Alexander and Darius

Victor Davis Hanson reviews Alexander the Great and finds it bears no resemblance to history.

The film goes on for nearly three hours, but we hear nothing of what either supporters or detractors of Alexander, both ancient and modern, have agreed were the central issues of his life. Did he really believe in a unity of mankind, and were his mass mixed marriages, Persian dress, and kowtowing cynical, sincere, or delusions of megalomania? We see nothing of the siege of Tyre, Gaza, much less Thebes or even the burning of Persepolis. Other than the talking head Ptolemy, none of his generals have much of a character. There is nothing really in detail about the page purging other than a single reference; Stone, I would have thought, could have had a field day with Alexander’s introduction of both crucifixion and decimation. ...

So since Stone omitted the controversial and key issues of Alexander’s career, what do we get instead for at least over two thirds of the movie? Mostly sit-com drama, with gay and bi- subplots, in various bedrooms and banquet halls. Olympias was something out of a teen-aged vampire movie, not the sophisticated and conniving royal we read about in the sources. It is the old Dallas or Falcon Crest glossy pulp in Macedonian drag.

A sense of the wealth of information that is omitted -- and which VDH knows is omitted -- can be glimpsed from the incident of mass mixed marriages. Some management theorists, going a little deeper than Oliver Stone, have regarded the incident as the first recorded instance of a merger in history. Others have characterized it as the first stumbling steps towards modern multiculturalism.

In quick succession he took Egypt, Babylonia, and then, over the course of two years, the heart of the Achaemenid Empire--Susa, Ecbatana, and Persepolis--the last of which he burned. Alexander married Roxana (Roshanak), the daughter of the most powerful of the Bactrian chiefs (Oxyartes, who revolted in present-day Tadzhikistan), and in 324 commanded his officers and 10,000 of his soldiers to marry Iranian women. The mass wedding, held at Susa, was a model of Alexander's desire to consummate the union of the Greek and Iranian peoples.

Of course, not every shotgun wedding ends happily. Some historians have argued the experiment was a failure. "The result was mass desertion and mutiny, one of many that occurred during his campaign." The siege of Tyre, which the erudite VDH refers to in a single phrase, was an instance in which an army defeated a maritime power, always an interesting situation. It was based on the appreciation that the Persian navy was operationally constrained by the need to obtain chandlering supplies at Tyre. Therefore he reduced Tyre, thereby defeating the Persian navy via a land campaign. Of Gaugamela I will say nothing, other than remark Alexander's oblique advance to the Persian left created a dynamic battlefield which destroyed Darius' set-piece. The outnumbered Alexander may not have known precisely where a gap in Darius' line would open except that he knew it would -- and bet his life on it.

But it is Darius I sometimes feel for. There is evidence he was a decent man, something in the mold of a Jimmy Carter, and he had no chance against the dynamic and ruthless Alexander.

The Roman author Quintus Curtius Rufus - who wrote his history of Alexander around 40 AD - tells us that Darius was of "mild and placid disposition". He seems to have been an optimist. Before his army set out to face the Macedonians at Issus, he had a terrible dream in which he saw his enemy Alexander in the same clothes as he himself wore before his accession. His seers offered conflicting interpretations. Darius chose to go for the most tempting explanation: that Alexander would be brought before him defeated, in the clothes of a commoner. What is highly informative about this passage is that Darius apparently was dressed very modestly when he became king.

Curtius continues by saying that Darius was "a man of justice and clemency". He was loyal to those who supported him. He felt responsible for the well-being of the troops under his command, even if they hailed from alien nations and practised customs which were culpable to his Persian courtiers. He appears to have been flexible up to the point of self-denial. Before Gaugamela he made three peace offerings to Alexander. In the first one he addresses Alexander as "Alexander" and himself as "His Majesty". In the third one he is virtually down on hands and knees. Prior to the final battle Darius in prayer expresses his hopes that after him Persia will be ruled by his "merciful victor".

Darius' reward was to die like a pursued animal. While attempting to organize a resistance against Alexander, Darius was betrayed by one his subordinates, Bessus, and slain. Bessus had calculated on winning the gratitude of Alexander; but the demi-god understood above all how treason, now that he was king, had to be rewarded. Bessus was cruelly mutilated at Alexander's command and executed.

Hollywood may have calculated that none of this was important; that the sole point of interest of a population weaned on the tabloids was the earth-shaking question of whether or not Alexander was gay. Jeanne Reames-Zimmerman convincingly argues the poverty of the question. In her monograph, Reames-Zimmerman argues that the concept of gayness, as it is presently understood, did not exist in the ancient world. From her discussion it is possible to say that Alexander might have been gay in the sense that convicts in a penitentiary are gay -- an exercise in power by one man over another -- and if that analogy is inexact so is any other. The world of 320 BC is as distant from us today as the 19th century, the last point in time when men intuitively understood the ancient world. It was then then that the explorer and anthropologist Richard Burton could write these words in his Book of the Sword and expect them to be widely understood:

The History of the Sword is the history of humanity ... Primitive man ... was doomed by the very conditions of his being and his media to a life of warfare; a course of offence to obtain his food, and of defence to retain his life. ... Peace was never anything to them but a fitful interval of repose. The golden age of the poets was a dream; a Videlou remarked 'Peace means death for all barbarian races'

Osama has as often said and we have as often misunderstood: 'peace be unto us'.

Specks on the Sea

A pacifist writes a polemical eulogy entitled A Coward's Tribute to Margaret Hassan. Tom Nagy introduced himself to Hassan when he traveled to Baghdad in the shadow of a "looming American invasion".

My passport held my credentials: letters identifying me as a reporter for the Progressive Magazine and as a researcher for the Canadian affiliate of the Nobel Peace Prize awardee, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. I was travelling to Iraq to estimate the level of child mortality that would result if the US government unleashed its threatened war of "Shock and Awe". I had also come to Iraq as a member of a group of ageing pacifists called the Iraq Peace Team.

Nagy, who wrote "The Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the US Intentionally Destroyed Iraq's Water Supply" believed that the US had intentionally targeted Saddam's water supply system to create "increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child mortality". He hoped Hassan would provide further evidence to help him uncover this diabolical plot.

Margaret confirmed to me that the machinations of the US-dominated UN Sanctions Committee had denied and delayed many items indispensable for the rehabilitation of Iraq's water system. But nothing prepared me for what followed next. Margaret handed me a section of pipe of huge diameter. The pipe, however, was so clogged that only a trickle of water could pass through it. What prevented the necessary maintenance of such water treatment pipes? Margaret explained that any items which the Sanctions Committee did, from time to time, permit to be imported were paid for in hard currency generated by the Oil for Food programme. Nevertheless, Iraq was required by the US-dominated UN to pay 100 per cent of the cost of these shipments at the border, before being allowed to inspect even these life-saving articles for usability or completeness. And, according to Margaret, the shipments were almost invariably incomplete and of unusable quality.

This must have been a remarkable scene, one which would have put the best efforts of Wile E. Coyote in the shade. But if it happened, then here is evidence, if any were needed, that the entire Oil-For-Food-Programme investigation is on the wrong track. Kofi Annan and Saddam had nothing to do with it. The thing was secretly run by the Pentagon.

Such cruelty by officials of my own country shattered me. That night sleep was impossible. The next day I could not leave my bed. I recalled the warning of a Canadian psychiatrist who had worked extensively with ex- refugees like me, that the experience of the first five years of my life as a refugee/displaced person increased my risk of "falling apart" in Iraq. The Canadian doctor warned me that if I could no longer function, I should leave the country at once. Following this medical advice, I took the next flight out of Baghdad. In my dazed condition, I mistakenly thought the Jordanian airliner taking me to Amman was travelling through the "no-fly zone". I remember looking out the window for US fighter planes and their heat-seeking missiles. Curiously I felt no fear. I was beyond caring. A part of me wanted to die.

Fortunately for Nagy, no US fighters were scheduled to shoot down commercial airliners that day and he lived. But when he came to himself Nagy understood the true meaning of his entire journey.

Now, I realise that I should have followed Margaret's example and stayed in Iraq, even if I remained bed-bound, to share the fate of the Iraqi people. ... If Margaret is dead, then are we not compelled to ask who benefits by her death? And are we not compelled to memorialise her dauntless heroism by racing to any country threatened by future invasions and staying there to try and avert war by sharing the fate of the innocent? Can there be any more fitting memorial to Margaret than to make wars and invasions impossible by interposing our bodies between their child-victims and the terror weapons of our own governments? Let us call future pacifist groups who take on this mission Margaret Hassan Peace Teams. If the current invasion of Iraq has killed Margaret Hassan, then may the example of Margaret Hassan inspire us to slay war itself.

In James Michener's The Bridges of Toko-ri an American naval aviator comes to the same moment of existential realization as he awaits death from North Korean soldiers who are closing in on his position as his squadron make one final protective pass with their F2H-Banshees before their fuel state compels them to return to the carrier. Michener rhetorically asks, "Where do we get such men? They leave this ship and they do their job. Then they must find this speck lost somewhere on the sea. When they find it, they have to land on its pitching deck. Where do we get such men?" Nagy would know.

The Beat Goes On

New York Sun

CLAUDIA ROSETT - Special to the Sun November 26, 2004 One of the next big chapters in the United Nations oil-for-food scandal will involve the family of the secretary-general, Kofi Annan, whose son turns out to have been receiving payments as recently as early this year from a key contractor in the oil-for-food program.

The secretary-general's son, Kojo Annan, was previously reported to have worked for a Swiss-based company called Cotecna Inspection Services SA, which from 1998-2003 held a lucrative contract with the U.N. to monitor goods arriving in Saddam Hussein's Iraq under the oil-for-food program. But investigators are now looking into new information suggesting that the younger Annan received far more money over a much longer period, even after his compensation from Cotecna had reportedly ended.

Reuters

Nov 26, 2004 — By Irwin Arieff  UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The son of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan got monthly payments more than four years longer than was previously known from a Swiss firm that won a lucrative contract under the scandal-ridden U.N. oil-for-food program, the United Nations said on Friday.

Kojo Annan, the U.N. leader's son, was paid $2,500 monthly — a total of $125,000 — by Geneva-based Cotecna from the beginning of 2000 through last February, as part of an agreement not to compete with Cotecna in West Africa after he left the firm, U.N. chief spokesman Fred Eckhard said.

Associated Press

"There is nothing illegal in this," Eckhard said of the payments from the Swiss firm Cotecna. However, it was an embarrassing moment for the United Nations to have to admit that its earlier information was wrong. Eckhard said that Kojo Annan's attorney told him that the younger Annan "continued to receive monthly payments beyond the end of 1999, when we previously thought they had ceased, through February 2004." Eckhard acknowledged that the United Nations previously said that Annan had stopped receiving monthly payments at the end of 1999.

CBC News

Annan's lawyers say he was paid as part of an open-ended agreement that he wouldn't set up a competing business after he stopped working for the company in 1998. Cotecna was contracted to ensure the delivery of goods Iraq bought through a UN-brokered arrangement that ran from 1996 to this autumn. The program let leader Saddam Hussein trade $46 billion US worth of Iraqi oil for food and other essential items the country couldn't acquire itself because of international sanctions.

UPI

U.N.chief returns to HQ for Iraq biz -- United Nations, United States, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan Thursday left Africa to return to U.N. World Headquarters in New York to deal with the situation in Iraq. A U.N. official at headquarters told United Press International he was leaving Burkina-Faso without attending a meeting of French-speaking nations as originally planned. She said it was not yet known if he would come into his office Friday. The official had no further details of why Annan was cutting short his overseas trip. Chief U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard Wednesday told reporters in New York Annan was considering curtailing his program "to deal with pressing business here."

The Ivory Coast Experience: Could Rwanda Have Been Prevented?

The trailer of the Hotel Rwanda has a scene in which hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, played by Don Cheadle is disabused by a UN General, played by Nick Nolte of his illusions that a "superpower" would come to save his people. Variety describes a promotional event for the film, sponsored by the UN refugee agency.

Still, star Don Cheadle disliked being trotted out for the chatterati. ... But the man Cheadle portrays, Paul Rusesabagina, was very social, saying he felt no ill will toward the superpower that did not intervene. ... Michael Moore came to support "one of the best films I've seen this year." He quipped, "My next job is to convince Tom Hanks (news) to run for president in '08."

"Superpower" of course, is a code word for the United States. It was the United States which let the atrocity which killed nearly a million people happen, or so the implication goes. The actual events which took place in 1994 are described succinctly by Wikipedia.

between April 6 and the beginning of July, a genocide of unprecedented swiftness officially left 937,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus dead at the hands of organized bands of militias known as the Interahamwe. ... For the next couple of weeks, many questionable decisions were made by the United Nations, which had a peacekeeping force in the country. Belgium and the UN withdrew almost all of their forces after ten Belgians were killed, leaving all of their Rwandans employees, mostly Tutsis, behind. The UN Security Council unanimously voted to withdraw its troops, with France and Belgium at the forefront, over the protests of the peacekeepers' top commander Canadian Romeo Dallaire. The new Rwandan government lead by self proclaimed President Sindikubwabo worked hard to minimize international criticism. Rwanda at that time had a seat on the Security Council and its ambassador argued that the claims of genocide were exaggerated and that the government was doing all that it could to stop it. Representatives of the Rwandan Catholic Church, long associated with the radical Hutus in Rwanda, also used their links in Europe to reduce criticism. France, which felt the United States and United Kingdom would use the massacres to try to expand their influence in that francophone part of Africa also worked to prevent a foreign intervention.

The failure of the UN peacekeeping force, led by Canadian Romeo Dallaire to militarily oppose the massacre has been the subject of much debate. What is not generally recognized is that aside from UN forces, which did nothing, French forces were rapidly present in Rwanda in some numbers. Africa Online quotes French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin as claiming credit for saving many Rwandan lives.

France's Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin insisted Thursday that French troops saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Rwanda, during the 1994 genocide. The statement comes as French and Rwandan officials are trading accusations on who was responsible for the genocide. ... In an interview with Radio France International, Kagame claimed that not only did French troops train and command the forces that carried out the massacres, they also had a direct hand in the killings. Kagame's remarks initially drew a no comment from French authorities, but on Thursday, Foreign Minister de Villepin offered a spirited defence of the actions of French troops in Rwanda. In an interview with the same French radio station, he claimed the French troops saved several hundred thousand lives. De Villepin called Kagame's remarks uncalled for, and an untrue version of history.

Exactly what forces were available in Rwanda? Dallaire's command contained 2,500 lightly armed men composed of different nationalities.

Gen. Dallaire was allotted only 2548 of the 4500 soldiers he requested to carry out his mission. To make matters worse, several contingents were poorly equipped and very lightly armed.

In the first weeks of the fighting, more than 1,000 French and Belgian paratroopers arrived in Rwanda. Foreign Affairs notes:

During the crucial first weeks, the U.N., at the behest of the United States, ordered the more than 2,000 peacekeepers in Rwanda to do nothing to halt the killing and then withdrew all but a rump force of 400 soldiers. Some 1,000 elite French and Belgian troops (backed by 250 U.S. Marines just across the border) swooped in to rescue foreign nationals (most of them not at risk) and then left, ignoring the slaughter of Rwandan civilians. Clinton and other international leaders said nothing of substance. Seeing the international indifference, Rwandans became convinced that the genocidal government would succeed. Those who hesitated at first now yielded to fear or opportunism and carried the slaughter throughout Rwanda.

U.N. peacekeepers and the evacuation force could have deterred the killings had they acted promptly. Belgian military records show cases in which they did just that when permitted to use their weapons. Firm and coherent international censure could have influenced the organizers of the genocide. On the two occasions when they received outraged telephone calls from foreign governments, the organizers halted attacks on hundreds of Tutsi at the Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali. Jamming the genocidal radio broadcasts would have kept the organizers from passing orders directly to the population. The military radio, the only other channel accessible to the genocide's organizers, did not broadcast to civilians.

This story is essentially repeated at NathanielTurnerCom.

Heavily armed western troops began materializing at Kigali airport within hours to evacuate their nationals. Beyond UNAMIR's 2500 peacekeepers, these included 500 Belgian para-commandos, 450 French and 80 Italian troops from parachute regiments, another 500 Belgian para-commandos on stand-by in Kenya, 250 US Rangers on stand-by in Burundi, and 800 more French troops on stand-by in the region. None made any attempt to protect Rwandans at risk. Besides western nationals, French troops evacuated a number of well-known leaders of the extremist Hutu Power movement, including the wife of the murdered president and her family. All non-UNAMIR troops left within days, immediately after their evacuation mission was completed.

One of the arguments that has often been made by the defenders of the UN Peacekeeping mission's failure was that only "a superpower" had the massive wherewithal to stop the genocide. While it is true that the Clinton administration seems to have turned a blind eye to events in the African country, recent events in the Ivory Coast suggest that effective military force did not have to be very large. The scale of the French action in Rwanda itself when it decided to intervene is indicative. Six weeks into the massacres, the French deployed in force.

After 6 weeks of genocide, France, which offered no troops to the UN mission, suddenly decided to intervene in Rwanda. Within a week of the decision, Operation Turquoise was able to deploy 2500 men with 100 armored personnel carriers, 10 helicopters, a battery of 120 mm mortars, 4 Jaguar fighter bombers, and 8 Mirage fighters and reconnaissance planes---all for an ostensibly humanitarian operation. The French forces created a safe haven in the south-west of the country which provided sanctuary not only to fortunate Tutsi but also to many leading Rwandan government and military officials as well as large numbers of soldiers and militia---the very Hutu Power militants who had organized and carried out the genocide.

This force was not only sufficient to stop the massacres but to create a geographical safe haven in the southern part of the country. The recently suppressed November, 2004 riots in the Ivory Coast provides another basis for comparison for the scale of forces required to effect at least a temporary cessation of unrest. According to Fox News, French strength, which was sufficient to halt the fighting in a day was as follows.

It now has 4,000 peacekeeping troops stationed mostly in the center of the country, between government and rebel forces. The UN has another 6,000 peacekeepers. The French reinforcements arriving yesterday number roughly 300.

This is larger, but not an order of magnitude larger, then the forces available in Rwanda during the 1994 massacres. Operation Turquoise was a brigade minus sized deployment. In the Ivory Coast, the French had a brigade plus and augmented it with a company plus. The UN force available in Rwanda had other problems, more to do with rules of engagement, mission orders and leadership than its mere size. NathanielTurnerCom reports:

Only days after the genocide began, 2500 Tutsi as well as Hutu opposition politicians crowded into a Kigali school known as ETO, where Belgian UN troops were billeted ... the Belgian soldiers were ordered to depart ETO to assist in evacuating foreign nationals from the country. They did so abruptly, making no arrangements whatever for the protection of those they were safeguarding. As they moved out, the killers moved in. When the afternoon was over, all 2500 civilians had been murdered.

We hear about those Belgian soldiers again from the Canadian Defence Association website:

Critics claim that against the better judgement of Belgian commanders, Gen. Dallaire ordered his troops to disperse into a number of weak outposts incapable of mutual support should trouble arise. The Belgian court-martial discovered that the opposite had occurred. Based on the original Belgian offer of a Battalion, Dallaire planned to concentrate the entire unit as a reaction force. Due to the failure of troop contributing nations to fulfil their commitments, Dallaire altered his plan somewhat, but still intended to deploy complete Belgian companies in strong defensible positions in the heart of the Rwandan capital where Hutu government troops and militias were located.

Belgian commanders refused to comply with Dallaire's orders. Concentrating soldiers, even in company locations, would require quartering them in tents. Belgian field living standards demanded that their soldiers be put up in hard shelters. With no extra UN funds to provide accommodation large enough to house a Belgian company, they instead dispersed themselves in platoon strength or less around the city. Each small position required its our security detail further reducing the already minimal UNAMIR capacity to conduct any kind of pro-active operations.

The question of whether a minor European or North American power could have intervened will always be an open one. As for American culpability, the producers of the Hotel Rwanda can hardly be faulted for insinuating that America was at fault when President Bill Clinton suggested as much. During a visit to Kigali in 1998 he apologized for not acting quickly enough to prevent the massacres. "It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."

Update

The Washington Post has a long article on the movie mentioned above, Hotel Rwanda, which describes the efforts of a hotelier credited with saving the lives of 1,200 people in 1994. Paul Rusesabagina is played by Don Cheadle in the movie. The Post says the real life character -- who may have saved more lives than the entire UN Peacekeeping operation -- used a Rolodex as his principal weapon.

The tools of his trade were nothing unusual: the keys to the hotel's storage rooms and cellars and a Rolodex of important people, including Rwandans, U.N. officials and employees at Sabena, the Belgian firm that owned the hotel. ... One morning, a phalanx of soldiers appeared at his door. "Are you the hotel manager?" one of them barked. "If so, tell all the cockroaches to leave in 30 minutes." Rusesabagina rushed to the roof and looked down on a sea of spears, guns and machetes. "This is the end, I told myself," he said. But then "I started calling. The director of Sabena in Brussels, he called the king of Belgium, the president of France, to weigh in."

Eventually, Rusesabagina, his family and two nieces whose parents had been killed were evacuated by the United Nations to a camp in Tanzania. Today, Rusesabagina lives in Brussels.

But the people he called must have kept his confidences to themselves. The official story is that nobody knew. The UN was surprised, the Canadians nonplussed, the Europeans unaware and President Clinton was shocked, positively shocked that such a thing could be happening. The Canadian General in charge of the peacekeeping force was given a Peace Medal; the director of UN Peacekeeping Operations went on to become the Secretary General and President Clinton went on to express his regrets in Kigali four years later. "It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."

The United Nations

UN peacekeeping personnel have recently been accused of using their positions to coerce sex, often from minors, in impoverished African countries. The perpetrators have included relief workers according to the BBC:

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has sent a team of investigators into refugee camps in west Africa following the revelation that large numbers of children have been sexually exploited by aid workers there. The scale of the problem - revealed in an overview of a report by the UNHCR in conjunction with the British-based charity Save the Children - has surprised relief personnel. ... Over 40 aid agencies - including the UNHCR itself - were implicated, and 67 individuals - mostly local staff - named by the children. Some under-age girls said United Nations peacekeepers in the West African region were involved.

But it said that poverty was the principle cause, with parents feeling compelled to offer their children to aid workers for sex in order to survive. "They want us to love to them (sic) so they can give us money," one refugee told the BBC.

The unstated implication was that the problem was limited to 'local staff' in Africa and therefore understandable (wink-wink) though this last conclusion had to remain unsaid. But then it transpired that the problem was not limited to Africa, but present in many places where the UN had a peacekeeping mission. The Scotsman described the widening extent of the sexual predation problem:

Linked in the past to sex crimes in East Timor, and prostitution in Cambodia and Kosovo, UN peacekeepers have now been accused of sexually abusing the very population they were deployed to protect in Congo. And while the 150 allegations of rape, pedophelia and solicitation in Congo may be the UN’ worst sex scandal in years, chronic problems almost guarantee that few of the suspects will face serious punishment. ...

In the case of Congo, the accusations seem as bad as anything the UN has ever seen. Women and children have reportedly been raped, and there is said to be video and photographic evidence of crimes. Similar allegations have been directed at UN peacekeepers and officials in East Timor. And, in Cambodia and Kosovo, local officials and human rights group charge that the presence of UN forces has been linked to an increase in trafficking of women and a sharp rise in prostitution.

Archival research suggests the problem has neither been confined to Africa nor to 'local' staff. It has involved personnel from First World countries perhaps contracting security companies. Global Policy carried this article in the summer of 2001.

A former United Nations police officer is suing a British security firm over claims that it covered up the involvement of her fellow officers in sex crimes and prostitution rackets in the Balkans. Kathryn Bolkovac, an American policewoman, was hired by DynCorp Aerospace in Aldershot for a UN post aimed at cracking down on sexual abuse and forced prostitution in Bosnia.

