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

[a_majoor]

Told you so (read the entire article here):

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/550kmbzd.asp

Saddam's Terror Training Camps
What the documents captured from the former Iraqi regime reveal--and why they should all be made public.
by Stephen F. Hayes
01/16/2006, Volume 011, Issue 17

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.

The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million "exploitable items" captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.

The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.

 

[a_majoor]

Combine this information with Iran's nuclear ambitions, and it is pretty clear that Iran will have to com into play in order for there to be a successful resolution

“Who’s an Iraqi?”
It’s a regional war.

Of all the confusions surrounding the war in Iraq, perhaps none has clouded so many minds as the phony question, "are we fighting domestic insurgents or foreign terrorists?" The people who purport to answer this question with "data," should look again at the demographics of Iraq, Syria, and Iran, and they can start by asking themselves, "who's an Iraqi"?

That question is surprisingly difficult to answer, above all because, during the Iran-Iraq war, millions (I say millions) of Iraqi Shiites took the Iranian side, and went to Iran, where they remained for the better part of twenty years. During that time a large number of them were recruited by Iranian intelligence, folded into the terror network of the Revolutionary Guards and the intelligence ministry, and placed under the command of the Badr Brigade of the SCIRI ("Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) or other radical Shiite groups.

When we liberated Iraq, many of them returned. What are they? Iraqis or Iranians? It's a surprisingly tough question. If, as is often the case, they show up as suicide terrorists or sharpshooters or IED manufacturers or spooks working for "insurgent" or "terrorist" groups, do they count as "foreign fighters" or "Iraqi insurgents"? They have Iraqi DNA, but Iranian ideology, and they are under effective Iranian control. But for the most part, it seems that our official bean counters in the intelligence community have defined them as "insurgents," which enables them to argue that we're basically fighting domestic groups. They can thus downplay the decisive role played by Iran (and, on the other side of Iraq, by Syria).

All this was underscored by a nifty story in the Washington Times two days ago (9 January), written by Sharon Behn: "Iraqis receive training in Iran." It's more of the same, albeit she falls into one of the tempting rhetorical traps set by our "analysts." She writes about young Iraqis being sent to Iran by SCIRI for "political indoctrination and militia training," and later on refers to claims by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (better known as the MEK, the Mujaheddin Khalq) that "Tehran has been training Iraqi and other nationals in intelligence gathering and terrorists operations." If you read carefully, you'll see that the so-called militia training is really terrorism: "They (the Iranians) trained them (the young Iraqis)...to go out on patrol, to get people out of their houses, execute them and leave them on the street..."

Let's stop talking about "militia training," okay? This is terrorist training. And let's stop the bogus "analysis" that turns Iranian-trained terrorists into "domestic insurgents" by punching find-and-replace. They're terrorists working at the behest of Iran. And let's (finally!) stop acting as if Sunnis and Shiites don't cooperate in the killing fields of the Middle East. Zarqawi's a Sunni and he has long been supported by Iran. The surviving bin Ladens are mostly in Iran, as is Zawahiri, Sunnis all.

The basic sermon remains as true as ever: We are playing a sucker's game in Iraq, because we are fighting in a single country even though we are engaged in a regional war. This guarantees we cannot win the broader war. Administration officials have struggled mightily to avoid this hard truth, because they want to be able to declare "victory" in Iraq as soon as possible, and then get out.

But the hard truth remains, as does the unbreakable determination of Iran and Syria to drive us from Iraq. And if they succeed, they will not stop there. The leaders of Iran have told their people to prepare to "rule the world." You may be sure they will not declare victory simply because they have won the battle for Iraq.

— 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/ledeen200601110825.asp

       

 

[McG]

Rumsfeld has epiphany over the 'I' word
The Associated Press
Wednesday, November 30, 2005

More than 2 1/2 years into the Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld has decided the enemy are not insurgents.

"This is a group of people who don't merit the word 'insurgency,' I think," Rumsfeld said Tuesday at a Pentagon news conference. He said the thought had come to him suddenly over the weekend.
"It was an epiphany."

Rumsfeld's comments drew chuckles but had a serious side.

"I think that you can have a legitimate insurgency in a country that has popular support and has a cohesiveness and has a legitimate gripe," he said. "These people don't have a legitimate gripe." Still, he acknowledged that his point may not be supported by the standard definition of "insurgent." He promised to look it up.

Webster's New World College Dictionary defines the term "insurgent" as "rising up against established authority."

Even Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who stood beside Rumsfeld at the news conference, found it impossible to describe the fighting in Iraq without twice using the term "insurgent."

After the word slipped out the first time, Pace looked sheepishly at Rumsfeld and quipped apologetically, "I have to use the word 'insurgent' because I can't think of a better word right now."

Without missing a beat, Rumsfeld replied with a wide grin: "Enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government. How's that?"

 

[a_majoor]

This is a very profound article. It ties many arguments together in identifying the centers of gravity against the Salafist Islamic threat, and also shows how reagonal and external actors are shaping the conflict against us (the West). It really is WW IV.

Quick exerpt:

But there is more than oil at stake in China’s strategic relations with Muslim countries. If 1979 marks the return of Islam in history, it also marks (more significantly than 1949 ever did) the return of China in history. Throughout the 1980s, China experienced phenomenal growth rates and was catching up fast with the West, when the advent of the information revolution widened the gap anew. Since the Chinese leadership cannot go into overdrive without destroying the social fabric (and ultimately its own power base), it can only hope to narrow the gap by slowing down the West. For Western historians, all this has a deja-vu all over again feel. Just as imperial latecomers like Germany and Japan did not hesitate to play the Islamic card for all it was worth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, today China has — to put it mildly — no reason to be a priori hostile to the idea of using jihadism as a weapon of mass disruption against the West.

The congruence between the Islamic 4GW jihad and China’s own Unrestricted Warfare20 doctrine is therefore no surprise. This Sino-Islamic connection has been largely ignored by European elites too busy indulging in anti-American posturing instead. In the EU media, China is invariably portrayed as being all (economic) opportunities and no (political) threats; from the Spanish and French media in particular, one would never guess that China in fact has a rather proactive — and sophisticated — policy in Spain’s and France’s former colonies. As for the Islamic question, EU elites continue to believe that it can best be solved by keeping as much distance as possible between the U.S. approach (Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative) and the EU approach (Euro-Med Partnership).21

The recent referenda on the EU Constitution have proven, if anything, how disconnected EU elites have become, not just from world realities, but from their own constituencies. It should now be clear to all that the intra-European gap between elites and public opinion is greater still (and in fact older) than the transatlantic gap between the U.S. and the EU. For Washington, there has never been a better time to do “European Outreach” and drive home the point that the existence of a “Sino-Islamic Connection” calls for closer transatlantic cooperation and a reassertion of the West. In short, if the Atlantic Alliance did not exist, it would have to be invented.

Read the rest here:

World War IV As Fourth-Generation Warfare
By Tony Corn

http://www.policyreview.org/000/corn.html

 

[a_majoor]

The manipulation of the press by the Jihadis (and the built in bias of some of the American and European press corps) is also a weapon in this battle; against us

THE PRESS IN BAGHDAD: An interesting report from DefenseTech on how fear of the insurgency is affecting reporting:

    The abduction of 28-year-old Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll in Baghdad on Jan. 7 has had a profound effect on the city's Western press corps. More so than ever, unembedded media in Baghdad are fortified in a handful of besieged hotels that are under constant surveillance by insurgent groups. Few Western reporters ever leave these hotels, instead relying on local stringers to gather quotes and research stories. And some reporters are finally throwing in the towel, forever abandoning this relentless and unforgiving city. . . .

    .S. Army Lt. Col. Barry Johnson has some sound theories about the insurgents' media strategies. While stressing that he "can't speak for insurgent groups," Col. Johnson says these strategies "boil down to influencing the media environment ... to get attention away from progress."

    Whether there is much progress in Arab Iraq is certainly debatable, but it's apparent that the increasing inability of media to cover ANYTHING, much less coalition successes, is hurting the war effort. Iraq is a big, complicated problem, and as media flee or hunker down deeper in their hotel fortresses, the Western world's understanding of Iraq can only suffer.

    There is a workable solution, and it's called embedding. No one protects journos as well as the U.S. and British militaries, but many media refuse to embed because they fear losing their objectivity. This is a valid fear, one even U.S. officers acknowledge, but what's better: slightly biased coverage? Or no coverage at all?

As the UPI's Pam Hess noted a while back, the press seems relatively unconcerned about being manipulated by the insurgency, but deeply afraid of anything that might slant its reporting in favor of the U.S. military; this is just another illustration of that phenomenon. But terrorism is, of course, information war disguised as military action, and manipulating the press is what the terrorists are all about. If the press were more resistant to such tactics, the terrorists would be less effective -- and, ironically, the press would be a less appealing target.

 

[ready to go]

I think, for them (Muslims) it is a Holy War. I also think we, as Christians, should defend our prophets, much the same as they have theirs. There is conflicting evidence on who's prophet is right. The Muslims believe they are the Chosen people and so do the Israelites. If Israel exists, Muhammad would be a false prophet. The Bible warns of false prophets as a sign of the End Times.
Iran is a radical Muslim nation secretly building a bomb that will exterminate Isreal. Now factor in the effects of a Saudi Oil crisis and civil war in iraq. Mother nature will indefinitely pose as a threat to everybody, everywhere. This is what I see. I see this war changing the face of the earth forever and life as we know it.

 

[ready to go]

This war is nothing new. It is simply the modernized version of an aberrated conflict that has endured from as far back as history books can recount. This fact alone makes me wonder and scrutinize those history books because, truly, they only tell half of the story: the winner's half. With secret societies lurking amid the shadows and corruption at every level of mainstream society, I question the very foundation of our world.
The fact that we can make a difference inspires me. Knowing that although some things must be done away with and global change is inevitable, we must find something truly worth dying for. Is democracy, high gas prices, lawyers and laptops worth it? Are we fighting for a world that allows us enough freedom to corrupt it? Are we dying to allow the rich-poor gap to expand even further and let vile rich men rape the earth for a few bucks? Personally, I think we need to rethink our whole plan of attack and formulate a solid ground for resolve. Our enemy is preying on this weak resolve. We are fighting for the things that we value dearly, yet have no true, lasting value.
As I said before, this is a holy war. If we do not fight for God and God's will, not our own, we will all die in vain. Our world will crumble to ashes. We must take arms against the false prohpets who defile our salvation. The roots of this disease grow deep and the entire tree must be uprooted and replanted. Let us fight for this. It is God's Will.

 

[Clément Barbeau Vermet]

Well said ready to go... sounds like the ultimate fight against the evil (to me, at least). :evil:
Capitalism might not be perfect, but it is certainly FAR better then radical islamic regimes...

 

[ready to go]

WASHINGTON, April 18 —As diplomats meeting in Moscow failed to reach agreement on how best to raise pressure on Iran over its nuclear program, the American and Iranian presidents, both using tough language, staked out unyielding positions today. In response to a reporter's question, President Bush declined to rule out a nuclear attack to stop Iran from building atomic weapons if diplomacy fails. "All options are on the table," he said. But Mr. Bush added, "We want to solve this issue diplomatically, and we're working hard to do so."

In Tehran, a defiant President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the Iranian military that it had to be "constantly ready," and he warned bluntly that Iran would "cut off the hand of any aggressor," The Associated Press reported.

In Moscow, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said diplomats of the five permanent United Nations Security Council members plus Germany had recognized the "need for a stiff response to Iran's flagrant violations of its international responsibilities," The Associated Press reported.

But he said talks on possible sanctions against Tehran had failed to produce an agreement. Mr. Burns said the United States expected Security Council action if Iran misses an April 28 deadline to stop uranium enrichment.

Neither Mr. Burns nor other American officials would say whether Russia and China had softened their opposition to sanctions.

Tensions over Iran have helped push oil prices to record highs. Crude oil for May delivery rose 90 cents today to settle at $71.35 a barrel, after trading as high as $71.60 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The diplomats meeting in Moscow hoped to narrow their own differences over how best to persuade Iran to halt work on nuclear weapons.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's warning came in a martial setting, at a Tehran parade commemorating Army Day that featured the latest in Iranian weaponry, The A.P. reported. Speaking hours before the Moscow meeting, he told the military that it must be prepared to defend Iran.

"Today, you are among the world's most powerful armies because you rely on God," Mr. Ahmadinejad declared.

"The land of Iran has created a powerful army that can powerfully defend the political borders and the integrity of the Iranian nation and cut off the hand of any aggressor and place the sign of disgrace on their forehead."

But he sought to underline that Iran bore no aggressive intentions unless attacked. "The power of our army will be no threat to any country," he said. "It is humble toward friends and a shooting star toward enemies."

The United States and Britain have said that if Iran continues uranium-enrichment activities past an April 28 deadline set by the Security Council, they will press for a resolution making the demand compulsory.

