Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Stratfor's policy on China is that its domestic stability in terms of rural uprising and political dissent will dictate whether or not it can successfully assert itself internationally.

This is wishful thinking on Stratfor's part, but has a historical basis in CHinese society.

China has a ton of subs that spreads its sea coverage, but not an effective long range fleet yet.  However, that is changing fast.

Japan will need to assert itself sooner rather than later.

This is a piece I wrote in response to a request from a senior State Department officer who is an Asia hand, but has not focused directly on China during his career.  He was looking for an insider's view of the social turmoil occurring recently such as that in Wukan this past Winter.  His question was "are these events isolated, one-time occurrences, or signs of growing tension throughout China?"  It is in part based on discussions with a college professor of Chinese Policy, who is well traveled in China and fluent in Mandarin, and my Father, who follows geopolitics religiously.

Analysis of Local Protests in Rural Chinese Areas

On April 18th in Lijiang, Yunnan, thousands of local farmers surrounded government buildings to protest damage to their homes from coal mining activities, and the behavior of the local officials who unjustly supported the coal companies to the detriment of the local villagers (http://www.kanzhongguo.com/news/12/04/19/448717.html).  A warning shot from a police firearm scared the farmers into attacking a large group of officers with their edged weapons.  Fifteen officers were injured and the Deputy Chief of Police of Yunnan Province was killed.  Riot police were called in to rescue the officers, and many of the farmers were shot dead.

Events like this are not uncommon in China on a national level.  There is a lot of local discontent that boils over into various forms of protest and demonstration.  Last fall, there was a similar uprising in Wukan, Guangdong that led to the abduction and extrajudicial detainment of several of the protest leaders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_of_Wukan), one of whom was killed.  This intensified the protest until thousands of police seized the town forcing a resolution.

The question here is if these events are isolated, one-time occurrences, or signs of growing tension throughout China.

What makes this incident unique is that it occurred in Lijiang.  Lijiang is a World Heritage Site and premier tourism center of China.  It is very wealthy, and a centerpiece of China’s program for successful minority relations.  The region is populated largely by non-Han people (Yi, Naxi, Hui, Tibetan, and Bai), although most of the police, and government officials are of the Han ethnicity.  The growing number of civil uprisings are not limited to the Han governed minority populated areas however.

"The data show that mass incidents are generally rooted in work-related grievances and seek address of immediate demands rather than seeking broad political changes"  (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1451828).  While the data, in a large part, reflects simple economic concerns, when do these incidents increase to the point where there are areas that become ungovernable due to the conflicts, simple in nature or not?

China has a history of breaking along certain fault lines that crack due to various strains.  So if you add nationwide scandal, like that of Bo Xi Lai, that shows the People how absent they really are in their leaders’ thoughts, to local grievances also related to quality of living and work, what will happen?

Typically, they air month long marathons of anti-Japanese WWII TV shows on every channel to take focus away from the Chinese Communist Party (“CCP”).  This has worked remarkably well to the point that I do not know one person in China that does not hate the Japanese, but they know basically nothing about the Gong Chan Dang/ CCP.

Before I left China earlier this year, I asked a lifelong member of the Gong Chan Dang what if my daughter can no longer speak Chinese after living in the United States for a while.  He said, "It doesn't matter.  China is nothing."  This was reflective of a newly found feeling that the Government doesn't take care of the people, and that they are trying to regulate them too closely and unfairly even when they fully comply with the Gong Chan Dang's agenda.  (see Member's Area for full story and analysis).

The most likely path from here is stabilization of conflicts and more Japanese WWII TV dramas.  However, it is interesting to examine the alternative.

There are several essential problems with creating an accurate picture about what is going on in China.  Most of the US/ foreign media and business interests tend to overhype any turmoil.  Academia tends to try to gain a balanced approach through careful analysis of trends and underemphasizes the turmoil as being common and not disruptive to progress or reform.  And, if you are actually on the ground there, you have little access to news of any events that are occurring, so you do not see or feel any turmoil unless you are in the midst of it.

In the end, what we have is a bunch of interest-biased information coming to us from all directions and people gravitating toward what fits their world image most closely.

What the lifelong member of the Gong Chan Dang said is instructive here.  He has benefited tremendously from the Chinese occupation of the Tibetan Plateau and has gone along with the Party's agenda for decades.  Still, he feels underrepresented and alien to his current Government.  The question is, will this feeling grow among the people like him, or can the Party control this sentiment?  I don't think any of us can predict the answer to that, or what will happen if it does grow beyond the Party's control.

Many Chinese feel that China is a dangerous place where those with money do as they please at the expense of everyone else.  They base this on the food quality issues, leadership abuses of their duties to take care of the People, and the token allowances given to minorities to appease them (financial and academic aid that only masks the vast disparities).  I am not aiming at getting into a comparative argument here between China and any other nation in terms of these issues, but rather to illustrate why people are frustrated to the point of despair about what is happening to their lives there.

There is no vehicle there for people to exert their rights, or to make gains other than through wealth.  And for those that do get wealth (media stars and business tycoons), they send their children overseas to escape the arbitrariness of that system.