She claims she was 'appalled' to find that many of her fellow officers were involved. She was fired by the British company after amassing evidence that UN police were taking part in the trafficking of young women from eastern Europe as sex slaves. She said: 'When I started collecting evidence from the victims of sex trafficking it was clear that a number of UN officers were involved from several countries, including quite a few from Britain. I was shocked, appalled and disgusted. They were supposed to be over there to help, but they were committing crimes themselves. When I told the supervisors they didn't want to know.'

DynCorp sacked her, claiming she had falsified time sheets, a charge she denies. Last month she filed her case at Southampton employment tribunal alleging wrongful dismissal and sexual discrimination against DynCorp, the British subsidiary of the US company DynCorp Inc. DynCorp has the contract to provide police officers for the 2,100-member UN international police task force in Bosnia which was created to help restore law and order after the civil war.

The extent and duration of the problem suggests that far from being isolated instances, the United Nations has longstanding and fairly widespread institutional defects which allowed these crimes to take place. How high these defects went was illustrated by a sex scandal in Geneva involving a former Dutch Prime Minister, Ruud Lubbers. The BBC again:

A senior UN official was cleared of sexual harassment earlier this year because the secretary general rejected the verdict of an internal watchdog. High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers, 65, a former Dutch prime minister, escaped censure in July when Kofi Annan dismissed a complaint. But a revised report issued by UN watchdogs on Thursday revealed that investigators supported the allegation.

Mr Annan refused to take action, saying the allegations were "not sustainable". Mr Lubbers was cleared of improper conduct after a 51-year-old woman on his staff claimed he had groped her. The UN's Office of Internal Oversight Services investigated the complaint and backed the woman's complaint, it has now been revealed.

 The plaintiff will likely wait years before her accusations are reinstated. According to Reuters:

A senior U.N staffer has appealed against Kofi Annan's decision to dismiss her sexual harassment accusations against refugee agency chief Ruud Lubbers, but the case could take years to conclude, her lawyer said on Monday. The woman, a 51-year-old American, accused Lubbers earlier this year of groping her as she left a meeting at the agency's Geneva headquarters in late 2003. ...

The appeal will be heard by the Geneva office of the U.N.'s Joint Appeals Board, a five-member tribunal made up of two representatives of U.N. employees, two from management and a chairman appointed by Annan. But the board's backlog of work is such that it could be two to three years before any conclusion is reached and its findings can in their turn be referred to a higher U.N. tribunal. "The internal U.N. system is in the Dark Ages. This could take four or five years," Flaherty said.

The possible existence of an institutional problem was practically articulated by disgruntled UN employees. CBS News reported:

Angered at Secretary-General Kofi Annan's dismissal of allegations against the U.N.'s top investigator, union leaders representating over 5,000 U.N. employees met for a second day on Friday to decide what action to take. A statement from the United Nations Staff Union said a draft resolution proposed by one group of employees that was discussed Thursday expresses a "lack of confidence" in the U.N.'s senior management.

American diplomat-bloggers with knowledge of UN operations have concluded that corruption is a way of life in the 'world organization'. (Via Instapundit)

On its official website, the UN modestly states, "United Nations. It's Your World." We at The Diplomad are here to ask you to forget all that misty-eyed blather. Our Diplomads have served at the UN, in New York, Vienna and Geneva, and worked with the UN in a variety of other posts, and can tell you from experience that the UN is a massive, expensive hoax that needs to be ended once and for all. ... The "oil-for-food" scam, huge as it is, flows logically from the ruling ethos at the UN. The UN system is built on corruption, on the principle of the shake-down; whatever lofty objectives might have existed at its creation, for the UN corruption now provides the means and reason to exist.

The institutional nature of the problem means even a zealous and reforming Secretary General, such as Vaclav Havel, would be hard pressed to clean it out. The root of the problem may be that the UN bureaucracy reports only to itself.

The UN as an institution is the purest of pure bureaucracy: it is the thirty-year single malt of bureaucracies. ... It exists to exist. To do that it has going one of the best scams imaginable. While most media and ordinary folks focus on the occasionally contentious UNSC resolutions and debates on Iraq or Iran, in fact, 99% of UN "work" has nothing to do with such high-visibility issues. No, it deals with scores, hundreds, in fact, of resolutions passed every year in the UN General Assembly, its main Committees, and in bodies such as the Human Rights Commission. It lives off those resolutions.

Slightly simplified, this is how it often works. A UN bureaucrat gets hold of a delegate from a sympathetic country and gets that country's delegation to propose some often innocuous sounding resolution ... Normally such a resolution gets adopted by consensus by the appropriate committee, and then goes to the UNGA where its hammered through ASAP. Under the Reagan Administration, the US delegation made a specialty of finding these little gems and trying to kill them or at least make clear that they would not pass by consensus. That is tough and frustrating work; it takes up incredible amounts of time and effort and burns up lots of political capital. Such efforts offend the MSM, powerful US NGOs and other lobby groups. The UN bureaucracy knows that at most only the US will fight these resolutions; the UN uses its allies in the MSM and the NGO "community" to savage the US and make the US look uncaring about deforestation and poverty, etc. As a result, often the US will back off as the politicial costs are seen as too great to be alone and on the "wrong" side of such an issue.

The air of UN sanctity has in the past been so high that whatever its bureaucracy wanted was ipso facto desirable, a clarion signal for Oxfam to go out and solicit  and for 'concerned' individuals swarm out onto the streets and rally for it. But even if the UN is swept off its pedestal it hard to imagine what mechanisms of accountability could be brought to bear on it. The problem was illustrated by the Oil For Food scandal investigations. The Washington Post carried a fascinating riposte from Edward Mortimer, Kofi Annan's Director for Communications, chiding columnist Robert Novak for criticizing the Oil For Food Programme because nothing has been proved and nothing could be proved because no one could be subpoenaed -- even by the UN's own investigators. It was an instance of a bureaucrat unwittingly proving a point he wished to refute.

Robert D. Novak was mistaken when he said that I "sneered" at the letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan from Sens. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) and Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.). I said that I found it "awkward and troubling" that two distinguished legislators thought the United Nations was trying to cover up corruption or obstruct justice.

Mr. Annan responded to allegations about the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq by asking Paul A. Volcker to head an independent inquiry. That inquiry does not have subpoena power, because the United Nations does not have that power to pass on to Mr. Volcker, but all U.N. staff members have been ordered to cooperate with the inquiry on pain of dismissal. If the inquiry finds evidence of criminal acts by U.N. officials or others, national courts with the right to subpoena will pursue these people. Also, Mr. Annan has said that any U.N. official found guilty of wrongdoing will not be allowed to claim immunity from prosecution.

Mortimer's entire argument may be fairly summarized in four words: 'come and get us'.

Al- Janabi Redux

The Associated Press presents a radically different picture of Abdullah al-Janabi, the Fallujah chieftain described in a previous post. In the AP's version of events, Fallujah was a sleepy little town until it was transformed into a Frankenstein place by heavy-handed American intervention and Al-Janabi a man of peace driven to the brink by events.  According to the Associated Press account:

Religious fervor and hatred of Americans brought Omar Hadid and Abdullah al-Janabi together in a partnership that played a major role in transforming Fallujah from a sleepy Euphrates River backwater into a potent symbol of Arab nationalism. Their rise to prominence provides insight into contemporary Iraq, where the U.S. presence sparked a religious backlash that gave radical Muslim leaders major roles in filling the void created by the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime and its replacement by a weak U.S.-backed government.

Hadid is described as ordinary tradesman and al-Janabi a dreamy Sufi mystic. "Fallujah residents and Iraqis with close family ties to the city said al-Janabi was more a spiritual leader -- deeply respected ... ", though it does allow that he sullied his hands on occasion. "al-Janabi, in his 50s, headed the Mujahedeen Shura Council, which set up Islamic courts that meted out Islamic punishments, executed suspected spies and enforced a strict Islamic lifestyle." But he was a good guy gone bad.

Al-Janabi, on the other hand, is a Sufi, a mystical version of the faith that seeks closeness to God through the cleansing of one's soul. Sufis abhor violence, but al-Janabi found in Hadid a like-minded partner as Salafis and Wahhabis began to prevail over Sufis in Fallujah. ... In 1998, al-Janabi, married with five children, was suspended by Saddam's government from delivering Friday sermons because of his public criticism of government policies. ... Residents said al-Janabi never carried a weapon in public, but was frequently seen during the April fighting talking to front-line mujahedeen, exhorting them to fight on and telling them that those who died fighting Islam's enemies would be rewarded with eternity in paradise.

The contents of al-Janabi's home were extensively described by Robert Worth of the New York Times, which paints a contrasting picture.

On a table were stacks of documents, including passports (the only country he had traveled to recently was Syria, a translator who read the document said) and other identification papers for Mr. Janabi and members of his family. There were letters, including one dated Oct. 20 from the clerical council of Baghdad asking him to negotiate the surrender of Falluja. In a box, there was a Bronze Star, an American military decoration awarded for valor - in all likelihood, the general said, stolen from a convoy. There was also Mr. Janabi's personal name stamp, used for letters, and a white hat signifying that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca that is expected of devout Muslims at least once in a lifetime, if they can afford it.

Also found in the house were files showing the names of people who had been tortured and executed for cooperating with the Americans and their allies, military officials said. There were also more than 500 letters from the families of insurgents who had been killed or wounded, asking for compensation from Mr. Janabi, said a military translator on the scene. They included the families of fighters from Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, Syria, Algeria, and about 100 native Fallujans.

When Fallujah was captured, the Marines found 60 mosques and 3 hospitals converted into fighting positions, 203 weapons caches and at least 3 hostage slaughterhouses and torture chambers.  A slideshow detailing these facilities can be found at this link. (Hat tip: Reader Tritons's Polar Tiger) How these hundreds of tons of munitions found their way into this "sleepy Euphrates River backwater" is intriguing.  The Chicago Tribune describes some of the other things that mysteriously materialized in the previously pacific locality of mystical Al-Janabi. (via Powerline)

As the Marine officers visited the two houses Sunday, accompanied by a few reporters, they carried maps, documents and photographs that itemized materials found in earlier inspections. While intermittent gunfire rattled nearby and the occasional thunder of arms caches being destroyed by American forces could be heard, the group viewed the homes in jaw-clenched silence.

The reporters walked through rooms littered with the paraphernalia of torture and the werewithal to capture it on video. At the last stage they saw this:

In a yawning black doorway off one of the clay-walled rooms was another chilling find: a dungeon-like room, pitch-black except for the flashlights of the Marines as they focused on a bloody fingerprint and cryptic etchings. Scratched into the clay were words:

"Put . . . "
"Kept . . . "
"Plan . . . "
" . . . to pass on."

All were written in both English and Arabic. Beside those words was one more, written only in giant Arabic loops:

"Hope."

Hope that the Associated Press gets it.

A Fallujah Mosque

The New York Times' Robert Worth has a fascinating article on the battlefield archaeology of Fallujah centering on the contents of a mosque just to the north of the main east-west road through the city, Highway 10. (Hat tip: FreeRepublic) The murdered Blackwater contractors must have driven just yards from it on their way to the bridge.

The mosque, in a residential area just north of the main east-west artery known as Highway 10, included at least a dozen brick outbuildings packed with bombs, guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and ammunition. The diversity of the weapons surprised the officers here: in the street outside, a ship mine stood in a puddle. Just inside the mosque compound was an aluminum shed full of mortars and TNT. Like many weapons depots in Falluja, it had been wired to explode, and had to be carefully dismantled by an American explosives team. Inside the compound was a document explaining how to destroy tanks using rocket-propelled grenades. General Natonski picked up a white pilot's helmet among the mortars and gazed wonderingly at it. "Did you find any Darth Vader helmets?" he asked the marine captain next to him.

One of the more interesting artifacts was a very special kind of ice-cream truck, probably driven by a laughing, mustachoied gentleman of the sort one would never suspect.

In the back of the compound was an ice cream truck, its sides colorfully decorated with orange, red and blue popsicles. Inside it was packed with rocket-propelled grenades and bomb-making materials. "This was probably a traveling I.E.D. factory," General Natonski said, using the military term for improvised explosive devices, or homemade bombs.

Near the mosque was the empty home of Abdullah Janabi, the insurgent leader of this city's mujahedeen council. Like the archives of some unfamiliar civilization, Janabi's correspondence provided a glimpse into the methods through which the insurgency was controlled, motivated and disciplined.

On a table were stacks of documents, including passports (the only country he had traveled to recently was Syria, a translator who read the document said) and other identification papers for Mr. Janabi and members of his family. There were letters, including one dated Oct. 20 from the clerical council of Baghdad asking him to negotiate the surrender of Falluja. In a box, there was a Bronze Star, an American military decoration awarded for valor - in all likelihood, the general said, stolen from a convoy. There was also Mr. Janabi's personal name stamp, used for letters, and a white hat signifying that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca that is expected of devout Muslims at least once in a lifetime, if they can afford it.

Also found in the house were files showing the names of people who had been tortured and executed for cooperating with the Americans and their allies, military officials said. There were also more than 500 letters from the families of insurgents who had been killed or wounded, asking for compensation from Mr. Janabi, said a military translator on the scene. They included the families of fighters from Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, Syria, Algeria, and about 100 native Fallujans.

Here was a man who could offer you paradise, money or excruciating torture, expert in the kind of governance still common in some parts of the world, a minor Saddam Hussein or a royal prince writ small. Robert Worth noted that "a fridge stood open in the kitchen, with a plate of rice visible inside, three yogurt containers, a half-rotten apricot", proof if anything that the evanescent insurgency; the unkillable idea of popular journalism was tangible after all, requiring physical weapons, logistics and money. It ate and drank; wrote and read; could kill and be killed; and knew both triumph and defeat.

Triangle of Death 3

This story from CNN links to Zarqawi's despairing accusation of Muslim scholars for having 'abandoned' the Jihad in Afghanistan and Iraq to the United States. He seems to be alleging that he has been thrown to the wolves. This story was reported by several readers in the Comments section of the Triangle of Death 2.

"Instead of implementing God's orders, you chose your safety and preferred your money and sons," said the voice, which could not be independently confirmed as al-Zarqawi's. "You left the mujahedeen facing the strongest power in the world." The message was posted on Islamist Web sites. "Are not your hearts shaken by the scenes of your brothers being surrounded and hurt by your enemy?"

The same text was included or perhaps was the same source as Zarqawi's denunciation of an Arab Cairo conference which failed to condemn the coming January elections in Iraq. Zarqawi said:

"We are committed to intensifying armed attacks against coalition forces and their spies and agents... in response to the Sharm al-Shaikh conference - a sordid and suspect farce," said Wednesday's statement signed by groups including the al-Qaida Group in the Land of Two Rivers (Iraq). ...

It also accused Egyptian President Husni Mubarak of wanting to use "plotters and mediators" at the forum for US benefit. "Numerous Arab regimes neighbouring Iraq, following the lead of Mubarak's regime... took part, along with the puppet power [Iraqi interim government], in the massacre of Iraqis, the destruction of their property, as well as the training and arming of [Iraqi] policemen and national guardsmen," the statement said.

"Oh scholars of the nation... you have betrayed us in the darkest circumstances. You have delivered us to our enemy... you have left the mujahidin to confront [alone] the greatest world power," said the voice attributed to al-Zarqawi, who has a $25 million US bounty on his head. "Until when will you abandon the nation to the tyrants of the east and of the west, who are inflicting the worst suffering, cutting the throats of the mujahidin, the best children of the nation, and taking its riches?" said the recording.

Then Zarqawi unequivocally takes the side of the Ba'ath Party.

Al-Zarqawi's group said it backs the call of Saddam Hussein's Baath party, which issued a previous statement calling for action against US-led forces in Iraq. The signatories said they signed "the statement written by the Iraqi Baath party, not because we support the party or Saddam, but because it expresses the demands of resistance groups in Iraq".

In one of the strangest twists, the Jordanian authorities arrested several of Zarqawi's relatives including his brother-in-law and nephew.

The tape surfaced as Jordanian security forces detained the husband of al-Zarqawi's sister in Amman. Relatives of Salih Ilhami told Aljazeera that the authorities arrested him after storming his home on Tuesday night. The authorities also detained al-Zarqawi's nephew. Sources from Ilhamy's family added that al-Zarqawi's first wife and his sons left their home in al-Zarqa, near Amman, and dissappeared about three months ago.

A report from Jordan, which may be related, gives Zarqawi ten days to capitulate or else his money will be confiscated. From the context, it appears the Jordanians are holding some of his property in connection with an earlier Zarqawi attack mounted inside Jordan. The interesting tidbit is that Zarqawi's money is within reach of the US.

The Jordanian Security Court has given 10 days for the Jordanian fundamentalist leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi and three other men to turn themselves in for plotting attacks in Jordan. According to Jordanian papers publishing the Court's ultimatum, if Zarqawi and the three men, each of whom have a $25 million bounty on them from the United States, do not capitulate, the US administration will confiscate their property holdings.

Interestingly enough some of Yasser Arafat's $1.9 billion fortune has been traced to Canada. Arafat also appears to have invested in at least one gambling casino on the West Bank through an Austrian bank.

Quoting a Central Intelligence Agency report, it said yesterday the CIA had conducted inquiries after receiving information that a holding company of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation had invested $11.6 million in a small pharmaceutical company in the Canadian town of Belleville, Ontario. Format said investigators had "stepped on an anthill" when they uncovered the stake held by the Palestinian Commercial Service Corporation in Bioniche Life Sciences. They uncovered a whole network of PLO funds such as Chalcedony, Onyx, Evergreen, SilverHaze and Avmax International, the latter based on the Caribbean island Aruba.

The Ukraine

Breaking news is now riveted on events in the Ukraine, where a Prime Ministerial candidate (Viktor Yanukovich) supported by Moscow is being accused to trying to steal the election from pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko.

The Central Electoral Commission said Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych won 49.4 percent of the vote in the election and Yushchenko had 46.7 percent. European and U.S. monitors said vote counting was flawed. The future of the former Soviet republic of 47 million people, sandwiched between the European Union and Russia, is in the balance 13 years after it declared independence, with Yushchenko advocating a free-market economy and closer links to the European Union and Yanukovych urging the country foster deeper ties with Russia.

The announcement of Yushchenko as a "so-called people's president, and calls not to fulfill decisions of legitimate power, are enormously dangerous and may lead to unpredictable consequences," President Leonid Kuchma said in his first statement, posted on his official Web site.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators are in the streets surrounding Yanukovich's headquarters; Russian Special Forces have been reported by former US Congressman Bob Schaffer as guarding the Kremlin's candidate. Schaffer is an election observer. (Via Instapundit)

Russian special forces dressed in Ukrainian Special forces uniforms are in Kyiv. Ukrainian militia have been instructed by the mayor to protect the people from the Russian troops. Ukrainian militia have established a hotline for Ukrainians to report any incidents with the Russians and pledged to protect Ukrainians. These Russians flew into Ukraine this morning. They're now surrounding the administration buildings they say "to protect Kuchma (the outgoing president and his PM Yanukovich). Following is a chain of email messages I've been sending by blackberry. Please pass along to others. Bob Schaffer.

... A representative of the Greek Catholic Church (a man who appeared to be a priest -- dressed as one) announced at the demonstration that he was speaking on behalf of the Greek Catholic Church, the Kyiv Patriarchiat and several Protestant denominations (Lutheran was the only specific one I heard but there were several others). He said this coalition of churches recognizes Yushchenko as president.

Yuschenko is now leading one million people from the square and surrounding streets to the administration headquarters of the Ukrainian government. He is in front of the column and many fear he is vulnerable to getting shot. They should be at the steps in 15 mins. Keep in mind, this is where the Russian special forces are stationed, dresses in Ukrainian garb.

Yushchenko declared himself the victor and took an oath of office and act which Yanukovich's allies described as a "farce". Vaclav Havel has issued a statement in support of Yushchenko (via Instapundit again), according to Radio Free Europe, but the statement is couched in very general terms. (Again via Instapundit)

Allow me to greet you in these dramatic days when the destiny of your country is being decided for decades ahead. You have its future in your hands. All trustworthy organizations, both local and international, agree that your demands are just. That is why I wish you strength, perseverance, courage and good fortune with your decisions.

Yours truly,

Vaclav Havel

American, European and Canadian diplomats all expressed concern at the Kremlin's actions, creating remarkable psychological solidarity which is in stark contrast towards the wrangling over Iraq. The Guardian intoned (The Guardian!)

International reactions to the presidential elections in Ukraine have been remarkably uniform. From the US, through the European parliament, to Nato, the view is that serious irregularities and worse marred Sunday's second-round run-off. Expressions of concern and dismay might have little practical effect if it were not for the fact that the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, yesterday claimed victory over the official winner, Viktor Yanukovich, raising the stakes both at home and abroad. Demonstrators massing dramatically in freezing temperatures in Kiev have invoked the example of Georgia last year, when the "rose revolution" overthrew Eduard Shevardnadze in favour of a pro-westerner.

Both Yanukovich and Yushchenko are negotiating to avoid an open breach. Although the Kremlin has deployed some Special Forces units to the Ukraine, it seems highly unlikely that Russia would risk an all out military campaign to bring the Ukraine within the fold. Although there are no explicit NATO security guarantees to the Ukraine, there have been many half-promises and partial arguments. The NATO website summarizes the situation thus:

NATO-Ukraine relations were formally launched in 1991, when Ukraine joined the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (later renamed the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council), immediately upon achieving independence with the break-up of the Soviet Union. A few years later, in 1994, Ukraine became the first of the Commonwealth of Independent States to join the Partnership for Peace – a major programme of practical security and defence cooperation between NATO and individual Partner countries. ...

Relations between the Allies and Ukraine hit a low point in 2002, when the Alliance expressed grave concerns about reports of the authorisation at the highest level of the transfer of air-defence equipment from Ukraine to Iraq. Yet NATO remained engaged in its cooperation with Ukraine, demonstrating the strength of the Allies' commitment to develop strong NATO-Ukraine relations and to encourage Ukraine to work towards closer Euro-Atlantic integration.  In May 2002, just before the fifth anniversary of the Distinctive Partnership, President Leonid Kuchma boldly announced Ukraine’s goal of eventual NATO membership. In response, at a meeting in Reykjavik later that month, NATO Foreign Ministers agreed with their Ukrainian counterpart to explore ways to take the NATO-Ukraine relationship to a qualitatively new level. This paved the way for the adoption of the NATO-Ukraine Action Plan by Ukrainian and Allied foreign ministers at their meeting in Prague in November 2002.

The tug-of-war between Russia and NATO now in evidence was discernible even then. In this crisis, the counterweight of NATO is effectively the power of the United States, which has slowly been positioning itself not only on the western marches of the former Soviet Union but also in Central Asia. A list of US allies in Iraq illustrates this dramatically. These include the Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Mongolia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Albania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Armenia; almost as if the entire former Warsaw Pact had come under CENTCOM control. If that were not enough, the United States has acquired a network of military bases at Khanabad in Uzbekistan, and at Manas in Kyrgyzstan.

Triangle of Death 2

A glimpse into the post-Fallujah world of the Sunni insurgency may have been provided by an evanescent web posting used to communicate between the insurgency's leadership, its cells and external supporters. ABC News reports:

The new message opens with a plea for advice from Palestinian and Chechen militants as well as Osama bin Laden supporters in Afghanistan and Pakistan. "We face many problems," it reads in Arabic, "and need your military guidance since you have more experience."

The problems, the message says, are the result of losing the insurgent safe haven of Fallujah to U.S. troops. It says the insurgency was hampered as checkpoints and raids spread "to every city and road." Communications broke down as insurgents were forced to spread out through the country. The arrest of some of their military experts, more "spies willing to help the enemy," and a dwindling supply of arms also added to the organizational breakdown, it reads. But the message also lists new "advantages," claiming insurgent groups are spreading -- to Mosul, Tikrit, Baghdad, and as far south as Basra.

