Iraq and Terrorism

Andrew McCarthy’s essay on NRO reads like a summary of every argument I’ve had over the past two years about whether or not we’re in a religious war disguised as a “war on terror.” In general, he stops short of saying our enemy is “Islam” (he carefully uses “militant Islam”), and he clarifies that doesn’t mean a war against a religion, but rather against an ideology.

Given that his first clarification is something it normally takes me months to get from those I debate, I consider McCarthy’s point of view refreshing to some degree. But I was actually quite disturbed as I read through his argument when it was confirmed for me what this war is really about for some: assimilation. Now this had occurred to me before, but it wasn’t until someone as honest with himself as McCarthy outlined the ideas here that it became crystal clear.

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In the previous thread on this topic, Constant Reader Bird Dog raised a good question about why Arabs choose to believe anti-American propaganda. The following response from reader Hilzoy deserves its own thread I believe:

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When the Commissar states that one of the wars going on right now is the one “between our inner Thomas Jefferson and our inner Phil Sheridan“, he is being entirely correct.

When Donald Sensing warns about the consequences of making this war personal, he is being entirely correct.

And when Wretchard declares himself to be afraid what of what comes next*… a merciful God willing, we will not have to determine whether or not he is entirely correct as well.

Moe

UPDATE: Jeebus, you know that it’s been a bad week when Lileks is being grim:

The West doesn’t have the power to change Islam; it only has the power to destroy it. We have a lot of nukes. We could kill everyone. We could just take out a few troublesome nations, kill millions, and irradiate Mecca so that the Fifth Pillar is invalidated. The hajj would be impossible. Every pilgrim a martyr. I don’t think we’ll do either; God help us if we do, but inasmuch as we have the capability, it’s an option. But it would be a crime greater than the crime that provoked such an act, and in the end that would stay our hand. They know we won’t do it.

Strong horse, weak horse.

There is another path, of course. Simply put: if a US city is nuked, the US will have to nuke someone, or let it stand that the United States can lose a city without cost to the other side. Defining “the other side” would be difficult, of course – do you erase Tehran to punish the mullahs? Make a crater out of Riyahd? These are exactly the sort of decisions we never want to make. But let’s say it happens. Baltimore: fire and wind. Gone. That horrible day would clarify things once and for all. It’s one thing for someone in a distant city to cheer the fall of two skyscrapers: from a distance, it looks like a bloody nose. But erasing a city is a different matter.

Everyone will have to choose sides. That would be one possible beginning of the end of this war.

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Each time an Islamist terrorist commits some atrocity against us, it’s natural to be angry.

It’s also natural to be angry indiscriminantly at Muslims. Not honorable, but natural. Until reason kicks in, that is.

But as the War on Terror progresses, I’m seeing a trend whereby Americans can’t get past what they see as a fundamental faithlessness among so-called Moderate Muslims: Why don’t they decry this violence? Are we to take their silence as sanction?

Personally, this strikes me somewhat as laziness and xenophobia (we don’t need our fellow Americans marching in the street to tell us they don’t support the likes of Timothy McVeigh). But I’ve realized that listing dozens of links to moderate Muslim sites that do decry the atrocities will not convince anyone for whom this remains a problem. So I’m abandoning the quantitative approach. It’s a problem. But where does it come from?

Let me begin by acknowledging the perception: the Muslims of the world are not as vocal about these acts of terror as we want/need them to be.

Personally, this “silence,” such as it is, doesn’t confuse me. I put two and two together and figure if a military power like the US is unable to completely protect itself from these killers, let alone track them down and bring them to justice, how are the people of much poorer nations supposed to stand up to them? In other words, there’s a bit of fear at play here. I fully expect, however, that argument to issue in charges of cowardice, and that’s unfair to the brave Muslims I know (and some prominent Muslim thinkers strongly deny that’s it), so I took some time to look deeper.

