Fire Hydrant of Freedom

This from today's Left Angeles Times:
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Guardsmen Say They're Facing Iraq Ill-Trained

Troops from California describe a prison-like, demoralized camp in New Mexico that's short on gear and setting them up for high casualties.
 
By Scott Gold, Times Staff Writer


DO?A ANA RANGE, N.M. ? Members of a California Army National Guard battalion preparing for deployment to Iraq said this week that they were under strict lockdown and being treated like prisoners rather than soldiers by Army commanders at the remote desert camp where they are training.

More troubling, a number of the soldiers said, is that the training they have received is so poor and equipment shortages so prevalent that they fear their casualty rate will be needlessly high when they arrive in Iraq early next year. "We are going to pay for this in blood," one soldier said.
 
They said they believed their treatment and training reflected an institutional bias against National Guard troops by commanders in the active-duty Army, an allegation that Army commanders denied.

The 680 soldiers of the 1st Battalion of the 184th Infantry Regiment were activated in August and are preparing for deployment at Do?a Ana, a former World War II prisoner-of-war camp 20 miles west of its large parent base, Ft. Bliss, Texas.

Members of the battalion, headquartered in Modesto, said in two dozen interviews that they were allowed no visitors or travel passes, had scant contact with their families and that morale was terrible.

"I feel like an inmate with a weapon," said Cpl. Jajuane Smith, 31, a six-year Guard veteran from Fresno who works for an armored transport company when not on active duty.

Several soldiers have fled Do?a Ana by vaulting over rolls of barbed wire that surround the small camp, the soldiers interviewed said. Others, they said, are contemplating going AWOL, at least temporarily, to reunite with their families for Thanksgiving.

Army commanders said the concerns were an inevitable result of the decision to shore up the strained military by turning "citizen soldiers" into fully integrated, front-line combat troops. About 40% of the troops in Iraq are either reservists or National Guard troops.

Lt. Col. Michael Hubbard of Ft. Bliss said the military must confine the soldiers largely to Do?a Ana to ensure that their training is complete before they are sent to Iraq.

"A lot of these individuals are used to doing this two days a month and then going home," Hubbard said. "Now the job is 24/7. And they experience culture shock."

But many of the soldiers interviewed said the problems they cited went much deeper than culture shock.

And military analysts agree that tensions between active-duty Army soldiers and National Guard troops have been exacerbated as the war in Iraq has required dangerous and long-term deployments of both.

The concerns of the Guard troops at Do?a Ana represent the latest in a series of incidents involving allegations that a two-tier system has shortchanged reservist and National Guard units compared with their active-duty counterparts.

In September, a National Guard battalion undergoing accelerated training at Ft. Dix, N.J., was confined to barracks for two weeks after 13 soldiers reportedly went AWOL to see family before shipping out for Iraq.

Last month, an Army National Guard platoon at Camp Shelby, Miss., refused its orders after voicing concerns about training conditions and poor leadership.

In the most highly publicized incident, in October, more than two dozen Army reservists in Iraq refused to drive a fuel convoy to a town north of Baghdad after arguing that the trucks they had been given were not armored for combat duty.

At Do?a Ana, soldiers have questioned their commanders about conditions at the camp, occasionally breaking the protocol of formation drills to do so. They said they had been told repeatedly that they could not be trusted because they were not active-duty soldiers ? though many of them are former active-duty soldiers.

"I'm a cop. I've got a career, a house, a family, a college degree," said one sergeant, who lives in Southern California and spoke, like most of the soldiers, on condition of anonymity.

"I came back to the National Guard specifically to go to Baghdad, because I believed in it, believed in the mission. But I have regretted every day of it. This is demoralizing, demeaning, degrading. And we're supposed to be ambassadors to another country? We're supposed to go to war like this?"

Pentagon and Army commanders rejected the allegation that National Guard or reserve troops were prepared for war differently than their active-duty counterparts.

"There is no difference," said Lt. Col. Chris Rodney, an Army spokesman in Washington. "We are, more than ever, one Army. Some have to come from a little farther back ? they have a little less training. But the goal is to get everybody the same."

The Guard troops at Do?a Ana were scheduled to train for six months before beginning a yearlong deployment. They recently learned, however, that the Army planned to send them overseas a month early ? in January, most likely ? as it speeds up troop movement to compensate for a shortage of full-time, active-duty troops.

Hubbard, the officer at Ft. Bliss, also said conditions at Do?a Ana were designed to mirror the harsh and often thankless assignments the soldiers would take on in Iraq. That was an initiative launched by Brig. Gen. Joseph Chavez, commander of the 29th Separate Infantry Brigade, which includes the 184th Regiment.

The program has resulted in everything from an alcohol ban to armed guards at the entrance to Do?a Ana, Hubbard said.

"We are preparing you and training you for what you're going to encounter over there," Hubbard said. "And they just have to get used to it."

Military analysts, however, questioned whether the soldiers' concerns could be attributed entirely to the military's attempt to mirror conditions in Iraq. For example, the soldiers say that an ammunition shortage has meant that they have often conducted operations firing blanks.

"The Bush administration had over a year of planning before going to war in Iraq," said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who has acted as a defense lawyer in military courts. "An ammunition shortage is not an exercise in tough love."

Turley said that in every military since Alexander the Great's, there have been "gripes from grunts" but that "the complaints raised by these National Guardsmen raise some significant and troubling concerns."

The Guard troops in New Mexico said they wanted more sophisticated training and better equipment. They said they had been told, for example, that the vehicles they would drive in Iraq would not be armored, a common complaint among their counterparts already serving overseas.

They also said the bulk of their training had been basic, such as first aid and rifle work, and not "theater-specific" to Iraq. They are supposed to be able to use night-vision goggles, for instance, because many patrols in Iraq take place in darkness. But one group of 200 soldiers trained for just an hour with 30 pairs of goggles, which they had to pass around quickly, soldiers said.

The soldiers said they had received little or no training for operations that they expected to undertake in Iraq, from convoy protection to guarding against insurgents' roadside bombs. One said he has put together a diary of what he called "wasted days" of training. It lists 95 days, he said, during which the soldiers learned nothing that would prepare them for Iraq.

Hubbard had said he would make two field commanders available on Tuesday to answer specific questions from the Los Angeles Times about the training, but that did not happen.

The fact that the National Guardsmen have undergone largely basic training suggests that Army commanders do not trust their skills as soldiers, said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. That tension underscores a divide that has long existed between "citizen soldiers" and their active-duty counterparts, he said.

"These soldiers should be getting theater-specific training," Segal said. "This should not be an area where they are getting on-the-job training. The military is just making a bad situation worse."

The soldiers at Do?a Ana emphasized their support for the war in Iraq. "In fact, a lot of us would rather go now rather than stay here," said one, a specialist and six-year National Guard veteran who works as a security guard in his civilian life in Southern California.

The soldiers also said they were risking courts-martial or other punishment by speaking publicly about their situation. But Staff Sgt. Lorenzo Dominguez, 45, one of the soldiers who allowed his identity to be revealed, said he feared that if nothing changed, men in his platoon would be killed in Iraq.

Dominguez is a father of two ? including a 13-month-old son named Reagan, after the former president ? and an employee of a mortgage bank in Alta Loma, Calif. A senior squad leader of his platoon, Dominguez said he had been in the National Guard for 20 years.

"Some of us are going to die there, and some of us are going to die unnecessarily because of the lack of training," he said. "So I don't care. Let them court-martial me. I want the American public to know what is going on. My men are guilty of one thing: volunteering to serve their country. And we are at the end of our rope."

Another case from Mexico.  I am much less in touch with matters in Mexico than I used to be, but have heard of cases of kidnapping gangs involving police.  This may or may not be a part of the dynamics of this affair.
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THE WORLD
Angry Mob Kills 2 Police Officers in Mexico

Crowd upset about child abductions attacks three undercover agents taking students' photos.
 
From Associated Press

MEXICO CITY ? A crowd angry about recent child kidnappings cornered plainclothes federal agents taking photos of students at a school on Mexico City's outskirts Tuesday and burned the officers alive.

Officials said two agents were killed and one was hospitalized.
 
Federal police director Adm. Jose Luis Figueroa told local media that the three agents went to the school in an unmarked car as part of an anti-drug-dealing operation.

The killings, filmed and broadcast on local television stations, were carried out by a crowd of people who cheered, chanted and shouted obscenities as they kicked and beat the agents. The mob then dowsed two officers with gasoline and set them ablaze.

Police didn't make any immediate arrests; officials said they were investigating.

In the video, the agents, blood streaming down their faces, spoke into the cameras before the burning, saying they were federal anti-terrorism agents who had been sent to the area on official business.

The mob held the agents for several hours before killing them. Figueroa said heavy traffic and residents who blocked authorities from moving kept police from responding in time.

The surviving agent, badly beaten, was rescued by police.

Images taken from a helicopter showed dozens of residents milling around the two burned bodies left in a street. Dozens of police in riot gear moved in more than an hour later and dispersed the crowd.

The violence began in the early evening, when several people collared three men staking out a school in the San Juan Ixtlayopan neighborhood.

The area has been tense since two youngsters disappeared and were feared kidnapped from the school. Some in the crowd appeared to believe the agents were kidnappers.

When asked about complaints that authorities had failed to respond to demands to investigate the disappearances, Figueroa said a full schedule had prohibited federal authorities from concentrating on the case.

November 21, 2004

In Falluja, Young Marines Saw the Savagery of an Urban War


By DEXTER FILKINS

New York Times


ALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 18 - Eight days after the Americans entered the city
on foot, a pair of marines wound their way up the darkened innards of a
minaret, shot through with holes by an American tank.

As the marines inched upward, a burst of gunfire rang down, fired by an
insurgent hiding in the top of the tower. The bullets hit the first
marine in the face, his blood spattering the marine behind him. The
marine in the rear tumbled backward down the stairwell, while Lance Cpl.
William Miller, age 22, lay in silence halfway up, mortally wounded.

"Miller!" the marines called from below. "Miller!"

With that, the marines' near mystical commandment against leaving a
comrade behind seized the group. One after another, the young marines
dashed into the minaret, into darkness and into gunfire, and wound their
way up the stairs.

After four attempts, Corporal Miller's lifeless body emerged from the
tower, his comrades choking and covered with dust. With more insurgents
closing in, the marines ran through volleys of machine-gun fire back to
their base.

"I was trying to be careful, but I was trying to get him out, you know
what I'm saying?" Lance Cpl. Michael Gogin, 19, said afterward.

So went eight days of combat for this Iraqi city, the most sustained
period of street-to-street fighting that Americans have encountered
since the Vietnam War. The proximity gave the fighting a hellish
intensity, with soldiers often close enough to look their enemies in the
eyes.

For a correspondent who has covered a half dozen armed conflicts,
including the war in Iraq since its start in March 2003, the fighting
seen while traveling with a frontline unit in Falluja was a
qualitatively different experience, a leap into a different kind of
battle.

>From the first rockets vaulting out of the city as the marines moved in,
the noise and feel of the battle seemed altogether extraordinary; at
other times, hardly real at all. The intimacy of combat, this plunge
into urban warfare, was new to this generation of American soldiers, but
it is a kind of fighting they will probably see again: a grinding
struggle to root out guerrillas entrenched in a city, on streets marked
in a language few American soldiers could comprehend.

