Fighting & Winning The Global War on Terror (WW IV)

[Edward Campbell]

I want to reinforce the point that we are not at war with Muslims or with Islam ... nor are we at war with terror or terrorism - both being the traditional tactics of many weak insurgents.

Our enemy du jour, (our referring to the American led West) is an fairly loose and eclectic mix of movements which, generally, share four attributes; they are:

"¢ Arabic;

"¢ Extremist;

"¢ Fundamentalist; and

"¢ Islamic.

That being said, many, most Muslims are neither of the middle two and a very large number are not even Arabic.

The problem which confronts us arises when all four are combined.   We, many of us, may find fundamentalist religious and social views unpalatable not matter what the source.   Canadian public intellectual or gadfly or, in her own words, Muslim Refusenik Irshad Manji uses a phrase I like to describe part of the problem: Arab foundamentalism. (See: http://www.muslim-refusenik.com/ )   What she means is that too many Muslim teachers and leaders insist that Islam, the faith, can only be practiced in the 21st century by honouring the Arab social and cultural traditions of the 12th.   Many people - Muslims or not - can and do have serious problems with trying to impose thousand year old social mores on anyone, anywhere - especially in Austria or Belgium, Canada,   Denmark or England and so on.   This leads to a backlash which, in turn, provides propaganda for the extremists amongst the Arab (socio-cultural) and Islamic (religious) fundamentalists.   They can, do and will twist our words and deeds (and some of them do not need much twisting) to suit their purposes which is to lead disaffected young Muslims to some sort of jihad - a holy war against the West and all things Western, especially social, cultural, political and religious liberalism.

These people are willing to fight us anywhere.   It is my view that the war in Iraq has provided them, temporarily, with a happy hunting ground - some hope that they can tie America down in a long, drawn out, dirty counter-insurgency operation; each day will provoke Americans and their surrogates to harsher and harsher measures which, in turn, will provoke more and more Muslims, especially, Arabs to take up the Arab extremist, fundamentalist Islamic cause.

There is no alternative, for the American led West, to engaging and defeating the Arab extremist, fundamentalist Islamic movements and this is the work of generations - work which must go on while we deal with a constantly changing strategic environment in which much of the world is indifferent to 'our' struggle, but not, necessarily, supportive of our enemy, either.

It is important to bear in mind that this is a war.   The issue is to defeat an enemy, not to bring criminals to justice.

I would like to pick up, also, on some of the ideas discussed in the Transformation thread, up above, in The Canadian Army.   We, Canadians, need to take a full, fair and responsible share in this war.   We will need to apply all of our power - political, socio-cultural, economic and military - to two parallel tasks:

1. Defeating the Arab extremist, fundamentalist Islamic challenges - wherever and whenever, including in Arabia; and

2. Securing the global peace by helping our friends and neighbours in the West to adapt to the inevitable rise of competitors, even opponents, from the East without turning them into enemies.

We must be prepared to:

"¢ Help secure our continent - this goes beyond just looking after our own economic best interests, it involves acting like a mature nation-state.   We should not offer improved security in hope of receiving favourable trade treatment in return; we should provide good, solid security because that is what mature nation-states do;

"¢ Help defeat the Arab extremist, fundamentalist Islamic challenges - in Canada and overseas, too;

"¢ Help to keep the peace - in all those places where it is threatened by a whole wide range of political miscreants; and

"¢ Help to win the other war - the one which seeks to prevent the rigid polarization of the world into two warring camps.

We will need highly adaptable (flexible) and readily available armed forces which are also appropriate in capability for a nation which, by any fair and reasonable measure ranks - and will continue to rank for most of the next century - amongst the top 10% of all the nation-states on earth.   Those forces also need to be affordable.   I have referred to this before, noting that while we may not and should not aspire to be in the military major leagues we are a Tripe A, plus country and we ought to have Triple A+ armed forces to promote and protect our vital interests and to promote our values and to help those who cannot help themselves.

These forces must be supported by a truly first rate intelligence and security apparatus - some of which should be part of and responsible to the Canadian Forces.

We need balanced forces - we must not draw down our naval and air capabilities to patch holes in the army; not even as a temporary expedient.   If the Minister of Finance will not give General Hillier the resources he needs then Hillier must resign, saying that he will not put ill-equipped, ill-supported Canadian military personnel into harm's way; he may have to be followed by other admirals and generals who also serve only short tours as CDS before resigning in a huff until the Prime Minister and his party are embarrassed and feel some political heat from Canadians - that has not happened, yet; that's why Paul Martin pooh-poohed Stephen Harper's aircraft carriers and offered some nebulous, way off in the future peacekeeping brigade: he knew that Canadians care little and know less about the armed forces and will not care any more until they perceive a crisis.

We may not, for a long, long time, deploy anything much larger than a large battle group or mini-brigade but we still need a good, sound, professional logistics tail which goes all the way back to depots and vendors.   It doesn't all have to be military; it may not be the most desirable thing but we may have to rely upon contracted support - including heavy air lift - for quite some time.   There may be some hard choices - cap badge choices - such as reducing the artillery to a light role with a good sized training cadre (and a few real howitzers) in the militia; ditto the armoured corps.   We could, for example, keep some tanks - even obsolete or light tanks - in the militia and we could, also, reopen and expand our exchange programme with the UK so that armoured and artillery officers and NCOs get to serve in modern, regular units.

What we must not do is transform our military into a peacekeeping force - which will, inevitable and in short order, stumble and fall, when it meets a fighting task, disgracing the country in the process and leading to the disarming of Canada and, consequentially, international irrelevance and something akin to colonial status.

We need units - ships, squadrons and battalions/regiments - which can, right now gather intelligence, survey our territory, contiguous waters and the airspace over both, detect, identify, intercept and (appropriately) deal with intruders: smugglers, illegal aliens, etc.   We need units - ships, squadrons and battalions/regiments - which can, right now, deploy, quickly, anywhere in the world and apply our national power to a wide range of targets - enemies and threats to the world peace and even threats to people who are too weak to help themselves.

Sorry this is long, repetitive and disjointed - I have been reading, reading, reading army.ca since I got back from a foreign visit and I probably tried to get too many thoughts into one post.   Anyway we are at war: with a real, definable enemy.   It will be a long, long, low intensity war - not overly popular, low intensity wars never are ... we still need adequate forces to fight the current war and keep the peace and help others and deter emerging powers, and ... and ... and and all that costs money, money most Canadians want spent on health care, child care, educations, industrial subsidies, old age pensions, minor hockey ...

 

[Kirkhill]

Hear, Hear ROJ.

Hopefully, it doesn't come to Hillier or others quitting.  The problem that I have with that is the age old one of the fact that the very people that care enough to quit are the ones we need in the positions.

Other than that, can't agree more.

Cheers.

 

[Infanteer]

I'll second that motion.  ROJ, we need you in Cabinet - I hear there is a spot open in the Citizenship and Immigration portfolio....

 

[a_majoor]

A long post from an American Task Force commander on the "media war"

Aiding and Abetting the Enemy: the Media in Iraq
By LTC Tim Ryan, CO, 2/12 Cav, 1st Cav Div

What if domestic news outlets continually fed American readers headlines like: "Bloody Week on U.S. Highways: Some 700 Killed," or "More Than 900 Americans Die Weekly  from Obesity-Related Diseases"?  Both of these headlines might be true statistically, but do they really represent accurate pictures of the situations?  What if you combined all of the negatives to be found in the state of Texas and used them as an indicator of the quality of life for all Texans?  Imagine the headlines: "Anti-law Enforcement Elements Spread Robbery, Rape and Murder through Texas Cities." For all intents and purposes, this statement is true for any day of any year in any state. True -- yes, accurate -- yes, but in context with the greater good taking place -- no!  After a year or two of headlines like these, more than a few folks back in Texas and the rest of the U.S. probably would be ready to jump off of a building and end it all. So, imagine being an American in Iraq right now.

I just read yet another distorted and grossly exaggerated story from a major news organization about the "failures" in the war in Iraq.  Print and video journalists are covering only a small fraction of the events in Iraq and more often than not, the events they cover are only the bad ones. Many of the journalists making public assessments about the progress of the war in Iraq are unqualified to do so, given their training and experience. The inaccurate picture they paint has distorted the world view of the daily realities in Iraq.  The result is a further erosion of international public support for the United States' efforts there, and a strengthening of the insurgents' resolve and recruiting efforts while weakening our own.  Through their incomplete, uninformed and unbalanced reporting, many members of the media covering the war in Iraq are aiding and abetting the enemy.

The fact is the Coalition is making steady progress in Iraq, but not without ups and downs.  War is a terrible thing and terrible things happen during wars, even when you are winning. In war, as in any contest of wills with capable opponents, things do not always go as planned; the guys with the white hats don't always come out on top in each engagement. That doesn't mean you are losing.  Sure, there are some high profile and very spectacular enemy attacks taking place in Iraq these days, but the great majority of what is happening in Iraq is positive.  So why is it that no matter what events unfold, good or bad, the media highlight mostly the negative aspects of the event?  The journalistic adage, "If it bleeds, it leads," still applies in Iraq, but why only when it's American blood?

As a recent example, the operation in Fallujah delivered an absolutely devastating blow to the insurgency.  Though much smaller in scope, clearing Fallujah of insurgents arguably could equate to the Allies' breakout from the hedgerows in France during World War II. In both cases, our troops overcame a well-prepared and solidly entrenched enemy and began what could be the latter's last stand.  In Fallujah, the enemy death toll has already exceeded 1,500 and still is climbing.  Put one in the win column for the good guys, right?  Wrong. As soon as there was nothing negative to report about Fallujah, the media shifted its focus to other parts of the country.  Just yesterday, a major news agency's website lead read: "Suicide Bomber Kills Six in Baghdad" and "Seven Marines Die in Iraq Clashes." True, yes. Comprehensive, no.  Did the author of this article bother to mention that Coalition troops killed 50 or so terrorists while incurring those seven losses? Of course not.  Nor was there any mention about the substantial progress these offensive operations continue to achieve in defeating the insurgents.  Unfortunately, this sort of incomplete reporting has become the norm for the media, whose poor job of presenting a complete picture of what is going on in Iraq borders on being criminal. 

Much of the problem is about perspective, putting things in scale and balance.  From where I sit in my command post at Camp Fallujah, Iraq, things are not all bad right now. In fact, they are going quite well.  We are not under attack by the enemy; on the contrary, we are taking the fight to him daily and have him on the ropes.  In the distance, I can hear the repeated impacts of heavy artillery and five hundred-pound bombs hitting their targets in the city.  The occasional tank main gun report and the staccato rhythm of a Marine Corps LAV or Army Bradley Fighting Vehicle's 25-millimeter cannon provide the bass line for a symphony of destruction. Right now, as elements from all four services complete the absolute annihilation of the insurgent forces remaining in Fallujah, the area around the former stronghold is more peaceful than it has been for more than a year. The number of attacks in the greater Al Anbar Province is down by at least 70-80% from late October -- before Operation Al Fajar began.  The enemy in this area is completely defeated, but not completely gone. Final eradication of the pockets of insurgents will take some time, as it always does, but the fact remains that the central geographic stronghold of the insurgents is now under friendly control. That sounds a lot like success to me.  Given all of this, why don't the papers lead with "Coalition Crushes Remaining Pockets of Insurgents" or "Enemy Forces Resort to Suicide Bombings of Civilians"? This would paint a far more accurate picture of the enemy's predicament over here.  Instead, headlines focus almost exclusively on our hardships.

What about the media's portrayal of the enemy?  Why do these ruthless murderers, kidnappers and thieves get a pass when it comes to their actions?  What did the media not show or tell us about Margaret Hassoon, the director of C.A.R.E. in Iraq and an Iraqi citizen, who was kidnapped, brutally tortured and left disemboweled in streets of Fallujah?  Did anyone in the press show these images over and over to emphasize the moral failings of the enemy as they did with the soldiers at Abu Ghuraib?  Did anyone show the world how this enemy had huge stockpiles of weapons in schools and mosques, or how he used these protected places as sanctuaries for planning and fighting in Fallujah and the rest of Iraq?  Are people of the world getting the complete story?  The answer again is no!  What the world got instead were repeated images of a battle-weary Marine who made a quick decision to use lethal force and who now is being tried in the world press.  Is this one act really illustrative of the overall action in Fallujah?  No, but the Marine video clip was shown an average of four times each hour on just about every major TV news channel for a week.  This is how the world views our efforts over here and stories like this without a counter continually serve as propaganda victories for the enemy.  Al Jazeera isn't showing the film of the CARE worker, but is showing the clip of the Marine.  Earlier this year, the Iraqi government banned Al Jazeera from the country for its inaccurate reporting.  Wonder where they get their information now?  Well, if you go to the Internet, you'll find a web link from the Al Jazeera home page to CNN's home page. Very interesting. 

The operation in Fallujah is only one of the recent examples of incomplete coverage of the events in Iraq. The battle in Najaf last August provides another. Television and newspapers spilled a continuous stream of images and stories about the destruction done to the sacred city, and of all the human suffering allegedly brought about by the hands of the big, bad Americans.  These stories and the lack of anything to counter them gave more fuel to the fire of anti-Americanism that burns in this part of the world. Those on the outside saw the Coalition portrayed as invaders or oppressors, killing hapless Iraqis who, one was given to believe, simply were trying to defend their homes and their Muslim way of life. 

