Category Archives: Iraq War

Betrayed

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If you are out and about this weekend, find a bookstore or newsstand and buy a copy of the September issue of Harper’s. The cover art is a modernist (modernist may be the wrong word; I’m not keeping up with trends in contemporary art) painting of a teacher and students posed for a class picture.

There are a number of good articles in this issue, but the one I most particularly want to call to your attention is “American Gulag: Prisoners’ Tales from the War on Terror” by Eliza Griswold. Griswold interviewed several former prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, and talked to family members and lawyers of prisoners still being held. The lawyers, working pro bono, are among 500 lawyers organized by the Center for Constitutional Rights to represent prisoners at Guantanamo. (The article probably will be posted on the web eventually, but not for two or three months.)

If even half of what Griswold writes is true, Guantanamo could be the blackest mark yet on our country’s history.

Highlights:

â–ºThere is no indication that the Hamdan decision will make a dime’s worth of difference to the “450 prisoners held at Guantanamo, let alone the 13,000 people currently ‘detained’ in Iraq, the 500 or so in Afghanistan, and the unknown number (estimated to be about 100) at secret CIA ‘black sites’ around the world,” Griswold writes. President Bush has made up his mind that the Court in Hamdan ruled in his favor, so he sees no reason to change.

â–ºTo date, “98 detainees have died (34 of those deaths are being investigated as homicides) and more than 600 U.S. personnel have been implicated in some form of abuse.”

â–ºSince even the Red Cross is given extremely limited and restricted access to the prisons (and, of course, no access at all to the “black sites,” shipboard brigs, or “forward operating sites” where most abuses occur), essentially this means there is no way to find out what’s really going on.

â–ºOnly about 5 percent of the prisoners at Guantanamo were arrested by Americans. The rest were captured by other Arabs Muslims/Middle Easterners and turned over or sold for a bounty. For example, Abdullah al Noaimi of Bahrain was captured by Pashtun tribesmen and sold to Pakistani security forces in 2001. At the time, Griswold writes, “there seemed to be a bounty on every Arab’s head, and fliers promising ‘wealth and power beyond your dreams’ were dropping, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, ‘like snowflakes in December in Chicago.'” After several weeks of detention by the Pakistanis, al Noaimi was turned over to Americans at Kandahar. Al Noaimi had visited the U.S. and for a time was a student at Old Dominion University in Virginia. He figured he’d tell the Americans his arrest was a mistake, and he could go home.

Abdullah al Noaimi was kept in Guantanamo for four years. He only recently returned home. The U.S. military decided al Noaimi was an enemy combatant, although the evidence supporting this claim remains secret.

â–º”Despite everything that is hidden about the practices in Guantanamo Bay,” Griswold says, “it is still the most transparent piece of the large mosaic of U.S. detention. And so the U.S. has begun to employ a sort of shell game to hide the more embarrassingly innocent detainees from public scrutiny: we simply send them home to be imprisoned by their own governments.”

â–ºA prominent Yemeni businessman, Abdulsalam al Hila, was in Egypt on business in September 2002 when he disappeared. His family had no idea where he was until, two years later, they received a letter smuggled out of a U.S. prison in Afghanistan.

â–ºIn 2004 an Afghani man was taken prisoner with his 12-year-old son. Both the father and son had a bag over their heads for eighteen days.

â–ºMen released from Bagram describe frequent beatings and days without food. The lawyers of the Center for Constitutional Rights say there is nothing they can do for prisoners there. They cannot even prove that U.S. law applies in Bagram.

Someday, whatever is going on in those prisons will see the light of day. And then there will be global outrage, and Americans will be shocked and say they had no idea any such thing was going on.

Elsewhere in this issue of Harper’s –a young man describes his internship with the Lincoln Group in Iraq. Lincoln Group is a pack of amateurs who got multi-million dollar contracts form the Pentagon to plant pro-U.S. stories in Middle Eastern newspapers. It’s a jaw-dropping story. See also Lewis Lapham’s “tribute” to Halliburton.

Many Thanks

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Not many bloggers noticed it, but yesterday Dan Froomkin revealed what it will take for President Bush to decide the Iraq mission is fulfilled so that our troops can leave.

He is waiting for Iraq to thank him.

Froomkin:

Alarmed at a brief dribble of actual un-spun news from inside the White House, spokesman Tony Snow yesterday tried his darndest to discredit it.

The dribble emerged courtesy of four scholars invited to talk with President Bush about Iraq on Monday. None of them substantively disagreed with Bush’s policies — see my column yesterday, Bush Bubble Alive and Well — but they did talk to New York Times reporters afterwards about where the president seemed to be coming from.

As a result, Thom Shanker and Mark Mazzetti wrote in the Times yesterday: “President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was concerned about the lack of progress in Iraq and frustrated that the new Iraqi government — and the Iraqi people — had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday. . . .

“[T]he president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd.”

Froomkin goes on to describe Tony Snow’s denial of the President’s frustration. The President is not frustrated, says Snow. He is determined. And that’s the official White House position.

But Froomkin found more evidence of presidential frustration.

As columnist Sidney Blumenthal points out in Salon today: “Bush’s demand for expressions of gratitude from the Iraqis is not a new one. In his memoir, L. Paul Bremer III, head of the ill-fated Coalition Provisional Authority, records that above all other issues Bush stressed the need for an Iraqi government to declare its thanks.”

Peter W. Galbraith has more in his article on Bremer’s book for the New York Review of Books: Bremer “had lunch with the President before leaving for Baghdad — a meeting joined by the Vice President and the national security team — but no decision seems to have been made on any of the major issues concerning Iraq’s future. Instead, Bremer got a blanket grant of authority that he clearly enjoyed exercising. The President’s directions seem to have been limited to such slogans as ‘we’re not going to fail’ and ‘pace yourself, Jerry.’ In Bremer’s account, the President was seriously interested in one issue: whether the leaders of the government that followed the CPA would publicly thank the United States. . . .

“Bush had only one demand: ‘It’s important to have someone who’s willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq.’ According to Bremer, he came back to this single point three times in the same meeting. Similarly, Ghazi al-Yawar, an obscure Sunni Arab businessman, became Bush’s candidate for president of Iraq’s interim government because, as Bremer reports, Bush had ‘been favorably impressed with his open thanks to the Coalition.’ “

If that’s what he’s waiting for, Iraq, by all means thank the man. Send him flowers and a fruit basket. Bake him the biggest bleeping cake you can fit into an oven and write Thank you President Bush on top. And add a picture of Bush surrounded by bald eagles (white and dark chocolate feathers!). If you can’t mail the cake, send him some of the chocolate feathers with a photo of the cake and tell him it was delicious.

And, Iraq, if mailing a thank you card is inconvenient — or dangerous — here is a selection of free email thank you cards. Customize one and send it to [email protected].

If it’s not too much trouble, stage a parade in his honor. I know you can’t have a real parade without inviting mass slaughter, but maybe you could build a secured soundstage and fake it. Have marchers walk past one of those blue screens and add street scenes later. Or maybe some Bollywood producer would make it for you, in India. The President won’t know the difference. Trust me on this.

Tell him you’re commissioning Iraq’s best sculptor to create a statue of President Bush the Victorious to be erected where the statue of Saddam Hussein used to stand. Send him sketches showing three or four versions of what the statue might look like, and tell him he can pick the one he likes best. Promise to invite him to a big ceremony when the statue is unveiled. Don’t forget to make up some excuse to explain why it’s going to take a really long time to get the statue finished. Like, you’re all out of bronze.

And don’t forget to tell the President that because of his determined and resolute guidance Iraq is all grown up now and can manage on its own. Say you’ll miss us, but now you’re standing up, and you want all those coalition soldiers so dear to your hearts to stand down. Maybe promise the President a nice going away present — something really special you’ll send him just as soon as all the Americans and Brits are gone.

You don’t have to mean it.

Non Sequiturs

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Non sequitur is Latin for “it does not follow.” In English, non sequitur can refer to a response that has no relevance to what preceded it, or to a conclusion that does not follow from the premises.

Wikipedia has a fun example of the first type of non sequitur:

A good example of this device can be seen in Season 2 of the Micallef Programme in which Shaun Micallef hosts a game show called Non-Sequitur Family Feud. He asks the question “Name ten things you plug in”, to which Francis Greenslade answers with a list of ten random words, including mules, Lewis Carroll, 1832 and ‘I like butterscotch‘.

An example of a conclusion that does not follow the premise — If I am in Tokyo I am in Japan. I am not in Tokyo, therefore I am not in Japan. Since there’s lots to Japan beside Tokyo, the statement is illogical.

I’ve come to believe that righties think entirely in non sequiturs.

I mentioned this in a post last week — check out this bit from Friday’s Hardball:

REP. CHARLIE RANGEL (D) NEW YORK: I like to quote Rumsfeld, who said that he didn‘t know whether we were creating more terrorists than we‘re killing. And I think that the terrible way in which we have gotten involved in Iraq, have no clue about how to get out, inability to have any diplomatic policy, that we got young people who are Islam but of course have now found that people are being killed, and they are being recruited to do this terrorist work.

So we‘ve created an atmosphere, not of diplomatic resolution of this problem, but thinking that we can bring peace and freedom at the end of a rifle. And it‘s not working,

MATTHEWS: Your answer, Mr. Lungren?

