The Redhunter

November 15, 2006

Book Review - "America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It"

Just when I think that the future can't be much darker for us in our war on Islamic Jihadism, Mark Steyn comes along to ruin things for me.

Consider our current situation: Iraq is in the throws of massive sectarian violence and may slide into Rwandan-style slaughter, Afghanistan is not-at-all secure, Musharraf has virtually ceded large parts of his country to the Taliban and their allies, most of Somalia, including it's capital Mogadishu, is controlled by the Supreme Islamic Courts Council, an Islamist militia, and Iran appears to be well on the way towards obtaining nuclear weapons. Did I miss anything?

Actually, as Steyn points out in America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, what I missed was the fact that the United States is now virtually alone in the world. Europe, he explains, is well on the road to being completely lost to the Jihadists.

On the surface, of course, it doesn't seem that way. Their leaders still mouth the traditional pieties, lamenting that "with only proper US leadership" and "less arrogance", why, we would all be together against the terrorists. Traditional institutions such as NATO and a European-dominated Security Council still prevail.

Further, it's tempting to think that of course we can't really lose to the likes of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Isn't Europe the rock of Western Civilization? Surely a continent that survived the Nazis, Communists, and other assorted fascists can take on a bunch of backward Islamic fanatics, right? I mean, maybe they'll get lucky with some terrorist acts, maybe even sneak a nuke into a city, but lose, as in foreign occupation? No way.

"Yes way" is Steyn's response.

Here is Steyn's argument in a nutshell; the populations of native Europeans are headed into steep decline. Not only that, but the radio of young to old people is rapidly declining. Over the past several decades they've set up an enormous welfare state which depends on lots of young people for old-age payments. European leaders, seeing that the young people simply won't be around when needed, have been encouraging massive immigration into their countries. These immigrants are overwhelmingly Muslim, and most have no desire to assimilate into European culture. Not only that, but, most or many of them plan on making Europe a Muslim continent, complete with Sharia law. Native Europeans, infected with leftist multiculturalism and a complete lack of a sense of nationhood, have no will to resist.

America, he says, will be alone in the world before we know it. In many ways we already are.

Combine a powerful argument with his world-famous Mark Steyn wit, and you've got a great book. It is at once deeply sobering and laugh-out-loud funny. Put it on your must-read list.

The Inexorable Power of Demography

In order for a population to maintain its existing numbers, there must be 2.1 live births per woman. More and it's numbers increase, less and they decline. The United States is at almost exactly 2.1. That our numbers are slightly increasing is due, of course, to immigration.

Europe as a whole is 1.38, Western Europe, 1.5 or less. A few country numbers: Germany and Austria 1.3, Italy 1.2, Sweden 1.64, Ireland 1.9, Spain and Greece 1.15. Russia has the lowest at 1.15, and France the highest at 1.89. On the other side of the globe, Japan is at 1.32, and while they'll have a benefits crisis, they don't have to contend with immigrants who want to change the very nature of their society.

All this leads to rapidly declining populations. The populations of Spain, Greece and Russia will start to halve every 35 or 40 years starting sometime mid-century. The population of Yemen will exceed that of Russia.

Besides the fact that the welfare-state will simply come crashing to the ground (it's a mathmatical certainty), no one knows what will happen economically when there are lots and lots of retired people relative to younger workers.

On the other hand, here are the birthrates in Islamic countries: Pakistan 5.03, Saudi Arabia 4.53, Iran 2.33 (though Ahmadinejad is trying to get it up), Afghanistan 6.69 and Yemen at 6.58

Calculators Don't Lie

Into all this come Muslim immigrants. Europeans want(ed?) them because of their labor and ability to fund their welfare states, and Muslims wanted to come because Europe is obviously a better place than, oh, say, Pakistan or Algeria.

Exactly how many Muslims are in Europe now is open to question, and the numbers are probably higher than advertised. However, most sources I checked conclude that about 5% of Western Europe is Muslim, with the total number being at around 23 million.

The Muslim birthrate in Europe is somewhere around 3.5 live births per woman.

The bottom line: Sometime towards the end of this century Western Europe will be majority Muslim. Get the picture?

Islam is Not Just a Religion

This is not the place for a full discussion of Islam, the law, and the nature of society. Suffice it to say that you just haven't been paying attention if you think that the difference between Westerners (whether Christian or not) and Muslims is trivial. We're not talking like the differences between Presbyterians and Mormons, or Jews and Hindus, for that matter.

The reality is that all Westerners, and Hindus too for that matter, live in countries that have been through or deeply influenced by the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment. This is why I'm not worried about the impact of Hispanics on American culture or society; fundamentally they're just like us.

Islam is another matter. There has never been an Islamic Martin Luther, much less a St Augustine or St Aquinas. I'd say Islam was stuck in the Middle Ages, but that would be an insult to Medieval Europe. I believe that Islam is reformable, it's just not on that path right now.

Radical Islam has exported itself to Europe. Melanie Phillips documented how bad the situation in the UK, who's capital was been dubbed "Londonistan" by French police officials. Islamism is an imperial project, says Steyn, and it's coming to a town near you.

It's not just the vast potential for terrorism that is the problem. Surveys show that up to 60% of these Muslims want Sharia law implimented in the European countries where they reside. Many or most of them have no wish to conform to Western standards, they want us to conform to them. Steyn, like any number of authors writing on this subject, provides example after example of demands that radical Muslims are making on their new countries; and time after time native Europe surrenders.

The problem is that the Muslim immigrants see the customs and law of Europe, and reject it. They see women who are free, and it offends them. They see that gays are allowed to live without being stoned to death, and it enrages them. They examine our legal system and believe it unjust because it is not based on Islam. They look at our democracy and seek ways to exploit it. They use our tradion of tolerance against us.

All Muslims? No. But enough Muslims? Yes. If there is a large group of "moderate Muslims" in Europe, it is a well-kept secret.

It's the Identity, Stupid

Population decline in and of itself would only be a economic problem; how to pay for all these benefits? A threat from radical Muslims would not be a problem in a culture and country that firmly believed in itself.

Add the two together, however, and you've got a disaster on your hands.

How Europe lost it's way is no great secret; two world wars, coupled with the threat of complete annihilation during the Cold War, prompted many to distrust or hate nationalism and put their faith in integration and international institutions. And it has, in this respect, worked; the idea of two major European countries going to war with each other is more remote than ever.

Sure, if the Islamists somehow cobbled together a traditional army and hit the beaches in Spain or Italy, Europe would rally to their defense. The problem, as Steyn points out, is that "the dragons are no longer on the edge of the map."

The reasons why Europe is not resisting are several. There is the lack of national identity that I mentioned earlier. There is also it's post-Christian state. Most Americans believe in God whether they go to church or synagogue or not. Most Europeans don't even believe in God. This results first of all in a lack of believing in anything, a lack of identity.

On top of that you've got leftist muliculturalism, which seeks to deny that any one culture or society is superior to any other.

All of this has led to a lack of identity. Islam is not only growing in Europe though immigration, but by conversion. Again, numbers are hard to come by, but there are all too-many news articles about the subject.

What Christian churches are left outside of Catholicism are in full-scale retreat. Most are desperate to retain whatever members they can, and believe that the best way to do so is to become like the society around them. This has led to a milquetoast version of their religion that is utterly unable to resist the threat that is all around them.

The funny part about it all is that if you had to invent an ideology that would be complete anathema to the liberal or leftist mindset, you couldn't do better than radical Islam. It's mysogenic, anti-gay, and theocratic. Yet to most leftists and indeed many liberals, the threat's simply not there. They'll tell you that the Islamists are just upset because we haven't solved the Palestinian-Israeli problem.

In the End

"Jihad can win", is Steyn's message. Although it may seem incredible to us to imagine the sort of changes that would forever change Europe, it is stability that is the illusion. Looking at the broad sweep of history, one realizes that not only do countries come and go, but peoples do to. Meet any Visigoths or Byzantines recently?

So yes, Europe as we know it can disappear. Before it does it will likely catch on as to what is happening, and we'll likely see mass riots or outright warfare, coupled with a rise of fascist parties on the right. We'll also see a mass exodus to the United States, which in my opinion would be a good thing. But in the end the tyranny of demography will prevail unless action is taken now.

What Can Be Done

Steyn doesn't spend much time here, prefering to spend most of the book simply laying out the problem. He does, however have some ideas, most of which are good ones.

First, he lays out our options

1. Submit to Islam
2. Destroy Islam
3. Reform Islam

As Steyn puts it, "because most of us don't take number one as a serious possibility, we're equally unserious about being forced to choose between two and three. But submission to Islam is very possible...."

Because "destroying Islam" is both impractical and immoral, our only option is number three. Ultimately, he says, we can't do this; only Muslims can. However, we can create the conditions for reform.

Some of the things he proposes are supporting women's rights in Islamic countries, rolling back Wahhabi "exports", ie Saudi-funded Mosques. In general, supporting liberty and democracy in Muslim countries is necessary, too. We must think more comprehensively about a ideological strategy as well as a military one. Forget the UN and NATO, they're worse than useless. Changing the government in Tehran must be a priority. Military action when necessary is required, though in general this war will not be won with bombs and bullets.

All of this stuff except ending the military parts are the types of things we don't do very well, but it's quite necessary that we learn.

Trends do not necessarily hold. It is possible that native Europeans will see an increase in their birthrates, or will suddenly come to their senses and enact measures to stop or seriously slow down immigration from Muslim countries. They might rediscover a sense of identity, and maybe even their Christianity. But it seems less than likely to me. Steyn's vision is, if anything, more frightening than even the prospects for defeat in Afghanistan or Iraq. The lights may be going out in Europe once more, and this time I'm not sure we can get them back on.

Posted by Tom at 9:30 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

October 26, 2006

Hanson Demolishes the Talkers

From NRO's The Corner today, here's Victor Davis Hanson:

In the last 24 hours I have heard some of the craziest things of this entire war.

The Palestinians are complaining about the Israeli security fence on grounds that it perpetuates "racial segregation" — in a way perhaps suicide bombers do not? Or the state-run Palestinian megaphones with their usual "apes and pigs" rants?

At a meeting the other day with some political scientists, I was lectured by some that there was nothing such as jihadism in the comprehensive sense. That is, that Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. simply have entirely separate agendas, understandable (i.e., Israel, "occupation" of Arab lands) and particularist grievances, etc. rather than a deeply shared anger at the West that originates from a common sense of lost pride and frustration, brought on by recognition of failure when zeal and religious purity do not restore honor or influence in the age of globalization.

I thought these who advocated such nonsense might at any second suggest that because Mussolini's fascists, Hitler's Nazis, and Tojo's militarists all had quite different agendas, separate racial ideologies, and particular aims in WWII, then, they could hardly be lumped together as the Axis that threatened Western republics and needed a generic anti-fascist response. All during the Vietnam War, we were lectured daily about the intricacies of Vietnamese, Russian, and Chinese Communists — their rivalries, hatreds, and quite separate aims-as they combined to defeat the United States, and trumped their own tensions with an all-encompassing hatred of Western democratic capitalism.

There is also an Alice in Wonderland flavor to the current Democratic response to the Korean and Iranian crises. We talked to the Koreans all during the 1990s as they prepared nuclear materials.

And now are told that we have a catastrophe since we have not recently talked to them. We talked all during the 1990s with Syria — and got nothing. Bill Clinton has always praised Iranian democracy; so, we talked to Tehran too, both stealthily and overtly.

So what is this obsession with talk, talk, talk? It reminds me of all those discredited British empty-headed pacifists and aristocrats who wanted to keep talking to Hitler after the fall of Poland, even after the fall of France, right up to the Battle of Britain.

Ditto that.

Posted by Tom at 9:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 17, 2006

Lenninist Lynne Gets Lucky

Here's how the AP story on the sentencing of Lynne Stewart, printed in the Washington Times, starts out

A firebrand civil rights lawyer who has defended Black Panthers and anti-war radicals was sentenced yesterday to nearly 2? years in prison -- far less than the 30 years prosecutors wanted -- for helping an imprisoned terrorist sheik communicate with his followers on the outside.

Lynne Stewart, 67, smiled, cried and hugged supporters after U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl pronounced the sentence of 28 months.

The judge said Stewart was guilty of smuggling messages between her client and his followers that could have "potentially lethal consequences." He called the crimes "extraordinarily severe criminal conduct."

But in departing from federal guidelines that called for 30 years behind bars, he cited Stewart's more than three decades of dedication to poor, disadvantaged and unpopular clients.

"Ms. Stewart performed a public service, not only to her clients, but to the nation," Judge Koeltl said.

"firebrand civil rights lawyer"? dedication to "poor, disadvantaged and unpopular clients"? "performed a public service...to the nation"?

What are this AP reporter and judge smoking? Lynne Stewart is a communist and member of the hate-America crowd if there every was one. If you don't believe me read what she herself has said

"We have in Washington a poisonous government that spreads its venom to the body politic in all corners of the globe. We now resume...our quests...like David going forth to meet Goliath, like Beowulf the dragon slayer...like Sir Galahad seeking the holy grail. And modern heroes, dare I mention? Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel and Nelson Mandela and John Brown, Che Guevara who reminds us 'At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.'"

How does she view "Muslim fundamentalists"?

"They are basically forces of national liberation. And I think that we, as persons who are committed to the liberation of oppressed people, should fasten on the need for self-determination....My own sense is that, were the Islamists to be empowered, there would be movements within their own countries...to liberate."

As for violence;

"I don't believe in anarchistic violence, but in directed violence. That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, and sexism, and the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions, and accompanied by popular support."

"Civil rights attorney" my foot. She's part of the New Fifth Columnists who take the side of our enemy that's all there is to it.

For Additional Reading

Much more about Stewart's background here.

Powerline dissects the sentencing and says "Not Enough Jail Time". I agree.

Captain Ed says that the light sentencing of Stewart "demonstrates the fecklessness of pursuing terrorists through the civil courts." Ditto that.

Michelle Malkin calls it a "travesty". So do I. She points to an article in the New York Times that is very sympathetic to Stewart. Unbelievable.

Andy McCarthy at NRO provides valuable legal insight. He relates how he spent some time on the phone with a New York Times reporter trying to explain how no, a long sentence would not have a chilling effect on lawyers who defend terrorists if she receives a long sentence.” The reporter didn't get it.

The Wall Street Journal also editoralizes that given her crime she got off light.

Lastly, be sure to check out Michelle Malkin's Hot Air, where she's got a "videoblog" entry about Lennist Lynne.

Posted by Tom at 8:17 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 11, 2006

A Case of Taqiyya?

An Associated Press article printed in today's Washington Times caught my attention this morning. It was titled "Defender of 'liberal Islam' shunned"

LONDON -- Tariq Ramadan's call for modernizing Islam has earned him the hatred of Muslim traditionalists. The Bush administration sees him as a threat and has banned him from the United States. France banned him from the country in 1995, linking him to Algerian terrorists, but leftist organizations successfully campaigned to overturn the measure, and he is now welcome there.

But underscoring the conflicting reactions provoked by this soft-spoken Muslim from Switzerland, British Prime Minister Tony Blair sees Mr. Ramadan as one of the best hopes for bridging the divide between the West and Islam, and has put him on a task force to tackle extremism.

Tariq Ramadan? Haven't I heard that somewhere? Reading on

To his admirers, the 44-year-old Oxford University scholar is the conscience of Western Europe's Muslims -- the man who can articulate what it means to play an active part in secular society while remaining true to the Koran ...

Two years ago -- and days before he was to arrive in the United States to become a professor of religion at the University of Notre Dame, the United States canceled his visa. The State Department said he was barred for actions "which constituted providing material support to a terrorist organization." Mr. Ramadan said the charge stems from his donation, then worth about $750, to a Palestinian charity.

I went to Melanie Phillips Londonistan, which I recently finished, and sure enough, there on pages 174-175. Widely thought to be close to the Muslim Brotherhood, he has made statements defending terrorists in Iraq, "Palestine", and Chechnya.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ramadan is on a special Muslim "task force" which advises Prime Minister Tony Blair on Muslim matters.

Looks like we might have a case of Taqiyya here.

From Wikipedia, Taqiyya "is the dispensation allowing believers to conceal their faith when under threat, persecution or compulsion." and "according to many Shia, Taqiyya can only be legally used by a Muslim verbally when he or she is being wrongly persecuted. "

Of course, should all know by this point that "wrongly persecuted" to Muslims means any and all criticism of the way the practice their religion. We haven't come to call it"The Religion of Perpetual Outrage" for nothing.

Again from Wikipedia, here's the brief on Tariq Ramadan

In February 2004, he accepted the tenured position of Luce professor of religion at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, USA. However, in late July 2004, his visa was revoked by the State Department, and he was forced to resign the position. [3]. Though the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) declined to provide a specific reason for denying the visa, they explained that the Patriot Act allows the government to ban foreigners who “espouse terrorist activity.” ...

In September 2006, a State Department statement said: "A U.S. consular officer has denied Dr. Tariq Ramadan's visa application. The consular officer concluded that Dr. Ramadan was inadmissible based solely on his actions, which constituted providing material support to a terrorist organization."[4][5]

Tariq Ramadan advocates that Muslims living in the West should not view themselves as foreigners or temporary residents of their countries, but rather as full citizens with full rights and responsibilities. In some respects, he argues for integration and not alienation from the surrounding society. Indeed, the main theme of his book, To Be a European Muslim attempts to bridge the gap between being a Muslim and being European.
..

Ramadan argues that there need be no conflict between being a Muslim and being a full citizen in Western countries, active in the community and caring about it. He criticizes what he sees as an 'us vs. them' mentality in Muslim discourse on the West.
...

Tariq Ramadan is criticised for his sometimes contradictory opinions, and for his refusal to accept the priority of civil law over religious law, as is the rule in all democracies. Many French intellectuals also accuse Ramadan of being "The Master of Doubletalk," of saying one thing to the non-Muslim public and the opposite to his Muslim audience. Perhaps most seriously, author Jean-Charles Brisard of the Terror Finance Blog has listed a number of alleged links between Ramadan and terrorism. [11]

Caroline Fourest analysed Tariq Ramadan's 15 books, 1,500 pages of interviews, and approximately 100 recordings, [12] and concludes "Ramadan is a war leader,"

Quite contradictory indeed. His defenders portray as an Islamic Martin Luther, his detractors a master of doubletalk. Ramadan has written several books which you can find on Amazon, the most important ones of which seem to be Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, and Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity

On the other side we have articles like this one on Jihad Watch and this one at the Middle East Forum, tell an entirely different story about Ramadan.

I haven't studied the matter myself,but it does seem that Ramadan is indeed engaged in Taqiyya, presenting himself as the voice of reason to gullible Westerners, but in reality "wants to see the islamization of Europe" (Jihad Watch article cited above). Anyway, since the ACLU is defending him, I'm all the more inclined to think he's guilty as charged.

Posted by Tom at 9:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 28, 2006

The Nature of our Enemy Part III An Islamic World

On the one hand, there's a danger in reading too much into any one incident. On the other, sometimes they can be so illustrative.

Take the issue of Steve Centani and Olaf Wiig, the Fox News journalists who were told to convert to Islam or die. In the video, posted here on Michelle Malkin's site (and on YouTube), Centanni reads a statement, which says in part

I have embraced Islam, and say the word Allah. My leader is the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. Islam is not meant for just some people, but it is the true religion for all people in all times. Westerners are not following the wrong path. And I hope they realize that and change their ways,and I hope I can help them to do that. Islam helps people to love mercy, brotherhood, equality and justice....

Disbelievers will be cast into an eternal fire. But Allah is also ever merciful, and the west can change it's ways and turn to the purifying power of Islam....

Islam is not fascism. Words lke that only serve to deepen the chasm between peoples.... The West is seen as waging war on Islam, and these words, "Islamic fascists", only reconfirm that belief among many.... Please, George Bush, please Tony Blair, open your minds to Islam, and bring peace to all people around the world....

Olaf Wiig reads a similar statement. Basically it's all "we are poor persecuted Muslims, please stop killing us with your bombs" stuff.

Prior to all this, however, there is a banner in the video that says

There is no compulsion in Religion. The right path is henceforth distinct from error

Right.

Let's see what we can make of this video

A Global Caliphate

First, as Glenn Reynolds observes, "It's not a religious war to us, but it is to them"

Their definition of victory is converting the whole world to Islam. To the Western mind, a conversion at gunpoint is invalid and pointless. But although it may be politically incorrect to point this out, up until recent centuries, Islam has been spread mainly by warfare and forced conversions. Only since the end of Islamic military power at the end of the 17th century was this ended.

No I am not saying that we should also treat it as a religious war. But as I said in The Nature of our Enemy, Part II: A Problem in Islam, Islam has a problem with violence. Islam itself is not violent, but the way in which it is practiced by a disturbingly high number of people leads to violence. This is ignored both by leftist Westerners and most Muslims alike.

The Nature of Religion

Now a quick note about the nature of religion is in order. If you are a Christian or Muslim, and do not believe that yours is the one and only true and right way to see God, then you don't believe in your own religion. If you are a Christian orMuslim, and do not in your heart want everyone else on the planet to convert to your religion, you do not believe in your own religion.

As for where you're going after you die, if you are a Christian then you know that this is a decision that only God can make. You do not have the right to "judge" people, or say where they are going (bty, this is the true definition of ""Do not judge, or you too will be judged"(Matt 7:1) to a Christian, it does not mean we can't comment on someone else's lifestyle).

The difference, if I need to point it out, is that in our modern world we Christians do not convert at swordpoint. Nor do we fight over religion. Islamic radicals still do. As Christians, we send missionaries out into the world (I've done this) to convert souls. We do not send soldiers to do this.

Now that's out of the way, let's get back to our subject matter

The Propaganda

I'll give the Islamic fascists this, they know what we're saying and what our news media is reporting, and do a good job of trying to turn it against us. I can see where the weak minded at home and abroad would be fooled. I can see in the days to come some leftie saying "see, I told you that 'Islamic fascist' was inflammatory!"

So Much for the "Grievance s" Argument

Fox News anchor Brit Hume nails it

Yes, and what an appealing faith these thugs must believe Islam is, that conversions have to be effected at the point of a gun. And what of the argument that all of the ills and troubles that beset the Palestinian people, that lead them to terrorism, are the cause of what they endlessly refer to as the illegal Israeli occupation.

Consider the latest rounds of trouble in Gaza and Lebanon, two places from which Israel has withdrawn.

It has been noted that not for one day after the Israeli pullout from Gaza did the rocket attacks that came from Gaza ever stop. We’re not dealing here with something that is susceptible to a political resolution of the kind of which the State Department and many a president has dreamed.

We’re dealing here with a lawless enemy whose goal far transcends any side-by-side, two-state solution. That isn’t going to do it. We’re dealing with a terrorist, gangland-style enemy, which I think it’s fair to conclude, and this episode only further illustrates it, must be defeated.

Ditto that.

In Part I of The Nature of Our Enemy I detailed how our enemy is in fact Islamic Fascism, and not "a hundred small grievances."

Get Them

Centanni and Wiig were kidnapped by the Holy Jihad Brigades, a group unknown until this action. Fox News reports that

Senior Palestinian security officials said Sunday the name was a front for local militants, and that Palestinian authorities had known the identity of the kidnappers from the start

.

What we must do is hunt them down and kill them. At the very least, they must be arrested and executed by Palestinian forces. And no this is not simply a "legal matter" that can be handled as in a police action. This should be considered an act of war It is important that we get these terrorists for several reasons.

As Cliff May points out,

I’m glad these guys are safe and free. I wish them well. But I hope there will be some attention paid by Fox and other media to the way in which kidnappings and similar threats coerce and intimidate journalists, and may influence their coverage.

Lastly, and most simply, they are both Westerners, Centanni an American and Wiig a New Zealander. New Zealand has sent special forces to Afghanistan (where they won praise from our guys for their ability to navigate in the mountains). If we do not get the terrorists who committed this act, Islamic fascists the world over will know that this is one more act that they can get away with.

Now let's not all forget about this story in the days and weeks to come, and make sure we get the terrorists who did this.

Posted by Tom at 8:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 22, 2006

The Nature of our Enemy, Part I

Who exactly are we fighting in this war, and why is our enemy so upset at us?

By "this war", I refer not to Iraq, but to what is called the "War on Terror."

Generally speaking, there are two schools of thought on the matter. One side says that we are at war with "Islamofascism", or Islamic radicalism, or Islamism, or jihad, call it what you will. The other side says that we are fighting people who are against various US policies. They fight us because they have a specific greviance.

Richard Fernandez has a typically insightful post at The Belmont Club titled "The Elusive War" in which he compares and contrasts the two views. He posts two articles, suggested to him by a reader, each of which typifies one of the sides.

First up is Michael Ledeen of National Review, who lays out his views in "The Real War". The war is not, he says, a series of small battles. If Israel had killed every last Hezbollah terrorist, if we won every battle in Afghanistan and Iraq, "we will only prolong the fighting." Rather, we are at war with Syria and Iran, and the ideologies that drive both of them. Money quote

The terror masters in Syria and Iran are waging a regional war against us, running from Afghanistan and Iraq to, Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon. Alongside the ground war in the Middle East, they are conducting fifth-column operations against us from Europe to India and on to Indonesia, Australia, and the United States; the plot just dismantled in Great Britain provides the latest evidence.

On the other side we have Max Hastings writing in The Guardian a piece titled "Bush's belief in a worldwide Islamist conspiracy is foolish and dangerous." He accepts that "we face a real threat from Muslim fundamentalists", but it is what has caused the threat that separates him from Ledeen. Here, in a nutshell, is his argument.