Reality couldn't have been farther from the truth.  What noticeably was missing were accounts of the atrocities committed by the Mehdi Militia -- Muqtada Al Sadr's band of henchmen. While the media was busy bashing the Coalition, Muqtada's boys were kidnapping policemen, city council members and anyone else accused of supporting the Coalition or the new government, trying them in a kangaroo court based on Islamic Shari'a law, then brutally torturing and executing them for their "crimes."  What the media didn't show or write about were the two hundred-plus headless bodies found in the main mosque there, or the body that was put into a bread oven and baked. Nor did they show the world the hundreds of thousands of mortar, artillery and small arms rounds found within the "sacred" walls of the mosque. Also missing from the coverage was the huge cache of weapons found in Muqtada's "political" headquarters nearby. No, none of this made it to the screen or to print.  All anyone showed were the few chipped tiles on the dome of the mosque and discussion centered on how we, the Coalition, had somehow done wrong.  Score another one for the enemy's propaganda machine.

Now, compare the Najaf example to the coverage and debate ad nauseam of the Abu Ghuraib Prison affair.  There certainly is no justification for what a dozen or so soldiers did there, but unbalanced reporting led the world to believe that the actions of the dozen were representative of the entire military. This has had an incredibly negative effect on Middle Easterners' already sagging opinion of the U.S. and its military.  Did anyone show the world images of the 200 who were beheaded and mutilated in Muqtada's Shari'a Law court, or spend the next six months talking about how horrible all of that was?  No, of course not.  Most people don't know that these atrocities happened. It's little wonder that many people here want us out and would vote someone like Muqtada Al Sadr into office given the chance -- they never see the whole truth.  Strange, when the enemy is the instigator the media does not flash images across the screens of televisions in the Middle East as they did with Abu Ghuraib.  Is it because the beheaded bodies might offend someone? If so, then why do we continue see photos of the naked human pyramid over and over?

So, why doesn't the military get more involved in showing the media the other side of the story? The answer is they do. Although some outfits are better than others, the Army and other military organizations today understand the importance of getting out the story -- the whole story -- and trains leaders to talk to the press. There is a saying about media and the military that goes: "The only way the media is going to tell a good story is if you give them one to tell." This doesn't always work as planned.  Recently, when a Coalition spokesman tried to let TV networks in on opening moves in the Fallujah operation, they misconstrued the events for something they were not and then blamed the military for their gullibility. CNN recently aired a "special report" in which the cable network accused the military of lying to it and others about the beginning of the Fallujah operation.  The incident referred to took place in October when a Marine public affairs officer called media representatives and told them that an operation was about to begin.  Reporters rushed to the outskirts of Fallujah to see what they assumed was going to be the beginning of the main attack on the city.  As it turned out, what they saw were tactical "feints" designed to confuse the enemy about the timing of the main attack, then planned to take place weeks later. 

Once the network realized that major combat operations wouldn't start for several more weeks, CNN alleged that the Marines had used them as a tool for their deception operation.  Now, they say they want answers from the military and the administration on the matter. The reality appears to be that in their zeal to scoop their competition, CNN and others took the information they were given and turned it into what they wanted it to be.  Did the military lie to the media: no. It is specifically against regulations to provide misinformation to the press.  However, did the military planners anticipate that reporters would take the ball and run with it, adding to the overall deception plan? Possibly. Is that unprecedented or illegal? Of course not.

CNN and others say they were duped by the military in this and other cases. Yet, they never seem to be upset by the undeniable fact that the enemy manipulates them with a cunning that is almost worthy of envy.  You can bet that terrorist leader Abu Musab Al Zarqarwi has his own version of a public affairs officer and it is evident that he uses him to great effect.  Each time Zarquari's group executes a terrorist act such as a beheading or a car bomb, they have a prepared statement ready to post on their website and feed to the press. Over-eager reporters take the bait, hook, line and sinker, and report it just as they got it. 

Did it ever occur to the media that this type of notoriety is just what the terrorists want and need?  Every headline they grab is a victory for them. Those who have read the ancient Chinese military theorist and army general Sun Tsu will recall the philosophy of "Kill one, scare ten thousand" as the basic theory behind the strategy of terrorism. Through fear, the terrorist can then manipulate the behavior of the masses. The media allows the terrorist to use relatively small but spectacular events that directly affect very few, and spread them around the world to scare millions.  What about the thousands of things that go right every day and are never reported?  Complete a multi-million-dollar sewer project and no one wants to cover it, but let one car bomb go off and it makes headlines.  With each headline, the enemy scores another point and the good-guys lose one. This method of scoring slowly is eroding domestic and international support while fueling the enemy's cause.

I believe one of the reasons for this shallow and subjective reporting is that many reporters never actually cover the events they report on. This is a point of growing concern within the Coalition. It appears many members of the media are hesitant to venture beyond the relative safety of the so-called "International Zone" in downtown Baghdad, or similar "safe havens" in other large cities. Because terrorists and other thugs wisely target western media members and others for kidnappings or attacks, the westerners stay close to their quarters. This has the effect of holding the media captive in cities and keeps them away from the broader truth that lies outside their view.  With the press thus cornered, the terrorists easily feed their unwitting captives a thin gruel of anarchy, one spoonful each day.  A car bomb at the entry point to the International Zone one day, a few mortars the next, maybe a kidnapping or two thrown in. All delivered to the doorsteps of those who will gladly accept it without having to leave their hotel rooms -- how convenient. 

The scene is repeated all too often: an attack takes place in Baghdad and the morning sounds are punctuated by a large explosion and a rising cloud of smoke.  Sirens wail in the distance and photographers dash to the scene a few miles away.  Within the hour, stern-faced reporters confidently stare into the camera while standing on the balcony of their tenth-floor Baghdad hotel room, their back to the city and a distant smoke plume rising behind them.  More mayhem in Gotham City they intone, and just in time for the morning news. There is a transparent reason why the majority of car bombings and other major events take place before noon Baghdad-time; any later and the event would miss the start of the morning news cycle on the U.S. east coast. These terrorists aren't stupid; they know just what to do to scare the masses and when to do it.  An important key to their plan is manipulation of the news media.  But, at least the reporters in Iraq are gathering information and filing their stories, regardless of whether or the stories are in perspective.  Much worse are the "talking heads" who sit in studios or offices back home and pontificate about how badly things are going when they never have been to Iraq and only occasionally leave Manhattan. 

Almost on a daily basis, newspapers, periodicals and airwaves give us negative views about the premises for this war and its progress. It seems that everyone from politicians to pop stars are voicing their unqualified opinions on how things are going. Recently, I saw a Rolling Stone magazine and in bold print on the cover was, "Iraq on Fire; Dispatches from the Lost War."  Now, will someone please tell me who at Rolling Stone or just about any other "news" outlet is qualified to make a determination as to when all is lost and it's time to throw in the towel? In reality, such flawed reporting serves only to misshape world opinion and bolster the enemy's position.  Each enemy success splashed across the front pages and TV screens of the world not only emboldens them, but increases their ability to recruit more money and followers.

So what are the credentials of these self proclaimed "experts"?  The fact is that most of those on whom we rely for complete and factual accounts have little or no experience or education in counter-insurgency operations or in nation-building to support their assessments.  How would they really know if things are going well or not?  War is an ugly thing with many unexpected twists and turns.  Who among them is qualified to say if this one is worse than any other at this point?  What would they have said in early 1942 about our chances of winning World War II?  Was it a lost cause too?  How much have these "experts" studied warfare and counter-insurgencies in particular?  Have they ever read Roger Trinquier's treatise Modern Warfare: A French View on Counter-insurgency (1956)?  He is one of the few French military guys who got it right.  The Algerian insurgency of the 1950s and the Iraq insurgency have many similarities.  What about Napoleon's campaigns in Sardinia in 1805-07? Again, there are a lot of similarities to this campaign. Have they studied that and contrasted the strategies? Or, have they even read Mao Zedung's theories on insurgencies, or Nygen Giap's, or maybe Che' Gueverra's?  Have they seen any of Sun Zsu's work lately?  Who are these guys?  It's time to start studying, folks. If a journalist doesn't recognize the names on this list, he or she probably isn't qualified to assess the state of this or any other campaign's progress.
 
Worse yet, why in the world would they seek opinion from someone who probably knows even less than they do about the state of affairs in Iraq?  It sells commercials, I suppose.  But, I find it amazing that some people are more apt to listen to a movie star's or rock singer's view on how we should prosecute world affairs than to someone whose profession it is to know how these things should go. I play the guitar, but Bruce Springsteen doesn't listen to me play.  Why should I be subjected to his views on the validity of the war?  By profession, he's a guitar player. Someone remind me what it is that makes Sean Penn an expert on anything.  It seems that anyone who has a dissenting view is first to get in front of the camera.  I'm all for freedom of speech, but let's talk about things we know. Otherwise, television news soon could have about as much credibility as "The Batchelor" has for showing us truly loving couples.

Also bothersome are references by "experts" on how "long" this war is taking.  I've read that in the world of manufacturing, you can have only two of the following three qualities when developing a product -- cheap, fast or good. You can produce something cheap and fast, but it won't be good; good and fast, but it won't be cheap; good and cheap, but it won't be fast. In this case, we want the result to be good and we want it at the lowest cost in human lives.  Given this set of conditions, one can expect this war is to take a while, and rightfully so. Creating a democracy in Iraq not only will require a change in the political system, but the economic system as well. Study of examples of similar socio-economic changes that took place in countries like Chile, Bulgaria, Serbia, Russia and other countries with oppressive Socialist dictatorships shows that it took seven to ten years to move those countries to where they are now.  There are many lessons to be learned from these transformations, the most important of which is that change doesn't come easily, even without an insurgency going on.  Maybe the experts should take a look at all of the work that has gone into stabilizing Bosnia-Herzegovina over the last 10 years. We are just at the eighteen-month mark in Iraq, a place far more oppressive than Bosnia ever was. If previous examples are any comparison, there will be no quick solutions here, but that should be no surprise to an analyst who has done his or her homework.

This war is not without its tragedies; none ever are. The key to the enemy's success is use of his limited assets to gain the greatest influence over the masses.  The media serves as the glass through which a relatively small event can be magnified to international proportions, and the enemy is exploiting this with incredible ease. There is no good news to counteract the bad, so the enemy scores a victory almost every day.  In its zeal to get to the hot spots and report the latest bombing, the media is missing the reality of a greater good going on in Iraq.  We seldom are seen doing anything right or positive in the news.  People believe what they see, and what people of the world see almost on a daily basis is negative.  How could they see it any other way?  These images and stories, out of scale and context to the greater good going on over here, are just the sort of thing the terrorists are looking for.  This focus on the enemy's successes strengthens his resolve and aids and abets his cause. It's the American image abroad that suffers in the end.

Ironically, the press freedom that we have brought to this part of the world is providing support for the enemy we fight. I obviously think it's a disgrace when many on whom the world relies for news paint such an incomplete picture of what actually has happened. Much too much is ignored or omitted. I am confident that history will prove our cause right in this war, but by the time that happens, the world might be so steeped in the gloom of ignorance we won't recognize victory when we achieve it.

Today, we have "bloggers", including soldiers in the theater who provide reports like this which goes a small way towards countering both openly hostile media like Al Jazeera as well as the MSM which is seemingly to lazy or incompetent to do the leg work required to get the story. This is the story which should be on the front pages, and should be forwarded to PAO's everywhere.

 

[Wizard of OZ]

a_majoor

You and i both know that the American press only reports bad news after any conflict.  It is the stuff that sells.  Because it is still purchased by those who oppose the war in the first place.  Those who support it are done(not in all cases) but they have seen the fruit of their labour and victory was achieved.  Those who failed to stop can only grasp at these straws to show see "we were right and should not have been there in the first place".  That is the problem with the Media.  And yes if it Bleeds it leads.  You never see the stories of new wells being dug and towns being rebuilt in Iraq do you?

No cause nobody wants to read that we live in a depressing time my friend where death and destruction rule.

The sad part is the media is playing into the hand of the enemy (much the same as in Vietnam) where for every story they report the more chaos is unlesashed.  If they stopped reporting the negative or slanted stories i bet the future would brighten up alot faster over there.  Tough to sell paradise when it is not on the news.

Further my last post it was not meant as slander to "Muslims" it was meant as a generic term from the Crusades i guess i could have chose a different word such as extremists or fanatic.

I do aplogize for this slander i meant no harm by it.

 

[a_majoor]

Focusing on the battlefront in Iraq:

http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200501180829.asp

January 18, 2005, 8:29 a.m.
Been There, Done That
Iraq's not foreign territory.

As the drumbeat of bad news continues in Iraq and calls for a U.S. withdrawal begin to take hold, a popular cliché will get increased currency: that it is impossible to win a war against a guerrilla insurgency. This is the historical inaccuracy that Vietnam wrought. Americans assume that since they lost a war that had a guerrilla aspect in Vietnam â ” never mind that it was a conventional North Vietnamese army that ultimately conquered the south â ” everyone must always lose guerrilla wars.

