Read the ex-Yugoslavia files covering the NATO offensive starting in late March 1999.

from TCSDaily.com, 2006-Nov-13, by Josh Manchester:

Why intellectuals love defeat

James Carroll, recently writing in the Boston Globe, wondered if America could finally accept defeat in Iraq, and be the better for it, comparing it to Vietnam:

"But what about the moral question? For all of the anguish felt over the loss of American lives, can we acknowledge that there is something proper in the way that hubristic American power has been thwarted? Can we admit that the loss of honor will not come with how the war ends, because we lost our honor when we began it? This time, can we accept defeat?"

To be frank, no. In Mr. Carroll's fantasyland, the United States is deserving of defeat, and through some sort of mental gymnastics, that defeat is honorable, because it smacked of hubris to ever have fought in the first place.

I contend instead that the ultimate dishonor will be to leave hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of Iraqis to violent deaths; and that this is far too large a price to pay for Mr. Carroll to feel better.

In his book The Culture of Defeat, the German scholar Wolfgang Schivelbusch described the stages of defeat through which nations pass upon losing a large war. He examined the South's loss of the Confederacy, the French loss in the Franco-Prussian War, and the German loss in World War I. He saw similar patterns in how their national cultures dealt with defeat: a "dreamland"-like state; then an awakening to the magnitude of the loss; then a call that the winning side used "unsoldierly" techniques or equipment; and next the stage of seeing the nation as being a loser in battle, but a winner in spirit. Schivelbusch expanded upon this last as such:

"To see victory as a curse and defeat as moral purification and salvation is to combine the ancient idea of hubris with the Christian virtue of humility, catharsis with apocalypse. That such a concept should have its greatest resonance among the intelligentsia can be explained in part by the intellectual's classical training but also by his inherently ambivalent stance toward power."

Who knows whether Mr. Carroll has had classical training, but should Schivelbusch meet him today, would he not recognize this idea of defeat as moral purification?

The only problem for those such as Mr. Carroll is that we have not yet lost. It is difficult not to conclude that there is a class of well-intentioned individuals in the United States like him who don't merely feel as they do upon witnessing a defeat, but instead think this way all the time. Like it or not, this mentality of permanent defeat plays a large part in the Democratic Party. It is now up to President Bush and the new Democratic congressional leadership to see that it does not become dominant.

How to do so? A charm offensive is not quite what is necessary. Instead, perhaps a combination of sobering events that will impress upon Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid the gravity of our current situation would do the trick. Why not invite both Pelosi and Reid to the White House every morning until the new Congress is sworn in - and ask them to listen with the President to his Presidential Daily Brief, describing what Al Qaeda has cooked up of late? Or, why not invite them along with the President to one of his private sessions with the families of those who have paid the ultimate price overseas? Speaking of those overseas whose lives hang upon American policy, Pelosi and Reid could be participants in the next conference call that Bush has with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki.

The point of all of this would be to create a true bipartisan consensus on Iraq that does not leave the Iraqis and US credibility to disaster. The Iraqi blogger "Sooni," who describes himself as a "free man" living in Baghdad, recently was asked what would happen if the US partitioned Iraq. "Just imagine it this way [sic] partitioning Iraq will create a small Iran in the south of Iraq and a small Afghanistan in the middle of it!"

Leaving Iraq will be worse than leaving Vietnam, not necessarily in terms of bloodshed, though that will be no comfort to those who will be slaughtered, but because the jihadist threat today is more dangerous than the Soviet threat then. Despite lacking - so far - in similar capabilities to the Communists, our enemies more than make up for it with an insatiable bloodthirsty ruthlessness. The honor that Mr. Carroll sees in defeat will soon be forgotten should Al Qaeda establish a caliphate in Anbar Province and begin a healthy trade in the export of mayhem throughout the West. The Furies that will visit us from such a redoubt will engender much more than a little longing that we had stayed.

Josh Manchester is a TCSDaily contributing writer. His blog is The Adventures of Chester (www.theadventuresofchester.com).

from the Orlando Sentinel, 2010-Jan-27, by Robert Block and Mark K. Matthews:

Obama aims to ax moon mission

Cape Canaveral and Washington — NASA's plans to return astronauts to the moon are dead. So are the rockets being designed to take them there — that is, if President Barack Obama gets his way.

When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon.

There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all.

In their place, according to White House insiders, agency officials, industry executives and congressional sources familiar with Obama's long-awaited plans for the space agency, NASA will look at developing a new "heavy-lift" rocket that one day will take humans and robots to explore beyond low Earth orbit. But that day will be years — possibly even a decade or more — away.

In the meantime, the White House will direct NASA to concentrate on Earth-science projects — principally, researching and monitoring climate change — and on a new technology research and development program that will one day make human exploration of asteroids and the inner solar system possible.

There will also be funding for private companies to develop capsules and rockets that can be used as space taxis to take astronauts on fixed-price contracts to and from the International Space Station — a major change in the way the agency has done business for the past 50 years.

The White House budget request, which is certain to meet fierce resistance in Congress, scraps the Bush administration's Vision for Space Exploration and signals a major reorientation of NASA, especially in the area of human spaceflight.

"We certainly don't need to go back to the moon," said one administration official.

Everyone interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity, either because they are not authorized to talk for the White House or because they fear for their jobs. All are familiar with the broad sweep of Obama's budget proposal, but none would talk about specific numbers because these are being tightly held by the White House until the release of the budget.

But senior administration officials say the spending freeze for some federal agencies is not going to apply to the space agency in this budget proposal. Officials said NASA was expected to see some "modest" increase in its current $18.7 billion annual budget — possibly $200 million to $300 million more but far less than the $1 billion boost agency officials had hoped for.

They also said that the White House plans to extend the life of the International Space Station to at least 2020. One insider said there would be an "attractive sum" of money — to be spent over several years — for private companies to make rockets to carry astronauts there.

But Obama's budget freeze is likely to hamstring NASA in coming years as the spending clampdown will eventually shackle the agency and its ambitions. And this year's funding request to develop both commercial rockets and a new NASA spaceship will be less than what was recommended by a White House panel of experts last year.

That panel, led by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine, concluded that to have a "viable" human space-exploration program, NASA needed a $3 billion annual budget hike, and that it would take as much as $5 billion distributed over five years to develop commercial rockets that could carry astronauts safely to and from the space station.

Last year, lawmakers prohibited NASA from canceling any Constellation programs and starting new ones in their place unless the cuts were approved by Congress. The provision sends a "direct message that the Congress believes Constellation is, and should remain, the future of America's human space flight program," wrote U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., last month.

Nevertheless, NASA contractors have been quietly planning on the end of Ares I, which is years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget. NASA has already spent more than $3 billion on Ares I and more than $5 billion on the rest of Constellation.

In recent days, NASA has been soliciting concepts for a new heavy-lift rocket from major contractors, including Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin Corp. and Pratt & Whitney. Last week, a group of moonlighting NASA engineers and rocket hobbyists proposed variations on old agency designs that use the shuttle's main engines and fuel tank to launch a capsule into space. According to officials and industry executives familiar with the presentations, some of the contractor designs are very similar to the one pressed by the hobbyists.

Officially, companies such as Boeing still support Constellation and its millions of dollars of contracts. Some believe that in a battle with Congress, Ares may survive.

"I would not say Ares is dead yet," said an executive with one major NASA contractor. "It's probably more accurate to say it's on life support. We have to wait to see how the coming battle ends."

Few doubt that a fight is looming. In order to finance new science and technology programs and find money for commercial rockets, Obama will be killing off programs that have created jobs in some powerful constituencies, including the Marshall Space Flight Center in Shelby's Alabama. But the White House is said to be ready for a fight.

The end of the shuttle program this year is already going to slash 7,000 jobs at Kennedy Space Center.

One administration official said the budget will send a message that it's time members of Congress recognize that NASA can't design space programs to create jobs in their districts. "That's the view of the president," the official said.

from the Wall Street Journal Asia, 2010-Jan-20, by Richard D. Fisher, Jr.:

China's Scary Space Ambitions
The U.S. risks losing the air superiority in Asia purchased through great sacrifice.

China's Jan. 11 test of exoatmospheric missile interception is worth paying attention to—especially in Washington. It isn't just an early step toward development of a missile-defense system; it's also a signal of a radical change in the country's stance on the militarization of space. The United States should take this as a wake-up call that in the long term, China intends to challenge its strategic superiority in aerospace.

The People's Liberation Army publicly unveiled its new strategy as part of the Air Force's 60th anniversary in November last year. It appears that this strategy was formulated in 2004, but the world did not learn about it until PLA Air Force Commander General Xu Qiliang summarized it as "effecting air and space integration, possessing capabilities for both offensive and defensive operations."

Meanwhile, Chinese diplomats continued to hew to the line set down in 1985 by the late leader Deng Xiaoping, when he told former U.S. President Richard Nixon that China "is against whoever goes in for development of outer space weapons." China started an intensive diplomatic and propaganda campaign against American missile defense programs. Most recently Beijing added its vocal assistance to Vladimir Putin's intimidation campaign, which succeeded in helping to convince current U.S. President Barack Obama to reverse his predecessor's commitment to build ground-based defenses in Europe against Iran's Chinese-aided nuclear missile threat.

Today, China is beginning to shed the cloak of deception over its own missile-defense efforts, and has all but declared its intention to build an aerospace power to rival that of the U.S. After General Xu's statements, Chinese media commentaries explained that the new aerospace strategy emerged from Communist Party leader and PLA commander Hu Jintao's December 2004 call for the PLA to implement new "historic missions," which include defending China's international interests. The PLA Air Force in particular will shift from being a "campaign air force" for theater-level wars (such as against Taiwan) in cooperation with the Army, Navy and Second Artillery missile force, to a "strategic air force" increasingly capable of independent action farther from home.

Of particular importance is the PLA's willingness to publicly justify a space combat mission. While it is not yet clear which service will lead this mission, the PLA Air Force is the most vocal booster. In an Oct. 31 interview, General Xu stated that "competition among armed forces is moving toward the space-air domain and is extending from the aviation domain to near space and even deep space . . . having control of space and air means having control of the ground, the seas and oceans, and the electromagnetic space, which also means having the strategic initiative in one's hands . . ."

General Xu's candor forced the Foreign Ministry to inveigh the following month: "We oppose the weaponization of outer space or a space arms race . . ." But even some Chinese scoff at this self-serving propaganda. Also in November, a Chinese military expert stated that as long as "hegemonism" (code for the U.S.) maintains primacy in space, "air-and-space non-militarization is merely people's naive illusion, or just a slogan and banner."

This isn't the first warning to Washington. In 2006, the PLA used ground-based lasers to "dazzle" a U.S. satellite, and in January 2007 demonstrated a ground-launched satellite interception. Last November, Chinese experts noted that the PLA may develop "assassin" satellites and "laser-armed" satellites, and reported China may already be developing an "orbital bomber." The PLA may also consider placing military assets on the moon—the first "Chang'e Three" moon lander may be equipped with a small radar and laser range-finder for "scientific" missions. The strict military-civilian "dual use" policy governing China's space program may mean that future larger unmanned Moon bases could be used to locate and target U.S. deep-space satellites that provide warning of missile strikes.

It's already public knowledge that China is now developing or deploying four new nuclear-armed intercontinental land-mobile and sea-based nuclear missiles. The key variable is whether the PLA will equip these missiles with multiple warheads, as some Asia sources have suggested to me, which could conceivably allow China quickly to achieve 400 or more warheads. These same sources also estimate a national missile-defense capability could emerge before the mid-2020s.

China is upgrading its aerospace capabilities closer to earth, too. Since the November PLA Air Force anniversary, PLA leaders have stated that China's fifth-generation fighter could fly "soon" and be in service by 2017-19, exceeding a recent U.S. government estimate by about a decade. Other Chinese sources speculate the PLA may build 300 of these fighters.

As China signals its intention to build space-combat capabilities, increase the size and survivability of its nuclear missile forces, and build new fifth-generation air combat systems, the Obama administration is signaling retreat on the same fronts. Having declared his disdain for "Cold War" weapons in early 2009, it is unlikely that Mr. Obama will begin U.S. space-combat programs that could match and deter China in space. If anything, in fact, U.S. officials convey an indifference to China's aggressive intent. In early 2009, Mr. Obama reduced the limited number of ground-based missile interceptors to be based in Alaska and terminated a theater missile-defense program to enable one interceptor to shoot down multiple warheads. By August, the administration had defeated a Congressional attempt to extend production beyond 187 of the Lockheed Martin F-22, the premier U.S. fifth-generation jet fighter.

Continuing this course risks sacrificing the air superiority in Asia the U.S. has purchased through great sacrifice. If the PLA is able to attack U.S. space assets, it can limit the U.S. military's ability to detect and respond to PLA movements. Should China decide to increase its warhead numbers to the hundreds and defend them, the U.S. nuclear deterrent extended to Japan and other allies will lose its credibility. And if a larger number of PLA fifth-generation air-superiority fighters is able to overwhelm a lesser number of U.S. F-22s, then U.S. naval forces and bases in the Western Pacific will be more vulnerable to PLA air and missile strikes.

As a new U.S. administration tries to "move beyond the Cold War," primarily by limiting U.S. military power, China is signaling its intent to start an arms race. An American failure to respond would constitute a retreat from leadership. Asians will then face two unpalatable choices: accommodate China or obtain their own military deterrence. Both would increase political instability and in turn threaten the region's economic growth.

Mr. Fisher is a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Alexandria, Va.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2010-Jan-24, by L. Gordon Crovitz:

Google, China and the Shores of Tripoli
Needed: a plan to sweep cyber pirates from the digital sea lanes.

In the years following the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. faced a great threat from the Barbary states, which attacked trading ships, plundered the cargo, and made slaves of the crew. Some 20% of American exports went through the Mediterranean, where the Dey of Algiers demanded $1 million, or about 10% of the U.S. budget, plus a portrait of George Washington as ransom for American traders.

President Thomas Jefferson rejected the European practice of paying bribes, instead creating a navy that eventually freed the seas from piracy. U.S. Marines still sing a hymn "to the shores of Tripoli" and carry scimitar-shaped swords. A global law of the sea was eventually enforced, which protects freedom of commerce over any ocean at any time. Open sea lanes became the key network of the Industrial Age.

Thanks to Google and China, we have just had our Barbary moment for the Information Age. Computing and communications networks are the sea lanes of modern economies, made possible by open platforms such as email and the Web. If high-tech companies are the unarmed ships of our era, will the U.S. now protect the modern sea lanes that enable global communications?

The Chinese government's fingerprints are all over the cyber attacks against dozens of Silicon Valley companies, plus the hacking of the personal Gmail accounts of individuals in the U.S. and elsewhere. Although Beijing apparently aimed at accessing information from human-rights advocates, the violation of personal email privacy potentially can affect anyone, anywhere. This comes after many incidents of hacked computers at the Pentagon, congressional offices and other government agencies.

Before confronting China, Google examined the hacked Gmail account and laptop of a 20-year-old sophomore at Stanford, Tenzin Seldon, a leader of Students for Free Tibet. Foreign journalists in China, including a reporter in the Beijing bureau of the Associated Press, also had Gmail accounts hacked, with messages forwarded to another address.

It's one thing for China to censor access to the Web in its country by blocking sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It's another matter entirely to reach into servers around the world to rummage through individual email accounts of citizens of other countries.

For Google, it would have been an unsustainable business policy to do nothing in response to having to tell its users that a foreign government is accessing its servers, undermining the integrity of the Web on which its operations are based. Google's threat to stop censoring its Chinese-language search engine is as powerful a response as a private company can make, creating a precedent that others would be wise to follow.

The U.S. government gets two cheers for its reaction. Last week, Hillary Clinton gave a speech at least rhetorically raising cyber security to a national priority. "We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas," the secretary of state said. "We recognize that the world's information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it."

Her solution to the problem was less forceful. "In an interconnected world, an attack on one nation's networks can be an attack on all," she said. "By reinforcing that message, we can create norms of behavior among states and encourage respect for the global networked commons."

Establishing new norms of behavior, as Jefferson found with the Barbary states, takes more than speeches. The Chinese foreign ministry replied to the State Department request that it investigate the breaches with doublespeak, claiming Beijing "proscribes any form of hacking activity" and that "China's Internet is open."

The Chinese state-run newspaper Global Times said, "The U.S. campaign for uncensored and free flow of information on an unrestricted internet is a disguised attempt to impose its values on other cultures in the name of democracy. . . . China's real stake in the 'free flow of information' is evident in its refusal to be victimized by information imperialism."

For its part, the high-tech world, usually happy for technology to resolve its own problems, seems stunned by these cyber attacks.

"Had the Chinese shot intercontinental ballistic missiles into 33 U.S.-based businesses including those in the finance and defense industries as well as the Mountain View-based headquarters of Google, there would be no question in anyone's mind as to whether war had been declared on the U.S.," Techweb editor David Berlind pointed out in Information Week. "Let's be honest with ourselves. It was an act of war and it deserves more of a response from the U.S. government than it is getting."

Just as the traders of the 18th century could not protect open sea lanes by themselves, technology companies, even ones as powerful as Google, today cannot keep digital sea lanes open on their own. Washington has started to talk about the seriousness of the problem. Now it needs a plan to fix it.

from the Weekly Standard, 2010-Jan-31, printed 2010-Feb-8, by William Kristol:

Don't Mess With Success
Is now the time to overturn Don't Ask, Don't Tell?

In his State of the Union address, Barack Obama worried that “too many of our citizens have lost faith” in “our biggest institutions.” Many of those institutions have, of course, invited disillusionment with their feckless and irresponsible behavior. But poll after poll shows that at least one major American institution retains citizens' faith. Indeed, this institution has improved its standing in recent years as respect for others has declined. That institution is the U.S. military.

So what institution does the president want to subject to an untested, unnecessary, and probably unwise social experiment? The U.S. military.

“This year,” the president informed us, “I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are.”

It's hard to know where that “finally” came from. Until a year ago, Americans had elected presidents who were in favor of upholding “Don't Ask, Don't Tell”—so if action on this has been overdue, it's only been for the single year of the Obama presidency.

But the repeal is something that Obama campaigned on. He believes in it. But with all due respect to his sincerely held if abstractly formed views on this subject, it would be reckless to require the military to carry out a major sociological change, one contrary to the preferences of a large majority of its members, as it fights two wars. What's more, it isn't a change an appreciable number of Americans are clamoring for. And even if one understood this change to be rectifying an injustice, the fact is it's an injustice that affects perhaps a few thousand people in a nation of 300 million.

But, “It's the right thing to do,” said the president.

Here is contemporary liberalism in a nutshell: No need to consider costs as well as benefits. No acknowledgment of competing goods or coexisting rights. No appreciation of the constraints of public sentiment or the challenges of organizational complexity. No sense that not every part of society can be treated dogmatically according to certain simple propositions. Just the assertion that something must be done because it is in some abstract way “the right thing.”

John McCain's response to Obama's statement was that of a grown-up: “This successful policy has been in effect for over 15 years, and it is well understood and predominantly supported by our military at all levels. We have the best trained, best equipped, and most professional force in the history of our country, and the men and women in uniform are performing heroically in two wars. At a time when our Armed Forces are fighting and sacrificing on the battlefield, now is not the time to abandon the policy.” Whatever its muddled origins and theoretical deficiencies, the fact is “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” works pretty well at accommodating the complex demands of a war-ready military nestled in a liberal society.

The advocates of repeal say, it's a matter of basic rights. No, it's not. Leave aside the fact that there are difficult and unresolved questions of how our society should deal in various areas of public policy with questions of sexual orientation. There is no basic right to serve in the military. That's why forms of discrimination we would ban in civilian life are permitted: Women have less opportunity to fight than men. The disabled are discriminated against, as are the short, the near-sighted, and the old.

Advocates of repeal will say sexual orientation is irrelevant to military performance in a way these attributes are not. But this is not clearly true given the peculiar characteristics of military service.

We'll hear a lot, as the debate moves forward, about gay Arabic translators being discharged from military service. A decision to separate from the military someone who is sitting in an office in Northern Virginia may look silly. But the Obama Defense Department is entirely free to ensure that those men and women continue to use their skills to serve their country in those same offices as civilians. And translators who are uniformed members of the military are subject to the usual demands of training and deployment, so the questions about the effect of open homosexuals on unit morale and cohesion in training and combat situations remain relevant.

As an intellectual matter, gays in the military is a not uninteresting question. We have our views, as does President Obama, and we are not averse to debating the issue. But surely there are more pressing and important matters for our political and military leaders to be spending their time on.

from the Associated Press via the Washington Post, 2010-Feb-1, by Dan Elliott:

Earth religions get worship area at AF Academy

DENVER -- The Air Force Academy has set aside an outdoor worship area for Pagans, Wiccans, Druids and other Earth-centered believers, school officials said Monday.

A double circle of stones atop a hill on the campus near Colorado Springs has been designated for the group, which previously met indoors.

"Being with nature and connecting with it is kind of the whole point," said Tech. Sgt. Brandon Longcrier, who sponsors the group and describes himself as a Pagan. "It will dramatically improve that atmosphere, the mindset and the actual connection."

The stones were moved to the hilltop last year because erosion threatened to make them unstable in their previous location near the visitors center. Crews arranged them in two concentric circles because they thought it would be a pleasant place for cadets to relax, Longcrier said.

When Longcrier and academy chaplains were looking for an outdoor worship space, they discovered one already existed in the form of the circles.

Lt. Col. William Ziegler, one of the academy's chaplains, said designating the space is part of the school's effort to foster religious tolerance and to defend the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.

"It's about our commitment as airmen to protect freedom and defend freedom. To me this is a freedom thing," he said.

The school also has worship facilities for Protestant and Catholic Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists.

The academy superintendent, Lt. Gen. Michael Gould, has made religious tolerance a priority. It became a concern in 2004 when a survey found many cadets had heard slurs or jokes about other religions and that some felt ostracized because they weren't religious.

Longcrier and Ziegler said they've heard no criticism of the new worship space but both noted its presence was just made public.

"Not to say that it's not coming, but so far we haven't had any real issues," Longcrier said.

He said 15 to 20 cadets have shown an interest in Earth-centered beliefs, and eight to 10 regularly attend Monday night meetings. Of those, six or seven are devout believers and the others are "searchers," Longcrier said.

The academy has about 4,000 cadets. The school is one of five U.S. service academies, including West Point and Annapolis. Cadets graduate as second lieutenants.

"Earth-centered" spirituality encompasses many beliefs, Longcrier said, many that recognize multiple gods and goddesses and observe holidays tied to the seasons.

Longcrier said he personally doesn't consider gods and goddesses to be actual beings but personifications of natural events that human ancestors wanted to put a face on.

"The goddess is symbolic of the Earth," Longcrier said. "Do I believe I'm worshipping this female entity living in the Earth or up in space somewhere? No. The symbolism is very important."

The group's meetings are usually devoted to mediation, lessons or ceremonies, he said.

Longcrier, who oversees laboratories in the academy's astronautics labs, said he has military designation as a "distinct faith group leader."

Anyone is welcome to visit the new worship site but it should be treated as a religious structure, he said. A formal dedication is planned in March.

from the Washington Post, 2009-Dec-4, by Charles Krauthammer:

Uncertain trumpet

We shall fight in the air, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, we shall fight in the hills -- for 18 months. Then we start packing for home.

We shall never surrender -- unless the war gets too expensive, in which case, we shall quote Eisenhower on "the need to maintain balance in and among national programs" and then insist that "we can't simply afford to ignore the price of these wars."

The quotes are from President Obama's West Point speech announcing the Afghanistan troop surge. What a strange speech it was -- a call to arms so ambivalent, so tentative, so defensive.

Which made his last-minute assertion of "resolve unwavering" so hollow. It was meant to be stirring. It fell flat. In August, he called Afghanistan "a war of necessity." On Tuesday night, he defined "what's at stake" as "the common security of the world." The world, no less. Yet, we begin leaving in July 2011?

Does he think that such ambivalence is not heard by the Taliban, by Afghan peasants deciding which side to choose, by Pakistani generals hedging their bets, by NATO allies already with one foot out of Afghanistan?

Nonetheless, most supporters of the Afghanistan war were satisfied. They got the policy; the liberals got the speech. The hawks got three-quarters of what Gen. Stanley McChrystal wanted -- 30,000 additional U.S. troops -- and the doves got a few soothing words. Big deal, say the hawks.

But it is a big deal. Words matter because will matters. Success in war depends on three things: a brave and highly skilled soldiery, such as the 2009 U.S. military, the finest counterinsurgency force in history; brilliant, battle-tested commanders such as Gens. David Petraeus and McChrystal, fresh from the success of the surge in Iraq; and the will to prevail as personified by the commander in chief.

There's the rub. And that is why at such crucial moments, presidents don't issue a policy paper. They give a speech. It gives tone and texture. It allows their policy to be imbued with purpose and feeling. This one was festooned with hedges, caveats and one giant exit ramp.

No one expected Obama to do a Henry V or a Churchill. But Obama could not even manage a George W. Bush, who, at an infinitely lower ebb in power and popularity, opposed by the political and foreign policy establishments and dealing with a war effort in far more dire straits, announced his surge -- Iraq 2007 -- with outright rejection of withdrawal or retreat. His implacability was widely decried at home as stubbornness, but heard loudly in Iraq by those fighting for and against us as unflinching -- and salutary -- determination.

Obama's surge speech wasn't that of a commander in chief but of a politician, perfectly splitting the difference. Two messages for two audiences. Placate the right -- you get the troops; placate the left -- we are on our way out.

And apart from Obama's personal commitment is the question of his ability as a wartime leader. If he feels compelled to placate his left with an exit date today -- while he is still personally popular, with large majorities in both houses of Congress, and even before the surge begins -- how will he stand up to the left when the going gets tough and the casualties mount, and he really has to choose between support from his party and success on the battlefield?

Despite my personal misgivings about the possibility of lasting success against Taliban insurgencies in both Afghanistan and the borderlands of Pakistan, I have deep confidence that Petraeus and McChrystal would not recommend a strategy that will be costly in lives without their having a firm belief in the possibility of success.

I would therefore defer to their judgment and support their recommended policy. But the fate of this war depends not just on them. It depends also on the president. We cannot prevail without a commander in chief committed to success.

And this commander in chief defended his exit date (vs. the straw man alternative of "open-ended" nation-building) thusly: "because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own."

Remarkable. Go and fight, he tells his cadets -- some of whom may not return alive -- but I may have to cut your mission short because my real priorities are domestic.

Has there ever been a call to arms more dispiriting, a trumpet more uncertain?

from Reuters via ABC News, 2010-Jan-22, by Maggie Fox, with editing by Paul Simao:

Government Doing Little About Asteroids: Report

WASHINGTON - The United States is doing little to defend the planet against potentially devastating asteroids and is not doing the basic searches that Congress has ordered, according to a report released on Friday.

While most of the really big and obvious threats are being found, almost nothing is being done to find the smaller objects that are arguably a more likely threat, the strongly worded report from the National Academy of Sciences said.

"It means we are not looking for the small ones which can cause huge damage on earth," astronomer Mike A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, who helped chair the committee that wrote the report, said in a telephone interview.

"Why has nothing been done? I don't know," added A'Hearn, who was principal investigator of NASA'S 2005 Deep Impact mission to knock open the comet 9P/Tempel.

He said it was not clear whether the administration of President Barack Obama, who has declared his support for science but is struggling with an economic downturn and budget deficits, would work any harder to do more.

The United States spends about $4 million a year looking for near-Earth objects, or NEOs, that might come too close. In 2005, Congress ordered a broader survey to find 90 percent of near-Earth objects 140 meters (460 feet) in diameter or greater.

Something this big could cause enormous regional damage.

But Congress has not funded this search and neither former President George W. Bush nor Obama have asked for it.

A'Hearn's committee made several recommendations.

"They are all expensive compared to what we are spending now. Compared to other things the country is spending money on they aren't expensive," he said.

"The minimal sensible program is probably two and a half times larger than the current program," he added.

To simply do what Congress asked in 2005 would likely cost $4 million, A'Hearn said.

DEFENSIVE MEASURES

And less than $1 million is being spent to study what could be done if it looked like something destructive was headed toward the Earth, the report found.

At the very least, civil defense measures should be planned, A'Hearn said. "For an object up to 50 to 75 meters (164 to 246 feet), civil defense is the right answer. You simply evacuate the area where it going to hit," he said -- although he noted how difficult it is to evacuate areas where hurricanes are bearing down.

An object that size would create the equivalent of a nuclear explosion in the sky, blowing down trees, buildings and killing animals and people underneath it.

Larger, more dangerous comets or asteroids could be deflected or blown up, but it would take years of planning to do so. And no one has systematically looked at the diplomacy and politics that would be involved.

"It wouldn't be a dramatic change in defense department budget to develop the capability to destroy near-Earth objects. On the other hand, there may be other countries that might not trust us to do it right," A'Hearn said.

Or a program could be interpreted as a weapons program and a threat, so diplomacy would be needed to ensure international cooperation and acceptance, A'Hearn said.

A'Hearn said he was not sure if Obama's declared support of science would extend to this program, or whether new space agency administrator Charlie Bolden would fight for it.

"The administration and the NASA administrator say nice words about science but it takes a while to implement things," he said.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Dec-4, p.A24:

The Welfare State and Military Power
Europe-style entitlements mean Europe-sized defenses.

For our money, one of the better parts of President Obama's speech at West Point this week was his connection between a healthy economy and U.S. national security. To quote: "Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy." We only wish Mr. Obama understood the link between the larger welfare state he is trying to build at home and the economic weakness that will undermine our military power.

The proof is right before his eyes in the U.S. struggle to get Europe to contribute more forces to Afghanistan. Mr. Obama has called on NATO to buttress the U.S. surge of 30,000 in Afghanistan with 5,000 or more European troops. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Brussels today to round up promissory notes. But except for the usual stalwarts—Britain and Poland—the allies are having trouble meeting even this modest goal. Germany and France are reluctant to contribute anything more to defeat the Taliban.

This is by now a familiar story, and a big part of the problem is the relative lack of military spending. Among the Western Europeans, only France and the U.K. spend more than 2% of GDP on defense, supposedly the NATO-mandated minimum. Nearly everyone else is below that. Germany, the continent's largest economy, stands at 1.3%. U.S. defense spending has been above 4% of GDP since 2004, having fallen to 3% after the Cold War ended.

No amount of pleading and shaming has worked on the continentals. NATO launched the "Defense Capabilities Initiative" in 1999, only to abandon it a few years later. Various attempts to stand up European "rapid reaction" forces have floundered.

Most European countries also commit more than half of what little they do spend on defense to soldier salaries and benefits. Equipment and training are shortchanged. Belgium devotes 74% to personnel; the U.S. 30.6%. Europeans lack cargo planes and helicopters to enable troops to get to, and move within, far-off conflict zones. In 2007, the U.S. deployed 14% of its troops in overseas operations, Europe 4%.

Such relative strategic weakness has made the Europeans more dependent on the American security umbrella, even as they resent it. But it also makes Europeans more disposed to avoid confrontation with adversaries like Saddam Hussein or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As Henry Kissinger has put it, European leaders are no longer able to ask their people to make major sacrifices.

The overlooked culprit here is the rise of the modern welfare state. Since World War II and especially from the 1960s, Europe has built elaborate domestic income-maintenance programs, with government-run health care, pensions and jobless benefits. These are hugely expensive, requiring high taxes and government spending that is a huge proportion of GDP. The nearby table compares the so-called tax wedge across nations, which is one measure of the relative burdens to finance cradle-to-grave entitlements.

One consequence has been slower growth in Europe, relative to the U.S. and China, with less tax revenue to spend on everything. Another result is that welfare spending has crowded out defense spending. The political imperative of health care and pensions always trumps defense spending, save perhaps in a hot war. Europe may never again be able to muster public support for a defense buildup of the kind the U.S. undertook to end the Cold War in the 1980s, or even the smaller surge after 9/11.

The tragic irony of this year is that Democrats are rushing the U.S. down this same primrose entitlement path. With ObamaCare certain to eat up several more percentage points of GDP as it inevitably expands, we will take a giant step toward European social priorities.

For many Democrats, this is precisely the goal. Many Europeans, such as those at the Financial Times, will also welcome America's relative decline. But we doubt the American people fully understand what such a gilded entitlement cage means for our national vitality, or for our ability to defend U.S. interests at home and abroad.

The chart nearby shows the change in the share of U.S. federal spending on defense and domestic programs across recent decades. The upward blips in defense outlays occurred during Vietnam, the Reagan buildup and post-9/11. But the overall trend has been to spend less of the budget on defense. Add the stimulus, ObamaCare, a new entitlement for college and other Democratic plans, and the defense squeeze will only tighten. Higher taxes and borrowing may allow guns and butter to co-exist for a while. But over time, the welfare state will defeat the Pentagon here, as it has in Europe.

President Obama's domestic agenda may well mean that his successors lack the option to deploy 100,000 troops to Afghanistan, or to some other future trouble spot. This is the way superpowers lose their superiority.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Sep-16, by Greg Zerzan:

More Government Health Care Means A Smaller U.S. Military

As America considers the merits of creating a government run health-care program a vitally important part of the debate has been ignored. One inevitable consequence of increased government intervention in the health-care arena is a corresponding reduction in funding for the U.S. military.

The numbers tell the story. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) defense spending makes up a total of 20% of the federal budget. Discretionary, non-defense spending accounts for roughly 18% of the budget, while interest on the debt accounts for 8%. The rest is composed of entitlement and mandatory spending on programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. These figures do not include de facto government obligations such as the debt of government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, nor other costs potentially arising from the continuing dysfunction in parts of the banking sector.

It is broadly understood that in coming years both interest on the national debt and spending on entitlements will take up a larger share of the total budget. According to the Government Accountability Office, these two sources of government spending alone will exceed U.S. government revenues somewhere around the year 2030. Heretofore the U.S. government has avoided making painful spending choices by borrowing trillions of dollars. It seems increasingly unlikely that this borrowing binge can continue.

Now imagine increased government intervention in the health-care system, for instance through the creation of a government-run insurance option. The President's budget for fiscal year 2010 totals $3.6 trillion, up from the roughly $2.98 trillion Congress spent in 2008. For the current fiscal year the national debt will increase $1.6 trillion, up from 2008's increase of $1 trillion. According to estimates by the CBO, current health-care reform proposals in the House and Senate would cost between $1 and $1.2 trillion over the next decade; depending on the type of policy enacted and the scope of government's role, the true cost could edge closer to $1.5 trillion or more. While this figure could be partially offset by revenue increases and reductions in other areas, divided over 10 years this equals roughly 7.5% of annual discretionary spending based on the fiscal year 2008 budget, and an increasingly larger share of discretionary spending heading out towards 2030 when interest and entitlements consume all federal revenues. And this does not account for the tendency of government programs to be more expensive than advertised.

As these numbers demonstrate, the U.S. government is quickly running out of room for new spending. Creating a government run health-care program will inevitably require cuts in other areas, and there are two strong reasons to believe spending on America's defense will be the most likely target for reductions.

The first reason is that a comparison of U.S. government spending on health care and defense with that of our allies shows a clear "guns or butter" dichotomy. For most of America's allies, government plays an expanded role in daily economic life by establishing a social welfare state, the centerpiece of which from a fiscal standpoint is health care. For comparison, the U.S. spends about 4% of GDP on defense. Among our allies the highest spenders are France and the UK, at 2.6% and 2.4% respectively. Germany's defense spending amounts to about 1.5% of GDP; other nations with government run health programs like Sweden and Canada spend a little over 1% of GDP on defense. When it comes to health care, however, these countries spend between 11% and 8.4% of their GDP. The U.S., according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates, actually spends far more, roughly 17% of GDP. But remember that in these other countries it is the government that is spending money on health care, whereas in the U.S. private expenditures account for the bulk of that amount (U.S. government spending on Medicare and Medicaid accounts for roughly 5 % of GDP, according to the CBO). These figures indicate that a nation's government can fund a military with worldwide presence and state of the art weaponry, or operate a nationalized health-care system. It can't do both. Our allies have almost uniformly chosen to create government-run health care at the expense of creating a rapid deployment, combat ready military.

It can be (and is) broadly debated whether nations that provide state-run health care actually provide better care than those that do not. But there is no precedent for a nation having both a national health-care system and a military with the reach and capabilities of the current U.S. armed forces.

There is a second, geopolitical reason to believe that cuts to fund health care will come out of the military budget. As noted above, the U.S. has borrowed heavily over the last two decades to fund its spending. Increasingly this borrowing has come from foreign creditors flush with U.S. dollar reserves as their economies have boomed in the 21st century. It cannot be overlooked that many of these regular purchasers of U.S. debt, such as China, Russia and Brazil, are also actual or potential strategic competitors of the United States. How long is China, our biggest foreign creditor, likely to continue to purchase Treasuries while watching the Pacific Fleet sail through the straits of Taiwan, or while witnessing increasingly sophisticated missile interception systems being deployed throughout the Asia-Pacific region? America's competitors are likely to balk at purchasing trillions more in Treasuries so the U.S. can pay for both military dominance and universal, government-run health care.

There is reason to believe the Obama Administration recognizes this and has already begun to lay the groundwork for a smaller, less costly U.S. force. While the pullback from Iraq was expected, other moves by the Administration indicate a bias against the types of expensive but unmatched weapons systems that give America its military superiority. Lately, the President has threatened to veto defense appropriations legislation on the grounds that it would fund the production of F-22 Raptor fighter jets beyond 187 planes, as originally called for by the Bush Administration. Instead the President wants to curtail development of the fighter jet altogether after fiscal year 2011. He also cited development of back-up engines for F-35 multi-role fighter jets as an unnecessary expense. In his threats against the proposals the President accused supporters of "pushing weapons that even our military says it doesn't want. At a time when we're fighting two wars and facing a serious deficit, it's inexcusable." Many in the military, however, do in fact want more fighters that will continue America's unmatched aerial superiority, as well as other expensive systems likely to be on the chopping block in future Presidential budgets.

More revealing perhaps are comments by Treasury Secretary Geithner in recent months acknowledging that recurrent federal deficits are unsustainable. Although many took this to mean the Administration is open to further tax increases (which they surely are), the other obvious implication is that projected spending will have to come down. For a President who ran on a platform of bringing home U.S. troops and expanding government-sponsored health care, the likely source of spending cuts seems obvious.

There is no question that a great deal of waste occurs in U.S. military spending. Some conservatives even share the view of many liberals that what President Eisenhower described as the "military-industrial complex" needs to be brought under control. But it should be unquestioned that new spending on a government run health-care system means a smaller, less powerful U.S. military. Whether that price is worth paying should be openly and honestly debated.

Mr. Zerzan served as Deputy Assistant Secretary and Acting Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions in the US Treasury under the Administration of President George W. Bush.

from Fox News, 2009-Jul-23, with contributions from the Associated Press:

Obama: 'Victory' Not Necessarily Goal in Afghanistan
The enemy facing U.S. and Afghan forces isn't so clearly defined defined, Obama explained in a TV interview

President Obama has put securing Afghanistan near the top of his foreign policy agenda, but "victory" in the war-torn country isn't necessarily the United States' goal, he said Thursday in a TV interview.

"I'm always worried about using the word 'victory,' because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur," Obama told ABC News.

The enemy facing U.S. and Afghan forces isn't so clearly defined, he explained.

"We're not dealing with nation states at this point. We're concerned with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Al Qaeda's allies," he said. "So when you have a non-state actor, a shadowy operation like Al Qaeda, our goal is to make sure they can't attack the United States."

The United States and Afghanistan are struggling to shore up security in the country, amid increasing violence. The Obama administration this year stepped up U.S. military operations in the country as the U.S. military presence begins to wind down in Iraq.

"We are confident that if we are assisting the Afghan people and improving their security situation, stabilizing their government, providing help on economic development ... those things will continue to contract the ability of Al Qaeda to operate. And that is absolutely critical," Obama told ABC News.

Rising casualties in Afghanistan are raising doubts among U.S. allies about the conduct of the war, forcing some governments to defend publicly their commitments and foreshadowing possible long-term trouble for the U.S. effort to bring in more resources to defeat the Taliban.

Pressure from the public and opposition politicians is growing as soldiers' bodies return home, and a poll released Thursday shows majorities in Britain, Germany and Canada oppose increasing their own troop levels in Afghanistan.

Europeans and Canadians are growing weary of the war -- or at least their involvement in combat operations -- even as Obama is shifting military resources to Afghanistan away from Iraq.

The United States, which runs the NATO-led force, has about 59,000 troops in Afghanistan -- nearly double the number a year ago -- and thousands more are on the way. There are about 32,000 other international troops in the country.

The new U.S. emphasis on Afghanistan has raised the level of fighting -- and in turn, the number of casualties. July is already the deadliest month of the war for both U.S. and NATO forces with 63 international troops killed, including 35 Americans and 19 Britons. Most have been killed in southern Afghanistan, scene of major operations against Taliban fighters in areas that had long been sanctuaries.

The leaders of the largest contributors to the coalition find themselves having to justify both their reasons for deploying troops and their management of the war effort. Britain, Italy and Australia are among those adding forces ahead of Afghanistan's Aug. 20 presidential election.

They say a Western pullout at this time would enable a resurgent Taliban to take over the country and give Al Qaeda more space to plan terror attacks against the West. Some emphasize humanitarian aspects of their missions, like development aid and civilian reconstruction.

from the New York Times, 2009-Oct-29, p.A31, by David Brooks:

The Tenacity Question

Today, President Obama will lead another meeting to debate strategy in Afghanistan. He will presumably discuss the questions that have divided his advisers: How many troops to commit? How to define plausible goals? Should troops be deployed broadly or just in the cities and towns?

For the past few days I have tried to do what journalists are supposed to do.

I've called around to several of the smartest military experts I know to get their views on these controversies. I called retired officers, analysts who have written books about counterinsurgency warfare, people who have spent years in Afghanistan. I tried to get them to talk about the strategic choices facing the president. To my surprise, I found them largely uninterested.

Most of them have no doubt that the president is conducting an intelligent policy review. They have no doubt that he will come up with some plausible troop level.

They are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination.

These people, who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan, have no idea if President Obama is committed to this effort. They have no idea if he is willing to stick by his decisions, explain the war to the American people and persevere through good times and bad.

Their first concerns are about Obama the man. They know he is intellectually sophisticated. They know he is capable of processing complicated arguments and weighing nuanced evidence.

But they do not know if he possesses the trait that is more important than intellectual sophistication and, in fact, stands in tension with it. They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.

Their second concern is political. They do not know if President Obama regards Afghanistan as a distraction from the matters he really cares about: health care, energy and education. Some of them suspect that Obama talked himself into supporting the Afghan effort so he could sound hawkish during the campaign. They suspect he is making a show of commitment now so he can let the matter drop at a politically opportune moment down the road.

Finally, they do not understand the president's fundamental read on the situation. Most of them, like most people who have spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, believe this war is winnable. They do not think it will be easy or quick. But they do have a bedrock conviction that the Taliban can be stymied and that the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan can be strengthened. But they do not know if Obama shares this gut conviction or possesses any gut conviction on this subject at all.

The experts I spoke with describe a vacuum at the heart of the war effort — a determination vacuum. And if these experts do not know the state of President Obama's resolve, neither do the Afghan villagers. They are now hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws. Nor does President Hamid Karzai know. He's cutting deals with the Afghan warlords he would need if NATO leaves his country.

Nor do the Pakistanis or the Iranians or the Russians know. They are maintaining ties with the Taliban elements that would represent their interests in the event of a U.S. withdrawal.

The determination vacuum affects the debate in this country, too. Every argument about troop levels is really a proxy argument for whether the U.S. should stay or go. The administration is so divided because the fundamental issue of commitment has not been settled.

Some of the experts asked what I thought of Obama's commitment level. I had to confess I'm not sure either.

So I guess the president's most important meeting is not the one with the Joint Chiefs and the cabinet secretaries. It's the one with the mirror, in which he looks for some firm conviction about whether Afghanistan is worthy of his full and unshakable commitment. If the president cannot find that core conviction, we should get out now. It would be shameful to deploy more troops only to withdraw them later. If he does find that conviction, then he should let us know, and fill the vacuum that is eroding the chances of success.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal has said that counterinsurgency is “an argument to win the support of the people.” But it's not an argument won through sophisticated analysis. It's an argument won through the display of raw determination.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Oct-18, by Michael B. Mukasey:

Civilian Courts Are No Place to Try Terrorists
We tried the first World Trade Center bombers in civilian courts. In return we got 9/11 and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents.

The Obama administration has said it intends to try several of the prisoners now detained at Guantanamo Bay in civilian courts in this country. This would include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and other detainees allegedly involved. The Justice Department claims that our courts are well suited to the task.

Based on my experience trying such cases, and what I saw as attorney general, they aren't. That is not to say that civilian courts cannot ever handle terrorist prosecutions, but rather that their role in a war on terror—to use an unfashionably harsh phrase—should be, as the term "war" would suggest, a supporting and not a principal role.

The challenges of a terrorism trial are overwhelming. To maintain the security of the courthouse and the jail facilities where defendants are housed, deputy U.S. marshals must be recruited from other jurisdictions; jurors must be selected anonymously and escorted to and from the courthouse under armed guard; and judges who preside over such cases often need protection as well. All such measures burden an already overloaded justice system and interfere with the handling of other cases, both criminal and civil.

Moreover, there is every reason to believe that the places of both trial and confinement for such defendants would become attractive targets for others intent on creating mayhem, whether it be terrorists intent on inflicting casualties on the local population, or lawyers intent on filing waves of lawsuits over issues as diverse as whether those captured in combat must be charged with crimes or released, or the conditions of confinement for all prisoners, whether convicted or not.

Even after conviction, the issue is not whether a maximum-security prison can hold these defendants; of course it can. But their presence even inside the walls, as proselytizers if nothing else, is itself a danger. The recent arrest of U.S. citizen Michael Finton, a convert to Islam proselytized in prison and charged with planning to blow up a building in Springfield, Ill., is only the latest example of that problem.

Moreover, the rules for conducting criminal trials in federal courts have been fashioned to prosecute conventional crimes by conventional criminals. Defendants are granted access to information relating to their case that might be useful in meeting the charges and shaping a defense, without regard to the wider impact such information might have. That can provide a cornucopia of valuable information to terrorists, both those in custody and those at large.

Thus, in the multidefendant terrorism prosecution of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and others that I presided over in 1995 in federal district court in Manhattan, the government was required to disclose, as it is routinely in conspiracy cases, the identity of all known co-conspirators, regardless of whether they are charged as defendants. One of those co-conspirators, relatively obscure in 1995, was Osama bin Laden. It was later learned that soon after the government's disclosure the list of unindicted co-conspirators had made its way to bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, where he then resided. He was able to learn not only that the government was aware of him, but also who else the government was aware of.

It is not simply the disclosure of information under discovery rules that can be useful to terrorists. The testimony in a public trial, particularly under the probing of appropriately diligent defense counsel, can elicit evidence about means and methods of evidence collection that have nothing to do with the underlying issues in the case, but which can be used to press government witnesses to either disclose information they would prefer to keep confidential or make it appear that they are concealing facts. The alternative is to lengthen criminal trials beyond what is tolerable by vetting topics in closed sessions before they can be presented in open ones.

In June, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the transfer of Ahmed Ghailani to this country from Guantanamo. Mr. Ghailani was indicted in connection with the 1998 bombing of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He was captured in 2004, after others had already been tried here for that bombing.

Mr. Ghailani was to be tried before a military commission for that and other war crimes committed afterward, but when the Obama administration elected to close Guantanamo, the existing indictment against Mr. Ghailani in New York apparently seemed to offer an attractive alternative. It may be as well that prosecuting Mr. Ghailani in an already pending case in New York was seen as an opportunity to illustrate how readily those at Guantanamo might be prosecuted in civilian courts. After all, as Mr. Holder said in his June announcement, four defendants were "successfully prosecuted" in that case.

It is certainly true that four defendants already were tried and sentenced in that case. But the proceedings were far from exemplary. The jury declined to impose the death penalty, which requires unanimity, when one juror disclosed at the end of the trial that he could not impose the death penalty—even though he had sworn previously that he could. Despite his disclosure, the juror was permitted to serve and render a verdict.

Mr. Holder failed to mention it, but there was also a fifth defendant in the case, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim. He never participated in the trial. Why? Because, before it began, in a foiled attempt to escape a maximum security prison, he sharpened a plastic comb into a weapon and drove it through the eye and into the brain of Louis Pepe, a 42-year-old Bureau of Prisons guard. Mr. Pepe was blinded in one eye and rendered nearly unable to speak.

Salim was prosecuted separately for that crime and found guilty of attempted murder. There are many words one might use to describe how these events unfolded; "successfully" is not among them.

The very length of Mr. Ghailani's detention prior to being brought here for prosecution presents difficult issues. The Speedy Trial Act requires that those charged be tried within a relatively short time after they are charged or captured, whichever comes last. Even if the pending charge against Mr. Ghailani is not dismissed for violation of that statute, he may well seek access to what the government knows of his activities after the embassy bombings, even if those activities are not charged in the pending indictment. Such disclosures could seriously compromise sources and methods of intelligence gathering.

Finally, the government (for undisclosed reasons) has chosen not to seek the death penalty against Mr. Ghailani, even though that penalty was sought, albeit unsuccessfully, against those who stood trial earlier. The embassy bombings killed more than 200 people.

Although the jury in the earlier case declined to sentence the defendants to death, that determination does not bind a future jury. However, when the government determines not to seek the death penalty against a defendant charged with complicity in the murder of hundreds, that potentially distorts every future capital case the government prosecutes. Put simply, once the government decides not to seek the death penalty against a defendant charged with mass murder, how can it justify seeking the death penalty against anyone charged with murder—however atrocious—on a smaller scale?

Even a successful prosecution of Mr. Ghailani, with none of the possible obstacles described earlier, would offer no example of how the cases against other Guantanamo detainees can be handled. The embassy bombing case was investigated for prosecution in a court, with all of the safeguards in handling evidence and securing witnesses that attend such a prosecution. By contrast, the charges against other detainees have not been so investigated.

It was anticipated that if those detainees were to be tried at all, it would be before a military commission where the touchstone for admissibility of evidence was simply relevance and apparent reliability. Thus, the circumstances of their capture on the battlefield could be described by affidavit if necessary, without bringing to court the particular soldier or unit that effected the capture, so long as the affidavit and surrounding circumstances appeared reliable. No such procedure would be permitted in an ordinary civilian court.

Moreover, it appears likely that certain charges could not be presented in a civilian court because the proof that would have to be offered could, if publicly disclosed, compromise sources and methods of intelligence gathering. The military commissions regimen established for use at Guantanamo was designed with such considerations in mind. It provided a way of handling classified information so as to make it available to a defendant's counsel while preserving confidentiality. The courtroom facility at Guantanamo was constructed, at a cost of millions of dollars, specifically to accommodate the handling of classified information and the heightened security needs of a trial of such defendants.

Nevertheless, critics of Guantanamo seem to believe that if we put our vaunted civilian justice system on display in these cases, then we will reap benefits in the coin of world opinion, and perhaps even in that part of the world that wishes us ill. Of course, we did just that after the first World Trade Center bombing, after the plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific, and after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

In return, we got the 9/11 attacks and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents. True, this won us a great deal of goodwill abroad—people around the globe lined up for blocks outside our embassies to sign the condolence books. That is the kind of goodwill we can do without.

Mr. Mukasey was attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009.

from the Associated Press, 2009-Nov-7, by Angela K. Brown and Allen G. Breed, with Dalia Nammari in Ramallah, West Bank, and Richard Lardner, Pamela Hess and Jessica Gresko in Washington, D.C., contributing:

Suspect told 'There's something wrong with you'

FORT HOOD, Texas - There was the classroom presentation that justified suicide bombings. Comments to colleagues about a climate of persecution faced by Muslims in the military. Conversations with a mosque leader that became incoherent.

As a student, some who knew Nidal Malik Hasan said they saw clear signs the young Army psychiatrist—who authorities say went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood that left 13 dead and 29 others wounded—had no place in the military. After arriving at Fort Hood, he was conflicted about what to tell fellow Muslim soldiers about the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, alarming an Islamic community leader from whom he sought counsel.

"I told him, `There's something wrong with you,'" Osman Danquah, co-founder of the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen, told The Associated Press on Saturday. "I didn't get the feeling he was talking for himself, but something just didn't seem right."

Danquah assumed the military's chain of command knew about Hasan's doubts, which had been known for more than a year to classmates in a graduate military medical program. His fellow students complained to the faculty about Hasan's "anti-American propaganda," but said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal written complaint.

"The system is not doing what it's supposed to do," said Dr. Val Finnell, who studied with Hasan from 2007-2008 in the master's program in public health at the military's Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. "He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out."

Military authorities continued Saturday to refer to Hasan as a suspect in the shootings, and have not yet said if they plan to charge him in a military or civilian court. His family described a man incapable of the attack, calling him a devoted doctor and devout Muslim who showed no signs that he might lash out with violence.

"I've known my brother Nidal to be a peaceful, loving and compassionate person who has shown great interest in the medical field and in helping others," said his brother, Eyad Hasan, of Sterling, Va., in a statement. "He has never committed an act of violence and was always known to be a good, law-abiding citizen."

Others recalled a pleasant neighbor who forgave a fellow soldier charged with tearing up his "Allah is Love" bumper sticker. A superior officer at Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood, Col. Kimberly Kesling, has said Hasan was a quiet man with a strong work ethic who provided excellent care for his patients.

Still, in the days since authorities believe Hasan fired more than 100 rounds in a soldier processing center at Fort Hood in the worst mass shooting on a military facility in the U.S., a picture has emerged of a man who was forcefully opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was trying to get out of his pending deployment to a war zone and had struggled professionally in his work as an Army psychiatrist.

"He told (them) that as a Muslim committed to his prayers he was discriminated against and not treated as is fitting for an officer and American," said Mohammed Malik Hasan, 24, a cousin, told the AP from his home on the outskirts of the Palestinian city of Ramallah. "He hired a lawyer to get him a discharge."

Twice this summer, Danquah said, Hasan asked him what to tell soldiers who expressed misgivings about fighting fellow Muslims. The retired Army first sergeant and Gulf War veteran said he reminded Hasan that these soldiers had volunteered to fight, and that Muslims were fighting against each other in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories.

"But what if a person gets in and feels that it's just not right?" Danquah recalled Hasan asking him.

"I'd give him my response. It didn't seem settled, you know. It didn't seem to satisfy," he said. "It would be like a person playing the devil's advocate. ... I said, `Look. I'm not impressed by you.'"

Danquah said he was so disturbed by Hasan's persistent questioning that he recommended the mosque reject Hasan's request to become a lay Muslim leader at Fort Hood. But he never saw a need tell anyone at the sprawling Army post about the talks, because Hasan never expressed anger toward the Army or indicated any plans for violence.

"If I had an inkling that he had this type of inclination or intentions, definitely I would have brought it to their attention," he said.

Finnell said he did just that during a year of study in which Hasan made a presentation "that justified suicide bombing" and spewed "anti-American propaganda" as he argued the war on terror was "a war against Islam." Finnell said he and at least one other student complained about Hasan, surprised that someone with "this type of vile ideology" would be allowed to wear an officer's uniform.

But Finnell said no one filed a formal, written complaint about Hasan's comments out of fear of appearing discriminatory.

"In retrospect, I'm not surprised he did it," Finnell said. "I had real questions about what his priorities were, what his beliefs were."

Hasan received a poor performance evaluation while at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly. And while he was an intern at the suburban Washington hospital, Hasan had some "difficulties" that required counseling and extra supervision, said Dr. Thomas Grieger, who was the training director at the time.

Hasan was promoted from captain to major in 2008, the same year he graduated from the master's program. Bernard Rostker, a military personnel expert at the Rand Corp., said Hasan's advancement was all but certain absent a serious blemish on his record, such as a DUI or a drug charge.

"We're short of officers, particularly at the major and lieutenant colonel level because of the war, and we're short of psychiatrists," said Rostker, who served as under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness during the Clinton administration. "There would have had to be something very detrimental in his record before there would have been a banner that would have said, 'No, we don't want to promote him.'"

Both military and civilian investigators have yet to talk with Hasan, who reportedly jumped up on a desk and shouted "Allahu akbar!"—Arabic for "God is great!"—at the start of Thursday's attack. He was seriously wounded by police and transferred Friday to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where officials gave no indication of his condition except to say he was "not able to converse."

"Hopefully, they can put together the pieces and find out what in the world was in his mind and why he went crazy," Danquah said. "Aaaaah, it's sad. Those soldiers could have been my soldiers."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Nov-9, by Dorothy Rabinowitz:

Dr. Phil and the Fort Hood Killer
His terrorist motive is obvious to everyone but the press and the Army brass.

It can by now come as no surprise that the Fort Hood massacre yielded an instant flow of exculpatory media meditations on the stresses that must have weighed on the killer who mowed down 13 Americans and wounded 29 others. Still, the intense drive to wrap this clear case in a fog of mystery is eminently worthy of notice.

The tide of pronouncements and ruminations pointing to every cause for this event other than the one obvious to everyone in the rational world continues apace. Commentators, reporters, psychologists and, indeed, army spokesmen continue to warn portentously, "We don't yet know the motive for the shootings."

What a puzzle this piece of vacuity must be to audiences hearing it, some, no doubt, with outrage. To those not terrorized by fear of offending Muslim sensitivities, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's motive was instantly clear: It was an act of terrorism by a man with a record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments. All were conspicuous signs of danger his Army superiors chose to ignore.

What is hard to ignore, now, is the growing derangement on all matters involving terrorism and Muslim sensitivities. Its chief symptoms: a palpitating fear of discomfiting facts and a willingness to discard those facts and embrace the richest possible variety of ludicrous theories as to the motives behind an act of Islamic terrorism. All this we have seen before but never in such naked form. The days following the Fort Hood rampage have told us more than we want to know, perhaps, about the depth and reach of this epidemic.

One of the first outbreaks of these fevers, the night of the shootings, featured television's star psychologist, Dr. Phil, who was outraged when fellow panelist and former JAG officer Tom Kenniff observed that he had been listening to a lot of psychobabble and evasions about Maj. Hasan's motives.

A shocked Dr. Phil, appalled that the guest had publicly mentioned Maj. Hasan's Islamic identity, went on to present what was, in essence, the case for Maj. Hasan as victim. Victim of deployment, of the Army, of the stresses of a new kind of terrible war unlike any other we have known. Unlike, can he have meant, the kind endured by those lucky Americans who fought and died at Iwo Jima, say, or the Ardennes?

It was the same case to be presented, in varying forms, by guest psychologists, the media, and a representative or two from the military, for days on end.

The quality and thrust of this argument was best captured by the impassioned Dr. Phil, who asked us to consider, "how far out of touch with reality do you have to be to kill your fellow Americans . . . this is not a well act." And how far out of touch with reality is such a question, one asks in return—not only of Dr. Phil, but of the legions of commentators like him immersed in the labyrinths of motive hunting even as the details of Maj. Hasan's proclivities became ever clearer and more ominous.

To kill your fellow Americans—as many as possible, unarmed and in the most helpless of circumstances, while shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is great), requires, of course, only murderous hatred—the sort of mindset that regularly eludes the Dr. Phils of our world as the motive for mass murder of this kind.

As the meditations on Maj. Hasan's motives rolled on, "fear of deployment" has served as a major theme—one announced as fact in the headline for the New York Times's front-page story: "Told of War Horror, Gunman Feared Deployment." The authority for this intelligence? The perpetrator's cousin. No story could have better suited that newspaper's ongoing preoccupation with the theme of madness in our fighting men, and the deadly horrors of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, than this story of a victim of war pressures gone berserk. The one fly in the ointment—Maj. Hasan had of course seen no war, and no combat.

Still, with a bit of stretching, adherents of Maj. Hasan-as-war-victim theme found a substitute of sorts—namely the fears allegedly provoked in him by his exposure, as an army psychologist, to the stories of men who had been deployed. The thesis then: Maj. Hasan's mental stress, provoked by the suffering of Americans who had been in combat, caused him to go out and butcher as many of these soldiers as he could. Let's try putting that one before a jury.

By Sunday morning, Gen. George Casey Jr., Army chief of staff, confronted questions put to him by ABC's George Stephanopolous—among them the matter of the complaints about Maj. Hasan's anti-American tirades that were made by fellow students in military classes, as well as other danger signs ignored by officials when they were reported, apparently for fear of offense to a Muslim member of the military.

These were speculations, Gen. Casey repeatedly cautioned. We need to be very careful, he explained, "We are a very diverse army." Mr. Stephanopolous then helpfully summarized matters: This case then was either a case of premeditated terror—or the man just snapped.

The general was not about to address such questions. He was there to recite the required pieties, and describe the military priorities . . . which are, it appears, a concern above all for the sensitivities of a diverse army, a concern so great as to render even the mention of salient facts out of order, as "speculation.'" "This terrible event," Gen. Casey noted, "would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty."

To hear this, and numerous other such pronouncements of recent days, was to be reminded of all those witnesses to the suspicious behavior of the 9/11 hijackers who held their tongues for fear of being charged with discrimination. It has taken Maj. Hasan, and the fantastic efforts to explain away his act of bloody hatred, to bring home how much less capable we are of recognizing the dangers confronting us than we were even before September 11.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Oct-7:

Obama and the General
The White House finds a four-star scapegoat for its Afghan jitters.

Democrats have found someone worth fighting in Afghanistan. His name is Stan McChrystal.

The other night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went after the commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, "with all due respect," for supposedly disrespecting the chain of command. Around the Congressional Democratic Caucus, we're told Members refer to General McChrystal as "General MacArthur," after the commander in Korea sacked by Harry Truman.

White House aides have fanned these flames with recent leaks to the media that "officials are challenging" his assessment asking for more troops. In the last two days, the White House National Security Adviser and the Secretary of Defense have both suggested that the general should keep his mouth shut. President Obama called him in Friday for a talking-to on the tarmac at Copenhagen airport.

Though a decorated Army four-star officer, the General's introduction to Beltway warfare is proving to be brutal. To be fair, Gen. McChrystal couldn't know that his Commander in Chief would go wobbly so soon on his commitment to him as well as to his own Afghan strategy when he was tapped for the job in April. We're told by people who know him that Gen. McChrystal "feels terrible" and "had no intention whatsoever of trying to lobby and influence" the Administration. His sense of bewilderment makes perfect sense anywhere but in the political battlefield of Washington. He was, after all, following orders.

***

Recall that in March Mr. Obama unveiled his "comprehensive new strategy . . . to reverse the Taliban's gains and promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government." The Commander in Chief pledged to properly resource this "war of necessity," which he also called during the 2008 campaign "the central front on terror." The President then sacked his war commander, who had been chosen by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in favor of Gen. McChrystal, an expert in counterinsurgency.

Upon arriving in June, Gen. McChrystal launched his assessment of the forces required to execute the Obama strategy. His confidential study was completed in August and sent to the Pentagon. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Michael Mullen told Congress that more troops would be needed, and a figure of 30,000-40,000 was bandied about.

The figure has clearly spooked the Administration. Soon after, Gen. McChrystal's confidential report was leaked to the Washington Post by, well, you'll have to ask Bob Woodward. The report said that the U.S. urgently needs to reverse a "deteriorating" security situation. Soon the full retreat began in Washington, led by a vocal group within the Administration that wants to scale back the mission. The White House told the Pentagon to hold off asking for troops and Gen. McChrystal not to testify to Congress. Remarkably, President Obama mused on the Sunday talks shows, "Are we doing the right thing?"

Then Gen. McChrystal gave a speech last Thursday before the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. It was scheduled and approved by the Pentagon weeks before the Afghan political jitters seized official Washington. The General was hardly incendiary.

"We need to reverse the current trends, and time does matter," he said. Asked vaguely about taking a narrower approach that leaves Afghanistan to its own devices and strikes at terrorists from afar, Gen. McChrystal offered that "a strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sighted one." He warned the country would descend into "Chaos-istan."

What really worries Democrats is the prospect of Midterm-istan if Mr. Obama escalates the war. But some thought to play up the General's innocuous comment into an attempt to torpedo the latest Administration rethink.

In fact, the White House is merely revisiting the idea rejected in its "careful policy review" last spring to move from ambitious counterinsurgency to "counterterrorism" that would involve fewer troops and target al Qaeda instead of the Taliban. Vice President Joe Biden champions the change, and Sen. John Kerry and Speaker Pelosi have endorsed it.

The Biden faction says changes in the region justify a U-turn: An expanded U.S. force would merely be fighting a motley group of insurgents who aren't planning the next 9/11. This is partly true, but the links between the Taliban and al Qaeda are longstanding, particularly in the Pashtun areas of the south. If America pulls back and lets Mullah Omar create a Talibanistan in Helmand and Kandahar, al Qaeda operatives will soon follow.

As we've learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, successful counterterrorism requires intelligence. This comes from earning the trust of the people, which in turn can only happen if they are protected. The Biden approach would pull U.S. soldiers back behind high walls, far from the field of battle, and turns security over to the Afghan army and police before they are prepared for the job.

The sudden Afghan rethink also jeopardizes progress in Pakistan, the world's leading sanctuary for al Qaeda. The Pakistani willingness to expand American drone strikes and launch a military campaign in their tribal regions dates squarely to the Administration's recommitment to the region. Now that Mr. Obama is having second thoughts, so might the Pakistanis.

The President's very public waver is already doing strategic harm. The Taliban are getting a morale boost and claiming victory, while our allies in Europe have one more reason to rethink their own deployments. Such a victory, as the head of the British army Sir David Richards warned on Sunday, would have an "intoxicating effect" on extremist Islam around the world.

Commanders in Chief can change their minds. George W. Bush waited too long to embrace the "surge." He had private doubts when the casualties also surged in 2007, but he gave the new approach a chance to succeed. Mr. Obama is blinking even before all the additional troops he ordered to Afghanistan have had time to deploy to the theater.

***

Gen. McChrystal's liberal critics also have very short memories. In 2003, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki clashed with his superiors by saying many more troops were needed to pacify Iraq. He became a Democratic hero and is now Mr. Obama's Veterans Secretary. In this case, Gen. McChrystal has become a political target merely for taking at face value Mr. Obama's order to fight the war properly. His superiors, the Central Commander David Petraeus and Adm. Mullen, back him, but can hardly be said to question civil control of the military.

In an interview with Newsweek, Gen. McChrystal said he wouldn't resign if the President rejects his request for more troops. If he were really trying to dictate policy, he'd have given a different answer. But we don't think Gen. McChrystal should stay to implement a Biden war plan either. No commander in uniform should ask his soldiers to die for a strategy he doesn't think is winnable—or for a President who lets his advisers and party blame a general for their own lack of political nerve.

from the Washington Post, 2009-Oct-9, by Charles Krauthammer:

Young Hamlet's Agony

The genius of democracy is the rotation of power, which forces the opposition to be serious -- particularly about things like war, about which until Jan. 20 of this year Democrats were decidedly unserious.

When the Iraq war (which a majority of Senate Democrats voted for) ran into trouble and casualties began to mount, Democrats followed the shifting winds of public opinion and turned decidedly antiwar. But needing political cover because of their post-Vietnam reputation for weakness on national defense, they adopted Afghanistan as their pet war.

"I was part of the 2004 Kerry campaign, which elevated the idea of Afghanistan as 'the right war' to conventional Democratic wisdom," wrote Democratic consultant Bob Shrum shortly after President Obama was elected. "This was accurate as criticism of the Bush administration, but it was also reflexive and perhaps by now even misleading as policy."

Which is a clever way to say that championing victory in Afghanistan was a contrived and disingenuous policy in which Democrats never seriously believed, a convenient two-by-four with which to bash George Bush over Iraq -- while still appearing warlike enough to fend off the soft-on-defense stereotype.

Brilliantly crafted and perfectly cynical, the "Iraq war bad, Afghan war good" posture worked. Democrats first won Congress, then the White House. But now, unfortunately, they must govern. No more games. No more pretense.

So what does their commander in chief do now with the war he once declared had to be won but had been almost criminally under-resourced by Bush?

Perhaps provide the resources to win it?

You would think so. And that's exactly what Obama's handpicked commander requested on Aug. 30 -- a surge of 30,000 to 40,000 troops to stabilize a downward spiral and save Afghanistan the way a similar surge saved Iraq.

That was more than five weeks ago. Still no response. Obama agonizes publicly as the world watches. Why? Because, explains national security adviser James Jones, you don't commit troops before you decide on a strategy.

No strategy? On March 27, flanked by his secretaries of defense and state, the president said this: "Today I'm announcing a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." He then outlined a civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

And to emphasize his seriousness, the president made clear that he had not arrived casually at this decision. The new strategy, he declared, "marks the conclusion of a careful policy review."

Conclusion, mind you. Not the beginning. Not a process. The conclusion of an extensive review, the president assured the nation, that included consultation with military commanders and diplomats, with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, with our NATO allies and members of Congress.

The general in charge was then relieved and replaced with Obama's own choice, Stanley McChrystal. And it's McChrystal who submitted the request for the 40,000 troops, a request upon which the commander in chief promptly gagged.

The White House began leaking an alternate strategy, apparently proposed (invented?) by Vice President Biden, for achieving immaculate victory with arm's-length use of cruise missiles, Predator drones and special ops.

The irony is that no one knows more about this kind of warfare than Gen. McChrystal. He was in charge of exactly this kind of "counterterrorism" in Iraq for nearly five years, killing thousands of bad guys in hugely successful under-the-radar operations.

When the world's expert on this type of counterterrorism warfare recommends precisely the opposite strategy -- "counterinsurgency," meaning a heavy-footprint, population-protecting troop surge -- you have the most convincing of cases against counterterrorism by the man who most knows its potential and its limits. And McChrystal was emphatic in his recommendation: To go any other way than counterinsurgency would lose the war.

Yet his commander in chief, young Hamlet, frets, demurs, agonizes. His domestic advisers, led by Rahm Emanuel, tell him if he goes for victory, he'll become LBJ, the domestic visionary destroyed by a foreign war. His vice president holds out the chimera of painless counterterrorism success.

Against Emanuel and Biden stand Gen. David Petraeus, the world's foremost expert on counterinsurgency (he saved Iraq with it), and Stanley McChrystal, the world's foremost expert on counterterrorism. Whose recommendation on how to fight would you rely on?

Less than two months ago -- Aug. 17 in front of an audience of veterans -- the president declared Afghanistan to be "a war of necessity." Does anything he says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause?

from the Washington Post, 2009-Oct-31, by Ann Scott Tyson:

U.S. combat injuries rise sharply
Three-month total in Afghanistan surpasses 1,000

More than 1,000 American troops have been wounded in battle over the past three months in Afghanistan, accounting for one-fourth of those injured in combat since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.

The dramatic increase in amputees and other seriously injured service members comes as October marks the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Expanded military operations, a near-doubling of the number of troops since the beginning of the year and a Taliban offensive that has included a proliferation of roadside bombings have led to the great increase in casualties. U.S. troops in Afghanistan are suffering wounds at a higher rate than those who were serving in Iraq when violence spiraled during the military "surge" two years ago. In mid-2007, 600 U.S. troops were wounded in Iraq each month out of about 150,000 troops deployed there. In Afghanistan, about 68,000 troops are currently installed, with about 350 wounded each month recently.

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell acknowledged that the casualties in Afghanistan have surpassed Iraq surge proportions and noted that the violence in Afghanistan is directed more against U.S. and other coalition forces, whereas it was heavily sectarian in Iraq. "It shows you how we are the targets and how effectively they are targeting us," Morrell said.

He noted that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has become concerned about the rising number of wounded and has ordered thousands of additional support troops to Afghanistan to look for, and minimize, the roadside bombs.

Military doctors say the nature of the Afghanistan casualties is reminiscent of those in Iraq in 2007. "We're seeing similar types of injuries from Afghanistan that we saw in Iraq" before and during the surge, said Lt. Col. Shelton Davis, chief of physical medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

More than 1,000 improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs, exploded or were found in Afghanistan in August, more than double any monthly total until this summer. The bombs account for 70 to 80 percent of U.S. and coalition casualties in that country, according to Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, director of the Pentagon's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization.

Metz told military reporters this week that IEDs are now the "weapon of choice" for Taliban fighters. The bombs are so powerful, he said, that they can take out the latest mine-resistant vehicles the Pentagon has employed to protect troops. In addition, insurgents have begun targeting troops on foot. He said that the rise in bombings has coincided with the doubling of U.S. troop numbers this year and that further troop increases -- now under consideration by President Obama -- would bring more bombs.

As U.S. ground forces moved in this year, Metz said at a House Armed Services Committee hearing this week, "the enemy was ready with a very thick array of IEDs. . . . Those soldiers and Marines ran into those IEDs, and it was what we predicted."

Walter Reed's Ward 57 provides wrenching proof of the devastating effectiveness of the bombs, with patients suffering amputations, spinal cord damage, traumatic brain injuries and fractures.

On Aug. 18, Lt. Dan Berschinski, 25, of Peach Tree City, Ga., was serving as a platoon leader with the Stryker brigade combat team in Kandahar province, where the roads were laced with bombs and his unit had to operate without engineer support or mine-detection equipment. His platoon was crossing a footbridge when a bomb threw Berschinski to the ground, deafened a sergeant and blew up Pfc. Jonathan Yanney, a radio operator. An initial search located part of Yanney's shredded helmet, pieces of a boot and some small body parts that Berschinski said team members put in a plastic bag.

Realizing that not only the roads but also the foot trails were too dangerous, Berschinski and his men moved on by walking through shin-high water. Regrouping in a mud-walled compound later that day, Berschinski was passing a gate when another bomb blew up underneath him, bouncing him off a wall and tossing him back into the crater that had formed.

"I immediately reached down -- up, really, since I was upside down -- for my legs. I could tell they were gone," Berschinski said in a written account provided by his family. His right leg and hip and his left leg above the knee were amputated. According to Metz, few soldiers have survived stepping on such bombs.

But the survival rate among the wounded is greater than in previous conflicts because of improved first aid, quick evacuations to field hospitals and better armored protection.

Busy wards in wartime

As more wounded flow in, hospitals must adjust. "We can open more beds as needed and bring on more staff as needed. As you can imagine, that is not without its own challenges," said Col. Paul Pasquina, chief of orthopedics and rehabilitation at Walter Reed and the Bethesda National Naval Medical Hospital. He noted that although military medical personnel are in demand stateside, they also must deploy overseas.

"The ward is pretty full now," said Tracy Glascoe, a physician assistant on Ward 57.

One significant challenge, she said, is helping wounded troops transition from a regimen of constant ward care so that they can work on further physical rehabilitation.

Resting the stub of his right leg on his hospital bed one day last week, Spec. Harrison Ruzicka, 23, said he is eager for physical therapy. Ruzicka, who is from North Carolina knows he faces a long recovery but said he was thankful to be alive after a bomb flipped his armored vehicle into a river on Aug. 7.

