THE DIGNIFIED RANT
NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS FEBRUARY 2004 ARCHIVES
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“The Iran-Iraq War Ended in 1988” (Posted
The last
POWs were released last May:
"There are no Iranian POWs in Iraq and no Iraqi POWs
in Iran now," the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Brig. Gen. Abdollah Najafi, head of Iran's
POW Commission, as saying.
Yessirree, good thing we didn’t
establish Gitmo prison back in 1988. Because that might have just given the green light to countries to
keep prisoners long after a war ends. Yep, nobody would ever do anything
horrible without the
Yeah. I’m done now.
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“Trend
or Lull?” (Posted
I get email notices of all
I’ve noticed a lull in the notices of combat casualties and I hated to bring it up.
This article
notes that there has not been a
I’m certainly happy to read that. We’ve had other lulls before, however, so it is hard to say whether it is a trend or we just rocked the regime loyalists and Islamists back on their heels and they are regrouping to strike again.
We need to keep on the offensive, though. If we sit in our fortified bases, the enemy will be free to act. I see no sign we are doing that, but it is worrisome enough of a prospect to watch for it.
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“Why I’m Skeptical” (Posted
About a large or prolonged
The
Our long history of intervening in
Excuse me if I express doubt that we can do any good other than to help facilitate yet another transfer of power from one thug to another with minimal disruption during the transition. Let’s keep our sights low. If it makes you feel better, we can plan for a bigger intervention in the next rebellion.
Mostly, I want to know why the usual peace protester suspects
over here aren’t protesting
Good luck to Supreme Court Justice
Boniface Alexandre who appears
to be in charge now. He’ll need it.
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“I Shudder” (Posted
I like Max Boot’s stuff. I’m currently reading his The Savage Wars of Peace. I agree with much of what he writes as far as the proper approach to small wars. What especially strikes me, as most history does, is how little things really change. Some of the history he writes about could be from last week or last year if you took away the names. People and institutions react to events much the same now as they did 50, or 100, or 200 years ago. I imagine the Athenians and Spartans would look pretty familiar, too.
But this article on peacekeeping is—what? It’s just wrong.
Boot wants the
Those failed states are sad, but the fact is that their failures
rarely impact our national security. He states they do, but how? Sure, some
failed states become recruiting grounds for terrorists but there are plenty of
actual states that are terrorist threats. Failed states without Islamists
stirring things up are just local cesspools with few repercussions beyond their
region. And if hopped up locals aren’t funded and organized by others—from real
non-failed states—they’d just be local madmen. And sure, some failed states
become breeding grounds for disease, but SARS and bird flu and countless other
viruses sweep out of
Can we study stability operations so that we can adapt our
military when needed? Sure. I have no problem with that. And our military in
And if we turn our troops into peacekeepers, they will be unsuited to war. We will commit them to war because they will still look like soldiers, but they will just be cops with cooler uniforms and automatic weapons. I still want our Army and Marine Corps to be able to crush conventional foes. This mission is not gone. Not by a long shot. If we want troops more suited to peacekeeping, build even more MP units. We are already boosting our MPs by 16-17%, as I recently read on Strategypage. We could use more. Add more separate MP battalions and even brigades that can be plugged into one of our divisional headquarters to assist the infantry units that can be retrained for particular missions.
But make peacekeeping their first mission? I shudder. I
remember in 1991, the Iraqis were particularly afraid of Army troops in green
camouflage uniforms—the ones from
Turn our troops into cops and they will get no respect from foes. And we won’t deserve respect.
But the biggest part of Boot’s article that I strongly contest is this:
It's time to resurrect the idea of a standing U.N. army, as a
supplement, if not replacement, for the other forces mentioned above. The key
to making it work would be eschewing the old U.N. way of doing things, which
consists of asking for military contributions from a lot of countries with
minimal capabilities, no record of working together and differing strategic
interests. This produces low-quality blue helmets that are the laughingstock of
thugs everywhere.
The U.N. needs a tough, professional force like the French Foreign
Legion that would not quail before Haitian gang leaders or Serbian
ethnic-cleansers. Members of such an outfit would have to be recruited on merit
and trained together; it could not be cobbled together at the last minute from
the military riffraff of
My disdain for this idea knows no limits. Who in their right mind would trust the UN with effective, lethal force? When we are seeing the dishonorable behavior of the UN members in the Oil for Food travesty. When we see who gets on the UN human rights committee and who gets left off? When the very basis for membership in the UN is an affront to rule of law, democracy, and good government? To whom would the troops swear allegiance? And just where the heck would we base this magical force? What a dream for the thugs of the UN! Just who would decide where it should go? If the thugs of the world have a say, how could it be an effective force for justice, order, and peace? If we order it around, it won’t have the “legitimacy” of the so-called world community.
We shouldn’t try to exhaust ourselves saving the world from itself. We shouldn’t try to transform our military into a world police force. We shouldn’t pretend that we can get the vaunted “international community” to do it, either. Lord, I think it is folly to believe the UN could have an effective standing force. But honestly, I’d be more fearful if it could.
We should do what we are doing but do it better. Use our forces to protect our national security. Assist friends who want to police their neighborhoods. Assist poor governments with money and advice—hopefully with strings attached to improve their effectiveness. And sometimes, just sometimes, embark on missions of choice to settle local disasters and rescue the locals.
I don’t know what the heck Boot is even talking about here. Mind boggling.
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“The ‘International Community’ Be Damned”
(Posted
For its complicity in providing Saddam huge sums of money in the Oil for Palaces program:
Iraq's suppliers included Russian factories,
Arab trade brokers, European manufacturers and state-owned companies from
The UN Security Council was viewed by Saddam as a body to bribe:
Other
Iraqi officials said the ministries were forced to order goods from companies
and countries according to political expediency instead of quality. …
"It
depended on what was going on in
Higher authority, indeed.
Oh yeah, we should definitely restrict contracts funded with our money to our allies. The others have gained enough cash.
Sadly, some of our friends will be implicated in this. We have to follow this, however.
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“Uprooting Settlers”
(Posted February 28, 2004)
The
I await the outrage of the world community in helping us reverse this ethnic cleansing.
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“Change of Strategy in
Rather than blanket the country with US and allied troops, which
I believed would provoke Afghan resistance, I felt it was reasonable to have
beaten the Taliban and placed a friendly government in
The
The
On the one hand, success in keeping the Taliban and al Qaeda broken up into small groups makes it possible to carry out this strategy of spreading out platoons or squads to cover more ground. Otherwise, little teams would be vulnerable to being overrun my groups of 50 or more rebels before help could arrive.
We’ll see. I worry that we are trying to do too much beyond
preventing
This is either a risky move or an indication that we’ve truly hammered the Islamist rebels down to the point where the risk is low.
This, by the way, is the Marine Corps plan for their sector
when they take over from the Army forces commanded by the 82nd AB
Division west of
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“Pillsbury Nuke Boy” (Posted
We continue
to try for a deal with
Despite the North's uneven track record, analysts say that
this time, a carefully structured deal could work. The famine-stricken North is
more desperate than ever — and an eventual agreement would be signed with all
of its neighbors, including allies
This is a good point. If
Of course, a multi-lateral agreement also makes it more
difficult to call
An agreement may yet be possible. But it is not the end, just the means to North Korean nuclear disarmament.
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“On Being a September 11 News Consumer” (Posted
There is no doubt that I’m a September 11 person. Not that I was even remotely oblivious to foreign affairs prior to September 11, 2002, but I recognize that date as a turning point in eras. Before that date was the nebulous “post-Cold War” era. We didn’t know what it was. We just knew it wasn’t the Cold War. On that morning, we were served notice that the age of terrorists seeking our mass murder was here. What seems so self-evident to is not, however, shared uniformly by Americans. Steyn puts it well in “It’s the War, Stupid’ on February 28 (as he usually does. Registration required):
This is, when you think about it, a very odd situation. Generally speaking, when a nation's at war, its citizens recognise it as such. In, say, 1944, even the conscientious objectors did not attempt to argue that there was, in fact, no war. But in 2004
This makes it so incredibly difficult to debate those who
oppose the President. And it isn’t like I am lockstep in support of whatever
the administration does. But when the other side amazingly analyzes everything
on the assumption that Bushrove is “wagging the dog”
for political purposes, one is pushed to defend the administration. Shoot, one
even has to agree with their basic logic. If there is no war going on, what our
government is doing (Gitmo, troops fighting in
But, of course, we really are at war. This makes what we are doing far less suspicious.
I think much of the media is infected with the September 10 outlook. This shapes their suspicion of what is going on. And this drives the frustration of those who criticize the efforts of most of our press as they cover this war.
Orson Scott Card (via Winds of Change) puts it well as he suggests how one is to use the news even as we recognize that it does not quite get it:
The first reality check is a thorough
knowledge of history. Human behavior has not changed a whit in any important
way for the past four thousand years. There are patterns of causality; certain
kinds of things happen over and over, for similar reasons and with similar
results. So when you see them happening again, but with an accompanying story
about how wonderful and new they are, you're better able to look at them with
skepticism.
In other words, the more history you know,
the more likely you are to notice when someone's pulling the wool over your
eyes.
Still, that's only a generalized skepticism.
