THE DIGNIFIED RANT
NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS AUGUST 2004 ARCHIVES
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“It’s Starting” (Posted
I worried what Hugo Chavez would do after he managed to hang onto power by hook or crook.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Sunday
that as part of his deepening "revolution," he will enforce an
agriculture law that allows the government to tax and expropriate idle lots.
"We are going after idle land and are going to put it to work," said
Chavez during his weekly television and radio show.
Chavez is an annoyance now. One day he will be an official foreign policy problem.
But what can we do now? If
When we have plenty of other military tasks, we can’t waste
our assets on
We can support the opposition publicly and support
democratic institutions in
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“Even the French Can’t Be French Enough” (Posted
You can support Saddam.
You can supply nuclear technology.
You can oppose a war against Saddam in the UN.
You can interfere with plans to wage the Iraq War.
You can refuse to participate in the Iraq War.
You can refuse to participate in the post-war security mission.
And still, the Islamists who say that all the above are necessary to avoid their wrath can find something over which to attack you over:
France vowed Monday to press ahead with a
controversial law banning Islamic head scarves in schools, despite demands by
militants holding two French journalists hostage in
The abduction shook the notion that
And to paint a picture of the bleeding obvious for those perhaps too French to understand the nuance, Prime Minister Allawi explained:
"France will not be spared — no more
than Italy, Spain, or Egypt," Allawi said in an
interview published Monday in Le Monde newspaper. "Governments that decide
to remain on the defensive will be the next targets of terrorist ... Avoiding
confrontation is not a response."
I sincerely want
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“The Post-War Plan” (Posted
There is still a lot of silly posturing over the
inadequacies of our post-war plan for
But we did have a plan—or at least expectation for the post-war. I’m going by memory here, but it seemed like we had clear expectations for the war.
So how did we do?
All in all, our assumptions were not outrageous. Some were right. Some were right but were irrelevant. Some were wrong. Some were wrong and didn’t matter.
In the end, errors are inevitable and as long as we adapt and drive on, it is silly to fixate on them. I believe we have adapted to the reality on the ground.
Once we win in
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“No Shia Revolt” (Posted
The Shias are not revolting
against the
In Shia
neighborhoods of
Sadr and his followers (the
survivors, anyway) do not represent the Shia
population of
The statement by these senior clerics should tell people over here about whether the Iraqi Shias really think we are an occupying power. Apparently, the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse (not torture) scandal hasn’t alienated Iraqis any more than fighting the Saddam leftovers, foreign jihadis, and Iranian pawns has alienated the Shias. They want us to go when we can, but right now they know they need us to keep the Sunnis from returning to power and to keep fanatical tools of the Iranians from seizing control.
This basic support of the Shias is
why we will win this insurgency. We are not facing a revolt by a sizable
portion of
As we get more and more Iraqis into the fight, we will be able to pull back and let the Iraqis shoulder more of the burden. This has taken longer than I thought it would. Just as an aside, I’m happy that we did not have the former Iraqi army under arms during the period starting in March when the first Sadr uprising and the Fallujah revolt took place. People still like to say we made a mistake disbanding the Iraqi army, but that is rot. Even if we could have recalled the army after it self-disbanded in the war in 2003, it would be ill-trained and tainted by Saddam ties. We couldn’t have trusted the officers and without good leadership, as we discovered in March, such units would be useless. And quite possibly they would have turned against us and made a bad situation worse. Training new units with new leaders is better even though it takes longer to get units in the field. In addition, such units should be less likely to interfere in Iraqi politics when we leave as the army has in the past.
Letting places like Fallujah and
thugs like Sadr escape consequences is a mistake and
I am eager for our forces and the Iraqis to end these
threats. I’ve heard that Fallujah is turning against
the jihadists and Baathists
holed up there. That’s wonderful. But only if we exploit that
fact to finally remove this sanctuary for the enemy. Occasional air
strikes are not enough. And I heard that we used the time during the Najaf crisis to clean up Sadr’s
people in
Yet we are winning despite inevitable errors. I just don’t have a good guess on the timeline for victory.
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“So Why Do They Hate Us?” (Posted
The Greeks don’t like us much. Powell cancelled his planned visit there after protests erupted. I’m sure that this hatred is caused by cowboy Bush’s unilateral war against Moslems and his disdain for small countries. Oh, but wait:
Greeks harbor anti-American feelings primarily over
In 1999, during a visit by then-President
The Greeks hate the Moslem Turks so sympathy for the plight of Moslems seems unlikely as a cause for Greek anti-Americanism.
The anger over their own
dictatorship that ended thirty years ago is strange. First of all, that’s a
long grudge and might they not blame Greek generals instead? And even if they
blame us for their dictators, didn’t decades of pre-Cowboy diplomacy have any
effect at all? The purported concern for small countries seems particularly odd
in this light since as a small country they presumably are happy we didn’t
institute regime change in
It’s clearly an irrational hatred for us no matter what we do. People in foreign countries worry (and a good chunk at home, sadly) about what we do because we are so large and we will have an impact even if we aren’t trying to affect others. It doesn’t matter what we do or don’t do, some group of people—or the same group ignoring all consistency—will think an act or inaction is evidence of our machinations. We should do what we need to do and ignore trying to figure out what the world street thinks of our policies. Talk softly, of course, and send out the smiling diplomats, but do what we must. Somebody will be suspicious no matter what.
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“Victory” (Posted
Sadr is still alive and walking free. We may have killed lots of his men but that is not relevant right now when we have stopped short of destroying Sadr. His thug army is not disarmed. Sadr’s spokesman declared:
"The Americans thought that they could exterminate the
Mehdi Army, but our fighters are still here. They
will be able to go back to their work whilst remaining an army."
As we should know by now, simply surviving a battle with us gives little thugs prestige. How many confrontations has Sadr lived through now? How many more times will we have to fight him and lose soldiers and Marines? Because the so-called peace deal is nothing of the sort:
U.S. soldiers in Humvees drove
through the troubled Sadr City slum with
loudspeakers, demanding people stay home because coalition forces were
"cleaning the area of armed men," according to an Associated Press
reporter at the scene. Sporadic gunfire could be heard.
The fighting came a day after al-Sadr
loyalists vacated the revered Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf
and turned over the keys to
Militants in
O'Malley said
Interior Ministry spokesman Col. Adnan
Abdul-Rahman said Iraqi National Guard troops were
fighting alongside
All we did is let Sadr’s cornered survivors escape to fight another day in another place should Sadr raise the banner of revolt yet again. How long will it be before Sadr succeeds and gets lucky or smart? He may be an idiot, but people who are not idiots may be pulling his strings.
Why are we unwilling to defeat our enemies? For God’s sake, it is perfectly appropriate to kill our enemies and achieve victory!! Sadr is our enemy! Do the math.
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“Iranian Interest in
Washington has hit a dead-end over Iran's
nuclear dossier, lacking enough proof to demand U.N. sanctions and too bogged
down in Iraq for a military strike, President Mohammad Khatami
said Saturday. …
"The Americans have to deal first with their problems
in
I’ll ignore the ridiculous characterization of Khatami as a “reformist.” This isn’t a post about media bias or laziness.
If the Iranians think that having Americans tied down fighting in Iraq will prevent us from acting against Iran in the next critical year or so while they deploy nukes, do you think the Iranian mullahs are leaving it in Allah’s hands or might they be involved in helping people opposed to us inside Iraq? So what is Sadr up to these days? And where is his address book?
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“Israeli Interest in
In
"Israel is very concerned ... that the ayatollahs will
acquire nuclear weapons because this is an unpredictable regime with close
network to terror organizations around the world," Yuval Steinitz said.
