From Senator Obama’s website comes his plan for Iraq. He says he will “remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.” The web page also contains some rather odd misstatements of fact regarding the Senator’s biography:
Barack Obama’s Plan — Judgment You Can Trust
As a candidate for the United States Senate in 2002, Obama put his political career on the line to oppose going to war in Iraq, and warned of “an occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined costs, and undetermined consequences.” Obama has been a consistent, principled and vocal opponent of the war in Iraq.
* In 2003 and 2004, he spoke out against the war on the campaign trail;
* In 2005, he called for a phased withdrawal of our troops;
* In 2006, he called for a timetable to remove our troops, a political solution within Iraq, and aggressive diplomacy with all of Iraq’s neighbors;
* In January 2007, he introduced legislation in the Senate to remove all of our combat troops from Iraq by March 2008.
* In September 2007, he laid out a detailed plan for how he will end the war as president.
Bringing Our Troops Home
Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months. Obama will make it clear that we will not build any permanent bases in Iraq. He will keep some troops in Iraq to protect our embassy and diplomats; if al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al Qaeda.
Whatever the merits or demerits of Senator Obama’s plan, he was not, as his web biography indicates, “a candidate for the United States Senate in 2002.” He was a candidate for the Illinois state senate in that year.
As for the statement that the Senator “put his political career on the line to oppose going to war in Iraq,” Thomas Edsall wrote at the Huffington Post: “In 2002, Obama was a state senator representing one of the most liberal districts in Illinois encompassing Chicago’s lake front, Hyde Park, the University of Chicago and African American neighborhoods in the southern half of the district.” That would clearly look like an anti-war district. Furthermore, at least one source says that Obama ran unopposed in the 2002 election. It is hard to put your political career too much on the line when you run unopposed.
Others have noticed the factual problems with the statements above and attributed them to Obama’s trying to stretch a thin resume into something more than it is. We don’t know about that. It is certainly true that Obama started thinking about a run for the US Senate in 2002, and announced it in 2003. Why the writer gilded the lily is something of a mystery.
It is possible that Senator Obama committed an unforced error in the Democratic debate in Texas last night. He said this:
I’ve heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon — supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition, they didn’t have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief. Now, that’s a consequence of bad judgment. And you know, the question is, on the critical issues that we face right now, who’s going to show the judgment to lead?
The Pentagon has cast doubt on Obama’s comments. The conservative blogosphere has chimed in with more extensive and colorful refutations of the Senator’s comments (here, here, here, and here, for example).
The issue of the veracity of the comments is as of this writing unsettled. Jake Tapper of ABC says he has spoken to the source and finds him credible; however, Senator John Warner apparently has doubts about the alleged 2003 incident; he has asked Obama to provide the “essential facts” of the incident in order to establish what actually happened and determine the proper accountability for this possible lapse in military procedures. (We have to say from reading commentaries from military men that the name “Scott Beauchamp” somehow comes to mind in this matter.)
If there are irregularities in the account Obama presented, this would appear to be a significant opportunity for Hillary Clinton. Senator Clinton has raised several trivial charges against Senator Obama, with negligible impact. This possible error by Obama is of a different order entirely. Mrs. Clinton portrays herself as realistic about our dangerous world and ready on Day One to be Commander in Chief. This gaffe by Obama, if it is one, would appear to be a perfect opportunity for Senator Clinton, displaying Senator Obama’s naiveté if he got all his facts bungled, or some dishonesty, if he or someone associated with his staff made important elements of the incident up.
Senator Obama himself opened the door to harsh criticism of his comments, if they were wrong. He said, speaking of the “captain” who found his platoon without ammunition: “the question is, on the critical issues that we face right now, who’s going to show the judgment to lead?” Senator Obama himself raised the issue of judgment in military matters, and it would be quite a negative thing if he had made an utter hash of it. So we will have to see whether this incident provides an opportunity for Senator Clinton to level a serious criticism at her opponent — and of course whether or not the infatuation with the Democratic Messiah is still so profound that no one may care.
Stratfor takes the position that on some international matters, including Iraq, it would not matter that much who gets elected president
There is no candidate arguing for the permanent stationing of more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. There are those who believe that political ends can and should be achieved in Iraq, and that the drawdown of forces should be keyed to achieving those ends. That is essentially the Bush policy. Then there are those who believe that the United States not only has failed to achieve its political goals but also, in fact, is not going to achieve them. Under this reasoning, the United States ought to be prepared to withdraw from Iraq on a timetable that is indifferent to the situation on the ground.
This has been Obama’s position to this point, and it distinguishes him from other candidates — including Clinton, who has been much less clear on what her policy going forward would be. But even Obama’s emphasis, if not his outright position, has shifted as a political resolution in Iraq has appeared more achievable. He remains committed to a withdrawal from Iraq, but he is not clear on the timeline. He calls for having all U.S. combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months, but qualifies his statement by saying that if al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes against the group. Since al Qaeda is in fact building a base within Iraq, Obama’s commitment to having troops in Iraq is open-ended.
The shift in Obama’s emphasis — and this is the important point — means his position on Iraq is not really different from that of McCain, the most pro-Bush candidate. Events have bypassed the stance that the situation on the ground is hopeless, so even Obama’s position has tacked toward a phased withdrawal based on political evolutions.
It has long been said that presidential candidates make promises but do what they want if elected. In foreign policy, presidential candidates make promises and, if elected, do what they must to get re-elected. Assume that the situation in Iraq does not deteriorate dramatically, which is always a possibility, and assume a president is elected who would simply withdraw troops from Iraq. The withdrawal from Iraq obviously would increase Iranian power and presence in Iraq. That, in turn, would precipitate a crisis between Iran and Saudi Arabia, two powers with substantial differences dividing them. The United States would then face the question of whether to support the Saudis against Iran. Placing forces in Saudi Arabia is the last thing the Americans or the Saudis want. But there is one thing that the Americans want less: Iranian dominance of the Arabian Peninsula.
Any president who simply withdrew forces from Iraq without a political settlement would find himself or herself in an enormously difficult position. Indeed, such a president would find himself or herself in a politically untenable position…assuming Obama wins the nomination and the presidency, the likelihood of a rapid, unilateral withdrawal is minimal. The political cost of the consequences would be too high, and he wouldn’t be able to afford it.
Question: suppose Obama were elected, and it was partially on the strength of his seemingly firm commitment to withdraw from Iraq — what would happen to his popularity and his standing among his Democratic base if he failed to deliver on his apparently clear promise, assuming the Stratfor analysis is correct?
Dick Morris says that McCain can win the general election and Romney can’t. Period. We’re not taking a position on that. As for the primaries, McCain won the Florida contest fairly decisively, 36/31, over Romney. Jay Cost has some of the details:
McCain won voters for whom the economy is their top concern, 40% to 32%…Romney won voters who think the economy is healthy. McCain won voters who think the economy is sick…
McCain did well among many of the factions he lost, including Bush supporters. He lost them by just 4% last night. It was his 22-point victory among those who dislike Bush that is the noteworthy result.,,
McCain was perceived by more Floridians as the most electable, edging Romney out by 13 points on that quality…
Romney won voters who said that cutting taxes was the higher priority, 35% to 29%. McCain won those who said reducing the deficit was more important, 42% to 27%…
McCain won a decisive victory on the question of who is most qualified to be commander-in-chief, beating Romney by 18 points.