REP. DAN LUNGREN ® CALIFORNIA: Well, we weren‘t in Iraq when we lost 241 marines in Lebanon,

Five-alarm non sequitur, that.

Khobar Towers, U.S. Cole. I don‘t think we need to do anything to radicalize these elements of Islamo-fascism, who are bent on killing Americans. I don‘t think we need to do anything to radicalize these elements of Islamo-fascism, who are bent on killing Americans. You can argue—

MATTHEWS: In each case, Mr. Lungren—in each case, sir, we were in the country where we were killed. You say it wasn‘t because we were in an Arab country, we were in Lebanon, we were killed by the Lebanese, we were in Saudi Arabia when we were attacked. And Saudi Arabia, some believe, was the trigger to bin Laden, who was in Saudi Arabia when we had 10,000 troops there.

LUNGREN: If you‘re going to argue that we‘re the ones that are radicalizing the Muslim world, I happen to disagree with you.

MATTHEWS: What is radicalizing them?

LUNGREN: This has been a commitment on the part of these radical elements for some decades. They don‘t need any excuse. The Fatwa that was published in 1993, specifically called on them to kill Americans anywhere in the world.

If the genius is referring to Osama bin Laden’s fatwa — he’s issued several, actually, although I don’t believe he has the authority to issue official fatwas — the ones I found on the Internets refer specifically to American occupation of “holy places.” As I wrote in the earlier post linked above, bin Laden’s beef with Americans dates from 1990, when American troops were moved into Saudi Arabia in anticipation of the Gulf War.

Lungren’s logical fallacy, of course, is — Osama bin Laden is Muslim; Osama bin Laden hates Americans; therefore, Muslims hate Americans. There are a couple of other Muslims in the world beside bin Laden, I believe.

Of course, there are many factors that cause Muslims to turn against the West. The Wahhabi sect in Saudi Arabia indoctrinates its followers, especially boys, into a radical, militant, and anti-western Islam. Muslims who grew up listening to this stuff certainly are pre-disposed to hate Americans. But Wahhabism is just one sect of Islam. To assume that Wahabism exemplifies Islam is like assuming that Seventh-Day Adventism exemplifies Christianity.

Further, to acknowledge that the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia incited bin Laden to issue fatwas against America is not to say that America “deserved” to be attacked on September 11. That would be another non sequitur. Bin Laden is a twisted bastard; just because he wants to kill us for something we did doesn’t mean that what we did was wrong. Certainly the Muslims of Kuwait appreciated us at the time, as I recall.

But it’s also nuts to deny that the 1983 deaths of 220 Marines and 21 other U.S. service members killed in a single truck bomb attack in Beirut had nothing whatsoever to do with what the Marines were doing in Beirut. As explained in this article by Max Bergmann,

In August 1982, Reagan sent troops to Lebanon to resolve an internal civil war and a wider regional conflict. About 1,800 Marines along with French and Italian troops formed a multinational force (MNF) to support the fledgling Lebanese government by acting as a peacekeeping force. After some initial success, however, the MNF became increasingly entangled in Lebanon’s sectarian conflict and soon was only exacerbating the problems it was supposed to resolve.

There’s a lot more to it, of course, and I’m not saying the Marines who were killed did anything wrong. The MNF suffered from muddled thinking on the part of the politicians about what the mission in Lebanon actually was. The troops dealt with the situation around them as best they could, I’m sure. But at the same time it’s illogical to offer Beirut 1983 to argue that what we’re doing in Iraq doesn’t matter; Muslims would hate us anyway.

Another brilliant Republican non sequitur is the one that goes If you don’t support the war in Iraq you don’t support fighting terrorism. Bob Herbert writes,

There was something pathetic about the delight with which Republicans seized upon the terror plot last week and began trying to wield it like a whip against their Democratic foes. The G.O.P. message seemed to be that the plot foiled in Britain was somehow proof that the U.S. needed to continue full speed ahead with the Bush administration’s disastrous war in Iraq, and that any Democrat who demurred was somehow soft on terrorism.

The truth, of course, is that the demolition derby policies of the Bush administration are creating enemies of the United States, not defeating them. It cannot be said often enough, for example, that the catastrophic war in Iraq, which has caused the deaths of tens of thousands, was a strategic mistake of the highest magnitude. It diverted our focus, energy and resources from the real enemy, Al Qaeda and its offshoots, and turned Iraq, a country critically important to the Muslim imagination, into a spawning ground for terrorists.

Almost three years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, Jessica Stern, who lectures on terrorism at Harvard, wrote in The New York Times that the U.S. had created in Iraq “precisely the situation the Bush administration has described as a breeding ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its borders or provide for its citizens’ rudimentary needs.”

Ms. Stern went on to say, “As bad as the situation inside Iraq may be, the effect that the war has had on terrorist recruitment around the globe may be even more worrisome.”

The situation has grown only worse since then. While Republicans are savoring the political possibilities of a foiled terror plot, the spiraling chaos in Iraq and other Bush administration policies are contributing mightily to the anger and radicalism in the Muslim world.

It’s true there were radical Muslims preaching hatred of America before we went into Iraq. But our presence in Iraq is making their sales pitch a lot more enticing. It’s like they’re air conditioner salesmen and we’re the heat wave.

Max Hastings:

In September 2001, most of the world clearly perceived that a monstrous crime had been committed against the United States, and that the defeat of al-Qaida was essential to global security. While many ordinary Muslims were by no means sorry to see American hubris punished, grassroots support for Osama bin Laden was still small, and remained so through the invasion of Afghanistan.

Today, of course, everything has changed. In the eyes of many Muslims, the actions of Bush and Blair have promoted and legitimised al-Qaida in a fashion even its founder could hardly have anticipated a decade ago.

Of course, it’s hard to make logical decisions without facts. But if you make illogical decisions, facts are just so much clutter.

Bush has chosen to lump together all violent Muslim opposition to what he perceives as western interests everywhere in the world, as part of a single conspiracy. He is indifferent to the huge variance of interests that drives the Taliban in Afghanistan, insurgents in Iraq, Hamas and Hizbullah fighting the Israelis. He simply identifies them as common enemies of the United States.

The Bush Administration: Fuzzy math, fuzzy facts, fuzzy logic. One would think the recent busted plot coming out of Britain would have highlighted the fallacy of “We’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here.” The neocons talk about creative chaos, which is a pretty good term for rightie thinking skills. Last Friday’s Hardball gave us a frightening example:

MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL. Does this foiled terrorism plot out of London help Republicans by refocusing the country on national security issues? Or will Democrats hammer home that the Bush administration‘s policy over in Iraq is encouraging hatred and terrorism? Our HARDBALLers tonight are here to answer those questions. Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now on the radio and it‘s on Pacifica, and on television, also the author of “Static Government: Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight Back” and Heidi Harris is a radio talk show host with no book out right now. Heidi you start, who wins this discussion as to the object lesson of catching those bad guys over in Britain?

HEIDI HARRIS, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: I think the Republicans do, and frankly I think it‘s a good thing some people have not forgotten about our national security, thanks to MI5, working in conjunction with America, we were able to catch these people before thousands of innocent people were killed.

MATTHEWS: Who has forgotten about our national security?

HARRIS: There are a lot of people who have, like those who want to see us pull out of Iraq instantly. They have forgotten about the fact that we‘ve still got the terrorists on the run and that‘s the objective. You‘re not going to make people like us, but ultimately we can keep them on the run and keep them off-balance and try to protect ourselves.

MATTHEWS: So Iraq is making us safer?

HARRIS: Well I think it is because we‘ve got them on the run. We‘ve caught people like Zarqawi. They hated us before we went there so the argument they only dislike Americans because of George Bush and because of we‘re over if Iraq, that‘s a lie. They attacked us. We weren‘t in Iraq.

MATTHEWS: OK, we were in Saudi Arabia however when bin Laden actually from Saudi Arabia decided he hated us, we were in Lebanon when we got blown up last time. There is a connection between our location and the anger that it causes, isn‘t there?

HARRIS: Well there‘s a connection between our location and where they can below us up. You don‘t see them blowing us up here since 9-11, because they would to come over here, but we have to be vigilant. So they blow us up in Lebanon because it‘s easier than trying to come over here, that‘s why we have to be vigilant and stay on top of them. They‘re not going to like us no matter what we do.

If this woman ever in her life were to put a logical conclusion after a premise, her head would explode. A plot originating in London is hardly vindication of the “flypaper” theory in Iraq.

Eric Leaver:

The British plot underscores the weakness in Bush’s counterterrorism strategy of “Taking the fight to the terrorists abroad, so we don’t have to face them here at home.” Reports note that all of those arrested in connection to the plot were British citizens. Even though many of the suspects appear to be of Pakistani descent, this operation was launched from within the country, just like 9/11.

The rising number of attacks, failure to capture bin Laden in five years, and the persistent and unabated threat of terror underscores the fact that our nation is not safer than it was before September 11, 2001. Bush has relied too heavily on military action and panic planning in the aftermath of attacks rather than addressing the root causes of terrorism, supporting effective prevention strategies and investing in the domestic infrastructure needed in case of an attack.

