerrilla, and the terrorist?because its leaders are "masters of long-term strategic subversion." The organization's Special Security Apparatus operates in Europe, North and South America, and East Asia. According to both American and Israeli intelligence officials, the group maintains floating "day camps" for terrorist training throughout the Bekaa Valley; many of the camps are said to be just outside Baalbek. In some of them, the instructors are supplied by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran's Ministry of Intelligence. In the past twenty years, terrorists from such disparate organizations as the Basque separatist group ETA, the Red Brigades, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, and the Irish Republican Army have been trained in these camps.
A main focus today appears to be the training of specifically anti-Israel militants in the science of constructing so-called "mega-bombs," devices that can bring down office towers and other large structures. The explosion of a mega-bomb is the sort of event that could lead to a major Middle East war. In fact, such attacks have been tried: in April, a plot to bomb the Azrieli Towers, two of Tel Aviv's tallest buildings, was foiled by Israeli security services; in May, a bomb exploded beneath a tanker truck at a fuel depot near Tel Aviv, but did not set off a larger explosion, as planned. Had these operations been successful, hundreds, if not thousands, of Israelis would have died. Salah Shehada, a Hamas leader in Gaza, is said by Israel to have been planning a co?rdinated attack on five buildings in Tel Aviv. (In July, an Israeli warplane dropped a one-ton bomb on the building where Shehada lived; he was killed, along with at least fourteen others, including nine children.)
Gal Luft, an Israeli reserve lieutenant colonel and an expert on counterterrorism, told me that Hezbollah's role in these plans is unknown. "Hezbollah has experience with bulk explosives," Luft said. "You can make the case that the Hezbollah provides inspiration and advice and technical support, but I wouldn't rule out its own cells trying this." Luft said that it is only a matter of time before a "mega-attack" succeeds.
Hezbollah agents have infiltrated the West Bank and Gaza, and Arab communities inside Israel, helping Hamas and Islamic Jihad and attempting to set up their own cells; many Palestinians revere Hezbollah for achieving in South Lebanon what the Palestinians have failed to achieve in the occupied territories. In the past year, Hezbollah has also been stockpiling rockets for potential use against Israel. These rockets, most of which are from Iran, are said to be moved by truck from Syria, through the Bekaa Valley, and then on to Hezbollah forces in South Lebanon.
Hezbollah has not been suspected of overt anti-American actions since 1996, when the Khobar Towers, in Saudi Arabia, were attacked, but, according to intelligence officials, its operatives, with the help and cover of Iranian diplomats, have been making surveillance tapes of American diplomatic installations in South America, Southeast Asia, and Europe. These tapes, along with maps and other tools, are said to be kept in well-organized clandestine libraries.
In recent days, top American officials have suggested that Hezbollah?and its state sponsors?may soon find themselves targeted in the Bush Administration's war on terror. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage recently called Hezbollah the "A-team" of terrorism and Al Qaeda the "B-team." The C.I.A. has lost at least seven officers to Hezbollah terrorism, including William Buckley. Sam Wyman, a retired C.I.A. official, who recommended Buckley for the job in Beirut, told me that "those who work the terrorism problem writ large, and those who are working the Hezbollah problem writ small, know that this is an account that has not been closed." The chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Bob Graham, of Florida, says he wants the Administration's war on terrorism to focus not on Iraq but on Hezbollah, its Bekaa Valley camps, and its state sponsors in Iran and Syria. "We should tell the Syrians that we expect them to shut down the Bekaa Valley camps within x number of days, and, if they don't, we are reserving the right to shut them down ourselves," Graham said last month.
After drinking a third Pepsi, I watched a Land Cruiser pull up to the restaurant and deliver a stiff and unhappy-looking man with a well-kept beard. The man sat down silently across from me. Three men, one of whom wore a leather jacket, despite the terrific heat, stood quietly by the Land Cruiser.
The bearded man was not Hussayn al-Mussawi, whom I had hoped to meet. He said that his name was Muhammad, that he was an aide to Mussawi, and that he had been sent to assess my intentions. I was here, I said, to examine the claim that Hezbollah had transformed itself into a mainstream Lebanese political party.
I said that I also wanted to gauge the group's feelings about America, and look for any sign that its implacable opposition to the existence of Israel had changed.
"Are you going to ask about past events?" Muhammad asked. I indicated that I would.
When he pressed me further, I admitted that I was curious about one person in particular, a Hezbollah security operative named Imad Mugniyah. Mugniyah, who began his career in the nineteen-seventies in Arafat's bodyguard unit, is the man whom the United States holds responsible for most of Hezbollah's anti-American attacks, including the Marine-barracks bombing and the 1985 hijacking of a T.W.A. flight, during which a U.S. Navy diver was executed. He is also suspected of involvement in the attack on the Khobar Towers, in which nineteen American servicemen were killed.
Last year, the U.S. government placed Mugniyah on the list of its twenty-two most wanted terrorists, along with two of his colleagues, Ali Atwa and Hassan Izz-al-Din. (Atwa and Izz-al-Din are wanted specifically in connection with the hijacking of the T.W.A. flight in 1985.) The very mention of Mugniyah's name is a sensitive issue in Lebanon and Syria, which have refused to carry out repeated American requests?one was delivered recently by Senator Graham?to shut down Hezbollah's security apparatus, and assist in the capture of Mugniyah. Lebanon's Prime Minister Hariri became agitated when, in a conversation this summer, I asked why his government has refused to help find Mugniyah and his accomplices. "They're not here! They're not here!" Hariri said. "I've told the Americans a hundred times, they're not here!"
Seated in the Nawras Restaurant in Ras al-Ein, across from a man who called himself Muhammad, I said yes, Imad Mugniyah would figure in my story. At that, Muhammad rose, looked at me dismissively, and left the restaurant without a word.
II?THE GOAL
The chief spokesman for Hezbollah is a narrow-shouldered, self-contained man of about forty named Hassan Ezzeddin, who dresses in the style of an Iranian diplomat: trim beard, dark jacket, white shirt, no tie. His office is on a low floor of an apartment building in the southern suburbs of Beirut, which are called the Dahiya. Hezbollah has five main offices there, and all are in apartment buildings, which helps to create a shield between the bureaucracy and Israeli fighter jets and bombers that periodically fly overhead. The shabby offices are sparsely furnished; apparently, the idea is to be able to dismantle them in half an hour or less, in case of an Israeli attack.
The eight members of Hezbollah's ruling council are said to meet in the Dahiya once a week. Lebanese police officers are stationed at a handful of intersections, but they don't stray from their posts. The buildings housing Hezbollah's offices are protected by gunmen dressed in black, and plainclothes Hezbollah agents patrol the streets. Once, while walking to an appointment, I took out a disposable camera and began to take pictures of posters celebrating the deaths of Hezbollah "martyrs." Within thirty seconds, two Hezbollah men confronted me. They ordered me to put my camera away and then followed me to my meeting.
The Shiite stronghold in the southern suburbs of the city is only a twenty-minute drive from the Virgin Mega-store in downtown Beirut, but it might as well be part of Tehran. Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei stare down from the walls, and the Western fashions ubiquitous in East Beirut are forbidden; many women wear the full chador. The suburbs are the most densely packed of Beirut's neighborhoods, with seven- and eight-story apartment buildings, many of them jerry-built, jammed against one another along congested streets and narrow alleys. The main businesses in the Dahiya are believed to be chop shops, where stolen automobiles and computers are taken apart and sold.
I was introduced to Ezzeddin by Hussain Naboulsi, and he translated our conversation. Naboulsi is in charge of Hezbollah's Web site. He spent some time in America, and incorporates American slang unself-consciously into his speech. He is young and gregarious, but he grew evasive when the subject of his background came up. "We lived in Brooklyn, and I was going to go to the University of Texas, but then we moved to Canada. . . ." He trailed off.
Ezzeddin said that anti-Americanism is no longer the focus of his party's actions. Hezbollah, he said, holds no brief against the American people; it is opposed only to the policies of the American government, principally its "unlimited" support for Israel. Like all Hezbollah's public figures, Ezzeddin is proud of the victory over Israel in South Lebanon, two years ago, and he spoke at length about the reasons for Hezbollah's success. He quoted a statement of Hezbollah's leader, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, made shortly after the Israeli withdrawal: "I tell you: this 'Israel' that owns nuclear weapons and the strongest air force in this region is more fragile than a spiderweb." Ezzeddin explained that Ehud Barak pulled out his troops because the soldiers?and their mothers?feared death. This isn't true for Muslims, he said. "Life doesn't end when you die. To us, there is real life after death. Reaching the afterlife is the goal of life. Once you have in mind the goal of dying, you stop fearing the Jews."
After Israel withdrew from south ern Lebanon, many experts on the Middle East assumed that Hezbollah would focus on social services and on domestic politics, in order to bring about a peaceful transformation of Lebanon into an Islamic republic. Even before the Israeli pullout, a leading scholar of Hezbollah, Augustus Richard Norton, of Boston University, wrote a paper entitled "Hezbollah: From Radicalism to Pragmatism?" In his paper, Norton said that in discussions with Hezbollah officials he had got the impression that the group "has no appetite to launch a military campaign across the Israeli border, should Israel withdraw from the South."
But Hezbollah is, at its core, a jihadist organization, and its leaders have never tried to disguise their ultimate goal: building an Islamic republic in Lebanon and liberating Jerusalem from the Jews. Immediately after the withdrawal, Hezbollah announced that Israel was still occupying a tiny slice of Lebanese land called Shebaa Farms. The United Nations ruled that Shebaa Farms was not part of Lebanon but belonged to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and thus was a matter for Israeli-Syrian negotiations. Hezbollah disagreed, and, with Syria's acquiescence, has continued to launch frequent attacks on Israeli outposts in Shebaa.
Ezzeddin seemed to concede that the Hezbollah campaign to rid Shebaa of Israeli troops is a pretext for something larger. "If they go from Shebaa, we will not stop fighting them," he told me. "Our goal is to liberate the 1948 borders of Palestine," he added, referring to the year of Israel's founding. The Jews who survive this war of liberation, Ezzeddin said, "can go back to Germany, or wherever they came from." He added, however, that the Jews who lived in Palestine before 1948 will be "allowed to live as a minority and they will be cared for by the Muslim majority." Sayyid Nasrallah himself told a conference held in Tehran last year that "we all have an extraordinary historic opportunity to finish off the entire cancerous Zionist project."
The balance of forces on Israel's northern border suggests that Hezbollah's ambitions are unrealizable. Its fighters number in the low thousands, at most; the Israeli Air Force is among the most powerful in the world. But the pullout from Lebanon heightened Hezbollah's self-regard, its contempt for Jews, and its desire for total victory. "Everyone told us, 'You're crazy, what are you doing, you can't defeat Israel,' " Ezzeddin said. "But we have shown that the Jews are not invincible. We dealt the Jews a serious blow, and we will continue to deal the Jews serious blows."
The withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, after eighteen years, closed a disastrous chapter in Israeli military history. The conflict destroyed the government of Menachem Begin, and Begin himself; he lived out his final days as a recluse. An Israeli commission held Ariel Sharon, his defense minister, "indirectly responsible" for the massacre by pro-Israeli Christian militiamen of approximately eight hundred Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, in Beirut, in 1982. The Lebanon invasion seemed to have ended Sharon's career. By the time the troops left, more than nine hundred Israeli soldiers had been killed in Lebanon. The withdrawal was badly managed and chaotic. The Army abandoned equipment, and also deserted its Christian allies, a militia called the South Lebanon Army.
In one of the Israeli Army's final acts, sappers tried to bring down the twelfth-century Beaufort Castle, a fortress that sits high over the upper Galilee. The castle had served as a platform for P.L.O. rocket attacks on Israeli towns and farms before Sharon's invasion, and, in the final days of the occupation, the Army was hoping to deny the Palestinians the shelter of its battlements. The Israelis succeeded only in part. The walls did not crumble, and the Hezbollah flag now flies from the highest tower.
I visited Beaufort on a brilliantly hot day this summer, and the only people around were a handful of Hezbollah fighters, a group of Beirutis on a day-long excursion through the South, and two Iranian tourists, with cheap cameras hanging from their necks. One of the Hezbollah guerrillas, a pimply man in his early twenties named Na'im, showed me around. We picked our way across half-collapsed battlements, among thorn bushes and patches of purple and yellow wildflowers, to the remains of the outer rampart, which overlooks a steep drop to the floor of the Litani River valley. Na'im wore bluejeans and a redand-green plaid shirt. He carried a rifle, which he used as a walking stick. He told me that the castle dated back to the Islamic conquest of the Holy Land. In fact, Beaufort was built by the Crusaders, but in Na'im's version the castle began as a Muslim fortress. "Saladin used this to defeat the Crusaders," he said, in a rehearsed manner. "Hezbollah will use it to defeat the Jews."
From where we stood, we had a clear view into the Israeli town of Metulla, with its red-roofed, whitewashed houses, small hotels, and orchards. "The Jews are sons of pigs and apes," Na'im said. We walked down the crumbling rampart, past a dry cistern, and up a ridge to the high tower, where the Hezbollah flag waved in the wind.
From Beaufort, I headed to the village of Kfar Kila, and the border, where the Fatima Gate is situated. During the occupation, Israel called it the Good Fence; it was the entrance to Metulla for Lebanese workers. The Good Fence has been sealed, and is now famous as the place where Palestinians and Lebanese throw rocks at Israeli soldiers.
I saw, on my drive down, the digging of what appeared to be anti-tank trenches, but, though the South may be a future battlefield, it is also a museum of past glory. Of the four or five main Islamic fundamentalist terror organizations in the Middle East, Hezbollah has by far the most sophisticated public-relations operation, and it has turned the South into an open-air celebration of its success against Israel. The experience of driving there is similar in some ways to driving through Gettysburg, or Antietam; roadside signs and billboards describe in great detail the battles and unit formations associated with a particular place. One multicolored sign, in both Arabic and English, reads:
On Oct. 19, 1988 at1:25 p.m. a martyr car that was body trapped with 500 kilogram of highly exploding materials transformed two Israeli troops into masses of fire and limbs, in one of the severe kicks that the Israeli army had received in Lebanon.
Most of the signs place the word "Israel" in quotation marks, to underscore the country's illegitimacy, and every sign includes a fact box: the number of "Israelis" killed and wounded at the location, and the "Date of Ignominious Departure" of "Israeli" forces. The historical markers also carry quotations from Israeli leaders praising the fighting abilities of Hezbollah's martyrs. One sign reads, "Zionists comments: 'Hezbollah's secret weapon is their self-innovation and their ability to produce bombs that are simple but effective.' " The attribution beneath the quote is "Former 'Israeli' Prime Minister Ihud Barak."
According to Israeli security sources, the Israelis have never been able to infiltrate Hezbollah as they have the P.L.O. One intelligence official told me that Hezbollah leaders have so far been immune to the three inducements that often lure Palestinians to the Israeli side. In Hebrew, they are called the three "K"s: kesef, or money; kavod, respect; and kussit, a crude sexual term for a woman.
The centerpiece of Hezbollah's propaganda effort in the South is the former Al-Khiam prison, a rambling stone-and-concrete complex of interconnected buildings, a few miles from the border, where I stopped on the way to Kfar Kila. For fifteen years, the prison was run by Israel's proxy force in Lebanon, the South Lebanon Army, with the assistance of the Shabak, the Israeli equivalent of the F.B.I. Prisoners in Al-Khiam?which held almost two hundred at any given time?were allegedly subjected to electric-shock torture and a variety of deprivations. The jail has been preserved just as it was on the day the Israelis left. There are still Israeli Army-issue sleeping bags in the cells. Hezbollah has added a gift shop, which sells Hezbollah key chains and flags and cassettes of martial Hezbollah music; a cafeteria; and signs on the walls of various rooms that describe, in Hezbollah's terms, the use of the rooms. "A Room for Investigation and Torturing by Electricity," reads one. "A Room for the Boss of Whippers." "A Room for Investigation with the Help of the Traitors." And "The Hall of Torturing-Burying-Kicking-Beating-Applying Electricity-Pouring Hot Water-Placing a Dog Beside." A busload of tourists, residents of a Palestinian refugee camp outside Beirut, were clearly in awe of the place, treating the cells as if they were reliquaries and congratulating the Hezbollah employees.
Like me, the tourists were headed for the border at Kfar Kila, where one can walk right up to the electrified fence, and where Israeli cameras feed real-time pictures to a series of fortified observation stations just south of the line. An Israeli bunker sits about fifty feet in from the fence?one man told me that the Israeli soldiers never show their faces?and the Palestinians took turns taking pictures and yelling curses. I drove a short distance to a Hezbollah position that faces a massive concrete Israeli fortress called Tziporen. The tour bus, headed for the same place, stopped on the way at an overlook, and the Palestinians got out. On the Israeli side, on a track that ran parallel to the Lebanese road, was a Humvee and three Israeli soldiers. They were protecting a group of workers who were repairing a section of the road. The Israelis were no more than forty feet away, on the lower part of the slope. The experience for the Palestinians?and for a group of Kuwaitis who arrived by car?was something like a grizzly sighting in a national park. "Yahud!" one Kuwaiti said, dumbfounded. "Jews!" His friends produced video cameras and began filming. The Israeli soldiers waved; the Arabs did not. A few began cursing the soldiers and, once it was decided that the workers were Israeli Arabs, cursed them, too. "Ana bidi'ani kak!" one Palestinian yelled at the soldiers?"I want to fuck you up." "Jasus"?"spy"?another called out. An argument broke out on the ridge, and the Palestinians decided that it was not right to curse the Arab workers, who were only earning a living in oppressive circumstances. Apologies were offered, and what was by now a cavalcade moved forward, to the Hezbollah position opposite the Israeli fortress.
Tziporen, the fortress, overlooks the mausoleum of a Jewish sage named Rav Ashi, who was the redactor of the Babylonian Talmud, and who died in 427. The modest mausoleum sits half in Lebanon and half in Israel. Barbed wire runs atop it, and, with the help of a southerly breeze, the Hezbollah flag planted on the Lebanese side of the mausoleum flapped into Israel. The fighters at the Hezbollah position warned us not to get too close to the fence; the Israelis might fire. Rock throwing from a comfortable distance was encouraged, and the Palestinians aimed for the roof of the fort. On weekends, when the crowds are thicker, villagers drive in tractors full of rocks to supply the tourists.
Because it was too risky to approach the fence, it was impossible to read a large billboard planted three feet north of the line. It faced south into Israel, carrying what was obviously a message for the Israelis alone. The border is, of course, sealed, so it was a month before I got a clear look at the billboard. It read, in Hebrew, "Sharon?Don't Forget Your Soldiers Are Still in Lebanon." The message was written under a photograph of a Hezbollah guerrilla holding, by the hair, the severed head of an Israeli commando.
III?THE SUICIDE CHANNEL
The true propaganda engine of Hezbollah is the Al Manar satellite television station. Unlike most of Hezbollah's public offices, the studios of Al Manar are not shoddily built or cheaply decorated. The station's five-story headquarters building in the Dahiya, at the end of a short side street, is surrounded by taller apartment buildings. Guards carrying rifles patrol its perimeter, but, inside, Al Manar has a corporate atmosphere. The lobby is glass and marble, and behind the reception desk a pleasant young man answers the telephone. He sits beneath a portrait of Abbas al-Mussawi, the previous Hezbollah leader, who was assassinated ten years ago by Israel. At the reception desk, women whose dress is deemed immodest can borrow a chador.
Al Manar's news director is Hassan Fadlallah, who is in his early thirties and is a member of the same clan as Muhammad Hussayn Fadlallah, the Hezbollah spiritual leader. Fadlallah, a studious-looking man who had several days' stubble on his face, is working on a Ph.D. in education. He apologized for his poor English. A waiter brought us orange juice and tea.
I began by asking him to compare Al Manar and the most famous Arabic satellite channel, Al Jazeera. "Neutrality like that of Al Jazeera is out of the question for us," Fadlallah said. "We cover only the victim, not the aggressor. CNN is the Zionist news network, Al Jazeera is neutral, and Al Manar takes the side of the Palestinians."
Fadlallah paused for a moment, and said he would like to amend his comment on CNN. "We were very happy with Ted Turner," he said. "We were so happy that he was getting closer to the truth." He was referring to recent comments by Turner, the founder of CNN, who talked about suicide bombers and the Israeli Army and then said, "So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism." Turner was criticized harshly in the American press and by supporters of Israel, and later said that he regretted "any implication that I believe the actions taken by Israel to protect its people are equal to terrorism." Fadlallah claimed that Turner revised his statement because "the Jews threatened his life." He said Al Manar's opposition to neutrality means that, unlike Al Jazeera, his station would never feature interviews or comments by Israeli officials. "We're not looking to interview Sharon," Fadlallah said. "We want to get close to him in order to kill him."
Al Manar would not rule out broadcasting comments from non-Israeli Jews. "There would be one or two we would put on our shows. For example, we would like to have Noam Chomsky." Fadlallah suggested, half jokingly, that I appear on a question-and-answer show. (Later, another Al Manar official suggested that I answer questions about what he termed "the true meaning of the Talmud.")
Fadlallah said that one of Al Manar's goals is to set in context the role of Jews in world affairs. Anti-Semitism, he said, was banned from the station, but he was considering a program on "scholars who dissent on the issue of the Holocaust," which would include the work of the French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy. "There are contradictions," Fadlallah said. "Many Europeans believe that the Holocaust was a myth invented so that the Jews could get compensation. Everyone knows how the Jews punish people who seek the truth about the Holocaust."
It would be a mistake, Fadlallah went on, to focus solely on Al Manar's antiIsrael programs. "We have news programming, kids' shows, game shows, political news, and culture." At the same time, he said, Al Manar is "trying to keep the people in the mood of suffering," and most of the station's daily schedule, including its game shows and children's programming, tends to center on Israel. A program called "The Spider's House" explores what Hezbollah sees as Israel's weaknesses; "In Spite of the Wounds" portrays as heroes men who were wounded fighting Israel in South Lebanon. On a game show entitled "The Viewer Is the Witness," contestants guess the names of prominent Israeli politicians and military figures, who are played by Lebanese actors. Al Manar also has a weekly program called "Terrorists."
Avi Jorisch, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank, who is writing a book about Al Manar, has visited the station and watched several hundred hours of its programming. The show "Terrorists," he told me, airs vintage footage of what it terms "Zionist crimes," which include, by Hezbollah's definition, any Israeli action, offensive or defensive. According to Jorisch, Al Manar, with its estimated ten million viewers, is not as popular in the Arab world as Al Jazeera, although he noted that Arab viewership is not audited. He said that his Lebanese sources credit Al Manar as the second most popular station among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. (Al Manar can be received in the United States via satellite.)
Al Manar regularly airs raw footage of violence in the occupied territories, and it will break into its programming with what one Al Manar official called "patriotic music videos" to announce Palestinian attacks and applaud the killing of Israelis. When I visited the station, the videos were being produced in a basement editing room by a young man named Firas Mansour. Al Manar has modern equipment, and the day I was there Mansour, who was in charge of mixing the videos, was working on a Windows-based editing suite. Mansour is in his late twenties, and he was dressed in hip-hop style. His hair was gelled, and he wore a gold chain, a heavy silver bracelet, and a goatee. He spoke colloquial American English. I asked him where he learned it. "Boston," he said.
Mansour showed me some recent footage from the West Bank, of Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinians. Accompanying the video was a Hezbollah fighting song. "What I'm doing is synchronizing the gunshots to form the downbeat of the song," he told me. "This is my technique. I thought of it." He had come up with a title: "I'm going to call it 'Death to Israel.' " Mansour said that he can produce two or three videos on a good day. "What I do is, first, I try to feel the music. Then I find the pictures to go along with it." He pulled up another video, this one almost ready to air. "Try and see if you could figure out the theme of this one," he said.
The video began with Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinians. Then the screen filled with pictures of Palestinians carrying the wounded to ambulances, followed by an angry funeral scene. Suddenly, the scene shifted to Israelis under fire. An Israeli soldier was on the ground, rocking back and forth, next to a burning jeep; this was followed by scenes of Jewish funerals, with coffins draped in the Israeli flag being lowered into graves.
Mansour pressed a button, and the images disappeared from the screen. "The idea is that even if the Jews are killing us we can still kill them. That we derive our power from blood. It's saying, 'Get ready to blow yourselves up, because this is the only way to liberate Palestine.' '' The video, he said, would be shown after the next attack in Israel. He said he was thinking of calling it "We Will Kill All the Jews." I suggested that these videos would encourage the recruitment of suicide bombers among the Palestinians. "Exactly," he replied.
The anti-Semitism of the Middle East groups that oppose Israel's right to exist often seems instrumental?anti-Jewish stereotypes are another weapon in the anti-Israeli armamentarium. The rhetoric is repellent, but in the past it did not quite touch the malignancy of genocidal anti-Semitism. The language has changed, however. In April, in a sermon delivered in the Gaza Strip, Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi, a Palestinian Authority imam, said, "Oh, Allah, accept our martyrs in the highest Heaven. Oh, Allah, show the Jews a black day. Oh, Allah, annihilate the Jews and their supporters." (The translation was made by the Middle East Media Research Institute.) In Saudi Arabia, where anti-Semitism permeates the newspapers and the mosques, the imam of the Al Harram mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Abd al-Rahman alSudais, recently declared, "Read history and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil forefathers of the even more evil Jews of today: infidels, falsifiers of words, calf worshippers, prophet murderers, deniers of prophecies . . . the scum of the human race, accursed by Allah." Hezbollah has been at the vanguard of this shift toward frank anti-Semitism, and its leaders frequently resort to epidemiological metaphors in describing the role of Jews in world affairs. Ibrahim Mussawi, the urbane and scholarly-seeming director of English-language news at Al Manar, called Jews "a lesion on the forehead of history." A biochemist named Hussein Haj Hassan, a Hezbollah official who represents Baalbek in the Lebanese parliament, told me that he is not anti-Semitic, but he has noticed that the Jews are a pan-national group "that functions in a way that lets them act as parasites in the nations that have given them shelter."
The Middle East scholar Martin Kramer, a biographer of Sayyid Muhammad Fadlallah, told me that he has sensed a shift in hard-line Shiite thinking in the past twenty years. In the first burst of revolution in Iran, the United States was cast by Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies as the "Great Satan." Israel occupied the role of "Little Satan." This has been reversed, Kramer said. Today, Shiite authorities in Lebanon view America as one more tool of the Jews, who have achieved covert world domination. President Mohammad Khatami of Iran, who is often described as a reformer, last year called Israel "a parasite in the heart of the Muslim world."
There are bitter feelings, to be sure, about Israel's invasion of Lebanon, about Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories, about the Israeli Air Force's not infrequent patrols in the skies over Beirut. But even some cosmopolitan Beirutis I met, Christians as well as Muslims, seemed surprisingly open to anti-Jewish propaganda?for instance, that the World Trade Center was destroyed by Jews.
A young Shiite scholar named Amal Saad-Ghorayeb has advanced what in Lebanon is a controversial argument: that Hezbollah is not merely anti-Israel but deeply, theologically anti-Jewish. Her new book, "Hezbollah: Politics & Religion," dissects the anti-Jewish roots of Hezbollah ideology. Hezbollah, she argues, believes that Jews, by the nature of Judaism, possess fatal character flaws.
I met Saad-Ghorayeb one afternoon in a caf? near the Lebanese American University, where she is an assistant professor. She was wearing an orange spaghetti-strap tank top, a knee-length skirt, and silver hoop earrings. She is thirty years old and married, and has a four-year-old daughter. Her father, Abdo Saad, is a prominent Shiite pollster; her mother is Christian.
Saad-Ghorayeb calls Israel "an aberration, a colonialist state that embraces its victimhood in order to displace another people." Yet her opposition to anti-Semitism seemed sincere, as when she described the anti-Jewish feeling that underlies Hezbollah's ideology. "There is a real antipathy to Jews as Jews," she said. "It is exacerbated by Zionism, but it existed before Zionism." She observed that Hezbollah, like many other Arab groups, is in the thrall of a belief system that she called "moral utilitarianism." Hezbollah, in other words, will find the religious justification for an act as long as the act is useful. "For the Arabs, the end often justifies the means, even if the means are dubious," she said. "If it works, it's moral."
In her book, she argues that Hezbollah's Koranic reading of Jewish history has led its leaders to believe that Jewish theology is evil. She criticizes the scholar Bernard Lewis for downplaying the depth of traditional Islamic antiJudaism, especially when compared with Christian anti-Semitism. "Lewis commits the . . . grave error of depicting traditional Islam as more tolerant of Jews . . . thereby implying that Zionism was the cause of Arab-Islamic anti-Semitism," she writes.
Saad-Ghorayeb is hesitant to label Hezbollah's outlook anti-Semitism, however. She prefers the term "antiJudaism," since in her terms anti-Semitism is a race-based hatred, while anti-Judaism is religion-based. Hezbollah, she says, tries to mask its antiJudaism for "public-relations reasons," but she argues that a study of its language, spoken and written, reveals an underlying truth. She quoted from a speech delivered by Hassan Nasrallah, in which he said, "If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli." To Saad-Ghorayeb, this statement "provides moral justification and ideological justification for dehumanizing the Jews." In this view, she went on, "the Israeli Jew becomes a legitimate target for extermination. And it also legitimatizes attacks on non-Israeli Jews."
Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism official in the Clinton State Department, once told me, "There's a fundamental view here of the Jew as subhuman. Hezbollah is the direct ideological heir of the Nazis." Saad-Ghorayeb disagrees. Nasrallah may skirt the line between racialist anti-Semitism and theological anti-Judaism, she said, but she argued that mainstream Hezbollah ideology provides the Jews with an obvious way to repair themselves in God's eyes: by converting to Islam.
IV?"THE LOGIC OF WAR"
One day near the end of my stay in Lebanon, I visited Sayyid Fadlallah, Hezbollah's spiritual leader, at his home in the Dahiya. Fadlallah, who is sixty-seven, is a surpassingly important figure in Shiism, inside and outside Lebanon. As many as twenty thousand people pray with him each Friday at a cavernous mosque near his home. He is a squat man with a white beard, and wears the black turban of the sayyid, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. Fadlallah has long denied any official role in Hezbollah. Some experts take him at his word; others believe that he is dissembling. However, intellectually Fadlallah has taken an independent course, and people close to him told me that he privately scorns Hezbollah's most important patron, Ayatollah Khamenei, as a mediocre thinker and cleric.
Several attempts have been made to assassinate Fadlallah. He believes that the C.I.A., working with Saudi Arabia, tried to kill him by setting off a bomb near his apartment building in 1985, an event cited in Bob Woodward's book "Veil: The Secret Wars of the C.I.A. 1981-1987," which, Fadlallah told me, he has read carefully and repeatedly. His offices are well guarded by men who have apparently been assigned to him by Hezbollah. My briefcase was taken from me for ten minutes and thoroughly searched by the guards. A man carrying a pistol sat in on our interview, along with three translators: Fadlallah's; mine (a Christian woman from East Beirut, who had been required to wear a chador for the occasion); and Abdo Saad, Amal Saad-Ghorayeb's father, who had arranged the interview.
Fadlallah entered the meeting room slowly and deliberately. He sat in a plush chair, the rest of us on couches near him. The room was lit with fluorescent light; as always, a picture of Khomeini stared down from the wall.
Fadlallah framed the core issues in political, not religious, terms. "The Israelis believe that after three thousand years they came back to Palestine," he said. "But can the American Indian come back to America after all this time? Can the Celts go back to Britain?" He said that he has no objection to Jewish statehood, but not at the expense of Palestinians. "The problem between Muslims and Jews has to do with security issues."
Like many Muslim clerics, he holds romantic, condescending, and contradictory views of the historic relationship between Jews and Muslims. He is aware that for hundreds of years, while Jews were persecuted and ostracized in Christian Europe, they were granted the status of protected inferiors by the caliphs, and subjected only to infrequent pogroms. Yet, despite his assertion that the dispute between Jews and Muslims was political, he made the theological observation that the Jews "never recognized Islam as a true religion." I asked him if he agreed with this passage from the Koran: "Strongest among men in enmity to the believers wilt thou find the Jews and Pagans." Yes, he said. "The Jews don't consider Islam to be a religion."
I tried to turn the conversation to Islamic beliefs?in particular, the rationale for suicide attacks. In the early nineteen-eighties, Fadlallah was accused of blessing the suicide bomber who destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, a charge that he heatedly denied to me. He pointed out that he was among the first Islamic clerics to condemn the September 11th attacks, though he blamed American foreign policy for creating the atmosphere that led to them. He has, however, endorsed attacks on Israeli civilians. Suicide, he said, is not an absolute value. It is an option left to a people who are without options, and so the act is no longer considered suicide but martyrdom in the name of self-defense. "This is part of the logic of war," he said.
On the killing of Israeli civilians, Fadlallah said, "In a state of war, it is permissible for Palestinians to kill Jews. When there is peace, this is not permissible." He does not believe in a peaceful settlement between two states, one Palestinian, the other Israeli; rather, he favors the disappearance of Israel.
I thought about Saad-Ghorayeb's argument that many in Hezbollah consider all Jews guilty of conspiring against Islam, and I asked Fadlallah if it was permissible to kill Jews beyond the borders of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors are considered by the governments of Israel, the United States, and Argentina to be responsible for the single deadliest anti-Semitic attack since the end of the Second World War: the suicide truck-bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, in 1994, which left more than a hundred people dead. As in the case of other accusations of terrorism, Hezbollah and Iran say that they were not involved in the attack. "We are against the killing of Jews outside Palestine," Fadlallah said. "Unless they transfer the war outside Palestine." When I asked if they had, Fadlallah raised an eyebrow, and let the question go unanswered.
Major General Benny Gantz is the chief of the Israeli Army's Northern Command, which is responsible for defending Israel from Hezbollah and Syria and any other threats from the north. Until recently, Gantz was the commander of Israeli forces in the West Bank.
When we met this summer, at an airbase outside Tel Aviv, he seemed pleased to have left behind the moral and strategic ambiguities of service in the West Bank. Gantz is forty-three, tall, lean, and cynical. Much of his career has been spent dealing with the Lebanon question. Before serving in the West Bank, he was the top Israeli officer in Lebanon in the days leading up to the withdrawal. A helicopter was waiting to carry him north to the border after our meeting. Gantz is almost certain that he will soon wage war against Hezbollah and Syria. "I'll be surprised if we don't see this fight," he said.
The Israelis believe that in South Lebanon Hezbollah has more than eight thousand rockets, weapons that are far more sophisticated than any previously seen in the group's arsenal. They include the Iranian-made Fajr-5 rocket, which has a range of up to forty-five miles, meaning that Israel's industrial heartland, in the area south of Haifa, falls within Hezbollah's reach. One intelligence official put it this way: "It's not tenable for us to have a jihadist organization on our border with the capability of destroying Israel's main oil refinery."
Hezbollah officials told me that they possessed no rockets whatsoever. But one reporter who has covered Hezbollah and the South for several years said he believes that Hezbollah has established a "balance of terror" along the border. The reporter, Nicholas Blanford, of the Beirut English-language newspaper the Daily Star, said that he is "pretty certain" that Hezbollah has "extensive weaponry down there, stashed away." He added, "Their refrain is, we're ready for all eventualities."
Blanford, who has good sources in the Hezbollah leadership, said, "They seem to be convinced that sooner or later there's going to be an Israeli-Arab conflict. In the long term, Israel cannot put up with this threat from Hezbollah." It seems clear that in ordinary times Israel would already have moved against Hezbollah. But these are not ordinary times. Intelligence officials told me that Israel cannot act pre?mptively against Hezbollah while America is trying to shore up Arab support for, or acquiescence in, a campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein. To do otherwise would be to risk angering the Bush Administration, which needs Israel to show restraint. One Israeli Army officer I spoke to put it bluntly: "The day after the American attack, we can move."
Both Israel and the United States believe that, at the outset of an American campaign against Saddam, Iraq will fire missiles at Israel?perhaps with chemical or biological payloads?in order to provoke an Israeli conventional, or even nuclear, response. But Hezbollah, which is better situated than Iraq to do damage to Israel, might do Saddam's work itself, forcing Israel to retaliate, and crippling the American effort against an Arab state. Hezbollah is not known to possess unconventional payloads for its missiles, though its state sponsors, Iran and Syria, maintain extensive biological- and chemical-weapons programs.
If Hezbollah wants to provoke Israel, it has other options. Early this year, it tried to smuggle fifty tons of heavy Iranian weapons?including mines, mortars, and missiles?to the Palestinian Authority aboard a ship called the Karine A. The Israeli Navy seized the ship in the Red Sea. Intelligence officials believe that the operation was under the control of a deputy of Imad Mugniyah, the Hezbollah security operative. According to a story in the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, King Abdullah of Jordan told American officials that Iran was behind attempts to launch at least seventeen rockets at Israeli targets from Jordanian territory. Hezbollah, meanwhile, is working with Palestinian groups, including Islamic Jihad, which, like Hezbollah, is sponsored by Iran, and which, like Hezbollah, is searching for the means to deliver a serious blow to Israel.
There is no affection for Saddam Hussein among the ruling mullahs in Iran, which lost a vicious war to Iraq in the nineteen-eighties, with hundreds of thousands of Iranians dead; or in the office of President Bashar al-Assad, in Syria. But some American analysts think that both regimes are alarmed by the prospect of Saddam's overthrow. Dennis Ross, the Clinton Administration's Middle East envoy, told me that American success against Iraq would legitimatize American-led "regime change" in the Middle East. It would also leave Iran surrounded by pro-American governments, in Kabul, Baghdad, and Istanbul. "They see encirclement," Ross said. "This explains the incredible flow of weaponry to Hezbollah after Israel left Lebanon."
Ross said that Bashar al-Assad's interest in forestalling an American attack on Iraq by igniting an Arab-Israeli war is more subtle, but still present. "Bashar realizes that if we go ahead and do this in Iraq he runs an enormous risk" by continuing to support terrorist organizations. The State Department lists Syria as a sponsor of terror. Ross also believes that Bashar, unlike his late father, is not thoughtful enough to grasp the cost of a war with Israel. "He still thinks that Israel will stay within certain boundaries," Ross said. "He needs to hear from us that, if he provokes a war, don't expect us to come to your rescue. He's playing with fire." Indeed, in April this year the Bush Administration had to intervene with Syria to halt Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel.
General Gantz told me that if Hezbollah uses rockets against Israel his forces will be hunting Syrians as well as Lebanese Shiites. Lebanon may be the battlefield, he said, but the twenty thousand Syrian soldiers in Lebanon will be fair targets. "Israel doesn't have to deal with Hezbollah as Hezbollah," he continued. "This is the Hezbollah tail wagging the Syrian dog. As far as I'm concerned, Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese and Syrian forces. Syria will pay the price. I'm not saying when or where. But it will be severe."
The Syrian Army, which used to have the Soviet Union as its patron, is no match for Israel, Gantz said. "I think the Syrians can create a few problems for us. But it's very hard to see in what way they're better than us. I just don't know how Bashar is going to rebuild his army after this. Assad, the father, was a smart guy. He knew how to walk a tightrope. His son is trying to dance on it."
In conversations with people in Beirut, and especially in the Christian areas to the city's north, I found great anxiety about an Israeli counterstrike against Lebanon. Hezbollah understands that the Lebanese have grown used to peace, and that they fear an Israeli attack; many Lebanese would hold Hezbollah responsible for the devastation caused by an Israeli attack. Among some of Lebanon's religious groups, particularly the Maronite Christians and the Druze, there is a feeling that the Syrians have overstayed their welcome in the country. These groups fear Hezbollah, too, but they do not express it; after all, Hezbollah is the only militia that is still armed, long after the end of the civil war.
Israel's foreign minister, Shimon Peres, mentioned these constraints when I spoke to him recently. "Hezbollah must not appear to be the destroyer of Lebanon," he said. Peres noted, however, that Hezbollah is an organization devoted to jihad, not to logic. "These are religious people. With the religious you can hardly negotiate. They think they have supreme permission to kill people and go to war. This is their nature."
When I met with Prime Minister Hariri, he alluded to some of these worries. Hariri, a Sunni, is a billionaire builder who made most of his money in Saudi Arabia. We spoke in a building that he constructed in Beirut, with his own money, to serve as his "palace"; it seems to be modelled on a Ritz-Carlton hotel. Hariri has tense relations with Hezbollah, which has accused him of trying to thwart development in poor Shiite areas. Hariri understands that Israel will make the Lebanese people suffer for any attacks that are launched from Lebanese territory. He loathes and fears Ariel Sharon, and said to me that Sharon was "no different" from Hitler in his belief "in racial purity." The people of southern Lebanon do not want the Israelis provoked, Hariri said. "Look around the South," he said. "Look at all the building."
In recent weeks, the borderland has become even more unstable. An Israeli soldier was killed last month when Hezbollah fired on an Israeli outpost in Shebaa; and the Lebanese government, with the endorsement of Hezbollah, announced plans to divert water that would otherwise be carried by the Hatsbani River into Israel. Israel has said that it will not allow Lebanon to curtail its water supply. General Gantz assumes that internal political considerations will not trump its desire for jihad. As he prepared to board his helicopter and fly to the border, he said, "I was the last officer to leave Lebanon, and maybe I'll be the first one to return."
(This is the first part of a two-part article.)
IN THE PARTY OF GOD
by JEFFREY GOLDBERG
Hezbollah sets up operations in South America and the United States.
Issue of 2002-10-28
Posted 2002-10-21
The patrol boat, a Boston Whaler, was worn at its edges, and it was pocked with bullet holes along its starboard side. It had a four-man crew, officers of the Brazilian Federal Police. They carried AK-47s and side arms, and they wore jeans, sunglasses, and bulletproof vests, which made them sweat. The patrol chief steered the boat into the middle of the Paran? River?half a mile wide, muddy, and sluggish. He opened up the boat's two Suzuki engines, and as we moved north the outskirts of the Brazilian city of Foz do Igua?u came into view on the right; on the opposite side was the Paraguayan jungle, where smoke from cooking fires rose above the tree line. The chief, who was worried about snipers, kept the boat moving fast. He pointed to a series of chutes, dug out from the banks on the Paraguayan side, down which drug smugglers move bales of marijuana to the river.
A decaying iron bridge, the International Friendship Bridge, connects Foz do Igua?u to its Paraguayan sister city, Ciudad del Este, the City of the East. Ciudad del Este is at the heart of the zone known as the Triple Frontier, the point where Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina meet, which has served for nearly thirty years as a hospitable base of operations for smugglers, counterfeiters, and tax dodgers. The Triple Frontier has earned its reputation as one of the most lawless places in the world. Now, it is believed, the Frontier is also the center of Middle Eastern terrorism in South America.
-
What is Balintawak?
And what do you believe in regards to Iraq and Israel with Lebanon? It will clarify things for us here.
A higher consciousness when it comes to the War on Terror means nothing to me. Unless it is the recognition that we are in the fight of our live and for our lives.
Hi Ppulatie,
I practice Balintawak Escrima as taught by Bobby Taboada:
http://www.worldbalintawak.com/vidclips.html
http://www.worldbalintawak.com
Regarding Higher consciousness, it is the goal of the Dog brothers is it not?
Regarding the war on terror, I believe that the best way to fight it is quite simply by fearing nothing.
.
-
B;
Fearing nothing, specifically what do you suggest should be our course of action? What should Israel's course of action be?
All:
I see that the extreme length of my post last night overwhelmed things. Here's Part Two.
IN THE PARTY OF GOD
by JEFFREY GOLDBERG
Hezbollah sets up operations in South America and the United States.
Issue of 2002-10-28
Posted 2002-10-21
The patrol boat, a Boston Whaler, was worn at its edges, and it was pocked with bullet holes along its starboard side. It had a four-man crew, officers of the Brazilian Federal Police. They carried AK-47s and side arms, and they wore jeans, sunglasses, and bulletproof vests, which made them sweat. The patrol chief steered the boat into the middle of the Paran? River?half a mile wide, muddy, and sluggish. He opened up the boat's two Suzuki engines, and as we moved north the outskirts of the Brazilian city of Foz do Igua?u came into view on the right; on the opposite side was the Paraguayan jungle, where smoke from cooking fires rose above the tree line. The chief, who was worried about snipers, kept the boat moving fast. He pointed to a series of chutes, dug out from the banks on the Paraguayan side, down which drug smugglers move bales of marijuana to the river.
A decaying iron bridge, the International Friendship Bridge, connects Foz do Igua?u to its Paraguayan sister city, Ciudad del Este, the City of the East. Ciudad del Este is at the heart of the zone known as the Triple Frontier, the point where Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina meet, which has served for nearly thirty years as a hospitable base of operations for smugglers, counterfeiters, and tax dodgers. The Triple Frontier has earned its reputation as one of the most lawless places in the world. Now, it is believed, the Frontier is also the center of Middle Eastern terrorism in South America.
From the boat, we could see that the traffic above us on the bridge was at a standstill. Between twenty and twenty-five thousand people cross the bridge each day, Brazilian police officials said. Pedestrians, many carrying huge packages, follow a narrow walkway that runs along the bridge's outer edge; motorcyclists maneuver among trucks and buses. From the river, one sees only a jumble of towers clustered near the edge of Ciudad del Este, and the men on the patrol looked that way with distaste. "It's filthy and disgusting," the chief said. "Everything there is illegal." And the local police? The men smiled, and the chief said, "They do what they do, and we do what we do."
The chief explained that the underworld of Ciudad del Este is dominated by Asian and Middle Eastern mobsters. Many of them prefer to float contraband across the river rather than use the bridge, but the men caught smuggling are invariably poor Paraguayans. As he spoke, we passed, on the Paraguayan shore, a group of shirtless men, who stared at the boat. "They're just waiting for us to leave the river," the chief said. "Then they'll start across." The sun by now was setting, and the police seldom patrol at night. It would be too dangerous, the chief said.
The men on the boat were all residents of Foz do Igua?u?Foz, as it is usually called?an orderly city that employs street sweepers and traffic police. I asked them if they ever visited Ciudad del Este. One said that he used to go for the shopping. Much of Ciudad del Este is built around vast, canyonlike shopping malls. The better malls sell legitimately acquired products at discounted prices, and the rougher ones specialize in stolen and pirated goods.
Roughly two hundred thousand people live in the Ciudad del Este region, including a substantial minority of Arab Muslims; in the Triple Frontier zone, there may be as many as thirty thousand. According to intelligence officials in the region and in Washington, this Muslim community has in its midst a hard core of terrorists, many of them associated with Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite group backed by the Iranian government; some with Hamas, the Palestinian fundamentalist group; and some with Al Qaeda. It is, over all, a community under the influence of extreme Islamic beliefs; intelligence officials told me that some of the Triple Frontier Arabs held celebrations on September 11th of last year and also on the anniversary this year. These officials said that Hezbollah runs weekend training camps on farms cut out of the rain forest of the Triple Frontier. In at least one of these camps, in the remote jungle terrain near Foz do Igua?u, young adults get weapons training and children are indoctrinated in Hezbollah ideology?a mixture of anti-American and anti-Jewish views inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini.
In the Triple Frontier, Hezbollah raises money from legitimate businesses but, more frequently, from illicit activities, ranging from drug smuggling to the pirating of compact disks. Unlike the other radical Islamic groups in the Triple Frontier, Hezbollah, it is said, has the capability to commit acts of terror.
A billboard advertising the services of the Kamikaze Tour Company stands near the Foz do Igua?u entrance to the International Friendship Bridge. It is faster to walk the half-mile span than to drive, and so I joined a line of Guaran? Indians and Brazilian traders who had assembled one morning under a sign on the Foz side that read, "You Are the Strong Ones, Not the Drugs." A Brazilian police helicopter circled overhead.
In Ciudad del Este, there is an immediate sense of heat and claustrophobic closeness. The streets, jammed with people and worked by watch sellers and money changers, give way to alleys, and the alleys open up onto strips of badly built shops. The smallest shops, some barely six feet by six feet, are called lojas, and are crammed with in-line skates and cellular telephones and pharmaceuticals?almost anything that could fall off a truck. Guaran? women sit on the ground, drinking mat? through metal straws. The sidewalks are dense with stands selling sunglasses and perfume, and with tables of pornographic videos. Marijuana is sold openly; so are pirated CDs. The music of Eminem came from one shop; from another, there were sounds familiar to me from South Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley?martial Hezbollah music. I bought a cassette recording of the speeches of Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader.
In a shop called Caza y Pesca Monday, or the Monday Hunting and Fishing Store, the owner offered to sell me an AK-47 rifle for three hundred and seventy dollars. For an extra thirty dollars, he said, he could have it smuggled to my hotel in Brazil. I asked whether it was possible to acquire explosives. He said it would be more difficult, though not impossible. The cost of smuggling them would be significantly more than thirty dollars.
A few blocks from the center of town, the Mosque of the Prophet Muhammad occupies the first three floors of an unfinished fourteen-story apartment house. The building is painted green and white and topped by an oversized crescent and star, the symbols of Islam. When I arrived, the mosque was opening for afternoon prayers, and I was introduced to Muhammad Youssef Abdallah, who owns the building and built the mosque. Abdallah, a short, round, voluble man in his fifties, is an immigrant from a village in South Lebanon, near the Israeli border.
He told me that he came to the Triple Frontier more than twenty years ago, in a wave of Lebanese immigrants who had discovered a part of South America that welcomed international traders. Like most Lebanese businessmen in Ciudad del Este, he lives in the more orderly climate of Foz do Igua?u. He also has a farm outside Foz. For many years, he said, he owned one of the malls in Ciudad del Este, but now he devotes his time to the propagation of the faith. He invited me into his office, on the second floor of the mosque. On the wall was a portrait of Sayyid Muhammad Hussayn Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah; on a shelf was a gun.
I told Abdallah that, a month earlier, I had interviewed Fadlallah in his home in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Hezbollah stronghold. He asked if I knew his cousin, Hani Abdallah, Fadlallah's spokesman, and seemed pleased when I said yes. In 1994, according to Paraguayan intelligence officials, Fadlallah travelled undercover to Ciudad del Este, on an Iranian passport, in order to bless the mosque. Abdallah was quick to say that Fadlallah plays no official role in the work of Hezbollah?that he is merely a spiritual adviser to poor Shiites throughout the world. Fadlallah and his followers said much the same thing when we met in Lebanon.
Abdallah, who has never been charged with any wrongdoing, was circumspect in describing his activities. "If you touch on Hezbollah, you get a shock," he told me, and added that charges sometimes levelled in the press against the Muslims of the Triple Frontier are untrue. "We are not involved in terrorism," he said. Many of the Muslims who once worshipped in the mosque are afraid to visit now, he said, believing that it is under surveillance by Israel and the United States. Abdallah insisted that he himself had no connection to Hezbollah, but he conceded that, like other Lebanese businessmen, he had given money to the group. "Five years ago, people were expected to give twenty per cent of their income," he said.
I asked him what he meant by "expected."
"Right, expected," he replied. A look of helplessness crossed his face. "What are people supposed to do?" he asked.
Abdallah would not elaborate, but, according to South American investigators and two Lebanese who once worked in the Triple Frontier, such donations were made under duress. At the beginning of each month, they said, a Hezbollah official named Sobhi Fayad or one of his associates would visit shops owned by Lebanese immigrants?Shiites, but also Sunni Muslims and Christians. The shop owner would be handed a certificate thanking him for the support he had provided to various Hezbollah-run charitable groups. A dollar amount would be written on each certificate?a South American investigator showed me one with the figure ten thousand dollars?and the shop owner would be expected to pay that sum. After that, the certificate would be put in his shopwindow?and no more "donations" would be sought for the remainder of the month. Otherwise, the shop owner would be warned, and then his relatives in Lebanon would be warned, that if they didn't comply Hezbollah would spread rumors about them. "People would be told that they are spies for Israel," one South American investigator told me. Some were beaten. "It's a very effective system," the investigator said.
The Fayad operation was expert in laundering money. According to intelligence documents provided to me by regional investigators, Hezbollah has used traders from India to move money from Paraguay to the Middle East. The documents referred to an Indian named Rajkumar Naraindas Sabnani, who does business in the Triple Frontier and in Hong Kong; investigators allege that he arranged to ship goods to Paraguay, receiving payment far in excess of their value. After subtracting his own fee and paying for the actual goods, Sabnani wired the surplus to banks in the United States or in Lebanon. Sabnani is believed to be currently in Hong Kong.
Abdallah, the founder of the Prophet Muhammad mosque, says that people in the Triple Frontier are giving less these days, because the region's economy is in very poor shape. But investigators in South America and experts on the group nevertheless believe that the amount raised in South America over the years is in the tens of millions of dollars; according to one Paraguayan official, two years ago Hezbollah raised twelve million dollars in the Triple Frontier. Hezbollah's annual budget is more than a hundred million dollars, provided by the Iranian government directly and by an international network of fund-raisers.
Besides Sobhi Fayad, several other figures in the Triple Frontier's Arab community play important roles in raising money for Hezbollah. One of the most notorious is a fugitive: Ali Khalil Mehri, a man considered by Paraguayan authorities to be a leading distributor of pirated compact disks. According to Paraguayan investigators, Mehri left for S?o Paulo, Brazil, then moved on to Europe and, finally, to Lebanon, where he is today. Sobhi Fayad is in jail in Asunci?n, the Paraguayan capital, awaiting trial on tax charges and on charges of associating with a criminal organization. Paraguay has no anti-terror law, and so it is not illegal to donate money to terrorist groups, as it is in the United States. "It's exactly the same as Al Capone," one investigator told me. "You have to get them on tax evasion."
In the days following September 11th of last year, the Paraguayans arrested twenty-three people in the region of Ciudad del Este and in southern Paraguay on suspicion of involvement with Hezbollah or other organizations. But Carlos Altemburger, the chief of the Paraguayan Secretariat for the Prevention and Investigation of Terrorism, told me that most of these detainees have been released and many have left the country. Even though the Paraguayan government is considered among the most corrupt in South America, the terrorism secretariat is thought by American officials to be free of corruption. Altemburger told me that he would like the government to impose strict controls on the border region, which would make it more difficult for Hezbollah members who live in Brazil to travel so freely into Paraguay. His requests, he said diplomatically, are still being weighed by the government.
The openness of the borders in the Triple Frontier, as much as its free-for-all ethos, makes the region particularly inviting for terrorists. (When I ran into a bureaucratic problem entering Paraguay, I was advised to sneak in by riding a motorcycle with Brazilian plates, and wearing a helmet to disguise my face. It worked perfectly.) The open borders provide politicians and senior law-enforcement officials of the three nations with a ready excuse for the presence of terrorists in cities under their nominal control.
Joaquim Mesquita, the chief of the Brazilian Federal Police in Foz do Igua?u, dismissed the idea that his third of the Triple Frontier was a haven for terrorists. "We have a marijuana problem, and cigarette smuggling," he said. But, he continued, "we don't have any concrete evidence that this is a terrorist region." In Asunci?n, I met with the interior minister, a former chief of the national police named V?ctor Hermoza. "Most of the Arabs live on the Brazil side, I should point out," Hermoza said, and added, "Anyway, the Arabs are all moving to Chile."
Hermoza, who has an open, friendly face, insists that his country is doing everything it can to aid the American war on terror. In fact, he said, with a suggestion of pride, he takes his orders from American diplomats. "The national police cannot do anything without the American Embassy," he said. "We rely on their intelligence."
We met in his office at the Interior Ministry, in downtown Asunci?n. Paraguay is small and poor, and perhaps best known for the longtime rule of Alfredo Stroessner, who made the country a hideout for Nazi fugitives, including Josef Mengele. Crime is rising, and the economy has been badly hurt by the collapses in Brazil and Argentina. Some Paraguayans have taken to spray-painting walls with the slogan "Stroessner Vuelve!," or "Stroessner Will Return!" Stroessner was deposed in 1989, and now, at the age of eighty-nine, lives in exile in Brazil.
Hermoza, who began his career during Stroessner's regime, suggests that the country is no different from its neighbors. "There's corruption in all three of the countries" that share the Triple Frontier, he said. "Even America has corruption. That's why you have internalaffairs departments in your police."
I asked Hermoza why the Interior Ministry didn't institute more stringent border controls. He listened to the story of my own illegal crossing, and said, "You're probably going to have to pay an extra fee at the airport." He did not seem bothered by the fact that a foreigner could sneak into his country by hiding inside a motorcycle helmet, but he said that he had raised the question of bridge security with local officials recently when he visited Ciudad del Este. "They showed me why they couldn't do it," he said. "They started to check cars, and within four or five minutes there was a line that was as long as the bridge." Economic considerations would outweigh security needs for the time being.
Like Hezbollah, Al Qaeda does considerable fund-raising in Ciudad del Este, investigators told me, and they named the Al Qaeda point men as Ali Nizar Dahroug and his uncle. Ali Dahroug is in jail in Ciudad del Este awaiting trial on tax-evasion charges; his uncle is a fugitive. The Dahrougs came to the attention of local investigators when the uncle's name was found in an address book belonging to the highest-ranking Al Qaeda official to be captured so far by the United States, Abu Zubaydah. According to investigators and intelligence files, Ali Dahroug owned a small perfume shop in Ciudad del Este. The entire enterprise was worth no more than two thousand dollars, so investigators were startled to learn that he was wiring as much as eighty thousand dollars each month to banks in the United States, the Middle East, and Europe. Hamas's chief fund-raiser in the Triple Frontier is Ayman Ghotme, who collected funds for the Holy Land Foundation, a Texas-based organization that sent money to Hamas but was closed down by American officials after September 11th. Ghotme lives in S?o Paulo, according to investigators. But the dominant terror group in the region is Hezbollah, and its ability to carry out terror operations in South America, investigators say, is due to one man: Imad Mugniyah.
Until September 11th of last year, Mugniyah was considered by American officials to be the world's most dangerous terrorist, and many terrorism experts still believe this to be true. For a decade, the American and Israeli governments have made repeated attempts to capture or kill him. The Israeli Air Force, which frequently dispatches fighter jets across Lebanon, has equipped many of its airplanes with advanced signal intelligence "packages," and it uses these to track his whereabouts. Several years ago, the Israelis killed Mugniyah's brother, and allegedly set a trap for Mugniyah at the funeral, but he didn't appear. Some believe that he has had plastic surgery, and that, in recent years, he has not moved beyond Lebanon and Iran, for fear of capture. Sources told me that Mugniyah will not even travel through the Beirut airport, believing that paramilitary officers commanded by the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorist Center have the airport under permanent surveillance.
Mugniyah's operation?known as the external security apparatus?is Hezbollah's most lethal weapon. It is commonly believed that Mugniyah is behind nearly every major act of terrorism that has been staged by Hezbollah during the last two decades; he is thought to have agents not only in South America but in Europe, Southeast Asia, West Africa, and even the United States. His operatives in the Triple Frontier include Assad Ahmad Barakat, an important fund-raiser for Hezbollah. (Paraguayan police discovered a letter in which Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, thanked Barakat for his efforts on behalf of children orphaned when their fathers became suicide bombers.) Terrorism experts say that Ali Kassam, who runs a Shiite religious center in Foz, is a close contact of Mugniyah's as well, and so is a sheikh named Bilal Mohsen Wehbi, a Lebanese who was trained in Iran, and who reports to the Iranian Cultural Affairs Ministry. The Ministry often provides diplomatic cover for both Hezbollah operatives and Iranian intelligence agents. It is believed that Mugniyah takes orders from the office of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, but that he reports to a man named Ghassem Soleimani, the chief of a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps called Al Quds, or the Jerusalem Force?the arm of the Iranian government responsible for sponsoring terror attacks on Israeli targets.
Mugniyah is believed to have established European cells; in the nineteen-eighties, he recruited operatives in France and Germany. In South America, his reach goes beyond the Triple Frontier. A cell in Incarnaci?n, a city south of Ciudad del Este, was run until recently by a man named Karim Diab; a regional investigator said that Diab has been sent to Angola to start a Hezbollah cell there.
Unlike Osama bin Laden, Mugniyah does not give interviews or issue statements on the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera. There are only two known photographs of Mugniyah, and even these have been called into question. He is believed to have been born in the Lebanese village of Tir Dibba, near Tyre, on July 12, 1962, into a prominent family; his father, Sheikh Muhammad Jawad Mugniyah, is thought to have been a Shiite scholar. According to Robert Baer, an ex-C.I.A. officer who spent a good part of his career tracking Mugniyah, even the basic details of his childhood are unknown to intelligence services. "Mugniyah systematically had all traces of himself removed," Baer says. "He erased himself. He had his records removed from high school, and his passport application was stolen. There are no civil records in Lebanon with his name in them."
By his middle teens, Mugniyah was a gun-carrying foot soldier in the Lebanese civil war, which began in 1975. He received his early training not with his fellow-Shiites, who were then unarmed and not very radicalized, but with Yasir Arafat and the Fatah movement of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Until 1982, when Arafat was expelled from Lebanon as a result of the Israeli invasion, his power was concentrated in South Lebanon, along the border with Israel, much as Hezbollah's is today. Fatah maintained training camps not only for Palestinians but for members of other, international terror groups as well. Many of the Iranian Shiites who later overthrew the Shah were trained there.
Mugniyah became a member of Arafat's personal bodyguard unit, Force 17. (It still exists in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.) In the early nineteen-eighties, after the P.L.O.'s departure from Lebanon, Mugniyah became a bodyguard for Sayyid Muhammad Fadlallah, Hezbollah's spiritual leader. Then, suddenly, according to Baer and another intelligence source, Mugniyah appeared, along with Hassan Nasrallah, as a central figure in the Islamic Jihad Organization, one of the names under which Hezbollah operated when, in the early eighties, it was still a clandestine group. The first major act of terrorism attributed to Mugniyah was the April, 1983, bombing of the United States Embassy in Beirut. Sixty-three people died, including six C.I.A. officers. It is believed that Mugniyah was involved in the simultaneous bombings, six months later, of the Marine barracks in Beirut, in which two hundred and forty-one died, and the French military barracks, a short distance away, in which fifty-eight died. Mugniyah is also thought to have been behind much of the hostage-taking in Lebanon in the mid-eighties, and some reports claim that he was personally involved in the torture of William Buckley, the C.I.A. Beirut station chief, who died in Hezbollah captivity. He has also been tied to the Khobar Towers bombing, in Saudi Arabia, six years ago, in which nineteen American servicemen were killed.
In 1985, two of Mugniyah's men hijacked a T.W.A. airplane, a Boeing 727, on a scheduled run between Athens and Rome. Almost immediately after seizing control, the hijackers, Hassan Izz-al-Din and Muhammad Ali Hamadi, began searching the plane for American servicemen. They soon discovered a group of Navy divers and a thirty-eight-year-old Army Reserve major named Kurt Carlson.
The hijackers were demanding the release of Shiite prisoners in Kuwait and more than seven hundred Shiite prisoners in Israel. Their behavior was erratic; they forced the plane to land in Beirut, then go to Algiers, and then fly back to Beirut. In Beirut, Izz-al-Din and Hamadi executed one of the divers, Robert Stethem, and dumped his body on the airport tarmac.
Carlson today lives in Rockford, Illinois; he is a builder, a friendly, small-boned man, who talks easily about his experience. On the tarmac in Algiers, Carlson said, Hamadi would preach the virtues of the Shiite revolution in Iran from the cockpit window to whoever happened to be listening below. "Every time Hamadi said the name Khomeini, Izz-al-Din would kick me in the back," Carlson said. Carlson was beaten steadily for several days, and his beatings intensified when the hijackers' demands for fuel weren't met. "They kept yelling, 'One American must die, one American must die,' " he said.
At one point, Carlson was dragged into the cockpit. "All of a sudden, I felt a blow, and I heard the captain yelling, 'They're beating and killing Americans! I need fuel!' Meanwhile, Hamadi was screaming in Arabic. He was hitting me with a steel pipe. When he got tired of hitting me with a pipe, he would drop-kick me two or three times. I wasn't making any sound, but I realized that the captain had kept the mike open, and that he wanted me to make sounds, to convince the tower to get us fuel. So I started grunting."
After the plane flew to Beirut the second time, American intelligence officials believe, Mugniyah boarded it; his fingerprints were reportedly identified in one of the bathrooms. American hostages were taken from the plane and dispersed around Beirut. Carlson, along with four of the surviving Navy divers, was put in the custody of the Shiite Amal militia, a less extreme radical group. The hostages were held in a basement, where they were subjected to mock executions and were fed intermittently.
"One day, we were told we had to speak to a visitor from Hezbollah," Carlson recalled. "They took us into another room. There was a bunch of guys there. One was a short guy with a beard. He just looked at us. The Amal guys who were our guards kept close to us. I felt like they were trying to protect us. This guy started asking us questions. Where we're from, what unit. All of a sudden, he let loose with a tirade. He spoke some English. I remember that his eyes were like glass. You could feel the hate coming out of him. He started screaming about the Israelis, how they're supported by the U.S. The Israelis were so bad they wouldn't consent to Red Cross visits to the Shiite prisoners. He was just screaming.
"One of the divers, Stuart Dahl, answered him," Carlson went on. "He said, 'If you believe in the rights of prisoners, you'll let the Red Cross see us.' This guy, the one who was screaming, just about fell over. He didn't expect anyone to answer him. They started talking among themselves, the Hezbollah guys. Now, there was the guy just behind the one who was screaming. I hadn't noticed him before. All of the Hezbollah guys turned to him. They spoke, and then he led them out of the room. I believe that that man was Imad Mugniyah." After seventeen days, Carlson and the remaining four Americans were freed.
Argentine police believe that Hezbollah worked in concert with its Iranian sponsors to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, an attack that killed twenty-nine people. Investigators suspect that Mugniyah may have visited the Triple Frontier two years later, when Hezbollah allegedly planned the suicide bombing of the Argentine-Jewish Mutual Association, or Jewish community center, known by its Spanish acronym, AMIA. The attack on the AMIA building, the deadliest anti-Semitic attack since the end of the Second World War, killed eighty-five people. The bombing profoundly disturbed Jewish communities throughout Latin America, and forced Jewish leaders to turn their synagogues and community centers into virtual fortresses. There are approximately two hundred thousand Jews in Argentina?it is South America's largest Jewish community?and today, spurred by the worst economic crisis in the country's history, many are leaving for Israel.
Twenty men have been on trial since late September of last year on charges related to the bombing, but these men?all of them Argentines?are considered by investigators to be secondary players in the attack. Alberto Nisman, one of the prosecutors, believes that the bombing succeeded in part because of lax oversight by the Paraguayan and Brazilian governments; Argentine officials believe that key participants in the attack entered Argentina through the Triple Frontier. V?ctor Hermoza, the Paraguayan interior minister, was skeptical. "The bomb could have been built anywhere," he said, adding that he does not believe that Hezbollah maintains terror cells in Paraguay. But Hezbollah is so deeply rooted in the Triple Frontier that, one Paraguayan official said, he believes that the bomb was almost certainly built in the area of Ciudad del Este. "It's impossible to believe that it wasn't," he said. "People were absolutely free here to do whatever they wanted."
Argentine officials have openly accused Iran of involvement in the bombing, and they have accused Hezbollah of carrying it out (the court has identified the man believed to be the suicide bomber but his name has not yet been released). Four of the defendants are police officers, who are accused of collaborating with the bombers. Charges that the police force in Argentina harbors officers with anti-Semitic tendencies have circulated for years.
The trial is being held in an Art Deco-style theatre in the basement of a courthouse near the harbor of Buenos Aires. Heavy mauve drapes cover the walls, and bulletproof glass separates the spectators from the defendants. On the day that I visited, early this year, the building was watched by snipers in flak jackets and police on horseback. In the courtroom, a survivor of the bombing was describing what had happened when a white Renault van holding a six-hundred-pound bomb was driven into the seven-story AMIA building?and the explosion sheared off its front.
Earlier this year, it was disclosed that a man calling himself Abdolghassem Mesbahi, who claimed to be an Iranian intelligence official, had told investigators that former President Carlos Sa?l Menem of Argentina maintained close relations with Iran and took a ten-million-dollar bribe to cover up Iran's involvement in the bombing. Menem, who is of Syrian descent, has denied the charge. He hopes to run again for President.
Lawyers for the Jewish community have used Mesbahi's testimony, along with information gathered in Argentina and abroad, to construct a time line of activities leading up to the bombing. The head lawyer, Marta Nercellas, described to me a plot that was set in motion at 4:30 P.M. on August 14, 1993, in a Tehran office belonging to the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. According to the time line, the Ministry, with the involvement of the minister, Ali Fallahian, asked a team made up of Lebanese Hezbollah operatives and its own agents, many of whom worked under diplomatic cover, to plan the attack.
An important figure in the plot, according to Nercellas and other investigators, was Mohsen Rabbani, an Iranian who was appointed to the Buenos Aires Embassy as a cultural attach? just a few months before the bombing. Rabbani, who was barred from Argentina after evidence of his involvement began to emerge, is believed to have been a few blocks away from the AMIA building in the minutes before the attack.
Alberto Nisman hopes that information will come out during testimony that will allow Argentine authorities to pursue the actual conspirators, including Rabbani. But Nisman says that he is focussed on the man who they think orchestrated the bombing: Imad Mugniyah. Standing outside the courtroom during a recess, Nisman said, "Mugniyah would be the ultimate. That is our target."
Not only Mugniyah has eluded capture; so have his associates. Hamadi, the T.W.A. hijacker believed by Carlson to have shot Robert Stethem, was captured several years ago in Germany, and he is now in prison there, but Izz-al-Din is, like Mugniyah, thought to be in either Lebanon or Iran.
The United States has come close to arresting Mugniyah at least twice. In 1985, American intelligence learned that Mugniyah was in Paris. According to Duane Clarridge, a former chief of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorist Center, the French refused to help, apparently because they were negotiating with Mugniyah for the release of French hostages in Lebanon. Several years later, American officials informed the Saudi government that Mugniyah was due to arrive in Saudi Arabia; in an effort to keep the United States from acting against Mugniyah on Saudi soil, the Saudis refused to let the plane land.
When I spoke to Hezbollah officials in Beirut, they denied knowing anything about Mugniyah; Hezbollah's allies call him a figment of the Israeli-influenced American imagination. Only one person in the Hezbollah orbit acknowledged even having heard of Mugniyah: the leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a man named Ramadan Abdallah Shallah. Palestinian Islamic Jihad is closely allied with Hezbollah; both are on the payroll of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
In Damascus in February, I asked Shallah about Mugniyah and Hezbollah. Shallah is not unschooled in public relations. (Before becoming the leader of Islamic Jihad, he served as an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa.) He laughed when I asked about Mugniyah's current role in Hezbollah. "That's a name from history," he said, before summarily ending the conversation.
The Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafiq Hariri, told me that Mugniyah was not in his country. But in Lebanon it is rumored that Mugniyah sits on the eight-member ruling council of Hezbollah and that he is active under various names, including Jawad Nour-al-Din. Intelligence officials, while unsure?or unwilling to talk?about Mugniyah's day-to-day operations, believe that he is in charge of Hezbollah's worldwide network of cells. They also say that in recent years he has paid more attention to operations inside Israel. For instance, in 1996 a man whose passport identified him as Andrew Jonathan Neumann nearly killed himself when a bomb he was preparing in an East Jerusalem hotel detonated prematurely. Neumann, Israeli investigators learned, was a Lebanese Shiite named Hussein Mohammad Mikdad, who told the Israelis that he had been sent to Israel by Mugniyah to blow up a civilian airliner.
Mugniyah's name came up early this year during the Karine-A affair, in which a ship loaded with Iranian weapons intended for the Palestinian Authority was intercepted by Israel in the Red Sea. Intelligence officials believe that Mugniyah helped organize the shipment, which suggests that he has maintained contacts with Yasir Arafat, his original employer.
Terrorism experts say that Mugniyah's organization is hard to penetrate because it is in certain ways a family business. Many of the men under his command?there are thought to be several hundred?are from one of three Lebanese Shiite clans, one of which is his, and another that of a brother-in-law, Mustafa Badr-adeen. The men are trained in camps in the Bekaa Valley and Iran; intelligence sources told me that Mugniyah, in co?peration with Iran's Ministry of Intelligence, also has a base on the Iranian shore of the Caspian Sea, where his men are trained in SEAL-style operations. Although Mugniyah has concentrated on anti-Jewish activities, he is believed to have the capability to strike at America; his agents have conducted video surveillance of possible American targets in South America and Southeast Asia, and he is suspected of having established links with Al Qaeda. According to the testimony of Ali Mohamed, a former U.S. soldier who conspired in the Al Qaeda bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and who trained Osama bin Laden's security detail, Mugniyah met with bin Laden in Sudan in the mid-nineteen-nineties to discuss joint strategy. "Hezbollah provided explosives training for Al Qaeda and Al Jihad," he said. "Iran supplied Egyptian Islamic Jihad with weapons. Iran also used Hezbollah to supply explosives that were disguised to look like rocks."
Bush Administration officials have suggested that the United States will strike at Hezbollah in what some are calling "Phase Three" of the war on terror, and there is pressure within the government to settle accounts with Mugniyah. Any action taken against him, however, would almost certainly bring a Hezbollah response. After Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage declared, in September, that Hezbollah would eventually become an American target, the group's chief spokesman, Hassan Ezzeddin, issued a statement on Nasrallah's behalf. "The American administration will be held accountable for any offensive against Lebanon," the statement read, "and we emphasize that we are in full readiness to confront any eventuality and defend our people."
But others believe that Hezbollah might attack American interests regardless of American actions in Lebanon. "Any number of things could provoke Hezbollah," Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation, says. For example, Iran could activate Hezbollah terror cells to carry out attacks. The Iranians might do this, Hoffman and others say, if they felt threatened by America's anti-terror campaign. "We see our role as bringing stability, and in situations like Lebanon stability rewards the status quo," he told me. "Stability is anathema to a revolutionary movement like Hezbollah."
One intelligence official suggested that Iran sees Mugniyah's overseas network as a kind of life insurance. "If Iran becomes the focus of Phase Three, it could send a message to the U.S. that it is not like Iraq, that it has the means to strike us at home, with a network of cells that it placed here a long time ago," he said. "The Iranians wouldn't take credit for blowing up a McDonald's, but we would know, and they would know we know."
It is not unusual for the JR Tobacco warehouse in Statesville, North Carolina, to sell cigarettes in great quantities. Federal law allows a person to buy up to two hundred and ninety-nine cartons of cigarettes at one time, and few people in North Carolina, a tobacco-growing state, object. Still, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when a group of olive-skinned men began visiting JR Tobacco, carrying shopping bags filled with cash and walking out with two hundred and ninety-nine cartons each, Bob Fromme, an off-duty detective with the Iredell County Sheriff's Office who was working as a security guard at the warehouse, found it worthy of note.
"I thought they were Mexicans at first," Fromme told me. "There was a group of six of them who would come in on a regular basis. They would go through the store, get the cigarettes, one guy would stand at the register, and each person would then get two hundred and ninety-nine cartons. The one guy would just keep paying for all of them." Fromme said he realized that these men were not speaking Spanish: "I knew soon enough that it was Arabic."
On his own time, Fromme began following the men, and trying to interest law-enforcement agencies in what he thought was a gang of cigarette smugglers. "I called the State Attorney General's office and told them what we had, but they didn't want the case," Fromme said. "The State Bureau of Investigation didn't want it, either."
But the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms opened an investigation, and brought Fromme into it. "In the spring of 1999, we were set to go, with searches and warrants and indictments," Fromme said. "Then the F.B.I. came and said, 'We're working these guys from a different angle. Give us everything you've got. We can't tell you what we're doing.' "
Fromme and the A.T.F. investigators soon learned what the F.B.I. knew: that the smugglers, led by a Lebanese immigrant, Mohamad Youssef Hammoud, were members of a Hezbollah cell in Charlotte, North Carolina, that in the course of a year and a half sold $7.9 million worth of cigarettes illegally in Michigan and sent some of the profits to Hezbollah in Lebanon. About a year after the F.B.I. entered the picture, ten members of the ring were arrested on racketeering charges. Eight of the ten pleaded guilty before going to trial; in June, a federal jury found Hammoud guilty of providing aid to a terrorist organization.
According to Kenneth Bell, the lead prosecutor, the case was built this way: Mohamad Hammoud ran a prayer meeting every Thursday?a meeting attended by Said Harb, a longtime friend of a man named Mohamad Hassan Dbouk. Dbouk was receiving instructions from Hassan Hilu Laqis, a Hezbollah official based in Lebanon, who was in charge of Hezbollah's North American procurement operation. A fax intercepted by Canadian intelligence suggested that Dbouk worked for Imad Mugniyah. In the fax, Dbouk "is assuring Laqis that he is doing everything he can" for Hezbollah, Bell told me. "At one point, he says that he is willing to do anything?and he says, 'I mean anything'?for someone they refer to as 'the father.' I believe 'the father' is a reference to Mugniyah." Dbouk was indicted in the North Carolina case, but he is now thought to be in Lebanon.
According to the indictment, Hezbollah officials in Lebanon asked the cell members in North America to buy such items as computers, night-vision equipment, mine-detection devices, global-positioning devices, and advanced aircraft-analysis software. Bell said he did not know how much of the equipment requested by Hezbollah was shipped to Lebanon. Wiretaps revealed that Hezbollah members discussed buying life-insurance policies for operatives who "might in a short period of time go for a 'walk' and 'never come back,' " the indictment reads.
The North Carolina operation is not the only Hezbollah cell to have been discovered in the United States. Asa Hutchinson, the director of the Drug Enforcement Administration, told me recently that his agents discovered a drug-trafficking ring in the Midwest that was sending some of its proceeds to Hezbollah.
There is no proof that the cells are capable of violent acts. But investigators in North Carolina found anti-American propaganda among the belongings of several of the cell members. "I believe that the structure was in place to carry out a command," the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, Bob Conrad, says. Among the items investigators found when they broke up the Charlotte group was a series of photographs taken in Washington, D.C. In one of them, a member of the cell stands in front of the Washington Monument, smiling. In another, two members are posing in front of the White House.
(This is the second part of a two-part article.)
-
Bowser,
It is great to seek a higher plane, but one cannot lose focus upon the reality of events around them.
Fear nothing? That sounds like a slogan from the 60's. Those who fear nothing make mistakes killing themsleves and others.
Would you say fear nothing to a person in Israel right now? Or in Lebanon? Or to a New Yorker on 9-12?
Honr the threat...and fear it. Especially when it involves Islamic Fascists.
-
Bowser claims:
Looks like you missed the 'higher consciousness' goal of the Dog Brothers
When you make hard contact, I'll seek higher consciousness. Nothing you've posted suggests that is likely to occur.
I fail to find a non sequiteur in my post, please explain why you suggested that there is one.
I find the link between "your righteous duty to ?deveop? your fighting abilities" and "mass market global military war," whatever that is, to be tenuous at best. Though I understand it's de rigueur in certain, to my mind lazy, intellectual circles to cite Madison Avenue, Hollywood, "cultural imperialism," et al when indicting America, slinging together terms like "mass market global military war" has more to do with disjointed jingoism than with any sort of meaningful analysis or discussion.
Bottom line is that I fail to understand what your ends are here. If you are looking to sway people your rhetoric needs work.
-
Bowser,
I would assume if someone invaded your small piece of land in NZ then you would do whatever it took to defend it.
Don't you believe that Israel also has the right to self defense?
Please excuse my ignorance but what is a "watcher"?
Myke Willis
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hunker Down With History
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, July 18, 2006; A19
The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.
This is why the Israeli-Arab war, now transformed into the Israeli-Muslim war (Iran is not an Arab state), persists and widens. It is why the conflict mutates and festers. It is why Israel is now fighting an organization, Hezbollah, that did not exist 30 years ago and why Hezbollah is being supported by a nation, Iran, that was once a tacit ally of Israel's. The underlying, subterranean hatred of the Jewish state in the Islamic world just keeps bubbling to the surface. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and some other Arab countries may condemn Hezbollah, but I doubt the proverbial man in their street shares that view.
There is no point in condemning Hezbollah. Zealots are not amenable to reason. And there's not much point, either, in condemning Hamas. It is a fetid, anti-Semitic outfit whose organizing principle is hatred of Israel. There is, though, a point in cautioning Israel to exercise restraint -- not for the sake of its enemies but for itself. Whatever happens, Israel must not use its military might to win back what it has already chosen to lose: the buffer zone in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip itself.
Hard-line critics of Ariel Sharon, the now-comatose Israeli leader who initiated the pullout from Gaza, always said this would happen: Gaza would become a terrorist haven. They said that the moderate Palestinian Authority would not be able to control the militants and that Gaza would be used to fire rockets into Israel and to launch terrorist raids. This is precisely what has happened.
It is also true, as some critics warned, that Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon was seen by its enemies -- and claimed by Hezbollah -- as a defeat for the mighty Jewish state. Hezbollah took credit for this, as well it should. Its persistent attacks bled Israel. In the end, Israel got out and the United Nations promised it a secure border. The Lebanese army would see to that. (And the check is in the mail.)
All that the critics warned has come true. But worse than what is happening now would be a retaking of those territories. That would put Israel smack back to where it was, subjugating a restless, angry population and having the world look on as it committed the inevitable sins of an occupying power. The smart choice is to pull back to defensible -- but hardly impervious -- borders. That includes getting out of most of the West Bank -- and waiting (and hoping) that history will get distracted and move on to something else. This will take some time, and in the meantime terrorism and rocket attacks will continue.
In his forthcoming book, "The War of the World," the admirably readable British historian Niall Ferguson devotes considerable space to the horrific history of the Jews in 19th- and 20th-century Europe. Never mind the Holocaust. In 1905 there were pogroms in 660 different places in Russia, and more than 800 Jews were killed -- all this in a period of less than two weeks. This was the reality of life for many of Europe's Jews.
Little wonder so many of them emigrated to the United States, Canada, Argentina or South Africa. Little wonder others embraced the dream of Zionism and went to Palestine, first a colony of Turkey and later of Britain. They were in effect running for their lives. Most of those who remained -- 97.5 percent of Poland's Jews, for instance -- were murdered in the Holocaust.
Another gifted British historian, Tony Judt, wraps up his recent book "Postwar" with an epilogue on how the sine qua non of the modern civilized state is recognition of the Holocaust. Much of the Islamic world, notably Iran under its Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stands outside that circle, refusing to make even a little space for the Jews of Europe and, later, those from the Islamic world. They see Israel not as a mistake but as a crime. Until they change their view, the longest war of the 20th century will persist deep into the 21st. It is best for Israel to hunker down.
cohenr@washpost.com
-
Regarding the war on terror, I believe that the best way to fight it is quite simply by fearing nothing.
Been there, done that, didn't work.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
For almost 2000 years starting with the destruction of the temple Jews feared nothing. They took what the world had to dish out believing that god would protect and provide. But in the 1900s they got tired of this attitude because it was not producing visible beneficial results. The young rebelled against their elders in the Warsaw ghetto. Against overwhelming odds they took on the NAZI army of extermination. That worked better, they now have a state to call their own and they are not going to roll over and die for some mythical appeasing "higher consciousness" that seems to exist only in the minds of their adversaries.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
Katyusha rockets raining down from the heavens is not enjoyable therefore we have to stop it from happening.
-
[Israel] is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.
By Cohen's measure, America was also a mistake, the native Americans took quite a toll on the colonials. The Washington Post would not exist if the American Founding Fathers had taken Cohen's advice and gone back where they came from. Where does that leave Cohen's view of history?
-
Captianccs,
I hope you are not suggesting that the Israeli's use genicide as a tactic against their Arab neighbors. Like the Anglo's used against the native tribes of the America's.
Myke
-
I think that Captainccs was just trying to show the faulty thinking of Cohen.
-
I think that Captainccs was just trying to show the faulty thinking of Cohen.
Thank you for clearing that up for Myke "xtremekali."
-
Captianccs,
I hope you are not suggesting that the Israeli's use genicide as a tactic against their Arab neighbors. Like the Anglo's used against the native tribes of the America's.
Myke
I don't think the colonials "used genocide against the native tribes of the Americas" but I don't care to argue the point at this time. I just wanted to show that Cohen misunderstands or misrepresents history as a way to attack Israel. Israel is not a mistake.
-
Captianccs,
I have no problem with Israel. All for their right to self defense. But when you bring up the treatment of how the Anglos treated the native tribes. Then I will speak up. When you talk about genocide and the stealing of land then the Anglos are experts.
Take it from Shis Inde.
Myke (Pastme-oma)
-
Regarding the war on terror, I believe that the best way to fight it is quite simply by fearing nothing.
Been there, done that, didn't work.
.[/quote]
It works for me, so I am sticking to it.. . . doesn't prevent actual fighting either. . . just prevents fear, which helps with everything, that's why i said it's the best way, it's kind of prior to everything else. . . at least that's my way of seeing it. No fear makes terrorism impossible by definition !
:D
-
But when you bring up the treatment of how the Anglos treated the native tribes. Then I will speak up. When you talk about genocide and the stealing of land then the Anglos are experts.
Take it from Shis Inde.
Myke (Pastme-oma)
Yes, I see that you do speak up and you have every right to do so. What I don't understand is what it has to do with anything I said. I said that Cohen is mistaken about history and I used America an example. I could have used any other piece of land conquered by invaders. England, for example, invaded by just about everybody from Romans to Danes. I could have used Spain invaded by Moors, I could have used Mesopotamia invaded by Turks, I could have used Hungary invaded by Huns, I could have used Russia invaded by Vikings. But it just so happens that Mr. Cohen works in Washington for the Washington Post so it made sense to stick to close quarters.
From the piece I deduce that Mr. Cohen is attacking Israel based on a flawed view of history or possibly by a willful misrepresentation of history and making that statement was my only objective. Although, as I said earlier, you have very right to bash Anglos if that is your preference, I fail to see what it has to do with my post.
What is "Shis Inde?"
What is "Pastme-oma?"
-
Bowser,
I would assume if someone invaded your small piece of land in NZ then you would do whatever it took to defend it.
Don't you believe that Israel also has the right to self defense?
Please excuse my ignorance but what is a "watcher"?
Myke Willis
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Correct xtremekali. . . I would defend it, ideally without fear. Note however that they would have to actually invade, I will not fight in their territory.
Of course Israelis have the right to self defence, but not sure if Israel has the right to take war outside its territory
Crafty Dog speaks of the watcher. . . activating the watcher as you enter the adrenal state . . . it's a higher consciousness, one's higher self. . . . I would like to hear from Crafty Dog on the subject, I am sure that he has a lot to share after more than 140 Dog Brothers fights.
:idea:
-
Of course Israelis have the right to self defence, but not sure if Israel has the right to take war outside its territory
By this reasoning, the Allies should not have bombed and invaded Japan or Germany in WWII, they should have just stayed in their own territory until Japan and Germany got tired of invading. Does not sound practical to me. :(
No fear makes terrorism impossible by definition !
If I'm fearless, then no Katyusha rocket can fall on my house? Defies logic. :?
-
Of course Israelis have the right to self defence, but not sure if Israel has the right to take war outside its territory
By this reasoning, the Allies should not have bombed and invaded Japan or Germany in WWII, they should have just stayed in their own territory until Japan and Germany got tired of invading. Does not sound practical to me. :(
I said that i am not sure. . . that's what I meant. . . I can only speak with absolute certainty regarding my own territory and tactics.
No fear makes terrorism impossible by definition !
If I'm fearless, then no Katyusha rocket can fall on my house? Defies logic. :?
It can but it is less likely to. . . . fear attracts that which is feared
.
-
Captiancss,
Shis Inde is the correct name of the tribe called Apache.
Pastme-oma is my native name.
Myke
-
Let Israel Take Off the Gloves
Author: Max Boot, Senior Fellow for National Security Studies
July 19, 2006
Los Angeles Times
A lot has been written in recent years about stateless terrorism. The events of the last few weeks show, to the contrary, that some of the world?s most malignant terrorist groups continue to rely on state support. Hamas runs its own quasi-state?the Palestinian Authority. Hezbollah is a state-within-a-state in Lebanon. And lurking behind both are the real troublemakers: Iran and Syria.
The current crisis exposes the inadequacy of American policy toward this new axis of evil. The problem is not, as so many have it, that President Bush?s ?cowboy diplomacy? has unsettled the region?s vaunted stability. It is that Bush hasn?t been enough of a cowboy.
Working with France, the U.S. succeeded last year in forcing Syrian troops out of Lebanon, thus allowing free elections to be held. But Lebanese democracy will remain hollow until Hezbollah disarms in accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, something that no one has been willing to enforce?until now.
The U.S. should have done more to stop Syria from supporting not only the terrorists targeting Israel but those targeting U.S. troops in Iraq. Syrian strongman Bashar Assad appeared to be down for the count when a U.N. investigation found evidence linking his regime to the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. But Bush let him get up off the mat. Senior U.S. officials keep proclaiming that Syria?s support for terrorism is unacceptable, but by not doing more to stop it, they have tacitly accepted it.
The same is true of Iran. The mullahs continue to develop nuclear weapons and smuggle explosives into Iraq, and our only response has been talk and more talk. Perhaps this is a prelude to eventual military action, but in the meantime the administration should have done more to aid internal foes of the mullahocracy. It has taken until no?five years into the Bush presidency?for the U.S. to commit any serious money ($66 million) for Iranian democracy promotion, and the State Department has blocked efforts on Capitol Hill to spend even more.
The Jewish state is now paying the price for American inaction. The Katyusha, Kassam and Fajr rockets raining down on Israel are either made by Iran or with Iranian assistance. The same is true of the C-802 cruise missile that hit an Israeli warship. Syria facilitates the delivery of these weapons and provides a haven for Hamas political head Khaled Meshaal. The Iranians and Syrians are as culpable for the aggression against Israel as if they had been pulling the triggers themselves?which, for all we know, they may have been.
And world leaders such as Vladimir V. Putin (he of the scorched-earth policy in Chechnya) have the chutzpah to criticize Israel for its ?disproportionate? response? What would a proportionate Israeli response to the snatching of its soldiers and the bombardment of its soil look like? Should Israel kidnap low-level Hamas and Hezbollah operatives? Those organizations wouldn?t mind in the slightest; they want as many martyrs as possible.
The real problem is that Israel?s response has been all too proportional. So far it has only gone after Hamas and Hezbollah. (Some collateral damage is inevitable because these groups hide among civilians.) Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is showing superhuman restraint by not, at the very least, ?accidentally? bombing the Syrian and Iranian embassies in Beirut, which serve as Hezbollah liaison offices.
It?s hard to know what accounts for this Israeli restraint, for which, of course, it gets no thanks. It may just be a matter of time before the gloves come off. Or Olmert may be afraid of upsetting the regional status quo. The American neocon agenda of regime change is not one that finds favor with most Israelis (ironic, considering how often the rest of the world has denounced neocons as Mossad agents). The Israeli attitude toward neighboring dictators is ?better the devil you know.? That may make sense with Jordan and Egypt, which have made peace with Israel, but not with Syria, which serves as a vital conduit between Tehran and Hamas and Hezbollah.
Iran may be too far away for much Israeli retaliation beyond a single strike on its nuclear weapons complex. (Now wouldn?t be a bad time.) But Syria is weak and next door. To secure its borders, Israel needs to hit the Assad regime. Hard. If it does, it will be doing Washington?s dirty work. Our best response is exactly what Bush has done so far?reject premature calls for a cease-fire and let Israel finish the job.
This article appears in full on CFR.org by permission of its original publisher. It was originally available here
-
Hezbollah negotiator rejects peace proposal
Rice holds tense meetings with parliament speaker in surprise Beirut visit
The Associated Press
Updated: 2:22 p.m. CT July 24, 2006
BEIRUT, Lebanon - Lebanon?s parliament speaker, Hezbollah?s de facto negotiator, rejected proposals brought by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday, insisting a cease-fire must precede any talks about resolving Hezbollah?s presence in the south, an official close to the speaker said.
An official close to parliament speaker Nabih Berri said his talks with Rice failed to ?reach an agreement because Rice insisted on one full package to end the fighting.?
The package included a cease-fire, simultaneous with the deployment of the Lebanese army and an international force in south Lebanon and the removal of Hezbollah weapons from a buffer zone extending 30 kilometers from the Israeli border, said the official. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were private.
Berri rejected the package, proposing instead a two-phased plan. First would come a cease-fire and negotiations for a prisoner swap. Then an inter-Lebanese dialogue would work out a solution to the situation in south Lebanon, said the official.
Root cause of violence
The United States has insisted that no cease-fire can take place without dealing with what it calls the root cause of the violence ? Hezbollah?s domination of the south along the Israeli border. Israel has rejected any halt in the fighting until two soldiers captured by the guerrillas are freed and the guerrillas are forced back.
The U.S. has said an international force might be necessary to help the Lebanese army move into the south. The central government has long refused to send the army in, insisting Hezbollah is a legitimate force and fearing that doing so would tear apart the country because of the guerrillas?s strength.
In her surprise visit to a battered Beirut, Rice met for about 45 minutes with Berri, an ally of Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and considered friendly to Syria, which held political and military sway in Lebanon for decades before pulling out troops last year.
Berri is an influential figure in Lebanon?s complicated and factionalized political structure. Although the United States considers Hezbollah a terrorist group and has no dealings with it, Rice has met with Berri before. She could use her discussions with him to send an indirect message to Hezbollah, and to try applying pressure on Syria.
?Backwards 50 years?
Rice also met with Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora, who told her that his government is looking to ?put an end to the war that is being inflicted on Lebanon.? Bush administration officials have so far said that a cease-fire would be premature unless it addresses the threat Hezbollah fighters pose to Israel.
Rice?s talks with Prime Minister Fuad Saniora appeared to have been tense. Saniora told Rice that Israel?s bombardment was taking his country ?backwards 50 years? and also called for a ?swift cease-fire,? the prime minister?s office said.
In a sign of the differences between the United States and Lebanon, Saniora presented his own package for a permanent solution that contained long-standing Lebanese complaints that must be addressed before ?Lebanese authority can be spread over all areas,? his office said.
It included a call for a ?swift cease-fire.? Then would come an over-all solution guaranteeing the return of Lebanese prisoners held by Israel, Israel?s withdrawal from the Chebaa Farms ? a tiny border region that Lebanon claims ? and the provision of minefields lain in south Lebanon during its 18-year occupation of the region.
Rice?s five-hour visit, which opened her trip to the Middle East, marked the first high-level U.S. diplomatic mission to the area since fighting erupted 13 days ago. Her stay was marked by tight security as motorcades whisked her through a pummeled capital city, passing cross streets that were blocked off by armed Lebanese security forces.
?Thank you for your courage and steadfastness,? Rice told Saniora after he greeted her with a kiss on both cheeks.
Rice arrived in Israel late Monday as darkness fell. She planned to meet with her Israeli counterpart, foreign minister Tzipi Livni.
Blair: ?Enormous diplomatic efforts?
In Washington, meanwhile, the White House announced that President Bush has ordered helicopters and ships to Lebanon to provide humanitarian aid. Presidential spokesman Tony Snow said Rice discussed the assistance with Lebanese officials during her visit would announce the U.S. commitment later in the day as she continued on to Israel.
Rice and Saniora shook hands across a conference table on which there were two flags, one Lebanese and one American. Half a dozen other diplomats sat around the table.
Though south Beirut has been heavily targeted by Israel because it is home to Hezbollah leaders, there have been no bombings in the city since Sunday afternoon. Reporters with Rice heard no explosions during their brief stay.
Rice said President Bush wanted her to make Lebanon the first stop on her trip to the region, which has been embroiled in combat between Israel and Hezbollah since July 12. It was her third visit to Lebanon and was intended to make a show of support and concern for both the Saniora government and the Lebanese people, administration officials said.
Meanwhile, Britain hopes a peace plan will emerge for Lebanon within days that could lead to a cessation of hostilities, Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Monday.
?There have been as you might expect over the past few days enormous diplomatic efforts to get us to the point where I hope at some point within the next few days we can say very clearly what our plan is to bring about an immediate cessation of hostilities,? Blair said during a news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in London.
Rice also met with members of the Lebanese parliament who have been staunch opponents of Syria?s influence in Lebanon. She was also scheduled to travel to Israel and to Rome, where she expected to meet with officials of European and moderate Arab governments.
Saniora and other Lebanese officials have been pushing Rice to call for an immediate cease-fire, something the Bush administration has resisted on grounds that it would not address the root causes of hostilities ? Hezbollah?s domination of south Lebanon.
?We all want to urgently end the fighting. We have absolutely the same goal,? Rice told reporters traveling with her.
Stringent security
Rice?s mission took a dramatic turn with her surprise arrival here under stringent security. Under heavy guard, Rice flew by helicopter over the Mediterranean from Cyprus. Her motorcade sped through Beirut on the way to her meeting with Saniora.
R. Nicholas Burns, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, said Monday that Rice will seek to use ?our influence to see if there can be a cessation of hostilities.?
However, he told CBS? ?The Early Show,? any cease-fire would have to be long-lasting and involve a removal of Hezbollah rockets on the Israeli-Lebanese border and a return of Israeli soldiers taken captive.
En route to the region, Rice discussed the role of Syria, which the U.S. considers one of the world?s state sponsors of terror. In recent weeks, the Bush administration has blamed it, along with Iran, for stoking the recent violence in the Middle East by encouraging the Lebanese Hezbollah militia to attack northern Israel.
Rice pointed out that there are existing channels for talking with Syrian leaders about resolving the Middle East crisis when they?re ready to talk.
Diplomacy from all sides
Egypt and Saudi Arabia are working to entice Syria to end support for Hezbollah, a move that is central to resolving the conflict in Lebanon and unhitching Damascus from its alliance with Iran, the Shiite Muslim guerrillas? other main backer.
