Stromata Blog

A Reminder About Saddam

Now and then, it’s worthwhile to think about the alternative to the dull, dreary battle against terrorists in Iraq that we must pursue because we had the effrontery to depose a hostile dictator. It isn’t peace and quiet. Visiting Ramadi, W. Thomas Smith, Jr. talks to a Marine major:

At Salman Pak [about 15 miles south of Baghdad], I was there in 2003. We found high quality leather suicide vests, wrapped in plastic, ready for shipment. . . . I wonder what the enemy was doing with those? We actually sent out press releases with pictures in and around April/May 2003, and it was ignored by the mainstream media.

It may not have been ignored completely. Mr. Smith quotes the April 13, 2003, issue of USA Today, describing what perhaps was the same discovery:

U.S. Marines found 310 explosive-packed vests for suicide bombers at an unspecified location in Baghdad, U.S. military officials said Sunday. The cache, discovered Friday, included 160 vests that combined explosives with ball bearings, making them more lethal, Central Command said. CNN reported that the vests were found in a school.

The suicide bomber garb obviously was manufactured by the Ba’athist regime. For what purpose? For internal use only – to blow up prospective Kurdish rebels? And how likely is it that this was the full extent of the Ba’athists’ production of terrorist accouterments?

Meanwhile, William Kristol, plowing through George Tenet’s “self-serving and often whiny recollection of his time as director of central intelligence”, has found a number of buried revelations about what the CIA thought regarding Saddam Hussein’s relationship with al-Qa’eda at the time when the decision to oust the tyrant was being made. This history is being rapidly airbrushed away.

[T]he book provides surprising evidence – some of it new – that Bush was right to take the war on terror to Iraq, and that he might be well advised to get more serious about Iran. Tenet offers this evidence inadvertently, for it undercuts the fashionable critique of the Iraq war that he now seeks to associate himself with. But precisely because the evidence cuts against Tenet's polemical thrust, it should be given considerable weight.

For instance, Tenet devotes several pages to a reexamination of the ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. And though he tries to stake out politically safe middle ground – by arguing against imaginary Bush administration officials who claimed Iraq was behind 9/11 – he concludes that Iraq did have a relationship with al Qaeda that the Bush administration was right to be worried about:

The intelligence told us that senior al-Qa’ida leaders and the Iraqis had discussed safe haven in Iraq. Most of the public discussion thus far has focused on Zarqawi’s arrival in Baghdad under an assumed name in May of 2002, allegedly to receive medical treatment. Zarqawi, whom we termed a ‘senior associate and collaborator’ of al-Qa’ida at the time, supervised camps in northern Iraq run by Ansar al-Islam (AI). . . .

What was even more worrisome was that by the spring and summer of 2002, more than a dozen al-Qa’ida-affiliated extremists converged on Baghdad, with apparently no harassment on the part of the Iraqi government. They had found a comfortable and secure environment in which they moved people and supplies to support Zarqawi’s operations in northeastern Iraq. . . .

Thirwat Shihata and Yussef Dardiri, two Egyptians assessed by a senior al-Qa’ida detainee to be among the Egyptian Islamic Jihad’s best operational planners, . . . arrived [in Baghdad] by mid-May of 2002. At times we lost track of them, though their associates continued to operate in Baghdad as of October 2002. Their activity in sending recruits to train in Zarqawi’s camps was compelling enough.

The primary motive for the invasion of Iraq was to prevent Saddam Hussein from expanding his role as a terrorist protector, supplier and financier. One indisputable fact is that we succeeded in that mission. Those who now declare that it should never have been undertaken implicitly regret the lives that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their subordinates thereby saved.

The Short Goodbye

While others pay for Times Select, those of us with sufficient chrononautical skills can access Times Pre-Select, which carries advance copies of stories that will appear over the next 12 to 18 months. (It’s obvious that the paper’s own columnists and management don’t make use of this service; perhaps that’s a safeguard against temporal paradoxes.)

Browsing through TP-S today, I thought that I’d share some of the highlights. I’m not sure how copyright works with copy that is not yet written, so I beg forgiveness if the excerpts below infringe on anyone’s intellectual property rights.

Bush Yields on Iraq Withdrawal Plan
Public sentiment, Congress’s principled stand overcome President’s stubbornness

WASHINGTON, June 1, 2007. With deadlines approaching for renewing funds for the military in Iraq, a reluctant President Bush today accepted the demands of Congress that the funding include a timetable for withdrawing American forces from the country. Under the new plan, reductions in troop strength will begin no later than October 1, 2007, and will be “substantially completed” by April 1, 2008, roughly the fifth anniversary of the start of the Nation’s deadliest conflict since the Vietnam War. Effective “as soon as feasible”, the mission of the U.S. soldiers will switch from the current one of providing security in Baghdad and other war-torn areas, to training the Iraqi armed forces and police and conducting “targeted counter-terrorism operations” against al-Qa’eda.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–Nev.) hailed the agreement as “the first sign that this President recognizes the obvious, that he rushed into an unwinnable war, has lost it and must from now on tell the country the truth”. Mr. Reid and his House counterpart, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Cal.), pledged to intensify investigations of pre-war intelligence claims, now discredited, that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a dictator who harbored ill intentions toward the United States. . . .

* * * *

European, Arab Leaders Applaud End of U.S. Occupation of Iraq
EU Parliament will step up inquiries into CIA tactics; Stabilizing role foreseen for Iran and Syria

BRUSSELS, June 3, 2007. Feeling that their criticisms of the Bush Administration’s unilateral policies have been vindicated by last week’s decision to begin withdrawal from Iraq, members of the European Parliament intend to press for greater input into the methods employed to combat “terrorism”. The highest priority, in these members’ view, shared by most European governments, should be placed on ending illegal CIA renditions, violations of privacy, stereotyping of Muslims, and other practices that, in one MEP’s words, “drive adherents of the world’s foremost religion of peace into the hands of Osama bin Laden.

In the Middle East, reaction to news of President Bush’s surrender to Congressional and public demands ranged from pleased to ecstatic. A spokesman for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad welcomed “the restoration of peace in a neighboring land” and stated that his government will take “concrete measures to promote stability”. Syria hopes that regional talks will lead to the establishment of a national unity government in Iraq in place of what the spokesman characterized as “the narrow regime installed by the U.S.” occupiers”. . . .

* * * *

Shia Dissident Leader Returns Home Victoriously
Shiite cleric despise by U.S. expected to play key role in political settlement; Cheered by thousands in Sadr City

BAGHDAD, June 16, 2007. Moqtada al-Sadr, the fiery Shiite cleric who went into hiding three months ago to escape possible arrest during the U.S. “security surge”, rode through the streets of Baghdad on Friday, enthusiastically cheered by tens of thousands of his followers. Preaching afterwards in a crowded mosque, he vowed to opposed both American occupation and any revival of Sunni political power.

Although he is demonized by the Bush Administration, many observers see al-Sadr as a man who must be dealt with. He is widely regarded as the most charismatic political leader in Iraq and the only one with a wide following among the urban poor. . . .

* * * *

Petraeus Accused of Skirting Restrictions on Military’s Role in Iraq
Secret report says many attacks on militias are “disguised” as against al-Qa’eda

WASHINGTON, July 18, 2007. A new scandal threatened to engulf the Bush Administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq. A classified report prepared by the Defense Department’s inspector general found that up to half of the “counter-terrorism operations” supposedly targeted at al-Qa’eda in Iraq in fact aim at Sunni or Shiite militias, including one loyal to the increasingly popular and influential Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

The report, a copy of which was given to the Times by an official who asked not to be identified, cited many examples of Army and Marine activities that apparently go well beyond their Congressionally authorized mission of training Iraqi troops and conducting targeted counter-terrorism operations specifically against al-Qa’eda.

On July 2nd, for instance, Marines raided a bomb factory in Sadr City, an area with very little al-Qa’eda presence, seizing a large quantity of explosives and arresting seven men. Neither the materials nor the captives could be conclusively linked to al-Qa’eda. The action followed an increase in car bombings in Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad. The report noted that, prior to authorizing the assault, U.S. commander General David Petraeus “made no attempt to ascertain that the alleged terrorist site was operated by al-Qa’eda or whether the intrusion would comport with Congressional policy. . . .

* * * *

Iraqi Parliament Ousts Al-Maliki, Al-Sadr Set to Assume Power
Dramatic comeback for anti-U.S. populist

BAGHDAD, August 1, 2007. After a stormy session marked by shouting matches among the delegates, Iraq’s Parliament voted by a three-to-one margin late Wednesday evening to remove prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose government has presided over a surging wave of violence in the capital and throughout the country.

The final blow to al-Maliki’s hopes of remaining in office was Monday’s declaration by leading the tribal sheiks in Anbar province, a Sunni stronghold, that they had lost confidence in the central government. The U.S. had in the past enjoyed some success in wooing the Anbar tribes, but they have turned against the occupying power over the past two months, a development that observers find impossible to explain fully. Some suggest that recent revelations of illegal military actions by American forces aroused outrage. The one point of agreement is that, contrary to predictions by Presidential advisors, the tribes were not reacting negatively to the Congressional decision to withdraw American forces from Iraq.

Almost certain to succeed al-Maliki is popular Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr. . . .

* * * *

Baghdad Riots Kill Thousands
Rally’s aftermath sparks weekend of violence; U.S. forces stand aside

BAGHDAD, August 5, 2007. Huge swathes of Baghdad lay in ruins this morning, and fearful citizens cowered in their homes, following a weekend that saw rampaging mobs murder indiscriminately, set fire to stores and markets, and even invade mosques. Authorities had no way to estimate the death toll. Numbers as high as 15,000 have been bruited about on the basis of partial counts of victims brought to the overworked morgues. Most of the dead are believed to be Sunni Muslims.

Trouble broke out at a demonstration Friday afternoon in support of Moqtada al-Sadr, who is expected to be chosen later this week as the country’s next prime minister. Some traditionalist Muslim leaders have objected to the rise of the young, charismatic Mr. al-Sadr. Speakers at the rally criticized them and also called for forcible suppression of Sunni militias, which have recently stepped up attacks against rival Shiites.

As the gathering broke up, about an hour before sundown, an officer of the Mahdi Army, a militia personally loyal to al-Sadr, assembled the men under his command and began marching toward a nearby Sunni neighborhood. A crowd formed around his contingent. As soon as it reached the Sunni area, fires broke out. A group of armed Sunnis tried to block any further advance. Shots were fired, and all control came to an end. . . .

* * * *

Democrats Blast Inaction During Baghdad Riot
Petraeus Kept Troops on Bases as City Burned; Pelosi calls failure to stop ethnic cleansing a “war crime”

WASHINGTON, August 7, 2007. As order slowly returned to Baghdad, Congressional leaders demanded to know why the 150,000 American soldiers in Iraq did nothing to prevent sectarian violence, described as the worst act of ethnic cleansing since Kosovo.

“Doing nothing while innocents are slaughtered is a war crime,” declared Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Cal.) in a statement issued by her office late last night. “If any American commander, up to and including General Petraeus, was responsible for this failure to act decisively, he or she must be prosecuted. If this administration will not act, I hope that the International Criminal Court will take cognizance of the case.”

Earlier in the day, White House press secretary Tony Snow argued that restrictions on the scope of U.S. military activity in Iraq, agreed to by President Bush in June, had made it impossible to intervene when the riots broke out. He also cited the absence of any significant military presence in Baghdad since the end of the discredited “surge”, the President’s previous, failed Iraqi strategy.

Speaker Pelosi brushed those excuses aside. “Blaming Congress is not the way to stop genocide,” she said.

On the campaign trail, Senator Hillary Clinton (D–N.Y.) contrasted the Republican administration’s failure to act in Baghdad with the swift American intervention to halt ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. “This isn’t just a failure by General Petraeus,” she declared in a speech in Los Angeles. “It’s about the refusal of this president to adopt smart policies or care about people.”

Senator Clinton’s principal rival, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, blamed cynicism. “The President just wants to cynically cut and run from responsibility for Iraq. Just like it won’t do anything about violence that takes other forms – Katrina, the shootings at Virginia Tech, Don Imus, outsourcing.”

Another candidate, Senator Joe Biden (D–Del.) said, “It isn’t accidental that these things have happened. Newt Gingrich pointed the way.”

Senator Majority Harry Reid (D–Nev.) joined in the criticism, stating, “This weekend’s tragic events show, more than ever, the incompetence of this administration and the reasons why it is essential to accelerate the redeployment of all U,S. forces from Iraq.” . . .

A Churchill in the Making

Both The Tank (National Review’s recently launched national security blog) and Power Line have posted the text of Senator Joe Lieberman’s speech in opposition to the Democrats’ Iraq Surrender Bill. If future collections of great speeches have room for anything not uttered in Arabic, this short, deadly logical oration will be in all of them. A few highlights:

When we say that U.S. troops shouldn’t be “policing a civil war,” that their operations should be restricted to this narrow list of missions, what does this actually mean?

To begin with, it means that our troops will not be allowed to protect the Iraqi people from the insurgents and militias who are trying to terrorize and kill them. Instead of restoring basic security, which General Petraeus has argued should be the central focus of any counterinsurgency campaign, it means our soldiers would instead be ordered, by force of this proposed law, not to stop the sectarian violence happening all around them—no matter how vicious or horrific it becomes.

In short, it means telling our troops to deliberately and consciously turn their backs on ethnic cleansing, to turn their backs on the slaughter of innocent civilians—men, women, and children singled out and killed on the basis of their religion alone. . . .

Al Qaeda’s own leaders have repeatedly said that one of the ways they intend to achieve victory in Iraq is to provoke civil war. They are trying to kill as many people as possible today, precisely in the hope of igniting sectarian violence, because they know that this is their best way to collapse Iraq’s political center, overthrow Iraq’s elected government, radicalize its population, and create a failed state in the heart of the Middle East that they can use as a base.

That is why Al Qaeda blew up the Golden Mosque in Samarra last year. And that is why we are seeing mass casualty suicide bombings by Al Qaeda in Baghdad now.

The sectarian violence that the Majority Leader says he wants to order American troops to stop policing, in other words, is the very same sectarian violence that Al Qaeda hopes to ride to victory. The suggestion that we can draw a bright legislative line between stopping terrorists in Iraq and stopping civil war in Iraq flies in the face of this reality. . . .

I ask the supporters of this legislation: How, exactly, are U.S. forces to gather intelligence about where, when, and against whom to strike, after you have ordered them walled off from the Iraqi population? How, exactly, are U.S. forces to carry out targeted counter-terror operations, after you have ordered them cut off from the very source of intelligence that drives these operations?

This is precisely why the congressional micromanagement of life-and-death decisions about how, where, and when our troops can fight is such a bad idea, especially on a complex and changing battlefield.

In sum, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t withdraw combat troops from Iraq and still fight Al Qaeda there. . . .

This legislation would impose a binding deadline for U.S. troops to begin retreating from Iraq. This withdrawal would happen regardless of conditions on the ground, regardless of the recommendations of General Petraeus, in short regardless of reality on October 1, 2007. . . .

How do proponents of this deadline defend it? On Monday, Senator Reid gave several reasons. First, he said, a date for withdrawal puts “pressure on the Iraqis to make the desperately needed political compromises.”

But will it? According to the legislation now before us, the withdrawal will happen regardless of what the Iraqi government does.

How, then, if you are an Iraqi government official, does this give you any incentive to make the right choices? . . .

Second, the Majority Leader said that withdrawing our troops, and again I quote, will “reduce the specter of the U.S. occupation which gives fuel to the insurgency.”

My colleague from Nevada, in other words, is suggesting that the insurgency is being provoked by the very presence of American troops. By diminishing that presence, then, he believes the insurgency will diminish.

But I ask my colleagues—where is the evidence to support this theory? Since 2003, and before General Petraeus took command, U.S. forces were ordered on several occasions to pull back from Iraqi cities and regions, including Mosul and Fallujah and Tel’Afar and Baghdad. And what happened in these places? Did they stabilize when American troops left? Did the insurgency go away?

On the contrary—in each of these places where U.S. forces pulled back, Al Qaeda rushed in. Rather than becoming islands of peace, they became safe havens for terrorists, islands of fear and violence.

So I ask advocates of withdrawal: on what evidence, on what data, have you concluded that pulling U.S. troops out will weaken the insurgency, when every single experience we have had since 2003 suggests that this legislation will strengthen it? . . .

In his remarks earlier this week, the Majority Leader observed that there is “a large and growing population of millions—who sit precariously on the fence. They will either condemn or contribute to terrorism in the years ahead. We must convince them of the goodness of America and Americans. We must win them over.”

On this, I completely agree with my friend from Nevada. My question to him, however, and to the supporters of this legislation, is this: how does the strategy you propose in this bill possibly help win over this population of millions in Iraq, who sit precariously on the fence?

What message, I ask, does this legislation announce to those people in Iraq? How will they respond when we tell them that we will no longer make any effort to protect them against insurgents and death squads? How will they respond when we declare that we will be withdrawing our forces—regardless of whether they make progress in the next six months towards political reconciliation? Where will their hopes for a better life be when we withdraw the troops that are the necessary precondition for the security and stability they yearn for?

Do my friends really believe that this is the way to convince Iraqis, and the world, of the goodness of America and Americans? Does anyone in this chamber really believe that, by announcing a date certain for withdrawal, we will empower Iraqi moderates, or enable Iraq’s reconstruction, or open more schools for their children, or more hospitals for their families, or freedom for everyone?

Mr. President, with all due respect, this is fantasy.

Fantasy has for some time been the most conspicuous element of the Left’s anti-terrorism strategy. In this evening’s absurdly premature Presidential debate, almost all of the Democratic candidates loudly proclaimed their willingness, nay, eagerness, nay, unbounded zeal to fight Islamofascism – except in Iraq, where the enemy actually is. It’s a strategy of fighting somewhere else, some other time. Will mañana ever come for Mrs. and Messrs. Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Biden, Richardson, Dodd et al.? Not, I fear, until the battlefield is much closer than it is today and the enemy both stronger materially and morally bolstered by triumph after triumph, beginning with the one that the Democratic Party wishes to hand them in Iraq.

Senator Lieberman’s peroration:

Mr. President, what we need now is a sober assessment of the progress we have made and a recognition of the challenges we face. There are still many uncertainties before us, many complexities. Barely half of the new troops that General Petraeus has requested have even arrived in Iraq, and, as we heard from him yesterday, it will still be months before we will know just how effective his new strategy is.

In following General Petraeus’ path, there is no guarantee of success—but there is hope, and a new plan, for success.

The plan embedded in this legislation, on the other hand, contains no such hope. It is a strategy of catchphrases and bromides, rather than military realities in Iraq. It does not learn from the many mistakes we have made in Iraq. Rather, it promises to repeat them.

Let me be absolutely clear: In my opinion, Iraq is not yet lost—but if we follow this plan, it will be. And so, I fear, much of our hope for stability in the Middle East and security from terrorism here at home.

How about Lieberman and Thompson in 2008?

What Senator Reid Could Have Said

Here is a more thoroughgoing and eloquent expression of the sort of defeatism and anti-Administration animus expressed the other day by the Senate’s Democratic leader:

[A]fter four years of failure [of] the experiment of war, during which, under the pretence of military necessity, or war power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down, and the material prosperity of the country essentially impaired, justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities. . . .

That’s from the Democratic Party’s 1864 election platform, and the Presidential tyrant it denounces is not George W. Bush, but Abraham Lincoln. (Thanx to Best of the Web.)

Invested in Defeat

Harry Reid has declared that “the war is lost” and that the U.S. “surge” in Iraq is no different from Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War. He adds that he’s sure that Condoleeza Rice and Robert Gates share his opinion; about President Bush he isn’t so confident.

Later in the day, he tried to make his defeatism more nuanced, saying, “And as long as we follow the president’s path in Iraq, the war is lost. But there is still a chance to change course – and we must change course.”

Change course to what? Well, the Senator is still willing to fight “diplomatically, politically and economically”, but only so long as American troops cease being in a position to apply force inside Iraq. It would be fascinating to hear how negotiations, speech making and economic pressure are expected to influence men whose modus operandi is mass murder. And one also wonders why an enemy that had defeated the world’s great superpower on the battlefield would have any interest in negotiating anything but Danegeld.

But the foremost question is why Senator Reid, not at all uniquely among Democrats and liberals, seemed so blasé about his country’s having been, as he avers, defeated, and defeated by a particularly vicious, inhumane enemy. He sounds very little like Winston Churchill.

Earlier this year, the Democratic leadership had a golden opportunity to put itself into a win/win posture on the Iraqi campaign. The President had just appointed a new commander and announced the reversal of the “light footprint” policy of the past. Many Democrats had been complaining about inadequate numbers of troops in the field. Now they could applaud the “surge”, without political risk. If it went well, they could crow that they had finally forced the adoption of their own “smarter” way of war. If there was no progress, well, that would be the fault of the Administration’s incompetence; withdrawal could then be presented as a course of action reluctantly adopted faute de mieux.

Moreover, the Democrats’ support for the “surge” would have heightened the chances of success, enabling them to do good for their country as well as themselves. There’s no reason to doubt that one of the key factors that keeps the terrorists going in Iraq is their conviction that the U.S. is on the verge of running away. The sight of Americans on both sides of the political aisle drawing together to beat them would be profoundly demoralizing. Alas, it isn’t a sight that any mufsidun has yet seen.

As we all know, the Democrats found their opportunity easy to turn down, reacting to General Petraeus by voting to pull the plug on his soldiers’ efforts. The only rational explanation is that principle trumped cynical politics. The Dems shunned an easily grasped advantage, because they did not want to compromise their fundamental beliefs.