He recalled being pinned under the vehicle and fearing he could drown in the river. He said he screamed for help but quickly realized no one was there. He somehow got loose, swam to the embankment and dragged himself onto land with his arms. He knew his legs were broken. "I didn't want to look at them because I would have put myself in shock," he said.

He started calling for his good friend, vehicle driver Sgt. Jerry R. Evans Jr., 23, of Eufaula, Ala. "I was in his wedding party," Ruzicka said. "There was no response. Nothing from him."

from the Times of London, 2009-Oct-8, by Martin Fletcher:

American troops in Afghanistan losing heart, say army chaplains

Forward Operating Base in Wardak province — American soldiers serving in Afghanistan are depressed and deeply disillusioned, according to the chaplains of two US battalions that have spent nine months on the front line in the war against the Taleban.

Many feel that they are risking their lives — and that colleagues have died — for a futile mission and an Afghan population that does nothing to help them, the chaplains told The Times in their makeshift chapel on this fortress-like base in a dusty, brown valley southwest of Kabul.

“The many soldiers who come to see us have a sense of futility and anger about being here. They are really in a state of depression and despair and just want to get back to their families,” said Captain Jeff Masengale, of the 10th Mountain Division's 2-87 Infantry Battalion.

“They feel they are risking their lives for progress that's hard to discern,” said Captain Sam Rico, of the Division's 4-25 Field Artillery Battalion. “They are tired, strained, confused and just want to get through.” The chaplains said that they were speaking out because the men could not.

The base is not, it has to be said, obviously downcast, and many troops do not share the chaplains' assessment. The soldiers are, by nature and training, upbeat, driven by a strong sense of duty, and they do their jobs as best they can. Re-enlistment rates are surprisingly good for the 2-87, though poor for the 4-25. Several men approached by The Times, however, readily admitted that their morale had slumped.

“We're lost — that's how I feel. I'm not exactly sure why we're here,” said Specialist Raquime Mercer, 20, whose closest friend was shot dead by a renegade Afghan policeman last Friday. “I need a clear-cut purpose if I'm going to get hurt out here or if I'm going to die.”

Sergeant Christopher Hughes, 37, from Detroit, has lost six colleagues and survived two roadside bombs. Asked if the mission was worthwhile, he replied: “If I knew exactly what the mission was, probably so, but I don't.”

The only soldiers who thought it was going well “work in an office, not on the ground”. In his opinion “the whole country is going to s***”.

The battalion's 1,500 soldiers are nine months in to a year-long deployment that has proved extraordinarily tough. Their goal was to secure the mountainous Wardak province and then to win the people's allegiance through development and good governance. They have, instead, found themselves locked in an increasingly vicious battle with the Taleban.

They have been targeted by at least 300 roadside bombs, about 180 of which have exploded. Nineteen men have been killed in action, with another committing suicide. About a hundred have been flown home with amputations, severe burns and other injuries likely to cause permanent disability, and many of those have not been replaced. More than two dozen mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs) have been knocked out of action.

Living conditions are good — abundant food, air-conditioned tents, hot water, free internet — but most of the men are on their second, third or fourth tours of Afghanistan and Iraq, with barely a year between each. Staff Sergeant Erika Cheney, Airborne's mental health specialist, expressed concern about their mental state — especially those in scattered outposts — and believes that many have mild post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “They're tired, frustrated, scared. A lot of them are afraid to go out but will still go,” she said.

Lieutenant Peter Hjelmstad, 2-87's Medical Platoon Leader, said sleeplessness and anger attacks were common.

A dozen men have been confined to desk jobs because they can no longer handle missions outside the base. One long-serving officer who has lost three friends this tour said he sometimes returned to his room at night and cried, or played war games on his laptop. “It's a release. It's a method of coping.” He has nightmares and sleeps little, and it does not help that the base is frequently shaken by outgoing artillery fire. He was briefly overcome as he recalled how, when a lorry backfired during his most recent home leave, he grabbed his young son and dived between two parked cars.

The chaplains said soldiers were seeking their help in unprecedented numbers. “Everyone you meet is just down, and you meet them everywhere — in the weight room, dining facility, getting mail,” said Captain Rico. Even “hard men” were coming to their tent chapel and breaking down.

The men are frustrated by the lack of obvious purpose or progress. “The soldiers' biggest question is: what can we do to make this war stop. Catch one person? Assault one objective? Soldiers want definite answers, other than to stop the Taleban, because that almost seems impossible. It's hard to catch someone you can't see,” said Specialist Mercer.

“It's a very frustrating mission,” said Lieutenant Hjelmstad. “The average soldier sees a friend blown up and his instinct is to retaliate or believe it's for something [worthwhile], but it's not like other wars where your buddy died but they took the hill. There's no tangible reward for the sacrifice. It's hard to say Wardak is better than when we got here.”

Captain Masengale, a soldier for 12 years before he became a chaplain, said: “We want to believe in a cause but we don't know what that cause is.”

The soldiers are angry that colleagues are losing their lives while trying to help a population that will not help them. “You give them all the humanitarian assistance that they want and they're still going to lie to you. They'll tell you there's no Taleban anywhere in the area and as soon as you roll away, ten feet from their house, you get shot at again,” said Specialist Eric Petty, from Georgia.

Captain Rico told of the disgust of a medic who was asked to treat an insurgent shortly after pulling a colleague's charred corpse from a bombed vehicle.

The soldiers complain that rules of engagement designed to minimise civilian casualties mean that they fight with one arm tied behind their backs. “They're a joke,” said one. “You get shot at but can do nothing about it. You have to see the person with the weapon. It's not enough to know which house the shooting's coming from.”

The soldiers joke that their Isaf arm badges stand not for International Security Assistance Force but “I Suck At Fighting” or “I Support Afghan Farmers”.

To compound matters, soldiers are mainly being killed not in combat but on routine journeys, by roadside bombs planted by an invisible enemy. “That's very demoralising,” said Captain Masengale.

The constant deployments are, meanwhile, playing havoc with the soldiers' private lives. “They're killing families,” he said. “Divorces are skyrocketing. PTSD is off the scale. There have been hundreds of injuries that send soldiers home and affect families for the rest of their lives.”

The chaplains said that many soldiers had lost their desire to help Afghanistan. “All they want to do is make it home alive and go back to their wives and children and visit the families who have lost husbands and fathers over here. It comes down to just surviving,” said Captain Masengale.

“If we make it back with ten toes and ten fingers the mission is successful,” Sergeant Hughes said.

“You carry on for the guys to your left or right,” added Specialist Mercer.

The chaplains have themselves struggled to cope with so much distress. “We have to encourage them, strengthen them and send them out again. No one comes in and says, `I've had a great day on a mission'. It's all pain,” said Captain Masengale. “The only way we've been able to make it is having each other.”

Lieutenant-Colonel Kimo Gallahue, 2-87's commanding officer, denied that his men were demoralised, and insisted they had achieved a great deal over the past nine months. A triathlete and former rugby player, he admitted pushing his men hard, but argued that taking the fight to the enemy was the best form of defence.

He said the security situation had worsened because the insurgents had chosen to fight in Wardak province, not abandon it. He said, however, that the situation would have been catastrophic without his men. They had managed to keep open the key Kabul-to-Kandahar highway which dissects Wardak, and prevent the province becoming a launch pad for attacks on the capital, which is barely 20 miles from its border. Above all, Colonel Gallahue argued that counter-insurgency — winning the allegiance of the indigenous population through security, development and good governance — was a long and laborious process that could not be completed in a year. “These 12 months have been, for me, laying the groundwork for future success,” he said.

At morning service on Sunday, the two chaplains sought to boost the spirits of their flock with uplifting hymns, accompanied by video footage of beautiful lakes, oceans and rivers.

Captain Rico offered a particularly apposite reading from Corinthians: “We are afflicted in every way but not crushed; perplexed but not driven to despair; persecuted but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.”

from the New York Times, 2009-Oct-19, p.A13, by Elisabeth Bumiller:

As the Commander in Chief Deliberates, Frustration Builds Within the Ranks

WASHINGTON — Only nine months ago, the Pentagon pronounced itself reassured by the early steps of a new commander in chief. President Obama was moving slowly on an American withdrawal from Iraq, had retained former President George W. Bush's defense secretary and, in a gesture much noticed, had executed his first military salute with crisp precision.

But now, after nearly a month of deliberations by Mr. Obama over whether to send more American troops to Afghanistan, frustrations and anxiety are on the rise within the military.

A number of active duty and retired senior officers say there is concern that the president is moving too slowly, is revisiting a war strategy he announced in March and is unduly influenced by political advisers in the Situation Room.

“The thunderstorm is there and it's kind of brewing and it's unstable and the lightning hasn't struck, and hopefully it won't,” said Nathaniel C. Fick, a former Marine Corps infantry officer who briefed Mr. Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and is now the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington. “I think it can probably be contained and avoided, but people are aware of the volatile brew.”

Last week the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Thomas J. Tradewell Sr., gave voice to the concerns of those in the military when he issued a terse statement criticizing Mr. Obama's review of Afghan war strategy.

“The extremists are sensing weakness and indecision within the U.S. government, which plays into their hands,” said Mr. Tradewell's statement on behalf of his group, which represents 1.5 million former soldiers.

Last August, in a speech to the V.F.W., Mr. Obama defended his strategy, saying, “This is not only a war worth fighting; this is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

A retired general who served in Iraq said that the military had listened, “perhaps naïvely,” to Mr. Obama's campaign promises that the Afghan war was critical. “What's changed, and are we having the rug pulled out from under us?” he asked. Like many of those interviewed for this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals from the military's civilian leadership and the White House.

Mr. Obama's civilian advisers on national security say the president is appropriately reviewing his policy options from all sides. They said it would be reckless to rush a decision on whether to send as many as 40,000 more American men and women to war, particularly when the unresolved Afghan election had left the United States without a clear partner in Kabul.

Although the tensions do not break entirely on classic civilian-military lines — some senior military officers have doubts about sending more troops to Afghanistan and some of Mr. Obama's top civilian advisers do not — the strains reflect the military's awareness in recent months that life has changed under the new White House.

After years of rising military budgets under the Bush administration, the new administration has tried to rein in Pentagon spending, and has signaled other changes as well, including reopening debate on the “don't ask, don't tell” policy governing military service by gay men and lesbians.

The administration has made clear that Mr. Obama will not necessarily follow the advice of his generals in the same way Mr. Bush did, notably in the former president's deference to Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the head of the Central Command, and that it does not want military leaders publicly pressing the commander in chief as they give their advice.

Two weeks ago, after Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, rejected calls for the Afghan war to be scaled back during a question-and-answer session in a speech in London, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned not only General McChrystal, but also the military as a whole, to keep quiet in public as the debate progressed.

“It is imperative that all of us taking part in these deliberations — civilian and military alike — provide our best advice to the president candidly but privately,” Mr. Gates told the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army, a private support group, in Washington.

Andrew M. Exum, a former Army officer in Afghanistan, an adviser to General McChrystal and a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said that the change in style from one administration to the next had led to some of the military's discontent. “The Bush administration would settle on a strategy and stick to it, and you could argue often to ill effect,” he said, referring to the president's decision not to send more troops to Iraq until 2007, after years of rising violence.

The Obama administration, he said, is not afraid to go back and question assumptions. “There's a value in that,” Mr. Exum said, “but that can be incredibly frustrating for those trying to operationalize the strategy.”

Part of the strain comes from lessons learned from the generals who acquiesced to former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's demands for a small invasion force in Iraq, then faced criticism that they had not spoken up for more troops to secure the country during the occupation.

The retired general who served in Iraq said that today's senior officers had decided, “I won't be so quiet, I won't be a lap dog.”

Another source of tension within the military is the view that a delay is endangering the 68,000 American troops now in Afghanistan. “McChrystal has troops out there who are risking their lives more than they need to, partly because we have not filled in the gaps and we have not created a safe zone in southern and eastern Afghanistan,” said Michael O'Hanlon, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution.

A military policy analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing senior Pentagon leaders, said that “the military lives in a very rarefied environment,” and that “they are not out there every day having to meet citizens who say, `What the hell are we doing?' ”

Senior military officers, the analyst said, “are smart guys, but they do not have the daily pulse of the American public in their face. They tend to interpret politicians who give voice to it as being weak, but none of this works if the public gives up on it.”

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Oct-11, by Lewis Sorley:

The Real Afghan Lessons From Vietnam
The 'clear and hold' strategy of Gen. Creighton Abrams was working in South Vietnam. Then Congress pulled the plug on funding.

More than 30 years have passed since North Vietnam, in gross violation of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, conquered South Vietnam. That outcome was partly the result of greatly increased logistical support to the North from its communist backers. It was also the result of America's failure to keep its commitments to the South.

Those commitments included promises to maintain a robust level of financial support, to replace combat materiel, and even the use of air power to support the South in case of aggression by the North. That failure was the doing of a U.S. Congress that had tired of the country's long involvement in a war in Southeast Asia and cared nothing for the sacrifices of its own armed forces or those of the South Vietnamese people.

Since then, whenever America has entered into other military actions abroad or contemplated such commitments, the specter of Vietnam has been raised. It is entirely appropriate that earlier military experiences be examined for such "lessons learned" as they may yield. But it is equally essential that those prior campaigns be accurately understood before any valid comparisons are made. When it comes to the Vietnam War, much skewed or inaccurate commentary has impeded our understanding of that conflict and its outcome.

All the better-known early works on the Vietnam War—by Stanley Karnow, Neil Sheehan, George Herring—concentrated disproportionately on the early period of American involvement when Gen. William C. Westmoreland commanded U.S. forces. As a consequence, many came to view the entirety of the war as more or less a homogeneous whole, and to apply to the whole endeavor valid criticisms of the early years, ignoring what happened after Gen. Creighton Abrams took command soon after the 1968 Tet Offensive.

William Colby, who headed American support for the South Vietnamese pacification program (and was later director of the CIA), once remarked that the prevalence of such truncated treatments of the Vietnam War was like what Americans would know about World War II if the histories of that conflict had stopped before Stalingrad, the invasion of North Africa and Guadalcanal.

We now know, or should, that virtually everything changed when Abrams took command. The changes grew out of his understanding of the nature of the war, and of his conviction that upgrading South Vietnam's armed forces and rooting out the enemy's covert infrastructure in rural hamlets and villages must be accorded equal priority with combat operations. Even combat operations were radically reconfigured.

Westmoreland had concentrated on a buildup of American forces—eventually peaking at 543,400 by 1969 in response to his repeated requests for more troops—to be used in large sweeps called "search and destroy" operations. The measure of merit was "body count," the number of enemy killed, based on his conviction that if enough casualties were inflicted on the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong elements in the South they would be induced to cease their aggression.

Westmoreland did, during his four years in command, inflict a horrifying number of casualties. But North Vietnam relentlessly sent more and more men into battle. Westmoreland largely ignored the crucial tasks of upgrading South Vietnam's military forces and supporting pacification, especially the campaign to eradicate the covert enemy infrastructure that used terror and coercion to dominate the rural population.

"Pacification bored him," said Gen. Phillip Davidson, Westmoreland's senior intelligence officer. As a consequence, the enemy's covert infrastructure continued to keep the rural peasantry in the South under domination. Meanwhile, South Vietnam's armed forces, consistently outgunned by the enemy (U.S. forces, already rich in combat assets, were given priority for issue of such weapons as the M-16 rifle), were slowed in their development and consequent ability to take on more responsibility for their nation's security.

In the later years, Abrams, along with Ellsworth Bunker (at the head of the embassy in Saigon) and William E. Colby (in charge of support for pacification) devised a more viable approach for conducting the war even as U.S. forces were being incrementally withdrawn.

Security for the South Vietnamese became the new measure of merit. Instead of "search and destroy," tactical operations were now focused on a "clear and hold" objective. Greatly increased South Vietnamese territorial forces, better trained and equipped and integrated into the regular army, provided the "hold."

Abrams, Bunker and Colby regarded South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu as his country's "No. 1 pacification officer." Against the advice of virtually all his advisers, Thieu took the courageous step of organizing and arming a People's Self-Defense Force to back up localized defense forces that defended their home provinces. Thieu's own view, validated by the results, was that "the government had to rest upon the support of the people, and it had little validity if it did not dare to arm them." Ultimately four million villagers were enrolled in the self-defense force.

Thieu also implemented a "Land to the Tiller" program which, for the first time, brought real land reform to the South Vietnamese peasantry. By 1972 over 400,000 farmers had acquired title to two and a half million acres of land. Tenancy was eliminated.

Better intelligence and a structured Phoenix program (as the campaign against the enemy infrastructure was called) progressively identified and neutralized the enemy's covert infrastructure. Most were either captured or induced to rally to the government side, providing valuable sources of intelligence for going after the rest.

By the time of the enemy's 1972 Easter Offensive virtually all U.S. ground troops had been withdrawn. Supported by American airpower and naval gunfire, South Vietnam's armed forces gallantly turned back an invasion from the North amounting to the equivalent of some 20 divisions, or about 200,000 troops.

Critics were quick to attribute the successful defense to American airpower. Abrams would have none of it. "The Vietnamese had to stand and fight," he said. If they hadn't done that, "ten times the [air] power we've got wouldn't have stopped them."

When the last U.S. forces departed South Vietnam in March 1973 pursuant to the Paris Peace Accords, South Vietnam had a viable government and military structure that was positioned—had the U.S. kept its commitments—to sustain itself against the renewed aggression from the North that began almost immediately after the peace accords were signed. When America defaulted on those commitments, South Vietnam was doomed.

Lessons learned from the past are only as good as our understanding of the past. This is especially important to keep in mind now, as the commander in chief, his principal national security advisers, and senior military leaders contemplate the next step in Afghanistan. Analogies to the real history of Vietnam could be as useful as those based on a flawed understanding of that conflict are dangerous and misleading.

Mr. Sorley, a military historian and retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, is the author of "A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam" (Harcourt, 1999).

from the Washington Post, 2009-Oct-5, by E.J. Dionne Jr.:

No Rush to Escalate

At a White House dinner with a group of historians at the beginning of the summer, Robert Dallek, a shrewd student of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, offered a chilling comment to President Obama.

"In my judgment," he recalls saying, "war kills off great reform movements." The American record is pretty clear: World War I brought the Progressive Era to a close. When Franklin D. Roosevelt was waging World War II, he was candid in saying that "Dr. New Deal" had given way to "Dr. Win the War." Korea ended Harry Truman's Fair Deal, and Vietnam brought Lyndon Johnson's Great Society to an abrupt halt.

Dallek is not a pacifist, and he does not pretend that his observation settles the question against war in every case. Of the four he mentioned, I think World War II and Korea were certainly necessary fights.

But Dallek's point helps explain why Obama is right to have grave qualms about an extended commitment of many more American troops to Afghanistan. Obama was elected not to escalate a war but to end one. The change and hope he promised did not involve a vast new campaign to transform Afghanistan.

It's easy to get enraged over the mess in Afghanistan and with the voices insisting that Obama has no choice but to remedy it by going big and going long.

Too many of those who say that Obama is obligated to step up the pace in Afghanistan spent the Bush presidency neglecting that war because their main interest was in waging a new one in Iraq.

In his recent report to the president, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, noted repeatedly that the effort there had been "under-resourced." It sure would have been nice if we had settled Afghanistan before beating the drums of war in Iraq.

It's also enraging that those who insist on offsetting every penny spent to expand health coverage would never ask the Congressional Budget Office to score the costs of McChrystal's strategy. For the uninsured, they propose fiscal prudence. For war, they offer profligacy.

Yet rage is a poor guide to policy. The truth is that Obama has only bad choices in Afghanistan.

Obama has said over and over that the war in Afghanistan, unlike the war in Iraq, is necessary. "We are in Afghanistan to confront a common enemy that threatens the United States, our friends and our allies," he declared in March. He cannot walk away from that.

But while his March speech was sweeping in certain ways, he defined a limited core objective. "I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal," he said, "to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future." These are the words that will give Obama room to reconsider his policy.

McChrystal argued that the full counterinsurgency strategy he proposes demands that we "elevate the importance of governance" in Afghanistan, and, to his credit, he is brutally frank about its current dismal state.

He writes of "the crisis of popular confidence that springs from the weakness of [Afghan government] institutions, the unpunished abuse of power by corrupt officials and power brokers, a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement, and a long-standing lack of economic opportunity." That doesn't even take into account the fraud involved in President Hamid Karzai's reelection.

Is this a situation in which Obama should commit tens of thousands more troops for a lengthy war? Should it surprise us that some administration officials are asking why it is that al-Qaeda has weakened even as the Taliban has grown stronger? These skeptics now question whether routing the Taliban is actually essential to Obama's core goal of defeating al-Qaeda.

There's a jelling conventional wisdom that if Obama doesn't go all in with McChrystal's strategy, he is admitting defeat and backing away from his earlier pledges. Those who want him to commit now are impatient for a decision.

Obama should resist both their impatience and their criticism of his search for an alternative strategy. The last thing he should do is rush into a new set of obligations in Afghanistan that would come to define his presidency more than any victory he wins on health care.

Those most eager for a bigger war have little interest in Obama's quest for domestic reform. As he ponders his options, theirs are not the voices he should worry about.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Oct-1, p.A22:

U.S. Credibility and Pakistan
What Islamabad thinks of a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Critics of the war in Afghanistan—inside and out of the Obama Administration—argue that we would be better off ensuring that nuclear-armed Pakistan will help us fight al Qaeda. As President Obama rethinks his Afghan strategy with his advisers in the coming days, he ought to listen to what the Pakistanis themselves think about that argument.

In an interview at the Journal's offices this week in New York, Pakistan Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi minced no words about the impact of a U.S. withdrawal before the Taliban is defeated. "This will be disastrous," he said. "You will lose credibility. . . . Who is going to trust you again?" As for Washington's latest public bout of ambivalence about the war, he added that "the fact that this is being debated—whether to stay or not stay—what sort of signal is that sending?"

Mr. Qureshi also sounded incredulous that the U.S. might walk away from a struggle in which it has already invested so much: "If you go in, why are you going out without getting the job done? Why did you send so many billion of dollars and lose so many lives? And why did we ally with you?" All fair questions, and all so far unanswered by the Obama Administration.

As for the consequences to Pakistan of an American withdrawal, the foreign minister noted that "we will be the immediate effectees of your policy." Among the effects he predicts are "more misery," "more suicide bombings," and a dramatic loss of confidence in the economy, presumably as investors fear that an emboldened Taliban, no longer pressed by coalition forces in Afghanistan, would soon turn its sights again on Islamabad.

Mr. Qureshi's arguments carry all the more weight now that Pakistan's army is waging an often bloody struggle to clear areas previously held by the Taliban and their allies. Pakistan has also furnished much of the crucial intelligence needed to kill top Taliban and al Qaeda leaders in U.S. drone strikes. But that kind of cooperation will be harder to come by if the U.S. withdraws from Afghanistan and Islamabad feels obliged to protect itself in the near term by striking deals with various jihadist groups, as it has in the past.

Pakistanis have long viewed the U.S. through the lens of a relationship that has oscillated between periods of close cooperation—as during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s—and periods of tension and even sanctions—as after Pakistan's test of a nuclear device in 1998. Pakistan's democratic government has taken major risks to increase its assistance to the U.S. against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Mr. Qureshi is warning, in so many words, that a U.S. retreat from Afghanistan would make it far more difficult for Pakistan to help against al Qaeda.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Sep-25, p.A13, by Kori Schake:

Commit to Afghanistan or Get Out
We shouldn't send Americans to fight and die if we're not in it to win.

In his inaugural address in 1961, John F. Kennedy said the United States would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend” in defense of liberty. Less than three months later, he decided not to supply air support to U.S.-trained Cuban exiles who tried to overthrow Fidel Castro in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. It wasn't a shining moment for American foreign policy. But JFK was right to turn off the spigot of American assistance if he wasn't committed to the fight.

President Barack Obama now faces a similar tough decision. The war in Afghanistan is not going well. The rebuilding effort isn't going well. The effort to create a competent government isn't going well. So should he commit American support if he isn't committed to doing what is needed to succeed?

Mr. Obama owns the war in Afghanistan. He bought it, on credit. But he is fulminating at the cost now that the bill is coming due. Gen. Stanley McChrystal has made clear what the bill will be in terms of additional troops. And the president now wants a review to determine whether we're pursuing the right strategy.

It is disappointing that this review comes after the president decided to keep 68,000 Americans risking their lives in Afghanistan. But Mr. Obama is right to give himself a chance to decide whether he is willing to follow through on this war, given what it will cost in blood, treasure, and other things.

What the president's review will reveal is a shocking incapacity by the nonmilitary parts of our war effort. Its talk of the need for "smart power" notwithstanding, right now the administration has only a military strategy for Afghanistan. What's more, the administration appears to only be debating the military requirements of the war, not the much bigger challenges—the nonmilitary pieces of the Afghanistan strategy.

When Mr. Obama announced his current Afghanistan policy in March, he said it was "a stronger, smarter, more comprehensive strategy" that would build schools, hospitals, roads, and enterprise zones, addressing issues like energy and trade. Where are those efforts?

He said "to advance security, opportunity and justice—not just in Kabul, but from the bottom up in the provinces—we need agricultural specialists and educators; engineers and lawyers." Where are those specialists?

The president said "I am ordering a substantial increase in our civilians on the ground." He directed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to develop a diplomatic plan to parallel Gen. McChrystal's military plan. Where is that plan?

The administration has done virtually nothing in these areas. Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, sent in a plea for funding for some of these civilian projects last month. It was dismissed as premature. The administration has not named a director for the Agency for International Development. And only 56 additional civilians as part of the "civilian surge" were in place before Afghanistan's August elections.

If the president turns off the spigot of American assistance in Afghanistan, he will pay a substantial price for it. He'll be going back on his rhetoric about Afghanistan as the "good war," a war of necessity. He will cast the withdrawal from Iraq in a different light, endow the jihadist with a public victory (which will only encourage future attacks), and make it more difficult to achieve positive change in Afghanistan as well as collect intelligence on terrorists. He may turn Hamid Karzai's government into an adversary. He will diminish our ability to help Pakistan fight terrorists, and will likely make the U.S. less trusted in the world. But those prices will be less than the cost of sending young Americans to fight and die in a war the president is not committed to winning.

The military is doing its job in Afghanistan. It's time the rest of the government does its job. We need to turn our attention to the failures of the nonmilitary parts of our strategy and bring them up to the standard at which our military is performing. Otherwise we will not be doing what is needed to win.

Ms. Schake is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and an associate professor at the United States Military Academy.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Sep-21, p.A19, by Ilan Berman:

Our Missile-Defense Race Against Iran
The Bush-era plan was the best of the realistic alternatives.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Obama administration's decision last Thursday to scrap missile-defense deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic is that it was so long in coming.

The handwriting has been on the wall since February, when President Barack Obama sent Russian President Dmitry Medvedev a secret letter proffering a quid pro quo of sorts to the Kremlin. The deal was simple: Washington would walk away from its plans to deploy antimissile capabilities in Eastern Europe in exchange for greater Russian cooperation on Iran.

The missive, promptly leaked by the Kremlin, became something of a self-fulfilling prophesy. Without signs of commitment from Washington, the governments in Warsaw and Prague found it impossible to promote the controversial effort to their own citizens. And so the idea of a European missile-defense shield faltered, progressively mothballed as a political agenda item in both countries. The administration's announcement last week put the final nail in the coffin.

Mr. Obama has defended his decision on both technical and financial grounds. The Bush administration's plans to deploy ground-based interceptors in Poland and early warning radars in the Czech Republic were targeted as part of his campaign pledge to eliminate billions of dollars in missile-defense spending. Instead, the White House now has pledged to develop a new theater and sea-based missile-defense architecture for Europe that "will provide stronger, smarter, and swifter defenses of American forces and America's allies."

But what about defense of America? The Bush-era plan is the best in a series of realistic alternatives for protecting not only our troops and international partners, but the U.S. homeland as well. That's the conclusion of a study released this past February by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). According to that report, "Options for Deploying Missile Defenses in Europe," the previous administration's Poland/Czech plan is preferable to sea-based missile defenses situated around Europe; to mobile midcourse defenses deployed at U.S. bases in Germany and Turkey; and to fast, forward-positioned Kinetic Energy Interceptors (missiles designed to neutralize enemy missiles earlier in flight) located at U.S. bases in Germany and Turkey.

One of those three is no longer an option. Earlier this year, the Obama administration canceled the Kinetic Energy Interceptor project as part of its $1.4 billion in cuts to the Pentagon's missile-defense budget.

Of the two that remain, each suffers serious deficiencies. Mobile ground-based defenses in Turkey and Germany would provide nominally greater coverage of Europe than the Poland/Czech Republic plan, and at comparable cost (between $9 billion and $14 billion over two decades). But according to the CBO, such a system would materialize a full two years later than the estimated operational date of 2013 for a Poland/Czech deployment. So would a sea-based missile-defense option, and at considerably greater cost, since it would require additional ships to be sustainable over the long term.

All of this matters a great deal. Conventional wisdom has it that Iran will be capable of fielding an intercontinental ballistic missile by the middle of the next decade. Iran's space program also has charted serious advances since the Islamic Republic (with Russian help) became the first Muslim spacefaring nation in 2005. There is real reason to believe that—given the similarities between space launch and ballistic missile technologies—the progress Tehran has made on one could lead to quantum leaps in the sophistication of the other.

A long-range Iranian missile capability, in other words, could materialize much sooner than currently projected. And according to a new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Islamic Republic is now working to marry its ballistic missile arsenal with its nuclear program, fashioning a missile system capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

Our security depends in large measure on beating Iran to the punch. If the U.S. succeeds in deploying missile defenses capable of intercepting Iranian long-range missiles before they are developed, it will help protect itself, its allies and its troops from the menace posed by a nuclear Iran. But if missile defenses become operational after Iran's long-range missile capability does, both America and its allies will find themselves vulnerable to nuclear blackmail, or worse, from the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism.

Pentagon planners have worried about this eventuality for some time. During the Bush administration, technical experts tasked with formulating the requirements for defense of the United States from ballistic-missile attack concluded that the country required three separate locations for antimissile systems. The first and second sites, to defend the homeland against North Korean missiles, are already operational in Fort Greely, Alaska, and at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The third site, intended to neutralize Iran's ability to menace the U.S., as well as American allies and forces in Europe, was to have been built in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Today that deployment may be off the table, but the requirement for such a "third site" remains. That the Obama administration has chosen to disregard it speaks volumes about its attitude toward missile defense, and its disdain for the directive, issued to the White House by Congress over a decade ago, "to deploy as soon as technologically possible an effective National Missile Defense."

Mr. Berman is vice president for policy of the American Foreign Policy Council.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Sep-21, p.A10, web-posted 2009-Sep-18, by Jonathan Weisman and Peter Spiegel:

Cost Concerns Propelled U.S. Missile Pivot
Obama Decision Is Aimed at Saving Pentagon Funds While Helping Nonproliferation Push; Shift Was Years in the Making

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration's scrapping of long-range missile interceptors in Europe wasn't just about security and diplomacy, according to people close to the process: It also came down to money.

"A ground-based interceptor is generally about a $70 million-per-missile asset going after a $10-$15 million [Iranian] missile," a senior administration official told arms-control analysts Thursday at a briefing explaining the rationale, according to a recording heard by The Wall Street Journal. "The trade is not a good one economically. It's not a good one from a military strategy position."

President Barack Obama's decision to shelve his predecessor's plans for long-range missile interceptors in Poland and an antimissile radar in the Czech Republic has divided opinion in Europe and provoked anger among U.S. conservatives. Administration officials have made the case that it will yield broad dividends diplomatically.

On Sept. 10, senior administration officials presented the case for substituting medium-range missile interceptors at a cabinet meeting at the White House. The presentation was the culmination of studies launched in 2006 by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, then serving in the same job in the Bush administration, to look at the efficacy of two separate missile-defense tracks. The "upper-tier" track included powerful rockets in Alaska and California as well as the small battery of interceptors in Poland.

The "lower tier" included ship-based Aegis missile defenses; the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system, whose first operational deployment in Israel is set for the coming weeks; and more established Patriot missiles.

At the same time, administration officials said, intelligence showed Iran was shifting from difficult-to-build, expensive intercontinental ballistic missiles to middle-range missiles aimed at the Middle East and Europe. Iran had "a construct in their mind that they're going to hold their neighbors and eventually most of Europe at risk," one official said at the arms-control briefing. The Defense Department began emphasizing its lower tier in response.

With the advent of the Obama administration, former Rep. Ellen Tauscher was appointed in March as the top State Department hand overseeing nuclear nonproliferation -- a powerful position that during the Bush administration was occupied by Russia hawks like John Bolton.

As chairman of a key House subcommittee, she had repeatedly stripped funding for the Czech and Polish sites, insisting the Pentagon prove the system actually worked.

Other shifts were under way at the Pentagon. Mr. Gates has said he began to have a change of heart about his embrace of the European system as intelligence made it clearer Iran was struggling with its ICBM program. Tehran, however, was becoming an innovator in short and medium-range missile technologies, officials believed.

Pentagon officials said Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff whose previous job was heading the military command responsible for missile and space weapons, became increasingly influential in these debates: He argued that focusing on Iranian long-range missiles was leading the Pentagon to build ever-more expensive defensive systems to counter an increasingly elusive threat.

Meanwhile, the military's most ardent missile defense backer, Air Force Lt. Gen. Trey Obering, retired; as longtime head of the Missile Defense Agency he had repeatedly advocated for the Czech and Polish system.

For Mr. Obama, another consideration was his personal push toward arms control and nonproliferation, said Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, an arms-control group with close ties to the administration.

In April, in a speech in Prague, Mr. Obama pledged to work toward a world without nuclear weapons. In July, in Moscow, he and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev committed to a binding treaty by December reducing the former Cold War nuclear arsenals. Next week, Mr. Obama chairs a United Nations Security Council summit on nonproliferation and disarmament.

In the spring, the White House plans to press for ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, ahead of a summer international conference to review the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

All of those issues require Russian cooperation, and the Russians made it clear they wanted the Eastern European antimissile system scrapped. "Anyone objectively assessing this European site knew it was a turkey. It was never going to work," Mr. Cirincione said. "But was there politics involved? Yes."

There was also money. The Pentagon had to start drawing up a new five-year defense plan, which lays out its plans for long-term defense spending. A decision had to be made whether to stick with about $5 billion in that new plan for the old system, or to devote half that amount to speed up deployment of the new missiles. The Pentagon chose the latter.

The presentation at the Sept. 10 cabinet meeting didn't end with a formal decision. That was made Sunday, according to people familiar with the timeline.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Sep-18, p.A22:

Obama's Missile Offense
It's better these days to be a U.S. adversary than its friend.

President Obama promised he would win America friends where, under George W. Bush, it had antagonists. The reality is that the U.S. is working hard to create antagonists where it previously had friends.

That's one conclusion to draw from President Obama's decision yesterday to scrap a missile-defense agreement the Bush Administration negotiated with Poland and the Czech Republic. Both governments took huge political risks—including the ire of their former Russian overlords—in order to accommodate the U.S., which wanted the system to defend against a possible Iranian missile attack. Don't expect either government to follow America's lead anytime soon.

"If the Administration approaches us in the future with any request, I would be strongly against it," Jan Vidim, a conservative Czech lawmaker who voted for the system, told the Associated Press.

The White House justifies its decision by claiming to have new intelligence showing that Iran's long-range missile capabilities are not as advanced as previously believed. Instead, it intends to upgrade and deploy currently available missile interceptors that are useful mainly for intercepting short- and medium-range missiles, where, it says, Iranian capability "is developing more rapidly than previously projected."

We're all for deploying interceptors to stop Iranian missiles of every range. But the Administration's argument is difficult to credit, not least because our sources told us as early as February that the Administration was prepared to abandon those sites—which is to say, well before the allegedly new intelligence became available.

It's also hard to square the intelligence community's sanguine assessment with Iran's successful launch of the solid-fuel Sejil missile in May. With an estimated range of 1,560 miles, the Sejil could deliver a one-ton payload as far as Warsaw. That cannot be comforting when the International Atomic Energy Agency is now saying that Iran has "sufficient information" to build an atomic bomb and will also "overcome problems" involved in its delivery system.

The Administration's likelier motive for scrapping the interceptors is that it hopes to win Russia's vote at the U.N. Security Council for tougher sanctions on Iran. Maybe the Russians have secretly agreed to such a quid pro quo, though publicly they were quick to deny it following yesterday's decision.

And as Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov has noted, Vladimir Putin's Kremlin benefits by keeping the Iranian crisis on a low boil, because the threat of a Middle East crisis drives energy prices up while putting U.S. interests at risk. Russia also likes spooning out dollops of diplomatic help at the U.N. in exchange for material Western concessions. This time, the concession was missile defense. Next time, perhaps, the West can be seduced into trading away the pro-Western government of Georgia, or even Ukraine.

That's hardly an idle fear. It has been the tragic fate of the countries of Eastern and Central Europe to be treated as bargaining chips in the designs of their more powerful neighbors. Their inclusion in NATO and EU was supposed to have buried that history, but Russia's new assertiveness, including its willingness to cut off energy supplies in winter and invade Georgia last year, is reviving powerful fears. Officials in Warsaw surely noticed that President Obama cancelled the missile system 70 years to the day that the Soviet Union invaded Poland as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany.

The U.S. decision also undermines the credibility of the U.S. nuclear defense umbrella. The Bush Administration sought to develop a global defense posture in part to reassure allies that they don't need their own nuclear deterrent, even as rogue regimes seek nuclear arms and the missiles to deliver them. America's Europe reversal tells other countries that they can't rely on the U.S. so it's best to follow the Israeli path and develop their own weapon and defenses. For that matter, this also makes the U.S. East Coast less safe; the ground-based system in Alaska and California covers the East, but barely. The Polish and Czech sites were to provide added protection.

The European switcheroo continues Mr. Obama's trend of courting adversaries while smacking allies. His Administration has sought warmer ties with Iran, Burma, North Korea, Russia and even Venezuela. But it has picked trade fights with Canada and Mexico, sat on trade treaties with Colombia and South Korea, battled Israel over West Bank settlements, ignored Japan in deciding to talk with North Korea, and sanctioned Honduras for its sin of resisting the encroachments of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.

We're reminded of the rueful quip, by scholar Bernard Lewis, that the problem with becoming friends with the U.S. is that you never know when it will shoot itself in the foot.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Sep-17, p.A1, by Peter Spiegel, with Marc Champion in Moscow contributing:

U.S. to Shelve Nuclear-Missile Shield
Defense Plans for Poland, Czech Republic to Be Dropped as Iran Rocket Threat Downgraded; Moscow Likely to Welcome Move

WASHINGTON -- The White House will shelve Bush administration plans to build a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, according to people familiar with the matter, a move likely to cheer Moscow and roil the security debate in Europe.

The U.S. will base its decision on a determination that Iran's long-range missile program has not progressed as rapidly as previously estimated, reducing the threat to the continental U.S. and major European capitals, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The findings, expected to be completed as early as next week following a 60-day review ordered by President Barack Obama, would be a major reversal from the Bush administration, which pushed aggressively to begin construction of the Eastern European system before leaving office in January.

The Bush administration proposed the European-based system to counter the perceived threat of Iran developing a nuclear weapon that could be placed atop its increasingly sophisticated missiles. There is widespread disagreement over the progress of Iran's nuclear program toward developing such a weapon, but miniaturizing nuclear weapons for use on long-range missiles is one of the most difficult technological hurdles for an aspiring nuclear nation.

The Bush plan infuriated the Kremlin, which argued the system was a potential threat to its own intercontinental ballistic missiles. U.S. officials repeatedly insisted the location and limited scale of the system -- a radar site in the Czech Republic and 10 interceptor missiles in Poland -- posed no threat to Russian strategic arms.

The Obama administration's assessment concludes that U.S. allies in Europe, including members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, face a more immediate threat from Iran's short- and medium-range missiles and will order a shift towards the development of regional missile defenses for the Continent, according to people familiar with the matter. Such systems would be far less controversial.

Critics of the shift are bound to view it as a gesture to win Russian cooperation with U.S.-led efforts to seek new economic sanctions on Iran if Tehran doesn't abandon its nuclear program. Russia, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, has opposed efforts to impose fresh sanctions on Tehran.

Security Council members, which include the U.S. and Russia, will meet with Iranian negotiators on Oct. 1 to discuss Iran's nuclear program.

Current and former U.S. officials briefed on the assessment's findings said the administration was expected to leave open the option of restarting the Polish and Czech system if Iran makes advances in its long-range missiles in the future.

But the decision to shelve the defense system is all but certain to raise alarms in Eastern Europe, where officials have expressed concerns that the White House's effort to "reset" relations with Moscow would come at the expense of U.S. allies in the former Soviet bloc. "The Poles are nervous," said a senior U.S. military official.

A Polish official said his government wouldn't "speculate" on administration decisions regarding missile defense, but said "we expect the U.S. will abide by its commitments" to cooperate with Poland militarily in areas beyond the missile-defense program.

Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he expected the Obama administration to drop the missile-defense plans. He said that Moscow wouldn't view the move as a concession but rather a reversal of a mistaken Bush-era policy.

Still, the decision is likely to be seen in Russia as a victory for the Kremlin. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will meet with Mr. Obama at next week's meetings of the U.N. General Assembly and Group of 20 industrialized and developing nations.

Although a center-right government in Prague supported the Bush missile-defense plan when it was first proposed, the Czech Republic is now run by a caretaker government. A Czech official said his government was concerned an announcement by the White House on the missile-defense program could influence upcoming elections and has urged a delay. But the Obama administration has decided to keep to its original timetable.

European analysts said the administration would be forced to work hard to convince both sides the decision wasn't made to curry favor with Moscow and, instead, relied only on the program's technical merits and analysis of Iran's missile capabilities.

"There are two audiences: the Russians and the various European countries," said Sarah Mendelson, a Russia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The task is: How do they cut through the conspiracy theories in Moscow?"

The Obama administration has been careful to characterize its review as a technical assessment of the threat posed by the Iranian regime, as well as the costs and capabilities of a ground-based antimissile system to complement the two already operating in Alaska and central California. Those West Coast sites are meant to defend against North Korean missiles.

The administration has also debated offering Poland and the Czech Republic alternative programs to reassure the two NATO members that the U.S. remains committed to their defense.

Poland, in particular, has lobbied the White House to deploy Patriot missile batteries -- the U.S. Army's primary battlefield missile-defense system -- manned by American troops as an alternative.

Although Polish officials supported the Bush plan, U.S. officials said they had indicated their primary desire was getting U.S. military personnel on Polish soil. Gen. Carter Hamm, commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe, said Washington has begun talks with Polish officials about starting to rotate Europe-based American Patriot units into Poland for month-long training tours as a first step toward a more permanent presence.

"My position has been: Let's get started as soon as we can with the training rotations, while the longer-term stationing...is decided between the two governments," Gen. Hamm said in an interview.

For several years, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency has been pushing for breaking ground in Poland and the Czech Republic, arguing that construction must begin so the system would be in place to counter Tehran's emerging long-range-missile program, which intelligence assessments determined would produce an effective rocket by about 2015.

But in recent months, several prominent experts have questioned that timetable. A study by Russian and U.S. scientists published in May by the East-West Institute, an international think tank, downplayed the progress of Iran's long-range-missile program. In addition, Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an expert in missile defense and space-based weapons, said in a speech last month that long-range capabilities of both Iran and North Korea "are not there yet."

"We believed that the emergence of the intercontinental ballistic missile would come much faster than it did," Gen. Cartwright said. "The reality is, it has not come as fast as we thought it would come."

It is not an assessment that is shared universally. Eric Edelman, who oversaw missile-defense issues at the Pentagon as undersecretary of defense for policy in the Bush administration, said intelligence reports he reviewed were more troubling.

"Maybe something really dramatic changed between Jan. 16 and now in terms of what the Iranians are doing with their missile system, but I don't think so," Mr. Edelman said, referring to his last day in office.

There is far more consensus on Iran's ability to develop its short- and medium-range missiles, and the administration review is expected to recommend a shift in focus toward European defenses against those threats. Such a program would be developed closely with NATO.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Aug-15, p.A12:

A Laser Defense Hit
The Airborne Laser scores a hit, even as its budget is being cut.

Never has Ronald Reagan's dream of layered missile defenses—Star Wars, for short—been as politically out of favor as in the Age of Obama. Nor as close, at least technologically, to becoming realized.

The latest encouraging news came Thursday courtesy of the Misssile Defense Agency. The Airborne Laser prototype aircraft this week found, tracked, engaged and simulated an intercept with a missile seconds after liftoff. It was the first time the Agency used an "instrumented" missile to confirm the laser works as expected. Next up this fall will be the first live attempt to bring down a ballistic missile, but this test confirms how far along this innovative effort has come.

Along with space-based weapons, the Airborne Laser is the next defense frontier. The modified Boeing 747 is supposed to send an intense beam of light over hundreds of miles to destroy missiles in the "boost phase," before they can release decoys and at a point in their trajectory when they would fall back down on enemy territory. It's a pioneering use of directed energy in defense. The laser complements the sea- and ground-based missile defenses that keep proving themselves in tests.

Yet the Obama Administration isn't buying it. Funding for missile defense was cut in the 2010 budget by some 15%—$1.2 billion to $1.6 billion, depending on how you calculate it. The number of ground-based interceptors was reduced. The Missile Defense Agency's budget for the Airborne Laser is to be slashed in half, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates pulled the plug on buying a second plane. The Pentagon says the program will have three tries to hit a live missile, or be killed altogether.

As the Administration keeps defense spending growth flat, while breaking the bank on its domestic priorities, Secretary Gates has to make hard choices. But he might try harder to convince his boss at the White House that Star Wars isn't a sci-fi fantasy. That's what critics used to say about stealth aircraft as well.

With time, and inevitable setbacks, the technology to make layered missile defenses a reality is being proven to work. The Airborne Laser could be—unless prematurely vaporized—an important part of a system to protect America and its allies from rogue states and their nuclear missiles.

from the Weekly Standard, 2009-Oct-12, by James Bowman:

Don't Change 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'
There are sound reasons--unbigoted ones--for our policy on gays in the military.

Reporting on the prospective dismissal from the Air Force of a decorated combat veteran, Lieutenant Colonel Victor Fehrenbach, because he had been identified by somebody else as gay, the Washington Post recently wrote:

After investigating, the Air Force charged him last September with damaging its good order and discipline. The "don't ask, don't tell" law, passed by Congress in 1993, prohibits gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals from serving openly in the U.S. armed forces.

This is a common mistake. Actually, there is no "Don't ask, don't tell" law. The law passed by Congress in 1993 (USC Section 654, Title 10) says, "The presence in the armed forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability."

"Don't ask, don't tell" is of course the name given to the executive order by Bill Clinton which was designed at once to implement and to circumvent this law. That is presumably why, as the Post notes, President Obama thinks any change "should be done legislatively," since an executive order from him allowing homosexuals equal status in the military would be in defiance of the law as written by Congress. Prospects for such legislation are increasing. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has asked the president and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to "bring to Congress your recommendations" for changing "Don't ask, don't tell." There is a legislative effort in the House, HR 1283, that is likely to come up for debate in the coming weeks, though it is doubtful, to say the least, whether "debate" is the right word. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have just published an essay in their quarterly journal (winner of the "2009 Secretary of Defense National Security Essay Competition") that explicitly compares the end of "Don't, ask, don't tell" to the civil-rights struggle to racially integrate the armed forces. And what debate can there be between right and wrong?

"Don't ask, don't tell" is a tribute to our national talent for hypocrisy. Yes, President Clinton was prepared to agree, homosexual acts might be a risk to the high standards of morale, good order, discipline, and unit cohesion, but if nobody knew about them, then what harm could they do? Since then, nobody has thought up a better way of coping with this thorny problem. The left has nothing better to offer than riding roughshod over the opinions of the majority of servicemen--58 percent in the latest Military Times poll--and repealing the law. The same poll found that 10 percent of respondents would leave the service if gays were allowed openly to serve and another 14 percent would consider leaving. We have at least to take seriously the possibility that this would be the price of treating military service as a human right.

This it clearly cannot be. There are all kinds of people--the very young and the very old, the sick or disabled, violent criminals or, in combat roles, women--whom we regard as unfit to be soldiers. The fact that open homosexuals are also excluded cannot by itself be considered an injustice. The mere assumption that it is may be related to the fact that the advocates of integrating gay soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines into the armed forces so often speak, mistakenly, about the "repeal" of the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy--as if, like waterboarding, it were a simple matter of presidential will to discontinue a practice that the "rights" lobby finds abhorrent. It's an assumption that often seems to go with the moralized politics of the Age of Obama.

The moralization owes something to President Obama's style of oratory, which has a regrettable tendency towards happy-talk. Thus he tells us that we don't have to choose between our ideals and our security, or between jobs and the environment, or between universal health care and a manageable deficit. These are supposedly "false choices." A big part of this new moralism has to do with the easy assumptions of the popular and media cultures that a whole range of issues, from gay marriage to global warming to Guantánamo, are morally perspicuous and that those on the wrong side of them must be supposed for that reason alone to be corrupt or bigoted. Apparently, when you sign on to the "progressive" agenda, you get a whole outfit of moral certainties that would make the allegedly simplistic George W. Bush green with envy.

Such certainty seems to be infectious, too. As Sam Schulman wrote in these pages a few months ago,

There is a new consensus on gay marriage: not on whether it should be legalized but about the motives of those of us who oppose it. All agree that any and all opposition to gay marriage is explained either by biblical literalism or anti-homosexual bigotry. This consensus is brilliantly constructed to be so unflattering to those of us who will vote against gay marriage--if we are allowed to do so--that even biblical literalists and bigots are scrambling out of the trenches and throwing down their weapons.

Recent opinion polls show that this is even more true of the opposition to "Don't ask, don't tell," which now seems to claim majorities among Republicans and regular churchgoers, for example, if not among servicemen and women themselves. I suspect these liberalizers have been persuaded that there really is no argument to be made on the other side, which is also what allows the rhetorical shock troops of the left to apply the discrediting word "bigotry" to those who are not so persuaded. This is the way our national conversation takes place now. Instead of serious problems on which men and women of goodwill may differ, all that remains on issue after issue, from global warming to gay marriage to health care, is a crude moral melodrama pitting enlightened and civilized adherents of the media consensus against bigots and reactionaries.

Once so identified, one is presumed in advance to have no rational case to make but only a knee-jerk reaction against "change"--that quality which, divorced from any substance, took on mystical properties during the late presidential campaign. We have the president's own word, at least, that the change he intended included allowing gay servicemen to serve openly, even where once this was thought to be prejudicial to "good order and discipline." Maybe good order and discipline are themselves now to be thought the concerns only of "bigots."

Yet if reason were to be readmitted to the debate, we might find something in the history of military honor to justify the principle now enshrined in the law decreeing that "homosexuality is incompatible with military service." We know that soldiering--I mean not training or support or peacekeeping or any of the myriad other things soldiers do, but facing enemy bullets--is inextricably bound up with ideas of masculinity. We also know that most heterosexual males' ideas of masculinity are inextricably bound up with what we now call sexual orientation. In other words, "being a man" typically does mean for soldiers both being brave, stoic, etc.--and being heterosexual. Another way to put this is to say that honor, which is by the testimony of soldiers throughout the ages of the essence of military service, includes the honor of being known for heterosexuality, and that, for most heterosexual males, shame attends a reputation as much for homosexuality as for weakness or cowardice.

This is not, of course, to say that homosexuals are weak or cowardly--only that the reputation of manliness, which we know to be an important component of military honor, is in practice incompatible with the imputation either of homosexuality or of weakness and cowardice. Now presumably an argument for the armed forces' being required to accept gay recruits is that it doesn't have to mean this, and that this simple reality is merely the product of custom and convention and no essential part of the moral and emotional equipment of men capable of nerving themselves to face combat. Possibly they are right. But what if they are wrong? Is there any way to find out without taking a real risk with national security? Are the advocates of gays in the military prepared to say, fiat justitia, ruat caelum? And if so, do the rest of us, the majority of gays and straights alike who would prefer not to take such a risk with our lives, property, and freedom, have any say in the matter? Or are the wishes of this minority of a minority to be paramount? They say they demand the "right" to make the supreme sacrifice for their country, and yet they are unwilling to make the presumably lesser sacrifice of being publicly reticent about their sexual behavior--or the sacrifice of not being in the military. It doesn't add up, somehow.

In fact, we do not know and we cannot know what our armed forces would be like under such conditions. The advocates of allowing open homosexuals to serve often cite the example of Israel or Britain, both of which have integrated homosexuals into their military services apparently without incident. But they have done so in circumstances which do not allow for any objective assessment of the success or failure of the experiment. In Israel, all citizens must perform military service, which presumably affords much more scope for diluting the impact, if any, of the presence of homosexuals than would be the case in an all-volunteer army like that in the United States. In Britain, the change came about in response to an order from the European Court of Human Rights, whose decrees have the force of law. For this reason, it would not be in the interest of any officer who valued his career prospects to remark upon any problems that the presence of gay soldiers, sailors, or airmen might be causing in their armed forces. Nor has the performance of the British Army in Iraq or the Royal Navy in the Persian Gulf been such as to render all suspicion of damage to morale, good order, and discipline ridiculous.

Yes Churchill, as first lord of the Admiralty, once spoke of the traditions of the Navy as being "rum, bum and the lash." And we do know that there have always been gays in the military--and that, therefore, they have been tolerated on the condition that they have been able to behave with discretion. This is not necessarily an argument for "Don't ask, don't tell," which is an attempt to make official what would be unofficial in any case. But if it is no longer possible to rely on the discretion, the decency, and tolerance of the individual soldier, then how much longer can we expect to rely on his courage and readiness to sacrifice himself for the greater good?

In Saving Private Ryan, when the word finally reaches the eponymous hero that his brothers have all been killed and that he is being withdrawn from his forward position as a precaution against his being killed likewise and so leaving his parents childless, his reply is to take in his combat buddies with a sweeping gesture and say: "These are my brothers." It is a way of looking at the experience of men in combat that is so familiar as to be almost a cliché. It echoes the words of Shakespeare's Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother. Be he ne'er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition.

In order for any military unit to function under extreme conditions, this sense of brotherhood, which is naturally fostered by shared hardships, will always be encouraged by the military culture for the sake of the unit's combat effectiveness.

Nor is the notion of brotherhood merely metaphorical. There is a kind of brotherhood of comrades in arms that should be seen, because it is so often seen by the men themselves, as a species of brotherhood of the blood. Certainly it involves a form of love--in Greek philia--whose strength is essential to the purposes which evoke it. It is striking how seldom this love between men in battle is mentioned by the advocates of lifting the ban on open homosexuals' serving in the armed forces. Characteristically, they argue on the basis of professionalism and the supposed irrelevance of "sexual orientation" to the job of soldiering. But is it irrelevant?

Perhaps even critics of "Don't ask, don't tell" have an uneasy sense that they cannot simultaneously say--as much of the commentary about the film Brokeback Mountain seemed to suggest--that the homosexual relationship is simply friendship carried to a higher power and, as the advocates for gay marriage imply, that it is exactly the same as the erotic love between men and women. Those who are not homosexuals have always resisted any simple equivalence between sexual love and friendship, not out of bigotry but at least partly because to grant it would be an abdication of their own right to love. Characteristically, the robust heterosexual, if told that close friendship with another man is only a degree away from homosexual relations with him, will back off the friendship. He knows, or believes, what it seems the homosexual cannot know or believe, or doesn't want to know or believe, namely that the two sorts of love are different in kind and not just in degree.

The resistance from military men to the idea of gays in the military seems to be due to this perception. In their minds there simply is no continuity between brotherly and erotic love. Indeed, the power of the former would be not just diminished but destroyed by any confusion of the two. When that other kind of love, eros, gets mixed up with the very different kind of love appropriate to siblings or parents and children, we call the result incest, which has been banned, often with extreme prejudice, in almost all cultures known to us. This is because eros is so strong that it corrupts and destroys the other kinds of love which, accordingly, simply cannot coexist with it. Eros is the gray squirrel, the kudzu, the zebra mussel of emotions: When it moves into an environment, it crowds out all its competitors.

Of course it will now be said by our new breed of political moralizers that I have compared homosexual love to incest, thus identifying myself--assuming that I had not already done so--as a bigot. I have done no such thing. I have said that homosexual love, like heterosexual love, must admit of certain human relationships, based on other, nonsexual kinds of love, where its presence would corrupt and destroy those more delicate types of love. I merely ask those who wish to do away with the prohibition of open homosexuality in the armed services to consider that the more than 1,100 flag and general officers who recently declared their support for the existing law were motivated, as they claim, by genuine concern for national security and not by bigotry. Wouldn't any refusal to do so be tantamount to bigotry itself?

James Bowman, a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is the author of Honor: A History (2006) and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture (2008).

from the New York Times, 2009-May-26, p.A19, by John R. Bolton:

A Fast Way to Lose the Arms Race

PRESIDENT OBAMA has called for a world without nuclear weapons, not as a distant goal, but as something imminently achievable. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed up, saying that American and Russian “leadership” in arms control and nonproliferation was “at the top of the list” of her priorities. Although the administration may be counting on the eyelid-lowering effect of arms-control terminology to minimize Congressional and public scrutiny, its plans are deeply troubling for America.

First, the administration's bilateral objectives with Russia play almost entirely to Moscow's advantage, as in arms-control days of yore. Hurrying to negotiate a successor to the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty by year's end, which Secretary Clinton has committed to, reflects a “zeal for the deal” approach that benefits only Russia.

We need not be rushed, since simply extending the existing treaty's verification provisions would preserve the status quo. Fortunately, Russia seems likely to save us from the dangerously low warhead levels proposed by Senator John Kerry and others, but the risks of foolish, unnecessary concessions remain high.

Paradoxically, the administration itself might put the entire negotiating process into gridlock by reaching much farther than the Russians are willing to go, such as by trying to negotiate numerical limits on tactical nuclear weapons. More seriously, the administration has pre-emptively conceded to Russia on strategic defensive issues: first by linking the general subject of missile defense with offensive issues, long a Russian goal; and secondly by signaling that specific projects, like the defense system intended for Poland and the Czech Republic, might be abandoned or bargained away.

Second, the Obama administration is seriously weakening both our strategic offensive and defensive capacity. The Defense Department budget proposes major cuts in missile defense programs, returning to an emphasis both in operational and diplomatic terms on “theater” missile defense (mainly for defending deployed military forces), rather than “national” missile defense (for shielding America's population from missile attack). Protecting our forces abroad must remain a top priority, but it need not be at the expense of homeland defense. President Ronald Reagan refused to bargain on missile defense, and President Obama isn't bargaining either. He is simply giving it away.

The Pentagon also proposes ending financing for the Reliable Replacement Warhead, a key to substituting safe, dependable warheads for the ones now aging. For the last two years, Congress refused President George W. Bush's requests to pay for the program, but dropping it from the Obama budget altogether is another diplomatic freebie for Moscow. Even worse, in his public statements, President Obama's seeming indifference to the beneficent effects of the United States' nuclear deterrent has to worry our friends and allies, most notably Japan.

Third, the president is resurrecting President Bill Clinton's unfinished multilateral arms-control agenda, committing, for example, to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would effectively make permanent the current moratorium on underground testing. Vice President Joe Biden is leading the administration's effort to reverse the Senate's 1999 rejection of the test-ban treaty, the first major treaty to fail on the Senate floor since the Treaty of Versailles after World War I.

The administration is also putting new emphasis on negotiating conventions against the “arms race” in outer space, which would undercut America's current substantial advantage above the earth, and on resuscitating a proposed treaty that would prohibit the production of uranium and plutonium for weapons.

Unhappily, the administration is pushing Israel to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a “non-nuclear-weapons state,” meaning Israel would have to eliminate its nuclear arsenal. Iran and others will welcome this, given their repeated demands for the same result. Today's real proliferation threat, however, is not Israel, but states like Iran and North Korea that become parties to the alphabet soup of arms control treaties and then violate them with abandon. Without robust American reactions to these violations — not apparent in administration thinking — more will follow.

The Senate, which must approve any treaty with a two-thirds supermajority, is now the only obstacle to Obama administration policies that will seriously weaken the United States. Voters should remind their representatives on Capitol Hill that they have a responsibility to keep us safe.

John R. Bolton, the United States ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “Surrender Is Not an Option.”

from the Wall Street Journal Asia, 2009-Dec-16, by Franklin C. Miller and Andrew Shearer:

U.S. Disarmament Is Dangerous for Asia
America's nuclear deterrent remains the cornerstone of regional stability.

Talk of nuclear disarmament is making a serious comeback. Just in the past week, President Obama received a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the issue, and now yet another blue-ribbon commission—this one co-chaired by former foreign ministers of Japan and Australia—has issued a high-profile report calling for disarmament. The goal, of course, is superficially appealing and may even be achievable some day. But the United States, Australia, Japan and America's other Asian allies would be well advised to think twice before embracing the report.

The paper released Tuesday in Tokyo by the International Commission on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament is representative of international antinuke theology. Some of the ideas are useful, such as strengthening the International Atomic Energy Agency as a proliferation watchdog and beefing up safeguards and verification mechanisms. Creating international nuclear fuel banks and shared management of enrichment, reprocessing and spent fuel storage facilities would make nonproliferation sense as well as supporting civil nuclear power in energy-thirsty Asia.

But other suggestions would be dangerous. Capping U.S. and Russian arsenals at 500 warheads is unrealistic given today's world. An unequivocal "no first use" declaration would weaken American deterrence. And the recommendation that the Proliferation Security Initiative, currently a coalition of the willing to interdict nuclear shipments, be folded into the United Nations is a surefire way to neuter a successful tool.

The basic problem is that such efforts ignore the fact that the world is an unfriendly place. And no part of it looks more Hobbesian than Asia, riven with unresolved Cold War tensions, rapid advances in military capabilities and growing competition among rising powers. Some of those governments maintain and deploy nuclear weapons. Others want nuclear weapons, break their treaty commitments not to acquire them and will want them whether the U.S. has nuclear weapons or not. Look no further than North Korea.

This is why a credible U.S. nuclear deterrent is so important. This is partly a matter of self interest: Washington must prevent a major power from attacking America or seeking to coerce it with a nuclear threat. But it also needs to be mindful of the effects of U.S. nuclear policies on its Asian allies who face real threats—North Korea among the most pressing. The U.S. nuclear arsenal protects allies including Australia, Japan and South Korea, with whom America has treaty commitments. Not only does the U.S. nuclear deterrent shape the behavior of rogue nations such as North Korea toward these allies; the U.S. umbrella also removes the need for countries like Japan to seek nuclear weapons of their own.

Maintaining an effective U.S. nuclear deterrent will become even more important in Asia as China works hard to close the conventional military gap. This should be one of the top priorities of the Obama administration's 2010 Nuclear Posture Review and should guide any response to Tuesday's high-profile report. Deterrence is about holding at risk what potentially hostile governments value. So the U.S. and its allies also must make every effort to understand the leadership of adversaries or potential enemies—a challenge particularly with respect to secretive authoritarian regimes.

The nuclear deterrent is not the only element of America's commitment to the region, of course. Forward-deployed U.S. forces—in South Korea, Okinawa and Guam—also contribute to security in Asia. So do combined exercises and missile defense systems. But the role of nuclear weapons is unique.

A credible U.S. nuclear deterrent means having an operational force, with capabilities for real operations and an operational plan. Washington also must retain forward-based systems in places where its allies view their presence as vital to their security—even if U.S. defense planners believe central strategic systems can do the job. Washington needs to maintain at least parity in strategic forces with Russia and must never allow those levels to fall to a point where allies believe the Russian or Chinese short-range nuclear arsenals will affect U.S. decision-making in a crisis.

The sages who crafted Tuesday's report paid too little attention to all these realities in the name of a nuclear "peace in our time." In his Nobel Peace Prize speech, President Obama proclaimed—rightly—that the U.S. has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades. He acknowledged that global stability rested on more than international treaties and declarations. The critical contribution of U.S. nuclear deterrence was left unspoken.

Additional reductions in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals are possible and indeed desirable. But this disarmament game is dangerous. Potential enemies will be deterred, and allies assured, only if America is visibly confident in its nuclear posture. Asia's future stability and prosperity will depend far more on this than on airy dreams of disarmament.

Mr. Miller, a senior counselor at the Cohen Group, a Washington-based consultancy, worked at the Pentagon and National Security Council from 1979 to 2005. Mr. Shearer is director of studies and a senior research fellow at Australia's Lowy Institute for International Policy.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Oct-20, by Jon Kyl:

Why We Need to Test Nuclear Weapons
The credibility of our nuclear deterrent depends on the reliability of the arsenal.

President Barack Obama made history last month when he presided over the nuclear nonproliferation summit at the United Nations Security Council. Since nuclear proliferation is among the most pressing threats facing the world, one would have thought that the president would use the Sept. 24 summit to condemn the newly discovered uranium enrichment facility in Qom, Iran.

He did not. Instead he asked the Security Council to pass a nonbinding resolution stressing the urgency of global disarmament and arms-control treaties among the five permanent Security Council members. The resolution never mentioned Iran or North Korea.

Mr. Obama also said, on behalf of the U.S., that "We will move forward with the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty" (CTBT). This is a profound mistake, as a ban on testing nuclear weapons would jeopardize American national security. Ten years ago this month the U.S. Senate rejected the treaty, and the reasons for doing so are even stronger today.

The CTBT then, as now, does not define what it purports to ban, which is nuclear-weapons testing. This ambiguity leaves countries free to interpret the treaty (and act) as they see fit. Thus, if the U.S. ratified the treaty, it would be held to a different standard than other nations.

Another concern in 1999 was that clandestine nuclear tests could not be verified. That, too, is still the case. While the treaty has not entered into force, the world still uses the treaty's monitoring system (the CTBT Organizations International Monitoring System) to detect nuclear-weapons tests. But even when Pyongyang declared that it would conduct a nuclear-weapons test and announced where and when it would occur, this monitoring system failed to collect necessary radioactive gases and particulates to prove that a test had occurred.

The CTBT relies on 30 of 51 nations on its executive council—most of whom are not friendly to the U.S.—to agree that an illegal test has been conducted, and then to agree to inspect the facilities of the offending country (which can still be declared off-limits by that country). This enforcement mechanism is obviously unworkable.

But there's another defect in the CTBT. There were concerns a decade ago that the U.S. might be unable to safely and reliably maintain its own nuclear deterrent—and the nuclear umbrella that protects our allies such as Japan, Australia and South Korea —if it forever surrendered the right to test its weapons. Those concerns over aging and reliability have only grown. Last year, Paul Robinson, chairman emeritus of Sandia National Laboratory, testified before Congress that the reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons still cannot be guaranteed without testing them, despite more than a decade of investments in technological advancements.

Treaty proponents, nevertheless, believe the prospective benefit of ratification outweigh its risks and problems. And what, exactly, is the benefit of ratification?

Mr. Obama has said that if the U.S. ratifies the test ban treaty the world would finally get serious about the problem of proliferation, in other words, the nuclear-weapons programs of Iran and North Korea. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it at the Sept. 24 nuclear nonproliferation summit at the U.N., "CTBT ratification would also encourage the international community to move forward with other essential nonproliferation steps."

There is some evidence to test that claim. Iran and North Korea are already in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires that they do not develop nuclear weapons. Yet for years the world has been unable to agree that these nations' NPT obligations must be enforced. If the world can't or won't enforce the NPT there is no reason to believe it would be any more effective in enforcing the CTBT.

Our allies have the same incentive to prevent Iran from going nuclear today as they would if the U.S. ratified the CTBT. There is nothing in the test ban treaty that enhances their incentive to stop Iran.

There's a related theory, which is that the U.S. has to ratify the CTBT if it wants to have any credibility or leadership on nonproliferation. Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller spoke for many in the arms-control community when she said at a nonproliferation conference in Virginia in August, "There is no step that we could take that would more effectively restore our moral leadership."

Aside from the fact that countries will act in their best interest whether or not the U.S. "leads" them, no one can legitimately question U.S. commitment on proliferation issues. No nation has worked harder than the U.S. to pressure North Korea and Iran, and there is no evidence that Russia and China would suddenly help us if we ratified the test-ban treaty.

Moreover, unlike other nations, the U.S. has not conducted a nuclear-weapons test since 1992; it has not designed a new warhead since the 1980s or built one since the 1990s. It has reduced its nuclear-weapons stockpile by 75% since the end of the Cold War and 90% since the height of the Cold War. Meanwhile, the U.S. has spent more than $7 billion on the Nunn-Lugar program, which deals with the "loose nukes" threat, and it will spend more than $2 billion on nonproliferation measures such as securing loose nuclear material this year alone. There is again no evidence one more symbolic gesture is going to change anything.

The immediate challenge we face is the threat posed by nuclear proliferation in the hands of rogue regimes. That, and not a flawed, irrelevant test ban treaty, is what the administration should focus on.

Mr. Kyl, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Arizona.

from the New York Times, 2009-Aug-22, printed 2009-Aug-23, p.WK1, by Peter Baker:

Could Afghanistan Become Obama's Vietnam?

WASHINGTON — President Obama had not even taken office before supporters were etching his likeness onto Mount Rushmore as another Abraham Lincoln or the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Yet what if they got the wrong predecessor? What if Mr. Obama is fated to be another Lyndon B. Johnson instead?

To be sure, such historical analogies are overly simplistic and fatally flawed, if only because each presidency is distinct in its own way. But the L.B.J. model — a president who aspired to reshape America at home while fighting a losing war abroad — is one that haunts Mr. Obama's White House as it seeks to salvage Afghanistan while enacting an expansive domestic program.

In this summer of discontent for Mr. Obama, as the heady early days give way to the grinding battle for elusive goals, he looks ahead to an uncertain future not only for his legislative agenda but for what has indisputably become his war. Last week's elections in Afghanistan played out at the same time as the debate over health care heated up in Washington, producing one of those split-screen moments that could not help but remind some of Mr. Johnson's struggles to build a Great Society while fighting in Vietnam.

“The analogy of Lyndon Johnson suggests itself very profoundly,” said David M. Kennedy, the Stanford University historian. Mr. Obama, he said, must avoid letting Afghanistan shadow his presidency as Vietnam did Mr. Johnson's. “He needs to worry about the outcome of that intervention and policy and how it could spill over into everything else he wants to accomplish.”

By several accounts, that risk weighs on Mr. Obama these days. Mr. Kennedy was among a group of historians who had dinner with Mr. Obama at the White House earlier this summer where the president expressed concern that Afghanistan could yet hijack his presidency. Although Mr. Kennedy said he could not discuss the off-the-record conversation, others in the room said Mr. Obama acknowledged the L.B.J. risk.

“He said he has a problem,” said one person who attended that dinner at the end of June, insisting on anonymity to share private discussions. “This is not just something he can turn his back on and walk away from. But it's an issue he understands could be a danger to his administration.”

Another person there was Robert Caro, the L.B.J. biographer who was struck that Mr. Johnson made some of his most fateful decisions about Vietnam in the same dining room. “All I could think of when I was sitting there and this subject came up was the setting,” he said. “You had such an awareness of how things can go wrong.”

Without quoting what the president said, Mr. Caro said it was clear Mr. Obama understood that precedent. “Any president with a grasp of history — and it seems to me President Obama has a deep understanding of history — would have to be very aware of what happened in another war to derail a great domestic agenda,” he said.

Afghanistan, of course, is not exactly Vietnam. At its peak, the United States had about 500,000 troops in Vietnam, compared with about 68,000 now set for Afghanistan, and most of those fighting in the 1960s were draftees as opposed to volunteer soldiers. Vietnam, therefore, reached deeper into American society, touching more homes and involving more unwilling participants. But the politics of the two seem to evoke comparisons.

Just as Mr. Johnson believed he had no choice but to fight in Vietnam to contain communism, Mr. Obama last week portrayed Afghanistan as the bulwark against international terrorism. “This is not a war of choice,” he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars at their convention in Phoenix. “This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.”

But while many Americans once shared that view, polls suggest that conviction is fading nearly eight years into the war. The share of Americans who said the war in Afghanistan was worth fighting slipped below 50 percent in a survey released last week by The Washington Post and ABC News. A July poll by the New York Times and CBS News showed that 57 percent of Americans think things are going badly for the United States in Afghanistan, compared with 33 percent who think they are going well.

That growing disenchantment in the countryside is increasingly mirrored in Washington, where liberals in Congress are speaking out more vocally against the Afghan war and newspapers are filled with more columns questioning America's involvement. The cover of the latest Economist is headlined “Afghanistan: The Growing Threat of Failure.”

Richard N. Haass, a former Bush administration official turned critic, wrote in The New York Times last week that what he once considered a war of necessity has become a war of choice. While he still supports it, he argued that there are now alternatives to a large-scale troop presence, like drone attacks on suspected terrorists, more development aid and expanded training of Afghan police and soldiers.

His former boss, George W. Bush, learned first-hand how political capital can slip away when an overseas war loses popular backing. With Iraq in flames, Mr. Bush found little support for his second-term domestic agenda of overhauling Social Security and liberalizing immigration laws. L.B.J. managed to create Medicare and enact landmark civil rights legislation but some historians have argued that the Great Society ultimately stalled because of Vietnam.

Mr. Obama has launched a new strategy intended to turn Afghanistan around, sending an additional 21,000 troops, installing a new commander, promising more civilian reconstruction help, shifting to more protection of the population and building up Afghan security forces. It is a strategy that some who study Afghanistan believe could make a difference.

But even some who agree worry that time is running out at home, particularly if the strategy does not produce results quickly. Success is so hard to imagine that Richard Holbrooke, Mr. Obama's special representative for Afghanistan, this month came up with this definition: “We'll know it when we see it.”

The consequences of failure go beyond just Afghanistan. Next door is its volatile neighbor Pakistan, armed with nuclear weapons and already seething with radical anti-American elements.

“It could all go belly up and we could run out of public support,” said Ronald E. Neumann, a former ambassador to Afghanistan and now president of the American Academy of Diplomacy. “The immediate danger is we don't explain to Americans how long things take. I certainly get questions like, `Is the new strategy turning things around? Is the civilian surge working?' We're not going to even get all of those people on the ground for months.”

Others are not so sure that the new strategy will make a difference regardless of how much time it is given. No matter who is eventually declared the winner of last week's election in Afghanistan, the government there remains so plagued by corruption and inefficiency that it has limited legitimacy with the Afghan public. Just as America was frustrated with successive South Vietnamese governments, it has grown sour on Afghanistan's leaders with little obvious recourse.

Lt. Col. Douglas A. Ollivant, a retired Army officer who worked on Iraq on the National Security Council staff first for Mr. Bush and then for Mr. Obama, said Afghanistan may be “several orders of magnitude” harder. It has none of the infrastructure, education and natural resources of Iraq, he noted, nor is the political leadership as aligned in its goals with those of America's leadership.

“We're in a place where we don't have good options and that's what everyone is struggling with,” Colonel Ollivant said. “Sticking it out seems to be a 10-year project and I'm not sure we have the political capital and financial capital to do that. Yet withdrawing, the cost of that seems awfully high as well. So we have the wolf by the ear.”