Every … single … time a Republican falls back on a non sequitur the Dems have got to smack it down. They’ve got to say, clearly, that is illogical. It doesn’t follow. And we’ve got to do as much as we can do to make Republican non sequiturs look ridiculous, because they are ridiculous.

Update: See also Altercation.

No Surrender

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“We are at war with an ideology, and pounding it frontally just disperses it. It’s like trying to smash mercury with a hammer.” — Eugene Robinson, “The War Bush Isn’t Fighting”

I came across this post yesterday, which IMO exemplifies why righties are living in a pre-9/11 world. The blogger is trying to justify the deaths of children in wars against “enemies” — I notice the blogger doesn’t call ’em “terrorists.” In a nutshell, the blogger argues that because killing the enemy is of paramount importance, and because the enemy chooses to surround himself with children and other civilians, then “we” must harden our hearts to the killing of children. And this is, he says, for the children’s own good. My favorite part (the post is written as a conversation between the wise and virtuous blogger and a bleeding-heart, presumably liberal, woman):

“It must be,” I tell her sadly, “Here: That we pursue war without thought of the children. That we do not turn aside from the death of the innocent, but push on to the conclusion, through all fearful fire. If we do that, the children will lose their value as hostages, and as targets: if we love them, we must harden our hearts against their loss. Ours and theirs.”

Now, I believe that some military actions are necessary, and where there is military action people are going to get killed. There is no weapon that can discriminate between the flesh of enemies and that of innocents. But the blogger is making a huge mistake if he thinks the wholesale killing of “enemies” must trump all other considerations. And it’s this muddled and outmoded thinking that is costing us dearly in the Middle East now.

A few days ago I wrote about fourth generation warfare, a.k.a. 4GW, and why it differs from the “total war” waged in earlier conflicts. Very simply, in “total war” political considerations are put aside in favor of military considerations. The object is to hurt “the enemy” in any way you can so that the enemy — the nation you are at war with — surrenders. And then when the enemy surrenders there’s a cease fire and formal ceremonies and agreements signed, etc., and the nations that had been at war enter into a new and entirely different relationship. In “total war,” if the bombing of civilians hastens surrender, then bombing civilians is militarily acceptable.

However, in our more recent “asymmetric” wars — usually, these days, pitting the conventional military power of a nation against a stateless ideological faction — there will be no surrender. Because ain’t nobody gonna surrender. Surrender isn’t the point. The enemy faction will not surrender even if all their strongholds are overrun and their leaders killed. Instead the survivors will disperse and find new strongholds (possibly virtual ones) or break into scattered cells. If the Cause still has supporters, new leaders will emerge; new followers will be recruited. Eventually a new enemy will arise from the ashes of the old one. And the war will continue.

At the same time, the enemy’s objective is not to get us to surrender to them. They don’t want our surrender, except in a metaphorical sense. They don’t want to occupy our territory or run our government.

So if they’re not going to surrender to us, and it’s out of the question that we would surrender to them, what is the nature of this war? What would “victory ” look like? Why is the enemy fighting us? Why are we fighting them? And how does this relate to killing children? The answers to these questions must be clearly understood if we are going to adopt effective strategies and tactics. Unfortunately in Iraq and Lebanon they are not well understood at all; most especially, they are not well understood by the very people most interested in promoting military solutions to our foreign policy problems. Instead of clarity, from the hawks we get empty slogans and rationalizations.

Righties are so terrified of the ghost of Neville Chamberlain they seem to think that even trying to understand what the enemy wants amounts to “appeasement.” Thus the vacuous nonsense about “they hate us for our freedoms.” But understanding what the enemy wants isn’t just about negotiation or appeasement, but understanding who the enemy is. This is vital when the enemy is a stateless faction, because what they want is what defines them. It’s what sets them apart from other people who might live in same region and share the same ethnic and religious heritage, but who are not necessarily our enemies. If we don’t understand clearly who, precisely, we are fighting, how can we develop effective tactics and strategies? How can we efficiently direct our resources to strike the people we most need to strike?

Last night on Hardball I saw some rightie — I didn’t catch his name — claim it is absurd to argue that our presence in Iraq is making more enemies. We weren’t in Iraq when terrorists killed 283 U.S. Marines in Lebanon, he said. No, but we were in Lebanon, said Chris Matthews, perplexed. You know someone’s gone off the stupid scale when even Tweety notices. Later in the program a right-wing radio host — I didn’t catch her name, either — sounded the same note. It doesn’t matter whether we’re in Iraq or not. They all hate us, anyway, she said. Who’s “they”? Tweety asked. It was clear she meant all Middle Eastern Muslims, and the other guest, Amy Goodman, took her to task for it. But the rightie, in so many words, denied she had said that all Middle Eastern Muslims are terrorists, just that they all hate us and wish us dead. Brilliant.

As I wrote in the last post, Osama bin Laden’s beef with the U.S. began in 1990, when U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia in preparation for the Gulf War. At that time Bin Laden was living in Saudi Arabia and working in his family’s construction business. Bin Laden was outraged by an infidel army within the nation that is the birthplace of the Prophet, and he also turned against the Saudi government for allowing this sacrilege. In 1991 the Saudis expelled him from Saudi Arabia. He moved to the Sudan, where he made connections with other exiled Muslim radicals. The following year he claimed responsibility for attempting to bomb U.S. soldiers in Yemen. This was followed by successful strikes on the U.S. military in Somalia.

I bring this up to emphasize that al Qaeda started out as a radical fringe group, and by 2001 it was still a radical fringe group, albeit a well-financed one, with only a few thousand followers. It’s true that other Muslims disliked Americans; the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam, which influenced bin Laden, comes to mind. But it is simply not true that the entire Muslim population of the Middle East was seething with rage against America and thought exactly as bin Laden thought. Yet somehow, in the name of striking out against the perpetrators of September 11, we’ve got the whole Middle East in an uproar. And a whole lot of people who weren’t all that worked up about us before would like to do us harm now.

Some righties still talk about fighting “terrorists” in Iraq, as if everyone in the conflict is either “coalition” (us) or “terrorist” (them). But it isn’t that simple. I understand that fewer than 10 percent of the fighters in Iraq are with al Qaeda or an affiliate. The rest are with a number of other warring factions that are fighting each other; some of these factions are also fighting us, and some are not. Yet. We invaded to liberate the oppressed Shi’ia majority from the regime of a ruthless Sunni Baathist dictator. Today the Shi’ite militias, armed by Iran and sometimes operating out of the “unity” government President Bush is so proud of, are slaughtering Sunnis wholesale. U.S. troops are sometimes put in the position of rescuing former Baathists — and former Saddam supporters — from the Shiias that we liberated. Note that neither the Baathists nor the Iraqi Shi’ias had a bleeping thing to do with al Qaeda or were in a position to harm America before we invaded Iraq.

Yet we are fighting “them” there so we don’t have to fight “them” here. Who are “they,” exactly?

And what about other terrorist organizations in the Middle East, like Hezbollah? I urge you to read this article by Lisa Beyer that appeared in the August 7 issue of Time. Highlights:

Bush two weeks ago likened Hizballah militants to the terrorists who last summer bombed London subways. That implies that Hizballah has the same mind-set and agenda as the global jihadis of al-Qaeda and its imitator groups, but they are not the same. Hizballah’s military mission is principally to defend Lebanon from Israeli intrusion and secondarily to destroy the Jewish state. As an Islamist group under Iran’s sway, Hizballah would like to see Islamic rule in Lebanon. The global jihadis think much bigger. They are Salafists, radicals who seek to revive the original and, to their minds, pure practice of Islam and establish a caliphate from Spain to Iraq, in all the lands where Islam has ever ruled. The Salafists are Sunni, and Hizballah is Shi’ite, which means their hatred for each other is apt to rival their hatred for the U.S. Al-Qaeda’s late leader in Iraq, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, used to say Shi’ites were worse than Americans and launched a brutal war on them in Iraq.

Of course, Sunnis and Shi’ites do sometimes cooperate. Ali Mohammed, a former Green Beret who pleaded guilty to being an al-Qaeda agent, testified in 2000 that he had provided security for a meeting in Sudan between Hizballah security chief Imad Mughniyah and Osama bin Laden and that Hizballah had provided al-Qaeda with explosives training. If there was cooperation, it seems to have been short-lived; the two groups certainly aren’t allies. Lebanese police in April arrested nine men that Hizballah officials claim were al-Qaeda agents plotting to assassinate their leader. In a recently published interview with the Washington Post’s Robin Wright, Nasrallah slammed al-Qaeda. “What do the people who worked in those two [World Trade Center] towers … have to do with war that is taking place in the Middle East?” he asked. Bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri last week released a videotape about the fighting in Lebanon, but at least in the excerpts released by al-Jazeera, he conspicuously failed to encourage Hizballah in its fight against Israel or to so much as mention the group. Instead, al-Zawahiri spoke of the jihad–that is, al-Qaeda’s jihad–being the one that would liberate Palestine.

The Bushies and Neocons are doing a great job of establishing the United States as the common foe of all Muslims, unfortunately. Where once only the most extreme, radical fringe of Islam wanted to take jihad to American soil, someday mainstream Muslims may decide they’ve had quite enough of us and unite against us. As I wrote yesterday, one of Osama bin Laden’s long-term goals was to draw a western power into attacking and occupying a Muslim nation. This would incite Muslims from many sects and nations to unify in jihad against the common foe (guess who?). It is unlikely such a jihad would unite under bin Laden’s leadership, but in every other way the Bush Administration has exceeded bin Laden’s fondest hopes.