Unfortunately, the fundamental, uncompromisable belief appears to be that the war in Iraq must be lost. After that humiliation, there is a prospect that Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack (“outsourcing is violence”) Obama, John Edwards et al. might be willing to take a stand somewhere. Just where we don’t know. Even less do we know why they would find a conflict in Afghanistan or Somalia or Jordan or Egypt or Saudi-controlled Arabia more endurable.

Blacksburg, Madmen and Terror

First and foremost, a tribute to a brave teacher who laid down his life for his students:

Among the 32 people killed by a lone gunman at Virginia Tech Monday is 77-year-old engineering professor Liviu Librescu, a citizen of Israel. According to eyewitness accounts, Librescu ran to the door of his classroom and blocked it with his body – preventing the gunman from entering but getting shot to death himself as a result.

Professor Librescu survived the Holocaust and life in communist Romania, from which he was freed in 1978 following an appeal in his behalf by Prime Minister Menachem Begin. He and his wife had lived in the U.S. since 1986. May his memory be for a blessing.

Non-tributes are easier to hand out: to the reflexively anti-American European press, to prize idiotarian Rosie O’Donnell and, above all, to Senator Barack Obama, who, with no hint of levity, equated the murders at Virginia Tech with Don Imus and outsourcing – all three just instances of “violence”.

The most predictably knee-jerk reactions came from gun control advocates, to whom this tragedy was another argument in favor of their panacea. My own thoughts turned to gun control, too. I’ve long been a very, very lukewarm Second Amendment supporter, for whom firearms have never been a key issue. The Blacksburg murders could change my mind, though not in the direction the Brady Campaign would like.

The Virginia Tech campus was (supposed to be) a gun-free zone. Students and faculty, including those with concealed-carry licenses, were forbidden to bring firearms onto the grounds; students who did so faced not the fine that the criminal law would have imposed, but expulsion. Hence, the killer faced an unarmed rabble. A striking contrast was an incident five years ago at another Virginia institution, Appalachian School of Law, which has no restrictions on the possession of licensed firearms. A demented student shot six people, killing three, but then –

Students ended the rampage by confronting and then tackling the gunman, officials said.

“We saw the shooter, stopped at my vehicle and got out my handgun and started to approach [him],” Tracy Bridges, who helped subdue the shooter with other students, said Thursday on NBC’s “Today” show. “At that time, [he] threw up his hands and threw his weapon down.”

That course of action wasn’t open to law abiding students at Virginia Tech. If it had been, Professor Librescu’s sacrifice might have been unnecessary.

I begin to think that the Right to Keep and Bear Arms may be more than just an abstract principle to be upheld out of fealty to the original understanding of the Constitution.

So far as anyone can tell, the murderer was a disturbed young man with personal grievances, not an Islamofascist terrorist. Nonetheless, his acts are a dreadful warning. The deranged we have with us always. Because they have no rational objectives, there is little that we can do to prevent their random onslaughts without bundling ourselves in a stifling cocoon of precautions. On the other hand, the world has more than enough mufsidun who would thrill with delight at the prospect of emulating Cho Seung-Hui. We read of their handiwork in the papers every day – in Iraq, in Israel, in Indonesia, in Thailand and Algeria and the Philippines.

Yet, since the terrible day of 9/11, there has been virtually no terrorist activity on American soil. The credit doesn’t lie with draconian safeguards. The tightening of security over the past five years has been far from dramatic, and huge gaps are visible to the naked eye. Nor is it very likely that we have been blessed with blind luck. The most plausible explanations for half a decade of relative peace and quiet are –

1. Memories of the strong American reaction to 9/11 and its immediate aftermath – the devastating campaign against the Taliban regime – still influence the less irrational elements of the Islamofascist leadership. They can reasonably fear that another direct strike against the U.S. would merely reignite anti-terrorist fervor, whereas the current calm promotes domestic dissension and distaste for the War on Terror. Waiting for the “peace party” to take over must appear to be a sound strategy.

2. While their extent and success can’t be evaluated by outsiders, internal anti-terrorist measures, probably including some that would give apoplexy to the New York Times editorial board, have doubtless disrupted many enemy projects.

3. American military action is steadily stripping away the high command from al-Qa’eda and kindred groups while forcing the surviving leaders to keep their heads down. New and harried kingpins can’t engage in the meticulous planning and preparation that marked al-Qa’eda’s earlier attacks. Their efforts are accordingly less effective and more readily detected.

4. The Iraqi campaign has absorbed a major share of enemy resources. Al-Qa’eda has identified that country as the “central front” in its war against the giaours, a misfortune for Iraqis but a great simplification for America. There are few military boons greater than an enemy’s insistence on attacking along the line of most resistance.

All portents are, alas, against the continuance of this favorable conjunction. When the Democrats take power in January 2009 (assuming no great reversal of political fortunes over the next year and a half), fear of America will diminish, allegedly “illegal” anti-terrorist tactics will be halted, and our armed forces will switch to a primarily defensive posture. The Islamofascists will then face a happy choice between overthrowing the weak non-fascist governments of the dar al-Islām or launching new attacks against the homeland of the Great Satan.

Either way, the Caliphate will be a step nearer to restoration. A Middle-East-first strategy will leave us a few years or decades of delusive peace. The alternative will offer little recourse but the hope that, when and as they are needed, heroes like Liviu Librescu will again appear.

Hitler and the Royal Navy, 1939: An Alternate History

Let’s suppose that it is April 1939, when international tensions are high but the world is not yet at war. A British destroyer in the vicinity of Denmark sends out a patrol boat. A couple of miles inside Danish waters, it is boarded by a German naval vessel. The complement of sailors and marines puts up no resistance. The destroyer watches without taking any action. The crewmen are taken away to Berlin. That evening, German newspapers report that they have been arrested for illegally entering German territory.

A few days later, Berlin radio carries broadcasts of the crew’s “confessions”. One sailor is photographed wearing a swastika. Meanwhile, His Majesty’s government protests. The League of Nations chimes in with a mild declaration of displeasure with the German government.

After two weeks, during which the captives are threatened with trial and long terms in prison, Herr Hitler announces that he is releasing them “as a gift to the English volk”. He summons them for an audience before they depart. There are smiles all around, and the men shake the Führer’s hand. At about the same time, an accused German spy in the custody of British Intelligence is quietly let go.

Returned to London, the former prisoners rush to tell their stories to the press. The swastika-wearer gets a fat honorarium from the Daily Mail. After a public outcry, the Navy bans further money-taking. That prohibition is the full extent of the discipline that the men face.

What would the people of Great Britain have made of such a bizarre chain of events? There can’t be much doubt. The unanimous conclusion would have been that the Royal Navy was either in the grip of madness or rotten with Nazi sympathizers. Historians would argue later about which explanation was true, but none would suggest that the episode was anything other than an indelible disgrace to the British Empire.

I see no need to comment on recent events off the coast of Iraq.

Iran’s Casus Belli

J. Peter Pham calls attention to what ought to be obvious to the meanest political or journalistic intelligence:

Amid all the coverage that Iran’s seizure by force of fifteen Royal Navy personnel — eight sailors and seven marines — from HMS Cornwall, the flagship of joint Coalition and Iraqi naval force that patrols Iraqi territorial waters, no one has mentioned that this latest outrage by Iran has crossed a line of great significance. If satellite tracking proves that the British were indeed in Iraqi or international waters at the time of their capture, then Iran is not only in the wrong, but it has just, according to classical international law doctrine, also committed an act of war which hands the Coalition the legal right to respond accordingly.

Coalition forces have uncovered overwhelming evidence that Iran already supplies terrorists in Iraq. An open attack goes a step further; it is an unambiguous act of war.

Yet does anyone expect Britain and the United States to react with more than limp protests? Coalition naval and air power could obliterate the Iranian navy within hours and impose a blockade. They won’t – because majorities in Congress and Parliament would quickly force a reversal. Prime Minister Blair, already a short timer, would swiftly depart from office, while cries for President Bush’s impeachment would assail our ears for the remainder of his term.

If the mullarchy needed reassurance that the Western “powers” lack the will to forestall its ambitions, it has it now. I wonder whether it will name its first atomic bomb factory after Michael Moore or Nancy Pelosi.

Quote of the Day: Honor and the Surge

James Bowman, author of Honor: A History:

What the anti-surgers don’t understand that the honor of their country is at stake. So used have they become to performing in the comparatively diminutive theatre of national politics that they have an exaggerated sense of their own importance. They don’t understand that, on the world stage, nobody is interested in them or in whether they are — or were — right or wrong about the Iraq war. Before the eyes of the world, the performer in Iraq is not them, or even President Bush, but the United States of America, with which they are included whether they like it or not. The humiliation of the United States which they are attempting to bring about by forcing a withdrawal from Iraq with the enemy still undefeated will, therefore, affect them every bit as much as it will the hated Bushites. Their foolishness in not seeing this is like that of Michael Moore in wondering why the terrorists of 9/11 would have hit a blue state like New York instead of some place where the war-mongers lived like Texas or Alabama. . . .

But the only thing that will matter to the enemy is that the USA chose the battlefield in Iraq and then chose to leave it with the enemy still in control. That is a defeat for our country whether Michael Moore or Senator Webb or Senator Kerry or Congressman Murtha or anyone else thinks it is or not. That’s the unforgiving nature of honor, which they don’t understand. Not only is it a defeat but, like all defeats, it cannot but breed further struggles — and further defeats — down the road. Once we are driven out of Iraq because three or four or five thousand dead — or whatever the final number turns out to be — seems too high a price for us to pay for national honor, it will only be a matter of time before we are driven out of Afghanistan and anywhere else where we meet the enemy directly. Then, when we think we can retreat behind our own borders and avoid him, he will come for us here too. And when he does the anti-surgers will doubtless still be bleating: “Why do you want to kill us? We were against the war?”

Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost

OpinionJournal Political Diary (only $3.95/month – cheap, if not always cheerful) passes along this depressing appraisal by election handicapper Charlie Cook:

The situation today in Iraq is, politically speaking, devastating for the Republican Party. It has begun to structurally damage the GOP and that damage might have consequences that go beyond just the 2008 general election. Just take a look at shifts in party identification numbers over the last three years, as measured by Gallup. People identifying themselves as Democrats have opened up an advantage over those identifying themselves as Republicans. And when independents who lean toward one party or another are mixed in, the lead Democrats have over Republicans grows to its widest margin since Gallup started measuring party identification in 1991.

Is that correct? Will the trend detected by Gallup continue? Is the Republican Party now doomed to wander again in the wilderness? I don’t know, but it might be. It’s not unimaginable that a majority of the electorate will sign onto the Democrats’ strategy for fighting the War on Terror, which can be summarized as –

• Attempt only easy military actions that will lead to bloodless victories.

• Retreat from any initially easy action that turns out to be difficult.

• Treat mistakes made in the course of carrying out a mission as reasons why it should not be undertaken at all.

• Treat governments with long records of encouraging, funding and facilitating terrorism as reasonable negotiating partners.

• Pay no attention when regimes and movements declare themselves to be dedicated to America’s destruction, or actually aid attacks on our soldiers.

• Take no action that violates international law, interpreted with a maximum solicitude for “alleged” terrorists.

• Assume that anyone who disagrees with the preceding principles harbors a secret desire to oppress Americans, kill innocent Moslems and subject the world to a quasi-theocratic U.S. hegemony.

That may not sound like a winning platform, but, put forward less candidly, it has its attractions. It promises “a return to normalcy” after the tumult of the past five and a half years. “Normalcy” could even last for a while. If American forces withdraw from Iraq and we assume a generally passive posture, fighting only in Afghanistan (and then only until that, too, becomes difficult), the Islamofascists may (will, if they have enough strategic sense and unity of direction) concentrate their efforts on the weak points in the dar-al-Islām. If America won’t sacrifice as much as few hundred lives and a small fraction of its budget each year to support a democratic government in Iraq, it will be less enthusiastic about bailing out Lebanon, Jordan, Pakistan, Saudi-controlled Arabia, Egypt, etc. At best, a Democratic majority might be willing to protect Israel from annihilation. (I don’t think the party’s antisemitic wing is yet dominant, though I wouldn’t bet my IRA against it.)

So we have a prospect of perhaps a decade of “peace” while a pivotal region passes under the control of what is essentially a murder cult. During that period, the left wing of the Democratic Party could hold the Presidency and Congress, while reasserting its sway over the courts. The consequences would include not merely a supine foreign policy but higher taxes, expanded government control over the economy, the loss of any opportunity to deal with the financial imbalances of Social Security and Medicare in relatively painless ways, a resurgence of officially sanctioned racial and sexual discrimination, the recrudescence of the Fairness Doctrine and other limitations on free speech, and much else that conservatives regard as undesirable.

Inevitably, viewing the domestic damage, many on the Right will be tempted to chuck unpopular foreign policy positions in the hope of regaining power with issues like cutting taxes, deregulating the economy, reducing government spending – the good old 1994 Republican agenda. Call it “Chuck Hagel conservatism”. (If all goes according to this post’s pessimistic prognosis, I expect to see Senator Hagel as the 2012 GOP Presidential nominee.) As a straw in the wind, when the Illinois State Senate passed a resolution this week opposing President Bush’s Iraqi “surge”, not a single Republican solon spoke up for the Administration.

The problem is that we will not be in 1994, when the world was enjoying an (illusory) interlude between the Cold War and the War on Terror. If Republicans persist in calling for an unrelenting struggle against Islamofascism, we may call in vain and spend years in the political wilderness. The odds do seem stacked against a quick triumph in the court of public opinion. On the other hand, if both parties adopt variations of the Democrats’ see-no-evil, do-no-good foreign policy, it is a sure thing that nothing will be done until the enemy is strong enough to be truly dangerous. When that occurs, and is recognized, the shifting of the political terrain will compare with the upheavals of the Civil War and the Great Depression. If mainstream politicians of all stripes are discredited by their association with what will then be stigmatized as appeasement, what takes their place may be quite appalling. Desperate times bring forth desperate measures. A Republican Party that can, like Winston Churchill in 1939, step forward untainted by illusions about evil will be a blessing to our country.

The thought of deliberately taking a minority stance and sticking to it in the face of probable defeat comes uneasily to most politicians. Still, that is what the conservative movement in America did for decades. The upshot was Ronald Reagan, the defeat of international communism, and an opportunity (sadly dissipated) to lead the nation. Remembering all that, we should have no fear of going into the wilderness again.

Quote of the Day

Rich Lowry, who has tended to view the Iraqi campaign gloomily, gets to the nub of the Democrats’ folly:

In a January letter to President Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said “counterterror” should be one of the “principal” missions of U.S. troops. Sen. Carl Levin wants to restrict U.S. troops to “an anti-terrorist mission to go after al-Qaida in Iraq.”

According to a U.S. intelligence report quoted by the New York Times, captured materials from al Qaeda in Iraq say that the group sees “the sectarian war for Baghdad as the necessary main focus of its operations.” So the Democrats profess to want to fight terrorists in Iraq, and al Qaeda in Iraq is making Baghdad its focus. It would stand to reason, then, that the Democrats wouldn’t want to undermine our effort to control Baghdad. Our counterinsurgency mission there is a counterterrorism mission. It aims to squeeze out terrorists, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Nonetheless, Democrats in the House and Senate are attempting to force our troops from Baghdad, exactly as al Qaeda in Iraq wants. There is an essential symmetry to the goals of Sunni militants and Democrats here at home with regard to the disposition of our forces — the fewer, the farther away from Baghdad, the better (needless to say, for vastly different reasons). In reporting on al Qaeda in Iraq’s strategy, the New York Times notes, “American forces, instead of withdrawing from the capital as the Sunni insurgents had hoped, prepared plans to reinforce their troops there.” Over the strenuous objections of Democrats. . . .

Even as the civil war has deescalated somewhat in Iraq — weakening the force of the Democrats’ favorite “middle of a civil war” sound bite — and even as the surge has elevated the fight against al Qaeda in Iraq — the enemy that Democrats say they want to defeat — Democratic opposition to the surge has only intensified. Will they oppose it even more if it continues to work?

I suspect so. It’s pretty obvious whom they regard as the real enemy.

Addendum: It’s always useful to look at what our enemies in Iraq are doing. From Agence France Press, datelined this morning:

Insurgents in Iraq detonated an explosives-rigged vehicle with two children in the back seat after US soldiers let it through a Baghdad checkpoint over the weekend, a senior US military official said Tuesday.

The vehicle was stopped at the checkpoint but was allowed through when soldiers saw the children in the back, said Major General Michael Barbero of the Pentagon's Joint Staff.

“Children in the back seat lowered suspicion. We let it move through.”

Because not even terrorists in Iraq would. . . .

After going through the checkpoint, the vehicle parked next to a market across the street from a school, said [a U.S. defense] official, who asked not to be identified.

“And the two adults were seen to get out of the vehicle, and run from the vehicle, and then followed by the detonation of the vehicle,” the official said.

“It killed the two children inside as well as three other civilians in the vicinity. So, a total of five killed, seven injured,” the official said.

Officials here said they did not know who the children were or their relationship to the two adults who fled the scene. They had no information about their ages or genders.

Ah, but we must never forget Abu Ghraib. . . .

Quest for Conspiracy

Twelve Eleven Good and True have found that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby obstructed Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of something-or-another by lying to FBI agents and a federal grand jury. It takes bold leaps of imagination to perceive how the falsehoods in question hindered the special counsel in any way, but that wasn’t the issue before the jury. Mr. Fitzgerald had every right to secure an indictment and conviction for inconsequential perjury. It isn’t legally significant that, by the time Mr. Libby engaged in his prevarications, Mr. Fitzgerald knew that the act that was the ostensible object of his inquiries (viz., the disclosure to Robert Novak that Valerie Plame Wilson worked for the CIA) wasn’t committed by Lewis Libby and didn’t violate any law. Mr. Libby had a duty to testify truthfully. If he didn’t, that’s his own fault, whether or not any good reason existed for his eight hour inquisition before the grand jury.

And that is all the “there” that is there. The prosecutor’s overheated summation declared that the case left “a cloud over the Vice President”. The “cloud” consists of evidence that Mr. Cheney (i) read newspaper columns containing allegations that he personally knew to be untrue, (ii) wrote notes on them, (iii) discussed them with his staff and (iv) tried to obtain more information about what lay behind them. Pretty shocking. Bill Clinton would never have done anything like that. No, within half a news cycle after the initial unfavorable story appeared, a Clinton operation would have fed every reporter in Washington every line of unflattering information that had ever appeared in Joe Wilson’s State Department personnel file, plus a slew of character assassinating anonymous quotes about how his wife was an incompetent airhead.

Between now and the appellate reversal, we’ll hear much along the lines of the final paragraph of the Wall Street Journal’s first story on the verdict (from the standard issue liberals in the news room, not the editorial page):

The focus of much of the attention likely will be Mr. Cheney himself, whose manipulation of classified information and of White House reporters alike during 2003 became perhaps the biggest revelation of Mr. Libby’s trial.

I’d say that the big revelation of the whole case is how few threads the elite media need to spin a fabric of conspiracy.

Addendum: The person who actually revealed Valerie Plame Wilson’s CIA employment was State Department bigwig Richard Armitage, whom no one has ever accused of being a tool of the Vice President. David Frum suggests a contest:

Can you our readers find any example of denunciations of Richard Armitage’s leak of Valerie Plame’s name by a) Democratic officeholders or b) MSM columnists or c) left-wing bloggers?

I did some Google searching this evening and came up pretty much blank.

So here’s the paradox:

We hear on the one hand that this leak represents a cloud over the vice presidency – a scandal – a threat to national security – possible grounds for impeachment.

And then on the other hand: not one word of condemnation of the person who actually did the leaking!

Of course, it isn’t really a paradox.

’Tis Four Years Since

Instapundit responds to a blogger challenge: “If you are a blogger who was active in March 2003, link to that month's archive and write an entry called ‘What I was wrong about in March 2003’.” Preliminary to reviewing his own record from four years ago, Professor Reynolds observes,

Brian’s entry isn't too impressive as mea culpas go – basically, he says he underestimated just how immoral and evil people who disagreed with him were.

After reading that, I guessed that the challenger was a left-wing anti-war blatherer – one of the least daring inferences I’ve made in my life.

My thoughts on events in March 2003 (not precisely a blog, but close enough) can be found here. The March 30, 2003, post recalls an already forgotten snatch of history.

A new left-wing line on the Iraqi campaign has taken shape rapidly: The war plans were formulated by extravagantly optimistic hawks, principally Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, who expected Saddam Hussein’s regime to topple at the first push. Overriding the wise counsel of military professionals, they sent an undermanned, under-armed force that is now stymied by the unanticipated resistance of pro-Ba’athist irregulars and the sullen indifference of the Iraqi people to “liberation”. Even if massive reinforcements eventually result in Saddam’s overthrow, the victory will be Pyrrhic. In the words of Robin Cook, who quit Tony Blair’s government to protest the war: “Nobody should start a war on the assumption that the enemy’s army will co-operate. But that is exactly what President Bush has done. And now his Marines have reached the outskirts of Baghdad, he does not seem to know what to do next.”

At the time, competent observers were forecasting that the coming battle for Baghdad would resemble Stalingrad. I didn’t go so far as to say that it wouldn’t but did venture an optimistic thought:

Mr. Cook’s “He does not seem to know what to do next” is founded on nothing more than the fact that President Bush has not announced to the world a step-by-step program for gaining control of the city. Conceivably there is no plan or a bad one. We will find out over the next few days or weeks. On the other hand, if everybody at CNN knows that urban fighting is difficult, perhaps the Pentagon has figured it out, too, and has thought about how to root out die-hard opposition with the least feasible loss of life. It is a trifle premature to condemn an as-yet-unknown strategy.