The price for the Americans so far: 51 dead and 425 wounded, a number
that may yet increase but that already exceeds the toll from any battle
in the Iraq war.

Marines in Harm's Way

The 150 marines with whom I traveled, Bravo Company of the First
Battalion, Eighth Marines, had it as tough as any unit in the fight.
They moved through the city almost entirely on foot, into the heart of
the resistance, rarely protected by tanks or troop carriers, working
their way through Falluja's narrow streets with 75-pound packs on their
backs.

In eight days of fighting, Bravo Company took 36 casualties, including 6
dead, meaning that the unit's men had about a one-in-four chance of
being wounded or killed in little more than a week.

The sounds, sights and feel of the battle were as old as war itself, and
as new as the Pentagon's latest weapons systems. The eerie pop from the
cannon of the AC-130 gunship, prowling above the city at night, firing
at guerrillas who were often only steps away from Americans on the
ground. The weird buzz of the Dragon Eye pilotless airplane, hovering
over the battlefield as its video cameras beamed real-time images back
to the base.

The glow of the insurgents' flares, throwing daylight over a landscape
to help them spot their targets: us.

The nervous shove of a marine scrambling for space along a brick wall as
tracer rounds ricocheted above.

The silence between the ping of the shell leaving its mortar tube and
the explosion when it strikes.

The screams of the marines when one of their comrades, Cpl. Jake
Knospler, lost part of his jaw to a hand grenade.

"No, no, no!" the marines shouted as they dragged Corporal Knospler from
the darkened house where the bomb went off. It was 2 a.m., the sky dark
without a moon. "No, no, no!"

Nothing in the combat I saw even remotely resembled the scenes regularly
flashed across movie screens; even so, they often seemed no more real.

Mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades began raining down on Bravo
Company the moment its men began piling out of their troop carriers just
outside Falluja. The shells looked like Fourth of July bottle rockets,
sailing over the ridge ahead as if fired by children, exploding in a
whoosh of sparks.

Whole buildings, minarets and human beings were vaporized in barrages of
exploding shells. A man dressed in a white dishdasha crawled across a
desolate field, reaching behind a gnarled plant to hide, when he
collapsed before a burst of fire from an American tank.

Sometimes the casualties came in volleys, like bursts of machine-gun
fire. On the first morning of battle, during a ferocious struggle for
the Muhammadia Mosque, about 45 marines with Bravo Company's Third
Platoon dashed across 40th Street, right into interlocking streams of
fire. By the time the platoon made it to the other side, five men lay
bleeding in the street.

The marines rushed out to get them, as they would days later in the
minaret, but it was too late for Sgt. Lonny Wells, who bled to death on
the side of the road. One of the men who braved gunfire to pull in
Sergeant Wells was Cpl. Nathan Anderson, who died three days later in an
ambush.

Sergeant Wells's death dealt the Third Platoon a heavy blow; as a leader
of one of its squads, he had written letters to the parents of its
younger members, assuring them he would look over them during the tour
in Iraq.

"He loved playing cards," Cpl. Gentian Marku recalled. "He knew all the
probabilities."

More than once, death crept up and snatched a member of Bravo Company
and quietly slipped away. Cpl. Nick Ziolkowski, nicknamed Ski, was a
Bravo Company sniper. For hours at a stretch, Corporal Ziolkowski would
sit on a rooftop, looking through the scope on his bolt-action M-40
rifle, waiting for guerrillas to step into his sights. The scope was big
and wide, and Corporal Ziolkowski often took off his helmet to get a
better look.

Tall, good-looking and gregarious, Corporal Ziolkowski was one of Bravo
Company's most popular soldiers. Unlike most snipers, who learned to
shoot growing up in the countryside, Corporal Ziolkowski grew up near
Baltimore, unfamiliar with guns. Though Baltimore boasts no beach front,
Corporal Ziolkowski's passion was surfing; at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Bravo
Company's base, he would often organize his entire day around the tides.

"All I need now is a beach with some waves," Corporal Ziolkowski said,
during a break from his sniper duties at Falluja's Grand Mosque, where
he killed three men in a single day.

During that same break, Corporal Ziolkowski foretold his own death. The
snipers, he said, were now among the most hunted of American soldiers.

In the first battle for Falluja, in April, American snipers had been
especially lethal, Corporal Ziolkowski said, and intelligence officers
had warned him that this time, the snipers would be targets.

"They are trying to take us out," Corporal Ziolkowski said.

The bullet knocked Corporal Ziolkowski backward and onto the roof. He
had been sitting there on the outskirts of the Shuhada neighborhood, an
area controlled by insurgents, peering through his wide scope. He had
taken his helmet off to get a better view. The bullet hit him in the
head.

Young Men, Heavy Burdens

For all the death about the place, one inescapable impression left by
the marines was their youth. Everyone knows that soldiers are young; it
is another thing to see men barely out of adolescence, many of whom were
still in high school when this war began, shoot people dead.

The marines of Bravo Company often fought over the packets of M&M's that
came with their rations. Sitting in their barracks, they sang along with
the Garth Brooks paean to chewing tobacco, "Copenhagen," named for the
brand they bought almost to a man:

Copenhagen, what a wad of flavor

Copenhagen, you can see it in my smile

Copenhagen, hey do yourself a favor, dip

Copenhagen, it drives the cowgirls wild

One of Bravo Company's more youthful members was Cpl. Romulo Jimenez II,
age 21 from Bellington, W.Va.. Cpl. Jimenez spent much of his time
showing off his tattoos - he had flames climbing up one of his arms -
and talking about his 1992 Ford Mustang. He was a popular member of
Bravo Company's Second Platoon, not least because he introduced his
sister to a fellow marine, Lance Cpl. Sean Evans, and the couple
married.

In the days before the battle started, Corporal Jimenez called his
sister, Katherine, to ask that she fix up the interior of his Mustang
before he got home.

"Make it look real nice," he told her.

On Wednesday, Nov. 10, around 2 p.m., Corporal Jimenez was shot in the
neck by a sniper as he advanced with his platoon through the northern
end of Falluja, just near the green-domed Muhammadia Mosque. He died
instantly.

Despite their youth, the marines seemed to tower over their peers
outside the military in maturity and guts. Many of Bravo Company's best
marines, its most proficient killers, were 19 and 20 years old; some
directed their comrades in maneuvers and assaults. Bravo Company's three
lieutenants, each responsible for the lives of about 50 men, were 23 and
24 years old.

They are a strangely anonymous bunch. The men who fight America's wars
seem invariably to come from little towns and medium-size cities far
away from the nation's arteries along the coast. Line up a group of
marines and ask them where they are from, and they will give you a list
of places like Pearland, Tex.; Lodi, Ohio; Osawatomie, Kan.

Typical of the marines who fought in Falluja was Chad Ritchie, a
22-year-old corporal from Keezletown, Va. Corporal Ritchie, a
soft-spoken, bespectacled intelligence officer, said he was happy to be
out of the tiny place where he grew up, though he admitted that he
sometimes missed the good times on Friday nights in the fields.

"We'd have a bonfire, and back the trucks up on it, and open up the
backs, and someone would always have some speakers," Corporal Ritchie
said. "We'd drink beer, tell stories."

Like many of the young men in Bravo Company, Corporal Ritchie said he
had joined the Marines because he yearned for an adventure greater than
his small town could offer.

"The guys who stayed, they're all living with their parents, making $7
an hour," Corporal Ritchie said. "I'm not going to be one of those
people who gets old and says, 'I wish I had done this. I wish I had done
that.' Every once in a while, you've got to do something hard, do
something you're not comfortable with. A person needs a gut check."

Holding Up Under Fire

Marines like Corporal Ritchie proved themselves time and again in
Falluja, but they were not without fear. While camped out one night in
the Iraqi National Guard building in the middle of city, Bravo Company
came under mortar fire that grew closer with each shot. The insurgents
were "bracketing" the building, firing shots to the left and right of
the target and adjusting their fire each time.

In the hallways, where the men had camped for the night, the murmured
sounds of prayers rose between the explosions. After 20 tries, the
shelling inexplicably stopped.

On one particularly grim night, a group of marines from Bravo Company's
First Platoon turned a corner in the darkness and headed up an alley. As
they did so, they came across men dressed in uniforms worn by the Iraqi
National Guard. The uniforms were so perfect that they even carried
pieces of red tape and white, the signal agreed upon to assure American
soldiers that any Iraqis dressed that way would be friendly; the others
could be killed.

The marines, spotting the red and white tape, waved, and the men in
Iraqi uniforms opened fire. One American, Corporal Anderson, died
instantly. One of the wounded men, Pfc. Andrew Russell, lay in the road,
screaming from a nearly severed leg.

A group of marines ran forward into the gunfire to pull their comrades
out. But the ambush, and the enemy flares and gunfire that followed,
rattled the men of Bravo Company more than any event. In the darkness,
the men began to argue. Others stood around in the road. As the
platoon's leader, Lt. Andy Eckert, struggled to take charge, the Third
Platoon seemed on the brink of panic.

"Everybody was scared," Lieutenant Eckert said afterward. "If the leader
can't hold, then the unit can't hold together."

The unit did hold, but only after the intervention of Bravo Company's
commanding officer, Capt. Read Omohundro.

Time and again through the week, Captain Omohundro kept his men from
folding, if not by his resolute manner then by his calmness under fire.
In the first 16 hours of battle, when the combat was continuous and the
threat of death ever present, Captain Omohundro never flinched, moving
his men through the warrens and back alleys of Falluja with an uncanny
sense of space and time, sensing the enemy, sensing the location of his
men, even in the darkness, entirely self-possessed.

"Damn it, get moving," Captain Omohundro said, and his men, looking
relieved that they had been given direction amid the anarchy, were only
too happy to oblige.

A little later, Captain Omohundro, a 34-year-old Texan, allowed that the
strain of the battle had weighed on him, but he said that he had long
ago trained himself to keep any self-doubt hidden from view.

"It's not like I don't feel it," Captain Omohundro said. "But if I were
to show it, the whole thing would come apart."

When the heavy fighting was finally over, a dog began to follow Bravo
Company through Falluja's broken streets. First it lay down in the road
outside one of the buildings the company had occupied, between troop
carriers. Then, as the troops moved on, the mangy dog slinked behind
them, first on a series of house searches, then on a foot patrol, always
keeping its distance, but never letting the marines out of its sight.

Bravo Company, looking a bit ragged itself as it moved up through
Falluja, momentarily fell out of its single-file line.

"Keep a sharp eye," Captain Omohundro told his men. "We ain't done with
this war yet."

Semper Fi
The story of Fallujah isn't on that NBC videotape.

Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

Some 40 Marines have just lost their lives cleaning out one of the world's worst terror dens, in Fallujah, yet all the world wants to talk about is the NBC videotape of a Marine shooting a prostrate Iraqi inside a mosque. Have we lost all sense of moral proportion?

