Category Archives: War on Terror

GWOT News

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I’m almost sorry I missed it:

BUSH: The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

QUESTION: What did Iraq have to do with it?

BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?

QUESTION: The attack on the World Trade Center.

BUSH: Nothing. Except it’s part of — and nobody has suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a — Iraq — the lesson of September 11th is take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody’s ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.

(Singing):

    Oh whats Iraq got to do, got to do with it
    What`s Iraq but a second hand scapegoat
    What`s Iraq got to do, got to do with it
    Who needs a brain
    When you’ve got the Marines …

More of today’s hiccups from the Commander in Chief, via Joe Aravosis:

President Bush said Monday the United States would lose “our soul as a nation” if it gave up on the Iraq war now, warning it would be a “disaster” if U.S. troops left before the new Iraqi government can control the country.

“We’re not leaving so long as I’m president,” an animated Bush said in a wide-ranging White House press conference. “That would be a huge mistake.” He conceded, though, that the war was “straining the psyche of our country” with U.S. deaths now standing at more than 2,600.

I’d say it’s straining a lot more than our psyche.

In other news, a judge in Miami dismissed the lead terror charge against Jose Padilla:

A federal judge in Miami on Monday dismissed the lead terror count against Jose Padilla, the U.S. citizen once identified as a “dirty bomb” suspect and detained as an “enemy combatant.”

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke said in a written opinion that the charge — conspiracy to “murder, kidnap and main persons in a foreign country” — duplicated other counts in an federal grand jury indictment handed down last year.

“An indictment is multiplicitous when it charges a single offense multiple times, in separate counts,” Cooke wrote. As charged, she added, the indictment exposes Padilla and his codefendants to multiple punishments for a single crime.

The indictment, Cooke noted, “alleges one and only one conspiracy” and that the same facts are “realleged in each of the consecutive counts.”

Cooke also ruled that the second count against Padilla and his co-defendants was “duplicitous” — charging them with the same offense under two sections of federal law. She ordered the government to choose one of the two counts, which provide for different penalties, by Friday.

Padilla still faces charges of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, and providing material support to terrorists.

Up for Discussion

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We’re approaching the anniversaries of our two big recent tragedies — Katrina and 9/11. Last week Digby blogged about the “Duelling Pageants” and wondered about these disasters’ relative impact on the upcoming midterm elections. Republicans are still running on 9/11 and will be pulling out all the stops for the fifth anniversary. Dems have Katrina, and for once they may have a media advantage, says Digby:

Obviously the Democrats will shine the light on Katrina as the iconic example of Bush’s mismanagement but the question will be whether the white house can control the way the press reports it. My bet is the media will want to go back and show plenty of footage of themselves down in New Orleans. They were in the middle of the story for a few days reporting on the appalling conditions when the government seemed paralyzed. They are going to want to revisit their glory days.

They will also undoubtedly do a bunch of “where are they now” stories and investigations into what has happened in the past year. I believe it’s going to be very bad for the Republicans to be reminded of their lowest moment, just before the election.

Of course, the Pugs are gonna anticipate this and will have a strategy to deal with it, which Digby discusses here.

Yesterday I reflected on the passing of September 11 as The Big Deal. There are signs the American people finally have had it up to here with 9/11 and don’t want to think about it any more. The Bushies have gone to that well a few times too many, methinks. On the other hand, although Katrina has been off the front pages for awhile, I think feelings about it nationwide are still pretty raw. And Katrina has not yet been transformed into sterile iconography, as I believe 9/11 has been transformed for most people who weren’t there. In our memories, Katrina is still hot and organic and damn messy.

Lately I’ve seen television commercials for some September 11 commemorative medallion or sculpture or some damn thing that I sincerely hope nobody buys. But can you imagine a Katrina commemorative sculpture? I’m sure someone will come up with something eventually, but I can’t imagine what it would look like. Bodies floating in flood water just aren’t inspirational.

But however the disasters are commemorated, my questions now are how will these disasters affect us long term, and which will historians say was more significant?

Of the two, September 11 was a unique sort of disaster, unlike anything else this nation has experienced; and the suddenness of it, the shock of it, gave it the bigger emotional wallop. On the other hand, in many ways it was an easier disaster to deal with than Katrina. The actual damage was contained within a few acres of lower Manhattan; the rest of the city was untouched. Further, New York is a rich and resourceful city that didn’t have to wait for federal help to take care of its own. Many people (Chris Matthews comes to mind) continue to praise Mayor Guiliani’s leadership during that crisis, and he was impressive, but the fact is he didn’t have shit to do except be on television. Had Hizzoner evaporated that day I think the city would have managed perfectly well without him.

Katrina, on the other hand, was a disaster that required excellent leadership and management, during and after, which it sure as hell didn’t get. It was a bigger disaster that presented myriad problems to be solved, many of which remain unsolved. And the states, cities and communities impacted by Katrina lacked the resources to take care of their own, and needed federal help, which in large part they are still waiting for.

The long-term significance of both disasters lies not in the disasters themselves, but in our responses to them. In that regard, right now it seems 9/11 wins the significance prize, since the Bushies used 9/11 to bleep up pretty much the entire planet. I suspect we’re going to be dealing with the responses to the response to 9/11 for many years, possibly generations, to come. Unfortunately.

On the other hand, someday historians might say that Katrina represented a more significant turning point. And I’m not just talking about George Bush’s popularity numbers.

For many years Americans were taught from infancy that the U.S. was the biggest richest strongest most advanced badass country on the motherbleeping planet; the fountainhead of wealth and science and resources and technology and cool pop culture, not to mention liberty and democracy. And after the Cold War we were the World’s Only Superpower. That makes us, like, the Supernation, the nation that can fly around flexing its muscles, admired and envied, fixing the rest of the world’s problems.

But what kind of Supernation leaves the bodies of its citizens rotting in the streets?

Someday historians may write that Katrina marked the true end of The American Century. It was the moment at which the Supernation finally came down to earth and began to recognize its own limitations and mortality. That, coupled with the squandering of our military resources in Iraq, has revealed us to be smaller, weaker, shabbier, and more vulnerable than many of us had realized. The facade may still be bright and impressive, but there’s rot underneath.

We have finally come up against our own limitations. And we smacked into ’em pretty hard.

What do you think?

Also: More ruminations on 9/11 and What It All Means by Athenae at First Draft.

Fighting Smart, Fighting Stupid

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[T]he deeper and more discouraging prospect—that the United States is doomed to spend decades cowering defensively—need not come true. How can the United States regain the initiative against terrorists, as opposed to living in a permanent crouch? By recognizing the point that I heard from so many military strategists: that terrorists, through their own efforts, can damage but not destroy us. Their real destructive power, again, lies in what they can provoke us to do. While the United States can never completely control what violent groups intend and sometimes achieve, it can determine its own response. That we have this power should come as good and important news, because it switches the strategic advantage to our side. — James Fallows, “Declaring Victory,” The Atlantic, September 2006

Chief among the reactions Osama bin Laden hoped to provoke was the invasion and occupation of a Muslim country. Fallows continues,

Documents captured after 9/11 showed that bin Laden hoped to provoke the United States into an invasion and occupation that would entail all the complications that have arisen in Iraq. His only error was to think that the place where Americans would get stuck would be Afghanistan.

Richard Clarke wrote in his book Against All Enemies that something like the Iraq War was bin Laden’s plan all along. At least a decade before 9/11, according to Clarke, Osama was hanging out in the Sudan dreaming up an Iraq scenario–

The ingredients al Qaeda dreamed of for propagating its movement were a Christian government attacking a weaker Muslim region, allowing the new terrorist group to rally jihadists from many countries to come to the aid of the religious brethren. After the success of the jihad, the Muslim region would become a radical Islamic state, a breeding ground for more terrorists, a part of the eventual network of Islamic states that would make up the great new Caliphate, or Muslim empire. [p. 136]

Time and time again, the Bush Administration’s fear and hubris and ignorance become puppet strings in jihadists’ hands. We might as well invite al Qaeda into the Pentagon and let them plan our security policies.

Rightie blogger Allahpundit wrote yesterday,

There are bits from Reid and Kerry too, but as usual it’s Teddy who provides the pull-quote for the day’s events:

    “Five years after 9-11, it is clear that our misguided policies are making America more hated in the world and making the war on terrorism harder to win,” Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts said.

We’ve reached the point where either you see instantly what’s wrong with that statement or you don’t, and if you don’t, nothing I’m going to say will change your mind. So I won’t try; maybe Ace or Goldstein will muster the energy later.

Of course Allahpundit can’t explain “what’s wrong” with Senator Kennedy’s statement, because coherently explaining something in words requires logic and dispassion. If one’s motivations are, in fact, a sludge of unprocessed fear and bigotry slopping around one’s psyche like raw sewage, then rendering those motivations into clear, dispassionate, and logical rhetoric is, um, futile. So righties do not explain; they package. We are at war with enemies who hate our freedoms. We must fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. Victory. Resolve. We can’t cut and run.

Then Allahpundit embraces one of the Right’s favorite conceits, which is that we lefties are opposed to Bush’s policies because we don’t understand the threat posed by terrorism. The fact that we oppose Bush policies because most of them amount to fighting a fire by pouring kerosene on it flies right over their terrorized little heads. But in a “nutroots terror-reaction round-up” he finds no prominent leftie bloggers to feed his fantasies; instead, he sites a commenter at Democratic Underground, a diarist at Daily Kos, and “some moron looking for attention at Goldstein’s site.” We’ve seen this before, too. They’re desperately trying to reassure themselves that we’re the crazy ones, and they’ll take any proof they can get.