Bush Administration has a one-size-fits-all policy for combating all Muslim militants and terrorists, as if they all came out of the same box. This is stupid. Smart would be to take differences and distinctions into account when crafting policy; policies for a group with purely local or regional interests should be different from policies that deal with al Qaeda or other global terrorist organizations. Most important, our policies should drive wedges between groups, not inspire diverse groups — some of which have been antagonists for centuries — to unite against us. The reverse of Julius Caesar’s famous military axiom — divide, and conquer — is unify, and lose.

By remaining ignorant of the historical, social, cultural, and political realities of the Middle East; by our ham-handed and disastrous “occupation” of Iraq; by knee-jerk support of Israel, right or wrong; we are fanning the flames of jihad, not putting them out. Today we might be sowing the seeds of many wars yet to come.

Christopher Dickey:

Most of the terrorist attacks since 9/11 were carried out by people who were or would be suicide bombers, and their numbers seem to be growing in number every day. Is this merely some contagious madness? When Al Qaeda planners Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Youssef plotted attacks on 11 American planes flying from Asia in 1995, their idea was to leave bombs on board hidden in life jackets after stopovers. The scanty information released thus far about the British plot suggests that teams of people, fully aware that they would die, were going to take components for the bombs on board separately, then assemble them to kill themselves and everybody traveling with them.

There is no excuse for those who would carry out such atrocities, but there are reasons that keep pushing recruits to take up the suicidal cause of attacking the United States. To blame “Islamic fascism” that “wants to destroy those of us who love freedom” dodges responsibility for making those reasons more abundant, and making them worse, over the last five years. What’s at work in the heads of those who would kill themselves to slaughter Americans is less Al Qaeda’s ideology, such as it is, than a pervasive sense that Muslims are under attack: their lands occupied; their men, women and children victimized around the world. The Iraqi slaughterhouse, besieged Gaza, wasted Lebanon are all examples in the minds of those who convince themselves that suicidal terror is the only way to fight back. While partly blaming Israel, their frantic logic finds easier targets among the people who elected the invaders of Iraq, the backers of Israel, George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The American failure to limit these scenes of carnage in the Muslim world, or even to understand them, has combined with shortsighted military policies to create a kind of breeder reactor for explosive terrorism. Today we are looking at a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, even as Osama bin Laden and his ideologue Ayman Zawahiri remain at large. Iraq is in the midst of an intensifying civil war that will only grow worse after today’s ghastly bombing in Najaf, which killed at least 34 people. Lebanon has become a cause that can cement ties among radical Sunnis and Shias against the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. Iran is cooking up nukes and the inflammatory issue of Palestine is farther than ever from resolution.

To those who say Bush’s policies must be working, because Muslim radicals haven’t achieved a terrorist attack in America in the past five years — remember, eight years separated the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and September 11, 2001. By rightie logic, Bill Clinton must’ve really been tough on terrorism.

Back to the dead children. As I said above, if you are trying to force the surrender of an enemy government, then the bombing of civilians, including childen, might be an acceptable tactic. But if your enemy is a cause, and not a country, the last thing you want to is gain them the world’s sympathy. In a very real and tangible sense, we are fighting for the moral high ground in the world’s eyes. Ignoring that reality not only strengthens our enemies and weakens us; it also could have long-term repercussions in our relations with the other nations on the planet for years to come.

Over the past several days the righties have complained that Hezbollah and Israel are expected to play by different rules, and it ain’t fair. But William Lind argues that’s how 4GW is; get used to it.

The fact is, both sides don’t get to operate by the same rules in 4GW. While the very strength of the intervening power means it must be careful how it applies its strength, that is much less true of the weaker forces opposing it. This is an aspect of what Martin van Creveld calls the power of weakness. Viewed from the moral level, a weak force can get away with tactics that damn its vastly stronger enemy. Its weakness itself tends to justify whatever it does.

Suicide bombing is itself a tactic of the weak (which does not mean it is ineffective.). The United States bombs from aircraft, where the pilot operates in complete safety against 4GW opponents, with rare exceptions. At the moral level, that safety works against us, not for us. In contrast, the fact that 4GW fighters often have to give their lives to place their bombs works for them. Their combination of physical weakness and apparent heroism leads civilians from their own culture to excuse them much, including “collateral damage” they would never excuse if the bomb came from an American F-18.

Does this mean that al Qaeda and its many clones can ignore the deaths and injuries they cause among fellow Islamics? No. They have to be careful not to go too far, as al Qaeda clearly did in Jordan. But they can still get away with a great deal we could not get away with. The same rules do not apply to all, and much stricter, more disadvantageous rules apply to us than to them. Is that fair? Of course not. But who ever said there was anything fair about war?

It’s one thing to hunt down and and imprison terrorists who threaten to harm the U.S. But “When the United States drops bombs from aircraft or otherwise dumps firepower on Iraqi cities, towns and farms, it alienates the population further,” Lind says, and causes more Iraqis to join the insurgency — the insurgency that didn’t exist before we invaded Iraq and which was no threat to the United States. And when photos of dead Lebanese children are all over the world’s newspaper, but Israeli children remain unharmed, Israel becomes the Bad Guy in the eyes of the world. Whether this is fair or not is beside the point; it is what it is.

Here’s something I wish the hawks would think about: What does “victory” look like when your enemy is not a government with the authority to surrender? What tactics do you adopt when your military offensive against the enemy wins it sympathy and recruits? You’ll never kill all of the enemy, and even if you did, public outrage would likely cause another group to organize and take its place. Can there even be a “victory” in any meaningful sense of the word against such an enemy? Or is a cessation of hostilies the best we can hope for (in which case, escalating war would seem to be counterproductive)? Righties? Anybody?

See also: “Know Your Enemy: Who Are We Fighting In Iraq?”

Also also: What Wes Clark says.

Fighting Smart, Fighting Stupid

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[T]he deeper and more discouraging prospect—that the United States is doomed to spend decades cowering defensively—need not come true. How can the United States regain the initiative against terrorists, as opposed to living in a permanent crouch? By recognizing the point that I heard from so many military strategists: that terrorists, through their own efforts, can damage but not destroy us. Their real destructive power, again, lies in what they can provoke us to do. While the United States can never completely control what violent groups intend and sometimes achieve, it can determine its own response. That we have this power should come as good and important news, because it switches the strategic advantage to our side. — James Fallows, “Declaring Victory,” The Atlantic, September 2006

Chief among the reactions Osama bin Laden hoped to provoke was the invasion and occupation of a Muslim country. Fallows continues,

Documents captured after 9/11 showed that bin Laden hoped to provoke the United States into an invasion and occupation that would entail all the complications that have arisen in Iraq. His only error was to think that the place where Americans would get stuck would be Afghanistan.

Richard Clarke wrote in his book Against All Enemies that something like the Iraq War was bin Laden’s plan all along. At least a decade before 9/11, according to Clarke, Osama was hanging out in the Sudan dreaming up an Iraq scenario–

The ingredients al Qaeda dreamed of for propagating its movement were a Christian government attacking a weaker Muslim region, allowing the new terrorist group to rally jihadists from many countries to come to the aid of the religious brethren. After the success of the jihad, the Muslim region would become a radical Islamic state, a breeding ground for more terrorists, a part of the eventual network of Islamic states that would make up the great new Caliphate, or Muslim empire. [p. 136]

Time and time again, the Bush Administration’s fear and hubris and ignorance become puppet strings in jihadists’ hands. We might as well invite al Qaeda into the Pentagon and let them plan our security policies.

Rightie blogger Allahpundit wrote yesterday,

There are bits from Reid and Kerry too, but as usual it’s Teddy who provides the pull-quote for the day’s events:

    “Five years after 9-11, it is clear that our misguided policies are making America more hated in the world and making the war on terrorism harder to win,” Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts said.

We’ve reached the point where either you see instantly what’s wrong with that statement or you don’t, and if you don’t, nothing I’m going to say will change your mind. So I won’t try; maybe Ace or Goldstein will muster the energy later.

Of course Allahpundit can’t explain “what’s wrong” with Senator Kennedy’s statement, because coherently explaining something in words requires logic and dispassion. If one’s motivations are, in fact, a sludge of unprocessed fear and bigotry slopping around one’s psyche like raw sewage, then rendering those motivations into clear, dispassionate, and logical rhetoric is, um, futile. So righties do not explain; they package. We are at war with enemies who hate our freedoms. We must fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. Victory. Resolve. We can’t cut and run.

Then Allahpundit embraces one of the Right’s favorite conceits, which is that we lefties are opposed to Bush’s policies because we don’t understand the threat posed by terrorism. The fact that we oppose Bush policies because most of them amount to fighting a fire by pouring kerosene on it flies right over their terrorized little heads. But in a “nutroots terror-reaction round-up” he finds no prominent leftie bloggers to feed his fantasies; instead, he sites a commenter at Democratic Underground, a diarist at Daily Kos, and “some moron looking for attention at Goldstein’s site.” We’ve seen this before, too. They’re desperately trying to reassure themselves that we’re the crazy ones, and they’ll take any proof they can get.