On May 17, 2012, it was reported that a suicide bomber, a woman carrying a baby with explosives strapped to her body, killed several people at a government office in Qiaojia, Yunnan.  She was protesting authority’s plans to tear down her home for a development project.  
Quickly the story was revised by the Government to say that the bombing had been done by a disgruntled worker (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/worldview/death-and-justice-in-south-china/article2435484/page1/).  Rather than awaiting a full investigation of the incident, the chief of Yunnan’s Public Security Bureau declared the case closed and stated that he could stake his reputation and career on the decision.  This prompted the Chinese public to ask why proof of the crime was not being used to determine the outcome rather than this Chief’s reputation and career.

It is becoming obvious that people are losing respect for the Government and the police, and the public's perception of the Bo Xi Lai scandal could be fueling this disconnect between the two further.  One blogger commenting on the Qiaojia incident wrote: “I'm not law professional, nor police, of course not a Public Security Bureau chief, but I know there must be enough evidence before confirming that some suspected criminal is guilty, instead of basing it on deduction or a subjective assumption. Why are there so many suspicious facts in the case? Why is the whole country of China asking questions?”

Of course, the Chinese People deserve better than this.  Dramas about the Japanese during WWII will hopefully outlive their usefulness and social media will hopefully have a positive impact as well.

In China, I asked many people if they thought peoples’ lives were improving and they said no.  They could not trust the food because of all of the scandals involving tainted products of every kind.  People were getting sick and in the hospital often from tainted food they said.  This is just one example, but it is indicative of the greater problem.

If the sentiment is that their lives are not improving and that their Government does not support them, how long can the WWII Japanese dramas keep the masses sedated?  And if they do not remain sedated, what happens then?  Who knows?  Maybe nothing.  

This year before the CCP change of power is going to be unpredictable and very dangerous.  Similar tensions as these reported above are what have led to popular revolt in modern China.  You also have to factor in the impact of the new and ubiquitous communication technologies, and the inflationary potential of bloggers.  These factors magnify all of the tensions, and lend new leverage to organizational effort.  The incident in Wukan is quite instructive in this regard.

So an Apple Store on every corner may be more than just good business for Apple. Tiananmen Square took place at a time that "rhymes" with the present political instability.  That was appreciated by Mark Twain, who has been quoted as saying that "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

Thanks Guro C.!

Before I moved to the Tibetan Plateau in 2009, I was living in Kunming, Yunnan, teaching International Law to international business majors from the EU, CH, North Africa, and China, of course!  We also had a DBMA Kunming group, and Guro C. allowed me to represent DBMA for a seminar in Beijing in 2006.

Before that I was living in NYC, working as an attorney at a firm, and running Manhattan DBMA (2003-2006).  While a law student, and intern at the San Diego DA's Office, I attended Guro Crafty's DBMA classes at Inosanto Academy in Marina Del Ray in 2001.  I was also a student of Raw Dog's in NYC during this time (1999-2004), and taught DBMA classes at his school, Progressive Martial Arts Academy, after my certification by Guro Crafty as an Apprenctice Instructor in 2002.

As for Tibet, here is what I was really doing over there:

igertrekking.webs.com
blackpotterycoffee.webs.com

Take a look when you have a chance.

We are back in Connecticut now, and eager to start up DBMA training here again.  So anyone in the area, please get in touch.

I look forward to many fine discussions here!

Woof,
Russ

The documentary takes a dramatic turn, though, when the infant’s Palestinian mother, Raida, who is being disparaged by fellow Gazans for having her son treated in Israel, blurts out that she hopes he’ll grow up to be a suicide bomber to help recover Jerusalem.

August 7, 2010
Steal This Movie
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I just saw a remarkable new documentary directed by Shlomi Eldar, the Gaza reporter for Israel’s Channel 10 news. Titled “Precious Life,” the film tracks the story of Mohammed Abu Mustafa, a 4-month-old Palestinian baby suffering from a rare immune deficiency. Moved by the baby’s plight, Eldar helps the infant and mother go from Gaza to Israel’s Tel Hashomer hospital for lifesaving bone-marrow treatment. The operation costs $55,000. Eldar puts out an appeal on Israel TV and within hours an Israeli Jew whose own son was killed during military service donates all the money.

The documentary takes a dramatic turn, though, when the infant’s Palestinian mother, Raida, who is being disparaged by fellow Gazans for having her son treated in Israel, blurts out that she hopes he’ll grow up to be a suicide bomber to help recover Jerusalem. Raida tells Eldar: “From the smallest infant, even smaller than Mohammed, to the oldest person, we will all sacrifice ourselves for the sake of Jerusalem. We feel we have the right to it. You’re free to be angry, so be angry.”

Eldar is devastated by her declaration and stops making the film. But this is no Israeli propaganda movie. The drama of the Palestinian boy’s rescue at an Israeli hospital is juxtaposed against Israeli retaliations for shelling from Gaza, which kill whole Palestinian families. Dr. Raz Somech, the specialist who treats Mohammed as if he were his own child, is summoned for reserve duty in Gaza in the middle of the film. The race by Israelis and Palestinians to save one life is embedded in the larger routine of the two communities grinding each other up.

“It’s clear to me that the war in Gaza was justified — no country can allow itself to be fired at with Qassam rockets — but I did not see many people pained by the loss of life on the Palestinian side,” Eldar told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “Because we were so angry at Hamas, all the Israeli public wanted was to [expletive] Gaza. ... It wasn’t until after the incident of Dr. Abu al-Aish — the Gaza physician I spoke with on live TV immediately after a shell struck his house and caused the death of his daughters and he was shouting with grief and fear — that I discovered the [Israeli] silent majority that has compassion for people, including Palestinians. I found that many Israeli viewers shared my feelings.” So Eldar finished the documentary about how Mohammed’s life was saved in Israel.