The Bush Administration’s habit of dangling terrorism alerts to distract us and manipulate public opinion is too well established to ignore. This timeline, which unfortunately stops in January 2005, provides some good examples. But of course, just because some child cries “wolf” as a prank doesn’t mean there are no wolves. It may be only a matter of time before a plot like the one stopped in London actually succeeds. Lord knows plenty of jihadists would love to hurt us on our own soil, and more such jihadists are being created every day by George Bush’s misbegotten policies.

The next argument is, of course, that the U.S. wasn’t in Iraq on September 11. No, but we were in Saudi Arabia. It’s well known that bin Laden’s grudge against the U.S. dates from August 1990, when the Saudi government allowed U.S. troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam. In this case I don’t blame America, because those troops were there at the behest of the Saudi government. Twisted people like Osama bin Laden can be set off by just about anything, and it’s probably not possible to devise a foreign policy that won’t offend some whackjob’s inflammable sensibilities.

On the other hand, when our policies utterly ignore the sensibilities of a majority of Muslims; when our policies are creating enemies faster than we can shoot them; when our policies help the war effort of our enemies but weaken us; there’s a problem. And I’ve yet to see evidence that anti-American terrorists give a hoohaw about our freedoms, one way or another.

I’ve written myriad blog posts explaining why the war in Iraq is hindering, not helping, our antiterrorism efforts. I’m not going to repeat all those arguments now; just click on “Iraq War” after “Filed under” at the top of this post, and start reading. The James Fallows article linked at the top of this page also explains why our war in Iraq is hurting us. If you can access the article (you may not be able to if you aren’t a subscriber), click here and scroll down to “What Has Gone Right for al-Qaeda,” and start reading. Because I believe there is a subscription firewall, I’ve added an excerpt to the end of this post.

It seems obvious to me that, after September 11, our focus should have been on destroying al Qaeda and increasing basic security at home. The “destroying al Qaeda” part certainly included military action (against al Qaeda and groups with a similar agenda, not action diffused over every terrorist cell on the planet whether it is likely to strike the U.S. or not), but it also should have included leading democratic nations in a cooperative global intelligence-and-police effort and addressing those “root causes,” which are still imperfectly understood, in order to deprive terrorists of popular support in the Muslim world.

The “basic security at home” part is a mess; the “security” policies exemplified by the Department of Homeland Security are described in Fallows’s article as “haphazard, wasteful, and sometimes self-defeating.” That other nations are aiding our intelligence and police efforts is mostly because it’s in their own self-interest to do so; they are are terrorism targets, too. We’ve pissed off enough people that I wonder how much they’d help us otherwise. But as for depriving terrorists of popular support, we’ve done just the opposite.

Righties will continue to lie to themselves and each other that we lefties oppose Bush’s policies because lefties don’t want to fight terrorism, and there’s not much point in trying to reason with them. Our efforts, IMO, must be to reach out to those Americans (and voters) whose brains are not pickled in extremist rightwing ideology and explain to them that the Bush White House is aiding terrorism, and foreign policy power must be taken away from the Bushies as quickly as possible.

Since Bush’s “approval” numbers are hovering at around 40 percent these days, that should leave us with plenty of people who are reachable. Of course, an important part of this effort is to keep watch on media and speak up when reporters and “pundits” repeat rightie talking points as gospel, which is most of the time. It’s an uphill fight. But we’ve got to fight as if our lives depend on it, because they probably do.

Here’s the James Fallows slice I promised:

In the modern brand of terrorist warfare, what an enemy can do directly is limited. The most dangerous thing it can do is to provoke you into hurting yourself.

This is what David Kilcullen meant in saying that the response to terrorism was potentially far more destructive than the deed itself. And it is why most people I spoke with said that three kinds of American reaction—the war in Iraq, the economic consequences of willy-nilly spending on security, and the erosion of America’s moral authority—were responsible for such strength as al-Qaeda now maintained.

“You only have to look at the Iraq War to see how much damage you can do to yourself by your response,” Kilcullen told me. He is another of those who supported the war and consider it important to fight toward some kind of victory, but who recognize the ways in which this conflict has helped al-Qaeda. So far the war in Iraq has advanced the jihadist cause because it generates a steady supply of Islamic victims, or martyrs; because it seems to prove Osama bin Laden’s contention that America lusts to occupy Islam’s sacred sites, abuse Muslim people, and steal Muslim resources; and because it raises the tantalizing possibility that humble Muslim insurgents, with cheap, primitive weapons, can once more hobble and ultimately destroy a superpower, as they believe they did to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan twenty years ago. The United States also played a large role in thwarting the Soviets, but that doesn’t matter. For mythic purposes, mujahideen brought down one anti-Islamic army and can bring down another. …

… Because the general point is familiar, I’ll let one more anecdote about the consequences of invading Iraq stand for many that I heard. When Americans think of satellite surveillance and the National Security Agency, they are likely to imagine something out of the TV show 24: a limitless set of eyes in the sky that can watch everything, all the time. In fact, even today’s amply funded NSA can watch only a limited number of sites. “Our overhead imagery is dedicated to force protection in Iraq and Afghanistan,” I was told by a former intelligence official who would not let me use his name. He meant that the satellites are tied up following U.S. troops on patrol and in firefights to let them know who might be waiting in ambush. “There are still ammo dumps in Iraq that are open to insurgents,” he said, “but we lack the imagery to cover them—let alone what people might be dreaming up in Thailand or Bangladesh.” Because so many spy satellites are trained on the countries we have invaded, they tell us less than they used to about the rest of the world.

Documents captured after 9/11 showed that bin Laden hoped to provoke the United States into an invasion and occupation that would entail all the complications that have arisen in Iraq. His only error was to think that the place where Americans would get stuck would be Afghanistan.

Bin Laden also hoped that such an entrapment would drain the United States financially. Many al-Qaeda documents refer to the importance of sapping American economic strength as a step toward reducing America’s ability to throw its weight around in the Middle East. Bin Laden imagined this would happen largely through attacks on America’s oil supply. This is still a goal. For instance, a 2004 fatwa from the imprisoned head of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia declared that targeting oil pipelines and refineries was a legitimate form of economic jihad—and that economic jihad “is one of the most powerful ways in which we can take revenge on the infidels during this present stage.” The fatwa went on to offer an analysis many economists would be proud of, laying out all the steps that would lead from a less-secure oil supply to a less-productive American economy and ultimately to a run on the dollar. (It also emphasized that oil wells themselves should be attacked only as a last resort, because news coverage of the smoke and fires would hurt al-Qaeda’s image.)

Higher-priced oil has hurt America, but what has hurt more is the economic reaction bin Laden didn’t fully foresee. This is the systematic drag on public and private resources created by the undifferentiated need to be “secure.”

The effect is most obvious on the public level. “The economy as a whole took six months or so to recover from the effects of 9/11,” Richard Clarke told me. “The federal budget never recovered. The federal budget is in a permanent mess, to a large degree because of 9/11.” At the start of 2001, the federal budget was $125 billion in surplus. Now it is $300 billion in deficit.

A total of five people died from anthrax spores sent through the mail shortly after 9/11. In Devils and Duct Tape, his forthcoming book, John Mueller points out that the U.S. Postal Service will eventually spend about $5 billion on protective screening equipment and other measures in response to the anthrax threat, or about $1 billion per fatality. Each new security guard, each extra checkpoint or biometric measure, is both a direct cost and an indirect drag on economic flexibility.

If bin Laden hadn’t fully anticipated this effect, he certainly recognized it after it occurred. In his statement just before the 2004 election, he quoted the finding of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (!) to the effect that the total cost, direct and indirect, to America of the 9/11 attacks was at least $500 billion. Bin Laden gleefully pointed out that the attacks had cost al-Qaeda about $500,000, for a million-to-one payoff ratio. America’s deficit spending for Iraq and homeland security was, he said, “evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan, with Allah’s permission.”

And they say some guys in caves in Afghanistan couldn’t have pulled off 9/11. Hah. Bottom line, they’ve been fighting us smart, and we’ve been fighting them stupid.

Update: Finally a serious anti-terror policy.

Can This Marriage Be Saved?

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I got up this morning looking forward to wallowing in the Lamont victory (I know there’s a big challenge ahead, but we get so little to wallow in; enjoy, I say). I had also planned to float the speculation that the Lieberman team deliberately sabotaged their own web site because they knew they were losing, and Joe wanted an excuse. An unfair primary gives him a moral basis on which to challenge the election results.

But then I read this from the Washington Times supplement Insight:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has become increasingly dismayed over President Bush’s support for Israel to continue its war with Hezbollah.

State Department sources said Ms. Rice has been repeatedly stymied in her attempts to pressure Israel to end strikes against Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon. The sources said the secretary’s trip to the Middle East last week was torpedoed by the Israeli air strike of a Lebanese village in which 25 people were killed.

“I’ve never seen her so angry,” an aide said.

The U.S. response to the Israeli-Hezbollah war was said to have divided both the administration as well as the family of President George W. Bush. At the same time, it marked the first time since Ms. Rice became secretary of state that the president has overruled her.