Among other things, this ignores the American victory over an insurgency in the Philippines in the 1950s, the Greek triumph over a Communist insurgency after World War II, El Salvador's defeat of Communist guerrillas in the 1980s, Peru's smashing of a terrorist insurgency in the 1990s, the recent qualified victory of the British over the Irish Republican Army, and Israel's continuing upper hand over terrorists in the West Bank and Gaza. Most importantly, the insurgents-always-win school skips over the textbook example of successful counterinsurgency, the British victory in Malaysia in the 1950s over a communist guerrilla movement.

The British experience is related in John Nagl's cult-classic book Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam. It has become must reading for high-level officers in Iraq because its lessons seem so directly applicable to the situation there. Nagl himself, an Army major, has been in Iraq, where we still can duplicate the British experience in Malaysia of stumbling initially, but prevailing through innovation, stick-to-itiveness and shrewd political maneuvering.

Communist guerrillas in Malaysia took up arms in the late 1940s, murdering Europeans, sabotaging industry and using terror to try to strengthen the insurgency's base among the country's Chinese minority. Given their colonial history, the British had plenty of experience with such low-intensity conflicts, but had forgotten it after the conventional warfare in Europe of World War II. The Brits at first considered the insurgency primarily a military problem, and tried to take the guerrillas on in conventional military formations. These tactics not only failed to engage the guerrillas, who easily evaded the large jungle sweeps, but their heavy-handedness alienated the local population.

The British were losing. One observer thought the guerrillas were "probably equal to that of government in the matter of supplies and superior in the matter of intelligence." Guerrilla attacks had been fewer than 100 a month in mid-1949, but spiked to more than 400 a month by mid-1950. This is when, had the Brits operated in our media and political environment, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd would have witheringly declared all lost, and calls from across the political spectrum would have gone up to quit.

With a patience born of fighting many "small wars" in dusty parts of the world, the British simply set about fixing what they had done wrong. Most fundamentally, they realized that counterinsurgency depends on winning a political battle for "hearts and minds" (a famous phrase that originated in the Malaysia fight). Military operations were conducted on a smaller scale. The Chinese population was secured from guerrilla influence. A Malaysian army was built, with Chinese involvement. Elections were organized and independence promised. Slowly, the air went out of the insurgency, which was officially declared over in 1960, 12 years after it began.

Iraq is not the same as Malaysia, of course, but it presents a very similar problem. The Malaysian example has been on the Pentagon's mind from the beginning, and is one reason it has placed such an emphasis on training Iraqi troops. Ultimately, just as important as establishing security in Iraq is having a political program more attractive than that of our revanchist enemies. Which is why â ” just as in Malaysia â ” holding elections and maintaining a glide path to full sovereignty are so crucial.

We should be clear-eyed about the fearsome difficulties in Iraq. But we shouldn't give in to despair, let alone an unjustified metaphysical despair about the possibility of ever defeating a stubborn insurgency. It's been done before.

â ” Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.

(c) 2004 King Features Syndicate

 

[Edward Campbell]

This very good study of the Malaya operations is still available, I'm pleased to say: http://www.selectbooks.com.sg/titles/34873.htm

It should have been required reading in Leavenworth and Carlisle back in the '60s and 70s and it should be required, in 2001, there, and in Kingston, Toronto and Camberley too.

 

[a_majoor]

The reality of Iraqi operations taking place in an expanded regional theater:

http://www.nationalreview.com/lerner/lerner200501190749.asp

Setting Sights on Syria
How to win in Iraq, and regionally.

By Barbara Lerner

The carnage from terrorist attacks in Iraq is discouraging many, and unless we make some unexpected new move, no one expects it to stop, even after a successful election on January 30. The Islamofascists who are blowing us up and butchering Iraqis won't quit, as long as they believe that if they keep it up long enough they can drive us out and gain control of the country. Our main attackers, after all, are Baathist thugs and Islamist jihadis. Together, branches of these two groups succeeded in driving us out of neighboring Lebanon in the pre-9/11 years. They control it still, and they boast that they will drive us from Iraq too.

President Bush's answer is that in the post-9/11 world, we must prove them wrong by staying the course, before and after the Iraqi election, doing more of what we are already doing, but doing it better, every day, making steady progress in spite of all obstacles â ” toughing it out until an elected Iraqi government commands Iraqi forces that are capable of maintaining their own security. Most of our troops agree. It's the true-grit answer, and they see it as right and necessary for America's long-term security. Despite their losses, morale remains high. Our guys are determined to defeat the Islamofascists in Iraq as they did in Afghanistan, pushing back the tide of terror that struck us on 9/11 until it no longer threatens our safety or the peace of the world. That's the president's basic plan; our troops support it, and in the long run, it's what most Americans and Iraqis want.

But in the short term, what majorities in both countries want most is a more effective response to the ongoing carnage, some new action we can take that will seriously de-grade the enemy's ability to kill and maim us. Is this just an impossible dream, or is there in fact some new move we can make that will weaken our enemies, sap their confidence in ultimate victory, and cut way down on our casualties?

A Regional War

Our Defense secretary thinks there is such a move, and he has been seeking a go-ahead to make it since at least mid-2003. But the camera-hogging chorus of Rumsfeld critics has no clue. More armor? The last few pieces were being hammered into place before the criticism started, and while they give our troops a slight defensive edge, they do nothing for the embattled Iraqi people. More troops? Wrong again, and chutzpah besides. Chutzpah, because the same congressmen who cut divisions from our military in the 1990s are berating Rumsfeld now for not overwhelming the enemy with those vanished divisions. Wrong, too â ” as active generals like Richard Myers, retired generals like Thom-as McInerney and Paul Vallely, military historians like Victor Davis Hanson, and intelligence experts like Herbert Meyer keep telling us â ” because the best defense is a good offense. The bottom line is that it's not how many troops we have, but how aggressively we use them. And in its first term, the Bush administration was divided about the aggressive use of offensive military force.

Rumsfeld and others wanted to bring down Saddam Hussein's regime without first spending months telegraphing our punches in the U.N. That would have given us the advantage of surprise, making it much harder for Iraq's Baathists and jihadis to set up bases in neighboring countries and transfer billions of dollars and large loads of unknown weapons and supplies there before the war. Key players in the State Department and the CIA opposed the invasion of Iraq altogether, and passionately opposed doing it without U.N. approval. Tony Blair was also passionate about the U.N., and President Bush split the difference. He gave the go-ahead for General Tommy Franks's daring shock-and-awe offensive for the liberation of Iraq, but not before he gave the U.N. every chance to take effective action first. When it came to running Iraq in the interim between the liberation and a new, elected, and empowered Iraqi government, control of American policy once again reverted, for the most part, to State and CIA. Key players there favored a long, slow transition, a major effort to woo hostile elements in both the Shiite and Sunni communities, and a conciliatory stance toward Iraq's predatory neighbors. Threats to arrest Muqtada al-Sadr with no follow-through; the aborted attack on the Iraqi terror-center of Fallujah in April 2004; and the long resistance to imposing sanctions on Syria: All these are examples of State-CIA policy in action. At Fallujah especially, our troops chafed under it. It was the site of the first gross, triumphant, in-your-face public lynching of American civilians, and our fighting men did not want to negotiate with the lynchers' frontmen. They wanted to crush them, to send the life-saving message: If you butcher Americans, you die. Their orders, instead, were to withdraw. In all these instances and more, Rumsfeld differed with his colleagues at State and CIA, and with a clique of military officers who agreed with them.

But perhaps the most important, least-recognized difference between Rumsfeld and his opponents has to do with our stance toward the countries that surround Iraq. Rumsfeld recognized, early on, that the terror war in Iraq is sustained by the critical support it gets from terror-sponsoring neighboring states, and he wanted to take offensive action against them, too. He focused especially on Iraq's western neighbor, asking for approval to pursue terrorists across the border, into the heart of today's terror network in Syria. Once again, major players at State and CIA were opposed, and they prevailed; we continued to fight what is, in fact, a regional war in one country only.

Bush's Decision

That was then; this is now. After giving both camps a fair chance to show what their methods could accomplish, President Bush appears to have made a far-reaching decision. In November, he gave our military the green light to go back on the offensive against the terrorists in Fallujah and finish the job. Since then, we have stayed on the offensive inside Iraq, pursuing terrorists aggressively throughout Anbar province and in Mosul. Most of the top anti-offensive players at CIA and State are gone now, or about to go, and an offensive against Syria may be next, because now, evidence that Syria and Syrian-controlled Lebanon provide the critical support that sustains the terror war in Iraq is overwhelming.

For starters, leaders of both the Iraqi Baathists and the foreign jihadis use Syrian-controlled turf as a safe haven and base of operations. Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the Iraqi general who directs the Baathist butchers, lives there; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Palestinian terrorist who runs the foreign jihadis, flits back and forth across the border. Both men rely on the terror-training camps in Syria and Syrian-controlled Lebanon, camps that have replaced the ones al Qaeda maintained in Afghanistan as the places hate-crazed Muslims go to learn to kill Westerners and moderate Muslims. Hezbollah, the Iranian-run terror group that killed 241 of our marines, still controls large parts of Lebanon and runs some of these training camps; Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that assassinated Anwar Sadat and spawned al Qaeda and a host of other terrorist groups, runs other camps. Some, like Ain al-Hilwe, are heavily infiltrated by al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists. Iranian agents brought them there, after we defeated them in Afghanistan. Syria and Iran both control other, less-well-known terror groups and training camps. Whatever changing names they use, all of these groups act as proxies for Syrian and Iranian aggression against us and against Iraq. Only Hezbollah and Hamas are out front, hiding in plain sight, under a false flag that reads: We're not a threat to America or the West; we have nothing to do with Iraq or al Qaeda â ” we only attack Israel.

Much of the money that sustains the jihadis' war in Iraq â ” money from Saddam Hussein's illicit oil-deals; from terrorist financiers in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Gulf states; and from terrorist drug gangs â ” is parked in Syria and Lebanon too. Every once in a while, when State Department diplomats turn up the pressure on Syria to stop being the terror world's most convenient ATM, Syria turns a little of this money over to us, like a parent distracting a child with a sweet. But these little fiscal treats do nothing to change the fundamentals. Tougher sanctions? Even if we could get enough other countries to go along to do noticeable damage to Syria's basket-case economy, Iran has already promised to compensate Syria, and the usual terror-financiers in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf will also pony up. All pay, because all have major stakes in the continued existence of terror-central in Syria. The rise of a Shiite-dominated Arab democracy in Iraq is a threat to all the region's dictators and terrorists, Sunni and Shia alike, and Alawite-run Syria-Lebanon is the regional center, the place where all their interests merge and combine to wage and sustain the terror war against us in Iraq. Recruitment of terrorists to fight in Iraq is an open secret in Syria; and, although the volunteers come from all over the Muslim world, most of them get their training in these camps and enter Iraq from Syrian-controlled turf.

Syria, in sum, is terror central, not because it is the only Middle Eastern nation that threatens us or even the most powerful one â ” it's the weakest â ” but because Syria rents space to them all, playing a critical enabling role for all of the Islamofascist terrorists who are attacking us in Iraq and threatening our interests in a host of other places. As long as we permit this terrorist mecca to operate unmolested, the terror war in Iraq can probably sustain itself indefinitely, taking its bloody toll, year after year. That's why Secretary Rumsfeld has been arguing, all along, for cross-border attacks, and why the president is likely to approve such attacks soon. Pursuing terrorists across the border into Syria is the idea Rumsfeld expressed in mid-2003, but it is unlikely to be his only idea about how America should deal with Syria.

Handling Syria

My own idea for Syria was spelled out in NRO over a year ago, and it seems to me even more relevant now. I argued that we should pound home the message that diplomatic pressure failed to deliver by launching a sudden and new shock-and-awe campaign, aimed at demolishing all the terror training camps on Syrian-controlled turf. No ground troops would be needed because:
If ever a task was tailor-made for air power alone, this is it. Syria has no oil...and no significant air defense system. What it does have in places like the Bekaa Valley and the parts of Lebanon that Syria leases out to Hezbollah and its many subleasees is a super-abundance of terrorists from many groups, massed together in places where there are few or no innocent civilians. Here, we don't have to limit ourselves to hunting down terrorists one by one, inevitably losing American lives and the lives of our friends in the process. Here, our bombs can take out large numbers of Islamofascist terrorists all at once, scoring another victory in the war against terror... a victory that will dry up the flow from Syria, and make Saudi Arabia and the mad mullahs who misrule Iran understand at last that they, too, must stop funneling terrorists into Iraq [and otherwise aiding the insurrection there]. It will give new hope to the millions of Iranians who are dying to overthrow the corrupt clerics who oppress them and dishonor their religion, and it will have a sobering effect on all those who harbor terrorists, anywhere in the world.

If President Bush decides to do this, it would, of course, be wishful thinking to expect all the carnage in Iraq to stop immediately afterwards. It won't, but without a never-ending supply of money, training camps, fresh recruits, and safe havens, it is reasonable to expect that terrorist attacks inside Iraq will diminish significantly, along with terrorist morale, allowing Iraqi forces to establish control of their own security in a year or two, and allowing our troops and those of our Coalition partners to come home, leaving behind a freer Iraq and a safer world.