Russia and China, both with trade and strategic ties to Iran, have insisted that diplomacy will require more time. A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mikhail Kamynin, said earlier that "neither sanctions nor the use of force will lead to the solution of the problem," the Itar-Tass news agency reported. But Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called on Iran to halt uranium enrichment.

Mr. Bush, in brief comments made after announcing White House staffing changes, said that he would urge President Hu Jintao of China to increase Beijing's pressure on Iran when Mr. Hu visits the White House on Thursday.

The top Chinese nonproliferation official, Cui Tiankai, visited Tehran over the weekend to urge Iranian leaders to seek a negotiated solution, officials said.

Mr. Cui spent 90 minutes in Moscow today meeting with Mr. Burns ahead of the meeting there, said Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman.

Mr. McCormack said, before the meeting had ended in Moscow, that diplomats were expected to weigh various ways for the Security Council to increase pressure on Iran, "whether that's sanctions or asset freezes or travel restrictions" on diplomats. He said there was also talk of ways that individual countries could increase the pressure on Iran.

Mr. Bush urged a united effort by countries "who recognize the danger of Iran having a nuclear weapon." The United States has been working closely with Britain, France and Germany on the issue.

The president's comment that "all options are on the table" came after a reporter asked whether, when Mr. Bush used those words previously, he meant to include the possibility of a nuclear strike.

"All options are on the table," Mr. Bush replied plainly, before adding, "We want to solve this issue diplomatically." The phrase has become a commonplace of administration officials since last summer in describing concerns about Iran.

It was used last month by Vice President Dick Cheney, who seemed to hint at military action or even the overthrow of the Tehran government. "We join other nations in sending that regime a clear message," Mr. Cheney said. "We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

He also said that the Security Council would "impose meaningful consequences" if Iran remained in defiance.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's speech was broadcast live on state-run Iranian television, and foreign military attachés attended the parade, during which Iran displayed radar-avoiding missiles and super-fast torpedoes.

Mr. Ahmadinejad, who has issued a series of highly provocative comments since coming to office, jolted outside observers last week by saying that Iran had enriched uranium using 164 centrifuges, a step that could lead either to the development of power generation or the construction of atomic bombs.

Iran also asserted that it is pursuing a far more sophisticated method of making atomic fuel, using a so-called P-2 centrifuge, which could greatly speed its progress to developing a nuclear weapon.

While Iran insists that it has the right to conduct research for civilian energy production, the United States has said that Iran lost world trust by hiding portions of its nuclear program for years.

American officials also point to Mr. Ahmadinejad's public calls for the destruction of Israel.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/18/world/middleeast/18cnd-iran.html?hp&ex=1145419200&en=cb696ef1f091d462&ei=5094&partner=homepage

 

[a_majoor]

Luckily, there are other institutional ways to deal with terrorism besides "kinetic effects"

http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/008476.php

Cartoon Jihad, Meet Cash Flow Jihad
by Joe Katzman at April 18, 2006 06:19 PM

Apparently, Hamas is finding it difficult to get a bank that will deal with them. M. Simon's response:

    "That is interesting. The Islamics have pretty much shut down Western newspapers through the cartoon jihad. We have eliminated their cash flow (in places) through the money jihad. I'd put it down to lack of strategic thinking on the part of the Islamics.

    See also my previous articles on jihadi money flow problems in Follow the Money and Follow the Gold."

Iran is working to step into the breach with $50 million, of course, since Hamas shares its goal of genocide against the Jews. Meanwhile, Hamas is calling for Arab help - truth is, $50 million doesn't go as far as it used to. Especially when you need to pay off your own supporters with jobs, and keep the Fatah people paid on some level so they don't take up arms. Qatar has also pledged $50 million... but the same article notes that despite promises to give the authority $55 million a month, Arab nations have not given any money since the Hamas election victory. apparently, it's due to a combination of their own wariness about Hamas, and US pressure.

The goal of all these efforts is to replace about $1 billion in aid from the West, plus the $55 million per month in taxes whose transfer has been halted by the state they do not recognize (seems fair - a state that doesn't exist can't gve you money). Yet throughout, the banking problem remains. Asking Arabs to give Hamas money for deposit in Persian banks isn't going to generate wild enthusiasm, so it will be fascinating to see how that one resolves.

Keep the tension on - it helps to keep the tension on.

 

[a_majoor]

Victor Davis Hanson offers a wide angle view of how the West is doing in WW IV; there is enough to be cautiously optomistic so long as we have the will to see it through to the finish.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Yjg5M2ExYTI5OTM4N2FkMzZkMDJkNThkZWU2Nzg2OWU=

For Better or Worse?
Is the U.S. better off with the Middle East as it is now than as it was before 2001?

By Victor Davis Hanson

After September 11, there were only seven sovereign countries in the Middle East that posed a real danger to the policies and, in some cases, the security of the United States—Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Ignoring the hysteria about the Sunni Triangle in Iraq, if we look at these states empirically, have they become more or less a threat in the last five years?

The Taliban in Afghanistan was actively harboring bin Laden and al Qaeda. Without their support, the mass murder on September 11 would have been difficult to pull off.

Iran was the chief sponsor of Hezbollah, which had killed more Americans than any other Islamist terror organization and was rumored to be at work on obtaining nuclear weapons.

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s agents were involved in the first World Trade Center bombing. They were also meeting with al Qaeda operatives throughout the 1990s and offering sanctuary both to al Qaeda offshoots in Kurdistan and, later, to veterans from Afghanistan. As the U.S. Senate observed in 2002, this was in addition to the general problems of no-fly zones, oil-for-food, violations of U.N. and 1991-armistice accords, and periodic retaliatory American bombing.

Libya was a de facto belligerent of the United States, provoking past U.S. air strikes on Tripolis. Among other things, it was involved in the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing and had a clandestine WMD program.

Pakistan had violated both U.N. and U.S. non-proliferation protocols. Its intelligence services were infiltrated by radical Islamists who were responsible for killing American diplomatic personnel and supplying the Taliban with support, as well as directly aiding al Qaeda operatives along the border.

Saudi Arabia, whose 15 subjects comprised the majority of the killers on 9/11, was stealthily giving blackmail money to Islamic terrorists to deflect their anti-Royal Family anger toward the United States. The kingdom’s vast financial clout subsidized radical “charities” and madrassas that offered at a global level the religious and ideological underpinnings for radical and violent Islamic extremism.

Syria had long swallowed most of Lebanon, and was a haven for anti-Western terrorists from Hamas to Hezbollah.

Four-and-a-half years after September 11, how has the United States fared in neutralizing these seven threats?

The Taliban is gone. In its place is the unthinkable—a parliamentary democracy that welcomes an open economy and foreign investment. Afghanistan is plagued still by drug-lords and resurgent terrorists, but after a successful war that removed the Taliban, the country hardly resembles the nightmare that existed before September 11.

Iran is closer to the bomb than ever, but there is at least worldwide scrutiny of its machinations, in a manner lacking in the past. Tehran is in a death struggle with the new Iraqi government, trying to undermine the democracy by transplanting its radical Shiite ganglia before a constitutional, diverse Iraqi culture energizes its own restive population that supposedly tires of the theocracy.

The thousands who died yearly under Saddam’s killing apparatus in Iraq have been followed by thousands killed in sectarian strife. Yet Saddam and his Baathist nightmare are gone from Iraq, offering hope where there was none. After three elections, a democratic government has emerged. Despite a terrible cost in American lives and wealth, so far elections have not been derailed, open civil war has not followed from the daily terror, and Americans are looking to reduce, not enlarge, their presence.

Libya is perhaps the strangest development of all. The United States is slowly exploring reestablishing diplomatic relations. Moammar Khadafy is giving up his WMD arsenal. And the country is suddenly open to cell phones, the Internet, satellite television, and is no longer a global financial conduit for international terrorism.

Pakistan is still run by a military dictator. But as a result of American bullying and financial enticement, it is slowly weeding out al Qaeda sympathizers from its government, which on rare occasions attacks terrorists residing in its borderlands. Indeed, al Qaeda seems to hate the present Pakistani government as much as it does the United States.

Saudi Arabia has gained enormous leverage as oil skyrocketed from $30 to over $70 a barrel. Yet under American pressure it has cracked down on al Qaeda terrorists and has cleaned up (somewhat) its overseas financial offices—perhaps evidenced by a wave of reactive terrorist attacks against the Riyadh government. American efforts to urge liberalization have met a tepid response—given Saudi reliance on the oil card, and its sophistic argument that for the present an autocratic monarchy is the only alternative to a terrorist-supporting theocracy.

Syria is out of Lebanon by popular pressure. It still supports terrorists against Israel—and now Iraq too—but judging from its rhetoric it must be feeling squeezed by a democratic Turkey, Iraq, and Israel on its borders, and a new tough stance from the United States.

So where does all this leave us? In every case, I think, far messier—but far better—than before September 11. Few argue that Afghanistan or Iraq is worse off than when under the Taliban or Saddam. Nor is Syria in a stronger position. Despite their respective nuclear and petroleum deterrence, both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are ever more sensitive to the dangers of Islamic radicalism. Libya no longer poses the threat of using WMD against its neighbors and is less likely to fund international terror. Iran is the wild card—closer to success in obtaining the bomb, but closer as well to becoming isolated by international pressure and the events that it cannot quite control across the border in Iraq.

Where do we go from here? The United States has its own paradoxes. These positive developments—themselves the result of a radical departure from the old appeasement that either used the cruise missile as an impotent gesture of retaliation or accepted realpolitik as a means of playing odious dictators against each other—have proved as controversial as they are costly.

A new strain of what we might call punitive isolationism is back (“more rubble, less trouble”), in which we should simply unleash bombers when evidence is produced of complicity in attacks against Americans, but under no circumstance put a single soldier on the ground to “help” such people who are “incapable” of liberal civilized society.

The hard Right is candid in its pessimistic dismissal of American idealism and worries that a new muscular Wilsonianism will lose the ascendant Republican majority and betray conservative values.

The Left buys into the neo-isolationism since it means less of an “imperial” footprint abroad and more funds released for entitlements at home—as well as a way of tarring George Bush and regaining Congress.

What is lacking has been a consistently spirited defense, both unapologetic and humble at the same time, of our efforts since September 11.

First, the United States was not cynical in its efforts: no oil was stolen; no hegemony was established; and democrats, not dictators, were promoted. We were appealing directly to the people of the Middle East, not negotiating with Mullah Omar or Saddam Hussein about their futures. No other oil-importing country in the world would have tried to pressure the Saudis to reform at a time of global petroleum shortages—not France, not China, not India.

Second, there were never good choices after September 11. The old appeasement had only emboldened the terrorists, from 1993 in Manhattan to the bombing in Yemen of the U.S.S. Cole. Saddam’s Iraq was unstable. It was only a matter of time before Saddam, energized with fresh petroleum profits, would renew his ambitions, once 12 years of no-fly-zones and controversial, but leaky, embargoes wore the West out. Given the premise that dictators promoted terrorists in an unholy alliance of convenience, and themselves often had oil and access to weapons, there were no good choices, whether we let them be or removed the worst.

Three, by the standard of Grenada, Panama, and the Balkans, our losses were costly. But the Middle East is a struggle of a different sort; it is an existential one in which defeat means more attacks on the United States homeland, while victory in changing the landscape of the region presages an end to the nexus of Islamic terror. In that regard, so far we have been fortunate, four-and-a-half years later, in avoiding the level of costs incurred on the first day of the war that took 3,000 American lives and resulted in a trillion dollars in economic damage.

Four, the strategy was not wholly military or political, much less characterized by preemption or unilateralism. Iraq was not the blueprint for endless military action to come, but the high-stakes gambit that offered real hope of bringing about associated change from Pakistan to Tripolis once Saddam was gone and a constitutional government established in its place.

Five, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. As we approach year five, there has been no subsequent attack on the United States. An entire intellectual industry has emerged to educate the West about radical Islamic fascism, something mostly lacking prior to September 11. Our enemies in al Qaeda are either dead, arrested, in hiding, or losing in Iraq, and the embrace of radical Islam through the Middle East at least now carries the consequence of fear of an unpredictable reaction on the part of the United States.

We are still in a race of sorts, hoping that Afghanistan and Iraq will enter a period of democratic stability and the violence halts before the American public tires of the daily visuals to the point of demanding a premature end to our efforts at birthing democracy. And while we do the unpopular work of trying to restore hope to the Middle East, the aloof Europeans pose as the moderate alternative, the Chinese make ever more trade, the Russians ever more trouble, and the Arab sheikdoms ever more money.

—Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.


National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Yjg5M2ExYTI5OTM4N2FkMzZkMDJkNThkZWU2Nzg2OWU=

 

[54/102 CEF]

Right on the money Dare.