The Bush Administration’s habit of dangling terrorism alerts to distract us and manipulate public opinion is too well established to ignore. This timeline, which unfortunately stops in January 2005, provides some good examples. But of course, just because some child cries “wolf” as a prank doesn’t mean there are no wolves. It may be only a matter of time before a plot like the one stopped in London actually succeeds. Lord knows plenty of jihadists would love to hurt us on our own soil, and more such jihadists are being created every day by George Bush’s misbegotten policies.

The next argument is, of course, that the U.S. wasn’t in Iraq on September 11. No, but we were in Saudi Arabia. It’s well known that bin Laden’s grudge against the U.S. dates from August 1990, when the Saudi government allowed U.S. troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam. In this case I don’t blame America, because those troops were there at the behest of the Saudi government. Twisted people like Osama bin Laden can be set off by just about anything, and it’s probably not possible to devise a foreign policy that won’t offend some whackjob’s inflammable sensibilities.

On the other hand, when our policies utterly ignore the sensibilities of a majority of Muslims; when our policies are creating enemies faster than we can shoot them; when our policies help the war effort of our enemies but weaken us; there’s a problem. And I’ve yet to see evidence that anti-American terrorists give a hoohaw about our freedoms, one way or another.

I’ve written myriad blog posts explaining why the war in Iraq is hindering, not helping, our antiterrorism efforts. I’m not going to repeat all those arguments now; just click on “Iraq War” after “Filed under” at the top of this post, and start reading. The James Fallows article linked at the top of this page also explains why our war in Iraq is hurting us. If you can access the article (you may not be able to if you aren’t a subscriber), click here and scroll down to “What Has Gone Right for al-Qaeda,” and start reading. Because I believe there is a subscription firewall, I’ve added an excerpt to the end of this post.

It seems obvious to me that, after September 11, our focus should have been on destroying al Qaeda and increasing basic security at home. The “destroying al Qaeda” part certainly included military action (against al Qaeda and groups with a similar agenda, not action diffused over every terrorist cell on the planet whether it is likely to strike the U.S. or not), but it also should have included leading democratic nations in a cooperative global intelligence-and-police effort and addressing those “root causes,” which are still imperfectly understood, in order to deprive terrorists of popular support in the Muslim world.

The “basic security at home” part is a mess; the “security” policies exemplified by the Department of Homeland Security are described in Fallows’s article as “haphazard, wasteful, and sometimes self-defeating.” That other nations are aiding our intelligence and police efforts is mostly because it’s in their own self-interest to do so; they are are terrorism targets, too. We’ve pissed off enough people that I wonder how much they’d help us otherwise. But as for depriving terrorists of popular support, we’ve done just the opposite.

Righties will continue to lie to themselves and each other that we lefties oppose Bush’s policies because lefties don’t want to fight terrorism, and there’s not much point in trying to reason with them. Our efforts, IMO, must be to reach out to those Americans (and voters) whose brains are not pickled in extremist rightwing ideology and explain to them that the Bush White House is aiding terrorism, and foreign policy power must be taken away from the Bushies as quickly as possible.

Since Bush’s “approval” numbers are hovering at around 40 percent these days, that should leave us with plenty of people who are reachable. Of course, an important part of this effort is to keep watch on media and speak up when reporters and “pundits” repeat rightie talking points as gospel, which is most of the time. It’s an uphill fight. But we’ve got to fight as if our lives depend on it, because they probably do.

Here’s the James Fallows slice I promised:

In the modern brand of terrorist warfare, what an enemy can do directly is limited. The most dangerous thing it can do is to provoke you into hurting yourself.

This is what David Kilcullen meant in saying that the response to terrorism was potentially far more destructive than the deed itself. And it is why most people I spoke with said that three kinds of American reaction—the war in Iraq, the economic consequences of willy-nilly spending on security, and the erosion of America’s moral authority—were responsible for such strength as al-Qaeda now maintained.

“You only have to look at the Iraq War to see how much damage you can do to yourself by your response,” Kilcullen told me. He is another of those who supported the war and consider it important to fight toward some kind of victory, but who recognize the ways in which this conflict has helped al-Qaeda. So far the war in Iraq has advanced the jihadist cause because it generates a steady supply of Islamic victims, or martyrs; because it seems to prove Osama bin Laden’s contention that America lusts to occupy Islam’s sacred sites, abuse Muslim people, and steal Muslim resources; and because it raises the tantalizing possibility that humble Muslim insurgents, with cheap, primitive weapons, can once more hobble and ultimately destroy a superpower, as they believe they did to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan twenty years ago. The United States also played a large role in thwarting the Soviets, but that doesn’t matter. For mythic purposes, mujahideen brought down one anti-Islamic army and can bring down another. …

… Because the general point is familiar, I’ll let one more anecdote about the consequences of invading Iraq stand for many that I heard. When Americans think of satellite surveillance and the National Security Agency, they are likely to imagine something out of the TV show 24: a limitless set of eyes in the sky that can watch everything, all the time. In fact, even today’s amply funded NSA can watch only a limited number of sites. “Our overhead imagery is dedicated to force protection in Iraq and Afghanistan,” I was told by a former intelligence official who would not let me use his name. He meant that the satellites are tied up following U.S. troops on patrol and in firefights to let them know who might be waiting in ambush. “There are still ammo dumps in Iraq that are open to insurgents,” he said, “but we lack the imagery to cover them—let alone what people might be dreaming up in Thailand or Bangladesh.” Because so many spy satellites are trained on the countries we have invaded, they tell us less than they used to about the rest of the world.

Documents captured after 9/11 showed that bin Laden hoped to provoke the United States into an invasion and occupation that would entail all the complications that have arisen in Iraq. His only error was to think that the place where Americans would get stuck would be Afghanistan.

Bin Laden also hoped that such an entrapment would drain the United States financially. Many al-Qaeda documents refer to the importance of sapping American economic strength as a step toward reducing America’s ability to throw its weight around in the Middle East. Bin Laden imagined this would happen largely through attacks on America’s oil supply. This is still a goal. For instance, a 2004 fatwa from the imprisoned head of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia declared that targeting oil pipelines and refineries was a legitimate form of economic jihad—and that economic jihad “is one of the most powerful ways in which we can take revenge on the infidels during this present stage.” The fatwa went on to offer an analysis many economists would be proud of, laying out all the steps that would lead from a less-secure oil supply to a less-productive American economy and ultimately to a run on the dollar. (It also emphasized that oil wells themselves should be attacked only as a last resort, because news coverage of the smoke and fires would hurt al-Qaeda’s image.)

Higher-priced oil has hurt America, but what has hurt more is the economic reaction bin Laden didn’t fully foresee. This is the systematic drag on public and private resources created by the undifferentiated need to be “secure.”

The effect is most obvious on the public level. “The economy as a whole took six months or so to recover from the effects of 9/11,” Richard Clarke told me. “The federal budget never recovered. The federal budget is in a permanent mess, to a large degree because of 9/11.” At the start of 2001, the federal budget was $125 billion in surplus. Now it is $300 billion in deficit.

A total of five people died from anthrax spores sent through the mail shortly after 9/11. In Devils and Duct Tape, his forthcoming book, John Mueller points out that the U.S. Postal Service will eventually spend about $5 billion on protective screening equipment and other measures in response to the anthrax threat, or about $1 billion per fatality. Each new security guard, each extra checkpoint or biometric measure, is both a direct cost and an indirect drag on economic flexibility.

If bin Laden hadn’t fully anticipated this effect, he certainly recognized it after it occurred. In his statement just before the 2004 election, he quoted the finding of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (!) to the effect that the total cost, direct and indirect, to America of the 9/11 attacks was at least $500 billion. Bin Laden gleefully pointed out that the attacks had cost al-Qaeda about $500,000, for a million-to-one payoff ratio. America’s deficit spending for Iraq and homeland security was, he said, “evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan, with Allah’s permission.”

And they say some guys in caves in Afghanistan couldn’t have pulled off 9/11. Hah. Bottom line, they’ve been fighting us smart, and we’ve been fighting them stupid.

Update: Finally a serious anti-terror policy.

Know Your Enemy

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Bill Kristol thinks the Republican Party has flaws, but “at least we have a president who knows we are at war with jihadist Islam.”

Says who?

This week at Time.com Lisa Beyer wrote,

Enunciating a new security doctrine nine days after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush declared that the war on terrorism would be fought not just against al-Qaeda but also against “every terrorist group of global reach.” Hizballah can certainly be said to fit in that category. However grand it may be to fight all global terrorists, though, the simple fact is that we can’t: we don’t have the troops, the money or the political will. That means it may make sense to limit our hit list to the groups that actually threaten us. Hizballah does not now do that. Nor does the other group currently in the spotlight, the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas. The U.S. has sound reasons for wanting to constrain these groups, principally that they threaten our ally Israel. But those reasons have largely gone unarticulated as Bush falls back on maxims about the need to confront terrorism, as if Hizballah and Hamas are likely to be behind the next spectacular that will top 9/11. They are not, and pretending that they are costs the U.S. credibility, risks driving terrorist groups that aren’t allied into alliance and obscures the real issues at hand in the Middle East: How do you soften up militants who vehemently oppose Israel’s existence? What should the U.S. put on the line for Israel? And does it make sense for Washington to engage in boxing by surrogate with Tehran?

