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

[a_majoor]

Just so long as you know where to go for the background briefings! 

 

[I_am_John_Galt]

But please, keep it up: makes for good reading ... 

 

[a_majoor]

Another one for the repository. The question here seems to be what will arouse American action against Iran and Syria, although the unspoken hope in the administration may be that something like the Ceadar Revolution will displace the dictatorsdhips in syria and Iran as well.

The Hand of the Mullahs
What we know, and what we don't do.

The State Department has once again awarded the blue ribbon to the mullahs of Tehran:

    Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism in 2004. Its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Ministry of Intelligence and Security were involved in the planning and support of terrorist acts and continued to exhort a variety of groups to use terrorism in pursuit of their goals.

This is no small accomplishment, even for the leaders of the Islamic republic. As recent events in Iraq make all too clear, there are still lots of terrorists with an insatiable appetite for the blood of their friends and neighbors, even if it has gotten much harder for them to slaughter crusaders and infidels. As Coalition fighters repeatedly report, Iran's claw marks â ” often side by side with the Syrians' and the Saudis' â ” are all over innumerable terrorist strikes, from Fallujah and Hilla to Baghdad and Mosul in Iraq, and, with the melting snows, across Afghanistan as well. It is not hard to get this story; I have abundant first-hand testimony to these facts from military and civilian sources in both countries. Any serious news organization could get it, but none seems to want it.

The State Department knows it, and says so in its own peculiar convoluted way:

    Iran pursued a variety of policies in Iraq during 2004, some of which appeared to be inconsistent with Iran's stated objectives regarding stability in Iraq... Senior (Iraqi) officials have publicly expressed concern over Iranian interference in Iraq, and there were reports that Iran provided funding, safe transit, and arms to insurgent elements...

In normal English, that would read, "Iran says it wants stability in Iraq, but it isn't so; the mullahcracy supports the terrorists." Had the State Department been interested in expanding its context ever so slightly, it could have added, "and its support for the terrorists is coordinated with the Syrians." A few months ago, American forces in Iraq captured photographs and documents about a meeting in Syria between Iraqi terrorists and Syrian and Iranian intelligence officials. Similar information was found in Fallujah.

If we cast our gaze elsewhere, we find the Iranians fighting democracy in Lebanon. Their Syrian buddies have withdrawn their armed forces â ” while sending their intelligence officers back into the country in new wardrobes â ” which leaves the Lebanese to the tender mercies of Hezbollah, the Iranian-created and mullah-operated organization that is the most dangerous band of killers on earth. And they have other allies, too, ranging from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (Ahmad Gibril's assassins, who have taken over a goodly number of rocket launchers and T55 tanks that the Syrians thoughtfully left behind in Damour and in the Bekaa Valley) to the militias of the Syrian Socialist National Party, the Baath Party, and the Tawhid in Tripoli.

All this raises some very embarrassing questions for President Bush and his top strategists. We know this is going on, yet we are fighting a purely defensive war in Iraq alone. The Iranians, Syrians, and Saudis have all heard the president say he wants an end to tyranny in the Middle East, because he understands the passionate embrace between the tyrants and the terrorists. The Iranian, Syrian and Saudi terror masters know that those words are aimed at their rule, and they are rightly afraid, afraid that Bush's vision will inspire their own people to become the gravediggers of the old regimes.

The terror masters hoped and expected that they would be able to turn Iraq into a replay of Lebanon in the 1980s, when they drove American and French armed forces out of the country. But they have failed. Contrary to their hopes and expectations, we â ” and the Iraqi people â ” have not been spooked by the wave of terror, and the Iraqis have demonstrated grit, bravery, and patience far beyond most expectations. Indeed, as the slaughter of innocent Iraqis grows, the people are manifestly becoming more resolute; dead national guardsmen and soldiers are quickly replaced with new volunteers, and the murder of government officials has not deterred Iraqi citizens from participating in government. The Iraqis are fighting back.

Worst of all, from the standpoint of the terror masters, the ultimate threat â ” freedom â ” is growing stronger, just as the president wishes, and freedom is spreading even though, despite his constant promises to support democratic revolution, he is doing virtually nothing to help it. He, along with Secretaries Rice and Rumsfeld, has not rallied to the side of the Iranian people, even though the Iranians have abundantly demonstrated their desire to be rid of the mullahs. Two weeks ago there were massive demonstrations and work stoppages in the oil-rich regions, centering around the city of Ahwaz. The demonstrators called for an end to the regime, scores of people were killed, and hundreds were beaten and arrested. On May Day, workers again demonstrated against the regime, this time in all the major cities. In Tehran, strongman and likely president-in-waiting Hashemi Rafsanjani was hooted down by the crowd, and pictures of him and Supreme Leader Khamenei were torn down and trampled. Yet no one in the American Government spoke a word of support for the demonstrators, and no one has yet endorsed the one thing that unites the overwhelming majority of Iranians, whatever their political proclivities: a national referendum on the legitimacy of the regime itself. If there were a national ballot on the single question â ” Do you want an Islamic republic? â ” the regime would pass into history overnight. But there is silence in official Washington.

The anti-Rafsanjani demonstrations are very important, because Rafsanjani will soon formally declare his candidacy for the presidency. Elections are scheduled for June, and the regime is desperate to "prove" its standing with the people. To that end, they will use force and trickery to produce a huge voter turnout. They will compel all government employees and all military personnel to go to the polls, and they will spread rumors (if you don't vote, you'll never get an exit visa; if you don't vote, your family members will be punished, etc.) to bring the unwilling to vote. The mullahs know that many millions of Iranians plan to boycott the elections, in a kind of silent demonstration of contempt.

The trickery has to do with Rafsanjani's grand return to national politics (he is an ex-president). He intends to campaign as the anti-establishment candidate par excellence, and has reportedly connived with Khamenei to prepare a super-reformist image. Rafsanjani intends to run against the Supreme Leader, criticizing the regime's performance on everything from foreign policy (hoping to seduce the West into thinking that he â ” who has been a key figure in the mullahcracy for decades â ” will produce the long awaited "opening" to the United States) to the management of the economy. It is unlikely that many Iranians will fall for this; they remember Rafsanjani as one of the most brutal leaders of the vicious crackdown on the student demonstration of the late eighties (a story recounted in shocking detail in the memoirs of the Grand Ayatollah Montazeri), and they are aware of the billions that he and his family have reportedly stashed away in foreign banks and real estate.

All of this is public information, yet we do not hear it from our leaders, and the silence in Washington must be terribly discouraging to the Iranian people. It will get even worse if the Rafsanjani ploy or others that will follow are taken seriously by our diplomats, as they surely will by those Europeans eager to continue to do business in Iran and restrain the United States from pursuing regime change there.

It is long past time for the president to show that he is serious about winning the war against terror; it can't be done by speeches alone, and it doesn't require armed invasion. But it does require action: political action to support and aid the forces of democratic revolution in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

If you listen to the hateful speeches of Rafsanjani, Khamenei, and the other tyrants in Tehran, you will hear them warning us that our day of judgment will soon arrive. They publicly enlist thousands of would-be martyrs, eager to wage jihad against us wherever they find us, here and overseas. And they are already here. In early March, Mr. Mahmoud Youssef Kourani, a resident of Dearborn, Michigan, pled guilty to providing material support to Hezbollah. The Detroit News carried the story, of which the last three paragraphs deserve our most careful attention:

    Kourani received training in weaponry, spy craft and counterintelligence in Lebanon and Iran...Kourani was "a member, fighter, recruiter and fund-raiser for Hezbollah."

    His brother is Hezbollah's chief of military security in southern Lebanon and oversaw Kourani's activities.