And as L.B.J. discovered, the wolf has sharp teeth.

from the Wall Street Journal Asia, 2009-Sep-21, by Mary Kissel:

Is the U.S. Losing the Pacific?
The trend isn't America's friend.

Honolulu

From the tranquil vantage point of Pacific Command's headquarters here at Camp H.M. Smith, overlooking Pearl Harbor, it's hard to recall the postcards from China that have jolted this command's peace of mind. Yet they are there: in 2004, when a Chinese Han-class nuclear submarine was spotted cruising near Japan's Miyako island; in 2006, when a Chinese Song-class submarine, armed with torpedoes and antiship cruise missiles, surfaced less than five miles from the USS Kitty Hawk carrier battle group off Okinawa; and in March, when a coterie of Chinese ships harassed the USNS Impeccable, an unarmed U.S. Navy surveillance ship operating in international waters off Hainan Island.

All sides counseled calm in these incidents, and none more so than the admiral in charge of Pacific Command, the U.S. military's biggest combatant command. The current chief, Timothy J. Keating, travels the region, as his predecessors before him, preaching the virtues of engagement. "It's not like we're going to go charging around the Pacific with our chin thrust out," he tells me. "Quite the contrary: We want to ease around the Pacific." China is not a "threat." Yet the tone of his public message is so resoundingly and consistently upbeat that it's starting to bring into question the Command's credibility and worry America's allies about the Navy's muscularity in the face of a rising China. Call it the Pacific Command conundrum: How to talk frankly about threats and reassure U.S. allies while not goading Beijing needlessly?

That's not to say the U.S. military will lose its preeminence in Asia-Pacific anytime soon. PaCom, as it's known, has an area of responsibility stretching from India to the west coast of California—over half the world's physical space—and boasts approximately 325,000 personnel from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. The Pacific Fleet alone has "five aircraft carrier strike groups, approximately 180 ships, 1,500 aircraft and 100,000 personnel" according to official figures. China's navy has, according to the Pentagon's latest estimate, "over 60 submarines, 55 medium and large amphibious ships, and approximately 70 missile-equipped patrol craft." As since World War II, the U.S. military is what keeps the peace in the Pacific and allows this region to prosper.

Yet the trend is not in America's favor. The Obama administration has curbed the Navy's expansion plans and sent signals that it doesn't believe in expanding missile defense. Beijing has meanwhile poured money into access denial capabilities, including antiship ballistic missiles, cyberwarfare and antisatellite weapons. The American Enterprise Institute's Dan Blumenthal estimates that China has added around three submarines to its fleet every year since 1995. The U.S. submarine fleet, by contrast, is shrinking. It's the same story for fighter jets: China is ramping up its fifth-generation technology, while the U.S. has capped the production of stealth F-22 fighters. The Iraq and Afghanistan engagements are also sapping personnel normally assigned to PaCom.

Little wonder that in its defense white paper projecting out to 2030, Australia predicted "the rise of China, the emergence of India and the beginning of the end of the so-called unipolar moment; the almost two-decade-long period in which the pre-eminence of our principal ally, the United States, was without question." Andrew Shearer, national security advisor to former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, says no one in Asia wants a "fractious" U.S.-China relationship, but equally, "nor do U.S. allies want the U.S. to be a pushover." "When someone is kicking sand in your face and you continue to lie back on your beach towel, that's a risk," he quips.

Admiral Keating dismisses these worries as not "an accurate or valid prediction." He deftly punts the question of budget cuts: "There are decisions being made in the Department that could have longer-term implications for us in the Pacific community." When asked what he would do if he had more resources, he gives the stock answer: "more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance." As regards China, Adm. Keating wants to engage, engage, engage: "We would like to work more closely with their military. We would like to understand their strategy better than we do. We want to get a much better grasp for their intentions: short-, mid- and long range," he says.

Yet it's unclear what this stance has accomplished. Only a few months after taking his job, in May 2007, Adm. Keating held a news conference in Beijing and said if China chose to develop an aircraft carrier program, the U.S. would "help them to the degree that they seek and the degree that we're capable, in developing their programs." That offer was quickly shelved back in Washington. Earlier this month, he suggested the U.S., Australia and China should hold a joint exercise together—which also came as a surprise to many back in Washington. China still hasn't responded to the offer. Meanwhile the Chinese are aggressively defending their ever-more muscular naval stance: "The way to resolve China-U.S. maritime incidents is for the U.S. to change its surveillance and survey operations policies against China, decrease and eventually stop such operations," China's Defense Ministry declared last month. No nuanced talk of "engagement" there.

Admiral Keating himself has a hard time citing what has changed for the better vis-à-vis China in his two-and-a-half years at the PaCom helm, besides the resumption of military-to-military talks (which the Chinese unilaterally suspended in October 2008) and the fact that since 2007, "we haven't had a ship visit denied." The transparency of China's military intentions is "less than completely fulfilling." U.S. military exchanges with the Chinese are "very limited." The missiles Beijing has pointed at Taiwan are "not insignificant in terms of quantity." In sum, "there is no question that we are going to have to deal with a Chinese military that is increasing in quantity and in some areas, quality, over the Chinese military of 20 years ago," the admiral admits.

That's the kind of frankness that U.S. allies want to hear, and that the Obama administration and Congressional defense appropriators need to hear. Admiral Keating will hand over the PaCom reins next month to the current commander of the Pacific Fleet, Adm. Robert Willard. Before he takes the job, Adm. Willard may want to review those Chinese military postcards and figure out just how much room the U.S. wants to give China in the Pacific in the years to come.

Ms. Kissel is editor of The Wall Street Journal Asia's editorial page.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Jul-18, by John Lehman:

Wasteful Defense Spending Is a Clear and Present Danger
We could afford a stronger military if we implemented some contracting reforms.

When John McCain was shot down over Hanoi in 1967, he was flying an A4 Skyhawk. That jet cost $860,000.

Inflation has risen by 700% since then. So Mr. McCain's A4 cost $6.1 million in 2008 dollars. Applying a generous factor of three for technological improvements, the price for a 2008 Navy F18 fighter should be about $18 million. Instead, we are paying about $90 million for each new fighter. As a result, the Navy cannot buy sufficient numbers. This is disarmament without a treaty.

The situation is worse in the Air Force. In 1983, I was in the Pentagon meeting that launched the F-22 Raptor. The plan was to buy 648 jets beginning in 1996 for $60 million each (in 1983 dollars). Now they cost $350 million apiece and the Obama budget caps the program at 187 jets. At least they are safe from cyberattack since no one in China knows how to program the '83 vintage IBM software that runs them.

There are other problems. Navy shipbuilding fiascoes like the staggering overruns on new surface combatants, the near total failure of the Army's Future Combat System that was meant to re-equip the entire army, the 400% cost overrun of the new Air Force weather satellite -- to name but a few -- all prove that we are currently unable to design, develop and deliver major weapons systems in anything approaching a cost-effective and timely manner. The Government Accountability Office recently reported that the cost overruns for the top 75% procurement programs were over $295 billion. We are rapidly disarming ourselves, even as defense spending grows.

On May 22, President Obama signed the Weapons System Acquisition Reform Act. Despite the grandiloquent name, it is in fact just an addition of 20,000 more bureaucrats who will only make matters worse.

Why is this happening? Where did things go wrong?

First, let's look at the customer.

Within the Pentagon, there has been an obliteration of clear lines of authority for managing procurement programs. What there has been is a steady growth in the size and layers of civilian offices, agencies and military staffs, resulting in severe bureaucratic bloat. In the private sector, a specific person is always responsible for the success or failure of a program. When it comes to the Pentagon, no one person is held accountable for good performance or punished for failure.

As a direct result of this lack of accountability, there has been a loss of discipline and control over equipment requirements and a surge in gold-plating in all Pentagon programs. New requirements and design changes -- originating in more than 30 different bureaus in the Pentagon -- are constantly being added, wreaking havoc with costs. On the Navy's new small warship building program (the LCS), for instance, change-orders have at times averaged 75 per week. Because of these constant changes, cost-plus-contracts have become the norm far into production, instead of fixed-price contracting when development is complete.

In addition, the Pentagon has surrendered control of many programs to large contractors. During the 1980s, the Pentagon employed thousands of experienced project managers and engineering professionals. Today most of this talent has gone to work for the contractors, and their duties have been contracted out to those same contractors. It's a classic case of the fox running the chicken coop. To make matters worse, the bureaucracies did not shrink because of this exodus, but actually grew as experienced engineering professionals were replaced by administrators and bookkeepers.

Next, let's look at the suppliers.

After the Cold War, there was a 70% reduction in procurement funding. The Pentagon encouraged consolidation and actually paid contractors to merge. That process went much too far, with some 50 prime contractors merging into only six -- far too few to support a competitive base for our current and future requirements. Because of lack of competition early in programs, there has been a serious decline in technological and engineering innovation. And costs have gone up steadily in mature production programs because of the absence of competition.

There is also the revolving door problem. While a number of experienced Pentagon procurement officials working for defense contractors and vice-versa is healthy, the current lack of any meaningful controls on this revolving door is creating an unhealthy tolerance of conflict of interest. All too frequently, procurement offices have become de facto out-placement offices for retiring officers seeking employment in the defense industry.

What must be done to reform the current mess?

First, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates must establish a culture that restores hierarchical decision-making authority and personal accountability to procurement. The backbone of such management should be the military departments, which have cultures of accountability. Each military department already has a service secretary and service chief who have the essential levers of control. Title 10 of the U.S. Code gives them power over assignments, promotions, retirements and expenditures. And it is they who should be held accountable. The staff of the secretary of defense should perform only those interservice functions that are essential to integrate and reconcile cross-service issues.

Second, the culture of unbridled design and engineering changes that has become entrenched in the Pentagon must be ended. Service secretaries alone should have the power to be the gatekeepers.

Third, the policy of ceding control to contractors should be abandoned and control should be taken back by the military services. That will require rebuilding cadres of procurement engineers, technologists and managers in the civilian and military ranks through special incentives, training programs and lateral recruiting from the private sector. No one should be assigned to any procurement executive job for less than a four-year tour.

Fourth, it should be general policy to maintain two or more providers competing throughout production. Programs such as aircraft carriers, where numbers may be insufficient to support annual competition, should be treated as exceptions, not the rule.

Fifth, there should be at least a 20% overall reduction in civilian and military staff bureaucracies. This can be done through normal attrition and early retirements, as has successfully been done in the past.

Sixth, for the more senior procurement positions, including the chief executives of the Defense agencies, there should be a major initiative to recruit outstanding leaders with proven records of accomplishment in private and public service. Like career procurement officials, they must commit to a minimum of four years in the job. So far the Obama/Gates picks are very promising.

It is wishful thinking, of course, to believe these changes can be accomplished rapidly or easily. But a new administration can provide a new vision and new discipline. To use an analogy from the old sailing Navy, we are being driven rapidly toward a lee shore set with the jagged rocks of nuclear terrorism and hostile powers. If we don't reverse course, we face future catastrophe.

Mr. Lehman was secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and a member of the 9-11 Commission.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-May-8:

A Pacific Warning
Australia prepares for U.S. decline.

Since World War II, U.S. military dominance has underpinned the Asia-Pacific region's prosperity and relative peace. So it's cause for concern when one of America's closest allies sees that power ebbing amid unstable nuclear regimes such as Pakistan and North Korea and the expanding military power of China.

In the preface to a sweeping defense review released Saturday, Australian Defense Minister Joel Fitzgibbon writes: "The biggest changes to our outlook . . . have been the rise of China, the emergence of India and the beginning of the end of the so-called unipolar moment; the almost two-decade-long period in which the pre-eminence of our principal ally, the United States, was without question."

Australia isn't forecasting the end of U.S. dominance soon; the report predicts that will continue through 2030. There are also a few bright spots, such as a stronger India and the emergence of Indonesia as a stable democratic ally.

But without sustained U.S. defense spending and focus on the Asia-Pacific, it's unclear which nation will ultimately dominate the region -- and that could have profound effects on security and trade. The clearest challenge comes from China, which the Pentagon estimates spent $105 billion to $150 billion in 2008 bulking up its forces. Australia also worries about instability among its Pacific island neighbors, terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and emerging threats like cyber war.

In response to this outlook, Canberra is retooling its defense. It is doubling the size of its submarine fleet to 12 from six and buying about 100 Joint Strike Fighters, three destroyers and eight frigates. The ships and subs will be equipped with cruise missiles. It will also upgrade its army and special forces units and look for new ways to cooperate with the U.S. and other regional democratic powers.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Saturday: "Some have argued that in the global economic recession we should reduce defense spending to ease the pressure on the budget. But the government believes the opposite to be true. In a period of global instability Australia must invest in a strong, capable and well resourced defense force."

Australia currently spends around $13.1 billion a year on defense, not counting money for new equipment. The new policy paper says spending will increase by 3% annually until 2018, which isn't much. But the importance of Canberra's message is about priorities. Australia is worried about the end of the "unipolar moment." Americans and Asians should be worried too.

from the Times of London, 2009-May-21, by Tony Halpin:

World Agenda: Russia won't abandon its radioactive 'special relationship'

American and Russian negotiators are busy hammering out a new agreement to reduce their nuclear arsenals before President Obama travels to Moscow for a summit with President Medvedev in July.

Mr Obama has set a long-term goal of establishing a world free of nuclear weapons, an ambition endorsed by his Russian counterpart when the two men met in London in April. But Russia will never give up the bomb. Its nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles are all that remains of its claim to be a global superpower on a par with the United States.

The Soviet Union was so decrepit economically that it was frequently described as “Upper Volta with rockets”. Russia's economy is still recovering from the Soviet collapse and its heavy dependence on exports of energy and raw materials has been exposed by the global financial crisis.

Why, then, would the Kremlin surrender the one thing that gets America's attention? Without the nuclear stockpile Mr Medvedev leads a country with a population smaller than Pakistan's and a GDP similar in size to Spain's.

The Bomb gets Russia disproportionate privileges in Washington, a radioactive “special relationship” that, like Britain's, allows it to punch above its weight in international affairs. Give it all away in some grand bargain and future American Presidents will have little incentive short of politeness to travel to Moscow for pale imitations of the sort of summitry that characterised the Cold War years.

Russia's status as a nuclear rival to the US also gives it special clout with anti-American regimes. Without the nuclear submarines, warships and long-range bombers, the symbolism of Russian visits would lose their irritant value for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and the Castro brothers in Cuba.

Even if Kremlin leaders did not enjoy a nostalgic wallow in their superpower past (and they do), Russia has strong security interests in maintaining its nuclear deterrent. It borders China and is within range of Pakistan and India, all nuclear powers that have shown little interest in surrendering their status.

Russia has a historical fear of being overwhelmed from the East, a legacy of the invading Mongol hordes, coupled with a modern demographic crisis that could see its population shrink by a third to 100 million by the middle of this century. The difficulty of hanging on to its vast territory in an era of depopulation is a live concern for Russian leaders.

Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, has already suggested darkly that the US and other countries are eager to get their hands on Russia's vast oil and gas reserves. In the Kremlin's mind the nuclear trigger keeps them at bay and holds the country together.

So for all of Mr Obama's fine rhetoric, it will never be in Russia's interests to implement his vision of a nuclear-free world. The Kremlin enjoys the bargaining process too much to give up the chance to share the limelight with its former superpower adversary.

The best Mr Obama can hope to achieve is a reduction to the minimum level compatible with Russia's sense of security and international prestige. And that will still be more than enough to blow up the world.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-May-19, p.A17, by Marc A. Thiessen:

The Arms-Control Dinosaurs Are Back
Why invite Russia to veto the nuclear progress we've been making on our own?

When John Bolton served in the State Department during the Bush administration, he often walked the halls of Foggy Bottom wearing his trademark dinosaur ties -- a self-deprecating nod to those who thought his political views somewhat Jurassic. Today other dinosaurs have replaced him. The aging arms controllers who once haggled with Soviet officials are staging a comeback in the Obama administration.

This week in Moscow they'll pick up where they left off nearly two decades ago, sitting across the table from their Russian counterparts negotiating a renewal of the 1991 U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start). One of the U.S. negotiators, Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, refers to herself as a "Sputnik baby." She told the Washington Post after initial talks in New York earlier this month: "We've all been looking around and chuckling and saying 'We're all over 50.'"

President Barack Obama's goal of "a world without nuclear weapons" notwithstanding, the State Department is reportedly scrambling to staff its arms-control bureau because so many arms-control experts have retired and there's no one coming up in the ranks to replace them. Apparently not many young policy wonks are aware that cutting nuclear deals with Moscow is again the fast track to a high-flying diplomatic career.

The Obama revival of arms control comes at an odd moment. The past eight years have seen the fewest arms-control negotiations in a generation and some of the deepest nuclear weapons reductions in history. Thanks to the work of the Bush administration, the U.S. nuclear stockpile is now one-quarter the size it was at the end of the Cold War -- the lowest level since the Eisenhower administration. When George W. Bush took office, the U.S. had more than 6,000 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads. Today, that number has been reduced to less than 2,200. The U.S. had originally planned to reach this milestone on Dec. 31, 2012, but instead met its goal this February.

How did the U.S. achieve such dramatic reductions so quickly? Answer: By abandoning traditional arms control. When Mr. Bush took office, he decided not to engage in lengthy, adversarial negotiations with Russia in which both sides kept thousands of weapons they did not need as bargaining chips. He did not establish standing negotiating teams in Geneva with armies of arms-control experts doing battle over every colon and comma. If he had done so, the two sides would probably still be negotiating today.

Instead, Mr. Bush simply announced his intention to reduce the U.S.'s operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads by some two-thirds and invited Russia to do the same. President Vladimir Putin accepted his offer. These unilateral reductions were then codified in the 2002 Moscow Treaty, a three-page pact that took just six months to negotiate. By contrast, the Start treaty signed by President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev -- and now being revived by the Obama team -- is 700-pages long and took nine years to negotiate.

Even as he enacted massive reductions in nuclear weapons, George W. Bush took other actions to reduce nuclear dangers. His administration launched the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which secured more than 600 vulnerable nuclear sites around the world and helped convert 57 nuclear reactors in 32 countries from highly-enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium, removing enough weapons-grade material from countries around the world for more than 40 nuclear bombs.

With G-8 leaders, Mr. Bush launched the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction -- a $20 billion international effort to secure and dispose of nuclear and fissile materials and help former weapons scientists find new lines of work. The U.S. and Russia launched the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, a coalition of 75 nations that is working to stop the illicit spread of nuclear materials. The U.S. and Russia also launched the Bratislava Initiative, which has secured nearly 150 Russian sites containing nuclear warheads and hundreds of metric tons of weapons-quality material.

Despite this record of achievement, the arms controllers see the Bush era as a dark age from which they must rescue the world. They are intent on reviving the antiquated and adversarial approach to arms reductions. As serious negotiations begin, Russia will use these negotiations on arms reductions as leverage to get the U.S. to give up its planned deployment of ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. Unlike Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik, it is not clear that Mr. Obama would walk away from a deal to preserve these vital defenses.

In addition to a new Start treaty, the Obama administration also reportedly plans to press the Senate to approve the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), a fatally flawed agreement that was rejected by the Senate in 1999 because it would undermine reliability of our nuclear stockpile. Instead of pressing the Senate to act on the CTBT, the administration should be calling on Congress to restore the funding it eliminated last year for the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, which would allow us to develop new warheads without the need for nuclear testing and thus ensure the reliability of America's nuclear deterrent.

Mr. Obama will visit Moscow in July where he and President Dmitry Medvedev will discuss progress on their stated goal to "move beyond Cold War mentalities and chart a fresh start in relations." Bringing back Cold War-era arms-control negotiations is a strange way to do so. In the 21st century, arms-control agreements are as antiquated as cave drawings. We no longer need pieces of parchment and armies of arms-control aficionados to achieve deep reductions in nuclear weapons. This fact is lost on the Sputnik babies now inhabiting the State Department.

Mr. Thiessen served as chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In 2002, he traveled to Russia with Mr. Rumsfeld for the negotiations of the Moscow Treaty.

from the Times of London, 2009-Apr-21, by Tim Reid:

Torture memo has put US in danger, CIA tells Barack Obama

Washington -- As the row intensified over the release of top-secret torture memos, President Obama visited the CIA headquarters yesterday to try to placate officials and rescue his reputation in the intelligence community.

Mr Obama's first visit to the CIA came as his decision to release the memos detailing interrogation sessions of terror suspects continued to attract criticism, including claims from inside the ranks of the CIA that the move had compromised its ability to extract vital intelligence from America's enemies.

The meetings between President Obama and the agency's leadership and staff in Langley, Virginia, were overshadowed by the information, contained in the Bush-era memos, that the CIA had used waterboarding techniques on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, 183 times in March 2003.

It suggested that the use of the technique, which simulates drowning, was more extensive than previously admitted.

Another terror suspect, Abu Zubaydah, was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002. A former CIA officer claimed in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah was subjected to the technique — which Mr Obama has outlawed — for 35 seconds.

In the memos, legal officials of the Bush Administration argued that harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, slapping and sleep deprivation did not amount to torture. Mr Obama made clear during his visit that he had no intention of seeking the prosecution of any CIA employees involved in waterboarding or of any Bush Administration officials who authorised and justified the policy.

The President faced a growing chorus of critics over the release of the memos and claims that such interrogation methods worked because they extracted information from terrorism suspects that disrupted plots and saved American lives.

Michael Hayden, who led the CIA under President Bush after waterboarding was halted, insisted that the release of the memos would make it harder to get useful information from suspected terrorists.

“I think that teaching our enemies our outer limits, by taking techniques off the table, we have made it more difficult in a whole host of circumstances ... for CIA officers to defend the nation,” he said.

Three other former CIA directors, and Leon Panetta, the head of CIA, opposed the release of the memos.

Mr Hayden denied claims in the US press that the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah had produced no useful information. “The critical information we got from Abu Zubaydah came after we began the ... enhanced interrogation techniques,” he said. “The facts of the case are that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer - it really did work.”

Mr Hayden said that the publication of the memos had damaged the morale of former CIA colleagues. “Officers are saying, 'Will this happen to me in five years because of the things I'm doing now?'. The basic foundation of the legitimacy of the agency's action has shifted from some durability of law to a product of the American political process.

"That puts the agency in a horrible position. There will be more revelations. There will be more commissions. There will be more investigations. And this to an agency ... that is at war and is on the front lines of defending America.”

“The really dangerous effect of this is that you will have the agency officers stepping back from the kinds of things that the nation expects them to do. You're going to have this agency on the front line of defending you in this current war playing back from the line,” Mr Hayden said.

Charles Grassley, a Republican senator, said: “You don't tell your enemy what you know or what you're going to do. This allows our enemies to be properly informed and properly prepared to be prisoners of the US.”

Mr Obama argued that such harsh techniques sullied the reputation of the US abroad and served as a recruiting tool for terrorists. He said that the release of the memos was to show transparency and to draw a line under a dark chapter in US history.

David Axelrod, the senior adviser to Mr Obama, said: “We are absolutely confident that we have the tools necessary to get the information we need to keep this country safe.”

Mr Obama has also faced Republican attacks for talking to Hugo Chávez, the anti-American Venezuelan President, at the Summit of the Americas, and for apologising for the US role in the global financial crisis during his European tour this month. They claim that Mr Obama is displaying naivety and weakness.

There have been many comments on the warm greeting that Mr Obama exchanged with Mr Chávez, who once called President Bush the devil and who called Mr Obama an ignoramus last month. John Ensign, a Republican Senator, said that it was irresponsible for Mr Obama to be seen “laughing and joking” with Mr Chávez.

Mr Obama said: “It's unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr Chávez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States.”

from the Associated Press, 2009-Apr-21, by Ben Feller, with writers Devlin Barrett and Larry Margasak contributing:

Obama open to torture memos probe, prosecution

WASHINGTON — Widening an explosive debate on torture, President Barack Obama on Tuesday opened the possibility of prosecution for Bush-era lawyers who authorized brutal interrogation of terror suspects and suggested Congress might order a full investigation.

Less than a week after declaring it was time for the nation to move on rather than "laying blame for the past," Obama found himself describing what might be done next to investigate what he called the loss of "our moral bearings."

His comments all but ensured that the vexing issue of detainee interrogation during the Bush administration will live on well into the new president's term. Obama, who severely criticized the harsh techniques during the campaign, is feeling pressure from his party's liberal wing to come down hard on the subject. At the same time, Republicans including former Vice President Dick Cheney are insisting the methods helped protect the nation and are assailing Obama for revealing Justice Department memos detailing them.

Answering a reporter's question Tuesday, Obama said it would be up to his attorney general to determine whether "those who formulated those legal decisions" behind the interrogation methods should be prosecuted. The methods, described in Bush-era memos Obama released last Thursday, included such grim and demeaning tactics as slamming detainees against walls and subjecting them to simulated drowning.

He said anew that CIA operatives who did the interrogating should not be charged with crimes because they thought they were following the law.

"I think there are a host of very complicated issues involved here," the president said. "As a general deal, I think that we should be looking forward and not backwards. I do worry about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively, and it hampers our ability to carry out national security operations."

Still, he suggested that Congress might set up a bipartisan review, outside its typical hearings, if it wants a "further accounting" of what happened during the period when the interrogation methods were authorized. His press secretary later said the independent Sept. 11 commission, which investigated and then reported on the terror attacks of 2001, might be a model.

The harsher methods were authorized to gain information after the 2001 attacks.

The three men facing the most scrutiny are former Justice Department officials Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury. Bybee is currently a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Yoo is a professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

It might be argued that the officials were simply doing their jobs, providing legal advice for the Bush administration. However, John Strait, a law professor at Seattle University said, "I think there are a slew of potential charges."

Those could include conspiracy to commit felonies, including torture, he suggested.

Bybee also could face impeachment in Congress if lawmakers were so inclined.

A federal investigation into the memos is being conducted by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, which usually limits itself to examining the ethical behavior of employees but whose work in rare cases leads to criminal investigations.

The chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary committees said Tuesday they want to move ahead with previously proposed, independent commissions to examine George W. Bush's national security policies.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who has referred to his proposed panel as a "Truth Commission," said, "I agree with President Obama: An examination into these Bush-Cheney era national security policies must be nonpartisan. ... Unfortunately, Republicans have shown no interest in a nonpartisan review."

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has proposed separate hearings by his committee in addition to an independent commission.

Over the past weekend, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said in a television interview the administration did not support prosecutions for "those who devised policy." White House aides say he was referring to CIA superiors who ordered the interrogations, not the Justice Department officials who wrote the legal memos allowing them.

Yet it was unclear exactly whom Obama meant in opening the door to potential prosecutions of those who "formulated the legal decisions." Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked if the president meant the lawyers who declared the interrogation methods legal, or the policymakers who ordered, them or both.

"I don't know the answer to that," Gibbs said during a briefing in which he was peppered with questions about the president's words. Later, he added: "The parsing of some of this is better done through a filter of the rule of law and done at the Justice Department and not done here at the White House."

When pressed about any confusion stemming from his comments and Emanuel's, Gibbs said: "Take what the president said, as I'm informed he got more votes than either of the two of us."

A number of Republicans, including former Vice President Cheney and former top intelligence officials, say Obama has undermined national security with his release of the memos on the matter. On the other side, some Democratic lawmakers, human rights groups and liberal advocates want to see punishment for those involved in sanctioning brutal interrogations — the kind they say amount to torture and have damaged U.S. standing around the world.

"Certainly, this is an attempt not just to stake a ground between the left and the right, but also to navigate through something that he would prefer not be there as an ongoing issue," said Norman Ornstein, a scholar of U.S. politics at the American Enterprise Institute.

"He's walking the tightrope," Ornstein added. "You don't want to give a blanket, `Everything's OK, we're only moving forward.' And you don't want a president making a decision that it is a legal decision."

Obama said he was not proposing that another investigation be launched, but if it happens it should be done in a way that does not "provide one side or another political advantage but rather is being done in order to learn some lessons so that we move forward in an effective way."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Mar-17, by Bret Stephens:

Afghanistan and the Left

It was probably inevitable that the American left would turn sharply against the war in Afghanistan the moment it was politically opportune. Still, the speed with which it has done so has been breathtaking.

Time was when the received bipartisan and trans-Atlantic wisdom about Afghanistan was that it was the necessary war, the good war, the no-choice-but-to-fight and can't-afford-to-lose war, and that not least of everything that made the invasion and occupation of Iraq such arrant folly was that it distracted us from "finishing the job" in the place where the attacks of 9/11 were conceived and planned.

This was the wisdom candidate Barack Obama was merely regurgitating when, in an August 2007 speech, he promised that his priority as president would be "getting out of Iraq and on to the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan." True to his word, he has now ordered the deployment of 17,000 additional soldiers to that battlefield.

So why are the people who cheered Mr. Obama then (or offered no objection) now running for the exit signs? Why, for example, is New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, the paper's reliably liberal tribune, calling Afghanistan a "quagmire" -- after denouncing the Bush administration in 2006 for "taking its eye off the real enemy in Afghanistan"?

Call it another instance of that old logic, reductio ad Vietnam. That's the view that every U.S. military action lasting more than the flight time of a cruise missile is likely to descend into a bloody, stalemated, morally and politically intolerable Sartrean nightmare.

Tellingly, the phrase "another Vietnam" seems to have first appeared under the byline of New York Times reporter C.L. Sulzberger, who opined on August 31, 1969, that "chances are" that the only kind of war in which the U.S. could become involved in the future "is another Vietnam." Times change, but not at the Times.

Since then, "another Vietnam" has served as the left's ideological totem for military interventions in Lebanon, the Falklands (for Britain), Nicaragua and Central America generally, the first Iraq war, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan right after 9/11, the second Iraq war, and now Afghanistan again. Maybe Grenada and Panama, too.

Of course, none of these interventions was "another Vietnam." Some turned out well, some badly, some had mixed results and for some the verdict isn't yet in. Each was its own circumstance. At the height of the Vietnam War in 1968, the U.S. was losing soldiers at a rate of 1,300 a month. At the height of the Iraq war in 2007, losses averaged 75 a month. In Afghanistan, the U.S. is currently losing about 15 a month. A body count should never be the decisive metric of failure, but if this is what now constitutes "quagmire" then the U.S. may as well declare itself a neutral power, vote the Ron Paul/Dennis Kucinich ticket in 2012 and never fight another foreign war for any reason.

What are the circumstances that define Afghanistan today? Yes, the Taliban is "resurgent," but mainly in the sense that militarily it is marginally more effective now than four years ago. Yes, much of the countryside is unsafe, but the cities, for the most part, are not unsafe.

Corruption is rampant and President Hamid Karzai is feckless, but he is legitimate and Afghanistan has seen far worse. The system of electing representatives and appointing governors is dysfunctional, but at least there's a system. NATO was much too slow in training and equipping the Afghan army and police, but now they are being trained and equipped. The poppy trade is flourishing and provides the Taliban leadership with considerable income, but they are as unpopular as ever.

And so on. The real heart of our Afghan problem lies in our expectations of what this primitive and riven country is ever likely to become. The achievement of the past seven years lies mainly in what Afghanistan has not become: To wit, a safe haven for some of the worst people on earth.

That's no small thing, though selling Americans on what amounts to a negative achievement will not be easy. (Just ask George Bush about all the credit he gets for no new 9/11s.) Nor will it be easy for Mr. Obama to sell his rank and file on an Afghan surge after he did such a terrific job as a candidate of trashing the Iraq surge. Congratulations, Mr. President: You've got a war to sell.

Which brings us back to the left. Much will never go right in Afghanistan, but that doesn't mean things couldn't be a lot worse. For instance, Joe Biden can continue to trash Hamid Karzai, as Jack Kennedy trashed Ngo Dinh Diem. Or we could pursue a talk-and-fight approach to the Taliban, as Lyndon Johnson did with North Vietnam. Or the antiwar movement of the present could give encouragement to our enemies in the Middle East that they can bleed America into withdrawal, as a previous generation of peace activists encouraged Ho Chi Minh.

In that case, Afghanistan really will turn out to be another Vietnam and the prophesies of the left will be (self-) fulfilled. The sequel to this movie, by the way, is called "The Killing Fields."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Apr-7, by Thomas Donnelly and Gary Schmitt:

Obama and Gates Gut the Military
The secretary's new budget will leave us weaker to pay for the president's domestic programs.

On Monday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced a significant reordering of U.S. defense programs. His recommendations should not go unchallenged.

In the 1990s, defense cuts helped pay for increased domestic spending, and that is true today. Though Mr. Gates said that his decisions were "almost exclusively influenced by factors other than simply finding a way to balance the books," the broad list of program reductions and terminations suggest otherwise. In fact, he tacitly acknowledged as much by saying the budget plan represented "one of those rare chances to match virtue to necessity" -- the "necessity" of course being the administration's decision to reorder the government's spending priorities.

However, warfare is not a human activity that directly awards virtue. Nor is it a perfectly calculable endeavor that permits a delicate "balancing" of risk. More often it rewards those who arrive on the battlefield "the fustest with the mostest," as Civil War Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest once put it. If Mr. Gates has his way, U.S. forces will find it increasingly hard to meet the Forrest standard. Consider a few of the details of the Gates proposals:

- The termination of the F-22 Raptor program at just 187 aircraft inevitably will call U.S. air supremacy -- the salient feature, since World War II, of the American way of war -- into question.

The need for these sophisticated, stealthy, radar-evading planes is already apparent. During Russia's invasion of Georgia, U.S. commanders wanted to fly unmanned surveillance aircraft over the region, and requested that F-22s sanitize the skies so that the slow-moving drones would be protected from Russian fighters or air defenses. When the F-22s were not made available, likely for fear of provoking Moscow, the reconnaissance flights were cancelled.

As the air-defense and air-combat capabilities of other nations, most notably China, increase, the demand for F-22s would likewise rise. And the Air Force will have to manage this small fleet of Raptors over 30 years. Compare that number with the 660 F-15s flying today, but which are literally falling apart at the seams from age and use. The F-22 is not merely a replacement for the F-15; it also performs the functions of electronic warfare and other support aircraft. Meanwhile, Mr. Gates is further postponing the already decades-long search for a replacement for the existing handful of B-2 bombers.

- The U.S. Navy will continue to shrink below the fleet size of 313 ships it set only a few years ago. Although Mr. Gates has rightly decided to end the massive and expensive DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer program, there will be additional reductions to the surface fleet. The number of aircraft carriers will drop eventually to 10. The next generation of cruisers will be delayed, and support-ship projects stretched out. Older Arleigh Burke destroyers will be upgraded and modernized, but at less-than-needed rates.

The good news is that Mr. Gates will not to reduce the purchases of the Littoral Combat Ship, which can be configured for missions from antipiracy to antisubmarine warfare. But neither will he buy more than the 55 planned for by the previous Bush administration. And the size and structure of the submarine fleet was studiously not mentioned. The Navy's plan to begin at last to procure two attack submarines per year -- absolutely vital considering the pace at which China is deploying new, quieter subs -- is uncertain, at best.

- Mr. Gates has promised to "restructure" the Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, arguing that the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan have called into question the need for new ground combat vehicles. The secretary noted that the Army's modernization plan does not take into account the $25 billion investment in the giant Mine Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles. But it's hard to think of a more specialized and less versatile vehicle.

The MRAP was ideal for dealing with the proliferation of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in Iraq. But the FCS vehicle -- with a lightweight yet better-protected chassis, greater fuel efficiency and superior off-road capacity -- is far more flexible and useful for irregular warfare. Further, the ability to form battlefield "networks" will make FCS units more effective than the sum of their individual parts. Delaying modernization means that future generations of soldiers will conduct mounted operations in the M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles designed in the 1970s. Finally, Mr. Gates capped the size of the U.S. ground force, ignoring all evidence that it is too small to handle current and future major contingencies.

- The proposed cuts in space and missile defense programs reflect a retreat in emerging environments that are increasingly critical in modern warfare. The termination of the Airborne Laser and Transformational Satellite programs is especially discouraging.

The Airborne Laser is the most promising form of defense against ballistic missiles in the "boost phase," the moments immediately after launch when the missiles are most vulnerable. This project was also the military's first operational foray into directed energy, which will be as revolutionary in the future as "stealth" technology has been in recent decades. The Transformational Satellite program employs laser technology for communications purposes, providing not only enhanced bandwidth -- essential to fulfill the value of all kinds of information networks -- but increased security.

Mr. Gates justifies these cuts as a matter of "hard choices" and "budget discipline," saying that "[E]very defense dollar spent to over-insure against a remote or diminishing risk . . . is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in." But this calculus is true only because the Obama administration has chosen to cut defense, while increasing domestic entitlements and debt so dramatically.

The budget cuts Mr. Gates is recommending are not a temporary measure to get us over a fiscal bump in the road. Rather, they are the opening bid in what, if the Obama administration has its way, will be a future U.S. military that is smaller and packs less wallop. But what is true for the wars we're in -- that numbers matter -- is also true for the wars that we aren't yet in, or that we simply wish to deter.

Mr. Donnelly is a resident fellow and Mr. Schmitt is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. They are co-editors of "Of Men and Materiel: the Crisis in Military Resources" (AEI, 2007).

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Mar-2:

Declining Defense
Obama's budget does cut one federal department.

For all of his lavish new spending plans, President Obama is making one major exception: defense. His fiscal 2010 budget telegraphs that Pentagon spending is going to be under pressure in the years going forward.

The White House proposes to spend $533.7 billion on the Pentagon, a 4% increase over 2009. Include spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, which would be another $130 billion (or a total of $664 billion), and overall defense spending would be around 4.2% of GDP, the same as 2007.

However, that 4% funding increase for the Pentagon trails the 6.7% overall rise in the 2010 budget -- and defense received almost nothing extra in the recent stimulus bill. The Joint Chiefs requested $584 billion for 2010 and have suggested a spending floor of 4% of GDP. Both pleas fell on deaf ears. The White House budget puts baseline defense spending at 3.7% of GDP, not including Iraq and Afghanistan. The budget summary pleads "scarce resources" for the defense shortfall, which is preposterous given the domestic spending blowout.

More ominously, Mr. Obama's budget has overall defense spending falling sharply starting in future years -- to $614 billion in 2011, and staying more or less flat for a half decade. This means that relative both to the economy and especially to domestic priorities, defense spending is earmarked to decline. Some of this assumes less spending on Iraq, which is realistic, but it also has to take account of Mr. Obama's surge in Afghanistan. That war won't be cheap either.

The danger is that Mr. Obama may be signaling a return to the defense mistakes of the 1990s. Bill Clinton slashed defense spending to 3% of GDP in 2000, from 4.8% in 1992. We learned on 9/11 that 3% isn't nearly enough to maintain our commitments and fight a war on terror -- and President Bush spent his two terms getting back to more realistic outlays for a global superpower.

American defense needs are, if anything, even more daunting today. Given challenges in the Mideast and new dangers from Iran, an erratic Russia, a rising China, and potential threats in outer space and cyberspace, the U.S. should be in the midst of a concerted military modernization. Mr. Obama's budget isn't adequate to meet those challenges.

That means Secretary of Defense Robert Gates faces some hard choices when he finishes his strategic review this spring. An early glimpse will come soon when the Pentagon must decide whether to continue to purchase more Lockheed F-22 Raptors. The Air Force is set to buy 183 of the next generation fighters, though it wanted 750, which would be enough to give the U.S. air supremacy over battlefields over the next three decades. Now the fighter may be prematurely mothballed.

Weapons programs, such as missile defense or the Army's Future Combat Systems, are also in danger. Others have been ridiculously delayed. The Air Force flies refueling tankers from the Eisenhower era. Mr. Obama's own 30-something Marine One helicopter is prone to break down and technologically out of date.

The Pentagon shouldn't get a blank check, though much of its procurement waste results from the demands made by Congress. Mr. Gates has also rightly focused on the immediate priority of irregular warfare and counterinsurgency. But history also teaches that a nation that downplays potential threats -- such as from China in outer space -- is likely to find itself ill-prepared when they arrive.

The U.S. ability to project power abroad has been crucial to maintaining a relatively peaceful world, but we have been living off the fruits of our Cold War investments for too long. We can't afford another lost defense decade.

from the Boston Globe, 2009-Apr-4, by Bryan Bender:

Gates envisions 'fundamental shift' in weapons spending
Congress to get a preview of proposed cuts

WASHINGTON - Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates will announce "a fundamental shift" in the military's weapons budget on Monday, unveiling a series of cuts to big-ticket programs that he deems ill-suited to meeting current national security threats, the Pentagon said yesterday.

"These are not changes to the margins. This is a fundamental shift," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters yesterday, though he declined to provide specifics of the plan, which Gates will unveil after briefing key members of Congress over the weekend.

Some news reports suggest that Gates's pruning of the Pentagon's $180 billion-a-year weapons acquisition plan will be more extensive than anticipated and potentially affect dozens of programs, including warships, aircraft, and combat vehicles, as well as missile defense systems and a new fleet of presidential helicopters.

New England-based defense firms such as Raytheon Co. and United Technologies have been expected to take a hit from cuts in several high-profile programs - potentially forcing layoffs of thousands - but the full package of terminations and delays could be even more extensive than expected.

For example, defense trade publications are reporting that several warships as well as submarine construction could be affected - cutbacks or delays that would harm the business of General Dynamics' two major shipbuilding facilities in New England: Bath Iron Works in Maine and Electric Boat in Connecticut.

Meanwhile, other projects that Gates considers more relevant to helping troops win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could see a boost in funding, analysts said.

As news of the decisions began leaking out late this week, Wall Street analysts were warning investors to expect a bold plan that would probably prompt a sell-off of major defense stocks.

"We believe [Gates's] proposal regarding these 40-plus programs will likely include proposed cancellations and bold, substantial cuts," Morgan Stanley's research division told investors in a note late Thursday. "Programs almost certain to be covered," the analysts predicted, citing "sources and trade press" reports, include all three major fighter aircraft programs - the F-22, F-35, and F/A-18 - as well as the Littoral Combat Ship, a small warship designed to operate close to shore that is under contract to Bath.

The plan will have to go before Congress, which is under heavy pressure to reverse some of the decisions from lobbyists and constituents.

Morgan Stanley predicted that announcing the cuts ahead of President Obama's full federal budget in May could take some of the heat off the new president and make Gates, who served as George W. Bush's defense secretary, the plan's chief salesman.

Gates, a former CIA director and deputy national security adviser who has served eight presidents, is considered a particularly convincing advocate for why the cuts are in the best interest of the country. He has insisted that some conventional weapons programs must be canceled or delayed in order to afford the tools needed to address terrorism and guerrilla insurgencies, which he believes will pose far greater dangers to the United States in the foreseeable future than opposing armies, navies, or air forces.

Still, some analysts predict Congress will question the analytical framework that Gates used to come to his decisions. Loren Thompson, president of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., who advocates for some of the weapons that may be cut, said that because the announcements will be made before a review of all military programs this summer, as required by Congress every four years, some critics could assert that Gates's decisions require further study before being implemented.

from FrontPageMagazine.com, 2009-Apr-3, by William R. Hawkins:

Obama: Ignoring China's Military Buildup

The Obama administration came into office looking to “deepen the dialogue” with the People's Republic of China (PRC). On her visit to Beijing in late February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said “it is essential that the United States and China have a positive, cooperative relationship. Both of us are seeking ways to deepen and broaden that relationship.” In reality, she narrowed the discussion by pushing to the margin areas of disagreement. She downplayed human rights abuses in China and glossed over U.S.-PRC rivalries in hot spots like North Korea and Iran. Her main concern was to reassure Beijing that its large investments in U.S. government securities were safe and to urge that capital keep flowing from the Chinese trade surplus to American budget deficits.

Testing just how much of a supplicant Clinton had been, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) fleet harassed a U.S. Navy research vessel in the South China Sea almost exactly a month later. This incident was similar to that of April 1, 2001, during which a Chinese fighter collided with a Navy EP-3 intelligence-gathering aircraft, forcing the American crew to crash land on Hainan island where the aircraft was dismantled and tits personnel held hostage against a U.S. apology. The Navy ship in the recent incident was also sailing in the vicinity of Hainan monitoring a new underground PLA naval base.

In both cases, Beijing claimed rights within its Exclusive Economic Zone which are in conflict with the traditional unrestricted use of international waters. The EEZ was awarded under the Law of the Sea Treaty (which the United States has not ratified) and extends 200 miles out from the Chinese coast. The EEZ applies only to the exploitation of resources. It is not meant to be an extension of sovereignty over the ocean itself, though Beijing is pushing for such an expanded interpretation.  

The Navy ship was 75 miles from Hainan, well outside the 12 mile legal reach of territorial waters. The U.S. Navy regularly operates in this area, so the timing of the incident, like the one eight years ago, must be seen as another test of a new American president. President Barack Obama shrugged it off to avoid a confrontation. In contrast, Admiral Timothy Keating, who heads the U.S. Pacific Command, said, “China, particularly in the South China Sea, is behaving in an aggressive, troublesome manner, and they're not willing to abide by acceptable standards of behavior or rules of the road.”

The growth of China's navy was a source of concern in the annual report on Chinese Military Power released by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates March 25. The report portrays a China rapidly acquiring advanced weapons in an effort to dominant Asia, Though Taiwan remains a focus of Beijing's military effort, the 2009 report, like its predecessors, warns that China wants to project its power beyond Taiwan. Beijing's “dependence on secure access to markets and natural resources, particularly metals and fossil fuels, has become an increasingly significant factor shaping China's strategic behavior,” says the report.

Control of the South China Sea is vital for future resource development, control of trade routes, and the isolation of Taiwan. This is the purpose of the Hainan base which the report says, “appears large enough to accommodate a mix of attack and ballistic missile submarines and advanced surface combatant ship.” The base “provides the PLA Navy with direct access to vital international sea lanes, and offers the potential for stealthy deployment of submarines into the deep waters of the South China Sea.”

The PLA has an “anti-access strategy” to keep American (and by extension U.S. allies like Japan) out of this area during a confrontation. Submarines, anti-satellite weapons, and new ballistic missiles are keys to this strategy. The report talks of Chinese development of ballistic missiles capable of homing in on aircraft carriers and of anti-satellite systems more sophisticated than what China tested successfully in January 2007. The test was of a missile, but Beijing is also investing in lasers, high-powered microwave and particle beam weapons for use against space targets.

China is expanding its surface fleet. Indeed, the PLA Navy, with 320 warships, outnumbers the U.S. Navy. And while ship-for-ship, the USN is far superior to the PLAN, the American fleet is spread thin around the world whereas the Chinese fleet is concentrated close to home in the theater of likely conflict. This is the same strategic problem the U.S. faced with Imperial Japan before the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack.

China, which is vying to create the world's largest shipbuilding industry, will likely soon start development of an aircraft carrier. In the meantime, China is building advanced shore-based strike fighters and cruise missiles that can be vectored against naval targets and regional bases by new surveillance satellites. The greatest threat, however, is PLAN attack submarines, both conventional and nuclear. The PLAN operates a dozen Russian-designed Kilo-class advanced conventional submarines, but is building its own undersea boats including experimenting with air-independent propulsion which can give non-nuclear submarines a greatly increased capability to operate submerged for extended periods. Currently, the PRC is outbuilding the U.S. in submarines by a 5-1 margin.

According to the Pentagon report, "China has the most active land-based ballistic and cruise missile program in the world.” At the strategic level, this includes the long-range DF-31A ICBM with a range of almost 7,000 miles which “can target any location in the continental United States.” China is also building more Type-094 ballistic missile submarines, whereas America has scrapped most of its “boomer” boats and has no new construction planned.

The Report also discusses Beijing's cyber-warfare capabilities which are already being tested in massive hacking attacks around the world on a daily basis.

The PRC reacted strongly to the Pentagon report. “This is a gross distortion of the facts and China resolutely opposes it,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told journalists in Beijing. “This report issued by the US side continues to play up the fallacy of China's military threat.” He asked the United States to stop issuing the annual report (which is mandated by Congress) to “avoid further damage to the two sides' military relations.”

The real question is what will President Obama's reaction be, particularly in regard to defense spending and major weapons programs that would be needed to counter the Chinese military buildup? With huge sums committed to anti-recession stimulus packages, bailouts for the failed financial sector, and expanded social programs such as health insurance, there is growing pressure to cut defense spending to contain future budget deficits. Department of Defense Comptroller Robert Hale told the House Budget Committee on March 18 that the F-22 air superiority fighter, missile defense systems, and naval shipbuilding programs are all under review, with no decisions about funding levels having yet been made. These are exactly the projects of most importance to the U.S.-PRC military balance.

Liberal opinion favors defense cuts, which require a benign view of China and world affairs to justify. Nina Hachigian, an Asia expert at the Center for American Progress, says Americans should take a deep breath before getting worked up about a sinister Chinese rival. The CAP is a liberal think tank closely aligned with the Obama administration. Hachigian told National Public Radio that China is still decades away from directly challenging U.S. military pre-eminence “in any way.” She even praised Beijing for sending warships to help fight pirates off the coast of Africa. Yet the deployment of two of the PLA's newest destroyers and a support ship to waters near the Persian Gulf will give Chinese commanders increased operational experience in projecting power on a global scale.

Chas Freeman, who holds a chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies funded by the family of the one of the founders of the AIG insurance firm that was originally established in China, was almost appointed chairman of the National Intelligence Council. The NIC prepares the National Intelligence Estimate that forecasts future threats to the country. Freeman complained to a meeting of the National War College alumni in April, 2008 that, “A small group of members [of Congress] seeks to equate hostility toward China with patriotism. These members have sought to raise public alarm about China through special commissions and annual reports and the passage of legislation to bar contacts and dialog with the Peoples Liberation Army.” He argued for a “strategic partnership” with China, so “that the credibility of China as a putative `peer competitor' of the United States would be greatly diminished. Our defense industries would be thrust back into another season of `enemy deprivation syndrome' – the queasy feeling they get when their enemy goes away and they have to find a new one to justify defense acquisition programs….A moment of disorientation in the military-industrial complex would, in any event, be a small price to pay for greater security in the western Pacific and the end of any serious prospect of armed conflict with China.” Comments like these stirred up so much controversy that Freeman was forced to withdraw his name form NIC consideration.

Retired Clinton-era Admiral Dennis Blair, who supported Freeman's initial nomination, remains Obama's Director of National Intelligence. In 2007, he wrote a monograph with former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills for the Council on Foreign Relations entitled U.S.-China Relations: An Affirmative Agenda, A Responsible Course. They recommended that American policy-makers should start by “Stating clearly and more often that the United Stets wants to establish a close, candid, constructive, and collaborative relationship with China” and by “Explaining to the American public the many benefits that flow from a strong bilateral relationship.” The future DNI, who in his new post is supposed to be ever vigilant, nevertheless recommended, “The president should frankly acknowledge that mutual suspicion currently burdens U.S.-China relations and call on both nations to take steps to deepen mutual understanding and trust.”

On the same day the China Military Power report was released, a letter sent to Democratic congressional leaders by a coalition of left-wing groups was reported by The Hill newspaper The letter called for steep cuts to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program and other “futuristic weapons” with the money saved going to schools, healthcare and other social services. The F-35 will not only be the mainstay of American airpower, being built for the Air Force, Navy and Marines, but will also be sold to U.S. allies. The letter came from the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Black Leadership Forum, the Hispanic Federation, the League of Rural Voters, the National Congress of Black Women, and the National Council of Negro Women.

Beijing has been proclaiming that the current financial crisis has put an end to both the Western economic model and to American hegemony in world affairs. It is, however, beyond China's unilateral ability to change the balance of power in its favor. The United States still has the technological lead and a larger national economy. Beijing's only hope (like that of the Soviets during the Cold War) is that U.S. leaders will not use these advantages to maintain American preeminence. The Obama administration seems poised to grant the Chinese communist regime its wish even as the Pentagon warns of the dire consequences of doing so.

William Hawkins is a consultant on international economics and national security issues.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Mar-18, by David K. Rehbein:

Will Obama Go AWOL on VA Health Benefits?

'If you were injured in Iraq or Afghanistan and you have not paid your co-pay, please press 1. If you were injured during military training and you have not yet reached your deductible, please press 2. If your family has reached its maximum insurance benefit, please call back after you have purchased additional coverage. Thank you for your service."

Before the leaders of other veteran's groups and I met with President Barack Obama at the White House on Monday, I believed a phone call like the one described above unimaginable. Now it seems all too possible.

President Obama made clear during our discussion that he intends to force private insurance companies to pay for the treatment of military veterans with service-connected disabilities. He is trying to unfairly generate $540 million on the backs of veterans.

The proposed requirement for private companies to reimburse the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) would not only be unfair, but would have an adverse impact on service-connected disabled veterans and their families. Depending on the severity of the medical conditions involved, maximum insurance coverage limits could be reached through treatment of the veteran's condition alone. That would leave the rest of the family without health-care benefits.

Currently, when veterans go to a VA hospital or related health-care facility for treatment of a service-connected disability, they receive the care without any billing to the veterans or the veterans' insurance. (On the other hand, those veterans who choose the VA for the treatment of nonservice-connected disabilities pay a co-pay, and the VA bills private insurance companies reasonable charges.)

Perhaps nobody would be hit harder by the Obama administration's proposal than the thousands of veterans who own small businesses. Not only will their private insurance premiums be drastically elevated to cover service-connected disabilities, but many will be forced to cut staff as a result. The unemployment rate for veterans may climb even higher, as businesses avoid hiring these heroes for fear of the impact they would have on insurance rates.

This plan is as unfair as it is unnecessary. According to the U.S. Constitution, it is the president and Congress who send troops in harm's way, not the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield.

As head of the nation's largest veterans organization, I was startled by this radical shift of position the president has taken. Last October, candidate Obama listed several proposals he had for the VA and none of them included billing veterans' insurance providers.

In fact, when asked how he would improve the funding formula for the VA's health-care system, then-Sen. Obama told the American Legion Magazine, "It starts with the president saying that if I'm budgeting for war, then I am also budgeting for VA. If I've got a half-a-trillion-dollar Pentagon budget, then I'd better make sure that I make some of those billions of dollars available to care for the soldiers once they come home. It should be a non-negotiable proposition that people are receiving the services that they need. This is the reason I joined the Veterans Affairs Committee -- because I believe deeply in that principle."

So I ask President Obama now, for all America's veterans, where is that principled stance today? By abandoning its responsibilities to the heroic men and women who answered our nation's call, the federal government is breaking a sacred promise. Moreover, it is unnecessary.

The 2.6 million member American Legion has long advocated for Medicare to reimburse the VA for its treatment of Medicare-eligible veterans. Veterans pay into the Medicare-system, yet they are unable to use Medicare benefits in the VA health system, which was created specifically for them. The Indian Health Service is successfully billing and collecting needed revenue for both Medicare and Medicaid. We also believe that direct billing between two federal agencies will reduce the opportunities for waste, fraud and abuse that tend to occur when for-profit corporations enter the mix.

Our military veterans have already served this country. They have given us their blood, sweat and devotion. Under President Obama's proposal, the most severely wounded veterans could easily exceed their maximum insurance benefit, leaving their family without any additional coverage. This is hardly the thanks of a grateful nation.

Mr. Rehbein, a former U.S. Army sergeant of the Vietnam War era, is national commander of the 2.6 million-member American Legion, the nation's largest wartime veterans organization.

from NewsMax.com, 2009-Mar-6, by Paul Kengor:

No Outrage Over Panetta as CIA Director?

As an unprecedented, colossal “stimulus” package was passed by the new president and Congress, something rather extraordinary slid beneath the public eye.

Leon Panetta was confirmed as our next director of central intelligence — i.e., head of the CIA.

Personally, I had a unique inside angle on this political theater. At Grove City College a few weeks ago, we hosted Herb Meyer, who in the 1980s had been the right-hand man to President Reagan's CIA director, Bill Casey.

Meyer was one of those behind-the-scenes, unsung heroes of the Cold War, who worked with Casey to take down the Soviet empire through numerous means ranging from economic warfare to aiding anti-communist forces from Krakow to Kabul.

As I arrived at Meyer's room to pick him up, I was greeted by a genial, pleasant man who was worked up over what he was watching on television. Meyer was enduring C-SPAN's coverage of Panetta's confirmation hearings for CIA director.

Something really insidious was on display at those hearings: a curious consensus that if American intelligence — heaven help us — knew there was a ticking bomb in a major city, and had in possession the terrorist who knew the bomb's location, that it would be wrong to “torture” the suspect to disclose the location.

This is where the unceasing hatred of George W. Bush has finally brought us: bloody irrationality.

In truth, everyone in that Senate room knew it would be imperative to use whatever time-tested techniques to prevent, say, 2 million innocents from morphing into a mushroom cloud over Manhattan. Of course, if such a scenario ever develops, every senator in that room — plus The New York Times editorial board — would urge Panetta to begin waterboarding the suspect immediately.

Yet, at this point in the sad state of the republic, none of the gentlemen could dare make such an untoward claim. “Can you believe this?” Meyer shouted at me and the TV as we observed this political spectacle.

No, I could not. Or maybe I could.

That's just one illustration of the new man in charge and the new mindset at the CIA.

But the crisis is even more acute. One of Herb Meyer's most crucial reminders is the thing that made Bill Casey's CIA different, and what made Ronald Reagan's presidency different: It was the objective to win, to win the war, the Cold War — and to think creatively, outside the box, to make that happen.

As Meyer emphasizes, Casey was a maverick, and a maverick was needed to win the Cold War, just as one is needed now to win the war on terror. To win today will require the right CIA director (like Casey), the right president (like Ronald Reagan), the right head of the National Security Council (Bill Clark), the right secretary of defense (Cap Weinberger), plus an Ed Meese, a Jean Kirkpatrick, and the unappreciated folks in the shadows, individuals like Roger Robinson (at the NSC) and Herb Meyer at the CIA.

“Reagan didn't play [not -AMPP Ed.] to lose,” says Meyer. “He played to win. And that's what made him different from every other president.” Meyer puts it this way: “Ronald Reagan was the first Western leader whose objective was to win. Now I suggest to you that there is a gigantic difference between playing not to lose and playing to win. It's different emotionally, it's different psychologically, and, of course, it's different practically . . .

“It was Reagan's judgment that the time had come to play offense — that they [the Soviets] could be had. When he made that decision . . . it flowed from a decision to play to win.”

And Reagan needed Bill Casey at the CIA to achieve this. As Casey's special assistant, and as vice chair of the National Intelligence Council, Meyer observed the full scope and brunt of the Reagan strategy.

That strategy, said Meyer, citing the tandem of Reagan and Casey, was “very dangerous . . . very gutsy. And there were a lot of people who said, `Oh dear, you're right, the bear is wounded. Don't poke sticks at a wounded bear.' But the Reagan-Casey approach was: `Hey, my enemy is on his knees. It's a good time to break his head.'”

They broke the head of the bear through a multipronged approach, carefully and successfully calculated to avoid armed conflict and nuclear war — to win peacefully.

As Meyer described it, they launched a systematic campaign to identify Soviet economic weaknesses. “What we realized, is that the CIA had been monitoring Soviet strengths,” said Meyer. “It was not looking at Soviet weaknesses.” With Reagan's backing and urging, Casey and crew searched for vulnerabilities that they could exploit to accelerate a Soviet collapse.

That is not where we stand today in the war on terror. We need people who are not concerned with being politically correct, who will take risks, who will think outside the box, who, first and foremost, will play to win. “We win and they lose,” as Ronald Reagan had put it in January 1977, four years before he was inaugurated as president.

Bill Casey did not care what the press thought about him, nor the encomiums of the kind of senators who postured before the C-SPAN cameras to demonstrate their humanity before Leon Panetta.

Casey did what he did for the right reasons: to change history for the better, and not for himself or his career. It was mix of bravado and creativity, of breaking the mold. It was exactly the opposite of what we have just sworn in.

Paul Kengor is professor of political science and executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. He is also author of “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism” (HarperPerennial, 2007) and “The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan's Top Hand” (Ignatius Press, 2007).

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Jan-24, by David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey:

The Laws of War Have Served Us Well
Our armed forces shouldn't have to play catch and release.

This week, President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the terrorist detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay within the year. It was a symbolic repudiation of the Bush administration's policies, but Gitmo is not the crucial issue. The real question is whether Mr. Obama will uphold the legal architecture necessary to continue the war against al Qaeda and its jihadist allies.

What Mr. Obama's national security team will quickly discover is that the civilian criminal-justice system is an inadequate tool to deal with terrorists. President Bush's policies -- particularly treating captured terrorists as unlawful enemy combatants and employing a military court system to try them -- were dictated by the very real need to defend American citizens, not by disdain for the rule of law.

The Bush administration chose the law-of-war paradigm because the international law of armed conflict gives the U.S. maximum flexibility to meet the jihadist threat, including the right to attack and destroy al Qaeda bases and fighters in foreign countries. The alternative legal framework, the civilian criminal-justice system, is unsuitable for several key reasons. Civilian criminal suspects quite obviously cannot be targeted for military attack. They can be subjected only to the minimum force necessary to effect an arrest. They cannot -- consistent with international law -- be pursued across national boundaries. And finally, they are entitled to a speedy trial in a public courtroom. These rules cannot be ignored or altered without constitutional amendment.

In addition, the type and quality of evidence necessary for convictions in civilian courts is simply unavailable for most captured terrorists. One federal district judge recently concluded that although the government's information on one detainee was sufficient for intelligence purposes -- that is, he presumably could have been targeted for deadly attack -- it was insufficient to hold him without trial.

Trying senior al Qaeda leaders for relatively minor offenses ancillary to their major war crimes (like Al Capone for tax evasion) also is not the answer. Even if convictions and punishments could be obtained in this way, the cause of justice and historic closure requires the perpetrators to be charged with their worst offenses. This view informed the Nuremberg prosecutions.

Many have advocated for the creation of a U.S.-based national security court. Such a court would certainly be subject to constitutional challenge, and likely could not handle the sheer number of detained enemy combatants. A few hundred detainees at Guantanamo is one thing, but U.S. forces have captured and processed thousands of prisoners in the war on terror, and still hold upward of a thousand al Qaeda fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan, with many more to come in the years ahead.

Some changes to the Bush policies are obviously inevitable. But what Mr. Obama must keep in mind is that the laws of war form a relatively seamless web. Different elements -- military detention and prosecution, and robust rules of engagement driven by combat necessities -- reinforce each other. So while he may grant detainees additional due process rights (the courts have already established a right to habeas corpus proceedings for those at Guantanamo), he must continue a system of military detention for most of the captured fighters.

That's because the law of war requires that enemies be "granted quarter" -- meaning prisoners must be taken if they surrender. But if these prisoners cannot be held until hostilities are concluded and must be released only to fight again, the military would be consigned to a deadly game of catch and release. Without a viable detention regime, the U.S. cannot fairly ask its soldiers to risk their lives in combat any more than we can send in troops with defective equipment.

Since routinely prosecuting captured terrorists in the civilian courts is unrealistic, some sort of military court system for the detainees must be retained, regardless of whether they are called military commissions or special courts martial. This reinvigorated military court system must be directed to begin prosecuting those captured enemy fighters that have committed war crimes against American troops or civilians. The fact that none of the individuals now held in U.S. custody in Iraq or Afghanistan has been brought to justice, even in situations where there is sufficient evidence to prosecute them, is historically unprecedented and a slap in the face of the U.S. troops fighting this war. Giving de facto immunity to war criminals is also inconsistent with international legal norms. Republicans like Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who have criticized some Bush policies, must make their voices heard here.

This system of detention and military trials must also apply here at home. We cannot limit the military legal paradigm to overseas operations. Al Qaeda has already successfully targeted American territory, and may do so again. Foreign fighters entering the U.S. to carry out attacks should not have rights superior to those on distant, more conventional battlefields. Not only does this double standard create exactly the wrong incentives for our enemies, but it is legally unsustainable. The Supreme Court has indicated a willingness to extend constitutional protections to detainees held where the United States exercises a sufficient level of control, and this ruling can easily be extended beyond Gitmo.

Finally, the new administration cannot behave as if the military justice system for detainees is shameful, like some crazy uncle in the attic. These are legitimate laws of war and should be treated as such.

Mr. Bush's opponents have denigrated this system for nearly eight years. Many of them have now assumed power, and with power comes responsibility -- especially when it comes to protecting Americans from their enemies.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey are Washington, D.C., lawyers who served in the Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Jan-19, by William McGurn:

Bush's Real Sin Was Winning in Iraq

In a few hours, George W. Bush will walk out of the Oval Office for the last time as president. As he leaves, he carries with him the near-universal opprobrium of the permanent class that inhabits our nation's capital. Yet perhaps the most important reason for this unpopularity is the one least commented on.

Here's a hint: It's not because of his failures. To the contrary, Mr. Bush's disfavor in Washington owes more to his greatest success. Simply put, there are those who will never forgive Mr. Bush for not losing a war they had all declared unwinnable.

Here in the afterglow of the turnaround led by Gen. David Petraeus, it's easy to forget what the smart set was saying two years ago -- and how categorical they all were in their certainty. The president was a simpleton, it was agreed. Didn't he know that Iraq was a civil war, and the only answer was to get out as fast as we could?

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- the man who will be sworn in as vice president today -- didn't limit himself to his own opinion. Days before the president announced the surge, Joe Biden suggested to the Washington Post he knew the president's people had also concluded the war was lost. They were, he said, just trying to "keep it from totally collapsing" until they could "hand it off to the next guy."

For his part, on the night Mr. Bush announced the surge, Barack Obama said he was "not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse."

Three months after that, before the surge had even started, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pronounced the war in Iraq "lost." These and similar comments, moreover, were amplified by a media echo chamber even more absolute in its sense of hopelessness about Iraq and its contempt for the president.

For many of these critics, the template for understanding Iraq was Vietnam -- especially after things started to get tough. In terms of the wars themselves, of course, there is almost no parallel between Vietnam and Iraq: The enemies are different, the fighting on the ground is different, the involvement of other powers is different, and so on.

Still, the operating metaphor of Vietnam has never been military. For the most part, it is political. And in this realm, we saw history repeat itself: a failure of nerve among the same class that endorsed the original action.

As with Vietnam, with Iraq the failure of nerve was most clear in Congress. For example, of the five active Democratic senators who sought the nomination, four voted in favor of the Iraqi intervention before discovering their antiwar selves.

As in Vietnam too, rather than finding their judgment questioned, those who flip-flopped on the war were held up as voices of reason. In a memorable editorial advocating a pullout, the New York Times gave voice to the chilling possibilities that this new realism was willing to accept in the name of bringing our soldiers home.

"Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave," read the editorial. "There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide." Even genocide. With no hint of irony, the Times nevertheless went on to conclude that it would be even worse if we stayed.

This is Vietnam thinking. And the president never accepted it. That was why his critics went ape when, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he touched on the killing fields and exodus of boat people that followed America's humiliating exit off an embassy rooftop. As the Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti noted, Mr. Bush had appropriated one of their most cherished analogies -- only he drew very different lessons from it.

Mr. Bush's success in Iraq is equally infuriating, because it showed he was right and they wrong. Many in Washington have not yet admitted that, even to themselves. Mr. Obama has. We know he has because he has elected to keep Mr. Bush's secretary of defense -- not something you do with a failure.

Mr. Obama seems aware that, at the end of the day, he will not be judged by his predecessor's approval ratings. Instead, he will soon find himself under pressure to measure up to two Bush achievements: a strategic victory in Iraq, and the prevention of another attack on America's home soil. As he rises to this challenge, our new president will learn that when you make a mistake, the keepers of the Beltway's received orthodoxies will make you pay dearly.

But it will not even be close to the price you pay for ignoring their advice and succeeding.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Jan-10:

President Gulliver's Lawyer
A nominee who wants to tie down the executive branch.

Barack Obama's cabinet choices are understandably getting most media attention, but everyone knows policy is also made by the sub-cabinet. So we think more public scrutiny should be drawn to Mr. Obama's choice of Dawn Johnsen to lead one of the executive branch's most important legal offices. Her appointment makes sense for a President Gulliver, but not for a Commander in Chief fighting terrorists.

Ms. Johnsen became famous in the left-wing blogosphere as an especially arch critic of the Bush Administration's war on terror. As an Indiana University law professor, she took to the Web with such lawyerly analysis as "rogue," "lawless," "outrage," and that's the mild stuff. Now she's been nominated to run the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which interprets the law for the entire executive branch.

One of the OLC's main duties is to defend the Presidency against the inevitable encroachment of the judiciary and Congress on Constitutional authority, executive privilege, war powers, and so forth. Ms. Johnsen knows this, or should, having served as acting OLC head in the Clinton Administration between 1997 and 1998. The office has since become all the more central in a war on terror that has been "strangled by law," to quote Jack Goldsmith, a former Bush OLC chief.

Yet Ms. Johnsen seems to think her job isn't to defend the Presidency but to tie it down with even more legal ropes. She has written that "an essential source of constraint is often underappreciated and underestimated: legal advisors within the executive branch." And in touting her qualifications, the Obama transition cited her recent law review articles "What's a President to Do?: Interpreting the Constitution in the Wake of the Bush Administration's Abuses"; and "Faithfully Executing the Laws: Internal Legal Constraints on Executive Power."

In other words, Mr. Obama has nominated as his main executive branch lawyer someone who believes in diminishing the powers of the executive branch. This is akin to naming a conscientious objector as the head of the armed forces, or hiring your wife's divorce lawyer to handle your side of the settlement too.

It's also a radical reinvention of the Framers' view that the three branches of the federal government would vigorously assert their powers to achieve the proper political balance. For this reason, OLC's longstanding jurisprudence -- reaching across Administrations of both parties -- emphasizes an expansive reading of Presidential authority. For example, the office has always filed opinions opposing the 1973 War Powers Act, which sought to limit the chief executive's ability to send military forces abroad. Such opinions covered both Bill Clinton's intervention in Kosovo and George H.W. Bush's in Somalia.

Ms. Johnsen's work ignores all of this in an attempt to assail the entire scope of Bush counterterrorism policy, from surveillance to detention to interrogation. She claims that the OLC "misinterpreted relevant constitutional authorities, particularly when seeking to justify actions otherwise prohibited by law." She pays special attention to John Yoo's August 2002 OLC memorandum that set down the legal limits for interrogation, which she calls "the Torture Opinion."

Ms. Johnsen accuses Mr. Yoo of "seeking maximum flexibility -- that is, the ability to use the most extreme methods possible without risking criminal liability -- in interrogations of suspected al Qaeda operatives." She means this as a condemnation. But this in fact is the OLC's job -- to explore the legal boundaries of vague statutes and treaties to define where lawful interrogation ends and torture begins. You can debate that Mr. Yoo went too far, as Mr. Goldsmith later did when the Bush Administration withdrew the opinion. But Mr. Yoo was acting in good faith in response to the CIA's request for legal clarity, while leaving the policy choices to the war fighters.

And that's where Ms. Johnsen's premises are most dangerous. "In considering whether a proposed action is lawful," she writes, "the proper OLC inquiry is not simply whether the executive branch can get away with it," in the sense of writing opinions that can "withstand judicial review." She sees the OLC staff not as legal technicians working on behalf of the President but as a policy outfit free to quash Presidential actions with which it happens to disagree.

This is far from an academic exercise, because the OLC's advice is traditionally binding for the executive branch except in rare cases where it is overruled by the President or Attorney General. To the extent that such a mentality seeps across the executive branch, it will begin to make our spies and other war fighters risk-averse and overcautious. This is precisely what happened during the Clinton years after Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick's infamous 1995 memo instructed FBI agents and federal prosecutors to go "beyond what the law requires" in limiting their collaboration against al Qaeda.

Suffocating our terror fighters with excessive legal caution can only impair the difficult task of defending a free society that believes in the rule of law from terrorists who believe in neither freedom nor law. If President Obama matures under the burden and accountability of stopping the next terror attack, he may come to regret having Dawn Johnsen around.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Nov-21, by Melanie Kirkpatrick:

Sounding the Nuclear Alarm
The U.S. will not have a credible arsenal unless Washington acts soon to replace aging warheads.

New York

Gen. Kevin Chilton, a former command astronaut, is no stranger to cutting-edge technology. But these days the man responsible for the command and control of U.S. nuclear forces finds himself talking more often about '57 Chevys than the space shuttle. On a recent visit to The Wall Street Journal he wheeled out the Chevy analogy to describe the nation's aging arsenal of nuclear warheads. The message he's carrying to the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, the press and anyone else who will listen is: Modernize, modernize, modernize.

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. nuclear weapons program has suffered from neglect. Warheads are old. There's been no new warhead design since the 1980s, and the last time one was tested was 1992, when the U.S. unilaterally stopped testing. Gen. Chilton, who heads U.S. Strategic Command, has been sounding the alarm, as has Defense Secretary Robert Gates. So far few seem to be listening.

The U.S. is alone among the five declared nuclear nations in not modernizing its arsenal. The U.K. and France are both doing so. Ditto China and Russia. "We're the only ones who aren't," Gen. Chilton says. Congress has refused to fund the Department of Energy's Reliable Replacement Warhead program beyond the concept stage and this year it cut funding even for that.

Gen. Chilton stresses that StratCom is "very prepared right now to conduct our nuclear deterrent mission" -- a point he takes pains to repeat more than once. But the words "right now" are carefully chosen too, and the general also conveys a sense of urgency. "We're at a point where we need to make some very hard choices and decisions," he says. These need to be "based on good studies that would tell us how we would modernize this force for the future to incorporate 21st century requirements, which I believe are different than in the Cold War."

"We've done a pretty good job of maintaining our delivery platforms," the general says, by which he means submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles and intercontinental bombers. But nuclear warheads are a different story. They are Cold War legacies, he says, "designed for about a 15- to 20-year life." That worked fine back when "we had a very robust infrastructure . . . that replenished those families of weapons at regular intervals." Now, however, "they're all older than 20 years . . . . The analogy would be trying to extend the life of your '57 Chevrolet into the 21st century."

Gen. Chilton pulls out a prop to illustrate his point: a glass bulb about two inches high. "This is a component of a V-61" nuclear warhead, he says. It was in "one of our gravity weapons" -- a weapon from the 1950s and '60s that is still in the U.S. arsenal. He pauses to look around the Journal's conference table. "I remember what these things were for. I bet you don't. It's a vacuum tube. My father used to take these out of the television set in the 1950s and '60s down to the local supermarket to test them and replace them."

And here comes the punch line: "This is the technology that we have . . . today." The technology in the weapons the U.S. relies on for its nuclear deterrent dates back to before many of the people in the room were born.

The general then pulls out another prop: a circuit board that he holds in the palm of his hand. "Compare that to this," he says, pointing to the vacuum tube. "That's just a tiny, little chip on this" circuit board. But replacing the vacuum tube with a chip isn't going to happen anytime soon. The Department of Energy can't even study how to do so since Congress has not appropriated the money for its Reliable Replacement Warhead program.