It would be unwise to conclude that the insurgents are on the run without further collateral evidence because effective disinformation is often pitched to what we want to believe. With that caveat in mind, the message claims the insurgency faces "many problems" due to command and control and logistical problems. The dispersal of enemy fighters, largely as a result of the loss of Fallujah, has made secure communications between cells slow and difficult. The new gaps have provided the US with opportunities to insert spies or surveill couriers. A second major factor has been the tourniquet applied on their lines of communication from 'checkpoints and raids to every city and road'.

The earlier River War post suggested that Fallujah was the opening US move in a campaign to roll up the insurgency's lines of communication; specifically to detach it from its strategic rear in Syria and to push back its principal logistical attack base to points further from Baghdad. The web posting reported by ABC News, if accurate, suggests the enemy is well aware of the danger they face and are attempting to adapt to new conditions. The appeal to their jihadi comrades in Afghanistan and Pakistan is intriguing because it suggests that the Taliban's style of fighting may now be viewed as the relevant model by the Iraqi insurgents. From their previous position of pre-eminence, the Taliban have been forced to adopt a very dispersed and low intensity fight against a US force allied to an increasingly established government. It is a position which the Sunni insurgents, unless they can reverse their fortunes, may soon find themselves in.

The Triangle of Death

The Los Angeles Times reports the onset of a new American offensive against Sunni antigovernment forces in the "Triangle of Death", a Ba'ath Party stronghold and the recent site of the execution of tens of  Iraqi policemen.

U.S. Marines accompanied by Iraqi security forces launched a new offensive early today aimed at regaining control of northern Babil province, a region just south of Baghdad beset by kidnappings, shootings and carjackings for more than a year. ...

Terming it their first major post-Fallouja campaign to regain control of an insurgent-riddled area outside Baghdad, officials said they would continue a series of preplanned raids in towns and farming areas largely within a so-called "death triangle" of cities bordered by Latifiya, Mahmoudiya and Yousifiya. U.S. troops have also engaged in a series of counterattacks to quell resistance in Mosul, Baghdad and other towns in the wake of their offensive to regain control of the rebel stronghold of Fallouja.

"We are going to push the fight back out to the enemy while he's reeling," said Capt. Tad Douglas, 28, who led an elite reconnaissance platoon of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit in the raids. "We've seen fighters from Fallouja filtering down here, and we're going to take the offensive while they're still licking their wounds."

Explosives are believed to be plentiful in the area, the site of the Al Qa Qaa munitions depot and numerous arms caches. "Marines have uncovered several weapons caches in northern Babil province buried in dirt fields. The arms include mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and 500-pound bombs. At this point, though, they believe they have made only a dent in the supply."

Just how much explosive may have been salted away in the months prior to OIF was underscored in a separate find far to the north, 45 kilometers south of Mosul when soldiers from the 25th Division found a very large cache of buried weapons.

During their patrol, Soldiers from 2nd Battalion, 8th Field Artillery Regiment discovered huge stockpiles of weapons and munitions, including: an anti-aircraft gun, 15,000 anti-aircraft rounds, 4,600 hand grenades, 144 VOG-17M anti-personnel grenade launchers, 25 SA-7 surface-to-air missiles, 44 SA-7 battery packs, 20 guided missile packs, 21 120mm mortar rounds, two 120mm mortar tubes, 10 122mm rockets, six 152mm artillery rounds and two 57mm artillery rounds. Soldiers also discovered a building full of explosive-making materials. The three-acre site is secure and still under investigation with more weapons and munitions discoveries expected, Task Force Olympia officials said.

The "Triangle of Death" has become an obstacle course for Shi'ites attempting to travel through the belt of Sunni towns to Baghdad. The Washington Post describes the butchery of Shi'ite travelers by men sometimes described by the press as 'militants' or 'freedom fighters'.

A particularly militant strain of Sunni Islam within the insurgency, Wahhabism, has chilled many Shiites. ... Each driver had a story: Abdullah was following a van carrying a coffin that was stopped at a checkpoint last month, destined for the vast Shiite cemetery in Najaf. The men at the checkpoint tossed the body on the street, doused it with gasoline and set fire to it, he said. ...

They forced the young men to get out, then ordered them to insult Ali (a figure revered by Shi'ites). Two men refused, he said, and were bundled off and apparently killed. "They act according to their own religious edict: If you kill a Shiite, you go to paradise," he said. "It's like they're bringing chickens from the market and slaughtering them," said another driver, Haider Abdel-Zahra.

Last week, residents traded stories about a young man with long hair who was forced into a car by insurgents. His body showed up at his father's house a few days later, with a gunshot to the chest and some of his hair pulled from his scalp. A letter left on top of his corpse warned that death was the fate of those who disobey Islamic injunctions. Residents also spoke of a woman whose body was left in the street. Though she was wearing a veil, they said, she was apparently killed for wearing pants, which some deem un-Islamic. In several Shiite mosques, prayer leaders have denounced the killings in their sermons, and the bloodshed has unleashed fears of sectarian strife.

The Strategy Page suggests that the former Ba'athists are somewhat off balance and the US is pressing its advantage.

For the last 18 months, coalition intelligence forces, and Special Forces units, have been developing informer networks. Tips from informants inside Fallujah were responsible for the rapid progress of the coalition attack, and the failure of many of the defenders ambushes and boob-traps. Now the coalition money is being spent all over central Iraq. With nearly 2,500 anti-government gunmen dead or captured in Fallujah, those who fled are shorthanded, out in the open, and a source of quick money for sharp eyed Iraqis.

This view is very similar to that put forward by a Marine spokesman interviewed by the Los Angeles Times.

In undertaking the operation, Marine Col. Ron Johnson said the aim was to squeeze the insurgents by taking territory and freedom of movement from them. Johnson's 2,200 Marines at Forward Operating Base Kalsu have already increased their presence in the province through more aggressive patrolling of towns and back roads. The heightened tempo is aimed at the insurgents or criminals who had grown accustomed to moving through the province with near-impunity. Marines have detained more than 600 Iraqis in raids or at roadblocks since early August. "There are multiple factions competing for power with a multitude of interests — some of them are no more than thugs — and they want to take advantage of the chaos," said Johnson, who declared that "there will be no place my men won't go" in north Babil. ... "You can't have a functioning country where Shiites cannot drive from their cities to the capital," said a senior military officer at Kalsu. "The insurgents know it. And everyone in Baghdad knows it."

The indiscriminate terrorist attacks on Shi'ites and Kurds may be erecting a counter "Triangle of Death" against them with American firepower and Shi'ite and Kurdish enmity at the three corners. Many of the Iraqi troops who fought in Fallujah were of Kurdish extraction. Another story from the LA Times reports:

Staff Sgt. Adel Ahmed led a reporter to a spot outside a yellow schoolhouse in central Fallouja. There, he said, his troops had finished off a fighter carrying Syrian identification. The Iraqis pointed to a protruding mound of earth behind the school where, they said, the Syrian was buried. "We are fighting to save our Iraq from foreigners and terrorists," Ahmed declared. Most Iraqi troops here appear to be either Shiite Muslims or Kurds. Both groups are rivals of the minority Sunni Muslim Arabs who have long dominated Iraq and constitute the majority of Fallouja's population. ...

But the preponderance of Shiites and Kurds also points to one of the Iraqi army's potential weaknesses: The failure to attract sufficient recruits from Sunni cities, where hostility toward America runs high and many young men choose to enlist in guerrilla forces instead.

Although the Sunnis are minority in Iraq, they were dominant under Saddam Hussein and the habit of command among some former Ba'athists may be hard to break. MSNBC describes Kurd-baiting baiting by the terrorists.

Insurgents battling U.S. and Iraqi forces in the northern city of Mosul have been trying to drag the Kurdish minority into their fight and set off a sectarian war, Kurdish and Arab officials say. ... Violence against Kurds has escalated in recent days, officials say. The offices -- and officials -- of Kurdish political parties have been attacked. Insurgents fired on a truck carrying Kurdish peshmerga fighters. And at least one Kurd was said to have been beheaded in Mosul, a largely Sunni Arab city. “They are trying to ignite the flames of sedition between Arabs and Kurds,” Khasro Gouran, Mosul’s Kurdish deputy provincial governor, said by telephone from Mosul. “They want the Kurds to react and the peshmerga to come in (from outside Mosul) so there would be sectarian strife in the city.”

Attempts to inflame the Kurds may eventually succeed.. The Associated Press reports that two Sunni clerics opposed to elections called by the interim government have been gunned down.

Sheik Ghalib Ali al-Zuhairi was a member of the Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential Sunni clerics group that has called for a boycott of nationwide elections scheduled for Jan. 30. He was shot as he was leaving a mosque in the town of Muqdadiyah and died in the local hospital, said police Col. Raisan Hussein. Muqdadiyah is about 60 miles north of Baghdad. A day earlier, unknown gunmen assassinated another prominent Sunni cleric in the northern city of Mosul Sheik Faidh Mohamed Amin al-Faidhi, who was the brother of the group's spokesman. It as unclear whether the two attacks were related.

The former Ba'athists may still have plenty of money, weapons and explosives. But they have plenty of enemies too.

No Anti-Semitism in Antwerp Death

The death of Orthodox Jew Moshe Na'eh, discussed in an earlier post turns out to be unrelated to anti-Semitism or the Jihad. According to the Jerusalem Post:

Belgian police have ruled out an anti-Semitic motive in last Thursday's shooting death of Moshe Na'eh, 26, a British citizen who worked at a synagogue in Antwerp. A source involved in the investigation said Na'eh was not shot by a Muslim. No suspects have yet been arrested, the source said.

Although Na'eh was not robbed – at the time of his shooting, he was carrying more than 1,500 – police are checking whether financial reasons could have played a part. The source added that Internet reports of threatening messages on Na'eh's cellphone voice mail were "not true."

The Fugitive

Sites' description of the shooting of a Jihadi in a Fallujah mosque by a Marine (featured in an earlier post) is now being used by the Associated Press to substantially advance the claim that the Marine fired without provocation.

The NBC correspondent who filmed the fatal shooting by a Marine of an apparently injured and unarmed Iraqi by a U.S. Marine inside a Fallujah mosque has written on his Web site that the wounded man made no sudden movements before the Marine opened fire on him. ...

In the video, as the cameraman moved into the mosque, a Marine can be heard shouting obscenities in the background, yelling that one of the men was only pretending to be dead. The Marine then raises his rifle toward an Iraqi lying on the floor of the mosque and shoots the man. Two other men are seen slumped by a wall. Sites' account said the men, who were hurt in the previous day's attack, had been shot again by the Marines. Earlier in the footage, as the Marine unit that Sites was accompanying approached the mosque, gunfire can be heard from inside.

Although Kevin Sites' weblog posting can be read, at one level, as a defense of a journalist's duty to report what he sees, it is now being used to convey the impression that a Marine now under investigation is guilty of shooting an inoffensive and wounded man. Sites himself does not say the Marine is guilty: he carefully avoids that; but was well aware that a journalist's story could easily be put to uses beyond his control. Describing his own video, Sites said:

We all knew it was a complicated story, and if not handled responsibly, could have the potential to further inflame the volatile region. I offered to hold the tape until they had time to look into incident and begin an investigation -- providing me with information that would fill in some of the blanks. ...

I knew NBC would be responsible with the footage. But there were complications. We were part of a video "pool" in Falluja, and that obligated us to share all of our footage with other networks. I had no idea how our other "pool" partners might use the footage. I considered not feeding the tape to the pool -- or even, for a moment, destroying it. But that thought created the same pit in my stomach that witnessing the shooting had. It felt wrong. Hiding this wouldn't make it go away. There were other people in that room. What happened in that mosque would eventually come out. I would be faced with the fact that I had betrayed truth as well as a life supposedly spent in pursuit of it.

When NBC aired the story 48-hours later, we did so in a way that attempted to highlight every possible mitigating issue for that Marine's actions. We wanted viewers to have a very clear understanding of the circumstances surrounding the fighting on that frontline. Many of our colleagues were just as responsible. Other foreign networks made different decisions, and because of that, I have become the conflicted conduit who has brought this to the world.

Sites had "no idea how our other 'pool' partners might use the footage"; he regrets that while NBC covered the story responsibly "other foreign networks made different decisions". Sites may now even regret that his explanatory web posting is being used by the Associated Press in ways that he did not originally intend. His story might indeed "further inflame the volatile region"; now his well-meant comments might bear on a political atmosphere that may send a man to jail. We can accept his sincerity, but who will accept the consequences?

I wrote in the earlier post that "we need the truth, however ugly. There is due process to protect the innocent from arbitrary punishment." I still believe in the former but can only hope for the latter.

The Truth Shall Make You Miserable

Darrin Mortenson of the North County Times, a source I've had occasion to quote before, believes that Kevin Sites, the NBC photographer who showed a Marine shooting a wounded Jihadi in a mosque, is caught between a rock and hard place.

And then the entire week of brutal fighting seemed to boil down to a single iconic image of a battle-weary Marine with a Marlboro hanging from his parched and broken lips. It said it all: true grit. The public cheered the image and no one complained about the wall-to-wall play the picture received around the world. ... And it was brought to us by ---- guess who? ---- an embedded reporter. But as soon as Sites' video aired Monday, many people were shouting to ban the embeds -- or worse. When I got to my Oceanside office Wednesday, the first phone message I retrieved was from an angry reader who said she was disturbed that -- in a follow-up article on Sites' Fallujah report -- I had called the slain Iraqi man a "fighter," and not a "chicken fighter."

Mortenson recalls his own experiences when he covered the earlier Marine battle for Fallujah.

Unofficially, while Marine public affairs officers who worked with Sites in Iraq have expressed support and have said he was just doing his job, they admit his report was probably a crushing blow to the morale of the men who'd witnessed and participated in so much horror and so much heroism over the last two weeks. Privately, many Marines said they knew Sites' relationship with the troops was doomed. According to reports from the field, Sites was last seen at the base camp near Fallujah eating alone in the chow hall, shunned by the Marines around him.

I could imagine it because, to some extent, Hayne and I sat in that same lonely seat when we covered the Marines in the spring. After entering Fallujah with a Marine platoon in late March, we witnessed a Marine sniper kill an unarmed Iraqi man who was standing on his roof talking on a cell phone. According to the Marines' rules of engagement that day, the troops could only shoot someone who was shooting at them. Even someone holding a rifle, if not raising it to fire, was off limits. I reported the killing matter-of-factly, without judgment, and definitely without wanting to damage the Marines' morale or reputation. It was war, I reasoned, and I included it as just one vignette in a story that otherwise detailed the Marines' courageous rush into battle.

Why I thought it was important enough to report was because of how the shooting -- whether the man was a legitimate military target or just an unfortunate casualty of war ---- had turned the entire neighborhood against the Marines. More than a hundred people had gathered outside the slain man's home. A nearby mosque blared condemnation and chants. Neighbors took up arms, and insurgents ended up chasing us out of town under fire. Neighbors on the other side of town said the "tribe" would have to get revenge for that man and the more than 20 other Iraqis who were reportedly killed or wounded that day. It was instructive: What we had witnessed and documented was how the insurgency grows -- something the military and folks at home seemed very uncomfortable hearing about.

... When the news is good, everyone hails those hardworking reporters who live in the dirt and danger to accompany the troops, as long as their reports make us feel good. But when the images make us uncomfortable or force us to ask questions, we blame the media. It's war. It's ugly. Believe me. War brings out the very best and the worst in men, especially when both sides claim they have God on their side and are therefore above reproach. Without passing judgment on that one Marine, Sites' footage was important for us to see. Marines quoted by The Boston Globe the day after the video aired said they had no trouble with the shooting in the blurred environment of Fallujah. "I would have shot the insurgent, too," said one sergeant. "Two shots to the head. "You can't trust these people," he said. "He did nothing wrong." If so, then why should Sites be damned for showing it?

Someone I cannot recall remarked that all men who have passed through great danger share the secret of shames no one has noticed or has pretended not to. Initiation is often marked by what is tacitcly kept quiet rather than what is described. It is what men do not say at reunions that marks the veteran. Many who repeat the shopworn phrase that 'there are no atheists in foxholes' only partially understand it. Men on the battlefield pray to God not so much because they want to survive, though there is certainly that; but also because they realize, better than any academic, how much men need forgiveness on every day of their lives.

I think Mortenson is right: we need the truth, however ugly. There is due process to protect the innocent from arbitrary punishment. But I also think that Morteson, Sites and everyone who can regard this calmly from a distance are lucky. They didn't have to pull the trigger and neither of them is a looking at a possible spell in Federal prison.

Update

Kevin Sites adds considerable detail to the shooting of an Iraqi in a mosque by a Marine. Sites stops short of saying the shooting was improper, but maintains that it didn't seem right.

While I continue to tape, a Marine walks up to the other two bodies about fifteen feet away, but also lying against the same back wall. Then I hear him say this about one of the men: "He's fucking faking he's dead -- he's faking he's fucking dead." Through my viewfinder I can see him raise the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the wounded Iraqi. There are no sudden movements, no reaching or lunging. However, the Marine could legitimately believe the man poses some kind of danger. Maybe he's going to cover him while another Marine searches for weapons. Instead, he pulls the trigger. There is a small splatter against the back wall and the man's leg slumps down. "Well he's dead now," says another Marine in the background.

During the course of these events, there was plenty of mitigating circumstances like the ones just mentioned and which I reported in my story. The Marine who fired the shot had reportedly been shot in the face himself the day before. I'm also well aware from many years as a war reporter that there have been times, especially in this conflict, when dead and wounded insurgents have been booby-trapped, even supposedly including an incident that happened just a block away from the mosque in which one Marine was killed and five others wounded. Again, a detail that was clearly stated in my television report. ...

In the particular circumstance I was reporting, it bothered me that the Marine didn't seem to consider the other insurgents a threat -- the one very obviously moving under the blanket, or even the two next to me that were still breathing. I can't know what was in the mind of that Marine. He is the only one who does. But observing all of this as an experienced war reporter who always bore in mind the dark perils of this conflict, even knowing the possibilities of mitigating circumstances -- it appeared to me very plainly that something was not right.

The really fascinating part of Site's account was how the video was subsequently handled.

I did not in any way feel like I had captured some kind of "prize" video. In fact, I was heartsick. Immediately after the mosque incident, I told the unit's commanding officer what had happened. I shared the video with him, and its impact rippled all the way up the chain of command. Marine commanders immediately pledged their cooperation. We all knew it was a complicated story, and if not handled responsibly, could have the potential to further inflame the volatile region. I offered to hold the tape until they had time to look into incident and begin an investigation -- providing me with information that would fill in some of the blanks. ...

When NBC aired the story 48-hours later, we did so in a way that attempted to highlight every possible mitigating issue for that Marine's actions. We wanted viewers to have a very clear understanding of the circumstances surrounding the fighting on that frontline. Many of our colleagues were just as responsible. Other foreign networks made different decisions, and because of that, I have become the conflicted conduit who has brought this to the world.

Here was a genuine dilemma. If the video was not suppressed entirely there would be no controlling its subsequent use, even if it were virtually certain that one of those uses would be enemy propaganda. All Sites could do was act within his own job description and proper lights. The alternative would be to keep the lid on it. Lyricist Tom Lehrer once satirzed Wehner von Braun's nomination to NASA despite his involvement with the V2 rocket:

Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun

It would be unfair to compare Sites to Von Braun and there is no intention to do so, but the dilemmas are superficially comparable. If the Marine's shooting must be viewed in context is there a similar context for shooting and releasing video? At what point does denying aid to the enemy become self-censorship and abetting a lie? At what point does legitimate combat on the battlefield become murder? Sites is explaining why he ought not be considered a traitor, but a man who in some sense was fulfilling his duty to the public. The Marine will be explaining why he ought not be sentenced to jail with the aid of a lawyer.

Through a Glass Darkly

Oliver Stone portrays Alexander the Great as gay (via Instapundit and Ann Althouse) and whether or not that was the case, it illustrates the potential dangers of learning history according to Hollywood. While the Third Reich still remains a potent historical image only the very old have any first hand recollection of it and there is the danger the term 'Nazi' may become just as much a figure of speech as 'working like a Trojan' -- a reference to nothing anyone understands in particular. When people aver that 'Bush is like Hitler', it presumes the speaker has a clear historical knowledge of what Hitler was really like, an assumption which is increasingly invalid.

For one, Hitler would have taken a very dim view of Jesusland, a country which George Bush is said to be in the process of founding, whose geographic location is to the immediate south of the United States of Canada. Martin Bormann said, "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable." Hitler, according to Klaus Fischer's Nazi Germany stated that "one day we want to be in a position where only complete idiots stand in the pulpit and preach to old women." In a concession to popular feeling, however, the Nazis offered the public certain acceptable 'faith traditions' including something called "Gottglaubig", a dished-up creed heavily overladen with ancient Germanic pagan beliefs with versions of rituals for birth, marriage and death.  "By 1938, carols and nativity plays were were forbidden in the schools, and the words 'Christmas' itself was replaced by the word 'Yuletide'."

It has been fashionable to equate teaching the Western classics to spreading an oppressive and fascist ideology. The views of the ultimate fascist on education would surprise many. Hitler did not believe that the classics or intellectual excellence had any more value than dirt on the bottom of a shoe. What he wanted was street fighters, brawlers and unthinking thugs. Articulating his vision of education, Hitler said:

"I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men. I would have them learn only what takes their fancy. But one thing they must learn - self-command! They shall learn to overcome the fear of death, under the severest tests. That is the intrepid and heroic stage of youth. Out of it comes the stage of the free man, the man who is the substance and essence of the world, the creative man, the god-man. In my Ordensburgen there will stand as a statue for worship the figure of the magnificent, self-ordaining god-man; it will prepare the young men for their coming period of ripe manhood."

Maybe Oliver Stone had the right idea, but the wrong historical figure. The Nazis were swingers in their own way, not at all like the stuck-up inhabitants of Jesusland. The wife of Martin Bormann, for example, thought having a menage a trois was a great idea. "A fanatical adherent to Nazi ideology, she bore her husband ten children, the first being named Adolf, after his god-father. Of her husbands mistress, Manja Behrens, she wrote "See to it that one year she has a child and next year I have a child, so that you will always have a wife who is serviceable". The Nazis were big fans of alternative families, as exemplified by the Lebensborn program.

As you know the Lebensborn program had two main components. The first was the encouragement of non-marital pregnancies between Aryan youths with the off-spring raised as Nordic supermen. The second, and more disturbing aspect of the program was the kidnapping of children from occupied territories and the distribution of these children to "Aryan" families. During this program about 200,000 children were kidnapped from Poland. It is estimated that about 50,000 Ukrainian children were kidnapped and about 50,000 from the Baltic regions. Even countries like Norway and France were not immune from such kidnappings and most of the children that survived the Lidice massacre (Czechoslavakia) were taken into the Lebensborn.

It would come as a surprise to many that Hitler believed in state control of the economy. In a speech Hitler gave to German business in 1934, he said:

Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality. Everything positive, good and valuable, which has been achieved in the world in the field of economics and culture, is solely attributable to personality. When, however, the defense of this existing order, its political administration, is left to a majority it will irretrievably go under. All the worldly goods which we possess, we owe to the struggle of the chosen.

He didn't believe in international trade either. Immediately upon taking over, Hitler embarked on a program of making Germany self-sufficient in every strategic commodity. "The goal of the re-organization of the economy was to achieve German self-sufficiency (Autarky). In September 1936, a Four-Year Plan was launched. It was intended to make Germany self-sufficient in coal, iron, steel and other basic raw materials and improve the economy by initiating public works and financial aid to industry and agriculture." What he ended up with was a hybrid economic system not unlike that recommended by many 'progressive' economists. Wikipedia summarizes Nazi economics.

It is important to note that the Nazi Party's conception of international economics was very limited. As the National Socialist in the name NSDAP suggests, the party's primary motivation was to incorporate previously international resources into the Reich by force, rather than by trade (compare to the international socialism as practiced by the Soviet Union and the COMECON trade organization). This made international economic theory a supporting factor in the political ideology rather than a core plank of the platform as it is in most modern political parties.

In an economic sense, Nazism and Fascism are related. Nazism may be considered a subset of Fascism, with all Nazis being Fascists, but not all Fascists being Nazis. Nazism shares many economic features with Fascism, featuring complete government control of finance and investment (allocation of credit), industry, and agriculture. Yet in both of these systems, corporate power and market based systems for providing price information still existed. Quoting Benito Mussolini: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power."

Rather than the state requiring goods from industrial enterprises and allocating raw materials required for their production (as in socialist / communist systems), the state paid for these goods. This allows price to play an essential role in providing information as to relative scarcity of materials, or the capital requirements in technology or labor (including education, as in skilled labor) inputs to produce a manufactured good. Additionally, the unionist (strictly speaking, syndicalist) veneer placed on corporate labor relations was another major point of agreement. Both the German and Italian fascist political parties began as unionist labor movements, and grew into totalitarian dictatorships. This idea was maintained throughout their time in power, with state control used as a means to eliminate the assumed conflict between management labor relations.

If Hitler was altogether more evil than we can conceive, he arose from a time and circumstance which few if any can still remember. Any comparisons between the 1945 and 2004 are likely to be inexact. Those who point to the shooting of Jihadi in Fallujah by a US Marine as evidence that America is drifting into Nazism would do well to remember that in 1945, American troops who arrived in Dachau were so disgusted by what they saw they executed hundreds of SS guards on the spot. This is a link to remarkable photographs of the incident.

"The killing of unarmed POWs did not trouble many of the men in I company that day for to them the SS guards did not deserve the same protected status as enemy soldiers who have been captured after a valiant fight. To many of the men in I company, the SS were nothing more than wild, vicious animals whose role in this war was to starve, brutalize, torment, torture and murder helpless civilians." Flint Whitlock, The Rock of Anzio, From Sicily to Dachau: A history of the U.S. 45th Infantry Division

The facile comparison of Hitler to the modern leftist bogeymen du jour lends itself to distortion. Most people are tolerably familiar with the Third Reich's oppression of homosexuals. But relatively few know that a special badge was minted in Dachau for assignment to the Jehovah's Witnesses: the purple triangle.

Red was for Communists, Social Democrats, anarchists, and other "enemies of the state"; green was for German criminals; blue was for foreign forced laborers; brown was for Gypsies; pink was for homosexuals; purple was for Jehovah's Witnesses and black was for asocials, a catch-all term for vagrants, bums, prostitutes, hobos, alcoholics who were living on the streets, or anyone who didn't have a permanent address. The "work-shy," or those who were arrested because they refused to work, wore a black badge.

That Nazi medical experiments were carried out on Jews is common knowledge. But what about Roman Catholic priests? Hitler was remarkably even handed in his treatment of religions.

After the war, Dr. Schilling was arrested by the American Army and charged with participating in a "common plan" to violate the Laws and Usages of War because he conducted experiments on Dachau prisoners, using various drugs in an effort to find a cure for malaria. Most of his subjects were young Polish priests whom Dr. Schilling infected by means of mosquitoes from the marshes of Italy and the Crimea, according to author Peter Padfield in his book entitled "Himmler." The priests were chosen for the experiments because they were not required to work, as were the ordinary prisoners at Dachau.

Roots

The Church of England was recently asked by Islington municipal council to rename one its schools to avoid alienating "people from other faiths and non-believers". The Islington municipal council had ironically been stripped of its school supervisory powers due its poor performance. Its duties were subsequently transferred to a private firm. But that did not prevent them from holding strong views on the naming of schools.

Islington council plans to incorporate the existing St Mary Magdalene Church of England Primary School into a new City Academy for five- to 18-year-olds. The church, which is giving £2 million towards building costs, has been told by the local authority - a partner in the scheme - that the name of the new school cannot be religious.

James Kempton, children and young people spokesman for the council's ruling Liberal Democrat party, said a consultation had been launched because of concerns over the use of the word "saint". "We want to create a school that is open to everybody in the community, not a school that selects through the back door," he said. "We need to ensure this is a school which is appropriate for Islington in the 21st century. "Church-going is now a much less significant part of people's lives."

It would not have been the first time that public authority had forgotten its cultural roots. In medieval England the legacy of classical Greece was often regarded as a form of heathenism, even though it lay at the root of Western Civilization. Homer was regarded as the "devil's entertainment". The knowledge of classical antiquity was largely forgotten. It was not until the Renaissance that Europe rehabilitated its wellsprings, readmitting it into public life partially because of its technological utility.

The reappraisal of classical texts may also have paved the way for another crucial development in west European history -- the Scientific Revolution. Until recently, scholars have seen little connection between the rise of modern science and the Renaissance. The latest research, however, has suggested a number of ways in which interest in ancient science may have fostered new approaches to the natural world. The astronomer Copernicus (1473-1547), for example, was educated in the humanist tradition, his scientific work owing much to the revival of Platonism in this period. Copernicus was the first to formulate the revolutionary proposal that the earth and the planets revolved around the sun. Likewise, the famous illustrated anatomical treatise published by Vesalius (1514-64) in 1543, owed much to Vesalius's deep-seated desire to emulate the work of the ancient Greek physician Galen. The critical re-evaluation of ancient texts, such as the botanical treatise of another ancient Greek physician, Dioscorides, and the Roman writer Pliny's Natural History, was also instrumental in promoting the revival of botany in the 16th century.

Eventually Homer became respectable again. The Iliad was again taught in the best circles and Aristotle placed at the service of the Church.

The great intellectual movement of Renaissance Italy was humanism. The humanists believed that the Greek and Latin classics contained both all the lessons one needed to lead a moral and effective life and the best models for a powerful Latin style. ... In the course of the fifteenth century, the humanists also convinced most of the popes that the papacy needed their skills. Sophisticated classical scholars were hired to write official correspondence and propaganda; to create an image of the popes as powerful, enlightened, modern rulers of the Church; and to apply their scholarly tools to the church's needs, including writing a more classical form of the Mass.

Nowhere was the resurgence of classicism so complete as in the English upper class. Maurice Baring, striving for a metaphor to describe the loss of a friend in the aerial combat of the Great War turned to his natural models:

And after days of watching, days of lead,
There came the certain news that you were dead.
You had died fighting, fighting against odds,
Such as in war the gods
Æthereal dared when all the world was young;
Such fighting as blind Homer never sung,
Nor Hector nor Achilles never knew,
High in the empty blue.
High, high, above the clouds, against the setting sun,
The fight was fought, and your great task was done.

Lord Byron, living a century and a half before the councilors at Islington, did not want to be "open to everybody in the community". At the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire, he did not prevaricate, but took sides: the side of a Christian Englishman certainly, but also that of what he regarded as Western Civilization's roots, as if Poseidon himself were cheering from 'the wooded top of Thracian Samos', and fought for the re-establishment of Greece.

Mavrokordatos and Byron planned to attack the Turkish-held fortress of Lepanto, at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth. He employed a fire master to prepare artillery and took part of the rebel army under his own command and pay, despite his lack of military experience. But before the expedition could sail, on February 15, 1824, he fell ill, and the usual remedy of bleeding weakened him further. He made a partial recovery, but in early April he caught a violent cold which was aggravated by the bleeding insisted on by his doctors. The cold became a violent fever, and he died on April 19.

He left a testament, which though heartfelt, is astonishingly partisan by today's standards; the thoughts of a man more certain of his perspective than may ever be again at least in Islington; a man who could name his saints and remember his Homer.

The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,---
Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.

The mountains look on Marathon---
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that Greece might yet be free
For, standing on the Persians' grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

Must we but weep o'er days more blest?
Must we but blush?---Our fathers bled.
Earth! render back from out thy breast
A remnant of our Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylae.

What, silent still, and silent all?
Ah! no; the voices of the dead
Sound like a distant torrent's fall,
And answer, "Let one living head,
But one arise,---we come, we come!"
'Tis but the living who are dumb.

Death in Antwerp

Andrew Sullivan links to an as-yet unsolved murder of an Orthodox Jew in Antwerp. The Jerusalem Post has the details:

Moshe Yitzhak Na'eh, 24, a Belgian Jew who was shot in the head Wednesday night in Antwerp in what seems to be an anti-Semitic attack, died of his wounds late Thursday afternoon, Belgium's Prosecutor's Office announced.  "We do not exclude any motive, but so far there are no indications that the motive was racist or extremist," said the prosecutor's spokeswoman, Dominique Renyers.  ...

Na'eh, 24, a father of three – the oldest five years old, the youngest an 18-month-old baby – was shot at about 2:20 a.m. on Lange Kievitstraat as he was unloading his car near a Muslim neighborhood in Antwerp, home to large Jewish and Muslim communities. Na'eh was also a British citizen.

Ceitlin added that he was informed that at the time of the shooting Na'eh was carrying 1,300 in his pockets, which the attackers are not believed to have attempted to steal. "This is further evidence that the attack might have been an anti-Semitic incident," Ceitlin said.

It is really too early to pin the blame on the usual suspects, a list which could be pretty long considering the checkered history of Europe. Readers will recall that a woman claiming to be Jewish alleged she was molested on a French train, a story which turned out to be a fabrication. But if Na'eh's murder is related to the jihad, then reader Jane's point on the Grozny thread will have proved prescient.

The youngsters, the violent impatient ones, have suffered a great loss at Falluja, while the patient ones may have suffered their greatest loss on 9/11 when some of us became aware. Daniel Pipes suggests the youthful terrorists will give up on theatrical violence and use mafia tactics. They already are in Paris and Malmo. Watching blogs and newspapers closely I see a new wave of warfare coming from the patient group. They are returning with a vengeance to the well-marketed psychological PR type moderate rhetoric directed at our desire to get along and our penchant for political correctness. There are plenty of apologetic dhimmis in Europe who will happily accommodate by spewing anything but their fear. You can see it today in a Glenn Reynolds post. What we need to worry most about is whether individually we will be as strong and prepared as our Marines when the silent patient battle comes to our neighborhood, school board and political system.

In that same thread, I remarked:

... I was also curious as to whether anything had been written about "subclinical" urban warfare, situations in which government authority is limited, but not actually totally prevented, by a network of gangs, intimidation and social pressure. That would probably characterize some of the worse Islamic ghettos in Europe. Is there a continuum in which terrorist cells in embryo can turn a subclinical urban area into a "no go" site?

But let's be mindful that there are no established facts in this case and until there are, it is all speculation.

War In the Darkness

Al Bawaba offers a glimpse into lowest level of urban warfare -- tunneling. "According to The AP, Israeli military sources said the tunnel collapsed while an unknown number of Palestinians were digging toward an Israeli outpost near Rafah in southern Gaza Strip. Palestinian officials conveyed the tunnel collapsed following the heavy rains in the area overnight. They said five people, all from the same family, were trapped in the rubble. Israel's Army Radio said three Palestinians were wounded."

Subterranean warfare is probably as old as man himself. Our ancestors were not called cave-men for nothing and mining was an essential part of ancient and medieval warfare. The Vietnam war illustrated that tunnel warfare could still be employed tactically. Yet probably nowhere have tunnels and cities merged more inextricably than in the city of Rafah in the Gaza strip, where a strange, troglodytic contest continues between the IDF and Palestinian terrorists, sometimes with tragicomic results.

Israeli army sappers called in by the Palestinian authorities rescued three wounded people from a collapsed arms-smuggling tunnel under the Egyptian border today and promptly arrested them, military sources said. ... Militant groups have dug a warren of tunnels under the Israeli-controlled border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip in order to smuggle in weapons and ammunition.

The immense extent of tunneling between Egypt and the Gaza strip is shown on this map. The Operation Rainbow site has an extensive description of the tunnels, together with some striking photographs. Some tunnels were discovered by US forces in Fallujah, possibly using techniques developed in Gaza. The mining techniques developed at Rafah were designed to evade close Israeli surveillance both from the surface and the air. Many ingenious methods have been devised for disposing of spoil, with the excavated materials transported in small lots by vehicle to points well away from the tunnel entrances. Once a tunnel is constructed, it is leased out, a fine fusion of free enterprise and terrorism.

On August 10, 2002, the Islamic web portal, "Islam Online," published an interview with an individual named "Honey." Honey identified himself as an active "expert" in the excavation of clandestine subterranean passages in the Rafah area, and described how he and his friends dug tunnels in which Palestinian terrorist organizations smuggled arms.

After determining the most suitable location to begin work, engineers survey the ground, which must be of a firm, and not overly sandy consistency. The further the point of origin is from the (Israeli) border, the less chance there is of being caught. A pit is dug one meter wide and between twelve to fourteen meters deep. Supports are placed on the sides of the pit. The pit is dug to a depth of at least twelve meters so that Israeli detection devices cannot detect tunnels at this depth. The tunnel is dug horizontally so that it has a width of forty centimeters by forty centimeters. Every three meters wooden planks are placed alongside the four sides of the tunnels so it doesn't collapse. Various mechanical devices are used to overcome natural obstacles like rock, including a machine that removes sand via suction. An electrical cable is hung in the tunnel to provide lighting.

The work is conducted clandestinely. The sand is not removed all at one time, but is placed in flour bags and transported to a remote location. A lookout is posted at the entrance to the tunnel to ensure that the work continues unimpeded. The completion of one tunnel takes three months or more. The last tunnel we built took three months. The workers who build a tunnel receive a percentage of the profit generated from smuggling weapons.

Between six to twelve meters are dug every day. The last tunnel we dug was two hundred and thirty meters long. At either end of the tunnel there is a "work manager;" the two work managers maintain contact by code, usually via phone. The workers on the Egyptian side direct where the tunnel exit will be. The exit from the Palestinian side is steep (a straight vertical shaft), while it is gradually inclined on the Egyptian side. Construction of a tunnel costs a minimum of $10,000. The minimal cost for smuggling weapons is $300 and the money is split between the five partners for building and maintaining the tunnels.

The Israelis have attempted to clear a strip on both sides of the Egypt-Gaza border to facilitate interdiction. These methods have been vigorously opposed by Human Rights Watch, which considers these precautions disproportionate. Their report reads in part:

The border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt is 12.5 kilometers long, of which four kilometers run alongside Rafah. The IDF refers to this border area as the “Philadelphi” corridor or zone, but it is better understood as two distinct areas: a shielded patrol corridor (between the border and IDF fortifications) and a buffer zone (the space between IDF fortifications and the houses of Rafah). The expansion of both of these areas is illustrated in the satellite imagery included in this report. Before the uprising, the IDF maintained a patrol corridor along the border some twenty to forty meters wide, separated from the camp in most places by a concrete wall, approximately three meters high, topped with barbed wire. In some areas, especially the densely populated Block O section of the camp, houses were situated within several meters of the patrol corridor.

... IDF positions fire with large caliber machine guns and tanks at civilian areas. Based on multiple visits to the area by Human Rights Watch since 2001 and interviews with local residents and foreign diplomats, aid workers, and journalists, this shooting appears to be largely indiscriminate and in some cases unprovoked. In July 2004, nearly every house on Rafah’s southern edge was pockmarked by heavy machine gun, tank, and rocket fire on the side facing the border. Bullet holes were not only clustered around windows or other possible sniper positions, but sprayed over entire sides of buildings. Human Rights Watch researchers also witnessed indiscriminate use of heavy machine gun fire against Palestinian civilian areas in nearby Khan Yunis, without apparent shooting by Palestinians from that area at the time.

On a regular basis, IDF positions and patrols on the border come under attack from Palestinian armed groups using small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. During three nights in July Human Rights Watch researchers spent in Rafah, Palestinian small arms fire was sporadic while IDF heavy machine guns fired long bursts into the camp. Representatives of Palestinian armed groups in Rafah told Human Rights Watch that the IDF-controlled border is well-fortified and attacking it is largely in vain, especially because a single 7.62 mm bullet in Rafah costs U.S. $7 (a figure also cited by the IDF as evidence of their success in blocking arms).

Both the IDF and Palestinian armed groups use tactics that place civilians at risk. Under customary international law, civilians must be kept outside hostilities as far as possible, and they enjoy general protection against danger arising from hostilities. Human Rights Watch documented multiple cases where the IDF converted civilian buildings into sniper positions during incursions and forced residents to remain with them inside. In some cases, the IDF coerced civilians to serve as “human shields” while searching Palestinian homes, a practice strictly prohibited by international humanitarian law.5 By attacking the IDF from within populated areas, Palestinian armed groups also place civilians at risk, but Human Rights Watch found no evidence that gunmen fire from inhabited homes or force residents to let armed groups use their homes.

The underground war briefly came under the media spotlight in connection with the death of American activist Rachel Corrie. Al Jazeera describes the circumstances of her death in Rafah.

A year has passed since Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American peace activist from Olympia, was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer while nonviolently trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian house in the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli government has refused to release its entire June 2003 military police investigation report to the United States but continues to claim that her death was simply an "unfortunate accident," despite the testimony of six eyewitnesses who claim that Corrie, with her bright orange jacket, was clearly visible to the bulldozer drivers, and that the bulldozer lifted her up and drove over her repeatedly with its plow down.

It is no wonder that the Corrie family is urging Congress to pass House Concurrent Resolution 111, which calls upon the "United States government to undertake a full, fair, and expeditious investigation into the death of Rachel Corrie." Yet, while questions remain about the details of her death, there should be no question about its ultimate cause. Corrie was killed by Israel's wall.

The Frontpage Magazine, however, took a different view of things.

But most of the press (but not FrontPagemag.com) failed to report the presence of extensive tunnels underneath the homes of Rafah, used to deliver arms across the Egyptian border to the terrorist Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Houses involved in such smuggling are demolished as a matter of course. And when Corrie was killed, according to a Israeli Consulate media officer in San Francisco, the bulldozer was not even attempting to raze a home - just remove shrubbery used to hide a tunnel.

Pro and Contra

Two different visions of the future of the world were separately articulated over the last few days. The first was delivered by Jacques Chirac, the President of France at a gathering sponsored by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

He said the West could not impose its values on the world and confuse democratisation and Westernisation. "Granted, it is still possible to organise the world based on a logic of power yet experience has taught us that this type of organisation is, by its very definition, unstable and sooner or later leads to crisis or conflict. ... It is by recognising the new reality of a multi-polar and interdependent world that we will succeed in building a sounder and fairer international order. This is why we must work together to revive multilateralism, a multilateralism based on a reformed and strengthened United Nations."

In Chirac's view the United States had tried to impose this "logic of power" on the world and stood condemned. The New York Times reported on remarks the French President had delivered earlier.

Most prominently, Mr. Chirac reiterated his view that the war in Iraq had led to an "expansion" of terrorism in the world. Though he said that France was willing to put its differences with Britain and the United States aside and look to the future by helping to rebuild a stable, democratic and sovereign Iraq, Mr. Chirac indicated that he thought the judgment of history would go against the Iraq war and vindicate those who opposed it. ...

"We have another choice," Mr. Chirac told an audience at the International Institute of Strategic Studies (remarks delivered later). "That of an order based on respect for international law and the empowerment of the world's new poles by fully and wholly involving them in the decision-making mechanisms. "Only this path," he added, "is likely to establish a stable, legitimate and accepted order in the long run." The new "poles" he spoke of are the emerging regional powers of the new century, including Europe, China, India and Brazil.

A fortnight earlier, an American Undersecretary of Defense gave a quiet interview to Radek Sikorski, at one time a deputy minister of defense himself in Poland, on the future as he saw it. Paul Wolfowitz. The full article is in the Prospect Magazine.

Export of democracy isn't really a good phrase. We're trying to remove the shackles on democracy. What you would hope is that governments can be encouraged on a path of gradual reform because that's the best way to avoid the sort of cataclysm that will come otherwise.  ... We're not trying to graft our system of government on to people who are different from us. We're trying to remove shackles that keep them from having what they want. And it's astonishing how many of them want something that's similar to what we in the west have.

Sikorski put a rhetorical question to Wolfowitz: "The US president used to be seen as the leader of the free world rather than just president of one country and America used to be seen as a benign global empire. Now, after 9/11, understandably, this is a more patriotic, perhaps even a more nationalistic country. But won't the price of running a nationalistic American empire be much higher than managing a co-operative one?" Wolfowitz responded with the most astonishing assertion of the interview, the idea that a cooperative "empire" -- if empire it could be called -- could only consist of free nations.

The premise of your question is that we're out to run an empire, but there is no American empire. Look at Japan and Korea. They were part of this so-called empire in the cold war. After the second world war and the Korean war, we invested heavily in the defence and economic systems of countries like Japan and Korea - hardly an imperial undertaking. I would submit that we have benefited enormously from their strength and their ability to stand on their own feet. They're now contributing to the rest of the world. We're so much better off with a Japan as a strong trading partner than a Japan as a basket case. If people want to redefine the word "empire" to mean this as an empire, then it's just semantics. We are not trying to control these countries so we can exploit their resources. We're trying to enable these countries to stand on their own feet and our experience says that when they do so, we're better off. It's back to the absurdity of saying we're trying to impose our ideas on other people when we want to help them become democracies. There's more legitimacy to the question of whether we are really prepared to live with what they produce when they become democratic. There's an uncertainty about the democratic process and there's always a danger that bad people will get elected. But it's a funny empire that relies on releasing basic human desires to be free and prosperous and live in peace. One of the things about this moment in history is that nobody really thinks they can produce an army, a navy or an air force that can take on the US. That should channel human competitiveness into more productive and peaceful pursuits.

History may remember Jacques Chirac as one of the most prolific institution builders of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The European Union and the United Nations are but some of the multilateral projects he sought to strengthen in the belief they would serve as a prototype for the future ordering of the world. Wolfowitz's vision seems altogether more complex. He seems unwilling to speak of institutions outside the context of empowerment, as if to speak of instruments of governance without freedoms was tantamount to prescribing tyranny. Their difference of opinion may be rooted, not so much in an argument over bureaucratic arrangements, but in their view of the nature of man himself.

Successive Cities

Historically, large urban battles have always been part of a larger campaign. Stalingrad from the German perspective was part of the general offensive whose goal was to destroy the Soviet Union. From the Soviet point of view Stalingrad represented a sinkhole which would empty the German 6th Army of its combat power preparatory to its later encirclement. The Battle of Manila was largely fought the possession of the seaport, which the Japanese wished to deny to American logisticians.

The relatively recent Battle of Grozny also had a wider context. Parameters noted that the Chechens saw it as part of their politico-military strategy for wearing down Russia. Grozny was merely the first in a succession of via Dolorosas they wanted to present the Russians.

The Chechens reverted to a battle of "successive cities" after the Grozny battle ended, hoping to recreate their Grozny successes elsewhere. They moved their operations base to Shali, Argun, and other city centers. They recognized that they could accomplish two things with this tactic: they could negate Russian advantages of firepower in the open from helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and tanks, and they could blend in with the local population to their advantage. This not only continued to make it difficult to distinguish combatants from civilians, but it also helped the Chechens get the local population on their side. This was usually the result when Russian forces entered a city, destroyed property and buildings, and killed or wounded civilians while searching for their armed opponent.

The Israeli Battle for Beirut was also part of a larger campaign named Peace for Galilee whose goal was to destroy a mini-PLO state that had fastened itself onto the carcass of a fragmented Lebanon. Wikipedia summarizes the situuation then.

In 1981, armed forces of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) occupied large areas of southern Lebanon. Attacks against Israeli territory increased, as the PLO's armed forces used Lebanon as a base to attack Israel with rockets and artillery. PLO soldiers fought with Lebanese forces; in 1996, the World Lebanese Organization, the World Maronite Union, and multiple human rights groups concerned with the Middle East issued a public declaration accusing the PLO of genocide in Lebanon and stating they were responsible for the deaths of 100,000 Lebanese civilians. Due to ongoing civil war since 1975, Lebanon had no effective central government at the time.

But from the first, the Israeli cabinet was uncertain about how hard or fast to move. As a result, they never trapped the elements they intended to destroy.