I wonder if these people ever bother to think what having the West knocking off another Islamic government will do for us in the Middle East (besides merely giving us a third theater of war to fight an insurgency in -

Very interesting choice of words - The Soldier level may be plinking targets - and doing it very well it seems - this article http://www.jhuapl.edu/POW/library/Vlahos_Two_Enemies.pdf suggests that the whole post colonial framework of governments in the Mid East is in transition - why many call it an insurgency is that the West may have started it - but they won't control the end state. He makes the point that today's terrorists are tomorrow's government.

Clear case studies exist in friendly states http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=King+David+Hotel+bombing+1948

 

[54/102 CEF]

Some more background on the idea that "insurgency" is the wrong way to look at events we see in the main stream media - its all about their changes their way - which the west may not be welcome because they are not "there" as in from the East.

Terror’s Mask (from the site below)

Written in the winter of 2001–2002. The three questions it asked
then are still relevant today—and they may be the war’s most important questions:
• If the enemy is not “terrorism”—networks of fighters and their support—but rather a
broader insurgency within Islam, how do we take its measure? Is it growing in strength
or declining? If it is growing, despite or even because of our efforts, how and when might
it coalesce into a more effective and organized movement?
• If the struggle across the Muslim World is about change and the future of Islam, how
do we assess the historical dynamic of change? How much longer can it be repressed by
an authoritarian status quo? Is there a change-alternative to radical Islam that has the
leadership strength to stand up to it?
• If the United States, in pursuing the war on terrorism, is also drawn into a struggle
over change, how should this change dynamic influence our overall strategy? If change
cannot be contained, what are the alternative risks of either embracing or denying it?
Can we achieve our goals if, at the same time, we are unable to bring about change that
we can support?
These questions have not yet been openly addressed. They certainly do not publicly
inform U.S. strategy. Can Terror’s Mask still help us understand the challenge that
America faces in this war?

Culture's Mask  (from the Website below)

The war challenges our understanding of the world and how it is changing. Both sides
present a simple picture of two wholly opposite forces, and thus of a straightforward
struggle of good against evil. But current circumstances can also be framed in terms of two
conflicting views:
From the American standpoint: the avowed grand strategy of the current administration
is a vision of asserting secular Western modernity throughout the Muslim—and especially
the Arab—World.
From the Muslim standpoint: a struggle between conflicting visions within the world
of Islam and one that is impacted strongly by the American vision. The urgent question
central to the future of Islam is how to integrate Western modernity without losing the
integrity of Islam itself.
Even though the situation can be described simply, its resolution will be extraordinarily
complex, for we are witnessing nothing less than the creative and violent interaction of two
civilizations. This is truly a “world-historical” story whose unfolding
• Will require decades—or generations—to complete
• Is nearly worldwide in its scope and consequences
• Will be fully realized, paradoxically, through longstanding U.S. involvement
• Is highly dynamic, suggesting surprising changes along the way
the world as we know it.

-------
See by Michael Vlahos

Terror's Mask - Insurgency within Islam  http://jhuapl.edu/POW/library/Terror_Islamsm.pdf

Culture's Mask http://jhuapl.edu/POW/library/culture_mask.pdf

 

[a_majoor]

More evidence that WW IV is spreading under the radar:

http://freewillblog.com/  Friday May 12, 2006

I'm Cancelling My Weekend Trip To Mogadishu

Apparently, this week was the week Somalia went back to hell:

    Hundreds of terrified residents fled a barrage of rockets and mortars in Mogadishu on Friday as Islamic fighters and warlord militias fought pitched battles for control of the Somali capital.

    Inhabitants of the battered city said at least 12 more people had died overnight and into Friday, pushing the death toll from six days of fighting to at least 133.

    Close-quarter street battles spread beyond Mogadishu's northern shanty town of Siisii into the neighbouring district of Yaqshid, in the worst violence in the lawless capital for more than a decade.

    Warlord spokesman Hussein Gutale Rage said the death toll had reached 150 but this could not be immediately verified.

    Clutching a few possessions, many Mogadishu inhabitants fled to safer parts of the city and looters ransacked empty houses, undeterred by a barrage from artillery, mortars and anti-aircraft missiles.

    "Around 600 civilians are trapped in storm drains with bullets and mortars flying over them, they can't get out because heavy fighting is still going on," said Ali Nur, a member of the warlords militia.

    Many seriously wounded civilians, including women and children, lay in the city's Madina hospital with heavy head, chest and limb wounds.

    Hundreds of people have been wounded in the clashes, with shells regularly hitting houses and killing many civilians.

    "We have decided to leave because the fighting looks like it will go on for a long time," Ahmed Jimale said as he fled with his children from Siisii.

    "Those who have cars have driven off with essential goods while the rest are fleeing on foot," Siyad Mohamed, a militia leader linked to the Islamic side, told Reuters by telephone.

    Hundreds of militiamen roared into battle on the backs of "technicals" -- pickup trucks mounted with heavy guns which are their favourite mobile weapon.

    By evening, Mohamed said the fighting had eased after the fighters paused for Muslim Friday prayers, but he expected it to be a short break.

    Analysts view the fighting in the failed Horn of Africa state as a proxy battle between al Qaeda and Washington, which is widely believed to be funding the warlords.

Foreign fighters have allegedly begun streaming into the country in recent months to help the Sharia courts impose Islamist laws. A leading Sheikh has promised that his followers will destroy any attempt at secular government, previously warning that "the fighting will continue until the evil side surrenders", a claim tantamount to announcing that beatings will continue until morale improves. The warlords, who have effectively been the Somalian government for years and recently began cooperating to create a makeshift government claim that the goons of the Sharia courts have been going about murdering moderate Islamic scholars, former military leaders, and secular intellectuals. Some believe that Washington is now backing the warlords.

 

[The_Falcon]

Found this rather interesting and long albiet 1 year old article from the New Yorker about how the NYPD re-organized itself (in particular its intelligence division) after 9/11.  Found it while searching for info about NYPD "HERCULES" teams (look it up)

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050725fa_fact2

THE TERRORISM BEAT
by WILLIAM FINNEGAN
How is the N.Y.P.D. defending the city?
Issue of 2005-07-25
Posted 2005-07-18



They meet every morning: Raymond W. Kelly, New York City’s Police Commissioner; David Cohen, the Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence; and Michael Sheehan, the Deputy Commissioner for Counter Terrorism. At these sessions, held at One Police Plaza, in a room known as the executive command center, Kelly is briefed on overnight developments related to terrorism. One morning, I was allowed to sit in.

“Suicide bombing in Pakistan,” Cohen said. “Details.” He slid a sheet of paper to Kelly. “I put Hercules out on three Shiite mosques for the day.”

Hercules is a set of police antiterror teams. The team members carry heavy weapons, and they turn up without warning at sites all over the city, for reasons never shared with the public.

“New al-Zawahiri video, went up last night on Al Jazeera. Mentions the U.S.”

Kelly nodded, studying the report on the mosque deployments.

“Morty’s back from Moscow,” Cohen went on. “His report’s worth your browsing.”

Morty is Mordecai Dzikansky, a New York City homicide detective, currently stationed near Tel Aviv. (The N.Y.P.D. also has officers based, these strange days, in Singapore, Britain, Canada, and France.) He went to Russia to learn what he could from the school massacre at Beslan, in September, 2004. Dzikansky told me, when we met, that he’d been on the scene of thirteen suicide bombings in Israel, and that he learns something every time. Dzikansky is fast. He was in Istanbul within hours of the bombings of the city’s synagogues in November of 2003. Four other New York City detectives were on a 9 a.m. flight to London after the morning rush-hour blasts there earlier this month.

Cohen said, “On Chechnya, Commissioner, we got this from Boston.” He handed Kelly a document, saying something I couldn’t decipher about Russian investors. (The ground rules of my presence precluded questions.)

News broadcasts from stations around the globe, including Al Jazeera, were playing silently on monitors in the room, along with live videocasts of traffic on New York’s streets and highways. A big precinct map of the city hung on the wall next to an illuminated map of the world. The executive command center contains one long table, with a bank of serious-looking telephones—secure lines, satellite phones—built into it.

Kelly brought up Semtex, a Czech plastic explosive known as “the poor man’s C-4.” He wanted to know whether it was ever used in construction.

“It’s military grade,” Sheehan said evenly. Sheehan, who is fifty, sharp-featured, and wiry, spent twenty years in the Army, mainly in Special Forces; he later served as the State Department’s Ambassador-at-Large for Counter Terrorism in the Clinton Administration. Kelly, who is sixty-three, was a marine and, even in a dark, double-breasted suit, still carries himself like a soldier on active duty. Presumably, both men know something about explosives.

“Let’s add it to Nexus,” Kelly told Cohen, who made a note.

Nexus is another police antiterror program, run by the intelligence division. Nexus keeps tabs on terror-sensitive businesses and merchandise, among other things.

An aide called Kelly out of the room. Sheehan and Cohen relaxed perceptibly. They discussed a recent bombing in a Moscow subway station. “She knew she was a suicide bomb?” Sheehan asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Cohen, who is sixty-three, said. “She was going the route. Cops spooked her.”

Subways and their vulnerabilities have been an abiding preoccupation with these men since long before the bombing of the London Underground. Some of their other major worries include, in no particular order, trucks, planes, helicopters, ferries, vans, tunnels, bridges, underground garages, high-rise buildings, the war in Iraq, the war in Chechnya, Al Qaeda, Indonesia, the Philippines, North Africa, East Africa, anthrax, nerve gas, ammonium nitrate, chemical plants, nuclear reactors, shipping containers, railroads, all large gatherings in New York City, and propane. “Worry,” I’ve noticed, is the hardest-working word in their collective vocabulary. “Another thing we need to worry about . . .” “My biggest worry is . . .” “Should we be worried about X?” “Hell, yes.”

Cohen, especially, has the pensive cast of a professional worrier. He spent thirty-five years in the C.I.A., rising to become director of operations. Kelly hired him in 2002 to revamp the Police Department’s intelligence division. There is no other program in the country even slightly like it now.

Kelly came back in. The briefing turned to local matters. “I.D. fraud in Queens,” Cohen said. (Document fraud is permanently high on the antiterror worry list.) “Two hundred arrests so far. I think there are another two hundred to be made. We flipped some people, but it’s very labor intensive. My advice: give them some more room on this. They’re all felony arrests.”

They moved on. Sheehan said, “Our four guys are back from Sweden. They found downloaded postcard photos of the Brooklyn Bridge.” At the mention of the Brooklyn Bridge, all jaws tightened.

“Anything back on al-Hindi?” Kelly asked Sheehan.

Abu Issa al-Hindi is an Al Qaeda operative, currently in British custody. Al-Hindi and his team were discovered, through a computer seized last summer in Pakistan, to have conducted extremely thorough surveillance on two large Manhattan buildings, including the Stock Exchange, and sites in Washington, D.C., and New Jersey. Because the surveillance seemed to date from before September, 2001, the press soon lost interest in the story. The N.Y.P.D. has not lost interest.

Sheehan said, “We’ve got a detective working it every day. Everything they touched here in New York, everybody they talked to. But they were very tightly packed, very discreet, like Mohamed Atta”—the September 11th hijacker.

“Did you check out the building I told you about?”

“Yeah.”

On a notepad, Sheehan started sketching what seemed to be a warehouse in Brooklyn. He and Kelly studied the drawing, filling in details, working out surveillance angles.

Kelly asked, “Hey, did you see what they did out front of Le Cirque? Two big brick boulders.”

“Le Cirque’s a little above my pay grade,” Sheehan said. “But I don’t think that’s authorized. I’ll drive by.”

“Listen,” Kelly said. “Tomorrow, remind them that it may be bigger than a shoebox.”

“Yeah, yeah, I will.”

Kelly was referring to a big training drill in the harbor that was to take place the next day. The police, along with the Fire Department and other agencies, would simulate a jet crash in the water off the end of a runway at LaGuardia, with the cause of the crash unknown.

Cohen mentioned a request from the C.I.A. His old employer wanted to borrow some N.Y.P.D. cyberintelligence specialists to help its people learn how to navigate jihadist chat rooms.

“Wait,” Kelly said, raising his hand. “My son.” He pointed to a monitor, where Greg Kelly, a correspondent for Fox News, was doing a standup. Kelly flicked on the sound. It was the Zawahiri video story. On the scroll across the bottom of the screen, the national terror-threat level appeared: yellow, “elevated.” Kelly flicked off the sound.

“O.K.,” he said. “C.I.A. wants what?”



Under Ray Kelly’s command, the New York City Police Department has been profoundly reorganized since the terror attacks of 2001. Before the attacks, there were fewer than two dozen officers working the terrorism beat full time. Today, there are about a thousand. In some key areas, such as languages that are critical to counterterror work, the N.Y.P.D., drawing on a city of immigrants, has deeper resources than the federal agencies traditionally responsible for fighting international terrorism. Beyond the officers (and civilian analysts) working on terrorism exclusively, the department, which employs nearly fifty thousand people, has been comprehensively persuaded—through intensive new training, new equipment, new protocols—to think of counterterrorism as a fundamental part of what cops still call the Job.