Will Turtle Bay and Brussels resound with denunciations of America's reckless unilateralism? Of course, but not as loudly or with as much unity as professional doomsayers like Brent Scowcroft and Michael Moore predict. They won't get the message, but it will be received, loud and clear, on the Arab street and in Arab palaces alike: Uncle Sucker is no more, and the price to pay for treating George W. Bush's America like one is more than they can afford. As for opinion at home, whenever this president made a bold military move in the past, big majorities of Americans rallied around him, strongly. Americans don't run from a battle, as long as we believe our leaders are clear about what it will take to win and determined not to stop short of it.

â ” Barbara Lerner is a freelance writer in Chicago.

 

[a_majoor]

The lineup of enemies just keeps growing.....

http://powerlineblog.com/

The U.N. at work

In a column that the Wall Street Journal has restricted to subscribers, Dore Gold writes about another U.N. scandal -- one that has received almost no attention. Gold writes:

    In 2003 and 2004, the Israel Defense Forces captured documentation showing how the U.N. Development Program was regularly funding two Hamas front organizations: the Tulkarm Charity Committee and the Jenin District Committee for Charitable Funds. The donations varied -- sometimes $4,000 and sometimes $10,000. Receipts and even copies of thank-you notes to UNDP were discovered. The U.N. should have exercised considerable caution with transfers of this sort, considering that in 2002, Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement described Jenin as "the capital of the suicide bombers." Nonetheless, one might ask, how was the U.N. to know that these were actually Hamas front groups?

    Here's how: In June 2003, the Office of the Coordinator of the Activities of the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip asked UNDP to stop all assistance to the Jenin District Committee because of its Hamas connection. Israel knew that Hamas operatives ran the charity; its deputy director had been a member of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the elite terrorist unit of Hamas. Timothy Rothermel, UNDP's special representative in Jerusalem, turned down the Israeli request.

    Another disturbing revelation from captured documents is the support provided by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for the "Koran and Sunna Society" of Kalkilya. UNRWA has been heavily penetrated by Hamas for years; Hamas members dominate many of its unions, including the teachers union. But this new link represented a further deterioration in the U.N.'s connections, for the "Koran and Sunna Society" defines itself as salafi -- it adopts doctrines from militant Islam. Indeed, the "Koran and Sunna Society," which has six branches in the West Bank, distributes pamphlets published in Saudi Arabia that are often written by radical Wahhabi clerics. References to the value of martyrdom and jihad are not uncommon in these materials. One of the Society's schools, called "The Martyrs of the Al-Aqsa Intifada," received payments from UNRWA for educating children of Palestinian refugees in March and June of 2004.

Gold adds: "Besides getting to the bottom of the Oil-for-Food scandal, it is equally vital to get the U.N. to halt its backing of recognized international terrorist groups." He notes that the Bush administration gave the U.N. a special status in the Arab-Israeli peace process by making it part of the multilateral "Quartet" -- along with the U.S., the EU and Russia. Isn't this an organization that needs to be sidelined for the good of, well, the world?

 

[a_majoor]

More on the leaders of the Western Coalition:

Idealism and Its Discontents
Thinking on the neoconservative slur.

Neo- is a prefix that derives from the Greek adjective veos - "new" or "fresh" - and in theory it is used inexactly for those conservatives who once were not - or for those who have reinterpreted conservatism in terms of a more idealistic foreign policy that eschewed both Cold War realpolitik and the hallowed traditions of American republican isolationism.

But the accepted definition has given way in practice to refer to the more particular proponents of the use of military action to remove threatening governments, and to replace them with democratic systems - hence the occasional sobriquets of "neo-Wilsonian." But for a number of detractors, "neoconservative" is also little more than generic disparagement, and (off-the-record) it is synonymous with American Jews who seek to alter American foreign policy to the wishes of the right-wing Likud party of Israel.

Yet note the misinformation about its meaning and usage. The five most prominent makers of American foreign policy at the moment - George Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld - are (1) not Jewish, (2) hard-headed and not easily bamboozled by any supposed cabal, and (3) were mostly in the past identified with the "realist" school and especially skeptical of using the military frequently for anything resembling Clintonian peace-keeping.

So, for example, while Secretary Rumsfeld signed the now-infamous 1998 letter to President Clinton calling for the de-facto preemptive removal of Saddam Hussein, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice did not. Yet Richard Armitage - considered a stalwart in the Colin Powell camp - was a signatory. Thus there seems no hard ideology or past litmus test to neoconservatism other than a coalescence of once-differing views after September 11.

Second, this new version of neoconservativism was predicated on the end of the Cold War, at least in its present approach to foreign policy. Nearly thousands of nukes pointed at the United States, coupled with global Communist-inspired national-liberation movements, did not leave much room for American idealism - or at least it was so felt. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall, former realist conservatives deduced that the advocacy of democracy was both practicable and in the long-term interest of the United States, as part of its promotion of international free markets and consensual government. Meanwhile, some liberals saw military action as not so odious if aimed at right-wing authoritarians rather than Communists masquerading as socialists (e.g., Noriega, Milosevic, the Taliban, or Saddam Hussein rather than Castro). Why the latter were not called neoliberals is unexplained.

Third, Iraq is not the sole touchstone of neoconservative thought. Many traditional conservatives, both Democrats and Republicans, who favor balanced budgets, an end to illegal immigration, and more sober judgment on entitlements, came to the conclusion after September 11 that the many lives of Saddam Hussein had run out. Indeed, one of the ironies of this war is the spectacle of many who called for the removal of Saddam Hussein in the late 1990s now turning on the war, while many who would have never supported such preemption before 9/11 insist on giving the administration full support in the midst of the present fighting.

Fourth, traditional conservatives especially distrust neoconservatives because, well, they are not entirely conservative and confuse the public about the virtues of the hallowed native reluctance to spend blood and treasure abroad for dubiously idealistic purposes. In contrast, progressives dislike them because their promotion of democracy can complicate liberalism, as if it were a fine and noble thing to insist on elections in the former Third World, even if need be through force. And every ideology saves its greatest venom for the perceived apostate: Thus Zell Miller infuriates liberals in the way John McCain or Chuck Nagel does conservatives.

Fifth, the battlefield adjudicates perceptions. Before the Iraqi invasion, neoconservatives took a beating in the acrimonious lead-up to the war about which scenarios were proffered about millions of refugees and thousands of American dead. Yet after the three-week victory, even television hosts were boasting, "We are all neoconservatives now." Then the messy post-bellum Iraqi reconstruction brought back disdain, while successful elections and a consensual government could well win admiration. For most, ideology or belief matters not nearly as much as impressions of being judged as smart, successful, and "cutting-edge" - a constantly changing and amorphous image that in Washington is predicated on the 24-hour news cycle.

Finally, radical foreign-policy changes always upset the status quo and beg for conspiratorial exegesis. After 1948, the Cold Warriors were felt to have appropriated the Democratic party from the Henry Wallace wing, and they suffered abuse both from the naïve Left who saw them as veritable McCarthyites, and from the isolationist Right who did not want to continue the sacrifices of internationalism endlessly on into the postwar peace.

The old border-state pragmaticism of Lincoln was felt to have been hijacked by the "Black Republicans," when the bumpkin candidate "came east" to get briefed. In such conspiracy thinking, clever abolitionists from their New England pulpits and snooty colleges saw Lincoln as a suitable and naïve emissary of their radical agenda. Indeed, in some sense almost all the charges that the Texas realist George Bush was brainwashed by neoconservative Israeli apologists are not that different from the writ against Lincoln.

My favorite example of castigating idealism is far older and from fourth-century B.C. Greece. By the 370s B.C. idealists were firmly in control of the government of conservative ancient Thebes, and turned an oligarchic Boeotian Confederacy into a real democracy. Convinced after their victory at Leuktra (371 B.C.) that a wounded Sparta was still a perennial threat, the new Boeotian democrats mobilized a Hellenic coalition of the willing to drop the old realist idea of containment or of just waiting for Sparta to attack.

Thus they embraced the preemptive act of invading Sparta and freeing 250,000 Laconian and Messenian indentured serfs or helots ("those taken"). The preemptory invasion was aimed at bringing freedom and democracy to Greeks heretofore deemed less than fully Hellenic and thought incapable of self-governance. Indeed, over the past century thousands of helots had been arbitrarily executed and routinely tortured and humiliated by their Spartan overlords. The Boeotians thought that by freeing the helots and creating autonomous democracies on Sparta's borders they could remake the Peloponnese and end the old pathology in which a professional Gestapo-like military coerced their neighbors and meddled abroad, while fed and supported by a veritable nation of serfs.

The subsequent successful invasion led by the general Epaminondas was one of the few military operations of the ancient world that had real elements of idealism. Yet the circle around Epaminondas was also suspected of being influenced by the Pythagoreans, zealots who had fallen under the spell of the subversive and dangerous teachings of Pythagoras. The latter purportedly had promulgated weird notions, ranging from the equality of women to vegetarianism, and his work seems to have influenced Plato. Perhaps, Pythagoras was an ancient bogeyman not unlike the contemporary Leo Strauss, and was used to explain the otherwise inexplicable fact that the Boeotians of all people went into the heart of darkness to free the people of the Peloponnese.

One last thing about such appreciation of idealism in foreign policy: After Epaminondas emasculated Sparta, liberated the helots, and fostered a democratic Peloponnese, the Thebans, far from hailing the hero, put the returning commander on trial for usurping his prescribed tenure.

The more things change, the more they...

- Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

 

[Wizard of OZ]

This battle will never be over.  There will always be someone who wants to strike the West.  It is in human nature to be jelous of what our neighbour has. Be it for religous or economic or vengence reasons.  The Coaliton may slow it down or make it harder, but were there is a will there is a way.  With the West made up of a Tossed Salad of migrates from other culters, the US is no longer the melting pot it used to be.  Not all who imigrate there buy into the dream.  Some have hopes, goals and dreams of thier own. 

Trying to solve the problem by forcing democracy to those who do not want it is not the answer. Spreading peace through violence is not the answer either.

My thoughts.

 

[a_majoor]

This battle will never be over. There will always be someone who wants to strike the West. It is in human nature to be jealous of what our neighbour has.

The ancient Greeks understood this very well:
"If these words are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will at some time or other and in much the same way, be repeated in the future."

With the West made up of a Tossed Salad of migrates from other cultures, the US is no longer the melting pot it used to be. Not all who immigrate there buy into the dream. Some have hopes, goals and dreams of their own.

The problem is we in the West seem bent on talking down the achievements of our own culture in favor of bogus "Multiculturalism" (bogus in the sense that when put to the test, only we cannot speak on our behalf, and are supposed to sit silent while listening to the virtues of such "culturally neutral" ideas as suicide bombing; female bondage or enslavement; female genital mutilation; oppressing of races or cultures so long as the oppressors are not white....you know) Most migrants to the west are here because they want to participate in "the American Dream" or its equivalent

Trying to solve the problem by forcing democracy to those who do not want it is not the answer. Spreading peace through violence is not the answer either.

Who does not want democracy? The oppressed masses or the thugs who hold the reigns of power? Will the thugs quietly walk away, or do they have to be removed from their seats of power? I think a reading of history will quickly answer these questions.

 

[a_majoor]

Some more analysis on what drives the Jihadis

http://www.strategypage.com/fyeo/qndguide/default.asp?target=urbang.htm

TERRORISM: At Least Make it Look Good...

January 21, 2005: Al Qaeda is all about symbolism, not reality. The basic idea that propels Islamic terrorists is the belief that Islam is under attack by infidels (non-Moslems). This attack comes in the form of ideas, including democracy, that are, or should be, abhorrent, to a true believer in Islam. The United States is considered the principal enemy, because America produces most of the video, audio and intellectual "attacks" that the Islamic radicals find so distasteful. At first, Islamic terrorists sought to overthrow the â Å“corruptâ ? governments in existing Islamic nations, and create Islamic republics. All of these â Å“trueâ ? Islamic nations would then unite to reconstitute the Caliphate that existed over a thousand years ago, the last (and only) time all Islamic countries were united. That unity didn't last because people, and countries, are different, and Islam was not enough to keep them all united. That has not changed.

But many Islamic terrorist leaders, like Osama bin Laden, concluded in the 1990s that it would be better to go after the United States, and the infidel West in general, first. The basic idea is to somehow force the West to get out of Islamic nations. Exactly how this would work is left vague. Many of the plans of Islamic terrorists get pretty murky if you try and look too far ahead. Taking on the West appears more as an act of despair. After all, Islamic radicals took control of Iran and Afghanistan, and brought nothing but misery. In actual fact, most Islamic terrorists are still trying to overthrow the existing governments in Islamic nations. International terrorism, against Western targets, was always a lot more difficult, and thus rather rare. But the September 11, 2001 attacks gave many Islamic terrorists the idea that they could actually bring down the West. The fact that there has not been another attack in the United States since 911, and only one in Western Europe, is often overlooked. Symbolism is powerful. If you can't deal with reality, call in al Jazeera and show them your best symbolism. This approach made al Qaeda stand out, even though it was but one of many Islamic radical organizations.

The battle against Moslem governments has not been going so well either. But this really doesn't matter, because Islamic terrorists have their hands full carrying out any attacks at all anywhere. The American invasion of Iraqi in 2003 enraged many Islamic radicals, and caused them to launch more attacks inside Islamic countries. The main result of this was to reveal how weak the Islamic terrorists actually were, how shallow their support was among Moslem populations, and how effective the governments in Moslem nations were in fighting back. The media likes to portray governments in Moslem nations as weak and getting weaker because of terrorist attacks. But the history of the Islamic world makes it clear that "Islamic Republics" are very much the exception, which various kinds of ruthless police states are very much the rule.