There is no chance that the west will get anywhere with the Muslim world until the US government is willing to disassemble a spread of grievances in widely diverse societies, examine them as separate components, and treat each on its merits.

I'm going to state my conclusion up front; I agree with Ledeen, and indeed would go even farther than he. While I am glad that Mr Hastings believes that we are threatened (a plus these days), I think he is completely wrong in his analysis. Richard Fernanez points out one obvious flaw in Hastings' argument

Max Hasting's striking phrase "yet we shall defeat them only when our Muslim community at large perceives that its interests are identified with Britain's polity" is as clever a case for surrender as I've ever heard

.

Why I Don't Buy Max Hastings' Argument

First, let me deal with Max Hastings.

One reason why I don't buy the "legitimate greviance" argument is that the terrorism inflicted on us does not always correlate to any known grevience. Just two weeks ago two suitcase bombs were found on trains in Germany. The bombs "may be traceable to the Middle East", big surprise. Thankfully they were found before they went off. But what has Germany done to deserve Islamic terror? They did not participate in the invasion of Iraq, and indeed have opposed US policy at every turn since.

This past June a huge Islamic terrorist plot was foiled in Canada. The plot, which involved both bombs and the kidnapping of the Canadian prime minister, was against soley Canadian targets. Again, Canada did not participate in the invasion of Iraq, and most of it's newspapers, to say nothing of it's leaders, have spent a lot of time denouncing this or that American policy.

Further, if it's not one grievance it's another. Victor Davis Hanson goes through the "excuse after excuse" offered by the Muslims and their apologists. One time it was that we were "stealing their oil", then prices jumped to $75 per barrel. Another day it's American troops in Saudi Arabia. But, er, they're mostly gone now. Then it's aid to Israel. But Europe and the US give considerable amounts aid to the Palestinian Authority. StrategyPage takes a look at the history of Islamic terrorism, and concludes that "ruthless men have been using Islamic radicalism to create terrorists for a long time" and that "historically, a noticeable increase in violence by Islamic radicals occurred every three or four generations."

Lastly, there is is simply too long a history of anti-semitism among prominent Muslim leaders to believe that their grevience against Israel is simply based on land. Jonah Goldberg relates how the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Husseini, made Nazi-like statements in 1942, well before the establishment of Israel or even the post-war influx of Jews into the area.

Also Not the Problem

"Islam" is not the problem. If it were, the war would be unwinnable. You simply cannot, and should not, attempt to destroy an entire religion.

Further, from what I see, the problem is in how the religion is taught in many places, and how it is used to promote violence and hatred. I'm not going to get into an analysis of the Koran, and don't think it necessary.

It is true, I think, that some religions lend themselves to fitting into the modern world better than others. Our Western models of democracy, secularism, and tolerance (true tolerance, not what the left teaches) are unimaginable without Christianity and other Western models of thought. It is very difficult to imagine these things rising out of Islam. But that does not mean that Islam and these things are incompatible. It simply means that they could not have been spawned or developed by the Muslim world. It does not mean that Muslims cannot adopt them.

What is "Islamofascism"?

A much better description of our enemy, and one that also tells us why they hate us, is "Islamofascism". The term, according to Roger Scruton, originated with Maxine Rodinson (1915-2004) "to describe the Iranian Revolution of 1978." President Bush recently referred to our enemy as "Islamic fascists", which caught him as much grief as Ronald Reagan's use of the term "evil empire", which tells me he is on to something.

Stephen Schwartz, writing in The Weekly Standard, offers a helpful definition

In my analysis, as originally put in print directly after the horror of September 11, 2001, Islamofascism refers to use of the faith of Islam as a cover for totalitarian ideology. This radical phenomenon is embodied among Sunni Muslims today by such fundamentalists as the Saudi-financed Wahhabis, the Pakistani jihadists known as Jama'atis, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. In the ranks of Shia Muslims, it is exemplified by Hezbollah in Lebanon and the clique around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran.

"Fascism", he says, " is distinguished from the broader category of extreme right-wing politics by its willingness to defy public civility and openly violate the law." This is precisely what the terrorists we are fighting do.

This said, "fascism" is still a very elusive term. Jonah Goldberg points out that "there’s still no accepted definition of fascism among students of the phenomenon. " Everyone uses it, but I've read a hundred definitions and still can't tell you exactly what it means.

Be that as it may, since "fascism" is something that everyone is against, it is as good a term as any.

Next up: A Problem In Islam

Posted by Tom at 8:20 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 15, 2006

Losing the War

If we're not losing the war, then we're certainly not making any progress. I refer not to Iraq in particular, or Lebanon, or even the recent war in Lebanon, but to the entire war. Although the term "War on Terror" is used most often, it's really a war on Islamic fascism, Islamic fanaticism, or jihad, as you prefer. Whatever term we use, we're fighting those people who are motivated by Islam to kill other people, specifically Westerners, but more generally anyone who disagrees with them.

Let's cut to the chase; we're in danger of Iraq becoming a failed state, Israel failed to destroy Hezbollah and we failed Israel by agreeing to a cease-fire. Iran and Syria are emboldened and are encouraged by recent events to spread more terror, and Islamofascists have taken over Somalia. Political correctness at home and in Europe prevents far too many people from seeing the danger from unassimilated Muslim immigrants. The Democrats stand poised to take over the House and maybe the Senate, and if they get the former they'll start impeachment hearings, and if they get the latter may toss the president from office. At the very least they will try and force a withdrawal from Iraq, and will wreck our most valuable internal security and terrorist-finding intelligence operations.

Bad enough for you?

Let's get more specific.

Hezbollah and Lebanon

On the one hand, Israel didn't lose, it simply failed to win. The strategic situation between it and Hezbollah is largely unchanged. Israel destroyed much of Hezbollah at little loss to itself. In that sense, Israel is better off than it was one month ago. Further, no one can now deny that Iran and Syria were behind Hezbollah. For example, IDF forces found Russian-made AT-5 Spandrel anti-tank missiles in Lebanon that had been shipped there by Syria and Iran.

On the other side, Hezbollah's prestige went up, and the mere fact that it survived serves as an recruitment tool for Islamic terrorist groups everywhere. IDF generals believe that they were denied victory by panicked politicians. More importantly, Hezbollah rocket attacks continued until the end, and in any event it is unlikely that the terrorist organization will actually disarm. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's popularity is falling, as may his government.

An Unstable Iraq

No I am not saying that we've lost in Iraq. We can still pull it out. And what's going on there is not "civil war", as James Dunnigan of StrategyPage once again points out. But it is, he says " the prelude to massacre and mass expulsion", which is just as bad.

Althogh we may have gone into Iraq initially because of WMD, it is now and has been for some time part of the war on Islamic fascism, whether anyone likes it or not.

Either way, when Rich Lowry writes in National Review that we stand a very real chance of losing in Iraq, you better pay attention.

Iran and Syria

Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979, a fact that we as a nation refuse to acknowledge. Never once have we struck Iran, for all the times it has attacked us through it's proxies, most recently of course in Iraq and Lebanon. We should not wonder that they consider us to be a paper tiger.

Ahmadinejad is the ever confident leader, convinced that he is winning. Not only doesIran spurn Western demands that they stop nuclear enrichment, their top nuclear negotiator said earlier this month "that Iran will expand — not suspend — uranium enrichment activities".

Yet Western liberals will continue to insist that with the right package of enticements Iran can be made to see reason. Just last week on the Sean Hannity radio show, I listened to a debate between David Horowitz and someone from The Nation who proposed just that. Stanley Kurtz sees a President Hillary trying to buy off the Iranians with a “grand bargain.”

This is madness. We are headed towards a showdown with Iran that will likely end in war, possibly nuclear.

Latin America

Although obviously not Islamic fascists themselves, leaders such as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia seem intent on allying themselves with the terrorists. They're currently able to run around making trouble without much intervention on our part.

Although Fidel Castro may die shortly, it is possible through Venezuelan influence, that the communists on Cuba may be able to keep power longer than many here think. Either way, Chavez will seek to complicate our plans to being democracy to the island.

Our "Episodic" Fighting

Rush Limbaugh said today that our fighting in this war is "episodic." He was making the point that we lack strategic vision. The West, specifically the US and Israel, fight piecemeal, one place at a time. We refuse to see that it is a wider war that encompases many areas of the world. For example, we fight hard in Iraq, yet seemingly refuse to recognize that it will be extremely difficult to succedd there unless we get regime change in Iran and Syria.

As I mentioned earlier, we can't even call the war what it is; a war on Islamic fanaticism or fascism. We use "War on Terror" because we know that CAIR and similar groups won't object. Politicians live in fear of being labeled "racist" by the media.

The Democrats

The GOP will most likely lose at least the House in November, possibly the Senate as well. If the Democrats capture the House, impeachment hearings are a certainty. This will put a halt to the war as the administration and country will be distracted.

We have seen how the Democrats couldn't care less about the threat of Islamo-fascism. On domestic policy they are infected with the troika of multiculturalism, tolerance, and diversity, and in foreign affairs they will not adopt any policy unless most European governments agree with it. At the very least this handicaps our war effort with a "lowest common denominator", at worst it means appeasement of terrorist states like Iran and Syria and a complete end to the war.

The Democrats are reverting to the party of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. Far from being a help in the war, they oppose the very policies that made the exposure of the British airline plot possible.

Korea, 1952

By 1952 Korea looked like a war gong bad. After a disasterous start, we regained our composure, and through a daring amphibious attack at Inchon we destroyed the North Korean Army. As we pushed north, it looked like we had won. But then we were caught completely by surprise by massive Chinese forces, which streamed across the border, dealing us a series of severe defeats. Although we managed to stabilize the situation, we seemed trapped in World War I style trench warfare.

President Truman faced severe criticism at home for his conduct of the war. His popularity plummeted, and he decided not to seek another term.

Yet today Truman is considered one of our greatest presidents. My point here is not to speculate on how George W Bush is considered in the future, but rather that we must not let the trees obsure our view of the forest.

The Korean War was the first "hot" conflict in a Cold War that lasted over 40 years. Our ventures in Afganistan and Iraq, as well as Israel's war with Hezbollah, are the "Korean Wars" of today. They are the first battles in what is going to be a long war.

And no, I don't think that promoting democracy is the problem. In this I agree with Steven A. Cook, who wrote an excellent editorial promoting just that view in the Washington Post last week. Rather, I agree with Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester (UK), when he wrote an editorial in the Telegraph titled "multiculturalism is to blame for perverting young Muslims"

Just as with the Cold War, and all other wars too for that matter, there will be ups and downs. We are definately in a "down" time now. Things are likely to get worse before they get better. In retrospect, the Cold War seems so simple.

Posted by Tom at 10:26 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 10, 2006

The Airline Plot

In all of the news about the plot, revealed earlier today, by Muslims to bomb up to 10 airliners en route from the UK to the United States, this is I think the most interesting. From the Telegraph

Twenty-four terrorist suspects being held last night over an alleged plot to blow up as many as 10 transatlantic jets include middle-class, well-educated young men born in Britain. At least one of them converted to Islam only recently.

As Britain remained on a "critical" level of alert, it emerged that among those arrested were the white son of a former Conservative Party worker, the son of an architect and an accountant and a heavily pregnant woman. Some had studied at university and came from families that owned several properties or ran their own businesses.

What's that now? Not from the slums? Not born and raised in Egypt or Saudi Arabia?

Nope. They were born in Britain.

Here's why this is important. Take a look at this poll of British Muslims taken by Channel 4 in the UK

(hat tip Andrew Stuttaford on NRO). Key Excerpts

- Almost a third of those polled would like to live under sharia law.

- More than one in ten understand why British Muslims might want to carry out suicide missions in this country.

- Nearly a quarter thought that the 7/7 bombings were justified because of Britain's foreign policy.

- Almost one in five respect Osama Bin Laden to some extent.

- Two-thirds think that the poeple who publish the cartoons critical of Mohammed or Islam should be punished

- 45% think that 9/11 was a conspiracy by America and Israel

Yet if you mention these facts you get attacked by the likes of CAIR. Political correctness uber alles.

But there's no problem with Muslim immigrants in Britain or elsewhere. Let's just forget about that little incident with the cartoons.

Michelle Malkin has more on this. Much more.

The graphs she posts on her site show that by overwhelming margins these people do not believe that Arabs/Muslims committed the 9/11 terrorist attack and that they consider tthemselves Muslims before citizens of their own country.

Note - yes I know that according to her graphs 42 of American Christians answered the question saying that they considered themselves a Christian before an American. But to anyone who wants to make hay out of this; it's not the same thing and you know it. I consider myself a Christian first, but it's not the same as with these folks.

The British are in trouble. Years of multiculturalism and leftist political indoctrination have taken their toll. It is fantastic the police and intelligence services stopped the plot. But it should not have developed in the first place.

Meanwhile, Across the Pond

Our problem is somewhat different than what the Brits face. Ours is not from our Muslim immigrants, but from leftist Democrats who are determined to force our surrender in Iraq and across the Middle East. The far right, typified by Pat Buchanan, is guilty of advocating our defeat also. But it is the left that is dangerous because they can put people into power.

We all know about Ned Lamont and how he defeated Joe Lieberman in the Democrat primary in Connecticut. Whether Lieberman wins in November is not the point. Nor is it whether the "netroots" really had as big a role to play as they think they did (Lamont may have simply been the beneficiary of a "perfect storm").

Take a look at these comments left today at the Daily Kos, as gathered by Jim Geraghty at NRO

"how convenient to release this news the day after Lamont wins the primary. The politicization of "terror" reporting is so obvious."

"We need to wait and see - this could be another case of DOJ-style entrap & hype."

"Blair needs cover right now even more than Bush... Brittish government leaks claim Bush told Blair in advance about invasion of Lebanon. The people arrested were planning this for sometime in the future. Bumping the terror rating over here all the way to red over that seems sketchy. Brittan does have a far more effective anti terror mechanism than we or Israel, and a more reliable media. But don't let the accents fool you, MI5 is every bit as malevolent as the CIA or Mossad, prehaps more so."

"This is the price for close ties to Bush... Has anyone noticed that the planes targeted were all UK - US flights? Pretty clear symbolism there, I think."

"Wait for the backlash in the UK press - this will be laid at the feet of Blair for his unconditional support of US foreign policy."

"There may actually be a terrorist plot here. But given the false alarms and the tendency for the UK police to act stupid and run around bumping into things, I think some hard facts would be useful before we assume that there really is a viable plot to start blowing planes out of the sky."

"The US is now on "red alert," but only for incoming planes from the UK, as far as I can tell. I'm not saying nothing has happened to cause genuine concern, but this UK/US response strikes me as bull****... The report I saw stated that most or all of the 21 arrested were Pakistani; most or all were UK-born Pakistanis. Bushco is openly selling arms to Pakistan, but incoming flights from Islamabad apparently aren't worth a scratch of the head at this red-alert moment. Evil is incoming today on air flights from London and only London, dammit. Be afraid! Be very afraid of England and the evil it spawns!

Or would it make more sense to just lock down the loos on flights from the UK?

Sorry, this story just isn't passing the smell test for me."

"So the war in Iraq and all that profiteering there, all the death, results in making our airspace safer HOW??? Tell us again, Holy Joe Lieberman, how your GOP buddies' tough talk and money-grabbing war profiteering made us safer???""how convenient to release this news the day after Lamont wins the primary. The politicization of "terror" reporting is so obvious."

Now, Lamont was endorsed by Kos. Marcos even appeared in a TV commercial with him. Whether Lamont believes the same thing all the moonbats in these excerpts do is questionable. But he has no problem associating himself with them. And he could be in power come November.

I listened to a remarkable call today on the Glenn Beck show. Beck is a very popluar radio talk show host, and even has a show on CNN (TV Headline News). It was the first call he took today, and it was so incredible that he played it again later. Beck let the guy continue his rant without interruption. The caller spewed all of the "it's all a Bush-Cheney-Blair plot" stuff you could imagine.

Accuse me of turning today's near-tragedy into politics if you will, but all I'm doing is pointing out that until we're all together on at least recognizing there is a threat from many Muslims we're not going to win this war.

Posted by Tom at 9:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 22, 2006

The Consequences of Failure II

Once again I find myself linking to a post at The Neo Con Blogger. I'm going to make this site one of my regular stops and suggest that you do likewise.

A letter is posted there, allegedly from a Major General in the Air Force. I'm not sure about the authenticity, but didn't see anything on snopes or other urban legends websites. It doesn't really matter, though, because regardless of who wrote it, the sentiments expressed are accurate.

The letter is titled This War is Real!, and following are some excerpts.

2.. Why were we attacked?
Envy of our position, our success, and our freedoms. The attacks happened during the administrations of Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton and Bush 2. We cannot fault either the Republicans or Democrats as there were no provocations by any of the presidents or their immediate predecessors, Presidents Ford or Carter.

3. Who were the attackers?
In each case, the attacks on the US were carried out by Muslims.

4. What is the Muslim population of the World?
25%.

5. Isn't the Muslim Religion peaceful?
Hopefully, but that is really not material. There is no doubt that the predominately Christian population of Germany was peaceful, but under the dictatorial leadership of Hitler (who was also Christian), that made no difference. You either went along with the administration or you were eliminated. There were 5 to 6 million Christians killed by the Nazis for political reasons (including 7,000 Polish priests). (see http://www.nazis.testimony.co.uk/7-a.htm)
...

6. So who are we at war with? There is no way we can honestly respond that it is anyone other than the Muslim terrorists. Trying to be politically correct and avoid verbalizing this conclusion can well be fatal. There is no way to win if you don't clearly recognize and articulate who you are fighting.

So with that background, now to the two major questions:

1. Can we lose this war?
2. What does losing really mean?

t would appear that a great many of us think that losing the war means hanging our heads, bringing the troops home and going on about our business, like post-Vietnam. This is as far from the truth as one can get.

What losing really means is:

We would no longer be the premier country in the world. The attacks will not subside, but rather will steadily increase. Remember, they want us dead, not just quiet. If they had just wanted us quiet, they would not have produced an increasing series of attacks against us, over the past 18 years. The plan was, clearly, for terrorists to attack us until we were neutered and submissive to them.

We would, of course, have no future support from other nations, for fear of reprisals and for the reason that they would see; we are impotent and cannot help them.

They will pick off the other non-Muslim nations, one at a time. It will be increasingly easier for them. They already hold Spain hostage. It doesn't matter whether it was right or wrong for Spain to withdraw its troops from Iraq. Spain did it because the Muslim terrorists bombed their train and told them to withdraw the troops. Anything else they want Spain to do will be done. Spain is finished.
...

So, how can we lose the war?

Again, the answer is simple. We can lose the war by "imploding." That is, defeating ourselves by refusing to recognize the enemy and their purpose, and really digging in and lending full support to the war effort. If we are united, there is no way that we can lose. If we continue to be divided, there is no way that we can win!

Read the whole thing.

Previous: The Consequences of Failure

Posted by Tom at 9:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 18, 2006

Saddam's Links to Terrorists, Part 4 Million

Unless you you are posessed by Bush Derangement Syndrome, you know that Saddam had many links to terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda. A partial list of articles that I have collected on this subject include

Saddam’s Terror Ties
Bin Laden uses Iraq to plot new attacks
Case Closed
Iraqi funds, training fuel Islamic terror group
Second 9/11 Hijacker Tied to Abu Nidal, Iraq
Gunning for Saddam
The Saddam-Osama Memo
Saddam Hussein's Philanthropy of Terror
It’s All About 9/11: The president links Iraq and al Qaeda - and the usual suspects moan
Saddam Possessed WMD, Had Extensive Terror Ties
The Mother of All Connections
Iraq & Militant Islam
Saddam's Terror Training Camps

If all that's not enough for you, last week a Fox News series reported on Ray Robison, who's team translated and analyzed a series of articles which once again document Saddam's link to terrorism.

Liberals sometimes dismiss Fox as a right-wing propaganda machine. This is a mistake, as one should never completely dismiss a news outlet. Readers of this site know that I peruse all sorts of media outlets, from Fox News and the Washington Times to CNN and the Washington Post. Foreign sources from the UK Telegraph and Guardian to Reuters and the BBC have all been quoted on this site. Even the most biased outlet gets it right occasionally.

Part I, "Documenting Saddam's Link to Terror" , sets the stage.

"The U.S. government seized thousands of classified Iraqi government papers when Saddam's regime was toppled, and Washington recently released a trove of these documents on the Pentagon's Foreign Military Studies Office Web site."

The documents, many in Arabic and with no accompanying translation, provide multiple insights into events inside pre-war Iraq. The dossier, however, is huge and disorganized. Digging out its secrets is a laborious task — one that the U.S. government decided to leave to others.

One problem with the FMSO site is that the documents appear to all have two numbers, a document number and a .pdf number, making the tracking process more difficult. I've read about this issue elsewhere (I forget where exactly).

Robison is a former infantry officer with the 101st Airborne, he is now a military operations research analyst specializing in aviation and missile research. He gathered a team of linguists to translate, organize, and analyze the documents.

In Part II, "Terror Links to Saddam's Inner Circle", we get to the nitty gritty.

In this part Robison looks at Document ISGP-2003-0001412 (listed at the FMSO site as ISGP-2003-00014127.pdf)

The document "appears to be a notebook kept by an Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) agent, one Khaled Abd El Majid, about which little is known. It was "apparently captured in 2003", and is 76 pages long. It covers events taking place in 1999.

It's all rather complicated, but the document tells of two meetiings. The first one, translated and analyzed in this part of the Fox News report, tells of a meeting between a former vice president of Iraq, and one of Saddam's "enforcers", one Taha Yassin Ramadan, and Maulana Fazlur Rahman, described as an " Al Qaeda/Taliban supporter" from Pakistan and a contender for the office of prime minister.
Here are some excerpts of the analysis provided by Robison and his team. This first meeting took place sometime in 1999.

This document appears to provide evidence that in 1999 the Taliban welcomed "Islamic relations with Iraq" to mediate between the Taliban, the Northern Alliance and Russia. It seems to provide evidence that the Taliban invited Iraqi officials to Afghanistan. According to this notebook, the Taliban did this via Maulana Fazlur Rahman. The notebook later mentions that another man, Fazlur Rahman Khalil, was visiting Iraq as well, although no transcript of that meeting is provided. ...

What is the relationship between Maulana Fazlur Rahman and the Taliban and Al Qaeda? Rahman often is described in news articles as the father or godfather of the Taliban. It seems clear that Rahman was close to Al Qaeda through his friend Mullah Omar, who sheltered Usama bin Laden prior to the allied invasion of Afghanistan. A leading news Web site in India has a 2003 article entitled Beware the Maulana! . It gives an extensive history of Rahman and explains how he helped to organize the men that would later become the Taliban under his friend Mullah Omar. It also describes links to Al Qaeda

And their conclusion:

The strong ties between Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and their joint responsibility for terrorism, are clear and well documented. This translated notebook segment provides possible evidence that the Saddam regime and the Taliban were planning diplomatic and possibly operational ties with each other. Independent research indicates Maulana Fazlur Rahman and Fazlur Rahman Khalil were both close to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The Maulana asked the Saddam regime to mediate with the Taliban's enemies to take off some of the pressure. A fair question is what would Saddam have wanted in return? One possible answer is the only thing the Taliban had left to offer: Islamic Jihad and extremists operating for his interests from outside Iraq. Other translations from this notebook appear to expose a commitment between the Saddam regime and the Taliban that goes beyond mediation in order to increase support among Islamic Jihad groups for Iraq via a secret intelligence relationship with the Taliban.

(emphasis added)

In Part III, "Documents Support Saddam-Taliban Connection", Robison and his team, using the same document linked to above, further explore whether the Taliban and Saddam and his inner circle actively courted each other, the purpose of which would be to establish an anti-American alliance.

Here they look at the second meeting described in the document. It took place on Nov. 28, 1999, with the same participants. For a full translation follow the link to the Fox News site.

Here again are excerpts from the analysis provided by Robison and his team:

Note the Iraqi official says, “We hope that they will win and control,” referring to the Taliban. According to this notebook, Iraq has clearly thrown its support to the Taliban, the epicenter of Islamic Jihad. This is a clear indication that Saddam had no problem working with Jihadists outside of Iraq. ...

This excerpt from the notebook indicates that both the Taliban and Saddam Regime agreed to a secret relationship involving intelligence services. We do not know the scope or extent of that operational relationship, but this notebook and other documents give us further clues. It might well be noted that if Saddam Hussein was merely looking for an Islamic voice to take up his cause, there are plenty of Arab and Muslim organizations that do not depend on violence and terrorism directed at the United States.

(emphais added)

The Taliban, of course, harbored Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network. Saddam was seeking a relationship with the Taliban. Therefore.... oh but no amount of evidence will convince some people. You either get it or you don't

Posted by Tom at 8:46 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 8, 2006

al-Zarqawi Dead!

News outlets are reporting that the must wanted terrorist in Iraq, Abu Musabal-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, has been killled. From an AP story posted on MSNBC

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida’s leader in Iraq who led a bloody campaign of suicide bombings and kidnappings, has been killed in an air strike, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Thursday, adding that his identity was confirmed by fingerprints and a look at his face. It was a major victory in the U.S.-led war in Iraq and the broader war on terror.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said al-Zarqawi was killed along with seven aides Wednesday evening in a remote area 30 miles northeast of Baghdad in the volatile province of Diyala, just east of the provincial capital of Baqouba, al-Maliki said.