The rationale for the N.Y.P.D.’s transformation after September 11th had two distinct facets. On the one hand, expanding its mission to include terrorism prevention made obvious sense. On the other, there was a strong feeling that federal agencies had let down New York City, and that the city should no longer count on the Feds for its protection. Some of Kelly’s initiatives were incursions into territory normally occupied by the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. And yet few objections were raised. It was as if the Feds, reeling from September 11th, silently acknowledged New York’s right to take extraordinary defensive measures. (Or, as one senior police official said to me, “Do you think anybody in Washington has the balls to tell Ray Kelly he can’t do something he decides to do?”)

Within the counterterrorism world, the department’s transformation is highly regarded. “The N.Y.P.D. is really cutting-edge,” Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser at the rand corporation and a respected authority on terrorism, told me. “They’re developing best practices here that should be emulated across the country. The Feds could learn from them.” The federal government must, of course, play the leading role in stopping international terrorism at the borders. But, Jenkins said, “As this thing metastasizes, cops are it. We’re going to win this at the local level.”

This is Kelly’s second tour as Commissioner; his first was in the early nineties, under David Dinkins. In his first week back, in January, 2002, Kelly announced the creation of a counter-terrorism bureau—the first new bureau at the N.Y.P.D. in more than thirty years. He started a talent search that took him far outside traditional police-recruitment channels. Kelly wanted people with military, intelligence, and diplomatic backgrounds, with deep knowledge of international terrorist organizations—people like Cohen and Sheehan.

Kelly has been sharply critical of the Bush Administration’s failure since September 11th to help New York protect itself. When I saw him at his office, where he sits at the desk that Theodore Roosevelt used when he was Commissioner, I asked him if the Administration had begun to do more. “We’ve seen some improvement,” he said. “But it’s not nearly what it should be, in my judgment. We’re still defending the city pretty much on our dime.” He glanced out the window at downtown Manhattan. “We’re defending the nation here,” he said. “These are national assets.”

Communication, at least, is better than it was. Kelly talked about a brief but terrible scare, in October, 2001, when the White House was informed by the C.I.A. that a ten-kiloton nuclear weapon was being smuggled into New York City. The C.I.A.’s source for the story was eventually discredited. But what seemed to stick in Kelly’s mind about the episode, which electrified the White House for several weeks, was that Rudolph Giuliani, who was then the mayor, was not told of the threat. “That would never happen now,” Kelly said. “Nobody would dare sit on that kind of information today.”

 

[The_Falcon]

continued

Ray Kelly came up the long way. He went from police cadet to Commissioner—the only officer in the history of the N.Y.P.D. to have done so. He was raised on the Upper West Side, the youngest child in a big, working-class Catholic family. His father started out as a milkman and ended up as a clerk at the Internal Revenue Service. Kelly, while working his way through Manhattan College toward a degree in business administration, took a job on the switchboard at Police Headquarters.

“It was the main number, and you had to memorize twelve hundred extensions,” he says. “You just felt, working there, like you were right at the heart of the city.” Kelly enrolled in a police-cadet program for college students. After graduation, he enlisted in the Marines and was sent to Vietnam. Before he left, he married Veronica Clarke, his high-school sweetheart. Their first child, James, was born while Kelly was overseas. (Greg was born two years later.)

Kelly rarely talks about his experience in Vietnam, and when I asked about it he used words like “frightening,” “depressing,” “debilitating.” He passed through Khe Sanh and Hue, but spent most of his time in the jungles and fields of the central highlands, serving, initially, as a forward artillery observer, one of the more dangerous combat posts.

Kelly’s early years as a police officer, in the late sixties, coincided with an epochal increase in violent crime. He became known as a “collar guy”—the type of cop who, given a choice, likes to make arrests, never mind the extra danger, paperwork, and court appearances they entail. Kelly has held twenty-five commands, and when I asked him which he liked most he talked about his days as a plainclothes officer in the old Twenty-third Precinct, in Manhattan, when it ran from East Eighty-sixth Street to East 110th Street. “Following people, jumping in cabs, keeping radios in whiskey bags,” he said. “We arrested a lot of people.”

Kelly went to law school at night, and got a master’s in public administration from the Kennedy School, at Harvard. In 1985, officers in the 106th Precinct, in Queens, were accused of torturing suspects with stun guns. “The department sent Kelly to clean it up,” Joe Calderone, who covered the story for New York Newsday, told me. “I’ll never forget when he arrived at the precinct. A couple of us were there, and here comes this guy down the block. It was, like, uh-oh—here come the Marines. He carried an attaché case, not a hair or anything even slightly out of place. He was just all business. You could tell they’d sent in the A team.”

Kelly is a strange kind of tough guy, though. His sense of urgency, his impatience with the Feds, seem balanced by a certain laconic calm. He has a blunt, nineteenth-century face, complete with crooked smile. (Or, if he’s angry, a perfect downturned circumflex of a mouth.) He wears his hair shorter than Sluggo’s. He is extremely fit, lifting weights five days a week in a regimen that his wife describes as “borderline addictive.” Still, there is no sense of gratuitous threat about him. He’s neither tall nor burly, and he moves precisely, economically. Kelly listens hard and catches jokes early, but he doesn’t have the verbal deftness of, say, a politician. He bites off sentences, or lets them trail toward the obvious point, as if to minimize the drama of what he’s saying. It’s a great affect for crisis management but not for winding up a crowd from a podium. His enthusiasms are wide-ranging: he relaxes by reading history, and by playing the drums.

Kelly became Commissioner in 1992, after Lee Brown was undone by officer corruption scandals and the Crown Heights riots. He improved morale and, more important, brought down the crime rate—finally reversing a long-term trend. But Giuliani was elected mayor the next year and decided to overhaul the police department. He replaced Kelly with William Bratton, who served as Commissioner for a little more than two years before Giuliani pushed him out. Bratton was innovative, flashy, and spectacularly successful at crime reduction. His achievement eclipsed Kelly’s in the public’s memory.

Kelly went on to serve in the Clinton Administration as an under-secretary of the Treasury, responsible for, among other agencies, the Customs Service, the Secret Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. He commanded the multinational police force in Haiti in 1994. In the late nineties, he was Interpol’s vice-president for the Americas. On September 11th, however, he was working, for the first time, in the private sector—as the director of global security at Bear, Stearns.

“I was out of it, out of the game,” he told me. He and Veronica live in Battery Park City, across from Ground Zero. “The World Trade Center was really our community,” he said. “Our bank was there, our drugstore. If you were going to the subway, you’d go through the World Trade Center.” Veronica was out of the city when the towers fell. Kelly was at his office, in midtown. Their building was evacuated, and they weren’t able to return for weeks. When they did, they went up on the roof. Veronica wept quietly. “This totally devastated—gone, you know—this huge hole, and it was still smoking,” Kelly said. He felt maddeningly confined to the sidelines of the city’s struggle to respond. But his chance came, unexpectedly, a few weeks later. Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor and immediately offered Kelly the Commissioner’s job.

“He had a unique combination,” Bloomberg told me. “He knew how to run a police department day in, day out—putting a cop at that corner, with this kind of backup, and that kind of training, and this kind of equipment. But he also had international and Washington experience, which are very different, and both very important. We need Washington for information, for funding. But we also need to have relations with security services and police departments around the world directly, not going through Washington. By luck of the draw, I knew somebody who had all three.”



The office of the department’s Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence, where I spoke with David Cohen, is in an unlikely, distinctly hip corner of southern Manhattan. Roughly a hundred plainclothes cops were busy in the loft-style space outside Cohen’s door, as they are around the clock. Cohen is ruddy-faced, with a piercing Boston accent. He said that he didn’t have time to talk, but he did anyway, and at a rapid pace. “This threat is not going to go away,” he said. “So we can’t relax. If we do, that will produce the seam they’ll go through.”

Before September 11th, the intelligence division was devoted mostly to guarding visiting dignitaries. Cohen estimates that two per cent of its work was counterterrorism. Now that figure is eighty per cent. The division runs Nexus, cyberintelligence, overseas deployments, financial investigations, and all manner of undercover operations. It also still guards dignitaries.

Cohen already knew something about setting up a counterterrorism program. In 1996, he established a special team at the C.I.A., known as “the Bin Laden unit,” that concentrated on Al Qaeda’s finances. Kelly first got to know him in the late nineties, when Cohen was the C.I.A.’s station chief in New York. When he called Cohen for the N.Y.P.D. job, Cohen had already left the agency, and was doing global risk assessment at the insurance company A.I.G. Kelly persuaded him to take a huge pay cut and return to public service.

After a career in federal government, Cohen found that he liked the speed at which things can happen in the N.Y.P.D. The first time he and Kelly talked about stationing officers overseas, Cohen thought it was an exciting idea. At a meeting the following week, he brought it up again. Kelly cut him off, saying, “Didn’t we already decide that?”

“The N.Y.P.D. is on a hair trigger,” Cohen said. “The air gap between information and action is the shortest I’ve ever experienced.” For example, he said, “Israeli border guards catch a guy who says he’s trained to do surveillance for possible assassination operations in North America. That goes to Morty, and we’re on it that day. This is about a week before we learn about it from other agencies.”

Cohen went on, “Manila ferryboat explosion, hundred dead. Reported as industrial accident. Then they picked up a guy who said it was an Abu Sayyaf job.” Abu Sayyaf is an Islamist guerrilla army in the Philippines, and an Al Qaeda ally. “We dispatched someone within the day. Any ferryboat incident anywhere, we want to know about it. It’s not the F.B.I. or the C.I.A. or the Homeland Security Department down in the subway tunnels. It’s the N.Y.P.D.

“We don’t want to learn from what’s happened here,” he said. “We’d rather learn from what’s happened somewhere else. We’re looking at how they did it, the fine-grained stuff—what kind of detonators they used, what vehicles—so that we can take the anatomy of the operation and transpose it onto New York City and figure out what we can do.”

Compared with what he did for the C.I.A., Cohen told me, “the work here is much less abstract. It’s the difference between protecting U.S. national interests and protecting lives. This is concrete. It’s the people, the city you see every day, the place where you live.” Because of his years at the C.I.A., he added, he had security clearance that gave him access to information from the interrogations of prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. N.Y.P.D. officers have also been directly involved in the arrests and interrogations of terror suspects in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Singapore. He didn’t seem especially interested in the debate about how to treat terror detainees, and when I asked about the Patriot Act, which has been criticized by civil-rights groups, he said brusquely, “The Patriot Act helps the F.B.I. do its job. And that’s good for us. I’m too busy to see if the F.B.I. abuses its powers.” His mandate, he said, as set forth by Kelly, is “Do everything we possibly can within the bounds of the law to make sure there is not another terrorist attack on New York City. It ain’t more complicated than that.”

Luck plays a role. “Transit cops on the 7 train caught two guys camcording infrastructure,” Cohen said. “Most of the video was tourist stuff. Two minutes was train track. Two minutes of train track? Turns out these guys worked for Iranian state intelligence. We turned them over to the F.B.I. They were deported ten days later.”

He rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know what we’ve stopped,” he said. “It’s impossible to calculate, and I don’t spend much time thinking about it. I’ve gotta be thinking about the next thing.”

Behind Cohen’s desk stood a bin of large rolled maps of New York’s neighborhoods, with handwritten tags attached: “Significant Concentrations of Pakistanis,” “Significant Concentrations of Palestinians.” A map of Iraq was pinned to the brick wall above the bin.

“Nothing from there yet,” Cohen said. But the many N.Y.P.D. officers who have been to Iraq with the National Guard or with the Reserves are debriefed upon their return. Cohen turned and stared at the map. “I have to assume it’s going to come out bad,” he said.

 

[The_Falcon]

continued part 2

One morning, I met Detective Charles Enright and his partner, Sergeant Joseph Salzone, at the Peninsula hotel, in midtown. Enright and Salzone work for Cohen on Operation Nexus, the program that tracks terror-sensitive businesses. Nexus squads visit about two hundred business concerns a week. Since the program was launched, in 2002, they’ve been to more than twenty thousand. Jimmy Chin, the Peninsula’s regional director of risk management, was meeting with Enright and Salzone. The Nexus officers wore business suits, and had the intense but deferential air of high-end sales reps. Anyone writing a parking ticket would be more intimidating. They rely, essentially, on the public-spiritedness of businesspeople, whom they practically beg to alert them to anything suspicious.

Chin, who is also the chairman of the safety-and-security committee of the Hotel Association of New York City, said, “The N.Y.P.D. is a huge police department that acts like a small one. In other places I go, nobody can imagine the kind of tight relationship we have here. But we’ve really changed our thinking since 9/11. I wouldn’t have given these guys my cell number before. Now they’ve got to be able to reach me 24/7.”