His raw film reflects the Middle East I know — one full of amazing compassion, even among enemies, and breathtaking cruelty, even among neighbors.

I write about this now because there is something foul in the air. It is a trend, both deliberate and inadvertent, to delegitimize Israel — to turn it into a pariah state, particularly in the wake of the Gaza war. You hear the director Oliver Stone saying crazy things about how Hitler killed more Russians than Jews, but the Jews got all the attention because they dominate the news media and their lobby controls Washington. You hear Britain’s prime minister describing Gaza as a big Israeli “prison camp” and Turkey’s prime minister telling Israel’s president, “When it comes to killing, you know very well how to kill.” You see singers canceling concerts in Tel Aviv. If you just landed from Mars, you might think that Israel is the only country that has killed civilians in war — never Hamas, never Hezbollah, never Turkey, never Iran, never Syria, never America.

I’m not here to defend Israel’s bad behavior. Just the opposite. I’ve long argued that Israel’s colonial settlements in the West Bank are suicidal for Israel as a Jewish democracy. I don’t think Israel’s friends can make that point often enough or loud enough.

But there are two kinds of criticism. Constructive criticism starts by making clear: “I know what world you are living in.” I know the Middle East is a place where Sunnis massacre Shiites in Iraq, Iran kills its own voters, Syria allegedly kills the prime minister next door, Turkey hammers the Kurds, and Hamas engages in indiscriminate shelling and refuses to recognize Israel. I know all of that. But Israel’s behavior, at times, only makes matters worse — for Palestinians and Israelis. If you convey to Israelis that you understand the world they’re living in, and then criticize, they’ll listen.

Destructive criticism closes Israeli ears. It says to Israelis: There is no context that could explain your behavior, and your wrongs are so uniquely wrong that they overshadow all others. Destructive critics dismiss Gaza as an Israeli prison, without ever mentioning that had Hamas decided — after Israel unilaterally left Gaza — to turn it into Dubai rather than Tehran, Israel would have behaved differently, too. Destructive criticism only empowers the most destructive elements in Israel to argue that nothing Israel does matters, so why change?

How about everybody take a deep breath, pop a copy of “Precious Life” into your DVD players, watch this documentary about the real Middle East, and if you still want to be a critic (as I do), be a constructive one. A lot more Israelis and Palestinians will listen to you.

Nicholas D. Kristof is off today.

Hey P.C., good to hear from you too!

Mattis will technically be Patraeus' senior as commander of CENTCOM.

There is so far no date listed for the confirmation hearing.  I can't imagine they plan to leave the post open for long.

Speaking of Patton....  Patton takes his staff on an unexpected detour to the site of the ancient Battle of Zama. There he reminisces about the battle, insisting to his second in command, General Omar Bradley (Karl Malden) that he was there.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patton_%28film%29

I think I'm going to spend some time reading up on counterinsurgency:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf

This manual is designed to fill a doctrinal gap. It has been 20 years since the Army published a field manual devoted exclusively to counterinsurgency operations. For the Marine Corps it has been 25 years. With our Soldiers and Marines fighting insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is essential that we give them a manual that provides principles and guidelines for counterinsurgency operations. Such guidance must be grounded in historical studies. However, it also must be informed by contemporary experiences.

This manual takes a general approach to counterinsurgency operations. The Army and Marine Corps recognize that every insurgency is contextual and presents its own set of challenges. You cannot fight former Saddamists and Islamic extremists the same way you would have fought the Viet Cong, Moros, or Tupamaros; the application of principles and fundamentals to deal with each varies considerably. Nonetheless, all insurgencies, even today’s highly adaptable strains, remain wars amongst the people. They use variations of standard themes and adhere to elements of a recognizable revolutionary campaign plan. This manual therefore addresses the common characteristics of insurgencies. It strives to provide those conducting counterinsurgency campaigns with a solid foundation for understanding and addressing specific insurgencies.

A counterinsurgency campaign is, as described in this manual, a mix of offensive, defensive, and stability operations conducted along multiple lines of operations. It requires Soldiers and Marines to employ a mix of familiar combat tasks and skills more often associated with nonmilitary agencies. The balance between them depends on the local situation. Achieving this balance is not easy. It requires leaders at all levels to adjust their approach constantly. They must ensure that their Soldiers and Marines are ready to be greeted with either a handshake or a hand grenade while taking on missions only infrequently practiced until recently at our combat training centers. Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors. They must be prepared to help reestablish institutions and local security forces and assist in rebuilding infrastructure and basic services. They must be able to facilitate establishing local governance and the rule of law. The list of such tasks is long; performing them involves extensive coordination and cooperation with many intergovernmental, host-nation, and international agencies. Indeed, the responsibilities of
leaders in a counterinsurgency campaign are daunting; however, the discussions in this manual alert leaders to the challenges of such campaigns and suggest general approaches for grappling with those challenges.

Conducting a successful counterinsurgency campaign requires a flexible, adaptive force led by agile, well-informed, culturally astute leaders. It is our hope that this manual provides the guidelines needed to succeed in operations that are exceedingly difficult and complex. Our Soldiers and Marines deserve nothing less.

