Category: War 2007-18

The good guys aren’t the only ones who have problems with former supporters turning on them:

One of Al Qaeda’s senior theologians is calling on his followers to end their military jihad and saying the attacks of September 11, 2001, were a “catastrophe for all Muslims.”
In a serialized manifesto written from prison in Egypt, Sayyed Imam al-Sharif is blasting Osama bin Laden for deceiving the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and for insulting the Prophet Muhammad by comparing the September 11 attacks to the early raids of the Ansar warriors. The lapsed jihadist even calls for the formation of a special Islamic court to try Osama bin Laden and his old comrade Ayman al-Zawahri.
The disclosures from Mr. Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl and Abd al-Qadir ibn Abd al-Aziz, have already opened a rift at the highest levels of Al Qaeda. The group’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, a former associate of the defecting theologian in Egypt, personally mocked him last month in a video, remarking that he was unaware Egyptian prisons had fax machines. Meanwhile, leading Western analysts are saying the defection of Mr. Sharif indicates the beginning of the end for Al Qaeda.

Continue reading There’s Still A War On. But For Now, It’s Going Pretty Well.

At first glance, the commercially available jet pack seems wonderful and Jetsons-ish, but while I hate to be a spoilsport, I have to think that suicide bombers will just love it:
1. Strap pack with tank of jet feul on back.
2. Strap on suicide belt. So far, all can be done in secluded private property.
3. Fly at and into target at maximum velocity, without need for mass transit, checkpoints, or any sort of license.
4. Profit!

A few thoughts on last week’s announcement of the National Intelligence Estimate, which estimates that Iran ceased its nuclear weapons program in 2003:
1. As Reagan used to say, trust, but verify. U.S. intelligence has historically been lousy regarding other nations’ WMD programs, especially police states, going back as far as the USSR and Red China getting The Bomb. The errors haven’t even all been in one direction: threats have been underestimated at least as often as overestimated. And if the post-9/11 bureaucratic imperative was to avoid charges of failing to ‘connect the dots,’ the post-Iraq War imperative is to avoid charges of overestimating WMD threats. So this may well be yet another case of fighting the last war. Taranto’s column last Wednesday collected some good analyses, of which there are many more. At a minimum, the NIE should not be taken at face value as holy writ. There’s a reason they call these things “estimates.”
2. Iran is certainly not disarmed, as Alan Deshowitz explains:

[The NIE] falls hook, line and sinker for a transparent bait and switch tactic employed not only by Iran, but by several other nuclear powers in the past.
The tactic is obvious and well-known to all intelligence officials with an IQ above room temperature. It goes like this: There are two tracks to making nuclear weapons: One is to conduct research and develop technology directly related to military use. That is what the United States did when it developed the atomic bomb during the Manhattan Project. The second track is to develop nuclear technology for civilian use and then to use the civilian technology for military purposes.
What every intelligence agency knows is that the most difficult part of developing weapons corresponds precisely to the second track, namely civilian use. In other words, it is relatively simple to move from track 2 to track 1 in a short period of time.

Read the whole thing. H/T (Dershowitz is an arch-liberal, but a Jewish arch-liberal of an age to remember when being pro-Israel was a liberal priority).
3. That said, if nothing else, the NIE’s conclusions, if true, suggest that we at least have a little more time to deal with the threat. As Dershowitz suggests, this may be part of the Bush Administration’s slipping into “legacy watch” mode, i.e., concluding that it can’t really solve any more problems in the time remaining and instead trying to make them look solved so problems down the road get pinned on the next President (this is a tried and true formula across many policy areas; Bush didn’t invent it and neither did Clinton). Even so, the preferred solution on the Right for handling Iran has been to pursue a multi-pronged strategy aimed at destabilizing the regime from within and keeping it sufficiently harrassed from without to limit its ability to make trouble; almost nobody actually wants war with Iran, for a variety of reasons. The urgency of dealing right now with the Iranian problem has largely been driven by two things: the nuclear threat, which once accomplished would take most of our other options off the table in addition to creating its own hazards, and the continuing Iranian meddling in Iraq (and to a lesser extent Lebanon). Those aren’t the only problems the Iranians present (there’s the longstanding issue of Iranian support for international terrorism, for which Iran has justly headed the list of state sponsors of terror for decades), but they’re the ones that have demanded the most immediate response. If Iran is ‘keeping its powder dry’ on the nuclear front, along with improving conditions and a more aggressive U.S. posture in Iraq, that may give some real, and not just perceived, breathing room in dealing with the problem.
4. Of course, as Taranto and others have noted, if Iran really did downshift its nuclear program in 2003, even as a matter of sending it further under cover, it requires some fairly severe contortions to pretend that this was not a direct result of the Iraq War, combined with the general perception that Bush was a trigger-happy warmonger who had Iran next on his list.