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My defense of Rumsfeld provoked a fair number of fair critiques by the readership. Jesurgislac sums up one line of argument with the following:

Well, Von, this is what you said, quoted exactly: “What I do suggest is that torture and abuses are a routine and expected part of war, and that if there mere presence of torture and abuse in wartime was sufficient to require a cabinent-level firing, no Defense Secretary would last any war.”

How is this not saying that since it’s “routine and expected” that US solders will break the law (against torture), no Defense Secretary should be expected to enforce the law or be fired if he doesn’t?

I’d appreciate it if you would actually explain what you were saying here, rather than just let me keep trying to figure it out and telling me I’ve got it wrong.

Since I got tied up in other matters and didn’t respond much this critique or others, here’s another go at why, based on present evidence, Rumsfeld should stay.

Note: I intentionally leave out practical (perhaps Rumsfeld, flawed though he is, is the best person for the job) or political (firing Rumsfeld is a tacit admission by Bush that his Iraq policy is off track) concerns. This doesn’t mean that these concerns don’t exist — just that I’m feeling moralistic, not pragmatic, today.

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Hat tip to readers Victor Falk and JimPortlandOR for suggesting and providing information on this topic.
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the more you know the less you panic

I’m setting up this thread for the sharing of solid information about “dirty bombs” and what to do should one be detonated. A good source of key questions and answers is this thread from Vanderbilt University. This discussion also references a good overview published in the Washington Post a while back (I can’t find the article on the WP’s site, but the considerate Vanderbilt folks provide it on theirs). First two quotes below from that WP article.

Right to the most pressing question:

John Zielinski, professor of military strategy and operations at the National War College in Washington, estimates that, generally, someone a mile from the blast is likely to walk away unscathed. And “you could be within a couple hundred yards of it, and if you are upwind, you might not have a problem at all,” he says. “If they set it off in a street and you are one block over and behind a building, there might be no risk.”

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Prefatory Note: Despite the charges of cheapshotery my last attempt at this provoked, I’m going to dive head first into how much goodwill a touch of humility brings again. Given how Buddha-less the blogosphere has gotten over this torture scandal issue, let me note up front, for clarity, my driving concern here is the US’s image in the world (and how we need a good one to do right by Iraq), not Bush’s or Kerry’s image in the upcoming election.

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European allies are now even less enamored of our President than they were before the torture photos emerged. This is worrisome, given that before then, as a recent straw poll in Britain revealed, Bush was already pretty damn unpopular:

… perhaps the only surprising thing about the vehemence of anti-Bush feeling, based on a reading of newspapers, opinion polls and interviews around Europe, is how unsurprising it truly is. In fact, one reason the recent disclosures have proved so damaging to the American cause here is that Mr. Bush had so little good will upon which to draw. (emphasis mine)

This is not easily dismissed as transatlantic partisanship, unfortunately. Those polled here “were all Conservatives, by tradition and temperament the Republican Party’s natural friends across the Atlantic.”

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There seem to be two distinct camps in the debate on the War on Terror:

The Big War crowd argues that there are alliances and common interests among terrorist groups that extend far beyond al Qaida and anything short of total ideological warfare is doomed to failure (i.e., we’ll be targeted again unless we rip this worldwide threat out by its roots and destroy its ability to regenerate, and quickly).

The Little War crowd argues that we have a known, dangerous enemy, still at large, and we should have focussed our energies on targeting that enemy and its leader, so that we’re fighting one battle at a time, and fighting each one well (i.e., we’re using resources in Iraq that could be better used at the Afghanistan/Pakistan border).

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This is the rare newspaper editorial (as opposed to Op-Ed) that pulls no punches, and gets it exactly right:

THE HORRIFIC abuses by American interrogators and guards at the Abu Ghraib prison and at other facilities maintained by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced, in part, to policy decisions and public statements of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld….