“Most of these major hotels, they have garages, and that’s what we’re actually most worried about,” Salzone said.

I asked what would be of interest to them. “People who don’t want to give the garage the keys. Any vehicle that looks overloaded,” he said.

“Salvage yards—they’re traditionally Mob-related, so they get their guard up when we show up,” Enright said. “But we tell them it’s about terrorism, their guard comes down, they’re ready to help. They know we don’t want to look at their books. Other departments are going to bust their chops on that. We just want to know about any used emergency vehicles they’ve been selling.”

“Ambulances,” Salzone said. “Ambulances can get through checkpoints. In the Middle East, they’ve been filled with explosives. Boom.”

“Pat Wagner manages the Thirty-fourth Street heliport, has a lot of Jet A fuel,” Salzone said. “We talk to her a lot.”

After a Palestinian suicide bomber in Israel disguised himself as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, the Nexus teams visited religious-garb suppliers. When, in early 2003, an alleged plot to poison the London Underground with ricin was reported, Enright and Salzone headed to Manhattan’s diamond district, because acetone, which dealers use to process their stones, is used in the production of ricin. Castor beans are also required. To learn more about those, the Nexus teams visited horticulturalists and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. (David Cohen told me proudly, “It’s been said, ‘Cohen knows where every castor bean in the city is!’ ”)

“Thing you’ve got to remember,” Salzone said. “We got a boss who doesn’t sleep.” He meant Cohen. “That percolates down to us.”

“9/11 is never over,” Enright said.

The officers wrapped up their business with Chin and left the Peninsula. A truck-rental place in Chelsea had a new manager they wanted to meet. She turned out to be a Trinidadian, young and friendly but very busy. She took business cards, murmuring “Terrorist Incident Prevention Unit” as she read, and eying Salzone and Enright. She took a Nexus information sheet, but was obviously eager to get back to work. Enright and Salzone headed for the door. Then the new manager said, “Wait. There was one fellow. A really strange guy.”

“Did he pay cash?”

“Yes.”

Enright and Salzone turned back. And so the manager told them a long story about a secretive, erratic, abusive customer. To me, he sounded extremely suspicious. I was riveted. Enright and Salzone were not. They thanked the manager for her time, and left.

Once we were back on the street, they gently explained to me that the man was just a bad truck-rental customer. Every truck-rental place had them. Yes, this guy had paid cash, but nothing else the manager said tripped any alarms. Then I realized why he had sounded so suspicious to me. Her manner, the sequence, even the rhythm of the conversation—“Wait, there was one fellow”—followed, to the letter, every script of every cop show ever made.

Enright seemed to read my mind. “All these duped-up cop cars they’re using on these TV shows,” he said. He was pointing along the West Side Highway. “ ‘Law & Order’—they shoot right over here. Those cars are all unsecured at night, so we visit them.”



The intelligence division doesn’t gather information only from the street. It has specialists tracking suspicious financial movements and others working the jails and prisons; in unmarked buildings throughout the boroughs, it has officers fluent in the relevant languages poring over the foreign press or surfing the innumerable jihadist Web sites and chat rooms. The N.Y.P.D. employment application form these days asks about knowledge of some sixty languages. The department has had considerably more success in attracting immigrants who can pass its careful background checks than either the F.B.I. or the C.I.A. has had. In a nation that, in 2002, conferred a total of six undergraduate degrees in Arabic, even the Pentagon, not known for its humility, recognizes this rare resource. The Department of Defense recently borrowed seventeen computer-literate Arabic speakers from the N.Y.P.D. to assist its intelligence arm. At one counterterrorism-bureau facility, in a darkened room full of cops wearing headphones and silently watching satellite broadcasts on big flat-screen TVs, I met a tall, gaunt officer, whom I’ll call Mohamed, taking notes on news reports from Pakistan. Mohamed grew up south of Kabul, speaking Dari. He also understands Pashto, Farsi, and Arabic. He joined the N.Y.P.D. in 1994, and was issuing parking tickets when the counterterrorism bureau found him, in 2002.

On another occasion, David Cohen introduced me to some of the N.Y.P.D.’s cyberintelligence specialists: a detective and a sergeant, both born and reared in Egypt, and a detective born and reared in Iran. “When we started, in 2002, we didn’t really know what we were doing,” Reza, the Iranian-born officer, said. “It was trial and error. Viruses beyond belief. But we got the medicine now. We go into the worst chat rooms.”

“We’re always being tested,” Maged, the detective from Egypt, said. “You know you passed the test when suddenly somebody gives you a password to a chat room you didn’t know existed.” He went on, “We’re familiar with the tradition, the background, we speak the slang.”

“Also, we’re cops,” Reza said. “We hear different things than the civilians the F.B.I. hires do. We got investigative backgrounds, looking for bad guys on the street. Sometimes it’s not what they’re saying, it’s what they’re not saying. You see patterns, like news items from two months before that suddenly start recirculating.”

Sometimes, Reza said, “You’ll see an offer of a video-clip download. It might be a beheading, or training materials, or proof that someone actually did something.”

Aly, the Egyptian-born sergeant, shook his head. “This is not Islam,” he said.

The cybercops told me that each of them belonged to more than thirty separate e-mail groups, or chat rooms.

“It can take a long time to work your way up the ladder,” Maged said. “At first, it might be just some guy in Texas talking with some guy from Saudi, anti-government shit. But other people are listening, and if they see you coming back every day, and you seem serious, they might invite you somewhere else.”

“Ninety-seven per cent of the juicy stuff is done P.M.—personal message,” Reza said. “Not in chat rooms. But it takes a lot of time—months, maybe years—to get this kind of trust.”

I asked the cybercops how they communicated with other security services.

“We tell the Commissioner,” Reza said, indicating Cohen. “He tells the C.I.A.”

“Or I call Kelly, depending what it is,” Cohen said. “And he takes our calls.”



Detective Ira Greenberg, the N.Y.P.D.’s man in Scotland Yard, was on the Tube, on his way to work, when the London bombs went off. As soon as he could reach the street, he started phoning in reports to the intelligence division. Kelly was awakened by a call at home. He ordered the entire department’s midnight-to-eight shift to stay on duty through the day, and posted an officer in every subway train during rush hour. Four detectives—two from intel, two from counterterrorism—left for London. The N.Y.P.D.’s response was similar on the day of the Madrid train bombings, last year. Cohen told me, “I got a call”—from Washington—“saying, ‘Don’t send anybody.’ I said, ‘They’re already on the plane.’ ” He went on, “They were the first foreign law enforcement on the scene with access. They were welcomed. They weren’t over there investigating. That’s someone else’s job. We’re just trying to understand, so as to increase protection here.” After learning that the Madrid train bombers parked their van a few blocks from the station, and carried their bombs by hand to the trains, the department ordered that the security perimeter around subway and commuter-train stations in New York be expanded by two blocks. The revelation that a small businessman saw the Madrid terrorists’ preparations but figured that it was just a petty crime in progress and didn’t bother calling the cops was seen as a reason to redouble Nexus, so that no New York shop owner will ever be that blasé.

The London bombings reminded me of something Sheehan had said: “Your greatest fear is that they’re out there below the horizon.” Unlike the Madrid bombers, the young jihadists who killed more than fifty people this month were not, it seems, even on the radar of the local police. British security has disrupted a number of serious plots in recent years, but its intelligence failed utterly this time. As the I.R.A. once darkly observed, after a botched attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher, “We only have to be lucky once; you will have to be lucky always.” Subway systems, moreover, are hugely vulnerable. Cohen’s undercover agents spent more than a year tracking a young Pakistani immigrant named Shahwar Matin Siraj, who, according to the police, enlisted an angry teen-ager from Staten Island named James Elshafay in a plot to bomb the Thirty-fourth Street/Herald Square subway station. Investigators never found a connection between the pair and any organization, but, according to the police, Siraj and Elshafay drew up detailed attack plans. Cohen’s informant was by then wearing a wire and, last August, the men were arrested. “Lone wolves,” Cohen said. “Homegrown, but inspired globally.”

What the N.Y.P.D. learns from London’s tragedy will flow from the investigation now under way. In the subways, more closed-circuit cameras and more—not fewer—station attendants would seem to be indicated. Hasty reactions are not always helpful. On the day of the London blasts, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the Brooklyn Battery and Queens Midtown tunnels, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, disconnected cell-phone service in the tunnels, calling it a counterterror measure. The measure’s logic was unclear. The Post quoted a Port Authority official as saying that the N.Y.P.D. had requested the cutoff. But an N.Y.P.D. spokesman told me, with some frustration, that the department had made no such request. Michael Sheehan, Kelly’s counterterrorism deputy, was closely monitoring events in London—his and Cohen’s officers are embedded in the investigation there—but he had not yet seen anything that would, he told me, “change how I deploy here.” Public fears of a possible follow-up attack rose and fell—“fiends poised to strike again,” the Post opined—but Sheehan seemed calm. “We’re on high alert,” he said. “They’re not going to attack you when you’re on high alert.”

 

[The_Falcon]

continued part 3

“Our backbone is hard-nosed detective work, investigations,” Sheehan told me. And yet there is not much about his job that resembles traditional police work. He worries about infrastructure protection—roadways, financial systems, the water supply. He works on grim, multi-agency protocols for identifying and responding to chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (C.B.R.N.) attacks. He supervises constant, intensive training—his bureau trains city, state, federal, and regional instructors, and also key corporate security divisions. “We train the trainers,” Sheehan says.

Sheehan, like Cohen, has been thinking hard about Al Qaeda for a long time. He was in Somalia in the early nineties, when Al Qaeda trained and supplied local militiamen who attacked American peacekeepers. By the time he retired from Special Forces, as a lieutenant colonel, in 1997—having completed two tours with the National Security Council, at the White House—Sheehan had developed what “The 9/11 Commission Report” describes as an “obsession with terrorism.” He became the State Department’s coördinator for counterterrorism in 1998, but was frustrated by the cautiousness of American efforts to oppose Al Qaeda. Sheehan told the 9/11 Commission that he felt he was regarded as “a one-note Johnny nutcase.”

Richard Clarke, the N.S.C.’s coördinator for counterterrrorism, in his book “Against All Enemies,” describes Sheehan’s fury after one White House meeting, in 2000: “ ‘What’s it going to take, Dick?’ Sheehan demanded. . . . ‘Does Al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?’ ”

Sheehan says that, even when he was at the State Department, he was often in New York. “Most of the real Al Qaeda expertise in this country was always here in New York,” he told me. John O’Neill, of the F.B.I., was the head of the local Joint Terrorism Task Force then. O’Neill was as prescient about Al Qaeda as Sheehan and Clarke were, and at least as frustrated. O’Neill quit the F.B.I. in 2001, became security director of the World Trade Center, and a few weeks later was killed in the terror attacks.

So Sheehan took the counterterrorism job at the N.Y.P.D. with a full appreciation of the federal government’s failings. Kelly knew Sheehan from his stint in Haiti, where Sheehan was the American liaison to the international forces. When Kelly approached him about the New York job, Sheehan was serving as the U.N.’s Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping. “He didn’t have to talk me into it,” Sheehan said. “I wanted to get back into counterterrorism.”

What’s striking about Sheehan is how casually he connects his unusual breadth of experience to his present job. He directs close studies of far-flung terrorist episodes and groups, on the theory that, as he put it, “We have to know what’s going on. When things went to hell in Egypt in 1990, it showed up here.” Among other things, he was referring to the fact that Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the leader of the foiled 1993 “landmarks” bomb plot against major New York buildings and tunnels, came to the United States in 1990, having escaped a brutal crackdown on Islamists.

As closely as Sheehan watches developments in Yemen and the Philippines, most of his work is profoundly local. It is basically civil defense, retooled for the age of terror. His conversation is full of “bomb curtains” (an Israeli invention, made of Kevlar—all vulnerable commercial windows should have them) and “clamshell” road barriers (also known as Delta barriers, a design refined by the N.Y.P.D.) and “standoff” (an area around targets, particularly buildings, not accessible to vehicles).

It was Sheehan who, in a letter to the Port Authority last year, raised the N.Y.P.D.’s concerns about the design of the Freedom Tower, at Ground Zero. The standoff was inadequate, Sheehan said, and there was too much glass near the ground. Kelly backed Sheehan, Mayor Bloomberg backed Kelly, and the plans for the site were eventually redrawn.

Sheehan stared ruefully at the papers on his desk, and pushed away the remains of a takeout lunch. He has a restless, loose-limbed energy; in a dark suit, carelessly worn, with his caustic asides and wide knowledge, he seems more like a professor than like a career soldier, or a top police official. “You’ve got to find a level of intensity you can sustain,” he said quietly. “If we let ourselves get all spun up by every bullshit threat we get from Washington—and not sleep for three nights, then sleep for two days—something real will happen during those two days.”