Venezuelan voters reject Hugo Chavez’ effort to get an electoral mandate to be president-for-life and impose wholesale socialism on the nation (as opposed to the creeping socialism and dictatorship he’s been working at for years).
Liberty is good. People tend to resist when the question of surrendering it entirely is put to them quite that directly.

If you read just one story this week about Iraq, make sure that it’s Jeff Emanuel’s story of incredible perseverance under fire by four U.S. Army snipers surrounded and badly outnumbered on a rooftop in Samarra in August 2007. Really, print it out and read it at leisure, but make sure you read it.
You might also go by Jeff’s site and toss some cash his way to support the kind of front-line reporting that made this possible.

Anti-war Eeyore journalism reaches new levels of self-parody.

By now you have no doubt seen the most important news story of the week, yesterday’s front-pager in the Washington Post reporting the debate among the U.S. military between those who believe that recent, dramatic successes against Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQIZ) represent a decisive and irreversible turning point, especially given the newfound cooperation in Sunni areas alienated by AQIZ, and those who caution that AQIZ might yet regenerate itself again as it did after its leadership was decimated by the series of raids beginning with the decaptitation strike that killed AQIZ’s notorious leader, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, in June 2006.
That debate is itself important, as are the collateral domestic political questions that follow from it. But perhaps the most intriguing line in the WaPo piece is this one:

The flow of foreign fighters through Syria into Iraq has also diminished, although officials are unsure of the reason and are concerned that the broader al-Qaeda network may be diverting new recruits to Afghanistan and elsewhere.

This raises a question I have addressed before: whether the United States is doing enough to expand the battlefield on which we take the fight to the enemy.
You see, regardless of the precise nature of the organizational charts of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, the basic fact remains: we are facing an enemy that operates across national borders, mostly shares common goals and common religious and poilitical ideology, and draws from the same pools of resources. Al Qaeda and its fellow travelers operate in Iraq, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, even in New Jersey and North Carolina.
Like any adversary in war, especially an asymmetrical war such as this one, the jihadist enemy has some advantages over us: fanatical foot soldiers willing to engage in suicide attacks, superior ability to manipulate the media, an absence of moral restraint, little or no territory to protect, an ability to blend in with the population, and patience to take the long view against a nation famous for its impatience. Their goal is to make maximum use of those advantages, while nullifying ours.
But it should not be a given that the U.S. lets the enemy dictate the terms of engagement – and indeed, that is precisely what the Iraq War has been all about. It is a basic rule of any form of conflict – from wars to political campaigns to sporting events to litigation to business competition – that you force the enemy to react to your strengths, rather than let him dictate that the battle be fought on the ground of your weaknesses. It’s a dictum as old as Sun Tzu. You don’t win wars by hunkering down to figure out how to stop what the other guy does best; you win wars by making the other guy wake up every morning wondering what you are going to do to him.
My concern is that, while the Iraq War has succeeded in occupying much of the enemy’s attention, U.S. policy has let the enemy too often off the hook by allowing them to fight only in Iraq. Remember, with no disrespect to our fighting men, America has won wars in the past (hot and Cold) not so much by having more or braver men than the enemy but in large part by forcing the enemy to compete on multiple fronts in ways that allow us to leverage our huge advantages in producing armaments and supplies and in moving men, materiel and information from place to place while interdicting the enemy’s ability to do so. Indeed, those are advantages being deployed now by Gen. Petraeus:

Captures and interrogations of AQI leaders over the summer had what a senior military intelligence official called a “cascade effect,” leading to other killings and captures. . . .
The deployment of more U.S. and Iraqi forces into AQI strongholds in Anbar province and the Baghdad area, as well as the recruitment of Sunni tribal fighters to combat AQI operatives in those locations, has helped to deprive the militants of a secure base of operations, U.S. military officials said. “They are less and less coordinated, more and more fragmented,” Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, said recently. Describing frayed support structures and supply lines, Odierno estimated that the group’s capabilities have been “degraded” by 60 to 70 percent since the beginning of the year.

There remains a debate about precisely how much manpower the jihadists can call upon, and thus whether a strategy of manpower attrition (i.e., killing terrorists) is likely to get us anywhere on a global basis any time soon:

Despite the increased killings and captures of AQI members, Odierno said, “it only takes three people” to construct and detonate a suicide car bomb that can “kill thousands.” The goal, he said, is to make each attack less effective and lengthen the periods between them.