DAVID H. PETRAEUS
Lieutenant General, U.S. Army
Commander
U.S. Army Combined Arms Center

JAMES F. AMOS
Lieutenant General, U.S. Marine Corps
Deputy Commandant
Combat Development and Integration

Frank Luntz on Why American Jewish Students Won’t Defend Israel
Evelyn Gordon - 07.18.2010 - 12:22 PM

PR guru Frank Luntz gave a lengthy interview last week to the Jerusalem Post’s David Horovitz. Much of it was what one might expect from a PR guru. But one incident he described was shocking: a session with 35 MIT and Harvard students, 20 non-Jews and 15 Jews:

    “Within 10 minutes, the non-Jews started with ‘the war crimes of Israel,’ with ‘the Jewish lobby,’ with ‘the Jews have a lot more power and influence’ – stuff that’s borderline anti-Jewish.

    And guess what? Did the Jewish kids at the best schools in America, did they stand up for themselves? Did they challenge the assertions? They didn’t say sh*t. And in that group was the leader of the Israeli caucus at Harvard. It took him 49 minutes of this before he responded to anything.”

After three hours, Luntz dismissed the non-Jews and confronted the Jews, furious that “you all didn’t say sh*t.”

    “And it all dawned on them: If they won’t say it to their classmates, whom they know, who will they stand up for Israel to? Two of the women in the group started to cry. … The guys are like, “Oh my God, I didn’t speak up, I can’t believe I let this happen.” And they’re all looking at each other with horrible embarrassment and guilt like you wouldn’t believe.”

But Luntz didn’t stop with illustrating this gaping hole in what American Jews are evidently teaching their children; he also explained it:

    “The problem that I see is that so many parents in the Jewish community taught their kids not to judge. I’m going to say something that’s a little bit ideological, but I find that kids on the right are far more likely to stand up for Israel than kids on the left. Because kids on the right believe that there is an absolute right and wrong; this is how they’ve been raised.

    Kids on the left have been taught not to judge. Therefore those on the left will not judge between Israel and the Palestinians; those on the right will.”

This is a travesty — because this particular right/left difference shouldn’t exist. First, it’s a travesty of everything the left once stood for — which was upholding a particular set of values, not refusing to judge between those values and others. Willingness to defend your own values shouldn’t be a trait limited to the right.

But it’s also a travesty because it shouldn’t be hard for any Jewish leftist to explain why Israel, for all its flaws, is still a far better example of the left’s one-time values, such as freedom, democracy, tolerance, and human rights, than any of its enemies. As Israel’s first Bedouin diplomat, Ishmael Khaldi, said in explaining why he chose to represent a country that allegedly oppresses his fellow Muslim Arabs, “We’re a multicultural, multilingual, multireligious country and I’m happy and proud to be part of it.”

Israel’s PR failings are innumerable. But if American Jews can’t get this particular message across to their children, the fault isn’t Israel’s; it’s their own. And only American Jews themselves can fix it.

Thanks G M!  Nelson is out of the hospital now, and recovering well.  It looks like the Thai Parliment is calling for all parties to reach for national reconciliation as well before holding elections early next year.

Hi All,

I have read Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan," and although he can be quite pompous in doing so, he points out a valid criticism of human thinking.... that we tend not to account for unforeseeable events even though we know they are there, and that they do happen.  That is his simple premise in the book.

As far as investing guidance, Peter Lynch, who ran the Magellan Fund during its peak years, has several excellent books such as "Beating the Street."  They describe his approach and statistically analyze how keeping your money in the market vastly increases your financial gains over time, despite rises and falls.

Also.... John Maudlin's "Outside the Box" is one of the best financial news letters out there.  He regularly has guest writers with expertise in different areas, such as Stratfor's George Friedman on geopolitical issues, as well as leading brokers from all over the world.  The newsletter is free: http://www.investorsinsight.com/blogs/thoughts_from_the_frontline/default.aspx

Good Luck!
Russ

A Friend Writes:

'A young man trudges along the frozen streets of Moscow, wrapping his scarf and coat tighter about himself. Looking around, he sees the homeless and the poor - people swilling home-made potato vodka and standing in long lines for toilet paper, and he vows to himself: "As god as my witness, I WILL own Machine Head."'

Heavy Metal Fanatic To Succeed PUTIN As Russian Leader

Russia's RIA Novosti reports: The man backed by Vladimir Putin for next year's presidential election is a heavy-metal-loving 42-year-old whose surname comes from the Russian word for 'bear'.

First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was nominated by the ruling United Russia party and three other smaller pro-Kremlin parties on Monday afternoon. President Putin later said on national television: "I have known Dmitry Medvedev well for over 17 years, and I completely and fully support his candidature."

The man who may well become leader of the largest nation on Earth said he had spent much of his youth compiling cassettes of popular Western groups, "Endlessly making copies of BLACK SABBATH, LED ZEPPELIN and DEEP PURPLE."

All these groups were on state-issued blacklists during Medvedev's Soviet-era schooldays.

"The quality was awful, but my interest colossal," he said.

Medvedev went on to boast of his collection of DEEP PURPLE LPs, saying that he had searched for the albums for many years.

"Not reissues, but the original albums," he added, concluding that, "If you set yourself a goal you can achieve it."

Read more RIA Novosti.

Protestor In England....


http://www.filedump.nl/plaatjes/20060203BritishMuslims_ps.jpg

 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming!
Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of it {Spiritus Mundi}
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
 
William Butler Yeats

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/tikrit-cc.htm

This link has photos, maps, and the different camps including FOB Danger where Kristin and her unit are stationed.

