War 2002-03 Archives

Punch the Bag shares some thoughts on Pat Tillman, late of the Arizona Cardinals and currently serving as an Army Ranger.

Al Bethke relates a reader email about a soldier returning from Iraq and points us to Operation Hero Miles, a program for donating frequent flyer miles to soldiers flying home on R&R from Iraq and Afghanistan. Check it out.

So, we took the kids up to the top of the Empire State Building yesterday, Orange Alert or no Orange Alert. Naturally, they were thrilled to be in the tallest building in NY (we still haven't told them about the World Trade Center, and I think by now they've forgotten I worked there).

You know, I'll never carry a rifle in this war, never go to a foreign combat zone, and I don't confuse my part in this with those who do. But there is a role to play for the rest of us back home, particularly New York, the City with the Big Bullseye, and that's just to hold our ground and not let our daily business be affected by threats. It's the least we can do.

Last entry for today, I promise. After Tim Noah and others complained about the US military naming the operation that captured Saddam Hussein after the cheesy 80s movie "Red Dawn" (about a ragtag band of Americans resisting a Soviet invasion), Eugene Volokh observed that the title probably was just picked by some soldiers who liked the movie without thought for the wider propaganda value, and Eugene and Sasha Volokh marshalled the evidence on the film's popularity with soldiers.

Let me add my own experience. Each summer, the US Military Academy at West Point offers an "Invitational Academic Workshop." You spend a week at the Point, get an overview of what the school has to offer academically and militarily, and generally get to see the life of the cadets up close but without too many of the hard parts. At the time, at least, I believe the main criteria for attending was a high PSAT score, which wasn't really a great predictor of interest in a career in the military, but the workshop was good propaganda for West Point (an important consideration for any public institution, especially with a population of academic high achievers who could go on to other influential positions in life), and it was a good recruiting tool for those who were so inclined. (The program still exists today, although it looks like they've changed the criteria a little).

Anyway, I attended in a brutally hot week in June 1988, the summer before my senior year of high school. It was a fun week, we had a little taste of the 'gung ho' with being roused from bed around 6am with a loudspeaker blaring, in succession, the opening monologue from Patton and the song "Danger Zone" from Top Gun. We didn't get to do too many of the outdoor activities - it was 104 degrees out, and they wouldn't even let the cadets exercise - which was fine by me, since I was about 5'9" and 110 pounds at the time and almost as nearsighted as I am today.

Getting at long last to the point here, one highlight of the week was a showing of Red Dawn. Remember, this is 1988, the last summer before the Soviet bloc unraveled, and the cadets were mostly kids who chose a military career during the Reagan years. Let me tell you: you have not seen Red Dawn until you've seen it with an audience of West Point cadets during the Cold War. There was much rejoicing at numerous points in the film when the Rooskies got their comeuppance and the homeland was defended. And who knows? Probably a few of those cadets are officers in Iraq now, probably a good ways up the chain of command by this point.

Saddam Hussein, on the American GI: "Why didn't you fight?" one Governing Council member asked Hussein as their meeting ended. Hussein gestured toward the U.S. soldiers guarding him and asked his own question: "Would you fight them?"

A US official, on Saddam's capture: "We can now determine," he said, "if he is the mastermind of everything or not." The official elaborated: "Have we actually cut the head of the snake or is he just an idiot hiding in a hole?"

And two from last week:

Tom Maguire, on Howard Dean: "[W]ill centrists peer in confusion at their television screens and wonder, who is this little man yelling at me, and why is his face so red?"

Tom Burka, with a little humor: "Gore To Claim He Invented Dean, Says GOP"

(Read the whole thing; link via Plum Crazy)

Howard Dean's major foreign policy address on Monday was probably a mixed bag politically; while Dean's anti-war crusade was yet again upstaged by reality, he once again succeeded in framing the public debate as Dean vs. Bush, and in the primaries, that's what you need.