What the Islamic terrorists are really fighting for is a solution to the problems most Islamic nations face. Even with all the oil wealth, the Arab world has made little economic progress versus the infidels in the last half century. Most Moslems feel the problem is inefficient governments, and a society that does not place enough emphasis on the two elements that have fueled economic growth in the rest of the world; education and honest government. Those two items allow people to start new businesses, run them efficiently, and grow economically. Islamic terrorists believe the solution is honest government and scrupulous adherence to Sharia (Islamic law.) Unfortunately, there are no working examples of this, either currently or historically. But when you're on a Mission From God, you don't need a working example. God's Word is enough.

 

[a_majoor]

Some updates as to what we are facing

The War's Far from Won
Harvey Kushner hones in on the home front.

Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez

"If we don't wake up to this, we could lose it all," that's Harvey Kushner's message to Americans â ” and American intelligence officials.

Harvey Kushner is a familiar face to many Fox viewers. The terrorism expert is a frequent TV commentator. In his full-time work in terrorism prevention, he has been a consultant to major government agencies including the FBI, INS, and U.S. Customs.

Kushner's most recent book is Holy War on the Home Front: The Secret Islamic Terror Network in the United States, written with Bart Davis.

Kushner recently answered some of NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez's questions. Kushner weighed in on the Patriot Act ("essential"), Michael Chertoff (he is less enthused than NR), and, of course, the secret Islamic terror network in the United States.

National Review Online: Boston, New York, Philly, D.C., Miami, Detroit, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Houston, Denver, L.A. (and more) â ” Hamas, al Qaeda, and Hezbollah are operating out of major U.S. cities today?

Harvey Kushner: Holy War on the Home Front is the first book to publish the "Charter of the Center of Studies, Intelligence and the Information." The "Charter" was handwritten in Arabic and dated 1981. It is a militant Islamic organizational plan for terrorism, with every cell, division, agent, and objective clearly defined. One expert's opinion regarding the original Arabic is that the document could have originated from the ranks of the Muslim brotherhood, the originator of all contemporary militant Islamic movements.

Also published in Holy War>/I> is a hand-drawn map of the United States and Canada that accompanies the "Charter." The map is divided into four sections: the Western Region, the Central Region, the Eastern Region, the Canadian Region. For example, the Eastern Region has dots over the cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Raleigh, and Miami. In 1981, few, if any, terrorist groups were in the cities labeled in Arabic on the map. Today, however, there are terrorist groups in every city shown on the map, proof of how far the secret Islamic terror network has spread.

While interviewed about Holy War on the radio by a former official in the Reagan administration, she said that she had been briefed about the Charter in the early 1980s. She was shocked that it took more than two decades for someone to publish this telling document about the secret Islamic network operating in the United States.

NRO: Tom Ridge is done with DHS as of last week. You report DHS officials saying the agency won't be functional until next year. Was it a mistake? What can be done?

Kushner: As I write in my book, high-level sources within the Department of Homeland Security say DHS won't even be "somewhat functional" until 2006. This disturbing progress report aside, the creation of DHS was no mistake. It was necessary to create an agency responsible for coordinating protection of the homeland. One agency responsible for assuring the seamless transfer of terrorist information into one database looms high on the DHS agenda. DHS would then transfer real-time terrorist data to local law enforcement. Until now, however, this has not taken place and it will be "job-one" for the new DHS secretary, Michael Chertoff.

The Harvard-educated Chertoff does not appear to have the managerial skills to unite the more than 180,000 DHS personnel from some 22 agencies into one cohesive unit devoid of their past organizational cultures. Nor does he seem to have the management experience to make DHS the point-of-contact for the 87,000 local jurisdictions across our nation. Moreover, Judge Chertoff credentials are not likely to impress the law-enforcement personnel under his jurisdiction. It is well-known that judges and lawyers often have little appreciation, albeit understanding, of the work of the men and women of law enforcement.

Secretary Chertoff needs to bring about unification with DHS and transfer real-time terrorist information to the locals. Accomplishing this will make DHS an effective unifying entity as well as protector of the homeland. Unfortunately, I'm not sanguine about his chances of accomplishing this; however, I wish him well.

NRO: Would you ditch the color-coded alert system? Does it hurt more than help?

Kushner: Every time we change colors and alert the public I'm reminded of Aesop's popular fable, "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." You can't keep alerting the people to the possibility of the wolf at your doorstep that never shows up without running the risk of making them "alert weary." I'm not advocating that it is necessary to have some horrific terrorist event occur to prove the color-coded system worthy. Instead, I would like to see implemented a system that balances high alert with a meaningful educational program to train the public in the ways of terrorism prevention.

NRO: You report a lot that is very wrong, but we haven't been attacked since 9/11 â ” isn't that some sort of relatively good sign?

Kushner: Absolutely not. Always remember that Islamic terrorists will strike at American assets both here and abroad according to their own schedule, not ours. If history is a guide, it took more than eight years for Islamic terrorists to destroy the World Trade towers, the first attack occurred in February 26, 1993. Moreover, the tale of the Bedouin chief who took 40 years to avenge a personal insult and was chided for acting so hastily speaks to the Islamic-terrorist mindset and warns us of things to come.

Lopez: The Patriot Act gets people on both the Left and Right riled up. But it's been effective, hasn't it?

Kushner: Yes, it sure has. The Patriot Act deserves credit for the arrest of members of terrorist cells in Buffalo, Seattle, Portland, and Detroit, and investigations of terrorist have frozen more than $125 million in terrorist assets and over 600 bank accounts around the world. I believe the Patriot Act has the right balances in the sometimes-competing interests of the war on terror and our civil liberties. If we are to prevent a terrorist attack of major proportions, it is essential. Usually, in law enforcement we wait until a crime is committed, and then we act. America cannot afford to wait until a terrorist act is committed to go after the terrorists who commit them.

Roving wiretaps are necessary in an age of cellular-phone technology. They were illegal until the Patriot Act. The old laws worked when the cord on the black metal family phone wouldn't let you move more than a couple of feet. Roving wire taps are necessary to intercept and track terrorists using satellite phones.

NRO: How are judges hurting the war effort?

Kushner: My book documents how a federal judge sentenced an illegal alien convicted of smuggling heroin, later referred to the FBI for suspicions of terrorist links, to 30 months in jail, three years on probation, a 100-dollar special assessment, and 200 hours of community service. What sort of community service does a convicted heroin smuggler suspected of being a terrorist get? He was assigned to help out in the Queens Botanical Gardens.

Hey, I can't make this stuff up; it sound too much like a Mel Brooks movie, something that would damage the credibility of some involved in counterterrorism. Nevertheless, it clearly illustrates how liberal federal judges contribute to our war effort. They don't.

NRO: Folks like John Kerry claim we are no safer today post-Iraq war. Is that true?

Kushner: If the question refers to our involvement in Iraq, then the answer is "no" inasmuch as we have removed a despot who sponsored terrorism. The Bush administration should have made Iraq's well-known support of Middle Eastern terrorists of all stripes a major issue before the liberation of the Iraqi people. Focusing specifically on weapons of mass destruction was clearly a mistake because they haven't turned up. Rather, a free Iraq begins the process of removing all sponsors of terrorism aimed at the United States and her allies and changes the very fabric of the greater Middle East. This should have been presented to the American public right from the get-go.

If we go back, however, to 9/11 then I would agree that we are no safer today. And that's why I wrote Holy War. Why? Because for all the money we've spent in the past three years on "security," Americans are no safer. Government agencies are still sloppy, negligent, or worse. For years, liberal federal judges have been probating illegal aliens who are "known or suspected terrorists" back onto our streets. Khat, a drug worth billions of dollars a year, is being smuggled into this country by a Middle Eastern-African-British network, but no one is investigating it â ” or its links to terrorism. The USCIS Asylum Offices get applications from Middle Easterners who testify to involvement with terrorism, but can't reject them because the FBI won't return their phone calls. Don't believe it? Sorry, my book has the documents to back up these strong assertions.

NRO: How can INS, such that it is, be fixed?

Kushner: The answer to this question is rather simple, it can't. No matter how many resources we devote to what is now INS, they won't be enough unless we fix our will to deal with illegal aliens inside our country. In other words, there has to be a concerted effort from the Bush administration right down to the public itself to get beyond the paralyzing effects of political correctness and crack down on illegal aliens. I'm not only referring to those that committed felons but to those who cross our borders without permission.

NRO: You write, "We need to "make sure that none of the 7 million ocean cargo containers coming to the United States contains a weapon of mass destruction." How is that even possible?

Kushner: We should not be put off by the numbers. There is still time to fix things. America is better at crash programs than any nation in the world. It's as simple as this: We need to quickly develop the technology to inspect ocean cargo containers. All it takes is money and sometimes that's no easy task.

NRO: Complaining about political correctness feels very knee-jerk right-wingy. But is it actually an obstacle in fighting the war on terrorism?

Kushner: It sure is [an obstacle in fighting the war]. As I stated in Holy War, "The only explanation as to why we continue to ignore the secret Islamic terror network in America is that the demands of political correctness have made us so afraid of being branded racists that we force ourselves to be color blind, identity blind, and gender blind till we end up, quite simply, totally blind."

As I discuss in my book, one of the problems with "profiling," a concept anathema to the PC police, is that liberals have made it almost impossible to use and as a consequence we aren't very good at it. One suburban New York police academy created a terrorist profile derived from the "Al Qaeda Training Manual." The latter is a fascinating document â ” and frightening, considering the level of preparation it indicates. Unfortunately, [it's not] what's taught to rookies at the police academy in their manual titled "Terrorism: Awareness, Prevention." Response becomes sanitized by the PC police. As a result, police officers wind up looking for an armed American-looking type carrying a fake ID who lives in a first-floor apartment in the middle of a new complex or an old tenement, has no phones but new locks, and likes to draw and take pictures.

The 9/11 hijackers don't fit that profile. Terrorists like Khalid "Shaikh" Mohammed don't fit that profile. Neither does Osama bin Laden. In fact, except for being armed, the people it most fits are college kids below the drinking age.

This kind of training gives the street cop very little useful information, and most complain there is simply no way to know what job to do, or how to do it. The intuition his or her experience has bred is unnerved by conflicting social, political, and legal forces. He figures a Muslim terrorist might look Middle Eastern or Arabic, but he's told that thinking like that is profiling, and it's wrong.

NRO: How are we fighting the war on militant Islam with a Cold War mentality? Why are we?

Kushner: In the winter of 2004, as I was completing my research for Holy War, a former CIA agent with a direct pipeline to Homeland Security arranged for me to have a combined briefing from a group of federal security, intelligence, and law-enforcement agencies in Washington, D.C. My briefing group can be identified only as including career CIA officers who had worked inside Syria and Iran; a State Department officer previously stationed in the Middle East, now with the FBI; government-security experts; and several others with long experience in intelligence and foreign service. Also in attendance was a casually dressed Middle-Eastern man. He was special ops and knew terrorists. He had infiltrated their organizations; he had killed terrorists before they could strike innocents.

During our conversations it became clear that my hosts were hung up on the graying secular terrorist of the past, the ones the Soviets supported, not the al Qaeda I knew that could explode without notice. One assured me, "Significant inroads have been made into damaging al Qaeda. This is proved by the fact there hasn't been another 9/11-type attack."

My hosts also believed that every terrorist organization had a single "head," and eliminating that head would destroy the group's ability to harm us. The prime example was that killing Osama bin Laden would end al Qaeda and the war on terrorism.

What my hosts did not understand was that al Qaeda has become more than itself. It is a "state of mind" that can give rise to the "lone wolf" terrorist who suddenly adopts the al Qaeda philosophy of jihad, for reasons of his own. That kind of terrorist is even harder to predict than the card-carrying member of the Soviet era because he will give almost no warning of his intent. Al Qaeda's most dangerous feature is this predisposition to be brought into militant Islam that can be triggered by exposure to something in a mosque, or on the Internet, or through media coverage of an event.

It became crystal clear to me that my hosts, who were in a position to help shape the war on terrorism, were giving advice that was based on models of terrorist activities tied to the Cold War era. That's one frightening scenario, isn't it?

NRO: Should we be calling it the war on militant Islam instead of the war on terror? Less beating-around-the-bush?

Kushner: You bet. In point of fact, we are not at war with a variety of terrorist organizations active throughout the world. I don't mean to indicate, however, that I approve or condone such behavior. A terrorist by any other name is still a terrorist. The terrorists that pull triggers, plant bombs, and blast holes in the New York skyline all have the same thing in common â ” they are simply terrorists.

I wrote Holy War to drive home the point that we are at war with militant Islam, not a concept like terrorism per se. A war against militant Islam is war against a tangible enemy we can defeat. We must also realize that battle against militant Islam is here in America. If we don't wake up to this, we could lose it all. That's why I wrote Holy War on the Home Front: The Secret Islamic Terror Network in the United States.

You can purchase Holy War on the Home Front: The Secret Islamic Terror Network in the United States via the NR Book Service here or through Amazon.com here.

         



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   
 
  http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/kushner200502070740.asp 

 

[a_majoor]

Stability OPs for the long term

Go-Go Iraq
Democracy works.