    Kourani...has been in custody since May 2003, when federal agents...charged him with harboring an illegal immigrant. Kourani pleaded guilty, served six months in a federal prison and was awaiting deportation...when he was indicted in 2004 on the terror charge.

We're talking about the brother of the chief of Hezbollah's military security in Lebanon, a man trained as an agent by the Iranians.

We dawdle at our peril, and yet we dawdle.

To continue to say "faster, please" is like spitting into the wind. We're back at September 10, waiting for our enemies to rouse us from our contented torpor.

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/ledeen200505040834.asp

 

[a_majoor]

The resonse of our so called "elites" has a lot to do with why the war seems to be so tentative, and also explains how horrible missteps like the Newsweek fabrication keep happening, without consequence.

As a side bar, Canada is sliding along the lines VDH suggests is common in the middle east; we wish to cherry pick the fruits of market capitalism and liberal democracy (in the true meaning of the word, not the "Liberal Party's" meaning) without being very accomodating to the cultur that allows it to thrive. Punative taxation, regulatory overkill and effective one party rule do have a lot to do with the wide gap between our GDP per capita and our declining productivity and relevance in global markets and politics. Thank goodness the various pathologies which induce violence are absent in Canada, for now.

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200505200756.asp

Our Two-Front Struggle
Pre-modern plus postmodern equals riots in Afghanistan.

One recent Newsweek story alleged - or fabricated - that a single Koran was desecrated by an American soldier in Guantanamo Bay.

The unsubstantiated rumor led to rioting and death in Afghanistan and general turmoil and rage across the Islamic world. Mullahs issued fatwas and the more lunatic even declared a "holy war." What explains the unsubstantiated story and why the hysterical reaction?

The superficial answer is that we now live in a globalized village - united by the marriage of satellite communications with cheap consumer goods. Someone sneezes in Texas and a few minutes later a villager in upper Russia can say "bless you." What an "in-the-know" Beltway insider conjures up as buzz in the "Periscope" section of the magazine for his American readers can cause death and mayhem hours later 7,000 a miles away in the Hindu Kush.

Yet there is something far more to these bizarre events than mere "interconnectedness," or even media-savvy fundamentalists who have got the hang of Western telecommunications and know how to use them to stir up the mob.

There is not a necessary connection in the Middle East - or anywhere else - between the occasional appearance of technological sophistication and what we might call humanism, or the commitment to explain phenomena through reason and empiricism. We forget that far too often as we kow-tow to extremists and seek to apologize or fathom the holy protocols surrounding a religious text.

In the West, the wonder of a cell phone in some sense is the ultimate expression of a long struggle for the primacy of scientific reason, tolerance, critical consciousness, and free expression. That intellectual journey goes back to Galileo, Newton, and Socrates.

Everything from CDs to Starbucks that we take for granted is a representation of millions of past Western lives. These forgotten scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs, along with other reformers in politics, journalism, economics, and religion, created our present liberal environment. Only its institutions led to our prosperous modernity.

Without them, thinkers cannot discuss ideas freely. They will not find legal protection for their accomplishments, status for their contributions, and profit for their benefactions - and thus would end up hopeless and adrift in a society such as present-day Syria, Iran, or Egypt.

That long odyssey is not so in the world of bin Laden or an Iranian theocrat - or the ignorant who stream out of the madrassas and Friday fundamentalist harangues along the Afghan-Pakistani border. These fist-shaking, flag-burning Islamic fascists all came late to the Western tradition and now cherry-pick its technology. As classic parasites, a Zawahiri or al-Zarqawi wants Western sophisticated weapons and playthings - without the bothersome foundations that made them all possible.

An Afghan who riots because he learns of a rumor in a Western magazine, and those like him who explode and behead in Iraq, are emblematic of this hypocrisy. Nothing they have accomplished in their lives, either materially or philosophically, would result in a free opinion magazine, much less the technology to send out the story instantaneously - or, in the case of al-Zarqawi, to have his murdering transmitted globally on the Internet.

Instead, our Afghan rioters, and the Islamist organizations that have endorsed them, live in the eighth century of rumor, sexual and religious intolerance, tribal chauvinism, and gratuitous violence - but now electrified by the veneer of the 21st-century civilization that is not their own, but sometimes fools the naïve who it is.

Yet all the illumination in the modern world - neon, fluorescent, or incandescent - cannot light up the illiberal Dark Age mind if it is not willing (or forced) to begin the long ordeal of democracy, tolerance, legality, and individual rights.

Despite cheap, accessible, and easy-to-operate consumer goods imported from the Westernized world, the thinking of a bin Laden or Muslim Brotherhood still leads back to swords, horses, and jihad, not ahead to iPods and Microsoft.

They want such things to use to destroy, but not along with them the institutions like democracy and freedom that would allow such progress in their own countries - and shortly make al Qaeda and the fundamentalists not merely irrelevant, but ridiculous as well. Thus, we can understand the increasing hatred of the United States and its policy of democratic idealism abroad that threatens to put them out of business.

As we learned on September 11, they try to kill us now with our own appurtenances before they are buried themselves under modernism, liberality, and freedom. That really is what this war is about: a last-ditch effort by primordial fascists to prevent the liberalization of the Muslim world and the union of Islamic society with the protocols found in the rest of the globe and which many in the Middle East prefer if given a chance.

Only democracy and freedom, not Western money or cheap guilt, will remedy the deep sickness of radical Islam that now so tires and sickens the rest of the world that daily has to watch and endure it.

For a suicide bomber like Mohammed Atta, the more he bumped into the West and used its bounties, the more he despised us for his own hypocrisy of enjoying what his culture could not make or allow. There was no law forcing Mr. Atta to go study in Germany or visit the United States or to wear Western clothes and use our technology; he did so on his own free volition - and later despised himself for doing so.

The Saudi insurgents who now volunteer to blow themselves up in northern Iraq, like their spiritual kindred suicide bombers on the West Bank, are not poor villagers content to plow ancestral fields and follow the tribal and religious rhythms of a timeless Middle East.

No, they are usually upscale and spoiled, or at least middle class, educated, and with some disposable income - the prerequisites to allow them contact with the West and almost immediately to incite their sense of envy, self-loathing, exaggerated entitlement, and ultimately nihilism at trying to destroy what they hate and lust for and cannot destroy.

Second, there is a certain mental disease here at home - long chronicled in Western literature - that encourages the Afghan rioter's love/hate relationship with things Western. After all, we have developed a culture in which a Newsweek writer grasps that if he scoops a story that the United States military is insensitive to the "other" and, better yet, religiously intolerant, he finds a certain resonance within our own elite. If that slur turns out to be wrong, well, his intentions were at least "noble" and there are likely to follow little consequences in his own circle that is far away from those soldiers who pay for his lapse on the ground in Afghanistan.

Note also after the riots how few Americans announced their immediate scorn for silly rumors about our own POW center in a time of war - especially when it is housing Afghan terrorists who helped kill 3,000 of our own innocents. Can one imagine fundamentalists in the Bible Belt rioting and shooting should they hear an unfounded rumor that an American prisoner in Riyadh, charged with complicity in killing thousands of Arabs, found his Old Testament trashed by a Saudi guard - or a Saudi official promising to apologize to the Western world should a miscreant guard be culpable?

Was the Church of the Nativity carefully treated by its Islamic intruders - or did the desecration cause rioting and holy-war warnings across Christendom? It is just this imbalance that our elites do not talk openly about, but that outrages the populace who tires of it.

So we do not dare remind the world that we have nothing to apologize for, given that we have expended lives and treasure in Afghanistan to improve a country that once helped to butcher us. Most of those rioting and killing idolize bin Laden. The problem is not that they are confused, but that they express exactly what they feel - and that is a deep hatred for Western liberalism, manifested on their now sacred day of September 11. We don't say such rude things, not only because it would be stupid politics, but because we don't quite believe them ourselves anymore.