"But if you think this might change our previous
decision to spy on the
President Bush has identified
Yet his administration has battled internally over how hard
a line to take toward
Israel, one of the United States' strongest allies, has
worked behind its conservative prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to push the Bush
administration toward more toughness against
Israel is not as capable of dealing with Iran as we are—whether
we are discussing an attack militarily or support for an overthrow of the
mullahs—but Israel arguably has far more vital reasons to make sure Iran does
not get nukes since Iran is close to Israel and not America, and America is far
larger than Israel. Even a small number of nukes could destroy
I think this reinforces my point that
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“Death From the Shadows” (Posted
The question of how to defeat al Qaeda
to prevent another attack and the related one of whether the invasion of
Sleeper
cells are a never-ending threat that never seems to materialize the way one
would expect. If Osama really had 50 or a 100 terror
cells spread throughout the West you'd think by now he would have activated
them — even just a few of them. For almost three years Osama
has been on the run. Many of al Qaeda's top leaders
are dead or captured and they have lost their safe bases in
As I’ve mentioned before, I never bought the figure of how
many trained terrorists were out there after cycling though al Qaeda training camps. Are there 100,000? I don’t think so. Just
like we do not have a huge number of astronauts just because every year
thousands of American kids go through Space Camp, al Qaeda
does not have a vast pool of committed killers just waiting for the signal to
strike. Some of the people who went through those terrorist training camps
undoubtedly are killers. Lots have been killed in
Opponents of the Patriot Act might be able to use this theory that few terrorists are out there to argue we’ve cracked down too hard at home (though the crack down is all in their heads, really) except that they are also heavily invested in the false idea that Iraq has distracted us from the real fight against al Qaeda! Hard to be distracted from an overblown threat, eh?
For me, this does not provide a contradiction since I don’t
think the Patriot Act is anywhere near as bad as hysterical critics charge.
Much of the outrages they say the act does have nothing to do with the act and
even some parts of the act are not anywhere near as ominous as the critics
claim. In addition, I don’t think that
On the other hand, we must hunt down the terrorists. When looking at terrorism in isolation, I think the threat from even a relatively small al Qaeda is substantial. Their hate is a force multiplier. Those that are out there managed to kill 3,000 of us three years ago and if circumstances had bee a little different it might have been 50- or 100,000. As this article notes about some information gleaned from a captured al Qaeda computer guy recently:
The computer had been used by bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, and contains an unfinished justification of
the 9/11 attacks on
This is not the only time that al Qaeda has
announced a target of four million. In June 2002, its spokesman, Suleiman Abu Gheith, published an article on the alneda website that claimed:
"We have the right to kill four million Americans — 2 million of them
children — and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of
thousands."
Their determination to kill millions of us is quite
clear—and quite insane. Nowhere in this terrorist goal of killing 4 million of
us any hint that they think killing that many of us
will achieve any goal. Will 4-million cause us to pull out of the Moslem world?
Stop supporting
I’ve never believed we were a helpless giant in the face of this amorphous asymmetric threat:
More importantly, we must
exploit the fact that these attacks take time to organize. Intelligence must track the enemy terror
cells in order to strike the enemy and disrupt them by keeping them on the move
and by killing or arresting their operatives.
We must sow confusion and paranoia in their ranks to slow them down and
get them to fight each other. Our
ability to use so many weapons is one advantage of being a powerful state. We may be a large target but we are not a
helpless giant.
I believed and still do think that we are able to wield tremendous military, financial, diplomatic, and economic power around the globe, fast or slow, massively or focused. We are damned capable when we realize we are at war as we’ve shown over the past three years.
Kill the terrorists and make sure there are no regimes that give them support.
Oh, and thank you to the domestic
losers, anarchists, socialists, and communists who will descend on
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“Axis of El Vil”
(Posted
Apparently, the fraud
by Chavez in Venezuela was massive according to reputable exit polling (via
Powerline):
How
could the exit polls be nearly 40 points off?
The short answer is, they weren’t. Chavez, whose anti-democratic, pro-Castro
sympathies are openly proclaimed (he tried to block the
constitutionally-mandated referendum for months), stole the election. “I think it was massive fraud,” Doug Schoen
told Michael Barone at
And Jimmy Carter blesses the
whole damn fraud.
Gosh, he’s such a model
ex-president.
Oh, and technically speaking,
the title refers to Chavez and not Carter. Just want to be clear on that point.
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“New 527?” (Posted
Well this
is clearly over the line:
The sad thing is, for the rantings of a psycho regime, they are strangely mild
compared to the recent fashion of 527-driven political discourse. Pretty sad
when Kim Jong Il is a piker
compared to Michael Moore. No wonder the president’s spokesman dismissed it as
just “more bluster.”
More to the point, it is
amazing that
North Korea is seeking
energy aid, lifting of economic sanctions and removal from
Is that all? The sad thing is, it used to work. New game, Pillsbury
Nuke Boy. New game.
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"A Question of Timing" (Posted
Hoagland
says this about our loss in the Vietnam War:
Certainly, it is difficult to
refute that statement since we did recover from the
But Hoagland is dead wrong on
dismissing the effects of our fighting in
I don't think it's a war like fighting
Hitler, but I think it was a correct war, a right war, and it had indirect effects
of the greatest importance as well. I think it demonstrated to the Russians of
the Russian leadership of the last years of communism that the Americans were
serious when they said that they opposed communism. And I think it, therefore,
contributed to -- eventually, to the end of the Cold War and the fall of
Communist regimes all over central and eastern Europe.
And the timing of our defeat
affected not just the Soviets. Would
Our troops served our country
well even in this "lost" war. Our veterans who fought there should be
proud of what they did for us in the larger Cold War and for their effort to
keep South Vietnamese free. Yes, free. Life under a victorious
So while our loss in
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"Target:
I've written that I think we
couldn't be sure of eliminating
While
If that is all we can do, then
we should strike until we figure out something better. There are no perfect
solutions, after all. But I didn't think we could even kick the problem down
the road with any assurance that we gave it a good kick. I don't think we have
any reason to be sure that we know where everything is.
I figured the Israelis had an
even smaller chance of success than we would given
their inferior resources and geography.
But now I wonder about at
least one of my assumptions.
The Iranians appear
to fear an Israeli strike to disarm them:
Insisting that
Why would they fear this if
they have safely buried their nuclear facilities? Or do they fear an attack? Is
this a statement of confidence that they can ride out a strike or a worry that
So in this light, this
assessment by Globalsecurity.org
about
The preponderance of
evidence and reasoning leads to the assumption that there is no underground
nuclear infrastructure, and that the above ground infrastructure constitutes
If what we see is what they
have, the possibility that an aerial attack could succeed in the operational
sense of having smoldering holes in
And my Jane's email news has
an August 18 snippet:
Tensions are running high IRAN project to develop an atomic bomb is no longer secret. The Israelis were so worried that the boss of the secret intelligence service (the Mossad), Shabtai Shavit, met with agents from the Central Intelligence Agency as long ago as the late 1980s. He urged them to do their utmost to stop Iran's nuclear ambitions becoming a reality. Ten years later and nothing had happened. ...
So the Israelis have been
looking at this problem for a long time. And
If the Israelis believe they
can destroy
We will have to deal with
possible failure since the Iranians will assume we were behind the attack. And
how will the Iranians hate the Israelis more? If the Israelis succeed in taking
out the facilities, pro-American sentiment might disappear in
So we will try regime change
in early 2005. Or, as I've noted, in December 2004 if we have a change in
administration here this November.
You know I think this decade
sucks, right?
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"Fight for
This is the 60th
anniversary of the liberation
of Paris. This isn't an opportunity for me to bash
So on this anniversary of the
liberation of
But they are right that we
had a strategic goal of defeating
We resisted Soviet communism
for the same reason. We could not afford to have
Now we are frustrated that
What
this means is that the U.S. must now engage in tough-minded alliance management
politics designed to tip the European balance firmly and permanently towards
the pro-American Anglo-Italian-Polish bloc — and to revive Atlanticism
in European politics
As frustrating as it may
seem, we must support our friends and not get tired of working to shape
European politics to our advantage. If we could liberate ungrateful French
because it was the right thing to do and because it was in our interests, we
can fight for the soul of
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"Intelligence Reorganization"
(Posted
These authors aren't
too impressed with the 9-11 Commission's report or its specific
recommendations on intelligence organization:
To
summarize, despite the commission's self-proclaimed belief that it has come up
with a set of bold and creative reforms, in reality, on most of the key legal
and policy issues, the report implicitly or explicitly advocates the
continuation of business as usual. It fails to advocate, or even to consider
seriously, such key matters as the merits of strategic preemption when dealing
with ambiguous, but lethal threats, the need to change fundamentally the nature
of the legal regime governing all aspects of covert operations and military
actions, as well as the legal rules governing collection of intelligence. In
the end of the day, regrettably, the commission, perhaps because of its quest for
bipartisanship and unanimity, has failed to make a meaningful contribution to
the ongoing national debate on how to avert future September 11-style attacks.