Though many on the conservative side have serious and deep problems with McCain, we can understand his weathered and gruff appeal to many. As one of our readers wrote, he’s like a tough but amiable guy who sits down with you in a bar to have a beer. Everything is all smiles until suddenly, for no reason, he picks up his glass and smashes it over your head. Maybe that’s what some people are looking for in a president in 2008.
A year ago, President Bush announced the surge. Fred Barnes described how he got to that decision. Here is what the NYT said on January 11, 2007, after the President announced the new strategy:
President Bush is not only inviting an epic clash with the Democrats who run Capitol Hill. He is ignoring the results of the November elections, rejecting the central thrust of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and flouting the advice of some of his own generals…In so doing, Mr. Bush is taking a calculated gamble that no matter how much hue and cry his new strategy may provoke, in the end the American people will give him more time to turn around the war in Iraq and Congress will not have the political nerve to thwart him by cutting off money for the war.
The plan, outlined by the president in stark, simple tones in a 20-minute speech from the White House library, is vintage George Bush — in the eyes of admirers, resolute and principled; in the eyes of critics, bull-headed, even delusional, about the prospects for success in Iraq…no American president has been able to prosecute a war indefinitely without the support of the American public. With polls showing fewer than 20 percent of Americans supporting increasing troop levels in Iraq, Mr. Bush and those Republicans who support him know that the new policy will be a tough sell.
Last night, amid the usual folderol, President Bush gave his final SOTU. He didn’t discuss the war in any detail until halfway through the 5500 word address. Some have criticized that. But we had a different take. In a year’s time, the President has changed from being beleaguered by Iraq to something quite different. The President’s relaxed and jovial demeanor was telling: this guy believes we won the war. This address seemed to be a “Mission Accomplished” speech without the swagger.
Mark Steyn reflects on the phony NYT crazed veterans story (and its sequel), and compares the cheapness of its anti-war sentiment to the famous 1933 Oxford Union resolution:
Seventy-five years ago, in February 1933, the Oxford Union passed a famous resolution, by an overwhelming margin, that “this House would under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” The Union was the world’s most famous debating society, in a great university of the dominant global power; its presidents have gone on to serve as prime ministers at home and overseas, from Gladstone in the 19th century all the way to Benazir Bhutto in the 1990s.
So the debate and its resolution sent a message to Britain’s enemies: As Churchill saw it, the vote was a “disgusting symptom” of the enervation of the ruling elites. Clifford May sees that same syndrome today around the Western world, but, in fact, it’s worse than that.
The Oxford debate took place a decade and a half after the worst carnage in human history. World War I cost the lives of some 20 million people. Do you remember in 2004 when Ted Koppel devoted one episode of “Nightline” to reading out the names of everyone killed in combat in Iraq? If he’d attempted a similar task with the British Empire’s war dead in 1919, the half-hour episode of “Nightline” would have had to be extended to 10 months – or longer if Ted took bathroom breaks. The war reached into the smallest English hamlet and culled a generation of young men. It swept through the glittering palaces, too: The brother of Queen Elizabeth (the mother of the present queen) was killed on the Western front in 1915.
It would be a statistical improbability to have been at that Oxford Union debate in 1933 and to have come from a home in which on some mantle or bureau there was not a photograph of a son or uncle or fiance forever young. It would be as if millions upon millions had been slaughtered in the first Gulf war, and, 15 years later, Harvard or Yale were debating whether we should do it all over again. In other words, we don’t have their excuse. Our war has one of the lowest fatality rates of any war ever…
Phoniness and cheap anti-war sentiment abound. Steyn notes another notorious study: “The Lancet reported that the Iraq war had killed over 650,000 civilians, over 90 percent victims of the U.S. military. That’s 500 civilians a day…Why aren’t there mass riots by Iraqi civilians protesting the daily bloodbath? Because it’s fake. It didn’t happen.”
What unites the phony stories of a crazed veteran epidemic, a homeless veteran surge, and the mass slaughter of Iraqi civilians is that they apparently are, in the minds of the media, stories too good to check. None of them can withstand a moment of serious reflection and a minute of Googling. But still they appear. Indeed, some speculate that this latest journalistic atrocity just might win a Pulitzer Prize.
Why does Johnny come marching homeless?…How is it that a nation that became so familiar with the archetypal homeless, combat-addled Vietnam veteran is now watching as more homeless veterans turn up from new wars? What lessons have we not learned? Who is failing these people? Or is homelessness an unavoidable byproduct of war, of young men and women who devote themselves to serving their country and then see things no man or woman should?…
most painfully, there was Vietnam: Tens of thousands of war-weary veterans, infamously rejected or forgotten by many of their own fellow citizens. Now it is happening again, in small but growing numbers. For now, about 1,500 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have been identified…
The homeless advocacy group that the AP story uses for its statistics says that there are on average of 3 million Americans who are homeless at some point in a given year, about 1% of the country. If 1500 recent veterans are among the homeless, that equates to something like 0.1-0.2% of the relevant population — far less than the national average calculated by the advocacy group. And this holds true even if the advocacy group is substantially overstating the problem of homelessness in the US.
So, just like the New York Times, the Associated Press gets the story precisely 180 degrees wrong. The story once again should be about how well the men and women of the armed forces do, not how poorly. But there’s as much chance of seeing such positive stories about America’s veterans as there is of seeing this tremendous military success trumpeted by our media.
Jewish identity in the past has been locked into the holocaust experience — a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends. The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful…The Jewish identity in the future appears bleak…We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players)…
“I am as certain as I am dictating these words that the stoniest German heart will melt [if only the Jews] adopt active non-violence. Human nature…unfailingly responds to the advances of love. I do not despair of his [Hitler's] responding to human suffering even though caused by him.”
They say all human traits are heritable. Maybe so.
The point of the surge was to push the Iraqi government to make these tough choices. Now, if we put in 30,000 of our finest young men and women, who are going to go after the bad guys and quell violence in certain parts of Iraq, there’s no doubt that can be done. The partnerships that have been created by the tribal sheiks in Anbar province and elsewhere gave us an extra advantage. But that doesn’t in any way undermine the basic reality.
The point of the surge was to quickly move the Iraqi government and Iraqi people. That is only now beginning to happen, and I believe in large measure because the Iraqi government, they watch us, they listen to us. I know very well that they follow everything that I say. And my commitment to begin withdrawing our troops in January of 2009 is a big factor, as it is with Senator Obama, Senator Edwards, those of us on the Democratic side. It is a big factor in pushing the Iraqi government to finally do what they should have been doing all along.