FALLUJAH, Iraq (Dec. 02, 2004) -- "You're still here, don't forget that.  Tell your kids, your grandkids, what Sgt. Peralta did for you and the other Marines today."
 
As a combat correspondent, I was attached to Company A, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment for Operation Al Fajr, to make sure the stories of heroic actions and the daily realities of battle were told.

On this day, I found myself without my camera. With the batteries dead, I
decided to leave the camera behind and live up to the ethos "every Marine a rifleman," by volunteering to help clear the fateful buildings that
lined streets.

After seven days of intense fighting in Fallujah, the Marines of 1/3 embraced a new day with a faceless enemy.

We awoke November 15, 2004, around day-break in the abandoned, battle-worn house we had made our home for the night. We shaved, ate breakfast from a Meal, Ready-to-Eat pouch and waited for the word to move.

The word came, and we started what we had done since the operation began - clear the city of insurgents, building by building.

As an attachment to the unit, I had been placed as the third man in a
six-man group, or what Marines call a 'stack.' Two stacks of Marines were
used to clear a house. Moving quickly from the third house to the fourth, our order in the stack changed. I found Sgt. Rafael Peralta in my spot, so I fell in behind him as we moved toward the house.

A Mexican-American who lived in San Diego, Peralta earned his citizenship
after he joined the Marine Corps. He was a platoon scout, which meant he could have stayed back in safety while the squads of 1st Platoon went into the danger filled streets, but he was constantly asking to help out by  giving them an extra Marine. I learned by speaking with him and other Marines the night before that he frequently put his safety, reputation and
career on the line for the needs and morale of the junior Marines around him.
 
When we reached the fourth house, we breached the gate and swiftly approached the building. The first Marine in the stack kicked in the front
door, revealing a locked door to their front and another at the right.

Kicking in the doors simultaneously, one stack filed swiftly into the room to the front as the other group of Marines darted off to the right.

"Clear!" screamed the Marines in one of the rooms followed only seconds
later by another shout of "clear!" from the second room. One word told us
all we wanted to know about the rooms: there was no one in there to shoot at us.
 
We found that the two rooms were adjoined and we had another closed door in front of us. We spread ourselves throughout the rooms to avoid a cluster going through the next door.
 
Two Marines stacked to the left of the door as Peralta, rifle in hand, tested the handle. I watched from the middle, slightly off to the right of the room as the handle turned with ease.
 
Ready to rush into the rear part of the house, Peralta threw open the door.

'POP! POP! POP!' Multiple bursts of cap-gun-like sounding AK-47 fire rang  throughout the house.

Three insurgents with AK-47s were waiting for us behind the door.
 
Peralta was hit several times in his upper torso and face at point-blank range by the fully-automatic 7.62mm weapons employed by three terrorists.
 
Mortally wounded, he jumped into the already cleared, adjoining room,  giving the rest of us a clear line of fire through the doorway to the rear
of the house.
 
We opened fire, adding the bangs of M-16A2 service rifles, and the deafening, rolling cracks of a Squad Automatic Weapon, or "SAW," to the
already nerve-racking sound of the AKs. One Marine was shot through the forearm and continued to fire at the enemy.

I fired until Marines closer to the door began to maneuver into better firing positions, blocking my line of fire. Not being an infantryman, I watched to see what those with more extensive training were doing.
 
I saw four Marines firing from the adjoining room when a yellow, foreign-made, oval-shaped grenade bounced into the room, rolling to a stop close to Peralta's nearly lifeless body.
 
In an act living up to the heroes of the Marine Corps' past, such as Medal  of Honor recipients Pfc. James LaBelle and Lance Cpl. Richard Anderson,
Peralta - in his last fleeting moments of consciousness- reached out and pulled the grenade into his body. LaBelle fought on Iwo Jima and Anderson in Vietnam, both died saving their fellow Marines by smothering the blast of enemy grenades.

Peralta did the same for all of us in those rooms.  I watched in fear and horror as the other four Marines scrambled to the corners of the room and the majority of the blast was absorbed by Peralta's now lifeless body. His selflessness left four other Marines with only minor injuries from smaller fragments of the grenade.
 
During the fight, a fire was sparked in the rear of the house. The flames
were becoming visible through the door.
 
The decision was made by the Marine in charge of the squad to evacuate the injured Marines from the house, regroup and return to finish the fight and retrieve Peralta's body.
 
We quickly ran for shelter, three or four houses up the street, in a house that had already been cleared and was occupied by the squad's platoon.

As Staff Sgt. Jacob M. Murdock took a count of the Marines coming back, he found it to be one man short, and demanded to know the whereabouts of the missing Marine.
 
"Sergeant Peralta! He's dead! He's f------ dead," screamed Lance Cpl. Adam Morrison, a machine gunner with the squad, as he came around a corner.  "He's still in there. We have to go back."
 
The ingrained code Marines have of never leaving a man behind drove the next few moments. Within seconds, we headed back to the house unknown what we may encounter yet ready for another round.

I don't remember walking back down the street or through the gate in front of the house, but walking through the door the second time, I prayed that we wouldn't lose another brother.
 
We entered the house and met no resistance. We couldn't clear the rest of the house because the fire had grown immensely and the danger of the enemy's weapons cache exploding in the house was increasing by the second.
 
Most of us provided security while Peralta's body was removed from the
house.
 
We carried him back to our rally point and upon returning were told that
the other Marines who went to support us encountered and killed the three
insurgents from inside the house.