The al-Zarqawi TV network, also known as Al-Jazeera, has broadcast the tape to the Arab world, and U.S. media have also played it up. The point seems to be to conjure up images again of Abu Ghraib, further maligning the American purpose in Iraq. Never mind that the pictures don't come close to telling us about the context of the incident, much less what was on the mind of the soldier after days of combat.

Put yourself in that Marine's boots. He and his mates have had to endure some of the toughest infantry duty imaginable, house-to-house urban fighting against an enemy that neither wears a uniform nor obeys any normal rules of war. Here is how that enemy fights, according to an account in the Times of London:

"In the south of Fallujah yesterday, U.S. Marines found the armless, legless body of a blonde woman, her throat slashed and her entrails cut out. Benjamin Finnell, a hospital apprentice with the U.S. Navy Corps, said that she had been dead for a while, but at that location for only a day or two. The woman was wearing a blue dress; her face had been disfigured. It was unclear if the remains were the body of the Irish-born aid worker Margaret Hassan, 59, or of Teresa Borcz, 54, a Pole abducted two weeks ago. Both were married to Iraqis and held Iraqi citizenship; both were kidnapped in Baghdad last month."

When not disemboweling Iraqi women, these killers hide in mosques and hospitals, booby-trap dead bodies, and open fire as they pretend to surrender. Their snipers kill U.S. soldiers out of nowhere. According to one account, the Marine in the videotape had seen a member of his unit killed by another insurgent pretending to be dead. Who from the safety of his Manhattan sofa has standing to judge what that Marine did in that mosque?

Beyond the one incident, think of what the Marine and Army units just accomplished in Fallujah. In a single week, they killed as many as 1,200 of the enemy and captured 1,000 more. They did this despite forfeiting the element of surprise, so civilians could escape, and while taking precautions to protect Iraqis that no doubt made their own mission more difficult and hazardous. And they did all of this not for personal advantage, and certainly not to get rich, but only out of a sense of duty to their comrades, their mission and their country.

In a more grateful age, this would be hailed as one of the great battles in Marine history--with Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Hue City and the Chosin Reservoir. We'd know the names of these military units, and of many of the soldiers too. Instead, the name we know belongs to the NBC correspondent, Kevin Sites.

We suppose he was only doing his job, too. But that doesn't mean the rest of us have to indulge in the moral abdication that would equate deliberate televised beheadings of civilians with a Marine shooting a terrorist, who may or may not have been armed, amid the ferocity of battle.

LOOKING for a cause with a difference? Adopt a sniper. A Texas police SWAT officer is running a charity for frontline snipers in Iraq and Afghanistan, supplying everything from baby wipes to body armour.
The brainchild of Port Arthur detective and police sniper Brian Sain, Adopt
a Sniper (www.adoptasniper.org) has raised thousands of dollars in cash and gear to supplement the kit of sharp shooters in up to 75 US combat platoons. "Being aware that police snipers often face the same logistical problems as their military counterparts, I assumed correctly that they were doing without things they needed to get their jobs done," Mr Sain said. He contacted US military sniper schools and began sending supplies, tailored to the needs of each sniper, in January.

"People from every walk of life are helping. Once the word got out that a
group of policemen was helping the military and inviting civilian
assistance, it really took off," he said.

Some US soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan spend their own money to supplement equipment issued by the military.

"Snipers need gear that is different than the average airman, marine,
sailor, or soldier," Mr Sain told Reuters via e-mail. "When the snipers
desperately need mission specific gear ... we just try and fill that void."
From the frontlines, snipers are writing to say thanks.
"Your package arrived ... and was met with great fanfare," said a Marine
platoon commander from Afghanistan. "The mini binos (binoculars) will help lighten our load as we continue to spend most of the time chasing the Taliban between 7000-10,000 feet (2100-3050m)."

He went on to ask for supplies of protein bars, Gatorade and dry cleaning
lubricants for guns. Sergeant John, who has been in the army for four-and-a-half years, wrote from Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, where rebels took over some districts this week. "I am always trying to improve my knowledge as a sniper and improve my lethality," he said. "I am proud to be a sniper when I see fellow snipers in the community are back home looking out for us snipers overseas fighting this horrible war on terrorism."

Some write of having to spend their own money buying gear, and of the lack of quality ammunition. "I hate asking for stuff," said one anonymous soldier seeking small binoculars and spotting scopes, "but if you have the means, we can damn sure put them to good use.

"Miscellaneous gear and morale type stuff is of course always welcome. My platoon has 16 guys from all over. Some eat kimchi (Korean national dish), some chew Redman (tobacco). "I can't tell you how much this means to all of us." Adopt a Sniper fills a need for civilians who want to help soldiers in combat but don't know how to, Mr Sain said.

"Unfortunately, due to the enormity of the commitment in Iraq and
Afghanistan, many American snipers are having to spend their own money and have their families try and procure gear and get it to them," Mr Sain said. Supplies are sent directly to individual soldiers and Adopt a Sniper spends as much on shipping as it does on supplies.

"We have been sending everything from baby wipes to body armour and
everything in between. Most of the items are sniper specific such as laser
rangefinders ... wind metres, rifle scopes, weapons maintenance gear, youname it," Mr Sain said.

"www.adoptasniper.org has become a full time secondary job for us," he said.

Reuters

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.

Guerrilla's paradise
Staff correspondent Matthew McAllester goes with members of the 7th Calvary Division into the middle of Fallujah as they fight core rebels

 
 
 

 
 
BY MATTHEW McALLESTER
STAFF CORRESPONDET

November 14, 2004


FALLUJAH, Iraq -- From inside, the sound of an armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenade hitting a Bradley Fighting Vehicle is more tenor than bass, a bang rather than a boom. It produces an immediate cloud of dust and smoke, shakes the entire 30-ton vehicle like an empty beer can and is suddenly over, making the relief of still being alive almost instantaneous and the window of fear negligibly small.

"Go, go, driver, go," Sgt. Calvin Smalley of the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment shouted on the radio, as soon as the explosion happened at 10:30 a.m. on Friday.

Specialist Eric Watson, the driver, said nothing. The vehicle didn't move.

"Is Watson hit?" Smalley shouted.

Suddenly, the Bradley roared into motion, taking off at pace as the gunner pounded the nearby buildings with the high explosive rounds on his 25-mm cannon.

"Hey, Watson, you hurt at all?" asked Sgt. Akram Abdelwahab, 28, speaking into a radio handset from the rear compartment of the Bradley.

"I got shrapnel in my ----," Watson radioed back. He drove on a bit more.

"We got a hole about four inches by four inches," he radioed. "I got shrapnel in my leg and in my ----."

That was Watson's second battle injury. He also was injured in the battle of Najaf in August. That's two Purple Hearts for the 22-year-old from Wirt County, W.Va.

Having established that Watson wasn't seriously injured, his buddies proceeded to roast him over the radio, teasing him as they do on a regular basis -- but this time with a sort of grudging admiration for his stoicism. He didn't suggest once that he wanted medical care, and he kept on driving.

"Hey Watson," Abdelwahab, from Spartanburg, S.C., asked him in a baritone, gravelly Southern drawl, "you missing your boyfriends?"

Although Abdelwahab is of a higher rank, Watson gave him a piece of his mind.

Well-equipped insurgents

The battle of Fallujah took on a menacing new dimension for the American military forces on Friday.

One thing more than any other convinced the 2nd Battalion and other U.S. forces early in the day that the forces they were now fighting in the south of the city are the hardcore of Fallujah's insurgents: They were using expensive and up-to-date armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, and they knew how to fire them accurately and in complex ambush formation. That implied considerable financial resources, efficient arms supplies and military experience and training. It had some military commanders wondering whether the rumors of expert Chechen rebels working as commanders in Fallujah might be true.

In total, four tanks and five Bradleys from the 2nd Battalion were damaged Friday by insurgents. None had been damaged before in the battle.

Commanders said they were happy at the progress of the vehicle-based Army units and the mainly infantry Marines working alongside each other,? but noted that the battle remained intense and hazardous for American and interim Iraqi government forces.

"It was a good fight," said Lt. Col. Jim Rainey, commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion. "Little better fighters, little better equipment."

The upsurge in fighting had come with Friday's sun. Apache and the two other armored companies of the 2nd Battalion had left their base just outside Fallujah at 6 p.m. on Thursday, pushed into town and headed south.

There, in thus-far uncharted territory for the American forces in Fallujah, they had encountered some resistance; but as on previous nights, the insurgents proved that they prefer to fight during the day. At night, the Americans can see the rebels through infrared sights. By day, that advantage is erased.

Fallujah in ruins

The center of Fallujah is a shattered place. Rotting bodies in the street fill the air with the stench of death, which comes and goes with the breeze. Chunks of rubble are strewn along roads and sidewalks. Many stores and homes and other cinderblock buildings have huge holes ripped into them by American shells. Bombs have collapsed many roofs.

The electric and telephone wires that line the streets are now twisted spaghetti. There's no power in town and the moon is a mere sliver right now, so at night, the only thing that lights up the streets is the glow of speeding munitions and explosions.

Cats and dogs are the only casual pedestrians in town. On Thursday night, soldiers in one Bradley watched on their infrared screen as three dogs, showing up as dark figures in the green-and-black world of infrared, tore at the flesh of a dead body.

War-torn Fallujah is a guerrilla's paradise. The rubble and the darkened holes of the town's abandoned shells provide great cover. Narrow alleyways and tight-knit housing help their movement. They appear, shoot and disappear. Actually spotting them is a rarity for most soldiers.

"It was like a shooting gallery at a carnival," said Capt. Ed Twaddell, 30, the commander of Apache company, Friday afternoon. "They pop up, they pop down."

With the fighting increasing in tempo, Twaddell, the other company commanders and Rainey decided to initiate a two-pronged attack in a fresh piece of territory south of a road the Americans have named Isabel. It would begin at noon.

The idea of the combined Army and Marine units at this stage in the battle was to keep pushing the insurgents south, killing as many as possible along the way, until they have been swept into the southern reaches of the city, where more American forces awaited them.

At the start of the path that Twaddell, of Jaffrey, N.H., and the other tank and Bradley commanders were about to take was an open area, a sort of courtyard. Three-story buildings stood nearby. A good spot for an ambush.

One officer said later that the insurgents who were hiding there must have been stockpiling weapons and scoping out positions inside the buildings for days, waiting for the Americans to come that way.

"These guys got some organization and did some research," said Smalley, 42, of San Diego, the commander of Apache 14. "They didn't just wing something like this. They're not special forces but I'm sure they've got some kind of training ... They got their financiers, trainers and executors."

The tanks and Bradleys of the 2nd Battalion have their own kind of organization and research, which they believe will prove ultimately successful. In the battle of Najaf in August, Rainey and his officers found that if you park it, they will come.

Sitting targets

Often, Rainey's Bradleys and tanks in Fallujah stay in the same spot for a long time, deliberately setting themselves up as targets in order to attract insurgents. Rainey describes this theory of combat as setting his vehicles up as "bugzappers."

"We got down there," he said on Friday afternoon. "We found the bugs. We're killing them."

It's a tactic that has its dangers. Staying static allows insurgents to get their sites on the vehicles and at various times in the morning mortars sailed out of the sky with unsettling frequency, landing close to the huge vehicles and shaking them, the layers of dust inside floating up into the close air yet another time.