It ought to go without saying, but the general says it anyway: His first priority for nuclear weapons is reliability. "The deterrent isn't useful if it's not believable, and to be believable you got to have tremendous, complete confidence that your stockpile will work. . . . We have that today. Let me be clear: We have that. We've monitored the stockpile, made adjustments as necessary, but, again, we're on the path of sustaining your '57 Chevrolet."

Security is another priority -- especially keeping nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists. This, he says, is another vital reason to modernize weapons that were designed and built in another era.

"In the Cold War you didn't worry about the Soviets coming over here and stealing one of our weapons. They had plenty of their own. . . . But now you worry about these things."

It's possible to design a terrorist-proof nuke, the general says. "We have the capability to design into these weapons today systems that, should they fall into wrong hands -- [should] someone either attempt to detonate them or open them up to take the material out -- that they would become not only nonfunctional, but the material inside would become unusable."

The general stresses the need to "revitalize" the infrastructure for producing nuclear weapons. The U.S. hasn't built a nuclear weapon in more than two decades and the manufacturing infrastructure has disappeared. The U.S. today "has no nuclear weapon production capacity," he says flatly. "We can produce a handful of weapons in a laboratory but we've taken down the manufacturing capability." At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. produced 3,000 weapons a year.

Under the Moscow Treaty, signed in 2002, the U.S. has committed to reducing its strategic nuclear arsenal by two-thirds -- to between 1,700 and 2,200 deployed nuclear weapons from about 10,000 at the height of the Cold War. "Deployed means they're either on top of an ICBM, on top of a submarine, or in a bunker on the base where the aircraft are located," Gen. Chilton says. "We're supposed to be down to those numbers by 2012, but we're on a glide path to actually get down to those numbers by the end of next year."

But these already-old weapons aren't going to last forever, and part of the general's job is to prepare for their refurbishing or replacement. "Think about what it's going to take to recapitalize or replace those 2,000 weapons over a period of time. . . . If you could do 10 a year, it takes you 200 years. If you build an infrastructure that would allow you to do 100 a year, then you could envision recapitalizing that over a 20-year-period."

There's also the issue of human capital, which is graying. It's "every bit as important as the aging of the weapon systems," the general says. "The last individual to have worked on an actual nuclear test in this country, the last scientist or engineer, will have retired or passed on in the next five years." The younger generation has no practical experience with designing or building nuclear warheads.

Generals don't talk politics, and the closest Gen. Chilton gets to the subject is to say that he had spoken to no one from either of the campaigns in the recent presidential election. It's a fair bet, though, that Barack Obama's comments on the campaign trail will not have escaped his notice. The president-elect likes to talk about a nuclear-free world and has said, "I will not authorize the development of new nuclear weapons." He has not weighed in on the Reliable Replacement Warhead program.

Gen. Chilton says the modernization of U.S. nuclear weapons is "an important issue for the next administration in their first year." At the very least, he says, the U.S. needs to "go out and do those studies" on design, cost and implementation. As for his own role: "You've got to talk about it. You can't just one day show up and say we have a problem."

Ms. Kirkpatrick is a deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Dec-14:

Disarming Ourselves
A new report warns Obama about our aging nuclear weapons.

Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo get more press, but among the most urgent national security challenges facing President-elect Obama is what to do about America's stockpile of aging nuclear weapons. No less an authority than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates calls the situation "bleak" and is urging immediate modernization.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Gates's new boss appeared to take a different view. Candidate Obama said he "seeks a world without nuclear weapons" and vowed to make "the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy." His woolly words have given a boost to the world disarmament movement, including last week's launch of Global Zero, the effort by Richard Branson and Queen Noor to eliminate nuclear weapons in 25 years. Naturally, they want to start with cuts in the U.S. arsenal.

But the reality of power has a way of focusing those charged with defending the U.S., and Mr. Obama will soon have to decide to modernize America's nuclear deterrent or let it continue to deteriorate. Every U.S. warhead is more than 20 years old, with some dating to the 1960s. The last test was 1992, when the U.S. adopted a unilateral test moratorium and since relied on computer modeling. Meanwhile, engineers and scientists with experience designing and building nuclear weapons are retiring or dying, and young Ph.D.s have little incentive to enter a field where innovation is taboo. The U.S. has zero production capability, beyond a few weapons in a lab.

We're told Mr. Gates's alarm will be echoed soon in a report by the Congressionally mandated commission charged with reviewing the role of nuclear weapons and the overall U.S. strategic posture. The commission's chairman is William Perry, a former Clinton Defense Secretary and a close Obama adviser. Mr. Perry is also one of the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," the nickname given to him, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn for an op-ed published in these pages last year offering a blueprint for ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

The commission's interim report is due out any day now, and the advance word is that Mr. Perry has come back to Earth. We're told the report's central finding is that the U.S. will need a nuclear deterrent for the indefinite future. A deterrent is credible, the report further notes, only if enemies believe it will work. That means modernization.

That logic ought to be obvious, but it escapes many in Congress who have stymied the Bush Administration's efforts to modernize. Britain, France, Russia and China are all updating their nuclear forces, but Mr. Bush couldn't even get Congress this year to fund so much as R&D for the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program. Senator Dianne Feinstein dismissed the RRW, saying "the Bush Administration's goal was to reopen the nuclear door."

In the House, similar damage has been done by Ellen Tauscher, chairman of the subcommittee on strategic weapons. Ms. Tauscher, whose California district includes the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, likes to talk about a strong nuclear deterrent while bragging about killing the RRW. She also wants to revive the unenforceable Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the Senate rejected in 1999. Let's hope the Perry report helps with her nuclear re-education.

If Congress isn't paying attention, U.S. allies are. The U.S. provides a nuclear umbrella for 30-plus countries, including several -- Japan, Germany and South Korea, for example -- capable of developing their own nuclear weapons. If they lose confidence in Washington's ability to protect them, the Perry report notes, they'll kick off a new nuclear arms race that will spread world-wide.

In a speech this fall, Mr. Gates said "there is no way we can maintain a credible deterrent" without "resorting to testing" or "pursuing a modernization program." General Kevin Chilton, the four-star in charge of U.S. strategic forces, has also spent the past year making the case for modernization. "The time to act is now," he told a Washington audience this month.

The aging U.S. nuclear arsenal is an urgent worry. A world free of nuclear weapons is a worthy goal, shared by many Presidents, including Ronald Reagan. Until that day arrives, no U.S. President can afford to let our nuclear deterrent erode.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Jan-24:

Atomic Bombshells
Shaping up America's nuclear deterrent.

The Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief of Staff lost their jobs last year after two incidents involving the misuse of nuclear materials. In one, nuclear-armed cruise missiles were loaded on a B-52 bomber and flown across the country without anyone noticing for a day and a half. In the other, nose cones fitted with nuclear triggers were erroneously shipped to Taiwan.

Neither of those mishaps ended badly, and in retrospect the nation can say thanks for the wake-up call. The blunders focused attention on a problem that might otherwise have gone undetected until catastrophe struck: the neglect of U.S. nuclear forces and -- even more dangerous -- a lack of understanding at the Pentagon about nuclear deterrence.

These are the key findings of the Pentagon's task force on nuclear weapons management, which recently released its final report. The task force was appointed by Defense Secretary Bob Gates in the wake of the Air Force scandals and was led by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger. Its initial report, last September, examined the Air Force's errors in its stewardship of nuclear weapons and made several recommendations. These mostly have been implemented, and the latest report commends the Air Force for its swift action.

The task force has now cast its eye more broadly and concludes that the "lack of interest and attention have been widespread" throughout the Pentagon's leadership. The exception is the Navy, which is responsible for submarine-launched nuclear weapons. Even there, though, not all is well. While the report finds the Navy's handling of nukes acceptable, it says there is evidence of some "fraying around the edges."

The Schlesinger panel makes a series of recommendations aimed at improving oversight and policy. They include establishing a position of assistant secretary of defense for deterrence, reducing the nonnuclear related responsibilities of U.S. Strategic Command, and beefing up inspections.

But the task force's most worrisome finding will require a new mindset. The panel finds a "distressing degree" of inattention to the role of nuclear deterrence among senior civilian and military leaders, especially regarding its psychological and political value. It proposes educational measures to "enhance understanding" of why we have a nuclear deterrent -- which, put simply, is to avoid the use of nuclear weapons. If adversaries believe the U.S. deterrent is weak, they might be tempted to use nukes against us or threaten to do so.

But there's a proliferation point too. The U.S. provides a nuclear umbrella for 30-plus countries. If our allies lose confidence, Mr. Schlesinger said at a press conference announcing the report, "five or six of those nations are quite capable of beginning to produce nuclear weapons on their own." This is precisely the opposite of what the nuclear-free-world types like to argue: If only the U.S. would get rid of its nukes, other countries would follow suit.

It's now up to the Obama Administration to move on the task force's findings. But adopting the management and personnel changes the report recommends won't be enough. "Strengthening the credibility of our nuclear deterrent should begin at the White House," the report states. If the new President makes clear his commitment to the U.S. nuclear deterrent, that attitude will echo down the chain of command.

from the Associated Press, 2008-Nov-12, by Robert Burns:

US general urges Obama to keep missile defense

Washington — The Air Force general who runs the Pentagon's missile defense projects said Wednesday that American interests would be "severely hurt" if President-elect Obama decided to halt plans developed by the Bush administration to install missile interceptors in Eastern Europe.

Lt. Gen. Henry A. Obering III, director of the Missile Defense Agency, told a group of reporters that he is awaiting word from Obama's transition team on their interest in receiving briefings.

During the campaign, Obama was not explicit about his intentions with regard to missile defense. The program has tended to draw less support from Democrats over the years, particularly during the Reagan presidency when it was seen as a "Star Wars" effort to erect an impenetrable shield against nuclear missile attack from the Soviet Union. More recently the project has been scaled back, although it has again created an East-West divide by stirring Russian opposition to the proposed European link.

Obama has said it would be prudent to "explore the possibility of deploying missile defense systems in Europe," in light of what he called active efforts by Iran to develop ballistic missiles as well as nuclear weapons.

But Obama expressed some skepticism about the technical capability of U.S. missile defenses. He said that if elected his administration would work with NATO allies to develop anti-missile technologies.

Obering, who is leaving his post next week after more than four years in charge, said in the interview that his office has pulled together information for a presentation to the Obama team, if asked.

"What we have discovered is that a lot of the folks that have not been in this administration seem to be dated, in terms of the program," he said. "They are kind of calibrated back in the 2000 time frame and we have come a hell of a long way since 2000. Our primary objective is going to be just, frankly, educating them on what we have accomplished, what we have been able to do and why we have confidence in what we are doing."

Asked whether he meant that Obama or his advisers had an outdated view of missile defense, Obering said he was speaking more generally about people who have not closely followed developments in this highly technical field.

A key question for the new president will be whether to proceed with the Bush administration's plans to install 10 missile interceptors in Poland and a missile-tracking radar in the Czech Republic. That system is on track to be ready for use by 2014, Obering said. It is strongly opposed by Russia, which sees it as an unwelcome military threat close to its borders; the Bush administration says it is needed to defend European allies against an emerging missile threat from Iran.

Obering said he is confident in the technology needed to make the European leg of the missile defense system work.

"In terms of any recommendations for the future, I would say that if we were to walk away from these proposed deployments to Europe, that it would severely hurt, number one, our ability to protect our deployed forces in that region and our allies and friends from what we see as an emerging threat. Number two, I think it would severely undermine U.S. leadership in NATO."

from the New York Times, 2008-Nov-12, by Nazila Fathi in Tehran and Alan Cowell in London:

Iran Claims Success in Tests Firing Long-Range Missiles

TEHRAN — Iran said Wednesday that it successfully test fired a new generation of long-range surface-to-surface missiles with a range of 1,200 miles, state-run television reported. A senior official said the missile would be used only defensively, but did not identify a potential aggressor.

A television news broadcast said the new missile, called the Sejil, used solid fuel and was more accurate than some other missiles in the country's arsenal. A British weapons expert, Duncan Lennox, said the missile seemed to resemble an earlier one called the Ashoura. Its claimed range would enable it to strike targets in Israel or the Persian Gulf region, he said,

Iran's Defense Minister, Mostafa Mohammad Najar, was quoted by state-run television as saying the missile was “very fast,” could be produced and stored “in mass” and was easy to prepare for launching. Its launcher could immediately be removed from the firing location, he said.

The state television showed Mr. Najar praying before giving the order to fire. The missile was shown rising from a launching pad in a desert area and leaving a white trail in the sky.

Mr. Najar said the test had been planned for months and had nothing to do with any recent international developments.

“This missile gives our military force a new capability,” he said. “It was produced as part of our deterrent policy. It will be for peace and security in the region, and we will only use it against enemies who invade the Islamic Republic.” He did not refer to any specific country.

The news of the launching emerged a day after Iranian news media said that the Revolutionary Guards had test fired another new missile, known as the Samen, in the western city of Merivan, near the border with Iraq, on Monday.

Iran is locked in a long-running dispute with the United States and other powers over its nuclear enrichment program. While Western nations suspect that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon, Iran says it is enriching uranium solely for civilian purposes.

In the past, Iran has announced new developments in missile technology in a manner that Westerners interpreted as saber-rattling to bolster its regional and international posture.

Last July during a war game, Iran's Revolutionary Guards test fired nine missiles, including at least one that the government in Tehran described as having the range to reach Israel.

At the time, state-run news media said the missiles were long- and medium-range weapons, and included a Shahab-3, which Tehran maintains can hit targets up to 1,250 miles away from its firing position. Parts of western Iran are within 650 miles of Tel Aviv.

Iran's missile capacity is cited by the United States as one reason for an American plan to station an antimissile shield in eastern Europe — a project that has enraged Russia. In response, Moscow said last week that it would station short-range missiles in its Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad if the United States went ahead with its plan.

Mr. Lennox, the editor of Jane's Strategic Weapons Systems, said the new missile's claimed range would not reach eastern Europe. “The worry would be that it would be used against Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Israel — anyone in the region the Iranians took a dislike to,” he said by telephone.

The latest Iranian reports of missile test firings came after Iran said last week that American helicopters were spotted flying close to Iranian airspace.

The Bush administration has consistently refused to rule out military action against Iran's nuclear facilities. But President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insisted on Wednesday that Iran would continue to seek access to “nuclear technology's know-how.”

He also suggested that Iran would look closely for any shift in American policy following the election of Senator Barack Obama as president. “It doesn't make a difference who comes and who leaves,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said in a speech broadcast live on state-run television from the northern city of Sari. “It is actions that will be carefully watched by Iranians and other nations in the world.”

According to the IRNA news agency, he continued: “Whoever talks with the great people of Iran with the language of force or in a rude, selfish and impolite tone would receive a clear response from the Iranian nation.”

from the Associated Press, 2008-Nov-14, by Angela Charlton, with writers Desmond Butler in Washington, Mike Eckel in Moscow and Karel Janicek in Prague contributing:

Sarkozy questions US missile shield plan

NICE, France — France's U.S.-friendly president sent a clear message Friday to the next American administration: Plans for a U.S. missile shield in Eastern Europe are misguided, and won't make the continent a safer place.

Nicolas Sarkozy also warned Russian President Dmitry Medvedev against upping tensions by deploying missiles on the borders of the European Union in response to the U.S. planned missile defense system. Medvedev urged all sides to refrain from "unilateral" moves.

Sarkozy's comments, at a summit with Medvedev, were the strongest to date by an American ally against the missile-defense plans — and undercut the rationale behind U.S. President George W. Bush's European security strategy.

The plans for using sites in Poland and the Czech Republic have infuriated Russia despite the Bush administration's insistence that they are aimed at protecting Europe from Iran.

"Deployment of a missile defense system would bring nothing to security ... it would complicate things, and would make them move backward," Sarkozy said at a news conference with Medvedev. Medvedev smiled and pointed his finger at Sarkozy in approval.

The remarks came at the end of a week in which the United States and Russia rejected each other's proposed solutions to the standoff over the missile plans, making it increasingly likely that it will not be resolved before U.S. President-elect Barack Obama takes office.

Obama has not been explicit about his intentions on European missile defense, saying it would be prudent to "explore the possibility" but expressing some skepticism about the technical capability of U.S. missile defenses.

Moscow sees the defense plans as a Cold War-style project that could eliminate Russia's nuclear deterrent or spy on its military installations. Much of Western Europe is nervous about the idea of such major defensive weaponry stationed around the continent.

But Poland and the Czech Republic, where bad memories of Soviet domination run deep, hope Obama follows through on the plans.

Czech Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for European Affairs Alexandr Vondra said in a statement he "was surprised" about Sarkozy's remarks, made at an EU-Russia summit.

"France never consulted with us such a standpoint," he said. "As far as I know a stance on the missile defense was not part of the French presidency mandate for the EU-Russia summit." France currently holds the rotating EU presidency.

Sarkozy said he was worried about Russia's threat to deploy short-range Iskander missiles near Poland in response to the U.S. move.

"We could continue between Europe and Russia to threaten each other with shields, with missiles, with navies," he said. "It would do Russia no good, Georgia no good and Europe no good."

Medvedev suggested deploying missiles in the Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad in a speech hours after Obama's election. Medvedev and other Kremlin officials later backed off slightly, and earlier this week Medvedev suggested that if Washington halts its plans, Moscow would do the same.

Sarkozy said he would discuss the missile issue with NATO counterparts at a summit early next year and proposed a pan-European security conference after that, under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Russia and the United States are members of the OSCE.

Medvedev welcomed the idea, and suggested Russia would wait to decide on its missile deployment until then.

"We should stay away from any unilateral moves" until the conference is held, he said.

Sarkozy has generally been hawkish on Iran and allied himself more closely with Bush than his predecessor Jacques Chirac. But Sarkozy is also clearly looking ahead to his relations with Bush's successor.

Medvedev stuck to Russia's stance. He suggested that the Russian threat to install missiles in the Baltic Sea region of Kaliningrad — announced just hours after Obama's election — was "a response to the behavior of certain European states that agreed to deploy new (missile defenses) on their own territories without consulting anyone."

Friday's summit made a key step toward rapprochement between Russia and the European Union: The EU announced the resumption of partnership talks with Russia that had been put on hold because of the war in Georgia.

Critics, including the United States and Georgian governments and human rights groups, say it is too soon to forgive Russia, in effect, when Russian troops remain implanted and unchecked in the two breakaway Georgian provinces at the core of the war.

Sarkozy, temporarily in charge of the 27-nation EU, insisted that the resumption wasn't "a sign of weakness."

He and Medvedev remained divided, though, over the continuing presence of Russian troops.

The European Union is Russia's No. 1 customer and No. 1 investor, and heavily dependent on Russian energy. With the world financial crisis shaking markets in Europe and beyond, officials of the 27-nation EU say reaching out to Moscow is crucial to ensuring stability and to keeping Russia from shutting off its economy to outsiders.

Medvedev pointed on Friday to the lucrative trade between the EU and Russia, worth hundreds of billions of euros annually.

"We should think of this when we make decisions on all cooperation," he said.

The EU-Russia talks, launched in 2007, aim for an agreement that would increase economic integration, tighten relations on justice and security and boost cooperation in education and science. U.S. diplomats warned European officials that the resumed talks could undermine Western attempts to rein in the Kremlin's aggressive foreign policy.

Sarkozy and Medvedev left France for Washington, where they will join Bush and other world leaders seeking a new financial architecture.

from Commentary Magazine, 2008-Nov, preview retrieved 2008-Oct-23, by Peter Wehner:

Liberals and the Surge

In early January 2007, 71 percent of Americans said the Iraq war was going moderately badly to very badly. Indeed, the war had been unpopular for much of the previous years, at times deeply so. But by this past September, a nationwide Pew survey found “a striking rise in public optimism about the situation in Iraq.” According to the poll, 58 percent of Americans now believe the war in Iraq is going well or very well, and the same percentage now also say that the U.S. will definitely or probably succeed in Iraq.

This news is encouraging—and not terribly surprising. After all, most Americans have assessed the situation in Iraq based on a reasonable interpretation of events on the ground. And since the January 2007 announcement of the “surge”—President Bush’s decision to deploy 30,000 additional troops to Iraq, armed with a fundamentally new counterinsurgency strategy—the situation on the ground has, by every conceivable measure, improved. In some cases, the progress has been stunning.

And yet, no matter what most American believe or what reality tells us is so, leading liberal observers and politicians, long in the vanguard of opposition to the war, have denounced the surge at every point. Even as some, in the face of overwhelming evidence, have been forced to concede a modicum of American progress, they have done so reluctantly and have downplayed the role played by administration policy in achieving that progress. Others have denied that significant progress has been made at all.

Why they have responded in this way is a question worth exploring. But first it may be useful to establish the record.

_____________

 

The formal inauguration of the surge in January 2007—in announcing it, the President said it would “change America’s course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror”—was met by liberal commentators with a skepticism bordering on derision.

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post mocked Bush’s “fantasy-based escalation . . . which could only make sense in some parallel universe where pigs fly and fish commute on bicycles.” At Time, Joe Klein ridiculed “Bush’s futile pipe dream.” Jonathan Chait, writing in the Los Angeles Times, found “something genuinely bizarre” about those Americans who actually supported the new strategy. “It is not just that they are wrong. . . . It’s that they are completely detached from reality.” The New Republic’s Peter Beinart predicted that, by 2008, American soldiers would “still be dying, and the catastrophe will still be deepening.” In sending more troops to Baghdad, Beinart wrote, “Bush is showing his commitment to win—except that the United States has already lost.”

Liberal politicians were just as certain that the surge was a doomed and irresponsible policy. On the night of the announcement, Senator Barack Obama proclaimed: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” Later in the month, Senator Joseph Biden declared: “If he surges another 20, 30 [thousand], or whatever number he’s going to, into Baghdad, it’ll be a tragic mistake.” Senator Hillary Clinton similarly insisted that “I cannot support [the] proposed escalation of the war in Iraq,” while Senator John Kerry said that sending in additional troops was not an “answer” but “a tragic mistake.”

Throughout the spring, even though the full complement of additional troops had yet to arrive in Iraq, the drumbeat of opposition continued, and so did intimations of American defeat. To Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, “the [American] lives lost in Iraq were wasted.” Former Ambassador Peter Galbraith, writing in the New York Review of Books, argued that Bush had embraced a plan that “has no chance of actually working. At this late stage, 21,500 additional troops cannot make a difference.” On Capitol Hill, Senator Christopher Dodd asserted that “there is no military solution in Iraq. To insist upon a surge is wrong.” Senate majority leader Harry Reid declared that “this surge is not accomplishing anything” and in April announced flatly that the Iraq war was “lost.”

_____________

 

Two months later, liberal critics of the war remained of the same mind, and were now demanding that we quit the field altogether. According to a July 8 New York Times editorial, the time had come “for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.” (This, despite the paper’s acknowledgment in the same editorial that an American pullout was likely to yield “further ethnic cleansing, even genocide,” not to mention regional chaos and more terrorism.) James Fallows of the Atlantic, a sharp critic of the surge from the outset, wrote that the expectations “being heaped” on it were “simply laughable.”

In August, Michael Ignatieff, formerly of Harvard and now deputy leader of Canada’s Liberal party, took to the pages of the New York Times Magazine with a mea culpa titled “Getting Iraq Wrong: What the War Has Taught Me About Political Judgment.” Ignatieff wrote:

The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a President. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the [2003] invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.

In fact, however, far from having turned into an “unfolding catastrophe,” the dream was already getting closer to realization. By the summer of 2007, although Iraq was still in many ways a broken nation, evidence was mounting that the surge was working. In almost no time, sectarian violence had been sharply decreased in Baghdad, and the provinces of Anbar and Diyala were being reclaimed. Coalition forces were making huge headway in human intelligence, and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was on the run.

In September, a full report on the situation was delivered by David Petraeus, the military architect of the surge and the new commanding general in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Both men had traveled to Washington to provide two days of congressional testimony.

Petraeus and Crocker reported that civilian Iraqi deaths in all categories had declined by more than 45 percent since the height of sectarian violence the previous December. During the same period, the number of overall ethno-sectarian deaths had decreased by more than half in the country as a whole, and by about 70 percent in Baghdad. In Anbar province, thanks in large part to the turn against AQI by local Anbaris, car bombings and suicide attacks had declined in each of the previous five months. Likewise, the number of areas in which AQI enjoyed sanctuary had been considerably reduced. Even the political front showed advances, with heartening early signs of a bottom-up reconciliation of hitherto warring Iraqi factions.

While both Petraeus and Crocker were careful not to overstate the degree of progress in Iraq, and reminded everyone who would listen that the country remained a fragile place, they left no doubt of their belief that, in the words of Crocker, “a secure, stable, democratic Iraq at peace with its neighbors is attainable.”

But none of this mattered to the administration’s liberal critics, who to their earlier prognosis of failure were now adding charges of government cooking of the evidence. Even before the Petraeus-Crocker testimony, Senator Dick Durbin, the Democratic majority whip, warned Americans that “by carefully manipulating the statistics, the Bush-Petraeus report will try to persuade us that violence in Iraq is decreasing and thus the surge is working.” After the hearing, Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts said the general’s testimony was “just a façade to hide from view the continuing failure of the Bush administration’s strategy.” To Representative Rahm Emanuel, the general’s written report deserved to win “the Nobel Prize for creative statistics or the Pulitzer for fiction.”

Paul Krugman, an influential columnist for the New York Times, could not have agreed more. The administration, he flatly asserted, was intentionally misleading the public by “creating the perception that the ‘surge’ is succeeding, even though there’s not a shred of verifiable evidence to suggest that it is.” Others were even more reckless. A Democratic Senator complained to the website Politico that no one was willing to call Petraeus “a liar on national TV,” hoping instead that “outside groups will do this for us.” As if in response, MoveOn.org, the left-wing political-action committee, promptly took out a full-page ad in the New York Times proposing, in giant type, a new name for General Petraeus: “General Betray Us.”

_____________

 

In November 2007, two months after Petraeus and Crocker testified, Barack Obama was still arguing that the surge was having the opposite effect from the one they had described: “not only have we not seen improvements, but we’re actually worsening, potentially, a situation there.” Representative David Obey, asked if the surge strategy was working, offered the novel view that if violence was in fact decreasing, it might be because the insurgents were “running out of people to kill.”

True, such palterings were becoming a little harder to sustain. The Washington Post, for one, was ready to conclude in a mid-November editorial that “the ‘surge’ of U.S. military forces in Iraq this year has been, in purely military terms, a remarkable success.” And not only in military terms:  “Markets in Baghdad are reopening, and the curfew is being eased; the huge refugee flow out of the country has begun to reverse itself.” By the end of 2007, there was no question that Iraq, which a year earlier had been on the brink of implosion, was now on the mend. Attacks against citizens in Baghdad had dropped by almost 80 percent since November 2006, murders in Baghdad province had decreased by 90 percent, and roadside bombings had declined by approximately 70 percent. In the Dura market in southern Baghdad, where fewer than a handful of shops had been open in January 2007 there were now 500 in operation. As Joseph Fil, commanding general of the multinational division in Baghdad, reported, “many Iraqis now can shop without fearing for their lives.”

Nevertheless, in a January 2008 debate, the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination—Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards—still refused to reassess their stance on the surge. Instead, they silently dropped the subject in favor of re-emphasizing their commitment to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq and their unchanged opposition to the presence of any permanent bases there.

Others were not quite so ready to abandon their conviction that the surge itself had failed, even if that meant moving the goalposts on the definition of success. In February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, questioned on her unbending insistence that American troops must begin an immediate and massive withdrawal from Iraq, was asked by the CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer: “Are you not worried that all the gains that have been achieved over the past year might be lost?” Pelosi replied: “There haven’t been gains, Wolf. The gains have not produced the desired effect, which is the reconciliation of Iraq. This is a failure. This is a failure.” In the Washington Post, the writer Michael Kinsley rang an inventive change on the same motif: the surge was a failure, he reasoned, because even though violence was down, and even though political progress was being made, the number of American troops was still roughly where it was when the surge was announced—as if the achievements produced by those troops were somehow disconnected from their presence.

In early April of this year, Petraeus and Crocker made a return appearance on Capitol Hill. By then, some liberal politicians were reluctantly conceding security gains, but insisted they were evanescent and therefore unimportant—“very nice to have,” in the words of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, “but essentially . . . meaningless.” To the columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., the problem now was that “the administration and its supporters talk incessantly about winning but offer no strategy for victory.” In doing so, he continued, they “resemble their own parody of liberal do-gooders insisting on continuing flawed and foolish programs no matter how obvious it becomes that their efforts are doing more harm than good.”

_____________

 

More harm than good? In his April testimony, while stipulating that “the situation in certain areas is still unsatisfactory and innumerable challenges remain,” Petraeus presented an avalanche of statistics illustrating the degree to which “security in Iraq is better than it was when Ambassador Crocker and I reported to you last September, and . . . significantly better than it was 15 months ago when Iraq was on the brink of civil war and the decision was made to deploy additional U.S. forces to Iraq.” To which Crocker added:

Last September, I said that the cumulative trajectory of political, economic, and diplomatic developments in Iraq was upward, although the slope of that line was not steep. Developments over the last seven months have strengthened my sense of a positive trend.

Which did not stop Barack Obama from taking to the op-ed page of the New York Times two months later to insist that “the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true.” A week later, ABC’s Terry Moran asked Obama if, knowing what he knew now, would he support it? Obama’s answer was “No.” That is, he was still against the surge despite his own belated acknowledgment that it had, in fact, “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.” In the effort to reconcile this blatant contradiction—akin to a diagnostician’s continuing to oppose the treatment that made the patient well—he twisted himself into an intellectual pretzel, asserting that the decrease in violence was the result not of any new American strategy but of “political factors inside Iraq that came right at the same time.” A similar counterfactual claim would later be made by Bob Woodward in his new book The War Within and by Peter Galbraith in the New York Review. In Galbraith’s summary judgment, “less violence . . . is not the same thing as success,” and in any case the surge “has not been the main reason for the decline in violence.”

And so it goes. By the time General Petraeus handed over the flag of his command to General Raymond Odierno in September, the situation in Iraq had been utterly transformed. Not only had overall violence in Iraq declined to almost “normal” levels,* and not only were Iraqi security forces growing in numbers and effectiveness as threats from al-Qaeda and Shiite militias decreased, but Iraq’s political leaders had also reached comprehensive domestic accommodations, passing key laws in the areas of provincial elections, the distribution of resources, amnesty, pensions, investment, and de-Baathification. Also in September, Iraq’s parliament passed a crucial election law that, according to a story in the New York Times, “represents a significant achievement for a country that has more often resorted to violence than political negotiation in resolving its differences.”

Petraeus once described Iraq as “hard but not hopeless.” Today, he says Iraq is “hard but hopeful.” That statement would seem beyond dispute.

Not, however, to the war’s liberal critics.

_____________

 

Those critics, in the piercing phrase of Senator Joseph Lieberman, “hear no progress in Iraq, see no progress in Iraq, and most of all, speak of no progress in Iraq.” So hermetically sealed off from reality are they that even Charles Peters, the founder of the liberal Washington Monthly, was driven to write as long ago as last December:

I have been troubled by the reluctance of my fellow liberals to acknowledge the progress made in Iraq in the last six months, a reluctance I am embarrassed to admit that I have shared. . . . [T]he fact is that the situation in Iraq, though some violence persists, is much improved since the summer. Why do liberals not want to face this fact, let alone ponder its implications?

Why, indeed? And, if reluctant in December 2007, why are most still reluctant today?

A generous interpretation is that by the end of 2006, many liberals had made a definitive good-faith judgment that the Iraq war was irretrievably lost. This then became the filter through which they viewed all later developments. Once convinced of the impossibility of substantial progress, never mind a decent outcome or an actual victory, they could not help receiving good news as anomalous and/or inherently unsustainable.

But the generous interpretation may be too generous, and also condescending. Reasonable and responsible adults are expected to assess the solidity of their convictions against the available evidence and in light of changing circumstances. Even at the time of the surge’s announcement, when things were going quite badly, should responsible adults not have been able to entertain the possibility that, given the enormity of what was at stake in the war, a fundamentally new approach merited at least a degree of support, however hesitant or conditional?

Instead, many pronounced the new approach a failure even before it was tried. Still worse was that they continued to pronounce it a failure even as the evidence began to amass that it was succeeding. Even those few who (like Richard Cohen and Joe Klein) eventually admitted they were wrong about the surge itself continued to insist they were right about the war. Others stuck more and more zealously to their original position the more it became falsified by reality. They, and not the President, were the ones who were truly “doubling down” on their bet—as if a decent outcome in Iraq threatened their entire worldview.

Nor was their blindness limited to the good news occurring in the lives of Iraqis. They seemed no less blind to the huge drop in American combat deaths. Those deaths, after all, had been said to be among the core concerns of the anti-surge critics, who along with their allies in the media had been focusing relentless attention on the numbers of American casualties in Iraq. Yet little was now made of the fact that—to take just one example—there were but five U.S. combat deaths in Iraq in July 2008. (The previous monthly low had been eight in May 2003, after the invasion.)

Nor, finally, has much if anything been made of the fact that coalition forces have drawn down significantly. All five of the U.S. combat brigades committed to the surge, as well as two Marine battalions and the Marine Expeditionary Unit, have withdrawn. One could not ask for a clearer sign that the surge has been achieving one of the key declared objectives of the anti-war critics themselves—namely, a reduction of American combat troops in Iraq. It is a sign that remains, for the critics, all but unnoticed.

_____________

 

Enter, ignominiously, politics. For some liberals, hatred of the President was clearly so all-encompassing that they had developed a deep investment in the failure of what they habitually dismissed not as America’s war but as “Bush’s war.” To an extent, this passion was driven by merely partisan considerations: Iraq had become a superbly effective instrument with which to bludgeon Republicans. It had helped the Democrats take control of both the House and the Senate in 2006; might not a thorough “Republican” defeat in Iraq lastingly reshape the political landscape in their favor?

This is, admittedly, an unpleasant line of speculation, and those foolhardy enough to venture upon it have been loudly condemned for questioning the patriotism of their political adversaries. But patriotism is not the issue—judgment is. When politicians acting in good faith misjudge a situation, nothing prevents them from acknowledging their error and explaining themselves. For the most part, we await such acknowledgments in vain.

In partial extenuation, it might be contended that politicians have an elementary obligation to be responsive to the opinions of their constituents; since Iraq had become a certifiably unpopular cause, stepping out of line on the issue was likely to be regarded as an offense punishable at the polls. But what, then, are we to say of the opinion shapers, the editorial writers of our great newspapers, the essayists and columnists and book authors who, unconstrained by petty interest, present themselves as stalwartly independent spirits willing to follow the truth wherever it may lead? What was at work in them when the evidence of American progress—which started as a trickle, and then became a river, and eventually became a flood—could no longer be denied? For not only did they continue to deny it, but they actively promoted an alternative policy of withdrawal and retreat that would have made an American defeat, and a jihadist and Iranian victory, inevitable. Is it not fair to say that what was at work in them was an ideological antipathy not just to an American President, but to America’s cause?

Fortunately, as I noted at the outset,  Americans at large are not so ready to deny the evidence of their senses, and appear open to reasoned argument on the basis of that evidence. For a political leader in high office, this is a great blessing. Some eyes will refuse to open and some ears will refuse to hear and some voices will always be raised high in derision. To act rightly in such circumstances is difficult and often enormously costly; but it is the very essence of leadership. If a leader’s decision is wise, there are grounds for hoping that in time this wisdom will be vindicated and, perhaps, recognized—even in the case of a war once massively unpopular but now winnable.

Footnotes

* According to the quarterly report submitted to Congress by the Department of Defense in September, “security incidents” in Iraq are at levels not seen since early 2004. Across Iraq, civilian deaths have declined by 77 percent since the same period in 2007, and ethno-sectarian-related deaths by 96 percent. Eleven of Iraq's eighteen provinces are now under local Iraqi control.

About the Author

Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., served in the Bush White House as director of the office of strategic initiatives.

from the American Spectator, 2008-Oct-15, by George Neumayr:

Sleepwalking Toward Cultural Revolution

During a CNN/YouTube debate last year, Barack Obama took a typically evasive position on women in combat: on the one hand, he wanted to let feminists know that he agrees with them that men and women should face military conscription equally (were a draft to happen); on the other hand, he didn't want to scare the American people unduly, so he hedged a bit, "I think that if women are registered for service -- not necessarily in combat roles, and I don't agree with the draft -- I think it will help to send a message to my two daughters that they've got obligations to this great country as well as boys do."

Not necessarily in combat roles. This translates as: definitely in combat roles. Having accepted the feminist logic that a draft should expose men and women to military service equally, Obama would have no principle left to differentiate roles for the conscripted. What begins as "equal opportunity" ends as equal obligation, as already evident in the military's Rumpelstilskin-style policy of dispatching recently-pregnant soldiers to war.

In a roundabout way, Obama's campaign staff has acknowledged that Obama favors full-blown women in combat. "Women are already serving in combat [in Iraq and Afghanistan] and the current policy should be updated to reflect realities on the ground," Wendy Morigi, Obama's national security spokeswoman, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Barack Obama would consult with military commanders to review the constraints that remain."

"Reviewing the constraints that remain" means kicking the door wide open to Eleanor Smeal and company. One would think that John McCain, despite his astonishingly wan interest in cultural issues, might alert Americans to the revolution ahead, if only for rudimentary political reasons.

Moreover, here's an issue that overlaps with his cherished area of expertise, the military. Where's the "straight talk" about the foolishness of sacrificing military effectiveness for the sake of more experiments in demented definitions of equality? Where's the straight talk about how the military can't afford to lose battles for the sake of appeasing Gloria Steinem?

Obama represents the last stages of a social revolution that has been unfolding for some time, using (as the quote from his staffer above indicates) concessions granted under Republicans as a point of leverage. But he still has to be somewhat coy about these last stages of revolution, lest he frighten off ambivalent voters. His task has been made much easier by McCain's refusal to engage cultural issues seriously. McCain made a promising start with his ad exposing Obama's support for Planned Parenthood-style sex-ed propaganda in elementary schools. But there's been almost no follow-up.

The Republican presidential nominee can't even rouse himself to condemn loudly the Connecticut State Supreme Court for imposing gay marriage on voters there -- a story now so routine in the minds of reporters and pols that the Washington Post placed it on A2.

Under Obama, recognition of gay marriage will probably expand from three states to thirty. Like John Kerry, he goes through the throat-clearing rigamarole of saying that he's opposed to gay marriage, but he isn't. Were he opposed to gay marriage, he wouldn't be sending out letters to gay-rights activists congratulating them on their new marriage licenses; he wouldn't consider Bill Clinton's Defense of Marriage act reactionary; he wouldn't send his wife out to applaud gay-rights activists for torpeoding gay-marriage bans; he wouldn't have included in his memoirs passages in which he roots for history to prove him excessively slow in accepting the concept.

He's "not necessarily" for women drafted into combat and not necessarily against it. Likewise, he's not necessarily for gay marriage and not necessarily against it. Shouldn't McCain ask the American people during Wednesday's debate if they want the last stages of social revolution?

That's what they will get. The triumvirate of Obama, Pelosi and Reid means national gay marriage, an expanded culture of women in combat, and much more. The first hundred days under Bill Clinton were pretty ridiculous, full of outlandish comments and false starts toward radicalism. But they will look tame in comparison to Obama's.

from Macleans, 2006-May-15, by Michael Friscolanti:

'We were abandoned'
An elite unit of snipers went from standouts to outcasts -- victims, many say, of a witch hunt driven by jealousy and fear

Lying low beside the rifle, his stomach touching the ground, Cpl. Rob Furlong concentrated hard on his breathing. In, out. In, out. In, out. Deep, but not too deep. Slow, but not too slow. The tiniest twitch -- a heavy exhale, perhaps, or a breath held one second too long -- could jerk his weapon ever so slightly, turning a sure hit into a narrow miss. In the sniping world, where one shot should always equal one kill, steady breathing is just as crucial as steady aim.

On that March afternoon in 2002, Cpl. Furlong squinted through the scope of his McMillan Tac-50, a sleek bolt-action rifle almost as long as he is. In his crosshairs were three men, each lugging weapons toward an al-Qaeda mortar nest high in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Master Cpl. Tim McMeekin, hunkered behind his fellow sniper, saw the same trio through the lens of his Vector, a binocular-like device that uses a laser to pinpoint targets thousands of metres away. Speaking quietly, both soldiers agreed on the obvious: take out the biggest threat first, in this case the man in the middle carrying the RPK machine gun. According to the Vector, he was exactly 2,430 m away -- nearly 2 1/2 kilometres.

A Newfoundland boy with pale blue eyes and a chiselled frame, Furlong adjusted the elevation knob on his scope, the barrel of his gun pointing higher and higher with each turn. He knew the routine, had practised it a thousand times back at the base in Edmonton. The farther away the target, the higher the rifle should point. Wind blowing to the left? Aim slightly right. Most snipers will tell you it's not much different than a golfer and his caddie lining up a long putt. Calculation. Instinct. And a little bit of luck. "You can teach a certain amount of it," Furlong says. "But there is a large percentage that you must have naturally. A good shooter is born. You can't teach someone to be a good shot if they don't naturally have it."

The 26-year-old stared through the scope, his left finger tickling the trigger. In, out. In, out. Behind him, McMeekin gazed through his Vector, reconfirming the precise distance one last time. "Stand by," Furlong said.

The first shot missed. A second round missed too, but not by much. It pierced the man's backpack. "They had no fear," Furlong recalls of his target. "They didn't run. I guess they've just been engaged so many times." He immediately reloaded the chamber and lined up his rifle for a third try, checking to make sure his grip was flawless. Furlong knew exactly why that second shot missed; instead of following a perfectly straight line, he had squeezed the trigger a tiny smidgen to one side. Even a fraction of a millimetre can make a huge difference on the other end -- in this case, the difference between a man's knapsack and his heart.

"Stand by," Furlong said again. Another loud pop echoed through the valley, sending a .50-calibre shell -- rocket-shaped, almost as long as a beer bottle -- slicing through the Afghan sky. Four seconds later, it tore into the man's torso, ripping apart his insides.

By that point, Rob Furlong, Tim McMeekin and three other Canadian sharpshooters -- Graham Ragsdale, Arron Perry and Dennis Eason -- had spent nearly a week in the rugged terrain of Afghanistan's Shahikot Valley, reaching out and touching the enemy from distances even they had never trained for. But that shot was something special. Rob Furlong had just killed another human being from 2,430 m, the rough equivalent of standing at Toronto's CN Tower and hitting a target near Bloor Street. It was -- and still is -- the longest-ever recorded kill by a sniper in combat, surpassing the mark of 2,250 m set by U.S. Marine Gunnery Sgt. Carlos Hathcock during the Vietnam War.

It should have been a moment of pride for the Canadian army. Five of its most talented snipers -- men trained to kill without remorse, then turn around and kill again -- did exactly that. They destroyed al-Qaeda firing positions, saved American lives and tallied a body count unmatched by any Canadian soldier of their generation. U.S. commanders who served alongside the snipers nominated all five for the coveted Bronze Star medal. "Thank God the Canadians were there," is how one American soldier put it.

Yet days later, their heroics on the mountain would be overshadowed by suspicion, including stunning allegations that one sniper, in a subsequent mission, sliced himself a souvenir from the battlefield: the finger of a dead Taliban fighter. Military police launched a criminal investigation, but uncovered nothing but denials. As the months wore on, there emerged so many conflicting accusations and supposed explanations that no charges were ever laid. Even Rob Furlong's record-breaking shot became lost in the confusion. In fact, until now, a different sniper has been widely -- and incorrectly -- credited with pulling the trigger on that long-distance kill.

Today, more than four years later, three of the five decorated snipers who served in Afghanistan are no longer in the army, brushed aside by a military machine that seemed all too willing to watch them go. Persecuted instead of praised, they fell victim to what many still believe was a witch hunt driven by jealousy and political correctness. Arron Perry was pushed out the door. Furlong left on his own, so disillusioned that he could barely stomach the thought of putting on his uniform. Graham Ragsdale -- the leader of the unit -- suffered perhaps the worst fate. Stripped of his command and later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, he has spent the ensuing years battling deep depression.

How those snipers went from standouts to outcasts is now the focus of another investigation, this one by Yves Côté, the Canadian Forces' independent ombudsman. For more than 19 months, his staff has revisited the saga, trying to determine whether the army's chain of command deserves some of the blame for the demise of a few good men. An answer is expected in the coming weeks.

"It's sad to see what happened over there," Furlong says now, recalling how the accusations ripped apart his unit. "It took the shine off what really took place there, and I think in the long run destroyed people's lives."

It was still dark on March 3, 2002, when hundreds of camouflaged troops piled into the Chinook helicopters humming on the runway at Bagram Airfield. Dressed in full battle rattle, their pockets and rucksacks stuffed with food and ammunition, the soldiers were minutes away from being dropped into the heart of America's boldest combat mission in more than a decade.

Among those waiting to climb aboard the choppers was a small contingent of Canadians, including Master Cpl. Graham Ragsdale. "Rags," as the boys called him, was the leader of a small cell of snipers, part of the 3rd Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. He was a popular boss, revered as much for his patience as for his talents with a rifle. "I only wished that I could have an ounce of his knowledge," one fellow soldier recalls. Those who knew Rags best considered him a shoo-in to one day reach the rank of "master sniper," a fraternity that includes barely two dozen sharpshooters in the entire Canadian army.

Ragsdale's unit was a tight-knit bunch, a small group of Type A personalities who respected one another simply for having reached the rank of sniper. Completing the training course -- a gruelling combination of classroom work and on-the-job drills -- is so demanding that in a typical batch of a dozen recruits, maybe three or four will walk away with a passing grade. The few who make the cut share a special bond.

That bond soon extended to Afghanistan, where 900 Canadian soldiers deployed as part of the U.S.-led retribution for Sept. 11. Like most of the troops, Ragsdale's sniper cell spent its first few weeks in theatre guarding the fenced perimeter of Kandahar Airfield. It was mind-numbing work. For days on end, they stood watch in the towers, their .50-calibre rifles ready to engage an enemy that never appeared. But as February blended into March, the brass ordered the snipers to pack. They were flying north to Bagram, hand-picked as Canada's lone contribution to Operation Anaconda.

Simply put, the goal of Anaconda was to kill or capture al-Qaeda and Taliban warriors cloaked in the Shahikot Valley, an enemy hideout protected by towering snow-capped mountains and sympathetic locals. U.S. special forces, bolstered by a small army of Afghan fighters, were to do most of the fighting, while hundreds of other conventional troops would guard any possible escape routes. After weeks of precision air assaults, Anaconda would be the biggest ground offensive in the war on terror. The Canadian snipers were asked to come along, just in case. "It was incredible," recalls Master Cpl. Arron Perry, who was among the Canadians squished inside a Chinook that morning. "We were in the right place at the right time and lucky enough to do it."

At 30, Perry was a massive man, a relentless weightlifter who moonlighted as a bouncer in downtown Edmonton. Born in Moncton, he joined the reserves at age 17, and by the time he landed in Afghanistan he had already served one tour in Croatia and two more in Bosnia. He had been a paratrooper, an instructor in unarmed combat and, most recently, a sniper. But he was also a recurring thorn in the side of his superiors, an outspoken soldier with an intimidating frame. Just weeks before deploying, his regimental sergeant major complained -- in writing -- that Perry had "an attitude problem" that "has gone unchecked for a long period of time."

Nevertheless, Perry was in Afghanistan, about to be lowered into a combat zone for the first time in his career. Following standard protocol, he would be one of three snipers working in tandem around a single, high-powered rifle. Each member of the trio was more than qualified to pull the trigger, but for this mission, Perry would be the primary shooter. Ragsdale would be his spotter. And Cpl. Dennis Eason, another Newfoundlander, would stand guard behind them -- the eyes in the back of their heads.

Down the runway, the other half of Ragsdale's cell -- a second trio of snipers -- hauled their gear toward a separate chopper waiting in the early morning darkness. Carrying his team's .50-calibre rifle was Furlong, a soft-spoken infantryman who seemed destined for sniping from an early age. At 10 years old, back home on the East Coast, he and his friends would spread rotten fish on a piece of wood, wait for the flies to show up, then try to shoot them out of the air with their pellet guns. Born a righty, Furlong even learned to fire left-handed. It reached the point where he actually preferred it that way. In fact, when he took his sniper course in 2001, he performed all his target practice left-handed.

Furlong's spotter for Anaconda would be Master Cpl. Tim McMeekin, a Manitoba-based sniper who was seconded to the unit just before the tour. Though an outsider, McMeekin -- tall, with a rock-solid build -- fit in right away. Sgt. Zevon Durham, an American soldier, rounded out the trio.

The Chinook carrying Perry, Ragsdale and Eason twisted its way onto the mountain just before dawn. Within minutes, enemy fighters opened up, feeding the new arrivals a steady stream of small-arms and mortar fire. Perry, hauling his rifle on his back, headed for higher ground. "Anyone who says they are not scared is crazy," he recalls. "But it was great." In that first hour, Perry fired at target after target, some as far away as 1,500 m. "His shots were incredible," says Sgt. Maj. Mark Nielsen, a veteran of America's 101st Airborne Division. "One shot, one kill. If I had to send him a sweatshirt, that's what it would say."

McMeekin and Furlong were minutes behind their friends, but as their Chinook approached the landing zone, an unseen enemy opened fire. The pilots immediately veered right, turning the chopper all the way around. Furlong was furious. His friends were in the centre of a hornet's nest, and there he was, on his way back to Bagram.

When the helicopter returned to the mountain a few hours later, dozens of troops spilled out the side doors and onto the valley floor, scanning the horizon as they sprinted through the dust kicked up by the rotor blades. The enemy was nowhere to be found, but that didn't mean the troops were alone. "We were nervous," Furlong admits. "You can feel it. You know when something is wrong."

His instinct was right. As dusk approached, mortars and muzzle flashes lit up the sky, hammering the ground all around their position. Furlong planted his head in the dirt, shielding his face. "McMeekin had already started to grab the rifle and engage targets," he remembers. "The guy was an absolute machine." Amid the onslaught, the snipers pummelled at least one enemy hideout. Everyone else took cover.

For the next nine days, the Canadian snipers disposed of rival fighters with diabolical precision. They became an all-star unit of sorts, shuttled from hill to hill as needed, sometimes by foot, sometimes by four-wheeler. Their bullets destroyed enemy lookouts, protected U.S. troops as they moved through the valley, and, in those moments when all hell broke loose, annihilated the source of fire. Along the way, they reset the bar of their elite profession, breaking -- then rebreaking -- the record for longest-ever combat kill.

First it was Master Cpl. Perry, hitting an enemy forward observer from 2,310 m. Days later, Furlong took out the man with the RPK, eclipsing his friend's mark by a mere 120 m. "These guys -- regardless of what country they were from, what flag they fought under -- they were just excellent military professionals," says Capt. Justin Overbaugh, the commander of a U.S. scout platoon that worked alongside one of the sniper teams. "We didn't want to give them up. I would have brought them home with me if I could."

By the time the snipers flew back to Bagram, their American commanders were already filling out nomination forms for Bronze Stars, a U.S. medal that recognizes heroism on the battlefield. All five names were submitted up the American chain of command: Perry, Ragsdale, Eason, Furlong and McMeekin.

Lt.-Col. Pat Stogran, the Canadian commander in Afghanistan, was waiting to meet his snipers when they touched down in Bagram. He was like a proud father, boasting and patting them on the back for a job well done. All they wanted was a shower and a phone call home. They'd had neither since heading overseas more than a month earlier. Furlong was so filthy he tossed most of his clothes in the trash. "They had been on for so long they kind of stood up on their own," he laughs.

The two sniper teams had not crossed paths during the nine-day mission. Reunited, they exchanged a few hugs and a few tales. They also made a vow, promising never to reveal -- outside the circle -- how many people they actually killed. That was for them to know. To this day, none has broken that pledge.

Hours after their showers, the snipers and hundreds of their Canadian comrades departed for another mission: Operation Harpoon. Their destination was "The Whale," a mountain range where, according to intelligence reports, dozens of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters had fled for cover during Anaconda. Canadian troops were assigned to find them, but after five days of sifting through caves and blowing up bunkers, they came up empty. The few enemy fighters they did encounter were long dead.

As uneventful as the mission was, it would be that assignment -- not Operation Anaconda -- that would forever define the snipers' tour in Afghanistan. Everything they had accomplished just days earlier was about to be destroyed.

As soon as the sniper cell returned to camp, an officer pulled them aside, warning them that one of their own -- Perry -- was under investigation for allegedly desecrating an enemy corpse. Among the gruesome accusations were that he cut off a dead man's finger, stuck a cigarette in the corpse's mouth and posted a sign on his lifeless chest. "Fuck Terrorism," the note read. Military police also suspected that Perry defecated on a second body.

The allegations were devastating, not just for Perry, but for the entire team. "Five days earlier I got off the plane and was met by the colonel who said: 'You guys are outstanding,' " Furlong remembers. "And then five days later you're told you're under investigation, so everything that happens before goes to shit. You can build a hundred bridges and rob a bank, but you'll never be known as a bridge builder. You'll be known as a bank robber. It only takes one bad thing to erase every good thing you've ever done."

Lt.-Col. Stogran called in the National Investigation Service(NIS), the major crimes unit of the military's internal police agency. Investigators dove in. On March 21, 2002 -- under heavily armed guard -- a team returned to the mountain to exhume one of the two corpses at the heart of the case. They took notes, snapped photos and collected a swab of DNA. They also found the "Fuck Terrorism" sign.

As investigators searched for clues, senior officers stripped Graham Ragsdale of his command, giving control of the sniper cell to Tim McMeekin. Then the NIS showed up at Perry's tent with a search warrant, tearing apart his barracks box and seizing a knife. A Canadian chaplain later claimed that Perry swore at him in a threatening manner -- an allegation that landed the soldier under arrest for "conduct unbecoming."

Three short weeks after taking lives and saving lives in the Shahikot Valley, Arron Perry was on a plane back to Canada. His tour was over, replaced by a looming court martial. "From day one, we're taught to trust," he says. "Loyalty, loyalty, loyalty. Then all of a sudden, you're abandoned and dropped."

Two days after Perry left camp, an American general visited Kandahar Airfield to distribute Bronze Stars. Included in his box of medals were five ribbons reserved for the snipers. The awards, however, never left the package. It seemed that someone in the Canadian military refused to rubber-stamp the U.S. honour, certainly not with such a sensitive investigation going on.

American troops were irate. Why aren't the snipers standing here with us? "They represented Canada's best," Sgt. Maj. Nielsen says. "It's a grave mistake to allow something like that to go unrecognized."

Morale sunk even lower. Ragsdale, still stunned by his demotion, was crushed. As for the rest of the unit, they did little else but sit around and wait for assignments that never came. As one of them later put it: "We just breathed oxygen and collected pay."

It made for an awkward few months. While the Canadian military tiptoed around its tainted snipers, U.S. soldiers regularly stopped by their tents to say hello. Many had served in Anaconda, and they wanted to personally thank the boys for saving their asses out there. As a token of appreciation, some left behind cans of tuna or bags of Mr. Noodles -- heaven compared to standard army rations.

Allegations aside, the camp was also abuzz with whispers about Furlong's record-breaking kill. The young corporal even agreed to grant a few media interviews, but only on the condition that his name never be printed. He wanted anonymity, not recognition.

Back home in Alberta, Perry chose a different approach, going public in late April 2002. His story sparked the inevitable outrage. A court martial for swearing at a chaplain? The fact that he was a celebrated sniper -- a member of a unit that now boasted a world-record kill -- only fuelled the media circus. In interview after interview, Perry denied that he swore at the padre, saying his cuss was a general rant aimed at nobody in particular. As for the finger investigation, he was adamant that he never mistreated a corpse or staged a so-called trophy photo. He even went so far as to say that although he was innocent, he still supported the words written on that sign. Fuck Terrorism? Who can disagree with that?

When Rob Furlong returned home to Edmonton in July 2002, he and most of the other soldiers who served in Afghanistan were granted a leave of absence, a couple of months off to unwind and relax. But the NIS -- still consumed by what Perry might have done on that mountain -- repeatedly phoned Furlong at home, asking if he could drop by the base and answer just a few more questions. They were always the same. Did you see anyone cut off the corpse's finger? Who wrote the sign? Was it Perry? Like the questions, his answer never changed. I don't know what happened. Your guess is as good as mine.

The men in the sniper cell did their best to stand behind Perry. He was, after all, one of their own. Around the battalion, fellow troops quietly complained that the entire investigation was a sham, a chance for senior officers to finally do what they had always wanted: get rid of Arron Perry. Few enlisted men had more run-ins with higher-ups than he did. His personal file read like a laundry list of insubordination. Maybe this was payback for years of bad behaviour?

Perhaps, but Perry's fellow snipers took as much heat as he did -- if not more. Over and over, the NIS grilled the men behind closed doors, hoping to catch one of them in a lie. "It was a really, really hard emotional time," Furlong remembers. "We fell apart when we came back."

Furlong tried to soldier on. After Afghanistan, he had set his sights on a new goal: qualifying for special forces, perhaps a spot in the military's ultra-secret Joint Task Force Two. Everything he did -- from his workout regimen to his reading habits -- coincided with that dream. And what did the army do in return? "Harassment," he says. "There were times I'd go home and I'd tell my wife: 'Look, I can't take this anymore.' I just didn't want to put a uniform back on."

Graham Ragsdale had already reached that point. He showed up for work at the Edmonton garrison, but remained heartbroken over his demotion. "He just didn't want anything to do with anything," Furlong recalls. "His motivation to carry on was gone."

As for Arron Perry, he enjoyed a small victory in the summer of 2002, when the military announced it was dropping the lone criminal charge laid in connection with his alleged threat against the chaplain. However, he would remain suspended with pay pending the outcome of the finger investigation. Barred from the base and under strict orders not to venture outside Edmonton, Perry passed most of his nights working the door at a local club. That Christmas, he spent the holidays alone, unable to leave the city and visit his family on the East Coast. "I was treated like a second-class citizen," he says.

Two months later, on a Friday morning in early February 2003, the NIS made a sudden announcement: despite a gruelling 10-month probe, investigators failed to uncover enough evidence to lay criminal charges. They never figured out who printed the sign. They never found a finger. And most importantly, the DNA from that corpse did not match anything on Arron Perry's knife.

"At some point in any police investigation, you've got to draw a line that says, 'We believe there is adequate evidence and we're laying charges,' or, 'We don't,' " says Capt. Mark Giles, an NIS spokesman. "The evidence might be five millimetres shy or it might be miles shy." Only investigators know for sure just how shy the evidence was, but regardless, Perry was exonerated, free to put on his uniform and return to work. "It's great," he told one reporter. "I am in the clear."

With the case now closed, the military bureaucracy decided it was probably time to finally give the snipers their due. All five were awarded a Mention in Dispatches, a pin that recognized their "impressive professionalism and dedication to duty." Headquarters also approved the U.S. Bronze Stars. On Dec. 8, 2003 -- 19 months after the snipers were nominated -- Paul Cellucci, then the American ambassador to Canada, flew to Edmonton for a ceremony that was long overdue.

"The whole thing took a while, and I don't know why it took so long," Cellucci, who stepped down as envoy in March 2005, recalled recently. "We were certainly proud to honour them, and I'll just leave it to others to comment about what the Canadian government should have done."

All five members of the sniper unit stood at attention as Cellucci pinned on their medals. McMeekin. Ragsdale. Perry. Furlong. Eason. For someone who did not know better, it sure seemed like a happy ending.

It was anything but. Not only were three of those five men on their way out of the army, but countless questions remained unanswered. Did someone really chop off a finger? Did the chain of command -- petrified it might have another Somalia on its hands -- jump to conclusions? Was it retribution? Envy? Or was it really Arron Perry's fault? Did his big mouth and hard head bring everyone down with him?

Pat Ragsdale, Graham's father, wanted some answers. After the tour, he watched his son suffer through an unthinkable depression, and he wanted to know why. For months, he wrote letter after letter to government officials, from the Prime Minister to high-ranking generals. "I wasn't happy with the treatment they got in Afghanistan or the treatment they got subsequent to Afghanistan," he told one reporter.

In September 2004, Pat Ragsdale finally received a response. Gen. Ray Henault, then the chief of the defence staff, personally asked the ombudsman to launch his own investigation. Unlike the NIS version, this one would focus not on fingers and signs, but on whether the military mistreated its snipers. In other words, did these men -- lauded as heroes by the Americans but treated as criminals in Canada -- deserve better?

Amid news of the investigation, another strange development: on websites across the Internet, military buffs and bloggers began to identify Perry as the Canadian sniper who killed another man from 2,430 m. The origin of the error is unclear, although it seems that a few well-intentioned supporters simply made a wrong assumption. Others followed, bolstering his legend with each new chat room posting. "I hope the record stands forever," one American wrote.

It was only a matter of time before some in the mainstream media started to repeat the mistake, crediting Arron Perry with the longest-ever combat kill. Because the real shooter -- Rob Furlong -- chose to remain anonymous, the error was never corrected.

Rob Furlong still wears a uniform to work, but not the green army fatigues he slid on every morning for seven years. He is a police officer now, a beat cop with a side arm. He loves the new job, but not quite enough to make him forget about his time in the army. Some days, he even thinks about re-enlisting.

He never does, though. Instead, Furlong -- Bronze Star winner and Canadian war hero -- lives a life of relative anonymity. Even when his world record somehow became Perry's property, he chose to keep his mouth shut. "It's quiet professionalism," he says, his Newfoundland accent still thick after a decade in Alberta. "That's what we've always been taught."

Only now, more than four years after Anaconda, has Furlong finally agreed to show his face and tell his story. He did not go searching for the spotlight. Maclean's found him, not the other way around. "Me coming here today was not to seek credit for anything, and I want that to be known," he says, sitting in a small Edmonton hotel room. "Do I care? No, I really don't. Do I need to set the record straight by saying that I was the one who pulled the trigger when that shot was made? No, I don't."

What he does say is typical Rob Furlong. The entire sniper cell -- not him -- should have been credited with the record. No names. No fame. "It's not going to make a difference if Ragsdale did it or Perry did it or I did it or McMeekin did it or Eason did it," he says. "It doesn't matter who did it. That guy was taken out and he didn't have an opportunity to kill anybody else, and that was it."

If Furlong holds any grudge, it is against the NIS, not Arron Perry. For months, he watched his once-proud unit crumble to pieces -- all because of allegations that, in the end, were never proven. Along the way, one of his closest friends, Ragsdale, plummeted into such a state of despondency that the army no longer wanted him around.

"They kicked him to the curb," he says of his one-time pal. "The way the military is -- and I've seen it for the seven years I was there -- they don't care what you bring to the table or how much talent you have or whatever. They'll just get someone else to replace you."

Arron Perry keeps his military files neatly organized in a light grey binder. Everything is in there. His Mention in Dispatches. Newspaper articles. Even the discipline reports, like the one outlining his "attitude problem" over the years. "I sometimes walked that line of insubordination," he admits, flipping through the pages. "I'm not perfect."

Nobody is. But in the sniping universe, Perry is as close as it comes. He is a household name, the standard by which all sharpshooters are now measured. Punch his name into Google and you will still uncover dozens of hits praising "his" kill from 2,430 m. "I don't want to talk about all that stuff," Perry says now, nodding his head from side to side. "It got so mixed up, the less said about that the better."

Looking at him, it is easy to think the worst, that he purposely lied in a desperate attempt to be something he isn't. Maybe he needed a silver lining, something positive to latch onto amid all the bad publicity. Or maybe he just liked the attention.

None of that is true, Perry insists. He never tried to mislead anyone. He never tried to hog the credit. Somebody on the Internet simply got his facts mixed up, and a few others followed suit. "They totally got it wrong," he says. "Rob's the one that made this great shot, and I wish people would understand."

Arron Perry is a fidgety man, a fast talker whose sentences spill out so

Arron Perry is a fidgety man, a fast talker whose sentences spill out so rapidly at times that he is difficult to understand. Yet he chooses his words carefully, convinced that the NIS is still after him. "They would love to see me do something bad," he says. "They would love to see me hang myself."

After investigators stopped digging, Perry stayed in the military. But the scrutiny didn't stop. His chain of command launched an internal board of inquiry into his character. Behind closed doors, witness after witness took the stand to testify. Perry was called a bully. Disrespectful. Uncontrollable. "They put a drop of water on your forehead constantly until you snap," he says.

He hit that breaking point in April 2005, opting, at 33, to retire from the service. Since then, he has started his own nightclub(it didn't last), looked for mercenary work overseas(nothing yet), and trained to be a pipefitter. That's what he is doing now, working shifts in Edmonton and pocketing decent money. Because he lasted 12 years in the army, he also collects a half-pension.

But what happened to him in Afghanistan and in the years after continues to define his life. "There is no one I trust 100 per cent," he says. "I'm going to be very upset for the rest of my life, for sure. There is no other way around it. So if that's what they were looking for, then they won."

Perry insists, as he always has, that he did nothing wrong on that mountain. The entire thing, he explains, was a case of battlefield humour gone horribly wrong. The way he remembers it, he tossed another soldier a Tootsie Roll sealed in a Ziploc baggie, joking that it was a severed finger from one of the bodies lying around. Another soldier who overheard the conversation misinterpreted the joke, Perry says. And the rest is history.

As for the cigarette and the "Fuck Terrorism" sign, Perry says hundreds of people -- officers included -- walked by that corpse, but nobody felt the need to do anything about it. "I know for a fact that I didn't do it," he says of the sign. "And to the best of my knowledge, no one from the Canadian sniper detachment did it."

By now, Perry has pleaded his case so many times to so many people that it's hard to picture him talking about anything else. When asked about the ombudsman's upcoming report, he says he is anxious to read the findings, but not overly anxious. It might bring vindication. It might not. Either way, it won't change what already happened. "I'm out of the military now," he says. "A little too late."

Pat Ragsdale has waited 18 months for the ombudsman to finish his job. He has remained patient the entire time, well aware that answers are not always easy to find. He is so committed to the process, so careful not to jeopardize the results, that he would rather wait until it is all over before offering his opinion. "If I'm not satisfied with the outcome of their report, then who knows what might happen," he says. "But in all fairness, I've got to give them the opportunity to investigate it properly and come up with their results."

In the meantime, he remains fiercely protective of his son, declining, on Graham's behalf, repeated requests for an interview. "The results of what happened to these guys has not been told to the Canadian public," is as much as he will say.(Tim McMeekin and Dennis Eason, both of whom still serve in the army, also declined to be interviewed in person for this article.)

Whatever the ombudsman concludes, it is sure to spark a wave of unwanted negative publicity for a military that is focused on its current mission in Afghanistan -- not the one that happened four years ago. It is a safe bet that officials will try to counter any potential criticism by insisting that things have changed, that important lessons have been learned since those snipers boarded the choppers for Operation Anaconda.

Indeed, much has changed. Four years later, the Canadian public has grown increasingly desensitized to flag-draped coffins and military funerals. With 2,300 troops now back in Kandahar, newspapers are filled with almost daily accounts of violent gun battles and enemy body counts. Not so in 2002. Of all the Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, the snipers were the only ones to actually kill rival fighters -- a reality that the military seemed anxious to sugar-coat. Speaking to the press, commanders praised the snipers for saving allied lives, not shooting people in the face.

Perhaps Ragsdale and his men would have been better suited to today's deployment, where political correctness is not the overriding order of the day. Perhaps the ombudsman will say exactly that when he finally unveils his findings in the coming weeks. His report is nearly complete, but Gordon O'Connor, the defence minister, will have a chance to review the results before the public gets a glimpse.

For his part, Mark Giles, the NIS spokesman, says he is confident that the military's police force acted professionally during its investigation. There was no "vendetta" against any particular soldier, he says, and no "predetermined agenda." Every interrogation was done in the name of discovering the truth, not harassment. "Police, whether they be military or civilian police, have a tough job," he says. "So where you draw that line between what is thorough and exhaustive in an investigation and what is over the top, it's obviously fairly subjective from different people's viewpoints."

Among the American troops who served with the snipers, the viewpoint is unanimous. "These are the type of people that I would want to put up on a pedestal and say: 'This is the very best that we have to offer,' " Justin Overbaugh says. "I am not big on apologies, but if they are owed an apology, I hope that they get one. I am quite certain that is all they want."

Staff Sgt. Corey Daniel, who marched through the mountains with Perry and Ragsdale, says they deserve much more than that. "A guy goes out and puts his life on the line, and then what happens? He comes home and he's not really recognized for what he did. That's a rough pill to swallow."

from Commentary Magazine's Contentions blog, 2008-Sep-19, by Abe Greenwald:

Weakened by Words

Throughout George W. Bush’s presidency, Bush’s detractors on Capitol Hill and in the media have pushed the idea that America’s troubled war in Iraq has effectively weakened the U.S.’s standing in relation to all other countries. America has exposed itself as overconfident and incapable of standing up to committed enemies in complex regions of the world. The only way back to a position of global preeminence, goes this line of argument, is to move forward with a humble foreign policy. Rigorous diplomacy will alert the world to our readiness for fruitful partnerships once again. Our next president must let everyone know that we are done policing the world and done with our search for new enemies. As Bill Clinton put it in a recent endorsement of Barack Obama, “Our position in the world has been weakened by too much unilateralism and too little cooperation.” In Barack Obama, it is believed, we will have a leader who understands that America’s strength lies primarily in its willingness to work multilaterally and without the implicit threat of military action.

But with Iraq turning out rather differently from the way Bush’s critics suspected it would and with initiatives such as the Middle East “roadmap,” and multilateral talks with North Korea and Iran degenerating into farce, it’s time to ask the question: what has actually made the U.S. look weaker in the eyes of the world, our successful military campaign in Iraq or our string of miserable diplomatic failures? In 2003, Muammar Gaddafi gave up Libya’s WMD ambitions and agreed to full inspections and a dismantling of WMD programs. He did so because the spectacle of shock and awe in Iraq was not lost on him. And if after seeing America falter over the next few years of war he regretted his initial compliance, he was certainly over any misgivings by the summer of this year, when he warned Tehran, “In the event of a decision against Iran, this country [Iran] will suffer the same outcome as Iraq … Iran is not any stronger than Iraq and won’t have the means to resist (a military attack) on its own.” The former Libyan strongman finds the U.S. no “weaker” for having prevailed in Iraq.

He is not alone. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy decided to re-integrate France into NATO’s command structure for the first time in four decades, did he do so because he believed America’s military protection is not what it used to be? When he pledged to commit thousands more French troops to the coalition fight in Afghanistan, was this because he decided the U.S. was a weakened power not worth the sacrifice of French troops? No: he is betting on the strong horse.

When Russia invaded Georgia last month, Poland didn’t decide to fast-track its agreement to host a battery of American intercept missiles because it thought American military might was a thing of the past. Rather, the Poles understood that America remains the best hope of free nations looking for protection against antagonists. And Russia’s neighbors are not clamoring to join NATO because they think the U.S. is a country of ineffective bullies.

However, when Tehran suckered the U.S. into sending William J. Burns, the third-ranking official at the State Department, to Geneva for talks with Iran’s “nuclear negotiator” and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, that was masterful exploitation of American weakness. Playing on the U.S.’s propensity to heed international opinion and on the State Department’s inclination for diplomacy at all costs, the mullahs snagged a little legitimacy on the world stage. And the U.S. slunk back home defeated.

And soon after the Geneva fiasco, when Pyongyang elicited from Washington a vow to be taken off the U.S. terror watch list in exchange for the false promise of ending its nuclear enrichment programs, there too was an example of an America weakened by the call to diplomacy. As Max Boot mentioned earlier, North Korea toyed with us so thoroughly in that exchange, they’re no longer even pretending they care if we take them off the watch list or not.

And of course, there’s Israel and the occupied territories: the ever-unresolved diplomatic quagmire that serves as a pallet for all nations looking to aggress through sham diplomacy while benefiting from American aid. As Iran arms Gaza, President Bush and Secretary Rice make pledge after pledge on the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

The U.S.’s most immediate challenge is in Afghanistan. And we see there how the insistence on fruitless negotiations has cost the U.S. dearly. For years, we tried to cajole Islamabad to act against Islamist militants who were killing coalition forces from bases inside Pakistan’s tribal regions. This has led to an immeasurable setback in our fight against the Taliban. Only recently, having taken the fight to these militants ourselves, have we been given reason to hope for a change of fortunes.

It’s clear that global perceptions of a weakened U.S. under George W. Bush have come, not from temporary setbacks on the battlefield, but from lasting naiveté at negotiating tables. It’s also obvious that the leaders of the world recognize this, as our friends continue to seek out our military support and our enemies continue to request conversations. Yet, Democrats and the press remain unconvinced.

from Investor's Business Daily, 2008-Jun-6:

Obama's Plan To Disarm The U.S.

Defense Policy: In the middle of a war on two fronts, Barack Obama plans to gut the military. He also wants to dismantle our nuclear arsenal. And he wants to keep you in the dark about it.

The Obamatons of the mainstream media have failed to report one of the most chilling campaign promises thus far uttered by the presumptive Democrat nominee for president.

He made it before the Iowa caucus to a left-wing pacifist group that seeks to reallocate defense dollars to welfare programs. The lobbying group, Caucus for Priorities, was so impressed by Obama's anti-military offering that it steered its 10,000 devotees his way.

In a 132-word videotaped pledge (still viewable on YouTube), Obama agreed to hollow out the U.S. military by slashing both conventional and nuclear weapons.

The scope of his planned defense cuts, combined with his angry tone, is breathtaking. He sounds as if the military is the enemy, not the bad guys it's fighting. Here is a transcript:

"I'm the only major candidate who opposed this war from the beginning; and as president, I will end it.

"Second, I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending. I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems.

"I will institute an independent defense priorities board to ensure that the Quadrennial Review is not used to justify unnecessary defense spending.

"Third, I will set a goal for a world without nuclear weapons. To seek that goal, I will not develop nuclear weapons; I will seek a global ban on the production of fissile material; and I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert, and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenal."

You can bet that Obama will not make this sweeping indictment of our security forces again as he tries to move to the center in the general election. But this is what he thinks, and this is what he plans to do.

His campaign Web site doesn't list a separate category for military or defense under "Issues." But search shows near-identical language there regarding nuclear weapons.

His plan, needless to say, is frighteningly irresponsible given the world threats.

While there is fat in the defense budget, defense spending both as a share of GDP and the total federal budget are still at historically low levels, despite the war.

And while cutting fat out of the defense budget is a worthy goal, Obama would cut beyond fat to bone.

Caucus for Priorities aims to redirect 15% of the Pentagon's discretionary budget away from "obsolete Cold War weapons towards education, health care, job training, alternative energy development, world hunger and deficit-reduction."

On the chopping block: the F-22 Raptor, the V-22 Osprey, the Virginia-class sub, the DDG-1,000 destroyer and the Army's Future Combat System.

Cutting allegedly "unproven" missile defense systems is music to Kim Jong Il's and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's ears, let alone all the PLA generals wishing our destruction.