Yesterday I speculated that the President had tuned out the Middle East because he doesn’t give a shit. But maybe he does give a shit. Or else the cluster bombing of civilians reminds him of his wholesome Texas childhood and the exploding frogs.

“We were terrible to animals,” recalled [Bush pal Terry] Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush borne turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. “Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,” Throckmorton said. “Or we’d put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.”

Kristof made plain that “we” explicitly included George W. Bush, and that George W., the Safari Club International Governor of the Year in 1999 for his support of trophy hunting, was the leader among the boys who did it.

I think I read somewhere that children get their first lessons in conflict resolution from playing with other children. But now let’s go back to Insight:

“For the last 18 months, Condi was given nearly carte blanche in setting foreign policy guidelines,” a senior government source familiar with the issue said. “All of a sudden, the president has a different opinion and he wants the last word.”

The disagreement between Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice is over the ramifications of U.S. support for Israel’s continued offensive against Lebanon. The sources said Mr. Bush believes that Israel’s failure to defeat Hezbollah would encourage Iranian adventurism in neighboring Iraq. Ms. Rice has argued that the United States would be isolated both in the Middle East and Europe at a time when the administration seeks to build a consensus against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Instead, Ms. Rice believes the United States should engage Iran and Syria to pressure Hezbollah to end the war with Israel. Ms. Rice has argued that such an effort would result in a U.S. dialogue with Damascus and Tehran on Middle East stability.

It occurs to me that this article may be part of the neocon’s scheme to scapegoat and marginalize Condi for being a stick-in-the-mud. Sidney Blumenthal wrote last week that the Bush Administration’s neoconservative insiders are eager to “widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war,” and Condi isn’t helping:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is said to have been “briefed” and to be “on board,” but she is not a central actor in pushing the covert neoconservative scenario. Her “briefing” appears to be an aspect of an internal struggle to intimidate and marginalize her. Recently she has come under fire from prominent neoconservatives who oppose her support for diplomatic negotiations with Iran to prevent its development of nuclear weaponry.

Rice’s diplomacy in the Middle East has erratically veered from initially calling on Israel for “restraint,” to categorically opposing a cease-fire, to proposing terms for a cease-fire guaranteed to conflict with the European proposal, and thus to thwarting diplomacy, prolonging the time available for the Israeli offensive to achieve its stated aim of driving Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon. But the neocon scenario extends far beyond that objective to pushing Israel into a “cleansing war” with Syria and Iran, says the national security official, which somehow will redeem Bush’s beleaguered policy in the entire region.

Last month Insight published an article titled “Dump Condi” that is riddled with dire warnings about accommodation and appeasement. Real Men don’t accommodate; they dictate. The neocons complain that Rice’s “ignorance of the Middle East” is hindering U.S. foreign policy. They expect Rice to be “transferred” after the November midterms, because by that time by that time “even Mr. Bush will recognize the failure of relying solely on diplomacy in the face of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”

Right now it’s hard to know exactly what Mr. Bush’s recognizes. Fred Kaplan writes in Slate that Bush doesn’t seem to understand his own foreign policy. Writing of Monday’s “presser” (in which Condi expressed her solicitous concern for the emotional problems of the Lebanese), Kaplan writes,

The transcript contains so many mind-boggling statements that it’s hard to know where to begin, so let’s take them in chronological order.

“Everybody wants the violence to stop,” Bush said in answer to the session’s first question. But of course this isn’t true. If it were, he could have imposed a cease-fire in the first few days. He and Rice explicitly wanted the violence to continue, wanted Israel to pummel Hezbollah, so that when the time was ripe for a settlement, Israel could come to the table with a huge advantage.

Then Bush made a statement that curiously veered off script: “People understand that there needs to be a cessation of hostilities in order for us to address the root causes of the problem.” This contradicted Rice’s mantra of the last two weeks—that there should be no cessation until these root causes are addressed. Did he understand what he was saying? Everybody skipped over it in any case.

And on and on. I urge you to read the entire Kaplan column. I may come back to it in another post. But there’s some more juicy stuff in the new Insight article about the spat between Condi and George. You’ll like this:

Mr. Bush’s position has been supported by Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and to a lesser extent National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. They have urged the president to hold off international pressure and give Israel more time to cause strategic damage to Hezbollah as well as Iranian and Syrian interests in Lebanon.

“I think if you think of what’s happening in Lebanon and Israel right now, you see the face of the beginning of the 21st century,” Mr. Rumsfeld said in a radio interview on Aug. 2.

Wait, it gets better.

Aides for Mr. Cheney have argued that the United States should have targeted Hezbollah and Syria during the war against Iraq in 2003. They said despite U.S. intelligence warnings Hezbollah was allowed to dominate Lebanon and build a formidable force along the Israeli border.

“There was talk of taking care of Hezbollah and Syria, but Condi and [then-Secretary of State Colin] Powell said ‘no way. We don’t need another front,'” an official said.

Oblivious doesn’t even get close to describing these people. They are lost in their own shit. John Williams writes about the neocon worldview on The Guardian web site:

One of the most interesting things I did as Jack Straw’s press secretary was to arrange the meeting between some of his Muslim constituents and Condoleezza Rice. That day in Blackburn last March came to mind when I saw the extraordinary suggestion that Straw might have been removed from the Foreign Office because the US administration thought he was too influenced by Muslim opinion in the town.

I say “extraordinary” not because I think it’s inaccurate but because it takes extreme mental gymnastics to conceive how anyone could believe it to be a bad thing to listen to and understand Muslim points of view. I’ve no idea whether the story is true. Under our unwritten constitution, nobody tells you why your competent, creative, diligent, honest, thoughtful boss of five years has suddenly been defenestrated.

The point about this story is that it is taken seriously. And it should be, because of its original source – Irwin Stelzer. An adviser to Rupert Murdoch, Stelzer is part of the commentating class in the US that glorifies itself with the title neoconservative. I’ve never quite understood the neoconservative worldview, except that its evidential base is their own prejudice, and its prescriptions are built on the world as they would like it to be, rather than as it is.

Some of them – for example, William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard – actually believe that Iranians would welcome a military attack on their country by America, taking their cue to rise up against their leaders. Again, it takes advanced mental gymnastics.

Nah, “mental gymnastics” doesn’t get there. It’s more like the neocons are so full of themselves they displace the rest of the universe. Reality is put through so many filters of ego-centrism and bigotry in a neocon’s head that it dissipates before it can reach consciousness. A neocon literally cannot see anything else in the world but himself. Wherever he looks, he sees only the shining reflection of his own bigotries and ideologies and pathologies scowling back at him.

[UPDATE: See also Robert Scheer, “Why We Don’t Know Our Enemy.” Outstanding.]

But I keep wandering away from the Insight article. We’re almost done. In fact, here’s the punch line:

Mr. Bush has been dismayed by the Israeli failure to defeat Hezbollah. They said several high-ranking Republicans have expressed amazement at the plodding Israeli advance into Lebanon.

“One Jewish friend of Bush actually called up a senior Israeli official and began yelling, ‘What the hell’s going on here,'” a source said. “‘Are you going to fight or what?'”

I love it that a friend of Bush who is, it seems, neither an elected or appointed government official takes it on himself to dictate policy to another nation. Grand.

Warren Strobel and Carol Rosenberg of McClatchy Newspapers (formerly known as Knight Ridder) write that Israel is preparing to expand the ground war in Lebanon. Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora begs Washington Post readers to “End This Tragedy Now.” And in Salon, Mitchell Prothero writes in “Bombs Over Beirut” that once pro-Western Lebanese are rapidly becoming Hezbollah supporters. Juan Cole has news of the fighting over the past few hours.

I’m going to wallow for awhile now. Catch ya later.

Update: See also Scott Ritter, “The Grave Consequences of Supporting War in Lebanon“; Thomas Friedman, “Warren Buffet and Hezbollah”

Know Your Enemy

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Bill Kristol thinks the Republican Party has flaws, but “at least we have a president who knows we are at war with jihadist Islam.”

Says who?

This week at Time.com Lisa Beyer wrote,

Enunciating a new security doctrine nine days after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush declared that the war on terrorism would be fought not just against al-Qaeda but also against “every terrorist group of global reach.” Hizballah can certainly be said to fit in that category. However grand it may be to fight all global terrorists, though, the simple fact is that we can’t: we don’t have the troops, the money or the political will. That means it may make sense to limit our hit list to the groups that actually threaten us. Hizballah does not now do that. Nor does the other group currently in the spotlight, the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas. The U.S. has sound reasons for wanting to constrain these groups, principally that they threaten our ally Israel. But those reasons have largely gone unarticulated as Bush falls back on maxims about the need to confront terrorism, as if Hizballah and Hamas are likely to be behind the next spectacular that will top 9/11. They are not, and pretending that they are costs the U.S. credibility, risks driving terrorist groups that aren’t allied into alliance and obscures the real issues at hand in the Middle East: How do you soften up militants who vehemently oppose Israel’s existence? What should the U.S. put on the line for Israel? And does it make sense for Washington to engage in boxing by surrogate with Tehran?

Yesterday I posted commentary on James Fallows’s new article in Atlantic, here and here. Here’s another bit:

How can the United States regain the initiative against terrorists, as opposed to living in a permanent crouch? By recognizing the point that I heard from so many military strategists: that terrorists, through their own efforts, can damage but not destroy us. Their real destructive power, again, lies in what they can provoke us to do. While the United States can never completely control what violent groups intend and sometimes achieve, it can determine its own response. That we have this power should come as good and important news, because it switches the strategic advantage to our side.

