Open Letter to a Democratic President by Richard Bulliet
January 21, 2009, Dear (Sir or Madam): May history remember your term in office as the greatest political turn-around in American history. Now to Iraq...
more...

Three Cultures, Three Views of Terror by Rami G. Khouri
A trip from Beirut to Boston, by way of London, reveals three different views of the global crisis of terrorism. In the case of the United States, a refusal to address reality is aiding the global terrorists' causes.
more...

Attacking Iran on the Agenda? by Immanuel Wallerstein
Those groups desirous of and promoting a U.S. attack on Iran are essentially two: Dick Cheney and friends, and Israel's rightwing government and friends. Given their reasons for such an attack -- and the arguments of those against it -- would it be "rational"? No.
more...

Losing Traction against Syria

By David Schenker


The September 6 Israeli bombing of a presumed North Korean-supplied nuclear weapons facility in Syria highlights the ongoing policy challenge posed by Damascus. More than three years after President Bush signed the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (SAA), Syria continues to support terrorism, destabilize Iraq, meddle in Lebanon, and develop weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile systems. This week's headlines tell the story: on September 19, yet another anti-Syrian parliamentarian was assassinated in Lebanon; the same day, Jane's Defence Weekly reported that a July 2007 chemical weapons accident in Syria -- involving mustard gas and VX and sarin nerve agents -- killed fifteen Syrian officers and dozens of Iranian engineers.

To date, Syria has proven largely impervious to U.S. sanctions, and Washington's efforts to forge international consensus on isolating Damascus have not gained traction. Although the regime seemed isolated after the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, the trend has recently shifted toward diplomatic and economic engagement. If such engagement continues, Syria may avoid accountability for both the Hariri assassination and Western demands to alter its behavior.

As information begins to emerge about the extent of North Korean-Syrian ties, Washington will have another opportunity to focus the international community on the continuing dangers posed by the Asad regime. The UN's Hariri tribunal will add to the pressure on the regime, but that alone will not suffice. To stem Syria's reacceptance into the international community, Washington needs to convince its European and Arab -- particularly Gulf -- allies to freeze their engagement with Damascus. It should also exclude Syria from the Arab-Israeli peace conference scheduled to take place this November.

In the absence of effective measures, the Asad regime will continue to undermine Washington's hopes for the region. You can read the full-length version of this article here.

September 21, 2007 03:47 PM Link

In the Name of God: Islamists Spearheaded Violence over Cartoon in Bangladesh

By Animesh Roul


Hundreds of Islamic hardliners including activists of Hizbut Tahrir, Islami Oikya Andolon, Chhatra Mukti Andolon, and Islami Shasantantra Andolon descended to the streets and later resorted to violence and arson to protest the publication of a cartoon that allegedly made fun of Mohammed, in a vernacular daily. The protesters said this was a deliberate attempt by the cartoonist and the news paper to ridicule Prophet Mohammad. The cartoon appeared on Sept 17 issue of Prothom Alo’s magazine Aalpin. It was titled "Naam” (Name)” which made a childish and harmless (not outrageous at all) fun of the naming custom in the Muslim countries. Even though, the Newspaper editor apologized on the same day for the inadvertent publication of the cartoon and urged to 'forgive the mistake', violence erupted in the National capital on September 21. Clerics have called for the cartoonist (who is in police custody right now) to be punished and the news paper office to be closed. Copies of the newspaper have been burned outside mosques in Dhaka. Defying emergency rule that prohibits protest and rally of any kind, angry protesters attempted to storm the offices of the news paper. However, one could read and see the cartoon to ascertain whether the cartoon (the text included) is blasphemous or the mindless violence and burning in the name of Prophet.

The cartoon has these texts (read it as conversation between a boy and elderly cleric):

Boy, what’s your name? My name is Abu.
It is customary to put Mohammed in front of the name.
What is your father’s name? Mohammed Abu.
What is that on your lap? Mohammed cat.

And the burning of newspapers that followed.






September 21, 2007 04:14 PM Link

Internal and External Threats to the Jihad Media War

By Evan Kohlmann


Several Sunni insurgent factions fighting in Iraq have recently released official communiqués addressing brewing conflicts over the jihad media war--including divisions that exist within the mujahideen community itself. On August 29, the Mujahideen Army issued a statement accusing their "dear brothers" from the Al-Furqan Foundation--the official media wing of Al-Qaida's "Islamic State of Iraq"--of distributing a video of a military operation that had already been claimed months earlier by the Mujahideen Army. In due course, the ISI's Al-Furqan Foundation issued a response acknowledging, "the operation had indeed been executed by one of the central brigades of the Mujahideen Army... However, following the establishment of the ISI, this particular brigade pledged its allegiance to Abu Omar Al-Baghdadi and, therefore, their media archives became the rightful property of the Al-Furqan Media Foundation." The ISI has also sparked controversy with the recent release of an audio recording by its leader Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, including accusations that several major Sunni insurgent organizations are now working in conjunction with U.S. forces. One of the groups singled out by al-Baghdadi--the Iraqi Islamic Resistance Front (JAAMI)--has issued its own letter firmly denying these allegations and demanding that "the gossiping cease from all those who posted harsh words on the Al-Hesbah web forum." Separately, Asaeb al-Iraq al-Jihadiya ("the Iraqi Jihad Union") has announced the expulsion of several prominent activists within its organization for unauthorized contacts with unspecified "outsiders." Finally, the ISI's Al-Furqan Foundation has released a statement condemning a series of recent electronic attacks by "crusaders" on notorious jihad web forums--including the Al-Hesbah network.

- 7/29/07: Asaeb al-Iraq al-Jihadiya Declares Expulsions of Dissidents for Unauthorized Contacts
- 8/29/07: Mujahideen Army Statement to ISI's Al-Furqan Foundation
- 9/3/07: Al-Furqan Foundation Response to Statement from the Mujahideen Army
- 9/13/07: Al-Furqan Foundation Statement Regarding Recent Attacks on Jihad Websites
- 9/16/07: Iraqi Islamic Resistance Front (JAAMI) Response to Speech by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi

See also:
- [CTBLOG]: "Operation Niche: The Conviction of Mohammed Atif Siddique"
- Report: "State of the Sunni Insurgency in Iraq: August 2007"

September 22, 2007 03:52 PM Link

Hillary's Plan Won't Make Us Healthierby Linda Chavez (09/21/07)Hillary Clinton has spent years trying to erase the memory of her failed attempt to bring socialized medicine to the United States, but this week the ghost of Hillary Care was lurking in the wings again as she unveiled her new plan to overhaul the …

Is Terrorism a Mortal Threat? by Patrick J. Buchanan (09/21/07)It may have been politically incorrect to publish the thoughts on the sixth anniversary of 9-11, but what Colin Powell had to say to GQ magazine needs to be heard. Terrorism, said Powell, is not a mortal threat to America. "What is the greatest …

Rudy's Coupby Robert Novak (09/21/07)Rudy Giuliani scored a hit with conservative activists by getting ahead of his Republican presidential competitors in blasting Sen. Hillary Clinton for not denouncing MoveOn.org's attack on Gen. David Petraeus.Giuliani caught the spirit of Republican …

Regional War, Blackwater & More
THE EDITORS: Iran is striving mightily to defeat the U.S. in Iraq because it knows that only by doing so can it impose its designs on the Middle East. “Countering Iran’s Designs” 09/21 11:20 AM

