Iraq and Terrorism

by Charles

24-year old West Point grad Laura Walker wrote about her time with the "Triple Nickel" out of Fort Lewis, a group officially known as the 864th Combat Engineer Battalion, 555th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade.  Her task:  Working on an 80-mile road construction project involving the support of the United Nations, Indian contractors, and United States Army troop labor.

Fifteen hours is a tremendous barrier. It is the obstacle preventing one village from attaining the assistance of another and surviving a drought. It is the reason a trip to the hospital, or receiving an education, aren’t realistic options. Fifteen hours is what stands in the way of commerce between two provinces. It prevents communication between neighbors only 80 kilometers apart. Fifteen hours is the reason for isolation. Before Task Force Pacemaker began work, the drive between Kandahar and Tarin-Kowt took fifteen hours. Upon completion of the road it will take only three. The end of geographical isolation will be a new beginning for hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan.

Walker contended that this isn’t just a public works project because it strengthens Afghanistan on multiple levels.

Continued development is essential to peace building in Afghanistan. The road between Tarin-Kowt and Kandahar will provide developmental access to rural areas which never existed before. As 1LT Sullivan puts it, “This road is not just an engineering feat; it is a show of political force.” The five month reduction in project duration by Task Force Pacemaker becomes five months gained by the new government towards progress. The fifteen hours of travel cut down to three are hours gained by Afghan citizens towards opportunity. Every cut of the TK road is another blow to the primary weapons of the Taliban, isolation and hardship. When Pacemaker soldiers watch the ribbon cutting on September 15th, every soldier can exhale with relief, joy, and pride in a job well done.

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by hilzoy

The reason I’ve been writing posts on Iraq is that I’ve been trying to figure out what I think of it all, and I wanted both to get a few large topics out of the way and to think it through as I wrote. In this post, I want to try to figure out what we can still achieve in Iraq, and whether it’s worth it. To state the obvious: I am not an expert on Iraq. I am just trying to work this out for myself. Everything I say could be completely wrong. However:

I think we are long past the point where we can talk about “success” in Iraq. Whatever we do now, we have undone decades’ worth of work containing Iranian influence in the Persian Gulf, destroyed any air of invincibility that we had after the first Gulf War, bogged down our army, destroyed our moral authority both by allowing the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere to occur and then by not holding anyone high up in the military or civilian leadership accountable, done enormous damage to our alliances and interests, and on and on and on. I take all of this as a given.

I also think it is pointless to think about constructing any kind of model democracy for the Middle East. That was always a very long shot; to bring it off we would have had to plan meticulously, and then have everything break our way. We didn’t; it didn’t; as a result, I think this possibility has gone glimmering.

My modest goals now are two. First, we should, if possible, prevent the outbreak of a full-scale civil war. (In the comments to my post on militias, several people noted that there is already a civil war underway in Iraq. They are, of course, right. But it’s a civil war within certain limits, of which more later.) Second, we should, if possible, prevent Iraq from becoming a failed state like Afghanistan, both because failed states are very bad for the people who live under them and because failed states are important to terrorists.

As I see it, Ted Kaczynski proved that you can be a terrorist without much assistance or infrastructure. But two things help a lot: money and a secure base of operations where terrorists can set up training camps and live unmolested. Non-failed states would have to be nuts to allow Osama bin Laden the latter. But failed states, which cannot enforce the law within their own borders, have no choice in the matter. A failed state is, therefore, not just a disaster for its own people but a danger to others.

The question is: can we prevent Iraq from becoming a failed state and/or having a full-blown civil war? And can we do so without instituting a draft, which we seem to be unwilling to do?

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by hilzoy

The NY Times reports this:

“Under a deal brokered Friday by the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, Islam was to be named “a primary source of legislation” in the new Iraqi constitution, with the proviso that no legislation be permitted that conflicted with the “universal principles” of the religion. The latter phrase raised concerns that Iraqi judges would have wide latitude to strike down laws now on the books, as well as future legislation.

At the same time, according to a Kurdish leader involved in the talks, Mr. Khalilzad had backed language that would have given clerics sole authority in settling marriage and family disputes. That gave rise to concerns that women’s rights, as they are enunciated in Iraq’s existing laws, could be curtailed.