Loud applause broke out among the reporters and soldiers as al-Maliki, flanked by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and U.S. Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told a news conference that “al-Zarqawi was eliminated.”

That's what I call good news to wake up to.

What I found most interesting was that we discovered his whereabouts through tips provided by Iraqi citizens

Al-Maliki said the airstrike was the result of intelligence reports provided to Iraqi security forces by residents in the area, and U.S. forces acted on the information. Casey said the hunt for al-Zarqawi began two weeks ago, and his body was identified by fingerprints and facial recognition.

CNN adds that jihadist websites have confirmed his death

A Web site used by Al Qaeda in Iraq confirmed al-Zarqawi's death and urged its followers to continue the insurgent fight.

Another Web site used by the group issued a statement: "People of Islam, God will not let our enemies celebrate and spread corruption in the ground. Expect the right that was stolen to come back to us and destroy the Crusaders" -- an apparent reference to U.S. troops in Iraq.

Here's a quick roundup from the sources I think provide the best analysis

Iraq the Model has some additional information (hat tip Belmont Club)

Bill Roggio, writing on The Counterterrism Blog, attributes his death to Task Force 145

Task Force 145 was very likely the linchpin in the success in killing Zarqawi, Sheik Abd-Al-Rahman, his spiritual adviser, and seven other lieutenants during a high-level meeting. Over the past two months, TF-145 has conducted numerous raids and killed or captured numerous high-level members of Zarqawi's organization in the area directly north and west of Baghdad. ...

The tightening of al-Qaeda's network in and around Baghdad provided Task Force 145 an opportunity to focus on Zarqawi's organization. Task Force 145 systematically began to dismantle al-Qaeda's organization from the bottom up. Cell leaders, financiers, facilitators and military commanders were rolled up in a series of target raids, slowly degrading al-Qaeda's capabilities while opening a window to al-Qaeda's organization and operations. The raids provided intelligence for follow-up strikes, which ultimately led to the attack of Zarqawi's safe house.

I don't need to tell you to read the whole thing.

We get these details of who makes up Task Force 145 from StrategyPage

Currently, TF 145 is divided into four sub units. Task Force West has several dozen commandoes from the U.S. Navy SEAL DevGroup, and a company of U.S. Army Rangers. Task Force Central has several dozen men from U.S. Army Delta Force and a company of Rangers. Task Force North has a about a dozen men from Delta Force, and a company of Rangers. Task Force Black has a few dozen SAS commandoes, with a company of British "Rangers" (the new Special Forces Support Group). TF 145 has a small headquarters element, plus a large intelligence operation, most of which is back in the United States, and connected in real time via satellite. There are also SOCOM helicopters and aircraft present.

Today marks a great victory in the War on Terror, or the War on Islamic Radicalism, if you prefer. No it does not mean that the insurgency is over, or even that final victory in Iraq is assured. No doubt the naysayers, anti-war left, and other assorted cynics will sniff that it "doesn't change anything" or "about time" or whatever. We need not listen to them. This is not a war that will not be one World War II style, as we learned shortly after marching into Baghdad in April of 2003. Defeating an insurgency is more like eating soup with a knife; it's messy and takes a long time, but if you persever you can achieve victory.

Posted by Tom at 7:49 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 25, 2006

The Anti-Anti-Terrorists

During the Cold War there were three groups of people in the West

1) The pro-communists
2) The anti-communists
3) The anti-anti-communists

Contrary to what some would tell you, yes there really was a communist movement in the United States. While it never stood a chance of overthrowing our government, if given a chance it might have influenced policy more than it did. Fortunately, many communists were exposed, some of the spies, such as Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg.

Liberals like to tell us that they participated in helping to defeat the Soviet Union and-how-dare-you-suggest-otherwise. And this is partially true. More precisely, it depends on the timeframe. Prior to the late 1960s we did have a species known as a liberal hawk. They were typified by presidents such as Harry Truman and John F Kennedy Jr, by senators such as Henry "Scoop" Jackson, and by philosophers such as Sidney Hook. During this time, many social liberals were staunch anti-communists.

But all this had changed by the early 1970s. Many liberals spent most of the next two decades opposing US efforts to stop the spread of communism, especially in Central America. They began to oppose every weapons system, from strategic weapons such as the MX and B-1 to theater weapons such as cruise missiles and Pershing IIs. There was never a Soviet proposal they didn't like, and rarely one by Reagan that they did. Some, but not all, became anti-anti-communists, more obsessed with opposing the efforts of anti-communists than anything else. It was at this time that some liberals broke with the Democrat party and became Republicans, calling themselves "neo-conservatives." They retained their (what was considered them) social liberalism, but realized that the Democrat party no longer represented their views on foreign policy.

The New Paradigm

The War on Terror has spawned three groups which closely mirror the ones of the Cold War

1) The pro-terrorists
2) The anti-terrorists
3) The anti-anti-terrorists

Let's go through them one at a time.

The Pro-Terrorists

Fortunately, there aren't very many. Unfortunately, when they do rear their heads they aren't always labeled as such.

One example of a pro-terrorist is Lynne Stewart, who was convicted in February 2005 of providing material support to terrorists, defrauding the government and making false statements.

Examples of pro-terrorist groups would be Code Pink, who in December of 2004 donated $600,000 in medical supplies and cash to the terrorist insurgents who were fighting American troops in Fallujah, Iraq." Another is International ANSWER, which is a front group for the communist Workers World Party. The various groups who participated in the June 2005 "International Tribunal", in which the sanctioned the killing of US troops in Iraq, certainly qualify as pro-terrorist(see section I. 11. in the link).

Although they portray themselves as anti-war, they're not. They're pro-terrorist.

Others are more borderline between pro-terrorist and anti-anti-terrorist. One wonders if the people who make up the Christian Peacemaker Teams are pro-terrorist or just naive "useful idiots."

The Anti-Terrorists

You do not have to believe that invading Iraq was a good idea to be an anti-terrorist, so let's get that out of the way right now.

Nor do you have to be a Republican. Democrats such as Senators Joe Lieberman and Joe Biden qualify as anti-terrorists.

However, you do have to think that since we are there we have to win it to qualify. Iraq is now part of the WOT whether anyone likes it or not. Failure to recognize that is crucial.

More importantly, though, is your answer to questions such as these:

What do you spend the balance of your time thinking about: how to win the War on Terror, or how terrible a person you think President Bush is.

Are most of your ideas on how to better interrogate suspects so that we get the information we need, or are you more concerned with protecting their real and imagined civil liberties?

Do you truely believe that we are in a war, or do you think that "the terrorist thing" is something best handled by international agreements and better police work?

Do you think we brought 9-11 on ourselves?

Do you think that the UN can play a useful war in helping to win the War on Terror?

Do you believe that the spread of democracy (which yes I know involves more than just voting) is crucial to defeating the terrorists?

I don't think I need to spell out which answers make you an anti-terrorist and which make you an anti-anti-terrorist.

The Anti-Anti-Terrorists

No anyone who complains about some aspect of how the Bush Administration is fighting the War on Terror is an anti-anti-terrorist. Yes, it is ok to question some of our intelligence-gathering efforts. But re-read the questions above. What do you spend most of your time thinking about; how to capture or kill terrorists, or whether some aspect of your civil rights are being violated? Yes civil rights are important, but if that's what you spend most of your time worrying about you're not being of help in winning the War on Terror.

Representative Jack Murtha is an anti-anti-terrorist. Cindy Sheehan also qualifies. Groups such as Moveon.org and the ALCU certainly seen to spend most of their time thinking of ways to thwart our efforts. For that matter, most of the "anti-war" groups listed on David Horowitz' DiscoverTheNetwork.org are anti-anti-terrorist, if not outright pro.

Worse, though, is when the national media join in. While Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post is capable of some very good reporting, sometimes I have to wonder which side of the WOT he and his newspaper are on, like when he breathtakingly reported what our military was engaged in a campaign to turn Iraqis against al-Zarqawi.

Sorry, but there is a Fifth Column in this country, and they are making it difficult to win.

Posted by Tom at 9:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 12, 2006

The USA Today Story

Note - sorry for my longer than expected absence from blogging. Between losing Bengal and a million other things going on, this is the first day in almost two weeks that I've had to blog)

As everyone knows by now, USA Today tells us that the "NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls"

The whole story smacks of a hit piece. It is less a story than an editorial. If you don't believe me read it yourself.

Once again, the left wants us to be more afraid of our government than the enemy. The reason, of course, that they're afflicted with Bush Derangement Syndrome, and couldn't care less about winning the War on Terror.

The story might not be true. We're supposed to take their word that USA Today checked out their sources, which are conveniently anonymous. Given the record of much of the msm, their word doesn't count for a whole lot.

The Bush Administration hasn't denied the story, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's true. Contrary to the way the left wants us to run this war, yes it is a good idea to keep the enemy guessing and no it is not a good idea to announce all of our operations in the newspapers.

Suppose It's True?

If true, what the NSA is doing is collecting records regarding calls that were made. The NSA has records of calls, local and long distance, they know who you called. The object is to discover patterns in order to track terrorists. They do not, however, record, the content of those communications. They were not listening in. AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth have cooperated with the NSA in this venture. Qwest declined, citing legal concerns.

For the record I hope the story is true. I certainly hope we're doing stuff like this.

Besides, it's perfectly legal.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross goes through the basics over at NRO.

Two possible laws are at issue, Gartenstein-Ross says, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) and the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

FISA first

FISA distinguishes between “electronic surveillance,” which collects the substantive content of electronic communications, and “pen registers,” which collect only the addressing information of electronic communications. Although the language of FISA is somewhat convoluted, information about what calls were being made that doesn’t involve listening in on the discussions themselves should be classified as a pen register rather than electronic surveillance under the statute.

However, the definition of “pen register” in FISA shows that the statute doesn’t regulate the government with respect to the technology at issue here. FISA states that the regulations governing pen registers do not “include any device or process used by a provider or customer of a wire or electronic communication service for billing, or recording as an incident to billing, for communications services provided by such provider.” That is precisely what was alleged in this case: The sources who spoke to USA Today said that the three participating telecommunications companies handed over information that was collected pursuant to their regular billing procedures. FISA does not implicate such action.

Ok, but what about the Fourth Amendment? Gartenstein-Ross points out that in Smith v. Maryland (1978) the Supreme Court held "that government collection of phone numbers called does not violate the Fourth Amendment. The Court reasoned that callers cannot have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in the numbers they dial" From the decision

[W]e doubt that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial. All telephone users realize that they must “convey” phone numbers to the telephone company, since it is through telephone company switching equipment that their calls are completed. All subscribers realize, moreover, that the phone company has facilities for making permanent records of the numbers they dial, for they see a list of their long-distance (toll) calls on their monthly bills. . . .

[E]ven if [a caller] did harbor some subjective expectation that the phone numbers he dialed would remain private, this expectation is not “one that society is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable.’” . . . This Court consistently has held that a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties. . . . [W]hen [a caller] used his phone, [he] voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the telephone company and “exposed” that information to its equipment in the ordinary course of business. In so doing, [the caller] assumed the risk that the company would reveal to police the numbers he dialed.

So much for the claim that the program is illegal.

Questions for Congress

Turns out that the NSA isn't the only ones gathering detailed information about your personal life.

Congresscritters are too. Both Republicans and Democrats. Andrew McCarthy describes what they are doing

Collecting your names and addresses. Mapping out your telephone numbers and e-mail address. Making note of your interests. Paying close attention to how you spend your money.

(Congressmen are) folding these bits of information about you and millions upon millions of your fellow Americans, and—you’d better be sitting down for this part—entering it into searchable databases.

Then, worse yet, (Congressmen are) using sophisticated computer programs to develop targeted strategies about how to deal with you in every aspect of your personal life.

"Modern American politics", McCarthy points out, "requires a fair amount of data mining."

While we're discussing Congress, have you noticed the outrage over how Senator Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) aides gathered private credit information about the GOP candidate for governor in Maryland, Lt. Gov. Michael Steele? About the calls for to investigate Schumer, or for him to resign? Neither had I.

History and More History

Abraham Lincoln suspended habius corpus during The Civil War. Easy to say now that it wasn't right, but he had a war to fight, one that makes our WOT look like childs play.

Are you familiar with FDR's domestic survelience program during World War II? Or that he gave what ammounted to secret orders to the US Navy to fight an undeclared war on German U-Boats well before Pearl Harbor?

It's easy to say now that his internment of Japanese-Americans was unjust, but the invaluable Michelle Malkin showed how it was hardly unwise.

Lastly, Mark Levin points out that the NSA program isn't nearly as intrusive as ECHELON, which has been in place for years, and no one in Congress complains about it.

The bottom line is that that their is nothing illegal or wrong with the alleged NSA data mining operation.

Posted by Tom at 7:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 30, 2006

And We Hate Everyone Else, Too

In my last post I wrote about in his latest diatribe Osama bin Laden effectively supports mass-murder by the government of Sudan.

Courtesy of Waled Phares of The CounterTerrorism Blog, here's a summary of Osama's outburst:

* One a long attack on the Cartoons crisis: Blood is needed to cleanse the matter.

* Two, there is a Western war on Muslims and Islam.

*Three, Western policy towards Hamas proves this aggression.

* Four, the United Nations is an infidel and criminal institution.

* Five, there is a Western-infidel aggression against Muslim Sudan. The Black southerners are bandits and the Darfur Blacks are agents of the infidels

* Six, Iraq’s Jihad is to stop future US military bases

* Seven, a cultural invasion is underway: Arab TVs are to be stopped, Muslim liberals to be killed

* Eight, France is to be punished for the female Hijab affair

* Nine, Bosnia’s Muslims were not salvaged by the West

* Ten, The independence of East Timor is a defeat to the Muslims

* Eleven, India and the Hindus are the enemies in Kashmir

* Twelve, Pakistan’s Musharraf is to be killed

* Thirteen, Russia must be punished

* Fourteen: Salman Rushdie is not to be forgotten

* Fifteen: The masses in the infidel lands think like their leaders. Their public (enemies) is responsible

* Sixteen: Calls for Dialogue with the West are to be rejected

* Seventeen: Do not trust the “traitors” including Muftis and moderate clerics

* Eighteen: King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia ignores world realities

* Nineteen: (Western) civilization is attacking ours

* Twenty: It is of the duty of all members of the Umma to offer everything for Jihad, including their lives.

Did he miss anyone?

The serious point, of course, is that he doesn't seem to have any friends. Yes I am sure that millions of Muslims still thrill at his words. Yes I am sure that Muslims volunteer for al Qaeda. And yes, I know that tomorrow I could wake up to another September 11.

But I think you'd be hard pressed to say that al Qaeda is gaining strength, or that we have not put a serious dent in it's ability to operate.

And this is not just an observation about military or secret operations, clandestine cloak-and-dagger stuff either. I'm talking about geopolitical politics as practiced by people at the highest levels of the Bush Administration. Say what you will, they're shutting down al Qaeda, surely but slowly.

Oh, and please, no nonsense about "why can't we capture the tallest guy in Pakistan/Afghanistan?" I dealt with that here.

You just have to realize that it's not all going to be front-page stuff. Richard Miniter's excellent book Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush is Winning the War on Terror, is a good place to start if you're not familiar withwhat I'm talking about.

Bottom line: bin Laden's got no friends and presides over a gravely weakened organization. They're still dangerous, just as Germany or Japan were in 1944, but we are winning.

Posted by Tom at 9:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Osama bin Laden Supports Genocide in Sudan

In his latest diatribe, released last week, Osama bin Laden put himself on record as supporting mass-murder of Muslims who live in the Sudan.

Walid Phares has the transcript, and even provides the original Arabic, if you're conversant in that language.

Here's bin Laden on the Sudan

"The West tries to seperate the south, attempts to establish an army there, and is supporting (the south) with money and arms and direct them to call for separation from Sudan."

"The US adopted logistical and moral support to this army (SPLA) through its international tools such as the United Nations and pressured the Khartum Government to sign an unjust agreement that allows the south to separate after 6 years."

"Let Bashir (Sudan's President) and Bush know that this agreement has no value whatsoever and does not engage us. No one has to concede any inch of Islamic land and the south will remain an unseparable piece of Islam's land, by Allah, even if wars will continue for decades to come."
...

(Waled Phares: Bin Laden called on the Mujahideen in Sudan and the Arabia Peninsula to prepare for a long war against the Crusader bandits (in Darfur). Our objective is clear, he said:) "It is in defense of Islam, its people, its land, not defending the Khartum Government. We have a great disagreement with this Government: It failed to apply the Sharia and let the south go."

"The (Jihadists) need to scout the area and get ready for fight on the tribal region of Darfur. The rain season is coming forward, which may obstruct movement. Which is why the occupation (Western-UN) postponed its advance for six months. We should take advantage of factor time to provide huge amounts of land mines, snipers and anti-tank launchers. "

In other words, "I'm going to attack the people who are trying to save impoverished Muslims from being mass murdered."

What a guy.

Austin Bay points out that for a guy who claims to fight in the name of Islam, he sure wants to kill a lot of Muslims:

Muslims, however, remain bin Laden's biggest enemy, perhaps not in theory and propaganda, but certainly in the flesh-and-blood world of murder and human massacre. Bin Laden, al-Qaida and its various affiliates have killed more Muslims than any other religious group, and Darfur is an example.

Since early 2003, nearly 200,000 people have died in the Sudan government's war with Darfur rebels. The Sudan government backs a variety of Islamist militias, many of them operating on horseback or in wheeled "technical vehicles" armed with light machine guns and rocket launchers. Darfur's rebels are a mixed bag of farmers, villagers and pastoralists. The rebels are also an ethnic mishmash, though most of them are black Africans. For the most part, they are Muslims, however, with a leavening of tribal animists.

This reminds of of the class on the French Revolution that I took in college. I remember most clearly the day the professor pointed out that once the monarchy had been overthrown, the revolutionaries quickly turned on each other. The Jacobins went after and murdered their political opponents, mostly the Girondists.

The wolves devour each other.

Ok, so Osama hasn't succeeded in overthrowing anyone. But you get my point.

And, to be sure, he isn't on the side of the government. As he says, "Let Bashir (Sudan's President) and Bush know that this agreement has no value whatsoever and does not engage us." The reason for this is that Osama lived in Sudan for many years, with the approval of it's government, and was expelled by that government in 1996 (after President Clinton turned down an offer by "Bashir" to hand him over to us).

A Bit of Background

The United States and the UK have been trying for several years now to put an end to the near-genocide that has been going on in the Sudan. Simply put, the government in the northern capital city of Khartoum is engaged in it's second mass-murder campaign.

Sudan gained its independence from Great Britain in 1956. The country has been rocked by civil wars. The first, an ethnic conflict between northern Arab Muslims and southern Christians and Animists, lasted from 1956 to 1972. This war ended with the south winning the right to self-government. The second civil war, again between the government backed forces and southern rebels, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), began in 1983. In January of 2005, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and the government in Khartoum reached an agreement to end the war and reform the government and structure of the military. The third civil war started in 2003 as a rebellion in the western province of Darfur. As in the first two wars, the fighting is between northern Arab Muslims and southern Christians and Animists, although the government maintains that the Janjaweed, the Arab militias actively involved, are not operating with government aid or approval. The discovery of oil in the south, and property rights and religious and ethnic race-hatred remain primary causes for the oppression of primarily black Christians and traditional Animists in both the southern portions of Sudan and in Darfur.

The government has committed terrible attrocities in all of the above wars. Directly or indirectly, it is engaged in mass-murder.

And Osama is effectively on the side of the murderers.

Posted by Tom at 8:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 28, 2006

The Zarqawi Video

The insane man who is responsible for murdering thousands of Iraqis, Americans, and other coalition troops released a video last Tuesday. From the CENTCOm website

A man identifying himself as Al-Qaeda's Iraq frontman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi appeared in an Internet video on Tuesday in what would be the first public appearance of one world's most wanted militants in at least three years.

"By God, America will be defeated in Iraq," said the man identified as Zarqawi.

Not so fast, buster.

A complete transcript of the video can be found on the CENTCOM website here. Bty, you really ought to bookmark the site and make it part of your regular reading. You can also sign up to receive their email bulletins, which is how I found out about the video transcript.

I'm not going to try and analyze it myself, as I haven't got the time.

Here's Waled Phares of The Counterterrorism Blog. He makes 7 observations regarding the video. Read the whole thing, but here are two

4. A third assertion is to blast the Sunni politicians who "ventured" into supporting the current Parliament, Government and Armed forces. Those "Sunnis" are the internal enemies of Zarqawi, for they have shifted the community into the Iraqi political process by accepting to integrate the various layers of Government. In his eyes, these politicians, including the speaker of the assembly, a Sunni, are obstructing his plans, and therefore his leadership.

5. A fourth assertion is about the other "insurgents." Few weeks ago, the chat rooms aired a number of releases from the "al Qiyada al Muwahhada lil Muwqawama." The "Unified Leadership of the Resistance" is a federation of other Jihadists and insurgents. They have rejected the extreme behavior of Zarqawi, especially the violence against Shiites and Iraqi civilians. At the time, observers in the West thought this was a rejection of Zarqawi as a leader of al Qaida. In fact this was a move by other Jihadists to distance themselves from the misdeeds of al Qaida-Iraq. The "Leadership" didn't criticize Bin Laden per se, but said Zarqawi is deflecting energies by waging an indiscriminate religious war (takfiri) against the Shiites.

Looks like there's some dissention in the ranks. This is no huge surprise. The letter we intercepted last summer (and released in October) from OBL's deputo Al-Zawahiri's to al-Zarqawi showed dissatisfaction with the way the latter was running the campaign in Iraq.

Bill Roggio analyzes the military and propaganda messages in the video. Roggio has moved to The CounterTerrorism Blog, so reset your bookmarks. Among his points

1) MANPADS. First and foremost, as Evan Kohlmann has noted, some of the terrorists standing guard during the scene in the desert are brandishing shoulder-fired surface to air missiles (MANPADS). While this indicates al-Qaeda in Iraq has this capability, very few Coalition aircraft have been shot down in Iraq. The likelihood here is Zarqawi's 'command element' has top priority in fielding these weapons systems. ...

5) The briefing. Zarqawi goes a long way to show he is the military planner and tactical commander. He pours over maps with four other masked terrorists. In one section of the tape, he appears to be pointing at the region around the city of Kirkuk. But remember that this scene, as all the others, were planned through in advance. Zarqawi knows U.S. intelligence will be thoroughly dissecting this tape, and may want to through the Coalition off of his scent.

Again, it seems as if Zarqawi is worried that he's losing control, or at least the confidence, of his fellow terrorists.

Douglas Farah, on the other hand, believes that it and and the latest bin Laden Tape Show Growing al Qaeda Propaganda Strength

What is interesting about the new bin Laden and Zarqawi tapes, besides some of the analysis done by my colleagues on the Counterterrorism Blog, is the fact that al Qaeda has grown increasingly adept at getting its propaganda videos quickly enough to be relevant to current events. This is new, and shows increased capacity and increased interest in keeping their message out in front, even it it may hint at internal problems.

Andrew Cochran, however, notes that while propaganda is all very fine and good, it is no substitute for battlefield victories. I hate to say it, but the VC and NVA didn't win any substantial victories against us in Vietnam, but they beat us in the end anyway. Victory is determined by achieving your political goals, which may or may not be achieved by tactical battlefield successes.

A story in todays Washington Times quoting an Arizona State University study shows that the jihadists propaganda very seriously as a weapon

The report found that jihadist operations use consistent patterns of outreach that establish them socially and religiously, generate public sympathy and intimidate opponents. Threats, in fact, are part of terrorist "talking points."

"Jihadis pursue these strategies using sophisticated, modern methods of communications and public relations," Mr. Corman said. "There's evidence in the documents that jihadis segment audiences and adapt their message to the audience."

Meanwhile, the always valuable StrategyPage believes that it shows that al Qaeda is on the verge of defeat.

Trends are often difficult to make out in this murky conflict, but the recent release of an audio message from Osama bin Laden on April 23rd, and a few days later, a rare video from Abu Musab al Zarqawi delivered the same message. Both sent out signals that failed to connect. Bin Laden urged his followers to go to Sudan and Israel and support the fight against Jews and Christian "crusaders." In Sudan, bin Laden was offering his services to kill Western peacekeepers that have not yet shown up in western Sudan (Darfur), where northern (largely Arab) Sudanese Moslems are killing southern (largely black African) Sudanese Moslems. Islamic radicals in Palestine (Hamas) and Sudan (the government) promptly and publicly rejected bin Laden's offer. This is a visible, to Western eyes, example of how Bin Laden's vision, of using Islamic terror to accomplish anything, has been discredited in the Islamic world. This shift in opinion was played out in Moslem media over the last three years, as Islamic terrorism was applied to Islamic populations in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The end result was that Islamic terrorism was no longer fashionable. Bin Laden is still something of a folk hero, but in the same iconic way that Che Guevara on a t-shirt or poster is. Ignored, but not forgotten. Bin Laden wannabe Abu Musab al Zarqawi followed with a video, where he urged Iraqi Sunni Arabs to buck up and get on with the war against "foreign occupiers" and the blasphemous (elected) government of Iraq. Zarqawi was basically pleading for the Iraqi Sunni Arabs to stop joining the government. This reflects the shift in Sunni Arab attitudes, against al Qaeda, in the last year. In an attempt to preserve it as a viable movement, Zarqawi has been demoted from commander of al Qaeda in Iraq, to figurehead and pitch man.