Arab diplomats in Cairo said the United States had signaled a willingness to re-engage Syria through Washington?s encouragement of the Egyptians and Saudis to lean on Damascus to stop backing Hezbollah.
In a brazen raid into Israel on July 12, Hezbollah killed eight and captured two Israeli soldiers, provoking Israel?s biggest military campaign against Lebanon in 24 years. The fighting has left hundreds of civilians dead, mostly in Lebanon.
? 2006 The Associated Press.
-
I am in the Bay Area at the moment interviewing a Filipino master and will probably return home on Wednesday. I will try to comment by Thursday.
CD
-
Why don't they sue Hezbollah in Lebanon? :lol:
Arab-American Group Sues U.S. For Slow Lebanon Evacuation :roll:
Monday, July 24, 2006
WASHINGTON ? A leading Arab-American advocacy group has sued the U.S. government, claiming that it failed to protect American citizens from the fighting in Lebanon.
The lawsuit, filed Monday on behalf of about 30 American citizens by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, alleges that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld did not take all possible steps to secure the safety and well being of U.S. citizens when fighting erupted between Israel and Hezbollah guerillas.
The committee is asking the U.S. District Court in Detroit to order the U.S. government to request a cease fire and to stop shipments of weapons or any other military support to Israel during the evacuation of U.S. citizens from Lebanon.
"We just feel the U.S. government has put its citizens at risk by supplying missiles when many U.S. citizens are still there," said Nabih Ayad, lead lawyer for the committee and the citizens who were all in Lebanon. Ayad said a few included in the lawsuit are still trying to leave the country.
"We're not trying to interfere with the war, we just want to protect our U.S. citizens and try to bring them back," Ayad said.
U.S. Consul William Gill said most Americans who wanted to leave Lebanon had done so by Sunday and U.S. evacuation efforts were nearly complete. He also urged anyone considering leaving to make up their minds quickly as fighting between Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah guerrillas showed no sign of waning.
About 12,000 Americans have been evacuated from Lebanon, officials said. Some 25,000 U.S. citizens were believed to be in Lebanon at the start of hostilities.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,205348,00.html
-
Jul. 23, 2006 14:20 | Updated Jul. 23, 2006 17:53
Iran: Israel doomed to 'destruction'
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
TEHERAN
Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declared Sunday that Israel had "pushed the button of its own destruction" by launching its military campaign against the Iranian-backed Hizbullah in Lebanon.
Ahmadinejad didn't elaborate, but suggested Islamic nations and others could somehow isolate Israel and its main backers led by the United States. On Saturday, the chairman of Iran's armed forced joint chiefs, Maj.-Gen. Sayyed Hassan Firuzabadi, said Iran would never join the current Middle East fighting.
Ahmadinejad's latest salvo against Israel came as the 12-day-old hostilities in Lebanon continued. The hard-line president drew international condemnation last year after publicly calling for Israel to be wiped out and calling the Holocaust a "myth."
Iran helped create the anti-Israel Hizbullah movement in the early 1980s and is among its main supplier of arms and funds. But Teheran has denied Israeli claims it is sent Hizbullah long-range missiles that have reached Haifa and other points in northern Israel since the battles broke out nearly two weeks ago following a cross-border Hizbullah raid that captured two Israeli soldiers.
"Britain and the United States are accomplices of the Zionist regime in its crimes in Lebanon and Palestine," said Ahmadinejad.
He said "the people of the region will respond" unless Israel and its allies apologize for their policies.
"Arrogant powers have set up a base for themselves to threaten and plunder nations in the region," said Ahmadinejad. "But today, the occupier regime (Israel) - whose philosophy is based on threats, massacre and invasion - has reached its finishing line."
Last week, Ahmadinejad sent a letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel that contained statements about Israel and the Holocaust that are "not acceptable," said German officials.
Germany has sharply criticized Ahmadinejad's anti-Israel statements.
In Teheran, the government has sanctioned billboards showing Hizbullah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and a message that it is the duty of Muslims to "wipe out" Israel. Officials also organized a demonstration in the southern city of Shiraz by Iran's small Jewish community calling for Israel's destruction and praising Hizbullah.
-
Hi All,
I got this email from my cousin who is currently working for an NGO in Kabul. Found it interesting thought I would share. I removed her and her boyfriends name.
Dear Friends and Family,
Greetings from Kabul. To be honest it's getting a little scary. Aside from the occasional suicide bombing in Kabul, last week Karzai decided to reinstate the Department for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice - which existed during the Taliban time. This department was responsible for ensuring that Afghans we're living as "good Muslims", and went to great lengths to ensure they lived accordingly. Well 2 days ago, some people from the Department (this isn't confirmed but it's what everyone is suspecting) went to one of the restaurants that were serving alcohol and beat up and arrested the owner, and destroyed all the alcohol in sight. now no restaurants are allowed to serve alcohol, even to non-Muslims. Needless to say people will be flocking to the liquor stores this weekend to stock up. i was going to go, but S***** said not to because you never know who is watching you. Yeah, it's a little scary right now. The department also issued letters to restaurants prohibiting men and women from sitting together in public. It doesn't matter if they are expatriates or not. How is any of this progress?
Apparently Karzai did it to gain tribal support, especially in the south, which btw is a full on war. It's so crazy down there. NGOs have either pulled out or put their programs on hold. And what makes me really angry is that many of our donors are withdrawing funding from our programme areas and diverting aid funding to provinces like Helmand and Kandahar. Not to say that these provinces don't need aid, but how can you deliver aid when you're busy dodging bullets?! There is absolutely no security down there. It makes absolutely no sense to me. And what is going to happen to the provinces that were once receiving aid and aren't any more.
On top of that a lot of donor funding is going into "Good Governance" initiatives, which mostly consists of establishing democratic institutions at the village level. This would be fine, but what many donors don't understand is that you just can't fund governance activities. I mean, now you've got this democratically elected village body. You've given them basically literacy and numeracy skills, and maybe some training in village planning. But if we don't support this structure with additional funds for development projects then what are these institutions supposed to do? They don't have money to do anything let alone operate. And what this does is just breed discontent in the village that development money isn't helping relieve any of the poverty. It's so frustrating I tell you.
Anyway, I'm sorry I needed to vent.
Hope everyone is well.
-S
-
Hezbollah: Party Of Cowards
Posted 7/25/2006
Global War On Terror: After the standard condemnation of Israel for defending itself, the U.N. humanitarian chief rightly attacked Hezbollah for its "cowardly blending" among civilians. Where have we seen this before?
Speaking to reporters at Cyprus' Larnaca Airport on Monday after a visit to Lebanon to coordinate international relief efforts, Jan Egeland issued the standard denunciation of Israel for using "disproportionate" force and for violating "international humanitarian law."
But he said something else, something that indicates that even the East River elites are beginning to recognize the calling card of terrorists ? the use of civilians and even entire nations as human shields.
"Consistently, from the Hezbollah heartland, my message was that Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending . . . among women and children," he said. "I heard they were proud because they lost very few fighters and that it was the civilians who bore the brunt of this. I don't think anyone should be proud of having many more children and women dead than armed men."
Members of Hezbollah, like the terrorist groups in Iraq, do not follow the rules of war. They do not wear uniforms to distinguish themselves from the civilian population. They routinely store their weapons in civilian homes and fire them from civilian neighborhoods. Then they scurry back to their hiding places.
Like the Nazi V-1 and V-2 rockets of World War II, Hezbollah's rockets and missiles are not aimed at military targets, but at the heart of cities and towns. They and their warheads are designed to indiscriminately kill and maim civilians.
As Middle East expert Kenneth Timmerman notes on Newsmax.com, the Katyusha rockets Hezbollah is raining down on northern Israeli towns, including the port city of Haifa, are different from the ones that the Soviets fired during World War II. Those carried standard explosive warheads.
Hezbollah's Syrian-made 220 mm version is stuffed with 40,000 ball bearings packed into a warhead containing 88 pounds of explosives. A longer-range version, the Chinese-made Raed, has also been supplied to Hezbollah by Iran.
The bearings are expelled at lethal velocity when the missile hits its target. Anyone within a 50-yard radius will be seriously wounded or maimed.
"This kind of rocket gives no one a chance," said Haifa's police chief, Nir Meriash. "I found a woman lying in the street with one of her legs beside her, detached from her body."
At least a half-dozen of the larger Iranian-made Fajr-3 rockets have hit the Haifa area, including the deadly July 16 strike that killed eight railway workers in a train maintenance depot. These carry a 100-pound warhead and, according to Meriash, "are meant to kill civilians."
Hezbollah is no different from the car bombers in Iraq, those who blew themselves up at weddings in Jordan, who bombed Bombay, Madrid and London, or who attacked us on 9-11. They just wreak their carnage at longer range.
Then again, they may be worse, for in addition to targeting civilians indiscriminately, they also use civilians, their homes and their neighborhoods to hide behind.
Civilians are casualties in every war, but arguably the Israelis are at least trying to hit military targets or the infrastructure that supports Hezbollah.
The problem is that Hezbollah has woven itself into the very fabric of Lebanon, masquerading as a political party much as the Nazis did in Germany. The terrorists have in fact converted an entire nation into a human shield.
http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=20&artnum=1&issue=20060725
-
Cowardly Blending
(http://softwaretimes.com/images/cowardly-blending-450.jpg) (http://www.coxandforkum.com/archives/000895.html)
Cox & Forkum (http://www.coxandforkum.com/archives/000895.html) editorial cartoons
-
BelmontClub blog has an interesting speculation on what is happening in Lebanon. He brings out one point the I had actually picked up on and expands upon its meaning. That is the point about how Hezbollah is now fighting a war of attrition with Israel. Fighting to keep ground. Not a guerrilla war that such movements excel at and should fight. This bodes well for Israel.
http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2006/07/pulp-fiction.html
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Pulp Fiction
I am going to write a completely speculative piece on the fighting in Lebanon. It's born of a need to make sense of events which on the face of it are incomprehensible, though by so doing the post detaches itself from verifiable fact. The reader is warned. Read on if you wish for entertainment but beware that what follows is hypothesis, there aren't even going to be hyperlinks for reference.
The first question that must be answered in divining IDF intentions in Lebanon is what the center of gravity of the Hezbollah is, because that is what the IDF must be aiming to destroy. The two obvious ones are Hezbollah's ability to influence the Lebanese government and the motor of that influence -- the military force that Hezbollah maintains in the south. A step down we can ask, what is the most important component of Hezbollah's power in the south? Again the answer is easy. It is the Hezbollah cadres themselves. Hezbollah's most precious possession isn't Katyushas, long-range rockets, night vision goggles or antitank missiles or electronic equipment. It is the trained core of its military force. Equipment can be replaced but Hezbollah's cadres represent an expensive, almost irreplaceable investment. In them resides the organizational knowledge of Nasrallah's organization. It embodies man-decades of operational experience against Israel. Rockets can be replaced. The stars of Hezbollah's operational force are less expendable.
From this observation I'm going to say that despite the received wisdom of the newspapers to the contrary, the fighting at Maroun al-Ras and Bint Jbeil have been and continue to be an unmitigated defeat for the Hezbollah. The Hezbollah are doing the single most stupid thing imaginable for a guerilla organization. They are fighting to keep territory. Oh, I know that this will be justified in terms of "inflicting casualties" on the Israelis. But the Hez are probably losing 10 for every Israeli lost. A bad bargain for Israel you say? No. A bad bargain for Hezbollah to trade their terrorist elite for highly trained but nevertheless conventional infantry. Guerillas should trade 1 for 10, not 10 for 1.
Reduced to its essentials, the IDF strategy may be ridiculously simple: fix the Hezbollah force in Southern Lebanon while detaching its command structure from the field by simultaneously striking Beirut. One of the great mysteries, upon which newpaper accounts shed no light, is why the IDF should so furiously pulverize Hezbollah's enclaves in southern Beirut, blockade the port and disable the airport. The object isn't to shut down Lebanon. It is to momentarily disorient the Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut, so that in a moment of absentmindedness, the Hezbollah forces in Southern Lebanon will do what comes most naturally: commit themselves against the IDF.
I should add that, although it sounds underhanded, the IDF may have cleverly used their warning to evacuate the Hezbollahland villages to great effect. Nothing so absorbs the energy of states and protostates like Hezbollah than the need to relocate tens of thousands of their supporters while fighting the IDF. Hezbollah's fighters in Southern Lebanon have three tasks they've willy-nilly accepted: to keep the IDF at bay, evacuate their supporters and stay in contact with Nasrallah in Beirut. They will fail in two out of three. What they should have done while they had the chance was run but now it is probably too late. The Hez are fighting the IDF; and moving rockets northward as they can in the belief that these militarily useless weapons are somehow important; relocating their supporters and fighting a diplomatic war at one and the same time. And all this with their offices bombed out. It creates a window of opportunity.
Prestidigitation is defined as "skill in performing magic or conjuring tricks with the hands". From the very beginning the IDF has kept the Hezbollah guessing about its true intentions. Nasrallah made the cardinal mistake of projecting his own estimate by believing that Israel would respond to his abduction of IDF soldiers with a limited cross border raid of their own. The IDF responded by smashing his Beirut headquarters and fixing the Hezbollah main force in the south. Nasrallah, Iran and Syria made a second error in believing that Israel, perhaps reinforced by the diplomaic mummery which encouraged the illusion, would be forced to accept a ceasefire within a fortnight only to discover that neither the international force was forthcoming (no one had the troops to put on the ground) nor would the Bush administration waver in its support for Israel. In reality Israel has been forced to accept nothing. No ceasefire is in sight. And now there is word that the Israeli cabinet is meeting to decide whether to expand its operation further north. Not a ceasefire but a further advance.
The next chimera being dangled before Nasrallah is the idea that Israel is only aiming to establish some buffer zone of about 15 miles in width. It's the conventional wisdom and maybe Nasrallah hopes it's true. But already doubt is apparently creeping into his soul. Sixty or more Lebanese have reportedly been arrested as Israeli spies in Beirut. The Hezbollah see them everywhere. Although subsequently denied, there were reports that Nasrallah had sought refuge in the Iranian embassy. In the meantime Ahmadinehjad and Assad are ceaselessly calling for ceasefires. Everywhere the word "ceasefire" is heard. But never from Israel. Maybe somewhere in his mind Nasrallah's realized that the IDF isn't after some buffer zone: they are after him and his cadre. His cadre they already have: they are fighting to keep real estate they are doomed to lose. Nasrallah himself they may have by and by. But there may be worse to come. Whether accidental or not, the IDF attack on Kiyam raises the specter that it will operate eastward against the Bekaa valley and perhaps eventually against the Beirut-Damascus highway. That would cut off supplies from Syria to his men in the south and to his command element in Damascus. Then where would Nasrallah's influence over Lebanese politics be? And how should he fare against his former adversaries in the recently concluded Civil War? With the onus of all the ruination he has visited upon Lebanon upon him and his forces in stuck in a southern front against the IDF he may find it hard to cut the swath he once did in government circles.
I warned the reader that this post would be pure speculation. No one should treat it seriously. Good night everybody.
-
The Missiles of 27 Rajab
By Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 28, 2006
This year, we are told, the Muslim commemorations associated with their calendar date 27 Rajab will occur on August 22. On this a most celebratory date in the Islamic calendar, best-selling author and Islamic scholar Robert Spencer reminds that the Prophet Muhammed made his ascension into heaven from the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, an event known as the Miraj. ?[T]he Night Journey has become firmly embedded in the Islamic consciousness,? Spencer notes, ?such that Muslims today celebrate it as one of the central events of Muhammad?s life.? And now, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has selected that as an auspicious date to create a light over the skies of Jerusalem such as the world has never seen since the Miraj.
If as the president of the Reform Party in Syria, Farid Ghadry claims, ?Ahmadinejad is planning an illumination of the night sky over Jerusalem to rival the one that greeted the Prophet of Islam on his journey,? then it is difficult to imagine anything other than a full-scale Iranian nuclear attack. As Spencer continues, ?a nuclear attack on Jerusalem or even an all-out conventional assault against Israel by Iran would be consistent with Ahmadinejad?s oft-repeated denials of Israel?s right to exist and recent predictions that its demise was at hand.? These observations are the latest from a growing list of ominous portents from Iranian and Syrian leaders too horrific to ignore.
Assuming the worst case ? a default mental mode for military planners ? what ought we to expect to happen the next several weeks? A possible scenario can be constructed based on events of recent weeks and months, although the groundwork for this action has taken years to develop. Let us try to outline what Ahmadinejad and his surrogates in Syria and inside Hezbollah might have on their minds.
To begin we review what we know for certain: 1) Iran has been focused on acquisition of nuclear weapons, working for years with the AQ Khan group and North Korea; 2) Iran has for all intents and purposes declared war on Israel and America (though the U.S. has not understood Iran?s commitment), outlining its war policy as one of utter extermination; 3) Iran has worked unceasingly with North Korean scientists and engineers to improve missile technology, resulting in several models of varying ranges and payloads, and with highly improved mobility over SCUDs; 4) Iran has used surrogate movements and states to support clandestinely attacks on Israel and America (the latter inside Iraq); 5) Iran has positioned large numbers of technologically advanced weapons and the troops from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to assist inside Lebanon and Syria.
We have confirmed that Iran was a sponsor and participant in North Korea?s early July 2006 missile tests, and have shown rather convincingly that the real testing was the ability to deploy rapidly missile units, each capable of firing several weapons independently. The capstone of the test was that multiple missiles fired on schedule, each simulating many, and that the tests were frighteningly successful. Equally important was that the public misunderstood the real purpose of the tests and vastly underestimated the value derived from them.
If we were investigating this as a possible murder case we?d look for motive, weapon, and opportunity. Motive is easy. Ahmadinejad want to wipe Israel and America off the map. How do we know? Because he told us, repeatedly, in great detail, and with utmost sincerity. Weapons? We are looking at a slate of which we?re told intelligence analysts were unaware. While this is doubtful, it may be factual that analysts were cautious about numbers of missiles and rockets deployed and the willingness of the Hezbollah enemy to employ them. Those doubts ought to be resolved as hundreds of rockets rain down on Israel and increasingly capable weapons are discovered. Opportunity? Made to order, on order. It was an Ahmadinejad-created opportunity, a directed Hezbollah attack on Israel designed to bring in America and allies. It?s all happening, per Iranian plan, and its right there for us to see.
In a July 27 NY Sun op-ed, premier radio talk show host John Bachelor addresses the opportunity issue. The behavior of Syria, Bachelor notes ?is meant to provoke Israel and pull America directly into the fighting.? Syria, as Bachelor points out, issued an unacceptable ultimatum to the U.S. ?Knowing that America cannot agree?.Syria and its sponsor, Iran, are preparing for the next stage of the escalation.? That next stage he affirms is a ?shooting war.? To what point? This is where the weapons come into the picture.
Ahmadinejad has an apocalyptic future vision. Unlike previous nuclear opponents, Soviet Russia and China, for example, for whom a policy of mutually assured destruction was a suitable deterrent, the Iranian leader and his mullocracy lust for as much violence as possible. He openly calls for massive destruction in Israel, Europe, and America, and welcome any and all retaliation as the necessary precursor to activate the mysterious 12 Imam. The suspended-life Imam, buried beneath the Shia Mosque of the Golden Dome, Samara in Iraq, will return to this world as the Madhi, the Caliph to lead hordes of Muslims to global victory, only if preceded with sufficient violence. Ahmadinejad believes this just as certainly as Adolph Hitler believed in his Thousand Year Reich and the superiority of the Aryan race. And in a manner similar to his mentor Hitler, Ahmadinejad is willing to sacrifice his life to achieve his ultimate goal.
Consequently Iran has accelerated nuclear weapons development (or purchase) and missile technology. It has a broad array of weapons including several classes of missiles. Some like the Farj Class, as Michael Krauss and Peter Pham note in Foundation for the Defense of Democracy this July, were built ?with Chinese and North Korean assistance,? and are capable of slinging a 200 pound warhead between 25 and 45 miles. ?Israeli intelligence estimates that several hundred Fajr rockets have been delivered so far,? they say. These can go further and carry more than the generic ?Katyushas.? Ken Timmerman notes that the Fajrs carry a 110 pound warhead, but what makes them so fearsome is ?the tiny ball bearings packed inside? designed as a terror weapon to kill and maim civilians.
Additionally, the Iranians have smuggled several of the Zelzal Class into Lebanon for Hezbollah use. These are heftier weapons, also known as Shehab Class missiles, derived from the North Korean Nodong Class, built with Iranian financial backing. These can fly up to 1600 kilometers carrying a payload of almost a ton. Even with conventional loads these are formidable terror weapons. Bachelor notes that these missiles are ?on their mobile launchers, under Iranian rocket crews? parked in Syria waiting the order to attack. Once given the green light crews will ?push over the border crossings, park about 15 meters inside Lebanon, and launch on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.?
Reinforcing the threat, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah leader, warned that ?deeper? attacks would be forthcoming. The Israelis, Bachelor says, have accounted for more than 36 such missiles inside Lebanon. They?ve already killed some, but how may more wait across the Syrian border? Dozens? Hundreds? Using the tactics just rehearsed in North Korea suppose Syria, backed to the hilt by Iran, having provoked an Israeli or American strike which provides them sufficient excuse, then floods across the border. Many specially trained battalions with scores of Zelzals and smaller payload missiles dispersed among them will lead. It is probably that many of the weapons and units are already pre-positioned.
These Zelzal missiles if properly dispersed and simultaneously launched ? if, in other words, the tactical model developed by the Soviets, taught to the Iranians, and just practiced in front of the world in North Korea is followed ? we could expect that existing Israeli missile defense systems would be overwhelmed. Radars would pick scores, perhaps hundreds of missiles launched from a very short distance away all converging on Israeli cities. It would be impossible for upgraded Patriot or any other deployed system to get them all. The leakers would certainly penetrate. Are they going to carry conventional explosives, a serious enough threat by itself, or will these be the ones that carry the dirty warheads, the small fission devices, or the VX nerve gas? Is this the ?day or rejoicing? that Ahmadinejad threatens? Does anyone really want to wait until mid August when this attack is launched to learn?
In this scenario inaction is not appropriate. Nor is the reprehensible laundry list of appeasement initiatives drafted by State Department Arabists acceptable. The options for a diplomatic solution have already expired. State has played its hand, and sterner leadership must take charge. Both Syria and Iran must be faced squarely and confronted with the consequences of their actions before they can attack. Iran is clearly attempting to use an attack on Israel to build momentum for an overthrow of that country combined with a defeat of America in Iraq. Rather than wait defensively America must strike Iran, taking out leadership, nuclear, and missile targets. Simultaneously every Iranian revolutionary group must be supported and turned loose to foment revolution inside Iran.
Syria has to be taken out immediately. Leadership targets - regime, Hezbollah, and Iranian - must be attacked and friendly forces put into the border area for missile suppression. U.S. units watching Syria?s back door can strike and raid, thereby collapsing Syrian resistance. Israeli forces need to continue to press Hezbollah terrorists inside Lebanon to keep them off balance. It is critically important that America and Israel supported by whatever allies have the courage to assist, take the fight immediately to the perpetrators. By waiting for a first-strike we are put in a position of playing a retaliation game after we have already endured unacceptable losses in population and perception. Once America and Israel are seen as weak enough to defeat, then the international jackals will all join in for the kill. This is what our enemies hope to accomplish.
How realistic is this plan politically? Probably not very, and that is what is going to be a major setback, possibly one from which it will be extraordinarily difficult to recover. Complicating American reaction to these events is the paralyzing idea prevalent among many Americans that by solving Iraq our troubles in the region are over. This na?ve perception is clouding America?s grasp of the scope, breadth, and reality of the threat. We face a crisis of major proportions. Hesitation may be fatal.
-
An 'e-mail from Nasrallah'
By Tom Segev
A man named Nasrallah whom I don't know sent me an e-mail this week. I thought that he was from Beirut. So I asked, naturally, and with no little hope, if there were a connection. As often happens in dialogues with our neighbors - this was the wrong question to ask. He has no connection to that Nasrallah, he replied, probably in a slightly reproachful tone.
The man in question is Yousry Nasrallah, the Egyptian film director. Recently he had directed the film "Bab al-Shams" ("The Gate of the Sun"), based on the book by Elias Khoury. Nasrallah forwarded to me a public appeal from Beirut, composed by Lebanese theater director Roger Assaf. He's one of the best there is in that country, Nasrallah wrote.
Along with the pope, the French president, the German chancellor and, of course, Israel, Assaf denounced the alliance between Syria and Iran, which has nothing at all to do with the true interest of Lebanon and has brought disaster upon it. His language is poetic. He writes about his dreams of a better world - one in which the children of Israel won't grow up amid the spirit of hatred and nationalist-militarist hysteria, one in which Palestinian and Lebanese children won't grow up amid the spirit of vengeance. He and his friends live in the spirit of Plato and Gandhi and Albert Camus and other humanist philosophers and intellectuals, he said.
Yousry Nasrallah sent me a second e-mail in which he explained the background to Assaf"s letter: "In July 2006, there are people (maybe I should use the past tense) who are neither with Iran, nor with Syria, nor with Hezbollah, nor with Israel. People who do not want to be used by either of these powers as human shields or targets. People who have tried these past few years to build a new Lebanon that is free from all this."
He sounds like a few people I know in Haifa.
The news of the deterioration this week in Ariel Sharon's condition caught many Israelis by surprise: Oh, yeah, Ariel Sharon. His illness spared him what would have been a terribly embarrassing confrontation with his failures: the growing power of Hezbollah in Lebanon, right under his nose; and the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections and the firing of Qassams at the south. The man who in his last days earned the admiration of the entire world, as if he were a great statesman and architect of peace, now appears to have been one of the worst prime ministers Israel ever had, maybe even worse than Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak.
If it weren't for the current war in Lebanon, this week everyone would almost certainly have been talking about the withdrawal from Gaza, on its first anniversary, and the summary isn't very positive: Instead of the areas of the settlements evacuated by Israel being put to use for the welfare of the Palestinians, they were taken over by the Qassam gangs. The Israel Defense Forces intensified the means of oppression and Gaza is on the verge of a humanitarian disaster. A further withdrawal in the West Bank, in an effort to make good on the promises made by Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz, doesn't appear possible right now.
Did all this have to happen? Maybe not. In this sense, the withdrawal from Gaza is similar to the Oslo Accords: a missed opportunity. Had the withdrawal been carried out in the context of an agreement with the Palestinians, rather than as a unilateral "disengagement," or had free passage been allowed meanwhile between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank - perhaps everything would have been different. In any event, the Gush Katif settlements were a reckless adventure and their dismantling has not caused a national trauma. But after almost a year of Qassam fire, a giant "We told you so" is hanging over the public discourse.
The forced evacuation of thousands of Israelis, which was executed without too much difficulty, threatens to lay the groundwork for an eventual expulsion of masses of Palestinians, too. The bombardment of Beirut and the instigation of mass flight by inhabitants of south Lebanon are turning the harming of civilians into a matter of routine. This is the legacy of Ariel Sharon: The fate of human beings always interested him less than military considerations.
If he could still speak today, one wonders whether Sharon would admit that he erred. Maybe not. So few politicians are capable of that. I would like to show Sharon Errol Morris' film, "The Fog of War" (2003), about Robert S. McNamara and tape his reaction. It's a movie that is well worth watching again, especially this week.
One night, during World War II, the Americans bombarded Tokyo, causing about 100,000 residents to be burned alive in their homes. Countless civilians were killed in other Japanese cities, all before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No, this wasn't proportional to the war objectives of the United States, says McNamara, the former U.S. secretary of defense.
A graduate of Harvard, McNamara was the president of the Ford Motor Company where, among other things, he introduced seatbelts in cars. He joined the Kennedy administration as secretary of defense and stayed on in the Johnson administration. Toward the end of 1967, McNamara realized that the war in Vietnam was lost and he proposed to Johnson that the United States stop its bombardments of cities in North Vietnam. Johnson reacted angrily and McNamara ended up leaving to take charge of the World Bank. Four years and about 60,000 dead later, he gazes into Errol Morris' camera and, with the wisdom of hindsight, says simply: We made a mistake. He bears part of the blame for this terrible failure and is doing his best to impart to the world the lessons that he learned. He came up with 11 lessons in all, including the importance of intelligence, before and during the course of the war, and the need to get into the mind of the enemy and to understand him.
McNamara says the United States didn't understand the motivations of North Vietnam and that the latter did not understand those of the United States: North Vietnam was not a pawn in the hands of the Communist Bloc, as the Americans believed - and America did not aspire to rule Vietnam as a colonial power, as the Vietnamese believed. McNamara warns of the tendency to assume that rational thinking will halt acts of madness: The three protagonists in the Cuban missile crisis - Nikita Krushchev, Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy - were all rational people. A review of the historic documentation shows that all three were prepared to go all the way - to nuclear war, that is.
The seventh lesson that McNamara offers to history is the most important of all: Very often, heads of states and armies do not really see what they think they see. They see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what's convenient for them to see. McNamara suggests that leaders take a second look at their assumptions at the moment of reckoning: Not only can intelligence be faulty, the basic conceptions guiding them may also be flawed. The communist threat that stood at the center of the Western world's thinking turned out years later to be an optical illusion. Today the Western world believes in the Islamic threat. The rhetoric accompanying the war in Lebanon sounds in part like it was borrowed from the Vietnam War.
What will happen to small nations if we abandon Vietnam to communism? - that was the question frequently posed by President Johnson. And McNamara spoke of the "domino effect": If South Vietnam falls to the communists, all of East Asia will follow suit. He wasn't lying. He sincerely believed that. Looking back, he offers his own definition of the phrase "the fog of war": an unclear vision of reality.
Politicians like to pat themselves on the back for the inner conviction that guides them, and for their determination to do what they deem to be right. McNamara advocates a more important quality: skepticism. The skepticism that eventually saved America from itself was born in the media there.
The film "The Fog of War," which earned an Oscar for its creator, is available for rental at local video libraries.
A diplomatic dispute erupted a little while ago between the State of Israel and the kingdom of Great Britain, and this week it was resolved before the IDF would have, very regretfully, been compelled to bombard London. Interior Minister Roni Bar-On told the tale in the Knesset.
Her Majesty's ambassador had protested a sign put up by the Jerusalem Municipality marking the 60th anniversary of the bombing of the King David Hotel. The British wanted the sign removed. Negotiations began. The sign that veterans of the Irgun underground had wanted to erect said that the British were warned ahead of time but, "despite this, for reasons known only to them, the British did not evacuate the hotel." In other words - the British are to blame. The original sign listed the identity of the 92 victims, who included Jews and Arabs and others. The new sign that was put up this week says only: "The hotel was not evacuated." According to the sign, the losses caused were "very regrettable," i.e., the intention was to carry out an attack without casualties.
In the English version that was on the original sign, the stronger term "dismay" was added. Dismay that the British didn't evacuate the hotel. On the new sign - that additional word is gone.
There are other differences. Here is a good topic for a study of Israelis' attitudes to terror attacks. A bit of this came up in the Knesset discussion, too.
Reuven Rivlin (Likud) complained that Israel had given into the Brits' demands: "In wake of this letter, will they be able to come with other letters? For example, that the daughter of one of the Irgun leaders can't serve as foreign minister? Or will the appointment or election of Menachem Begin as prime minister of Israel for two terms in a row be retroactively nullified? Will (Israel) Eldad's son be unable to serve as a Knesset member? These are questions that just need to be asked. After all, we're talking about the blowing up of the command center that was the symbol of the British Mandate in Palestine that prevented the immigration of the uprooted from the fields of the burning of our people in Europe."
Meir Porush (United Torah Judaism), on the other hand, protested the whole idea of honoring the attack on the hotel: "I really don't understand what this celebration is all about ... We're acting like the goyim [gentiles]. Blood was spilled. Dozens of people were killed. What's to celebrate?"
The interior minister brought the discussion to a close with these timely words from the Passover Haggadah: "In every generation there are those who rise up against us and seek to destroy us. But the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/743696.html
-
One of the main goals of martial arts should be the prevention of world wars through the expression of warlike instincts in a harmless way.
Higher consciousness through harder contact prevents war. . . if you are indulging in harder contact while supporting war then you have not achieved higher consciousness and should re evaluate your martial activities.
:!:
-
B:
Martial Arts begins with the consciousness that we are worthy of defending.
=============
The Terror Ahead, by Gabriel Schoenfeld
Commentary November 2003
ON DAY 18 of the war in Iraq, a single United States Air Force B-1 bomber attacked a residence in the north of Baghdad where Saddam Hussein was believed to be hiding. The effects were dramatic. Explosions not only demolished the structure entirely but left a gigantic crater of jumbled steel and debris 60 feet deep and 150 feet wide. This devastation was caused by four conventional bombs, each weighing 2,000 pounds. They are by no means the heaviest bombs in the U.S. arsenal. The Air Force?s ?Daisy Cutter? weighs in at 15,000 pounds and can dig a much deeper and wider area of destruction.
But these devices, fearsome though they may be, are trivial in their effects compared with a nuclear weapon. If the destructive power of each of the bombs dropped in Baghdad was roughly equivalent to 1,000 pounds of TNT (trinitrotoluene), a nuclear bomb fueled by a single pound of a fissionable element like uranium or plutonium would release the explosive equivalent of approximately sixteen million pounds (eight kilotons). Over the course of the nuclear age, devices in the megaton range (millions of tons of TNT) have been developed and tested.
The tremendous force of a nuclear blast causes correspondingly greater destruction, including from its sheer heat. Whereas a conventional explosion generates temperatures nearing 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit, a nuclear detonation unleashes heat in the millions of degrees, which is then dispersed with terrible effect. In the initial phase, all of the material of the bomb itself?the nuclear fuel, the metal casing, the triggering device?is converted instantaneously into an intensely compressed vapor. Within less than a millionth of a second, this vapor expands into a highly luminous mass of burning air and nuclear material that ascends on its own far up into the atmosphere, reaching widths as large as thousands of feet across.
On the surface of the earth, the fireball vaporizes whatever solid materials abut the explosion, including soil and rock, which then fuse with the radioactive elements of the bomb itself and are borne aloft, gradually returning to earth as fallout: highly lethal radioactive particles ranging in width from the size of a grain of fine sand to small marbles. The rapidly expanding gas of the explosion also gives off a shock wave, a wall of air that continues to move away from the explosive center well after the fireball has disappeared. The wave generates winds exceeding several hundred miles an hour at the epicenter of the explosion and can cause destruction for miles around.
Finally, nuclear weapons yield radiation, including highly penetrating gamma rays that remain lethal over a considerable distance. The rays from a one-megaton explosion can extend approximately two miles; at one mile from ground zero, one would need a concrete barrier four-feet thick to afford protection from them?on the unlikely assumption one could survive the blast?s other, more violent effects.
Nuclear weapons have been used in anger only twice: first at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and then three days later, when the Japanese still refused to capitulate, at Nagasaki. In all, the immediate death toll from the two attacks was approximately 150,000, with many more tens of thousands left gravely injured. Whatever one?s view of President Truman?s decision to employ the bomb against Japan, no one then or later would dispute that these are the most dreadful weapons ever devised.
Which is why, ever since their invention, a mainstay of American policy has been to prevent a surprise attack with them on our soil. During the cold war, one main leg of this effort was the policy of deterrence, aimed at convincing our principal adversary, the USSR, that a nuclear strike on the U.S. would be met by an even more devastating counterattack that would wipe the USSR from the map. The policy worked, and now that the Soviet empire is no more, we are engaged in a largely cooperative relationship with its nuclear- and non-nuclear-armed successor states.
A second leg of our effort was, and still is, aimed at keeping nuclear weapons from falling into the wrong hands. Until relatively recently, this policy too has largely been a success. Here, technology was long on our side. So considerable were the costs and expertise required to create nuclear weapons that, in the first decades after World War II, only highly developed countries?the USSR, China, England, and France (and, by the late 1960?s, perhaps Israel)?succeeded in developing them on their own. But with the passage of years, the spread of civilian nuclear technology?especially nuclear power plants?and the emergence of a global cadre of nuclear engineers and physicists steadily reduced the obstacles to building such weapons. The essentials of bomb design are today widely understood, and key technologies can either be fabricated indigenously or purchased on open or black and gray markets. Only the nuclear fuel itself?plutonium or highly enriched uranium?remains exceedingly difficult to acquire, although countries with civilian nuclear-power programs can create it on their own.
The U.S. has employed a variety of diplomatic instruments to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. The primary tool?the ?cornerstone of U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policies,? according to a ranking Bush administration official?is the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). This multilateral agreement became international law in 1970 and has by now been signed by some 187 nations?all the nations of the world save three: India, Pakistan, and Israel.*
Along with lofty-sounding provisions calling for peace, the elimination of all nuclear weapons from the planet, and a number of other general goals, the NPT includes a number of specific measures. In particular, it obligates those signatories who do not already have nuclear weapons to remain in that condition, and to accept regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to verify that any civilian nuclear resources are under ?safeguard? and are not being covertly diverted to military ends.
In some respects, the NPT has worked extremely well. Thanks to IAEA inspections, the U.S. government and the world community have access to a wealth of highly detailed information about the civilian nuclear programs of countries around the globe, including countries hostile to the United States. The NPT regime has also played a vital role in preserving the nuclear-free status of regional rivals like Argentina and Brazil, to name two countries that in the 1970?s and 80?s were veering into a nuclear-arms race. Perhaps the treaty?s most remarkable achievement was to have fostered the denuclearization of South Africa; as F. W. de Klerk, that country?s former president, would confess, South Africa had surreptitiously developed a small nuclear arsenal, but then dismantled and destroyed it in order to accede to the agreement in 1991.
Such accomplishments have led supporters of the NPT to insist, in the words of the Bush administration, that the ?global nuclear nonproliferation regime remains strong.? But the global nuclear nonproliferation regime is not strong. It has been in serious and growing difficulty for years, and is now virtually in tatters. The story of its decline is full of the most worrisome implications for the future course of world politics. It is also a case study in the pitfalls of relying on multilateral arms-control agreements to protect critical U.S. interests.
IN RECENT years, the NPT regime has faced serious challenge from four countries, and flunked each test. In the case of only one of them?Iraq?has the crisis been definitively resolved, but at the cost of two major wars. Other dangers remain very much upon us, and they are both terrible to contemplate and difficult to avoid.
The history of Iraq?s nuclear program exemplifies what has gone wrong. Iraq ratified the NPT in 1969 under Saddam Hussein, but the country?s signature was an act of deceit. From the outset, the Iraqi dictator was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons; by the mid-1970?s, assisted by avid European suppliers, he had an active program under way. By 1981, Iraqi scientists were on the verge of gaining access to a plentiful source of nuclear fuel from their new reactor at Osirak, a turn-key facility provided by France. Then, on June 7, 1981, Israel, fearing a nuclear-armed Saddam in its neighborhood, destroyed the facility in a precision air-strike that shocked the world.
Iraq responded to this setback by reconstituting its secret program, dispersing facilities widely and placing key technology in hardened shelters. Although the program?s existence was widely suspected, IAEA inspectors came and went without uncovering evidence that radioactive materials were either being diverted from civilian reactors or being acquired by other means. Only in 1991, in the aftermath of the first Gulf war, did the scope and scale of Iraq?s prewar efforts become evident.
Yet even in defeat, and even after having signed surrender terms pledging to disclose all information about the illicit program, Saddam Hussein?s government continued to engage in denial and deception. At first it stated flatly that it had ?no industrial and support facilities related to any form of atomic-energy use which have to be declared.? When this statement was rebutted with incontrovertible facts by the IAEA, the regime acknowledged a handful of sites but still failed to disclose the lion?s share of its activity. Only after the IAEA initiated special on-site inspections did Iraq begin to release significant information, even then omitting important details and either blocking IAEA access to key sites or hurriedly removing nuclear-related equipment from locations that inspectors were likely to visit. The full scope of the Iraqi effort become evident only when the IAEA stumbled on a trove of classified documents.
Under the noses of IAEA inspectors, those documents revealed, the Iraqis had constructed what Hans Blix, then the head of the agency, ruefully admitted was a ?vast unknown, undeclared uranium-enrichment program in the billion-dollar range,? constituting an essential part of ?an advanced nuclear-weapons development program.? Among other things, Iraq was in possession of some 400 tons of previously undisclosed radioactive materials, including six grams of clandestinely produced plutonium and more than 35 kilograms of highly enriched uranium?not yet bomb-grade material but of ?high strategic value.? Iraq had also acquired a large number of calutrons for enriching uranium; these electro-magnetic devices, used by the U.S. in constructing its first atomic bombs but subsequently abandoned in favor of more efficient means, were extremely well suited for a clandestine program like Iraq?s.
It seems that, at the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Baghdad had been only months away from acquiring a workable nuclear device. Had Saddam Hussein been a little more patient, he could have had a nuclear-equipped military before embarking on that aggressive adventure. Standing up to him in those circumstances would have presented incalculably greater risks to Washington and its hesitant allies in Europe.
Nor, in the aftermath of the first Gulf war, did Iraq cease its activity. A great deal of information came to light in 1995 with the defection to Jordan of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein?s son-in-law, who revealed a well-funded and continuing program to mount a nuclear warhead on an intermediate-range ballistic missile as well as efforts to turn highly enriched uranium into fuel for a nuclear bomb. Once again, these efforts were proceeding in the face of special IAEA and UNSCOM inspections mandated by the UN Security Council and far more intrusive than the ones for a normal country under the NPT.
What happened to Iraq?s nuclear program after the mid-decade revelations, and especially after 1998 when Saddam Hussein halted all cooperation with the UN inspectors and they withdrew from the country, is unclear. As is well known, Washington based its case for the second Gulf war in part on intelligence pointing to a continuing covert Iraqi effort to acquire nuclear weapons, including the highly controversial sixteen words in President Bush?s State of the Union Address about Iraq?s alleged effort to purchase uranium yellowcake from the African country of Niger. But in the aftermath of our victory, the search for evidence of this program has thus far come up dry. Did the Iraqi dictator order the program transferred to new and as yet undiscovered locations, or was it dismantled and destroyed? We do not yet have the answer.
IF IRAQ represents one kind of failure for the NPT, Pakistan represents another?not so much of the treaty itself as of U.S. policy. The salient fact here is that Pakistan has refused to sign the pact, and is not subject to its strictures.
The Pakistani nuclear program, like Iraq?s, is decades old. It began in earnest after the loss of East Pakistan?now Bangladesh?to India in the war of 1971, a defeat that impelled Pakistan to develop an ?Islamic bomb? (in the phrase employed at the time by prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto) to counter India?s Hindu one. The fuel for this Islamic bomb was initially to come from a reprocessing facility provided by France in 1974, although the French and other Western suppliers withdrew as Pakistani intentions became clear. In stepped the Chinese, who in the intervening decades have provided Pakistan with technicians, highly enriched uranium, key components of enrichment facilities, and a heavy-water reactor for the production of plutonium and tritium, as well as designs for a relatively sophisticated and readily deliverable 25-kiloton-yield weapon.
Lacking recourse to the machinery of the NPT, the U.S. has responded to this Pakistani program with an assortment of carrots and sticks, pledging financial and military assistance if Pakistan would desist, threatening a series of sanctions, some of them mandated by Congress, if it pressed ahead. But the sanctions have been waived at every turn, for the simple reason that Pakistan has been a pivotal player in U.S. foreign policy as a frontline state both in the Soviet-Afghan war that began in 1979 and in the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban that began in October 2001. In any case, the sanctions were unlikely to have deflected Pakistan from a strategic goal it has perceived as vital to its national existence.
Already by the mid-1990?s, Pakistan was widely believed to have obtained a small stockpile of nuclear weapons, as well as the missiles for delivering them. Its status as a nuclear power was confirmed when it conducted five underground tests on May 28, 1998. By any yardstick, this date deserves to be remembered as a watershed in international affairs, marking the first time that a certifiable basket-case of a country became an officially-declared nuclear power.
Since its birth as a nation in 1947, Pakistan?s government has been regularly toppled by military coups. A major segment of the population is in the grip of radical Islam, and some leading nuclear scientists have close ties to the most fanatical Muslims of Afghanistan and al Qaeda. The country is locked in a conflict with India over the status of Kashmir that periodically threatens to become the first nuclear flashpoint since World War II. To complete the picture, Pakistan is so desperately poor that it has been paying for its military programs by barter.
Its most important partner in this arrangement happens to be North Korea. In exchange for North Korean missiles that can carry a nuclear payload, Pakistan has provided Pyongyang with gas centrifuges, a key technology for processing uranium into bomb-grade material. The U.S. response to this illicit trade has been a mild slap on the wrist: this past April, Washington imposed a two-year ban on any American dealings with the research laboratory where Pakistan?s nuclear weapons are designed and fabricated.
IF PAKISTAN is a stick of dynamite, North Korea is a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse. The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK), run today by the mad Communist dictator Kim Jong Il, became a signatory of the NPT in 1985. But from the outset it declined to permit the IAEA to verify its initial accounting of nuclear materials, or to monitor more than a single one of its reactors. As the charade continued in the 1990?s, the Clinton administration engaged in an intense but ultimately fruitless effort to persuade the North to abandon its nuclear ambitions, encouraging it to sign a supplementary agreement?the Yongbyon Agreed Framework, brokered by former President Jimmy Carter?that promised generous foreign aid in exchange for forbearance. North Korea grudgingly accepted the aid but, as we now know, declined to show any forbearance.?
The most dramatic chapter of this saga opened last October, when for no discernible reason Pyongyang suddenly revealed that, in violation of both the NPT and Yongbyon, it was operating an active nuclear-weapons program all along. By December it had ratcheted up the pressure, declaring the Yongbyon agreement null and void and renouncing the NPT in the bargain. On New Year?s eve, all IAEA personnel were expelled from the country. In April, Pyongyang declared that it already possessed nuclear weapons and was in the midst of manufacturing more, having reprocessed the fuel from 8,000 control rods at one of its ?civilian? reactors. In August, it announced that it might shortly commence test-firing nuclear weapons, something it has not yet openly done (although one of Pakistan?s nuclear tests may actually have been of a North Korean device).
The North Korean regime is Stalinist to the core?and then some. Thanks to a calcified, centrally-planned economy, large portions of the country suffer from famine. Amid the general destitution, Kim Jong Il has sponsored a personality cult whose symbols and slogans are ubiquitous. His subjects speak of him with the mandatory appellation ?Dear Leader? and wear a badge of his likeness on their lapels. The North Korean regime has engaged in bizarre kidnapping plots (of South Korean actors and actresses, to jump-start an indigenous film industry; of girls off beaches in Japan, to be employed as teachers of Japanese language and manners in a school for spies). Pyongyang has also engaged in terrorism. Among other violent deeds, it blew up a South Korean airliner in 1987, killing all 115 aboard.
It is this demented and venomous regime that boasts of having nuclear weapons at its disposal. According to the CIA, in addition to the one or two bombs already in its possession, the North has been ?constructing a plant that could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for two or more nuclear weapons per year when fully operational?which could be as soon as mid-decade.? According to another government study, Pyongyang has also been at work on two very large ?electrical-generating? stations that, upon completion, will produce sufficient spent nuclear fuel to yield 200 kilograms of plutonium, enough to manufacture approximately 30 nuclear weapons a year.
Compounding the peril is the fact that North Korea has been vigorously developing intermediate- and long-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. It has already successfully tested intermediate-range missiles that can strike all of Japan, points far beyond in Asia and the Pacific, and?with a reduced payload?the west coast of the United States. In September, U.S. officials reported a new model in the works with a range of 9,400 miles, a capability that would place every city in the United States under its shadow.
Not only is North Korea steadily adding missiles to its own arsenal, it is exporting them to other unsavory regimes around the world. With its ample supplies of uranium and uranium-enrichment equipment, it has threatened to export nuclear materials as well. Not only does North Korea ?pose a serious and immediate challenge to the nuclear non-proliferation regime,? in the words of Mohamed ElBaradei, the current head of the IAEA; it poses an even more serious and immediate challenge to the peace and security of the world.
AMONG THE countries trading with North Korea is Iran, a country likewise governed by violent fanatics, of the Islamic rather than the Marxist-Leninist stripe. Iran joined the NPT at the treaty?s inception. It was then still under the rule of the shah, who had started an ambitious civilian-nuclear program and possibly some weapons-related research as well. But IAEA inspectors were finally invited to visit the country?s facilities only in 1992, thirteen years after the shah was deposed by the Islamic revolution. The ayatollahs appear to have calculated that, being limited to officially designated sites, the IAEA would be unable to find evidence of their secret program. If so, their calculation proved correct, for the IAEA regularly certified Iran to be in compliance with the treaty?s strictures?until it became unmistakably apparent that it had been in violation all along.
Earlier this year, in the face of detailed media reports, Iran admitted to the IAEA that it had been constructing two hitherto secret plants: one to enrich uranium and another to produce heavy water, an essential ingredient in developing plutonium. The Iranians also acknowledged having imported nearly two metric tons of uranium from China in 1991, which, in a major breach of the NPT, they stored in a facility not subject to IAEA supervision. In late August and again in late September, IAEA inspections turned up traces of uranium on equipment in supposedly non-nuclear facilities, leading the agency to conclude that an illicit enrichment program was under way. Commented ElBaradei: ?This worries us greatly.?
Iran is an oil-rich country. It has no need for an ambitious civilian nuclear-energy industry. The fact that it has been vigorously developing one was a red flag that the ayatollahs did not deign to conceal. To augment the menace, Iran is ?the most active state sponsor of terrorism? in the world, according to the U.S. Department of State. Tehran has carried out a series of kidnappings and assassinations in Europe. It has funded and provided training and arms to a variety of Palestinian terrorist organizations, including Hizballah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and factions within Yasir Arafat?s PLO. It was almost certainly behind the bombings in Argentina of the Israeli embassy in March 1992, killing 29, and the Jewish community center in July 1994, killing 86. It is thought to have had a hand in the June 1996 bombing of the al-Khobar barracks in Saudi Arabia that took the lives of nineteen U.S. soldiers. It has ties with al Qaeda and, in the wake of September 11, may have given shelter to some of its leading operatives. The list goes on and on.
To augment the menace even more, Iran has also been building missiles at a feverish pace. In July it successfully tested the Shehab-3 (a variant of the No Dong missile first provided to it by North Korea), with a range of 930 miles and capable of carrying a small nuclear warhead. Iranian engineers are similarly moving forward with the Shehab-4 and Shehab-5, with ranges of 1,240 and 3,100 miles respectively. Brigadier General Safavi, who heads Iran?s Revolutionary Guard Corps, declared not long ago that ?Iranian missiles can cause irreparable damage to either Israel or the United States.? This is partly bluster. Israel indeed lies within range of Iranian missiles. The United States does not?not yet.
PERHAPS BECAUSE the attention of our policymakers has been diverted elsewhere, perhaps because our military resources are stretched thin in Afghanistan and Iraq, perhaps because the options are all so unattractive, perhaps because the issues are so dire, the twin challenge presented by North Korea and Iran has met with an even more muted American response than has the challenge posed by Pakistan.
In Asia, the U.S. has been engaged in desultory six-way talks with North Korea and its neighbors. The idea is to bring pressure to bear on Pyongyang, especially from China and Russia, while also holding out the prospect of still more aid if North Korea dismantles its program in a verifiable way. It would be something of a miracle if the talks were to succeed; this approach has been tried in the past and failed.
Under the Yongbyon framework, the Clinton administration plied North Korea with huge shipments of oil. It also promised two proliferation-resistant light-water nuclear reactors if Pyongyang would only promise to stop developing the bomb. In a magnanimous gesture during Clinton?s final year in office, Madeleine Albright became the first American cabinet member ever to visit Communist Pyongyang?following which, noting ?important progress? in talks about missile exports, the administration eased longstanding sanctions against the North under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the Defense Production Act, and the Export Administration Act. But there was no ?important progress?: North Korea did not limit its missile exports or do anything else, except, presumably, absorb a lesson or two about American credulity. In the end, one may hope that it will turn out to be an incorrect lesson; but if, today, the North Koreans make preposterous demands and feign outrage when we do not yield, at least we have some inkling why.
The American reaction to developments in Iran has been even quieter. Once again, we have attempted to work in concert with neighbors and, especially, the IAEA to pressure the ayatollahs to adhere to their obligations under the NPT or face the disapprobation of the UN Security Council. The IAEA is also seeking Iran?s signature on a supplementary protocol that would make the country more ?transparent? to inspectors. The success of these initiatives may be judged by the fact that Ayatollah Khatami, Iran?s ?moderate? president, has pledged continued fealty to the NPT even as his regime blatantly breaches its provisions. Other influential clerics, including Ayatollah Jannati, head of the Guardian Council and closely aligned with Iran?s ?hardline? supreme leader, Ayatollah Kha?menei, have urged that the government shun the ?extra humiliation? of the new protocol and follow the path of North Korea by withdrawing from the NPT altogether.
HOW NORTH KOREA and Iran will conduct themselves in the months to come is a matter of speculation. Many different behaviors are possible, ranging from delaying tactics to phony concessions to threats of aggression. But, the immediate future aside, the predicament we are in is as unmistakable as is our apparent determination to ignore or deny it.
The NPT regime is radically flawed. Three countries whose facilities have been under its safeguards have managed either to develop nuclear weapons or to come perilously close to it. This has occurred because the NPT exhibits almost all the classical problems of arms-control agreements as Washington has pursued them. Elaborate mechanisms are put in place that seem to ensure the achievement of desirable objectives. Yet, in the absence of airtight verification procedures, the only countries thereby restrained are the law-abiding ones who are not themselves a menace. In the meantime, determined cheaters like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea make use of loopholes to pursue their objectives. Though the NPT appeared to work well in its early years, when the relevant technology was more difficult to acquire, now it serves mostly as a cover for would-be proliferators, offering assurances to the world that everything is fine and encouraging Washington to slumber when it needs most to be alert.
The NPT also exhibits structural defects specific unto itself. IAEA inspectors, of whom there are only several hundred responsible for policing approximately 1,000 nuclear facilities around the world, can barely do their job as it is. They are spread even thinner by the need to devote the same amount of attention to wholly innocuous programs in countries like Canada as they do to suspicious ones in countries like Iran. At the same time, IAEA officials lack the freedom to conduct unfettered inspections of any site they choose; they can only visit sites declared (by the signatory nation) to be under the IAEA?s ?safeguard.? And even if they were granted more sweeping rights, the idea that they could find undeclared facilities on their own in a country attempting to conceal them is a delusion. Finally, a glaring loophole in the treaty exempts states from declaring a nuclear installation until 180 days before introducing radioactive material into it; this is precisely the escape mechanism that Iran has exploited to build the uranium and plutonium facilities it has only now disclosed.
In theory the NPT could be strengthened by closing its loopholes and mandating intrusive inspections of sites selected by the inspectors themselves. But the political obstacles would be formidable, and the countries of greatest concern would almost certainly demur. Even if there were universal agreement about amending the NPT, moreover, it would remain only as strong as the will of its strongest members to enforce it. Thus far, with the exception of the decisive action taken on two occasions by the United States against Iraq, that will has been absent. One should note, of course, that even here, Iraqi breaches of the NPT were not a casus belli cited by the U.S. before either Gulf war.
As for Pakistan, as a non-member state, it would of course not be directly touched by any changes to the NPT. For the moment, unlike Pyongyang and Tehran, the government of Pakistan does still seem capable of making rational choices. But if that situation were to change, and radical Islamists were to ascend to power, the prospect that Pakistani nuclear weapons might be transferred to the remnants of al Qaeda or to other Islamic terrorists would be intolerable. Both India and the United States would feel under tremendous pressure to disarm Islamabad, a step that in the logic of things would quite possibly require a nuclear first strike.
U.S. influence on the future course of Pakistani politics is quite limited. Where the U.S. might play an active role right now is in making it utterly clear to our ostensible ally that unless it ceases to export its nuclear know-how and materials to rogue states, it will be made to pay a very stiff price. Similar efforts might also be made to rein in or punish other exporters of nuclear material, including not only Pakistan and North Korea but also Russia, China, and France.
THE RADICAL insufficiency of the NPT confirms once again the wisdom of deploying a missile-defense shield. This project, widely ridiculed when it was first proposed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980?s, has become an urgent national imperative. The U.S. needs a strategic system to defend its own skies, and portable ship- or air-borne theater systems to defend its allies.
But even if we could deploy an impermeable missile shield tomorrow (and no missile shield is likely to be impermeable), there are other ways than missiles to deliver nuclear weapons. Such weapons can be packed into shipping containers and brought into American ports, or smuggled across our borders wrapped inside, say, a bale of marijuana. Countering this particular facet of the threat defensively is virtually impossible?a fact that points toward yet another urgent imperative.
In the National Security Strategy he unveiled at West Point in June 2002, President Bush enunciated a doctrine of preemption. Certain kinds of international challenges, he said, must be forcibly answered before the evidence of danger is presented to us in the shape of a mushroom cloud. The United States, Bush declared,
can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today?s threats, and the magnitude of the potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries? choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.
This was precisely Israel?s thinking when it destroyed Iraq?s reactor at Osirak in 1981. At the time, Israel?s action was condemned by all the countries of the world, including the United States. In its unanimous resolution, the UN Security Council asserted that Iraq was a member in good standing of the NPT, had ?accepted [IAEA] safeguards on its nuclear activities, and . . . these safeguards have been satisfactorily applied to date.? It went on to denounce Israel?s raid as a ?danger to international peace.?
We can now see things as they are?that is, just as the government of Israel saw them in 1981. In the aftermath of September 11, fanatical anti-American regimes like those ruling Iran and North Korea cannot be permitted to obtain weapons that can be easily hidden and used without warning to destroy entire cities in an instant. If peaceful means of persuasion have been exhausted, it is incumbent on us to consider, coolly, other means.
Unfortunately, military action is not likely to be as simple as it was for Israel at Osirak?not that that operation was in the least simple. Rehearsed for months by the Israeli air force, it required up-to-date intelligence, superb airmanship, and total surprise to succeed. It also had to be done within a narrow window of time, before the reactor went critical; otherwise, there was a real possibility of radiological contamination over a large area.
In both North Korea and Iran, the radioactive elements are already in place and hence some level of contamination would be likely in a preemptive strike. There are other major difficulties as well. Although Iran is without question the easier country to hit, the locations of its nuclear facilities being well-known and within range of American warships and bases, the sites there are nevertheless widely dispersed, guarded by air-defense systems, and in some cases built underground and protected by heavy layers of reinforced concrete. A successful strike would need to be broad-based and sustained and include very heavy bunker-busting weapons.
As for Iran?s ability to retaliate, that is limited but not insignificant. Though it has attempted to modernize its forces in the aftermath of its war with Iraq, the pace has been slowed by a general shortage of cash. That shortage, indeed, is one reason Tehran has confined itself to a narrow buildup, focusing on the acquisition of unconventional weapons?not only nuclear but also chemical and biological?and the shells and missiles to deliver them. It has also invested in its navy, with the idea of being able to choke off Western supplies of oil by obstructing the Persian Gulf. Its final point of leverage lies in its command of terrorist forces like Hizballah in Lebanon and elsewhere, which in a crisis could be used to divert Western arms.
In a worst case, a preemptive strike against Iran might lead to a medium-sized conflagration involving unconventional weapons. Nevertheless, given Iran?s overwhelming weakness, this contest would be one in which the U.S. and its allies would rapidly prevail. That in itself holds out a faint ray of hope?namely, that the very threat of a preemptive strike, especially if it is preceded by a visible military buildup and an ultimatum, might possibly persuade the ayatollahs to stand down and relinquish their nuclear ambitions.
North Korea is a much trickier problem. Some facilities are buried deep inside mountains and cannot be readily attacked and destroyed from the air. Others we may not know about at all. The regime itself is highly secretive, and unless the U.S. had reliable and timely intelligence about the whereabouts of Kim Jong Il and his top lieutenants, exceptional luck would be required to decapitate it by means of a conventional blow. Even if we did get lucky, there would still be the possibility of a North Korean response.
Not only does the North appear to have deliverable nuclear weapons, it also has one of the world?s largest armies, comprising 1.2 million soldiers, some 70 percent of whom are positioned in and around the 12,000 underground bunkers near the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that separates the two Koreas. These forces are armed with approximately 10,000 artillery pieces and over 800 missiles capable of reaching South Korea and some of its neighbors. In addition, they are equipped with 2,500 multiple-rocket launchers capable of firing (by a conservative estimate) 500,000 shells an hour to a range of 33 miles. The city of Seoul, situated 24 miles from the DMZ and with a population of more than ten million, could be devastated within hours.
That is the bad news. The better news is that North Korea is not ten or even six feet tall. Its military equipment consists of aging Soviet and Chinese stocks that qualitatively are vastly inferior to both the U.S. and South Korean militaries. Its army is large to the point of bloat; significant numbers of conscripts are engaged in forced-labor projects that have little or no military significance. The populace from which these troops are drawn is hungry and downtrodden, and many soldiers are undoubtedly hungry as well. It is an open question whether, if push came to war, North Korea?s military would disintegrate on its own, and with it the Communist regime.
IN THE final analysis, we cannot know with any certainty how such preemptive actions would play out. We can be certain only of this: as the danger looms closer, the divas of peace at any price will begin their predictable serenades. It is ?vital,? says Jimmy Carter, ?that some accommodation? be reached with Pyongyang, a regime that ?feels increasingly threatened by being branded an ?axis of evil? member.? The New York Times, for its part, editorializes that ?diplomacy is the only acceptable alternative,? just as it editorialized back in 1995 when, lauding the ?accommodation? with North Korea achieved by the same Jimmy Carter, it urged the Clinton administration to strike a similar ?bargain? with the ayatollahs in Tehran.
Curiously enough, even the notoriously cautious Clintonites may, at the time, have had doubts about the efficacy of this course of inaction where North Korea was concerned. In fact, if a recent article by then-Secretary of Defense William B. Perry and Assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton J. Carter is to be believed, the administration seriously weighed a preemptive attack on the North?s weapons-producing site at Yongbyon. The Clinton team, Perry and Carter write,
readied a detailed plan to attack the Yongbyon facility with precision-guided bombs. We were highly confident that it could be destroyed without causing a meltdown that would release radioactivity into the air. The plutonium would be entombed, and the special buildings nearby designed to reprocess the reactor fuel into bomb material would also be leveled.
To be sure, there was the worry of a ?spasmodic? North Korean response that would cost the lives of thousands of U.S. troops, tens of thousands of South Korean troops, and an untold number of civilians. Nevertheless, Perry and Carter conclude, ?we believed that the nuclear program on which North Korea was embarked was even more dangerous, and [we] were prepared to risk a war to stop it.? Indeed, it was only when Jimmy Carter stepped in to ?solve? the problem through his brand of personal diplomacy that the plan for preemptive war was dropped.**
Needless to say, the North Korean problem was not solved and a crucial decade has been lost. Today, while our forces are engaged in a major open-ended operation in Iraq, a minor open-ended operation in Afghanistan, and a global war against al Qaeda, we are quietly sliding into the gravest crisis of this kind since Nikita Khrushchev placed nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba. Two crazy states?both charter members of what President Bush has rightly called the ?axis of evil,? both openly flouting an international treaty to which they are party, both perpetrators of acts of international terrorism, both animated by a blistering hatred for America and the West?are bent on acquiring weapons of unthinkable destructive power. The CIA, as it admits in its own statements, does not know what it needs to know about either country, except that North Korea almost certainly possesses two or more fully operational bombs and could have as many as ten within months, while Iran is at most several years away from acquiring the bomb unless it purchases one or more tomorrow or next week or next month from Pyongyang.
Whatever the constraints on our resources, the challenge is unmistakable and cannot be dodged. The price of action is likely to be high, very high; the price of inaction is likely to be much higher. Courtesy of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, we have already had to relearn the lesson of Pearl Harbor in a second and more terrible form. In the age of terrorism and nuclear weapons, we cannot afford to relearn it a third time and a fourth.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* The Washington Post, October 20, 2002. Perry and Carter may be engaged here in historical revisionism, designed to make timorousness look like toughness. In open testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1995, Perry stated flatly that he and his advisers only considered destroying North Korea?s nuclear installations but did not advocate this to the President. Instead, they recommended the imposition of sanctions, plus a military build-up in case the sanctions provoked a North Korean first strike.
===================
Gaddafi says Libya came close to building bomb
Reuters
Monday, July 24, 2006; 3:05 PM
TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, whose country abandoned weapons of mass destruction programs in 2003, said that at one stage Libya had come close to building a nuclear bomb, the Libyan news agency reported on Monday.
It was the first time any Libyan official has confirmed that the north African country of more than five million had been trying to build a nuclear bomb.
"It is true that Libya came close to building a nuclear bomb. This is no longer a secret ... as everything was laid bare by the International Atomic (Energy) Agency for everyone to see," the agency quoted Gaddafi as saying on Sunday in a speech to Libyan engineers.
"The programs and equipment (to build a nuclear bomb) are known," he added.
Gaddafi, who was speaking mainly about the need for economic self-reliance, referred to Libya's efforts to gain the bomb as one of several examples of Libyans being successful in challenging endeavors. He gave no further details.
The main point of Gaddafi's speech was to say that he wanted to limit the role of foreigners in the economy to ensure as much of the country's wealth as possible stayed at home.
In December 2003 Libya said it was abandoning its weapons of mass destruction programs and would allow in international weapons inspectors.
The move was the most startling of several by Libya that helped the OPEC oil producer repair relations with the West after decades of estrangement.
The U.S. government said in May that it would restore formal ties with Tripoli and take Libya off the list of countries deemed state sponsors of terrorism.
Gaddafi, elaborating on a long-standing explanation for his abandonment of confrontation with the West, said the time for spending large amounts of money on supporting political movements overseas was now over.
Although the support was a "must" at the time, it was clear that the effort had used up large amounts of resources.
"All revolutionaries used to come to the (Libyan) revolution for help. Revolutionaries in Latin America, Africa and Asia, sought our help, even the IRA (Irish Republican Army)," he said.
"I put a stop to this because we spent a great deal of money on the military side, not only in terms of construction."
He said Libya had taken part in a "battle" for Arab nationalism, but this era was now over.
"There were hopes and aspirations to have a strong nationalist entity of which we would be a part, expanding from Iraq to Morocco, for example. This no longer valid," he said. "Arabs would be one nation ... Unfortunately this has failed and that era ended and a new era began."
"We have to learn lessons."
====================
Pakistan nuclear expansion raises US concerns By Carol Giacomo and Andrea Shalal-Esa
Mon Jul 24, 6:31 PM ET
Pakistan is building a new nuclear reactor that could produce enough plutonium for 40 to 50 nuclear weapons a year in what would be a major expansion of its nuclear program and could prompt an intensified arms race in South Asia, a report said Monday.
But U.S. officials and congressional aides, who confirmed the Pakistani plan, said it was unlikely to derail a nuclear cooperation accord with India or the sale of U.S.-made F-16 jets to Islamabad.
News of the planned new Pakistani facility was confirmed as the U.S. Congress faced targets for action this week on both an Indian cooperation accord and the F-16s deal.
"We have been aware of these plans, and we discourage any use of that facility for military purposes such as weapons development," White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters.
He said the administration "discourage(s) expansion and modernization of nuclear weapons programs, both of India and Pakistan," nuclear rivals who refused to sign the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
While U.S. officials knew about the reactor project, congressional aides said Congress was largely unaware until a report in the Washington Post on Monday citing an analysis of satellite photos and other data by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.
The analysis concluded Pakistan was building a second larger heavy water reactor at its Khushab complex that could produce enough plutonium for 40 to 50 nuclear weapons a year.
Construction apparently began sometime after March 2000. But the analysis said Pakistan did not appear to be hastening completion, possibly due to shortages of reactor components or weapons production infrastructure.
The administration preferred to keep the project quiet because public disclosure "probably will aggravate concerns in India" as well as on Capitol Hill, one U.S. official said.
Congress this week faces a deadline for acting if it wants to block administration plans to sell Pakistan up to 36 F-16C/D Block 50/52 Falcon fighters built by Lockheed Martin Corp. in a deal potentially worth up to $5 billion.
Some lawmakers are concerned about Pakistan's past nuclear proliferation record and fear the warplane technology could be leaked to China, Pakistan's close ally.
Congress could block the sale by enacting a resolution of disapproval in both houses within 30 days of the June 28 notification date, but such action is rare.
But to survive a presidential veto, the legislation would have to pass both houses with a two-thirds majority.
"The reality ...is that it's very difficult to pass a resolution of disapproval," said Rachel Stohl of the Center for Defense Information.
Added a congressional aide: "There should be no effect on the sale of F-16s (because of the new reactor). So far there seem to be no major obstacles to the sale.
The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday is to take the first of two key votes on the U.S.-India nuclear deal, which would permit sales of American nuclear fuel and reactors to New Delhi for the first time in 30 years. U.S. officials and congressional aides expect the deal to be approved.
However, Democratic Rep. Edward Markey (news, bio, voting record), an administration critic, said: "The nuclear arms race in South Asia is about to ignite, and ... the Bush Administration is throwing fuel on the fire. If either India or Pakistan starts increasing its nuclear arsenal, the other side will respond in kind; and the Bush Administration's proposed nuclear deal with India is making that much more likely."
He and other lawmakers accused the State Department of withholding until after the vote an embarrassing report which will show Indian entities have sold or received weapons of mass destruction technology from Iran or Syria. A department spokesman said the report would be out "shortly."
(additional reporting by Steve Holland))
=================
Posted July 28, 2006 06:39 AM July 28, 2006 06:39 AM
Pak has between 25 and 50 N-weapons: Report
Press Trust of India
New York, July 27, 2006|14:23 IST
Pakistan currently has between 25 and 50 nuclear weapons, mostly relatively simple uranium arms with "modest" yields around the size of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a journal claimed on Thursday.
The Nature magazine's claim followed media reports that satellite photos of Pakistan's Khushab nuclear site have shown what appears to be a partially completed heavy-water reactor capable of a 20-fold increase from its current nuclear capabilities.
Quoting Director of globalsecurity.org, a non-profit group that specialises in image analysis John Pike, Nature says if the new facility is what it seems to be, it would allow Pakistan to build a lot more bombs.
The reactor is "gigantic" and would allow Pakistan to increase its total number of weapons tenfold, he says. Plutonium can be used to construct smaller and more lightweight weapons than uranium.
Most uranium bombs require 15 to 20 kilograms of material, but plutonium weapons can be built with as little as 5 kilograms. That makes it easier to fit plutonium warheads on missiles.
In addition, small plutonium bombs are often used to trigger larger hydrogen weapons.
So the technology, says Pike, is an important step towards developing those bombs, which are thousands of times more powerful than uranium and plutonium weapons.
-
B:
Martial Arts begins with the consciousness that we are worthy of defending.
=============
.
Defence? This war is the equivalent of you coming and attempting to destroy my house and family because your president tells you that you are defending yourself by doing so even though i am innocent of any attack. . . . that's not defence, that's an attack. . . . calling it defence is just pseudo political double talk. . . . and so apparently is your "higher consciousness through harder contact" claim.
Martial arts are not a pseudo patriotic political excuse to indulge in mechanised killing. . .. but that's what you are treating them as. . . shame on you.. . . you get no repect from this puppy.
:!:
-
Lacking respect means you lack the requirements of participation here.
-
We don't see a eye to eye at all.
goodbye
.
-
Interview with Tony Jones - Lateline
Tuesday, 23 August 2005 - 10.40 pm
SUBJECTS: Australian values, Muslim clerics, anti-Americanism, Telstra
TONY JONES:
Peter Costello thanks for joining us.
TREASURER:
Good to be with you, Tony.
TONY JONES:
Now, over the past 24 hours you've been repeating the notion that migrants, evidently Islamic migrants, who don't like Australia, or Australian values, should think of packing up and moving to another country. Is that a fair assessment?
TREASURER:
What I've said is that this is a country, which is founded on a democracy. According to our Constitution, we have a secular state. Our laws are made by the Australian Parliament. If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you. This is not the kind of country where you would feel comfortable if you were opposed to democracy, parliamentary law, independent courts and so I would say to people who don't feel comfortable with those values there might be other countries where they'd feel more comfortable with their own values or beliefs.
TONY JONES:
It sounds like you're inviting Muslims who don't want to integrate to go to another country. Is it as simple as that?
TREASURER:
No. I'm saying if you are thinking of coming to Australia, you ought to know what Australian values are.
TONY JONES:
But what about if you're already here and you don't want to integrate?
TREASURER:
Well, I'll come to that in a moment. But there are some clerics who have been quoted as saying they recognise two laws. They recognise Australian law and Sharia law. There's only one law in Australia, it's the Australian law. For those coming to Australia, I think we ought to be very clear about that. We expect them to recognise only one law and to observe it.
Now, for those who are born in Australia, I'd make the same point. This is a country which has a Constitution. Under its Constitution, the state is secular. Under its constitution, the law is made by the parliament. Under its Constitution, it's enforced by the judiciary. These are Australian values and they're not going to change and we would expect people, when they come to Australia or if they are born in Australia, to respect those values.
TONY JONES:
I take it that if you're a dual citizen and you have the opportunity to leave and you don't like Australian values, you're encouraging them to go away; is that right?
TREASURER:
Well, if you can't agree with parliamentary law, independent courts, democracy and would prefer Sharia law and have the opportunity to go to another country which practises it, perhaps then that's a better option.
TONY JONES:
But isn't this the sort of thing you hear in pubs, the meaningless populism you hear on talkback radio? Essentially, the argument is if you don't like it here, you should go back home.
TREASURER:
No. Essentially, the argument is Australia expects its citizens to abide by core beliefs - democracy, the rule of law, the independent judiciary, independent liberty. You see, Tony, when you come to Australia and you go to take out Australian citizenship you either swear on oath or make an affirmation that you respect Australia's democracy and its values. That's what we ask of people that come to Australia and if they don't, then it's very clear that this is not the country - if they can't live with them - whose values they can't share. Well, there might be another country where their values can be shared.
TONY JONES:
Who exactly are you aiming this at? Are you aiming it at young Muslims who don't want to integrate or are you aiming it at clerics like Sheikh Omran or Abu Bakr both from Melbourne?
TREASURER:
I'd be saying to clerics who are teaching that there are two laws governing people in Australia, one the Australian law and another the Islamic law, that that is false. It's not the situation in Australia. It's not the situation under our Constitution. There's only one law in Australia. It's the law that's made by the Parliament of Australia and enforced by our courts. There's no second law. There's only one law that applies in Australia and Australia expects its citizens to observe it.
TONY JONES:
But you're not moving to the next stage, as they have in Britain, of actively seeking out clerics who teach what they regard as dangerous philosophy to young Muslims and forcing them to leave the country?
TREASURER:
The only thing I would say - and let me say it again - is we can't be ambivalent about this point. Australia has one law, Australia has a secular state and anybody who teaches to the contrary doesn't know Australia and anybody who can't accept that, can't accept something that is fundamental to the nature of our society.
TONY JONES:
All right. But the situation now, as far as you're concerned, if they are to leave, it should be completely voluntary.
TREASURER:
Well, I'm just saying if they object to a secular state with parliamentary law, there might be other countries where the system of law is more acceptable to them.
TONY JONES:
Alright. Could that situation change? I mean, the voluntary nature of it at least, could you compel people to leave, including radical preachers, if there were a terrorist attack in Australia, as there was in London not so long ago?
TREASURER:
Well, where a person has dual citizenship, Tony, it might be possible to ask them to exercise that other citizenship where they could just as easily exercise a citizenship of another country. That might be a live possibility.
TONY JONES:
You mean to force them to leave?
TREASURER:
Well, you could ask them to exercise another citizenship.
TONY JONES:
But you would only do that if there were a terrorist attack in the aftermath of it. You wouldn't do it, for example, if there were a thwarted terrorist attack as ASIO has told us there has been in this country?
TREASURER:
Well, I am not going into individual circumstances. I just make the point that where people have dual citizenship and they're not comfortable with the way Australia is structured, it may be possible to ask them to exercise their other citizenship.
TONY JONES:
Forcibly?
TREASURER:
Well, as I said, it may be possible to ask them to exercise their other citizenship.
TONY JONES:
Let's move on. You made a speech at the weekend in which you warned that Australia could be hurt by growing anti-Americanism or Australia's interests at least could be hurt by growing anti-Americanism in the world. How could that happen?
TREASURER:
Well, I think there is a lot of anti-Americanism in Australia. It's not just in Australia. It there's anti-Americanism in Europe and other parts of the world and to some degree it may be less in Australia than in countries like France or in parts of the Arab world. But I don't believe we can be complacent about it. It is a real strand of public opinion and I think we ought to engage it and discuss it. The point I'm trying to make is we in Australia have no reason to be anti-American; that where American power has been exercised, such as in the World War II, it was exercised in the defence of Australia, not the attack of Australia. By and large, American power, which is exercised in defence of democracy and in individual liberty, is supportive of Australia in its interests and not a threat to it.
TONY JONES:
You said to Laurie Oakes on Sunday that anti-Americanism can easily morph into anti-Westernism and effectively that could threaten our interests. How could that happen?
TREASURER:
Well, we've seen with some terrorist attacks already that Western places are targets. Not necessarily because there are Australians present, but because in the terrorist mind there are Westerners present, whether they be Americans or Britons or Australians.
TONY JONES:
This is to do with anti-Americanism?
TREASURER:
Well, as I said, anti-Westernism, and terrorists don't particularly distinguish when they're setting off bombs, can hit Australians as much as it can hit Americans or it can hit Britons.
TONY JONES:
But this is anti-Americanism morphing into a broader anti-Western feeling which could affect Australian interests. Is that what you are saying?
TREASURER:
Well, there have been occasions when Australians have been hit by terrorist incidents where people haven't distinguished between whether it's Americans or Britons or Australians. There is a strand of terrorist thinking that says that anybody who is a Westerner is a legitimate target.
TONY JONES:
But the core of it is anti-American from what you are saying? The logic of what you are saying is pretty clear.
TREASURER:
In some terrorist minds, if you're hitting a Westerner, you're hitting a legitimate target. The point I want to make is that because we're Westerners, in the minds of some terrorists we can be targets. So it's in our interests to defend the values of the West and it's in our interests to explain our policy. It's in America's interests to defend its own image and I would urge it to do so and I would also say to Australia's security -
TONY JONES:
You seem to be suggesting that anti-Americanism is in fact a dangerous thing for Australians.
TREASURER:
Well, it is in a security sense because the US is Australia's principal defence partner. When I say there is a danger of anti-Americanism in Australia amongst Australians, what I'm saying is, particularly amongst younger Australians, if they don't understand the events of 1942 when the US was the principal ally defending Australia and without which we wouldn't have been able to defend the islands to our near north, if they don't understand that, they may not understand what the importance of the American alliance is to the defence of Australia and our strategic interests.
TONY JONES:
I don't want to keep coming back to this necessarily, but you've made the point quite clearly that anti-Americanism can morph into anti-Westernism and that threatens our interests. It threatens our interest, does it, because we could, like Americans, as a result of anti-Americanism become terrorist targets?
TREASURER:
We have become terrorist targets because we are perceived to be Western. We've become terrorist targets because we are perceived to stand for a whole lot of values, which in the terrorist mind they oppose. Australians became terrorists in Bali not because of anything Australia did, but because in Bali they were perceived to be Westerners and in a sick terrorist mind that makes you a target.
TONY JONES:
Right. Given that the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq is probably the leading cause of anti-Americanism in the Arab world, does that make us, as an ally of the Americans, a greater target for terrorists?
TREASURER:
I don't think it's the principle cause at all. I think if you want to look for perceived areas of anti-Americanism in the Arab world, it was around a lot before Iraq. It's been around for a very long time, Tony, and most of it, I believe -
TONY JONES:
I'm talking about what's happening right now. We're seeing it even in the lead-up to the Islamic summit we've been having in Canberra. What we are hearing is young Australian Muslims are particularly angry with the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.
TREASURER:
No, I couldn't disagree with you more profoundly. There was substantial hostility to the US in the Arab world long before Iraq. Whether it's over perceived injustices to Islam, whether it's over the Palestinian issue, whether it's over support for Israel. Most of these things, and I don't believe justify hostility at all, but it's been there long before Iraq. Let me tell you this, Tony - you are profoundly wrong if you thought hostility to the United States started in 2003. It was around a long before that.
TONY JONES:
I don't believe I said or even suggested that, but let's move on if we can.
TREASURER:
No, no, no. You said the primary cause...
TONY JONES:
At the present moment.
TREASURER:
..of anti-Americanism...
TONY JONES:
At the present moment.
TREASURER:
..in the Arab world was the war in Iraq...
TONY JONES:
At the present moment.
TREASURER:
..and I explained to you, long before the war in Iraq, the attack on the US on the World Trade Centre showed there were great causes of disaffection to America long before Iraq, Tony.
TONY JONES:
That's completely understood, but I did say "at the present moment". Can we move on from foreign affairs and onto your own portfolio. How much revenue did the Government get from its dividends on the Telstra shares last year?
[snip]They talk about Telstra[/snip]
TONY JONES:
Peter Costello, we'll have to leave it there. We thank you very much once again for taking the time to come and talk to us tonight.
TREASURER:
Thanks, Tony.
http://www.treasurer.gov.au/tsr/content/transcripts/2005/123.asp
-
This video explains the roots of WWIII, it's a video that we all should watch. The film is supposed to be in theaters next month.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6162397493278181614&hl=en
-
Message from the President and Founder
americancongressfortruth.com
Brigitte Gabriel
Welcome and thank you for taking the time to visit our website, American Congress for Truth. Evil prevails when good people do nothing. With the spread of radical Islamic fundamentalism throughout the world, it is important for the people of the western world to know and understand what to expect and what to do about it.
(http://americancongressfortruth.com/images/brigitte-pic2.jpg)
We are faced with a war that has been declared on Christians and Jews in America and the world. Citizens of the most powerful country on earth watched in horror on 9/11, 2001 as a handful of men brought the United States of America to its knees. Wall Street froze, the stock market tumbled, and national air traffic ground to a halt. The West faces a threat more menacing today than the past goals of communist world domination.
We are facing an enemy that uses children as human bombs, mothers as suicide bombers, and men driven by the glory of death and the promise of eternal sexual bliss in heaven. We are fighting an enemy that loves death more than we love life. I am a victim of the Lebanese civil war, which was the first front in the worldwide Jihad of militant Islam against the only Christian country in the Middle East. My family?s home was shelled and destroyed leaving me wounded. I lived underground in a bomb shelter from age 10 to 17 without electricity and very little food. I had to crawl under sniper bullets to a spring to fetch water for my elderly parents. I was betrayed by my country, rescued by my enemy Israel, the Jewish State that is under attack for its existence today.
911 changed most American lives forever, but it struck an especially sensitive chord with me. It reminded me that the entire world is threatened by the same radical Islamic theology that succeeded in annihilating the ?infidels? in Lebanon. That?s why I created American Congress for Truth. ACT was formed in June 2002 to inform, inspire and motivate Jews and Christians throughout society in ways to act and fight for our western ways of life and the values we cherish. Our members include Jews, Arabs and Christians from all background both secular and religious, liberals and conservatives. People who have put their differences aside to combat both anti American and anti Israel propaganda masquerading as anti Imperialism and anti Zionism wherever it exists; in the western media, among the intellectual elite, and on American college Campuses.
So many times in history in the last 100 years, citizens have stood by and done nothing allowing evil to prevail. As America stood up against and defeated communism now it is time to stand up against the terror of religious bigotry and intolerance. I urge you to become an ACT activist and join a growing network of Americans concerned about securing their nation from acts of terrorism. Through American Congress for Truth you can be a voice effecting the future of your community and your nation.
Thank you for your support. You are the heroes who make all our work possible. And I especially thank you for helping me protect the country that has blessed me so much, America, the dream that became my address.
Brigitte Gabriel
http://americancongressfortruth.com/
-
July 26, 2006:
The Evolution of Improvised Explosive Devices (back to list)
International Analysis Alert Level: Severe
World
None
TRC Analysis:
Many insurgents and terrorists around the world are examining and embracing the successful use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) in Iraq (Country Profile) and integrating them into their battle plans. Defeating the IED threat requires a comprehensive approach.
Insurgents in Iraq have made the IED a central component of their overall 'bleed until bankruptcy' strategy. According to CENTCOM, in 2004, there were 5,607 IED attacks; in 2005, there was massive increase of 10,953 IED attacks, as insurgents realized the cost effectiveness of this weapon (source). Overall, IEDs have accounted for 873 of the over 1,600 Coalition fatalities in Iraq since the start of the war (source). This analysis examines how IEDs are constructed and used in Iraq; how the IED fits into the insurgents' overall strategy in Iraq; how the strategy governing the use of IEDs has proliferated to Afghanistan (Country Profile) and other fields of battle; and what the successful use of IEDs in Iraq means for the future national security of the United States (Country Profile).
IEDs were first used in Iraq in the fall of 2003 as the insurgency gathered steam. The devices were smaller and relatively unsophisticated. Early generations of IEDs in Iraq were typically constructed via a single mortar round or 152mm artillery round. Coalition forces soon adapted to these early IEDs by up-armoring their vehicles. However, insurgents responded by developing both more powerful and technically sophisticated devices and a networked web of cells capable of avoiding detection and carrying out attacks.
The IED
From a technical standpoint, IEDs in Iraq have evolved into devices capable of penetrating a 22-ton Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The increase in destructive power of insurgent IEDs is due in part to technical innovations such as stacking multiple heavy artillery rounds or anti-tank mines together. Additionally, insurgents mastered the construction and use of explosively formed projectiles, which can be constructed with readily available threaded pipe. A steel plate is screwed on to one end of the pipe, which is packed with high explosives, and a metal concave cap, which becomes the projectile upon detonation, seals the other end. The August 3, 2005 roadside bombing that killed 14 US Marines (Terrorist Incident) demonstrated the destructive power of explosively formed projectiles.
The IED Network
Technology was not the insurgent's only area of innovation. In an effort to increase efficiency and improve operational security, the Iraq insurgency has organized itself as a series of loosely affiliated groups and operational cells. Many of the IED attack cells are contracted out on an ad-hoc basis to terrorist and insurgent groups operating in Iraq. Moreover, these IEDs cells are organized in a modular manner: each member of the cell fills an organizational function?fundraising, acquiring components, constructing the bomb, choosing a target, concealing the IED, and detonating the device (source). IED cells may work together as a unit, or an individual specialist may organize an attack on an ad hoc basis. Typically, there are no more than 5-10 members in a single IED cell, and US intelligence estimates that there are approximately 100 IED cells operating within Iraq (source). The loosely coupled nature of IED cells to insurgent networks and the networked nature of the IED cells themselves reduced their exposure to attack and disruption from Coalition forces.
Defeating the IED Threat
The insurgents' growing sophistication in both the technology of their devices and the tradecraft used to build and deploy weapons have left the US military with the difficult choice of attempting to defeat the IED itself or the insurgent network responsible for the IED attacks. Both are required. Attacking the individual cells responsible for the construction and detonation of an IED is a temporary, albeit life saving, solution. Even if an individual IED cell is eliminated, there are other cells left to carry out attacks. Moreover, when Coalition forces develop a successful defense against IEDs, insurgents are able to respond with a low-cost countermeasure that can defeat the newly developed defense. This cycle of innovation typically favors the insurgents, as their innovations are less expensive and developed with greater speed than Coalition forces' defense.
One example of this cycle of defensive and offensive innovation can be seen in the insurgents' innovative use of various triggering devices. In response to the insurgents' use of radio signals to detonate an IED remotely, Coalition forces developed a jammer device, the Warlock, that blocked all radio signals within a set range. The Warlock system cost millions of dollars to deploy to the field, and it only worked for a short time until insurgents developed infrared and other wire-triggering devices that used no radio signals and circumvented the Warlock's radio-jamming defense. As a result, the low-cost innovation of new triggers invalidated millions of dollars of research and development. This example helps illustrate how the insurgents' individual tactical innovations fit into their overall strategy of bleeding the Coalition forces' capability and will to fight.
IED Proliferation
The use of IEDs in Iraq and elsewhere is a threat to US national security. Recent evidence demonstrates that the lessons learned from the successful use of IEDs in Iraq are bleeding out to other theaters of battle, Afghanistan in particular, creating a greater threat to US national security. Powerful IED designs proliferate rapidly from one theater to another in part through the Internet. According to Lt. Col Shawn Weed, an Army intelligence officer, "the Internet has changed the nature of warfare. Someone can learn how to build a new bomb, plug the plans into the Internet and share the technology very quickly." IEDs are increasingly used in Afghanistan, as Taliban insurgents (Group Profile) adopt the proven tools and tactics of Iraq's insurgents. Examples of the Taliban's increasingly sophisticated use of IEDs can be found in the April 9, 2006 attack against the Afghani military (Terrorist Incident).
Bomb recipes, generated from the Iraqi battlefront, will continue to proliferate across the Internet to other insurgent and terrorist groups around the world. Insurgents or terrorists in other battlefields will not always use the artillery shell IED design favored in Iraq; rather, homegrown cells adopt a design suitable to their local conditions and appropriate to their desired type of attack. For example, the London bombers constructed a bomb, based in part on a recipe from the Internet (source), and concealed the weapon in a backpack to avoid suspicion. As the disrupted plot against the PATH transit system in New York (Intel Report) and the successful Mumbai rail bombings (Intel Report) have demonstrated, terrorist cells continue to demonstrate preference for the cheap, easy, yet potentially spectacular, IED attack.
By Ned Moran, TRC Staff
-
From the Weekly Standard
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Weak Horses
Most liberals (and the odd conservative) don't want to fight--Bush does.
by William Kristol
07/31/2006, Volume 011, Issue 43
On Tuesday, July 18, in Tehran, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke to his countrymen. He reminded them of the connection between Israel and the liberal West: "The final point of liberal civilization is the false and corrupt state that has occupied Jerusalem. That is the bottom line. That is what all those who talk about liberalism and support it have in common." He went on to explain that when the Muslim world erupts, "its waves will not be limited to this region." That same day, Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, issued a warning to the Zionists who had intruded into the Muslim Middle East: "Today, the land of Palestine is painted red with your contemptible blood. . . . No place in Israel will be safe."
Meanwhile, on that same summer day, the Washington Post appeared as usual on the doorsteps of most residents of Washington, D.C., the capital of the liberal civilization Ahmadinejad so dislikes. Its editorial page featured three of its distinguished columnists.
Two were liberals. One, E.J. Dionne, was worried--very, very worried. He saw only "disaster" and "calamity" ahead in the Middle East, no silver lining to the "frightening" developments taking place. He judged that "alarmism is the highest form of realism in this case"--and called for "at least a brief cease-fire." The other, Richard Cohen, was less alarmed, more philosophical. Cohen concurred in part with Ahmadinejad, judging that "Israel itself is a mistake." He dissented in part from Ahmadinejad because Cohen allowed that Israel is, after all, "an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable." So Israel should not be destroyed. But neither should Israel, when it is attacked, go on the offensive. It should "hunker down."
The other regular columnist was a conservative, George F. Will. Will felt it important to remind his readers of the conservative truth of "the limits of power to subdue an unruly world." He mocked the possibility of military action against Syria or Iran. In passing, he cast an ironic eye--perhaps a disapproving one--on the fact that, while Israel has patiently borne the "torment" of terrorism "for decades," the United States "responded to two hours of terrorism one September morning by toppling two regimes halfway around the world with wars that show no signs of ending." (If the 9/11 attacks had lasted a little longer, would one's fine sense of proportion be less disturbed by the vigor of the American response?) In any case, Will concluded, things could get worse.
That's a lot of "weak horses," to borrow an Osama bin Laden formulation, for one op-ed page. Fortunately, there are at least a few strong horses in the nation's capital as well. One was to be found on the Post's own editorial page, right across from Dionne and Cohen and Will. The clear-eyed liberalism of the Post's own editorial, "A War With Extremists," was bracing, as the editors argued that "this Middle East conflict should end with the defeat of its instigators," Hamas and Hezbollah, and warned against accepting a premature cease-fire or any result other than a "decisive defeat" for the terrorists and their state backers in Damascus and Tehran.
And on the news pages were reports of a couple more strong horses--George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Bush and Blair were, famously, caught on an open mike at the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg. Blair demonstrated a shrewd understanding of what was at stake for Syria's dictator, Bashar Assad: "He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way . . . he's done." And Bush explained, simply and correctly, that the first step was "to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s---."
Israel is fighting to stop, and defeat, Hezbollah. Bush, Blair, and the Post editors understand that the right policy is to stand behind Israel, and to support that nation in defeating terror--for its own sake, and on behalf of liberal civilization. They understand that we are at war with an axis of jihadist-terrorist organizations and the states that sponsor them. They understand that we need to win the war. With Bush's leadership, we have a good chance to do so.
--William Kristol
-
Back to Story - Help
Raise readiness, Assad tells Syrian Army By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
12 minutes ago
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told the Syrian military on Monday to raise its readiness, pledging not to abandon support for Lebanese resistance against Israel.
In an annual address on the anniversary of the foundation of the Syria Arab Army, Assad called on the military to "work on more preparedness and raise readiness of all units.
"We are facing international circumstances and regional challenges that require caution, alertness, readiness and preparedness," Assad said in the written address.
Diplomats in Damascus say the Syrian army has been on alert since the Israeli onslaught on Lebanon began on July 12 after Hizbollah fighters captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border operation.
Assad said Israel's war on Lebanon was an attempt by Israel to settle scores with Hizbollah, whose war of attrition forced Israel to pull out of southern Lebanon in 2000 after a 22-year occupation.
"The barbaric war of annihilation the Israeli aggression is waging on our people in Lebanon and Palestine is increasing in ferocity," the 40-year-old president said.
"All these threats by the powers supporting the aggression will not stop us from the liberation march and from supporting the resistance."
Over the last three weeks Israel has raided targets just inside the Lebanese side of the border with Syria, but it has not attacked Syria proper since 2003, when it raided installations belonging to a pro-Syrian Palestinian group near Damascus.
The Israeli army, which has forces in the occupied Golan Heights, 35 km (22 miles) from Damascus, has repeatedly said it has no intention of attacking Syria.
On Monday, an Israeli official said a Syrian-made bomb was detonated next to an Israeli army patrol in the Golan Heights, causing no casualties.
Israel's Channel Two television quoted military sources as saying the blast in the Golan, which Israel occupied in 1967, was believed to be an act of solidarity with Hizbollah.
Syrian officials have occasionally said they could consider activating the Golan front, which has been quiet since a 1974 ceasefire with Israel.
-
Does this remind you of Hitler youth?
(http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/rdonlyres/CB987629-F0CC-4160-A2DF-4E1ABC16C715/121961/2F0FD3FE4FAE4A0883C2B805288F39F4.jpg)
Beirut march marks Qana bombing
Thursday 27 April 2006, 21:33 Makka Time, 18:33 GMT
About 2,000 children have marched through the streets of Beirut armed with fake rockets in a rally organised by Hezbollah to mark the anniversary of a deadly Israeli bombardment 10 years ago.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/CB987629-F0CC-4160-A2DF-4E1ABC16C715.htm
-
Don't know how long this link will be up. It is supposedly from Al Jazeera with Wafa Sultan, an Arab-American psychologist from Los Angeles.
http://switch3.castup.net/cunet/gm.asp?ai=214&ar=1050wmv&ak=null
--Rafael--
-
"We have met the enemy... and he is us" Pogo
Bleeding-heart ignoramuses
By Julie Burchill
Personally, I'd far prefer the Jews to be angry, aggressive and alive than meek, mild and dead
A few weeks back it was my birthday, and my equally non-Jewish journalist friend Chas Newkey-Burden took his life in his hands and presented me with a cuddly toy. Now, normally I feel that people who bother with cuddly toys over the age of eight are either mad and/or prostitutes, but this little sweetie stole my heart. A honey-brown camel with a heart-melting smile and a jaunty cap, he proudly wore an Israeli Army uniform with a fetching hole cut out for his hump. "I've named him Bibi," Chas told me, obviously in honor of our mutual crush.
Later that night Chas and I were watching a TV news report of the beginnings of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. To say we were amazed when a news presenter solemnly intoned that there had been "two militants wounded" with all the grieving gravitas of Richard Dimbleby reporting on the state funeral of the late Winston Churchill is to employ English understatement to an almost surreal degree. But it's been that way ever since - and more than one night has seen me screaming at the TV/my husband "You don't understand! None of you English bastards understands!" before running into the bedroom, slamming the door and collapsing in a tearful heap with only Bibi to comfort me.
One of the most grotesque examples of the almost brainwashed level of bias can be seen on the official BBC Religions Web site, where that "peace be upon him" eyewash is going on like crazy, while other religions are coolly commented on in a strictly "objective" way.
The conflict has sent this tendency into overdrive, with not just the usual Masochist Hacks For Mohammed such as Robert Fisk (beaten up by Islamists, says they were right to do it) and Yvonne Ridley (kidnapped by Islamists, then became one) getting their chadors in a twist about big swarthy men with tea-towels on their heads treating the West mean and keeping it - in their case at least - keen.
Even the women's magazines have gotten in on the act, with lots of first-person eye-witness accounts of British citizens fleeing the Jewish jackboot. Then turn the page and you'll often find a shocked article about honor-killing or forced marriage, Muslim-style. That Israel is fighting the frontline war, on behalf of the freedom and civilization of all of us, against the very real evils of shari'a law never seems to occur to these bleeding-heart ignoramuses.