But even terrorist groups don’t just run on warm bodies; they need money, leadership, experience and expertise (e.g., in building IEDs), munitions, and communications. All of these are finite resources, and the United States and its allies can reproduce them, move them, coordinate them and interdict them far better and on a far larger scale than the enemy can. We need them to be fighting on more fronts than they can logistically handle. And unless there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than we can guess, I’m not convinced that we are doing nearly enough of that. The Iranians, for example, appear to have a very free hand to stoke the violence in Iraq and Lebanon and support the jihadis (even the Sunni jihadis who represent Iran’s ancient enemies, but who are fighting us now) with minimal consequences for themselves, and little taxation of resources they would have difficulty replenishing. Ditto the Syrians.
The prescription to expand the battlefield is easier said than done, of course; we don’t really need to be invading countries willy-nilly, nor am I suggesting we do so. As the Cold War experience – against a much vaster and better-funded enemy – shows, there are a variety of ways to engage the enemy in combat without committing large numbers of our own troops (although we had a much larger and better-funded military then, as we probably should today). And there is a counter-argument, which is in essence that our main priority needs to be consolidating gains of fragile democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, to a much more tenuous extent, in Lebanon, where the democrats still have a fighting chance against difficult odds) rather than opening new fronts. But the longstanding logic of war, together with the political reality of a restive U.S. populace, counsels daring rather than caution. As a guiding principle, whenever and wherever U.S. policymakers have the opportunity to engage the jihadist enemy in ways that further tax its finite resources, we should be doing so.

Who the Nobel Peace Prize Committee wouldhave chosen if they were serious about supporting opposition to tyranny and terrorism, especially non-violent opposition. Surely, each of these was a better candidate.
We are rapidly approaching the point at which the Nobel committee will just cut out the middleman and give itself the prize. In the meantime, I guess it’s progress not to give the award (as done repeatedly in the past) to someone who signed a cease-fire they had no intention of honoring.

Eliot Spitzer’s remarks today at the September 11 memorial service:

We stand on this terrible threshold remembering all that happened. We feel today as we felt then, that we belong to one another, not because we are inhabitants of the same city or same country but because we are all part of the same human story, part of one community of our fellow human beings. John Dunne wrote these immortal words centuries ago: “No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, apart of the main, any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”

Well, actually no, Eliot. You are a Governor. Which means you are elected by a particular group of people, who share a basic social contract of self-government (I know it’s hard to get used to that after thinking you were Attorney General of the entire financial world, but there we have it). Now, we New Yorkers are indeed a diverse lot, as people come here from all throughout the nation and the world. But that doesn’t change the fact that we belong to each other because we share a city, a state, and a nation; to the contrary, the fact that so many of your constituents are New Yorkers by choice means precisely that any notion of belonging to one another is about more than just common humanity; it is, instead, a compact grounded in common values, values we can choose to accept, or reject.
The men who flew those planes into our neighborhood rejected them. And they would reject you, Governor Spitzer, and never forget that. They would reject you first of all for your faith, which is certainly the first thing that would pop in their heads while sawing off yours, which they would gladly do if given the opportunity. They would reject you for your city, which they attacked, and your nation, which stands in their way.
We New Yorkers may be a broad-minded lot, but when the day is done, like any other people anywhere, we take care of our own. We elect people who swear to do that, even at times people we do not particularly like. You were not asked to speak at a memorial service for the hijackers (notice the absence of reading of their names?), or for humanity at large. You were asked to speak at a memorial for our neighbors. Whose families and friends are gathered here, because those who died were their family and friends.
I would offer Rudy Giuliani’s statement at the same service as a more appropriate way to offer some general, non-controversial sentiments without descending into this swamp of moral equivalence in which we care not who died, or why:

On this day six years ago and on the days that followed, in the midst of our great grief and turmoil, we also witnessed uncompromising strength and resilience as a people. It was a day with no answers, but with an unending line of those who came forward to try to help one another. Elie Wiesel wrote this about the blackest night a human being can know: “I have learned two lessons in my life. First, there are no significant literary, psychological or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope too can be given to one only by other human beings.”
God bless America.

As James Lileks once put it, speaking of former Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton:

It’s as if people of Dayton’s ilk believe they’re really Senators in some transnational body that represents the world, not a weirdly-shaped state with its head jammed up against the broad flat butt of Canada. I’m starting to think they’re all Senators from the United Federation of Planets, and soon the Temporal Police will show up and take them back to the future.

Governor, by those sentiments, you are no family, no friend of ours. We need someone who understands that our Governor is supposed to be on our side, and not just on the side of “humanity” in general.

It only hit me when we turned over the calendar to September that the 11th would be on a Tuesday this year. Mercifully, it’s a rainy morning; yesterday was more reminiscent of the day. This video of the news reports at 8am that morning should bring it back.
For remembering the events of September 11, I still can’t add to what I wrote when it was still fresh in my mind.
We have been fortunate indeed – and it is not just luck, of course – that there has been no follow-up attack within the U.S. in the six succeeding years. I have to say, I’m increasingly pessimistic that this can keep up, especially in light of the Left’s continuous and longstanding assault on every method of intelligence-gathering we have – electronic surveillance, interrogation of captured detainees, boots on the ground, covert operations, use of defectors and double-agents, reports by citizens of suspicious behavior – and on our ability to act on them.
It is altogether fitting that this day in Washington is taken up with the question of whether and how the United States will continue the fight in Iraq. One of the central facts that the Vietnam analogists always ignore is the geographic, strategic and cultural centrality of Iraq to the Arab and Muslim worlds, which of course are the origin of the threat that struck us on that September morning. The case for abandoning Vietnam would have been far weaker had the war been fought in Poland. These days, the anti-war crowd is mainly occupied with contortions to prove that we are not actually fighting Al Qaeda and related jihadists in Iraq. But short of admitting that we were not going to conduct a broad offensive campaign to get to the problem at its roots, there was never a good answer to how we were going to win a war on terror with Saddam at our back, as he would have been had we started the second stage (after Afghanistan) anywhere else. And today, the option of having a “do-over” of the past five years having faded into the alt-history swamp, the question is still more pressing: given that the very ideological forces we are fighting, and who attacked us that day, have made it a priority to defeat the United States in Iraq, how can the wider war be won without it being seen that the U.S. has defeated them there?
I’m thankful this morning for the men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan precisely because I remember that morning six years ago.