Finally, according to the person close to the negotiations, Mr. Khalilzad had been backing an arrangement that could have allowed clerics to have a hand in interpreting the constitution. That arrangement, coupled with the expansive language for Islam, prompted accusations from the Kurd that the Americans were helping in the formation of an Islamic state.”

The Times also reports that this deal is unravelling. And much as I’d like to see the delegates who are drafting the Iraqi constitution (or accepting bits of it drafted by us) meet their deadline, I can’t say that I’m sorry. Because Iraq under Sharia law is simply not something the United States should be pushing. As one Kurdish politician put it:

“We understand the Americans have sided with the Shi’ites,” he said. “It’s shocking. It doesn’t fit American values. They have spent so much blood and money here, only to back the creation of an Islamist state … I can’t believe that’s what the Americans really want or what the American people want.”

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by hilzoy

The Washington Post has a terrifying article on militias in Iraq. Excerpts:

“Shiite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country’s divide along ethnic and sectarian lines, according to political leaders, families of the victims, human rights activists and Iraqi officials.

While Iraqi representatives wrangle over the drafting of a constitution in Baghdad, the militias, and the Shiite and Kurdish parties that control them, are creating their own institutions of authority, unaccountable to elected governments, the activists and officials said. In Basra in the south, dominated by the Shiites, and Mosul in the north, ruled by the Kurds, as well as cities and villages around them, many residents have said they are powerless before the growing sway of the militias, which instill a climate of fear that many see as redolent of the era of former president Saddam Hussein.

The parties and their armed wings sometimes operate independently, and other times as part of Iraqi army and police units trained and equipped by the United States and Britain and controlled by the central government. Their growing authority has enabled them to control territory, confront their perceived enemies and provide patronage to their followers. Their ascendance has come about because of a power vacuum in Baghdad and their own success in the January parliamentary elections.

Since the formation of a government this spring, Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, has witnessed dozens of assassinations, which claimed members of the former ruling Baath Party, Sunni political leaders and officials of competing Shiite parties. Many have been carried out by uniformed men in police vehicles, according to political leaders and families of the victims, with some of the bullet-riddled bodies dumped at night in a trash-strewn parcel known as The Lot. The province’s governor said in an interview that Shiite militias have penetrated the police force; an Iraqi official estimated that as many as 90 percent of officers were loyal to religious parties.

Across northern Iraq, Kurdish parties have employed a previously undisclosed network of at least five detention facilities to incarcerate hundreds of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens and other minorities abducted and secretly transferred from Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, and from territories stretching to the Iranian border, according to political leaders and detainees’ families. Nominally under the authority of the U.S.-backed Iraqi army, the militias have beaten up and threatened government officials and political leaders deemed to be working against Kurdish interests; one bloodied official was paraded through a town in a pickup truck, witnesses said.

“I don’t see any difference between Saddam and the way the Kurds are running things here,” said Nahrain Toma, who heads a human rights organization, Bethnahrain, which has offices in northern Iraq and has faced several death threats. Toma said the tactics were eroding what remained of U.S. credibility as the militias operate under what many Iraqis view as the blessing of American and British forces. “Nobody wants anything to do with the Americans anymore,” she said. “Why? Because they gave the power to the Kurds and to the Shiites. No one else has any rights.”

“Here’s the problem,” said Majid Sari, an adviser in the Iraqi Defense Ministry in Basra, who travels with a security detail of 25 handpicked Iraqi soldiers. Referring to the militias, he said, “They’re taking money from the state, they’re taking clothes from the state, they’re taking vehicles from the state, but their loyalty is to the parties.” Whoever disagrees, he said, “the next day you’ll find them dead in the street.””

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by hilzoy

Ron Brownstein of the LA Times did a good piece on the question of permanent bases in Iraq a few days ago, and I have been collecting links on it for a while, with the vague intention of posting something on it. Since it was brought up in the comments to von’s last post, I thought: why not now? For starters, some excerpts from Brownstein’s article:

“So far the administration has downplayed the possibility of permanent bases without excluding it. In Senate testimony in February, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said flatly: “We have no intention at the present time of putting permanent bases in Iraq.” Pentagon officials echo that insistence today. But Rumsfeld last winter said he could not rule out the idea because the United States and the permanent Iraqi government would make the final decision. Bush took a similar line in January in an interview with Arabic television. “That’s going to be up to the Iraqi government,” the president said. “[It] will be making the decisions as to how best to secure their country, what kind of help they need.”