To know you're being lied to is not the same thing as
knowing what the truth is.
He suggests a variety of news sources by which to gain information
to test whether what you are hearing even makes sense. His suggestion makes
sense. And I do feel lucky to be a history and political science major which at
one time (as one dentist I had long ago suggested) trained me to be an
interesting waiter. I don’t feel uncomfortable listening to NPR news because I
feel I have a good enough background to filter out their editorializing—even
when they don’t realize it—to pull out the actual news item. Not
that it can’t piss me off thoroughly. It does. But they can still
provide news. Knowing that
And Card points out one thing that is really frustrating—the tendency of most American newsreaders to pretend they are freaking neutral when our nation is at war against fanatics. For God’s sake, they can use the word “we” when discussing American actions.
But that’s so September 11 of me, I guess.
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“Remember the Cold War?” (Posted
Just a reminder of what we struggled against during the Cold
War. It was a real war and our enemy in
The
KGB campaign to assault the
The fruits of that campaign linger on today.
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“A Victory in
Sistani has been persuaded on elections:
Iraq (news
- web
sites)'s most prominent Shiite cleric signaled Thursday that he would
accept the installation of an unelected government after June 30 if elections
are set — possibly at the end of the year — and the United Nations (news
- web
sites) guarantees the date.
This is good.
Yet critics continue to attack the June 30 timeline for nominal sovereignty as politically driven:
The Bush administration — eager to end the formal
occupation ahead of the presidential election in November — has said the June
30 deadline is firm.
Look, we originally planned for a formal constitution first and then a transfer of sovereignty in 2005. The French said this was too long. In time, the Shias worried that the goal of freedom could be snatched away as it had so many times in the past, and expressed a desire for a more rapid turnover.
So we set June 30. The French still claimed this was too long!
I really want to know how this Bushrove
(I still don’t know who this guy is, but he’s mentioned a lot) fellow thinks a
handover of nominal sovereignty on June 30 is politically driven? If casualties
are the issue, what fool thinks we are pulling our troops out on June 30?
Notice the massive troop rotation going on? We will be fighting for a while.
The goal is to gradually pull back as Iraqis gain the ability to fight the
insurgency (remember, we don’t need to turn over a country as peaceful as a
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“Well I’ll Be Darned“ (Posted
The opposition to the Iraq War strongly suggested that the
path to determining the legitimacy of a government went through
The French have decided Aristide must go! I eagerly await
the replies of those members of Congress who want the
Meanwhile, Aristide’s supporters are demonstrating why they are not worthy of being supported even as the armed opposition remains too thug-like to support:
Attacks against members or employees of the international
community have increased in recent days since U.S. Secretary of State Colin
Powell (news
- web
sites) and French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin
called for Aristide to cede power amid rising violence.
The
Some 2,200
That sounds about right. The 1994 invasion was overkill. The
local thugs aren’t very good at fighting real soldiers. We can’t abandon Americans
or foreigners to be killed by xenophobic thugs. Not to be cold toward Haitian
lives but these are Haitians killing other Haitians—and they do it at pretty
regular intervals. If they are willing, who are we to risk our lives to stop
them? We have no interest in supporting either side in winning. It would also be
nice, as much as I am uncomfortable with this reasoning, to keep Haitians from
fleeing to
The 2,200 Marines represent a reinforced battalion with air assets, too (a Marine Expeditionary Unit), which is the Marine equivalent of the thousand-man battalion-sized force I suggested was enough to achieve the limited goals I mentioned.
And this pattern of revolts of upset Haitians marching out
of the north to seize the capital and oust the current president stretches back
two centuries. Aid to
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“
Some are urging the US to intervene in Haiti. Jesse Jackson want us to prop up Aristide. Oh, and Senator Dodd, too.
I don’t know, shouldn’t we be going to regional
organizations to urge a “
We probably shouldn’t underestimate Voodoo extremists, either.
Even assuming we can figure out whose side we intervene on, shouldn’t we be exhausting all non-violent means first? I mean, let’s try a decade of sanctions before we do anything hasty.
And we don’t even have our first UN resolution on the crisis! But since we have a decade of sanctions ahead of us, we have time to collect a dozen or so.
Or perhaps human shields can stand in front of the machete-wielding rebels and shame them into going home. Or, the human shields can march with the machete-wielding rebels and shame Aristide into being a decent ruler. Or at least less of a thug.
And then we need to gather up a real coalition. The British, Australians, Poles, New Zealanders, Dutch, South Koreans, Japanese, Ukrainians, Central Americans, Italians, Spanish, Mongols, Romanians, Bulgarians, and anybody else associated with Iraq will just need to sit this one out since they aren’t, apparently, real.
Ultimately, many who usually like to march in solidarity
with dictators to oppose American military action want us to invade (oh, I
mentioned Jackson already. Never mind).
The French see a role for a foreign intervention:
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin
urged the "immediate" establishment of an international civilian
force.
Of course, the French suggestion may explain a lot. I can
see it, the elite Detachment Du Claims’ Adjustaires. The 1st Demi-Battalion, Royal Regiment of Clerc-Typistes.
He actually proposed an international civilian
force to intervene. My God, the French have totally lost it. I think we in
Just what is de Villepin thinking? Oh, here it is:
"This international force would be responsible for
guaranteeing the return to public order and supporting the international community's
action on the ground," Villepin said. "It
would come to the support of a government of national unity."
Ah, of course! De Villepin thinks the rebels and government can just collaborate with each other and all will be fine. My, that is sophisticated. Those former colonial powers are good at such deep thinking.
Hey, I’m not saying we shouldn’t intervene. Though I admit I am prone to being against luxury missions like this. I feel better when doing the right thing actually preserves our security, too. I also feel better when we can intervene on somebody’s side. Which group of bully boys are we supposed to favor?
But then, I thought
So as long as we aren’t talking more than a battalion to guard the capital for a bit and force both sides to negotiate since we won’t allow either odious side to win, we might be able to settle the place down without straining our forces unduly. Shoot, we probably wouldn’t do any worse than the 20,000-strong intervention in 1994 and the 2 or 3 billion dollars we sank into that perpetual Hell hole since we dropped in ten years ago.
Mostly, though, I look forward to
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“African Future” (Posted
Our military is paying more attention to Africa:
Top
The military’s adaptation to the post-Cold War world continues.
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“I Should Think This Should Clear Things Up” (Posted
This isn’t about the goodies we can give
"The United States seeks the complete, verifiable and
irreversible dismantlement of all the DPRK's (North
Korea's) nuclear programs, both plutonium and uranium-based," Assistant
Secretary of State James Kelly said.
We will not stand for nuclear rogue states anymore. And the nutballs in
Hell, we may destroy the North Korean regime anyway given how untrustworthy that Stalinist prison camp is. And given how brutal it is to its own people.
On moral grounds, we should overthrow the regime. On
practical grounds, we’ll settle for their nuclear disarmament. I wonder if
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“Yes, We Do Stand With the Iranian People” (Posted
NRO mentioned this. The President has spoken up for the Iranian people:
"I join many in
He said
Oh, and the Iranians are insulting
their only hope for holding off
On Monday, the European Union (news
- web
sites) called the elections a "setback for the democratic process in
"We don't think much of the words of enemies,"
said Ahmad Tavakkoli, the No. 2 vote-getter in
When the thug Iranians call the EU their enemy along with
the
We’re coming. And our coalition will include the old Europeans. This time we let them have a shot with their way. And it is failing.
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“The Military Serious About Fighting War Over
Long Run” (Posted
The Army shows it is thoroughly reacting to the needs for a long-term strategy to win this war. From division reorganization, to unit manning, to improving the Current Force and evolving to the Future Force instead of banking all on a totally transformed future Objective Force. And now adjusting our AC/RC balance and changing the types of troops we field:
The
I still tend to think we need a couple motorized infantry
divisions, or perhaps half a dozen separate brigades (or 8 or 9 of the smaller
“Units of Action”), bolstered by heavy armor. But I do appreciate the concerns
that we can’t spend ourselves broke building forces we don’t need over the long
run. A lot depends on how long
I’m willing to give the Pentagon the benefit of the doubt on not adding to end strength just yet. They really are doing a lot with what they’ve got.
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“FA-22 Doomed?” (Posted
Strategypage notes that the Raptor is on shaky grounds:
The
Back in July 2002, in my now abandoned Defense Issues page, I wrote that the plane should be built in only small numbers as a hedge. I basically stand by that but I seem to have gotten a bit more skeptical of how many we need.
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“Another Distortion of the SOTU” (Posted
Al Qaeda has learned how to get
the
"We remind Bush that he didn't destroy two-thirds of
al-Qaida. On the contrary, thanks be
to God, al-Qaida is still in the holy war battleground
raising the banner of Islam."
The AP article does note that the President didn’t actually say what the tape reader says the President claimed:
In his State of the Union address in January, Bush said
"nearly two-thirds" of al-Qaida's known leaders
were captured or killed.
More seriously, this statement says a lot about our enemy:
"The decision of the French president to issue a law
to prevent Muslim girls from covering their heads in schools is another example
of the Crusader's malice, which Westerners have against Muslims," the
recording said.
How do we deal with people who seem
to hold the
And doesn’t this bravado have just
a little of the Monty Pythonesque “What are you going
to do? Bleed on me?” tone?