Via one of the WSJ’s many blogs, an article in the Economiston the possible dissolution of Belgium, yet another of the awkward multi-ethnic creations of the European leadership of the past two centuries, and how little it might mean.

I haven’t linked to nearly enough of my RedState colleague Jeff Emanuel’s dispatches from Iraq, but you won’t want to miss his first-person account of being on a patrol hit by an IED on the road in Samarra.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says he is undeterred by the possibility that his pursuit of nuclear weapons could lead to armed conflict with the United States, because he can prove mathematically that the U.S. will not respond:

“In some discussions I told them ‘I am an engineer and I am examining the issue. They do not dare wage war against us and I base this on a double proof’,” he said in the speech on Sunday, reported by the reformist Etemad Melli and Kargozaran newspapers.
“I tell them: ‘I am an engineer and I am a master in calculation and tabulation.
“I draw up tables. For hours, I write out different hypotheses. I reject, I reason. I reason with planning and I make a conclusion. They cannot make problems for Iran.'”

This would be funnier if Ahmadinejad wasn’t using this kind of reasoning to pursue weapons of mass destruction on behalf of a theocratic tyranny.

Political progress and military progress going hand in hand in Iraq.

Remember in April when Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid said of the war in Iraq that “this war is lost, that the surge is not accomplishing anything”? Remember in June when Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote to the president that “[t]he increase in US forces [in Iraq] has had little impact in curbing the violence or fostering political reconciliation” and “has failed to produce the intended results,”?
Well, lo and behold, Democratic Senators Durbin (the #2 ranking Democrat in the Senate) and Casey, after actually visiting Iraq, now admit that the surge is, in fact, making precisely the military progress that Senator Reid declared to be impossible:

The funniest thing is CNN anchor John Roberts’ shock at hearing Democrats admit this, and his repeated efforts to get them to say it again. As Allahpundit and Brian Faughnan of the Weekly Standard note, Durbin and Casey try to move the goalposts by talking up the political problems remaining in Iraq, but of course legislative gridlock and paralysis are much more tractable than car bombings. Also, Casey’s description of the new military strategy (which he admits he voted against) as “a stay the course policy, no change in direction” is a hilarious illustration of how thoroughly out of his depth Pennsylvania’s lightweight junior Senator really is; he’s still using last year’s talking points.
Seems like General Petraeus may well find himself facing a divided and disorganized enemy when he comes to Capitol Hill in September. In any event, it’s a healthy sign for the nation that not everyone in the Democratic Party is willing to personally invest their credibility in the message that we have lost the war.

By now you have seen, if you followed the story at all, that Scott Thomas Beauchamp has recanted and admitted to peddling false smears of American troops in The New Republic. Beauchamp himself is small potatoes, but TNR isn’t, and given their history with prior fabulists, this is going to be very tough to come back from. The irony, of course, is that under Peter Beinart the magazine originally supported the Iraq War; it wasn’t so long ago that Spencer Ackerman’s strident attacks on the war’s supporters, including the publisher of the magazine, got him canned. But it increasingly looks like new editor Franklin Foer got suckered into publishing Beauchamp due to a confluence of factors all coming together at once: Foer’s youth and inexperience as a new editor and unfamiliarity with the military, his desire to pander to anti-war and anti-military factions that TNR had alienated, his willingness, even eagerness, to believe the worst of American troops, and plain old cronyism/nepotism of the Valerie Plame/Joe Isuzu variety (Beauchamp is married to a TNR reporter).
As usual in cases of this nature, the larger question is how many more subtle fabrications make their way under the radar; it takes little imagination to see in what direction they – like the ones that have been uncovered – would push the narrative on the war.

Today’s NY Daily News carried an op-ed by Hillary Clinton (co-signed by whoever it is that signs stuff for Robert Byrd these days) that seems to say…well, in typical Clinton fashion, its meaning would appear to depend on the reader. Let’s walk through and see if we can make sense of the words she pours past our eyes:

On Oct. 11, 2002, the Senate gave President Bush authority to use force against Iraq. Nearly five years later, it is time for Congress to say enough is enough.
The American people have waited long enough for progress in Iraq. They have waited long enough for the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own future.