On the other hand …

So far, the United States has been as predictable in its responses as al-Qaeda could have dreamed. Early in 2004, a Saudi exile named Saad al-Faqih was interviewed by the online publication Terrorism Monitor. Al-Faqih, who leads an opposition group seeking political reform in Saudi Arabia, is a longtime observer of his fellow Saudi Osama bin Laden and of the evolution of bin Laden’s doctrine for al-Qaeda.

In the interview, al-Faqih said that for nearly a decade, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had followed a powerful grand strategy for confronting the United States. Their approach boiled down to “superpower baiting” (as John Robb, of the Global Guerrillas blog, put it in an article about the interview). The most predictable thing about Americans, in this view, was that they would rise to the bait of a challenge or provocation. …

…The United States is immeasurably stronger than al-Qaeda, but against jujitsu forms of attack its strength has been its disadvantage. The predictability of the U.S. response has allowed opponents to turn our bulk and momentum against us. Al-Qaeda can do more harm to the United States than to, say, Italy because the self-damaging potential of an uncontrolled American reaction is so vast.

Bill Kristol rants that Democrats are “Anti-war, Anti-Israel, Anti-Joe [Lieberman].” I say neocons like Kristol are anti-American. They seem to have no connection whatsoever to this country, its future, and its historical values. They’re also anti-smart. Let’s face it; your standard neocon is to intelligence what a black hole is to matter. If, after all that’s gone wrong, these people still think they are qualified to dictate America’s foreign policy, they are pathologically dense.

At Haaretz.com, Michael Levy calls for the end of the neocon nightmare.

The key neocon protagonists, their think tanks and publications may be unfamiliar to many Israelis, but they are redefining the region we live in. This tight-knit group of “defense intellectuals” – centered around Bill Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Elliott Abrams, Perle, Feith and others – were considered somewhat off-beat until they teamed up with hawkish well-connected Republicans like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Newt Gingrich, and with the emerging powerhouse of the Christian right. Their agenda was an aggressive unilateralist U.S. global supremacy, a radical vision of transformative regime-change democratization, with a fixation on the Middle East, an obsession with Iraq and an affinity to “old Likud” politics in Israel. Their extended moment in the sun arrived after 9/11.

Finding themselves somewhat bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, the neoconservatives are reveling in the latest crisis, displaying their customary hubris in re-seizing the initiative. The U.S. press and blogosphere is awash with neocon-inspired calls for indefinite shooting, no talking and extension of hostilities to Syria and Iran, with Gingrich calling this a third world war to “defend civilization.”

Bottom line:

An America that seeks to reshape the region through an unsophisticated mixture of bombs and ballots, devoid of local contextual understanding, alliance-building or redressing of grievances, ultimately undermines both itself and Israel.

Levy provides the alternative:

A U.S. return to proactive diplomacy, realism and multilateralism, with sustained and hard engagement that delivers concrete progress, would best serve its own, Israeli and regional interests. …

…Beyond that, Israel and its friends in the United States should seriously reconsider their alliances not only with the neocons, but also with the Christian Right. The largest “pro-Israel” lobby day during this crisis was mobilized by Pastor John Hagee and his Christians United For Israel, a believer in Armageddon with all its implications for a rather particular end to the Jewish story. This is just asking to become the mother of all dumb, self-defeating and morally abhorrent alliances.

Well, yeah.

Be sure to read all of Levy’s article. See also commentary by Brent Budowsky. Billmon and Taylor Marsh discuss the UN Security Council Resolution proposed today by the United States and France.

Good New, Bad News, Part I

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From James Fallows’s new article in the current issue of Atlantic Online (emphasis added):

No modern nation is immune to politically inspired violence, and even the best-executed antiterrorism strategy will not be airtight.

But the overall prospect looks better than many Americans believe, and better than nearly all political rhetoric asserts. The essence of the change is this: because of al-Qaeda’s own mistakes, and because of the things the United States and its allies have done right, al-Qaeda’s ability to inflict direct damage in America or on Americans has been sharply reduced. Its successor groups in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere will continue to pose dangers. But its hopes for fundamentally harming the United States now rest less on what it can do itself than on what it can trick, tempt, or goad us into doing. Its destiny is no longer in its own hands.

“Does al-Qaeda still constitute an ‘existential’ threat?” asks David Kilcullen, who has written several influential papers on the need for a new strategy against Islamic insurgents. Kilcullen, who as an Australian army officer commanded counter-insurgency units in East Timor, recently served as an adviser in the Pentagon and is now a senior adviser on counterterrorism at the State Department. He was referring to the argument about whether the terrorism of the twenty-first century endangers the very existence of the United States and its allies, as the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons did throughout the Cold War (and as the remnants of that arsenal still might).

“I think it does, but not for the obvious reasons,” Kilcullen told me. He said the most useful analogy was the menace posed by European anarchists in the nineteenth century. “If you add up everyone they personally killed, it came to maybe 2,000 people, which is not an existential threat.” But one of their number assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. The act itself took the lives of two people. The unthinking response of European governments in effect started World War I. “So because of the reaction they provoked, they were able to kill millions of people and destroy a civilization.

“It is not the people al-Qaeda might kill that is the threat,” he concluded. “Our reaction is what can cause the damage. It’s al-Qaeda plus our response that creates the existential danger.”

That’s a point I attempted to make on C-SPAN last February. There’s aren’t enough jihadists in the world to invade and occupy the United States and destroy our government and our military. Only we can do that.

And I say we’re doing a heck of a job.

Fallows interviewed a number of experts — some from military intelligence, some from academia — to understand exactly where we are now, antiterrorism-wise. The essential point of Fallows article is that, although the threat of terrorist attacks in the U.S. remains, there is reason for optimism. In some ways America is safer, he says.

However, as I read the article it struck me that, in just about every area where problems remain, the Bush Administration is heading in the wrong direction.

The good news: The experts that Fallows interviewed say that the old al Qaeda, the one that existed on September 11, no longer has operational ability. Among jihadists Osama bin Laden is not much more than a “Che Guevara–like” symbol. What we have now is “a global proliferation of ‘self-starter’ terrorist groups.” These groups certainly can inflict damage — the London and Madrid bombings, for example — but they lack the resources and organizational ability to pull off another September 11. This, some speculate, is the primary reason there hasn’t been another terrorist attack in the U.S. since.

At the moment about the only way a terrorist group could equal or top September 11 is with a nuclear weapon. And “if nuclear weapons constitute the one true existential threat,” the experts say, “then countering the proliferation of those weapons themselves is what American policy should address, more than fighting terrorism in general.”

Naturally, the Bush Administration has taken a different approach.

The Department of Homeland Security, on the other hand, is, um, probably not the reason there hasn’t been another terrorist attack in the U.S. since. “Indeed, nearly all emphasized the haphazard, wasteful, and sometimes self-defeating nature of the DHS’s approach,” Fallows writes.

Muslim Americans are another reason we’ve been terrorist-attack free for almost five years.

“The patriotism of the American Muslim community has been grossly underreported,” says Marc Sageman, who has studied the process by which people decide to join or leave terrorist networks. According to Daniel Benjamin, a former official on the National Security Council and coauthor of The Next Attack, Muslims in America “have been our first line of defense.” Even though many have been “unnerved by a law-enforcement approach that might have been inevitable but was still disturbing,” the community has been “pretty much immune to the jihadist virus.”

Something about the Arab and Muslim immigrants who have come to America, or about their absorption here, has made them basically similar to other well-assimilated American ethnic groups—and basically different from the estranged Muslim underclass of much of Europe. … most measures of Muslim disaffection or upheaval in Europe—arrests, riots, violence based on religion—show it to be ten to fifty times worse than here.

Muslims in Europe are not always economically disadvantaged. They just don’t assimilate:

The difference between the European and American assimilation of Muslims becomes most apparent in the second generation, when American Muslims are culturally and economically Americanized and many European Muslims often develop a sharper sense of alienation. “If you ask a second-generation American Muslim,” says Robert Leiken, author of Bearers of Global Jihad: Immigration and National Security After 9/11, “he will say, ‘I’m an American and a Muslim.’ A second-generation Turk in Germany is a Turk, and a French Moroccan doesn’t know what he is.”

We have a lot more experience with assimilating people here, of course. Yet we cannot be complacent. Anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. is up (thanks loads, Ms. Malkin) and extreme views can be found among American Muslims. Seeing to it that the rightie hatemongers don’t screw up one of our few advantages ought to be a priority.

There’s another gain against terrorism that we’re in the process of losing. In most Muslim countries support for jihadist violence among “civilian” populations has eroded —

“Like Tourette’s syndrome, they keep killing Muslim civilians,” says Peter Bergen. “That is their Achilles’ heel. Every time the bombs go off and kill civilians, it works in our favor. It’s a double whammy when the civilians they kill are Muslims.” Last November, groups directed by al-Zarqawi set off bombs in three hotels in Amman, Jordan. Some sixty civilians were killed, including thirty-eight at a wedding. The result was to turn Jordanian public opinion against al-Qaeda and al-Zarqawi, and to make the Jordanian government more openly cooperative with the United States.