By Derek Reveron

President George W. Bush continues to insist that ending tyranny in the world is in the national interest â ” a notable goal. Democracy is superior to other forms of governance and promoting democracy is the right and good thing to do. In his State of the Union address last week, the president said:

    Our aim is to build and preserve a community of free and independent nations, with governments that answer to their citizens, and reflect their own cultures. And because democracies respect their own people and their neighbors, the advance of freedom will lead to peace.

Democracy is desired not only for the peace it brings (democracies do not militarily fight one another), but because President Bush thinks it is the best political arrangement between a government and a people. He not only has U.S. diplomatic history on his side, but also a large body of empirical evidence that says good governance brings stability, prosperity, and peace.

The emphasis placed on democracy promotion is not new for President Bush or the U.S. In his 2002 National Security Strategy, President Bush gave primacy to human dignity:

    These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society â ” and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages.

Democracy promotion has been a part of U.S. foreign policy for decades. During the Cold War, democracy was promoted as an alternative to Communism. It wasn't simply enough to militarily oppose Communism as we did in various parts of the world, but a viable alternative had to be presented to fledgling states after World War II. Through political and economic liberalization policies, the United States created a community of democratic nations â ” a community that does not wage war against its members, benefits from international trade, and draws upon each other in times of crisis.

For democracy promotion to be successful, timing matters. When Gorbachev released the Soviet grip on Central and Eastern Europe, American foreign-policy actors were presented with an opportunity to support advocates for open societies. President H. W. Bush responded with legislation to give former Warsaw Pact members and Soviet states the necessary assistance to navigate through the dangers of democratic transition. Fifteen years later, results are mixed in the region (Hungary vs. Belarus), but generally favor democracy. The important lesson from the region is that democratic transition is risky, but once consolidated, democracies are very stable.

Under the Clinton administration, democracy promotion as a foreign policy goal was institutionalized and was furthered by President George W. Bush. This dimension of U.S. policy echoes Pericles of Athens who said in 431 BC,

    Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. We do not copy our neighbors, but are an example to them

.

President Bush said as much last Wednesday night and challenged America's friends and allies to fight the common threat of terror and encourage a higher standard of freedom. The United States does not intend to impose American democracy on the world. Those that insist U.S. policies of political imperialism underlie the Administration's efforts should only look at how democracy was promoted in Afghanistan and Iraq. Two very different approaches to democracy were used in two very different places. A Loya Jirga was convened to launch Afghan democratization. Or the Iraqi legislature was elected by voting for party lists, not individual candidates as in the United States. The United States is flexible enough and experienced enough with democracy to guide democratization in a way that it will take root according to local conditions.

For those that are skeptical of democracy promotion and its motive, know that social-science research supports it. Good governance matters.

For the last several years, researchers sponsored by the CIA have been attempting to understand why some countries are consistently stable, prosperous, and democratic, and other countries are plagued by revolution, poverty, and authoritarianism. Driving the CIA's inquiry is to understand why some states fail, so the U.S. government can preempt the humanitarian disasters or civil wars that accompany state collapse. The Political Instability Task Force (formerly known as the State Failure Project) identified that economic, ethnic, and regional effects have just a modest impact on a country's risk for political instability. The most important factor is the type of government. Democracies are more resilient than other forms of government (this characteristic is explored in detail by Jack Goldstone and Jay Ulfelder in The Washington Quarterly).

Though it was popular in the 1990s to characterize various conflicts as a clash of civilizations, bad governments are to blame for instability and violence, not ethnicity. The Political Instability Task Force's findings suggest nationalist leader Milosevic's politics are more responsible for genocide in Bosnia-Hercegovina, not a historic animosity emanating from the 14th century battle at Kosovo Polje or any civilizational fault line. It was the kleptocratic regime of Mobutu Sese Seko in Kinshasa that inspired a revolution in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). And it was decades-long Indonesian repression in East Timor that led to that province becoming the first independent country of the 21st century. These regimes could not deal with the pressures created by social, economic, and political challenges.

The key to maintaining stability and peace appears to lie in democratic institutions. Democracy promotes open competition of ideas, channels dissent into peaceful discourse, and constrains power-hungry tendencies (Recall Madison: If men were angels government wouldn't be necessary). Democracy provides for the peaceful resolution of conflict. Without the means to express grievances, violence will likely occur and authoritarian governments will fail.

Data shouldn't necessarily drive policy choices, but there is clear evidence to support President Bush's efforts to energize democracy promotion. Bad governance in Iraq kept Iraqis impoverished, vulnerable, and afraid. Supporters and detractors of the war agree on that. When we forget that, we should remember the name of the military operation's name: Iraqi Freedom. Though WMDs were the rationale for war, the military campaign has been about freedom since day one. And when the mission is accomplished and Iraqis are free, the world will not only be a better place without the Iraqi dictator, but because there is another democracy in the world.

â ” Derek Reveron is the editor of America's Viceroys: the Military and U.S. Foreign Policy, associate professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College, and a former intelligence analyst for the FBI.

 





 
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/reveron200502090752.asp

 

[Kirkhill]

It seems to me that, as far as the Forces are concerned and their role on this war, after they have secured the domestic sanctuary that stability revolves around Strategic offence, Operational defence and Tactical Aggressive defence.

In other words the ability to project force at long range to secured UNcontested ground (Strategic Offence), create sanctuaries where the INNOCENT and/or VICTIMS can find refuge (Operational defence) and then defend the sanctuaries with the usual combinations of prepared defences, mutual support and Offensive Action in the form of agressive patrols of the region around the sanctuary.

Perhaps Yugoslavia but with political will.

 

[a_majoor]

Some more thoughts on long term stability ops

Why Democracy?
Ten reasons to support democracy in the Middle East.

Neoconservatives hope that a democratic Iraq and Afghanistan can usher in a new age of Middle Eastern consensual government that will cool down a century-old cauldron of hatred. Realists counter that democratic roots will surely starve in sterile Middle East soil, and it is a waste of time to play Wilsonian games with a people full of anti-American hatred who display only ingratitude for the huge investment of American lives and treasure spent on their freedom. Paleoconservatives prefer to spend our treasure here at home, while liberals oppose anything that is remotely connected with George W. Bush or refutes their own utopian notions of a world to be adjudicated by a paternal United Nations. All rightly fear demonocracy â ” the Arafat or Iranian unconstitutional formula of "one vote, one time."

Yet for all its uncertainties and dangers in the Islamic Arab world, there remain some undeniable facts about democracy across time and space that suggest with effort and sacrifice it can both work in the Middle East and will be in the long-term security interests of the United States. So why exactly should we support the daunting task of democratizing the Middle East and how is it possible?

1. It is widely said that democracies rarely attack other democracies. Thus the more that exist in the world â ” and at no time in history have there been more such governments than today â ” the less likely is war itself. That cliché proves, in fact, mostly true. There are gray areas of course in such blanket generalizations: The Confederates, British, Boers, and Prussians all had parliaments of sorts, but were clearly not as democratic as their adversaries in 1861, 1812, 1899, and 1914. While modern forms of democracy are sometimes hard to define, we more or less know them when we see them: All citizens are eligible to vote and hold office, a free press flourishes, and the rule of constitutional law trumps fiat. Thus should Iraq become a true constitutional government, it is less likely to invade a Kuwait, pay subsidies to suicide murderers, send missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia, or gas its own people.

2. More often than not, democracies arise through violence â ” either by threat of force or after war with all the incumbent detritus of humiliation, impoverishment, and revolution. The shame of the Falklands debacle brought down the Argentine dictatorship in the same manner that Portugal's imperial disasters in Africa steered it from fascism to republicanism. Japan, Germany, and Italy arose from the ashes of war, as did South Korea and in a sense Taiwan as well.

Most likely Ronald Reagan's arms build-up of the 1980s bankrupted the Soviet Empire and freed both its "republics" and the enslaved states of Eastern Europe. So the birth pangs of democracy are often violent, and we should pay little attention to critics who clamor that the United States cannot prompt reform through regime change. Instead, let skeptical Americans (who were not given their own liberty through debate) adduce evidence that freedom is usually a result of mere petition or always indigenous. Even the Philippines and South Africa were the dividends of diplomatic strong-arming, the cessation of U.S. support, and veiled threats that continued autocracy would lead to disaster.

3. Democracies are more likely to be internally stable, inasmuch as they allow people to take credit and accept blame for their own predicaments. They keep their word, or as Woodrow Wilson once put it, "A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations."

A Hitler, Mussolini, shah, or Pinochet can hijack for a time weak democracies, but they offered no real improvement and only led the people to disaster. Some in desperation talk of the need for a "good" Saddam-like strongman to knock a few heads in the Sunni Triangle â ” but that vestigial idea from the Cold War would only bring a few months or years of stability at the price of decades of unrest. Sooner or later every people has a rendezvous with freedom.

4. The democratic idea is contagious. We once worried about the negative Communist domino theory, but the real chain reaction has always been the positive explosion of democracy. Once Epaminondas curbed Spartan autocracy, suddenly Mantinea, Megalopolis, and Messenia went democratic and the entire Peloponnese began to adopt consensual governments. When Portugal and Spain flipped, it had an enormous positive effect on moving change forward in the Spanish-speaking world of Latin America â ” as liberty spread, once-right-wing Chile and left-wing Nicaragua were freed. The Soviet republics and Eastern European satellites without much warning imploded in succession â ” more quickly even than the Russians had once enslaved them in the late 1940s.

It is not a neocon pipedream, but historically plausible that a democratic Israel, Palestine, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq can create momentum that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and eventually even a Syria or Iran would find hard to resist. Saudi Arabia's ballyhooed liberalization, Mubarak's unease about his successor, Libya's strange antics, Pakistan's revelation about nuclear commerce, and the Gulf States' talk of parliaments did not happen in a vacuum, but are rumblings that follow from fears of voters in Afghanistan and Iraq â ” and a Mullah Omar dethroned and Saddam's clan either dead or in chains.

5. In the case of the Muslim world, there is nothing inherently incompatible between Islam and democracy. Witness millions in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Turkey who vote. Such liberal venting may well explain why those who blow up Americans are rarely Indian or Turkish Muslims, but more likely Saudis or Egyptians. The trick is now to show that Arab Muslims can establish democracy, and thus the Palestine and Iraq experiments are critical to the entire region.

6. Democracy brings moral clarity and cures deluded populaces of their false grievances and exaggerated hurts. The problem in the Middle East is the depressing relationship between autocracies and Islamists: Illiberal governments fault the Americans and Jews for their own failure. Thus in lieu of reform, strongmen deflect popular frustration by allowing the Wahhabis, al Qaedists, and other terrorists to use their state-controlled media likewise to blame us rather than a Mubarak, Saudi Royal Family, or Saddam Hussein. Yet just as crowded Germans today do not talk of the need for lebensraum and resource-less Japanese have dropped dreams of a Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere, so too a democratic Middle East will more likely look inward at tribalism, patriarchy, fundamentalism, religious intolerance, and polygamy rather than automatically at Israel and the United States when their airliners crash or a car bomb goes off.

7. We fret rightly about the spread of weapons of mass destruction. But the truth is that we worry mainly about nukes in the hands of autocracies like China, Iran, or North Korea. No American loses sleep that the UK or France has deadly missiles. A Russia that used to paralyze American foreign policy by virtue of it atomic arsenal poses little threat as long as President Putin can be persuaded not to destroy his consensual government. We should of course try to keep the number of nuclear nations static. Yet the next-best course is to ensure that Pakistan or China can evolve into free societies, and hope that should Iran obtain such weapons, its mullahs can be overthrown and their successors can follow the course of a South Africa whose new democracy dismantled its inherited arsenal. We cannot expect a successful democratic Germany or Japan to sit back and watch criminal states like Iran and North Korea go nuclear without expecting them to do the same â ” thus the need now to support democratic agitation in Tehran and elsewhere.

8. The promotion of democracy abroad by democracy at home is internally consistent and empowers rather than embarrasses a sponsoring consensual society. All sensible Europeans and Americans eventually ask themselves why freedom is fine for us but not for others. And if the novel orthodoxy of the post-Cold War era demanded that democracies must cease their support for rightist thugs, the subsequent wisdom is that they should be even more muscular, actively supporting democratic change rather than postfacto politely clapping after its establishment.

9. By promoting democracies, Americans can at last come to a reckoning with the Cold War. If it was wrong then to back a shah or Saudi Royal family ("keep the oil flowing and the Commies out") or to abandon Afghanistan after repelling the Soviets, it is surely right now not to repeat the error of realpolitik â ” especially when there is no longer the understandable excuse of having thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons pointing at the heart of America. Since 1946 the United States has had to check the Soviet Union, attempt to save millions from its state slavery, and then liberate its subjects. That messy and brutal task is mostly accomplished, and now we can at least attempt to provide freedom to those states in the past we once neglected.

10. Like it or not, a growing consensus has emerged that consumer capitalism and democracy are the only ways to organize society. We are not at the end of history yet â ” wars and revolutions may well plague us for decades. But if we cannot achieve universal democracy, we can at least get near enough to envision it. I doubt whether George Bush's vision of ending tyranny in our lifetime is possible, but he is to be congratulated for grasping that in our lifetime most of the world agrees that it should be. The Arab world so far has missed the bus of history. The success of democratic reform in parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia is a daily reminder of the decades lost in the Middle East, and how endemic Arab envy, jealousy, and excuses â ” which so repel or bore the world â ” can be ameliorated only by a new maturity and responsibility that are the wages of democratic government.