Their conclusion is that

No amount of hot air and spin will change the fact that al Qaeda has accomplished none of its goals, and has gotten lots of Moslems killed in the process.

Al Qaeda may not be destroyed, but they are defeated. Bin Laden and Zarqawi just said so.

This is true. The insurgency in Iraq we've been fighting is not the danger anymore. The new danger is these militias, mainly the Sadr and Badr armies. My prediction is the in the next phase we will concentrate on taking them down. This will start once the new government is consolidated. Stay tuned, because I've got a post planned on the phases of the war and where we are now.

Lastly, retired General John Keane has visited Iraq several times and believes that the insurgency is considerably weaker

"I think the insurgency is considerably weaker in one very large respect and its the most important respect. It doesn't enjoy the same support of the people it once had. The people are reaching for democracy and they do not support the insurgents. The majority of the Sunnis is what I'm talking about."

The Key to Success

The key to success has shifted from the military to the political. No great insight there, I realize, but it needs to be said. Last week Iraq achieved a great success with the formation of a new government. Much still needs to be done, such as assigning cabinet posts, resolving constitutional issues left hanging, and getting the resolved constitution approved by the people in a vote. But we can only take it one step at a time.

Posted by Tom at 8:45 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 23, 2006

Osama bin Laden's Latest Diatribe

Earlier today, Osama bin Laden issued his latest series of threats against the West. it was carried, predictably, on al Jazeera

In the recording, aired on Sunday, the al-Qaeda leader said the isolation and cutting off of aid to the Hamas-led Palestinian government reaffirmed that the West was at war with the Islamic nation.

"The blockade which the West is imposing on the government of Hamas proves that there is a Zionist crusaders war on Islam," he said.

"Zionist-Crusaders" again, eh? Time to check out the Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) again, I think.

Anyway.

Waled Phares, writing at the CounterTerrorism Blog summarizes OBL's main points

1. Hamas: Despite the fact that we (including Ayman Zawahiri) warned (Muslim Palestinians) not to take part in elections in general, the victory of Hamas shows that there is a "Crusader Zionist War against Islam." Cutting foreign aid to the Palestinians because of Hamas victory proves that war.

2. The public (in the West and the US), despite our warnings, continues to reelect these Governments, pay taxes to these Governments, and send their children to fight against us. They (civilians) are therefore part of the war against us. They are responsible for any harm that would be caused to them.

3. Sudan: The Bashir Government is failing in stopping the Crusader War in Sudan. The Crusaders (Britain) has pushed the southerners (Blacks) to separate. The US has armed them and is supporting them. And now, because of tribal tensions in Darfour, the Crusaders are planning on intervening there. We are calling on the Jihadists to fight them in Darfour and Southern Sudan.

4. Long War: We're calling on all Jihadists, particularly in Sudan and the Arabian Peninsula to prepare themselves for a long war.

5. Danish Cartoons: We are asking the Danish Government to remit the Cartoonists to al Qaida.

6. Saudis: We criticize the Saudi Monarch for refuting the idea of Clash of civilization. There is a clash led by the West against Islam.

7. Arab Liberals: Jihadists must silence the Arab and Muslim liberals. (A list has been established, but it wasn't aired).

8. Education: We warn from any change that would affect the educational curriculum in the Arab and Muslim world.

9. Arab TV: We warn against those TV stations airing into the region and propagating Crusader propaganda.

10: Truce: We offered a truce to the West (US and Europe) but their public refused to accept it. They will only blame themselves.

He promises a complete analysis, but that is not up as of this posting.

All good stuff, as Dr Phares' analyses usually are. TigerHawk asks why OBL didn't talk about Iraq. Good question

Less than 2 1/2 years ago, al Qaeda broke the news to the Taliban that it was diverting resources to Iraq so as to humiliate the American "Crusaders."

All this was on the orders of bin Laden himself, the sources said. Why? Because the terror chieftain and his top lieutenants see a great opportunity for killing Americans and their allies in Iraq and neighboring countries such as Turkey, according to Taliban sources who complain that their own movement will suffer... Bin Laden believes that Iraq is becoming the perfect battlefield to fight the “American crusaders” and that the Iraqi insurgency has been “100 percent successful so far,” according to a Taliban participant at the mid-November meeting who goes by the nom de guerre Sharafullah.

Al Qaeda drew a line in the sands of the Sunni Triangle, and the United States Army and Marines walked right across it. First, al Qaeda tried to kill Americans, per bin Laden's orders. It largely failed. Then al Qaeda went after America's allies, and succeeded only in turning public opinion against itself in every Muslim country it attacked. After thirty months of battlefield defeats and political embarrassments, bin Laden won't even mention Iraq in one of his rare public utterances, and he rallies his troops to fight a war where American soldiers aren't. How humiliating. How delightful.

Al Qaeda has lost in Iraq, and bin Laden is desperate to change the subject. He and his organization are at grave risk of being discredited, and when that happens it will be much harder for al Qaeda to attract recruits, raise money, or deal with governments.

But Why Can't We Get Him?

I heard this today from a lady at my part time job. On Sunday's I work at an electronic retail store, and we usually have Fox News on the TV. We were watching the news of OBL's latest and she asked the obvious.

"Since we know he's in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region, why can't we get him?"

Just for the record I avoid discussing politics at work, especially with customers. But I figured I could answer this one without betraying my political sympathies. What I told her went something like this.

We are caught in a Catch-22. When Pakistan was formed in the late 40s and early 50s, it's new government realized that it couldn't control this mountainous region. So it made a deal with the local tribes; you don't make trouble for us and we'll grant you de facto autonomy. They agreed, and a deal was struck. All off the record, of course.

The current president/dictator of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, is in a somewhat precarious position. While his position is pretty solid, it is also fragile. He has been the target of four(?) assassaination attempts already. His enemies are radical Islamists, and there are many of them in Pakistan, and particulary in their security services. In other words, he needs to tread carefully.

So flooding the border region with US troops will create much angst and will likely destabilize the country. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. The last thing we want are these weapons in the hands of Islamic fanatics.

The bottom line is that it is a difficult situation, and if you hear anyone make trite remarks like "why can't we catch the tallest man in Pakistan(or whereever)", you can be sure you're dealing with someone afflicted with Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Posted by Tom at 10:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 8, 2006

The US of Islam

Check out this map from an Islamofascist web site that NRO contributor Cliff May linked to today:

Kind of puts things in perspective, doesn't it?

Update

Go to Red Hot Cuppa Politics, where FrauBudgie has the inside story on this map and the group behind it.

Posted by Tom at 10:00 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 21, 2006

"Stand Up for Denmark!"

Wednesday Update at Bottom - Meet this Friday at Noon

Hitch says we ought to stand up for Denmark by joining him at the Danish Embassy in Washington DC

The incredible thing about the ongoing Kristallnacht against Denmark (and in some places, against the embassies and citizens of any Scandinavian or even European Union nation) is that it has resulted in, not opprobrium for the religion that perpetrates and excuses it, but increased respectability! A small democratic country with an open society, a system of confessional pluralism, and a free press has been subjected to a fantastic, incredible, organized campaign of lies and hatred and violence, extending to one of the gravest imaginable breaches of international law and civility: the violation of diplomatic immunity. And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let's be sure we haven't hurt the vandals' feelings.

Ah yes, feelings.

But words are not enough. Hitchens issues a call to action

Surely here is a case that can be taken up by those who worry that America is too casual and arrogant with its allies. I feel terrible that I have taken so long to get around to this, but I wonder if anyone might feel like joining me in gathering outside the Danish Embassy in Washington, in a quiet and composed manner, to affirm some elementary friendship. Those who like the idea might contact me at christopher.hitchens@yahoo.com, and those who live in other cities with Danish consulates might wish to initiate a stand for decency on their own account.

I sent him an email, and if my schedule allows I'll join him and anyone else who shows. I don't know what day and time he has in mind so this might not work out. But I'm going to try.

If you live anywhere near the Washington DC area I strongly encourage you to consider attending. Freedom must be defended.

Even if you live elsewhere in the country, there may be a Danish Consulate in your town or city.

Stay Tuned

I've got a post planned on the subject of activisim. In the past year or so I've done things I never before thought I'd do, from becoming active in political campaigns to traipsing around holding signs and counter-protesting the left. I am fortunate to live near Washington DC, where there are many opportunities for action.

But I've noticed that on some of my posts, like the one where we chased Code Pink off of their corners outside of Walter Reed, or where we acted as "human shields", symbolically protecting the Danish Embassy in Washington DC, that I get comments like "I wish I lived near you". I've also seen this on FreeRepublic posts.

I understand that I've got more opportunities. But my guess is there's more going on in your area than you realize, and on Wednesday I'm going to post some ideas on how you can get involved, and how to make contacts and all that.

Update, Feb. 22: Thank you all who've written. Please be outside the Embassy of Denmark, 3200 Whitehaven Street (off Massachusetts Avenue) between noon and 1 p.m. this Friday, Feb. 24. Quietness and calm are the necessities, plus cheerful conversation. Danish flags are good, or posters reading "Stand By Denmark" and any variation on this theme (such as "Buy Carlsberg/ Havarti/ Lego") The response has been astonishing and I know that the Danes are appreciative. But they are an embassy and thus do not of course endorse or comment on any demonstration. Let us hope, however, to set a precedent for other cities and countries. Please pass on this message to friends and colleagues.

Unfortunately I can't make it. I was hoping for a Saturday, but obviously it's easier for most people to simply take a long lunch than to drive in on the weekend. But if you do live in the DC area, please consider attending.

Posted by Tom at 11:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 8, 2006

Will Europe Wake Up?

I'm wondering if much of Western Europe will soon wake up from their current slumber. Consider what's happened these past three years:

1. Theo van Gogh murdered by a Muslim terrorist
2. Dutch politicians such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, forced to go into hiding or live under police protection after threats by Muslim extremists
3. The Madrid metro bombed by Al Qaeda
4. The London subways bombed by Al Qaeda
5. Riots in France by Muslim immigrants
6. The current "cartoon infidata"

Europeans have reacted in various ways to each of the above. The Spanish reacted by attempting to appease the terrorists. The French pretended they didn't have a problem. But it seems to me that there is a growing recognition on the other side of the pond that they face a real danger. I believe that the current rioting over the cartoons published six months ago in Danish newspapers might prove to be the last straw.

Why not Appease Them?

The reaction to the current rioting hasn't been completely solid. A few newspapers in France and Germany have republished the caroons to show their committment to freedom of the press. In the United States, the only one to do was is the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of the Washington Times, says that four reasons are usually provided by those who advise against reprinting the cartoons:

1) just because one has the right to speak doesn't mean one must;

2) restraint is often exercised, particularly when being respectful of other religions or cultures;

3) tensions are particularly high among Muslims now;

4) only a madman, or, if there is a difference, those who want to instigate the "clash of civilizations" would pour gasoline on that already raging fire.

This seems to make sense on the surface, but as he points out "That argument would be not only plausible, but persuasive, if the cause of the violent Muslim reaction to the cartoons was merely a transitory phenomenon -- a brief, spontaneous, bizarre overreaction."

Exactly.

It's not a "Double Standard"

Blankley points to a Muslim who sees exactly what the danger is:

Hirsi Ali, the black, Muslim, female co-producer of assassinated Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, talked about Western journalists to Der Spiegel this week, while in hiding: "They probably feel numb. On the one hand, a voice in their heads is encouraging them not to sell out their freedom of speech. At the same time, they're experiencing the shocking sensation of what it's like to lose your own personal freedom. One mustn't forget that they're part of the postwar generation, and that all they've experienced is peace and prosperity. And now they suddenly have to fight for their own human rights once again."

"The [Islamists] call Jews and Christians inferior, and we say they're just exercising their freedom of speech... Islamists don't allow their critics the same rights... After the West prostrates itself, the [Islamists] will be more than happy to say that Allah has made the infidels spineless."

The point is that when people say the Muslims "have a double standard", they are missing the point. To the Muslims it isn't a double standad; they believe that sharia law should rule the world. Christianity, Judaism, and all other religions are to be subjugated to Islam. Everyone but Muslims get second-class status. Western democracy is to be subverted and eventually overthrown.

No not all Muslims think this way. Yes I know that many or even most Muslims are good decent people. But if that's where you end you are missing the boat, because it doesn't take a majority to decide matters, just a determined minority. Just ask Lenin.

The Washington Times agrees, and points out that the Muslims who object to the Danish cartoons stirring up riots are not interested in our "tolerance", but rather

They wanted to create a groundswell of discontent among Muslims in Europe, put pressure on Denmark -- and other nations -- to abide by sharia law and to build a sympathetic base for further terrorist attacks. The placards of British Muslims, demanding more "7/7s," a reference to the London subway bombings on July 7, went straight to the point of the clerics' Middle East tour. This was an exercise in agitprop to further the goals of Islamofascism, and it worked

What We Must Do

What we must not do is blather on about "now is the time for restraint by the press", or "with freedom of the press comes responsibility". Yes yes we know all that. But what we must do is react strongly to reassure newspapers that what they need not fear intimidation by murderous fanatics.

We can't do it alone, we need our European friends to help us out. But we are all in this together, and it is my hope, and cautious prediction, that (most of) the Europeans will finally see the light. The Times points out that

An awakened Europe, after all, is exactly what the United States has been waiting for -- reinforcements in the war against the terrorists

.

Of course, it's not really a desire for "more troops" to help us fight, or at least that's not all of it. As much as we've had policy differences with some Europeans over the years, between the lot of us we are still the best the world has to offer, and we'd best preserve our nations and our cultures.

Posted by Tom at 9:50 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 6, 2006

With Men Such as These... II

Explain this if the war in Iraq is going so poorly:

"I've only met two kinds of soldiers in the combat arms community: Those who have served in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, and those who are pulling every bureaucratic string to get deployed there.

"I spent the summer of 2004 with a group of Marines in Niger and sub-Saharan Africa, and every Marine in that platoon was trying to get to Iraq. A few months later, one of them got lucky and ended up leading Iraqi forces into combat in the second battle of Fallujah. He was a sergeant from Georgia, and after the battle, he sent me a long e-mail flush with pride. And that's not just a cutesy-pie story -- that's basically what I encounter all the time. ...

"Soldiers are very aware of why they're fighting -- and that awareness stems from their own practical day-to-day experience, which is not killing people. By and large, they're rebuilding, patrolling, and helping the Iraqi people."

-- Robert Kaplan, author of "Imperial Grunts," interviewed in the January/February issue of the American Enterprise (excerpted in today's Washington Times)

Further, as Marc at USS Neverdock reports, the Army exceeded it's reenlistment goals for 2005.

As Kaplan reports, the troops are by and large quite proud of their service in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. While we so often hear about how we are simply "creating more terrorists" by our actions in Iraq, or because of various administration policies, the determination of US troops must give the terrorists pause.

All too often the news media forgets that the other side has troubles of it's own. If you only read the press, you could be excused for thinking that things were going swimmingly for the insurgents in Iraq, and for al Qaeda in general. Osama bin Laden, after all, is still on the loose.

But as Al-Zawahiri's letter to al-Zarqawi, intercepted last summer, showed, the insurgents are deeply concerned that they are the ones who are loosing. One reason for this is that no matter what mayhem they cause, those darned Americans just won't give up.

This reminds me of an incident last summer that occured in Afghanistan regarding Seal Recon Team 3.

Four US Navy Seals, on patrol in a remote mountanous region of Afghanistan, ran into a large number of Taliban. In the ensuing firefight, three of the Seals were killed. One survived, evading superior numbers while escaping their grasp. He was later rescued by US forces rushed to the region.

At the time this occured, Wretchard, writing at Belmont Club, reflected on how our enemy must have preceived our determination:

Sixteen more Special Operations soldiers died in an attempt to reinforce the recon team when their MH-47 was shot down. The US response to the loss of the recon team was not to run but insert hundreds of troops into the area to find the missing men and possibly to complete the unfinished mission. The Al Qaeda might ask themselves what manner of men these are, who fight to the death rather than surrender, and who though injured evade over high and cold mountains until they have outdistanced their unwounded pursuers. It's not an idle question. One of Osama Bin Laden's strategic assumptions when he wrote contemptuously of the US in his 1996 fatwa was that he was facing cowards.

What manner of men indeed? Those who do not give up until the fight is won. Those who understand that there will always be setbacks in war, but who does not let this deter them.

It has always struck me as rather odd, that while those who face danger directly perform so heroically, and are so determined to finish the job, that all too many here safe at home want to give up.

So on the home front it is our duty to support the troops by whatever means possible, private and public. As individuals we should contribue to one or more organizations that directly help them. On the sidebar of this blog you'll see a section titled "Helping the Troops". If you're not already doing so, I encourage you to go through them, and contribute in some way.

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November 7, 2005

Who'd a Thunk It?

Another great story in today's Washington Times. Here's the headline:

Recruits join armed forces seeking war

Well who'd a thunk it?

Not from reading most of the news you wouldn't. I can't even take most of Fox News these days. Most of the time they're off chasing whatever young white girl has gone missing recently.

Back to the story:

Going to war, more than job opportunities and money for college, is the post-September 11 allure for joining the armed services, military officials say. And, in a trend that bewilders and dismays those opposed to the war in Iraq, enlistment numbers are up and recruiting goals are mostly being met or exceeded.

"There is a sort of vendetta because of 9/11," says Staff Sgt. Jose Guerreiro, a senior drill instructor at Parris Island.

"Some recruits have even had family members killed in Iraq. We tell them chances are they'll be going," the sergeant said. "We explain to them that not everybody's going to be kicking down doors up front, but they know combat is likely for all Marines."

My heavens you have to love 'em.

If I wasn't so damn old I'd join up myself. When I was young enough to sign up, I was too stupid and off doing things I oughtn't to have been doing. But if I lived life regretting things I didn't do when I should have I'd go nuts. But I've gotten off topic, and it's time to go back to the story.

What strikes me is the statement by the sergeant about a "vendetta because of 9/11". One, we are so often told by the msm that because there is no proof that Saddam was involved in 9/11(and he probably wasn't), the war in Iraq has nothing to do with the War on Terror. Further, liberals often trot out some survey which purportedly shows that some high percentage of Americans believe that Saddam was involved in 9/11, then we are instructed that this is due to the lies of the Bush administration... and it's here we go again with the same old tired mantra.

Second, many of the young men and women signing up must be in the 18-20 year age bracket. That means that they were 14-16 when 9/11 occured. And this in turn tells me that we have an awefully bunch of astute and smart young people in this country.

But if I may toot my own horn I knew this already. For anyone who is exasperated with the stories of young people doing wrong, I'd say you simply don't know where to look. Some years ago I discovered just where to look, and that place is as close as your local church.

I told you about my latest experience working with young people when I went on the mission trip to Scotland a few months ago. What I don't think I told you is that over the past 5 or 6 years I've been on other such trips and everytime I am impressed. (P.S. yes I know kids are on their best behavior around adults and all that but nevertheless I saw some amazing things)

I'll leave you with another quote from the article, about how recruitment goals are being met:

The military's numbers seem to back him up for the active-duty services, although the Reserves and National Guard units are having more trouble attracting new recruits.

For four out of the past five years, the Army has exceeded its goal for active-duty recruits, while regularly increasing the number desired. Fiscal 2005, which ended Sept. 30, was the first year it fell short, getting 92 percent of its 80,000 goal.

The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps have all met or exceeded their annual recruiting goals for every year since September 11, although some monthly and quarterly shortfalls have occurred.

For 2005, for example, the Air Force exceeded its active recruiting goal of 18,900 new airmen by 322; the Navy topped its goal of 37,635 recruits by 68; and the Marines exceeded their 32,917 target by 44.

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September 7, 2005

The Question of Political Identity and Values

in The War On Terror

David Frum asks "Who Are We?" in the most September 12 print edition of National Review (digital subscription required to view it online).

The questions references the age-old political question of Identity: "Who am I as a political creature?" In the Middle Ages this question might have been answered with reference to nobility, clergy, whether one was a merchant or serf, Christian or Muslim. In the early years of our nation one might have said "Virginian" first, "American" second. In the past few hundred years, we in the West we have come to see ourselves in terms of nationhood. Seeing ourselves as citizens of a particular nation is stronger in the United States or Australia, weaker in western Europe, so it varies by locale. Either way, Westerners see themselves as members of a political entitiy, as opposed to most Muslims, for example, who see themselves more in terms of their religion.

Frum is interested in the question the question of nationhood poses,and puts it in terms of "common values". Political scientists distinguish between a "state", which is political entity, and a "nation". Wikopedia has as good a definition as any, and tells us that the members of a nation

...are distinguished by a common identity, and almost always by a common origin, in the sense of ancestry, parentage or descent. The national identity refers both to the distinguishing features of the group, and to the individual’s sense of belonging to it.

The key in this is "identity". One way individuals may be said to have a common identity is to hold certain values in common.

And it is just this that worries David Frum.

The Enemy Within

The War on Terror (a poor term, but let that pass) has more in common with the Cold War than any other that we have fought, in that if we are to win then a critical mass of our citizens must not only believe that the war is worth fighting and winning, but must understand that it is in part (even primarily) a war of values, and that our values are superior.

During the Cold War we had a fifth column within the west that fortunately never reached this critical mass. But, contrary to the claims of some revisionist liberals today, it was a near-run thing. Perhaps the critical juncture was in the early '80s when we determined to meet the Soviet SS-20 threat with GLCMs and Pershing IIs. If the anti-nuclear left had prevented their installation, the Cold War might still be in progress.

Frum worries that we face the same problem today. The situation in America is no small matter, but it's Tony Blair and the UK that really worries him.

At the Labour party’s national conference nine days after the first London bombing, British prime minister Tony Blair offered a powerful and memorable answer: “The spirit of our age is one in which the prejudices of the past are put behind us, where our diversity is our strength. It is this which is under attack. Moderates are not moderate through weakness but through strength. Now is the time to show it in defense of our common values.”

Sounds good, right? But as Frum demonstrates, when you dig beneath the surface of those fine words, you find...nothing.

A Nearly Extinct Species

In the US, as in Europe, you used to be able to find a species known as the "liberal hawk". Leaders such as Harry Truman, LBJ, and Henry "Scoop" Jackson, were once common. Ditto for Europe. Frum describes Blair's thinking:

Tony Blair was the original liberal hawk, albeit one endowed with rather more staying power than most of the breed. Still, you can catch a continuing echo of the Old Labour way of thinking in his July 16 speech to the Labour-party conference: They believe in the global caliphate; we believe in . . . diversity, which is to say, in everything, which is again to say, in nothing. That’s why Blair refers to “our common values” without dropping any hint as to what those values might be. To name them would be to exclude others, and to exclude things is to acknowledge limits to our diversity.

Ah, "diversity", that new god to whom the left prays, and the rest of us are force to acknowledge, lest our HR department find out our true opinions.

The Paradox of "Diversity"

To believe in "diversity", and it's twin "multiculturalism", is to believe that all cultures are worthy of respect. Fine if you're dealing with Episcopalians vs Catholics vs Jews vs aethists, but what happens when you throw radical Islam into the mix?

Chaos, thats what.

As Frum relates, Britons today face an insane situation whereby in the name of "diversity"

...imported brutalities have begun to occur under the jurisdiction of Western police and Western courts: “honor killings,” forced marriages, and the below-the-horizon pressure for the tacit legal recognition of polygamy. Britain’s Inland Revenue acknowledged in December 2004 that it was considering legal changes that would permit a husband to divide his estate tax-free among more than one wife. In at least one U.K. case (A-M v. A-M, 2001), British courts have held that polygamous marriages contracted outside Britain could be recognized as valid by British authorities. Although it remains a crime in Britain to enter into a second marriage before the first is dissolved, senior Muslim officials estimate that up to 4,000 British Muslim men have multiple wives. And one British Muslim group plans to launch a challenge to British marriage laws before the European Court of Human Rights.

What's a good multiculturalist to do? On the one hand, multiculturalism dicates "...that immigrants, and others, should preserve their cultures with the different cultures interacting peacefully within one nation." (Wikopedia) On the other, Islamic culture is in many instances directly contradicts western values.

Lets take a minute to define matters. "Tolerance", if one means by it a societal agreement not to persecute others because of their race, sex, religion, excetera, then I'm all for it. Tolerance is then one of the hallmarks of western civilization. But that's not what we're talking about here.

We are talking about whether we have the desire to defend ourselves. Do we have what it takes to say to Muslim immigrants "sorry, but that's not acceptable here. Change or move back to where you came from."

Do We have What it Takes?

George W Bush does. Most Americans do, too. Many Democrats get it, although those on the left certainy don't

And unfortunately, Tony Blair probably doesn't either. As John O'Sullivan observes in the Aug 29 edition of NR (digital subscription only), "One senses that Blair, underneath his public mask of self-confident leadership, is baffled by the scope and nature of the problems of domestic and imported radical Islamism facing him."

Blair understands WMD, and the necessity of a strong relationship with the US, I'll give him that. But he can't understand how anyone cannot but fail to love his new "multicultural" UK.

Frum tells of what happens when we refuse to defend ourselves:

The Islamic extremists accuse the West of lacking any sexual morality. Indeed, the alleged immorality of the West — the indecent liberty of women, the lewd explicitness of entertainment — is one of the principal grievances of Islamic radicals in the West. (One of the perpetrators of the second London bombing, Somali-born Yasin Hassan Omar, was also offended that alcohol was sold in Western cities in violation of Islamic law.) They think: The West believes in nothing but personal whim. Anything goes! And those Westerners who draw comparisons between Islamic extremists and defenders of traditional marriage — don’t they think just the same thing? Yes! We believe in nothing but personal — well, not whim, that sounds . . . whimsical — but choice. Anything goes!