How clever must be this candidate. It was all a ruse then last September when, in her questioning of that “serious individual” General Petraeus, she “came closer than any of her colleagues to calling the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq a liar” (NY Sun). When she called the evidence that the Surge was working merely “anecdotal” and said that accepting Petraeus’s report required “a willing suspension of disbelief”, she was being merely tactical — in order to influence those Iraqis who “follow everything I say.”
No doubt those legions of AQI who were killed in the Anbar Awakening were also following Senator Clinton’s instructions, and just dropped dead at her request. Or have we committed a faux pas that “undermines the basic reality” of the Senator’s self-serving spin on what brave Americans and brave Iraqis accomplished, often at the expense of their lives.
The NYT today used 6200 words in 140 paragraphs to make the point that War is Hell — but the newspaper failed utterly in the particulars of its argument, the gist of which was this:
The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war.
Assuming that half a million Americans have served in and around Afghanistan and Iraq in the last five years (340,000 or so were deployed in 2003), the murder rate would be about 11 per 100,000 annually. This compares with a murder rate in the US overall of 27 per 100,000 for the relevant age group.
So the murder rate for servicemen, some of whom no doubt have been severely impacted by the stresses of combat, appears to be actually less than among their civilian cohort. Powerline makes the additional point that this continues to be true, even after adjusting for male/female differences in murder rates.
There is no purpose served by a fatuous hit piece like this. Even if it were true that war produced higher murder rates among ex-servicemen, so what? Must the US then abstain from military activities? Should we have not fought in wars from the Revolution through the Civil War and World Wars I and II?
We note that the Times produced a similarly gratuitous anti-military hit piece like this last year — this year’s piece argues that those coming out of the military are criminals; last year’s piece argued that those going into the military were criminals. Hard for the military to catch a break from the New York Times.
After the US invaded Iraq in 2003, one of the first orders of business was a collective judgment on Baath Party members, who were dismissed en masse from their employment. In a somewhat messy compromise, the Iraqi parliament just passed a bill intended to make it easier for former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party to return to government jobs and collect their pensions. Washington Post:
When the U.S. military overthrew Hussein in 2003, the first order of business for the Coalition Provisional Authority was to disband the Baath Party that Hussein had fashioned into his personal empire over more than three decades in power.
CPA Order 1, or the “De-Baathification of Iraqi Society,” ordered members of the Baath Party’s top four echelons “removed from their positions and banned from future employment in the public sector.” The number of Baathists purged is in dispute, but Ali al-Lami, spokesman for the current de-Baathification commission, said 150,000 people were removed between May and September 2003.
Since early 2004, when the de-Baathification commission began its work overseeing who could come back, about 102,000 former Baathists have returned to their jobs, Lami said. Existing rules prohibit members from the top three levels from government work but allowed people on the fourth level to return in some circumstances, he said.
It remains unclear how many former Baath Party members would be eligible to return under the new legislation. Lami estimated that 3,500 people from the third-highest Baathist rank, or Shubah members, would be allowed to apply for pension payments but would still be kept from their jobs. About 13,000 people from the fourth rank, known as Firqa members, would be eligible to return, but he expected that many would not.
As with so many things in the fledgling attempt at self-government in Iraq, there will no doubt be conflict, perhaps violent, as implementation becomes the issue. Yet it is hard not to think this represents progress. We tend to agree with the prominent Shiite politician Humam Hamoudi, who said, “The most important thing about this new law is that it is an Iraqi law.”
We won’t bother to give you the context of this government inquisitor’s attempt to probe the mind of a magazine publisher to determine whether his inner being is acceptable to the state. The whole story is fairly chilling. For many years, the proper response of a publisher to the thought police would have been a three word interview (”go to hell”) but it appears that times are different now:
The performance of the grand inquisitor in the video, a “blandly unexceptional bureaucrat,” is, its way, Oscar-worthy and reminiscent of past films that cover similar ground. The government apparently thinks it is its business to enforce a regime where “tolerance means accepting and defending everyone’s values but your own.” More of the interview here and here. (Finally, Scott Johnson manages to work Alexis de Tocqueville into the discussion.)
The AP reports that bureaucracies seem to move on a painfully slow schedule:
The hijacker-pilot who flew into the Pentagon, Hani Hanjour, had a total of four driver’s licenses and ID cards from three states. The DHS, which was created in response to the attacks, has created a slogan for REAL ID: “One driver, one license.”
By 2014, anyone seeking to board an airplane or enter a federal building would have to present a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license, with the notable exception of those more than 50 years old, Homeland Security officials said.
The over-50 exemption was created to give states more time to get everyone new licenses, and officials say the risk of someone in that age group being a terrorist, illegal immigrant or con artist is much less.
2014 is thirteen years after 9-11. It is longer than the ten years Hani Hnajour spent living in the United States, traveling all over the world to cell meetings and terrorist camps, and planning and executing his murder-suicide.
The AP reports on Iranians who charged US Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz, dropped make believe explosives and threatened “we’re coming at you and you’ll explode in a couple minutes”:
Iranian boats harassed and provoked three U.S. Navy ships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, threatening to explode the American vessels. U.S. forces were on the verge of firing on the Iranian boats in the early Sunday incident, when the boats — believed to be from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s navy — turned and moved away…There were no injuries but the official said there could have been, because the Iranian boats turned away “literally at the very moment that U.S. forces were preparing to open fire” in self defense….
The incident occurred at about 5 a.m. local time Sunday as Navy cruiser USS Port Royal, destroyer USS Hopper and frigate USS Ingraham were on their way into the Persian Gulf and passing through the strait — a major oil shipping route….Five small boats began charging the U.S. ships, dropping boxes in the water in front of the ships and forcing the U.S. ships to take evasive maneuvers…the Iranians radioed something like “we’re coming at you and you’ll explode in a couple minutes.”
This development, as well as others, certainly make it look as if there was no hidden deal that triggered the strange recent NIE.
WNBC reports the latest good news in commercial aviation:
Anti-missile systems will be put on several passenger planes flying in and out of John F. Kennedy Airport, U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials said Friday…Three of the anti-missile systems will be placed on American Airlines flights flying between JFK and airports in California, officials said. It is the first time passenger planes will be outfitted with the technology. Military jets have the equipment and there were recent tests on non-passenger cargo flights…
The program is a test to see if the anti-missile systems are effective in helping prevent a terrorist from using a shoulder-fired missile to shoot down a passenger jet. Shoulder fired missiles can be referred to as MANPADS, man portable air defense systems.
New cabin announcement: “In preparation for take off, please make sure that your seat is in its upright and locked position, your tray tables are stowed, and all electronic devices are in the off position, including iPods, cells phones and any devices that can remotely trigger MANPADS or other man portable air defense systems.” Feel better about flying now?
We predicted a while back that we could see some really novel and dumb initiatives in politics as the boomers (at last, thank God!) began to fade from prominence, trailing their own old, worn-out, and often dumb initiatives in their wake. Michael Barone has created a conceptual framework for this thought
In 1992 voters elected a 46-year-old Arkansas governor as president, and in the spring of that year, if the polls are to be believed, they were ready to elect a Texas billionaire whose governmental experience included serving as a junior naval officer and running a firm that provided computer services to local welfare departments. In 1976 voters elected a one-term former governor of Georgia who’d served as a state senator and a naval officer.