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Ledeen is on the Iran
election scam.
The real numbers are a tiny fragment of the official ones. The overall
turnout came in at about twelve percent, with
It
shouldn't have been hard to get this story right, at least in its broad
outlines. A leading member of the old parliament, Mehdi
Karoubi, was asked why he did badly, and he replied,
publicly: "because the people boycotted the election."
Keep
in mind that the reporters knew full well that all but a handful of polling
sites in Tehran — the only place they were able to observe, thanks to the usual
clampdown on information — were virtually dead. They knew, or should have
known, that the regime had trotted out more than 10,000 "mobile voting
booths," that is to say, trucks driving around inviting people to vote.
They surely heard the stories — widely repeated on Iranian web sites — of
thousands of phony ballots, and of citizens being forced to turn over their
identity cards, thus making it possible for others to pose as legitimate
voters. They must also have heard that high-school students were warned that if
they did not vote they would never get into the universities.
But
they did not report any of this. The Washington
Post's Karl Vick wrote an upbeat report, as if the hardliners had won a
normal election, and CNN's legendary Ms. Amanpour
stressed that Iran was changing for the better since the dress code for women
had loosened a bit in the past few years. Neither seemed to know that there
were violent protests throughout the country, that several people had been
killed and scores wounded by the regime's thugs, and that highways were blocked
because the regime was afraid the protests would spread. There was enough
electoral fraud to fill any Western news report, had the correspondents wished
to do so.
Why can’t the press report what is happening? This is a
brutal regime that is quite possibly on the verge of getting nuclear weapons.
The people there actually like us and seem to be looking to us for some sign of
support that we give a damn and don’t think the mullahs are men we can deal
with. Are we viewing the
Lord, I’d consider it an improvement if the press would report on the fraud and brutality of the Iranian mullahs but blame it on Karl Rove or some Texan cabal.
This is too important. I think we will deal with
More accurately, please.
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Indonesian President Megawati
Sukarnoputri has divined a pattern
of injustice toward the Islamic world:
An exceptional injustice is apparent in the attitude and
actions of big countries toward countries with major Muslim populations,"
she said.
Intentional or not, a pattern is emerging, Megawati said.
"The act of violence undertaken unilaterally against
the
Sometimes it is difficult not to just reach out and slap some people and just pray that they snap out of whatever trance they are in.
We liberate Afghan Moslems. We liberate Iraqi Moslems. We rescue Kosovo Moslems. We rescue Bosnian Moslems. We feed and try to save Somali Moslems. We liberate Kuwaiti Moslems. Yeah, quite the pattern of injustice.
The bottom line is that I thank God we have a diplomatic corps. Our State Department may annoy me, but we need people that can look across a table at people who believe we are a curse upon the Moslem world and move on to point two on the agenda rather than pressing the fix location button on their GPS receiver in order to guide the JDAMs into their position an hour after they leave.
Megawati and others less responsible keep saying we inflicted injustice on the Islamic world. I don’t think that word means what they thinks it means. (with thanks to the Princess Pride for that line).
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Via Donald Sensing, this report on the hunt for bin Laden
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Huh? So fighting tribally based insurgents is impossible?
Even tribes hopped up on Islamism can be defeated and they can become too discouraged to fight.
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Hoagland thinks the Governing Council should be trusted with sovereignty and setting up elections:
Who should organize
I noted that I figured since we picked the council 25, we should have some trust in them. Apparently not:
The
Bush administration liberated Iraqis 10 months ago. But it still does not trust
them -- not even the 25 Iraqis chosen to help manage their country's transition
to freedom. They have been rewarded for their cooperation with disdain and
denigration from
I do think we should place some trust and authority in them. Not enough to refrain from vetoing a constitution that will not provide for a secular state with minority rights and rule of law, but enough to start the transition to democracy through them.
Hoagland seems to think that the 25 alone will be enough of a transition, but I don’t know. I think added legitimacy and some practical governing experience will be added by promoting city council members, by vote of those councils, to the national governing council.
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I’ve been called the pemalinkless Dignified Rant. Others have apologized for linking to a site where you have to scroll down. Another simply stated, sadly, that I have no permalinks.
But then a kindly administrator of Winds of Change advised me, “Dude. You need permalinks. Badly.”
Fine.
When I started my site, I thought of going to a blog hosting site. But I didn’t see myself posting that much. So I used my existing Yahoo! Geocities site where I had biographical and publishing information. It was intended as an online portfolio. I had used little space so I just used that site. I figured I’d be lucky to update something once a week
Little did I know.
Responding in Foreign Affairs (now combined with Defense issues into on National Security Affairs page) to perceived idiocy in the war on terror. Advocating options. Predicting options. Reporting interesting news. And I had other categories.
As posting took on a life of its own, I had to add monthly archives to handle the volume when the general purpose archives filled up. So I add to current posts. Cut and paste to archives. And then cut and paste again to monthly archives when archives fill up.
I knew I needed permalinks but I just wasn’t motivated enough to figure out a decent way to handle them.
I think this will work. I’ll post to current and simultaneously to the monthly archives where the permalink will reside. Archives will just be a pointer to the monthly National Security archives. When I get tired of a post being in the current page, I’ll just delete it. It will already be in the archives.
For the rest of February, I’m going to use the temporary “permalinks” test page. If this works, I’ll start real permanent permalinks in March.
Permalink to this post: www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAFEB2004ARCHIVES.html#22FEB04B
“Real Aid” (Posted
Foreign aid has basically been about easing our rich
The
To
qualify for the funds, countries must demonstrate, in the president's words, that they are "ruling justly, investing in their
people, and establishing economic freedom."
Now, we will insist on performance standards to earn our aid, and thus increase the chances that the aid will be about helping the recipients. And the recipient nations will have the freedom to decide how to spend the money. (What, no Halliburton connection?)
Quite the revolution in thinking.
And compassionate, too, in a meaningful way.
“Blind Info
The Atlantic
article “Blind Into Baghdad” is pretty damning of pre-war US planning
for the invasion of
Let me say right off the bat that I was skeptical of the thrust of the article before I read word one.
And this pet peeve of mine that Fallows asserts as fact really drove me away:
On May 6 the Administration announced that Bremer would be the new
If the failure to stop the looting was a major sin of omission, sending
the Iraqi soldiers home was, in the view of nearly everyone except those who
made the decision, a catastrophic error of commission. There were two arguments
for taking this step. First, the army had "already disbanded itself,"
as Douglas Feith put it to me—soldiers had melted
away, with their weapons. Second, the army had been an integral part of the
Sunni-dominated Baathist security structure. Leaving
it intact would be the wrong symbol for the new
Fallows simply notes that some argue the army self-disbanded and then just disregards it, asserting “nearly everyone except those who made the decision” think it was a catastrophic error. Hogwash. The fact that the army and police melted away despite our efforts to get them to defect as units is not some inconvenient fact to ignore in a rush to condemn the administration. The army was gone. The question of whether to retain it was rendered rather moot and no amount of hostility toward the administration can change that.
Second, even if elements survived intact, we would have still had to fire everybody above the rank of colonel to get rid of Baathists or Baathist-trusted elements. Even in the pre-war phase of arguments, I mentioned we could take defectors and organize them into light infantry units to help us if city fighting was too tough. I would not have wanted entire divisions sitting around, potentially able to “undefect” and cause an embarrassing situation for us.
Now, I don’t intend to go into a line-by-line critique. But the “disbanding” criticism is one that never fails to rile me up. It is bull.
Certainly, the author lists a number of errors made. Some I think are reasonable to note, such as failing to quickly secure the borders and arms depots.
Yet there are reasons we failed that relate to the speed of
our victory. Our spearheads were short on spare parts, ammo, and even food. We
had to divert troops to fight in the cities west of the
More broadly, should we have delayed the war to gather the
support troops and NGOs and the additional combat troops to protect them as
they followed the Army and Marine Corps? Would the NGOs have even cooperated? Before
the war, many opponents of fighting Iraq opposed any type of preparation for
the post-war because it assumed war—and they didn’t think we should assume war.
And if we did take the time to do all this, would Saddam have still been
confident we were not going to invade? We gained a tremendous advantage by
invading a country whose leader was convinced we would not invade. Early in
this blog I did a Red Team analysis about what I’d do
to defend
War is an uncertain enterprise. It is easy to complain about individual things that did go wrong. It can be done for the Iraq War or any war. This is the friction of war, plain and simple. So rather than debate the individual things Fallows says went wrong and what the significance of those things are, what is Fallows’ bottom line?
Fallows’ conclusion just reads wrong despite the laundry list of failures:
George W. Bush has an obvious preference for large choices. This gave
him his chance for greatness after the September 11 attacks. But his lack of
curiosity about significant details may be his fatal weakness. When the
decisions of the past eighteen months are assessed and judged, the
Administration will be found wanting for its carelessness. Because of warnings
it chose to ignore, it squandered American prestige, fortune, and lives.
The conclusion rings wrong because we won. We won decisively.
In roughly three weeks. With few American battle casualties and little
collateral damage. His judgment clearly shows he just basically opposed the
war. Which is fine. That is his right. But to describe
this as going blind into
The Iraq War was a decisive victory, folks. What war in history—by anybody—went right with these ridiculous standards of success?