Far too many in the west simply have not recognized that there is a significant number of Muslim immigrants who see "diversity" as a sin. While only a small number become terrorists, it is the number who turn their eyes from the radicals, or who even shield them, that should be our concern.

Frum summarizes the situation in Europe:

National survival in the age of terror is not just a matter of intelligence operations and security measures. It’s not just a job for armies and police. National survival depends on the willingness and ability of the targets of terrorism to assert and defend a national identity: an identity that is more than a catalogue of self-doubts and self-criticisms, an identity that is more than a statement of disagreements and diversities — an identity that can say, in English, in French, in German, on behalf of the nations of the Atlantic community on both sides of the ocean, This is who we are — and we are prepared to fight for it

.

NEXT: Our Shared Western Values

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July 21, 2005

God Bless John Howard

Australian Prime Minister John Howard gave what is possibly the most devastating answer to a stupid question by a moonbat reporter that I have ever seen (hat tip NRO):

Question:

To both Prime Ministers, what was your immediate reaction on hearing that some incidents had occurred, was it here we go again? And do incidents like this, coming just 14 days after the horrific attacks, suggest that the war against terror is being lost on the streets? And yesterday an Australian bomb victim of July 7 linked the bombings to Iraq. Does that suggest that the propaganda war against terrorists is also being lost?

Mr Howard:

Could I start by saying the Prime Minister and I were having a discussion when we heard about it, and my first reaction was to get some more information, and I really don't want to add to what the Prime Minister has said. It is a matter for the police and a matter for the British authorities to talk in detail about what has happened here. Could I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government, and indeed the policies of the British and American government on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it has given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.

Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq; and could I remind you that the 11 September occurred before the operation in Iraq; can I also remind you that the very first occasion that Bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor.

Are people, by implication, suggesting that we shouldn't have done that? When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on 7 July, they talked about British policy, not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn't be in Afghanistan?

When Sergio de Melo was murdered in Iraq, a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, immensely respected for his work in the United Nations, when al Queda gloated about that they referred specifically to the role that de Melo had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations administrator in East Timor. Now I don't know the mind of the terrorist, by definition you can't put yourself in the mind of a successful suicide bomber, I can only look at objective facts, and the objective facts are as I have cited. The objective evidence is that Australia was a terrorist target long before the operation in Iraq, and indeed all the evidence, as distinct from the suppositions, suggest to me that this is about hatred of a way of life, this is about the perverted use of the principles of a great world religion that at its root preaches peace and cooperation, and I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances, rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder.

Take that, you leftie apologists.

Trey Jackson has the video here. It's a must-see.

Posted by Tom at 10:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 14, 2005

Shocked, Shocked!

So Tony Blair is shocked, shocked! that the London terrorists were indiginous and did not come into the country especially for that purpose, as did the 9/11 hijackers(hat tip NRO)

Tony Blair said it is "shocking" that the four suspected London suicide bombers are believed to be home-grown terrorists.

The Prime Minister told the Commons during PMQs that it was "shocking that they were brought up in this country".

Unbelieveable. Anyone who has followed events in the UK knows that the Islamists are tolerated there, all in the name of "tolerance" and "multiculturalism." The left is so absorbed in the idea the greviances of all minority groups are automatically valid that they can't see hate when it's staring them in the face.

But on the other side of the pond they can't figure it out:

The four suspects in the London suicide bombings were young men who had lived outwardly normal lives in the northern English city of Leeds.

That leaves police, politicians, Britain's 1.7 million Muslims and a nation known for its multicultural tolerance asking the same anguished question -- what turned these young men into killers?

It's pretty simple, actually, and as always Christopher Hitchens summed it up nicely the other day(again, hat tip NRO):

We know very well what the "grievances" of the jihadists are.

The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won't abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor's liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way.

Dead spot on. But some people seem intent on ignoring the radicals in our midst.

If you really want to follow the PC pandering in the UK, read USS Neverdock. He tracks this stuff daily.

Daniel Pipes is also a great source. Check out this list of PC follies on his blog. Just be warned; keep objects that can be thrown out of reach before you read it.

It's stuff like what Marc of USS Neverdock and Daniel Pipes track that allows terrorism to develop. When you have hate speech coming from even a few mosques, and no one in the major media or a major politician dares to call them on it, then sooner or later some young Muslims are going to become radicalized to the point where they become terrorists. How hard is this to figure out?

Victor Davis Hanson also nails it in a recent column of his (Hat tip USS Neverdock)

The terrorists and their supporters understand that in a strange way the West is not only split, but also increasingly illiberal as well. It has lost confidence in its old commitment to rationalism, free speech and empiricism, and now embraces the deductive near-religious doctrines of moral equivalence and utopian pacifism. Al Qaeda's supporters will say that Thursday's victims were killed because of Afghanistan or Iraq. Westerners will duly repeat the dull refrain that "Bush lied, thousands died" in their guilt-ridden search for something we did to cause this.

And so, rather than focus our attention on the madrassas and the mosques that preach hatred, we will strive to learn more about Islamic culture, as if our own insensitivity were the true culprit. Our grandfathers could despise Bushido — Japan's warrior cult — without worrying whether they were being unfair to Buddhists; we of less conviction and even less courage, cannot do likewise.

In short, we now know what to expect from the London bombings and the others to follow. There will be no effort to punish the states that subsidize al Qaeda. Critics will cling to the myth that the British got what they had coming. The primary obsession of many Westerners will be to extend sensitivity to Islam, not the victims of those who kill in its name. And all will be consoled that just a few dozen were harvested this time.

What a strange way to fight a war.

Strange indeed.

Posted by Tom at 8:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 12, 2005

Al Qaeda Attacks" Movie

You have got to go over to Winds of Change and watch this video on Al Qaeda by Marvin and Bill.

Posted by Tom at 9:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 11, 2005

Do We "Cause" Terrorism?

Does the United States and our allies bring terrorism on ourselves? More specifically, is it our foreign policy that "causes" certain people to become terrorists? Do we bring it on ourselves?

To the left the answer seems to be an unequivocal "yes!" This is also the case with some conservatives of the Pat Buchanan school, who since the end of the Cold War have advocated a withdrawal from the world and a "seal the borders" policy at home.

While I am certainly in favor of enhanced border security, readers of this blog will know that I have no patience with the isolationists, whether from the right or left.

There are several ways in which it is said that we bring terrorism on ourselves. I'll try and hit on a few of them this morning:

1) Our failure to alleviate poverty drives people to extremist groups which in turn see terrorist actions as their only means of bringing attention to their cause. DagneyT has an excellent post on this very subject.

2) Our aggressive foreign policy, and stationing of troops in foreign lands sparks resentment and brings humiliation to the people of the affected countries. This in turn drives people to extremist movements and thus terrorism.

3) Our support of Israel, and failure to force a peace settlement on the region engenders hatred of the United States.

My answer to whether these things cause terrorism is...yes and no.

I suspect you were expecting me to say "heck no!" but the truth is a bit more complicated.

The fact is if we did completely withdraw from the world a la Canada or Sweden, the terrorists probably would leave us alone.

The reality is that we cannot withdraw, no matter how much people like Pat Buchanan would like us to. We have little choice but to be involved in the world. This is so for several reasons; our economy demands it, the world requires our presence, and it fits us temperamentally.

Avoiding World War II

The Japanese believed that they had no choice but to attack us at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Our foreign policy, they said, coupled with our stationing of troops so close to their empire, posed an unacceptable threat.

Japanese expansionism, especially their invasions of Manchuria and China in 1931 and 1937 respectively, led to U.S. condemnation. Roosevelt ordered that trade sanctions be placed on Japanese goods.

The Japanese saw our bases in the Philippines and Hawaii as threats. The United States had been active in seeking territory and bases in the Pacific since at least the Spanish-American War of 1898, when we seized control of the Philippines. Since then, U.S. Naval stragegists had developed contingency plans for war with Japan, which was called War Plan Orange.

So in a sense one could say that we brought the Pacific War on ourselves, in that we could have drawn down our forces in that region, and ignored Japanese atrocities in China and Manchuria. We could have held a "peace" conference, of the sort that Tony Benn urges for the Middle East today.

But of course none of this was possible.

Likewise, we could have avoided war with Hitler. It was our support of Great Britain in 1940 and 1941 that led us into the conflict. The Axis treaty between Germany, Italy, and Japan, was strictly defensive in nature. Because Japan initiated hostilities, German and Italian obligations to come to her aid were rendered null and void.

We could have stayed out of the European war. Presdent Roosevelt didn't have to send those forty destroyers to Britain, or push the lend-lease act through congress, and he certainly didn't have to fight a virtual secret war against German U-boats in 1941 well before our entrance into the conflict.

Honest Abe

For that matter, Abraham Lincoln could have ignored slavery. He could well have soothed Southern fears before taking office. He did not.

And although he fought the war "to preserve the Union", and the Southerners fought it "for states rights", everyone knew that the root cause of the problem was slavery.

Not Inevitable but Unavoidable

Wars are not inevitable. Before any conflict, there are things that could have been done to prevent them. American presidents of the 1850s could have at least tried to keep the old compromises of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster alive. One might argue that we should have "engaged" Japan in dialogue and negotiations earlier. Certainly the opportunities to stop Hitler that were missed have been well discussed.

But Northerners of strong moral foundation could not avoid the issue of slavery as the Whigs had. The United States could not ignore Japanese atrocities in China, nor abandon our Pacific territories. The Britons and French who appeased Hitler had public opinion on their side.

And as I argued in "History Backwards", our support of Saddam in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war was the right thing to do, even knowing what we know today.

Back to Terrorism

The bottom line is that yes, in a way, we "cause" terrorism in that we could totally withdraw from the world and let it go it's own way. They use terrorism as their tactic because we are too strong for direct military confrontation, and because it suits their fanatical philosoply of life.

But the fact is that most of our actions in the Middle East and elsewhere have been necessary. We needed to keep troops in Saudi Arabia (OBLs big complaint in his 1996 Fatwa) to keep an eye on Saddam Hussein. We support Israel because it is the morally correct thing to do.

If we are in the wrong, it is because as Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice recently said in her speech at Cairo University, "For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither."

In the final analysis, then, of course we do not "cause" terrorism, or "bring it on ourselves". To say so at minimum excuses those who are guilty of such deeds. It also ignores the reality of our world, and how we have little choice but to be engaged. We can, and have, set a new foreign policy goal of encouraging democracy and pluralism, of "no more excuses."

It will take much time, but in the end we will prevail.

Posted by Tom at 8:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 7, 2005

The London Attacks

I'm finally back home and able to write something on these terrible attacks. I actually first heard about them from a fellow blogger in an email this morning. Unfortunately, it was just as I had to run off to work so I only found out the details on the radio.

Here is a quick survey from around the Internet

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's statement says it perfectly:

Though it is not yet known with certainty precisely who is responsible, we do know terrorists’ intentions. They strike without warning and without regard for human life in the hope that they can frighten and intimidate free people -- to change our way of life. And they won't stop until their side or our side has prevailed.

But if these terrorists thought they could intimidate the people of a great nation, they picked the wrong people and the wrong nation. For generations, tyrants, fascists, and terrorists have sought to carry out their violent designs upon the British people only to founder upon its unrelenting shores.

Before long, I suspect that those responsible for these acts will encounter British steel. Their kind of steel has an uncommon strength. It does not bend or break.

Indeed. Although the left will howl and moan that "we brought it on ourselves by going to Iraq", the Brits will not be cowed.

Wretchard nails it as always:

The Al Qaeda have characterized the attack on London as 'punishment' for Britain's temerity to resist the inevitability of Islam. It is the kind of punishment these self-ordained masters of the universe are accustomed to meting out against harem women and insolent slaves. A few administered licks, and no doubt the cowardly kuffar will crawl back to his place. The tragedy is that Al Qaeda's perception is perfectly correct when applied to the Left, for whom no position is too supine, no degradation too shameful to endure; but incorrect for the vast majority of humans, in whom the instinct for self-preservation has not yet been extinguished. It will result in history's greatest case of mistaken identity; the mismatch that should never have happened. The enemy is even now dying at our feet, where we should kick him and kick him again.

Exactly. Don't let the naysayers tell you that we're losing.

Christopher Hitchens explains why Iraq was not the original motivating force behind the Al-Qaeda attacks, and taht Britain had better face up to their internal problems with a certain immigrant group:

...there are two considerations here. The first is Britain's role as a leading member of the "Coalition" in Iraq and Afghanistan. The second is its role as a host to a large and growing Muslim minority. The first British citizens to be killed in Afghanistan were fighting for the Taliban, which is proof in itself that the Iraq war is not the original motivating force. Last year, two British Muslims pulled off a suicide attack at an Israeli beach resort. In many British cities, there are now demands for sexual segregation in schools and for separate sharia courts to try Muslim defendants. The electoral strength of Muslims is great enough to encourage pandering from all three parties: The most egregious pandering of all has come from Blair himself, who has promised legislation that would outlaw any speech that could be construed as offensive to Islam. Since most British Muslims are of Asian descent, a faint sense exists that criticism of their religion is somehow racist: In practice this weak-mindedness leads to the extension of an antiquated law on blasphemy that ought long ago to have been repealed but is now to cover the wounded feelings of Muslims as well as Christians.

Yep. They've got a big problem, and so far have largely refused to deal with it.

Take a look at National Review. They've got the British flag on their mast.

Chris Muir's Day by Day is all British today.

For yes, we are all Londonders today.

My thoughts and prayers are with the Brits.

Posted by Tom at 10:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 1, 2005

Primary Documents: Osama bin Laden's 1996 Fatwa

Speaking of basics in our War on Terror, let's go back to Osama bin Laden's initial fatwa, or declaration of war, against the west in general and United States in particular. It was issued in 1996 and was published in a London newspaper. It is, appropriately enough, titled "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places" (hat tip NRO for the link)

It makes for instructive reading. Of course, everything is "obvious" in retrospect. It is "obvious" that he was a huge danger, that we should have taken him more seriously, blah blah. If that was it this would only be an academic exercise.

Unfortunately, some people still don't get it. They still don't get that

- bin Laden sees the world with a long historical perspective. His basis, or baseline, was the Crusades. To him this is not ancient history, but an event (or series of events) with close relevance to the world today.

- bin Laden and his sort cannot be satisfied with policy changes. "Settling" the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not dissuade them from attacking us.

- bin Laden was quite willing to make an alliance with anyone to achieve his goals, whether that person or entity was "righteous" or not. Thus he would have no problem in cooperating with Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

- bin Laden wants to impost Sharia (strict Islamic law), apparently with a corresponding return to the ancient Caliphate.

Let's then go through his 1996 Fatwa and see exactly what it says:

First, there's a lot of "praise be to Allah", and exortations to the faithful:

O you who believe! be careful of -your duty to- Allah with the proper care which is due to Him, and do not die unless you are Muslim} (Imraan; 3:102), {O people be careful of -your duty to- your Lord, Who created you from a single being and created its mate of the same -kind- and spread from these two, many men and women; and be careful of -your duty to- Allah , by whom you demand one of another -your rights-, and (be careful) to the ties of kinship; surely Allah ever watches over you} (An-Nisa; 4:1), {O you who believe! be careful- of your duty- to Allah and speak the right word; He will put your deeds into a right state for you, and forgive you your faults; and who ever obeys Allah and his Apostle, he indeed achieve a mighty success} (Al-Ahzab; 33:70-71).

The entire document is filled stuff like this. One tends to skim through it, trying to find the "good parts" where he talks about something concrete. On the one hand there is nothing wrong with doing this. On the other one can miss the essence of bin Laden; religious fanaticism. This may sound obvious, but consider history.

Adolf Hitler was underestimated because the "smart set" couldn't believe that he really meant what he said in Mein Kampf. When Hitler and his henchmen in the 1930s spun their outlandish racial theories, they were dismissed as cranks. What people failed to understand is that Hitler wanted to act on those beliefs. He also had the talent and political acumen to tell each audience just what it wanted to hear. We have no such excuse with bin Laden.

My point is that those who say that bin Laden and his sort can be satisfied by changing this or that American policy are just as mistaken as Chamberlain and Lord Halifax were sixty-odd years ago about Hitler. Hitler wanted racial purity throughout all of Europe and would kill to achieve it, bin Laden wants a rise of the ancient Caliphate and will kill to get it also.

It is, nevertheless, instructive to find out what bin Laden's complaints are. Let's go through some of them:

It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajakestan, Burma, Cashmere, Assam, Philippine, Fatani, Ogadin, Somalia, Erithria, Chechnia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience. All of this and the world watch and hear, and not only didn't respond to these atrocities, but also with a clear conspiracy between the USA and its' allies and under the cover of the iniquitous United Nations, the dispossessed people were even prevented from obtaining arms to defend themselves.

The people of Islam awakened and realised that they are the main target for the aggression of the Zionist-Crusaders alliance. All false claims and propaganda about "Human Rights" were hammered down and exposed by the massacres that took place against the Muslims in every part of the world.

There is much of this talk about western "massacres". What is interesting is that "Palestine" is listed as only one of many. The idea that the "Arab-Israeli" conflict is at the heart of his complaint does not stand up to scrutiny. He does, however, mention "Zionist-Crusader" alliance several times. This tells me that 1) the existance of Israel is the problem to him, so no "solution" short of it's dismanteling will satisfy him. 2) He believes that the problems of the Arab world are all caused by the West, and again the solution is a return to the glory days of Saladin.

Injustice had affected the people of the industry and agriculture. It affected the people of the rural and urban areas. And almost every body complain about something. The situation at the land of the two Holy places became like a huge volcano at the verge of eruption that would destroy the Kufr and the corruption and its' sources. The explosion at Riyadh and Al-Khobar is a warning of this volcanic eruption emerging as a result of the sever oppression, suffering, excessive iniquity, humiliation and poverty.

By "two Holy places" he means Mecca and Medina, Islams to most holy sites, both of which are in Saudi Arabia. At the time we had a lot of troops stationed in the KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), and it was the presence of the "infidels" that upset him so. He goes on to complain about the KSA at some length.

His complaints against the KSA can be broken down into

1) The rulers of the KSA have violated the tenants of Islam.

2) The economic/public works situations have deteriorated

3) The rulers of the KSA are corrupt.

4) The rulers of the KSA have allowed the "infidels" to occupy parts of the country.

In summary,

If there are more than one duty to be carried out, then the most important one should receive priority. Clearly after Belief (Imaan) there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land. No other priority, except Belief, could be considered before it...

bin Laden is willing to use anyone to help him.

It was the tradition of the people of the Sunnah (Ahlul-Sunnah) to join and invade- fight- with the righteous and non righteous men. Allah may support this religion by righteous and non righteous people as told by the prophet...

In other words, he has no problem in making an alliance with "non-righteous" people. Saddam Hussein was a Muslim in name only. Therefore... that blank is easy to fill in. Those who say that bin Laden would never have allied himself with Saddam haven't read what the man said.

Israel, or as he calls it, "the Zionist state in Palestine" is a problem, and it must be destroyed. To him, Israel is not an entity in itself, as much as it is part of "the Zionist-Crusader alliance"

The "infidel" forces in the KSA are a problem for this reason:

It is out of date and no longer acceptable to claim that the presence of the crusaders is necessity and only a temporary measures to protect the land of the two Holy Places. Especially when the civil and the military infrastructures of Iraq were savagely destroyed showing the depth of the Zionist-Crusaders hatred to the Muslims and their children, and the rejection of the idea of replacing the crusaders forces by an Islamic force composed of the sons of the country and other Muslim people.

Osama bin Laden's Solution

Jihad, of course.

Interestingly, he also calls for an economic boycott against us. This is to be coupled with military action. Any Muslim who does not cooperate is to be considered an enemy.

If economical boycotting is intertwined with the military operations of the Mujahideen, then defeating the enemy will be even nearer, by the Permission of Allah. However if Muslims don't co-operate and support their Mujahideen brothers then , in effect, they are supplying the army of the enemy with financial help and extending the war and increasing the suffering of the Muslims.

bin Laden then goes on a long ramble about "this difficult period in the history of our Ummah", with many historical references, going back several centuries and concluding with the Russians in Afghanistan and the United States in Somalia (he saw that we pulled out after taking casualties. A lesson, there).

After this there are many exortations to young Muslims, and how they must join him in the battle ahead. These calls are intersperced with liberal references to the Koran, as is throughout the Fatwa.

He does not mince words about how he will go after Americans. He says that he will be

Terrorising you, while you are carrying arms on our land, is a legitimate and morally demanded duty

Like the Japanese and Germans of World War II, he takes it for granted that his soldiers ("youths")are brave, but that Americans are weak and cowardly:

Those youths are different from your soldiers. Your problem will be how to convince your troops to fight, while our problem will be how to restrain our youths to wait for their turn in fighting and in operations.

Lastly he asks for God's help. Here is one of many such passages

Our Lord, You are the Revealer of the book, Director of the clouds, You defeated the allies (Ahzab); defeat them and make us victorious over them.

So What of It?

He's a religious fanatic, of course.

One is also struck at how long the document is. Today it is obvious that it was written by someone who has dedicated his life to destroying the KSA and the "infidels".

He believes strongly in what he says, and as I said at the beginning cannot be compromised with.

Their are two ways to deal with him and his followers:

The first is to utterly destroy them though all military means at our disposal. This means war, not a law-enforcement model of conflict.

Second,we must reform the Arab/Muslim countries of the Middle East. bin Laden was right, the rulers of the KSA are corrupt.

It also means something else; that we were right in taking out Saddam. He was a cancer in the region, and Osama bin Laden had no problem in making alliances with the "non-righteous". Given Saddam's hatred of the US and UK, he no doubt joined Al Qaeda in a de facto alliance. Anyone who says otherwise just doesn't know what they're talking about.

Posted by Tom at 8:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 30, 2005

All the Right Enemies II

Well, well, so the liberals are all in a huff over President Bush' mention of 9/11 in his speech Tuesday night.

Fine. What's important is who is upset, and who is happy. The invaluable Victor Davis Hanson pointed this out some time ago in a must-read article.

And it appears that all the right people are upset. All those who I never agree with anyway didn't like it.

Such as David Gergen, the man who will serve in any administration as long as they stroke his ego.

Like the Washington Post, who is still off on the bogus he "missed an opportunity to fully level with Americans" line that I dealt with a post or so ago.

Like the New York Times, which makes the Post look positively reactionary by comparison. Their editorial is beyond pathetic.

Like the Democrat's response to the speech. That they don't get it has been obvious for a long time.

The editors of National Review, typically, do:

The September 11 attacks were so important and so horrific that they never should be mentioned again. That at least seems to be the position of the Left and establishment media. Images of the planes hitting the towers on that day have been all but banned from the public airwaves. And the president of the United States cannot mention 9/11 when explaining the stakes in a fight against jihadists supported by Osama bin Laden in Iraq without prompting howls of outrage. Bush was absolutely justified in invoking repeatedly Sept. 11 and the fight against terrorism in his speech from Fort Bragg Tuesday night. Let's count the ways:

There never would have been an Iraq war without 9/11, which drastically reduced the country's tolerance for a hostile Arab who had sought weapons of mass destruction before and was likely to do so again.

Saddam's regime had a web of connections to Islamic extremists and terrorists, as explained by Andy McCarthy elsewhere on NRO.

Foreign jihadists are now pouring into Iraq to fight on behalf of Abu Zarqawi, who has explicitly allied himself with Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. The case for a connection between the Iraq war and the sort of terrorists who perpetrated 9/11 is — sadly — stronger than ever.

Bin Laden himself has, as Bush noted Tuesday night, called the Iraq war a crucial front in the war on terror. He has said that the war will end in “victory and glory or misery and humiliation.”

If we lose in Iraq, a Sunni rump state could emerge that would provide a haven for terrorists, the same way Afghanistan provided a haven for the 9/11 terrorists.

If we fail in Iraq, it will be a blow to America's prestige. One reason the terrorists struck on 9/11 is that they thought America was weak and making it bleed would prompt it to abandon its allies in the Middle East. The signal of weakness sent by a loss in Iraq wouldn't placate our enemies, but invite more attacks.

Supporters of a radical Islamic ideology struck American on 9/11. The war on terror is not a fight against a tactic (as the name falsely suggests), but against that ideology. The appeal of an ideology ebbs and flows with perceptions of its success. Communism advanced in the third world after its victory in Vietnam. The Islamists would get a similar boost if they were to prevail in Iraq.

Competing interpretations of Islam are at war in Iraq — that of Aytollah Sistani, who says Islam is compatible with democracy, and that of Zarqawi, who believes like bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers that Islam is a religion of violence. It is imperative that Sistani win out.

Islamic extremists justifiably fear a Middle East that turns away from radicalism and anti-Americanism. Victory in Iraq will be a step toward that goal.

In short, not only was it defensible for Bush to talk of 9/11 Tuesday night, it would be impossible for him to make the case for the Iraq war without reference to it. The war on terror began in earnest on that day, and Iraq is properly understood as a front in that larger, necessary war.

As mentioned by the NR editors, Andrew McCarthy outlined the links between Saddam and terrorism (for the umpteenth time, one might add):

It is not the war for democratization. It is not the war for stability. Democratization and stability are not unimportant. They are among a host of developments that could help defeat the enemy.