Later that night, while I was thinking about the day's somber events, Cpl.
Richard A. Mason, an infantryman with Headquarters Platoon, who, in the short time I was with the company became a good friend, told me, "You're
still here, don't forget that. Tell your kids, your grandkids, what Sgt. Peralta did for you and the other Marines today."
 
As a combat correspondent, this is not only my job, but an honor.

Throughout Operation Al Fajr, we were constantly being told that we were
making history, but if the books never mention this battle in the future,
I'm sure that the day and the sacrifice that was made, will never be forgotten by the Marines who were there.

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

"The dumb grunt is an anachronism. He has been replaced by the strategic corporal."      

       July 20, 2004
       OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
       Don't Dumb Down the Military
       By NATHANIEL FICK

       WASHINGTON ? I went to war as a believer in the citizen-soldier. My
college study of the classics idealized Greeks who put down their plows for
swords, returning to their fields at the end of the war. As a Marine officer
in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, I learned that the victors on today's
battlefields are long-term, professional soldiers. Thus the increasing calls
for reinstating the draft - and the bills now before Congress that would do
so - are well intentioned but misguided. Imposing a draft on the military I
served in would harm it grievously for years.

       I led platoons of volunteers. In Afghanistan, my marines slept each
night in holes they hacked from the rocky ground. They carried hundred-pound
packs in addition to their fears of minefields and ambushes, their
homesickness, loneliness and exhaustion. The most junior did it for $964.80
per month. They didn't complain, and I never wrestled with discipline
problems. Each and every marine wanted to be there. If anyone hadn't, he
would have been a drain on the platoon and a liability in combat.

       In Iraq, I commanded a reconnaissance platoon, the Marines' special
operations force. Many of my enlisted marines were college-educated; some
had been to graduate school. All had volunteered once for the Marines, again
for the infantry, and a third time for recon. They were proud to serve as
part of an elite unit. Like most demanding professionals, they were their
own harshest critics, intolerant of their peers whose performance fell
short.

       The dumb grunt is an anachronism. He has been replaced by the
strategic corporal. Immense firepower and improved technology have pushed
decision-making with national consequences down to individual enlisted men.
Modern warfare requires that even the most junior infantryman master a wide
array of technical and tactical skills.

       Honing these skills to reflex, a prerequisite for survival in combat,
takes time - a year of formal training and another year of on-the-job
experience were generally needed to transform my young marines into
competent warriors. The Marine Corps demands four-year active enlistments
because it takes that long to train troops and ensure those training dollars
are put to use in the field. One- or two-year terms, the longest that would
be likely under conscription, would simply not allow for this comprehensive
training.

       Some supporters of the draft argue that America's wars are being
fought primarily by minorities from poor families who enlisted in the
economic equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. They insist that the sacrifices of
citizenship be shared by all Americans. The sentiment is correct, but the
outrage is misplaced. There is no cannon-fodder underclass in the military.
In fact, front-line combat troops are a near-perfect reflection of American
male society.

       Yes, some minority men and women enlist for lack of other options, but
they tend to concentrate in support jobs where they can learn marketable
skills like driving trucks or fixing jets, not throwing grenades and setting
up interlocking fields of machine gun fire. African-Americans, who comprise
nearly 13 percent of the general population, are overrepresented in the
military at more than 19 percent - but they account for only 10.6 percent of
infantry soldiers, the group that suffers most in combat. Hispanics, who
make up 13.3 percent of the American population, are underrepresented at
only 11 percent of those in uniform.

       The men in my infantry platoons came from virtually every part of the
socio-economic spectrum. There were prep-school graduates and
first-generation immigrants, blacks and whites, Muslims and Jews, Democrats
and Republicans. They were more diverse than my class at Dartmouth, and far
more willing to act on their principles.

       The second argument most often advanced for a renewed draft is that
the military is too small to meet its commitments. Absolutely true. But the
armed forces are stretched thin not from a lack of volunteers but because
Congress and the Pentagon are not willing to spend the money to expand the
force. Each of the services met or exceeded its recruiting goals in 2003,
and the numbers have increased across the board so far this year. Even the
Army National Guard, often cited as the abused beast of burden in Iraq, has
seen re-enlistments soar past its goal, 65 percent, to 141 percent (the
figure is greater than 100 because many guardsmen are re-enlisting early).

       Expanding the military to meet additional responsibilities is a matter
of structural change: if we build it, they will come. And build it we must.
Many of my marines are already on their third combat deployment in the
global war on terrorism; they will need replacing. Increasing the size of
the active-duty military would lighten the burden on every soldier, sailor,
airman and marine. Paradoxically, a larger military becomes more sustainable
than a smaller one: fewer combat deployments improves service members'
quality of life and contributes to higher rates of enlistment and retention.
For now, expanding the volunteer force would give us a larger military
without the inherent liabilities of conscription.

       And while draft supporters insist we have learned the lessons of
Vietnam and can create a fair system this time around, even an equitable
draft would lower the standards for enlistees. Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld was chastised for saying Vietnam-era draftees added no value to the
armed forces. But his error was semantic; the statement was true of the
system, if not of the patriotic and capable individuals who served.

       The current volunteer force rejects applicants who score poorly on its
entrance aptitude exam, disclose a history of significant drug use or suffer
from any of a number of orthopedic or chronic injuries. Face it: any
unwilling draftee could easily find a way to fail any of these tests. The
military, then, would be left either to abandon its standards and accept all
comers, or to remain true to them and allow the draft to become volunteerism
by another name. Stripped of its volunteer ideology, but still unable to
compel service from dissenters, the military would end up weaker and less
representative than the volunteer force - the very opposite of the draft's
intended goals.