I'm glad that others aren't
very impressed with the commission. Although universally praised, it seems, I
didn't see that it reported anything terribly insightful. The best I could say
about it is that it didn't do harm as it seemed it might from the self-serving
public hearings it held.
As to the recommendations on
intelligence, I don't feel terribly competent to comment on the subject. I
don't know how the boxes should be arranged.
But then, I don't know if it
matters. I don't think reorganizing the CIA prior to 9-11 would have led us to
detecting and stopping the attacks. It simply wasn't in our frame of mind and
no intelligence analyst could have persuaded our leaders to take drastic action
prior to the attack. In my opinion, the only thing that made us better prepared
to stop future attacks is that we endured a horrific attack on 9-11. We knew it
could happen after that, and that appreciation is the major factor that allows
us to fight the terrorists and their backers. We've had great success against
the terrorists without a reorganization of intelligence services, haven't we?
I'd be pretty mad if we were waiting for a commission report to have an
effective CIA nearly three years after 9-11.
I'll read about plans to
reorganize the CIA with interest. I just don't know enough to say whether the
proposals will do any good—or any harm.
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“Time” (Posted
So does Sadr have time on his side or do we?
This article says that time is on Sadr’s side:
So time is on Sadr's side despite
the
This article says time is not on Sadr’s side:
Still,
months of battling
The
past 24 hours have seen
The author says clearly:
Though
some would argue otherwise, time — and the fact that positive news stories will
eventually see ink — is in many ways on the side of the Americans in Iraq and
the new Iraqi interim government. Not so for al Sadr.
This Marine officer flying an attack helicopter over Najaf notes that the Shias are on our side and that we are taking care to avoid wanton destruction or killing innocents:
I think the majority are on our side. I've learned that this enemy is
not just a mass of angry Iraqis who want us to leave their country, as some
would have you believe. The forces we're fighting around Iraq are a
conglomeration of renegade Shiites, former Baathists,
Iranians, Syrians, terrorists with ties to Ansar
al-Islam and Al Qaeda, petty criminals, destitute
citizens looking for excitement or money, and yes, even a few frustrated Iraqis
who worry about Wal-Mart culture infringing on their neighborhood.
His story seems to say that time is on our side to wipe out Sadr’s forces. If most Shias backed Sadr, we’d be in a precarious situation. But Sadr is backed by the usual suspects and some desperately poor people, so we can afford to kill the Mahdi army carefully over time.
So what is it?
I’m generally of the bandaid-off-fast
school of thought. If you give your enemy time, he might very well find a way
to use it. Or sheer dumb luck could work against you. When outgunned, that’s
why you play for time—you never know what might happen to change the odds. So
when you are stronger, end the fight quickly. With Sadr
in the holy city of
I admit that back in April when the first Sadr uprising was taking place, I discounted the Sadr threat and favored going after Fallujah
fast. My reasoning then was that the Baathists and
their Islamist Sunni allies were the biggest threat to building a new
So why do I think we need to move fast now when I was urging calmly responding to Sadr in the spring? Am I panicking? Do I think the Shias are moving against us?
No to both questions. I still think
the Shias are against Sadr
and support at least nominally our removal of Sadr
from Najaf. What I worry about is that Sadr will escape to fight yet again after we failed in May
to finish him off and after we failed just after the invasion to put this guy
away when he was weak. Eventually, even the idiot Sadr
may figure out how to cause real trouble for us. Or just get lucky. Or, Sadr might lose control of his so-called army to Iranian
intelligence backers who will engineer the destruction of the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf and
successfully blame the
To be fair, we may be unable to come to grips with Sadr himself and end the Mahdi occupation of the shrine without destroying or damaging it. We can’t level the town to kill that thug. I’d just really be happy if a sniper could spot Sadr and put him down. If we can’t go fast, we have no choice but to continue squeezing and killing the Mahdi army thugs until they break or are dead. Once we can finally send Iraqi security forces into the shrine to secure it, we need to make sure Sadr cannot ever fight again.
Sadr will clearly keep coming back
at us if we keep letting him go. Time is not automatically on our side or Sadr’s side. But I worry that time is more valuable to Sadr while fighting continues. He is losing every day
slowly but events could arise to reverse his misfortune. Once we end this
fighting, on the other hand, and accelerate reconstruction in
Nail the idiot Sadr.
“Global Posture” (Posted
The DOD went over the redeployment
plan for the
Right now it looks like the removal of a brigade from
A Stryker brigade will go to
Warm bases with equipment and support personnel will be used
to receive and then launch Army units flown in from the
The redeployment will take place over a decade.
I agree with the basic assumption that a heavy corps is
ill-suited to the
But I am not clear what will be sent to
But what assets will replace the nearly five combat brigades
we have now? Only two brigades are noted and that isn’t even a full division
let alone a corps. Even if we assume that a brigade’s worth of light infantry troops
are pretty much constantly rotated into
One can also say that with the problems with base closings
in the
A lot still needs to be said about what will happen. I suspect lots of details aren’t worked out yet. Some good stuff but I have some worries; and I await details about how we are turning European bases into a power projection base.
“Chavez Wins” (Posted
There was never any doubt that Chavez would remain in power at the end of the referendum process. The only question was whether it would be through real popularity, old-fashioned fraud, or armed might. It looks like it will fall somewhere between bought popularity and fraud, even though observers declared the vote clean. For the observers, however, their own self interest would lead them to say the vote was fair. Now they can go home with a clear conscience that they did their duty. What if they had found fraud? They had no power to change the results and they would have gone home leaving a crisis behind them. For former president Carter, the opportunity to oversee another kick in the legs at Bush was probably pretty gratifying. It is possible the results were mostly clean and the observers are correct. Yet there is this disturbing report:
Opposition leaders claim touch-screen voting machines at
hundreds of polling stations produced the exact same number of "yes"
votes in favor of ousting Chavez, a result they say was statistically
impossible. Chavez foes argue the supposed finding indicated the machines were
rigged to impose a ceiling on "yes" votes.
This would be one novel way to guard against a repeat of the
So Chavez remains in power. This is distasteful to me and should
be to any proponent of human rights and democracy. But he gets a pass for
hating Bush. What can we do? Not much.
I’m disappointed. I just don’t know if we can afford to do anything about Chavez. The Venezuelans may just have to suffer under the thug leader that many foolishly support.
“Back” (Posted
I'm back from beyond the event horizon. I know this is true since time stopped. How else to explain that the idiot Sadr is still alive? More later. Must find out how Chavez won his referendum.
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“Look Around” (Posted
I’ll be out of the loop for a
week. No internet. No TV. News itself will be scarce. I think I actually pass
the event horizon at some point. God help me. So I’ll post nothing new until the
22nd .
If you’ve just started
reading The Dignified Rant in the last few months, feel free to pick a month
from my archives
of national security posts back to July 2002 and see how I did in the light of
hindsight. Or check out my war essay written
just after 9-11. Or see my List of Annoying
Things or my occasional stabs at humor in Landfill. I also
have essays about my home life in Home Front,
although I’m sure this has a more limited appeal since my readership here tends
to be family and female friends since it is way off foreign policy topics.
Heck, you can check out some of my published
stuff, too, and see what editing can do for my writing!
Thanks for reading!
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“What if We Stop ‘Stealing’ the Moslem
World’s Oil?” (Posted
It seems like many critics of
the war argue that we could walk away from the
So what if we manage to
create a hydrogen or fossil fuel-free economy in the next 20 or 30 years? What
if solar power and wind power change from a Green wet dream to reality? Will
the Islamist fanatics finally stop trying to kill us when we no longer “steal”
their oil? Sudan’s recent playing of the “oil card” by claiming the West’s
interest in stopping a Sudanese genocide in Darfur was
really about oil and Gold prompted this thought, as well as a recent NPR report
on alternative fuels. Or listen to Sadr or the other
grievance masters talk about how we “steal” their oil. They seem genuinely
angry, eh?