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: What did Israel do this week? “Before the Volcano Explodes” 09/21 12:00 AM

MARK HEMINGWAY: Was the Iraqi interior ministry waiting for a mess-up? “Blackwater Down” 09/21 6:30 AM

MONA CHAREN: World War IV is a jolt of intellectual electricity for the Bush Doctrine. “The Podhoretz Cavalry” 09/21 12:00 AM

JOHN DERBYSHIRE: I see some appeal in Islam. “Islamophobophobia” 09/20 10:36 AM

• How to Think, Not What to Think at Leavenworth by SWJ Editors
• Iraq Briefing 21 September 2007 by SWJ Editors
• All Hands On Deck – Radically Reorienting Private Security in Iraq by Malcolm Nance
• 22 September SWJ Op-Ed Roundup by Dave Dilegge
• Will the Petraeus Strategy Be the Last? by Bing West
• NPR: A Profile of Iraq's Anbar Province by SWJ Editors

Department of Veterans Affairs Reports 73 Thousand U.S. Gulf War Deaths [b]By Clive Boustred (4 comments) More Gulf War Veterans have died than Vietnam Veterans: The Department of Veterans Affairs, May 2007, Gulf War Veterans Information System reports 73 thousand Gulf War Vets Dead[/b]

Kissinger Admits Iran Attack Is About Oil (2 comments) First, Greenspan; Now, "Henry the K" admits that U.S. hostility against Iran is not about the threat of nuclear proliferation, but as part of a larger agenda to seize Iranian oil supplies.

Dave Lindorff: Why Don't We Ban Blackwater and other Mercenary Outfits Here? The Iraqi's have the right idea. Mercenary forces do not belong in the role of soldiers or of police. Ban them now!

Hillary Clinton's Health Care Diva
(Laurie Rubiner, Legislative Director in the Office of Senator Hillary Clinton)

Hillary's foreign policy team has some of the mega-stars in the national security business. She has Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke, Sandy Berger, Wesley Clark, William Perry, and a good number of their acolytes -- but her counselors are about as top-heavy as George W. Bush's team was with Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz and others on board.

Having a lot of big guns as advisers doesn't mean that they will all shoot the same direction. In fact, rumors continue to slip out of the Clinton camp that there are substantial tensions between Holbrooke, Albright, and Berger who all are trying to define the key features of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy persona. To give Hillary some credit that John Kerry's campaign doesn't deserve, I think she has more a sense of her own views than Kerry might have -- and is willing to knock back the counsel of her advisers and is willing to tell them to cease the bickering, elbowing, and theatrics between these competitive camps.

But in health care -- there is one voice who dominates the policy work in "Hillary Land" and that is Laurie Rubiner. (and yes I know, Hillary knows a lot about health care policy but I'm not counting her.)

Imagine a diva who was not haughty and spoiled -- but just emanated total confidence and knowledge of some skill or issue -- like quantum mechanics, or magazine editing, or health care. That is Laurie Rubiner.

Yesterday, the New York Times profiled Rubiner and her significant contributions to Hillary's much talked about health care proposal. The Washington Note profiled Laurie Rubiner's work this past January -- and today John Fund at the Wall Street Journal takes on Rubiner (and of course, Hillary).

Rubiner doesn't only do health care policy; she runs Hillary Clinton's entire policy shop in her Senate office. In fact, in my view some of the major power brokers in Hillary Clinton's political machine sometime forget that the actual Senate staff Hillary has hired are mostly better in their ability to project tomorrow's policy needs than the White House-hungry policy advisers she has brought in to the campaign.

I should probably disclose that Rubiner and I had one serious argument that had to do with communication, honor, and who said what to whom -- but her husband told me later that what I saw was a mild breeze compared to what was possible. But I have learned from several sources that Hillary Clinton and Rubiner have the kind of gritty give-and-take relationship that few have with the Senator and would-be President of the United States. They can argue about some serious policy difference, tell each other to go to hell, and then laugh it off.

Rubiner headed the health care policy program of the New America Foundation where I have worked for the last nine years. Before joining New America, Rubiner worked in a number of key policy and advocacy roles -- but it was her work for the late Senator John Chafee (R-RI) where she conceived under the Senator's name and at his direction a health care plan that would maintain private sector deployment of health care services as the backbone of America's health system, avoid the single payer debate that divides that policy community, and be universal.

Rubiner brought her work to New America -- and the DNA of her efforts exists in all of the significant "test efforts" of comprehensive health care coverage -- including in Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposal for California, Democrat Gavin Newsom's in San Francisco, and Republican Mitt Romney's in Massachusetts.

Now, Hillary Clinton has brought the sensibility of the Chafee/Rubiner health care proposals into her own plan for the country and demonstrated considerable political bravery and sensitivity in doing so. I think it takes a lot for someone like Hillary Clinton to abandon her former approach on health care coverage in which she drilled down into the fine and messy details -- and change course, rather than doing what many people who acquire power do -- and that is just yell more loudly or force more strongly a posiition they previously held.

Rubiner does a killer impersonation of Senator John Chafee, and it's so compelling that on one occasion when I was quite upset with the vote of his son, the no-longer-Republican former Senator Lincoln Chafee, on John Bolton's UN confirmation, I advised the younger Chafee to go spend time with his dad via Laurie Rubiner. I can just imagine Rubiner channeling John Chafee for Hillary Clinton and giving the Senator the secrets to making this universal health care coverage work.

Interestingly, John Fund today hardly scrapes the policy framework or nuts-and-bolts of the Hillary/Chafee/Rubiner health care plan -- but rather the optics and the politics of it. He slams Clinton's plan for being like Schwarzenegger's -- and then asserts that this plan will lead to new bureaucracies, open up tensions on coverage for illegal aliens, and fail to generate needed bipartisan support.

The fundamental, underlying problem that exists in America's health care sector is getting people with financial means who elect not to get health care to do so. If a mandate were generated that everyone needed to be in health care, not only would the nation as a whole become healthier but the costs of subsidizing those in real need or without financial means declines on a relative basis. I hope John Fund and other critics of Hillary Clinton's new proposal don't believe that the less well off should just stay that way and should get nothing at all from America's health care system.

Clinton's (and Rubiner's) proposal maintains a vibrant private sector backbone for the provision of health services; there is no "socialization" of providers and no single payer requirement.

John Fund may revisit this issue of how to get to a healthier health care system in the United States, so let me share with him and others what conservative libertarian Ronald Bailey wrote in 2003 in Reason Magazine about the New America Foundation's health care proposal (as hatched and incubated by Laurie Rubiner). This from Bailey's "Mandatory Universal Health Insurance? Perhaps It's a Better Idea Than You Think It Is":

Since it's unlikely that Americans will allow their improvident neighbors to expire without medical care in the streets, is there a politically palatable alternative that can preserve and expand private medicine in the United States? Yes: mandatory private health insurance.

Should the federal government require all Americans to buy private health insurance? This intriguing proposal is being pushed by the New America Foundation, a liberal policy shop in Washington, D.C. "Universal coverage in exchange for universal responsibility," is how the NAF characterizes it. Before rejecting the proposal out of hand, stop and consider that it may be a second-best alternative for relieving the growing political pressure to create some sort of nationalized single-payer health care system modeled on the nearly bankrupt and increasingly shabby health care schemes in Canada and Western Europe. Make no mistake about it—private health care is imperiled in the United States, given that all of the Democratic presidential hopefuls want to expand existing government health care programs and/or create some sort of universal government-run system. The NAF proposal could derail this pernicious political dynamic.