The threat reports from Washington were incessant, he said. “A lot of stuff originates overseas, probably from some jerkoff teen-ager. We get it from C.I.A., F.B.I., and I’m glad they pass it to us, but the first thing we ask is ‘What’s the source?’ Our hot line, which gets a lot of calls, somebody answers and asks for a name and address. So we get very little b.s.” (The hot-line number is 888-NYC-SAFE. It can also be reached through 311. All the signs in the subways and at bus stops—“If You See Something, Say Something”—point to the hot line.)

Sheehan, as an outsider to local institutions, seems to have a relatively easy time forming unheard-of alliances with other city agencies. He even claims to welcome the N.Y.P.D.’s traditional rivalry with the Fire Department. “They’re both aggressive organizations, and that’s fine,” he said. In April, the Mayor signed a formal order designating the Police Department the lead agency in hazardous-materials incidents, which had previously been handled by the Fire Department with the police in a subordinate role—and the F.D.N.Y., naturally, objected. In other American cities, fire departments still have the command role in hazmat incidents. But New York City is at an exceptionally high risk for a C.B.R.N. attack, and that has caused the city to revise the traditional approach.

Assistant Chief Phil T. Pulaski, a commanding officer in the counterterrorism bureau, gave me an example: “A tanker-truck collision, a spill, it’s an accident anywhere in the country, but not here in New York City. Our intel shows that Al Qaeda’s instructions to its people are ‘Get your hazmat license, get your tanker-truck license, and we will use them as weapons.’ So any tanker spill here is presumed to be criminal in nature, and it’s investigated as such until proved otherwise. Why? Because if the scene is just cleaned up as fast as possible, we may miss the evidence of a terror crime in progress. The driver may get away. Even if he’s killed, we want to go through his pocket litter, find out who he’s meeting. We want to prevent the next incident.”



Much of the counterterrorism bureau’s work is done at a facility in an obscure warehouse district in Coney Island. Like other nodes on the N.Y.P.D.’s antiterror grid, it has a slightly “X-Files” feel. There’s no sign on the building; if you don’t know where to look, you probably won’t find it. Pass through the solidly built, monitored, and remote-controlled door, however, and you’re in a bustling, gleaming, windowless, oddly cosmopolitan world. There are classrooms, meeting rooms, lots of cops (uniformed and plainclothes), a little cafeteria, a library. On one wall is a big framed black-and-white photograph—an aerial shot, taken at night—of the twin towers, looking intensely romantic.

“We collect information on the strategic threat, including from overseas, and analyze it,” Captain Hugh O’Rourke told me. “Then we take it out and put it to work: target hardening.”

We were joined by Lieutenant John Rowland, the director of regional training for the bureau. “We’ve been doing instruction on Islam for the N.Y.P.D.,” Rowland said. “It’s needed. We’ve got a lot of Catholics in this department.” (I had already noted, in a restroom at the facility, a well-thumbed copy of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam.”)

O’Rourke said, “We’re trying to get our analysis influenced with the proper cultural perspective, because we’re a long way from southwest Asia. Some of our officers were born there, though.”

“Pashtun tribesmen, Pakistanis, Egyptians, Farsi-speakers, Filipinos, Chinese—you name it,” Rowland said. “They’ve been tremendously helpful. One guy here just made his hajj.”

The N.Y.P.D.’s contingency planning now includes the devolution of decision-making, in an emergency, from One Police Plaza to eight borough command posts around the city. This system got an unplanned tryout during the big summer power failure in 2003. It passed that test. I visited a facility known as the “shadow command center,” which will replace N.Y.P.D. headquarters if One Police Plaza becomes disabled. It’s in an even more obscure spot than the Coney Island center, and it sees very little telltale traffic in and out. Vast rooms full of desks, phones, and silent monitors stretched around us, inside a huge windowless warehouse. It’s designed to be up and running in an hour.

I went out to Floyd Bennett Field, the old airbase on Jamaica Bay, to watch some N.Y.P.D. training exercises. There were “fast rope” helicopter maneuvers: officers zipped down ropes from choppers hovering thirty or forty feet above the ground; they hit the dirt, rolled, and sprinted to positions, under the beady eyes of trainers with stopwatches. Charles Kammerdener, the commanding officer of the special-operations division, met me in his office. He was white-haired, almost naval-looking. “In the old days, it was basically a perp in a building in a tactical situation,” he said. “ ‘Thank you. Do it over.’ That was then. Nowadays, we train for people who may be military-trained, booby-trapped, automatic-armed, working multiply.”

Sheehan talks about “adding a counterterrorism element to event management.” Kammerdener gave me an example. “The marathon,” he said. “While those runners are warming up and stretching on Staten Island, I have people moving through the crowd doing air monitoring. I have a helicopter up with a video downlink and snipers.”

Outside the old airbase headquarters, there were subway cars parked in the scrub, swarming with guys in huge blue hooded suits—a simulated chemical attack. A mannequin representing a victim was rushed past me to a portable outdoor shower, where it was scrubbed with long-handled brushes while an instructor barked suggestions: “More water!” More blue suits were going through the train cars with monitors.

Dr. Dani-Margot Zavasky, an infectious-disease specialist with an interest, previously only academic, in unconventional weapons, is the medical director of the counterterrorism bureau. “Not only are bioagents hard to detect, they’re hard to put yellow tape around,” she said. “They’re not like other crime scenes.” Recently, she told me, “a number of us have been studying the issue of quarantine—what can be done, legally, in the United States. The N.Y.P.D. cannot order a quarantine, of course, but we can help enforce one. So we must prepare.”

Phil Pulaski, from the counterterrorism bureau, told me that all officers had at least basic training in C.B.R.N. response, and some “have all the equipment—they can enter the hot zone.” He added, “We’ll work with the chief medical examiner, going through the bodies, in case they’re suicide perps.”

John Colgan, a deputy chief in the counterterrorism bureau, said, “We’ve got a seventeen-page protocol on C.B.R.N. / hazmat incidents. Officer Jones may need to know just one page, but he trains on the whole thing, so he knows where he fits in. He’s seen the whole movie, that’s good. But you really gotta know your lines.”

 

[The_Falcon]

last one

Before September 11th, the N.Y.P.D. had a small unit that, on request, reviewed the security arrangements of important businesses and facilities. “That was really just lights and locks,” a counterterrorism officer told me. Now the unit offers much more comprehensive, terror-risk assessments, free of charge. The N.Y.P.D. sends the officers who carry out the assessments to labs around the country for radiological, biological, chemical, and bomb training.

Sheehan and one of his detectives took me through an assessment they had produced for a prominent Manhattan institution. The detective, flipping slowly through a volume of photographs of walls, doors, driveways, fences, chimneys, air vents, and columns, told me, “We look at both the facility and its potential adversaries. This particular institution might be targeted by computer hackers, or animal-rights activists.”

The detective went on, “You see these columns here? No bomb-blast mitigation measures in place. Very easy for a truck to pull up right here, with this whole big structure up above. That’s bad. They’re hardening these columns as we speak.”

Not all businesses are thrilled to receive a detailed, official tally of their “risk exposures,” however. The alterations suggested are often expensive, and not all insurers agree that the liability implications of having such a list would be good for their clients if an attack occurred.

The No. 1 private-sector target in New York—perhaps the No. 1 target, period—is, according to many experts, Wall Street. I went to talk to James Esposito, the New York Stock Exchange’s senior vice-president for security. Esposito is big, imposing, in his sixties. He was the top F.B.I. agent in New Jersey at the time of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. “These guys are just like smugglers,” Esposito said. “They’re always going to be trying to come up with something different. It’s like a bad dream, and it won’t go away.”

“ ‘Groundhog Day,’ ” said his deputy, Sam Cocozza, who is ex-N.Y.P.D.

Wall Street has been closed to traffic at Broadway since the mid-nineties, and Broad Street and other blocks have been closed since September 11th. The result is an eerie, very un-Manhattan stillness. There are cops everywhere you look, including a full N.Y.P.D. Hercules team, with automatic weapons, armored trucks, and a K-9 unit. The cobbled streets are laced with iron fencing, heavy concrete planters, and huge steel bollards, anchored deep in the ground—a fixed defense against truck bombs. There are still plenty of tourists milling around, although the top attraction in the area, the Stock Exchange tour, has been shut down since September 11th. Indeed, it is believed that Issa al-Hindi’s reconnaissance team used the tour to case its target.

“They had counted the chairs in the Big Board room,” Esposito said sourly.

“We had sharpshooters, bomb dogs, drug dogs years ago,” Esposito went on. “But, suddenly, it’s so sophisticated. The N.Y.P.D. has created a body of experts that is just unbelievable. Without frightening the public, they’ve just been quietly going about their business. Our people have trained with the Police Department, the Fire Department, on C.B.R.N. We’re really customers of their expertise.”



I was walking through a crowded shopping district downtown with a senior police official. We were on our way to one of the “undisclosed locations” of the metropolitan antiterror effort. The official said, “Now, guess who the Feds are.” I saw two young white men in dark suits standing stiffly against a wall, failing utterly to blend into the scene.

A former federal prosecutor told me, “New York has never been a sought-after post among F.B.I. agents. That’s partly the cost of living, and partly the ferocious competition with the N.Y.P.D. Detectives are just so much more experienced than young federal agents at interviewing suspects and sources. It’s intimidating. F.B.I. agents parachute in. They don’t know the city. They look like aliens to us, let alone to an immigrant community.”

The N.Y.P.D. works closely with the F.B.I. on counterterrorism, mainly through the local Joint Terrorism Task Force. (The task force worked on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and apprehended the main perpetrators.) Tim Herlocker, the agent in charge of the local branch of the Bureau’s new Office of Intelligence, told me that the N.Y.P.D. had “soldiers to invest in this at a level that we never will have.” The N.Y.P.D., which is nearly twice the size of the F.B.I., “really stepped up,” Herlocker said, after September 11th.

Still, the tensions persist. The F.B.I. reportedly opposed the deployment of Morty Dzikansky to Israel, for example. John Colgan, the deputy chief for counterterrorism, says, “We reach through the F.B.I. to get federal assets. But the Bureau’s got to let us know what it’s doing in our city. You can’t have some guy you don’t know coming into your house to cook hamburgers on your stove. You might blow him away. We’ve got to be kept informed, or there may be trouble.”

Local police departments tend to resent the F.B.I.—if nothing else, for its tendency to condescend to them. Its agents actually have a better working relationship with the N.Y.P.D. than most, partly, no doubt, because the condescension runs both ways. The deep identity crises and public exposures of incompetence that have distracted and consumed the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. since September 11th may, paradoxically, have strengthened New York’s counterterror efforts by allowing it to move into the vacuum and build an aggressive municipal self-defense.

Cohen told me, “We’ve got the Feds working for us now, in a good way; it’s not the usual feeding of raw material to the experts.” It’s doubtful that anyone at the F.B.I. would put it quite the same way. When I mentioned Commissioner Kelly to Pasquale D’Amuro, then the F.B.I.’s lead agent in New York, he grew testy. “I don’t tell Ray Kelly what to do,” he said. “He doesn’t tell me what to do.” (D’Amuro recently left the F.B.I. and joined Giuliani Partners.)

Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, in 2002, there has been one large, inert, misshapen bureaucracy that, for New York, at least, symbolizes the extent of the Bush Administration’s neglect. When Kelly says that New York is having to defend itself “pretty much on our dime,” he is referring, primarily, to the budgeting formula under which homeland-security funds are disbursed. In fiscal year 2004, Wyoming received $37.74 per capita, and North Dakota $30.82, while New York got $5.41. Among the fifty states, New York’s per-capita allotment was forty-eighth. This bizarre formula is, from New York’s point of view, only slowly improving.

The bill for New York City’s antiterror budget, which is roughly two hundred million dollars a year, is footed, for the most part, by the city itself. Bloomberg’s view has been, from the beginning, that Kelly should do whatever he considers necessary, and that a way to pay for it will be found later.

Kelly, in return, has given Bloomberg a rare political gift: crime rates that have continued to fall without an over-reliance on the kind of tactics that alienated minorities during the Giuliani administration. The fact that crime is so low has also made the department’s ferocious new focus on terrorism possible. Kelly has sometimes infuriated the police unions by refusing to defend officers in controversial incidents. However, within the department, his dramatic restructuring of the Job has encountered surprisingly little resistance. He told me that was because police officers identified with the counterterrorism effort: “They see themselves on a mission to protect the city.”



“Salaam alaikum.” Mayor Bloomberg was greeting an auditorium full of Muslim community leaders last fall at One Police Plaza. Ramadan was about to begin, and Bloomberg and Kelly had invited them for an annual pre-holiday conference. The gathering had been blessed by a diminutive imam from Indonesia, who sang a verse from the Koran.

Bloomberg extolled New York as “a city based on religious tolerance,” and deplored bias crimes against Muslims (which have increased many-fold throughout the United States since September 11th). “The N.Y.P.D. is our first line of defense against hate and bias,” he said. He wished his esteemed constituents a good Ramadan. “Ma’assalama.”