I think that however good it
would be to make Middle Eastern oil irrelevant to our energy needs, becoming
independent or even significantly less dependent would not end our reasons to
stay involved in the region. It would probably increase our need to intervene,
actually. If you think the Islamists want to kill us and the Moslems resent us
now when we buy their oil, imagine
what they’ll think when we stop buying their
oil. Imagine what they’ll think when the money slows to a trickle and oil is
just a pollutant that spoils their land. Imagine what the rulers will think
when we don’t care about their continued rule to keep stability? Imagine how
they’ll act when they can’t buy the weapons and other things that make them
states. Imagine how angry they’ll get when they realize they blew the decades
of opportunity they had from oil exports by failing to build up non-oil
economic assets.
They’ll be pissed.
It will be a race to see if
looming poverty leads the people of the region to make a reality check and use
their education to rebuild their world or whether they grip their grievances
even tighter and try to use their diminishing resources to strike us in
revenge.
And we won’t have to switch
completely to get this result. Once non-oil energy sources reach some minimum
level, the writing will be on the wall for oil as an energy source and all that
oil in the ground will be sold at fire sale prices lest the owners be stuck
with a pollutant rather than black Gold.
Not that this will happen any
time soon so I’m sure my prediction will go untested, but I bet the oil states
will see conspiracies everywhere to keep them down.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAUG2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA16AUG04B
“Looking Ahead to Future War” (Posted
Strategypage has what appears to be a dry bomb
damage assessment story (BDA) that hints to me of what the Air Force is
looking ahead to fight:
August 14, 2004: The
U.S. Air Force, long a leader in technological innovation, is reinventing the
wheel. The air force has rediscovered target networks and is revising it’s combat planning process to better analyze the overall
impact of bombing different types of targets. JEFX is an Air Force experiment
that is trying new technologies to improve the ability to do the most damage to
enemy military capability, in the shortest amount of time, and using the least
number of bombs. As the air force puts it, JEFX, “provides new capabilities and
machine-to-machine information flow between intelligence preparation of the battlespace, targeting, information collection management
and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance management tools.” In plain
English that means that more powerful computers, communications and software
are going to be used to speed up the analysis of targets in terms how they fit
into the overall enemy war effort, and what effect bombing any particular
target will have on the overall enemy war capabilities
When you are talking about
impacting the overall enemy war capabilities, you are talking about a long war.
So when looking at this Air Force effort, we can rule out wars such as Panama
1989, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and the 2003 Iraq War. These were all six
weeks or less in duration and we were able to take down the enemy very quickly.
Long wars can be insurgencies such as in
Given that short conventional
wars don’t really need this strategic-level focus on overall warfighting capabilities; and long counter-insurgencies are
not appropriate for BDA, what kind of wars are we worried about having accurate
BDA to quickly and effectively reduce enemy warfighting
abilities? Are we really looking ahead to more Kosovo-type wars? Or
I think we are looking at
On the first goal, doing the
most damage to enemy military capabilities, this is obviously most important
when fighting an enemy with a lot of military capabilities. When fighting a
smaller power, other factors such as limiting friendly military casualties,
maintaining public opinion, and avoiding civilian deaths are the real
constraints on our ability to totally destroy the enemy from the air. Heck, in
those wars, our ground superiority is so great that air power can be restrained
by non-military factors without harming our war effort very much at all. When
we don’t have a huge margin of superiority to start, this ability to damage the
enemy becomes highly important.
On the second, doing the
damage in the shortest amount of time, we have to again rule out wars against
small powers as the main motivation. Since speed in bombing risks civilian
casualties in all but Persian Gulf War-style operations where we could
leisurely blast Iraqi army units out in the desert away from civilian targets,
why would we insist on this type of speed. In the Iraq War, we just focused on
the Republican Guards for bombing and ignored the rabble army and the cities
except for precise strikes. Given that
The third factor, using the
least number of bombs, does not make much sense when looking at minor wars. We
had plenty of bombs to use over
In addition, we have to
remember that we will be engaging in an asymmetric fight here in terms of pain.
The Chinese will be hitting our bases on foreign soil with
It is clear in my mind that
So I hope the Air Force gets
good at bomb damage assessment and analyzing how best to break down an enemy’s warfighting capability, and shares it with the Navy. While
I focused on Air Force assets, any war with
The War on Terror and efforts
to eliminate nuclear-armed rogue states are rough enough. It is painful to
realize that old fashioned peer enemies can develop, too.
"Present at the Creation"
(Posted
DOD had an outstanding briefing
on Army transformation last month.
We have 1.2 million soldiers
in the Army available from the active component (about half a million), and the
National Guard and Army Reserve (350,000 each. With over 123,000 combined
mobilized). More than a quarter million are overseas now in 120 countries.
The Army is fighting two wars
in
The briefing brings up an
issue of manpower that is not often addressed, the concept of the factors that
make our troop strength less than what it appears for putting boots on the
ground. We have an “institutional army” that is composed of recruiters,
trainers, base operations, doctrine drafters, maintenance, administration,
construction, and the like. Without these people we don’t have trained troops,
doctrine, and the right equipment and we don’t have the ability to project them
around the globe. The briefing doesn’t give numbers but I think we’re talking a
hundred thousand plus here as a ball park figure. If some of these jobs are
transferred to civilians, more troops will become available for the deploying
Army.
There is also a category of
troops who are in school, sick or injured, transferring units, or in the brig,
that numbers 63,000. Stabilizing units so that people go to school at the same
time and not when they are on call will cut down on the impact of this
category. The Army is looking at a three-year rotation for active units and the
reserves could be on a five- or six-year rotation, so you know when you are
likely to be deployed and when you will be down for retraining, school, or
whatever. Stabilizing the units so troops train together for years will also
improve the effectiveness of the units in a way that is not apparent except in
battle. Unit cohesiveness will be enhanced, too. And satisfaction in staying in
one location longer will help families put down roots and reduce the stress on
military families. That helps troop morale, too.
The Army is also retraining
units from those oriented to holding Europe in the face of a Soviet invasion in
a big war where everyone is mobilized to
support the active Army to those more appropriate for smaller but more frequent
wars that may need to be at least started without relying on the reserves.
With the National Guard, part
of the problem is that it has too many units for the 350,000 soldiers it has.
So do you fill it up or look at units not needed and get rid of them so the
remaining units are overstrength? If you do the latter, people can go to school
without harming a given unit’s ability to mobilize deploy without raiding other
units for personnel and thus impacting non-deploying units. Apparently, 100,000
slots are being restructured (deleted or moved to the active component). In
addition, the Army is looking at reorganization so that no states are hit too
hard at any one time to spread the pain of mobilization out among the states
and to ensure that states have troops on call for state emergencies. Some might
come from adjoining states to help cover contingencies.
With our combat units, we are
adding 10 brigades by the end of 2006 (3 in ’04, 3 in ’05, and 4 in ’06) and
may add five more. And all brigades (but the Strykers
apparently) will be reorganized with 2 line battalions of 4 companies each and
a recon battalion plus support units so they can operate pretty independently.
To me, it looks like these BCTs will operate like
little corps with the recon battalion scouting like the old armored cavalry
regiment and the two battalions operating like the divisions behind the
regiment. The recon units would direct incredible firepower from assets from
all the services. They are supposed to be more modular than the current
brigades but that is not apparent to me. Still, they do provide more maneuver
units for better force rotation. I like this. I thought we’d be better off with
more but smaller
divisions but this will work (as published is here
though editing garbled it a bit). Maybe better or worse but it is better than
the current organization.
In addition, the Army is
looking to build Future Combat Systems to equip the Future Force as it is
called in order to build a networked force lighter and more lethal than the
current heavy forces. I am skeptical
about this, I’ll admit.