In that sense, we can be as warped as the Afghan rioter. Westerners have their own delusions. We seem to think that our neat gadgets also equate with an ability to refashion human nature or that a fascist abroad needs to know how much we care about his hurt.

There is a sort of arrogance in the liberal West - the handmaiden to our own guilt and self-loathing - that strangely believes we are both to blame for the ills abroad and alone can solve them through handing out money. Almost all of the pathetic rhetoric of al Qaeda - "colonial exploitation," "American hegemony," or "blood for oil" - was as imported from the West as were the terrorists' bombs and communications.

Some Western intellectuals, I think, need a bin Laden to illustrate and confirm their nihilistic ideas about their own postmodern society, just as he needs them to explain why his culture's failure is not its own fault. So just as al Qaeda will always find an enabling Westerner to say, "You lashed out at us in frustration for your unfair treatment," so too a guilty Westerner will always find a compliant terrorist to boast, "Yes, we kill you for your sins." America was once a country that demolished Hitler and Tojo combined in less than four years and broke the nuclear Soviet Union - and now frets and whines that a few thousand deranged fascists want an apology.

Abroad, we battle Islamic fascists who hate us for our success and want to kill us with the tools of the modern world they despise. But at home, we are also at odds with our own privileged guilt-ridden aristocracy, whose very munificence has made them misunderstand why they are hated.

The Islamists insist, "We kill you for being soft." Westerners in response feel, "We are killed because we are not being soft enough."

And so they riot and kill in Afghanistan over a stupid rumor, and we seek to apologize that it somehow spread.

How truly sad.

- 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/hanson200505200756.asp

 

[Edward Campbell]

I usually find something with which to agree in most of Hanson's work, but this time my agreement is absolute, 100%, all the way, etc.

 

[a_majoor]

I usually find something with which to agree in most of Hanson's work, but this time my agreement is absolute, 100%, all the way, etc.

Some more agreeable writing then,

Our Strange War
Looking ahead, our options.

The three-year-plus war that began on September 11 is the strangest conflict in our history. It is not just that the first day saw the worst attack on American soil since our creation, or that we are publicly pledged to fighting a method â ” â Å“terrorâ ? â ” rather than the concrete enemy of Islamic fascism that employs it.

Our dilemma is that we have not sought to defeat and humiliate the enemy as much as wean a people from the thrall of Islamic autocracy. That is our challenge, and explains our exasperating strategy of half-measures and apologies â ” and the inability to articulate exactly whom we are fighting and why.

Imagine that a weak Hitler in the mid-1930s never planned conventional war with the democracies. Instead, he stealthily would fund and train thousands of SS fanatics on neutral ground to permeate European society, convinced of its decadence and the need to return to a mythical time when a purer Aryan Volk reigned supreme. Such terrorists would bomb, assassinate, promulgate fascistic hatred in the media, and whine about Versailles, hoping insidiously to gain concessions from wearied liberal societies that would make ever more excuses as they looked inward and blamed themselves for the presence of such inexplicable evil. All the while, Nazi Germany would deny any connections to these â Å“indigenous movementsâ ? and â Å“deploreâ ? such â Å“terrorism,â ? even as the German people got a certain buzz from seeing the victors of World War I squirm in their discomfort. A triangulating Mussolini or Franco would use their good graces to â Å“bridge the gap,â ? and seek a â Å“peaceful resolution,â ? while we sought to â Å“liberateâ ? rather than defeat the German nation.

So to recap: The real enemy is an Islamic fascist ideology that is promulgated by a few thousand. They wear no uniforms and are deeply embedded within and protected by Muslim society.

Beyond the terrorists, a larger percentage of Middle Easterners, if it cost them little, gain psychological satisfaction when fellow defiant Muslims (terrorists or not) â Å“stand upâ ? to Westerners, who enjoy power, status, and wealth undreamed of in the Middle East.

Even if they would hate living under Taliban-like theocrats, millions at least see the jihadists as about the only way of â Å“getting backâ ? at the Western world that has left them so far behind. This passive-aggressive sense of inferiority explains why millions of Muslims flock to Europe to enjoy its freedom and prosperity, even as they recreate there an Islamist identity to reconcile their longing and desire for what they profess to hate.

Still, most in the Middle East wish simply to embrace the human desire for prosperity, freedom, and security within the umbrella of traditional Muslim society â ” and will support American efforts if (a) these initiatives seem to be successful, and (b) are not seen as American.

Consequently, the United States has not been able to bring its full arsenal of military assets to the fray. It is nearly impossible to extract the killers from the midst of civilian society. Too much force causes collateral damage and incites religious and nationalist anti-American fervor. Too little power emboldens the fascists and suggests America (e.g., Nixon's â Å“pitiful, helpless giantâ ?) cannot or will not win the war.

Like a parent with a naughty child, a maddening forbearance is the order of the day: They burn American flags, behead, murder, and promise death and ruin to Americans; we ignore it and instead find new ways of displaying our sensitivity to Islam.

Although the enemy is weak militarily and its nihilist ideology appeals to few, it still has powerful ways to meet our own overwhelming military power and economic strength.

First is the doctrine of the deniability of culpability. In the legalistic world of the United Nations and international courts, Islamists depend on their patrons' not being held responsible beyond a reasonable doubt for the shelter and cash they provide to those who kill Westerners. Elites in Syria or Iran deny that they offer aid to terrorists. Or if caught, they retreat to a fallback position of something like, â Å“Do you really want to go to war over our help for a few ragtag insurrectionists?â ?

A second advantage is oil. A third to half the world's reserves is under Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf States, Iraq, and Iran. None until recently were democratic; most at one time or another have given bribe money to terrorists, sponsored anti-Americanism, or survived by blaming us for their own failures.

These otherwise backward societies â ” that neither developed nor can maintain their natural wealth â ” rake in billions, as oil that costs $2-5 to pump is sold for $50. Some of that money in nefarious ways arms terrorists. Should an exasperated United States finally strike back at their patrons, we risk ruining the world economy â ” or at least so it will be perceived by paranoid and petroleum-dependent Japan, Europe, and China. Without an energy policy of independence, this war will be hard to win, since Saudi Arabia will never feel any pressure to purge its royal family of terrorist sympathizers or to cease its subsidies for Wahhabist hatred.

A third edge for the terrorists lies in the West itself. After 40 years of multiculturalism and moral equivalence â ” the wages of wealth and freedom unmatched in the history of civilization â ” many in the United States believe that they have evolved beyond the use of force. Education, money, dialogue, conflict resolution theory â ” all this and more can achieve far more than crude Abrams tanks and F-16s.

A bin Laden or Saddam is rare in the West. In our arrogance, we think such folk are more or less like ourselves and live in a similar world of reason and tolerance. The long antennae of the canny terrorists pick up on that self-doubt. Most of the rhetoric in bin Laden's infomercials came right out of the Western media.

As September 11 fades in the memory, too many Americans feel that it is time to let bygones be bygones. Some now consider Islamic fascism and its method of terror a â Å“nuisanceâ ? that will go away if we just come home. We are a society where many of our elite believe the killer bin Laden is less of a threat than the elected George Bush. Al Qaeda keeps promising to kill us all; meanwhile Ralph Nader wants the wartime president impeached for misuse of failed intelligence.

Fourth, in an asymmetrical war the cult of the underdog is a valuable tool. Europeans march with posters showing scenes from Abu Ghraib, not of the beheading of Daniel Pearl or the murder of Margaret Hassan. They do not wish, much less expect, al Qaeda to win, but they still find psychic satisfaction in seeing the world's sole superpower tied down, as if it were the glory days of the Vietnam protests all over again. How else can we explain why Amnesty International claims that Guantanamo â ” specialized ethnic foods, available Korans, and international observers â ” is comparable to a Soviet Gulag where millions once perished? So there is a deep, deep sickness in the West.