Leaks from the Pentagon have deepened the uncertainty. In May, the Washington Post reported that military planning did not envision permanent bases in Iraq but rather stationing troops in nearby Kuwait. But the report noted that the Pentagon was also planning to consolidate U.S. troops in Iraq into four large fortified bases. On the theory that concrete speaks louder than words, critics see such work as a sign the administration is planning to stay longer than it has acknowledged.

John E. Pike, a defense analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, points to another indication. Although the United States is systematically training Iraqis to fight the insurgents, he notes, the Pentagon has not taken key steps — like making plans for acquiring tanks or aircraft — to build an Iraqi military capable of defending the country against its neighbors. To Pike that means that although the United States might reduce its troop level in Iraq, the fledgling nation, like Germany or South Korea, will require the sustained presence of a large American contingent, perhaps 50,000 soldiers. “We are building the base structure to facilitate exactly [that],” he says.”

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by Edward

After all the gigabytes folks consumed arguing that Jean Charles de Menezes, the 27-year-old Brazilian electrician, who was shot eight times last month on the London Underground, deserved what he got for essentially looking suspicious, I hope an equal number of gigabytes of outrage will be forthcoming from the same folks now that it turns out the story the British Police offered seems to be very, very different from what actually happened that day:

A Brazilian shot to death a day after botched bombings in London had walked casually onto a train before being gunned down by undercover officers, according to leaked footage that appeared to contradict earlier police reports that said the man disobeyed police orders.

Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old electrician, was shot eight times last month in front of terrified commuters on a subway train, after undercover police tailed him from a house under surveillance.

Police first said the shooting was related to the failed bombings on the London transit system July 21 — two weeks after four suspected suicide bombers blew themselves up in three Underground stations and aboard one double-decker bus.

Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, called the death regrettable, but said it appeared "the man was challenged and refused to obey police instructions."

Citing security footage, a British television station reported Tuesday that Menezes entered the Stockwell subway station at a normal walking pace, stopping to pick up a newspaper before boarding a train and taking a seat.

The ITV News broadcast, citing an investigation report into the shooting, also said Menezes was wearing a light denim jacket when he was shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder. Witness reports described a terrifying scene of the man — wearing a bulky jacket on a warm July day — running through the train station, being tackled by a group of undercover police officers, then being shot several times at close range.

Now here’s the thing. In the US we’re constantly pooh-poohed when we question the PATRIOT ACT and other measures that strengthen the law enforcement efforts to stop terrorism. "If you don’t do anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about from these laws," is the conventional wisdom. Of course, though, that only applies if you can implicitly trust the authorities.

If this report turns out to reveal what it looks like it reveals, I cannot imagine the London Police will be able to re-build their credibility for ages. At the very least, Ian Blair owes the public (not to mention Menezes’ family) one huge apology.

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by Charles

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by hilzoy

In a recent comment, Charles has said:

“Noted, that the lefties in this thread and in my most recent post think Iraq is a lost cause. In my view, it’s only lost if we lose our political will to prevail. That should’ve been a prime lesson learned from Vietnam. Sadly, it looks like that lesson didn’t take here.”

He has also referred to “the troubling liberal-left “can’t do” attitude that I’m seeing more and more of”, and repeated the claim that Iraq is “only a lost cause if enough people like you believe it is.”

I will leave aside the fantastical idea that liberal defeatism, or for that matter liberal anything, could be responsible if we suffer a defeat in Iraq. I want instead to think about ‘defeatism’. When I read Charles’ comments, I was reminded of the time when the shelter I was working at got a new executive director. We were all happy to have her, and we all gave her the benefit of the doubt at first, even when she did things that struck us as odd. Then, about six weeks into her job, she had a retreat, where most of us got to see her in action for the first time. At one point, she was talking about the need to bring more volunteers into the organization, and in the discussion said that it would be interesting to think about having them take over some of the shifts, alone. One of the people whose job it was to do things like negotiate our insurance said: unfortunately, it’s written into our insurance policy that we have to have a paid staffer present at all times. And our new executive director said: “You see, I think that’s just the kind of negative thinking we need to do away with around here.” The person who had pointed out the insurance problem said: I’m not trying to be negative; it’s just that if we did that, we would, in fact, lose our insurance.