The devil is in the details, of course. Still, the NAF plan offers some interesting possibilities. For example, mandatory health insurance coverage might be combined with desirable features such as medical savings accounts, which would encourage people to save and invest for future medical emergencies.

The NAF proposal preserves private insurance and allows consumers to choose among competing insurance plans and coverage options. Most intriguingly, NAF offers a way out of the dysfunctional employer-financed third-party-payer system that is so grievously distorting our current health insurance system. Employers would eventually devolve responsibility for health insurance to their employees by giving them the money the companies currently pay out to insurance agents. Employees would then have a strong incentive to shop around for the best health care deals, putting pressure on insurance companies to keep costs low.

While I think the New America Foundation is more "radical centrist" than "liberal", I completely agree with Bailey's general take on how to get Americans covered by health insurance without tipping towards inefficient socialized bureaucracies or the alternative, manic market provision of health care which assures humanitarian nightmares for the tens of millions and growing in the United States who have little prospect of securing health insurance.

If the libertarians in addition to Democrats like Gavin Newsom and Hillary Clinton and Republicans like Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger can sign up for what John Chafee launched some years ago -- then this deserves serious national scrutiny at all levels of government. Next to America's deteriorated national security and foreign policy standing in the world, the absence of strategy to credibly broaden health care in this country is our largest problem.

Kudos to Hillary Clinton for having the confidence of self to allow a "Senate staffer" in her employ to get some of the media credit for her proposal. This alone says something about Clinton that I haven't noted before. Staffers aren't supposed to get credit, and they certainly can't angle for it.

Rubiner is getting credit not because she wanted any of this -- but because to connect the dots in the political history of what is the most likely universal health care plan to come into being -- one must tell the story of Laurie Rubiner.

-- Steve Clemons

08:57 AM | Permalink

Casey, Murkowski Endorse a "Comprehensive Diplomatic Offensive" -- Now for the Next Step

Last weekend, Henry Kissinger wrote a syndicated op-ed defending the President's position in Iraq but qualified with a critical point:

The second and ultimately decisive route to overcoming the Iraqi crisis is through international diplomacy. Today the United States is bearing the major burden for regional security militarily, politically and economically.

Certainly arguments have been levied to challenge Kissinger's strategic outlook, but far less disputed and patently evident is that the current administration has fallen short on this diplomatic effort upon which Kissinger predicates his support. In the absence of a robust diplomatic strategy coming from the White House, two Senators have stepped up to take on this role.

Senators Robert Casey (D-PA) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) are the latest to have joined the ranks of other leading figures (including

Representative Lantos and Senator Hagel) in calling for a "diplomatic offensive" as outlined nine months ago in the Iraq Study Group (ISG) report. The Senators have filed an amendment to promote both a diplomatic and civilian surge, which have been neglected of late. The press release reads:

The amendment calls for the following steps, among others: --The United States should take the lead in organizing a comprehensive diplomatic offensive, consisting of bilateral, regional, and international initiatives, to assist the Government of Iraq in achieving national reconciliation and meeting security, political, and economic benchmarks;

--The United States should bring together Iraq’s neighbors through a regional conference or other mechanism to develop specific measures to stabilize Iraq and, in particular, end the outside flows of weapons, explosive materials, foreign fighters, and funding that contribute to the current sectarian warfare;

--The President and the Secretary of State should invest their personal time and energy in these diplomatic efforts to ensure that they receive the highest priority within the U.S. government and are viewed seriously in the region;

--The President should appoint a seasoned, high-level Presidential envoy to the region to supplement the efforts of Ambassador Crocker and focus on the establishment of a regional framework to help stabilize Iraq;

--The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations should seek the appointment of an international mediator in Iraq to engage political, religious, ethnic, and tribal leaders in Iraq to foster national reconciliation efforts;

--The United States should more directly press Iraq’s neighbors to open fully operating embassies in Baghdad and establish inclusive diplomatic relations with Iraq so that the Iraqi government is viewed as legitimate throughout the region;

The amendment reflects a key recommendation of the Iraq Study Group which called upon the United States to “embark on a robust diplomatic effort to establish an international support structure intended to stabilize Iraq and ease tensions in other countries in the region.�

Finally, the amendment also focuses attention on the need to implement a “civilian surge� to ensure that all components of the U.S. government are contributing to assist the Iraqi government to strengthen its capabilities to provide essential government services.

The Senators should be applauded for their efforts to revitalize this debate, but I at this point I doubt it will produce the stability the ISG suggested 10 months ago. I'm increasingly of the opinion that a diplomatic offensive is necessary, as Richard Haass put it -- to rebalance our portfolio in the Middle East and diversify our overall position in the world -- in other words, to hedge against the damage from Iraq.

I understand that politics is the slow boring of holes and welcome this effort, especially one co-sponsored by moderates in the Senate, but at some point these amendments calling for diplomacy need to develop real teeth and define with greater precision what we mean when we invoke the phrase "regional diplomacy". As I've written before, so long as it remains amorphous and devoid of specific contents, even the John Boltons of the world can claim to be pursuing diplomacy.

Unlike the ISG, the Senators said not a word about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process which will be central to improving our position in the region. The major Middle East conference on the horizon in November is already imperiled due to the absence of specific contents or agendas.

Beyond calls for diplomacy, we need to begin talking about what a regional security architecture that includes Israel would look like and what security assurances are we willing to exchange for it.

And though the amendment calls for assistance to internal and external Iraqi refugees, it provides no specifics. We've done little to nothing to assist neighboring states and allies who are taking in the 2 million or more refugees spilling out of Iraq and taking on the onerous economic burden that accompanies the refugees. For instance, one of our key allies, Jordan, estimates that Iraqi refugees are costing the government $1 billion a year. In 2003, our economic assistance to Jordan jumped by almost $1 billion to cushion effects of the Iraq war but then dropped back down to normal levels since everything was going so swimmingly in that part of the world. If we were serious about assisting refugees and bolstering our critical allies in the region (the few we have left), we would need to start putting our money where our mouths are.

If we're serious about a civilian surge, we need to define the contents of that as well. Does it involve more private contractors or does it mean activating our civilian wings of government to take on a larger share of our foreign policy portfolio? If it's the latter, then it requires more than statements in the well of the Senate. It requires making some hard choices in budgets -- as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report suggested last December -- and moving more resources in the budget process from the military into the State Department and USAID (not simply shifting resources within departments as the amendment proposes).

I don't mean to diminish the significance or work done for this amendment -- this is more of an urging onwards in a Frost-ian "miles to go before I sleep" manner.

Senators Casey and Murkowski have drawn up an excellent outline of where we need to go on this, but unless others in the Administration and Congress begin to populate it with specific mechanisms and begin making some hard choices on resources, the outline will remain only that, and eventually swept into the dustbins of history.