Cultural risk

Another risky part of the American tactics -- although in this scenario the risk is cultural and political -- is the military's willingness to fire on mosques if insurgents fire from them first. No matter the justification of such tactics under international law, images or reports of U.S. soldiers firing on mosques does not play well in Iraq, the Muslim world at large or in many non-Muslim countries around the world, where anti-war feeling is high.

That's a price the commanders are prepared to pay if it means allowing their soldiers to defend themselves fully.

At one stage on Friday morning, insurgents fired at Apache 14 from a mosque. Under the military's rules of engagement, American soldiers are permitted to fire on any of Fallujah's 77 mosques if insurgents shoot from them first.

"They brought this ---- to themselves," Rainey said in the afternoon, visibly upset by casualties his battalion had just sustained. "Every mosque we found weapons inside. They're the ones who don't respect Islam, not us."

Apache 14's gunner shot through every window he could see. He pounded parts of the minaret, splinters of stone flying into the air.

Abdelwahab grabbed the radio handset and listened in to what the commanders were discussing.

An insurgent "hit a tank and the tank shot a main gun round through the mosque," reported Abdelwahab, whose father is Lebanese by birth and a Muslim. "Yeah, we gotta back off at least 300 meters. The Marines are going to drop a 300 pounder on the mosque."

"The main gun round going through there would pretty much wipe them out anyway," Cogil said.

Watson backed the Bradley away from the mosque, but the bomb never came. Officers later said they felt there were too many American vehicles in the vicinity to bomb the mosque without risk of a friendly fire incident.

The morning wore on amid an ever-intensifying hail of mortars, RPG attacks and small-arms fire. It was time for the two-pronged push to the south that Rainey, Twaddell and the other senior officers had planned.

The troops, after experiencing the early attack on Apache 14, might have assumed the worst was over for the day. It wasn't.

Attack on an Apache

At noon, Apache 14 had joined a group of other armored vehicles near the courtyard and three-story building. Suddenly, fire seemed to be coming from all sides.

"Apache 60's been hit," came a tense voice over the radio. Apache 60 was Twaddell's, the company commander. There were casualties, the voice said. "They need evac immediately."

Specialist Scott Cogil knew that meant he was up. He was the closest medic to the scene.

Sitting in the back of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, Apache 14, only 50 yards from the Bradley that had just taken a vicious hit from another armor-piercing RPG, 20-year-old Cogil jammed his Kevlar helmet onto his head, grabbed his aid bag and waited for the ramp at the back of the tracked vehicle to lower.

So did four other soldiers, waiting in the near-dark box they had been sitting in for 18 hours, crawling around the streets of Fallujah while the gunner blasted away at insurgents.

With the hum of hydraulics, the ramp started going down. Their faces were tight. For all they knew, some of them, perhaps all of them, might not come back. They didn't discuss what they had to do in those moments as sunlight flooded the vehicle; not a word. The ramp hit the ground and outside there were hundreds of bullets flying around.

"Let's go," one shouted.

Operation rescue

Their M-16 rifles pointing toward nearby buildings, the five young soldiers burst out into a confusing world of noon light, massive gunfire, hidden enemies and injured comrades. They didn't even know which of the other nearby Bradleys they were meant to run to.

They found it.

There was a hole in the rear of Apache 60. Small, about an inch in diameter, but big enough for the grenade to enter the tiny compartment that can fit six soldiers. It had crashed through, searing through the side of an Iraqi-American translator, ripping the left arm off one of the soldiers almost at the shoulder and leaving shrapnel embedded in two others. Blinding smoke mixed with blood in an instant.

Twaddell was in the turret. Soft-spoken, bespectacled and modest, he kept his nerve in the chaos.

"It was very confusing," he said later. "I saw a flash in front of my knee. The turret was filled with smoke. I checked the gunner was OK, popped the hatch."

Twaddell stuck to his radio while his men tended to the wounded. Within minutes, he had organized a group of Bradleys around Apache 60 and Cogil and the other four from Apache 14 were there to help.

Bullets cracked past them and they didn't really know where they were coming from. Everywhere, it seemed.

Cogil found the wounded sergeant already lifted out of the Bradley, a soldier holding his belt tightly around the bleeding stump as a tourniquet. Fortunately, the arm was severed so far up that the major artery in the upper arm was not blown open. Cogil applied a more permanent tourniquet and helped load the wounded soldier into another Bradley.

"He was taking it like a champ, saying 'I'm fine, I'm fine,'" said Cogil, of Rantoul, Ill. The wounded sergeant kept asking if his men were safe as they rushed him out of the kill zone. On the way, Cogil said, boxes of ammunition and other items kept falling on the wounded man. "I felt terrible," Cogil said.

Their job done, Cogil's four colleagues grabbed one of the less seriously wounded men and raced back through the gunfire to their Bradley.

To safety, for now

With the ramp back up, the men sat in silence, breathing heavily, keeping their helmets on.

"That was ... freaky," the wounded soldier said. (His name, and the names of other wounded soldiers, are being withheld to allow them or the military time to notify their families.) "An RPG came through the side."

He stared at the three pieces of metal poking out of his right hand. They glinted in the small shaft of light slicing into the compartment from one of the envelope-sized periscopes in the rear.

"Get 'em back right now," came an officer's voice on the radio. "Let's go back to the train station."

As Apache 14 headed north, the soldier with the shards of metal in his hand stretched it out gingerly, keeping the blood flowing. He looked up and laughed: "It's crazy." Then he bowed his head and put his fingers to his forehead, rubbing them gently as if he were extremely tired.

"We're rolling," Abdelwahab said.

Barely a word was said before the Bradley had rolled past the train station on the outskirts of town and north toward the 2nd Battalion's temporary base in the desert at an old plaster factory.

Back out to battle

Once there, the injured went to the medical aid tent and the rest of the soldiers cleaned the inside of the Bradley and then themselves.

Rainey spoke with Twaddell and other officers. Twaddell "guesstimated" that they had killed about 35 insurgents, that there were perhaps 200 out there in the south still.

The commanding officer, it turned out, had lost another soldier from his corps. A tank had rolled over, killing the man instantly. But overall, Rainey was pleased with the progress his men were making. One of the hit tanks was quickly repaired and returned to duty. A soldier painted "I'm Back" in black spray paint on its front.

"I made him paint it over," Rainey said, laughing. He walked through the fields of powdery dust toward Apache 14. Abdelwahab was shaving. Cogil was dabbing at himself with baby wipes, the closest soldiers here come to a shower. The limping Watson offered to display his rear-end wounds and deflected the usual ribbings.

"Listen," Rainey said. "You guys are doing great ... It's humbling, humbling to be around."

"Thanks, sir," someone said.

Six hours later, they got back in Apache 14 and headed back to the fight.

===================
What's Wrong With Combat Pay?

By JOHN BERLAU
November 15, 2004; Page A22

American soldiers are risking their lives in Fallujah. No one would say that they don't deserve a special bonus for wearing America's uniform in these embattled times. No one, that is, except many members of Congress -- Republican and Democrat. While these pols fall all over themselves to argue how much they support the troops, they back a policy called "pay parity" -- which sends the message that the soldier risking his or her life in Iraq is just like any other government worker.

"Pay parity" dictates that federal military and civilian workers must get the same percentage increase in pay. The concept has governed in most of the last 20 years of congressional appropriations, but the Bush administration has argued that a special raise is in order for the armed services. The administration's budget for fiscal year 2005 provides for across-the-board pay increases of 3.5% for military employees and a smaller raise for federal civilian workers.

But even with a war on, government employees' unions and many in Congress still make the argument that soldiers serving in Iraq and bureaucrats at the IRS are equally important to the well-being of America. Tom Davis (R., Va.), who represents suburbs of D.C. that many federal workers call home, states that "both civilian and military employees are the government's greatest asset." House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D., Md.), with a similar constituency, asserts that "Congress and the White House should not undermine the morale of dedicated federal public servants by failing to bring their pay adjustments in line with military personnel." Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, says that ending pay parity would send to federal employees the message "that their work is . . . not as valued, and not as vital as that of . . . military counterparts."

Yet if members of Congress are as concerned about soldiers as they say they are, the message to Ms. Kelley and her ilk must be that, as important as some of the work done by civilian employees is, their work is not as indispensable as that done by the soldiers keeping our country free. Congress still has a chance to change this policy in the lame duck session.

Opponents of pay parity also warn that sticking to existing policy in the coming years could hamper the efforts to retain the best soldiers in the military. They also refute arguments used to support pay parity based on the supposedly large pay gap between federal-civilian and private-sector workers. Rep. Ernest Istook (R., Okla.) points out that over the last four years, pay raises for federal civilians have been double the Consumer Price Index's cost-of-living increase. Federal workers also get the day off with pay on 11 federal holidays, more paid time off than most private-sector jobs provide. And, of course, American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan don't get any holidays from being in harm's way.

Besides, in wartime, federal civilian workers should understand why the military should get priority in pay raises. As Ramona Fortanbary, editor of Veterans' Vision, writes, "These patriotic men and women, who after all did choose government service over more lucrative private employment, can and will understand that . . . at times of great demand upon the military services . . . the troops need the money more."

Mr. Berlau is a journalism fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

FWIW:
================================

Bordering On Nukes?
New accounts from al-Qaeda to attack the U.S. with weapons of mass
destruction
By ADAM ZAGORIN

Sunday, Nov. 14, 2004
A key al-Qaeda operative seized in Pakistan recently offered an alarming
account of the group's potential plans to target the U.S. with weapons of
mass destruction, senior U.S. security officials tell TIME. Sharif al-Masri,
an Egyptian who was captured in late August near Pakistan's border with Iran and Afghanistan, has told his interrogators of "al-Qaeda's interest in
moving nuclear materials from Europe to either the U.S. or Mexico,"
according to a report circulating among U.S. government officials.

Masri also said al-Qaeda has considered plans to "smuggle nuclear materials to Mexico, then operatives would carry material into the U.S.," according to the report, parts of which were read to TIME. Masri says his family, seeking refuge from al-Qaeda hunters, is now in Iran.

Masri's account, though unproved, has added to already heightened U.S.
concerns about Mexico. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge met publicly with top Mexican officials last week to discuss border security and
smuggling rings that could be used to slip al-Qaeda terrorists into the
country. Weeks prior to Ridge's lightning visit, U.S. and Mexican
intelligence conferred about reports from several al-Qaeda detainees
indicating the potential use of Mexico as a staging area "to acquire
end-stage chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear material." U.S.
officials have begun to keep a closer eye on heavy-truck traffic across the
border. The Mexicans will also focus on flight schools and aviation
facilities on their side of the frontier.

And another episode has some senior U.S. officials worried: the theft of a crop-duster aircraft south of San Diego, apparently by three men from southern Mexico who assaulted a watchman and then flew off in a southerly direction. Though the theft's connection to terrorism remains unclear, a senior U.S. law-enforcement official notes that crop dusters can be used to disperse toxic substances. The plane, stolen at night two weeks ago, has not been recovered.

Here is a woman, married for years, trying to understand why her husband would volunteer to join a National Guard unit that would be going to war.  Maybe her thoughts can help others understand what being in the miltary, or having served, is all about.  
 