Democracy is not faultless. The Left sees it as selfish individualism at the expense of equality of result â ” a desired egalitarianism that can only be achieved by undemocratic government coercion. The extreme Right at best sees democracy as a devolving concept of dumbing society down to its lowest common element â ” Plato's notion that eventually even the animals would be given equality â ” as a prelude to the rule of the rabble.

In response, our politicians and pundits constantly try to fine-tune democracy, to tinker with voting, redistribute wealth, turn to legislative plebiscites, gerrymander, and use the courts to trump popular sovereignty. Ancient political thinkers likewise bickered in their definition of democracy, and provided unworkable typologies that ranged from oligarchic republicanism to mob rule.

Democracy was not our first, but rather out last choice in the Middle East. For decades we have promoted Cold War realpolitik and supported thugs whose merit was simply that they were not as bad as a murderous Saddam or Assad (true enough), while the Arab world has gone from kings and dictators to Soviet puppets, Pan-Arabists, Islamists, and theocrats. Democracy in some sense is the last chance. It alone offers constitutional guarantees of free speech, minority rights, and an independent judiciary â ” a framework, a system, a paradigm in which naturally savage humans, prone to all sorts of awful things, as the 20th century attests, can somehow get along. Given the savagery of the modern Middle East that would say quite a lot.

â ” Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
 
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200502110738.asp

 

[a_majoor]

Identifying players and preparing for the end game

Watersheds
We live in a time of democratic revolution.

Has there ever been a more dramatic moment than this one? The Middle East is boiling, as the failed tyrants scramble to come to terms with the political tsunami unleashed on Afghanistan and Iraq. The power of democratic revolution can be seen in every country in the region. Even the Saudi royal family has had to stage a farcical "election." But this first halting step has fooled no one. Only males could vote, no political parties were permitted, and only the Wahhabi establishment was permitted to organize. The results will not satisfy any serious person. As Iraq constitutes a new, representative government, and wave after wave of elections sweep through the region, even the Saudis will have to submit to the freely expressed desires of their people.

The tidal wave has even reached into the planet's darkest corners, most recently shaking the foundations of the North Korean hermit kingdom. A new leader is announced at the same time the monsters in Pyongyang whisper "We've got nukes" and demand legitimacy from George W. Bush. Given the opacity of the country, and the irrationality of its leaders, nobody seems to know whether the Dear Leader is still alive, or, if he is, why the transition has been proclaimed. But the North Koreans, as tyrants everywhere on the planet, are acting like a regime no longer confident in its own legitimacy. Notice that the world's longest-running dictator, old man Castro, is conjuring up the illusion of American assassination teams planning the murder of his buddy in Venezuela, even as Fidel promises death to anyone who has the nerve to propose popular validation of his own failed tyranny. Such is the drama of our time.

Free elections do not solve all problems. The fascist tyrants of the last century were enormously popular, and won huge electoral victories; Stalin was truly loved by millions of oppressed Soviets; and fanatics might win an election today in some unhappy lands. But this is a revolutionary moment, we are unexpectedly blessed with a revolutionary president, and very few peoples will freely support a new dictatorship, even one that claims Divine Right.

But the wheel turns, as ever. Such moments are transient, and if they are not seized, they will pass, leaving the bitter aftertaste of failure in dry mouths and throttled throats. The world looks to us for more action, not just brave words, and we must understand both the quality of this moment and the revolutionary strategy we need to adopt to ensure that the revolution succeeds. Above all, we must applaud those who got it right, starting with the president, and discard the advice of those who got it wrong, including some of our "professional experts."

The two great elections of recent months were held in Iraq and Ukraine. In both cases, the conventional wisdom was wrong. The conventional wisdom embraced the elitist notion that neither the Ukrainians nor the Iraqis were "ready" for democracy, because they lacked one or another component of the so-called requirements for a free society. Their alleged limitations ranged from historical tradition and internal conflicts to a lack of education and culture and insufficient internal "stability." How I hate the word stability! Is it not the antithesis of everything we stand for? We are the embodiment of revolutionary change, at home and abroad. Most of the time, those who deplore a lack of stability are in reality apologizing for dictators, and selling out great masses of people who wish to be free. And even as those un-American apologists invoke stability, we, as the incarnation of democratic capitalism, are unleashing creative destruction in all directions, sending once-great corporations to history's garbage heap, voting once-glorious leaders into early retirement, and inspiring people everywhere to seek their own happiness by asserting their right to be free.

The Ukrainians are now in control, but the Iraqis still have to contend with the discredited meddlers and schemers who never believed in their democracy, and still seek to place failed puppets in positions of power in Baghdad. Anyone who reads the dozens of blogs from Iraq â ” which express a wide range of political opinion â ” must surely see that the Allawi interregnum has failed. The results of the election speak clearly: The Allawi list was outvoted five to one by its major opponents, even though Allawi commanded a treasure chest vastly greater than that of the others. Ambassador Negroponte, Secretary of State Rice, and DCI Goss should tell their "experts" to admit error, and cease their efforts to install a president and prime minister who reflect the consensus of Foggy Bottom rather than the will of the Iraqi people. If they persist in attempting to dictate the makeup of the new Iraqi government, and continue to meddle in the drafting of the new Iraqi constitution, they will turn the majority of Iraqis against us. Despite countless errors of judgment and commission, we have, for the moment at least, won a glorious victory. We should be smart enough, and modest enough, to accept it.

This glorious victory is due in large part to the truly heroic performance of our armed forces, most recently in that great turning point, the battle of Fallujah. Our victory in Fallujah has had enormous consequences, first of all because the information we gathered there has made it possible to capture or kill considerable numbers of terrorists and their leaders. It also sent a chill through the spinal column of the terror network, because it exposed the lie at the heart of their global recruitment campaign. As captured terrorists have told the region on Iraqi television and radio, they signed up for jihad because they had been told that the anti-American crusade in Iraq was a great success, and they wanted to participate in the slaughter of the Jews, crusaders, and infidels. But when they got to Iraq â ” and discovered that the terrorist leaders immediately confiscated their travel documents so that they could not escape their terrible destiny â ” they saw that the opposite was true. The slaughter â ” of which Fallujah was the inescapable proof â ” was that of the jihadists at the hands of the joint coalition and Iraqi forces.

Thirdly, the brilliant maneuvers of the Army and Marine forces in Fallujah produced strategic surprise. The terrorists expected an attack from the south, and when we suddenly smashed into the heart of the city from the north, they panicked and ran, leaving behind a treasure trove of information, subsequently augmented by newly cooperative would-be martyrs. Above all, the intelligence from Fallujah â ” and I have this from military people recently returned from the city â ” documented in enormous detail the massive involvement of the governments of Syria and Iran in the terror war in Iraq. And the high proportion of Saudi "recruits" among the jihadists leaves little doubt that the folks in Riyadh are, at a minimum, not doing much to stop the flow of fanatical Wahhabis from the south.

Thus, the great force of the democratic revolution is now in collision with the firmly rooted tyrannical objects in Tehran, Damascus, and Riyadh. In one of history's fine little ironies, the "Arab street," long considered our mortal enemy, now threatens Muslim tyrants, and yearns for support from us. That is our immediate task.

It would be an error of enormous proportions if, on the verge of a revolutionary transformation of the Middle East, we backed away from this historic mission. It would be doubly tragic if we did it because of one of two possible failures of vision: insisting on focusing on Iraq alone, and viewing military power as the prime element in our revolutionary strategy. Revolution often comes from the barrel of a gun, but not always. Having demonstrated our military might, we must now employ our political artillery against the surviving terror masters. The great political battlefield in the Middle East is, as it has been all along, Iran, the mother of modern terrorism, the creator of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, and the prime mover of Hamas. When the murderous mullahs fall in Tehran, the terror network will splinter into its component parts, and the jihadist doctrine will be exposed as the embodiment of failed lies and misguided messianism.

The instrument of their destruction is democratic revolution, not war, and the first salvo in the political battle of Iran is national referendum. Let the Iranian people express their desires in the simplest way possible: "Do you want an Islamic republic?" Send Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel to supervise the vote. Let the contending parties compete openly and freely, let newspapers publish, let radios and televisions broadcast, fully supported by the free nations. If the mullahs accept this gauntlet, I have every confidence that Iran will be on the path to freedom within months. If, fearing a massive rejection from their own people, the tyrants of Tehran reject a free referendum and reassert their repression, then the free nations will know it is time to deploy the full panoply of pressure to enable the Iranians to gain their freedom.

The time is now. Faster, please.

â ” Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. He is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.
 
http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200502140945.asp

 

[a_majoor]

The MSM perspective, explained?

Merchants of Despair
Sort of for the war, sort of...


Much of the recent domestic critique of American efforts in the Middle East has long roots in our own past â ” and little to do with the historic developments on the ground in Iraq

1. "It's America's fault."

Some on the hard left sought to cite our support for Israel or general "American imperialism" in the Middle East as culpable for bin Laden's wrath on September 11. Past American efforts to save Muslims in Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Kuwait, and Afghanistan counted for little. Even less thanks were earned by billions of dollars given to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. The Islamofascist vision of a Dark Age world run by unelected imams â ” where women were in seclusion, homosexuals were killed, Jews were terrorized, Christians were routed, and freedom was squelched â ” registered little, even though such visions were by definition at war with all that Western liberalism stands for.

This flawed idea that autocrats supposedly hate democracy more for what it does rather than for what it represents is not new. On the eve of World War II isolationists on the right insisted that America had treated Germany unfairly after World War I and wrongly sided with British imperialism in its efforts to rub in their past defeat. "International Jewry" was blamed for poisoning the good will between the two otherwise friendly countries by demanding punitive measures from a victimized Germany. Likewise, poor Japan was supposedly unfairly cut off from American ore and petroleum, and hemmed in by provocative Anglo Americans.

By the late 1940s things had changed, and now it was the turn of the old Left, which blamed "fascists" for ruining the hallowed American-Soviet wartime alliance by "isolating" and "surrounding" the Russians with hostile bases and allies. The same was supposedly true of China: We were lectured ad nauseam by idealists and "China hands" that Mao "really" wanted to cultivate American friendship, but was spurned by our right-wing ideologues â ” as if there were nothing of the absolutism and innate thuggery in him that would soon account for 50 million or more murdered and starved.

Ditto the animosity from dictators like Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro. The Left assured us instead that both were actually neo-Jeffersonians whose olive branches were crushed by Cold Warriors, and who then â ” but only then â ” went on to plan their own gulags in Vietnam and Cuba.

2. "Americans are weak."

Before we went into Afghanistan, we were hectored that the country's fierce people, colonial history, rugged terrain, hostile neighbors, foreign religion, and shattered infrastructure made victory unlikely. We also forget now how the Left warned us of terrible casualties and millions of refugees before the Iraq war, and then went dormant until the insurgents emerged. At that point it resurfaced to assure that Iraq was lost and precipitate withdrawal our only hope, only to grow quiet again after the recent Iraqi election â ” a cycle that followed about the same 20-month timetable of military victory to voting in Afghanistan.

Now a new geopolitical litany has arisen: The reserves are "shattered"; North Korea, Syria, and Iran are untouchable while we are "bogged down" in the Sunni Triangle; a schedule for withdrawal from Iraq needs to be spelled out; there is no real American-trained Iraqi army; the entire Arab world hates us; blah, blah, blah... (interjection by me; this is not to say there are serious issues involved with attempts to deal with Syria, Iran etc.)

In 1917, "a million men over there" was considered preposterous for a Potemkin American Expeditionary Force; by late 1918 it was chasing Germany out of Belgium. Charles Lindbergh returned from an obsequious visitation with Goering to warn us that the Luftwaffe was unstoppable. Four years later it was in shambles as four-engine American bombers reduced the Third Reich to ashes.

Japanese Zeroes, supposed proof of comparative American backwardness in 1941-2, were the easy targets of "Turkey Shoots" by 1944 as American fighters blew them out of the skies. Sputnik "proved" how far we were behind the socialist workhorse in Russia, even as we easily went to the moon first a little over a decade later. The history of the American military and economy in the 20th century is one of being habitually underestimated, even as the United States defeated Prussian imperialism, German Nazism, Italian fascism, Japanese militarism, and Stalinist Communism.

Nor in our more recent peacetime were we buried by stagflation, Jimmy Carter's "malaise," Japan, Inc., and all the other supposed bogeymen that were prophesized to overwhelm the institutional strength of the American state, its free-enterprise system, and the highly innovative and individualistic nature of the American people.

3. "They are supermen."

When suicide murderers dominated the news of the Intifada, followed by the car bombers and beheaders of the Sunni Triangle, many in the West despaired that there was no thwarting such fanatics. Perhaps they simply believed more in their cause than we did in ours. How can you stop someone who kills to die rather than merely dying to kill?

That Ariel Sharon in two years defeated the Intifada by decapitating the Hamas leadership, starting the fence, announcing withdrawal from Gaza, and humiliating Arafat was forgotten. In the same manner few now write or think about how the United States military went into the heart of darkness in Fallujah and simply destroyed or routed the insurgents of that fundamentalist stronghold in less than two weeks, an historic operation that ensured a successful turnout on election day and an eventual takeover by an elected Iraqi government.