The metrically minded will see a common thread. Every 16 years–in 1976, 1992 and now in 2008–American voters have seemed less interested in experience and credentials and more interested in a new face unconnected to the current political establishment. What can explain this 16-year itch?
The first explanation is that voters are responding to public policy failures. The insiders have screwed up; let’s take a chance on an outsider. This fits 1976 very well. The foreign and defense policy experts of the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations gave us Vietnam. Richard Nixon gave us Watergate, and his successor Gerald Ford pardoned him. Nixon also gave us a juiced-up economy in time for the 1972 campaign, which resulted in inflation and stagnant economic growth–stagflation–in the ensuing years.
But public policy failure doesn’t fit 1992 or 2008 as closely. Yes, Ross Perot and Bill Clinton campaigned against “the worst economic recession” since the 1930s. But in fact the economy was growing throughout 1992, and the recession of 1990-91 was one of the mildest ever recorded. During the preceding four years the Soviet Union collapsed, and the U.S. and its allies won a crushing victory in the Gulf War.
Perhaps voters were upset about the tax increase that the Democratic Congress and George H.W. Bush, despite his “read my lips” pledge, colluded in. But the result was the election of a Democratic president and Congress who predictably raised taxes again…
For the past 14 years, voters have been almost precisely evenly divided between the two parties. Mr. Clinton was re-elected with 49% of the vote, Mr. Bush with 51%. For six years we had a Democratic president and a Republican Congress, a situation that changed in 2000 when Mr. Bush was elected by the narrowest of margins. For six years we had a Republican president and a Republican Congress (except for 18 months when Jim Jeffords gave Democrats a 51-49 Senate majority), a situation that was ended when voters chose, by a small but decisive margin, a Democratic Congress. We hear complaints from voters on all sides now about earmarks, pork-barrel spending and the scandals that resulted in part from longstanding one-party control.
Again the pattern: Voters make pretty much the same decisions time and again for 14 years. Then in the 16th year decide they are disgusted with the results.
Why 16 years? Political scientists like to come up with generalizations about voting behavior for all time. The problem is that we don’t have the same electorate over time. Political scientists have developed rules for predicting presidential elections based on macroeconomic trends at a time when most voters remembered the trauma of the Great Depression. Most voters today don’t and those rules no longer work.
One such rule predicted that Al Gore would get 56% of the vote in 2000, which was 8% off. Your barber or hairdresser could have come closer.My thought is that, over a period of 16 years, there is enough turnover in the electorate to stimulate an itch that produces a willingness to take a chance on something new…
The median-age voter in 1992 was born around 1947 (the same year as Dan Quayle and Hillary Clinton, one year after Messrs. Clinton and Bush, one year before Mr. Gore). These voters came of age in the culture wars of the 1960s. They experienced stagflation and gas lines of the 1970s, and the prosperity and foreign policy successes of the 1980s. Mr. Clinton persuaded these voters to take a chance on change by promising not to radically alter policy. They rebuked him when he tried to break that promise, then for 14 years remained closely divided along culture lines as if the ’60s never ended.
The median-age voter in 2008 was born around 1963, so he or she missed out on the culture wars of the ’60s, and on the economic disasters and foreign policy reverses of the 1970s. These voters have experienced low-inflation economic growth something like 95% of their adult lives–something true of no other generation in history. They are weary of the cultural polarization of our politics, relatively unconcerned about the downside risks of big government programs, and largely unaware of America’s historic foreign policy successes. They are ready, it seems, to take a chance on an outside-the-system candidate.
The idea of the “new”, whatever its universal appeal to youth, has always been a captivating concept for Americans, who have for generations naively embraced the future while they ignorantly shucked off the past. Well, maybe it’s time to throw out the old shibboleths and bring in some new ones. Maybe the new ones will work better. Maybe.
I don’t think the Pakistani government at this time under President Musharraf has any credibility at all…I’m calling for a full, independent, international investigation, perhaps along the lines of what the United Nations has been doing with respect to the assassination of Prime Minister Hariri in Lebanon.
The logic of Senator Clinton’s statement is that Assad is to Hariri as Musharraf is to Bhutto. Are we missing something or should this be a scandal of some sort? Isn’t Syria an enemy and Pakistan an ally? How would a Clinton presidency in 2009 deal with President Musharraf, who, like him or loathe him, has a tremendously difficult and complex situation on his hands?
UPDATE
Oops. We didn’t realize that accusing and getting rid of Musharraf was considered conventional wisdom among some of the Democratic presidential contenders.
Iran is putting a lot of firepower into protecting its “peaceful” nuclear reactor at Bushehr, including the Tor-M1 (SA-15 Gauntlet) and a rumored deal involving the S-300. IBD wonders why and notes, regarding the current NIE, that such reports have been rather dramatically wrong in the past:
Russia completed delivery of 29 mobile Tor-M1 (SA-15 Gauntlet) short-range surface-to-air missiles in January, part of an arms deal worth $700 million. The Tor-M1 is part of a nationwide air defense system clearly designed to prevent a repeat of Israel’s 1981 strike against Iraq’s French-built Osirak reactor. That’s an awful lot of firepower to protect a peaceful nuclear power program…
The S-300 is a much more powerful and versatile weapon than the Tor-M1 missile systems that Moscow supplied earlier this year and which are capable of hitting airborne targets at altitudes up to 20,000 feet. The S-300 is capable of downing aircraft, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles at a distance up to 95 miles and at altitudes up to 90,000 feet…
The Bushehr deal supposedly has safeguards: Iran would return spent fuel rods to Russia, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has surveillance cameras at various Iranian nuclear facilities. But as noted by Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center who served under Bush 41, the deal brings Tehran frighteningly close to a nuclear warhead.
“At any time while it is loading the fuel,” he told the Washington Times, “Tehran could seize it and have enough uranium to fuel its centrifuges at Natanz to make up to 150 crude nuclear weapons.”
A year after Bushehr is brought on line, a third of its fuel in the form of near-weapons-grade plutonium is scheduled to be removed from the reactor — enough to make 20 nukes. For a single bomb, Iran would simply have to divert just 5% of the spent fuel…
National Intelligence Estimates have been wrong before. On Sept. 19, 1962, a NIE reassured us that while it would give the Soviets a military advantage, “the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range missiles in Cuba…would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it.”
The strangeness of the current NIE, so completely at odds with the previous NIE, combined with the Bush administration’s rather passive attitude towards it, continue to confound and confuse us.
The case for energy alternatives continues to strengthen, and not just for the US. Walter Russell Mead implicitly discusses the subject in the WSJ in the course of describing why the control of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz are vital US interests:
The U.S. depends on the Mideast for a small portion of its energy supplies. Still the world’s third-largest oil producer and holding large coal reserves, America is significantly less dependent on foreign energy sources than the other great economies. Imports account for 35% of U.S. energy consumption versus 56% for the EU and 80% for Japan. Nearly half the oil and all the natural gas imported by the U.S. comes from the Western Hemisphere; sub-Saharan Africa supplies most of the balance. Only 17% of U.S. oil imports and less than 0.5% of its natural gas come from the Persian Gulf; 80% of Japan’s imports come from the Gulf, and by 2015 70% of China’s oil will come from the same source.