We squandered nothing. And our mistakes were inconsequential in the big picture.
“Bin
Laden Trapped?” (Posted
The
Moderate Voice (via Donald Sensing)
reports on a
story that says bin Laden is essentially trapped and under surveillance by
a
OSAMA
bin Laden is reportedly surrounded by
Interesting if true. And assuming Osama isn’t really dead.
And this part seems a little off:
The article goes on to say bin Laden's
movements are continually monitored by a US National Security Agency satellite
positioned over the land in which the wealthy Saudi is trapped.
I didn’t think that photographic satellites could be put in geosynchronous orbits. Isn’t the altitude required for that way too high for photographs? And wouldn’t other types of satellites that could function from that distance be useless to track a small band of men? I’ll be interested in reading something on this. I’m not sat expert, though.
If we do nab him quickly, that would be good timing for a spring offensive to hit al Qaeda operatives in the Horn region. Who wouldn’t assume that nabbing bin Laden was the much anticipated spring offensive?
Only people who assume this administration isn’t committed to winning the war instead of just short-term tactical victories, I guess.
“And As Long As We’re All Together Here Talking…” (Posted
Another Strategypage gem:
February 21, 2004: Uganda, Djibouti, Kenya, Rwanda and Somalia have
offered troops to the Eastern African Standby Brigade (EASBRIG), soon to be
formed as part of the African Standby Force (ASF). Eritrea, Ethiopia,
Madagascar, Mauritius,
The seven day long closed meeting of chiefs of defense staff and
Experts (chaired by the Ugandan army commander) did not disclose specific troop
quotas. However, they did formulate the EASBRIG policy framework and agree that
the region's defense ministers will meet in April at the AU's
THE AFRICAN STANDBY FORCE: Progress and prospects, online at
www.trainingforpeace.org/pubs/iss/asr123.pdf
In the long run, this will certainly be helpful to us and the African states involved.
But in the short run (like, oh this spring), I wonder if we
talked to some of the leaders about a new offensive operation to nail al Qaeda in the region.
I know we cooperate with nations all over the world (yeah,
that’s right, we have lots of cooperation), so this may not mean anything other
than that I am looking for meaning, but I’d focus on the Horn region were I
CINC.
“
Oil is fungible. So we can’t really nail down our imports
from one region of the world at the expense of others. That’s why talk of us
avoiding the
So the possibility of gaining more of our oil from
West Africa's Gulf of Guinea supplies the United States
with 15 percent of its oil, a figure projected to grow to 25 percent by 2015.
And of course (from the same article), with more of our oil imports coming from the area, increasing our ability to deploy military force here is important:
The
With more oil discoveries being made, the importance of the region increases:
The Gambian president announced the discovery
of "large quantities" of oil in his tiny West African nation, saying
the offshore find would eliminate poverty and hunger, Gambian media reported.
In the modern age, oil is not the only reason to base forces in the region (from Strategypage). This nicely ties it all together:
This corner of
“Selected (Not
Directly Elected)” (Posted
The UN sided with us on direct elections prior to the June 30 transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis:
Annan on Thursday
confirmed what he and other U.N. officials have been saying for days — that
elections can't be held before the end of June. He also told Security Council
members that "caucuses are no good," said
The secretary-general stressed that there was wide support
inside and outside
I imagine this was the price of our intervention in
With caucuses out, what can we do?
I bet an expanded Governing Council will work. Those people will love it, of course. They’ll get a leg up on running for real elections when they are held. Since we did pick them, they certainly should be acceptable even if they aren’t puppets. Disagreement doesn’t mean we are enemies.
So how do we expand it without elections and without caucuses?
How about having local city and regional legislative bodies
that are already up and running select members of their own bodies for
promotion? This has the advantage of being at least an indirect election.
Shoot, that’s how we used to select our
Just my two cents but I bet it could work.
“Selected (Not
Elected): Actual Occurrence” (Posted
The Iranian Islamists will win the parliamentary elections held Friday. There is no doubt. Few who even pretended to be a reformist (and most did pretend—whether to others or just to themselves) were allowed to run by the mullahs. The biggest question is how much the mullahs will inflate the vote total to make it look like a real election. The Iranian government says turnout was good:
Iran's hard-line Islamic rulers claimed
Saturday that voters dealt reformers a decisive blow with a strong turnout in
disputed parliament elections, but partial returns suggested the pro-reform
boycott had an impact.
I’d be really surprised if the total wasn’t doubled by the government. And even this is lower than past turnout.
So what will happen?
Some reformers still live in a dream world where the hardliners are capable of being swayed by reason and process:
The reformist newspaper Aftab
expressed the hopes of many liberals: that the new parliament will be more pragmatic
and eventually drift to their side.
My Jane’s email news alert/direct marketing ploy says:
Editor's notes
[Jane's
Intelligence Digest - first posted to http://jid.janes.com -
I just don’t see how there is a direct connection between apathy toward voting and unwillingness to fight the mullahs. Given the pressure to vote exerted by the mullahs, couldn’t refusal to vote be called something other than apathy? Like, maybe, not giving a damn anymore? If a sizable portion of the population doesn’t give a damn about the Mullah’s power, a real crisis that could overthrow the mullahs could occur.
The Iraq War showed that we could contact enemy generals directly. Could we be doing this now with potentially friendly Iranian generals?
The Iranian people may not be able to overcome the mullah’s and their imported bully boys on their own, but with support from the Iranian armed forces, who in turn can count on US aid, the people could spark a true revolt and end the 25-year reign of terror of the mullahs.
“Sensinglanche”
(Posted
Dang. More hits than my last Instalanche. Thanks Donald!
If you’re linking here from Sensing, (dang, gotta avoid late night posts. Little faux pas with the wrong name--but right link--up for a few hours...) you’ll need to go to the February 16th post to see the Iran/lion post.
I don’t need no stinkin’
permalinks. I leave that to the fancy high-tech bloggers.
“The Next 9-11”
(Posted
May well be by sea. Look for a port or sea lane choke point to go boom:
"We believe al Qaeda and its
associates may be planning a maritime 'spectacular'," said Dominick
Donald, a senior analyst with Aegis Defense Services, a leading London-based
risk and security consultancy.
Maybe in
Citing a surge in piracy attacks and ocean crime, he said
the building blocks for an attack were already in place, particularly in little-patrolled
waters around the Horn of
Another reason to go on the offensive in
the spring against the Islamists in the Horn region.
“The Iranian Threat”
(Posted
Ledeen has an excellent article on Iranian developments. He writes about things that just don’t make the papers.
He explains well the silliness of the so-called struggle between hardliners and the faux reformers. The former like to stomp on throats gleefully. The latter want a kinder, gentler throat stomping. The bottom line is that we lose no matter who wins this struggle and the winners will have nukes:
And
we may see them with atomic bombs. Oddly, just as the foreign minister was
announcing Iran's intention to sell enriched uranium to interested parties —
thereby spitting in the eye of the French, German, and English diplomats who
sang love songs to themselves just a few short months ago, proclaiming they had
negotiated an end to the Iranian nuclear program — two smugglers were arrested
in Iraq, near Mosul, with what an Iraqi general
described as a barrel of uranium. Here is what General Hikmat
Mahmoud Mohammed had to say about the event:
"This material is in the category of weapons of mass destruction, which is
why the investigation is secret. The two suspects were transferred to American
forces, who are in charge of the inquiry."
As an added kicker, Ledeen says
this is from the same location from which
We will deal with
Unreported in the American press and apparently unnoted by the leaders
of the Bush administration, the regime is in open battle with its own people.
In late January the regime's thugs murdered four workers, injured more than 40
others, and arrested nearly 100 more in Shahr-e Babak and the small
We may yet be lucky and have the Iranians themselves solve our problems. I fear we’ll have to push them over the edge and take a hand in this. I am confident we will not let this threat emerge. Let the Europeans play at diplomacy while we prepare for one of our three options.
Shoot, maybe the EU horse will sing.
“Chinese Threat”
(Posted
This article (via Winds of Change, via Instapundit)
discusses the looming competition
over oil between the
Sixty-seven years ago, oil-starved
While the
Dependence on oil means dependence on the
Optimists claim that the world oil market
will be able to accommodate
History shows the opposite: Superpowers find
it difficult to coexist while competing over scarce resources. The main bone of
contention probably will revolve around
First, I’m not that impressed with the Chinese 8-10 percent
annual growth rate. It’s easy to get that kind of growth when you put peasants
into factories. The most productive peasant will be outshone GDP-wise by the
worst, most inefficient factory worker. The Soviets did this for decades,
making it seem like they advanced more than they did. Let’s see how
Certainly,
And we can count on a lot of allies to help us. Or at the
very least, there are powers that
Then we have
The
The former Soviet Central Asian ‘Stans’ are hosting American bases.
That’s quite a ring of potential enemies. I wouldn’t want to swap geography with the Chinese!