The lawlessness began in January 2002 when Mr. Rumsfeld publicly declared that hundreds of people detained by U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan “do not have any rights” under the Geneva Conventions. That was not the case: At a minimum, all those arrested in the war zone were entitled under the conventions to a formal hearing to determine whether they were prisoners of war or unlawful combatants. No such hearings were held, but then Mr. Rumsfeld made clear that U.S. observance of the convention was now optional. Prisoners, he said, would be treated “for the most part” in “a manner that is reasonably consistent” with the conventions — which, the secretary breezily suggested, was outdated.

Note that the Post accepts the administration’s view that Al Qaeda terrorists can be legitimately held and interrogated without the protections of the Geneva convention. They are okay with that, as long as there’s an initial hearing to determine that this is really an Al Qaeda terrorist and not a Taliban conscript; as long as we have procedures that ensure that the Convention Against Torture is not violated; and as long as it is reserved for extraoardinary cases.

(This will surprise many readers, but I think I am okay with that too. I would add that indefinite detention without a real hearing–probably not an ordinary criminal trial, but a real hearing with real representation for the accused that goes beyond the original POW/enemy combatant distinction–should not be an option.)

Of course, none of that is relevant in Iraq, a country which we chose to invade, where the few Al Qaeda and Ba’athist terrorists are scattered among many ordinary guerillas and even more innocent civilians we’ve captured by mistake. Yet Rumsfeld still says the Geneva Convention is optional:

On Monday Mr. Rumsfeld’s spokesman said that the secretary had not read Mr. Taguba’s report, which was completed in early March. Yesterday Mr. Rumsfeld told a television interviewer that he still hadn’t finished reading it, and he repeated his view that the Geneva Conventions “did not precisely apply” but were only “basic rules” for handling prisoners.

Even if you don’t care about the Iraqis, this is not doing our own troops any favors. It’s obvious to almost everyone that Abu Ghraib is a practical as well as a moral disaster. And even if our success in Iraq didn’t depend so heavily on the general population’s trust; even if it were a simpler and more purely military struggle; even if those pictures weren’t the world’s best ad campaign for Osama bin Laden….we didn’t sign the Geneva Convention because we were goody-two-shoes. It’s in our interest to treat captives decently. It encourages the enemy to surrender instead of fighting to the death, and it increases the chances that our own soldiers will be treated decently when they’re captured.

I like his poetry as much as the next girl. But as far as I’m concerned, Rumsfeld has joined Ashcroft and Tenet and whoever ratted out Valerie Plame in the “should be SO fired” club. Read the whole Washington Post editorial and tell me you disagree.

(via commenter otmar at Tacitus)

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(to paraphrase Fox News…read on.)

Part of me wishes that the Abu Ghraib story had never come out, or at least not the pictures that accompanied it. “Hearts and minds” arguments are usually full of conjecture and self serving assumptions, but this one is easy. These pictures are going to make more people hate us. They’re going to drive recruiting for Al Qaeda, and certainly the Iraqi militias. Americans will almost certainly get killed because of these photographs—maybe only in Iraq; maybe also here.

But I also know that’s not a brave or responsible reaction on my part. The problem is what happened, not that we found about it, or that the Arab world found about it or that CBS released pictures of it. The pictures might well be necessary to prevent it from happening it again. And journalists’ responsibility is to the truth, not to the U.S.’s image. If only censorship and self-censorship stand between us and what Islamic extremists say about us—well, God help us.

John Podhoretz and Glenn Reynolds seem to disagree with me. Podhoretz:

For others, however, thoughts of the Vietnam War conjure up a sense of moral triumph. They opposed the war, and their opposition was a key element in this nation’s withdrawal from the battlefield over the course of the Nixon presidency.

Those were glory days for the anti-war movement and the American counterculture, both of which reveled in their hostility to and rejection of authority… Keep this fact in mind when considering the actions of CBS News and The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh.

Hersh and CBS are leading the media pack with graphic and lurid coverage of the disgusting atrocities committed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. The tone they are adopting is a tone of moral outrage. But beneath it you can feel the thrill, the excitement of being back on the old familiar turf of standing in opposition to the foreign-policy aims of the United States – using the most despicable actions of a few criminals as a stand-in for the overall effort in Iraq.