In response, we have embarked on the only strategy that offers a lasting victory: Kill the Islamic fascists; remove the worst autocracies that sponsored terrorists; and jump-start democratic governments in the Middle East.

Our two chief worries â ” terrorists and weapons of mass destruction â ” wane when constitutional societies replace autocracies. Currently few democratic states harbor and employ terrorists or threaten their neighbors with biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons, even if they have ample stockpiles of each.

Where will it all end? Our choices are threefold.

We can wind down â ” essentially the position of the mainstream Left â ” and return to a pre-September 11 situation, treating Islamism as a criminal justice matter or deserving of an occasional cruise missile. This, in my view, would be a disaster and guarantee another mass attack.

Or we can continue to pacify Iraq. We then wait and see whether the ripples from the January elections â ” without further overt American military action into other countries â ” bring democracy to Lebanon, Egypt, the Gulf States, and eventually the entire Middle East. This is the apparent present policy of the administration: talking up democracy, not provoking any who might disagree. It may well work, though such patience requires constant articulation to the American people that we are really in a deadly war when it doesn't seem to everyone that we are.

Or we can press on. We apprise Syria to cease all sanctuary for al Qaedists and Iran to give up its nuclear program â ” or face surgical and punitive American air strikes. Such escalation is embraced by few, although many acknowledge that we may soon have few choices other than just that. But for now we can sum up the American plans as hoping that democracy spreads faster than Islamism, and thus responsible government will appear to ensure terrorists and WMD disappear.

The above, of course, is what we plan, but gives no consideration to the intent of the enemy. As we speak, he desperately searches for new strategies to ward off defeat as jihad seems more likely to lead to ruin than the return of the caliphate.

For now Islamic fascist strategy is to make such horrific news in Iraq that America throws up its hands and sighs, â Å“These crazy people simply aren't worth it,â ? goes home, snoozes â ” and thus becomes ripe for another September 11.

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/hanson200506030807.asp

A lot of this ties into Infanteers observations about "4GW", where absolute military power is not the engine which wins wars, but only one of the tools available.

 

[a_majoor]

As if the situation on the ground isn't complex enough, US forces in Iraq are now dealing with "Red on Red" incidents....

http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/007038.php

Red-on-Red
by Bill Roggio at June 21, 2005 05:37 PM

The brutal acts of violence directed at civilians and Iraqi police is losing favor among some of the members of the Iraqi insurgency. During Operation Matador, we saw examples of the local tribes, some of whom are sympathetic or even participating in the insurgency, rise up to fight the foreign jihadis after their attempts to impose a Taliban-like rule of law in Western Anbar. Today's New York Times reports further cases of 'red-on-red', AKA the enemy fighting amongst themselves. The Marines gladly watched as insurgents duked it out along the Syrian border.

    Late Sunday night, American marines watching the skyline from their second-story perch in an abandoned house here saw a curious thing: in the distance, mortar and gunfire popped, but the volleys did not seem to be aimed at them. In the dark, one spoke in hushed code words on a radio, and after a minute found the answer. "Red on red," he said, using a military term for enemy-on-enemy fire.

    Marines patrolling this desert region near the Syrian border have for months been seeing a strange new trend in the already complex Iraqi insurgency. Insurgents, they say, have been fighting each other in towns along the Euphrates from Husayba, on the border, to Qaim, farther west. The observations offer a new clue in the hidden world of the insurgency and suggest that there may have been, as American commanders suggest, a split between Islamic militants and local rebels.

    A United Nations official who served in Iraq last year and who consulted widely with militant groups said in a telephone interview that there has been a split for some time.
    "There is a rift," said the official, who requested anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the talks he had held. "I'm certain that the nationalist Iraqi part of the insurgency is very much fed up with the Jihadists grabbing the headlines and carrying out the sort of violence that they don't want against innocent civilians."

Mohammed at Iraq the Model reports there is turmoil among the Mosul insurgency over the methodology used by al Qaeda to intimidate the less radical groups. The recent arrest of Abu Talha may have been precipitated by these divisions.

    This conflict originated from the different attitudes of the different groups regarding the issue of targeting civilian "collaborators" (which refers to anyone who works for the government) and it's more likely that this conflict has lead to the appearance of opportunities for a dialogue between some of these groups and the government and this will possibly put an end to a great deal of the violence going on in that area. It's becoming clearer that most of those groups have begun to doubt the benefits of violence and their reluctance has been taking the shape of an internal conflict with the hard-line groups and I think what supports this theory is the message that came from Al-Qaeda to the Sunnis warning them from the consequences of being involved in the political process and I think that Al-Qaeda wouldn't have threatened its allies in Iraq if Al-Qaeda didn't feel that the carpet was being pulled from under its feet.

As Mohammed states, the split in the insurgency gives the Coalition room to maneuver, and co-opt the insurgents and tribal groups disgusted by the tactics and ideology of al Qaeda in Iraq. In a critical assessment by the New York Times of US force deployments in Tal Afar, the dislike of the foreign elements of the insurgency becomes clear. Al Qaeda is not winning allies by their ruthless tactics and vicious treatment of the Iraqi tribes. The terrorists must stoop to threatening children to project fear within the city.

    On arrival here, commanders found a town that was, for all practical purposes, dead, strangled by the violent insurgents who held it in their thrall. "Anyone not helping the terrorists can't leave their homes because they will be kidnapped and the terrorists will demand money or weapons or make them join them to kill people," said Hikmat Ameen al-Lawand, the leader of one of Tal Afar's 82 tribes, who said most of the city is controlled by insurgents. "If they refuse they will chop their heads off."

    Khasro Goran, the deputy provincial governor in Ninewa, which includes Tal Afar, concurred. "There is no life in Tal Afar," he said in an interview a week ago. "It is like Mosul a few months ago - a ghost town." There are more than 500 insurgents in Tal Afar, he said, and they project a level of fear and intimidation across the city far in excess of their numbers. Thoroughfares lined with stores have been deserted, the storefronts covered with blue metal roll-down gates.

    In northeast Tal Afar, a young mother now home-schools her six children, after a flier posted at their school warned: "If you love your children, you won't send them to school here because we will kill them." A neighbor, Muhammad Ameen, will not let his kids play outside. "Standing out in the open is not a good idea," he said.

    Tribes sympathetic to the new Iraqi government have suffered constant assaults at the hands of insurgents and rival tribes. More than 500 mortars have struck lands belonging to the Al-Sada al-Mousawiyah tribe since September, said the tribe's leader, Sheik Sayed Abdullah Sayed Wahab. "All of my tribe are prisoners in their own homes," he says. "We can't even take our people to the hospital...
    Real leadership in Tal Afar lies with the 82 tribal leaders. Angered by the attacks and emboldened by the enlarged American military presence here, some sheiks [tribal leaders] have become outspoken critics of the insurgency. On June 4, at great risk to their own lives, more than 60 attended a security conference at Al Kasik Iraqi Army base near here. To the surprise of Iraqi and American commanders who organized the gathering, many sheiks demanded a Falluja-style military assault to rid Tal Afar of insurgents and complained that American forces do not treat terror suspects roughly enough.

It has become clear that as the terrorists move into remote locations and attempts to establish their vile brand of civil law, the local populations begin to despise and reject them. As the Sunnis who are typically sympathetic or supportive of the insurgency come into close proximity to the extreme jihadis, they witness their true nature.