All this change in the
structure of the Army is to be accompanied by a major change in global
deployment patterns. On Monday, the President is supposed to speak on a major
redeployment of our military forces around the world. 70- to 100,000 troops
will be moved from
Two-thirds of the reduction will come
from
I don’t think that having
Army units in
The post-Cold War era ended
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAUG2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA15AUG04A
“Permanent
Seat?” (Posted
This article
is interesting.
We would like
Article Nine of
"If Japan is going to play a full role on the world
stage and become a full active participating member of the Security Council,
and have the kind of obligations that it would pick up as a member of the
Security Council, Article Nine would have to be examined in that light,"
Kyodo quoted Powell as saying.
"But whether or not Article Nine should be modified or
changed is absolutely and entirely up to the Japanese people to decide because
the United States would not presume an opinion," he added in an interview
with Japanese media in Washington on Thursday.
I wonder what is going on. It
seems that we are definitely expecting
In a perfect world,
I say give the European Union
a seat. Give
I guess I don’t know what the
big picture should look like even though the UN Security Council clearly must
change from the world of 1945. We can’t hold the UN in stasis forever. But
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAUG2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA14AUG04B
“Strykers
Survive” (Posted
I am on record as supporting Strykers as a gap bridger
between light infantry and heavy armor. Yet I have been highly skeptical that
they would be survivable against enemy fire in combat and have been highly skeptical
that there are many cases where we can’t afford to rely on airlifted light
infantry or nearby Marines afloat because of the lethality of the enemy; or
can’t afford to wait for shipped in heavy forces because of the time factor.
The Strykers were supposed to be able to drive off
the C-130s with guns blazing if necessary. Strategypage highlights the success of the Stryker in
real combat in
August 14, 2004: A
U.S. Army Stryker brigade stationed in the north of Iraq, around Mosul, for eight months now, has proved itself quite
capable. The Stryker armored vehicles are controversial, as they are light
armored vehicles that move via wheels, rather than tracks. The Stryker brigade
equipment exchanged a lot of armor protection and heavy weapons for more
electronics and communications equipment. The brigade has an initial version of
the “battlefield Internet” that the army is slowly putting together. The action
in and around
The troops in the Stryker Brigade are
trained to same high standards of all American infantry, which means soldiers
capable of operating at high speed. The Stryker brigade has a new
communications system that allows for speedier operations. Whether it’s getting
out of an ambush, or getting into position for a raid or attack, the extra
speed leaves the enemy at a disadvantage.
I still think the idea that
we will rush these forces in by air to fight a bolt-from-the-blue invasion of
an ally is unlikely. But I have to admit I was wrong on vehicle survivability.
I will draw a small amount of analytical comfort by noting that the Strykers in
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“Are the Shias on the Verge of Revolting?”
(Posted
With US Marines and the Army spearheading the effort, a joint US-Iraqi force has driven the Sadr Mahdi army into a corner in Najaf. Unfortunately the corner is a revered shrine in Najaf where the defeated remnants have taken refuge. Instead of sending Iraqis in to finish off Sadr, the Iraqi government is negotiating with the Sadr thugs:
Hoagland says our attacks on Najaf while we leave Fallujah and other centers of Sunni resistance alone risk telling the Shias that we are more interested in suppressing Shias to promote stability than in finally defeating the Baathist Sunnis:
Baathist killers and Wahhabi terrorists go unarrested,
unprosecuted and unchallenged in the streets of Fallujah, Ramadi and Sunni
sections of
Sadr deserves no sympathy.
Are we blowing it? Are the Shias
forgetting that we did in fact overthrow Saddam and set in motion a process
under which they will dominate
There is certainly no shortage of articles saying the same thing. This article says the Shias are mad about the Najaf fighting:
Iraqi Shiites expressed anger Thursday at a
major U.S.-led assault on a rebel militia in the holy city of
This AP analysis expands on this theme:
Najaf is no Fallujah. It is a city sacred to Shiite Muslims, who make
up 60 percent of the country's 25 million people. And it is home to the Imam
Ali shrine, which holds the remains of Ali, the most exalted Shia saint.
With militants loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr hiding out in the shrine, fighting will
almost certainly reach there — a battle sure to infuriate Shiites throughout
the country.
The fighting, if it ends with the arrest or killing of al-Sadr, also risks turning the young anti-American firebrand
into a martyr.
The writer notes the risks of striking decisively or keeping the fighting as low key as possible:
If they can rapidly put down the uprising — and the Marines
have said they plan to rout the militants with massive force — it might spark
intense, but short-lived, anti-government protests.
If they chose to continue low-level daily confrontations
with the militants, it would chip away at the government's legitimacy,
erode its already shaky efforts to stabilize the country and sabotage moves to
push
He describes my “band aid off fast” approach to irritants like Sadr. Better to nail him as rapidly as possible and risk some anger than keep a potential source of rebellion around while he looks for a chance to do real harm to us and gains sympathy from the Shias. The writer’s analysis argues that both sides are looking for total victory, quoting one of Sadr’s people:
"Occupation forces have come to realize that there
will be no stability in
How this squares with the negotiations that began instead of the assault I do not know. And there are bigger stakes involved than putting down that idiot Sadr who leads young Iraqi men and boys (and whatever Iranians are with him too) to their deaths while he escapes again and again:
The Shia majority of
We risk the destruction of or damage to the Najaf Imam Ali shrine if our Iraqi allies rush the mosque
to capture or kill Sadr and secure the shrine once
and for all. Indeed, the Iranians might have rigged the shrine to blow even
without Sadr’s knowledge. Should that happen, the
Iranians will try to exploit the incident to divide
I think the West continues to see the Shias
through the distorting lens of
I think the Shias are still shell-shocked from the Saddam era but in our corner. Other than Sadr, I’ve seen no indications of Shia resistance to us. And Sadr apparently requires significant Iranian aid to be a pain.
End that pudgy thug Sadr’s budding career now. I’ll risk him becoming a martyr. Most dead rebels just become footnotes. If not, there’d be a heck of a lot more martyrs in this world. The Shias will stick with us as long as we kill our enemies and move forward on democracy. Just do it fast but please be careful with the shrine. There are risks regardless of what we do and I still believe in pulling the band aid off fast. And then turn our attention once and for all to Fallujah and the Sunni Baathist resisters. Their continued resistance may not mean we are plotting against the Shias, but this resistance is an indication that we made a mistake holding back when we had them by the throat in April.
And deal with Tehran soon. The mullahs are the Shias I worry about:
Iran has issued an extraordinary list of
demands to Britain and other European countries, telling them to provide
advanced nuclear technology, conventional weapons and a security guarantee
against nuclear attack by
The mullahs also lie that they just want nuclear energy for peaceful economic reasons (and will endure whatever economic sanctions the West imposes in order to enjoy these economic benefits!). And by the way, they tested a missile, too.
Don’t let the mullahs keep us from ending their nuclear
ambitions by tying us down in
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAUG2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA13AUG04A
“Legion of Idiots” (Posted
We are engaged in a two-front war in
When the concept of fighting two major nations along two
separate fronts hundreds of miles long each (and which is commonly used to
describe biting off more than you can chew as in the Germans in two world wars)
is transferred to describe two battles against a Legion of Idiots, the press is
descending into girlie man status or idiocy. Having panicked over the first Sadr uprising, the press is trying to portray this one as
the real thing, too. To be fair, the actual article which is reported in part
by John Burns, is far more straightforward. Still, the
headline reflects the general tenor of a press corps that thinks a couple
mortar shells landing is a major attack. In their minds this seems to be a new
We are simply fighting battles against one poorly led militia in two locations and that is the extent of the drama. The press can’t even point to initial militia success or any collapses by Iraqi police or National Guard forces as proof of drama. The Iraqi security forces have held against the intial Sadr attacks:
In a repeat of what happened in April and
May, the gunmen of Muqtada al Sadr
are being killed or dispersed. The big difference now is that the Iraqis are
doing more of the fighting, and Sadr's followers are
having a harder time trying to take over neighborhoods in large cities like
Sadr's
rebellion is only occupying a portion of coalition troops. For the last two
weeks, there have been major efforts along the Syrian and Iranian border to
keep out foreign fighters and military assistance. Documents and material
captured from Sadr fighters indicate lots of assistance
coming from
Having absorbed the first enemy blow, our combined forces (via Instapundit and then American Thinker) are now attacking and smashing the Sadr fools:
Early this morning, at the request of the governor of
In a move to operate efficiently, members of Najaf's
ING and portions of neighboring ING units were put under operational control of
the 11th MEU yesterday. This action will allow for a more effective integration
with ING forces, as both units fight side-by-side against enemy forces that
threaten the peace and stability of Najaf. In
addition, ING soldiers received a shipment of hundreds of AK-47 machine guns
and crates of ammunition.