On the substance? Well, Dean argued that he wouldn't abandon the idea of pre-emption, but (1) would stage a preemptive attack only where an "imminent" threat existed and (2) doesn't think Iraq met that test. It's a politically clever tactic, since it wouldn't necessarily tie down his own freedom of action as President in another case as dramatically as if he rejected preemption entirely, although it does call into question his judgment and does indicate a return to pre-September 11 policy (i.e., Operation Desert Fox vs. Gulf War II as the logical response to Saddam). Of course, I disagree completely with Dean on this.

I'm sure you saw this linked in many places, but if you didn't: this is just beyond the pale.

Michele has to go and remind me that New York is on a heightened terror watch at the moment. (Scroll up from that entry for more on the story).

Merry Christmas!

I've signed on as a contributor to The Command Post; you can see my first entry here. Given my already busy schedule, I don't expect to be a regular contributor, least of all during times like this when the more regular contributors are posting breaking news at a frantic pace, but it made sense to get posting privileges over there for those times when I do see something noteworthy that hasn't been posted, especially during the slower periods in what still promises to be a very long war against terrorism and the tyrannies that support it. It's not a big part, but I'll do my bit.

Looks like that Telegraph report is getting lots of attention in the blogosphere and even some attention in the mainstream media. I'm still skeptical, but this is too important a story to let pass without investigating it thoroughly.

UPDATE 12/18: More on this to come, but Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball have done some digging and think the memo is probably, as suspected, some sort of forgery. Their evidence isn't ironclad, particularly since they haven't seen the document or investigated its provenance, but they cite FBI records showing that Atta's movements are mostly accounted for in the spring and summer of 2001 - making it unlikely, though not impossible, that he could have slipped off to Baghdad for three days - and they note that the Telegraph reporter simply says he got it from "a 'senior' member of the Iraqi Governing Council who insisted it was 'genuine,'" and the Iraqi National Congress thinks the document is bunk.

Good leg work on this by Isikoff and Hosenball; this story needed to be checked out, and it looks like they scooped everyone else in doing so. Stay tuned to see if there's anything else to this story.

I couldn't even hope to keep up with the barrage of news and commentary today, but Instapundit and The Command Post both had links galore. Just make sure you don't miss the Mohammed Atta memo story I linked to last night, which may have a terribly hard time drawing the scrutiny it deserves in the tidal wave of Saddamarama.

Interesting now to look back on this article from Friday's NY Times, which was good news in itself in Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno talking about breaking up the "cycle of financing" for the insurgency in Iraq; Odierno, who's today's man of the hour, added this:

Capturing or killing Mr. Hussein would provide a huge lift toward that goal. "It's psychological," General Odierno said. "I don't think he's really directing any of the operations, but I think he has a psychological effect. They fear him. They absolutely fear him. And there's a fear he might come back and suppress them."

"I think he's moving around," General Odierno said. "Look at the quality of his tapes. Any one of my soldiers could make a better tape than he does right now."

SOLDIERS FIND ASS IN HOLE IN THE GROUND

Saddam has been captured:

He was found, fittingly enough, hiding in a hole in a cellar in Tikrit. Unlike so many of his victims, however, Saddam emerged from the hole alive.

The president will do a jig on national television address the nation at noon.

The London Telegraph is reporting an improbably damning find -- a memo to Saddam Hussein himself demonstrating that Mohammed Atta was training in Baghdad under Abu Nidal in the summer of 2001, and tossing in claims about uranium from Niger to boot:

Details of Atta's visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in US history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

"We are uncovering evidence all the time of Saddam's involvement with al-Qaeda," he said. "But this is the most compelling piece of evidence that we have found so far. It shows that not only did Saddam have contacts with al-Qaeda, he had contact with those responsible for the September 11 attacks."

(Link via The Corner)

This is a huge story if it has even a grain of truth to it, and a significant story (i.e, big-time fabrication) if it doesn't. Frankly, this almost seems too convenient -- it's entirely possible that all this happened, but finding a memo addressed to the dictator himself and including both the Al Qaeda connection in its strongest form (i.e., contemporaneous support of September 11) and the Niger story in the same breath makes me rather suspicious. I'm sure if there's anything bad to be known about Dr Ayad Allawi, we'll be hearing it very soon from the usual suspects (Josh Marshall, call your office). Certainly, it's not improbable that the Iraqi provisional government includes some people who are desperate to suck up to the Bush Administration and not too subtle about doing so.