But they are not the primary goal of this war, which is to destroy the network of Islamic militants who declared war against the United States when they bombed the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, and finally jarred us into an appropriate response when they demolished that complex, struck the Pentagon, and killed 3000 of us on September 11, 2001.

That is why we are in Iraq.

On September 12, 2001, no one in America cared about whether there would be enough Sunni participation in a fledgling Iraqi democracy if Saddam were ever toppled. No one in lower Manhattan cared whether the electricity would work in Baghdad, or whether Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia could be coaxed into a political process. They cared about smashing terrorists and the states that supported them for the purpose of promoting American national security.

Saddam Hussein’s regime was a crucial part of that response because it was a safety net for al Qaeda. A place where terror attacks against the United States and the West were planned. A place where Saddam’s intelligence service aided and abetted al Qaeda terrorists planning operations. A place where terrorists could hide safely between attacks. A place where terrorists could lick their wounds. A place where committed terrorists could receive vital training in weapons construction and paramilitary tactics. In short, a platform of precisely the type without which an international terror network cannot succeed.
...
On that score, nobody should worry about anything the Times or David Gergen or Senator Reid has to say about all this until they have some straight answers on questions like these. What does the “nothing whatsoever” crowd have to say about:

Ahmed Hikmat Shakir — the Iraqi Intelligence operative who facilitated a 9/11 hijacker into Malaysia and was in attendance at the Kuala Lampur meeting with two of the hijackers, and other conspirators, at what is roundly acknowledged to be the initial 9/11 planning session in January 2000? Who was arrested after the 9/11 attacks in possession of contact information for several known terrorists? Who managed to make his way out of Jordanian custody over our objections after the 9/11 attacks because of special pleading by Saddam’s regime?

Saddam's intelligence agency's efforts to recruit jihadists to bomb Radio Free Europe in Prague in the late 1990's?

Mohammed Atta's unexplained visits to Prague in 2000, and his alleged visit there in April 2001 which — notwithstanding the 9/11 Commission's dismissal of it (based on interviewing exactly zero relevant witnesses) — the Czechs have not retracted?

The Clinton Justice Department's allegation in a 1998 indictment (two months before the embassy bombings) against bin Laden, to wit: In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.

Seized Iraq Intelligence Service records indicating that Saddam's henchmen regarded bin Laden as an asset as early as 1992?

Saddam's hosting of al Qaeda No. 2, Ayman Zawahiri beginning in the early 1990’s, and reports of a large payment of money to Zawahiri in 1998?

Saddam’s ten years of harboring of 1993 World Trade Center bomber Abdul Rahman Yasin?

Iraqi Intelligence Service operatives being dispatched to meet with bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998 (the year of bin Laden’s fatwa demanding the killing of all Americans, as well as the embassy bombings)?

Saddam’s official press lionizing bin Laden as “an Arab and Islamic hero” following the 1998 embassy bombing attacks?

The continued insistence of high-ranking Clinton administration officials to the 9/11 Commission that the 1998 retaliatory strikes (after the embassy bombings) against a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory were justified because the factory was a chemical weapons hub tied to Iraq and bin Laden?

Top Clinton administration counterterrorism official Richard Clarke’s assertions, based on intelligence reports in 1999, that Saddam had offered bin Laden asylum after the embassy bombings, and Clarke’s memo to then-National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, advising him not to fly U-2 missions against bin Laden in Afghanistan because he might be tipped off by Pakistani Intelligence, and “[a]rmed with that knowledge, old wily Usama will likely boogie to Baghdad”? (See 9/11 Commission Final Report, p. 134 & n.135.)

Terror master Abu Musab Zarqawi's choice to boogie to Baghdad of all places when he needed surgery after fighting American forces in Afghanistan in 2001?

Saddam's Intelligence Service running a training camp at Salman Pak, were terrorists were instructed in tactics for assassination, kidnapping and hijacking?

Former CIA Director George Tenet’s October 7, 2002 letter to Congress, which asserted: Our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability. Some of the information we have received comes from detainees, including some of high rank.

We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda going back a decade.

Credible information indicates that Iraq and Al Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal nonaggression.

Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad.

We have credible reporting that Al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.

Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians coupled with growing indications of relationship with Al Qaeda suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action.

There's more. Stephen Hayes’s book, The Connection, remains required reading. But these are just the questions; the answers — if someone will just investigate the questions rather than pretending there’s “nothing whatsoever” there — will provide more still.

So Gergen, Reid, the Times, and the rest are “offended” at the president's reminding us of 9/11? The rest of us should be offended, too. Offended at the “nothing whatsoever” crowd’s inexplicable lack of curiosity about these ties, and about the answers to these questions.

Just tell us one thing: Do you have any good answer to what Ahmed Hikmat Shakir was doing with the 9/11 hijackers in Kuala Lampur? Can you explain it?

If not, why aren't you moving heaven and earth to find out the answer?

Update

I was doing a google search for some other information and look at what I found. The article, by CNS, is about a year old, so is not exactly news. But as with the information above, it is useful to throw at people who still insist that there were few ties between Saddam and terrorism:

Iraqi intelligence documents, confiscated by U.S. forces and obtained by CNSNews.com, show numerous efforts by Saddam Hussein's regime to work with some of the world's most notorious terror organizations, including al Qaeda, to target Americans. They demonstrate that Saddam's government possessed mustard gas and anthrax, both considered weapons of mass destruction, in the summer of 2000, during the period in which United Nations weapons inspectors were not present in Iraq. And the papers show that Iraq trained dozens of terrorists inside its borders.

One of the Iraqi memos contains an order from Saddam for his intelligence service to support terrorist attacks against Americans in Somalia. The memo was written nine months before U.S. Army Rangers were ambushed in Mogadishu by forces loyal to a warlord with alleged ties to al Qaeda.

Other memos provide a list of terrorist groups with whom Iraq had relationships and considered available for terror operations against the United States.

Among the organizations mentioned are those affiliated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman al-Zawahiri, two of the world's most wanted terrorists.

As always, read the whole thing.

Posted by Tom at 10:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 28, 2005

The President's Speech

The short version is simple - the president hit a home run.

The longer take is to ask why he doesn't do this more often. When he wants to be on he's on. There are other times, like during the first two debates with John Kerry, that he looked positively aweful. Ok, he only looked aweful in the first debate. Bad enough.

The most telling aspect is how members of the military feel. After the speech Carl Cameron, of Fox News, talked about the audience. It was made up of members of the 82nd airborne, as well as some special ops forces at Fort Bragg, where the president spoke.

Cameron told of how they had been admonished beforehand by their officers not to clap or cheer during the speech, as it wasn't appropriate for this type of speech. It was obvious, however, he said, that they were full of approval and about ready to burst from holding back. At one point, some GOP staffers at the back of the room clapped after Bush made a point, and they took this as a signal to let loose.

The point is obvious; if we're in such an unwinnable quagmire in Iraq, don't you think that members of the military would be the first to know? The enlisted and junior officers, I mean, not the generals.

Let's go into what Bush actually said tonight.

You can find the entire text here.

At this point let me say that I'm not going to rehash the history of our involvement in Iraq, as I've done that so many times on this blog interested parties can do the research themselves.

The bottom line is that Bush didn't pull any punches tonight. He didn't sugarcoat the situation, but neither did he (nor should he) apologize for mistakes. He didn't give an inch, nor should he have

What the Liberals Wanted

The latest lie from the left is that "the president needs to come clean with the American people".

Let me translate this into English: "We want the president to apologize and say he's sorry for invading Iraq. We also want him to say that we're losing the war and that we should pull out our troops."

Our president's not stupid enough to give the libs what they want. Instead, tonight he basically threw it in their faces. Good for him.

And good for us. Because like all people, Americans don't want some wishy-washy "maybe we'll be able to do this maybe not, and gee I'm sorry won't you please forgive me" weakness. We had our fill of that with Jimmy Carter. Americans like strength and resolve, just like the Brits did some sixty-five years ago.

Building up the Iraqi Forces

Today Iraq has more than 160,000 security forces trained and equipped for a variety of missions. Iraqi forces have fought bravely — helping to capture terrorists and insurgents in Najaf, Samarra, Fallujah, and Mosul. And in the past month, Iraqi forces have led a major anti-terrorist campaign in Baghdad called Operation Lightning — which has led to the capture of hundreds of suspected insurgents. Like free people everywhere, Iraqis want to be defended by their own countrymen — and we are helping Iraqis assume those duties.

No doubt that the naysayers will dispute the figure cited above. And they'll be partially correct.

But am I the only one to notice that the left has totally ignored the sacrifice of the Iraqis? This first hit me during the vice-presidential debate, when Cheney rightfully admonished Senator Edwards over this issue. And they still haven't learned.

Why We are There

Iraq is the latest battlefield in this war. Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home. The commander in charge of Coalition operations in Iraq — who is also senior commander at this base — General John Vines, put it well the other day. He said: “We either deal with terrorism and this extremism abroad, or we deal with it when it comes to us.”

Yes yes, we all know that we didn't find any of the WMD that we expected that we would. But I've dealt with the idiotic Bush Lied! nonsense extensively in other posts.

The fact is that without the invasion of Iraq a huge cancer would still be festering in the Middle East, one that stymied pluralistic government and supported terrorism (again, I've covered this).

The Idiocy of a Deadline

Some contend that we should set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. forces. Let me explain why that would be a serious mistake. Setting an artificial timetable would send the wrong message to the Iraqis — who need to know that America will not leave before the job is done. It would send the wrong message to our troops — who need to know that we are serious about completing the mission they are risking their lives to achieve. And it would send the wrong message to the enemy — who would know that all they have to do is to wait us out. We will stay in Iraq as long as we are needed — and not a day longer.

Well of course. To anyone who wants to win the war this is obvious. Hmmm. That would mean that anyone who does not see this...wants us to lose. Or just doesn't care.

After two long years, the Iraqis more and more are standing with us, or at least against the terrorists (two different things, I know, but for purposes of winning the war the same thing). As one commenter on lgf said, "They want an exit strategy? That's it, when the Iraqis are ready to stand alone we leave."

or, in a slightly more colorful comment:

Dec 7 1942. White House press conference.

A CNN reporter askes: President Rosevelt, we have been fighting Germany and Japan for a year now. This is clearly a quagmire. What is you exit strategy for bringing the troops home?

FDR replies: Whats my exit strategy? Win you stupid f**k, by any means necessary!

I swear I laughed so hard I almost dropped the laptop when I read that one. BTW, you've got to follow lgf during these events.

FINALLY; the "I" Word

After two years of using the somewhat nonsensical "War on Terror", the president told it like it is:

Some of the violence you see in Iraq is being carried out by ruthless killers who are converging on Iraq to fight the advance of peace and freedom. Our military reports that we have killed or captured hundreds of foreign fighters in Iraq who have come from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and other nations. They are making common cause with criminal elements, Iraqi insurgents, and remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime who want to restore the old order. They fight because they know that the survival of their hateful ideology is at stake. They know that as freedom takes root in Iraq, it will inspire millions across the Middle East to claim their liberty as well. And when the Middle East grows in democracy, prosperity, and hope, the terrorists will lose their sponsors, lose their recruits, and lose their hopes for turning that region into a base for attacks on America and our allies around the world.

Some wonder whether Iraq is a central front in the war on terror. Among the terrorists, there is no debate. Hear the words of Osama Bin Laden: “This Third World War … is raging” in Iraq. “The whole world is watching this war.” He says it will end in “victory and glory or misery and humiliation.”

The terrorists know that the outcome will leave them emboldened, or defeated. So, they are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to take.

Wars are often begun for one reason, and then later justified or remembered by another. Lincoln did not fight the Civil War to free the slaves, and we didn't fight World War II to liberate concentration camps. Yet that is how we remember them now. It will be the legacy of this war that it was begun mostly over WMD, yet it's benefit was to begin a process of liberation throughout the region. How ironic that those in this country who always tell us that they are the most concerned with freedome cannot or will not see this.

Democracy, or at least a version of it, has come to Iraq. The Purple Revolution was a watershed event. The president mentioned Libya giving up it's WMD program, liberaliztions in Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian elections. Egypt and Lebanon have seen progress. Small steps, to be sure, but real ones. Our own country was hardly perfect in 1793, and isn't now.

Listen

After September 11, 2001, I told the American people that the road ahead would be difficult — and that we would prevail. Well, it has been difficult. And we are prevailing.

Well yes you did. And some people weren't listening when they should have. Here and overseas.

Sixty four years ago someone listened, heard, and understood us.

"I fear that all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve"

Those words were spoken by Admiral Isokoru Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, to his aides following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

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June 24, 2005

The Gitmo Investigation Fraud

So now the Democrats have decided that the most important thing to do in the War on Terror is to provide Al-Jazeera with more anti-American propaganda. As such, they've demanded an independent investigation to look into alleged abuses at Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, where we are holding several hundred terrorists.

Of course, as it is Al-Jazzera covers in detail the attempt by far-left Congressman John Conyers' and other Democrats to impeach President Bush. That network is full of stories about our supposedly regular torture of prisoners at the camp. Don't think they don't follow what goes on over here.

The Democrats aren't the only ones in the business of trying to make us look bad, as the UN is trying to get in the game too, demanding access to the prison "to check out conditions there." That's rich. This from the same organization that has Cuba, Egypt, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Zimbabwe as members on it's Commission on Human Rights.

I've gone over many times the fallacy of treating the prisoners there as if they were criminals, and interested readers need only select "Guantanamo Bay and the Geneva Convention" at right for the full story.

Right now I'm going to deal with this latest Democrat diversion.

And let us have no doubt, for it is indeed a diversion from the War on Terror. Let me stop right here and point out the obvious; about half of the Democrats are sincere in wanting to win the War on Terror. We and they may disagree on this or that, but it's all an argument within the family.

But Ted Kennedy, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, John Conyers, Jim McDermott and crowd, they do not seem to care at all if we win. To them it's all a diversion from their plan to put us all under the rule of the EPA (this is HUMOR, trolls).

I've got other posts to write, and since the editors of National Review say it best, I'll just quote them:

It is argued that a commission will help clear the country’s good name. Put aside that the portion of the foreign audience that hates us won’t be swayed by a commission’s findings one way or another. A commission will, in political terms, never clear the Bush administration of anything. The Robb-Silberman Commission cleared Bush officials of the charge that they pressured intelligence officials to hype intelligence about Iraq’s WMD. Democrats and swaths of the media dismissed the report for exactly that reason.

The Pentagon has investigated its detainee practices repeatedly. Air Force Lt. General Randall Schmidt’s investigation into Gitmo — it is his forthcoming report that Newsweek falsely said would contain the toilet-flushing incident — will just be the latest. There is no reason to believe that violations of the rules at the facility, including of the minute procedures for handling the Koran, haven’t resulted in discipline for the violators. And numerous congressional hearings have been held about the detentions there.

An independent commission is not just unnecessary, it’s a cop out. Democrats should simply say what they would do with the detainees, and offer a congressional resolution to that effect and vote on it. Do they oppose tough interrogation techniques for the 20th hijacker? Then they should put themselves on record against them, even if it’s only in a symbolic resolution. Do they think terrorists deserve Geneva Convention protections? That we should attempt (futilely) to try the detainees in the American courts and — failing that — release them? If they are such fans of “accountability,” Democrats shouldn’t blanch at putting such positions in black and white and voting on them.

Of course, they will do no such thing. They instead want to hide behind a commission that at best will duplicate investigative work that has already been done and at worst replicate the 9/11 Commission at its lowest, most politicized moments. The response to calls for such a commission should be simple: “Hell, no.”

Ditto that.

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June 22, 2005

War Update

Here are some things that have come to my attention recently regarding the War on Teror that I thought I'd share with you.

Here's a story in USA today that is must-read. It's about how a group of Vietnam vets in Iraq see an "Entirely Different War":

"In Vietnam, I don't think the local population ever understood that we were just there to help them," says Chief Warrant Officer James Miles, 57, of Sioux Falls, S.D., who flew UH-1H Hueys in Vietnam from February 1969 to February 1970. And the Vietcong and North Vietnamese were a tougher, more tenacious enemy, he says. Instead of setting off bombs outside the base, they'd be inside.

"I knew we were going to lose Vietnam the day I walked off the plane," says Miles, who returned home this month after nearly a year in Iraq. Not this time. "There's no doubt in my mind that this was the right thing to do," he says.
...

Miles says the biggest difference he saw was that, over time, Iraqi civilians grew more positive toward U.S. forces. He says he saw more people smiling and waving near his base here than there were 10 months ago when he arrived.

1st Sgt. Patrick Olechny, 52, of Marydel, Del., an attack helicopter crew chief and door gunner in Vietnam from March 1971 to February 1972, says the most important difference to him is the attitude of the American public.

"Vietnam was an entirely different war than this one," he says. The basic job of flying helicopters is the same, but the overall mission now is clear when it wasn't then. "We thought in Vietnam we were doing the right thing, and in the end it didn't seem that way," he says.

Now, "the people in the United States respect what the soldiers are doing," says Olechny, who still fills in at the door gunner position when he can get away from his administrative duties.

This next article is about how the insurgents are turning on each other.

I've seen this before on Belmont Club and I believe The Fourth Rail, but didn't have a chance to post it here. This story is from the New York Times:

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

A United Nations official who served in Iraq last year and who consulted widely with militant groups said in a telephone interview that there has been a split for some time.

"There is a rift," said the official, who requested anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the talks he had held. "I'm certain that the nationalist Iraqi part of the insurgency is very much fed up with the Jihadists grabbing the headlines and carrying out the sort of violence that they don't want against innocent civilians."

The nationalist insurgent groups, "are giving a lot of signals implying that there should be a settlement with the Americans," while the Jihadists have a purely ideological agenda, he added

.

As we said above, folks, this isn't another Vietnam. The NVA, and VC before them, were far too disciplined to let disagreements come to blows.

Meanwhile, Karl Zinmeister of the American Enterprise Institute just got back from Iraq and says that "The War is Over, and We Won":

What the establishment media covering Iraq have utterly failed to make clear today is this central reality: With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over. Egregious acts of terror will continue—in Iraq as in many other parts of the world. But there is now no chance whatever of the U.S. losing this critical guerilla war.

Contrary to the impression given by most newspaper headlines, the United States has won the day in Iraq. In 2004, our military fought fierce battles in Najaf, Fallujah, and Sadr City. Many thousands of terrorists were killed, with comparatively little collateral damage. As examples of the very hardest sorts of urban combat, these will go down in history as smashing U.S. victories.

And our successes at urban combat (which, scandalously, are mostly untold stories in the U.S.) made it crystal clear to both the terrorists and the millions of moderate Iraqis that the insurgents simply cannot win against today’s U.S. Army and Marines. That’s why everyday citizens have surged into politics instead.

Oh, and anyone who says "but but but casualties are up! huh, huh, what about that?" - just please read some history. Anything but your favorite, Vietnam.

And last but not least is the where abouts that favorite hide-and-go-seek participant, Osama bin Laden.

Porter Goss, Director of Central Intelligence (that's CIA), was interviewed by Time Magazine, and this very interesting exchange occured:

Q: WHEN WILL WE GET OSAMA BIN LADEN?
Goss: That is a question that goes far deeper than you know. In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we're probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice. We are making very good progress on it. But when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play. We have to find a way to work in a conventional world in unconventional ways that are acceptable to the international community.

Q:IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU HAVE A PRETTY GOOD IDEA OF WHERE HE IS. WHERE?
Goss: I have an excellent idea of where he is. What's the next question?

In other words, he's in Iran. Which is just where Richard Miniter, author of "Shadow War", thought he was. As Clausewitz would have said, it's all part of the friction of war.

6/23 Update

Wretchard provides the analysis and context. He talks about guerilla forces, and the difference for them between prospects for victory and merely continuing to exist. In other words, just because they are able to continue their existance and even do damage, does not mean that they stand a realistic prospect for success:

Political influence, combat capability and territorial control are the real metrics of a successful guerilla campaign. The argument that mere existence or avoidance of defeat constitutes victory is hogwash: both the IRA and the Red Hand Commandos exist, but clearly the IRA is the more successful guerilla organization because it has a national united front, some combat capability and hard and diverse leadership core where the Red Hand Commandos do not. Even Al Qaeda, which some claim to be a creature of pure thought has sought to control territory in Afghanistan and spread its influence through Islamic "charities" while under the control of a central group of militants. It was, in other words, no different from any other classic guerilla organization.

While the Iraqi insurgents still retain the capability to kill significant numbers of people they are almost total losers by the traditional metric of guerilla warfare. First of all, by attacking civilians of every ethnic group and vowing to resubjugate the majority ethnic groups in the country they have at a stroke made creating a national united front against the United States a near impossibility. Second, there is a battle for supremacy among the insurgent leaders.

Which is why anyone who depends on the TV, newspapers, or magazines for analysis will never understand what is going on.

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June 5, 2005

The Consequences of Failure

This morning in the Washington Times the lead editorial was so "right on" that I thought I'd share it with you. Now, I'm sure that most of my readers will also say "right on!" after you read it, so in that sense it's nothing new.

But that's ok, because that's one thing that makes Internet blogging so grea; the ability to spread good ideas. Well, that and the ability to spread the absolutely whacko stuff spoken by the likes of Eason Jordan, Linda Foley, and our newest corporate bigwig whacko; Indra Nooyi. But I don't want to get too far off on a tangent so I'll get back to what I was talking about.

The editorial is by Clifford May, and unfortunately for some reason the Times doesn't have it on their website, so I went to townhall.com to get it. Which is fine, but the Times can be frustrating like that sometimes.

May asks what the result would be if we simply gave up and pulled out of Iraq. What might happen if we up and agreed with the liberals in the Democrat Party and the mainstream media that Iraq was a hopeless quagmire and that the only thing to do was to pull out?

It surely would mean a blood bath as the Ba'athist insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists settled scores and demonstrated – as an object lesson for others -- the price that must be paid for collaborating with American infidels.

Iraqi terrorist training camps would no doubt be re-opened. Refurbishing Salman Pak, for example, not only would humiliate America but, more practically, could turn out skilled replacements for those combatants lost during the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns.

On a conceptual level, it would now be apparent that America's flight from Beirut after the slaughter of its Marines in 1983, its hasty withdrawal from Somalia ten years later, its refusal to hold any terrorist nation, dictator or group responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing – these were not flukes or mistakes but points in a trend line. It would confirm the belief that the West is in decline and that a superior force is destined to prevail – exactly what both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have long predicted.

Al-Qaeda, Saddam loyalists, agents of the Iranian mullahs – whichever group or alliance of groups emerged on top in Iraq would build on their success. Before long we could expect an “insurgency” in Kuwait: the assassination of a few key figures, some beheadings and suicide bombings. The wave would continue into Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and beyond. Who would stop it? How would they stop it?

With expanding territory, population and resources, including vast oil wealth, the leaders of the new totalitarian confederation or empire – or caliphate -- could manipulate the world's economy to its benefit and to the detriment of those few nations who might dare obstruct their ascendance. Nuclear, biological and chemical weapons would soon be theirs. They'd want them only for peaceful purposes, of course; and for deterrence.

Before long, the dream of both Saddam and bin Laden would be realized. There would be an oil-rich, nuclear-armed new superpower, a true rival to the decadent and divided West. Quietly, it would empower “non-state actors,” AKA, terrorist groups.

In Europe, radical Islamists would become increasingly demanding. They'd find European leaders surprisingly accommodating. Americans, by contrast, would be obstreperous and try to better seal their borders. Such efforts would only delay the inevitable. Chances are that, eventually, a nuclear weapon or germ bomb would be detonated in some American population center. World leaders would express sympathy. But what could be done? Investigate who had supplied it to whom? Ask the United Nations to impose sanctions? Retaliate against the civilian populations of Baghdad and Tehran?

So let's break down what he is saying and go over each part a bit:

One, Iraq will experience a bloodbath that will rival Saddam's murders. And they think things are bad now. This happened, recall, when we pulled out of Vietnam. More people were killed by the communists in South Vietnam and Cambodia (mainly the latteer) after the war than during it. We'll have another episode of "boat people", just don't count on the liberals to be there to pick them up.

Two, terrorists newly trained in Iraq will come forth to wreck havoc on the rest of the world. Ok, I can just hear it, some pointy-head anti-war type is saying "see! see! if you'd never invaded we wouldn't have this problem!" Uh, you miss the point. If we hadn't taken down Saddam we'd eventually have had a Iraq free of sanctions and armed with WMD. The sanctions were falling apart by 2003, but I don't have time to go into that now.

Three, Al-Quada would establish their Caliphate and institute fundamendalist Islam throughout as much of the world as they can. They would create a regular army and send it forth to wreck havoc on the world. And you thought terrorists were trouble? Hmm, there's a historical analogy here somewhere, let me think. Oh yes, there it is; can you say "Third Reich"? Remember that Hitler wanted to recreate what he saw as past German glories. Hard as it is for the modern western mind to grasp, the crazies in Al-Qaeda want to to the same for Islam.

The horror of the post-war in Vietnam would be tame compared to Iraq. May knows that some will say that defeat in Vietnam wasn't so bad, because

...after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam life returned to normal for most Americans. But Ho Chi Min had modest ambitions. He never sought to topple the American colossus; the Viet Cong never attempted to massacre Americans on American soil.

Exactly.

Fortunately for the other countries in the region such as Thailand, they were able to use the time we fought the communists in Vietnam to arm themselves. And the North Vietnamese were so exhausted by the war that they didn't have the strengh to spread their ideology to neighboring countries.