Yet Obama wants to kill a program that's yielding success after success, with both sea- and land-based systems. The military just this week intercepted a ballistic missile near Hawaii in a sea-based missile defense test.

Proposing "deep cuts in our nuclear arsenal" amounts to unilateral disarmament, and it's suicidal given China's and now Russia's aggressive military buildup.

Meanwhile, Iran and North Korea threaten nuclear madness, and Osama bin Laden dreams of unleashing a nuclear 9/11 on America.

In contrast, John McCain has vowed: "We must continue to deploy a safe and reliable nuclear deterrent, robust missile defenses and superior conventional forces that are capable of defending the United States and our allies."

We've been down this road before. President Clinton pursued a denuclearization program, including his 1995 pledge to sign a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and it led to him kicking open our nuclear labs to the Chinese, who proceeded to steal our warhead secrets and strengthen their own arsenal.

Like the Ben & Jerry's crowd that supports him, Obama believes "real" national security is "humanitarian foreign aid" — essentially using our troops as international meals-on-wheels in Africa.

We've been down that road before, too, in Somalia and elsewhere. Thanks, but we don't need a third Clinton, or a second Carter, term.

(The point of the following item is how it dovetails with the above, regarding military spending and priorities.)

from the Standard-Times of Massachusetts, 2008-Oct-24, by Steve Urbon:

Frank envisions post-election stimulus from Democrats

NEW BEDFORD — After the November election, Democrats will push for a second economic stimulus package that includes money for the states' stalled infrastructure projects, along with help paying for healthcare expenses, food stamps and extended unemployment benefits, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank said Thursday.

In a meeting with the editorial board of The Standard-Times, Rep. Frank, D-Mass., also called for a 25 percent cut in military spending, saying the Pentagon has to start choosing from its many weapons programs, and that upper-income taxpayers are going to see an increase in what they are asked to pay.

The military cuts also mean getting out of Iraq sooner, he said.

"The people of Iraq want us out, and we want to stay over their objection," he said. "It's extraordinary." The Maliki government in Iraq "can't sell (the withdrawal deal with the U.S.) because it sounds like we're going to stay too long."

"I was teasing (U.S. Rep.) Jack Murtha (a key supporter of military budgets) and I said to him, 'For the first time, somebody else has got a bill that's almost as big as yours.' We don't need all these fancy new weapons. I think there needs to be additional review."

Rep. Frank called on President Bush to appoint a senior official to guide the economic stimulus packages through the transition to the Barack Obama or John McCain administration when it takes office in January.

And he said that if the Democrats can't find an adequate agreement on a stimulus package in the lame-duck Congress, they would rather wait until the new Congress takes over — likely with many more Democrats, if polling results bear fruit in the November voting.

The new package, he said, will be aimed at easing fears about lending and investing. "The psychological problem is even worse than the real problem," he said.

"There is money to lend and projects worth borrowing money to do. But people are afraid to lend. That's what we're trying to unfreeze."

States have many infrastructure projects — bridges, highways, etc. — that have been shut down because of a cash-flow problems, he said. So it is not the case that a stimulus will take months or years to wait for design and approval, since projects are already in progress or ready to go.

Also, he said, "we'll increase the federal share of medical care so states won't have to lay off people." Unemployment insurance benefits won't increase, he said, but the period of collecting them will, and eligibility requirements might be relaxed.

And, ultimately, there will be tax increases on the upper brackets. "We'll have to raise taxes ultimately. Not now, but eventually," he said.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Oct-28, by Bret Stephens:

Will Obama Gut Defense?
Capitol Hill Democrats want to target the Pentagon.

Barney Frank will not soon be named secretary of defense or, insha'Allah, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. So there's really no reason to fear that his recent call to cut defense spending by 25% is a harbinger of what to expect in an Obama administration.

Then again, maybe there is.

When it comes to defense, there are two Barack Obamas in this race. There is the candidate who insists, as he did last year in an article in Foreign Affairs, that "a strong military is, more than anything, necessary to sustain peace"; pledges to increase the size of our ground forces by 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 Marines while providing them with "first-rate equipment, armor, incentives and training"; and seems to be as gung-ho for a surge in Afghanistan as he was opposed to the one in Iraq.

And then there is the candidate who early this year recorded an ad for Caucus for Priorities, a far-left outfit that wants to cut 15% of the Pentagon's budget in favor of "education, healthcare, job training, alternative energy development, world hunger [and] deficit reduction."

"Thanks so much for the Caucus for Priorities for the great work you've been doing," says Mr. Obama in the ad, before promising to "cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending . . . slow our development of future combat systems . . . not develop new nuclear weapons."

Joe Biden also cut an ad for the group that was even more emphatic: "I'll tell you what we cannot afford . . . a trillion-dollar commitment to 'Star Wars,' new nuclear weapons, a thousand-ship Navy, the F-22 Raptor."

Mr. Biden is right that we can't afford a thousand-ship Navy, not that anyone has proposed it. Current levels of funding don't quite suffice to operate 300 ships, or about half the number the U.S. had at the end of the Reagan arms buildup. The Navy would be satisfied with 313.

Current funding is also just adequate to purchase about 65 new planes for the Air Force each year, even as the average age of each plane creeps upward to nearly 24 years. Last year, the entire fleet of F-15Cs -- the Air Force's mainstay fighter -- was grounded after one of the planes came apart in midair. Spending on maintenance alone is up more than 80% from a decade ago. Is that another defense item Mr. Biden thinks we can't afford?

(As for nuclear weapons, the U.S. hasn't built a new warhead in decades. Its mainstay, the W76, is widely suspected of being unreliable, yet Congress has resisted funding the so-called Reliable Replacement Warhead.)

Maybe it seems odd that the Pentagon, whose budget for 2009 runs to well over $500 billion -- not including the supplemental $165 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan -- should struggle to afford the equipment it needs.

But it's not odd. We've been fighting two wars, straining people and equipment. Weapons have generally become more complex and expensive. President Clinton's "procurement holiday" punted the modernization problems to the present. And even after the Bush buildup, defense spending amounts to just 4% of gross domestic product. By contrast, at the nadir of Cold War defense spending under Jimmy Carter, the figure was 4.7%.

All this should argue for at least a modest recapitalization effort by an Obama administration, assuming it really believes a strong military is "necessary to sustain peace." A study by the Heritage Foundation makes the case that defense spending should rise to close to $800 billion over the next four years in order to stick to the 4% GDP benchmark. That's unrealistic in light of the financial crisis. But holding the line at current levels is doable -- and necessary.

But what if a President Obama doesn't actually believe in the importance of a strong military to keep the peace? Or has an attenuated idea of what qualifies as a "strong" military? Or considers military strength a luxury at a moment of financial crisis? Or thinks now is the moment to smash the Pentagon piggy bank to fund a second Great Society?

Does anyone really know where Mr. Obama's instincts lie? During the third debate, he cited former Marine Gen. James Jones as a member of his wise man's circle -- which was reassuring but odd, given that the general made a point of appearing at a McCain campaign event simply to distance himself from the Democratic candidate.

The Obama campaign has also produced a lengthy defense blueprint on its Web site. It reads more like a social manifesto, promising to "improve transition services," "make mental health a priority," and end "don't-ask, don't-tell." All very well, except the document is notably vague on naming the kinds of weapons systems Mr. Obama would actually support.

And so the question remains: If elected, which Obama do we get? The nuanced centrist or the man from Ben and Jerry's?

Some voters may like answers sometime before next Tuesday. Alternatively, they can click the button called "I'm Feeling Lucky."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Jun-17, p.A23, by John Yoo:

The Supreme Court Goes to War

Last week's Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush has been painted as a stinging rebuke of the administration's antiterrorism policies. From the celebrations on most U.S. editorial pages, one might think that the court had stopped a dictator from trampling civil liberties. Boumediene did anything but. The 5-4 ruling is judicial imperialism of the highest order.

Boumediene should finally put to rest the popular myth that right-wing conservatives dominate the Supreme Court. Academics used to complain about the Rehnquist Court's "activism" for striking down minor federal laws on issues such as whether states are immune from damage lawsuits, or if Congress could ban handguns in school. Justice Anthony Kennedy -- joined by the liberal bloc of Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer -- saves his claims of judicial supremacy for the truly momentous: striking down a wartime statute, agreed upon by the president and large majorities of Congress, while hostilities are ongoing, no less.

First out the window went precedent. Under the writ of habeas corpus, Americans (and aliens on our territory) can challenge the legality of their detentions before a federal judge. Until Boumediene, the Supreme Court had never allowed an alien who was captured fighting against the U.S. to use our courts to challenge his detention.

In World War II, no civilian court reviewed the thousands of German prisoners housed in the U.S. Federal judges never heard cases from the Confederate prisoners of war held during the Civil War. In a trilogy of cases decided at the end of World War II, the Supreme Court agreed that the writ did not benefit enemy aliens held outside the U.S. In the months after the 9/11 attacks, we in the Justice Department relied on the Supreme Court's word when we evaluated Guantanamo Bay as a place to hold al Qaeda terrorists.

The Boumediene five also ignored the Constitution's structure, which grants all war decisions to the president and Congress. In 2004 and 2006, the Court tried to extend its reach to al Qaeda terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay. It was overruled twice by Congress, which has the power to define the jurisdiction of the federal courts. Congress established its own procedures for the appeal of detentions.

Incredibly, these five Justices have now defied the considered judgment of the president and Congress for a third time, all to grant captured al Qaeda terrorists the exact same rights as American citizens to a day in civilian court.

Judicial modesty, respect for the executive and legislative branches, and pure common sense weren't concerns here either. The Court refused to wait and see how Congress's 2006 procedures for the review of enemy combatant cases work. Congress gave Guantanamo Bay prisoners more rights than any prisoners of war, in any war, ever. The justices violated the classic rule of self-restraint by deciding an issue not yet before them.

Judicial micromanagement will now intrude into the conduct of war. Federal courts will jury-rig a process whose every rule second-guesses our soldiers and intelligence agents in the field. A judge's view on how much "proof" is needed to find that a "suspect" is a terrorist will become the standard applied on the battlefield. Soldiers will have to gather "evidence," which will have to be safeguarded until a court hearing, take statements from "witnesses," and probably provide some kind of Miranda-style warning upon capture. No doubt lawyers will swarm to provide representation for new prisoners.

So our fighting men and women now must add C.S.I. duties to that of capturing or killing the enemy. Nor will this be the end of it. Under Boumediene's claim of judicial supremacy, it is only a hop, skip and a jump from judges second-guessing whether someone is an enemy to second-guessing whether a soldier should have aimed and fired at him.

President Bush has declared, rightly, that the government will abide by the decision. No American lives are yet imperiled, as the courts will have to wrestle with the cases for months, if not years. But the upshot of Boumediene is that courts will release detainees from Guantanamo Bay, or the Defense Department will do so voluntarily, in the near future.

Just as there is always the chance of a mistaken detention, there is also the probability that we will release the wrong man. As Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion notes, at least 30 detainees released from Guantanamo Bay -- with the military, not the courts, making the call -- have returned to Afghanistan and Iraq battlefields.

The Boumediene majority has two hopes for getting away with its brazen power grab. It assumes that we have accepted judicial control over virtually every important policy in our society, from abortion and affirmative action to religion. Boumediene simply adds war to the list. The justices act like we are no longer really at war. Our homeland has not suffered another 9/11 attack for seven years, and our military and intelligence agencies have killed or captured much of al Qaeda's original leadership. What's left is on the run, due to the very terrorism policies under judicial attack.

Justice Kennedy and his majority assume that terrorism is some long-term social problem, like crime, so the standard methods of law enforcement can be used to deal with al Qaeda. Boumediene reflects a judicial desire to return to the comfortable, business-as-usual attitude that characterized U.S. antiterrorism policy up to Sept. 10, 2001.

The only real hope of returning the Supreme Court to its normal wartime role rests in the November elections. Sometimes it is difficult to tell Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain apart on issues like campaign finance or global warming. But they have real differences on Supreme Court appointments. Mr. Obama had nothing but praise for Boumediene, while Mr. McCain attacked it and promised to choose judges like Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both dissenters.

Because of the advancing age of several justices (Justice Stevens is 88, and several others are above 70), the next president will be in a position to appoint a new Court that can reverse the damage done to the nation's security.

Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03.

from the Supreme Court of the United States of America, 2008-Jun-12, by Antonin Scalia:

LAKHDAR BOUMEDIENE, et al., PETITIONERS

06-1195     v.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED
STATES, et al.

KHALED A. F. AL ODAH, next friend of FAWZI
KHALID ABDULLAH FAHAD AL ODAH, et al.,
PETITIONERS

06-1196     v.

UNITED STATES et al.

on writs of certiorari to the united states court of
appeals for the district of columbia circuit

[June 12, 2008]

---

     Justice Scalia, with whom The Chief Justice, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito join, dissenting.

     Today, for the first time in our Nation's history, the Court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war. The Chief Justice's dissent, which I join, shows that the procedures prescribed by Congress in the Detainee Treatment Act provide the essential protections that habeas corpus guarantees; there has thus been no suspension of the writ, and no basis exists for judicial intervention beyond what the Act allows. My problem with today's opinion is more fundamental still: The writ of habeas corpus does not, and never has, run in favor of aliens abroad; the Suspension Clause thus has no application, and the Court's intervention in this military matter is entirely ultra vires.

     I shall devote most of what will be a lengthy opinion to the legal errors contained in the opinion of the Court. Contrary to my usual practice, however, I think it appropriate to begin with a description of the disastrous consequences of what the Court has done today.

I

     America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen. See National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 60-61, 70, 190 (2004). On September 11, 2001, the enemy brought the battle to American soil, killing 2,749 at the Twin Towers in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., and 40 in Pennsylvania. See id., at 552, n. 9. It has threatened further attacks against our homeland; one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know that the threat is a serious one. Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last week, 13 of our countrymen in arms were killed.

     The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the Nation's Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court's blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today. The President relied on our settled precedent in Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U. S. 763 (1950), when he established the prison at Guantanamo Bay for enemy aliens. Citing that case, the President's Office of Legal Counsel advised him "that the great weight of legal authority indicates that a federal district court could not properly exercise habeas jurisdiction over an alien detained at [Guantanamo Bay]." Memorandum from Patrick F. Philbin and John C. Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorneys General, Office of Legal Counsel, to William J. Haynes II, General Counsel, Dept. of Defense (Dec. 28, 2001). Had the law been otherwise, the military surely would not have transported prisoners there, but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention. Those other facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves.

     In the long term, then, the Court's decision today accomplishes little, except perhaps to reduce the well-being of enemy combatants that the Court ostensibly seeks to protect. In the short term, however, the decision is devastating. At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield. See S. Rep. No. 110-90, pt. 7, p. 13 (2007) (Minority Views of Sens. Kyl, Sessions, Graham, Cornyn, and Coburn) (hereinafter Minority Report). Some have been captured or killed. See ibid.; see also Mintz, Released Detainees Rejoining the Fight, Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2004, pp. A1, A12. But others have succeeded in carrying on their atrocities against innocent civilians. In one case, a detainee released from Guantanamo Bay masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese dam workers, one of whom was later shot to death when used as a human shield against Pakistani commandoes. See Khan & Lancaster, Pakistanis Rescue Hostage; 2nd Dies, Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2004, p. A18. Another former detainee promptly resumed his post as a senior Taliban commander and murdered a United Nations engineer and three Afghan soldiers. Mintz, supra. Still another murdered an Afghan judge. See Minority Report 13. It was reported only last month that a released detainee carried out a suicide bombing against Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, Iraq. See White, Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack, Washington Post, May 8, 2008, p. A18.

     These, mind you, were detainees whom the military had concluded were not enemy combatants. Their return to the kill illustrates the incredible difficulty of assessing who is and who is not an enemy combatant in a foreign theater of operations where the environment does not lend itself to rigorous evidence collection. Astoundingly, the Court today raises the bar, requiring military officials to appear before civilian courts and defend their decisions under procedural and evidentiary rules that go beyond what Congress has specified. As The Chief Justice's dissent makes clear, we have no idea what those procedural and evidentiary rules are, but they will be determined by civil courts and (in the Court's contemplation at least) will be more detainee-friendly than those now applied, since otherwise there would no reason to hold the congressionally prescribed procedures unconstitutional. If they impose a higher standard of proof (from foreign battlefields) than the current procedures require, the number of the enemy returned to combat will obviously increase.

     But even when the military has evidence that it can bring forward, it is often foolhardy to release that evidence to the attorneys representing our enemies. And one escalation of procedures that the Court is clear about is affording the detainees increased access to witnesses (perhaps troops serving in Afghanistan?) and to classified information. See ante, at 54-55. During the 1995 prosecution of Omar Abdel Rahman, federal prosecutors gave the names of 200 unindicted co-conspirators to the "Blind Sheik's" defense lawyers; that information was in the hands of Osama Bin Laden within two weeks. See Minority Report 14-15. In another case, trial testimony revealed to the enemy that the United States had been monitoring their cellular network, whereupon they promptly stopped using it, enabling more of them to evade capture and continue their atrocities. See id., at 15.

     And today it is not just the military that the Court elbows aside. A mere two Terms ago in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U. S. 557 (2006), when the Court held (quite amazingly) that the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 had not stripped habeas jurisdiction over Guantanamo petitioners' claims, four Members of today's five-Justice majority joined an opinion saying the following:

"Nothing prevents the President from returning to Congress to seek the authority [for trial by military commission] he believes necessary.

     "Where, as here, no emergency prevents consultation with Congress, judicial insistence upon that consultation does not weaken our Nation's ability to deal with danger. To the contrary, that insistence strengthens the Nation's ability to determine--through democratic means--how best to do so. The Constitution places its faith in those democratic means." Id., at 636 (Breyer, J., concurring).¹

Turns out they were just kidding. For in response, Congress, at the President's request, quickly enacted the Military Commissions Act, emphatically reasserting that it did not want these prisoners filing habeas petitions. It is therefore clear that Congress and the Executive--both political branches--have determined that limiting the role of civilian courts in adjudicating whether prisoners captured abroad are properly detained is important to success in the war that some 190,000 of our men and women are now fighting. As the Solicitor General argued, "the Military Commissions Act and the Detainee Treatment Act ... represent an effort by the political branches to strike an appropriate balance between the need to preserve liberty and the need to accommodate the weighty and sensitive governmental interests in ensuring that those who have in fact fought with the enemy during a war do not return to battle against the United States." Brief for Respondents 10-11 (internal quotation marks omitted).

     But it does not matter. The Court today decrees that no good reason to accept the judgment of the other two branches is "apparent." Ante, at 40. "The Government," it declares, "presents no credible arguments that the military mission at Guantanamo would be compromised if habeas corpus courts had jurisdiction to hear the detainees' claims." Id., at 39. What competence does the Court have to second-guess the judgment of Congress and the President on such a point? None whatever. But the Court blunders in nonetheless. Henceforth, as today's opinion makes unnervingly clear, how to handle enemy prisoners in this war will ultimately lie with the branch that knows least about the national security concerns that the subject entails.

II

A

     The Suspension Clause of the Constitution provides: "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." Art. I, §9, cl. 2. As a court of law operating under a written Constitution, our role is to determine whether there is a conflict between that Clause and the Military Commissions Act. A conflict arises only if the Suspension Clause preserves the privilege of the writ for aliens held by the United States military as enemy combatants at the base in Guantanamo Bay, located within the sovereign territory of Cuba.

     We have frequently stated that we owe great deference to Congress's view that a law it has passed is constitutional. See, e.g., Department of Labor v. Triplett, 494 U. S. 715, 721 (1990); United States v. National Dairy Products Corp., 372 U. S. 29, 32 (1963); see also American Communications Assn. v. Douds, 339 U. S. 382, 435 (1950) (Jackson, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). That is especially so in the area of foreign and military affairs; "perhaps in no other area has the Court accorded Congress greater deference." Rostker v. Goldberg, 453 U. S. 57, 64-65 (1981). Indeed, we accord great deference even when the President acts alone in this area. See Department of Navy v. Egan, 484 U. S. 518, 529-530 (1988); Regan v. Wald, 468 U. S. 222, 243 (1984).

     In light of those principles of deference, the Court's conclusion that "the common law [does not] yiel[d] a definite answer to the questions before us," ante, at 22, leaves it no choice but to affirm the Court of Appeals. The writ as preserved in the Constitution could not possibly extend farther than the common law provided when that Clause was written. See Part III, infra. The Court admits that it cannot determine whether the writ historically extended to aliens held abroad, and it concedes (necessarily) that Guantanamo Bay lies outside the sovereign territory of the United States. See ante, at 22-23; Rasul v. Bush, 542 U. S. 466, 500-501 (2004) (Scalia, J., dissenting). Together, these two concessions establish that it is (in the Court's view) perfectly ambiguous whether the common-law writ would have provided a remedy for these petitioners. If that is so, the Court has no basis to strike down the Military Commissions Act, and must leave undisturbed the considered judgment of the coequal branches.²

     How, then, does the Court weave a clear constitutional prohibition out of pure interpretive equipoise? The Court resorts to "fundamental separation-of-powers principles" to interpret the Suspension Clause. Ante, at 25. According to the Court, because "the writ of habeas corpus is itself an indispensable mechanism for monitoring the separation of powers," the test of its extraterritorial reach "must not be subject to manipulation by those whose power it is designed to restrain." Ante, at 36.

     That approach distorts the nature of the separation of powers and its role in the constitutional structure. The "fundamental separation-of-powers principles" that the Constitution embodies are to be derived not from some judicially imagined matrix, but from the sum total of the individual separation-of-powers provisions that the Constitution sets forth. Only by considering them one-by-one does the full shape of the Constitution's separation-of-powers principles emerge. It is nonsensical to interpret those provisions themselves in light of some general "separation-of-powers principles" dreamed up by the Court. Rather, they must be interpreted to mean what they were understood to mean when the people ratified them. And if the understood scope of the writ of habeas corpus was "designed to restrain" (as the Court says) the actions of the Executive, the understood limits upon that scope were (as the Court seems not to grasp) just as much "designed to restrain" the incursions of the Third Branch. "Manipulation" of the territorial reach of the writ by the Judiciary poses just as much a threat to the proper separation of powers as "manipulation" by the Executive. As I will show below, manipulation is what is afoot here. The understood limits upon the writ deny our jurisdiction over the habeas petitions brought by these enemy aliens, and entrust the President with the crucial wartime determinations about their status and continued confinement.

B

     The Court purports to derive from our precedents a "functional" test for the extraterritorial reach of the writ, ante, at 34, which shows that the Military Commissions Act unconstitutionally restricts the scope of habeas. That is remarkable because the most pertinent of those precedents, Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U. S. 763, conclusively establishes the opposite. There we were confronted with the claims of 21 Germans held at Landsberg Prison, an American military facility located in the American Zone of occupation in postwar Germany. They had been captured in China, and an American military commission sitting there had convicted them of war crimes--collaborating with the Japanese after Germany's surrender. Id., at 765-766. Like the petitioners here, the Germans claimed that their detentions violated the Constitution and international law, and sought a writ of habeas corpus. Writing for the Court, Justice Jackson held that American courts lacked habeas jurisdiction:

     "We are cited to [sic] no instance where a court, in this or any other country where the writ is known, has issued it on behalf of an alien enemy who, at no relevant time and in no stage of his captivity, has been within its territorial jurisdiction. Nothing in the text of the Constitution extends such a right, nor does anything in our statutes." Id., at 768.

     Justice Jackson then elaborated on the historical scope of the writ:

     "The alien, to whom the United States has been traditionally hospitable, has been accorded a generous and ascending scale of rights as he increases his identity with our society... .

     "But, in extending constitutional protections beyond the citizenry, the Court has been at pains to point out that it was the alien's presence within its territorial jurisdiction that gave the Judiciary power to act." Id., at 770-771.

     Lest there be any doubt about the primacy of territorial sovereignty in determining the jurisdiction of a habeas court over an alien, Justice Jackson distinguished two cases in which aliens had been permitted to seek habeas relief, on the ground that the prisoners in those cases were in custody within the sovereign territory of the United States. Id., at 779-780 (discussing Ex parte Quirin, 317 U. S. 1 (1942), and In re Yamashita, 327 U. S. 1 (1946)). "By reason of our sovereignty at that time over [the Philippines]," Jackson wrote, "Yamashita stood much as did Quirin before American courts." 339 U. S., at 780.

     Eisentrager thus held--held beyond any doubt--that the Constitution does not ensure habeas for aliens held by the United States in areas over which our Government is not sovereign.³

     The Court would have us believe that Eisentrager rested on "[p]ractical considerations," such as the "difficulties of ordering the Government to produce the prisoners in a habeas corpus proceeding." Ante, at 32. Formal sovereignty, says the Court, is merely one consideration "that bears upon which constitutional guarantees apply" in a given location. Ante, at 34. This is a sheer rewriting of the case. Eisentrager mentioned practical concerns, to be sure--but not for the purpose of determining under what circumstances American courts could issue writs of habeas corpus for aliens abroad. It cited them to support its holding that the Constitution does not empower courts to issue writs of habeas corpus to aliens abroad in any circumstances. As Justice Black accurately said in dissent, "the Court's opinion inescapably denies courts power to afford the least bit of protection for any alien who is subject to our occupation government abroad, even if he is neither enemy nor belligerent and even after peace is officially declared." 339 U. S., at 796.

     The Court also tries to change Eisentrager into a "functional" test by quoting a paragraph that lists the characteristics of the German petitioners:

"To support [the] assumption [of a constitutional right to habeas corpus] we must hold that a prisoner of our military authorities is constitutionally entitled to the writ, even though he (a) is an enemy alien; (b) has never been or resided in the United States; (c) was captured outside of our territory and there held in military custody as a prisoner of war; (d) was tried and convicted by a Military Commission sitting outside the United States; (e) for offenses against laws of war committed outside the United States; (f) and is at all times imprisoned outside the United States." Id., at 777 (quoted in part, ante, at 36).

But that paragraph is introduced by a sentence stating that "[t]he foregoing demonstrates how much further we must go if we are to invest these enemy aliens, resident, captured and imprisoned abroad, with standing to demand access to our courts." 339 U. S., at 777 (emphasis added). How much further than what? Further than the rule set forth in the prior section of the opinion, which said that "in extending constitutional protections beyond the citizenry, the Court has been at pains to point out that it was the alien's presence within its territorial jurisdiction that gave the Judiciary power to act." Id., at 771. In other words, the characteristics of the German prisoners were set forth, not in application of some "functional" test, but to show that the case before the Court represented an a fortiori application of the ordinary rule. That is reaffirmed by the sentences that immediately follow the listing of the Germans' characteristics:

     "We have pointed out that the privilege of litigation has been extended to aliens, whether friendly or enemy, only because permitting their presence in the country implied protection. No such basis can be invoked here, for these prisoners at no relevant time were within any territory over which the United States is sovereign, and the scenes of their offense, their capture, their trial and their punishment were all beyond the territorial jurisdiction of any court of the United States." Id., at 777-778.

Eisentrager nowhere mentions a "functional" test, and the notion that it is based upon such a principle is patently false.⁴

     The Court also reasons that Eisentrager must be read as a "functional" opinion because of our prior decisions in the Insular Cases. See ante, at 26-29. It cites our statement in Balzac v. Porto Rico, 258 U. S. 298, 312 (1922), that " 'the real issue in the Insular Cases was not whether the Constitution extended to the Philippines or Porto Rico when we went there, but which of its provisions were applicable by way of limitation upon the exercise of executive and legislative power in dealing with new conditions and requirements.' " Ante, at 28. But the Court conveniently omits Balzac's predicate to that statement: "The Constitution of the United States is in force in Porto Rico as it is wherever and whenever the sovereign power of that government is exerted." 258 U. S., at 312 (emphasis added). The Insular Cases all concerned territories acquired by Congress under its Article IV authority and indisputably part of the sovereign territory of the United States. See United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U. S. 259, 268 (1990); Reid v. Covert, 354 U. S. 1, 13 (1957) (plurality opinion of Black, J.). None of the Insular Cases stands for the proposition that aliens located outside U. S. sovereign territory have constitutional rights, and Eisentrager held just the opposite with respect to habeas corpus. As I have said, Eisentrager distinguished Yamashita on the ground of "our sovereignty [over the Philippines]," 339 U. S., at 780.

     The Court also relies on the "[p]ractical considerations" that influenced our decision in Reid v. Covert, supra. See ante, at 29-32. But all the Justices in the majority except Justice Frankfurter limited their analysis to the rights of citizens abroad. See Reid, supra, at 5-6 (plurality opinion of Black, J.); id., at 74-75 (Harlan, J., concurring in result). (Frankfurter limited his analysis to the even narrower class of civilian dependents of American military personnel abroad, see id., at 45 (opinion concurring in result).) In trying to wring some kind of support out of Reid for today's novel holding, the Court resorts to a chain of logic that does not hold. The members of the Reid majority, the Court says, were divided over whether In re Ross, 140 U. S. 453 (1891), which had (according to the Court) held that under certain circumstances American citizens abroad do not have indictment and jury-trial rights, should be overruled. In the Court's view, the Reid plurality would have overruled Ross, but Justices Frankfurter and Harlan preferred to distinguish it. The upshot: "If citizenship had been the only relevant factor in the case, it would have been necessary for the Court to overturn Ross, something Justices Harlan and Frankfurter were unwilling to do." Ante, at 32. What, exactly, is this point supposed to prove? To say that "practical considerations" determine the precise content of the constitutional protections American citizens enjoy when they are abroad is quite different from saying that "practical considerations" determine whether aliens abroad enjoy any constitutional protections whatever, including habeas. In other words, merely because citizenship is not a sufficient factor to extend constitutional rights abroad does not mean that it is not a necessary one.

     The Court tries to reconcile Eisentrager with its holding today by pointing out that in postwar Germany, the United States was "answerable to its Allies" and did not "pla[n] a long-term occupation." Ante, at 38, 39. Those factors were not mentioned in Eisentrager. Worse still, it is impossible to see how they relate to the Court's asserted purpose in creating this "functional" test--namely, to ensure a judicial inquiry into detention and prevent the political branches from acting with impunity. Can it possibly be that the Court trusts the political branches more when they are beholden to foreign powers than when they act alone?

     After transforming the a fortiori elements discussed above into a "functional" test, the Court is still left with the difficulty that most of those elements exist here as well with regard to all the detainees. To make the application of the newly crafted "functional" test produce a different result in the present cases, the Court must rely upon factors (d) and (e): The Germans had been tried by a military commission for violations of the laws of war; the present petitioners, by contrast, have been tried by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) whose procedural protections, according to the Court's ipse dixit, "fall well short of the procedures and adversarial mechanisms that would eliminate the need for habeas corpus review." Ante, at 37. But no one looking for "functional" equivalents would put Eisentrager and the present cases in the same category, much less place the present cases in a preferred category. The difference between them cries out for lesser procedures in the present cases. The prisoners in Eisentrager were prosecuted for crimes after the cessation of hostilities; the prisoners here are enemy combatants detained during an ongoing conflict. See Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U. S. 507, 538 (2004) (plurality opinion) (suggesting, as an adequate substitute for habeas corpus, the use of a tribunal akin to a CSRT to authorize the detention of American citizens as enemy combatants during the course of the present conflict).

     The category of prisoner comparable to these detainees are not the Eisentrager criminal defendants, but the more than 400,000 prisoners of war detained in the United States alone during World War II. Not a single one was accorded the right to have his detention validated by a habeas corpus action in federal court--and that despite the fact that they were present on U. S. soil. See Bradley, The Military Commissions Act, Habeas Corpus, and the Geneva Conventions, 101 Am. J. Int'l L. 322, 338 (2007). The Court's analysis produces a crazy result: Whereas those convicted and sentenced to death for war crimes are without judicial remedy, all enemy combatants detained during a war, at least insofar as they are confined in an area away from the battlefield over which the United States exercises "absolute and indefinite" control, may seek a writ of habeas corpus in federal court. And, as an even more bizarre implication from the Court's reasoning, those prisoners whom the military plans to try by full-dress Commission at a future date may file habeas petitions and secure release before their trials take place.

     There is simply no support for the Court's assertion that constitutional rights extend to aliens held outside U. S. sovereign territory, see Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U. S., at 271, and Eisentrager could not be clearer that the privilege of habeas corpus does not extend to aliens abroad. By blatantly distorting Eisentrager, the Court avoids the difficulty of explaining why it should be overruled. See Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833, 854-855 (1992) (identifying stare decisis factors). The rule that aliens abroad are not constitutionally entitled to habeas corpus has not proved unworkable in practice; if anything, it is the Court's "functional" test that does not (and never will) provide clear guidance for the future. Eisentrager forms a coherent whole with the accepted proposition that aliens abroad have no substantive rights under our Constitution. Since it was announced, no relevant factual premises have changed. It has engendered considerable reliance on the part of our military. And, as the Court acknowledges, text and history do not clearly compel a contrary ruling. It is a sad day for the rule of law when such an important constitutional precedent is discarded without an apologia, much less an apology.

C

     What drives today's decision is neither the meaning of the Suspension Clause, nor the principles of our precedents, but rather an inflated notion of judicial supremacy. The Court says that if the extraterritorial applicability of the Suspension Clause turned on formal notions of sovereignty, "it would be possible for the political branches to govern without legal constraint" in areas beyond the sovereign territory of the United States. Ante, at 35. That cannot be, the Court says, because it is the duty of this Court to say what the law is. Id., at 35-36. It would be difficult to imagine a more question-begging analysis. "The very foundation of the power of the federal courts to declare Acts of Congress unconstitutional lies in the power and duty of those courts to decide cases and controversies properly before them." United States v. Raines, 362 U. S. 17, 20-21 (1960) (citing Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137 (1803); emphasis added). Our power "to say what the law is" is circumscribed by the limits of our statutorily and constitutionally conferred jurisdiction. See Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U. S. 555, 573-578 (1992). And that is precisely the question in these cases: whether the Constitution confers habeas jurisdiction on federal courts to decide petitioners' claims. It is both irrational and arrogant to say that the answer must be yes, because otherwise we would not be supreme.

     But so long as there are some places to which habeas does not run--so long as the Court's new "functional" test will not be satisfied in every case--then there will be circumstances in which "it would be possible for the political branches to govern without legal constraint." Or, to put it more impartially, areas in which the legal determinations of the other branches will be (shudder!) supreme. In other words, judicial supremacy is not really assured by the constitutional rule that the Court creates. The gap between rationale and rule leads me to conclude that the Court's ultimate, unexpressed goal is to preserve the power to review the confinement of enemy prisoners held by the Executive anywhere in the world. The "functional" test usefully evades the precedential landmine of Eisentrager but is so inherently subjective that it clears a wide path for the Court to traverse in the years to come.

III

     Putting aside the conclusive precedent of Eisentrager, it is clear that the original understanding of the Suspension Clause was that habeas corpus was not available to aliens abroad, as Judge Randolph's thorough opinion for the court below detailed. See 476 F. 3d 981, 988-990 (CADC 2007).

     The Suspension Clause reads: "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." U. S. Const., Art. I, §9, cl. 2. The proper course of constitutional interpretation is to give the text the meaning it was understood to have at the time of its adoption by the people. See, e.g., Crawford v. Washington, 541 U. S. 36, 54 (2004). That course is especially demanded when (as here) the Constitution limits the power of Congress to infringe upon a pre-existing common-law right. The nature of the writ of habeas corpus that cannot be suspended must be defined by the common-law writ that was available at the time of the founding. See McNally v. Hill, 293 U. S. 131, 135-136 (1934); see also INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U. S. 289, 342 (2001) (Scalia, J., dissenting); D'Oench, Duhme & Co. v. FDIC, 315 U. S. 447, 471, n. 9 (1942) (Jackson, J., concurring).

     It is entirely clear that, at English common law, the writ of habeas corpus did not extend beyond the sovereign territory of the Crown. To be sure, the writ had an "extraordinary territorial ambit," because it was a so-called "prerogative writ," which, unlike other writs, could extend beyond the realm of England to other places where the Crown was sovereign. R. Sharpe, The Law of Habeas Corpus 188 (2d ed. 1989) (hereinafter Sharpe); see also Note on the Power of the English Courts to Issue the Writ of Habeas to Places Within the Dominions of the Crown, But Out of England, and On the Position of Scotland in Relation to that Power, 8 Jurid. Rev. 157 (1896) (hereinafter Note on Habeas); King v. Cowle, 2 Burr. 834, 855-856, 97 Eng. Rep. 587, 599 (K. B. 1759).

     But prerogative writs could not issue to foreign countries, even for British subjects; they were confined to the King's dominions--those areas over which the Crown was sovereign. See Sharpe 188; 2 R. Chambers, A Course of Lectures on the English Law 1767-1773, pp. 7-8 (Curley ed. 1986); 3 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 131 (1768) (hereinafter Blackstone). Thus, the writ has never extended to Scotland, which, although united to England when James I succeeded to the English throne in 1603, was considered a foreign dominion under a different Crown--that of the King of Scotland. Sharpe 191; Note on Habeas 158.⁵ That is why Lord Mansfield wrote that "[t]o foreign dominions, which belong to a prince who succeeds to the throne of England, this Court has no power to send any writ of any kind. We cannot send a habeas corpus to Scotland . . . ." Cowle, supra, at 856, 97 Eng. Rep., at 599-600.

     The common-law writ was codified by the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which "stood alongside Magna Charta and the English Bill of Rights of 1689 as a towering common law lighthouse of liberty--a beacon by which framing lawyers in America consciously steered their course." Amar, Sixth Amendment First Principles, 84 Geo. L. J. 641, 663 (1996). The writ was established in the Colonies beginning in the 1690's and at least one colony adopted the 1679 Act almost verbatim. See Dept. of Political Science, Okla. State Univ., Research Reports, No. 1, R. Walker, The American Reception of the Writ of Liberty 12-16 (1961). Section XI of the Act stated where the writ could run. It "may be directed and run into any county palatine, the cinque-ports, or other privileged places within the kingdom of England, dominion of Wales, or town of Berwick upon Tweed, and the islands of Jersey or Guernsey." 31 Car. 2, ch. 2. The cinque-ports and county palatine were so-called "exempt jurisdictions"--franchises granted by the Crown in which local authorities would manage municipal affairs, including the court system, but over which the Crown maintained ultimate sovereignty. See 3 Blackstone 78-79. The other places listed--Wales, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Jersey, and Guernsey--were territories of the Crown even though not part England proper. See Cowle, supra, at 853-854, 97 Eng. Rep., at 598 (Wales and Berwick-upon-Tweed); 1 Blackstone 104 (Jersey and Guernsey); Sharpe 192 (same).

     The Act did not extend the writ elsewhere, even though the existence of other places to which British prisoners could be sent was recognized by the Act. The possibility of evading judicial review through such spiriting-away was eliminated, not by expanding the writ abroad, but by forbidding (in Article XII of the Act) the shipment of prisoners to places where the writ did not run or where its execution would be difficult. See 31 Car. 2, ch. 2; see generally Nutting, The Most Wholesome Law--The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, 65 Am. Hist. Rev. 527 (1960).

     The Habeas Corpus Act, then, confirms the consensus view of scholars and jurists that the writ did not run outside the sovereign territory of the Crown. The Court says that the idea that "jurisdiction followed the King's officers" is an equally credible view. Ante, at 16. It is not credible at all. The only support the Court cites for it is a page in Boumediene's brief, which in turn cites this Court's dicta in Rasul, 542 U. S., at 482, mischaracterizing Lord Mansfield's statement that the writ ran to any place that was "under the subjection of the Crown," Cowle, supra, at 856, 97 Eng. Rep., at 599. It is clear that Lord Mansfield was saying that the writ extended outside the realm of England proper, not outside the sovereign territory of the Crown.⁶

     The Court dismisses the example of Scotland on the grounds that Scotland had its own judicial system and that the writ could not, as a practical matter, have been enforced there. Ante, at 20. Those explanations are totally unpersuasive. The existence of a separate court system was never a basis for denying the power of a court to issue the writ. See 9 W. Holdsworth, A History of English Law 124 (3d ed. 1944) (citing Ex parte Anderson, 3 El. and El. 487 (1861)). And as for logistical problems, the same difficulties were present for places like the Channel Islands, where the writ did run. The Court attempts to draw an analogy between the prudential limitations on issuing the writ to such remote areas within the sovereign territory of the Crown and the jurisdictional prohibition on issuing the writ to Scotland. See ante, at 19-20. But the very authority that the Court cites, Lord Mansfield, expressly distinguished between these two concepts, stating that English courts had the "power" to send the writ to places within the Crown's sovereignty, the "only question" being the "propriety," while they had "no power to send any writ of any kind" to Scotland and other "foreign dominions." Cowle, supra, at 856, 97 Eng. Rep., at 599-600. The writ did not run to Scotland because, even after the Union, "Scotland remained a foreign dominion of the prince who succeeded to the English throne," and "union did not extend the prerogative of the English crown to Scotland." Sharpe 191; see also Sir Matthew Hale's The Prerogatives of the King 19 (D. Yale ed. 1976).⁷

      In sum, all available historical evidence points to the conclusion that the writ would not have been available at common law for aliens captured and held outside the sovereign territory of the Crown. Despite three opening briefs, three reply briefs, and support from a legion of amici, petitioners have failed to identify a single case in the history of Anglo-American law that supports their claim to jurisdiction. The Court finds it significant that there is no recorded case denying jurisdiction to such prisoners either. See ante, at 21-22. But a case standing for the remarkable proposition that the writ could issue to a foreign land would surely have been reported, whereas a case denying such a writ for lack of jurisdiction would likely not. At a minimum, the absence of a reported case either way leaves unrefuted the voluminous commentary stating that habeas was confined to the dominions of the Crown.

     What history teaches is confirmed by the nature of the limitations that the Constitution places upon suspension of the common-law writ. It can be suspended only "in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion." Art. I, §9, cl. 2. The latter case (invasion) is plainly limited to the territory of the United States; and while it is conceivable that a rebellion could be mounted by American citizens abroad, surely the overwhelming majority of its occurrences would be domestic. If the extraterritorial scope of habeas turned on flexible, "functional" considerations, as the Court holds, why would the Constitution limit its suspension almost entirely to instances of domestic crisis? Surely there is an even greater justification for suspension in foreign lands where the United States might hold prisoners of war during an ongoing conflict. And correspondingly, there is less threat to liberty when the Government suspends the writ's (supposed) application in foreign lands, where even on the most extreme view prisoners are entitled to fewer constitutional rights. It makes no sense, therefore, for the Constitution generally to forbid suspension of the writ abroad if indeed the writ has application there.

     It may be objected that the foregoing analysis proves too much, since this Court has already suggested that the writ of habeas corpus does run abroad for the benefit of United States citizens. "[T]he position that United States citizens throughout the world may be entitled to habeas corpus rights ... is precisely the position that this Court adopted in Eisentrager, see 339 U. S., at 769-770, even while holding that aliens abroad did not have habeas corpus rights." Rasul, 542 U. S., at 501, 502 (Scalia, J., dissenting) (emphasis deleted). The reason for that divergence is not difficult to discern. The common-law writ, as received into the law of the new constitutional Republic, took on such changes as were demanded by a system in which rule is derived from the consent of the governed, and in which citizens (not "subjects") are afforded defined protections against the Government. As Justice Story wrote for the Court,

"The common law of England is not to be taken in all respects to be that of America. Our ancestors brought with them its general principles, and claimed it as their birthright; but they brought with them and adopted only that portion which was applicable to their situation." Van Ness v. Pacard,  2 Pet. 137, 144 (1829).

See also Hall, The Common Law: An Account of its Reception in the United States, 4 Vand. L. Rev. 791 (1951). It accords with that principle to say, as the plurality opinion said in Reid: "When the Government reaches out to punish a citizen who is abroad, the shield which the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution provide to protect his life and liberty should not be stripped away just because he happens to be in another land." 354 U. S., at 6; see also Verdugo-Urquidez,  494 U. S., at 269-270. On that analysis, "[t]he distinction between citizens and aliens follows from the undoubted proposition that the Constitution does not create, nor do general principles of law create, any juridical relation between our country and some undefined, limitless class of noncitizens who are beyond our territory." Id., at 275 (Kennedy, J., concurring).

     In sum, because I conclude that the text and history of the Suspension Clause provide no basis for our jurisdiction, I would affirm the Court of Appeals even if Eisentrager did not govern these cases.

*  *  *

     Today the Court warps our Constitution in a way that goes beyond the narrow issue of the reach of the Suspension Clause, invoking judicially brainstormed separation-of-powers principles to establish a manipulable "functional" test for the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus (and, no doubt, for the extraterritorial reach of other constitutional protections as well). It blatantly misdescribes important precedents, most conspicuously Justice Jackson's opinion for the Court in Johnson v. Eisentrager. It breaks a chain of precedent as old as the common law that prohibits judicial inquiry into detentions of aliens abroad absent statutory authorization. And, most tragically, it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.

     The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today. I dissent.

from the Washington Post, 2008-May-8, p.A18, by Josh White:

Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack

A Kuwaiti man who complained about maltreatment during a three-year stay in the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was involved in a deadly suicide bombing in northern Iraq last month, the U.S. military confirmed yesterday.

Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi, 29, whom the U.S. military accused of fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan and wanting to kill Americans, was involved in one of three suicide bombings that killed seven Iraqi security forces in Mosul on April 26, Defense Department officials said.

They said that after his release in Kuwait, Ajmi traveled to Iraq via Syria -- a common way for foreign fighters to enter Iraq through porous borders. Military officials said Ajmi's motives were unclear, but in a lengthy martyrdom audio recording before his death, Ajmi implores people to take part in suicide bombings to attack Americans.

In portions of the recording translated by the Bethesda-based SITE Intelligence Group, Ajmi decries the conditions at Guantanamo as "deplorable" and urges others to fight.

"Whoever can join them and execute a suicide operation, let him do so. By God, it will be a mortal blow," Ajmi says. "The Americans complain much about it. By God, in Guantanamo, all their talk was about explosives and whether you make explosives. It is as if explosives were hell to them."

The suicide bombing is the first such attack in Iraq linked to a former Guantanamo detainee, though the Defense Intelligence Agency has estimated that as many as three dozen former Guantanamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of having returned to terrorist activities.

International human rights groups and lawyers for Guantanamo detainees have disputed that estimate, saying only a handful of former detainees have left U.S. custody and gone on to fight U.S. forces.

"Our reports indicate that a number of former Guantanamo detainees have taken part in anti-coalition militant activities after leaving U.S. detention," said Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman. "As these facts illustrate, there is an implied future risk to U.S. and allied interests with every detainee who is released or transferred from Guantanamo."

Approximately 500 detainees have been released from Guantanamo or transferred to other governments since the facility opened in January 2002. Of the 270 who remain, about 65 more detainees have been cleared for release or transfer.

Ajmi was held at Guantanamo until late 2005, when he was transferred to the custody of the Kuwaiti government as part of a diplomatic arrangement. In hearings at Guantanamo, Ajmi maintained his innocence and said he never fought with the Taliban or meant anyone any harm.

He also said he did not have a "grudge" against his American captors -- a claim belied by his later martyrdom statements. In the audio clip, accompanied by a propaganda video with an image of Ajmi and a young child, Ajmi said detainees were "like guinea pigs for experiments."

Referring to one detainee at Guantanamo -- Yasser al-Zahrani, a Saudi national -- Ajmi said that the detainee used to stand up for other detainees "every time a soldier or an officer hurt us" and that he "took revenge for us." The Defense Department reported that Zahrani died in June 2006, when he allegedly took part in a coordinated suicide with two other detainees, an act that defense officials called an asymmetric attack on his captors.

Ajmi disagreed, saying: "The Americans killed him and said he hanged himself."

In 2006, Ajmi was tried in a Kuwaiti court, along with a group of other alleged terrorists, but was acquitted and released. Defense officials said he apparently had been living a "productive life" in Kuwait since his release, and an attorney for him in the United States said yesterday that Ajmi had fathered a child shortly after returning home.

But Thomas Wilner, a Washington lawyer who represented Ajmi in seeking a habeas corpus hearing during his stay at Guantanamo, said yesterday that Ajmi was young and not well educated, and that he appeared deeply affected by his incarceration at the U.S. facility.

Ajmi told Wilner in five 2005 meetings that he had been badly abused after his capture in Afghanistan and later at Guantanamo, at one point coming to a meeting with a broken arm Ajmi said he sustained in a scuffle with guards.

Wilner said that over the course of the visits, Ajmi became "more and more distraught . . . about the way he was treated and the fact that he couldn't do anything about it." Wilner called the suicide bombing a "horrible tragedy" and a result of the absence of appropriate legal processes at Guantanamo. "All we sought for him was a fair hearing, a process, and he was released by the U.S. government without that process," Wilner said.

"The lack of a process leads to problems. It leads to innocent people being held unfairly and not-so-innocent people going home without any hearing. The [U.S.] government decided to release this guy, and why, we'll never know," Wilner added.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Jul-1, p.A16:

Tortured Evidence

Democrats on Capitol Hill are continuing their "torture" hearings, with selective leaks suggesting that government officials delighted in cruel and inhuman punishment. Allow us to tell you the story they aren't telling friendly reporters.

Consider the case against former Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes, who in 2002 recommended the use of some "enhanced" interrogation techniques, such as light deprivation, stress positions and removal of clothing. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed off on that recommendation. Michigan's Carl Levin, the main Monday morning Senator, has been portraying this as illegal and disdainful of other Pentagon lawyers.

But Mr. Haynes was offering advice consistent with Justice Department legal briefs. And a document produced by Mr. Levin's own investigation shows that Mr. Haynes was willing to listen to internal critics. Among Mr. Levin's star witnesses was former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora. That's the same Mr. Mora who in 2004 wrote a long statement about his role in the interrogation debate, and his interaction with Mr. Haynes.

According to that document, Mr. Mora arranged a meeting with Mr. Haynes in late 2002 to object to certain Guantanamo interrogation techniques. Mr. Haynes explained that he believed the techniques were legal and weren't torture. Mr. Mora agreed torture was not the "intent," but worried the interrogations could get out of hand. "Mr. Haynes listened attentively throughout. He promised to consider carefully what I had said," Mr. Mora wrote.

Several weeks later, concerned the policy hadn't changed, Mr. Mora again met with Mr. Haynes, who said that some U.S. officials felt the techniques were necessary to elicit information from men believed to have participated in 9/11 with knowledge of other terror plots. "I acknowledged the ethical issues were difficult. I was not sure what my position would be in the classic 'ticking bomb' scenario . . . ," Mr. Mora wrote.

Mr. Haynes said he'd get back to him, and he did by initiating two meetings – including one between Mr. Mora and the legal adviser to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – so Mr. Mora could register his concerns. "I regarded Mr. Haynes's initiative to schedule the above two meetings as a positive development and a sign that he not only took my arguments seriously, but that he possibly agreed with some or many of them."

About five days later, Mr. Rumsfeld suspended the techniques, and set up a working group to develop new recommendations. It was Mr. Haynes who oversaw an effort to find consensus among that group. Mr. Mora was also pleased by a letter Mr. Haynes sent to Senator Patrick Leahy, which Mr. Mora wrote was "the perfect expression of the legal obligations binding DOD and the happy culmination of the long debates in the Pentagon as to what the DOD detainee treatment policy should be. I wrote an email to Mr. Haynes expressing my pleasure on his letter and stating that I was proud to be on his team." Keep in mind this was written by one of the most vocal internal Pentagon critics of aggressive interrogation.

We report all this because it shows that, even as Senator Levin tries to portray a Bush Administration conspiracy to ram through "illegal" interrogation methods, what we really had in the period following 9/11 was a legitimate difference of opinion. President Bush ordered political appointees to prevent another attack, in part by breaking al Qaeda detainees, and they argued over how best to do this. Mr. Levin is now using those internal disagreements to play "gotcha," when he should be congratulating Administration officials for their willingness to listen and their moral conscience.

What isn't in doubt is that these public servants acted in good faith, and their efforts are one reason the country hasn't been attacked again. As political smears go, this tortured exercise is low even by Carl Levin's degraded standards of fairness.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Jun-19, p.A14:

Judge Ahab and the Whales

In its storied history the U.S. Navy has defeated German U-boats and the British and Japanese Imperial navies, but we are about to find out if it can be whipped by whales and activist judges. Welcome to the new world of lawsuits as antiwar weapons.

The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether to take the case, National Resources Defense Council v. Donald Winter. For the sake of the U.S. military and the Constitution's separation of powers, this one deserves its day before the High Court.

Mr. Winter is Secretary of the Navy. The NRDC, a left-wing activist group that specializes in lawsuits, has sued him for conducting training exercises off the coast of California, as the Navy has done for 40 years. The NRDC claims the use of medium-frequency active sonar – a type of sonar especially useful for antisubmarine warfare – might harm whales, or at least confuse them.

When the issue was first raised eight years ago, the Bush Administration went out of its way to allay the concerns – though the Navy says that it has never harmed a whale with sonar, as far as it knows. It asked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to study the issue under the Endangered Species Act. NOAA gave the Navy a permit to continue to train. Just to be sure, the Navy asked for another study, under the Marine Mammals Protection Act. NOAA replied that this would take time but granted the Navy permission to continue the exercises, noting that the Navy had adopted 29 separate measures to minimize any impact on marine mammals.

None of this was good enough for the litigious greens, who sued again in March 2007 to stop the training – in the middle of a war. Enter federal judge Florence Cooper, who ordered the Navy to halt the exercises while the suit is pending. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a rare moment of sanity, stayed the injunction "on the grounds that the district court had failed to consider the 'public interest' in having a trained and effective Navy." Talk about understatement.

This bout of clarity didn't last long. In January, Judge Cooper issued another partial injunction, allowing the exercises to proceed as long as no whales came swimming through. This time, the Ninth Circuit concurred. In response, President Bush, citing "emergency circumstances" and the "paramount interests of the United States," and implementing alternative safeguards, asked the judge to reconsider. Judge Cooper declined, saying there was no emergency. The appeals court affirmed.

The last time we checked, the executive branch was responsible for national security and the President is Commander in Chief. Having unelected judges order our troops to stand down in response to a phantom threat to whales is bad enough. But the laws at issue in this case are mere "paperwork" statutes. The Navy and Bush Administration are accused of having failed merely to complete an environmental impact statement on the possible threat to whales. Under the substantive laws intended to protect the whales, NOAA has already given the Navy the approval it needs.

Judge Cooper is a major culprit here, arbitrarily preventing the Navy from maintaining its military readiness training for the sake of compliance with a purely procedural law. But the larger problem is the culture of environmental law and litigation, which puts the speculative threat to whales above U.S. national security. The Supreme Court should leap at the chance to slap these activist litigants and judges down.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-May-23, p.A15, by Thomas Donnelly and Frederick W. Kagan:

We Still Need a Larger Army

"That is the war we are in.
That is the war we must win."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is a plainspoken man, as befits his Texas roots. His words, quoted above, were about the war in Iraq. But as a remarkable series of recent speeches indicates, he intends to do what he can during the final months of his tenure to reorient the American military for the tasks of the "Long War."

This is long overdue. Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Gates' predecessor, famously lamented that you went to war with the force you had, not the one you'd like to have. Yet in the years since 9/11, the U.S. military still hasn't developed into the force that we need. To be sure, our soldiers have transformed themselves radically, painstakingly acquiring the arts of modern irregular warfare. But success in Baghdad and Kabul will be hard to sustain unless it is matched in Washington.

As Mr. Gates recognizes, the first order of business is to expand, restructure and modernize U.S. land forces. Unfortunately, the Bush administration's program – to grow the active Army and Marine Corps from the current 700,000 to about 750,000 in the next five years – is a Rumsfeld legacy and entirely inadequate. Regardless of the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, we will need a total active land force of something like one million soldiers and Marines.

The active duty portion of the U.S. Army needs to grow to about 800,000 soldiers. That's the size maintained during the 1980s and into the early 1990s, and it is a bare minimum for success in the many and varied missions that will be required in the future – missions that have ranged from "building partnership capacity" in West Africa to tracking down terrorists in Southeast Asia, as well as large-scale invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Those who believe that the need for such a force size will abate as troops are drawn down in Iraq should consider the larger pattern of American operations over the past generation. Since its creation in 1983, the U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for operations in East Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, has demanded an ever-increasing American presence, a presence which has changed from being largely air and maritime to boots on the ground. That's the war we are in.

Repairing and reshaping the active Army is also key to restoring the Marine Corps to its traditional and still essential role as a sea-based contingency force. And it is critical in order to return the Army National Guard to a proper place as a national strategic reserve, and an operational force with state responsibilities. The Army is the keystone in the arch of America's land-force structure.

The Army brigade also needs to be reworked. Under a plan initiated in the late 1990s – and embraced by Mr. Rumsfeld as part of his program of defense transformation to "lighten" the Army by creating a larger number of smaller, "modularized" brigades – the personnel strength of an Army brigade was reduced to about 3,500. Yet in practice in Iraq and Afghanistan, as units scramble to secure additional mission-enabling capabilities, the total climbs to about 5,000 – roughly the strength of a premodularized unit. The current Bush expansion plan will not remedy the problem of having more but weaker units.

More important, the concept of the "tooth-to-tail ratio" needs to be revisited. For the past generation, military reformers looked at the support, headquarters and institutional base of the armed services, especially the Army, as overhead fat to be trimmed ruthlessly. But in an irregular warfare environment, the old tail – military police, engineers, civil affairs units, intelligence analysts, command-and-control nodes, military education and so on – is the new tooth.

Finally, the failure to modernize U.S. land-force equipment has stunted the ability of the Marines and Army to meet their new missions. The Mine Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle provides a case in point. The Army also has not expanded its planned procurement of wheeled Stryker vehicles, nor accelerated the pace at which it is "networking" the force under the Future Combat Systems project.

There have been extraordinarily successful experiments suggesting that the effectiveness and survivability of dismounted infantry can be exponentially multiplied, even in a complex, urban environment. But the so-called Land Warrior program has been managed with peacetime lethargy rather than wartime urgency.

While there is a general bipartisan consensus that America's land forces are too small, there are big differences among the candidates about the size of the problem. Sen. John McCain, for example, has suggested that the active Army and Marine Corps should be increased to about 900,000. Sen. Barack Obama, by contrast, believes the Bush expansion plan is sufficient.

The limitations of America's land forces remain the most fundamental constraint on U.S. military strategy. Unless we begin now to restore and reshape the services to do what we have asked them to do, there will be tragic consequences: not that our Army and Marine Corps will be "broken," but that our nation will not win the war that it is in.

Messrs. Donnelly and Kagan are co-authors of "Ground Truth: The Future of U.S. Land Power," just published by AEI Press.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Feb-1:

NATO's Afghan Failure

We feel Stephen Harper's pique. Maybe France, Germany and other so-called NATO allies will as well and heed the Canadian Prime Minister's call to share the war-fighting burden in Afghanistan.

Miracles happen. For the time being, however, the Continentals are in no apparent hurry to break a five-decade habit of enjoying a free ride on security. None seriously answered NATO's call for up to 7,000 more troops for Afghanistan. So the U.S. last month announced a "temporary" deployment of another 3,200 Marines, the second large reinforcement in a year. That brings the U.S. deployment to nearly 30,000, with about half those troops as part of the NATO force of 42,000.

The plight of the Canadians ought to shame other allies. Mr. Harper warned that his country wouldn't extend its 2,500-strong mission in Afghanistan's unstable southern provinces unless Europe ponies up troops and equipment. His minority party will soon put the deployment to Parliament, where the opposition wants a withdrawal. "If NATO can't come through with that help, then I think, frankly, NATO's own reputation and future will be in jeopardy," he said this week. Canadians aren't known for hyperbole.

In the past year and a half, the alliance has successfully fought a resurgent Taliban. But the struggle isn't over, and the success of NATO's first ever deployment outside Europe is far from assured. The U.S., Britain, the Netherlands and Canada -- which alone has lost 78 soldiers -- are carrying a disproportionate load.

Though the mission flies a NATO flag, Germany, Italy and Spain put caveats on their troops, preventing them from leaving more peaceful areas to reinforce the Canadians and others in the south and east. With a limited presence on the ground, France would appear best placed of the big European countries to contribute 1,000 new troops or more.

The Continentals fill up lots of air space at policy conferences talking about Europe's readiness to play a prominent role in global affairs. The Canadians are now usefully calling their bluff.

(The following two items are notable for their reporting of academic establishment opposition to a program that is obviously good for everyone involved with it.)

from the Boston Globe, 2007-Oct-8, by Bryan Bender:

Efforts to aid US roil anthropology
Some object to project on Iraq, Afghanistan

WASHINGTON - A new project in which university anthropologists study tribal customs in Iraq and Afghanistan for the US military has prompted a fierce backlash among academics, some of whom accuse their colleagues of engaging in a wartime effort that violates their professional ethics.

The handful of anthropologists working with so-called human terrain teams designed to help commanders navigate the cultural thickets of both countries are being accused of "prostituting science" and presiding over the "militarization of anthropology," the study of the social practices and cultural origins of humans.

Internet blogs oppose the project, urging "anthropologists of the world, unite!" Academic journal articles with titles such as "Anthropologists as Spies" criticize the efforts. And some of the scientists under attack fear they could be blackballed by their profession.

Felix Moos, who has been an anthropology professor at the University of Kansas for 47 years, is helping train the human terrain teams at nearby Fort Leavenworth. Colleagues who oppose his actions have called him a "killer for hire."

"Academia looks at me as being too close to the military," he said in recent interview in his crowded campus office, copies of the Nepali Manual of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency strewn about. "It has affected me negatively. I have been accused of introducing spies into academia."

At issue is a longstanding code of ethics for the discipline, one which decrees that anthropological research should never be used to inflict harm, must always have the consent of the population being studied, and must not be conducted in secret.

The debate over the role of anthropology in national security is expected to come to a head next month in an American Anthropological Association report examining the ethical questions of cooperating with the military.

Last week, a group calling itself the Network of Concerned Anthropologists urged colleagues to sign a "pledge of nonparticipation in counterinsurgency."

While anthropology conducted on behalf of the military is "often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world, protects US soldiers on the battlefield or promotes cross-cultural understanding," the pledge states, "at base it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties."

Such work "breaches relations of openness and trust with the people anthropologists work with around the world," it added.

One of its authors is David Price, a professor at Saint Martin's University in Lacy, Wash., who is also a member of the ethics commission set to report in November.

"I am not sure that adequate consent [from the research subjects] is going on," said Price. He said he believes it will be difficult to know how the military and intelligence agencies will use the population studies.

"I am not opposed to anthropologists engaging with the military, but I am very concerned when it happens under conditions of secrecy," he said. "There will always be spies but it shouldn't be anthropologists who are doing it."

The military's own descriptions of the new teams give pause to Price and others - such as one Pentagon official who likened them to the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support project during the Vietnam War. That effort helped identify Vietnamese suspected as communists and Viet Cong collaborators; some were later assassinated by the United States.

But some anthropologists in favor of the program urge their colleagues to look beyond stereotypes and assess the military's new efforts firsthand.

"The military is changing in a dramatic way," said Brian Selmeski, an anthropology researcher at the Royal Military College of Canada who consults with the US Army and Air Force. "It is reevaluating itself not just to make war but to fix some profound deficiencies."

He stressed that the highly controversial human terrain teams are just one way anthropologists assist the military. Others include teaching at military colleges and helping draft cultural training programs for soldiers operating overseas.

"I don't want to help them kill people," Selmeski said. "What I want to do is help them avoid conflict."

The US forces' superficial understanding of local tribal customs and ancient ethnic and sectarian rivalries has hampered their efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. An outstretched arm, palm facing forward, for example, means "stop" in most Western cultures, but in Iraq it's considered a sign of welcome. Confusion over the signal has had deadly consequences, leading US troops to open fire at Iraqi civilians who didn't stop at checkpoints.

Authorities hope the human terrain project, which plans to create 26 teams by next summer, can help avoid such potentially disastrous misunderstandings, according to Jim Greer, the deputy program manager. One seven-person team is working in Afghanistan and five teams are on the ground in Iraq.

But Greer worries that unless the academic world can get past its deep suspicions about the military's intentions, finding enough brainpower to make the project work "could get tough."

Greer maintains that the project is sensitive to anthropologists' concerns, pointing to the fact that the anthropologists' work - if not the military's - will be unclassified and their findings available for publication.

"It's all open-source research," said Greer, who has a master's degree in education. "They are not spies. They don't have informants running around."

Selmeski of the Royal Military College of Canada believes the US armed forces must do more to ease anthropologists' concerns, and more independent monitoring of the project could help. "There is no charter or civilian oversight or a human subjects review board," he said.

Kerry Fosher, recently hired as the command social scientist at the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity in Quantico, Va., has been pleased so far with her dealings with the military. "I asked a lot of really hard questions about what kind of freedoms I would have," she said.

But she said it's still unclear whether the military bureaucracy will tolerate her approach.

"One thing I will not give up is my ability to step back . . . and get the long view," Fosher said. "That's why they want us but it is very difficult" for the military's rigid hierarchy to accept their methods.

Specific guidelines are needed for the relationship to work, she added.

Jim Peacock, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina who is chairman of the ethics commission, says he believes there is enough room to help the military if there is enough transparency and oversight to make anthropologists more comfortable. Using anthropological data for use in a military offensive would probably "violate the code," he said. But teaching cultural sensitivities to military personnel before they deploy "might not do harm and it might even diminish harm."

from the International Herald Tribune (NYT Paris edition), 2007-Oct-4, by David Rohde:

Anthropologists help U.S. Army in Afghanistan and Iraq

SHABAK VALLEY, Afghanistan: In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a demure civilian anthropologist named Tracy.

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first-ever Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they act as cultural advisers and suggest ways to win local support without using military force.

Colonel Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with anthropologists here, said the unit's combat operations had been reduced by 60 percent since the anthropologists arrived this spring. He said the focus had shifted from combat to improving security, health care and education for the population.

"We're looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist's perspective," he said. "We're not focused on the enemy. We're focused on bringing governance down to the people."

Last month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates authorized a $40 million expansion of the program, which will assign teams of anthropologists and social scientists to each of the 26 American combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, military officials are scrambling to find more scholars willing to deploy to the front lines to interpret tribal structures and explain cultural differences.

Yet criticism is emerging in academia. Citing the past misuse of social sciences in counterinsurgency campaigns, some denounce the program as "mercenary anthropology" that exploits social science for political gain. Opponents fear that, whatever their intention, the scholars who work with the military could inadvertently cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the U.S. military.

Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, and 10 other anthropologists are circulating an online pledge calling for anthropologists to boycott the teams, particularly in Iraq.

"While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world," the petition says, "at base, it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties."

In Afghanistan, the anthropologists arrived along with 6,000 troops, which doubled the U.S. military's strength in the area it patrols, the country's east.

A smaller version of the Bush administration's troop increase in Iraq, the buildup in Afghanistan has allowed U.S. units to carry out the counterinsurgency strategy here, where American forces generally face less resistance and are better able to take risks.

Since General David Petraeus, now the overall American commander in Iraq, oversaw the drafting of the army's new counterinsurgency manual last year, the strategy has become the new mantra of the military. A recent U.S. military operation here offered a window into how attempts to apply the new approach are playing out on the ground in counterintuitive ways.

In interviews, American officers lavishly praised the anthropology program, saying that the scientists' advice had proved to be "brilliant," helped them see the situation from an Afghan perspective and cut down on combat operations. The eventual aim, they say, is to improve the performance of local government officials, persuade local tribesman to join the police, ease poverty and protect villagers from the Taliban and criminals.

Afghans and Western civilian officials, too, praised the anthropologists and the new American military approach but were cautious about predicting long-term success. Many of the economic and political problems fueling instability can be solved only by large numbers of Afghan and American civilian experts.

"My feeling is that the military are going through an enormous change right now where they recognize they won't succeed militarily," said Tom Gregg, the chief United Nations official in southeastern Afghanistan. "But they don't yet have the skill sets to implement" a coherent nonmilitary strategy.

Deploying small groups of American soldiers into remote areas, Schweitzer's paratroopers organized jirgas, or local councils, to resolve tribal disputes that have simmered for decades.

Officers shrugged off questions about whether the military was comfortable with what David Kilcullen, an Australian anthropologist and an architect of the new strategy, calls "armed social work."

"Who else is going to do it?" asked Lieutenant Colonel David Woods, commander of the 4th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry. "You have to evolve. Otherwise, you're useless."

The arrival of the anthropologists in this Taliban stronghold was part of what the military called Operation Khyber. It was a 15-day drive in which 500 Afghan and 500 American soldiers tried to clear an estimated 200 to 250 Taliban insurgents out of much of Paktia Province, secure southeastern Afghanistan's most important road and halt a string of suicide attacks on American troops and local governors.

The process that led to the creation of the teams began in late 2003, when American officers in Iraq complained that they had little to no information about the local population. Pentagon officials contacted Montgomery McFate, a Yale-educated cultural anthropologist working for the navy who advocated using social science to improve military operations and strategy.

McFate helped developed a computer database in 2005 that provided commanders with detailed data on the local population.

The following year, Steve Fondacaro, a retired Special Operations colonel, joined the program and advocated embedding social scientists with American combat units.

McFate, the program's senior social science adviser and an author of the military's new counterinsurgency manual, dismissed criticism of scholars working with the military. "I'm frequently accused of militarizing anthropology," she said. "But we're really anthropologizing the military."

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Jun-26, by James Taranto:

The Truth About Guantanamo
Proposals to treat detainees as criminal defendants make a mockery of international humanitarian law.

Was it wishful thinking? On Thursday the Associated Press reported that, according to sources it did not name, "the Bush administration is nearing a decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detainee facility and move the terror suspects there to military prisons elsewhere." The White House quickly denied the rumor, and, for good measure, on Friday the Pentagon announced that Guantanamo had admitted its first new detainee in months: Haroon al-Afghani, a commander from the al Qaeda-affiliated terror group Hezb-i-Islami.

The AP's impatience to write the final chapter of the Guantanamo story is of a piece with the way news organizations generally have told the story. Although the Supreme Court has granted some rights to detainees, it has been remarkably restrained in doing so. But journalists have falsely portrayed Guantanamo as an affront to the Constitution and international law.

Perhaps the most striking example was the New York Times's coverage of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which the court decided a year ago this week. "The decision was such a sweeping and categorical defeat for the administration that it left human rights lawyers who have pressed this and other cases on behalf of Guantanamo detainees almost speechless with surprise and delight, using words like 'fantastic,' 'amazing' and 'remarkable,' " correspondent Linda Greenhouse exulted. She opined that there was "no doubt" the ruling represented "a historic event, a defining moment," and likened it to U.S. v. Nixon, the 1974 case in which the court unanimously ordered the president to turn over the Watergate tapes.

Nixon resigned 15 days after that decision. A year after Hamdan, it is safe to say that its impact has been rather less dramatic. While the court, by a vote of 5-3, did hand Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's personal driver and bodyguard, a victory on key points, Ms. Greenhouse's purple prose belied the narrow grounds on which it did so. Less than four months after Hamdan, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which effectively undid the ruling. Congress had this power because the Supreme Court has not extended a single constitutional right to alien enemy combatants.

---

Hamdan dealt with two legal questions: whether detainees have the right to challenge their captivity by petitioning a court for a writ of habeas corpus, and whether the military commissions established to try detainees for war crimes passed muster under U.S. and international law.

The court had ruled in Rasul v. Bush (2004) that detainees had the right to file habeas petitions. But it rested that conclusion on statutory, not constitutional, grounds--that is, it found that Congress had conferred this right on the detainees. Congress therefore had the authority to take it away, and it did so by passing the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which stripped federal courts of jurisdiction to hear Guantanamo detainees' habeas petitions.

But in Hamdan, the high court held that the 2005 act did not apply retroactively, so that habeas proceedings already under way could continue. The Military Commissions Act removed this ambiguity and ordered a stop to all habeas petitions. An appellate court upheld this provision in February 2007, and in April the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to that ruling. The Justice Department has petitioned for the dismissal of still-pending habeas claims.

In overturning the administratively created war-crimes commissions, the Supreme Court found that detainees are entitled to some protections under the Geneva Conventions. It did not afford them the privileges enjoyed by legitimate prisoners of war--those who wear uniforms, carry weapons openly and otherwise comply with the rules of war. Instead, it ruled that they have more-limited rights under Geneva's Common Article 3, which applies to conflicts "not of an international character." This originally meant civil wars, but the court imaginatively reasoned that since al Qaeda is not a nation, its war against America is not "international."

Yet the justices granted the detainees only one specific right under Common Article 3: the right to have any criminal charges heard by a "regularly constituted court"--one created by an act of Congress. The high court has not adjudicated the legality of the legislatively created commissions, but it seems unlikely to rule against them. Four justices in the Hamdan majority joined Stephen Breyer's concurrence, which expressly invited Congress to authorize military commissions.

To be sure, legal obstacles remain. Earlier this month two military judges dismissed charges against Hamdan and another detainee, on the pedantic ground that administrative tribunals had designated them enemy combatants, not unlawful enemy combatants--notwithstanding that they clearly meet the Military Commissions Act's definition of unlawful combatants.

---

Some politicians have also undertaken efforts on behalf of enemy fighters. Senate Democrats, joined by Republican Arlen Specter, have introduced legislation that would restore habeas rights to Guantanamo detainees, although this is unlikely to become law as long as George W. Bush is president.

Colin Powell would go even further. "I would close Guantanamo, not tomorrow, but this afternoon," the former secretary of state told NBC's Tim Russert earlier this month. "I'd get rid of the military commission system and use established procedures in federal law or in the manual for courts-martial."

Mr. Powell claimed that "I would not let any of [the detainees] go," but his proposal would inevitably have that effect. Once inside the criminal justice system, detainees would become defendants with full constitutional rights, including the right to be charged or released, the right to exclude tainted evidence, and the right to be freed unless found guilty of a specific crime beyond a reasonable doubt.

Legitimate prisoners of war enjoy no such rights. The primary purpose of holding enemy combatants during wartime is not punitive but preventive--to keep them off the battlefield. No one disputes that a country at war can hold POWs without charge for the duration of hostilities. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority in Hamdan, reaffirmed the government's authority to do the same with the unlawful combatants at Guantanamo.

By granting constitutional protections to detainees, Mr. Powell's proposal would endanger the lives of American civilians. It would also afford preferential treatment to enemy fighters who defy the rules of war. This would make a mockery of international humanitarian law.

In the long run, it could also imperil the civil liberties of Americans. Leniency toward detainees is on the table today only because al Qaeda has so far failed to strike America since 9/11. If it succeeded again, public pressure for harsher measures would be hard for politicians to resist. And if enemy combatants had been transferred to the criminal justice system, those measures would be much more likely to diminish the rights of citizens who have nothing to do with terrorism.

By keeping terrorists out of America, Guantanamo protects Americans' physical safety. By keeping them out of our justice system, it also protects our freedom.

Mr. Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com.

from the Associated Press via Google News, 2007-Oct-10:

Jimmy Carter: U.S. Tortures Prisoners

WASHINGTON — The U.S. tortures prisoners in violation of international law, former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday, adding that President Bush makes up his own definition of torture.