 Marshall-Bowler
Gregory, MI

I didn?t understand until that Sunday evening as we drove down the road. I had tried to get it. I had tried to understand why the man who hated to be separated from me for even a day would be willing to pack up his duffle bag and go to a place that was everything he hated in this world.

My husband is one of a dying breed. He grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in a small town. His address in the town of McMillan was ?Just past Helmer. It?s the white house with the five big maple trees and two Farmall tractors out front.? He was born in that white house, learned to drive on the tractors and spent his childhood playing underneath the maple trees as he dreamed of the big city. He is not a ?city slicker? as he calls me. This man loves the small farming towns and is outside of his element in the city. He hates the heat and can?t live without trees; many trees. The desert and intense heat is not something he has ever had a desire to visit.

When he explained to me that he was planning to transfer to a new unit within the Michigan Army National Guard, I understood why. The unit he had spent the past five or so years was going to be disbanded and made over. He would no longer be a mechanic but a truck driver. A man who even in his off time visits the dairy farm behind us and throws hay for the heck of it, is not a one who can sit and drive a truck all day. So, when he explained he would be changing units, it made perfect sense to me.

What did not make sense to me was the unit he had decided to transfer too. He chose one that he knew was already on alert. I was horrified at best. While alert is not a guarantee of mobilization, it is a fairly safe bet to expect within a short time that unit will receive orders for parts unknown. I asked him why on earth he would voluntarily move to unit that is very likely destined to find itself in the thick of Operation Enduring Freedom. He just looked at me, obviously a bit startled by my horror and explained ?Well, I am going to go anyway, sooner or later. I might as well get it done and over with.?

After over seven years of marriage I know when I am being sold a bunch of bull and this was more bull than he had ever tried selling me before. I wasn?t buying a single word. Get it done and over with; not quite. This was the same man I had to beg, plead and throw a fit to keep from finding a unit that had been deployed to Afghanistan after 911. This had nothing to do with getting anything done and over.

While, I did not understand why he felt the need to do this, I did understand he believed this was something he must do. I hated it and cursed myself as I promised to stand behind him and support whatever decision he had made. We had discussed the various units that had his MOS available, where they had been located, which units he had some contact with during AT, which units he liked and so on. We had also discussed which ones looked good for mobilization in the near future before he made any decision about leaving his old unit. When he asked me where I wanted him to go, I told him not to ask me. I was terrified that any suggestion I made would land him in a unit that would be find itself mobilized, I also did not want to make him feel guilty for doing what he felt was right.

I knew I could not live with the guilt if my input had any bearing on his choices. I promised to stand behind any decision he made and left it at that. It didn?t take long before I was kicking myself for taking such a stand. I wanted to scream, cry and beg for him to choose another unit. As tempting as it was, I knew that if he changed his mind merely to please me, we would both have to live with the regret for the rest of our lives. That kind of regret I can live without.

I spent weeks trying to comprehend why he would purposely put himself in harms way. I asked every question I could think of, never getting a satisfactory answer. I even started to ask other members of the military. Everyone I came across from Vietnam Vets to other members of the National Guard found themselves being questioned about what drives them to head into a combat zone. Nobody could give me an answer that helped me understand.

Many times husband reminded me that while he was in service during Panama and Operation Desert Storm for reasons beyond his own control he never actually left the United States. Being a civilian, this sounded to me like a good thing. He would just smile at me with a look of amusement and say ?It?s all about the patch Honey.? My husband has never been one to worry about awards or patches, but the combat patch was more than one more thing to sew onto his uniform. For him it was something much bigger. If that patch was all this was about, I would happily go to a surplus store and find him one: I knew better.

One Sunday evening after having dinner with our brother-in-law and his wife we were driving home. Somehow we ended up on the topic of my greatest pet peeve: The phrase ?Weekend Warrior?. I have always felt those two words are the most insulting thing one can say to any soldier. I had spent a good part of the past several years as a member of family support for his unit. I knew the men and women of his unit, I knew about their past military history. I knew about the phone call they received the day after Christmas several years before. Their holiday celebrations took quite a turn as they were informed they were being mobilized for Operation Desert Storm. These men and women had served their country in so many ways; they have all gone above and beyond one weekend a month and two weeks a year. They had served in combat and still most American?s had no idea that any of them have ever done anything but assist during a flood or a local crisis.

Somewhere in that conversation my husband had become very quiet. He looked over at me and I could see something in his eyes, something that I had not recognized before that day. He looked at me and began to speak in a voice that chilled me to the bone. The quiet for some reason seemed ear shattering ?A Weekend Warrior but a full time soldier.? I didn?t get a chance to respond this very simple comment that suddenly spoke volumes before he began to explain. ?When I was at PLDC, there was a Colonel there who spoke at graduation.? The look on his face assured that he had my full attention. The man who usually had a glimpse of humor in his eyes was deadly serious as he continued ?He told us that he saw his civilian job as his part time job and the Guard was his full time job. At the time I thought he was crazy. The check I got each month didn?t feed my family or pay my bills. But now??..? There was sadness in his eyes. September 11, 2001 had changed us all in many ways; it had changed my husband?s ideals and his reasoning for remaining a soldier. It had given him a different sense of pride and a much stronger belief in his duty to his country.

My husband didn?t need to finish that sentence; he had actually explained it to me many times and in many ways over the previous 3 years. The man that had been a soldier first in the regular Army and then a reservist with the Guard was in for more than the fun or because he would get a very small retirement in comparison to his retirement from his civilian job. This man is a soldier at heart. It is who he is, it defines him. He is a Carpenter by trade, an incredibly talented craftsman; yet, he does not take even a fraction of the pride in his skill as he does when he puts on his uniform and shines his boots. When a friend questioned his reasoning for choosing a unit that is already on alert he explained. ?The easiest thing in the world is knowing what is right; the hard part is doing what is right.? Finally I understood.

My husband like so many others who give up their weekends and summer vacations to fufill a promise they have made to the citizens of the United States is also willing to take a large cut in pay and separate himself from those he loves to join his other family: The family of fellow Weekend Warriors who no matter where they are, what they are wear or what they are doing are always soldiers.
==================

An American Hero
More than a few folks predicted that after the elections there would be a shift in the tone of coverage of the Iraq war. Whatever the reason, credit the NY Times for publishing this profile of an American hero, Sgt Rowe Slayton.

FORWARD OPERATING BASE HEADHUNTER, Iraq - Wearing 60 pounds of body armor over his desert camouflage uniform and cradling a black M-4 rifle, Sgt. Rowe Slayton looks every bit the typical Army infantryman in Iraq.
He is not.

An Air Force Academy graduate and former F-15 fighter pilot, then-Major Slayton left the Air National Guard 17 years ago to run his civilian law practice in Denver and rear his six children. But his life changed not long after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when he enlisted in the Arkansas Army National Guard in what he says was an act of patriotism.

Now Sergeant Slayton, 53, is leading three other soldiers young enough to be his sons on an infantry fire team that regularly runs combat patrols in the Haifa Street section of Baghdad, one of the riskiest missions in the Iraqi capital. More than a third of the 119 soldiers in his Guard unit, Company C of the First Battalion, 153rd Infantry Regiment, have been awarded Purple Hearts for being wounded in action since they arrived here in April.

"That's one club I don't necessarily want to join," said Sergeant Slayton, in full battle gear one recent afternoon while his platoon acted as a quick-response force to back up another unit on patrol.

Pentagon officials have been expressing fear that the sweeping call-up of tens of thousands of Army Reserve and National Guard soldiers for yearlong tours in Iraq and Afghanistan may soon cripple recruiting and retention in America's part-time force. But Sergeant Slayton's story echoes those of a small number of other reservists with prior military service who have answered the nation's call to arms.

Military personnel specialists say that his case is unusual in several other ways too: the long gap since his previous service, his willingness to enlist as an Army sergeant after a career as an Air Force officer and fighter pilot and his willingness to volunteer for infantry duty when the Army is searching for every able-bodied foot soldier to battle the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It all raises the question, "Why?" to which Sergeant Slayton smiles and patiently tries to explain, obviously not for the first time.

"This country has been so good to me," he said. "I just have so many things to be grateful for. It's an honor to be here."

<...>

Sergeant Slayton is a self-effacing man who initially declined to be interviewed for this article and agreed only after being assured that his fire-team comrades would be included.

<...>

For a high-flying aviator, the life of a muddy-boots ground-pounder has been an adjustment. "It's taught me humility," Sergeant Slayton said. "I'm not at the bottom, but I can sure see it."

Then again, there are not many Army sergeants whose college classmates are now senior generals in Washington and in Japan.

Sergeant Slayton graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1973. He rose quickly through the ranks, first as a T-37 instructor and then as a pilot in the first operational F-15 fighter squadron at Langley Air Force Base, Va.

But he said he became disenchanted with the military. It was during the Carter administration, and he was frustrated with cuts in military spending and capability. He left active duty to attend law school in Denver, but remained in the Air National Guard, commuting to a unit in Des Moines for seven years.

In 1987, he decided to leave the Guard. By then he was a major and more promotions seemed likely. But the cold war was winding down, and he had never been deployed overseas, much less seen combat. His family and law practice beckoned.

When the Persian Gulf crisis broke out in 1990, he looked into volunteering, but the war ended before anything came of that.

It was not until the Sept. 11 attacks that he again felt the calling. This time, he said, he was determined to find a combat unit. An Air Force recruiter told him that he had been out too long and had lost his officer's commission. "I was too old to fly anyway," he said.

On a trip to his summer home in Arkansas in 2002, he stopped at an Army National Guard armory in Arkadelphia, where a recruiter listened to Sergeant Slayton's story and promised him a spot if he passed a physical exam. That was easy for Sergeant Slayton, a stocky, muscular man with cropped graying hair. After nearly a year of bureaucratic snarls during which the Guard lost his records twice, Sergeant Slayton finally took his oath of service in June 2003 and reported for two weeks of annual training.

The deployment has taken its toll on his personal and professional life, as it has for many other reservists. His law partner married, and he had to close his practice. "Clients don't really like their lawyer being in Baghdad," he said. (Nonetheless, he has filed two appellate briefs from here.)

Sergeant Slayton sent his 11-year-old son, James, the only one of his children left at home, to live with the boy's mother. He said he regularly called and sent e-mail messages to his son, but had underestimated how difficult his deployment to a combat zone would be on James. Despite the danger and hard stares he and his unit get from many Iraqis in the streets, Sergeant Slayton said he still believed in America's mission in Iraq. "While out on patrol recently, I had an older woman walk alongside me," he said. "She kept her eyes straight ahead so no one could see she was talking to me, and she kept thanking me for being here."

An amazing story. There's a picture of Sgt Slayton on the Time's page, complete with DCU pilot and jump wings.

http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004/11/fallujah-again-although-us-military.html

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

http://www.thegreenside.com/story.asp?ContentID=11004

Email from Dave - Nov 3, 04  
Dear Dad -

As you have no doubt been watching, we have had our hands full around Fallujah.  It would seem as if the final reckoning is coming.  The city has been on a consistent down hill spiral since we were ordered out in April. It's siren call for extremists and criminals has only increased steadily and the instability and violence that radiates out of the town has expanded exponentially.  If there is another city in the world that contains more terrorists, I would be surprised.  From the last two years, I just don't see a way that we can succeed in Iraq without reducing this threat.  The cost of continuing on without taking decisive action is too high to dwell on.