       Renewing the draft would be a blow against the men and women in
uniform, a dumbing down of the institution they serve. The United States
military exists to win battles, not to test social policy. Enlarging the
volunteer force would show our soldiers that Americans recognize their
hardship and are willing to pay the bill to help them better protect the
nation. My view of the citizen-soldier was altered, but not destroyed, in
combat. We cannot all pick up the sword, nor should we be forced to - but we
owe our support to those who do.


       Nathaniel Fick, a former Marine captain, is writing a memoir of his
military training and combat experience.



       Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

BANGKOK, Feb 17 (Reuters) - Flick open the menu at the "Barbara" in central Bangkok and a picture of a blonde woman unwrapping her dressing gown beside a picture of fried garlic prawns tells you it is no ordinary restaurant.

"Truth is often stranger than fiction," the menu reads -- a better description of Chuwit Kamolvisit, owner of the coffee shop and adjoining massage parlour, than of the dishes on offer.

An accountant who graduated from one of Thailand's most prestigious universities, Chuwit has made millions since hopping a decade ago from the property business to the sex industry, one of the few areas unscathed by Asia's 1997-1998 economic crisis.

After a series of publicity stunts to expose corruption, a short jail term and a kidnapping he blames on bent policemen, the self-styled "massage parlour king" is plotting to become Bangkok governor in August elections likely to centre on morals.

Alarmed that nearly a third of Thais lose their virginity before they are 18, the government is ratcheting up a social order crusade popular with the middle class. It is considering a 10 p.m. curfew for teenagers and whether to shut nightclubs two hours earlier at midnight.

Chuwit has led sex industry employees on protests against the plans, which he says will ruin Bangkok as a tourist magnet. He dismisses establishment politicians as hypocrites.

"We don't need dinosaurs," Chuwit said. "And I know secrets about them no one else knows. They used to come here all the time before, but then suddenly they became family men overnight."

A musty office in a warren of bedrooms at the Copacabana, one of Chuwit's six massage parlours, serves as campaign headquarters for his First Thai Nation Party.

A golden Buddha image sits on one shelf and on another is a photograph of five women in evening dress draped over a portly, moustached Chuwit sporting a flowered Hawaiian shirt.

Windows are plastered with "We love Chuwit" stickers that will take an anti-corruption message to voters in the hope of upsetting candidates put up by the governing and main opposition parties.

The central plank of Chuwit's policy is to cut police numbers drastically to keep the men in uniform busy fighting crime rather than pushing paper.

He is undeterred by polls giving him just under five per cent of public support. Chuwit's nemesis, Deputy Prime Minister Purachai Piumsombun, who heads the government's social order drive, leads with 36.7 per cent.

CLEANING "DIRTY PEOPLE"

"I'm in the massage parlour industry. I clean bodies," Chuwit said. "And in politics, I'm going to clean some dirty people. I want to make Bangkok a city of happiness, a city of joy."

But Chuwit now wants to get out of the lucrative massage business because he has fallen foul of the police and they are making life difficult.

Undercover police had sex with five masseuses at a club last September and arrested them for prostitution -- dubbed the "get laid and raid" sting by Thai newspapers. Another club was shut down because it had more rooms than its licence allowed.

A bribe would have done the trick in the past, but the police now only take them from others and shun him, Chuwit said.

Chuwit's relations with the police began to deteriorate at the beginning of last year, when they arrested him for sending men to bulldoze bars on land he owns in central Bangkok.

He argues a company that sublet the land evicted the out-of-contract tenants. The case is still pending in court.

Angry at his treatment, Chuwit told reporters he had been paying high-ranking officers 12 million baht ($300,000) a month to keep his massage parlours up and running -- an accusation the police have denied vehemently.

Thais were stunned, but only because the claims were so open. Surveys showed 60 per cent of the public lost their already low levels of confidence in the police but many believed Chuwit's comments would shame them into reducing corruption.

Then Chuwit disappeared, to be found staggering but unharmed by a truck driver two days later. He insists he was drugged and abducted, but police say it was just another publicity stunt.

"I was kidnapped by four guys. They said 'stay cool, don't talk anymore'," Chuwit said. "It was absolutely the police. They didn't ask for money, they just wanted me to stop talking."

INTO THE GOLD FISH BOWL

The publicity caused a 70 per cent fall in Thai clientele at Chuwit-owned Victoria's Secret, Emanuelle and Honolulu, but Hong Kong and Singapore businessmen still flock there, he said.

In the "good old days" Chuwit was making 30 million baht profit a month from each massage parlour, which all gave a full return on investment within two years.

But Chuwit's clubs, in a busy area of Bangkok housing embassies and investment banks, still receive dozens of job applications a day from budding masseuses.

Next to the account books on Chuwit's desk, one form marked "approved", came with the comments: "Average body, yellowish skin, good-looking, nice manner, beautiful breasts".

At 2,000 baht for a basic jacuzzi and massage, a masseuse could make around 80,000 baht a month before tips for "extras", if she had three clients a day, Chuwit said.

A police sergeant's monthly salary is around 10,000 baht.

"You have to face the fact that Thailand's still a poor country. If people could earn enough, no one would sleep with someone they didn't know," Chuwit said.