Now: our new executive director had, until her arrival at our shelter, lived in Alberta. She had no knowledge of US federal, state, or local laws, funding organizations, or, well, insurance regulations. But she went off on this tear about how all she was hearing was negativity; no willingness to try fresh new thoughts; just a kind of hidebound throwing up of obstacles. I couldn’t see what she was talking about: nothing in the previous discussion had struck me that way at all, nor were my co-workers an inflexible, defeatist bunch. It was just that, in this specific case, what she wanted to try was not, in fact, possible, and someone had tried to say so.

Which is all a long way of saying: when someone says that something can’t be done, it could be defeatist, or it could be a recognition of reality. And when someone else responds that the first person is defeatist, it could be right, or it could be a way of denying reality by attacking those who try to describe the features the second person doesn’t want to hear about.

Before I’m willing to accept the charge that people on the left are defeatist, I want to hear some actual reasons for thinking (a) that we can, in fact, achieve our goals in Iraq, and (b) that we can do so while being led by George W. Bush, a man who has driven such Bush-hating, latte-drinking, Michael Moore-embracing, Islamofascist-coddling members of the loony left as von to ask: “What the Hell does a guy have to do to get fired in this town?” For the record, this does not seem to me to be an adequate response:

“The fact remains that we are the most powerful country in human history, and our main opposition are groups of paramilitary thugs and mostly non-Iraqi terrorists. They will lose, provided we have the sticktuitiveness to overcome.”

Our army can defeat any other army. It can prevent any insurgency from defeating it. It cannot defeat an insurgency with enough popular support to be able to replace its fighters, explosives, and so forth. It especially cannot do so when the force we have deployed is too small to secure Iraq’s borders. The most it can be sure of doing militarily is maintaining a presence there indefinitely, without yet having been defeated. It cannot be assured of actually defeating the insurgency. Still less can an army, by itself, achieve political or social goals. And our primary goals in Iraq have never been military goals like holding a town; they have been goals like: creating a stable country at peace with us and its neighbors. No army on earth can achieve that through force of arms alone.

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by Charles

I’m not the biggest fan of Bill Kristol but you have to give him his due.  As it is right now, Bush can’t be fired for the poor job of rebuilding Iraq, but one of the chief architects can, especially when the messages from Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department conflict with the president’s.  Forgive me quoting at length, but Bill Kristol writes:

And Iraq is, as the president said Wednesday, "the latest battlefield in the war on terror." It is also the central battlefield in that war. And so, the president added, "I hear all the time, ‘Well, when are you bringing the troops home?’ And my answer to you: ‘As soon as possible, but not before the mission is complete.’" As the president said Thursday, "We will stay the course. We will complete the job in Iraq."

Or will we? The president seems determined to complete the job. Is his defense secretary? In addition to trying to abandon the term "war on terror," Rumsfeld and some of his subordinates have spent an awful lot of time in recent weeks talking about withdrawing troops from Iraq–and before the job is complete.

Until a few months ago, Bush administration officials refused to speculate on a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. They criticized those who did talk about withdrawing, arguing that such talk would encourage the terrorists, discourage our friends, and make it harder to win over waverers who wanted to be assured that we would be there to help. The administration’s line was simply that we were going to stay the course in Iraq, do what it takes, and win.

The president still tends to say this. But not Defense Department civilian officials, who have recently been willing to indicate a desire to get out, and sooner rather than later. After all, Rumsfeld has said, insurgencies allegedly take a decade or so to defeat. What’s more, our presence gives those darned Iraqi allies of ours excuses not to step up to the plate. So let’s get a government elected under the new Iraqi constitution, and accelerate our plans to get the troops home. As Rumsfeld said Thursday, "once Iraq is safely in the hands of the Iraqi people and a government that they elect under a new constitution that they are now fashioning, and which should be completed by August 15, our troops will be able to, as the capability of the Iraqi security forces evolve, pass over responsibility to them and then come home." The key "metric" is finding enough Iraqis to whom we can turn over the responsibility for fighting–not defeating the terrorists.