While U.S. import needs are projected to grow significantly, U.S. dependence on Persian Gulf energy is not, thanks largely to expected production increases in the Western Hemisphere and sub-Saharan Africa. U.S. energy imports from the Persian Gulf are expected to remain below 20% of total consumption. The oil market, of course, is global, and if something were to happen to the Middle Eastern supplies, prices would rise world-wide, and the U.S. economy would be seriously disrupted. But domestic supply is not the key to American interest in the Gulf.
For the past few centuries, a global economic and political system has been slowly taking shape under first British and then American leadership. As a vital element of that system, the leading global power — with help from allies and other parties — maintains the security of world trade over the seas and air while also ensuring that international economic transactions take place in an orderly way. Thanks to the American umbrella, Germany, Japan, China, Korea and India do not need to maintain the military strength to project forces into the Middle East to defend their access to energy. Nor must each country’s navy protect the supertankers carrying oil and liquefied national gas (LNG).
For this system to work, the U.S. must prevent any power from dominating the Persian Gulf while retaining the ability to protect the safe passage of ships through its waters. The Soviets had to be kept out during the Cold War, and the security and independence of the oil sheikdoms had to be protected from ambitious Arab leaders like Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. During the Cold War Americans forged alliances with Turkey, Israel and (until 1979) Iran, three non-Arab states that had their own reasons for opposing both the Soviets and any pan-Arab state.
Mead adds that, in addition to terrorism concerns, “American opposition to Iran’s nuclear program…reflects the U.S. interest in protecting its ability to project conventional forces into the Gulf.” Which presidential candidates, if any, sufficiently understand the Great Game that is being played around the globe?
Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud today “denied the Pakistan government’s claims that he was behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.” (Al Qaeda did claim credit for the assassination of “the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat mujahadeen”.) Meshud’s denial came after the Pakistani government released this widely quoted transcript of a phone conversation:
Maulvi Sahib: Congratulations, I just got back during the night.
Baitullah Mehsud: Congratulations to you, were they our men?
Maulvi Sahib: Yes they were ours.
Baitullah Mehsud: Who were they?
Maulvi Sahib: There was Saeed, there was Bilal from Badar and Ikramullah.
Baitullah Mehsud: The three of them did it?
Maulvi Sahib: Ikramullah and Bilal did it.
Baitullah Mehsud: Then congratulations.
So Baitullah Mehsud was apparently recorded speaking with a field coordinator of the attack, if the transcript is accurate and his voice can be identified. That would appear to be pretty damning evidence. But that’s hardly the most interesting part of the conversation. Here’s more:
Maulvi: Where are you? I want to meet with you?
Mehsud: I am in Makin. Come I am at Anwar Shah’s home.
Maulvi Sahib: OK I will come.
Mehsud: Do not inform their family presently.
Maulvi Sahib: Right.
Mehsud: It was a spectacular job. They were very brave boys who killed her.
Maulvi Sahib: Praise be to God. I will give you more details when I come.
Mehsud: I will wait for you. Congratulation once again.
Baitullah Mehsud thus was waiting in Makin (photos here), a village in South Waziristan “at Anwar Shah’s home.” With a little luck, you might be able to find Mr. Shah’s house on Google Earth. Certainly its location, whether a safe house or not, should not be that difficult to locate for people who are already listening to his phone calls. It would seem simple enough to capture or dispatch this Taliban commander who is apparently responsible for the death of Benazir Bhutto.
So why is this fellow Meshud still roaming free? Wikipedia may or may not give us a hint: “The principal villages of the Mahsuds are Makin and Kanigurram…A large number of Mahsuds are employed in the Army.” Musharraf would appear to have quite a situation on his hands.
UPDATE
Let’s not forget that in Pakistan: “According to poll results, bin Laden has a 46 percent approval rating. Musharraf’s support is 38 percent.” You may judge for yourself whether US presidential candidates of either party as well as administration officials who blandly speak of democracy as a solution to Pakistan’s ills really understand the complexity of that country.
UPDATE II
Still unexplained is the very peculiar behavior of the Musharraf administration, whose explanations for the precise cause of Bhutto’s death appear to be contradicted by videos of the incident, as well as other evidence. Very strange indeed. And now this:
Caretaker Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz Khan has asked the media and people to “forgive and ignore” comments made by his ministry’s spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema which were slammed by her Pakistan People’s Party as “lies” and led to an uproar at home and abroad. The Interior Minister made the apology during a briefing for Pakistani newspaper editors on Monday. Punjab province on Tuesday issued a front-page advertisement in newspapers that offered a reward of Rs 1 crore for information about a gunman and a suspected suicide bomber seen in the photos and video footage of the assassination.
Pretty stupid thing to lie about, especially with all the cameras.
In some ways Benazir Bhutto’s acute personal sense of destiny appears to have contributed to her death. In numerous situations, she courted danger in a dangerous land, and survived. Doubtless that has an effect. As Churchill said: “There is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at, without result.”
We note that Benazir Bhutto was killed in the city that CBS reported was home to Osama bin Laden during kidney treatments in 2002. A very dangerous city and country indeed, as Andrew McCarthy said yesterday. Christopher Hitchens remembers Bhutto as an unusual mix of attributes: a woman of physical courage, corruption, hauteur and charm — and perhaps other things just emerging:
It is grotesque, of course, that the murder should have occurred in Rawalpindi, the garrison town of the Pakistani military elite and the site of Flashman’s Hotel. It is as if she had been slain on a visit to West Point or Quantico. But it’s hard to construct any cui bono analysis on which Gen. Pervez Musharraf is the beneficiary of her death. The likeliest culprit is the al-Qaida/Taliban axis, perhaps with some assistance from its many covert and not-so-covert sympathizers in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. These were the people at whom she had been pointing the finger since the huge bomb that devastated her welcome-home motorcade on Oct. 18.
She would have been in a good position to know about this connection, because when she was prime minister, she pursued a very active pro-Taliban policy, designed to extend and entrench Pakistani control over Afghanistan and to give Pakistan strategic depth in its long confrontation with India over Kashmir. The fact of the matter is that Benazir’s undoubted courage had a certain fanaticism to it. She had the largest Electra complex of any female politician in modern history, entirely consecrated to the memory of her executed father, the charming and unscrupulous Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had once boasted that the people of Pakistan would eat grass before they would give up the struggle to acquire a nuclear weapon.