This time is different. As Clifford May says, "Failure is Not an Option" No indeed.

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May 13, 2005

On Casualties and War

Just a few thoughts this morning as I'm off to work on another threat assessment for our new Threats Watch site. Then it's off to work (oh yeah, that).

Anyone who's followed the news recently knows that casualties from bombings in Iraq are up. The number of dead and wounded are almost double what they were not too many months ago.

I have no doubt that this will prompt the usual suspects to declare that all is lost and that we have failed.

Need we point out to them that casualty rates is a very poor way of determining who is winning and who is losing? Apparently so.

The most bloody battles we fought in World War II were near the end of the war. Iwo Jima and Okinawa were fought in the closing months of the war, the former in February and March, and the latter in April of 1945.

Iwo Jima cost some 7,000 Americans their lives, and Okinawa 12,000. The battle for Okinawa was a marked by mistake after mistake on our side, starting with a gross underestimation of the number of Japanese troops on the island (we estimated 65,000, it turned out the number was more like 130,000). We had no real counter to the kamikaze, which devastated our navy and support vessels.

The situation was no better in Europe. We were totally taken by surprise by a German offensive in December of 1944, in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. Many American units were completely overrun, and we only turned the tide when the Wehrmacht ran out of gas and the weather improved to where we could use our air power. As it was, we lost some 19,000 lives.

No Neat Lines

Today we have no neat maps where we can draw the "front line". The enemy does not make it easy be organizing in neat identifiable western-style military units that we can mark with pins.

No, this time we have to actually think. That's right, use our heads and try to analyze exactly what is going on. I don't have the time or expertise to do that right now, so if you want the best go to these sites, where I assure you you'll be amply rewarded:

Belmont Club
Bill Roggio
Strategy Page

Al-Qaeda Organization Chart

As promised, Bill Roggio has posted a link to an organization chart to Al-Qaeda in Iraq (link to download here)

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May 11, 2005

Stand up for Israel

Maia Lazar has organized a "Jewish Blogburst". Stop over at the blogburst site where she has a list of those who participated and an excerpt from their post.

I will use this opportunity to discuss once more a topic that I believe to be vitally important; moral clarity and the Middle East.

In all of the areas of the world, of all the issues that we discuss, none is more clouded by moral confusion as that of Israel and the Middle East. It is a subject that to me seems so obvious, yet to so many others at home and abroad it is so clouded. It almost pains me to say it, but their moral confusion on this issue is evidence of problems with the entire concept of democracy, freedom, and the concept of "right versus wrong". Big stuff, but there it is.

The Confused

Here is what we hear from the confused on an almost daily basis:

• Israel stole land that belongs to the Palestinians
• Israel is one of the most repressive states on the planet
• Zionists are racists
• Israeli troops deliberately kill civilians
• "The Jews" control the banks, Hollywood, U.S. foreign policy, (fill in the blank with your favorite)

On and on it goes. Of all of the repressive regimes on our planet, tiny Israel receives more venom and hatred directed towards it than all of the others put together. It is regularly attacked in the UN General Assembly. It is despised in Europe.

The fact is, of course, that those who attack Israel so venemously know perfectly well what they are doing. They are not really confused at all.

A Perfect Example

The best example of moral confusion is in regard to Israeli military actions versus terrorist actions by Palestinian and other Muslim extremists.

Israel directs it's attacks at military targets, by which we mean people who are either armed themselves or directly part of a military-type structure aimed at doing harm. Sometimes civilians are killed during the fighting. However, they civilians are not only the ones not targeted, but the evidence is overwhelming that Israel, like the United States, goes out of its way to avoid civilian casualties.

Palestinian and other Muslim extemists, however, directly target Israeli civilians.

Why this difference is hard for some people to understand is utterly beyond me. My only conclusion is that they are so enraptured by leftist ideologies that they are beyond reason.

The Settlements

We're forever hearing that the settlements are standing in the way of peace.

To which I ask; if the settlements are the problem today, what was the problem before 1967?

The usual response; silence. Of course. They have no answer.

I wrote about this at some length in a previous post. My conclusion:

The main issues preventing peace are the following

1. Lack of Moral Clarity. I've written on this before here. Here are two of the essential elements of moral clarity lacking in some people:
   
1. Israel is an imperfect democracy, but it is a democracy. No Arab state is a democracy. This does not mean that Israel may do anything it wishes, but it does mean that we should give them the benefit of the doubt.
2. Israeli forces practice discrimination in warfare. That is, they only attack military targets. Civilians are sometimes killed as a byproduct, but the civilians are not the target themselves. Arab/Muslim terrorists deliberately target civilians. Why this is hard for some people to understand is beyond me.
2. Lack of Democracy among the Arab States. Natan Scharansky wrote about this in his excellent book "The Case for Democracy". Simply put, democracies do not fight each other. We in the west are partly responsible for the current state of affairs, since in the past we did not pressure Arab governments to reform.
   
3. Palestinian terrorism - until the Arab states and/or the PA put and end to terrorism by organizations such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the others there will be no peace.
4. The expansion of the settlements should stop. Ok, I know I said earlier that "the settlements per se" are not the problem. And that is true. But it is also true that in my opinion Israel does not need new settlements, and by expanding them they give Palestinian extremists a propaganda message that is useful in recruiting terrorists.

1. 
   

Onwards to Democracy

There will not be a permanent peace in the Middle East until the Arab states start to embrace pluralistic forms of government. This includes the Palestinian Authority.

Natan Sharansky wrote about this in his book "The Case for Democracy". Sharansky said that agreements such as the one at Oslo were a mistake because they did not require that the Palestinians reform themselves, and I believe that history has shown him to be correct.

While some doubt that democracy is possible among Muslims, Sharansky (and I) disagree. Many once thought that democracy was not possible for people in the former Soviet Republics and Eastern Europe. History has proven them wrong.

Stand up for Israel

So in the meantime we must stand up for Israel, for to do so is to stand for democracy. We do this not because of some misguided notion of "Israel right or wrong", for Israel is not always in the right. But it is more right more often that it's enemies, far more, in fact. And we also stand up for Israel because, strange as it may sound, to do so is to stand up for democratic change in the Arab world, for they deserve to live as we do also.

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May 2, 2005

Brilliant

If you're not reading Belmont Club you're missing out. Wretchard says he has the flu yet still writes so brilliantly I am in awe. The comments are well worth reading also.

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April 29, 2005

All the Right Enemies (and Friends!)

Victor Davis Hanson says that that United States is hated by all the right people:

At the U.N. it is said that a ruling hierarchy mistrusts the United States and that a culture of anti-Americanism has become endemic within the organization. No wonder — the Americans alone push for more facts about the Oil-for-Food scandal, question Kofi Annan's breaches of ethics, and want investigations about U.N. crimes in Africa. If we are mistrusted for caring about those thousands who are inhumanely treated by a supposedly humane organization, then why in the world should we wish to be liked by such a group?
...
In short, who exactly does not like the United States and why? First, almost all the 20 or so illiberal Arab governments that used to count on American realpolitik's giving them a pass on accounting for their crimes. They fear not the realist Europeans, nor the resource-mad Chinese, nor the old brutal Russians, but the Americans, who alone are prodding them to open their economies and democratize their corrupt political cultures. We must learn to expect, not lament, their hostility, and begin to worry that things would be indeed wrong if such unelected dictators praised the United States.

Ok but what about the Europeans? Shouldn't we want them to like us?

The EU is well past being merely silly, as its vast complex of bureaucrats tries to control what 400 million speak, eat, and think. Its biggest concerns are three: figuring out how its nations are to keep paying billions of euros to retirees, unemployed, and assorted other entitlement recipients; how to continue to ankle-bite the United States without antagonizing it to the degree that these utopians might have to pay for their own security; and how not to depopulate itself out of existence. Europeans sold Saddam terrible arms for oil well after the first Gulf War. Democratic Israel or Taiwan means nothing to them; indeed, democracy is increasingly becoming the barometer by which to judge European hostility.

Who, then, likes us?

Perhaps one billion Indians, who appreciated that at a time of recession we kept our economy open, and exported jobs and expertise there that helped evolve its economy.

Millions of Japanese trust America as well. Unlike the Chinese, who on script vandalized Japanese interests abroad in anguish over right-wing Japanese textbooks, Americans — who at great cost once freed China — without such violence urge the Japanese to deal honestly with the past. After all, the Tokyo government that started the war is gone and replaced by a democracy; in contrast, the Communist dictatorship that killed 50 million of its own and many of its neighbors is still in place in China. At a time when no one in Europe seems to care that Japan is squeezed between a nuclear North Korea and a nuclear China, the United States alone proves a reliable friend. The French, on spec, conduct maneuvers with the ascendant Communist Chinese navy.

Eastern Europeans do not find the larger families, religiosity, or commitment to individualism and freedom in America disturbing. Apparently, millions in South America don't either — if their eagerness to emigrate here is any indication.

In short, we are hated by all the right people, and liked by all the right people. We should be disturbed if it was any different

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April 26, 2005

Terror in the Skies Update

and The James Woods Encounter

Last July (here, here here and here I wrote about Annie Jacobson, who's experience on Northwest flight 327 was the subject of her much-talked about "Terror in the Skies" article in the Women's Wall Street Journal.

At the time some say that she overreacted. I wondered, but thought it credible. Michelle Malkin, who has done great work keeping air safety in the forefront of her reporting, thinks so also. Joe Scarbough took it seriously enough to report on it on his MSNBC television show.

Jacobson's latest installment on the incident appeared a few days ago in the Women's Wall Street Journal. This one details a visit she got from the Department of Homeland Security, which took the incident a lot more seriously than did Transportation.

Here's what I find fascinating: while one arm of the government (the Federal Air Marshal Service) has vehemently maintained all along that "nothing happened on flight 327," the other, more muscular arm (the Department of Homeland Security) has been conducting a rather large investigation about it. Based on my 4 ½ hour meeting with the agents, I can tell you that not only have they been investigating what did happen during the flight, but they've also been investigating who botched the subsequent investigation as well as how it got botched.

(Hat tip Michelle Malkin).

Thank you, Tom Ridge.

The Homeland Security agents had called her to request an interview (they called her on her cell phone, which is of course an unlisted number. Interesting...) Anyway, four agents flew from their office in Los Angeles to her house in Chicago even though Jacobson had warned them that she was about to give birth so might not be available.

The first thing I clarified for the agents was that, prior to my experience on flight 327, I had never heard of a "probe" or a "dry run." For the record, I explained, I had never heard of the James Woods incident either. [In case you're not aware, the actor James Woods flew on an American Airlines flight from Boston to Los Angeles one month prior to 9/11. Alarmed by the behavior of a group of four Middle Eastern men, Woods summoned the pilot and told him that he was "concerned the men were going to hijack the plane." A report was filed with the FAA on Woods' behalf but, tragically, no one followed up with Woods or the men. A few days after 9/11, several federal agents showed up in Woods' kitchen. Woods can't talk about what was said -- he believes his testimony will be used in the trial of the supposed 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui-- but, in an interview with Bill O'Reilly, Woods revealed that his flight "was a rehearsal [for 9/11] with four men."]

Standing in my kitchen, one of the agents said, "What I can tell you is this: Mohammed Atta

was one of the passengers on that flight with James Woods." (Apparently, this information has never been made public.) With that, the agent pulled out his chair, opened his notebook and started in with his questions for me (at which point the other three agents opened up their notepads almost simultaneously).

You have got to read the whole thing.

The New Yorker also wrote a story on the James Woods incident by Seymore Hersh. Since I don't generally trust Hersh you'll have to take it for what it's worth.

This is also another reason why I don't trust Snopes, a so-called "rumor investigating" website. Their bias on the matter shows plainly in their "investigation." Over the past few months I've seen lefties quote them in attempts to say that something or another "has been debunked by snopes". But even a cursory reading of many snopes articles reveals shoddy research and an obvious bias.

Far from being an "urban legend", as snopes would have us believe, the case is not at all closed:

The agents who sat with me all morning going over the events of flight 327 seemed sincerely committed to getting to the bottom of what happened on that flight. It seemed obvious that they believe something happened. Was it a probe? A dry run? A training exercise or an intelligence gathering mission? My sense is that the jury's still out on a hard and fast answer. But flight 327 was far from a situation involving 13 hapless Syrian musicians and a case of bad behavior.

Don't let your guard down.

Posted by Tom at 10:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 21, 2005

The Strategic Offensive III:

The Next Step

Last August I posted an article titled "The Strategic Offensive I: What We have Achieved in the War on Terror" on this site. In it I made the case that by invading Iraq we had achieved far more than what most people seemed to think.

What we have done is nothing short of revolutionary. We have gone to the heart of the enemy camp and destroyed his headquarters. We have seized his leaders and forced the others to flee for their lives. We have grabbed them by the throat and are slowly but surely strangling them.

No more are we probing the enemy listening posts and attacking selected, weakly defended targets. No more are we simply skirting around the periphery.

For a new Iraq, secure in it's borders and with a new spirit of freedom, will shine a light to the countries in the rest of the Arab and Muslim world. That light has already revealed those regimes to be decadent, corrupt, and uncaring towards their own citizens.

The theses of the article were threefold:

1. We must strike directly into the heart of the enemy camp, and not be content with "contaiment or piddling around the edges
2. By invading and thus seizing the strategic offensive "...we have forced them to fight where we want to fight, at a time and place of our choosing."
3. This will result in a new democratic Iraq, which will in turn spread democracy throughout the region.

During the Cold War we had little choice but to adopt a strategy of containment. Now we have the opportunity to act before our enemies get nuclear weapons.

Not to toot my own horn (at least not too loud) but I believe that the recent elections in Iraq, and other events around the Middle East have vindicated me.

Writing in the Feb 28 print edition of National Review (a digital subscription is required for on-line viewing), historian Paul Johnson seems to agree:

By taking up the leadership of the War on Terror, and by insisting that America would act unilaterally if necessary, Bush showed he was eager to take full advantage of America's vastly increased relative power. The results are now coming in. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, fair and free elections have been held for the first time. What a half a century of exhortation had failed to do, the judicious use of military force achieved in two years — to bring democracy to the Muslim Middle East.

In the process, America obliged the leaders of international terrorism to concentrate all their efforts on preventing democracy from emerging in Iraq. By inflicting defeat on them there — where they were strongest — U.S. armed forces have dealt a blow to terrorist morale from which it may never recover. The families of American and Allied soldiers killed in Iraq should take comfort from this. The operation has succeeded. Terrorism is now on the retreat, and countless innocent lives may be saved in consequence.

Certainly I do not imagine that Mr. Johnson reads The Redhunter (although a little fantasy every now and then can't be so bad, can it?).

The results of the election, and the way the Iraqi's have handled themselves, is encouraging. No one group got over 50% of the vote, and thus enough power to rule by themselves. There have been many reports of how the Shia have "reached out" to the Sunnis, recognizing that they must be brought into decision making. There is evidence that some or many in the Sunni leadership have seen that they made a mistake by staying out of the elections. Many average Sunnis would have voted were it not for fear of terrorists. Indeed, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's own approved electoral list included 30 Sunnis.

Far from provoking a civil war, Zarqawi seems to have provoked cooperation. This alone will be his undoing. For once the Iraqis have a government by them and for them, they will fight for it.

That Arabs in neighboring countries are taking notice is much in evidence. David Pryce Jones (same NR print edition) tells us that

Iraq's version of a round table is already having positive repercussions. In Beirut, Rami G. Khouri, one of the most prominent and articulate Arab commentators, writes that the sight of Iraqis enthusiastically choosing their leaders from among a wide range of options is causing many Arabs to reassess the political implications of developments inside Iraq. Except for the usual collaborators and quislings, the Lebanese actively want an end to the Syrian occupation of their country, and may use the elections as a means of showing that they too can choose leaders able to hand their state to them.

Even in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia we are seeing the beginnings of reform;

Bahrain is to hold legislative elections this year. As for Saudi Arabia, it takes pride in maintaining its Muslim identity and absolute rule, but even there the retrograde royal family has agreed to hold municipal elections, limited, to be sure, because women will have no vote and a proportion of candidates are to be appointed rather than elected. Still, nothing like it has ever taken place. Nor has anything ever taken place in Morocco like the commission now trying to establish the extent of injustice and torture in that country's concentration camps under the previous ruler.

All of this is very encouraging. To be sure, we're not out of the woods yet. Much could go wrong to thwart our plans.

And two of the things that could go wrong are meddling by Iran and Syria.

What to do Next

Some, like Johnson, think that the best way to deal with Iran and Syria is to eliminate the threat from North Korea first. His rational is that since it has been proven that they supplied uranium hexaflouride to Libya, they may supply it to others as well. Uranium hexaflouride can be enriched into weapons-grade levels by use of centrafuges, and is thus uniquely dangerous material.

Either way, the point is that we need to stay on the offensive and not sit back. That Iraq has proved harder than expected must not deter us. Although our ground forces may be stretched thin, our Navy and Air Force do not have much to do. We need to make use of all of our resources before it is too late.

North Korea

Some advocate immediate air strikes on North Korea. I am wary of this, as the DPRK could easily destroy the South Korean capital with the massive amounts of artillery that they currently have hidden in caves just north of the border. The resulting damage would be tremendous. While there may well come a time when this step is necessary, I think it premature to act now.

Iran

There are several problems with regard to Iran. One is that although the people there seem to like the United States and oppose their government, they don't want us to attack militarily. It is problamatic as to whether air strikes will significantly set back their nuclear program, and may turn the people against us as well.

However, if we continue along the current path of endless negotiations and limited sanctions, we are only delaying the inevitable. While the people may revolt, it is too thin a reed upon which to place much hope. We need stronger action.

We should strongly consider a naval blockade, perhaps of selective items, perhaps of everything, including oil.

Tough? Yes. Risky? Certainly. Will we have the support of the "world community"? No. But which is worse, these or a nuclear-armed Iran? You know my answer.

Syria

While Syria has no nuclear program, they are armed with chemical and perhaps biological weapons. The real threat from them, however, is their aid to terrorists within Iraq. This is intollerable and must be made to stop. Beefing up border security will not be enough.

Syria has a relatively weak military. They have a small army and air force, and most analysis I read does not think much of their abilities.

We need to inform Bashir Assad, the current dictator/strongman (he doesn't deserve to be called by whatever his title really is) that he stops his aid to terrorists or else. And that "or else" is air attacks on his country. At first we should hit suspected terrorist camps, but as many are probably unknown to us (or hidden within populated areas), we should hit some of his bases as well.

Again, tough stuff, I know. Yes it will be an "escallation," with risks. But if we do not stabilize Iraq the game is up anyway. Assad's position is not strong, and he knows it. I believe that he can be made to see reason, unlike his cohorts in Iran and North Korea.

Saudi Arabia

They are not direct threats in the same way that the others are. But for far too long we have tolerated their export of radical Wahhabist ideology to many countries, including the United States. They did recently hold elections for municipal government. Granted, they were very imperfect elections, with no women voting, and only approved candidates on the ballot. But they did occur, and it is a good start. We must hold their feet to the fire on this, and especially on ending their support to clerics who preach Wahhabi hate ideology. Business as usual must end.

Staying on the Offensive

Whatever we do, we must not simply sit back and think that the business-as-usual of negotiations and sanctions will work. That Iraq has tied up more of our ground forces for longer than expected must not deter us. No I am not arguing for new military adventures, mainly for judicious use of force.

The choice is not between a stable status quo and stirring things up. The choice is between taking calculated risks or living in a future that is much worse.

Posted by Tom at 9:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 15, 2004

Shadow War

In his book Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush is Winning the War on Terror, Richard Miniter sets out to answer three questions:

Where is Osama bin Laden? Why hasn't there been another terrorist strike inside the U.S. since September 11, 2001? Is President Bush winning the war?

Miniter answers the second two conclusively and well, and gives a credible case for his answer on the first. Unfortunately, several sections of the book, and one entire chapter, are essentially non sequiturs.

Where is Osama bin Laden?

Miniter makes the case the he is alive and well and living in Iran. The book was published in September 2004, well before bin Laden's pre-election videotape, when there was much speculation that he was dead. Miniter makes a good case that he is in Iran, though admits that it is quite possible that he is somewhere near the Afghan-Pakistani border.

John Kerry famously declared that we failed to get bin Laden at Tora Bora because we "outsourced" the operation. Tommy Franks answered that accusation by responding that one, we never knew for certain whether he was even there or not, two that we relied on Afghans because they knew the area better than us, and third, our Special Forces were heavily involved.

Richard Miniter describes Afghanistan and the Tora Bora region

(Superimposed over the United States on a map) Afghanistan stretched from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans and from Cincinnati to Atlanta. The implications were clear; Afghanistan is far bigger than most Americans realize and there remain many places for terrorists to hide. the land is a smuggler's paradise of deep ravines, caves, crevices, dry plains prone to visibility-destroying dust storms, and snow-caped peaks soaring high above the limits of American helicopters. (p. 14)

The mountainous environment "...made encirciling al Qaeda's forces at Tora Bora impossible." That, coupled with the distrust locals traditionally show to outsiders, meant that flooding the country or even a region of it would be foolish.

Why hasn't there been another Terrorist Strike since Sept 11, 2004?

It's not for lack of trying, answers Miniter. Rather, it is because we are defeating "...something like a plot a day."(p. 4)

Recall that a second wave of attacks by hijacked aircraft were planned for the days after Sept 11. Al Qaeda never got a chance to carry them out, because "afterwards, we never got time to catch our breath, we were always on the run," explained Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to his interrogators after his capture.

Much of the book is dedicated to telling the story of how the U.S. and it's allies defeated several terrorist plots. I won't give them away, other than to say that much of what he relates has not appeared in the papers. It is the result of good old-fashioned investigative journalism.

The Bush Administration is not spared criticism, however. "Visa Express," and their failure attempt to recruit informants inside al Qaeda come under scrutiny, for example. The feud between Condelezza Rice and Richard Clarke is dealt with at some length. Miniter seems to have a more positive assessment of Clarke than did Tommy Franks.

Is President Bush winning the War?

Yes, and in a thousand small battles. Many are related in the book, too numerous for me to list here.

Miniter makes the case that Saddam Hussein "...provided arms, training, and money to bin Laden." and details the Iraq - al Qaeda connection in an appendix.

There are many fronts in the War on Terror, most of which do not make the daily newspapers. One of them is on the oceans and at our port facilities. Al Qaeda hatched several plots to attack U.S. Navy ships, so far all of which have been successfully foiled. One of them even involved a traitor on a U.S. warship who sent sensitive information to his al Qaeda contacts about naval operations. The Navy and Coast Guard have gone from being reactive to adopting the Bush strategy of preemption. We are now actively stopping and searching suspicious ships on the high seas as well as when they enter port.

Miniter also discusses our successful operations in North Africa.

Fought largely by forces from the U.S. Army's European Command (whish is responsible for North Africa), the CIA, French Intelligence (many of the Saharan countries are former French colonies), and a panoply of African allies, the war on al Qaeda in North Africa has gone largely unnoticed in the American media. At the very least, this war shows that the Iraq War was not a distraction from President Bush's War on Terror, only a distraction for the press. (p. 89)

Much time is taken to discuss this cooperation with other countries. After relating the arrest of an important al Qaeda terrorist in the UAE, Miniter concludes that

The UAE alliance with the U.S. is just one of the many that the Bush Administration has negotiated - and others are said to be just as productive. With its dizzying number of alliances, the Bush administration's War on Terror is anything but unilateral. (p. 117)

Whither the Press?

Actually, says Minitar, most of the successes in the War on Terror are "no secret," such as the fact that Libya has renounced WMD. Why, then, has the press missed them? Why do they concentrate on Abu Graib and

While there is some merit to both of these suspicions, the root cause is something more subtle: a failure of imaginatioin. The media does not understanad the workings of the intelligence community or the military, and therefore does not understand the war.(p. 160)

Further, there is no context to the reporting. Rather, we get bits and fragments, and sensational headlines of "scandals," but no big picture. It's as if during World War II the press spent their entire time attacking Roosevelt over failure to prevent Pearl Harbor.

The War on Terror is not like World War II, but is more like the Cold War in that we are fighting an ideological enemy rather than a geographical one. To be sure, the Nazis and Fascists had their ideologies, but few others in the world wanted to adopt it. In our current war, we are fighting a movement which may at times have state sponsors but is not absolutely dependant on them. Therefore, success cannot measured in geographical terms, or even in terms of time. Imagine, Minitar asks, if a reporter had demanded that Harry Truman tell them how long it would take to win the Cold War.

Why did bin Laden want war with the U.S.?

Miniter says that the best answer he found came from a French(!) intelligence agent who specialized in counter-terrorism. In his view, bin Laden thought that

A massive attack on America's soaring skyscrapers and public offices would compel the infidel power to invade Afghanistan, forcing a final showdown between the "house of peace"(Islam), and the "house of war" (the infidels). (p.31)

Bin Laden expected to easily defeat us, just as he defeated the Soviets. He did not imagine that we would not adopt their failed strategy. To him, the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan was the "defining moment" in his life.

Oddly enough, some on the far left used as a reason why we should not have invaded Afghanistan. By doing so, they argued, we were simply "playing into his hands" or "doing what he wanted us to do." As Miniter shows, however, we are in fact winning the War on Terror; you just won't read about it in the papers.

Reason for Hope

Miniter provides much reason for hope that we will win the War on Terror. As stated earlier, he describes many small successes that usually don't make the papers. But history is also a guide, and it gives us reason for hope.