--Sameer Lalwani

Beyond "The Ad": Getting Back to Substance in the Petraeus Controversy

My former boss, Senator Jeff Bingaman, did not vote with others to condemn MoveOn.org's recent ads attacking David Petraeus. Bingaman votes his conscience -- and sometimes that is a lonely exercise. I remember when he was just one of four votes -- along with Richard Lugar, Christopher Dodd, and someone else -- who voted against the Helms-Burton legislation designed to strangle Cuba and Cubans while essentially undermining American interests.

Here is the breakdown of the vote today condemning the "General Betray Us" ad.

Unfortunately, the MoveOn ad has now taken the limelight away from what is really important and what should be debated. Americans and Iraqis are dying in a war where it's clear that progress is negative on the political front and at best nuanced on the military front.

What Senators should be doing instead of the distracting vote held today is to debate what is going on inside Iraq as well as whether America's objectives are being met or not -- and whether those objectives are connected at all to crucial American interests. For an increasing number of people, this war is seen as an unmitigated disaster.

I want the focus back on the issue of Petraeus's testimony and what it means politically. My colleague, Steve Coll, wrote this on Petraeus in a September 24 New Yorker piece titled "General Accounting," but this bit is worth extra emphasis:

Petraeus also apparently clings to the belief that Iraq's sectarian leaders might reconcile if American forces stay the course. This opinion, shared by many in the Bush Administration, has encouraged yet another generation of unconvincing strategic plans that assume that a unified Iraq governed from Baghdad is attainable and that thousands of American troops might help patrol the capital's streets for years. A more plausible strategy, devoted to managing as successfully as possible the informal sectarian partition of Iraq which is already well under way, has again been postponed, along with substantial troop reductions.

American majorities repudiated the Vietnam War and have repudiated the invasion of Iraq. They did not lack guts then or now; they saw past the false promises and manipulations of their leaders, and called time.

George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden appear to share the belief that the United States is chronically afflicted with a cut-and-run syndrome, but they are both wrong: the most striking aspect of American democracy during the catastrophe in Iraq today is not the public's inconstancy but, rather, its capacity to absorb thousands of casualties on behalf of a war that is widely understood as a mistake and has no foreseeable end.

Coll's take is very bleak -- and very real -- and is what the real debate should be about.

As Chris Matthews recently said, "the ad didn't kill anybody."

-- Steve Clemons

10:19 PM | Permalink

Will Bush Bomb Iran?

I think not, at least not in the way that those asserting that Bush will bomb Iran have been arguing. I make my case in a piece titled "Why Bush Won't Bomb Iran" that ran as the lead on Salon.com yesterday.

I worry a great deal about various players to loyal to Dick Cheney and/or to the IRGC/Al Quds force in Iran trying to trigger a quick escalation of conflict that circumvents the national security decision-making structure that surrounds Bush -- or alternatively Iran's Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei.

What may be cooking is an effort to trigger purposefully an accidental war, but I don't believe that Bush is part of that. Views at Salon.com in reaction to my piece have been running about 3 to 1 against my perspective,

Here are some others who have commented on the subject:

Scott MacLeod at Time Julian Borger at The Guardian

Thomas P.M. Barnett's Blog

Christy Hardin Smith at Fire Dog Lake

Scott Horton at Antiwar.com Radio

Matthew Yglesias

Taylor Marsh

Brian Beutler

Blake Hounshell at Foreign Policy's Passport Blog

John Byrne at Raw Story

William Hartung at TPM Cafe

Ezra Klein at the American Prospect's Tapped

Moira Whalen at Democracy Arsenal

SusanUnPC at No Quarter

Tom Engelhardt at The Nation

Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish

There are many I have missed -- but the discourse and further commentary on these blogs challenge and complement the arguments I make. I can't think of a topic more important to seriously work through right now.

For other sources on the debate, here is a roster of linked pieces at Tailrank.com, Bloglines.com, and Technorati.

I'll have more on this later -- and I look forward to constructive exchanges with readers about this subject. And yes, I know many of you disagree.

But it's the last paragraph of the article that we really should be organizing against and exposing:

We should also worry about the kind of scenario David Wurmser floated, meaning an engineered provocation. An "accidental war" would escalate quickly and "end run," as Wurmser put it, the president's diplomatic, intelligence and military decision-making apparatus. It would most likely be triggered by one or both of the two people who would see their political fortunes rise through a new conflict -- Cheney and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That kind of war is much more probable and very much worth worrying about.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

05:34 PM | Permalink

A Fed Panic and a Massive Bailout of American Banks Paid for by the Entire World - by Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay - 2007-09-21 Financial collapses are usually the result of the unbridled greed and cupidity of financial operators and of the lack of necessary supervision by public institutions.

Joint Rice-Kouchner demand for assassination not to d_ DEBKAfile reports: Iran shows off new long-range 1,800-km missile together with fierce slogans and defiant rhetoric at a big military parade outside Tehran

September 22, 2007, 7:46 PM (GMT+02:00)


The official announcer said the weapon put US bases in the Middle East and Israel within reach, as a large slogan was displayed from supreme ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: “The Iranian nation is ready to bring any oppressive power to its knees."

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Tehran used the parade Saturday, Sept. 22, marking 27th anniversary of Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980, to unveil its new Ghadr-1, described by Western experts as having a "baby bottle-style" nose for extra aerodynamic efficiency and an improved version of Iran's existing longer-range Shahab-3. They believe it can carry a more advanced payload.


More...

Americans warned by State Department against traveling to Syria

September 22, 2007, 10:44 PM (GMT+02:00)

US Officials say Syria is harboring groups posing a threat to Americans such as Hamas, Hizballah, Islamic Jihad and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian-General Command, all groups financed by Iran. Americans in Syria are urged to consider risks before travel and if traveling to exercise caution and take measures to maintain their security. They should avoid crowds and demonstrations, maintain a low profile, revise travel times and routes and ensure valid travel documents.

Is White House policy fueling civil war?
Pepe Escobar on the counterinsurgency not working because the population is against the occupation (2 of 2) (more) view

Is White House policy fueling civil war?
Pepe Escobar: Sheik Abu Risha fought al Qaeda for his own reasons (1 of 2) (more) view

http://www.therealnews.com/web/index.php?thisepisode=52

From the New York Times: Lost at Sea, by Robert D. Kaplan.

From Congressional Quarterly: Blackwater Draws Senate Attention, by Josh Rogin.

From Pajamas Media: Dam Bursts at Al Dura Trial, by Nidra Poller.

From Captain's Quarters: The Bully Boys of the Internet, by Ed Morrissey.

From Contentions: Why Try?, by Max Boot.

Israelis seized nuclear material in Syrian
Times Online, UK - 3 hours ago
Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, ...
Israel seized North Korean nuclear material from Syria: report AFP
Report: IDF seized nuclear material before Syria air strike Ha'aretz

Israel is capable of using force against 'threats'
MSNBC - Sep 21, 2007
There is a lot of speculation about what the actual target was since both Syria and Israel are uncharacteristically tight-lipped about it. ...
The Israel-Syria Thing Swampland
Geopolitical Diary: The Increasingly Mysterious Israeli-Syrian ... Stratfor (subscription)
all 4 news articles »Israel's Right of Self-Defense: Gordon Prather
Antiwar.com, CA - 22 hours ago
Well, Syria and Israel are still technically at war – just as North and South Korea are technically still at war. So why not just bomb the geewhiz of that ...