Ten days later, Baghdad fell with scarcely any bloodshed. Might there be a moral there for persistent pessimists?

Other highlights of the month:

Sudden Conversion or A New Way to Obstruct?

Cynicism is mean-spirited, of course. When a Democratic senator who isn’t named Lieberman says –

We’ve got to try to stop weapons coming into Iraq from any source that are killing our troops. I agree with the comments about trying to stop them coming in from Iran. I think we have to try stop them that are going to the Sunni insurgents as well as to the Shia. I was just wondering, does the military have a plan to, if necessary, to go into Syria to go to the source of any weapons coming from Syria? That are going to Sunni insurgents? That are killing our troops? … I think we ought to take action on all fronts including Syria and any other source of weapons coming in, obviously Iran is the focus – but it shouldn’t be the sole focus.

– we should be grateful and attribute his turn-around to the patient advocacy of fellow liberals like Senator Lieberman and the New Statesman’s Nick Cohen.

But then a small, doubting voice intrudes. Earlier in the day, before Carl Levin (D–Mich.) uttered the quoted words, the news wires reported that the Bush Administration is backing a plan to include Iran and Syria in regional peace talks. That’s the sort of terrible idea that Jim Baker’s Iraq Study Group pushed during its 15 minutes in the limelight. At the time, liberals smirked about how “adults” from the Bush I era were at last taking control of foreign policy. “Father Knows Best”, one of the news mags (I forget which) gloated.

Is it just coincidence that, as soon as the Administration takes a step toward the ISG’s views, a leading Democratic opponent of the war starts denouncing the prospective negotiating partners and taking notice of the fact that they furnish weaponry to our enemies? One can’t help suspecting that Senator Levin is more interested in torpedoing whatever the Administration does than in “go[ing] into Syria”. If Coalition troops actually cross the Syrian border in search of terrorists or weapons caches, can we be confident that he will endorse their actions?

Confidence would be warranted if he ceased his drives to repeal Congressional authorization of military intervention in Iraq and to “prove” that a vast White House/Pentagon conspiracy duped all of the world’s intelligence agencies prior to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. More likely, today’s rhetoric, if it doesn’t vanish without a trace by tomorrow, will lead not to support of more forceful action in the Iraqi theater but to demands that soldiers be pulled out of Baghdad and Anbar in order to set up border cordons. Energetic words thus will become the rationale for nerveless deeds.

I hope that I’m wrong and that Senator Levin is the first anti-war Democrat to wake up to the impossibility of peaceful coexistence with the Islamofascist murder cult. If that proves to be the case, I’ll gladly apologize for the doubts expressed in this post. And the crow will taste delicious.

Quote of the Day

Political cartoonist Sam Ryskind (any relation to Morrie, I wonder?) on Congressional Democrats’ “support for the troops”:

One day the U.S. Congress may change allegiance and support al-Qaeda instead of the sons and daughters of their own constituents....

They will denounce the terrorist leadership as incompetent. Condemn the insurgency for atrocities befitting Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. Seek ways of cutting off funds for the failed jihad and prevent terrorist networks from eavesdropping on suspected American agents. And mock the rank and file as dupes who wasted their lives for a Paradise that doesn’t exist.

They might also declare that al-Qa’eda had no good cause to go to war against America, that Islamofascist violence is responsible for provoking hostile reactions, that Moslems who have a duty to try to understand and accept Western culture, etc., etc.

Unfortunately, we’ll hear none of that salutary rhetoric so long as the Pelosis and Reids are nominally on our own side.

(Thanx to Power Line)

The Safest War in History

In 1980, the last year of the Carter Presidency, active duty U.S. military personnel died from accidents and hostile action at a rate of 72.0 per 100,000 serving. In 2004, the first full year of the Iraqi campaign (and the one with the most American combat deaths so far), the rate was 76.1 per 100,000 (statistics from the Defense Manpower Data Center). In other words, military service was just about as risky under de facto pacifist Jimmy Carter as under “cowboy” George W. Bush.

Looked at from another perspective, death from hostile action is not strikingly more likely for today’s soldiers than death from an accident was throughout the past quarter century. From 1980 through 2004, the average annual accidental death rate was 41.4 per 100,000. The 2004 rate for killed in action was 43.1.

In the words of a commenter on NRO:

The bottom line is that we’re fighting this war with lower casualties than expected from normal training accidents in a peacetime army. You should be embarrassed that you didn’t know this. It’s a testament to the near universal innumeracy and incompetence of the journalism profession that most journalists haven’t even seriously considered looking at basic statistics and putting things in context 5½ years after 9/11.

“Lower casualties” is an exaggeration, but not nearly so grotesque as the exaggeration of those who shriek that the Tigris and Euphrates are running with American blood.

A Liberal Looks Beyond Cut-and-Run

Peter Beinart is one liberal who, while calling for scuttling from Iraq, unquestionably regards the War on Terror as a serious conflict that the West must win, not as a Bush-manufactured political ploy. It’s interesting, then, to see this admission in the middle of a paean to the malapropish fair weather hawk Joe Biden:

Biden just wants his opponents to be honest about what they’re proposing. Because, if they are, they will have to begin a highly unpleasant and urgently needed debate about how to handle the awful consequences of a necessary withdrawal. No one really knows how an all-out Iraqi civil war will affect the Middle East, but, as the Brookings Institution’s Kenneth Pollack and Daniel Byman recently argued, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait, and even Iran could be destabilized by waves of refugees, weapons, and jihadists. Keeping those countries from buckling may require aggressive diplomatic, financial, and even military intervention (not to mention a generous refugee policy for the Iraqis whose country we have helped destroy).

So, what we gain from abandoning the purported quagmire of Iraq is – a quagmire spread through the whole Middle East! When truck bombs are exploding in Amman and mufsidun are assaulting the palaces of the kings and emirs, will protecting the region’s generally fragile non-fascist regimes be easier than fighting a single war in democratic Iraq?

Saudi-controlled Arabia, the most important Arab domino, was carved out by hardy, puritanical, camel-riding desert warriors. Today it is ruled by a corrupt oligarchy whose only contact with camels is to smoke them. Without an abundance of American military support, how long would its fainéant princes last against mufsidun fresh from a morale-boosting rout of the Great Satan?

Today we fight in Iraq and keep our logistical tail in Kuwait and Qatar. Will we be in a better position when our front line is in those countries and our nearest secure base is Diego Garcia?

Maybe Mr. Beinart thinks so. His final parenthetical reveals a capacity for ideologically driven delusion. As John Burns of the New York Times has observed, Iraqi society was destroyed by three decades of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. To reattribute the damage to three years of American occupation doesn’t qualify as rational. That Mr. Beinart is on the relatively sane fringe of opposition to the Iraqi campaign illustrates the degeneration of the American Left into an unthinking intellectual mob.

Questions FDR Didn’t Have to Answer

If the press corps of 1941 had been like today’s, it’s easy to imagine what it would have been asking on December 8th:

Mr. President, are you certain that this attack was authorized at the highest levels of the Japanese government?

Mr. President, are you complaining about these events in order to gin up war fever against Japan?

Mr. President, how do we know that the evidence you’ve presented wasn’t manufactured for propaganda purposes?

Mr. President, wouldn’t retaliation against Japan without a sincere effort at negotiating our differences violate international law?

Mr. President, couldn’t we avoid these problems by just withdrawing from the Pacific and not getting involved in an Asian civil war?

People who are indifferent to Iran’s acts of war against the United States ought to ask themselves whether it’s a good idea to encourage the notion that killing, or helping to kill, Americans has no down side.

The Oxford Union Precedent

Penraker calls attention to an historical parallel that deserves all the attention it can be given.

In 1933, the Oxford Union debated the proposition: “This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country”. The proposition passed by a wide margin. The students had just declared they would back down in any coming fight.

From that declaration, German Nazis and Italian fascists drew the logical conclusion: The English could be counted on not to fight. They eventually learned differently, but tens of millions died, because, as one contemporary put it, “The bully believes we are decadent and that he can smash all the china he likes.”

Today the threat to peace and civilization is different, but a body more consequential than the Oxford Union, namely, the United States House of Representative, is in the process of passing an Oxford-like resolution.

The Islamists imagine that we are a decadent society, unmanly and fun loving. To them, we are like trust fund kids. Their doctrine says we are rotten to the core and ready to fall over. Someone just needs to attack us to make it happen.

This resolution says that we are ready to give up.

We have undertaken a noble task. We are trying to bring an entire region of the world out of its dangerous past. That is our only chance of avoiding a major war: If that region becomes part of the regular world, there will be peace. Otherwise, the plague of Islamism will grow, just as Nazism grew in Germany. The thugs cowed everyone and took over, claiming they were in support of the people. All we had to do was sustain a level of casualties that was equal to the number of men killed in training accidents in the 1990’s (about 800 per year).

But our Congress now says “Enough! We can’t take it anymore!”

Nothing could be better calculated to bring out the bad qualities in the Arab world. These folks are going to follow us all the way home. There is a simple calculation there: those who are strong, rule. Those who are weak, want to negotiate. And the next rule follows as night does day in the Arab world: If your opponent is weak, never negotiate. Press the advantage. If he shows any weakness, that is the time to strike harder and harder.

As I’ve noted before, one of the tenets that Islamofascism draws from the Koran is that “Allah casts terror into the unbelievers’ hearts”. John Howard has been stridently criticized for naysaying Senator Obama’s bill to force withdrawal from Iraq by March 31, 2008:

I think that will just encourage those who want to completely destabilize and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for an Obama victory.

If I were running al-Qaida in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory, not only for Obama but also for the Democrats.

This is one of those cases in which “gaffe” is a synonym for “a truth that no one wants to speak”. Does anyone think that al-Qa’eda fears the success of the Obama initiative? Or that it will be other than heartened when the House takes the first step down that road?

What’s Wrong With Iraq? – In One Easy Lesson

John Podhoretz has posted excerpts from a TV interview with John Burns, one of the few saving graces of the New York Times. Mr. Burns was in Iraq during the years of Saddam Hussein:

I’ve been to, I think many of the world’s nastiest places in a 30 year career as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, and Iraq was, by a long way saving only North Korea, the nastiest place I’ve ever been. It was a truly terrible place and what I think we were transfixed by was the notion that if you could remove this of carapace of terror and you could liberate the Iraqi people, many good things would happen.

That is why “the American troops were greeted as liberators. We saw it.” Unhappily, as the experience of post-communist Russia also illustrates,

I think that the policy makers in Washington, and to be on honest with you the journalists also, to speak for myself, completely miscalculated the impact of 30 years of violent, brutal repression on the Iraqi people and their willingness, in President Bush’s phrase, “to stand up” for themselves, to take authority, to take risks.

“Violent, brutal repression” actually goes back further – to the Ba’athist coup that bloodily overthrew the monarchy in 1958. Iraq was no garden before Saddam Hussein seized power. Its history was no preparation for a swift transition to parliamentary democracy, the rule of law and peaceful resolution of disputes.

Many on the Left and the Paleo-Right now declare that, because the Iraqis have had trouble coping with freedom, they should have been left beneath a “carapace of terror”, with the prospect that Saddam would eventually be succeeded by his less humane progeny. Perhaps there is some level of realpolitik that can justify so heartless a point of view. To the rest of us, it is reasonable to think that learning how to be free takes time, and that the Iraqis are better off for having started the trek in 2003. Enduring another decade or century in slavery would not have made liberation, when it finally came, any easier an undertaking.

Would Responsibility Make the Dems Responsible?

With the teaser “Why I’m Considering Voting for Hillary”, Instapundit links to Jay Nordlinger’s account of a conversation with a friend “who makes a speciality of saying the unsayable”:

He said, “The Democrats have to win in 2008 — I mean, the whole enchilada: House, Senate, and presidency.” You ought to know that my friend is a staunch conservative Republican. “Why?” I said. “Why do they have to win?” He answered, “Because that’s the only way they will be fully onboard the War on Terror. They won’t fully support it otherwise, because they will always be trying to trip up the Republicans. If you want the Democrats onboard the War on Terror, they have to be in charge. Period.”

A dark, dark proclamation. And redolent of ol’ Joe, the one from Wisconsin. I am not entirely convinced of its wrongness, however.

If only politics were so simple, not to mention reasonable! We have, I’m afraid, seen the results of this strategy already. When the World Trade Center was bombed for the first time, on February 26, 1993, the Democrats held “the whole enchilada”. Neither that nor subsequent terrorist attacks against our fellow citizens led the Clinton Administration to believe in the existence of a war between ourselves and Islamofascism, much less get onboard fighting it.

Is there any reason to think that a Hillary Clinton Administration, backed by isolationist majorities in both Houses, wouldn’t return to Bill Clinton’s slumbers? The War on Terror is easy to ignore if one wants to. If (or should I say “when”) the U.S. pulls out of the Middle East, the short-term consequence will be a series of revolutions and coups in “distant countries about which we know little”. American politicians who object to fighting the Islamofascists in Iraq won’t endorse intervention in Jordan or the Gulf emirates or Morocco or Algeria or Egypt or Saudi-controlled Arabia. Then, after the entire region is under the control of medieval despots armed with nuclear weapons, “realists” will tell us that our only choice is to find a modus vivendi.

Let’s ponder now what we will have to offer the al-Qa’eda/Mullarchy bloc at the conference table in order to reach an accommodation. The elimination of Israel and the outlawing of “anti-Moslem” discourse will certainly be minimum demands. Back in the 19th Century, European powers claimed quasi-protectorates over Christian minorities in Moslem lands. Perhaps the reverse lies in our future: treaties that will give the Iranian mullarchs or a Moslem Brotherhood-dominated Egypt legal authority to “safeguard” co-religionists who want to live under shariah and escape the burdens of Western law.

Will any Democrat, save the isolated Senator Lieberman, think ahead to that point? Were Hillary Rodham Clinton inclined to do so, I think that we would have heard from her by now. Instead, as the quintessential political coward that she is, she follows what polls and focus groups tell her is the sentiment of the Democratic Party’s “base” (a base that includes a significant proportion of antisemites, xenophobes and conspiracy theorists). A candidate who will not lead her party when she is by far the most popular figure within its ranks is a sure bet to play a passive role in the Presidency, just like her husband. Ruthlessness against personal enemies and paranoia about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” don’t correlate with willingness to take responsibility for pursuing the national interest even at the price of having to press unwanted truths into the minds of one’s partisan supporters. Unless she discovers that an Islamofascist consortium financed The American Spectator, the next President Clinton will treat the War on Terror as an irritating distraction from the fun of being back in the White House.

Addendum: As James S. Robbins puts it:

Hillary Clinton’s new Iraq position — that “We expect [President Bush] to extricate our country from this before he leaves office” (Royal “we”?) — is the perfect posture. It commits her to nothing, yet seems to say something. It might placate the anti-war crowd, and keeps focus and blame squarely on the President. And if the new Iraq strategy works and we begin to pull troops out, she can declare victory too. It is also the kind of thing one could expect from her Administration, as we saw in her husband’s — posturing without policymaking, image without substance. I would consider her harmless except that the challenges the United States faces are real, and we have seen what happens when a president answers them with triangulation.

And James Taranto (second item) raises a pertinent question: If Senator Clinton thinks withdrawal from Iraq is such a great idea, why doesn’t she look forward to being the one to implement it? Ronald Reagan never regretted that he, rather than Jimmy Carter, got to take credit for cutting taxes.

Let us think this through, shall we? If withdrawing from Iraq is in America’s interests, why doesn’t Mrs. Clinton – who by the way voted for the war [but you forget, James, that she is so smart that the simpleton W fooled her] – simply urge President Bush to do so on that ground, or promise to do so herself if elected?

Her demand for withdrawal by Jan. 20, 2009, has a logic to it, though, if she believes it isn’t in America’s interests. Even the Iraq Study Group acknowledged that premature U.S. withdrawal carries with it “the potential for catastrophe.” If Bush withdraws and catastrophe ensues, then President Clinton 44 will not bear any of the blame for it.

If Bush stands firm, the continued presence of U.S. troops in Iraq would present Clinton 44 with a choice between continuing an unpopular war or doing the politically expedient thing and withdrawing: between doing what is right and doing what is popular. If she does what is popular and catastrophe results, the public, fickle beast that it is, would blame her.

BTW, the Senator is a real profile in courage on domestic issues, too.

Hurray for Colorado!

The NRSC Pledge, preemptively denouncing Senate Republican squishiness on the Iraq campaign, has gathered over 18,000 on-line signatures as of the moment of writing. The results by state show that the largest number come from the two largest states, California and Texas, as one would expect. But in third place (1,391 right now, not far behind Texas’s 1,541) is – Colorado. (Illinois, sadly, has only 590.)

My sister, who lives in Fort Collins, suggests that the cold and snow leave her fellow Coloradans with little to do but sit in front of their computers. Whatever the reason, one wonders whether the Democratic National Committee was right to think that the state would be a sympathetic venue for its 2008 convention.

Further reading: Fred Barnes, “Not This Time”, explains the real parallel between Iraq and Vietnam:

Now in Iraq, Petraeus has as good a chance of success, starting with the pacification of Baghdad, as Abrams had. And the painful lesson of Vietnam applies in Iraq: Don’t give up when victory is at hand.

Those in Congress who advocate retreat in Iraq refuse to acknowledge this lesson. And they may have their way, whatever Petraeus accomplishes. With their calls for troop withdrawals and fund cutoffs and their antiwar resolutions, they have put America on a slippery slope in Iraq.

And we know where it leads: to defeat while victory remains quite possible.

Also worth attention is Strategy Page’s dissection of “The Top Ten Myths of the Iraq War”.

Senator Webb Channels Ike

In the Democratic response last night to the President’s State of the Union address, Senator James Webb (Fasc.-Vir.) enlisted a ghostly ally in the Democratic campaign against Iraq, General Dwight Eisenhower. In the Senator’s words,

As I look at Iraq, I recall the words of former general and soon-to-be President Dwight Eisenhower during the dark days of the Korean War, which had fallen into a bloody stalemate. “When comes the end?” asked the General who had commanded our forces in Europe during World War Two. And as soon as he became President, he brought the Korean War to an end.

The parallel between Ike and today’s Democrats would be perfect if only General Eisenhower had –

• furiously denounced the decision to intervene in Korea, and

• announced that he would pull American troops out “in short order”, and

• directed more criticism at the (far from ideal) South Korean government than at our enemies, and

• led a party, half of whose members opposed or didn’t care about American success in the war.

As Senator Webb says, President Eisenhower “brought the Korean War to an end” – not, however, through “strong regionally-based diplomacy” and pulling our soldiers off the battle line. What he actually did to persuade the Chinese Communists that it was time to negotiate seriously is thus described by Max Hastings (not a pro-American writer – his lamentations over the alleged plight of communist POW’s have a distinct contemporary ring):

On May 19 [1953], the Joint Chiefs recommended direct air and naval operations against China and Manchuria, including the use of nuclear weapons. There should be no gradual escalation of force, they argued, but a dramatic surprise attack [sort of like a surge?]. The next day the National Security Council endorsed the JCS recommendations.

Dulles, the Secretary of State, was visiting India. He told her Prime Minister, Nehru, that a warning should be conveyed to Chou En Lai [the Red Chinese premier]: if peace was not speedily attained at Panmunjom, the United States would begin to bomb north of the Yalu. The Pentagon had recently carried out successful tests of atomic artillery shells. The implication was plain. So, too, was the significance of Eisenhower’s public announcement that the Seventh Fleet would no longer be committed to preventing military operations between Formosa and the mainland of China. Nationalist guerillas, armed and trained by the CIA, embarked upon an intensified program of raids against the mainland, more than 200 in the first five months of 1953, according to Peking.

It will never be certain how close the United States came to employing nuclear weapons against China in the spring and summer of 1953, or how far the JCS study and the Dulles warning were intended as bluffs. If such they were, there is no doubt of their success.

– The Korean War, pp. 318–19 (1987)

Within a week after Secretary Dulles’ chat with Nehru, “it was apparent that the Communists were ready to accept the modified American proposals for the exchange of prisoners” [p. 323]. An armistice was signed on July 27th.

One final point to bear in mind is that, although the outcome of the Korean War disappointed most Americans, the U.S. achieved its original objective of preserving South Korea from communist rule. Our country’s enemies could be under no delusion that they had won a great triumph. That will scarcely be the case if America heeds Senator Webb’s plea for passivity, followed by retreat, in Iraq.

Addendum: Delivering the State of the Union response is quite an honor, particularly for a man who has been a Senator for less than a month. It’s interesting that the leadership of the Democratic Party had no qualms about putting forward as its public face someone whose campaign was marked by barely covert antisemitism. Also interesting is the party leadership’s lack of interest in repudiating the anti-Jewish ravings of Jimmy Carter and Wesley Clark.

It would be a gross exaggeration to call the Democrats a party of antisemites , yet it seems on the way to becoming one in which irrational hostility toward Jews and Israel is a tolerated point of view, just as racism was in the first half of the last century. I await signals that any of the Democratic Presidential contenders is troubled by that development.

Quote of the Day

“This manslaughter must be stopped. You are losing; if you persist, it will only result in greater bloodshed.”

Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama pleading with George W. Bush?

No.