The fact is, the West is much better at being flexible, and adopting new strategies, than are the Muslim terrorists. Our experience shows as much. During World War II, we learned from our mistakes. At the start of the war we were surprised, not just tactically such as at Pearl Harbor, but also technically when we discovered our aircraft were far inferior to those of our enemies. We built new aircraft and developed new tactics. We went from initial surprise to recovery, to victory. Our enemies stayed with the same equipment and tactics throughout the war.

The same seems to be happening in this war. Is is we who are learning from our mistakes, and are developing new methods to combat our enemy. Al Qaeda, who thought we would fight like the Soviets had in Afghanistan, has not recovered or shown that they can adapt to our way of war. The reason, Minitar says, is that their experience in war has been much more limited. They simply do not have the institutional knowledge that we possess.

The non sequiturs

Miniter spends an entire chapter on the Madrid bombing and subsequent defeat of Prime Minister Jose Maria Anzar. He uses this to speculate on what might happen if we suffer(ed) a similar attack before our election, and to provide advice for the Bush Administration.

There is also a chapter on an alleged plot to kill President George W Bush. The "plot" turns out to be a fabrication, although in the end we developed a valuable relationship with Sudanese Intelligence that has helped in the War on Terror. Important as it may be, it's hard to see how it justifies an entire chapter.

It is hard to see how either of these tie into his thesis.

In Conclusion

The book is generally good, and is worth purchasing, but could have used a good editor. Minitar includes many facts and much information about the War on Terror that, to my knowledge, have not been previously published.

You may also want to visit amazon.com and read the reviews of this book there. This book has brought the Bush-haters out in force. You'll find that most of their reviews are quite childish and do not address the facts presented in the book. Nothing surprising there, of course.

Richard Miniter is also the author of Losing bin Laden; How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror.

My next review: Inside the Asylum: Why the United Nations and Old Europe are Worse Than You Think, by Jed Babbin

Update

I found an interview with Richard Miniter on "Blogs for Bush." (via Mud & Phud) Here's a sample of what he had to say:

Here's the key statistic: More 3,000 al Qaeda fighters have been seized or slain since 9-11 in 102 different countries. That shows that the effort is larger than the public has been told--3,000 may be equal to one-quarter of al Qaeda's total strength--and far more global than the public believes. If you destroy a division of the enemy and it does not score a comparable victory against you, you are winning. That is the position of the U.S. today.

The war is more than Iraq and Afghanistan: In all but a handful of those 102 cases, those captures and kills have occurred with the help of local governments. Forget the 30 allies we have on the ground in Iraq, we have almost 100 allies in the war on terror--including virtually every Muslim-majority country in the world.

I learned this firsthand by reporting in the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, Israel and beyond.

Posted by Tom at 10:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 5, 2004

But Should We Care?

Over on the other side of the pond, the Guardian has a roundup of what they see as world opinion as regards the election in particular and our role in a post 9/11 world in particular. Are they ever bitter over there.

Of the 14 articles that make up their post-election "America's Place in the World", all but two are critical, if not outright hostile, to George W Bush. One country friendly towards us is Israel. No surprise there. But the other is Russia, where there may be a New-Found Friendship. According to the author of that piece, in the aftermath of the Beslan massacre Russians have developed a more favorable attitude towards the United States. Funny what a terrorist attack on one's own soil will do to one's predilections.

A review of just a few of the articles will suffice

Poll Reveals World Anger at Bush

George Bush has squandered a wealth of sympathy around the world towards America since September 11 with public opinion in 10 leading countries - including some of its closest allies - growing more hostile to the United States while he has been in office.

Never mind that this is a load of bunk. The reality is different. I'm willing to believe that most Europeans were actually sympathetic (even if privately happy to see us humbled). The problem is that they simply do not see 9/11 as a cause for war of any sort. Afghanistan, maybe. But a broader war? No. They are far too cynical, too sardonic, to accept the idea that we can reform the Middle East. The idea of moral values driving foreign policy is quite beyond them.

The most condesending article was regarding opinion in Spain

A Mature Society Condemns the War

Generally speaking, the polls show the same pattern in almost every country: rejection of the Iraq invasion, contempt for the Bush administration and lukewarm support for Kerry, but no clear sentiment of anti-Americanism, no rejection of the Americans or of their society. Such is the case in Spain, where there has traditionally been anti-American sentiment on the extreme right and the extreme left, but not in the centre. This lack of anti-Americanism is evidence of a mature society.

Thi attempt to separate "Americans" from "Bush", seen in other Guardian articles too, grates. Do they not realize that in a democracy a government is a reflection of what the people want? Or is it that the only Americans they meet are the Michael Moore-types?

But should we care? Niccolo Machiavelli offered this response to his Prince

Here the question arises; whether it is better to be loved than feared than feared or feared than loved. The answer is that it would be desireable to be both, but, since that is difficult, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one must choose.

We live in a time in which we might just have to choose. As Robert Kagan wrote two years ago

It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power — the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power — American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less. And this state of affairs is not transitory — the product of one American election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure.

If he is right, and I believe that he is, then the idea that holding summits will change matters was more than naive. Thank heavens John Kerry did not win the election and force us to witness several useless get-togethers by the world's leaders.

So yes, we should care. No, we should not compromise. As a result of the election it is they who will be forced to deal with us. We will see articles like those in the Guardian for a time. Let them get it out of their system. But at the end of the day they must come to grips with four more years of George W Bush. The American people have spoken, and they approve of his policies. American power and determination cannot be ignored.

Posted by Tom at 9:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 20, 2004

The New Fifth Column

Late in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, the Nationalist General Mola was advancing on Madrid with four columns of soldiers. During a radio address he was asked which one would take the city, which was held by Republican forces. He replied that a "fifth column" of hidden supporters within the city would undermine the government from within.

We are today faced with a new Fifth Column in the War on Terror. One that is working to undermine us from within.

From the BBC's website we learn of a new documentary to be broadcast tonight

The Power of Nightmares
Wed 20 Oct, 9:00 pm - 10:00 pm 60mins
Baby It's Cold Outside

In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares. The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams weren't true, neither are these nightmares.

This series shows dramatically how the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. It is a myth that has spread unquestioned through politics, the security services and the international media.

"Baby It's Cold Outside" is the first of a three part series.

Lest anyone be in doubt as to the Curtis' point of view, the review in the Guardian tells us that

During the three years in which the "war on terror" has been waged, high-profile challenges to its assumptions have been rare. The sheer number of incidents and warnings connected or attributed to the war has left little room, it seems, for heretical thoughts. In this context, the central theme of The Power of Nightmares is riskily counter-intuitive and provocative. Much of the currently perceived threat from international terrorism, the series argues, "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media." The series' explanation for this is even bolder: "In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power."

In other words, the entire war is a fraud. Not just the invasion of Iraq, mind you, but the entire concept of a War on Terror, which the writer helpfully puts in quotation marks so you'll get the point. Al Qaeda? Doesn't exist.

The Power of Nightmares seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an organised international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have "sleeper cells". It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence.

One hardly knows where to begin. That every point of this inditement is wrong has been amply documented elsewhere. Where does this idea that it is all an illusion come from, then?

Even before the start of the Cold War the left never believed the Soviet Union to be a threat. Far from it. They saw the communist experiment as one of hope for the future of mankind. After returning from a visit to the Soviet Union in 1921, Lincoln Stefans famously proclaimed that "I have seen the future, and it works."

Far from a threat, the "Old Left" saw it as the saviour of mankind.

We're all familiar with the run-up to the Second World War. The British and French ignored what today seem to us as obvious signs that Hitler would settle for nothing less than European domination. The idea that Hitler was anyting more than a nuisance was dismissed by the "enlightened" crowd. Churchill? Well, he was uncouth, a loudmouth, and everyone knew that he drank too much.

When the Cold War started up in the late '40s, again we were told that we were overreacting. Far from being a threat, the Soviet military buildup was simply a response to an understandable fear of us. It was the Soviet Union, we were told, who was surrounded by unfriendly states. We threatened them, and we should learn to understand their position.

The movement received new vigor with the rise of the "New Left" (their own term) in the 1960's, and reached it's climax with the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Carter went so far as to tell us that we had an "inordinate fear of communism."

What ultimately saved the West in each of these examples was not a new military weapon, or better intelligence, or the employment of some new military tactics or strategy. It was willpower. The resolve to stand up and stare down our enemy even, or perhaps especially, in the face of opposition from within.

The key to winning the War on Terror, then, is not military (although it is crucial), nor improvement of our intelligence capabilities (though surely we must), or even a repackaging of our message (which has been neglected). The key lies in Willpower and Resolve. We must develop what I call a philosophy of "anti-nihilism." For unlike what the multi-culturalists would have us believe, our beliefs and values are better than those of the Islamic world. There is an objective truth, and it is that freedom is the best hope for mankind.

And we are indeed in a War on Terror. It is real. Al Qaeda is not a fiction of our imagination, any more than the communists in the United States were during the '30s and '40's were. As the Venona transcripts have shown, there was a serious espionage threat from the Soviet Union. We today are faced with a similar infiltration that will likely only be exposed in it's entirety many years from now. We already have enough evidence to understand the threat.

We all remember the heady days following the attacks of Sept 11. The extreme left kept out of sight. Only a few, Susan Sontag among them, dared to say anything controversial. Her wrongheaded commets made a bit of a splash, then faded from the scene. Only Norman Podhoretz forsaw that the left would rise to oppose this war with all the ferocity they could muster.

It didn't take long, however, for indications of trouble to appear. There was the manufactured "controversy" over whether we should continue our attacks in Afghanistan during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Some who said we should stop the bombing were trying to be genuinly helpful. They feared an uprising by the "Arab Street." But others seemed to be using it as the excuse of-the-day to stop the war. Any reason would do, and this was the must convenient for the moment.

Had we hesitated we would have set a terrible precident. We would have given hope to our enemies and demonstrated weakness instead of resolve. War is, indeed, a terrible business. It is a measure of our humanity that we may wish to delay or avoid bloodletting. There are times, however, when we must carry forward.

None of this is to be construed as advocating indiscriminate killing. I am a firm believer in the Just War principles of proportionality and discrimination.

Nor am I saying that anyone who opposes the invasion of Iraq, or who has criticisms of how we are conducting the War on Terror, is a member of the Fifth Column. You can vote for Kerry and be a patriotic American. You can oppose the invasion of Iraq, although I will disagree with you. You can even wish that we involve the UN and French more, although I will really disagree with you.

What distinguishes members of the Fifth Column are their utter lack of constructive criticism, their blind "peace" mantra, those who apologize for American actions, or those who seek to tell us that it is all in our heads, that Al Qaeda doesn't really exist or is not a threat.

For additional reading, you may enjoy these books. I must warn you, however, they can be profoundly depressing at times.

Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left by David Horowitz
Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba by Paul Hollander
Anti-Americanism: Critiques at Home and Abroad 1965 - 1990 by Paul Hollander
Useful Idiots: How Liberals got it Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First by Mona Charen

Update

I was reading Paul Hollander's Anti-Americanism again last night and came upon this passage

The people I have in mind - who belong to this broader adversary culture - can be identified by a number of beliefs. Among them is that American intervention almost anywhere in the world is without moral justification. They also aver that the United States bears the lion's share of responsibility for the sufferings of the poor in the Third World. They include prosperous white middle-class people who voted for Jesse Jackson, thosse who would not register for the draft (or who support and encourage nonregistration). They are citizens for whom all American military expenditure is wasteful, who claim to have sleepless nightts over the prospect of nuclear war and press for making their towns "nuclear free zones"(and "sister cities" of those in the USSR and Nicaragua), people who in any conceivable conflict between the U.S. and other powers instinctively place the blame on the U.S., those among the college educated who are persuaded that Orwell's1984 captures most aptly the characteristics of contemporary America. They can also be identified by sporting bumper stickers proclaiming "US out of North America" and "This Country Was Build on the Bones of Indians." They are inclined to believe that the United States is a uniquely hypocritical and destructive society that failed to live up to it's promises. They are for the most part people of goodwill anhd frustrated idealism, persuaded that in no other country are social ideals and practices so far apart as in the United States of America.

We've all met people who fit the description above. The amazing thing is that almost inevitably they have good jobs and families. They have benefited most from American society, and are kept safe through the use of American military force. Although written in 1992, with only a few slight updates those words are as appropriate today as they were then.

It is these people, then, who hate the very concept of a "War on Terror". "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is their motto. I said it above, and I'll say it again; I am not speaking of those who simply have honest disagreements over how to fight the terrorists, or those who oppose the invasion of Iraq (again, as long as they do it for honest reasons), or even those who think that we should adopt a more "law enforcement" model.

Rather, I speak of those such as Michael Moore, who make "documentaries" filled with lies and half truths, and of his followers. This even includes a past president, Jimmy Carter, who invited Mr Moore to sit with him in his box at the Democratic National Convention. The writers of the BBC documentary discussed above also appear to fit into this category. Most of those who protested outside the Republican National Convention in New York also fit into this category of a "Fifth Column".

Those of us who dare to call these people by their true name can expect vituperation in return. "McCarthyite!" will be among the more tame insults we will endure. But as I've said, the key to winning this war is not about military force, or intelligence gathering, or by broadcasting a better "message", although these things are important. The key is Willpower and Resolve in the face of trials and troubles. The words of Thomas Paine come to mind

These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the servive of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love of man and woman. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

Update II

Jamie at Conservapuppies has an excellent post on the BBC "documentary". Check it out.

Update III

After happening upon some leftist websites and blogs, I've just got to write this: Anyone who calls our country, Republicans, or George W Bush "fascist" is a member of the Fifth Column.

Posted by Tom at 11:50 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 11, 2004

The Strategic Offensive II

W Thomas Smith has an excellant article posted on NRO in which he interviews a Navy SEAL, Lt. Commander Mark Divine.

Currently, Divine is working on a report for the U.S. Special Operations Command regarding the development of a Marine Corps special-operations unit attached to SEAL Team One, which he has been observing in Iraq. When asked about ongoing U.S. military efforts in that country, he says, "We have established a beachhead in what is Islamist-fascist territory. We're in their breeding ground and we've upset the plans of the Islamic fascists who during the years of the Clinton administration believed they could force our presence out of the Middle East."
...
President Bush's opponents, however, continue to rail against the war in Iraq. They contend that the three-year-old response to 9/11 in Afghanistan has been sidetracked by an unrelated adventure in Iraq. "Not so," says Divine, who believes such views are shortsighted. "Look, we are fighting terrorists — in the shadows — which is where we want to fight, and we are fighting them all over the world, not just in Afghanistan or in Iraq, but in places no one is even aware of. This is a global war where the major victory is in a thousand minor victories."

The Lt Commander is outlining the principle of the Strategic Offensive, which I discussed in a post last month.

"Shortsighted" is being too nice, however. It takes a very small mind to believe that the reason that we shouldn't be in Iraq is because we should have spent the money on health care or education here at home. Note that I am not saying that these are not important issues that should not be debated. Perhaps we do need to spend more money here at home, although I rather think that lask of money is not the cause of our problems. But to use it as a reason, no excuse, for not going into Iraq is small thinking indeed.

That al Qaeda Connection

LtC Divine sees clearly what so many on the left are (deliberately?) blind to

"There are enormous numbers of foreign fighters in Iraq right now. Whether some of those fighters were there before September 11, 2001, or as a call to arms later, will be argued by both [Democrats and Republicans] until they are blue in the face. What I can tell you is that there is tremendous evidence to suggest there were terrorist training camps in Iraq before 9/11."
...
President Bush's opponents, however, continue to rail against the war in Iraq. They contend that the three-year-old response to 9/11 in Afghanistan has been sidetracked by an unrelated adventure in Iraq. "Not so," says Divine, who believes such views are shortsighted. "Look, we are fighting terrorists — in the shadows — which is where we want to fight, and we are fighting them all over the world, not just in Afghanistan or in Iraq, but in places no one is even aware of. This is a global war where the major victory is in a thousand minor victories."

Amen. "Short sighted" about sums up the liberal/left response to Bush' strategic offensive. And anyone who says that there was no connection between terrorism and Iraq prior to 9/11 simply doesn't know what they're talking about.

Posted by Tom at 10:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 10, 2004

That Useless UN

The third, and last part of Bill Gertz' book "Treachery" is excerpted in today's Washington Times.

In today's piece Gertz shows how the UN utterly failed to prevent dangerous nations from developing nuclear-weapons programs:

Three times, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency missed the covert nuclear-arms programs of rogue regimes, allowing those states to build deadly weapons capability under the guise of generating nuclear power.

Disclosures of the nuclear progress of North Korea, Libya and Iran came in rapid succession, within the space of about a year. If the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) did not detect these programs, one must wonder what purpose the U.N. branch serves.

And to think that there are those in this country who would have us entrust our national security to such an organization. They would be perfectly happy with Hans Blix still in charge of inspections in Iraq. This, the same man who was utterly fooled by Saddam in the 1980's and who admitted as much after the Gulf War.

The Gertz article makes for painful, though necessary, reading. To show how effective he is, the French ambassador to the US felt compelled to write a letter to the editor showing his displeasure with Wednesday's piece.

While outright withdrawal from the UN is not realistic, we should work towards forming an alternate organization of "like minded nations" that can handle international crisis such as that unfolding in the Sudan. The UN is institutionally incapable of working to resolve issues regarding rogue states. We need a change.

Posted by Tom at 8:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 10, 2004

Strategic Offensive I:

What we have Achieved in the War on Terror

I have been convinced for some time that there are a fair amount of people in the world who have not grasped the enormity of what we have done in Iraq.

To them we have panel opened a new era of danger by needlessly provoking Muslims. They say we have overreacted to 9/11. To them the war in Iraq was at best unnecessary, at worst immoral and unjustified.

They are not only mistaken, they have no strategic vision.

For what we have done is nothing short of revolutionary. We have gone to the heart of the enemy camp and destroyed his headquarters. We have seized his leaders and forced the others to flee for their lives. We have grabbed them by the throat and are slowly but surely strangling them.

No more are we probing the enemy listening posts and attacking selected, weakly defended targets. No more are we simply skirting around the periphery.

For a new Iraq, secure in it's borders and with a new spirit of freedom, will shine a light to the countries in the rest of the Arab and Muslim world. That light has already revealed those regimes to be decadent, corrupt, and uncaring towards their own citizens.

Nothing so far has been achieved without great difficulty. Harder times are sure to come. A safe and secure Iraq is not at all assured. Our experiment could still go awry, and Iraq could fall to the Jihadists.

The Nature of the Enemy

It will be objected that since the regime in Iraq was secular, it had no connection with religious terrorism in general or al Qaeda in particular. If they even concede the religious nature of the enemy they say that the terrorist organization is based on a fundamentalist(yet distorted) reading of the Koran, and Saddam was their enemy as much as ours. That this view has been shown to be incorrect (see here and here) does not disuade them.

This is a fundamental misreading of the situation. Al Qaeda is indeed an organization based on a fundamentalist reading of the Koran. Osama bin Laden's goal is to establish a seventh-century Caliphate across the Middle East. Thousands of Muslims have joined his organization, and millions more are sympathetic to it's goals.

One primary reason that they have joined or are sympathetic is that their own governments are corrupt and unresponsive to their needs. They are frustrated by the inability of their governments to provide for their needs, and are embarrassed by their military ineptness and technological backwardness. Saddam Hussein's regime was no different in this regard. It simply stood out because it was more overtly brutal than the others in the region.

As such, Iraq was a particularly virulent cancer in the Middle East. Saddam's regime was uniquely destabilizing. As I have written before, the situation was intolerable and the status quo unsustainable.

As a result of these conditions young Arab/Muslim men looked for an answer to their problems. Radical Islam appeared to provide those answers. Al Qaeda is simply the vehicle.

The nature of the governments in the Middle East is therefore a prime cause of terrorism. In order for conditions to improve, they must be changed. Ideally they will change through an evolutionary process, as revolution is an uncertain and dangerous business. We had no choice in Iraq, and the hope is that this serves as a beacon of hope to the people of the region, and as a ray of warning to their leaders.

To be sure, there are other causes for Muslim terrorism; the lack of a secular tradition, various cultural attitudes, and some of the teachings of Islam are problems. I do not wish to pursue those here, however.

What must be Done

During the worst days of the Cold War the threat of nuclear war kept us from doing anything more than simply containing the Soviet Empire. Only when they had become visibly decadent could we speak of true "rollback." And even then we could apply our military forces only at the periphery of the empire, at places such as Grenada.

But there is no such threat from the Arab and Muslim worlds. The worst-case scenario is that the terrorists could sneak one or more nuclear weapons into our cities. Such an attack is horrible to contemplate, but it would not end our civilization. That the Soviets could do so limited our options severely. We face no such limitations today.

On Strategy and Tactics

By invading Iraq not long after Afghanistan we maintained the Strategic Offensive. An understanding of this concept is crucial to whether we will succeed or fail in this war.

Strategy is the art and science of employing the forces of a nation to achieve the desired political result. These forces include not only military power, but economic, political, psychological, economic, and social forces as well. For example, North Vietnam was able to use our democracy against us during that war. The actions of the protestors sapped our strength and made us doubt the rightness of our cause. These factors are every bit as important as those which occur on the battlefield

Tactics are the minutiae of combat. They are the means by which one employs forces on the battlefield.

Karl von Clausewitz said that we needed to distinguish between "that which is merely preparation for war and war proper." The former is the tactics, the latter the strategy. In other words, it is one thing to train and equip an army. It is quite another to use that force to achieve the desired result.

It is crucial to understand that success on the battlefield (tactics) does not necessarily translate into overall success(strategy). A 1975 conversation in Hanoi illustrates the point:

"You know you never defeated us on the battlefield," said the American colonel.

The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. "That may be so," he replied, "but it is also irrelevant."

We can say that we defeated the Vietnamese on the battlefield all we want. Saigon, however, is now Ho Chi Minh City. There is more to winning wars than what occurs on the battlefield, which is a lesson we forgot during that war.

The North Vietnamese were on the strategic offensive during the war. That they were also on the tactical defensive during most of it did not prevent their eventual success. Our refusal to invade the north or seriously attempt to disrupt operations on the Ho Chi Minh trail placed us on the strategic defensive, whether we wanted to admit it or not.

The purpose here is not to analyze that war in detail. Rather it is to set the stage for a discussion of the current one.

The Offensive

We must remain on the strategic offensive if we are to win the War on Terror.

John Kerry and his supporters imagine that "strong diplomacy" coupled with police-type actions would also place us on the offensive. They could not be more mistaken. This strategy of theirs is strictly defensive. The enemy would be the ones "calling the shots" and we would be relegated to a role of pursuit. That we would be on the tactical offensive by carrying forth raids by special forces would only give the illusion of offense. Our victories on the battlefield would not result in positive results in the general campaign.

By carrying the war to the enemy we have forced them to fight where we want to fight, at a time and place of our choosing. That they are carrying out ambushes and bombings does not change this, for these are merely tactical offensives, and do not change the basic nature of the campaign. By carrying the war to them we are on the offensive. We have taken the war into their neighborhood, and by doing so have kept it out of ours. As Dick Morris recently observed, “The fact is, that the reason we have not been attacked in the United States is that the terrorists are fleeing from cave to cave in Afghanistan and from building to building in Iraq — pursued by our heroic young men and women.”

The Risks

The Strategic Offensive is not without risks. They have been well documented elsewhere, so there is no need to list them here. Yet we must be cognizant of what exactly constitutes a risk. We would do well to consider the words of Confederate General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson;

Never take council of your fears

Col Harry Summers evaluates this advice;

The key word is not "fears" since only a fool would disregard the very real dangers of the battlefield. The key word is "counsel" because if fears dominate thinking the resulting paralysis will only increase the hazard.

Jackson, as a student of history, knew what he was talking about.

In Vietnam we allowed our fear of creating a "wider war" to paralyze our thinking. The result was a multitude of restrictions on the targets our pilots could attack. Our fears were not unjustified, for the danger of a wider war was quite real. In the Korean War we turned a successful eight-month campaign to defeat the North Koreans into a bloody three year stalemate against the Chinese. We had ignored the danger that they might intervene and paid the price. However, we were so paralyzed by this fear in Vietnam that we lost all ability to think strategically.

We must not allow that to happen again. We must be quite sensitive the danger of a collapse of the Saudi regime, for example, but we should think creatively to overcome such a possibility. Taking calculated risks is acceptable, gambling with the lives of our soldiers is not.

The Alternative View

The alternative view seems restricted to the headlines of the day. The latest bombing, kidnapping, prison scandal photos, is all they see. They imagine that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will have magical results. They fail to see that while resolution of that conflict would deprive the Jihadists of a recruiting slogan, it is not central to their demands. Others say that it is poverty that has caused so many to take up arms against us. Yet even a casual survey of the terrorists we face tells us that most of them came from solidly middle-class backgrounds. More to the point, virtually none of Osama bin Laden's demands are economic.

The alternative course of action recommended by the left would have no effect on the regimes in the Middle East. They would have no reason to change their policies. The people would have no cause for hope. Life as usual would simply go on.

And of course there is the fact that most of them simply abhor American power. They are embarrassed by who we are as a country and our role in the world. Witness the reaction to one of Mel Gibson's films, The Patriot. The left attacked the movie as jingoistic. The scene where Mel Gibson's character seizes the American flag and rallies the troops to victory was simply too much for the liberals to take.

The Choice

The choice is clear; stay on the stategic offensive and the road to victory, or delude ourselves with a false strategy.

Posted by Tom at 6:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack