The Truth is Out There

Doug links to a  Seymour Hersh interview by Amy Goodman, whose contents are so self-expressive they need no comment. Here are some of the things Hersh says:

We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because be won. We took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they're very actively fighting. The frightening thing about it is, we have no intelligence. Maybe it's -- it's -- it is frightening, we have no intelligence about what they're doing. A year-and-a-half ago, we're up against two and three-man teams. We estimated the cells operating against us were two and three people, that we could not penetrate. As of now, we still don't know what's coming next. There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrific communications. Somebody told me, it's -- somebody in the system, an officer -- and by the way, the good part of it is, more and more people are available to somebody like me.

... the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside

I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people -- I don't call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.’s, and he picked up the phone and he said, “Welcome to Stalingrad.”

This amazing interview closes with a flourish.

AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh. This news just in: 31 Marines have died in a helicopter crash in Iraq. To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359.

Time was that when you read about 'black helicopters',  'ghostly white trains' and motherships it was in the context of a laughing academy. Now you can listen to a Pulitzer-prize winner seriously describe how less than a dozen changelings have taken over the entire US Government by ordering a transcript on a toll-free number. Major credit cards accepted. Better yet, if you know the home phone of a certain Air Force officer, he will tell you how to unobtrusively bomb urban targets, so no one notices. Maybe it's like the silencers they have for guns, only it works for 2,000 lb bombs.

Legitimacy Versus Informed Comment

Oxblog asks whether Juan Cole's latest post on Iraq counts as informed comment. Cole said:

I'm just appalled by the cheerleading tone of US news coverage of the so-called elections in Iraq on Sunday. I said on television last week that this event is a "political earthquake" and "a historical first step" for Iraq. It is an event of the utmost importance, for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. All the boosterism has a kernel of truth to it, of course. Iraqis hadn't been able to choose their leaders at all in recent decades, even by some strange process where they chose unknown leaders. But this process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan.

How's that again?

Juan Cole as quoted by himself	Juan Cole as quoted in Reuters
I said on television last week that this event is a "political earthquake" and "a historical first step" for Iraq.	"These elections are a joke," said Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Michigan. "The Bush administration has created the worst possible advertisement for democracy because the perception across the Middle East is that democracy means you get a country where everything is out of control," he said.

Then he tells this story.

Moreover, as Swopa rightly reminds us all, the Bush administration opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani immediately gave a fatwa denouncing this plan and demanding free elections mandated by a UN Security Council resolution. Bush was reportedly "extremely offended" at these two demands and opposed Sistani. Bremer got his appointed Interim Governing Council to go along in fighting Sistani. Sistani then brought thousands of protesters into the streets in January of 2004, demanding free elections. Soon thereafter, Bush caved and gave the ayatollah everything he demanded. Except that he was apparently afraid that open, non-manipulated elections in Iraq might become a factor in the US presidential campaign, so he got the elections postponed to January 2005. This enormous delay allowed the country to fall into much worse chaos, and Sistani is still bitter that the Americans didn't hold the elections last May. The US objected that they couldn't use UN food ration cards for registration, as Sistani suggested. But in the end that is exactly what they did.

Salim Lone, the director of communications for Sergio Viera de Mello has another version of events, which he tells in the Guardian. In Lone's version, the Interim Governing Council (full title Iraq Interim Governing Council), which in Cole's narrative was unleashed by Bremer on Sistani, was actually the brainstorm of "the late Sergio Vieira de Mello".

In its search for greater legitimacy for its preferred Iraqi leadership, the US has avoided the UN security council, since most of its members abhor what is being done to Iraq. The US has instead chosen to work with individual representatives. The first such UN involvement, when the late Sergio Vieira de Mello headed the UN mission in Iraq, was the most effective. He was able to persuade the then US proconsul, Paul Bremer, that he should appoint an Iraqi Governing Council rather than an advisory body. Even then, the anger about the individuals and groups on this council, and for UN support for it, was palpable in Iraq.

Nearly a year later, in another bid for UN support, Bush assured the world that the interim government would be picked by Lakhdar Brahimi, Kofi Annan's special representative. Brahimi spent weeks in Iraq consulting domestic groups about who they felt should lead the country. But on the day the interim government was to be appointed, a deal was struck by the Americans behind Brahimi's back, to make the CIA-linked Ayad Allawi prime minister.

Lone's main beef is that America reneged on the arrangement that "the interim government would be picked by Lakhdar Brahimi, Kofi Annan's special representative". And who was sent to do the picking? Was it someone the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who Cole says possessed the power to make or break the White House would likely respect? Annan had sent Lakhdar Brahimi, who PBS describes as "a Sunni Muslim, Brahimi ... with decades of experience as an Algerian diplomat." Not to put too fine a point on it, according to a contemporaneous New York Times article by Edward Wong,  Brahimi was there to "pick a secular Sunni politician to be president of the interim government ..."

So the helpless President George Bush, in the Cole version, submitted to Sistani's fatwa with the mansuetude he should have displayed from the first. Only this submission, according to Salim Lone's perspective, was a mistake, because by allying themselves with Sistani, America had yoked itself to a sectarian enterprise that will only deepen the hatred most Arabs and Muslims feel for America.

The millions of Iraqis, as well as the UN electoral team and the Iraqi election commission staff, who did participate in the process despite the grave risk, deserve our respect. But it was a risk taken in vain. The election was illegitimate, and cannot resolve the rampant insecurity resulting from the occupation. The only way to stop the destruction of Iraq is to end the occupation and enfranchise the Sunnis, who are leading the resistance because they see the US as systematically excluding them from the role they deserve to play in Iraq. ...

The US has little popular support in the country. It has, however, won the support of the extremely influential Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who tolerates an occupation most of his followers hate, with the single-minded sectarian goal of having the majority Shia at the helm of power in Iraq. The occupation has destroyed Iraq and is destabilising the world by exacerbating the deep animosity that most Arabs and Muslims feel for the US. The Bush administration is now provoking the Muslim world by threats against Iran. The rest of the world looks on, mostly helplessly.

I'm feeling better already.

Did We Win?

Juan Cole puts up this post.

Guerrillas launched mortar and suicide bomb attacks at polling stations throughout Iraq on Sunday as thousands of Iraqis headed to the polls. As many as 27 were dead by 1 pm Iraqi time, with several times that wounded.

Explosions rocked West, South and East Baghdad, as well as many cities throughout the Sunni heartland--Baqubah, Mosul, Balad, and in Salahuddin Province (7 attacks by noon). There was also an attack in the Turkmen north at Talafar, and in the Shiite deep south at Basra. In Basra, Coalition troops raided the al-Hamra Mosque. Four were killed and seven wounded in an attack in Sadr City. These kinds of statistics were common in the election-poll attacks.

Turnout seems extremely light in the Sunni Arab areas, where some polling stations did not even open. It was heavier in the Shiite south and in the Kurdish north.

Cole earlier characterized the Iraqi electoral process as a "joke" in a Reuters article.

"These elections are a joke," said Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Michigan. "The Bush administration has created the worst possible advertisement for democracy because the perception across the Middle East is that democracy means you get a country where everything is out of control," he said.

The Boston Globe reports that a lot of Iraqi voters have a lively sense of humor.

Baghdad, Iraq (AP) Iraqis danced and clapped with joy Sunday as they voted in their country's first free election in a half-century, defying insurgents who launched eight deadly suicide bombings and mortar strikes at polling stations. The attacks killed at least 31 people. After a slow start, men and women in flowing black abayas often holding babies formed long lines, although there were pockets of Iraq where the streets and polling stations were deserted. Iraqis prohibited from using private cars walked streets crowded in a few places nearly shoulder-to-shoulder with voters, hitched rides on military buses and trucks, and some even carried the elderly in their arms.

''This is democracy,'' said Karfia Abbasi, holding up a thumb stained with purple ink to prove she had voted.

The BBC reporter's notebook gives area-by-area impressions of the voting.

Area	BBC Correspondent Impressions
Basra	"People have been literally streaming towards polling stations. I have never witnessed this huge turnout for long time."
Mosul	"In places with a Kurdish majority such as the Noor and Masarif districts, there is a huge turnout."
Fallujah	"The turnout to all these stations is very low."
Baghdad	"We have seen voting here in the capital, and in the streets close to the BBC office the atmosphere was almost euphoric."
Arbil	"We're not looking at vast crowds of people but this particular polling station has been allocated 3,000 registered voters and I would say we've probably seen the bulk of them passing through already."
Al Amarah	"From Basra to Al Amarah, to the northern most sections of the British zone, thousands of people are lined up on the streets. Even in the smaller provincial towns 400 kilometres from Basra, towns like Ali al-Ghabi and Komait, where there are only a handful of polling stations, the queues are several hundred deep."
Najaf	"A lot of women turned out and their numbers dwarf those of the men. I have seen very old people unable to walk, I have seen blind people being led to the polling stations."

Turnout out has been low in Fallujah and higher in Basra and Mosul; in a very narrow sense Cole's post has been accurate. But in a larger sense, his appreciation was totally wrong. Think of what it means for anyone to dare vote in Fallujah at all, despite the penalties prescribed by terrorists, some of whom are certain to be kinsmen. And when was the time, at any Faculty meeting, that the halt and the blind tramped in to vote (cars are banned from approaching the polling precincts for security reasons) at the risk of death? If the electoral process was a charade, it was one in which too many participated too willingly.

None of this means that the insurgency in Iraq has finally been beaten down or that only plain sailing lies ahead. But the voter turnouts certainly suggests that the electoral results will stick. It will be very hard to de-legitimize the whole process or cast aside the ballots as if the elections had never happened; not after the sacrifice that the Shi'ites, Kurds and the Sunnis (the risk was all the greater for them) have endured simply to exercise their choice. Commentators have pointed out that elected candidates may subsequently express views which may be regarded as anti-American; but if the US, which is the occupying power, is to be bound by the result, as is consistent with the concept of the return of sovereignty to the Iraqi people, why should 'insurgents' or the Left be able to say 'I won't accept the elections as legitimate'? While that will not prevent them from dismissing the elections or making disparaging noises, all but the most obtuse will understand that they can't be undone and will move on instead to the next point of criticism. Which means the elections weren't a joke after all, except on Cole. And did we win? Who knows? But many Iraqis think they did.

The Ministry of Truth

The Obsidian Order is applying the commonsense test to photos taken by Ali Jasim of Reuters, Ali Al-Saadi of AFP and Khalid Mohammed of AP purporting to show a car exploding in front of a high school scheduled to be a voting center. These provide powerful visual proof of how 'insurgents' are winning in Iraq. The Obsidian Order observes that for openers, the car in the photos is not experiencing any kind of high-order explosion; it is simply burning. (Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds)

What do you see? A car on fire, apparently not close to anything flammable. We are told this is in front of a school, but we do not see the school. The fire looks like petrol, probably in cans in the back of the vehicle, set off with an incendiary WP shell (White Phosphorus - the white smoke and sparks). ... The key and blindingly obvious point: there are at least three photojournalists from different outfits there exactly at the time it goes off! Interpretation: ... this was staged

Staged? Staged? The Obsidian Order forgets that coincidences of this type are normal in Iraq. An AP photographer also happened to be around when Iraqi election workers were murdered on Haifa street. Some French journalists just happened to be present when 'insurgents' attempted to shoot down a DHL cargo plane. So why shouldn't three wire service photographers happen to stroll by when a car 'explodes' in front of an obscure high school building in Baghdad? But Chester is not to be persuaded that everything is on the up-and-up. He observes that the three wire service accounts differ from that provided by the Iraqi police.

One of the comments on the site says:

Fox news had the sequence on the TV tonight. FNC said the Iraq police had shot up the car and stopped it -- the car caught fire -- then apparently a bomb inside went off. When the camera pulled back, the police with their guns raised were in the near filed framing -- as if they had been shooting at the car.

So I am not sure what your point is. Looked to me like the Iraqi police got their man before he could reach the school. FNC said a school was the target, not that it was hit by the explosion.

Ah ha! There we have it! The reason the pictures look funny is because the Iraqi security forces killed the attacker before he could properly position his vehicle and the vehicle then sympathetically detonated. But wait! This is good news right? Iraqi security forces disrupted an attack. Then why does the Reuters caption under each photo read thus:

An Iraqi boy runs past a car just as it explodes in front of al-Nahdha High School which was scheduled to be used as a voting centre in Baghdad, January 28, 2005. Hours earlier in the same area in southern Baghdad, a car bomb exploded next to a police station, killing four Iraqi civilians, police said. REUTERS/Ali Jasim

Not only does Reuters refuse to acknowledge the success of Iraqi security forces in every single caption, but they instead mention a completely different bombing that was successful in killing innocents.

So what? The wire services have reported it and it must be true. The last posts have coincidentally dealt with Orwell's description of how totalitarianisms manufacture a media-generated alternative reality to suit their ends. In 1984 real events are never reported by the Ministry of Truth; false events are manufactured out of whole cloth. The Party knows that "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past". Thankfully, these falsifications happen only in fiction. The car really exploded as three photojournalists were strolling by, even though the pictures show it is just burning. Honest it did.

A Trip Down Memory Hole Lane

Mary Madigan at Michael Totten's site adds another nuance to our understanding of George Orwell's 'memory hole' concept. She reminds us that the practice of obliterating the past in order to leave the field clear for the seeds of new thought is an ancient practice. Her example is the Wahabi destruction of history.

Militias from the Islamic courts set up in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, are destroying a colonial Italian cemetery. They are digging up the graves and dumping human remains near the airport.

The BBC's Mohammed Olad Hassan says he was horrified to see a large number of abandoned human skulls. Young boys were playing with one as a toy. According to Sunni scholar Stephen Schwartz, grave desecration is a Wahhabi tradition:

Saudi agents uprooted graveyards in Kosovo even before the war began there in the late 1990s, and Wahhabi missionaries have sought to demolish Sufi tombs in Kurdistan. Late in 2002, the Saudi government tore down the historic Ottoman fortress of Ajyad in Mecca, causing outrage in many Muslim countries.

The grave desecrations are an obvious illustration of Orwell's dictum that "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." Like the destruction of the Bamian Buddhas in Afghanistan, their effect is remove any recollection of a creed or way of life that may have preceded Wahabism. Yet  it is one of Madigan's quotes that shows how it affects the present.

Somali journalist Bashir Goth wrote about the influence of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi Islam in Somalia:

"Nowadays, it is sad to see… that the ideal harmony between Islam and Somali culture is swept aside by a new brand of Islam that is being pushed down the throat of our people - Wahhabism. Anywhere one looks, one finds that alien, perverted version of Islam that depends on punctilious manners more than it depends on deep-rooted faith. A strange uniformity… has crept into the social manners of our people. The unique fashion and identity of our people has changed forever. We have become a people without fashion, without culture, and without identity…

An ongoing campaign to impoverish culture and thought was a pillar of the totalitarian 1984; something which was achieved largely through the censorship of language resulting in a bowdlerized dialect called Newspeak. We would recognize it instantly as modern 'political correctness'; and it is not surprising that the Wahabis would use the technique as well to create 'a people without fashion, without culture, without identity'. Orwell defined Newspeak in this way:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought - that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc - should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

The chief ward against the temptation of 'thought crime' was doublethink, here described by Orwell.

But it is also necessary to remember that events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper with written records, then it is necessary to forget that one has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned like any other mental technique. It is learned by the majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, 'reality control'. In Newspeak it is called doublethink, though doublethink comprises much else as well.

Orwell's works themselves were not immune from this process of redaction. The Newspeak Dictionary drily observes that "Michael Moore Ends Fahrenheit 911 with a quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four! - I was certainly pleased to see that M&M used the words of Orwell to sum up his film. But unfortunately, it appears that the quote really wasn't the actual words of Orwell!"

Orwell

Michael Moore

"In accordance with the principles of doubthink it does not matter if the war is not real, or when it is, victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labour. A hierarchical society is only possible and the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society of the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects. And its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact."

"It does not matter if the war is not real, or when it is, victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, but it is meant to be continuous. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or Eastasia but to keep the very structure of society intact"

Finally, Mary Madigan's piece on Wahabism mentions how the Saudi Arabian ambassador called for the removal of an elected legislator in the country to which he was accredited -- a case of a person protected by newspeak attempting to shove someone down the 'memory hole'.

According to the German publication, Der Spiegel, the killer’s actual target was Dutch legislator Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali immigrant. She and other legislators were so unable to ensure their security against extremist death threats, they had to leave the Netherlands to hide in the United States. In short, a Western nation couldn't defend its own legislators against an occupying paramilitary group. Fortunately, Hirsi Ali has returned. According to Spiegel’s report:

Hirsi Ali made championing the cause of Muslim women her career and eventually got elected to parliament. When the ambassador of Saudi Arabia called for her to be removed from office because of her polemics against Islam she just scored even more points with Dutch voters. In a survey of the most-popular Dutch people in 2003, she landed in second place.

The Saudi ambassador felt he had the right to call for an elected legislator to be removed from office. Who does he think he is?

Madigan should have patience. She will eventually understand that resistance is futile. Orwell closed his classic novel with these words.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

The Wave of the Future

Joshua Micah Marshall thinks Simon Rosenberg should be the next DNC Chair.

As most all of you know, there's a heated race going on for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, something that hasn't happened since before the Clinton era. The race will be decided in about two weeks; but so far I've only done a handful of posts about it. ... If I were one of the four-hundred-odd people who have a vote in this race, I'd be voting for Simon Rosenberg. And I'd feel very strongly about the vote and cast it without reservation.

Mr. Rosenberg's political ideas are on display in two of his speeches: "Where We Are", "Some Thoughts on Internet, Politics and Participation" and an NYT article called "Wiring the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" all of which are linked to his site. The NYT article describes the core of Rosenberg's thinking at length. It begins through the eyes of a venture capitalist, Andy Rapaport, who thinks he knows how to fix the Democratic Party.

Rappaport was surprisingly downcast about the party's prospects, which, he said, would not be improved simply by winning back the White House. ... ''There is a growing realization among people who take very seriously the importance of progressive politics that the Democratic Party has kind of failed to create a vision for the country that is strongly resonant,'' he said. ''And our numbers'' -- meaning Democrats as a whole -- ''are decreasing. Our political power has been diminishing, and it's become common knowledge that the conservative movement has established a very strong, long-term foundation, whereas we've basically allowed our foundation, if not to crumble, to at least fall into a state of disrepair. So there are a lot of people thinking, What can we do about this?'' ...

Actually, Rappaport says he may be on to an answer. Last summer, he got a call from Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, a fund-raising and advocacy group in Washington. Would Rappaport mind sitting down for a confidential meeting with a veteran Democratic operative named Rob Stein? Sure, Rappaport replied. What Stein showed him when they met was a PowerPoint presentation that laid out step by step, in a series of diagrams a ninth-grader could understand, how conservatives, over a period of 30 years, had managed to build a ''message machine'' that today spends more than $300 million annually to promote its agenda. Rappaport was blown away by the half-hour-long presentation. ''Man,'' he said, ''that's all it took to buy the country?''

There were two elements to the Roseberg-Stein Powerpoint presentation. The first was the idea that it was possible to offer up parts of the liberal policy agenda direct to ideological 'investors' and then sell that agenda to the country via a powerful 'message machine'. The Republicans had done it! What remained was for the Democrats to harness the same mechanism to a higher purpose.

Stein and Rosenberg weren't asking Rappaport for money -- at least not yet. They wanted Democrats to know what they were up against, and they wanted them to stop thinking about politics only as a succession of elections. ... In March of this year, Rappaport convened a meeting of wealthy Democrats at a Silicon Valley hotel so that they, too, could see Stein's presentation. Similar gatherings were already under way in Washington and New York, where the meetings included two of the most generous billionaires in the Democratic universe -- the financier George Soros and Peter Lewis, an Ohio insurance tycoon -- as well as Soros's son and Lewis's son. ... The plan is to gather investors from each city -- perhaps in one big meeting early next year -- and create a kind of venture-capital pipeline that would funnel money into a new political movement, working independently of the existing Democratic establishment. ...

Into this vacuum rushes money -- and already it is creating an entirely new kind of independent force in American politics. Led by Soros and Lewis, Democratic donors will, by November, have contributed as much as $150 million to a handful of outside groups -- America Coming Together, the Media Fund, MoveOn.org -- that are going online, door to door and on the airways in an effort to defeat Bush. These groups aren't loyal to any one candidate, and they don't plan to disband after the election; instead, they expect to yield immense influence over the party's future, at the very moment when the power of some traditional Democratic interest groups, like the once mighty manufacturing unions, is clearly on the wane.

The key to defeating the 'Right Wing conspiracy' was freeing ideological spenders from the constraints of the institutional Democratic Party. The New Democratic Network aimed to duplicate Ronald Reagan's rebuilding of the Republican Party. The way to go was to learn from the enemy.

Stein spent much of the spring of 2003 consumed with connecting the dots of what Hillary Clinton famously called the ''vast right-wing conspiracy'' and then translating it into flow charts and bullet points. The presentation itself, a collection of about 40 slides titled ''The Conservative Message Machine's Money Matrix,'' essentially makes the case that a handful of families -- Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Coors and others -- laid the foundation for a $300 million network of policy centers, advocacy groups and media outlets that now wield great influence over the national agenda. The network, as Stein diagrams it, includes scores of powerful organizations -- most of them with bland names like the State Policy Network and the Leadership Institute -- that he says train young leaders and lawmakers and promote policy ideas on the national and local level. These groups are, in turn, linked to a massive message apparatus, into which Stein lumps everything from Fox News and the Wall Street Journal op-ed page to Pat Robertson's ''700 Club.'' And all of this, he contends, is underwritten by some 200 ''anchor donors.'' ''This is perhaps the most potent, independent institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system,'' he said.

There was optimism, at least in the beginning, that this process would could drive George W. Bush from the White House in 2004 and create a Kerry presidency; others were not so sure; nor did they care.

But if Kerry does not ascend to the presidency, and Democrats fail to make significant gains in Congress, then the party and its various factions will be as close to debilitating disunity and outright irrelevance as they have been in almost a century. Leftist investors will see their opening -- a chance, at last, to swoop in and save the party from empty centrism. The struggle for control in 2008 will begin almost immediately.

In a memorandum distributed by the New Democractic Network, Rosenberg summarized what he thought to be the salient components of the conservative revolution. The Democratic Party had in its way, suffered a private and political 9/11 -- an asymmetrical assault from the right -- due Rosenberg believed, to four reasons.

1. The Republican/conservative alliance has built a superior information-age political machine.
2. As an intellectually-based movement born when the Republicans were a true minority Party, their infrastructure is built on a foundation on the need to persuade.
3. 9/11 gave the Republicans an opening that they have adroitly exploited.
4. Bush’s brand of conservatism has had a particularly big impact in the South.
5. The new Republican momentum with Hispanics is a grave threat.

From a superficial point of view, Rosenberg's analysis fits all the facts he cares to acknowledge. But it begs the question of whether conservative ideas have succeeded, at least in part, because they were more consonant with reality than the 'progressive' ideas of the Left. It is not my intention to prove the superiority of one ideology over the other; simply to point out that the very possibility is excluded from Rosenberg's analysis; and by excluding the possibility that Conservative ascendance might be due to a careful selection of 'correct' positions into their portfolio, the NDN is really assuming what must be proved.

The book Reagan's Revolution : The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All (hat tip: Glenn Reynolds) points out that Reagan rebuilt the conservative movement, not by putting the message machine on steroids, but by changing the message. One book reviewer observed.

What is remarkable about Shirley's stirring account of the start of the revolution is his description of the state of the GOP in 1976. The party establishment had been practicing a move to the left strategy for years, unhappy conservatives were beginning to talk about forming a third party, and open talk about a "brain dead" Republican party devoid of ideas was commonplace. As I read his book, I felt I was reading the description of the Democratic Party of today.

Yet it was not simply changing the message, nor even improving its dissemination that was the key to Reagan's success. Their real power came from the fact that the ideas embodied in the message worked. It's possible, however, that Simon Rosenberg is not Ronald Reagan. That observation at least, would probably flatter both.

Colors to the Mast

The one unarguable virtue of Ted Kennedy's speech at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies is that it nails his colors to the mast. He wants America to begin pulling immediately out of Iraq after the elections. Going in the first place was in his view a mistake, a strategic dead end in which the Janaury 30 election is a compounded error; another step on the road to another Vietnam. (Hat tip: the Command Post)

President Bush has left us with few good choices. There are costs to staying, and costs to leaving. There may well be violence as we disengage militarily from Iraq and Iraq disengages politically from us, but there will be much more violence if we continue our present dangerous and destabilizing course. It will not be easy to extricate ourselves from Iraq, but we must begin. ... 

We all hope for the best from Sunday's election. The Iraqis have a right to determine their own future. But Sunday's elections are not a cure for the violence and instability. Unless the Sunni and all the communities in Iraq believe they have a stake in the outcome and a genuine role in drafting the new Iraqi constitution, the election could lead to greater alienation, greater escalation, greater death - for us and for the Iraqis. ...

A new Iraq policy must begin with acceptance of hard truths. Most of the violence in Iraq is not being perpetrated - as President Bush has claimed - by "a handful of folks that fear freedom" and people who want to try to impose their will on people…just like Osama bin Laden." The insurgency is largely home-grown. By our own government's count, the ranks of the guerillas are large and growing larger. ...

The first point in a new plan would be for the United Nations, not the United States, to provide assistance and advice on establishing a system of government and drafting a Constitution. An international meeting - led by the United Nations and the new Iraqi Government -- should be convened immediately in Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East to begin that process.

A less famous personage, Chaldean Bishop Louis Sako of Kirkuk, asserted the contrary in an interview which garnered only scant attention.

Q: Will elections on January 30 be meaningful despite the constraints of ongoing violence?

Bishop Sako: Yes, because the current government is provisional but, after the elections, it will be the result of popular vote. Iraqis have the opportunity to choose their leaders, those they prefer. The elections are something immense and new. Nothing of the kind has happened in the past 50 years: first because of clashes and revolts, then due to 35 years of dictatorship. There has never been freedom of expression. But now, anything is possible: If there are people and parties arguing and clashing, that is because they are free to do so. Now, Iraqis must learn to discuss in a civil manner. But the people of Iraq have never been trained for coexistence; they have always lived in the midst of violence: three wars, a dictatorship, 13 years of embargo. This is why freedom is not used in a responsible way and problems arise.

Q: How many people will turn out to vote next Sunday?

Bishop Sako: The televisions news is saying 80%. There are, of course, people who are frightened by threats, but I say that achieving normality has its condition, and this condition is the election process. I can say that many people will cast their vote on Sunday.

Q: The Iraqi elections don't seem to be very popular in the West, with Western media. How do you account for this skepticism?

Bishop Sako: Just yesterday the Pope asked the media to help people understand the reality of things. The media is a big problem in Iraq: a lot of lies and provocations are being written and broadcast. It's enough to think of al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya that are misinforming a great deal, in what amounts to utter fanaticism, which even Iraqi Muslim leaders themselves have condemned. These television broadcasters are continuously trying to spark violence against the Americans and even against Iraqis. They are throwing terrorism and resistance into the same pot, but to me there is a clear difference. Resistance is something noble; but two days ago a car bomb exploded at a wedding -- 20 people died. Now I ask: Is that resistance? Those 20 victims were Iraqis, innocent men and women: Was that an act of resistance? Is attacking a church or a mosque an act of resistance?

Q: Archbishop Casmoussa of Mosul was kidnapped last week and, upon his liberation, asked that the Americans withdraw. What do you make of that?

Bishop Sako: I think Archbishop Casmoussa said what he did because he's thinking of his situation in Mosul: With a very large Sunni majority, the city is almost entirely against the American presence. But if the Americans leave Iraq today, there will be civil war between Kurds, Arabs, Sunnis, Shiites, Muslims, Christians. This is clear. For this reason, it is better that Americans not leave now. There will soon be a new national government; an army and police force is taking shape. Step by step a revival plan is going forward, but it is not the result of some kind of magic. The U.S. must stay on until Iraqis can take command of the nation. For the moment, they can't do this, the necessary structures are not yet in place.

It is probably fair to point out that Bishop Sako is also nailing his colors to the mast, a fact more impressive because he will have to live with the consequences of his analysis. This is not the place to comment on Kennedy's speech, merely to observe that his words should not be forgotten. They should be memorialized, and if, as is expected, a large percentage of the Iraqi people go down the path he has declared a cul de sac despite his dire warnings; and participate in a 'joke' as Juan Cole put it, he should be reminded of it, not out of spite, but out of justice, the same whose consequences will overtake George Bush if the contrary happens; whose tide will overtake Bishop Sako and his parishioners should he prove wrong.

And perhaps for the first time in history, Ted Kennedy's words will not be forgotten. The emergence of the Internet has closed down the "memory hole" within which the former apologists of Joseph Stalin, Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein could hide their bad advice and from which they could emerge at whiles to offer new sage advice. The term 'memory hole' itself was coined by George Orwell who used it to describe the mechanism through which the media manipulated historical memory. One of the tenets of the Party in Orwell's 1984 was that "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past", and the key to achieving mastery over history was the liberal use of the 'memory hole'.

The book's hero, Winston Smith, works in the Ministry of Truth rewriting and falsifying history. The Ministry writes people out of history -- they go "down the memory hole" as though they never existed. The Ministry also creates people as historical figures who never existed. ... O'Brien, a member of the inner Party, pretends to Smith that he is part of the Goldstein conspiracy against Big Brother. He asks Smith what he would most like to drink a toast to. Smith chooses to drink a toast, not to the death of Big Brother, the confusion of the Thought Police, or Humanity, but "to the past." ...

Because of his experience in the Spanish civil war that media reports of the conflict bore no relation to what was happening, Orwell developed a great skepticism about the ability of even a well intentioned and honest writer to get to the truth. He was generally skeptical of atrocity stories. ... It should be noted that Orwell worked for the BBC for a time, and the Ministry of Truth is modeled to some extent on the BBC. Orwell noted that the BBC put out false hate propaganda during World War II, and controlled history by censoring news about the genocidal Allied policy of leveling German cities by saturation bombing. Orwell's beliefs about the control of the past, including the recent past, also derived from his experiences in the Spanish civil war, where he found that "no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain for the first time I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts."

Unfortunately for someone, whether it be Senator Kennedy, Bishop Sako or George Bush, a monolithic media no longer controls collective memory. Recently Max Boot reminded Seymour Hersh of his past writing and what little resemblance it bore to events. If Iraqis, in defiance of present-day O'Briens, can drink a toast to the future, it is due in part to the new-found power to stand once again upon the past. To all the custodians of the memory hole one can say, 'Who acts in the present controls the future. Who manufactures fantasy becomes the past.'

Religious War: East and West

The underground diplomats at the New Sisyphus make an eloquent case for listening to those who want to kill us, something which the Munich generation neglected to do to Adolph Hitler.

One of the most common observations about World War II was that if only Western leaders had heeded what the National Socialist Worker's Party and its leader Adolf Hitler were saying, they would have known of the grave danger facing the world. After all, it's not as if the Nazi Party or its frenzied Fuhrer tried to hide what they were about.  On the contrary, in speech after speech, newspaper after newspaper and book after book, Hitler and other senior Nazis laid out in some detail their plans for European domination, the destruction of parliamentary democracy and the elimination of the Jewish people.

But when we ourselves have supplied the rationale for our own condemnation then listening to the indictments of the enemy is a waste of time. To the question 'why does Bin Laden hate us', there are those who unhelpfully suggest that we ask Bin Laden. Besides being unacceptable it is also unnecessary because some already know why we should be hated. There is no need to listen further. The New Sisyphus observes that while there are two competing explanations for Islamic extremism, only one explanation is provided by the Islamic extremists themselves.

The first group, the "Muslim Rage School," believes that the source of Islamic Terrorism is the wide-spread anger in the Muslim world directed at the West and at Israel. For partisans of this school, US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians, US support for despotic Middle Eastern regimes, Western economic outperformance of the Muslim world and anger towards US responses to the 9/11 Attacks, all add up to one thing: a seething mass of justifiable rage that presents itself, though a minority of those affected, as radical Islamic Terrorism.  ... As a rule, this school's policy preference for defeating Islamic Terrorism is to reduce the generators of the anger. Thus, the US must bring and end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, atone for past actions against the Muslim world, and generally radically change its long-standing foreign policy towards the Middle East. Only then will there be peace. ...

The second school of thought, the Clash of Civilizations School, argues that the source of Islamic Terrorism is the Muslim world's seething hatred of the fundamental values of the West, and, since the U.S. is the standard-bearer for the West at the moment, especially those of the United States. Adherents of this school, like Victor Hanson and most neo-conservative thinkers, argue that the value system of modern Islam produces a culture that is violently at odds with Western values and, because of this, it wages asymmetric war against the West when and where it can.

What is surprising is that Abu Musab Zarqawi categorically belongs to the second school, which holds that America is to be destroyed for what it is. In an audiotape released on January 23, 2005, Zarqawi puts forth a view which he has repeated many times in the past, but which, like Mein Kampf, some are determined never to hear. In the audio Zarqawi cursed democracy because it promoted such un-Islamic behavior as freedom of religion, rule of the people, freedom of expression, separation of religion and state, forming political parties and majority rule. Freedom of speech was particularly evil because it allowed "even cursing God. This means that there is nothing sacred in democracy."

While these are not the only reasons for extremist Islamic hatred, clearly if the fundamental characteristics of American society are sufficient to mark it for destruction, then nothing will deflect the hatred of the enemy. But Joe Katzman at Winds of Change argues that to some extent, the facts don't matter, because the public debate over the War on Terror within the West is in many respects as twisted as Zarqawi's. The debate, Katzman says, is dominated by activists who are incapable of seeing anything outside the prism of their own fantasies.

Al Qaeda may not be the only ones out there with a fantasy ideology ... If you see activism as the default mode of politics, goes this thesis, you shouldn't be surprised when it leads to anti-intellectualism, tolerance of extremists, retreat into fantasy, and a self-defeating kind of partisanship designed to make people feel better about themselves rather than produce meaningful change. ... There's a strongly religious quality to a lot of supposedly secular activism, in part due to the baby boomers' cultivated sense of grandiosity.

Katzman uses Lee Harris to illustrate how people saw what they wanted in the September 11 attacks, as if it were a giant Rorschach test. Harris knew it would never be regarded as anything so simple as widebodied airliners killing thousands of people.

I would like to pursue a line suggested by a remark by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in reference to 9-11: his much-quoted comment that it was “the greatest work of art of all time.” ... Stockhausen did grasp one big truth: 9-11 was the enactment of a fantasy -- not an artistic fantasy, to be sure, but a fantasy nonetheless.

Visions like Stockhausen's arose from a particular form of secular religious exaltation, one that had nothing to do with practical politics. In striving to explain it, Harris recalled an argument with a friend during his Vietnam protest days over whether it made sense for demonstrators to block a commuter bridge and alienate the public.

My friend did not disagree with me as to the likely counterproductive effects of such a demonstration. Instead, he argued that this simply did not matter. His answer was that even if it was counterproductive, even if it turned people against war protesters, indeed even if it made them more likely to support the continuation of the war, he would still participate in the demonstration and he would do so for one simple reason -- because it was, in his words, good for his soul. What I saw as a political act was not, for my friend, any such thing. It was not aimed at altering the minds of other people or persuading them to act differently. Its whole point was what it did for him.

And what it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy -- a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. By participating in a violent anti-war demonstration, he was in no sense aiming at coercing conformity with his view -- for that would still have been a political objective. Instead, he took his part in order to confirm his ideological fantasy of marching on the right side of history, of feeling himself among the elect few who stood with the angels of historical inevitability. Thus, when he lay down in front of hapless commuters on the bridges over the Potomac, he had no interest in changing the minds of these commuters, no concern over whether they became angry at the protesters or not. They were there merely as props, as so many supernumeraries in his private psychodrama. The protest for him was not politics, but theater; and the significance of his role lay not in the political ends his actions might achieve, but rather in their symbolic value as ritual. In short, he was acting out a fantasy.

Katzman shrewdly points out that "The Right is not immune to this kind of 'activism as ritual worship'", though he suggests that what we are really worshipping is ourselves.

it seems that my generation is an extraordinary mixture of greatness and narcissism, and that strange amalgam has affected almost everything we do. We don't seem content to simply have a fine new idea, we must have the new paradigm that will herald one of the greatest transformations in the history of the world. We don;t really want to just recycle bottles and paper; we need to see ourrselves dramatically saving the planet and saving Gaia and resurrecting the Goddess that previous generations had brutally repressed but we will finally liberate.... We need to see ourselves as the vanguard of something unprecedented in all history: the extraordinarywonder of being us.

Bin Laden's vision of  a Global Caliphate and the Left's Worker's Paradise have found a worthy foe in President Bush's campaign to bring freedom to the world. Perhaps we should have expected that the new century would resurrect the eternal questions. Fyodor Dostoevsky wound have understood the Boomers.

"Answer: why have we met here? To talk of my love for Katerina Ivanovna, of the old man and Dmitri? of foreign travel? of the fatal position of Russia? of the Emperor Napoleon? Is that it?"

"No."

"Then you know what for. It's different for other people; but we in our green youth have to settle the eternal questions first of all. That's what we care about. Young Russia is talking about nothing but the eternal questions now; just when the old folks are all taken up with practical questions. ... Of the eternal questions, of the existence of God and immortality. And those who do not believe in God talk of socialism or anarchism, of the transformation of all humanity on a new pattern, so that it all comes to the same, they're the same questions turned inside out. And masses, masses of the most original Russian boys do nothing but talk of the eternal questions! Isn't it so?"

The Kissinger-Schultz Article 2

The consequences of having to include the base of the Sunni insurgency in the political process yet get on with the process of building a unitary Iraq were highlighted in this PBS Online Newshour transcript (hat tip: Glenn Reynolds). On opposite sides of the discussion were Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institute and Brett McGurk, late of the CPA and one of the men who helped draft the legal framework under which the elections are taking place.

LARRY DIAMOND: Well, Ray, I think Jeffrey Gettleman had it very well analyzed when he said that we'll probably see a very high turnout in most of the Kurdish constituencies and the Shiite constituencies in the South and probably a very low turnout in most of the Sunni constituencies and in al-Anbar Province and Salahadeen Province and elsewhere. And this is going to create an enormous imbalance in representation among groups in Iraq. And then the question will be: How do you correct, after the election, for a system in which the Sunnis may represent 15 to 20 percent of the population but may have only been able to elect perhaps 3 to 5 percent of the seats in parliament.

BRETT McGURK: I think it's fair to assume that there will be a lower turnout in some of those Sunni-dominated provinces because of the violence and intimidation tactics. But I do think it's important to stress and the report earlier said that the administration is starting to stress the process - but it's not just the administration. ... And what I tried to explain in an op-ed in the Washington Post about a week ago is that there are ample institutional mechanisms in place for inclusion of Sunni groups post election the way the three-member presidency council will be formed, each member must receive super majority votes from within the national assembly.

LARRY DIAMOND: I think the fixes that Brett is talking about will be important but inadequate. ... One of the concerns I think of many Sunni political forces -- some of them which are clearly democratic and civic-minded forces -- is that the Sunnis who are now being disenfranchised potentially in this election be able to choose their own representatives.

McGurk went on to explain that the current electoral process was agreed to by the UN. But Diamond was not persuaded that the elections would constitute an adequate framework within which to select representatives who would build the national framework for Iraq. He plumped for an extra-electoral process, or at least a supplementary one:

I think there will need to be a national conference or dialogue, Ray, in which they bring in the wide range of Sunni groups that met in Tikrit late in December and have formed a coalition and elected a leadership and think about amending the constitution to provide for supplementary election of some number of seats either indirectly or directly from the provinces if their proportion of the turnout is much, much less than in other sections of the country.

But if the fear of a 'Shiite-dominated bloc extending to the Mediterranean' and the policy need to maintain a unitary Iraq by accommodating the minority Sunnis is allowed to repeatedly veto the efforts of those who, after all, have agreed to participate in the American-sponsored process, then the precise thing that Kissinger and Schultz fear may emerge from the frustrations of the opposite quarter. The only thing worse than Sunni disaffection is a Shi'ite and Kurdish belief that they have been betrayed. The storm petrels are already flying. Reuters reports:

An Iraqi Arab party based in Kirkuk said on Monday it was boycotting Jan. 30 polls because thousands of Kurdish refugees would be allowed to vote, reigniting a row over the election in the northern city. The United Arab Front said it would not participate in the national polls and Kirkuk provincial elections scheduled on the same day because around 70,000 Iraqi Kurds who have returned to the area in recent months were being allowed to vote in Kirkuk. ...

The question of who should be allowed to vote in Kirkuk, a strategic oil city with an uneasy ethnic mix of Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, has caused bitter arguments ahead of the polls. Many Kurds regard the city as part of their territory in northern Iraq. But during his rule Saddam Hussein pursued an "Arabisation" policy in the city, displacing Kurds and moving thousands of Arabs there from other parts of Iraq. Kurdish parties had initially threatened to boycott the polls unless returning Kurdish refugees were allowed to vote in Kirkuk. They later said they would take part in the elections after receiving assurances that Kurds could vote there, but that has angered the city's large Arab and Turkmen communities.

The Kissinger-Schultz Article

An article jointly authored by Henry Kissinger and George Schultz in the Washington Post entitled Results, Not Timetables, Matter in Iraq argues that a definite timetable for an American withdrawal in Iraq is not as important as the attainment of a definite goal which represents success. They argue that it is the achievement of the goal which is vital.

A precipitate American withdrawal would be almost certain to cause a civil war that would dwarf Yugoslavia's, and it would be compounded as neighbors escalated their current involvement into full-scale intervention. ... We owe it to ourselves to become clear about what post-election outcome is compatible with our values and global security.

Much of the article focuses on the what they believe to be the desirable endpoint of the political process, of which the elections on January 30 are but a part. Their recommendations implicitly assume that Iraq must be preserved as a multiethnic, unitary state. Kissinger and Schultz believe that the minimum outcome should be:

The Constituent Assembly emerging from the elections will be sovereign to some extent. But the United States' continuing leverage should be focused on four key objectives:

(1) to prevent any group from using the political process to establish the kind of dominance previously enjoyed by the Sunnis;
(2) to prevent any areas from slipping into Taliban conditions as havens and recruitment centers for terrorists;
(3) to keep Shiite government from turning into a theocracy, Iranian or indigenous;
(4) to leave scope for regional autonomy within the Iraqi democratic process.

The article repeatedly warns against letting the almost foregone Shi'ite majority ride roughshod over the Sunnis, however bitter their memories; however brutal the campaign by "insurgents" against them has been. The one thing that must never be permitted, in Kissinger and Schultz's view is "a Shiite-dominated bloc extending to the Mediterranean"

The reaction to intransigent Sunni brutality and the relative Shiite quiet must not tempt us into identifying Iraqi legitimacy with unchecked Shiite rule. The American experience with Shiite theocracy in Iran since 1979 does not inspire confidence in our ability to forecast Shiite evolution or the prospects of a Shiite-dominated bloc extending to the Mediterranean. A thoughtful American policy will not mortgage itself to one side in a religious conflict fervently conducted for 1,000 years.

This proposition should be read in conjunction with Gerecht's The Islamic Paradox, who observed that a Shi'ite dominated Iraq is not necessarily the same as a clerically dominated Iraq, which must certainly be Kissinger and Schultz's meaning for their injunction to make any sense at all, for Iraq by ethnic composition will be Shi'ite dominated by definition. Gerecht wrote:

So, is there a Sunni parallel to the political evolution among the Shiites? Inside Iraq, it is easy to find Arab Sunnis who want to see democracy triumph. If for no other reason, fear of a Shiite dictatorship appears to inspire a certain Sunni willingness to embrace some kind of a democratic order. ... Given the widespread Sunni-led violence in Iraq, particularly among the hard-core takfiri fundamentalists, we can lose sight of the fact that the Sunnis will still likely follow the Shiite lead, however reluctantly. ... Arab Sunnis today realize they are vastly outnumbered by “the other side.” ... Even if Sistani dies, the Hawza will remain a more influential force than any association of Sunni clerics. And both Arab Sunnis and Shiites regularly remark about the lack of revenge killing since the fall of Saddam Hussein even though the pursuit of revenge (intiqam) for perceived wrongs is a leitmotif of Iraqi Arab culture. ...

The Kissinger-Schultz requirement to keep the Sunnis in play, no matter how they may subject themselves to old Ba'athist influences creates a problem for the counterinsurgency strategy, especially if has to be addressed within the requirement of preserving a unitary Iraq. Kissinger and Schultz say:

It is axiomatic that guerrillas win if they do not lose. And in Iraq the guerrillas are not losing, at least not in the Sunni region, at least not visibly. A successful strategy needs to answer these questions: Are we waging "one war" in which military and political efforts are mutually reinforcing? ... Do we have a policy for eliminating the sanctuaries in Syria and Iran from which the enemy can be instructed, supplied, and given refuge and time to regroup?

Here lies the core of the problem. The policy of keeping the Sunnis within Iraq at all costs in conjunction with the Kissingerian imperative that the insurgency be 'defeated', not merely contained,  sets up a potential contradiction, one that Gerecht has already foreseen. Unless the Ba'athists and their backers in Syria are to be implictly given veto power over the birth of a democratic Iraq, either the risk of widening the war, or decisive closure, even if it means partition, must be accepted.

But democracy in the Middle East obviously does not rise or fall on the participation of Iraqi Sunnis. The principal question is then whether Sunni Islam writ large is able to embrace a democratic ethic? Democracy could triumph in Iraq because the Iraqi Shiite community wills it, but if representative government does not spread to the Sunni nation-states, where 85 to 90 percent of all Muslims live, then the nexus between dictatorship and Islamic extremism is little changed.

Yet despite these remaining questions, the Kissinger-Schultz article indicates that the post-Saddam regime is already fait accompli. That is already a sign of strategic success. It is far from clear the proposition that "guerrillas win if they do not lose" is a valid axiom. There are hundreds of guerilla groups throughout the world that will never 'lose' yet we never hear of them, perhaps in part because the press does not care about them. Yet  Kissinger and Schultz are undoubtedly correct in maintaining that the only way forward is through success and not via some arbitrarily selected date on the calendar.

A Leap in the Dark

Ruel Marc Gerecht's book The Islamic Paradox (hat tip: reader DL) argues that America must nerve itself to spreading democracy in the Islamic world even though it will probably result in the emergence of anti-American governments largely hostile to Israel.

... the march of democracy in the Middle East is likely to be very anti-American. Decades of American support to Middle Eastern dictators helped create bin Ladenism. Popular anger at Washington’s past actions may not fade quickly, even if the United States were to switch sides and defend openly all the parties calling for representative government. Nationalism and fundamentalism, two complementary forces throughout most of the Middle East, will likely pump up popular patriotism. Such feelings always have a sharp anti-Western edge to them. That is what Professor Lewis called “the clash of civilizations.”64 Fourteen hundred years of tense, competitive history is not easily overcome, but this antagonism can diminish.

Gerecht's book is a fascinating look at the evolution of American political policy in Iraq, centering on the CPA's slow discovery that Westernized intellectuals -- the sort policymakers and the press love -- represented nothing in the way of popular sentiment. He recounts how attempts to create a new Iraqi democratic framework based on caucuses foundered on the rock of Islamic structures, which -- and this is the crux of his argument -- had been slowly becoming democratic themselves in reaction to Middle Eastern dictatorships. Nothing short of elections at which the various Islamic structures could run as political parties would do. The result was that the while the January 30 Iraqi elections became the genuine goal of the majority of the people of Iraq, the form of government which it is likely to produce may bear little resemblance to previous conceptions of democracy.

Gerecht relentlessly points out how Khomeini's Iran eventually became the most pro-American country in the region, free of the anti-Americanism of Cairo simply because the Iranians were left to discover for themselves that the 'Koran did not hold all the answers'; at least, not to fixing potholes or delivering electricity. He constrasts it to the elder Bush's decision to support the military junta in Algeria against fundamentalist Islamists, who would by now be discredited or just another party had they been allowed to take over the reins of government. "Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East Edward Djerejian’s famous defense of the first Bush administration’s fear of Islamic extremism -- 'one man, one vote, one time'-- defined clearly Washington’s discomfort with the possibility that free elections could empower Muslim fundamentalists, who could be zealously anti-American and ultimately antidemocratic." That was a mistake, he believes, which George W. Bush is unlikely to repeat. Written before the November elections, the book's main concern was that a Kerry victory would result in a 'quick withdrawal strategy'; a return to the traditional preference for short-term 'stability' over a long-term commitment to democracy.

Only a quick-withdrawal policy advanced by a determined Kerry administration, admittedly a possibility given Senator Kerry’s deep-rooted Vietnam-era sensibilities, could shatter American perseverance. But Kerry would run against the 9/11 understanding widely held, if not publicly confessed to, by many of the Clintonites who would staff his administration. They know that running from Iraq—by declaring a victory over Saddam Hussein and getting out—would be seen throughout the Muslim Middle East as an enormous defeat for the United States. Bin Ladenism, which psychologically kicked into high gear after President Clinton’s “Black Hawk Down” retreat from Somalia, could be supercharged by a rapid American departure.

Although Gerecht doesn't say directly, the key factor which enables America to confidently face democratic regimes of all sorts, even the kinds that are anti-American, is the availablity of raw power, the kind which permits it to deal with skeptical and even hostile Shi'ite clerics in Iraq today. The kind of power that became available once the Soviet Union had rotted away, plus the will in Washington to exercise it. That power, plus the natural divisions in the Islamic world, has made America simply too big not to deal with.

"We need the Americans, but the Americans need us. Democracy in the Middle East will not be possible without us," quietly intoned Sayyid Ali al-Wa’iz, a senior Shiite cleric of Baghdad’s Kadhimayn shrine, one of the holiest in Iraq. Dressed in white, weak, if not dying, from twenty-three years of detention, the son and grandson of grand ayatollahs, al-Wa’iz smiled softly as he tried to sit up in his bed. "We don’t want to repeat the revolution of 1920 [when Shiite clerics rose against the British occupation]. We want democracy this time and we want the coalition troops to go home safely."

This kind of commitment to the outcomes of  the democratic process, even if they are unwelcome, represents a very considerable risk. Unnoticed in Peggy Noonan's critique of President George W. Bush's Second Inaugural Speech as having 'too much God' was the fact that it invoked a wholly different paradigm from Ronald Reagan's City on a Hill. Bush's peroration did not come from Winthrop, but from the Declaration of Independence. Reagan had asked:

And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was 8 years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

But as the shining city stood, so too would the outer dark continue to enfold it. In Winthrop's original formulation, America was condemned to be a City on a Hill; forced to keep the fires lit against the night. "For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses . . ." On the day the light failed, other, dark spirits would alight beneath the extinguished torch. But the Declaration of Independence contained a new element; the suggestion that the flame could not be contained, because all men could be kindled by it. Logically it was the flame, not the torch of liberty, that was invincible; that once released could not be restrained. The light would go to the nations, until the darkness was no more. It was an altogether more dangerous proposition. There were hints in Bush's Second Inaugural Speech that he understood or at least had thought about the sheer hazard of it.

Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities. And when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own. America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way. ...

... Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty though this time in history, four decades defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen, is an odd time for doubt. Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals. Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul. We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery. Liberty will come to those who love it.

... We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now" they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the author of Liberty.

When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, "It rang as if it meant something." In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength tested, but not weary we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.

Actual foreign policy is unlikely to be formed in such absolutist terms. The usual considerations of national security and commercial gain will probably play a large part in concrete decision making. But unless the 'proclamation of liberty throughout all the world' is wholly rhetorical, it undoubtedly represents a step into uncharted paths.

Update

Interested readers may want to read this closely related piece by Victor Davis Hanson in Commentary Magazine entitled Has Iraq Weakened Us?  Hanson argues that Iraq has opened up new strategic opportunities. (Hat tip: Powerline)

There are lessons here for those who claim that American flexibility has become increasingly constricted and American choices all but foreclosed. In fact, as Iraq comes slowly under control, the opposite prognosis is at least as likely to be the case. Precisely because of proven American resolve in Iraq, the United States now commands both military and diplomatic options -- well short of another Iraq-style invasion -- that were not at its disposal previously. ...

The U.S. might, to begin with, pressure the UN Security Council to go beyond its recent call for Syria to end its occupation of Lebanon by demanding internationally supervised elections, to follow immediately upon the departure of the Baathists. ... Other equally bold diplomatic initiatives could be undertaken, their credibility similarly enhanced by the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. For example, the present Middle-East-aid policy of the United States is a relic both of the cold war (pump oil and keep out Communists) and the 1979 Camp David agreements (subsidize Egypt). Such short-term measures, carrying the odor of entreaty if not of bribery, hardly reflect our current aim of promoting consensual government. With both Saddam and the Soviets gone, granting weapons and money to the regime in Cairo—nearly $50 billion since 1979—is becoming counterproductive. What advantages the United States receives in “moderation” is overshadowed by the venomous anti-Americanism that is the daily fare of millions of Egyptians, whipped up and manipulated by state-sponsored clerics and media.

One may argue that VDH is making a virtue out of a necessity, that however one slices it, a commitment in Iraq soaks up troops that prevent deployments elsewhere. Chester explores this issue at length in a comprehensive review of Mark Helprin's growing criticism that the Bush Administration has not fully mobilized America's military resources to provide it with the margin of strength necessary to pursue its strategic goals. Chester calls it a 'conservative critique of the war'. An excerpt from Helprin says:

From the beginning, the scale of the war was based on the fundamental strategic misconception that the primary objective was Iraq rather than the imagination of the Arab World, which, if sufficiently stunned, would tip itself back into the heretofore easily induced fatalism that makes it hesitate to war against the West. After the true shock and awe of a campaign of massive surplus, as in the Gulf War, no regime would have risked its survival by failing to go after the terrorists within its purview. But a campaign of bare sufficiency, that had trouble punching through even ragtag irregulars, taught the Arabs that we could be effectively opposed.

But Helprin's accusation that the Bush strategy suffers from the "fundamental strategic misconception that the primary objective was Iraq rather than the imagination of the Arab World" is immediately denied -- I will not say refuted -- by Gerecht, who sees the emergence of an Arab and democratic Shi'ite-dominated state as a fundamental shift in the political foundations of the entire region, if not to very currents of Islam itself. While Helprin may well be right about US defense being underfunded, it is at least worth considering whether the approach of establishing a democratic process in Iraq is not at least as strategically imaginative as the implied alternative of serially conquering of Syria and Iran; or at least threatening to.

It seems clear at least, that Abu Musab "Z-Man" Zarqawi considers the elections an existential threat, which he would not have done had they been an irrelevancy and a dead end. Austin Bay writes:

Z-Man’s been suckered. Z-Man is the troops’ nickname for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda’s jefe in Iraq. Z-Man has declared a “fierce war” on democracy. Z’s taken Bush’s bait -- except the President's “bait” of promoting democracy and declaring war on tyranny and 0ppression isn’t mere bait, it’s essential American values. ...

The media and blogosphere have been focusing on the philosophical and theoretical elements of Bush’s speech and America’s “democracy on the offensive” strategy. But the strategy seeks to address a very concrete issue: “technological compression.” Technological compression is a fact of 21st century existence–and it is the superglue bonding American foreign policy idealism and foreign policy pragmatism. I think my Weekly Standard article of January 3, 2005 frames it accurately: “Technology has compressed the planet, with positive effects in communication, trade, and transportation; with horrifyingly negative effects in weaponry. Decades ago, radio, phone cables on the seabed, long-range aircraft, and then nuclear weapons shrunk the oceans. September 11 demonstrated that religious killers could turn domestic jumbo jets into strategic bombers -- and the oceans were no obstacles. “Technological compression” is a fact; it cannot be reversed. To deny it or ignore it has deadly consequences.”

And it is because technology has compressed the planet that events in Iraq escape the bounds of locality and have a bearing on the entire region. Clearly, the debate over the grand strategy in Iraq is far from settled, but there are no arrogant ignoramuses on either side.

(Trivia. The word "Z-Man" is a relic from a 1960s movie entitled Beyond the Valley of the Dolls written by none other than the Roger Ebert. The age of the movie is given away by the fact that Z-Man is terrifyingly revealed to be a transvestite before the final scene, a development which would have earned Ebert condemnation from the European Union or some such today.)

Armaggedon

Neil Prakash, AKA blogger Armor Geddon and a 1ID Armor Officer, won the Silver Star for his actions in Baquba, Iraq. These are extracts from his profile on Blogger.

Liverpool H.S. '98
Johns Hopkins '02 Neuroscience
Armor OBC Grad '03
Ranger School Grad '03
Currently enrolled in School of Hard Knocks

An account of the action from an obviously proud Indian community may be found in The Times of India. In part it reads:

Although unable to rotate the turret, Prakash continued in the lead, navigating with a map and manoeuvring his tank in order to continue engaging the enemy with the main weapon system and his .50 calibre machine-gun. He watched as men on rooftops sprayed down at his tank with machine-guns and small arms. "I just remember thinking, 'I hope these bullets don't go in this one inch of space,'" said Prakash. "Looking out the hatch, I'm spraying guys and they're just falling. They would just drop - no blood, no nothing. We just kept rolling, getting shot at from everywhere."

By battle's end, the platoon was responsible for 25 confirmed destroyed enemy and an estimated 50 to 60 additional destroyed enemy personnel, the US Army said. Prakash was personally credited with the destruction of eight enemy strong-points, one enemy re-supply vehicle, and multiple enemy dismounts. ...

Prakash, who comes from a family of doctors (his mother, father and older brother are all physicians) was set to follow in their footsteps at Johns Hopkins when he attended an orientation course for reserves. He was awed by a stylish colonel in a Stetson and spurs and resolved to join the forces. Although born in India and maintaining strong ties to the Indian community, he was raised in Syracuse, New York, in what he says is a very patriotic American household.

Demon in the Dark

The Buzz Machine is posting live from a conference on blogging at Harvard. I've left the typos in and excerpted a few lines. One eye catching exchange goes as follows:

: Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia, says that a few years ago, nobody could have predicted that a bunch of unpaid citizens could replace the Encyclopedia Brittanica with its budget of $350 million but it happened. He said that the business model of The New York Times is not sustainable. Abramson shudders, of course. Kaplan said Wales doesn't know what he's talking about; he has not been in a place like Baghdad and does not know the dififculty of getting information there and does not know how the existing system can be replaced.

:Hinderaker goes back to Bill Mitchell's question from his presentation, in which he asked what tool we need to help build trust. Hinderaker says it would help to show us the material behind the story. The attitude bloggers have is -- via the link: "See for yourself. Don't take our word for it."

Then somewhat later.

: Jill Abramson, an editor at the NY Times, and Dave Winer, get kerfluffling together and I can't summarize it well. But I entered in when she went on about the expense of keeping journalists in Iraq -- which is true and for which we are grateful. But I started telling the story of Zeyad taking his camera to cover an antiterrorism demonstration last December that The Times didn't cover. As soon as I mention it, Abramson starts shaking her head and looking away.

: Abramson said that it is "completely contrary" to the histyry and standards of The Times to run content that they do not vet.

I would have given anything to have asked whether Abramson of the Times preferred an unidentified AP stringer taking pictures of Iraqi election workers being executed on Haifa Street over Zeyad, and why. But that would have been churlish, and I must admit, intellectually shallow. The really interesting question was posed by Jimbo Wales. The engine that enabled Wikipedia to overtake Brittanica at the encyclopedia game was self-evidently a powerful one; a phenomenon, which I am tempted to surmise may structurally resemble asymmetrical warfare. Abramson shuddered and well she should. But at what? What was out there in the dark about which these conference participants are talking? It is a something that has already swallowed Brittanica. No one is quite sure what it is, but everyone should be quite certain that it will strike again.

The Lost Elections 3

The Washington Post report on Iraqi elections is unlikely to convince those who regard it as 'illegitimate' otherwise because the polling results on which the story is based were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.

BAGHDAD, Jan. 20 -- An overwhelming majority of Iraqis continue to say they intend to vote on Jan. 30 even as insurgents press attacks aimed at rendering the elections a failure, according to a new public opinion survey. The poll, conducted in late December and early January for the International Republican Institute, found 80 percent of respondents saying they were likely to vote, a rate that has held roughly steady for months.

"Despite the efforts of the terrorists, Iraqis remain committed to casting their vote on election day," IRI President Lorne Craner said in a statement. The organization, which is funded by Congress through the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Agency for International Development, commissioned the poll, which surveyed 1,900 Iraqis in all but two of the country's 18 provinces. Poor security made two in the far north, Nineveh and Dohuk, inaccessible. The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Wouldn't the only way of verifying the poll predictions be to hold the elections? That would assume the existence of compelling objective arguments which still persuade both sides of the current debate over the War on Terror. Peggy Noonan is afraid that the time of argument is over; positions have become an article of religious faith. In an article entitled Too Much God, Noonan says:

The inaugural address itself was startling. It left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike. Rhetorically, it veered from high-class boilerplate to strong and simple sentences, but it was not pedestrian. George W. Bush's second inaugural will no doubt prove historic because it carried a punch, asserting an agenda so sweeping that an observer quipped that by the end he would not have been surprised if the president had announced we were going to colonize Mars.

The president's speech seemed rather heavenish. It was a God-drenched speech. This president, who has been accused of giving too much attention to religious imagery and religious thought, has not let the criticism enter him. God was invoked relentlessly. "The Author of Liberty." "God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind . . . the longing of the soul." It seemed a document produced by a White House on a mission.

The Left has been on a mission for a long time; what alarms them and even some conservatives is that they may have conjured up their own mirror image on the Right. This is less an intellectual development than an emotional one. Wars do not alter the underlying causes of conflict, but they fundamentally sharpen the attitudes of those who fight them to the point where the ultimate goal of the struggle becomes victory itself. The armies of the First World War could not bring themselves to retreat from strategically insignificant ground simply because they had paid so much in blood for it. They had to keep or declare it was not worth the price. You could not break the faith on Flanders Fields. The intractability of modern Leftism is the understandable result of the defeat they have endured in recent years. But until recently large parts of Conservatism exuded the easy air of the Reagan years, and answered in the part-humorous, part-taunt of P. J. O'Rourke. But the grim struggle with domestic Liberalism and foreign terror has left its mark. "Man, I look old" President Bush was reported to have said when he saw his photo on the cover of Time Magazine.

Whatever the War on Terror is, it is a duel to the death. A glance at Juan Cole's website -- which is a reliable thermometer of Leftist temper -- is a case in point. It should be the website of a respectable academic but it's a shrine to half-forgotten causes and a casket of exorcisms against half-apprehended devils. To illustrate the right of peaceful assembly he has a photo of flag-draped military caskets being shipped home. To illustrate the the 8th Amendment he has an Abu Ghraib photo. Noonan worries about religion. So do I, coming upon a room of stubbed out and smoked ideas. As for the elections, Cole says they are a joke, and it is doubtful if any poll would persuade him otherwise.

"These elections are a joke," said Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Michigan. "The Bush administration has created the worst possible advertisement for democracy because the perception across the Middle East is that democracy means you get a country where everything is out of control," he said.

If so, he is the only one laughing, though maybe we all did once, and I forget whether that's a promise or a threat.

The Lost Elections 2

The Iraqi Election Newswire links to this letter in the Guardian which exactly echoes the analysis of the Nation.

Iraq is being denied free and fair elections, after enduring decades of Saddam's brutal dictatorship. The US and British occupation governments have engineered a process for reproducing the US-appointed Iraqi interim government to prolong the occupation and incite sectarian and ethnic conflicts.

Millions of Iraqis, under siege in many parts of their homeland, will be disenfranchised. While boycotting this undemocratic exercise, we strongly condemn all forms of violence against Iraqis participating in it. We, as exiles, are confident that the vast majority of Iraqis, at home and abroad, shall unite to end the US-led occupation and establish democracy, whatever their stance on participation.

We echo opinions within Iraq stressing the impossibility of holding free and fair elections while under occupation, and being subjected to war crimes by the US-led forces.

However, we support demands for minimal pre-conditions: setting a strict timetable for the withdrawal of all occupation forces; ceasing all attacks, and confining all occupation forces to barracks until withdrawal; ending martial law and releasing all political prisoners; establishing an independent election commission, led by Iraq's senior serving and retired judges, and including all Iraq's political forces. It could be assisted by anti-occupation figures, eg Nelson Mandela, and the UN. Sami Ramadani, Haifa Zangana, Prof Kamal Majid, Tahrir Numan, Dr Imad Khaddur, iMundher Adhami, and 14 others.

The Nation advocated exactly the same thing: that the US give up on the election as a botched job and retreat from Iraq as quickly as possible confident that things will work themselves out.

Therefore, for the sake of Iraq's future and the safety of our young men and women, the United States must begin an orderly withdrawal, coordinated with stepped-up US and international economic assistance. We recognize that further violence and internal fighting among Iraqis may follow, but to believe that a continuing US military presence can prevent this is naïve or disingenuous; it will, rather, contribute to the instability. The best long-term outcome is for Iraqis to regain control of their own country and sort out their own future.

Those who may have hoped that 'insurgents' could somehow prevent the Iraqi elections from taking place have given that up as a botched job and fallen back on Plan B. The belated emergence of the 'elections are rigged' line, only two weeks from the scheduled polls, are virtual admissions that they cannot now be stopped. They can only be discredited. In all probability the new line will be. 'So what if elections were held in Iraq. It's still illegitimate, etc.' That sad thing about that is it will tend to immunize the elected candidates in the eyes of American Conservatives and mask any real shortcomings they may have in the turbulence of ideological conflict. That process has already done much to deodorize 'insurgents' who, properly considered, are by any standard some of the lowest sorts of snakes ever to slither in the dust.

That said, the 'elections are rigged' line is a masterpiece of irony. There is oblique reference to 'millions of Iraqis, under siege' without identifying the besiegers; it disenfranchises voters in Shi'ite and Kurdish Iraq, by making their suffrage contingent upon the pleasure of their former Ba'athist masters. It is in effect, an announcement of electoral results before the first vote has been cast, which in a way, has the force of custom behind it. In October, 2002 CNN reported that Saddam had won 100 percent of votes in a referendum granting him another seven year term. Now that was a peaceful and legitimate election.

Baghdad, Iraq -- Iraq has declared Saddam Hussein the winner with 100 percent of the votes in a referendum granting him another seven-year term, bringing bursts of celebratory gunfire in Baghdad's streets. The statistics-busting result were seen in Baghdad as a message of defiance to U.S. President George W. Bush and his declared desire to end Saddam's 23-year rule."Our leader President Saddam Hussein, may God preserve him and look after him, has won 100 percent of the votes of eligible voters," said Saddam's top deputy Izzat Ibrahim, reading official results at a news conference in Baghdad. Saddam was the only candidate in the referendum ...

Ibrahim, vice-chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council, said all 11,445,638 Iraqis eligible to vote had done so and every single one of them answered "Yes" to another seven-year term for Saddam, 65, who was appointed president in 1979.

The Lost Elections

The Nation argues in its article Iraq's Lost Election that the elections in Iraq are a lost cause because the interim government and the United States have failed to provide adequate security for the campaign and balloting to take place according to an accepted standard.

As Dexter Filkins of the New York Times reported, rather than the normal democratic ritual of voters and candidates, what Iraqis know is "a campaign in the shadows, where candidates are often too terrified to say their names. Instead of holding rallies, they meet voters in secret, if they meet them at all. Instead of canvassing for votes, they fend off death threats." Filkins further reported: "Of the 7,471 people who have filed to run, only a handful outside the relatively safe Kurdish areas have publicly identified themselves. The locations for the 5,776 polling places have not been announced, lest they become targets for attacks."

As conditions deteriorated, it became harder for the Bush Administration to spin the upcoming poll to choose an Iraq National Assembly as a major step toward restoring security. Gen. George Casey, commander of coalition forces in Iraq, predicted more violence on election day and "for some time" thereafter, while a new US intelligence estimate foresees the elections being followed by more violence and possible civil war. ...

As long as the occupation continues, any Iraqi government or constitution will be tainted and incapable of producing the compromises necessary for a stable and unified Iraq. Therefore, for the sake of Iraq's future and the safety of our young men and women, the United States must begin an orderly withdrawal, coordinated with stepped-up US and international economic assistance. We recognize that further violence and internal fighting among Iraqis may follow, but to believe that a continuing US military presence can prevent this is naïve or disingenuous; it will, rather, contribute to the instability. The best long-term outcome is for Iraqis to regain control of their own country and sort out their own future.

There are two parts to the Nation's indictment. The first is that the elections will fail; and second, that even if elections formally take place a civil war will follow. From these premises they conclude that  the United States should withdraw, but not before leaving a large chunk of money, though to whom is not explained; that civil war may follow anyway, yet somehow this civil war will be less destructive than one they predict will follow the elections and therefore the lesser of evils.

A few loose ends might remain. For example, the Iraqis and Kurds who joined the Iraq government interim forces under American tutelage may find themselves hunted down by the 'insurgents' once US forces leave and become refugees. Who should accept them? If a civil war ensues as the Nation admits is possible, if Syria and Iran enter the lists of their co-religionists, how should America restrain them? Surely all-out conflict would be the time to heed the Nation's advice "No more money for war!". And if the Kurds were subsequently attacked and massacred all over again; and the Marsh Arabs slaughtered once more, without elections too, would there be enough days of silence, enough bags of flour in the UN relief warehouses, enough editorial handwringing to make it all up to them?

What then but to blame America for being the root cause of a tragic conflict, which was nevertheless the least evil of all remaining paths, once the basic and tragic mistake of invading Iraq was undertaken. Or is the Nation referring to the wrong lost election?

Unrepentant

Thomas Friedman observes that it's hard to be an American in Paris these days, unless you are an anti-American American. Europe, he says, is the "ultimate Blue State". Only in Iran, apparently, is the general population looking forward to a second Bush Administration.

Watching George W. Bush's second inaugural from a bistro in Paris is like watching the Red Sox win the World Series from a sports bar in New York City. Odds are that someone around you is celebrating -- I mean, someone, somewhere in Europe must be happy about this — but it's not obvious. Why are Europeans so blue over George W. Bush's re-election? Because Europe is the world's biggest "blue state." This whole region is a rhapsody in blue.

But European disapproval is counterpointed by the emotion of surprised helplessness:

and then suddenly, as the truth emerged, there was a feeling of slow resignation: 'Oh well, we've been dreaming,' " said Dominique Moisi, one of France's top foreign policy analysts. "In fact, real America is moving away from us. We don't share the same values." ... Moisi said. "It is not that we are so much against America, it is that we cannot understand the evolution of that country. This election has weakened the concept of 'the West.'

The unspoken assumption of Friedman and Moisi was that the West was authentic only as long as it remained a development of the secular European ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries. For Friedman, Europe remained the ground of Westernism; and when America and Europe diverged, it was America that had left the 'West'. If so, the 'West' had become a museum. The NIC 2020 report stressed that globalization had so revitalized the world economy that 21st century modernity would almost certainly wear a non-European face.

While today’s most advanced nations -- especially the United States -- will remain important forces driving capital, technology and goods, globalization is likely to take on much more of a “non-Western face” over the next 15 years. Most of the increase in world population and consumer demand through 2020 will take place in today’s developing nations—especially China, India, and Indonesia—and multinational companies from today’s advanced nations will adapt their “profiles” and business practices to the demands of these cultures. ...

Countries such as China and India will be in a position to achieve higher economic growth than Europe and Japan, whose aging work forces may inhibit their growth. Given its enormous population—and assuming a reasonable degree of real currency appreciation—the dollar value of China’s gross national product (GNP) may be the second largest in the world by 2020. For similar reasons, the value of India’s output could match that of a large European country. The economies of other developing countries, such as Brazil and Indonesia, could surpass all but the largest European economies by 2020.

What Moisi should have said was 'in fact, due to unstoppable trends the World may be moving away from us. We don't share the same values.' Friedman's celebration of Europe as the world's largest 'Blue State' avoids mention that it might become the world's only Blue State. Certainly in the matter of religion, the differential growth in populations between the Europe on the one hand, and the Third World and even the United States on the other, is dooming 'Western' secular atheism, and perhaps much else, to demographic extinction. Nor, with India on track to surpass the French and German economies in size by the 2020s is there any realistic hope of re-imposing 'Western' European values on the benighted Red States of the world by aid packages which will by then be regarded as chump change. It is perhaps the subconscious realization that it has awakened to a nightmare new world that drives the the Left's incredulous reaction to George Bush. A story on the Kerry Spot describing a Leftist assault on conservative protesters is provided by Glenn Reynolds, who describes it in terms of  'crushing free speech'. But the real caption should be 'Nooo! It can't be!! This can't be happening!!"

Hundreds of people gathered at both ends of Meridian Hill Park in Northwest Washington for a peace rally sponsored by the D.C Antiwar Network. But there were interlopers: Thirteen members of ProtestWarror, supporting the Bush administration and its policies in Iraq. When the Bush supporters arrived, about 20 black-clad, self-described anarchists emerged from the crowd, shouting profanity and epithets and demanding that they leave the peace rally. When the Bush supporters refused to leave, the anarchists tore the sign out of the Bush supporters' hands and stomped on them. When ProtestWarrior leader Gil Kobrin objected, several male anarchists knocked him to the ground, kicking him in the back and punching him. Other anarchists punched and shoved Kobrin's 12 colleagues.

Yet it is happening. The European ideologies of the last century have left the stream of history and will not, cannot acknowledge it. But it is not merely Liberalism that is unrepentant. Austin Bay listened to President Bush repeat the evangelical themes of his War on Terrorism and said: faster please. "The President’s inaugural speech said in spades what I wish he would say every day. When I returned from Iraq I said our biggest mistake was failing to “ideologize” the war. This war is truly a fight for the future -- a struggle between liberty and tyranny." The Daily Demarche has a literate yet uncompromising reiteration of the same theme: the Delaware is crossed. Fly the colors.

I have long been opposed to the phrase “War on Terror” itself. Designed to be non-offensive to the public in general and Muslims in particular it is an incredibly vague construct. “Terror” is not the enemy, it is the tactic. We have, more or less, declared war on a feeling in order to spare the feelings of a certain demographic and avoid the PC issues inherent in naming a readily identifiable enemy. We can’t even argue that we are at war against terrorists- we are not, after all, pursuing the Basque separatists, or Chechnyan rebels. As was argued on this site back in November, if we are at war with anyone it is the islamo-fscists. We need to clearly articulate who the enemy is, and then define how we will defeat that enemy, thereby identifying an endpoint in the “war”.  ...

As the President delivers his speech at the inauguration tomorrow, and as we enter the final countdown for the election in Iraq, we must be sure to say what we mean, and mean what we say. This administration has been accused of oversimplifying matters when it comes to global relations and foreign policy. I accuse the MSM, the apologists and the anti-America crowd of obfuscating what are simple truths: there is an enemy, the enemy can be named and must be defeated. Islamo-fascism is our “bird”- but you can call call this flock what you wish, the name is not important. We have all seen them at work. We all recognize them when presented with their deeds. We all know what they want- nothing short of the death of the West. We all know the difference between the name of this war and the reality. The time has come to stop mincing words.

Personally I find it difficult to conceive of an enmity with Muslims in general when it is Muslims doing the most dying on the side of freedom in Iraq. Surely that is proof that the basic faultline is nothing so slender as the boundary between Sunni and Shi'ite; Muslim and Jew; atheist or Christian, but something wider still. Yet Col. Bay and the Daily Demarche are correct in insisting that the great issues which divide the world must now be called by their proper names, although that name is not religious war. The listeners in Friedman's bistro would have listened to the Bush inaugurual speech more carefully if they understood that Moisi was very near the truth when he remarked, 'Oh well, we've been dreaming' -- a belated realization that words taken to be empty were really uttered in earnest -- that things had changed. Each would have listened, with fear or upliftment, according to his gifts, as the President said:

America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth. Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time. ...

We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies. ...

When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, "It rang as if it meant something." In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength tested, but not weary we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.

May God bless you, and may He watch over the United States of America.

"I've Never Been Happier"

The Mudville Gazette has a special on Rick Rescorla, the man who fought in, among other things, the battle made into the movie We Were Soldiers Once, And Young. But being in a particular place at certain time was nothing so special as being a particular kind of man in every place and time.

The survivors of the 7th Cavalry still tell awestruck stories about Rescorla. Like the time he stumbled into a hooch full of enemy soldiers on a reconnaissance patrol in Bon Song. "Oh, pardon me," he said, before firing a few rounds and racing away. "Oh, comma, pardon me," repeats Dennis Deal, who followed Rescorla that day in April 1966. "Like he had walked into a ladies' tea party!"  ...

After fighting in Vietnam, he returned to the United States and used his military benefits to study creative writing at the University of Oklahoma. Literary minded, even before college he had read all fifty-one volumes of the Harvard Classics and could recite Shakespeare and quote Churchill. He had started writing a novel about a mobile-air-cavalry unit, and had several stories published in Western-themed magazines. He eventually earned a bachelor's, a master's in literature, and a law degree.

Later he took jobs in corporate security and become vice-president for security at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter -- the largest tenant in the World Trade Center. And he was Rick Rescorla on September 11, 2001 too. After the plane hit, he made the decision to evacuate everyone he could from the tower despite a request from the Port Authority to hold in place, but Rescorla knew better.

"What'd you say?" Hill (a colleague he had called by phone to help him on that day) asked.

"I said, 'Piss off, you son of a bitch,' " Rescorla replied. "Everything above where that plane hit is going to collapse, and it's going to take the whole building with it. I'm getting my people the fuck out of here." Then he said, "I got to go. Get your shit in one basket and get ready to come up."

When the second plane slammed into the South Tower, Rescorla knew he had been right. It had been no accident.  Rescorla made one final call to his wife and spoke words which to many will seem curious yet from a certain point of view were perfectly natural.

"Stop crying," he told her. "I have to get these people out safely. If something should happen to me, I want you to know I've never been happier. You made my life."

There was a time when stories like this were special; they are special still but not quite so unique. Too many men all over the world -- in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the Horn of Africa or in Southeast Asia -- have said words to keep them company.

Hill reached Susan (Rescorla's wife), who had just got off the phone with Sullivan. "Take it easy," he said, as she continued to sob. "He's been through tight spots before, a million times." Suddenly Susan screamed. Hill turned to look at his own television and saw the south tower collapse. He thought of the words Rescorla had so often used to comfort dying soldiers. "Susan, he'll be O.K.," he said gently. "Take deep breaths. Take it easy. If anyone will survive, Rick will survive." When Hill hung up, he turned to his wife. Her face was ashen. "Shit," he said. "Rescorla is dead."

But he was wrong. Only we the living can still betray; Rick will survive as Rescorla until the end of time; undiminished and forever who he was.

A Ghost on the Internet

There are interesting points of contrast between Sarah Boxer's speculation on the affiliations and motives of the Iraq the Model bloggers and Associated Press' determination to protect the anonymity and refusal to judge the motives of a stringer who photographed the execution of Iraqi electoral workers at fairly close range on Haifa Street. The juxtapositions are even more interesting because one of the bloggers in Iraq the Model  is standing for election under the Iraqi Pro-Democracy Party ticket while the victims of the Haifa Street execution were workers helping organize that election.

Iraq the Model Bloggers	Unknown Associated Press Photographer
When I telephoned a man named Ali Fadhil in Baghdad last week, I wondered who might answer. A CIA operative? An American posing as an Iraqi? Someone paid by the Defense Department to support the war? Or simply an Iraqi with some mixed feelings about the American presence in Iraq? Until he picked up the phone, he was just a ghost on the Internet. -- Sarah Boxer	From JACK STOKES, director of media relations, Associated Press: [This is a solicited letter regarding Salon's "The Associated Press 'insurgency.'"] Several brave Iraqi photographers work for The Associated Press in places that only Iraqis can cover. Many are covering the communities they live in where family and tribal relations give them access that would not be available to Western photographers, or even Iraqi photographers who are not from the area. Insurgents want their stories told as much as other people and some are willing to let Iraqi photographers take their pictures. It's important to note, though, that the photographers are not "embedded" with the insurgents. They do not have to swear allegiance or otherwise join up philosophically with them just to take their pictures.
Jeez guys – I thought you said everything was fine in Iraq!This trio uses their real names in interviews, on their web sites and even in press releases. This USA Today article and this LA Times piece also mentioned the CIA allegations (in the context of rebutting them, though Boxer also seemed to conclude the bloggers weren’t with the CIA). (Both are pay links, alas). -- Derek Rose	A source at the Associated Press knowledgeable about the events covered in Baghdad on Sunday told Salon that accusations that the photographer was aware of the militants' plans are "ridiculous." The photographer, whose identity the AP is withholding due to safety concerns, was likely "tipped off to a demonstration that was supposed to take place on Haifa Street," said the AP source, who was not at liberty to comment by name. But the photographer "definitely would not have had foreknowledge" of a violent event like an execution, the source said. -- Salon

The most powerful argument that can be mustered in favor Ms. Boxer is, as Derek Rose pointed out, that she could hardly make things worse for Ali or his brothers. After all, in Ms. Boxer's own words, things had already hit a low point after "the Washington Post wrote about the meeting, and the Arabic press ended up translating the story, which, Ali felt, put his family in real danger." One might even argue that Ali and his brothers put their own lives in jeopardy after they decided to blog, visit America and stand for elections. So it is no one's fault but their own. 'Insurgents' and journalists are above the moral judgment  --  they are merely disinterested, impersonal forces that visit the necessary fates or coverage on those who bring it on themselves.

The problem with this line of argument is that it fails to account for the weight given to symbolism in the insurgent's targeting calculus. The Iraqi electoral workers were killed on Haifa Street not out of any personal spite against them but because these noncelebrities symbolized a process which the insurgents were determined to derail. A photographer was invited -- through subterfuge according to the Associated Press -- but invited nonetheless to record the execution of the symbols. It was a kind of burning in effigy with real people acting as effigies. Hence, Ms. Boxer's semiotic operations on the Iraq the Model bloggers are not as harmless as Derek Rose would make it seem. Neither, for that matter, is this post itself, a fact of which I am most acutely aware.

Then there is no help for it but to destroy these insurgents root and branch; because for so long as these terrorists exist then expressing an independent opinion, running for election or shaking the hand of the President of the United States will always be offenses punishable by death. That is to say, for so long as terrorists and their publicists prevail, then neither bloggers, nor a free press nor people anything remotely like Sarah Boxer will never be able to exist in Iraq. It is not necessary to agree with Iraq the Model in order to defend their right to say it. Of all the uses to which Ms. Boxer could have put freedom, this was the worst.

Update

Reader MJ links to Ali's reponse to the Sarah Boxer piece on Iraq the Model.

The article was, despite Ms Boxer's kindness, a bad piece of journalism. I had around 45 minutes long phone call with the reporter about my journey with Iraq the Model, my new site, the elections, the general situation here in Baghdad but she (or the paper) seems to have a certain agenda and managed to change the whole issue into a very silly gossip (going as far as quoting trolls!) that is way beneath any respectable paper and certainly beneath me so I won't give it more attention but lesson learned and I won't make the mistake of talking to anyone from the NY times again.

On the Diplomatic Battlefront

Those who haven't done so yet should check out the Daily Demarche, a blog run by underground conservative diplomats who have that pricelss extra, a self-deprecating sense of humor. From them and the Diplomad, we discover such terms as the "Far Abroad". One of the more hilarious entries is by Smiley, who describes the dangers of living in a fashion time capsule in the Far Abroad.

We are not well-dressed. At all. There are two main problems with the dress tastes of male FSOs. First, many of them, while really nice people and competent at their jobs, simply lack dress sense. Even the Land’s End catalogue, a perennial foreign service favorite, cannot rescue them -- simply because a shirt, tie, and coat appear in the same catalogue does not mean that they can be worn at the same time.  ...

... there are some FSOs out there who are capable of being trendy. The problem, however, occurs when they leave for the Far Abroad. Even if they are au courant when they leave Washington DC, and they arrive at post at the leading edge of fashion, style will change, as it always does, and they will return to DC from some far away place some years later, failing to comprehend that the fashion scene in the US just may have moved on, while the scene in, say, Niamey (Niger) may not have quite kept the pace. This is true of diplomats who have been abroad for any number of years; when returning to the Department one begins to believe that some people must have been overseas since the mid-seventies – this is the only possible way to account for all the polyester grape smugglers and weird suits (plaid, linen, anyone?) one sees swishing through Foggy Bottom’s halls.

Is there a savior for our sartorially cursed consuls and second secretaries? Yes. There is. Behold Manolo.

If for nothing else, the link to Manolo is worth the visit to the Daily Demarche. He must be the equivalent of the Onion or Scrappelface for the fashion industry. Consider Manolo's advice on shoes, which every diplomat, even those posted in the Far Abroad, may at one time or another wear. His lavishly illustrated page discusses the merits, or lack thereof, of such classic footwear as Uggs, Birkenstock, Earth Shoes and Betsy Johnsons. A sample:

The Earth Shoe it has the famous, "negative sole" which puts the toes of the wearer higher then the heels...perfect for making every girl look like she has the kegs for calves. Also, this it is another of the favorite shoe of the hippies.

Query: why do the hippies and the crunchy bohemians insist on displaying their solidarity with the peasants by wearing the peasant shoes that cost $100 the pair? Manolo asks, if they are indeed serious about wearing the comfortable footwear of the peasant should they not be sporting the shoes made out of the recycled treads of the steel-belted tires?

And I thought bloggers had it bad with their pajamas.

All the News That's Fit to Fit 2

Sarah Boxer of the New York Times News Service, asks 'who can you trust' and tentatively answers, maybe not Iraq the Model.

When I telephoned a man named Ali Fadhil in Baghdad last week, I wondered who might answer. A CIA operative? An American posing as an Iraqi? Someone paid by the Defense Department to support the war? Or simply an Iraqi with some mixed feelings about the American presence in Iraq? ... I clicked on Iraq the Model because it promised three blogging brothers in one, Omar, Mohammed and Ali. ... People posting messages on an American Web site called Martini Republic accused the three bloggers of working for the CIA, of being American puppets, of not being Iraqis and even of not existing at all.

She focuses on the reason why one of the three brother-bloggers, Ali, quit posting. Boxer asked whether they had been 'astroturfed' that is: received help from a 'powerful think-tank'. Or worse.

a conspiracy theory had emerged about Iraq the Model on Martini Republic. One of the principal bloggers there, Joseph Mailander, had some questions for the Iraqi brothers. He wanted to know whether someone in the U.S. government or close to it had set up the blog. (The Web host, based in Abilene, Texas, is called CIATech Solutions.) And what about the two brothers' tour of the United States? Did the U.S. government "have a shadow role in promoting it?"

'CIATech Solutions' is really a reference to Complex Internet Applications Technical Solutions, something the reader learns about further down. Boxer reported that some commentators doubted whether Iraq the Model represented 'mainstream of Iraqi thinking'. They believed it was a refuge for fantasists who wanted to see Iraqi events in a certain way and were willing to fete those who would pander to their point of view. She might have been referring to commentators like Juan Cole, or someone very like him, who wrote:

Joseph Mailander of the Martini Republic weblog has an extremely important posting on Sunday about the dangers of "blog trolling." ... A related practice has been called by Josh Marshall "astroturfing," where a "grass roots" campaign turns out actually to be sponsored by a think tank or corporation. ... The MR posting brings up questions about the Iraqi brothers who run the Iraq The Model site. It points out that the views of the brothers are celebrated in the right-leaning weblogging world of the US, even though opinion polling shows that their views are far out of the mainstream of Iraqi opinion. ... Contrast all this to the young woman computer systems analyst in Baghdad, Riverbend, who is in her views closer to the Iraqi opinion polls

With mystery swirling around Ali, Boxer finally contacted him and asked why he had quit Iraq the Model. His short answer was danger.

His views took a sharp turn when his two brothers met with the president. There wasn't supposed to be any press coverage about their trip to the United States, he said. But The Washington Post wrote about the meeting, and the Arabic press ended up translating the story, which, Ali felt, put his family in real danger. Anyway, he said, he didn't see any sense in his brothers' meeting with Bush. "My brothers say it happened accidentally, that it was not planned." But why, he asked, take such an "unnecessary risk"? He explained his worries: "Here some people would kill you for just writing to an American."

His longer answer was that he found blogging, by itself, ineffective. With danger a given, Ali and his brothers went into politics, which in Iraq is a hazardous profession. Boxer reports that Ali then started his own blog and is helping his brother run for office under Iraqi Pro-Democracy Party ticket in the Jan. 30 election. But Boxer never did provide an adequate explanation for why three brothers with professional qualifications might express opinions on which a sentence of death was laid. In the end she came to no answer. It apparently wasn't money; and as for the trip, it had brought them nothing but more danger. She might have tried William Babington Macaulay who understood the power of an older motivation: belief and the courage to uphold that belief; a motive many journalists have no problem assigning to 'insurgents'.

‘Hew down the bridge, Sir Consul,
With all the speed ye may;
I, with two more to help me,
Will hold the foe in play.
In yon strait path a thousand
May well be stopped by three.
Now who will stand on either hand,
And keep the bridge with me?’

Then out spake Spurius Lartius;
A Ramnian proud was he:
‘Lo, I will stand at thy right hand,
And keep the bridge with thee.’
And out spake strong Herminius;
Of Titian blood was he:
‘I will abide on thy left side,
And keep the bridge with thee.’

‘Horatius,’ quoth the Consul,
‘As thou sayest, so let it be.’
And straight against that great array
Forth went the dauntless Three.
For Romans in Rome’s quarrel
Spared neither land nor gold,
Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life,
In the brave days of old.

All the News That's Fit to Fit

The most salient difference between the Global War on Terror and the great conflicts of the 20th century, such as World War 2, is that there is literally no more front line. It therefore came as no surprise that the media -- that is to say the newsrooms, editorial desks and reportorial -- proved but one more foxhole in the conflict. The Jerusalem Post (hat tip: The Counterterrorism Blog) describes how some representatives of major wire services and news agencies were in the paid service of terrorist organizations. A small sampler of dubious connections is given below:

Meanwhile, the Associated Press and Reuters, which have their own TV production services, rely almost entirely on footage provided to them by Palestinian crews covering events in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The material, distributed to thousands of subscribers worldwide, mostly focuses on Palestinians as victims of IDF operations; the cameramen decide from which angle to film and which material to send at the end of the day to their employers in Jerusalem. The Associated Press also has a journalist -- Muhammad Daraghmeh -- who works for the PA's Al-Ayyam. "It's like employing someone from the [Israeli] Government Press Office or one of the Israeli political parties to work as a journalist," comments a veteran foreign journalist based in Israel.

The Counterterrorism Blog asks: "Well, excuse me, but how about the 'journalists' in the Arab world who were either on Saddam's or Arafat's payroll? Why hasn't the media seen fit to pursue those secret arrangements and admit that perhaps those payments twisted the coverage of those two thugs by Western media?" This can only be a rhetorical question. It is entirely probable that there is no, and possibly was never any collectively responsible, self-policing, ethically consistent 'media' able to act as single organism. Saddam and Arafat discovered this long ago and its audience is only belatedly realizing it now.

This process of corruption has pulled a curtain of suspicion over all information products. No longer is it possible to rely on the assurance of a brand name. Each item of news must now be sniffed, examined, poked and weighed to determine its authenticity. Collateral confirmation, once the staple of skeptical intelligence analysts, is now the task of every sophisticated newsreader -- at least those who want to avoid being taken for a ride. Once the media itself became an informational battleground the most natural greeting in the dark became 'who goes there?' That skepticism has in part, empowered the blogosphere, which provides some filtering for readers too busy to do it themselves. Yet the blogosphere is not in principle immune from any of the corroding influences of fear, money or influence, as the readers of Armstrong Williams and the Daily Kos discovered to their disillusionment. We are, in James Jesus Angleton's famous phrase, in a 'Wilderness of Mirrors', though he himself had the idea from T. S. Eliot.

I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use it for your closer contact?

These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors.

Fortunately for most there is the salvation of the common senses: the ability to observe the real through the packaging, and to learn from the airplane crashing into the tower facts we could not read in the newspapers. One of the strangest consequences of the development of Internet was the reimposition of the need for each individual to learn things for themselves. It is a task most would gladly do without, but it is the burden of sentience and the price of freedom.

The Return of God

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles site links to news about UAV 'flocks' that are being developed as anti-terrorist weapons.

A heterogeneous flock of UAVs, each with its own capabilities, has one “leader.” The leader spots the target, conducts a “tender” among the flock members, decides which has the best chance of destroying the target, and assigns the mission to that member. ... When a malfunction is detected in a flock member, or one simply runs out of fuel, that member is returned to the base for repair or refueling, while the mission continues.

The Israeli researchers developing this weapons system may simply be copying a tactic Al Qaeda had stumbled onto earlier. Dr. Gordon Woo described terrorist attacks as a species of "swarm" warfare in the Mathematical Aspects of Terrorism Hazard. Compare his description of the organizational characteristics of a terrorist network with the the 'flock' of UAVs above.

In 1994, Algerian terrorists planned to fly a jet into the Eiffel tower in Paris. Unbeknown to both MI5 and CIA, as early as 1995, dissident Afghan waiters in London were soliciting American signatories on applications for flight training in USA. The planning for September 11 had begun at least seven years earlier. Faced with the contrasting prospects of paradise, if they succeeded, or prison, if they failed, the leaders of the suicide hijack mission were rational in taking meticulous care over every detail of their planning.

Not just the preparation time, but also the swarm attack is a feature of al-Qaeda strategy which is comprehensible in game theory terms. In an al-Qaeda training manual, found in an apartment in Manchester, England, missions are listed as including the destruction of embassies, urban bridges, and centres of vital economic interest. If one specific class of target is selected for attack, (e.g. embassies, bridges, ports, etc.), defences would inevitably be strengthened after a strike, making a second attempt more difficult. Already this has happened with US airport security. Hence an opportunist terrorist strategy would be to launch a simultaneous attack on many individual targets within the same class, so stretching homeland defence. Al-Qaeda have managed to synchronize surprise attacks on US embassies and landmark buildings. In conventional military strategy, the casualty rate resulting from such simultaneous attacks might be prohibitive. The strategist, Sun Tze, argued against using troops like a swarm of ants; a strategy bound to lead to high casualties.

The social insect metaphor is intriguing for a terrorist network such as al-Qaeda, prepared to launch martyrdom missions. Astonishing levels of spatial swarm intelligence are achievable by colonies of ants, which can fulfill their programmed functions without the need for central instruction. If terrorists depended heavily on communication with a command hub, swarm attacks might be quite susceptible to counter-intelligence. However, participants may operate essentially individually, and may not be stationed together in any one locality. Instead, they may form emergent virtual cells, the members of which would be dispersed over the world, communicating via the internet to plan an attack.

The NIC 2020 Report of the National Intelligence Council recently concluded that the Islamic "swarm" will continue to grow, linked together by asynchoronous communication.

The key factors that spawned international terrorism show no signs of abating over the next 15 years. Experts assess that the majority of international terrorist groups will continue to identify with radical Islam. The revival of Muslim identity will create a framework for the spread of radical Islamic ideology both inside and outside the Middle East, including Western Europe, Southeast Asia and Central Asia. ... Informal networks of charitable foundations, madrasas, hawalas, and other mechanisms will continue to proliferate and be exploited by radical elements.

But the Islamic swarm will not be alone. In one of the most dramatic developments of the new century, secular 'interntionalist' ideologies are declining in the face of resurgent ethnic and religious identities. In its chapter on New Challenges to Governance, the National Intelligence Council pointed out that as aging secular centers of Europe continue into eclipse, the world ratio of believers to nonbelievers will begin to shift dramatically in favor of Christians and Muslims in the Third World.  God, who Marx confidently predicted would soon be out of business, has turned the tables on him.

Over the next 15 years, religious identity is likely to become an increasingly important factor in how people define themselves. ... For example, Christianity, Buddhism, and other religions and practices are spreading in such countries as China as Marxism declines, and the proportion of evangelical converts in traditionally heavily Catholic Latin America is rising. By 2020, China and Nigeria will have some of the largest Christian communities in the world, a shift that will reshape the traditionally Western-based Christian institutions, giving them more of an African or Asian or, more broadly, a developing world face. Western Europe stands apart from this growing global “religiosity” except for the migrant communities from Africa and the Middle East.

Samuel Huntington in an interview with Kyodo News observed the same thing.

There is global resurgence of the importance of religion in a wide variety of countries. We see the identity of countries increasingly taking on more of religious character. In countries like India, Turkey, Israel, not to mention Iran, you have had religious movements develop, challenging the secular definition of those countries' identities by their (modern) founding leaders in the early 20th century, such as Nehru, Ben-Gurion, Ataturk and the Shah of Iran. It is a fairly widespread phenomenon that people are thinking of their country in more religious terms. Even in secular Western Europe, religion is becoming more important. By enacting a new law banning Muslims scarves in schools, the French feel the need to reassert their religious identity which happens to be the tradition of secularism. That is their religion.

2020

The Counterterrorism blog discusses the The NIC 2020 report.  NIC stands for National Intelligence Council, an organization affiliated with the CIA tasked with providing a semi-independent assessment of events. Their self-described mission is to: "provide policymakers with the best, unvarnished, and unbiased information -- regardless of whether analytic judgments conform to US policy." It is a long horizon piece aimed at identifying the main trends in the world over the next few years. Its key findings are reproduced verbatim in the matrix below.

Relative Certainties	Key Uncertainties
Globalization largely irreversible, likely to become less Westernized.	Whether globalization will pull in lagging economies; degree to which Asian countries set new “rules of the game.”
World economy substantially larger.	Extent of gaps between “haves” and “have-nots”; backsliding by fragile democracies; managing or containing financial crises.
Increasing number of global firms facilitate spread of new technologies.	Extent to which connectivity challenges governments.
Rise of Asia and advent of possible new economic middle-weights.	Whether rise of China/India occurs smoothly.
Aging populations in established powers	Ability of EU and Japan to adapt work forces, welfare systems, and integrate migrant populations; whether EU becomes a superpower.
Energy supplies “in the ground” sufficient to meet global demand.	Political instability in producer countries; supply disruptions
Growing power of nonstate actors.	Willingness and ability of states and international institutions to accommodate these actors.
Political Islam remains a potent force.	Impact of religiosity on unity of states and potential for conflict; growth of jihadist ideology.
Improved WMD capabilities of some states.	More or fewer nuclear powers; ability of terrorists to acquire biological, chemical, radiological, or nuclear weapons.
Arc of instability spanning Middle East, Asia, Africa.	Precipitating events leading to overthrow of regimes.
Great power conflict escalating into total war unlikely.	Ability to manage flashpoints and competition for resources.
Environmental and ethical issues even more to the fore.	Extent to which new technologies create or resolve ethical dilemmas.
US will remain single most powerful actor economically, technologically, militarily.	Whether other countries will more openly challenge Washington; whether US loses S&T edge.

This assessment implies that the Global War on Terror would have happened eventually with or without September 11 as a result of certain long term and unavoidable trends emerging in the world. In particular, the weakening of Great Power rivalry has been accompanied by a corresponding rise in technological proliferation and the sophistication of nonstate actors, a trend which the report considers 'relatively certain' to continue over the coming years. The magnitude of the role of Europe and the 'middle powers' will play in the first decades of this century are still 'key uncertainties'. What is fairly certain is that the United States will shape the global response for the next 20 years or so.

That central fact means the fate of the world will be effectively decided by Americans in the near term. This further implies that divisions within American polity -- the debate over the response to terrorism -- or the lack thereof -- will assume an inordinate importance, magnified by its position in the fulcrum of power. Just as the fate of the planet was effectively decided in Europe during the 19th century, many of the main trends in the world will be settled within the boundaries of the fifty states over the coming years. For good or ill, America will become a cockpit into which global conflicts will converge. For men of hope and the merchants of evil; for visionaries and as well as terrorists, nothing --  not even the minarets of Mecca -- will beckon more naturally than the alabaster cities of the New World.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
-- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Backward, Please 2

The lack of consensus on how to conduct to Global War on Terror is illustrated by this incident in Indonesia.  Geoffrey MG blog links to An American Expat in Southeast Asia, who is following the trial of Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, the man accused of masterminding the Bali bombing, blowing up Christian churches, plotting to kill the Indonesian President and being a key figure in Al Qaeda franchise Jemaah Islamiah. According to An American Expat in Southeast Asia, key defense for Abu Bakar Ba'asyir is being provided by a former US Embassy interpreter called Frank Burks. Burks interpreted for Presidents Clinton and Bush but resigned after he refused to agree to a  secrecy clause in his new contract.

"The contractor ... shall not communicate to any person or organization any information known to them by reason of their performance of services under this agreement that has not been made public, except in the necessary performance of their duties or upon written authorization of the contracting officer," the contract says. "These obligations do not cease upon the expiration or termination of this agreement."

A link provided by Burks, said to be original Washington Post URL bylined by Michael Dobbs, suggests the dispute was more than just a disagreement over contractual terms.

In addition to his complaints about government secrecy, Burks is at odds with the Bush administration over an unauthorized trip to Cuba that he made with his girlfriend in December 1999. The government initially fined him $7,590 for breaching the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba but eventually offered to let him pay only $250. Burks declined the deal, and the case has been referred to an administrative court for adjudication.

Burks charged that the United States had plotted to secretly arrest Abu Bakar Ba'asyir and take him to the US for questioning. This interview was conducted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation News.

Mr Burks, who appeared for Mr Bashir's defence team, spoke to Rafael Epstein in Jakarta.

FRED BURKS: It was the Ambassador, US Ambassador Ralph Boyce, it was the National Security Council expert on Indonesia, Karen Brooks, it was a special assistant to the President and myself. The four of us went over to Megawati's residence, and when we went in there was a little bit of, you know, small talk. Just, "How you doing?" Karen Brooks knew her well so. Then Karen introduced this special assistant saying that President Bush himself ordered this special assistant to come here and give a message. The special assistant then proceeded to describe information that the United States had obtained from Omar Al Faruk, who had been detained by the US.

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: He's someone who has been suspected of being an al-Qaeda operative.

FRED BURKS: Or somehow related to al-Qaeda, yes, and they say that he said that Abu Bakar Bashir was actually behind the Christmas bombings, behind two attempts on Megawati's life and also was thought to be the head of a Jemaah Islamiah, JI. And because of that, she, the special assistant requested, "We would like you to secretly capture him and turn him over". They used a term that I had not heard before then, "render" - not in the normal sense, but render means to secretly capture and turn over to another government.

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: So this was basically a request to the Indonesian President for them to secretly arrest Abu Bakar Bashir, hand him over to the American Government and the American Government would take him somewhere overseas and question him and keep him detained.

FRED BURKS: Exactly.

The Brunei Bulletin says Burks is repeating the story as a defense witness for Ba'asyir.

The witness, Fred Burks, told a court that a US envoy made the appeal in a meeting with former President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who took a breath and thought for a moment before saying, "I cannot fulfill the request of the US president." Burks said the envoy, who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, later warned that if the cleric, Abu Bakar Bashir, weren't handed over to U.S. authorities, "then there will be a problem."

The US witness told the South Jakarta District Court that he was the interpreter for the American delegation that met Megawati at her home on Sept. 16, 2002. Burks said the meeting also included then US Ambassador Ralph Boyce, US National Security Council official Karen Brooks and the CIA envoy, whom he declined to identify.

Although the name of the CIA agent was not mentioned in court, An American Expat in Southeast Asia suggests that someone subsequently divulged the name of a CIA agent outside the courtroom.

This is Mr. Fred Burks a former translator to George W. Bush who for unknown reasons seems to go out of his way in bending over backwards to help the defense team and goes into great detail about a secret meeting on the evening of 16 September 2002 at the residence of Megawati Sukarnoputri between Ambassador Ralph L. Boyce, the Indonesian Expert in the National Security Council (NSC) Ms. Karen Brooks, Mr. Fred Burks and a CIA agent whom Ambassador Boyce introduced as a special envoy to President Bush.

According to Mr. Burks, the CIA agent then informs Megawati that President Bush wants her to arrest Ba'asyir and gives a time deadline that Ba'asyir must be arrested before the APEC Summit Conference in Cabos, Mexico in October 2002. Megawati declines and say that she cannot arrest Ba'asyir or she will face domestic problems because of Ba'asyir's popularity. Can things get worse? They can if you tell someone the name of a female CIA agent outside the courtroom.

As the Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker illustrated, a large part of American society is unalterably opposed to the War on Terror not simply in Iraq. Despite President Bush's belief that his re-election in 2004 was a referendum which provided a mandate to pursue his strategy against  terrorism, there are many who disagree -- and virulently. Abu Bakar Ba'asyir may well be acquitted, in part by testimony from an American witness. The trial continues.

The terrorism trial of Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Bashir was halted abruptly Tuesday as his supporters tried to attack a witness testifying against the alleged leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah extremist group. The row erupted as Bashir's lawyers scolded Mohammad Nasir Abbas, a former key member of Jemaah Islamiyah, for repeatedly replying "no comment" as they cross-examined his claims the cleric was now the group's leader.

Police came to the rescue of Abbas, a Malaysian who served 10 months in prison in Indonesia for immigration offences, as Bashir's supporters tried to grab him from the witness stand, prompting judges hearing the case to flee the court. Tempers flared after Abbas earlier accused Bashir of leading Jemaah Islamiyah -- a valuable testimony for prosecutors struggling to link him to the Southeast Asian extremist group believed to have ties to Al-Qaeda.

 

Backward, Please

Stratfor reacts to Seymour Hersh's article in the New Yorker outlining the covert war that is being waged against terrorism. (Hat tip: MIG)

Logic tells us that these operations are going on. There is a gap between logic and confirmation that Hersh has chosen to bridge. More precisely, if Hersh is to be believed, a former U.S. intelligence officer allowed him to bridge this gap by providing him with information so sensitive that its disclosure would put in danger the lives of the members of the reconnaissance team, as well as the lives of Pakistani scientists cooperating with the United States.

... It comes down to this: On the broadest level, Hersh's story simply restates what is known or logical. On a deeper level, it reveals details that, if true, could cripple U.S. intelligence collection in Iran. That Hersh would publish this is a given. That he could get hold of information like this from the CIA is a crisis. Or, Hersh could simply have been the victim of U. S. information operations.

According to Hersh the operations are defective because they are an extension of current Bush policies by a new and more extreme means and can only lead to further and worse disasters. The Washington Post has carried an interview with President Bush which they argued showed he regarded the election as blanket absolution over any mistakes it may have made. But Hersh is making a subtly different point: he is suggesting that President Bush regardes the election as having given him a hunting license.

Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush’s reëlection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. ... Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing. “This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”

The key to the plan is a secret warfighting arm whose job is to undertake operations "off the books", a prospect that Hersh finds chilling.

Rumsfeld planned and lobbied for more than two years before getting Presidential authority, in a series of findings and executive orders, to use military commandos for covert operations. One of his first steps was bureaucratic: to shift control of an undercover unit, known then as the Gray Fox ... The order specifically authorized the military “to find and finish” terrorist targets, the consultant said. It included a target list that cited Al Qaeda network members, Al Qaeda senior leadership, and other high-value targets. ... “If a confused young man from Marin County can join up with Al Qaeda,” Arquilla wrote, referring to John Walker Lindh, the twenty-year-old Californian who was seized in Afghanistan, “think what professional operatives might do.”

As the earlier post on the supposed "blanket absolution" argued, the dialogue over a war now going into it's fourth year shows no closure or consensus at all. The argument between liberals and conservatives over the War on Terror is not limited to the specifics of Iraq policy, as is often alleged, but extends to the very issue of whether terrorism should be fought at all. From the outset many liberals believed, often sincerely, that a conciliatory rather than a combative approach should have been adopted towards radical Islamism. Any admiration professed for American efforts to destroy Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was articulated for the sole purpose of comparing it to the more difficult conditions in Iraq. The idea of appeasement never died. Hersh practically pitches for it in his article in the New Yorker:

For more than a year, France, Germany, Britain, and other countries in the European Union have seen preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon as a race against time—and against the Bush Administration. They have been negotiating with the Iranian leadership to give up its nuclear-weapons ambitions in exchange for economic aid and trade benefits. ... The Europeans have been urging the Bush Administration to join in these negotiations. The Administration has refused to do so.

There are many military and diplomatic experts who dispute the notion that military action, on whatever scale, is the right approach. Shahram Chubin, an Iranian scholar who is the director of research at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, told me, “It’s a fantasy to think that there’s a good American or Israeli military option in Iran.”

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita has gone on the record attacking Hersh's piece, ripping its specifics to pieces, while remaining silent on the key issue of whether there is in fact an unseen component to the Global War on Terror.

Mr. Hersh’s article is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed.  Mr. Hersh’s source(s) feed him with rumor, innuendo, and assertions about meetings that never happened, programs that do not exist, and statements by officials that were never made. A  sampling from this article alone includes:

• The post-election meeting he describes between the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not happen.
• The only civilians in the chain-of-command are the President and the Secretary of Defense, despite Mr. Hersh’s confident assertion that the chain of command now includes two Department policy officials. His assertion is outrageous, and constitutionally specious.
•  
• Arrangements Mr. Hersh alleges between Under Secretary Douglas Feith and Israel, government or non-government, do not exist. Here, Mr. Hersh is building on links created by the soft bigotry of some conspiracy theorists. This reflects poorly on Mr. Hersh and the New Yorker.
•  
• Mr. Hersh cannot even keep track of his own wanderings. At one point in his article, he makes the outlandish assertion that the military operations he describes are so secret that the operations are being kept secret even from U.S. military Combatant Commanders. Mr. Hersh later states, though, that the locus of this super-secret activity is at the U.S. Central Command headquarters, evidently without the knowledge of the commander if Mr. Hersh is to be believed.

By his own admission, Mr. Hersh evidently is working on an “alternative history” novel. He is well along in that work, given the high quality of “alternative present” that he has developed in several recent articles.

The Battle of the Ballot Box

Two briefings provided by the Department of Defense have clearly indicated that Mosul is going to be the chief battleground between US forces and the anti-Iraqi forces attempting to prevent Iraqi lections from taking place on January 30. The first briefing was given by General Batiste of 1ID, whose area of responsibility is north central Iraq, which includes Baqubah, Samarra and Tikrit. He was clearly confident. In "Diyala Province, Baqubah, things are going very well. Very well. I see no problems there." Moreover, his area of responsibility was generating the 4th Iraqi infantry division, a formation of 18 battalions. And although the area had experienced 87 vehicle borne IED attacks in the last 11 months, General Batiste conveyed the impression that not only was he giving better than he got, he was content to leave the main security duties to Iraqi forces with the American forces in the quick reaction role.

My 25,000 soldiers -- and by the way, that includes an extra brigade and twice the helicopters that I had a month ago -- will be in full support. We will be working with our Iraqi security force partners to make sure that what they're doing makes sense, to make sure that if they need help we are there to mentor and advise, and as I said earlier to provide the quick reaction forces that will be necessary to stomp on the insurgent when he raises his ugly head.

For their part, the anti-Iraqi forces were realigning their own strength, shifting their strength around for attacks, a fact of which Batiste was well aware and probably intent on thwarting.

There's no doubt that there will be elections in Samarra. We will set the conditions and the polling stations will be there. In Baiji there's another problem set. That's the crossroads for all the insurgents heading from Mosul to Baghdad, and from Fallujah to Kirkuk. And we are still in the process of developing and setting the conditions for successful elections in Baiji.

But if north central Iraq exuded confidence, the mood in northwestern Iraq clearly reflected the crisis conditions in that area. Brigadier General Carter Ham the commander of the Multinational Brigade-Northwest, and commander of Task Force Olympia described the situation in Mosul, where the elections would only be held with great difficulty.

Two months ago, the security situation in Mosul was rather tenuous. Many of you recall the 10th and 11th of November, when police largely failed, and the insurgents conducted widespread attacks. Then, on the 21st of December, a murderous attack killed 22, and wounded over 70 (the suicide bombing on Marez base -- Wretchard). More recently, the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq staff largely quit in Nineweh Province. Insurgents have mounted a gruesome campaign of murder, threats and intimidation.

Ham described the steps being taken to replace the electoral workers who had been frightened away from their posts.

This is the greatest -- this is the biggest challenge that the IECI faces in Mosul and throughout Nineweh Province right now. To tell you the truth, we don’t know how many staff there actually were, but we know that at one point there were essentially none left. There is a coordinator now appointed for Mosul -- he's present in Mosul, and is building a staff. He has asked the provincial governor for assistance in recruiting. We learned today that they have had some success, but they are -- together, the IECI, the provincial governor, local mayors and local councils are working to identify the workers that are necessary to operate the polling stations.

There's also some consideration, I believe, being given by the IECI to bringing in polling center staff from other parts of Iraq to assist in Mosul and throughout the province. So that's not yet a resolved issue, and it is one that needs to be resolved very quickly. It is the highest priority for the IECI staff that is in Mosul today.

The question was why any new electoral workers, having observed the fate of the old, would stay. The obvious answer was to provide them with better security and therein lay the rub. Mosul was peculiar in several respects. A huge city of 2 million people, it was one of Iraq's most ethnically diverse urban centers, a diversity sometimes better described as a ticking time bomb. Mosul was consciously repopulated with Arabs by Saddam Hussein in order to put his ethnic allies in control of the oil resources of the region. Today it has a large Sunni population whose ranks have been swelled by fighters fleeing from Fallujah, although the surrounding area remains largely Kurdish. After the largely Sunni police forces fled in the face of insurgent intimidation, the obvious alternative was to replace them with Kurds who could be expected to provide security with a capital S.

Q General, Rod Nordland from Newsweek magazine. Two questions closely related. Can you tell us a bit more about the new police chief and just what he's doing to get the police going again? And will they actually be on the streets come election day? And then we've heard from a lot of Sunnis complaints that after the mostly Sunni police force collapsed that the solution has been to bring in Kurds and Shi'ia from other parts of the country for Iraqi security forces, and they're quite unhappy about that.

GEN. HAM: The newly-appointed police chief was selected by the minister of interior, in consultation with a wide variety of individuals to include the provincial governor. He has been in Mosul now for a week, and is just starting the rebuilding process. Representatives of the minister of interior -- in fact, the minister of interior himself today was in Mosul discussing the rebuilding of the police force with the new chief and with the provincial governor.

But to use the Kurds against the Sunnis would be tantamount to ethnic cleansing, something that was strictly verboten. Thus the problem for US forces was to pacify a largely Sunni city without resorting to the tools that had made it Sunni in the first place. Wary of stirring up trouble between rival ethnic groups,  CENTCOM's way out of the dilemma, in contrast to north central Iraq, has been to beat the insurgents down with men of no local identity: American troops. The UK Times reports:

Thousands of American reinforcements are pouring into Iraq’s northern capital for a battle that could decide the fate of the country’s elections, being held in less than two weeks. In the biggest military operation since US troops stormed the rebel city of Fallujah two months ago, paratroopers, infantrymen and armoured units have converged on the city over the past two weeks, increasing the number of Americans on the ground to more than 10,000. Their objective is not only to wrest back control of the city from insurgents, but to create enough stability so that Mosul’s inhabitants can be coaxed into voting in the January 30 elections.

American numbers will be augmented by Iraqi forces from other parts of the country -- probably with units from the 4th Iraqi Infantry division.

While voters are expected to cast their ballots in the Shia Muslim South and the Kurdish North, this ethnically mixed city of two million could go either way. Half the population is Sunni Arab, but there are also large minorities of Kurds, Christians and other ethnic groups who might well vote if free from intimidation. On patrol with the Americans it is easy to see how divided Mosul is. In Kurdish areas the population waves enthusiastically at a passing patrol. In Arab areas the same Americans are greeted with angry stares and the troops scan rooftops and alleys for the next ambush.

Through the application of unrelenting terror the insurgents have managed to discipline their own ranks into pursuing a scorched earth strategy. Since they are in no conceivable position to retrieve their former position of power in Iraq, they are bent upon thwarting its attainment by anyone else. By refusing to unleash sectarian violence against the Sunnis and taking every step to coax their participation in the elections, the US hopes may hope to drive a wedge between the average Sunni Arab and the insurgent leadership, whose willingness to expend an unlimited quantity of blood and cruelty constitutes the ultimate asymmetrical weapon.

Gunmen killed eight Iraqi National Guard soldiers at a checkpoint in central Iraq on Monday, and eight people died in a suicide car bombing at a police station north of Baghdad, as insurgents struck at Iraqi security forces ahead of national elections. Some of the latest violence, including a series of weekend attacks along a highway southeast of Baghdad, occurred in provinces which U.S. and Iraqi authorities have deemed safe enough to hold the elections and appear to be attempts to scare the country's majority Shiites away from the Jan. 30 polls. Boston Com

"back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile...A pile of little arms. And I remember...I...I...I cried... I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized...like I was shot...Like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead...And I thought: My God...the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they that could stand that were not monsters...These were men...trained cadres...these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love...but they had the strength...the strength...to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral...and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling...without passion... without judgment...without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us. " -- Marlon Brando as Col. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now, courtesy of Gerard Van der Leun, American Digest

Absolution

The 

Correction

Readers have pointed out that the "Articles of Confederation" described above do not refer to the Civil War to an earlier period. I regret the error and am thankful to readers for pointing it out. Dave writes: "I took Bush to mean the Articles of Conferation ratified in 1781 that held the colonies together until the Constitution was ratified in 1788."

I thought I had put the correction in earlier in the day but discovered that for some reason I had omitted to.

Washington Post summarizes its account of an interview with President Bush entitled "US voters 'endorsed Iraq policy' " in the following way:

President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.

"We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. "The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me."

The BBC's "US voters 'endorsed Iraq policy' " reports the Washington Post interview in substantially identical terms: "Mr Bush said there was no need to hold any of his officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgements in pre-war planning or managing the aftermath. In an interview in Sunday's Washington Post he said that his re-election was an "accountability moment".  A CBS article entitled "Bush: Voters Ratified Iraq Policy" has this for its opening paragraph.

President Bush says his re-election proves Americans agree with his decision to invade Iraq, and that as a result, there's no need to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes made in planning for the war, or its aftermath  "We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections," Mr. Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post for Sunday's editions. "The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me."

Andrew Olmstead at Winds of Change quite naturally bristles at the idea that the 2004 election conferred a blanket absolution on any mistakes or misjudgements that the administration may have made.

Demonstrating a fascinating understanding of culpability, President Bush claims that his reelection victory means there is no reason to hold anyone culpable for mistakes made in planning or executing the Iraq war and its aftermath. One wonders if everyone would have voted the same had they known that was the message they were sending.

Of course, Bush didn't actually say 'there's no need to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes made in planning for the war, or its aftermath'. The Washington Post's transcript of the interview renders the actual exchange as follows.

The Post: In Iraq, there's been a steady stream of surprises. We weren't welcomed as liberators, as Vice President Cheney had talked about. We haven't found the weapons of mass destruction as predicted. The postwar process hasn't gone as well as some had hoped. Why hasn't anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election. And the American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me, for which I'm grateful.

Listen, in times of war, things don't go exactly as planned. Some were saying there was no way that Saddam Hussein would be toppled as quickly as we toppled him. Some were saying there would be mass refugee flows and starvation, which didn't happen. My only point is, is that, on a complicated matter such as removing a dictator from power and trying to help achieve democracy, sometimes the unexpected will happen, both good and bad.

And the point is, there has to be a flexible strategy that will enable our commanders on the ground and our diplomats to be able to adjust strategy to meet the needs on the ground, all aiming at an eventual goal, which is a free and democratic Iraq, not in our image, in their image, according to their customs. See, we haven't been -- we've been there -- sovereignty was transferred in June of 2004. So this has been a sovereign nation in its new form for less than a year. I'm optimistic about it, and so are a lot of other people who were there in Iraq --optimistic about that, being optimistic about the emergence of a free government.

I'm also mindful that it takes a while for democracy to take hold. Witness our own history. We weren't -- we certainly were not the perfect democracy and are yet the perfect democracy. Ours is a constitution that said every man -- a system that said every man was equal, but in fact, every man wasn't equal for a long period of time in our history. The Articles of Confederation were a bumpy period of time. And my only point is, is that I am realistic about how quickly a society that has been dominated by a tyrant can become a democracy. And therefore, I am more patient than some, but also mindful that we've got to get the Iraqis up and running as quickly as possible, so they can defeat these terrorists.

The interview rapidly moved on to other questions which are listed below verbatim, before passing on to the subject of Social Security.

1. There [are] signs of a manpower squeeze in the regular Army. The National Guard and Reserves have been pressed to their limit. Do you plan to ask Congress to authorize additional National Guard or regular Army units?
2. Why do you think [Osama] bin Laden has not been caught?
3. Our allies have done all they can do to help catch him?
4. Anyone you're not happy with?
5. How concerned are you about the enormously high levels of anti-Americanism, particularly in the Muslim world? And is that an indication that somehow the terrorists are winning the hearts and minds of those people?

It was a pity. The Post implicitly invited President Bush to confess four sins. The first accusation was that the President had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the War on Terror leading to "high levels of anti-Americanism" throughout the world. The second was culpability for an intelligence failure on the existence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. The third was that he made a political misjudgement in thinking that bringing democracy to Iraq was possible. The fourth was the charge of incompetence in the prosecution of the war and the occupation of Iraq.

The reader may judge for himself whether the Post's summary is a fair restatement of the President's answer. But it seems abundantly clear that he said rather more than 'the election absolved everyone of guilt'. He candidly admitted to making mistakes. "Listen, in times of war, things don't go exactly as planned." and compared the difficulties in Iraq to one of the most trying periods in American history -- the Civil War and Reconstruction. "I'm also mindful that it takes a while for democracy to take hold. Witness our own history. ...  The Articles of Confederation were a bumpy period of time." President made no effort to address any of the specific charges implicitly made by the Post. He seemed content to admit that certain mistakes had gone been made -- without specifying what these were -- but seemed to insist that despite these he had fundamentally done the right thing and that the American people had agreed with him.

Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election. And the American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me, for which I'm grateful.

Thus passed another moment in the nonspecific policy debate over Iraq. Had the Post's accusations been answered individually it might have been reasonable for the President to assert that while the electorate had endorsed President Bush's general strategy on the War on Terror, the intelligence apparatus had been found definitely wanting; and that the jury was still out on the subject of whether democracy could be nourished in the Middle East and whether the military strategy employed had been chiefly correct. That would have created the possibility of closure in the fundamental approach to the War on Terror while leaving open the debate on where to go from here. The election of 2004 closed some doors only to open new ones. "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

More Men on the Ground 3

A reader provides four links, all related to the subject of troop strengths and occupation.

1. RAND's Lessons Learned;
2. Steven Budiansky in the Washington Post;
3. Colonel Daniel Smith's Iraq: Descending into the Quagmire; and
4. James Quinlivan's Force Requirements in Stability Operations in Parameters

Everything except Budiansky and Smith's articles are a few years old. The ratio between occupying troops to population described in these publications can be calculated as follows (thanks to the reader, who does not wish to be identified, for the summary table)

Country	Ratio per thousands
Germany	100 rapidly descending to 25
Kosovo	20
Bosnia	18.6
Japan	5
Somalia	5
Haiti	3.5
Afghanistan	0.2
Iraq countrywide	6
Baghdad only	11
Malaya (Emergency)	20
Northern Ireland (on occasion)	20
Horn of Africa	?
Central Asia	?

The reader notes the Parameters article sets out the following historical ratios of adequacy for troops to population ratios.

Scenario	Ratio
Policing	2.2
Some resistance	4 to 10
Serious counterinsurgency	20

Iraq veteran and Marine Chester has more thoughts on the concept of a "Colonial Corps" -- a force whose primary mission is stabilization and reconstruction. He notes that the Robert Kaplan argued in Indian Country that smaller, but more focused American contingents actually do better than massive deployments of large formations. Kaplan said:

In months of travels with the American military, I have learned that the smaller the American footprint and the less notice it draws from the international media, the more effective is the operation. One good soldier-diplomat in a place like Mongolia can accomplish miracles. A few hundred Green Berets in Colombia and the Philippines can be adequate force multipliers. Ten thousand troops, as in Afghanistan, can tread water. And 130,000, as in Iraq, constitutes a mess that nobody wants to repeat--regardless of one's position on the war.

Of course this is in some sense a comparison between apples and oranges. A perusal of the provided links shows how different one occupation is from another. It was surprising to find from the RAND study that "The United States and its allies have put 25 times more money and 50 times more troops per capita into postconflict Kosovo than into postconflict Afghanistan" or that by today's standards Harry Truman and George Marshall would be regarded as abject failures.

George Marshall was seriously concerned about the potential economic collapse of Germany in winter 1947, a concern that led to the passage of the Marshall Plan in 1948, three years after the end of the war. Japan had one of the slowest rates of recovery among the case studies. Per capita incomes in Bosnia have recovered much more rapidly; those in Kosovo exceeded preconflict levels within 24 months of the end of the conflict. In Japan, this did not happen until 1956, over a decade after the end of the war.

Against Kaplan's observation there is the undeniable fact that there is an historical inverse relationship between the number of occupation troops deployed and American casualties. But just as in the case of Kaplan's observations, this too may be apples and oranges.  There is at least some question about comparing a society like Japan's, occupied in the age of mass armies by an America willing to resort to an Atom Bomb, with the politically correct warfare that is waged by professional armies today. Chester rightly draws our attention to a formation which he suggests has certain characteristics of a proto-colonial corps, the Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa.

"Combined" means it has forces from more than just the US, and "joint" means it employs members of all US forces. This task force has in the past had responsibility for military training and operations, sometimes diplomacy, humanitarian assistance, and intelligence collection in the countries of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Yemen, Kenya, and Tanzania, though not all of these are currently listed on its website. ...

It must be noted that these ad hoc colonial operations efforts incorporate the concept of "jointness" in a much greater way than has been the case in the past. Though jointness is only mandated by law amongst the military services, it has now expanded to include the incorporation of subject-matter experts from a variety of government agencies -- the State Dept, the Treasury Dept, the FBI, the CIA, etc. – within military units. Jointness concepts continue to expand – the consultation of foreign military advisors by Central Command has recently been in the news. In this sense, jointness means using existing agencies, personnel, and capabilities in cross-functional and interdisciplinary ways to tackle complex problems (like reconstruction, or colonial operations).

Neither Chester nor the unattributed Belmont Club reader touch on what the Defense Science Board study called strategic communication: something an earlier generation would have called political warfare or the propaganda war.

Strategic communication -- which encompasses public affairs, public diplomacy, international broadcasting, information operations, and special activities -- is vital to America’s national security and foreign policy. Over the past few decades, the strategic communication environment and requirements have changed considerably as a result of many influences. Some of the most important of these influences are a rise in anti-American attitudes around the world; the use of terrorism as a framework for national security issues; and the volatility of Islamic internal and external struggles over values, identity, and change. ... America needs a revolution in strategic communication rooted in strong leadership from the top and supported by an orchestrated blend of public and private sector components.

But then an earlier generation would have been ignorant of bloggers like Chester and the "joint" response of Internet outlets to propaganda attacks mounted by the enemy through traditional media channels.

Update

Major Mike writes in Comments:

All-in-all I think the comparisons of the various occupation force levels, while mathematically interesting, take little of the operational differences of each of the circumstances into account. I won’t belabor the point, but insurgency strength and organization, insurgency weaponeering and available re-supply, leadership capability, popular support, terrain, insurgent tactics, and occupier objectives will all drive the force levels and organization. Generally, the better the weaponeering of the enemy, the more difficult the terrain, the more popular support for the insurgency, the better the tactics of the insurgents; the more forces it will take for the liberators/occupiers to be successful. I think the variables are too great to put a marker down as the “correct” number or ratio.

Casualties will not correspondingly be lowered simply because occupying forces add troop strength. Occupying force casualties will certainly rise if these forces are unable to adapt their force structures and tactics to EFFECTIVELY combat the insurgent group(s) or population. Adding more troops on the ground without developing winning strategies and tactics only increases the target density for the enemy. Highly effective and adaptive tactics could easily have the effect of lowering the overall troop requirements and casualties. Conversely, poor tactics and strategies have always resulted in higher unit casualties, and bear a greater role in overall casualty rates than force strengths. This is true in all operational environments.

Additionally, I cringe a bit with talk of re-organization to “colonial” style forces, or a variation thereof. The post World War I explosion of nationalistic movements throughout the world can be attributed directly to the occupation of nations by colonial forces. Fighting an insurgent nationalistic force would be logarithmically more costly than fighting a disgruntled band of malcontents and outsiders. Our current reliance on our conventional forces necessitates development of efficient and effective tactics to be successful in Iraq. In our current situation, our force limitations are a driving factor for immediate tactical innovation and strategic re-thinking, both key elements in finding a quick, but decisive tactical/strategic combination for exiting Iraq. Developing specific occupation forces would lessen this sense of urgency, re-invigorate grass roots nationalistic movements world wide, and plant the vision of the US as a global conqueror.

The reasons for post-invasion occupation success are as varied as the situations in which they have occurred. Docile and defeated populations, free from outside agitation, have been relatively easy to pacify. Divided nations where the unpopular will of an outside nation is being imposed, have been costly and deadly to occupy. I doubt this will change in the near future, regardless of the amount of strategic analysis that occurs. I submit that our current force structures, with our ability and experience in task organizing, our weaponerring, and our advanced military educational programs, can provide workable solutions long into the future without major force or structural changes. In the end, it will be our mastery of the operational art that will be the difference between success and failure, not mathmatics.

Part of the problem of wanting something is that you might get it. The desire to have "more boots on the ground", to 'bring freedom to the Middle East' sets in train a number of activities which may not turn out exactly as one expected. In the comments section of the torture posts I pointed out that while the United States had historically ceded unilateral military advantages to the enemy in order to stay within its self-appointed moral bounds it just as often developed compensating capabilities. Thus, it avoided using poison gas on Iwo Jima and Okinawa because that was proscribed but it developed "blowtorch and corkscrew" tactics which, by combination of demolition and flamethrower, buried the Japanese defenders alive when they did not roast them: that was permitted under Geneva. During the Cold War there was a clamor to renounce a first strike on the Soviet Union so America built an arsensal so large that it could survive any Soviet pre-emptive strike and still incinerate the enemy. Current criticisms of the DOD's shortcomings in planning for the occupation of Iraq may in time generate a Colonial Corps that Major Mike warns against.

The Defense Science Board study pointed out that agitation for this kind of interventionary capacity pre-dated OIF. The clamor for the organizational wherewithal to engage in nation-building, dealing with failed states, humanitarian intervention, etc. is ironically something that the Left has long wanted and which Conservatives may wind up providing. Perhaps one argument for the existence of God is the occasional discovery that a joke has been played on humanity. But that remark is not entirely facetious. Sam Huntington, author of the "Clash of Civilizations", recently gave an interview in Japan Today (hurry before the link expires) in which he argues that God, in some sense, is the greatest ideological force today.

In an interview with Kyodo News on postelection America and the world, Huntington, a professor at Harvard University, said the United States is now going through a period of religious "Great Awakening." ... We have gone through several religious revivals. They are called "Great Awakenings." We had one before the (American) revolution, which many historians say created the basis for the revolution, another in the early 19th century, which generated all sorts of reforms, including the abolitionist movement to abolish slavery. I think we are going through such a period of Great Awakening now. The movement is in a way meeting a great concern of the American people about the decline of morality and traditional values.

 The first Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s coincided with the intensification of the wars between the British and the French, which were fought in part here in North America. It certainly played a major role in promoting the development of an American sense of nationality. ... The current (Great Awakening), with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the U.S. as the only superpower, it seems to me, has reinforced the sense of confidence in ability to go out and change the world in ways in which we think it should be changed. That is very notable in the policies of the Bush administration.

More Men on the Ground 2

The Defense Science Board, an organization which consists of eminent civilian experts to advise the Department of Defense,  issued a report entitled Summer Study 2004: Transition to and from Hostilities. (Hat tip: Cedarford) But it should really be entitled a Guide to Occupation Warfare, Present and Future. The report opens with the observation that  "U.S. military expeditions to Afghanistan and Iraq are unlikely to be the last such excursions." But before setting forth its recommendations, it notes with some irony that US forces were historically never designed for occupation and conquest and lack even the conceptual framework with which to approach "the stabilization and reconstruction operations that follow hostilities". The study task force consisted of civilians with considerable military, industrial or diplomatic experience. A full list of the report's authors is at the Belmont Lounge. The report was commissioned in January 2004 with the mandate to examine how best to perform the following tasks in Iraq and Afghanistan:

1. Protect the US forces during occupation;
2. Neutralize and destroy munitions stocks;
3. Exploit intelligence in the aftermath of the fall of the Hussein regime;
4. Stabilize the condition of the civilian population;
5. Re-establish the rule of law; and
6. Rebuild Iraq

It concluded that the United States should create occupation contingency plans for any countries it was likely to invade. The development of these plans in their fullest sense was not currently part of the military planning process. Indeed, they could not be formulated by the military alone. A new interagency mechanism was needed to generate them.

We believe this management discipline, now focused on combat operations, must be extended to peacetime activities, to stabilization and reconstruction operations, and to intelligence—not only in DOD, but across the government. ... The process should be codified in a presidential directive. ... DOD and the Department of State need to make stabilization and reconstruction (S&R) missions one of their core competencies. Success in these missions depends upon a stronger partnership and closer working relationship between the two departments.

The report called for what amounted to a Colonial Corps. "To be fully effective the United States will need to have some of its people continuously abroad for years, so they become familiar with the local scene and the indigenous people come to trust them as individuals -- tours of duty that we imagine to be far longer than traditional assignments today."

History indicates that stabilization of societies that are relatively ordered, without ambitious goals, may require 5 troops per 1000 indigenous people; while stabilization of disordered societies, with ambitious goals involving lasting cultural change, may require 20 troops per 1000 indigenous people. That need, with the cumulative requirement to maintain human resources for three to five overlapping stabilization operations as noted above, presents a formidable challenge.

As an aside, one should note that if these recommendations are to be taken seriously nothing that Donald Rumsfeld could have done in the short term before Operation Iraqi Freedom would have fitted the bill. Deploying a larger number of regular military formations as Fred Kagan has suggested would not have helped much. What was required was not more combat formations of monolingual young Americans but something rather different and which America did not then or in the foreseeable future possess.

The report also recognized that occupation warfare required a very large political and public relations component, which they termed "strategic communiction"to articulate a political message with the full force of American media resources. It observed there was an entire propaganda front in which US military with its rigid separation from the press was not prepared to address and which had been ceded to the enemy with its purposeful media strategy.

Strategic communication -- which encompasses public affairs, public diplomacy, international broadcasting, information operations, and special activities -- is vital to America’s national security and foreign policy. Over the past few decades, the strategic communication environment and requirements have changed considerably as a result of many influences. Some of the most important of these influences are a rise in anti-American attitudes around the world; the use of terrorism as a framework for national security issues; and the volatility of Islamic internal and external struggles over values, identity, and change. ... America needs a revolution in strategic communication rooted in strong leadership from the top and supported by an orchestrated blend of public and private sector components.

But most of all America needed better human intelligence capabilities to successfully conduct any successful occupation warfare. Overhead satellite imagery and electronic intercepts might help, but they it was eyes on the ground that were required above all. An earlier post pointed out that  Howard Hart, a former CIA clandestine officer alleged there "are far far fewer clandestine service officers serving abroad than there are faculty members at the University of Virginia. ... It is hard to reach them to recruit them in the first place. The universities with the highest concentrations of talent are hostile toward the CIA." It needed capabilities which were in very short supply and in some cases nonexistent. But the Defense Science Board concluded that it was impossible to win occupation warfare without them:

We need to treat learning knowledge of culture and developing language skills as seriously as we treat learning combat skills: both are needed for success in achieving U.S. political and military objectives. But collecting, compiling, and sustaining cultural knowledge of this sort, as well as developing linguistic competency in a wide array of languages, requires an effort and attention span that is far longer than the short-term focus that is typical of those who use and collect information and intelligence today. ... Language skills are a key enabler of country and area knowledge. Today, DOD lacks sufficient personnel with the languages and skills that are required for countries ripe and important.

Earlier Belmont Club posts noted how Middle Eastern warfare, beginning in modern times from the Franco-Algerian war in the 1960s favored a strategic withdrawal by its militarily weaker forces into social redoubts, defended not by concrete fortifications but by a nearly impenetrable barriers of kinship, language and religion. America might deploy a million men to Iraq and physically control every inch of ground, but unless it could reach into this social fortress it could never successfully engage the enemy.

The Defense Science Board believed that in addition to human intelligence the US needed to pursue revolutionary technologies which would help identify and track terrorist forces calling for an effort at par with the Manhattan Project.

A variety of available and emerging technologies can be brought to bear to identify objects or people of interest from surveillance data and to verify a specific individual’s identification. Available or emerging technologies include biometrics, tags, object recognition, and identification tokens. However, further development of sensors and databases is needed to overcome the shortcomings of conventional intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems.

We believe an integrated, coherent approach is required in order to develop identification, tagging, tracking, and locating (ID/TTL) capabilities that will give U.S. military forces the same advantage finding targets in asymmetric warfare that it has in conventional warfare. Although much good work is going on today, it is disjointed across disconnected activities, organizations, and interests. What is needed is a discipline—not “just” a set of excellent programs— focused on the overall ID/TTL challenge. We recommend that the secretary of defense, along with the new head of the intelligence community, establish a “Manhattan Project”-like program for ID/TTL. (Emphasis theirs)

Although it is possible to find occasional -- and very passing references -- to the possible lack of occupation troops and shortcomings in pre-invasion planning, the Summer Study 2004 report clearly doesn't assign much importance to the kinds of short-term steps which Kagan and Andrew Sullivan have suggested -- having more troops to guard dams and pipelines -- which essentially consisted of larger deployments of kinds of military units available in early 2003. The report makes a far more serious criticism: that the US embarked on a mission to transform the Middle East in 2003 while lacking even a modicum of the capability necessary to undertake the task required. Indeed, as Kevin Drum has observed, if Rumsfeld had acknowledged all that he lacked in the days after September 11, "the invasion of Iraq almost certainly would never have happened". Nor, one might add, would have it struck back against terrorism at all had the full extent of its defense shortcomings been known as the towers were falling onto Manhattan.

In hindsight the days immediately after the World Trade Center attacks were a time of naivete for both terrorist and American counter-terrorist strategists. If Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein erred in believing that the US would fall after a few sharp blows, America may have wrongfully believed that a sharp riposte in the Arab heartland would topple the age-old hatreds that had encrusted there. The generation which marched off to the Western Front in 1914 eventually discovered that no one would be "home before the leaves fall".  As it happened, the generation of 1914 would return eventually though not as they imagined and never to the homes they had left behind. The intractability of Middle Eastern terrorism will eventually call forth a corresponding irresistability in the American response. "Stabilization and reconstruction operations" are much more than something Donald Rumsfeld forgot in the lead up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. They represent a terrifying and historically inevitable response to the terrorist way of war.

Update

Norman Podhoretz has a long essay called The War Against World War IV (hat tip: Roger Simon) which can be read as an eerie companion piece to this post. He makes two large points. The first is that America has no alternative but to accept battle against this enemy. The second is quoted by Roger Simon.

Furthermore, facing a conflict that may well go on for three or four decades, Americans of this generation are called upon to be more patient than "the greatest generation" needed to be in World War II, which for us lasted only four years; and facing an enemy even more elusive than the Communists, the American people of today are required to summon at least as much perseverance as the American people of those days did-for all their bitching and moaning-over the 47 long years of World War III. Indeed, in this area the generation of World War IV has an even more difficult row to hoe than its predecessors in World War II and World War III.

A Colonial Corps indeed.

More Men on the Ground

Kevin Drum points out that Andrew Sullivan's argument that Rumsfeld starved Iraq of troops founders on the problem of arithmetic. (Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds)

Here's why I ask. Suppose Rumsfeld had agreed with guys like Eric Shinseki and proposed an invasion with more troops. How many could he have called on?  Several months ago I chatted with Phil Carter about this and then did a bit of research on my own, and as near as I can tell the answer is this: if we used every single active combat brigade of the Army and Marines — denuding our forces everywhere in the world to do it — and then filled up every possible National Guard and reserve brigade, we might scrape up about 500,000 troops. ...

Realistically, then, the maximum number of troops available for use in Iraq is probably pretty close to the number we have now: 300,000 rotated annually, for a presence of about 150,000 at any given time. The only way to appreciably increase this is to raise the Army's end strength by several divisions, and this is exactly what Kagan and Sullivan think Rumsfeld has been too stubborn about opposing.

Jason Van Steenwyk at Iraq Now makes a very similar argument, tackling the Fred Kagan article which Andrew Sullivan quotes for support.

Just how many troops does Kagan think it would have taken to guard all these dumps? Assuming, of course, that we could even have known where they were all located. All the Iraqi tribes and clans amassed large ammunition stocks of their own, even under Saddam Hussein. I'm talking about hundreds of mortar shells, artillery shells, landmines, machine guns, and RPGs at a time, which are buried in the back yards of sheikhs and those loyal to them all over the country.

The clans, you see, were very nervous about a civil war, even down to the interclan level within provinces and cities. Saddam Hussein managed to keep a lid on clan v. clan warfare within the Sunni community. But the sheikhs had to plan for after Saddam, too. And they did. It's foolish to suppose that simply forming a ring around the ammunition dumps would have prevented an insurgency. There is no problem getting explosives in Iraq, even without tapping the official government stores.

The heart of Kagan's argument was that the Donald Rumsfeld failed to expand the US ground forces immediately after taking office. With more troops available, Kagan argued, it would have been possible to:

• Capture or kill thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were at that time still concentrated in combat units and had not yet melted back into the countryside with their weapons and their skills.
• Guard the scores of enormous ammunition dumps from which the insurgents have drawn the vast majority of their weapons, ammunition, and explosives.
• Secure critical oil and electrical infrastructure that the insurgents subsequently attacked, setting back the economic and political recovery of Iraq.
• Prevent the development of insurgent safe havens in Najaf and Falluja, or at least disrupt them at a much earlier stage of formation.
• Work to interdict the infiltration of foreign fighters across Iraq's borders.

Steenwyk attempts to rebut each of Kagan's arguments point by point, in part based on his own experience in Iraq. The main thrust of his counterargument is that more troops per se would not have made a difference if a purely defensive posture were adopted. And a more effective offense was impossible at the time because of the lack of targeting intelligence and the policy of ignoring Syrian, Iranian and Saudi provocation.

There is no reason of course, why intelligence improvements and changes in policy towards Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia cannot be combined with an increase in available ground forces. Rumsfeld's efforts to reorganize divisions into a larger number of smaller brigades and the reallocation of money from weapons systems like submarines to the ground forces are tacit acknowledgement that the ground forces need to be augmented. So it is not as if Rumsefeld was against more available men in principle. OIF was planned from the outset with more men than were available (the 4th ID did not attack through the Sunni Triangle, thanks to the UN and Turkey) and the OIF rotations have used as many men as were sustainably deployable. A larger ground force implies creating distortions in the "whole spectrum force" capability or a bigger defense budget. It's a political decision at heart and a money decision in particular as are aspects of policy towards Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. It needs to be addressed in the Congress as much as the DOD; and it needs to arise from a national consensus, which the recently concluded Presidential election indicates is slim at best.

Update

Ex-Marine and Iraq veteran Chester says this about military manpower or the lack thereof. He dissects the assertions of Stratfor's George Friedman that the US ground component is a "broken force".

After Viet Nam, the nation's military leadership decided that in the future they did not want to fight another unpopular war. They therefore restructured the US Army such that nearly all of its combat support and combat service support units were transferred to the Reserves. We've heard various figures but for some specialties, close to 90% of the personnel needed for some key support missions are reservists. The thinking on the part of the Army leadership, specifically Chief of Staff General Creighton Abrams, was that since any large scale deployment of Army combat forces would require combat service support personnel to be activated, that politicians would be hesitant to commit the Army to a large-scale conflict unless they were sure that it would be supported be an electorate totally fine with watching its citizen soldiers deploy and possibly die. This situation continues today. One reason why such a large number of the Army personnel deployed in iraq are reservists is because there simply are no active-duty troops who do their jobs. ...

Friedman's thesis is thus:

1. Rumsfeld is correct about the changing nature of war, but wrong about the tempo of the change.
2. The US needs drastically more troops in Iraq.

Friedman even mentions that the US' personnel policies "have not been radically restructured to take into account either that the U.S. needs a wartime force structure or that that force structure must be congruent with the type and tempo of operations that will be undertaken." But he doesn't quite go the whole nine yards and say what is left unsaid: The US cannot commit more troops to Iraq because it has no more troops to commit. Troops must be cycled and rotated on a manageable schedule. We have maxed that out. Any further increase in troop rotations would leave us strategically vulnerable in other theaters. 150,000 or so at a time is the best we can do.

 

One of the interesting things about Andrew Sullivan's criticism of operations in Iraq is the nonrecognition of the fact that military means is only partially a function of raw troop numbers. US ground forces are actually smaller than many of the other major powers. Using  these CSIS estimates (West) and CSIS Estimates Asia and CSIS Estimates Middle East as a basis, we have the following figures for world ground forces manpower:

Nation	Manpower (thousands)
USA	472
China	1,600
North Korea	950
South Korea	560
India	1,100
Turkey	495
Russia	348
Iran	540
Former Iraq	350

What made US forces comparatively potent compared to these other armies was many of the very things whose advantages have been negated or diluted in the Iraqi campaign: namely, strategic mobility, supporting fires, the control of air and space and targeting systems. The US was never going to win the "numbers game" if it could not compensate for it in other ways with which it provided itself for conventional battlefield. But the kinds of capabilities it needs to restore its comparatively few numbers to a dominant position in Iraq are things like HUMINT, language capabilities and robotic systems. Without these capabilities, simply adding more troops can bring some relief, but never a decisive access in strength.

To a large extent the development of US HUMINT and language capabilities hinges on the development of Iraqi forces and the retention of experienced soldiers into the US Armed Forces. The creation of a new Iraqi state always had an implicit military dimension, a fact of which the insurgents have always been cognizant but of which many US commentators have been dismissive. Many of the 'transformational' efforts reported in the press, such as training programs for Iraqi security forces, the 'flattening' of US Army formations by breaking them up into smaller independent units, the rotation of the same units back into Iraq, the development of unmanned aerial and ground vehicles -- and the elections -- especially the elections are part of the effort to increase the military means. That's not to say that simply adding more troops will not ipso facto help, but it is only one factor in the equation and the one bounded by the harshest constraints.

Update 2

Parapundit reviews the presentation of Howard Hart, a former CIA clandestine operative who has little patience for Porter Goss, but less for the agency for which he once worked.

Howard Hart, former CIA clandestine service officer, said on C-SPAN 2 that there are far far fewer clandestine service officers serving abroad than there are faculty members at the University of Virginia. He also said there are fewer than there are FBI agents serving at the FBI NYC office. He was speaking at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at University of Virginia on Dec. 3, 2004 for a seminar entitled Futre of CIA Espionage Operations. Hart expects many more countries to develop nuclear weapons in the future. Hart says it is extremely difficult to recruit people into the clandestine service of the CIA. It is hard to reach them to recruit them in the first place. The universities with the highest concentrations of talent are hostile toward the CIA.

CIA's intake of junior officers every year is low. 1995: 25 junior trainee case officers for the year. More died that year. Same happened during the Carter Administration. He said Stansfield Turner, DCI under Carter, was a disaster. He said it wasn't until the Iranian embassy seizure that Carter realized the world is full of bad people and that the CIA needed the capability to defend against those bad people.

More than half a century ago military analysts played the numbers game between formations of dissimilar capabilities and types. During World War 2, a battleship was rated the 'equivalent' of an Army Corps (2 divisions). Some more recent equivalences used by military accountants would be ground forces division=carrier battlegroup=airforce air wing, but these are more notional than actual. No one would dream of using the one in place of the other. Part of the problem with arguing, as Kagan and Sullivan do, that X number of troops should have been deployed to Iraq instead of Y number is that sheer troop numbers are not a good numaire or yardstick for what one really wants to measure, which is capability. Howard Hart's recital of the sheer paucity of American clandestine agents raises the question of what the real constraining factors of battlefield dominance are. There is probably more than enough conventional military firepower in Iraq to incinerate any conceivable target. Even during the second battle for Fallujah, the calls on artillery and air did not stretch their capabilities. But where these fires are to be directed or raids are to be launched is a function of actionable intelligence. And that -- as Howard Hart suggests -- may be constrained in some ways.

The Revenge of the Dittoheads

In December 2004, Juan Cole asserted that the Iraq the Model blogsite was not representative of Iraqi opinion. Cole believed that Omar was far too pro-American to be taken seriously and presented as proof an April 2004 Gallup poll which concluded that most Iraqis believed US forces were detestable occupiers. The Gallup poll was based on a sample of 3,500 Iraqis across the country from a variety of ethnic groups.

"My allegation that the IraqTheModel website is far outside the norm of Iraqi public opinion as measured by polling has caused a stir in the weblogging world among, apparently, dittoheads who can't read polls."

On Balance, do you think of the Americans mostly as Occupiers or liberators?

Occupiers: 71 %
Liberators 19%

etc.

Although that poll was a year old and taken at the height of fighting in Iraq Cole had presented his data and awaited a response. Iraq the Model answers with a new poll taken by the Al-Sabah newspaper based on a sample of slightly fewer than 5,000 people living around Baghdad. Although it is not strictly comparable to the Gallup Poll, the Al-Sabah poll suggests things may be a little more complex than Professor Cole believes. (Hat tip: Mudville Gazette)

1-The poll was of 4974 Iraqis living in and around Baghdad.

2-Will the security problems cause you to? Not come out and vote the day of elections = 18.3% Come out and vote the day of elections = 78.3% No opinion = 3.4%

3-Do you support military action against the terrorists?Yes = 87.7 %No = 11.1% Don’t Know = 1.2%

If these were the results that appeared after taking samples from in and around Baghdad which is considered to be the most dangerous area in the country (and inhabited by lots of Sunni Iraqis by the way!), then what would the results look like if the samples were taken from Basra or Erbil??

Of course, what will really count are the Iraqi election results on January 30. While a high voter turnout may not necessarily indicate a rejection by the Sunni community of the insurgency, it would certainly be a strong indicator that the Iraqi nation as a whole did not support it. Who's right? Juan Cole or Iraq the Model? We'll know in three weeks.

Trading Punches

The terrorist campaign to derail elections scheduled for January 30 approach continues apace.

Baghdad, Iraq Jan 10, 2005 -- The deputy police chief of Baghdad and his son, also a police officer, were shot dead Monday, and a suicide car bomb detonated inside a police station courtyard, killing at least four policemen, the latest violence ahead of the country's landmark election. Scores of police and regional government officials have been assassinated in recent months, part of the insurgents' campaign to try to instill fear ahead of the Jan. 30 vote and to hunt down people who are perceived as collaborators with the U.S.-led coalition. Last week, gunmen shot dead the governor of Baghdad, Ali al-Haidari, and six of his bodyguards.

A background briefing provided by a senior State Department official expected a large turnout in Shia and Kurdish areas, with the Sunni areas the more problematic. The campaign to stop the elections is expected to intensify with emphasis on more spectacular attacks.

Ayatollah Sistani issued a religious edict, a fatwa, saying that it is an obligation for people to vote, men and women. Everyone that we are talking to from the Shi'a community is telling us that that edict is having a significant impact on people's thinking. And I expect to see a very heavy turnout among Iraq's Shi'a. In the northern part of the country, in the Kurdish areas, of course they have already been having elections since they set up the regional government there several years ago... So I think you're going to have very heavy turnout in the Kurdish areas, very heavy turnout in Shi'a areas. Those two parts of Iraq alone by themselves probably comprise 75 to 80 percent of Iraq's overall population. ...

In Sunni areas I think it's going to vary from location to location. Some places, obviously Ramadi (and Fallujah ?), are going to be less high than in Shi'a or Kurdish areas. There are some parts of the Sunni Triangle where the security right now, frankly, is not that bad. In parts of Diyala Province, some parts of Salahuddin Province, some parts of Nineveh Province, is not all blood and fire and destruction in all places every day. Some places obviously do have problems, but many places do not.

The press is expected to focus on the 'growing chaos' in Iraq in the lead up to the elections. But the Senior State Department briefer paradoxically characterized the expected violence as on par with the Algerian elections of the 1990s and actually improving.

But I want to say that I was in Algeria during the mid-1990s. I was the political officer at the American embassy then, and the violence in Algeria in the mid-1990s -- (audio break) -- go back and look at it, really was not any less than what we're seeing in some of the Sunni provinces here. Yet they were able to conduct an election in those -- in the worst-hit part of Algeria, they got voter turnout 50 percent. ...

Q Rick Whittle with the Dallas Morning News again. I just wanted to ask -- I wanted to follow up on your answer to my original question about the security situation. Why do you say the security situation has gotten better in the last six weeks? I believe the governor of Baghdad was assassinated today and yesterday was quite a violent day. If you could just explain what you mean, how you see it that way.

SR. STATE DEPT. OFFICIAL: To be simple about it, the number of attacks against coalition and Iraqi forces six weeks ago was probably about double what it is now. ...  number of ... soldiers getting killed six weeks ago was much higher than it is now. They have changed their targets more to softer targets -- going after police, going after National Guard and things like that -- but the number of attacks themselves has dropped sharply.

ABC and Reuters ran a story noting the same trend: fewer, but more powerful attacks -- headline grabbers. "We've noticed in the recent couple of weeks that the IEDs (improvised explosive devices) are all being built more powerfully, with more explosive effort in a smaller number of IEDs," Army Brigadier General David Rodriguez told reporters at a Pentagon briefing on Iraq. "That trend has occurred over the last two weeks," he added about the new tactic. "It is mainly in the Sunni triangle."

Meanwhile US forces have been striking frequently in the city of Mosul, once heavily Kurdish but now inhabited by a large number of Sunnis who moved there during the Saddam era and in Anbar province. Most have been raids against insurgent networks which are described on this page. However there was at least one airstrike which hit a house occupied by civilians, described here, probably a precision raid against possible leadership targets which went very badly awry. Coalition officers claim that a significant number of insurgent cells, including a ring close to Abu Musab Zarqawi, have been broken up. But these efforts have a merely suppressive quality to them. Increasingly, coalition officers are placing the heart of the insurgency in Syria. The Associated Press, for example, described a trip by Richard Armitage to Syria with the object of persuading the leadership to stop anti-Iraqi activities.

The U.S. State Department's second-ranking official is traveling to Syria to talk with officials there about the infiltration of insurgents across the Syrian border into Iraq. ... "We have felt that it's very, very important for Syria to continue to take further action on the issues of infiltration of insurgents or support for insurgents in Iraq," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. The administration believes Iraqis who served under ousted President Saddam Hussein are using Syria as a base of operations for supporting the insurgency.

The Chicago Tribune reports the same issues are being taken up by Iraqi President Iyad Allawi and former US Presidential candidate John Kerry.

Day after day, and despite a general ban on allowing Syrian men to enter Iraq, the Marines face a constant flow of people trying to cross the border, Syrians and those claiming to be Syrian, a steady stream of the inscrutable. The Marines' job is to stop them--an assignment not nearly so simple as it might seem--and to turn them away. "You get a lot of them who insist they are going to visit their dying mothers in Iraq," said Sgt. Steven Miller of suburban Kansas City, Mo. "Everyone seems to have a dying mother."

Iraqi officials allege, more angrily of late, that the Syrian government is enabling Iraq's roiling insurgency. They say they have growing proof, from documents, informants and interrogations, that Iraqis operating openly in Syria are behind a flow of money, weapons, reinforcements and orders to the guerrillas.

American officials are more cautious. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage left a weekend visit to Damascus praising the Syrians for tightening their border with Iraq. But he also warned that the United States was displeased with what it sees as, at least, Syrian coddling of insurgents. ... On Thursday, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) arrived in Syria to discuss some of the same issues. Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi issued a vague warning last week, though he did not mention Syria by name.

The elections, the growing focus on Syria and suggestions that the US will revamp its strategy in Iraq are all elements in a tantalizing article in the Daily Telegraph entitled Rumsfeld ready to send in Iraqi hit squads.

An investigation by The Telegraph found that large numbers of Syrians were crossing the border to attack American forces. ... The Pentagon is considering plans to train Iraqi hit squads to quash the Sunni-led insurgency and may sanction clandestine raids into Syria led by special forces. ... "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents," said one senior officer. "Right now, we are playing defence. And we are losing." The scheme is one of a number being considered as Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, tries to ease the pressure on his overstretched forces. ...

One military source said: "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists. From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation." The squads would also seek to kill or capture the former Saddam aides believed to be leading the insurgency and would be Iraqi-led. Newsweek says the interim administration of the prime minister, Iyad Allawi, is pressing for this more ruthless approach to Sunni guerrillas. Raids into Syria would also include Iraqi forces, but would be American-led. ... There are other signs of growing urgency in the Pentagon as the situation in Iraq worsens. Last week, Mr Rumsfeld dispatched a highly regarded four-star officer, Gen Gary Luck, to Iraq to review the entire military strategy.

The apparent confidence of the "Senior State Department Official" that Iraqi elections will be held on time is not necessarily inconsistent with the idea that US strategy is entering a new phase. The refusal to postpone the elections, the likely voting patterns and the absence of a deal to almost guarantee that the incoming Iraqi government will be largely Shi'ite and Kurdish. The uncompromising position of the Sunni insurgents will create a post-electoral Iraq where they have been largely excluded: a choice they have strategically embraced. With Syrian sanctuary and extensive clandestine networks in Sunni areas surrounding Baghdad, the insurgents hope to destabilize the new government, believing the America too overstretched to take on Damascus directly.

The more the American military struggles to stabilize Iraq, the Syrians may reason, the less likely the Bush administration will be to directly confront the Damascus regime or try to dictate changes in the Middle East. Tied down fighting in Iraq, the thousands of U.S. troops deployed across Syria's eastern border are not so unnerving. As it is, patrolling the border area, vast and desolate and reminiscent of West Texas, is a relentless challenge for the Marines and a new group of Iraqi border agents.

The US was clearly content to stay on the defensive while it attained its strategic goal of creating a new Iraqi State. Now that achievement is in sight the US is faced with the choice of whether to remain on the defensive over go over to the attack. As long as Damascus can persuade the new Iraqi government it will not directly threaten it, Syria and the Ba'athist holdouts can hope to eventually pry the incoming government in Baghdad away from the Americans. One way the US can neutralize that potential danger is to pre-emptively transform the new Iraq into a direct threat to Syria. It is possible that US planners are examining offensive options that do not necessarily involve a conventional invasion of Syria. What seems certain is that US leaders are rapidly approaching a new decision point.

The Times said retired General Gary Luck's review will be "open ended" and include a broader look at US military operations, including US troop levels and the strategy for fighting the insurgency. But Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita said Luck's mission was to assess the efforts to train and field Iraqi security forces, whose halting performance has compared unfavorably with an Iraqi insurgency that appears to be growing in strength and sophistication. "His mission is to go over there and take a look at Iraqi security force development -- where are we, how's it going -- provide an assessment to the commanders over there," he told reporters.

Rumsfeld's decision to send Luck arose from discussions with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, and his top commanders over forces in Iraq, General John Abizaid and General George Casey, officials said.... "We've done this on so many occasions. We sent five or six assessment teams in the spring," he said. "It was just another one of those operations, to have a fresh set of eyes look at Iraqi security force development, look at any insights any guidance, any suggestions, recommendations."

Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser under the president’s father, warned Jan. 6 that the Iraq elections "rather than turning out to be a promising turning point, have the great potential for deepening the conflict." Scowcroft, a retired general, said predicted sharper ethnic divisions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims after the elections and a slide into "incipient civil war."

Tsunami Roundup

"I must admit I have never seen such utter destruction, mile after mile. You wonder, where are the people?," said Annan on Friday on his return to the provincial capital, Banda Aceh. -- Swissinfo

Maybe the feeling is mutual.

The UN is being criticised for its failure to organise dozens of aid groups in and around Banda Aceh more than a week and a half after the tsunami hit the region, forcing some of them to bypass the international body and take action into their own hands to ensure aid reaches areas with the most urgent needs. "If we wait for the UN to tell us what to do, we wouldn't do anything," said Abdul Hadi bin e Rashid, first admiral of the Malaysian navy at the country's operations tent at Banda Aceh airport. "There are people who are hungry and angry. Why wait? So we just do it." -- Financial Times

Good slogan for sneakers.

Mr Annan's visit today has prompted fears that Banda Aceh airport may be closed - in a repeat of Wednesday's shutdown during a visit by Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, which halted all incoming flights, except for helicopters, for two hours and brought the aid effort to an effective standstill.  -- Financial Times

Mr. Trouble never hangs around, when he hears that mighty sound: "Here I come to save the day." That means that Mighty Mouse is on the way.

At the same time, US officials were briefing journalists about the lack of a UN presence at the airport in Banda Aceh, the capital of the province. "Look around and see who's present, and you will also see who's missing," said one. "I think you can read between the lines. "They [the UN] have their compound in town, their cars, but are they getting food out? Are they setting up clinics?"

The UN has been desperate to put experts on the ground all week, fearing that thousands of people have yet to receive food or medical treatment. Michael Elmquist, the UN co-ordinator, said he had approached the Americans for help. "The answer was, I should go through the Indonesians," he said. The Indonesian military agreed to lend three helicopters for the UN to use yesterday. But the mission to assess needs was cancelled due to a lack of paperwork. When UN officials arrived at the airport they were told they had failed to hand in flight permission forms by 8pm the previous night. "They were at the airport and I was expecting them to go out," said Mr Elmquist. "We were not informed in advance that it was necessary to fill in these forms." -- The Daily Telegraph

The Indonesians forgot to fill out the UN form advising them they needed to complete an Indonesian form in Indonesia.

Your "friendly" Chief Diplomad's plan to move on to another set of duties, for now, has fallen by the roadside. He must remain in the current job for now. The local Guardian correspondent has called the Embassy; he is doing a negative story on the US relief effort based on "information" provided by the UN at a press conference. The Diplomad is in a dark, dark mood. So, of course, just as anyone else would do in such circumstances, The Diplomad writes about the UN. -- The Diplomad

Let the games begin.

The Grand Inquisitor 2

We are finally getting to the heart of the matter. Michael Totten wrote in response to an Andrew Sullivan post:

I won’t climb down an inch in my opposition to torture. And I’m not talking about make-believe “torture,” I mean real actual torture, the kind Andrew Sullivan is talking about here:

Let's retire at the start the notion that the only torture that has been used by the U.S. has been against known members of al Qaeda. This is not true. Many innocent men and boys were raped, brutally beaten, crucified for hours (a more accurate term than put in "stress positions"), left in their own excrement, sodomized, electrocuted, had chemicals from fluorescent lights poured on them, forced to lie down on burning metal till they were unrecognizable from burns - all this in Iraq alone, at several prisons as well as Abu Ghraib. I spent a week reading all the official reports over Christmas for a forthcoming review essay. Abu Ghraib is but one aspect of a pervasive pattern of torture and abuse that, in my view, is only beginning to sink in.

If someone were to ask me where I think we ought to draw the line while interrogating prisoners, I couldn’t answer. I don’t know. A question like that isn’t exactly a no-brainer. Reasonable people can argue about it and, most likely, come up with a reasonable compromise. But I will say this: raping, electrocuting, and crucifying boys (or girls or adults or anyone else) absolutely is over the line.

Although Michael Totten claims he can't draw the line on interrogating prisoners he plainly knows where to start. Most people would agree that the acts described above are torture; that they are abhorrent to national values and anyone guilty of perpretrating them should be punished. These are the acts which should be ruthlessly proscribed in clear and pointed distinction from activities like putting panties over people's heads, playing loud music, forcing suspects to drink whiskey to loosen their tongues or imposing sleep deprivation. By having the moral sense to recognize torture so clearly Mr. Totten rescues us from being blinded by the merely legal perspective. Michael Ledeen points out that the most questionable interrogation method of all is process called rendition, which is unlikely to be examined by the committee examining Mr. Gonzalez.

A week or so back, I criticized the Washington Post for giving a lot of space to an article that basically "outed" a CIA aircraft, and only in passing raised what I took to be the main issue, namely the transportation of captured terrorist suspects to countries where they could be interrogated more vigorously than in the United States. The Post journalist had briefly quoted Michael Scheuer, the recently retired CIA officer who became a best-selling author writing under "Anonymous," to the effect that the philosophical subleties of this issue would not have disturbed his former employers. They would simply have saluted and done what they were told by the White House.

I doubt anyone in this administration -- which, remember, already retreated from its earlier positions on interrogation methods permitted against captured terrorist suspects -- is going to point out that the most controversial and ethically questionable method of all was developed during the Clinton administration in direct response to orders that came directly from the White House. "Rendition" was a Clinton creation, and was approved by Clinton's lawyers, with no apparent cries of pain either from the Justice Department or from anyone in Congressional "oversight" committees. Gonzales might quietly make that point if anyone yells at him. It won't register with the Democrats, but it might help the public understand the real world a little better.

Here, returned to earth, it should be plain that whatever the letter of the Geneva Convention, rendition and raping boys should be classed as like abominations while photographing prisoners or putting women's underwear over their heads should be left out of the reckoning altogether. The real task is to create a practical and ethically acceptable regime for interrogating prisoners while strengthening the safeguards against real torture -- two sides of the same coin, for we are charged by the spirit of humanitarian law to safeguard not only prisoners, but all protected persons. We are adjured to prevent the torture of Margaret Hassan no less than Abu Musab Zarqawi, and in so doing must give the troops such means as can be countenanced by our moral values. This process should not be cheapened by the tacit understanding that no embarassing questions will be put to Roberto Gonzalez if none will be be addressed to William Jefferson Clinton.

Addendum

Heather MacDonald at City Journal describes the evolution of the Pentagon's interrogation methods after finding that its preexisting "16 approaches" didn't work. (Hat tip: Rick Ballard)

But the Kandahar prisoners were not playing by the army rule book. They divulged nothing. “Prisoners overcame the [traditional] model almost effortlessly,” writes Chris Mackey in The Interrogators, his gripping account of his interrogation service in Afghanistan. The prisoners confounded their captors “not with clever cover stories but with simple refusal to cooperate. They offered lame stories, pretended not to remember even the most basic of details, and then waited for consequences that never really came.” Some of the al-Qaida fighters had received resistance training, which taught that Americans were strictly limited in how they could question prisoners. Failure to cooperate, the al-Qaida manuals revealed, carried no penalties and certainly no risk of torture—a sign, gloated the manuals, of American weakness.

Attempts were made to adapt the doctrine by pushing the envelope of the Geneva Conventions focusing on stress and sleep deprivation techniques. But the Pentagon was not the only organization looking for answers. The CIA, having been assigned the hardest cases, wanted more.

In response to the CIA’s request, Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee produced a hair-raising memo that understandably caused widespread alarm. Bybee argued that a U.S. law ratifying the 1984 Convention Against Torture -- covering all persons, whether lawful combatants or not -- forbade only physical pain equivalent to that “accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” or mental pain that resulted in “significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.” More troubling still, Bybee concluded that the torture statute and international humanitarian treaties did not bind the executive branch in wartime.

Here was the smoking gun, the administration's opponents argued: the philosophical underpinning for Abu Ghraib was the presumed Presidential power to authorize any force that stopped short of producing "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death".  A Presidential license to torment. MacDonald makes the point that the Abu Ghraib violations flowed, not from the Bybee memorandum, but from entirely different causes, but were unfairly presented in the same narrative. Yet in a sense they were part of the same narrative because the Bybee Memorandum represented the Executive Branch's attempt to answer the question: what is torture and what is allowable under interrogation. But Bybee's advice was rejected and the Presidential license refused. In June, 2004 a New York Times article reported:

At a White House briefing Tuesday, Gonzales specifically disavowed the part of the memorandum discussing the president's authority as commander in chief, saying it was "irrelevant and unnecessary." Senior Justice Department officials took a broader view, saying the entire memorandum would be withdrawn.

Still the doubts remained. The Washington Post records this exchange between Senator Leahy and Roberto Gonzales.

LEAHY: Do you think if the Bybee memo had not been leaked to the press -- because it had never been shown to Congress, even though we'd asked for it -- do you think it would still be the overriding legal opinion?

GONZALES: Sir, that I do not know. I do know that when it became -- it was leaked, we had concern about the fact that people were assumed that the president was somehow exercising that authority to engage in torture. And we wanted to clarify the record that the president had not authorized or condoned torture, nor had directed any actions or excused any actions under the commander-in-chief-override that might otherwise constitute torture.

LEAHY: Well, do you think there's any connection whatsoever between the policies which actually you helped to formulate regarding the treatment interrogation of prisoners, policies that were sent out, Department of Defense and elsewhere, and the widespread abuses that have occurred? ...

GONZALES: I believe that is a very good question, Senator. And that is why we have these eight completed investigations and these three pending investigations. And while we've had four hearings involving the secretary of defense, you've had 18 hearings involving the deputy secretary, undersecretary of defense, you've had over 40 briefings with the Congress, because we care very much about finding out what happened and holding people accountable. Unlike other countries that simply talk about Geneva, if there is an allegation that we've done something wrong, we investigate it. We're very serious about our commitments, our legal obligations in Iraq. And if people have done things that they shouldn't have done in violation of our legal obligations, they are going to be held accountable.

Yet despite the fact that everyone went home and felt good after such assurances, no one was nearer an answer. Heather MacDonald described that by attempting to push the limits the military found itself with fewer licit interrogation techniques than it had before.

Reeling under the PR disaster of Abu Ghraib, the Pentagon shut down every stress technique but one -- isolation -- and that can be used only after extensive review. An interrogator who so much as requests permission to question a detainee into the night could be putting his career in jeopardy. Even the traditional army psychological approaches have fallen under a deep cloud of suspicion: deflating a detainee’s ego, aggressive but non-physical histrionics, and good cop-bad cop have been banished along with sleep deprivation.

Timidity among officers prevents the energetic application of those techniques that remain. Interrogation plans have to be triple-checked all the way up through the Pentagon by officers who have never conducted an interrogation in their lives. In losing these techniques, interrogators have lost the ability to create the uncertainty vital to getting terrorist information. Since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, the military has made public nearly every record of its internal interrogation debates, providing al-Qaida analysts with an encyclopedia of U.S. methods and constraints. Those constraints make perfectly clear that the interrogator is not in control. “In reassuring the world about our limits, we have destroyed our biggest asset: detainee doubt,” a senior Pentagon intelligence official laments.

Donald Sensing has a long post on the recent destruction of a 36-ton Bradley in Iraq resulting in the death of all 7 occupants. If a suspect is found, what technique should be be used to discover where the other mines are planted? The ridiculous "16 approaches" method reviled by Heather MacDonald's interviewees, even now watered down? Or the rapes and crucifixion system which by common consent is torture? Is there is nothing in between? How did we get to where the only choices are between the impractical and the inadmissible? Possibly by the route of partisan politics; at hearings where you may either recite the Boy Scout Pledge or the Green Lantern Oath; where the failure to supply answers never got in the way of uttering a good platitude; where votive candles burn and still burn before the letter of Geneva and the practice of rendition; and people weep at a grave alone.

The Grand Inquisitor

At one level the debate over the use of torture in the War on Terror is moot. The United States military has a long operational history of forgoing possible practical advantages in favor of upholding certain national values. The most obvious modern example are rules of engagement in the use of fires. During the recently concluded assault on Fallujah and in current operations in Iraq, military restrictions on the use of firepower around mosques or populated areas are enforced with the foreknowledge that such steps will result in statistically higher casualties to troops. This practice follows long historical precedent. The policy of precision daylight bombing during World War 2; the tendency toward 'No First Strike' during the Cold War and even the restriction on political assassinations in the Carter years are all examples of unilateral renunciations of military advantage.

As Eugene Volokh pointed out, framing the debate over torture in purely moral terms blinds us to other issues that it raises. Unless it is wholly pointless and sadistic, torture is the act of substituting the torment of one person for another; the suffering of a suspect to prevent the suffering of the presumed victim. This characteristic makes the legalization of torture appealing even to intelligent people like Alan Dershowitz. His characterization of the need for a 'torture warrant' to find a way out of the predicament of the 'ticking time bomb' underscores the fungibility of suffering in the starkest terms. The absolute refusal to employ torture under any circumstances is inevitably the acceptance of the suffering of victims whose death or dismemberment could have been prevented by its use. Yet accepting the legitimacy of torture, however extreme the circumstances, carries with it the danger of what Eugene Volokh called the 'slippery slope': the embrace of an abhorrent principle to satisfy the exigencies of the moment.

The way out of this logical prison may lie in appreciating the similarity between restraints on torture and restrictions on dealing out death on a battlefield on which innocents may be present. Time and again a military commander must give orders which will result in the statistically certain death of civilians in order to combat the enemy. He never admits to its desirability -- never embraces the abhorrent principle -- but instead binds himself to a process designed to reduce these evils to the practical minimum. It is a position made tenable only by the rejection of absolutes: on the one hand to maintain the principle against harming innocents while at the same time accepting the existential need to defeat the enemy. It is often a world of compromise and sometimes of fiction. But it is real enough. Americans pay the price of humanity with actual red blood.

Two things flow from this observation. The first is that sacrosanct principles are upheld even at great cost. Limits on allowable behavior are imposed even in the presence of a literally ticking bomb. As pointed out earlier, the US has a long history of accepting the consequent suffering of its men as a price for prosecuting war under nationally accepted principles. If Iraq is not proof of that, then Vietnam certainly was. But the second is that the preservation of those sacrosanct principles is never carried to the point where action becomes impossible. Upholding national values must never come at the cost of defeat and extinction; must never become 'a death pact'. Hence abstract rules of engagement are meaningless; they acquire a significance only in their practical effect. This implies that the debate on torture, if is to have any relevance, cannot simply be a carping or grand restatement of principles. They must meaningfully determine what American fighters are allowed or not allowed to do with the specificity that even now controls the use of force in Iraq.

The danger is that the confirmation hearings of Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales will in the end leave the entire question of interrogating prisoners undefined or stuck in the 19th century idealisms of the Geneva Convention. There must be definite guidance on whether it is permissible to require more than the name and rank and serial number of a captured terrorist; and if so how far one may go. It should be understood that any restrictions imposed must be carried out to the letter, even if these restrictions almost certainly result in the deaths of American soldiers and innocents, because that is what rules of engagement do. That realization should make policy makers craft their restrictions very thoughtfully; something alas, which they rarely do. Just as the torturer who claims that he serves a higher cause stands on false ground so too must the man who advocates gentleness with terrorists accept that the pursuit of his moral good will often be bought by the suffering of children. On every battlefield men have tried to strike a balance between saving their lives and saving themselves; and the choice though hard is before us. 

Addendum

I am not at all convinced that putting panties on a prisoner's head constitutes torture in the context of the War on Terror; nor should sleep deprivation, some physical violence and other types of intimidation be ruled out of bounds. But neither is it persuasive to argue that standing at the telephone receiver while an Egyptian interrogates a "rendered" prisoner in Cairo not torture, though legally it may not be. That is the weasel-world toward which a pious acceptance of unrealistic rules of war leads us to.

We ought to be manly enough to authorize the use of a certain amount force on terrorist suspects, but only to the degree consistent with our deepest national values. To strike a balance between the need to maintain certain principles without paying too much for it in terms of military advantage; remembering what cost in blood must be paid for keeping the national conscience clean. It is a cup that will not pass away. We will be called to account not only for our management of captives but also for whether we allowed them to kill the innocent while they grinned insolently before us. Both the tortured prisoner and the child blown to pieces by a terrorist bomb will accuse us on the Last Day. About the only thing we can do is our best. But there is no weaseling out, no escape from choice.

The Belmont Lounge

Because there is a lot of interesting material that cannot be accomodated within the narrative structure of a regular post, I've set up a site called the Belmont Lounge where these can be referenced. I'll start by linking to this account sent by longtime commenter Jinderella from a friend of a friend detailing his experiences in the Sri Lankan tsunami. The Belmont Lounge will operate under somewhat looser rules than Belmont Club. Material will be posted there as is, with little attempt at collateral confirmation or analysis, often without comment. Entries will normally be linked to posts in the Belmont Club, and I hope it proves useful.

Problems with Identifying Bodies

Carridine reports from on the spot on the difficulties of mortuary identification now that many bodies have decomposed beyond visual recognition.

A Message of Hope

The Diplomad has lots of details on the relief effort in Aceh, from the arrival of Margareta Wahlstrom, the "United Nations Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator and the Secretary-General's Special Coordinator for Humanitarian Assistance in Tsunami-afected countries" -- yes that's her title -- to a Dutch diplomatic report that reads like it was written by the Belmont Club. The Diplomad was so funny as to strain credulity, especially its reproduction of the request to attend Ms. Wahlstrom -- issued "by the same UN official who suggested a couple of days back that the Australian and US air traffic controllers in Aceh should don UN blue".

"Ms. Wahlstrom's main task will be provide leadership and support to the international relief effort. She will undertake high-level consultations with the concerned governments in order to facilitate the delivery of international assistance."

That leadership was to be provided over two whole days from January 4-5. However my dropped jaw was reaffixed to the upper dentures by collateral confirmation from this article on the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies site. Wahlstrom's remarks have nearly convinced me that the folks at Diplomad are not exaggerating.

“You are an important actor and an important partner for the United Nations, especially the National Societies,” Margareta Wahlstrom said during a visit to the Sri Lanka Red Cross and the International Federation office in Colombo. “What people do on the ground is very important. They are the people who respond first and it is only then that we come. So what people do out there at community level is very important,” the UN Secretary General's envoy added.