Kelly was crisp and specific. He said that he would be increasing patrols around mosques for the holiday, and would put out extra plainclothes officers. “We want recent immigrants in particular to know that the Police Department is not an immigration agency,” he said. He added that he hoped that more Muslims would become police officers, and gave specifics—dates, phone numbers, Web sites—for applying to take the next police exam. He said he had no new threat information to report. “Still, we ask all New Yorkers to look at events through the prism of 9/11. If you see or hear anything suspicious, we urge you to call 311 and ask for the terrorism hot line.” Then he, too, wished the crowd a good Ramadan.

The Mayor left, but Kelly stayed and took questions. Some conferees looked as though they’d just arrived from a Saudi village, others from the Afghan mountains. There were turbans, djellabahs, tall black embroidered caps, red checked kaffiyehs, and Western suits, and many languages were spoken. Kelly listened closely to all questions and speeches, and gave respectful answers.

An African-American chaplain from the Department of Corrections was concerned about the treatment of Muslim women taken into custody. People were unhappy about being made to change their clothes, she said. Kelly said he would check out the protocol.

A Turk in a red kufi wanted to thank the police for twelve years of untroubled Ramadan parking at his mosque. This speech brought general applause.

Later, I told a senior police official about this pre-Ramadan lovefest. “Well, some of those guys in there don’t talk quite so nice about us when they’re back at the mosque,” he said.

One of the men he may have had in mind was Amin Awad, a co-founder and the president of the Al-Farooq mosque, in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. Awad was at the pre-Ramadan conference at One Police Plaza—indeed, he goes every year. Sheikh Rahman preached at Al-Farooq in the early nineteen-nineties, and until 1994, according to the Times, the mosque openly raised money for Osama bin Laden. In 2003, Al-Farooq was implicated in a case in which the Justice Department accused a Yemeni sheikh of funnelling twenty million dollars to Al Qaeda. The Daily News called for the mosque to be shut down. In the end, the sheikh was convicted of providing material support to Hamas, not Al Qaeda, and no mosque officials were charged.

When I spoke with Awad in his tiny, third-floor office at Al-Farooq recently, he was circumspect about the N.Y.P.D. He has been a chaplain at a jail on Rikers Island for fifteen years, and he said that his advice to younger Muslims concerning the police is “Don’t ever take the officer as your enemy.” He also said that AlFarooq’s relations with the local precinct—the Eighty-fourth—were “very sweet.” But then he made the disconcerting observation that he himself was still not sure who the September 11th hijackers were, or even if they were Muslim.

Zein Rimawi, a Palestinian who helps run the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, in Brooklyn, and who was also at the pre-Ramadan conference, is loudly critical of some police operations, including the Herald Square subway bombing plot, which he considers entrapment. But he is far more critical of the F.B.I., which he believes targets for harassment Muslim community leaders who decline to become informants. “We are like the African-Americans used to be. What they used to suffer, we are suffering now,” he told me. He also said, however, that relations between local Muslims and the police vary from precinct to precinct, and that in his precinct, the Sixty-eighth, things could not be better. “We have a problem, we talk with the captain, he’s very kind and gentle.” He laughed. “I’m even going to be a police captain for a couple of hours later this month, just to see how the precinct works.” On the other hand, in Sunset Park, where Rimawi is on the board of an Islamic school, relations with the precinct are not so warm.

Donna Lieberman, of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told me that she sees “lots of room for improvement” in the N.Y.P.D.’s treatment of the city’s Muslims. For example, she said, the department often contradicts itself about not being an immigration agency. Suspects under arrest are routinely asked whether they are citizens, and their answers are sometimes turned over to federal authorities.

I asked Kelly if the N.Y.P.D.’s relations with the city’s Muslim communities today are a challenge comparable to its dealings with the black community in the past. He looked a bit surprised. No, he said. The relationship with black New Yorkers went back, he said, “many, many years.” The Police Department’s relations with Muslims, Kelly said, weren’t even an issue before September 11th. “There was no history of real or perceived abuse,” he said. “We, institutionally, had not much contact with them. After 9/11, we have more.”



Hardening the target: that’s the term of art for the overarching goal of local counterterror work. It can help to know what’s happening thousands of miles away, but a densely layered system of municipal defense is a terrorism deterrent of a special type. It says, basically, Try another town.

There are obvious limits to what local cops can prevent. As Sheehan told a symposium of terrorism experts at One Police Plaza last year, “I don’t know what I can do about somebody bringing a nuclear bomb through the Port of Newark. That’s the federal government’s problem. You can drive yourself crazy thinking about that.” The attack plans for September 11th did not originate or mature locally, and nothing about them would necessarily have appeared on the radar of even today’s extended, hypersensitive, metropolitan terror-detection system. The attacks came, literally, out of the air. Other law-enforcement or national-security agencies might have caught and stopped them, but that was the point—that is exactly why New York has stepped up its defenses.

No counterterrorism program, no amount of homeland-security spending, can eliminate the threat. For politicians, there is a temptation to hype it, to practice the politics of fear. Some, like Bloomberg, have resisted the temptation; the Bush Administration has not. But spreading alarm is one of the aims of terrorism, and fearmongering subverts the counterterrorism effort, which essentially seeks to manage the threat. Cohen, talking to the same symposium as Sheehan, brought the N.Y.P.D.’s position into sharp focus when he said, “New York City sees more than a thousand arrests a day, and we have to watch them all—watch for the one that means something to us.” That is a description of serious counterterrorism work. It is done quietly, incessantly, with no gratuitous public alarms.

Endless vigilance, no victory; success means nothing happens. Such anti-drama is the essence of prevention. Meanwhile, there is an element of theatre to a lot of counterterror work. The American “sleeper cells” that we have heard so much about—but whose existence has yet to be convincingly demonstrated—may prove to be as elusive as Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Believing that jihadist fighters may be inside the United States waiting to strike feels, some days, like a paranoid leap of faith (other days, like after London, it may not). Sleeper cells, or something very like them, have been uncovered in Europe certainly, though there is nothing here comparable to the millions of angry young Muslims living there. The “enemy” here is still in large measure a phantom. It may be necessary to presume he exists, but when will that cease to be true?



The N.Y.P.D.’s Hercules teams are the city’s street-level deterrent. Their deployment can be startling. A Chevrolet Suburban with blacked-out windows pulls up to the curb, doors fly open, and officers in Kevlar combat helmets and body armor, carrying M-4 assault rifles, rush to positions. Pedestrians freeze; some recoil. Motorcycle patrols often accompany the teams, and a bomb-sniffing dog is always there. The site may be a bank or a bus station or a concert hall—or an ordinary block with no self-evident potential target. The team knows why it is there; bystanders are left to guess. I watched a Hercules team in action one afternoon on Broadway, north of Columbus Circle. Some passersby ignored the commotion, many hurried away, but a few stopped to ask the officers what they were doing.

“We’re here for you,” they were told.

“It’s for the Bible college,” a woman said knowingly, pointing at the American Bible Society offices down the block. (Wrong.)

“It’s the Israeli film festival,” an older man said, pointing at a movie house in the other direction. (Right.)

“We’re here to protect you.”

An immaculately dressed sergeant from intelligence who was observing explained the scripted answers: “They don’t want to find themselves in a debate about the intifada or Ariel Sharon.”

Hercules deployments are “asymmetric,” unpredictable—they deliberately follow no pattern. They are self-conscious displays of force, presuming the existence of enemy reconnaissance. “The goal is to create a hostile environment for terrorist operatives in the city,” Detective Abad Nieves, a Hercules officer, told me.

Hercules commanders like to point to Iyman Faris, an Al Qaeda operative with designs on the Brooklyn Bridge. He was here, in 2002. We know what hotel he stayed in. We know what Pakistani restaurant near City Hall he ate in. He admitted, after his capture, in Ohio, in 2003, that he was plotting to destroy the bridge. After months of casing the target, he sent a message to his Al Qaeda handlers that “the weather is too hot,” which investigators took as a reference to intensified police activity around the bridge. Hercules teams, acting on tips, provided much of that activity.

Most New Yorkers are happy to see the Hercules teams, according to the cops I asked. One of them said, “It’s only tourists from the Midwest who don’t like us, because Americans aren’t used to seeing automatic weapons on the street. Foreigners are.”

The people who did not seem intimidated at all, I noticed, were older women. Several of them marched right up to the warrior cops and asked if there was something they should be worried about. But it occurred to me that people who were not happy to see machine guns and military gear on Broadway might not feel comfortable saying so.

I asked Lieutenant Cory Cuneo, one of the Hercules officers posted outside the Israeli film festival, about the worst hostility he had encountered in this role. He said it had come from a woman outside the Winter Garden, across from Ground Zero.

“Why are you out here?” she said.

“There used to be two buildings right over there,” Cuneo told her.

“That was just one event,” she said. “It’s being used to justify all kinds of horrible things.”

“Just one event? Where are you from?”

“New York.”

“No. Originally.”

“New York.”

“No way. Nobody who was born and raised here would ever say what you just said.”

I thought the woman sounded like a New Yorker, all right. But, of course, Cuneo sounded like one, too

 

[a_majoor]

An interesting take on the Victor Davis Hanson argument that the West has the "cultural" ability to defeat its enemies:

http://article.nationalreview.com/

Victory Record
Can we do it again?

An NRO Q&A

This just in: We’re going to win the war on terror. Or so University of Dayton history professor Larry Schweikart says. He is author of the new book, America’s Victories: Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terror and thinks the case is made in American military and political history. Schweikart went through some of it in an interview with National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: So why does the U.S. win wars?

Larry Schweikart: The glib answer is (cue Bill Murray from Stripes), “We’re Americans, dammit!” In fact, there are several characteristics of American fighting forces — some of them unique to us, some common to most Western nations — that make it difficult for us to lose. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, all free individuals in a volunteer force, come from a remarkably typical cross-section of American society, and always have. Whether it was the free men of color, Indians, and Baratarian pirates who fought under Andy Jackson or the special-ops forces riding horses to rain down precision-guided munitions on the Taliban, our military has generally represented our society almost perfectly. “It ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son,” sang Creedence Clearwater Revival, but in fact the modern military has a higher proportion of sons and daughters of our elected officials than from the population as a whole; and zip-code studies have shown that virtually every zip code is represented pretty proportionally, including the infamous 90210. (Note to John Kerry: The Northeast has, except for the Civil War and the Revolution, been notoriously underrepresented in our wars).

Americans win wars because we learn from loss — this is a no brainer, but there have been, and are today, cultures that find shame and dishonor in admitting a mistake, and thus can’t fix it. We win wars because our fighting men and women are the best trained in the world, then we give them unprecedented levels of autonomy, so that, as one American officer put it, a U.S. sergeant has the operational autonomy of most Middle Eastern colonels. Americans are successful in wars because we embrace technology, which itself comes from a society that tolerates failure and the ability to adjust to a bad hypothesis; we are successful because our protesters actually have caused the military, through their constant focus on American casualties, to relentlessly push down the level of casualties we take and push up the levels we inflict on others; and we are successful because above all we subscribe to concepts of sanctity of life that lead us to “leave no man behind.” In fact, I can find no other military in human history that has attempted so many times to rescue its own prisoners of war.

Lopez: Even so, isn’t your declaration that we will win the war on terror ridiculously optimistic? How do you know?

Schweikart: If it was based on mere political punditry, it might be optimistic. I base my views on the historical record. If you ask any historian, “When did we win the war in the Pacific?” the answer would almost always be, “Midway.” After that, Japan couldn’t win — the only issue was the final, often gruesome, death toll. Think of that! That’s years before Iwo Jima or Okinawa, and yet historically the war was over after June 1942. Likewise, if you look at the Filipino Insurrection (1899-1902, followed by the “Moro Wars”) — which mirrors Iraq very closely, the war was over when William McKinley was reelected. It took two more years for Emilio Aguinaldo to admit defeat, but his stated goal of forcing a political solution by “un-electing” McKinley was finished. I think we hit the “tipping point” in Fallujah in November 2004. After that, the terrorists could no longer hold up in any town for long, nor could they organize effectively. Zarqawi’s recent death closely resembles our Pacific model as well when American P-38s ambushed Isoroku Yamamoto and killed him. Historically, of the 11 “insurgencies” and “guerilla wars” of the 20th century (including Vietnam), the government (in this case, that would be us) won eight. However, most of these took between five and eight years to win. That places us right on our timetable, which is to expect the death throes of the terrorists in Iraq in another year or two.

Lopez: Besides possibly thinking you’re delusional for reasons already discussed, someone skimming your book is going to think you’re an unfair partisan. You have a subhead that reads “Why Does the Left Hate America’s Citizen Soldiers?” This is a book for right-wingers, right?