This is a measure of success that cannot be quantified, such as the numbers of insurgent fighters killed or captured, the number of suicide attacks across the country, Coalition casualties, the number of operational Iraqi battalions or their fighting effectiveness, money spent of reconstruction or the number of completed projects. As Grim eloquently reminds us, â Å“The fact that escalation exists does not prove anything about the success or failure of the mission in Iraqâ ?, and in fact we should expect escalation as the enemy commits more resources to fight the progress of the Coalition.

The Christian Science Monitor looks at the US Strategy in Iraq and asks if it is working. In the assessment, Professor Juan Cole is quoted as saying the insurgency is gaining ground in the Sunni Triangle and Anbar, and not losing it:

    "It's indisputable that the insurgents are enormously more popular among the Sunni Arab community today than they were two years ago,'' says Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Michigan. "Every time you hear a suicide bomb has gone off ... I guarantee you that means there are 3,000 Iraqis who saw the preparations and decided that this would be a good thing."

How would Professor Cole explain red-on-red fighting in Western Iraq, or the pleas for cooperation from local tribes? These are facts Professor Cole conveniently ignores as they do not fit into his preconceived notion that the US has lost the war and it is time for the UN to ride to the rescue.

Two indicators that Professor Cole is wrong are the attitudes of the Syrians and the Kofi Annan. Syria continues to tout its efforts to bolster security along its borders. Kofi Annan publishes a column in the Washington Post touting the political progress in Iraq and the strides made to reach consensus on the Iraqi Constitution, which Iraq the Model reports as being 80% completed.

Neither Syria (the headwaters of the ratline) or Kofi Annan (Mr. Illegal) have been sympathetic to American efforts in Iraq, and their attempts to curry favor with the US speak volumes on their assessment of the situation. And this comes before Coalition forces and the Iraqi Army commits the resources to fully engage and occupy the towns and cities of Anbar.

 

[a_majoor]

Indications the war might indeed widen:

Come Back, Cowboy
Why public support for the Iraq war is fading.

By Barbara Lerner

Four June polls show the president in increasing trouble over the war in Iraq. The poll numbers are bad. But the usual interpretations of them are even worse â ” and, I think, dangerously mistaken.

First, the numbers: In the AP/Ipsos poll, only 41 percent of Americans support Bush's handling of the Iraq war; in the CBS/New York Times poll it's only 37 percent. In the Gallup poll, 56 percent say the war isn't worth fighting. In the Post/ABC poll, almost 60 percent say the same, with two thirds seeing the U.S as "bogged down" in Iraq and 52 percent not believing the fighting there contributes to our long-term security. The biggest majority â ” nearly three-quarters â ” say our level of casualties is "unacceptable."

Why is the public mood so defeatist? Some say it's because Americans don't have the patience for the long war we face and have grown too soft to accept the casualties we must accept to win. Jim Hoagland blames it on the Bush administration's "lack of serious accountability for lies, mistakes and worse in the military and civilian chain of command."

I don't buy the "soft America" argument. I agree that the administration is at fault, but for an entirely different reason: because Cowboy George morphed into Cautious George. Cowboy George was a bold leader, unafraid to take the tough offensive actions we must take to win this war. He led us in the first two years after 9/11, and Americans rallied behind him in numbers so overwhelming they made "soft America" all but invisible. But after our conquest of the Iraqi military in 2003, Cautious George replaced Cowboy George. Cautious George is forcing us to fight with one hand tied behind our back by pretending we are fighting against one country only. In fact, we are fighting a regional war in Iraq, and have been since day one. It's past time for America to acknowledge that fact and act on it. Time to make all the Middle Eastern despots who are pouring money, men, and arms into the battle in Iraq stop.

Because the president has not done this, most Americans think we are fighting only against Iraqis â ” local people, dependent on local resources. In that light, our inability to stem the daily toll of bombs and blood looks like evidence that most Iraqis support terror. Americans don't see that Iraq as worth fighting for, or that kind of war as winnable. Other polls suggest Americans worry, increasingly, that Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia also threaten our security. They fear that by expending so much blood and treasure on Iraq alone, we may make ourselves more vulnerable to attacks from others.

Iraq is a difficult place, but this all-dark picture is false as well as dispiriting. Inadvertently, the Bush administration has made it look believable by downplaying the big role that foreign governments and their terrorist proxies play in Iraq. Administration spokesmen rarely pointed to the support â ” diplomatic as well as military â ” Iraq's Sunni Baathist terrorists get from Sunni tyrants abroad, and they kept insisting that foreign jihadists are only a minority of the fighters we face. But foreign support is a fact, and harping on the relatively small number of foreign jihadists in Iraq at any one time misses the point. Foreign jihadists are responsible for almost all suicide bombings, and suicide bombings cause a disproportionate share of American and Iraqi casualties. Worse, because foreign jihadists come from all the Arab states as well as Iran, there is an endless supply of them. If we confine ourselves to hunting them down, one by one, only after they infiltrate Iraq, we will be there forever. Far better to act forcefully to stop the infiltration, and do it in a way that sends a message to all terror-succoring states: The free ride is over. The price for continuing to aid and abet the war against us and against a free Iraq has gone up.

We can do that with relative ease, because although foreign jihadists come from all over the Middle East, most of them enter Iraq from only one country: Syria. Syria is a police state, a small, economic basket-case of a country that hosts a multitude of terrorist groups and terror training camps, and which is working to defeat democracy in Lebanon as well as Iraq. Syria could stop the foreign terrorist influx into Iraq if it wanted to, and we could make Syria want to. The Turks did it in 1998, when Syria hosted the PKK terror group and sent them across the border to murder Turkish soldiers and civilians. Then as now, Syria claimed it was doing no such thing, but instead of spluttering impotently, Turkey massed her army on the border and made it clear that if Syria didn't end PKK infiltration, Turkey would invade. Surprise, surprise, PKK infiltration from Syria suddenly stopped.

We can make Syria stop too, and do it without putting additional strain on our hard-working ground troops. Democracy is a fine long-term goal, but for now, we don't need to remake Syria; we just need to make her stop. We can use our air power to bomb the rat lines that feed terrorists into Iraq, and blow up all the terror training camps and weapons sites in Syria and Lebanon, hitting enemy targets from the Bekaa Valley to the Iraqi border in a new shock-and-awe campaign. That would end the easy re-supply of suicide bombers in Iraq, and reduce our casualties significantly. It would, equally, send a clear message to terror-harborers everywhere: Stop.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has been asking President Bush for a go-ahead to strike back at Syria from the start of the Syrian campaign against us, but has yet to get one. The president's toughening rhetoric toward Syria in recent weeks suggests he may, now, be considering it; and the excellent new tone set by our new ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, reinforces that possibility. If President Bush does order military strikes on enemy bases in Syria and Lebanon, it would mark the return of the war leader so many of us cheered in 2001 and 2002 â ” the stand-up Texan who made us believe we can win this war. Come back, Cowboy George. America needs you.

â ” Barbara Lerner is a frequent NRO contributor.
 
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/lerner200506230745.asp

 

[I_am_John_Galt]

Another interesting opinion (forgive me, but I'm too lazy to link all the references within the article):

Posted 17:03 UT by Michael McNeil
BBC World confirms the Flypaper Strategy

It was Canadian essayist David Warren who in 2003 originated the concept of the so-called â Å“Flypaperâ ? strategy with regard to the war in Iraq.  As Warren wrote in his first essay on the subject:

    While engaged in the very difficult business of building a democracy in Iraq â ” the first democracy should it succeed in the entire history of the Arabs â ” President Bush has also quite consciously to my information created a new playground for the enemy away from Israel and even farther away from the United States itself.  By the very act of proving this lower ground he drains terrorist resources from other swamps.