The enemy inside the town have come to fight and kill Americans.  Nothing will sate their bloodlust and hatred other than to kill everyone of us or at least die trying.  It is hard to fathom as a Westerner as rational thought would dictate that we will only be here for a relatively short blip in their history and while we are here, billions of dollars in investments will pour in and opportunity that is beyond comprehension will open up for anyone willing to work.  This is not Kansas and this enemy does not think like that.

If we build a school or clinic, they destroy it.  They would rather deny medical care or education for the children of the citizens who live nearby than to have any symbol of the West in general and America specifically among them.  It is hard to comprehend.  Frankly, we are done trying.

For eight months, we have been on our chain.  The enemy has fooled itself misinterpreting our humanity and restraint for lack of will and courage. For eight months, we have watched Marines, Soldiers and Sailors maimed and killed by invisible cowards hiding behind some wall or in a canal as he detonates another IED.  For eight months, we have been witness to suicidal sociopaths driving vehicles laden with explosives into crowds of Iraqis and into our own convoys.  

Just last week, we lost another nine Marines killed and an equal number of wounded as the result of some ignorant extremists who was able to convince himself that killing himself and as many Americans as possible would send him to paradise where he could finally get his virgins.

Now, their own ignorance and arrogance will be their undoing.  They believe that they can hold Fallujah.  In fact, they have come from all over to be part of its glorious defense.  I cannot describe the atmosphere that exists in the Regiment right now.  Of course the men are nervous but I think they are more nervous that we will not be allowed to clean the rats nest out and instead will be forced to continue operating as is.  

Its as if a window of opportunity has opened and everyone just wants to get on with it before it closes.  The Marines know the enemy has massed and has temporarily decided to stay and fight.  For the first time, the men feel as though we may be allowed to do what needs to be done.  If the enemy wants to sit in his citadel and try to defend it against the Marine Corps and some very hard Soldiers... then the men want to execute before the enemy sobers up and flees.

It may come off as an exceptionally bellicose perspective but where the Marines live and operate is a war zone in the starkest reality.  When the Marines leave the front gate on an operation or patrol, someone within direct line of sight of that gate is trying to kill them.  All have lost friends and watched as the enemy hides within his sanctuary that has been allowed out of what one must assume is political necessity.  The enemy has been given every advantage by our sense of morality and restraint and by a set of operational rules that we are constrained to operate under.  The Marines feel like their time has come and we will finally be ordered to do what must be done and be given the latitude to do it.  Even though the price will be high, there is not a man here that would chose status quo over paying the price.

Every day, the enemy takes more hostages, assassinates developing Iraqi leaders and savagely beats suspected collaborators.  I will give you just one recent example that happened last week.  One of our patrols was moving down a street when they saw what looked like a fight.  The Marines closed with the scene.  It was a family that had come to Iraq on religious pilgrimage that was taken hostage and was being taken into Fallujah.  The muj stopped for some reason and the father began fighting.  The Marines interdicted and captured two of the kidnappers.  Two more ran and the Marines could not get a shot without fear of killing/wounding others.  

Every day, insurgents from inside Fallujah drive out and wait for Iraqis that work on our bases.  Once the Iraqis leave they are stopped.  The lucky ones are savagely beaten.  The unfortunate ones are killed.    A family that had fled Fallujah in order to get away from the fighting recently tried to return.  When they got to their home, they found it taken over by terrorists (very common).  When the patriarch showed the muj his deed in order to prove that the house was his, they took the old man out into the street and beat him senseless in front of his family.

Summary executions are common.  Think about that.  Summary executions inside Fallujah happen with sobering frequency.  We have been witness to the scene on a number of occasions.  Three men are taken from the trunk of a car and are made to walk to a ditch where they are shot.  Bodies are found in the Euphrates without heads washed downstream from Fallujah.  To date we have been allowed to do nothing.

I have no idea the numbers of beheadings that have occurred in Fallujah since I have been here.  I have no idea the number of hostages that have ended up in Fallujah since we have been here.  I just don't know that Americans would be able to comprehend the number anyway.  Unfortunately, the situation has only gotten worse.  There is no hope for any type of reasoned solution with an enemy like this.  

Once again, we are being asked by citizens who have fled the city to go in and take the city back.  They are willing for us to literally rubble the place in order to kill the terrorists within.  Don't get me wrong, there are still many inside the town that support the terrorists and we cannot expect to be thanked publicly if we do take the city.  There is a sense of de ja vu with the refugees telling us where their houses are and asking us to bomb them because the muj have taken them over.  We heard the same thing in April only to end up letting the people down.  Some no doubt have paid with their lives.  The "good" people who may ultimately buy into a peaceful and prosperous Iraq are again asking us to do what we know must be done.  

The Marines understand and are eager to get on with it.  The only lingering fear in them is that we will be ordered to stop again.  I don't know if this is going to happen but if it happens soon, I will write you when its over,

Love,

Dave

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

All:

This man seems like a fine "point of light" worthy of our support.  See the website at the end of the article.

Woof,
Crafty Dog
=============================

Dentist Sinks His Teeth Into Relief
Jim Rolfe has spent weeks and about $50,000 trying to fill a big void in Afghanistan. Now he is planning to set up his own clinic in Kabul.

By Steve Chawkins, Times Staff Writer


At 65, Jim Rolfe has been a dentist for a long time, but his practice in downtown Santa Barbara hardly prepared him for what he found in Afghanistan.

"There was a continuous flow of problems you couldn't imagine even existing in the U.S.," he said. "It's like coming onto an auto accident with bodies lying all over the street. That's how it is when a person opens his mouth to be treated."

     
 
 
   
     
 
Like numerous other medical professionals who pitch in at Third World clinics for brief periods, Rolfe wanted to spend a few weeks simply doing what he could. What he didn't count on was his spark of altruism turning into a full-fledged mission.

So far, Rolfe has spent more than $50,000 of his own money to provide dental care in Afghanistan. What he has in mind, though, is far grander in scope than simply writing a check.

Rolfe could be the only Santa Barbara dentist currently looking to buy land in Kabul. When he finds it, he will plunk down a used shipping container he purchased as the hub of his future clinic. He will rig it up with a generator and running water, outfit it with dental equipment, recruit U.S. professionals, train Afghan dental assistants, and, practically overnight, give Afghans in sore need of dental work an opportunity to get it.

Rolfe has a gray beard, rock-star-length hair, and a down-to-earth style. It's not hard to picture him as what he once was: the official dentist ? as well as goat tender and truck driver ? for a Santa Barbara commune called Brotherhood of the Sun.

Decades later, his office is as distinctive as his background. Conga drums and bongos sit in the waiting room for patients anxious to take the edge off their visit to the dentist. Patients recline to view TV sets mounted in the ceiling as a fountain cascades in the background. Designed and built by Rolfe, the treatment areas are cozy beige nooks with curved walls, a style Rolfe calls "Southwestern Eskimo."

Such comforts are a world away from the grim certainties of a country torn by war over the last 30 years. Sitting in his waiting room, Rolfe wearily reels off the statistics: The average male dies at 44. One in four children die by age 5. Ten percent of the population are orphans. Only one in seven people can read.

And the number of people in a land of 27 million who have ever seen a dentist is too small to measure.

"I'd look into mouths and just see a disaster," he said. "Instead of teeth, I'd see abscessed roots. These people had never had their teeth cleaned; I'd pull out tartar in huge rocks."

In 2002, Rolfe read about an orphanage in a remote mountain province and volunteered there for three weeks. He worked from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., using the children he treated as his "assistants."

"When I saw how grateful they were, I cried," he said. "They couldn't wait to get treatment."

Two years later, he returned for another couple of weeks, this time setting up shop at a women's clinic in Kabul.

For this trip, Rolfe had made a portable wooden dental chair, pocked with a Swiss-cheese pattern of holes to reduce its weight.

He also had some help. A recent graduate of Kabul's medical university acted as translator for $20 a day. He was jobless, as were all of the other 314 graduates in his class. And one of Rolfe's Santa Barbara patients, yoga instructor Hayley Parlen, came along as well. She had hoped to teach yoga techniques to children in Kabul but wound up assisting Rolfe.

Parlen, 29, had learned about Rolfe's plans when she was getting her teeth cleaned. She had no idea that within months, she would be able to soothe frightened women by intoning, in the local dialect, standard dental bromides such as "Just breathe" and "It'll only hurt for a second."

"With one hand, I'd suction blood from their mouth and with the other, I'd squeeze their hands or massage their forehead," she said. "My calmness translated to them that they'd be OK."

Rolfe is looking for donations and volunteers to help him on his planned trip in April. Setting up a booth at a recent state dental conference in San Francisco, he already has recruited Ike Rahimi, an Afghanistan-born dentist who treats farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley.

"The need is enormous," said Rahimi, whose mother might accompany him on the trip to see sisters still in Afghanistan. "Life is not so forgiving there."

In January, the secondhand shipping container that Rolfe bought for $2,500 will be stuffed with equipment and placed on a freighter to Rotterdam. From there, it will travel by rail to southern Russia, and then by truck through Uzbekistan, and, finally, to Kabul.

When it's set up, it will house a lab and three dental chairs. Westerners now fly four hours to Qatar for dental treatment. With his new facility, Rolfe hopes to treat them for fees that will subsidize treatment of the poor.

He hopes to eventually add simple accommodations for visiting professionals and classrooms where Afghan hygienists and technicians can be trained.

His is not the first such plan in Afghanistan. Other dentists have volunteered as well, and the American military has worked on restoring the nation's only dental hospital. Still, Rolfe said he has to focus on not being overwhelmed.

"I feel like a drop of water in the desert," he said.

For more information, see Rolfe's Afghanistan Dental Relief Project website at http://www.adrpinc.org .

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

An organization for Paralyzed veterans:

http://www.pva.org/index.htm

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.




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John O?Sullivan is the editor of The National Interest.

THE FACES OF DENIAL


By RALPH PETERS October 24, 2004 -- EUROPEANS insist that the United States overreacted to 9/11. Conde scendingly, they observe that they've been dealing with terror ism successfully for three dec ades, that it can be
managed, that life goes on.

They're wrong.

What Europeans fail to grasp - what they willfully refuse to face - is that
the nature of terrorism has changed.

The alphabet-soup terrorists of the past - the IRA, ETA, PLO, RAF and the
rest - were essentially political organizations with political goals. No
matter how brutal their actions or unrealistic their hopes, their common
intent was to change a system of government, either to gain a people's
independence or to force their ideology on society.

The old-school terrorists that Europe survived did not seek death, although they were sometimes willing to die for their causes. None were suicide bombers, although a few committed suicide in prison to make a political statement.

Crucially, their goals were of this earth. All would have preferred to
survive to rule in a government that they controlled.

Now we face terrorists who regard death as a promotion - who reject secular ideologies and believe themselves to be instruments of their god's will.