Over at Channel 4, Jon Snow interviewed an Israeli diplomat with all the finesse and objectivity of a neo-Nazi spraying a six-foot swastika on a wall. Of the rockets which murdered Israeli civilians in the town of Sderot, he said "Rockets, pretty pathetic things - nobody gets injured." This was gleefully picked up and proclaimed by The Guardian, the newspaper I left some years ago in protest at what I saw as its vile anti-Semitism.
All across the board, Lebanese civilians are referred to as "civilians" where Israeli civilians are referred to as "Israelis" - an eerie and sinister difference pointed out by the non-Jewish stand-up comic genius Natalie Haynes, and one which very few people appear to have noticed - even me, until then.
In fact the tone in papers as diverse as the "liberal" Guardian to the right-wing Daily Mail has been repulsively similar; look, look, the Israelis are as bad as the terrorists! Worse, in fact, because they've got America behind them! Even the normally sensible Matthew Parris in the normally sensible Times wrote: "The past 40 years have been a catastrophe, gradual and incremental, for world Jewry. Seldom in history have the name and reputation of a human grouping lost so vast a store of support and sympathy so fast."
The catastrophe he refers to is the State of Israel itself; you'd really think, reading this, that the years leading up to the creation of the Jewish state were, in fact, a right royal romp in the park. Instead of the Holocaust.
A surprising number of British people - especially the super-creepy British Jews who recently signed a treacherous letter to the press distancing themselves from Israel's actions - seem to think Israel should exist not as a real, imperfect country full of real, imperfect people led by real, imperfect leaders, but as some sort of collective kosher Mater Dolorosa, there to provide a selfless, suffering example to the rest of us.
Fight back, and the outside world reacts with the revulsion of a man seeing his sainted grandmother drunk and offering sailors outside. Even (especially?) anti-Semites and enemies of Israel are shameless in recycling the legends of "brave little Israel" - I'm thinking of David and Goliath here - and basically believe that each IDF member should go into battle against the assembled hordes of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah armed with nothing but a slingshot apiece. Failing that, this tiny country must embark on a suicidal act of self-sacrifice in the face of murderous, genocidal hatred, as Matthew Parris astoundingly suggests:
"The settlement has to be a return to its pre-1967 boundaries. Precisely because Israel is by no means forced to make so generous a move, the international support (even love) this would generate would secure its future permanently. It would bring it back within the pale."
Personally, I'd far prefer the Jews to be angry, aggressive and alive than meek, mild and dead - and that's what makes me and a minority like me feel so much like strangers in our own country, now more than ever. I've always loved being a hack, but now even that feels weird, as though I'm living among a bunch of snatched-body zombies who look like journalists but believe and say the most inhuman, evil things.
When Mel Gibson was picked up for drunk-driving recently, he was reported to have screamed at the police officer, whom he believed to be Jewish, "Fucking Jews! The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." His subsequent excuse was that he has "battled the disease of alcoholism for all my adult life." The British media are notorious for our love of the hard stuff; is that going to be our excuse too, I wonder, when large numbers of us are finally bang to rights for peddling the same loathsome lie?
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/749291.html
-
Surreal Rules
The difficulties of fighting in an absurdly complicated region.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Prior to September 11, the general consensus was that conventional Middle East armies were paper tigers and that their terrorist alternatives were best dealt with by bombing them from a distance ? as in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, east Africa, etc. ? and then letting them sort out their own rubble.
Then following 9/11, the West adopted a necessary change in strategy that involved regime change and the need to win ?hearts and minds? to ensure something better was established in place of the deposed dictator or theocrat. That necessitated close engagements with terrorists in their favored urban landscape. After the last four years, we have learned just how difficult that struggle can be, especially in light of the type of weapons $500 billion in Middle East windfall petroleum profits can buy, when oil went from $20 a barrel to almost $80 over the last few years. To best deal with certain difficulties we?ve encountered in these battles thus far, perhaps the United States should adopt the following set of surreal rules of war.
1. Any death ? enemy or friendly, accidental or deliberate, civilian or soldier ? favors the terrorists. The Islamists have no claim on morality; Westerners do and show it hourly. So, in a strange way, images of the dead and dying are attributed only to our failing. If ours are killed, it is because those in power were not careful (inadequate body armor, unarmored humvees, etc), most likely due to some supposed conspiracy (Halliburton profiteering, blood for oil, wars for Israel, etc.). When Muslim enemies are killed, whether by intent or accidentally, the whole arsenal of Western postmodern thought comes into play. For the United States to have such power over life and death, the enemy appears to the world as weak, sympathetic, and victimized; we as strong and oppressive. Terrorists are still ?constructed? as ?the other? and thus are seen as suffering ? doctored photos or not ? through the grim prism of Western colonialism, racism, and imperialism.
In short, it is not just that Western public opinion won?t tolerate many losses; it won?t tolerate for very long killing the enemy either ? unless the belligerents are something akin to the white, Christian Europeans of Milosevic?s Serbia, who, fortunately for NATO war planners in the Balkans, could not seek refuge behind any politically correct paradigm and so were bombed with impunity. Remember, multiculturalism always trumps fascism: the worst homophobe, the intolerant theocrat, and the woman-hating bigot is always sympathetic if he wears some third-world garb, mouths anti-Americanism, and looks most un-European. To win these wars, our soldiers must not die or kill.
2. All media coverage of fighting in the Middle East is ultimately hostile ? and for a variety of reasons. Since the 1960s too many reporters have seen their mission as more than disinterested news gathering, but rather as near missionary: they seek to counter the advantages of the Western capitalist power structure by preparing the news in such a way as to show us the victims of profit-making and an affluent elite. Second, most fighting is far from home and dangerous. Trash the U.S. military and you might suffer a bad look at a well-stocked PX as the downside for winning the Pulitzer; trash Hezbollah or Hamas, and you might end up headless on the side of the road. Third, while in a southern Lebanon or the Green Zone, it is always safer to outsource a story and photos to local stringers, whose sympathies are usually with the enemy. A doctored photo that exaggerates Israeli ?war crimes? causes a mini-controversy for a day or two back in the States; a doctored photo that exaggerates Hezbollah atrocities wins an RPG in your hotel window. To win these wars, there must be no news of them.
3. The opposition ? whether an establishment figure like Howard Dean or an activist such as Cindy Sheehan ? ultimately prefers the enemy to win. In their way of thinking, there is such a reservoir of American strength that no enemy can ever really defeat us at home and so take away our Starbucks? lattes, iPods, Reeboks, or 401Ks. But being checked in ?optional? wars in Iraq, or seeing Israel falter in Lebanon, has its advantages: a George Bush and his conservatives are humiliated; the military-industrial complex learns to be a little bit more humble; and guilt over living in a prosperous Western suburb is assuaged. When a Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton ? unlike a Nixon, Reagan, or Bush ? sends helicopters or bombs into the Middle East desert, it is always as a last resort and with reluctance, and so can be grudgingly supported. To win these wars, a liberal Democrat must wage them.
4. Europeans have shown little morality, but plenty of influence, abroad and here at home during Middle East wars. Europeans, who helped to bomb Belgrade, now easily condemn Israel in the skies over Beirut. They sold Saddam his bunkers and reactor, and won in exchange sweetheart oil concessions. Iran could not build a bomb without Russian and European machine tools. Iran is not on any serious European embargo list; much of the off-the-shelf weaponry so critical to Hezbollah was purchased through European arms merchants. And if they are consistent in their willingness to do business with any tyrant, the Europeans also know how to spread enough aid or money around to the Middle East, to ensure some protection and a prominent role in any postwar conference. Had we allowed eager Europeans to get in on the postbellum contracts in Iraq, they would have muted their criticism considerably. To win these wars, we must win over the Europeans by ensuring they can always earn a profit.
5. To fight in the Middle East, the United States and Israel must enlist China, Russia, Europe, or any nation in the Arab world to fight its wars. China has killed tens of thousands in Tibet in a ruthless war leading to occupation and annexation. Russia leveled Grozny and obliterated Chechnyans. Europeans helped to bomb Belgrade, where hundreds of civilians were lost to ?collateral damage.? Egyptians gassed Yemenis; Iraqis gassed Kurds; Iraqis gassed Iranians; Syrians murdered thousands of men, women, and children in Hama; Jordanians slaughtered thousands of Palestinians. None received much lasting, if any, global condemnation. In the sick moral calculus of the world?s attention span, a terrorist who commits suicide in Guantanamo Bay always merits at least 500 dead Kurds, 1,000 Chechnyans, or 10,000 Tibetans. To win these wars, we need to outsource the job to those who can fight them with impunity.
6. Time is always an enemy. Most Westerners are oblivious to criticism if they wake up in the morning and learn their military has bombed a Saddam or sent a missile into Afghanistan ? and the war was begun and then ended all while they were sleeping. In contrast, 6-8 weeks ? about the length of the Balkan or Afghanistan war ? is the limit of our patience. After that, Americans become so sensitive to global criticism that they begin to hate themselves as much as others do. To win these wars, they should be over in 24 hours ? but at all cost no more than 8 weeks.
Silly, you say, are such fanciful rules? Of course ? but not as absurd as the wars now going on in the Middle East.
? 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.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjczYzA4OWQyYTI0MzBiYjhiZDY4YjQxMzkzNGQ0OWY=
-
The Guns Of August
By Richard Holbrooke
Thursday, August 10, 2006; A23
Two full-blown crises, in Lebanon and Iraq, are merging into a single emergency. A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay. Turkey is talking openly of invading northern Iraq to deal with Kurdish terrorists based there. Syria could easily get pulled into the war in southern Lebanon. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are under pressure from jihadists to support Hezbollah, even though the governments in Cairo and Riyadh hate that organization. Afghanistan accuses Pakistan of giving shelter to al-Qaeda and the Taliban; there is constant fighting on both sides of that border. NATO's own war in Afghanistan is not going well. India talks of taking punitive action against Pakistan for allegedly being behind the Bombay bombings. Uzbekistan is a repressive dictatorship with a growing Islamic resistance.
The only beneficiaries of this chaos are Iran, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and the Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who last week held the largest anti-American, anti-Israel demonstration in the world in the very heart of Baghdad, even as 6,000 additional U.S. troops were rushing into the city to "prevent" a civil war that has already begun.
This combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, history's only nuclear superpower confrontation. The Cuba crisis, although immensely dangerous, was comparatively simple: It came down to two leaders and no war. In 13 days of brilliant diplomacy, John F. Kennedy induced Nikita Khrushchev to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba.
Kennedy was deeply influenced by Barbara Tuchman's classic, "The Guns of August," which recounted how a seemingly isolated event 92 summers ago -- an assassination in Sarajevo by a Serb terrorist -- set off a chain reaction that led in just a few weeks to World War I. There are vast differences between that August and this one. But Tuchman ended her book with a sentence that resonates in this summer of crisis: "The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit."
Preventing just such a trap must be the highest priority of American policy. Unfortunately, there is little public sign that the president and his top advisers recognize how close we are to a chain reaction, or that they have any larger strategy beyond tactical actions.
Under the universally accepted doctrine of self-defense, which is embodied in Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, there is no question that Israel has a legitimate right to take action against a group that has sworn to destroy it and had hidden some 13,000 missiles in southern Lebanon. In these circumstances, American support for Israel is essential, as it has been since the time of Truman; if Washington abandoned Jerusalem, the very existence of the Jewish state could be jeopardized, and the world crisis whose early phase we are now in would quickly get far worse. The United States must continue to make clear that it is ready to come to Israel's defense, both with American diplomacy and, as necessary, with military equipment.
But the United States must also understand, and deal with, the wider consequences of its own actions and public statements, which have caused an unprecedented decline in America's position in much of the world and are provoking dangerous new anti-American coalitions and encouraging a new generation of terrorists. American disengagement from active Middle East diplomacy since 2001 has led to greater violence and a decline in U.S. influence. Others have been eager to fill the vacuum. (Note the sudden emergence of France as a key player in the current burst of diplomacy.)
American policy has had the unintended, but entirely predictable, effect of pushing our enemies closer together. Throughout the region, Sunnis and Shiites have put aside their hatred of each other just long enough to join in shaking their fists -- or doing worse -- at the United States and Israel. Meanwhile, in Baghdad, our troops are coming under attack by both sides -- Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents. If this continues, the U.S. presence in Baghdad has no future.
President Bush owes it to the nation, and especially the troops who risk their lives every day, to reexamine his policies. For starters, he should redeploy some U.S. troops into the safer northern areas of Iraq to serve as a buffer between the increasingly agitated Turks and the restive, independence-minded Kurds. Given the new situation, such a redeployment to Kurdish areas and a phased drawdown elsewhere -- with no final decision yet as to a full withdrawal from Iraq -- is fully justified. At the same time, we should send more troops to Afghanistan, where the situation has deteriorated even as the Pentagon is reducing U.S. troop levels -- which is read in the region as a sign of declining U.S. interest in Afghanistan.
On the diplomatic front, the United States cannot abandon the field to other nations (not even France!) or the United Nations. Every secretary of state from Henry Kissinger to Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright negotiated with Syria, including those Republican icons George Shultz and James Baker. Why won't this administration follow suit, in full consultation with Israel at every step? This would clearly be in Israel's interest. Instead, administration officials refuse direct talks and say publicly, "Syria knows what it must do" -- a statement that denies the very point of diplomacy.
The same is true of talks with Iran, although these would be more difficult. Why has the world's leading nation stood aside for over five years and allowed the international dialogue with Tehran to be conducted by Europeans, the Chinese and the United Nations? And why has that dialogue been restricted to the nuclear issue -- vitally important, to be sure, but not as urgent at this moment as Iran's sponsorship and arming of Hezbollah and its support of actions against U.S. forces in Iraq?
Containing the violence must be Washington's first priority. Finding a stable and secure solution that protects Israel must follow. Then must come the unwinding of America's disastrous entanglement in Iraq in a manner that is not a complete humiliation and does not lead to even greater turmoil. All of this will take sustained high-level diplomacy -- precisely what the American administration has avoided in the Middle East. Washington has, or at least used to have, leverage over the more moderate Arab states; it should use it again, in the closest consultation with and on behalf of Israel.
And we must be ready for unexpected problems that will test us; they could come in Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, Jordan or even Somalia -- but one thing seems sure: They will come. Without a new, comprehensive strategy based on our most urgent national security needs -- as opposed to a muddled version of Wilsonianism -- this crisis is almost certain to worsen and spread.
Richard Holbrooke, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, writes a monthly column for The Post.
-
U.S. Troops kill 26 insurgents, wound 6, capture 60
RAMADI, Iraq - The military said it had killed 26 rebels on Friday night after coming under fire from several locations in the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, west of Baghdad.
Six insurgents were wounded and there were no U.S. casualties in the fighting, said the military. Street battles continue in Ramadi, a key bastion for the insurgency.
In Baghdad, 60 Iraqis suspected of links with a local al-Qaeda cell were captured in a raid on a funeral on the outskirts of Baghdad, US forces say.
US troops are being bolstered by reinforcements to help stop daily attacks by militants.
Iraqi man rescued by US Soldiers
TIKRIT, Iraq ? An Iraqi man being held hostage by unknown kidnappers was freed after US Soldiers found him blindfolded and bound in the back of a vehicle Thursday morning.
The rescue occurred after the vehicle was spotted by a US helicopter that was patrolling the area. The pilot noticed a suspicious gathering of people around the vehicle and reported the sighting.
A ground patrol attached to the 4th Infantry Division was sent to the area to investigate and found the man who claimed to have been kidnapped in Baqubah on Aug. 2. The Soldiers treated the man for his injuries and provided him a cell phone to call his family before taking him to a nearby base.
This is the second hostage rescue by Iraqi and U.S. Soldiers in the past two weeks. On July 30, Iraqi and U.S. Soldiers raiding a terrorist weapons cache near Muqdadiyah freed another Iraqi man the day before he was to be ?judged? by his kidnappers.
Kidnapping, whether for ransom, terror or propaganda use, continues to be a tactic of terrorists and criminals throughout Iraq.
Wanted terrorist captured
BAGHDAD ? Coalition forces captured a wanted terrorist leader and 6 other insurgents during coordinated raids in Bayji Aug. 11.
The targeted individual is reported to be a new senior al-Qaida in Iraq leader. He is additionally reported to be supplying terrorists to al-Qaida in Baghdad to target innocent Iraqis. The ground forces apprehended the individuals without incident.
This operation was part of ongoing efforts that have successfully captured several other terrorist leaders in the last 30 days. Coalition forces will use information gathered from this raid to continue building a clear picture of the terrorist network in the region, and how best to capture or eliminate them.
HOW'S THIS FOR U.S. TROOPS CUTTING DOWN THE MURDER RATE IN THIS DISTRICT:
US, Iraqi forces seal off Baghdad district in crackdown
10 Aug 2006
BAGHDAD - U.S. and Iraqi forces sealed off parts of one of Baghdad's most dangerous districts on Thursday, searching thousands of homes in an effort to regain control of the capital's lawless streets.
The sweep in the southern Dora district, involving 5,000 troops and lasting three days, has had one immediate result, U.S. Colonel Michael Beech said -- the murder rate, which peaked at 20 a day after a surge in sectarian violence, is now zero.
"There is no place safer in Baghdad right now," the commander of the U.S. 4th Brigade Combat team told journalists at an Iraqi police compound in Dora.
When U.S. troops break down doors or smash windows to enter homes in search of illegal weapons, explosives and wanted insurgents, they are followed shortly afterwards by local contractors who repair the locks or replace the windows.
The aim of the operation, expected to last another 24 hours, was to radically reduce the number of murders, kidnappings and assassinations in the area.
Iraqi Police Brigadier General Abd al-Rahman Yusif said thousands of homes had been searched. Fourteen AK-47s, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and improvised hand grenades had been seized and 36 insurgents and supporters were arrested.
"We are striking with an iron fist," he told the same news briefing.
In other news, Iraqi police raided a mosque Thursday in western Baghdad to arrest three gunmen involved in an armed attack on Iraqi police in which a police colonel was killed. "A group of terrorists attacked the national police in Saydiah area in Baghdad, and then took refuge in a mosque," said the statement.
The gunmen "continued firing from the mosque killing Colonel Dhiaa Al-Samirrai and two other policemen," added the statement.
The Iraqi police then arrested the 3 gunmen, one of whom was wounded by police fire. Police also confiscated a large quantity of weapons stored in the mosque.
US troops kill 4 armed men
BAGHDAD, Aug 8 (KUNA) -- The United States military said that its warplanes killed 4 armed men who were trying to plant bombs in the suburbs of the Iraqi capital.
A statement from the US military said its reconnaissance planes along with US military forces have scouted places of 13 armed men who were planting explosives near a road in an agriculture location along the bank of the Euphrates River.
The statement added US warplanes have conducted a raid on the targets, killing four while a fifth man managed to escape.
Meanwhile, the US military also said that a joint Iraqi and US paratrooper force has arrested 13 armed men in an operation in the northern part of the capital.
-
I am not sure how this will be received. On the forum where this was originally and later on Winds of Change, it has stirred up m;uch debate. Lots of comments are knee jerk reactions, but I ask each to try and read this from a rational and unemotional mind. It may be that mostly people who have read much of Blackfive can understand the thinking. We shall see. And as you read this, think Breslan.
I post it because it shows the inherent
problemn of what we face and how to react. Reading it actually choked
me up. The comments after it are just as profound..
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2006/08/on_the_virtues_.html
On the Virtues of Killing Children
Posted By Grim
You are not going to like this.
On the demonstrable virtues of not caring if children die, on hardening your
mind for war, and other things we can no longer avoid discussing.
Beware that you are ready before you pass this seal.
Let us begin with a debate between a peaceful, gentle soul, and me. The
topic could be Israel's war, or ours in Iraq, or -- if they have the heart
for it -- the one to come.
The gentle soul -- how I respect her! -- will begin by pointing out how
many innocents have died in the recent wars, and especially the children,
who are the most obviously innocent. She will point out figures for Iraq,
for Afghanistan, for Lebanon, and ask: "How can you justify this? These
poor children, who might have been good men, good women, lain in the cold
earth?"
We have all had the conversation that far, have we not? We are accustomed
to reply: "But the enemy is the one that targets children. We try our best
to avoid hurting children. That makes us better. Furthermore, the enemy
hides himself among children. As a result, in spite of our best efforts,
sometimes children die on the other side also. But again, it is not our
fault -- it is his fault. He endangers them."
She replies: "But how can you justify their deaths? Regardless of how hard
you try, will you not kill them? Some of them? Should we not choose peace
instead?"
Let us consider that.
What if we asked her, "Let us speculate that our enemy -- say in Iran --
seeks to kill our children. If we attack them to stop it, we may or may not
kill any of their children -- and we will do everything in our power to
avoid it. If we do not, they certainly will kill ours. Should we attack
them or not?"
She will answer: "That is a false example. Nothing is certain, and it is
said that hard cases make bad law."
"Fair enough," we reply, "but where will you find the parent who will
sacrifice her children for the possibility of keeping another parent's child
alive?"
"It would be impossible," she will agree, but add, "However, nothing is that
certain."
"Then let us make it conditional," I continue. "Let us say that there is
the possibility we shall kill a child -- but we shall do our best not to do
so -- and only the possibility that they will kill our child, but it is
their aim. Now, should we try to stop them -- though risking their child?
Or should we refuse, and take the increased risk that they will succeed in
their murder, since no one dares disrupt them?"
"It is always wrong to take the risk of killing a child, whether we do it or
they do," she will say.
"Why so?" I ask.
"Because it endangers the innocent," she replies.
"If that is the reason," I answer, "then you are wrong. It is best that we
bomb without fear."
Her eyes grow wide. "You are mad," she says.
"Not so," I answer. "Consider: when the enemy seeks to kill our child to
motivate us to surrender to his will, is it not because he believes that the
danger to the children will move our hearts?"
"It is," she must agree.
"And when he hides among children," I add, "why? Children do little to
deflect artillery. Must it not be because he knows that we -- we
ourselves -- fear for the children, even his children?"
She nods, silently.
"Then it is proven," I say. "It is our love of these innocents that
endangers them. If we did not care if children died, they would be in
little danger."
"That cannot be," she replies in anger.
"But it is so," I contest. "If we did not care if our children died, they
would not be targets. There would be no reason to target them, because we
would not be moved by their deaths.
"If we did not care if their children died," I add, "there would be no
reason to clutter military emplacements with their presence. If it were not
that we are horrified by the deaths of children, the enemy's children would
be clear of all places of battle -- because they are, except for the fact
that we love them, a hindrance."
She bites her lip.
"Of course, we cannot cut out our hearts," I tell her. "Nor should we -- as
we wish to remain men, and good men, rather than monsters. Yet it is our
love that is the chief danger to the innocent now -- to our own innocents,
and theirs also."
"What do you suggest?" she demands of me. "If you will not hate children,
if you assert that it is right to love them -- but you say we cannot love
them, without wrongfully endangering them -- what can we do? Where is the
right?"
"It must be," I tell her sadly, "Here: That we pursue war without thought
of the children. That we do not turn aside from the death of the innocent,
but push on to the conclusion, through all fearful fire. If we do that, the
children will lose their value as hostages, and as targets: if we love
them, we must harden our hearts against their loss. Ours and theirs."
"How can that be right?" she wonders.
"It cannot be," I must say. "Love should always rise, above war and fear
and death. Love should always be first, and not last, in our hearts. It
should never be that love brings wrong, and disdain brings right.
"And yet," I say, "It is. I have shown you that it is. That means we have
moved into a time beyond human wisdom. We can no longer know the right. It
is beyond us.
"We can only do," I must warn her, and you. "We can only do, and pray, that
when we are done we may be forgiven."
-
Such convoluted arguing makes my brain hurt so I was not able to go through the whole thing. I like to keep things simple.
I don't like war.
I don't start wars.
I refuse to lose.
If you start a war you have to lose it.
End of story.
Killing people is not the objective. President Lyndon Johnson and general William Westmoreland proved without a shadow of a doubt in Vietnam that body count is not a useful strategy or tactic. The objective is to demoralize the enemy to the point that they totally lose the will to fight. That was the way the Allies beat Germany and Japan in the Second World War. No one will ever know what the body count was at Dresden or Tokyo as a result of the fire bombings. But the Tokyo fire bombing plus Hiroshima plus Nagasaki finally broke the Japanese spirit. Do the Japanese hate America for this? Not at all. Japan considers Douglas MacArthur their liberator. That is the lesson to be learned from previous wars.
Appeasement brings on war.
Total humiliating defeat ends war and makes friends.
Israel's big mistake was not waging total war on Hezbollah. Israel's mistake was loving their soldiers so much that they did not commit them to total victory. The sterile air campaign proved to be sterile, it did not bring victory and the conditions on the ground have not changed. Hezbollah is whole, Syria is whole, Iran is whole.
I know this will sound crude and rude but if you survive you can make more children. If you don't survive then there will never be more children. Nature is not cruel, nature plays the numbers: Make enough of them and let the fittest survive. If there are not enough fit ones then let another species take their place.
To quote general George Patton: "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
---------------------------------------------------------------
The author of this article grasps Islam-induced thinking, part of what is called "psycho-epistemology," very well.? This article is one of the best, and one of the very, very few, about Muslim thinking per se.
Getting Into Their Minds III:? How Does Islam Do It?
Deterring Those Who Are Already Dead? (http://www.6thcolumnagainstjihad.com/GMASON_P6.htm)
-
Cap,
I like your simplified thinking, and also the article.
What Grim is trying to do in his post is to address the issue of the enemy using children as shields, and the reaction of people to it. Simplified, if the enemy uses children as shields and we back down, unwilling to use force that might get children killed, then they will use them as shields more often. Yet,this same enemy will deliberately target children. The end must be the following, we must be willing to engage in actions that might take innocent lives of children to save the lives of many more children. Not a pleasant thought, but a necessary action.
I mentioned Breslan because this was the perfect example of what the author was trying to make. The terrorists were killing the adults. A bomb went off in the building, likely by accident, killing many innocent men, women, and children. The decision had to be made, "wait it out and let the terrorists kill others until who knows when, or take the risk and go in, likely causing many innocent deaths." Neither action is "good", but one takes the action that may prevent some useless deaths from occurring.
I have often used one argument about killing and total war. It takes 15-18 years to create a person who can then be trained to fight. Deny an enemy a source of this material and you win the war.
-
What Next?
By Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack
Sunday, August 20, 2006; B01
The debate is over: By any definition, Iraq is in a state of civil war. Indeed, the only thing standing between Iraq and a descent into total Bosnia-like devastation is 135,000 U.S. troops -- and even they are merely slowing the fall. The internecine conflict could easily spiral into one that threatens not only Iraq but also its neighbors throughout the oil-rich Persian Gulf region with instability, turmoil and war.
The consequences of an all-out civil war in Iraq could be dire. Considering the experiences of recent such conflicts, hundreds of thousands of people may die. Refugees and displaced people could number in the millions. And with Iraqi insurgents, militias and organized crime rings wreaking havoc on Iraq's oil infrastructure, a full-scale civil war could send global oil prices soaring even higher.
However, the greatest threat that the United States would face from civil war in Iraq is from the spillover -- the burdens, the instability, the copycat secession attempts and even the follow-on wars that could emerge in neighboring countries. Welcome to the new "new Middle East" -- a region where civil wars could follow one after another, like so many Cold War dominoes.
And unlike communism, these dominoes may actually fall.
For all the recent attention on the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, far more people died in Iraq over the past month than in Israel and Lebanon, and tens of thousands have been killed from the fighting and criminal activity since the U.S. occupation began. Additional signs of civil war abound. Refugees and displaced people number in the hundreds of thousands. Militias continue to proliferate. The sense of being an "Iraqi" is evaporating.
Considering how many mistakes the United States has made in Iraq, how much time has been squandered, and how difficult the task is, even a serious course correction in Washington and Baghdad may only postpone the inevitable.
Iraq displays many of the conditions most conducive to spillover. The country's ethnic, tribal and religious groups are also found in neighboring states, and they share many of the same grievances. Iraq has a history of violence with its neighbors, which has fostered desires for vengeance and fomented constant clashes. Iraq also possesses resources that its neighbors covet -- oil being the most obvious, but important religious shrines also figure in the mix -- and its borders are porous.
Civil wars -- whether in Africa, Asia, Europe or the Middle East -- tend to spread across borders. For example, the effects of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict, which began in the 1920s and continued even after formal hostilities ended in 1948, contributed to the 1956 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars, provoked a civil war in Jordan in 1970-71 and then triggered the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90. In turn, the Lebanese conflict helped spark civil war in Syria in 1976-82.
With an all-out civil war looming in Iraq, Washington must decide how to deal with the most common and dangerous ways such conflicts spill across national boundaries. Only by understanding the refugee crises, terrorism, radicalization of neighboring populations, copycat secessions and foreign interventions that such wars frequently spark can we begin to plan for how to cope with them in the months and years ahead.
Refugees Spread The Fighting
Massive refugee flows are a hallmark of major civil wars. Afghanistan's produced the largest such stream since World War II, with more than a third of the population fleeing. Conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s also generated millions of refugees and internally displaced people: In Kosovo, more than two-thirds of Kosovar Albanians fled the country. In Bosnia, half of the country's 4.4 million people were displaced, and 1 million of them fled the country altogether. Comparable figures for Iraq would mean more than 13 million displaced Iraqis, and more than 6 million of them running to neighboring countries.
Refugees are not merely a humanitarian burden. They often continue the wars from their new homes, thus spreading the violence to other countries. At times, armed units move from one side of the border to the other. The millions of Afghans who fled to Pakistan during the anti-Soviet struggle in the 1980s illustrate such violent transformation. Stuck in the camps for years while war consumed their homeland, many refugees joined radical Islamist organizations. When the Soviets departed, refugees became the core of the Taliban. This movement, nurtured by Pakistani intelligence and various Islamist political parties, eventually took power in Kabul and opened the door for Osama bin Laden to establish a new base of operations for al-Qaeda.
Refugee camps often become a sanctuary and recruiting ground for militias, which use them to launch raids on their homelands. Inevitably, their enemies attack the camps -- or even the host governments. In turn, those governments begin to use the refugees as tools to influence events back in their homelands, arming, training and directing them, and thereby exacerbating the conflict.
Perhaps the most tragic example of the problems created by large refugee flows occurred in the wake of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. After the Hutu-led genocide resulted in the death of 800,000 to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front "invaded" the country from neighboring Uganda. The RPF was drawn from the 500,000 or so Tutsis who had already fled Rwanda from past pogroms. As the RPF swept through Rwanda, almost 1 million Hutus fled to neighboring Congo, fearing that the evil they did unto others would be done unto them.
For two years after 1994, Hutu bands continued to conduct raids in Rwanda and began to work with Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. The new RPF government of Rwanda responded by attacking not only the Hutu militia camps, but also its much larger neighbor, bolstering a formerly obscure Congolese opposition leader named Laurent Kabila and installing him in power in Kinshasa. A civil war in Congo ensued, killing perhaps 4 million people.
The flow of refugees from Iraq could worsen instability in all of its neighboring countries. Kuwait, for example, has just over 1 million citizens, one-third of whom are Shiite. The influx of several hundred thousand Iraqi Shiites across the border could change the religious balance in the country overnight. Both these Iraqi refugees and the Kuwaiti Shiites could turn against the Sunni-dominated Kuwaiti government, seeing violence as a means to end the centuries of discrimination they have faced at the hands of Kuwait's Sunnis.
Numbers of displaced people are already rising in Iraq, although they are nowhere near what they could be if the country slid into a full civil war. About 100,000 Arabs are believed to have fled northern Iraq under pressure from Kurdish militias. As many as 200,000 Sunni Arabs reportedly have been displaced by the fighting between Sunni groups and the American-led coalition in western Iraq. In the past 18 months, 50,000 to 100,000 Shiites have fled mixed-population cities in central Iraq for greater safety farther south. So far, in addition to the Palestinians and other foreigners, only the Iraqi upper and middle classes are fleeing the country altogether, moving to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon or the Gulf States. As one indicator of the size of this flight, since 2004 the Ministry of Education has issued nearly 40,000 letters permitting parents to take their children's academic records abroad. If the violence continues to escalate, even those without resources will soon flee to vast refugee camps in the nearest country.
Terrorism Finds New Homes
The war in Iraq has proved to be a disaster for the struggle against Osama bin Laden. Fighters there are receiving training, building networks and becoming further radicalized -- and the U.S. occupation is proving a dream recruiting tool for young Muslims worldwide. As bad as this is, a wide-scale civil war in Iraq could make the terrorism problem even worse.
Such terrorist organizations as Hezbollah, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were all born of civil wars. They eventually shifted from assaulting their enemies in Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Northern Ireland and Israel, respectively, to mounting attacks elsewhere. Hezbollah has attacked Israeli, American and European targets on four continents. The LTTE assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi because of his intervention in Sri Lanka. The IRA began a campaign of attacks in Britain in the 1980s. The GIA did the same to France the mid-1990s, hijacking an Air France flight then moving on to bombings in the country. In the 1970s, various Palestinian groups began launching terrorist attacks against Israelis wherever they could find them -- including at the Munich Olympics and airports in Athens and Rome -- and then attacked Western civilians whose governments supported Israel.
In Afghanistan, the anti-Soviet struggle in the 1980s was a key incubator for bin Laden's movement. Many young mujaheddin went to Afghanistan with only the foggiest notion of jihad. But during the fighting in Afghanistan, individuals took on one another's grievances, so that Saudi jihadists learned to hate the Egyptian government and Chechens learned to hate Israel. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda convinced many of them that the United States was at the center of the Muslim world's problems -- a view that almost no Sunni terrorist group had previously embraced. Other civil wars in Muslim countries, including the Balkans, Chechnya and Kashmir, began for local reasons but became enmeshed in the broader jihadist movement. Should Iraq descend into a deeper civil war, the country could become a sanctuary for both Shiite and Sunni terrorists, possibly even exceeding the problems of Lebanon in the 1980s or Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Right now, the U.S. military presence keeps a lid on the jihadist effort. There are no enormous training camps such as those the radicals enjoyed in Afghanistan. Likewise, Hezbollah and other Shiite terrorist groups have maintained a low profile in Iraq so far, but the more embattled the Shiites feel, the better the chance they will invite greater Hezbollah involvement. Shiite fighters may even strike the Sunni backers of their Iraqi adversaries, such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, or incite their own Shiite populations against them. And lost in the focus on Arab terrorist groups is the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), an anti-Turkish group that has long fought to establish a Kurdish state in Turkey from bases in Iraq. The more Iraq is consumed by chaos, the more likely it is that the PKK will regain a haven in northern Iraq.
The Sunni jihadists would be particularly likely to go after Saudi Arabia given its long, lightly patrolled border with Iraq, as well as their interest in destabilizing the ruling Saud family. The turmoil in Iraq has energized young Saudi Islamists. In the future, the balance may shift from Saudis helping Iraqi fighters against the Americans to Iraqi fighters helping Saudi jihadists against the Saudi government, with Saudi oil infrastructure an obvious target.
Radicalism Is Contagious
Civil wars tend to inflame the passions of neighboring populations. This is often just a matter of proximity: Chaos and slaughter five miles down the road has a much greater emotional impact than a massacre 5,000 miles away. The problem worsens whenever ethnic or religious groupings also spill across borders. Frequently, people demand that their government intervene on behalf of their compatriots embroiled in the civil war. Alternatively, they may aid their co-religionists or co-ethnics on their own -- taking in refugees, funneling money and guns, providing sanctuary.
The Albanian government came under heavy pressure from its people to support the Kosovar Albanians who were fighting for independence from the Serbs. As a result, Tirana provided diplomatic support and covert aid to the Kosovo Liberation Army in 1998-99, and threatened to intervene to prevent Serbia from crushing the Kosovars. Similarly, numerous Irish and Irish American groups clandestinely supported the Irish Republican Army, providing money and guns to the group and lobbying Dublin and Washington.
Sometimes, radicalization works in the opposite direction if neighboring populations share the grievances of their comrades across the border, and as a result are inspired to fight in pursuit of similar goals in their own country. Although Sunni Syrians had chafed under the minority Alawite dictatorship since the 1960s, members of the Muslim Brotherhood (the leading Sunni Arab opposition group) were spurred to action when they saw Lebanese Sunni Arabs fighting to wrest a share of political power from the minority Maronite-dominated government in Beirut. This spurred their own decision to organize against Hafez al-Assad's regime in Damascus. By the late 1970s, their resistance had blossomed into civil war, but Assad's regime was not as weak as Lebanon's. In 1982, Assad razed the center of the city of Hama, a Muslim Brotherhood stronghold, killing 20,000 to 40,000 people and snuffing out the revolt.
Iraq's neighbors are vulnerable to this aspect of spillover. Iraq's own divisions are mirrored throughout the region; for instance, Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia all have sizable Shiite communities. In Saudi Arabia, Shiites make up about 10 percent of the population, but they are heavily concentrated in its oil-rich Eastern Province. Bahrain's population is majority Shiite, although the regime is Sunni. Likewise, Iran, Syria and Turkey all have important Kurdish minorities, which are geographically concentrated adjacent to Iraqi Kurdistan.
Populations in some countries around Iraq are already showing dangerous signs of radicalization. In March, after the Sunni jihadist bombing of the Shiite Askariya shrine in Iraq, more than 100,000 Bahraini Shiites took to the streets in anger. In 2004, when U.S. forces were battling Iraqi Sunni insurgents in Fallujah, large numbers of Bahraini Sunnis protested. There has been unrest in Iranian Kurdistan in the past year, prompting Iran to deploy troops to the border and even shell Kurdish positions in Iraq. The Turks, too, have deployed additional forces to the Iraqi border to prevent any movement of Kurdish forces between the two countries.
Most ominous of all, tensions are rising between Shiites and Sunnis in the key Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. As in Bahrain, many Saudi Shiites saw the success of Iraq's Shiites and are now demanding better political and economic treatment. The government made a few initial concessions, but now the kingdom's Sunnis are openly accusing the Shiites of heresy. Religious leaders on both sides have begun to warn of a coming civil war or schism within Islam. The horrors of such a split are on display only miles away in Iraq.
Secession Breeds Secessionism
-
PART TWO
Secession Breeds Secessionism
Iraq's neighbors are just as fractured as Iraq itself. Should Iraq fragment, voices for secession elsewhere will gain strength. The dynamic is clear: One oppressed group with a sense of national identity stakes a claim to independence and goes to war to achieve it. As long as that group isn't crushed immediately, others with similar goals can be inspired to do the same.
The various civil wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s provide a good example. Slovenia was determined to declare independence, which led the Croats to follow suit. When the Serbs opposed Croatian secession from Yugoslavia by force, the first of the Yugoslav civil wars broke out. The European Union foolishly recognized both Slovene and Croatian independence, hoping that would end the bloodshed. However, many Bosnian Muslims wanted independence, and when they saw the Slovenes and Croats rewarded for their revolts, they pursued the same course. The new Bosnian government feared that if it did not declare independence, Serbia and Croatia would gobble up the respective Serb- and Croat-inhabited parts of their country. When Bosnia held a March 1992 referendum on independence, 98 percent voted in favor. The barricades went up all over Sarajevo the next day, kicking off the worst of the Balkan civil wars.
It didn't stop there. The eventual success of the Bosnians -- even after four years of war -- was an important element in the thinking of Kosovar Albanians when they agitated against the Serbian government in 1997-98. Serbian repression sparked an escalation toward independence that ended in the 1999 Kosovo War between NATO and Serbia. Kosovo, in turn, inspired Albanians in Macedonia to launch a guerrilla war against the Skopje government in hope of achieving the same or better.
In Iraq's case, the first candidate for secession is obvious: Kurdistan. If any group on Earth deserves its own country, it is surely the Kurds -- a distinct nation of 25 million people living in a geographically contiguous space with their own language and culture. However, if the Iraqi Kurds declare their independence and are protected by the international community, it is not hard to imagine Kurdish groups in Turkey and Iran following suit.
Moreover, the Kurds are not the only candidates. Shiite leader Abdul Aziz Hakim has called for autonomy for Iraq's Shiite regions -- a likely precursor for demands of outright independence. If Iraqi Shiites try to split off, other Shiites in the Gulf region might agitate against their own regimes along similar lines. Moreover, if ethnic or sectarian self-determination begins spreading throughout the Middle East more generally, secessionist movements could also spread to unlikely groups such as Iran's minority Azeri and Baluch populations.
Beware of Neighborly Interventions
Another critical problem of civil wars is the tendency of neighboring states to get involved, turning the conflicts into regional wars. Foreign governments may intervene overtly or covertly to "stabilize" the country in turmoil and stop the refugees pouring across their borders, as the Europeans did during the Yugoslav wars. Neighboring states will intervene to eliminate terrorist groups setting up shop in the midst of the civil war, as Israel did repeatedly in Lebanon. They also may intervene to stem the flow of "dangerous ideas" into their country. Iran and Tajikistan intervened in the Afghan civil war on behalf of co-religionists and co-ethnicists suffering at the hands of the rabidly Sunni, rabidly Pashtun Taliban, just as Syria intervened in Lebanon for fear that the conflict there was radicalizing its Sunni population.
In virtually every case, these interventions brought only further grief to the interveners and to the parties of the civil war.
Opportunism is another powerful motive. States often harbor designs on their neighbors' land and resources and see the chaos of civil war as an opportunity to achieve long-frustrated ambitions. Much as Croatia's Franjo Tudjman and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic may have felt the need to intervene in the Bosnian civil war to protect their ethnic brothers, it seems clear that a more important motive for both was to carve up Bosnia between them.
Many states attempt to influence the course of a civil war by providing money, weapons and other support to one side. In effect, they use their intelligence services to create proxies who can fight the war for them. But states find that proxies are rarely able to secure their interests, typically leading them to escalate to open intervention. Both Israel and Syria employed proxies in Lebanon, for example, but found them inadequate, prompting their own invasions.
Pakistan is one of the few countries to succeed in using a proxy force (the Taliban) to secure its interests in a civil war. However, the nation's support of these radical Islamists encouraged the explosion of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan itself -- increasing the number of armed groups operating from Pakistan and creating networks for drugs and weapons to fuel the conflict. Today, Pakistan is a basket case, and much of the reason lies in its costly effort to prevail in the Afghan civil war.
Covert foreign intervention is proceeding apace in Iraq, with Iran leading the way. U.S. military and Iraqi sources think there are several thousand Iranian agents of all kinds already in Iraq. These personnel have simultaneously funneled money, guns and other support to friendly Shiite groups and established the infrastructure to wage a large-scale clandestine war if necessary. Iran has set up an extensive network of safe houses, arms caches, communications channels and proxy fighters, and will be well-positioned to pursue its interests in a full-blown civil war. The Sunni powers of Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are frightened by Iran's growing influence and presence in Iraq and have been scrambling to catch up.
Turkey may be the most likely country to overtly intervene in Iraq. Turkish leaders fear both the spillover of Turkish secessionism and the possibility that Iraq is becoming a haven for the PKK. Turkey has already massed troops on its southern border, and officials are threatening to intervene.
What's more, none of Iraq's neighbors thinks that it can afford to have the country fall into the hands of the other side. An Iranian "victory" would put the nation's forces in the heartland of the Arab world, bordering Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Syria; several of these states poured tens of billions of dollars into Saddam Hussein's military to prevent just such an occurrence in the 1980s. Similarly, a Sunni Arab victory (backed by the Jordanians, Kuwaitis and Saudis) would put radical Sunni fundamentalists on Iran's doorstep -- a nightmare scenario for Tehran.
Add in, too, each country's interest in preventing its rivals from capturing Iraq's oil resources. If these states are unable to achieve their goals through clandestine intervention, they will have a powerful incentive to launch a conventional invasion.
* * *
Much as Americans may want to believe that the United States can just walk away from Iraq should it slide into all-out civil war, the threat of spillover from such a conflict throughout the Middle East means it can't. Instead, Washington will have to devise strategies to deal with refugees, minimize terrorist attacks emanating from Iraq, dampen the anger in neighboring populations caused by the conflict, prevent secession fever and keep Iraq's neighbors from intervening. The odds of success are poor, but, nonetheless, we have to try.
Providing Support
The United States, along with its Asian and European allies, will have to make a major effort to persuade Iraq's neighbors not to intervene in its civil war. Economic aid should be part of such an effort, but will not suffice. For Jordan and Saudi Arabia, it may require an effort to reinvigorate Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, thereby addressing one of their major concerns -- an effort made all the more important and complex in light of the recent conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. For Iran and Syria, it may be a clear (but not cost-free) path toward acceptance back into the international community.
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait would be extremely difficult for the United States to coerce, and the best Washington might do is to convince them that their intervention is unnecessary because the United States and its allies will take great pains to keep Iran from meddling, which will be one of Riyadh's greatest worries.
When it comes to foreign intervention, Iran is the biggest headache of all. Given its immense interests in Iraq, some involvement is inevitable. For Tehran, and probably for Damascus, the United States and its allies probably will have to put down red lines regarding what is absolutely impermissible -- such as sending uniformed Iranian military units into Iraq or claiming Iraqi territory. Washington and its allies will also have to lay out what they will do if Iran crosses any of those red lines. Economic sanctions would be one possibility, but they could be effective only if the European Union, China, India and Russia all cooperate. On its own, the United States could employ punitive military operations, either to make Iran pay an unacceptable price for one-time infractions or to persuade it to halt ongoing violations of one or more red lines.
Don't Pick Winners
From Washington, it is tempting to consider ways to play one Iraqi faction against another in an effort to manage the civil war from within. The experiences of other powers, however, suggest how difficult this is. The Soviet Union tried to prop up President Najibullah when it left Afghanistan, and Israel used various Maronite militias as its proxies in Lebanon, but they all proved ineffective. Syria tried to use the Palestine Liberation Army to secure its interests in Lebanon, but its failure forced Damascus to invade instead. Washington tried to use a proxy force and intervene directly in Somalia, with equally disastrous results.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine a priori who will prevail in a civil war. The victor is rarely a key player in the country beforehand. Hezbollah did not exist in Lebanon at the start of the civil war there, nor did the Taliban in Afghanistan.
In Iraq, it is not clear which proxy would be the most effective militarily. Many communities are divided, fighting against one another more than against their supposed enemies. Iraq's Shiites may go the way of the Palestinians or the various Lebanese factions, who generally killed more of their own than of their declared enemies.
Manage the Kurds
Should chaos engulf Iraq, the Kurds will understandably want out, but this risks inspiring secessionists elsewhere in Iraq and throughout the region. In return for the Kurds agreeing to postpone formal secession, Washington should offer them extensive economic aid, assistance with refugees and security assurances (perhaps backed by U.S. troops) -- as well as promising support for their eventual independence when Iraq is more stable.
Buffer the Borders
One of Washington's hardest tasks would be to prevent the flow of dangerous people across Iraq's borders in either direction -- refugees, militias, foreign invaders and terrorists.
One option might be to create a system of buffer zones and refugee collection points inside Iraq staffed by U.S. and other coalition personnel. These collection points would be located on major roads, preferably near airstrips along Iraq's border -- thus on the principal routes that refugees would take to flee, providing a good logistical infrastructure to house, feed and otherwise care for tens or hundreds of thousands of refugees. Iraqi refugees would be gathered at these points and held there. In addition, coalition military forces would defend the refugee camps against attack, pacify and disarm them, and patrol large swaths of Iraqi territory nearby.
These zones would serve as "catch basins" for Iraqis fleeing the fighting, offering a secure place to stay within the nation's borders and thus preventing them from destabilizing neighboring countries. At the same time, they would serve as buffers between Iraq and its neighbors, preventing other forms of spillover -- such as militia movements, refugee flows out of Iraq and invasions into Iraq.
The catch-basin concept, while potentially useful, faces at least one big problem: Iran. Unlike Iraq's borders with Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Syria, the Iranian border is too long and has too many crossing points for it to be policed effectively by smaller numbers of coalition troops. Iran will never allow the United States the access across its territory, let alone logistical support, that would be necessary to make catch-basins along the Iran-Iraq border realistic. Thus, this scheme could make it look as though the United States was turning Iraq over to the Iranians, with the catch-basins effectively preventing intervention by Iraq's Sunni neighbors while doing nothing to deter Iran. For this reason, the United States's clear red lines to Iran about not intervening (at least overtly) would have to be enforced assiduously.
Perhaps most important, the catch-basin proposal requires Americans to endure significant long-term costs -- both in blood and treasure -- in Iraq. The United States would still need to deploy tens of thousands of troops to the nation (albeit on its periphery), as well as supplies to feed and care for hundreds of thousands of refugees. The United States would still occupy parts of Iraq, and the U.S. presence would remain a recruiting poster for the jihadist movement. Finally, all of these costs would have to be endured for as long as the war rages; recall that refugees from the wars in Afghanistan lived away from their homes for more than 20 years.
* * *
No country in recent history has successfully managed the spillovers from a full-blown civil war; in fact, most attempts have failed miserably. Syria spent at least eight years trying to end the Lebanese civil war before the 1989 Taif accords and the 1991 Persian Gulf War gave it the opportunity to finally do so. Israel's 1982 invasion was also a bid to end the Lebanese civil war after its previous efforts to contain it had failed, and when this also failed, Jerusalem tried to go back to managing spillover. By 2000, it was clear that this was again ineffective and so Israel pulled out of Lebanon altogether.
Withdrawing from Lebanon was smart for Israel for many reasons, but it did not end its Lebanon problem -- as the latest conflict showed all too clearly. In the Balkans, the United States and its NATO allies realized that it was impossible to manage the Bosnian or Kosovar civil wars and so in both cases they employed coercion -- including the deployment of massive ground forces -- to bring them to an end.
That point is critical: Ending an all-out civil war typically requires overwhelming military power to nail down a political settlement. It took 30,000 British troops to bring the Irish civil war to an end, 45,000 Syrian troops to conclude the Lebanese civil war, 50,000 NATO troops to stop the Bosnian civil war, and 60,000 to do the job in Kosovo. Considering Iraq's much larger population, it probably would require 450,000 troops to quash an all-out civil war there. Such an effort would require a commitment of enormous military and economic resources, far in excess of what the United States has already put forth.
How Iraq got to this point is now an issue for historians (and perhaps for voters in 2008); what matters today is how to move forward and prepare for the tremendous risks an Iraqi civil war poses for this critical region. The outbreak of a large-scale civil conflict would not relieve us of our responsibilities in Iraq; in fact, it could multiply them. Unfortunately, in the Middle East, one should never assume that the situation can't get worse. It always can -- and usually does.
dlb32@georgetown.edu
kpollack@brookings.edu
Daniel L. Byman is director of Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies. Kenneth M. Pollack is research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
? 2006 The Washington Post Company
-
The Nuclear Deadlines and a Strengthening Iran
By Kamran Bokhari
For weeks now, Aug. 22 has been marked as a red-letter day: the day Iran would formally respond to the incentives offered by world powers in exchange for a halt to its nuclear program. Given all the other things that have been occurring in the region -- especially the psychological impact that Hezbollah's successful resistance to Israeli forces has had -- there was a good deal of speculation (and in some quarters, trepidation) about what the day would bring. On the extremes, there were those among our readers who suggested Iran would launch a nuclear strike against Israel; others spoke of the potential for a direct U.S. military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.
We have not been among those predicting apocalyptic action. It is our view that, despite the presence of some extremists in both the American and Iranian camps, the nations and governments as a whole are rational actors that (rhetoric notwithstanding) will not take actions that threaten their own core interests or survival. In short, actions are governed by very real and practical limitations, regardless of what some may think about Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's mental state or George W. Bush's abilities as a leader.
That said, at least a little craziness surrounding the calendar date was to be expected. And the Iranians made sure to put on a good show.
The day began with reports that Iranian security forces had assaulted and briefly occupied an oil rig operated by Romania's Grup Servicii Petroliere (GSP) in Iran's territorial waters. The incident (which Iran described as a police action that disrupted a robbery attempt) lasted only a few hours but sent a clear signal that Iran is prepared to escalate matters if Washington moves toward punitive sanctions over the nuclear issue.
Shortly afterward, Tehran issued its formal response to the incentives package -- though details, at this writing, remain secret. Leaks likely will emerge in the coming hours or by evening in the United States. If our thinking is correct, Iran has not yielded to demands that it cease uranium enrichment (as Tehran steadfastly has said that it won't), but instead will have issued a response that plays to and widens political divisions among the five permanent U.N. Security Council (P-5) members and Germany. The complexity of the response will demand considerable deliberation and debate within the P-5+Germany -- inviting infighting and delaying any meaningful action, such as a vote for sanctions against Iran. At this point, it appears that U.N. Security Council resolutions and diplomacy may be reaching the limits of their usefulness.
Events of the coming days will warrant attention, certainly, but the underlying reality is this: The Iranians, correctly or otherwise, perceive that their moment in history has arrived. With the nuclear issue, through Hezbollah, and to some extent in Iraq, they are moving to secure their interests and extend influence -- seeing before them the opportunity to establish Persian, Shiite Iran as a hegemon in the Middle East and a power within the Muslim and wider worlds. And for the United States, like its Western allies, there are few meaningful options left to block it.
The Diplomatic Backdrop
To fully understand this, it's useful to review the recent buildup over the nuclear issue -- and to note that the 34-day Israel-Hezbollah war erupted precisely in the middle of that escalation.
On June 1, the P-5+Germany agreed to a package of incentives and penalties designed to force Iran to give up uranium enrichment. Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy adviser, delivered the terms to Tehran, and the White House urged Iran to study them thoroughly before issuing a formal response. No firm deadline was set, but the United States and its European allies indicated that one would be expected within a matter of weeks.
Details of the incentives were kept secret by both sides until July 13. The terms include greater investments in water-power reactors, provisions for Iran to join the World Trade Organization, and the possibility that U.S. and European restrictions on purchases of civilian aircraft and telecommunications equipment from Iran will be lifted if Iran suspends uranium enrichment. The package also lists a "catalog of sanctions" that countries might enact if Iran refuses to halt enrichment.
It was made obvious during this time that the P-5+Germany is less than united over the Iranian nuclear issue; Russia and China retained the right to opt out of U.N. sanctions for Iran, even if enrichment were to continue. In short, Russia and China reportedly could refuse to adopt sanctions of their own, but they would not block attempts by other U.N. members to sanction Iran.
Tehran several times rebuffed pressures to issue its response to the package, saying officials needed time to study the proposal. On June 29, the G-8 foreign ministers said they expected Iran's response to come on July 5, at a meeting between Solana and Iranian national security chief Ali Larijani. At that point, the Iranians made it clear that no response would come before mid-August. Finally, on July 21 (several days after the Israel-Hezbollah conflict had begun), they set the Aug. 22 date in stone.
Throughout all of this, Tehran has steadfastly stated that it will not suspend enrichment. Thus, in the midst of the Israeli-Hezbollah war, the U.N. Security Council passed legally binding Resolution 1696, setting Aug. 31 as the deadline for uranium enrichment to cease.
There has been no meaningful change in the Iranian stance since the resolution was passed. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, on Aug. 16, did say Tehran was willing to negotiate about enrichment suspension, so long as Iran's right to pursue enrichment in the future remained unquestioned and world powers ceased to question Tehran's intentions for its nuclear program. Significantly, Mottaki called, on the same day, for Western states to re-evaluate their relations with Muslim countries in light of the emerging reality in the Middle East -- clearly referencing the outcome of the Israel-Hezbollah war.
A New Regional Paradigm?
The outcome of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has given Iran the opportunity to strengthen the influence it wields in the Levant, while also bolstering perceptions that any attempts to solve the nuclear issue militarily could be very costly.
The Israelis' mismanagement of the war effort worked to the advantage of the Iranians, who are intimating to other Muslim states that Israel not only is not an invincible military power, but now is a power in decline. At a higher level, the war also has divided Arab states into two camps -- pro- and anti-Hezbollah -- and, at the same time, allowed Iran, through its sponsorship of Hezbollah, to project itself as the leader of all Muslim groups in the struggle against Israel.
Given the psychological impacts that Hezbollah's successful resistance brings throughout the region, it is little surprise that Iran is surging forward with new, and probably excessive, confidence. From Tehran's standpoint, this is the perfect moment to press its advantage and establish itself as a regional hegemon and global player.
Events of the last few days should be viewed very much in this light.
For instance, during the weekend, a new round of Iranian military exercises -- the second this summer -- commenced, unveiling the country's new defense doctrine. The first stage of the war games -- code-named "Zarbat Zolfaghar," or "The Blow of Zolfaghar" (a reference to the double-pointed scimitar of Imam Ali) occurred in Sistan-Baluchistan, a province in the southeast, and will continue in 15 other provinces in the country over the next five weeks. During the battle drills, the military test-fired 10 surface-to-surface Saegheh missiles, which have a range of 50-150 miles.
Iran also unveiled what it calls a new "air mine system," which officials claimed could be used from low and high altitudes, and in general has upgraded its entire air defense system. These are attempts to mitigate Iran's vulnerability, since it lacks an air force. In fact, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Hassan Dadras, commander of Iranian ground forces, said on Saturday that no air force in the region would be capable of confronting the Iranian army. This seems to have excluded the United States, a non-regional power.
Along with that, the army's commander-in-chief, Maj. Gen. Ataollah Salehi, made the interesting statement that the Iranian military is prepared to meet any threat from Israel, which he described as an "insane enemy."
And if the situation wasn't highly charged enough, there was an apparently deliberate escalation of a commercial dispute involving Romania's GSP. This seemed designed to generate jitters in the oil markets without directly harming Iranian interests.
From all appearances, the Iranians and their Shiite allies in the region are quite confident that this is their moment. We do not expect this to lead to any of the more extreme outcomes that have been speculated -- distances, for instance, argue against a direct strike by Iran against Israel -- but the political and military dynamics of the region certainly are shifting.
The Iraq Angle
As a result, the situation in Iraq must be considered carefully. As the Israel-Hezbollah conflict drew to a close, U.S.-Iranian exchanges concerning Iraq began to take on a more confrontational tone. Larijani, for example, on Aug. 7 accused Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, of meeting with terrorist groups there and encouraging attacks against Iranian and Shiite targets. Khalilzad's retorts over the following days were rather ambiguous, but he essentially accused Iran of using agents to foment sectarian violence in Iraq and to stage attacks against U.S.-led forces -- in retaliation, he suggested, for Israeli strikes in Lebanon.
These statements were clarified a bit on Aug. 14: Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said there "is nothing that we definitively have found to say that there are any Iranians operating within the country of Iraq," though the Americans believe that "some Shia elements have been in Iran receiving training." Caldwell said it is not clear how much the government of Iran knows about or endorses such activity.
Ultimately, the American fear appears to be that Iran, if backed into a corner, would use the Shiite militias in Iraq against the United States. To an extent, this is a reasonable fear, but there also are reasons why Iran would not be willing to push things beyond the level of "managed chaos."
For one thing, it is not in Iran's interest for Iraq to descend into full civil war, since uncontrolled sectarian violence could lead to repercussions on the Iranian side of the border. In fact, the political and financial investments that Iran has been making in Iraq would indicate that Tehran wants to make sure the situation, though violent, does not spin utterly out of control.
The Iranians have realized that they will not be able to exert any more influence over Baghdad than they can now, through the Shiite-dominated government -- so the goal is to make sure that Tehran secures the gains it has made in Iraq. Moreover, Iran is well aware of the delicate ethnic and political balance that holds the government in Baghdad together and keeps the intra-Shiite rivalries within acceptable parameters.
If our assumption holds -- that Iran will escape any punitive consequences for its actions on the nuclear front -- this fear of uncontrolled chaos in Iraq could be one of the few points of leverage left for the United States. It is a weak card in what is certainly a bad hand for Washington, and poses great risks for the Bush administration itself. However, if the Americans are incapable of achieving their own goals in Iraq or in the nuclear issue, the next best option would be to ensure, through their own political maneuverings with the Sunnis, that the Iranians will not be able to achieve their goals either.
Latest Moves, Next Moves
As we issue this report, developments in the last 24 hours have been these:
Solana and Larijani spoke by phone on Aug. 21, saying they were open to "further contacts" about Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
The deputy director of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization said "suspension of uranium enrichment has now turned practically impossible."
Foreign Ministry officials said Tehran's response to the incentives package would be "multi-dimensional" and hopefully lead to a comprehensive negotiated settlement.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Tehran will continue its pursuit of nuclear technology.
Tehran barred U.N. nuclear inspectors from an underground nuclear facility at Natanz, and the chairman of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission said a bill is being drafted that would require inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to cease immediately if sanctions are placed on Iran.
The Iranians delivered their point-by-point counteroffer to the P-5+Germany, saying they were offering a fresh approach and are ready for "serious negotiations," beginning Aug. 23.
Clearly, the Iranians have spent the past several weeks preparing not only the terms of their counteroffer, but also the international atmosphere in which those terms would be presented. Their goal has been to make sufficient positive gestures that not only Russia and China, but perhaps European powers as well, might be loathe to side with the United States over possible sanctions. At the same time, they have been sufficiently bellicose to ensure the world knows there will be international repercussions if things don't go their way.
The United States itself lacks political leverage over Iran, and the diplomatic process -- as it currently stands -- will not bring about the results Washington seeks. Therefore, the Bush administration's best option is to ensure that even if Tehran wins the current diplomatic battle, it will not win the entire war over uranium enrichment. We would expect Washington to argue that since there is no way to guarantee the Iranians will honor any deal they make on the nuclear issue, no deals can be made.
At most, the United States will open a new process to discuss the process of slapping eventual sanctions on Iran. Moreover, the pick-and-choose menu that was included in the June incentives package basically ensures that no meaningful sanctions will be enacted, even if U.N. Security Council members should eventually choose to go that route. All of the sound and fury over the incentives package will, in the end, signify next to nothing.
And Iran is well aware of this. So long as a military option is not on the table for the U.N. Security Council members -- and at this point, it is not -- it appears that Iran will emerge unscathed from this contest.
This should not be taken to mean that Iran will be on the fast track for acquiring nuclear weapons, since that is a function of technology rather than politics. But it does mean that Iran is growing stronger within a region where, on all sides, fundamental interests and assumptions are now being reassessed.
www.stratfor.com
-
My second post of the afternoon:
============
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/07/1866019
Clausewitz and World War IV
BY Maj. Gen. ROBERT H. SCALES (ret.)
The essence of every profession is expressed in the writings of its unifying theorists: Freud for psychology, Adam Smith on economics, Justice Marshall on law, and ? depending on one's preferences ? Marx or Jefferson on governance. War is no exception. The 19th-century Prussian writer Carl von Clausewitz is regarded as a prophet whose views on the character and nature of war have held up best over the past two centuries.
Periodically, changes in the culture, technology, economics or demographics induce movements to revise the classic masters. After the Great Depression, Keynes amended Smith, behavioralists supplanted Freud, Marshall gave way to Oliver Holmes, who eventually surrendered to the revisionist doctrines of Hugo Black and Earl Warren. The profession of arms, perhaps more than any other profession, has been ? is "blessed" the right word? ? by intellectual revisionists more frequently perhaps because armed conflict is the most complex, changeable and unpredictable of all human endeavors. And history has shown, tragically, that failure to amend theories of conflict in time has had catastrophic consequences for the human race.
Changes in theories of war come most often during periods of historical discontinuity. Events after 9/11 clearly show that we are in such a period now. Unfortunately, contemporary revisionists to the classical master have not been well treated in today's practical laboratory of real war. In the moment before Sept. 11, 2001, the great hope was that technology would permit the creation of new theories of war. This view, influenced by the historical successes of the U.S. in exploiting technology, has been carried to extremes by some proponents of "effects-based and net-centric operations." These true believers visualized that sensors, computers and telecommunications networks would "lift the fog of war." They postulated that victory would be assured when admirals and generals could sit on some lofty perch and use networks to see, sense and kill anything that moved about the battlefield. Actions of the enemy in Iraq have made these techno-warriors about as credible today as stockbrokers after the Great Depression.
Theory abhors a vacuum as much as nature, so newer revisionists have popped up in profusion to fill the void left by the collapse of technocentric theories of war. One philosophy proposes to build a new theory of war around organizational and bureaucratic efficiency. Build two armies, so the proponents argue, one to fight and the other to administer, and the new age of more flexible and adaptive military action will begin. Another group of theorists seeks to twist the facts of history into a pattern that brings us to a fourth generation of warfare, one that makes all Clausewitzian theories of state-on-state warfare obsolete. Thus Western states are threatened by an amorphous, globally based insurgent movement. The inconvenience of Middle Eastern states collapsing and reforming in the midst of a state-dependent terrorist environment makes this fourth generationalist assault on the master difficult to sustain, if not actually embarrassing.
To be generous, each of these revisions contains some elements of truth. But none satisfies sufficiently to give confidence that Clausewitz can be amended, much less discarded. To be sure, networks and sensors are useful, even against terrorists, particularly in ground warfare at the tactical level. Armies should be reorganized to fight irregular wars more efficiently. And the influence of the state in irregular war must be revised to accommodate the realities of nonstate threats or, perhaps more accurately, not-yet-state threats; Osama bin Laden's first desire is for his own caliphate, or even emirate. But at the end of the day ? and in light of the bitter experiences of recent years ? it's clear that none of these rudimentary attempts at revision possesses the intellectual heft or durability to challenge the tenets of the classic master of conflict theory.
The age of 'amplifiers'
Enter Alan Beyerchen, distinguished historian at Ohio State University. He's adopted a fundamentally different approach and by doing so has captured the intellectual high ground in the battle to amend theory in light of modern war's realities: Beyerchen would embrace rather than replace the master. Beyerchen has developed a taxonomy of war in the modern era in terms of four world wars. Each war was shaped by what he calls "amplifying factors." Amplifiers are not "multipliers" or "enablers" in that their influence on the course of war is nonlinear rather than linear; amplifiers don't simply accelerate the trends of the past, they make war different.
For example, World War I was a chemists' war in that the decisive strategic advantage on the battlefield was driven in large measure by new applications of chemistry and chemical engineering. The war should have ended for the Germans in 1915 when their supplies of gunpowder nitrates exhausted. But the synthesis of nitrates by German scientists allowed the war to continue for another three horrific years. World War II was a physicists' war. To paraphrase Churchill, the atom bomb ended the conflict, but exploitation of the electromagnetic spectrum in the form of the wireless and radar won it for the allies. "World War III" was the "information researchers'" war, a war in which intelligence and knowledge of the enemy and the ability to fully exploit that knowledge allowed the U.S. to defeat the Soviet Union with relatively small loss of life.
The information age
Most strikingly, Beyerchen places what is popularly known as "transformation" at the end rather than the beginning of an epoch in which the microchip accelerated the technology of the information age but only after the culmination point of the information age was reached and the war was substantially won. In other words, the value of net-centrism as an amplifier ? a factor that fundamentally shapes the nature of conflict ? has passed; its formative influence on the course of war is over. Al-Qaida's success in Iraq simply drives the last nail in its coffin.
Think of the shifts between world wars as tectonic rather than volcanic events. The physicists' war did not simply erupt to supplant the chemists' war. Their respective influences as amplifiers simply diminished over time. Amplifiers still retain influence: Armies still use chemistry and physics (and most certainly networks) to gain advantage on the battlefield. The danger is that a military force will remain devoted to an amplifier long after it can no longer offer truly decisive returns. Thus, by Beyerchen's logic, we may be spending trillions on old amplifiers, on better chemistry, better physics and better information technologies, only to gain marginal improvements, a few additional few knots of speed, bits of bandwidth and centimeters of precision. In doing so, the question that begs itself is: Are we ignoring the amplifying factor that promises to be truly decisive, that might win World War IV at very little cost?
In searching for this "emerging amplifier," Beyerchen returns to Clausewitz's basic insight: that war is influenced primarily by human beings rather than technology or bureaucracy. The problem in the past has been that the human factor could never be a significant amplifier simply because its influence was relatively fixed and difficult to exploit; humans have been considered constants more than variables. Yes, soldiers could be made better through conditioning, selection, psychological tuning and, since the last century, through education. But, ultimately, the human factor has usually come down to numbers. Bigger battalions make better armies. Clausewitz did allow for the amplifying factor of genius in war ? he fought repeatedly against Napoleon. But he conceded that human frailties made the identification and nurturing of genius problematic.
Winning World War IV
Beyerchen's idea is that the human and social sciences will change Clausewitz's perception of the constancy of the human influence in war. In effect, he argues that we are beginning the tectonic shift into World War IV, the epoch when the controlling amplifier will be human and biological rather than organizational or technological. From his theory we can postulate a new vision of the battlefield, one that shifts from the traditional linear construct to a battlefield that is amoebic in shape; it is distributed, dispersed, nonlinear, and essentially formless in space and unbounded in time. This war and all to follow will be what I would call "psycho-cultural" wars.
Let's come down from the clouds a bit: Experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have convinced many in the military intellectual community of the value of psycho-cultural factors in war, but the idea that these factors are now decisive, that indeed they comprise the battle space, may be a tough sell. After all, American forces have won three world wars through the efficient application of technology. And we have grown generations of generals who have been taught and have learned by their own experience that victories come from building better things. Our fixation on technology ? our very technological success ? has led us to believe that the soldier is a system and the enemy is a target. Soldiers are now viewed, especially by this U.S. Defense Department, as an "overhead expense," not a source of investment. Viewing war too much as a contest of technologies, we have become impatient and detached from those forms of war that do not fit our paradigms. Technocentric solutions are in our strategic cultural DNA.
Moreover, even if we were not burdened with the baggage of our past successes, trying to divine the depths of the coming human and biological era of war would be as problematic today as anticipating the arrival of the digital age immediately after World War II. Wars, blessedly, are fought infrequently, and epoch-defining conflicts are even more rare. Our base of experience for anticipating future events is limited to experimenting in the laboratory of war; we only discover that tectonic plates are moving when we feel the ground shake. We can perhaps say that Korea and the first Afghan war are the alpha and omega of World War III but can only dimly begin to see the plates of our new world war.
And so let us stipulate that Iraq and the second Afghan war are the beginnings of a new era, but let's also be extremely cautious not to forecast so much as to anticipate what these wars portend from the human and cultural perspective. Let's not look for a level of precision or prediction that we cannot achieve and is likely to lead us astray.
Building on Beyerchen, here's what I anticipate current conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere are telling us about what is to come. In a nutshell: World War IV will cause a shift in classical centers of gravity from the will of governments and armies to the perceptions of populations. Victory will be defined more in terms of capturing the psycho-cultural rather than the geographical high ground. Understanding and empathy will be important weapons of war. Soldier conduct will be as important as skill at arms. Culture awareness and the ability to build ties of trust will offer protection to our troops more effectively than body armor. Leaders will seek wisdom and quick but reflective thought rather than operational and planning skills as essential intellectual tools for guaranteeing future victories.
As in all past world wars, clashes of arms will occur. But future combat will be tactical, isolated, precise and most likely geographically remote, unexpected and often terribly brutal and intimate. Strategic success will come not from grand sweeping maneuvers but rather from a stacking of local successes, the sum of which will be a shift in the perceptual advantage ? the tactical schwerpunkt, the point of decision, will be very difficult to see and especially to predict. As seems to be happening in Iraq, for a time the enemy may well own the psycho-cultural high ground and hold it effectively against American technological dominance. Perceptions and trust are built among people, and people live on the ground. Thus, future wars will be decided principally by ground forces, specifically the Army, Marine Corps, Special Forces and the various reserve formations that support them.
Clausewitz tells us that the side that holds the initiative will ultimately prevail. In this new era, the initiative will be owned by the side that controls time. As retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, former commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan, is fond of saying, "In Afghanistan, Americans have all the wrist watches but Afghans have all the time." The enemy will attempt to control the clock with the strategic intent of winning by not losing. He will use the clock to wear down American resolve. Management of the clock will allow him to use patience as a means to offset American superiority in killing power. His hope is to leverage our impatience to cause us to overreact with inappropriate use of physical violence. Perception control will be achieved and opinions shaped by the side that best exploits the global media. And there is another sense of the clock that is important to appreciate. We are in a race between the rogue states or nonstate terrorists acquiring and using nuclear weapons versus our acquiring and deploying enough psycho-cultural armament to beat them on the ground. But even without nukes, the enemy has a natural advantage. He presents a paradox that plays to his intrinsic strengths. You must support us, he says, in spite of our brutality, or support the outsider who may be more humane but who is not part of our religion, culture, clan, tribe or ethnicity. And, he can say, I will always be here; will the Americans?
The Elements of Victories
How can we discover the path to victory in these future wars? Chemistry had little practical wartime utility when the irreducible elements of knowledge were earth, air, fire and water. During World War I, chemists learned to analyze and design molecules for desired functions. Applications quickly emerged for explosives, propulsion and poison gas. Only in the past few decades have the foundations of the social sciences advanced to the point that they might become the elements for victory. And until the military intellectual community acknowledges that virtually all failures in Afghanistan and Iraq were human rather than technological ? perhaps still an open question ? will the social sciences attract much interest as amplifiers. Can we yet say we understand the enemy's culture and intent? The evidence thus far is that we have been intellectually, culturally, sociologically and psychologically unprepared for this kind of war. To me, the bottom line is clear: If the single most important objective for the first three world wars was to make better machines, then surely the fourth world war corollary will be to make better soldiers, more effective humans. To do so, soldiers need improved social science in nine areas:
Cultural awareness: In Iraq, a curtain of cultural ignorance continues to separate the good intentions of the American soldier from Iraqis of good will. Inability to speak the language and insensitive conduct become real combat vulnerabilities that the enemy has exploited to his advantage. The military of the future must be able to go to war with enough cultural knowledge to thrive in an alien environment. Empathy will become a weapon. Soldiers must gain the ability to move comfortably among alien cultures, to establish trust and cement relationships that can be exploited in battle. Not all are fit for this kind of work. Some will remain committed to fighting the kinetic battle. But others will come to the task with intuitive cultural court sense, an innate ability to connect with other cultures. These soldiers must be identified and nurtured just as surely as the Army selects out those with innate operational court sense.
Social science can help select soldiers very early who possess social and cultural intelligence. Likewise, scientific psychology can assist in designing and running cultural immersion institutions that will hasten the development of culturally adept soldiers and intelligence agents. Cultural psychology can teach us to better understand both common elements of human culture and how they differ. An understanding of these commonalities and differences can help gain local allies, fracture enemy subgroups, avoid conflicts among allies, promote beneficial alliances and undermine enemy alliances.
Building alien armies and alliances: World War IV will be manpower-intensive. The U.S. cannot hope to field enough soldiers to be effective wherever the enemy appears. Effective surrogates are needed to help us fight our wars. The Army has a long tradition of creating effective indigenous armies in such remote places as Greece, Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador and now Iraq. But almost without exception, the unique skills required to perform this complex task have never been valued, and those who practice them are rarely rewarded. Today's soldiers would prefer to be recognized as operators rather than advisers. This must change. If our strategic success on a future battlefield will depend on our ability to create armies from whole cloth ? or, as in Iraq, to remove an army that has been part of the problem and make it a part of the solution ? then we must select, promote and put into positions of authority those who know how to build armies. We must cultivate, amplify, research and inculcate these skills in educational institutions reserved specifically for that purpose. We must also do this pre-emptively or prophylactically by building the most suitable psycho-cultural infrastructures, both in the theater of war and at home.
-
PART TWO
Perception shaping as art, not science: People in many regions of the world hate us. They have been led to these beliefs by an enemy whose perception-shaping effort is as brilliant as it is diabolical. If the center of gravity in World War IV is the perception of the people, then perhaps we should learn how the enemy manipulates the people. Information technology will be of little use in this effort. Damage is only amplified when inappropriate, culturally insensitive or false messages are sent over the most sophisticated information networks. Recent advances in the social psychology of leadership and persuasion can help train soldiers to win acceptance of local populations and obtain better intelligence from locals. Recent cognitive behavioral therapy has documented remarkably effective techniques for countering fear and abiding hatred such as we see in the Middle East. Our challenge is to create a human science intended specifically for shaping opinions, particularly among alien peoples. This task is too big for a single service or event for the Defense Department. It must be a national effort superintended by distinguished academics and practitioners in the human sciences who understand such things, rather than by policy-makers who have proven in Iraq that they do not.
Inculcate knowledge and teach wisdom: In Iraq and Afghanistan, junior soldiers and Marines today are asked to make decisions that in previous wars were reserved for far more senior officers. A corporal standing guard in Baghdad or Fallujah can commit an act that might well affect the strategic outcome of an entire campaign. Yet the intellectual preparation of these very junior leaders is no more advanced today than it was during World War III. However, the native creativity, innovativeness and initiative exhibited by these young men and women belie their woeful lack of psycho-social preparation.
Learning to deal with the human and cultural complexities of this era of war will take time. Leaders, intelligence officers and soldiers must be given the time to immerse themselves in alien cultures and reflect on their profession. Yet in our haste to put more soldiers and Marines in the field, we risk breaking the intellectual institutions that create opportunities to learn. Today, we are contracting out our need for wisdom by hiring civilians to teach in military schools and colleges. Educational science has long understood that reading and listening are the least effective means for retaining or increasing knowledge. Teaching is at least an order of magnitude more effective, while researching and writing are far better still.
Tactical intelligence: The value of tactical intelligence ? knowledge of the enemy's actions or intentions sufficiently precise and timely to kill him ? has been demonstrated in Iraq and Afghanistan. Killing power is of no use unless a soldier on patrol knows who to kill. We should take away from our combat experience a commitment to leverage human sciences to make the tactical view of the enemy clearer and more certain, to be able to differentiate between the innocents and the enemy by reading actions to discern intentions.
The essential tools necessary to make a soldier a superb intelligence gatherer must be imbedded in his brain rather than placed in his rucksack. He must be taught to perceive his surroundings in such a way that he can make immediate intuitive decisions about the intentions of those about him. His commanders must be taught to see the battlefield through the eyes of his soldiers. He must make decisions based on the gut feel and developed intuition that come from an intelligence gatherer's ability to see what others cannot. There is a growing science of intuition and gut feeling, and these capabilities might be enhanced by this new capability and its allied technology. Machines and processes might make intelligence easier to parse and read. But knowing the enemy better than he knows us is inherently a psycho-cultural rather than a technological, organizational or procedural challenge.
Psychological and physiological tuning: Life sciences offer promise that older, more mature soldiers will be able to endure the physical stresses of close combat for longer periods. This is important because experience strongly supports the conclusion that older men make better close-combat soldiers. Scientific research also suggests that social intelligence and diplomatic skills increase with age. Older soldiers are more stable in crisis situations, are less likely to be killed or wounded and are far more effective in performing the essential tasks that attend to close-in killing. Experience within special operations units also suggests that more mature soldiers are better suited for fighting in complex human environments. Science can help determine when soldiers are at their cognitive peak. Psychological instruments are available today to increase endurance and sustained attention on the battlefield. Today, conditioning science has succeeded in keeping professional athletes competitive much longer than even a decade ago. These methods should be adapted to prepare ground soldiers as well for the physical and psychological stresses of close combat.
Develop high performing soldiers and small units: Close combat has always been a personal and intimate experience. Close combat is the only skill that cannot be bought off the street or contracted out. In all of our world wars, success of campaigns has been threatened by a shortage of first rate, professional infantrymen. Inevitably, a protracted campaign drains the supply of intimate killers. Many infantrymen are sent into close combat with about four months' preparation. What little social science the research and development community has devote to understanding the human component in war has not been spent on close-combat soldiers. We know far more about pilot and astronaut behavior than we do about those who in the next world war will do most of the killing and dying, the close-combat soldiers. If dead soldiers constitute our greatest weakness in war, then we should, as a matter of national importance, devote resources to making them better.
The enemy has drawn us unwillingly into fighting him at the tactical level of war where the importance of technology diminishes in proportion to the value of intangibles. Thus, winning World War IV will require greater attention to the tactical fight. Technology will play a part, to be sure. Our small units, squads and platoons should be equipped with only the best vehicles, small arms, sensors, radios and self-protection. But more important to victory will be human influencers such as the selection, bonding, and psychological and physical preparation of tactical units.
As the battlefield expands and becomes more uncertain and lethal, it also becomes lonelier and enormously frightening for those obliged to fight close. Most recent American campaigns have been fought in unfamiliar and horrifically desolate terrain and weather. Modern social science offers some promising solutions to this problem. Recently, we have learned that soldiers can now be better tuned psychologically to endure the stresses of close combat. Tests, assessments, role-playing exercises and careful vetting will reduce the percentage of soldiers who suffer from stress disorders after coming off the line.
Cognitive sciences can be leveraged to enhance small-unit training in many ways, from speeding the acquisition and enhancing the retention of foreign languages to training soldiers in command decision simulators to sharpen the ability to make decisions in complex tactical situations. Cognitive sciences can be employed in the creation of highly efficient and flexible training programs that can respond to the ever-changing problems. Models of human cognition can also be used to diagnose performance failures during simulated exercises. These measures can assist in training soldiers to attend to hidden variables and to properly weigh and filter the many factors that determine optimal performance in complex decision-making tasks.
But the social sciences can accelerate the process for building great small units only so much. The one ingredient necessary for creating a closely bonded unit is time. The aging of a good unit, like that of a good wine, cannot be hurried. Platoons need at least a year to develop full body and character. Because the pipeline will be so long and the probability of death so great, the ground services must create many more close-combat units than conventional logic would demand. The lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan is clear: In future wars we can never have too many close-combat units. The performance of small ground units will be so critical to success on the World War IV battlefield that we should replace the World War III methods of mass producing small units and treat them more like professional sports teams with highly paid coaching and dedicated practice with the highest quality equipment and assessment methods.
Leadership and decision-making: World War IV will demand intellectually ambidextrous leaders who are capable of facing a conventional enemy one moment, then shifting to an irregular threat the next moment before transitioning to the task of providing humanitarian solace to the innocent. All of these missions may have to be performed by the same commander simultaneously. Developing leaders with such a varied menu of skills takes time. Unfortunately, World War IV will be long and will occupy ground leaders to the extent that time available to sharpen leadership skills will be at a premium.
There are precedents for developing these skills. In Vietnam, the air services developed "Top Gun" and "Red Flag" exercises as a means of improving the flying skills of new pilots bloodlessly before they faced a real and skilled opponent. Recent advances in the science of intuitive decision-making will give the ground services a similar ability to improve the close-combat decision-making skills of young leaders. Senior commanders will be able to use these tools to select those leaders with the intuitive right stuff. Over time, leaders will be able to measure and assess improvements in their ability to make the right decisions in ever more complex and demanding combat situations. They will have access to coaches and mentors who will pass on newly learned experiences with an exceptional degree of accountability and scientific precision.
Intuitive battle command: The Army and Marine Corps learned in Afghanistan and Iraq that operational planning systems inherited from World War III would no longer work against an elusive and adaptive enemy. They were forced to improvise a new method of campaign planning that emphasized the human component in war. Gut feel and intuition replaced hierarchical, linear processes. They learned to command by discourse rather than formal orders. Information-sharing became ubiquitous, with even the most junior leaders able to communicate in real time with each other and with their seniors. Dedicated soldier networks have fundamentally altered the relationship between leaders and led and have changed forever how the Army and Marine Corps command soldiers in battle.
Developing new and effective command-and-control technologies and procedures will do no good unless we educate leaders to exploit these opportunities fully. We have only begun to leverage the power of the learning sciences to battle command. Teaching commanders how to think and intuit rather than what to think will allow them to anticipate how the enemy will act. Convincing commanders to leave World War III-era decision-making processes in favor of nonlinear intuitive processes will accelerate the pace and tempo of battle. The promise is enormous. But we will only achieve the full potential of this promise if we devote the resources to the research and education necessary to make it happen.
Strange partners
Military leaders have had three world wars to establish comfortable relationships with chemists, physicists and information technologists. This was a marriage of necessity, but it has worked. The relationship between the military and human and behavioral scientists has, to date, been one of antipathy and neglect. Academics and behavioral practitioners have rarely violated the turf of the soldier. Many are turned off by the prospects of relating their professions to war. But most take the war against terrorism seriously. If the Army and Marine Corps give them the opportunity, they will gladly turn the best of their sciences to the future defense of our nation.
We are in a race, and the times demand change. World War IV can only be won by harnessing the social and human sciences as the essential amplifiers of military performance, just as the physical sciences were the amplifiers of past world wars. Such a shift in how the defense community approaches war will require a fundamental shift in military culture. Of course, new planes, ships and combat vehicles will have to be built to win World War IV, but building new social, cultural and learning structures will have to become the first priority for resources within the Defense Department. There is an old saying that the Navy and the Air Force man the equipment and the Army and Marine Corps equip the man. Surely those services that focus on the man rather than the machine should receive a disproportionate share of future defense budgets?
Beyerchen convinces me that we have moved from one world war to the next with little ability to predict how science and human circumstances will dictate our course. We can only imagine how the human and biological sciences will redirect the course of war. What will the new amplifiers be? Will breakthroughs in bioscience make the battlefield more lethal? Will new human and behavioral developments make us more effective in battle? Only time will tell. But none of these questions can be answered by speculation alone. The Defense Department must invest the resources now to realize the potential of psycho-cultural sciences to winning World War IV.
One thing is certain, however: We are in for decades of psycho-social warfare. We must begin now to harness the potential of the social sciences in a manner not dissimilar to the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Project. Perhaps we will need to assemble an A team and build social science institutions similar to Los Alamos or the Kennedy Space Center. Such a transformational change is beyond the resources of a single service, particularly the ground services.
Thus a human and biological revolution will have to be managed and driven by the highest authorities in the nation. I sincerely hope they are listening.
THE EVOLUTION OF WARFARE
THE CHEMISTS' WAR
The decisive strategic advantage on the World War I battlefield was driven by new applications of chemistry and chemical engineering. Germany, for example, exhausted its supplies of gunpowder nitrates in 1915, but the synthesis of nitrates by German scientists allowed the war to continue for another three years.
THE PHYSICISTS' WAR
The atomic bomb ended World War II, but exploitation of the electromagnetic spectrum in the form of wireless communications and radar won it for the allies.
THE INFORMATION RESEARCHERS' WAR
In World War III, intelligence and the ability to fully exploit it allowed the U.S. to defeat the Soviet Union. Information-age concepts of transformation and net-centrism mark the end of this epoch.
THE SOCIAL SCIENTISTS' WAR
To win World War IV, the military must be culturally knowledgeable enough to thrive in an alien environment. Victory will be defined more in terms of capturing the psycho-cultural rather than the geographical high ground. Understanding and empathy will be important weapons of war.
■Retired Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales is a former U.S. Army War College commander and deputy chief of staff for doctrine.
You may not be interested in the global jihad, but the global jihad is interested in you.
-
It's clear Bush doesn't understand Iraq, or Lebanon, or Gaza, or ?
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2006, at 5:48 PM ET www.slate.com
Among the many flabbergasting answers that President Bush gave at his press conference on Monday, this one?about Democrats who propose pulling out of Iraq?triggered the steepest jaw drop: "I would never question the patriotism of somebody who disagrees with me. This has nothing to do with patriotism. It has everything to do with understanding the world in which we live."
George W. Bush criticizing someone for not understanding the world is like ? well, it's like George W. Bush criticizing someone for not understanding the world. It's sui generis: No parallel quite captures the absurdity so succinctly. This, after all, is the president who invaded Iraq without the slightest understanding of the country's ethnic composition or of the volcanic tensions that toppling its dictator might unleash. Complexity has no place in his schemes. Choices are never cloudy. The world is divided into the forces of terror and the forces of freedom: The one's defeat means the other's victory.
Defeating terror by promoting freedom?it's "the fundamental challenge of the 21st century," he has said several times, especially when it comes to the Middle East. But here, from the transcript of the press conference, is how he sees the region's recent events:
"What's very interesting about the violence in Lebanon and the violence in Iraq and the violence in Gaza is this: These are all groups of terrorists who are trying to stop the advance of democracy."
What is he talking about? Hamas, which has been responsible for much of the violence in Gaza, won the Palestinian territory's parliamentary elections. Hezbollah, which started its recent war with Israel, holds a substantial minority of seats in Lebanon's parliament and would probably win many more seats if a new election were held tomorrow. Many of the militants waging sectarian battle in Iraq have representation in Baghdad's popularly elected parliament.
The key reality that Bush fails to grasp is that terrorism and democracy are not opposites. They can, and sometimes do, coexist. One is not a cure for the other.
Here, as a further example of this failing, is his summation of Iraq:
"I hear a lot about "civil war"? [But] the Iraqis want a unified country. ? Twelve million Iraqis voted. ? It's an indication about the desire for people to live in a free society."
What he misses is that those 12 million Iraqis had sharply divided views of what a free society meant. Shiites voted for a unified country led by Shiites, Sunnis voted for a unified country led by Sunnis, and Kurds voted for their own separate country. Almost nobody voted for a free society in any Western sense of the term. (The secular parties did very poorly.)
The total number of voters, in such a context, means nothing. Look at American history. In the 1860 election, held right before our own Civil War, 81.2 percent of eligible citizens voted?the second-largest turnout ever.
Another comment from the president: "It's in our interests that we help reformers across the Middle East achieve their objectives." But who are these reformers? What are their objectives? And how can we most effectively help them?
This is where Bush's performance proved most discouraging. He said, as he's said before, "Resentment and the lack of hope create the breeding grounds for terrorists." This may or may not be true. (Many terrorist leaders are well-off, and, according to some studies, their resentment is often aimed at foreign occupiers.) In any case, what is Bush doing to reduce their resentment?
He said he wants to help Lebanon's democratic government survive, but what is he doing about that? Bush called the press conference to announce a $230 million aid package. That's a step above the pathetic $50 million that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had offered the week before, but it's still way below the $1 billion or more than Iran is shoveling to Hezbollah, which is using the money to rebuild Lebanon's bombed-out neighborhoods?and to take credit for the assistance.
As for Iraq, it's no news that Bush has no strategy. What did come as news?and, really, a bit of a shocker?is that he doesn't seem to know what "strategy" means. Asked if it might be time for a new strategy in Iraq, given the unceasing rise in casualties and chaos, Bush replied, "The strategy is to help the Iraqi people achieve their objectives and dreams, which is a democratic society. That's the strategy. ? Either you say, 'It's important we stay there and get it done,' or we leave. We're not leaving, so long as I'm the president."
The reporter followed up, "Sir, that's not really the question. The strategy?"
Bush interrupted, "Sounded like the question to me."
First, it's not clear that the Iraqi people want a "democratic society" in the Western sense. Second, and more to the point, "helping Iraqis achieve a democratic society" may be a strategic objective, but it's not a strategy?any more than "ending poverty" or "going to the moon" is a strategy.
Strategy involves how to achieve one's objectives?or, as the great British strategist B.H. Liddell Hart put it, "the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy." These are the issues that Bush refuses to address publicly?what means and resources are to be applied, in what way, at what risk, and to what end, in pursuing his policy. Instead, he reduces everything to two options: "Cut and run" or, "Stay the course." It's as if there's nothing in between, no alternative way of applying military means. Could it be that he doesn't grasp the distinction between an "objective" and a "strategy," and so doesn't see that there might be alternatives? Might our situation be that grim?
-
"We're not leaving, so long as I'm the president."
What exactly can we take this to mean?
Is he prepared to defy Congress if (in the unlikely event) they impose a deadline on withdrawal from Iraq?
What if the present "sovereign" Iraqi government calls for us to withdraw? Will Bush simply organize a coup and install a new government?
-
"We're not leaving, so long as I'm the president."
What exactly can we take this to mean?
Sounds perfectly clear to me: as long as Mr. Bush is president of the United States of America he will endeavor by all legal means to keep the American armed presence in Iraq. I'm sure glad that Mr. Bush is the American president.?
-
Sounds perfectly clear to me: as long as Mr. Bush is president of the United States of America he will endeavor by all legal means to keep the American armed presence in Iraq.
Another quote from the press conference:
Look, I?m going to do what I think is right and if, you know, if people don?t like me for it, that?s just the way it is.
This is a president who's violated the Geneva Conventions, assumed the authority to spy on American citizens without a warrant, and locked up American citizens indefinitely without charging them with any crime. So it's actually not clear to me that Bush will respect any democratic restraints on his war powers.
I'm sure glad that Mr. Bush is the American president.
Good for you. I sure am glad Hugo Chavez is president of Venezuela.
-
Good for you.? I sure am glad Hugo Chavez is president of Venezuela.
Figures! ;)? <== the "wink" smily is missing
-
Churchill on Islamic Fundamentalism
Winston Churchill's grandson says radical Islam at war with the world
By CJ Staff
March 03, 2006
Winston S. Churchill III speaking at the John Locke Foundation's 16th anniversary dinner in Raleigh on Feb. 10.
RALEIGH ? Winston S. Churchill III maintains that Islamic fundamentalism is as destructive as the malevolent "isms" of the 20th century: Nazism, Communism and Facism. In a speech on Feb. 10 at the John Locke Foundation's anniversary dinner, the grandson of Winston Churchill urged the West to stay the course in the fight against extremist Islam.
Here is the text of his speech:
It is both an honor and a pleasure to be your guest here tonight and to have the privilege of addressing the John Locke Foundation. First and foremost, may I congratulate you for honouring the memory of John Locke, who was very much involved in the establishment of the Governments of the Carolinas and who, most important of all, was one of the great philosophers of the English-speaking world.
Locke?s message ? the vital importance of resisting authoritarianism ? is as relevant to the strife-torn times of the world in which we live, as it was in the strife-torn times of the 17th Century. Authoritarianism constantly rears its ugly head, even within our own societies on both sides of the Atlantic, in so many guises and disguises, and in every field, be it religion, government or the military.
At its most extreme, authoritarianism is exemplified by the isms of the 20th Century ? Communism, Fascism and Nazism. The Fascists and Nazis were responsible for the deaths of more than 30 million human beings, while more than 50 million are estimated to have been murdered by Stalin and the Russian Communists, while Mao-Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communists are believed to have accounted for some 80 million.
But today a new challenge ? another ism ? confronts us, and that is the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism. Extremist Islam has declared war on the rest of the world, as evidenced by their ruthless attacks across the globe ? overwhelmingly targeted at innocent civilians. Beside the outrage of 9/11, the bombings in Madrid, in Bali, in London and, most recently, in Jordan come to mind.
Those who have declared jihad against the West, and Western values, such as freedom of speech, are doing all in their power to mobilize against us the large Muslim communities living in our midst. In North America, there are an estimated six million Muslims in the USA, plus a further three-quarter million in Canada; while in the European Union, they number an estimated 20 million, including nearly 2 million in Britain. Unlike most other categories of migrant, the Muslims are reluctant to assimilate and, all too often, wish to pursue their own agenda.
Unbelievably, Washington is urging Europe to admit Turkey to the EU. Were that to happen, the Muslim population of Europe would skyrocket to 100 million ? an act, in my view, of consummate folly. Already Judeo-Christian Europe is under siege from a tidal wave of Islamic immigration. The admission of Turkey would hasten its demise. While I have a great regard for the Turks, the only democracy in the Muslim world and stalwart members of NATO, I am firmly opposed to their admission to the EU. I would accord them most-favoured nation status, but not the right to settle in Western Europe and become EU citizens.
The scale of the problem confronting Europe today is epitomized by France, which has a Muslim community of some 6 million, or 10 percent of its population. But, if you take the population aged 20 and below, the figure rockets to 30 percent, such is the birthrate of the immigrant communities. In other words, within one further generation, France will be a Muslim country ? a truly horrifying prospect.
At the same time it is vital that, in our pursuit of the men and women of terror ? we do all we can, not to alienate these large Muslim communities already established among us. For, without the active support of the Muslim communities, we shall never excise this deadly cancer in our midst.
Intriguingly, the dangers of extremist Islam were foreseen by Winston Churchill all of 85 years ago, as I discovered to my amazement, while compiling my most recent book NEVER GIVE IN! The Best of Winston Churchill?s Speeches.
Churchill is, of course, well-known for his gift of prescience and, specifically, for being the first to warn of the menace of Hitler and Nazism as early as 1932, and of the Soviet threat in his famous Iron Curtain speech in 1946 in Fulton, Mo. But how many know that he also warned the world of the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism? I certainly did not!
On 14 June 1921, hard on the heels of the Cairo Conference, at which he had presided over the re-shaping of the Middle East, including the creation of modern day Iraq, he warned the House of Commons:
A large number of [Saudi Arabia?s King] Bin Saud?s followers belong to the Wahabi sect, a form of Mohammedanism which bears, roughly speaking, the same relationship to orthodox Islam as the most militant form of Calvinism would have borne to Rome in the fiercest times of [Europe?s] religious wars.
The Wahabis profess a life of exceeding austerity, and what they practice themselves they rigorously enforce on others. They hold it as an article of duty, as well as of faith, to kill all who do not share their opinions and to make slaves of their wives and children. Women have been put to death in Wahabi villages for simply appearing in the streets.
It is a penal offence to wear a silk garment. Men have been killed for smoking a cigarette and, as for the crime of alcohol, the most energetic supporter of the temperance cause in this country falls far behind them. Austere, intolerant, well-armed, and blood-thirsty, in their own regions the Wahabis are a distinct factor which must be taken into account, and they have been, and still are, very dangerous to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina?
In Churchill?s day, of course, the viciousness and cruelty of the Wahabis was confined to the Saudi Arabia peninsula, and their atrocities were directed exclusively against their fellow Muslims, whom they held to be heretics for not adhering to the Wahabi creed ? but not anymore.
Today the combination of the oil wealth of Saudi Arabia and the supine weakness of the Saudi royal family which ? as the price for not having their own behavior subjected to scrutiny and public criticism by these austere, extremist clerics ? has bank-rolled the Wahabi fundamentalist movement, and given these fanatical zealots a global reach to their vicious creed of hatred and extremism.