So what if
But will
Certainly,
Between
2000 and 2025
Although
For
most aging Chinese today, the pension system is the family, and even with
continuing national economic progress, Chinese families are likely to be placed
under mounting pressure by the swelling ranks of seniors. By 2025,
there will be nearly 300 million members of China’s 60-plus population, but, at the same time, the cohorts
rising into that pool will be the same people who accounted for China’s
sub-replacement fertility patterns in the early 1990s
and thereafter. Absent a functioning nationwide pension program, unforgiving
arithmetic suggests there may be something approaching a one-to-one ratio
emerging between elderly parents and the children obliged to support them. Even
worse, from the perspective of a Confucian culture, a sizable fraction —
perhaps nearly one-fourth — of these older Chinese will have no living son on
whom to rely for sustenance. One need not be a novelist to imagine the intense
social tensions such conditions could engender (to say nothing of the personal
and humanitarian tragedies).
Second,
and no less important, there is no particular reason to expect that older
people in
Data
on the health status of older people in
Thus,
Sorry, that was a long quote but it is quite interesting. This
demographic challenge seems to be a real problem for a
Plus, the legacy of the one-child policy will make for a nation of little kings. Will the Chinese be willing to sacrifice their only sons for foreign adventure?
Some wrote us off when the Soviets were rising,
with one author I read years ago asserting that the American century ended in
1975 and the next century would be
I’m still betting on the
“Just In Case They
Aren’t Really Paying Attention” (Posted
We keep telling
The times they
are a changing (and to be fair, when
"I think
Threats to our nation and people are looked at a little differently since 9-11.
Is there anybody in
“A Sign We are Winning in
The Japanese and local Iraqis are having some problems agreeing on a price for renting land for a base. So what do the Iraqis threaten to do? Car bomb? Give their blood and souls for Saddam? No. They threaten this:
Iraqis negotiating over rent with Japanese troops building
a base on their land said Wednesday the talks have broken down and threatened
to sue, though
<fatherlytearsofjoy>They grow up so fast!</fatherlytearsofjoy>
Law suits and protests! Seriously, this is kind of cool.
“Meanwhile in
The Fallujah attack was carried out by Iraqis and not Islamists, apparently. The Baathists still have some teeth and the heart of the Sunni triangle is where they fight the most. In other locations within the Sunni triangle, it seems as if the Islamists have taken the lead role.
This has surprised me the most. I did not think the resistance would go on this long. But I did not think it would take until December to nail Saddam. And I didn’t think we would have problems keeping the borders secure to stop Islamists from coming in. Nonetheless, the Baathist/Islamist resistance has been relatively weak. They show no sign of being able to actually win. Yet reporters trot out the “if you aren’t winning, you’re losing” line, without really knowing whether we are winning or losing. I think the trend lines are good. We are winning more slowly than I thought, but money and foreign fervor combined with ample local weaponry have given the regime die-hards more resources than I thought they’d have.
For reporters, it seems easy for them to assume that a lengthy, slow path to victory is actually defeat because they wrongly believe insurgents have the advantage. Strategypage repeats what I’ve noted:
The Sunni Arab resistance, while they make for good
media headlines, have a poor understanding of history. For example,
since World War II, must insurgencies have failed.
Moreover, insurgencies have always failed when the insurgents did not represent
(ethnically or religiously) the majority of the population they were fighting
amongst. Worse yet, if the Sunni Arab resistance triggers a civil war and
causes Iraqi to break up, it should be noted that all the oil is in Kurdish or Shia Arab areas. The Sunni Arabs would be left with mostly
desert.
Even Sunni leaders can see that Baathist and Islamist resistance will only harm the Sunnis.
We are winning.
“Solid Front Against the Psychopath in
The North Koreans have been throwing tantrums hoping to get
concessions from the
"I don't think our position has changed from what it's
been for quite some time,"
I think we can afford to hold tight.
And, because of the Pakistanis, we now know that
"If the North Koreans don't acknowledge the half of
their program that deals with uranium enrichment, it's hard to see how you can
get a complete verifiable and irreversible dismantlement,"
Squeeze them ever so gently so they don’t notice they are strangling. Give them a little hope so they refrain from using their deteriorating military to lash out in desperation. One day it will be too late and they’ll just collapse.
“Preparing to
Intervene?” (Posted
It sure looks like we are preparing to intervene in the Horn
of Africa. General Abizaid visited
"We know the terrorists gravitate toward ungoverned
spaces, and these are areas where they look for the opportunities to gain
recruits, establish safe-havens and move money," he said. "We
certainly have indications to believe that people associated with these groups
operate in and around areas such as
Talk of a spring offensive in
No, the Horn should be the site of a new military operation in
the spring. Mostly
We need to remind people we are still on the hunt and not sitting back, too tired to fight.
“Good Sign We’ll Support Our Friends” (Posted
We need to turn over sovereignty to Iraqis. But since we went to the trouble of invading and all, we really shouldn’t be shy about supporting our friends and insisting on ground rules that will aid our friends and hamper those who wish us ill:
Iraq's U.S. administrator suggested Monday he would block any move by
Iraqi leaders to make Islamic law the backbone of an interim constitution,
which women's groups fear could threaten their rights.
I hope Bremer isn’t bluffing.
“
An old joke has it that if a lion is chasing you, you don’t have to be able to run faster than the lion—just be faster than the slowest person in your group.
Well, a lot of Axis of Evil and Axis wannabees are breathing
a sigh of relief as
Iran
said Sunday that it plans to sell nuclear reactor fuel internationally,
establishing the Islamic republic as a country with the technology required to
enrich uranium.
We will catch them. I’ve felt since
The Iranian mullahs just slowed down even more.
“The ‘Fraudulent’
Coalition” (Posted
The
“Missing Links”
(Posted
Aha. A link I meant to use but couldn’t find when I referred to it. Regarding US Army reorganization. (see the February 12 Strategypage article).
And my reference to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace “200X” report. I remembered it, meant to go find it and link to it, and then forgot.
Anyway, here it is with the following little bit of CEIP wisdom of particular note:
According to a U.S. Defense Department 2001 report, “Iraq
would need five or more years and key foreign assistance” to rebuild its
nuclear facilities to enrich sufficient uranium for a nuclear weapon.2
Significantly, this time frame has not changed from the five to seven years
estimated in the department’s 1996 assessment.3 The time will be considerably
shortened if Baghdad acquires fissile material from foreign suppliers. Iraq’s
greatest asset is the two dozen nuclear scientists and engineers still in
Iraq.4 This expertise, combined with the absence of ground monitors and
decreasing support for the U.N. sanctions regime, has led to heightened anxiety
about
Now, CEIP complains about the evidence, saying we made up
the threat. In 2002, CEIP saw circumstances under which
Quite the spin on Iraqi nuclear capabilities, eh? Wonder who will investigate CEIP for its blatant slanting of the hazy information about Saddam’s WMD ambitions?
“A Backlash to
‘Bully’
I’m getting tired of reading stories like this. The title is
“A Backlash to ‘bully’
Rarely in history has a country been as powerful as the
The article says that our rivals worry about our dominance
and that their common concerns have become more focused and unified. Even our
traditional allies and friends fear our dominance. And of course, some
developing countries “complain that they are too often bullied by the
The litany of our sins follows rapidly.
Latin American countries are upset about our actions to support the Colombian government.
Our allies are upset at national missile defense.
The
Then the author hauls out a national security expert from the US Institute for Peace:
“You can get away with unilateralism for only the briefest of times,”
he says. “You can’t have it both ways—pushing for greater globalization but not
supporting things like an international criminal court or the United Nations”
Another expert chimes in:
One of the most important things the next president will have to do is
strengthen our alliances and explain to other countries why our presence is
needed around the world.
The complaints are old and the article says nothing new.
And I know the article can’t be right. It simply can’t be.
I know this because it was published
We all know that having other nations upset with us is all due to the current administration. I mean, in September 2000, we’d had nearly eight years of a multilateral-loving, UN-appeasing, lip-biting, apology-prone, compassionate, sophisticated, Euro-friendly administration.
Sorry. I couldn’t resist. I ran across the old article while cleaning out my office this week.
If you search by date or title, you’ll get the link to the article online. Sorry, it requires subscription or payment to get in.
Ah, the good old days when we were loved…
“Chinese Carriers”
(Posted
From Strategypage.com:
The Chinese article says the lead ship should “commission” in 2006 and
that a “battle group” should form “by 2010.” These appear to be very
conservative dates. Evidence strongly suggests that these ships are intended to
be a technical surprise in several senses, including initial operating dates.
The 2006 date is more realistic for the first carrier group. All three ships
could be operational with battle groups by 2008-2010. The Chinese article says
that maintenance facilities have been built at
So the Peking Olympics are in 2008?
As I’ve said, were I a ruthless Chinese dictatorship, I’d be
really tempted to invade
Besides, in time the Taiwanese will get better defenses and
maybe nukes. Time is running out for the Chinese to absorb
I don’t think the Chinese need the carriers to take
“New Army
Organization” (Posted
From the always useful Strategypage.com (sorry, can’t find the link. I emailed the text to myself to remind myself to post it):
February 12, 2004: The U.S. Army wants to spend $20 billion over the next seven years to create a force of 42 active duty combat brigades (from the current force of 33), and increasing the number of National Guard combat brigades from 15 to 22. In addition, many unneeded field artillery, air defense, engineer, armor and ordnance battalions will be disbanded while increasing the number of military police, transportation, petroleum and water distribution, civil affairs, psychological operations and biological warfare detection units. The new combat brigades would be smaller than the current ones (two battalions versus three) and have more support units attached to enable the brigades to operate independently. The current 33 brigades include 11 light infantry, 17 heavy infantry and armor, 5 Stryker) will be turned into 15 infantry brigades, 22 armored brigades and five Stryker brigades. The new armor brigades will combine tanks and infantry by having four companies (two tank and two mech infantry) per each of its two battalions. The armor brigade would also have a recon battalion.