Why single out Iran? What about Israel?
Guardian Unlimited, UK - 4 hours ago
In his careful analysis of what is and is not known about the reason for Operation Orchard, the Israelis' 6 September bombing raid into northern Syria, ...
Snatched: Israeli commandos ‘nuclear’ raid The Sunday Times
Israelis have unearthed a deadlier axis of evil Telegraph.co.uk
Olmert's Respect For Assad Totally Jewish
all 7 news articles »

JOHN W. DEAN Why Authoritarians Now Control the Republican Party: The Rise of Authoritarian Conservatism Part Two in a Three-Part Series With this second column, FindLaw columnist and former counsel to the president John Dean continues a three-part series of columns relating to his best-selling book Conservatives Without Conscience. Dean's thesis is that both the leadership and membership of today's Republican Party are dominated by authoritarian personalities. In this column, he goes into detail regarding research by Professor Bob Altemeyer on both authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders, and traces the historical roots -- going back to Alexander Hamilton -- of the authoritarian personality's influence on American government.

[b]Exclusive: Terrorist Leader Welcomed to USA

[/b] Sher Zieve

Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not only being allowed to travel to the US, but is being welcomed as a speaker at Columbia University. Who’s next on the guest list? FSM Contributing Editor Sher Zieve fears that this offensive episode is part of a growing trend.






[b]Exclusive: First ‘North American Union’ Driver's Licenses Issued in US

[/b] Jim Kouri, CPP

North Carolina has begun issuing driver’s licenses with a hologram of the North American continent on the back. Some believe this is a step toward a North American Union. FSM Contributing Editor Jim Kouri, CPP reports.






[b]Al Qaeda: An International Jihadi Operation?

[/b] Walid Phares

The recent bounty offered by al Qaeda Iraq’s leader in connection to the Swedish cartoon of Mohammed sends a very clear message: al Qaeda in Iraq has bigger fish to fry than just the American presence there. FSM Contributing Editor Dr. Walid Phares shares his concerns about their alarming agenda.

Pakistan backs off Al Qaeda pursuit
By Greg Miller
Political realities force Musharraf to reduce efforts against Al Qaeda,
depriving the U.S. of one of its strongest counter-terrorism allies.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBY...Io30G2B0Ixet0EE

How warheads made an unplanned flight
By Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus
A report on an incident when six were flown from North Dakota to Louisiana
unnoticed uncovers alarming security failures.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBY...Io30G2B0Ixe10E6

Lack of urgency on national debt is a scary stance
By David Lazarus
The country will pay a high price down the road for avoiding tough fiscal
choices now.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBY...Io30G2B0IxfA0EO

State-secret overreach
By Barry Siegel
For too long, judges have allowed the government to hide mistakes behind
national security.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBY...Io30G2B0IxfL0EZ

Democrats, look West
By Matt Bai
A new breed of 'progressives' is shifting the party's center of gravity from the
South and Northeast.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBY...Io30G2B0IxfM0Ea

Security Company Faces Iraqi Criminal Charges
By JAMES GLANZ and SABRINA TAVERNISE The Iraqi government plans to refer charges to its courts within days in the killing of at least eight Iraqis.

• Week in Review: The Deadly Game of Private Security
• $50 Billion Increase Sought for Military in Iraq and Afghanistan
• U.N. Chief Urges Aid to Iraq

Clinton Solidifies Edge as Rivals Take a Tougher Line
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s rivals for the Democratic nomination have begun rolling out aggressive new strategies aimed primarily at her.

• Video: Obama on Experience

G.O.P. Hopefuls Take Varying Paths in Wide Open Race
By MICHAEL COOPER and MICHAEL LUO The race for the Republican nomination remains remarkably fluid, with key constituencies having yet to settle on a candidate.

• The Caucus: Romney Works the House | McCain Weighs In

The Dissenter
Platon for The New York Times Majority of One Stevens at the Supreme Court.

'Three decades ago, Justice John Paul Stevens was appointed to the Supreme Court as a judicial conservative and moderate Republican. So how did he come to lead the
liberal wing of a fiercely divided court? By JEFFREY ROSEN Published: September 23, 2007

Saudi Youth Driven Up a Wall Graffiti walls offer rare sanctioned outlet for frustrated young males in socially repressive monarchy.

Faiza Saleh Ambah

• Graffiti Engages Young Saudis

Secret US air force team to perfect plan for Iran strike

President Bush Bunkers Down: New shocking twist in strategy - Bush using Iraq War as means by which to contain Iran

Iranian president set for chilly reception in NYC

'A modern Hitler honored': Jewish organizations to mobilize 'thousands' against Columbia University's invite to Iran president

"Sure we'd invite Hitler to speak": Columbia dean

Iran shows off new long-range 1,800-km missile together with fierce slogans and defiant rhetoric at a big military parade outside Tehran

Iran’s vaunted first home-produced fighter jet is a hybrid of Soviet and Chinese technologies and vintage American components

Iran, Israel clash at IAEA conference

President Bush hints at Clinton victory: Bush has expressed admiration for her tenacity in the campaign

Senator Obama Floats Social Security Tax Hike

Romney Promises to Restore a Wayward GOP: Scolds Republican Party

The Israel Lobby--and the Interview with Cong. Jim Moran Most liberals in the U.S. today oppose preventive wars in general and a military strike against Iran in particular. So who supports such a move? The answer is: the right wing government of Israel and its champion in the U.S., the Israel Lobby.

Jamison Foser: Media Matters Update on Generals Powell and Petraeus When Powell was selling the invasion of Iraq, the media not only believed him without question, but worse, the media suggested that anyone who disagreed with him was a liar or a fool. The media's coverage of Petraeus in 2007 is depressingly similar to their treatment of Powell in 2003. This week the Senate voted, by a 72-25 margin, to officially condemn private citizens for criticizing their government. Does anybody care?

Abu Dhabi takes ownership stake in Carlyle Group
Arab emirate's investment ties with Bush family deepen
Posted: September 21, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

The Financial Times announced last night the government of Abu Dhabi has made an investment in the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based private investment firm with close ties to former President George H. W. Bush and his family, as well as to top government officials in the Reagan and Clinton administrations. Mubadala, a wholly owned investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government, bought a 7.5 percent share of the Carlyle Group in a transaction in which the deal price was struck at a 10 percent discount to a valuation of $20 billion for all of the Carlyle Group.

Abu Dhabi is the largest of the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates and the capital.

Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the Abu Dhabi ruling family is the chairman of Mubadala.

Rising seas likely to flood U.S. history
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science WriterSat Sep 22, 7:14 PM ET

Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting.

In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.

Global warming — through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding — is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.

Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the locations of big city airports and major interstate highways.

Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront getaways of rich politicians — the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John Edwards' place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on Spring Break.

That's the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps reviewed by The Associated Press. The maps, created by scientists at the University of Arizona, are based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Few of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree with the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50 years, others say 100, and still others say 150.

Sea level rise is "the thing that I'm most concerned about as a scientist," says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

"We're going to get a meter and there's nothing we can do about it," said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Paris. "It's going to happen no matter what — the question is when."

Sea level rise "has consequences about where people live and what they care about," said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland scientist who has studied the issue. "We're going to be into this big national debate about what we protect and at what cost."

This week, beginning with a meeting at the United Nations on Monday, world leaders will convene to talk about fighting global warming. At week's end, leaders will gather in Washington with President Bush.