The consequence has been that the Wahabis have been able to export their exceptionally intolerant brand of Islamic fundamentalism from Mauritania and Morocco on Africa?s Atlantic shores, through more than two dozen countries including Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East, to as far afield as the Philippines and East Timor in the Pacific. This is the stark challenge that today confronts the Western world and I fear it will be with us, not just for a matter of years, but perhaps even for generations.
Just in the past two weeks the temperature in the Middle East has risen markedly with three significant developments. First, we have seen the wild and furious reaction, whipped up by firebrand clerics throughout the Islamic world, to the publication some five months ago in a Danish newspaper of a cartoon depicting the prophet with a smoking bomb in his turban, as tattered suicide bombers were being greeted at the Muslim pearly gates by a gate-keeper shooing them away and shouting: ?Get lost! We?ve run out of Virgins!? The fury that this mild piece of satire engendered, epitomizes the clash of civilizations that is the key factor confronting us today.
Secondly, the stunning election victory in the Palestinian elections of Hamas ? a terrorist organization committed to the destruction of Israel ? provided a rude shock to those in Washington who naively imagined that democracy would provide the answer to the problems of the Middle East. For many within the Beltway, free elections have been an article of faith, even though it was in a free election that Hitler first came to power, before establishing his Nazi dictatorship.
Such is the anger of the Moslem world against the West, inflamed by extremist clerics and fanned by the Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia television networks, that truly democratic and free elections would result in the election of fundamentalist governments throughout the Muslim world. It is a frightening fact, that in 50 Muslim countries countless millions of Muslims tell pollsters that they regard Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri as more trustworthy than President Bush.
The third and by far the most serious development, is the decision of the Iranian government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to remove the U.N. seals from its nuclear research facilities. He it is who not only denies the Holocaust ever happened, but who declares that Israel is a ?tumor? that should be ?wiped off the map?! Some Western analysts state that the Iranian president doesn?t really mean what he says. There were, of course, many who said just that of Hitler?s Mein Kampf, and we saw the result.
Having reported events ? including two wars ? in the Middle East over the past 45 years, I think I know the Israelis well enough to say that Israel is not about to wait to find out whether or not the Iranian president means what he says. In 1981 Israel took decisive steps to take out Saddam Hussein?s Osirak nuclear facility with a long-range air strike. I do not see how she can fail to do the same in the case of the even greater threat posed to Israel by a nuclear-armed Iran.
This time it will not be so easy, as the mullahs have dispersed their nuclear facilities across 16 sites and built them deep underground, making them far more difficult to attack. But with 500 ?bunker-busting? bombs from the U.S. and precision-guidance technology they will certainly make a mess of the place. The whole Muslim world will be enflamed with outrage and Iran?s reaction may well be to deploy 100,000 guerrilla fighters to Iraq to fight the Americans and British ? not a happy thought.
But even before these developments, siren voices could already be heard on Capitol Hill, raising the cry: ?Bring the Boys home.? I tell you: Nothing could be more disastrous than if, at this juncture, the United States were to cut and run. It would, at a stroke, undermine those forces of moderation we are seeking to establish in power, betray our troops as they fight a difficult, but necessary, battle, and break faith with those of our soldiers who have sacrificed their lives to establish a free Iraq.
Gravest of all, we should be handing a victory of gigantic proportions to our sworn enemies. Let no one imagine that by pulling out of Iraq, the threat will simply evaporate. On the contrary, it will redouble, it will come closer to home and our enemies will have established in Iraq the very base that, by our defeat of the Taliban, we have denied them in Afghanistan. We shall see a desperately weakened United States, with its armed forces undermined and demoralized, increasingly at the mercy of our terrorist enemies.
Precipitate withdrawal is the counsel of defeatism and cowardice, which, if it holds sway, will immeasurably increase the dangers that today confront, not just America, but the entire Western world. It is something for which we shall pay a terrible price in the years ahead. When great nations go to war ? and they should do so only as a last resort ? they must expect to suffer grievous losses and must commit to war with an unconquerable resolve to secure victory.
In Iraq the United States has lost some 2,200 men and women, Britain just over 100. Compare that to the first day of the Battle of the Somme ? 1 July 1916 ? when the British Army in a single day, nay, before breakfast, lost 55,000 men killed, wounded or missing in action. Did we talk of quitting?
What has happened to the mighty United States? Is it going soft? Are the elected representatives of the American people ready to surrender to those who threaten their homeland ? indeed their civilian population ? with death and destruction? I pray that they are not, and I call to mind the words of my grandfather, addressing the Canadian Parliament on New Year's Day 1941, in which ? referring to the British nation dwelling around the globe, but it applies equally to our American cousins today ? when he declared:
are a tough and hardy people! We have not travelled across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains & across the prairies, because we're made of sugar candy!
In conclusion, I would remind you ? and especially the legislators on Capitol Hill ? of Winston Churchill?s words to the House of Commons on becoming prime minister in May 1940, which applies every bit as much to the situation that confronts us today.
You ask: What is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror. However long or hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.
Provided we have the courage to stay the course, I am convinced that we can, in the end, prevail. Any alternative is too terrible to contemplate. There are no quick, easy solutions; on the contrary it will be a long, hard slog. But more leadership is needed from on high and, above all, more guts and determination if we are to see this through to victory.
Let us fight the good fight ? and let us fight it together! How pleased my grandfather would be to know that ? 40 years on from his death ? the Anglo-American alliance is still strong and that British and American soldiers stand shoulder-to-shoulder in Iraq and in Afghanistan, confronting the peril of the hour! Long may we stand together! God bless America!
http://carolinajournal.com/exclusives/display_exclusive.html?id=3158
-
Sweating out the truth in Iran
Maziar Bahari
Published: August 24, 2006
TEHRAN - Working as a journalist in Iran embodies the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again without getting any results. That's how I felt at the height of the conflict in Lebanon, when I asked officials about Iran's relations with Hezbollah, bearing in mind that posing such questions can be a futile, dangerous and sometimes even lethal exercise.
How was Iran helping Hezbollah? Did Iran really start the war to divert attention from its uranium enrichment program (which it vowed this week to continue)? Was Iran, as Hezbollah's ally, if not patron, willing to put its money where its mouth was and enter the conflict?
Questions, questions. Of course no one answered.
So as a good Iranian, I indulged in fantasy. Fantasizing has become something of a national sport here. Our president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, predicted that the national soccer team would finish third or fourth in the World Cup. He also thinks we can become a nuclear powerhouse, even though we have a hard time manufacturing safety matches or making light bulbs with life expectancies of more than two weeks. (By the way, the soccer team didn't make it out of the first round.)
The setting of my dream was a sauna, where I questioned an imaginary official for five minutes (alas, even our dreams have boundaries here). Why a sauna? For some reason, Iranian officials love going to saunas. Some of the most important decisions in our recent history have been made in saunas. I'm serious.
I politely approach the high-ranking official and give him the impression that he is actually as important as he thinks he is. A bearded man in his early 50s, he usually wears a navy-blue suit and a collarless white shirt buttoned to the neck. He is friendly and polite at first, but then his munificent smile turns to an agitated frown.
Q. How do you support the Lebanese resistance?
A. The Israeli regime has shown it has no concern for human rights and international law. It kills infants and pregnant women.
Q. How do you support the Lebanese resistance?
A. Americans have double standards. There is one for Israel and another one for the rest of the world. If it were not for America, Israel would never dare to kill innocent Lebanese citizens with such impunity.
Q. How do you support the Lebanese resistance?
A. I just answered you.
Q. No. You didn't. You just repeated the slogans I heard people were chanting in the Palestine Square demonstration yesterday and at Friday prayers two days before that. How does Iran support Hezbollah? Financially? Militarily? Spiritually? How?
The official gets annoyed and looks to his bodyguards to take him away. He wipes the sweat off his face, adjusts his towel and leaves.
It is a silly fantasy, I admit. But the Iranian regime has reached a crossroads in its relationship with the rest of the world, and no one in the government is willing to give the public a straight answer.
There is a vague logic in the absurdity of the events here. But the people in the government tend not to share the obscure reasons behind their decisions with the public during crises. Officials usually leave it to pundits to interpret the government's behavior as they wish.
Using Hezbollah as a threat has always helped Iran in its negotiations with the West. Iran would like to keep it that way. Helping Hezbollah overtly, however, would lead to a direct confrontation with Israel and the United States, while officially staying out of Lebanese affairs means betraying revolutionary ideals the regime pretends to hold dear to its heart. For the moment, Iran is sticking to bombastic rhetoric while doing nothing, to the chagrin of many of its hard-line supporters.
Iran helped create Hezbollah in the early 1980s, it is Hezbollah's most vocal supporter, and before the war it sent the group millions of dollars in cash, medicine and arms.
Does this Iranian aid make Hezbollah Iran's puppet? From all evidence, Hezbollah, to a great extent, makes decisions independently of Iran. Hezbollah is an indigenous Lebanese armed resistance group that owes its popularity to Israeli atrocities, biased American policies and corrupt Lebanese politicians. When the United States and Israel try to portray Hezbollah as an Iranian proxy, they are pointing the finger in the wrong direction.
But Iran definitely uses the threat of its influence over Hezbollah to further its objectives. And its prime objective is the survival of the Islamic regime at any price. The clerics and non-clerics (they are now mostly non-clerics) in power in Iran are not the old revolutionary zealots the Americans tend to imagine. They are pragmatic men who have enjoyed the fruits of power for 27 years and don't want to lose them. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, Iranian statesmen were so scared of American retaliation that for the first time since the revolution, no one chanted "Death to America" in Iran for 10 days.
The regime's rhetoric about the United States and Israel is a remnant of the time when seizing embassies and staging revolutions were in vogue. But now the Islamic Republic has one of the world's younger populations. Most young Iranians I know don't care for their fathers' ideals. They prefer the better things in life, like plasma TVs on which to watch Britney Spears and the exiled Iranian pop diva Googoosh on illegal satellite channels. (No, Mr. Cheney, they don't want the United States to invade their country.) The government spends much of its $60 billion in annual oil revenue to import goods and keep its youth happy.
The paradoxes of the regime have exposed its hypocrisies. On one hand, the fiery slogans are the raison d'?tre of the Islamic Republic, and on the other, acting openly on those slogans would spell its demise. The most expedient thing to do has been nothing, while continuing to chant.
Until the start of the war in Lebanon, that was just fine. Iran benefited from a series of victories without doing much. First the Americans got rid of the Taliban, Iran's enemy to the east. Then the Americans got rid of Iran's archenemy to the west, Saddam Hussein. Finally, with Americans mired in both countries, the price of oil went through the roof, and Iran started enriching uranium again, knowing that the West could do nothing. The regime was intoxicated with oil money and regional influence.
But the war in Lebanon has made it impossible for the Islamic Republic to enjoy the same calm. Hezbollah has become a liability for Iran. Weakened, it now needs Iran's petrodollars and rockets to regain its strength. At the same time, Israel and the United States are scrutinizing the transfer of arms and money from Iran to Hezbollah more closely than ever. The next shipment of arms from Iran to Hezbollah may result in direct confrontation with Israel and the United States.
The bearded men in the saunas must be sweating more than usual, even though in public they toast Hezbollah's "victory" with glasses of pomegranate juice. The Islamic Republic is coming to the point where it has to choose: destroy itself by repeating the same old slogans, or come up with new definitions for itself, its friends and foes.
Maziar Bahari is a journalist and documentary film maker.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/24/opinion/edbahari.php
-
Russian Footprints
What does Moscow have to do with the recent war in Lebanon?
By Ion Mihai Pacepa
The Kremlin may be the main winner in the Lebanon war. Israel has been attacked with Soviet Kalashnikovs and Katyushas, Russian Fajr-1 and Fajr-3 rockets, Russian AT-5 Spandrel antitank missiles and Kornet antitank rockets. Russia?s outmoded weapons are now all the rage with terrorists everywhere in the world, and the bad guys know exactly where to get them. The weapons cases abandoned by Hezbollah were marked: ?Customer: Ministry of Defense of Syria. Supplier: KBP, Tula, Russia.?
Today?s international terrorism was conceived at the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, in the aftermath of the1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East. I witnessed its birth in my other life, as a Communist general. Israel humiliated Egypt and Syria, whose bellicose governments were being run by Soviet razvedka (Russian for ?foreign intelligence?) advisers, whereupon the Kremlin decided to arm Israel?s enemy neighbors, the Palestinians, and draw them into a terrorist war against Israel.
General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, who created Communist Romania?s intelligence structure and then rose to head up all of Soviet Russia?s foreign intelligence, often lectured me: ?In today?s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.?
Between 1968 and 1978, when I broke with Communism, the security forces of Romania alone sent two cargo planes full of military goodies every week to Palestinian terrorists in Lebanon. Since the fall of Communism the East German Stasi archives have revealed that, in 1983 alone, its foreign intelligence service sent $1,877,600 worth of AK-47 ammunition to Lebanon. According to Vaclav Havel, Communist Czechoslovakia shipped 1,000 tons of the odorless explosive Semtex-H (which can?t be detected by sniffer dogs) to Islamic terrorists ? enough for 150 years.
The terrorist war per se came into action at the end of 1968, when the KGB transformed airplane hijacking ? that weapon of choice for September 11, 2001 ? into an instrument of terror. In 1969 alone there were 82 hijackings of planes worldwide, carried out by the KGB-financed PLO. In 1971, when I was visiting Sakharovsky at his Lubyanka office, he called my attention to a sea of red flags pinned onto a world map hanging on the wall. Each flag represented a captured plane. ?Airplane hijacking is my own invention,? he claimed.
The political ?success? occasioned by hijacking Israeli airplanes prompted the KGB?s 13th Department, known in our intelligence jargon as the ?Department for Wet Affairs? (wet being a euphemism for bloody), to expand into organizing ?public executions? of Jews in airports, train stations, and other public places. In 1969 Dr. George Habash, a KGB puppet, explained: ?Killing one Jew far away from the field of battle is more effective than killing a hundred Jews on the field of battle, because it attracts more attention.?
By the end of the 1960s, the KGB was deeply involved in mass terrorism against Jews, carried out by various Palestinian client organizations. Here are some terrorist actions for which the KGB took credit while I was still in Romania: November 1969, armed attack on the El Al office in Athens, leaving 1 dead and 14 wounded; May 30, 1972, Ben Gurion Airport attack, leaving 22 dead and 76 wounded; December 1974, Tel Aviv movie theater bomb, leaving 2 dead and 66 wounded; March 1975, attack on a Tel Aviv hotel, leaving 25 dead and 6 wounded; May 1975, Jerusalem bomb, leaving 1 dead and 3 wounded; July 4, 1975, bomb in Zion Square, Jerusalem, leaving 15 dead and 62 wounded; April 1978, Brussels airport attack, leaving 12 wounded; May 1978, attack on an El Al plane in Paris, leaving 12 wounded.
In 1971, the KGB launched operation Tayfun (Russian for ?typhoon?), aimed at destabilizing Western Europe. The Baader-Meinhof, the Red Army Faction (RAF), and other KGB-sponsored Marxist organizations unleashed a wave of anti-American terrorism that shook Western Europe. Richard Welsh, the CIA station chief in Athens, was shot to death in Greece on December 23, 1975. General Alexander Haig, commander of NATO in Brussels was injured in a bomb attack that damaged his armored Mercedes beyond repair in June 1979. General Frederick J. Kroesen, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, barely survived a rocket attack in September 1981. Alfred Herrhausen, the pro-American chairman of Deutsche Bank, was killed during a grenade attack in November 1989. Hans Neusel, a pro-American state secretary in the West Germaninterior ministry, was wounded during an assassination attempt in July 1990.
In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov told me, a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions. We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States. No one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe.
According to Andropov, the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.
Terrorism and violence against Israel and her master, American Zionism, would flow naturally from the Muslims? religious fervor, Andropov sermonized. We had only to keep repeating our themes ? that the United States and Israel were ?fascist, imperial-Zionist countries? bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels? occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of the U.S. Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom.
The codename of this operation was ?SIG? (Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or ?Zionist Governments?), and was within my Romanian service?s ?sphere of influence,? for it embraced Libya, Lebanon, and Syria. SIG was a large party/state operation. We created joint ventures to build hospitals, houses, and roads in these countries, and there we sent thousands of doctors, engineers, technicians, professors, and even dance instructors. All had the task of portraying the United States as an arrogant and haughty Jewish fiefdom financed by Jewish money and run by Jewish politicians, whose aim was to subordinate the entire Islamic world.
In the mid 1970s, the KGB ordered my service, the DIE ? along with other East European sister services ? to scour the country for trusted party activists belonging to various Islamic ethnic groups, train them in disinformation and terrorist operations, and infiltrate them into the countries of our ?sphere of influence.? Their task was to export a rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism by manipulating the ancestral abhorrence for Jews felt by the people in that part of the world. Before I left Romania for good, in 1978, my DIE had dispatched around 500 such undercover agents to Islamic countries. According to a rough estimate received from Moscow, by 1978 the whole Soviet-bloc intelligence community had sent some 4,000 such agents of influence into the Islamic world.
In the mid-1970s we also started showering the Islamic world with an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a tsarist Russian forgery that had been used by Hitler as the foundation for his anti-Semitic philosophy. We also disseminated a KGB-fabricated ?documentary? paper in Arabic alleging that Israel and its main supporter, the United States, were Zionist countries dedicated to converting the Islamic world into a Jewish colony.
We in the Soviet bloc tried to conquer minds, because we knew we could not win any military battles. It is hard to say what exactly are the lasting effects of operation SIG. But the cumulative effect of disseminating hundreds of thousands of Protocols in the Islamic world and portraying Israel and the United States as Islam?s deadly enemies was surely not constructive.
Post-Soviet Russia has been transformed in unprecedented ways, but the widely popular belief that the nefarious Soviet legacy was rooted out at the end of the Cold War the same way that Nazism was rooted out with the conclusion of World War II, is not yet correct.
In the 1950s, when I was chief of Romania?s foreign intelligence station in West Germany, I witnessed how Hitler?s Third Reich had been demolished, its war criminals put on trial, its military and police forces disbanded, and the Nazis removed from public office. None of these things has happened in the former Soviet Union. No individual has been put on trial, although the Soviet Union?s Communist regime killed over a hundred million people. Most Soviet institutions have been left in place, having simply been given new names, and are now run by many of the same people who guided the Communist state. In 2000, former officers of the KGB and the Soviet Red Army took over the Kremlin and Russia?s government.
Germany would have never become a democracy with Gestapo and SS officers running the show.
On September 11, 2001, President Vladimir Putin became the first leader of a foreign country to express sympathy to President George W. Bush for what he called ?these terrible tragedies of the terrorist attacks.? Soon, however, Putin began moving his country back into the terrorist business. In March 2002, he quietly reinstituted sales of weapons to Iran?s terrorist dictator, Ayatollah Khamenei, and engaged Russia in the construction of a 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor at Bushehr, with a uranium conversion facility able to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons. Hundreds of Russian technicians also started helping the government of Iran to develop the Shahab-4 missile, with a range of over 1,250 miles, which can carry a nuclear or germ warhead anywhere in the Middle East and Europe.
Iran?s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had already announced that nothing could stop his country from building nuclear weapons, and he stated that Israel was a ?disgraceful stain [on] the Islamic world? that would be eliminated. During World War II, 405,399 Americans died to eradicate Nazism and its anti-Semitic terrorism. Now we are facing Islamic fascism and nuclear anti-Semitic terrorism. The United Nations can offer no hope. It has not yet even been able to define terrorism.
A proverb says that one fire drives out another. The Kremlin may be our best hope. In May 2002, the NATO foreign ministers approved a partnership with Russia, the alliance?s former enemy. The rest of the world said that the Cold War was over and done with. Kaput. Now Russia wants to be admitted to the World Trade Organization. For that to happen, the Kremlin should be firmly told first to get out of the terrorism business.
We should also help the Russians realize that it is in their own interest to make President Ahmadinejad renounce nuclear weapons. He is an unpredictable tyrant who may also consider Russia an enemy at some point in time. ?If Iran gets weapons of mass destruction, deliverable by a missile, that?s going to be a problem,? President Bush correctly stated. ?That?s going to be a problem for all of us, including Russia.?
?Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. His book Red Horizons has been republished in 27 countries.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjUzMGU4NTMyOTdkOTdmNTA1MWJlYjYyZDliODZkOGM=
-
August 26, 2006
Our Strategic Intelligence Problem
By Ralph Peters
Our national intelligence system will never meet our unrealistic expectations, nor can it ever answer all of our needs. No matter what we do or change or buy, intelligence agencies will remain unable to satisfy our government's appetite for knowledge. This isn't defeatism, but realism. We had better get used to the idea.
This does not mean that our intelligence system cannot be improved. It can. Nor does it imply that our leaders should be less demanding. Stressing the system enhances its performance. But our fantastic expectations must be lowered to a level more in accord with our present and potential capabilities.
And we must end the decades-old practice of blaming flawed intelligence for broader policy failures. For all of its indisputable shortcomings, the U.S. intelligence community has become a too-convenient scapegoat for erroneous decisions made by a succession of leaders indifferent to the substance of intelligence, but alert to the advantages of politics. If we want to improve our comprehensive security, we need to begin with a sharp dose of realism regarding what intelligence can and cannot deliver. We do not expect our health-care system to return every patient to perfect health. It is just as foolish to expect perfect intelligence.
While there are real, endemic problems within our intelligence system, the greater problem may be with the expectations of the public, the media, and our Nation's policymakers. From indefensible defense-contractor promises to the insidious effects of Hollywood's long-running fantasy of all-seeing, all-powerful intelligence agencies, the lack of an accurate grasp of what intelligence generally can provide, occasionally can deliver, and still cannot begin to achieve results in reflexive cries of "Intelligence failure!" under circumstances in which it would have been impossible--or a case of hit-the-lottery luck--for intelligence to succeed.
Despite the political grandstanding over a catalytic tragedy, any probability of preventing 9/11 through better intelligence work was a myth. Our enemies out-maneuvered and out-imagined us so boldly that none of those who now insist that they warned us offered any useful specificity before the event. In retrospect, many matters appear far simpler and more linear. We cannot believe that a general was so foolish in battle, forgetting that our privileged view is far different from that confronting the general amid the chaos of war. Looking back, it appears obvious that, by 1999, there was an unsustainable hi-tech bubble in the stock market--but how many of us nonetheless bought in near the top? Charges that "They should have seen it coming!" are usually wrong and rarely helpful. The only useful question is "Why didn't we see it coming?"
Sometimes the answer is that the system's attention was elsewhere. But the answer also might be that a given event was impossible to prevent without a phenomenal stroke of luck. The problem with luck is that it is not very dependable. September 11th was not only an intelligence failure, it was also a law-enforcement failure, an airline failure, an architectural failure, a fire-and-rescue failure, a long-term policy failure, and a failure of our national imagination. Our enemies told us openly that they intended to attack us. From Langley to Los Angeles, we, the people, could not conceive that they meant it. Even those of us who wrote theoretically about massive attacks on lower Manhattan have no right to claim prescience. We did not truly envision the reality. Our collective belief systems needed to be shaken by images of catastrophes on our soil.
Similarly, our military had to undergo a succession of asymmetrical conflicts to begin to shake its cold-war-era mindset. No succession of briefings, books, or articles could have had the impact of the suicide bomber and the improvised explosive device. Likewise, in military intelligence, we are beginning to see a generational divide between yesterday's technology-?ber-alles managers--who continue, for now, to be promoted--and a younger generation of intelligence officers who have endured the brutal human crucibles of Iraq and Afghanistan, and who do not expect a van full of electronics to do all of their work for them. Because it routinely deals with life-and-death issues, tactical intelligence, long a backwater, might improve more profoundly than strategic intelligence in the coming years.
If the events of the past decade (or century) should teach us anything about the relationship between the intelligence community and our national leadership, it is that the more reliant any policy or action is on the comprehensive accuracy of intelligence, the more likely it is to disappoint, if not humiliate, us with its results.
Intelligence can help leaders shape their views, but it is not a substitute for leadership. Senior members in the intelligence world must share the blame for our unrealistic expectations. In order to secure funding for ever-more-expensive technologies, too much was promised in return. While technical assets, from satellites to adept computer programs, bring us great advantages in amassing and processing data, even the best machine cannot predict the behavior of hostile individuals or governments.
The salvation-through-technology types do great damage to our intelligence effort. They deliver massive amounts of data, but become so mesmerized by what technology can do that they slight the importance of relevance. And humans are messy, while technology appears pristine. Furthermore, there are massive profits to be made on the technology side (and good retirement jobs for program managers); thus, Congress leans inevitably toward funding systems rather than fostering human abilities.
There is no consistent lobby for human intelligence, language skills, or deep analysis. Despite occasional bursts of supportive rhetoric on Capitol Hill, the money still goes for machinery, not flesh and blood. Recent personnel increases remain trivial compared to our investments in technology. Yet, we live in an age when our security problems are overwhelmingly human problems. Despite a half-decade of reorganizations near and at the top of the intelligence system, we remain far better suited to detecting the movements of yesteryear's Soviet armies and fleets than we are at comprehending and finding terrorists. (In Washington, the immediate response to any crisis within a government bureaucracy is to rotate the usual suspects at the top, not to address the pervasive reforms required--and no one in our government understands the concept of "sunk costs.")
Nor do our intelligence difficulties end with our inability to locate and kill Osama bin-Laden, who will be eliminated eventually, just as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was. Our hi-tech intelligence architecture even failed in many of the spheres in which it was supposed to excel. Consider just a few examples of the system falling short when required to perform:
? During the air campaign to break Belgrade's hold on Kosovo, the Serbian military fooled our overhead collectors with decoy targets composed of campfires, old hulks, and metal scraps. Hundreds of millions of dollars in precision munitions went to waste as we attacked improvised charcoal grills. It took the threat of American ground troops to force a sloppy diplomatic compromise--a 6-week air effort hit only a handful of real targets.
? Notoriously, our hundreds of billions in collection systems could neither confirm nor deny that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction as we moved toward war. Our intelligence system proved so weak that it could offer nothing substantial to challenge or support the position assumed by decision-makers. Without convincing evidence to the contrary, the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq became little more than a matter of opinion. Opinion then attained the force of fact in the build-up to war. The lack of reliable sources in Iraq and agents on the ground left the satellites searching desperately for the slightest hint that the Baghdad regime was armed with forbidden weapons. We were no longer collecting--we were conjuring. Conjecture hardened into conviction. And we went to war focused on finding chemical rounds, rather than on a convulsive population.
? None of our technical collection means detected the wartime threat from the Saddam Fedayeen or other irregular forces. As then-Lieutenant General William Scott Wallace, the Army V Corps commander on the march to Baghdad, observed, the enemy we ended up fighting (albeit successfully) was not the enemy the intelligence community had briefed. Commanders learned as they fought, after our best intelligence had promised them a different war. In Iraq, we couldn't see what we wanted to see, so we refused to see what we didn't want to see. We relied so heavily on technical collection means that we forgot to think.
? Not a single one of over a hundred attempted "decapitation" strikes with precision weapons succeeded in killing the targeted individual during the initial stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom--even though most of the sites were destroyed. The concept remains sound in theory, but our ability to hit targets has far outstripped our ability to identify them accurately. It's just plain hard to find people who are doing their best to hide. Even now, our successful strikes against terrorists rely far more often on tips, interrogations, and the processing of captured material than on national collection means. On the ground in Iraq, military intelligence personnel diagram the human relationships among our enemies much as their British predecessors would have done 80 years ago (although we can do our sketching on computer screens).
? Satellites famously can read a license plate (and more). But they rarely tell you whether that battered Toyota contains an innocent civilian, a suicide bomber, or a terrorist chieftain. If the enemy declines to use communications technologies, we are back to the human factor to do our target spotting.
The problem with the human factor is that the technocrats who dominate the intelligence community just don't like it. The "metal benders" see technology as reliable (and immune to personnel management problems), even if that reliability isn't germane to our actual needs. The more our security problems take on a human shape, the more money we throw at technology. A retired psychiatrist I know points out that one form of insanity is to repeat a failed action obsessively. By that measure, our intelligence community is as mad as Lear on the heath.
Only human beings can penetrate the minds of other human beings. Understanding our enemies is the most important requirement for our intelligence system. Yet, "understanding" is a word you rarely, if ever, find in our intelligence manuals. We are obsessed with accumulating great volumes of data, measuring success in tonnage rather than results. Instead of panning for gold, we proudly pile up the mud.
Two things must happen if our national intelligence system is to improve. Within the intelligence community, we need to achieve a more effective balance between our default to technology and the slighted human factor. At the top of the game, intelligence is about deciphering what an enemy will do before the enemy knows it himself. The very best analysts can do this, if only sometimes. But occasional successes are better than consistent failures. However imperfect the results, who would deny that a better grasp of the mentalities, ambitions, fears, jealousies, schemes, and desires of our opponents would have offered us more in the days before 9/11 or in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq (or now, in dealing with Iran) than any series of satellite photos?
If we want to improve the quality and usefulness of the intelligence that reaches our nation's leaders, we need to accept the primacy of the human being in intelligence. Instead of the current system, in which people support technology, we need our technologies to support people.
The other thing that must be done--and this is terribly hard--is for all of us, from the Oval Office, through military commanders, to the Wi-Fi crowd down at Starbucks, to have rational expectations of what intelligence can provide and how reliably it can perform. The technocrats continue to insist, against all evidence, that machines can solve all of our intelligence problems, if only we develop and buy more of them. But this age of Cain-and-Abel warfare, of global disorientation, and of a sweeping return to primitive identities and exclusive beliefs is characterized by its raw, brutal humanity. Far from bringing us together, the computer age has amplified our differences and reinvigorated old hatreds. A new, global ruling class profits, while the human masses seethe.
Nothing is a greater challenge for the intelligence system than the individual human being who hates us enough to kill us. How do we spot him in the crowd before he acts? Why does he wish to kill us--perhaps committing suicide in the process? How do we find him in a city's wretched crowding or amid remote tribes? What happens when he gains access to weapons of mass destruction? The long-term costs to our country from 9/11 proved to be far greater than the 3,000 casualties we suffered that morning. What second-, third-, and fourth-order effects might even a small nuclear blast trigger?
We can defeat states with relative ease. Individuals are tougher. At present, we know approximately where Osama bin-Laden is, but we lack the specific awareness to strike him with a single, politically tolerable bomb. To have a reasonable chance of killing or capturing him, we would have to send in a large ground force, potentially igniting all Pakistan and bringing down the military regime that, tragically, is that country's sole hope. So we wait for the whispered word that will tell us what we need to know. After all of the hyper-expensive collection systems have failed, we find ourselves relying on bribes, informers, and luck, and attacking huts and caves rather than command bunkers and missile silos.
Our intelligence system can do more to protect us than it has done, but, even reformed, it will not detect or stop all of our enemies. We need to do better, but we will never perform perfectly. Intelligence is, at last, about people--on both sides. And human beings are imperfect. Yet, amid the tumult confronting us today, the imperfect human offers more hope for intelligence successes than the perfect machine.
Decision-makers have to accept that they must live with a large measure of uncertainty. (Generals have had to do so since the Bronze Age.) Even the intelligence estimate that captures today's issues with remarkable acuity might be upended by a single distant event tomorrow. There are few, if any, static answers in intelligence. The problems we face from foreign enemies are throbbing, morphing, living, often-irrational manifestations of human problems that are themselves in the process of constant change. Intelligence moves. Even the best strategic intelligence provides only not-quite-focused snapshots and rough-compass bearings, not detailed maps to a predetermined future. The iron paradox of any intelligence system is that to expand its effectiveness you must recognize its limitations.
Blaming faulty intelligence for policy failures is the ultimate case of the workman blaming his tools. Even the best intelligence can only inform decisions. It cannot be forced to make them.
Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters, U.S. Army, is a retired intelligence officer and the author of 21 books, including the recent Never Quit the Fight (Stackpole Books).
-
Nice article.
But it fails to acknowledge something which I believe has been our greatest shortcoming in the current war we are fighting: the ability to admit that our enemy is intelligent.
-
UNDECLARED WWIII
Forwarded by Emanuel A. Winston
Middle East analyst & commentator
This speech by the former President of Weizmann Institute of Science, Haim Harari is a lesson that the politicians and the Media would do well to learn. I doubt that they will either read or absorb the lessons in this insightful analysis of Terror and what it means towhat we call civilization. This is not a trite 'sound byte' for the Media to toss of with a a one liner. Harari is not the average person speaking his mind but, rather like listening to the thoughts of an Einstein. Most journalists and politicians do not have time for deep thinkers who have matured over the years into wise men with vision. In fact, they simply do not want to know and pursue ignorance as the safest course. Well, perhaps a few will take the time to read and absorb. This is a very insightful speech given by Haim Harari, the former International Advisory Board of a large multi-national corporation, April, 2004. It's very well worth reading.
UNDECLARED WWIII
By Haim Harari
"As you know, I usually provide the scientific and technological "entertainment" in our meetings, but, on this occasion, our Chairman suggested that I present my own personal view on events in the part of the world from which I come. I have never been and I will never be a Government official and I have no privileged information. My perspective is entirely based on what I see, on what I read and on the fact that my family has lived in this region for almost 200 years. You may regard my views as those of the proverbial taxi driver, which you are supposed to question, when you visit a country.
I could have shared with you some fascinating facts and some personal thoughts about the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, I will touch upon it only in passing. I prefer to devote most of my remarks to the broader picture of the region and its place in world events. I refer to the entire area between Pakistan and Morocco, which is predominantly Arab, predominantly Moslem, but includes many non-Arab and also significant non-Moslem minorities.
Why do I put aside Israel and its own immediate neighborhood? Because Israel and any problems related to it, in spite of what you might read or hear in the world media, is not the central issue, and has never been the central issue in the upheaval in the region. Yes, there is a 100 year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, but it is not where the main show is. The millions who died in the Iran-Iraq war had nothing to do with Israel. The mass murder happening right now in Sudan, where the Arab Moslem regime is massacring its black Christian citizens, has nothing to do with Israel. The frequent reports from Algeria about the murders of hundreds of civilian in one village or another by other Algerians have nothing to do with Israel. Saddam Hussein did not invade Kuwait, endangered Saudi Arabia and butchered his own people because of Israel. Egypt did not use poison gas against Yemen in the 60's because of Israel. Assad the Father did not kill tens of thousands of his own citizens in one week in El Hamma in Syria because of Israel. The Taliban control of Afghanistan and the civil war there had nothing to do with Israel. The Libyan blowing up of the Pan-Am flight had nothing to do with Israel, and I could go on and on and on.
The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even if Israel would have joined the Arab league and an independent Palestine would have existed for 100 years. The 22 member countries of the Arab league, from Mauritania to the Gulf States, have a total population of 300 millions, larger than the US and almost as large as the EU before its expansion. They have a land area larger than either the US or all of Europe. These 22 countries, with all their oil and natural resources, have a combined GDP smaller than that of Netherlands plus Belgium and equal to half of the GDP of California alone. Within this meager GDP, the gaps between rich and poor are beyond belief and too many of the rich made their money not by succeeding in business, but by being corrupt rulers. The social status of women is far below what it was in the Western World 150 years ago. Human rights are below any reasonable standard, in spite of the grotesque fact that Libya was elected Chair of the UN Human Rights commission. According to a report prepared by a committee of Arab intellectuals and published under the auspices of the U.N., the number of books translated by the entire Arab world is much smaller than what little Greece alone translates. The total number of scientific publications of 300 million Arabs is less than that of 6 million Israelis. Birth rates in the region are very high, increasing the poverty, the social gaps and the cultural decline. And all of this is happening in a region, which only 30 years ago, was believed to be the next wealthy part of the world, and in a Moslem area, which developed, at some point in history, one of the most advanced cultures in the world.
It is fair to say that this creates an unprecedented breeding ground for cruel dictators, terror networks, fanaticism, incitement, suicide murders and general decline. It is also a fact that almost everybody in the region blames this situation on the United States, on Israel, on Western Civilization, on Judaism and Christianity, on anyone and anything, except themselves.
Do I say all of this with the satisfaction of someone discussing the failings of his enemies? On the contrary, I firmly believe that the world would have been a much better place and my own neighborhood would have been much more pleasant and peaceful, if things were different.
I should also say a word about the millions of decent, honest, good people who are either devout Moslems or are not very religious but grew up in Moslem families. They are double victims of an outside world, which now develops Islamophobia and of their own environment, which breaks their heart by being totally dysfunctional. The problem is that the vast silent majority of these Moslems are not part of the terror and of the incitement but they also do not stand up against it. They become accomplices, by omission, and this applies to political leaders, intellectuals, business people and many others. Many of them can certainly tell right from wrong, but are afraid to express their views.
The events of the last few years have amplified four issues, which have always existed, but have never been as rampant as in the present upheaval in the region. These are the four main pillars of the current World Conflict, or perhaps we should already refer to it as "the undeclared World War III". I have no better name for the present situation. A few more years may pass before everybody acknowledges that it is a World War, but we are already well into it. The first element is the suicide murder. Suicide murders are not new invention but they have been made popular, if I may use this __expression, only lately. Even after September 11, it seems that most of the Western World does not yet understand this weapon. It is a very potent psychological weapon. Its real direct impact is relatively minor. The total number of casualties from hundreds of suicide murders within Israel in the last three years is much smaller than those due to car accidents. September 11 was quantitatively much less lethal than many earthquakes. More people die from AIDS in one day in Africa than all the Russians who died in the hands of Chechnya-based Moslem suicide murderers since that conflict started. Saddam killed every month more people than all those who died from suicide murders since the Coalition occupation of Iraq.
So what is all the fuss about suicide killings? It creates headlines. It is spectacular. It is frightening. It is a very cruel death with bodies dismembered and horrible severe lifelong injuries to many of the wounded. It is always shown on television in great detail. One such murder, with the help of hysterical media coverage, can destroy the tourism industry of a country for quite a while, as it did in Bali and in Turkey.
But the real fear comes from the undisputed fact that no defense and no preventive measures can succeed against a determined suicide murderer. This has not yet penetrated the thinking of the Western World. The U.S. and Europe are constantly improving their defense against the last murder, not the next one. We may arrange for the best airport security in the world. But if you want to murder by suicide, you do not have to board a plane in order to explode yourself and kill many people. Who could stop a suicide murder in the midst of the crowded line waiting to be checked by the airport metal detector? How about the lines to the check-in counters in a busy travel period? Put a metal detector in front of every train station in Spain and the terrorists will get the buses. Protect the buses and they will explode in movie theaters, concert halls, supermarkets, shopping malls, schools and hospitals. Put guards in front of every concert hall and there will always be a line of people to be checked by the guards and this line will be the target, not to speak of killing the guards themselves. You can somewhat reduce your vulnerability by preventive and defensive measures and by strict border controls but not eliminate it and definitely not in the war in a defensive way. And it is a war!
What is behind the suicide murders? Money, power and cold-blooded murderous incitement, nothing else. It has nothing to do with true fanatic religious beliefs. No Moslem preacher has ever blown himself up. No son of an Arab politician or religious leader has ever blown himself. No relative of anyone influential has done it. Wouldn't you expect some of the religious leaders to do it themselves, or to talk their sons into doing it, if this is truly a supreme act of religious fervor? Aren't they interested in the benefits of going to Heaven? Instead, they send outcast women, naive children, retarded people and young incited hotheads. They promise them the delights, mostly sexual, of the next world, and pay their families handsomely after the supreme act is performed and enough innocent people are dead.
Suicide murders also have nothing to do with poverty and despair. The poorest region in the world, by far, is Africa. It never happens there. There are numerous desperate people in the world, in different cultures, countries and continents. Desperation does not provide anyone with explosives, reconnaissance and transportation. There was certainly more despair in Saddam's Iraq then in Paul Bremmer's Iraq, and no one exploded himself. A suicide murder is simply a horrible, vicious weapon of cruel, inhuman, cynical, well-funded terrorists, with no regard to human life, including the life of their fellow countrymen, but with very high regard to their own affluent well-being and their hunger for power.
The only way to fight this new "popular" weapon is identical to the only way in which you fight organized crime or pirates on the high seas: the offensive way. Like in the case of organized crime, it is crucial that the forces on the offensive be united and it is crucial to reach the top of the crime pyramid. You cannot eliminate organized crime by arresting the little drug dealer in the street corner. You must go after the head of the "Family".
If part of the public supports it, others tolerate it, many are afraid of it and some try to explain it away by poverty or by a miserable childhood, organized crime will thrive and so will terrorism. The United States understands this now, after September 11. Russia is beginning to understand it. Turkey nderstands it well. I am very much afraid that most of Europe still does not understand it. Unfortunately, it seems that Europe will understand it only after suicide murders will arrive in Europe in a big way. In my humble opinion, this will definitely happen. The Spanish trains and the Istanbul bombings are only the beginning. The unity of the Civilized World in fighting this horror is absolutely indispensable. Until Europe wakes up, this unity will not be achieved.
The second ingredient is words, more precisely lies. Words can be lethal. They kill people. It is often said that politicians, diplomats and perhaps also lawyers and business people must sometimes lie, as part of their professional life. But the norms of politics and diplomacy are childish, in comparison with the level of incitement and total absolute deliberate fabrications, which have reached new heights in the region we are talking about. An incredible number of people in the Arab world believe that September 11 never happened, or was an American provocation or, even better, a Jewish plot.
You all remember the Iraqi Minister of Information, Mr. Mouhamad Said al-Sahaf and his press conferences when the US forces were already inside Baghdad. Disinformation at time of war is an accepted tactic. But to stand, day after day, and to make such preposterous statements, known to everybody to be lies, without even being ridiculed in your newspapers from giving him equal time. It also does not prevent the Western press from giving credence, every day, even now, to similar liars. After all, if you want to be an anti-Semite, there are subtle ways of doing it. You do not have to claim that the holocaust never happened and that the Jewish temple in Jerusalem never existed. But millions of Moslems are told by their leaders that this is the case. When these same leaders make other statements, the Western media report them as if they could be true. It is a daily occurrence that the same people, who finance, arm and dispatch suicide murderers, condemn the act in English in front of western TV cameras, talking to a world audience, which even partly believes them. It is a daily routine to hear the same leader making opposite statements in Arabic to his people and in English to the rest of the world. Incitement by Arab TV, accompanied by horror pictures of mutilated bodies, has become a powerful weapon of those who lie, distort and want to destroy. World does not notice it because its own TV sets are mostly tuned to soap operas and game shows. I recommend to you, even though most of you do not understand Arabic, to watch Al Jazeera, from time to time. You will not believe your own eyes.
But words also work in other ways, more subtle. A demonstration in Berlin, carrying banners supporting Saddam's regime and featuring three-year old babies dressed as suicide murderers, is defined by the press and by political leaders as a "peace demonstration". You may support or oppose the Iraq war, but to refer to fans of Saddam, Arafat or Bin Laden as peace activists is a bit too much. A woman walks into an Israeli restaurant in mid-day, eats, observes families with old people and children eating their lunch in the adjacent tables and pays the bill. She then blows herself up, killing 20 people, including many children, with heads and arms rolling around in the restaurant. She is called "martyr" by several Arab leaders and "activist" by the European press. Dignitaries condemn the act but visit her bereaved family and the money flows.
There is a new game in town: The actual murderer is called "the military wing", the one who pays him, equips him and sends him is now called "the political wing" and the head of the operation is called the "spiritual leader". There are numerous other examples of such Orwellian nomenclature, used every day not only by terror chiefs but also by Western media. These words are much more dangerous than many people realize. They provide an emotional infrastructure for atrocities. It was Joseph Goebbels who said that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. He is now being outperformed by his successors.
The third aspect is money. Huge amounts of money, which could have solved many social problems in this dysfunctional part of the world, are channeled into three concentric spheres supporting death and murder. In the inner circle are the terrorists themselves. The money funds their travel, explosives, ideouts and permanent search for soft vulnerable targets. They are surrounded by a second wider circle of direct supporters, planners, commanders, preachers, all of whom make a living, usually a very comfortable living, by serving as terror infrastructure. Finally, we find the third circle of so-called religious, educational and welfare organizations, which actually do some good, feed the hungry and provide some schooling, but brainwash a new generation with hatred, lies and ignorance. This circle operates mostly through mosques, madrassas and other religious establishments but also through inciting electronic and printed media. It is this circle that makes sure that women remain inferior, that democracy is unthinkable and that exposure to the outside world is minimal. It is also that circle that leads the way in blaming everybody outside the Moslem world, for the miseries of the region.
Figuratively speaking, this outer circle is the guardian, which makes sure that the people look and listen inwards to the inner circle of terror and incitement, rather than to the world outside. Some parts of this same outer circle actually operate as a result of fear from, or blackmail by, the inner circles. The horrifying added factor is the high birth rate. Half of the population of the Arab world is under the age of 20, the most receptive age to incitement, guaranteeing two more generations of blind hatred.
Of the three circles described above, the inner circles are primarily financed by terrorist states like Iran and Syria, until recently also by Iraq and Libya and earlier also by some of the Communist regimes. These states, as well as the Palestinian Authority, are the safe havens of the wholesale murder vendors. The outer circle is largely financed by Saudi Arabia, but also by donations from certain Moslem communities in the United States and Europe and, to a smaller extent, by donations of European Governments to various NGO's and by certain United Nations organizations, whose goals may be noble, but they are infested and exploited by agents of the outer circle. The Saudi regime, of course, will be the next victim of major terror, when the inner circle will explode into the outer circle. The Saudis are beginning to understand it, but they fight the inner circles, while still financing the infrastructure at the outer circle.
Some of the leaders of these various circles live very comfortably on their loot. You meet their children in the best private schools in Europe, not in the training camps of suicide murderers. The Jihad "soldiers" join packaged death tours to Iraq and other hot spots, while some of their leaders ski in Switzerland. Mrs. Arafat, who lives in Paris with her daughter, receives tens of thousands Dollars per month from the allegedly bankrupt Palestinian Authority while a typical local ringleader of the Al-Aksa brigade, reporting to Arafat, receives only a cash payment of a couple of hundred dollars, for performing murders at the retail level.
-
The fourth element of the current world conflict is the total breaking of all laws. The civilized world believes in democracy, the rule of law, including international law, human rights, free speech and free press, among other liberties. There are naive old-fashioned habits such as respecting religious sites and symbols, not using ambulances and hospitals for acts of war, avoiding the mutilation of dead bodies and not using children as human shields or human bombs. Never in history, not even in the Nazi period, was there such total disregard of all of the above as we observe now. Every student of political science debates how you prevent an anti-democratic force from winning a democratic election and abolishing democracy. Other aspects of a civilized society must also have limitations. Can a policeman open fire on someone trying to kill him? Can a government listen to phone conversations of terrorists and drug dealers? Does free speech protects you when you shout "fire" in a crowded theater? Should there be death penalty, for deliberate multiple murders? These are the old-fashioned dilemmas. But now we have an entire new set.
Do you raid a mosque, which serves as a terrorist ammunition storage? Do you return fire, if you are attacked from a hospital? Do you storm a church taken over by terrorists who took the priests hostages? Do you search every ambulance after a few suicide murderers use ambulances to reach their targets? Do you strip every woman because one pretended to be pregnant and carried a suicide bomb on her belly? Do you shoot back at someone trying to kill you, standing deliberately behind a group of children? Do you raid terrorist headquarters, hidden in a mental hospital? Do you shoot an arch-murderer who deliberately moves from one location to another, always surrounded by children? All of these happen daily in Iraq and in the Palestinian areas. What do you do? Well, you do not want to face the dilemma. But it cannot be avoided.
Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that someone would openly stay in a well-known address in Teheran, hosted by the Iranian Government and financed by it, executing one atrocity after another in Spain or in France, killing hundreds of innocent people, accepting responsibility for the crimes, promising in public TV interviews to do more of the same, while the Government of Iran issues public condemnations of his acts but continues to host him, invite him to official functions and treat him as a great dignitary. I leave it to you as homework to figure out what Spain or France would have done, in such a situation.
The problem is that the civilized world is still having illusions about the rule of law in a totally lawless environment. It is trying to play ice hockey by sending a ballerina ice-skater into the rink or to knock out a heavyweight boxer by a chess player. In the same way that no country has a law against cannibals eating its prime minister, because such an act is unthinkable, international law does not address killers shooting from hospitals, mosques and ambulances, while being protected by their Government or society. International law does not know how to handle someone who sends children to throw stones, stands behind them and shoots with immunity and cannot be arrested because he is sheltered by a Government.
International law does not know how to deal with a leader of murderers who is royally and comfortably hosted by a country, which pretends to condemn his acts or just claims to be too weak to arrest him. The amazing thing is that all of these crooks demand protection under international law and define all those who attack them as war criminals, with some Western media repeating the allegations. The good news is that all of this is temporary, because the evolution of international law has always adapted itself to reality. The punishment for suicide murder should be death or arrest before the murder, not during and not after. After every world war, the rules of international law have changed and the same will happen after the present one. But during the twilight zone, a lot of harm can be done.
The picture I described here is not pretty. What can we do about it? In the short run, only fight and win. In the long run - only educate the next generation and open it to the world. The inner circles can and must be destroyed by force. The outer circle cannot be eliminated by force. Here we need financial starvation of the organizing elite, more power to women, more education, counter propaganda, boycott whenever feasible and access to Western media, internet and the international scene. Above all, we need a total absolute unity and determination of the civilized world against all three circles of evil.
Allow me, for a moment, to depart from my alleged role as a taxi driver and return to science. When you have a malignant tumor, you may remove the tumor itself surgically. You may also starve it by preventing new blood from reaching it from other parts of the body, thereby preventing new "supplies" from expanding the tumor. If you want to be sure, it is best to do both. But before you fight and win, by force or otherwise, you have to realize that you are in a war, and this may take Europe a few more years. In order to win, it is necessary to first eliminate the terrorist regimes, so that no Government in the world will serve as a safe haven for these people. I do not want to comment here on whether the American-led attack on Iraq was justified from the point of view of weapons of mass destruction or any other pre-war argument, but I can look at the post-war map of Western Asia. Now that Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are out, two and a half terrorist states remain: Iran, Syria and Lebanon, the latter being a Syrian colony. Perhaps Sudan should be added to the list. As a result of the conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq, both Iran and Syria are now totally surrounded by territories unfriendly to them. Iran is encircled by Afghanistan, by the Gulf States, Iraq and the Moslem republics of the former Soviet Union. Syria is surrounded by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Israel. This is a significant strategic change and it applies strong pressure on the terrorist countries. It is not surprising that Iran is so active in trying to incite a Shiite uprising in Iraq.
I do not know if the American plan was actually to encircle both Iran and Syria, but that is the resulting situation.
In my humble opinion, the number one danger to the world today is Iran and its regime. It definitely has ambitions to rule vast areas and to expand in all directions. It has an ideology, which claims supremacy over Western culture. It is ruthless. It has proven that it can execute elaborate terrorist acts without leaving too many traces, using Iranian Embassies. It is clearly trying to develop Nuclear Weapons. Its so-called moderates and conservatives play their own virtuoso version of the "good-cop versus bad-cop" game. Iran sponsors Syrian terrorism, it is certainly behind much of the action in Iraq, it is fully funding the Hezb'Allah and, through it, the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad, it performed acts of terror at least in Europe and in South America and probably also in Uzbekhistan and Saudi Arabia and it truly leads a multi-national terror consortium, which includes, as minor players, Syria, Lebanon and certain Shiite elements in Iraq. Nevertheless, most European countries still trade with Iran, try to appease it and refuse to read the clear signals.
In order to win the war it is also necessary to dry the financial resources of the terror conglomerate. It is pointless to try to understand the subtle differences between the Sunni terror of Al Qaeda and Hamas and the Shiite terror of Hezb'Allah, Sadr and other Iranian inspired enterprises. When it serves their business needs, all of them collaborate beautifully.
It is crucial to stop Saudi and other financial support of the outer circle, which is the fertile breeding ground of terror. It is important to monitor all donations from the Western World to Islamic organizations, to monitor the finances of international relief organizations and to react with forceful economic measures to any small sign of financial aid to any of the three circles of terrorism. It is also important to act decisively against the campaign of lies and fabrications and to monitor those Western media who collaborate with it out of naivety, financial interests or ignorance.
Above all, never surrender to terror. No one will ever know whether the recent elections in Spain would have yielded a different result, if not for the train bombings a few days earlier. But it really does not matter. What matters is that the terrorists believe that they caused the result and that they won by driving Spain out of Iraq. The Spanish story will surely end up being extremely costly to other European countries, including France, who is now expelling inciting preachers and forbidding veils and including others who sent troops to Iraq. In the long run, Spain itself will pay even more.
Is the solution a democratic Arab world? If by democracy we mean free elections but also free press, free speech, a functioning judicial system, civil liberties, equality to women, free international travel, exposure to international media and ideas, laws against racial incitement and against defamation, and avoidance of lawless behavior regarding hospitals, places of worship and children, then yes, democracy is the solution. If democracy is just free elections, it is likely that the most fanatic regime will be elected, the one whose incitement and fabrications are the most inflammatory. We have seen it already in Algeria and, to a certain extent, in Turkey. It will happen again, if the ground is not prepared very carefully. On the other hand, a certain transition democracy, as in Jordan, may be a better temporary solution, paving the way for the real thing, perhaps in the same way that an immediate sudden democracy did not work in Russia and would not have worked in China.
I have no doubt that the civilized world will prevail. But the longer it takes us to understand the new landscape of this war, the more costly and painful the victory will be. Europe, more than any other region, is the key. Its understandable recoil from wars, following the horrors of World War II, may cost thousands of additional innocent lives, before the tide will turn."
=====================
http://www.freeman.org/m_online/jul04/harari.htm
Haim Harari is the former President of the Weizmann Institute.
-
Kingdom Come
What a mess a nuclear Iran will make.
By Stanley Kurtz
Iran may soon have nuclear weapons. Official intelligence estimates put an Iranian bomb five-to-ten years away. Yet some experts think one-to-four years is a more realistic figure. Regardless of whether or when Iran announces that it has fabricated nuclear weapons, prudence may soon dictate that Iran?s neighbors treat it as a de facto nuclear power. And that will change the world.
Of course, a preemptive American strike may preserve the nuclear status quo. Yet prospects for an American attack are anything but certain. What?s more, given Iran?s ability to hide large sections of its nuclear program, an American raid could fail. So it behooves us to consider what may result from Iran?s getting the bomb. That will help us to decide whether stopping Iran is worth the considerable risks of a preemptive strike, and/or how we ought to conduct ourselves once Iran becomes a nuclear power.
The implications of nuclear weapons being gained by the largest and most radical power in the Middle East are much too broad to be investigated in a single piece. A nuclear-capable Iran, the chief state-supporter of Islamist terrorism standing athwart the world?s oil spigot, will not be like India, Pakistan, or even North Korea going nuclear. This is bigger. So here I?ll concentrate on just some of the effects of a nuclear Iran on the Persian Gulf region, and particularly on Saudi Arabia.
Umbrellas
Even without using agents to slip a retaliatory bomb onto American soil, Iran could repel a conventional American attack simply by dropping a nuclear bomb on our massed forces. Thus protected from a direct conventional assault by the United States, a nuclear Iran would have much greater freedom to make mischief in the Gulf.
So if a nuclear-armed Iran made a play to take over Saudi Arabia (and with it, the world?s oil supply), should the United States retaliate with nuclear weapons? What about an Iranian attack on one of the smaller Gulf states, like Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, or the United Arab Emirates? After all, over and above the question of their huge oil reserves, these countries provide our armed forces with critical basing privileges. Doesn?t the granting of such privileges gain for these Gulf states a place under America?s nuclear umbrella?
In 1980, after their invasion of Afghanistan put the Soviets just a move away from an outlet on (and possible control of) the Persian Gulf, President Carter enunciated the ?Carter Doctrine.? According to Carter, ?Any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America; any such assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.? At the time, the United States lacked the conventional force projection capabilities to follow through on that pledge. So the Carter Doctrine was a barely disguised threat to break a Soviet stranglehold on world?s oil jugular with a nuclear attack. Would today?s Democratic party favor a similar pledge to protect the Gulf from Iranian control? Oh, and while we?re at it, what is the Republican line on this issue?
This time, however, there will be a radically new element to the debate. If the United States is unwilling to pledge to protect the Persian Gulf with its nuclear deterrent, these states just might buy umbrellas of their own. That especially applies to Saudi Arabia, which is poised to become the first post-Iran domino in what may soon become a nuclear proliferation nightmare. Once Iran, Saudi Arabia, and a number of other Muslim states become nuclear powers, it could become next to impossible to trace the state source of a terrorist nuclear device. And by removing our ability to know where a terrorist-planted bomb had come from, proliferation would vastly increase the likelihood that some state (or rogue element within a state) might pass a nuclear weapon to terrorists.
Escalation
But why all this talk of nuclear weapons? The Iranians aren?t fools. They?re unlikely to risk a direct nuclear strike on the Persian Gulf, since pledge or no-pledge, the possibility of American nuclear retaliation would loom large. And while the Iranians have significantly more conventional power than any of the Gulf states, they are military midgets in comparison to the United States. It?s no longer 1980, and America now has considerable force projection capabilities in the Gulf. So the Iranians would seem to be stymied ? unable to risk a nuclear strike on the Gulf, and unable to launch a conventional invasion that America couldn?t easily repulse.
Unfortunately, the Iranians are masters at fighting low-level wars through terrorist proxies. An Iran protected from direct American attack by its own nuclear umbrella would be likely to ramp up terrorist mischief in the Gulf. That would destabilize American-allied Gulf regimes, force up oil prices, and put pressure on Gulf states to revoke American basing rights. Chronic, low-level terrorist proxy battles between America and Iran may remain ?safely? below the nuclear threshold. Then again, they may not.
The spectacle of an America powerless to stop Ahmadinejad from obtaining the bomb may change the internal dynamic of the Gulf states, making such an Islamist revolution thinkable. What if Iran succeeds in destabilizing one of the Gulf-state regimes to the point where it is overthrown by pro-Iranian Islamists? Would the United States stand idly by as effectively pro-Iranian regimes take control of the Gulf? Or what if one or more Gulf states try to save themselves from internal subversion by revoking America?s basing privileges? And what if the conflict, chaos, and uncertainty of a post-nuclear-Iran Gulf sends oil prices through the roof, doing major damage to the world?s economy?
Then there?s the possibility of Iranian-supported terrorist attacks on U.S. forces based in the Gulf. Many American servicemen were killed, and hundreds of soldiers were wounded, in the Khobar Towers bombing of 1996. Yet the Saudi?s were reluctant to investigate that bombing, for fear of uncovering a hidden Iranian hand. That would have lodged the Saudis uncomfortably between America and Iran. But in our current environment, terrorist strikes on American soldiers defending the Gulf would fairly obviously have been done in alliance with and with support from Iran (even if conducted by al Qaeda, which has cooperated with Iran in the past).
In other words, terrorist pressure on the Gulf, orchestrated by a newly nuclear Iran, may at some point escalate to general war between Iran and the United States, nuclear stand-off or not. This would be particularly so if Iranian-backed terror attacks threatened decisively to drive America from the Gulf and/or to generate world-wide economic chaos. All of which brings us back to our initial question. In the event that Iran should begin to gain control of the Gulf, overturning or blackmailing states through some combination of nuclear, conventional, and terrorist force, how far will the United States go to stop it? The Gulf states will insist on answers to these questions as they assess whether they may need to purchase nuclear weapons of their own to defend against Iran.
Chat with Armitage
Let?s step back for a moment and look at the history of proliferation in the Gulf. Richard Armitage is famous for chatting with Robert Novak about Valerie Plame. But a conversation Armitage had when he was an assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration is at least as interesting. Quite by accident, the United States had just stumbled onto a secret purchase of Chinese CSS-2 missiles by Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were in the market for a weapon that could reach Tehran, yet be deployed outside the range of Iranian surface-to-surface missiles. The Chinese CSS-2 missiles fit the bill, but were too inaccurate to be used for anything other than nuclear, chemical, or biological warfare. All known deployments of CSS-2s carried nuclear weapons, so the United States had to assume that the Saudis were secretly purchasing atomic warheads as well. Fresh from their attack on Saddam?s nuclear reactor, the Israelis realized they could be facing a new ?Islamic bomb,? and so they threatened a preemptive strike.
In the ensuing atmosphere of crisis, Armitage delivered a most undiplomatic dressing down to Saudi Arabia?s American ambassador, Prince Bandar, who had personally negotiated the missile deal. ?I want to congratulate you,? Armitage said to Bandar, ?This is the law of unintended consequences. You have put Saudi Arabia squarely in the targeting package of the Israelis. You are now number one on the Israeli hit parade. If the balloon goes up anywhere in the Middle East, you?re going to get hit first.? (For more, see Thomas W. Lippman?s excellent piece in ?The Nuclear Tipping Point?, on which I?m drawing here.) Having received a graphic demonstration of America?s shock and concern over his secret missile purchase, first from Armitage, and later from Congress, Prince Bandar cut a deal. The missiles would stay, but Saudi Arabia would sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the king would promise never to go nuclear. To this day, however, the Saudis will not allow the United States to inspect their CSS-2 missiles.
At the time, the Saudis probably hadn?t meant to go nuclear. Worried by the all the missiles being lobbed in the nearby Iran-Iraq war, the Saudis wanted missiles of their own. The Chinese actually seem to have hoodwinked the Saudis into purchasing missiles that were worthless without nuclear warheads. Like something out of Goldfinger, these antique missiles sit in the Saudi desert, still manned by Chinese crews (the Saudi?s being too technologically challenged to take over).
Yet the Keystone Cops aspect to the affair only underlines the dangers of the ?law of unintended consequences? in matters nuclear. In the game of proliferation, inexperienced powers can make costly mistakes. And the United States itself was caught off-guard by the secrecy of our Saudi ally. American satellites could have easily found those missiles, but no one had dreamed of checking for Chinese missiles in the middle of the Saudi desert. After all, the Saudis were rabid anti-Communists. Officially, Chinese civilians couldn?t even visit Saudi Arabia. Yet there were Chinese military men, sitting in the Saudi desert, manning a potentially nuclear delivery system.
A Bomb of One?s Own
The Saudis may not have actually wanted nuclear weapons back in the 1980s, but they have plenty of reasons to think of purchasing them now. A huge country, four times the size of France, with vast coastlines, a small population, and a tiny, technologically challenged army, Saudi Arabia is incredibly vulnerable to military attack. As Lippman puts it, ?The oil installations that provide most of the country?s revenue and the desalination plants the produce 70 percent of its drinking water are visible, vulnerable targets that could be devastated in short order by air assault or seaborne attack.? The Saudis have never recovered from the shock of watching America stand by as the Iranian Revolution overthrew the U.S. backed Shah. With the American public shaken to its roots by less than 3,000 casualties in Iraq (a fraction of the tolls in earlier American wars), the Saudis now have reason to doubt American resolve in the face of a nuclear-armed and terrorist-friendly Iran.
On the other side of the coin, the Saudis have direct experience of American resolve in the first Persian Gulf War. And they understand perfectly well that America and the West cannot afford to surrender control of the world?s oil supply-line to Iran. Yet even America?s unarguable and inescapable interest in the Gulf holds problems for the Saudis. From the Saudi point of view, ongoing conflict between America and Iran threatens to subordinate completely Saudi Arabia?s interests to America?s. Yet as we saw with the Khobar Towers investigation, the Saudis would prefer to carve out some wiggle room between the two powers. America?s post-9/11 suspicion of the Saudis frightens the House of Saud, which worries about American-enforced regime change, perhaps in response to further al Qaeda terrorist attacks. There are reports that the Saudis have already decided to obtain a nuclear deterrent, if and when Iran gets the bomb.
Warheads purchased from North Korea or Pakistan (whose nuclear program the Saudis have long supported, with just this sort of exchange in mind) would likely be retrofitted onto the Chinese CSS-2 missiles. Those missiles are probably useless at the moment. But if the Saudis were to allow us to inspect them now, when Saudis blocked future inspections, we?d know they?d been weaponized. That?s probably why we?ve been forbidden to visit them. And if the Chinese won?t help fit nuclear warheads onto the missiles (for fear of provoking the United States), the Saudis could seek new missiles elsewhere, or simply plant ?suitcases? where needed.
Choices
The days when Richard Armitage could extract non-proliferation guarantees from the Saudis with a stiff dressing down are gone. At this point, in the wake of a nuclear-capable Iran, we?d need to offer the Gulf states a sophisticated anti-missile system, major conventional weapons capabilities, and serious American defense guarantees, to have any hope of preventing further proliferation. Yet each of these potential solutions to the proliferation problem raises troubling difficulties of its own.
Richard Russell (whose article ?Arab Security Responses to a Nuclear-Ready Iran? I?ve also drawn on here) argues that it would be a mistake to follow the Carter Doctrine in extending guarantees of nuclear retaliation to our allies in the Gulf. Russell believes that American reluctance to kill thousands to millions of Iranian civilians in retaliation for Iranian mischief in the Gulf would dampen the credibility of such a deterrent in any case. Better, says Russell, for America to threaten Iran with regime change imposed by conventional forces. But of course, it?s far from clear whether America has the will, and the conventional forces, to impose regime change on Iran. Then there?s that problem of Iran dropping a nuclear device on massed American troops. So our nuclear deterrent may be all we have left.
In ?Deter and Contain: Dealing with a Nuclear Iran,? Michael Eisenstadt suggests a different answer. To stop nuclear proliferation in the Gulf, arm our allies with major naval and air power, enabling them to threaten conventional destruction of Iran?s oil production and export facilities, in retaliation for Iranian assaults on the Gulf. But this would mean a dangerous conventional arms race in the Gulf, with all the instability and provocation to war that that implies (a war that could easily cripple the world?s economy). Nor would this arms aid likely eliminate pressure for American nuclear guarantees.
Imagine the battles over American foreign policy when the question becomes whether to extend our nuclear deterrence to the states of the Gulf, and how to arm and protect them. The offer of our nuclear umbrella raises the prospect of devastating nuclear war with Iran. Yet failure to deter means losing control of the world economy, and speeding up a proliferation nightmare. Options short of a nuclear guarantee require kicking off a major conventional arms race and/or a huge expansion of our own conventional military capabilities. All the options will be bad, and none of them will be dovish.
A nuclear-armed Saudi Arabia (perhaps eventually joined by a few of the smaller Gulf states) may soon emerge, whether America offers nuclear guarantees or not. A decade or two from now, an Islamist revolution in the Gulf could land those bombs in the hands of yet another rogue regime. In the meantime, a Saudi bomb (perhaps mounted on Chinese missiles that can reach Haifa as well as Tehran) could spark a conflagration in the Middle East and/or stimulate further proliferation, with Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Algeria all candidates. At that point, it would be all-too-safe to hand effectively untraceable nukes off to terrorists for use against the cities of the United States.
? Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MmI2ZDg5Y2NmYzZkNzY3YTg5MzA4YTI4NGQ4N2FiOWE=
-
Iraq: Tehran's Shiite Autonomy Solution
Summary
Iraq's Shiite alliance said it will soon submit draft legislation in Parliament aimed at altering the structure of the Iraqi state. The move shows Iran has found a way around its Shiite allies' inability to dominate Baghdad. Even so, a number of domestic and international factors mean Iran is not interested seeing the Iraqi state collapse.
Analysis
Iraq's ruling Shiite bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), will soon submit a proposed law aimed at carving autonomous regions out of the Iraqi state, UIA officials said Sept. 6. The officials said they had completed drafting a mechanism by which Iraqi provinces can combine to form federal regions. An unnamed senior aide to senior UIA deputy Humam al-Hamoudi, the chair of the committee that drafted the Iraqi Constitution in 2005, told Reuters that the draft law was broadly in line with wording removed from the draft constitution last year in the face of Sunni objections. These remarks come a day after UIA spokesman Abbas al-Bayati said that "in the next few sessions, the Parliament will discuss the law for the formation of provinces."
The proposed law suggests Iraq is witnessing two major developments. First, the Shiite factions that until now have competed for power in southern Iraq have reached an internal power-sharing mechanism. Second, Tehran has found a way to circumvent the obstacles to a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad. Combining existing provinces into federal zones would allow Tehran and its Shiite allies in Iraq to wield greater power over the Iraqi state by creating an additional layer of government.
The Iranians are well aware of divisions in the Iraqi Shiite community and of the dangers -- and potential international implications -- of an all-out Shiite-Sunni war. And Iran is not interested in seeing Iraq partitioned out of fears this could deter Tehran's bid to emerge as a regional hegemon.
The Shiite bloc's internal agreement to back a proposed southern federal zone is extraordinary given that previously only the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) pushed for such a zone. SCIRI -- led by Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, who also heads the UIA -- is the most powerful and pro-Iranian component of the UIA. The consensus in the previously fractious UIA shows Tehran has used its influence among Iraq's various Shiite factions to get them all behind the proposed law.
As part of this process, Iran succeeded via its proxies in sidelining top Iraqi Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has long been trying to maintain a distance between the Iraqi Shia and Tehran. The Daily Telegraph reported that al-Sistani said Sept. 3 that he no longer had the power to prevent Iraq from descending into civil war.
Evidence suggests Iran has worked hard to get non-Shiite Iraqi factions to agree to the plan, over which intense negotiations can be expected. For several weeks, and especially in the last few days, multiple Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders have made high-level visits to Tehran.
Iraq's Sunnis do not appear to be completely opposed to the idea of federalism, as evidenced by Sunni Parliament member Ala Makki's statement that Sunnis "do not object to the administrative application of federalism for better administration under the supervision of a strong central government." Not coincidentally, Iraqi Speaker of Parliament Mahmud Dawood al-Mashhadani -- another Sunni -- led a large delegation to Tehran some weeks back, showing the extent of Tehran's preparations for the proposed law.
Iran's efforts to create federal zones came in response to the U.S.-sponsored political process in Iraq, which has prevented Iran from attaining greater control over Baghdad despite its disproportionate influence not just among the Shia but also through its relations with key Sunni and Kurdish political actors. In keeping with the demographics of the country, Iraq's existing political system limits the extent to which pro-Iranian Shia can gain the upper hand, despite controlling the premiership, one vice presidency and the interior, finance, oil and national security positions in the Cabinet, along with the post of national security adviser.
By rearranging the provinces into autonomous federal zones along the lines of Iraq's northern Kurdistan region, the pro-Iranian Shia have found a way to consolidate their gains over power and the oil resources in the south. The Iraqi Shia and their Iranian patrons are trying to make regional autonomy the rule rather than an exception limited to the Kurds. Such an arrangement would help the Shia balance their power-sharing arrangement with the Kurds, which goes back to the early days of the interim administrations following Saddam Hussein's ouster.
How governorates and municipalities would be configured under this new federal structure remains unclear. Regardless, Iraq's persistent intercommunal and intracommunal conflicts will complicate the regional-autonomy plan. The row over the national flag stirred up by the Kurds a few days ago provides a vivid example of how federalism could unravel the Iraqi state.
There is the question of the balance of power between the central government and the proposed autonomous regions in terms of control over security and oil revenues. A key related development is the Sept. 7 hand-over of control of the Iraqi security forces from the United States to the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell called the step "gigantic," and Iraqi Defense Minister Abdul-Qadre Mohammed Jassim said a dispute over a text outlining the new working relationship between the U.S. military and Iraqi armed forces had been resolved.
Events such as the Iraqi Shiite move for federalism have made Iran's position in Iraq much clearer: Tehran is going for the gold, and it will not settle for an Iraq in which Iran's allies are merely the largest political group in a coalition government. Moving toward a federalist model at a time when the United States and Israel are not in a position to do much about its regional ambitions would allow Tehran to reap the benefits it craves in Iraq, but potential pitfalls remain. Turkey, with which Iran has sought enhanced ties, will not welcome the justification Kurds will gain to increase their autonomy, given the Shiite move to enhance their own autonomy. And if the Sunnis decide to break off from the political process -- which could well happen -- the Iraqi state will slide into a true civil war. The Saudis and other Sunni Arab states are also very concerned about the outcome of the political struggle in Iraq, something Iran simply cannot dismiss.
Negotiations over the proposed autonomy plan thus could put Iraq's future at risk and could be detrimental to Iran's security. Iran is playing a very dangerous game, one in which success could mean strategic influence in Iraq, while failure could mean regional war.
-
Bush and Lincoln
Echoes of the past in today's strategic mistakes.
BY NEWT GINGRICH
Thursday, September 7, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves."
--Abraham Lincoln
Annual message to Congress
Dec. 1, 1862
WASHINGTON--Five years have passed since the horrific attack on our American homeland, and, still, there is one serious, undeniable fact we have yet to confront: We are, today, not where we wanted to be and nowhere near where we need to be.
In April of 1861, in response to the firing on Fort Sumter, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to serve for 90 days. Lincoln had greatly underestimated the challenge of preserving the Union. No one imagined that what would become the Civil War would last four years and take the lives of 620,000 Americans.
By the summer of 1862, with thousands of Americans already dead or wounded and the hopes of a quick resolution to the war all but abandoned, three political factions had emerged. There were those who thought the war was too hard and would have accepted defeat by negotiating the end of the United States by allowing the South to secede. Second were those who urged staying the course by muddling through with a cautious military policy and a desire to be "moderate and reasonable" about Southern property rights, including slavery.
We see these first two factions today. The Kerry-Gore-Pelosi-Lamont bloc declares the war too hard, the world too dangerous. They try to find some explainable way to avoid reality while advocating return to "normalcy," and promoting a policy of weakness and withdrawal abroad.
Most government officials constitute the second wing, which argues the system is doing the best it can and that we have to "stay the course"--no matter how unproductive. But, after being exposed in the failed response to Hurricane Katrina, it will become increasingly difficult for this wing to keep explaining the continuing failures of the system.
Just consider the following: Osama bin Laden is still at large. Afghanistan is still insecure. Iraq is still violent. North Korea and Iran are still building nuclear weapons and missiles. Terrorist recruiting is still occurring in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and across the planet.
By late summer, 1862, Lincoln agonizingly concluded that a third faction had the right strategy for victory. This group's strategy demanded reorganizing everything as needed, intensifying the war, and bringing the full might of the industrial North to bear until the war was won.
The first and greatest lesson of the last five years parallels what Lincoln came to understand. The dangers are greater, the enemy is more determined, and victory will be substantially harder than we had expected in the early days after the initial attack. Despite how painful it would prove to be, Lincoln chose the road to victory. President Bush today finds himself in precisely the same dilemma Lincoln faced 144 years ago. With American survival at stake, he also must choose. His strategies are not wrong, but they are failing. And they are failing for three reasons.
(1) They do not define the scale of the emerging World War III, between the West and the forces of militant Islam, and so they do not outline how difficult the challenge is and how big the effort will have to be. (2) They do not define victory in this larger war as our goal, and so the energy, resources and intensity needed to win cannot be mobilized. (3) They do not establish clear metrics of achievement and then replace leaders, bureaucrats and bureaucracies as needed to achieve those goals.
To be sure, Mr. Bush understands that we cannot ignore our enemies; they are real. He knows that an enemy who believes in religiously sanctioned suicide-bombing is an enemy who, with a nuclear or biological weapon, is a mortal threat to our survival as a free country. The analysis Mr. Bush offers the nation--before the Joint Session on Sept. 20, 2001, in his 2002 State of the Union, in his 2005 Second Inaugural--is consistently correct. On each occasion, he outlines the threat, the moral nature of the conflict and the absolute requirement for victory.
Unfortunately, the great bureaucracies Mr. Bush presides over (but does not run) have either not read his speeches or do not believe in his analysis. The result has been a national security performance gap that we must confront if we are to succeed in winning this rising World War III.
We have to be honest about how big this problem is and then design new, bolder and more profound strategies to secure American national security in a very dangerous 21st century. Unless we, like Lincoln, think anew, we cannot set the nation on a course for victory. Here are some initial steps:
First, the president should address a Joint Session of Congress to explain to the country the urgency of the threat of losing millions of people in one or more cities if our enemies find a way to deliver weapons of mass murder to American soil. He should further communicate the scale of the anti-American coalition, the clarity of their desire to destroy America, and the requirement that we defeat them. He should then make clear to the world that a determined American people whose very civilization is at stake will undertake the measures needed to prevail over our enemies. While desiring the widest possible support, we will not compromise our self-defense in order to please our critics.
Then he should announce an aggressively honest review of what has not worked in the first five years of the war. Based upon the findings he should initiate a sweeping transformation of the White House's national security apparatus. The current hopelessly slow and inefficient interagency system should be replaced by a new metrics-based and ruthlessly disciplined integrated system of accountability, with clear timetables and clear responsibilities.
The president should insist upon creating new aggressive entrepreneurial national security systems that replace (rather than reform) the current failing bureaucracies. For example, the Agency for International Development has been a disaster in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The president should issue new regulations where possible and propose new legislation where necessary. The old systems cannot be allowed to continue to fail without consequence. Those within the bureaucracies who cannot follow the president's directives should be compelled to leave.
Following this initiative, the president should propose a dramatic and deep overhaul of homeland security grounded in metrics-based performance to create a system capable of meeting the seriousness of the threat. The leaders of the new national security and homeland security organizations should be asked what they need to win this emerging World War III, and then the budget should be developed. We need a war budget, but we currently have an OMB-driven, pseudo-war budget. The goal of victory, ultimately, will lead to a dramatically larger budget, which will lead to a serious national debate. We can win this argument, but we first have to make it.
Congress should immediately pass the legislation sent by the president yesterday to meet the requirements of the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision. More broadly, it should pass an act that recognizes that we are entering World War III and serves notice that the U.S. will use all its resources to defeat our enemies--not accommodate, understand or negotiate with them, but defeat them.
Because the threat of losing millions of Americans is real, Congress should hold blunt, no-holds-barred oversight hearings on what is and is not working. Laws should be changed to shift from bureaucratic to entrepreneurial implementation throughout the national security and homeland security elements of government.
Beyond our shores, we must commit to defeating the enemies of freedom in Iraq, starting with doubling the size of the Iraqi military and police forces. We should put Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia on notice that any help going to the enemies of the Iraqi people will be considered hostile acts by the U.S. In southern Lebanon, the U.S. should insist on disarming Hezbollah, emphasizing it as the first direct defeat of Syria and Iran--thus restoring American prestige in the region while undermining the influence of the Syrian and Iranian dictatorships.
Further, we should make clear our goal of replacing the repressive dictatorships in North Korea, Iran and Syria, whose aim is to do great harm to the American people and our allies. Our first steps should be the kind of sustained aggressive strategy of replacement which Ronald Reagan directed brilliantly in Poland, and ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet empire.
The result of this effort would be borders that are controlled, ports that are secure and an enemy that understands the cost of going up against the full might of the U.S. No enemy can stand against a determined American people. But first we must commit to victory. These steps are the first on a long and difficult road to victory, but are necessary to win the future.
Mr. Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America" (Regnery, 2005).
-
A general theory of just about everything
By JONATHAN ROSENBLUM
Now that recluse mathematician Grigory Perelman has proven Poincaire's Conjecture, only a few longstanding conundrums remain to be solved. To name two: Why do Western societies inevitably tend towards appeasement? Why has anti-Semitism migrated to the Left?
The answer to both questions lies in the prevalent Western view of man as a rational pleasure-seeking animal, whose life has no ultimate purpose outside itself and ends with death. As a descriptive matter, that is a fair picture of the way many members of post-Christian, Western societies live their lives.
The question, however, is: Can a society comprised primarily of such people defend itself? For those who experience their lives in this way, war will always be an irrational choice, unless the chance of being killed is very small and the potential reward very great. Only fools who believe in some transcendental values, such as the nation or democracy, or who have a very large stake in the future, will ever go to war, as long as any alternative exists.
Plummeting Western fertility rates have left ever fewer people with that kind of stake in the future. Without children to whom to bequeath the world, or a belief in an afterlife, why sacrifice oneself on the altar of the future?
Even in the face of an aggressive external threat, the rational choice will always be to placate the enemy, hopefully long enough to allow one to shuffle off this mortal coil before the bribe money runs out.
The West has delegitimized the resort to war in almost every circumstance. It enunciates rules of combat that favor non-state actors and terrorists. And its fetish with body counts reflects the belief that every resort to violence is proof of immorality. (As Binyamin Netanyahu pointed out to a BBC interviewer, Germany suffered more casualties in World War II than America and Britain combined, without thereby establishing its superior moral claim.)
The simulacrum of peace is confused with peace itself. As long as the sides are talking, all is well. Europe will still be engaging Iran in further discussions long after the latter has armed its intercontinental missiles with nuclear warheads.
PLEASURE-SEEKING children of the enlightenment mistakenly view all men in their own image.They dwell in a fantasy world, in which men of goodwill can iron out all their differences over a conference table, oblivious to the real threats confronting them.
There is no room in their philosophy for a young British-born Muslim couple who intended to blow up a transatlantic airplane by igniting liquid explosive in their baby's bottle. Nor can they appreciate the impeccable religious logic of nuclear war for the Iranian mullahs. As Ayatollah Khomeini put it: Either we will annihilate all the infidels, and thereby gain our freedom, or we will die trying, and thereby attain the greater freedom of a martyr's death.
Contemplating the jihadists' logic - the logic of those who crave death - is terrifying and causes many to deny the obvious: the West is in a religious war. After Canadian police uncovered a plot to blow up the Parliament buildings and behead the prime minister, the police spokesman described the plotters as coming from a broad cross-section of society - albeit all named Muhammad or Ahmed. And the deputy commissioner of Scotland Yard called those plotting to blow up 10 airliners nothing but common criminals, at most "hiding behind certain faiths."
The intellectuals desperately grasp at the model of a grievance for every man, and a price for every grievance. They cannot acknowledge that Muslims engage in terror not to achieve any definable goal, but because terrorizing the infidels is what they do best, and doing so provides them with a sense of power otherwise absent from their thwarted lives and failed societies.
But not all goals can be reconciled, and it is not always possible to split the difference. The Islamists' goal of imposing Shari'a law on the entire world cannot find a happy modus vivendi with the West's desire to live in peace and comfort.
Even when Westerners glimpse the truth, they flee from it and quickly revert to type. Over half of Britons now view Islam itself as a threat to society. Yet flogged by the BBC, they convince themselves that Islam has grievances and those grievances can be assuaged.
The Muslim MPs and peers who audaciously warned of further terrorist attacks by native-born Muslims unless Prime Minister Tony Blair mends his foreign policy knew their audience. Britons prefer to believe that British foreign policy, not bottomless Islamic rage, breeds suicide bombers. Blair's dismal poll numbers reflect that belief.
THE CONTINUED existence of the Jewish people has always posed an insolvable problem for materialists of every stripe, from Toynbee to Marx, and caused them to rail against the Jews. Today's enlightened humanists rail against Israel in the same way. And increasingly they couch their condemnations of Israel in explicitly religious terms.
Norwegian novelist Jostein Gaarder and Human Rights Watch's Kenneth Roth both attributed Israeli bombing of Lebanon to the primitive Jewish morality of "an eye for an eye" (ignorant that the Talmud interprets the verse as referring to monetary compensation). Toynbee once declared the Jews an "atavism"; today Prof. Tony Judt calls Israel's religious-ethnic state an "anachronism" and prominent European voices bemoan Israel's creation as a costly "mistake."
Intellectuals seek to preserve their fantasy model of a world of rational game-players by turning Israel into the Islamists' only grievance and imagining an idyllic world without the Jewish state.
Just as Neville Chamberlain convinced himself that Hitler would be satisfied with the Sudetenland, so do many Western intellectuals, on far weaker evidence, imagine that the Islamists will be satisfied with Israel, and that only Israel's obstinate determination to exist prevents peace in our time.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154526026234&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
-
Some deep thoughts in there Denny, good one.
Changing subjects completely, here's something about the Anbar province of Iraq and some discouraging news from Afg.
=======
Situation Called Dire in West Iraq
Anbar Is Lost Politically, Marine Analyst Says
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 11, 2006; A01
The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western al Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents.
The officials described Col. Pete Devlin's classified assessment of the dire state of Anbar as the first time that a senior U.S. military officer has filed so negative a report from Iraq.
One Army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar province, "We haven't been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically -- and that's where wars are won and lost."
The "very pessimistic" statement, as one Marine officer called it, was dated Aug. 16 and sent to Washington shortly after that, and has been discussed across the Pentagon and elsewhere in national security circles. "I don't know if it is a shock wave, but it's made people uncomfortable," said a Defense Department official who has read the report. Like others interviewed about the report, he spoke on the condition that he not be identified by name because of the document's sensitivity.
Devlin reports that there are no functioning Iraqi government institutions in Anbar, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has become the province's most significant political force, said the Army officer, who has read the report. Another person familiar with the report said it describes Anbar as beyond repair; a third said it concludes that the United States has lost in Anbar.
Devlin offers a series of reasons for the situation, including a lack of U.S. and Iraqi troops, a problem that has dogged commanders since the fall of Baghdad more than three years ago, said people who have read it. These people said he reported that not only are military operations facing a stalemate, unable to extend and sustain security beyond the perimeters of their bases, but local governments in the province have also collapsed and the weak central government has almost no presence.
Those conclusions are striking because, even after four years of fighting an unexpectedly difficult war in Iraq, the U.S. military has tended to maintain an optimistic view: that its mission is difficult, but that progress is being made. Although CIA station chiefs in Baghdad have filed negative classified reports over the past several years, military intelligence officials have consistently been more positive, both in public statements and in internal reports.
Devlin, as part of the I Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward) headquarters in Iraq, has been stationed there since February, so his report isn't being dismissed as the stunned assessment of a newly arrived officer. In addition, he has the reputation of being one of the Marine Corps' best intelligence officers, with a tendency to be careful and straightforward, said another Marine intelligence officer. Hence, the report is being taken seriously as it is examined inside the military establishment and also by some CIA officials.
Not everyone interviewed about the report agrees with its glum findings. The Defense Department official, who worked in Iraq earlier this year, said his sense is that Anbar province is going to be troubled as long as U.S. troops are in Iraq. "Lawlessness is a way of life there," he said. As for the report, he said, "It's one conclusion about one area. The conclusion on al Anbar doesn't translate into a perspective on the entire country."
No one interviewed would quote from the report, citing its classification, and The Washington Post was not shown a copy of it. But over the past three weeks, Devlin's paper has been widely disseminated in military and intelligence circles. It is provoking intense debate over the key finding that in Anbar, the U.S. effort to clear and hold major cities and the upper Euphrates valley has failed.
The report comes at an awkward time politically, just as a midterm election campaign gets underway that promises to be in part a referendum on the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war. It also follows by just a few weeks the testimony of Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee early last month that "it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war."
"It's hard to be optimistic right now," said one Army general who has served in Iraq. "There's a sort of critical mass of tough news," he said, with intensifying violence from the insurgency and between Sunnis and Shiites, a lack of effective Iraqi government and a growing concern that Iraq may be falling apart.
"In the analytical world, there is a real pall of gloom descending," said Jeffrey White, a former analyst of Middle Eastern militaries for the Defense Intelligence Agency, who also had been told about the pessimistic Marine report.
Devlin, who is in Iraq, could not be reached to comment. Col. Jerry Renne, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, said Saturday that "as a matter of policy, we don't comment on classified documents."
Anbar is a key province; it encompasses Ramadi and Fallujah, which with Baghdad pose the greatest challenge U.S. forces have faced in Iraq. It accounts for 30 percent of Iraq's land mass, encompassing the vast area from the capital to the borders of Syria and Jordan, including much of the area that has come to be known as the Sunni Triangle.
The insurgency arguably began there with fighting in Fallujah not long after U.S. troops arrived in April 2003, and fighting has since continued. Thirty-three U.S. military personnel died there in August -- 17 of them Marines, 13 from the Army and three from the Navy.
A second general who has read the report warned that he thought it was accurate as far as it went, but agreed with the defense official that Devlin's "dismal" view may not have much applicability elsewhere in Iraq. The problems facing Anbar are peculiar to that region, he and others argued.
But an Army officer in Iraq familiar with the report said he considers it accurate. "It is best characterized as 'realistic,' " he said.
"From what I understand, it is very candid, very unvarnished," said retired Marine Col. G. I. Wilson. "It says the emperor has no clothes."
One view of the report offered by some Marine officers is that it is a cry for help from an area where fighting remains intense, yet which recently has been neglected by top commanders and Bush administration officials as they focus their efforts on bringing a sense of security to Baghdad. An Army unit of Stryker light armored vehicles that had been slated to replace another unit in Anbar was sent to reinforce operations in Baghdad, leaving commanders in the west scrambling to move around other troops to fill the gap.
Devlin's report is a work of intelligence analysis, not of policy prescription, so it does not try to suggest what, if anything, can be done to fix the situation. It is not clear what the implications would be for U.S. forces if Devlin's view is embraced by top commanders elsewhere in Iraq. U.S. officials are wary of simply abandoning the Sunni parts of Iraq, for fear that they could become havens for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
One possible solution would be to try to turn over the province to Iraqi forces, but that could increase the risk of a full-blown civil war, because Shiite-dominated forces might begin slaughtering Sunnis, while Sunni-dominated units might simply begin acting independently of the central government.
? 2006 The Washington Post Company
======================
Top soldier quits as blundering campaign turns into 'pointless' war
Christina Lamb
THE former aide-de-camp to the commander of the British taskforce in southern Afghanistan has described the campaign in Helmand province as ?a textbook case of how to screw up a counter-insurgency?.
?Having a big old fight is pointless and just making things worse,? said Captain Leo Docherty, of the Scots Guards, who became so disillusioned that he quit the army last month.
?All those people whose homes have been destroyed and sons killed are going to turn against the British,? he said. ?It?s a pretty clear equation ? if people are losing homes and poppy fields, they will go and fight. I certainly would.
?We?ve been grotesquely clumsy ? we?ve said we?ll be different to the Americans who were bombing and strafing villages, then behaved exactly like them.?
Docherty?s criticisms, the first from an officer who has served in Helmand, came during the worst week so far for British troops in Afghanistan, with the loss of 18 men.
They reflected growing concern that forces have been left exposed in small northern outposts of Helmand such as Sangin, Musa Qala and Nawzad. Pinned down by daily Taliban attacks, many have run short of food and water and have been forced to rely on air support and artillery.
?We?ve deviated spectacularly from the original plan,? said Docherty, who was aide-de-camp to Colonel Charlie Knaggs, the commander in Helmand.
?The plan was to secure the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, initiate development projects and enable governance . . . During this time, the insecure northern part of Helmand would be contained: troops would not be ?sucked in? to a problem unsolvable by military means alone.?
According to Docherty, the planning ?fell by the wayside? because of pressure from the governor of Helmand, who feared the Taliban were toppling his district chiefs in northern towns.
Docherty traces the start of the problems to the British capture of Sangin on May 25, in which he took part. He says troops were sent to seize this notorious centre of Taliban and narcotics activity without night-vision goggles and with so few vehicles they had to borrow a pick-up truck.
More damningly, once they had established a base in the town, the mission failed to capitalise on their presence. Sangin has no paved roads, running water or electricity, but because of a lack of support his men were unable to carry out any development, throwing away any opportunity to win over townspeople.
?The military is just one side of the triangle,? he said. ?Where were the Department for International Development and the Foreign Office? ?The window was briefly open for our message to be spread, for the civilian population to be informed of our intent and realise that we weren?t there simply to destroy the poppy fields and their livelihoods. I felt at this stage that the Taliban were sitting back and observing us, deciding in their own time how to most effectively hit us.?
Eventually the Taliban attacked on June 11, when Captain Jim Philippson became the first British soldier to be killed in Helmand. British troops have since been holed up in their compound with attacks coming at least once a day. Seven British soldiers have died in the Sangin area.
?Now the ground has been lost and all we?re doing in places like Sangin is surviving,? said Docherty. ?It?s completely barking mad.
?We?re now scattered in a shallow meaningless way across northern towns where the only way for the troops to survive is to increase the level of violence so more people get killed. It?s pretty shocking and not something I want to be part of.?
-
The Battle of Britain and our battle
By JONATHAN ARIEL
This September 15, Great Britain will commemorate one of its proudest moments, the 66th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. This is a day that should be remembered and honored not just by the citizens of Britain, but by every inhabitant of this planet who cherishes liberty and freedom.
The Battle of Britain is one of history's turning points. From July to September 1940, the RAF was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the vaunted Luftwaffe, which until then had known nothing but success in Spain, Poland and France. By the thinnest of margins, the pilots and ground crews of RAF's Fighter Command prevailed, denying the Luftwaffe the air superiority it needed to enable the Wehrmacht to attempt an invasion of Britain.
The victory was not due to the Spitfire's mythical superiority over the Luftwaffe's Messerschmitt fighters. In reality the two aircraft were equally matched, and, it should be remembered, two-thirds of Fighter Command's squadrons flew the older Hawker Hurricanes, which by 1940 were approaching obsolescence, and no match for the ME 109.
The victory was ultimately due to the will power, vision and faith of Winston Churchill and Hugh Dowding, CO RAF Fighter Command. The former, who had been a voice in the wilderness against the appeasement of Nazi Germany, was able at the crucial hour to rally and inspire his country to an extraordinary act of valor. The latter had the very rare ability to think completely creatively.
Dowding realized that the combination of faster monoplane fighters and the invention of radar (in the nick of time) meant that the long-held doctrine of air war - "the bomber will always get through" - no longer applied, and designed, over the opposition of much of his own country's military establishment, the world's first air defense system.
This system, Britain's sole material advantage over Germany, was completed shortly before the war broke out.
TODAY THE West is in a similar mind-set to that of France and Britain after WWI. The horrors of that war generated within Western democracies a profound revulsion of the very idea of war. This led to the policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany.
Following its victory in the Cold War, and the demise of the USSR, the conventional wisdom was that war, as far as the West was concerned, had become a thing of the past and that economics, not politics, would dominate international diplomacy and geopolitics.
Unfortunately large parts of the Arab-Islamic world have not accepted that conventional wisdom. To them the defeat of the Soviet Union was not an opportunity to end war, but one to make war on the West.
Certain Western liberal intellectual circles have proven themselves capable of coming up with a seemingly limitless supply of specious reasons to explain, understand and even justify this visceral hatred of the West by large parts of the Arab-Islamic world.
Ultimately the reason is very simple: resentment of the ascent of the West.
Islam so far has proven congenitally incapable of doing what Christianity has done - allowing the evolution of a society in which the political and religious establishments are independent of one another. It is this evolution that facilitated and expedited the ascent of the West, by enabling the development of a political system based on democracy, freedom of thought and speech, and religious and cultural pluralism. These then spurred the major technological, scientific, economic and social advancements that empowered the West and have enabled it to dominate the globe politically and economically for the past 200 years.
THE ISLAMIC world has had ample opportunity to adopt the values that were instrumental in the West's ascent, but its political and religious establishments have chosen not to. The reason is very clear: They would rather wield total power over a failed society than share power with other groups in a successful one.
To facilitate this they have abused their oil wealth. Instead of using it to promote and develop their societies, they have impoverished them. Petrodollars that could have been spent on creating first-class educational systems have instead been used to create and maintain security apparatuses whose sole purpose is to ensure the absolute rule of a corrupt elite by repressing any sign of dissent.
These same political and religious leaders have constantly aided and abetted the most reactionary elements within their religious establishments, which in return have channeled popular frustrations generated by the regimes' failures outwards, against the "infidel West."
The Islamic world has, for the most part, been willing to buy this, preferring to blame the West for conspiring against it rather than take responsibility for its spectacular failures.
IS THIS perhaps beginning to sound familiar? It should, for all one has to do is replace "Muslim" with "German" and "the West" with "Jews" in order to generate a feeling of d j vu.
For several years the West preferred to ignore the threat posed by Nazi Germany until it was almost too late. In 1940 Britain found itself locked in a life or death struggle with Nazi Germany, outmanned and outgunned. Fortunately it found the required reserves of will power to persevere, and ultimately prevail.
Today we face a similar threat, that of Islamo-fascism. This threat is no less serious than that posed by the Nazis, since it also is founded on an ideology totally incompatible with the core Western values of democracy and freedom. Just as there was ultimately no possibility to compromise with Nazi Germany, so there can be no possibility of compromising and coexisting with Islamo-fascism.
Unlike Britain in 1940, this time Western democracy has entered the battle from a position of relative strength, with all the means needed to prevail. Unfortunately we, or at least much of our political and cultural leadership, seems to be lacking the will to do so. Rather than accept the unpalatable reality that we are faced by an enemy threatened by our values and willing to destroy us in order to eradicate them, there are far too many among us who insist on turning a blind eye toward it.
Just as the democracies deluded themselves into thinking they could coexist with the Nazis, and maintained a policy based on appeasement and compromise, there are unfortunately influential forces within our societies who would rather compromise and appease than face facts and confront.
Churchill's words to Britain and the free world - "It's time to brace ourselves for the coming battle" - uttered after the fall of France, are unfortunately as apt today as they were in the summer of 1940.
However no less important is to fully appreciate the magnitude of what is at stake. The words of Lincoln do this best, because the ultimate targets of the forces of fascism are the very core, idea and values on which "government of the people, for the people, and by the people" is based.
The writer is a former editor-in-chief of Ma'ariv International.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1157913616828&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
-
The Right Troops in the Right Places
By SETH MOULTON
Published: September 15, 2006
Marblehead, Mass.
Today's NY Times
APPROACHING the city of Karbala last year for a meeting with a local Iraqi Army commander, my convoy of four Army Humvees came across hundreds of bearded men in green camouflage uniforms lining the road. They were directing traffic and searching vehicles for bombs ? good things ? and they waved us through, just as Iraqi security forces should.