When Hitler attacked Poland, . . . Gandhi suddenly endorsed the Polish army’s military resistance, calling it “almost nonviolent.” (If this sounds like double-talk, I can only urge readers to read Gandhi.) He seemed at this point to have a rather low opinion of Hitler, but when Germany’s panzer divisions turned west, Allied armies collapsed under the ferocious onslaught, and British ships were streaming across the Straits of Dover from Dunkirk, he wrote furiously to the Viceroy of India: “This manslaughter must be stopped. You are losing; if you persist, it will only result in greater bloodshed. Hitler is not a bad man....”

Gandhi also wrote an open letter to the British people, passionately urging them to surrender and accept whatever fate Hitler had prepared for them.

– Richard Grenier, The Gandhi Nobody Knows (1983), quoted by Power Line

Perhaps the various Democratic presidentabiles will highlight this parallel between themselves and the Mahatma: When defeating evil looked easy, they were in favor of it. When the effort became difficult, they denounced resistance as futile.

Hallucinations of Defeat

That the United States is losing the war in Iraq has gone beyond conventional wisdom. It is now a premise that cannot be questioned, on penalty of being charged with the sin of “denial”. Liberals and conservatives, hawks and doves, the President’s staunchest supporters and fiercest critics all agree. Discussion of the new “surge” starts and ends with the question of whether it can “rescue” the American position.

The proverbial Martian reading current op-eds would infer from their tone that our Army and Marines had suffered a succession of reverses and were now grimly hanging on in the face of an overwhelming enemy offensive. He would envision a situation like Dunkirk or Pusan.

The contrast between the gloomy war of the intelligentsia’s imagination and the real one on the ground in Mesopotamia is astonishing. There is no sign that anti-government forces are expanding their numbers, gaining momentum, increasing their control of territory or otherwise advancing militarily. To the contrary: American combat deaths were slightly lower in 2006 than in 2005 or 2004 (and does anybody remember when Joe Wilson and the like were assuring us that the number would rise to 10 or 20 a day?); the Sunni tribal chiefs of Anbar province, the former Ba’athist stronghold, have come over to the Baghdad government’s side; reports indicate that al-Qa’eda recently pulled its men out of the capital; and terrorists have been unable to stifle the Iraqi economy. The increase in violence against civilians, tragic as it is, is not evidence of the enemy’s military strength. It stems primarily from attacks by Shi’ite militias (pro-government, albeit unsavory), spurred to vengeance by last year’s bombing of the al-Askareyya Mosque.

The classic pattern for a successful insurgency begins with guerilla warfare. The guerillas gain control over economic and demographic resources and steadily expand until they can raise armies to overthrow the incumbent regime. None of that is happening in Iraq. No credible observer argues that Ba’athist bitter-enders, al-Qa’eda mufsidun, Sunni tribes, or any combination thereof, will be able to reduce government authority to isolated pockets, demoralize its defenders and finally march into Baghdad with overwhelming force. The vision of helicopters desperately airlifting refugees from the roof of the American embassy, recently invoked by the increasingly bizarre Senator Biden, is fantastical. In 1975 North Vietnam defeated a South Vietnamese army that had no American support whatsoever. The Democrats in Congress had prohibited even the sale of ammunition to our former ally. In the Middle East today, the only armies that could engage the Coalition forces in Baghdad with any possibility of success are those of Israel and Turkey – not likely enlistees on the side of Islamofascism.

There are, in fact, only two plausible scenarios that lead to a regime in Iraq unfavorable to Western interests: In one, advocated by the anti-war Left in this country, the Coalition withdraws its troops, opening the way for Iran, Syria and perhaps Saudi-controlled Arabia to wage a conventional war for dominance over Mesopotamia. In the other, the present government transforms itself into a pro-Iranian dictatorship. The first is solely in our own hands. The second is all but inconceivable so long as a substantial Coalition force remains in Iraq.

To call the overall situation a “defeat” requires an extraordinarily stringent definition of “victory”. In objective military terms, the mufsidun are losing badly, and the only question is how long it will be before their physical and moral capabilities are exhausted. What emerges in Iraq after that may not be wholly in accord with Western interests, but the difficulties then will be political and intellectual: Too many Moslems prefer medieval illusions to modern realities. Too few Moslem leaders are ready and willing to tell the truth to their people. The easy course today, as it has been for a hundred years, is to blame the travails of the dar-al-Islām on malevolent outside forces rather than Moslem practices and attitudes. That is a problem that the West cannot solve in the short run, for reasons that have nothing to do with George W. Bush.

The mufsidun could still win in Iraq. They have made no progress on the battlefield, but plenty of Americans want to hand them a victory. The poll finding that only a bare majority of Democrats desire for the “surge” to succeed is chilling. It won’t be long before liberal opinion makers start extolling the virtues of al-Qa’eda, just as their predecessors idealized Ho Chi Minh.

The rationale for the “surge” is not that it is needed to defeat the enemy in Iraq but that the morale of the American public has fallen to a dangerously low level on account and can be restored only by the imposition of civil order in Baghdad. The objections of our commanders in the theater make a good deal of sense in purely military terms. Peacekeeping in a large city will distract from the task of rooting out the terrorist remnants and driving home the lesson that fighting against the West is a waste of lives. The President was right, however, to overrule them. Since we can now lose this war only at home, military operations must give first priority to the home front.

While it’s always risky to make predictions about warfare, I’m reasonably confident that the “surge” will make ordinary civilians safer in Baghdad. Al-Qa’eda has already scuttled to safer, more distant locales. Indigenous terrorists don’t have that option. They will be forced to devote greater efforts to simple hiding and staying alive, which will reduce their terrorist potential.

The magnitude of the improvement is impossible to predict. It will also be hard to judge after the fact, for, whatever happens, the elite media will portray the “surge” as a failure. Some aspect of the situation six months from now is certain to be negative, and that will be the one we hear about. In the rosiest of scenarios, where the Ba’athist bitter-enders are all killed or captured, the Shi’a militias disband, and the streets of Baghdad become safer than downtown New Orleans, the media will dig up “war crimes” to contemplate with horror. Or they will assert that the “momentary lull” in Iraq was purchased at the cost of turmoil elsewhere in the world. What they won’t do, I soothsay with absolute certainty, is give up the comforting hallucination that America should never fight and can never win.

Casting Terror Into Their Hearts

One of the founding myths of Islam is that Mohammed won his early victories, against tremendous odds, because Allah made his enemies fearful, so much so that in some instances they destroyed themselves. This view is expressed over and over in the Koran (translations by Arthur J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (1955) [Arberry doesn’t number verses, so references are to his volume and page number]):

I [Allah] am with you; so confirm the believers.
I shall cast into the unbelievers’ hearts
terror; so smite above the necks, and smite
every finger of them!
(Sura 8, I:198)

Those words, supposedly pronounced by Allah after the Battle of Badr (624), in which 300 Moslems routed a thousand pagans, are dear and familiar to every mufsidun, for, in addition to promising divine terror, they constitute the scriptural “justification” for beheading captives like Nicholas Berg and Danny Pearl.

And He [Allah] brought down those of the People of the
Book who supported them [Mohammed’s enemies] from their fortresses
and cast terror in their hearts; some you [Mohammed] slew,
some you made captive.
And He bequeathed upon you their lands,
their habitations, and their possessions,
and a land you never trod. God is powerful
over everything.
(Sura 33, II:124)

It is He [Allah] who expelled from their habitations
the unbelievers among the People of the Book
at the first mustering. You [Mohammed] did not think
that they would go forth, and they thought
that their fortresses would defend them
against God; then God came upon them from
whence they had not reckoned, and He cast
terror into their hearts as they destroyed
their houses with their own hands, and the
hands of the believers; therefore take heed,
you who have eyes!
(Sura 59, II:267)

Islamofascists who contemplate the current American debate over Iraq can be forgiven for believing that Allah has aided them there as he did Mohammed at Badr. The American giaours outnumber the mufsidun heavily, are infinitely better armed and have inflicted vastly heavier casualties than they have suffered. Yet it is Americans – all except the demon-possessed George W. Bush and his Jewish cronies – who talk loudly about running away. What can that mean if not that the Islamic deity has “cast terror into their hearts”?

Advocates of scaling back the U.S. presence in Iraq will declare, naturally, that they are not afraid. I believe them. Unwillingness to fight in Iraq stems, I’m sure, from rabid political partisanship (viz., the ever present fear that a Republican Administration might gain an electorally useful success), coupled with indifference to the fate of people who live in faraway lands and insouciance about the danger that an energized Islamofascism will overrun much of the Middle East.

There is no reason, though, to think that our enemies will seek explanations in our political stasis when Revelation so snugly fits the observed facts. One might as well expect a 16th Century Englishman to believe the “Protestant wind” that scattered the Armada was nothing more than a meteorological phenomenon.

If there were no other reason to continue the campaign in Iraq, it would be important not to lend credibility to claims that Allah is openly fighting for our enemies. It is hard to imagine a greater morale booster and recruiting tool for fanaticism. By the same token, nothing would be more likely to cause the mufsidun armies to melt away than a growing realization that every bomb and beheading simply strengthened our resolve and brought greater woe down on our enemies’ heads.

John F. Kerry: Spurner, Not Spurnee

Shortly after impugning the education and intelligence of U.S. soldiers, Senator John Kerry visited an army base in Iraq. A number of right-of-center blogs carried a photograph of him sitting in the mess hall at a table with zero soldiers. The rather obvious moral was that his condescending attitude had made him less than wildly popular among the troops. Various left-wingers promptly indulged their standard fantasies.

It was, of course, our friends on the left who insisted that the photo itself was bogus by challenging facts of Kerry’s travel schedule, the data embedded in the photo, the decorations on the walls around him, etc, forcing our other friends at Powerline and elsewhere to prove that, yes indeed, that is a chow hall in Iraq, and yes indeed, Kerry was there at the specified time in question, yes indeed, most people don’t set the dates on their digital cameras, yes indeed, the decorations are there as in the photo, and yes indeed, there is a Portuguese flag hanging there even though Portugal has no troops in Iraq anymore. Our friends on the left toss up silly conspiracy theories with multiple moving parts, our friends on the right spend hours and hours shooting said conspiracy theories down. That’s just how it works most of the time.

Now a diligent leftoid has uncovered the truth: Senator Kerry chose not to breakfast with American soldiers. Instead he set up a briefing with a pair of reporters, to whom he no doubt had vitally important information to impart. “In fact, Kerry and the reporters even sought out empty seats, I’m told.” In other words, he didn’t care to spend time in the company of the undereducated morons who “get stuck in Iraq”. They didn’t spurn him; he spurned them.

So it’s clear that the “wingnuts” were wrong about the Senator. I trust that they’re ashamed of themselves.

Addendum: Captain Ed, showing the conciliatory penchant of most leading right-of-center bloggers, has apologized rather abjectly for joining in “the snark” over the Kerry photo. The leftoid referred to above, the Captain avers, “pretty much demolishes the notion that Kerry couldn't buy a friend in Iraq”.

Really? Senator Kerry was in the mess hall of a U.S. military base at meal time. Either (i) he passed up talking to our servicemen in favor of imparting his own wisdom to reporters, or (ii) he knew full well that he would eat alone unless he set up a meeting with outsiders. Whichever was the case, the photo illustrates it neatly.

The Mystery of Jamil Hussein

There must be a rational explanation that fits all the facts. Either that, or we’re living in a movie with glaring continuity problems.

For those who came in late, Jamil Hussein is(?) a police captain in Baghdad who has been a named source for 61 Associated Press stories, many of them recounting Shi’ite militia atrocities against the city’s Sunni population. His 61st story was particularly horrifying: six Sunnis doused in kerosene and burned to death. After that report appeared, several strange things happened:

1. Iraq’s Interior Ministry, which controls the police force, denied that “Captain Jamil Hussein” existed. The U.S. Armed Forces issued the same denial.

2. The AP responded that he was, too, real but produced not a scintilla of corroborative evidence: not Captain Hussein himself nor statements from people who knew him nor anything else. It also ran no more stories quoting him.

3. Other news organizations, none of which ever seems to have heard of Captain Hussein, could find no witnesses to the alleged Sunni conflagration. The people who saw it were apparently AP exclusivists, just like the captain.

4. Attempts by third parties to locate Captain Hussein or anyone who knew of him were fruitless.

By this time, it was hard to avoid suspecting that the AP had either lied outrageously or, more likely, been duped. That it stonewalled all inquiries, adopting a progressively nastier tone toward skeptics, didn’t ease suspicions.

Then, after six weeks, Jamil Hussein suddenly turned up, as confirmed by the Interior Minister himself. The minister vaguely attributed the prior misinformation to poor record checking. He also issued a warrant for the captain’s arrest, then announced farcically that there would be no prosecution unless the AP identified him in a lineup as its source. He added helpfully that it would not be punished for noncooperation.

All this is less coherent than the plot of Il Trovatore. Where has Captain Hussein been for the past six weeks? Why is he seemingly unknown anywhere outside the AP newsroom? How has he been able to home in again and again on incidents all around Baghdad, many far away from his beat? Why did the AP ignore prima facie reasonable questions about his reality?

Bloggers who have gnawed on this episode will doubtless draw many jeers from the usual bevy of leftoids. It’s hard to see, though, how they can be faulted, unless it is a fault not to trust the Associated Press blindly. With so many peculiar circumstances, one would have to be devoid of rational curiosity not to suspect that something was wrong. Moreover, rather than just rant, folks like Armed Liberal, Eason Jordan (no conservative he) and others with local contacts tried to find the missing policeman; that is, they did the AP’s work for it. I don’t see how anybody writing in good faith can fault them, even if they turn out to have been wrong.

Will we ever learn what really happened here? If the Associated Press is interested in honest reporting, it will track down the true explanations of the anomalies. If it prefers to sneer at bloggers, that will tell us something as well.

Addendum: Michelle Malkin, who followed this saga so intensely that she has gone to Iraq to follow up, has a roundup of reactions from fellow Jamil doubters.

A Corrupt Sense of Pity

The banner headline on today’s Chicago Tribune is “Was Justice Too Swift?”. The story is an extended editorial in favor of the view that three years was too short an interval between Saddam Hussein’s capture and his execution. If only there had been an international trial at the Hague, where all of the tyrant’s crimes could have been scrutinized with nitpicking tediousness, till he died, like Slobodan Milosević, of old age.

Well, I’ve decided that I partly agree. The final stage of justice was indeed too swift. Hanging is almost instantaneous, and any pain is gone before the felon realizes it is there. That is a more merciful end than Saddam allowed his hundreds of thousands of victims.

The ideal pace of justice would have been to release him – at high noon in the main square of Baghdad, after public announcement of the exact time and place. That fate, too, would have been no more than an eyelid for an eye, but it would have approached due proportion.

In today’s New York Times, in the midst of much that, as Captain Ed observes, “is more suited to the valediction of a national hero than a genocidal dictator” and “reads like a radical Sunni insurgent history book, circa 2008”, John Burns offers an impressive portrait, “Feared and Pitiless; Fearful and Pitiable”, of a man who truly earned his death.

Amusing, were it not so grim, is the account of Saddam’s first appearance in the courtroom. Beforehand, “All he was told was that he was being taken ‘to face Iraqi justice’.” Mr. Burns was one of reporters present.

The man who stepped into the court had the demeanor of a condemned man, his eyes swiveling left, then right, his gait unsteady, his curious, lisping voice raised to a tenor that resonated fear. Quickly, he fixed his gaze on the handful of foreigners in the court, and I had my own moment of anxiety when it came to my mind that he was intent on remembering the faces of the non-Iraqis that were there to witness his humiliation, perhaps to get word through to his lawyers, and then on to the insurgents, that we were to be punished for our intrusion. It was only later, after I learned what he had been told before being taken from his cell to the court, that I understood that our presence meant something else to him entirely, that with foreigners present, he was not going to be summarily hanged or shot. . . .

At that instant, I felt sorry for him, as a man in distress and perhaps, too, as a once almighty figure reduced to ignominy. But the expression of that pity to the Iraqis present marked the distance between those, like me, who had taken the measure of Saddam’s terror as a visitor, shielded from the worst of it by the minders and the claustrophobic world of closely guarded hotels and supervised Information Ministry trips, and Iraqis who lived through it with no shield.

That I could feel pity for him struck the Iraqis with whom I talked as evidence of a profound moral corruption. I came to understand how a Westerner used to the civilities of democracy and due process — even a reporter who thought he grasped the depths of Saddam’s depravity — fell short of the Iraqis’ sense, forged by years of brutality, of the power of his unmitigated evil.

Can pity be “evidence of a profound moral corruption”? Whenever justice overtakes a tyrant, men who scorn everything else in the Gospels remind us of Our Lord’s injunction to love our enemies. Yes, but He also wanted us to love innocent people who are not our enemies, to whom the civil authorities owe the duty of justice.

Saddam Hussein was a monster, because, through decades of monstrous conduct, he made himself into one. Once, no doubt, there was a human being beneath his skin, but his humanity was eaten away, with the full cooperation of his will. Our pity should be reserved for the man who once was. That man was killed long ago. Yesterday, his murderer at last received the punishment he deserved.

Tulips and Iraq

After my last post, it seemed prudent to lie low, lest I fall into the clutches of Stephen Harper’s secret police. Now that more than a week has gone by without a midnight visit from the Mounties, I feel reassured that Canada doesn’t read this blog and bold enough to comment on a (non-Canuck) question that is currently agitating the blogosphere, to wit, are we winning or losing in Iraq?

Quite a few people, including many on the Right who favor different approaches to the war effort, have an intellectual or emotional investment in “losing”. Their supporting argument is simple: Ordinary Iraqis in many parts of the country run a high risk of violence, and that risk is increasing as sectarian militias become more and more active.

From a humanitarian point of view, one can assuredly call those conditions a defeat for human decency. But does that kind of defeat have anything to do with the war against Islamofascism?

It may be helpful to look at the situation from the enemy’s point of view. While Islamofascism has strong veins of sadism and nihilism, its objectives do not include perpetual mayhem in Baghdad. To be useful to either al-Qa’eda or the Iranian mullarchy, Iraq must be under the firm control of a sympathetic regime, not loosely presided over by a hostile one that allows Western soldiers to roam its territory at will.

There are two conceivable routes by which the present turmoil might lead to an Islamofascist takeover. First, the mufsidun might come to be seen as the least intolerable of evils and take power on a wave of popular support. Second, they might so weaken the government as to be able to topple it militarily. Neither of those is very plausible.

Killing civilians, bombing religious shrines and destroying economic infrastructure are not the obvious ways to win hearts and minds. Nor is there even a remote chance that the mufsidun can win an armed confrontation against the United States. They can’t even inflict significant damage, particularly not in relation to the losses that they suffer. The U.S. has been chary of “body counts” (a phobia borne of anti-American propaganda during the Vietnam War), but President Bush did note in passing recently that, from the beginning of October through early December, our men killed or captured just under 6,000 enemy combatants in Iraq – twice as many in a bit over two months as our own total losses in three and a half years.

From the point of view of American interests, no great harm would be done if Iraq were to remain in its present state for years or decades. In fact, the concentration of the entire War on Terror onto one remote battleground would be much to our advantage. It would be bad luck to the Iraqi people, of course, and we’d prefer that they live in peace, freedom and prosperity, but the enemy would remain frustrated and ourselves unbloodied.

Islamofascism’s only hope for victory in Iraq is one that would sound ridiculous in any historical context: that America will act like the proverbial elephant frightened by a mouse. Many commentators seem determined to bring that strange scene about by instilling a sense of terror in the American public, but their arguments consist of nothing but words: “debacle”, “catastrophe”, “disaster”, etc., all founded on casualties and expenditures that barely exceed what we endure in peacetime.

At some level, I suspect, the anti-war faction recognizes that America is not being damaged, much less defeated, in Iraq. The heat of their rhetoric is a psychological defense against the impotence of their de facto allies. Unfortunately, much of our country’s mediocre political class is easily panicked and browbeaten. It could shrink from the mild challenge presented in Iraq. If so, future historians will shake their heads and find the entire episode as inexplicable as the Grande Peur or the Tulip Mania, another entry into the catalogue of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds.

The Wrath of Kofi

Kofi Annan’s farewell denunciation of America moves me about as much as a comparable tirade by John Gotti. Annan (no honorific “Mr.” merited), if not a criminal himself, has spent the past ten years presiding over a criminal enterprise, one that has brought monetary benefit to a host of shady characters (among them his son Kojo) and political benefit to despotic and genocidal regimes around the world. The 21st Century is young, but his standing as a top contender for its leading villain is secure.

That he is eager now to establish his credentials as a leading light of anti-Americanism is readily explicable. As a practical matter, he may soon need a shield from extradition to face our criminal courts. Building credibility with men who loathe and fear America is a prudent strategy. Perhaps he can live out his remaining shameful days in a Russian dacha or a villa in the Sudan.

Nonetheless, one should try to examine the proposition that he has put forward, just in case, despite its perpetrator’s motives, it contains a dram of good sense. Our country has a giant’s strength, and I know of no American who wants to use it tyrannously like a giant.

Boiled down to its essence, Annan argues that America has no right to fight terrorism without using “international instruments”, by which he means obtaining the formal assent of the Dictators’ Club United Nations to its tactics. He calls that a “rules-based system” and intones, “Playing by the rules can sometimes be inconvenient, but ultimately what matters is not convenience. It is doing the right thing.”

For the sake of argument, let’s concede a great deal to that argument. Let’s suppose that it is desirable for the U.N. to possess a unique legitimacy and be the definer of rules in conflicts among nations. Is that ideal in even slight touch with reality?