Suspicious of Sharon’s sincerity and concerned about possible Syrian intervention, the cabinet decided to monitor the campaign closely, thus leaving any military escalation subject to its approval. Begin told the ministers that “the cabinet will meet daily and make decisions according to the evolving situation.” ... In the five days that followed Begin’s announcement of 8 June, Sharon did everything he could to gain approval for tactical moves that inched the IDF to an encirclement of Beirut. The resultant piecemeal movements aggravated the question in the IDF concerning the final objectives of the campaign. Meanwhile, confusion started to grow in both the cabinet and the public when military operations began to exceed the publicly stated forty-kilometer limit.

Apparently at this juncture in the war, the IDF missed a golden opportunity to capture west Beirut in quick order. A Western reporter inside Beirut at the time observed how “the sheer speed and depth of the mass Israeli invasion stunned both the Palestinians and the Syrians.” In interviews conducted after the war, a number of Palestinians depicted the Arab forces in the city as “demoralized, dispirited, and panic-stricken as a result of the crushing defeat they had suffered in the previous week.” ...

In response to Sharon’s encirclement of Beirut, the Israeli cabinet changed the objectives of Operation Peace for Galilee. Instead of placing the civilian population of Galilee out of artillery range, Israel now demanded the departure of all Palestinian fighters and Syrian troops from Beirut. The Lebanese Army would enter west Beirut to accept arms from the PLO fighters, who in turn would leave without their weapons.

Arafat rejected Israel’s demand to leave the city with his organization and decided to bide his time. Meanwhile, Arab forces in west Beirut took advantage of the Israeli delay in assaulting the city by frantically fortifying their own positions. “They mined the southern approaches to the city, booby-trapped junctions, placed explosives in buildings so that they could be blown up to collapse on advancing forces, dug trenches, and fortified bunkers.” Eventually, a system of strong points and barricades guarded all possible avenues of entry into the city.

The Israelis eventually won the urban battle from a military point of view, but were counterattacked politically. The Israeli Labor party called for an end to the war. The Reagan Administration attempted to negotiate an omnibus withdrawal of all parties: the Syrians, the PLO and the Israelis. America backed its guarantee with Marine peacekeepers, of whom 220 were killed in a suicide bombing of their barracks. (Answer the trivia question: the most costly US urban battle in the Middle East is a) Beirut, b) Baghdad, c) Fallujah, d) Mogadishu. Bonus question: which were UN missions?) Although Israel withdrew nearly completely from Lebanon under the deal, the Syrians never did. Wikipedia again:

On May 22, 2000, Israel completed its withdrawal from the south of Lebanon in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 425. A 50 square kilometer piece of disputed mountain terrain, commonly referred to as the Shebaa Farms, remains under the control of Israel. The UN has certified Israel's pullout and regards the Shebaa Farms as occupied Syrian territory ... During Lebanon's civil war, Syria's troop deployment in Lebanon was legitimized by the Lebanese Parliament in the Taif Agreement, and supported by the Arab League. Fifteen years later, Damascus justifies its continued military presence in Lebanon by citing the continued weakness of the LAF (Lebanese Armed Forces), Beirut's requests, and the agreement with the Lebanese Government to implement all of the constitutional reforms in the Taif Agreement. Contrary to Taif, the Hezbollah militia has not been dismantled, and the LAF has not been allowed to deploy along the border with Israel, though it was called on to do so by UN Security Council Resolution 1391, urged by UN Resolution UN Security Council Resolution 1496, and demanded by UN Security Council Resolution 1559.

An estimated 20,000 Syrian troops (down from 35,000) remain in position in many areas of Lebanon, although Taif stipulations called for agreement between the Syrian and Lebanese Governments on their redeployment by September 1992. ... Syria has been accused of turning Lebanon's Government into a puppet. Recently, the US has begun applying pressure on Syria to end its occupation and cease interfering with internal Lebanese matters. ...France, Germany and Britain, along with Lebanese politicians have joined the US in denouncing Syria's interference. On September 2nd 2004 the UN Security Council adopted UN Security Council Resolution 1559, authored by France and the US in an uncommon show of cooperation. Echoing the Taif Agreement the resolution "calls upon all remaining foreign forces to withdraw from Lebanon" and " for the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias".

Although Israel "won" the Battle of Beirut and the Russians eventually ousted the Chechens from Grozny, they achieved far less than they bargained for. These two instances illustrate how Islamic strategists believe it is possible to lose a battle, yet win the campaign of "successive cities" within the wider war. By skillfully playing on the political divisions of their enemies and "internationalizing" a conflict they may be able to politically retain objectives that they could not defend by military means.

Grozny

It was in Grozny that Islamic fighters first learned that they could defeat a multidivisional superpower force equipped with armor, artillery and aviation. The Russian Army's fight for Grozny lasted from December 1994 until 8 February 1995. The campaign is covered in detail here. The Russians advanced on the city from four directions. At their disposal were 34 battalions totalling 24,000 men, equipped with 80 tanks, 208 BMP armored personnel carriers, and 182 artillery pieces and mortars.

Defense Minister Grachev's forces believed that the Chechen command had created three defensive rings to defend Grozny. There were an inner circle with a radius of 1-1.5 km around the Presidential Palace, a middle circle to a distance of up to 1 km from the inner borderline in the northwestern part of the city and up to 5 km in its southwestern and southeastern parts, and an outer circle that passed mainly through the city outskirts.

Grachev estimated that the Chechens would hold these concentric defensive rings with a force of 10,000 men. But when the Russian columns reached Grozny, they found the streets deserted and drove straight into the center of the city. The concentric defensive rings did not exist. 

there were no concentric rings or forces available for such resistance. The Chechens, in fact, noted that no such plan existed. ...a statement supported by the fact that no barricades or fighters met the Russian force moving into the city that day.

In place of defensive rings, the Chechens had created platoon plus sized urban battlegroups, each a miniature combined arms unit. Unlike the Russian units, these battlegroups had nearly complete autonomy and intimate familiarity with the terrain. These could be combined to create ambush groups, which were especially effective against Russian armor operating without infantry support. These groups would use their knowledge of the byways, as well as underground sewage and water tunnels both to flank and to get into the rear of military units. Parameters noted: "The Chechens were proficient at booby-trapping doorways, breakthrough areas, entrances to metros and sewers, discarded equipment, and the bodies of dead soldiers. Some command-detonated mines were also used, but this weapon found greater use in other cities the Chechens defended."

The Chechens lacked enough numerical strength to organize even one echelon of defense around the city. However, the company or group commanders had a great deal of autonomy. ... The ambush was based on the 25-man group, composed of three mobile squads of two heavy machine gunners, two RPG gunners, one sniper, and three riflemen. Three of these 25-man groups (supported by an 82mm-mortar crew with two tubes) would conduct an ambush as a 75-man unit. Three of the eight-man squads would serve as a “killer team” and set up in three positions along the ambush route. They would occupy the lower level of buildings in the ambush zone to prevent being wounded by incoming artillery. The remaining fifty men would occupy blocking positions to ensure the entrapped Russians could not escape and to prevent reinforcements from entering the ambush area.

... Organizationally, the Chechen force had seven-man subgroups that contained three riflemen/automatic riflemen/ammunition bearers, two RPG gunners, one sniper, and one medic/corpsman. Three of these subgroups made up the majority of a 25-man group or platoon, and three of these platoons formed 75-man groups. The Chechen force exploited Russian disorientation by moving behind and parallel to the Russian force once it entered the city. Snipers set up in hide positions that supported their respective platoons.

The Motorola hand-held radio was the primary communications device. There was one radio for every six combatants but it would have been preferable to have one per combatant. Little encryption was used, only the Chechen language. At the national equivalent of headquarters, access was available to INMARSAT.

In December 1994, the Russian 131st Maikovskiy (sometimes called Mikop) brigade advanced through the eerily deserted Grozny streets straight into the train station in the center of town. There was no apparent opposition but unknown to them, the Chechen battlegroups were gathering in the surrounding buildings.

Since the situation appeared so calm, they had gone into the train station, hardly securing their vehicles or even bothering to post guards. In the meantime, Chechen mobile units had fallen back on the city center and had surrounded them at the train station.

One of the first signs of trouble was when the communications officer of the Maikovskiy brigade reported that he had heard the phrase "welcome to hell" through his head set. He reported it to the Brigade Commander, Colonel Savin, who thought it was a joke. Then the firing began. Colonel Savin would not survive the next 12 hours. As described in an earlier post:

Sixty hours later, the unit had been wiped out. "By 3 January 1995, the brigade had lost nearly 800 men, 20 of 26 tanks, and 102 of 120 armored vehicles." It had been surrounded and despite urgent pleas for relief, been utterly destroyed. "Its commander, Colonel Ivan Savin and almost 1000 officers and men died and 74 were taken prisoners. As for the two Spetsnaz groups south of the city, they surrendered to the Chechens after having tried to survive without food for several days," one historian observed.

The Battle of Grozny had begun. It was a fate reserved for the US Marines and soldiers heading into Fallujah. The events in Grozny reverberated not only throughout the Muslim world, but in the West. Ralph Peters wrote a landmark article entitled "Our Soldiers, Their Cities" where he predicted that the urbanization of the Third World made it likely that America would encounter, not just one but many Groznys. By the late 1990s, steps had been taken to address some of the issues that were might be encountered. Although Baghdad was expected to be the first test of urban warfare, its rapid fall made intensive fighting for it unnecessary.

The jihadis had regarded the earlier Marine assault on Fallujah as a victory and confidently faced the next assault. Even some British civilians agreed.

"My son told me the British troops in southern Iraq have all been pulled back to Basra. They reckon there's going to be one big push to Falluja. It's us going to pull the Yanks out of the fire once again. They're so stupid and gung-ho, they go round shooting everyone. And now they need our boys to sort out their mess. This is just a political game to help George Bush win the election, and it all just stinks." Rob Scott, 61, of Methil, Fife, whose grandson, Private Charles Scott, 18, is with the Black Watch in Basra, was also convinced the troops were being sent north. The former Black Watch warrant officer said: "It's bloody disgusting the lies this government is telling our boys and morale is just going through the floor. We're having to go north to clear up the muck the Americans have left behind because they're so pathetic."

Even after Fallujah had been largely cleared, the argument that America had accomplished nothing soldiered on. This is how the Guardian reported it.

US commanders said yesterday hundreds of insurgents had been killed in the four-day assault on Falluja but acknowledged taking heavy casualties themselves. ... Planeloads of injured soldiers have been flown to the US military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and doctors were bracing for a further influx as the Falluja battle culminates. ...

Two US Marine Corps Super Cobra helicopters were hit yesterday near Falluja and forced down. No crew were hurt.

Many believe the weeks of warnings preceding the Falluja attack allowed insurgents to slip away from the city.

Gen Myers warned: "If anybody thinks that Falluja is going to be the end of the insurgency in Iraq, that was never the objective, never our intention, and even never our hope." Iraqi aid officials said they were increasingly concerned about the families still in Falluja and the thousands camped in villages nearby.

Residents said the stench of decomposing bodies hung over the city, power and water supplies were cut and food was running out for thousands of trapped civilians. The Iraqi Red Crescent sent a convoy of four trucks to the city yesterday, carrying first aid kits, food, blankets and tents. "It is a disaster inside Falluja," said Firdoos al-Abadi, head of the Red Crescent's emergency committee.

Perfidy and Treachery

The Crimes of War Project has a list of terms many of which relate, or are bound to relate to combat in places like the Sunni Triangle. One of the more interesting definitions is the notion of "Perfidy and Treachery" and its relationship to the ruse de guerre. What is interesting in this discussion is the distinction drawn between what seems barbarous, such as the massacre at Srebrenica, and the technical illegality of using neutral emblems in a perfidious manner.

... Bosnian Serb soldiers wearing stolen UN uniforms and driving stolen UN vehicles announced over megaphones that that they were UN peacekeepers and that they were prepared to oversee the Bosnian Muslims’ surrender and guarantee they would not be harmed.  Disoriented and exhausted, many Bosnian Muslims fell for the lie. It was only after they had surrendered that they discovered their fatal mistake. For in surrendering, they were going to their deaths. Those whom the Serbs got their hands on were killed by firing squad.

Srebrenica was the worst massacre in Europe since World War II. The shock at what took place there was so great that to separate war crimes from entirely licit military actions seemed, and in many ways still seems, almost obscene. And yet from the point of view of international humanitarian law, the ambushes the Serbs sprang on the fleeing Bosnians were legal ruses soldiers can employ in wartime. Investigators for the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia said the fact that many of those in the retreating column were Bosnian government soldiers made the column a military threat and thus a legitimate target. In legal terms, the Bosnian Serb ambushes did not lull the Bosnian Muslims into a false sense of protection under international law, rather they led them to miscalculate the nature of the threat.

What was entirely criminal was the Bosnian Serbs’ use of UN emblems and matériel to lure the fleeing Muslims to surrender—a clear example of a war crime. The prohibition in modern times against what is alternatively called “perfidy” and “treachery” goes back to the American Civil War.

... Other examples of perfidy are feigning to negotiate under a flag of truce or surrender, feigning to be incapacitated by wounds or sickness, and feigning of civilian, noncombatant status. Article 39 prohibits the use of flags, military emblems, insignia, or uniforms of the opposing side at the time of an attack in order to protect or impede military operations.

... But the protocol states explicitly that ruses of war are not prohibited. A ruse is an act that is intended to mislead an adversary or to “induce him to act recklessly” but which infringe no rule of armed conflict and do not attempt to gain his confidence by assuring protection under law. Camouflage, decoys, mock operations, and misinformation are all permitted ruses. An example of a legal ruse was when U.S. forces gathered at sea during the Gulf War to trick Iraq into thinking an amphibious assault was imminent; the attack eventually came by land. Another example might be sending a bomber toward barracks in order to draw air defense away from a shipyard.

In the Heat of Battle 2

One of the situational dangers of the battlefield was illustrated by the death of a California Marine. The Mercury News reports:

Marine Lance Cpl. Jeramy Ailes, 22, of Gilroy was killed Monday in Al-Fallujah by small arms fire. "They had finished mopping up in Fallujah and they went back to double-check on some insurgents. From what we gathered, somebody playing possum jumped up and shot him,'' said his father, Joel Ailes, who learned of his death Monday evening. "It's extremely hard."

... His first time in Iraq, Jeramy Ailes gave $10 to each child he came across because he knew it would feed their families for 30 days. This time, he asked his family to mail as many soccer balls as they could. His family sent 300 balls, and Jeramy Ailes' platoon handed them out to children.

Joel Ailes warmly remembered the last conversation he had with his son last month, in which Jeramy Ailes recounted how he had come across a large man walking with a 12-year-old girl carrying a huge bale of straw on her back. His son, who spoke and read Arabic, exchanged words with the man. And, for the next seven miles, his son carried the girl on his back and the man carried the bales of straw. "That was my son," Joel Ailes said.

That was his son.

Note to Readers

I've decided to write fewer essays and more "mini-case studies". These are likely to be more open-ended in style and are primarily intended to serve as a springboard for discussion. Older-style essay posts will still feature occasionally, but less frequently than before.

In the Heat of Battle

USA Today reports that the "U.S. Marines Corps is investigating the shooting death of a wounded Iraqi in Fallujah last weekend to determine if the man posed a threat to Marines or was a victim of the improper use of force. The Marine who pulled the trigger has been removed from action and has not been identified. "We follow the law of armed conflict and hold ourselves to a high standard of accountability," Lt. Gen. John Sattler, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said. "The facts of this case will be thoroughly pursued."

Joe Stork, Washington director of the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch said, "If it is what it appears to be it would probably be a war crime". Robert Work, a former Marine colonel and now a senior defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said "Marines were warned to be on the lookout for this. Coming upon someone who had been shot and started to move and perhaps look like they were going to trigger a device and take Marines with them, you have to make a split-second decision."

One of the international conventions which the accused Marine may have violated is the Geneva Convention. Prior to their adoption, behavior on the battlefield was governed by a mutual understanding among the combatants, where they existed at all. But in 1864 there were attempts to adopt a single standard of behavior that would apply to all combatants. The Geneva Conventions were considered to be a great advance in ameliorating the conditions commonly found on the 19th century battlefield.

 It all began in June 1859, when a merchant named Henry Dunant was traveling through the war-ravaged plain of Normandia, north of Italia, after the battle of Solferino. Seeing thousands of wounded soldiers left dying in the mercy of fate, he appealed to the local inhabitants to come and help, insisting that combatants from both sides should be taken care of.

... the Swiss government agreed to convene a Diplomatic Conference which was held in Geneva in 1864. Representatives of twelve governments took part and adopted a treaty prepared by the International Committee and entitled the "Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field". This agreement, with its ten articles, was the first treaty of international humanitarian law. Subsequently, further conferences were held, extending the basic law to other categories of victims, such as prisoners of war.

Some of the protections accorded to prisoners under the Geneva Convention are as follows:

Art 13. Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated. Any unlawful act or omission by the Detaining Power causing death or seriously endangering the health of a prisoner of war in its custody is prohibited, and will be regarded as a serious breach of the present Convention. In particular, no prisoner of war may be subjected to physical mutilation or to medical or scientific experiments of any kind which are not justified by the medical, dental or hospital treatment of the prisoner concerned and carried out in his interest. Likewise, prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity. Measures of reprisal against prisoners of war are prohibited.

Art 17. Every prisoner of war, when questioned on the subject, is bound to give only his surname, first names and rank, date of birth, and army, regimental, personal or serial number, or failing this, equivalent information.

Any one, not simply uniformed persons in regular armies, could be considered prisoners of war, provided they met certain conditions.

Art 4. A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:  ...

(2) Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions: (a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; (c) that of carrying arms openly; (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.  ....

(6) Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.

The articles of the Geneva Convention have not always been respected, even by nations that have adopted them. A sampler of events below shows that while the Conventions are widely recognized as an ideal, their faithful implementation has left much to be desired.

Chechnyan bodies booby-trapped	The discovery coincided with the visit to Chechnya of the Council of Europe human rights commissioner, Alvaro Gil-Robles. He has asked the Russian authorities for a full investigation. Russian sources have said some of the human remains in the grave were booby-trapped, using trip-wires linked to mines.
Marine Shoots Wounded Prisoner in Fallujah	A colonel who recently returned from his second tour of duty in Iraq, told Arab News the Marine in question was wounded in the face the previous day; and that a Marine in the same unit had been killed a day earlier, and five others wounded, as they tended to the booby trapped dead body of an insurgent. “They use bodies as booby traps all the time,” said the Marine colonel, who spoke anonymously. “They wait until Marines are close, then they detonate themselves. From what I hear, the unit didn’t know those guys were supposed to be there. “Those poor kids -- they’re on duty day in and day out, and have to deal with corpses and wounded guys that are booby trapped -- the insurgents do this all the time. We had incidents where they detonated themselves either in a car full of explosives or with suicide belts,” said the colonel.
Iraqis Alert for Booby-trapped Bodies in Fallujah	Gagging amid the overpowering stench of rotting flesh, the Iraqis had to take special care because of the danger that insurgents booby-trapped some bodies with explosives. On one stoop, the Iraqis pushed over a corpse and a grenade rolled out of its pocket. The weapon didn't detonate, but Marines quickly hurried the workers away.
Few Prisoners on Iwo Jima	Out of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers on the island, only 212 were taken prisoners.
Picture of a War Criminal?	"There were 13 scouts in our outfit, 11 were killed, 1 was wounded and the other was YOURS TRULY. I was lead scout looking for the Goettge Patrol, we went up the Minitakau River, water up to our chests. We were a rifle platoon, we found the patrol, bodies all cut up. After this, 'no prisoners' was an unspoken agreement."
Lawrence Takes No Prisoners, excerpted from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom	"The village lay stilly under its slow wreaths of white smoke, as we rode near, on our guard. Some grey heaps seemed to hide in the long grass, embracing the ground in the close way of corpses. We looked away from these, knowing they were dead; but from one a little figure tottered off, as if to escape us. It was a child, three or four years old, whose dirty smock was stained red over one shoulder and side, with blood from a large half-fibrous wound, perhaps a lance thrust, just where neck and body joined. The child ran a few steps, then stood and cried to us in a tone of astonishing strength (all else being very silent), 'Don't hit me, Baba.' Abd el Aziz, choking out something - this was his village, and she might be of his family - flung himself off his camel, and stumbled, kneeling, in the grass beside the child. His suddenness frightened her, for she threw up her arms and tried to scream; but, instead, dropped in a little heap, while the blood rushed out again over her clothes; then, I think, she died. We rode past the other bodies of men and women and four more dead babies, looking very soiled in the daylight, towards the village; whose loneliness we now knew meant death and horror. By the outskirts were low mud walls, sheepfolds, and on one something red and white. I looked close and saw the body of a woman folded across it, bottom upwards, nailed there by a saw bayonet whose haft stuck hideously into the air from between her naked legs. About her lay others, perhaps twenty in all, variously killed. The Zaagi burst into wild peals of laughter, the more desolate for the warm sunshine and clear air of this upland afternoon. I said, 'The best of you bring me the most Turkish dead,' and we turned after the fading enemy, on our way shooting down those who had fallen out by the roadside and came imploring our pity. One wounded Turk, half naked, not able to stand, sat and wept to us. Abdulla turned away his camel's head, but the Zaagi, with curses, crossed his track and whipped three bullets from his automatic through the man's bare chest. The blood came out with his heart beats, throb, throb, throb, slower and slower. Tallal had seen what we had seen. He gave one moan like a hurt animal; then rode to the upper ground and sat there a while on his mare, shivering and looking fixedly after the Turks. I moved near to speak to him, but Auda caught my rein and stayed me. Very slowly Tallal drew his headcloth about his face; and then he seemed suddenly to take hold of himself, for he dashed his stirrups into the mare's flanks and galloped headlong, bending low and swaying in the saddle, right at the main body of the enemy. It was a long ride down a gentle slope and across a hollow. We sat there like stone while he rushed forward, the drumming of his hoofs unnaturally loud in our ears, for we had stopped shooting, and the Turks had stopped. Both armies waited for him; and he rocked on in the hushed evening till only a few lengths from the enemy. Then he sat up in the saddle and cried his war cry, 'Tallal, Tallal,' twice in a tremendous shout. Instantly their rifles and machine-guns crashed out, and he and his mare riddled through and through with bullets, fell dead among the lance points. Auda looked very cold and grim. 'God give him mercy; we will take his price.' He shook his rein and moved slowly after the enemy. We called up the peasants, now drunk with fear and blood, and sent them from this side and that against the retreating column. The old lion of battle waked in Auda's heart, and made him again our natural, inevitable leader. By a skilful turn he drove the Turks into bad ground and split their formation into three parts. The third part, the smallest, was mostly made up of German and Austrian machine-gunners grouped round three motor cars and a handful of mounted officers or troopers. They fought magnificently and repulsed us time and again despite our hardiness. The Arabs were fighting like devils, the sweat blurring their eyes, dust parching their throats; while the flame of cruelty and revenge which was burning in their bodies so twisted them that their hands could hardly shoot. By my order we took no prisoners, for the only time in our war.'"

Although battlefield ethics are not always simple, people intuitively understand that not all behavior is lawful. The Boston Globe describes this incident in Fallujah and most readers will agree that a war crime had been prevented, yet what distinguishes it from the shooting of a wounded enemy combatant in a mosque is hard to encompass in so many words.

Salehma Mahmoud, 43, and her four daughters fled Fallujah on Tuesday after her husband was killed fighting against the Americans. They walked 4 miles only to be confronted by Iraqi soldiers who insulted and harassed them, grabbing at Mahmoud's oldest daughter. "He grabbed Fatima's hand and tried to kiss her. I was trying to stop him with all I had," she said. "He beat me and pushed me to the ground, and his friends were laughing at us loud. He tore the right sleeve of my daughter's dress and lay her on the ground."