The exact details of the reorganization are still being worked out. For example, the fourth and fifth brigades in divisions would use the current headquarters of the aviation and engineer brigades to form headquarters.
That answers one question—the Stryker brigades will stay large infantry formations. Plus, the heavy battalions will have two companies each of armor and mechanized infantry. This is larger than current triangular battalions and will allow each battalion to fight with two balanced tank/infantry task forces. So the new heavy brigades will have two larger line battalions. Plus a recon battalion. With the artillery and other support units that will allow the brigade to fight on its own, they will be like small divisions with the full weight of the Air Force at its call.
Divisions are supposed to be refitted as they rotate out of
I like the plan. I think the Army is adapting admirably to
modernizing while fighting an ongoing war. No more strategic pause talk.
“State Is Capable of Being Forceful” (Posted
Powell put a staffer and a
Good. I like Powell. Sure, his department has an unfortunate tendency to be wishy washy, but that’s why we have a Department of Defense too. Their job is to be the “good cop” for the most part. So I don’t get too upset the Powell isn’t Rumsfeld. At the end of the day, it seems that Powell advocates the administration line.
I’m not happy with State a lot of times, I just don’t despair for the republic over it.
Anyway, kudos to Powell.
“Evolving Resistance”
(Posted February 14, 2004)
I’ve got to believe that killing police officers and freeing criminals isn’t the best way to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis. Of course, if it scares Iraqi police and civilians from cooperating with us, that is clearly bad. We need to make the Iraqi security forces harder targets. The Iraqi Civil Defense Corps building was able to take the heat but the attack on them was probably just to pin them down to keep them from intervening in the attack on the police station:
Police Lt. Col. Jalal Sabri said 21 people were killed, almost all police. Among
the dead were four attackers, two of whom carried Lebanese passports, he said.
Two other attackers were captured, and the rest escaped.
And the attack appeared to be designed to free three foreign fighters being held prisoner at the station. This makes sense. Would Baathists risk an attack to free foreign fighters? I doubt it.
I know we’ve basically pulled out of Fallujah to let the Iraqis police this nest of resistance, but we can’t let the police and security forces take it on the chin like this. Seventy insurgents are way too many. We have to do something to keep them from massing in formations that large. Isolated police posts and government facilities will always be vulnerable if they must face that many attackers.
On the bright side, the Iraqi security forces apparently are on our side since the insurgents saw fit to attack them.
It is interesting if the major fighters are foreigners. This
seems to be the norm
in the country. This makes perfect sense. Al Qaeda
already is rumored to have shifted priority to
This article discusses the apparent changes in the resistance:
The
fourth deadly suicide bombing in
Since
peaking in mid-November, attacks against American soldiers have dropped by more
than half, and the gun battles between American soldiers and Iraqi insurgents
that used to mark daily life in many cities and towns seem in many places to be
on the wane.
At
the same time, attacks have increasingly focused on Iraqi civilians,
particularly those who are seen to be collaborating with the American-led
occupation.
And
the attacks are less likely to involve rocket-propelled grenades and homemade
bombs from Baathist arsenals.
Instead,
suicide bombings have aimed to inflict maximum damage on Iraqi institutions
like the police and military that are central to the American effort to turn
over the reins of government by June 30.
Some
American and Iraqi officials call these changes evidence that the insurgency is
being sustained by foreign fighters with links to international terrorist
groups like Al Qaeda, as the ranks of Mr. Hussein's
cadre are thinned by capture or death.
This is good. I think the enemy made a mistake taking their sights off of Americans. They probably felt they had no choice since our troops are hard targets and inflicted far more casualties than we suffered. And we give no indication we will cut and run.
Yet turning on the Iraqis will only make the Iraqis ruthless with the foreign elements. The hope is that the attacks will scare Iraqis and turn them against us and the new Iraqi government. But I still think the Sunnis are beginning to realize we are their only protection once we turn over sovereignty to the Iraqis dominate by Shias and Kurds.
The date of direct elections may yet be uncertain, but the June 30 turnover date should be solid.
“But They Agreed to
Suspend Their Nuke Activities!” (Posted
This from Iran:
U.N. inspectors in Iran have discovered
undeclared designs for an advanced centrifuge used to enrich uranium, diplomats
said Thursday, another apparent link to the nuclear black market emanating from
But wouldn’t an
The diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said
You’re thinking, but didn’t
The IAEA continues to negotiate with
It was left to a simplistic American to state the obvious:
"We're not convinced
We’ll see how the Europeans deal with this slap at their
well-intentioned faces. At worst, it buys us some time for the Europeans to try
and fail to solve the problem their way. With
This, on the other hand, is some good diplomatic activity:
U.S.
Navy forces may board thousands of commercial ships in international waters to
search for weapons of mass destruction under a landmark deal signed this week
between the United States and Liberia, the world's No. 2 shipping registry.
Maybe we got something concrete out of our Liberian foray
after all. I assumed we bargained with Kofi Annan for something on
“Maybe Saddam Read The Dignified Rant” (Posted
My greatest failure of my pre-war predictions was my
eventual belief that two American heavy divisions and 101st AB would
attack toward
Mr. Hussein believed that a "casualty averse" White House
would order a bombing campaign that
Of course, the reason why Saddam would never have given in
to demands for full disarmament (and why keeping a hundred thousand troops
massed in
A complacent Saddam Hussein was so convinced that war would be averted
or that America would mount only a limited bombing campaign that he deployed
the Iraqi military to crush domestic uprisings rather than defend against a
ground invasion, according to a classified log of interrogations of captured
Iraqi leaders and former officers.
Saddam failed to do so many things that I assumed he’d do to defend his country that this explanation really is the only one to make sense. Hide his assets (like burying precious combat aircraft and probably whatever WMD he still had), keep the Republican Guards north to be as far from our air power as possible, deploy the regulars and para-military thugs to control the Kurds and Shias in case they revolted, and get Baghdad Bob ready to tell tales of shot down American planes and mass killings by American missiles.
The article also explains why the Iraqi army didn’t defect when we invaded:
When
a wave of calls went out to the private telephone numbers of selected officials
inside Iraq, asking them to turn against Mr. Hussein and avoid war, the Arabic
speakers making the calls were so fluent that the recipients did not believe
the calls were from Americans.
Instead,
the Iraqis believed the calls were part of a "loyalty test" mounted
by Mr. Hussein's secret services, the officials said during questioning. Afraid
of arrest, incarceration, torture and even death, they refused to cooperate.
But
as a result, the officers limited their calls or stopped using those telephones
altogether, hampering their ability to
communicate in the critical days before war.
I’d read before the war that loyal Saddam guys would sneak into barracks in the middle of the night, wake up the officers, and whisper “The coup is on, brother officer. Are you with us?” Any fool saying yes would be shot. Rather deterred the army from organizing an effective revolt.
Saddam’s calculation envisioned sacrificing his military to retain his odious regime. He didn’t expect anything more than a heavy air campaign that would never touch his regime at the end of the day:
The
leadership in
Regime change by invasion was our only option.
“More of This,
Please” (Posted
Our generals clearly expected to be greeted with bugs and
chemicals when we went into
What I really like is that Senator Levin asked a couple of good, serious questions:
Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the committee's top Democrat,
said there were consequences to the intelligence problem on weapons and on
other issues.
For instance, there were more than 500 sites where weapons
of mass destruction were believed stored, he said, adding: "That means
that there may have been targets that we did not strike because we were
concerned about collateral damage from a potential release of chemical and
biological weapons."
Intelligence also indicated Iraqi police would stay in
their stations, and when that didn't happen, it likely contributed to the
widespread looting that destroyed government files and buildings, Levin said.
We need to look at our intelligence services. This is
serious stuff. And I’m glad to see an opposition senator ask serious questions.
“Root Cause of
Islamist Terrorism” (Posted
Well, I thought it was supposed to be poverty and exploitation. But then I read this:
In December,
Italian investigators said they shut down a European network suspected of
recruiting Islamic militants to carry out attacks on U.S.-led forces in
I guess the root cause is really expansive welfare benefits and an indulgent society that lets you spend your ample spare time sulking about personal failure and doesn’t hold you to any societal standards.
If only the Europeans showed more compassion to their
troubled immigrants, right?
“Spring Offensive”
(Posted
We plan a spring offensive. This I believe.
We plan on doing some work in
But I don’t think this is our
Resistance to U.S.-led forces in
If the Taliban are running down, it certainly makes sense to pile on and hit them harder. But we hardly need Rangers and an aircraft carrier to reinforce the effort, as earlier reports on the spring offensive report.
I’m still sticking to the Horn of Africa as the spring target.