As Newsweek reported last week: "Now the conditions for U.S. withdrawal no longer include a defeated insurgency, Pentagon sources say. The new administration mantra is that the insurgency can be beaten only politically, by the success of Iraq’s new government. Indeed, Washington is now less concerned about the insurgents than the unwillingness of Iraq’s politicians to make compromises for the sake of national unity. Pentagon planners want to send a spine-stiffening message: the Americans won’t be there forever."

Donald Rumsfeld appears to be caving in to defeatism, a trait that Secretaries of Defense should not have.  There is only one real measure for success in Iraq:  a free, peaceful, non-theocratic representative republic.  Delivery of this entity spells doom for the terrorists and the Sunni/Baathist paramilitary gangs.  If Rumsfeld is unwilling to achieve this goal, he should be gone, and in this I am in full agreement with Joe Biden.  More Kristol:

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by hilzoy

From the NYTimes:

“For the second time since the Iraq war began, the Pentagon is struggling to replace body armor that is failing to protect American troops from the most lethal attacks by insurgents. The ceramic plates in vests worn by most personnel cannot withstand certain munitions the insurgents use. But more than a year after military officials initiated an effort to replace the armor with thicker, more resistant plates, tens of thousands of soldiers are still without the stronger protection because of a string of delays in the Pentagon’s procurement system. The effort to replace the armor began in May 2004, just months after the Pentagon finished supplying troops with the original plates – a process also plagued by delays. The officials disclosed the new armor effort Wednesday after questioning by The New York Times, and acknowledged that it would take several more months or longer to complete. (…)”

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By Edward

I realize there are those in certain quarters who will cry "what took so long?" as if there were no cultural, practical, or personal (including personal safety) obstacles, but two moderate Muslims are now clearly leading the way toward a brighter future for the followers of Islam who live in the West.

The first has been at it a while actually (and I don’t mind pointing out to those who feel homosexuals harm rather than help society, that it took a lesbian to find the courage to stand up the world and say what’s right here). Irshad Manji (whose book The Trouble with Islam Today sits on my nightstand for quick reference) voiced an opinion that I’ve long held regarding foreign-born Muslims who preach hate in adopted Western countries: they should be deported swiftly:

For a European leader, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain has done something daring. He has given notice not just to the theocrats of Islam, but also to the theocracy of tolerance.

"Staying here carries with it a duty," Mr. Blair said in referring to foreign-born Muslim clerics who glorify terror on British soil. "That duty is to share and support the values that sustain the British way of life. Those who break that duty and try to incite hatred or engage in violence against our country and its people have no place here."

With that, his government proposed new laws to deport extremist religious leaders, to shut down the mosques that house them and to ban groups with a history of supporting terrorism. The reaction was swift: a prominent human rights advocate described Mr. Blair’s measures as "neo-McCarthyite hectoring," warning that they would make the British "less distinguishable from the violent, hateful and unforgiving theocrats, our democracy undermined from within in ways that the suicide bombers could only have dreamed of."

Of course, there’s the danger that some folks will misconstrue what Blair said, and Manji applauds, and conclude "tolerance" in and of itself is a bad thing, so it bears pointing out that they’re clearly limiting their statements to a tolerance for for tolerance’s sake that forgives violence here. Any citizen of any nation can work, within the system, for change, but no one has the right to intentionally harm others in that quest. I’ve noted frequently (and long before the July 7th bombing) that the laws that permitted hate-mongering foreign-born Imams to remain in England were foolish. You don’t have to love it or leave it, but you damn well better let it live in peace or leave it. Muslims are obligated, like everyone else, to protect their nation, whether immigrants or born there.

My second hero is new to me, but precisely what the UK needs. Meet Shahid Malik:

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by hilzoy

Newsweek reports that we knew that Osama bin Laden was at Tora Bora, but let him slip away:

“In a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency’s Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. “He was there,” Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen’s remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. “We don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001,” Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. “Bin Laden was never within our grasp.” Berntsen says Franks is “a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was.”

In his book—titled “Jawbreaker”—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon’s own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen’s lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book’s specifics, saying he’s awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a “strategic disaster” because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora “was not necessarily just the number of troops.””