Experts say that protecting America's coastlines would run well into the billions and not all spots could be saved.

And it's not just a rising ocean that is the problem. With it comes an even greater danger of storm surge, from hurricanes, winter storms and regular coastal storms, Boesch said. Sea level rise means higher and more frequent flooding from these extreme events, he said.

All told, one meter of sea level rise in just the lower 48 states would put about 25,000 square miles under water, according to Jonathan Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona. That's an area the size of West Virginia.

The amount of lost land is even greater when Hawaii and Alaska are included, Overpeck said.

The Environmental Protection Agency's calculation projects a land loss of about 22,000 square miles. The EPA, which studied only the Eastern and Gulf coasts, found that Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, Texas and South Carolina would lose the most land. But even inland areas like Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia also have slivers of at-risk land, according to the EPA.

This past summer's flooding of subways in New York could become far more regular, even an everyday occurrence, with the projected sea rise, other scientists said. And New Orleans' Katrina experience and the daily loss of Louisiana wetlands — which serve as a barrier that weakens hurricanes — are previews of what's to come there.

Florida faces a serious public health risk from rising salt water tainting drinking water wells, said Joel Scheraga, the EPA's director of global change research. And the farm-rich San Joaquin Delta in California faces serious salt water flooding problems, other experts said.

"Sea level rise is going to have more general impact to the population and the infrastructure than almost anything else that I can think of," said S. Jeffress Williams, a U.S. Geological Survey coastal geologist in Woods Hole, Mass.

Even John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a scientist often quoted by global warming skeptics, said he figures the seas will rise at least 16 inches by the end of the century. But he tells people to prepare for a rise of about three feet just in case.

Williams says it's "not unreasonable at all" to expect that much in 100 years. "We've had a third of a meter in the last century."

The change will be a gradual process, one that is so slow it will be easy to ignore for a while.

"It's like sticking your finger in a pot of water on a burner and you turn the heat on, Williams said. "You kind of get used to it."

___

On the Net:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on sea level:

http://tinyurl.com/2df72n

The U.S. Geological Survey on sea level rise and global warming:

http://woodshole.er.usgs.gov/project-pages/cvi/

University of Arizona's interactive maps on sea level rise:

http://tinyurl.com/ca73h

Architecture 2030 study on one-meter sea level rise and cities:

http://www.architecture2030.org/current_si...tal_impact.html

<h3 class="entry-header">Alterman: Iraq Refugees (and my thoughts)</h3> http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/

CATO: Assessing the Surge
This morning I took part in a panel discussion at the Cato Institute called "assessing the surge." It appears that last week's fireworks did not exhaust interest in the subject; the room was full - the organizer estimated about 150 people. The other panelists were Daveed Gartenstein-Ross from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Weekly Standard (pinch-hitting for Clifford May), James Dobbins of RAND, and Chris Preble of Cato. Luckily, my worst fears were not realized; nobody wanted to talk about Ayn Rand.

My comments for the most part won't surprise anyone who reads the blog regularly. In the first half, I outlined where I agreed with the Petraeus/Crocker report: there has been no political progress at the national level and in fact things have regressed - and therefore, by the original logic of the surge, it has failed; there has been little progress in the south, where intra-Shia violence is escalating; sectarian cleansing of Baghdad proceeds apace; and there have been some changes in the Sunni areas. I pointed out that the reduction of violence in Baghdad and other mixed cities results in part from the brutal fact that sectarian cleansing has succeeded - and that there is no prospect on the horizon for the return of these refugees and displaced persons, who constitute a new Iraqi community likely consumed by sectarian resentment fueled by immediate harsh experience and formulating new communal narratives which are the farthest thing from "bottom up reconciliation." I gave my usual argument about what happened in the Sunni areas, which I won't recapitulate here. I concluded with my mind-boggling experience yesterday of watching an American neoconservative on al-Jazeera lecturing a Sunni Iraqi tribal shaykh - in English - about what is really going on in the Sunni tribal areas, and warned against believing our own propaganda about the Sunni areas.

All the speakers were interesting: Garenstein-Ross gave a much more sober and guarded assessment than I had expected from a Weekly Standard writer, and we actually ended up agreeing about more than we disagreed (though I don't understand how he could argue that the Bush administration's spin was misleading and overly optimistic in 2005 and 2006, while simultaneously expecting us to believe that now, in 2007, we should take their claims at face value). Preble gave a sobering analysis focused on domestic politics which argued that the real model was Korea and that the US was not leaving Iraq any time soon in spite of the strategic failures and the hostile public opinion.

I found James Dobbins the most interesting speaker (including myself). Drawing on his own long experience as a diplomat and as a student of interventions, he argued forcefully for a version of the Iraq Study Group's 'diplomatic surge' which would bring all of Iraq's neighbors into a Dayton-like (or Bonn-like) conference. The US brought Milosevic and Tudjman to Dayton knowing perfectly well the amount of blood on their hands and the boost it would give to their domestic political fortunes, because that was the only way to end the violence - and it worked. He argued that no civil war can ever be resolved if the country's neighbors don't want it to be resolved; the US can either contain Iran or stabilize Iraq, but it can't have both.

At the end, I elaborated on Dobbins' Dayton example by suggesting an alternative lesson of the Anbar model which is rarely discussed. After years of failed warfare against the Sunni insurgency, the US decided to talk with and then cooperate with "former" insurgents with a lot of American blood on their hands. They discovered that it worked (at least for the short term). It's ironic that the same people who currently most vigorously defend the "Anbar Model" of working with these "former insurgents" usually strongly oppose any serious dialogue with Syria or Iran. If there's one good thing which could come out of the current American Sunni strategy in Iraq, perhaps it will be the recognition that talking to one's enemies can sometimes have positive results.

I'll put up a link to the video when Cato puts it online.

UPDATE: Ilan Goldenberg offers up his thoughts on the panel; he was also impressed by Jim Dobbins.


Posted on September 20, 2007 at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Co

AJ: Ibrahim Shammari (Islamic Army of Iraq)
Al-Jazeera just aired a half-hour interview with Ibrahim al-Shammari, spokesman of the Islamic Army of Iraq (which is one of the largest of the "nationalist-jihadist" Sunni insurgency factions). I'd been seeing discussions about the interview in the Iraqi-oriented forums for a couple of days before it aired, suggesting considerable interest in what the IAI would have to say about the Crocker-Petraeus report. I'm not sure when it was recorded, but no mention was made of the murder of Sattar Abu Risha, so if I had to guess I'd say it was done September 12- after the Congressional hearings but before the assassination. I didn't notice any particular innovations in his discourse, but it's worth pointing out his major arguments and themes.



Ibrahim al-Shammari, screen capture from al-Jazeera.

In response to a question about the Petraeus report and the role of the surge in Anbar, Shammari replied that the Islamic Army of Iraq saw nothing new in the report. It claims to see progress in the tribal areas, but, he said, the American forces haven't done anything in those areas. What happened in Anbar is the al-Qaeda Organization turned itself into a state, and terrorized anyone who had a different opinion, and this caused great unhappiness among the tribes and the factions who turned against it. Then the US intervened and tried to exploit the differences, spreading money around and trying to buy support, but the troops they sent didn't accomplish anything. This narrative actually doesn't deeply conflict with the Petraeus narrative about what happened last year in the Sunni areas, but of course diverges sharply when you get to the end about the significance of the US role and the nature of Sunni cooperation. He didn't seem particularly concerned about the Anbar Salvation Council or its counterparts elsewhere, treating them as perfectly compatible with the resistance's agenda and a response to al-Qaeda's transgressions but not a threat to the role of the factions.