Israel’s attacks on Lebanon blew that one out of the water, I’m afraid. We had already blown it in Iraq —

There, insurgents have slaughtered civilians daily, before and after the death this spring of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. But since American troops are also assumed to be killing civilians, the anti-insurgent backlash is muddied.

In fact, according to Caleb Carr, the only thing that keeps al Qaeda alive at all is Iraq.

Back to the original point:

In the modern brand of terrorist warfare, what an enemy can do directly is limited. The most dangerous thing it can do is to provoke you into hurting yourself.

This is what David Kilcullen meant in saying that the response to terrorism was potentially far more destructive than the deed itself. And it is why most people I spoke with said that three kinds of American reaction—the war in Iraq, the economic consequences of willy-nilly spending on security, and the erosion of America’s moral authority—were responsible for such strength as al-Qaeda now maintained.

“You only have to look at the Iraq War to see how much damage you can do to yourself by your response,” Kilcullen told me. He is another of those who supported the war and consider it important to fight toward some kind of victory, but who recognize the ways in which this conflict has helped al-Qaeda. So far the war in Iraq has advanced the jihadist cause because it generates a steady supply of Islamic victims, or martyrs; because it seems to prove Osama bin Laden’s contention that America lusts to occupy Islam’s sacred sites, abuse Muslim people, and steal Muslim resources; and because it raises the tantalizing possibility that humble Muslim insurgents, with cheap, primitive weapons, can once more hobble and ultimately destroy a superpower, as they believe they did to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan twenty years ago. The United States also played a large role in thwarting the Soviets, but that doesn’t matter. For mythic purposes, mujahideen brought down one anti-Islamic army and can bring down another. …

… “Many believe that the United States, bloodied and exhausted by the insurgency, stripped of its allies, will eventually withdraw,” Brian Jenkins writes of the jihadist view. From that perspective, “this defeat alone could bring about the collapse of the United States, just as collapse followed the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.”

The rest of the article catalogues the many ways the war in Iraq is hurting the United States and helping jihadists. And time and time again, the Bush Administration follows Osama bin Laden’s original game plan. We fell into bin Laden’s trap, in other words. And even though bin Laden himself is not reaping the benefits, other jihadists certainly are. Staying in Iraq will continue to drain the United States and strengthen jihad. There are serious perils to leaving, also. There’s no happy remedy to the mess Bush made.

But the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate. The Associated Press reports:

Hundreds of thousands of Shiites chanting “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” marched through the streets of Baghdad’s biggest Shiite district today in a show of support for Hezbollah militants battling Israeli troops in Lebanon. …

…Al-Sadr followers painted U.S. and Israeli flags on the main road leading to the rally site, and demonstrators stepped on them — a gesture of contempt in Iraq. Alongside the painted flags was written: “These are the terrorists.”

Protesters set fire to American and Israeli flags, as well as effigies of President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, showing the men with Dracula teeth. “Saddam and Bush, Two Faces of One Coin” was scrawled on Bush’s effigy.

The Shiites were the people we “liberated,” remember.

I’ve got more to say about Iraq and the James Fallows article, but I’ll say it this afternoon.

Smart War

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This is something that’s been slooshing around in my head for a while … Richard Norton-Taylor writes on The Guardian web site that

Israel is learning a lesson that the armies of other countries, including the US, have already grasped. Military force can no longer guarantee victory, certainly not in the conflict Israel and its western allies say they are engaged in – the “war on terror”, as the Bush White House calls it, or the “long war”, as the Pentagon now prefers.

Whether you call them guerrillas, insurgents or terrorists, you cannot bomb them into submission, as the US has found to its cost in Iraq, and as Israel is discovering in Lebanon. Even Tony Blair appeared to admit this in his weekend speech to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp organisation. “My concern is that we cannot win this struggle by military means or security measures alone, or even principally by them,” he said. “We have to put our ideas up against theirs.”

The neocons still haven’t figured this out yet, of course. But this got my attention:

Senior officers in the British army are wondering whether they will ever again fight a war, let alone win one, in the conventional sense.

I sincerely believe the old-fashioned government-declared war between nation-states has become a relic of history. I could be wildly mistaken, of course. Time will tell.

For them, the phrase “war on terror” is a misnomer, one that elevates the enemy and suggests terrorist groups can be defeated by force of arms alone.

Before the attacks of September 11 2001 on New York and Washington, the MoD had published a paper entitled The Future Strategic Context for Defence. No conventional military threats to Britain were likely to emerge, it predicted, in the 30 years to 2030. Instead, it identified terrorism, along with international crime. Prompted by the experiences of the military in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s (which are far from settled), the MoD, in a further attempt to drive home the military’s limitations, decided to develop what it calls a “comprehensive approach”. In this century, it says in a paper ordered by the chiefs of staff, “the symptoms of crisis will be spawned by a combination of climate change, ideology, greed, ethnic animosity, residual territorial claims, religious fanaticism and competition for resources”.

Military force is no answer to these. What is needed is a “clearer understanding of the root causes” of potential (and actual) conflicts. Revealing the MoD’s [the UK’s Ministry of Defense] liking for acronyms, the paper says there should be more cooperation with OGDs (other government departments), NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and IOs (international organisations).

There’s that “root causes” thing again. The problem is that when Bush talk about “root causes” he seems to think that it’s just fine to bomb the smithereens out of the problem population while the smart guys work out the “root causes.”

The British general who knows this best is David Richards, who yesterday took command of an expanded Nato force in Afghanistan. He knows he is engaged in a battle for “hearts and minds”, a task that requires political and civil institutions, diplomacy and negotiations, not the barrel of a gun or a bomb from a warplane.

The reasons for the futility of force are many, but very crudely — Through history wars have been fought for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is smoldering enmity left over from the last war. Since the 17th century, when firepower began to dominate warfare, governments had a near-monopoly on war. This was partly because only nation-states had the big guns. But now the forces of changing technology and globalization have made it possible for stateless groups to wage war, too. This is true even though these stateless groups don’t have as many fighters or as much military ordnance as the “regulars,” and this takes us to “asymmetric warfare.”

Just after September 11 Richard Norton-Taylor wrote that asymmetric warfare isn’t new, but in the post-9/11 world it has taken on new dimensions. Such warfare has to be fought on many levels — psychological (the old “hearts and minds” thing), political, diplomatic, financial, and economic, as well as military.

You cannot apply a simple military response when you are challenged politically. The Americans tried in Vietnam and failed, says Wilkinson. [Phillip Wilkinson of King’s College, London]

He is about to go to Washington at the invitation of the Pentagon – the US defence department – to discuss, among other things, the development of “logic and language” and political discourse in “complex emergencies”. What exactly is meant by “war” or “victory”?

These are good questions in a world which has said goodbye (though many, perhaps most, military leaders are slow to recognise the fact) to the era of Clausewitz, the great 19th century German strategist, who was preoccupied with wars between states and the conventional enemy’s “centre of gravity”.

It seems that Mr. Wilkerson traveled in vain. The Bush Administration never did think through the basic question — What exactly is meant by “war” or “victory”? They use the words, but I bet if you gave ’em paper and pencils and asked them to write down what they mean by “war” and “victory,” coherently and concisely, they couldn’t do it. This is, IMO, the primary reason our foreign policy is such a mess.

Another current buzz-phrase is “fourth generation warfare,” or 4GW. There is a great deal of information on 4GW here. I suggest everyone become acquainted with 4GW basics, because understanding it helps clarify many things. Here’s just a bit —

We appear to be returning to the situation that characterizes most of human experience, where both states and non-states wage war. In 4GW, at least one side is something other than a military force organized and operating under the control of a national government, and one that often exploits the weakness of the state system in many parts of the world. For a graphical depiction of how the “generations” evolve, please download The Evolution of Conflict (194KB PowerPoint – version 2/December 2005). …

… One way to tell that 4GW is truly new is that we don’t even have a name for its participants—typically dismissing them as “terrorists,” “extremists,” or “thugs.”

Name calling, though, is not often an effective substitute for strategy.

The attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center dispelled the notion that 4GW is simple “terrorism.” But one can sympathize with our political and military leaders, because 4GW is a strange form of warfare, one where military force plays a smaller role than in earlier generations, supporting initiatives that are more political, diplomatic, and economic.

As important as finding and destroying the actual combatants, for example, is drying up the bases of popular support that allow them to recruit for, plan, and execute their attacks. Perhaps most odd of all, being seen as too successful militarily may create a backlash, making the opponent’s other elements of 4GW more effective.

Get this …

The distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ may disappear.

Not comforting. Anyway, it seems the days of “total war,” which according to Wikipedia involves “the total subordination of politics to the war effort,” are gone. Now, the war effort must be subordinate to politics. Back in 1864 William Tecumseh Sherman set out to “make Georgia howl” and break the will of southern civilians to support the Confederate army. The March to the Sea helped the Union achieve a complete victory over the Confederacy. But that sort of war, and that sort of victory, are over.

The Bush Administration and the government of Israel have refused to face up to these new realities, and instead are trying to wage an old-fashioned World War II-type war. And it won’t work.

One of the reasons it won’t work is explained in this op ed by Caleb Carr, “Why Good Countries Fight Dirty Wars.” Carr writes that popular notions about “honor” in warfare are so much hoohaw.

The citizen-soldiers sent into the field by the United States or any other Western popular government are expected, by virtue of not so long ago having been free civilians themselves, to be more empathetic with the plight of the noncombatants with whom they come into contact. Certainly, brutal incidents like the My Lai massacre or the Abu Ghraib scandal occur from time to time, but they are widely viewed as cultural aberrations.