For Hersh, this is quite literally an effort to return to old glory: He made his career almost 35 years ago by uncovering the Vietnam-era massacre at My Lai.

To take this story, and make it about American-hating hippies and journalists, is so misguided I don’t know where to start.

I once planned to grow up and be an investigative journalist, so I know about Seymour Hersh and My Lai. It is striking that the same person broke the story that shook our faith in our own rectitude in Vietnam, and the story that is doing the same in Iraq. Either a strange coincidence, or a sign of Hersh’s tenacity and the rest of the press’ lack thereof.

But. Is Hersh gleeful? He sure as hell doesn’t sound gleeful when he’s interviewed. Maybe he’s not above the odd surge of triumph, but if there is any element of vindication involved—Hersh is an investigative journalist. Finding out this stuff is his job, and he’s done it very well, and we all like to be best at our jobs. There is no indication whatsoever that Seymour Hersh is cackling with glee to be able to subvert American hegemony once again.

And even if there were….who the hell cares about the tricksy anti-Americanism that motivates Seymour Hersh, if his story is accurate? What, precisely, does Podhoretz think Hersh should have done? Not published the story of Abu Ghraib or My Lai, because it made us look bad? Say that these were six bad apples and did not detract from our noble liberation of Iraq? Hersh could say that, but it wouldn’t make it true and it certainly wouldn’t make anyone in the Muslim world believe it–for the most part they’re not learning about this from the New Yorker.

When U.S. soldiers abuse prisoners, the problem is that U.S. soldiers abuse prisoners, not that reporters write about it. When things go badly in Iraq, the problem is that things are going badly in Iraq, not that some antiwar people might be having impure thoughts about it, or think they were right to oppose this war before it started.*

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UPDATE: Based on the response from fellow bloggers on this site, I’ve rethought a central line in this post. I’ve left it in, willing to own up to my mistakes, but realize that I projected an objection to the line about “good liberals” on the Tacitus site to my thoughts about this issue here. My defense of Liberals (and the corresponding snark about “normal conservative stance”) belong on Tacitus, not here. Having conceded that (and underlined the offending bits for anyone who can forgive and carry on with this topic), let me clarify that this post is asking whether this critique of the Fallujah decision is on target or a bit hyperbolic.

Across the blogosphere conservative folks are fretting about the turn of events in Fallujah. Tacitus, worried that this is another Mogadishu moment, spares no scorn for Bush in his blistering attack. Andrew Sullivan worries that the unthinkable is happening: Bush is losing his resolve. And it’s made The Politburo Diktat question “what are we fighting for?”

And so I have to wonder—feeling that this does not follow the {{normal conservative}} stance that criticizing our leaders during war is unpatriotic—how FUBAR is the Fallujah decision, really?

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Via Kuro5hin
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In a letter to British Prime Minister Tony Blair published in The Independent, an overwhelming host of former diplomats* argued that the effort in Iraq is doomed:

The conduct of the war in Iraq has made it clear that there was no effective plan for the post-Saddam settlement. All those with experience of the area predicted that the occupation of Iraq by the coalition forces would meet serious and stubborn resistance, as has proved to be the case. To describe the resistance as led by terrorists, fanatics and foreigners is neither convincing nor helpful. Policy must take account of the nature and history of Iraq, the most complex country in the region. However much Iraqis may yearn for a democratic society, the belief that one could now be created by the coalition is naive.

It’s time to acknowledge we’ve made some mistakes and move on, quickly, to Plan B here.

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Via the incomparable Gary Farber @ Amygdala

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As I noted before—when the photo of the soldier who had the Iraqi boy hold up a sign about killing his father and knocking up his sister was making the rounds—I can’t relate to the sort of stress doing the job our soldiers are doing must put them under. And, therefore, I tend to be very generous in my assessment of conduct unbecoming situations.

It’s a little tougher to be so evenhanded about the situation at Abu Ghraib though. And before anyone asks “Where’s the outrage from the Right on this?”: Here’s some.

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