But we don?t issue green uniforms to Iraqi troops.
After the meeting, I sent an e-mail message to my headquarters in Baghdad, asking whether an entire Iraqi battalion, usually 700 to 1,000 soldiers, had been newly authorized for this relatively peaceful province.
Of course, it hadn?t. This was another new militia. And even though the militia had already been approved by Iraqi officials, and recruited, outfitted and deployed in daily operations, no senior American commander in Baghdad knew about it.
Still, it wasn?t hard to explain how this could happen in Karbala, a major city just two hours from Baghdad. There were hardly any Americans there.
The last American base in Karbala was closed in the summer of 2005. Ostensibly our departure was a victory ? an area turned over to Iraqi control. The American troops weren?t sent home, though; they were simply shifted north to a town near Falluja, where they were needed more.
For most of 2005, I worked for the American commander in charge of training Iraqi security forces. My job was to keep tabs on Iraqi troops in several provinces south of Baghdad that were mostly Iraqi-controlled. As a young Marine lieutenant, I was honored to have the responsibility, but it was a sign of how thinly our forces are stretched. My team of two marines could have used about 50 more.
Time and again I watched as American forces drew down, and militias blossomed in the resulting power vacuum. The first provinces we are handing over to our Iraqi counterparts are in the heart of the Shiite south, an area where anti-American violence is minimal but ethnic hatred is brewing.
Sunni insurgents started attacking Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of all Iraqis, to destabilize the new Iraqi government. The Shiites? ethnic-based response, however, carried out by their militias, is what ignited the deeply sectarian violence that now threatens outright civil war. The premature departure of American troops from the places where the militias were born only feeds their growth. A good Iraqi friend from the area told me recently that Iraqis now call this time ?the militia era.?
In the long term, we must withdraw American troops, and replacing them with capable Iraqi forces is the right way to do it. But there are two serious problems with how we are putting this strategy into effect.
First, despite all rhetoric in Washington to the contrary, American commanders are being pressured to meet timelines rather than encouraged to wait until Iraqi forces are ready. ?Standing up? Iraqi troops is not enough; they must be well-trained.
Second, our strategy is based on consolidating American forces in huge megabases as a means to reduce numbers and, as advocated by several members of Congress, to ?move to the periphery.? This is exactly the opposite of what has been prescribed for decades to fight a counterinsurgency, or to squelch a fomenting civil war.
American military advisers, and the Green Berets they take after, are our greatest assets in Iraq because they are a model for how to fight insurgents and build indigenous forces. Our advisers teach the Iraqi troops everything from physical fitness to urban warfare tactics, and mentor their officers in leadership and mission planning.
I once visited an Iraqi base where a combination of officer corruption and insurgent activity had led to a severe water shortage. An entire battalion was ready to quit, but the Green Berets embedded with the Iraqis encouraged them to stay while they pressed for a solution ? and endured the shortage alongside the Iraqi soldiers. The battalion remained intact, and we discovered new problems with the Iraqi supply system and new tactics of local insurgents.
Our advisers can also thwart militia attempts to infiltrate the Iraqi units, and are better able to judge when the Iraqis are competent to take over. Most important, while sharing intelligence and conducting joint operations, these small groups of American soldiers and marines develop the trust of their Iraqi soldiers and the local populace. Our growing megabases do anything but.
So, what should we do? The obvious prescription to stop the rising violence is more troops, but the wrong kinds of soldiers and tactics only alienate the Iraqi people, strengthening the insurgency. On top of that, the Army and Marine Corps don?t have any extra troops to send. President Bush recently sent more American forces back into Baghdad, another place where militias took over after United States troops were withdrawn too quickly. But they too have to come from somewhere, and in turn we should expect those areas to become more violent.
This makes it all the more important to use the troops we have as effectively as possible.
We need more military advisers, including both Special Forces teams and specially trained conventional units. Our precious few Special Forces troops must focus on mentoring Iraqi troops, rather than on the more exciting diversion of unilateral raids. Some of our best Special Forces units were devoted to hunting down the Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but violence has only increased in the three months since his death. Had that same manpower and money been devoted to training Iraqi troops and stemming the growth of militias, we would have another Iraqi battalion or two ready to take our places.
While consolidating bases is a short-term way to reduce troop requirements, fielding more adviser teams will eventually allow more Americans to come home. American troops embedded with the Iraqis they train usually require less support than conventional units; many rely on the Iraqis for food, shelter and basic defenses. Green Berets in 12-man teams have already replaced entire battalions of conventional forces in some Iraqi cities.
Yet despite the success of advisers, the Army and Marine Corps still have a habit of sending their least capable troops to fill these positions. Many teams have trouble getting essential supplies like weapons and ammunition, even as the Army finds the resources to man speed traps on its ever-growing bases. Only 1 in 30 Americans deployed to Iraq serves as an embedded adviser. We can?t win this war from the Burger Kings and rec centers of our largest bases, nor can we afford the thousands of non-combat troops needed to support them.
Iraq?s militia problems are likely to get worse before they get better, and only a legitimate Iraqi government can rid the country of them completely. But we must be sure we are fighting the war we say we are. Both problems with our current strategy ? not waiting for Iraqi forces to be ready, and consolidating our bases at the expense of classic counterinsurgency tactics like small adviser teams ? emanate from the overriding concern for bringing the troops home.
Pushing for withdrawal timelines is not helping the struggle in Iraq; encouraging the military to better fight the insurgency will. After all, winning the war would be the best reason to leave.
Seth Moulton was a Marine infantry officerin Iraq from March toSeptember 2003 and from July 2004 toOctober 2005. He is writing a book about his service.
-
The U.S. War, Five Years On
By George Friedman
It has been five years since the Sept. 11 attacks. In thinking about the
course of the war against al Qaeda, two facts emerge pre-eminent.
The first is that the war has succeeded far better than anyone would have
thought on Sept. 12, 2001. We remember that day clearly, and had anyone told
us that there would be no more al Qaeda attacks in the United States for at
least five years, we would have been incredulous. Yet there have been no
attacks.
The second fact is that the U.S. intervention in the Islamic world has not
achieved its operational goals. There are multiple insurgencies under way in
Iraq, and the United States does not appear to have sufficient force or
strategic intent to suppress them. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has
re-emerged as a powerful fighting force. It is possible that the relatively
small coalition force -- a force much smaller than that fielded by the
defeated Soviets in Afghanistan -- can hold it at bay, but clearly coalition
troops cannot annihilate it.
A Strategic Response
The strategic goal of the United States on Sept. 12, 2001, was to prevent
any further attacks within the United States. Al Qaeda, defined as the
original entity that orchestrated the 1998 attacks against the U.S.
embassies in Africa, the USS Cole strike and 9/11, has been thrown into
disarray and has been unable to mount a follow-on attack without being
detected and disrupted. Other groups, loosely linked to al Qaeda or linked
only by name or shared ideology, have carried out attacks, but none have
been as daring and successful as 9/11.
In response to 9/11, the United States resorted to direct overt and covert
intervention throughout the Islamic world. With the first intervention, in
Afghanistan, the United States and coalition forces disrupted al Qaeda's
base of operations, destabilized the group and forced it on the defensive.
Here also, the stage was set for a long guerrilla war that the United States
cannot win with the forces available.
The invasion of Iraq, however incoherent the Bush administration's
explanation of it might be, achieved two things. First, it convinced Saudi
Arabia of the seriousness of American resolve and caused the Saudis to
become much more aggressive in cooperating with U.S. intelligence. Second,
it allowed the United States to occupy the most strategic ground in the
Middle East -- bordering on Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Iran.
From here, the United States was able to pose overt threats and to stage
covert operations against al Qaeda. Yet by invading Iraq, the United States
also set the stage for the current military crisis.
The U.S. strategy was to disrupt al Qaeda in three ways:
1. Bring the intelligence services of Muslim states -- through persuasion,
intimidation or coercion -- to provide intelligence that was available only
to them on al Qaeda's operations.
2. By invading Afghanistan and Iraq, use main force to disrupt al Qaeda and
to intimidate and coerce Islamic states. In other words, use Operation 2 to
achieve Operation 1.
3. Use the intelligence gained by these methods to conduct a range of covert
operations throughout the world, including in the United States itself, to
disrupt al Qaeda operations.
The problem, however, was this. The means used to compel cooperation with
the intelligence services in countries such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia
involved actions that, while successful in the immediate intent, left U.S.
forces exposed on a battleground where the correlation of forces, over time,
ceased to favor the United States. In other words, while the invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq did achieve their immediate ends and did result in
effective action against al Qaeda, the outcome was to expose the U.S. forces
to exhausting counterinsurgency that they were not configured to win.
Hindsight: The Search for an Ideal Strategy
The ideal outcome likely would have been to carry out the first and third
operations without the second. As many would argue, an acceptable outcome
would have been to carry out the Afghanistan operation without going into
Iraq. This is the crux of the debate that has been raging since the Iraq
invasion and that really began earlier, during the Afghan war, albeit in
muted form. On the one side, the argument is that by invading Muslim
countries, the United States has played into al Qaeda's hands and actually
contributed to radicalization among Islamists -- and that by refraining from
invasion, the Americans would have reduced the threat posed by al Qaeda. On
the other side, the argument has been made that without these two
invasions -- the one for direct tactical reasons, the other for
psychological and political reasons -- al Qaeda would be able to operate
securely and without effective interference from U.S. intelligence and that,
therefore, these invasions were the price to be paid.
There are three models, then, that have been proposed as ideals:
1. The United States should have invaded neither Afghanistan nor Iraq, but
instead should have relied entirely on covert measures (with various levels
of restraint suggested) to defeat al Qaeda.
2. The United States should have invaded Afghanistan to drive out al Qaeda
and disrupt the organization, but should not have invaded Iraq.
3. The United States needed to invade both Iraq and Afghanistan -- the
former for strategic reasons and to intimidate key players, the latter to
disrupt al Qaeda operations and its home base.
It is interesting to pause and consider that the argument is rarely this
clear-cut. Those arguing for Option 1 rarely explain how U.S. covert
operations would be carried out, and frequently oppose those operations as
well. Those who make the second argument fail to explain how, given that the
command cell of al Qaeda had escaped Afghanistan, the United States would
continue the war -- or more precisely, where the Americans would get the
intelligence to fight a covert war. Those who argue for the third course --
the Bush administration -- rarely explain precisely what the strategic
purpose of the war was.
In fact, 9/11 created a logic that drove the U.S. responses. Before any
covert war could be launched, al Qaeda's operational structure had to be
disrupted -- at the very least, to buy time before another attack.
Therefore, an attack in Afghanistan had to come first (and did, commencing
about a month after 9/11). Calling this an invasion, of course, would be an
error: The United States borrowed forces from Russian and Iranian allies in
Afghanistan -- and that, coupled with U.S. air power, forced the Taliban out
of the cities to disperse, regroup and restart the war later.
Covert War and a Logical Progression
The problem that the United States had with commencing covert operations
against al Qaeda was weakness in its intelligence system. To conduct a
covert war, you must have excellent intelligence -- and U.S. intelligence on
al Qaeda in the wake of 9/11 was not good enough to sustain a global covert
effort. The best intelligence on al Qaeda, simply given the nature of the
group as well as its ideology, was in the hands of the Pakistanis and the
Saudis. At the very least, Islamic governments were more likely to have
accumulated the needed intelligence than the CIA was.
The issue was in motivating these governments to cooperate with the U.S.
effort. The Saudis in particular were dubious about U.S. will, given
previous decades of behavior. Officials in Riyadh frankly were more worried
about al Qaeda's behavior within Saudi Arabia if they collaborated with the
Americans than they were about the United States acting resolutely. Recall
that the Saudis asked U.S. forces to leave Saudi Arabia after 9/11. Changing
the kingdom's attitude was a necessary precursor to waging the covert war,
just as Afghanistan was a precursor to changing attitudes in Pakistan.
Invading Iraq was a way for the United States to demonstrate will, while
occupying strategic territory to bring further pressure against countries
like Syria. It was also a facilitator for a global covert war. The
information the Saudis started to provide after the U.S. invasion was
critical in disrupting al Qaeda operations. And the Saudis did, in fact, pay
the price for collaboration: Al Qaeda rose up against the regime, staging
its first attack in the kingdom in May 2003, and was repressed.
In this sense, we can see a logical progression. Invading Afghanistan
disrupted al Qaeda operations there and forced Pakistani President Gen.
Pervez Musharraf to step up cooperation with the United States. Invading
Iraq reshaped Saudi thinking and put the United States in a position to
pressure neighboring countries. The two moves together increased U.S.
intelligence capabilities decisively and allowed it to disrupt al Qaeda.
But it also placed U.S. forces in a strategically difficult position. Any
U.S. intervention in Asia, it has long been noted, places the United States
at a massive disadvantage. U.S. troops inevitably will be outnumbered. They
also will be fighting on an enemy's home turf, far away from everything
familiar and comfortable. If forced into a political war, in which the enemy
combatants use the local populace to hide themselves -- and if that populace
is itself hostile to the Americans -- the results can be extraordinarily
unpleasant. Thus, the same strategy that allowed the United States to
disrupt al Qaeda also placed U.S. forces in strategically difficult
positions in two theaters of operation.
Mission Creep and Crisis
The root problem was that the United States did not crisply define the
mission in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Obviously, the immediate purpose was
to create an environment in which al Qaeda was disrupted and the
intelligence services of Muslim states felt compelled to cooperate with the
United States. But by revising the mission upward -- from achieving these
goals to providing security to rooting out Baathism and the Taliban, then to
providing security against insurgents and even to redefining these two
societies as democracies -- the United States overreached. The issue was not
whether democracy is desirable; the issue was whether the United States had
sufficient forces at hand to reshape Iraqi and Afghan societies in the face
of resistance.
If the Americans had not at first expected resistance, they certainly
discovered that they were facing it shortly after taking control of the
major cities of each country. At that moment, they had to make a basic
decision between pursuing the United States' own interests or defining the
interest as transforming Afghan and Iraqi society. At the moment Washington
chose transformation, it had launched into a task it could not fulfill --
or, if it could fulfill it, would be able to do so only with enormously more
force than it placed in either country. When we consider that 300,000 Soviet
troops could not subdue Afghanistan, we get a sense of how large a force
would have been needed.
The point here is this: The means used by the United States to cripple al
Qaeda also created a situation that was inherently dangerous to the United
States. Unless the mission had been parsed precisely -- with the United
States doing what it needed to do to disrupt al Qaeda but not overreaching
itself -- the outcome would be what we see now. It is, of course, easy to
say that the United States should have intervened, achieved its goals and
left each country in chaos; it is harder to do. Nevertheless, the United
States intervened, did not leave the countries and still has chaos. That can
be said with hindsight. Acting so callously with foresight is more
difficult.
There remains the question of whether the United States could have crippled
al Qaeda without invading Iraq -- a move that still would have left
Afghanistan in its current state, but which would seem to have been better
than the situation now at hand. The answer to that question rests on two
elements. First, it is simply not clear that the Saudis' appreciation of the
situation, prior to March 2003, would have moved them to cooperate, and
extensive diplomacy over the subject prior to the invasion had left the
Americans reasonably convinced that the Saudis could do more. Advocates of
diplomacy would have to answer the question of what more the United States
could have done on that score. Now, perhaps, over time the United States
could have developed its own intelligence sources within al Qaeda. But time
was exactly what the United States did not have.
But most important, the U.S. leadership underestimated the consequences of
an invasion. They set their goals as high as they did because they did not
believe that the Iraqis would resist -- and when resistance began, they
denied that it involved anything more than the ragtag remnants of the old
regime. Their misreading of Iraq was compounded with an extraordinary
difficulty in adjusting their thinking as reality unfolded.
But even without the administration's denial, we can see in hindsight that
the current crisis was hardwired into the strategy. If the United States
wanted to destroy al Qaeda, it had to do things that would suck it into the
current situation -- unless it was enormously skilled and nimble, which it
certainly was not. In the end, the primary objective -- defending the
homeland -- was won at the cost of trying to achieve goals in Iraq and
Afghanistan that cannot be achieved.
In the political debate that is raging today in the United States, our view
is that both sides are quite wrong. The administration's argument for
building democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan misses the point that the United
States cannot be successful in this, because it lacks the force to carry out
the mission. The administration's critics, who argue that Iraq particularly
diverted attention from fighting al Qaeda, fail to appreciate the complex
matrix of relationships the United States was trying to adjust with its
invasion of Iraq.
The administration is incapable of admitting that it has overreached and led
U.S. forces into an impossible position. Its critics fail to understand the
intricate connections between the administration's various actions and the
failure of al Qaeda to strike inside the United States for five years.
-
Today's NYTimes
Most Tribes in Anbar Agree to Unite Against Insurgents
Yahya Ahmed/Associated Press
A victim of a blast Sunday in Kirkuk. More than two dozen people were killed in coordinated attacks by suicide bombers in Kirkuk and Falluja.
By KHALID AL-ANSARY and ALI ADEEB
Published: September 18, 2006
BAGHDAD, Sept. 17 ? Nearly all the tribes from Iraq?s volatile Sunni-dominated Anbar Province have agreed to join forces and fight Al Qaeda insurgents and other foreign-backed ?terrorists,? an influential tribal leader said Sunday. Iraqi government leaders encouraged the movement.
Twenty-five of about 31 tribes in Anbar, a vast, mostly desert region that stretches westward from Baghdad to the borders of Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, have united against insurgents and gangs that are ?killing people for no reason,? said the tribal leader, Sheik Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi.
?We held a meeting earlier and agreed to fight those who call themselves mujahadeen,? Mr. Rishawi said in an interview. ?We believe that there is a conspiracy against our Iraqi people. Those terrorists claimed that they are fighters working on liberating Iraq, but they turned out to be killers. Now all the people are fed up and have turned against them.?
It is unclear how quickly or forcefully the tribal fighters will confront Al Qaeda and other insurgents, who mostly operate in and around the provincial capital, Ramadi, despite recurrent American military efforts to stop them. But for American and Iraqi officials, who have tried to persuade the Sunni Arab majority in Anbar to reject the insurgency and embrace Iraqi nationalism, Mr. Rishawi?s comments are seen as an encouraging sign.
Word of the tribal agreement came on a day when coordinated suicide bombings rocked Kirkuk and Falluja, and graphic evidence of more sectarian killings surfaced in Baghdad.
In Kirkuk, an oil-rich city in the north bordering the autonomous Kurdish region, suicide bombers detonated four cars and one truck laden with explosives, killing more than two dozen people and wounding more than 100, Iraqi and American officials said. In Falluja, a Sunni-controlled city in Anbar, 30 miles west of Baghdad, five suicide car bombs exploded within 15 minutes, an American military official said, killing five people and wounding 23.
The police in Baghdad reported finding 36 bodies in several neighborhoods, an Interior Ministry official said. Eight were discovered in one area with gunshot wounds to the head and bearing marks of torture. But an American military spokesman said her office was aware of only 11 bodies found.
Also Sunday, the American military said a sailor with the First Marine Logistics Group died Saturday from wounds in fighting in Anbar Province.
Mr. Rishawi said the 25 tribes counted 30,000 young men armed with assault rifles who were willing to confront and kill the insurgents and criminal gangs that he blamed for damaging tribal life in Anbar, dividing members by religious sect and driving a wave of violent crime in Ramadi.
?We are in battle with the terrorists who kill Sunnis and Shiites, and we do not respect anyone between us who talks in a sectarian sense,? said Mr. Rishawi, the leader of the Rishawi tribe, a subset of the Dulaimi tribe, the largest in Anbar. Half the Rishawi are Shiite Arabs and half are Sunni, he said.
Mr. Rishawi estimated that the insurgents had about 1,300 fighters, many of them foreigners, and are backed by other nations? intelligence services, though he declined to specify them.
On Sunday, he said the coalition of 25 tribes sent letters to the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and other top government officials to seek their support.
Sheik Fassal al-Guood, a prominent tribal leader from Ramadi, said Sheik Khalid al-Attiya, the deputy speaker of Parliament and a Shiite, met with the tribal leaders Thursday and gave them a ?positive response.?
In addition to the government?s blessing, Mr. Rishawi said, the tribes also wanted weapons, equipment and tactical help from an Iraqi Army brigade. ?The terrorists have different kinds of weapons while we have only AK-47?s,? Mr. Rishawi said. He predicted that with sufficient help, ?their force will collapse in one month.?
Ali Dabbagh, a government spokesman, said Mr. Maliki supported ?any operations that try to resist terrorism and aims to maintain security in this dear and important part from the country.?
Government officials are weighing an official response to the tribes, Mr. Dabbagh said, but there has not been any agreement to supply them. ?We are grateful to them for their desire to protect their cities,? he said, ?and we are encouraging them.?
An American military official said tribes had fought Sunni insurgents in Anbar in the past but had never formed a united front. ?This would be the first we?ve seen of tribes banding together,? said the official, who asked for anonymity because the subject was a delicate one.
Reuters quoted a man who identified himself as a senior Al Qaeda leader in northern Ramadi calling for an Islamic caliphate in Anbar and portraying tribal leaders as the enemy.
?We have the right to kill all infidels, like the police and army and all those who support them,? said the man, who called himself Abu Farouk, Reuters reported. ?This tribal system is un-Islamic. We are proud to kill tribal leaders who are helping the Americans.?
Last month, a Marine intelligence report described Al Qaeda as an ?integral part of the social fabric? of Anbar, and said the American military, with about 30,000 troops there, did not control vast reaches of the province, roughly the size of Louisiana.
In Kirkuk, Iraqi and American military officials said they could not immediately tell which groups were behind the suicide bomb attacks. Kirkuk has become a violent battleground between Iraqi Arabs ? Shiite and Sunni ? and Kurds who control Kirkuk?s police and government.
The deadliest of the Kirkuk bomb attacks, by a truck laden with explosives that blew up between the offices of two Kurdish political parties, killed at least 18 people and wounded 55, said Lt. Col. Urhan Abdullah of the Kirkuk police. Two minutes later, a car bomb, apparently intended for a private security firm, killed two people and wounded three others, said Maj. Farhad Mahmoud of the Kirkuk police.
A third suicide car bomb detonated near an Iraqi police checkpoint about 15 miles south of Kirkuk, the police said. A fourth car bomb exploded in front of the house of Sheik Wasfi al-Asi, who had recently publicly called on the government to release Saddam Hussein, who is currently being tried on genocide charges. The house was empty, the police said, but the bomb killed two people and wounded five others.
Firefighters battled flames at collapsed buildings and charred bodies lay in streets littered with twisted car parts, Reuters reported.
Reporting was contributed by Paul von Zielbauer, Omar al-Neami, Khalid W. Hassan and Qais Mizher.
-
This article out of India gives what seems to be a well-informed breakdown of the dynamics of Pakistan.
==================================
Pakistan's Faultline
The so-called land of the pure, Pakistan, on its creation in 1947 had approximately 13 percent minorities residing within an Islamic population of 76 million. In its unholy fervour to achieve physical instead of the spiritual purity, the minorities were reduced to 2.5 percent even as the country's population soared to 156 millions by the year 2000. In any society, it is the minorities that play the crucial role of moderation. Their existence is a safeguard against extreme tendencies. Pakistan lost the benefit of this natural societal instrument of balance early in its history. Once the minorities, more or less, were out of the way, Pakistan's Punjabi Sunni population which not only constituted the majority but also controlled the instruments of power in the state, turned to ? killing Shias, expelling Ahmadiyas from Islam, denying basic rights to the Balochis, depriving Sind of water resources, and suppressing populations in the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir including Northern Areas. Under the clouds of Talibanisation, this became further skewed when the women who constitute nearly half the population were denied education and practically incarcerated in their homes ? thus further impairing the societal balance. Simultaneously, Pakistan Army and the ISI persisted with their destructive spree by exporting terrorism to India, SE Asia, Central Asia, EU and America ? all in the name of religion! In the comity of nations, one can hardly find a parallel to this inherent self-destructive proclivity.
Pakistan 's Punjabi dominated army in search of the elusive purity and to perpetuate its hold on power structures encourages the majority Punjabi Sunni population in its misadventures. In pursuit of power, the bogey of threat from India was conjured. In schools children were indoctrinated to hate Indians. Therefore, the genesis of the Pakistan's present Fault Line lies in the diabolically engineered mindset that has created multiple fault lines and which have now coalesced into one deep and divisive fault line running right across the length of the country, threatening its virtual vivisection into two halves.
The first major setback to Pakistan occurred 24 years after inception when it lost 55% of its population in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and almost half of its territory. Religion could not act as effective glue due to the insatiable avarice the Pakistan's Punjabi Army displayed in its refusal to share legitimate power with the eastern wing. Islamabad conveniently blames New Delhi for this separation but a closer scrutiny of facts reveals otherwise. Between 1947 and 1970, whenever Pakistan chose to attack India, the strategically simple option available to India could have been to annex East Pakistan, which Islamabad was never in a position to defend effectively due to the vast geographical distances and consequently the enormous military logistics involved. Nevertheless, New Delhi absorbed Pakistan's attacks and localised it to its Western front, never extending the war to the eastern theatre. With millions of refugees pouring into India in 1971, Islamabad made its position in East Pakistan untenable, and India was compelled to initiate positive action. Since occupation of territory was not the motive, Indian Army promptly withdrew after liberating Pakistan's eastern wing from the miseries and atrocities being perpetrated by the western wing on its own people.
In 1950s, Hans J. Morgenthau, the then Director of Center for the Study of American Foreign Policy at University of Chicago, in his book The New Republic had observed, "Pakistan is not a nation and hardly a state. It has no justification, ethnic origin, language, civilisation or the consciousness of those who make up its population. They have no interest in common except one: fear of Hindu domination. It is to that fear and nothing else that Pakistan poses its existence and thus for survival as an independent state." During the same period, another American scholar Keith Callard in his book Pakistan - a Political Study commented, "the force behind the establishment of Pakistan was largely the feeling of insecurity." Both these scholars missed out on some vital aspects that can be attributed to the "fear of Hindu domination" and "insecurity". First, creation of Pakistan was an Anglo-Saxon mischief to protect their vested strategic interests. Second, the land bestowed to create Pakistan was separated amicably without war. Third, the Western powers, (and China that uses Pakistan as a proxy against India) fuelled these imagined fears that only created the effect of exacerbating latter's psychological fault line. Therefore, explanations like "fear of Hindu domination" and "insecurity" and other excuses as justification are used as psywar tool to disguise Islamabad's treachery against New Delhi since 1947. Indian political right does not indulge in 'export of terrorism' or 'suicide bombers' as an instrument of foreign policy!
After the break-up of Pakistan in 1971, West Pakistan should have emerged as a more cohesive unit - geographically, politically, economically and in orientation. However 33 years hence, nearly 55% of Pakistan's area is witnessing vicious insurgencies, which if not controlled, could lead to further vivisection of the country. Most of the population in these areas i.e. Waziristan, Balochistan, NWFP, and Northern Areas (Gilgit and Baltistan) in POK has been historically difficult to control and administer. This notwithstanding, ever since Musharraf's ascension to power, these areas have slipped from peripheral disquiet to intense insurgencies. Normal governance in these areas has collapsed and is being held only by military force. These multiple fault lines as explained subsequently, if not adequately addressed can lead to internal strife and break up of Pakistan.
WAZIRISTAN (Federally Administered Tribal Areas). The population of this area is 3,138,000 that are 2% of Pakistan's total population. Socio-economic development has been totally lagging in Waziristan. The literacy rate is 17% and only 10% population has access to sanitation. With an area of 27,220 sq km, it constitutes 3% of Pakistan's total landmass. The area is inhabited by Wazirs (Pathan Tribe). The Taliban and Al-Qaeda has significant presence and influence in this area. Post 9/11, after reported death of Namangani (Head of Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan), the second-in-command Yuldeshev crossed over with surviving members of IMU into South Waziristan, where he and his Uzbek and Chechen instructors set up training camp for Jihadi terrorists. The Jihadi and Kalishkinov culture in this area is a legacy of the region's intense involvement in the war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 80's. Post 9/11, consequent to jettisoning of Taliban by the Pakistan dispensation, the population in Waziristan has been subjected to ground and aerial attacks to flush-out Al-Qaeda and Taliban carders. There are 80,000 Pak Army personnel deployed in the 13 areas / agencies that make up Waziristan or FATA. The area known for its fiercely independent tribes and Islamic terrorists vehemently resent presence of the Army and its coordinated operations with US troops based in Afghanistan. The enormity of the growing strife in Waziristan can be gauged from the casualty figures. In 2005, 300 civilians and 250 troops were killed, and another 1400 were wounded; while up to March 2006, 121 civilians, 475 terrorists and 71 soldiers have been killed. Reportedly nearly 80% of pro-government tribal leaders have also been eliminated. The Pakistan government has also been using money to buy the allegiance of tribal leaders. Recently, the corps commander Lt Gen Safdar Hussain has publicly admitted to having paid Rs.32 million (US $ 5,40,000) to some tribal leaders for severing their links with Al-Qaeda and Taliban.
BALOCHISTAN. The Balochistan province constitutes 44% (347,190 sq km) of Pakistan's landmass and has a population of 6.5 million i.e. 4% of Pakistan's population. Only 70% of Baloch are in Pakistan, the reminder being in Iran and Afghanistan. The Baloch are Hanafi Sunnis and a strong group of Zikri Baloch, having a population of about 7,00,000 inhabit the Makran area, who believe in the 15th century teachings of Madhi ? an Islamic Messiah ? Nur Pak, have their own prayers and do not fast during Ramzan. Baloch nationalism has been a factor in Pakistan since its existence. The Baloch, who in general had supported the overthrow of Bhutto by Zia-ul-Haq, are up in arms against the central authority under Musharraf. In addition to 1,00,000 Para-military forces, there are nearly 23,000 Pak Army personnel deployed to quell the growing insurgency in Balochistan under the leadership of Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti (ex Provincial Governor). The Baloch have been demanding greater autonomy, more public sector jobs and higher share of revenues. The extremely inhospitable landmass of Balochistan, where subsistence is difficult, is critical for Pakistan's energy supplies, and its maritime security and trade by way of Gwadar port. Balochistan meets 45 percent of Pakistan's energy needs. The Baloch people lament that the Gwadar area has been appropriated by Generals of Pakistan Army, who in turn have sold it to Karachi and Punjabi business magnets at astronomical prices. All the 22 districts of Balochistan are currently impacted by insurgency incurring an estimated cost of Rs. 6 million every month to the Pak establishment, and also resulting in severe gas and power shortages in the country, especially in Punjab. Gas supplies from Sui, Loti and Pir Koh gas fields have been disrupted. Surface transport has been crippled. Three naval boats have so far been destroyed in Gwadar port. Railways have been compelled to operate only at night. So far, on at least a dozen occasions, railway tracks have been blown and on more than two dozens occasions gas pipelines have been targeted.
NWFP. North West Frontier Province (NWFP) with an area of 74,521 sq km and a population of approximately 24 million in addition to 3 million Afghan refugees, is a problem in perpetuity because of the Pashtuns, who straddle the Durand Line (2450 Km long Pakistan-Afghanistan border). The relations between the NWFP and the central government are increasingly becoming tenuous, as the majority of the population is averse to Pakistan's cooperation with the US against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The area continues to be infested with fundamentalists and the Jihadis. In fact, it is the fundamentalist Islamic parties, who call shots in the province and lend all kinds of support to the remnants of Taliban.
POK (NORTHERN AREAS). The Northern Areas comprising Gilgit and Baltistan have an area of 72,496 sq km and a population of 1.5 million, is governed directly by the Central Government in Pakistan. In fact the Northern Areas, which are actually a part of POK, but incorporated in Pakistan, are five times of the area designated as Azad Kashmir. This area, culturally and linguistically much different from other parts of Pakistan, has been subjected to state backed Sunni terrorism. The composition of the Northern Light Infantry Units is being re-engineered by the central government to make it Sunni dominant. Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK), which witnessed devastating earthquake in which more than 70,000 people lost their lives, demonstrated the administrative apathy of the Central Government in Pakistan with regard to the region. The Pakistan Army unlike the Indian Army was unable to respond to the needs of the people ? thus leaving much of the rescue and rehabilitation to 1000 NATO personnel and fundamentalist organisations like JuD.
PUNJAB & SIND . The situation in the heartland of Pakistan i.e. Punjab and Sind is rapidly deteriorating, given the proliferation of Islamic fundamentalist ideology and their mushrooming activities. Organisations like Jamat-ud-Dawa (JuD), the parent organisation of Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) is fast occupying the political space due to absence of legitimate political parties. The reach of the Islamic terrorists in Pakistan's heartland was evidenced by the car bomb attack near the US Consulate in Karachi before the recent visit of President Bush to the country. The degeneration of law and order situation in the heartland can also be gauged by the fact that for security reasons, President Musharraf was asked by the US authorities not to receive President Bush at the Chaklala airport.
Predicated on the situation in Pakistan, it can be averred that more than half the country has slipped into anarchy and the remaining may also follow if Islamabad does not carryout a drastic reassessment of its nationhood and statehood. In fact, Pakistan Army is getting over- stretched owing to its commitments in internal security duties and deployment on its borders with India and Afghanistan. Internally, the anti-India catalyst that sustained Pakistan Army is no longer effective. Even on the Afghanistan border the ISAF and Karzai are fiercely determined to defeat any attempt by Islamabad's to re-export Taliban. Today the internal instability within Pakistan is fast acquiring proportions which could lead to further break up of the country ? all due to sheer myopic policies pursued by its military junta. An external power today does not need to wage a war. It can simply exploit the precarious internal situation by using its intelligence agencies to attain the same objectives by fuelling the dissent through psywar and financial means. Fortunately, Pakistan has to contend with a benign power like India, which in the first instance created the former by magnanimously donating its land. Therefore Islamabad instead of exporting hatred and destruction, should seek positive parity with India and others in terms of improving the quality of life of its citizens in an inclusive manner. Towards this Pakistan must:
Seek positive parity with India i.e. with regard to human development. Negative parity will bleed Pakistan in human and economic terms.
Realise that Pakistani statehood has remained vulnerable due to flawed nation building policies e.g. Punjabi domination that constitute 58% of the total population.
Realise that Army can be a symbol of nationhood and an instrument and not the state itself.
Realise that jihadis are a double-edged weapon and can never get Pakistan its illusive nationhood and statehood.
Realise that by attempting to engineer history, the future is rendered in jeopardy.
Realise that Pakistan has the potential to be a positive role model for other Islamic countries.
It is a well-known fact that a large number of Islamic countries are bestowed with extraordinary oil wealth that drives the world economy. If the jehad factory of Pakistan and other Islamic fundamentalist institutions had used this wealth to educate, modernise their societies and improved the quality of human resources in the early eighties, at the dawn of the 21 st century, it would have emerged as a modern, powerful and positive entity in the world arena without firing a single shot! Pakistan's establishment therefore must realise that its possible vivisection, due to its flawed policies, may deal a fatal blow to the very Islamic cause, that it purports to countenance and guide.
The writer is Editor, Indian Defence Review. The article first appeared in Indian Defence Review Vol 20(4).
?Security Research Review Volume 2(2) 2006
-
And one more article which suggests that the US is going into Waziristan. Note also the similarities with the Hizb strategy in Lebanon...
Sep 2, 2006 ?
?
?The knife at Pakistan's throat
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
MIRANSHAH, North Waziristan - "I can see slit throats beneath these turbans and beards" were the words of Hajaj bin Yusuf, an 8th-century tyrant in what is now Iraq, as he witnessed a gathering of leading religious and political figures.
A similar thought occurred to this writer as he attended the largest ever gathering of Pakistani Taliban, tribal elders and politicians in Miranshah, the tribal capital of North Waziristan, on Wednesday. Fire and blood were in the air as momentous events
?
loomed over the Pakistani tribal areas of North and South Waziristan, where the Taliban are in complete control.
The tribal areas bordering Afghanistan's volatile southern and southwestern provinces are once again a focus of the "war on ?terror" and are likely to soon become as significant to the United States as Afghanistan itself.
The Americans are pointing directly at the two Waziristans as the primary conduit for the suicide bombers who are currently playing havoc with the US-NATO-led war machine in Afghanistan, and a safe haven for enemy combatants. The US now has come up with a plan to confront the strategic arm of the Taliban based on the Pakistani side of the border.
The anti-US forces, meanwhile, are taking countermeasures, and the Pakistani government is trying to find a safe position for itself between the antagonists.
Negotiations have begun to finalize new rules for dealing with the tribal region. Last month Pakistani Vice Chief of Army Staff General Ehsan Saleem Hayat attended the conference of the Tripartite Commission (representing Afghanistan, Pakistan and the forces of the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) in Kabul, and General John Abizaid of US Centcom (Central Command) has traveled to Pakistan to finalize a blueprint.
Sources say the Americans are set on a plan of hot pursuit of enemy combatants across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and they want a clear demarcation of the Pakistani tribal areas that have long been volatile and which they say should be part of the Afghanistan front in the "war on terror".
Last month, Pakistan considered the issue and offered in response a geographical demarcation of the border and a fence along it. In fact the border in this region is the imaginary Durand Line, which passes through mountains and populated areas, and is impossible to seal. The only practical solution, as far as Washington is concerned, is hot pursuit of enemy combatants into their refuges in Pakistan.
On Wednesday in Miranshah, hundreds of people attended a ceremony for new madrassa graduates in what was considered the largest ever gathering of people from the two Waziristans. The gathering was also a manifestation of the broader current now ?flowing through the tribal areas - the imminent arrival of the US military.
The ceremony was scheduled soon after negotiations started in the two Waziristans between Pakistani authorities on one side and the Pakistani Taliban and Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam (Fazlur Rehman) on the other. Jamiat-i-Ulama-i-Islam (JUI-F) is the political party of Pakistani opposition leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman, and is the only party still working in the two Waziristans. JUI-F keeps in close contact with the mujahideen who call themselves the Pakistani Taliban.
At this meeting, the authorities, still smarting from the rout of Islamabad's forces by the tribals in both Waziristans when the government tried to impose its will in the region, declared that under the status quo the government could neither withdraw its military nor prevent US-led forces from entering the tribal areas.
The JUI-F itself is desperately looking for ways to restrict the Pakistani Taliban's ambitions. The latter movement is clearly intent on moving into the cities, especially those politically influenced by the JUI-F, and becoming a major power player in the country as a whole.
The JUI-F, therefore, is forging a strategy with the Pakistani Taliban under which the Taliban will retain de facto control of the Waziristans while the political-cum-religious leadership, including the JUI-F, will appear to be running the show - and, at the same time, be shielding the Taliban from US-led forces. The Miranshah gathering was a manifestation of this new strategy.
At the gathering, mujahideen leader Maulana Sadiq Noor and a representative of Gul Badar (chief of the Pakistani Taliban in North Waziristan), as well as other members of the mujahideen shura (council), were seated on a stage while the leaders of the JUI-F delivered the speeches. Said an organizer belonging to the student wing of the JUI-F, "Mujahideen will not be allowed to speak; rather they will only sit on the back benches on the stage."
The gathering presaged the future setup in the Waziristans. The mujahideen will remain in the background and the non-militant face of leadership, in the form of local tribal elders, the JUI-F and religious leaders, will be visible. This will enable the Pakistani authorities to justify their proposal to fence the Durand Line rather than allow US-led forces a free hand in the tribal areas.
Meanwhile the "guests" - foreign anti-US fighters including Uzbeks, Arabs and Chechens - who are living in North Waziristan have had their own command structures dismantled and been asked to join the central mujahideen force of commander Gul Badar, or simply to scatter into ordinary tribal society.
Certainly, there is no overt connection between the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Pakistani Taliban, yet the new setup in the Waziristans clearly echoes that in Lebanon, where Hezbollah hides itself behind many thick curtains while remaining in a position of power. It was precisely this setup that enabled Lebanon to defend its territorial integrity and political interests during the recent Israeli invasion.
Neither the US nor Islamabad knows the strength of the Pakistani Taliban in the mountain fastnesses of the two Waziristans. Pakistan has offered a general amnesty for all previously wanted people, and military checkpoints are manned only at three or four points on the borders of the region. The Taliban, meanwhile, call the shots everywhere.
Such was the situation until Wednesday, when the two Waziristans embarked on a new phase in which US military campaigns seem unavoidable. Cognizant of developments and intent on saving turbans, beards and throats, thick curtains have been drawn.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan bureau chief.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)
===========
From a Feb 06 article in asia times..Some ghastly pictures below...not for
the squeamish...
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The Taliban's bloody foothold in Pakistan
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?By Syed Saleem Shahzad
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? KARACHI - By taking control of virtually all of
Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area on the border with Afghanistan, the
Taliban have gained a significant base from which to wage their resistance
against US-led forces in Afghanistan. At the same time, the development
solidifies the anti-US resistance groups in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan,
which will now fight under a single strategy.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The Taliban recently declared the establishment of
an "Islamic state" in North Waziristan, and they now, through the brutal
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?elimination of the criminal elements who previously
held sway, in effect rule in the rugged territory.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?As a tribal area, North Waziristan has always
enjoyed significant ?independence from Islamabad, and even on the occasions
when the Pakistani army has ventured into the area to root out foreign
fighters or Afghan resistance figures, it has received fierce opposition,
and in effect been forced to back off.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The Taliban and their supporters plant ?roadside
bombs on the routes used by the Pakistani paramilitary forces, and virtually
every day one or two vehicles are blown up. This measure is aimed to keep
the security forces away from the actual tribal areas of Waziristan. In
short, the writ of the Pakistani political agent (the central government's
representative) barely extends beyond Miramshah Bazaar and Wana Bazaar (the
official headquarters). Everywhere else, the Taliban are calling the shots.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?Asia Times Online has viewed a video disc released
by the ?Taliban that illustrates their control in North Waziristan. The
footage includes their bases, where thousands of youths are present,
preparations for an attack into Afghanistan, and shots of criminals executed
at a public rally staged by the Taliban.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The government of Pakistan has termed the executions
"tyranny".
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The video opens with pictures of the headless bodies
of criminals strung up in Miramshah Bazaar, executed by the Taliban.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The next segment showcases the establishment of
strong bases in which thousands of turban-clad youths can be seen with guns.
Commanders scan the ranks and select a squad to launch a ?guerrilla attack
on a US base in Khost province in Afghanistan. They put on headbands with
the wording "There is no God but the one God; Mohammed is the messenger of
God."
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The fighters emerge from their base at night and
head for Khost. After a 30-minute battle, flames can be seen rising from
within the US base. The squad returns before dawn.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The video also includes the "official" announcement
of the establishment of an Islamic state in Waziristan (which includes ?the
tribal area of South Waziristan) and a declaration of the Taliban's rule in
North Waziristan.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?This development confirms an Asia Times Online
article describing how al-Qaeda and its allies - in this case the Taliban -
would establish bases from which to coordinate and strengthen its global war
against the United States ( Al-Qaeda goes back to base, November 4, 2005).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?This announcement of an Islamic state is interpreted
as a prelude ?to the Taliban's summer offensive, precisely at a time when
Iran's nuclear dossier will be submitted to the United Nations Security
Council, and both Europe and the US will be mounting pressure on Tehran to
abandon its nuclear program.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The US and Iran being at loggerheads sits very well
with al-Qaeda's plans to establish bases and a unified command system of
anti-US resistance from Iraq to Afghanistan. Iran is at present the only
missing link in this strategy.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?Despite little love being lost between the Taliban
and Iran, al- Qaeda's Egyptian camp has retained its traditional decades-old
ties with the Iranian regime. The real ideologue of the Iranian revolution
of 1979 was Dr Ali Shariati, who was inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood's
Syed Qutub. Similarly, the Islamic Jihad of Palestine officially claims its
inspiration from the Shi'ite Iranian revolution, despite being a completely
Sunni Islamic group.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?Al-Qaeda's link with Iran, although at a very low
level, could prove critical in the coming months. Should Iran find itself
sanctioned, or even attacked by the US, few states would dare to support
Tehran.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?Al-Qaeda, however, would seize the opportunity,
asking in return that it be given its desperately needed corridor through
Iran to link Afghanistan and Pakistan with Iraq and the Arab world.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?A silent revolution
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The Taliban video disc, which is a mixture of Pashtu
and Urdu, maintained that criminals had been calling the shots in North
Waziristan. They routinely abducted children and sodomized them, and they
charged protection money from shopkeepers, from transport operators, and
even for marriage ceremonies. The gangs were headed by an Afghan, Hakeem
Khan Zadran. They had various sanctuaries where drugs, women and alcohol
were available.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The government, too, was claimed to have paid the
criminals so that they would not interfere with official business.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?But a turning point came last December. A group of
Taliban fighters were heading to Khost to launch an operation in Afghanistan
when they were stopped by some criminals demanding money for safe passage.
The Taliban refused, and were allowed to pass. However, a few kilometers
further down the ?road the criminals fired a rocket and blew up the vehicle.
Four Taliban belonging to the Wazir tribe were killed.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The incident outraged local supporters of the
Taliban, who converged near Miramshah and warned people to leave their homes
if they lived near criminals. A raid was then conducted on one criminal
sanctuary. In a fierce 15-minute gun battle, several gangsters were killed,
some were seized and many fled.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?Over the next three days, according to the video,
the Taliban smoked out numerous criminals from their hideouts all over North
Waziristan. Many were executed at mass rallies in Miramshah Bazaar.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The Taliban movement
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?In a similar manner, the Taliban emerged as a
reformist movement against criminals and warlords in Zabul and Kandahar in
Afghanistan about 16 years ago.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The Taliban have shown their muscles so powerfully
in North Waziristan that Pakistani forces have just stepped away. It has now
become a popular movement with the complete support of local tribes.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The Taliban have attracted thousands of foot
soldiers from all over, including Arabs, Chechens, Pakistanis, Afghans,
Uzbeks and local tribals. North Waziristan is now their "Islamic state" and
base from which to launch a summer offensive in Afghanistan.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?According to Asia Times Online investigations, more
than 100 suicide squads have been lined up for the summer assault. These
squads have precise targets all over Afghanistan. The Taliban leadership is
also encouraged by the strong representation of Islamists in the new Afghan
parliament as potential supporters.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?The Taliban have already disseminated warnings to
all the governors in the south and southeast of Afghanistan not to mobilize
forces in search of the Taliban - or else they will face the music in the
form of suicide attacks. (On Tuesday in the southern city of Kandahar, a
suicide bomber attacked a guard post outside the police headquarters,
killing 13 people and wounding 11.)
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?Local Taliban commanders such as Mullah Dadullah are
already in the field to sway Afghan tribes in the Pashtun heartlands of
Afghanistan to be prepared for the offensive.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?Contacts in the Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan - a major
resistance group - in Kabul maintain that the long absence of commander
Kashmir Khan had led many to believe that he had been arrested by US forces.
However, he recently emerged from hiding and has become the main engine of
the resistance in the Kunar Valley, where he is cultivating local tribes for
support.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?"If this military strategy is implemented it would
have serious consequences for the allied forces in Afghanistan, especially
at a time when they are mounting pressure on Iran," commented an
intelligence analyst. "However, the Taliban made tall claims about winter
suicide attacks, but barring a few events they failed to inflict major
losses on allied forces."
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?That was before the Taliban secured a base in North
Waziristan, though. This time around could see a very different outcome.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?Next: The resistance route from southern to
southeastern Afghanistan
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?Syed Saleem Shahzad is Bureau Chief, Pakistan
-
Sep 2, 2006
The knife at Pakistan's throat
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
MIRANSHAH, North Waziristan - "I can see slit throats
beneath these turbans and beards" were the words of Hajaj bin Yusuf, an
8th-century tyrant in what is now Iraq, as he witnessed a gathering of
leading religious and political figures.
A similar thought occurred to this writer as he attended
the largest ever gathering of Pakistani Taliban, tribal elders and
politicians in Miranshah, the tribal capital of North Waziristan, on
Wednesday. Fire and blood were in the air as momentous events
loomed over the Pakistani tribal areas of North and South
Waziristan, where the Taliban are in complete control.
The tribal areas bordering Afghanistan's volatile southern
and southwestern provinces are once again a focus of the "war on terror"
and are likely to soon become as significant to the United States as
Afghanistan itself.
The Americans are pointing directly at the two Waziristans
as the primary conduit for the suicide bombers who are currently playing
havoc with the US-NATO-led war machine in Afghanistan, and a safe haven for
enemy combatants. The US now has come up with a plan to confront the
strategic arm of the Taliban based on the Pakistani side of the border.
The anti-US forces, meanwhile, are taking countermeasures,
and the Pakistani government is trying to find a safe position for itself
between the antagonists.
Negotiations have begun to finalize new rules for dealing
with the tribal region. Last month Pakistani Vice Chief of Army Staff
General Ehsan Saleem Hayat attended the conference of the Tripartite
Commission (representing Afghanistan, Pakistan and the forces of the US and
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) in Kabul, and General John Abizaid
of US Centcom (Central Command) has traveled to Pakistan to finalize a
blueprint.
Sources say the Americans are set on a plan of hot pursuit
of enemy combatants across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and they want a
clear demarcation of the Pakistani tribal areas that have long been volatile
and which they say should be part of the Afghanistan front in the "war on
terror".
Last month, Pakistan considered the issue and offered in
response a geographical demarcation of the border and a fence along it. In
fact the border in this region is the imaginary Durand Line, which passes
through mountains and populated areas, and is impossible to seal. The only
practical solution, as far as Washington is concerned, is hot pursuit of
enemy combatants into their refuges in Pakistan.
On Wednesday in Miranshah, hundreds of people attended a
ceremony for new madrassa graduates in what was considered the largest ever
gathering of people from the two Waziristans. The gathering was also a
manifestation of the broader current now flowing through the tribal areas -
the imminent arrival of the US military.
The ceremony was scheduled soon after negotiations started
in the two Waziristans between Pakistani authorities on one side and the
Pakistani Taliban and Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam (Fazlur Rehman) on the other.
Jamiat-i-Ulama-i-Islam (JUI-F) is the political party of Pakistani
opposition leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman, and is the only party still working
in the two Waziristans. JUI-F keeps in close contact with the mujahideen who
call themselves the Pakistani Taliban.
At this meeting, the authorities, still smarting from the
rout of Islamabad's forces by the tribals in both Waziristans when the
government tried to impose its will in the region, declared that under the
status quo the government could neither withdraw its military nor prevent
US-led forces from entering the tribal areas.
The JUI-F itself is desperately looking for ways to
restrict the Pakistani Taliban's ambitions. The latter movement is clearly
intent on moving into the cities, especially those politically influenced by
the JUI-F, and becoming a major power player in the country as a whole.
The JUI-F, therefore, is forging a strategy with the
Pakistani Taliban under which the Taliban will retain de facto control of
the Waziristans while the political-cum-religious leadership, including the
JUI-F, will appear to be running the show - and, at the same time, be
shielding the Taliban from US-led forces. The Miranshah gathering was a
manifestation of this new strategy.
At the gathering, mujahideen leader Maulana Sadiq Noor and
a representative of Gul Badar (chief of the Pakistani Taliban in North
Waziristan), as well as other members of the mujahideen shura (council),
were seated on a stage while the leaders of the JUI-F delivered the
speeches. Said an organizer belonging to the student wing of the JUI-F,
"Mujahideen will not be allowed to speak; rather they will only sit on the
back benches on the stage."
The gathering presaged the future setup in the
Waziristans. The mujahideen will remain in the background and the
non-militant face of leadership, in the form of local tribal elders, the
JUI-F and religious leaders, will be visible. This will enable the Pakistani
authorities to justify their proposal to fence the Durand Line rather than
allow US-led forces a free hand in the tribal areas.
Meanwhile the "guests" - foreign anti-US fighters
including Uzbeks, Arabs and Chechens - who are living in North Waziristan
have had their own command structures dismantled and been asked to join the
central mujahideen force of commander Gul Badar, or simply to scatter into
ordinary tribal society.
Certainly, there is no overt connection between the
Lebanese Hezbollah and the Pakistani Taliban, yet the new setup in the
Waziristans clearly echoes that in Lebanon, where Hezbollah hides itself
behind many thick curtains while remaining in a position of power. It was
precisely this setup that enabled Lebanon to defend its territorial
integrity and political interests during the recent Israeli invasion.
Neither the US nor Islamabad knows the strength of the
Pakistani Taliban in the mountain fastnesses of the two Waziristans.
Pakistan has offered a general amnesty for all previously wanted people, and
military checkpoints are manned only at three or four points on the borders
of the region. The Taliban, meanwhile, call the shots everywhere.
Such was the situation until Wednesday, when the two
Waziristans embarked on a new phase in which US military campaigns seem
unavoidable. Cognizant of developments and intent on saving turbans, beards
and throats, thick curtains have been drawn.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan bureau
chief.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)
Why it's not working in Afghanistan (Aug 30, '06)
The Taliban's bloody foothold in Pakistan (Feb 8, '06)
==============
A friend comments:
I can comment on "At the same time, what if it is understood that the US can send into Pakistan tribal areas, Spec Ops soldiers and support to root out the problems? Too wild an idea? It is "rumored" among some sources in a position to know that this is exactly what has occurred." (As a sidebar: Mush thinks the US is not winning in Afghanistan, and he has chose to side with the Taliban to try and maintain his dictatorship)."
I believe this "rumor" is true. The US has wanted to do this for a long time, but Mush has opposed it for political reasons. I believe the agreement states that the Taliban have immunity only so long as they live peacefully, but no immunity against US retaliation in the instance of a quick cross border raid to Afghanistan. This is confirmed by Bush's recent comment that we will bomb Pak if OBL is there.
As to my second point, Mush does not think Bush is winning in Afghanistan. For Bush to win, the Taliban/AQ in Afghanistan have to be rendered impotent. This has clearly not happened, infact there is a resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and their sanctuary is based in Waziristan. Mush has tried very hard to control the NWFP/Balochistan/Waziristan taliban/AQ areas without any success. Apparently 80,000 Pak troops are present in that region and still could not do it. As you know some of this is disputed territory with Afghanistan and Mush would love to have full control over it (annex it). Mush sees the ground realities and knows that if he continues on the present course, he will be fighting the Taliban as well as opposition parties demanding that he relinquish his uniform. On the other hand, making peace with the Taliban is a win-win for all. Mush can concentrate on the opposition parties and let Bush do the dirty work of cleaning out the Taliban, the Taliban can choose to live freely or at war with the Americans, Bush is happy because US soldiers will now be able to enter Waziristan with impunity ("hot pursuit")..atleast this is what I am understanding of the situation...Yash
-
Our World: Bush's information offensive
By CAROLINE GLICK
During the past week we learned a great deal about the nature of our enemies. We also learned a great deal about ourselves. If we draw the proper lessons from what we have seen we will go far toward winning the war.
With their ghoulish presentations at the UN General Assembly, both Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez made clear their hostile intent, disdain for freedom and their foes, and their fanatical intent to use all murderous means toward their totalitarian ends. The men were so hostile that even their usual apologists in academia and the political Left were too embarrassed to be seen in their company.
The Chavez and Ahmadinejad show ensured that the Bush administration's gamble in permitting the two entry to the United States had paid off. Given a platform, the dictators demonstrated the gravity of the threat they posed, as the administration had doubtless hoped they would.
Yet laying out a gangplank and hoping the enemy will be stupid enough to walk it is hardly a winning strategy in war. The stark reality of the global Islamist jihad and its strong support from European appeasers to third world dictators makes it necessary for the US to enact an information campaign capable of effectively advancing the stated American war aim of destroying jihad as a governing ideology and social force.
The potential for victory in the information warfare arena is great, and the failure of the US to meet this challenge is a great shame.
INFORMATION operations are a vital part of any war effort. They serve four basic purposes: to rally supporters to the rightness of their cause and the wrongness of their enemies cause; to dissuade any potential allies of one's enemies from joining their forces; to gain an ideological foothold in the enemies' society; and to demoralize enemy societies and so convince them that they have no chance of winning the war.
In both the Muslim world and the West, massive Saudi and other Islamist funding of mosques, Islamic schools, Middle East studies departments in universities, and lobbying arms show that jihadists have placed a premium on their information operations. The jihadists' extensive use of the Internet, cassette tapes, DVDs, videotapes and the print and broadcast media in the Muslim world complement these efforts.
The goals of the jihadists are clear. They wish to recruit soldiers. They wish to buy supporters among Western elites who will act as their apologists. They wish to demonize and delegitimize their ideological opponents in both Muslim societies and in the West by calling them apostates or racists. They wish to convince their enemies that there is no way to defeat the forces of jihad.
While massive, these efforts should be easy enough to undermine. For all the billions of dollars the jihadists have spent indoctrinating Muslims and weakening the West's will to fight them, their cause is anything but attractive. The cause of jihad is the cause of totalitarianism. It is the cause of hatred, misogyny, bigotry, mass murder, slavery, barbarism and humiliation. It is fundamentally unesthetic and unsympathetic.
As a result, attacking those who sponsor jihad, or serve as its apologists or purveyors should be a simple matter that can be undertaken at vastly less expense than that which has already been paid by the other side.
BUT THERE is a catch, of course. In order to conduct information operations effectively you have to be willing to identify your enemies and your allies, and to point fingers at those who refuse to take sides and embarrass them for sitting on the fence. That is, you need moral courage and clarity. You need to be willing to make people angry at you if you wish to earn their respect and support.
For the past five years the Bush administration has shirked this unpleasant task. It has categorized Saudi Arabia, the prime financier and propagator of jihad, as its ally. It has labeled Egypt, the epicenter of jihadist propaganda and incitement, a paragon of moderation and a stalwart ally.
Then there is Pakistan, which created the Taliban and has served as a refuge for Osama bin Laden since November 2001. Pakistan, too, is labeled a great ally, as are the Europeans and the Russians.
Israel, on the other hand, is a problem. Israel is the excuse that all of America's "great allies" give for refusing to act like America's allies. In the interests of pleasing its great allies, America holds Israel at arm's length.
Unfortunately, this policy sends exactly the wrong message. It teaches America's "allies" that they have nothing to lose by double-crossing the US. And it teaches truly liberal forces in the Muslim world and in the non-Islamic world that the US will not keep faith with them, and that they are, essentially on their own if they wish to take on the forces of jihad in their own societies and throughout the world.
THE BUSH administration's refusal to acknowledge the difference between its enemies and its allies was most pronounced last week in the president's meetings with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.
Earlier in the month Musharraf signed an accord with the Taliban that gave the group control over the Pakistani territories of north and south Waziristan. This agreement, which also involved Pakistan's release of some 2,500 Taliban and al-Qaida fighters from prison, is the Taliban's and al-Qaida's greatest victory since September 11, 2001. As military analyst Bill Roggio has reported on his Web site, The Fourth Rail, Musharraf's decision to hand Waziristan over to the Taliban and al-Qaida makes clear that he is a major enemy of the US.
But the Bush administration refuses to acknowledge this fact. Bush met with Musharraf in the White House and praised his leadership and his strong alliance with the US in fighting al-Qaida. The State Department praised the agreement that has caused NATO commanders to announce that more troops will be required in Afghanistan to fight the resurgent Taliban.
Likewise, Abbas has gone out of his way in recent months to forge an alliance between Fatah and Hamas on Hamas's terms. He agreed to form a unity government with Hamas that would unify their terror forces under one command to better wage war against Israel. He agreed that Hamas would not recognize Israel's right to exist. Fatah itself, which he commands, has committed more attacks against Israel than Hamas in recent years, and was involved in the cross-border attack on Israel in June where Cpl. Gilad Shalit was abducted. Under the agreement he offered, Fatah would maintain its terrorist agenda.
And yet, rather than announce that the US will have nothing to do with Abbas, Bush invited him to the White House and praised his commitment to peace. Rather than acknowledge that the Palestinian leadership - in Fatah and Hamas, as well as all other major parties - has shown by word and deed that it seeks not an independent Palestinian state but the eradication of the Jewish state, Bush has insisted that he wants nothing more than to see the creation of a Palestinian state.
THE BUSH administration's insistence on confusing friends and foes has been complemented by its refusal to make distinctions between jihadist political parties and non-jihadist political parties. Indeed, the US facilitated the participation of Hamas in the Palestinian elections, Hizbullah in the Lebanese elections, the Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian elections, and the jihadist Justice and Development party in the Moroccan elections.
In all these cases, these forces of totalitarianism were legitimized by their participation in the elections and their empowerment has enabled them to more ably advance the cause of jihad in their own societies and worldwide, at the expense of those moderate, liberal Muslims that must be empowered if jihad is to be defeated.
The world stands today on the edge of a potential upheaval. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas are poised to retake power in elections in November. In the US, on November 7, voters will decide the composition of the Congress and Senate and so, in many ways, decide whether the war will continue to be fought to victory or will be abandoned.
Israelis have awoken from the fantasy of appeasement and are poised to bring in a government capable of defending them. In Britain, Tony Blair's heirs operate with the knowledge that they will be better off politically if they abandon the US.
Information operations that expose liberal democratic civilization's foes and support its allies - be they states or individuals - have never been more vital. Yet unless the Bush administration finds the courage to properly identify those foes and allies, its message will do more to confound than to clarify, and US policies will continue to be plagued by confusion - to the detriment of America and humanity as a whole.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1159193315824&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
-
The New Detainee Law Does Not Deny Habeas Corpus
Fear not, New York Times, al Qaeda?s lawfare rights are still intact.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
There are innumerable positives in the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the new law on the treatment of enemy combatants that President Bush will soon sign. Among the best is Congress?s refusal to grant habeas-corpus rights to alien terrorists. After all, the terrorists already have them.
That the critique on this entirely appropriate measure has been dead wrong is given away by its full-throated hysteria. Typical was Richard Epstein, a distinguished constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, who admonished the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Bush administration and a compliant Republican Congress were unconstitutionally ?suspend[ing]? the great writ. The New York Times editorial board, in its signature hyperbole, railed that ?[d]etainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment.? What bunkum.
AL QAEDA TERRORISTS HAVE NO CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS
First, Congress cannot ?suspend? habeas corpus by denying it to people who have no right to it in the first place. The right against suspension of habeas corpus is found in the Constitution (art. I, 9). Constitutional rights belong only to Americans ? that is, according to the Supreme Court, U.S. citizens and those aliens who, by lawfully weaving themselves into the fabric of our society, have become part of our national community (which is to say, lawful permanent resident aliens). To the contrary, aliens with no immigration status who are captured and held outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, and whose only connection to our country is to wage a barbaric war against it, do not have any rights, much less ?basic rights,? under our Constitution.
Indeed, even when the Supreme Court, in its radical 2004 Rasul case, opened the courthouse doors to enemy fighters in wartime for the first time in American history, it relied not on the Constitution but on the federal habeas corpus statute. So put aside that Rasul was an exercise in judicial legerdemain whose holding depended on a distortion of both that statute and the long-established limitations on the Court?s own jurisdiction (which does not extend outside sovereign U.S. territory to places like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba). Even in its willful determination to reach a result that rewarded al Qaeda?s lawfare, the Court declined to rule that alien combatants have fundamental habeas rights. Instead, they have only what Congress chooses to give them ? which Congress can change at any time.
AL QAEDA TERRORISTS HAVE NO TREATY RIGHTS
But wait. Isn?t habeas corpus necessary so that the terrorists can press the Geneva Convention rights with which the Court most recently vested them in its 2006 Hamdan case? Wrong again.
To begin with, although its reasoning was murky, the Hamdan majority seems technically to have held that Geneva?s Common Article 3 applied to military commissions because of a congressional statute, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Again, if a right is rooted in a statute, not in the Constitution, Congress is at liberty to withdraw or alter the right simply by enacting a new statute. Such a right is not in any sense ?basic.?
But don?t some human-rights activists contend the Hamdan ruling means Common Article 3 applies not just because of a statute but because of its own force as part of a treaty that the United States has ratified? Well, yes, they do make that claim ? and (as I recently argued here) they have gotten plenty of help from the recent debate prompted by Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and others who insisted Hamdan meant Common Article 3 controls interrogation practices.
Even with all of that, though, it remains a settled principle that treaties are compacts between sovereign nations, not fonts of individual rights. Alleged violations are thus grist for diplomacy, not litigation. Treaties are not judicially enforceable by individuals absent an express statement to the contrary in the treaty?s text. By contrast, Geneva's express statements indicate that no judicial intervention was contemplated.
This, no doubt, is why the Geneva Conventions, qua treaties, have never been judicially enforced. Consequently, if Congress had actually denied al Qaeda detainees a right to use Common Article 3 to challenge their detention in federal court (and, as we?ll soon see, Congress has not done that), that would merely have reaffirmed what has been the law for over a half century.
If the political representatives of a nation believe one of its citizens is being unlawfully held at Gitmo, the proper procedure is for that nation to protest to our State Department, not for the detainee to sue our country in our courts. In fact, several nations have made such claims, and Bush administration has often responded by repatriating detainees to their home countries ? only to have many of them rejoin the jihad. In any event, though, there would be nothing wrong with declining to allow habeas to be used for the creation of individual rights that detainees do not in fact have under international law.
AL QAEDA TERRORISTS DO GET TO CHALLENGE THEIR DETENTION
But let?s ignore that the critics are wrong about the entitlement of al Qaeda terrorists to constitutional or treaty-based rights to habeas. There is an even more gaping hole in their attack on the new law. Congress has already given al Qaeda detainees the very rights the critics claim have been denied.
Last December, Congress enacted the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA). It requires that the military must grant each detainee a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) at which to challenge his detention. Assuming the military?s CSRT process determines he is properly detained, the detainee then has a right to appeal to our civilian-justice system ? specifically, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. And if that appeal is unsuccessful, the terrorist may also seek certiorari review by the Supreme Court.
This was a revolutionary innovation. As we?ve seen, Rasul did not (and could not) require Congress to allow enemy combatants access to the federal courts. Congress could lawfully have responded to Rasul by amending the habeas statute to make clear that al Qaeda terrorists have no more right to petition our courts in wartime than any other enemy prisoners have had in the preceding two-plus centuries. Instead, Congress responded by giving the enemy what are in every meaningful way habeas rights.
For the enemy combatants, habeas corpus, to borrow the Times?s articulation, is simply a ?right to challenge their imprisonment? in federal court. So what does the DTA do? It allows a detainee who has been found by the military to be properly held as an enemy combatant to challenge his incarceration in federal court. Under DTA section 1005(e)(2), that court (the D.C. Circuit) is expressly empowered to determine whether the detention is in violation of the Constitution and laws of the United States ? which, of course, include treaties to whatever extent they may create individual rights.
Thus, the DTA has already granted to our enemies the very remedy critics claim is now being denied. Moreover, the new Military Commissions Act (MCA) does not repeal the DTA. It strengthens it. That is, because the Supreme Court?s Hamdan decision created confusion about whether the DTA was meant to apply retroactively to the 400-plus habeas petitions that were already filed, the MCA clarifies that all detainees who wish to challenge their imprisonment must follow the DTA procedure for doing so. But, importantly, the right to challenge imprisonment is itself reaffirmed.
That the DTA does not refer to this right as habeas corpus is irrelevant. It?s not the name of the remedy that counts; it?s the substance. The DTA gives the detainee exactly what habeas provides. Therefore, it would have been pointless for the MCA to add yet another round of habeas.
To understand why this is so, one need only consider the legal restrictions on imprisoned American citizens. If they wish to claim their detention is baseless, they are not permitted to file habeas petitions which simply re-allege claims they have already made (or at least had a fair opportunity to make) during prior legal proceedings (such as the appeal of a criminal conviction, or a previously filed habeas petition). Repetitious claims are instantly disregarded by courts as a form of procedural default known as ?abuse of the writ? of habeas corpus.
Given that habeas would not be available to an American for the purpose of rehashing a previously unsuccessful challenge to his imprisonment, why on earth should we extend habeas to an alien al Qaeda terrorist so he can re-litigate under the MCA an argument against his detention that has already been heard and rejected by a federal appeals court under the DTA?
WHO?S MANIPULATING HISTORY?
Epstein?s arguments are especially unbecoming. First, for all his bombast about the storied history of the habeas writ, he neglects to mention that the thousands upon thousands of alien enemy combatants our military has detained outside the U.S. in the long history of American warfare have never had a right to challenge their detention by calling on the judicial branch of our government at the very time the political branches have taken our nation into battle. It was Rasul that broke with tradition here. Even if enemy combatants had been denied habeas in this war ? which, of course, has not happened ? that would not have been a departure from tradition at all.
Second, it is simply preposterous to suggest, as Epstein does, that the government is likely to frustrate the DTA?s judicial review procedure by such shenanigans as starting a CSRT but then suspending it indefinitely without ruling on a detainee?s status (so the DTA right to appeal to the D.C. Circuit would never be triggered). The DTA not only directed the Defense Department to come up with CSRT procedures, including an annual review of the status of detainees found to be enemy combatants; it expressly contemplated oversight by the Armed Services committees in both Houses of Congress. There is no basis to believe either that the Pentagon is engaged in the kind of gamesmanship Epstein imagines or that Congress would tolerate such antics were they to occur.
It would be the height of folly to confer additional rights on alien enemy combatant terrorists ? which, by the way, would be far better rights than honorable alien enemy combatants who do not mass-murder civilians get under the Geneva Conventions ? for no better reason than to prevent an abuse that is virtually inconceivable in the real world. Such thinking reflects the same September 10th mentality that gave us the Justice Department?s infamous ?wall? ? which prevented criminal investigators and national security agents from pooling threat information in order to forfend hypothetical and empirically unheard-of civil-rights violations.
Been there done that.
? Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YWNlMjg3YWRlNmNjMTk0NDc1NzE0ZWI2YzBlOGRlNzU=
-
Taliban lay plans for Islamic intifada
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
THE PASHTUN HEARTLAND, Pakistan and Afghanistan - With the snows approaching, the Taliban's spring offensive has fallen short of its primary objective of reviving the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan, as the country was known under Taliban rule from 1996-2001.
Both foreign forces and the Taliban will bunker down until next spring, although the Taliban are expected to continue with suicide missions and some hit-and-run guerrilla activities. The Taliban will
take refuge in the mountains that cross the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where they will have plenty of time to plan the next stage
of their struggle: a countrywide "Islamic Intifada of Afghanistan" calling on all former mujahideen to join the movement to boot out foreign forces from Afghanistan.
The intifada will be both national and international. On the one hand it aims to organize a national uprising, and on the other it will attempt to make Afghanistan the hub of the worldwide Islamic resistance movement, as it was previously under the Taliban when Osama bin Laden and his training camps were guests of the country.
The ideologue of the intifada is bin Laden's deputy, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, who has assembled a special team to implement the idea. Key to this mission is Mullah Mehmood Allah Haq Yar. Asia Times Online was early to pinpoint Haq Yar as an important player (see Osama adds weight to Afghan resistance, September 11, 2004).
Oriented primarily towards Arabs, especially Zawahiri, Haq Yar speaks English, Arabic, Urdu and Pashtu with great fluency. He was sent by Taliban leader Mullah Omar to northern Iraq to train with Ansarul Islam fighters before the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. He returned to Afghanistan in 2004 and was inducted into a special council of commanders formed by Mullah Omar and assigned the task of shepherding all foreign fighters and high-value targets from Pakistani territory into Afghanistan.
He is an expert in urban guerrilla warfare, a skill he has shared with the Taliban in Afghanistan. His new task might be more challenging: to gather local warlords from north to south under one umbrella and secure international support from regional players.
A major first step toward creating an intifada in Afghanistan was the establishment of the Islamic State of North Waziristan in the Pakistani tribal area this year. This brought all fragmented sections of the Taliban under one command, and was the launching pad for the Taliban's spring offensive.
Subsequently, there has been agreement between a number of top warlords in northern Afghanistan and the Taliban to make the intifada a success next year. Credit for this development goes mainly to Haq Yar.
Haq Yar was recently almost cornered in Helmand province in Afghanistan by British forces. Before that, he spoke to Asia Times Online at an undisclosed location in the Pashtun heartland straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Asia Times Online: When are the Taliban expected to announce the revival of the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan?
Haq Yar: Well, the whole Islamic world is waiting for the revival of the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan, but it will take some time. But sure, it will ultimately happen, and this is what the Taliban's struggle is all about.
ATol: Can you define the level of Taliban-led resistance in Afghanistan?
Haq Yar: It has already passed the initial phases and now has entered into a tactical and decisive phase. It can be measured from the hue and cry raised by the US and its allies. Daily attacks on NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] forces are now routine and suicide attacks are rampant.
ATol: To date, the Taliban have been very active in southwestern Afghanistan, but traditionally success comes when a resistance reaches eastern areas, especially the strategically important Jalalabad. When will this happen?
Haq Yar: Well, I do not agree that the Taliban movement is restricted to southwest Afghanistan. We have now established a network under which we are allied with many big and small mujahideen organizations, and in that way we are fighting foreign forces throughout Afghanistan. In a recent development, the deputy chief of the Taliban movement, Maulana Jalaluddin Haqqani, is now positioned in the eastern zone, including Jalalabad, from where he is guiding attacks on coalition forces. This eastern zone is also part of the Taliban's stronghold.
ATol: What is the role of bin Laden and Zawahiri?
Haq Yar: We are allies and part and parcel of every strategy. Wherever mujahideen are resisting the forces of evil, Arab mujahideen, al-Qaeda and leaders Osama bin Laden and Dr Zawahiri have a key role. In Afghanistan they also have a significant role to support the Taliban movement.
ATol: Is the present Taliban-led resistance against the US and its allies a local resistance or is it international? That is, are resistance movements in other parts of the world led from Afghanistan?
Haq Yar: Initially it was a local movement, but now it is linked with resistance movements in Iraq and other places. We are certainly in coordination with all resistance movements of the Muslim world.
ATol: What is the Taliban strategy with groups like Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan (Khalis)?
Haq Yar: The Hezb-i-Islami of Hekmatyar and the Taliban are fighting under a coordinated strategy and support each other. The leadership of the Khalis group is now in the hands of his son, who is coordinating everything with Maulana Jalaluddin Haqqani.
ATol: What is the Taliban's weaponry? Is it old Russian arms or they have acquired new ones - and if so, where are they getting them?
Haq Yar: The Taliban have all the latest weaponry required for a guerrilla warfare. Where does it come from? Well, Afghanistan is known as a place where weapons are stockpiled. And forces that provided arms a few decades ago - the same weapons are now being used against them.
ATol: The Taliban contacted commanders in northern Afghanistan. What was the result?
Haq Yar: About one and a half years ago these contacts were initiated. Various groups from the north contacted us. We discussed the matter with [Taliban leader] Mullah Mohammed Omar Akhund and then, with his consent, I was assigned to negotiate matters with the Northern Alliance.
The first meeting was held in northern Afghanistan, where I represented the Taliban. Many individuals from various groups of the Northern Alliance attended the meeting and they all condemned the foreign presence in the country, but insisted that the Taliban should take the lead, and then they would follow suit. Another meeting was held after that in which various individuals come up with some conditions, and there was no conclusion. There was no collective meeting, but there are contacts.
ATol: What is the role of the tribal chiefs?
Haq Yar: The tribal chiefs have always been supportive of the Taliban and still are. How could they not be? The US bombed and killed thousand of their people and the puppet [President Hamid] Karzai government is silent. All Afghans are sick and tired of US tyrannies and daily bombardment, whether they are commoners or chiefs, and that is why they are all with the Taliban.
Actually, we have also worked on organizing that support. On the instructions of Mullah Mohammed Omar Akhund, I met with tribal chiefs last year and prepared the grounds for this year's battle [spring offensive], and all tribal chiefs assured me of their support. And now there is support - it is there for everybody to see.
ATol: It is said that the Taliban are now fueled by drug money. Is this correct, and if not, how do they manage their financial matters?
Haq Yar: It is shameful to say that the Taliban, who eliminated poppies from Afghanistan, are dependent on the drug trade to make money. This is wrong. As far as money is concerned, we do not need much. Whatever is required, we manage it through our own limited resources.
ATol: Are you satisfied with the media's role?
Haq Yar: Not at all. They do not publish our point of view. They never tried to talk to the genuine Taliban. Rather, they go after not genuine people who are basically plants and rejected by the Taliban leadership.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.
==========================================
-
Iran, Russia: A Nuclear Marriage of Convenience
Summary
Russia and Iran have signed a contract for the delivery of 80 tons of nuclear fuel to Iran's Bushehr facility, which is scheduled to be completed in September 2007. Russia appears to be in the process of finishing updating its military doctrine. Closer economic ties with Iran will allow Russia to maintain a foothold in the Middle East while keeping pressure on the United States, which lacks the bandwidth to respond to Russia's provocative moves.
Analysis
During a visit by an Iranian delegation to Russia, Tehran and Moscow signed agreements Sept. 26 for the delivery of 80 metric tons of nuclear fuel to supply the Bushehr nuclear plant in southern Iran in March 2007. Sergei Kiriyenko, the head of Russia's Federal Nuclear Power Agency, recently said the plant will be commissioned in September 2007, and will commence generating power two months later.
The fuel agreements are the most significant steps toward finalizing the shape of Russian-Iranian cooperation on Bushehr. Consistent with its current strategy, Russia is simultaneously strengthening ties with Iran and expanding its presence in the Middle East, both of which irk the United States. Of course, if the September 2007 deadline becomes inconvenient in the future by conflicting with Moscow's political goals, it can be altered to suit Russia's needs, as Moscow has repeatedly done during the past decade.
The Russian stance, including its continued cooperation with Iran on Tehran's civilian nuclear program, reflects Moscow's present global position. The Kremlin is focused on strengthening its hold on domestic industry and politics, maintaining influence on Russia's periphery and indirectly challenging the United States while Washington is preoccupied with the conflict in Iraq and November's midterm congressional elections. Russia's actions in the Middle East, which present a challenge for the U.S. presence in the region, also include continued weapons systems sales to Syria, the deployment of military engineers to assist in Lebanon's reconstruction and the possible sale of surface-to-air missile systems to Iran (ostensibly to protect the Bushehr plant from Israeli or U.S. aggression).
Moscow's position has been articulated by a leaked draft of the latest update to Russia's military doctrine, published by the Russian newspaper Gazeta on Sept. 19. (The Russian Ministry of Defense denied the document's mere existence.) Along with naming the United States and NATO as enemies Nos. 1 and 2, ahead of international terrorism, the document also states that Russia would participate in conflicts on the country's periphery in order to protect its citizens. By moving from a "universal regime of nonproliferation" to a mere stance "for nonproliferation of nuclear weapons and its means of delivery," Russia is leaving itself an out from being held responsible for allowing Iran the opportunity to get nuclear weapons. Though Russia has just as much incentive as the Western powers to make sure Iran does not acquire nuclear weapons, Moscow wants to make sure it is not seen as complicit with Tehran.
Even if the documents obtained by Gazeta turn out to be legitimate, little change will come to Russian foreign and domestic policy. All of the updates suggested are in line with what Russia is already doing or can do, and military doctrines as such are not binding. This particular document, however, could bolster Russian Defense Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov's position. Ivanov is widely seen as Russian President Vladimir Putin's possible successor. Ivanov has reportedly insisted on the changes in the doctrine that improve conditions in the Russian armed forces consistent with Putin's policy. This is helpful in consolidating the Kremlin's position ahead of the 2007 parliamentary and 2008 presidential elections, as is continued cooperation with Iran.
Though Russia and Iran cannot be called allies, Moscow does want to give the impression that it holds some sway over Tehran. Regardless of the continued cooperation between the two, the Islamic republic is just as likely to spurn Russian advances when it suits Tehran and play Russia just as skillfully.
-
Second post of the morning:
www.stratfor.com
Iran, Iraq, Turkey: The Kurdish Factor
Summary
An explosion on an Iran-to-Turkey natural gas pipeline outside the Iranian border city of Maku probably resulted from sabotage by Kurdish separatist rebels, Iranian authorities said Sept. 29. The incident comes shortly after Iraq's Kurdish President Jalal Talabani said Baghdad could make trouble for Iran and Turkey if they do not stop interfering in Iraq's internal affairs. As Iraqi Kurds become more aggressive in their push to secure oil revenues in northern Iraq, Ankara and Tehran have made common cause to suppress Kurdish separatism, creating further complications for Washington's goal of containing Iran.
Analysis
An explosion on an Iran-to-Turkey natural gas pipeline outside the Iranian border city of Maku occurred at 11:30 p.m. Sept. 28. The explosion, which destroyed about 65-75 yards of the line, likely will take three to four days to repair, Turkey's state pipeline company, Botas, said. The company also said the shortage in Iranian gas deliveries to Turkey would be compensated by Russian natural gas coming through the Blue Stream pipeline beneath the Black Sea.
Most Kurdish acts of sabotage on the Iran-Turkey gas pipeline occur in Turkey and are carried out by guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has increased attacks on security, government and commercial targets in Kurdish-majority areas of Turkey in recent months. The 1,600 mile pipeline, running from Tabriz to Ankara, is an attractive target for Kurdish guerrillas aiming to strike at the Turkish economy, since it supplies Turkey with more than a third of its annual gas consumption. Turkey most recently experienced natural gas shortages for four days when PKK rebels blew up part of the same pipeline in the Turkish city of Agri in September.
While the PKK has sustained its level of operations in Turkey, Kurdish separatist rebels in Iran have largely stayed quiet out of fear of incurring a major crackdown by the Iranian regime. Lacking a viable leadership structure, the Kurdish rebel movement in Iran generally sticks to low-level operations, which draw a stiff response from the Iranian armed forces. The latest pipeline explosion, however, reveals the manner in which the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and Iran can cooperate on some level to further their territorial ambitions through hard-hitting attacks.
Iraq's Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, made a telling statement Sept. 26 in Washington when he told National Public Radio that Iraq can "make trouble" for its neighbors (e.g., Turkey, Iran and Syria) if they do not stop interfering in his country's internal affairs. With a political arrangement in Baghdad still nowhere in sight, the Kurdish bloc in Iraq has taken the opportunity to push its own demands while Sunni and Shiite factions are deeply consumed in sectarian fighting. The most contentious of the Kurdish demands undoubtedly revolves around the issue of oil revenues in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. Despite the lack of federal legislation on how to divide oil revenues among Iraq's three dominant factions, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) has pressed forward in talks with oil majors, having even signed an agreement with Norwegian oil company DNO to start producing up to 5,000 barrels per day of oil in northern Iraq beginning the first quarter of 2007. While this outrages Iraq's Oil Ministry, which has said the government does not need to honor previous KRG oil investment deals, the political disarray in Baghdad prevents the center from taking any real action to suppress Kurdish moves to grab oil returns.
With sizable Kurdish populations, Iran and Turkey have been watching these developments closely, and are becoming increasingly alarmed at the rate at which the Iraqi Kurds are asserting their autonomy without restraint. As a result, Tehran and Ankara have coordinated military operations against Kurds on Iraqi soil, with the deepest Iranian incursion taking place Sept. 5 when Iran fired artillery against Kurdish positions near the Iraqi town of Mandali, 60 miles northeast of Baghdad. Talabani made it clear during his Washington visit that his patience for such actions is wearing thin, and that Iraq will respond by supporting "opposition forces" within its neighbors' borders, a warning that appears to have been actualized by the late-night pipeline explosion.
The pipeline attack will only strengthen Iran's and Turkey's incentive to work together to curb Kurdish separatist tendencies. Major crackdowns against Kurdish strongholds in the region thus can be expected in the coming weeks.
The Kurdish issue also complicates matters for Washington, as U.S. officials are running out of options to contain Iran's expansionist push. Ankara is especially peeved at Washington for not following through with a commitment to help contain the Kurds in Iraq and block support for PKK operations in Turkey. As long as Turkey feels territorially threatened by developments in its Iraqi neighbor, the United States will be hard-pressed to find strong regional allies to help keep the Iranians at bay.
-
Third post of the day:
The Boring Fabulist
"State of Denial" amazes me.
Friday, October 6, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
Thirty-two years into his career as a writer of books, Bob Woodward has won a reputation as slipshod ("Wired"), slippery ("All the President's Men," "The Final Days"), opportunistic ("Veil"; everything) and generally unaware of the implications even of those facts he's offered that have gone unchallenged. As a reporter he's been compared to a great dumb shark, remorselessly moving toward hunks of information he can swallow but not digest. As a writer his style has been to lard unconnected sentences with extraneous data in order to give his assertions a fact-y weight that suggests truth is being told. And so: On July 23, 1994, at 4:18 p.m., the meeting over, the president gazed out the double-paned windows of the Oval Office, built in October 1909 by workers uncovered by later minimum wage legislation, and saw the storm moving in. "I think I'll kill my wife," he said, the words echoing in the empty room. I made that up. It's my homage.
Mr. Woodward has been that amazing thing, the boring fabulist.
The Bush White House has spent the past five years thinking they could manage him. Talk about a state of denial.
Now he has thwarted me. I bought "State of Denial" thinking I might have a merry time bashing it and a satisfying time defending the innocent injured.
But it is a good book. It may be a great one. It is serious, densely, even exhaustively, reported, and a real contribution to history in that it gives history what it most requires, first-person testimony. (It is well documented, with copious notes.) What is most striking is that Mr. Woodward seems to try very hard to be fair, not in a phony "Armitage, however, denies it" way, but in a way that--it will seem too much to say this--reminded me of Jean Renoir: "The real hell of life is that everyone has his reasons."
His Bush is not a monster but a personally disciplined, yearning, vain and intensely limited man. His advisers in all levels of the government are tugged and torn by understandable currents and display varying degrees of guile, cynicism and courage. As usual, prime sources get the best treatment--the affable Andy Card, the always well-meaning Prince Bandar. Members of the armed forces get a high-gloss spit shine. But once you decode it and put it aside--and Woodward readers always know to do that--you get real history:
The almost epic bureaucratic battle of Donald Rumsfeld to re-establish civilian control of the post-Clinton Joint Chiefs of Staff; the struggle of the State Department to be heard and not just handled by the president; the search on the ground for the weapons of mass destruction; the struggles, advances and removal from Iraq of Jay Garner, sent to oversee humanitarian aid; the utter disconnect between the experience on the ground after Baghdad was taken and the attitude of the White House--"borderline giddy." This is a primer on how the executive branch of the United States works, or rather doesn't work, in the early years of the 21st century.
There is previously unreported information. Former Secretary of State George Shultz was top contender for American envoy to Baghdad, but there were worries he was "not known for taking direction." Spies called "bats" were planted in American agencies by American agencies to report to rival superiors back home.
After Baghdad fell, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, who appears to be the best friend of everybody in the world, went to the White House and advised the president to fill the power vacuum immediately: The Baath Party and the military had run the country. Remove the top echelon--they have bloody hands--but keep and maintain everyone else. Tell the Iraqi military to report to their barracks, he advised, and keep the colonels on down. Have them restore order. Have Iraqi intelligence find the insurgents: "Those bad guys will know how to find bad guys." Use them, and then throw them over the side. This is advice that has the brilliance of the obvious, and not only in retrospect.
Mr. Woodward: "'That's too Machiavellian,' someone said. The Saudi notes of the meeting indicate it was either Bush or Rice."
It's isn't clear if "too Machiavellian" meant too clever by half, or too devious for good people like us. Either way it was another path not taken. The newly unemployed personnel of the old Iraqi government took to the streets, like everyone else.
To the central thesis. Was the White House, from the beginning, in a state of denial? I doubt denial is the word. They were in a state of unknowingness. (I have come to give greater credence to the importance, in the age of terror, among our leaders, of having served in the military. For you need personal experience that you absorbed deep down in your bones, or a kind of imaginative wisdom that tells you even though you were never there what war is like, what invasion is, what building a foreign nation entails.) They were in a state of conviction: They really thought Saddam had those WMDs. (Yes, so did Bill Clinton, so did The New Yorker, so did I, and so likely did you. But Mr. Bush moved on, insisted on, intelligence that was faulty, inadequate.) They were in a state of propulsion: 9/11 had just wounded a great nation. Strong action was needed.
Here I add something I have been thinking about the past year. It is about the young guys at the table in the Reagan era. The young, mid-level guys who came to Washington in the Reagan years were always at the table in the meeting with the career State Department guy. And the man from State, timid in all ways except bureaucratic warfare, was always going "Ooh, aah, you can't do that, the Soviet Union is so big, Galbraith told us how strong their economy is, the Sandinistas have the passionate support of the people, there's nothing we can do, stop with your evil empire and your Grenada invasion, it's needlessly aggressive!" Those guys from State--they were almost always wrong. Their caution was timorousness, their prudence a way to evade responsibility. The young Reagan guys at the table grew up to be the heavyweights of the Bush era. They walked into the White House knowing who'd been wrong at the table 20 years before. And so when State and others came in and said, "The intelligence doesn't support it, we see no WMDs," the Bush men knew who not to believe.
History is human.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.
-
Is it any surprise that James Baker wants to sell our only real Allies in the Middle East (Israel) down the river. Not only this but we should invite Iran and Syria to the table and ask for their input on Iraq. The Bush admin has finally lost its mind.
When did the American people become sheep! All we have done is shown Islamic Radicals that if they hold out long enough that America no longer has the stomach for war and is weak. If times get hard we will run and hide.
Someone once asked how do you win a political correct war? Answer, you don't. WWII will be the last war we win unless the politicians stop worrying about being re-elected and let generals fight wars.
Myke
-
Someone once asked how do you win a political correct war?
Myke
It is not enough to win a war, you have to demoralize the enemy to the point that they lose their will to fight. That was the job of the A bombs over Japan and the fire bombings of European cities. Only after you have beaten the enemy can you go in to help them build up again.
Without having won the war in Iraq it is ridiculous to try to establish a democracy there. It is ridiculous to give humanitarian aide to the Palestinians or to Lebanon before defeating the enemy.
-
Past the Apogee: America Under Pressure
Keynote Address at FPRI’s Annual Dinner, November 14, 2006
by Charles Krauthammer
December 2006
Charles Krauthammer writes an internationally syndicated column for the Washington Post Writers Group. He is also a monthly essayist for Time magazine, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and The New Republic, and a weekly panelist on Inside Washington. He was awarded the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, and Financial Times recently named him America’s most influential commentator. This enote is based on his keynote address at FPRI’s November 14, 2006, annual dinner, at which Dr. Krauthammer was the second recipient of FPRI’s Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Service.
We are now in a period of confusion and disorientation, almost despair. I think it is worthwhile to look back historically to see how we got to where we are today.
In the mid to late 1980s, the idea of American decline was in vogue. Japan was rising, China was awakening, Europe was consolidating, America was said to have been in the midst of what historian Paul Kennedy called “imperial overstretch.”[1] The conventional wisdom of the time was that the bipolar world of the United States and the Soviet Union would yield to a new world structure which would be multipolar, with power fairly equally divided between Japan, perhaps China, a diminished Soviet Union, a consolidating Europe, the United States, and perhaps other rising countries such as India or perhaps even Brazil. That’s how the world looked in the mid to late 1980s.
When I wrote the article “The Unipolar Moment” (Foreign Affairs, Winter 1990/91), it achieved some renown because, remarkably, I was the only one saying at the time, that in fact, with the end of the Cold War, the United States would end up as the unipolar power, the dominant, hegemonic power in the world. There would be none even close to us in ranking. The old bipolar world would yield not to a multipolar world but to one with only one great influence, and that would be us.
In fact, that has occurred. At the time, I was thinking about how long this might last and called the article “The Unipolar Moment.” I thought it might last a generation. Twenty to thirty years, I wrote. Here we are almost exactly 15 years later, the midpoint of the more optimistic estimate.
The first part of the unipolar era since the fall of the Soviet Union, which can the dated between 11/09 (November 9, 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall) and 9/11, would be the period of American ascent, in which our dominance in the world became absolutely undeniable, to the degree that in the 1990s, we couldn’t quite figure out what to do with all this preponderance of power. There were some neoconservatives and others who were proclaiming an era of American greatness where we ought to exert ourselves overseas, even in the absence of a threat, simply as a way of being true to our traditions and values. To some extent, one might say that our intervention in the Balkan wars, where we had almost no national interest, was an example of this assertion of unrivaled power in the interests of our values.
Others of us thought that in the absence of an enemy, we ought not be exerting ourselves for the sake of exerting ourselves. I advocated a policy that I called “dry powder,” where we would maintain our resources, conserve our strength, and wait for the inevitable, which would be the rise of an adversary. In the 1990s, of course, that adversary was not obvious. He was working in the shadows, preparing, and finally revealing himself on 9/11. That’s when the structure of the world became blindingly clear. We were confronted with a new ideological, existential enemy, meaning an enemy who threatens our existence and very way of life; who is driven by a messianic faith and is engaged in a struggle to the death. This was an heir to the ideological existential struggles of the twentieth century, first against fascism and then against communism, in which we had prevailed.
Sept. 11 ushered in the second era of this unipolar era, which I would call the era of assertion, where the power that had been latent in America shows itself. I would date this era from 9/11 to the March 14, 2005, a date probably unfamiliar to you and not particularly renowned in our history today, but a date that I think will be remembered by historians as the apogee of American power, the peak of the arc of the unipolar era.
On 9/11, the United States, with its ally Great Britain, decided that it would respond in two ways: revenge and reconstruction. It would retaliate against the enemy, try to pursue him and his associates in Afghanistan and elsewhere; but it also decided — and this was the Bush Doctrine — that that was not enough of a response; that spending the next twenty to thirty years hunting cave-to-cave in Afghanistan was not an adequate response. It was perhaps necessary, but certainly not sufficient, to deal with this new ideological enemy. This enemy is not, as some have pretended, simply a band of terrorists and extremists numbering in the thousands. It’s an idea with many, many practitioners of different stripes—some Shiite, some Sunni—and with allies, fifth columns, potential recruits throughout the world, including large immigrant populations in the West.
The Bush Doctrine held that besides attacking the immediate enemy who had perpetrated 9/11, it would have to engage in a larger enterprise of changing the underlying conditions which had given birth to this idea of Islamic radicalism, and to change the conditions that had allowed it to recruit and breed, particularly in the Arab world.
This meant changing the internal structure of Arab regimes and in a larger sense the culture of the Arab/Islamic world. This had been the one area of the world that uniquely had been untouched by the modernizing and democratizing influences of the postwar era. East Asia had famously taken off economically and politically, in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere; Latin America and even some parts of Africa had democratized; of course, Western Europe had been democratic ever since World War II, but now Eastern Europe had joined the march. Only the Arab/Islamic world had been left out. Unless it was somehow encouraged and brought along on that march, it would remain recalcitrant, alienated, oppressed, tyrannical, and the place from which the kind of atavistic attacks on America and the West that we have seen on 9/11 and since would continue.
That’s why the entire enterprise of changing the culture of the Arab world was undertaken. It was, as I and others had said at the time, a radical idea, an arrogant idea, a risky idea. But it was also the only idea of any coherence and consistency that anyone has advanced on how to change the underlying conditions that had led to 9/11 and ultimately to prevent the kind of conditions that would lead to a second 9/11.
So we have this half decade of American assertion. And it was an astonishing demonstration. In the mood of despair and disorientation of today, we forget what happened less than half a decade ago. The astonishingly swift and decisive success in Afghanistan, with a few hundred soldiers, some of them riding horses, directing lasers, organizing a campaign with indigenous Afghans, and defeating a regime in about a month and a half in a place that others had said was impossible to conquer; that the British and the Russians and others had left in defeat and despair in the past. It was an event so remarkable that the aforementioned Paul Kennedy now wrote an article, "The Eagle has Landed" (Financial Times, Feb. 2, 2002) in which he simply expressed his astonishment at the primacy, the power, and the unrivalled strength of the United States as demonstrated in the Afghan campaign.
After that, of course, was the swift initial victory in Iraq, in which the capital fell within three weeks. After that was a ripple effect in the region. Libya, seeing what we had done in Iraq, gave up its nuclear capacity; then the remarkable revolution in Lebanon in which Syria was essentially expelled. And that demarks the date that I spoke of. March 14 is the name of the movement in Lebanon of those who rose up against the Syrians and essentially created a new democracy—fragile, as we will see. You have all of these events happening at once: you have the glimmerings of democracy in the elections in Egypt, some changes even in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and of course what we had in January 2005 was the famous first election in Iraq, which had an electric effect on the region. That winter-spring of 2005, I think, is the apogee of this assertion of unipolarity and American power.
What we have seen, however, in the last almost two years now is what I think historians will write of as the setback. That is the year and a half between the Iraqi election and the Lebanese revolution, on the one hand, and the date that I think is going to live in history as an extremely important one, November 7, 2006, the American election, in which it was absolutely clear that the electorate had expressed its dismay and dissatisfaction with the policies in Iraq, and more generally, a sense of loss, lack of direction, and wish to contemplate retreat. As a result , we are in position now where people are talking about negotiating, for example, with our enemies Syria and Iran, which, given the conditions that Iran and Syria would lay and their objectives, which have been expressed openly and clearly, would mean very little other than American surrender of Iraq to an Iran-Syria condominium.
So what happened in this year and a half? What we have seen, for example, was the collapse in Lebanon of this new direction; we just heard two days ago that Hezbollah has pulled its members of the cabinet and is calling for demonstrations on November 20 in an attempt to actually destroy and bring down the newly elected and pro-Western government. What you have is a resurgence of Syrian influence in Lebanon, Syria being of course an ally of Iran and the patron of Hezbollah. Syria is doing all this because the Lebanese government was about to pass a law and actually did today in which it approved an international court to try the murderers of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. So you have a power play in Lebanon that would undo the Lebanese revolution. You have, of course, the Lebanon war of August 2006, in which Israel had an opportunity to deliver a huge strategic setback to Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah but ended up in a relative stalemate. You have Hamas gaining power in Gaza and chaos descending in Gaza, with the loss of control of the relatively moderate Abu Mazen and the Fatah movement. You had of course the rise in Iran of the very radical, ideological, and quite messianic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who speaks openly about the end of days, who speaks privately about its arrival within two or three years, and who talks about wiping Israel off the map, who clearly is intent upon achieving a nuclear capacity, but even more importantly, who defies every deadline or warning or threat from the West and does it with impunity. We’ve had in the last half year a collapse of our position on Iran. We talk about pressure and sanctions, but we have allowed deadline after deadline to elapse, and Iran is openly contemptuous of our attempts to impose sanctions, knowing correctly that we will not be able to get the Russians and Chinese to back them, and that ultimately even the Europeans will be weak and unwilling to join in real sanctions.