Rumsfeld didn’t provide enough troops. That has an oddly familiar ring to it…

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by Charles

Words mean things, and the right word or phrase speaks volumes and sets the tone for communicating ideas.  Republican pollster Frank Luntz understands this, as does Berkeley professor George Lakoff in his Framing Wars.  If a phrase is turned just right, it has the advantage of being descriptive, true and all the while sounding good.  Conversely, bad phrasing can come off as obvious and desperate political spin, moving an idea or an issue backwards.  Also important is that the idea being framed happens to be a good and definitive one, otherwise it’s tantamount to lipstick on a pig, hence my general problem with Lakoff.  The final paragraph of Matt Bai’s piece:

What all these middling generalities suggest, perhaps, is that Democrats are still unwilling to put their more concrete convictions about the country into words, either because they don’t know what those convictions are or because they lack confidence in the notion that voters can be persuaded to embrace them. Either way, this is where the power of language meets its outer limit. The right words can frame an argument, but they will never stand in its place.

While the idea of fighting the War on Terror is right and necessary, the name itself has been lacking from the get-go.  It just doesn’t quite fit and it’s not quite enough.  A few days ago, the Weekly Standard remarked on a Bush administration trial balloon, where several Defense Department suits renamed the conflict from the Global War on Terror (GWOT)–or The War Against Terror (TWAT) or what have you–to the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (GSAVE).  Ugh.  Thankfully, Bush has vetoed the renamers:

President Bush publicly overruled some of his top advisers on Wednesday in a debate about what to call the conflict with Islamic extremists, saying, "Make no mistake about it, we are at war."

I agree that we have to call this a war.  After all, our enemies call it such and al Qaeda has in fact declared war against us.  But we’re not at war with terror per se, but against militant radical Muslims who are not only fighting western countries but also moderate Muslims.  I’ve wondered about this terminology before and I think it’s fair to call it World War IV.  Because let’s face it, the Cold War really was World War III. 

Another fair phrasing of this conflict is the War Against Militant Islamists (WAMI), since it recognizes that we’re in a war and it identifies who we’re fighting against.  [Since they’re fighting us and fellow Muslims, it could even be considered a double WAMI 😉 ].  We’re not fighting all terrorists out there, so again the War on Terror is too broad and it implies that we’re fighting against a tactic.  Though they’re terrorists, we’re not at war against Columbian narcos or Tamil Tigers or the IRA.

A slight variation would be the War Against Militant Islamism, which recognizes that we’re battling the ideology that breeds Islamic terrorists.  This is somewhat akin to the nature of World War III, since we fought the spread of Soviet communism as well as hot wars such as Korea and Vietnam, and proxy fights and spy vs. spy skulduggery.  So must we fight the ideology of radical violent Islam (and moderate Muslims must take a stand here), as well as the physical battles and other fronts such as money, communications and propaganda.  Note also that the fight is not against Islamists or Islamism in general, but against the militant strains.  WAMI is a much better and more descriptive phrase than TWAT.

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by hilzoy

The BBC has a story I hope is wrong, but fear is true:

“Iraq’s new police force is facing mounting allegations of systematic abuse and torture of people in detention, as well as allegations of extra-judicial killings. The minority Sunni community in particular claims it is being targeted by the Shia-dominated police force.”

According to the BBC, Human Rights Watch has collected a number of similar stories, including a novel use for power tools that I hope I manage to repress as soon as possible:

“The camera focuses on marks all over his body including what appear to be drill holes. According to Salman al-Faraji, a human rights activist and lawyer, the use of drills is common. “Most cases are quite similar, the same methods are used,” he said. “They torture them, breaking hands and legs. They use electric drills to pierce their bodies and then the killing is carried out at close range.””

One of several nightmare outcomes for Iraq has always been the emergence of a police state like Saddam Hussein’s, but with different allegiances. It is, I think, marginally better than civil war, but that’s sort of like saying that being tortured with an electric drill is marginally better than being tortured with a belt sander. And of course the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

In the latest New York Review of Books, Peter Galbraith has an article about Iraq that is disturbing, though not surprising. I’ve posted a longish excerpt below the fold, but it’s worth reading the whole article, since Galbraith is, in my opinion, one of the sharpest observers of Iraq around.

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by Charles

U.S. News and World Report has a piece on the Pentagon’s updated strategy for combating the war against radical Islamist militants.  For one thing, it’s not just a war against al Qaeda anymore, but we knew that.