To Mahmoud's surprise -- because she had been told that US troops would beat and rape her -- a US patrol rescued them. An American soldier pulled the Iraqi soldier away and yelled at him. Mahmoud's daughter, who speaks some English, told her that the American called the Iraqi names and said, "If you had really come to save the people of this city, you would not have done such a thing."

The CIA Shakeup

In July, 2004 Marc Ruel Gerecht wrote a critique of the CIA in the Weekly Standard accusing it of failing to develop the operational methods necessary to penetrate its targets. Gerecht was a former CIA officer now with the American Enterprise Institute. He believed the core problem facing the CIA was there was "no way that case officers--who still today are overwhelmingly deployed overseas under official cover or, worse, at home in ever-larger task forces--can possibly meet, recruit, or neutralize the most dangerous targets in a sensible, sustainable way." Most of America's agents were foreigners on the periphery of enemy secrets handled by American bureaucrats unable or unwilling to make the make the final run in.

When I entered the CIA in 1985, Aldrich Ames's treason and the Iran-contra scandal were in gestation, yet headquarters in Langley, Virginia, seemed a happy place. ... But in practice the good old days were mostly a myth. For the Directorate of Operations, the 1980s were years of routine operational dishonesty, whose principal source was a defective system for determining who got promoted.

Under this system, thousands of agents were recruited abroad neither for their intelligence-reporting potential nor their operational utility. They were put on the books--case officers often referred to the sport as "collecting scalps"--because that is how CIAoperatives earned promotion. ... For most case officers, the Cold War was a backdrop for the constant search for an easy "developmental," somebody who could be quickly turned into a "recruitment" for the annual performance report. ...

It is also absolutely true that George Tenet's CIA failed to penetrate Saddam Hussein's inner circle. And only penetrations at the highest political and scientific levels could have possibly given us evidence that Saddam Hussein had decided to give up his billion-dollar, decades-long quest to develop weapons of mass destruction. (And note the plural "penetrations": Against such a proficient counterespionage regime, there would have to be more than one penetration, assessed for protracted periods of time, before it would be possible to believe that the information from these assets was not disinformation.) But it is also true that the CIA failed to penetrate Moscow's inner circle in the Cold War and that the great agents we did have (the most valuable were probably scientists) were all volunteers. The CIA was not similarly lucky with Saddam Hussein's regime, whose Orwellian grip on Iraqi society was as savage as Joseph Stalin's on the USSR. It's a very good bet that the CIA has not had a single penetration in the inner circle of any of its totalitarian adversaries. The same is probably true for the French, British, and Israeli foreign intelligence services. In other words, one simply cannot judge the caliber of a Western espionage service by its ability to penetrate the power circles of totalitarian regimes. The difficulties are just overwhelming.

One can, however, grade intelligence services on whether they have established operational methods that would maximize the chances of success against less demanding targets--for example, against Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, which is by definition an ecumenical organization constantly searching for holy-warrior recruits. It is by this standard that George Tenet failed and the CIA will continue to fail, assuming it maintains its current practices. But the odds are poor that the White House, Congress, and the press will condemn the Agency for its failure to develop a workable strategy and tactics against the Islamic terrorist target.

The question is whether Porter Goss, having confirmed Gerecht's critique will prove his prediction of continued executive inaction wrong. Goss explained his estimate of the CIA to Gordon Corera of the BBC.

There is no doubt that Mr Goss is a man of strong views. When I interviewed him earlier this year, before he was nominated to run the CIA, he made clear that he thought the Agency had failed in its "core mission".

"The core business of intelligence is spying", he told me. "That means close in access to the hard targets. That means a lot of risk. ...  In his view, it needed "clandestine officers who know how to run agents into hard target areas, all of the people skills, all of the tradecraft skills that go into this. "Those are things we sort of let go...we suddenly found ourselves disinvesting - not just not investing - but actually disinvesting in our core collection business [in the 1990s]." He warned that, as well as greater investment, a real shake-up was needed in the clandestine service that recruits spies, and throughout the intelligence community. As he put it, "This is not just [about] individuals or moving chairs. Some really serious changes" were needed.

A PBS interview with Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) seemed to confirm the general thrust of Goss's current shake up of the CIA with varying emphasis.

SEN. SAXBY CHAMBLISS: Well, what Jane and I both know is that the No. 1 problem at the Central Intelligence Agency today is the fact that we're pretty risk-averse out there. We're not doing a very good job of gathering intelligence through human assets. Porter Goss has committed himself during the hearing process to rebuild our human asset part of the Central Intelligence Agency from an intelligence-gathering standpoint. I don't know how he needs to do that. But I know this: I know what we've got out there in the last several years is not working. We know that we've had massive intelligence failures, and Jane and I both talked about this on TV, and virtually every member of the oversight committees in the House and Senate have talked about. So there are changes that must be made to correct the problems out there.

Who should go and who should stay is up to the management, and I don't think it's up to the oversight committee. So I'm fully supportive of Chairman Goss and his capacity now as director of the CIA to make sure that we rebuild that human -- our human intelligence aspect of the CIA, and to make what changes are necessary to accomplish that.

REP. JANE HARMAN: And it isn't clear to me, by the way, exactly where he's headed with these changes. I just want to say one thing about the human service, the spy service. It is true that we had an inadequate human intelligence capability in the '90s. I'm sure Saxby and I, we always have agreed on this and we still agree. But it is also true that this is being fixed since 9/11, and we're recruiting a lot more good people. I just saw those people in the field in the Middle East, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and Israel last week. I saw the new recruits and I saw the chiefs of station in these states, and what I'm saying to you, Margaret, is they're doing a lot better.

But at the moment, what it looks like, sadly, Margaret, is that the directorate of operations, which is a spy service which has begun to heal itself since 9/11, is the target of this purge, and it doesn't make much sense to me, given the fact that these are not the folks who brought us the faulty intelligence reports that led up to 9/11, or led to the mistaken view that they were stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iran... in Iraq.

Whether or not the CIA has in fact 'healed itself', both Chambliss and Harman essentially seem to agree that the agency was in deep trouble in the 1990s, specifically in the area of human intelligence gathering, that is, spying. The debate between Chambliss and Harman centered on whether Goss was acting inappropriately -- in a partisan manner for example -- but not over whether he had a real job in front of him.

Light Posting

I'll be taking a break over the next few days. The Command Post and Winds of Change are great sites, if you haven't discovered them yet and there are links to many others in the sidebar. The Internet has made is easy for many who have never written before to try their hand. The real impact of blogs and similar sites has been to tap into a large pool of people who would never have written otherwise. It has brought people -- doctors, engineers, businessmen, soldiers, teachers, etc -- who would otherwise never been accounted 'writers' into the public discourse. Whatever their stylistic failings, this huge access of participation has rewritten the rules on what it means to be a 'public intellectual'. When Greyhawk or Austin Bay file from the battlefield; or when recognized experts in computer fonts can instantly participate in the analysis of fake documents proferred as genuine a huge reservoir of previously untapped intelligence suddenly becomes available to everyone. Well, bye for now.

The Communism of the 21st Century

Cardinal George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney asks a question which is neither completely secular nor religious, one which Thomas Jefferson might have revolved in his mind but which no modern politician would dare discuss. Pell rhetorically asks whether democracy must of necessity be spiritually empty. Not whether it can occasionally be, but whether it must be. In an article published in the Australian, he says:

Lately there has been interest in the possibility of "Islamic democracy". These descriptors do not simply refer to how democracy might be constituted, but to the moral vision democracy is intended to serve. This is especially true in the case of secular democracy, which some insist is intended to serve no moral vision at all.  ... But think for a moment what it means to say that there can be no other form of democracy than secular democracy. Does democracy need a burgeoning billion-dollar pornography industry to be truly democratic? Does it need an abortion rate in the tens of millions? Does it need high levels of marriage breakdown, with the growing rates of family dysfunction that come with them? Does democracy (as in Holland's case) need legalised euthanasia, extending to children under the age of 12? Does democracy need assisted reproductive technology (such as IVF) and embryonic stem cell research? Does democracy really need these things? What would democracy look like if you took some of these things out of the picture? Would it cease to be democracy? Or would it actually become more democratic? ...

The alarm with which many treat people in public life who are opposed to these things often implies that they are a danger to democracy. This overreaction is, of course, a bluff, an attempt to silence opposition, almost suggesting that these practices are essential to democracy. ... From outside Western culture, of course, come other possibilities. It is still very early in the piece, of course, but the small but growing conversion of native Westerners within Western societies to Islam carries the suggestion that Islam may provide in the 21st century the attraction that communism provided in the 20th, both for those who are alienated or embittered on the one hand, and for those who seek order or justice on the other.

I am not sure that the Cardinal's proposed "democratic personalism" is a viable alternative, but he asks a logical question which cannot be evaded. When the Founding Fathers created the framework for procedural democracy it was unnecessary to spell out its ends because those were largely provided by the moral, ethical and religious consensus of the underlying society. When that underlying civilizational consensus has been destroyed or diluted, as is the case in Western Europe and to a lesser extent the United States, what intrinsic ends does a value-neutral democratic mechanism serve? The answer possibly, is whatever it can be put to, like a Turing Machine which adopts whichever persona the loaded instruction set demands. Then Dutch democracy becomes the Muslim right to chuck a hand grenade out the door at policemen come to arrest them for plotting to blow up a public landmark. Democracy becomes a vehicle waiting to be hijacked; a metaphor for the old saw that someone who believes in nothing will believe in anything.

But of course the process of secularization -- or 'value emptying' as Pell might put it -- has not been entirely uniform. In actuality, while whole chunks of the West have thrown out their traditional value systems, other chunks have been busy proseletyzing theirs. As Episcopalian churches have emptied the fundamentalist Islamic mosques have filled. That uneven development, if left unchecked, may eventually mean that the magnificent mechanism of secular democracy, which serves no value of itself, will be arbitrarily assigned a goal by the majority most willing to hijack it. Pell's observation that "the small but growing conversion of native Westerners within Western societies to Islam carries the suggestion that Islam may provide in the 21st century the attraction that communism provided in the 20th ..." will mark him in liberal Australian circles as a bigot. It should mark him as a wit, for he has managed to slander those they would least offend by comparing them to those they most admire.

Jean Paul-Sartre seized upon Dostoevsky's dictum that "if God did not exist, everything would be permitted" to justify existentialism. He forgot that Dostoevsky added that if God did not exist, we would be compelled to invent him. For if, as Sarte argued "in the present one is forsaken" why should the future when it arrives be less forlorn than today? For good or ill, man can as much live under a heaven swept of stars as endure a sky without stars to dream of. If Agustine of Hippo was right, that  "our soul is restless until it rests in Thee" then when all the lights of the Tabernacle are extinguished the Kaaba will beckon in the desert.

River War 2

At least one set of people understand that the battle for the Sunni Triangle is a single, integrated theater which does not consist of Fallujah alone.

Insurgents have set police stations ablaze, stole weapons and brazenly roamed the streets of Mosul as Iraq's third largest city appeared to be sliding out of control, residents said. Explosions and fire from assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades echoed across the city and columns of smoke rose from at least two police stations set alight. At least seven police stations have been attacked in the past 48 hours.

The US military issued a statement admitting that local security forces had been overrun in several areas and said local authorities were doing what they could to restore order. "It's crazy, really, really crazy," said Abdallah Fathi, a resident who witnessed one police station being attacked.

"Yesterday, the city felt like hell, today it could be the same or worse." The northern city of Mosul has seen frequent outbreaks of violence, but residents and reporters said the past two days were the worst since the end of the war last year. As US forces battle to suppress insurgents in the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, it appears many fighters may have fled to other cities where they are launching new attacks. In the past three days, there has been a step up in guerrilla activity in Samarra, Baiji, Baquba, Tikrit, Ramadi and parts of Baghdad - across the Sunni Muslim heartland.

The US military understands this too. Shortly before the Fallujah operation commenced, an earlier post quoted a US source as anticipating these kinds of diversionary attacks. The Seattle Times reported on November 7:

Reports are circulating among Iraqi and U.S. officials that large numbers of insurgents have already left the Fallujah area in anticipation of the coming invasion. The militants are reportedly fanning to other cities in the Sunni Triangle, where they will stage diversionary attacks -- and underscore that despite an expected defeat for insurgent forces in Fallujah, the rebel movement remains strong.

"There will be horrific events outside Fallujah," said a senior U.S. diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. "I would never tell you that violence in Sunni areas won't get worse when you open up a battle." He added that officials expect that period to last "not many weeks." "You will have a shortish period when everybody will say the whole country's falling apart but they (the insurgents) will not be able to maintain that tempo."

The aim of the present campaign in the Sunni triangle is to destroy the enemy human and physical infrastructure to prevent the enemy from maintaining that tempo, a subject described in The River War. For  follow-on Iraqi forces to hold places like Fallujah so that the enemy cannot regroup within it again, the skilled and dangerous professional soldiers of the old regime must be reduced to the point where the new Iraqi government can contain them. Whether the US will succeed remains to be seen. But it is likely that while the battle for Fallujah is ending, the campaign for the Sunni Triangle is just beginning.

Update

• Counteroffensive operations in Mosul against insurgents have started. "In a statement, the US military said it had launched offensive operations in southern Mosul to try to quell the rampaging insurgency after a request from the governor. 'Insurgent forces attacked several police stations and other targets within the city,' it said. ...'It doesn’t feel like the police or any local government officials are in charge at all,' one resident said. 'The insurgents are everywhere.'"
• Takedown of a Sunni terrorist ring at a landmark mosque in Baghdad by US and Iraqi forces. "The U.S. command said American troops "provided the outer cordon" while the 90-minute raid was carried out by Iraqi troops. Two U.S. soldiers were wounded by snipers during the raid, the military statement said. Abdullah said they also found TNT explosives, lists with names of Iraqi officers employed in the U.S.-trained Iraqi National Guard, as well as photographs of recent attacks on U.S. soldiers and foreign convoys on the airport road."
• At Fallujah the encirclement and destruction continues: the 108 hour plan is on schedule.  "The grim job of sifting through the hostile neighbourhoods, also uncovered numerous corpses --  not all killed by US military fire, said an AFP reporter embedded with the Marines. In one street, Marines found a body with its feet hacked off and a young man in a house with a bullet in his chest." The Associated Press reports that military age men in Fallujah aren't being allowed out. "Hundreds of men trying to flee the assault on Fallujah have been turned back by U.S. troops following orders to allow only women, children and the elderly to leave. ... Once the battle ends, military officials say all surviving military-age men can expect to be tested for explosive residue, catalogued, checked against insurgent databases and interrogated about ties with the guerrillas. U.S. and Iraqi troops are in the midst of searching homes, and plan to check every house in the city for weapons." The article continues:

Single refugees have made their way out of the city by swimming across the broad Euphrates River or sneaking out across desert paths, military officials said. On Wednesday and Thursday, American troops sunk boats being used to ferry people -- and in some cases, rebel arms -- across the river. The ongoing U.S. advance is bottling up Fallujah's insurgents -- and others fleeing the fighting -- in the southern section of the city, where U.S. forces were moving Thursday night. Most of the remaining attacks by insurgents inside Fallujah have been on Marines blocking the roads and bridges leaving the city, reports show. Marines have returned fire killing numerous insurgents trying to escape, officers here said.

It's a campaign, not a battle for a single town, and at issue is the destruction or survival of the Sunni insurgency. The enemy is maneuvering to strike at his chosen points and at US lines of communication. It's safe to say the foe will pull no punches. They won't be holding anything back for tomorrow. Allawie has also crossed his Rubicon and so, perhaps, has CENTCOM.

The River War

The Fallujah battle, which is just winding down, should be seen in the context a wider campaign against the enemy in the Sunni triangle. To properly understand the goals of that campaign, we should first put ourselves in the shoes of the enemy. The Command Post reproduces an extensive extract of a press statement by a former Republican Guard general who now styles himself as a spokesman for the 'resistance'. Although it is probably puffed up for propaganda purposes, it contains a degree of plausibility from which we can infer the outlines of their strategy.

We are very satisfied indeed concerning the reality of the resistance and its results on the terrain. The Resistance in fact has become an every day popular state no one can ignore. We can speak about the Resistance in two terms: First in Iraqi terms: the Resistance has spread its complete control over a great number of Iraqi towns. What is happening in Fallujah, Samaraa, Qaem, Baaquba, Hawijah, Tallafar, Heet, Saqlawyia, Ramadi, Anah, Rawa, Haditha, Balad, Beiji, Bahraz, Baladruz, and other cities and towns of Iraq, confirm perfectly this reality. The Resistance also controls totally some areas in Baghdad and its suburbs such as Yusufya, Latifya, Abu Ghraib, and Mahmudya, which shows the political and the security impasse encountered by the Occupiers and their agents. Here we have to mention the widespread popular cover the Resistance enjoys in these areas and elsewhere, rendering all Iraqi resistance fighters in the confrontation moments with the enemy.

... After this rapid and summary lecture of the Iraqi resistance reality, I can say that we are very confident about the future. What we planned before the Occupation is being achieved on the terrain in a good way. This shows the correct political and military Iraqi leadership long-term vision, when it planned the Resistance and started its fire. There is a unified military leadership, which leads the operations in the terrain in every town of Iraq. This leadership includes the best officers of the Iraqi Army, the Republican Guard, Saddam’s Fidayyins, and the Security and Intelligence services. What is happening in the Provinces of al Anbar, Diyala, Mosul, and Salah el Din, Babel and elsewhere is a bright sign of what I am telling you.

There are two factual nuggets in this screed. First, it gives us a map of the the towns which the enemy considers its bastions. Second, it hints of a fallback plan conceived before the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, a subject earlier discussed in War Plan Orange. By plotting the enemy strongholds on the map it is at once evident that they are coextensive with two pathways. The first goes northward along the Euphrates from western Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi, Hadithah, Anah and Qusabayah -- along the river and road from Baghdad to the Syrian border. The omission of Qusabayah from mention is very peculiar, since it has been the scene of battalion sized battles between infiltrators and Marines guarding the Syrian frontier since the earliest post-OIF days, but I include it here on that account. The second set of towns goes northeast along the Tigris towards Tikrit and parts of Kurdistan: Hawijah, Balad and Samarra. A spur runs off toward the Iranian border: Baqubah and Baladruz, on the road to the Iran. It is hard not to think that we are looking at their lines of communication.

The towns along these pathways are probably waystations where men and weapons can be smuggled by stages, a kind of Sunni Ho Chi Minh  Trail. My own guess is they are probably superimposed on traditional smuggling routes from Syria and Iran which have now been converted to serve the enemy cause. I caution the reader that this is guesswork, but I think it is correct. The discovery of carbomb factories in Fallujah suggests that town was the easternmost terminus of a finger that extended straight from the Syrian border, a final launching pad where enemy delivery systems were "bombed up" for their sorties at US targets in the city or as convoys made their way along the highways west of Baghdad.

Taking Fallujah then, was not merely a symbolic political act to reduce a 'symbol of defiance', but a sound operational move. It interdicts the conveyor belt of destruction that flowed from the Syrian border towards Baghdad. The logical next step is to cut the line again near the Syrian border, perhaps at Anah, so that by taking out both ends the middle is left unsupported. Alternatively, the US could roll up the enemy line of communication going north by taking out Ramadi which would force the enemy to sortie from Haditha, a little ville a lot farther from Baghdad. Although this will not totally destroy the insurgency, it will throttle movement along their lines of communication considerably. Guerilla warfare, like all warfare, is logistics. It just takes different forms.

In order to accomplish this task, the US has approximately 18 brigades -- about 50 battalions -- at hand. But many of these are assigned to important security duties and about 10 battalions were directly employed in the Fallujah operation or in support, and it will be some days, even weeks, before these units are available again to mount other operations. But the Prime Minister Allawie's 60 day declaration of martial law strongly suggests that the Sunni campaign will be finished before elections are held in January and that means there will be very little pause in American operational tempo. In fact, although the focus of media coverage has been on the urban battle in Fallujah, pursuit operations up and down the ratline to Syria are probably in progress. Chester was surprised to learn that contrary to his expectations, the British Black Watch regiment was to the west and probably north of Fallujah, not east as he expected. That means it was not between Fallujah and Baghdad, but between Fallujah and Ramadi. This suggests the hammer could fall on Ramadi, with Black Watch in a blocking position. One can only wait and see.

Every campaign has a political dimension. The campaign in the Sunni Triangle is probably aimed at convincing the enemy that resistance is now futile and their best hope lies in participating in the new Iraqi government through elections. Personally (speculation alert!) I doubt it can achieve as much. The campaign will absolutely gut the enemy as a guerilla force, but it will not be enough to prevent them from terrorizing Sunni politicians who may wish to participate in the coming elections. But this will only postpone unconditional Sunni defeat for another year because a terrorist enforced boycott will mean that Kurds and Shi'ites will dominate the new administration and most importantly, its Army. By next year, the regular Iraqi Army will be a far more potent force and the Sunni insurgency a far weaker one. But that's the old sad human story; to miss the chance when it comes and pine for it ever afterward.

Arafat is Dead

A Palestinian power struggle is expected to break out among the pretenders to his vacated throne. Even in death, Arafat has lost none of his power to kill. Shakespeare once wrote that 'the evil that men do lives after them' and that is right enough. But I think John Milton more completely captured the essence of terrorism's aims in Satan's speech to the demons mustered in hell. If the damned desire one thing, it is company.

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?

Fall'n Cherube, to be weak is miserable
Doing or Suffering: but of this be sure,
To do ought good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight,
As being the contrary to his high will
Whom we resist. If then his Providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil;
Which oft times may succeed, so as perhaps
Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb
His inmost counsels from their destind aim.

Hell in a Very Small Place

The Bakersfield Californian reports that US forces have reached the major east-west highway that runs through Fallujah.

U.S. Marines said American forces had taken control Wednesday of 70 percent of Fallujah in the third day of a major offensive to retake the insurgent stronghold. Major Francis Piccoli, of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said enemy fighters were bottled up in a strip of the city flanking the major east-west highway that splits Fallujah. Army and Marine units had pushed south to the highway overnight, Piccoli said.

... As the American forces crossed the highway that split Fallujah, armored Army units stayed behind to guard the thoroughfare.

To realize the significance of this, refer to this map from Global Security, which shows the start lines of the participating American units: USMC 3/1, USMC 3/5, Army 2/7 Cavalry, USMC 1/8, USMC 1/3 and  Army 2/2 Infantry. These units were attacking north to south, down towards the highway. The east-west highway referred to in the paragraph above is the bright green line running horizontally across the map. US Army armor is now on that highway, after advancing south and probably swinging west. US forces are probably waiting across the highway. We are fairly sure of this because the London Telegraph recounted how a US Army Cavalry Unit was moving through the industrial area which is located in the southeast corner of the city, below the green line which represents the highway which US armor is now patrolling going north to south; that is up towards the highway. We know it is cavalry because they call their companies "troops".

The flimsy metal door was ripped off its hinges as a hefty boot from a Legion platoon soldier made decisive contact. Inside the small room lay an AK-47 rifle, alarm clock parts and a handwritten notebook in Farsi. Moments earlier, the gunman, thought to be Iranian, had fled as Legion, Hunter and Outlaw platoons of the US army's Task Force 2-2 undertook one of the more dangerous tasks of the battle for Fallujah. Clearing buildings door to door in a guerrilla stronghold is risky at any time. Into the bargain this time, the platoons from Phantom troop had been ordered to sweep Fallujah's industrial zone, a haven for foreign fighters.

Simply reading the map shows that the enemy is pinned in a strip north of the highway, which is now a barrier to further escape south. As Major Piccoli put it, the "enemy fighters were bottled up in a strip of the city flanking the major east-west highway that splits Fallujah". Pressing them against the highway are four US battalions from the north and two from the east. Two days ago, the Telegraph carried an interview with Captain Natalie Friel, which eerily anticipated this very outcome.