OK, so she is calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq? That’s the position of many in her party; it’s foolish in the extreme, but at least has the virtue of clarity. But if it’s clarity you are expecting, you have forgotten what the Clintons are all about.

Today, more than 150,000 members of our armed forces are caught in a civil war. According to the Pentagon, overall levels of violence in Iraq have not decreased since the surge began. The last three months have been the deadliest period for American troops since the start of the war.

Note: if by “the surge” she means the expansion of the number of troops in Iraq to the cited 150,000 figure, that has only barely come on line in the past few weeks. Unfortunately, leading Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have difficulty grasping a military strategy that requires more than one syllable to describe. The new rules of engagement have been in place since February, but the actual escalation in boots on the ground only became complete in the past month.

It is time for the waiting to end and for our troops to start to come home.

OK, withdrawal then.

That is why we propose to end the authorization for the war in Iraq. The civil war we have on our hands in Iraq is not our fight and it is not the fight Congress authorized. Iraq is at war with itself and American troops are caught in the middle.

Now, the idea that what is going on in Iraq is “civil war” is debatable as a matter of military doctrine as well as popular understanding among Iraqis, given the large areas of the country not engulfed in conflict and the absence of organized factions that are openly seeking to secede from or overturn the government. But leave that aside – there certainly is violence perpetrated by factions looking in general to undermine the government. Leave aside for now the fact that there is also substantial foreign (esp. Iranian) involvement in Iraq, and that we are fighting as well Al Qaeda in Iraq, which one would think of as an important foe to be rid of.
The fact is, while the mission endorsed by the 2002 resolution – the use of force to remove the threat presented by Saddam’s regime – has long since been accomplished, a resolution authorizing an invasion always assumes that the U.S. may well stay to do post-war reconstruction, a task which has frequently throughout history involved putting down armed insurrections (ask the Congress that authorized the Spanish-American War).

At a recent Senate hearing, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was asked if the 2002 authorization still applies to Iraq. His response was surprisingly candid: “I don’t know.” . . .

Well, that proves yet again why Gates is such a pathetic excuse for a spokesman for an Administration policy he shows no signs of agreeing with, but it also means he’s uninformed. Argue if you like that the war is a bad idea, but it’s ridiculous to contend that the Administration is proceeding without proper legal authority. In fact, that’s precisely why Senator Clinton has to propose changing the law.

The 2008 defense authorization bill is now before the U.S. Senate. This legislation presents a vital opportunity for Congress to step up and force the President to change course in Iraq. Amending the bill to deauthorize the war would do exactly that. We intend to lead that effort.

“Change course”? I thought the point of this op-ed was to, well, “deauthorize the war,” which would involve not doing what is no longer authorized.

If the Bush administration believes that the current war, as it is being executed, is critical to America’s future, then it should make the case and let the people decide. Explain to the public why our young men and women should be sent into the middle of a fight between religious factions. Explain why we should continue to devote $10 billion each month to this fight.

“[A]s it is being executed” is another dodge here…and if the goal is to stop the war, then say you are for doing that, not merely that you want him to “explain” himself, which Heaven knows the President has done often enough, albeit rarely as well as he might have.

Prior to the vote on the original authorization of force in 2002, we worked to limit that authority to one year. Unfortunately, the amendment failed — a fact rendered all the more distressing in hindsight.

Oh, a 1-year time limit would have been a brilliant way to enter a war. Recall that many critics of the war predicted a protracted Stalingrad-style battle for Baghdad alone, with as many as 3,000 casualties, and others predicted ten times that. Recall also that many of the Democrats who supported the authorization wanted more time to first be spent trying to bluff Saddam. Can any serious person think it would have been a good thing to get into a seige situation with a ticking clock?
Anyway, the defeat of that time limit clearly shows that what Congress did authorize was more open-ended, as wars generally are.

By deauthorizing the original use-of-force resolution this year, we would put a stop to the President’s failed strategy and require him to articulate a new policy that takes into account the desires of the American people, the reality in Iraq and the recommendations of military experts. . . .

Leaving entirely unsaid what that should be.

Our men and women in uniform toppled the dictator. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq has established a parliament and elected a president and a prime minister. Yet our troops remain in Iraq and our President remains unmoved by any arguments to change course.

How?
Note that we have about reached the end, yet there is no discussion here at all of the regional and global consequences of withdrawal, or indeed of anything at all. It’s Iraq in a Vaccuum.

As Bush admitted in his State of the Union address in January, “This is not the fight we entered in Iraq.” We could not agree more. This is not the fight Congress authorized, Mr. President. If you want to continue to wage this fight, come to Congress and make your case. Otherwise, bring our troops home.

That’s President Bush to you, Senator. So, are we back to bringing the troops home, or not? That depends what you want to believe – whatever it is, Senator Clinton is for it.