"Our country for the first time in my life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights," Carter said on CNN. "We've said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we've said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime."

Bush, responding to an Oct. 4 report by The New York Times on secret Justice Department memorandums supporting the use of "harsh interrogation techniques," defended the techniques Friday by proclaiming: "This government does not torture people."

Carter said the interrogation methods cited by the Times, including "head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures," constitute torture "if you use the international norms of torture as has always been honored — certainly in the last 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated.

"But you can make your own definition of human rights and say we don't violate them, and you can make your own definition of torture and say we don't violate them," Carter said.

In an interview that aired Wednesday on BBC, Carter ripped Vice President Dick Cheney as "a militant who avoided any service of his own in the military."

Carter went on to say Cheney has been "a disaster for our country. I think he's been overly persuasive on President George Bush."

Cheney spokeswoman Megan Mitchell declined to speak to Carter's allegations.

"We're not going to engage in this kind of rhetoric," she said.

In the CNN interview, the Democratic former president disparaged the field of Republican presidential candidates.

"They all seem to be outdoing each other in who wants to go to war first with Iran, who wants to keep Guantanamo open longer and expand its capacity — things of that kind," Carter said.

He said he also disagreed with positions taken by Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who have declined to promise to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq over the following four years if elected president next year.

from the Telegraph of London, 2007-Aug-11, by Toby Harnden:

'Return to conscription should be considered'

Washington -- A senior military officer brought into the White House to coordinate the Bush administration's Iraq war policy has said that a return to conscription should be considered because of the increasing demands on United States military.

Lt Gen Douglas Lute, President George W. Bush's deputy national security adviser, said: "I think it makes sense to certainly consider it, and I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table."

President Richard Nixon abolished the draft, which sent tens of thousands to their death during the Vietnam war, in 1973. Restoring it, Lt Gen Lute said, would be a "major policy shift" and he conceded that Mr Bush had made it clear he did not favour such a move.

But the floating of the idea by a general in such a key political position will add dramatic impetus to a debate over the expansion of the US armed forces. It has primarily been anti-war Democrats who have argued for the restoration of the draft.

Some argue that the draft should be reinstituted as a way of preventing future wars by ensuring that the pain of conflict would be spread across all sectors of society. Anti-war agitators such as Michael Moore have highlighted that very few relatives of members of Congress or other politicians have served in uniform.

Lt Gen Lute said that repeated overseas deployments affected not only the troops but their families, who often had a key influence whether a service member decides to stay in the services.

"There's both a personal dimension of this, where this kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living room conversations within these families," he said in an interview with National Public Radio "And ultimately, the health of the all- volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions."

An opponent of the current "surge" in Iraq, Lt Gen Lute is viewed with intense suspicion by conservative Republicans, who will be incensed by his unexpected comments, in his first interview since he was confirmed by the Senate.

Mr Bush recently agreed to expand the strength of the US armed services, currently at about 1.4 million active-duty personnel. The U.S. Army alone has 480,000 active-duty soldiers and 200,000 reservists. Many soldiers and marines have served four tours in Iraq.

The US military held a draft during the American civil war, both world wars and between 1948 and 1973. The Selective Service System, re-established in 1980, maintains a registry of 18-year-old men in case the draft should be reintroduced.

The Army, which missed its recruiting goals in May and June, is now offering new recruits $20,000 bonuses if they sign up before September 30.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Aug-8:

Reason and Wiretaps
What the terrorist surveillance fight is really all about.

To hear the critics tell it, the warrantless wiretapping law passed by Congress this weekend is an immoral license for a mad President Bush and his spymasters to eavesdrop on all Americans. For those willing to believe such things, mere facts don't matter. But for anyone still amenable to reason, the deal is worth parsing for its national security precedents, good and bad. The next Democratic President might be grateful.

The good news is that the new law will at least allow the National Security Agency to monitor terrorist communications again. That ability has been severely limited since January, when Mr. Bush agreed to put the wiretap program under the supervision of a special court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The new law provides a six-month fix to the outdated FISA provision that had defined even foreign-to-foreign calls as subject to a U.S. judicial warrant.

The first duty of Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell is to prevent the next terrorist attack, and it's disgraceful that some have vilified him for trying to revive our intelligence ability in that cause. His effort has been no different, and no less honorable, than a general arguing for more troops.

---

But it's important to understand for the debate ahead why all of this has become so ferociously controversial. Opposition from the Democratic left to this intelligence program isn't merely part of the partisan blood feud against a weak President near the end of his term. It is part of a far larger ideological campaign to erode Presidential war powers. Goaded by the ACLU and much of the press corps, many Democrats want to use the courts and lawsuits to restrict Mr. Bush and future Presidents in their ability to gather intelligence in the war on terror. For a flavor of this strategy, spend a few minutes on the ACLU's Web site.

In that regard, even the weekend deal is far from encouraging. For example, the new law does not offer explicit liability protection for telecom companies that cooperate with the wiretap program. Instead, the most Democrats would accept is language to "compel" the cooperation of these companies going forward. The Administration hope is that this "I had no choice" claim will be an adequate defense against future lawsuits, but in the U.S. tort lottery that is no sure thing.

Meantime, Democrats blocked any retroactive liability protection for companies that thought they were doing their patriotic duty by cooperating with the National Security Agency after 9/11. The goal here isn't merely to open another rich target for the tort bar. It is to use lawsuits to raise the costs for private actors of cooperating with the executive branch. Even if they lose at the ballot box or in Congress, these antiwar activists still might be able to hamstring the executive via the courts.

That's also the explicit strategy in trying to expand the reach of the special FISA court to all wiretaps, foreign and domestic. The left is howling that the NSA will no longer need a FISA warrant for each wiretap (of which there were 2,176 in 2006). That's the best part of the bill. But the Administration did concede to let FISA judges review the procedures for wiretapping up to 120 days after the fact. If a judge objects, the wiretapping can at least continue, pending appeal all the way to the Supreme Court.

This is the kind of review that judges are neither allowed to perform under the Constitution, nor equipped to provide as a matter of policy. Whatever the merits of the 1978 FISA law, no Administration has ever conceded that that law trumped a President's power to make exceptions to FISA if national security requires it. To do so would be a direct infringement on the President's Article II powers as Commander in Chief to protect the nation against its enemies.

The courts have been explicit about this, with the FISA appellate court asserting in a 2002 opinion (In Re: Sealed Case) that "we take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power." FISA established a process by which certain domestic wiretaps in the context of the Cold War could be approved, not a limit on what wiretaps were ever allowed.

In the weekend deal, the Bush Administration grants the FISA court power to review procedures even for foreign communications, which is unprecedented. Under Article III of the Constitution, the courts are granted the power to settle disputes. The judiciary also has power under the Fourth Amendment, which gives courts the ability to issue warrants. But nowhere does the Constitution empower our nation's judges to serve as foreign policy advisers or reviewers of intelligence policy. Judges have no particular expertise on intelligence, and in any case they are unaccountable to voters if their decisions are faulty. Recent news reports have suggested that several current FISA judges are uncomfortable with making such intelligence decisions, and rightly so.

As for the possibility that Presidents will abuse this power, fear of exposure is an even more powerful disincentive than legal constraint. The political costs of being seen as spying on Americans for partisan ends would be tremendous. Congress, on the other hand, is only too happy to use the courts to squeeze executive power, in part because this allows the Members to dodge responsibility themselves. If there's another terror attack, the President still gets the blame even if some unelected judge refused a warrant. Congress can blame everyone else.

This is a statutory version of Senator Jay Rockefeller's famous decision to write a letter to Dick Cheney objecting to the warrantless wiretap program after he'd been briefed on it, but then sticking the letter (literally) in a drawer. Only after the program was exposed did he unearth the letter to show he'd objected all along, though he'd done nothing at all to stop it.

---

The weekend law expires in six months, and it would be nice to think enough Democrats would put aside this ideological obsession to work with Mr. Bush on a more permanent wiretap statute. Given the current state of Beltway rationality, we aren't optimistic.

As negotiations unfold, we hope the President resists any deal that compromises the ability of his successors to defend the country. In 18 months, Mr. Bush will be leaving office, but the terrorist threat will continue. The stakes are too large for any President to accept new judicial limitations on his ability to track terrorists at home or abroad. Rather than accept such limits, Mr. Bush could use Congressional recalcitrance as an opportunity to withdraw the terrorist surveillance program from FISA authority, and thus toss the issue squarely in the middle of the 2008 Presidential campaign.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2007-Apr-27, p.A16:

Missile Defense Mischief

One of the Bush Administration's quiet successes has been missile defense -- from the negotiated demise of the Cold War ABM Treaty to initial ground-based deployments. But that progress is suddenly in jeopardy from opposition in Russia and Congress, and just when we might really begin to need it against the likes of Iran.

The immediate dispute concerns the U.S. offer to extend missile defenses to Europe. The Czech Republic has expressed interest in providing a site for a tracking radar, while Poland is considering whether to host the interceptors that would destroy incoming missiles.

Linked to upgraded radars in Britain and Greenland and a command-and-control system in Colorado, the Polish and Czech sites could protect Europe from long-range missiles launched from Iran. It would also provide an additional layer of defense for America's East Coast. Tehran is expected to have long-range missiles by 2015 or sooner, and since the world can't seem to muster the resolve to halt its nuclear program, missile defense would seem a logical -- and urgent -- priority.

If only. After Warsaw and Prague announced negotiations with the U.S., some Europeans, notably the French and the Germans, accused the U.S. of acting unilaterally. Moscow has called it "destabilizing," and Democrats in Congress have vowed to kill it. Representative Ellen Tauscher, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, is opposing the Pentagon's $310 million request to begin construction next year.

The arguments against the "third site," as the Polish-Czech contribution is known, are updated versions of the anti-Star Wars rhetoric of the Reagan years. Ms. Tauscher claims the missile defense system isn't "fully tested," but the initial system the Bush Administration has fielded in Alaska and California and now wants to extend to Europe isn't the final architecture. The idea is to follow the models provided by the JSTAR military surveillance plane and Predator spy plane. Both were still in the experimental phase when they were called into service in the Gulf War and Afghanistan, respectively. The missile defense system is constantly being tested and upgraded.

Critics also argue that the third site wouldn't protect all of Europe from Iranian missiles because the Southern flank would remain exposed. But the site is designed to defend against missiles with ranges of more than 1,500 kilometers, which means Greece, Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria aren't at risk from this specific threat. The Iranian threat against Southern Europe is from medium- and short-range missiles, which require different kinds of defenses, and the U.S. is prepared to work with individual countries as well as NATO to install Patriots or other systems against those missiles.

Moscow's objection is that the third site is somehow intended for use against Russian missiles. This is untrue -- as the Russians well know because U.S. officials have briefed them repeatedly on how the system would operate and have even offered to bring Russia under the missile-defense umbrella, an offer Moscow has so far rejected.

No one believes 10 interceptors based in Poland could deter the thousands of missiles in Russia's arsenal, and it's unclear what game Moscow is playing here. Perhaps it hopes to forestall U.S. missile defenses for Georgia or other former Soviet republics, or maybe it sees an opportunity to drive a wedge between Washington and Warsaw, where the government is already facing heat over Poland's role in Iraq.

Democrats claim that the third site creates "divisions" among our European allies and should therefore be subject to NATO's multilateral seal of approval -- and a consensus process that would mean the kiss of death. But why should bilateral agreements between the U.S. and the sovereign nations of Poland and the Czech Republic be subject to NATO approval any more than U.S. agreements with Denmark and Britain over the radars located in their territories? Or agreements with Germany, the Netherlands or Italy on other kinds of missile defenses? In any case, NATO may acquire theater missile defenses, which could be deployed to protect against medium- and short-range missiles.

Iran's not the only potential missile threat. More than 20 nations, including North Korea and Syria, have ballistic missiles and their proliferation is sure to continue. The third site is part of the Bush Administration's vision of missile defense with a global reach. Since the U.S. withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002, nations have been lining up to get under the new missile defense umbrella. The U.S. and its allies are safer for it.

from National Review Online, 2007-Apr-27, by Rich Lowry:

Lost on Iraq
Democrats should admit that they want to give up.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had a bright, shining moment of honesty when he said that the war in Iraq is lost.

He unburdened himself of what he and many of his colleagues have long believed about the war. Now if only Democrats saw fit to continue with their truthtelling. Then they would acknowledge that their mandate for a U.S. withdrawal beginning in October is a policy predicated on our defeat, and that they don't think anything can or should be done about Iran and al Qaeda feasting on a prostrate Iraq and the country possibly descending into genocidal bloodletting.

This position would be unimpeachably logical. It would accept, in the words Reid has repeated a lot lately, “facts and reality,” as Democrats see them. One could strenuously disagree with this position but still see a certain honor in its frankness and internal consistency.

Democrats, of course, are doing nothing of the kind. Instead, after Reid's “lost” comment, they retreated back into their fog of evasion, contradictions, and groan-inducing implausibilities. The party of defeat has a deep identity crisis because it can't admit what it is, and thus lives a life of dishonesty and unconvincing denial.

Reid didn't disavow his remark, but his spokesman said that in the future he will “couch it more.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein said that Reid had “more a problem of tone rather than of substance.” Democrats therefore have resolved themselves to find euphemisms for the word “lost.” Their current favorite is “there is no military solution in Iraq.”

Asked about his “lost” comment on CNN, Reid said, “I agree with Gen. Petraeus,” because Petraeus has said only part of the war is military. Saying that the war is multifaceted, however, bears no relation to the proposition that it is lost. Pressed on as to what message it sends to the troops to tell them the war is unwinnable, Reid said, “Gen. Petraeus has told them that.” Really? Reid apparently inhabits an alternate reality created by his need to weasel his way out of his own convictions on the war.

Reid doesn't want to hear it if Petraeus has anything positive to say about the war. “I don't believe him,” Reid said of Petraeus's reports of progress. This is not surprising. Like many Democrats, Reid has a faith in defeat that is impervious to all contrary evidence. Acknowledging any fluidity in conditions in Iraq — say, how our position has improved in Anbar province in recent months — is to tacitly admit the folly of making final statements about defeat or victory. So Reid fixates on exactly the indicator that al Qaeda in Iraq wants him to — the spectacular suicide bombings meant to undermine our will.

To compensate for giving up on this war, Democrats conjure an imaginary Iraq War to which they will be utterly committed and which we will fight until glorious victory. That is the war we supposedly will fight against al Qaeda in Iraq — after, of course, we withdraw our troops and hand over the Anbar and Diyala provinces to it. Sen. Chuck Schumer, in Reid cleanup mode, says then we'll be wondrously positioned to go “after an al-Qaida camp that might arise in Iraq.” Might? We already are engaged in a fight with al Qaeda in Iraq now — to keep it from stoking a full-scale sectarian war and from taking over swathes of Iraq — but the Democrats think that we've lost it.

“No one wants us to succeed in Iraq more than the Democrats,” Reid maintains. What a pathetic canard. As if believing a war is lost has no effect on your will to succeed in it. Reid might have been right if he had said the past tense, “wanted.”

Democrats are under no obligation to think the war can be won. But they should feel obliged to their consciences and voters to be forthright about what they believe. Waiting for them to do that seems the real lost cause.

from Reuters, 2007-May-26, by John Whitesides:

Obama, Clinton side with anti-war Democrats

WASHINGTON - Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton earned praise from anti-war activists but criticism from Republicans on Friday for voting against a measure to pay for the Iraq war that sets no timetables for withdrawing U.S. troops.

The two leading 2008 Democratic presidential contenders had been under heavy pressure from the party's influential anti-war wing and from other Democratic candidates to oppose the emergency funding bill sought by President George W. Bush.

Unlike an earlier funding bill Bush vetoed on May 1, the measure passed comfortably on Thursday by the Senate and House of Representatives did not have deadlines for pulling out U.S. combat troops.

Obama and Clinton had refused to say how they would vote, but ultimately sided with opponents of the increasingly unpopular war. Liberal advocacy groups like MoveOn.org had warned Democrats who backed the measure of possible political consequences.

Republican presidential contenders John McCain and Mitt Romney blasted Obama and Clinton for not supporting U.S. troops -- a criticism likely to linger into next year's general election campaign and the November 2008 vote for the White House.

"I was very disappointed to see Senator Obama and Senator Clinton embrace the policy of surrender," said McCain, an Arizona senator who backed the bill.

"This vote may win favor with MoveOn and liberal primary voters, but it's the equivalent of waving a white flag to al Qaeda," McCain said, setting off a testy exchange with Obama.

STROLL THROUGH BAGHDAD MARKET

Obama said Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, and McCain "clearly believe the course we are on is working, but I do not," and said proof could be found in McCain's need for heavy security on a recent stroll through a Baghdad market.

McCain, a Vietnam War veteran, said his experience gave him a different view than Obama had gained during "two years in the U.S. Senate."

Two other Democratic senators running for president split their votes, with Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd voting against it and Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden for it.

The bill passed 280-142 in the House and 80-14 in the Senate.

Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn.org, praised the bill's opponents.

"Senators Obama, Clinton and Dodd stood up and did the right thing -- voting down the president's war policy," Pariser said. "They're showing real leadership toward ending the war, and MoveOn's members are grateful."

Other Democratic contenders like John Edwards, a former senator, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson had urged Congress to reject the measure.

Clinton has angered anti-war Democrats with her refusal to apologize or repudiate her 2002 vote to authorize the war in Iraq, while Obama stresses his early opposition to the war.

While initially reluctant to back withdrawal timetables, Clinton and Obama voted for the earlier bill that included them.

Analysts said opposing the bill was a safe choice for Democrats given the public mood against the war. But the delay in making a decision by Obama and Clinton made them appear calculating, said Cal Jillson, a political analyst at Southern Methodist University in Texas.

"Neither Hillary nor Obama have been beacons of courage," he said. "People are saying 'Do you guys have the sense of self and the confidence to state a position and then defend it?' And both of them have been hiding in the bushes."

Clinton, of New York, said she supported the troops but opposed the bill because "it fails to compel the president to give our troops a new strategy in Iraq." Obama, of Illinois, said U.S. troops deserved more.

Biden, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, said Democrats did not have the votes yet to overcome Bush's veto and the troops needed to be funded.

"The president may be prepared to play a game of political chicken with the well-being of our troops. I am not. I will not," Biden said.

from the Associated Press, 2007-May-23, by Beth Fouhy:

Edwards: 'War on terror' has hurt U.S.

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards addresses the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Wednesday, May 23, 2007. In a defense policy speech, Edwards called the war on terror a "bumper sticker" slogan Bush had used to justify everything from abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison to the invasion of Iraq.

Democrat John Edwards Wednesday repudiated the notion that there is a "global war on terror," calling it an ideological doctrine advanced by the Bush administration that has strained American military resources and emboldened terrorists.

In a defense policy speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Edwards called the war on terror a "bumper sticker" slogan Bush had used to justify everything from abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison to the invasion of Iraq.

"We need a post-Bush, post-9/11, post-Iraq military that is mission focused on protecting Americans from 21st century threats, not misused for discredited ideological purposes," Edwards said. "By framing this as a war, we have walked right into the trap the terrorists have set - that we are engaged in some kind of clash of civilizations and a war on Islam."

Edwards is not the first presidential candidate to publicly reject the notion of a war on terrorism. In a speech last fall, Democrat Joe Biden also criticized the doctrine as "simply wrong."

In the first presidential debate last month in South Carolina, Edwards and Biden said they did not believe there was a global war on terror, along with Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel. Front-runners Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama indicated that they did.

It was a new line of attack for Edwards, who often spoke out in support of pursuing a war on terror as a North Carolina senator and later as the 2004 Democratic vice-presidential nominee.

"For us to be successful in this war on terrorism, we have to find these terrorist groups where they are, whether it's within our borders or outside our borders, and stop them and stamp them out before they do us harm," Edwards said in a 2004 CNN interview.

Edwards also voted in 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq but has since become a harsh critic of the conflict. In his speech, he reiterated his call to remove American combat troops from Iraq within a year and vowed to "restore the contract we have with those who proudly wear the uniform to defend our country and make the world a safe and better place."

Edwards outlined several steps he said he would pursue as president to strengthen the military, including using force only to pursue essential national security missions, improve civilian-military relations, and root out mismanagement at the Pentagon.

He said he would created a "national security budget" to include the activities of several agencies, including the Pentagon, Energy Department, and Homeland Security. He also said he would boost the budget for military recruiting.

But Edwards saved his toughest words for the Bush administration, whom he accused of engaging in wrongheaded military adventures while abandoning U.S. "moral leadership" in the world. Because of the administration's poor stewardship, Edwards said troops were exhausted, overworked, and potentially ill-prepared for future threats.

"Leading the military out of the wreckage left by the poor civilian leadership of this administration will be the single most important duty of the next commander in chief," Edwards said.

Anticipating the speech, the Republican National Committee sent out a research document titled "Edwards' Troop Profiteering," noting that his campaign routinely solicits donations to help Edwards pursue his anti-war efforts.

"One can't help but wonder how John Edwards is comfortable beefing up his campaign coffers at the expense of our troops," RNC spokeswoman Summer Johnson said. "Edwards' profiteering isn't only in poor taste but it also illustrates his hunger for the White House trumps his sensitivity toward those serving America."

from the Los Angeles Times, 2007-Jun-11, by Paul Richter:

Powell: It's time to close Guantanamo

The onetime secretary of State says the prison is only damaging the United States in the eyes of the world.

WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Sunday called for the closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison and a rethinking of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy he authored as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The public comments represent Powell's effort to further distance himself from the Bush administration he once served.

A key architect of the Pentagon's policy on homosexual troops, Powell said the country is moving away from the attitudes about gays it had in 1993, when the policy was adopted. But he stopped short of calling for a redesign while the country is at war.

Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," Powell urged that the military commission system for accused terrorists be scrapped, and that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be taken to the United States and handled through the federal justice system. The United States continues to hold about 385 people in the detention center, despite the complaints of human rights advocates and other foreign and domestic critics. Their continued imprisonment there, he said, has "shaken the belief that the world had in America's justice system."

Responding to defenders of the current system who are reluctant to allow detainees access to lawyers and judicial protections, Powell said, "So what? Let them…. America, unfortunately, has 2 million people in jail, all of whom had lawyers and access to writs of habeas corpus…. We can handle bad people in our system."

With authoritarian world leaders citing Guantanamo to "hide their own misdeeds," he said, Guantanamo "is causing us far more damage than any good we get from it."

Powell's comments are a step further in his steady evolution as a public critic of the Bush administration he served. Even as secretary of State in President Bush's first term, Powell privately expressed misgivings about the Iraq war and its aftermath. Since leaving the administration in 2005, Powell has made more and more clear his unhappiness with administration policy.

Last September, Powell made a stir by attacking, in a letter to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Bush's plan to handle detainees through military commissions. He wrote that "the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism."

But now, with Bush and the war in Iraq increasingly unpopular, Powell's concerns about the system are shared even within the administration. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, for example, has expressed his preference to move to a different approach.

Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when President Clinton began devising the military policy on gays. Called "don't ask, don't tell," the policy was intended to allow homosexuals to serve in the military only as long as they did not disclose or act on their orientation. In recent weeks, Democratic presidential candidates have urged that the policy be jettisoned.

Powell said the policy was "an appropriate response to the situation back in 1993. And the country certainly has changed."

But unlike his successor as Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, Powell said he was not yet convinced that the country had changed so much that the system needed to be changed.

At debates in New Hampshire last week, all the Democratic candidates said it was time to move on from the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, while none of the GOP candidates expressed that view.

On the war in Iraq, Powell expressed pessimism about the status of the U.S. effort. Noting that the current strategy is built on three "legs" — the U.S. military escalation, the attempt to train Iraqi security forces, and the effort to move the country to political reconciliation through changes in its laws and constitution — he said the most crucial political component "is not going well."

Though Powell has served Republican presidents, his comments on Guantanamo put him closer to the Democratic field than the GOP.

And Powell, who was urged to run for the presidency in 1996, acknowledged that he had not decided which party to back in 2008 and that he had twice been consulted recently by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois on national security issues.

On another issue, on CBS' "Face the Nation," Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said the United States should consider "aggressive" military action against Iran.

The comment put Lieberman in a minority among U.S. officials.

Though the Bush administration says it will not take options off the table, few U.S. officials are speaking of military action against Tehran because of the risks and costs of a wider war when U.S. forces are already stretched thin.

from the International Herald Tribune (New York Times Paris edition), 2007-Apr-18, by Thom Shanker:

U.S. Army's juggling and corner-cutting comes at a price

WASHINGTON: As the U.S. Army juggles its financial accounts and cuts logistical corners to maintain combat operations during a budget standoff between the White House and Congress, efficiency and economy are likely to be the first casualties.

The army has announced that it would squeeze out money for the continuing war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan by requesting the temporary transfer of $1.6 billion from air force and navy payrolls and slowing the purchase of spare parts and other supplies not bound for those countries. It also said it would freeze new civilian hires and suspend some service contracts.

Whether in war or in peace, this kind of stop-and-start spending pattern has long been recognized as one of the chief sources of inefficiency and cost overruns in military programs, which are always subject to the shifting priorities reflected in annual White House budget proposals and subsequent congressional spending legislation.

Faced last year with a budget standoff between the White House and Congress, then held by Republicans, the army pinched pennies by making moves similar to this year's to guarantee money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It halted civilian hiring, froze orders for inessential spare parts, reduced administrative travel and transferred large sums from other army accounts to its combat operations.

Pentagon budget officials have said that extra costs resulting from unusual spending restrictions are seen first in the area of contracts.

"Rather than sign a long-term contract, one tied to performance, we may have to contract for goods and services incrementally, job-by-job as required, under these new rules," said a Pentagon budget official who was not authorized to speak for attribution. "That is a nightmare. It is inefficient and more expensive. You would never run your household that way."

This year's steps, announced on Monday night, were designed to find money to continue army combat operations through June - time, perhaps, for the White House and Congress to settle their differences.

"In order to stretch the money it has, the army will tell commanders to slow spending in certain areas so that war-related activities and support to families can continue," said an official army statement announcing the new spending restrictions.

For the next two months, the Pentagon statement said, purchasing regular supplies with government charge cards will be restricted, nonessential travel will be postponed or canceled, and shipping equipment or supplies will be restricted or deferred "unless needed immediately for war efforts." The army, it said, "will delay the repair of facilities and environmental programs unless the work is for safety or health reasons, or impacts on family support."

Many of the measures will roll out in sequence. "If the budget impasse is not resolved by May, the army will freeze new civilian hiring, will release temporary employees and will cease entering into new contracts while suspending some service contracts for training and facilities," the army announced. "Orders for nonessential spare parts and supplies will be canceled."

These actions "carry consequential effects, including substantial disruption to installation functions, decreasing efficiency and potentially further degrading the readiness of nondeployed units," the army statement said.

William Campbell, the deputy director for the army budget, said the service learned last year that some of its spending targets, programs with high visibility and impact, yielded little savings. Thus, this year, the army will not restrict its summer hiring program, because last year's freeze on that effort "brought very, very little in return," he said.

One other difference between the set of levers chosen by the army this year over last is the request for borrowing funds from air force and navy personnel accounts. Last year, the $1.4 billion in reprogrammed money came from within the army.

Because of the unexpected nature of last year's spending battle, General Richard Cody, the army vice chief of staff, announced spending restrictions in late May that were rushed into effect over just a few weeks. This year's restrictions ratchet up the cost-cutting measures more gradually, over the next eight weeks.

"Frankly, what I worry about is that second- or third-order effect that might affect a soldier or a soldier's safety or his ability to do a mission," Campbell said. "As we put these brakes on, I do worry about the impact that we don't know about, that someone will take some action trying to do the right thing, but it will have a negative impact on the ability of a soldier to do his or her job."

Most of the new spending restrictions "are not savings," Campbell said. "We are deferring when we will spend the money."

Postponing contracts on maintaining facilities, he said, "generates a lot of money in the near term but puts a burden on contracting offices and contractors later in the year."

Unless the budget standoff is resolved by the end of June, Pentagon officials have warned, units preparing to go to Iraq may not have enough money to undertake all of the required training.

Since no units are sent into combat until certified, units now in Iraq might have to extend their tours until money is available to fully train fresh units, according to Pentagon planners.

from Fox News, 2007-Apr-19, by Molly Hooper with the Associated Press contributing:

Reid: Someone Tell Bush the War in Iraq is Lost

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Thursday said the war in Iraq is lost militarily and "can only be won diplomatically, politically and economically" after more than four years of fighting.

"Now I believe, myself, that the secretary of state, the secretary of defense and you have to make your own decision as to what the president knows: that this war is lost, that the surge is not accomplishing anything," Reid, D-Nev., told reporters.

Repeating remarks he made to President Bush during a meeting of congressional leaders at the White House, Reid said the president is hearing only from people who are backing up his view of the war.

"I know I was the odd guy out yesterday at the White House, but I at least told him what he needs to hear. … I told George Bush what he needs to hear, not what he wants to hear, I did that and my conscience is great," said Reid, who was one of several lawmakers who met with the president on Wednesday at the White House. Reid added that more people need to tell Bush the same.

Reid's prognosis came after Defense Secretary Robert Gates made a surprise visit to Iraq and repeated remarks of a day earlier in which he said that Iraqi officials have to move faster in taking control of their country, including through political means. He added that America's military commitment is not open-ended.

But speaking in Camp Fallujah, Gates said progress in al-Anbar province is "really a good news story."

"It's a place where the Iraqis have decided to take control of their future. The Sheiks have played a key role in making good things happen out here, along with the Iraqi police and the Iraqi army and with our help. I received a briefing not just about military operations, but about construction projects, rule of law initiatives and a variety of local political developments that are encouraging," Gates said.

Meanwhile, Bush offered his own perspective on the global War On Terror to a friendly audience at Tippecanoe High School in Tipp City, Ohio. House Minority Leader John Boehner traveled with the president to the congressman's district, which voted for Bush by a 2-1 ratio in the 2004 election.

At one point, a man in the audience politely asked Bush how he deals with low poll numbers. Bush responded by saying that polls "go poof at times." He then said that he is sticking to his principles regardless of the poll data.

White House spokesman Dana Perino said tickets for the event were distributed by the Chamber of Commerce, except for a handful that went to Rep. Boehner's office, and since the town hall style of the event wasn't decided until Thursday morning, none of the questions had been prescreened.

In the 90-minute conversation, Bush repeated that he will veto an emergency spending bill that includes a timetable for withdrawal.

The House of Representatives was slated Thursday to name its negotiators on the war funding bill with the intent of producing a House-Senate compromise next week. In Washington, House Minority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said a supplemental bill with a timetable allows for a process where the United States is "willing to accept failure" and "set a deadline for defeat."

On the Senate side of Capitol Hill, Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., said he didn't want to "dignify with a response" the GOP's new characterization of the Democratic position on troop withdrawal as "surrender."

"Surrender to who? Who are we surrendering to? This is an unconventional war and has to be dealt with in unconventional ways. This is an administration that has never understood the nature of the threat or the way to respond to it," Kennedy said.

While the president has pledged a veto, Democrats seem intent to send the supplemental bill to the president with the deadline for withdrawal. Doing so would further delay the funding measure, a situation that Pentagon officials says slows military readiness, delays equipment repairs and limits travel.

Army spokesman Col. William Wiggins told FOX News on Thursday that the military has "enough money to slide until the first of June" after the Navy and Air Force sent $1.6 billion to Army accounts.

While lawmakers were outspoken in press briefings, several officials described Wednesday's White House meeting as polite for the most part, but pointed during Reid's comments that he spoke with generals who likened Iraq to Vietnam and described it as a war in which the president refused to change course despite knowing victory was impossible.

Bush bristled at the comparison, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. One quoted him as saying, "I reject" the comparison.

from the Associated Press via MLive.com, 2007-May-4, by Beth Fouhy:

Analysis: Clinton tries to rectify past

NEW YORK — Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's move to repeal President Bush's authority for the Iraq war amounts to a do-over — an effort to rectify her most glaring vulnerability among presidential primary voters.

And this from a candidate who when pressed to explain her 2002 vote giving a green light to the invasion often says — "There are no do-overs in life."

Clinton, D-N.Y., joined Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., on Thursday on legislation that would repeal congressional authorization for the war and require Bush to seek new authority from Congress to extend the conflict beyond Oct. 11, 2007 — five years after the original permission was given.

For the Democratic front-runner, the bill represents her latest effort to step away from a vote for which she refuses to apologize but which has caused her no end of political headaches.

"For someone who voted for the authorization, she disappoints Democratic activist audiences by saying a different president would have used the authority better," Democratic strategist Erik Smith said. "This legislation shows she's exhibiting leadership and taking some action, which might answer a lot of activists' concerns."

Still, Smith said, "There will certainly be people who will say, 'Why didn't you do this years ago?'"

Anti-war activists and other Democrats routinely grill her about the vote on the campaign trail. It's also proven to be a valuable opening for her rivals, especially Sen. Barack Obama, who has made early opposition to the war a campaign centerpiece.

Obama's campaign issued a lukewarm response to what it called the "Byrd measure," noting the Illinois senator had introduced legislation to begin redeploying troops this month.

"As someone who opposed this war from the start, and opposed its authorization by those in Congress, Senator Obama would support this measure," spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement. "But he doesn't believe we should wait until October to begin bringing this war to a close."

Another top rival, John Edwards, criticized Clinton's bill as insufficient Friday but never referred to her by name.

A former North Carolina senator, Edwards voted for the 2002 war authorization but has since recanted his vote. At a campaign stop in New Orleans, he insisted Congress use its funding authority to end the war.

"Congress, right this minute, has the authority to stop this. All they have to do is use it instead of doing these other measures that are off in the future," he told The Associated Press.

Clinton aides have long insisted voters care more about how to end the war than revisiting how it started. But privately, they have fretted considerably about what the vote has cost her among primary voters.

As a result, Clinton has sharpened her anti-war rhetoric over the course of the campaign, even bringing delegates to their feet at the California Democratic Convention last weekend with a call to "End this war now!"

Her legislation takes her evolution a step farther, pairing her with a visible anti-war stalwart, Byrd, and offering a decisive end to a seemingly intractable conflict.

Bush vetoed legislation this week that would have tied funding for the war to a timetable for the withdrawal of troops. Clinton voted for the legislation, as did all the other Democratic contenders who are members of the Senate.

None has said what they will do if the next version they are asked to vote on drops the timetable for troop withdrawals.

Another 2008 contender, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, first broached the idea of deauthorizing the war at a speech to the Democratic National Committee in February.

In a telephone interview Friday, Richardson generally praised Clinton's bill but said it didn't go far enough. He advocated a binding resolution that would reinforce Congress's authority to start wars and end them — a strategy that could require the Supreme Court to intervene.

"It has to be a war powers resolution, and it means fighting the administration on Constitutional grounds and foreign policy grounds," Richardson said. "The public would understand what that means, rather than all these convoluted timetables and benchmarks."

Another contender, Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., has called publicly for congressional authorization for the war to be revoked but has not introduced legislation to do so.

For his part, Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd insisted that the legislation authored by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., was the most effective vehicle to end the war. Dodd is the only Democratic presidential contender to support the legislation, which would end war funding and redeploy all troops by next March 31.

"I will continue to support Feingold-Reid ... and I urge the other candidates to do the same," Dodd said in an e-mail to supporters Friday.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Apr-5, by Daniel Henninger:

The Democrats' Surge
Will they thwart a military success, or will success thwart them?

Carried aloft on the gassy fumes of politics, the congressional Democrats may be overshooting on Iraq. Six months from now, they may wish they had been more temperate. Helped finally by the right U.S. military strategy, the Iraq nightmare might be ebbing. Then what?

No such thought intrudes today on Democratic politics. Buoyed by President Bush's 30-something approval and with disaffection over the war at 60%, Senate Majority Leader Reid can promise to sign on to Russ Feingold's pull-the-plug bill; and House Speaker Pelosi, as if making foie gras, can cram an Iraq-withdrawal bill down the gullets of her chamber's membership. The polls are with Harry and Nancy. What can go wrong?

What could go wrong is that the U.S. military's "surge" could go right. The surge, led by Gen. David Petraeus and formally known as the Baghdad Security Plan, is a real strategy being executed by real people on the ground in Iraq. For the past several months, since President Bush announced the plan, the Democratic leadership has acted as if this effort were so irrelevant as to not exist. Why bother? The House leadership has its own "surge" up and running in Washington against the enemy in the White House.

---

The Democrats' D.C. surge began in February when Rep. John Murtha announced plans to shut off the war. What followed was a six-week push by the Pelosi team toward a March vote on a date-certain pullout. Across those weeks, this domestic offensive has been the big story in our politics. Add in as well the theater of operations opened by Democratic Lt. Gen. Chuck Schumer's siege of the Justice Department.

This is heady stuff, rolling a president off the field, so heady the Democrats may be allowing their compulsions to make them the one force thwarting a much longed-for military success in Iraq. This in turn could leave the Democratic Party on the wrong side of the most revered institution in American life--the U.S. military. That is, back where they were when Bill Clinton was president. The "we support the troops" mantra will ring hollow if the Democrats are pulling out Army and Marine personnel just as they're gaining on the killers of their comrades.

The timelines for the Iraq surge announced on Jan. 10 and the Democrats' surge to shut it down have run in tandem.

On Jan. 23 Gen. Petraeus offered the Senate Armed Services Committee an outline of the surge. By Feb. 8, U.S. paratroopers and engineers in Baghdad had quickly put together 10 Joint Security Stations, the new command centers to be operated with Iraq's security forces. (The material for the surge timeline here comes from the excellent "Iraq Report" compiled by Kimberly Kagan, director of the Institute for the Study of War and published biweekly on the Web site of the Weekly Standard.)

On Feb. 10, Gen. Petraeus arrived to take command of these forces in Baghdad. In the second week of February, U.S. troops conducted 20,000 patrols compared to 7,400 the week before.

On Feb. 16, the House of Representatives passed a resolution, 246-182, to oppose the mission. Nancy Pelosi: "The stakes in Iraq are too high to recycle proposals that have little prospect for success." That might not be true. It might indeed succeed.

Through February and into March, the U.S.-Iraqi forces moved into neighborhoods on the edge of Sadr City, stronghold of Shiite militias. "While the house-to-house operations continued," Ms. Kagan writes, "U.S. and Iraqi forces also interdicted the flow of fighters and supplies through those neighborhoods into Sadr City."

Meanwhile, House Democrats worked on a bill to force the withdrawal of U.S. troops by fall 2008.

On March 4, 600 U.S. and 550 Iraqi forces commenced house-to-house searches in Sadr City's Jamil neighborhood. Also in early March, with little fanfare, U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested 16 individuals connected with the Jaysh al-Mahdi cell, suspected of sectarian kidnappings and killings.

On March 23, the House voted 218-212 to remove these U.S. forces by August's end, 2008.

It's not quite three months since the surge began in Iraq, and some early assessments of the operation have emerged. They are positive. Keep in mind that this strategy emerged from military reassessment over the past year, led largely by Gen. Petraeus; this isn't a pick-up team.

Testifying last Wednesday to a House Armed Services subcommittee, military historian Fred Kagan, who has criticized administration policies, noted that the Iraqi army is "now larger than the standing armies of France and Great Britain." The nine Iraqi army battalions called for in the surge have arrived, at over 90% of programmed strength. "They are taking casualties, inflicting casualties on the enemy and helping to maintain and establish peace for the people of Baghdad," said Mr. Kagan.

---

A report filed last week by retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey gets the political-military dynamic just right. He notes that we are "in a position of strategic peril there. But he then describes in detail how since early February the situation on the ground has "measurably improved." Thus the conclusion: "We now need a last powerful effort to provide to U.S. leaders on the ground the political support . . . and military strength it requires to succeed."

Gen. Petraeus himself in recent interviews has been careful not to oversell this early success. But it is difficult to imagine that the American public would want to hang its military with a failure if a better outcome is in reach. Failed wars exact a price. During Vietnam, between 1966 and 1973 support for the U.S. military dropped from 62% to 32%. We're not there, yet. From 2002 till now polls have found a combined favorable view toward the military of around 85%. But withdrawing these American troops on the cusp of a reasonable success could do long-term damage.

No one can simply assume that we would avoid a decline in faith in the army as an effective American institution deserving financial support, as happened with the post-Vietnam defense cuts. As bad, it could force a failed military class--officers to grunts--to rebuild, again, the ethos and esprit necessary to defend us from the next threat. That takes time. We don't have time.

If the Iraq surge is succeeding, the Democrats' surge should stand down. If a year from now the Petraeus plan is foundering, the Democrats will have plenty of time to hang it around the GOP's neck by demanding a legitimate withdrawal date--November 2008. But not now.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Mar-8, by Debra Burlingame:

Gitmo's Guerrilla Lawyers
How an unscrupulous legal and PR campaign changed the way the world looks at Guantanamo.

He was the first American to die in what some have called "the real war." Johnny "Mike" Spann, the 32-year-old CIA paramilitary commando, was interrogating prisoners in an open courtyard at the Qala-I-Jangi fortress in Afghanistan when the uprising of 538 hard-core Taliban and al Qaeda fighters began. Spann emptied his rifle, then his sidearm, then fought hand-to-hand as he was swarmed by raging prisoners screaming "Allahu akbar!"

The bloody siege by Northern Alliance and U.S. forces went on for several days, only ending when 86 of the remaining jihadi fighters were smoked out of a basement where they had retreated and where they murdered a Red Cross worker who had gone in to check on their condition. Spann, a former Marine, is credited with saving the lives of countless Alliance fighters and Afghan civilians by standing and firing as they ran for cover. His beaten and booby-trapped body was recovered with two bullet wounds in his head, the angle of trajectory suggesting he had been shot execution style.

One of the committed jihadis who came out of that basement, wounded and unrepentant, was "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, now serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison. Another who was shot during the uprising and pulled out of the basement along with Lindh was Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi. Today, the 29-year-old is living somewhere in Kuwait, a free man.

The true story of Mr. Mutairi's journey, from the uprising in Qala-I-Jangi to Guantanamo Bay's military detention camp to the privileged life of an affluent Kuwaiti citizen, is one that his team of high-priced lawyers and the government of Kuwait doesn't want you to know. His case reveals a disturbing counterpoint to the false narrative advanced by Gitmo lawyers and human-rights groups--which holds that the Guantanamo Bay detainees are innocent victims of circumstance, swept up in the angry, anti-Muslim fervor that followed the attacks of September 11, then abused and brutally tortured at the hands of the U.S. military.

Mr. Mutairi was among 12 Kuwaitis picked up in Afghanistan and detained at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. Their families retained Tom Wilner and the prestigious law firm of Shearman & Sterling early that same year. Arguably, it is Mr. Wilner's aggressive representation, along with the determined efforts of the Kuwait government, that has had the greatest influence in the outcome of all the enemy combatant cases, in the court of law and in the court of public opinion. The lawsuit filed on their behalf, renamed Rasul v. Bush when three cases were joined, is credited with opening the door for the blizzard of litigation that followed.

According to Michael Ratner, the radical lawyer and head of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the center received 300 pieces of hate mail when the organization filed the very first Guantanamo detainee case in February of 2002. The shocking images of 9/11 were still fresh; it would be three more months until most human remains and rubble would be cleared from ground zero. There was no interest in Guantanamo from the lawyers at premium law firms.

But by 2004, when the first of three detainee cases was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, the national climate had changed. The country was politically divided, the presidential election was in full swing, and John Kerry was talking about treating terrorism like a criminal nuisance. The Guantanamo cases gave lawyers a chance to take a swipe at the president's policies, give heroic speeches about protecting the rights of indigents, and be a part of the kind of landmark legal cases that come along once in a lifetime. The Guantanamo Bay Bar increased from a lonely band of activist lawyers operating out of a run down office in Greenwich Village to an association of 500 lawyers. Said Mr. Ratner about the blue chip firms that initially shunned these cases, "You had to beat the lawyers off with a stick."

Mr. Wilner and his colleagues at Shearman & Sterling were the exception, although he has been exceedingly coy about the true nature of his firm's role. Unlike the many lawyers who later joined in the litigation on a pro bono basis, Shearman & Sterling was handsomely paid. Mr. Wilner has repeatedly stated that the detainees' families insisted on paying Shearman & Sterling for its services and that the fees it earned have been donated to an unspecified 9/11-related charity. According to one news report, the families had spent $2 million in legal fees by mid-2004. In truth, Kuwaiti officials confirmed that the government was footing the bills.

How did Shearman & Sterling get tapped for this historic assignment? Speaking at Seton Hall Law School in fall of 2006, Mr. Wilner recounted that he visited the facility at Guantanamo Bay in 2002, months before he met the Kuwaiti 12's families. What was Mr. Wilner doing at Gitmo more than two years before Rasul established the legal basis for lawyers getting access to detainees inside the camp? One of his Gitmo legal colleagues has said that Mr. Wilner was brought into the case by an oil industry client.

It turns out that Shearman & Sterling, a 1,000-lawyer firm with offices in 19 cities all over the world, has substantial business dealings on six continents. Indeed, Shearman's client care for Middle Eastern matters has established a new industry standard: The firm's Abu Dhabi office states that it has pioneered the concept of "Shariah-compliant" financing. In Kuwait, the firm has represented the government on a wide variety of matters involving billions of dollars worth of assets. So the party underwriting the litigation on behalf of the Kuwaiti 12--from which all of the detainees have benefited--is one of Shearman & Sterling's most lucrative OPEC accounts.

Shearman & Sterling did far more than just write legal briefs and shuttle down to Gitmo to conduct interviews about alleged torture for the BBC. In addition to its legal services, the firm registered as an agent of a foreign principal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) as well as the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA) to press the Kuwaiti detainees' cause on Capitol Hill. Shearman reported $749,980 in lobbying fees under FARA for one six-month period in 2005 and another $200,000 under the LDA over a one-year period between 2005 and 2006. Those are the precise time periods when Congress was engaged in intense debates over the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act, legislation which Shearman & Sterling and its Kuwaiti paymasters hoped would pave the way for shutting down Guantanamo permanently and setting their clients free.

Mr. Wilner, a media-savvy lawyer who immediately realized that the detainee cases posed a tremendous PR challenge in the wake of September 11, hired high-stakes media guru Richard Levick to change public perception about the Kuwaiti 12. Mr. Levick, a former attorney whose Washington, D.C.-based "crisis PR" firm has carved out a niche in litigation-related issues, has represented clients as varied as Rosie O'Donnell, Napster, and the Roman Catholic Church. Mr. Levick's firm is also registered under FARA as an agent of a foreign principal for the "Kuwaiti Detainees Committee," reporting $774,000 in fees in a one year period. After the U.S. Supreme Court heard the first consolidated case, the PR campaign went into high gear, Mr. Levick wrote, to "turn the Guantanamo tide."

In numerous published articles and interviews, Mr. Levick has laid out the essence of the entire Kuwaiti PR campaign. The strategy sought to accomplish two things: put a sympathetic "human face" on the detainees and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a part of al Qaeda's jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a "teacher on vacation" who went to Afghanistan in 2001 "to help refugees." The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden's chief spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became the innocent victims of "bounty hunters."

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A Montreal-based marketing firm was hired to create the families' full-service Web site which fed propaganda--unsourced, unrebutted and uninvestigated by the media--aimed at the media all over the world. Creating what Mr. Levick calls a "war of pictures," the site is replete with images meant to appeal to Americans: smiling Kuwaiti families wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, cute children passing out yellow ribbons.

After the Rasul decision, the PR momentum picked up speed and the Supreme Court became, in Mr. Levick's words, their "main weapon," a "cudgel" that forced more attention in what he calls the traditional "liberal" press. Dozens of op-eds by Mr. Wilner and the family group leader (described as a U.S.-trained former Kuwaiti Air Force pilot who cherishes the memory of drinking Coca Cola) were aimed at the public and Congress.

Mr. Levick maintains that a year and a half after they began the campaign, their PR outreach produced literally thousands of news placements and that, eventually, a majority of the top 100 newspapers were editorializing on the detainees' behalf. Convinced that judges can be influenced by aggressive PR campaigns, Mr. Levick points to rulings in the detainee cases which openly cite news stories that resulted from his team's media outreach.

The Kuwaiti 12 case is a primer on the anatomy of a guerilla PR offensive, packaged and sold to the public as a fight for the "rule of law" and "America's core principles." Begin with flimsy information, generate stories that are spun from uncorroborated double or triple hearsay uttered by interested parties that are hard to confirm from halfway around the world. Feed the phonied-up stories to friendly media who write credulous reports and emotional human interest features, post them on a Web site where they will then be read and used as sources by other lazy (or busy) media from all over the world. In short, create one giant echo chamber.

Mr. Mutairi's profile is the most brazen example of Mr. Levick's confidence that the media can be easily manipulated. The Web site describes him as a member of an apolitical and peaceful sect of missionaries, and that he went to Afghanistan in October of 2000 to "minister in the small mosques and schools" in the country's poorer regions.

Everything Mr. Levick did was in partnership with Tom Wilner and the law firm of Sherman & Sterling. It was their joint litigation-PR plan, with the Guantanamo lawsuits helping the PR messaging and the PR messaging helping the lawsuits. All of this may be legal, but it is hardly ethical.

Shearman & Sterling lawyers aren't hucksters crassly promoting a cheap product; they are sworn officers of the court volunteering to represent alien enemy combatants in a time of war, interjecting themselves in cases that affect how American soldiers on the battlefield do their job. It is one thing to take these cases in order to achieve the proper balance between due process concerns and unprecedented national security issues. It is another to hire PR and marketing consultants to create image makeovers for suspected al Qaeda financiers, foot soldiers, weapons trainers and bomb makers, all of which is financed by millions of dollars from a foreign country enmeshed in the anti-American, anti-Israel elements of Middle East politics.

Although a few mistakes were made when some of the Guantanamo detainees were taken into custody in the fog of war, others were indisputably captured with AK-47s still smoking in their hands. Any one of those who have been properly classified in Combat Status Review Tribunals as an unlawful enemy combatant could be the next Mohamed Atta or Hani Hanjour, who, if captured in the summer of 2001, would have been described by these lawyers as a quiet engineering student from Hamburg and a nice Saudi kid who dreams of learning to fly.

How we deal with alien enemy combatants goes to the essence of the debate between those who see terrorism as a series of criminal acts that should be litigated in the justice system, one attack at a time, and those who see it as a global war where the "criminal paradigm" is no more effective against militant Islamists whose chief tactic is mass murder than indictments would have been in stopping Hitler's march across Europe. Michael Ratner and the lawyers in the Gitmo bar have expressly stated that the habeas corpus lawsuits are a tactic to prevent the U.S. military from doing its job. He has bragged that "The litigation is brutal [for the United States]  . . . You can't run an interrogation . . . with attorneys." No, you can't. Lawyers can literally get us killed.

We may never know how many of the hundreds of repatriated detainees are back in action, fighting the U.S. or our allies thanks to the efforts of the Guantanamo Bay Bar. Approximately 20 former detainees have been confirmed as having returned to the battlefield, 12 of them killed by U.S. forces. Of the eight detainees who were rendered back to Kuwait for review of their cases, all were acquitted in criminal proceedings, including Mr. Mutairi, who has given press interviews admitting that he was shot in the November 2001 uprising at Qala-I-Jangi.

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Only one Kuwaiti, Adel al-Zamel, has been sent to prison for crimes committed before his work with al-Wafa in Afghanistan. A member of an Islamist gang that stalked, videotaped and savagely beat "adulterers," he was sentenced to a year in prison in 2000 for attacking a coed sitting in her car. These are some of the men Tom Wilner was talking about when he went on national television and said with a straight face, "My guys . . . loved the United States."

The guy who really loved the United States stood and fought to protect us from radical Islamists, rather than enable them. In his job application for the CIA, Mike Spann wrote, "I am an action person that feels personally responsible for making any changes in this world that are in my power because if I don't no one else will." We owe our unqualified support and steadfastness to the warriors who take personal responsibility when no one else will.

Allowing lawyers to subvert the truth and transform the Constitution into a lethal weapon in the hands of our enemies--while casting themselves as patriots--makes a mockery of the sacrifices made by true patriots like Mike Spann. If Sens. Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter, chairman and ranking members, respectively, of the Senate Judiciary Committee succeed in their plan to turn enemy combatant cases over to the federal courts, we will sorely rue the day that we eliminated "lawyer-free zones."

Ms. Burlingame, a former attorney and a director of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

from the Washington Post, 2007-Mar-23, p.A16:

Retreat and Butter
Are Democrats in the House voting for farm subsidies or withdrawal from Iraq?

TODAY THE House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill that would grant $25 million to spinach farmers in California. The legislation would also appropriate $75 million for peanut storage in Georgia and $15 million to protect Louisiana rice fields from saltwater. More substantially, there is $120 million for shrimp and menhaden fishermen, $250 million for milk subsidies, $500 million for wildfire suppression and $1.3 billion to build levees in New Orleans.

Altogether the House Democratic leadership has come up with more than $20 billion in new spending, much of it wasteful subsidies to agriculture or pork barrel projects aimed at individual members of Congress. At the tail of all of this logrolling and political bribery lies this stinger: Representatives who support the bill -- for whatever reason -- will be voting to require that all U.S. combat troops leave Iraq by August 2008, regardless of what happens during the next 17 months or whether U.S. commanders believe a pullout at that moment protects or endangers U.S. national security, not to mention the thousands of American trainers and Special Forces troops who would remain behind.

The Democrats claim to have a mandate from voters to reverse the Bush administration's policy in Iraq. Yet the leadership is ready to piece together the votes necessary to force a fateful turn in the war by using tactics usually dedicated to highway bills or the Army Corps of Engineers budget. The legislation pays more heed to a handful of peanut farmers than to the 24 million Iraqis who are living through a maelstrom initiated by the United States, the outcome of which could shape the future of the Middle East for decades.

Congress can and should play a major role in determining how and when the war ends. Political benchmarks for the Iraqi government are important, provided they are not unrealistic or inflexible. Even dates for troop withdrawals might be helpful, if they are cast as goals rather than requirements -- and if the timing derives from the needs of Iraq, not the U.S. election cycle. The Senate's version of the supplemental spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan contains nonbinding benchmarks and a withdrawal date that is a goal; that approach is more likely to win broad support and avoid a White House veto.

As it is, House Democrats are pressing a bill that has the endorsement of MoveOn.org but excludes the judgment of the U.S. commanders who would have to execute the retreat the bill mandates. It would heap money on unneedy dairy farmers while provoking a constitutional fight with the White House that could block the funding to equip troops in the field. Democrats who want to force a withdrawal should vote against war appropriations. They should not seek to use pork to buy a majority for an unconditional retreat that the majority does not support.

from the Military Times, 2007-Apr-4, by Rick Maze:

No more GWOT, House committee decrees

The House Armed Services Committee is banishing the global war on terror from the 2008 defense budget.

This is not because the war has been won, lost or even called off, but because the committee's Democratic leadership doesn't like the phrase.

A memo for the committee staff, circulated March 27, says the 2008 bill and its accompanying explanatory report that will set defense policy should be specific about military operations and “avoid using colloquialisms.”

The “global war on terror,” a phrase first used by President Bush shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., should not be used, according to the memo. Also banned is the phrase the “long war,” which military officials began using last year as a way of acknowledging that military operations against terrorist states and organizations would not be wrapped up in a few years.

Committee staff members are told in the memo to use specific references to specific operations instead of the Bush administration's catch phrases. The memo, written by Staff Director Erin Conaton, provides examples of acceptable phrases, such as “the war in Iraq,” the “war in Afghanistan, “operations in the Horn of Africa” or “ongoing military operations throughout the world.”

“There was no political intent in doing this,” said a Democratic aide who asked not to be identified. “We were just trying to avoid catch phrases.”

Josh Holly, a spokesman for Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, the committee's former chairman and now its senior Republican, said Republicans “were not consulted” about the change.

Committee aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said dropping or reducing references to the global war on terror could have many purposes, including an effort to be more precise about military operations, but also has a political element involving a disagreement over whether the war in Iraq is part of the effort to combat terrorism or is actually a distraction from fighting terrorists.

House Democratic leaders who have been pushing for an Iraq withdrawal timetable have talked about the need to get combat troops out of Iraq so they can be deployed against terrorists in other parts of the world, while Republicans have said that Iraq is part of the front line in the war on terror. Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the armed services committee chairman, has been among those who have complained that having the military tied up with Iraq operations has reduced its capacity to respond to more pressing problems, like tracking down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

“This is a philosophical and political question,” said a Republican aide. “Republicans generally believe that by fighting the war on terror in Iraq, we are preventing terrorists from spreading elsewhere and are keeping them engaged so they are not attacking us at home.”

However, U.S. intelligence officials have been telling Congress that most of the violence in Iraq is the result of sectarian strife and not directly linked to terrorists, although some foreign insurgents with ties to terrorist groups have been helping to fuel the fighting.

“You have to wonder if this means that we have to rename the GWOT,” said a Republican aide, referring to the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal and the Global War on Terrorism Service Medals established in 2003 for service members involved, directly and indirectly, in military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world.

“If you are a reader of the Harry Potter books, you might describe this as the war that must not be named,” said another Republican aide. That is a reference to the fact that the villain in the Harry Potter series, Lord Voldemort, is often referred to as “he who must not be named” because of fears of his dark wizardry.

James Taranto's comments on the above item, from OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Apr-4, from his Best of the Web blog:

A Republican aide quips, "If you are a reader of the Harry Potter books, you might describe this as the war that must not be named." But underlying this semantic argument is a serious question--one that shows why the Democratic Party cannot be trusted with national security.

There are valid reasons to quibble with the phrase "global war on terror"--primarily the last word, which focuses on the enemy's tactical approach rather than on its identity, ideology and strategic goals.

What the Democrats object to, however, is the idea that it is a "global war." In particular, they are trying to sell the fantasy that Iraq is a discrete problem with no relation to any broader conflict--so that surrendering in Iraq would have no deleterious consequences for U.S. national security.

It would be nice for Americans (albeit brutal for Iraqis) if the U.S. could simply cut its losses and abandon Iraq. But it seems to us there is far more wisdom in the holistic approach of the "global war." America has failed to engage its enemies, or tactically retreated when the going got tough, repeatedly since Vietnam: Iran in 1979, Lebanon in 1983, Iraq in 1991, Somalia in 1993.

There is ample reason to think that these shows of weakness--or, more precisely, of irresoluteness--emboldened America's enemies. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, provided strong--at the time, seemingly irrefutable--evidence that taking the easy way out did not enhance American national security.

America seems dangerously close to a tipping point: a return to the 9/10 mindset that led to 9/11. It may be that President Bush's steadfastness is the only thing standing in the way, and that his departure from the scene in January 2009 will leave a more timid America.

Or, more optimistically, it may be that the current opposition to the "global war" is less about the war itself than about partisanship and Bush-hatred--and that its apparent gain in strength is really only a reflection of the president's political weakness late in his term.

If this is the case, then President Bush's successor, be he Democrat or Republican, will be likely to take a more realistic view of the world than the House Democrats are now doing. Bush's policies, once untethered to Bush himself, may prove more resilient than many of his detractors now expect.

from CNSNews.com, 2007-Apr-3, by Randy Hall:

Murtha Joins Debate Over Reinstating Military Draft

Seeking to boost the movement to reinstitute a military draft, Rep. John Murtha is arguing that the U.S. should have a "citizen's army" in addition to a "volunteer, professional army." However, a critic of the Pennsylvania Democrat on Monday called his statement "ridiculous" and "without merit."

"I voted against the volunteer army because I felt if we ever had a war, we wouldn't be able to sustain [it]," Murtha said during the March 29 edition of CNN's "The Situation Room."

"This is one of the smallest armies we've had since before World War II, right before the Korean War," added the congressman. Murtha, a frequent critic of the war in Iraq, claimed that the president's handling of the war has depleted the country's strategic reserve.

"And I think also, everybody ought to be able to serve in this country," Murtha said. "I think we ought to not just have a select few who volunteer. I think everybody ought to be obligated to serve.

"We'd do it by lottery, and we'd call everybody up," he continued. "I think we have a citizen's army is what it ought to be, not just a volunteer professional army."

When host Wolf Blitzer noted that most members of Congress, the military and the American public don't want to bring back the draft, Murtha responded, "I think it's absolutely needed."

Murtha's comments make him the latest member of the U.S. House of Representatives to support a return of the draft, which is also the focus of a bill sponsored by Rep. Charlie Rangel.

On January 10, the New York Democrat introduced H.R. 393, which would "require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security."

The bill would also "authorize the induction of persons in the uniformed services during wartime to meet end-strength requirements of the uniformed services."

As Cybercast News Service previously reported, Rangel and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) in Dec. 2002 proposed a reinstatement of the military draft in an attempt to stall possible military action against Iraq.

"I think if [members of Congress] went home and found out that there were families concerned about their kids going off to war," Rangel said at the time, "there would be more cautiousness and more willingness to work with the international community than to say, 'Our way or the highway.'"

Rangel's proposal was voted down 402 to two despite his claims that the current volunteer military was the only employment option for minority youths living in impoverished areas.

However, the situation on Capitol Hill changed when Democrats won marginal control of both houses of Congress in November of 2006. As a result, Rangel now serves as chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, while Murtha chairs the Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on defense.

The concept of restoring the draft has received support from such individuals as John Roper, professor of history at Emory & Henry College in Emory, Va.

In a column for the Roanoke Times entitled "Call to Conscript Citizen Soldiers," Roper noted that the tradition of having civilian soldiers "remains dear to me" because "farm boys, factory hands, stock brokers, ministers and, yes, pimps, hustlers and petty thieves left those pursuits, got themselves through boot camp, learned how to use their gear and fought."

"They defeated the professionals who were well trained and who were, on paper, better suited to the battle," he added. "Citizen soldiers accomplished the stated mission in every war from 1775 to 1973.

"Such a drafted army looked like America, as some like to say of other things," Roper stated. "It was America. Everybody was in the army, all racial groups, all religious beliefs, every kind of character, people from every class.

"The beauty of the uniform was that it could not be designer made, and the poor could wear it as proudly as the wealthy," he noted. "The beauty of the mission was that a democratic people could vote to start it or stop it.

"Bring back the draft, bring the average boy back to responsibility and bring back the best traditions of the United States of America," he concluded.

However, Roger Hughes, chairman of the Presidential Watch Political Action Committee - an umbrella organization for the "Boot Murtha" project that sought to have the Pennsylvania Democrat "redeployed" out of Congress - told Cybercast News Service the concept of reviving the draft was "ridiculous."

"Murtha's suggestion is without merit," Hughes argued. "It has more to do with political maneuvering than with defending our country. Of course, Murtha's played politics and self-aggrandized himself on the military defense budget for a very long time.

"Today's military is probably the best any military has ever been in the world," he said. "[It] requires a very sophisticated soldier who's willing to give service to his country. The taking of anyone randomly off the street would not give us the same result."

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Mar-15, by Daniel Henninger:

The Walter Reed Fiasco
The Army fired the one guy who can fix it.

Since its publication on Feb. 18 in the Washington Post, the story of the bureaucratic nightmares experienced at Walter Reed Army Medical Center by soldiers from the Iraq and Afghan wars has been Washington's biggest bonfire in a long time. Nearly four weeks on it still consumes official Washington--with firings, hearings, denunciations and the waving forward of commissions.

The problem with bonfires made in Washington is that the high and wild flames of politics sometimes blind the public to the fire's true cause. So it is with the Walter Reed scandal. The true cause of this bonfire is Washington itself, the local tribe. As we know from dreadful experience.

The pain caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was made worse by Washington's inadequacies. In 2000, the Bremer Commission on terrorism said the national-security bureaucracy was poorly organized to protect us from a terrorist attack. The 9/11 Commission retrospectively confirmed the Bremer Commission's findings. Walter Reed is a scandal, but a familiar scandal.

It has also produced a particularly bitter irony. One of its first casualties was the career of Maj. Gen. George Weightman. Gen. Weightman, the commander of Walter Reed, is in fact precisely the kind of person the nation should wish to have in public life. But in an act of supreme self-destruction, our politics is driving him out of public life. We'll return to Gen. Weightman shortly.

Last week, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came forward to announce the speaker's perspective on the manifest problems at Walter Reed: "The American people spoke clearly in the November elections that they wanted accountability and oversight. Under the Republican Congress it has been almost nonexistent, and you can certainly see that with what occurred at Walter Reed." No, you cannot see that. Rep. John Tierney, a Massachusetts Democrat, added that "we should have known all this before."

But all this was known before, though not by Reps. Pelosi and Tierney.

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On Feb. 17, 2005--two years ago--GOP Rep. Tom Davis and the government reform committee held a public hearing on the maltreatment of wounded soldiers. The hearing was the culmination of an investigation, begun in 2003, by the committee and the Government Accountability Office. Virtually everything of substance in that Washington Post story was described, in numbing detail, at that hearing two years ago. Two soldiers, Army Sgts. John Allen and Joseph Perez, appeared before the Davis hearing and described their tours through the same hell painted by the Post last month.

Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, described the problems at Walter Reed in words that should be inscribed on portals across every bridge leading into Washington: "Life every day in this system is like running in hip boots in a swamp." He called it a "bureaucratic morass."

The core of the problem has been the peacetime administrative system's difficulty in handling wounded or disabled soldiers from the reserves and National Guard. In the words of the system itself, they have "fallen off orders." Here's how that happens:

To enter treatment, a wounded reservist would ask to have his "active duty orders"--i.e., the order that called him up for Iraq or Afghanistan--extended for 90 days, what is called an active duty medical extension, or ADME. But some soldiers would fall off their active orders before the ADME came through. Others, often with complex injuries, would use up their three-month ADME and again fall off orders before receiving a renewal.

Sgt. First Class Allen told the Davis committee in laymen's terms what this means: "When my orders expire, it creates a multitude of problems for me and my family: no pay, no access to the base [such as Walter Reed], no medical coverage for my family and the cancellation of all my scheduled medical appointments."

Someone should make a movie called "National Lampoon's Federal Government." The dialogue would include this line from the GAO's Gregory Kutz describing the soldiers' problem: "overall, we found the current stove-piped, non-integrated order-writing, personnel, pay, and medical eligibility systems require extensive error-prone manual data entry and re-entry." That's right--"and re-entry."

Despite the public record, the committee's new Democratic chairman, Henry Waxman, has rebooted the focus of the "mice-and-mold" scandal, from the obviously dysfunctional government to "privatization" at Walter Reed. Maintenance at Walter Reed collapsed in 2005, when the BRAC base-closing commission, whatever the merits and with President Bush's approval, ill-advisedly listed Walter Reed, amid a major war. So of course the civilian workforce went looking for permanent work elsewhere.

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Into this collapsing "morass" the Army six months ago dropped Maj. Gen. George Weightman, M.D. No ordinary desk-bound doc, George Weightman spent five years in the infantry after graduating in 1973 from West Point. Then he went to medical school. It's a decision that has required him to design medical assistance techniques, in theater, with the troops that entered Saudi Arabia for the first Gulf War, in Honduras with Delta Force (there contracting malaria), in Kosovo as head of the 30th Medical Brigade for all troops in Europe, and in Kuwait training the surgeons and medics who would treat our wounded in Iraq the past four years, a model system. A former Army surgeon who served there with him told me he saw "numerous instances of George cutting through the bureaucracy on the run-up to Baghdad." And this is just the official side of the ledger. One son, also West Point, is on his second Army tour in Iraq, and the other is in the Army's medical school.

So when Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered Army Secretary Francis Harvey to run across the Potomac River to Walter Reed and fire someone, this is who he hit. He fired the wrong person. The next day, Mr. Gates fired Mr. Harvey.

Washington of late has been giving talented civilians reason not to come there to serve, for fear of being destroyed in feckless political wars. So naturally it follows we should also drive out the best people willing to forego civilian wealth to defend us in real wars.

The powers-that-be in this sorry Walter Reed saga--Congress, Secretary Gates, the Dole-Shalala commission--could prove wisdom hasn't fled Washington by reinstating Gen. Weightman. A government establishment so profligate that it thinks nothing of throwing its best people onto bonfires of its own making will likely, over time, burn down to nothing.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

from CNSNews.com, 2007-Apr-3, by Kevin McCandless:

Britons Split Over Military Action to Resolve Hostage Crisis

London - As the hostage standoff between the United Kingdom and Iran continued Tuesday, the mood in Britain appears divided over the wisdom of military action.

Ali Larijani, a senior Iranian official, was quoted Tuesday as telling Iranian state-run radio that negotiations with Britain had begun over 15 British sailors and marines captured in the Persian Gulf.

"The British government has started some diplomatic talks with the Iranian Foreign Ministry. They are only at the beginning," said Larijani, who is secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and Iran's chief nuclear negotiator.

British media reports say Iraqi government officials are working separately to release five Iranian officials who were seized in January by American officials. There has been speculation that Iran may have abducted the British service personnel in retaliation.

Amid the ongoing crisis, two new polls here indicate that the British public is not eager for military action against Iran.

An ICM poll of 762 British voters found that 48 percent rejected force as a solution to the crisis even as a last resort. Forty-four percent of respondents approved of force if diplomacy failed.

In a separate question, 26 percent of the respondents thought that Britain should apologize to Iran.

However, 66 percent of respondents said they trusted Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett to resolve the situation.

Despite increasingly fractious relations between Blair and the opposition Conservative Party, Conservative leader David Cameron has told media organizations that the government has his full support.

As the country marks the 25th anniversary of the start of the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina, another poll on Tuesday indicated that most Britons want their country to scale back on its military commitments.

In a YouGov poll of 2,042 voters, 65 percent of respondents said Britain should spend less on its armed forces and not seek to have as much military influence around the world.

Around 55 percent agreed with the statement that Britain should stop trying to "punch above its weight" by seeking more global influence than warranted by its economic and military power.

Howard Elcock, an expert on British politics, said Tuesday the war in Iraq had soured the British public against further military action.

"Apart from anything else, I think the Iraq experience has put everyone off," he said. "I think Iran is a different matter altogether. It's a big country, with a big army and they would fight."

The incident began on March 23 when the party of marines and sailors were captured by Iranian fast boats in the northern stretches of the Persian Gulf.

Britain maintains that they were well within Iraqi waters, but Iran asserts that they had crossed over into Iranian territory and has broadcast televised "confessions" from the sailors.

The marines and sailors were captured by members of the hard-line Revolutionary Guards. Analysts have debated over whether this was a deliberate attempt by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - a former Revolutionary Guard official - to shore up his support.

However, Charles Tripp, a Middle Eastern expert at the University of London, said Tuesday that Britain is still hated by many parts of Iranian society for the 1953 coup that removed democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh from power.

Due to Britain's part in the American-backed coup, Tripp told Cybercast News Service, a commonly held belief in Iran holds that Britain is ready to snuff out Iranian independence at any time.

"Many Iranians still believe that the British are calling the shots and the Americans are just puppets dancing on their string," he said. "In a way, it's quite flattering if you're an old imperialist."

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Mar-1, by Daniel Henninger:

The Real American Idol
Why the New York Times buried Maj. Bruce Crandall's Medal of Honor on page 15.

Amid the mad jumble that makes the news in our time, the White House on Monday held a ceremony for a Medal of Honor recipient. His name is Bruce Crandall. Mr. Crandall is 74 now, and earned his medal as a major, flying a Huey helicopter in 1965 in the Vietnam War.

The Medal of Honor is conferred only for bravery in combat. It is a military medal, and it is still generally regarded as the highest public tribute this nation can bestow. It is also very rare.

Still, the Medal of Honor does not occupy the place in the nation's cultural life that it once did. This has much to do with the ambivalent place of the military in our angry politics.

In the House debate just ended on a "non-binding" resolution to thwart the sending of more troops to Iraq, its most noted element was the Democratic formulation to "support the troops" but oppose the war. We will hear more of this when the members of the Senate debate their own symbolic resolution.

In last November's congressional election, the Democrats picked several military veterans as candidates to mitigate the notion, a burden since Vietnam, that an endemic hostility toward things military runs through the party's veins. Those Democratic veterans won. Notwithstanding the bitter divide over Iraq, the presence of these veterans in Congress should be a good thing, if one thinks that the oft-publicized "divide" between the professional military and American civilians is not in this country's interest. It surely cannot be in the country's interest if over time more Americans come to regard the life of U.S. soldiers at war and in combat as an abstraction--as say, mainly Oscar nominees or as newspaper photographs of scenes of utter loss at arms.

---

Two men have received the Medal of Honor for service in Iraq: Army Sgt. First Class Paul R. Smith, who died defending some 100 fellow soldiers, allowing their withdrawal; and Marine Cpl. Jason L. Dunham, who died after he dove atop a live grenade to protect his squad. (Cpl. Dunham's act was the subject of a 2004 Wall Street Journal story by reporter Michael M. Phillips and later a book, "The Gift of Valor.")

Bruce Crandall's Medal of Honor, at an emotional remove of 42 years, offers a chance to ponder just where the military stands now in the nation's life. The particulars of Lt. Col. Crandall's act of heroism, and what others said of it at the awarding of the medal on Monday, offers we civilians a chance to understand not merely the risks of combat but what animates those who embrace those risks.

Mr. Crandall, then a major, commanded a company with the 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion, carrying soldiers to a landing zone, called X-ray, in the la Drang Valley. An assault from the North Vietnamese army erupted, as described at the White House ceremony Monday. Three soldiers on Maj. Crandall's helicopter were killed. He kept it on the ground while four wounded were taken aboard. Back at base, he asked for a volunteer to return with him to X-ray. Capt. Ed Freeman came forward. Through smoke and bullets, they flew in and out 14 times, spent 14 hours in the air and used three helicopters. They evacuated 70 wounded. The battalion survived.

A Medal of Honor requires eyewitness accounts, and an officer there attested, "Maj. Crandall's actions were without question the most valorous I've observed of any helicopter pilot in Vietnam."

Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, spoke at the ceremony of what he called "the warrior ethos." Look at his words and consider whether they still stand today, or whether as a matter of the nation's broader ethos of commonly accepted beliefs, they are under challenge. Gen. Schoomaker said: "The words of the warrior ethos that we have today--I will always place the mission first; I will never accept defeat; I will never quit; and I will never leave a fallen comrade--were made real that day in the la Drang Valley."

At issue today is the question: Is that ethos worth it, worth the inevitable sacrifice? And not only in Iraq but in whatever may lie beyond Iraq?

The secretary of the Army, Francis Harvey, went on in this vein: "The courage and fortitude of America's soldiers in combat exemplified by these individuals is, without question, the highest level of human behavior. It demonstrates the basic goodness of mankind as well as the inherent kindness and patriotism of American soldiers."

An American soldier in combat demonstrates "the basic goodness of mankind"? And the highest level of human behavior? This was not thought to be true at the moment Maj. Crandall was flying those choppers in Vietnam. Nor is it now.

To embrace the thoughts of Gen. Schoomaker and of Secretary Harvey is to risk being accused of defending notions of American triumphalism and an overly strong martial spirit thought inappropriate to the realities of a multilateral world. This is a debate worth having. But we are not having it. We are hiding from it.