To this constellation we can add one more factor, which is of course Iraq. The hope that we had through the first election in 2005 has now been completely lost. That is because we’ve had the rise of sectarian violence, particularly after the Samara bombing, and also because the Sunni insurgency continues to rage and the Shiite militias continue untamed. You put all of those together and you have a large strategic setback for the United States, and most important, for the idea of successfully changing the nature of the Arab world to one which would be more democratic and tranquil and accommodationist. As a result, what you have in this recent American election is essentially a referendum on that idea, and the notion that it cannot succeed, it has not been succeeding, and we’re going to have to have a change of course.
-
Now, the question is, what happened in the two years between the apogee of our power and this moment of despair which was registered by the American election. Al Qaeda had a chance after the first few years to if not recover, at least reorganize itself enough to be able to make advances, attacks in Madrid and London, and now of course the insurgency in Iraq, where it has relatively strengthened itself in the last several years. But most importantly is the assertiveness of Iran and its proxies in Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas. In that sense Iran is something of a mini-parallel to the Communist International. It is the leader of the movement. (Al Qaeda is the twin church, the Sunni version of it, in the same way perhaps that the Russians and the Chinese had their twin churches of communism, rivals but allies at times during the Cold War.) But Iran of course is the central actor now in the rise and the activity of Islamic fundamentalism, with its proxies, as I said, in Hamas, Hezbollah, the Mahdi army in Iraq and elsewhere. And it is determined, pressing its case in Iraq, and in Lebanon, in Palestine, and elsewhere.
We Americans, looking at a situation like the one that has unraveled in Iraq, immediately want to blame ourselves. We traditionally flatter ourselves that we are the root of all planetary good and evil, whether it is nuclear weapons in North Korea, poverty in Bolivia, or disco attacks in Bali. Fingers are pointed that somehow attempt to locate the root of the problem in the United States. Our discourse on Iraq has followed this same pattern. Where did we go wrong? Not enough troops, too arrogant an occupation, too little direction from the political authorities in Washington or too much? Everybody has his own theory. I have mine on the things that we should have done otherwise. We should have shot looters on day 1, we should have installed a government of Iraqi exiles immediately, and above all, we should have taken out Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army in 2004, when we had the opportunity. All of those decisions, I think, greatly complicated our problems.
Nonetheless, the root problem is not the United States and not the tactical errors that we have made in Iraq. The root problem is the Iraqis and their own political culture. Since this an evening honoring Benjamin Franklin, I want to recall to you one of his most famous statements. When leaving the Constitutional Convention, he was asked what they had accomplished. His response was “A republic, if you can keep it.” What we have done in Iraq is given them a republic, but they appear unable to keep it.
I think that has a lot to do with Iraqi history. We had two objectives going into Iraq. The first was to depose the regime—relatively easy. The second was to try to establish a self-sustaining, democratic successor government. That has proved to be extraordinarily difficult. The problem is not, as we endlessly hear, American troop levels. It’s not even Iraqi troop levels. The size and the training of Iraqi forces is much less an issue than is the question of their allegiance. Some of these soldiers serve an abstraction called Iraq, but others serve political entities, militias, and/or religious sects. The Iraqi police, for example, are so infiltrated by Shiite death squads that they cannot be relied upon at all for the security of the country.
And again, the reason is not, as many critics now claim, that there is something intrinsic within Arab culture that makes them incapable of democracy. Yes, there are political, historical, and even religious reasons why the Arabs might be less prepared to be democratic in their governance than, say, East Asians or Latin Americans. But the problem, I believe, is Iraq’s particular culture and history. This after all is a country that was raped and ruined for thirty years by a uniquely sadistic and cruel and atomizing totalitarianism. What was left in its wake was a social and political desert, a dearth of the kind of trust and good will and sheer human capital required for democratic governance. All that was left to the individual in Iraq was to attach himself to a mosque or clan or militia. That’s why at this earliest stage of democratic development Iraqi national consciousness is as yet too weak and the culture of compromise too underdeveloped to produce effective government enjoying broad allegiance.
Just a month ago the U.S. launched operations against the Mahdi army in Baghdad and was ordered to stop by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government. Under pressure, the barricades that we had established around Sadr City to find one of our missing soldiers and to arrest a death squad leader were suspended. This is no way to conduct a war. I believe the government of Prime Minister Maliki is a failure. The problem is not his personality, it’s the fact that the coalition on which he depends is predominated by Shiite elements of militias and religious parties, armed and ambitious, at odds with each other and with the very idea of a democratic Iraq.
Is this our fault? I think the answer is no. It’s the result of Iraq’s first experiment in democracy. When the U.S. went into Iraq, it was not going to replace on tyrant with another. We were trying to begin the planting of democracy in the heart of the Middle East as the one conceivable antidote to terrorism and extremism. In a country that is two thirds Shiite, that meant inevitably Shiite rule. It was never certain whether the long-oppressed Shia would have enough sense of nation or sense of compromise to set aside their own grievances and internal differences and make a generous offer to the Sunnis in order to tame the insurgency and begin a new page in their country’s political history. The answer to whether that was going to happen is now in, and the answer is no.
The ruling Shia themselves are lacking in cohesion. Just a month ago there was a fight in the city of Amara between the two leading Shiite political parties, a bloody and brutal fight, which actually holds out some hope for what might help to ameliorate the situation in Iraq—namely, a change in structure of the coalition, which is now Shiite with the Kurds as a junior partner, and try to establish a new government with a new set of coalition partners, which would involve secular and religious Shiites who would reach out to some of the Sunnis, those who recognize their minority status but would be willing to accept a generously offered place at the table. This kind of cross-sectarian coalition almost happened after the election last year. Almost half of the parliament consists of these Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni elements. It seems to me that unless there is a change in the government, which has clearly not succeeded, we are not going to succeed. You can tinker with American tactics and troop levels all you want, but unless the Iraqis can establish a government of unitary purpose and resolute action, the simple objective of the war—leaving behind a self-sustaining, democratic government—will not be achieved.
Given these circumstances, we now have a situation in Washington after the election, which is looking for a kind of exit, honorable or not, and that is why I think there is a lot of discussion about negotiations with Iran and Syria, which I think ultimately would amount to nothing more than cover for an American retreat. I don’t think that is the only alternative, however. I think there is at least a chance of trying to save the situation not only in Iraq, but the general idea of trying to establish more liberal democratic and less confrontational governments in that region. Part of that effort I think has to be a very important and exerted effort now to try to rescue the Lebanese government, which in the next week or so will be under threat of demonstration, perhaps even civil war and perhaps even open Syrian intervention against it. That’s why even though our situation today is a rather gloomy one and there is a lot of disorientation and despair, I think that if we do not lose our nerve and lose our way, there is a way to actually emerge from this two-year era of setback.
What is becoming clear is that the overall international strategic situation in which we had unchallenged hegemony for the first decade and half the unipolar moment is now over. We are seeing on the horizon the rise of something that is always expected in any unipolar era, which is an alliance of others who oppose us.
Historically, whenever one country has arisen above all the others in power, anti-hegemonic alliances immediately formed against them. The classic example is the alliance against Napoleon in the early nineteenth century, and of course the alliances against Germany from World War I to World War II, particularly in the 1930s, where you had the rise of an aggressive, hegemonic Germany in the heart of Europe. What is interesting about our unipolar era is that whereas we had achieved unprecedented hegemony in the first decade and a half, there were no alliances against us. What I think we are beginning to see now is Iran positioning itself at the center of a regional alliance against us, again with the—Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria, Sadr—looking to overawe the entire region with the acquisition of nuclear weapons, which would make it the regional superpower. And Iran is receiving tacit backing for its regional and anti-American ambitions from two great powers: Russia and China. That, I think, is the structure of the adversary that we will be looking at for the decades to come.
As the Bush Doctrine has come under attack, there are those in America who have welcomed its apparent setbacks and defeats as a vindication of their criticism of the policy. But the problem is that that kind of vindication leaves America in a position where there are no good alternatives. The reason that there is general despair now is because if it proves to be true that the Bush Doctrine has proclaimed an idea of democratizing the Arab/Islamic world that is unattainable and undoable, then there are no remaining answers to how to counter ultimately the threat of Islamic radicalism.
It remains the only plausible answer—changing the culture of that area, no matter how slow and how difficult the process. It starts in Iraq and Lebanon, and must be allowed to proceed and not precipitate an early and premature surrender. That idea remains the only conceivable one for ultimately prevailing over the Arab Islamic radicalism that exploded upon us 9/11. Every other is a policy of retreat and defeat that would ultimately bring ruin not only on the U.S. but on the very idea of freedom.
Charles Krauthammer and FPRI President Harvey Sicherman greet guests at FPRI’s Annual Dinner.
Notes
Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Random House, 1987), p. 515. [back]
You may forward this email as you like provided that you send it in its entirety, attribute it to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and include our web address (www.fpri.org). If you post it on a mailing list, please contact FPRI with the name, location, purpose, and number of recipients of the mailing list.
If you receive this as a forward and would like to be placed directly on our mailing lists, send email to FPRI@fpri.org. Include your name, address, and affiliation. For further information, contact Alan Luxenberg at (215) 732-3774 x105.
http://www.fpri.org/enotes/20061213.krauthammer.pastapogee.html
-
stratfor.com
Geopolitical Diary: Russia as the U.S.-Iranian Mediator?
Former Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday, reportedly to deliver a message from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Velayati, a former chief diplomat, has not embarked on a diplomatic mission in years; bilateral meetings of such a nature are usually handled by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki or national security chief Ali Larijani.
Velayati has a close relationship with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that goes back to 1981, when Khamenei was president and Velayati became foreign minister. Though Khamenei initially appointed him as prime minister, Velayati failed to secure parliamentary approval. But for the past several years, Velayati has been Khamenei's adviser on international affairs.
Velayati's sudden return to the diplomatic arena, especially when U.S.-Iranian dealings over Iraq are reaching an impasse, is a sign that Khamenei has decided to directly take over foreign policy matters. It also means the executive branch has been asked to confine itself to the more mundane matters of governance.
This is why it is Velayati who has been dispatched on a special mission involving Russia. Moscow has been able to mediate between the United States and Iran -- a role the Kremlin thinks will help it to advance its own interests. The Russians have offered to help the United States get out of Iraq if Washington cuts back in its support of anti-Moscow elements in Ukraine. Such mediating also gives Russia an enormous amount of international clout.
Aware that the Iraq issue cannot be solved without Iranian help, and knowing that directly dealing with Tehran is not something that will sit well domestically for the Bush administration, Washington has likely taken Russia up on the offer. That said, there is another critical issue that weighs heavily in the U.S. decision to accept Russia as a go-between -- Moscow has recently sold the TOR-M1 anti-aircraft missile system to Iran.
Tehran and the Kremlin are also negotiating the sale of the Russian S300 missile. This is something the United States does not want to see realized because these missiles would make it difficult for U.S. warplanes to conduct airstrikes against Iran, should Washington ever take the military option in dealing with Iran.
The Iranians have been preparing for negotiations with the United States for quite some time, but since they are having difficulty in getting Washington to cooperate, Tehran is only too happy to see Russia help out; but the Iranians have not only been working with Russia.
Earlier this week during a visit to Iran, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, the head of Iraq's ruling Shiite coalition, said U.S.-Iranian dialogue on Iraq is critical. It should be noted that al-Hakim is not just the most pro-Iranian of all Iraqi Shiite leaders, he also is Washington's closest Iraqi Shiite partner.
The Iranians also have been working with their rivals. In January Tehran began significant negotiations with the Saudis and even reportedly sought Riyadh's assistance in getting the Bush administration to the negotiating table. Saudi national security chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan visited Tehran a few days after Larijani traveled to Riyadh.
Larijani, who also reports directly to Khamenei, will attend the Munich Conference on Security Policy on Feb. 9-11 in Germany. World leaders including Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates will also be in attendance. Larijani said Thursday that he will be holding talks with several Western officials. Since Gates dealt with the Iranians during the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s and also was involved in the Iraq Study Group that recommended that Washington approach Iran diplomatically on Iraq, a Gates-Larijani discussion on the sidelines of the conference is not out of the question, though it likely would be through middlemen.
Regardless of what happens in Munich, it appears as though a serious and complex diplomatic game involving the United States and Iran is under way.
-
From a post of mine on the "help our troops/our cause" thread, posted here at Crafty's request.
Perhaps Marc can also explain why these questions are inappropriate for that thread while characterizing war opposition as cowardice and treason appratently is.
I'll agree that the use of the legal term "treason" is over the top, but IMHO as our troops, who have strong re-enlistment rates, are finally being unleashed to apply a different approach,
Can you elaborate on what exactly this "different approach" is?
that the actions of the Democratic majority are for the most part despicable.
Didn't voters put the Democrats in charge precisely because they wanted the war brought to an end regardless of whether or not we win? Before the election, just about every poll was showing a clear majority in favor of withdrawing some or all of the troops from Iraq.
They are telling the enemy AND those who would be our friends, to just wait it out a few months and we will be gone. This dramatically reduces the chance of success of the mission for which our troops fight.
I understand that the troops would prefer that the war end with a US victory, but wars have never been about what the troops want or how they feel about the political decisions that are made. And frankly, I'm not convinced that most of the military itself is as gung-ho about fighting the war as you and other war supporters think.
-
Rogt,
What's the upside of handing Iran and Al Qaeda a victory? Perhaps there is something good about cutting and running I don't understand.
-
Rog:
C'mon Rog! You may have a way of looking at things that I think is quite off-kilter is many regards, but you are not a stupid guy-- so please don't pretend you don't know what the different approach is.
As for the meaning of the Democrats taking majority position in the Congress, apart from the role of various corruption scandals I would submit that in most cases the Dems offered absolutely nothing as to what they would do. They simply criticized President Bush and Sec'y Rumbo. In that there is plenty there to criticize, the people voted to express discontent with the way things were going.
Would someone refresh my memory as to when the President began discussing the "surge"? (What an inept name for it, but I digress , , ,) IIRC Bush proposed it AFTER the election. IOW it was not part on the table for the election-- yet another inept Bush step.
We have troops on the field of a very difficult battle and I do find it despicable that the Congressional Democrats let our enemies know that all they have to do is sit it out for a few months-- all the more so when so many of them during the summer were criticizing the President for not having enough troops to do the job!
I suspect I am in touch with more men with their boots on the ground in Iraq than you. I agree that there is some discontent-- but I find that most of it is with having their hands tied, not shutting the borders with Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc not going after Mookie Sadr, the firing of the Iraqi Army, and things of that sort-- all of which cut against the point you seek to make.
Of course in America the President, a civilian, is the Commander in Chief-- but given that there are something like only a handful of reporters outside of the Emerald City it seems to me that we would want to get the troops sense of things --without drawing them into domestic politics. By the way, anyone who wants to read from someone who IS on the ground in the sh*t, I highly recommend Michael Yon's blog-- see the thread nearby http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1168.0
Marc
-
C'mon Rog! You may have a way of looking at things that I think is quite off-kilter is many regards, but you are not a stupid guy-- so please don't pretend you don't know what the different approach is.
As far as I can see, the "different approach" is to terrorize the Iraqi population into not supporting the insurgents, grant US forces virtual immunity from prosecution for any war crimes, and as best as possible keep any negative reporting on our actions in Iraq from making it into the news. Does that more or less sum it up? Let's the quit the pussy-footing around about this.
We have troops on the field of a very difficult battle and I do find it despicable that the Congressional Democrats let our enemies know that all they have to do is sit it out for a few months
I'm not sure how any meaningful discussion of withdrawing troops or ending the war is supposed to take place without the enemy somehow hearing about it. It sounds like you're saying the discussion shouldn't take place, or that if it must take place then we have a patriotic duty to dismiss and ridicule anti-war views so the enemy doesn't get the idea that any of us take them seriously. Please clarify if I'm misrepresenting your position.
I suspect I am in touch with more men with their boots on the ground in Iraq than you. I agree that there is some discontent-- but I find that most of it is with having their hands tied, not shutting the borders with Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc not going after Mookie Sadr, the firing of the Iraqi Army, and things of that sort-- all of which cut against the point you seek to make.
Of course in America the President, a civilian, is the Commander in Chief-- but given that there are something like only a handful of reporters outside of the Emerald City it seems to me that we would want to get the troops sense of things --without drawing them into domestic politics.
I suppose, but even if it were somehow possible to accurately determine a single prevailing view amongst the troops of whether or not we should remain in the war, I don't see how it would be relevant in terms of making this decision. Would you be OK with "cut and run" if it turned out this was what the troops overwhelmingly agreed should happen?
-
"As far as I can see, the "different approach" is to terrorize the Iraqi population into not supporting the insurgents, grant US forces virtual immunity from prosecution for any war crimes, and as best as possible keep any negative reporting on our actions in Iraq from making it into the news. Does that more or less sum it up? Let's the quit the pussy-footing around about this."
**Ah yes, the US military is evil. Glad to see we've gotten to the heart of the matter. It must be tough to be one of the few decent, ethical people to live in the malevolent US, Rogt.**
"I'm not sure how any meaningful discussion of withdrawing troops or ending the war is supposed to take place without the enemy somehow hearing about it. It sounds like you're saying the discussion shouldn't take place, or that if it must take place then we have a patriotic duty to dismiss and ridicule anti-war views so the enemy doesn't get the idea that any of us take them seriously. Please clarify if I'm misrepresenting your position."
**Giving aid and comfort to America's enemies was once taboo, thankfully the left now holds it to be a birthright.
As Ayman al-Zawahiri said "These traitors in Iraq and Afghanistan must face their inevitable fate, and face up to the inescapable facts. America - which was transformed from the “Great Satan” into the “Closest Ally” - is about to depart and abandon them, just as it abandoned their like in Vietnam."
Just like Vietnam, the "peace movement" can deliver those who aspired towards freedom into torture, oppression and mass graves. Hey, if it harms America, it's got to be for the greater global good, right?**
-
Woof GM,
I'll take your comments as agreement that my description of the "different approach" is accurate.
Are you interested in an actual discussion here, or is it just going to be more blather about how "the left" is a bunch of cowards and traitors?
Rog
-
First, a gentle leash yank: Rog, GM, lets make that extra special effort that distinguishes this forum to speak to each other as if we were breaking bread together.
Returning now to the subject at hand.
"As far as I can see, the "different approach" is to terrorize the Iraqi population into not supporting the insurgents, grant US forces virtual immunity from prosecution for any war crimes, and as best as possible keep any negative reporting on our actions in Iraq from making it into the news. Does that more or less sum it up? Let's the quit the pussy-footing around about this."
Our planes of reality do not sufficiently overlap to make conversation here productive.
""I'm not sure how any meaningful discussion of withdrawing troops or ending the war is supposed to take place without the enemy somehow hearing about it. It sounds like you're saying the discussion shouldn't take place, or that if it must take place then we have a patriotic duty to dismiss and ridicule anti-war views so the enemy doesn't get the idea that any of us take them seriously. Please clarify if I'm misrepresenting your position.""
I agree the point is a difficult one. What irks me greatly is that a goodly portion of the Democratic Party seems not to consider in the slightest amount the costs in human lives of our troops of the things it says in the search for political advantage and the complete lack of sincerity of so many of them. For example, all summer long during the campaign many Dems ragged Bush for not having sufficient troops to do the job-- then when he proposes increasing the troops, without batting an Orwellian eyelash they reverse direction and vote against more troops even while funding them. WTF? They are telling the enemy to wait us out even as President Bush and Gen. Petraeus (seemingly quite well qualified for the job) are trying a new and different approach. This is vile and is but one example of the sort of thing which really gets me seething.
I distinguish this from someone who consistently says "I think this is a mistake and that we should come home."
As for the relevance of the troops views, those of them who interact with the people and with the enemy have more and better real time intel than the Barbie Doll enemedia safely esconsed in the Emerald City. If they tell me that we can do it, that carries a lot more weight with me than the NY Slimes telling me that we cannot-- especially after the NY Slimes reveals how we spy on enemy financial transactions. Scum! Similarly, if they were to tell me that we have blown it and that it is too late too pull off our original intention, that carries more weight with me than former Sec'y Rumbo.
-
First, a gentle leash yank: Rog, GM, lets make that extra special effort that distinguishes this forum to speak to each other as if we were breaking bread together.
Returning now to the subject at hand.
"As far as I can see, the "different approach" is to terrorize the Iraqi population into not supporting the insurgents, grant US forces virtual immunity from prosecution for any war crimes, and as best as possible keep any negative reporting on our actions in Iraq from making it into the news. Does that more or less sum it up? Let's the quit the pussy-footing around about this."
Our planes of reality do not sufficiently overlap to make conversation here productive.
Sorry, but I'm not going to let this go. I can understand if you object to my use of the word "terrorize", but I believe the gist of my description to be more or less accurate. If you're not willing to tell me where I'm wrong, then I have to assume you agree.
""I'm not sure how any meaningful discussion of withdrawing troops or ending the war is supposed to take place without the enemy somehow hearing about it. It sounds like you're saying the discussion shouldn't take place, or that if it must take place then we have a patriotic duty to dismiss and ridicule anti-war views so the enemy doesn't get the idea that any of us take them seriously. Please clarify if I'm misrepresenting your position.""
I agree the point is a difficult one. What irks me greatly is that a goodly portion of the Democratic Party seems not to consider in the slightest amount the costs in human lives of our troops of the things it says in the search for political advantage and the complete lack of sincerity of so many of them.
I would agree that this accurately characterizes many Democrats, but what irks me is that many right-wingers (not necessarily you) make the same accusations (cowardice, soft on national security, hate America and the troops) against Dems like Murtha who, while not exactly an anti-war poster boy, has what I think you'd agree is an honest and principled opposition to this war.
For example, all summer long during the campaign many Dems ragged Bush for not having sufficient troops to do the job-- then when he proposes increasing the troops, without batting an Orwellian eyelash they reverse direction and vote against more troops even while funding them. WTF? They are telling the enemy to wait us out even as President Bush and Gen. Petraeus (seemingly quite well qualified for the job) are trying a new and different approach. This is vile and is but one example of the sort of thing which really gets me seething.
I distinguish this from someone who consistently says "I think this is a mistake and that we should come home."
Again, no disagreement with me as to the general cowardice and spinelessness of most Democrats. My objection is to the deliberate focus on these types in order to avoid addressing the legitimate anti-war arguments.
As for the relevance of the troops views, those of them who interact with the people and with the enemy have more and better real time intel than the Barbie Doll enemedia safely esconsed in the Emerald City. If they tell me that we can do it, that carries a lot more weight with me than the NY Slimes telling me that we cannot
So do the troops who say we can't do it or otherwise validate anti-war arguments carry any weight with you? I think you'll agree that within the culture of the military, it's a lot easier to be pro-war than anti-war. Not to mention what the right-wing media will say about any soldier who expresses an anti-war view or calls attention to crimes being committed by his fellow soldiers.
-
*If you're not willing to tell me where I'm wrong, then I have to assume you agree.*
Rog, this is profoundly silly. I have been interacting with you for several years on this now so you know quite well that this is not so. As I said, there are points where our respective concepts of reality do not interface enough to make further conversation worth my time.
*Again, no disagreement with me as to the general cowardice and spinelessness of most Democrats. My objection is to the deliberate focus on these types in order to avoid addressing the legitimate anti-war arguments.*
I think it a most fair point that these types have the effect of persuading our enemies, our would be friends and those who seek to back the strong horse that we are going to cut and run. I really do not see any way around this.
As for avoiding the issues, again our respective realities do not interface. The great bulk of this forum is precisely about discussing what to do! If you want to make legitimate anti war arguments in the tone of friends breaking bread together by all means go for it. That said, talking as if our troops are war criminals and other inflammatotry nonsense does not get respect from me.
Lastly, by leaving out this portion of what I said
*Similarly, if they were to tell me that we have blown it and that it is too late too pull off our original intention, that carries more weight with me than former Sec'y Rumbo.*
you leave out the answer to your final question.
-
Though technically this belongs in the Iraq thread, it continues the conversation here.
_________________________
BATTLING FOR BAGHDAD
By RALPH PETERS
March 1, 2007 -- WITH all of the mud-sling ing on Capitol Hill,
you could almost forget the gun-slinging in Baghdad.
As Democrats, Iraqi insurgents and terrorists all struggle to
prevent an American win, it's hard to get an accurate sense of Iraq
nowadays.
When in doubt, ask a soldier.
My best source in Baghdad offered a soberly optimistic
assessment at odds with the "Gotcha!" negativity in Washington. He doesn't
claim that success is guaranteed. But he believes in his head, heart and
soul that we've got a fighting chance.
And I believe him.
I took the temperature of other officers, as well. They agree
unanimously that the administration made terrible mistakes from which we and
the Iraqis are still recovering. But not one of these soldiers is ready to
quit.
Here are the key points I've heard from those I trust:
* Of the five additional U.S. brigades headed for Baghdad, only
one is in place, with the second starting to arrive. Yet the city is already
quieter and safer. The terrorists continue to detonate their bombs - with
suicidal fanatics targeting the innocent - but sectarian killings
(death-squad hits) have dropped from over 50 each night down to single
digits.
* The tactic of stationing U.S. units and their Iraqi
counterparts down in the Baghdad 'hoods is already paying off. (It should
have been used from the outset - instead of hunkering down on massive bases.
But better late than never.) The effort has triggered a flood of
intelligence tips: When citizens feel safe, they cooperate. And when they
help us, our success compounds.
* U.S. commanders now have a lot of experience in Iraq. They're
not wide-eyed kids at the circus anymore. They understand there are no
uniform, easy answers to Iraq's violence and complex allegiances. As a
senior officer put it, "Every neighborhood and city is unique, with their
own challenges."
I'll leave it to The New York Times to betray our military
secrets, and just say I'm very impressed by the insight shown by our brigade
and battalion commanders these days.
* We hear the bad news from the rest of Iraq, such as this
week's monstrous car bombing of children at play on a soccer field in
Ramadi, but we don't hear that such attacks by al Qaeda operatives have
infuriated mainstream Sunni sheiks and their tribes - who increasingly make
common cause with us and their government. And winning over the Sunni
"middle" is crucial to Iraq's future.
* We'll never stop all suicide bombers and car bombers, but our
security crackdown has already taken out two major Vehicle-Borne Improvised
Explosive Device (VBIED) factories. And we took down a huge arms cache late
last week.
* No one's getting any "Mission Accomplished" banners ready to
go, but front-line leaders in Iraq are convinced the situation just isn't as
hopeless as politicians back home insist. I don't know a single officer
in-country who believes the reporting from Iraq gives an honest, balanced
picture.
Of course, there are serious worries:
* Above all, senior leaders worry that, thanks to political
shenanigans back home, they won't be given the time it would take to win.
Even with improved tactics, this just isn't easy work.
Personally, I continue to believe that 2007 is the year of
decision - when the Iraqi government and its security forces have to show
their mettle. But 2007 has barely begun. Let's not declare defeat for April
Fool's Day. The stakes are so high that Iraq merits this last chance.
* The sectarian violence between Sunni Arabs and the Shia that
gathered strength after last year's Golden Mosque bombing has "damaged trust
between the two sects enormously," as a U.S. official put it. It's possible
that the damage is too deep to be repaired - we just don't know. At best,
reconstructing a shared national identity is going to be hard. But many
gruesome conflicts have ended in national reconciliation.
* There's one thing we know won't work: The nutty Pelosi-crat
proposal to restrict the mission of U.S. troops to "training Iraqis and
defeating al Qaeda." Would our troops have to wait to return fire until they
checked the ID cards of their attackers? If they saw a massacre of women and
children in progress, would we want them to stand by until they received a
legal opinion as to whether the killers were bona fide foreign terrorists?
This ain't the NFL, where everybody wears a uniform and plays by
the rules. Proposals to limit the freedom of action of our troops reflect
domestic politics at their shabbiest - and you and I know it. Our troops
need fewer restrictions, not more.
THERE are no guarantees of success. The president's troop surge
may not be enough to make a decisive difference; in the end, Iraq may
collapse all around us. A sectarian bloodbath could be inevitable.
But our brave men and women in uniform have new coaches and a
new playbook for Iraq. They believe they've got a reasonable chance to cross
the goal line - and they've got more at risk than a sports celebrity's
salary.
Yes, the Iraqis have to pick up the ball - but it would be an
immoral act of strategic madness to fumble the ball on purpose.
In the end, we may not win. But you can't win if you walk off
the field while the game's still under way. The clock may run out on hope
for Iraq. But it hasn't yet.
Ralph Peters' latest book is "Never Quit The Fight."
-
*If you're not willing to tell me where I'm wrong, then I have to assume you agree.*
Rog, this is profoundly silly. I have been interacting with you for several years on this now so you know quite well that this is not so. As I said, there are points where our respective concepts of reality do not interface enough to make further conversation worth my time.
Well, I am explicitly asking you to spell out what the "different approach" is as you see it. Why wouldn't you be willing to discuss it?
Rog
-
Rog:
I have been posting about this on the DBMA Ass'n forum now, often in interaction with you, since 2001 and extensively on this forum in its previous incarnation as well as its present one. If you haven't gotten a sense of my thinking by now, I must acknowledge that my communication skills do not have what it takes for you and move on.
Marc
-
Don't question the left's patriotism....
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/006990.htm?print=1
-
The "Peacemakers"
By Deborah T. Bucknam
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 6, 2007
On March 12, 1975, Democrat Rep. (now Senator and Presidential candidate) Chris Dodd from Connecticut stated on the floor of the U.S. House:
“The greatest gift our country can give the Cambodian people is not guns but peace. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now.” The American Congress cut off all military aid to Cambodia and South Vietnam.
This is what happened one month and five days later as a result of Chris Dodd’s and other Democrats’ “gift of peace”:
On April 17th, 1975 the Khmer Rouge, a communist guerrilla group led by Pol Pot, took power in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. They forced all city dwellers into the countryside and to labor camps. During their rule, it is estimated that 2 million Cambodians died by starvation, torture or execution. 2 million Cambodians represented approximately 30% of the Cambodian population during that time.
The so-called “peace” movement today is proposing a similar “gift of peace” to Iraq.
There is no serious dispute that withdrawal of the American military from Iraq will result in an increase in torture, beheadings, drive-by shootings, car bombs. Indeed, the increase in American troop presence in Bagdad over the last few weeks has resulted in a 70% decrease in violence in Bagdad—that means far fewer deaths of innocent men, women and children. Yet the “peace” movement ignores this decrease in violence, and in fact continues to advocate an immediate withdrawal of American troops.
So how does the “peace” movement define peace? The “peace” movement defines peace as no overseas military operations by American troops.
That is not a definition of peace. Peace is the absence of political violence. Political violence is defined by the Center for Systemic Peace as the number of deaths resulting from wars, including government violence against citizens, civil wars and insurgencies, as well as wars between nations. By that measure, we are in an era of almost unprecedented peace. According to the Center for Systemic Peace which has tracked world wide political violence since 1946, political violence has decreased dramatically since the end of the Cold War in the late 1980’s. And in this decade, the world wide number of deaths as a result of political violence is only one third what it was in the “peaceful” 1990’s.
So for those who like to connect the dots, American foreign policy, including military action against thugs like the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, has resulted in this decade in a dramatic decrease in political deaths world wide. A new global threat to peace from Islamic extremists, which had replaced the threat to peace posed by communist insurgencies in previous decades, has been dramatically reduced by an aggressive U.S. policy against this form of political violence.
And Iraq was not a “peaceful” nation before American troops liberated its people from the grip of Saddam Hussein and his criminal enterprise. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Iraqis were murdered by Hussein, many by the most brutal methods known to history. Iraq, before American liberation, has been called a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave underneath.
The “peace” movement, by advocating withdrawal of American troops, willfully disregards what is actually happening in Iraq. They blame us, not the criminal gangs, ethnic cleansers, suicide bombers, and jihadists for the death and destruction in that country. American troops are trying to quell the political violence in Iraq, and they will succeed if given enough time, money and support from the American people. Quelling political violence in a country that was a concentration camp for five decades is not easy. Withdrawing before the job is done will result in an increase in violence, as withdrawal from Southeast Asia in the 1970’s resulted in the death and destruction of millions.
In conclusion, when peace is defined properly—the absence of political violence—the American military are the peacemakers. And those who would leave Iraq and the Middle East to the barbarians are the genuine warmongers.
-
KILLING MUSLIMS
By RALPH PETERS
March 8, 2007 -- IMAGINE the reaction if Western agents slaughtered a hundred Sunni pilgrims on their way to Mecca. The outrage would spark incendiary rhetoric, riots and revenge killings from Peshawar to Paris.
But when Sunni suicide bombers murdered 118 Shia pilgrims (and wounded almost 200 more) on Tuesday, Sunnis around the globe looked away: Shias only count as Muslims when America can be blamed for their suffering.
Many of those Shia victims of religious totalitarianism were traveling on foot to Karbala to honor Mohammed's grandson Hussein - who was butchered by the founders of Sunni Islam, to whom power was worth more than the Prophet's family.
The hatred goes deep.
The Sunni Arab campaign against Shias isn't just a struggle for political advantage: It reflects an impulse to genocide. And it makes a grim joke of claims of Muslim unity.
The Tuesday atrocities, followed by smaller-scale attacks on more pilgrims yesterday, were meant to be as outrageous as possible. They not only underscored the hatred Sunni extremists feel toward all Shias, but had the immediate goal of provoking Muqtada al-Sadr's Shia militia to retaliate.
The Sunni insurgents and their foreign-terrorist allies are worried. The recent effort by American and Iraqi forces to pacify Baghdad has shown early signs of success. Wary of tangling with our troops again, Sadr's Mahdi Army has been laying low, while the Sunni extremists have taken heavy losses.
The Sunnis want the Shias back in the fight.
Why? Because they want to disrupt the Baghdad security plan. Because they want to deepen the reawakened hatred between Iraq's religious communities. And because they yearn for a regional conflict that would "put Shias back in their place."
So they slaughtered more than a hundred pilgrims - men, women and children; young and old - in Allah's name.
Where was the outcry?
Human-rights groups were too busy applauding European requests for the extradition of CIA operatives (the real enemies of Western civilization, of course). Since this butchery wasn't the fault of Americans or Brits, the Europeans themselves took no interest.
American leftists, who raved that Abu Ghraib was another Auschwitz, didn't offer a single word of pity for the Muslim victims of Muslims.
All to be expected.
But shouldn't Muslims have denounced the attacks on the pilgrims? Shouldn't such an atrocity have sparked Arab anger that transcended Islam's internal divide? After all, those murdered Shias were fellow Arabs, not Persians.
Where were the public statements of sympathy by government ministers and mullahs? Where was the noble Arab media? Where are the outraged demonstrations?
Not only is Islamic unity a sham, the Middle East's hypocrisy stinks like a shallow grave. Sunnis regard Shias as Untermenschen. No Sunni government wants to see Shias receive a fair deal - in Iraq or anywhere else.
In the short term, the question is whether Shias will take the bait and retaliate against Sunni Arab civilians in Iraq. The Baghdad government is doing its best to calm the furious Shia community. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.
But the greater, long-term danger is one this column has highlighted before: The administration's rush back into the arms of the Saudis and other America-hating Sunni Arab governments is a colossal strategic mistake.
The moral issues are bad enough: To the Saudi royal family, dead Shias aren't tragedies - they're trophies. One almost expects those bloated, bigoted princes to organize Shia-hunting safaris the way they slaughter endangered species when vacationing in impoverished African countries (been there, seen that).
The strategic catastrophe that would result from a return to our wretched mistakes of the 20th century would cost us dearly. When picking allies in the Middle East, we've been on the wrong side of history for over a half-century. And now the Saudis are waging a propaganda campaign to convince American opinion-makers that they're our best pals in the whole, wide world.
It works. An honorable elder statesman I respect recently got suckered during a junket to Saudi Arabia. He left Riyadh convinced he'd been sitting down with our indispensible allies.
Well, the view I've seen with my own eyes - in dozens of Muslim and mixed-faith countries - is of Saudi money spent lavishly to divide struggling societies, to block social and educational progress for Muslims and to preach deadly hatred toward the West.
Until 9/11, the Saudis got away with their extremist filth in this country, too. And Saudi-funded mosques here still seek to prevent Muslims from integrating into American society.
The Saudis, not the Iranians, are the worst anti-American hate-mongers in the world today. When our dignitaries visit Prince Bandar and his buddies, they get the (literal) royal treatment. But in the slums of Mombasa or Cairo, in Lahore, Delhi and Istanbul, the Saudis do everything in their power to make Muslims hate us.
After the suicide attacks on those pilgrims, did any member of the Saudi royal family visit the kingdom's own oppressed Shias to express sympathy and Muslim solidarity?
Our relationship with the Saudis reminds me of the scene in the film "The Shining" when Jack Nicholson's character imagines he's embracing a beautiful woman only to open his eyes and find himself smooching a decomposing corpse. It's time for Washington's Saudi-lovers to open their eyes.
By the way: The two suicide bombers who killed those pilgrims were Saudis.
Ralph Peters' latest book is "Never Quit the Fight."
-
Private Papers
www.victorhanson.com
April 13, 2007
The Post-west
A civilization that has become just a dream.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
I recently had a dream that British marines fought back, like their forefathers of old, against criminals and pirates. When taken captive, they proved defiant in their silence. When released, they talked to the tabloids with restraint and dignity, and accepted no recompense.
I dreamed that a kindred German government, which best knew the wages of appeasement, cut-off all trade credits to the outlaw Iranian mullahs — even as the European Union joined the Americans in refusing commerce with this Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic, and thuggish regime.
NATO countries would then warn Iran that their next unprovoked attack on a vessel of a member nation would incite the entire alliance against them in a response that truly would be of a “disproportionate” nature.
In this apparition of mine, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in Syria at the time, would lecture the Assad regime that there would be consequences to its serial murdering of democratic reformers in Lebanon, to fomenting war with Israel by means of its surrogates, and to sending terrorists to destroy the nascent constitutional government in Iraq.
She would add that the United States could never be friends with an illegitimate dictatorship that does its best to destroy the only three democracies in the region. And then our speaker would explain to Iran that a U.S. Congresswoman would never detour to Tehran to dialogue with a renegade government that had utterly ignored U.N. non-proliferation mandates and daily had the blood of Americans on its hands.
Fellow Democrats like John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, and Harry Reid would add that, as defenders of the liberal tradition of the West, they were not about to call a retreat before extremist killers who behead and kidnap, who blow up children and threaten female reformers and religious minorities, and who have begun using poison gas, all in an effort to annihilate voices of tolerance in Iraq.
These Democrats would reiterate that they had not authorized a war to remove the psychopathic Saddam Hussein only to allow the hopeful country to be hijacked by equally vicious killers. And they would warn the world that their differences with the Bush administration, whatever they might be, pale in comparison to the shared American opposition to the efforts of al Qaeda, the Taliban, Syria, and Iran to kill any who would advocate freedom of the individual.
Those in Congress would not deny that Congress itself had voted for a war against Saddam on 23 counts — the vast majority of which had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction and remain as valid today as when they were approved in 2002.
Congressional Democrats would make clear that, while in the interests of peace they might wish to talk to Iran, they had no idea how to approach a regime that subsidizes Holocaust denial, threatens to wipe out Israel, defies the world in seeking nuclear weapons, trains terrorists to kill Americans in Iraq, engages in piracy and hostage taking, and butchers or incarcerates any of its own who question the regime.
In this dream, I heard our ex-presidents add to this chorus of war-time solidarity. Jimmy Carter reminded Americans that radical Islam had started in earnest on his watch, out of an endemic hatred of all things Western. I imagined him explaining that America began being called the “Great Satan” during the presidential tenure of a liberal pacifist, not a Texan conservative.
Bill Clinton would likewise add that he bombed Iraq, and Afghanistan, and East Africa without congressional or U.N. approval because of the need for unilateral action against serial terrorism and the efforts of radicals to obtain weapons of mass destruction.
George Bush Sr. would in turn lecture the media that it was once as furious at him for not removing Saddam as it is now furious at his son for doing so; that it was once as critical of him for sending too many troops to the Middle East as it is now critical of his son for sending too few; that it was once as hostile to the dictates of his excessively large coalition as it is now disparaging of his son’s intolerably small alliance; that it was once as dismissive of his old concern about Iranian influence in Iraq as it is now aghast at his son’s naiveté about Tehran’s interest in absorbing southern Iraq; and that it was once as repulsed by his own cynical realism as it is now repulsed by his son’s blinkered idealism.
I also dreamed that the British government only laughed at calls to curtail studies of the Holocaust in deference to radical Muslims, and instead repeatedly aired a documentary on its sole Victoria Cross winner in Iraq. The British, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish foreign ministers would collectively warn the radical Islamic world that there would be no more concessions to the pre-rational primeval mind, no more backpeddling and equivocating on rioting and threats over cartoons or operas or papal statements. There would be no more apologies about how the West need make amends for a hallowed tradition that started 2,500 years ago with classical Athens, led to the Italian Republics of the Renaissance, and inspired the liberal democracies that defeated fascism, Japanese militarism, Nazism, and Communist totalitarianism, and now are likewise poised to end radical Islamic fascism.
Europeans would advise their own Muslim immigrants, from London to Berlin, that the West, founded on principles of the Hellenic and European Enlightenments, and enriched by the Sermon on the Mount, had nothing to apologize for, now or in the future. Newcomers would either accept this revered culture of tolerance, assimilation, and equality of religions and the sexes — or return home to live under its antithesis of seventh-century Sharia law.
Media critics of the ongoing war might deplore our tactics, take issue with the strategy, and lament the failure to articulate our goals and values. But they would not stoop to the lies of “no blood for oil” — not when Iraqi petroleum is now at last under transparent auspices and bid on by non-American companies, even as the price skyrockets and American ships protect the vulnerable sea-lanes, ensuring life-saving commerce for all importing nations.
I also dreamed that no columnist, no talking head, no pundit would level the charge of “We took our eye off bin Laden in Afghanistan” when they themselves had no answer on how to reach al Qaedists inside nuclear Pakistan, a country ruled by a triangulating dictator and just one bullet away from an Islamic theocracy.
…
And then I woke up, remembering that the West of old lives only in dreams. Yes, the new religion of the post-Westerner is neither the Enlightenment nor Christianity, but the gospel of the Path of Least Resistance — one that must lead inevitably to gratification rather than sacrifice.
Once one understands this new creed, then all the surreal present at last makes sense: life in the contemporary West is so good, so free, so undemanding, that we will pay, say, and suffer almost anything to enjoy its uninterrupted continuance — and accordingly avoid almost any principled act that might endanger it.
-
That's a keeper GM.
-
Another must read.
http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000140.html
-
Harry's War
Democrats are taking ownership of a defeat in Iraq.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
We're going to pick up Senate seats as a result of this war. Senator Schumer has shown me numbers that are compelling and astounding.
--Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, April 12.
Gen. David Petraeus is in Washington this week, where on Monday he briefed President Bush on the progress of the new military strategy in Iraq. Today he will give similar briefings on Capitol Hill, but maybe he should save his breath. As fellow four-star Harry Reid recently informed America, the war Gen. Petraeus is fighting and trying to win is already "lost."
Mr. Reid has since tried to "clarify" that remark, and in a speech Monday he laid out his own strategy for Iraq. But perhaps we ought to be grateful for his earlier candor in laying out the strategic judgment--and nakedly political rationale--that underlies the latest Congressional bid to force a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq starting this fall. By doing so, he and the Democrats are taking ownership of whatever ugly outcome follows a U.S. defeat in Iraq.
This isn't to say that the Administration hasn't made its share of major blunders in this war. But at least Mr. Bush and his commanders are now trying to make up for these mistakes with a strategy to put Prime Minister Maliki's government on a stronger footing, secure Baghdad and the Sunni provinces against al Qaeda and allow for an eventual, honorable, U.S. withdrawal. That's more than can be said for Mr. Reid and the Democratic left, who are making the job for our troops more difficult by undermining U.S. morale and Iraqi confidence in American support.
In his speech Monday, Mr. Reid claimed that "nothing has changed" since the surge began taking effect in February. It's true that the car bombings and U.S. casualties continue, and may increase. But such an enemy counterattack was to be expected, aimed as it is directly at the Democrats in Washington. The real test of the surge is whether it can secure enough of the population to win their cooperation and gradually create fewer safe havens for the terrorists.
So far, the surge is meeting that test, even before the additional troops Mr. Bush ordered have been fully deployed. Between February and March sectarian violence declined by 26%, according to Gen. William Caldwell. Security in Baghdad has improved sufficiently to allow the government to shorten its nightly curfew. Radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has been politically marginalized, which explains his apparent departure from Iraq and the resignation of his minions from Mr. Maliki's parliamentary coalition--a sign that moderate Shiites are gaining strength at his expense.
More significantly, most Sunni tribal sheikhs are now turning against al Qaeda and cooperating with coalition and Iraqi forces. What has turned these sheikhs isn't some grand "political solution," which Mr. Reid claims is essential for Iraq's salvation. They've turned because they have tired of being fodder for al Qaeda's strategy of fomenting a civil war with a goal of creating a Taliban regime in Baghdad, or at least in Anbar province. The sheikhs realize that they will probably lose such a civil war now that the Shiites are as well-armed as the insurgents and prepared to be just as ruthless. Their best chance for survival now lies with a democratic government in Baghdad. The political solution becomes easier the stronger Mr. Maliki and Iraqi government forces are, and strengthening both is a major goal of the surge.
By contrast, Mr. Reid's strategy of withdrawal will only serve to enlarge the security vacuum in which Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents have thrived. That's also true of what an American withdrawal will mean for the broader Middle East. Mr. Reid says that by withdrawing from Iraq we will be better able to take on al Qaeda and a nuclear Iran. But the reality (to use Mr. Reid's new favorite word) is that we are fighting al Qaeda in Iraq, and if we lose there we will only make it harder to prevail in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Countries do not usually win wars by losing their biggest battles.
As for Iran, Mr. Reid's strategy of defeat would guarantee that the radical mullahs of Tehran have more influence in Baghdad than the moderate Shiites of Najaf. It would also make the mullahs even more confident that they can build a bomb with impunity and no fear of any Western response.
The stakes in Iraq are about the future of the entire Middle East--and of our inevitable involvement in it. In calling for withdrawal, Mr. Reid and his allies, just as with Vietnam, may think they are merely following polls that show the public is unhappy with the war. Yet Americans will come to dislike a humiliation and its aftermath even more, especially as they realize that a withdrawal from Iraq now will only make it harder to stabilize the region and defeat Islamist radicals. And they will like it even less should we be required to re-enter the country someday under far worse circumstances.
This is the outcome toward which the "lost" Democrats and Harry Reid are heading, and for which they will be responsible if it occurs. The alternative is to fight for a stable Iraqi government that can control the country and keep it together in a federal, democratic system. As long as such an outcome is within reach, it is our responsibility to achieve it.
WSJ
-
Geopolitical Diary: Iran's Current Conciliatory Mood Swing
Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani arrived in Ankara, Turkey, on Wednesday to resume talks with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana over Tehran's nuclear program. Negotiations came to an abrupt halt in December 2006 when the United Nations imposed long-awaited sanctions on the Islamic Republic. A few days before Larijani's meeting with Solana, the European Union approved a second phase of U.N. sanctions, which includes a ban on Iranian arms exports and an asset freeze targeting 28 individuals, one-third of whom are members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Despite the new sanctions, Iran has continued to play nice and has issued a series of conciliatory statements expressing its desire to create a rational atmosphere for negotiations. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said April 22 that the United States is showing signs of "softening" its stance toward Iran, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he is ready to hold talks with U.S. President George W. Bush. Even Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has dialed back the pressure, telling Israel Radio on April 23 that there is still time for the international community to peacefully prevent Iran from going nuclear.
The Iranian nuclear playbook revolves around consolidating that country's power in Iraq. During the ebb and flow of negotiations between Washington and Tehran, the Iranians have developed a number of bargaining chips -- including their nuclear program -- to strengthen their hand against the United States in discussions about a post-Saddam Hussein power structure in Baghdad. Throughout this process, Iran has undergone a number of calculated mood swings in order to shape the discussions in its favor. We now are witnessing one such swing. Iran is taking a conciliatory approach ahead of a key meeting May 3-4 at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, at which Iran and the United States are expected to participate in a multilateral discussion about how to bring security to Iraq.
Thus far, Iran is playing hard to get, making it appear as though Washington -- not Tehran -- is begging for talks on Iraq. Iran played the same game ahead of earlier meetings attended by both U.S. and Iranian representatives, including a March meeting in Baghdad and the February security conference in Munich, Germany. Iran's apparent hesitation this time around has been attributed to the "venue and agenda" of the meeting. Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari traveled to Tehran on Wednesday with a mission sent by Washington to convince the Iranians to participate in the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting, which was originally set to take place in Ankara, but was moved to Egypt, likely due to the protestations of Iraq's Kurdish bloc. (Iran and Turkey are both outside the Arab fold and are on the same page in terms of ensuring that Iraqi Kurds do not carve out a separate region for themselves while Baghdad burns -- making Ankara an ideal meeting place in Iran's eyes.)
One thing Tehran does not want is for the Arab powers and the United States to turn the Egypt conference into a Tehran-bashing event, in which all the blame for Iraq's security problems would fall on its eastern neighbor. Iran wants to go into the talks on relatively equal footing with the United States, and will attempt to extract concessions from Washington ahead of the meeting, including the release of the five Iranian officials who were seized by U.S. forces in January from an Iranian diplomatic office in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil. This explains Iran's recent public statements that it has received positive signs regarding the five Iranians being held in Iraq. By bringing the private negotiations into the public sphere, Iran is trying to hold the United States to any behind-the-scenes assurances it might have given about freeing the diplomats.
Iran has not yet announced whether its representatives will attend the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting. While the Iranians likely will make the trip, do not expect them to take any big leaps during the negotiations. Iran is still watching to see how the U.S. congressional debate over Iraq war funding shapes up, and can clearly see the Bush administration battling popular opinion by refusing to set a date for withdrawing from Iraq. If Iran could be assured that the upcoming U.S. presidential race would produce a leader who would attempt to get U.S. forces out of Iraq quickly, the clerical regime could risk dragging out the negotiations. But this is by no means guaranteed, and Bush is doing all he can to convince Iran that U.S. troops are in the Gulf for the long haul -- and that it is in Iran's best interest to deal now before the tide turns against it. Moreover, the Iranians are not at all confident about the state of Iraq's Shiite bloc, which is rife with fissures.
With all of these uncertainties, Iran likely will continue to stall, and to manipulate the nuclear negotiations as much as possible until it can better manage the Iraqi Shia.
stratfor.com
-
Not sure in which thread to put this article from today's NYTimes, so I put it here:
===============
WASHINGTON, April 28 — No foreign diplomat has been closer or had more access to President Bush, his family and his administration than the magnetic and fabulously wealthy Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia.
Prince Bandar has mentored Mr. Bush and his father through three wars and the broader campaign against terrorism, reliably delivering — sometimes in the Oval Office — his nation’s support for crucial Middle East initiatives dependent on the regional legitimacy the Saudis could bring, as well as timely warnings of Saudi regional priorities that might put it into apparent conflict with the United States. Even after his 22-year term as Saudi ambassador ended in 2005, he still seemed the insider’s insider. But now, current and former Bush administration officials are wondering if the longtime reliance on him has begun to outlive its usefulness.
Bush administration officials have been scratching their heads over steps taken by Prince Bandar’s uncle, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, that have surprised them by going against the American playbook, after receiving assurances to the contrary from Prince Bandar during secret trips he made to Washington.
For instance, in February, King Abdullah effectively torpedoed plans by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for a high-profile peace summit meeting between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, by brokering a power-sharing agreement with Mr. Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas that did not require Hamas to recognize Israel or forswear violence. The Americans had believed, after discussions with Prince Bandar, that the Saudis were on board with the strategy of isolating Hamas.
American officials also believed, again after speaking with Prince Bandar, that the Saudis might agree to direct engagement with Israel as part of a broad American plan to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. King Abdullah countermanded that plan.
Most bitingly, during a speech before Arab heads of state in Riyadh three weeks ago, the king condemned the American invasion of Iraq as “an illegal foreign occupation.” The Bush administration, caught off guard, was infuriated, and administration officials have found Prince Bandar hard to reach since.
Since the Iraq war and the attendant plummeting of America’s image in the Muslim world, King Abdullah has been striving to set a more independent and less pro-American course, American and Arab officials said. And that has steered America’s relationship with its staunchest Arab ally into uncharted waters. Prince Bandar, they say, may no longer be able to serve as an unerring beacon of Saudi intent.
“The problem is that Bandar has been pursuing a policy that was music to the ears of the Bush administration, but was not what King Abdullah had in mind at all,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former United States ambassador to Israel who is now head of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy.
Of course it is ultimately the king — and not the prince — who makes the final call on policy. More than a dozen associates of Prince Bandar, including personal friends and Saudi officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that if his counsel has led to the recent misunderstandings, it is due to his longtime penchant for leaving room in his dispatches for friends to hear what they want to hear. That approach, they said, is catching up to the prince as new tensions emerge between the United States and Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Bandar, son of one of the powerful seven sons born to the favorite wife of Saudi Arabia’s founding king, “needs to personally regroup and figure out how to put Humpty Dumpty together again,” one associate said.
Robert Jordan, a former Bush administration ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said the Saudis’ mixed signals have come at a time when King Abdullah — who has ruled the country since 1995 but became king only in 2005 after the death of his brother, Fahd — has said he does not want to go down in history as Mr. Bush’s Arab Tony Blair. “I think he feels the need as a kind of emerging leader of the Arab world right now to maintain a distance,” he said.
Mr. Jordan said that although the United States and Saudi Arabia “have different views on how to get there,” the countries still share the same long-term goals for the region and remain at heart strong allies.
An administration spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, said none of the current issues threatened the relationship. “We may have differences on issues now and then,” he said, “but we remain close allies.”
Or, as Saleh al-Kallab, a former minister of information in Jordan, put it, “The relationship between the United States and the Arab regimes is like a Catholic marriage where you can have no divorce.”
But there can be separation. And several associates of Prince Bandar acknowledge that he feels caught between the opposing pressure of the king and that of his close friends in the Bush administration. It is a relationship that Prince Bandar has fostered with great care and attention to detail over the years, making himself practically indispensable to Mr. Bush, his family and his aides.
----------
Page 2 of 2)
A few nights after he resigned his post as secretary of state two years ago, Colin L. Powell answered a ring at his front door. Standing outside was Prince Bandar, then Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, with a 1995 Jaguar. Mr. Powell’s wife, Alma, had once mentioned that she missed their 1995 Jaguar, which she and her husband had traded in. Prince Bandar had filed that information away, and presented the Powells that night with an identical, 10-year-old model. The Powells kept the car — a gift that the State Department said was legal — but recently traded it away.
The move was classic Bandar, who has been referred to as Bandar Bush, attending birthday celebrations, sending notes in times of personal crisis and entertaining the Bushes or top administration officials at sumptuous dinner parties at Prince Bandar’s opulent homes in McLean, Va., and Aspen, Colo.
He has invited top officials to pizza and movies out at a mall in suburban Virginia — and then rented out the movie theater (candy served chair-side, in a wagon) and the local Pizza Hut so he and his guests could enjoy themselves in solitude. He is said to feel a strong sense of loyalty toward Mr. Bush’s father dating to the Persian Gulf war, which transferred to the son, whom he counseled about international diplomacy during Mr. Bush’s first campaign for president.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, as the United States learned that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi and focused on the strict Wahhabi school of Islam that informed them and their leader and fellow Saudi, Osama bin Laden, Prince Bandar took a public role in assuring the Americans that his nation would cooperate in investigating and combating anti-American terrorism. He also helped arrange for more than a hundred members of the bin Laden family to be flown out of the United States.
Even since he left the Saudi ambassador’s post in Washington and returned to Saudi Arabia two years ago, Prince Bandar has continued his long courtship, over decades, of the Bush family and Vice President Dick Cheney, flying into Washington for unofficial meetings at the White House. He cruises in without consulting the Saudi Embassy in Washington, where miffed officials have sometimes said they had no idea that he was in town — a perceived slight that contributed to the resignation of his cousin Prince Turki al-Faisal as ambassador to the United States last year. He has been succeeded by Adel al-Jubeir, who is said to have strong support from the king.
Prince Turki was never able to match the role of Prince Bandar, whom the president, vice president and other officials regularly consult on every major Middle East initiative — from the approach to Iran to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to Iraq. Prince Bandar played a crucial role in securing the use of the Prince Sultan Air Base at Al Kharj, roughly 70 miles outside Riyadh, in the attacks led by the United States against Afghanistan and Iraq, despite chafing within his government.
He helped in the negotiations that led to Libya giving up its weapons programs, a victory for Mr. Bush. He pledged to protect the world economy from oil shocks after the invasion, the White House said in 2004, but he denied a report, by the author Bob Woodward, that he had promised to stabilize oil prices in time for Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign.
The cause of the latest friction in the American-Saudi relationship began in 2003, before the invasion of Iraq. The Saudis agreed with the Bush view of Saddam Hussein as a threat, but voiced concern about post-invasion contingencies and the fate of the Sunni minority. When it became clear that the administration was committed to invading Iraq, Prince Bandar took a lead role in negotiations between the Bush administration and Saudi officials over securing bases and staging grounds.
But Saudi frustration has mounted over the past four years, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated. King Abdullah was angry that the Bush administration ignored his advice against de-Baathification and the disbanding of the Iraqi military. He became more frustrated as America’s image in the Muslim world deteriorated, because Saudi Arabia is viewed as a close American ally.
Tensions between King Abdullah and top Bush officials escalated further when Mr. Bush announced a new energy initiative to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil during his 2006 State of the Union address, and announced new initiatives in that direction this year.
Both American and Saudi officials say that King Abdullah clearly values — and uses — Prince Bandar’s close relationship with the White House. And that, associates said, will dictate what Prince Bandar can do.
“Don’t expect the man, because he happens to have an American background, not to play the game for his home team,” said William Simpson, Prince Bandar’s biographer, and a former classmate at the Royal Air Force College in England. “The home team is Saudi Arabia.”
-
That is the question. TB:
Everyone seems to have their own answer and their opinions cannot be changed.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/tblankley.htm
-
Victor Davis HansonMay 2, 2007 8:48 AM The Crazy Middle East
All Eyes on Baghdad
All the pros and cons on the war have been aired. We’ve read all the tell-all books by Woodward, Ricks, Gordon, Trainor and the rest that now contradict the arguments and theses of what they wrote about the 1991 war—that then we should have done what we are doing now, which in turn should now be what we had done then.
All the once insider geniuses like Clark, Scheuer, O’Neil and Tenet have sold their tell-all accounts in which they were brilliant and all else obtuse. Feith has been called a dumb _____ by almost everyone in DC. Libby is facing jail for something or other, but most certainly not what the Special Prosecutor was supposed to be looking for; Wolfowitz faces an ouster: so much for bringing up to your board that you might have a conflict of interest down the road.
We’ve suffered through the distortions of Michael Moore and know that Cindy Sheehan once thanked President Bush for meeting with her. We’ve heard that the US military is akin to Saddam, Nazis, Pol Pot, or Stalin from the likes of Sens. Durbin and Kennedy, that America is a pariah from Sen. Kerry, that the war is lost from Sen. Reid and Howard Dean, and about everything imaginable from poor Sen. Biden.
We know that the Clintons once tried to restore their fides on national security by railing about Saddam’s WMD program, both before and after September 11. There has been a revolt of the generals and CIA operatives, that in addition to demonstrating opposition to the war, showed just how angry top brass are at our restructuring the military and /or intelligence agencies.
The Celebs have weighed in, and now we know that the Dixie Chicks, Sean Penn, Barbra Streisand, Rosie, the Donald, and Alec Baldwin are as ignorant as they are vehement and vicious in their pronouncements.
We’ve seen all the supposed landmark stories come and go: Dick Cheney’s shotgun, the supposed flushed Koran, the forged memos about Bush’s National Guard service, the doctored photos from Beirut, the slips from CNN brass about bias, the implosion of Dan Rather, the blood lust for Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Gonzalez, et. al. None of them did anything illegal; all of them were hounded by the press to resign—all of whom Republicans thought if these just go, the Left will stop, when in fact its appetite was only fed.
All that has come and gone, and we are left in the end with the verdict of the battlefield. The war will be won or lost, like it or not, fairly or unjustly, in the next six months in Baghdad. Either Gen. Petraeus quells the violence to a level that even the media cannot exaggerate, or the enterprise fails, and we withdraw. For all the acrimony and hysteria at home, that in the end is what we face—the verdict of all wars that ultimately are decided by the soldiers, and then either supported or opposed by the majority at home with no views or ideology other than its desire to conform to the narrative from the front: support our winners, oppose our losers. In the end, that is what this entire hysterical four years are about.
Win Iraq in the sense of a government stabilizing analogous to Kurdistan or Turkey, and even at this late hour, pundits and politicians will scramble around to dig up their 2002-3 quotes supporting the war, while Hollywood goes quiet and turns to more sermons on Darfur.
Sad, but true.
And the Palestinians wonder?
Polls show about 20% of Americans favor the Palestinians in their war against Israel, while about half the US population now expresses an unease with Muslims in general. Meanwhile a large minority of Muslims, according to polls, condones terrorist attacks on civilians, while a vast majority is vehemently anti-American. Their prejudice apparently is chalked up to our omnipresence—like saving Kuwait, feeding Somalia, stopping Muslims dying en masse in the Balkans, ridding Afghanistan of the Soviets, paying astronomical prices for their oil, and giving nearly $100 billion over the years to the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Palestinians.
Our prejudice surely could not be due to 19 Muslims slaughtering— to the delight of millions—3,000 Americans, nor to the news almost every hour of Christian-Muslim violence, Hindu-Muslim violence, Buddhist-Muslim violence, or secular-Muslim violence. And now the much circulated quote from Sheik Ahmad Bahr, acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council:
“You will be victorious” on the face of this planet. You are the masters of the world on the face of this planet. Yes, [the Koran says that] “you will be victorious,” but only “if you are believers.” Allah willing, “you will be victorious,” while America and Israel will be annihilated. I guarantee you that the power of belief and faith is greater than the power of America and Israel. They are cowards, who are eager for life, while we are eager for death for the sake of Allah. That is why America’s nose was rubbed in the mud in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, and everywhere… Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one. Oh Allah, show them a day of darkness. Oh Allah, who sent down His Book, the mover of the clouds, who defeated the enemies of the Prophet defeat the Jews and the Americans, and bring us victory over them.”
And wait till these people get the bomb. So much for the war against Islamism being “over.”
What is it about the Palestinians?
Occupied Land? Are we speaking of Tibet? And why not worry about territorial disputes between Argentina and its neighbors, or Russia and Japan over the Kuriles, or a divided and Turkish-occupied Cyprus, or for that matter, Germany that lost historic homelands to postwar Poland? Or let us stop the earth’s rotation for Kashmir, which at least involves two large nuclear adversaries. Do the millions of Kurds in Turkey qualify as homeless or refugees or voiceless?
Refugees?
Are we talking of the 600,000 plus Jews that were expelled from the major Arab capitals following the 1967 war?
Or are we drawn to the millions in the Congo and Nigeria that have lost their homes?
If we are speaking of Palestinians, do we refer to the quarter-million plus expelled from Kuwait following the 1991 Gulf War?
Violence?
Surely the world mourns the million lost in Rwanda? Or the tens of thousands now killed in Darfur? Or the million plus starved the last decade in North Korea?
So why just the Palestinians?
The truth is that the international media has created the entire Palestinian crisis, at least in terms of elevating it beyond all others of far worse magnitude.
Why?
Fear of international terrorists, going way back to the plane hijackings and Olympian killings of the 1970s.
Fear of oil price hikes, as if the Saudis might once again turn off the spigots in solidarity with Palestinians.
Demography? There are tens of millions of pro-Palestinian angry Muslims with a propensity toward supporting violent acts, and very few Jews who are busy writing scientific articles and discovering new products. So whom to fear?
And then there is the old anti-Semitism, old in the sense of both generated in Europe and as old as the Koran itself in the Middle East.
What to Do?
We should give not a cent to any government in Palestine. Americans might wish the people there well, but explain due to their vehement anti-American prejudices, we cannot accept any into this country, revoke the visas of those who are here, and politely ask them to settle their own differences with Israel.
Perhaps with Gulf oil money, they can one day forget Israel, create a just society, foster a vibrant, non-corrupt economy, and then with confidence negotiate with Israel about borders. But until then, there is no reason to have relations with this government or its populace.
Its mother’s milk is envy and jealousy that a displaced decimated people was placed down beside them in rock and scrub, and sixty years later built a humane, prosperous society that is a daily reminder to them that what they do—statism, gender apartheid, tribalism, feuding, religious intolerance, corruption, autocracy, polygamy, honor killings, etc.—lead to the very opposite sort of society in which nothing is invented, no discovery is found, no security or prosperity is achieved, and hand-outs are demanded but never appreciated.
But why discuss self-inflicted misery when the Jews are a few hundred yards away to blame, and guilt-ridden wealthy Westerners are easy marks for shake-downs, themselves anti-Semitic and fearful of hooded men with shaking fist and blood-curdling chants?
Don’t forget Syria.
Nancy Pelosi et al. gave sermons on the need to include Syria in regional discussions and to open a dialogue with this “key player.” Here’s what that olive branch won in reply, a boast from dictator Assad that Syria is essential to the killing of Americans in Iraq:
“To the east there is the resistance in Iraq, to the west there is the resistance in Lebanon and to the south there is the resistance of the Palestinian people…We, in Syria, are at the heart of all these events. Syria, the Arab region and the Middle East are going through a dangerous period. Destructive colonial projects are seeking to divide and reshape our region…Every Syrian citizen supports the Iraqi people who are resisting the American occupation.”
“Destructive colonial projects” means offering someone the right to vote and have some freedom of expression, in other words to say no to thugs like Assad, Ahmadinejad, or Khadafy.
Be careful what you wish for.
For years Arab intellectuals demanded from the West some concern for human rights, and a cessation of business as usual with their dictatorial strongmen. But post 2003 we are learning that such posturing was, well, posturing, and most of these hothouse plants are more angry at the democratization efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq than they are at their own autocrats. An unspoken truth in the post 9/11 climate is that Arab reformers have zero credibility. Most live in Europe and the United States (including members of the families of the Pakistani, Syrian, Lebanese, and Saudi autocrats and extremists). Most are far more critical of western governments that gave them refuge and a new life than they are of the illiberal regimes that drove them out.
Oil, father of us all
In the end, all reasoning and caclucation comes down to oil, not energy independce just a lessening of our need to import by about 5 million barrels or so on the world market. Let Brazil export duty-free ethanol; drill in Anwar and off our coasts; build 20 or so nuclear reactors to replace natural gas and power batteries at night of small commuter cars; up the fleet average gas mileage; develop oil tar and oil shale; use alternative energies—and do all that inclusively rather than in an either/or strategy, and we can collapse the world price, and with it the strategic importance of this dangerous, dysfunctional, and ultimately irrelevant part of the world.
Without oil and nukes, the Arab and Iranian Middle East has no hold on the world, no more than does Paraguay or the Ivory Coast or Bulgaria or Laos. We wish them well, but find Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, the House of Saud, Hamas, Khadafy, and all the rest, well, all too retro-7th-century for our tastes.
-
Regarding the VDH piece just posted. That is a great read from start to finish IMO. Looking past the question of Baghdad, wouldn't it be nice if we tried this strategy toward world peace:
"Let Brazil export duty-free ethanol; drill in Anwar and off our coasts; build 20 or so nuclear reactors to replace natural gas and power batteries at night of small commuter cars; up the fleet average gas mileage; develop oil tar and oil shale; use alternative energies—and do all that inclusively rather than in an either/or strategy, and we can collapse the world price, and with it the strategic importance of this dangerous, dysfunctional, and ultimately irrelevant part of the world."
Considering the trillion dollars and thousands of lives going into war right now, isn't it amazing that we can't even agree on taking these simple steps to empower ourselves and depower the thugs of that region.
-
http://www.lauramansfield.com/j/default.asp
BREAKING: Zawahiri comments on timetable for Iraq withdrawal
Excerpt from soon to be released Zawahiri tape:
Interviewer: The American Congress recently passed a bill which ties the funding of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq which ends next March. What is your comment on this resolution?
Zawahiri: This bill reflects American failure and frustration. However, this bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap. We ask Allah that they only get out of it after losing two hundred to three hundred thousand killed, in order that we give the spillers of blood in Washington and Europe an unforgettable lesson which will motivate them to review their entire doctrinal and moral system which produced their historic criminal Crusader/Zionist entity.
Later in the tape, he goes on to say:
Thus, I warn everyone who has helped the Crusade against Iraq and Afghanistan that the Crusaders are departing – by their own admission – and soon, with Allah’s permission, so let him ponder his fate and future.
Please check back - we will post this video as soon as it becomes available.
-
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=3143623
New Tape: Al Qaeda No. 2 Wants 200,000-300,000 U.S. Dead in Iraq
Ayman al-Zawahiri Says Al Qaeda Wants to Spill More U.S. Blood Before America Withdraws
By BRIAN ROSS
May 5, 2007 —
In a new video posted today on the Internet, al Qaeda's number two man, Ayman al Zawahiri, mocks the bill passed by Congress setting a timetable for the pullout of U.S. troops in Iraq.
"This bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap," Zawahiri says in answer to a question posed to him an interviewer.
Continuing in the same tone, Zawahiri says, "We ask Allah that they only get out of it after losing 200,000 to 300,000 killed, in order that we give the spillers of blood in Washington and Europe an unforgettable lesson."
Based on the references to the bill, the tape, produced by al Qaeda's propaganda arm, as-Sahab, appears to have been made after Congress passed the legislation last week but before President Bush vetoed in on Thursday.
According to Laura Mansfield, a counter terrorism analyst with Strategic Translations, an organization that monitors al Qaeda postings, the tape was posted on the Internet this morning and covers the usual range of Zawahri's topics including Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.
There has been a flurry of audio and video releases featuring Zawahiri, although no new communication from Osama bin Laden since mid-2006.
-
http://www.siteinstitute.org/bin/printerfriendly/pf.cgi
SITE Publications
As-Sahab Video of Third Interview with Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri – 5/2007
By SITE Institute
May 5, 2007
Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two figure in al-Qaeda, is featured in a video interview produced by as-Sahab, marking the third such sit-down interview to be conducted with the multimedia wing of al-Qaeda. The first was issued in September 2005, and was followed a year later by the second, which is titled, “Hot Issues”. The video, one-hour and seven minutes in length, is subtitled in English, and features Zawahiri sitting in front of a shelves of books and his gun. The video and transcript were obtained by the SITE Institute. In this interview, dated in the current month, Zawahiri remarks on the row he created in his last speech, charging the leaders of Hamas with abandoning jihad and shirking the Shari’a, or Islamic law, on which their group was founded, using his usual fiery rhetoric and strict adherence to the belief that a Palestinian entity is greater than the lives of Palestinians. However, most interesting to note is Zawahiri’s frequent references to Malcolm X AKA Al-Hajj Malik al-Shabazz, a past spokesman for the Nation of Islam, Sahab’s inclusion of excerpts from his speeches, and Zawahiri courting of all minorities in arguing that the jihad by the Mujahideen and al-Qaeda is not merely for the benefit of Muslims. He states:
“That’s why I want blacks in America, people of color, American Indians, Hispanics, and all the weak and oppressed in North and South America, in Africa and Asia, and all over the world, to know that when we wage Jihad in Allah’s path, we aren’t waging Jihad to lift oppression from the Muslims only, we are waging Jihad to lift oppression from all of mankind, because Allah has ordered us never to accept oppression, whatever it may be.”
Aside from Zawahiri’s opportunistic approach to minority rights, he comments on the current issue over the War in Iraq vis-à-vis the U.S. Congress and U.S. President George W. Bush. Speaking to the bill tying funding for the war to a timetable to withdrawal, Zawahiri comments that this is evidence of American “failure and frustration”, and sarcastically voices his disappointment that the bill deprives the Mujahideen of crushing the U.S. forces. Concerning Bush claiming success in the Baghdad security plan, Zawahiri continues to mock U.S. policy, referring to the suicide bombing at the Iraqi Parliament building in the Green Zone, stating: “And lest Bush worry, I congratulate him on the success of his security plan, and I invite him on the occasion for a glass of juice, but in the cafeteria of the Iraqi parliament in the middle of the Green Zone!”
To the issue of Hamas, which was embellished upon by Abu Yahya al-Libi in his speech issue one week prior by as-Sahab, Zawahiri further derides the government for its refusal to maintain a militaristic approach and believing it harmful to Palestinian lives. Zawahiri questions the relationship between Palestinian blood and “selling” Palestine to Israel and the West, arguing that their blood must be “sacrificed cheaply” for Islam and the land of Palestine. As for Hamas’ moderate position, he states: “fie on moderation, politics, the presidency and the cabinet, and I thank Allah for the bounty of extremism, militancy and terrorism and everything else we are labeled with.”
To the question of sectarian fighting in Iraq, Zawahiri believes this was stirred up not by the Mujahideen or the Islamic State of Iraq, but by those individuals and groups in Iraq who do not want the coalition forces to leave. The Mujahideen in Iraq, he claims, are nearing closer to victory over their enemy, despite this sectarian fighting, as are the Mujahideen in other fields of battle, including Afghanistan, Chechnya, Algeria, and Somalia. Other portions of the interview concern Saudi Arabia, Egyptian constitutional reform to consolidate power in the executive branch and allow Gamal Mubarak to ascend to power, and Zawahiri’s opinion of the U.S. Pentagon releasing the confessions of 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.
The video and transcript are provided to our Intel Service members.
-
Geopolitical Diary: Cheney in a Sandstorm
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney left Tuesday for a trip to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Jordan. The Cheney trip comes on the heels of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, where she attended a regional security conference on Iraq and interacted with the Syrian and Iranian foreign ministers.
Rice's meet-and-greets at Sharm el-Sheikh were all about putting a fresh, conciliatory face on the Bush administration in dealing with the Iranian and Syrian pariahs of the Middle East. By engaging the Syrians and Iranians in high-level talks, albeit brief ones, Washington took a small step toward bringing its back-channel negotiations over Iraq into the public realm. The forum allowed Rice to demonstrate a willingness by the United States to deal openly with Iraq's Sunni and Shiite neighbors in bringing stability -- and an eventual U.S. exit strategy -- to Iraq.
Cheney's visit to the region, however, has a starkly different purpose. Whereas Rice played the role of the engaging diplomat, Cheney will be playing the role of enforcer.
Cheney is notably visiting the main Sunni powerhouses of the region -- Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Cairo and Amman. By intently focusing his trip on Washington's Arab allies, Cheney is sending a clear message to Tehran that the U.S. government is not about to allow Iran to sweep into Iraq and upset the regional balance by spreading Shiite influence into the heart of the Arab world. The Sunni Arab states are very concerned that any deal the United States makes with Iran would end up compromising the historical upper hand that the Sunnis have long maintained in containing their Shiite rivals.
Moreover, the Sunni powers are worried that the continuing sectarian conflict in Iraq will eventually spread beyond the country's borders and threaten political interests at home. Saudi King Abdullah expressed his exasperation at the U.S. lack of progress in Iraq quite bluntly at the Arab League summit in March, when he labeled the U.S. troop presence in Iraq as an "illegitimate foreign occupation." Though King Abdullah lambasted the United States in his speech, the reality of the situation is that Riyadh, as well as the other Sunni states, are not exactly keen on the idea of a U.S. troop withdrawal leaving a power vacuum in Iraq for the Iranians to fill. King Abdullah has doubtless given serious thought to a scenario down the line in which Iranian troops are sitting on the Iraqi-Saudi border within spitting distance of Saudi Arabia's prized oil fields.
In light of these concerns, Cheney will be delivering two very important messages to these Sunni governments. The first message will involve a number of reassurances that the United States is still a reliable ally to its Sunni friends in the region, and is not about to let Iraq transform into an Iranian satellite state. Cheney can pacify the Arab states by assuring them that U.S. troops are not on the verge of pulling out of Iraq (particularly as the Pentagon announced on Tuesday that it has earmarked 35,000 more troops for deployments there this year) -- but he will also tell these Arab leaders very bluntly that, with less than two years to go under the Bush administration and with a presidential race in which "withdrawal" has become practically every candidate's buzzword, he cannot promise U.S. troops will stay in Iraq for the long haul.
And this brings us to the second message that we expect Cheney to deliver. As we have outlined in depth in previous analyses, the United States is working toward a negotiated settlement on Iraq with the main power players in the region, most notably Iran and Saudi Arabia. For such a settlement to materialize, sectarian violence in Iraq must be brought down to manageable levels for the government in Baghdad to function. However, this strategy rests on faulty assumptions that Tehran and Riyadh have the leverage in Iraq to rein in the Sunni and Shiite militants responsible for the majority of the bloodshed. In other words, the United States cannot move forward in stabilizing Iraq until it knows who in Iraq it is dealing with -- and who can actually be dealt with in the first place.
This is where Iraq's Sunni neighbors come in.
Not coincidentally, Cheney is traveling to countries that house the Arab world's most sophisticated intelligence services. What Cheney is looking for is a commitment by Riyadh, Amman, Abu Dhabi and Cairo to step up and coalesce an Iraqi Sunni platform that can deliver in negotiations with Iraq's Shiite and Kurdish factions. These Arab states have the connections, the money and the coercive tools to bring the Sunni nationalist insurgents in line and close Iraq's doors to the foreign jihadists. Or so the United States would like to assume.
Whether the Sunni Arab powers will take action, or be successful in their efforts, depends on how seriously these states are considering the thought of U.S. troops withdrawing. U.S. President George W. Bush is in a very tricky position right now. By pursuing a surge strategy in Iraq, he is signaling to the Iranians that Washington has no intent to draw down its military presence in the region -- and that therefore it would be in the Persian ayatollahs' best interest to deal now, rather than wait out the administration. On the other hand, Bush also has to convince the Arab states that they had better start moving now to unite the Iraqi Sunni front, otherwise they will be dealing with the Iranians on their own in a couple of years.
Cheney has his work cut out for him during this trip -- getting the Sunni Arab powers to comply with Bush's strategy for Iraq is a bulls-eye that only the sharpest diplomatic marksman could hope to hit. We wonder whether, this time around, Cheney has improved his aim.
-
Defeat’s Killing Fields
E-Mail
Print
Save
Share
Digg
Facebook
Newsvine
Permalink
By PETER W. RODMAN and WILLIAM SHAWCROSS
Published: June 7, 2007
SOME opponents of the Iraq war are toying with the idea of American defeat. A number of them are simply predicting it, while others advocate measures that would make it more likely. Lending intellectual respectability to all this is an argument that takes a strange comfort from the outcome of the Vietnam War. The defeat of the American enterprise in Indochina, it is said, turned out not to be as bad as expected. The United States recovered, and no lasting price was paid.
Skip to next paragraph
Alain Pilon
We beg to differ. Many years ago, the two of us clashed sharply over the wisdom and morality of American policy in Indochina, especially in Cambodia. One of us (Mr. Shawcross) published a book, “Sideshow,” that bitterly criticized Nixon administration policy. The other (Mr. Rodman), a longtime associate of Henry Kissinger, issued a rebuttal in The American Spectator, defending American policy. Decades later, we have not changed our views. But we agreed even then that the outcome in Indochina was indeed disastrous, both in human and geopolitical terms, for the United States and the region. Today we agree equally strongly that the consequences of defeat in Iraq would be even more serious and lasting.
The 1975 Communist victory in Indochina led to horrors that engulfed the region. The victorious Khmer Rouge killed one to two million of their fellow Cambodians in a genocidal, ideological rampage. In Vietnam and Laos, cruel gulags and “re-education” camps enforced repression. Millions of people fled, mostly by boat, with thousands dying in the attempt.
The defeat had a lasting and significant strategic impact. Leonid Brezhnev trumpeted that the global “correlation of forces” had shifted in favor of “socialism,” and the Soviets went on a geopolitical offensive in the third world for a decade. Their invasion of Afghanistan was one result. Demoralized European leaders publicly lamented Soviet aggressiveness and American paralysis.
True, the consequences of defeat were mitigated by various factors. The Nixon-Kissinger breakthrough with China contributed to China’s role as a counterweight to Moscow’s and Hanoi’s new power in Southeast Asia. (Although China, a Khmer Rouge ally, was less scrupulous than the United States about who its partners were.)
And despite the defeat in 1975, America’s 10 years in Indochina had positive effects. Lee Kuan Yew, then prime minister of Singapore, has well articulated how the consequences would have been worse if the United States had not made the effort in Indochina. “Had there been no U.S. intervention,” he argues, the will of non-communist countries to resist communist revolution in the 1960s “would have melted and Southeast Asia would most likely have gone communist.” The domino theory would have proved correct.
Today, in Iraq, there should be no illusion that defeat would come at an acceptable price. George Orwell wrote that the quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. But anyone who thinks an American defeat in Iraq will bring a merciful end to this conflict is deluded. Defeat would produce an explosion of euphoria among all the forces of Islamist extremism, throwing the entire Middle East into even greater upheaval. The likely human and strategic costs are appalling to contemplate. Perhaps that is why so much of the current debate seeks to ignore these consequences.
As in Indochina more than 30 years ago, millions of Iraqis today see the United States helping them defeat their murderous opponents as the only hope for their country. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have committed themselves to working with us and with their democratically elected government to enable their country to rejoin the world as a peaceful, moderate state that is a partner to its neighbors instead of a threat. If we accept defeat, these Iraqis will be at terrible risk. Thousands upon thousands of them will flee, as so many Vietnamese did after 1975.
The new strategy of the coalition and the Iraqis, ably directed by Gen. David Petraeus, offers the best prospect of reversing the direction of events — provided that we show staying power. Osama bin Laden said, a few months after 9/11, that “when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” The United States, in his mind, is the weak horse. American defeat in Iraq would embolden the extremists in the Muslim world, demoralize and perhaps destabilize many moderate friendly governments, and accelerate the radicalization of every conflict in the Middle East.
Our conduct in Iraq is a crucial test of our credibility, especially with regard to the looming threat from revolutionary Iran. Our Arab and Israeli friends view Iraq in that wider context. They worry about our domestic debate, which had such a devastating impact on the outcome of the Vietnam War, and they want reassurance.
When government officials argued that American credibility was at stake in Indochina, critics ridiculed the notion. But when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, he and his colleagues invoked Vietnam as a reason not to take American warnings seriously. The United States cannot be strong against Iran — or anywhere — if we accept defeat in Iraq.
Peter W. Rodman, an assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs from 2001 to March, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. William Shawcross is the author of “Allies: Why the West Had to Remove Saddam.”
-
Newt Gingrich makes a lot of sense to me on this clip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnnMuDG3XlA&mode=user&search=
-
Geopolitical Diary: The Reality of Al Qaeda's Resurgence
A leak from the U.S. defense community revealed a document titled "Al Qaeda better positioned to strike the West" on Thursday, touching off a firestorm of debate within the United States over the status of the war on terror. According to the leak, al Qaeda is "considerably operationally stronger than a year ago," has "regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001" and is "showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States."
Stratfor cannot analyze the contents of the report because we have not read it; so far, no one has felt it necessary to commit a felony by leaking this specific document to us. But the general thrust of the document, that al Qaeda has regenerated, is clear. Many of Stratfor's readers have noted that this position clashes with our recently clarified assessment that, while al Qaeda remains dangerous, the group's day in the sun is over.
The first and most important question to ask when looking at this leaked report, then, is which al Qaeda is being discussed. Evolution and misuse of terminology means there are now two.
The first is the al Qaeda that carried out the 9/11 attacks. This group deeply understands how intelligence agencies work, and therefore how to avoid them. After the 9/11 attacks, however, this group's security protocols forced it to go underground, pushing itself deeper into the cave each time it thought one of its assets or plans had been compromised. The result was a steady degradation of capabilities, with its attacks proving less and less significant. Stratfor now estimates that, while this al Qaeda -- which we often refer to as the apex leadership, or al Qaeda prime -- still exists and is still dangerous, it is no longer a strategic threat to the United States. Its members can carry out attacks, but not ones of the grandeur and horror of 9/11, or even of the Madrid bombings, that achieve the group's goal of forcing policy changes on Western governments.
The second al Qaeda is a result of the apex leadership's isolation. It represents a range of largely disconnected Islamist militants who either have been inspired by the real al Qaeda or who seek to use the name to bolster their credibility. While many of these groups are rather amateurish, others are deadly efficient. It is best to think of them as al Qaeda franchises. However, these franchises lack the security policy or vision of their predecessor, and they do not constitute a strategic threat.
The difference between a strategic and a tactical threat is the core distinction, and one that should not be trivialized. There are hundreds of militant groups in the world that pose tactical threats, and many of them are indeed affiliated with al Qaeda in some way. As a bombmaker or expert marksman, a single person possesses the skills to kill many people, but that does not make that individual a strategic threat to the United States.
Posing a strategic threat requires the ability to carry out operations in a foreign land, raise and transfer funds, recruit and relocate people, train and hide promising agents, a multitude of reconnaissance and technical skills, and -- most important -- the ability to do all this while avoiding detection before striking at a target of national importance. Yes, an attack against a local mall or a regional airport would be a calamity, but it would not be the sort of strategic attack against national targets that reshapes Western geopolitics as 9/11 did.
Charging that al Qaeda is as strong now as it was in 2001 simply seems a bridge too far. Prior to 9/11, al Qaeda was running multiple operations across multiple regions simultaneously. Its agents were traveling the globe regularly and operating very much in the open financially. Their vision of resurrecting the caliphate was a large and difficult one. Achieving that vision required mobilizing the Muslim masses, and this required spectacular attacks.
A spectacular attack is what they carried out -- once. Since then, all the apex leadership has done is issue a seemingly endless string of empty threats, and consequently its credibility is in tatters. No one doubts al Qaeda's desire to strike at the United States as hard and as often as possible, but the lack of activity indicates its capabilities simply do not measure up.
And even if al Qaeda did not have a goal that required regular attacks, we would still doubt the veracity of this report. If an intelligence agency has penetrated an organization sufficiently to be aware of its full capabilities, the last thing the agency would want to disclose is this success. The agency would keep its intelligence secret until it had neutralized the militants. Shouting to the world that it knows what the militants are up to tells the militants they have been penetrated and starts them on the process of going underground and sealing the leak.
Which, of course, raises the question: What is this report actually seeking to accomplish? That depends on who commissioned the report in the first place, and -- considering the size of the U.S. intelligence community -- it could well mean just about anything. A partial list of justifications could include:
an effort to pressure Pakistan into cracking down on al Qaeda for fear that the group is just about ready to launch another attack,
an effort by the U.S. administration to regenerate its political fortunes by reconsolidating national security conservatives under its wing,
a plea for more funding for this or that branch of U.S. security forces,
a general warning to force any militants currently planning attacks to pull back and reassess -- in essence, an effort by intelligence services to disrupt any cells they have been unable to penetrate,
or even an effort by one branch of the government to discredit the efforts of another.
But regardless of which memos are floating around in Washington these days, al Qaeda prime is not feeling all that confident of late. In his most recent taped release (al Qaeda's attacks have sputtered but its multimedia arm is booming), deputy al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri calls on Muslims everywhere to focus their efforts on the jihad in Afghanistan. He does not focus on Iraq, where the fires burn bright, or on Pakistan, where the apex leadership resides.
It appears the Pakistani government is on the verge of finally moving in force against al Qaeda in the country, and a looming U.S.-Iranian rapprochement is making the position of foreign jihadists in Iraq increasingly tenuous. That leaves the movement with only the mountains of Afghanistan for shelter. After all, there is no spot on the globe farther away from what the West might consider friendly shores.
stratfor.com
-
Caveat lector-- its the NY Times
Marines Press to Remove Their Forces From Iraq
TOM SHANKER
Published: October 11, 2007
WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 — The Marine Corps is pressing to remove its forces from Iraq and to send marines instead to Afghanistan, to take over the leading role in combat there, according to senior military and Pentagon officials.
The idea by the Marine Corps commandant would effectively leave the Iraq war in the hands of the Army while giving the Marines a prominent new role in Afghanistan, under overall NATO command.
The suggestion was raised in a session last week convened by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and regional war-fighting commanders. While still under review, its supporters, including some in the Army, argue that a realignment could allow the Army and Marines each to operate more efficiently in sustaining troop levels for two wars that have put a strain on their forces.
As described by officials who had been briefed on the closed-door discussion, the idea represents the first tangible new thinking to emerge since the White House last month endorsed a plan to begin gradual troop withdrawals from Iraq, but also signals that American forces likely will be in Iraq for years to come.
At the moment, there are no major Marine units among the 26,000 or so American forces in Afghanistan. In Iraq there are about 25,000 marines among the 160,000 American troops there.
It is not clear exactly how many of the marines in Iraq would be moved over. But the plan would require a major reshuffling, and it would make marines the dominant American force in Afghanistan, in a war that has broader public support than the one in Iraq.
Mr. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have not spoken publicly about the Marine concept, and aides to both officials said no formal proposal had been presented by the Marines. But the idea has been the focus of intense discussions between senior Marine Corps officers and other officials within the Defense Department.
It is not clear whether the Army would support the idea. But some officials sympathetic to the Army said that such a realignment would help ease some pressure on the Army, by allowing it to shift forces from Afghanistan into Iraq, and by simplifying planning for future troop rotations.
The Marine proposal could also face resistance from the Air Force, whose current role in providing combat aircraft for Afghanistan could be squeezed if the overall mission was handed to the Marines. Unlike the Army, the Marines would bring a significant force of combat aircraft to that conflict.
Whether the Marine proposal takes hold, the most delicate counterterrorism missions in Afghanistan, including the hunt for forces of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, would remain the job of a military task force that draws on Army, Navy and Air Force Special Operations units.
Military officials say the Marine proposal is also an early indication of jockeying among the four armed services for a place in combat missions in years to come. “At the end of the day, this could be decided by parochialism, and making sure each service does not lose equity, as much as on how best to manage the risk of force levels for Iraq and Afghanistan,” said one Pentagon planner.
Tensions over how to divide future budgets have begun to resurface across the military because of apprehension that Congressional support for large increases in defense spending seen since the Sept. 11 attacks will diminish, leaving the services to compete for money.
Those traditional turf battles have subsided somewhat given the overwhelming demands of waging two simultaneous wars — and because Pentagon budgets reached new heights.
Last week, the Senate approved a $459 billion Pentagon spending bill, an increase of $43 billion, or more than 10 percent over the last budget. That bill did not include, as part of a separate bill, President Bush’s request for almost $190 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Senior officials briefed on the Marine Corps concept said the new idea went beyond simply drawing clearer lines about who was in charge of providing combat personnel, war-fighting equipment and supplies to the two war zones.
They said it would allow the Marines to carry out the Afghan mission in a way the Army cannot, by deploying as an integrated Marine Corps task force that included combat aircraft as well as infantry and armored vehicles, while the Army must rely on the Air Force.
The Marine Corps concept was raised last week during a Defense Senior Leadership Conference convened by Mr. Gates just hours after Admiral Mullen was sworn in as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
During that session, the idea of assigning the Afghan mission to the Marines was described by Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant. Details of the discussion were provided by military officers and Pentagon civilian officials briefed on the session and who requested anonymity to summarize portions of the private talks.
The Marine Corps has recently played the leading combat role in Anbar Province, the restive Sunni area west of Baghdad.
--------------------
Page 2 of 2)
Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior Army officer in Iraq, and his No. 2 commander, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, also of the Army, have described Anbar Province as a significant success story, with local tribal leaders joining the fight against terrorists.
Both generals strongly hint that if the security situation in Anbar holds steady, then reductions of American forces can be expected in the province, which could free up Marine units to move elsewhere.
In recent years, the emphasis by the Pentagon has been on joint operations that blur the lines between the military services, but there is also considerable precedent for geographic divisions in their duties. For much of the Vietnam War, responsibility was divided region by region between the Army and the Marines. As described by military planners, the Marine proposal would allow Marine units moved to Afghanistan to take over the tasks now performed by an Army headquarters unit and two brigade combat teams operating in eastern Afghanistan.
That would ease the strain on the Army and allow it to focus on managing overall troop numbers for Iraq, as well as movements of forces inside the country as required by commanders to meet emerging threats.
The American military prides itself on the ability to go to war as a “joint force,” with all of the armed services intermixed on the battlefield — vastly different from past wars when more primitive communications required separate ground units to fight within narrowly defined lanes to make sure they did not cross into the fire of friendly forces.
The Marine Corps is designed to fight with other services — it is based overseas aboard Navy ships and is intertwined with the Army in Iraq. At the same time, the Marines also are designed to be an agile, “expeditionary” force on call for quick deployment, and thus can go to war with everything needed to carry out the mission — troops, armor, attack jets and supplies.
General Petraeus is due to report back to Congress by March on his troop requirements beyond the summer. His request for forces will be analyzed by the military’s Central Command, which oversees combat missions across the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and by the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. All troop deployment orders must be approved by Mr. Gates, with the separate armed services then assigned to supply specific numbers of troops and equipment.
Marines train to fight in what is called a Marine Air-Ground Task Force. That term refers to a Marine deployment that arrives in a combat zone complete with its own headquarters, infantry combat troops, armored and transport vehicles and attack jets for close-air support, as well as logistics and support personnel.
“This is not about trading one ground war for another,” said one Pentagon official briefed on the Marine concept. “It is about the nature of the fight in Afghanistan, and figuring out whether the Afghan mission lends itself more readily to the integrated MAGTF deployment than even Iraq.”
-
October 17, 2007, 4:00 a.m.
Listen to the Enemy
The stakes.
By Jack David
The nation vociferously debates Iraq: We have lost the war, Iraq’s government is not doing its part, the surge is working, the surge is not working, we need to cut our losses, we need to stay till the job is done. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden is telling us that Iraq now is al Qaeda’s main battleground and that the only way forward for the United States is for every American to convert to Islam. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad advises us to solve the problem of our Iraq involvement by turning that nation over to Iran.Debate participants, in proposing their nostrums, pay virtually no heed to either Osama or Mahmoud.
Watch the enemy and listen to him, and four factors emerge as central to any analysis of what is at stake for the U.S. in Iraq:
First, Iran and al Qaeda both want to establish Islamofascist rule in the Middle East and hope to extend it everywhere else.
Second, their leaders have made it clear that control over Iraq is central to their plans.
Third, the Middle East produces the lion’s share of the world’s oil and control over Iraq goes a long way toward controlling all of it.
Fourth, as both al Qaeda and Iran have said over and again, directly and indirectly, nothing less than total victory will cause them to abandon their goals and their methods.
Although these factors indicate that we have no choice in the matter of allowing control of Iraq to fall to Iran or to al Qaeda, they are virtually ignored in the current debate.
The Iranian government’s ambitions for hegemony are evident from its actions. Force and intimidation are the methods it is using to extend its dominion. It already is engaged in an undeclared war with its neighbors, with others in the region and with the West. It uses force indirectly through terrorist proxies: Hezbollah and al Qaeda-linked Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon, Hamas, and Jihad Islami in Gaza and Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias in Iraq. It uses proxies to kill Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan and to kill adversaries elsewhere. It is conserving its own forces for later in the fight. It is developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles that already can reach Europe and soon will be able to reach North America. It beats, tortures, and murders its own people for engaging in conduct that is ordinary in the West.
Al Qaeda also has told us repeatedly that its goal is to reestablish the caliphate. Osama tells us to convert. Al Qaeda differs from Iran in that it doesn’t have a secure geographic and population base and in that it wants to create a homogenized Sunni caliphate while Iran seeks a Shiia-led Islamist empire. Al Qaeda uses terrorism directly, has sought WMD and already has initiated attacks in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Indonesia and elsewhere. Plainly, if it gains control of Iraq, that country will become a secure base for launching terror operations around the world.
The ambitions of al Qaeda and Iran and the means they use to pursue them are an existing threat to the United States and its allies. Since al Qaeda and Iran are at war with us and make it clear that nothing less than the victory they seek will satisfy them, we have no choice but to oppose them, to do what we can to diminish the chance that either will succeed and to reduce the ultimate cost to us of whatever we need to do to assure that they are not victorious. The questions of whether the U.S. should stay in Iraq and what its goals there should be ought to be discussed in this context.
So why is control of Iraq important to al Qaeda and to Iran? Control of Iraq would go a long way toward giving al Qaeda or Iran control over most of the world’s supply of oil, not only because of Iraq’s own reserves, but also because it would provide al Qaeda or Iran with overland access to both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The threat of further aggression would be a powerful weapon and control of the oil would be yet another weapon to use in advancing their goals. The results would be catastrophic. Terrible personal suffering for countless millions, and even war would result.
We cannot wish away the wars al Qaeda and Iran are waging against us. Preventing Iran and al Qaeda from gaining control of Iraq is a vital U.S. interest and a central near-term objective in those wars. Those who think otherwise have not listened to the enemy.