Andrew McCarthy parses the subtle shifts in the party line at the NY Times.

I mean really, who wouldn’t want to do this?
Of course, the guy probably felt it more once he was no longer on fire. More here.

Bad economic management leads, predictably, to bad economic results. Which leads political leaders who have been in power too long to blame their predecessors a few commonly used choices:
1. Admit there’s a problem and change course.
2. Blame external enemies.
3. Lie.
4. Beg/borrow/print money to give government handouts.
5. Steal stuff that belongs to rich people and/or foreigners.
Well, actually #1 isn’t all that common. Hugo Chavez, in the course of gradually grinding down Venezuela’s economy, has sampled liberally from the rest of that menu. Now, however, he’s taking a more audacious step to avoid fixing the economy: “demanding” that Venezuelans make do with less, and in the process discouraging consumer demand:

Continue reading You Have Been Volunteered To Have Less

Via Allahpundit, Spencer Ackerman – as vociferous and intemperate a left-wing war opponent as you could hope to meet – reports from Iraq that yes, the troops want to stay and finish the job:

The truth of the matter, however, is this: many troops in Iraq, perhaps even most of them, want to stay and fight. That doesn’t mean that we should stay in Iraq any longer. It does mean, however, that if Democrats want to bridge the divide between themselves and the military – an effort further complicated by their opposition to the war – they’re going to have to recognize that arguing in the name of the troops isn’t going to work . . .
[F]or many troops in Baghdad, the surge had brought a significant boost in morale. . .
Democrats would do much better to speak honestly: to acknowledge that many fighting men and women want to stay in the battle and would be willing to do so for years longer.

But, you know, the only people who support the war are “chickenhawks,” so Ackerman must be ignored, and so must the views of the people actually fighting the war.

No.

Mohammed Fadhil, of Iraq the Model, writes in today’s NY Daily News about how the Congressional Democrats look from Iraq:

I wasn’t surprised when I saw Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, appear on Al Jazeera to announce America’s defeat last week, not long after U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did. Zawahiri claims Al Qaeda has won, and Reid claims America has lost.
But from here in Baghdad, I see only a war that’s still raging – with no victory in sight for Al Qaeda or any other entity. In fact, I see Al Qaeda on the ropes, losing support among my fellow Iraqis.
In the midst of such a fierce war, sending more wrong messages could only further complicate an already complicated situation. It would only create more of a mess inside Iraq – a mess that would then be exploited by Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia for their own purposes: more iron-fisted control of the peoples and treasures of the region, more pushing the Middle East to crises and confrontations, and more spreading of their dark, backward ideologies.
And so, as an Iraqi, I say without hesitation: the American forces should stay here, and further reinforcements should be sent if the situation requires them. Not only that, these forces should be prepared to expand their operations whenever and wherever necessary to strike hard at the nests of evil that not only threaten Iraq and the Middle East, but seek to blackmail the whole world in the ugliest way through pursuing nuclear weapons.

You know, America went to Iraq for its own national interests; we don’t do wars just to benefit somebody else. But once you go in, and your friends on the grounds stick out their necks in reliance on you, and your other enemies pour in to fight you, how can you say you have no obligation to finish the job? And what credibility do you have with the people you will ask for help in the future if you abandon your friends?
It’s not like this is a morally ambiguous battle:

Those who prefer to bury their heads in the dirt today, and withdraw from this difficult fight, will be cursed forever for abandoning their duty when they were most capable. I don’t understand why someone who has all the tools for victory would refuse to fight an enemy that reminds us every day that it is evil – with all the daily beheadings, torture and violations of all humane laws and values.

Well said. Read the whole thing. RedState’s Jeff Emanuel has much more from Iraq in the same vein.

In pictures.

What could possibly go wrong with Russia building floating nuclear plants that admittedly “could be sold to other nations.”?
That has “next season on 24” written all over it, to say nothing of the “Perfect Storm Meets the China Syndrome” aspect. I mean, I’m all in favor of more nuclear power, but this strikes me as (1) the kind of thing that ought not to be mobile and (2) probably not the kind of project the Russians are likely to get right before anybody else has tried it.

Two of my colleagues at RedState, Jeff Emanuel and Victoria Coates a/k/a Academic Elephant, are traveling to Iraq shortly and need to raise $10,000 to fund the trip. You can read more here and here. Pitch in if you can; it’s a great chance to get bloggers on the ground to do firsthand reporting. It’s a return trip for Jeff, who fought in the original invasion, and Victoria has established herself as a leading voice at RS on defense issues and the war.