The interviewer interrupted to say that the operations against the Americans did go down, a claim which Shammari rejected. Attacks against American forces have not gone down, he said, operations against the Americans continue ever day (he claimed over 50 a day for the IAI alone). Shammari acknowledged that some "sons of the tribes" were cooperating with the Americans, but insisted that the cooperation was strictly limited to self-defense and to fighting against al-Qaeda - nothing more, nothing less. The street remains with the resistance, he claimed, and it was absurd to try to distinguish between the resistance and the tribes. When pressed on the nature of Sunni-American cooperation, he responded by harping on the levels of US-Shia cooperation through the Iraqi state, and military and police forces.


Shammari talked a lot about the Sunni-Shia conflict, trying to draw a sharp distinction between the Shia - with whom there could be no conflict since at the societal level there were no differences - and the Iranian-backed Shia forces. The two problems facing Iraq, he said, are Iran and the occupation, and in the absence of the occupation the Shia would turn back to their natural affinity with other Iraqi Arabs rather than to Iran. Iraq is not a sectarian (ta'ifi) society, he argued, and it was only the occupation which had sowed the seeds of sectarianism (which led to a lengthy argument over Iraqi history). He insisted that the IAI and other factions were Sunni, but fought in defense of all Iraqis whether Sunni or Shia - liberation from occupation was the goal of all, he claimed. He rejected the suggestion that Sadr's Mahdi Army might be a partner in this fight, however, claiming that the Mahdi Army's only problems with the occupation were over Iran and not over liberating Iraq.

On al-Qaeda, Shammari took a rather calmer tone than in past IAI statements (forum discussions had suggested that he was going to be far more aggressive, so it's interesting that he wasn't). He acknowledged that the IAI had worked with al-Qaeda in the past - back then all the factions cooperated against the occupation, he said. But then al-Qaeda changed, he said, and began pursuing a private secret agenda which nobody could understand. He called for all factions to come back to a clear agenda of national liberation. In a line singled out already in the forums, he rejected insults to al-Qaeda, instead calling for it to come back to the shared agenda of the resistance. At the same time, as befits the "nationalist" in "nationalist-jihadist", Shammari stressed the Iraqi national interest and put the jihad in service of national liberation - which has for almost a year been the argument at the core of the doctrinal arguments between the IAI allies and the al-Qaeda allies.

Finally, he repeated the IAI's frequently articulated position of refusing to negotiate or sit with the Americans until there was a clear and binding commitment to withdrawal - at which point, the IAI would naturally be willing to talk to the Americans about the terms of the withdrawal. He said that there was no political process in Iraq to join right now, anyway. It had come to its end, collapsing on itself, and everyone was looking past the failed institutions. He decried all plans for federalism and partition as an American long-term agenda to weaken and divide Iraq, and went on at some length appealing for a united Iraq. He looked forward to an Iraq ruled by all the nationalist-jihadist factions, which would seem to suggest an expansive rather than limited agenda on their part.

No particular further comment here, just wanted to pass on info about a fairly important intervention in the Iraqi Sunni political field. I'll update if/when I see interesting discussion of it. One point I did want to make, though: you'll notice that Shammari in the screen capture above is still veiled in shadows to protect his identity. If these insurgency factions ever expect to advance an effective public political agenda, they are going to have to start putting forth some spokesmen who are not veiled in shadows.

UPDATE: just heard through a source that Shammari's interview was recorded in Qatar, not in Amman as I had assumed - and not in Damascus, as others might have assumed. If my source is right, that raises some very interesting questions about the relationship between the "nationalist-jihadist" factions and various regional governments - especially, given that Shammari complained in the interview that the Sunni Arab governments were not adequately supporting the resistance.


Posted on September 17, 2007 at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Co

Watch: Clinton Laughs Her Way Through Chris Wallace Interview
Quick Read

Democrats Should Attack Bush, Not MoveOn
Paul Begala, 09.20.2007

Before Democrats fall all over themselves to agree with Bush, let's look at the real record of his cowardice when it comes to speaking out against attacks on military heroes.

Read Post

The MoveOn Dust-Up, the GOP's Self-Righteous Indignation, and Winning the White House
Joe Scarborough, 09.21.2007

This week's dust-up reminded me of that time when we Republicans led with our hearts and got pounded in our faces. We loved bathing in self-righteous indignation. Our base loved it too.

Read Post

William R. Polk's superb study: "Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism & Guerrilla War from the American Revolution to Iraq" is just out. In the days to come, there should be reviews of it to be posted. In the interim, here is a talk that he gave that relates to the topic.




The people who have fought insurgencies in the last few hundred years have spoken various languages, followed different religions, been motivated by diverse ideologies, made their livings in dissimilar occupations and lived apart from one another all over the world.

So are there common features from which we can construct a rough model that will help us to understand what is now happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Chechnya, Colombia, the Philippines and other countries?

This is a question that began to puzzle me back in 1962 when I began to observe the Vietnam war. But Vietnam was not the first guerrilla war I had seen. I was in the Palestine Mandate in 1946 and Greece in 1947. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to study, sometimes uncomfortably closely, several other insurgencies. It was Vietnam, however, that challenged me to try to understand.

I was then fortunate in being a Member of the Policy Planning Council of the U.S. Department of State whose Chairman, Walt Rostow, has been called the "architect" of American policy on Vietnam. Rostow was a true believer in the war. I was not. And our differences more or less forced me to begin the process that has led me to write Violent Politics.

The first major task to which I was assigned in Government was the chairmanship of the interdepartmental task force charged with helping to bring to an end the guerrilla war the Algerians were fighting against the French.

The American role in Algeria was only peripheral: General de Gaulle did not want outside interference (although he was happy to take the money we provided to pay for his army ) and he refused to share his thoughts or information with us.

Thus, we were somewhat blind, but we got ready to act if our action was demanded – the CIA thought that we might be asked to evacuate the 1 million 200 thousand Europeans then living in Algeria from the beaches like the British at Dunkirk. Fortunately, the French and Algerians reached agreement to give Algeria its freedom. So, while the whole pro-French population got out with all deliberate speed, as the lawyers say, their leaving was not a rout. Our Sixth Fleet, which was standing by, was not needed.

Vietnam was quite a different story. Almost every branch of the American government – even the Department of the Interior – became deeply involved. And, whereas few Americans could have placed Algeria on a map, Vietnam (in Michael Arlen's famous phase) was our "living room war." Every American experienced it at least on TV. No country was ever so reported upon as was Vietnam by Americans.

Consequently, I spent a part of each day perusing a deluge of cables, intelligence reports, summaries, and policy papers in addition to myriad press dispatches.

In all the mass of materials, thousands upon thousands of pages, one looked in vain for a penetrating definition of guerrilla warfare. Indeed, there was little coherent analysis of what was happening in Vietnam. The single exception was the work done by the small team that functioned under the leadership of my friend and colleague Tom Hughes in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Although its voice was usually drowned out, it was consistently right about what was happening and what was not happening in Vietnam. Almost everything else was episodic, short on questions but quick on answers.