Indeed, they hope to nudge their god along, to convince him through their
actions that the final struggle between faith and infidelity is at hand.
While they'd like to see certain changes here on earth - the destruction of
Israel, of the United States, of the West, of unbelievers and heretics
everywhere - their longed-for destination is paradise beyond the grave.

THE new terrorists are vastly more dangerous, more implacable and crueler than the old models. The political terrorists of the 1970s and '80s used bloodshed to gain their goals. Religious terrorists see mass murder as an end in itself, as a purifying act that cleanses the world of infidels. They don't place their bombs for political leverage, but to kill as many innocent human beings as possible.

Yesteryear's murderers of European politicians and businessmen by the old crowd seem almost mannerly compared to today's religion-fueled terrorists, who openly rejoice in decapitating their living victims in front of cameras.



When political terrorists hijacked airplanes, they hoped to draw attention
to their cause. When Islamic terrorists seize passenger jets, they do it to
kill as many people as possible.

The old terrorists were sometimes so rabid that they had to be killed or
imprisoned. But others became negotiating partners for governments. From Yasser Arafat to Gerry Adams, some gained international respectability. (It even may be argued that Adams became part of the solution, rather than simply remaining part of the problem.)

For today's apocalyptic terrorists, negotiations are no more than a tool to
be used in extreme situations, to allow them to live to kill again another
day. And no promises made to infidels need be honored.

The Islamic terrorists we now face will never become statesmen. They wish to shed our blood to fortify their faith, to impose their beliefs upon the world, to placate a vengeful god.

That doesn't offer much room for polite diplomacy. Islamic terrorists have
reverted to the most primitive of religious practices: human sacrifice.
Their brand of Islam is no "religion of peace." They're Aztecs without the
art. And it takes a Cortez to deal with them.

Europeans' experience of negotiating with political terrorists has allowed
them to deceive themselves into a false sense of security. Forgetting the
pain inflicted on their societies by tiny bands of assassins (whether the
Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Brigades or the IRA-Provos), Europeans refuse to imagine what tens of thousands of fanatics bent on destruction might do if not faced down with courage and resolution.

It wasn't the United States that didn't "get" 9/11. It was the Europeans,
anxious that their comfortable slumber not be disturbed. They insist that
terrorism remains a law-enforcement problem, refusing even to consider that we might face a broad, complex, psychotic threat spawned by a failed civilization.

EUROPE will pay. And the price in the coming years will be much higher than any paid by the United States. Europe, not North America, is the vulnerable continent. Our homeland-security efforts, unfairly derided at home and abroad, are making our country markedly safer. Yes, we will be struck again. But "Old Europe" is going to be hit again, and again, and again.

American Muslims not only become citizens - they become good citizens.
Despite the assimilation hurdles that face every new group of immigrants,
our Muslims have opportunity and hope. A disaffected few may make headlines, but American Muslims overwhelmingly support their new country and do not wish it harm. They see no contradiction between faith in their god and faith in America. Our worries are their worries, and their dreams are our dreams.

Europe is another, grimmer story. Not a single European state - not even the United Kingdom - has successfully integrated its Muslim minority into
mainstream society.

While the United Kingdom has done the best job, countries such as France and Germany have time-bombs in their midst, large, excluded Muslim populations that the native majority regard as hopelessly inferior. If you want to see bigotry alive and well, visit "Old Europe."

It wasn't a random choice on the part of the 9/11 terrorists that led them
to do so much of their preparation in Europe. They know that American-Muslim communities won't offer hospitality to terrorists. But Germany, France, Spain and neighboring states contain embittered Islamic communities glad to see any part of the West get the punishment it "deserves."

As the United States becomes ever harder to strike - and as we respond so fiercely to those attacks that succeed - soft Europe, with its proximity to the Muslim world, its indigestible Muslim communities and its moral
fecklessness, is likely to become the key Western battleground in the
Islamic extremists' war against civilization.

Europeans don't want it to be so. But they are not going to get a choice.

Europeans are simply in denial. They've lived so well for so long that they
don't want the siesta from reality to end. One of the many reasons that
continental Europeans reacted so angrily to our liberation of Iraq was that
it made it harder than ever for them to sustain their myth of a benign world in which peace could be purchased and the government welfare checks would never stop coming.

America's crime was to acknowledge reality. It will be a long time before
Europeans forgive us.

IN many ways, the civilizations of North America and Europe are diverging. Eu rope has a crisis of values behind its failure of will. Their anxiety to tell everyone else what to do reflects their own uncertainty. Corrupt, selfish and cowardly, old Europe has fallen to moral lows not seen since 1945.

The one factor that will finally bring us closer again is terrorism.

In this horrid election year, we've heard endless complaints that Washington needs allies. Of course, we already have many allies. The old-thinkers just mean France and Germany. But the truth is that France and Germany - weak, blind, duplicitous and inept - will need us far more than we could ever need them.

The nature of terrorism has changed profoundly. It's no longer about
ideology, but about slaughter for its own sake. Nothing we could do would
placate these terrorists. They must be fought and destroyed, no matter how many decades that requires. For Europe to pretend otherwise harms the general counter-terror effort. But, above all, it sets Europe up for
calamity.

Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World."

Subject: FW: Statement of RADM William L. Schachte, Jr.]

A new voice has been added to the debate over the
circumstances surrounding Sen. John Kerry's first Purple Heart.
William Schachte, who was a lieutenant in the Navy during Kerry's Vietnam tour - and who later rose to the rank of Rear Admiral - has released a statement describing the events of December 2-3, 1968,  when Kerry received a minor shrapnel wound for which he was awarded the Purple Heart. What follows is Schachte's statement, in full.

Statement of RADM William L. Schachte, Jr. USN (Ret.)
August 27, 2004

 As was true of all "Swiftees," I volunteered to serve in Vietnam and was assigned to Coastal Division 14 for a normal tour of duty. I was a Lieutenant serving as Operations Officer and second in command at Coastal Division 14 when Lieutenant (junior grade) John Kerry reported to us in mid-November, 1968. Lt. (jg) Kerry was an Officer-in-Charge (O-in-C) under training in preparing to be assigned as one of our Swift Boat O-in-C's.

At some point following President Johnson's announcement of the suspension of bombing in North Vietnam in March 1968, we were directed to become more aggressive in seeking to find and destroy or disrupt the enemy in our operating area. As part of this effort, I conceived a new operation that became known as "Skimmer OPS." The concept was simple. A 15-foot Boston Whaler was sent into an area where, based on coordinated intelligence, North Vietnamese cadre and Viet Cong were
expected to be meeting or where, for example, concentrations of enemy forces might be involved in the movement of arms or munitions. We  were to draw fire and quickly get out of the area. This would allow more concentrated firepower to be brought against the enemy forces we had been able to identify.

These operations were carried out only in "hot" areas and well away from any villages or populated areas. A Swift Boat would tow the skimmer to the general area of operations, and the ambush team would then board the skimmer and proceed to the designated area of operations. The Swift Boat would be riding shotgun and standing off, occasionally out of sight, to provide fire support and long-range communications. The Skimmer was powered by an outboard motor, and we carried an FM radio, handheld flares, an M-60 machine gun with a
bipod mount, and an M-16 mounted with a starlight scope. If the night was heavily overcast, we brought an M-14 mounted with an infrared scope. We also carried an M-79 single-shot grenade launcher. In addition to our combat gear and flak jackets, we often carried .38-caliber pistols.

The operation consisted of allowing the skimmer to drift silently
along shorelines or riverbanks to look or listen for sounds of enemyactivity. If activity was identified, we would open fire with our automatic weapons, and if we received fire, we would depart the area as quickly as possible, leaving it to air support or mortar fire from a Swift Boat standing off at a distance to carry out an attack.

I commanded each of these Skimmer operations up to and including the one on the night in question involving Lt. (jg) Kerry. On each of these operations, I was in the skimmer manning the M-60 machine gun.

I took with me one other officer and an enlisted man to operate the outboard motor. I wanted another officer because officers, when not on patrol, were briefed daily on the latest intelligence concerning our sector of operations and were therefore more familiar with the current intelligence. Additionally, at these daily briefings, officers debriefed on their patrol areas after returning to port.

On the night of December 2-3, we conducted one of these operations, and Lt. (jg) Kerry accompanied me. Our call sign for that operation was "Batman." I have no independent recollection of the identity of the enlisted man, who was operating the outboard motor. Sometime during the early morning hours, I thought I detected some movement inland. At the time we were so close to land that we could hear water
lapping on the shoreline. I fired a hand-held flare, and upon it
bursting and illuminating the surrounding area, I thought I saw
movement. I immediately opened fire with my M-60. It jammed after a brief burst. Lt. (jg) Kerry also opened fire with his M-16 on automatic, firing in the direction of my tracers. His weapon also jammed. As I was trying to clear my weapon, I heard the distinctive sound of the M-79 being fired and turned to see Lt. (jg) Kerry holding the M-79 from which he had just launched a round. We received no return fire of any kind nor were there any muzzle flashes from the beach. I directed the outboard motor operator to clear the area.

Upon returning to base, I informed my commanding officer, Lt. Cmdr. Grant Hibbard, of the events, informing him of the details of the operation and that we had received no enemy fire. I did not file an "after action" report, as one was only required when there was hostile fire. Soon thereafter, Lt. (jg) Kerry requested that he be put in for a Purple Heart as a result of a small piece of shrapnel removed from his arm that he attributed to the just-completed mission. I advised Lt. Cmdr. Hibbard that I could not support the request because there
was no hostile fire. The shrapnel must have been a fragment from the M-79 that struck Lt. (jg) Kerry, because he had fired the M-79 too close to our boat. Lt. Cmdr. Hibbard denied Lt. (jg) Kerry's request.

Lt. (jg) Kerry detached our division a few days later to be
reassigned to another division. I departed Vietnam approximately three weeks later, and Lt. Cmdr. Hibbard followed shortly thereafter. It was not until years later that I was surprised to learn that Lt. (jg) Kerry had been awarded a Purple Heart for this night.

I did not see Lt. (jg) Kerry in person again for almost 20 years.
Sometime in 1988, while I was on Capitol Hill, I ran into him in the basement of the Russell Senate Office Building. I was at that time a Rear Admiral and in uniform. He was about 20 paces away, waiting to catch the underground subway. In a fairly loud voice I called out to him, "Hey, John." He turned, looked at me, came over and said, "Batman!" We exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes, agreed to have lunch sometime in the future, and parted ways. We have not been together since that day.

In March of this year, I was contacted by one of my former swift boat colleagues concerning Douglas Brinkley's book about Senator Kerry, "Tour of Duty." I told him that I had not read it. He faxed me a copy of the pages relating to the action on the night of December 2-3, 1968. I was astonished by Senator Kerry's rendition of the facts of that night. Notably, Lt. (jg) Kerry had himself in charge of the operation, and I was not mentioned at all. He also claimed that he was wounded by hostile fire.

None of this is accurate. I know, because I was not only in the boat, but I was in command of the mission. He was never more than several feet away from me at anytime during the operation that night. It is inconceivable that any commanding officer would put an officer in training, who had been in country only a couple of weeks, in charge of such an ambush operation. Had there been enemy action that night, there would have been an after action report filed, which I would have been responsible for filing.