(He was rather prescient there—the country now does have nukes, and millions of its inhabitants can barely feed themselves.) A nominal socialist, Zulfikar Bhutto was an autocratic opportunist, and this family tradition was carried on by the PPP, a supposedly populist party that never had a genuine internal election and was in fact—like quite a lot else in Pakistan—Bhutto family property…
She always displayed the same unironic lack of embarrassment. How prettily she lied to me, I remember, and with such a level gaze from those topaz eyes, about how exclusively peaceful and civilian Pakistan’s nuclear program was. How righteously indignant she always sounded when asked unwelcome questions about the vast corruption alleged against her and her playboy husband, Asif Ali Zardari…
now the two main legacies of Bhutto rule—the nukes and the empowered Islamists—have moved measurably closer together. This is what makes her murder such a disaster. There is at least some reason to think that she had truly changed her mind, at least on the Taliban and al-Qaida, and was willing to help lead a battle against them…
Perhaps we’ll never really know now if “she had truly changed her mind.” Her other qualities contributed to eliminating that possibility — this was, after all, a woman who had named three specific individuals who were plotting to kill her several months ago, before she had even returned from exile to Pakistan. She came back anyway, apparently heedless of the near inevitability of her demise. What a waste of recklessness that might otherwise have been useful. One possible moral to the story is this: even if you have a well developed sense of your own destiny, perhaps you shouldn’t bet the house on it.
Austin Bay predicts a 40th anniversary rerun of the Tet Offensive in Iraq next year:
Reflecting on Tet in a 1989 interview with CBS News’ Morley Safer, NVA commander General Vo Nguyen Giap said: “The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was American public opinion.” He added: “Military power is not the decisive factor in war. Human beings! Human beings are the decisive factor.” (See Howard Langer’s “The Vietnam War: An Encyclopedia of Quotations.”)
Giap knew attacking U.S. public opinion was a classic anti-U.S. ploy. In 1864, politically shattering Abraham Lincoln was a key Confederate goal. The Confederates launched limited offensives (Early’s attack on Washington) and bitterly resisted Union attacks, particularly in Virginia where Ulysses S. Grant’s limited success was achieved at an enormous cost in casualties. The Confederates’ political message: “We remain militarily powerful. The Abolitionist Party will never defeat us. Lincoln is a mad man, a dictator, a gangling fool from hinterland Illinois whose war aims are delusional.” That message dovetailed (pun intended) with the campaign message of Copperhead Democrats like Ohio’s Clement Vallandigham. (The Copperheads were the “peace wing” of the Democratic Party.) In reality the Confederacy was an impoverished wreck split by Union armies. Its only hope was the psychological erosion of Union will.
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and his ilk, arguably our era’s Vallandighams, have already declared Iraq lost. Last week Reid hedged his defeatist rhetoric. However, al Qaeda and Saddamist plotters are betting a deadly spasm of bombs and subsequent media magnification will give Reid a reason “to clip his hedge.”
Their “ultimate Iraqi Tet” would feature simultaneous terror strikes in every major Iraqi city. These simultaneous strikes would inflict hideous civilian casualties with the goal of discrediting Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s and General David Petraeus’ assessments that Iraqi internal security has improved. The terrorists would reduce Iraqi government buildings to rubble. Striking the Green Zone would be the media coup de grace, intentionally echoing North Vietnam’s assault on the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Al Qaeda terrorists would also attack Shia shrines. Kidnapping or assassinating of senior Iraqi leaders would be another objective.
We have discussed previously the Tet Offensive of 1968 and the subsequent declaration of American stalemate or defeat by Walter Cronkite of CBS News. If there is a rerun of Tet in Iraq next year, who will play the role of Cronkite in 2008?
The notion that a Norwegian imam can make a statement in Norway but if a Canadian magazine quotes that statement in Canada it’s a “hate crime” should be deeply shaming to all Canadians.
What wisdom do celebrities not possess? Will Smith via Yahoo shows the extraordinary level of knowledge commonly found among the entertainment elites of our modern world:
“Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘Let me do the most evil thing I can do today’…I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good’. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.”
The author of the Smith piece then pathetically tries to explain history for the 97% of young Europeans and Americans who might not otherwise know it, but botches it: “Hitler’s totalitarian leadership as Fuhrer during 1934 until his eventual suicide in 1945 resulted in the persecution of an estimated six million Jews in the Holocaust, and his invasion of Poland in 1939 led to the start of the Second World War.”
The “persecution” of an estimated six million Jews? It’s hard to admit, but the world is in even worse shape than we feared.
UPDATE
Mr. Smith’s staff has apparently gotten involved. AP:
“It is an awful and disgusting lie,” Smith said in a statement Monday provided by his publicist. “It speaks to the dangerous power of an ignorant person with a pen. I am incensed and infuriated to have to respond to such ludicrous misinterpretation…Adolf Hitler was a vile, heinous vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet”…
Some theological tracts from one of the founders of modern jihad “have already opened a rift at the highest levels of Al Qaeda,” according to Eli Lake:
One of Al Qaeda’s senior theologians is calling on his followers to end their military jihad and saying the attacks of September 11, 2001, were a “catastrophe for all Muslims.” In a serialized manifesto written from prison in Egypt, Sayyed Imam al-Sharif is blasting Osama bin Laden…
Originally rounded up in the arrests following the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, Mr. Sharif served in an Egyptian jail with Ayman al-Zawahri, who would later go on to be the deputy to Mr. bin Laden. In 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks, Mr. Sharif was arrested in Yemen and was later sent to Egypt in 2003 or 2004.
His latest texts are a renunciation of his earlier work, saying the military jihad or war against apostate states and America is futile. But the ex-jihadist also calls into question the virtue of Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri. In some ways the manifesto reads in parts like a spicy Washington memoir by an embittered former official.
Of his old associates he writes, “Bin Laden, al-Zawahri, and others fled at the beginning of the American bombing [in Afghanistan], to the point of abandoning their wives and families to be killed along with other innocent people,” according to a translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute. It goes on, “I think that a sharia court should be established, composed of reliable scholars, to hold these people accountable for their crimes — even if in absentia — so that those who are ignorant in their religion do not repeat this futility.”
One Western expert opined: “Here you have someone with the stature and credibility, who more or less wrote the book on jihadism and is oft cited by other jihadists, making the case against it. This is someone with the heft on legal and religious grounds to make the counter argument that we can’t.” It would not be illogical if an ideology that worships death turns out to be self limiting — particularly when it is also seen to be on the losing side.
The home front once accepted that our adversaries faced the same obstacles and challenges of war. Moreover Americans assumed that the enemy, being less introspective and self-critical, was even more prone to military error than we—and less likely to innovate and correct. That confidence ensured that the public saw mistakes not just in absolute but also in relative terms. World War I saw one million ill-equipped Doughboys deployed against the most experienced and deadly modern army the world had yet seen. But the mass drafting of one million soldiers, equipped and sent across the Atlantic in a mere year, was acknowledged on all sides as a feat even beyond the ability of the Kaiser’s general staff. In World War II, lapses in our convoy system were hardly as damaging to us as Germany’s repeated mistakes at sea were to the Nazi cause—faulty torpedoes, poor air support for submarine operations, and abject security breaches that lent the Allies almost instantaneous knowledge of the Kriegsmarine’s operations.