    This is the meaning of Mr. Bush's â Å“bring 'em onâ ? taunt from the Roosevelt Room on Wednesday when he was quizzed about the â Å“growing threat to U.S. forcesâ ? on the ground in Iraq.  It should have been obvious that no U.S. President actually relishes having his soldiers take casualties.  What the media and U.S. Democrats affect not to grasp is that the soldiers are now replacing targets that otherwise would be provided by defenceless civilians both in Iraq and at large.  The sore thumb of the U.S. occupation â ” and it is a sore thumb equally to Baathists and Islamists compelling their response â ” is not a mistake.  It is carefully hung flypaper.

Nothing that has occurred since in Iraq and elsewhere has invalidated the fundamental correctness of this doctrine.  Warren himself has written considerably further on this topic, most recently during this last month here, where he says:

    I do feel sure, that while the continuing terrorist carnage in Iraq, especially, but also in Afghanistan, must disturb us as conscientious human beings, we have less reason than ever to be alarmed by it.  We are witnessing what amounts to the purposeful bleeding of a septic wound, as the most fanatic Islamist incendiaries from within Iraq and abroad take their best, hopeless shot at bringing down the new Iraqi constitutional order.  It is a matter of life or death for their cause, and we could hardly expect them to abandon it easily.

    As the author of the much-mocked â Å“flypaper theoryâ ? â ” the phrase I used to describe the implicit strategy behind the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan â ” I am more and more persuaded it has worked.  All ground indications are that large numbers of Islamist terrorists who would otherwise remain dangerously under cover, not only across the region but in Europe and elsewhere, are irresistibly drawn towards these theatres of action, where they sooner or later get themselves killed.

    As terrorists, they were, almost invariably, in a position to be more effective where they were.  They are lured away for emotional reasons, or â Å“spiritualâ ? if that word can be applied to something that is essentially not Godly but demonic.  It is the Islamist analogy to the way young socialists, anarchists, and adventurers from across Europe were drawn to Spain during its Civil War in the 1930s.

    In addition to being annihilated, themselves, they deflate their cause by showing it to be losing.  And what began as a recruiting inducement, soon becomes the opposite.  For the near-certainty of getting killed oneself, in the cause of murdering (mostly) defenceless civilians, is not as attractive a motivator as the incendiaries make out.

Many other analysts have commented on this strategy, most recently James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal's editorial OpinionJournal page, where he runs a daily feature the â Å“Best of the Web Today.â ?  Yesterday, in a piece called â Å“Red on Red,â ? Taranto notes a report from that day's New York Times revealing that insurgents in Iraq are now fighting each other as some local Iraqis, otherwise opponents of the Coalition's presence in the country, seek to forestall the imported foreign jihadists' proclivities towards blowing up Iraqis right and left in their campaign to prevent the newly installed elected Iraqi government from consolidating its hold on power and completing work on the new democratic Iraqi constitution.

As Taranto says, â Å“it would seem to vindicate both Vice President Cheney's much-maligned view that the indigenous insurgency is in its 'final throes' and the 'flypaper' theory that liberating Iraq is drawing in terrorists and forcing them to face the U.S. military.â ?

In this regard, a report from the BBC just a week ago thoroughly reinforces this point of view.  While the BBC has been almost unremittingly negative with respect to the war on terror, including its Iraqi theater, even a stopped clock gets it right occasionally, and the BBC now and then does partially make up for its â Å“sins.â ?

On June 15, 2005, BBC World broadcast a remarkable story (carried in the U.S. by PBS outlets) illustrating how fighting the terrorists in Iraq is making both America and Europe safer.  They reported, â Å“Police in Spain say they've arrested sixteen suspected Islamic militants in raids across the country.  Eleven of them are said to be linked to Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.â ?

As BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner (who was crippled a year ago incidentally by gunmen in Saudi Arabia) narrates:

    Under cover of darkness, Spanish police move into position.  In five different locations around the country, more than 500 officers broke into the suspected hideouts of Islamist militants.  Sixteen men of North African origin were arrested, in what's said to be one of Europe's biggest ever counter-terrorist operations.  Spain's Interior Minister spoke today of jihad and would-be suicide bombers, but their targets, he said, were not in Europe, they're in Iraq.  Investigators believe they have uncovered an international network of extremists, financed and supported by robbery, drug dealing, and false documents.  They say most of those arrested in Spain are linked to a cell of Islamist recruiters in Syria dedicated to sending volunteers into Iraq to fight the US-led Coalition.  Five of those arrested are accused of links to last year's Madrid bombings.  The remainder are accused of connections to Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, the Al Qaeda operative who's been driving the insurgency in Iraq.

A BBC interviewee, Jeremy Binnie of Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, put it thusly:

  The war in Iraq has minimized the threat to Europe because everyone who's Jihad-inclined wants to go fight over there.  So even though some of these... the guys suspected of involvement in the train bombings have reportedly gone over to lodge themselves in Iraq.  So there are these radicals sort of coming out of Europe and actually going to a different theater altogether.

Gardner concludes his report, noting:  â Å“Spain has seen terror-related arrests like these before, but despite early claims by the authorities, insufficient evidence has often seen them result in embarrassing acquittals.â ?

As one might expect from the BBC, the written reportat their web site concerning this incident has been sanitized of all such stuff as â Å“The war in Iraq has minimized the threat to Europe.â ?  However, the report does include some other very interesting tidbits, to wit:

    Twenty-four men charged with terror offences recently appeared in court, three of them accused of involvement in planning the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US [!].  The BBC's Katya Adler says interior ministry sources say one Madrid train bombing suspect who escaped police is believed to have carried out a suicide attack in Iraq last month.

Thus, the importance of the war in Iraq for keeping terrorists at bay from the centers of civilization.  The BBC broadcast piece shows how the â Å“flypaper strategyâ ? for attracting terrorists to Iraq is working.  Instead of subverting European countries or attacking America, potentially at the cost of thousands of civilian casualties as we've seen before, jihadists are flocking to Iraq, where our military can kill them in detail.

It's also worth observing how the suicide bombers we hear about every day in the news from Iraq are actually arriving from abroad.  From the reports I've seen, essentially none of the fanatics willing to blow themselves up taking many Iraqis along with them are Iraqis themselves.  So much for the idea that it's primarily the Iraqis who hate Americans and the Coalition and want us out; rather it's radical Islamofascist foreigners from around the world who are desperate to prevent Iraqis from taking destiny in their own hands to establish a modern, decent democratic society in the heart of the Muslim world.

http://impearls.blogspot.com/2005_06_19_impearls_archive.html#111945985253374887

 

[a_majoor]

What is old is new again (as always). This book tell the tale of how America fought a "War on Terror" some 205 years ago with a combination of diplomacy, militrary action, "covert" action and general wheeling and dealing.

Gangway! for Real History
Richard Zacks gets it right.

When you get finished reading the Radoshes' Red Star Over Hollywood, grab a copy of Richard Zacks's rollicking account of the event that put "the shores of Tripoli" in the Marine Hymn. The two have a lot in common, somewhat surprisingly. Both meet my standard for historical writing, which comes from Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon. After telling Humphrey Bogart the story of the bird, Greenstreet folds his hands over his belly and says â ” this is from the fading memory of an aging scholar, remember â ” "and that, Mr. Spade, is the stuff history is made of. Real history. Not that junk H. G. Wells writes about."

But here I'm interested in the Zacks book.

The Pirate Coast is the truly cinematic story of the American response to the trafficking of American and European slaves by the Bey, or Pasha, or Bashaw (the Arabs don't pronounce the letter "P" so "Pasha" became "Bashaw") of Tripoli in the early 19th century. Even those who fancy themselves well educated in such matters will, I fear, be astonished at how much has been Hollywoodized and even falsified in the popular press and the children's texts. The real tale is at once more entertaining, more believable, and far more instructive than the mythology most of us have been fed. Just for starters, you will no doubt be surprised to learn that the first Marines â ” a mere eight of them â ” to see foreign combat did not actually make it to "the shores of Tripoli," but fought their way across the Libyan desert to a less celebrated location, and then were forced to leave the matter in the hands of our diplomats.