This interpretation, however, is as simplistic as it is misleading. All too often the armies of modern democracies have tolerated and even initiated outrages against civilians, in manners uneasily close to those of their totalitarian and terrorist enemies. Israeli troops are currently demonstrating this fact in their response to the Hezbollah rocket offensive — a response most of the world community, according to recent polls, believes is taking an unacceptably disproportionate toll on Lebanese civilians. And there have been times when democratic leaders have been even more open about their brutal intentions: Speaking of the Allied bombing campaign during World War II that culminated in that consummate act of state terrorism, the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, Winston Churchill flatly stated that the objective was “to make the enemy burn and bleed in every way.”

I urge you to read all of Carr’s op ed. Essentially what he says is that conventional warfare and civilian populations just don’t mix, and never did. Soldiers in war will commit atrocities. You can apply training and discipline to keep atrocities to a minimum, but you’re being foolish if you expect to eliminate them. And when applied to asymmetric warfare and 4GW, any abuse of civilians amounts to an army shooting itself in the foot. But instead of a smart, disciplined, fourth generation war, the Bush Administration launched a fiasco. Michael Hirsh:

Reading “Fiasco,” Thomas Ricks’s devastating new book about the Iraq war, brought back memories for me. Memories of going on night raids in Samarra in January 2004, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, with the Fourth Infantry Division units that Ricks describes. During these raids, confused young Americans would burst into Iraqi homes, overturn beds, dump out drawers, and summarily arrest all military-age men—actions that made them unwitting recruits for the insurgency. For American soldiers battling the resistance throughout Iraq, the unspoken rule was that all Iraqis were guilty until proven innocent. Arrests, beatings and sometimes killings were arbitrary, often based on the flimsiest intelligence, and Iraqis had no recourse whatever to justice. Imagine the sense of helpless rage that emerges from this sort of treatment. Apply three years of it and you have one furious, traumatized population. And a country out of control.

Caleb Carr concludes,

… what happens when a democratic army faces an opponent whose command-and-control structure, as well as its fighting units, is intimately woven into the fabric of civilian society? Is there any solution to the problem of such insurgencies? There is, but it involves the same kind of thinking that pragmatic commanders throughout the modern age have turned to: increased and innovative discipline.

Right now, there are senior U.S. commanders in Iraq (notably Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli) who are urging new and strict training to teach American troops the cultural, political and military methods necessary to fight this kind of war, steps that could be as revolutionary in reforming how the U.S. projects its power as the more primitive but equally critical reforms instituted by Cromwell and Frederick the Great were for their nations.

If support for such steps among top Pentagon and White House leaders continues to be as halfhearted as it has proved to date, however, the beast inside America’s armed forces will remain alive, and America’s own noncombatants will suffer for it along with the nation’s soldiers, as an active desire for revenge on the part of increasing numbers of foreign civilians steadily mounts.

We’re screwed.

All week the righties have been whining that Israel just can’t help killing civilians because Hezbollah operates out of residential areas, and that ain’t fair. It’s the old “unintentional collateral damage” problem. Back in the days when “victory” meant utterly crushing another nation-state and forcing it to surrender, “unintentional collateral damage” could be tolerated. But now it cannot. Righties like Rush Limbaugh are trying to stir up outrage against the “Hezbos” who don’t wear uniforms and who bivouac in residential neighborhoods and it ain’t fair, but righties are still living in a way pre-9/11 world. .

Here Edward “Captain Ed” Morrissey argues that “terrorists” don’t have to follow rules, and this creates “an impossible double standard for Israel.” Well, yes, that’s the nature of asymmetric warfare. He complains that Israel is criticized for the bombing of Qana while Hezbollah is not criticized for the rockets that it has launched against Israel. Hey, welcome to the world of 4GW. Remember, Hezbollah started the current ruckus not by attacking civilians, but by ambushing Israeli soldiers on the Lebanon-Israel border (which side of the border they were on when this happened depends on whom you ask). In other words, this was an act between two groups of soldiers. It would have been entirely appropriate for Israel to have responded in a discriminatory way that kept the conflict limited to precise strikes, probably by ground troops or special ops, on Hezbollah strongholds. Instead, Israel indiscriminately bombed residential areas and civilian infrastructure even in areas of Lebanon where Hezbollah is not concentrated. Many wise people tried to tell them this was a real bad idea, and they wouldn’t listen.

“We have a right to defend ourselves!” they cried. Yes, but defend yourself smart. Not stupid.

The Oblivious Right thinks that all this hand-wringing over civilians is for weenies. Catch this …

Part of what is crippling Western leaders is the sacrifice-worship of the altruist morality, which programs them, in response to human suffering, to suspend thinking and react emotionally. Natan Sharansky recounts a discussion he had with former president Jimmy Carter about why the Palestinian-Israeli “peace process” kept failing. Carter responded, “You know, you are right, but don’t try to be too rational about these things. The moment you see people suffering, you should feel solidarity with them and try to help them without thinking too much about the reasons.”

Somehow I think some context got left out there, but let’s go on … in fact, it is the righties and the neocons who have suspended thinking and are reacting emotionally. They refuse to sit down and think through consequences; they cannot say precisely what they even mean by “war” and “victory.” They don’t clarify their grand objectives, but think only of killing an ill-defined and amorphous enemy. They still think they are fighting total war, in which the political consequences are subordinated to the war effort.

But even more insidious is a kind of cognitive altruism that tells men to sacrifice, not just their interests, but their judgment, subordinating their knowledge to the opinions and prejudices of others. That is what seems to be operating here. Whatever Secretary Rice knows about the Iranians’ strategy is discarded the moment lurid images of civilian casualties are splashed across the front pages of European newspapers and the broadcasts of Arab television stations. Just as, in this self-abnegating morality, you have to consider the interests of everyone except yourself–so, in this morality of cognitive self-abnegation, you have to consider everyone’s opinion except your own. Thus, faced with the united force of “world opinion,” the formerly “tough-minded” Secretary of State was flustered into an ignominious surrender of American interests.

He’s saying that we shouldn’t be so tender-hearted about the poor civilians or so craven to win the favor of world opinion. But in 4GW, the objective is not to win a military victory but to effect political change. The objective is to dry up Hezbollah’s base of support, not make them more popular. The objective is to encourage peaceful economic enterprises and democratic governments, not blow them to bits while you’re trying to get at the “bad guys.”

This is a strange kind of war, in which we have more than enough military capability to crush the enemy’s “lousy army.” Nor do we lack the intellectual power to understand and counteract the enemy’s strategy. But we lack the moral confidence to use both our power and our knowledge.

Yes, exactly; just as it says above: “4GW is a strange form of warfare, one where military force plays a smaller role than in earlier generations, supporting initiatives that are more political, diplomatic, and economic.”

The righties can’t understand why our superior military might can’t prevail. They cannot wrap their heads around the simple truth that the means they want to use and the objectives don’t fit. At this point, for example, we could bring peace to Iraq with military might, but we’d have to slaughter most of its population and leave Iraq a barren wasteland in the process. And yes, I believe we could do that. But I don’t believe that is the objective. If the objective is to effect political change and turn a population away from Islamic totalitarianism and toward the West, our use of force must be smart and strategically discriminating. Israel didn’t think that through, and that’s why Israel is losing in Lebanon. And the Bush Administration didn’t think that through, and that’s why we’re losing in Iraq.

Good Point

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Wolcott (emphasis added):

This afternoon Fox Newser Shepard Smith, stationed on the Lebanese-Israeli border, described the faces and demeanor of the Israeli soldiers returning from incursions into southern Lebanon. He said they looked “stunned” at the ferocity of the Hezbollah fighters. He added that even though the Israeli military knew Hezbollah had had six years to prepare defenses and traps in the southern area, they were unprepared for how lethally sophisticated the tactics were.* (I’m paraphrasing wildly, but I haven’t mischaracterized the gist of what he reported.)

Which brings me to one of the arch paradoxes of the War on Terror–that nearly five years after 9/11 we persist in both overestimating and underestimating our enemies. The hawks warn about a clash of civilizations, nuclear clouds as smoking guns, the global network of sleeper cells, an octopus with a thousand tentacles: a foe that kills without pity or remorse or discrimination, and ranks with Nazi Germany as a juggernaut of evil. Yet at the same time the politicians and pundits (particularly on the right) persist in deprecating the strength, agility, and ingenuity of the very foes they claim could bring down Western society, mocking Bin Laden in his cave (the greatest mass murder in American history, and the Bush administration treats his non-capture as a negligible detail), sluffing off the Iraqi insurgents as embittered Baathists and “dead-enders,” and deluding ourselves that massive air power will bug-squash guerrilla fighters and shock and awe the remnants into submission. We still regard them as savage primitives of low cunning who sporadically lash out. Our commentators and military strategists suffer from a catastrophic failure of imagination, unable or unwilling to see the world through our enemies’ eye and to think like them, assuming that our thought processes are superior, sufficient, and will prevail. Victor Davis Hanson’s Western way of war always wins, except when it doesn’t (Vietnam and, now, Iraq).

Today’s Bob Herbert column is good, too.