There is no need to document the stupendous strategic and tactical blunders that led to Saddam’s ignominious defeat. But in his wake (and after his demise), the supposedly sophisticated jihadists have made just as many mistakes. In a self-proclaimed war of Islamic liberation, al-Qaeda in Iraq has mutilated, butchered, and terrorized a once largely sympathetic population. As a result they have nearly pulled off the impossible: a formerly receptive Sunni tribal community has turned against Sunni Muslim jihadists, and joined with American infidels, sometimes alongside the troops of a Shiite-led government.
In past wars there was recognition of factors beyond human control—the weather; the fickleness of human nature; the role of chance, the irrational, and the inexplicable—that lent a humility to our efforts and tolerance for unintended consequences. “Wars begin when you will,” Machiavelli reminds us, “but they do not end when you please.” The star-crossed and disastrous Dieppe raid of August 1942 did not mean that D-Day two years later had to fail. When in March 1945 maverick General Curtis LeMay sent high-altitude precision B-29 bombers carrying napalm in low over Tokyo, with little if any armament, the expected American bloodbath did not follow—thanks to a ferocious jet stream and dark nights that meant the huge planes came in much faster and with better cover. “To a good general,” wrote the Roman historian Livy, “luck is important.” By contrast the American media went into near hysterics during the so-called “pause” in the three-week victory over Saddam, when an unforeseen sandstorm temporarily stalled our advance. Only later was it revealed that air operations with precision weapons had continued all along to decimate Saddam’s static forces.
WMDs were not found in Iraq, it is true. Yet an earlier American generation might have consoled itself with the notion that at last we had proved (as previous intelligence had not) that Saddam no longer posed a threat, and ensured that Iraq would not again translate oil wealth into the deadly forces with which it had attacked four of its neighbors. Our ancestors might have added that the war had effectively raised our standard of proof from “We must prove that you have WMDs” to “You must prove that you don’t.” Libya, for example, had more WMDs than Saddam did—and may well have given them up to avoid the latter’s fate.
Victory does not require achieving all of your objectives, but achieving more of yours than your enemy does of his. Patient Northerners realized almost too late that victory required not merely warding off or defeating Confederate armies, but also invading and occupying an area as large as Western Europe in order to render an entire people incapable of waging war. Blunders were seen as inevitable once an unarmed U.S. decided to fight Germany, Italy, and Japan all at once in a war to be conducted far away across wide oceans, against enemies that had a long head start in rearmament. We had disastrous intelligence failures in World War II, but we also broke most of the German and Japanese codes in a fashion our enemies could neither fathom nor emulate. Somehow we forget that going into the heart of the ancient caliphate, taking out a dictator in three weeks, and then staying on to foster a constitutional republic amid a sea of enemies like Iran and Syria and duplicitous friends like Jordan and Saudi Arabia—and losing less than 4,000 Americans in the five-year enterprise—was beyond the ability of any of our friends or enemies, and perhaps past generations of Americans as well.
But more likely the American public, not the timeless nature of war, has changed.
What is the cause of the change? Wealth and leisure and their attendant utopianism, a decline in religiosity, the end of American frontiers, mistaking the one hour TV drama for reality, the innate isolationism that comes from being a continental power bordered by oceans, the low levels of learning and knowledge of history of the American public, a simple sense that the stakes are low? None or all of the above? What would have to happen to have 80 or 90 per cent of Americans united in a war cause for the duration?
Todd Bensman, whose reporting on a particularly alarming strain of illegal immigration we’ve noted in the past, has discovered more illegal immigration, this time from Iran into Nicaragua:
The second military helicopter in as many days hovered over the jungle and then landed to a most unwelcome reception from several dozen angry Rama Indian and Creole villagers. Rupert Allen Clear Duncan, a leader of some 400 Creole who live along the shoreline, confronted the foreigners dressed in suits and military uniforms that day in March and demanded to know the purpose of their aerial trespasses. “This is our land; we have always lived here, and you don’t have our permission to be here,” Duncan spat, when refused the courtesy of an explanation.
Not until Duncan threatened to have his machete-waving followers damage the aircraft did they learn that some of the men were from the Islamic Republic of Iran and had come promising to establish a Central American foothold in the middle of their territory…
A mystery compound — Twelve-foot-high concrete walls topped by neat rolls of razor-sharp concertina wire protect the manicured grounds of a mansion inside. The compound is not unlike many others in the affluent Managua suburb of Las Colinas, except for a telltale identifier. From the street outside, through the wire at just the right angle, can be seen the top half of the distinctive red, white and green flag of Iran. This is the temporary embassy of Iran’s new envoy to Nicaragua, Akbar Esmaeil-Pour.
The envoy, however, hasn’t been in a talking mood lately, since local media stirred just the sort of questions that fuel Yankee fears. Last month, the country’s largest-circulation newspaper, La Prensa, published leaked government documents that showed Nicaragua’s chief immigration minister personally authorized 21 Iranian men to enter the country, without visas that would have left a record. Officials denied the report until confronted with the document but refused to explain why the men were let in that way or what became of them.
Another report named as Revolutionary Guard operatives several men who accompanied the Iranian envoy to his new digs. A Honduran newspaper in June reported that Iranians had entered that country without permission from Nicaragua…Iran’s latest move places it just a few porous borders from Texas, where illegal Nicaraguan laborers routinely travel.
Bensman adds: “on many minds is Argentina’s contention that Iran, using its embassy as cover, orchestrated two Hezbollah bombings of Israeli and Jewish community targets in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s. This year, Argentina secured Interpol arrest warrants for five former Iranian officials, most of them who worked as diplomats in the Buenos Aires embassy.”
Of course Iran dismissed the charges by Argentina that it used its Buenos Aires embassy to plot and stage Hezbollah bombings as “a Zionist plot“. So that settles that. Nothing to worry about from Nicaragua and our new friends in the neighborhood.
the details of what happened that morning in Haditha are more disturbing, disputed and horrific than the military initially reported. According to eyewitnesses and local officials interviewed over the past 10 weeks, the civilians who died in Haditha on Nov. 19 were killed not by a roadside bomb but by the Marines themselves, who went on a rampage in the village after the attack, killing 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes, including seven women and three children.
The horrible discovery in Diyala Province Monday was disturbing even by the standards of Iraq’s running sectarian violence. Iraqi police said they found 20 decapitated bodies dumped near a police station west of Baquba, the capital of Diyala province.
What these stories have in common is that they are totally untrue. There was no “rampage” in Haditha, and there were no “20 decapitated bodies” in Diyala.
We discussed the Haditha fabrication last year. Gateway Pundit discusses Diyala and five similar bogus stories that have appeared just since November. The two TIME articles above use the word “disturbing” to describe events. That word might apply to the MSM reports — if such events were not all too common today.