In a less doubtful culture, Maj. Crandall's magnificent medal would have been on every front page, if only a photograph. It was on no one's front page Tuesday. The New York Times, the culture's lodestar, had a photograph on its front page of President Bush addressing governors about an insurance plan. Maj. Crandall's Medal of Honor was on page 15, in a round-up, three lines from the bottom. Other big-city dailies also ran it in their news summaries; some--the Washington Post, USA Today--ran full accounts inside.

---

Most schoolchildren once knew the names of the nation's heroes in war--Ethan Allen, John Paul Jones, Stephen Decatur, the Swamp Fox Francis Marion, Ulysses S. Grant, Clara Barton, Billy Mitchell, Alvin York, Leigh Ann Hester. Lee Ann who? She's the first woman to win a Silver Star for direct combat with the enemy. Did it in a trench in Iraq. Her story should be in schools, but it won't be.

All nations celebrate personal icons, and ours now tend to be doers of good. That's fine. But if we suppress the martial feats of a Bruce Crandall, we distance ourselves further from our military. And in time, we will change. At some risk.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Feb-26, by Joseph Lieberman:

The Choice on Iraq
"I appeal to my colleagues in Congress to step back and think carefully about what to do next."

Two months into the 110th Congress, Washington has never been more bitterly divided over our mission in Iraq. The Senate and House of Representatives are bracing for parliamentary trench warfare--trapped in an escalating dynamic of division and confrontation that will neither resolve the tough challenges we face in Iraq nor strengthen our nation against its terrorist enemies around the world.

What is remarkable about this state of affairs in Washington is just how removed it is from what is actually happening in Iraq. There, the battle of Baghdad is now under way. A new commander, Gen. David Petraeus, has taken command, having been confirmed by the Senate, 81-0, just a few weeks ago. And a new strategy is being put into action, with thousands of additional American soldiers streaming into the Iraqi capital.

Congress thus faces a choice in the weeks and months ahead. Will we allow our actions to be driven by the changing conditions on the ground in Iraq--or by the unchanging political and ideological positions long ago staked out in Washington? What ultimately matters more to us: the real fight over there, or the political fight over here?

If we stopped the legislative maneuvering and looked to Baghdad, we would see what the new security strategy actually entails and how dramatically it differs from previous efforts. For the first time in the Iraqi capital, the focus of the U.S. military is not just training indigenous forces or chasing down insurgents, but ensuring basic security--meaning an end, at last, to the large-scale sectarian slaughter and ethnic cleansing that has paralyzed Iraq for the past year.

Tamping down this violence is more than a moral imperative. Al Qaeda's stated strategy in Iraq has been to provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war, precisely because they recognize that it is their best chance to radicalize the country's politics, derail any hope of democracy in the Middle East, and drive the U.S. to despair and retreat. It also takes advantage of what has been the single greatest American weakness in Iraq: the absence of sufficient troops to protect ordinary Iraqis from violence and terrorism.

The new strategy at last begins to tackle these problems. Where previously there weren't enough soldiers to hold key neighborhoods after they had been cleared of extremists and militias, now more U.S. and Iraqi forces are either in place or on the way. Where previously American forces were based on the outskirts of Baghdad, unable to help secure the city, now they are living and working side-by-side with their Iraqi counterparts on small bases being set up throughout the capital.

At least four of these new joint bases have already been established in the Sunni neighborhoods in west Baghdad--the same neighborhoods where, just a few weeks ago, jihadists and death squads held sway. In the Shiite neighborhoods of east Baghdad, American troops are also moving in--and Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army are moving out.

---

We of course will not know whether this new strategy in Iraq will succeed for some time. Even under the most optimistic of scenarios, there will be more attacks and casualties in the months ahead, especially as our fanatical enemies react and attempt to thwart any perception of progress.

But the fact is that we are in a different place in Iraq today from even just a month ago--with a new strategy, a new commander, and more troops on the ground. We are now in a stronger position to ensure basic security--and with that, we are in a stronger position to marginalize the extremists and strengthen the moderates; a stronger position to foster the economic activity that will drain the insurgency and militias of public support; and a stronger position to press the Iraqi government to make the tough decisions that everyone acknowledges are necessary for progress.

Unfortunately, for many congressional opponents of the war, none of this seems to matter. As the battle of Baghdad just gets underway, they have already made up their minds about America's cause in Iraq, declaring their intention to put an end to the mission before we have had the time to see whether our new plan will work.

There is of course a direct and straightforward way that Congress could end the war, consistent with its authority under the Constitution: by cutting off funds. Yet this option is not being proposed. Critics of the war instead are planning to constrain and squeeze the current strategy and troops by a thousand cuts and conditions.

Among the specific ideas under consideration are to tangle up the deployment of requested reinforcements by imposing certain "readiness" standards, and to redraft the congressional authorization for the war, apparently in such a way that Congress will assume the role of commander in chief and dictate when, where and against whom U.S. troops can fight.

I understand the frustration, anger and exhaustion so many Americans feel about Iraq, the desire to throw up our hands and simply say, "Enough." And I am painfully aware of the enormous toll of this war in human life, and of the infuriating mistakes that have been made in the war's conduct.

But we must not make another terrible mistake now. Many of the worst errors in Iraq arose precisely because the Bush administration best-cased what would happen after Saddam was overthrown. Now many opponents of the war are making the very same best-case mistake--assuming we can pull back in the midst of a critical battle with impunity, even arguing that our retreat will reduce the terrorism and sectarian violence in Iraq.

In fact, halting the current security operation at midpoint, as virtually all of the congressional proposals seek to do, would have devastating consequences. It would put thousands of American troops already deployed in the heart of Baghdad in even greater danger--forced to choose between trying to hold their position without the required reinforcements or, more likely, abandoning them outright. A precipitous pullout would leave a gaping security vacuum in its wake, which terrorists, insurgents, militias and Iran would rush to fill--probably resulting in a spiral of ethnic cleansing and slaughter on a scale as yet unseen in Iraq.

I appeal to my colleagues in Congress to step back and think carefully about what to do next. Instead of undermining Gen. Petraeus before he has been in Iraq for even a month, let us give him and his troops the time and support they need to succeed.

---

Gen. Petraeus says he will be able to see whether progress is occurring by the end of the summer, so let us declare a truce in the Washington political war over Iraq until then. Let us come together around a constructive legislative agenda for our security: authorizing an increase in the size of the Army and Marines, funding the equipment and protection our troops need, monitoring progress on the ground in Iraq with oversight hearings, investigating contract procedures, and guaranteeing Iraq war veterans the first-class treatment and care they deserve when they come home.

We are at a critical moment in Iraq--at the beginning of a key battle, in the midst of a war that is irretrievably bound up in an even bigger, global struggle against the totalitarian ideology of radical Islamism. However tired, however frustrated, however angry we may feel, we must remember that our forces in Iraq carry America's cause--the cause of freedom--which we abandon at our peril.

Mr. Lieberman is an Independent senator from Connecticut.

from the Washington Post, 2007-Mar-28, p.A1, by Shailagh Murray with Jonathan Weisman contributing:

Senate Backs Pullout Proposal
Hagel Joins Democrats On War Funding Bill

Senate Democrats scored a surprise victory yesterday in their bid to force President Bush to end the Iraq war, turning back a Republican amendment that would have struck a troop withdrawal plan from emergency military funding legislation.

The defection of a prominent Republican war critic, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, sealed the Democrats' win. Hagel, who opposed identical withdrawal language two weeks ago, walked onto the Senate floor an hour before the late-afternoon vote and announced that he would "not support sustaining a flawed and failing policy," adding: "It's now time for the Congress to step forward and establish responsible boundaries and conditions for our continued military involvement in Iraq."

Democratic leaders think the 50 to 48 victory greatly strengthens their negotiating position as they prepare to face down a White House that yesterday reiterated its threat of a presidential veto. The Senate vote was also the first time since Democrats took control of Congress in January that a majority of lawmakers have supported binding legislation to bring U.S. troops home.

The Senate withdrawal provision, which sets a March 31, 2008, target for ending U.S. combat operations, is tucked into a $122 billion package to fund operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a must-pass bill that Democrats view as their best shot at forcing Bush to change direction. The withdrawal language was nearly identical to that of a Senate resolution rejected 50 to 48 two weeks ago.

Top Democrats in the House and the Senate had been uncertain about the outcome of the vote when they convened for a joint leadership meeting yesterday morning. They were convinced that defeat of the Senate's proposed timeline would force negotiators to soften the House language, which sets a firm deadline of Aug. 31, 2008, for the removal of U.S. combat forces. But they concluded that a Democratic victory would give them no reason to compromise, according to House Democratic leadership aides.

Speaking to reporters, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) was conciliatory, but only to a point: "We ought to reach out to the president and say, 'Mr. President, this is not a unilateral government. It is a separation of powers, and the Congress of the United States . . . has taken some action. You obviously disagree with that. Where are the areas of compromise?' "

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) said he was skeptical about proceeding too quickly. "Of course, we should reach out to the White House, and I'm happy to do that," he said. But, he added: "They have been very uncooperative to this point. Hopefully, they will cooperate with us." Referring to the president, he said, "I would like to have a bill that he wouldn't veto."

Senate GOP leaders remain confident that Bush will ultimately prevail. "I expect the president to get the money for the troops, to get this bill in large measure like he wants it," predicted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.). "It may take two tries to get there, but I think that's very likely going to be the final outcome."

But Democrats are just as convinced that they have the momentum on the issue. "This is not one battle. It's a long-term campaign," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.). "Every time we have a vote like this, it ratchets up the pressure on the president and on many of those of his party."

Under the Senate bill, which is slated for a vote on final passage as early as today, certain U.S. troops would remain in Iraq after the March 31, 2008, target date in order to conduct counterterrorism training and security operations. But troop withdrawals would begin within four months of enactment.

The White House has strongly protested both the House and Senate bills, issuing a series of veto threats. "This bill assumes and forces the failure of the new strategy even before American commanders in the field are able to fully implement their plans," the administration said in a statement yesterday, referring to the Senate measure.

Democrats and Republicans largely remained united in the Senate vote, with only Hagel and Sen. Gordon Smith (Ore.) on the GOP side voting to preserve the withdrawal provision, and Sen. Mark Pryor (Ark.) the only Democrat to break ranks. Yet, on both sides, several senators remained undecided until the roll was called, and Vice President Cheney was on hand to break a tie in the case of a deadlock.

Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) said she was torn between her desire to send a strong message to the president that a change of course is needed and her uneasiness about wading into war policymaking. "Clearly it's frustrating," she said of the grim conditions in Iraq. "On the other hand, you don't want to telegraph to the enemy a moment in time" for leaving. Snowe wound up voting with her party.

Because troop funding is at stake, Republicans have decided to forgo maneuvers that could draw out the Senate debate or block final passage, tactics the GOP had used successfully in previous Iraq war showdowns. Some GOP senators even floated the idea of introducing the Iraq war legislation of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) as an amendment to the spending bill, in a bid to make political mischief. The Clinton proposal would cap troop levels, start a phased withdrawal and cut off Iraqi security funding under some circumstances, but so far has attracted no co-sponsors.

Reid said final negotiations between the House and the Senate will take place after the spring recess. Despite signs that Democrats are slowly building support for their position, they are still nowhere close to achieving the two-thirds House and Senate majorities that would be necessary to override a Bush veto.

from the Washington Post, 2002-Dec-20, by Joseph R. Biden and Chuck Hagel:

Iraq: The Decade After

The United States will face enormous challenges in a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, as well as broad regional questions that must be addressed. These are both matters that members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have been focusing on for some time. During a week-long trip to the region, we came away with a better understanding of the possibilities and perils that lie ahead.

In northern Iraq we saw the extraordinary potential of Iraqis once they are out from under Saddam Hussein's murderous hand. New hospitals, schools, roads and lively media are testimony to the determination of Iraqi Kurds and to the bravery of coalition air crews patrolling the no-fly zone. Just a few hours' drive from the oppressive rule in Baghdad, a freely elected regional government and legislature (which we were honored to address) are embarked on a path of clear-eyed realism. While neighboring countries fear an independent Kurdistan, Kurdish leaders appear committed to working together for a united Iraq. They realize they could lose everything they have built in the past decade by pursuing independence.

Although no one doubts our forces will prevail over Saddam Hussein's, key regional leaders confirm what the Foreign Relations Committee emphasized in its Iraq hearings last summer: The most challenging phase will likely be the day after -- or, more accurately, the decade after -- Saddam Hussein.

Once he is gone, expectations are high that coalition forces will remain in large numbers to stabilize Iraq and support a civilian administration. That presence will be necessary for several years, given the vacuum there, which a divided Iraqi opposition will have trouble filling and which some new Iraqi military strongman must not fill. Various experts have testified that as many as 75,000 troops may be necessary, at a cost of up to $ 20 billion a year. That does not include the cost of the war itself, or the effort to rebuild Iraq.

Americans are largely unprepared for such an undertaking. President Bush must make clear to the American people the scale of the commitment.

The northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk is an example of the perils American forces may encounter. It sits atop valuable oil fields and is home to a mixed population of Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds. In recent years, Saddam Hussein has expelled Turkmen and Kurds as part of an "Arabization," or ethnic cleansing, campaign. We toured a refugee camp housing 120,000 displaced people and heard countless stories of brutality and the loss of loved ones. Kirkuk could become the Iraqi version of Mitrovica, the volatile city in Kosovo where the U.N.-led administration has faced the dilemma of forcibly resettling people from various ethnic communities who have been evicted from their homes.

This is one reason why we will need our allies to help rebuild Iraq. Cementing a broad coalition today will keep the pressure on Hussein to disarm, build legitimacy for the use of force if he refuses, reduce the risks to our troops and spread the burden of securing and reconstructing Iraq. Going it alone and imposing a U.S.-led military government instead of a multinational civilian administration could turn us from liberators into occupiers, fueling resentment throughout the Arab world.

Iraq cannot be viewed in a vacuum. Disarming and stabilizing that country will be all the more difficult because of the unsettled regional environment, in particular the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While it is essential that the United States aggressively pursue Israeli-Palestinian peace on its own merits, doing so has ancillary benefits for the disarmament of Iraq. Simply put, we will make it easier for Arab governments to participate in, or at least support, our actions in Iraq if they can show their people we are engaged in the peace process.

Meetings with Israeli officials and Palestinian reformers led us to believe new opportunities exist for American diplomacy. Recent polling shows that nearly three-quarters of Israelis and Palestinians seek reconciliation and a two-state solution. For the first time since the violence began, a majority of Palestinians support a crackdown against terrorism as part of a peace process. A large majority have no confidence in Yasser Arafat.

The key is to empower Palestinian reformers and encourage Arab moderates. President Bush should lose no time in publicly endorsing the "road map" developed by the Quartet -- an informal group of mediators on the Middle East from the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia. The road map provides for a series of reciprocal steps to jump-start a renewed peace process. That would give hope to Palestinian reformers and send a clear message to the Arab world that the United States remains determined to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian settlement even as we deal with Iraq.

Working on multiple fronts poses a difficult test for American leadership, but there is no escaping the fact that we face several related, interlocking crises in the region. As the bulwark of freedom and democracy, the United States faces the need to disarm Saddam Hussein and set the stage for a stable Iraq, win a protracted war on terrorism and engage fully on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Working with our friends and allies, it is a challenge we can, and must, meet.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) is chairman and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

from syndication via the Washington Post, p.A19, 2007-Feb-23, by Charles Krauthammer:

No Way To End A War

The United States has fought many wars since 1941 but has never again declared one. No one abroad declares war anymore either, perhaps because it has the anachronistic feel of an aristocratic challenge. Whatever the reason, today Congress doesn't declare war; it "authorizes" the "use of force."

In October 2002, both houses of Congress did exactly that with open eyes and large majorities. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a Democratic member of the Senate intelligence committee who had access to all the relevant information at the time, said, "I have come to the inescapable conclusion that the threat posed to America by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction is so serious that despite the risks -- and we should not minimize the risks -- we must authorize the president to take the necessary steps to deal with that threat."

Now, more than four years later, the Democrats want out of the resulting war. Most, such as Rep. John Murtha, want to do so for a simple reason: They think the war is lost. If you believe that, then getting out is the most reasonable and honorable and patriotic policy.

Congress has the power to do that by cutting off the funds. But Democrats will not, because it is politically dangerous. Instead, they are seeking other ways, clever ways. The House is pursuing a method, developed by Murtha and deemed "ingenious" by antiwar activist Tom Andrews of Win Without War, to impose a conditional cutoff of funds, ostensibly in the name of protecting the troops. Unless the troops are given the precise equipment, training and amount of rest Murtha stipulates -- no funds.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, Murtha is not disingenuous enough to have concealed the real motive for these ostensibly pro-readiness, pro-troops conditions. He has chosen conditions he knows are impossible to meet -- "We have analyzed this, and we have come to the conclusion that it can't be done," he told MoveCongress.org -- in order to make the continued prosecution of the war difficult, if not impossible, for the commanders in the field.

But think of what that entails. It leaves the existing 130,000 troops out there without the reinforcements and tactical flexibility that the commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, says he needs to win.

Of course, the Democrats believe the war cannot be won. But if that's the case, they should order a withdrawal by cutting off funds. They shouldn't micromanage the war in a way that will make winning impossible. That not only endangers the troops remaining in the field, it also makes the Democrats' "the war is lost" mantra a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Murtha's ruse is so transparent that even Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, who opposes the war, will not countenance it: "I think that sends the wrong message to our troops."

Levin has a different idea -- change the original October 2002 authorization. "We . . . will be looking at modification of that authorization in order to limit the mission of American troops to a support mission instead of a combat mission," says Levin. "That is very different from cutting funds."

While this idea is not as perverse as Murtha's, it is totally illogical. There is something exceedingly strange about authorizing the use of force -- except for combat. That is an oxymoron. Changing the language of authorization means -- if it means anything -- that Petraeus will have to surround himself with lawyers who will tell him, every time he wants to deploy a unit, whether he is ordering a legal "support" mission or an illegal "combat" mission.

If Levin wants to withdraw our forces from the civil war in the cities to more secure bases from which we can continue training and launching operations against al-Qaeda, he should present that to the country as an alternative to (or a fallback after) the administration's troop surge. But to force it on our commanders through legalisms is simply to undermine their ability to fight the war occurring on the ground today.

Slowly bleeding our forces by defunding what our commanders think they need to win (the House approach) or rewording the authorization of the use of force so that lawyers decide what operations are to be launched (the Senate approach) is no way to fight a war. It is no way to end a war. It is a way to complicate the war and make it inherently unwinnable -- and to shirk the political responsibility for doing so.

from McClatchy Newspapers via the Kansas City Star, 2007-Feb-17, by Margaret Talev:

Senate Democrats promise `relentless' flood of anti-war legislation

WASHINGTON - After Republicans blocked a Senate debate for a second time, Democrats said Saturday they'll drop efforts to pass a non-binding resolution opposing President Bush's troop buildup in Iraq and instead will offer a flurry of anti-war legislation "just like in the days of Vietnam."

The tough talk came a day after the House of Representatives passed its own anti-Iraq resolution and as the GOP used a procedural vote to stop the Senate from taking a position on the 21,500 troop increase.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Democrats would be "relentless."

"There will be resolution after resolution, amendment after amendment . . . just like in the days of Vietnam," Schumer said. "The pressure will mount, the president will find he has no strategy, he will have to change his strategy and the vast majority of our troops will be taken out of harm's way and come home."

Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said: "We're going to move on to other things."

But with Democrats divided over whether to restrict funds for the Iraq war, and with the Senate unlikely to have the votes right now to buck President Bush, the immediate success of the Democrats' plan seems difficult. Reid also declined to say exactly what the strategy might include.

Saturday's rare weekend vote was a political calculation by the Democratic majority, who delayed the start of a weeklong legislative recess to make it happen and called back senators who had left town.

Democrats had hoped that if enough Senate Republicans felt pressured by the House vote and with national polling showing support for the resolution, they might let a debate go ahead this time. If not, Democrats would have more ammunition to criticize Republicans for backing an unpopular war.

Saturday's 56-to-34 vote fell short of the 60-vote majority the Senate requires to move to debate. But this time, seven Republicans joined Democrats in favoring a debate, five more than in the earlier vote.

Republicans who voted against debating the resolution maintained in both instances that they were objecting to Reid's refusal to consider a different resolution supporting the troops but taking no position on sending more to Baghdad. Reid says that resolution is intended to muddy the debate.

Republicans Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, John Warner of Virginia, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Gordon Smith of Oregon and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania sided with Democrats in calling for debate to begin, as did the two Republicans already on board, Sens. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., and Susan Collins, R-Maine. Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman of Connecticut joined the 33 Republicans to block the vote.

"I am not running from a vote," said Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky: "Republicans in the Senate have not prevented any debate. What we have prevented is the majority leader dictating to the minority exactly what resolutions we will vote on."

But several Republicans said Saturday the Iraq debate was too important to hold off any longer.

"If we continue to debate whether there should be a debate while the House of Representatives acts, the Senate will become irrelevant," said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa. "To paraphrase the Roman adage, the Senate should not fiddle while Iraq burns."

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll this week found 63 percent of Americans oppose the troop increase, but at the same time 60 percent oppose cutting funding for those troops.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told Democrats, "You want to be seen in history, I guess, or for the next election that `this wasn't my idea, this was Bush's folly.'

"If you believe half of what you're saying in these resolutions then have the courage of your convictions to stop this war by cutting off funding. But no one wants to do that because they don't really know how that's going to play out here at home."

from the Associated Press via FoxNews.com, 2007-Feb-16:

Lawmakers Cross Party Lines on Iraq

Here is a look at the 19 House members - 17 Republicans and two Democrats - who voted against their party's position on the resolution opposing President Bush's decision to send more U.S. troops to Iraq.

Republicans supporting the resolution: Mike Castle of Delaware, Howard Coble of North Carolina, Tom Davis of Virginia, John Duncan of Tennessee, Phil English of Pennsylvania, Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland, Bob Inglis of South Carolina, Timothy Johnson of Illinois, Walter Jones of North Carolina, Ric Keller of Florida, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Steven LaTourette of Ohio, Ron Paul of Texas, Thomas Petri of Wisconsin, Jim Ramstad of Minnesota, Fred Upton of Michigan and James Walsh of New York.

Democrats opposing the resolution: Jim Marshall of Georgia and Gene Taylor of Mississippi.

from the San Francisco Chronicle, 2007-Feb-16, by Edward Epstein:

House passes nonbinding resolution on Iraq

(02-16) 12:25 PST Washington -- The House sent President Bush a double-barreled confrontational message today, telling him it opposes his latest buildup of troops in Iraq and in the next few weeks will try to start curtailing military operations in the war zone.

The Democratic-led House approved 246 to 182 a nonbinding resolution expressing the support of Congress for the U.S. troops serving in Iraq while opposing Bush's plan to send 21,500 more combat troops into the war.

Seventeen Republicans joined 229 Democrats in voting for the resolution. Two Democrats and 180 Republicans voted against it.

Before the House voted after 45 hours of debate that began Tuesday, lawmakers heard Speaker Nancy Pelosi reiterate her position that the 97-word resolution is just the start of the Democratic effort to end the four-year-old war.

"The passage of this legislation will signal a change in direction in Iraq that will end the fighting and bring our troops home,'' Pelosi said in the debate's final hours before a chamber half-full of Democrats who had been summoned to hear their new speaker. The Republican side was all but empty as she spoke.

Next up for the House will be legislation being pushed by one of Pelosi's closest allies, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., that will seek to limit Bush's ability to deploy more troops to Iraq. Murtha, the chairman of the panel overseeing military spending, plans to attach his proposals as conditions next month to Bush's latest $100 billion war spending request. Murtha said he will require that no units be sent to Iraq until fully trained and equipped, including the latest armored protection against roadside bombs.

Murtha also plans, with Pelosi's full support, to require military units receive more time at home before they can be redeployed to Iraq and to end the practice of "stop loss'' in which miliary personnel are kept on active duty past their date for leaving the service.

Today's House passage of the resolution spurred Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to try to break the partisan deadlock over the war in the upper chamber.

Republicans earlier blocked a vote on a more wide-ranging bipartisan resolution against Bush's plan that had been sponsored by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., a former Navy secretary and past chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Reid plans a rare Saturday vote -- when the body should have begun its weeklong Presidents' Day recess -- on a motion to proceed with debate on the House-approved statement.

But the minority leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters Friday that he remains confident he can muster enough Republicans to block Reid's latest effort, which would need 60 votes to pass. Democrats hold a 51-49 majority in the Senate.

McConnell appeared with the House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, to demand votes in both chambers on proposals that Congress not cut funding for the war while U.S. forces are in the field.

Bush has said that while he disagrees with Pelosi and Murtha and their supporters he respects their right to make their case opposing his latest troop increase.

Bush's spokesman, Tony Snow, said Murtha's proposals to require better training and equipment as well as longer times between deployments were dangerous.

"Anything that is going to tie the hands of military commanders and deny both the funds and flexibility they're going to need, he will take a dim view of,'' Snow said of the president.

"We're just not going to get into trying to characterize a specific position about a bill that has yet to see the light of day," Snow added.

Bush spoke with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki on Friday and encouraged him to have his forces take a more active role in fighting insurgents. The president said he conveyed "a message of urgency to the Iraqi government that our patience is not unlimited and that we expect that government to perform.''

The final hours of the House debate -- in which 392 members spoke -- were pointed as both sides repeated the themes that have sounded since Tuesday.

Republicans opponents said the resolution was contradictory in praising the troops but opposing their mission. They also said it amounted to micromanaging military strategy.

"Are we really best equipped to decide what reinforcements are sent into battle?'' asked Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore. "Isn't that better left to the commanders in the field?''

Rep. Mike Ferguson, R-N.J., acknowledged that Bush's strategy hasn't worked too well, but said the Democrats, by opposing Bush's "surge,'' were in effect endorsing the status quo.

"The prospected of success are dwindling but a new and amplified effort may offer the best hope we have for success and for the Iraqi government,'' Ferguson said.

And Republicans warned that the Iraq war is part of the broader fight against Islamic extremism.

"What we're doing with this resolution is not a salute to GI Joe. It's a salute to jihadist Joe,'' said Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga.

But Democrats said it's time for a sharp change of course with Iraq stuck in a civil war as the American military operation soon enters its fifth year with more than 3,100 Americans killed and more than $400 billion spent.

"Sending 21,000 more troops is nothing but stay the course on steroids,'' said Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Los Angeles

Rep. Paul Hodes, D-N.H., one of the Democratic freshman who ousted a GOP incumbent last November on an anti-war platform, said Congress must rein in the president. "The administration is in a parallel universe of its own creation,'' Hodes said.

While the resolution doesn't require Bush to do anything, its proponents hope it sends him a strong signal that he should sit down with Congress' Democratic leaders to discuss new strategy.

Rep. Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo, one of the resolution's bipartisan co-sponsors, said calling the resolution nonbinding ignores its real power.

"What could be more binding on the president than the view of the elected representatives of the American people?'' asked Lantos, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Boehner, who accuses the Democrats of slowly trying to suffocate the miliary effort in Iraq, challenged them to a direct debate on cutting off funding.

"Let's get away from the shadow boxing, the slow bleed,'' and have an up-or-down vote on funding, rather than attaching conditions to future spending legislation, he said.

from the Associated Press via the Guardian of London, 2007-Feb-17, by David Espo:

Senate Gridlocks on Iraq War Resolution

WASHINGTON - The Senate gridlocked on the Iraq war in a sharply worded showdown Saturday as Republicans foiled a Democratic bid to repudiate President Bush's deployment of 21,500 additional combat troops.

The 56-34 vote fell four short of the 60 needed to advance a nonbinding measure identical to one the House passed Friday. Seven GOP senators broke ranks, compared with only two during an earlier test on the issue.

Democrats swiftly claimed victory. ``A majority of the United States Senate is against the escalation in Iraq,'' said Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. ``As for the Republicans who chose once again to block further debate and protect President Bush, the American people now know they support the escalation'' in troops.

Republicans blasted the Democratic leadership for refusing to allow a vote on an alternative that ruled out any reduction in money for troops in the field.

``There is no place for chicanery at a time of war,'' said Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. ``Even some of the president's most strident opponents know that. They know that the only vote that truly matters in a vote on whether to fund the troops.''

The White House echoed his remarks, issuing a written statement that touched lightly on the votes in the House and Senate, and looked to the coming debate over Bush's request for an additional $93 billion for the military.

``This week's voting gave the world a glimpse of democracy's vigor. The next votes should provide unmistakable assurance of this nation's resolve in achieving success, supporting the cause of democracy and stopping terrorist forces in their ultimate aim of bringing their violence to our shores,'' said the statement, issued in the name of press secretary Tony Snow.

The day's events ended the initial phase of what looms as a yearlong confrontation between the new, Democratic-controlled Congress and the commander in chief.

Reid told reporters he would no longer attempt to win passage for nonbinding measures and would turn his attention to legislation designed to force Bush to change course. House Democratic leaders intend to do likewise.

Saturday's maneuvering occurred in an intensely political environment, both in and out of the Capitol.

The unusual weekend session sent presidential contenders in both parties scrambling to make the roll call.

One of them, Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, squeezed in a morning appearance in New Hampshire, where she told one audience, ``We have to end this war and we can't do it without Republican votes.''

Nine Republicans skipped the Senate session, calculating that because they support Bush's policies, their votes would not affect the outcome of the vote.

Among them was Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a presidential hopeful who campaigned in Iowa. He called the Senate vote meaningless, and told one audience the symbolic measures are ``insulting to the public and the soldiers.''

At least two Republican lawmakers chose to leave on an official trip to Iraq rather than remain behind for the vote.

The nonbinding measure consisted of fewer than 100 words. It disapproved of Bush's decision to deploy more troops and pledged to support and protect the troops in the field.

Even before the House acted, Bush had made it clear that congressional opposition would not deter him from proceeding with the deployment of another 21,500 troops, designed primarily to quell sectarian violence in heavily populated Baghdad.

Already, troops of the Army's 82nd Airborne have arrived in Iraq. Another brigade is in Kuwait, in final training before going to Iraq. Three more brigades are ticketed for the Baghdad area, one each in March, April and May.

In addition, the Pentagon is sending two Marine battalions to Anbar province in the western part of the country, the heart of the Sunni insurgency.

Polls show strong public opposition to the war, which has killed more than 3,100 U.S. troops. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died, the majority of them since Saddam Hussein was toppled from power in the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

Democrats seemed eager to force Republicans into votes that might prove politically troublesome.

``They are torn between their president's policy and the wishes of the constituents, but vote they must,'' said Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, head of the Senate Democrats' campaign committee.

But Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Democrats, too, were caught in a political squeeze play. He said the alternative measure pledging not to cut off funds for the troops would have drawn as many as 75 votes, but accused Reid of blocking it to protect his rank and file.

``If you have this vote, the left, the radical Democratic left, would eat every Democratic presidential candidate alive,'' Graham said.

Democrats in both the House and Senate have said the nonbinding measures would be only the first attempt to force a shift in Bush's war policies.

In the Senate, Reid has told lawmakers he will turn anti-terrorism legislation into a forum for debate over the war. He has met privately in recent days with fellow Democrats as the leadership plans its next move.

``The Senate will keep fighting to force President Bush to change course,'' Reid said at a news conference after the vote.

In the House, Democrats have said they will attempt to place restrictions on Bush's request for an additional $93 billion for the military in an effort to make it impossible for him to deploy all 21,500 additional troops.

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., has described a series of provisions that would require the Pentagon to meet certain standards for training and equipping the troops, and for making sure they have enough time at home between deployments.

Murtha and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said these provisions were designed to protect the troops.

Republicans argued the effect would be to deny troops needed reinforcements and are expected to try to block the restrictions.

In the Senate, the seven Republicans who voted to advance the measure were Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Susan Collins of Maine, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Gordon Smith of Oregon, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and John Warner of Virginia. All but Snowe and Specter could face the voters in 2008.

Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, sided with Republicans on the vote.

from the Associated Press via the Boston Globe, 2007-Feb-18, by Andrew Miga:

Mass. congressmen eye new fight over Iraq war funds

WASHINGTON --Massachusetts lawmakers say they are eager to join fellow House Democrats in targeting a new wartime spending bill to try to force President Bush to change course in Iraq.

"It's the only place we can have any impact," said Rep. Michael Capuano, D-Mass. "We want to make it impossible for the president to continue doing what he's doing."

In the wake of the House's public rebuke of Bush's 21,500 troop buildup, Democrats are crafting new strategies to ratchet up pressure on the White House. More than 3,100 U.S. troops have been killed as the war nears the four-year mark.

"This debate marks the beginning of the end of an ill-conceived, mismanaged, and ultimately failed war in Iraq," said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass.

Anti-war sentiment runs high in the state's all-Democratic congressional delegation, which includes some of the strongest voices in Congress against the war. All 10 House members from Massachusetts voted for the nonbinding resolution opposing Bush's troop increase.

"If Bush wants to ignore the will of Congress, we'll look to do some things on funding bills," said Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., one of the House's most vociferous war opponents.

McGovern and his Bay State colleagues stressed that Democrats will not cut off funds for American troops in the field. But party leaders are looking for aggressive ways to challenge Bush, McGovern asserted. One option, he said, is to set conditions on new funding for the war that Bush is requesting.

Rep. Martin Meehan, D-Mass., agreed there are many creative ways in the House budget process for Democrats who control Congress to force Bush's hand.

"I'm all in favor of using the budget to try to shape policy," said Meehan, a member of the House Armed Services panel. "We need to be more aggressive in shaping policy in Iraq."

The House is expected to consider a supplemental spending bill next month that includes funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. Democrats are already floating proposals to set strict limits on combat deployments. They hope to make it hard for the Pentagon to find enough troops for Bush's buildup.

House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio, however, accused Democrats of embracing strategies that would undermine American forces in Iraq.

"Republicans know our troops are up to the task, and we will stand strong in the coming weeks to ensure they have full, complete and unfettered access to the resources they need to achieve victory," Boehner said in a statement. "The American people will not support a 'slow-bleed' policy that cuts off funding and reinforcements for our troops in harm's way."

Capuano, however, said he even would be willing to reject any new war spending. But he realizes such a hard-line approach is a distinctly minority view, even among anti-war House Democrats.

"I don't think Congress is ready to do what I want to do, so I will probably have to vote for something that's in the middle, which happens all the time," said Capuano, whose 8th Congressional District includes Cambridge, Somerville and Boston -- comprising one of the most liberal districts in the nation.

McGovern struck a similar note of compromise.

"I'm interested in ending the war," said McGovern. "It's not my-way-or-the-highway. I'm willing to support whatever will work in Congress to end the war."

On Saturday, a 56-34 vote in the Senate fell four short of the 60 needed to advance the nonbinding resolution opposing the troop surge. Seven GOP senators broke ranks, however, and Democrats claimed victory.

Massachusetts lawmakers said Friday's House vote renouncing Bush's troop buildup was a turning point in the anti-war push on Capitol Hill.

"This is the first time during the four-year-long war that Congress has gone on record as objecting to the war," said McGovern. "It's significant because it shows the climate has changed in the Congress.

from the Washington Times, 2007-Feb-16:

Murtha's plan for defeat

In the wake of September 11, McGovernism -- that is, the reflexive opposition to the use of force by the United States against foreign enemies that has dogged the Democratic Party since Richard Nixon's time -- became more of a liability than ever. At least, it appeared that way judging from the 2002 and 2004 election results. But in last year's congressional elections, the Democrats came up with a shrewd, cynical new P.R. strategy that has until now served them well: saying lots of nice things about American soldiers fighting in Iraq while simultaneously advancing resolutions that denigrate their mission. But the decision to effectively cut off funds by micromanaging their use -- rather than by doing so directly -- may also be unconstitutional.

When the House votes today on the resolution denouncing Mr. Bush's plans for additional troops to combat al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Iraq, members should be under no illusions about what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership are trying to do: to make it impossible for American troops to properly do their job in Iraq. In an interview yesterday with MoveCongress.org, a Web site for a coalition of anti-war groups, Mr. Murtha, who chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, explained that by placing conditions on $93.4 billion in new combat funds, he would make be able to effectively stop the troops in their tracks. "They won't be able to continue. They won't be able to do the deployment. They won't have the equipment, they don't have the training and they won't be able to do the work. There's no question in my mind," Mr. Murtha said.

"We will set benchmarks for readiness," a top Democratic leadership aide told the nonpartisan Politico.com Web site, which summarized the Democrats' strategy this way: "If enacted, these provisions would have the effect of limiting the number of troops available for the Bush surge plan, while blunting the GOP charge that Democrats are cutting funding for the troops in Iraq."

Aside from doing severe damage to the war effort in Iraq, the Democrats' political strategy to cripple the war effort by attaching thousands of legislative strings to war funding may also be unconstitutional. Noted attorney and constitutional scholar David Rivkin makes a strong case that Congress cannot act like a "puppet master" appropriating and authorizing funds while attaching conditions that would effectively transform the president into a marionette. If Congress wants to cut off funding, it must do so honestly and directly, rather than dishonestly through micromanagement. In addition to paving the way for a geopolitical catastrophe for this country, the Democratic leadership may be setting the stage for a constitutional confrontation with the White House.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Feb-15:

Awaiting the Dishonor Roll
Congress "supports the troops" while emboldening the enemy.

Congress has rarely been distinguished by its moral courage. But even grading on a curve, we can only describe this week's House debate on a vote of no-confidence in the mission in Iraq as one of the most shameful moments in the institution's history.

On present course, the Members will vote on Friday to approve a resolution that does nothing to remove American troops from harm's way in Iraq but that will do substantial damage to their morale and that of their Iraqi allies while emboldening the enemy. The only real question is how many Republicans will also participate in this disgrace in the mistaken belief that their votes will put some distance between themselves and the war most of them voted to authorize in 2002.

The motion at issue is plainly dishonest, in that exquisitely Congressional way of trying to have it both ways. (We reprint the text nearby.) The resolution purports to "support" the troops even as it disapproves of their mission. It praises their "bravery," while opposing the additional forces that both President Bush and General David Petreaus, the new commanding general in Iraq, say are vital to accomplishing that mission. And it claims to want to "protect" the troops even as its practical impact will be to encourage Iraqi insurgents to believe that every roadside bomb brings them closer to their goal.

As for how "the troops" themselves feel, we refer readers to Richard Engel's recent story on NBC News quoting Specialist Tyler Johnson in Iraq: "People are dying here. You know what I'm saying . . . You may [say] 'oh we support the troops.' So you're not supporting what they do. What they's [sic] here to sweat for, what we bleed for and we die for." Added another soldier: "If they don't think we're doing a good job, everything we've done here is all in vain." In other words, the troops themselves realize that the first part of the resolution is empty posturing, while the second is deeply immoral.

All the more so because if Congress feels so strongly about the troops, it arguably has the power to start removing them from harm's way by voting to cut off the funds they need to operate in Iraq. But that would make Congress responsible for what followed--whether those consequences are Americans killed in retreat, or ethnic cleansing in Baghdad, or the toppling of the elected Maliki government by radical Shiite or military forces. The one result Congress fears above all is being accountable.

We aren't prone to quoting the young John Kerry, but this week's vote reminds us of the comment the antiwar veteran told another cut-and-run Congress in the early 1970s: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" The difference this time is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha expect men and women to keep dying for something they say is a mistake but also don't have the political courage to help end.

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), that (1) Congress and the American people will continue to support and protect the members of the United States Armed Forces who are serving or who have served bravely and honorably in Iraq; and (2) Congress disapproves of the decision of President George W. Bush announced on Jan. 10, 2007, to deploy more than 20,000 additional United States combat troops to Iraq.

Instead, they'll pass this "non-binding resolution," to be followed soon by attempts at micromanagement that would make the war all but impossible to prosecute--and once again without taking responsibility. Mr. Murtha is already broadcasting his strategy, which the new Politico Web site described yesterday as "a slow-bleed strategy designed to gradually limit the administration's options."

In concert with antiwar groups, the story reported, Mr. Murtha's "goal is crafted to circumvent the biggest political vulnerability of the antiwar movement--the accusation that it is willing to abandon troops in the field." So instead of cutting off funds, Mr. Murtha will "slow-bleed" the troops with "readiness" restrictions or limits on National Guard forces that will make them all but impossible to deploy. These will be attached to appropriations bills that will also purport to "support the troops."

"There's a D-Day coming in here, and it's going to start with the supplemental and finish with the '08 [defense] budget,'' Congressman Neil Abercrombie (D., Hawaii) told the Web site. He must mean D-Day as in Dunkirk.

All of this is something that House Republicans should keep in mind as they consider whether to follow this retreat. The GOP leadership has been stalwart, even eloquent, this week in opposing the resolution. But some Republicans figure they can use this vote to distance themselves from Mr. Bush and the war while not doing any real harm. They should understand that the Democratic willingness to follow the Murtha "slow-bleed" strategy will depend in part on how many Republicans follow them in this vote. The Democrats are themselves divided on how to proceed, and they want a big GOP vote to give them political cover. However "non-binding," this is a vote that Republican partisans will long remember.

History is likely to remember the roll as well. A newly confirmed commander is about to lead 20,000 American soldiers on a dangerous and difficult mission to secure Baghdad, risking their lives for their country. And the message their elected Representatives will send them off to battle with is a vote declaring their inevitable defeat.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Jan-25, by Daniel Henninger:

Talking Ourselves Into Defeat
Profligate self-doubt can exact a price.

The United States is talking itself into defeat in Iraq. Its political culture is now in a downward spiral of pessimism. In the halls of Congress, across endless newspaper columns, amid the punditocracy and on Sunday morning talk shows--all emit a Stygian gloom about America.

Yes, on any given day on some discrete issue (Prime Minister Maliki's bona fides, for example), the criticism of the American role is not without justification. But the cumulative effect of this unremitting ill wind is corrosive. We are not only on the way to talking ourselves into defeat in Iraq but into a diminished international status that may be harder to recover than the doom mob imagines. Self-criticism has its role, but profligate self-doubt can exact a price.

Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins wonders "whether the clock has already run out." To U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton the new strategy is "a dead end." For the Bush troop request, presidential candidate Joe Biden predicted "overwhelming rejection." (His committee resolution to that effect yesterday passed by three votes.) Presidential candidate Chuck Hagel: "We have anarchy in Iraq. It's getting worse." And not least, Sen. John Warner this week heaved his tenured eminence against the war effort, proposing another "non-binding" resolution against more troops.

To pick one amid scores of similar characterizations in the media, the Associated Press wrote from Washington before the State of the Union speech that "Democrats--and even some Republicans--scoffed at his policy." "Scoff" is a strong word, suggesting eye-rolling ridicule. (The line was so good that the AP ran it after the speech as well, under another writer's byline, this time from Baghdad.) But of course amid the giddy vapors of mass mockery, they all "support the troops."

Our slide to a national nervous breakdown because of Iraq is not going unnoticed. Australia's foreign minister, Alexander Downer, has been visiting across the U.S. this week. "I've been pretty worried about what I've heard," Mr. Downer said in an interview. Walking on Santa Monica beach Sunday before last, Mr. Downer said he encountered a display of crosses in the sand, representing the American dead in Iraq.

"What concerns me about this," he said, "is that it's sort of an isolationist sentiment, subconsciously, not consciously, and that would be an enormous problem for the world. I hope the American people understand the importance of not retreating and thinking the world's problems aren't theirs."

---

Some of this is politics as usual, but even normal partisanship comes dressed now in the language of apocalypse. In his SOTU rebuttal, Democratic Sen. Jim Webb ripped into the current economy, saying it reminded him of the early 1900s: "The dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening revolt." Ah, we've fallen to the level of czarist Russia.

You know the pessimism has turned manic when no one is allowed to depart the asylum. Sen. John McCain's support for Iraq and the new Bush plan is now being described in press reports as not only costing him support in the polls (the asylum's inkblot of reality) but worse, the support of campaign contributors.

It is a phenomenon fascinating to behold. Its causes are multiple, but here are several:

• Bush schadenfreude. Partisan pleasure in George Bush's pain dates to the anguish of the contested 2000 election loss. The Democrats have run against something called "Bush" for so long that this sentiment is now bound up in any act or policy remotely attached to the president. Iraq's troubles, or Iran or North Korea, are merely an artifact of crushing this one guy.

• The Iraq Study Group. The ISG report wasn't defeatist, but it enabled the vocabulary of defeat. Its warning of a "slide toward chaos" was re-defined as the current Iraqi status quo. They called their bipartisan solution "phased withdrawal," but it was a euphemism for defeat. Momentum was already building in this direction, and the ISG propelled it.

• The leadership vacuum. The administration never rallied the nation behind the war in a concrete way. A young Marine officer recently returned from combat in Iraq told me this week he is taken aback at how disassociated the American people seem from Iraq, no matter how constantly it's in the news. He says it's as if the problem is not so much what is actually happening in Iraq but that the war is "annoying" to Americans, as if to say: Can't it just go away or not be on the front page all the time? Rallying a nation at war is a president's job.

• The opposition vacuum. One reason the negative mood in politics is so disconcerting is that the opposition's alternative vision is nonexistent. On joining the opposition recently, GOP Sen. Norm Coleman announced, "I can't tell you what the path to success is." Joe Biden says the "primary" Iraq strategy should be to force its leaders to make the political compromises necessary to "end the violence."

As a political strategy, unremitting opposition has worked. Approval for the president and the war is low. The GOP lost sight of its ideological lodestars and so control of Congress. But the U.S. still occupies a unique position of power in the world, and we are putting that status at risk by playing politics without a net.

On the "Charlie Rose Show" this month, former Army vice chief of staff Gen. Jack Keane, who supports the counterinsurgency plan being undertaken by Gen. David Petraeus, said in exasperation: "My God, this is the United States. We are the world's No. 1 superpower. This isn't about arrogance. This is about capability and applying ourselves to a problem that is at its essence a human problem."

At our current juncture, Gen. Keane's words probably rub many the wrong way. But there's a Cassandra-like warning implicit in them. The mood of mass resignation spreading through the body politic is toxic. It is uncharacteristic of Americans under stress. Some might call it realism, but it looks closer to the fatalism of elderly Europe, overwhelmed and exhausted by its burdens, than to the American tradition.

In 1966, Sen. George Aiken delivered a speech on Vietnam famously translated for history as "declare victory and go home.' " On current course, it looks like we may declare defeat and go home.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

from ABC News, 2007-Mar-3:

Walter Reed Turmoil Goes On
Army Officials Are Turning Up the Heat at Walter Reed Medical Center

WASHINGTON — - The widening scandal at the Army's Walter Reed Medical Center is causing the careers of some of the Army's top brass to come to a very abrupt end -- and repercussions are being felt all the way to the top, as President Bush gets involved.

The Investigation Widens

Bush announced an investigation into the entire military medical system today in his weekly radio address.

"This review," the president said, "will examine their treatment from the time they leave the battlefield through their return to civilian life as veterans."

A series of investigations have followed reports by the Washington Post about squalid conditions at Walter Reed Medical Center. ABC News' Bob Woodruff's reports this week have also highlighted some of the shortcomings of military medicine.

In an Army shakeup, Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired Army Secretary Francis Harvey. Gates said Harvey was too slow in responding to roach and mouse infestation and excessive red tape at Walter Reed.

One Soldier's Story

Take the case of Army Chief Warrant Officer James Lowman, hurt in a helicopter crash in Iraq in 2005. He says he saw doctors at Balad Hospital in Iraq and Womack Army Medical Center in North Carolina. But they found no serious injuries. A civilian doctor finally diagnosed him, six months later, with a broken disc in his back. He says much more needs to be done.

"I think the military care that I've received hasn't been adequate in the sense that the providers that have seen me have not been qualified to give the diagnosis for the injuries that I've had, and it's been a struggle to get to the people that are qualified," Lowman said.

The Tip of the Iceberg

That's just not good enough according to the watchdog group, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America.

"Walter Reed is really just the tip of the iceberg," said the group's executive director, Paul Rieckoff. "The [Department of Veteran's Affairs] is chronically under-resourced and under-funded."

The Iraq war veteran added that the organization is just not ready to serve the 1 million veterans who have battled in the war on terror.

And its not just poor conditions that are cause for concern. Last August, the VA's own inspector general listed 119 hospitals where improvements are needed. Among the problems: access to post-traumatic stress treatment.

Just ask Army Reserve Sgt. Larry Provost. He served at Ground Zero after 9/11, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Back home, he told a Virginia VA hospital he was suffering from post-traumatic stress. He says he was told to "Take a number."

"They just said there is such a backfill of GI's who are coming home and they didn't mean it personally," Provost said.

But Veterans Affairs Secretary James Nicholson said such storiesare the exception.

"I'm committed to assuring and providing to America's veterans that even in a system that now has over 1 million patients visits a week that one failure is unacceptable," said Nicholson.

On Monday, a House committee will call on top Army officials to answer for problems at Walter Reed. But many veterans say the problems go much deeper than one hospital, that it's a reflection of a military system that is under-funded and overstretched by a war on two fronts.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, from Best of the Web, 2007-Feb-13, by James Taranto:

Dems Disappoint Zawahiri

The Associated Press reports there's a new audiotape out, putatively from al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is disappointed so far in the Democratic Congress:

On the tape, al-Zawahri said recent congressional elections in the United States that elected a majority of Democrats would change nothing.

"The people chose you due to your opposition to Bush's policy in Iraq, but it appears that you are marching with him to the same abyss," al-Zawahri told the Democrats according to the transcript.

Like those on the Angry Left who are demanding an immediate surrender, Zawahiri is not satisfied with "nonbinding resolutions." There's also this:

Al-Zawahri called what he described as Bush' [sic] failure in Iraq and the growing Taliban resistance in Afghanistan the "most important events" of the past year. He also said that "the people cooperating with the United States in Afghanistan and in Iraq would be abandoned by the Americans once they fail, the same way they did in Vietnam."

Yesterday we got an email from a Republican Senate staffer containing two quotes from Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut--originally a supporter of the Iraq war, now one of the most impatient advocates for retreat--that drive home this point. The first is from March 12, 1975, and it appears, ironically enough, on the personal Web site of Sen. Jim Webb, an antiwar Democratic colleague of Dodd's, who used it in a 2000 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal:

The greatest gift our country can give the Cambodian people is not guns but peace. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now.

DithPran.org reminds us of what happened the following month:

On April 17th, 1975 the Khmer Rouge, a communist guerrilla group led by Pol Pot, took power in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. They forced all city dwellers into the countryside and to labor camps. During their rule, it is estimated that 2 million Cambodians died by starvation, torture or execution. 2 million Cambodians represented approximately 30% of the Cambodian population during that time.

The second Dodd quote comes from Sunday's "Face the Nation" (PDF, see page 4) on CBS:

Well, it can't be any worse than it is today.

Dodd is not exactly consistent in this view; moments before he characterized Iraq as "getting worse by the day." But in any case, given Dodd's track record, wouldn't it be fatuous in the extreme to trust his assurances that things wouldn't get worse if we followed his advice and deserted Iraq?

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Feb-8, by James Taranto:

Reckless Caution
Edwards vs. Clinton: Indecision 2008.

When NBC's Tim Russert asked John Edwards on Sunday if he, as president, would accept a nuclear-armed Iran, the silver-tongued lawyer got tongue-tied: "I--there's no answer to that question at this moment. I think that it's a--it's a--it's a very bad thing for Iran to get a nuclear weapon. I think we have--we have many steps in front of us that have not been used. We ought to negotiate directly with the Iranians, which has not, not been done. The things that I just talked about, I think, are the right approach in dealing with Iran. And then we'll, we'll see what the result is. . . . I think--I think the--we don't know, and you have to make a judgment as you go along, and that's what I would do as president."

Less than two weeks earlier, Mr. Edwards had spoken by satellite to Israel's annual Herzliya Conference. "Let me be clear: Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons. . . . To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep all options on the table. Let me reiterate--all options must remain on the table."

Why did Mr. Edwards's views morph so quickly from hawkish to weaselly? Probably because confrontation with Iran is very unpopular among the Democratic antiwar base. Last week Ezra Klein of The American Prospect, a left-liberal magazine, confronted Mr. Edwards about the Herzliya speech, and the candidate waffled. Although allowing that "it would be foolish for any American president to ever take any option off the table," he offered this criticism of President Bush: "When he uses this kind of language 'options are on the table,' he does it in a very threatening kind of way." Does Mr. Edwards mean to be docile?

Mr. Klein asked if America can live with a nuclear Iran. "I'm not ready to cross that bridge yet," Mr. Edwards answered. There's a world of difference between the unequivocal "under no circumstances" and the coy "I'm not ready." And that "yet" suggests it is only a matter of time before he does cross the bridge.

---

Mr. Edwards is not the only Democratic presidential candidate without a comprehensible position on Iran. Last week Hillary Clinton spoke to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Heather Robinson of PoliticalMavens.com reported that Mrs. Clinton said: "There are many, including our president, who reject any engagement with Iran and Syria. I believe that is a good-faith position to take, but I'm not sure it's the smart strategy that'll take us to the goal we share. What do I mean by engagement or some kind of process? I'm not sure anything positive would come out of it . . . but there are a number of factors that argue for doing what I'm suggesting." Whatever that may be.

Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton have something else in common: Both voted for the Iraq war in 2002, and both turned against it only after it become unpopular. On Iraq, they followed public opinion; on Iran, they are waiting to be led.

Pandering to public sentiment may be fine for a senator, but the president needs to be able to make decisions in the national interest--which sometimes means shaping public opinion, sometimes defying it. Mr. Bush has done both, whether or not his decisions were wise ones.

Perhaps voters next year, chastened by Mr. Bush's dangerous boldness, will opt for someone more risk-averse. But if a crisis arises and the president proves unable to lead, they may find themselves longing for Mr. Bush's steadfastness. An excess of caution is itself a form of recklessness.

Mr. Taranto is the editor of OpinionJournal.com.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2006-Nov-10, p.A16, by Reuel Marc Gerecht:

Gates Crasher

When my junior-officer class graduated from Clandestine Service training, Robert Gates was there to hand us our diplomas. I and the other newly minted case officers were underwhelmed. We'd wanted Bill Casey, the director of central intelligence, one of the brotherhood of spies from World War II -- not his deputy -- to welcome us into the CIA. Inside the Directorate of Operations, Mr. Gates was viewed as an intelligent, adept bureaucratic operator, a finger-in-the-air, greasy-pole climbing, charisma-free, unlovable fellow whom you'd not want to watch your back.

This view was unfair and predicated largely on one undeniable fact: Mr. Gates didn't think the world of case officers and the Clandestine Service's contribution to America's national security. Mr. Gates, who'd come from the analytical wing at Langley -- the Directorate of Intelligence -- and had risen as a Washington insider, knew that the DI, not the DO, was the dominant force in producing the intelligence that the capital's VIPs read.

And Mr. Gates always gave the impression -- it is the single most commendable aspect of his autobiography, "From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War" -- that CIA analysis, espionage and covert action all had their limits in how well they could inform and guide policy makers. In the bubble world of Langley, downgrading the salience of the CIA isn't a disposition that wins you friends, and consequently Mr. Gates had far fewer than the more CIA-centric Richard Helms, the operative turned bureaucrat turned central intelligence director, whom Mr. Gates in many ways resembles.

If Mr. Gates is to be a success as secretary of defense, he will have to show senior military officers, particularly within the Pentagon's Central Command (Centcom), which is responsible for Iraq, the attitude he once displayed toward operatives. Although Donald Rumsfeld has received the lion's share of the criticism for what's gone wrong in Iraq, senior U.S. military officers, most importantly Gen. John Abizaid, the lord of Centcom, are nearly as responsible for the mess.

The press has preferred to dwell on Mr. Rumsfeld -- as a force of nature, he is a compelling character. Also, former generals who loathe Mr. Rumsfeld have, intentionally or not, pre-empted criticism of active-duty generals by being so public in their denouncements of the secretary. And Gen. Abizaid, who has been since the summer of 2003 the grand military architect of America's counterinsurgency, is a highly intelligent, Harvard-educated, Arabic-speaking Arab-American -- in theory, just the person you would want to command U.S. forces in the Middle East.

Yet Gen. Abizaid's "light footprint" strategy -- the idea that a forceful American presence provokes more violence than it brings security -- was not foisted on him by Mr. Rumsfeld. The successful and it seems almost accidental battle at Tal Afar, where the U.S. deployed classical counterinsurgency techniques, and Gen. Abizaid's efforts to reduce the street presence of U.S. forces have clearly shown that security for Iraqis is directly proportional to the number of U.S. soldiers you put on contested ground.

The primary problem in Iraq since May 2003 has not been that Mr. Rumsfeld has been at war with his generals, whose advice he's supposedly refused to listen to. It's been that he and his generals, for sometimes differing reasons, have been in accord. Will Mr. Gates be inclined to reverse the strategy and tactics of Messrs. Rumsfeld and Abizaid? In other words, can he be a general-defying anti-establishmentarian? Mr. Gates's past -- his meteoric rise in the CIA and the National Security Council, his profound loyalty to his bosses, his presidency of the National Eagle Scout Association -- suggests that he doesn't like making waves.

Mr. Rumsfeld has rightly been criticized for his lack of interest in postwar planning. He brought to this war and to the conflict in Afghanistan, which also isn't going well, a mania for transformational warfare that at its core says you can do more with less.

Mr. Rumsfeld was undoubtedly right, and his Cold War-educated generals were wrong, about the forces necessary to vanquish Saddam's armed forces. But occupying foreign countries and counterinsurgencies, which both demand large numbers of not particularly sophisticated foot soldiers, are cruel to the secretary's transformational creed -- which seems perfectly sensible if America only aspires to blow things up overseas. Mr. Rumsfeld also brought to our post-9/11 battlefields a particularly conservative notion that nanny-state welfare-ism is bad for people, and that America's occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, if it were to be protracted or profound, would keep both countries from growing up. When applied to Iraq, however, with its enormous potential for sectarian rage, where U.S. military power was essential to keeping order and the thickly intertwined but stressed bonds between the Shiite and Sunni Arab communities intact, this attitude helped produce the conflagration now destroying the country.

It is a relief to see that Mr. Gates isn't, so far as the public record shows, enamored of the idea that America's ground forces need to be shrunk and "transformed." If Mr. Gates is defined by service to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush -- who never gave up on the idea that the U.S. needed to have sufficient ground, naval and air forces to fight two wars simultaneously -- we can only hope that he'll urge the president to reverse Mr. Rumsfeld's less-is-more doctrine, which could not even handle the insurgency of Iraq's minority, revanchist Sunni community when it was small-scale and the Shia hadn't yet gone on a vengeful warpath. It's not clear whether Mr. Gates would agree with Mr. Rumsfeld on the dangers of U.S. military welfare in Iraq.

As will soon be apparent, the Iraq Survey Group, of which Mr. Gates is a member and to which I'm an adviser, has not discovered any way for the U.S. to exit Iraq -- except under catastrophic conditions. Its recommendations will probably be the least helpful of all the blue-ribbon commissions in Washington since World War II because it cannot escape from an unavoidable reality: We either declare defeat and withdraw completely tout de suite, or we surge troops into Baghdad and fight. The ISG will surely try to find some middle ground between these positions, which, of course, doesn't exist.

If one works through the different scenarios, they all return quickly to a Rumsfeldian position that the U.S. needs to do more in Iraq with less -- a position that has been proven flatly wrong since the spring of 2003. This is why Washington has not been able to draw down even though the president, his defense secretary and his generals have dearly wanted to do so. Any meaningful reduction of U.S. forces is very likely to collapse the Iraqi Army into Shiite and Sunni militias and bring on massive carnage, the likes of which the Middle East has not seen since the Iran-Iraq War. If Mr. Gates signs off on the ISG's recommendations, which will probably be completed before he assumes office, he will be party to a doomed strategy -- and everyone in Washington and abroad will recognize it as a failure as soon as they start to work through it -- before he even sets foot in the Pentagon. It may not be easy for Mr. Gates to recover from this initial flop.

However, when the ISG bombs, the Bush administration may finally get serious about correcting its mistakes in Iraq. It's a decent bet that when this happens, America's military officers may start to miss Donald Rumsfeld. He was the best cover any failing general could ever have.

Mr. Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an adviser to the Iraq Survey Group.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Nov-25:

Uncle Charlie Wants You!
The draft would weaken the world's best military.

Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel created a stir once again this week with his call for renewing the military draft. His own party leaders quickly disavowed any such plan, suggesting just how unpopular the idea is among most Americans. Yet the proposal deserves some further inspection before it vanishes, if only to expose its false assumptions about the current U.S. military.

A vocal Iraq war critic, Mr. Rangel told CBS News recently, "There's no question in my mind that this President and this Administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the Administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way."

In other words, Mr. Rangel's real argument is about class in America, not over the best way to fight Islamic terrorism overseas. He's suggesting that somehow only the poor serve in Uncle Sam's Army. But his views are both out of date and condescending to those who do serve. Alas, they are shared by many on the political left, who think that the military places an unfair burden on the working class.

---

In this mythology, the military is overly reliant on uneducated dupes from poor communities because those from more affluent backgrounds don't want to serve. But the truth is closer to the opposite, according to a recent Heritage Foundation report on the demographic characteristics of the military. It's titled "Who Are the Recruits?" and Mr. Rangel, a Korean War veteran, might want to read it before implying that the military doesn't look like America.

According to the report, which analyzed the most recent Pentagon enlistee data, "the only group that is lowering its participation in the military is the poor. The percentage of recruits from the poorest American neighborhoods (with one-fifth of the U.S. population) declined from 18 percent in 1999 to 14.6 percent in 2003, 14.1 percent in 2004, and 13.7 percent in 2005." Put another way, if military burdens aren't spread more evenly among socio-economic groups in the U.S., it's because the poor are underrepresented.

Or consider education levels. In the general U.S. population, the high school graduation rate is a little under 80%. But among military recruits from 2003-2005, nearly 97% had high school diplomas. The academic quality of recruits has also been rising this decade. According to Heritage, the military defines a "high quality" recruit as someone who scores above the 50th percentile on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test and has a high school degree. The percentage of high quality recruits had climbed to 67% in 2004 and 64% in 2005, up from 57% in 2001.

And what about race? In 2004, about 76% of the U.S. population was white, which was only slightly above the 73% of military recruits (and 72% of Army recruits) who were white. Blacks made up 12.17% of the population in 2004, and made up 14.54% of recruits in 2004 and 13% in 2005. Hispanic Americans are also slightly overrepresented in the military compared to their share of the population, but also not to a degree that suggests some worrisome cultural chasm among the races.

The overall truth is that today's recruits come primarily from the middle class, and, more importantly, they come willingly. This makes them more amenable to training and more likely to adapt to the rigors of military culture. An Army of draftees would so expand the number of recruits that training resources would inevitably be stretched and standards watered down. Meanwhile, scarce resources would be devoted to tens of thousands of temporary soldiers who planned to leave as soon as their year or two of forced service was up.

It's true that such training would help to shape up more young Americans who could use a few weeks of Marine discipline at Parris Island, and if this is what Mr. Rangel has in mind he should say so. But the price would be a less effective fighting force, and precisely at a time when experience and technological mastery are more important than ever in a fighting force.

"The military doesn't want a draft," says Tim Kane, an Air Force veteran and author of the Heritage study. "What the military wants is the most effective fighting force they can field. They want to win wars and minimize casualties. And you don't do that when you're forced to take less-educated, unmotivated people."

What about Mr. Rangel's point that conscription would have made intervention in Iraq less likely? It's impossible to know, but this is a dangerous argument for the future in any case. The main reason for having an effective Army is to deter enemies by making them believe we have the will to fight if we must. Mr. Rangel is saying the U.S. needs a conscript Army precisely to show an adversary we'll never use it. This is a good way to tempt Iran, say, into provocations that could lead to larger conflicts in which we would have no choice but to fight.

---

Mr. Rangel insists he will reintroduce a draft bill "as soon as we start the new session," but for all of these reasons it isn't likely to go anywhere. In 2004 GOP House leaders scheduled a floor vote on Mr. Rangel's Universal National Service Act, which would have required "all persons" to perform military or civilian service "in furtherance of national defense." The bill lost 402-2, and even Mr. Rangel opposed it.

from the New York Daily News, 2006-Nov-20, by Michael Mcauliff with Adam Playford in New York:

Rangel feelin' a draft
But Harlem voters deride renewed push by Dem big

WASHINGTON - Rep. Charles Rangel plans to resurrect a bill to reinstate the draft when Democrats take power in January, but the idea got a chilly reception yesterday in the heart of his Harlem district.

"There's no question in my mind that this President and this administration would never have invaded Iraq ... if, indeed, we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way," Rangel said yesterday.

Rangel floated the same idea in Congress two years ago, but ended up voting against his own bill, along with 401 other Congress members, when the measure came up just before the presidential election.

At the time, he accused Republicans of rushing it out as a stunt against Democrats instead of giving it a legitimate hearing.

But the soon-to-be powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee said yesterday a draft bill will be no stunt this time, insisting he's very serious about it.

"You bet your life; underscore serious," Rangel said on CBS' "Face the Nation" yesterday.

Along 125th St. yesterday, Rangel's draft plan was met mostly with derision.

"What, he was smoking pot or something?" said 58-year-old James Brown.

"He doesn't represent the people of Harlem if he's for the draft," Neil Davis, 48, said.

The White House and the military also oppose the idea.

"America has the best military in the world," said Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin, a Defense Department spokesman. "The all-volunteer force has served the American people well for over 30 years and will continue to do so."

But Rangel insisted that with rising threats around the world, and the huge drain Iraq puts on U.S. forces, a draft is crucial.

"If we're going to challenge Iran and challenge North Korea and then, as some people have asked, to send more troops to Iraq, we can't do that without a draft," he said.

Rangel said, though, that the draft shouldn't be all about the military and war, and that it can be a way to beef up national security forces at "seaports, our airports, in schools, in hospitals" while giving draftees some education in return.

"I will be introducing that bill as soon as we start the new session," said Rangel, a Korean War veteran. "I don't see how anyone can support the war and not support the draft. I think to do so is hypocritical."

from the New York Post, 2006-Sep-13, by Ian Bishop with wire services:

TALIBAN GETS BURY LUCKY
FURY AS NICEY-NICE BRASS CALL OFF STRIKE ON FUNERAL

WASHINGTON - Taliban terror leaders who had gathered for a funeral - and were secretly being watched by an eye-in-the-sky American drone - dodged assassination because U.S. rules of engagement bar attacks in cemeteries, according to a shocking report.

U.S. intelligence officers in Afghanistan are still fuming about the recent lost opportunity for an easy kill of Taliban honchos packed in tight formation for the burial, NBC News reported.

The unmanned airplane, circling undetected high overhead, fed a continuous satellite feed of the juicy target to officers on the ground.

"We were so excited. I came rushing in with the picture," one U.S. Army officer told NBC.

But that excitement quickly turned to gut-wrenching frustration because the rules of engagement on the ground in Afghanistan blocked the U.S. from mounting a missile or bomb strike in a cemetery, according to the report.

Pentagon officials declined comment and referred The Post to Central Command officers in Afghanistan, who did not respond to a request for comment or explanation.

Agonizingly, Army officers could do nothing but watch the pictures being fed back from the drone as the Taliban splintered into tiny groups - too small to effectively target with the drone - and headed back to their mountainside hideouts.

Military experts told The Post that rules of engagement are constantly adjusted on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, depending on the severity of the threat posed by the enemy.

In Iraq, gun battles have raged inside cemeteries in Fallujah, and once-off-limits mosques are now subject to U.S. searches.

The lost opportunity in Afghanistan came amid a spike in Taliban activity in Afghanistan - a craggy country roughly the size of Texas that poses problems for U.S. troops hunting fighters in remote mountain areas.

Taliban militants have launched their deadliest attacks since the terrorist regime was toppled by U.S.-led forces in late 2001 for providing a sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda camps.

U.S. troops and NATO allies recently reclaimed territory in southern Afghanistan from Taliban fighters following a bloody 11-day operation.

NATO leaders announced yesterday the hard fighting killed at least 510 Taliban insurgents.

And American and Afghan forces stormed a fortified compound in the Wardak province to arrest a dozen Taliban leaders who were planning a new wave of attacks.

"Five years ago, the Afghan national army was zero," Maj. Gen. Robert Durbin, who heads the training of Afghan soldiers and police, told CNN.

"We now have sufficient forces - that's why there is some tough fighting down in Kandahar."

from DefenseNews.com, 2006-Sep-25, by Vago Muradian:

China Attempted To Blind U.S. Satellites With Laser

China has fired high-power lasers at U.S. spy satellites flying over its territory in what experts see as a test of Chinese ability to blind the spacecraft, according to sources.

It remains unclear how many times the ground-based laser was tested against U.S. spacecraft or whether it was successful.

But the combination of China's efforts and advances in Russian satellite jamming capabilities illustrate vulnerabilities to the U.S. space network are at the core of U.S. Air Force plans to develop new space architectures and highly classified systems, according to sources.

According to experts, lasers — depending on their power level — could blind electro-optical satellites like the giant Keyhole spacecraft or even interfere with radar satellites like the Lacrosse. Blinding, one source said, is different than disabling given the enormous power required to shoot a laser through the dense lower atmosphere and reach a fast-moving satellite in space. The hardware on the spacecraft can't be changed given they're in orbit, but software changes can help them weather disruptive attacks.

Russian jamming systems are publicly known — the Air Force destroyed such a system deployed to Iraq to keep American GPS guided bombs from finding their targets during the 2003. The site was destroyed by GPS guided bombs.

Pentagon officials, however, have kept quiet regarding China's efforts as part of a Bush administration policy to keep from angering Beijing, which is a leading U.S. trading partner and seen as key to dealing with onerous states like North Korea and Iran.

Even the Pentagon's recent China report failed to mention Beijing's efforts to blind U.S. reconnaissance satellites. Rather, after a contentious debate, the White House directed the Pentagon to limit its concern to one line. In that one line, the report merely acknowledges China has the ability to blind U.S. satellites, thanks to a powerful ground-based laser capable of firing a beam of light at an optical reconnaissance satellite to keep it from taking pictures as it passes overhead.

According to top officials, however, China not only has the capability, but has exercised it. It is not clear when China first used lasers to attack American satellites. Sources would only say that there have been several tests over the past several years.

“The Chinese are very strategically minded and are extremely active in this arena,” said one senior former Pentagon official. “They really believe all the stuff written in the 1980s about the high frontier and are looking at symmetrical and asymmetrical means to offset American dominance in space.”

China's burgeoning anti-satellite capabilities are further evidence of Beijing's focused military strategy that aims not to engage the United States in direct confrontation, but through asymmetric means, according to Andrew Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.

Krepinevich points out that China has outlined a set of capabilities it refers to as “Assassins Mace” to keep U.S. forces in the region at risk and away from China's borders, and tailored to undermine each U.S. advantage from submarine to satellite capabilities.

For their part, service officials are not expressing alarm at efforts to counter the U.S. space advantage, explaining that such moves are predictable and understandable. But they are taking it seriously enough to test ground-based lasers against their own spacecraft to determine their efficacy and map space architectures that are resilient enough to resist such attacks.

The problem, according to sources, is that current satellites are large, on predictable orbits that are easy to track and have scant defenses against lasers.

The United States operates three large optical reconnaissance satellites of the Keyhole-series by Lockheed Martin that were introduced some three decades ago. The loss of any of the three would prove a blow to U.S. space capabilities, sources said, which is why they will be replaced by a large constellation of spacecraft under the Future Imagery Architecture program by Boeing and Lockheed.

Top officials, among them Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne, flatly declined to comment on whether China has attempted to blind its satellites. Chinese officials could not be reached for comment at press time.

Wynne did, however, acknowledge that the Air Force's space plans are shaped recognizing that potential foes will seek asymmetric means to harm a U.S. space network that gives the American military an enormous edge.

The goal, Wynne said, is to minimize the impact that real-life attacks would have on U.S. space capabilities through a networked architecture that can lose nodes but keep functioning.

Wynne stressed that what's at stake isn't merely U.S. military superiority, but the fate of global commerce because signals from Air Force GPS satellites are critical to everything from airline and maritime commerce to car navigation systems.

And unlike the 1980's threat from Soviet anti-satellite plans, future space attacks will be limited in scope, Wynne said.

“At the time, the Soviets were always talking about a bald-faced assault,” he said. Future “asymmetric attacks are going to be local to try to mask out our capabilities in one region. The trick to winning asymmetrical warfare is to make it irrelevant.”

He said a new generation of GPS 3 satellite “will make further assaults and jamming efforts irrelevant.”

Doing “space and ISR through very different means ... means asking good questions,” he said. “Do 22,200-mile-high orbits make sense? Does an orbital periodicity that is well known to any adversary have any relevance today? What you really want is assured situational awareness, position location and communications capabilities.”

But analysts, executives and even officials within the Pentagon have criticized the Air Force, arguing that the service is talking a good game but falling short on execution — largely for lack of budget.

One veteran space industry executive expressed shock at how limited the debate has been to better secure U.S. spacecraft, given the evidence that nations are investing in systems to blind American leaders in a future crisis.

The reason, executives and analysts said, is that such safeguards are complicated and expensive, and become targets when programs go over budget or fall behind schedule.

Case in point? One source said the Pentagon is so thirsty for more bandwidth to handle burgeoning communications demands that it has been short-changing security, which consumes bandwidth.

“It's a tradeoff,” said one industry source. “And so far, the pressure has been for capacity over security.”

According to analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, the Air Force is making poor investment choices not only in space, but ISR programs.

“The U.S. Air Force's ambitious plan for fielding orbital and airborne reconnaissance systems has begun to come unhinged in the budget process from Space Radar, to missile warning to future radar planes, the whole mission area seems to be melting down,” Thompson said.

Wynne contends that space programs are merely in the process of being restructured to rein in cost increases and schedule slips. Wynne also argues that the F-22 fighter's powerful radar and electronic capabilities allow it to perform the roles of larger existing aircraft like the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, the Airborne Warning and Control System and the Rivet Joint, allowing the service to forgo investment in aircraft that are vulnerable to a new generation of powerful surface-to-air missiles.

“I'm probably the biggest supporter of the F-22 outside the Air Force, and while it's the best fighter ever and can do these jobs, but not as well as dedicated assets that have the ability to stay on station far longer,” Thompson said. “Osama bin Laden is still at large and there are known vulnerabilities to our space systems. In this environment, it's odd that the Air Force is cutting its orbital, manned and unmanned reconnaissance assets while presenting the F-22 as a reconnaissance platform. The point is, where are we deficient, firepower or finding the enemy?”

As for China specifically, Thompson said the country has a right to defend itself.

“If you keep looking over the fence at you neighbor's back yard, you're going to get poked in the eye, so it's not surprising that China might be worried about U.S. forces stationed on their doorstep,” Thompson said. “They don't like it and are figuring out how to poke us in the eye. Now I'm no great admirer of the Chinese leadership, but how would we feel if the Chinese had their aircraft carriers off Long Island. That's why we have to do a better job of protecting ourselves and I'm afraid that's not what we're doing.”