Just Wait

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My only quibble with this New York Times editorial is in the first paragraph:

It is only now, nearly five years after Sept. 11, that the full picture of the Bush administration’s response to the terror attacks is becoming clear. Much of it, we can see now, had far less to do with fighting Osama bin Laden than with expanding presidential power.

Some of us realized what was going on a lot sooner. Like when Attorney General John Ashcroft suggested habeas corpus be suspended indefinitely. He wanted this written into the original version of the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act was introduced to Congress on September 19, 2001.

At the time, I thought Ashcroft was just being hysterical. The alarm bells went off for me, however, when President Bush issued an executive order allowing former presidents to keep their presidential records sealed indefinitely. In this case “indefinitely” means that former president’s life plus the life of anyone designated by that former president to act in his behalf postpartum. Bush signed this on November 1, 2001.

I figured at the time he was up to something. I don’t see any reason why a future president couldn’t countermand that executive order, but still … Anyway, back to the New York Times.

Over and over again, the same pattern emerges: Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the legal constraints. Even when the only challenge was to get required approval from an ever-cooperative Congress, the president and his staff preferred to go it alone. While no one questions the determination of the White House to fight terrorism, the methods this administration has used to do it have been shaped by another, perverse determination: never to consult, never to ask and always to fight against any constraint on the executive branch.

One result has been a frayed democratic fabric in a country founded on a constitutional system of checks and balances. Another has been a less effective war on terror.

The editorial then goes into more detail on the way Bush handled the Guantánamo Bay Prison —

This whole sorry story has been on vivid display since the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions and United States law both applied to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. For one brief, shining moment, it appeared that the administration realized it had met a check that it could not simply ignore. The White House sent out signals that the president was ready to work with Congress in creating a proper procedure for trying the hundreds of men who have spent years now locked up as suspected terrorists without any hope of due process.

But by week’s end it was clear that the president’s idea of cooperation was purely cosmetic. At hearings last week, the administration made it clear that it merely wanted Congress to legalize President Bush’s illegal actions — to amend the law to negate the court’s ruling instead of creating a system of justice within the law. As for the Geneva Conventions, administration witnesses and some of their more ideologically blinkered supporters in Congress want to scrap the international consensus that no prisoner may be robbed of basic human dignity. …

… The divide made it clear how little this all has to do with fighting terrorism. Undoing the Geneva Conventions would further endanger the life of every member of the American military who might ever be taken captive in the future. And if the prisoners scooped up in Afghanistan and sent to Guantánamo had been properly processed first — as military lawyers wanted to do — many would never have been kept in custody, a continuing reproach to the country that is holding them. Others would actually have been able to be tried under a fair system that would give the world a less perverse vision of American justice. The recent disbanding of the C.I.A. unit charged with finding Osama bin Laden is a reminder that the American people may never see anyone brought to trial for the terrible crimes of 9/11.

— and eavesdropping on Americans —

Once again, the early perception that the president was going to bend to the rules turned out to be premature.

The bill the president has agreed to accept would allow him to go on ignoring the eavesdropping law. It does not require the president to obtain warrants for the one domestic spying program we know about — or for any other program — from the special intelligence surveillance court. It makes that an option and sets the precedent of giving blanket approval to programs, rather than insisting on the individual warrants required by the Constitution. Once again, the president has refused to acknowledge that there are rules he is required to follow.

And while the bill would establish new rules that Mr. Bush could voluntarily follow, it strips the federal courts of the right to hear legal challenges to the president’s wiretapping authority. The Supreme Court made it clear in the Guantánamo Bay case that this sort of meddling is unconstitutional.

The editorial concludes with an assessment of the cost of executive arrogance.

The president’s constant efforts to assert his power to act without consent or consultation has warped the war on terror. The unity and sense of national purpose that followed 9/11 is gone, replaced by suspicion and divisiveness that never needed to emerge. The president had no need to go it alone — everyone wanted to go with him. Both parties in Congress were eager to show they were tough on terrorism. But the obsession with presidential prerogatives created fights where no fights needed to occur and made huge messes out of programs that could have functioned more efficiently within the rules. …

… To a disturbing degree, the horror of 9/11 became an excuse to take up this cause behind the shield of Americans’ deep insecurity. The results have been devastating. Americans’ civil liberties have been trampled. The nation’s image as a champion of human rights has been gravely harmed. Prisoners have been abused, tortured and even killed at the prisons we know about, while other prisons operate in secret. American agents “disappear” people, some entirely innocent, and send them off to torture chambers in distant lands. Hundreds of innocent men have been jailed at Guantánamo Bay without charges or rudimentary rights. And Congress has shirked its duty to correct this out of fear of being painted as pro-terrorist at election time.

The editorial also cites this article by Jane Mayer from the July 3 issue of The New Yorker on the “effort to undermine the constitutional separation of powers.”

If you google “New York Times treason” you get no end of anti-NY Times calumniation, and not all from the Right. Today the righties are linking to a Little Green Footballs post titled “The Media Are the Enemy.” (I don’t link to lgf, but it shouldn’t be hard to find if you really want to read it.) I gather from other rightie posts that a New York Times photographer took a photo of a Shiite militia sniper aiming at Americans, and the righties are outraged. Expect more calls for Times managers and staffers to be hunted down. And you know the bleepheads are taking their cues from the GOP and White House insiders.

I guess the Times editorial page just returned fire.

It’s a shame the reporting side isn’t so, um, uncompromised. Glenn Greenwald explains that the Times (and the Washington Post, and Time) mis-reported the Specter bill, making it sound as if the President were giving ground to Congress.

It wasn’t just the Post which fundamentally misled its readers about this bill. So, too, did Eric Lichtblau in his article in The New York Times (“The proposed legislation represents a middle-ground approach among the myriad proposals in Congress for dealing with the wiretapping controversy”).

Today’s editorial described the Senate hearings differently —

The hearings were supposed to produce a hopeful vision of a newly humbled and cooperative administration working with Congress to undo the mess it had created in stashing away hundreds of people, many with limited connections to terrorism at the most, without any plan for what to do with them over the long run. Instead, we saw an administration whose political core was still intent on hunkering down. The most embarrassing moment came when Bush loyalists argued that the United States could not follow the Geneva Conventions because Common Article Three, which has governed the treatment of wartime prisoners for more than half a century, was too vague. Which part of “civilized peoples,” “judicial guarantees” or “humiliating and degrading treatment” do they find confusing?

Today’s Washington Post carries amuch more docile article written by David Broder and Dan Balz titled “How Common Ground of 9/11 Gave Way to Partisan Split.” Instead of actually explaining how the common ground of 9/11 gave way to a partisan split, Broder and Balz delicately tiptoe around the elephant in the living room and blame, um, partisanship.

I say the effort is a waste of ink and paper, not to mention bandwidth. Joe Gandelman calls it a must-read, but I am not persuaded.

See also the Los Angeles Times, “License to Wiretap.”

Tortured Reasoning

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DigbyTristero explains why you can’t reason with a rightie:

Folks, if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a zillion times. Never argue on the right’s playing field. Ever. It’s a setup and you will lose. That’s ’cause the questions as they pose them are defined so narrowly and foolishly, they preclude anything resembling what a liberal means by rational discourse. In the post linked above, Jonah Goldberg emits:

    If Democrats want terrorists to fall under the Geneva Convention let them say so. My guess is most won’t, if they’re smart.

And Kevin falls for it:

    Well, I’m a Democrat, and I’ll say it: anyone we capture on a battlefield should be subject to the minimum standards of decency outlined in the Geneva Conventions. That includes terrorists.

Wrong, wrong wrong!

Like, “So, would you rather Saddam stay in power?” this is a framing of the issue that provides for not even the hint of an intellectually coherent response, let alone a “dialogue.” It is designed to elicit the narrowest range of acceptable responses, responses that reduce disagreement with Bushism to a quibble.

This goes back to something Goldberg wrote this past Sunday, which in turn was a comment on something Charles Pierce wrote at TAPPED the same day. Pierce was commenting on an article in Saturday’s Washington Post titled “GOP Seeks Advantage In Ruling On Trials” by Michael Abramowitz and Jonathan Weisman. Abramowitz and Weisman wrote that Republicans were planning to turn the recent Hamdan decision into a political tool with which to bash Democrats:

Republicans yesterday looked to wrest a political victory from a legal defeat in the Supreme Court, serving notice to Democrats that they must back President Bush on how to try suspects at Guantanamo Bay or risk being branded as weak on terrorism. …

… “It would be good politics to have a debate about this if Democrats are going to argue for additional rights for terrorists,” said Terry Nelson, a prominent GOP political strategist who was political director for Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004. …

…A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the issue is still being debated internally, seemed to hint at the potential political implications in Congress. “Members of both parties will have to decide whether terrorists who cherish the killing of innocents deserve the same protections as our men and women who wear the uniform,” this official said.

Working backward — Charles Pierce’s point was that the last paragraph in the block quote above made Abramowitz and Weisman “part of a political dirty-tricks operation robed in constitutional privileges.” Does anyone seriously think the White House is engaged in a serious internal debate on how to treat the prisoners/detainees? Instead of how to tweak the issue to political advantage? Please.

And then Jonah Goldberg responded to Charles Pierce —

And I say this as someone who basically sees nothing wrong with making a political issue out of the Hamdan decision. If Democrats want terrorists to fall under the Geneva Convention let them say so. My guess is most won’t, if they’re smart.