I have avoided talking to media about this issue for months. But, because of the recent media attention, I felt I had to step up to recount my personal experiences concerning this incident.

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.

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.

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.)

Woof All:

There was a foto of the President with Mike McNaugton on a run together which came with the following email but I don't know how to post the foto.

Crafty
----------------------------------------------

Subject: Fw: A promise kept]


Attached is a picture of one of my best friends in the Army, Mike McNaughton.  We were privates together in 1990-1994.  He stepped on a landmine in Afghanistan Christmas 2002.  President Bush came to visit the wounded in the hospital.  He told Mike that when he could run a mile, that they would go on a run together.  True to his word, he called Mike every month or so to see how he was doing.  Well, last week they went on the run, one mile with the president.  Not something you'll see in the news, but seeing the president taking the time to say thank you to the wounded and to give hope to one of my best friends was one of the greatest/best things I have seen in my life.  It almost sounds like a corny email chain letter, but God bless him.

CPT Justin P. Dodge, MD

Flight Surgeon, 1-2 AVN RGT

Medical Corps, U.S. Army

http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcelroy/mcelroy36.html

Feds seek to impose mental health testing  

Woof Mig:

I can't get the video to open but this is horrendous:

"Americans must be able to trust the facts in political ads. Every voter has the right to truthful advertising.  Free speech is no defense to massive, purposeful fraud.

"You, the FCC, have an obligation to ensure that broadcast stations around the country do not transmit misleading, deceptive and fraudulent advertising.  

"We, the undersigned American citizens, demand that you require proof of fact before airing political advertisements.  Laws must change to protect our democracy. "

Said with love, but are you crazy?!?  You have to prove truth to a government agency before engaging in political speech?!?!?!?!?!?  Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Naderian, whatever-- this is profoundly ass-backwards.

McCain-Feingold is one of the most pernicious pieces of legislation to pass in a long, long time and shame on President Bush for signing it, and shame on the Supreme Court for upholding it.  Our First Amendment has taken a serious blow with this.

http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/editorial/9576050.htm

Opinion

Posted on Sun, Sep. 05, 2004

'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' is no strategy for homeland security

by TIM PAWLENTY (governor of Minnesota)

When Zacarias Moussaoui was in Minnesota allegedly preparing to take part in the biggest terrorist attack in American history, he would have liked the protections given to him by city ordinances in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Minnesota's two largest cities prevent their police officers from inquiring about a person's immigration status. Police can't check to see if a visa is expired or if a person is in the United States illegally. Essentially, Minneapolis and St. Paul have taken a "don't ask, don't tell" approach that could impede our homeland security efforts.

Why would Minneapolis and St. Paul want to tie the hands of their police in protecting homeland security? With the threats that Sept. 11 made apparent to all Americans, why would city councils prevent their police officers from using all available legal means to protect their communities from terrorism? These are questions to which I'd like to hear some answers from the members of the Minneapolis and St. Paul city councils.

We are a country of immigrants, and immigration has contributed greatly to America's success. But immigration must be legal, reasonable and orderly. We cannot pretend there is no connection between illegal immigration and homeland security concerns.

Recently, in North Carolina, a police officer observed a man filming financial institutions and other nontourist structures. This was suspicious, but not necessarily illegal activity. The basis upon which the man could be detained and questioned was his immigration status, he was in the country illegally. His behavior and motives are now being reviewed for possible terrorism-related charges. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, city ordinance could have prevented that officer from taking action.

Minnesota has not been isolated from the war on terror. For a relatively small state in the middle of the country, we have had more than our fair share of terrorism-related arrests. Since 2001, five men from different countries ? all with connections to Minnesota ? were detained or arrested on suspicion of terrorism-related activities. This includes, for example, a Moroccan who lived in Minneapolis, who was indicted and later convicted of conspiring to provide material support or resources to terrorists, of fraud and of misusing documents.

The city councils argue that all residents should be able to seek the help of the police without fear their immigration status may become an issue. That concern, however, needs to be balanced against the need for increased vigilance to protect homeland security. That balancing can be accomplished without compromising public safety.

The ordinances in St. Paul and Minneapolis should be repealed. If the city councils are unwilling to take that action, they should at least be willing to grant police officers the option of questioning immigration status if there are concerns about homeland security.

The heart, soul and hope of America is reflected in the immigrants who come here to find a new life and new opportunity. Protecting our homeland does not oppress immigrants. It protects them ? and the freedom and opportunity for which they came. Our local law enforcement is the first line of defense in America's homeland security. Prohibiting them from using a critical public safety tool simply defies common sense.

U.S. Erred in Terror Convictions
The Justice Department admits possible criminal misconduct. Key charges may be dropped.
By Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writer


WASHINGTON ? The Justice Department conceded Wednesday that in its zeal to win convictions in a terrorism case in Detroit last year, prosecutors engaged in "a pattern of mistakes and oversights" that may constitute criminal misconduct.

The case was the first major terrorism prosecution after the Sept. 11 attacks and had been hailed by U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft as an example of the government's successful campaign to disrupt terrorist "sleeper cells" in the country.

In its 60-page court-ordered filing, the Justice Department supports the Detroit defendants' request for a new trial and states that it will no longer pursue terrorism charges against them.

A ruling by the judge in the case could come as early as today.

The filing details a wide range of misdeeds, while offering a rare glimpse inside the government's war on terrorism. It includes allegations that the main prosecutor in the case ? Richard G. Convertino ? disregarded dissenting views from experts and suppressed or withheld evidence that might have been helpful to the defense.

Prosecutors accused four defendants, arrested in Detroit in a roundup of Arab immigrants a week after the Sept. 11 attacks, of conspiring to launch attacks in the United States, Jordan and Turkey.

Federal agents had been looking for another man when they went to a second-story apartment in the middle of the night and found the men, some of whom had worked at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. They were arrested and charged with canvassing the airport and other locations. In Washington, Ashcroft announced that federal officials believed that the men had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, a statement he later retracted.

In June 2003, a jury in Detroit convicted two of the men on charges including conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism. A third defendant was convicted of document fraud, and a fourth was acquitted. When problems in the case came to light last fall, Convertino, an assistant U.S. attorney in Detroit, was removed from the case. In February he sued the government, claiming that he was never given adequate support.

Among other findings, the report issued late Tuesday found that prosecutors had withheld a jailhouse letter discrediting the government's star witness and used a federal defendant in a separate cocaine case to translate sensitive audiotapes.

The report found that prosecutors had suppressed evidence supporting a defense position that sketches found in a day planner in the defendants' Detroit apartment were the doodlings of a mentally ill man ? rather than evidence that the defendants were casing possible terrorist targets, as the government asserted at trial.

And it also revealed that the department's public integrity section launched a criminal investigation into the handling of the case. A Justice Department spokesman declined to elaborate or say who was the target.

The findings come as vindication for defense lawyers who, throughout the case, had complained that the government withheld evidence and was not playing fairly.

The Justice Department's admissions present a counterpoint to claims by the Bush administration that it is winning the war on terrorism, which have been reverberating in speeches this week at the Republican National Convention in New York.

It also underscored the government's mixed success in prosecuting terrorism cases since Sept. 11. Although the Justice Department has won numerous highly publicized guilty pleas ? often by dropping the most serious charges ? it has been handed partial or outright defeats in major terrorism cases it has taken to trial. Most recently, a computer student in Boise, Idaho, was acquitted of federal charges that he used the Internet to raise money and recruit people for terrorist causes.

U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen is expected to rule as early as today on whether to order a new trial on document fraud charges alone. Defense lawyers are expected to seek a dismissal of all charges and the defendants' release.

"There is actual evidence that there was a deliberate withholding of evidence that is inconsistent with the government theory of terrorism and consistent with our defense, and that is a subversion of justice," said James Thomas, a Detroit lawyer who represents one of the defendants.

"That is not a way to win a war on terror. That is not what the Constitution is talking about. It certainly isn't the way that prosecutors should conduct business," he said.

A lawyer for Convertino strongly disputed that characterization. "Even if Rick was aware of the material that the government characterizes as disclosable to the defense, that material was insubstantial and cumulative and would not have encouraged the reasonable probability that a different verdict would have resulted after trial," attorney William Sullivan Jr. said.

"As with every other case he has prosecuted, Rick Convertino pursued this one fairly and justly, with the safety and security of his community uppermost in his mind in the wake of 9/11," Sullivan said.

The case began unraveling late last year after Rosen learned that prosecutors had not turned over to the defense a letter from a Detroit gang leader who was once held in the same prison as the star witness for the government. The letter suggested that the witness, Youssef Hmimssa, a former roommate of the defendants who had a history of credit card fraud, had lied to the FBI. Hmimssa testified that they were all Islamic fundamentalists involved in terrorist activities.

Convertino, a 14-year Justice Department veteran, became the target of an ethics investigation by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility. After being removed from the case, the prosecutor sued Ashcroft, saying the department had violated his rights and that he was a target of retaliation because he had complained internally that department red tape had hobbled the prosecution.

In its report, the Justice Department acknowledged that the letter about Hmimssa should have been turned over. But the inquiry also found additional evidence that the department now says should have been shared with the defense, and exposed deep differences of opinion within the government over the handling of evidence and testimony.

The report raised new doubts about a central piece of the government's case ? a day planner found in the defendants' apartment that the government said included surveillance sketches of a Turkish air base used by American fighter jets and a military hospital in Jordan.

The report said the government attempted to create the "false impression" at trial that "diplomatic red tape" prevented them from obtaining photos of the hospital to compare to the sketches. In fact, the report said, the facility bore little, if any resemblance to the sketches.

The report also found that a retired CIA officer, whom Convertino had consulted about the supposed air base sketch, told the prosecutor on numerous occasions that he did not believe the sketch "conveyed any useful information," and that the former officer believed "Convertino was shopping for an opinion consistent with his own."

The report also cast doubt on the testimony of an FBI supervisory agent in Detroit who said that a videotape found in the defendants' possession included "casing" shots of Las Vegas, Disneyland and New York.

The report found that the prosecutors had evidence that the Las Vegas office of the FBI disagreed with that view, but did not turn that information over to the court or the defense.

"In its best light, the record would show that the prosecution committed a pattern of mistakes and oversights that deprived the defendants of discoverable evidence (including impeachment material) and created a record filled with misleading inferences that such material did not exist," the department said in its memo. "Accordingly, the government believes that it should not prolong the resolution of this matter pursuing hearings it has no reasonable prospect of winning."

Woof All:

Linda is right, my question is directed at criminal (both misdemeanor and felony) arrests and convictions, not credit histories.

In our mobile society it would be nice if one could find out the misdemeanors and/or felony arrests and/or convictions nationwide of a particular individual and not have to go through the tedium of searching all 50 states, DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.

I have not had a chance yet to go through the resources so kindly provided already, so please forgive me if this is a question which, in effect, has already been answered:  Are there any particular sources for Virginia and Maryland? Or will I get these two states as part of the search on the previously mentioned sources?

TIA to all,
Crafty

Party pooper Mr. Guest!  

Seriously, quite right and thank you.