The article doesn't say whether Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti is in US custody, and a cursory web search indicates he may still be at large (although I may have missed something; the best list a Google search turned up was this BBC list from October).

Either way, it's a story we need to hear more about.

Rich Lowry was blogging the Democrats' most recent debate, and came up with this, on a statement from Howard Dean:

Dean also seems to have boned up on his Iraq policy, although he is still not making much sense. He calls for foreign troops from Iraq's neighbors to come into the country, apparently not noticing that that is exactly what the Iraqi's don't want. That's why there are no Turkish troops in Iraq now...

I was aghast at this; who are Iraq's neighbors besides Turkey?

Iran
Saudi Arabia
Syria
Jordan
Kuwait

I could be wrong, but I suspect that the Kuwaiti armed forces aren't particularly useful. And we sure as hell don't want Saudis, Syrians and Iranians patrolling the country if we're hoping to make it safe for democracy. Besides their other flaws - like the fact that none of them is really on our side in the war on terror, to put it mildly - they all have their own regional agendas. That leaves Jordan, which ain't much of a coalition if your alternative is scoffing at allies like Britian and Australia.

But I thought I'd check out the transcript, and Lowry doesn't seem to have precisely captured Dean's statement:

Peter Beinart (in a column that's now web-accessible only to subscribers of The New Republic) suggested some weeks back that, given the GOP's skepticism about nation-building during the Clinton years and the hesitance of some Republicans to support the Clinton Administration's policy on the war in Kosovo, one might assume that if the Democrats still held the White House, the Republicans would be playing the same role of petulant anti-warriors currently filled by the Democrats. Beinart's a reasonable enough guy, and he understands national security issues well, but he clearly doesn't understand much about Republicans if he thinks we would have been calling for a President Gore to restrain his response after September 11. Did Republicans castigate Harry Truman for being too much of a hard-line anti-Communist? I think it far more likely that if Gore were in the White House on September 11, Republicans would have been calling for a much more belligerent response, full of Old Testament-style smiting and wrath.

ESPN has an inspiring profile of a former Army quarterback now serving in Iraq.

Last month, I echoed Frank Gaffney's suggestion on NRO that President Bush should go to Baghdad; I suggested that Thanksgiving would be an appropriate time to go. I was dismayed to see reports that Hillary Clinton would be going (she was in Afghanistan today), not just for the partisan points but because her presence only underlined Bush's absence from what would be an important morale-boosting visit.

News came today, though, that the president did the right thing. Whatever you think of the politics of the event, that's just what it was: the right thing to do, for the sake of our soldiers who don't have the luxury of deciding where they'd like to be for Thanksgiving.

(PS - Oddly, The Corner is noting the visit without giving due credit to Gaffney for being an early booster of the idea)

It took a while, but on Thursday, the NY Times finally addressed the memo from Douglas Feith laying out the evidence of longstanding connections between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda; whatever you think of the credibility or novelty of the memo, it's unquestionably newsworthy to have all the evidence laid out in one place.

So, what does the Times do, but include this line:

"With the disclosure of Mr. Feith's memorandum, some conservative commentators have resurrected claims of a link between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks, even though President Bush said in September that he had seen no such evidence."

Now, for the millionth time, evidence of connections to al Qaeda is not necessarily the same as evidence of connections to September 11; opponents of the Iraq war have repeatedly obscured this distinction to accuse conservatives and the Administration of making the latter charge (which is supported by only very tenuous evidence) when most have made the former, which is supported by a more substantial body of allegations. But what stinks here is the way the Times makes this assertion: it doesn't quote anyone, thus leaving the impression that it's talking about leading commentators (the Sept. 11 point is not really being pushed by any of the leading lights on the Right), and then it just dismisses those arguments without giving the unnamed commentators at least a sentence or two to say what their argument is.

I haven't had time to digest this one, but don't miss conspiracy theorist Edward Jay Epstein's piece debunking the debunkers of the reports that Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague in the spring of 2001. Epstein's verdict: we still don't really know.