“The War on Terror is
Global—Just Not in
First of all, let me say that defeating
That said, I am mightily tired of people pretending they too
want to fight our enemies (and it is tough for them to admit thugs want to kill
us) by arguing that invading
The critics insist that our government's
attention was forced away from the urgent pursuit of terrorists. It simply
isn't true. The instruments of power used to overthrow Saddam were
fundamentally different from those required by the cat-and-mouse game that
continues on the Afghan-Pakistani border - or in the countless rat-holes around
the world where our efforts don't show up on 24/7.
What did those on the left want us to do in
The fact is that
"Resistance" to our occupation in
The War on Terror in
Occupations never lasted in
Have we done everything perfectly in
In any event, I eagerly await the “diversion” crowd’s plans for using our conventional military power in the war on terror.
Of course, an armored sweep west through
Never mind. Just a pleasant detour to my happy place.
“The Fraudulent Coalition Steps Up” (Posted
As
Koizumi
and other supporters of the deployment view the mission as a step on
The
Japanese were deeply stung by
We will win. We are winning. And if our purported allies don’t step up before we win, we will not forget that. They are close as it is to being on their own when the stuff hits the fan.
I wish them luck.
“Enhancing Unit
Cohesion” (Posted
Dang. The Army is serious about enhancing unit cohesion:
The
Army announced yesterday that it will discourage the type of nomadic career
that has characterized Army life for generations and will instead station
soldiers at one base for much of their service, an effort to improve combat
readiness and make life easier on troops and their families.
The new policy calls for troops to remain at their first post for six
to seven years -- twice as long as the current average -- and envisions
bringing them back to the home base later in their career as well.
Good. This is an intangible that is tough to quantify yet is very important to winning wars.
“Another Thought on
the Iraqi Scam Artists” (Posted
I’m already on record as being highly skeptical that all of
But just as important is that not all of the scientists would have had to play a con game. The nuke scientists would have had to do a con. Although the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 200X said that if Saddam got fissionable material, the Iraqis could build the bomb in months. Still, absent a shipment of bomb-ready material, Saddam was many years from a real program.
But what about chemical weapons? The Iraqis had a lot of experience with this and it could be made in civilian facilities. Why couldn’t the chemical guys have pointed to small programs making small amounts and refining procedures and recipes in preparation for a big breakout when the time came?
Or the bio guys. A small laboratory was sufficient for a real program to develop weapons.
Indeed, if the UN inspectors under Blix prior to the Iraq War hadn’t discovered a class of Iraqi missiles that violated range limits, I wonder if the scam would have extended to these? Would we also be hearing that those missiles, which were destroyed in the war in this scenario, were within the limits but the missile guys only told Saddam they were longer ranged?
I’m just not buying it.
“Reason for
Overthrowing the Mullahs” (Posted
Ledeen has consistently called for
supporting regime opponents in
We need to keep Iranian agents out of
This is not to say that a win in
Deal with
But deal with
And in the meantime, offer our full moral support for the
opponents of the regime in
Of course, maybe (via Instapundit) we are waiting on this project to get going:
Details
are still being crafted. But the initiative, scheduled to be announced at the
G-8 summit hosted by President Bush at Sea Island, Ga., in June, would call for
Arab and South Asian governments to adopt major political reforms, be held
accountable on human rights -- particularly women's empowerment -- and
introduce economic reforms, U.S. and European officials said.
As
incentives for the targeted countries to cooperate, Western nations would offer
to expand political engagement, increase aid, facilitate membership in the
World Trade Organization and foster security arrangements, possibly some
equivalent of the Partnership for Peace with former Eastern Bloc countries.
By framing the question in terms of human rights and democracy for the Moslem world, even the Canadians (who are doing serious work on this) may sign on.
And I really want to know why our press still doesn’t cover
Demonstrations in Kerman a couple of weeks ago were so large that the
regime was forced to bring in helicopter gunships to
mow down the protesters, and the usual thugs were unleashed on student
demonstrators in Tehran and Shiraz in the last few days.
“Target-Rich
Environment?” (Posted
I’m already on record as saying I think a special operations
offensive will target the Horn of Africa region. Probably centered
on
Al-Qaeda's shadow over East Africa
Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda
network remains a significant threat in many parts of
[Jane's
Islamic Affairs Analyst - first posted to http://jiaa.janes.com -
I’d be surprised if our attacks were wide-ranging, from
We need an offensive. Too many people, especially our
enemies, think we have lost the will to win. They think perhaps we are too
tired to go after the thugs and kill them. As al Qaeda
regroups after their
If we don’t pursue them, they’ll attack us again.
Never forget what they did to us. Not for one damn minute.
“For the Press, We
Just Can’t Win” (Posted
Al Qaeda is having problems getting Iraqis to help them attack us. One would think this is good news.
But no, according to this AP writer:
A letter seized from an al-Qaida courier shows Osama bin
Laden has made little headway in recruiting Iraqis for a holy war against
Wow. Our enemy is having troubles and this calls into
question our fighting in
But as long as your conclusion is that
But, with some evidence that attacks are dwindling since the capture of Saddam, the difficulties of the Islamists are good signs. It may be that the Islamists are causing the casualties with their more effective and bigger attacks. And if they are losing hope, that too will peter out.
But I can just see it. At some point we’ll have the last resister cornered and the press will breathlessly wonder if we will accept his demands for our surrender.
“Deploying the Korean Army” (Posted
And thank you to the South Korean
soldiers who are volunteering
in droves to man the brigade that will deploy to the
“Deploying the Army” (Posted
The new unit manning system we
are embarking on will make our Army better. If you recall in We Were Soldiers Once, and Young, the superb air cavalry battalion
that
Some complain now that our
stop-loss orders to keep soldiers in units deploying to
This will be our new policy as Strategypage explains. One factor that is interesting is how it will affect the readiness of units for deployment:
The new system means that about 75 percent of your combat units will
always be a peak effectiveness, Even those units that
are in the two month break or six months of training can be sent off to a
combat zone if it’s an emergency. Such units will still have excellent NCOs and
officers, and the troops will all have completed their individual combat
training. During the 36 Month cycle, troops lost due to sickness, accidents or
other causes will be replaced in groups, that will go
through special training to familiarize them on how the unit operates. Such
losses will not be large, and will not, based on past experience, do much
damage to the units effectiveness.
The 36 month system is based on lessons learned from earlier attempts,
and most of the things that can go wrong have been addressed. Everyone in the
army agrees that keeping troops together makes them more effective in combat.
At this point, it’s up to the senior generals to fight off attempts by the many
bureaucracies and special interests to wreck the system. In the end, it always
depends on the quality of the leadership.
Now, this is significant when you look at the reorganization of our divisions. A recent DOD briefing (sorry, I don’t have the link) noted that right now we are committed to going from 33 combat brigades to 43 smaller combat brigades. We are going to do this by adding one brigade to each of our divisions (we’ll hopefully add five more if we can. I’d guess 1st CAV, 1st AD, 1st ID, 3rd ID, and 4th ID). So, if 75% of our combat units will be effective, that means we can rotate the training schedule within each of our division. With four combat brigades in each division, we’ll be able to deploy a division with three smaller brigades at all times. And we’ll be able to do this with all of our division. They’ll be smaller and so more deployable. Plus, with more self-contained brigades, we’ll be able to plug in brigades from other divisions if we need to when power is more important than speed. Or to reinforce the division later after it is in the theatre. Or we can add reserve brigades or battalions. We already mixed and matched brigades in the Iraq War and in the post-war fight with the terrorsits and Baathists. We also used Guard enhanced readiness battalions quite effectively.
I still think we need a couple more divisions, probably motorized infantry division with some armor support in each. And more MPs.
But this reorganization looks good to me for what we need to do in the next decade.
“Support Our Friends and Ideals in
We can’t be neutral on the
internal politics of
Individual
religious liberty and women's equality must be
guaranteed in Iraq's interim constitution, otherwise all that we have fought
for in the Middle East will be lost — not just for Iraq and its citizens, but
for the United States's interests and democratic
values as well.
Turning over guard duty and sovereignty to the Iraqis is fine—good in fact. But it is folly to just wash our hands and let hostile forces lobby for the support of Iraqis.
It is also folly to fear the Shias. This isn’t 1979 in
Simply put, Shiites everywhere have been
cheated. By the Ottomans, British, Sunni Arab Hashemites,
pan-Arab nationalists, Baathists, and the first Bush
administration, which let them die by the tens of thousands when Saddam put
down the rebellion following the first Gulf War. To make matters worse for the
Shiites of
Support Shias who are moderate and supportive of us. Nail the nutjobs like Sadr who preach hate and rebellion. Don’t let them get away with it. It sends a bad signal to Iraqis that they need to get on board with the strongest local psychos rather than counting on voting and the rights of those who lose at the ballot box.
I don’t know if we are screwing up but I worry we might be. We won the war. We could still lose the peace, as I’ve long held. Nothing is guaranteed.
It’s something to watch.
“WMD in
In an article on the quality of our intelligence, Babbin notes:
We may never know precisely what Saddam had and was capable of
producing or using because we gave him six months to hide it. That his troops
were equipped with anti-exposure suits and doses of antitoxins is quietly
forgotten. The president and Secretary Powell seem ready to concede that the
threat of Iraqi WMD wasn't what we thought it was. The most likely reason for
the apparent failure — the six months we gave Saddam to move and hide his
weapons — is not even being discussed.