One of the jobs that American apparently have to seek out foreigners to perform is chaining their girlfriends to engine blocks, according to information buried at the very bottom of a story in the Deseret Morning News:
Investigators believe the woman was held captive in her apartment, near 2900 West and 3500 South, for several days, possibly a week or more. When her boyfriend was home, she was allowed to roam freely in the apartment. But when he left, a chain was tied around her ankles, said West Valley police Capt. Tom McLachlan. The other end of the 20-foot dog chain was tied to a 6-cylinder engine in the closet, he said…
Fernando Orozco-Trevizo, 32, was arrested Tuesday while working construction in South Jordan. When investigators asked him about chaining up his girlfriend, he said, “It was just a game,” according to jail records. Orozco-Trevizo further told investigators that he believed his girlfriend was having an affair with someone else in the apartment complex and that she got her injuries from falling down.
Orozco-Trevizo was booked into the Salt Lake County Jail for investigation of aggravated kidnapping and assault. He also had an immigration detainer put on him for aggravated re-entry into the United States. Orozco-Trevizo told police if he got deported again, “he will come back for the victim,” according to jail records.
On the other hand, there are plenty of jobs that Americans apparently are willing to do. These include carrying out terrorist attacks against National Guard facilities, Army recruiting centers and something referred to as the “camp site of Zion,” according to the LA Times:
Kevin Lamar James and Levar Haney Washington, members of the homegrown radical Islamic organization dubbed JIS, entered guilty pleas in front of U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney in federal court in Santa Ana. James, who founded the group while in California state prison in 1997, recruited Washington years later when they were both inmates at New Folsom prison near Sacramento…
in a search of James’ prison cell, authorities found a draft of a statement that was to be released to the media after the group’s first fatal attack. “This incident is the first in a series of incidents to come in a plight to defend and propagate traditional Islam in its purity,” the statement read. It warned “sincere Muslims” to avoid potential targets, including “those Jewish and non-Jewish supporters of an Israeli state.”…
James founded Jam’iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh, also known as a JIS, in 1997. It was then that he began drafting the lengthy JIS protocol, a 103-page collection of writings about his religious “movement,” aimed at teaching his “students” about Islam and how to practice their faith. The document — parts of which are neatly handwritten in Arabic — covers required readings for his followers. One section for new recruits tells them to show “obedience to established authority” within the organization and instructs them on the “importance of being esoteric or clandestine in our activities.”
The group’s tenets were based on “James’ radical interpretation of Islam, which imposed a duty to attack infidels, or enemies of Islam, including the United States government and supporters of Israel,” [Thomas P. O'Brien, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles] said…
“James’ radical interpretation of Islam, which imposed a duty to attack infidels, or enemies of Islam…” Yes, that old time “radical interpretation.” Lots of that going round.
The Iranian dissident group that exposed Natanz several years ago takes exception to a number of the NIE’s “high” and “moderate” confidence assessments, via WSJ:
According to the NCRI, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council decided to shut down its most important center for nuclear-weapons research in eastern Tehran, called Lavisan-Shian, in August 2003.
The NCRI, which claims to have intelligence sources inside Iran, said Lavisan was broken into 11 fields of research, including development of a nuclear trigger and of the technology to shape weapons-grade uranium into a warhead. But at the same meeting, the council decided to disperse pieces of the research to a number of locations around Iran, according to the NCRI. By the time international nuclear inspectors were allowed to get access to the Lavisan site, the buildings allegedly devoted to nuclear research had been torn down and the ground bulldozed.
“What the first part of the NIE says is right, that they halted their weaponization research in 2003,” said Mohammad Mohaddessin, foreign-affairs chief for the NCRI. “But the second part, that they stopped until at least the middle of 2007, is wrong. They scattered the weaponization program to other locations and restarted in 2004.”
Equipment was relocated first from Lavisan-Shian to another military compound in Tehran’s Lavisan district, the Center for Readiness and Advanced Technology, Mr. Mohaddessin said. Two devices designed to measure radiation levels were moved to Malek-Ashtar University in Isfahan and to a defense ministry hospital in Tehran, he said. Other equipment was sent to other locations the NCRI hasn’t been able to identify, he said.
“Their strategy was that if the IAEA found any one piece of this research program, it would be possible to justify it as civilian. But so long as it was all together, they wouldn’t be able to,” Mr. Mohaddessin said….
And, via Reuters: Asked how Washington’s entire intelligence community and the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, could have missed evidence of this, Mohaddessin said: “Exactly as they missed Natanz (Iran’s uranium enrichment plant) and (the original) Lavisan.” Mohaddessin said the new Lavisan site hosted research on laser enrichment of uranium, while two whole-body counters — used for detecting radiation — were in use at a university in the central city of Isfahan and a hospital outside Tehran.
Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger obliquely referred to a potential strategy of sabotage in the leak of the NIE: “the deputy director for intelligence estimates explained the release of the NIE as follows: Publication was chosen because the estimate conflicted with public statements by top U.S. officials about Iran, and ‘we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available.’ That may explain releasing the facts but not the sources and methods…”
So a dissident Iranian group insists that Iran’s nuclear program continues undiminished, while a dissident American group insists that the program has ceased. Is that a fair statment of the facts?
Pelosi’s press aide Brendan Daly told me that the Washington Post report on her CIA briefing was “overblown” because Pelosi, then the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee thought the techniques described, which the CIA insists included waterboarding, were planned for the future and not yet in use.
Pelosi claimed that “several months later” her successor as the ranking Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman of Los Angeles County, was advised the techniques “had in fact been employed” and wrote a classified letter to the CIA in protest, and Pelosi “concurred.” Neither went public with her concerns.
Harman told the Washington Post “I was briefed, but the information was closely held to just the Gang of Four. I was not free to disclose anything.” The “Gang of Four” is an insider reference to the top members of the House and Senate intelligence committees and not to the thugs who ran Mao’s China during the Cultural Revolution.
Not only did the congressional Gang of Four fail to inform the public about the use of torture by our government but they also kept the 9/11 Commission in the dark. Pelosi testified before the commission on May 22, 2003 but uttered not a word of caution about the methods used.
We thought this perspective was interesting, given Scheer’s life on the left.
“They like this war. They want this war to continue,” Pelosi, D- Calif., told reporters…”We thought that they shared the view of so many people in our country that we needed a new direction in Iraq,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference in the Capitol. “But the Republicans have made it very clear that this is not just George Bush’s war. This is the war of the Republicans in Congress.”
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that it was “a step forward” that U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded that Tehran stopped developing its nuclear weapons program four years ago. Ahmadinejad told reporters that an “entirely different” situation between the United States and Iran could be created if more steps like the intelligence report followed.
“We consider this measure by the U.S. government a positive step. It is a step forward,” Ahmadinejad said. “If one or two other steps are taken, the issues we have in front of us will be entirely different and will lose their complexity, and the way will be open for the resolution of basic issues in the region and in dealings between the two sides,” he said.
Another started sounding irrational:
“Iran is dangerous,” Bush said after an Oval Office meeting with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano. “We believe Iran had a secret military weapons program, and Iran must explain to the world why they had such a program…Iran has an obligation to explain to the IAEA why they hid this program from them”…
A little late to be so insistent, if the horse left the barn four years ago. And if the 2007 NIE was itself wrong, then in a sense it is later still. The jury is still out on whether this entire episode has been clever or insipid. But we can’t say we have a good feeling about this.