To which Kevin Drum said,

Well, I’m a Democrat, and I’ll say it: anyone we capture on a battlefield should be subject to the minimum standards of decency outlined in the Geneva Conventions. That includes terrorists. It’s our way of telling the world that we aren’t barbarians; that we believe in minimal standards of human decency even if our enemies don’t. It’s also a necessary — though not sufficient — requirement for winning this war.

To which Digby Tristero responded (adding to the quote above),

And if, without thinking, you take the bait and respond as Kevin has, you’re instantly battling uphill:

– – – – – – –

    What is all this preposterous liberal hand-wringing about rights for terrorists? They’re beheading our soldiers! They are evil! And there you are, worried sick about their rights. And look, the world thinks we’re barbarians anyway, anti-Americanism predates anti-Bushism, duh. And let’s not forget the big picture here: The important issue is not to demonstrate we’re not barbarians but to defeat the terrorists before they kill us. The rest is detail.

Anyway, the point here is that it’s the Right, not the Left, that time and time again proves it is not serious about combating terrorism or strengthening our national security. All the Right cares about is setting semantic traps to win political advantage.

In today’s Washington Post, Harold Meyerson writes that Republicans seem conflicted on the rule of law regarding the Hamdan decision.

Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens also said that whatever procedures were adopted had to comport with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which mandates humane treatment for prisoners of war and entitles them to some rights at trial — such as their, and their attorneys’, right to actually attend.

In February 2002, President Bush signed an order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to our war on terrorism, since it was not a war against a nation as such. A memo from the White House counsel one month before had called the Conventions “quaint” and “obsolete.” (Good thing nobody asked the office for its assessment of the Bill of Rights.) But the court ruled flatly that Bush’s order was wrong. Article 3, Stevens noted, explicitly says that its terms apply even in a “conflict not of an international character.” Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his concurring opinion, even had the bad manners to point out that violations of Article 3 were war crimes subject to severe punishment under statutes passed by Congress.

Now, if one were to think about this issue rationally, one might understand there is no reason lawful procedures for determining if prisoners/detainees actually require being imprisoned or detained would compromise American national security. But of course, when attempting to reason with righties, rational thinking will just get you into trouble.

As I understand it, the Hamdan decision says that Congress — not the White House — must stipulate how the prisoners/detainees will be tried. Just as judges are not supposed to legislate from the bench, neither are presidents supposed to legislate from the Oval Office. So the matter is to go back to Congress, and Congress might well just rubber stamp whatever the White House wants to do. In any event, some congressional Republicans call for working with Democrats on this issue. For example:

South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, who was a military attorney before he entered politics, has said, “My nation needs both parties working in collaboration with the executive branch to solve the military commission problem.”

Again, this is rational, and this is what the law and the Constitution and even the global war on terror require. However,

According to Karl Rove — the guy who actually decrees the strategy — Republicans will maintain their hold on Congress come November by stressing at every turn that the Democrats are a pre-Sept. 11 party while the Republicans are a post-Sept. 11 party.

The Democrats are concerned with such quaint and obsolete concepts as the rule of law. None of that for the Republicans; they’re too tough and realistic.

And so, when Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi had the temerity to welcome the court’s decision, Republican House leader John Boehner responded with a press release that attacked her for advocating “special privileges for terrorists.”

Echoing Boehner, the talk-radio thugocracy could speak of little else.

Here’s Meyerson’s punch line:

So Republicans have a choice. Working with the Democrats, they could craft a legislative response that incorporates both halves of the court’s decision, guaranteeing the legality of the new procedures — but forfeiting a major opportunity to demagogue against Democrats between now and November. Or, as they do roughly 100 times out of 100, they could simply choose to go for the politics. A bill that gives the force of law to the administration’s kangaroo courts could surely pass the House with close to unanimous Republican support. In the Senate, so many Republicans might demur that such a bill could fail. No matter: Some Democrats in both houses would surely vote against such a bill, which Rove and Co. would use to brand the party as one big Osama Enabling Society.

Jonah Goldberg is siding with the games-players, of course. Digby explains how to respond to him:

Jonah Goldberg is indulging in political games when he knows full well that the lives of millions of Americans working abroad, including soldiers who are fighting a war he supports but refuses to fight, are being endangered by the arrogant refusal of the Bush administration to set an example of principled action in the world. By embracing an official policy that embraces torture and murder, Bush (and enablers like Goldberg) are ensuring that what happened to Daniel Pearl will happen to more and more Americans. But the effect of this egregious flouting of bedrock principles going back thousands of years will transcend even the numerous terrible personal tragedies that are sure to come. As it becomes more dangerous for Americans to travel, trade will suffer and the security of our country will suffer precipitous declines.

Instead helping to create an atmosphere for genuine inquiry and dialogue, with recourse to facts and intelligent give and take, all Goldberg offers is one more opportunity to toss around the same old vacuous smears the right has been peddling for 30 plus years against the rest of America’s politicians, including those who are quite willing to fight wars Goldberg and company don’t have the guts to fight themselves. If Goldberg were prepared to discuss these very serious issues with any seriousness, he never would have proposed doing with such constricted, partisan language. And until he is prepared to be serious, I see no reason to enter his farcical rhetorical world.

Two points, which to Goldberg are irrelevant: One, we have no way to know if all the prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere are terrorists A number of prisoners have been determined to be innocent and released, but only after being detained in for months, even years. The BBC reported that one of the men who committed suicide at Guantanamo last month was scheduled to be released but did not know it.

Second, the issue of prisoners of war, or detainees, or whatever you want to call them, and torture, is not about what a prisoner/detainee “deserves” or giving him special rights. It’s about our values.

Over the long 4th of July weekend the Right Blogosphere was a warehouse of every flag-waving, pro-American sentiment you ever heard, along with the usual drivel about how “The Left” hates America. For example, “The left is apparently afraid to be in awe of this wonderful country, what it has done for mankind. They are afraid to recognize its good aspects.”

No, child, we are not afraid to recognize its good aspects. We are trying desperately to preserve its good aspects from being destroyed by the likes of you.

Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, the Judge Advocate General‘s Corps JAG who defended Hamdan in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case, was questioned last week by Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: I only have a minute here, sir, and I appreciate your position, and I‘m being tough with you because there is another side to this argument. Let me ask you, do you believe that people who fight us as terrorists deserve Geneva Convention treatment?

SWIFT: It‘s not whether they deserve it or not. It‘s how we conduct ourselves. It has to do where if we say that our opponent can cause us not to follow the rules anymore, then we‘ve lost who we are. We‘re the good guys. We‘re the guys who follow the rule and the people we fight are the bad guys and we show that every day when we follow the rules, regardless of what they do. It‘s what sets us apart. It‘s what makes us great and in my mind, it‘s what makes us undefeatable, ultimately.

Got that, rightie?

For years righties have been telling us we lefties lack a moral compass. We engage in situational ethics. Well, folks, I say that whenever righties peg their ethical judgments on what they think other people have done first, I’d say their “moral compass” got lost in a swamp. This is doubly true when those “other peo;ple” are not given adequate means to challenge their incarceration.

Having ditched their moral compasses, righties justify their substandard ethics with legalisms about uniforms. But seems to me that when our enemies do not wear uniforms, we must be even more careful than with uniformed “regulars” to be sure those detainees are not harmless civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s the point of Hamdan; we need to have lawful procedures to ensure that innocent people are not locked up for years with the enemy. This is not about giving “rights” to terrorists, but following our own moral compass.

Here’s a little bit of history for you:

… at the time of the Guadalcanal Invasion in 1942, much of the Japanese populace believed that Americans tortured prisoners. Rumors circulated that the barbarians churned tanks over those Japanese captured in the Solomon Islands. These of course were untrue, but they were widely believed. Japan, unlike the United States, was not bound to treat its prisoners under international law because she failed to ratify the Geneva Convention articles on prisoners of war. Japan claimed, however, she would observe its stipulations.

The Vatican, of all places, broadcast to the world Japan’s kindness to its captives. Prisoners of war in Japan and Japanese occupied territory, the Holy City reported, received ample supplies of soap, cigarettes, and money to purchase other items from their captors. Those who knew the truth but were unable to speak because of their plight meanwhile learned to avoid the wrath of an Ishihara or to “stand fast or move fast” when suddenly face to face with a “menacing bayonet or rifle butt.” Behind the cold wire walked death, hatred, and hunger. [David Oran Faries, “Home Is My Only Destination: William Harold Thomas, North China Marine, 1940-1945” (Master’s Thesis, Department of History, Western Illinois University, August 1985), pp. 69-70.]

I happen to have a copy of this master’s thesis because David Faries is my cousin and William Harold Thomas was our uncle. I’ve mentioned him before; he’s the guy who was a U.S. Marine embassy guard in Peking in 1941, and who was a prisoner of war in Japan from the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to after the surrender of Japan in August 1945. My uncle was beaten and starved, but he survived the camp. Several other Marines were killed, cruelly. But he came home emaciated and in fragile health. He was, I believe, only in his 50s when he died of health problems that began in Japan.

The Japanese decided that my uncle didn’t “deserve” humane treatment.

I was born after World War II, but I grew up hearing the legend of Uncle Harry in Japan. And was a point of pride with me that American policy was to treat POWs humanely, no matter what the enemy did to our soldiers. That’s why we were the good guys. We often fell short of our own ideals, but at least we had ideals.

Update: See Glenn Greenwald, “Legalizing torture – distorting Hamdan“