Ba’athist Iraq furnishes a test case. What did the Ba’athist regime do to gain the enmity of the United States? First, it invaded Kuwait, an action that did not, one might note, have U.N. approval or otherwise display much respect for “playing by the rules”. Second, after being driven out, it refused to abide by the terms of the cease fire to which it had agreed. There, too, it disregarded the U.N. Third, it belligerently declared its hostility toward the United States, praised the 9/11 terrorists, regularly fired on American aircraft, and acted in ways that strongly suggested that it possessed or was developing weapons of particular use to terrorists.

By Annan’s own standards, if one applies them with the least modicum of even-handedness, the Ba’athists had put themselves in the wrong with respect to the U.N. as well as the U.S. Still, it had allies inside the U.N., governments that either sympathized with international terrorism or had been bribed to oppose any action to enforce the U.N. mandates. As a consequence, the Security Council dithered, passing numerous resolutions denouncing Iraqi conduct but putting off authorization of concrete steps to rectify it.

Under those circumstances, Annan asserts that the United States and its thirty-some allies were was wrong to act where the U.N. wouldn’t. That position is tantamount to giving terrorists the right to attack at will and veto any response. Does anyone seriously believe that, left to its own devices, the Security Council would ever have done more than hurl words at Saddam Hussein, no matter what he did? Well, what weapon more forceful than words has the U.N. deployed anywhere at any time? Is there a single atrocity that this organization, under Annan’s stewardship, either prevented or punished? He himself cites no such accomplishments and concedes, as unemphatically as he can, that the U.N. “may be failing” in the Sudan, where its simulacrum of a “rules-based system” lets the government indulge in slaughter without penalty.

The choice that faces America is not between acting on our own or “playing by the rules”. It is between acting on our own and effectively disarming. Perhaps national suicide would be a high-minded gesture. It would certainly earn kudos from Annan and his band of mobsters. But would it be “doing the right thing”? Only if complicity in evil is right.

Further reading: National Review, “Annan’s Legacy: A Symposium”
The Wall Street Journal, Kofi and U.N. “Ideals”:

Mr. Annan came to power at a moment when it was at least plausible to believe that a properly reformed U.N. could serve the purposes it was originally meant to serve: to be a guarantor of collective security and a moral compass in global affairs. Mr. Annan’s legacy is that nobody can entertain those hopes today.

Training as Panacea

Part of the unexamined conventional wisdom about the conflict in Iraq is that much greater emphasis ought to be placed on training the local army and police. The Iraq Study Group wants American forces to do little else. The concept is that properly trained Iraqi troops are the key to defeating the mufsidun. The model is Vietnamization, which in the early 1970’s created a capable South Vietnamese military that could probably have resisted communist invasion indefinitely, had not a spiteful Congress not only cut off aid but denied it the right to buy American arms and ammunition.

It is certainly true that a well led, well trained, highly motivated Iraqi gendarmerie would be a great improvement over the current one, whose performance is far below Western standards. There are, however, several flaws in the theory that a “training first” strategy is the key to victory.

First, Arab armies in the post-WWII era have been consistently incompetent, not only against European and Israeli opponents but against Persians, Africans and everyone else they have fought. Kenneth Pollack’s Arabs at War exhaustively describes and analyzes this surprising but undeniable phenomenon. The reasons for Arab military ineptitude, a strange contrast to the same people’s pre-modern success, are obscure. The contemporary Arab rejection of modernity and retreat into a culture of victimhood may be at work. Whatever the causes, it is unlikely that Iraqi soldiers and policemen are exempt from the effects, which implies that it is imprudent to count on training, however intensive and skilled, to produce something better than mediocrity. I’d be delighted to be proven wrong, but that’s not the way to bet.

Second, Iraq does not face a conventional invasion or even a conventional guerrilla war. The enemy has so far concentrated on urban terrorism. Unfortunately, while tested methods exist for winning both conventional and guerrilla wars, nobody knows a good strategy for stamping out terrorism. The French proved in Algiers that it can be done, but the methods employed there, of which torture was almost the least objectionable, aren’t what we want to pass along to our Iraqi protegés. Until we have a good urban warfare doctrine to instill, training in our current half-measures, while not useless, can produce only disappointing results.

Third, and most important, the assumption behind “training first” is that the most important part of the campaign against the terrorists is tracking them down and eliminating their cells one by one. Killing and capturing the enemy is, however, more a means than an end. The end sought is the demoralization of the terrorist forces. They need to be convinced that their cause is doomed, and the best means of forcing that conviction upon them is patient, relentless fighting. For that purpose, a not-too-good, though one hopes steadily improving, Iraqi army will suffice, so long as it has first rate allies (i. e., America and other willing Western nations)..

We tend to assume that the Islamofascists have an infinite supply of fanatics willing to accept immense casualties in a war of attrition against the West. The record suggests otherwise. The number of active mufsidun has been very small except when either (i) a temporary coincidence of strategic interests has given them the benefit of large-scale Western subventions, as during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, or (ii) the West has given the impression of being a weak, demoralized foe that will succumb readily to pressure. The second condition exists at the moment and makes Islamofascist recruiting easy. (It helps that no one publicizes the short life expectancy of mufsidun in Iraq.)

I saw a suggestion somewhere (link not remembered) that the Iraq Study Group was partly right: There should be a firm U.S. deadline for withdrawal from Iraq – March 1, 2122. The writer may not have been wholly serious, but he was correct. If the hope of driving us out with IED’s and random mortar rounds were to disappear, so would most of the enemy’s manpower and morale. After that, we could train the Iraqis to mop up.

Taking steps to enhance the quality of our Iraqi allies is a fine idea – but only a fine idea, not a panacea or a substitute for doing out own work.

The Magic Realism School of Foreign Policy

If a tsunami-like sandstorm had devastated Iraq, and the U.S. were leading a humanitarian relief effort, the report of the Iraq Study Group would point in the right direction: Encourage quarreling political factions to work together for the common good. Get neighboring countries involved. Link continued aid to progress in resolving problems. Make it clear that the country will eventually have to stand on its own. All good advice – for New Orleans or Sumatra.

But war isn’t a natural disaster. It arises from human will. Trying to end a war by calling on everyone to be cooperative, decent and good-hearted is like appealing to the humane instincts of Mafia capi. What are the elements of a peaceable settlement among inter alia al-Qa’eda, whose late leader in Iraq excoriated “the evil principle of democracy” and whose ambitions include replacing all Middle Eastern governments with a medieval caliphate, Ba’athist bitter-enders, who want to regain the perquisites of their defunct dictatorship, and Shia extremists full of zeal to cleanse their territory of Sunni Moslems, Christians and insufficiently observant fellow Shi’ites?

The mufsidun now troubling Mesopotamia will be ready for national reconciliation when, and only when, they realize that they have no chance of taking power by force. The ISG does not believe that the Iraqi government can thwart them on its own. It also recognizes that their success would be catastrophic for both the Iraqi people and for America’s position in the world.

So these “wise men” propose to reduce the one force that keeps the mufsidun in check, the 15 U.S. brigades deployed in Iraq, and to replace it with the good offices of, primarily, Iran, Syria, Saudi-controlled Arabia and Turkey. Their succor will be obtained by America’s fostering an amicable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and winking at Iran’s nuclear weapons program (which implies, though these realists seem oblivious to the fact, winking at counter-efforts on the part of Egypt and the Saudis).

Like the prototypical incompetent war plan, the ISG’s peace plan consists of elaborate maneuvers that can be executed only if the enemy cooperates, and it makes no provision for contingencies. What becomes of Syria’s role, for instance, if its dictator doesn’t think that reoccupation of the Golan Heights is enough of a reward for the dozen or so good deeds demanded of him? What if the Iranian mullarchy sees chaos in Iraq as not a problem but an opportunity? What if the multitude of countries nominated for the “Support Group” are uninterested in taking on any burdens? What if, instead of pursuing reconciliation, the various breeds of terrorist wait for March 2008, the ISG’s deadline for withdrawing American forces from Iraqi soil?

The ISG may be slightly more realistic than Dennis Kucinich, who fantasizes that United Nations stewardship would bring peace and financial honesty to Iraq. At least, Messrs. Baker, Hamilton et al. intermittently recognize that American defeat would be a huge morale booster for al-Qa’eda and the other mufsidun. It’s a pity that they make no serious effort to figure out what it will take to win. Instead, they pretty much say that, if something doesn’t turn up in the next 16 months, we should just concede the field and accept the consequences.

Others (vide “Further reading”) have dissected the flaws in the ISG’s vision more cogently than I can, leaving puzzles for the rest of us: Why did a conclave of experienced Washington hands produce such a vacuous document? And why have the media and the political elite treated it, by and large, as a brilliant accomplishment?

I don’t overlook the possibility that the members of the ISG are wiser than I, as a general proposition. I’ll be open to the likelihood that they are wise on these particular issues as soon as I see a convincing explanation of, to take a few points at semi-random, why Iran should fear Saudi intervention in Iraq, or where we will find Palestinians who both accept the existence of Israel and have any influence over Palestinian opinion, or how the creation of a Palestinian state would persuade al-Qa’eda to stop killing Iraqis, or what pressure we can exert on Iran and Syria if we refuse to look at any military options whatsoever.

The ISG’s lodestar isn’t realism; it’s magic realism. And I think that it appeals to America’s political elite because of its promise of magical effects. Think of the relative attractiveness of the alternatives. On one side, George W. Bush and the neocons offer a long, tedious, shadowy war against elusive terrorists, a war that, in the President’s words –

will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated. . . . Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen.

Ugh – nasty, brutish and long. On the other side, Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton have a nicely wrapped, comprehensive, bipartisan New Diplomatic Offensive that will dispatch the terrorist nuisance without an inordinate expenditure of blood, toil, tears, sweat or cash.

No one truly believes that the New Diplomatic Offensive will heal the troubled lands of the Middle East or expel the terrorist dragons from the world. Still, trying it is an excuse for setting aside the serious, troublesome responsibilities of the world’s only superpower; a way to resume, for a year or three, the Clintonian vacation from history.

Then vacation will end. The feeble half-measures of magic realist diplomacy will have sputtered to their inevitable failure, leaving our friends (the only people the ISG has the nerve to threaten) weaker, our enemies bolder and the unlucky peoples of the Middle East more miserable than before. And then, like it or not, we will have to fight or surrender.

Further reading: Richard Fernandez, “The Baker Report: Speak Loudly and Carry a Small Stick”
David Frum “Realism”
The Wall Street Journal, “The Iraq Muddle Group”
Philip Klein, “Realist Fantasies”
Power Line, “The ISG Report: Still a Mystery”
Frederick W. Kagan, “Missing the Obvious”
Jeff Jacoby, “Fighting to Win in Iraq”, “The Danger of Engaging with the Enemy”
T. F. Boggs, “What We Should Do and Should Not Do: An Authoritative Voice”
Mark Steyn, “Iraq Is Just Test of Will for America”
Jonah Goldberg, “It’s a War, Not a Buffet”
Mona Charen, “Are You for Real?”

Small Steps for Iraq

Instapundit has solicited “new ideas – beyond ‘cut and run’ or ‘stay the course’ – on things we’re not doing that we should be doing” in Iraq. I’m happy to join in, though without much confidence that my ideas will be unique, or, for that matter, better than those that folks at the DoD have thought of already.

But, first, what are these ideas for? What is America trying to accomplish in Iraq? To be more specific, what can we do in Iraq that will further our ultimate objective of demoralizing and decimating the mufsidun to the point where Islamic fascism withers away?

What one might call the “maximum objective” of the Iraqi campaign is to foster a prosperous, internally strong, non-fascist polity that will both give our cause a formidable Moslem ally and prove to Moslems that their religion doesn’t have to go hand in hand with tyranny, poverty and delusion. At the moment, that goal is obviously a long way off.

Less exalted but still useful would be generally democratic but somewhat floundering government that would provide our forces with an entry point into the Middle East, cooperate in the War on Terror, and deny resources to the enemy. That is basically what we have now. From the strategic standpoint, that is a success. It feels like failure only because our intelligentsia, both Right and Left, defines it as failure, the former because they impatiently hunger for spectacular victories, the latter because they abhor any victory at all.

Separate from, though intertwined with, the state of the Iraqi government is another objective: to demonstrate that opposition to American power is futile. Contrary to glib assumptions about Islamofascist militancy, no movement, including the mufsidun has an unlimited roster of fanatics. There has never been a fighting force in history that gained strength as its chances of success diminished. We shouldn’t forget that the first several months after the Coalition’s ouster of the Ba’athist regime were fairly quiet. Western tourists could travel safely through the Sunni Triangle – because potential recruits to the enemy cause were convinced that displeasing Americans was fatal. Today, by contrast, they think that Americans will react to hostility by running away. That is not a frame of mind that encourages good behavior.

Viewed in the light of these objectives, the first entry into the Instapundit symposium, from the estimable Charles Krauthammer, doesn’t make the grade. He proposes that the U.S. insist upon a “grand political settlement” embracing “Kurds, moderate Sunnis, secular Shiites, and some of the religious Shiites”. The deal he foresees includes “vesting the Sunnis with proportionate political and financial (i.e. oil) power”. If we can’t find a set of indigenous politicians willing and able to do that, our military should “abandon the Green Zone, retire to its bases, move much of its personnel to Kurdistan where we are welcome and safe, and let the civil war take its course”.

There is a very slight chance, I suppose, that such a threat would have the desired effect, but so what? Will the grand settlement discourage radicals of either Sunni or Shi’ite persuasion from keeping up their attacks? Will al-Qa’eda slink away in the face of a democratic compromise? No doubt a government resting on a broader consensus would be somewhat stronger, but it isn’t likely to be strong enough to eradicate urban terrorism bankrolled and supplied from abroad.

And what if no settlement could be reached and our troops hunkered down in Kurdistan to watch the ensuing war with polite disinterest? Eventually someone would win, and that someone would owe nothing to America.

Unlike Mr. Krauthammer, I don’t have a comprehensive scheme to put forward, but I would like to suggest three ways to push events in the right direction:

1. Now that we have confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that Iran is supplying weapons to anti-American militias, and probably training them, too, we should cut transport lines between the two countries. Sealing the border completely presumably isn’t feasible, but we can make travel dangerous by patrolling with drones and fighters. I would start by announcing, through radio broadcasts and leaflets, that any vehicle proceeding from east to west across the international boundary is liable to be destroyed without warning. To facilitate enforcement and increase pressure, we could establish a steadily expanding “no traffic” zone, initially extending one mile into Iran and growing after a few weeks to, say, 20 miles. This tactic would both constrict the arms flow to hostile forces and serve as a reminder that American power is limited by very little but our will to exercise it. If it also fostered discontent with the mullarchy, so much the better.

2. While I see no point in trying to compel the Iraqi government to bring about unattainable harmony among the country’s rival factions, we ought to demand that Prime Minister al-Maliki break all ties with Moqtada al-Sadr. Sadr’s parliamentary deputies have withdrawn from the government, so there is no reason to appease him any further. Once his official protection is withdrawn, I think we can count on the make-believe mahdi to create ample opportunities for his elimination from the scene.

3. As many others have observed, the true Achilles heel of the American war effort is home front morale. We can’t round up the defeatists and traitors in the press corps (and shouldn’t even if we could), but would it be too much trouble to offer the public an alternative source of war news, one that would emphasize what’s happening on the battlefield, instead of headlining only terrorist attacks and friendly casualties? Our military makes a fair quantity of information available, but the facts aren’t shaped into a comprehensible narrative and aren’t vigorously put into circulation. As a start, how about a 24-hour Military News Channel, supplemented by an active Internet site and a weekly magazine? Making a low intensity conflict interesting and understandable is a challenge, I’ll admit, but aren’t soldiers supposed to do the merely difficult at once?

   The drawback to putting more news before the public is that some of it is bound to be bad and will be seized on by advocates of American defeat. Against that risk, we must balance the certainty that the current information vacuum will continue to be filled by the gloom-and-doom chorus.

All by themselves, these three ideas won’t win the war. I offer them only as small steps. Many small steps in the right direction will, in the end, bring us to victory.

Cold War Deja vu: The “Realists” Aren’t

After the Cold War had been going on for a couple of decades, everybody with pretensions to being a strategic thinker knew one thing for sure: The Soviet Union was a stable, deep-rooted superpower, with which the Free World would have to live for the indefinite future. Only ignorant ideologues like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan thought otherwise.

Not all the experts reached that conclusion by the same route. Some on the Left persisted in seeing communism as no more than “liberalism in a hurry”: a viable system, widely acceptable to its people, that was bringing increasing comfort and prosperity as it converged with the social democratic West. On the Right, there were no illusions about communism’s fundamental inhumanity, but also no doubts that it would endure. The “realist” policy of détente grew out of the premise of Soviet invulnerability. That premise, in turn, rested on two main assumptions: that communism had a powerful appeal throughout the world and that the hedonistic populations of the Western countries would not sustain a long period of confrontation. The realists believed, in their hearts, that the Red Tide could only be channeled, not turned back.

From the early 1970’s, when President Nixon adopted détente as the centerpiece of his Administration, until Ronald Reagan’s unexpected election to the Presidency, the advocates of victory over communism were relegated to the policy backbenches. With the Democratic Congressional takeover last week and the President’s rush to bring on board the same right-of-center realists who scoffed at Ronald Reagan, it is possible, even likely, that resolute opposition to Islamofascism will be banished to the wilderness of right-wing magazines, talk radio, blogs and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, that it will be 1973 all over again.

It’s odd that events in Iraq have pushed the mood among the policy making elite so swiftly toward accommodating the current adversary. The Vietnam imbroglio, which soured the previous generation of mandarins on energetic anticommunism, was a middle-sized war that lasted over a decade and claimed the lives of 50,000 American soldiers. The Iraqi campaign is a low intensity conflict against an enemy that couldn’t carry the sandals of the Viet Cong and whose foreign sponsors are far less formidable than the Soviet Union, Red China or even North Vietnam. Yet this modest obstacle appears to have inspired the same hopelessness that marked Cold War “realism”.

That Islamofascism might be no more robust than communism, and that Americans are no more decadent in the early 21st Century than in the late 20th, are possibilities that realists can’t seem to comprehend. Nonetheless, both are eminently reasonable.

Islamofascism was nearly invisible 25 years ago, the predilection of a small core of clerical fascists on the margins of Islam. The sole exception was the aberrant mullarchy in Iran, which had taken power under peculiar circumstances, was well isolated from the Moslem mainstream and was generally thought unlikely to outlive its charismatic founder. Otherwise, the great divide in the House of Islam pitted various strains of conservative or radical secularism (Atatürk, Nasser, the Ba’ath Party) against each other and against inward-looking religious traditionalism. Groups like the Moslem Brotherhood were persecuted everywhere except in the tolerant West, where they had no visible following. Western Moslems acted much like other old-fashioned minorities, acquiescent in the values of the dominant culture and trending toward assimilation.

If that picture has now changed completely, it is not because the Wahhabis and Salafists and Twelver Shi’ites have proselytized the Islamic world with brilliant theological polemics. The rising popularity of Islamofascism correlates almost perfectly with its employment of conspicuous terrorist tactics and the West’s supine response. A series of perceived victories, from the “expulsion” of American troops from Lebanon in 1983 through Western governments’ humble apologies for allowing cartoonists to draw pictures of Mohammed, has convinced millions of Moslems that the conquests halted in the 16th and 17th Centuries are about to resume under the leadership of figures like Osama bin-Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hassan Nasrullah.

Doesn’t it look that way? Haven’t the infidels lost a series of wars against the faithful – Israel and America in Lebanon in 1983, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Israelis against Hezbollah this year, the Americans in the near future in Iraq? And isn’t Iran about to show the hollowness of Western threats by obtaining its own atomic bomb? And don’t infidel politicians, journalists and clerics acknowledge their moral inferiority by decrying insults to Islam and rebuking “Islamophobia”, meanwhile keeping politely silent about the persecution of Christians by Moslems? And haven’t those Western leaders who continue to resist the will of Allah been rejected by their own political parties or at the polls?

There was, it is true, one brief, now forgotten, interruption to the new jihad’s string of successes. For about two years after April 2003, Islamofascism was forced to retreat. Its eccentric hanger-on Ghaddafi disarmed his Libyan regime. Arab countries held what were, by historical standards, free and open elections. The Cedar Revolution overthrew Syrian control of Lebanon. Iranian dissidents staged massive street demonstrations.

Then, unable to withstand continued pinprick violence in Iraq, the morale of Western opinion makers collapsed. In place of high hopes for democratic reform, Moslems heard a litany of recriminations and regrets. The Western media, in tune with the spokesmen of leading political parties, declared that attacking an inveterate fascist regime had been a dire mistake whose perpetrators deserved condign chastisement. The implication was that, in the future, vociferous anti-Westerners may safely engage in one-way warfare: They can treat us as enemies, and we will not reciprocate.

Saddam Hussein ignored the Gulf War cease fire accords, tried hundreds of times to shoot down American aircraft, subsidized suicide bombers, celebrated 9/11, refused to cooperate with inspections to determine whether he was complying with restrictions on his weapons programs, bribed Western politicians, maintained close contact with terrorists, and failed to fulfill even one of the conditions that President Bush declared he must meet if he wanted peace with America.

As a reminder, here is what the President said in a speech to the United Nations on September 12, 2002:

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all support for terrorism and act to suppress it, as all states are required to do by U.N. Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shi’a, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans, and others, again as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will release or account for all Gulf War personnel whose fate is still unknown. It will return the remains of any who are deceased, return stolen property, accept liability for losses resulting from the invasion of Kuwait, and fully cooperate with international efforts to resolve these issues, as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. It will accept U.N. administration of funds from that program, to ensure that the money is used fairly and promptly for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

Saddam Hussein remained defiant. Now Moslems are told that he was an injured innocent. If that is so, and if dominant opinion in the West is determined never to repeat that injustice, what behavior will ever provoke the faint-hearted giaours? Why should any Islamofascist feel threatened? And can any anti-fascist in Moslem lands retain any hope of having useful friends elsewhere in the world?