Yesterday I posted commentary on James Fallows’s new article in Atlantic, here and here. Here’s another bit:

How can the United States regain the initiative against terrorists, as opposed to living in a permanent crouch? By recognizing the point that I heard from so many military strategists: that terrorists, through their own efforts, can damage but not destroy us. Their real destructive power, again, lies in what they can provoke us to do. While the United States can never completely control what violent groups intend and sometimes achieve, it can determine its own response. That we have this power should come as good and important news, because it switches the strategic advantage to our side.

On the other hand …

So far, the United States has been as predictable in its responses as al-Qaeda could have dreamed. Early in 2004, a Saudi exile named Saad al-Faqih was interviewed by the online publication Terrorism Monitor. Al-Faqih, who leads an opposition group seeking political reform in Saudi Arabia, is a longtime observer of his fellow Saudi Osama bin Laden and of the evolution of bin Laden’s doctrine for al-Qaeda.

In the interview, al-Faqih said that for nearly a decade, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had followed a powerful grand strategy for confronting the United States. Their approach boiled down to “superpower baiting” (as John Robb, of the Global Guerrillas blog, put it in an article about the interview). The most predictable thing about Americans, in this view, was that they would rise to the bait of a challenge or provocation. …

…The United States is immeasurably stronger than al-Qaeda, but against jujitsu forms of attack its strength has been its disadvantage. The predictability of the U.S. response has allowed opponents to turn our bulk and momentum against us. Al-Qaeda can do more harm to the United States than to, say, Italy because the self-damaging potential of an uncontrolled American reaction is so vast.

Bill Kristol rants that Democrats are “Anti-war, Anti-Israel, Anti-Joe [Lieberman].” I say neocons like Kristol are anti-American. They seem to have no connection whatsoever to this country, its future, and its historical values. They’re also anti-smart. Let’s face it; your standard neocon is to intelligence what a black hole is to matter. If, after all that’s gone wrong, these people still think they are qualified to dictate America’s foreign policy, they are pathologically dense.

At Haaretz.com, Michael Levy calls for the end of the neocon nightmare.

The key neocon protagonists, their think tanks and publications may be unfamiliar to many Israelis, but they are redefining the region we live in. This tight-knit group of “defense intellectuals” – centered around Bill Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Elliott Abrams, Perle, Feith and others – were considered somewhat off-beat until they teamed up with hawkish well-connected Republicans like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Newt Gingrich, and with the emerging powerhouse of the Christian right. Their agenda was an aggressive unilateralist U.S. global supremacy, a radical vision of transformative regime-change democratization, with a fixation on the Middle East, an obsession with Iraq and an affinity to “old Likud” politics in Israel. Their extended moment in the sun arrived after 9/11.

Finding themselves somewhat bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, the neoconservatives are reveling in the latest crisis, displaying their customary hubris in re-seizing the initiative. The U.S. press and blogosphere is awash with neocon-inspired calls for indefinite shooting, no talking and extension of hostilities to Syria and Iran, with Gingrich calling this a third world war to “defend civilization.”

Bottom line:

An America that seeks to reshape the region through an unsophisticated mixture of bombs and ballots, devoid of local contextual understanding, alliance-building or redressing of grievances, ultimately undermines both itself and Israel.

Levy provides the alternative:

A U.S. return to proactive diplomacy, realism and multilateralism, with sustained and hard engagement that delivers concrete progress, would best serve its own, Israeli and regional interests. …

…Beyond that, Israel and its friends in the United States should seriously reconsider their alliances not only with the neocons, but also with the Christian Right. The largest “pro-Israel” lobby day during this crisis was mobilized by Pastor John Hagee and his Christians United For Israel, a believer in Armageddon with all its implications for a rather particular end to the Jewish story. This is just asking to become the mother of all dumb, self-defeating and morally abhorrent alliances.

Well, yeah.

Be sure to read all of Levy’s article. See also commentary by Brent Budowsky. Billmon and Taylor Marsh discuss the UN Security Council Resolution proposed today by the United States and France.

Good New, Bad News, Part II

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Back to the new James Fallows article in Atlantic, which I discussed here —

Recap: Fallows interviewed a number of experts to determine where we are in the “war” on terrorism. In spite of the Bush Administration’s multiple blunders, at the moment our national security situation isn’t all that bad. As explained here, the chance of al Qaeda or another terrorist group pulling off another September 11 is fairly small.

The fly in the ointment is Iraq.

About half of the authorities I spoke with were from military or intelligence organizations; the others were academics or members of think tanks, plus a few businesspeople. Half were Americans; the rest were Europeans, Middle Easterners, Australians, and others. Four years ago, most of these people had supported the decision to invade Iraq. Although they now said that the war had been a mistake (followed by what nearly all viewed as a disastrously mismanaged occupation), relatively few said that the United States should withdraw anytime soon. The reasons most of them gave were the need for America to make good on commitments, the importance of keeping the Sunni parts of Iraq from turning into a new haven for global terrorists, and the chance that conditions in Iraq would eventually improve.

One, I worry about the expertise of anyone who supported the decision to invade Iraq. Two, this article was written before the recent Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. I strongly suspect that whatever slim chance there might have been of a not-too-terrible outcome in Iraq is now utterly gone. And there’s no doubt the neocons are hoping to use the conflict to take the war to Syria and Iran.

“If the United States stays in Iraq, it keeps making enemies,” Fallows writes. “If it leaves, it goes dragging its tail.” The war is hurting us so many ways, from the misallocation of resources, growing deficits, erosion of civil liberties, and loss of moral high ground. Maybe a little tail dragging is in order.

The final destructive response helping al-Qaeda has been America’s estrangement from its allies and diminution of its traditionally vast “soft power.” “America’s cause is doomed unless it regains the moral high ground,” Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of Britain’s secret intelligence agency, MI-6, told me. He pointed out that by the end of the Cold War there was no dispute worldwide about which side held the moral high ground—and that this made his work as a spymaster far easier. “Potential recruits would come to us because they believed in the cause,” he said. A senior army officer from a country whose forces are fighting alongside America’s in Iraq similarly told me that America “simply has to recapture its moral authority.” His reasoning:

    The United States is so powerful militarily that by its very nature it represents a threat to every other nation on earth. The only country that could theoretically destroy every single other country is the United States. The only way we can say that the U.S. is not a threat is by looking at intent, and that depends on moral authority. If you’re not sure the United States is going to do the right thing, you can’t trust it with that power, so you begin thinking, How can I balance it off and find other alliances to protect myself?

America’s glory has been its openness and idealism, internally and externally. Each has been constrained from time to time, but not for as long or in as open-ended a way as now.

I combed through the Fallows article looking for a compelling argument to stay in Iraq, other than “the need for America to make good on commitments, the importance of keeping the Sunni parts of Iraq from turning into a new haven for global terrorists, and the chance that conditions in Iraq would eventually improve.” No luck. If improving the security situation in Iraq by force of American arms were still possible, then perhaps those would be arguments for staying in Iraq. I doubt it’s still possible, however.

Yet note this from Billmon:

If the United States were to begin pulling troops out of Iraq now, it would be interpreted correctly throughout the Middle East as an open admission of defeat — one that would likely lead fairly quickly to a complete American evacuation of the country. (Maybe not literally by landing helicopters on the roof of the embassy, but all in the region would understand the military reality that as the force grows smaller it will become progressively more dangerous to keep it in Iraq.)

Such an outcome could well force Iraq’s Shi’a political leaders to snuggle up even more tightly to Iran, if only as a matter of physical survival. If the full-scale civil war everyone seems to expect were to break out following an American withdrawal, Baghdad might even feel compelled to call in Iranian troops. At a minimum, Iran could be left with enormous influence over, if not outright control of, the Iraqi government and its security forces. Access to Iraqi air space would give Iran a direct resupply corridor to Syria, and, through Syria, to Hizbullah. A ground presence could provide Tehran with a direct ground link — call it the Ayatollah Khomeini Trail — assuming the Kurds could be bought off and/or intimidated, or the Sunni belt pacified (one shudders to think of what that might involve.)

Presto: one Shi’a crescent to go.

The Israel situation has, um, complicated it all:

Of course, it might not actually come to this — or if it did it might not come quickly. But the fact remains that the U.S. Army is the only significant force standing between Iran and it’s closest allies, and thus between Iran and Israel. If, as it now seems, Washington and Jerusalem both perceive Iran as the primary threat (and/or target for aggression) in the region, then there is no real distinction between America’s occupation of Iraq and Israel’s intended re-occupation of southern Lebanon. They are, in essence, both part of the next war.

It seems increasingly probable that that war will come soon — perhaps as early as November or December, although more likely next year. Israel’s failure to knock out Hizbullah with a rapid first strike has left the neocons even deeper in the hole, enormously ratcheting up the pressure to try to recoup all losses by taking the war to Damascus and Tehran.

In other words, it’s almost time for the ultimate “flight forward” — the one that finally pushes the Middle East into World War III.

You’ll like this — Sidney Blumenthal writes in Salon,

The National Security Agency is providing signal intelligence to Israel to monitor whether Syria and Iran are supplying new armaments to Hezbollah as it fires hundreds of missiles into northern Israel, according to a national security official with direct knowledge of the operation. President Bush has approved the secret program.