— Jack David, a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for combating weapons of mass destruction and negotiations policy from 2004 to 2006.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NWU1NWU0ZWQwZTBlYmU4NTM0ZDE5NWY2MGVkNWUxMjI=
-
http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=F715A709-2614-4EA5-967C-F6151F94A364
Shattering Conventional Wisdom About Saddam's WMD's
By John Loftus
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, November 16, 2007
Finally, there are some definitive answers to the mystery of the missing WMD. Civilian volunteers, mostly retired intelligence officers belonging to the non-partisan IntelligenceSummit.org, have been poring over the secret archives captured from Saddam Hussein. The inescapable conclusion is this: Saddam really did have WMD after all, but not in the way the Bush administration believed. A 9,000 word research paper with citations to each captured document has been posted online at LoftusReport.com, along with translations of the captured Iraqi documents, courtesy of Mr. Ryan Mauro and his friends.
This Iraqi document research has been supplemented with satellite photographs and dozens of interviews, among them David Gaubatz who risked radiation exposure to locate Saddam’s underwater WMD warehouses , and John Shaw, whose brilliant detective work solved the puzzle of where the WMD went. Both have contributed substantially to solving one of the most difficult mysteries of our decade.
The absolutists on either side of the WMD debate will be more than a bit chagrinned at these disclosures. The documents show a much more complex history than previously suspected. The "Bush lied, people died" chorus has insisted that Saddam had no WMD whatsoever after 1991 - and thus that WMD was no good reason for the war. The Neocon diehards insist that, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the treasure-trove is still out there somewhere, buried under the sand dunes of Iraq. Each side is more than a little bit wrong about Saddam's WMD, and each side is only a little bit right about what happened to it.
The gist of the new evidence is this: roughly one quarter of Saddam's WMD was destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990's. Saddam sold approximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors during the mid to late 1990's. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the last few months before the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam's nuclear weapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in 2003. His nuclear weapons equipment was hidden in enormous underwater warehouses beneath the Euphrates River. Saddam’s entire nuclear inventory was later stolen from these warehouses right out from under the Americans’ noses. The theft of the unguarded Iraqi nuclear stockpile is perhaps, the worst scandal of the war, suggesting a level of extreme incompetence and gross dereliction of duty that makes the Hurricane Katrina debacle look like a model of efficiency.
Without pointing fingers at the Americans, the Israeli government now believes that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear stockpiles have ended up in weapons dumps in Syria. Debkafile, a somewhat reliable private Israeli intelligence service, has recently published a report claiming that the Syrians were importing North Korean plutonium to be mixed with Saddam’s enriched uranium. Allegedly, the Syrians were close to completing a warhead factory next to Saddam’s WMD dump in Deir al Zour, Syria to produce hundreds, if not thousands, of super toxic “dirty bombs” that would pollute wherever they landed in Israel for the next several thousands of years. Debka alleged that it was this combination factory/WMD dump site which was the target of the recent Israeli air strike in Deir al Zour province..
Senior sources in the Israeli government have privately confirmed to me that the recent New York Times articles and satellite photographs about the Israeli raid on an alleged Syrian nuclear target in Al Tabitha, Syria were of the completely wrong location. Armed with this knowledge, I searched Google Earth satellite photos for the rest of the province of Deir al Zour for a site that would match the unofficial Israeli descriptions: camouflaged black factory building, next to a military ammunition dump, between an airport and an orchard. There is a clear match in only one location, Longitude 35 degrees, 16 minutes 49.31 seconds North, Latitude 40 degrees, 3 minutes, 29.97 seconds East. Analysts and members of the public are invited to determine for themselves whether this was indeed the weapons dump for Saddam’s WMD.
Photos of this complex taken after the Israel raid appear to show that all of the buildings, earthern blast berms, bunkers, roads, even the acres of blackened topsoil, have all been dug up and removed. All that remains are what appear to be smoothed over bomb craters. Of course, that is not of itself definitive proof, but it is extremely suspicious.
It should be noted that the American interrogators had accurate information about a possible Deir al Zour location shortly after the war, but ignored it:
"An Iraqi dissident going by the name of "Abu Abdallah" claims that on March 10, 2003, 50 trucks arrived in Deir Al-Zour, Syria after being loaded in Baghdad. …Abdallah approached his friend who was hesitant to confirm the WMD shipment, but did after Abdallah explained what his sources informed him of. The friend told him not to tell anyone about the shipment."
These interrogation reports should be re-evaluated in light of the recently opened Iraqi secret archives, which we submit are the best evidence. But the captured document evidence should not be overstated. It must be emphasized that there is no one captured Saddam document which mentions both the possession of WMD and the movement to Syria.
Moreover, many of Saddam's own tapes and documents concerning chemical and biological weapons are ambiguous. When read together as a mosaic whole, Saddam's secret files certainly make a persuasive case of massive WMD acquisition right up to a few months before the war. Not only was he buying banned precursors for nerve gas, he was ordering the chemicals to make Zyklon B, the Nazis favorite gas at Auschwitz. However odious and well documented his purchases in 2002, there is no direct evidence of any CW or BW actually remaining inside Iraq on the day the war started in 2003. As stated in more detail in my full report, the British, Ukrainian and American secret services all believed that the Russians had organized a last minute evacuation of CW and BW stockpiles from Baghdad to Syria.
We know from Saddam’s documents that huge quantities of CW and BW were in fact produced, and there is no record of their destruction. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Therefore, at least as to chemical and biological weapons, the evidence is compelling, but not conclusive. There is no one individual document or audiotape that contains a smoking gun.
There is no ambiguity, however, about captured tape ISGQ-2003-M0007379, in which Saddam is briefed on his secret nuclear weapons project. This meeting clearly took place in 2002 or afterwards: almost a decade after the State Department claimed that Saddam had abandoned his nuclear weapons research.
Moreover the tape describes a laser enrichment process for uranium that had never been known by the UN inspectors to even exist in Iraq, and Saddam's nuclear briefers on the tape were Iraqi scientists who had never been on any weapons inspector’s list. The tape explicitly discusses how civilian plasma research could be used as a cover for military plasma research necessary to build a hydrogen bomb.
When this tape came to the attention of the International Intelligence Summit, a non-profit, non-partisan educational forum focusing on global intelligence affairs, the organization asked the NSA to verify the voiceprints of Saddam and his cronies, invited a certified translator to present Saddam’s nuclear tapes to the public, and then invited leading intelligence analysts to comment.
At the direct request of the Summit, President Bush promptly overruled his national intelligence adviser, John Negroponte, a career State Department man, and ordered that the rest of the captured Saddam tapes and documents be reviewed as rapidly as possible. The Intelligence Summit asked that Saddam's tapes and documents be posted on a public website so that Arabic-speaking volunteers could help with the translation and analysis.
At first, the public website seemed like a good idea. Another document was quickly discovered, dated November 2002, describing an expensive plan to remove radioactive contamination from an isotope production building. The document cites the return of UNMOVIC inspectors as the reason for cleaning up the evidence of radioactivity. This is not far from a smoking gun: there were not supposed to be any nuclear production plants in Iraq in 2002.
Then a barrage of near-smoking guns opened up. Document after document from Saddam's files was posted unread on the public website, each one describing how to make a nuclear bomb in more detail than the last. These documents, dated just before the war, show that Saddam had accumulated just about every secret there was for the construction of nuclear weapons. The Iraqi intelligence files contain so much accurate information on the atom bomb that the translators’ public website had to be closed for reasons of national security.
If Saddam had nuclear weapons facilities, where was he hiding them? Iraqi informants showed US investigators where Saddam had constructed huge underwater storage facilities beneath the Euphrates River. The tunnel entrances were still sealed with tons of concrete. The US investigators who approached the sealed entrances were later determined to have been exposed to radiation. Incredibly, their reports were lost in the postwar confusion, and Saddam’s underground nuclear storage sites were left unguarded for the next three years. Still, the eyewitness testimony about the sealed underwater warehouses matched with radiation exposure is strong circumstantial evidence that some amount of radioactive material was still present in Iraq on the day the war began.
Our volunteer researchers discovered the actual movement order from the Iraqi high command ordering all the remaining special equipment to be moved into the underground sites only a few weeks before the onset of the war. The date of the movement order suggests that President Bush, who clearly knew nothing of the specifics of the underground nuclear sites, or even that a nuclear weapons program still existed in Iraq, may have been accidentally correct about the main point of the war: the discovery of Saddam’s secret nuclear program, even in hindsight, arguably provides sufficient legal justification for the previous use of force.
Saddam’s nuclear documents compel any reasonable person to the conclusion that, more probably than not, there were in fact nuclear WMD sites, components, and programs hidden inside Iraq at the time the Coalition forces invaded. In view of these newly discovered documents, it can be concluded, more probably than not, that Saddam did have a nuclear weapons program in 2001-2002, and that it is reasonably certain that he would have continued his efforts towards making a nuclear bomb in 2003 had he not been stopped by the Coalition forces. Four years after the war began, we still do not have all the answers, but we have many of them. Ninety percent of the Saddam files have never been read, let alone translated. It is time to utterly reject the conventional wisdom that there were no WMD in Iraq and look to the best evidence: Saddam’s own files on WMD. The truth is what it is, the documents speak for themselves.
John Loftus is President of IntelligenceSummit.org, which is entirely free of government funding, and depends solely upon private contributions for its support. The full research paper on Iraqi WMD, along with the supporting documents and photographs can be found at www.LoftusReport.com
-
I found the previous post here about Saddam's WMD to be the most helpful so far. They outline a scenario that is believable and backed up in bits and pieces, though they admit without a single smoking gun. New information makes the administration and coalition look bad, but as they write, correct by accident. They also prove false IMO the refrain of the critics - that Saddam posed no threat.
The captured documents in need of translation had to be pulled from the internet site when it turned out they contained extremely precise information on how to build nuclear weapons. I'm sure more details on all of this will emerge as more translations are done.
It is quite scary that we still don't have enough translators to handle our intelligence and informational requirements for security. Meanwhile our troops are still in harm's way without all the information available that they need. No widespread attempt is yet being made that I am aware of to teach our troops Arabic, either at home or while serving in Iraq.
The information on Syria is interesting, but certainly not conclusive. I remember the Debka reports from back then. This report claims that Israel recently hit the wrong spot, but they seem to have something on Syria who remained amazingly silent about the attack.
To be continued, I'm sure.
-
Didn't really know where to post this, so decided to put it here:
=============
Summary
A Dec. 24 raid by the government of Yemen against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has reportedly killed several senior leaders of the group. If these reports are confirmed, the operation could have far-reaching implications for the group and for the security for the Arabian Peninsula.
Analysis
At 4:30 a.m. local time on Dec. 24, the government of Yemen launched an operation in the Rafadh area of al-Said district in the Shabwa province southeast of Sanaa. The operation, which reportedly involved an airstrike and a coordinated ground assault, was apparently targeting militants associated with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The Yemeni authorities are reporting that between 31 and 34 AQAP members were killed and 29 arrested in the operation. The Yemeni sources also advise that among those killed and arrested in the raid were several foreigners, including militants from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iraq.
According to STRATFOR sources, Anwar al-Awlaki the American-Yemeni cleric, who is well-known for his ties to U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan (who attacked a group of U.S Army soldiers at Fort Hood), was the primary target of the operation. STRATFOR sources have also said that as Yemeni authorities were watching al-Awlaki’s safe house, a number of other AQAP leaders arrived at the location to meet with the radical cleric.
Yemen is now reporting that it appears the operation also resulted in the deaths of other major AQAP leaders, including the group’s leader and former secretary to Osama bin Laden, Nasir al-Wahayshi, his Saudi deputy, Abu-Sayyaf al-Shihri (who is a former Guantanamo detainee), and another high-ranking operative, Mohammad Ahmed Saleh Umer, who was seen just days before on a widely disseminated videotape preaching openly to crowds in Abyan. The Yemeni authorities are attempting to verify the identities of all those killed in the strike, in order to confirm the deaths of these senior AQAP figures.
(click here to enlarge image)
The operation to target al-Awlaki was apparently aided by his recent interview with the television network Al Jazeera. The interview, which was posted to Al Jazeera’s Web site on Dec. 23, could have provided Yemeni or U.S. intelligence the opportunity to locate al-Awlaki. The interview — like the public speeches recently made by AQAP leaders in front of crowds in Abyan — may have been a deadly lapse of operational security.
If it is confirmed that al-Wahayshi and al-Shihri were indeed killed in the strike, the operation would be a devastating blow to the resurgent al Qaeda node in the Arabian Peninsula. The organization has been under considerable pressure in recent weeks. Thursday’s raid follows similar raids last week in Abyan and Sanaa provinces that resulted in the deaths of some 34 AQAP members, including high-ranking operative Mohammed Ali al-Kazemi, and the arrests of 17 other AQAP militants.
This is not the first time al Qaeda-affiliated militants in Yemen have been struck. In November 2002, the CIA launched a predator drone strike against Abu Ali al-Harithi and five confederates in Marib. That strike essentially decapitated the al Qaeda node in Yemen and greatly reduced their operational effectiveness. The arrest of al-Harithi’s replacement, Muhammad Hamdi al-Ahdal, a year later, was another crippling blow to the organization.
In 2003 as part of an extradition agreement with Iran, Nasir al-Wahayshi was returned to Yemen. In February 2006, al-Wahayshi and 22 other prisoners escaped from a prison in Sanaa, beginning a second phase of al Qaeda’s operations in Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula. With the help of other senior jihadist operatives like Qasim al-Rami — who reportedly managed to escape last week’s raids — al-Wahayshi, who assumed leadership of the group in mid-2007, managed to rebuild the organizational structure of al Qaeda in Yemen into a more cohesive, structured and effective organization. Under al-Wahayshi’s leadership, the al Qaeda-affiliated militants in Yemen have experienced a marked resurgence. Al-Wahayahi’s organization in Yemen was even strong enough to adopt the al Qaeda-linked militants who were forced to flee Saudi Arabia in the face of the Saudi government’s campaign against al Qaeda in the Kingdom, formally announcing the formation of AQAP in January 2009.
Although al-Wahayshi’s followers have not realized a great deal of tactical success, they have launched several high-profile attacks, including the Mar. 18, 2008 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa and the Aug. 28, 2009 assassination attempt against Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi Deputy Interior Minister.
As STRATFOR has long noted, effective leadership is a key element in the effectiveness of militant organizations. If Yemeni forces were in fact successful in killing al-Wahayshi, al-Shihri, Mohammad Ahmed Saleh Umer, Anwar al-Awlaki — in addition to the death of Mohammed Ali al-Kazemi last week — AQAP has indeed suffered a significant organizational blow. The long-term consequences of these developments in Yemen, and their consequences for the security of Yemen and Saudi Arabia, will depend largely upon the leadership transition plan the group had in place (if there was one), and the personal abilities of the man who will step in to assume leadership of the group. In the face of such adversity, it will take an individual with a rare combination of charisma and leadership to quickly rebuild AQAP’s capabilities.
-
Apparently they missed al-Awlaki or it could be a smoke screen
Radical Yemeni cleric believed unhurt in airstrike
By AHMED AL-HAJ, Associated Press Writer – Fri Dec 25, 1:28 pm ET
SAN'A, Yemen – A U.S.-born radical cleric is alive and well following reports he may have been killed in a Yemeni airstrike against suspected al-Qaida hideouts, friends and relatives said Friday.
The government said it targeted a meeting of high-level al-Qaida operatives in Thursday's airstrike in the remote Shabwa region. It claimed at least 30 militants were killed, possibly including Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric who has been linked to the shooter in last month's attack at the Fort Hood military base in the U.S.
On Friday, a friend of the cleric, Abu Bakr al-Awlaki, told The Associated Press he was not among those killed. He refused to say if the cleric was attending the meeting.
Abu Bakr al-Awlaki was in Shabwa and in contact with the gunmen in control of the area following the strike. He is not related to the cleric, but the two are from the same tribe and carry the same last name.
Thursday's airstrikes were the second in a week against al-Qaida and were carried out with U.S. and Saudi intelligence help. The newly aggressive Yemeni campaign, backed by American aid, reflects Washington's fears that the terror network could turn this fragmented, unstable nation into an Afghanistan-like refuge in a highly strategic location on the border with oil-rich Saudi Arabia.
The Yemeni government said it struck a gathering of senior al-Qaida figures in Rafd, a remote mountain valley in eastern Shabwa province, where they were plotting new terror attacks.
In addition to al-Awlaki, the top leader of al-Qaida's branch in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Naser Abdel-Karim al-Wahishi, and his deputy Saeed al-Shihri were also believed to be at the meeting, Yemen's Supreme Security Committee said.
But Yemeni officials still have no access to the area, which is controlled by armed gunmen and supporters of al-Qaida, and could not confirm for certain who was killed in the attack.
Saudi officials were not immediately available for comment on Friday.
In Washington, a U.S. government official who was briefed on the strike told The Associated Press that there has been no confirmation yet of who was killed in the strike. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the attack.
Al-Awlaki was born in the United States and moved back to Yemen in 2002. Al-Awlaki reportedly corresponded by e-mail with Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who is charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, on Nov.5.
People close to al-Alwaki said it is unlikely the cleric would be sitting through a field meeting convened by fighters, considering he saw his role as a scholar and one that gives religious advises and rulings.
The cleric's brother, who only agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, said he also received assurances that his older sibling is still alive.
A tribal chief in Shabwa, who only used his alias Abu Mohammed, said he was informed that Anwar al-Alwaki was alive and is unharmed. He refused to elaborate.
So far, residents of the area and relatives of those killed say six bodies have been retrieved from the area of the strike and buried. The relatives spoke on condition of anonymity because they were still at the area controlled by the gunmen.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091225/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_yemen_al_qaida
-
In Washington, a U.S. government official who was briefed on the strike told The Associated Press that there has been no confirmation yet of who was killed in the strike. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the attack.
LOL! It is an arranged leak, any official this close to the situation knows such a statement could be traced back to him in about 3 heartbeats. In giving this reassurance that "we know what is going on" what is being given up? A question to ask when dealing with intel..
I hope they got a whole bunch, but then again who carried out the strikes? that is the real point since some of these air forces are happy to take off and land without breaking a plane, much less being capable of sucessful strikes.
-
Since we are right on the edge...
https://ejmagnier.com/2022/03/27/the-prospects-of-a-wider-war-beyond-the-ukrainian-borders-are-dangerously-growing/
-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10663553/Putin-high-command-hunkering-secret-nuclear-bunkers.html
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/kremlin-warns-bidens-emotional-rhetoric-could-lead-something-irreparable-dangerous
-
I get the point GM, but question: Where is the dividing line between posting in this thread versus existing threads?
-
I get the point GM, but question: Where is the dividing line between posting in this thread versus existing threads?
When NATO/US formally become combatants. We are right on the line.
-
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/03/who_thinks_biden_is_a_war_leader.html
-
https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2022/03/29/china-biden-pushing-ukraine-crisis-nuclear-war/
-
https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2022/03/29/china-biden-pushing-ukraine-crisis-nuclear-war/
If China state media says it, isn't that a contrary indicator of truth?
Among the biggest 3 military powers in the world, I can think of 3 who need and deserve regime change, perhaps most urgently and importantly is China.
Invade, ok , but speak truth, how dare we?
Blind squirrel Biden got something right, so of course he backs off of it:
"I didn't say that."
Yes you did.
-
The PRC is just as untrustworthy as the USG and the MSM-DNC. Occasionally, they all tell the truth when it serves their purposes.
https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2022/03/29/china-biden-pushing-ukraine-crisis-nuclear-war/
If China state media says it, isn't that a contrary indicator of truth?
Among the biggest 3 military powers in the world, I can think of 3 who need and deserve regime change, perhaps most urgently and importantly is China.
Invade, ok , but speak truth, how dare we?
Blind squirrel Biden got something right, so of course he backs off of it:
"I didn't say that."
Yes you did.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/niall-ferguson-seven-worst-case-scenarios-war-ukraine
Right on the edge.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/biden-vows-more-russia-sanctions-saying-war-crime-committed-bucha
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjrPS8Lzs2g
Let's threaten him with war crimes trials!
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1948179/the-third-horseman-has-begun-its-gallop
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1948179/the-third-horseman-has-begun-its-gallop
Happy Happy Joy Joy!
-
https://asiatimes.com/2022/03/n-war-risk-real-bidens-living-a-dangerous-fantasy/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjrPS8Lzs2g
Let's threaten him with war crimes trials!
-
:-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/romania-issues-iodine-pills-citizens-war-neighboring-ukraine-continues
Why? No reason.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/if-poland-hosts-us-nukes-russia-will-station-nuclear-weapons-along-western-border
-
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/joe-biden-pushes-world-war-3-unscripted-remarks-gotta-go-war-going-guys-mean-video/
-
https://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2022/04/we-now-have-paired-box-canyon-war.html
-
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/joe-biden-pushes-world-war-3-unscripted-remarks-gotta-go-war-going-guys-mean-video/
https://summit.news/2022/04/07/video-biden-jokes-about-starting-world-war-3/
-
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/04/08/as-facts-cannot-be-acknowledged-the-insane-drive-into-nuclear-war-cannot-be-stopped/
-
Not sure that PCR's argument makes much sense.
Hypersonics can/will be launched from planes, boats, and/or subs, so the first strike danger exists regardless.
Also, IIRC the Russkis were upset at the anti-missile missiles Trump negotiated for Poland and Czech Republic-- IIRC promptly thrown away by President Magoo , , ,
-
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-warns-of-direct-military-confrontation-with-us-moscow-taps-new-ukraine-war-commander-live-updates/ar-AAW3riE
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/chinas-nuclear-expansion-confirmed-beijing-officials-cite-fear-us-led-regime-change
-
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/103/970/347/original/2f03ee7d3bdcc691.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/103/970/347/original/2f03ee7d3bdcc691.png)
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/kremlin-again-warns-us-nato-weapons-transports-ukraine-will-be-attacked
At a moment the Pentagon has vowed to "speed up" weapons deliveries to Ukraine forces, and after Slovakia announced early this week it is in discussion with NATO allies to provide Kiev with MiG-29 fighter jets, the Kremlin has repeated its warning that any weapons shipments entering the country will be viewed as "legitimate military targets".
The renewed warning was issued Wednesday by Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who told TASS news agency that the military stands ready to attack any US or NATO vehicles caught transporting weapons into the conflict.
"We are warning that US-NATO weapons transports across Ukrainian territory will be considered by us as legal military targets," said Ryabkov, after last month the Kremlin issued a similar warning. But this time the language has been narrowed to specifically put the US and NATO on notice, whereas previously this was left somewhat ambiguous.
-
"We are warning that US-NATO weapons transports across Ukrainian territory will be considered by us as legal military targets,"
this whole concept of WAR and war crimes
"illegal war"
seems like an oxymoron to me.
if a country is at war what do laws have to do with it.
why do lawyers have to decide wha
-
Perhaps a declaration with an eye to maintaining the kinetic expression of the fight to the Ukraine i.e. avoiding direct conflict.
-
https://tomluongo.me/2022/04/13/paris-karachi-regime-change-in-the-air/
-
Though there are some relevant questions raised, there is also a goodly amount of denial about Russian behavior in that piece.
For example: "By bringing in air support and precision bombing (in Syria) Russia proved to all the world".
Seriously?
-
Though there are some relevant questions raised, there is also a goodly amount of denial about Russian behavior in that piece.
For example: "By bringing in air support and precision bombing (in Syria) Russia proved to all the world".
Seriously?
Did Russia hit ISIS in Syria?
-
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/give-war-a-chance?s=r
-
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sas-troops-are-training-local-forces-in-ukraine-32vs5bjzb
Not combatants! :wink:
-
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/zelenskyy-says-world-ready-nuclear-war-russia-video/
-
https://summit.news/2022/04/18/bidens-closest-senate-ally-suggests-us-troops-be-sent-to-ukraine/
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-tests-new-intercontinental-ballistic-missile-putin-warns-enemies-its-food
-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10733677/Moskva-sinking-Did-supply-Kyiv-location-Black-Sea-flag-ship.html
-
https://jrnyquist.blog/2022/04/21/will-russia-go-nuclear/
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russian-airlines-told-prepare-world-without-gps
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russian-airlines-told-prepare-world-without-gps
https://www.c4isrnet.com/opinion/2022/04/12/putin-is-holding-gps-hostage-heres-how-to-get-it-back/
-
"Putin is holding GPS hostage.":
****Unlike Russia, China, and some other countries, the U.S. does not have a terrestrial system to fall back on when essential timing and navigation signals from space are not available.
We had such a system, but instead of security and resiliency, bureaucrats saw unneeded duplication with GPS and it was shutdown. And notwithstanding promises in 2008 and 2015 to establish a land-based backup for GPS, and a 2018 law requiring one to be in operation by the end of 2020, nothing has been done.****
:-o. :roll: :x
-
They’ll seize Russian owned yachts without due process, but they won’t even bother to
comply with a federal law that actually protects Americans.
"Putin is holding GPS hostage.":
****Unlike Russia, China, and some other countries, the U.S. does not have a terrestrial system to fall back on when essential timing and navigation signals from space are not available.
We had such a system, but instead of security and resiliency, bureaucrats saw unneeded duplication with GPS and it was shutdown. And notwithstanding promises in 2008 and 2015 to establish a land-based backup for GPS, and a 2018 law requiring one to be in operation by the end of 2020, nothing has been done.****
:-o. :roll: :x
-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10753935/Ukraine-war-Russias-Sergei-Lavrov-warns-nuclear-conflict-West.html#v-4681986073060593651
-
Trump says Putin needs to be reminded ours are bigger, better, and more numerous than his.
-
".Trump says Putin needs to be reminded ours are bigger, better, and more numerous than his."
:-o
risky business
comparing nuclear dicks
-
".Trump says Putin needs to be reminded ours are bigger, better, and more numerous than his."
:-o
risky business
comparing nuclear dicks
Yes, and ours are antiques for the most part.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/putin-warns-quick-response-if-west-intervenes-ukraine
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/post/2056092/chance-of-nuclear-war-this-year-51
-
must think the unthinkable
are you listening Mark Levin?
who I otherwise agree with and admire .
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russian-tv-warns-britain-can-be-drowned-radioactive-tsunami-single-nuclear-sub-strike
-
https://vernoncoleman.org/videos/why-they-need-world-war-iii
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-nato-not-taking-nuclear-threat-seriously
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russian-tv-warns-britain-can-be-drowned-radioactive-tsunami-single-nuclear-sub-strike
-
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/05/the_united_states_has_committed_numerous_acts_of_war_against_russia.html
-
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/is_the_left_agitating_for_war_with_russia_so_it_can_cement_domestic_tyranny.html
-
https://www.google.com/search?q=inside+typhoon+sub&rlz=1C5GCEM_enUS1001US1001&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&vet=1&fir=2l6ybWVg8Q79XM%252CYnZnONwRWQ-BUM%252C_%253BawvinYxhw-rHHM%252C7RpY2uW7HDhNQM%252C_%253Ba2x2cs8MpaJ2sM%252CzA8oYsWFNwgX4M%252C_%253BAge6sdRLyZakaM%252Cg63rxZbRyKM3GM%252C_%253BS_FANYphhecFQM%252CzA8oYsWFNwgX4M%252C_%253BQVt0sD0A1LndUM%252C7g2Mi3kJMRErnM%252C_%253BybnGnJAaSz7VAM%252C7RpY2uW7HDhNQM%252C_%253B_HX1x-xfGO_8AM%252CDN8NdxvUUYBK_M%252C_%253BvBlbEp0t_KCHhM%252C__3SaorR5SZDYM%252C_%253Bllu1oh5-GYwlCM%252CcV2X0_BOlJ-DXM%252C_%253Bbl1X7XJBpgjs-M%252CYnZnONwRWQ-BUM%252C_%253Bf_9UFcX6ZiCJMM%252C_QP8uFfv47O05M%252C_&usg=AI4_-kRGbe4C5b8uaDt9mgMIf-FCtvRalQ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiHod_Fl9X3AhU7k4kEHWmaAi0Q9QF6BAgDEAE#imgrc=vBlbEp0t_KCHhM
-
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/mitt-romney-calls-nato-prepare-nuclear-strike-russia/
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdZ0Qm9DjJ4
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-engaged-offensive-cyber-ops-against-russia-ukraine-nsa-director-admits-first
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-engaged-offensive-cyber-ops-against-russia-ukraine-nsa-director-admits-first
https://twitter.com/catchwreck3/status/1538593592289243136
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-engaged-offensive-cyber-ops-against-russia-ukraine-nsa-director-admits-first
https://twitter.com/catchwreck3/status/1538593592289243136
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/eu-just-implemented-risky-anti-russia-measure-could-trigger-ww3-few-are-taking-notice
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-engaged-offensive-cyber-ops-against-russia-ukraine-nsa-director-admits-first
https://twitter.com/catchwreck3/status/1538593592289243136
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/eu-just-implemented-risky-anti-russia-measure-could-trigger-ww3-few-are-taking-notice
https://michaelyon.locals.com/post/2307592/strangling-kaliningrad-very-serious
-
https://comeandmakeit.blogspot.com/2022/06/ww3-looms.html
-
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/06/29/deafening-drumbeats-for-war-biden-sends-more-u-s-troops-to-ukraine-border-101st-airborne-deployed-six-destroyers-to-mediterranean-f-35-squadrons-to-u-k/
-
Powerful points, and we are agreed that the deal for Ukraine to be neutral should have been struck, but OTOH, what message would be sent by accepting Russia's invasion? What to do as Russia drives Ukraine into becoming a failed state?
-
Powerful points, and we are agreed that the deal for Ukraine to be neutral should have been struck, but OTOH, what message would be sent by accepting Russia's invasion? What to do as Russia drives Ukraine into becoming a failed state?
Cut a deal, if at all possible at this point.
That's not what the idiots at the white house want.
WWIII is their way out for blame for the Biden disaster.
-
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/06/30/during-nato-press-conference-joe-biden-blames-russia-for-upcoming-global-food-shortage/
-
"Cut a deal, if at all possible at this point."
Here's the thing: it is not.
-
"Cut a deal, if at all possible at this point."
Here's the thing: it is not.
The the Ukes will be back with Mother Russia, as their Mafiya-crats flee with billions of our tax dollars.
-
I'm seeing A LOT of genuine fighting spirit from the Ukes.
-
I'm seeing A LOT of genuine fighting spirit from the Ukes.
Yes. What's wrong with having them on our side?
-
I'm seeing A LOT of genuine fighting spirit from the Ukes.
The ones left alive?
They are running out of those.
-
I'm seeing A LOT of genuine fighting spirit from the Ukes.
Yes. What's wrong with having them on our side?
https://twitter.com/imetatronink/status/1542973048483000320
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdXHOtI8ejo&t=1222s
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2399358/steven-bannon-swatted
-
https://www.imetatronink.com/2022/07/playing-with-fire.html
-
https://www.imetatronink.com/2022/07/playing-with-fire.html
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/111/081/212/original/bcd2f7daac0e4fa3.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/111/081/212/original/bcd2f7daac0e4fa3.jpg)
If they just nuke NYC, DC, SF, Boston, Chicago and LA, we will be ever grateful!
-
https://www.imetatronink.com/2022/07/playing-with-fire.html
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/111/081/212/original/bcd2f7daac0e4fa3.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/111/081/212/original/bcd2f7daac0e4fa3.jpg)
If they just nuke NYC, DC, SF, Boston, Chicago and LA, we will be ever grateful!
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/em/about/press-releases/20220711_pr-nycem-releases-nuclear-preparedness-psa.page
-
https://www.rt.com/news/559016-gabbard-warns-of-us-russia-nuclear-war/
-
Worth noting that the source is RT.
-
Worth noting that the source is RT.
Yes, not our totally trustworthy media.
Do you think they fabricated the interview?
-
Just saying I note that it is RT.
Indeed, one could make the case that the fact that RT publishes this and our Pravdas do not is a point in favor of reading RT.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-signals-ukraine-it-can-use-himars-against-russian-targets-crimea
-
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/worshipping-dead-horses/
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/pelosi-leading-delegation-asia-taiwan-stop-not-clear
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/pelosi-leading-delegation-asia-taiwan-stop-not-clear
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/112/229/047/original/d05e09ff88df38ad.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/112/229/047/original/d05e09ff88df38ad.jpg)
-
Are you saying she should not go?
-
Are you saying she should not go?
I'd hate for her not to be shot down.
If she were, Biden (His Junta in the shadows) would choke.
-
The US is in a bind. It cannot, not send Pelosi, otherwise all credibility as a super power and that the US will defend Taiwan is gone. If we cannot even send Pelosi, just how strong is our support for Taiwan ?. China is just huffing and puffing, IMHO.
-
Agree, but Biden's weakness increases the odds of things getting seriously testy.
-
Having seen previous China huffing and puffing wrt India, am not concerned. If things go awry, the Military takes over and Biden will just go along with them. China is very weak, IMHO.
-
Having seen previous China huffing and puffing wrt India, am not concerned. If things go awry, the Military takes over and Biden will just go along with them. China is very weak, IMHO.
An alternative take:
https://www.imetatronink.com/2022/07/dinosaurs-of-deep-blue-sea.html
Watch the attached video.
-
https://sonar21.com/will-tweaking-the-dragons-tail-ignite-a-terrible-fire/
-
https://flightaware.com/live/flight/SPAR19
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-pelosi-you-will-perish-over-taiwan
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/stocks-sink-pelosi-taiwan-headlines
-
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/112/418/642/original/783d1a277889e3f1.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/112/418/642/original/783d1a277889e3f1.jpg)
-
I agree with Esper.
-
I agree with Esper.
I would have been cool with changing things up under Trump.
Now? NO!
They (the Deep State) want WWIII to wage war against us.
-
I agree with Esper.
Taiwan is a country. The CCP has never ruled it. It is more of a nation than most of the 193 UN member nations. It is actually mainland China that has a disputed border.
We should not say truth aloud?
-
I agree with Esper.
Taiwan is a country. The CCP has never ruled it. It is more of a nation than most of the 193 UN member nations. It is actually mainland China that has a disputed border.
We should not say truth aloud?
It’s true, IMHO the legitimate Chinese government in in Taipei, not Beijing.
-
I agree with Esper.
Taiwan is a country. The CCP has never ruled it. It is more of a nation than most of the 193 UN member nations. It is actually mainland China that has a disputed border.
We should not say truth aloud?
It’s true, IMHO the legitimate Chinese government in in Taipei, not Beijing.
https://instapundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/biden_taiwan_campaign_promise_08-01-2022.jpg
(https://instapundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/biden_taiwan_campaign_promise_08-01-2022.jpg)
-
https://nypost.com/2022/08/01/pelosis-visit-could-accidentally-start-a-war-with-china-and-america-would-lose/
we would have to resort to nucs but could we even deliver them without satellites communications
for 30 yrs we did nothing while China infiltrated every corner of our society
and commercial military medical education corner of our society
while our leaders played nice dupes they schemed
and planned
everything they do has military applications
and all the fucking rinos who let this happen worry about is DJT.
and the LEFT has destroyed our will our pride and direction cohesiveness
dividing everyone in this country into groups
better then the CCP ever could have.
and the present leaders sit on there assess and lie to us night and day right before our eyes
so biden sent in a drone to kill some al queda guy who I never even knew was still out there
what courage. :roll:
what a display of power. :roll:
what a joke. :x
-
Entirely too plausible.
-
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jul/28/chinas-nuclear-arms-push-rising-challenge-stratcom/
frankly I do not believe this:
"Asked what needs to be done, the commander said he has great confidence in the current nuclear deterrent strategy and is “very comfortable” with the current U.S. nuclear posture."
if he is truly comfortable then we have a problem .
Biden I heard the other day reversed Trump's executive orders to slow and work to prevent transfer of IP to China...
I think on Newsmax
-
Exactly!
https://nypost.com/2022/08/01/pelosis-visit-could-accidentally-start-a-war-with-china-and-america-would-lose/
we would have to resort to nucs but could we even deliver them without satellites communications
for 30 yrs we did nothing while China infiltrated every corner of our society
and commercial military medical education corner of our society
while our leaders played nice dupes they schemed
and planned
everything they do has military applications
and all the fucking rinos who let this happen worry about is DJT.
and the LEFT has destroyed our will our pride and direction cohesiveness
dividing everyone in this country into groups
better then the CCP ever could have.
and the present leaders sit on there assess and lie to us night and day right before our eyes
so biden sent in a drone to kill some al queda guy who I never even knew was still out there
what courage. :roll:
what a display of power. :roll:
what a joke. :x
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/china-new-home-sales-crater-40-mortgage-revolt-spreads
So does our kleptocracy.
-
New Chinese video out https://twitter.com/i/status/1554086730067738624
Same playbook as with India. Probably same result too. i.e. China gets egg on its face. The US military, perhaps to get more funding has painted China as a powerful threat. While they are powerful, they are no military match. She Gin Ping needs a distraction, same as Biden. Win-Win.
-
"US military, perhaps to get more funding has painted China as a powerful threat. While they are powerful, they are no military match"
Ya
can you be more specific?
do we know they cannot cut off our satellites, communications etc.
why do I keep reading think tanks saying that we lose all hypothetical match ups?
does this mean their systems will not work as advertised?
do we know ours will?
-
I am reminded of the story of Alexander the Great as a boy. The Persian ambassador of the huge kickass Persian Empire was there to see his father King Philip and young Alex was there to entertain the Ambassador until his father arrived.
As they chatted Alexander asked him about the size of the Persian military. Seeing a chance to impress the future king of Macedonia, the Ambassador waxed eloquent.
Alex responded "How long would it take to get all of them across the Bosphorus or the Agean Sea?"
The Ambassador stuttered in reply.
We too are spread out around the entire world. LONG logistic lines tend to be very fragile particularly the one across the Pacific Ocean enforced by a shrinking and tired Navy. Much of our military capability is structured for threats different than the one of the South China Sea/Taiwan.
Most of China's capabilities are focused on Taiwan/SCS.
Our Carrier Groups are fg amazing and allow us to show up on the doorstep of any country with a coast in the world with truly formidable power BUT all of that is irrelevant if China has missiles that cover the battle space/submarine capabilities that are a threat/ and the ability to blind us and sever our comms by taking out our satellites (and cut off our antibiotics, fk with our internet, etc.)
Who knows how it would turn out TODAY, (Pentagon War Games show them winning quickly and decisively) but on current trajectories they will be passing us rather soon.
-
are you comparing Alexander the Great
to Xi?
:-D
-
I am reminded of the story of Alexander the Great as a boy. The Persian ambassador of the huge kickass Persian Empire was there to see his father King Philip and young Alex was there to entertain the Ambassador until his father arrived.
As they chatted Alexander asked him about the size of the Persian military. Seeing a chance to impress the future king of Macedonia, the Ambassador waxed eloquent.
Alex responded "How long would it take to get all of them across the Bosphorus or the Agean Sea?"
The Ambassador stuttered in reply.
We too are spread out around the entire world. LONG logistic lines tend to be very fragile particularly the one across the Pacific Ocean enforced by a shrinking and tired Navy. Much of our military capability is structured for threats different than the one of the South China Sea/Taiwan.
Most of China's capabilities are focused on Taiwan/SCS.
Our Carrier Groups are fg amazing and allow us to show up on the doorstep of any country with a coast in the world with truly formidable power BUT all of that is irrelevant if China has missiles that cover the battle space/submarine capabilities that are a threat/ and the ability to blind us and sever our comms by taking out our satellites (and cut off our antibiotics, fk with our internet, etc.)
Who knows how it would turn out TODAY, (Pentagon War Games show them winning quickly and decisively) but on current trajectories they will be passing us rather soon.
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2020/11/chinas-new-aircraft-carrier-killer-is-worlds-largest-air-launched-missile/
-
"US military, perhaps to get more funding has painted China as a powerful threat. While they are powerful, they are no military match"
Ya
can you be more specific?
do we know they cannot cut off our satellites, communications etc.
why do I keep reading think tanks saying that we lose all hypothetical match ups?
does this mean their systems will not work as advertised?
do we know ours will?
It is a reasonable hypothesis, that were the US to beat China in military war games, Congress is not going to give them more funding ?. So it is important to show that the Chinese are far ahead of the USA. How do I know this...well the recent India-China stand off revealed a lot. India's GDP is about 1/4 of China's, clearly China is wealthier and more advanced than India with respect to military weapons. India was bombarded with slick videos of superhuman Chinese soldiers, modern cutting edge weapons, drone delivery of hot foods at himalayan heights, sleeping and relaxing in oxygen enriched chambers. When it was time for the rubber to meet the road, the Chinese fell quite short. Their conscripts were poorly trained, not aclimatized and had to withdraw. China has received several "bloody noses" in various skirmishes where they lost men on the Eastern front of India. So while India recognizes that China could be a formidable enemy, in India people are not afraid to take China on.
Going forward, I expect China to harass Taiwan, and they may even launch an attack and capture a few island rocks. Not sure why the US gives them much credibility.
-
It's not a matter of quality of troops and equipment head to head. We had our best troops, incredibly well trained with state of the art equipment, air superiority and literal eyes in the sky watching the enemy.
Our opponents were illiterates that literally fcuk goats, wearing man-dresses and armed with rusty AK-47s.
Who won?
China doesn't need a superior military to win. PLA generals brag about how they'd happily lose 100,000 troops to kill 10,000 Americans.
If the USS Ronald Reagan is at the bottom of the S. China sea along with it's escort ships, it's not going to turn out as a win for us.
"US military, perhaps to get more funding has painted China as a powerful threat. While they are powerful, they are no military match"
Ya
can you be more specific?
do we know they cannot cut off our satellites, communications etc.
why do I keep reading think tanks saying that we lose all hypothetical match ups?
does this mean their systems will not work as advertised?
do we know ours will?
It is a reasonable hypothesis, that were the US to beat China in military war games, Congress is not going to give them more funding ?. So it is important to show that the Chinese are far ahead of the USA. How do I know this...well the recent India-China stand off revealed a lot. India's GDP is about 1/4 of China's, clearly China is wealthier and more advanced than India with respect to military weapons. India was bombarded with slick videos of superhuman Chinese soldiers, modern cutting edge weapons, drone delivery of hot foods at himalayan heights, sleeping and relaxing in oxygen enriched chambers. When it was time for the rubber to meet the road, the Chinese fell quite short. Their conscripts were poorly trained, not aclimatized and had to withdraw. China has received several "bloody noses" in various skirmishes where they lost men on the Eastern front of India. So while India recognizes that China could be a formidable enemy, in India people are not afraid to take China on.
Going forward, I expect China to harass Taiwan, and they may even launch an attack and capture a few island rocks. Not sure why the US gives them much credibility.
-
Question:
What happens if China puts a blockade on China?
-
Question:
What happens if China puts a blockade on China?
I think a PLAN blockade around the ROC is quite possible. Then we will see if the Biden Junta is ready to take more casualties in a day than we lost in two decades of the GWOT.
-
Over time, I expect Taiwan will be taken over by China. Proximity to China does not work in Taiwan's favor. Same as for Hong Kong.
Re: Aircraft carriers being susceptible to missiles, China has claimed that their DF 21 missiles can do the job. I have also read elsewhere, not withstanding their claims, its not a simple job as AC have defenses. The same issue was brought up re: India's aircraft carriers and the Indian Navy are asking for a third AC. Apparently, the Indian navy thinks its not straight forward to down an AC. I agree the risk remains.
To down a US AC means full fledged war, which China will not win.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/pelosi-departs-taiwan-after-president-tsai-bestowed-highest-medal-china-preps-largest
-
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/08/pelosi-short-circuits-starts-babbling-nonsense-taiwan-president-benjamin-franklin-biden-regime-taunts-china-world-war-iii-video/
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2522859/taiwan-situation-serious
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2522859/taiwan-situation-serious
Here is one person who says it's already started.
https://twitter.com/imetatronink/status/1554891760995733506
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ballistic-missiles-soar-over-taiwan-hundreds-pla-fighters-breach-airspace-5-day-drills
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ballistic-missiles-soar-over-taiwan-hundreds-pla-fighters-breach-airspace-5-day-drills
Chinese saving 'face'. Does not look like a nuclear war to me, at least not yet.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ballistic-missiles-soar-over-taiwan-hundreds-pla-fighters-breach-airspace-5-day-drills
Chinese saving 'face'. Does not look like a nuclear war to me, at least not yet.
The potential is there for things to spiral rapidly.
-
Yes, and yes.
I'm also seeing right now a bitch slap across America's face-- we can blockade Taiwan and there is nothing you can do militarily about it-- and economically you ain't gonna do jack excrement either.
-
Yes, and yes.
I'm also seeing right now a bitch slap across America's face-- we can blockade Taiwan and there is nothing you can do militarily about it-- and economically you ain't gonna do jack excrement either.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ballistic-missiles-soar-over-taiwan-hundreds-pla-fighters-breach-airspace-5-day-drills
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-risks-provoking-north-koreas-kim-holding-drills-simulating-his-assassination
-
I'm not familiar with the source here citing anonymous sources.
-
I'm not familiar with the source here citing anonymous sources.
On a decapitation strike?
https://archive.ph/jVqxX
-
Yeah, I went back to that citation.
This is less than definitive:
"The U.S. will not acknowledge—formally or officially—that decapitation is on the agenda. Unofficially, though, that’s the name of the game, as explained to The Daily Beast by those familiar with the upcoming exercise as well as the exercises of five years ago."
-
Yeah, I went back to that citation.
This is less than definitive:
"The U.S. will not acknowledge—formally or officially—that decapitation is on the agenda. Unofficially, though, that’s the name of the game, as explained to The Daily Beast by those familiar with the upcoming exercise as well as the exercises of five years ago."
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA429271.pdf
-
Nice find (How do you do that?!? :-D )
Of course our military has thought about such things! But is that sufficient basis for asserting that our military exercise with the SORKs give the NORKs proper foundation for getting in a tizzy on such a basis?
-
Nice find (How do you do that?!? :-D )
Of course our military has thought about such things! But is that sufficient basis for asserting that our military exercise with the SORKs give the NORKs proper foundation for getting in a tizzy on such a basis?
Every tyrant has to sleep with one eye open. Little Kim especially.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2022-08-08/ray-dalio-us-china-tit-tat-escalations-are-very-dangerous
-
So, what do you suggest?
-
So, what do you suggest?
From the Ray Dalio article:
"This conflict is still a low-grade military conflict (which I call a Category 2 military conflict) because 1) it has not yet produced an exchange of bloodshed of people from the two major sides i.e., Chinese and/or Americans and 2) it is not taking place on either country’s homeland (though the Chinese would say Taiwan is part of their homeland even though it’s not part of mainland China)."
-------------
(Doug) It makes sense to not respond directly to the "3 day" exercises that were in retaliation for the Pelosi visit and to not cross the lines described above. They needed that tantrum to save face.
It makes more sense (to me) to talk quietly with Taiwanese, Japanese, South Koreans, other like minded Asians and powers, and Democrats talk with Republicans, about developing the military capability to deter what seems to be PRC's inevitable military invasion of Taiwan.
Build ships, fighter planes and advanced defense capabilities while shifting the discussion with China to economic issues.
-
Agree!
I would add denying China access to American capital, going after Chinese intel operations, and the like.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/pelosi-says-xis-reaction-scared-bully-fragile-crisis
-
https://www.birchgold.com/news/nightmare-shortages/
-
August 10, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
A New Phase in the Global Economic War
War is the ultimate disruptor.
By: Antonia Colibasanu
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, it didn’t just start a ground war in Europe – it opened up what would become a worldwide economic war involving nearly every major power. The West responded to the invasion by imposing sanctions and using the international financial system against Russia, hoping to bleed Moscow enough economically to come to terms. Instead, Russia dug its heels in, doubling down on the decades-long strategy of weaponizing its energy sales to Europe while searching for new allies and buyers. Naturally, the removal of Russian energy sent shocks throughout the global economy.
Nearly six months later, the world has entered a new phase of the economic war. Even major powers are dealing with surging inflation, an ongoing pandemic, energy shortages and a potential food crisis. Extended high temperatures across Europe have raised energy demand for consumers trying to stay cool, as industry attempts to ramp up production as part of a long economic recovery. And that’s to say nothing of the upcoming winter, droughts in both hemispheres, pollution, supply chain disruptions, and continued ravages to fertile lands in Ukraine – all of which will compound global economic problems.
While inflation means higher prices for everyone, the consequences of the economic war go beyond price concerns. The shipping industry, for example, has been disproportionately affected. After the initial Russian invasion, the industry’s primary concern was to resolve war zone-related issues – for example, getting ships out of the northern shore of the Black Sea – before dealing with higher operational costs. The Russian shipping industry in particular is at all but a standstill. Though it accounts for just 1 percent of global shipping, Russians themselves account for nearly 11 percent of the seafaring workforce; Ukrainians account for nearly 5 percent, and so the war has created a labor shortage in the industry. Meanwhile, operators have developed audit procedures to make sure both shipment ownership and merchandise doesn’t come under sanctions – all of which is not only costly but time consuming, slowing down global supply chains while they are still under the impact of pandemic policies.
The insurance industry was next to adapt to the new business environment. The first challenge for insurers was to develop procedures that made it possible to audit institutional exposure to sanctions as they came (at an unprecedented pace, no less). Ensuring effective compliance in a rapidly evolving landscape is not only expensive but also risky, considering the potential for business losses. The pace of change that the implementation of the sanctions imposed has rendered companies unable to insure a sanctioned person or reinsure a sanctioned insurer, regardless of the type of business. Keeping tabs on sanctions, now business as usual, continues to increase operational costs and inflate the premiums paid by businesses worldwide, all of which are included in the final consumer price.
For all these reasons, rivalries will continue to grow as nations determine what is best for themselves. They will have to adapt their policies to the massive accumulation of minor and major shocks that result from the high uncertainty both producers and consumers are facing. These will include restricted exports, higher storage thresholds, measures supporting increased domestic production or even rationing. This will ultimately result in unintended, unpredictable consequences that will be harder to manage for all states, with some taking the hit more than others.
Case Study: France and Germany
France's nuclear power regulator announced on Aug. 8 that it had extended temporary waivers to allow five power stations to continue discharging hot water into rivers as the country faces one of the most severe droughts in decades. Cool water is essential for keeping reactors humming at nuclear power plants. But even if France is a major European nuclear energy producer and exporter, weather conditions have made it hard for it to continue operations. Last week, Electricite de France said it needs to decrease the nuclear energy production at two other plants because of weather conditions.
This is just as much a problem for Germany, which hoped to import some French electricity production to try to reduce its energy dependence on Russia. Faced with high inflation and expecting an energy shortage in the coming months, German lawmakers are exploring measures to save energy. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz acknowledged that the spiraling energy costs are a potential source of social distress and instability. Meanwhile, the same drought is affecting the German economy. Germany's transport minister said low water levels on the Rhine may cause shipping problems and called for an urgent dredging plan to keep the German economy safe. Put simply, nothing seems reassuring for Europe’s economic powerhouse. And if Russia decides to cut natural gas supplies, the situation will only get worse.
Case Study: Odesa
All these issues are also evident in the way the recently brokered grain export agreement has been implemented at the port of Odesa. The deal was supposed to ensure that Ukrainian grain could reach Africa and other parts of the world, averting a food crisis and bringing relief to global grain markets. Hours after the agreement was signed, however, two Russian missiles hit the port. Moreover, port operators, like the shipping industry, are facing a labor shortage. And legal questions abound over the application of sanctions; local sources mention issues with paperwork and approval processes.
Russia is a top exporter of most commodities, so naturally sanctions raise similar questions in ports around the world. Except for the U.S., which is largely self-sufficient, most of the world’s industrial producers – especially China – depend on imports of commodities. China is also dependent on the U.S. to buy its exports. Considering its mounting socio-economic troubles, Beijing will do all it can to avoid getting caught in the economic war between the West and Russia – unless events around Taiwan force it to do so. For the business world, this translates into higher operating expenses and more supply chain risks, all of which contributes to the accelerated adoption of onshoring or reshoring.
For Western firms, however, onshoring comes with its own risks – inflation, first and foremost. American firms must consider higher energy prices, but Europeans are dealing with uncertainty over the security of supply itself. Even if Russia doesn’t cut Europe’s gas supply, the Europeans will need to use rubles for the purchases, weakening the euro and driving inflation higher. At the same time the West, especially Europe, must help keep the Ukrainian economy afloat. All this uncertainty makes Europe a less attractive destination for business investment, let alone onshoring.
Russia’s Problems
The Kremlin’s challenges are similar, if not worse. Sanctions and supply chain havoc are reducing what gets to Russian producers, and when things get there, they’re more expensive than they used to be. The government has reassured the population about its anti-sanctions measures, but its businesses are feeling the heat. One measure requires Russian firms to sell a percentage of their foreign currency to the central bank for rubles, helping to prop up the national currency. This percentage has fallen significantly since the war began, but close financial monitoring continues, as does business uncertainty.
The Kremlin was aware of these risks before invading Ukraine but made a political calculation. Putin placed Russia’s security strategy above its prosperity, knowing the Western counter had strict limits. For starters, the prospect of a weak and unstable nuclear-armed Russia isn’t very appealing for Europe or the United States. Nevertheless, the Kremlin also knew that without Western technology, the Russian economy would struggle to maintain the previous pace of development. The sanctions have started eating into Russian energy production, and there are indications that broader manufacturing output is suffering. Even if Russia benefits from higher commodity prices, the technology restrictions in particular will start to bite and could turn into socio-economic problems.
The Kremlin believes Russians will endure these hardships so long as it can sell a plausible story that Russia is winning the war. As part of this effort, Moscow benefits from the opportunity to deliver positive news at home about new friends in Africa backing it against the West. Though it’s unclear how much African allies can help, for the Kremlin the moral support may be enough. At the same time, it’s unclear what affect the war is having on Russia’s labor force after the damage wrought by the pandemic.
War is the ultimate disruptor. The risk of global economic destabilization grows with each step, offensive or defensive, in the economic war, and as business executives’ decisions trickle through the supply chain. Together, this accelerates the fragmentation process that was already underway because of the pandemic.
Europe and Russia will be most affected first. A difficult winter is coming for both. Europe’s energy dependence on Russia is a massive challenge, especially during the Continent’s worst drought in decades. For Russia, even if it can find new markets to sell to, the stream of key technologies into the country is drying up. Things will get worse late in the year, especially if we factor in the uncertain labor market. Moscow’s insistence that things are going well is worrying. For both Russia and the global economy, they clearly aren’t.
-
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/kissinger-says-u-s-is-aimlessly-heading-toward-edge-of-war-against-russia-and-china-11660552482
“We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to.”
-
https://www.revolver.news/2022/08/reports-military-is-taking-equipment-from-us-soldiers-sending-it-to-ukraine/
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/post/2625909/general-state-of-war-is-growing
-
https://plus2.credit-suisse.com/shorturlpdf.html?v=5amR-YP34-V&t=-1e4y7st99l5d0a0be21hgr5ht
Hat tip to YA
-
https://gatesofvienna.net/2022/08/stop-waiting-for-ww3/
-
https://gatesofvienna.net/2022/08/stop-waiting-for-ww3/
Iraqis will Genocide — Because That is Their Way of War
29 August 2022
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Iraqis do total war. Incredibly savage to one another. They fight to exhaustion. Pretend it was a one-off, rest up. Repeat. Just as Germany occasionally commits ritual, mass genocide/suicide. Iraqis commit ritual genocide. That is their way. Their firmware.
There are cultures within the United States who have been highly weaponized against white people. When this breaks — and it will break soon — they will go for genocide aided by FBI, CIA, and the US military. The current US military is not the one I served in or accompanied in the wars.
The current US military is led by Evil Woke such as Austin and White Rage Milley. The current US military is not trained to fight China or Russia. They are groomed to commit genocide across America. Specifically to kill as many white people as possible. White Rage Mi lley is too stupid, brainwashed, or compromised to see he is nothing more than a useful, disposable idiot.
White Rage Milley will stand obediently by the oven doors while young US service members are brainwashed and injected with poison jihad-jabs.
Milley and Austin are traitors.
This apparently was from Iraq today. Not confirmed. But what is confirmed is that the latest genocide has begun and the energy and other implications are massive.
World War III is on.
-
Yes
Both
At the same time.
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2022/08/michael-yon-and-tucker-carlson-issue.html
-
Auron MacIntyre:
The liberal world order has been so dominant for so long they can't imagine a scenario where there are consequences for the decisions they make
That's why they outsourced energy production to adversarial nations and then fought a proxy war with those providers over a client state
They assumed those nations would blink, everyone always blinks eventually under the social and financial pressure
But now that strategy has failed and all they can do is tell their people to freeze and starve in the name of democracy
This is why they are pushing forward with electric cars as they lose the ability to reliably provide electricity
Why they're trying to shutdown farmers as store shelves empty
The plans were already in motion and they can't imagine a scenario where they lose, so they accelerate.
-
"The plans were already in motion, and they can't imagine a scenario where they lose, so they accelerate."
-
https://summit.news/2022/09/10/ukraines-top-general-doesnt-rule-out-limited-nuclear-war/
-
He is making the common sense observation that Putin using tactical nukes if the Russki forces are being humiliated/forced out cannot be ruled out, yes?
-
He is making the common sense observation that Putin using tactical nukes if the Russki forces are being humiliated/forced out cannot be ruled out, yes?
Yes.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/prologue-3rd-world-war-kremlin-reacts-security-guarantees-ukraine
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/prologue-3rd-world-war-kremlin-reacts-security-guarantees-ukraine
https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1570141395498962944
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/prologue-3rd-world-war-kremlin-reacts-security-guarantees-ukraine
https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1570141395498962944
https://twitter.com/imetatronink/status/1570380645477797888
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/prologue-3rd-world-war-kremlin-reacts-security-guarantees-ukraine
https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1570141395498962944
https://twitter.com/imetatronink/status/1570380645477797888
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11234251/America-hit-Russias-military-devastating-strike-Putin-nukes-Ukraine-says-general.html
-
September 23, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF
How to Fight a Nuclear War
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s occasional threat of nuclear war has achieved its desired goal: to create a sense of catastrophe if the West, and in particular the United States, continues to support Ukraine. Clearly, Moscow is having a hard time waging a conventional war, which was premised on the (faulty) assumption that Russia’s military would quickly and easily overpower Ukraine’s. Some suspect the opposite may now be true.
This has created problems for Russia at home and abroad. Though Putin’s authority is fairly intact, confidence in his judgment and in Russia’s future has declined. There are protests in the streets of Moscow and reports of conscripted men trying to flee the country.
Russia’s performance in the war has also quelled international fears of Moscow. Without fear, countries are free to disagree with Russia, aid Ukraine, or generally challenge Moscow elsewhere without risk of retribution. In Central Asia, for example, Russia’s authority has declined significantly. Since the region is in Russia’s backyard, its authority, or lack thereof, matters greatly.
Russia needs to demonstrate that it remains an overwhelmingly powerful nation. Its ideal strategy, of course, would be to decisively beat the Ukrainian army. For now, that appears unlikely. The longer that remains the case, the further the perception of Russian power declines.
By raising the threat of nuclear war, Putin is attempting to raise the perception that defeating Russia in Ukraine could have catastrophic consequences. To make the threat credible, Putin must appear indifferent to the potential counterattacks against Russia. It’s impossible to know what someone else is thinking, let alone a Russian autocrat, so it behooves us to take the threat seriously. What was incredible during the Cold War becomes possible in the Ukraine war, and the calculus of possibility relative to the dangers of nuclear reality starts to loom large. The threat is credible only if it involves a strategic intercontinental strike rather than a localized, tactical one. Putin has carefully avoided explaining what type of nuclear strike he is talking about, so the dread of Russian power surges in spite of the losses in the conventional war.
In gaming nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s, it quickly became obvious that if a country were to launch a nuclear attack, it would have to be an entirely unanticipated first strike designed to eliminate the risk of retaliation by eliminating enemy missiles before launch. We never discovered if a successful first strike was possible because the chances of it failing to at least some degree would mean a strike on the attacker’s home. If a first strike was essential, the probability of failure was too high, so nobody tried it. Thus nuclear powers, particularly the Soviet Union and the United States, were painfully careful when confronting each other, taking every care not to alarm the other about the threat of a first strike. Such a danger might have triggered a first strike by the other side.
A first strike with even one nuclear weapon may well release the entire U.S. arsenal on Russia. But Putin is in a declining position. His best option for forcing the U.S. to step back from Ukraine is to employ what was once called the crazy SOB strategy. It was meant to frighten your sane adversary into believing you had lost your mind, causing them to try to calm the threat by making concessions. According to this strategy, the defender must be convinced that the attacker has a credible capability and is prepared to accept a nuclear holocaust in his own country to gain the upper hand. It was essential to allow the defender to scare himself into making concessions without ever actually launching anything. The danger of this strategy, of course, is that the defender would believe that if a foreign leader is crazy enough to launch at all, then he is crazy enough to launch preemptively. The metaphysics of nuclear war was a great pastime in grad school, but it was never a practical affair because it depended on alerting your adversary of the threat.
The only real nuclear option, according to Herman Kahn’s “On Thermonuclear War,” is to launch without any warning at all enemy facilities, hoping that the surprise will cost defenders precious minutes before launching a retaliatory strike. In theory, all sides are on an instant trigger to respond. The goal is to make them wonder for a few minutes if the radars had had a failure – which could happen. Those minutes of confusion are what you are looking for.
Under no circumstances are you to give any hint of an impending attack. Nothing should interrupt the dogmatic belief that it’s just another boring day. The last thing that a Soviet or American leader would do is mumble vague promises about global catastrophe. Doing that would get the adrenaline flowing in enemy command bunkers, which is not what you want, and your first strike could turn into a disastrous second strike.
The point is that if you are thinking of using nuclear weapons, don’t threaten to use them. If you are going to discuss their use, you are simply trying to bluff the other side. Putin is many things that I won’t name, but he is not stupid. Russian grad students and KGB agents were playing the same nuclear theory games we were. With Putin’s recent comments, the U.S. nuclear system has to dust off the cobwebs. A nuclear team has always been on standby but perhaps not always on full alert. Now it is. This is not an ideal way to start a nuclear war.
I am reminded of a movie: “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb.” But it was talking about global nuclear war. That would change life as we know it. Tactical nukes won’t.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/prologue-3rd-world-war-kremlin-reacts-security-guarantees-ukraine
https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1570141395498962944
https://twitter.com/imetatronink/status/1570380645477797888
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11234251/America-hit-Russias-military-devastating-strike-Putin-nukes-Ukraine-says-general.html
https://www.revolver.news/2022/09/tucker-the-state-department-wants-this-war-and-they-want-it-big/
-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11246381/PETER-HITCHENS-questions-wisdom-stoking-Ukraine-conflict-despite-threat-nuclear-armageddon.html
-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11246381/PETER-HITCHENS-questions-wisdom-stoking-Ukraine-conflict-despite-threat-nuclear-armageddon.html
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/nuclear-war-possible-first-time-30-years-us-commander
-
https://capitalisteric.wordpress.com/2022/09/26/youve-got-one-week/
I'm hoping this is wrong!
-
"I'm hoping this is wrong!"
i dunno but I nominate Chris Wallace to go to Russia to interview Vlad and ask for his response
might me more interesting then ARods love life
that is his next interview supposedly
So A rod :
where has your rod been?
-
"I'm hoping this is wrong!"
i dunno but I nominate Chris Wallace to go to Russia to interview Vlad and ask for his response
might me more interesting then ARods love life
that is his next interview supposedly
So A rod :
where has your rod been?
Wallace needs to fall out of a Russian window.
-
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/116/937/452/original/368be76ce2c1760e.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/116/937/452/original/368be76ce2c1760e.jpg)
-
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/401192.php
This is fine!
-
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/401192.php
This is fine!
https://www.theinteldrop.org/2022/09/29/pepe-escobar-germany-and-eu-have-been-handed-over-a-declaration-of-war/
-
".Re: Let’s get WW III going!-Things down always play out like the junta wants"
isn't that one of the tenets of war; things rarely go exactly as planned ....
however the war experts are , I thought , supposed to plan for every contingency
or every possible outcome and twist and turn
:roll:
(now that I read CCP defeats us in their war games .
and we are in new quagmire in Ukraine
thanks to Biden Admin weakness to start with enticing putin to invade)
planning has not been so scrupulous has it?
-
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/401192.php
This is fine!
"Zelenzky, in a Hot War With Russia, Asks for Accelerated Entry Into NATO"
- I wouldn't want to be a potential rape victim in a world where trying to defend yourself is what provoked the attack.
-
https://www.navylookout.com/the-threat-to-worlds-communications-backbone-the-vulnerability-of-undersea-cables/?fbclid=IwAR2dSEJ9FrfSRP0Q2TE_6IsREZhv6brhEx2_muJWONaMgjIo5UNTLrS121c
-
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/401192.php
This is fine!
"Zelenzky, in a Hot War With Russia, Asks for Accelerated Entry Into NATO"
- I wouldn't want to be a potential rape victim in a world where trying to defend yourself is what provoked the attack.
Interesting metaphor, given Ukraine’s well documented human trafficking, including the sex trafficking of children and having been listed as one of the top 3 producers of child exploitation media in the world.
-
".Re: Let’s get WW III going!-Things down always play out like the junta wants"
isn't that one of the tenets of war; things rarely go exactly as planned ....
however the war experts are , I thought , supposed to plan for every contingency
or every possible outcome and twist and turn
:roll:
(now that I read CCP defeats us in their war games .
and we are in new quagmire in Ukraine
thanks to Biden Admin weakness to start with enticing putin to invade)
planning has not been so scrupulous has it?
Our “leaders” both civilian and military are highly credentialed and profoundly stupid and incompetent.
-
https://www.revolver.news/2022/09/world-war-iii-nord-stream-pipeline-sabotage-one-giant-leap-toward-armageddon/
-
https://thelawdogfiles.com/2022/09/nordstream.html?fbclid=IwAR1a8ECwjgwkVbdU5H2kgYwFSeQlkSkQoH0D_1_3a_rPLci92dSl3IIT2Wc
-
https://thelawdogfiles.com/2022/09/nordstream.html?fbclid=IwAR1a8ECwjgwkVbdU5H2kgYwFSeQlkSkQoH0D_1_3a_rPLci92dSl3IIT2Wc
A very interesting theory. I have a minimal amount of post-blast investigative training. As I understand, what remains of the pipeline should make it clear if it was an internal explosion that caused the breach, or if it was an external explosion, using high explosives and shaped charges. No idea if traces of chemicals resultant from the use of explosives would be present underwater.
-
https://thelawdogfiles.com/2022/09/nordstream.html?fbclid=IwAR1a8ECwjgwkVbdU5H2kgYwFSeQlkSkQoH0D_1_3a_rPLci92dSl3IIT2Wc
A very interesting theory. I have a minimal amount of post-blast investigative training. As I understand, what remains of the pipeline should make it clear if it was an internal explosion that caused the breach, or if it was an external explosion, using high explosives and shaped charges. No idea if traces of chemicals resultant from the use of explosives would be present underwater.
"Yes, 17 hours apart. No military is going to arrange for two pipes in the same general area to be destroyed 17 hours apart."
Plausible deniability. If you are staging an "accident", you want plausible deniability.
-
https://www-telegraph-co-uk.translate.goog/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1455559/CIA-plot-led-to-huge-blast-in-Siberian-gas-pipeline.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
CIA plot led to huge blast in Siberian gas pipeline
By Alec Russell in Washington
28 February 2004 • 12:00am
A CIA operation to sabotage Soviet industry by duping Moscow into stealing booby-trapped software was spectacularly successful when it triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian gas pipeline, it emerged yesterday.
Thomas Reed, a former US Air Force secretary who was in Ronald Reagan's National Security Council, discloses what he called just one example of the CIA's "cold-eyed economic warfare" against Moscow in a memoir to be published next month.
Leaked extracts in yesterday's Washington Post describe how the operation caused "the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space" in the summer of 1982.
Mr Reed writes that the software "was programmed to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds".
The CIA learned of Soviet ambitions to steal the software via a French KGB source, Col Vladimir Vetrov, codenamed Farewell. His job was to evaluate the intelligence collected by a shadowy arm of the KGB set up a network of industrial spies to steal technology from the West.
The breakthrough came when Vetrov told the CIA of a specific "shopping list" of software technology that Moscow was seeking to update its pipeline as it sought to export natural gas to Western Europe.
Washington was keen to block the deal and, after securing President Reagan's approval in January 1982, the CIA tricked the Soviet Union into acquiring software with built-in flaws.
"In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds," Mr Reed writes.
The project exceeded the CIA's wildest dreams. There were no casualties in the explosion, but it was so dramatic that the first reports are said to have stirred alarm in Washington.
The initial reports led to fears that the Soviets had launched a missile from a place where rockets were not known to be based, or even had detonated "a small nuclear device", Mr Reed writes in his book.
While some of the details of the CIA's counter-offensive have emerged before, the sabotage of the gas pipeline has remained a secret until now. Mr Reed told the Post he had CIA approval to make the disclosures.
Mr Vetrov's spying was discovered by the KGB and he was executed in 1983.
-
"The CIA learned of Soviet ambitions to steal the software via a French KGB source, Col Vladimir Vetrov, codenamed Farewell. His job was to evaluate the intelligence collected by a shadowy arm of the KGB set up a network of industrial spies to steal technology from the West.
The breakthrough came when Vetrov told the CIA of a specific "shopping list" of software technology that Moscow was seeking to update its pipeline as it sought to export natural gas to Western Europe. Washington was keen to block the deal and, after securing President Reagan's approval in January 1982, the CIA tricked the Soviet Union into acquiring software with built-in flaws."
Maybe we should do this to the Chinese?
-
"The CIA learned of Soviet ambitions to steal the software via a French KGB source, Col Vladimir Vetrov, codenamed Farewell. His job was to evaluate the intelligence collected by a shadowy arm of the KGB set up a network of industrial spies to steal technology from the West.
The breakthrough came when Vetrov told the CIA of a specific "shopping list" of software technology that Moscow was seeking to update its pipeline as it sought to export natural gas to Western Europe. Washington was keen to block the deal and, after securing President Reagan's approval in January 1982, the CIA tricked the Soviet Union into acquiring software with built-in flaws."
Maybe we should do this to the Chinese?
Do you think we aren't a vassal state of the PRC?
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/prologue-3rd-world-war-kremlin-reacts-security-guarantees-ukraine
https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1570141395498962944
https://twitter.com/imetatronink/status/1570380645477797888
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11234251/America-hit-Russias-military-devastating-strike-Putin-nukes-Ukraine-says-general.html
https://www.revolver.news/2022/09/tucker-the-state-department-wants-this-war-and-they-want-it-big/
https://summit.news/2022/10/01/globalists-are-marching-us-relentlessly-toward-nuclear-armageddon-warns-former-senator/
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/prologue-3rd-world-war-kremlin-reacts-security-guarantees-ukraine
https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1570141395498962944
https://twitter.com/imetatronink/status/1570380645477797888
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11234251/America-hit-Russias-military-devastating-strike-Putin-nukes-Ukraine-says-general.html
https://www.revolver.news/2022/09/tucker-the-state-department-wants-this-war-and-they-want-it-big/
https://summit.news/2022/10/01/globalists-are-marching-us-relentlessly-toward-nuclear-armageddon-warns-former-senator/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/10/no-one-wants-go-war-russia-poland-people-washington-d-c-col-doug-macgregor-biden-wanting-war-russia-video/
-
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO8gZLROW8IwMBBI7Lr53nOS4fswOenQ9Gu0cPJ77xWDokCQeSLzqAU8-QhQuf04oF_A0OIkIL2yLy4PcSm2tR0vA0bFGeBkD5U6WtNvGhgpZfNKNx-ZhEN8qCyNtGTkvzqU0xkaCDGJnLWYc_ij0lKTiRsN4LoesrIeiDNCLPiI7YLe-ob-HMk_5d/w638-h663/cramer.JPG
(https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO8gZLROW8IwMBBI7Lr53nOS4fswOenQ9Gu0cPJ77xWDokCQeSLzqAU8-QhQuf04oF_A0OIkIL2yLy4PcSm2tR0vA0bFGeBkD5U6WtNvGhgpZfNKNx-ZhEN8qCyNtGTkvzqU0xkaCDGJnLWYc_ij0lKTiRsN4LoesrIeiDNCLPiI7YLe-ob-HMk_5d/w638-h663/cramer.JPG)
Time to start digging a fallout shelter!
-
Putin’s Nuclear Threat Is Real
The conflict isn’t only about Ukraine. He’s waging a global war on the U.S.-led order.
Walter Russell Mead hedcutBy Walter Russell MeadFollow
Oct. 3, 2022 6:03 pm ET
Even as poorly trained, poorly led and poorly supplied Russian forces retreat on the battlefield, the danger that the war in Ukraine will erupt into a wider conflict continues to grow. Vladimir Putin has responded to the weakening of his military position by “annexing” four contested regions inside Ukraine, declaring that the conflict in Ukraine is a war for the survival of Russia, and raising the specter of a nuclear strike. The West is taking note of these moves and the sabotage of Baltic pipelines connecting European consumers to Russian gas. National security adviser Jake Sullivan has warned Russia that any use of nuclear weapons would have catastrophic consequences for Russian forces, and Jens Stoltenberg, secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, repeated that message Sunday morning.
As the Biden administration scrambles to manage the most dangerous international confrontation since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, it must see the world through Mr. Putin’s eyes. Only then can officials know how seriously to take the nuclear saber-rattling and develop an appropriate response.
While American presidents going back to George W. Bush have failed to appreciate the depth and passion of Mr. Putin’s hostility to the U.S., the Russian president isn’t that hard to read. Like a movie supervillain who can’t resist sharing the details of his plans for world conquest with the captured hero, Mr. Putin makes no secret of his agenda. At Friday’s ceremony marking Russia’s illegal and invalid “annexation” of four Ukrainian regions, he laid out his worldview and ambitions in a chilling and extraordinary speech that every American policy maker should read.
Mr. Putin sees global politics today as a struggle between a rapacious and domineering West and the rest of the world bent on resisting our arrogance and exploitation. The West is cynical and hypocritical, and its professed devotion to “liberal values” is a sham. The West is not a coalition of equals; it represents the domination of the “evil Anglo-Saxons” over the Europeans and Japan. Mr. Putin sees this American-led world system as the successor to the British Empire, and he blames the Anglo-Saxon or English-speaking powers for a host of evils, from the Atlantic slave trade to European imperialism to the use of nuclear weapons in World War II.
This attack on “Anglo-Saxon” greed, brutality and hypocrisy is not original to Mr. Putin. He is reading from a script developed by opponents of British and American liberal capitalism and geopolitical power over hundreds of years. Napoleon could have delivered large swathes of this speech. Very different figures such as Kaiser Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler as well as Joseph Stalin, Imperial Japanese leaders like Hideki Tojo, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden shared much of Mr. Putin’s critique. One can hear versions of it on many college campuses, and it plays a significant role in the intellectual and cultural life of many postcolonial countries and movements around the world.
Drawing on this widespread resentment of the liberal West allows Mr. Putin to appeal to currents of opinion in Russia and beyond that transcend normal ideological boundaries. Russians who are nostalgic for the Soviet Union can happily cooperate with Russians longing for the czars. Orthodox Christian traditionalists can make common cause with anti-Western Islamists. This is a hymn book from which fascists and communists can both happily sing. It appeals to the illiberal fifth column Mr. Putin hopes to foster in the West as well as to Africans, Latin Americans and Asians who resent continued Western wealth and power. Building a global front against Western and especially American power is central to Russian and Chinese foreign policy.
Mr. Putin’s version of the anti-American worldview gives a special role to Russia. “I would like to remind you that in the past, ambitions of world domination have repeatedly shattered against the courage and resilience of our people,” Mr. Putin told his audience in the Kremlin on Friday. In this view, Russia is the bulwark of the rest of the world against Western aggression and domination. And for Mr. Putin, the conquest of Ukraine is an essential step in preserving Russia’s ability to carry out its historic mission to curb the ambitions of the imperial West.
The Biden administration must remember that for Mr. Putin the battle in Ukraine is only one part of a global war against the American-led world order. And if Ukraine is going poorly for Mr. Putin, the global scene is more encouraging. While NATO has been strengthened and—thanks to Finnish and Swedish accession—is about to be expanded, the global order, already shaken by the Covid pandemic, has taken a beating this year. At least in part owing to Mr. Putin’s war, financial markets are in turmoil. Europe faces a daunting mix of double-digit inflation and fuel costs high enough to make important energy-intensive industries economically unviable. Rising food, fuel and fertilizer prices across the Middle East, Latin America and Africa threaten significant social suffering and political unrest. Mr. Putin can reasonably hope that over time these problems will strain the West’s cohesion.
Making threats about the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine advances both Mr. Putin’s goals in Ukraine and his larger campaign against the American-led order. Nuclear weapons, he hopes, could shift the military balance on the ground, and the fear of nuclear war could force Washington to dial back military support for Ukraine. The threat or use of nuclear weapons could split Europe between “peace at any price” governments and governments of countries closer to Russia whose determination to resist nuclear blackmail would only grow.
There is one other consideration. Ever since taking power in Russia, Mr. Putin has been frustrated by his inability to parlay his country’s immense arsenal of nuclear weapons into real political power in the world. Nuclear weapons made the Soviet Union a superpower; Mr. Putin wants that stature back. Extracting significant concessions from the West by nuclear blackmail over Ukraine would be a major step in his goal of regaining the Soviet Union’s place in world affairs.
None of this is good news for the Biden administration. Yielding to Russian blackmail over Ukraine would be a massive blow to American credibility and power overseas and would look weak to Americans who have cheered Ukraine on. Yet deterring a Russian attack involves the risk of a deepening American engagement in an escalating war.
Mr. Putin’s armies are in headlong retreat across much of Ukraine. His support at home looks threatened. But the threat he poses to vital American interests must not be underestimated, and the threat that he will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine is real.
-
I hold WRM at the highest level of respect on foreign policy matters. That said, I don't fully follow him here.
Putin would lie, cheat, steal, murder, even commit genocide to advance himself and his cause. Would he use nukes? Sure. But how does that advance himself or his cause?
IMHO, the threat of using nuclear weapons is his weapon.
-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11274113/Putin-deploys-Belgorod-nuclear-submarine-amid-sabre-rattling-Ukraine.html
...Fuck around and find out, in Russian?
-
"fuck around and find out in Russian": "погуглите и узнайте"
click on link before to find out how pronounced:
https://www.google.com/search?q=fuck+around+and+find+out+in+fussian&rlz=1C5GCEM_enUS1001US1001&oq=fuck+around+and+find+out+in+fussian&aqs=chrome..69i57.7857j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
-
I hold WRM at the highest level of respect on foreign policy matters. That said, I don't fully follow him here.
Putin would lie, cheat, steal, murder, even commit genocide to advance himself and his cause. Would he use nukes? Sure. But how does that advance himself or his cause?
IMHO, the threat of using nuclear weapons is his weapon.
Better read up on Russian doctrine.
https://globalsecurityreview.com/nuclear-de-escalation-russias-deterrence-strategy/
-
https://ncrenegade.com/glenn-greenwald-sounds-the-alarm-on-a-very-real-threat-of-a-nuclear-exchange/
-
Speaking of which , , ,
https://nypost.com/2022/10/04/russia-planning-nuke-test-near-ukraine-border-report/?fbclid=IwAR0owxB9To0AxShF-L70LtxVvfA5mXCZ2vRQllHnGgInWS5pXhIQ8DtrlgA
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/our-nuclear-options/
-
told us not to worry
as the risk if very low:
https://nj1015.com/apocalypse-nj-what-happens-if-were-hit-with-a-nuclear-weapon/
I only hope I die immediately in the blast not sometime after bleeding from every orifice skin falling off and of sepsis
-
told us not to worry
as the risk if very low:
https://nj1015.com/apocalypse-nj-what-happens-if-were-hit-with-a-nuclear-weapon/
I only hope I die immediately in the blast not sometime after bleeding from every orifice skin falling off and of sepsis
At least we will have shown the world we stuck by Ukraine to the bitter end!
-
told us not to worry
as the risk if very low:
https://nj1015.com/apocalypse-nj-what-happens-if-were-hit-with-a-nuclear-weapon/
I only hope I die immediately in the blast not sometime after bleeding from every orifice skin falling off and of sepsis
At least we will have shown the world we stuck by Ukraine to the bitter end!
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/117/251/164/original/1c118886daf62c05.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/117/251/164/original/1c118886daf62c05.jpeg)
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/biden-warns-nuclear-armageddon-threat-back-first-time-cuban-missile-crisis
-
https://sonar21.com/americans-better-wake-up-and-realize-the-russians-are-genuinely-pissed-off/
-
Ummm , , , sincere question: Just how honest were the elections of 2014 that the Ukes overthrew with American help (and support here on this forum?)?
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/we-must-speak-prudence-macron-scolds-biden-armageddon-rhetoric
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/escobar-nord-stream-2-offers-germany-date-destiny
-
Ummm , , , sincere question: Just how honest were the elections of 2014 that the Ukes overthrew with American help (and support here on this forum?)?
https://www.cato.org/commentary/americas-ukraine-hypocrisy
https://progressive.org/latest/us-reaping-sowed-in-ukraine-benjamin-davies-220201/
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/435906-us-embassy-pressed-ukraine-to-drop-probe-of-george-soros-group-during-2016/
-
don't know this person but sounds quit believable
we have 40 minutes for ICBMs to reach USA Canada from Russia
over the North Pole
15 minutes maybe till detected by satellites
of course must be even less then that if submarine launched
about enough time to gather your loved ones in the house and get to basement
and pray before we die.
no need to worry
General Keane ( who I like but he keeps being wrong) says Putin would never do such.a thing because he knows the consequences
so I will not worry ....... :roll:
______
Profile photo for Dave Sullivan
Dave Sullivan
Studied Electrical Engineering at Birkenhead TechAuthor has 343 answers and 225.8K answer viewsSep 10
How does a nuclear attack work?
It takes around thirty minutes from Russian missile fields, over the North Pole, reentering the atmosphere over Canada before arriving at US Targets
US satellites would detect the infrared from the exhaust plumes of the missile’s boost phase within ten to fifteen seconds
NORAD uses a double detection system of verification, so a few more seconds go by while, for example, telemetry from the climbing missile is detected
Then it will appear as a “Launch detection” and the response will occur. The President will be informed of the size of the incoming strike package and can issue orders to strike back
This probably takes around fifteen minutes
In the meantime, the Russian ICBM had left the atmosphere, discarded its nose cone and released its warhead “Bus”, a carrier for the MIRVs that sit on it. This will have made some minor course corrections depending upon its programmed targets and is now cruising silently over the Arctic ice cap
Some twenty five minutes after launch was detected, the Bus arrives over Northern Canada. Small rockets fire to orient it at different targets and, at each point, a MIRV is released. The now empty Bus then tries to make a nuisance of itself by ejecting decoys and trying to spoof detection systems
With only a few minutes to go, each MIRV, glowing hot from reentry and decelerating from air friction is making its way over the Great Lakes and into US airspace
Down below, there is frantic activity, some are trying to flee, some to hunker down behind whatever protection they can find. But thirty minutes isn’t really that long at all. Perhaps the husband is trying to get back to his family from work, perhaps the wife was round at her mother’s, perhaps the kids are at school
Once the MIRV reaches around 5000 meters over its intended target, it detonates with around a 550 kiloton yield from the thermonuclear device inside
The flash will blind anyone who looks directly at it and at close range, within a kilometer, prompt X-Rays will vaporize anything that has a water content. Humans are mostly water.
An expanding blast wave will completely flatten every building within two kilometers, substantially damage any out to five kilometers and blow out windows up to ten kilometers away. The PSI overpressure will crush the air spaces inside humans within two kilometers, bringing death from ruptured lungs and compressive trauma. Further out, people will survive with ruptured eardrums
Far more deadly however will be the radiated heat from the rising fireball. Anything that heat “Shines” upon will be burnt. Anything that has a line of sight to the fireball will be heated. A few thousand degrees near the epicenter, dropping as distance increases but still giving third degree burns at five kilometers to unprotected skin
Remember the fireball is rising so the higher it gets the more the area it affects and the less you csn be safe hiding behind a wall or in a ditch for example
Forget about fallout. Since the fireball didn’t touch the ground and was an airburst, no surface material was sucked up to fall down later, irradiated
The danger from radiation is from direct gamma and x-rays absorbed from the initial prompt radiation. You should be safe in one to two weeks
However, you are now alone. No paramedics will come to treat your injuries from burns or flying debris. No Fire Department will come to extinguish your burning house. There is no water, no electricity, only the supplies you have with you. And you have to stay there for two weeks
Now if you live near a national command location, Cheyenne Mountain or a Presidential bunker, you are in far greater trouble. Expect, instead of ten MIRVs on that missile, there to be a single 27 megaton warhead, fuzed for groundburst, with a hardened penetrator on it to “Dig out” the bunker. Expect lethal effects forty kilometers away and you definitely will be getting fallout downwind
That is the reality of a nuclear attack
-
https://jrnyquist.blog/2022/06/04/beijings-war-plan-an-interview-with-lude-media/
-
quote author=ccp
"...no need to worry
General Keane ( who I like but he keeps being wrong) says Putin would never do such.a thing because he knows the consequences
so I will not worry ....... :roll:. "
------------
To deter this, every American President must be clear that everything Putin values would be destroyed if he attempts this.
Meanwhile, I live mostly upwind and upstream from the targets in our town.
I can't remember, did we have fallout shelter funding in the "bipartisan infrastructure bill"?
-
quote author=ccp
"...no need to worry
General Keane ( who I like but he keeps being wrong) says Putin would never do such.a thing because he knows the consequences
so I will not worry ....... :roll:. "
------------
To deter this, every American President must be clear that everything Putin values would be destroyed if he attempts this.
Meanwhile, I live mostly upwind and upstream from the targets in our town.
I can't remember, did we have fallout shelter funding in the "bipartisan infrastructure bill"?
Who is our president?
Meaning who actually has the ability to order a nuclear strike?
Biden?
-
Who is our president?
Meaning who actually has the ability to order a nuclear strike?
Biden?
We lost some (all?) deterrence in the last election / count.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/joe-rogan-dave-smith-break-down-real-reasons-russia-invaded-ukraine-viral-clip
-
What does the off-ramp look like?
In the present context, the only thing I can see is that we stop supplying the Ukes and/or yank their leash to stop attacking.
What comes next?
-
What does the off-ramp look like?
In the present context, the only thing I can see is that we stop supplying the Ukes and/or yank their leash to stop attacking.
What comes next?
Russia keep it's new territories and Ukraine pledges never to join NATO. Ukraine gets the other territory Russia seized back.
-
What does the off-ramp look like?
In the present context, the only thing I can see is that we stop supplying the Ukes and/or yank their leash to stop attacking.
What comes next?
"yank their (Uke) leash to stop attacking." - I believe that would not work.
"stop supplying the Ukes" - That is our only lever, but are we their only supplier? I don't think they would stop but would be less effective and perhaps start losing.
What do you see stopping the Russians? - Oops, that wasn't asked. We have no lever with Putin, or we already used all our levers with Putin.
We recently discussed "saving face" in the context of Xi and the Chinese. That applies here. Putin can't quit while losing even though he already got what he (allegedly) wanted.
Give him all he wanted to stop the fighting? Then what?
I heard Mike Pompeo this a.m. basically saying we should be all in. From the limited sample here, that won't win him the nomination or the Presidency.
Given all the circumstances, I'm okay with limited in. Putin in a quagmire is as good a place as we can find for him - other than dead or tried for war crimes at The Hague.
Per some of G M's links, he isn't about to take over western Europe if he can't take over Ukraine.
And why would he send nukes to NYC or DC if the Ukes blew up the bridge. He has not been attacked (yet) in this war inside his borders (that I know of). Attacking the US (Pearl Harbor, 911) is what brought us together. He knows we are weakest divided. This war, as it is, is divisive here. The question seems to be, who can outlast whom?
In the so called armageddon, everyone loses - especially him (IMHO).
Boxed into a corner, worst case he loses Ukraine, not Russia.
He didn't steal a trillion dollars from his own people (cf. Bill Browder, Freezing Order), hidden assets in other people's names, to be dead in retirement.
Soon we'll all be talking about China as the threat.
-
"."yank their (Uke) leash to stop attacking." - I believe that would not work.
"stop supplying the Ukes" - That is our only lever, but are we their only supplier? I don't think they would stop but would be less effective and perhaps start losing.
What do you see stopping the Russians? - Oops, that wasn't asked. We have no lever with Putin, or we already used all our levers with Putin.
We recently discussed "saving face" in the context of Xi and the Chinese. That applies here. Putin can't quit while losing even though he already got what he (allegedly) wanted.
Give him all he wanted to stop the fighting? Then what?
I heard Mike Pompeo this a.m. basically saying we should be all in. From the limited sample here, that won't win him the nomination or the Presidency.
Given all the circumstances, I'm okay with limited in. Putin in a quagmire is as good a place as we can find for him - other than dead or tried for war crimes at The Hague.
Per some of G M's links, he isn't about to take over western Europe if he can't take over Ukraine.
And why would he send nukes to NYC or DC if the Ukes blew up the bridge. He has not been attacked (yet) in this war inside his borders (that I know of). Attacking the US (Pearl Harbor, 911) is what brought us together. He knows we are weakest divided. This war, as it is, is divisive here. The question seems to be, who can outlast whom?
In the so called armageddon, everyone loses - especially him (IMHO).
Boxed into a corner, worst case he loses Ukraine, not Russia.
He didn't steal a trillion dollars from his own people (cf. Bill Browder, Freezing Order), hidden assets in other people's names, to be dead in retirement.
Soon we'll all be talking about China as the threat.
Way too much logic here :-)
However is logic alone the answer?
that said Biden (one of the great presidents - to be - just ask John Meacham ) himself suggested we prepare for atomic war :roll:
we could always have Trump who knows more today about modern weaponry then anyone in the world since he funded them
thinks we should hold peace talks and sounds like he would support GM's proposals
otherwise what in the world would Trump "broker" :
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/10/11/trump-to-biden-start-talks-on-ukraine-to-prevent-world-war-iii/
As for me
I lean toward giving them Donbas as I don't think the rest is worth fighting for with all the death destruction and risks involved .
Not clear if Putin would agree anyway to this but is sounds like many in the Donbas region might :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donbas#Demographics_and_politics
-
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/117/718/007/original/828cb458d4b3c142.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/117/718/007/original/828cb458d4b3c142.png)
-
https://theconversation.com/how-the-image-of-a-besieged-and-victimized-russia-came-to-be-so-ingrained-in-the-countrys-psyche-180480
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAoqwc2WNV8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OngI6Vioe_c
George Friedman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6eaJUNHo2c
Gen. Keane
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTVKs_RLLo4
-
https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2022/10/12/americas-arsenal-is-in-need-of-life-support/
-
https://thepostmillennial.com/russia-says-ukraines-entry-into-nato-would-guarantee-world-war-3-report?utm_campaign=64483
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2887553/infrastructure-war
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2887553/infrastructure-war
All the major players can crash each other’s infrastructure.
Plan accordingly.
-
Yup.
-
https://andmagazine.substack.com/p/are-we-trying-to-start-a-war-nato
-
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/118/234/289/original/f6118a73ffa68034.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/118/234/289/original/f6118a73ffa68034.jpg)
-
https://archive.ph/44Cit
Who needs weapons or oil?
-
https://www.india.com/news/world/russia-nuclear-weapon-black-sea-vladimir-putin-all-out-war-on-ukraine-moscow-kyiv-nuclear-war-atomic-bomb-5695250/
-
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1582966955236937728
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2930318/freedom-fighting-without-paywall
-
https://andmagazine.substack.com/p/putin-may-be-getting-ready-to-take
-
https://andmagazine.substack.com/p/putin-may-be-getting-ready-to-take
"And, when you decide to pour jet fuel on the fire that is the Russian-Ukrainian war, you back Putin into a corner and give him every motivation in the world to inflict pain on you for your decision. We ought to be making every effort to get the Russians and Ukrainians to the negotiating table and ending this war. We are not. We are stumbling forward, delighting in showing off our new weapons systems and the profits being enjoyed by powerful defense contractors."
THIS!!!
-
https://archive.ph/44Cit
Who needs weapons or oil?
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/the-united-states-is-in-a-coffin-corner/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=native-latest&utm_term=second
-
Very crisp summary of reality.
-
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/10/23/uniparty-supports-nuclear-armageddon/#more-282819
-
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/10/23/uniparty-supports-nuclear-armageddon/#more-282819
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-shoigu-warns-uncontrolled-escalation-ukraine-conflict-2022-10-23/
-
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/10/23/uniparty-supports-nuclear-armageddon/#more-282819
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-shoigu-warns-uncontrolled-escalation-ukraine-conflict-2022-10-23/
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/massive-new-strike-leaves-15-million-ukrainians-without-power-phased-blackouts-kiev
-
https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1580040513687678978?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1580040513687678978%7Ctwgr%5E45a97c013d649980e8da960db33827314e7db76e%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.unz.com%2Fmwhitney%2Fputins-winter-offensive%2F
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/30-house-dems-urge-dramatic-shift-biden-policy-ukraine-get-serious-about-diplomacy-or
Talk-talk instead of war-war?
-
Nearly 13 minutes of serious convo on Russian TV. Good to know what they say to themselves.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russian-tv-warns-new-big-war-coming-after-putin-ultimatum/ar-AA16EhGT?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=a92936610f194fb3927be05522964d7c
-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11683647/Is-preparing-nuclear-war-Health-body-publishes-list-medicines-nations-stockpile.html
-
Yes very interesting.
Like the comment from one to the other something about do not give advice to our "supreme commander". [me: if you want to live]
Russians watch Tucker Carlson too ! :-D
Love the Maria Bartiromo look alike ! :-D
-
That "Stockpile Meds for Nuke War" URL from two posts above is now about something else.
-
That "Stockpile Meds for Nuke War" URL from two posts above is now about something else.
Weird.
These days, you don't know if it's an error or something is being hidden...
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/white-house-refuses-say-if-ukraine-will-get-toxic-depleted-uranium-ammo
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/nord-stream-sabotage-was-cia-us-navy-covert-op-seymour-hersh-bombshell-prompts-white
Unpossible!
-
who blew it up
but where is Germany's protests?
were they in on it?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60131520
does anyone truly think Biden, Blinks, or our military would lie to us when they claim
"it ain't us"?
-
who blew it up
but where is Germany's protests?
were they in on it?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60131520
does anyone truly think Biden, Blinks, or our military would lie to us when they claim
"it ain't us"?
It would seem, part.of the policy was, deny it forever.
-
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/russian-parliament-speaker-nord-stream-attack-joe-biden-terrorist-must-brought-justice/
-
https://sonar21.com/independent-evidence-confirms-key-part-of-sy-hershs-report-on-the-attack-on-nord-stream-2/
-
just google CNN and Hersh
nothing comes up since 2015 for a different reason
amazing the US blows up a Russian pipeline
to Germany
Congress was not notified
the American people are kept in the dark
no official explanation from any country
and other then Hersh there is total silence from MSM
though when it came to Trump every anonymous source, hearsay from those "in the know" was front page headline news
Congress was not notified
the American people are kept in the dark
sounds CIA ish
I thought the Left hated the CIA ?
perhaps after we set up the devices we gave the red button to Trudeau to pull the trigger
so Biden /WH could. claim it was not us .
-
https://www.2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com/p/on-the-eve-of-psyop-ww3-the-coming
On The Eve of PSYOP-WW3: The Coming Existential Threat: Do We Act In Common Or Is It Going To Be Every Man for Himself?
2nd Smartest Guy in the World
Feb 9
The illegitimate Federal government that is waging a full spectrum soft war on We the People from the foreign nation of Washington, D.C. has a senile diaper shitting ice cream eating pedo criminal puppet installed as POTUS, a low IQ hooker as his VP, a middling lawyer that is subverting what is left of the law of the land as Attorney General, a warmongering fool as Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, and so on and so forth. Basically, the Intelligence Industrial Complex that is an asset of the One World Government has staffed the American “government” with compromised villains, half-wits and cretins. This charivari of Dr. Strangelovian State clowns actually believe that a nuclear war is somehow winnable, more at that PSYOP-WW3 could be the perfect pivot from PSYOP-19 and the “pandemic” given that the country is insolvent, the global financial system is doomed, the debt supercycle is kaput, the mass bioterror slow kill depopulation is accelerating, and Western nations are collapsing in realtime. All by design. And with each passing day the various narratives are being exposed as lies such that a coverup of epic proportions is needed by the very technocrats vying to take over a world that they are actively destroying.
The coming existential threat: do we act in common or is it going to be every man for himself?
by Gilbert Doctorow
International relations, Russian affairs
I returned to Brussels on Sunday after a month of travels in exotic and warm lands south of the equator. The re-entry shock upon arrival in Belgium was a lot greater than the 27 degree Centigrade drop in outdoor air temperature. After a month of only very limited reception of Russian news, due to satellite issues and hotel service issues, last night I switched on Russian state television’s news and talk show “Sixty Minutes” on www.smotrim.ru and got a full blast of the current state of relations with the US, which are very close to Doomsday.
Allow me to share with you the key point, namely the soon to be announced changes to the Russian doctrine on first use of nuclear weapons and their new more precise red lines that have come about from the plans for Russia’s partition and destruction that seem to be aired daily on US television.