Schweikart: My editors forced me to exercise restraint, as my original subtitle was, “Why the U.S. Wins Wars and the Left Hates It That We Do!” Actually, this is a book for anyone who honestly wants to understand why our military is so damn good. Far from “broken,” as Jack Murtha claims, our military is kicking tail and taking names, and it has done this for 200 years. What I’m struck by, though, Kathryn, is how often in the past — and even now — our enemies have underestimated us. The Mexican generals boldly predicted they’d march into New Orleans in six weeks; Europeans all expected the Spanish to destroy us; Eric Luddendorf brushed off the involvement of the U.S. into World War I as insignificant; and recently the infamous Osama bin Laden letter to the late Zarqawi urging a “Mogadishu Strategy” has proven remarkably consistent and consistently wrong.

Now, how does this tie in with the Left hating America’s citizen soldiers? Well, we have always had antiwar protesters, from Emerson to Bryan, and one effect that their loud voices has had is to fool our enemies into thinking that the majority of Americans are soft and without commitment.

As for today’s Left, I still await any — and I repeat, any — news of a military victory to which they do not attach a “but.” They are, in Laura Ingraham’s words, the “but monkeys.” Every Fallujah dismantling, every successful election, every dead Zarqawi is adjoined to a “but,” to the point that a headline out this weekend from Reuters — supposedly a news agency, mind you, reported the news that the Army’s recruiting was considerably above its goals, followed with a but “Challenges in the Future Remain.” So our news agencies are now reduced to hoping for future events to temper news of current military successes. It’s sad.

Lopez: How did “we” rewrite Custer’s Last Stand in Fallujah?

Schweikart: The latest research on the Custer massacre is fascinating, indicating that rather than a “last stand,” in which all of Custer’s forces were quickly under assault from a huge body of Sioux, the boy general spread his men out rather thinly while he attempted to cut off the escaping women and children. Meanwhile, the Indians slowly infiltrated the perimeters of the remaining troops and, when they had a critical mass, overwhelmed them. At Fallujah, while there was a final massed assault, it was preceded by months of “battlefield shaping” in which our forces, nightly infiltrated Fallujah — often with the assistance of locals, who pointed out the locations of the baddies — and winnowed down their numbers. One sniper had 100 recorded kills alone! When the final attack came, al Qaeda and the Saddamist resistance were a hollow shell, and collapsed accordingly.

Lopez: Name a military mistake we haven’t learn from and how we can.

Schweikart: I would say that despite the fact that we, better than anyone, embrace new technology, we still have a habit of ignoring some cutting-edge weapons. Hiram Maxim was an American, who, due to lack of interest from the War Department, took his famous machine gun to Britain. Thompson’s submachine gun did not catch on for some time, in part due to the doctrinal emphasis on each soldier being a “sharpshooter.” Likewise, more recently, I think we became absorbed with the Soviet-style battle, with its “front” and its “support units,” and therefore when a guerilla war came, lacking any “front line,” our support units paid a high price in lack of training. But this, ultimately, was addressed. The fate of Jessica Lynch’s 507th Maintenance unit was reviewed and studied, and within months, the Army concluded that all personnel, including “support troops,” were combat soldiers first — something the Marines always understood. As a result, casualties among those units has fallen substantially.

Schweikart: Outside of Vietnam, American pols have a pretty good track record of keeping the U.S. military from losing situations?

Schweikart: Yes, I think that’s true. This goes back to “sanctity of life.” Americans see peace as the norm, and don’t want to fight unless absolutely necessary — quite a contrast from some societies in which warfare is an extension of religion or a means to establish honor. However, this can get us into trouble. Ronald Reagan, looking at Vietnam, established the “Reagan Doctrine” that said that the U.S. should not commit troops without a “clear exit strategy” and a high likelihood of winning. Normally, that’s good advice. But as Gandalf noted in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, sometimes you have to fight because it’s the right thing to do, whether or not there is a high likelihood of winning. That was the case after 9/11. We will win, but it would be the right fight even if we were not sure we would.

Lopez: Then why does Iraq look so bad right now?

Schweikart: This is the value of history. If you look at Iraq through a “current events” mode, it doesn’t look great. But imagine where we were after Midway in 1942: The Germans still occupied a large chunk of Russia, and the Red Army had not yet shown it could beat the Nazis in open combat; the Japanese still held more territory than any empire in history, and still had nearly a dozen carriers to our four or five; and there was no indication that the Brits could hold Burma. Indeed, with a few minor twists and turns, we could have lost Midway, the Russians could have lost Kursk, and the Second World War would have developed much, much differently.

Or consider, from the Union’s point of view, where we were in the spring of 1863. The Army of the Potomac had been soundly thrashed at all but a few battles — Antietam a significant exception — and commanders were being changed faster than Sandy Berger could shove documents down his pants. It looked bad. Yet below the surface, the South had lost a higher percentage of men-per-total forces committed than the North in every single battle except Fredricksburg. Lincoln knew that, and that’s why he was so frustrated with both the Radical Republicans and the Copperhead Democrats for trying to undercut him at every turn. Despite some battlefield defeats, the North was winning — yet only Lincoln could see it.

Lopez: How is the American military underestimated?

Schweikart: We are constantly underestimated because our natural tendency is to abhor war. We are not — contrary to the hysterical shrieks of the Cindy Sheehans and the madcap inanities of Michael Moore — a “militaristic” society. It takes a lot to make us “throw down.” What foreign powers don’t understand is that because our military is so representative of society as a whole, because it is not a group of elites who have purchased commissions, or slaves who are forced into service, our armed forces fight with a tenacity that never ceases to surprise our foes. The Germans were stunned after their first battles with us in World War I, battles in which they dealt us severe casualties due to our inadequate training. But the Germans also knew that we would not relent until we achieved victory. This stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of who Americans are, and how our military works. Yamamoto was one of the few enemies who “got it,” but he could not exert much influence over the Japanese warlords who deceived themselves into thinking along the lines of bin Laden: “a little bloodshed and the Americans will withdraw.”

Lopez: I did not know that Art Carney of Honeymooners fame was wounded by shrapnel while invading Normandy. Not to pick on Hollywood — especially given we’re talking draft vs. non-draft days — but it’s a bit of a different scene there in Tinseltown now?

Schweikart: The Hollywood stories in the book are amazing — I learned so much about that heroic generation. Many of those I discuss, of course, became stars after the war, but many were big names before Pearl Harbor and volunteered. Humphrey Bogart, who fought in World War I, attempted to join up even though he was way too old. Henry Fonda, already a star for his role in Of Mice and Men, and later an antiwar voice, nevertheless fought, as did Jimmy Stewart. Clark Gable, technically too old to serve, also joined up but his publicist requested special placement for him, to which General “Hap” Arnold uncategorically said “no.” Gable began as an enlisted man and became a general officer. One of the more ironic stories involved Werner Klemperer, who gained fame as “Col. Klink” on the TV show, Hogan’s Heroes. He was a prison-camp commandant — a policeman of sorts. Klemperer served in the U.S. Army, in Hawaii as . . . an MP!

So why, or when, did it change? I don’t know why, but the change came, as it did with the news media, in the 1960s, and my hunch is it started well before Vietnam. Some of it was self-selecting: As Hollywood got more left, it repelled patriots and engaged in some of its own “blacklisting.” There are abundant stories out there today of conservatives in Hollywood who cannot fly their colors. Moreover, I think there is a malignant elitism associated with the motion-picture industry today that, rather than entertaining, it is “making art” and therefore is engaged in political discourse. So they tend to think that they are not only too good to serve, but are above all that anyway.

Lopez: And writers, too — Ray Bradbury was a military propagandist?

Schweikart: One of the most stunning things I found was that Dr. Seuss, Theodor Geisel, was a war art propagandist. His wartime art is “in your face,” to say the least, featuring one “cartoon” in which Hitler and his fellow Nazis jokes in front of several Jews hanging from trees behind him, or another in which a buck-toothed Japanese Emperor is being attacked by American planes and bombs. Walt Disney, although a little more restrained than Dr. Seuss, produced numerous wartime propaganda films and training films using Donald Duck. His “Victory Through Air Power” unabashedly advocated bombing civilian populations in Germany and Japan until those nations surrendered. Japan was portrayed as a black octopus, ultimately killed by a “sword” of air power. When survival was on the line, it’s interesting how the artists and writers suddenly see the value of an American military.

Lopez: What about training? Are our guys and gals getting enough of it — character training included?

Schweikart: Ours is the finest-trained force in human history. Everyone I’ve spoken to agrees that if there is one key difference-maker on the battlefield, it is our men and women are trained, and our enemies — no matter how devious or unorthodox — are not. But this has been true going back to pre-World War II, when the U.S. Army concluded that the single best way to reduce American casualties was through better training, not necessarily better weapons. The Prussians showed in the 1870s that a well-trained army could annihilate an opposing force of equal size and even, perhaps, higher morale, for once the casualties start, morale fades without training.

As for character training, not long ago and exasperated Bill O’Reilly wondered why “we train soldiers in six weeks” and we still haven’t been able to train Iraqi soldiers. The answer is that we aren’t training the Iraqis to be soldiers — many of them already were soldiers. We are, essentially, training them to be “Americans,” to have American values of sanctity of life, to learn from loss, to submit to civilian audit, and so on. We’ve had 200 years to do that. Give the Iraqis a couple of years, Bill.

Lopez: How do protesters make soldiers better?

Schweikart: Conservatives hate to hear this one, but the fact is that since 1920 at least, the U.S. Army (and other service branches since) has been exceptionally sensitive to casualties. The military was shocked at how many ground combat deaths it had in World War I. Typically, antiwar protesters in America have had little success getting Americans worked up about either “collateral damage” to civilians or even brutality to enemy combatants if this occurred in the heat of battle. For example, there were instances of GIs sending home Japanese skulls from the Pacific in the Second World War — it was exceptionally rare, but even then, few people here at home got too concerned about it. Rather, since Korea, the only tactic that the antiwar Left has had any success with has been to play on American losses — the flag-draped caskets, the body bags, the scenes of carnage to “our boys.” The military figured that out some time ago, and has relentlessly addressed what it called after World War I “The Casualty Issue.” Simply put, the protesters’ focus on American losses has led our military to take fewer and fewer battle deaths. This wasn’t the primary factor — winning wars was — but it was an indirect and unintended consequence of the protesters. Santa Anna, in contrast, referred to his soldiers as so many “chickens,” and Zulu kings routinely tested the range of British rifles with the bodies of their warriors. Protesters have paradoxically made our soldiers more lethal than ever, in Patton’s words, making the other guy die for his country . . . or cause.

Lopez: Even Cindy Sheehan?

Schweikart: Every war has its whacko. In the Civil War it was Clement Valladigham — who, as it happens, is buried just across the street from where I teach. This war, it’s ”Mother Sheehan.” As long as she was in the “let’s save our sons and daughters” mode, she had some appeal to the mainstream of society. To the extent that she calls President Bush a “terrorist,” she has no impact on anything and no credibility, and, fortunately, she has drifted more to this extreme in the last year.

Lopez: So a prediction based on your historical survey: What we gonna do about Iran?

Schweikart: You hit the nail on the head: Iran is likely next. Any serious presidential candidate for 2008 with a shred of credibility would already be taking this on (along with illegal immigration). My guess is that they will all ignore it, and allow the Iranians to a) get a bomb and b) do something horrible. The question then is: Will Bush leave office without addressing this? I suspect from what I know of Bush that he does not care what history thinks of him or what Reuters thinks of him. He cares if he has left this country safer. Therefore, my not-so-bold prediction is if we have started to witness an obvious suppression of hostile activity in Iraq by late 2007, you might see a last-ditch diplomatic offensive followed by military action. It is necessary, but it won’t be pretty.

Lopez: How long does it take to write a book like yours?

Schweikart: Some books are in the works for years. I’ve taught a class that students call “Stirrups to Star Wars” for more than a decade, and have amassed much of the research while teaching this class. After completing A Patriot’s History of the United States with Mike Allen, I looked at all this stuff and concluded it could pretty much write itself. So the specific answer to your question is, less than a year to write, a decade to research.

Lopez: Why did you write it? Was there one catalyst?

Schweikart: I’ve loved Victor Hanson’s analysis in NRO, and use his Carnage and Culture for my classes. But I always wanted a brief, one-volume explanation of why we are so successful militarily, and the invasion of Afghanistan — which we completed in a matter of weeks, when the Soviets, with 80,000 men, could do it in years — convinced me that this was the time.

Lopez: Besides, say: We win! Hooraah! What’s the most important lesson from your book?

Schweikart: Military success does not come merely from great generals or high-falutin’ technology: It comes from an ongoing, widespread set of values that make it phenomenally easy to turn civilians into well-trained, disciplined fighting troops. Americans need to know that their fighting men and women reflect them — their sacrifices, their core beliefs, and their unrestrained optimism.

National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGQwYmYzNDY2ZjdkYzliYWY3MjdmNThlODJlNmUxYmU