A Marine battalion and two Army ground battalions plus Iraqi ground forces are participating in the Najaf operation.
This is not a two-front war. This is not an uprising. This
is a demented pawn of
Yet there is danger and this farce of resistance could be leveraged into a problem by a bigger enemy:
But military planners were also vexed by
intelligence reports that the militiamen, who have fought U.S. and Iraqi
security forces here for a week, had rigged explosives in the shrine of Imam
Ali, the most sacred site in the Shiite branch of Islam. The reports indicated that
the insurgents, who have been using the shrine as a refuge and staging area,
would wait until advancing
Military officials said the reports had not been
confirmed. "The fear is that the intelligence might not be right in fact,
but in effect -- that he has something catastrophic planned for the mosque that
he will blame on the U.S.," one commander said, referring to Moqtada Sadr, the radical cleric
who leads the loosely formed Mahdi Army militia.
The sensitivity of any
"The
"These crimes are a dark blemish which
will never be wiped from the face of
Unless the Iranians can engineer the destruction of a sacred site and portray this as an American atrocity, this will simply be a decisive American and Iraqi victory over a minor enemy, Sadr, and a setback for Sadr’s Iranian backers.
I think this is it for Sadr:
American forces have been close to capturing or killing Mr. Sadr before, but have repeatedly backed off. This time American commanders had vowed to crush his guerrillas,
known as the Mahdi Army.
It would be shameful to let Sadr walk away yet again. We should not have stopped short of his death or arrest in May, giving him a chance to fight us again now and risk damage to a Shia holy site. He’ll be enjoying his 72 raisins any day now. I suggest he eat them slowly. They’ll need to last an eternity.
And Iran itself will be next.
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“An Excuse for Doing Nothing” (Posted
Via Instapundit,
a Vodkapundit
essay on the folly of believing we can have a plan for the peace that
actually will work when the reality of peace arrives:
That's what gets me about
all the complaints that President Bush "didn't have a plan" to
"win the peace" in
The dictum was von Moltke's but no matter, the idea still right. As with virtually any
objection the anti-war side made and continues to make, this objection was not
made with the objective of making the war or the peace after the battlefield victory
more successful. No, this objection was made to kill the whole war with studies
and plans. Study it. Study it more. Update the study with more information. And
then study it yet again. Then make different assumptions and then study it
again from a new perspective. Can’t have groupthink, right? Oh, and the data
needs updating. Revise the study. Then draw up the plan. Then, and only then,
can we debate going to war.
Before you know it, however, Uday and his equally psycho brother are announcing that
American ships must leave the Gulf since the Iraqis have nuclear missiles and
are crazy enough to use them if we don’t leave.
Better yet from the anti-war
“planning bloc” perspective, back to revise the plan! Iraqi nukes would be new
data we must incorporate! Ah, nuance.
Green also notes what really
annoys me when some say we should not fight back—that we’ll only create more
terrorists! They kill us when we don’t fight but if we fight, look out! Then
they’ll really get mad! Better to let them kill us in bearable numbers is the
reasoning, since we can’t beat them. Heck we not only can’t beat them, we don’t
deserve to beat them. Maybe if we get hit enough, we’ll get humble and our
enemies will decide we are worthy of living. That is their logic and it sickens
me. As Green says:
First off, let's brush aside the Loser
Notion that if we kill terrorists, we'll only breed more terrorists. So what?
Every dead terrorist is, well, dead. And we can always build more bombs and
make more bullets. For 30 years now, the
I don’t like it that we are at
war and I want to win this war. I want peace. It would be nice to win in my
lifetime. It would be nice if my son could grow up in a world not at war and without
a government that has clamped down so hard for security that he does not know
what it is like to live free from surveillance and tracking and the threat of explosions
and gas attacks and genetically engineered plagues. To win we must kill our
enemies. There is nothing bloodthirsty about advocating killing those who try
to kill us. So I say kill them. Kill them in large numbers and kill them as
soon as we can. Anything less gives our enemies the chance to kill us. And postpones the day of peace.
Which
brings me to the last point of Green’s. That we have to go on the offensive or we will evolve into a security
state that fuels our own homegrown terrorists. This is what puzzles me about
the civil libertarians. How can they oppose going on the offensive and fighting
our enemies overseas? How can they base their opposition to the war on the idea
that it makes us less free? How can
they fail to see that we have enemies out to kill us? If we stand on our
shores and passively defend, no amount of security measures and no level of
martial law will protect us. And after every attack, we will clamp down harder
at home. In time, the enemy will figure a way around our new security measures
and in time, civil libertarians will dream of the happy days when the
government only had the theoretical right to see their library records. This
type of struggle might never end. And worse, it might not matter if we won. If
we become a dictatorship will we be worth fighting for? At
some level, sure, in the sense that it is better to at least be alive.
But we will have lost the edge freedom gives us in war. And we will have lost
our freedom.
Fighting the war doesn’t make
us less free, but fighting the war on the defensive will make us less free in
time. For the sake of our liberties, we must reach out around the globe and
crush our enemies. With haste. Some of them seek
nuclear weapons and they will use them if they can get them. When states that
support terror and pursue nukes to kill us are themselves destroyed and when
radical Islamism is dead or sitting in poverty in the middle of a rump,
oil-less
And yes, I’m thinking mostly
about
There are two on the Axis of
Evil left to deal with.
Spring 2005
please. Or December, if the loyal
opposition gets their regime change at home this November. There is no excuse
for doing nothing. We have a lot to do.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAUG2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA10AUG04A
"Honor Sadr!" (Posted
That dimwitted
despot-in-waiting Sadr has urged his followers to keep
fighting. Never mind that his cannon fodder are
being mowed down in a form of a live-fire training exercise for our troops. But
Sadr is at least working with us now. We're singing
from the same Hymnal, so to speak:
"I wish I will be bombed by a
We're making real progress in
attitude adjustment when Sadr is reduced to opining
on his preferred method of dispatch.
Honor him. Our snipers have
bullets.
The nuke is overkill,
although I appreciate the newly cooperative attitude.
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAUG2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA09AUG04B
"Oh Good Grief" (Posted
Do we not have enough
problems without this blast from the past nipping at our ankles? Check this
out.
The Russians are upset that
we will upgrade a radar site for anti-missile
defense in
"The
"However, the very geography of the radar in
I think we need to call in
the Russian ambassador and have him explain why
Or perhaps we could just
explain to them that according to domestic opponents of missile defense, it
won't work anyway. I'm sure the Russians will be relieved to hear that.
Or hey, the Russians could
listen to their own military. They may not think the system won't work at all
but they have a bright side:
The Russian military meanwhile, has said
it does not believe the
At worst, the Russians have a
few decades before it is a problem for
Permalink to this post: http://www.geocities.com/brianjamesdunn/TDRFAAUG2004ARCHIVES.html#TDRNSA09AUG04A
“Bad News for Sadr” (Posted
Sadr is alive but his new army went down faster than his old one. Sadr wants a ceasefire now and I’m sure he’d like to gear up for a round 3 if he can’t get his way through bullying. Or maybe the Iranians are pulling his army’s strings totally now and it has spun out of his control.
But potential recruits would like to give the new Iraqi government a chance to make things work. In Sadr City itself, hope for the new government and perhaps a reality check as young men counted the ones who came back from the April and August clashes (and didn’t need to take off their shoes to keep counting), have led to a new outlook for now at least:
Those moderate young men with hopes of an improved economy
provide Allawi with a chance to rally support among
Iraqis still patient after decades of oppression under Saddam, American
occupation and continuing uncertainty.