"I tell the girls to save, but they have to send money to parents, aunts and uncles because they are the only earners."

With business down, only a dozen women with numbered tags sit on the red velvet steps in the "gold fish bowl", waiting for men to appear on the otherside of the glass wall to make a choice.

One offers a tour of Copacabana's suites, some with three bedrooms with jacuzzis and saunas, that open onto a living room with large-screen television and a dining table.

She opened a door to a "special" room, with two giant four-poster beds and two adjacent bath tubs, and giggled: "I don't know why, but this room is really popular with policemen."

Myanmar: The case against sanctions
By Nelson Rand

BANGKOK - When US Senator Mitch McConnell stood before the Senate last week to propose new legislation that will ban all US imports from Myanmar, he stated bluntly, "It's time for tyrants to fear in Burma."

But will they?

"Total US imports from Burma are not extensive, about US$356 million in 2002," said Harry Clark, a US lawyer and expert on export-control laws. "Given the limited trade levels between the United States and Burma, [tougher] sanctions would not have a major impact on the Burmese economy.

"They would presumably have a substantial impact on a relatively few US companies that rely heavily on Burmese imports," he said.

According to the US Census Bureau, US imports from Myanmar last year totaled $356.4 million. In comparison, Myanmar's natural-gas exports last year were more than double that figure, bringing in $846 million to the cashed-starve junta, according to a recent report in the Chinese People's Daily.

Border trade in timber, gems and seafood with Myanmar's neighbors - mainly China, Thailand and Malaysia - is largely unofficial and is hard to get reliable figures on. The Thai Farmers Bank estimates that Thai imports from Myanmar on border trade alone was worth $389.4 million in the first six months of 2002.

The isolationist regime in Myanmar has never relied heavily on the international community for commerce and trade.

So as Washington and the European Union step up pressure on the generals in Yangon to release opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and implement democratic reforms in the country, the question remains: Just how effective will tougher sanctions be against the junta to bring political change to the country?

Proposed new US sanctions, which US President George W Bush is expected to sign into law, would include banning all imports made in Myanmar and companies owned by Myanmar's rulers, freezing assets of Myanmar's rulers in US banks, directing US representatives to international financial institutions to oppose lending to Myanmar, and expanding the visa blacklist on Myanmar's rulers to the United States. This is in addition to the current investment ban and arms embargo implemented by the administration of president Bill Clinton in 1997.

Most analysts and economists agree that unless China, Singapore and Thailand - Myanmar's three largest trading partners - follow Washington's lead and restrict trade, sanctions just won't deliver the knockout punch to the regime. There is no indication that China, Singapore and Thailand will.

Retired World Bank economist Bradley Babson told the Far Eastern Economic Review for its June 19 edition that Myanmar's generals will not change their behavior because of tougher sanctions. He said the burden would fall mainly on the estimated 350,000 textile workers in the country.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer also believes that tougher sanctions will be of little effect to bring change in Myanmar. "America has taken the sanctions route in the past," he told reporters on Wednesday at the Association for Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum (ARF) in Phnom Penh. "Those sanctions haven't worked, haven't changed anything in Burma."

In the past 10 years, Washington has imposed sanctions on at least 35 countries, which in most cases have done little except to make the situation worse for the people in those countries. Critics say sanctions are incapable of achieving significant results within the timeframe of foreign-policy goals. Just look at Iraq. Thirteen years of sanctions wasn't enough to topple Saddam Hussein. Only a decisive military invasion accomplished that.

"US unilateral sanctions have a poor record with regard to advancing US foreign-policy goals," said legal expert Clark. "Current sanctions [on Myanmar] plainly are not 'working' in the sense that they have not induced [Myanmar's] military dictatorship to adopt policies and practices that satisfy minimum international human-rights standards."

So what will tougher US sanctions on Myanmar accomplish? Probably not much of anything, says William A Reinsch, president of the US National Foreign Trade Council, a corporate-backed organization.

He said it's a "lose lose lose" situation for the junta, US companies and the Myanmese people. For US importers, it's more of an inconvenience than anything, he said.

"Burma is not unique. Lots of countries produce their products. If [US companies] can't buy shoes from Burma, they will say 'Fine, we'll try Pakistan or Bangladesh or Thailand.'

"It's the Burmese people I feel sorry for," he said.

Supporters of sanctions argue that since the junta controls the nation's economy, any restriction on trade hurts the government. Isolation - not engagement - is also the preferred course of action that Suu Kyi urges the international community to take on Myanmar.

Many US giants have pulled out of Myanmar in recent years, including Wal-Mart, Adidas, and Tommy Hilfiger, bowing to pressure from human-rights groups.

"We are hopeful that sanctions will increase pressure on the regime and that other [countries] will also participate in this," said Steve Lamar, senior vice president of the American Apparel and Footwear Association - a staunch supporter of boycotting Myanmar. "Engagement is preferable, but it is clear that this is a regime that does not respond to the norms of engagement."

Clark maintains that although the economic impact on tougher sanctions against Myanmar would be minimal, the political impact on such sanctions may be more significant.

"The proposed sanctions represent more of a political gesture than an economic tool," he said. "At the same time, my sense is that Burma's junta has, at various points, moderated its policies and practices somewhat in response to international pressure."

For now, as Myanmar's ruling generals remain defiant in the face of international pressure to release Suu Kyi and restore national reconciliation talks, it seems the big losers are still the poverty-stricken people of Myanmar.

(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)