Yes, they performed admirably. Yes, they left their mark on history. But no, it was not a particularly glorious adventure. You wouldn't cast John Wayne in this movie. Sidney Greenstreet, on the other hand, has a target-rich environment.

Which is to say that Zacks gets it right.

For one thing, Zacks has a refreshing way of putting events into their proper context. So, at the very beginning, he talks about slavery, since the whole thing started in 1798 when Arab pirates raided an Italian island and carted off 950 people â ” all but 248 were women and children, who fetched higher prices than the older men â ” to Tripoli. And Zacks gives us the big picture:

    On the northern coast of Africa circa 1800, blacks AND whites could still be sold into slavery. Men were usually peddled near naked, or in dangly shirts, in an outdoor auction; women could be inspected privately in stalls nearby. Unlike slave auctions in the southern United States, male buyers here openly acknowledged lustful desires for their human purchases; matrons inspected the women, and virgins were sold at a steep premium...

And Zacks, perhaps unaware of the current stigma on pointing out unfortunate elements of Islam, reminds us that "Sura 47 of the Koran allowed these Muslim attackers to enslave and ransom any of these captives."

Having set the stage, Zacks presents us with the ensuing saga in enthusiastic detail, from a series of bumbling and cowardly American sea captains stumbling into captivity in Tripoli, to the emergence of the story's leading man, William Eaton, a crazy Massachusetts military man who sought to recover his honor (he'd been court-martialed) and his fortune (he'd ruined himself by ransoming some of those slaves from Italy) by embarking on a covert operation to produce regime change in north Africa.

To be cinematically attractive, this kind of story needs several great minor characters, and The Pirate Coast has lots of them. To begin with, there's President Jefferson, who comes off as a cynical politico who grudgingly lets Eaton sail off with a mealy-mouthed letter of commission that would provide Jefferson with plausible deniability if the thing went bad, and who cheerfully pursued other options along parallel tracks. Chief among these was the negotiating track, conducted by another of the tale's terrific minor characters, our Consul in Malta. I love this:

    While Jefferson's secret agent, Eaton, starved in the desert, Jefferson's diplomat Tobias Lear lounged in the perfumed gardens of Malta and decided that the time was ripe to reopen peace negotiations with Tripoli. Lear â ” eager to settle the peace himself â ” chose to ignore Eaton's covert mission...

It is so today, isn't it? The warriors are out there risking all on behalf of our national honor, while the realists are busily selling out in order to make a deal (and Lear, unlike some of his more modern heirs, didn't wait until retirement to start making private business deals with north African rulers). The president, as so often happens, supports them all. It's a great lesson in real geopolitics: Most everything you can imagine is gong on all the time, and neat simplifications rarely account for the richness of human activity.

Zacks does not spare Jefferson, quoting from a memorandum of Senator Plumer: "The President was in an undress â ” Blue coat, red vest, cloth coloured small cloths â ” white hose, ragged slippers with his toes out â ” clean linen (!) â ” but hair disheveled." To which Zacks adds, a bit over the top, "Jefferson's rebellion from British formality was reaching new extremes." It does seem to have established an American tradition which, for example, Lyndon Baines Johnson vigorously continued.

In the end, Eaton succeeded in his mission by making it possible for Lear to cut his deal, and then we abandoned our Arab allies, thereby establishing yet another tradition, most recently incarnated in our Kurd "policy" of betraying them to their murderous neighbors at least once a decade. And Eaton achieved brief celebrity in another singularly contemporary way â ” his operation was blown out of all proportion by a politically motivated press â ” only to have the air let out of his balloon by Jefferson once the media feeding frenzy died down.

It all ended with suitable disgrace for most of the characters, major and minor. Eaton was disgraced and his name vanished from most history books. Lear returned to America a wealthy man â ” thanks to his Arab business deals â ” got a reward of sorts from Jefferson (chief accountant of the War Department), and eventually committed suicide for no apparent reason. Eaton's Arab allies ended badly, and his main enemy, the Bashaw, ruled successfully for nearly three more decades, during which he shook down European and American leaders for a vast cornucopia of presents. Finally, having bankrupted the kingdom, he was overthrown by an ambitious son and driven into a dark corner of his palace "half-naked in rags."

America's honor was not rescued until the end of the War of 1812, when Steven Decatur Jr. captured an Algerian flagship, forced the local regime to promise an end to taking American slaves, and then went to Tripoli where he collected a tribute from the Bashaw and liberated ten Christian slaves. As Zacks tells us in his admirable book's penultimate paragraph, "ultimately, a few years after Jefferson's death, it was military coercion and not diplomatic finesse that ended the three-century-long reign of terror of the Barbary pirates."

Somebody might mention that to Jack Straw the next time he implores us to be patient as he appeases the ayatollahs in Tehran.

Or we can wait for the movie.

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/ledeen200506270746.asp

 

[a_majoor]

In this issue of Parameters http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/05summer/contents.htm, there is a look at the evolution of "containment" policy against the former USSR; and the comparison with the current GWOT.

Our Cold War containment policy wasn't easily arrived at, and went through several permutations - some good, some bad - through 40-plus years. We're still in the early stages of this new war - and we'll need time for a good policy to cohere. (NOTE: When I say "early stages," I mean that this Terror War is likely to last as long, if not longer, than the Cold War. If the Cold War began in 1948 and the Terror War began in 2001, then today we're only up to the equivalent of 1951. By that measure, we're doing much better at this early stage than we were doing back then.)

 

[McG]

War on terror strategists should leaf through U.S. Cold War doctrine
Battlefield victories won't defeat al-Qaeda unless its ideology is contained
IAN BREMMER
International Herald Tribune
(Printed: Edmonton Journal, 26 Mar 05)
NEW YORK

George Kennan, a giant of U.S. foreign policy who died on March 17, will be remembered as the architect of the Cold War doctrine of containment. But Kennan was more than an insightful analyst of the logic behind Soviet expansionism.  He was a big-picture strategist who understood that the Cold War could only be won with a variety of tools, weapons and ideas.

Like the Cold War, the war on terror can't be won by military means alone. President George W. Bush got it wrong when, in a speech at West Point in June 2004, he rejected â Å“Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containmentâ ? for the war on terror and argued instead that, to defeat terrorism, all that was needed was to â Å“take the battle to the enemy.â ?

In 1947, Kennan exhorted the United States and its allies to engage in â Å“a long- term, patient, but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.â ? The goal of the Cold War was not to defeat the Soviet Army, but to contain Communist expansionism. Its means, while partly military, were primarily political, economic and cultural.

U.S. policymakers saw the wisdom in Kennan's counsel and patiently built states capable of resisting and rejecting Communism. Kennan's strategy was not simply to eliminate the Soviet â Å“supplyâ ? of Communism, but to undermine â Å“demandâ ? for it all over the world.  The application of that formula to the war on terror is vitally important.

The war on terror requires that non-military efforts take the upper hand in U.S. foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Middle East, and that the United States maintain a long-standing coalition of allies committed to a common goal. America survived the Cold War because it did not try to go it alone. The Cold War was won because the United States helped spark a European economic recovery and remained committed to promoting effective governance in Europe, if not, alas, elsewhere. The war on terror will require a similar commitment to open governance, particularly in the Middle East. 

Finally, the Cold War was won because the United States and its allies were able to offer the peoples of the Soviet bloc an attractive ideological, political and cultural alternative to Communism.  Here, too, winning the war on terror re quires that Washington work to reduce the appeal of militant Islam by demonstrating that the West can provide better solutions to pressing issues â ” from economic development to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To win the war on terror, the United States must promote the transformation of failed societies into stable, functioning states.