Inside the administration, neoconservatives on Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security staff and Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council, are prime movers behind sharing NSA intelligence with Israel, and they have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply activities as a potential pretext for Israeli bombing of both countries, the source privy to conversations about the program says. (Intelligence, including that gathered by the NSA, has been provided to Israel in the past for various purposes.) The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war.

While the much-derided Condi Rice muddles ahead with something that might resemble a foreign policy if you squint and cross your eyes when you look at it, the neocons are actively trying to marginalize her. Condi mostly has been buying time for the Israelis to continue to bomb Lebanon,

But the neocon scenario extends far beyond that objective to pushing Israel into a “cleansing war” with Syria and Iran, says the national security official, which somehow will redeem Bush’s beleaguered policy in the entire region.

Of course, it’s desirable to get the American people on board with the program. Back to Billmon:

A number of wealthy pro-Israel donors, including Ronald Lauder, the perfume heir, have given millions to something called the Israel Project — a “public education” cum PR cum grassroots lobbying machine — to fund a program specifically aimed at building support for a military strike on Iran. You can’t turn on Fox News these days without finding James Woolsey or Newt Gingrich or Bill Kristol or some other pro-Israel mouthpiece demanding war with Syria and/or Iran, and painting it as the only way to stop the rockets falling on Haifa.

Billmon writes that even if the Dems finally speak out against Iraq, he predicts they will remain loyal spear carriers for Israel.

I don’t want rockets falling on Haifa, and I believe most Americans don’t want rockets falling on Haifa. But at some point the American people need to have a serious discussion about how far we’re willing to go, and how much of our own security we’re willing to risk, to keep rockets from falling on Haifa. And, especially after more than three years in Iraq, I think many Americans could be ready to establish some boundaries.

It’s true that the latest Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg Poll shows that Americans think recent Israeli actions in Lebanon are justified, 59 to 28 percent, with 13 percent unsure. 50 percent of Americans believe the U.S. should remain aligned with Israel, although a hefty minority, 44 percent, think the U.S. should be neutral. None of the poll questions mentioned risk or cost, however. None of them asked Would you still support Israel if you knew that Israel’s actions are making the security situation in Iraq even worse? If it means drawing the United States into war with Iran and Syria? If it means inspiring new and better armed groups of jihadists to attack the U.S.? Are you willing to risk your life, or the lives of your loved ones, to keep rockets from falling on Haifa?

Of course, we’re not going to have that conversation, except perhaps on the blogosphere.

The President of the United States is lost in space. The Vice President and Secretary of Defense are delusional. The Secretary of State is incompetent. Republicans in Congress are yes men. A few Dems are finally standing up against the last war — the one started three years ago — but it’s unlikely they’ll stand in the way of the next war.

James Fallows’s article — again, written before the Israel-Lebanon conflict began — ends on a hopeful note. He says this is an ideal time to declare victory in the “war on terror” and launch realistic and practical policies for long-term security and anti-terrorism efforts. Too bad that won’t happen.

Good New, Bad News, Part I

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From James Fallows’s new article in the current issue of Atlantic Online (emphasis added):

No modern nation is immune to politically inspired violence, and even the best-executed antiterrorism strategy will not be airtight.

But the overall prospect looks better than many Americans believe, and better than nearly all political rhetoric asserts. The essence of the change is this: because of al-Qaeda’s own mistakes, and because of the things the United States and its allies have done right, al-Qaeda’s ability to inflict direct damage in America or on Americans has been sharply reduced. Its successor groups in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere will continue to pose dangers. But its hopes for fundamentally harming the United States now rest less on what it can do itself than on what it can trick, tempt, or goad us into doing. Its destiny is no longer in its own hands.

“Does al-Qaeda still constitute an ‘existential’ threat?” asks David Kilcullen, who has written several influential papers on the need for a new strategy against Islamic insurgents. Kilcullen, who as an Australian army officer commanded counter-insurgency units in East Timor, recently served as an adviser in the Pentagon and is now a senior adviser on counterterrorism at the State Department. He was referring to the argument about whether the terrorism of the twenty-first century endangers the very existence of the United States and its allies, as the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons did throughout the Cold War (and as the remnants of that arsenal still might).

“I think it does, but not for the obvious reasons,” Kilcullen told me. He said the most useful analogy was the menace posed by European anarchists in the nineteenth century. “If you add up everyone they personally killed, it came to maybe 2,000 people, which is not an existential threat.” But one of their number assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. The act itself took the lives of two people. The unthinking response of European governments in effect started World War I. “So because of the reaction they provoked, they were able to kill millions of people and destroy a civilization.

“It is not the people al-Qaeda might kill that is the threat,” he concluded. “Our reaction is what can cause the damage. It’s al-Qaeda plus our response that creates the existential danger.”

That’s a point I attempted to make on C-SPAN last February. There’s aren’t enough jihadists in the world to invade and occupy the United States and destroy our government and our military. Only we can do that.

And I say we’re doing a heck of a job.

Fallows interviewed a number of experts — some from military intelligence, some from academia — to understand exactly where we are now, antiterrorism-wise. The essential point of Fallows article is that, although the threat of terrorist attacks in the U.S. remains, there is reason for optimism. In some ways America is safer, he says.

However, as I read the article it struck me that, in just about every area where problems remain, the Bush Administration is heading in the wrong direction.

The good news: The experts that Fallows interviewed say that the old al Qaeda, the one that existed on September 11, no longer has operational ability. Among jihadists Osama bin Laden is not much more than a “Che Guevara–like” symbol. What we have now is “a global proliferation of ‘self-starter’ terrorist groups.” These groups certainly can inflict damage — the London and Madrid bombings, for example — but they lack the resources and organizational ability to pull off another September 11. This, some speculate, is the primary reason there hasn’t been another terrorist attack in the U.S. since.

At the moment about the only way a terrorist group could equal or top September 11 is with a nuclear weapon. And “if nuclear weapons constitute the one true existential threat,” the experts say, “then countering the proliferation of those weapons themselves is what American policy should address, more than fighting terrorism in general.”

Naturally, the Bush Administration has taken a different approach.

The Department of Homeland Security, on the other hand, is, um, probably not the reason there hasn’t been another terrorist attack in the U.S. since. “Indeed, nearly all emphasized the haphazard, wasteful, and sometimes self-defeating nature of the DHS’s approach,” Fallows writes.

Muslim Americans are another reason we’ve been terrorist-attack free for almost five years.

“The patriotism of the American Muslim community has been grossly underreported,” says Marc Sageman, who has studied the process by which people decide to join or leave terrorist networks. According to Daniel Benjamin, a former official on the National Security Council and coauthor of The Next Attack, Muslims in America “have been our first line of defense.” Even though many have been “unnerved by a law-enforcement approach that might have been inevitable but was still disturbing,” the community has been “pretty much immune to the jihadist virus.”

Something about the Arab and Muslim immigrants who have come to America, or about their absorption here, has made them basically similar to other well-assimilated American ethnic groups—and basically different from the estranged Muslim underclass of much of Europe. … most measures of Muslim disaffection or upheaval in Europe—arrests, riots, violence based on religion—show it to be ten to fifty times worse than here.

Muslims in Europe are not always economically disadvantaged. They just don’t assimilate:

The difference between the European and American assimilation of Muslims becomes most apparent in the second generation, when American Muslims are culturally and economically Americanized and many European Muslims often develop a sharper sense of alienation. “If you ask a second-generation American Muslim,” says Robert Leiken, author of Bearers of Global Jihad: Immigration and National Security After 9/11, “he will say, ‘I’m an American and a Muslim.’ A second-generation Turk in Germany is a Turk, and a French Moroccan doesn’t know what he is.”

We have a lot more experience with assimilating people here, of course. Yet we cannot be complacent. Anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. is up (thanks loads, Ms. Malkin) and extreme views can be found among American Muslims. Seeing to it that the rightie hatemongers don’t screw up one of our few advantages ought to be a priority.

There’s another gain against terrorism that we’re in the process of losing. In most Muslim countries support for jihadist violence among “civilian” populations has eroded —

“Like Tourette’s syndrome, they keep killing Muslim civilians,” says Peter Bergen. “That is their Achilles’ heel. Every time the bombs go off and kill civilians, it works in our favor. It’s a double whammy when the civilians they kill are Muslims.” Last November, groups directed by al-Zarqawi set off bombs in three hotels in Amman, Jordan. Some sixty civilians were killed, including thirty-eight at a wedding. The result was to turn Jordanian public opinion against al-Qaeda and al-Zarqawi, and to make the Jordanian government more openly cooperative with the United States.

Israel’s attacks on Lebanon blew that one out of the water, I’m afraid. We had already blown it in Iraq —

There, insurgents have slaughtered civilians daily, before and after the death this spring of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. But since American troops are also assumed to be killing civilians, the anti-insurgent backlash is muddied.

In fact, according to Caleb Carr, the only thing that keeps al Qaeda alive at all is Iraq.

Back to the original point:

In the modern brand of terrorist warfare, what an enemy can do directly is limited. The most dangerous thing it can do is to provoke you into hurting yourself.

This is what David Kilcullen meant in saying that the response to terrorism was potentially far more destructive than the deed itself. And it is why most people I spoke with said that three kinds of American reaction—the war in Iraq, the economic consequences of willy-nilly spending on security, and the erosion of America’s moral authority—were responsible for such strength as al-Qaeda now maintained.