"They're probably thinking that we'll come in from the east," said Capt Natalie Friel, an intelligence officer with task force, before the battle. But the actual plan involves penetrating the city from the north and sweeping south. "I don't think they know what's coming. They have no idea of the magnitude," she said. "But their defences are pretty circular. They're prepared for any kind of direction. They've got strong points on all four corners of the city." The aim was to push the insurgents south, killing as many as possible, before swinging west. They would then be driven into the Euphrates.

The reader is invited to draw his own conclusions about the enemy's prospects in this position. They are pinned against the highway, with no exit north, east or south.

Update

An AFP-Reuters story has more details on the situation in Fallujah.

"If everything goes as planned we will take full control of the city in the next 48 hours," the officer said, on condition of anonymity. The officer said the troops would still need up to a week to make the north-east corner of Falluja safe "and at least 10 days to clear the city". "For now we are clearing pockets of resistance."

Back in World War 2, this would have been described as the "end of organized resistance" and the start of "mop-up operations". Historically mop-up operations on Pacific Islands could last for weeks and months. It won't be easy. There are probably many tons of unexploded ordnance lying around, undetonated IEDs and more than a few bypassed tunnels and bolt-holes with holdouts in them. US troops are still probably going to suffer casualties in the coming days cleaning that mess up. But the focus has already moved on to the "slaughterhouses" and charges that 'we let Zarqawi get away'. No one is seriously alleging that 'US troops have been fought to a standstill' anymore.

Signs of the gruesome killings of hostages were found by Iraqi troops in the northern districts, according to an Iraqi general who called himself the chief spokesman for the operation. "We have found hostage slaughter houses in Falluja that were used by these people and the black clothing that they used to wear to identify themselves, hundreds of CDs and whole records with names," Major General Abdul Qader Mohan told reporters.

Here at least, is one reason why geographical sanctuaries are useful to "evanescent" resistants.

The Enemy Starts to Collapse

Enemy resistance in Fallujah is starting to collapse, with US forces deep inside the city and fighters pulling back to their ultimate stronghold in the Jolan district. There is no more room to retreat with the Euphrates to the west and American forces on every side.

Troops have been advancing towards the center, fighting insurgents armed with rifles and mortars street by street. Early on Tuesday the US-led troops reached a key objective early -- a mosque in the north part of Falluja. ... The BBC's Paul Wood, embedded with US soldiers - and whose reporting is subject to military restrictions - says US-led forces reached their first major objective early on Tuesday, when they surrounded al-Hidra mosque in the northern parts of Falluja. The US military said the building was being used as an arms depot and a meeting point for the leaders of the insurgency. Our correspondent says Iraqi forces fighting alongside US marines will storm it.

Earlier, a US tank commander said guerrillas were putting up a strong fight in the north-western Jolan district. "These people are hardcore," Capt Robert Bodisch told Reuters news agency. "A man pulled out from behind a wall and fired an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) at my tank. I have to get another tank to go back in there."

"I can see heavy street-fighting from my house in the center of the city -- US soldiers are here, moving from house to house", according to BBC reporter Fadil Badrani.

A synoptic view of the same engagement comes from Ned Parker in the Australian.

US troops moved from house to house through the Jolan neighbourhood of Fallujah yesterday, knocking down walls and spraying machinegun fire at buildings from which insurgents fought back with small arms and mortars. The US forces, supported by Iraqi soldiers, pushed towards the centre of the besieged rebel city as columns of smoke plumed skyward after a night of heavy air raids and artillery shelling. "We are downing them," said US marine officer Major Todd Desgrosseilliers. "We're using good old American firepower."

A smattering of trained Iraqi forces accompanied the marines in their assault on the city, while more were poised on the outskirts, preparing to enter in an offensive codenamed Phantom Fury. Helicopter gunships swooped overhead, dropping flares on buildings from where the muzzles of insurgent rocket launchers jutted out, while the rebels fought back with anti-aircraft fire. White and red flashes lit the sky in a relentless barrage of artillery shells and aerial bombing that thundered throughout the night.

Mortars are what the enemy has for reserves, the only part of their firepower that remains mobile on the Fallujah battlefield because its high-angle fire allows it to shoot over obstacles in built up areas. Enemy forces have also been known to volley RPGs upward into neighboring streets. But their fire is largely blind. They have no comms and direction centers to mass fires or shift them as the battle progresses. The BBC press account indicates that heavy armor has actually penetrated deep inside the city (with an armor company commander joking about the disabling of his vehicle) with infantry progressing over and through the walls of houses on either side (probably what the BBC reporter is describing as 'moving from house to house').

Today's news will tell whether American commanders have decided to keep up the tempo and profit from enemy confusion or slow down and reduce the remainder by fire. One of the factors will be the condition of the Iraqi troops fighting alongside Americans. As suggested in the article above, Iraqi troops are employed to clean out areas like mosques that have been bypassed by US forces. This is dangerous and exhausting work. The limited number of trained Iraqi troops may enforce a limit on tempo. As the enemy fragments it will become a battle of small unit holdouts in dozens of locations. Each enemy position is doomed but they will take time to clean out.

Readers will remember that Fallujah is only a part of the wider campaign in the Sunni triangle. Chester has pointed out that the 3rd Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, identified as fighting at Fallujah, was detached from Ramadi. The enemy is now trying to relieve pressure on Fallujah with demonstration attacks in Ramadi, where they may have sensed the departure of the battalion. This has taken the form of a repulsed car bomb attack on checkpoints controlling access to the city and low level skirmishing. This report from the AP describes how two enemy vehicles were destroyed as they bore down on a checkpoint.

The military says five U-S troops have been injured after they attacked two suspected car bombs in the Iraqi city of Ramadi. It also says seven insurgents were killed in yesterday's attack. It gave few other details, but says the U-S troops wounded had shot at and destroyed the vehicles.

In a portentous development, the Marines have apparently withdrawn their observation posts inside Ramadi. Middle East Online reports:

Rebel fighters massed in the centre of the restive Iraqi city of Ramadi Tuesday after US military snipers withdrew from their positions following 24 hours of clashes, an AFP correspondent said. The US military could not immediately be contacted for comment.

US snipers left a hotel from where they were able to control most of Ramadi's main roads, but the military remained in its headquarters in the governor's office nearby, the correspondent said. Other US soldiers left the city for their bases in the east and west of the city.

As the snipers departed, large crowds of armed insurgents, their faces hidden by scarves, began dancing in the street and shooting in to the air, yelling "Allah Akbar" (God is great). Banners proclaiming solidarity with insurgents in Fallujah, where US-led forces launched a massive offensive to retake the city on Monday, were hung in the streets. "The residents of Ramadi condemn the attack against Fallujah and we appeal to the inhabitants of Ramadi to wage jihad against the American occupants who want to eradicate Islam," said one man who did not want to be named.

An earlier generation of historians would call the withdrawal of snipers "bringing in the pickets" and concentrating the fist. The feeble enemy response suggests a real weakness. The car bomb attack and public demonstration of "fighters" who are apparently unable to hinder the comings and goings of snipers will be portrayed as a great jihadi victory but is pathetic in reality. They are being measured for a pine box and the best they can do is caper in the streets. In a few days 3rd Battalion will be back in Ramadi, together with powerful units currently busy in Fallujah and the dance tempo will change to a funeral march unless the enemy lays down his arms. Wellington once observed that "nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won." Nothing about it is nice; but better them than us.

Update

An Agence France Press report describes the terrible closed loop of networked firepower. For the first time in a major battle, guided artillery is being used quantity. In addition to the now familiar JDAMs, or GPS guided bombs, there are now GPS guided shells. Space based positioning satellites, laser range finding, robotics and networked computing are now as much a part of infantry combat as the boot heel.

"Body parts everywhere!" cries a US soldier as a shell crashes onto a group of suspected rebels in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, where a punishing torrent of firepower thundered down on Tuesday.

More than 500 rounds of 155-millimetre Howitzer cannon shells have been fired on the besieged Sunni stronghold west of Baghdad since a US-Iraqi offensive to take control of the city started on Monday evening, said Sergeant Michael Hamby. Using a global positioning system, each shell is precision aimed and fired at insurgent spots, while unmanned reconnaisance aircraft check whether the target was hit and feed back the information, Hamby told AFP.

"We probably had 20-to-30 air strikes in the Jolan and probably two-to-three times that in artillery missions," he said. Attack helicopters swooped overhead, dropping flares on buildings from where the muzzle of insurgent rocket heads jutted out.

Though the enemy is to be frank, very brave, news reports them falling back everywhere. The Washington Post says:

Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, commander of multinational forces in Iraq, predicted "several more days of tough urban fighting." He said insurgents were "fighting hard, but not to the death. They are falling back," adding that the U.S. advance was progressing "ahead of schedule."

The enemy withdrawals have sometimes been explained by suggesting that the enemy is suckering in US forces into a trap. But this is impossible. Their backs are to the river and the Marines are across that. Every retrograde movement compresses the enemy into a smaller area and forces them to leave behind prepared positions painstakingly stockpiled with food, batteries and ammo. Running backward with wounded, they can't carry much ammunition and won't find any unless a prepared position is already available. And how does anyone stand fast in the face of the otherworldly violence of the American onslaught?

Small bands of gunmen -- fewer than 20 -- were engaging U.S. troops, then falling back in the face of overwhelming fire from American tanks, 20mm cannons and heavy machine guns, said Time magazine reporter Michael Ware, embedded with troops. Ware reported that there appeared to be no civilians in the area he was in. On one thoroughfare in the city, U.S. troops traded fire with gunmen holed up in a row of houses about 100 yards away. An American gunner on an armored vehicle let loose with his machine gun, grinding the upper part of a small building to rubble.

This is a description of platoon-sized enemy units attempting to hold back the Martians. The bravado of Al Jazeera has this completely wrong. If classical history were still widely taught, these scenes would be instantly recognizable as a rout, that terrible disintegration of ranks as the foe closes in before and behind. Describing the rout of the Roman Legions by Hannibal at Cannae, Livy wrote:

It was a terrible slaughter. ... On a narrow area 48,000 corpses lay in heaps. ... Hannibal once more released non-Roman prisoners. ... Roman knight's gold rings were collected in baskets and later poured out onto the floor of the Carthaginian senate. One of the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paulus (and one of the preceding year's) were killed, as well as both quaestors of the consuls, 29 out of 48 military tribunes and 80 other senators.

There can be no joy in war: it is always repulsive in actual detail, but if we are not left with the facts, then the world is deprived even of the doleful experience of the battlefield. The jihadi dream was a fraud. September 11 opened the door, not to Paradise but the portal to Hell and the jihadi nightmare will continue for as long as they are nourished on illusion and false encouragement. We are not their permanent enemies; that foe is within their breast.

Fallujah Again

Although the US military has refused to give a timeline for the capture of Fallujah developments suggest they are moving at very rapid operational pace.

Hours after starting the offensive, U.S. tanks and Humvees from the 1st Infantry Division entered the northeastern Askari neighborhood, the first ground assault into an insurgent bastion. In the northwestern area of the city, U.S. troops advanced slowly after dusk on the Jolan neighborhood, a warren of alleyways where Sunni militants have dug in. Artillery, tanks and warplanes pounded the district's northern edge, softening the defenses and trying to set off any bombs or boobytraps planted by the militants.

Marines were visible on rooftops in Jolan. This reporter, located at a U.S. camp near the city, saw orange explosions lighting up the district's palm trees, minarets and dusty roofs, and a fire burning on the city's edge. Just outside the Jolan and Askari neighborhoods, Iraqi troops deployed with U.S. forces took over a train station after the Americans fired on it to drive off fighters.

The Fallujah can be conceived as a rough rectangle two miles on a side bounded by the Euphrates to the west, the railroad track to the north, a highway to the east and an "industrial park" and suburbs to the south. The recognized enemy stronghold is the upper northwest corner called the Jolan but their forces are likely to be more widespread than that. But in two successive nights, US forces have compressed the enemy from three sides (probably a fourth, as it is likely the US has also seized the 'industrial area' to the southeast) and have actually penetrated the enemy stronghold of Jolan in parts, without any published casualties apart from the two Marines who died when their bulldozer flipped into the Euphrates.

Readers will recall the same pattern of operations in Najaf where US infantry secured the buildings and rooftops while vehicles advanced on the streets below. In Najaf as in Fallujah too, apparently, US forces did not advance on a single broad front but snaked in to seize key areas, breaking up enemy defenses into pockets which can no longer support each other. The pockets may be further isolated by bulldozing fire lanes. The low number of casualties so far indicates that US forces have successfully sidestepped enemy forces the way a broken field runner dodges tackles. The Strategic Studies Institute warns that heavy casualties may result from assaulting "mini fortresses", but many of those redoubts may be entirely bypassed and fields of fire cleared around them.

"The big fights, where you're going to see lots of casualties, are when defenders create miniature fortresses," Millen said. "Your infantry gets sucked into those things, and that's when you see casualties building up."  U.S. forces have managed to keep casualties relatively low in previous urban battles in Iraq. In three weeks of fighting a Shiite Muslim insurgency in the streets and massive cemetery of Najaf this summer, seven Marines and two soldiers were killed out of a force of about 3,000. "If you go in there well and you go in there methodically - if you have a good plan - you're not going to have as many casualties," Millen said.

I believe (speculation alert!) that the enemy mobile defense is nearly at an end; that his active response has probably fallen to pieces much quicker than he anticipated and they are probably going to concentrate their resistance into mutually supportive strongpoints or explosive barriers fairly soon. The enemy's remaining hope is to hit the "jackpot" by demolishing a building or blowing up a street just as US forces occupy or overrun it. As they become squeezed into a smaller and smaller area, the risk that US forces will run into an exploding house or building will increase. But the rapid progress of the last two nights may be tempting US commanders to accept the risks and snap at the enemy's heels. Going fast may prevent the enemy from setting up their defense. One almost certain thing is that a fearful execution is being inflicted on the enemy, and probably worst among their officers and NCOs. Tonight's events will probably indicate whether the US goes for broke or takes a more deliberate approach.

Update

The Daily Telegraph has an atmospheric article which describes the terrible effect of networked forces on the enemy inside Fallujah.

"I got myself a real juicy target," shouted Sgt James Anyett, peering through the thermal sight of a Long Range Acquisition System (LRAS) mounted on one of Phantom's Humvees. "Prepare to copy that 89089226. Direction 202 degrees. Range 950 metres. I got five motherf****** in a building with weapons." A dozen loud booms rattle the sky and smoke rose as mortars rained down on the co-ordinates the sergeant had given. "Yeah," he yelled. "Battle Damage Assessment - nothing. Building's gone. I got my kills, I'm coming down. I just love my job."

... The insurgents, not understanding the capabilities of the LRAS, crept along rooftops and poked their heads out of windows. Even when they were more than a mile away, the soldiers of Phantom Troop had their eyes on them. Lt Jack Farley, a US Marines officer, sauntered over to compare notes with the Phantoms. "You guys get to do all the fun stuff," he said. "It's like a video game. We've taken small arms fire here all day. It just sounds like popcorn going off."

This engagement is all the more chilling because it probably happened at night. Five enemy soldiers died simply because they could not comprehend how destruction could flow from an observer a mile away networked to mortars that could fire for effect without ranging. All over Fallujah virtual teams of snipers and fire-control observers are jockeying for lines of sight to deal death to the enemy. For many jihadis that one peek over a sill could be their last.

"Everybody's curious," grinned Sgt Anyett as he waited for a sniper with a Russian-made Dragonov to show his face one last, fatal time. A bullet zinged by. ...

His officers said that the plan to invade Fallujah involved months of detailed planning and elaborate "feints" designed to draw the insurgents out into the open and fool them into thinking the offensive would come from another side of the city.  "They're probably thinking that we'll come in from the east," said Capt Natalie Friel, an intelligence officer with task force, before the battle. But the actual plan involves penetrating the city from the north and sweeping south. "I don't think they know what's coming. They have no idea of the magnitude," she said. "But their defences are pretty circular. They're prepared for any kind of direction. They've got strong points on all four corners of the city." The aim was to push the insurgents south, killing as many as possible, before swinging west. They would then be driven into the Euphrates.

From UAVs wheeling overhead to Marines going through alleys linked by their intra-squad radios (a kind of headset and boom-mike operated comm device), the US force is generating lethal, real-time information which is almost immediately transformed into strike action. Against this, the jihadis have no chance. This doesn't mean (as I pointed out above) that there will be no American losses. The battlefield is too lethal to hope for that. But it does mean that terrorism has unleashed a terrible engine upon itself. Capabilities which didn't exist on September 11 have now been deployed in combat. It isn't that American forces have become inconceivably lethal that is scary; it is that the process has just started.

Update 2

An NYT article with an accompanying photo essay illustrates the high level of skill which some of the enemy display. It's not that the enemy is dumb, just that the US is that much better. A sequence of photos shows US troops observing targets from a rooftop to call in fires. Right after the Americans scoot off, enemy mortars land on the roof, too late to hurt their tormentors. It is a perfect illustration of the lethality of information and essentially futile enemy attempts to negate it. As the battle progresses, enemy snipers, mortarmen and machinegunners -- who are desperately trying to deny Americans their lethal targeting information -- will be picked off or run low on ammunition. The combat, already lopsided to start with, will grow more unequal. If it sounds unfair, it meant to be.

The Strategy Page points out that the enemy has dug tunnels under streets, utilized overhead cover and knocked holes in walls in an attempt to negate the US information warfare advantage. But the price for living like moles is relative immobility in trading concealment for stasis. The battle for Fallujah illustrates the relative strengths and weaknesses of both sides. The enemy, whatever his faults, is not obviously short on courage or resourcefulness and America can expect to encounter the same tenacity anywhere he is met. But against these strengths, enemy inherited not only the weakness of a poor technological base but a fundamentally flawed concept of American determination. They wrongly assumed, as Osama often claimed, that Americans were too morally weak to fight. They believed they could use physical remoteness and terrorist tactics to wage "asymmetrical warfare" on an American force geared to fight conventional battles -- the army of Desert Storm. Both these assumptions have proved poor bets. There are now tens of thousands of Americans with a good understanding of the Middle East; there are many systems now coming online which are designed to fight the terrorist enemy. They are going to get snowed under by the same tidal wave that buried the Imperial Japanese Army and the Wehrmacht in World War 2.

Thinking Muslim and Arab leaders probably recognize the handwriting on the wall, but like the peace factions in wartime Germany and Japan, are still reluctant to step forward. This is tragic, because like the unequal struggle in Fallujah, once the US gains the strategic upper hand its advantages will progressively mount and a hideous, irresistible annihilation of enemy forces will unfold, until despair brings an enemy statesman forward; not too late for his society, but too tardy to save the wasted lives of their young men.

The Banner of Zarqawi

Ralph Kinney Bennet at Tech Central Station asks why Zarqawi should fight for Falluja and whether his men have not already melted away to other Sunni towns in the face of the imminent American strike.

The legendary Arab insurgent leader T. E. Lawrence described the characteristics of a guerrilla force as "speed and endurance, ubiquity and independence of arteries of supply." The "ubiquity" of al-Zarqawi and his fighters - their presence as a force to be reckoned with in Iraq -- will be severely compromised or eliminated if they choose to stay and fight in Fallujah.

One partial answer is that Zarqawi will fight for Falluja for the same reasons he wanted it in the first place. Anecdotal evidence in April 2004 suggested that many bunkers had been built. The secondary explosions from US strikes over the last days implies that a lot of explosive has also been stored up. Zarqawi had invested quite a lot of effort into Fallujah and he would have done this only if it were valuable to him. The interesting and apparently paradoxical thing about terrorism -- which is often characterized as rootless and spectral -- is how rooted it is in sanctuaries, an apparent indication of their utility. Whether South Waziristan, Pankasi Gorge, the Bekaa Valley, Fallujah or the banlieus of Paris, terrorism apparently needs some locus in order to exert a material force.

In Dark Networks the Belmont Club referred to idea of the Dunbar Number, which John Robb and others have related to terrorist networks. Robb observed:

Distributed, dynamic terrorist networks cannot scale like hierarchical networks. The same network design that makes them resiliant against attack puts absolute limits on their size. If so, what are those limits?

A good starting point is to look at limits to group size within peaceful online communities on which we have extensive data -- terrorist networks are essentially geographically dispersed online communities. Chris Allen does a good job analyzing optimal group size with his critique of the Dunbar number.

His analysis (replete with examples) shows that there is a gradual fall-off in effectiveness at 80 members, with an absolute fall-off at 150 members. The initial fall-off occurs, according to Chris, due to an increasing amount of effort spent on "grooming" the group to maintain cohesion. The absolute fall-off at 150 members occurs when grooming fails to stem dissatisfaction and dissension, which causes the group to cleave apart into smaller subgroups (that may remain affiliated).

Al Qaeda may have been able to grow much larger than this when it ran physical training camps in Afghanistan. Physical proximity allowed al Qaeda to operate as a hierarchy along military lines, complete with middle management (or at least a mix of a hierarchy in Afghanistan and a distributed network outside of Afghanistan). Once those camps were broken apart, the factors listed above were likely to have caused the fragmentation we see today (lots of references to this in the news).

Chester says more or less the same thing in commonsense terms.

... the sanctuary of weaponry, local political support, command and control infrastructure (however sophisticated), and ready ties to cash sources cannot be picked up and moved. I've touched on this earlier when I mention why I think Zarqawi is still in the city. I'm not saying that small bands of insurgents can'tleave, posing as civilians and setting up shop elsewhere. What I'm saying is that by doing so, they will completely cut themselves off from command and control from above, and will no longer be able to mass in a single place. The US won't let this happen again. Therefore, if some small groups do leave, even if they are successful afterwards in some bombings or beheadings, eventually they will run out of steam without the logistical, moral, and command support that can be readily found when they have coalesced in a physical place.

Lawrence's Arab guerillas always had a base, -- their tribes -- fixed in concept yet mobile as camels and his perennial difficulty was keeping the tribes in the field in the face of pastoral demands. It was a difficulty Lawrence did not surmount until he obtained sufficient gold from General Allenby to keep his warriors in funds, for ride where they would, the desert legions could live only for as long as somewhere, their tribe existed. When Falluja is taken, Zarqawi's tribe will be dispersed, to meet furtively by the roadside perhaps, but never to muster under their full banner again.

The Assault Begins

The ground assault on Fallujah has apparently started -- from a surprising direction -- the river. According to the Bakersfield Californian

US forces stormed into western districts of Fallujah early Monday, seizing the main city hospital and securing two key bridges over the Euphrates river in what appeared to be the first stage of the long-expected assault on the insurgent stronghold. ... The action began after sundown on the outskirts of the city, which has been sealed off by U.S. and Iraqi forces, and the minaret-studded skyline was lit up with huge flashes of light. Flares were dropped to illuminate targets, and defenders fought back with heavy machine gunfire. Flaming red tracer rounds streaked through the night sky from guerrilla positions inside the city, 40 miles west of Baghdad.

Although nothing is certain in war, there are indications that the reduction of Fallujah has a timeline measured in weeks rather than months. The British Black Watch regiment, which Chester believes is playing the role of a blocking force outside Fallujah has a been attached to the operation for 30 days from the end of October.

Blair has promised to bring the Black Watch home by Christmas. The senior officer said: "The operation is approximately thirty days' duration, approximately, i.e., it could be longer. And we've heard, but not formally, that we could be replaced, but that is a political, high-level military decision which I'm not going to go into."

As Chester puts it, the British troops block any retreat to the north and east of the Euphrates (which is in the direction away from where the Marines assaulted last night the anvil to hammer)

the Black Watch has moved to positions east of the Euphrates, at the request of US military commanders, in order to "stop reinforcements moving north and block the way of insurgents leaving the city."  This is consistent with my prediction last week that the Black Watch will be serving as a blocking force, so that it can clean up any insurgents who flee to the east of the city of Fallujah.

Presumably US planners have calculated that resistance in the central redoubt will have crumbled before the end of November and enemy survivors would then be trying to evade crosscountry to other Sunni towns to make sense of the Black Watch deployment. It should also be recalled that the Fallujah operation is part of a wider campaign against other strongholds in the Sunni triangle. In this connection, the 60-day declaration of Martial Law by Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawie on December 7 suggests a time horizon for related operations.