For his part, Allawi has taken a
cautious approach to Sadr, saying he was still
welcome to take part in the political process and blaming much of the current
fighting on common criminals.
Even some Iraqis who say they would go to war for Sadr seem less radical than in April, when the fiery cleric
led a Shi'ite uprising against
Allawi does need to make some progress, with our substantial help of course, to improve the lives of the poor. Fear is the beginning of wisdom; but despair leads to suicidal behavior as much as anger can lead to acts of defiance.
Yet being cautious with Sadr is a
mistake. If the government of
Moderate young men say life won't change in
Taking a stand against the militiamen could be risky for
teenagers who want to see Allawi stamp his authority
along its potholed streets and dirt lanes piled high with garbage.
"The youth are not joining the Mehdi
Army these days. But if we confront any of them they threaten us," said
carpenter Mohammed Saleh, 19.
Sadr and others causing problems more effectively for the government and us may face a humiliating and final end now:
Iraq's interim government reinstated the
death penalty Sunday for a range of crimes including murder, kidnapping and
drug offences, officials said.
The EU isn’t happy. The Iraqis don’t care. And why should they?
Allawi’s government appears to be looking to confront Sadr instead of coddle him.
Yet Sadr’s surviving militia appear to be preparing for a fight:
"There is no negotiation with any militia that bears
arms against Iraq and the Iraqi people," a heavily guarded Allawi told reporters in Najaf,
160 km (100 miles) south of Baghdad.
"I believe gunmen should leave the holy sites ...
quickly, lay down their weapons and return to the rule of order and law." Allawi held talks with the governor of Najaf,
the holiest Shi'ite city in
Despite Allawi's order, fighters
roamed the streets and laid mines around the crypts and mausoleums of Najaf's ancient cemetery, one of the oldest in the
All in all, these seem like bad news for Sadr.
Even worse, unlike the April uprising, I’ve read no reports of shaky Iraqi
security units. Is the end game finally arriving for his mini reign of terror?
And if he is really backed or pushed by the Iranians, are we clearing the decks
for action against
As an aside, why do the president’s opponents claim that this small amount of oil off the market will harm us by keeping oil prices high while amounts that would be ten times or more greater per day from ANWR are believed insignificant? But I digress. But then again, I have no editors. Hahahahaha.
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“Two
Chavez has the support of Venezuela’s poor and could win the election even if he did not cheat:
By labeling his foes as "devils"
backed by what he calls President Bush's "imperialist"
administration, Chavez has presented the recall vote as a decisive battle
between good and evil, poor and rich, patriots and traitors.
Wow. Has anyone seen Carville around lately? Nah…
Yet Chavez won’t take chances on that score. Recall the Sandinistas ahead in the polls who then lost the election. No, there will not be a fair election contest on August 15th.
The opposition has a hard path to travel to get rid of Chavez.
As noted above, Chavez could actually win the election straight out. He might be able to out-poll the opposition even without spending state money and using state assets to bribe the electorate and spread his propaganda. Winning this way is the best for him, of course.
If Chavez can’t win the vote, he can depress the vote in opposition strongholds so that even if he loses the popular vote, the pro-recall total remains less than the 3.8 million votes Chavez got in his last election. In that case, the recall fails. This can be accomplished through the cumbersome voting procedure that people who work cannot afford to endure. The poor who back Chavez will have an advantage in long lines.
Chavez can also delay the vote or the actual count of the vote a week or so until the date by which the vote must be held to force a new presidential election for the remainder of the term has passed. Past that date and the vice president becomes president and no new election is held. Chavez runs the show behind the scenes and runs again in a year and a half.
If Chavez does not delay the vote or count, he could actually get his courts to say Chavez may run in the special election that will be held 30 days after a successful recall. With the opposition potentially fractured, Chavez could win this election even after losing the recall vote.
Chavez could claim—with a few bombs going off in pro-recall strongholds and maybe a token bomb that takes out some of the pro-Chavez people—that violence has invalidated the election. Chavez will declare martial law and round up the opposition leaders. Chavez has already claimed explosives and plotters have disappeared, so someone to blame is conveniently set up. If Chavez claims violence invalidates the vote and the military backs him, what can be done? Heck, if Chavez wins the vote even with a few bombs going off, he will portray himself as the brave defiant leader who withstood thuggery and superpower intrigue to win. Please keep in mind that nobody but Chavez has any interest in violence during the voting.
And I sincerely doubt Jimmy Carter will do anything but validate the election process that Chavez has stacked in his favor.
So the opposition has to overcome a number of obstacles to eject Chavez from power. Chavez can throw in a road block at any point and stay in control.
The Number Two man on the Axis of El Vil will remain in power at the end of this exercise. What will we do then?
What will he do? I have a bad feeling about that last question.
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“Amnesty” (Posted
Ah, the details of the
Those who committed pardonable crimes must
present themselves to authorities, provide intelligence on others who committed
serious crimes and give a statement vowing not to commit such crimes again.
Good. Bind them to our side.
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“No Help. Just Kill Sadr” (Posted
Seriously. No need to arrest Sadr after his latest attacks. He wants to play GI Jihadi? Fine. Shoot him. He commands his Mahdi Army? Let him die leading it. His so-called army may be a joke but even when we kill 400 in three or four days, a few too many of our troops die too. Plus the civilians caught in the crossfire.
As for the UN offer to help, they can forget it. We don’t need that kind of help.
Or does Sadr have more oil than I thought. Perhaps old habits are hard to break for the UN crooks.
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“And at Sea” (Posted
Our enemies plot to kill us. The
What we've noticed is that al-Qaida and other organizations have an
awareness about maritime trade," Adm. Alan West, the first sea
lord, told Lloyd's List newspaper. "They've realized how important it is
for world trade in general (and) they understand that significance."
Gibralter and
Or one of our carriers could be targeted. Highly symbolic of US military power.
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“Never Mind” (Posted
Sadr is apparently open to a ceasefire since his call to attack our forces and the Iraqi government. Well no doubt he is ready to stop fighting:
The Marines have been busy. When we pulled out 1st Armored Division (-) and elements of 2nd Cavalry Regiment (light) we replaced them with a brigade of Army troops (National Guard, I think?) and two Marine Expeditionary Units (like a reinforced battalion each). Najaf is apparently the responsibility of one of the MEUs.
No ceasefire. Bullet to forehead. I
have no problem with an
amnesty for the common low-level resisters as
If we fail to kill our enemies, we get situations like Ramadi where Marines hold outposts trying to keep the enemy suppressed:
This is what the war has come down to in
Half a dozen or so Marine observation posts dot Ramadi's
main drag, linking heavily fortified bases and helping to keep the inhospitable
city from turning into a Fallouja-like sanctuary for
insurgents.
When the enemy lives, they get the opportunity every day to attack us. Even though we win fight after fight quietly, eventually the Baathists will overrun an outpost and kill a dozen Marines. This is why I wanted our armor to roll through the Ramadi Gap in the Iraq War.
End the Sadr threat for good. The
main enemy of Baathists and their small number of
Islamist shock troops are the bigger threat and I hate to have Sadr sparking anything in the Shia
areas when we turn our attention to the Sunni triangle. Fallujah
is target one. Ramadi is dangerous. And
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“
There seems to be momentum building on
"The AU plans to increase troop strength of its
protection force for
Deployment could take place in a few days.
French soldiers of the 16th Hunter's
Battalion secure the tarmac at Abeche airport in
eastern
That was the southern of the two airfields I figured the west could use. I didn’t know if either was still usable but this one is. It’s on a main road so it probably had a higher chance of still being in usable condition. The northern one is at Fada. And might the Libyans let us use our old air base there as a staging point?