As usual, Yevgeny Popov, State Duma member and host of “Sixty Minutes,” put a lot of video segments from Western television up on the screen, including a lengthy statement by Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, former commander of all U.S. forces in Europe from 2014 to 2017, on how the Ukrainians must be given long range precision missiles for them to attack Russian Crimea and also further into the Russian heartland. The interview from which this declaration was made does not yet appear in Google search, but from interviews posted in 2022 it is clear that Hodges is no madman, and his statements must, as Popov said, be taken with utmost seriousness.
The context, of course, for the radical escalation now being discussed in the United States is the expectation of a massive Russian offensive to begin shortly as the anniversary of the Special Military Operation approaches. The imminent defeat of Ukrainian forces has focused minds in Washington.
One of the regular panelists on “Sixty Minutes” then faced the cameras directly and said that Russia’s nuclear doctrine is under revision in light of these aggressive plans being aired in the United States, so that Russia is headed towards a policy of ‘preventive’ tactical nuclear strikes, similar to what the United States has. Moreover, if Ukraine targets Crimea and heartland Russia, then Russia will respond according to plans now being laid down. These plans foresee counter strikes against U.S military installations in Europe and in the Continental United States using hypersonic missiles. The panelist calls for this threat of counter strikes in Europe and the US to be made public and explicit, so that no one is in doubt about what to expect from the Kremlin.
So here we are. The Russians are stripping away the fiction of a proxy war and revealing the co-belligerent status of the US and its NATO allies in preparation for a kinetic war with NATO. As our illustrious former President, a man of few words, would say: “Not good!”
Allow me also to share with my readership the bitter medicine that I just shared with our daughter: look for an escape hatch!
Either, as I fervently hope, there will be an anti-war movement in the USA, in Europe arising from the shock therapy news now developing with respect to the coming kinetic war between NATO and Russia, OR failing that, it will be every man for himself.
Back in 1937 there were Jews in Berlin who decided they could ride out the storm and stay put. There were others who took the first boats out, to England, to the US, to South America. All of us in the Northern Hemisphere now may be facing the same existential choice.
Do NOT comply.
-
who is the first smartest man?
-
who is the first smartest man?
Not anyone named Biden.
-
https://archive.vn/PaGAY
-
UK could last 5 days
china is gearing up in every facet of life for WAR
and we
and we ,,,, you know the rest.....
-
UK could last 5 days
china is gearing up in every facet of life for WAR
and we
and we ,,,, you know the rest.....
It's almost like we are being set up to lose.
-
https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/the-arsenal-of-democracy-isnt
-
https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/the-arsenal-of-democracy-isnt
https://sonar21.com/persistent-delusion-among-the-american-and-nato-defense-establishment/
-
https://archive.vn/PaGAY
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11740539/Fears-Britains-armed-forces-small-combat-Russia.html
-
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6320117645112?fbclid=IwAR3j-9O7B0dVw2z03Z1Br3QJ_X3WpVv4XJTA-oCpthwIi6pYqZqFdiI3E3I
-
https://dailycaller.com/2023/02/06/gama-sosa-childhood-obesity-china-war-shooting/
-
https://summit.news/2023/02/13/french-historian-world-war-iii-has-already-begun/
-
https://dailycaller.com/2023/02/06/gama-sosa-childhood-obesity-china-war-shooting/
https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2023/02/the-pentagons-pronoun-wars.html?m=1
-
https://twitter.com/notBilly/status/1625798373843533825
What time is Drag Queen Story hour at that school?
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russian-diplomats-issue-dire-warnings-war-us-close
Well, quite possibly yes.
At least we fought for Hunter’s Burisma money and the secret bio labs!
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russian-diplomats-issue-dire-warnings-war-us-close
Well, quite possibly yes.
At least we fought for Hunter’s Burisma money and the secret bio labs!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ominous-warning-vladimir-putin-sends-two-blackjack-nuclear-bombers-near-the-uk-as-war-rages-on/ar-AA17wOcb
-
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19405/china-lasers-hawaii
-
Can we get the WW3 and WWIII threads fused?
-
I have relayed the request to Bob and he tells me the task is done.
-
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/feb/12/rising-red-threat-china-now-outpaces-us-interconti/
-
https://twitter.com/fox6now/status/1627122082378022912
This is fine.
Nothing to be concerned about.
-
U.S. officials are warning China against supplying Russia with arms and ammunition, as Moscow struggles to gain ground in Ukraine despite deploying almost the entirety of its ground forces in its smaller neighbor.
Concerns that China was considering providing lethal assistance to Russia first surfaced in meetings between officials late last year and early this year, officials said. U.S. officials put their Chinese counterparts on notice in videoconferences and at in-person meetings that China is “nearing a red line” in assisting Russia’s war, the officials said.
With the war approaching the one-year mark, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said publicly this weekend that Washington had information that Beijing was weighing providing lethal support to Moscow, primarily in the form of weapons.
“We’ve made very clear to them that that would cause a serious problem for us and in our relationship,” Mr. Blinken told CBS News in an interview after meeting Saturday with China’s top foreign-policy official, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
“If there are any thoughts and efforts by the Chinese and others to provide lethal support to the Russians in their brutal attack against Ukraine, that is unacceptable,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told CNN on Sunday.
The new concerns are being aired as President Biden travels to Poland this week to rally European allies, while Mr. Wang is scheduled to arrive in Moscow on Monday for talks. Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to deliver a major address to Russia’s Federal Council on Tuesday.
“The most catastrophic thing that could happen to U.S.-China relationship, in my opinion, is for China…to start to give lethal weapons to Putin in this crime against humanity,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) on ABC News on Sunday. He said China providing lethal aid “would be like buying a ticket on the Titanic after you saw the movie.”
As the West scrambles to move away from Russian energy sources and imposes sanctions on Moscow, China and India have stepped in to fill the gap. WSJ examines how those countries have boosted Russia’s revenue from oil sales, supporting its economy. Photo illustration: Sharon Shi
Beijing has called for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine. At the same time, China has provided crucial economic and diplomatic support for Moscow, buying up Russian energy and accusing the U.S. and NATO of creating conditions that provoked Russia’s invasion.
Beijing has denied it is aiding the Russian war effort and said its companies conduct normal trade with Russia.
Vice President Kamala Harris said Saturday the U.S. has formally determined that Russian forces and officials have committed crimes against humanity.
Tensions between Beijing and Washington have increased in recent weeks after the U.S. shot down what it said was a Chinese surveillance balloon over the U.S. At the Munich conference, Mr. Wang criticized what he called the “nearly hysterical” reaction of Washington to the balloon.
China is already providing technology that Moscow needs despite sanctions and export controls, according to a recent Wall Street Journal review of Russian customs data. The customs records show Chinese state-owned defense companies providing goods that have civilian and military uses, shipping navigation equipment, jamming technology and jet-fighter parts to sanctioned Russian government-owned defense companies.
Russia has also continued to purchase and deploy commercially available Chinese drones to target Ukrainian forces on the battlefield.
On the ground in Ukraine, the war has intensified in recent weeks as Russia hastens to capture the remainder of the eastern Donbas region before Kyiv receives better and heavier weapons pledged by its Western allies. Ukraine is bracing for a possible further escalation in fighting in the run-up to the first anniversary of the invasion later this week.
Ukrainian forces said they repelled Russian attacks along the front line in the east of the country, as Russian forces attacked Ukrainian positions, the General Staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said Sunday, including around the city of Bakhmut, which has become an epicenter of the war in recent months.
The war has come at a huge cost. Russian armed forces and private military contractors fighting alongside them have lost 40,000 to 60,000 troops and suffered up to 200,000 casualties, which includes troops killed or wounded in action, the U.K. has said.
Ukraine doesn’t disclose figures for its dead and wounded, though Western officials have estimated some 100,000 casualties among Ukrainian troops.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Saturday it had captured the village of Hryanykivka in Ukraine’s northern Kharkiv region. Ukraine said Sunday its forces had repelled an attack in the vicinity of the village.
The Ukrainian General Staff said its forces had pushed back an attack on the eastern city of Bakhmut and the nearby villages of Ivanivske and Chasiv Yar, as Moscow’s forces push to encircle the city after months of failed assaults.
The Russian paramilitary Wagner Group said it had seized the village of Paraskoviivka on the northern edge of Bakhmut on Friday. While Ukraine hasn’t confirmed that, the General Staff on Sunday said it had foiled a Russian attack on the nearby village of Berkhivka, suggesting that Paraskoviivka was no longer under its control.
Kyiv’s Western allies are rushing to equip Ukrainian forces with the means to prevent Russia from making further inroads now while building up for a counteroffensive in the coming months. Ukrainian officials have vowed to retake all of the territory occupied by Russian forces, though some Western officials and analysts say that goal is unrealistic.
While Kyiv has recently lobbied the West for tanks and jet fighters, the immediate priority is ammunition, which Ukraine is burning through faster than its allies can supply.
The European Union is exploring ways for member countries to team up to buy munitions for Ukraine.
“These are not normal times; these are extraordinary times. And therefore, we should also look at extraordinary measures or procedures,” European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen told reporters at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.
Ahead of the war’s anniversary, Lt. Gen. Serhiy Nayev, commander of the Joint Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, played down concerns about a renewed Russian thrust from neighboring Belarus, which served as a staging ground for the initial invasion last year.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko last week said he would allow Russia to use the country as a springboard for further attacks on Ukraine, but that Belarus would only send troops of its own if it was attacked. The two countries launched a series of joint military exercises along the border last month.
“These forces are not sufficient for a ground offensive at the moment, but what may happen in the future depends on the intentions of the enemy,” Lt. Gen. Nayev said.
“We have created a system of engineering barriers, in particular mine-explosive barriers, increasing their amount along the state border. We have created a system of defensive lines and positions,” he said.
Write to Isabel Coles at isabel.coles@wsj.com and Charles Hutzler at charles.hutzler@wsj.com
-
:roll:
U.S. officials are warning China against supplying Russia with arms and ammunition, as Moscow struggles to gain ground in Ukraine despite deploying almost the entirety of its ground forces in its smaller neighbor.
Concerns that China was considering providing lethal assistance to Russia first surfaced in meetings between officials late last year and early this year, officials said. U.S. officials put their Chinese counterparts on notice in videoconferences and at in-person meetings that China is “nearing a red line” in assisting Russia’s war, the officials said.
With the war approaching the one-year mark, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said publicly this weekend that Washington had information that Beijing was weighing providing lethal support to Moscow, primarily in the form of weapons.
“We’ve made very clear to them that that would cause a serious problem for us and in our relationship,” Mr. Blinken told CBS News in an interview after meeting Saturday with China’s top foreign-policy official, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
“If there are any thoughts and efforts by the Chinese and others to provide lethal support to the Russians in their brutal attack against Ukraine, that is unacceptable,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told CNN on Sunday.
The new concerns are being aired as President Biden travels to Poland this week to rally European allies, while Mr. Wang is scheduled to arrive in Moscow on Monday for talks. Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to deliver a major address to Russia’s Federal Council on Tuesday.
“The most catastrophic thing that could happen to U.S.-China relationship, in my opinion, is for China…to start to give lethal weapons to Putin in this crime against humanity,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) on ABC News on Sunday. He said China providing lethal aid “would be like buying a ticket on the Titanic after you saw the movie.”
As the West scrambles to move away from Russian energy sources and imposes sanctions on Moscow, China and India have stepped in to fill the gap. WSJ examines how those countries have boosted Russia’s revenue from oil sales, supporting its economy. Photo illustration: Sharon Shi
Beijing has called for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine. At the same time, China has provided crucial economic and diplomatic support for Moscow, buying up Russian energy and accusing the U.S. and NATO of creating conditions that provoked Russia’s invasion.
Beijing has denied it is aiding the Russian war effort and said its companies conduct normal trade with Russia.
Vice President Kamala Harris said Saturday the U.S. has formally determined that Russian forces and officials have committed crimes against humanity.
Tensions between Beijing and Washington have increased in recent weeks after the U.S. shot down what it said was a Chinese surveillance balloon over the U.S. At the Munich conference, Mr. Wang criticized what he called the “nearly hysterical” reaction of Washington to the balloon.
China is already providing technology that Moscow needs despite sanctions and export controls, according to a recent Wall Street Journal review of Russian customs data. The customs records show Chinese state-owned defense companies providing goods that have civilian and military uses, shipping navigation equipment, jamming technology and jet-fighter parts to sanctioned Russian government-owned defense companies.
Russia has also continued to purchase and deploy commercially available Chinese drones to target Ukrainian forces on the battlefield.
On the ground in Ukraine, the war has intensified in recent weeks as Russia hastens to capture the remainder of the eastern Donbas region before Kyiv receives better and heavier weapons pledged by its Western allies. Ukraine is bracing for a possible further escalation in fighting in the run-up to the first anniversary of the invasion later this week.
Ukrainian forces said they repelled Russian attacks along the front line in the east of the country, as Russian forces attacked Ukrainian positions, the General Staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said Sunday, including around the city of Bakhmut, which has become an epicenter of the war in recent months.
The war has come at a huge cost. Russian armed forces and private military contractors fighting alongside them have lost 40,000 to 60,000 troops and suffered up to 200,000 casualties, which includes troops killed or wounded in action, the U.K. has said.
Ukraine doesn’t disclose figures for its dead and wounded, though Western officials have estimated some 100,000 casualties among Ukrainian troops.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Saturday it had captured the village of Hryanykivka in Ukraine’s northern Kharkiv region. Ukraine said Sunday its forces had repelled an attack in the vicinity of the village.
The Ukrainian General Staff said its forces had pushed back an attack on the eastern city of Bakhmut and the nearby villages of Ivanivske and Chasiv Yar, as Moscow’s forces push to encircle the city after months of failed assaults.
The Russian paramilitary Wagner Group said it had seized the village of Paraskoviivka on the northern edge of Bakhmut on Friday. While Ukraine hasn’t confirmed that, the General Staff on Sunday said it had foiled a Russian attack on the nearby village of Berkhivka, suggesting that Paraskoviivka was no longer under its control.
Kyiv’s Western allies are rushing to equip Ukrainian forces with the means to prevent Russia from making further inroads now while building up for a counteroffensive in the coming months. Ukrainian officials have vowed to retake all of the territory occupied by Russian forces, though some Western officials and analysts say that goal is unrealistic.
While Kyiv has recently lobbied the West for tanks and jet fighters, the immediate priority is ammunition, which Ukraine is burning through faster than its allies can supply.
The European Union is exploring ways for member countries to team up to buy munitions for Ukraine.
“These are not normal times; these are extraordinary times. And therefore, we should also look at extraordinary measures or procedures,” European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen told reporters at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.
Ahead of the war’s anniversary, Lt. Gen. Serhiy Nayev, commander of the Joint Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, played down concerns about a renewed Russian thrust from neighboring Belarus, which served as a staging ground for the initial invasion last year.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko last week said he would allow Russia to use the country as a springboard for further attacks on Ukraine, but that Belarus would only send troops of its own if it was attacked. The two countries launched a series of joint military exercises along the border last month.
“These forces are not sufficient for a ground offensive at the moment, but what may happen in the future depends on the intentions of the enemy,” Lt. Gen. Nayev said.
“We have created a system of engineering barriers, in particular mine-explosive barriers, increasing their amount along the state border. We have created a system of defensive lines and positions,” he said.
Write to Isabel Coles at isabel.coles@wsj.com and Charles Hutzler at charles.hutzler@wsj.com
-
As we here have predicted , , ,
-
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-putin-politics-government-united-states-23cc21a1f42798177a40d4e53204b054
-
just wondering
what if we had invited Russia to join NATO
I know NATO was to protect Europe from the Russian bear
but what if we had a real detente with Russia and made them an ally with us against the bigger threat China.
Not clear if I am simply dreaming or if this was even possible
but just wondering...
if Russian in Nato would they still have taken ukraine or Crimea for that matter
maybe - I just don't know
too complex for me.
-
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/04/ex-nato-head-says-putin-wanted-to-join-alliance-early-on-in-his-rule
just wondering
what if we had invited Russia to join NATO
I know was to protect Europe from the Russian bear
but what is we had a real detente with Russia and made them an ally with us against the bigger threat China.
Not clear if I am simply dreaming or if this was even possible
but just wondering...
if Russian in Nato would they still have taken ukraine or Crimea for that matter
maybe - I just don't know
too complex for me.
-
interesting
It seems like Putin broached the possibility but no one on our side took it too seriously
and OTOH not clear to me how serious Putin was really interested in being a real "partner " in NATO or simply be able to neutralize it for a power grab
we leaders foolishly and stupidly trusted China for too long an look how that turned out
though even pedestrian civilians like ourselves here could see how they were ripping us off and building up their military
while we footed the R & D bill. What dopes our leaders were .
-
Our government never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
On the other hand, Russia seems to have dodged a bullet by being separate from the decadent and dying west.
interesting
It seems like Putin broached the possibility but no one on our side took it too seriously
and OTOH not clear to me how serious Putin was really interested in being a real "partner " in NATO or simply be able to neutralize it for a power grab
we leaders foolishly and stupidly trusted China for too long an look how that turned out
though even pedestrian civilians like ourselves here could see how they were ripping us off and building up their military
while we footed the R & D bill. What dopes our leaders were .
-
https://sonar21.com/an-unexpected-insight-for-the-elite-the-us-may-be-the-biggest-loser-in-the-war-on-russia-by-alastair-crooke/
-
Some major gaps in logic there for me:
The Germans were backstabbing the Poles, the Ukes, and NATO with the Nordstream 2 (and 1) all the while shirking financial obligations to NATO. I have no conceptual problem with the idea of taking away the backstab option for them. Fukk them.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-says-ready-join-forces-russia-defend-national-interests-putin-confirms-xi-visit
-
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/leo-hohmann-worlds-superpowers-threw-their-cards-on-the-table-this-week-and-every-one-of-them-came-up-in-favor-of-wwiii/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=leo-hohmann-worlds-superpowers-threw-their-cards-on-the-table-this-week-and-every-one-of-them-came-up-in-favor-of-wwiii
-
https://rumble.com/v2a8xn8-ed-dowd-rate-of-serious-adverse-events-closely-tracks-spike-in-post-vax-dis.html
-
Biden pushed Russia to China and Iran
https://twitter.com/i/status/1629524540953862144 (https://twitter.com/i/status/1629524540953862144)
-
https://www.donshift.com/blog/predictions-what-world-war-iii-might-look-like
-
https://www.donshift.com/blog/predictions-what-world-war-iii-might-look-like
"The two world wars didn't threaten the US until we inserted ourselves into the messes that began the chain of events. Through the eyes of history, future civilizations will wonder why the US got involved in European wars and an Asian war of conquest."
- Lost me there.
-
I enjoyed the maps but found some of the commentary to be glib isolationism e.g.
"China/Taiwan... Of course, the United States has ... no real ... economic interest ... involved.
Without even getting into the geopolitics, Taiwan's role in superconductors alone makes this a very dumb statement.
WW2 began with an axis of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia/Soviet Union and Imperial Japan bent on conquest. The idea that we had the option of sitting that out is infantile.
OTOH I can't say that I could give a coherent explanation as to why we got in WW1.
-
Tips on surviving a nucl. war
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/war/do-not-fear-nuclear-war-you-can-survive/ (https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/war/do-not-fear-nuclear-war-you-can-survive/)
-
https://gab.com/JenniferZeng/posts/109945195011106483
-
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1630894801590657024/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1630894801590657024¤tTweetUser=mtracey
-
Page does not exist
-
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1630894801590657024/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1630894801590657024¤tTweetUser=mtracey
Is it this?
https://twitter.com/mtracey
"Pro-Ukraine accounts boasting about apparent drone strike in Moscow area. Not long ago the idea of the US sponsoring aerial bombings in Moscow would’ve sounded insane. Today, it’s hardly even noticed. The “boiling frog” escalation strategy has successfully habituated the public"
-------------------------------
In my previous post I may have said, "No one is attacking inside Russia. They are attacking Russian troops inside Ukraine." Ooops.
-
Arguably a distinction can be made if we are not supplying the drone(s) in question, but such niceties are not likely to be noticed in the fevered heat of escalation.
-
Ya had a very interesting post on the Money thread thinking out the consequences of a major disruption to world oil for BTC.
To the thorough consideration of variables of the article, I would like to add a bit more:
As Iran goes nuke, the chances of the Straits of Hormuz go up significantly. To this I would like to add that feeling emboldened by being a nuclear power (with missiles that can reach Israel and Europe) they could up their play for Yemen. What I think that many miss is that Yemen is a choke point for the Red Sea and with it the Suez Canal. The consequences would not only be for oil, but for all the trade that flows through there.
-
Note well these folks sell survival gear haha.
Have not read this yet.
https://www.mirasafety.com/blogs/news/nuclear-attack-map?utm_source=Klaviyo&utm_medium=campaign&nb_klid=01GF68BQP2GZ5JP5G1C11WXPZG&_kx=X6GDvEqnTVJ-x0d_b_yNihFiRFEan1ZhTKtxRLY02rE%3D.Mb9Ceg
-
Note well these folks sell survival gear haha.
Have not read this yet.
https://www.mirasafety.com/blogs/news/nuclear-attack-map?utm_source=Klaviyo&utm_medium=campaign&nb_klid=01GF68BQP2GZ5JP5G1C11WXPZG&_kx=X6GDvEqnTVJ-x0d_b_yNihFiRFEan1ZhTKtxRLY02rE%3D.Mb9Ceg
Potassium iodide is useless for middle aged adults and beyond, but essential for children and young adults in the proper dosages.
-
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/03/04/yeah-well-beat-russia-china-in-a-two-front-ww3/#more-296023
Good thing we sent most of our weapons to Ukraine. Maybe we can buy some of them back on the black market!
-
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/03/04/yeah-well-beat-russia-china-in-a-two-front-ww3/#more-296023
Good thing we sent most of our weapons to Ukraine. Maybe we can buy some of them back on the black market!
https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-10.14.02-PM-768x299.png
(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-10.14.02-PM-768x299.png)
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/watch-samantha-power-lets-slip-us-war-russia-ukrainians-doing-fighting
-
https://metallicman.com/casus-belli-a-cause-for-just-war/
-
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/03/04/yeah-well-beat-russia-china-in-a-two-front-ww3/#more-296023
Good thing we sent most of our weapons to Ukraine. Maybe we can buy some of them back on the black market!
https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-10.14.02-PM-768x299.png
(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-10.14.02-PM-768x299.png)
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/u-s-troops-running-out-of-arms-and-munitions-as-biden-keeps-sending-more-to-ukraine/
-
Nord Stream's Tap on the Shoulder
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/nord-streams-tap-on-the-shoulder?sd=pf
CDR Salamander
12 hr ago
Outside everyone's interest in knowing "who'dun'it" in the blowing up on the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea, there has yet to be an full appreciation of the larger meaning of its destruction.
1937's bombing of Guernica gave a preview of what would befall Europe's cities just a few years later. The Russo-Ukrainian War is giving hints of what has changed over the last few decades that should give everyone pause to review their assumptions and critical vulnerabilities. Small and medium wars are good for that - they give hints to issues that will arise in future large wars.
While it is easier to understand, even in the face of "sea blindness," the importance of the trade that arrives by ship, food and fuel at the top of the list, from the man on the street to policy makers in nations' capitals, the importance of what lies on the sea bed is lost to most.
Though focused on the UK, our friend Alessio Patalano today has an article up at the Council on Geostrategy, Unseen but Vital: Britain and Undersea Security, that is worth an investment in your time for a quick read;
The first and third aspects of today’s maritime century have direct relevance to undersea security. Maritime connectivity is both a function of, and a key driver behind, contemporary prosperity. It is a well-known fact that some 90% of global trade is carried by sea, yet it is a less well-known fact that some 99% of the world’s communications are delivered by 1.4 million kilometres of submarine cables. Of no less significance, a substantial part of gas and electricity resources is delivered through a series of undersea connectors.
...between 2010 and 2021, the capacity of energy interconnectors has increased to unprecedented levels. According to official data, electricity imports to the UK increased almost tenfold, with HM Government planning to expand the country’s capacity from 7,440 megawatts to 18 gigawatts by 2030.
Within this context, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and the Republic of Ireland are primary energy trade partners for the UK, with new interconnectors set to link the UK to Germany and Denmark in the near future. The undersea security of Northern Europe is indivisible from the security of the UK.
By a similar token, much of the UK economy and social services rest upon the continuous and uninterrupted use of undersea cables delivering data connectivity. As one informed observer recently noted, a disruption to the network of the approximately 60 British undersea cables would have potentially devastating consequences. Incredibly diverse aspects of life in the UK, from multimillion international bank transactions to medical activities resting on access to cloud-based access to data, would be at risk if a sufficient number of cables were severed or sabotaged.
As we covered in a FbF back in 2009, attacking undersea cables dates back to the 19th Century - but the modern reliance on what is on the sea bed is orders of magnitude greater than just telegraphs were back then.
Getting to them is not easy ... but life once they are cut is even less easy.
Time to think about what is needed to keep them secure, especially in any time of heightened tensions...but in an era of international terrorism, is there really a time of peace for vulnerable targets?
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/wartime-scenario-unfolds-taiwan-suspects-chinese-ships-cut-undersea-internet-cables?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1288
"Wartime Scenario" Unfolds As Taiwan Suspects Chinese Ships Cut Undersea Internet Cables
Tyler Durden's Photo
BY TYLER DURDEN
WEDNESDAY, MAR 08, 2023 - 12:05 PM
According to Taiwanese authorities, on Feb. 2, a Chinese fishing boat damaged an undersea communications cable that connects Taiwan's main island to Matsu Islands. About one week later, a Chinese cargo ship severed another cable.
Located approximately 30 miles off the coast of China, the tiny island of Dongyin has quickly established a backup communication system, as reported by the WSJ. The new system uses a high-powered microwave radio to transmit data to Taipei. WSJ described the disruption as a "wartime scenario" and "in a potential preview of a Chinese attack."
Taiwan has a network of fourteen undersea fiber-optic cables, some buried as shallow as 6 feet below the seabed. These cables are critical as they provide 95% of the island's data-and-voice traffic.
If Western military planners learned anything from the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia made a considerable effort to severe internet infrastructure in the Eastern European country in the early days of the war.
The Ukraine war has demonstrated how vital the internet can be to a smaller country facing invasion, for both mustering global support and coordinating resistance. If China were to cut Taiwan's cables, most of the island would be thrown offline, leaving it vulnerable. --WSJ
The loss of internet across the Matsu Islands has alerted Taiwan to the potential national security threat posed by Beijing, which considers the island nation part of China and has expressed intentions to take control of it.
WSJ said no evidence so far supports Beijing intentionally cut Matsu Island's internet. Taiwanese officials have theorized that illegal Chinese sand dredging around the tiny island exposed the cables and allowed for accidental damage by vessels.
However, Taiwanese lawmakers warn:
"If an internet outage can happen on Matsu, the same could happen in Taiwan," said Wen Lii, director of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party in Matsu's Lienchiang county.
And there's good news for Taiwan -- just like Ukraine -- satellite-based internet service Starlink offered by Elon Musk's SpaceX provides high-speed internet that neither Russia nor China can fully disrupt.
-
Gee, I wonder if China and Russia know who blew up Nord Stream and have decided it’s now fair game.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/wartime-scenario-unfolds-taiwan-suspects-chinese-ships-cut-undersea-internet-cables?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1288
"Wartime Scenario" Unfolds As Taiwan Suspects Chinese Ships Cut Undersea Internet Cables
Tyler Durden's Photo
BY TYLER DURDEN
WEDNESDAY, MAR 08, 2023 - 12:05 PM
According to Taiwanese authorities, on Feb. 2, a Chinese fishing boat damaged an undersea communications cable that connects Taiwan's main island to Matsu Islands. About one week later, a Chinese cargo ship severed another cable.
Located approximately 30 miles off the coast of China, the tiny island of Dongyin has quickly established a backup communication system, as reported by the WSJ. The new system uses a high-powered microwave radio to transmit data to Taipei. WSJ described the disruption as a "wartime scenario" and "in a potential preview of a Chinese attack."
Taiwan has a network of fourteen undersea fiber-optic cables, some buried as shallow as 6 feet below the seabed. These cables are critical as they provide 95% of the island's data-and-voice traffic.
If Western military planners learned anything from the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia made a considerable effort to severe internet infrastructure in the Eastern European country in the early days of the war.
The Ukraine war has demonstrated how vital the internet can be to a smaller country facing invasion, for both mustering global support and coordinating resistance. If China were to cut Taiwan's cables, most of the island would be thrown offline, leaving it vulnerable. --WSJ
The loss of internet across the Matsu Islands has alerted Taiwan to the potential national security threat posed by Beijing, which considers the island nation part of China and has expressed intentions to take control of it.
WSJ said no evidence so far supports Beijing intentionally cut Matsu Island's internet. Taiwanese officials have theorized that illegal Chinese sand dredging around the tiny island exposed the cables and allowed for accidental damage by vessels.
However, Taiwanese lawmakers warn:
"If an internet outage can happen on Matsu, the same could happen in Taiwan," said Wen Lii, director of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party in Matsu's Lienchiang county.
And there's good news for Taiwan -- just like Ukraine -- satellite-based internet service Starlink offered by Elon Musk's SpaceX provides high-speed internet that neither Russia nor China can fully disrupt.
-
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/03/04/yeah-well-beat-russia-china-in-a-two-front-ww3/#more-296023
Good thing we sent most of our weapons to Ukraine. Maybe we can buy some of them back on the black market!
https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-10.14.02-PM-768x299.png
(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-10.14.02-PM-768x299.png)
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/u-s-troops-running-out-of-arms-and-munitions-as-biden-keeps-sending-more-to-ukraine/
https://twitter.com/ImMeme0/status/1634954092224352256
https://twitter.com/SecArmy/status/1634195903190908931
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/im-telling-you-he-did-it-seymour-hersh-blames-biden-nord-stream-attack
-
MSM silence on this matter is deafening.
funny how no one seems to know who did it.
funny the Germanics as far as we do not hear in the US MSM are silent about it.
(unless they are not and the US MSM has blacked it out)
how could this be if not some conspiracy .
-
MSM silence on this matter is deafening.
funny how no one seems to know who did it.
funny the Germanics as far as we do not hear in the US MSM are silent about it.
(unless they are not and the US MSM has blacked it out)
how could this be if not some conspiracy .
The Germans are being force fed the "Uke supporters on a sailboat did it" lie our malignant retards in Langley came up with.
Russia and China know.
-
The Ukes certainly had motive.
-
Second
China’s Green Lasers Over Hawaii Signal a Coming War: Expert
Richard D. Fisher Jr. (L), International Assessment and Strategy Center, gives a book titled "China's Military Modernization" to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) after a Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on China’s Worldwide Military Expansion at the Rayburn House Office Building at U.S. Congress in Washington on May 17, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
Richard D. Fisher Jr. (L), International Assessment and Strategy Center, gives a book titled "China's Military Modernization" to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) after a Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on China’s Worldwide Military Expansion at the Rayburn House Office Building at U.S. Congress in Washington on May 17, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
Hannah Ng
Tiffany Meier
By Hannah Ng and Tiffany Meier
March 16, 2023Updated: March 16, 2023
biggersmaller Print
0:00
4:51
1
The appearance of China’s green lasers over Hawaii signals a coming war, warns Rick Fisher, a senior fellow at International Assessment and Strategy Center.
In late January, Japanese astronomers stationed in Hawaii noticed mysterious green laser beams being fired over the island. The laser beams are being shot down from space over one of the largest mountain ranges in Hawaii.
When they first reported these beams to the public, the astronomers said they came from a NASA satellite—they were thought to be American lasers. But just a week later, the Japanese astronomers issued a correction saying that the green laser beams were not from a U.S. satellite, but instead, they were more likely from a Chinese satellite.
According to NASA’s assessment, it was likely caused by China’s Daqi-1 satellite, which is a “Chinese atmospheric environment monitoring satellite” launched in April 2022.
“This weather satellite passing over Hawaii, shooting its lasers, its atmospheric measuring lasers, down from on high is very much a signal to the United States that if there is a confrontation over the future of democratic Taiwan, they are ready to target American military forces, which will definitely impact American civilian lives in the state of Hawaii,” Fisher told the “China in Focus” host on NTD, the sister media outlet of the Epoch Times.
The expert disagreed that the Daqi-1 satellite is solely for environmental research.
“While this satellite indeed can be used to advance environmental research, the lasers that it uses to assess the atmosphere can also be used to provide key measurements of atmospheric density, wind direction, all of which are essential for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to be able to target its latest weapons known as hypersonic glide vehicles,” he said in the interview.
“In reality, this is a classic example of a Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s dual-use system,” he noted.
Hypersonic Glide Vehicle
According to Fisher, the hypersonic glide vehicle is designed to exploit low altitudes as it travels at speeds above five times the speed of sound.
“Now, at that speed, a hypersonic glide vehicle is very vulnerable to changes in the weather, minute changes in atmospheric density, the change in direction of the wind,” he said.
“So, the PLA would want the Daqi-1 satellite or a satellite with that capability, to have reconnoitered the weather over the target, the weather over Hawaii, the weather over Pearl Harbor, it wants the hypersonic glide vehicle to be as accurate as possible,” he added.
He said that its ability to travel at lower altitudes enables the satellite to avoid radar detection until it approaches the target.
“It means less time for the Americans to mobilize missile defenses, if they have them, or to target this missile. And in addition, [the] hypersonic glide vehicle is designed to be maneuverable. So as it approaches the target, it can make evasive maneuvers,” he said.
The fact that the Chinese satellite targeted Pearl Harbor also made the American nuclear attack submarines based there vulnerable to any threat.
“Those submarines would provide a very significant margin of the American deterrent and combat power in the event of confrontation or war,” he said.
“So China would attach an extremely high priority to attacking Pearl Harbor and destroying American naval assets, including those submarines,” he added.
Close-Run
According to Fisher, the United States can counter hypersonic glide vehicles with its air-launched ballistic missile (ALBM), which he said: “offers the advantage of being able to intercept the bomber that’s carrying the missile early on in its mission.”
“If the hypersonic glide vehicle missiles are on ships, then the ships can be intercepted and dealt with at a far distance from potential targets as well. But if the missiles are air-launched ballistic missiles, that means the missiles are in the air, [and] it becomes important to try to intercept the missile as far away as possible from the target before the hypersonic glide vehicle becomes a freely maneuvering and evasive target itself,” he said.
The United States has that intercepting capability, he noted. Still, it’s a close-run situation as “the hypersonic glide vehicle is very fast, very maneuverable, and can also execute violent maneuvers.”
“It means that the United States would have to launch a significant number of intercepting missiles in order to be able to assure the destruction of an incoming hypersonic glide vehicle,” Fisher said.
-
The Ukes certainly had motive.
To antagonize the largest economy in NATO?
-
To eliminate Germany's option of selling out the Ukes for the ease and comfort of a deal with Russia?
Sure!
-
To eliminate Germany's option of selling out the Ukes for the ease and comfort of a deal with Russia?
Sure!
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=840,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/132/288/176/original/c09ff558398e5e51.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=840,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/132/288/176/original/c09ff558398e5e51.png)
-
The trollery continues!
-
To eliminate Germany's option of selling out the Ukes for the ease and comfort of a deal with Russia?
Sure!
Lots of people have motivation, ability and opportunity, not so much.
I'm sure you know people who know people who are SME on underwater demolitions. I bet they'll tell you the idea that non-state actors doing it from a sailboat is laughable.
-
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/03/04/yeah-well-beat-russia-china-in-a-two-front-ww3/#more-296023
Good thing we sent most of our weapons to Ukraine. Maybe we can buy some of them back on the black market!
https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-10.14.02-PM-768x299.png
(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-10.14.02-PM-768x299.png)
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/u-s-troops-running-out-of-arms-and-munitions-as-biden-keeps-sending-more-to-ukraine/
https://twitter.com/ImMeme0/status/1634954092224352256
https://twitter.com/SecArmy/status/1634195903190908931
https://www.realcleardefense.com/2023/03/14/the_age_of_american_naval_dominance_is_over_887126.html
-
https://alexkrainer.substack.com/p/why-hypersonic-weapons-change-everything
-
Remember the Chinese testing launching hypersonics from , , , balloons?
-
I tried to search on the Russian hypersonics
and get really sparse very confusing ambiguous results
the source for article posted by GM
is a bit of a character according to wikipedia ( which of course itself is a bit of source I will often take with grain of salt):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davor_Domazet-Lo%C5%A1o
In addition why would a Croatian admiral be any more privy to top secret Russian or US intelligence ?
-
I tried to search on the Russian hypersonics
and get really sparse very confusing ambiguous results
the source for article posted by GM
is a bit of a character according to wikipedia ( which of course itself is a bit of source I will often take with grain of salt):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davor_Domazet-Lo%C5%A1o
In addition why would a Croatian admiral be any more privy to top secret Russian or US intelligence ?
I think he's more willing to tell the truth.
-
that is what you want to believe since what he is saying what you believe
but I take him with a grain of salt
as I do not know the truth
I don't know who or what to believe and that includes him
but again why do you choose believe him?
do you think he has more privy/credibility as some guy from Croatia?
Does Croatia have hypersonics - why would he be so expert in the technology
Why would he be so expert in the military tech that might counter hypersonics ?
maybe he does know but I have not read anything to explain how he knows
-
that is what you want to believe since what he is saying what you believe
but I take him with a grain of salt
as I do not know the truth
I don't know who or what to believe and that includes him
but again why do you choose believe him?
do you think he has more privy/credibility as some guy from Croatia?
Does Croatia have hypersonics - why would he be so expert in the technology
Why would he be so expert in the military tech that might counter hypersonics ?
maybe he does know but I have not read anything to explain how he knows
https://news.usni.org/2021/06/14/mda-u-s-aircraft-carriers-now-at-risk-from-hypersonic-missiles
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/3/22/incoming-can-aircraft-carriers-survive-hypersonic-weapons
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/are-hypersonic-missiles-ultimate-threat-aircraft-carriers-186298
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/well-attack-any-country-tries-arrest-putin-kremlin
-
Remember the Chinese testing launching hypersonics from , , , balloons?
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/china-sees-balloon-launched-drone-swarms-in-its-future
-
as for the Russian Kinzhal
I pulled up rather mixed and not glowing reports of its effectiveness
some apparently have been used in Ukraine but I have not seen any reports of their effectiveness
and does not seem likely that our best defenses are in Ukraine so not know if they would work against us
I see speeds up to Mach 10 in some places others at Mach 3 or so
All I CAN say is I hope we have the intelligence that leads our military closer to the truth
As for CCP missiles I cannot make clear heads or tails of them.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/only-7-out-30-nato-members-hit-2-gdp-defense-spending-target-2022
-
Remember the Chinese testing launching hypersonics from , , , balloons?
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/china-sees-balloon-launched-drone-swarms-in-its-future
Balloons are cheap, as are cardboard boxes set up to have the same radar profile.
How many Sidewinders do we have in inventory? How fast can we produce them? Good thing we can print endless dollars!
-
and so are hypersonic missiles compared to 13 billion dollar aircraft carriers:
https://www.google.com/search?q=cost+of+aircraft+carrier&rlz=1C5GCEM_enUS1001US1001&oq=cost+of+aircraft+carrier&aqs=chrome..69i57.4917j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
-
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/03/26/has-the-us-gone-to-defcon-3/#more-297969
-
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/03/04/yeah-well-beat-russia-china-in-a-two-front-ww3/#more-296023
Good thing we sent most of our weapons to Ukraine. Maybe we can buy some of them back on the black market!
https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-10.14.02-PM-768x299.png
(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-10.14.02-PM-768x299.png)
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/u-s-troops-running-out-of-arms-and-munitions-as-biden-keeps-sending-more-to-ukraine/
https://twitter.com/ImMeme0/status/1634954092224352256
https://twitter.com/SecArmy/status/1634195903190908931
https://www.realcleardefense.com/2023/03/14/the_age_of_american_naval_dominance_is_over_887126.html
https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2023/03/as-china-war-looms-navys-priority-is.html
We are going to see massive losses and most people will be surprised.
-
Gen Keane concurs on the status of our Navy, especially in the the South China Sea.
-
https://nitter.net/KimDotcom/status/1640307376803975169#m
-
What the U.S. Can Do to Prepare for a War With China
The military’s problem isn’t technological. It’s a strategy designed only for low-intensity conflict.
By Seth Cropsey
March 28, 2023 6:23 pm ET
The U.S. is unprepared for an impending great-power conflict. That’s widely understood, but most commentary on American military preparedness misses three critical points: the time horizon for a conflict with China, the logistical challenges of building and sustaining American military power, and the industrial difficulties of replenishing and expanding current stockpiles. A war with Beijing wouldn’t be decided primarily with high-end weapons systems but with the traditional elements of military power.
The threats to global stability and the US homeland are growing. How will the war in Ukraine end? Can China and the US develop a less combative relationship? Join historian and Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead and editorial page editor Paul Gigot for an interactive conversation on the threats to US security.
A new cold war has begun. At its heart is a fundamental disagreement between the U.S. and China over the structure of Asian security considerations. The original Cold War’s antagonism stemmed from Soviet insistence that Washington remove itself from Europe and Eurasia more broadly. China’s strategic effort to deny U.S. forces access to international waters where a naval conflict could occur, its increasing numbers of military bases around the world, and its growing ability to interrupt logistic communications with America’s Indo-Pacific allies demonstrate that Beijing has the same ambition today. Just as Soviet Russia sought to destroy the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and thereby eliminate U.S. political engagement in Western Europe, communist China now seeks to capture Taiwan and to fragment the U.S. alliance system in Asia.
China has something against which to measure its policy that the Soviets never had: history. Beijing has studied Moscow’s Cold War mistakes, notably the tendency among Soviet strategists to wait patiently until their military power exceeded that of the U.S. This never occurred, primarily because the West engaged in a massive military expansion in the 1980s that nullified Soviet gains over the preceding two decades.
The Chinese aren’t going to wait patiently. They are prepared to capitalize on an apparent shift in their favor. China enjoys a growing advantage in geographic position, fleet size and missile numbers. In Xi Jinping, it also has a leader willing to use force to achieve political objectives. China stands a better chance now than it ever has of defeating the U.S. and its allies in a major war. The U.S. should expect an attack on Taiwan within this decade, perhaps as soon as 2025.
The imminence of conflict means the U.S. must consider how it would fight with the military as currently constituted. In some cases that would mean repurposing equipment and hardware for new uses. In others it would require reconceiving the service branches’ approaches to war fighting. The legacy systems of the U.S. military—fighter planes, heavy bombers, destroyers and aircraft carriers—would be crucial in a major Indo-Pacific war. The immediate question isn’t how to replace these platforms, but rather how to amplify their effectiveness.
America’s traditional forces aren’t particularly vulnerable or outdated, at least intrinsically. The aircraft carrier has always fought as a system—it needs fighter and strike aircraft that can reach targets without exposing the ship to attack, and an escort screen of smaller ships that can shoot down enemy missiles. The American surface fleet, if used for strike operations, needs long-range missiles to hit the infrastructure that supports the Chinese military.
But the nuts and bolts of American military power are lacking. Most glaring, the U.S. has no logistical capacity to support a major-power war. The military cargo fleet is designed for limited contingencies. According to the Government Accountability Office, ships in the reserve fleet are on average more than 40 years old and in poor repair. According to a 2020 Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments analysis, there simply wouldn’t be enough merchant mariners to crew American ships in a major logistical effort. Even during the Gulf and Iraq wars, the U.S. contracted for significant added merchant capacity. Most ships that call at U.S. ports are foreign-flagged or foreign-crewed, if not both. This means that once a conflict begins, Washington can’t rely on them. Without an effective link between American forces in the Indo-Pacific and materiel depots in the continental U.S., a fight will be hard to sustain.
Some commentators have claimed that aid to Ukraine has run down American stockpiles for the defense of Taiwan. That isn’t right. What we’ve been sending to Ukraine is radically different from what would be required in a war over Taiwan and, critically, is built in entirely different locations and with entirely different processes. The real problem stems from Washington’s decision to “rationalize” the defense industrial base after the Cold War, allowing a healthy ecosystem of defense producers to shrink to a handful of corporations. These companies operate far better than their predecessors bureaucratically but can’t deliver results rapidly. Unless the U.S. can scale up production of the weapons it will need in the Indo-Pacific—hypersonics, cruise and ballistic missiles, and short-range antiship weapons—it would lose a fight for Taiwan in weeks.
This is the core issue. The U.S. military isn’t behind the curve in some grand transformation in warfare. It simply can’t employ the combat tools it has so carefully cultivated over the past 30 to 50 years because it has spent that time preparing to fight low-intensity wars, not a major strategic contest with a peer. If stagnation continues, deterrence will fail. So will the prospects for American victory in any major-power conflict.
Mr. Cropsey is founder and president of the Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy undersecretary of the Navy and is author of “Mayday” and “Seablindness.”
-
https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Screenshot-2023-04-06-at-8.00.03-AM.png
(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Screenshot-2023-04-06-at-8.00.03-AM.png)
-
de dollarization
what does this mean
who funds the debt - if countries start buying rupees or yuan
then what happens to our debt financing?
The public owns the majority of it but then its value for the public drops :
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-3306124
sounds like a viscous cycle of decline possible
on other hand China already past its peak economic growth so yuan may not become so attractive see El-Erian on in Barron's ( I can't post as I don't subscribe to barrons though oddly I was able to read the article in I phone news )
-
"sounds like a viscous (sic) cycle of decline possible"
YES!!!
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/chinese-aircraft-carrier-seals-taiwan-sends-58-planes-buzz-island
-
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/hersh-on-bidens-ukraine-corruption-quagmire-this-is-not-just-bad-leadership-there-is-none/
-
"Seymour Hersh on Biden’s Ukraine Corruption Quagmire: “This is Not Just Bad Leadership. There is None.”
And astonishingly the MSM is totally silent.
Remember when in Vietnam they were in the faces of politicians every single minute of every day .
Today , because we have a Democrat in power - nothing .
-
China is Preparing for War; Is the US Ready? (theepochtimes.com)
Andrew Thornebrooke
By Andrew Thornebrooke
April 12, 2023Updated: April 12, 2023
biggersmaller Print
News Analysis
The ammunition is running low, casualties are immense, medicine and other critical supplies have not come for weeks, and a nuclear attack on the American homeland is imminent.
It is a dramatic scene, more closely resembling a Hollywood drama than any war that the United States has actually fought in the last half-century. It is nevertheless what many expect a war between the United States and communist China could look like this decade.
Both the United States and China are investing record-breaking sums in building up their military capabilities. Leadership on both sides increasingly appears to consider such a conflict as inevitable, despite rhetoric to the contrary.
The cause for that mutual enmity is the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) claim that democratic Taiwan belongs to China, and CCP leader Xi Jinping’s desire to force that unification within a few years’ time.
Xi has ordered the regime’s military wing to prepare for war, and to be ready to launch an invasion of Taiwan by 2027.
Preparing for what would be history’s most ambitious amphibious assault is not the same as actually launching it. But, should the worst occur, the Biden administration or its successor will have to decide either to join the fray, or to let Taiwan stand on its own and fight for its freedom.
Before U.S. leadership decides on that question, however, it must answer another, more foundational one: Can the United States win a war with China?
‘The Window of Maximum Danger’
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) is more invested in the new cold war between the United States and China than most.
Tasked with leading Congress’ new House Select Committee on Strategic Competition with the CCP, he is one of the few movers and shakers in the legislative branch directly engaged in developing an action plan to defend the American people, its economy, and values from CCP aggression.
For him, Russia’s ongoing conquest of Ukraine, and the United States’ failure to deter it, contain all the lessons necessary to prepare for what comes next in Taiwan.
“If we don’t learn the right lessons from the failure of deterrence in Ukraine, authoritarian aggression and the CCP’s malign influence will spread to the Indo-Pacific, and our New Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party could quickly become hot,” Gallagher told The Epoch Times.
“To prevent this, we have to act with a sense of urgency and do everything we can to deter a CCP invasion of Taiwan.”
That plan is much the same as it has been since 1979, when the United States passed the Taiwan Relations Act and agreed to provide the island with the arms necessary to maintain its self-defense.
The strategic landscape 44 years ago was something altogether different, however, and the number of weapons and systems that Taiwan now requires to hold the CCP at threat are immense.
The way Gallagher sees it, neither Taiwan nor the United States is prepared for the possibility of war with China.
Speaking back in November of 2021, Gallagher warned that, “if we went to war in the Taiwan Strait tomorrow, we’d probably lose.”
Gallagher is careful now to avoid similar doomspeak but, when asked if he still agreed with that assessment, his optimism for the United States’ performance in a war with China is palpably limited.
“If the Chinese Communist Party invaded Taiwan today, we would not be well positioned to defend our friend, our interests, or American values in the Indo-Pacific,” Gallagher says.
The United States must choose, he believes, to arm Taiwan to the teeth now or come to Taiwan’s aid at a much greater cost later.
Either way, the choices the United States makes now, he says, will largely determine the conditions of victory and defeat at a later date. To that end, Congress must unite to arm Taiwan and systematically counter the CCP’s malign influence at every opportunity.
“We are in the window of maximum danger,” Gallagher says, “and if we are going to ensure that it’s the U.S.—not the CCP—writing the rules of the 21st century, we need to unite in overwhelming bipartisan fashion to combat CCP aggression.”
Taiwan Holds Defence Drills
Taiwan’s armed forces hold two days of routine drills to show combat readiness ahead of Lunar New Year holidays at a military base in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, on Jan. 12, 2023. (Annabelle Chih/Getty Images)
Preventing Nuclear ‘Armageddon’
While the phrase “maximum danger” is superlative, it may still fall short of impressing the seriousness of the CCP’s growing nuclear arsenal and the role that it will play in any conflict.
The CCP’s military wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), has been working tirelessly to expand and enhance the regime’s nuclear arsenal and to hold the U.S. homeland at threat.
The regime is expected to field 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030, many of them capable of carrying multiple warheads. And it is working to field hypersonic bombardment systems apparently designed to be used as a first-strike weapon.
Such capabilities would put the United States at grave risk in a war and would present a decision-making dynamic among both militaries unseen since the Cold War.
Epoch Times Photo
General Robert Spalding (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
Retired U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding knows something about PLA decision-making.
His career has taken him to China on more than one occasion, including a stint as a defense attache in Beijing, where he negotiated with PLA officers on critical events and established contours for managing strategic competition.
When asked if the United States could win a war against China over the future of Taiwan, Spalding answers clearly and simply.
“No,” Spalding says. “The Chinese have too many weapons and they are too close to home.”
“The U.S. could not muster enough combat power to stop China.”
The United States’ ability to project power across 3,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean is sorely lacking, he says.
Sustaining a full combat force in the region all while being held at threat by the PLA’s missile and rocket forces, to say nothing of its navy, would risk nuclear escalation at every moment.
Simply put, the United States would be outmanned and outgunned by China in any Indo-Pacific conflict. Strategic nuclear weapons in such a scenario become the United States’ most clear advantage, and the world’s most clear threat.
Spalding, understandably, views the use of nuclear weapons as a no-win scenario. Still, he does consider the strengthening of the United States’ nuclear deterrent as an essential element to deter China from extending its aggression beyond Taiwan.
“The only weapons that would enable us to balance the conventional military might of China are nuclear weapons,” Spalding says. “These would give the U.S. a fighting chance, but would be devastating for the U.S., China, and the world.”
“Nevertheless, the surest way to war is to appear weak. This is why it is imperative that the U.S. project power. Today, the only way is with nuclear weapons. We don’t have time for anything else.”
To that end, Spalding says that the United States will need to immediately start transitioning critical supply chains, including pharmaceuticals and technological resources, out of China. Leaving the delivery of such items to China is a surefire way to lose any war.
“There is no time but, nevertheless, the U.S. needs to rebuild its industrial base now while we still have some level of control,” Spalding says.
He underscores that, because the United States would be stuck trying to create new supply chains for critical resources even as current supply chains through China are destroyed, deaths at home and on the front lines could ensue.
Embedded in Spalding’s view is a certain duality present among many today. On the one hand, he believes a CCP invasion is inevitable. On the other, he believes U.S. aid to Taiwan in such a war should fall short of military intervention, which he believes would risk a nuclear holocaust.
“They [the CCP] will invade at a time of their choosing,” Spalding says. “We have to prepare for the inevitable help the Taiwanese people will need.”
“If America is attacked, it will fight. That said, I believe China will not attack the U.S. directly for fear of a wider war that consumes the CCP. This and America’s nuclear weapons will prevent Armageddon if we show strength.”
Epoch Times Photo
Military personnel stand next to Harpoon A-84, anti-ship missiles and AIM-120 and AIM-9 air-to-air missiles prepared for a weapon loading drills in front of a F16V fighter jet at the Hualien Airbase in Taiwan’s southeastern Hualien county on Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/Johnson Lai)
Defense Industrial Base ‘Not Adequately Prepared’ for War with China
Provided the United States did come to the defense of Taiwan, however, and provided it could adequately deter the PLA from launching nuclear missiles, victory would still be far from assured.
Beyond the logistical issue of supplying the front lines—that is the problem of actually getting ammo to rifles and munitions to guns across the Pacific—the United States simply does not have the stockpiles required to conduct anything other than a brief, perhaps weeks-long campaign in the Pacific.
Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth said as much during a March 30 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, during which she explained that the nation’s support for Ukraine is rapidly depleting its own munitions stockpiles, and that it would be years before replacement was possible.
“One of the most important things we have learned from Ukraine is the need for a more robust defense industrial base,” Wormuth said.
“We are buying at the absolute edge of defense industrial capacity right now.”
Epoch Times Photo
U.S. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth (L) and Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville testify during a Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 10, 2022. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
To that end, Wormuth said that the Army is spending $1.5 billion on surging production of new munitions and depots to create an “organic supply base.”
Due to the complexity of the supply chains involved and the specialized nature of the equipment, however, standing up such production and procurement efforts will take years. Well beyond the 2025-2027 start date that many military officials believe a Taiwan invasion scenario could come to fruition.
“Some of the machining tools that are needed to open up new production lines are just very large, complex machines themselves that take time to fabricate and time to install,” Wormuth said.
To be sure, not all of the munitions that the United States is currently hemorrhaging in Ukraine would necessarily be useful in a fight for Taiwan.
The 155 mm rounds used by many artillery systems in Ukraine, for example, would lose their preeminence to long-range anti-ship missiles, or LRASMs.
But here again, the United States is simply not prepared for war.
Wargames demonstrate that the United States could deplete its entire arsenal of LRASMs within one single week of fighting with China, according to a January report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
“In a major regional conflict—such as a war with China in the Taiwan Strait—the U.S. use of munitions would likely exceed the current stockpiles of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), leading to a problem of ‘empty bins.’”
“The problem is the U.S. has such low stockpiles for those long-range anti-ship missiles that in our wargames, in multiple iterations of the wargame, we run out [of LRASMs] in less than a week virtually every time,” report author Seth Jones said in an associated video.
“We cannot fight in that case in protracted war because we don’t have sufficient supply of munitions.”
On this issue, military procurement programs are thus far proving of little worth. Though Army leaders like Wormuth may point to renewed investments in artillery, and speak of growing the nation’s stockpiles, one critical and inconvenient fact remains.
Nearly the entirety of the U.S. military’s precision munitions is built by the private sector.
Assistant Secretary of the Army Douglas Bush spoke on the issue during a March 3 talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
“The broader joint view is, of course, that a fight with China will be very much a precision munitions fight,” Bush said.
To overcome that gap in manufacturing ability, he added, the U.S. Army is funneling money to private corporations to effectively subsidize precision munitions production. Supply chains are no less complicated for those entities, however, and are likewise expected to take years to become functional.
Epoch Times Photo
Military vehicles carrying DF-21D intermediate-range anti-ship ballistic missiles participate in a military parade at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on September 3, 2015. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)
A World at War
The risks of a war for Taiwan morphing into a catastrophic nuclear conflict or else depleting the United States’ arsenal of vital munitions and leaving it enfeebled in the western Pacific appear to be high.
But what if they could be overcome?
Sam Kessler is a national security and geopolitical risk analyst for North Star Support Group, an international risk advisory firm. He believes victory is possible in such a scenario, but only narrowly.
Kessler says that the war would need to be fought and won quickly to prevent nuclear escalation, retain the nation’s stockpiles, and ensure the global economy does not spiral into nothingness as the world’s two largest economies duke it out.
To do that, he says, the United States needs the support of its allies to stem the outward flow of manpower and materiel.
“Although the U.S. has significant, powerful capabilities at its disposal, a potential war over the defense of Taiwan would need to be fought and won within a short time frame,” Kessler says.
“If there is a war between the U.S. and China, the U.S. needs to have its longstanding allies involved and committed under a unified banner.”
To that end, Kessler says that the need for allies will be most prevalent in securing global supply chains, bolstering the U.S. economy, and providing critical, non-military defense and security support in domains like space and cyber.
“The risk is a long, drawn-out conflict that depletes both manpower and resources over a period that won’t be so easily replaced in a world where supply chains, logistics, and manufacturing outlets are being re-evaluated and restructured to meet changing realities,” Kessler says.
“After all, a potential war will not just be about direct fighting on the shores of Taiwan but also in other domains of warfare that greatly impact U.S. standing and power projection at home and abroad, which can also potentially impact its global partners and allies.”
Because of the technological and economic interconnectivity of the world, he says, most nations would become involved in such a war one way or another, regardless of whether they sought to remain neutral.
Kessler, therefore, suggests the creation of a multilateral coalition of the willing, not unlike the one deployed in the Gulf War.
On this point, there is one critical problem. Because the United States would be entering a war of its own volition, it would not be entitled to the benefits of NATO’s collective defense clause.
Thus, while regional allies such as Japan and Australia could well join the fight, the United States’ European partners would likely be absent in the actual fighting.
Indeed, French President Emmanuel Macron suggested as much in early April, saying that Europe must resist becoming “America’s followers” on the issue of Taiwan.
To shore up the United States’ position then, Kessler says that the nation needs to start turning up its diplomacy efforts now, in order to ensure it receives security aid and other benefits from its partners in the war.
“Sooner or later, they would likely end up being in situations where their hands are forced to declare a position on the matter,” Kessler says. “Whether war occurs or not, the U.S. needs full assurance from its longstanding partners and allies that they have their support and vice versa.”
“To make this happen requires aggressive and proactive diplomacy as well as presenting a strong and rational case for creating a coalition of the willing.”
Here again, though, the United States is not the only one with allies.
Though the CCP regime does not formally engage in NATO-style alliances, it does have a string of partners across the globe who would be either willing to engage in direct support of its war effort or otherwise pursue their own destabilizing interests while the United States was distracted.
“Alliances and partnerships are crucial to both China and the U.S but each implements them differently,” Kessler says.
“The CCP recognizes partners in the form of client states that could play a role in helping destabilize American leadership in the international system, while spearheading a multipolar system that they can lead and project influence themselves.”
The result of the CCP’s push for multipolarity is that its own partners could launch destabilizing conflicts of their own.
Epoch Times Photo
Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin make a toast during their dinner at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 21, 2023. (Pavel Byrkin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
One report by the Center for a New American Security think tank, for example, postulates that North Korea could use a CCP invasion of Taiwan to launch its own attack on South Korea.
The problem is not limited to East Asia either.
Iran could initiate further hostilities against U.S. forces in Syria or even invade neighboring Iraq. Russia, meanwhile, could extend its hostilities from Ukraine to Moldova, or otherwise provide direct military support to China. Brazil, Nicaragua, and South Africa could all capitalize on the event to increase their ties with China and Russia while avoiding engaging in hostilities themselves.
The result would be a world at war if not a world war outright.
“Each of these nations are skilled in the distraction game and a war effort in defense of Taiwan would present them with a unique opportunity to attempt at catching the U.S. off guard to gain a victory or prize out of it,” Kessler says.
“The likelihood of such regional conflicts erupting in these areas is very high.”
He believes the extent to which each nation takes advantage of a U.S.-China war will be dependent not only on their relationship with China, but also their own capabilities, goals, and political-economic realities.
While war might suit Russia, for example, smaller economic partners like South Africa and Brazil would be more likely to engage in increased trade or sanctions busting.
The resulting effect is political chaos, and a world in which instability and disruption are the norm.
US Should ‘Hedge’ its Bets
But what if we’re getting it all wrong: if Taiwan is not the next global catastrophe waiting to happen, and if the United States can fight and win but doesn’t even need to.
Such is the perspective of former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.
For Miller, the military decision-making apparatus is prone to see only what it wants to see. Everything looks like a nail to a hammer, the old saying goes.
“I know the one thing we will get wrong is we will mispredict the next major conflict,” Miller said during an April 4 talk with the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank.
“That’s the only thing I know.”
On that note, Miller said that he worries the United States is overestimating the capabilities and expertise of the CCP regime the same way it did of Russia prior to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Far from being a peer military competitor, Miller suggested that the CCP could be deploying a strategy similar to the one used by the United States to defeat the Soviet Union without overt conflict during the Cold War.
By fooling the United States into believing that war is constantly imminent the CCP could actually be goading the United States into destroying its own economy through excessive investments in major military platforms, Miller said.
“I think they’re goading us and we’re just taking it [at face value],” Miller said.
As such, Miller said that the threat to Taiwan’s continued de facto independence was a reality, but that the United States could be playing into the CCP’s plans by heavily investing in ultra-expensive, and easily targetable systems such as fighter jets and aircraft carriers.
Miller pointed instead to the four elements of national power: diplomacy, information, military, and economics.
To obtain victory against China, and to preserve greater liberty across the world, he said, the best path forward for the United States is to better leverage the non-military elements of national power.
“I believe with the Chinese threat, the way to approach that is a very subtle and indirect approach … irregular warfare,” Miller said.
“Let’s go ahead and use a little more … diplomacy, information, and economics, and let’s go ahead and back off on the military for a little while, because we have time. If we’re wrong, we can spin things up.”
When asked by the Epoch Times what advice he had for directing the nation’s military development given that a future war with China was as of yet unwritten, Miller said that the best course of action was to hedge the nation’s bets.
“If you’re a business person and you’re in an unpredictable business climate, what do you do? You hedge.”
“We can’t go all in on any one thing. We need to have a wide range of capabilities.”
To simultaneously avoid the disaster of war in Asia and defeat the regime, he said, the best weapon in the U.S. arsenal was the truth about the CCP.
By shining an unflinching light on the atrocities committed by the regime every day, and by ensuring that those atrocities were seen and understood by the Chinese people, the regime will crumble to internal pressures.
“My belief is that authoritarian, totalitarian governments fear one thing: Popular discontent and popular uprising… The thing that they fear most is not fleets of aircraft carriers, tanks, or expeditionary logistics. They fear information. And that’s one of the key components of irregular warfare.”
“Just tell the truth. It will work through it.”
-
By shining an unflinching light on the atrocities committed by the regime every day, and by ensuring that those atrocities were seen and understood by the
Chinese American people, the regime will crumble to internal pressures.
“My belief is that authoritarian, totalitarian governments fear one thing: Popular discontent and popular uprising… The thing that they fear most is not fleets of aircraft carriers, tanks, or expeditionary logistics. They fear information. And that’s one of the key components of irregular warfare.”
“Just tell the truth. It will work through it.”
China is Preparing for War; Is the US Ready? (theepochtimes.com)
Andrew Thornebrooke
By Andrew Thornebrooke
April 12, 2023Updated: April 12, 2023
biggersmaller Print
News Analysis
The ammunition is running low, casualties are immense, medicine and other critical supplies have not come for weeks, and a nuclear attack on the American homeland is imminent.
It is a dramatic scene, more closely resembling a Hollywood drama than any war that the United States has actually fought in the last half-century. It is nevertheless what many expect a war between the United States and communist China could look like this decade.
Both the United States and China are investing record-breaking sums in building up their military capabilities. Leadership on both sides increasingly appears to consider such a conflict as inevitable, despite rhetoric to the contrary.
The cause for that mutual enmity is the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) claim that democratic Taiwan belongs to China, and CCP leader Xi Jinping’s desire to force that unification within a few years’ time.
Xi has ordered the regime’s military wing to prepare for war, and to be ready to launch an invasion of Taiwan by 2027.
Preparing for what would be history’s most ambitious amphibious assault is not the same as actually launching it. But, should the worst occur, the Biden administration or its successor will have to decide either to join the fray, or to let Taiwan stand on its own and fight for its freedom.
Before U.S. leadership decides on that question, however, it must answer another, more foundational one: Can the United States win a war with China?
‘The Window of Maximum Danger’
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) is more invested in the new cold war between the United States and China than most.
Tasked with leading Congress’ new House Select Committee on Strategic Competition with the CCP, he is one of the few movers and shakers in the legislative branch directly engaged in developing an action plan to defend the American people, its economy, and values from CCP aggression.
For him, Russia’s ongoing conquest of Ukraine, and the United States’ failure to deter it, contain all the lessons necessary to prepare for what comes next in Taiwan.
“If we don’t learn the right lessons from the failure of deterrence in Ukraine, authoritarian aggression and the CCP’s malign influence will spread to the Indo-Pacific, and our New Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party could quickly become hot,” Gallagher told The Epoch Times.
“To prevent this, we have to act with a sense of urgency and do everything we can to deter a CCP invasion of Taiwan.”
That plan is much the same as it has been since 1979, when the United States passed the Taiwan Relations Act and agreed to provide the island with the arms necessary to maintain its self-defense.
The strategic landscape 44 years ago was something altogether different, however, and the number of weapons and systems that Taiwan now requires to hold the CCP at threat are immense.
The way Gallagher sees it, neither Taiwan nor the United States is prepared for the possibility of war with China.
Speaking back in November of 2021, Gallagher warned that, “if we went to war in the Taiwan Strait tomorrow, we’d probably lose.”
Gallagher is careful now to avoid similar doomspeak but, when asked if he still agreed with that assessment, his optimism for the United States’ performance in a war with China is palpably limited.
“If the Chinese Communist Party invaded Taiwan today, we would not be well positioned to defend our friend, our interests, or American values in the Indo-Pacific,” Gallagher says.
The United States must choose, he believes, to arm Taiwan to the teeth now or come to Taiwan’s aid at a much greater cost later.
Either way, the choices the United States makes now, he says, will largely determine the conditions of victory and defeat at a later date. To that end, Congress must unite to arm Taiwan and systematically counter the CCP’s malign influence at every opportunity.
“We are in the window of maximum danger,” Gallagher says, “and if we are going to ensure that it’s the U.S.—not the CCP—writing the rules of the 21st century, we need to unite in overwhelming bipartisan fashion to combat CCP aggression.”
Taiwan Holds Defence Drills
Taiwan’s armed forces hold two days of routine drills to show combat readiness ahead of Lunar New Year holidays at a military base in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, on Jan. 12, 2023. (Annabelle Chih/Getty Images)
Preventing Nuclear ‘Armageddon’
While the phrase “maximum danger” is superlative, it may still fall short of impressing the seriousness of the CCP’s growing nuclear arsenal and the role that it will play in any conflict.
The CCP’s military wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), has been working tirelessly to expand and enhance the regime’s nuclear arsenal and to hold the U.S. homeland at threat.
The regime is expected to field 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030, many of them capable of carrying multiple warheads. And it is working to field hypersonic bombardment systems apparently designed to be used as a first-strike weapon.
Such capabilities would put the United States at grave risk in a war and would present a decision-making dynamic among both militaries unseen since the Cold War.
Epoch Times Photo
General Robert Spalding (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
Retired U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding knows something about PLA decision-making.
His career has taken him to China on more than one occasion, including a stint as a defense attache in Beijing, where he negotiated with PLA officers on critical events and established contours for managing strategic competition.
When asked if the United States could win a war against China over the future of Taiwan, Spalding answers clearly and simply.
“No,” Spalding says. “The Chinese have too many weapons and they are too close to home.”
“The U.S. could not muster enough combat power to stop China.”
The United States’ ability to project power across 3,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean is sorely lacking, he says.
Sustaining a full combat force in the region all while being held at threat by the PLA’s missile and rocket forces, to say nothing of its navy, would risk nuclear escalation at every moment.
Simply put, the United States would be outmanned and outgunned by China in any Indo-Pacific conflict. Strategic nuclear weapons in such a scenario become the United States’ most clear advantage, and the world’s most clear threat.
Spalding, understandably, views the use of nuclear weapons as a no-win scenario. Still, he does consider the strengthening of the United States’ nuclear deterrent as an essential element to deter China from extending its aggression beyond Taiwan.
“The only weapons that would enable us to balance the conventional military might of China are nuclear weapons,” Spalding says. “These would give the U.S. a fighting chance, but would be devastating for the U.S., China, and the world.”
“Nevertheless, the surest way to war is to appear weak. This is why it is imperative that the U.S. project power. Today, the only way is with nuclear weapons. We don’t have time for anything else.”
To that end, Spalding says that the United States will need to immediately start transitioning critical supply chains, including pharmaceuticals and technological resources, out of China. Leaving the delivery of such items to China is a surefire way to lose any war.
“There is no time but, nevertheless, the U.S. needs to rebuild its industrial base now while we still have some level of control,” Spalding says.
He underscores that, because the United States would be stuck trying to create new supply chains for critical resources even as current supply chains through China are destroyed, deaths at home and on the front lines could ensue.
Embedded in Spalding’s view is a certain duality present among many today. On the one hand, he believes a CCP invasion is inevitable. On the other, he believes U.S. aid to Taiwan in such a war should fall short of military intervention, which he believes would risk a nuclear holocaust.
“They [the CCP] will invade at a time of their choosing,” Spalding says. “We have to prepare for the inevitable help the Taiwanese people will need.”
“If America is attacked, it will fight. That said, I believe China will not attack the U.S. directly for fear of a wider war that consumes the CCP. This and America’s nuclear weapons will prevent Armageddon if we show strength.”
Epoch Times Photo
Military personnel stand next to Harpoon A-84, anti-ship missiles and AIM-120 and AIM-9 air-to-air missiles prepared for a weapon loading drills in front of a F16V fighter jet at the Hualien Airbase in Taiwan’s southeastern Hualien county on Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/Johnson Lai)
Defense Industrial Base ‘Not Adequately Prepared’ for War with China
Provided the United States did come to the defense of Taiwan, however, and provided it could adequately deter the PLA from launching nuclear missiles, victory would still be far from assured.
Beyond the logistical issue of supplying the front lines—that is the problem of actually getting ammo to rifles and munitions to guns across the Pacific—the United States simply does not have the stockpiles required to conduct anything other than a brief, perhaps weeks-long campaign in the Pacific.
Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth said as much during a March 30 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, during which she explained that the nation’s support for Ukraine is rapidly depleting its own munitions stockpiles, and that it would be years before replacement was possible.
“One of the most important things we have learned from Ukraine is the need for a more robust defense industrial base,” Wormuth said.
“We are buying at the absolute edge of defense industrial capacity right now.”
Epoch Times Photo
U.S. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth (L) and Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville testify during a Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 10, 2022. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
To that end, Wormuth said that the Army is spending $1.5 billion on surging production of new munitions and depots to create an “organic supply base.”
Due to the complexity of the supply chains involved and the specialized nature of the equipment, however, standing up such production and procurement efforts will take years. Well beyond the 2025-2027 start date that many military officials believe a Taiwan invasion scenario could come to fruition.
“Some of the machining tools that are needed to open up new production lines are just very large, complex machines themselves that take time to fabricate and time to install,” Wormuth said.
To be sure, not all of the munitions that the United States is currently hemorrhaging in Ukraine would necessarily be useful in a fight for Taiwan.
The 155 mm rounds used by many artillery systems in Ukraine, for example, would lose their preeminence to long-range anti-ship missiles, or LRASMs.
But here again, the United States is simply not prepared for war.
Wargames demonstrate that the United States could deplete its entire arsenal of LRASMs within one single week of fighting with China, according to a January report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
“In a major regional conflict—such as a war with China in the Taiwan Strait—the U.S. use of munitions would likely exceed the current stockpiles of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), leading to a problem of ‘empty bins.’”
“The problem is the U.S. has such low stockpiles for those long-range anti-ship missiles that in our wargames, in multiple iterations of the wargame, we run out [of LRASMs] in less than a week virtually every time,” report author Seth Jones said in an associated video.
“We cannot fight in that case in protracted war because we don’t have sufficient supply of munitions.”
On this issue, military procurement programs are thus far proving of little worth. Though Army leaders like Wormuth may point to renewed investments in artillery, and speak of growing the nation’s stockpiles, one critical and inconvenient fact remains.
Nearly the entirety of the U.S. military’s precision munitions is built by the private sector.
Assistant Secretary of the Army Douglas Bush spoke on the issue during a March 3 talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
“The broader joint view is, of course, that a fight with China will be very much a precision munitions fight,” Bush said.
To overcome that gap in manufacturing ability, he added, the U.S. Army is funneling money to private corporations to effectively subsidize precision munitions production. Supply chains are no less complicated for those entities, however, and are likewise expected to take years to become functional.
Epoch Times Photo
Military vehicles carrying DF-21D intermediate-range anti-ship ballistic missiles participate in a military parade at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on September 3, 2015. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)
A World at War
The risks of a war for Taiwan morphing into a catastrophic nuclear conflict or else depleting the United States’ arsenal of vital munitions and leaving it enfeebled in the western Pacific appear to be high.
But what if they could be overcome?
Sam Kessler is a national security and geopolitical risk analyst for North Star Support Group, an international risk advisory firm. He believes victory is possible in such a scenario, but only narrowly.
Kessler says that the war would need to be fought and won quickly to prevent nuclear escalation, retain the nation’s stockpiles, and ensure the global economy does not spiral into nothingness as the world’s two largest economies duke it out.
To do that, he says, the United States needs the support of its allies to stem the outward flow of manpower and materiel.
“Although the U.S. has significant, powerful capabilities at its disposal, a potential war over the defense of Taiwan would need to be fought and won within a short time frame,” Kessler says.
“If there is a war between the U.S. and China, the U.S. needs to have its longstanding allies involved and committed under a unified banner.”
To that end, Kessler says that the need for allies will be most prevalent in securing global supply chains, bolstering the U.S. economy, and providing critical, non-military defense and security support in domains like space and cyber.
“The risk is a long, drawn-out conflict that depletes both manpower and resources over a period that won’t be so easily replaced in a world where supply chains, logistics, and manufacturing outlets are being re-evaluated and restructured to meet changing realities,” Kessler says.
“After all, a potential war will not just be about direct fighting on the shores of Taiwan but also in other domains of warfare that greatly impact U.S. standing and power projection at home and abroad, which can also potentially impact its global partners and allies.”
Because of the technological and economic interconnectivity of the world, he says, most nations would become involved in such a war one way or another, regardless of whether they sought to remain neutral.
Kessler, therefore, suggests the creation of a multilateral coalition of the willing, not unlike the one deployed in the Gulf War.
On this point, there is one critical problem. Because the United States would be entering a war of its own volition, it would not be entitled to the benefits of NATO’s collective defense clause.
Thus, while regional allies such as Japan and Australia could well join the fight, the United States’ European partners would likely be absent in the actual fighting.
Indeed, French President Emmanuel Macron suggested as much in early April, saying that Europe must resist becoming “America’s followers” on the issue of Taiwan.
To shore up the United States’ position then, Kessler says that the nation needs to start turning up its diplomacy efforts now, in order to ensure it receives security aid and other benefits from its partners in the war.
“Sooner or later, they would likely end up being in situations where their hands are forced to declare a position on the matter,” Kessler says. “Whether war occurs or not, the U.S. needs full assurance from its longstanding partners and allies that they have their support and vice versa.”
“To make this happen requires aggressive and proactive diplomacy as well as presenting a strong and rational case for creating a coalition of the willing.”
Here again, though, the United States is not the only one with allies.
Though the CCP regime does not formally engage in NATO-style alliances, it does have a string of partners across the globe who would be either willing to engage in direct support of its war effort or otherwise pursue their own destabilizing interests while the United States was distracted.
“Alliances and partnerships are crucial to both China and the U.S but each implements them differently,” Kessler says.
“The CCP recognizes partners in the form of client states that could play a role in helping destabilize American leadership in the international system, while spearheading a multipolar system that they can lead and project influence themselves.”
The result of the CCP’s push for multipolarity is that its own partners could launch destabilizing conflicts of their own.
Epoch Times Photo
Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin make a toast during their dinner at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 21, 2023. (Pavel Byrkin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
One report by the Center for a New American Security think tank, for example, postulates that North Korea could use a CCP invasion of Taiwan to launch its own attack on South Korea.
The problem is not limited to East Asia either.
Iran could initiate further hostilities against U.S. forces in Syria or even invade neighboring Iraq. Russia, meanwhile, could extend its hostilities from Ukraine to Moldova, or otherwise provide direct military support to China. Brazil, Nicaragua, and South Africa could all capitalize on the event to increase their ties with China and Russia while avoiding engaging in hostilities themselves.
The result would be a world at war if not a world war outright.
“Each of these nations are skilled in the distraction game and a war effort in defense of Taiwan would present them with a unique opportunity to attempt at catching the U.S. off guard to gain a victory or prize out of it,” Kessler says.
“The likelihood of such regional conflicts erupting in these areas is very high.”
He believes the extent to which each nation takes advantage of a U.S.-China war will be dependent not only on their relationship with China, but also their own capabilities, goals, and political-economic realities.
While war might suit Russia, for example, smaller economic partners like South Africa and Brazil would be more likely to engage in increased trade or sanctions busting.
The resulting effect is political chaos, and a world in which instability and disruption are the norm.
US Should ‘Hedge’ its Bets
But what if we’re getting it all wrong: if Taiwan is not the next global catastrophe waiting to happen, and if the United States can fight and win but doesn’t even need to.
Such is the perspective of former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.
For Miller, the military decision-making apparatus is prone to see only what it wants to see. Everything looks like a nail to a hammer, the old saying goes.
“I know the one thing we will get wrong is we will mispredict the next major conflict,” Miller said during an April 4 talk with the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank.
“That’s the only thing I know.”
On that note, Miller said that he worries the United States is overestimating the capabilities and expertise of the CCP regime the same way it did of Russia prior to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Far from being a peer military competitor, Miller suggested that the CCP could be deploying a strategy similar to the one used by the United States to defeat the Soviet Union without overt conflict during the Cold War.
By fooling the United States into believing that war is constantly imminent the CCP could actually be goading the United States into destroying its own economy through excessive investments in major military platforms, Miller said.
“I think they’re goading us and we’re just taking it [at face value],” Miller said.
As such, Miller said that the threat to Taiwan’s continued de facto independence was a reality, but that the United States could be playing into the CCP’s plans by heavily investing in ultra-expensive, and easily targetable systems such as fighter jets and aircraft carriers.
Miller pointed instead to the four elements of national power: diplomacy, information, military, and economics.
To obtain victory against China, and to preserve greater liberty across the world, he said, the best path forward for the United States is to better leverage the non-military elements of national power.
“I believe with the Chinese threat, the way to approach that is a very subtle and indirect approach … irregular warfare,” Miller said.
“Let’s go ahead and use a little more … diplomacy, information, and economics, and let’s go ahead and back off on the military for a little while, because we have time. If we’re wrong, we can spin things up.”
When asked by the Epoch Times what advice he had for directing the nation’s military development given that a future war with China was as of yet unwritten, Miller said that the best course of action was to hedge the nation’s bets.
“If you’re a business person and you’re in an unpredictable business climate, what do you do? You hedge.”
“We can’t go all in on any one thing. We need to have a wide range of capabilities.”
To simultaneously avoid the disaster of war in Asia and defeat the regime, he said, the best weapon in the U.S. arsenal was the truth about the CCP.
By shining an unflinching light on the atrocities committed by the regime every day, and by ensuring that those atrocities were seen and understood by the Chinese people, the regime will crumble to internal pressures.
“My belief is that authoritarian, totalitarian governments fear one thing: Popular discontent and popular uprising… The thing that they fear most is not fleets of aircraft carriers, tanks, or expeditionary logistics. They fear information. And that’s one of the key components of irregular warfare.”
“Just tell the truth. It will work through it.”
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-preparing-war-us-ready
-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11976881/PETER-HITCHENS-SAS-Ukraine-clue-involved-war.html
-
"First of all, what interest does the United Kingdom have in continuing and sustaining this war? A powerful faction in Washington DC, with supporters in the West Wing of the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA, have long wanted a proxy war with Russia."
I recall asking a Brit once what they think of US
and her response many wonder why they always have to follow what the US wants to do.
So this rings true ......
OTOH one could argue Russian aggression is a threat to other European countries
along with Nato.
-
"First of all, what interest does the United Kingdom have in continuing and sustaining this war? A powerful faction in Washington DC, with supporters in the West Wing of the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA, have long wanted a proxy war with Russia."
I recall asking a Brit once what they think of US
and her response many wonder why they always have to follow what the US wants to do.
So this rings true ......
OTOH one could argue Russian aggression is a threat to other European countries
along with Nato.
We (The US and NATO) have been fcuking around into former Warsaw Pact/Soviet Union places for DECADES (After we promised we wouldn't) until finally we get a response and it's "OMG! PUTINHitler!"
:roll:
-
Sorry, but this is partially delusional.
The totalitarian suppression of East Europe by the Soviet Empire is a matter of record, as is America's success is keeping it from rolling through West Europe as well.
Entirely a rational thought to want to prevent it from happening again.
-
Sorry, but this is partially delusional.
The totalitarian suppression of East Europe by the Soviet Empire is a matter of record, as is America's success is keeping it from rolling through West Europe as well.
Entirely a rational thought to want to prevent it from happening again.
1. We promised we WOULD NOT push into the former Soviet Union and of course we lied.
2. Western Europe is in much greater danger from it's 3rd world invasion and crippling "green energy" policies.
-
https://www.newsweek.com/nato-agrees-ukraine-member-alliance-stoltenberg-zelensky-1795816
Because they do.
-
"1. We promised we WOULD NOT push into the former Soviet Union"
Ummm , , , this has been asserted , , , and quite plausibly challenged e.g. as being an oral comment only. I would also note that that Russia SIGNED the formal agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum to respect Uke territory in 1993. Since then it has seized Donbas and more and is in the process of turning much of Ukraine into Grozny status.
"2. Western Europe is in much greater danger from it's 3rd world invasion and crippling "green energy" policies."
Don't know that I would say "much greater" but certainly agree to calling these "existential threats".
-
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/135/754/267/original/d293b4bf8459fd63.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/135/754/267/original/d293b4bf8459fd63.jpg)
"I hereby inform you that the Wagner PMC commanders’ council has signed the protocol. ‘The council was attended by 427 people (quorum has been reached). The following decisions were made:
1. To consider as illegitimate government bodies of the USA, Great Britain and Canada.
We know for certain that the policy of these countries is based on the creation and use of terrorist organizations, as well as terrorist methods in the following spheres: military, economic, biological, information, telecommunications (cyberterrorism), humanitarian (resulting in various forms of genocide and neo-colonialism: the oppression of the black population of Africa, the Slavic peoples in particular, Russians, oppression of Asians on racial grounds), as well as confessional terrorism, especially towards Christians and Muslims.
2. Recognize as invalid the following documents: the US Declaration of Independence (ratified 4 July 1776), the Treaty of Union of Great Britain (ratified 1 May 1707), the Constitutional Act of British North America (adopted March 29, 1867).
Accordingly, having all the necessary information about the 2016 and 2020 US elections, as well as the documented facts of fraud during the latter, we determine the 2020 US election to be illegal. We recognize Great Britain as a state whose citizens currently live in a “troubled time of anarchy.”
We challenge the sovereignty of Canada due to the fact that it is a territory of the Commonwealth led by King Charles.
Based on the above, the governments of the United States, Great Britain and Canada are recognized as terrorist and illegal:
Clauses 4 and 9 of paragraph 7 of the Charter of PMC “Wagner” apply to the following chief terrorists.
US President Joseph Biden, King Charles III of Great Britain and Canada must give an explanation for what reason they illegitimately hold power in the above states, oppressing the peoples of the USA, Great Britain and Canada.
In turn, PMC “Wagner” will provide the peoples of these and other oppressed countries all kinds of assistance in countering the terrorist structures, such as the government of the United States, British and Canadian government, Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Katiba Masina, etc. We will protect and support the civilian population of states, that has been exposed to genocide, neo-colonialism, terrorism by private, public and supranational entities."
-
Asked sincerely:
How did you come to this? Do you give it credence? Why?
-
Asked sincerely:
How did you come to this? Do you give it credence? Why?
I don't know if it's valid, thus the header on the post. I don't have any in-house Russian translation ability, so hoping someone can help with that and verification Wagner actually wrote it.
-
"I don't know if it's valid, thus the header on the post."
Whoops, I failed to read for comprehension.
-
The Global Defense Spending Boom
Countries see a more dangerous world and are buying new weapons. The U.S. isn’t keeping pace with the threats.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
April 24, 2023 6:26 pm ET
104
Gift unlocked article
Listen
(4 min)
image
A tomahawk land attack missile is launched aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur in Philippine Sea, May 27, 2019. PHOTO: U.S. NAVY
A report out Monday details a boom in military spending from Europe to Asia, and mark it down as the sign of a nervous world with dictators on the march. The U.S. is less prepared for this precarious moment than the official statistics suggest, and the risks of inaction are growing.
World military expenditures rose 3.7% in real terms in 2022, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or Sipri. By far the sharpest rise in spending came from Europe (up 13%). The pity is that it took a land war on the European continent—Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—to persuade NATO allies to spend more on their own hard power.
Lithuania’s account is up 27%. Poland’s spending increased 11%, and Warsaw is above the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s target of dedicating 2% of GDP to defense. Finland’s military spending increased 36% in 2022, the “highest year-on-year increase” since 1962, thanks in part to a decision to buy F-35 fighter jets. A warm welcome to NATO, Finns.
Meanwhile in the Pacific, Japan increased spending 5.9% in 2022 to 1.1% of GDP, which is the highest since 1960. Selling American Tomahawk cruise missiles to Tokyo will help check China. Australia and others promise to spend more in the coming years, such as the landmark deal for Sydney to acquire nuclear-powered submarines.
NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
Morning Editorial Report
All the day's Opinion headlines.
Preview
Subscribed
Sipri notes that 39% of world military spending is done by the United States, and making the rounds is the talking point that the U.S. spends more than the next 10 countries combined. So why spend more? Lots of reasons.
One reason is that China’s $292 billion in military spending is the tip of an iceberg. Beijing’s “military-civil fusion” policy obliterates the distinction between public and private spending. The Communist Party in any crisis could command civilian fishing fleets and commercial artificial intelligence.
Beijing can also reserve its military might for the Pacific, but the U.S. doesn’t have the luxury of abandoning Europe to focus on Asia. China and Russia are a two-headed threat. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin at least had the courtesy to make that plain as the pair clinked champagne flutes at a recent meeting.
The truth is that U.S. defense spending is flat at 3% of the economy and is failing to keep pace with the world’s threats. Americans may prefer that other countries pick up more of the tab, but some (Saudi Arabia) are increasing their own defense spending because they perceive America is in decline. That is a fast lane to a world in which more nations develop their own nuclear weapons.
Sipri says Central and Western Europe are spending on militaries at levels not seen since 1989, and the Cold War is a relevant but incomplete comparison. The difference is that China is a more formidable threat than the Soviet Union, and asymmetric technological threats are going to spread faster to more adversaries.
The U.S. victory in the Cold War wasn’t inevitable. It was the result of choices—not least building the dominant military power necessary to prevail.
-
second
China Developing Systems to Hijack US Satellites: Leaked Pentagon Document
A Long March 7Y4 rocket carrying the Tianzhou 3 cargo ship launches from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on a mission to deliver supplies to China's Tiangong space station, in China's southern Hainan Province, on Sept. 20, 2021. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)
A Long March 7Y4 rocket carrying the Tianzhou 3 cargo ship launches from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on a mission to deliver supplies to China's Tiangong space station, in China's southern Hainan Province, on Sept. 20, 2021. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)
Andrew Thornebrooke
By Andrew Thornebrooke
April 24, 2023Updated: April 24, 2023
biggersmaller Print
China’s communist regime is likely developing cyberweapons capable of hijacking U.S. satellite systems during a war, according to newly leaked Pentagon documents.
Among the recent trove of top secret Pentagon files allegedly leaked by an Air National Guardsman this year is one document that suggests that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, is “probably developing cyber-attack capabilities that will threaten Western satellite systems.”
“The [intelligence community] assesses China is developing cyber-attack capabilities to deny, exploit, and hijack satellite links and networks as part of its strategy to control information, which it considers a key warfighting domain,” the document reads.
The document was classified as top secret special intelligence and was marked to prohibit its release to foreign nationals.
The Pentagon didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment regarding the file.
The document suggests that the CCP is developing systems capable not only of knocking U.S. satellites offline but also of actually hijacking and using them toward the regime’s own ends.
“China’s ability to infiltrate a core network or mimic a specific command link could allow it to seize control of a satellite, rendering it ineffective to support communications, weapons, or intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems,” the document reads.
China Preparing to Attack US Satellite Systems
The leaked Pentagon document presents the latest glimpse into the CCP’s long-running attempts to develop technologies capable of attacking and defeating U.S. satellite-based infrastructure.
The regime has been developing a comprehensive arsenal of space and counterspace capabilities for years. Such capabilities would allow the CCP to target U.S. communications and GPS infrastructures, as well as its missile defense systems.
China’s research into such capabilities includes experiments with directed energy weapons, microsatellites, robotic explosives, satellite jammers, anti-satellite missiles, grabber satellites, and a comprehensive suite of cyber warfare tools.
The regime has also been testing the U.S. ability to defend its satellite.
Speaking to The Washington Post in December 2021, Gen. David Thompson, the U.S. Space Force’s first vice chief of space operations, said the CCP was launching attacks on U.S. space infrastructure “every single day.”
Those reversible attacks—in which U.S. satellite architecture or cyber systems are compromised temporarily—are largely understood to be a testing of the waters for an actual assault in the event of a war between the United States and China.
The United States, its allies, and its partners are investing heavily to deploy newer, more distributed satellite systems to mitigate the threat posed by the CCP.
Such systems will replace the nation’s heavily centralized and vulnerable satellite systems with satellite constellations consisting of hundreds or even thousands of satellites.
-
Biden administration public response
we seek friendly competition
no conflict
yet historians rank him and his planners fairly high
a presenter in a required class at my work giddily pointed out how some study
found ~ 21 % of gen Z now describe themselves as LBGTQ . she was as happy as Dr. Ruth in a good mood .
friends - which topic do you think is more important to the well being of our nation.
and please don't give me an Obama line the libs like to use now more and more frequently -> "we can walk and chew gum at the same time".
-
"friends - which topic do you think is more important to the well being of our nation?"
There is no way around it, the answer is BOTH.
-
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/136/296/752/original/66e63da73659dd20.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/136/296/752/original/66e63da73659dd20.jpg)
Stolen elections have consequences.
-
https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1653933371230392322
-
https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1653933371230392322
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-russia-verge-open-armed-conflict-after-kremlin-drone-attack-foreign-ministry
-
Getting but a tiny taste of their own medicine, the Russkis are flapping their gums with yet another nuclear saber rattle.
-
Getting but a tiny taste of their own medicine, the Russkis are flapping their gums with yet another nuclear saber rattle.
Why such confidence that this won't escalate?
-
We are all agreed that the risk of escalation is there, but we have also seen quite a bit of bluster from the Russkis as things go to shit for them too.
-
We are all agreed that the risk of escalation is there, but we have also seen quite a bit of bluster from the Russkis as things go to shit for them too.
History is full of examples where nations miscalculate their way into war. Is the most corrupt country in eastern europe worth risking WWIII over?
Both europe and the US are being destroyed from invasion. That is what matters.
Ukraine is a shiny object.
-
"Both europe and the US are being destroyed from invasion. That is what matters."
AGREED!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Ukraine is a shiny object".
It certainly is being used as such to distract from the invasion of our country!
That said, the problem is it is also a tar baby, and just simply disengaging would have catastropic consequences as well-- which is why we should not have FAFO on Russia's border.
-
"Both europe and the US are being destroyed from invasion. That is what matters."
AGREED!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Ukraine is a shiny object".
It certainly is being used as such to distract from the invasion of our country!
That said, the problem is it is also a tar baby, and just simply disengaging would have catastropic consequences as well-- which is why we should not have FAFO on Russia's border.
We should not have. Then we should have cut a peace deal instead of scuttling it last year.
Russia is not a Durkadurkastan that we can bomb from afar. Russia can turn CONUS into radioactive glass.
The fight is HERE. The FOUR Horsemen will be HERE. Your children will be fighting for survival HERE.
(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/enemywithin.jpg)
-
Link for that meme please?
-
Link for that meme please?
https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/enemywithin.jpg
-
TY
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/russia-issues-dire-warning-after-us-approves-ukrainian-strikes-crimea
-
Biden : march forward !!! like it or not !!! :evil:
Us: back up step by step :-o
https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-standing-on-top-of-cliff-13217844/
-
the US in 2050 if Dems have their way:
we will all be equal :
https://borgenproject.org/definition-of-a-third-world-country/
-
the US in 2050 if Dems have their way:
we will all be equal :
https://borgenproject.org/definition-of-a-third-world-country/
Luckily, the magic soil of the US turns the millions flooding in into English speaking patriots!
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/russia-issues-dire-warning-after-us-approves-ukrainian-strikes-crimea
https://sonar21.com/compared-to-the-munchkins-the-g-7-is-a-veritable-midget-clown-show/
-
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/05/28/why-rogan-is-the-only-place-left-for-truth/
-
As well as being well informed I like the way this guy expresses himself; not snarky, but designed to engage with and reach the other POV.
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_NATO
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/possible-outcomes-war-ukraine
-
https://themostimportantnews.com/archives/they-are-doing-their-best-to-provoke-a-nuclear-war-with-russia
-
How dare those pesky Ukes five the Russian a taste of what they have been dealing out , , ,
-
How dare those pesky Ukes five the Russian a taste of what they have been dealing out , , ,
Russia can dish us a big heaping helping. Ready for that?
-
Thought experiment:
Somehow, Russia's will colapses: Putin is thrown out of a window, troop munity, Wagner goes home, mothers of the fallen march on the Kremlin, SOMETHING.
Question Presented: What you say GM?
What should be an unnecessary qualifier, but isn't: This is NOT a prediction. It IS a possibility.
-
Thought experiment:
Somehow, Russia's will colapses: Putin is thrown out of a window, troop munity, Wagner goes home, mothers of the fallen march on the Kremlin, SOMETHING.
Question Presented: What you say GM?
What should be an unnecessary qualifier, but isn't: This is NOT a prediction. It IS a possibility.
It's about as likely as me winning a million dollars (I don't gamble) and a supermodel accidentally falling on my smeckle.
-
Thought experiment:
Somehow, Russia's will colapses: Putin is thrown out of a window, troop munity, Wagner goes home, mothers of the fallen march on the Kremlin, SOMETHING.
Question Presented: What you say GM?
What should be an unnecessary qualifier, but isn't: This is NOT a prediction. It IS a possibility.
It's about as likely as me winning a million dollars (I don't gamble) and a supermodel accidentally falling on my smeckle.
Speaking of "thinking like a gambler", profession gamblers don't bet their rent money. They don't bet what they can't afford to lose.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-munitions-stockpile-too-low-defend-war-over-taiwan
-
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/06/08/blackout-warfare-the-world-war-iii-threat-more-deadly-than-nukes/
-
Agree on the EMP threat from balloons.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-munitions-stockpile-too-low-defend-war-over-taiwan
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-weapons-china-00100373
-
Major cognitive dissonance here between fighting Russia to prove to China not to invade Taiwan and our capabilities.
-
Major cognitive dissonance here between fighting Russia to prove to China not to invade Taiwan and our capabilities.
What capabilities? Our fake and gay military? Our less than wonderful wonder weapons we can't replace in YEARS?
-
Major cognitive dissonance here between fighting Russia to prove to China not to invade Taiwan and our capabilities.
What capabilities? Our fake and gay military? Our less than wonderful wonder weapons we can't replace in YEARS?
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/140/087/931/original/5aa7b70b7489a010.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/140/087/931/original/5aa7b70b7489a010.jpg)
-
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/06/20/northwest-alaska-hit-with-internet-and-cellphone-outages-caused-by-offshore-fiber-optic-cut/
-
I forget in which thread we posted in the last few days about a Russki threat of this sort asserting justification because of the sabotage of Nord Stream 2 so this sounds like a warning shot across the bow to me:
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/06/20/northwest-alaska-hit-with-internet-and-cellphone-outages-caused-by-offshore-fiber-optic-cut/
-
I forget in which thread we posted in the last few days about a Russki threat of this sort asserting justification because of the sabotage of Nord Stream 2 so this sounds like a warning shot across the bow to me:
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/06/20/northwest-alaska-hit-with-internet-and-cellphone-outages-caused-by-offshore-fiber-optic-cut/
I don’t remember either.
Or maybe it’s just ice in Alaskan waters…
-
".Or maybe it’s just ice in Alaskan waters…"
that would be part of it .
the other part would be due to ice that was only there due to climate change
thus full circle
this whole thing is linked to climate change.
:wink:
-
".Or maybe it’s just ice in Alaskan waters…"
that would be part of it .
the other part would be due to ice that was only there due to climate change
thus full circle
this whole thing is linked to climate change.
:wink:
Well done.
Coming soon:
Climate change crashed our grid!
-
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/dissecting-west-point-think-tanks
This will be coming here, on our soil.
-
while the Dems focus on the religion of woke and race
the world is preparing for war:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jul/28/threat-china-prompts-major-military-buildup-japan-/
India, Japan, Australia