“You only have to look at the Iraq War to see how much damage you can do to yourself by your response,” Kilcullen told me. He is another of those who supported the war and consider it important to fight toward some kind of victory, but who recognize the ways in which this conflict has helped al-Qaeda. So far the war in Iraq has advanced the jihadist cause because it generates a steady supply of Islamic victims, or martyrs; because it seems to prove Osama bin Laden’s contention that America lusts to occupy Islam’s sacred sites, abuse Muslim people, and steal Muslim resources; and because it raises the tantalizing possibility that humble Muslim insurgents, with cheap, primitive weapons, can once more hobble and ultimately destroy a superpower, as they believe they did to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan twenty years ago. The United States also played a large role in thwarting the Soviets, but that doesn’t matter. For mythic purposes, mujahideen brought down one anti-Islamic army and can bring down another. …

… “Many believe that the United States, bloodied and exhausted by the insurgency, stripped of its allies, will eventually withdraw,” Brian Jenkins writes of the jihadist view. From that perspective, “this defeat alone could bring about the collapse of the United States, just as collapse followed the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.”

The rest of the article catalogues the many ways the war in Iraq is hurting the United States and helping jihadists. And time and time again, the Bush Administration follows Osama bin Laden’s original game plan. We fell into bin Laden’s trap, in other words. And even though bin Laden himself is not reaping the benefits, other jihadists certainly are. Staying in Iraq will continue to drain the United States and strengthen jihad. There are serious perils to leaving, also. There’s no happy remedy to the mess Bush made.

But the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate. The Associated Press reports:

Hundreds of thousands of Shiites chanting “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” marched through the streets of Baghdad’s biggest Shiite district today in a show of support for Hezbollah militants battling Israeli troops in Lebanon. …

…Al-Sadr followers painted U.S. and Israeli flags on the main road leading to the rally site, and demonstrators stepped on them — a gesture of contempt in Iraq. Alongside the painted flags was written: “These are the terrorists.”

Protesters set fire to American and Israeli flags, as well as effigies of President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, showing the men with Dracula teeth. “Saddam and Bush, Two Faces of One Coin” was scrawled on Bush’s effigy.

The Shiites were the people we “liberated,” remember.

I’ve got more to say about Iraq and the James Fallows article, but I’ll say it this afternoon.

Creative Chaos

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“The result in war is never absolute.” — Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Chapter 1

I’ve been trying to wrap my head about the neoconservative “creative chaos” theory. Apparently, the neocons believe that if the Middle East is thrown into enough turmoil, the bad old authoritarian governments will break down and nice democratic governments will rise up out of the ashes. There is more explanation here and here. From the second link, we find a quote from neocon Michel Ledeen:

Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence–our existence, not our politics–threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.

What is “our historic mission”? World domination? When did we vote on that?

This does explain why the Bushies didn’t think they needed a postwar plan for Iraq. They really did believe that once they removed Saddam Hussein, the chaos of instability would generate energy and creativity, and out of this a democratic and pro-western nation would rise. I assumed they believed in the Good Democracy Fairy, but it’s really more like quantum chaos theory applied to politics.

Glenn Greenwald asks if Bill Kristol is writing George Bush’s Middle East speeches —

George Bush’s radio address yesterday on the Israel-Lebanon war preaches pure neoconservative gospel. Every point the President made would fit very comfortably into a Bill Kristol Weekly Standard column or a Michael Ledeen Corner item. This speech leaves no doubt that, at least rhetorically, the President is still a full-fledged adherent to the tenets of neoconservatism, and thus considers the Israel-Lebanon war to be “our war” in every sense, merely another front in the Epic Global War of Civilizations (a/k/a The Long War, World War III/IV, etc.):

    1. As we work to resolve this current crisis, we must recognize that Lebanon is the latest flashpoint in a broader struggle between freedom and terror that is unfolding across the region.

For decades, American policy sought to achieve peace in the Middle East by promoting stability in the Middle East, yet these policies gave us neither.

    The lack of freedom in that region created conditions where anger and resentment grew, radicalism thrived, and terrorists found willing recruits. We saw the consequences on September the 11th, 2001, when terrorists brought death and destruction to our country, killing nearly 3,000 innocent Americans. [emphasis added]

Since that nasty stability gave us all these problems, Bush says, what we need is instability.

So, says the President, the Israel-Lebanon war is not about territorial conflicts or endless Israeli-Hezbollah disputes but, instead, is part of the glorious worldwide “struggle between freedom and terror.” It is but the “latest flashpoint” in the “broader struggle,” which includes the U.S. war in Afghanistan, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and America’s hostilities with Iran and Syria. All of these problems are part of the same War, and are all caused by the one big neoconservative sin — stability. Exactly as Mark Levin pointed out yesterday — Mark Levin — the President claims that the reason 9/11 happened is because the foreign policy of both political parties for the last several decades was devoted to preserving stability (i.e., a state of peace, avoidance of war), and stability in the Middle East is our greatest enemy.

That, according to neoconservatives (apparently including the President), is what needs to be changed. Stability is our enemy because it breeds hatred and war. Only instability and war will breed a “lasting peace.” Thus, the more instability and war in the Middle East, the better. That is the central neoconservative warmongering tenet and it is what is coming out of the President’s mouth as he discusses his views of the new war in the Middle East. [emphasis added]

That’s just the beginning of Glenn’s thought-provoking post; you can read the rest of it at Unclaimed Territory. I also want to highlight this paragraph of Glenn’s written yesterday —

To neoconservatives, everything that made the U.S. a respected superpower over the last six decades is all obsolete and worthless. To them, foreign policy experts from both political parties are responsible for 9/11 and the rise of Islamic extremism because they believe too much in diplomacy and restraint. They didn’t wage enough wars and the wars they did wage weren’t ferocious enough. There weren’t enough Qanas, and as a result, we aren’t sufficiently feared. People around the world need to know that they either comply with our instructions or fire and brimstone will rain upon their heads.

IMO Neoconservative foreign policy seems rooted in two basic childish conceits. The first conceit is that every foreign policy problem can be resolved, once and for all, and if problems continue to fester after years, or decades, of diplomacy, then diplomacy failed. The second conceit is that we’re better than them, and deep down they know it, and once we knock some sense into them they’ll try harder to be like us.

Regarding the “failure” of diplomacy — when you’re dealing with matters like nationalistic, ethnic, and religious identities, and clashing cultural values, it may in fact take generations for people to stop fearing and hating each other. This is especially true when people have already been locked in a cycle of mutual retribution for many years. It may be that the best anyone can do is prevent war long enough for people to chill out and develop a little tolerance. This can take a long time, as witnessed by the history of racial animosity in America. But sometimes, I believe, there are no shortcuts.

Basic rule: Anything you feed will grow. If you feed hate and war, you get more hate and war. If you feed tolerance and peace, you get more tolerance and peace. It may take a lot of feeding for a warring people to develop tolerance and peace, but that’s the only way peace can get big enough to prevail.

Neocons, on the other hand, think America can force the simple native people to be nice, and that’ll be that. They think they can apply war and get an absolute result, which Carl von Clausewitz said ain’t the way it works. Instead, I believe, the neocon approach just grows hate and war, and it’s going to come back and bite us eventually. Possibly hard.

Who recognizes his limitations is healthy;
Who ignores his limitations is sick.
The sage recognizes this sickness as a limitation.
And so becomes immune.
— Tao Teh Ching, Verse 71

The Fantasy Lives of Chickenhawks, II

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Mark Steyn needs to join Victor Davis Hanson in the Shady Rest Hospice for the Terminally Oblivious.

In fact, the notion that “fighting” a war is the monopoly of those “in uniform” gets to the heart of why America and its allies are having such a difficult time in the present struggle.

Translation: Steyn is miffed because some people don’t understand his service — undertaken mostly from his home in New Hampshire, I assume — is just as important as a soldier’s.

You can have the best fastest state-of-the-art car on the road, but, if you don’t know where you’re going, the fellow in the rusting ’73 Oldsmobile will get there and you won’t. It’s the ideas that drive a war and the support they command in the broader society that determine whether you’ll see it through to real victory. After Korea and Vietnam and Gulf War I, it shouldn’t be necessary to have to state that.

Translation: If the war is losing support and direction, this is entirely the fault of the American people, not the Bush Administration. The American people aren’t fighting hard enough. Or maybe they aren’t shopping hard enough. Or something.

In Iraq, the leviathan has somehow managed to give the impression that what previous mid-rank powers would have regarded as a little light colonial policing has left it stretched dangerously thin and bogged down in an almighty quagmire.

I can’t translate that, but oh, I would so love to ship Steyn to Iraq so he can tell the troops — the ones who just got their tours of duty extended — that all they’re doing is “a little light colonial policing.”

British and European education these last 30 years is now one of the biggest obstacles to civilizational self-preservation.

He’s saying that liberal arts education has turned us all into weenies, as opposed to Iron Man Steyn, within whom the great warrior spirit burns bright and hot as he stands resolved against the enemies of freedom. In New Hampshire.

I don’t believe Steyn has ever been in the military. Heck of an imagination, though.

Update: The Editors find another candidate for the Shady Rest Hospice for the Terminally Oblivious.