Marine Corps News reports that several embedded reporters are having second thoughts about accompanying combat troops into the city on the basis of what they have been briefed to expect.

The Marines recently embedded more than 30 media agencies with units that are operating in the Al Anbar province where the well-known towns of Ramadi and Fallujah are located. All were invited, many accepted the offer, but now some have doubts. The Marines are trained for this, the media is not, continued the CNN reporter who was actually covered other battles including the Iraq invasion during the spring of 2003.

One photographer, who has prided himself since his arrival here, on being in more than 17 conflicts, says he is more worried about this operation than any before. Because of the tactics the insurgents are using there is much more uncertainty, he explained. He went on to say that he did not expect to have this much access or be this involved with the Marines when he arrived. “What if I get separated, what if I think I’m in a safe place and all of a sudden an insurgent walks in with a gun,” he said.

Many of these reporters are experienced men who have been under some type of fire before. But the urban combat facing the troops they will accompany will probably consist of small units in constantly moving through a very dangerous kind of environment,  full of IEDs, snipers and close-range engagements. In this situation, getting lost may well mean dying from enemy fire or blue on blue. Sticking close to Marine infantry advancing under fire is only slightly more palatable. Everyone knows the saying that 'war is hell, you cannot refine it'; but Sherman might have added, 'you cannot describe it'. The Marines and many reporters will come to know what can never be described and what no sane person should ever hope to experience at first hand.

Stranger in a Strange Land

The Dutch blog Zacht Ei is an interesting window into how people in the Netherlands are reacting to the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by Islamic fundamentalists. The UK Times described Gogh's death in the following way:

Theo van Gogh, the film maker who had often attacked radical Muslims, had been riding along on his bicycle when a Muslim fanatic first shot and then butchered him on a busy street with the nonchalance of an abattoir worker. ... Now other people were being targeted, too, as evidence emerged of a "brigade" of Dutch jihadists preparing to murder "the enemies of Islam" in a terror campaign that would be easier to carry out than the bombing of trains or heavily guarded government buildings.

He was not the only one to be threatened. "There will be no mercy" said a document that the killer had held over van Gogh's chest before skewering it there with a final knife blow to his heart. By then van Gogh, 47, had been shot several times and was seen by one witness on his knees, pleading with his assailant, "Don’t do it . . . we can still talk about it." The response was a knife to the throat. The killer sawed through the neck and spinal column, almost to the point of decapitating him.

The murder caused widespread popular anger, yet political correctness forced much of the public reaction into unconventional channels. The Mayor of Rotterdam Ivo Opstelten had a mural with the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill" removed in the aftermath of the Gogh murder because it might inflame Muslims. Gogh's film "Submission", which offended his murderers in the first place, was pulled from the Stedelijk Museum of modern art because it might cause an "uproar"; the same film was yanked off Rotterdam TV West for fear it would endanger their employees. Instead the Dutch PBS ran a special program to discuss:

'how a multicultural society should deal with freedom of expression'. This implicitly suggests that Mr. Van Gogh may just have stepped over some sort of invisible line, and therefore may be partly to blame for his own death. Of course, this suggestion was never spoken out aloud.

In this strange atmosphere, the debate took on a surrealistic aspect. Dutch entrepreneur Ron Eilers hired a light plane to pull a streamer around Amsterdam with the words "Theo was right --  no theocracy". Other politicians, renegade Muslims and Jews, came forward to show death letters written to them, making their point by indirection. Opinion polls showed an shift in public attitudes towards unassimilated Muslims. The UK Times described telling scenes.

Tensions rose. Shouting matches erupted between Moroccans and Dutch people at the scene of van Gogh’s killing where well-wishers left a carpet of flowers and handwritten notes, some of them angrily calling for more control on radical Muslims. At one point a car filled with dark-skinned young men pulled up alongside the shrine. The windows came down to the sound of blaring Arab music and whoops of delight from the passengers. Dutch men paying their respects to van Gogh, a grandson of the famous artist’s brother, yelled at them to move on. Things were equally tense at the home of the killer’s parents in a sprawling complex of red-brick council housing. Young Moroccans shouted abuse on Thursday afternoon when a Dutch colleague and I tried to ask about the killer. We were obliged to withdraw when a bucket of water was thrown from the first floor.

Still the Dutch authorities twisted and squirmed; trying to say the necessary without uttering the impermissible. Yet reading Zacht Ei conveys a sense that a public dialogue was taking place anyway, despite everything; in attenuated sentences and sign language, like powerful currents surging under a falsely placid surface. Although the Gogh murder is unlikely to create any drastic changes in Dutch policy by itself, it may provide a nucleus around which ideas, long thought to be dissolved in the multicultural solution of the Netherlands, begin to precipitate. One of these is the Islamic message; and the other the memory of the Dutch nation.

The Preparations for the Fallujah Assault

Former Marine officer and Iraq veteran Chester has more on the "battlefield shaping" preparations to assault Fallujah. The enemy has been engaged in some battlefield preparation of his own by attacking lines of communications in an attempt to force the dispersal of US forces to security duties. Twenty Americans were wounded in a spate of attacks outside in Ramadi and elsewhere. Reuters describes the desertion of a Kurdish company commander who they describe as being in possession of the Fallujah battle plan which may or may not be related to enemy counterintelligence. This kind of skirmishing has preceded every set-piece battle from time immemorial. The Seattle Times reports:

Reports are circulating among Iraqi and U.S. officials that large numbers of insurgents have already left the Fallujah area in anticipation of the coming invasion. The militants are reportedly fanning to other cities in the Sunni Triangle, where they will stage diversionary attacks -- and underscore that despite an expected defeat for insurgent forces in Fallujah, the rebel movement remains strong.

"There will be horrific events outside Fallujah," said a senior U.S. diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. "I would never tell you that violence in Sunni areas won't get worse when you open up a battle." He added that officials expect that period to last "not many weeks." "You will have a shortish period when everybody will say the whole country's falling apart but they (the insurgents) will not be able to maintain that tempo."

But fundamentally the enemy can do nothing to dilute the concentration of combat power that is gathering all around Fallujah. This combat power not only takes the form of traditional firepower and infantry strength but also informational power. Chester links to an SFGate article suggesting the US will use UGVs (ground robots) in the upcoming battle. Some of these, like the Marine Gladiator, have been described in the press. A wide variety of ground and air vehicles have been in development and limited use even from the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Although the larger systems are controlled by datalinks which range out to thousands of miles, the smaller systems are controlled by line of site devices and wireless protocols that are essentially identical to the kind used in your laptop. The establishment of a wireless router infrastructure and the integration of these individual unmanned systems has become one of the key preparatory tasks of the battlefield. Once the assault begins in earnest these systems will help control fires, identify friend from foe and coordinate the battle. This is especially necessary because American forces will go through houses and alleys in built up areas, walking through walls with explosive dooropeners. There will be many small units maneuvering out of visual contact with each other. The air will be thick with American air and UAVs but that will only help if these can coordinate with one another and the people on the ground.

Yet after the last technological refinement has been applied, the Marine infantry will go forward to close with an enemy many of whom have traveled thousands of miles specifically to kill them; pilgrims of death. The Marines will want to live; and yet by some miracle they will advance. There in the ancient Land Between the Rivers young men from big cities and small towns will perform the most incomprehensible act of generosity on earth and press their extravagant gift into our uncertain hands.

Wanted: Dead Nor Alive

Yasser Arafat might not be dead, but how long can they keep him alive? 

On Friday, Israel's Justice Minister Yosef Lapid said Arafat was being kept alive artificially, but the source of his information was not clear. "We all know that clinically he's dead but we won't interfere with internal Palestinian affairs. They'll announce his death when they find it proper," he told Associated Press Television News.

A Palestinian spokeswoman denied Lapid's assertion. "He is in a coma. We don't know the type but it's a reversible coma," Leila Shahid, the Palestinian envoy to France, told French RTL radio. Shahid suggested the coma occurred after Arafat was put under anesthesia for medical tests including an endoscopy, colonoscopy and a biopsy of the spinal cord. She said doctors do not yet have a diagnosis.

His existence may be less a matter of fact than a matter of state. An official extension of Arafat's time on earth would give the pretenders to his throne more time to bury the hatchets in each other's backs. The vultures have already gathered at his bedside.

Many members of the Palestinian leadership, Arafat's closest aides, and his wife, Suha, gathered in Paris. Many were staying at the Intercontinental Hotel in the Opera neighborhood of Paris. Observers said that the power struggle within the Palestinian leadership was already taking place, even in Paris as members gathered by their leader's bed.

It's unclear what anyone can gain from a man unable to anoint a successor and who may never waken again. Perhaps the mere fiction that Arafat still lives and occupies the Palestinian Presidency will be enough to prevent an open claim to the supreme position. The demons may be momentarily held back; but only just. Yet the inherent instability is that the fiction cannot be sustained indefinitely.

But while French medical sources said Arafat was technically still alive, they added that he was brain dead and was breathing only with the help of life support machines while in an irreversible coma. Technically, Arafat is "not dead", one source said on condition of confidentiality. But there was no hope of his leaving his vegetative state and recovering basic bodily functions such as breathing without assistance. Such artificial care could be "extended for several days or several weeks thanks to the machines", the source said.

Then the real weakness of the position, the absence of stable Palestinian institutions, will soon manifest itself with a vengeance. Once internecine struggle breaks out each faction will call for international backers in a kind of bizarre, winner-take-all casino game where human lives are chips. The prospect of striking a deal with the eventual survivor is called 'finding a partner for peace'. Dennis Ross says:

"Certainly with Arafat out of the way, you have an impediment removed," Dennis Ross, the chief Middle East negotiator for the first President Bush and for Mr Clinton said. But, he said, the Bush administration must expect a protracted, potentially tumultuous process for replacing Arafat, and should begin pressing now for elections in which Palestinians choose a new leader. If Arafat passes from the scene, whoever is elected or appointed to replace him "couldn't be worse" from the US viewpoint, said Ross, who recently wrote a book titled The Missing Peace on his experiences negotiating with Arafat and other leaders in the region.

The only reason why the gang of scoundrels which make up the Palestinian leadership may opt for election, which is the least familiar tool of their polity, is if they fear intramural warfare will consume them all. But they may turn to the gun anyway out of sheer habit. The Israeli Defense Force has prepared contingency plan "New Leaf" against the possibility that all hell will break loose.

IDF commanders were instructed, should such a situation arise, to do everything in their power to prevent a flare-up and reduce friction between troops and Palestinian demonstrators in West Bank and Gaza towns. Even so, commanders were also told to make every effort to prevent demonstrations from overrunning IDF roadblocks and settlements in the territories.

The French may have performed a valuable service by admitting Arafat to a military hospital in Europe which will reduce the risk of imputing his death to Jewish poisoning, a rumor that has already made the rounds in the Middle East.

in Jerusalem, after it was reported that Arafat had died, several dozen Jewish demonstrators celebrated in a city square, declaring that one of the greatest enemies of the Jewish people was "on his way to hell". ... The head of Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Mohammed al-Hindi, said the high committee of Palestinian and national Islamic factions would meet at the Gaza offices of the Palestinian parliament. "We will discuss the dangerous situation, especially what will happen if the president were to die," Hindi said. The high committee is an umbrella forum of 13 factions including Arafat's Fatah party, the Islamist movement Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Even after Arafat dies the various terrorist factions can mark some time by making his place of burial an issue.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said he would not permit Arafat to be buried in Jerusalem, which is claimed by both Israel and the Palestinians as their capital. Army chiefs said they had also ruled out a burial in the Jerusalem suburb of Abu Dis in the West Bank.

Sooner or later a day with neither Arafat nor his ghost must dawn, but even in life he was a phantom; the counterfeit of a peace process rather than its reality, maybe the only specter ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The greatest tragedy that could attend his passage is for the diplomats to select yet another shadowy figure rather than the hard reality of stable Palestinian institutions upon which to found their slim hopes of peace.

The Red and the Blue

This article from Jane Smiley in Slate argues that the majority of the American electorate consists of fools who have made the wrong choice. Smiley's article is part of a series of election postmortems at Slate, which "asked a number of wise liberals to take up the question of why Americans won't vote for the Democrats." She says:

I grew up in Missouri and most of my family voted for Bush, so I am going to be the one to say it: The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. ... Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states. There used to be a kind of hand-to-hand fight on the frontier called a "knock-down-drag-out," where any kind of gouging, biting, or maiming was considered fair. The ancestors of today's red-state voters used to stand around cheering and betting on these fights.

Here is how ignorance works: First, they put the fear of God into you—if you don't believe in the literal word of the Bible, you will burn in hell. ... Next, they tell you that you are the best of a bad lot (humans, that is) and that as bad as you are, if you stick with them, you are among the chosen. ... Third, and most important, when life grows difficult or fearsome, they (politicians, preachers, pundits) encourage you to cling to your ignorance with even more fervor.

The reason the Democrats have lost five of the last seven presidential elections is simple: A generation ago, the big capitalists, who have no morals, as we know, decided to make use of the religious right in their class war against the middle class and against the regulations that were protecting those whom they considered to be their rightful prey -- workers and consumers. ... Progressives have only one course of action now: React quickly to every outrage -- red state types love to cheat and intimidate, so we have to assume the worst and call them on it every time. ... Whatever their short-term appeal, they are borne of hubris and hatred, and will destroy their purveyors in the end.

One of the several ways to parse this argument is to take it on its own terms. In this account, the bulk of Ms. Smiley's enemies consist of a single, undifferentiated mass of red staters with the bestial appetites and intelligence of retarded slugs. Unfortunately for the Democrats, they are led by diabolically clever manipulators -- "the big capitalists, who have no morals" -- who employ cant, superstition and lies to lead their dimwitted mob around for the purposes of rapine and coarse gratification. We are vouchsafed a glimpse of the 'good guys',  the Progressives, the champions of the workers and consumers. These Progressives are somehow resistant to blandishments of the "big capitalists". Something -- superior intelligence or a finer moral fiber perhaps -- has made them insusceptible to ignorance and manipulation. And they alone stand in the way of the Darkness.

This is Ms. Smiley's actual intellectual model. She confidently predicts that red staters, like the Gadarene Swine, are doomed to self-destruction. "Whatever their short-term appeal, they are borne of hubris and hatred, and will destroy their purveyors in the end"; yet warns against complacency, pointing out that  liberals "have only one course of action now: React quickly to every outrage". Everything happens with the automaticity of clockwork, an historical drama whose ending has already been written in which liberals have no choice but to react indignantly and the red staters no alternative but to cast themselves over the cliff. The red staters should enjoy their triumph while they can. For Progressives, Courage, Hope is on the Way.

I should encourage her to believe it. It cannot be improved upon. As a model of simplification it is unexampled. Nothing could be clearer; nothing more proof against refutation. Yet that reply, however gratifying, would constitute an abandonment of dialogue and acceptance of the irreconcilable conflict she proposes. Against the supposition that red staters are slugs it is hardly useful to retort that people like Jane Smiley are blinkered ideologues upon whom rational argument is wasted. It isn't because time and reality are corrosive of dogmatic certitude; and even dedicated Communists may reach that stage in life when they begin to doubt the nonexistence of God. For one Marxist professor the moment came when she lost her sons to a guerilla war which burned, flickered and went out. I can't recall exactly when she began to haunt the terminal cancer ward of the island hospital, visiting the dying; but at the last she began to offer patients rosaries and holy pictures, having discovered they had no appetite for the Collected Works of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Whether she will see her sons again in aftertime, I do not know; but I cherish the hope red staters may see Jane Smiley again -- not necessarily after watching the NASCAR races and swilling cheap beer.

The Ex-Wave of the Future

Samizdata has an interesting statistical table showing how demographics has worked against the Democratic Party. Had the apportionment of electoral votes followed the population distribution of the 1960s, John Kerry would have won. Democrat bailiwicks have not grown as quickly as the those which have tended Republican.

1960 census (1964, 68 elections) -- Kerry 270, Bush 268
1970 census (1972, 76, 80 elections) -- Kerry 270, Bush 268
1980 census (1984, 88 elections) -- Bush 276, Kerry 262
1990 census (1992, 96, 2000 elections) -- Bush 279, Kerry 259
2000 census (2004, 08 elections) -- Bush 286, Kerry 252

It would be interesting to discover what the underlying reason for this differential growth is. Some will argue, no doubt, that "Blue State" social attitudes may have depressed their birthrates, but that is too pat an answer, and the whole question deserves a more scholarly treatment. But whatever the explanation, if the trend is real -- and the divergence looks to have persisted for forty years -- then the leftist assumption that they are the vanguard of the future and the party of youth is empirically suspect. Time is not obviously on their side. If so, there is no reason to believe that their prospects will improve simply with the passage of years.

Cormallen

The recent Presidential election was neither a mandate for empire nor a signal to impose a set of values on an empirically diverse world. If it was revolutionary it was also defensive in character, but in the way of Midway and Stalindgrad; a kind of turning of the tide. The passage of the gay marriage ban in eleven states occurred in the same election that rejected the candidacy of Alan Keyes. It is not that most people wanted to thump a Bible, it was that they didn't want to be thumped at all -- least of all by a synthetic political correctness. The rejection of gay marriage cannot be understood except in relation to the social activism from the Left, any more than a Warsaw barricade can be explained by a sudden desire to pile domestic possessions in the middle of a roadway without glancing at the Panzerkampfwagen VI rattling down the street. The Left still can't understand why people won't get with the program. The Daily Kos articulates the point succinctly:

Throughout our country’s history, abolitionists, suffragists, union organizers, anti-racists, antiwarriors, civil libertarians, feminists and gay rights activists have challenged the majority of Americans to take off their blinders. Each succeeded one way or another, but not overnight, and certainly not without serious setbacks.

Take off your blinders and listen to your betters. They will condescend to speak more loudly and slowly next time, so we had better listen. The Daily Kos says elsewhere:

It's over. For now.

Michael Totten was forced to protest, quoting Michelle Catalano, that not every Republican supporter was the subhuman, ignorant troglodyte the Left felt dutibound to uplift. Catalano said:

I voted for George Bush.
I am not a redneck.
I do not spend my days watching cars race around a track, drinking cheap beer and slapping my woman on the ass.
I am not a bible thumper. In fact, I am an atheist.
I am not a homophobe.
I am educated beyond the fifth grade. In fact, I am college educated.
I am not stupid. Not by any stretch of facts.
I do not bomb abortion clinics.

Even in the field of national security, the recently concluded election was ideational rather than personal. It has been said that John Kerry never stood for President in any other capacity than as the abstract 'anyone but Bush' candidate. But this characterization cuts both ways. To a large extent President Bush himself represented the 'anyone but the Peace Movement' candidacy. If Kerry was the anti-Bush, Bush was the anti-anti-Bush, the anti-antiWar candidate. The candidate of action as opposed to the candidate of self-recrimination. Just as the Right united the Left, the Left united the Right. A great deed -- perhaps doom is the better word -- lies behind us and its consequences both bind and free us. We are on a field of victory on which there will be many partings. We have come together and will diverge again. But not from the same point. The events of the last three years make it much more likely that we will move into a world where attitudes toward marriage will still change, but not at the bidding of a handful of judicial activists; where Muslims will be free to worship Allah, but not free to carve up anyone who happens to disagree; where people can fly in freedom, but not into buildings. It seems little to ask, but it is oh, so much.

November 3, 2004

The Presidential election is over for all practical purposes. Although spin doctors and lawyers will quibble and obfuscate, the essence of the news is not so much that Bush won, but how big he won. Whatever shaving is done on the margins it must now be accepted that the old order is dead. Neither the 60s nor vaudeville are coming back. Overlooked in the obsession with Presidential electoral votes was the passage in 11 out of 11 states of the Gay Marriage Ban. The Guardian reports:

In a resounding, coast-to-coast rejection of gay marriage, voters in 11 states approved constitutional amendments Tuesday limiting marriage to one man and one woman. The amendments won, often by huge margins, in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Utah and Oregon - the one state where gay-rights activists hoped to prevail. The bans won by a 3-to-1 margin in Kentucky, Georgia and Arkansas, 3-to-2 in Ohio, and 6-to-1 in Mississippi.

This is not the place to discuss the subject of homosexual marriage, but this result together with everything else, if does not suggest something definite, unmistakably hints the atmosphere has changed forever. The Left cannot now attempt to reassemble the pieces of their old platforms, hoping that a little tweaking and repackaging here and there will once again make them competitive. It's the platform itself that has rotted and fallen to pieces. The times, they are a' changing.

Thoughtful people within the Liberal establishment must now accept, or at least seriously consider the possibility that:

• the world is indeed facing a new fascist threat in the shape of radical Islam. It is not imaginary;
• chaos and disorder are threatening to engulf large parts of the Third World and international institutions, like the World Bank and the UN have proved incapable to deal with it; and
• the populations of Europe and America, or America at least, retain certain core beliefs -- never mind what these are for the present -- which are absolutely nonnegotiable and which will not be surrendered under any circumstances.

On this basis all men of goodwill can work together to build a 21st century society that will face the new aggressors; use the power of the markets and technology to bring material prosperity to the billions of impoverished people in the Third World; and acknowledge that we, like all our ancestors from the day we first learned to bury our dead under a cairn of stones are still entitled to ask the eternal questions. That we desire, not to be New Soviet or Post-modern Men, but simply Men, as ever we were.

The Rearview Mirror

The flu has a put a crimp on posting, but there is likely to be too much, rather than too little information out there on election day, so I will not be missed. My last comments on the matter come from a semi-comatose reading of U.S. Grant's biography. The election of 1864 bears an uncanny resemblance to 2004's on several points, a comparison that has not escaped others. After three years of war, victory in 1864 over the Confederacy seemed farther than ever. The Democrats, therefore, fielded ex-general McClellan as a candidate on a something of a peace platform, for many in the party intended to negotiate either a return to the Union of the seceding states (allowing them to keep slavery) or recognize the Confederacy. Lincoln himself thought it unlikely that he would win. In fact, he had made matters worse by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, which made it abundantly clear that while he remained President, the South would be fighting not only for State's Rights but to preserve its entire social fabric. It was therefore true that Lincoln, by his obduracy, had made peace impossible in a war that had cost nearly half a million lives on a population base of 30 million. And all the Democrats were saying, was that after a failed war of three years, that it was best to give peace a chance.

Although the Union disposed of more resources than the Confederacy, it's armies in the West had to use a large part of their strength to guard supply lines against a restive population. Its attenuated vanguard had made some, but not dramatic progress against the South. To the embarassment of Union commanders, Confederate armies would sometimes raid deep into the North. Jubal Early actually reached Washington DC by slipping up the Shenandoah Valley past the Army of the Potomac and was only ejected by a rapid reaction. This was the picture as Election Day, 1864 approached and it was little wonder that many regarded Abraham Lincoln a failure.

Now we know that the coming months would bring Sherman's March to the Sea, Sheridan's campaign in the Shenandoah and Grant's relentless pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia. The capitulation of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox followed with the inevitability that accompanies historical fact. But nothing was certain then. Not victory over the Confederacy; not Jefferson Davis' capture; not the end of slavery; not the survival of the Union. It is hard now, with all the water that has flowed under the bridge to imagine that it could have been different. Yet of necessity it could have been.

Going forward into the future with only the past as our guide is akin to driving down a road with a blacked-out windshield and only a fleeting glimpse of the rearview mirror to help us on our way. It is unfair that men should live thus; uncertain of their eternal fate; blinkered and ignorant even of the consequences of their well-intended actions. Perhaps the most we can hope for is to act with honesty and goodwill. Robert E. Lee is forgiven for choosing the wrong side; forgiven for his sincerity and manliness. Sherman is pardoned his brutality; pardoned him for being in the right. But the book has not yet been written of our days; yet tomorrow we shall write and be judged.