In 1962 and 1963, the brilliant work on the war done by Frankie FitzGerald, Neil Sheehan, Chalmers Johnson, Joseph Buttinger and a few others was still far in the future. As the months passed, I came to believe that our lack of criteria – lack of what came to be called a paradigm or model -- to make sense of the rush of daily events was immensely dangerous. So, with Walt Rostow's permission -- and tolerance -- I took six weeks off from my regular duties on the Council and immersed myself in Vietnam


Learning about my study, the National War College invited me to summarize my findings for its graduating class of the "best and brightest" Navy captains and Army, Air Force and Marine colonels who were headed for senior command – and for combat in Vietnam.

I knew they would be a highly critical audience but one whose lives rode on an understanding of insurgency.

The gist of what I told them was that I had found that guerrilla warfare was made up of three parts that fell roughly in a sequence and which could be weighted in impact.

The first component was politics. In that phase, the principal task of the guerrillas was to establish their claim to speak for their people, that is, to establish their legitimacy. Generally, they did this by portraying themselves as the only true nationalists.

The second component was administration. The guerrillas had first to destroy the institutions and mechanisms by which the existing government interfaced with the population – how it delivered essential services, kept the peace, adjudicated disputes and prevented starvation. Then, the guerrillas had to step in to do what government had been doing.

The third component was combat. The guerrillas had to show that they could defeat the government, drive it away from the population, and force it to surrender, withdraw or collapse.

* * *


Applying these criteria or stages to the Vietnam conflict, I argued that Ho Chi Minh had embodied Vietnamese nationalism already by the end of the Second World War. He had long opposed French colonialism and the French forces who collaborated with the hated Japanese occupation. His leadership of the nation was symbolized when the French puppet ruler, the Emperor Bao Dai, turned over rule to him in a ceremony in Hanoi on August 25, 1945. Thereafter, fighting the French who were determined, despite initial American opposition, to reimpose their rule on Vietnam, his prestige increased to the point that President Eisenhower believed that Ho could have won any election for president with an 80% landslide victory. No other Vietnamese figure or group could challenge Ho and the Viet Minh. It wasn't so much that Ho was carried to power by Communists as that Communists rode on the coat tails of nationalism as embodied in Ho.

In those days, political scientists loved statistics and I guessed that this, the political component of insurgency, was about 80% of the whole effort.

In administration, the Viet Minh were less active, at least in the south, for a decade. Many of the cadres of what was then known as Giai Phong Quan , the Viet Minh of the southern area, had gone north in a population swap that brought the Catholics south.

When the Viet Minh cadres returned and became active, they systematically murdered government-appointed village officials. The astute French journalist Bernard Fall estimated that the Giai Phong Quan killed about 700 officials during 1957-1958, 2,500 from 1959 to 1960 and 4,000 from 1960 to 1961. But it was not just the officials who were liquidated. As George Carver of the CIA wrote in 1966 in Foreign Affairs, "The terror was directed not only against officials but against all whose operations were essential to the functioning of organized political society, school teachers, health workers, agricultural officials, etc."

Thus, by about 1960 the South Vietnamese government had virtually ceased to function. It could not collect taxes or even deliver mail much beyond downtown Saigon. Its officials could move only during daylight. Even in Saigon, as I witnessed one night standing next to Henry Cabot Lodge on from the roof of our embassy, government patrols avoided the streets when darkness fell because they were apt to be ambushed. The one we saw was.

Disruption is followed by replacement. Having killed or chased away the representatives of the regime, the insurgents immediately begin to create an alternative administration or "anti-state." That happened in Vietnam where the Viet Minh set up a variety of local government institutions in which virtually the whole southern population became involved.

My guess was that this second stage of the insurgency amounted to about 15% of the total effort leading to Viet Minh "victory."

Thus, 95% of the insurgency was lost before the Americans became active in Vietnam. From 1963 to 1974, we grasped the short end of the lever.

So I told my War College audience in 1963 that we had already lost the war.

The War College audience in 1963 was no more receptive to that analysis than at least some of our senior generals are today. The idea that we would – or even could – lose the war to a rag-tag bunch of what we regarded as mere hooligans was then regarded as rank heresy.

So we plunged ahead militarily, "surging" from a few thousand to half a million troops and turning our whole economy toward fighting the war. Despite graphic body counts and glowing proofs of success, casualties mounted. Finally the public would take no more. Lyndon Johnson gave up and America began to wind down the war. Many of the phrases we hear today were coined then. More time was needed. We were near success. Conditions were improving. If we left, Vietnam would collapse into chaos. So, trying to be statesmanlike and not wishing to do anything precipitous or rash or radical or to appear unpatriotic, we moved slowly. It took 4 years to get out. And in those 4 years we lost an additional 21,000 young Americans.


* * *
I had resigned from government in 1965 and became professor of history at the University of Chicago. In 1967, I also became president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. That position enabled me to encourage others to work on Vietnam. It was there that David Halberstam wrote The Best and the Brightest and Neil Sheehan began the study on counterinsurgency that became A Bright and Shining Lie. To bring out all the viewpoints, the Institute also held a conference of hawks, doves and those who thought of themselves as owls that resulted in a book called No More Vietnams?

When I left Chicago, I changed the focus of my research to the problems of the Middle East. It was partly Afghanistan and partly Iraq that pulled me back into the study of insurgency.

* * *


Both to test what I had proposed in 1963 and to deepen my knowledge, I decided to study other insurgencies. The first I picked is not one that is usually described as insurgency, the American Revolution.

Somewhat to my surprise, I found the same elements as in Vietnam.

From roughly 1760, the American colonists began the process that would lead to the Revolution. They were very reluctant insurgents. Virginia's ties were with England, not with New York or Massachusetts. The colonists were widely scattered and hardly knew one another. It took the British to help them do what they could not do themselves, unify them in opposition.

Ironically, they remained loyal to the monarchy. It was Parliament that they opposed. Today we look back on that period and see the rise of democracy as Parliament asserted itself against royal tyranny, but our ancestors did not see it that way. For them, Parliament was the tyrant usurping their by-then "traditional" rights as free-born Englishmen. They were the conservatives; Parliament was the innovator. And its representatives in the Colonies were corrupt and greedy. Why did they think these things?

To stop the drain on the Treasury caused by wars with the Indians, Parliament sought to prevent the colonists from expanding into Indian territory, thus thwarting their desire for free or cheap land and, sensitive to the demands of the leaders of the Industrial Revolution, Parliament enacted laws that made what the colonists thought was their right to commerce into felonies – blockade running, customs evasion and dealing in prohibited goods.

Consequently, avoiding British administration was both common and popular. Only if the colonists evaded the authorities could they get the goods they needed to live; John Hancock was said to have had about 500 indictments against him for smuggling, which led his contemporary John Adams to remark that it was the British attempt to curtail his smuggling that made him a patriot.

But flouting the law was dangerous; only if they disrupted the British-sponsored colonial governments could the merchants move safely and only if they made impossible the implementation of British laws could they avoid paying the price for disobedience.

So, in the decade after the end of the French and Indian wars, what amounted to an unarticulated strategy of avoidance turned increasingly into insurgency.

Both the colonists and the British more or less stumbled into combat. In part the Colonists were pushed by agitators, mainly the small group headed by Sam Ad