This plausible image of the state of the world is what makes Islamofascism powerful. When Western supremacy was taken for granted, the movement was feeble. When the West flexed its overwhelming military might, Western concepts of democracy challenged the fascists. When the West lacerates and humbles itself, the mufsidun rise again.

If we diagnose Islamofascism as what it truly is, an opportunistic virus that thrives on Western displays of weakness, the cure is not dauntingly difficult. Maintain a relentless offensive against our self-proclaimed enemies, and Moslems will learn in time that the golden age of the Caliphate is not going to return. At that point, they will turn on the Islamofascists, just as they used to scorn them. Unhappily, a quarter century of superficial triumph, however delusory in substance, will not vanish from the Islamic psyche overnight. Victory will take longer now than if we had started fighting the war when Bill Clinton was President, longer than if we had given vigorous backing to democratic flowerings after the overthrow of the Iraqi Ba’athists, longer than if there had not been an orgy of conspiracy theorizing about the origins of the campaign against Saddam. If we flee from Iraq, accept a nuclear-armed Iran and bow before demands for concessions to Moslem minorities, it will take longer still.

“Realism”, we can see with hindsight, prolonged the life of the Soviet Union by perhaps a decade. That the heyday of Islamofascism should be similarly prolonged is a sad repetition of history. Still, we have firm grounds for hope that the ultimate outcome will be the same.

Further reading: Mark Steyn, “U.S. Must Prove It’s a Staying Power”

A Sense of Disconnection

A poll taken just before the election (thanx to Sound Politics) reveals a seeming paradox. It was conducted in Washington State, where Republicans fared badly last Tuesday, failing to unseat a Senator with less than a 50 percent approval rating and losing a bunch of state legislative seats. The reason looks obvious when one reads President Bush’s ratings for job performance (30%–60% unfavorable), handling the economy (28%–60% unfavorable (the Dow had just hit a new record and unemployment fallen to a five-year low)) and handling the war in Iraq (20%–69% unfavorable).

But then there is, “Do you approve or disapprove of President Bush’s handling of the war on terrorism?” The response: 49 percent approve, 40 percent disapprove.

It may be that neither terrorism nor Iraq was crucially important to Washington voters. Their astonishing misperception of the state of the economy may have overriden lesser considerations. Assuming, however, that their votes were influenced by what exit polls said were two of the biggest issues in this election (after “corruption in government”), the natural inference is that they view Iraq and terrorism as independent concerns, with the former being more significant, not offset by good performance on the latter.

It’s possible to argue that the Washington voters are correct not to link Iraq to terrorism, a plausible position if the criteria for a connection are stringent enough. Let’s suppose arguendo that the terrorists currently setting off bombs in Iraq are homebodies who would never threaten any place else and that the National Intelligence Estimate that the New York Times leaked before the election was wrong to conclude that “perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere”. Can it really be the case that the President’s handling of a distant, low intensity war, even if less than stellar, outweighs success in keeping the country safe from a repeat of 9/11? Or does the public imagine that preventing terrorist attacks is such a simple matter that success deserves no credit?

Recent news reports indicate that the absence of attacks is not due to any loss of interest by aspiring terrorists. Britain’s MI5 says that it knows of 200 active terrorist cells in that country alone. Counterterrorism experts are also worried, according to CBS News about plots to bomb transportation systems in Europe. And, as has been widely reported, al-Qa’eda’s capo in Iraq has proclaimed that his mufsidun intend to follow up American retreat from that country not by fading away but by taking the war to American soil. “We swear we will not rest from our jihad... before blowing up the filthiest house, dubbed the White House.”

To date, the U.S. has fought the enemy in Iraq and has not been attacked at home. Is it prudent to assume that there is no cause and effect? If that was the nation’s assumption when it voted to put the Democratic Party into power in Washington, we can only hope that there is still truth in Bismarck’s dictum that God has a special providence for fools, drunkards and the United States of America.

Further reading: James Lewis in The American Thinker:

Withdrawal would embolden Hamas and Hezbollah and weaken Iran’s natural enemies—the Sunni Arab countries, including the Sunni Gulf states. In Afghanistan, the Taliban would be reinvigorated, and in Pakistan the Al-Qaida-supporting elements in the military and secret services might try—again—to launch a coup. A successful Al Qaida coup in Pakistan would give Islamofascists not just one, but two nuclear-armed states.

The US held on in Vietnam for fourteen years. We gave Vietnamization a chance. The 12 million Iraqis who voted for parliamentary parties deserve a chance to see their elected government work.

This Millennium’s First Great Captain

Fully recognizing that jettisoning Donald Rumsfeld was a political necessity, I nonetheless don’t want to leave the left-wing narrative, taken up all too eagerly by segments of the Right, to be the only version on the table. Judged by his accomplishments, Mr. Rumsfeld has been an outstanding public servant, one of the top two or three Secretaries of Defense in our nation’s history.

As almost everyone seems to have forgotten, the two offensives that he oversaw, in Afghanistan and Iraq, were won far more rapidly, with far fewer American casualties, than any expert predicted. Two successes in particular – toppling the Taliban regime without bringing in tens of thousands of troops for a months’ long slog and seizing heavily fortified Baghdad virtually without a fight – rank with the most brilliant feats in military history. Soldiers will study them for generations to come (provided that those generations don’t speak only Arabic).

The anti-mufsidun conflict in Iraq has been less brilliant. It is the principal, indeed the sole, pretext for declaring the Secretary a failure. And it is true that he has not, despite repeated shifts of tactics, devised a method of decisively eradicating urban terrorism. Neither has anybody else. His critics, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, have yet to propose solutions that are more than half-plausible. The best, a sharp enlargement of our forces to support systematic clear-and-hold operations in terrorist-infected neighborhoods, is politically unsaleable and offers only modest prospects at potentially high cost. Most of the other anti-Rumsfeld tooth-gnashers are incoherent, particularly those who complain that the Secretary sent too small an army to Iraq, then want to rectify his errors by reducing what is there.

There is only one successful model for this kind of campaign: the French victory in the Battle of Algiers, where the victorious army’s methods nauseated France and would not be tolerated by the most hawkish American opinion (albeit they are par for the course for al-Qa’eda). Secretary Rumsfeld has worked energetically to find acceptable countermeasures. Since history argues strongly against the existence of an invincible form of warfare, they will inevitably appear. That they haven’t yet is unfortunate but scarcely blameworthy.

In the meantime, our armed forces show no signs of being “broken” by an often frustrating conflict. American casualties are low. The enemy has yet to win a single skirmish and is unable to hold terrain. All evidence indicates that morale in high. Recruitment and retention are doing well. The Secretary appears to be immensely popular with the rank-and-file. There’s no reason to think that, given adequate backing from the home front, we couldn’t grind down the terrorists through attrition, if nothing more spectacular.

Looking beyond Iraq, the Rumsfeld tenure has been marked by the accelerated adaptation of modern technology to military needs. The ability of our men to see the battlefield, communicate during operations, engage in combat regardless of weather or time of day, and bring maximum firepower to bear with minimal collateral damage is unsurpassed in the history of war. Aerial drones, personal computers, GPS systems, night vision, body armor and a host of other inventions are as much the G.I.’s weapons as his rifle and grenades. In all that, Secretary Rumsfeld has pushed the military further and faster than many high-ranking officers wanted to go. That fact is vitally important. A successful army is always tempted to relax and fall behind its adversaries. So far, American is avoiding that mistake.

History will, I’m sure, decide that some Rumsfeld decisions were ill-conceived. No military commander is infallible, and one could fill volumes with the blunders of Alexander, Caesar, Gustavus, Frederick and Napoleon. What makes a Great Captain is the quality of his successes and the soundness of his judgment. Once the current passions abate, Donald Rumsfeld will, I am confident, be recognized as the first commander of the 21st Century to deserve a place in the pantheon of Mars.

Further reading: Mark Steyn, “Exit Rumsfeld”

Victor Davis Hanson:

Here is the record of Donald Rumsfeld. (1) Tried to take a top-heavy Pentagon and prepare it for the wars of the postmodern world, in which on a minute’s notice thousands of American soldiers, with air and sea support, would have to be sent to some god-awful place to fight some savagery—and then be trashed live on CNN for doing it; (2) less than a month after 9/11 he organized the retaliation against al Qaeda in the heart of primordial Afghanistan that removed the Taliban in 7 weeks, when we were all warned that the U.S., like the British and Russians of old, would fail; (3) oversaw the removal of Saddam in 3 weeks—after the 1991 Gulf War and the 12-years of 350,000 sorties in the no-fly-zones, and various bombing strikes, had failed. (4) Ah, you say, then there is the disastrous 3-year insurgency—too few troops, Iraqi army let go, underestimated “dead-enders” etc.?

But Rumsfeld knew that in a counterinsurgency (cf. Vietnam 1965-71) massive deployments only ensure complacency, breed dependency, and create resentment, and that, in contrast, training indigenous forces, ensuring political autonomy, and providing air and commando support (e.g., Vietnam circa 1972-4) is the only answer—although that is a long process that can work only if political support at home allows the military to finish the job (cf. the turn-of-the-century Philippines, and the British in Malaysia). He was a good man, and we were lucky to have him in our hour of need.

Quotes of the Day

From the invaluable (but only $3.95 a month) OpinionJournal Political Diary: First, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. describes the job of American forces in Iraq:

That job is to be the biggest, baddest force in the country, ready and able to drop the hammer on any group that tries to get power by any path other than the ballot box. Notice how utterly this situation differs from the Korean war analogy now on every lip. The rest of the job is for Iraqis. They’re the ones who have to figure out how to live with each other. It may take five years. It may take 15. We could afford to have a more relaxed attitude about this (albeit continuously learning how to minimize the cost of this mission to our troops and taxpayers). And let’s be realistic: It will be useful for American interests to have a sizeable, battle-hardened force in the region, increasingly savvy and subtle in local ways, for the foreseeable future.

If the Democrats’ control of Congress makes it impossible to press ahead with more vigor against the mufsidun troubling Iraq, the role outlined by Mr. Jenkins has the virtue of not handing bragging rights to the enemy.

Second, John Fund on the political consequences of creating an immigration “crisis” out of a third rate irritant:

This summer, as polls showed GOP House incumbents increasingly in trouble, the talk in closed-door meetings of GOP members was that the party needed to use opposition to illegal immigration to deflect voter anger on other issues. “The issue is a magic carpet to victory for us,” was the memorable way one anti-immigration member put it. Later that same month, the House GOP pushed through a bill that authorized the building of a massive border fence without adding a sensible guest-worker program to provide a legal means for needed workers to enter the country.

Well, the returns are in and the strategy was a clear failure. GOP candidates who ran almost exclusively on the immigration issue lost in districts that President Bush easily carried in 2004. The most surprising loser was Rep. J.D. Hayworth of Arizona, who wrote a book on immigration called Whatever It Takes and yet managed to lose a district Mr. Bush won with 54% of the vote two years ago. Another Arizona GOP candidate, former state legislator Randy Graf, did ride the immigration issue to a plurality win in the GOP primary only to lose badly in a Tucson district last night that Mr. Bush had won with 53%.

The biggest bellyflop on the immigration issue came in Indiana, where Rep. John Hostettler, the hardline chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, lost by a stunning 22 points in a district that gave John Kerry only 38% of its votes just two years ago. “Immigration has never been an issue that brings people to the polls in single-minded desire to vote on that one issue,” says political analyst Michael Barone, co-author of the Almanac of American Politics. “Voters end up having other concerns, and anti-illegal immigration polling numbers are more often than not political fools’ gold.”

Even if the gold were 24-carat, the ability to spend it wouldn’t be limited to Republicans. The essential element of an effective “enforcement only” strategy, as restrictionists are quite willing to say, is punishing companies that hire illegal aliens. Most of those are small businessmen. Don’t you think that Democrats can find their way to pushing measures that will do the most harm to a natural Republican constituency?

The (Very Mild) Agony of Defeat

Having been a conservative Republican through the 1960’s and 1970’s, I know about losing elections. For kids who first became aware of politics around 1994, tonight must be harder to take. The only people who will be devastated, though, are the political insiders who grew comfortable with the assumption that pork, gerrymandering and incumbency are adequate substitutes for action and ideas. Those work all right when the waters are smooth; in stormy weather, they can’t keep a party afloat.

The most striking facts about this election are, first, the breadth of sentiment among Republicans that our party deserved to lose, second, the complete fecklessness of the opposition party, and, third, the failure of partisans on both sides to face up to the fact that, like it or not, we are in the middle of a long, difficult war, which will only become longer and harder if we pretend it isn’t there.

The masochistic Republican sentiment, which I expect will be trumpeted in tomorrow’s blogs, is understandable. In my own view, the disgruntled gave the Republican Congress too little credit for tax cuts, welfare reform, trade liberalization, judicial confirmations and other excellent achievements, but their lack of gruntlement wasn’t irrational. When the party of limited government increases discretionary spending at a rapid clip and gets cozy with K Street, it isn’t going to please its rank-and-file.

The GOP leadership also, IMHO, committed one spectacular blunder. Egged on by certain right-wing circles (whose judgment is generally better than this), it turned immigration into a major issue, in the transparent expectation of tapping a current of restrictionist feeling. But, as past elections have abundantly proven, the immigration hardliners are a small cadre, almost all of whom vote Republican in any event. Pandering to their whims succeeded only in making a lot of them so angry at President Bush that they became less attached to the Republican Party. The decision to build “The Fence” wasn’t enough to please them, as I’ve noted elsewhere. Instead, they remained angry and evidently infected a portion of the GOP base with their discontent. If illegal immigration had to be addressed at all this year (and it is a festering irritant rather than any kind of crisis), an approach on Mike Pence’s lines would have been truer to free enterprise principles, and the restrictionists might not have sniffed at The Fence if it had been the concession made to them as part of a bigger package.

The conventional wisdom-to-be is almost certain to be that Republicans are the authors of their own misfortunes. Just because it will be conventional doesn’t mean that it won’t be correct.

On the other side of the aisle, the Democratic success most nearly resembles that won by the GOP sixty years ago on a similarly negative platform. “Had Enough?” was the slogan then. Unhappily for the Taft-Martin Republicans, it wasn’t a persuasive cry they faced re-election two years later. The 80th Congress proved to be a meaningless blip in the Democrats’ 60-year run as the country’s “natural” majority party. It’s highly likely that the 110th will have a similar distinction.

In a way, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are in a worse position. Despite Harry Truman’s “do-nothing 80th Congress” rhetoric, the Republican majority did quite a bit, including repeal of wartime wage-price controls (which leading liberals wanted to make permanent), passage of the Taft-Hartley Act (over a Truman veto) and enactment of the Marshall Plan. Next year, the majority party’s leadership will be far to the left of the mainstream of Congress, with its extremely narrow majorities (or majority; as I write, the balance of power in the Senate isn’t determined) dependent on members who ran as moderates or conservatives in Republican-leaning districts. The Democrats will be in a good position to harass the Administration and perhaps impose defeat in Iraq. Their positive accomplishments will be ignominiously paltry. By 2008, I expect the electorate to be heartily sick of their shrill impotence.

I could almost relax and look forward to a happy November 5, 2008. The problem is that America and the world can’t hibernate until then. If Congress insists on withdrawal from Iraq, Hassan Nasrallah has already told us the mufsidun propaganda line: Anyone who puts his trust in America is a fool, and the triumph of the jihad is inevitable.

We can’t wish Islamofascism away, and every victory it can claim is bound to enhance its prestige and power, both in the Middle East and, increasingly, in South Asia and Europe. Sure, there’s an ocean between us and them. Perhaps, if we do nothing, massive terrorism won’t become a reality over here. But a confident Islamofascist movement, backed by a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran, will have little trouble overthrowing the fearful, weakening regimes in Saudi-controlled Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf emirates, or at least compelling them to subsidize terrorism. Nancy Pelosi’s grand strategy, to the extent that she has one, is to move the focus of the War on Terror to Afghanistan. Why does she imagine that the enemy will follow us there rather than descend on the rich pickings in the Gulf?

Anyone who thinks that we and the world have nothing to fear from a Middle East dominated by fanatical, anti-Western ideologues, or to worry about from a Europe and Asia with an expanding population of Islamofascist sympathizers, belongs in the cock-eyed company of the America Firsters. Putting the War on Terror on hold for two years while John Conyers assembles “evidence” for his grand conspiracy theories just means that we will have to deal with a more dangerous enemy when we wake up again.

Oh, well. There were times when the will to defeat communism seemed at a vanishingly low ebb. The West has reserves of strength, and I remain confident that, fifty years from now, there will be more cathedrals in Tehran than mosques in Chicago.

Tonight is a disappointment. It is not the moment to say “Kismet”. Nor is it the time for those of us who wish to press ahead with the War on Terror to sink into a quagmire of recriminations. Let’s learn defeat’s not-too-disguised lessons and get on with our work.

Redefining “Misrepresentation”

A commenter takes exception to my reading of Friday’s New York Times piece on the state of Ba’athist Iraq’s nuclear weapons know-how. To some extent, his argument is rational, if not persuasive. He contends that the Saddam regime could have been “contained” indefinitely and had no interest in sharing deadly secrets with terrorists. Well, maybe. Hope springs eternal, and it is comforting to think that our avowed enemies don’t, in their hearts of hearts, really mean to do us any harm. He and I are unlikely to reach agreement on that (now hypothetical) question, no matter how many pixels we expend.

What is less rational, but very typical of the Left these days, is his accusation “that you have misrepresented the NY Times article in order to advance your specious thesis”. I quoted the Times verbatim and linked to the story, too. Any reader could decide for himself whether my interpretation (or, to be more precise, Jim Geraghty’s interpretation, which I quoted) made sense. Even if I am completely off base, I don’t see how “misrepresentation”, which implies distorting a passage or taking it out of context, can be an issue.

To take a parallel that was recently in the news, the Times misrepresented Senator Kerry’s “stuck in Iraq” comment when it wrote:

Mr. Kerry’s prepared remarks to California students on Monday called for him to say, “Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.” In his delivery, he dropped the word “us.”

As everybody knows by now, and as the Times has acknowledged, the Senator’s spoken words diverged from his (alleged) written text in more ways than the omission of a single word. For instance, he never mentioned President Bush. “Misrepresentation” is clearly the right term for the original report.

By contrast, a number of bloggers got the quotation right but contended that it wasn’t intended to demean American soldiers. I don’t think that view passes the giggle test, but I wouldn’t say that those who advance it are misrepresenting anything. They are wrong but not mendacious.

Unhappily, the contemporary Left is highly prone to turn all disagreements into charges that its opponents are lying. Thus leftists repeat endlessly that the President “lied” about Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs when, at worst, he erroneously trusted the overwhelming consensus of the intelligence community. The concept of honest mistakes, or even of good faith differences of opinion, no longer seems to be part of the intellectual furniture of much, if not all, of the Left.

It used to be that liberals thought conservatives were “the stupid party”, and conservatives that liberals were too clever by half. Now, as Charles Krauthammer puts it, conservatives think liberals are stupid, and liberals think conservatives are evil. The old set of beliefs led to vigorous argumentation but was, at root, consistent with domestic tranquility. Neither side doubted that the other, wrong-headed though it was, had the common good at heart. That mutual good will is now vanishing. I suspect that even the Left will regret it someday.

Blog Headline of the Day

All-Encompassingly sums it up:

NY Times: Documents from the non-existent Iraqi nuclear weapons program pose grave nuclear danger to world

This is National Cliché Day, so I’ll put the straight skivvy in a nutshell:

1. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had the capability to construct nuclear weapons within a dangerously short period of time.

2. Hoping that a murderous, anti-American tyrant, one who erected billboards to celebrate 9/11, would make no use of his capabilities, and would not share information with his fellow anti-Westerners, was an unacceptably risky policy.

3. Because the United States had the means to remove this threat to ourselves and the rest of the world, we had the right, and probably the duty, to do so. That remains true, whether post-Saddam Iraq turns out to be a success story or an ongoing trouble spot. Better that it be a trouble spot without atomic bombs.

4. It is unfortunate and ironic that the public learned of this vindication of President Bush’s policies only through an accidental posting on the Internet and the New York Times’ relentless drive to transform itself from a newspaper into a daily Democrat campaign leaflet.

Karl Rove’s Master Stroke!

Weeks ago, rumors wafted about the blogosphere that Karl Rove was promising nervous Republicans an October Surprise for our side. The sources were deeply anonymous, so I discounted them. Besides, how could the Administration spring a helpful surprise? Suppose that it released, say, ironclad proof that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program that was within a year of building a bomb. The New York Times would sniff “desperation ploy” and would trot out “experts” to explain that the evidence didn’t really mean anything.

But Evil Genius Karl is diabolically clever. Among the millions of pages of documents captured in Baghdad were some showing that Iraq was well along the road to making its own bombs, further, in fact, than Iran is today. Instead of announcing this discovery, Karl, it appears, had one of his minions whisper to a Times reporter that Idiot Bush had let these dangerous secrets be posted on the Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal. The Times, he anticipated, would take the bait by running a story lambasting the White House’s incompetence, never noticing that it was falsifying the left-wing fable that Ba’athist Iraq was no threat to the world. Naturally, the story would run the Friday before the election.

Very clever, Karl. Of course, that kind of cleverness works only if one has stupid enemies.