Seriously, I want to know what happened with our intelligence on this issue, but why are we assuming we were wrong all along? We were wrong in March and April of 2003 but that could be a very different question.
While I’m satisfied with an examination of our intelligence services, I just don’t know enough to comment on whether Tenet should go.
But by all means, keep looking for the WMD while we examine
the intelligence question. One fear I have is that one of our garrisons in
And as we consider the issues of Iraqi WMD and our
intelligence, let’s
remember what the Iraqis admitted having but failed to document its
destruction. And remember what others thought
And remember, too, the alternative we had to overthrowing Saddam’s regime:
It is possible that instead of building up
large stockpiles of weapons, Saddam decided the safer thing would be to advance
his covert programs for producing weapons but wait until the pressure was off
to produce the weapons themselves. By the time inspectors returned to
There are no doubt
some Americans who believe that this would have been an acceptable outcome. Or
who believe that another six months of inspections would have uncovered all
that Saddam was hiding. Or that a policy of "containment"--which
included 200,000 troops on
We are safer with Saddam gone. And so are the Iraqi people. The President needs to say this more often.
"Proper Reaction to an Imminent Threat" (Posted February 5, 2004)
I am truly going to go nuts. False attacks on the decision for war are brought up again in a bizarre form of whack-a-mole long after they are refuted. NPR talks about the SOTU address and the "Uranium from West Africa" line. Grrr. Then of course, they start talking about the claim of an "imminent" threat from Iraq. Grrr 2.0.
But I digress.
I'm just wondering what those who think we can only act when there is an imminent threat of nuclear attack think about missile defense. I mean, if you really think that only an imminent threat justifies military action, then you really should be for a robust missile defense. Risking absorbing a first blow really requires us to be able to survive--by defeating--a first blow.
Just wondering.
“The
Funny how stuff comes up when you are thinking about them.
The author makes the excellent point that crushing an enemy
in battle isn’t enough if you don’t win the war. An American way of war is
different than an American way of
battle.
“Tooth to Tail Ratio”
(Posted
Our logistics effort in 2003 teetered on the edge of failure:
In
most cases, soldiers improvised solutions to keep the offensive rolling. But
the study found that the Third Infantry Division, the Army's lead combat force,
was within two weeks of being halted by a lack of spare parts, and Army
logisticians had no effective distribution system.
We faced an enemy poor enough that it doesn’t look like we suffered any casualties as a result, but we won’t always have incompetent foes.
Supply soldiers are easy to ignore when spectacular stealth aircraft and fancy hardware get the press coverage. But logistics keeps those magnificent troopers in the fight.
Or not.
We ignore this at our peril.
“Casualties” (Posted
Robert Burns discusses US
casualties in
August 2004: 35.
September 2004: 30.
October 2004: 43.
November 2004: 82
December 2004: 40.
January 2004: 47.
The January pattern shows:
In an eight-day span, Jan. 9 to Jan. 16, only three
American soldiers died, and two from nonhostile
causes.
But in the two weeks after that, 26 died — all but three in
hostile action.
It seems as if the attacks have died down. In numbers anyway. From 50+ per day to 15+ or so, going by memory. Yet the KIA have not declined to less than September levels. (Even the November levels aren’t way out there if you ignore two very deadly helicopter downings.)
It also seems as if large car bomb type attacks dominate now. Such attacks are more likely Islamists and imported al Qaeda types.
If so, then the Baathists must have been severely depleted. The capture of Saddam and the new currency may have dried up many of the attacks that had been paid for, and discouraged the less committed Baathists. Having casualties at the same level as October when Islamists hadn’t really established themselves must mean that the attacks by Islamists in December and January have masked the decline in the Baathist resistance.
We still have some fighting to do. Sadly, we may be reaping
the problem of failing to control the borders. I hoped we were decimating
Islamists crossing from
But the Iraqis, including Sunnis, may be able to help more in this new phase. Especially since the recent resistance seems to target Iraqis more. Iraqis have reason to hunt down the foreign killers.
We will be able to step back and let the Iraqis carry the burden of the fight. It is their fight after all—not just ours.
“Iraqi WMD” (Posted
So, we are to believe that after a decade of calculating that Saddam had chemical weapons and nuclear and biological weapons programs, since we haven’t found them, they weren’t there.
I mean, he used them during the 1980s and after the Persian Gulf War we found out that Saddam’s programs were way more advanced than we thought. But we are to forget that history since after telegraphing our 2003 war for a year, we didn’t find any stockpiles.
We found remnants of programs, evidence of advanced missile programs, and widespread evidence that evidence was scrubbed as Saddam’s regime fell. We have indications that weapons were smuggled out and we’ve found non-WMD weapons buried as well as old WMD shells. All of it was clearly in violation of Saddam’s agreements with the UN. And Kay himself believed what he found showed Saddam to be way more dangerous than we believed prior to the war.
But instead of concluding that the Baathists
destroyed weapons at the last minute or hid them inside
But, ah, we figured out what happened.
Saddam’s scientists lied to him about the status of the WMD programs.
The scientists pretended to have WMD programs and tricked Saddam into funding them. They all did it. Not just one or two—all of them lied to Saddam.
In a regime that had starving dogs rip you to shreds. A regime that raped your daughters as punishment. A regime that killed on suspicion of disloyalty. A regime that used plastic shredders for people.
Are we really to believe that scientists who lived in a regime that killed people even suspected of treason by running them through plastic shredders would lie and cheat Saddam? Even if one or two were that reckless, we are to believe that all his scientists were reckless with their very lives?
These weren’t mad scientists, they were nuts.
I’m sorry, I just don’t buy that these scientists all carried out a big scam on Saddam, Uday, and Qusay.
Either Saddam hid his WMD or he was building a surge program
to break out once the UN was tired of watching
If the former, we have a lot of work to do.
If the latter, that says something pretty interesting that I’d like the “we can deter Saddam” side to answer.
So if Saddam was no threat and just wanted to deter us, why didn’t he have stocks of weapons? How could he deter us with nothing? Only a person who will use WMD offensively—at a time of his choosing—waits until he needs them to produce them.
I want to know what happened in the intelligence community. But I think it is way too early to establish that the purpose of the new American and British inquiries is to find out why we didn’t realize Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. Inquire first. Then conclusions.
Ledeen is skeptical of the no-WMD claim, too. He says, “I love the theory. But I have my doubts. Maybe time will tell.”
Yeah, it is too easy to believe the CIA blew it. Of course, it is easy to believe that because we read about the failures. The successes take time to come out. Like this one.
I think our intelligence people are better than this theory makes them out to be. Time will tell.
“Death Watch for
Talks on
We "may be able to have another round of six-party
talks before very long. Perhaps even this month of February," [Assistant Secretary of State James] Kelly told reporters upon arrival in
It has been a while since the last talks and I imagine the
failure of the
Academics say Koguryo has future
implications too. China fears a scenario in which impoverished North Korea
collapses, releasing a flood of refugees — and instability — in its backyard
and forcing it to establish a new frontier facing a unified pro-U.S. Korea.
And one part of our ill-conceived bribery seems mercifully dead:
"As we have made clear, we see no future for the light
water reactor project," the
Those plants could still have been used in a nuclear program
contrary to what some think. Given
“Back on the Homeland
Security Front” (Posted
Better safe than sorry:
Flights from Britain and France were cancelled. It would be nice if we could cancel them on the tarmac. You know, drain the fuel instead of fueling it so it can’t be hijacked and then screen the passengers. I wonder why the flights are cancelled ahead of time, presumably giving any hijackers warning that they need to lie low? Or are they under surveillance and we want to see where they run? Or who they call?
Dunno.
“Call
to Revolt?” (Posted
In the first challenge to the Iranian mullahs:
More than a third of the Iranian parliament
resigned Sunday and the speaker delivered a stinging rebuke to the hard-line
Guardian Council for its disqualification of hundreds of liberal candidates in
upcoming elections.
The second:
On Saturday, Khatami suggested
his government would call off the vote, which he called undemocratic because
hard-line Islamic clerics have disqualified more than 2,400 liberal candidates.
"My government will only hold competitive and free
elections ... the parliament must represent the views of the majority and
include all (political) tendencies," Khatami
said, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.
If the mullahs can’t manage to hold even a sham election,
how will the people, the opposition clerics, the armed forces, and even the Pasdaran react?
“Call to Peace?”
(Posted
The imam may have defended Wahabbi Islam, but he did condemn terrorism:
Sheik Abdul Aziz al-Sheik said in
his sermon there were those who claim to be holy warriors, but were shedding
Muslim blood and destabilizing the nation.
"Is it holy war to shed Muslim blood? Is it holy war
to shed the blood of non-Muslims given sanctuary in Muslim lands? Is it holy
war to destroy the possession of Muslims," he said, adding that their
actions gave enemies an excuse to criticize Muslim nations.
A large number of the victims of suicide attacks in
Al-Sheik, who is widely respected in the Arab world as the
foremost cleric in the country considered the birthplace of Islam, spoke at Namira Mosque in a televised sermon watched by millions of
Muslims in
Well, sort of. But a call to end terrorism in Moslem lands
will go a long way to cooling off the attacks and support for attacks in