There is one indication from this article that a no-fly zone is firming up:
At the United
Nations, U.S. Ambassador John Danforth said
"If this
situation continues, it's going to be very visible," Danforth
said. "The government of
And the ground component of a no-drive zone is evolving:
The "Plan of Action for
I’m skeptical of stretching military resources for purely
humanitarian missions when they might be needed elsewhere. These are missions
of choice—albeit with a high moral component to do something, I concede. I do
worry about mission creep in these things where the threshold for intervention
is low because stopping slaughter or starvation is good to do, but the
increased mission that can develop “as long as we’re there” is usually something
we would not have done had we debated the bigger mission before going in. But as
I’ve said, this isn’t just a humanitarian mission.
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"Lessons Learned?" (Posted
Sadr lived to fight another day after his pasting by US
troops this spring. We had him by the throat and we released our grip. Summer
is upon us and Sadr is tanned, rested, and ready to fight:
The
radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr
called for a national uprising against American and coalition forces today as a
two-month truce between Mr. Sadr and the
In
But
heavy fighting appeared confined to Najaf, a Shiite
holy city 100 miles south of
American
and Iraqi casualty figures were unavailable as of late afternoon.
Each
side blamed the other for the apparent breakdown of the truce, which comes less
than two weeks before a national political conference that Mr. Sadr has refused to attend.
Is it too much to ask that we
actually treat our enemies as enemies? Damn it all, that thug Sadr deserves the attention of a sniper. He deserved it a
couple months ago. Or a year ago. But we are where we
are and I'd settle for a jail cell as an improvement over the current coddling.
In three months I wouldn't be too surprised to read that he received
How clear can it get? Is this
good enough?
"Fight
the blasphemous, fight the Americans," Mr. Sadr
said in a statement issued in Najaf, about 100 miles
south of
He's declared war on
us—again. Finish the Sadr Uprising once and for all.
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“Why is This Man Still Alive?” (Posted
We beat the crud out of Sadr’s militia after his forces unwisely tried to spark an uprising against us. But at the end of the operations, Sadr walked free. I was very upset at the time despite my satisfaction that we fought a slow and careful campaign that decimated his forces while avoiding antagonizing the Shias as we fought near holy sites. I am firmly committed to the simple concept that we support our friends and punish our enemies. Where were the consequences for Sadr’s revolt? What lesson did he learn? Did he learn that he had a close call and should be grateful for a second chance? Heck no. He learned what any nutball can reasonably be expected to learn—we just won’t go for the kill. So what is Sadr doing now?
Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr's militia has kidnapped 18 Iraqi police
officers in hopes of using them as leverage to force authorities to free
detained militants, police said Tuesday.
The Iraqis need to get him. Arrest him or shoot him if he doesn’t respond to the order to surrender in about ten seconds.
Consequences. How will we earn friends if we won’t destroy our enemies? Don’t teach the Iraqis it is safer to be our enemy!
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“If it Sails—Sink It!” (Posted
Via National Review Online, this from Jane’s:
In an article due to appear on Wednesday, Jane's said the
two new systems appeared to be based on a decommissioned Soviet
submarine-launched ballistic missile, the R-27.
It said communist
Jane's, which did not specify its sources, said the
sea-based missile was potentially the more threatening of the two new weapons
systems.
"It would fundamentally alter the missile threat posed
by the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of
Its missiles would have a range of at least 2,500 km. We cannot let that sub sail:
"If you can get a missile aboard a warship, in
particular aboard a submarine...you can move your submarine to strike at
targets such as
We may not be able to do much about destroying every deeply dug in, hidden, and dispersed land-based missile North Korea may build, but if they try to put nuclear missiles at sea, we can do something.
Put a couple of our nuclear attack submarines (or let the Japanese use their diesels and give them the honor) outside the port where it is building and when it puts to sea, we should sink it. No envoys. No bribes. No deals. Just multiple wire-guided torpedoes to send the sub to the bottom. And then publicly deplore the terrible safety of their boats while denying any involvement at all. Or not. Perhaps we should just dare the world to complain about our taking action. If the French can blow up a Greenpeace ship without too much loss of international stature, surely we can take out a nuclear missile-armed submarine.
As the North Koreans have helpfully reminded us recently, we are technically at war.
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“Damn Straight” (Posted
The president defended the Iraq War. About time.
Bush acknowledged that no banned weapons had been found in
Iraq, but he said they might still turn up. "We still would have gone to
make our country more secure," he said, adding that Hussein "had the
capability of making weapons."
"He had terrorist ties," Bush said. "The
decision I made was the right decision."
The comments, which the president offered during a brief
White House news conference, marked something of a political gamble. Polls
suggest that up to half the American public now believes that the war was a
mistake, given that no weapons of mass destruction have turned up in
Skeptics think he made a mistake. They can, if you’ll pardon the expression, shove it.
We did the right thing. No doubt about it. And a good chunk of the people who think now the war was a mistake will swing back to support once the peace is won. Victory has a soothing effect.
But I have one quibble with the President. It’s bad enough
the press keeps saying we have not found any chemical weapons in
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"Who Do the Islamists Want to
Win?" (Posted
I think it is pretty silly to
argue over who the Islamists want to win this fall—Bush or Kerry (or Nader if you insist on being dense).
This letter to Andrew Sullivan puts one side of this
debate well:
EMAIL OF THE DAY II: First of all, Islamic
terrorists need Bush to win re-election so that they can continue the theme of
their propaganda campaign: that
I've been thinking about who
the Islamists want to win. Does al Qaeda want to pull
a
Immensely
stupid.
The Islamo-fascists
think that anybody who fails to support their insane war and vision of Wahhabi Sunni Islam paradise—oh, say 98% of the Moslem
world—is an infidel or worse and a legitimate target. Aren't we expecting just
a little too much of these nutjobs to discern the
fine difference between
And really, for the pro-war
side, isn’t arguing over who the Islamists want to win just buying into the
anti-war side’s view that we have been attacked because of what we do? They say
if we all acted like good
And even if the Islamists
have a preference, who says they are right in their analysis? Did Osama really plan
his 9-11 attack in order to have his butt whipped and chased across
Let’s just go to the simpler
explanation. We are all the fuel for the Islamist fire. If the Islamists strike
us before the elections, the only statement the Islamists want to make is that
they want us all dead
We really need to stop
arguing over which shade if infidelism pisses them
off more.
It distracts us from the long-term
job of killing them off wherever they plot against us.
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"Ah, Screw the Diplomatic
Niceties" (Posted
Ok, the Chinese threaten
"If the '
In a further threat aimed at
us:
President and Communist Party chief Hu
Jintao issued a blunt warning to Bush Friday not to press
ahead with arms sales to the democratically ruled island that
And finally, lest anybody
fail to understand why
"We absolutely will not allow any person, using any
means, to split
There is nothing more
important to them. I bet they would even throw away the 2008 Olympics if they
provide cover to invade with the element of surprise.
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"Dang, He's Good" (Posted
Hugo Chavez is clearly not
leaving anything to chance:
Two weeks before a
presidential recall referendum, a Venezuelan judge ordered the arrests of 59
former military officers on suspicion of plotting against President Hugo
Chavez's government, the state-run press agency said Saturday.
The article says the officers
went into hiding. No doubt.
Unwilling to risk a loss at
the polls even if he thinks he's ahead in polling (like Daniel Ortega's
mistake in 1990 election in
And will our protests have
any weight after opportunists here outrageously complain that our 2000
elections were tainted by fraud? Not so harmless, is it?
"Tinpot dictator"
really fails to convey the cunning these thugs wield to remain in power.
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"Writers Unclear on the Concept:
Part Deux" (Posted
This is the first sentence of
the article:
Then the writer questions the
whole arrest:
It was not clear why al-Dhari was
detained and the
Strangely unclear on the whys
involved, the writer then notes in what should be a moment of clarity:
Ammar
Abdul Kareem said U.S. troops forced them to get out of the car, searched them,
then said they detected traces of explosive materials on the hands of al-Dhari and two other companions
Yet clarity eludes the
author, who notes:
The association was founded
last year to promote the interests of
Promoting the interests is so
elastic. You know, organizing political parties, petitions, shooting at
American troops, blowing up Iraqi civilians, kidnapping. Yep, it sure is
unclear why al-Dhari was detained. No clue in this
article at all. Nope.
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