The terrorist threat against the United States is now defined as "Islamist extremism" –not just al Qaeda. The Pentagon document identifies the "primary enemy" as "extremist Sunni and Shia movements that exploit Islam for political ends" and that form part of a "global web of enemy networks." Recognizing that al Qaeda’s influence has spread, the United States is now targeting some two dozen groups–a significant change from the early focus on just al Qaeda and its leadership.

The new approach emphasizes "encouraging" and "enabling" foreign partners, especially in countries where the United States is not at war. Concluding that the conflict cannot be fought by military means alone–or by the United States acting alone–the new Pentagon plan outlines a multipronged strategy that targets eight pressure points and outlines six methods for attacking terrorist network.

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by hilzoy

Over the weekend, as I was eating lunch, I flipped on C-SPAN and, as luck would have it, the Democrats’ hearing on the damage done by the exposure of Valerie Plame was just getting started. I’d urge you all to watch it (it’s currently second on the list of “recent programs”; you can skip the opening statements by the various Congresspeople at the beginning). While Democrats held the hearing, the witnesses — a group of ex-intelligence officers — were not from any particular side of the political spectrum; the two whose political affiliations were mentioned were a registered Republican and an ex-President of the Michigan Young Republicans. They were there because they were outraged by the exposure of a CIA agent, by the lack of any serious response to it on the part of the White House, and by what they see as either ignorant or dishonest commentary about its implications.

This is one of the things (by no means the most important one) that has dismayed me about this whole episode: the willingness of all sorts of people who have no particular expertise in intelligence or clandestine operations to blithely assert that Valerie Plame was not undercover, that outing her did no damage, that this is no big deal. One might think that the possibility that an undercover agent’s identity had been disclosed would be serious enough that people would wait before announcing that it didn’t matter. And one might think that since the CIA filed a criminal referral about Plame’s outing, a prosecutor investigating the matter found enough evidence of a crime to mount a serious investigation, and the judges who have reviewed his evidence in camera think he’s after something quite serious, those who are inclined to think that this is no big deal might wonder whether Patrick Fitzgerald might know something they don’t. I mean, should we really have to be reminded that outing CIA officers is a big deal, or that random bloggers and journalists might not always be able to figure out someone’s undercover status based on their extensive reading of Tom Clancy novels and a few GOP talking points? Apparently, we do.

So here is Patrick Lang, ex-director of the Defense Department’s Human Intelligence, to give us the reminder none of us should need.

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by Charles

In the latest from CNN, three explosions–two suicide bombings and one planted device–hit the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh early Saturday morning.  So far, there are 83 murdered and 200 wounded in the coordinated terrorist attacks.  All three bombs went off around 1:15am.  Because of the heat, most people were up and about.  Andrew Cochran has a good compilation here.  Who did it?  The circumstantial evidence points to al Qaeda.  AP:

Several hours after the attacks, a group citing ties to al-Qaida claimed responsibility for the explosion on an Islamic web site. The group, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, al-Qaida, in Syria and Egypt, was one of two extremist groups that also claimed responsibility for October bombings at the Egyptian resorts of Taba and Ras Shitan that killed 34. The group also claimed responsbility for a Cairo bombing in late April.

The authenticity of the statement could not be immediately verified.

But a top Egyptian official said there are some indications the latest bombings were linked to last fall’s Taba explosions.

The death toll is likely to rise.  Sharm el-Sheikh is a tourist destination, a "major player in Egypt’s vital tourism industry, drawing Europeans, Israelis and Arabs from oil-producing Gulf nations".  However, most who died were Egyptians and Muslims.  So far, at least eight foreigners were slain.  In another AP article:

A group calling itself the Al-Qaeda Organisation in the Levant and Egypt said it carried out the multiple bombings as a "response against the global evil powers which are spilling the blood of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestince and Chechnya".

So their answer is to spill the blood of fellow Muslims in a country that has no military presence in any of those four territories.  I guess Egypt is just not Muslim enough for al Qaeda’s taste.  One of the bombs went off in the Old Market, over two miles from the resorts, a place "where many Egyptians and others who work in the resorts live".   Captain Ed on Egypt’s involvement:

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