Further reading: Jim Geraghty, “Shocker: New York Times Confirms Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Program”:

Saddam could have sold this information to anybody, any other state, or any well-funded terrorist group that had publicly pledged to kill millions of Americans and had expressed interest in nuclear arms. You know, like, oh... al-Qaeda. . . .

The antiwar crowd is going to have to argue that the information somehow wasn’t dangerous in the hands of Saddam Hussein, but was dangerous posted on the Internet. . . .

I’m still kinda blown away by this paragraph:

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990’s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.

Is this sentence referring to 1990, before the Persian Gulf War? Or 2002, months before the invasion of Iraq? Because “Iraq is a year away from building a nuclear bomb” was supposed to be a myth, a lie that Bush used to trick us into war.

And yet here is the New York Times, saying that Iraq had a “how to manual” on how to build a nuclear bomb, and could have had a nuke in a year.

In other news, it’s good to see that the New York Times is firmly against publicizing sensitive and classified information. Unless, of course, they’re the ones doing it.

The Politeness of the Blogosphere

Okay, “politeness” isn’t a term often applied to Internet discourse, but what else can one call the Right side of the blogosphere’s general acquiescence in the notion that John Kerry’s “stuck in Iraq” statement was, as he now claims, just a “botched joke”?

One of the manifestations of politeness is the gentle, compliant nod as someone caught in a howler stammers forth his demands-suspension-of-disbelief-from-the-yardarm excuse. On this occasion, Senator Kerry asks us to believe that he had in front of him the prefabricated words,

Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.

Yet it came out as,

You know, education, if you make the most of it, and you study hard, and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

Does misreading on that scale pass the giggle test?

There’s really no need to dig any deeper for clues, but it’s also noteworthy that the Senator needed a day to discover this “prepared text” and that his first response to criticism wasn’t to explain what he had meant to say but instead to release a demented rant claiming that the whole incident was the product of “right-wing nutjobs”. Done by a similarly situated Republican, his actions would call forth multiple repetitions of “The cover-up is worse than the crime.”

Eventually appeared a grudging apology that reiterated the cover story and added more insults directed at Republicans who had been so nervy as to take his words at face value. Whereupon, the inclination on the Right was to forgive and forget (even if Jonah Goldberg did later add, “It’s entirely possible I accepted his apology out of the soft bigotry of low expectations”). That was a gentlemanly gesture, but it won’t be reciprocated. The rhetorical war between Left and Right is classically asymmetrical. Recall how often George Allen’s “macaca” – a word that no one had ever heard before – was excoriated, no matter how often he expressed his contrition.

Now, I don’t favor excoriating John Kerry just for the sake of venting at an annoying character. For instance, while his last “botched joke” (“I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone”) deserved more notice than the none that it got, it lacked world-shaking significance. (OTOH, isn’t glib talk about assassinating the President slightly more offensive than uttering a word that might be a racial slur in some language somewhere in the world?) The reason why “stuck in Iraq” shouldn’t be similarly brushed aside is that it tells us a great deal about how the Angry Left views our country.

Senator Kerry drew a dichotomy between education and hard work on the one side and a military career on the other. His message was that serving America as a soldier is a last resort, the kind of low-prestige job that only the desperate accept. In other words, it is an occupation to be shunned. He was, in fact, making an anti-recruitment pitch. If enough young men and women listen to him, the military will become what he falsely claims it already is: to borrow the Duke of Wellington’s memorable phrase, “the mere scum of the earth”.

And what then? Senator Kerry doesn’t like the use that is currently being made of our Army, but does he imagine that we will never need one again? Breaking it in hopes of forcing an exit from Iraq is a prescription for national suicide. Either he – and the numerous Angry Leftists whose blogs applauded his (pre-cover-up) comments – are too foolish to see that, or they don’t care whether their country remains in a condition to resist its enemies. Maybe it isn’t unfair to wonder whether they really regard it as “their” country.

Perfect Foresight and the Iraqi Campaign

Recriminating about now irreversible decisions is generally an unprofitable enterprise. We ought to learn from our mistakes, of course, but accurate lessons won’t be drawn so long as the debate is mostly over assigning blame. Much of the recent discussion about events in Iraq seems to be founded on the notion that, because America failed to bring perfect peace, liberty and harmony to a turbulent region, the Iraqi people should atone for our faults by undergoing a purgatory of terrorism and civil war. To many on the Left, the collapse of democratic government in Iraq would prove that America should have taken no action against Saddam Hussein’s tyranny and has no rightful role on the world stage except as a faithful handmaiden of the United Nations, no matter how corrupt, ineffectual and supportive of despotism that body may be.

Whether Iraq is really on the verge of disintegration is hard to tell. Media reports harp on that theme, but much of the dour analysis comes from men who have a vested interest in American failure. History shows that the conventional wisdom of the press can be entirely wrong. Vietnam parallels being popular at the moment, let’s recall a couple: During the months preceding the coup d’etat against Ngo Dihn Diem, American correspondents painted a dire picture of a collapsing regime steadily losing ground to the Viet Cong. The truth, as Mark Moyar recounts in Triumph Forsaken, a history of the early years of the Vietnam War that makes good use of communist and other underutilized sources, was almost exactly the opposite. The government’s pacification program was making such rapid progress that the communist rebels despaired of survival, much less victory. North Vietnamese histories now admit as much. The impotent Diem we read about in the New York Times was a fiction, and his overthrow, largely instigated by the U.S. Embassy, was the greatest single cause of our ultimate defeat.

A more famous and deadly fiction is the one that Walter Cronkite et al. constructed around the Tet Offensive of 1968. The communists’ military disaster was on a level with Dien Bien Phu, but, thanks to the American media, the outcome was a victory for the defeated. As John O’Sullivan recalls,

It was a dramatic escalation of the war, but it was also a severe defeat for the Vietcong that revealed the fraudulence of their claim to be a people’s army.

Among the many aspects of Tet were that South Vietnam’s population failed to rally to the Vietcong's standard; that the Vietcong carried out mass murders of the civilian population in the areas it briefly occupied; that many of the Vietcong’s strongest units were destroyed in battle by the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces; and that South Vietnamese forces quickly reestablished the Saigon government’s authority throughout the country.

After Tet, the Vietcong had no chance of winning on their own. . . . But that is not how it was presented to the people by the U.S. media at the time. As the late Peter Braestrup demonstrated in his magisterial study, Big Story, the mainstream U.S. media depicted Tet as a severe defeat for the United States and as the beginning of an endless quagmire for American forces. That became the conventional wisdom of both the media and political elites. And as a result, the North Vietnamese eventually triumphed on the only battlefield where the United States could be defeated — the American home front.

The media could be right this time, but I see no reason to accept the word of prejudiced informants. There are no signs that American units are being defeated in combat or becoming demoralized, that terrorists are able to maintain a secure hold on any territory whatsoever, or that the populace has deserted the government that it elected last year. Urban terrorists, lavishly supported from across the Iranian and Syrian borders, continue their murders and have provoked indiscriminate amateur retaliation, but the effects add up to one of the lesser humanitarian crises of our era. If the death rate in Iraq were as high as the recent, thoroughly discredited Lancet study asserts, it would about equal that of a number of more or less peaceful African nations. That would be bad, but it would not justify the current outburst of hopelessness. The real figure, estimated by the CIA at about 5.37 per 1,000, is better than Iran’s. (NationMaster is a useful source of statistics, but bear in mind that death rates are heavily skewed by the age structure of the population. For instance, the European countries with high death rates, such as Russia and Bulgaria, have high percentages of oldsters.)

Let us, however, accept arguendo that Iraq is a wretched mess. Suppose that, in early 2003, we had possessed 20/20 foresight. Would we have been right to conclude that our best option was to stay home and do nothing?

Consider what we would have foreseen:

• A swift military victory, deposing Saddam Hussein without thousands of combat deaths, a bloody siege of Baghdad, the destruction of Iraq’s oil fields, mass starvation or the creation of millions of refugees – all of which experts forecast as high probabilities.

• Three democratic elections with a peaceful transition of power to the winners, in a country that had never held a free election before.

• The dismantling of Libya’s nuclear weapons program, which proved to be more advanced that our intelligence agencies had believed, and the breakup of A. Q. Khan’s Pakistani nuclear smuggling ring.

• The exposure of, and end to, Saddam’s program of massive international bribery under the cover of the United Nations Oil-for-Food program.

• A nascent movement toward liberalization and democracy inside the Moslem world – an opportunity created by events in Iraq, then squandered through the inaction of Western “realists”.

• No successful revenge attacks against American soil, which is very likely attributable to –

• The concentration of mufsidun in Iraq, responding to al-Qa’eda’s declaration that it is the central front in the Islamofascist hirabah, which has led to –

• The death or capture of thousands of enemy leaders and foot soldiers, who will never plot destruction in London or New York.

In exchange, the auspices would have told us, we would have lost over 2,000 brave young soldiers – not a happy prospect but also not a large number by the standards of past wars – and have had to endure the frustration of propping up a weak and disorderly government. That price would not, I think, have looked so high, particularly not when one compares it to the other possible courses of action.

The only alternatives to deposing Saddam that anyone ever put forward were continuing to contain his regime or giving up the effort and letting Iraq return to the position of a “normal” country. Only wild-eyed optimists can believe that the former strategy could have been sustained much longer. Saddam’s corruption of foreign leaders and UN bureaucrats ensured its demise. For practical purposes, not invading Iraq was tantamount to lifting sanctions in the near future, which meant handing Saddam a prestige-enhancing victory. According to the Duelfer Report, he intended to follow up by pushing forward with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons research. Oil money, a network of bribed foreigners and the undisrupted A. Q. Khan operation would have facilitated his progress.

In retrospect, the worst that one can say about the Iraqi campaign is that it produced a few surprises that were mostly not surprising: The enemy decided to continue the fight at the point where our forces were strongest, rather than looking for a vulnerable spot elsewhere. Iraqis found that self-government is hard work, and many didn’t forgo the chance to settle old scores violently. The Islamofascists continued to hate the West and didn’t instantly accept defeat. The positive results immensely outweigh those negatives. Just as in Vietnam, the United States faces success, and many of our elite want to run away in panic.

Further reading: The Wall Street Journal, “The Beltway Retreat”

666,666 Killed!

I wonder why the authors of the now notorious Lancet study of the alleged death toll in Iraq didn’t pick a more attention grabbing estimate of “excess mortality” than “654,965”. If one’s digits aren’t really significant mathematically, they can at least be significant in a different sense. Besides, a double invocation of the Number of the Beast would reflect the Lancet’s fair and balanced view of the devilish United States of America and its demonic President.

Tim Blair has taken the trouble to round up commentary on this absurd piece of pseudo-scholarship. Also worth reading is David Frum’s concise demolition. But Mr. Blair is a right winger from Australia, where Evil John Howard is almost as insidious as the Bushitler himself, and Mr. Frum is known to be a Jew neoconservative. For readers who are disinclined to credit such critics, I suggest “Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates”, issued by the hard Left, anti-American group, Iraq Body Count. IBC keeps a running tally of what it claims are civilian deaths from military action in Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Its sources and methods are heavily skewed to make the situation look as bad as possible (vide Alston B. Ramsay, “Iraq Body Fraud” and Stephen Spruiell, “Bad Counts”), but its tally is about a tenth of Lancet’s, and its criticisms of the unreality of the latter’s figures are devastating.

The Iraqi mortality estimates published in the Lancet in October 2006 imply, among other things, that:

1. On average, a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every single day in the first half of 2006, with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms;
2. Some 800,000 or more Iraqis suffered blast wounds and other serious conflict-related injuries in the past two years, but less than a tenth of them received any kind of hospital treatment;
3. Over 7% of the entire adult male population of Iraq has already been killed in violence, with no less than 10% in the worst affected areas covering most of central Iraq;
4. Half a million death certificates were received by families which were never officially recorded as having been issued;
5. The Coalition has killed far more Iraqis in the last year than in earlier years containing the initial massive "Shock and Awe" invasion and the major assaults on Falluja.

The notion that over half a million deaths from combat, plus a presumably greater number of wounds, have been inflicted in three years of desultory action, mostly carried out with firearms, improvised explosives and small mortars, requires heroic suspension of disbelief; indeed, disbelief must be hanged, drawn and quartered to make such statistics plausible.

The IBC declines to speculate on how the Lancet’s results could be so far from believability, much less accuracy, but a clue is offered by a different pair of oddities noted by a statistics teacher blogging under the name Notropis:

• First, the study’s response rate was astounding: 98 percent of the residences visited had a head of household present who was willing to answer strangers’ questions. American polls typically get responses from 10 to 15 percent of the houses called upon. Iraq is different, but is it really a society of eager survey subjects?

• Second, although households to be interviewed were initially selected in what looks like a rigorous, neutral fashion, the interviewers had carte blanche to “to change to an alternate location if they perceived the level of insecurity or risk to be unacceptable”.

Furthermore, there were only two interview teams, so that any sloppiness or bias on the part of either infected half the data. Given the ease with which the teams could depart from the survey plan and select their own uncontrolled samples, the 98 percent response becomes more explicable. My inference is that they got in touch with whatever contacts they had in the vicinity of the preselected sites and had them assemble a group of interviewees. If those contacts included a high proportion of terrorist sympathizers (not unlikely for people hired by openly anti-American researchers), the reported rate of violent death would most likely be many times the national average. What we thus may have is a moderately accurate insight into how much damage the war is meting out to the mufsidun, which is no tragedy at all to the average, peaceable citizen of Iraq.

Further reading: Steven E. Moore, “655,000 War Dead?”:

[T]he key to the validity of cluster sampling is to use enough cluster points. . . .[T]he Johns Hopkins team says it used 47 cluster points for their sample of 1,849 interviews. This is astonishing: I wouldn’t survey a junior high school, no less an entire country, using only 47 cluster points.

Neither would anyone else. For its 2004 survey of Iraq, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) used 2,200 cluster points of 10 interviews each for a total sample of 21,688. True, interviews are expensive and not everyone has the U.N.’s bank account. However, even for a similarly sized sample, that is an extraordinarily small number of cluster points. A 2005 survey conducted by ABC News, Time magazine, the BBC, NHK and Der Spiegel used 135 cluster points with a sample size of 1,711 – almost three times that of the Johns Hopkins team for 93% of the sample size.

What happens when you don't use enough cluster points in a survey? You get crazy results when compared to a known quantity, or a survey with more cluster points. . . . With so few cluster points, it is highly unlikely the Johns Hopkins survey is representative of the population in Iraq. However, there is a definitive method of establishing if it is. Recording the gender, age, education and other demographic characteristics of the respondents allows a researcher to compare his survey results to a known demographic instrument, such as a census.

Dr. Roberts [one of the authors of the study] said that his team’s surveyors did not ask demographic questions. I was so surprised to hear this that I emailed him later in the day to ask a second time if his team asked demographic questions and compared the results to the 1997 Iraqi census. Dr. Roberts replied that he had not even looked at the Iraqi census.

And so, while the gender and the age of the deceased were recorded in the 2006 Johns Hopkins study, nobody, according to Dr. Roberts, recorded demographic information for the living survey respondents.

Mr. Moore doesn’t ask the obvious question, but I will: Did the researchers fail to collect demographic data out of mere carelessness, or did they want to make it impossible for anyone to demonstrate that their sample was not a cross-section of the Iraqi population?

“A House Divided Against Itself”

If the Democrats win a sweeping victory on November 7th – and that is certainly the way to bet – the media will instantly forget all about Mark Foley. What the voters demand, the pundits will intone, is a rapid American scuttle from Iraq and a general winding down of the War on Terror. In a sense, they will be right.

Not right in the way that they’ll pretend: Nowhere near a majority of the country aligns with the Angry Left. On the other hand, it looks more and more like a majority, including a large segment of the Right, accepts one key Angry Left premise: that Islamic fascism and its allies of convenience are not a genuine threat that necessitates any kind of energetic American response. Whatever problems exist in the world can be either left to fester or resolved through talk. Senator Kerry exhibited this worldview at its farcical fringe last week when he declared that the proper approach to Kim Jong Il’s nuclear ambitions would have been to dispatch “a top-level negotiating team with a mandate to stop this test from going forward”. Well, a “negotiating team” headed by James Bond might do the job; James Baker? I doubt it.

Much of the softness of recent Bush Administration policy (an “all-U.N.-all-the-time defensive crouch”, as Bill Kristol calls it) can be explained by the President’s realization that he doesn’t lead a united America. In the wake of 9/11, there was vast popular and political support for toppling the pro-terrorist regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now it takes the exertion of extraordinary effort by the White House to avoid being compelled to treat major terrorist leaders like motorists stopped for illegal left turns.

The problem is not merely that vigorous action, e. g., mining North Korea’s harbors, wiping out military installations and systematically destroying the Dear Leader’s palaces, would encounter fierce domestic opposition, but that our enemies would not be intimidated. Having concluded that most Americans don’t want to fight anybody, anywhere, at any time, they would wait out the flurry of Presidential activity, confident that it would soon be reined in. At the same time, what rational government will do much to aid our initiatives, knowing that today’s show of resolution will dwindle into tomorrow’s embarrassed retreat? Enemy confidence and friends’ apprehensions will bound upward, naturally, after Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi take their places as kingpins of the U.S. Congress.

Back when American opinion was united, unexpressed threats were sufficient to elicit foreign cooperation. General Musharraf of Pakistan, as he himself no longer disguises, didn’t facilitate our overthrow of the Taliban out of liking for our cause. He acquiesced in our using his nation as a route to Afghanistan because he was afraid of the consequences of doing otherwise. Similarly, many Arab governments that don’t like to offend the mufsidun quietly eased the way for the ouster of Saddam Hussein, because George W. Bush frightened them even more than Osama bin-Laden. Today he frightens only Keith Olbermann.

To make matters worse, the President can’t really count on his own side of the political spectrum these days. What issue has evoked real passion on the Right this year? Building a fence along to Mexican border to keep out a dangerous influx of bus boys and tomato pickers. How about a fence where it would do some good, along the Iran-Iraq border? The “Minuteman” sympathizers would, I suppose, nod absently before getting back to what they really care about.

Maybe the President could have done something to head off this dismal state of affairs, but I doubt it. The central cause of the country’s loss of energy is that the Angry Left and its friends in the media focused single-mindedly on creating a negative image of the War on Terror. Meanwhile, the Right acted as if there weren’t a war on, as if pork barrel spending (not exactly invented by the 109th Congress, though readers of some conservative blogs may think so) and homosexuality and immigration were in the same league of significance as the mufsiduns’ ongoing war against Western civilization. In a tug-of-war in which one side pulls with all its might and the other with half an arm, you know which way the rope will move.

Well, we can do nothing about what might have been, only about what may be. With Democrats in control of Congress, the prospect for the next two years is grim. Barring incredible strokes of brilliance or luck, the President who is sworn in on January 20, 2009, will face a much stronger Islamofascist threat from a far weaker position than today.

The Left’s fantasy is that we will leave Iraq, apologizing all the way, and the terrorists will then feel such a glow of kindliness that they will beat their bomb belts into plowshares. And if they instead launch offensives against Jordan, Saudi-controlled Arabia and the Gulf emirates, while a nuclear-armed Iran cows Europe into neutrality, that will just prove that we haven’t been sensitive enough to Islam’s multiple “grievances”.

My hope, and indeed expectation, is that the West will eventually rouse itself to turn back the barbarian tide. In a decade, it will be a harder task than it would be now, and the last act is likely to be a heavy-handed “crusader” occupation of all the Moslem lands rather than the benign spread of democratic self-governance that could be brought about by a vigorous prosecution of the present conflict. Mind you, I am predicting, not advocating. The early, easy incision would be preferable by far, but it appears that Dr. Bush will not be allowed to perform that surgery.

Not Just “Empty Bureaucratic Twaddle”

Instapundit calls the newly released portions of last April’s National Intelligence Estimate “empty bureaucratic twaddle”, a characterization that is hard to dispute. Let’s remember, though, that the Beltway intellectual universe is rich in twaddle. The important question is which twaddle is true and which is false. The NIE, while not scintillating in its insights, tells us, at least, that the consensus of our country’s intelligence agencies firmly rejects the twaddle about the War on Terror currently being peddled by the anti-war Left in general and the leaders of the Democratic Party in particular.

The central themes of the Democrats’ rather unspecific “smart and tough” War on Terror strategy are –

1. The withdrawal (er, “strategic redeployment”) of American forces from Iraq would reduce the mufsiduns’ motivation to fight us and thereby reduce the terrorist threat.

2. Our most important immediate objective should be the elimination of al-Qa’eda’s top echelons. Troops withdrawn from Iraq should head for Pakistan to hunt for Osama bin-Laden.

3. Increased funding for passive defensive measures like port security would be more effective than taking the war to the enemy.

On all of those points, the NIE contradicts the Democratic message.

The contradiction is most direct on Iraq. The NIE identifies that country as the center of gravity of the War on Terror, the place where defeat will demoralize the mufsidun and victory spur them to greater efforts. Right now, unfortunately, they believe that they are winning. After all, the New York Times says so practically every day! An American pullout could only increase their elation; they won’t be fooled by our labeling it “strategic redeployment”. Contrariwise, if we patiently and persistently hunt down their leaders and kill their soldiers, they will waken one day to the realization that they cannot beat a foe that has overwhelming superiority in numbers, troop quality, technology and cash – and refuses to accommodatingly give up.