So this paradox of exaggerating the strength of our weaker enemies is likewise an American trademark. Spiked-helmeted Prussians were considered vicious pros who would make short work of doughboy hicks who had trained with brooms and sticks. Indeed, the German imperial army of World War I may have been made up of the most formidable foot soldiers of any age. Still, it was destroyed in less than four years by supposedly decadent and corrupt liberal democracies.

The Gestapo was the vanguard of a new Aryan super-race, pitiless and proud in its martial superiority. How could soda-jockeys of the Depression ever fight something like the Waffen SS with poor equipment, little training, and a happy-go-lucky attitude rather than an engrained death wish? Rather easily as it turned out, as the Allies not only defeated Nazism but literally annihilated it in about five years. Kamikazes were also felt to be otherworldly in their eerie death cult â ” who, after all, in the United States would take off to ram his Corsair or Hellcat into a Japanese ship? No matter â ” the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Army Air Corps were not impressed, and rather quickly destroyed not merely the death pilots but the very culture that launched them.

4. "We are alone."

George Bush was said to have alienated the world, as if our friends in Eastern Europe, Britain, Australia, and a billion in India did not matter. Yet the same was said in 1941 when Latin America, Asia, and Africa were in thrall to the Axis. Neutrals like Spain, Argentina, and Turkey wanted little to do with a disarmed United States that had unwisely found itself in a two-front war with the world's most formidable military powers.

By the 1950s we seemed to have defeated Germany and Japan only to have subsequently "lost" China and Eastern Europe once more. Much of Asia and Latin America deified the mass-murdering Stalin and Mao while deriding elected American presidents. The Richard Clarks and Joe Wilsons of that age lectured about a paranoid Eisenhower administration, clumsy CIA work, and the general hopelessness of ever defeating global Communism, whose spores sprouted almost everywhere in the form of Nasserism, Pan-Arabism, Baathism, Castroism, and various "national liberationist" movements. (interjection by me: many of these movements are fascist in nature. This is no accident or surprise; NAZI is the contraction of National Socialism. Remember that next time someone says NAZIs are "right wing.)

5. Why?

Why do Americans do all this to themselves? In part, the nature of an open society is constant self-critique, especially at times of national elections. Our successes at creating an affluent and free citizenry also only raise the bar ever higher as we sense we are closer to heaven on earth â ” and with a little more perfection could walk more like gods than crawl as mere men.

There are also still others among us who are impatient with the give and take of a consensual society. They harbor a secret admiration for the single-mindedness of the zealot in pursuit of a utopian cause â ” hence the occasional crazy applause given by some Americans to the beheading "Minutemen" of the Sunni Triangle or the "brave" "combat teams" who killed 3,000 on September 11.

Finally, the intellectual class that we often read and hear from is increasingly divorced from much of what makes America work, especially the sort of folk who join the military. They have little appreciation that the U.S. Marine Corps is far more deadly than Baathist diehards or Taliban remnants â ” or that a fleet of American bombers with GPS bombs can do more damage in a few seconds than most of the suicide bombers of the Middle East could do in a year.

It is wise to cite and publicize our errors â ” and there have been many in this war. Humility and circumspection are military assets as well. And we should not deprecate the danger of our enemies, who are cruel and ingenious. Moreover, we should never confuse the sharp dissent of the well-meaning critic with disloyalty to the cause.

But nor should we fall into pessimism, when in less than four years we have destroyed the two worst regimes in the Middle East, scattered al Qaeda, avoided another promised 9/11 at home, and sent shock waves of democracy throughout the Arab world â ” so far at an aggregate cost of less than what was incurred on the first day of this unprovoked war. Car bombs are bad news, but in the shadows is the real story: The terrorists are losing, and radical reform, the likes of which millions have never seen, is right on the horizon. So this American gloominess is not new. Yet, if the past is any guide, our present lack of optimism in this struggle presages its ultimate success.

A final prediction: By the end of this year, formerly critical liberal pundits, backsliding conservative columnists, once-fiery politicians, Arab "moderates," ex-statesmen and generals emeriti, smug stand-up comedians, recently strident Euros â ” perhaps even Hillary herself â ” will quietly come to a consensus that what we are witnessing from Afghanistan and the West Bank to Iraq and beyond, with its growing tremors in Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, and the Gulf, is a moral awakening, a radical break with an ugly past that threatens a corrupt, entrenched, and autocratic elite and is just the sort of thing that they were sort of for, sort of all along â ” sort of...

â ” Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
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  http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200502250748.asp 

   

 

[a_majoor]

Language as a weapon of war

Since this is primaraly a war of ideas and opposing idiologies, we need to be much more careful in how we speak of this:

Terror and the English Language
Making use of a chief weapon.

The long, twilight struggle against Islamo-fascism requires Civilization to deploy numerous weapons against this implacable foe. As usual, these will include intelligence, covert operations, and high-tech armaments. But another vital tool is language. How Americans and our allies speak and write about this conflict will influence when and how victory will come.

We now face the most anti-Semitic enemy since Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels blew their brains out in Berlin in 1945.

Militant Islam is the most bloodthirsty ideology since the Khmer Rouge exterminated one-third of Cambodia's people. The big difference, of course, is that Pol Pot had the good manners to keep his killing fields within his own borders, as awful as that was.

Islamo-fascism, in contrast, is a worldwide phenomenon that already has touched this country and many of our allies. And yet Muslim extremists rarely have armies we can see, fighter jets we can knock from the sky, nor an easily identifiable headquarters, such as the Reich's Chancellery of the 1940s or the Kremlin of the Cold War.

While basketball players and their fans battle each other on TV, actresses suffer wardrobe malfunctions, and rap singers scream sweet nothings in our ears, it's very easy to forget that Islamic extremists plot daily to end all of that and more by killing as many of us as possible.

Language can lull Americans to sleep in this new war, or it can keep us on the offense and our enemies off balance.

Here are a few ways language can keep Americans alert to the danger Islamic terrorism poses to this country:

September 11 was an attack, not just a string of coincidental strokes and heart failures that eliminated thousands of victims at once.

Recall some of the words that soon followed the September 11 atrocity. Kinko's stores, for instance, installed placed with the Stars and Stripes emblazoned across the lower 48 states. That graphic included this regrettable caption:

"The Kinko's family extends our condolences and sympathies to all Americans who have been affected by the circumstances in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania."

Circumstances? That word describes an electrical blackout, not terrorist bloodshed.

Similarly, September 11 was tragic, but far more, too. "The September 11 tragedy" misses the point: Tornadoes cause tragedies, but they are not malicious, as America's enemies were that day, and still are.

Victims of terrorism do not "die," nor are they "lost." They are killed, murdered, and slaughtered.

Likewise, many say that people "died" in the Twin Towers and at the Pentagon. No, people "die" in hospitals, often surrounded by their loved ones while doctors and nurses offer them aid and comfort.

The innocent people at the World Trade Center, the Defense Department, and that field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, were killed in a carefully choreographed act of mass murder.

Specify the number of human beings who terrorists destroy.

â ” "3,000" killed on 9-11 sounds like an amorphous blob. The actual number â ” 2,977 â ” forces people to regard these individuals as men and women with faces, stories, and loved ones who miss them very much.

â ” The precise figures are 2,749 killed at the World Trade Center, 184 at the Pentagon, and 44 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

â ” Likewise, the Bali disco bombings killed 202 people, mainly Australians.

â ” The Madrid train bombings killed 191 men, women, and children.

Somehow, a total of 191 people killed by al Qaeda's Spanish franchisees seems more ominous and concrete than a smoothly rounded "200."

Terrorists do not simply "threaten" us, nor does homeland security merely shield Americans from "future attacks." These things are true, but it is more persuasive to acknowledge what these people have done and hope to do once more: Wipe us out.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R ., Wis.), said this on the November 28 NBC Nightly News:

"We need to tighten up our drivers license provisions and our immigration laws so that terrorists cannot take advantage of the present system to kill thousands of Americans again."

That is a perfect sound bite. There is no amorphous talk about "the terrorist threat" or "stopping further attacks." Sensenbrenner concisely explained exactly what is at risk, and what needs to be thwarted:

No more killing of Americans, by the thousands, again.

Quote Islamo-fascist leaders to remind people of their true intentions.
President Bush, Heritage Foundation chief Ed Feulner, or I could explain how deadly militant Islam is and how seriously we should consider this toxic philosophy. Far more impressive, however, is to let these extremists do the talking. And yet their words are nowhere as commonly known as they should be:

â ” As Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri said in their 1998 declaration of war on the United States:

"The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies â ” civilian and military â ” is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."

â ” As the late Iranian dictator, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, stated in 1980:

"Our struggle is not about land or water...It is about bringing, by force if necessary, the whole of mankind onto the right path."

â ” Khomeini, ever the comedian, said this in 1986: "Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious."

â ” Asked what he would say to the loved ones of the 202 people killed in the October 2002 Bali nightclub explosions, Abu Bakar Bashir, the al-Qaeda-tied leader of Indonesia's radical Jemaah Islamiyah, replied, "My message to the families is, please convert to Islam as soon as possible."

The phrase "Weapons of Mass Destruction" has been pounded into meaninglessness. It has been repeated ad infinitum. Fairly or unfairly, the absence of warehouses full of anthrax and nerve gas in Iraq has made the whole idea of "WMD" sound synonymous with "LIE."

America's enemies do not plot the "mass destruction" of empty office buildings or abandoned parking structures. Conversely, they want to see packed office buildings ablaze as their inhabitants scream for mercy. That's why I use the terms "Weapons of Mass Death" and "Weapons of Mass Murder."

When discussing those who are killed by terrorists, be specific, name them, and tell us about them. Humanize these individuals. They are more than just statistics or stick figures.

I have written 18 articles and produced a website, HUSSEINandTERROR.com, to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein did have ties to terrorism.

(By the way, I call him "Saddam Hussein" or "Hussein." I never call him "Saddam" any more than I call Joseph Stalin "Joseph" or Adolf Hitler "Adolf." "Saddam" also has a cute, one-name ring to it, like Cher, Gallagher, Liberace, or Sting. Saddam Hussein does not deserve such a term of endearment.)

To demonstrate that Saddam Hussein's support of terrorism cost American lives, I remind people about the aid and comfort he provided to terror master Abu Nidal.

Among Abu Nidal's victims in the 1985 bombing of Rome's airport was John Buonocore, a 20-year-old exchange student from Delaware. Palestinian terrorists fatally shot Buonocore in the back as he checked in for his flight. He was heading home after Christmas to celebrate his father's 50th birthday.

In another example, those killed by Palestinian homicide bombers subsidized by Saddam Hussein were not all Israeli, which would have been unacceptable enough. Among the 12 or more Americans killed by those Baathist-funded murderers was Abigail Litle, the 14-year-old daughter of a Baptist minister. She was blown away aboard a bus in Haifa on March 5, 2003.

Her killer's family got a check for $25,000 courtesy of Saddam Hussein as a bonus for their son's "martyrdom."

Is all of this designed to press emotional buttons? You bet it is!

Americans must remain committed â ” intellectually and emotionally â ” to this struggle. There are many ways to engage the American people.

No one should hesitate to remind Americans that terrorism kills our countrymen â ” at home and abroad â ” and that those who militant Islam demolishes include promising young people with bright futures, big smiles, and, now, six feet of soil between them and their dreams.

*Who are we fighting? Militants? Martyrs? Insurgents?

Melinda Bowman of Brief Hill, Pennsylvania, wrote this in a November 24 letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal:

"And, by the way, what is all this 'insurgent' nonsense? These people kidnap, behead, dismember and disembowel. They are terrorists." Nicely and accurately put, Ms. Bowman.

Is this a war on terror, per se? A war on terrorism? Or is really a war on Islamo-fascism? It's really the latter, and Americans should say so.

Daniel Pipes of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum believes terror is a tactic, not an enemy.

Calling today's conflict "a 'War on Terror' is like America in 1941, after Pearl Harbor, declaring a 'War on Surprise Attacks.' We really are engaged in a war on radical Islam."

Jim Guirard runs the TrueSpeak Institute in Washington, D.C. He has thought long and hard about terror and the English language.

He recently informed me, to my horror, that more than three years into the war on Islamo-fascism, the State Department and the CIA have not produced a glossary of the Arabic-language words that Middle Eastern Islamo-fascists use, as well as the antonyms for those words. Such a "Thesaurus of Terrorism" would help Civilization turn this war's words upside down.

Why, for instance, do we inadvertently praise our enemies by agreeing that they fight a jihad or "holy war?" Instead, we correctly should describe them as soldiers in a hirabah or "unholy war."

Guirard has many astute and valuable recommendations in this area. U.S. diplomats and national security officials promptly should implement his common-sense proposals.

America and the rest of civilization can and must win this showdown against these sadistic cavemen. We can and will crush them â ” through espionage, high-tech force, statecraft, and public diplomacy. And, here at home, we can and will vanquish them through eternal vigilance.

One of our chief weapons should be something readily available to everyone who reads these words: The English language.

â ” Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Fairfax, Virginia. This article is adapted from a speech delivered at the Heritage Foundation.
 
http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock200503021001.asp