The Bush administration has not completely ignored demand-side issues. It has increased foreign-aid budgets and established the Millennium Challenge Account, which ties economic aid to political and economic reform.  These measures are welcome, but when the means to achieve them are compared with the resources devoted to defeating the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, it is clear the administration is still pursuing the war on terror as if it can be won on a battlefield.

It's too early to say that America is losing the war on terror, but signs are not encouraging. The Iraqi elections were a welcome demonstration that Arabs want to choose their own leaders. But nothing has yet occurred in Iraq to suggest that a civil war can be avoided once U.S. troops pull back.  Afghanistan remains precariously balanced between order and chaos.

Devoting U.S. resources and imagination to the construction of states that serve the needs of their citizens must be the long-term complement to the short-term pursuit of military goals.  A U.S. strategic framework that charts a course toward transforming the Middle East of the future into the Eastern Europe of today will be worthy of George Kennan's considerable legacy.

Ian Bremmer is president of the Eurasia Group and a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute

 

[paracowboy]

Devoting...resources and imagination to the construction of states that serve the needs of their citizens must be the long-term complement to the short-term pursuit of military goals.

that's what I been sayin'!

 

[McG]

That is what a lot of people have been saying.

 

[paracowboy]

That is what a lot of people have been saying.

true, but this guy owes me money, 'cause I said it before him. Anybody sees him, tell him I want my money! Or an ice cream sandwich. I'm good either way.

 

[Infanteer]

Something to think about - here is what I said yesterday:

Al Qaeda has stuck to six points on where it feels it is justified calling a defensive Jihad against the West:

1) Support for Israel

2) The Presence of Western troops in dar al-Islam

3) The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan

4) Acquiescence to the persecution of Muslims by states like China (Xinjiang), India (Kashmir), and Russia (Chechnya)

5) Western hand in taking the petroleum resources in the Middle East

6) Support for apostate regimes in the Middle East that do not govern according to the Word of God (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc, etc).

...and, here is what the attackers stated:

â Å“Rejoice, Islamic nation. Rejoice, Arab world. The time has come for vengeance against the Zionist crusader government of Britain in response to the massacres Britain committed in Iraq and Afghanistan,â ? said the statement, translated by The Associated Press in Cairo.

The authenticity of the message could not be immediately confirmed. The Associated Press was unable to access the Web site where it was posted, which was closed quickly after the reports.

â Å“The heroic mujahedeen carried out a blessed attack in London, and now Britain is burning with fear and terror, from north to south, east to west,â ? the statement said.

â Å“We warned the British government repeated. We have carried out our promise and carried out a military attack in Britain after great efforts by the heroic mujahedeen over a long period to ensure its success.â ?

â Å“We continue to warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all crusader governments that they will receive the same punishment if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan,â ? the statement went on.

There you have it.  Notice that there is no mention of democracy, freedom of speech, or separation of church and state.

Regardless, this is an attack on us.  Those reasons cited above prove that this easily could have been Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal.

This is a war people - don't look at it as some sort of underground isolated terrorist attacks, this is an offensive attack in our rear area by the enemy aimed at the moral level of warfare.  These are not terrorists, these are insurgents, and the battlefield ranges from Bali, to Kashmir, to Baghdad, to our own streets.

Obviously, after over 3 years of fighting, Al Qaeda has not lost its ability to reach out and strike us.  This is a war, we must do one of two things or these attacks will only continue.  We must seek an understanding - dar al-Ahd - with the specific demands of the Insurgency.  Or the gloves must come off and we must root out and destroy support for the Islamic Insurgency at the physical, mental, and moral planes; no more pussy-footing with "democracy" and whatnot, for we must go as Sherman and Grant did, to destroy any and all ability to fight us.

"War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want." William Tecumseh Sherman

Infanteer

 

[Edward Campbell]

...

Regardless, this is an attack on us.   Those reasons cited above prove that this easily could have been Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal.

This is a war people - don't look at it as some sort of underground isolated terrorist attacks, this is an offensive attack in our rear area by the enemy aimed at the moral level of warfare.   These are not terrorists, these are insurgents, and the battlefield ranges from Bali, to Kashmir, to Baghdad, to our own streets.

Obviously, after over 3 years of fighting, Al Qaeda has not lost its ability to reach out and strike us.   This is a war, we must do one of two things or these attacks will only continue.   We must seek an understanding - dar al-Ahd - with the specific demands of the Insurgency.   Or the gloves must come off and we must root out and destroy support for the Islamic Insurgency at the physical, mental, and moral planes; no more pussy-footing with "democracy" and whatnot, for we must go as Sherman and Grant did, to destroy any and all ability to fight us.

"War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want." William Tecumseh Sherman

Infanteer

Spot on, Infanteer.  Messers Martin, Pettigrew, Graham and Hiller: please take note and repeat after Infanteer, "... this is an attack on us ... This is a war ... these are insurgents ... the battlefield ranges  to our own streets ... we must root out and destroy support for the Islamic Insurgency at the physical, mental, and moral planes."

 

[Dare]

Something to think about - here is what I said yesterday:

...and, here is what the attackers stated:

There you have it.  Notice that there is no mention of democracy, freedom of speech, or separation of church and state.

Regardless, this is an attack on us.  Those reasons cited above prove that this easily could have been Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal.

This is a war people - don't look at it as some sort of underground isolated terrorist attacks, this is an offensive attack in our rear area by the enemy aimed at the moral level of warfare.  These are not terrorists, these are insurgents, and the battlefield ranges from Bali, to Kashmir, to Baghdad, to our own streets.

Obviously, after over 3 years of fighting, Al Qaeda has not lost its ability to reach out and strike us.  This is a war, we must do one of two things or these attacks will only continue.  We must seek an understanding - dar al-Ahd - with the specific demands of the Insurgency.  Or the gloves must come off and we must root out and destroy support for the Islamic Insurgency at the physical, mental, and moral planes; no more *****-footing with "democracy" and whatnot, for we must go as Sherman and Grant did, to destroy any and all ability to fight us.

"War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want." William Tecumseh Sherman

Infanteer

Calling these people "insurgents" militarizes these people. They are not part of a military, nor attacking a military asset. They are *terrorists* plain and simple. They are several orders of magnitude below the legitimacy of an insurgent. Absolutely this is a war, but these people are NOT warriors. They are COWARDS, and SLIME. They are *terrorists*.  An "insurgent" fights against the authority of an establish government, it is not a mass murderer of innocent men, women and children. Maybe even a better term would be "cultist mass murderers".

 

[paracowboy]

Regardless, this is an attack on us.   Those reasons cited above prove that this easily could have been Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal...This is a war people...Obviously, after over 3 years of fighting, Al Qaeda has not lost its ability to reach out and strike us...the gloves must come off and we must root out and destroy support for the Islamic Insurgency at the physical, mental, and moral planes; no more *****-footing with "democracy" and whatnot, for we must go as Sherman and Grant did, to destroy any and all ability to fight us...

I agree, but this is not an 'Insurgency'. These are terrorists. Criminals. Period.

 

[paracowboy]

Calling these people "insurgents" militarizes these people. They are not part of a military, nor attacking a military asset. They are *terrorists* plain and simple. They are several orders of magnitude below the legitimacy of an insurgent. Absolutely this is a war, but these people are NOT warriors. They are COWARDS, and SLIME. They are *terrorists*.   An "insurgent" fights against the authority of an establish government, it is not a mass murderer of innocent men, women and children. Maybe even a better term would be "cultist mass murderers".

spot on. Good grouping. You're zeroed.