Though willing to abandon Iraq, Democrats profess to eagerness for battle in Afghanistan, where, they say, our troops can pursue Osama bin-Laden and the rest of the al-Qa’eda upper echelon. The NIE indicates that those tasks, however satisfying they may be to contemplate, are decreasingly urgent. As the NIE says, “United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qa’ida and disrupted its operations”. It “continue[s] to pose the greatest threat to the Homeland and US interests abroad by a single terrorist organization”, but that threat is less than it used to be.

Instead of a unified, powerful threat, the NIE judges that we face a multitude of relatively weak ones. That is good news in the sense that uncoordinated cells with limited manpower and resources are less likely to be able to launch devastating attacks. It is bad news in the sense that fighting a “diffuse” foe requires more patience than Americans historically have possessed.

The essentials for winning this kind of war are intelligence gathering and preemptive strikes against terrorist groups at the earliest feasible moment after they are identified. Concern for terrorists’ due process rights, which so many Democrats have demonstrated over the past five years, gravely heightens the risk that we will learn about plots only after they kill more of our countrymen.

The Democrats’ substitute for intelligence and preemption is to play pure defense: inspect more cargo containers, tighten airline security (but no profiling, please!), guard buildings more closely, screen baggage on trains and buses, and so on. Putting aside the question of whether these expensive, inconvenient safeguards would be effective, their direction is wrong. They would passively protect U.S. territory when the main terrorist threat lies elsewhere. Note these passages from the NIE:

The jihadists regard Europe as an important venue for attacking Western interests. Extremist networks inside the extensive Muslim diasporas in Europe facilitate recruitment and staging for urban attacks, as illustrated by the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bombings.

* * * *

We assess that such groups [various mufsidun independent of al-Qa’eda] pose less of a danger to the Homeland than does al-Qa’ida but will pose varying degrees of threat to our allies and to US interests abroad. The focus of their attacks is likely to ebb and flow between local regime targets and regional or global ones.

And, in fact, all of the major terrorist attacks since 9/11 have taken place outside the homeland – in England, Spain, Bali, India, etc. For both humanitarian and strategic reasons, we need to place a high priority on degrading terrorists’ capacity for attacking other countries, the very opposite of the passivity that the Left prefers.

The principal solace that the Democrats find in the NIE is its judgment that Iraq has become a “cause célèbre” among the mufsidun, useful for stirring up anti-Western feeling. From that, they infer that the whole Iraqi venture was a mistake. The flaw in that logic is that the NIE is not a comparison of the real world to counterfactual possibilities. It does not speculate on where the war’s center of gravity would be if it were not in Iraq, nor on whether the level of enemy activity would be more or less in an alternative universe. If the Left wants to argue that the overthrow of Ba’athist Iraq had a unique resonance in the Moslem world, without which terrorism would be static or declining, that’s fine, but the NIE doesn’t say anything of the sort.

We know in hindsight that the upsurge of Islamofascist terrorism began in the early 1990’s. Would greater American forbearance toward Saddam Hussein have halted that trend? Or would it have demonstrated that defying the U.S. carried only limited risks, that hirabah was not only pleasing to Allah but not especially dangerous to oneself? Would Islamofascist propagandists have been at a loss to find other causes célèbres? How about in Afghanistan? Or in Israel? Or in one of the non-Islamofascist Moslem states: Pakistan or Morocco or Jordan or Saudi-controlled Arabia? For that matter, as The Mudville Gazette recollects, one of the grievances stressed in Osama bin-Laden’s pre-9/11 fatwas was the Clinton era policy of “containing” Saddam Hussein. One could well have said back then that our sanctions, no-fly zones and inspections were, to borrow the NIE’s words, “breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement”. Don’t we all remember the jeremiads against the U.S. for supposedly denying Arab babies food and medicine?

No one knows what might have been. In this case, though, only one set of guesses is plausible, and those are not the ones that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Teddy Kennedy make.

The Blurb Writers’ School of Journalism

We’re all familiar with the way producers of Broadway flops yank phony nuggets of praise out of negative reviews. “If you pay to see this hideous show, don’t expect an enjoyable evening or that you’ll get a tenth of your money’s worth” becomes “an enjoyable evening . . . you’ll get . . . your money’s worth”.

That’s all in good sport, and readers of theater ads know what to expect. Should we be similarly skeptical of what purport to be straightforward news reports about the contents of government documents?

The first Associated Press story [link probably for on-line Wall Street Journal subscribers only, but AP is, of course, reposted everywhere] on the just-declassified “key findings” of last April’s National Intelligence Estimate reads like a travesty straight out of The Producers. Let’s compare AP’s pseudo-summary to the NIE’s words:

AP: A declassified government intelligence report says the war in Iraq has become a “cause celebre” for Islamic extremists, breeding deep resentment of the U.S. that is likely to get worse before it gets better.

NIE: We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.

• The Iraq conflict has become the cause celebre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

AP: In the bleak report, released Tuesday on President Bush’s orders, the nation’s most veteran analysts conclude that despite serious damage to the leadership of al Qaeda, the threat from Islamic extremists has spread both in numbers and in geographic reach.

“If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks world-wide,” the document says.

NIE: United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qa’ida and disrupted its operations; however, we judge that al-Qa’ida will continue to pose the greatest threat to the Homeland and US interests abroad by a single terrorist organization. We also assess that the global jihadist movement – which includes al-Qa’ida, affiliated and independent terrorist groups, and emerging networks and cells – is spreading and adapting to counterterrorism efforts.

• Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with precision, a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion.
• If this trend continues, threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide.
• Greater pluralism and more responsive political systems in Muslim majority nations would alleviate some of the grievances jihadists exploit. Over time, such progress, together with sustained, multifaceted programs targeting the vulnerabilities of the jihadist movement and continued pressure on al-Qa’ida, could erode support for the jihadists.

AP: “The confluence of shared purpose and dispersed actors will make it harder to find and undermine jihadist groups.”

NIE: We assess that the global jihadist movement is decentralized, lacks a coherent global strategy, and is becoming more diffuse. New jihadist networks and cells, with anti-American agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge. The confluence of shared purpose and dispersed actors will make it harder to find and undermine jihadist groups.

• We assess that the operational threat from self-radicalized cells will grow in importance to US counterterrorism efforts, particularly abroad but also in the Homeland.
• The jihadists regard Europe as an important venue for attacking Western interests. Extremist networks inside the extensive Muslim diasporas in Europe facilitate recruitment and staging for urban attacks, as illustrated by the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bombings.

Summarizing its own spin, AP assures us that “more than three pages of stark judgments warning about the spread of terrorism contrasted with the administration's glass-half-full declarations”.

The parts of the NIE that I have quoted obviously do not present a Pollyannish “victory is just around the corner” assessment of the War on Terror. They do, however, sound very much like “glass-half-full declarations”. The enemy is still fighting and is adapting to our tactics. On the other hand, al-Qa’eda, judged to be “the greatest threat”, has been seriously damaged and disrupted, and Islamofascism, taken as a whole, “is decentralized, lacks a coherent global strategy, and is becoming more diffuse”.

It should go without saying that, while a decentralized, diffuse, incoherent enemy is hard to eradicate completely, it also lacks the tools for launching truly devastating attacks. What the NIE foresees is a long period of low-grade terrorism, focused more intensely on Europe (not, I note, the leading participant in the Iraqi campaign) and “local regime targets” (i. e., Moslem-run governments) than the U.S. Its assessment (as of last February, when its data gathering was reportedly concluded) is that, at the present time, “the underlying factors fueling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities and are likely to do so for the duration of the timeframe of this Estimate [indicated elsewhere to be five years]”.

That is not good news, but let’s look at the bases for the report’s uncheerful estimate:

Four underlying factors are fueling the spread of the jihadist movement: (1) Entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness; (2) the Iraq “jihad;” (3) the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations; and (4) pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims all of which jihadists exploit.

The report’s opinion of what can be done to mitigate the second factor has already been quoted: “Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.” The other factors are not the kind that can be dealt with overnight. Numbers (1) and (4) are longstanding and in large part irrational. Mitigating number (3) requires action by Moslems themselves, which is sadly unlikely so long as so much of the Islamic world refuses to take responsibility for its own future.

The report also has ideas about ways to exploit Islamofascist weaknesses, and it is here that it wanders into Pollyanna territory:

Concomitant vulnerabilities in the jihadist movement have emerged that, if fully exposed and exploited, could begin to slow the spread of the movement. They include dependence on the continuation of Muslim-related conflicts, the limited appeal of the jihadists radical ideology, the emergence of respected voices of moderation, and criticism of the violent tactics employed against mostly Muslim citizens.

• The jihadists’ greatest vulnerability is that their ultimate political solution – an ultra-conservative interpretation of shari’a-based governance spanning the Muslim world – is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims. Exposing the religious and political straitjacket that is implied by the jihadists’ propaganda would help to divide them from the audiences they seek to persuade.
• Recent condemnations of violence and extremist religious interpretations by a few notable Muslim clerics signal a trend that could facilitate the growth of a constructive alternative to jihadist ideology: peaceful political activism. This also could lead to the consistent and dynamic participation of broader Muslim communities in rejecting violence, reducing the ability of radicals to capitalize on passive community support. In this way, the Muslim mainstream emerges as the most powerful weapon in the war on terror.
• Countering the spread of the jihadist movement will require coordinated multilateral efforts that go well beyond operations to capture or kill terrorist leaders.

If democratic reform efforts in Muslim majority nations progress over the next five years, political participation probably would drive a wedge between intransigent extremists and groups willing to use the political process to achieve their local objectives. Nonetheless, attendant reforms and potentially destabilizing transitions will create new opportunities for jihadists to exploit.

That is the mush that we’ve heard so often from the “intelligence community”, where fear of clear, decisive action and faith in a silent majority of friends that will spring to our side if only we can find the right words to woo them are the overriding predispositions. It’s remarkable that the analysts steeled themselves to state the obvious: that defeating Islamofascism in Iraq is a vital step toward defeating it everywhere, while “perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere”.

Still, whatever its flaws, the NIE findings, read as a whole rather than in the AP’s snippets, lead to several important conclusions:

1. Just as President Bush predicted in his first speech to the nation after 9/11, the War on Terror will be prolonged and often frustrating. Demands for fast victories, perfect plans and zero-defects execution remain as childish as ever.

2. While terrorist clusters are most likely increasing in number, they are decreasing in capability, and they lack a war-winning strategy. As a consequence, their attacks will tend to be uncoordinated mosquito bites rather than hammer blows directed at vital Western interests.

3. Adopting a stance of passive defense, in effect retreating to the homeland and striving to secure it against all possible threats, is a losing strategy even if it could be guaranteed to keep American soil safe. The mufsidun offensive against Europe and non-fascist Moslem regimes would continue and has a high likelihood of prevailing in the absence of powerful U.S. countermeasures.

4. Because the motives that lead men to join the mufsidun are emotional instead of rational, Islamofascist recruitment will ebb and flow rapidly, depending upon current events. That volatility limits the ability of our enemies to make long-term plans and can be expected to lead to rash decision making. Moreover, victories and defeats can swing emotions wildly. Yesterday’s zealot can quickly become discouraged by setbacks to his cause.

5. The emotions that fuel the mufsidun have far deeper roots than recent American actions. They are a pathology within Islam that, ultimately, only Islamic reformers can weed out. In the meantime, we have little choice but to do all that we can to destroy those who are implacably determined to destroy us.

The traitors who leaked “summaries” of the NIE, knowing what it really said, must have counted on its remaining classified. Now that the contents are public, the media will, as AP’s Max Bialystock-like efforts show, do what they can to keep the spin going. Perhaps they’ll succeed, but I suspect that Karl Rove is smiling broadly tonight.

Addendum: Debating on TV yesterday with lefty Jonathan Alter, Hugh Hewitt stuck his neck out only very slightly when he declared that he didn’t believe that the New York Times had portrayed the NIE accurately. The ensuing exchange is a classic of left-wing fantasy logic:

HH: I don't believe the New York Times.

JA: Nobody in government is disputing it, Hugh.

HH: Oh, they are, too. The White House is disputing it, John Cornyn did on this program last hour.

JA: Yeah, they are now. They're trying to get...because they realize that politically, they have a problem. Nobody disputed it.

In the Alter-verse, it appears, every golden word in the NYT must be accepted as true unless it is disputed before it appears.

Uncle Osama’s Recruiting Posters

Let’s assume arguendo, over the Administration’s denials, that the leaked highlights from last April’s National Intelligence Estimate fairly reflect the document’s thrust. And let’s pass lightly over the question of how U.S. intelligence agencies get their information about how well or badly terrorist recruiting is going these days. Have they captured al-Qa’eda’s personnel rosters? Or do they depend on impressions that anybody might gather from reading al-Jazeera, al-Reuters and the New York Times? If the CIA has credible data showing that the number of terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S. has increased dramatically since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, that means a great deal. If it knows only that there are more al-Qa’eda foot soldiers in Iraq today than in September 2002, the interest quotient is much less.

Setting all doubts aside and taking it as given that the American presence in Iraq is an effective talking point for our enemies’ recruiting sergeants, let’s consider what that means.

One possible analysis – the one that the Left implicitly or explicitly adopts – is that our invasion of Iraq and subsequent underwriting of its post-Ba’athist government have aroused fierce anger throughout the House of Islam, motivating young Moslems to flock to the ranks of al-Qa’eda and its siblings. If we had left Saddam Hussein alone, that anger would never have been sparked; as soon as we depart from Iraq, it will abate. Such is the lesson that the Howard Dean/Teddy Kennedy/Michael Moore Democrats want the public to draw from the NIE leaks, but how cogent is it?

A prima facie oddity is that it contradicts one of the Democrats’ favorite shibboleths: that irreconcilable differences existed between the “secular” Saddam and the “religious” al-Qa’eda. If the idea of cooperation between the two is beyond the prospect of belief, why should an attack on the atheistical Ba’athists have incited the wrath of Osama’s acolytes? From the leftist point of view, it seems, Moslems are sometimes all of one mind and sometimes riven by divisions, whichever happens to suit the needs of the argument of the moment.

Why, indeed, should any Moslem, outside the Ba’athist ruling circle, have felt sympathy for Baghdad’s preening tyrant? No rational observer can doubt that Saddam brought on his own fate. Having been left in power after his crushing military defeat in 1991, he devoted the next decade to antagonizing powerful enemies, almost as if he wanted America to put finis to his regime. The crowning folly was his refusal to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors, from which it was natural to conclude that he had much to hide. The Left may think that he was entitled to a presumption of innocence, but it’s hard to see how Arabs, living where attitudes toward due process of law are rather casual, would expect the United States to treat national security like a criminal trial.

Perhaps, then, the Islamofascist volunteers were inflamed less by the invasion than its aftermath. In that case, what enraged them? Abu Ghraib, so often invoked by the Western Left, is an absurdly inadequate irritant. Any Moslem angered by the humiliating, but basically harmless, indignities inflicted on suspected terrorists in that prison ought to be vastly more appalled by random murders of innocent Iraqi civilians. Yet we are urged to believe that the horror at the former led men to commit the latter.

Aside from the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, the American “occupation” has been benign by any reasonable standard. We have let the Iraqis choose their own government, not even vetoing anti-Americans like Muqtadr al-Sadr, poured money into reconstruction and, contrary to what the Left predicted, made no effort to reimburse our costs from local oil revenues. If anything, we have erred on the side of passive benevolence, but I don’t think that Administration critics are postulating that throwing al-Sadr in jail for his easily provable crimes would quiet the “insurgents”.

The idea that America and its allies have inflicted any palpable injury on Iraq in particular or Arabs and Moslems in general is unsustainable. If enmity had not already existed before March 2003, our actions in Iraq would not have created it. At worst, they were the occasion for an outbreak of latent hostilities. Had nothing occurred in Iraq, something displeasing to the Islamofascist psyche would have happened somewhere. As Jim Geraghty aptly says,

Look, not even I would argue that the Iraq war was not a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology – i.e., a reason that Islamists are angry at the United States. But as we have seen in recent months, these folks explode in a murderous rage over rumors of a flushed Koran, cartoons in Denmark, a line from the Pope’s speech, an edition of Playboy in Indonesia, a Salman Rushdie novel. In other words, if it wasn’t Iraq, these people would be embracing jihadism for any one of a million other reasons. It seems to be widely forgotten that all of these groups are outraged over the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, as well. It’s not like al-Qaeda and its affiliates are cool with our first post-9/11 war, and simply object to the second one.

The only way to avoid the confrontation that now happens to center on Iraq would be to adopt a policy of “retreat to the wall”: Wherever the terrorists push, we give way.

Yielding constantly would keep the peace – until we faced demands that we could not accept. Those who scoff at the necessity of fighting Islamofascism here and now either hope that the enemy’s maximum aspirations won’t turn out to be intolerable or imagine that the battle will go more easily if it is fought at a later time in another place.

Is the expectation that a series of easy victories will palliate Moslem anger or that, as the West falls back, it will gather support from currently unfriendly precincts? If so, I’d be interested to know how much the Left is willing to surrender. Will they take in stride the destruction of Israel, a nuclear-armed Iran and Egypt, the replacement by the Saudi oligarchy by an Islamofascist caliphate, the end of the secularist ascendancy in Turkey, the formation of a de facto state-within-a-state for European Moslems, the introduction of shariah into Western judicial systems, the reshaping of social legislation to suit Islamic preferences (from bans on immodest female attire to legal sanctions for homosexuality), the suppression of speech and writings “offensive” to Moslem ears and eyes. . . ? Every item on that list is already a plank of the Islamofascist platform. None of them was inspired by events in Iraq.

There is, let me note, one way in which the Iraqi campaign has unquestionably been a boon to terrorist recruitment. Before Iraq, ill-disposed Moslems might well have seen the West as a unified colossus, against which resistance, however desirable, was futile. Now they are more likely to think that Osama bin-Laden was right: The West is a “weak horse”, many of whose riders regard George W. Bush, neoconservatives and the Religious Right as their true enemies. If mere persistence in pinprick assaults in Iraq can induce a near-majority of Americans to favor precipitate withdrawal, isn’t it obvious that Islamic fascism is the “strong horse”, to which Allah will grant speedy and complete victory?

Al-Qa’eda’s best recruiting posters, I often think, are the front pages of the New York Times.

Further reading: A retired intelligence analyst offers insights into what the National Intelligence Estimate really says, as opposed to the anti-Bush cherries that the NYT has extracted: “What You Won’t Read in the New York Times”; “More of What You Won’t Read in the NYT”.

The Path to 9/11: The Only Lesson We Need

Since I don’t receive either network or cable television, it isn’t likely that I’ll see ABC’s The Path to 9/11. Judging by John Podhoretz’s and John J. Miller’s reviews, that won’t be a grievous loss. The show’s principal merit, it seems, is its tribute to Afghan freedom fighter Ahmed Massoud, assassinated by al-Qa’eda two days before 9/11. Its flaws are what one expects from a Hollywood mockumentary, namely, an itch to “improve” real events. Shakespeare could do that. When ABC tries, it invents scenes that are neither accurate history nor compelling drama. They merely furnish ammunition to Clintonistas, whose real complaint is not that words are put into Sandy Berger’s mouth but that the American public is reminded of how insouciantly Mr. Clinton and his advisors viewed the terrorist threat.

While my sympathy for the allegations of factual distortions is much diminished by disgust at the Democrats’ typically thuggish tactics (such as not-too-veiled threats to challenge the broadcast licenses of ABC affiliates), I do agree that recriminations ought to be limited. Nobody expected an act of war as grotesque as the 9/11 skyjackings. If the authorities had discovered and publicized the plot, how many would have believed them?

The fundamental flaw in our country’s pre-9/11 approach to terrorism was that we treated our openly declared enemies as if they were garden variety criminals. They were allowed to go about their business unmolested until and unless definite evidence of nefarious designs came to light. That is an adequate strategy for dealing with mafiosi, whose conspiracies center around vice, robbery and individual acts of violence. It’s no way to fight a war.

When Osama bin Laden issued a declaration of war against the United States on August 23, 1996, our government’s reaction was – nothing. It was ridiculous for an obscure Arab businessman to start a war with the world’s mightiest nation, so we treated his statement as a meaningless tantrum. Osama might be at war with us, but we were not with him. Five years later, we learned the cost of that asymmetrical attitude.

In a world where individuals or small groups can murder hundreds or thousands (and maybe millions, if they are able to obtain chemical, biological or nuclear weapons), no adversary is so tiny that it can be prudently ignored.

There can be no legal or moral objection to waging war against those who define themselves as our enemies, either in Osama’s formalistic fashion or by enthusiastically applauding the death of Americans and urging others to commit murder. There may be practical reasons to exert less than our full force against particular foes – he who attacks everywhere attacks nothing – but I see no reason why overt enemies, whether al-Qa’eda or Ba’athist Iraq or the Iranian mullarchy, should feel safe from American onslaught. They chose war; let them take the consequences.

That is the lesson we should reflect on tomorrow, as we remember the atrocities of five years ago. It’s obvious, though, that some people refuse to learn. A host of Democratic politicians are taking the occasion to bewail the fate of Saddam Hussein, a tyrant who glorified Mohammed Atta and paid money to encourage suicide bombings. I fear that Senator Jay Rockefeller spoke for much of his party when he declared this morning that, if left in power, Saddam “wasn’t going to attack us”. Implicit in that confident assurance is the belief that all of Saddam’s anti-American rhetoric was just bad temper. So what if he used his oil money to give $25,000 grants to the families of Jew killers and to bribe foreign politicians? Surely he would never have hired anybody to kill Americans. And would never have slipped sarin into hostile hands. He was, after all, “isolated”, just as harmless as, well, Osama bin Laden in 1996.