Wahlstrom, who was on a two day visit to the island, also said it was time for the world to be thoughtful and rebuild after the destruction caused by the tsunami. “We see a pattern in the problems we are facing now: the challenges, overall conditions and the logistics. Infrastructure is destroyed. The President is spearheading the operations with the support at local levels, government agencies, United Nations and other agencies. People are still under shock and we also must be careful that people are not overwhelmed by the system. We must be thoughtful,” she added.

She was, of course, probably referring to the President of Sri Lanka, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. People can rest easy now that the very flower of the international civil service is on the spot.

It has been argued that comparisons between United Nations disaster relief actions and those of sovereign nations are odious. A British Department for International Development report dated December 31, 2004 listed out the accomplishments of the United Nations and other agencies to that date. What is striking is how poorly the UN seems to perform even in comparison with the International Red Cross and private relief organizations like Save the Children Foundation (SCF) and Christian AID.

For example, by December 31, the Red Cross had already implemented a fairly long list of concrete actions across the entire region. Medical teams with specific compositions, destinations and missions had already been dispatched. Sample Red Cross activities were:

• "The Federation is purchasing body bags, burial cloths and masks. They also sent a medical team of five doctors and nurses to Aceh 29 December. The Federation and the Indonesian Red Cross are arranging helicopters to transport assessment teams and medical personnel to the affected areas."
• FACT team (Field Assessment Coordination Team) including health, telecoms, relief/logistics, water/sanitation, reporting and information specialists arrived in Jakarta 29 December. They are tasked to determine the location of the (Emergency Response Unit) ERU in Meulaboh. Danish logistics ERU, Belgian telecoms ERU arrived 29 December. Japanese basic health care ERU due 30 December, French Watsan ERU due 31 December. Majority of ERU equipment to be sent to Medan, then sent by helicopter to Meulaboh. New Emergency Health Kits (NEHK) are being procured.
• Thai Red Cross mobilised since 26 December, providing medical care, food, water and clothing to the homeless, injured and affected. The national delegation has also sent 29 doctors, 45 specialist nurses and mobile medical teams (surgeons, plastic surgeons, orthopaedics, anaesthetists and forensic) to supplement local medical teams, the government, the military, medical and relief agencies. The Federation has allocated CHF 100,000 to the Thai Red Cross.

In contrast, most of the overall UN activities were maddeningly vague and mostly in the future tense. (These excerpts are taken verbatim from the report)

• UN appoints Ms. Margareta Wahlstrom, UN Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator as Special Coordinator for Humanitarian Assistance to tsunami affected countries.
• WHO estimates up to 5 million people displaced by tsunamis.
• OCHA prepared to serve as a channel for unearmarked cash contributions for immediate relief assistance.
• FAO undertaking damage assessment missions in each of the affected countries.
• UNICEF warns that lack of access to potable water may result in outbreaks of cholera and diarrhoea.
• UN preparing to launch regional Flash Appeal - due 6 or 7 January 2005.

The reaction of in-country UN teams was hardly better. In Indonesia, the country hardest hit by the earthquake and the tsunami, the specific activities of the UN at year end stood thus.

• UN country team estimates USD 40.1 million for UN agency projects.
• UNDAC team in Aceh province undertaking assessments. This team will be reinforced by a further 5 members in due course as well as members of UNJLC.
• 29-31 December - OCHA arranging a joint rapid assessment mission to Banda Aceh (including NGOs and UN agencies).
• UN agencies in Indonesia in a position to provide immediate assistance worth $1 million.
• OCHA released $50,000 and UNDP $100,000 - emergency grants.
• UNDP to deploy recovery expert. o WFP assigned $500,000 for food procurement and distribution. They are also preparing an emergency operation for $12 million. WFP to establish a presence in Banda Aceh.
• WHO/UNICEF to provide 10 health kits (100,000 people for 3 months). Due 30 December. WHO to provide technical assistance.
• UNICEF to send tarpaulins and family sets for 8,000 households, plus emergency health kits to supply 200,000 people for 2 weeks.

Forgetting for a moment any ideological views toward the United Nations the reader may have, what is striking is how slow off the mark the UN was, even in comparison to smaller nongovernment organizations. Consider the difference in the OODA loop of the UN and the US military, which is widely parodied in movies as being hidebound and inflexible. The Abraham Lincoln arrived in Hong Kong on December 22, 2004 for replenishment. The tsunami devastated the Bay of Bengal region on the morning of December 26; on December 28 the Lincoln received orders to leave Hong Kong for the disaster area. It prepared to sail, with all that implies for a major formation yet by January 1st, the Lincoln was off the coast of Sumatra. Leaving aside the resource differences that allowed the Navy to move major assets vast distances in 72 hours, it had taken less than 48 hours for the US to come up with an implementable plan, obtain approval from national command authority and execute, in essence, no slower than the Red Cross, only bigger. In contrast, the UN is much bigger than the Red Cross, but its OODA cycle seemed much slower.

The Memory Hole

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and his relief coordinator Jan Egeland delivered an advance blast against future welshers in a story reported by Evelyn Leopold:

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland expressed their gratitude for the promises of help from 45 nations.  But both said said they were concerned that some of the money would not be handed over. "If we go by past history, yes, I do have concern," Mr Annan said. "We've got over $US2 billion, but it is quite likely that at the end of the day we will not receive all of it." Mr Annan cited shortfalls in aid promised after an earthquake in Bam, Iran, in December 2003, where the money received fell short of pledges....

But he noted the $US2 billion pledged for Asia was equal to all the emergency appeals last year for other nations, such as Sudan's Darfur region and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Egeland said a "tsunami" took place each month in thousands of preventable deaths from disease and hunger. "The rich world should be able to foot the bill for feeding all the children in the world," he said. "It's one day's worth of military spending.

The story is chiefly interesting for the insight it provides into the thinking of the top United Nations leadership. It is a curious case of selective vision, which is blind to the expensive nuclear arms program of the mullahs but alert to shortcomings by the outside world to feed earthquake victims in Bam. It ignores the abject failure of the United Nations in Sudan and the Congo; shows no interest in or even awareness of its root causes yet focuses on the 'stinginess' which causes a "tsunami of preventable deaths from hunger and disease" each month. It bemoans the fact that the rich do not feed "all the children of the world", as if all of a sudden it had ceased to become the responsibility of the societies in which they lived. These regrets are all uttered in the context of a demand for more money. Not just more money now, but for the money they fear they will be cheated out of in the future. Of course, the funding and the feeding must be passed through that most morally authoritative and legitimate organization, the United Nations -- through their fingers.

An interesting contrast is provided by two private charity organizations, the Australian branch of Medecins Sans Frontieres and the Australian branch of World Vision. (Hat tip: Arthur Chrenkoff)

"The Australian branch of aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors without Borders) has become possibly the first in the world to ask donors to stop pledging money to its tsunami appeal. The local MSF branch paused its appeal after reaching its $1 million [US$ 0.77 million] target in just three days. It decided it would be breaching its ethical code to collect money if it could not be used for its designated purpose."

Another Australian charity, World Vision, has rejected a $500,000 donation (US$ 380,000) from Clubs New South Wales, because the funds "were raised from revenue from gambling and alcohol." It's a free market of charities out there, however, and the donations has now been snapped up by Care Australia.

Annan prepared for his trip to Asia to promise victims that help was on the way. He called it "a message of hope".

"So I urge all of you to be generous in your contributions. Together, we will work to rebuild the lives, livelihoods and communities devastated by this catastrophe. "Together, we will send a message of hope." UN emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland said: "I have never seen such an outpouring of international assistance in any natural disaster, ever. "We are now counting new pledges by the hour."

Annan had acted earlier to streamline UN operations  by appointing the man in charge of tsunami relief, Mark Malloch Brown, as his new chief of staff. One of Brown's main tasks as new chief of staff will be to manage the media.

After a year of scandal that sullied the UN's image, Secretary General Kofi Annan announced a management shake-up with a new chief-of-staff who will play a key role in managing the media. Annan promised the suprise move, announced unusually while the United Nations is trying to cope with the massive tsunami relief effort, would not take away from vital, round-the-clock work going on in devastated Asia. "This is the first in a series of changes," Annan said as he presented Mark Malloch Brown, currently head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), as his new chief of staff effective on January 19.

With what UN officials say is a reconstruction effort in affected Asian countries that could require hundreds of billions of dollars, Annan said Malloch Brown would stay on as UNDP chief for the time being. He said he would "make sure" that the appointment does not have a "negative impact" on the crucial relief effort. But Malloch Brown made clear that he had been asked by Annan to take on a media role at a time when the United Nations has been buffeted by staff unrest and scandal that led some US politicians to call for Annan's resignation. "A modern, global public organisation of this kind has to understand that there are many news cycles a day, that to get your message out requires ... a vigorous, rapid response," Malloch Brown said.

This is an extremely cunning move on the part of Annan, who will now make tsunami victims the public face of the United Nations, even at the cost of making the operating manager of the UN relief effort a pitchman for Secretary General. We are solemnly assured that attending to the "many news cycles a day" will have little impact on the practical management of relief delivery. It may reflect an belief that the perception of reality rather than reality itself which determines the success of a bureaucracy. It certainly works for Burma.

In the aftermath of the tsunami the government in Rangoon sealed off parts of its coastline, fuelling concerns that thousands more people died in the disaster than it - to the disgust of many ordinary Burmese - has so far been prepared to acknowledge. Other fishermen spoke of the terrible loss of life farther up the coast at Kra Buri, 50 miles north of the border with Thailand. "Many, many homes were ripped away by the big wave," said one fisherman. "The government is lying, lying very much, when it says just a few people were killed." While aid workers believe that Burma escaped the carnage that was visited on Indonesia, where about 100,000 people are feared to have lost their lives, they say the death toll is certain to be higher than Burmese officials have admitted. "It is in the thousands," estimated one foreign diplomat.

Nothing happened in Burma. Nothing at all. The waves stopped at the border with Thailand. The idea that the management of truth may be important than the truth itself recalls the conversation between O'Brien and Winston Smith in Room 101 about the nature of reality.

" I am taking trouble with you, Winston ", he said, " because you are worth trouble. You know perfectly well what is the matter with you. ...You are mentally deranged. You suffer from a defective memory. You are unable to remember real events and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened. Fortunately it is curable....Now we will take an example. ... Some years ago you had a very serious delusion indeed. You believed that three men, three one-time Party members ... were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with. You believed that you had seen unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their confessions were false. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. "

An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O'Brien's fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston's vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was THE photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it ! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre in any direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it.

" It exists ! " he cried.

" No ", said O'Brien.

He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O'Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air ; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O'Brien turned away from the wall.

" Ashes ", he said. " Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed. "

" But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it. "

" I do not remember it ", said O'Brien.

The United Nations has always been good. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Livery but sick and green

Any argument against asserted authority, however minor, necessarily takes on the character of rebellion.  While dialogue between the elected and their electors is a not only tolerated but encouraged; conversations on equal terms between subjects and Kings are by definition treason and a deadly threat. In the matter of providing relief for tsunami victims, the UN cannot afford to assume any other attitude than a reluctant willingness to stoop to command the national contingents. For the United Nations to abandon its claim to primacy in the tsunami relief effort is the equivalent of renouncing its scepter as the 'sole source of legitimacy' and the only fount of 'moral authority'. For no danger is so great to international organizations and Kings as the peril of being proved unnecessary.

Though almost almost none of the food, supplies and logistical systems to provide relief have so far have come from the World Body, it appears existentially important to it that what has arrived wear the livery of the United Nations. The necessity of controlling livery was also understood by Kings.

First in England, and later on the continent, there developed the practice of raising armies with a system that came to be known as "livery and maintenance." ... Maintenance was the medieval term for the money payment made to the soldier. Livery referred to a coat of distinctive color and design that indicated who the soldier was fighting for. After the Wars of the Roses, King Henry VII (1485-1509) could not afford to take the chance of an uprising, so he restrained his nobles' old abilities to raise private armies. In 1487 he had a law enacted against livery and maintenance and in 1504 codified existing statutes against "retaining", to prevent the nobles keeping independent forces.

In this context, a report from Diplomadic blog correspondent in Aceh alleging a UN request that US and Australian troops wear UN livery is hardly surprising.

A colleague came back from a meeting held by the local UN representative yesterday and reported that the UN rep had said that while it was a good thing that the Australians and Americans were running the air ops into tsunami-wrecked Aceh, for cultural and political reasons, those Australians and Americans really "should go blue." In other words, they should switch into UN uniforms and give up their national ones.

Besides an instant readiness to throw a bal masque, the one activity at which the United Nations excels is constructing the Potemkin Village, defined as "something that appears elaborate and impressive but in actual fact lacks substance". The urgency to construct one rose as Kofi Annan's airplane neared Indonesia.

In this part of the tsunami-wrecked Far Abroad, the UN is still nowhere to be seen where it counts, i.e., feeding and helping victims. The relief effort continues to be a US-Australia effort, with Singapore now in and coordinating closely with the US and Australia. Other countries are also signing up to be part of the US-Australia effort. Nobody wants to be "coordinated" by the UN. The local UN reps are getting desperate. They're calling for yet another meeting this afternoon; they've flown in more UN big shots to lecture us all on "coordination" and the need to work together, i.e., let the UN take credit. With Kofi about to arrive for a big conference, the UNocrats are scrambling to show something, anything as a UN accomplishment.

It would be ludicrous if it weren't so tragic. Yet is far from certain that the United States will not make a limited bow of obeisance to Annan, if only to get him out of the way. His one undoubted power is the ability to make himself a pest. Annan has already indicated that he is willing to turn a kinder, gentler face towards the US in exchange for something in return, a sentiment Al Capone would understand. The International Herald Tribune reports that Kofi Annan met in closed door session with supporters in the Manhattan apartment of Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton Ambassador to the United Nations. It was a strategy session to discuss ways to save Kofi Annan's tenure and the stature of the United Nations after it had repeatedly been wracked by scandals.

The larger argument, according to participants, addressed two broad needs. First, Annan had to move aggressively to repair relations with Washington where, they said, the administration and many in Congress thought he and the United Nations had worked actively against President George W. Bush's reelection. And second, he had to restore his relationship with his own bureaucracy, where workers felt his office protected high-level officials accused of misconduct.

In the days following the session, Annan sought and obtained a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, the incoming secretary of state, that United Nations officials viewed positively, and he traveled on to Brussels to see European Union leaders. The secret gathering came at the end of a year that Annan has described as the organization's "annus horribilis," a year in which the United Nations faced charges of corruption in the way it ran the oil-for-food program in Iraq, evidence that blue-helmeted peacekeepers in Congo ran prostitution rings and raped women and teenage girls and formal motions of no confidence in the organization's senior management from staff unions.

Whether these steps will save Kofi Annan and the United Nations remains to be seen. Whether it will save any victims of the recent tsunami is an irrelevancy.

Update

In the comments section, we discuss the implications of armed groups attempting to control the relief process and the consequences of their coming into contact with US or Australian personnel. I wrote:

The UN uniform issue can become deadly serious if some of the Achenese armed groups fire on convoys at which American or Australian military/official personnel are present. The UN would then be in a position to say 'if they had worn UN uniforms the incident would not have happened'. Worse if the Aussies or Americans fire back. Then we will have Kofi Annan in full accusatory mode.

More in comments.

Would you like fries with that?

According to the New York Times With $2 Billion Donated, U.N. Now Needs Help to Deliver Aid.

"The military and civil defense assets that many countries are providing us are as valuable as cash or gold would be today because it makes us move with the assistance and it makes us get there in the race against the clock."

Mr. Egeland said the food and medical relief that was arriving in thousands of shipments was running into "logistical constraints" caused by overloaded airports and other bottlenecks. He gave a list of equipment needs drawn up in a telephone conference meeting on Friday with representatives of the United States-led core group of nations that also includes Australia, India and Japan. Those needs included helicopters and ships able to carry them, air-traffic-control units, landing craft, trucks, cargo planes, base camps for the aid workers, fuel storage and water treatment units, generators and medical kits.

The material and logistical infrastructure was largely provided by national contributions, chiefly from the "United States-led core group of nations" which had earlier been criticized by former British International Development Secretary Clare Short as an attempt to undermine the United Nations relief effort.

United States President George Bush was tonight accused of trying to undermine the United Nations by setting up a rival coalition to coordinate relief following the Asian tsunami disaster. The president has announced that the US, Japan, India and Australia would coordinate the world’s response.

But former International Development Secretary Clare Short said that role should be left to the UN. “I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to coordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN when it is the best system we have got and the one that needs building up,” she said. “Only really the UN can do that job,” she told BBC Radio Four’s PM programme. “It is the only body that has the moral authority.”

But that was last week. Now that the faucet has been opened a little too wide for the UN to cope, the World Body needs help in delivering the assistance that is piling up at ports and airfieldsj. It will be forthcoming. In return, the core group has been amply rewarded by a nod of acknowledgement from the United Nations. But there is no question who the UN regards as leading with its unique legitimacy and moral authority. At a press conference given by Kofi Annan at UN headquarters on December 30, 2004, the Secretary General answered this question at in an exchange with reporters.

Q: Could you give us an indication: there is a core group, there is the United Nations, there is a whole bunch of different groups coordinating - who is taking the leadership role on the humanitarian side of this? ...

Kofi Annan: Thank you for the question. In fact, I did speak to Secretary of State Powell yesterday as the announcement was made, and we have also spoken this morning. The core group will support the United Nations effort. ...  It is clear that their purpose is to work with us and to support the United Nations effort, and we are going to make it a truly international effort.

Q: Given the magnitude of this disaster, shouldn't the United Nations, rather the United States, have taken the lead in establishing a coalition of donor and affected countries to deal with this disaster? ...

Kofi Annan:  First of all, on the question of how we pool the international community together, I think it is important that an initiative has been taken. We ourselves were discussing our possible initiative, but I applaud what has been done by the United States Government, by the United States Administration and President Bush. As I have said, we have spoken to other countries which are also going to join the group, and that group will be in support of the efforts that the United Nations is leading. So, we are very satisfied with that.

Within the struggle against the effects of a natural disaster is the barely concealed struggle for political supremacy between the national and the international. Once the principle of subsidiarity has been rejected in favor of subordination no matter how far in front of the UN a member nation gets it will always remain behind. Just as the uttermost battlefield skirmisher in the age of crowned heads was still in principle the King's Man, by analogy American food transported on US bottoms, delivered by Marines remains the UN's, according to a certain point of view. A national effort subordinated to international effort. Hence the issue of what livery relief bags are to wear assumes serious proportions. Historically, the packaging of forces in the field reflected the alignments of power within the society. A commentator on the history of the Foot Guards recalls:

First in England, and later on the continent, there developed the practice of raising armies with a system that came to be known as "livery and maintenance." Such a feudal system encouraged local lords to raise their own armies. Maintenance was the medieval term for the money payment made to the soldier. Livery referred to a coat of distinctive color and design that indicated who the soldier was fighting for.

After the Wars of the Roses, King Henry VII (1485-1509) could not afford to take the chance of an uprising, so he restrained his nobles' old abilities to raise private armies. In 1487 he had a law enacted against livery and maintenance and in 1504 codified existing statutes against "retaining", to prevent the nobles keeping independent forces.

The alternative view regards subordination as contingent on consent; and accountability enforced by the possibility that consent can be withdrawn.  But where "legitimacy" and "moral authority" is asserted independently of consent  it begins to resemble the Divine Right of Kings, and with such mandates any disagreements necessarily take the form of defiance. The Boston Tea Party occurred because there was no possibility of negotiating what color the tax was to wear or who was to levy it. Asking the question was itself unacceptable.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. ... The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

The stage was set for wrangling between the US and the UN. The proponents of the United Nations have argued that the key issue dividing it from America is legitimacy. They would be right.

Swine Before Pearls

The UN plan to provide relief to tsunami victims reflects an image of the organization itself. The press release Multifaceted UN response to tsunami focuses on both large and small reads like a repackaging of inconsequential UN field programs to give the appearance of action. They include "monitoring fisheries in India", undertaking disease planning exercises, providing safe delivery kits for expectant mothers and harnessing the International Labor Organization to undertake long-term rehabilitation and employment recovery. As a statement of good intentions it would be adequate but as a program for coping with one of the worst natural disasters in modern times it leaves much to be desired. The hollowness of the program is betrayed by the pathetically small amounts of specific physical relief it can point to. For example, in:

Sri Lanka: UNFPA is carrying out reproductive health assessments. UNICEF continues to help ferry the wounded and dead to area hospitals while providing 10,000 bed sheets, towels, drinking water bottles, cooking utensils sets and mats to assist the displaced and stranded. UNHCR has been distributing non-food items.

These very same pots and pans are featured in another press release titled UN launches unprecedented multiple effort to aid victims of Asia's devastating tsunami. The repetition does not provide assurance. Rather it provides confirmation that these are indeed the folks who brought us Kosovo, Rwanda, Congo and the Sudan. 

Overall, UNHCR has seven offices in Sri Lanka, where it has worked for nearly two decades helping displaced populations as well as returning refugees. The agency will provide 18,000 pieces of plastic sheeting, 17,000 plastic mats, rope, and non-food relief packages for 2,000 families, including cooking sets, plastic jerry cans, mosquito nets and clothing.

Every organization responds according to its repertoire and a UN captured by 'advocacy groups', riddled with ethnic politics, hamstrung by corruption and managed by individuals derived from academia and NGOs is no different. The problem is not that such people exist -- they are tolerable in some roles -- but that they have been put in charge of serious business. The bloggers at Diplomadic describe some of the public relations tricks that are played to make the UN facade seem real. To begin with, much of the UN relief consists of rehandling national aid.

"Notice to the UN: The USA is by far the biggest donor to the UN system. We pay for about 25% of the whole operation, but when you look at operations like WFP or UNHCR, we cough up about 40%. That wheat and rice that the WFP is bragging about? It is almost all from the USA."

Then there is the tactic of taking credit for assistance provided by others. The UN claims that they have set up an "air-freight handling centre" in Aceh, according to  UN Undersecretary Egeland:

I discussed today with Washington whether we can draw on some assets on their side, after consultations with the Indonesian Government, to set up what we call an “air-freight handling centre” in Aceh. Tomorrow, we will have to set up a camp for relief workers – 90 of them – which is fully self-contained, with kitchen, food, lodging, everything, because they have nowhere to stay and we don't want them to be an additional burden on the people there.

Diplomadic claims that the actual UN effort amounts to setting up a camp for their "relief workers" complete with "kitchen, food, lodging, everything", but that air ops are managed by the US and Australia and that trucking, drivers and fuel is provided by USAID. These are "some assets on their side" that make the UN achievement possible. UN inadequacy at meeting any serious crisis was indirectly admitted by French President Jacques Chirac, who suggested that the UN and the EU set up a "'humanitarian rapid reaction force' to help deal with similar catastrophes in future." But Chirac's suggestion makes no sense unless that rapid reaction force is provided with a standing capability and ready stockpiles. Under present arrangements, the UN must go to its principal supporters to muster national contingents and contributions to march under its flag. Because that process takes time it negates the 'rapid' in Chirac's proposed "humanitarian rapid reaction force".

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today that an international donors conference is tentatively being scheduled for Jan. 11 in Geneva. ... The EU's development aid commissioner, Louis Michel, proposed the international conference to coordinate assistance to the countries affected by the Dec. 26 earthquake and resulting tsunamis.

Finally there is the tactic of denying 'legitimacy' to any unsanctioned effort. The UN has criticized the United States, Australia, Japan and India for going ahead with tsunami relief efforts without waiting to course it through the UN. Since the UN effort will consist of national contributions to be determined at a conference in Geneva anyway, one would have thought the issue inconsequential. But grabbing political credit is never unimportant. Former British International Development Secretary Clare Short upbraided the US for daring to spend American taxpayer money without UN approval:

United States President George Bush was tonight accused of trying to undermine the United Nations by setting up a rival coalition to coordinate relief following the Asian tsunami disaster. The president has announced that the US, Japan, India and Australia would coordinate the world’s response.

But former International Development Secretary Clare Short said that role should be left to the UN. “I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to coordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN when it is the best system we have got and the one that needs building up,” she said. “Only really the UN can do that job,” she told BBC Radio Four’s PM programme. “It is the only body that has the moral authority.”

Michael Totten is nonplussed.

What a bizarre assertion. If the UN didn’t exist, what on earth would we do? Would south Asia drown in wreckage and mud while we tried to create a UN from scratch before we could send in some aid? ... The US, Japan, India, and Australia don’t have the moral authority for crisis relief? Who bestows this moral authority? Clare Short? Who gave her the authority to do that?

Leaving the issues of moral authority aside, the operational question is whether the world is better and more efficiently served by the UN organizational model. The real thought experiment that proponents of UN legitimacy must pass is whether they would entrust Paris, not just Kigali to the bureaucrats on the East River. Clare Short is probably perfectly happy to entrust Rwandan lives to the United Nations; whether she would entrust her own to it is another question.

The December 2004 tsunami reminds us that there are catastrophes which cannot be confined to the Third World. In the immediate aftermath of the waves which devastated shorelines throughout the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, a large number of editorial writers dismissed suggestions that natural disasters were Divine punishment visited on mankind. But the notion is not so strange if one substitutes stupidity for sin as the cause of chastisement; because it is tautologically true that catastrophes always punish any unworthiness as a species. By far the greatest conceit of the late 20th century was that the postmodern world would never again suffer the lash of planetary cataclysms; that we were past any tests nature might administer; exempt from the consequences of stupidity. Only an international political class secure in its own invincibility could have thrown such scraps as the UN provides to the people of the Third World and demanded such peremptory obedience of the US, as if it were exempt from the laws of physics; men too precious to perish by fire or water.

And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.
-- Bertolt Brecht