What would you say if I told you that a UN agency was undermining U.S.-led diplomatic and economic sanctions by funnelling untraceable cash to a dangerous rogue regime?
Shocking, I know. But this time it’s not the Iraq Oil-for-Food program, nor for that matter is it UNRWA providing cover for Palestinian terror attacks on Israel. This time, it’s North Korea:

The United Nations Development Programme office in Pyongyang, North Korea, sits in a Soviet-style compound. Like clockwork, a North Korean official wearing a standard-issue dark windbreaker and slacks would come to the door each business day.
He would take a manila envelope stuffed with cash — a healthy portion of the UN’s disbursements for aid projects in the country — and leave without ever providing receipts.
According to sources at the UN, this went on for years, resulting in the transfer of up to $150 million in hard foreign currency to the Kim Jong Il government at a time when the United States was trying to keep North Korea from receiving hard currency as part of its sanctions against the Kim regime.
“At the end, we were being used completely as an ATM machine for the regime,” said one UN official with extensive knowledge of the program. “We were completely a cash cow, the only cash cow in town. The money was going to the regime whenever they wanted it.”

Is the UN interested in getting to the bottom of this?

Earlier this month, the development program, known as UNDP, quietly suspended operations in North Korea, saying it could not operate under guidelines imposed by its executive board in January that prohibited payments in hard currency and forbade the employment of local workers handpicked by the North Korean government.
But some diplomats suspect the timing of the suspension was heavily influenced by a looming audit that could have proved embarrassing to the UN.
Documents obtained by the Tribune indicate that as early as last May, top UNDP officials at headquarters in New York were informed in writing of significant problems relating to the agency’s use of hard foreign currency in North Korea, and that such use violated UN regulations that local expenses be paid in local currency. No action was taken for months.
Then, under pressure from the United States, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon on Jan. 19 ordered an audit of all UN operations in North Korea to be completed within 90 days, or by mid-April.
The Board of Auditors, the UN body tasked with the audit, made no movement on the audit for 40 days after Ban’s order. It sent out its notification letter for the beginning of the audit on the same day the development program announced the closure of its office–March 1.
That timing, combined with past concerns about the UNDP’s transparency, has raised suspicions that suspending operations would be a way to hamstring the audit, the results of which may prove damning to the organization.
“The office was closed precisely for that reason,” said another UN official with extensive knowledge of the program. “With no operations in place, first of all, you have no claim to get auditors into the country. Second, it will take months and months to get documentation out of the office there, to transfer to somewhere else like New York.”

Again: shocking, I know. Maybe this was rogue UN officials acting outside of their organization’s policy?

UNDP spokesman David Morrison said the use of hard currency and the hiring of staff through local governments was standard practice in authoritarian countries like North Korea.

So is there anyone in this picture who is willing to stand up for accountability and integrity?

“I don’t think this is an audit you can whip through in 30 days; this may take some time,” John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the UN until the end of last year and a staunch critic of the world body, said when contacted by the Tribune for a reaction to the newspaper’s reporting of the cash payments. “But I think for the reputation and integrity of the UN system, it’s critical that it proceed without delay.”

There will be more talk, of course, in the coming months, of UN economic sanctions against Iran. Just remember where the Iranians will go whenever they want to get around those sanctions.
The simple fact is, stories like this one are not about UN programs being subverted by rogue employees, but rather about the inherent structure of the UN. The UN is a trade association of heads of state and de facto states like the Palestinian Authority, staffed by people who have dedicated their careers to an organization separate and apart from loyalty to their own home countries. Nobody at the UN draws their authority, or depends for their salary, on the consent of the governed. Thus, inevitably, when push comes to shove, the UN staff will – even more than is usually true of bureaucracies – serve the interests of heads of state, of the status quo, of the international “community,” and of the UN as an institution – the common people and the goals of particular policies don’t merit a place on that list. And this will always be true of organizations structured in this way – so long as they draw their power, money and legitimacy without ultimately having to answer to the people.

The LA Times Editorial Board is not where you would look for support for a Republican Administration in a debate about war, unless the answer is so screamingly obvious that the newspaper doesn’t want to lose credibility even with liberal readers by siding with the Democrats.
Guess what?
This morning’s LAT carries a remarkable editorial entitled, “Do we really need a Gen. Pelosi?” that criticizes the House Democrats’ latest effort to hamstring the war effort in Iraq without openly taking responsibility for demanding retreat:

AFTER WEEKS OF internal strife, House Democrats have brought forth their proposal for forcing President Bush to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by 2008. The plan is an unruly mess: bad public policy, bad precedent and bad politics. If the legislation passes, Bush says he’ll veto it, as well he should.
It was one thing for the House to pass a nonbinding vote of disapproval. It’s quite another for it to set out a detailed timetable with specific benchmarks and conditions for the continuation of the conflict. Imagine if Dwight Eisenhower had been forced to adhere to a congressional war plan in scheduling the Normandy landings or if, in 1863, President Lincoln had been forced by Congress to conclude the Civil War the following year. This is the worst kind of congressional meddling in military strategy.

As the LAT points out, Congress has the power to stop the war – but only if it really means it and is willing to take responsibility for doing so:

If a majority in Congress truly believes that the war is not in the national interest, then lawmakers should have the courage of their convictions and vote to stop funding U.S. involvement. They could cut the final checks in six months or so to give Bush time to manage the withdrawal. Or lawmakers could, as some Senate Democrats are proposing, revoke the authority that Congress gave Bush in 2002 to use force against Iraq.
But if Congress accepts Bush’s argument that there is still hope, however faint, that the U.S. military can be effective in quelling the sectarian violence, that U.S. economic aid can yet bring about an improvement in Iraqi lives that won’t be bombed away and that American diplomatic power can be harnessed to pressure Shiites and Sunnis to make peace — if Congress accepts this, then lawmakers have a duty to let the president try this “surge and leverage” strategy.

Amen to that. Of course, the editorial contains the usual nods to criticism of Bush, Rumsfeld, et al, but at the end of the day, the LAT hears the sawing and isn’t especially willing to stay out on the limb Nancy Pelosi is on. Looks like her modified, limited slow bleed is losing her troops in the media.

Yesterday’s news that Congressional Democrats, led by Virginia Congressman Jim Moran, plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and bring the terrorists held there to be held in the U.S., is a terrible idea for several reasons, but for one of them, you need look no further than to ask Louis Pepe, the former prison guard at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan who was attacked on November 1, 2000 by Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, a high-ranking Al Qaeda terrorist who was awaiting trial for the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania:

Prosecutors allege that Salim jabbed a sharpened comb, purchased in the MCC commissary, into the eye of corrections officer Louis Pepe. Pepe was blinded in the eye, paralyzed in half of his body, and rendered unable to speak clearly.
The jail no longer sells combs to inmates.
The attack, prosecutors allege, was part of a plan to take guards hostage and escape from the jail.

Pepe’s detailed description of the attack paints a horrific, if all too familiar, portrait of the brutality of the jihadists behind bars:

Pepe said he will tell the judge how he properly handcuffed the inmates before they slipped free, blinded him with hot sauce, beat him repeatedly and even tried to rape him before stabbing him to get his keys in a bid to free other suspected terrorists. “Both of them did it, not just one,” Pepe said excitedly, his right eye wide open and a piece of gauze resting in the socket where the left eye used to be….Pepe said the attack lasted an hour, rather than the 20 minutes that prison authorities maintain it took for help to arrive from less-isolated parts of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center.
Pepe described how he resisted throughout the attack, even giving the inmates his house keys when they demanded his prison keys. He said the inmates scrawled the sign of the cross in his blood on his chest before they left him for dead. In the end, Pepe walked out of the cellblock, the sharpened comb still stuck in his eye.

According to a 2004 interview, he has suffered terribly since the attack:

For more than two years, Pepe was hospitalized. He suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed, along with pneumonia, a collapsed lung, seizures, infections, a blood clot and high fevers. He underwent brain surgery and spent three weeks in a coma…
Pepe sleeps on a small donated bed and maneuvers his wheelchair across worn floors. Almost no one visits him. Pepe said his pain, from the collapsed left side of his head to the stroke-damaged legs, is chronic. “Every day it hurts so much that it feels like I’m going to be dead,” he said.

It should not surprise us that men who are willing to strap bombs to themselves, fly airplanes into buildings, decapitate women and massacre schoolchildren would be willing to perform extreme acts of cruelty and violence to escape from confinement. At Guantanamo, their prison is on an island, the sea to one side, a fortified border to a brutal and paranoid Communist dictatorship on the other. There’s nowhere to go. Put these guys in Jim Moran’s district, or your home town – whether in a civilian prison or a military brig – and they will do anything in their power to do to more prison guards what they did to Louis Pepe.

Carl Levin is my least favorite US Senator; other Senators, like John Kerry and Chris Dodd, may have equally bad records of working at all times against the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States and taking the side of our enemies in every argument, but nobody else works as hard at it as Levin. If the New York Times was a Senator, it would be Carl Levin.
So I’m still reeling at the news that at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing today, Sen. Levin called for more aggressive action against Iran and Syria’s meddling in Iraq, including openly advocating military action against Syria:

It’s more than just – we’re trying to close down the Iranian border area too. The problem is that these weapons are coming from a state which is – doesn’t recognize Israel either, just like Iran doesn’t. We’ve got to try to stop weapons coming into Iraq from any source that are killing our troops. I agree with the comments about trying to stop them coming in from Iran, I think we have to try stop them that are going to the Sunni insurgents as well as to the Shia. I was just wondering, does the military have a plan to, if necessary, to go into Syria to go to the source of any weapons coming from Syria? That are going to Sunni insurgents? That are killing our troops? … I think we ought to take action on all fronts including Syria and any other source of weapons coming in, obviously Iran is the focus – but it shouldn’t be the sole focus.

Levin also conceded that U.S. troops are needed in Iraq for “a counter-terrorism purpose” against Al Qaeda. Amazing.
The video of Levin’s comments on Syria is here.