The former Pentagon official put it more bluntly.

“The Air Force is trying to put a happy face on this,” he said. “It's not that they don't know what do. It's that they don't have the money in their space budget. It's that simple.”

Another factor is the sheer complexity of building satellites that has fueled cost overruns and schedule delays. For example, the Air Force originally envisioned the National Polar Orbiting Environmental Observation Satellite as a powerful new climate spacecraft. But departments across the government added their unique payloads to the spacecraft, causing integration challenges and cost growth.

The same happens on classified spacecraft as intelligence agencies pile on payloads. Then there is the challenge of ensuring that the technology that is on the spacecraft is the best possible given it will be in orbit for a decade or more.

“Unlike an airplane, once you launch something into space you can't upgrade it again, so when it comes to technology, you are often reworking your system to get the best available in there because you know that it's going to be around for a long time once it's in orbit,” the former official said. “So when people talk about cost, that's a piece of it. It's even harder when you're trying to protect yourself against threats over the next 50 years.”

from OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Sep-15, by James Taranto, from Best of the Web:

For McCain, It's Personal

President Bush's call for new legislation on the interrogation of terrorists is running into resistance from a few Republicans--or, as the New York Times puts it, from "some of the best-known warriors in the Republican Party," specifically "three Republicans with impeccable credentials on military matters: Senators John McCain of Arizona, John W. Warner of Virginia and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina."

Of course one should beware when a liberal newspaper praises someone's "impeccable credentials." You won't hear the Times, for example, characterizing the president or vice president as having "impeccable credentials on energy matters" because both have worked in the oil industry. Surely the military experience of McCain, Warner and Graham gives them a perspective that makes their views more informed in some ways--but it may also bias them, in this case in favor of the institutional interests of the military.

In this passage quoting a letter from retired general Colin Powell, the Financial Times gets to the nub of the problem without really realizing it:

"The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. To redefine Common Article 3 [of the Geneva conventions] would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk," Mr Powell wrote in a letter to Mr McCain released yesterday.

"We are not saying the CIA cannot carry out a programme," Mr McCain said yesterday. "We are saying it cannot amend the Geneva conventions, which calls for the kind of treatment of prisoners that fall under Common Article 3."

The argument is that unless we interpret the Geneva Convention as providing maximal protections to terrorists, our enemies will mistreat U.S. soldiers in their captivity. Assume for the sake of argument that this is true. If the restrictions on interrogations that Powell and McCain advocate result in another 9/11, then they will have sacrificed the lives of women and children in order to protect soldiers. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?

Further, McCain's personal experiences--which lead people to be skittish about criticizing him on this subject--actually argue against his position. As a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, McCain suffered actual, brutal torture--not just aggressive questioning of the sort that the Bush administration seeks to legalize. America's adherence to the Geneva Conventions did not protect McCain--even though he, unlike the al Qaeda detainees, was a legitimate prisoner of war; and Hanoi, unlike al Qaeda, had ratified the Geneva Conventions and thus was legally bound by them.

The whole point of the Geneva Conventions is reciprocity: Nations agree that when they fight wars, they will do so in accordance with some civilized rules. Extending the conventions' protection to terrorists, who reject those rules, transforms Geneva into a suicide pact. John McCain is one of the Senate's true war heroes, but in this area his personal experience seems to be clouding, rather than clarifying, his views.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2006-Aug-15, p.A12, by Ross Douthat:

What Year Is It? 1938? 1972?
Or 1914?

Foreign-policy debates are usually easy to follow: Liberals battle conservatives, realists feud with idealists, doves vie with hawks. But well into the second Bush term, traditional categories are in a state of collapse. On issue after issue, the Republicans and Democrats are divided against themselves, and every pundit seems determined to play George Kennan and found an intellectual party of one. We suffer from a surfeit of baffling labels -- "progressive realism," "realistic Wilsonianism," "progressive internationalism," "democratic globalism" -- that require a scorecard to keep straight. But perhaps there's a simpler way. For the moment at least, where you line up on any foreign-policy question has less to do with whether you're Republican or Democrat, isolationist or internationalist -- and more to do with what year you think it is.

There are five major schools of thought on this question, beginning with the "1942ists," who believe that we stand in Iraq today where the U.S. stood shortly after Pearl Harbor: bogged down against a fascist enemy and duty-bound to carry on the fight to victory. To the 1942ist, Iraq is Europe and the Pacific rolled into one, Saddam and Zarqawi are the Hitlers and Tojos of our era, suicide-bombers are the equivalent of kamikazes -- and George Bush is Churchill, or maybe Truman. The most prominent exponent of 1942ism is Mr. Bush himself. His speech on last year's V-J Day anniversary, for instance, was a long meditation on the similarities between the Iraq war and the challenges faced by FDR. But Mr. Bush hasn't been alone in his invocation of World War II. For much of the post-9/11 period, '42ism has been the position of most mainstream conservatives (and many liberals as well), embraced by realists as well as idealists, and inspiring everything from the term "Islamofascism" to calls for Manzanar-style internment camps for disloyal Muslim-Americans.

Over the last year, though, many conservatives have been peeling away from '42ism, joining the "1938ists" instead, for whom Iran's march toward nuclear power is the equivalent of Hitler's 1930s brinkmanship. While most '38ists still support the decision to invade Iraq, they increasingly see that struggle as the prelude to a broader regional conflict, and worry that we're engaged in Munich-esque appeasement. This camp's leading spokesmen include Michael Ledeen, Bill Kristol and Newt Gingrich. If you hear someone compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler, demand a pre-emptive strike on Iran, or suggest that the Hezbollah-Israel battle is a necessary overture to a larger confrontation, you're listening to a 1938ist.

Liberals, too, have been abandoning '42ism of late. The once-sizable bloc of left-of-center Iraq project supporters has shrunk to include Joe Lieberman, Christopher Hitchens and almost nobody else. Most of the liberal ex-'42ists have joined up with the "1948ists," who share the '42ist and '38ist view of the war on terror as a major generational challenge, but insist that we should think about it in terms of Cold War-style containment and multilateralism, not Iraq-style pre-emption. 1948ism is a broad church: It includes politicians who still technically support the Iraq war (but not really), pundits who opposed it from the beginning, chastened liberal hawks like Peter Beinart and chastened neocons like Francis Fukuyama. What unites them all is a skepticism about military interventions, a fear of hubris, and an abiding faith in the ability of diplomacy, international institutions and "soft power" to win out in a long struggle with militant Islamism.

What unites the '48ists, too, is a desire to avoid being tarred as antiwar leftists. This is precisely the position that the "1972ists" embrace. '72ism has few mainstream politicians behind it, but a great many Americans, and it holds that George Bush is Nixon, Iraq is Vietnam, and that any attack on Iran or Syria would be equivalent to bombing Cambodia. Where 1948ists compare themselves to Dean Acheson and Reinhold Niebuhr, '72ists suggest that the greater danger is repression at home and blowback from imperialist ventures abroad. '72ism is the worldview of Michael Moore, the makers of "Syriana," and the editors of the Nation -- and its power is growing.

As 1972ists are to mainstream liberalism, the "1919ists" are to the political right: The old-guard faction that damns its own party's leaders as sellouts to the other side. For '19ists, Mr. Bush is Woodrow Wilson, a feckless idealist bent on sacrificing U.S. interests and global stability on the altar of messianic liberalism. 1919ism was marginal three years ago, confined to figures like Pat Buchanan who (like the '72ists) saw Zionist fingerprints all over U.S. foreign policy. But of late, many traditional conservatives have migrated in this direction, including William F. Buckley and George Will. As the administration flirts with '38ism, rattling its sabers at Syria and Iran, the '19ers have become convinced that the only thing more dangerous than an incautious '42ism is a still more reckless belief that the year is 1938.

The '19ist-versus-'38ist struggle in the conservative ranks is just one example of how this new alignment creates odd bedfellows and unexpected fissures. Right-wing intellectuals like Andrew Bacevich pen 1919ist essays in the Nation as well as the American Conservative, while a '42ist liberal like Mr. Lieberman bonds with a conservative president and suffers for it at the hands of '48ist and '72ist primary voters. The Democrats' chances of winning in 2008 depend on whether a '42ist or '48ist candidate can get through the primary season without being forced to pander to the party's '72ist base (as John Kerry did, fatally, in 2004). The GOP primaries, meanwhile, may turn on whether a '42ist candidate like John McCain or Rudy Giuliani takes up Iran-hawk themes to fend off '38ist criticism -- and whether this provokes a revolt among disgruntled '19ists, who for now remain a movement in search of a leader.

And yet. A few voices have spoken up of late for the most disquieting possibility of all. This possibility lacks heroes and villains (Bush/Wilson, Ahmadinejad/Hitler) and obvious lessons (impeach Bush, stay the course in Iraq). But as our crisis deepens, it's worth considering 1914ism, and with it the possibility that all of us, whatever year we think it is, are poised on the edge of an abyss that nobody saw coming.

Mr. Douthat is an associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly.

from DefenseLink.mil (US Department of Defense), 2006-Aug-29, by Donald Rumsfeld:

Address at the 88th Annual American Legion National Convention
As Delivered by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Salt Lake City, Utah, Tuesday, August 29, 2006

[I am skipping Don's opening remarks, but they are preserved (commented out) in the HTML source here -AMPP Ed.]

The American Legion -- actually the members of the American Legion -- have achieved a great deal since its founding in the months following World War I, when those small number of folks got together in a hotel room in Europe looking for a way to help some of their fellow veterans who would be coming home soon.

That year -- 1919 -- turned out to be one of the pivotal junctures in modern history with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the creation of the League of Nations, a treaty and an organization intended to make future wars unnecessary and obsolete. Indeed, 1919 was the beginning of a period where, over time, a very different set of views would come to dominate public discourse and thinking in the West.

Over the next decades, a sentiment took root that contended that if only the growing threats that had begun to emerge in Europe and Asia could be accommodated, then the carnage and the destruction of then-recent memory of World War I could be avoided.

It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among Western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis, the rise of fascism and nazism, they were ridiculed or ignored. Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated or that it was someone else's problem. Some nations tried to negotiate a separate peace, even as the enemy made its deadly ambitions crystal clear. It was, as Winston Churchill observed, a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.

There was a strange innocence about the world. Someone recently recalled one U.S. senator's reaction in September of 1939 upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II. He exclaimed:

“Lord, if only I had talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided!”

I recount that history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism. Today -- another enemy, a different kind of enemy -- has made clear its intentions with attacks in places like New York and Washington, D.C., Bali, London, Madrid, Moscow and so many other places. But some seem not to have learned history's lessons.

We need to consider the following questions, I would submit:

• With the growing lethality and the increasing availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow, some way, vicious extremists can be appeased?
• Can folks really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?
• Can we afford the luxury of pretending that the threats today are simply law enforcement problems, like robbing a bank or stealing a car; rather than threats of a fundamentally different nature requiring fundamentally different approaches?
• And can we really afford to return to the destructive view that America, not the enemy, but America, is the source of the world's troubles?

These are central questions of our time, and we must face them and face them honestly.

We hear every day of new plans, new efforts to murder Americans and other free people. Indeed, the plot that was discovered in London that would have killed hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of innocent men, women and children on aircraft flying from London to the United States should remind us that this enemy is serious, lethal, and relentless.

But this is still not well recognized or fully understood. It seems that in some quarters there's more of a focus on dividing our country than acting with unity against the gathering threats.

It's a strange time:

• When a database search of America's leading newspapers turns up literally 10 times as many mentions of one of the soldiers who has been punished for misconduct -- 10 times more -- than the mentions of Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith, the first recipient of the Medal of Honor in the Global War on Terror;
• Or when a senior editor at Newsweek disparagingly refers to the brave volunteers in our armed forces -- the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, the Coast Guard -- as a "mercenary army;"
• When the former head of CNN accuses the American military of deliberately targeting journalists; and the once CNN Baghdad bureau chief finally admits that as bureau chief in Baghdad, he concealed reports of Saddam Hussein's crimes when he was in charge there so that CNN could keep on reporting selective news; [as James Taranto noted in his coverage, and as is evident from the contemporary coverage in the media bias chapter of AMPP, it was Eason Jordan, then CNN news chief, not Jane Arraf, then CNN Baghdad bureau chief, who orchestrated and knew of this foul bargain. Clearly Don meant Eason — Jane Arraf is obviously female. -AMPP Ed.]
• And it's a time when Amnesty International refers to the military facility at Guantanamo Bay -- which holds terrorists who have vowed to kill Americans and which is arguably the best run and most scrutinized detention facility in the history of warfare -- "the gulag of our times." It's inexcusable. (Applause.)

Those who know the truth need to speak out against these kinds of myths and distortions that are being told about our troops and about our country. America is not what's wrong with the world. (Applause.)

The struggle we are in -- the consequences are too severe -- the struggle too important to have the luxury of returning to that old mentality of “Blame America First.”

One of the most important things the American Legion has done is not only to serve and assist and advocate, as you have done so superbly for so much of the past century, but also to educate and to speak the truth about our country and about the men and women in the military.

Not so long ago, an exhibit -- Enola Gay at the Smithsonian during the 1990s -- seemed to try to rewrite the history of World War II by portraying the United States as somewhat of an aggressor. Fortunately, the American Legion was there to lead the effort to set the record straight. (Applause.)

Your watchdog role is particularly important today in a war that is to a great extent fought in the media on a global stage, a role to not allow the distortions and myths be repeated without challenge so that at the least the second or third draft of history will be more accurate than the first quick allegations we see.

You know from experience personally that in every war there have been mistakes, setbacks, and casualties. War is, as Clemenceau said, “a series of catastrophes that result in victory.”

And in every army, there are occasional bad actors, the ones who dominate the headlines today, who don't live up to the standards of the oath and of our country. But you also know that they are a very, very small percentage of the literally hundreds of thousands of honorable men and women in all theaters in this struggle who are serving our country with humanity, with decency, with professionalism, and with courage in the face of continuous provocation. (Applause.)

And that is important in any long struggle or long war, where any kind of moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong, can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.

Our enemies know this well. They frequently invoke the names of Beirut or Somalia -- places they see as examples of American retreat and American weakness. And as we've seen -- even this month -- in Lebanon, they design attacks and manipulate the media to try to demoralize public opinion. They doctor photographs of casualties. They use civilians as human shields. And then they try to provoke an outcry when civilians are killed in their midst, which of course was their intent.

The good news is that most Americans, though understandably influenced by what they see and read, have good inner gyroscopes. They have good center of gravity. So, I'm confident that over time they will evaluate and reflect on what is happening in this struggle and come to wise conclusions about it.

Iraq, a country that was brutalized by a cruel and dangerous dictatorship, is now traveling the slow, difficult, bumpy, uncertain path to a secure new future under a representative government that will be at peace with its neighbors, rather than a threat to their own people, to their neighbors, or to the world.

As the nature of the threat and the conflict in Iraq has changed over these past several years, so have the tactics and the deployments. But while military tactics have changed and adapted to the realities on the ground -- as they must -- the strategy has not changed, which is to empower the Iraqi people to be able to defend, and govern, and rebuild their own country.

The extremists themselves call Iraq the “epicenter” in the War on Terror. And our troops know how important their mission is.

A soldier who recently volunteered for a second tour in Iraq captured the feeling of many of his peers. In an e-mail to some friends, he wrote the following, and I quote:

“I ask that you never take advantage of the liberties guaranteed by the shedding of free blood, never take for granted the freedoms granted by our Constitution. For those liberties would be merely ink on paper were it not for the sacrifice of generations of Americans who heard the call of duty and responded heart, mind and soul with `Yes, I will.'”

Some day that young man very likely will be a member of the American Legion attending a convention like this. I certainly hope so. And I hope he does that and that we all have a chance to meet. And one day a future speaker may reflect back on the time of historic choice, remembering the questions raised as to our country's courage, and dedication, and willingness to persevere in this fight until we prevail.

The question is not whether we can win; it's whether we have the will to persevere to win. I'm convinced that Americans do have that determination and that we have learned the lessons of history, of the folly of trying to turn a blind eye to danger. These are lessons you know well, lessons that your heroism has helped to teach to generations of Americans.

May God bless each of you. May God bless the men and women in uniform, and their families. And may God continue to bless our wonderful country.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Jul-13:

Osama in Genevaland
Terrorists are now getting lawful-combatant legitimacy.

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 govern the treatment of lawful combatants and civilians during wartime. But now a new Pentagon memorandum concludes that Common Article 3 of the Conventions also governs the treatment of unlawful combatants: pirates, drug mafias and especially terrorists. So, five years after 9/11, the U.S. is about to give to people who ram commercial jets into buildings many of the same legal privileges and immunities as the average GI.

How did we get to this Osama in Genevaland world? Credit belongs to last week's Hamdan Supreme Court decision, and to Pentagon officials who have overinterpreted the meaning of that decision. Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England signed the memo, and our sources tell us it was issued without any wide deliberation with, or even particular awareness by, the White House Counsel's office or the Justice Department. (A White House spokesman didn't respond to our query.)

Mr. England's memo overturns a 2002 Justice Department memo that ruled explicitly that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to members of al Qaeda or the Taliban, a policy change the White House confirmed late on Tuesday. For an Administration that has fought so hard, and in our view rightly, to protect its executive powers, this is being heralded as an embarrassing reversal. It also has the smell of a bureaucratic fiasco, since we can't recall another situation in which Presidential power was so freely handed away.

Some in the Bush Administration claim the memo does nothing more than require the Pentagon to ensure compliance with Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and that troops in the field had to be warned. But Hamdan was a limited and ambiguous ruling: limited, because it dealt solely with the question of military commissions that put terrorists on trial; ambiguous, because Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion did not fully subscribe to the four-Justice majority's reasoning.

At a minimum, the Bush Administration should have thought carefully about Hamdan and interpreted it as narrowly as possible. Instead, Mr. England's memo interprets the ruling in the broadest way possible, applying the standards of Common Article 3 to all "DoD orders, policies, directives, execute orders and doctrine." As a matter of law, every other government agency, including the CIA, will now have to follow the Pentagon's line.

In practice, this means that a captured terrorist such as September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is now protected by Common Article 3. People often associate the Geneva Conventions with guarantees against torture, protection for the wounded and the sick, and other "bare minimum" humanitarian standards. But Common Article 3 goes considerably further, forbidding, for example, "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."

What exactly constitutes personal dignity and outrages upon it? Who knows, though we bet the ACLU will be more than happy to supply some answers. Our guess is that the concept can be read so expansively as to forbid the U.S. from so much as shouting at captured al Qaeda suspects, never mind "waterboarding" them, as was reportedly done to break KSM. In a war in which actionable intelligence acquired from captives is crucial to uncovering terrorist plots and preventing future attacks, it's hard to imagine a greater self-inflicted setback to counterterror efforts.

---

The setback is also political, and by that we don't mean partisan. We mean in the larger sense of the Bush Administration's moral and legal authority for its anti-terror cause. By identifying terrorists as illegal combatants and treating them accordingly, the Administration was attempting to remedy the defects of the pre-September 11 legal architecture for handling terrorists. The pre-9/11 view divided the world between combatants and noncombatants, and viewed terrorism as just another crime to be dealt with through the existing criminal-justice system.

We have learned the hard way that that approach doesn't work. The criminal-justice system takes too long and is complicated by the government's need to keep military secrets. Moreover, according such rights to terrorists who murder women and children gives them moral legitimacy that will make winning this war that much harder. It elevates terrorists nearly to the level of GIs who obey formal rules of engagement and who can be, and as we've seen often are, punished severely for harming innocents.

What the world needs is a new legal framework for distinguishing between legal and illegal combatants, but instead we are now heading toward the European model where terrorism is seen as just another fact of life and not a unique evil or grave threat. In Germany, the High Court earlier this year released from custody Mounir El Motassedeq, an accomplice of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta, on a technicality. Germany may be able to afford such legal exquisiteness; as the main terror target, the U.S. and its citizens cannot.

---

Already, in the wake of this reversal, the Bush Administration's critics are talking about the "illegality" of its previous failure to abide by Geneva rules. We'll predict that it won't be very long until some European magistrate indicts Donald Rumsfeld or National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley or some other U.S. official for "war crimes" for this failure. The Pentagon's new memo won't be much of a defense.

Believe it or not, Congress can still fix this royal mess by following the Supreme Court's Hamdan order to write a new set of procedures and rules for handling unlawful combatants. And Congress can and should say that it is these new rules, not Geneva Common Article 3, that is the controlling law in America. The Pentagon may have surrendered prematurely to legal generals, but that doesn't mean the American people want to.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-May-26:

Victors, Not Victims
Honor soldiers. Don't pity them.

Here's a Memorial Day quiz:

1. Who is Jessica Lynch?

Correct. She's the Army private captured, and later rescued, in the early days of the war.

2. Who is Leigh Ann Hester?

Come on. The Kentucky National Guard vehicle commander was awarded a Silver Star last year for fighting off an insurgent attack on a convoy in Iraq. The first woman to receive a Silver Star since World War II, and the first woman ever to receive one for close combat.

If you don't recognize Sergeant Hester's name, that's not surprising. While Private Lynch's ordeal appears in some 12,992 newspaper and broadcast reports on the Factiva news service, Sergeant Hester and her decoration for extraordinary valor show up in only 162.

One difference: Sergeant Hester is a victor, while Private Lynch can be seen as a victim. And when it comes to media reports about the military these days, victimology is all the rage. For every story about someone who served out of conviction and resolutely went on with his civilian life, there are many more articles about a soldier's failure or a veteran's floundering.

It's a sign of some progress that the men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are not spit upon and shunned as Vietnam vets were. Yet there may be something more pernicious about mouthing "Support Our Troops" while also asserting that many of them are poor, uneducated dupes who were cannon fodder overseas and have come home as basket cases, plagued by a range of mental, emotional and financial problems.

The vast majority of vets don't fit that description. Many, like one returned Army guardsman we talked to, chalk up this portrayal to the media's fascination with bad news in general. As for his combat in Iraq, both "going to war and coming home is very overwhelming," he says. "But you make choices in life . . . and through inner strength and support, I am making a choice that I want to be healthy."

In some cases, the depiction of military personnel as damaged goods serves the antiwar agenda. Yet retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Tom Linn sees more basic impulses at work. "I honestly believe it is guilt" and even resentment, he says. The military type as misfit "is a stereotype that a lot of people from the Vietnam era have held on to." Then, as now, "they saw men and women who did more than they did . . . and they'd compensate by casting those folks in an inferior status."

---

This Memorial Day, most of us will remember the Americans who have served their country since the Revolutionary War not with pity but with admiration. For those who want to show their gratitude, Major John Morris has some recommendations. He's deputy chaplain for Minnesota's Army National Guard and a founder of a state program called Reintegration: Beyond Reunion. Its broad goal, he explains, is to help returning guardsmen and reservists frame their "experience, to draw from it everything that they can to grow into productive citizens."

How can we help? For one thing, he says, don't assume that all struggling vets are sick, since what looks like abnormal behavior may be culture shock. But do give vets and their families the tools to adjust. Major Morris explains: "Schools, look out for these military kids. Neighbors, cut their grass and shovel their snow, baby-sit and do chores around the house. Employers, make sure those jobs are still there." It's the least we can do, he says: "Since there are so few of us fighting the war, it's easy for the rest of us to try."

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-May-2, by Shelby Steele:

White Guilt and the Western Past
Why is America so delicate with the enemy?

There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.

For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along--if admirably--in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one--including, very likely, the insurgents themselves--believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.

Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.

Why this new minimalism in war?

---

It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world's population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.

I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes--here racism and imperialism--lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.

They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that invoke the memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not relapsed into their group's former sinfulness. So when America--the greatest embodiment of Western power--goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus, in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and another against the past--two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.

The collapse of white supremacy--and the resulting white guilt--introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for Western nations and for their actions in the world. In Iraq, America is fighting as much for the legitimacy of its war effort as for victory in war. In fact, legitimacy may be the more important goal. If a military victory makes us look like an imperialist nation bent on occupying and raping the resources of a poor brown nation, then victory would mean less because it would have no legitimacy. Europe would scorn. Conversely, if America suffered a military loss in Iraq but in so doing dispelled the imperialist stigma, the loss would be seen as a necessary sacrifice made to restore our nation's legitimacy. Europe's halls of internationalism would suddenly open to us.

Because dissociation from the racist and imperialist stigma is so tied to legitimacy in this age of white guilt, America's act of going to war can have legitimacy only if it seems to be an act of social work--something that uplifts and transforms the poor brown nation (thus dissociating us from the white exploitations of old). So our war effort in Iraq is shrouded in a new language of social work in which democracy is cast as an instrument of social transformation bringing new institutions, new relations between men and women, new ideas of individual autonomy, new and more open forms of education, new ways of overcoming poverty--war as the Great Society.

This does not mean that President Bush is insincere in his desire to bring democracy to Iraq, nor is it to say that democracy won't ultimately be socially transformative in Iraq. It's just that today the United States cannot go to war in the Third World simply to defeat a dangerous enemy.

White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems--even the tyrannies they live under--were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must "understand" and pity our enemy even as we fight him. And, though Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war--and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past.

Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly disparate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort--only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.

Today words like "power" and "victory" are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.

---

America and the broader West are now going through a rather tender era, a time when Western societies have very little defense against the moral accusations that come from their own left wings and from those vast stretches of nonwhite humanity that were once so disregarded.

Europeans are utterly confounded by the swelling Muslim populations in their midst. America has run from its own mounting immigration problem for decades, and even today, after finally taking up the issue, our government seems entirely flummoxed. White guilt is a vacuum of moral authority visited on the present by the shames of the past. In the abstract it seems a slight thing, almost irrelevant, an unconvincing proposition. Yet a society as enormously powerful as America lacks the authority to ask its most brilliant, wealthy and superbly educated minority students to compete freely for college admission with poor whites who lack all these things. Just can't do it.

Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem--win a war, fix immigration--they lose legitimacy.

To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from stigmatization as a "unilateralist cowboy"? And where is the will to truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you retreat into minimalism.

Possibly white guilt's worst effect is that it does not permit whites--and nonwhites--to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.

This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life--absorbed as new history--so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.

Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is author, most recently, of "White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era," published this week by HarperCollins.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Apr-25, by Brendan Miniter:

Rage at Don
The war on Rumsfeld is really a bureaucratic turf battle.

"I think Director [of National Intelligence John] Negroponte has battles to fight within the bureaucracy, and particularly with the Department of Defense. DOD is refusing to recognize that the director of national intelligence is in charge of the intelligence community."--Sen. Susan Collins

On Sept. 10, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a town hall meeting at the Pentagon and identified what he saw as the gravest threat to national security: the Pentagon's own bureaucracy. "With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk," he said. He may have underestimated both the size and tenacity of this foe.

In the opening pages of their new book about the Iraq war, "Cobra II," Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor quote the Sept. 10 speech to frame the battle that has raged inside the Pentagon for five years. As the nation has weathered the most deadly terrorist attack on its soil in history, fought a global war on terror and liberated two countries, there has been a battle inside the Pentagon over the size, organization and weaponry of the U.S. military. And that battle has only intensified as the bureaucracy that Mr. Rumsfeld chastised for being stuck in a Cold War mindset has picked up allies in Congress, the military and in some quarters of the administration. It is this coalition that is now pushing for Mr. Rumsfeld to be fired.

But it's not just the defense secretary's head the former generals, anonymous leakers and senators are after. This is a classic Washington turf and policy war. In the balance is the nation's ability to fight the war on terror and confront other threats around the globe. One of the more significant theaters of this war has been waged in the intelligence community. Two years ago at the behest of the 9/11 Commission, Congress created the director of national intelligence to sit atop the CIA, FBI and other intelligence gathering agencies. In theory the DNI would improve the nation's ability to collect, analyze and disseminate information about national security threats. In this process Congress was cheered on by the Bush administration's normal critics in the media.

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Initially the Bush administration resisted creating the new post, but as the 2004 presidential election approached Mr. Bush came out in support of it. A few members of Congress, however, put the breaks on for a few weeks. They included Rep. Duncan Hunter, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, a relatively new arrival on Capitol Hill, who as a former Marine helicopter pilot had seen the need for good intelligence firsthand while carrying the "nuclear football" for President Reagan and while serving in Somalia in the 1990s. Before the legislation creating the new layer of bureaucracy was sent to the president to be signed into law shortly after the election, these few holdouts in the House won a critical battle for the military. They ensured that the Pentagon would not lose its ability to gather and analyze intelligence independently to support soldiers in harms way.

That victory, however, always depended on vigorous civilian control over a Pentagon that would rather not make enemies on Capitol Hill. That leadership starts with the defense secretary and also requires support from a president who understands that it's vital for the Pentagon to control its own intelligence assets. Sen. Collins, who led the fight in Congress against Reps. Hunter and Kline, has never accepted the powerful but limited role for the DNI. Instead she has continued to insist that Mr. Negroponte push to expand his mandate and gain total dominance over the intelligence community. This has come even as the New York Times and Washington Post have printed articles recently pointing out that the DNI has turned out to be--surprise, surprise--ineffective at creating more-accurate intelligence or even in turning out competing analysis that then filters up to policy makers. If anything, the creation of the DNI has made it less likely that members of Congress will receive anything but a consensus view from the intelligence community.

A recent House Intelligence Committee report puts its finger on the problem by saying the DNI is in danger of becoming "less an intended 'orchestration mechanism,' and more another layer of large, unintended and unnecessary bureaucracy." The committee is threatening to cut Mr. Negroponte's funding unless he comes up with a plan for reforming the intelligence community. But short of abolishing his own position, it's hard to see how that is possible.

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It is in this context that we can view the criticism of Mr. Rumsfeld intensifying over the past year. The underlying theme from the handful of retired generals who have spoken out against the defense secretary to the critics on Capitol Hill and elsewhere is that Mr. Rumsfeld has been too forceful a leader at the Pentagon. Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, wants to go so far as to hold a symbolic "no-confidence vote" on the defense secretary. "Let the Senate go on the record," he told reporters last week.

Unable to persuade the president from invading Iraq or to stop him from pushing for a more flexible military with an expanded role around the world, it seems the critics are now trying to throw sand in the gears of the military machine in the hope that it will grind to a halt. It's hard to see how this serves the national interest.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Apr-17, edited by Paul Gigot and Daniel Henninger:

The Generals War
What's behind the attacks against Rumsfeld.

So when did Generals cease to be responsible for outcomes in war? We ask that question amid the latest calls by certain retired senior military officers for Donald Rumsfeld to resign over U.S. difficulties in Iraq.

Major General Charles H. Swannack Jr., for one, was quoted last week as saying the Defense Secretary's "absolute failures in managing the war against Saddam in Iraq" mean he is not "the right person" to continue leading the Pentagon. Mr. Swannack, who commanded the 82nd Airborne in Iraq, joins other ex-uniformed Iraq War critics such as former Centcom Commander Anthony Zinni and retired Army Major General John Batiste. But there's far more behind this firefight than Mr. Rumsfeld's performance.

Mr. Zinni in particular neither fought the Iraq War nor supported it in the first place. He is a longtime advocate of "realism" in the Middle East, which is fancy-speak for leaving Arab dictators alone in the name of "stability." What Mr. Zinni really opposes is President Bush's "forward strategy of freedom," not the means by which the Administration has waged the Iraq campaign.

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As for those who've raised the issue of competence, we'd be more persuaded if they weren't so impossibly vague. If their critique is that Mr. Rumsfeld underestimated the Sunni insurgency, well, so did the CIA and military intelligence. Retired General Tommy Franks, who led and planned the campaign that toppled Saddam Hussein, took a victory lap after the invasion even as the insurgency gathered strength.

If their complaint is that Mr. Rumsfeld has since fought the insurgents with too few troops, well, what about current Centcom Commander John Abizaid? He is by far the most forceful advocate of the "small footprint" strategy--the idea that fewer U.S. troops mean less Iraqi resentment of occupation.

Our point here isn't to join the generals, real or armchair, in pointing fingers of blame for what has gone wrong in Iraq. Mistakes are made in every war; there's a reason the word "snafu" began as a military acronym whose meaning we can't reprint in a family newspaper. But if we're going to start assigning blame, then the generals themselves are going to have to assume much of it.

A recent article by former Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor for the Center for Defense Information details how the U.S. advance on Baghdad in March and April 2003 was slowed against Mr. Rumsfeld's wishes by overcautious commanders on the scene. That may have allowed Saddam and many of his supporters to escape to fight the insurgency. General Abizaid also resisted the first assault on Fallujah, in April 2004, which sent a signal of U.S. political weakness. We don't agree with all of Mr. Macgregor's points, but it is likely that these Rumsfeld critics are trying to write their own first, rough draft of historic blame shifting.

Our own view is that the worst mistakes in Iraq have been more political than military, especially in not establishing a provisional Iraqi government from the very start. Instead, the U.S. allowed itself to be portrayed as occupiers, a fact that the insurgency exploited. But the blame for that goes well beyond Mr. Rumsfeld--and would extend to then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and to Mr. Bush himself.

Mr. Rumsfeld's largest mistake may have been giving L. Paul Bremer too free a hand to govern like a viceroy in 2003 and 2004 when a more rapid turnover of political power to Iraqis, and more rapid training of Iraqi forces, might have made a big difference. More than anything else, that unnecessary delay in Iraq's political and self-defense evolution has contributed to the current instability.

But that is for the historians to sort out. What matters now is doing what it takes to prevail in Iraq, setting up a new government and defeating the terrorists. How firing Mr. Rumsfeld will help in any of this, none of the critics say. They certainly aren't offering any better military strategy for victory.

More than likely, Mr. Rumsfeld's departure would create new problems, starting with a crisis of confidence in Iraq about American staying power. What do Mr. Rumsfeld's critics imagine Iraqis think as they watch former commanders assigning blame? And how would a Rumsfeld resignation contribute to the credible threat of force necessary to meet America's next major security challenge, which is Iran's attempt to build a nuclear bomb? Sacking the Defense Secretary mid-conflict would only reinforce the Iranian mullahs' belief that they have nothing to worry about because Americans have no stomach for a prolonged engagement in their part of the world.

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The anti-Rumsfeld generals have a right to their opinion. But there's a reason the Founders provided for civilian control of the military, and a danger in military men using their presumed authority to push elected Administrations around. As for Democrats and their media allies, we can only admire their sudden new deference to the senior U.S. officer corps, which follows their strange new respect for the "intelligence community" they also once despised. U.S. military recruiters might not be welcome on Ivy League campuses, but they're heroes when they trash the Bush Administration.

Mr. Rumsfeld's departure has been loudly demanded in various quarters for a couple of years now, without much success, and on Friday Mr. Bush said he still has his every confidence. We suspect the President understands that most of those calling for Mr. Rumsfeld's head are really longing for his.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2006-Apr-17, p.A16, by John Crosby, Thomas Mcinerney, Buron Moore and Paul Vallely:

In Defense of Donald Rumsfeld

Foes of the Bush administration described the recent calls by six retired generals for Donald Rumsfeld to resign or be fired as "growing military pressure" for him to do so. These retired generals claim he should go for, among other things, ignoring the advice of senior military leaders and bungling the global war on terror in Iraq with poorly planned war-fighting strategies and post-Saddam planning efforts. We strongly disagree.

Like former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, we do not believe that it is appropriate for active duty, or retired, senior military officers to publicly criticize U.S. civilian leadership during war. Calling for the secretary's resignation during wartime may undercut the U.S. mission and incites individual challenge to the good order and discipline of our military culture. At best, such comments may send a confusing message to our troops deployed on dangerous missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. At worst, they can also inspire and motivate the evil forces we seek to defeat.

Since our nation's founding, the principle of civilian control over the military has been a centerpiece of our system of government. Under our constitutional system, it places elected and appointed government leaders in charge. American soldiers are bound by this tradition to subordinate themselves to civilian authority. We give advice but it is ultimately up to civilian leaders to make key strategic and policy decisions. Unlike many other democracies, this is one important reason why we have never been ruled by the military, and have been the most successful country the world has ever seen.

Some critics suggest that the calls by the six retired generals signify widespread discontent in the military with Secretary Rumsfeld's leadership. It is preposterous for them to suggest that this small group represents the views of the 1.4 million men and women serving on active duty or the 7,000 retired generals and flag officers who respect, understand and appreciate the established American tradition of the military being subordinate to civilian control and direction.

Moreover, despite the frustration of the current situation in Iraq, military morale remains high, as evidenced by the high re-enlistment rate of active-duty forces. This fact belies the contention that there is rising military discontent.

The notion that Secretary Rumsfeld doesn't meet with, or ignores the advice of, senior military leaders is not founded in fact. During his tenure, senior military leaders have been involved to an unprecedented degree in every decision-making process. In addition to the Senior Level Review Group, Defense Senior Leadership Conference, and Quadrennial Defense Review, in 2005 Secretary Rumsfeld also participated in meetings involving service chiefs 110 times and combatant commanders 163 times. Gen. Myers correctly describes these meetings as "very collaborative" with a free flow of information and discussion. Gen. Tommy Franks, U.S. Central Command Commander during the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq, echoes Gen. Myers's comments and supports Secretary Rumsfeld as collaborative in the decision-making process. Gen. Franks has stated recently that he is a tough collaborator and demands sound thinking and recommendations from the senior military leadership and staff.

Much of the acrimony expressed by Secretary Rumsfeld's military critics appears to stem from his efforts to "transform" the military by moving to a joint expeditionary force that is lighter and more mobile in nature to meet the nation's current and future threats. Many senior officers and bureaucrats did not support his transformation goals -- preferring conventional weapons of the past like the Crusader artillery piece and World War II war-fighting strategies, which prove practically useless against lawless and uncivilized enemies engaged in asymmetric warfare. It unfortunately appears that two of the retired generals (Messrs. Zinni and Newbold) do not understand the true nature of this radical ideology, Islamic extremism, and why we fight in Iraq. We suggest they listen to the tapes of United 93.

Despite criticisms, Mr. Rumsfeld is arguably one of the most effective secretaries of defense our nation has ever had. Under his watch, the U.S. military has been transforming; it brilliantly deposed Mullah Omar's barbaric Taliban regime (Osama bin Laden's sanctuary) and Saddam Hussein's ruthless Baathist regime, freeing 50 million people from oppression and placing the countries on democratic paths. With these actions, terrorists have been denied secure home bases. These are a few key factors why terrorists have been unable to attack the American homeland again. The policy and forward strategy implemented by Secretary Rumsfeld has taken the fight to the enemy as did the nation in World War II and the Cold War.

Some, like Generals Zinni, Newbold, Eaton, Batiste, Swannack, Riggs and others, may not like Secretary Rumsfeld's leadership style. They certainly have the right as private citizens now to speak their minds. Some may feel that he's been unfair, arrogant and autocratic to some senior officers. But those sentiments and feelings are irrelevant. In the end he's the man in charge and the buck stops with him. As long as he retains the confidence of the commander in chief he will make the important calls at the top of the department of defense. That's the way America works. So let's all breathe into a bag and get on with winning the global war against radical Islam. In time the electorate, and history, will grade their decisions.

Lt. Gen. Crosby (ret.) is former deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. Lt. Gen. McInerney (ret.) is former assistant vice chief of staff, U.S. Air Force. Maj. Gen. Moore (ret.), U.S. Air Force, was director of Central Command during Operation Desert Storm. Maj. Gen. Vallely (ret.) is former deputy commander of the U.S. Army, Pacific.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Jan-7:

The Wisdom in Wiretaps
Bush critics seek war-powers loopholes to benefit terrorists.

The Bush Administration's use of warrantless wiretaps in the war on terrorism continues to generate controversy, and Congress is planning hearings. Some of the loopier elements of the Democratic Party have even suggested the wiretaps are grounds for impeachment. But the more we learn about the practice, the clearer it is that the White House has been right to employ and defend it.

The issue is not about circumventing normal civilian Constitutional protections, after all. The debate concerns surveillance for military purposes during wartime. No one would suggest the President must get a warrant to listen to terrorist communications on the battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan. But what the critics are really insisting on here is that the President get a warrant the minute a terrorist communicates with an associate who may be inside in the U.S. That's a loophole only a terrorist could love.

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To the extent the President's critics are motivated by anything other than partisanship, their confusion seems to involve a 1978 law called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA provides a mechanism by which the executive can conduct warrant-approved surveillance under certain circumstances. But FISA covers only a limited number of intelligence-gathering scenarios. And no Administration--Democrat or Republican--has recognized FISA as a binding limit on executive power.

Jimmy Carter's Attorney General, Griffin Bell, emphasized when FISA passed that the law "does not take away the power of the President under the Constitution." And in the 1980 case of United States v. Truong, the Carter Administration successfully argued the government's authority to have conducted entirely domestic, warrantless wiretaps of a U.S. citizen and a Vietnamese citizen who had been passing intelligence to the North Vietnamese during the 1970s Paris peace talks.

In 1994, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick also asserted an "inherent authority" not just to warrantless electronic surveillance but to "warrantless physical searches," too. The close associate of Hillary Rodham Clinton told Congress that much intelligence gathering couldn't be conducted within the limits placed on normal criminal investigations--even if you wanted to for the sake of appearances. For example, she added, "it is usually impossible to describe the object of the search in advance with sufficient detail to satisfy the requirements of the criminal law."

Some critics have argued that the surveillance now at issue could have been conducted within the confines of FISA. But that doesn't appear to be true. FISA warrants are similar to criminal warrants in that they require a showing of "probable cause"--cause, that is, to believe the subject is an "agent of a foreign power." But if the desired object of surveillance is a phone number found on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's computer, you may not even know the identity of its owner and you can't show probable cause.

Nor does the actual track record of FISA argue for the sacredness of judicial oversight of intelligence gathering. In the 1990s, FISA judges nitpicked warrant requests to the extent that Ms. Gorelick and others believed FISA required a complete "wall" of separation between foreign intelligence gathering and U.S. criminal investigators. One consequence was the FBI's failure to request a warrant to search alleged "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui's computer. Only after 9/11 did FISA's appeals panel rule that such a wall had never been necessary, and did the Patriot Act destroy it once and for all.

Other critics accept the President's inherent power but say he still should have asked Congress to approve the wiretaps. But some in Congress were informed of the wiretaps and did nothing to stop them. Instead, the ranking Democrat on Senate Intelligence, Jay Rockefeller, wrote a private letter to Vice President Dick Cheney expressing his "lingering concerns" and saying he'd keep it on file for posterity--or more precisely, for posterior-covering. The Senator then released the letter after the story became public as a way to play "gotcha."

If Mr. Rockefeller had been serious about his objections in 2003, he should have told Mr. Cheney to cease and desist or that he'd try to pass legislation to stop it. After reading Mr. Rockefeller's letter of self-absolution, we can understand if Mr. Cheney concluded that the wiretapping was too important to the war on terror to risk seeking an explicit legislative endorsement from so feckless a Congress. The way the Members have played politics with the Patriot Act is another reason not to give Congress a chance to micromanage war-fighting decisions.

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As for the judiciary, one question that Congressional hearings should explore is whether FISA itself is unconstitutional. That is, whether it already grants the courts too much power over the executive branch's conduct of foreign policy by illegitimately imposing the "probable cause" standard.

Laurence Silberman, a former deputy attorney general, testified on this point while Congress was debating FISA. He also pointed out that while fear of exposure is a strong disincentive to executive abuse of surveillance power, "since judges are not politically responsible, there is no self-correcting mechanism to remedy their abuses of power" in such matters. In other words, FISA grants the judiciary a policy supremacy that the Constitution doesn't.

The upside of the coming Congressional hearings, we guess, is that Americans will get a lesson in the Constitution's separation of powers. We're confident they'll come away believing the Founders were right to the give the President broad war-fighting--including surveillance--powers.

from the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Dec-16, by James Taranto, in Best of the Web:

'Unilateral Disarmament'

President Bush has apparently capitulated on the "torture" issue, agreeing to accept, with only slight modifications, Sen. John McCain's amendment that would ban "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" of terrorists in U.S. custody. CNN quotes McCain: "I think that this will help us enormously in winning the war for the hearts and minds of people throughout the world in the war on terror."

This is fatuous. In September 1999 Norman Podhoretz wrote in The Wall Street Journal about an Israeli Supreme Court decision "to ban certain forms of interrogating suspected terrorists (like forceful shaking)":

It was only a matter of time before that court, being part of the same intellectual and political culture pervading the Israeli left as a whole (some have likened it to the Warren court), would enforce its point of view on the security services. . . . The Supreme Court's decision can be interpreted as a form of unilateral disarmament by Israel in the face of a still intransigent enemy.

More than six years later, one would be hard-pressed to produce evidence that the Israeli Supreme Court decision has helped the Jewish state win "hearts and minds." The Arab world still treats Israel as a pariah; Iran's ruler openly calls for its destruction; and the U.N. actively demonizes it, with at least the complicity of much of the free world. Inasmuch as Israel's position in international politics has improved, it is only because, since Sept. 11, the U.S. has become fully engaged in its own war against Islamist terrorists.

Podhoretz's phrase--"a form of unilateral disarmament . . . in the face of a still intransigent enemy"--is an apt description of the McCain amendment, which will certainly not prompt any reciprocal moves by terrorists to abjure tactics like beheading civilians or flying planes into buildings.

The McCain amendment, along with U.S. Supreme Court decisions in favor of terrorists' rights and the threatened Democratic filibuster of the Patriot Act's renewal, represents, in part, an overcompensation for the excesses of previous wars. In the past, the Supreme Court has upheld genuine outrages against civil liberties during wartime, such as restrictions on free speech during World War I (Schenck v. U.S.) and the internment of innocent Japanese-Americans during World War II (Korematsu v. U.S.)

But nothing remotely like these abuses has occurred during our current conflict. It seems that politicians and judges, like generals, have a tendency to fight the last war. One can only hope their efforts will not prove too damaging to American intelligence-gathering and terror-prevention efforts.

from the Washington Post, 2005-Nov-28, p.A21, by Michael O'Hanlon:

Our Dangerous, Growing Divide

In recent months a civil-military divide has emerged in the United States over the war in Iraq. Unlike much of the Iraq debate between Democrats and Republicans, it is over the present and the future rather than the past. Increasingly, civilians worry that the war is being lost, or at least not won. But the military appears as confident as ever of ultimate victory. This difference of opinion does not amount to a crisis in national resolve, and it will not radically affect our Iraq policy in the short term. But it is insidious and dangerous nonetheless. To the extent possible, the gap should be closed.

In fact, objective realities in Iraq suggest that the military is too optimistic -- but also that the public and the strategic community are becoming too fatalistic. Neither of these outlooks should be left unchecked. To the extent that military planners see Iraq through a rosy prism, they may not favor making policy changes when they should. And if we somehow lose in Iraq, the military may collectively blame the national media and the American body politic for a defeat that occurred on the streets of Iraq. On the other hand, if the public becomes too negative about the war, calls for a premature departure could grow louder and louder -- and have a real policy effect, if not through George Bush directly then through Congress.

The military's enthusiasm about the course of the war may be natural among those four-star officers in leadership positions, for it has largely become their war. Their careers have become so intertwined with the campaign in Iraq that truly independent analysis may be difficult. But it is striking that most lower-ranking officers seem to share the irrepressible optimism of their superiors. In talking with at least 50 officers this year, I have met no more than a handful expressing any real doubt about the basic course of the war.

Contrast that with the rest of the country. The polls are clear; the American public is deeply worried and increasingly pessimistic. The numbers are not (yet) abysmal; 30 to 40 percent still seem bullish on trends in Iraq. But even among those who strongly support the Bush administration, doubts are emerging. Among defense and Middle East analysts, my own informal survey suggests at least as negative an overall outlook, with decidedly more pessimism than optimism. Even among centrists who supported the war or saw the case for it, optimism is now hard to find. Many expect things to get worse, even much worse, in the coming months and years.

Members of both camps have plenty of evidence to support their view. But the risk is that each group is starting to selectively ignore information that does not fit with its increasingly firm conceptions about how things are going.

For example, military leaders (and many Bush administration officials) point to some good news on the economic front: growing gross domestic product, bustle on the streets, creation of small businesses, adequate availability of most household fuels, gradually improving national infrastructure for water and sewage, more children in school, more Internet usage, and lots more telephone service. They also note the gradual improvement in Iraqi security forces, with 30,000 or more now capable of largely independent operations. And they rightly observe the remarkable progress made in drafting the Iraqi constitution. A can-do military officer aware of such information, and also tactically succeeding day in and day out in finding and killing insurgents, is likely to see a trajectory toward victory.

But is that really what is happening? Growing GDP is good for those with access to the twin golden rivers flowing through Iraq -- not the Tigris and Euphrates, but oil revenue and foreign aid. The rest of the economy is, on the whole, weak. Unemployment remains in the 30 to 40 percent range, and the psychologically most critical type of infrastructure -- electricity -- has barely improved since Saddam Hussein fell. Iraqi security forces are getting better, but they are also losing more than 200 men a month to the insurgency. Civilian casualties in Iraq from the war are as high as ever; combine that with the region's highest crime rates, and Iraq has clearly become a much more violent society since Hussein fell. Tactically, the resistance appears to be outmaneuvering the best military in the world in its use of improvised explosive devices. And politically, every move forward toward greater Sunni Arab participation in the political process seems to be accompanied by at least one step back.

In the short term, of course, this civil-military divide matters only so much. The Bush administration has great political leeway in how it prosecutes the Iraq war. Officers in the field are not so stubborn as to resist smart changes in policy when the need becomes obvious. And on the other side of things, even those members of Congress and the public who think we are stuck in stalemate generally oppose radical alternatives to present policy.

But the dangers of a growing divide are real. In a year we will have a new Congress, and if the public has become fatalistic about Iraq by then, Congress may assert itself in demanding rapid moves toward complete withdrawal -- be they prudent or not. By contrast, if military officers see the good news more than the bad, they may feel increasingly cut off from the rest of the country. They may fail to understand why their recruiting efforts are not always appreciated by parents. They may be too reluctant to change tactics away from overly muscular combat operations that have accorded insufficient emphasis to protecting the Iraqi population. They may not feel enough urgency about advocating changes in policy that are needed there -- like much better protection for Iraqi security forces, which remain badly under-armored, and a jobs program to directly target the high unemployment rate.

Penetrating and respectful civil-military debates are difficult to conduct, especially in a time of war. But we need one now.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

from the Washington Post, 2005-Nov-27, p.A4, by Chris Cillizza and Peter Slevin:

Sympathetic Vibrations

Democrats fumed last week at Vice President Cheney's suggestion that criticism of the administration's war policies was itself becoming a hindrance to the war effort. But a new poll indicates most Americans are sympathetic to Cheney's point.

Seventy percent of people surveyed said that criticism of the war by Democratic senators hurts troop morale -- with 44 percent saying morale is hurt "a lot," according to a poll taken by RT Strategies. Even self-identified Democrats agree: 55 percent believe criticism hurts morale, while 21 percent say it helps morale.

The results surely will rankle many Democrats, who argue that it is patriotic and supportive of the troops to call attention to what they believe are deep flaws in President Bush's Iraq strategy. But the survey itself cannot be dismissed as a partisan attack. The RTs in RT Strategies are Thomas Riehle, a Democrat, and Lance Tarrance, a veteran GOP pollster.

Their poll also indicates many Americans are skeptical of Democratic complaints about the war. Just three of 10 adults accept that Democrats are leveling criticism because they believe this will help U.S. efforts in Iraq. A majority believes the motive is really to "gain a partisan political advantage."

This poll is one of the few pieces of supportive news the administration has had lately on Iraq. Most surveys have shown significant majorities believe it was a mistake to go to war, as well as rising sentiment that Bush misled Americans in making the case for it.

Even so, there is still support for Bush's policy going forward. A plurality, 49 percent, believe that troops should come home only when the Iraqi government can provide for its own security, while 16 percent support immediate withdrawal, regardless of the circumstances.

from OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Dec-7, by Donald Rumsfeld:

'Do Some Soul Searching'
Why aren't the media telling the whole story about Iraq?

(Editor's note: Mr. Rumsfeld delivered this speech Monday at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.)

I'm not one to put much faith in opinion polls. But the other day, I came across an interesting set of statistics that I want to mention. It seems that the Pew Research Center asked opinion leaders in the United States their views of the prospects for a stable democracy in Iraq.

Here were some of the results: 63% of people in the news media thought the enterprise would fail. So did 71% of people in the foreign affairs establishment and 71% in academic settings or think tanks. Interestingly, opinion leaders from the U.S. military are optimistic about Iraq by a margin of 64% to 32%. And so is the American public, by a margin of 56% to 37%.

And the Iraqi people are also optimistic. I've seen this demonstrated repeatedly--in public opinion polls, in the turnout for the elections, and that tips to authorities from ordinary Iraqis have grown from 483 to 4,700 tips in a month.

This prompts the question: Which view of Iraq is more accurate? The pessimistic view of so-called elites in our country--or the optimism expressed by millions of Iraqis and by the roughly 158,000 troops on the ground? But, most important is the question: why should Iraq's success or failure matter to the American people? I'd like to address these questions today.

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First, should we be optimistic or pessimistic about Iraq's future? The answer may depend on one's perspective. Indeed, one of the reasons that views of Iraq are so divergent is that we may be looking at Iraq through different prisms of experience and expectation.

For starters, it must be jarring for reporters who have never covered the Middle East to leave the United States and arrive in a country that is so different, where they consistently have to worry about their personal safety, then are rushed to the scene of car bombs and shootings, and have little opportunity to see the rest of the country.

By contrast, the Iraqi people see things somewhat differently: They can compare as it is Iraq today, to what it was three years ago--a brutal dictatorship where the secret police would murder or mutilate a family member sometimes in front of their children, and where hundreds of thousands disappeared into Saddam's mass graves. From that perspective, Iraq today is on a vastly different, and a greatly improved path.

If one is viewing events through a soda straw, one should know that one is by definition selectively focusing on facts that may highlight one's perceived view and not seeing other perspectives. A full picture of Iraq comes best from an understanding of both the good and the bad, and the context for each.

Among the continuing difficulties are:

• Bursts of violence, including continued assassinations and attempts to intimidate Iraqi leaders and those supporting the legitimate Iraqi government.
• Continuing U.S. and Iraqi casualties.
• Iran and Syria continue to be notably unhelpful.

However, there are also a number of positive developments to be seen, if one looks for them:

• The political process is on schedule. Iraqis have a Constitution they wrote and voted for, and hundreds of candidates are politicking for the elections.
• There seem to be growing divisions among the enemies of the Iraqi people, particularly after the bombing of a wedding reception in Amman, Jordan.
• More of Iraq's neighbors now seem to believe this new democracy might succeed and are moving to get right with the Iraqi people by being more active in their support.
• A vital and engaged media is emerging, with some 100 newspapers, 72 radio stations, and 44 television stations.
• Sunnis are increasingly taking part in the political process, further isolating those who still oppose the legitimate Iraqi government.

To be responsible, one needs to stop defining success in Iraq as the absence of terrorist attacks. As Sen. Joe Lieberman recently suggested, a better measure of success might be that a vast majority of Iraqis--tens of millions--are on the side of the democratic government, while a comparatively small number are opposed. This gives the Iraqi people an enormous advantage over time.

---

The other question I posed is of critical importance: why does Iraq's success or failure matter to the American people?

Consider this quote: "What you have seen, Americans, in New York and Washington, D.C., and the losses you are having in Afghanistan and Iraq, in spite of all the media blackout, are only the losses of the initial clashes."

The speaker is Ayman al-Zawahiri, a senior member of the terrorist group al Qaeda and a top leader in the effort to defeat U.S. and coalition forces around the world. The terrorists' method of attack, simply put, is slaughter. They behead. They bomb children. They attack funerals and wedding receptions.

This is the kind of brutality and mayhem the terrorists are working to bring to our shores. And if we do not succeed in our efforts to arm and train Iraqis to help defeat these terrorists in Iraq, this is the kind of mayhem that a terrorist, emboldened by a victory, will bring to our cities again--let there be no doubt.

Indeed, the most important reason for our involvement in Iraq--despite the cost--is often overlooked. It is not only about building democracy, though democracies tend to be peaceful and prosperous and are in and of themselves good things. It is not about reopening Iraqi schools and hospitals or rebuilding infrastructure, though they are proceeding apace and are desirable and essential to ensure stability.

But, simply put, defeating extremist aspirations in Iraq is essential to protect the lives of Americans here at home.

Imagine the world our children would face if we allowed Zawahiri, Zarqawi, bin Laden and others of their ilk to seize power or operate with impunity out of Iraq. They would turn Iraq into what Afghanistan was before 9/11--a haven for terrorist recruitment and training and a launching pad for attacks against U.S. interests and our fellow citizens. Iraq would serve as the base of a new Islamic caliphate to extend throughout the Middle East and to threaten legitimate governments throughout the world . This is their plan. They have said so. We should listen and learn.

Quitting is not a strategy. Quitting is an invitation to more attacks and more terrorist violence here at home. This is not just an hypothesis. The U.S. withdrawal from Somalia emboldened Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. We know this. He has said so.

The message retreat in Iraq would send to the free people of Iraq and to moderate Muslim reformers throughout the region would be that they can't count on America. The message it would send to our enemies would be: that if America will not defend itself against terrorists in Iraq, it will not defend itself against terrorists anywhere.

What is needed is resolve, not retreat; courage, not concession. Rather than thinking in terms of an exit strategy, we should be focused on a strategy for success. The president's strategy focuses on progress on the political, economic, and security tracks. You can read that strategy paper on the White House's Web site.

On the security side, some 214,000 Iraqi security forces have been trained and equipped. Working with coalition forces, they are steadily improving in experience and capability:

• Coalition forces have handed over military bases to Iraqi control and a complex of palaces in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit.
• Iraqi forces are improving their control of the Western borders of Iraq, with coalition support.

• The Shiite areas of Najaf, Karbala and Sadr City, the scenes of battles last year, are considerably more peaceful.
• In Tal Afar, 5,000 Iraqi troops took a key role in liberating and securing what had been a base of operations for extremists' networks and foreign networks.

---

I began these remarks by mentioning the jarring contrast between what the American people are reading and hearing about Iraq and the views of the Iraqi people. I don't think we can close a discussion on Iraq without mentioning the media coverage and the current political debate.

Recently, a member of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association recounted intense discussions within the AP over whether or not their coverage of Iraq has been slanted. For my part, almost every time I meet with troops, I am asked the same question. They ask, why are the American people being given a pessimistic, inaccurate picture of what is happening in Iraq?

But let me say something in defense of the media. They have a tough job. Many reporters in Afghanistan and Iraq have done excellent reporting, and some have lost their lives.

And consider what would result if the federal government had to put out a daily newspaper or a daily television program. You can probably imagine what the bureaucrats would come up with: conflicting rules and regulations, an army of lawyers to sort through all the conflicts, a multitude of auditors to check up on everyone, a mammoth bill to the taxpayers, followed by congressional investigations of why they missed their daily deadline.

The media serves a valuable--indeed an indispensable--role in informing our society and holding government to account. But I would submit it is also important for the media to hold itself to account.

We have arrived at a strange time in this country when the worst about America and our military seems to be so quickly taken as truth by the press and reported and spread around the world--with little or no context or scrutiny--let alone correction or accountability--even after the fact. Speed, it appears, is often the first goal--not accuracy, not context.

Recently there were claims by two Iraqis on a speaking tour that U.S. soldiers threw them in a cage with lions. Their charges were widely reported--still without substantiation. Not too long ago, there was a false and damaging story about a Koran supposedly flushed down a toilet, and in the riots that followed people were killed. And a recent New York Times editorial implied America's armed forces--your armed forces--use tactics reminiscent of Saddam Hussein.

I understand that there may be great pressure on them to tell a dramatic story. And while it is easy to use a bombing or a terrorist attack to support a belief that Iraq is a failure, that is not the accurate picture. And further, it is not good journalism.

Consider this: You couldn't tell the full story of Iwo Jima simply by listing the nearly 26,000 American casualties over about 40 days; or explain the importance of Grant's push to Virginia just by noting the savagery of the battles. So too, in Iraq, it is appropriate to note not only how many Americans have been killed--and may God bless them and their families--but what they died for--or more accurately, what they lived for.

So I suggest to editors and reporters--whose good intentions I take for granted--to do some soul searching. To ask: how will history judge--if it does--the reporting decades from now when Iraq's path is settled?

I would urge us all to make every effort to ensure we are telling the whole story. To take a moment for self-reflection and reassessment.

Further it is worth noting that there are 158,000 Americans in uniform who are sending e-mails back to friends and families, telling them the truth as they see it. And much of it is different than what those in the United States are seeing and reading about every day.

---

Our country is waging a battle unlike any other in history. We are waging it in a media age unlike any that war fighters have ever known. In this new century, we all need to make adjustments--in government and in the media. And change is hard.

But to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, we are all Republicans. We are all Democrats. We are all Americans. We are all in this together. And what we do today will not only impact us, but our children and our grandchildren, and the kind of world they will live in.

Mr. Rumsfeld is secretary of defense.

from NewsMax, 2005-Nov-21, by Carl Limbacher et al.:

Rep. John Murtha Urged Somalia Pullout in '93

After terrorists attacked U.S. troops in Mogadishu, Somalia 12 years ago, anti-Iraq war Democrat, Rep. John Murtha urged then-President Clinton to begin a complete pullout of U.S. troops from the region.

Clinton took the advice and ordered the withdrawal - a decision that Osama bin Laden would later credit with emboldening his terrorist fighters and encouraging him to mount further attacks against the U.S.

"Our welcome has been worn out," Rep Murtha told NBC's "Today" show in Sept. 1993, a month after 4 U.S. Military Police had been killed in Somalia by a remote-detonated land mine.

The Pennsylvania Democrat announced that President Clinton had been "listening to our suggestions. And I think you'll see him move those troops out very quickly."

Two weeks later, after 18 U.S. Rangers were killed in the battle of Mogadishu, Murtha visited U.S. forces in Somalia.

Upon his return he proclaimed to the world that the Mogadishu defeat had a devastating impact on the Rangers' morale.

"They're subdued compared to normal morale of elite forces," Murtha said. "Obviously, it was a very difficult battle. A lot of Somalis were killed, but it was a brutal battle."

Murtha said the U.S. had to no choice but to pull out now, explaining, "There's no military solution. Some of them will tell you [that] to get [warlord Mohamed Farrah] Aidid is the solution. I don't agree with that."

The comments were eerily similar to Murtha's assessment of U.S involvement in Iraq last week, when he declared, "the U.S. cannot accomplish anything further militarily. It is time to bring [the troops] home."

Taking Murtha's advice back then, however, turned out to have deadly consequences for U.S. security.

In a 1998 interview with ABC's John Miller, Osama bin Laden said that America's withdrawal from Somalia had emboldened his burgeoning al Qaida force and encouraged him to plan new attacks.

"Our people realize[d] more than before that the American soldier is a paper tiger that run[s] in defeat after a few blows," the terror chief recalled. "America forgot all about the hoopla and media propaganda and left dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat."

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Nov-12:

A 'Tortured' Debate
A ban on aggressive interrogation would amount to unilateral disarmament in the war on terror.

If Osama bin Laden is alive and looking for signs of flagging U.S. will to fight the war on terror, he need look no further than our national debate about interrogating his compatriots and others who would do us harm.

Post-9/11, after all, it is hardly far-fetched to imagine a scenario in which our ability to extract information from a terrorist is the only thing that might prevent a bioterror attack or even the nuclear annihilation of an American city. And we know for a fact that information wrung from 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others has helped prevent further attacks on U.S. soil.

Yet according to many Bush Administration critics, the aggressive and stressful questioning techniques used successfully against the likes of KSM put the U.S. on a slippery slope to widespread "torture" and the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib. John McCain (R., Arizona) has pushed an amendment through the Senate that would effectively bar all stressful interrogation techniques. The danger for American security is that this would telegraph to every terrorist in the world that he has absolutely nothing to fear from silence should he fall into U.S. hands.

---

The McCain Amendment is driven by the so-called torture narrative: the proposition that CIA techniques for questioning high-level al Qaeda detainees somehow "migrated" to Iraq and caused the Abu Ghraib abuses. But the irony is that Congress is proposing this remedial overreaction at the very moment the evidence has become overwhelming that the torture narrative is false.

Former Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger headed one of more than a dozen major inquiries into detainee abuse, and he explained last year that the Abu Ghraib abuses were simply sadistic behavior by poorly trained reservists on the "night shift." The victims weren't even intelligence targets. If that evidence wasn't conclusive enough, we now have the verdicts of the nine courts-martial that punished the Abu Ghraib offenders, none of which found evidence to support the proposition that the abuses had anything to do with interrogations.

We aren't saying that there haven't been abuses--probably hundreds of them--of detainees in the war on terror. But there have also been more than 70,000 detainees. In other words, the rate of prisoner abuse compares favorably with the U.S. civilian detention system, and it is better than the rate in earlier conflicts such as Vietnam and even World War II. Alleged abuses have been routinely investigated, and punished when warranted in courts-martial that have revealed a military willing and able to police its own.

Unfortunately, the Bush Administration has done a perfectly awful job of defending its policy with such facts. And its reaction to the McCain Amendment has been to propose an unsatisfactory compromise whereby the CIA would be exempted from prohibitions on aggressive interrogation while many Defense Department methods would be barred. But U.S. tactics should be morally defensible based on who the detainee is, not which department is doing the interrogating.

In Iraq at this very moment the military is dealing with a hardened al Qaeda wing headed by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, whose un-uniformed fighters are not entitled to Geneva Convention protections against aggressive interrogation. Neither the McCain Amendment nor the Administration's reaction to it send a message of resolve to win that intelligence war.

Two persistent sources of confusion in this debate have been misreadings of the Geneva Conventions and sloppy (or willfully distorted) use of the word "torture." The Geneva Conventions are very strict about which detainees qualify for the protections of "prisoner of war" status: They must, for example, have fought in uniform and shown some respect for the laws of war, such as avoiding attacks on civilians.

What's more, any form of manipulation, including positive reinforcements such as better rations, are forbidden when it comes to interrogating legitimate POWs. Recognizing guerrillas and terrorists as POWs would be a form of unilateral disarmament, and, worse, would legitimize their behavior. The U.S. was respecting, not skirting, international law when it refused to classify them as such.

As for "torture," it is simply perverse to conflate the amputations and electrocutions Saddam once inflicted at Abu Ghraib with the lesser abuses committed by rogue American soldiers there, much less with any authorized U.S. interrogation techniques. No one has yet come up with any evidence that anyone in the U.S. military or government has officially sanctioned anything close to "torture." The "stress positions" that have been allowed (such as wearing a hood, exposure to heat and cold, and the rarely authorized "waterboarding," which induces a feeling of suffocation) are all psychological techniques designed to break a detainee.

---

Democratic Senators Ted Kennedy and Richard Durbin have gotten a lot of media mileage posturing over alleged "torture." But they should be asked unequivocally whether they'd rule out techniques such as "waterboarding" if there was good reason to believe it might prevent a mass-casualty attack.

That such "torture" demagoguery can be successfully challenged was demonstrated earlier this year, when Amnesty International was forced to back down from its odious comparison of U.S. detention facilities to the Soviet gulag. We wish the Administration directly challenged its Congressional critics. The American people are wise enough to understand that we can't win the war on terror without good intelligence, and that there won't be good intelligence without aggressive interrogations.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Sep-8, by Peter R. Kann:

A Bad Analogy
The war in Iraq is not another "Vietnam."

While it is far from clear that antiwar sentiment actually has been spreading this summer (after all, 60% of Americans indicated continuing support in a recent AP poll), there's little doubt that antiwar rhetoric is on the rise.

Predictably, the most convenient comparison the doubters and doomsayers on Iraq can find is the Vietnam War that ended over 30 years ago. We see that word--Vietnam--sprouting on the signs carried by still-small clusters of antiwar protestors, as in "No More Vietnams." We hear it cited in superficial analogies by liberal pundits. More depressingly, we hear it mouthed, however incongruously, by would-be leaders like Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, who recently made televised comments about America being "bogged down" like we were in Vietnam.

It is inevitable that every war leads to historical comparisons. Much as some of us would prefer to see the current Iraq war through the lens of our own Revolutionary War and the framing of our Constitution that followed it, it cannot be surprising that the antiwar--or perhaps just anti-Bush--Left chooses to latch on to a more recent and more painful comparison. What is surprising, however, is how poorly considered that comparison is. There are innumerable differences between the Iraq and Vietnam experiences. But there also are valid similarities--they just aren't the ones the critics cite.

The differences include the fact that America pursued the struggle in Vietnam for more than a decade against a regular North Vietnamese army backed by the Soviet Union and China, and lost more than 58,000 American soldiers, many of them draftees, before we decided to toss in the towel. By comparison, America, now the world's sole superpower, has been fighting a collection of terrorists in Iraq for less than two years and has lost fewer than 2,000 troops--and these from a fully professional and volunteer military. Nevertheless, significant elements of our elite are already beginning to sound retreat, even as Iraq takes serious steps toward democracy. Such differences, one might argue, are a sad commentary on the softening sinews of our society.

---

That said, it is more illuminating and relevant to look at some of the genuine similarities.

First, during the wars in both Vietnam and Iraq, the American people have retained their common sense and consequent sense of commitment far longer than the elites who claimed to lead or represent them. During Vietnam, the elites, from the college campuses to the media to the halls of Congress, tired of fighting well before the larger American public which, even by the early '70s, continued to show significant support for the war effort and rejected the cut-and-run calls of the McGovernites. But eventually, the persistent pessimism of the elites took its toll on the public.

Today, as antiwar activists wave their placards, as media coverage from Iraq focuses almost entirely on the several American soldiers killed each day, and as politicians begin distancing themselves from a war for which they voted, there are clear signs of a similar but compressed syndrome.

Second, in the case of Vietnam, the war was lost less on the battlefield than on the home front. North Vietnamese leaders themselves have frequently credited "the peace movement of the heroic American people" as important to the communist victory. Few military authorities would any longer dispute that the vaunted Tet Offensive of 1968 was a significant military defeat for the North Vietnamese, or that well into the early '70s the military balance on the ground had shifted in favor of the Americans and South Vietnamese.

Covering the Tet Offensive, I, too, was stunned into initially seeing it as a communist triumph. Traveling the Vietnamese countryside in the years that followed, I came to see the military progress we were making. But even as the balance of power on the ground shifted in one direction, the balance of politics at home was shifting in the other.

And so, by the early '70s, with antiwar protests mounting in the streets and antiwar sentiment seething in Washington, we accelerated our military withdrawals, Congress cut off military aid to a South Vietnamese government we had committed to support, and the U.S. was left to negotiate a fig-leaf surrender. We then stood by to watch the 1975 collapse of South Vietnam under a massive North Vietnamese assault. One need not argue that Vietnam was ever a fully winnable war to suggest that political rather than military realities led most directly to that grim outcome. And, as today's senators complain about casualties, begin to seek certain dates for troops withdrawals, and argue that the price of persistence is too high, the similarities to the Vietnam era are all too recognizable.

Third, the clearest lesson of all from Vietnam is that commitments cannot be abdicated without consequence. The costs of our eventual failure of will in Indochina included several million South Vietnamese--who had trusted us--suffering in brutal re-education camps or risking, and often losing, their lives as boat people on the South China Sea. The consequences in Cambodia were even more terrible, as several million Cambodians were beaten, starved or worked to death and then buried in the mass graves of Pol Pot's killing fields. What fate might await the Iraqis if we withdraw is anyone's guess. But that fate surely will not be the "peace and reconciliation" once promised by the victors in Indochina.

Then, too, there is a larger and still more controversial set of consequences--and a fourth potential similarity. The war in Vietnam was not simply about Vietnam but also about the future of Asia, just as the war in Iraq is not simply about that country's future. It is also about the future of the larger Middle East.

With 30 years of hindsight, it seems unarguable that Asia in the wake of the Vietnam War turned out very well, above all for Asians, but also for the U.S. The dominos we once worried would collapse not only held, but have since held out the promise of free people and free markets to the rest of the Third World. From Korea and Taiwan down through the whole arc of Southeast Asia, the political and economic systems we advocated have triumphed. This transformation did not take place despite the Vietnam War but because of it. It happened precisely because America, for all the pain of those war years, had the patience and persistence to buy the time the rest of Asia needed to change. In that sense, while we lost the battle for Vietnam, we won the wider war for the future of Asia.

---

Today, you do not have to be a Bush partisan to understand that the current war is about more than Iraq itself. It is also, and indeed above all, about the future of the Middle East, about the kind of change we recently have seen glimmers of in Lebanon and Libya and possibly even Palestine, the kind of change we hope to see more of in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and eventually in Syria and Iran. Whatever the hopes for larger transformative events across the region, they clearly depend on America. At the very least, we need to buy time. Alternatively, to lose heart and retreat--after less than two years and with fewer than 2,000 casualties--almost surely means losing not just the battle but also the war, a far worse outcome than those who cite Vietnam similarities can seem to comprehend.

Mr. Kann, chairman of Dow Jones, covered the Vietnam War for The Wall Street Journal.

from Government Security News, 2005-Aug, by Jacob Goodwin:

Did DoD lawyers blow the chance to nab Atta?

In September 2000, one year before the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11, a U.S. Army military intelligence program, known as “Able Danger,” identified a terrorist cell based in Brooklyn, NY, one of whose members was 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta, and recommended to their military superiors that the FBI be called in to “take out that cell,” according to Rep. Curt Weldon, a longtime Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who is currently vice chairman of both the House Homeland Security and House Armed Services Committees.

The recommendation to bring down that New York City cell -- in which two other Al Qaeda terrorists were also active -- was not pursued during the weeks leading up to the 2000 presidential election, said Weldon. That’s because Mohammed Atta possessed a “green card” at the time and Defense Department lawyers did not want to recommend that the FBI go after someone holding a green card, Weldon told his House colleagues last June 27 during a little-noticed speech, known as a “special order,” which he delivered on the House floor.

Details of the origins and efforts of Able Danger were corroborated in a telephone interview by GSN with a former defense intelligence officer who said he worked closely with that program. That intelligence officer, who spoke to GSN while sitting in Rep. Weldon’s Capitol Hill office, requested anonymity for fear that his current efforts to help re-start a similar intelligence-gathering operation might be hampered if his identity becomes known.

The intelligence officer recalled carrying documents to the offices of Able Danger, which was being run by the Special Operations Command, headquartered in Tampa, FL. The documents included a photo of Mohammed Atta supplied by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and described Atta’s relationship with Osama bin Laden. The officer was very disappointed when lawyers working for Special Ops decided that anyone holding a green card had to be granted essentially the same legal protections as any U.S. citizen. Thus, the information Able Danger had amassed about the only terrorist cell they had located inside the United States could not be shared with the FBI, the lawyers concluded.

“We were directed to take those 3M yellow stickers and place them over the faces of Atta and the other terrorists and pretend they didn’t exist,” the intelligence officer told GSN.

DoD lawyers may also have been reluctant to suggest a bold action by FBI agents after the bureau’s disastrous 1993 strike against the Branch Davidian religious cult in Waco, TX, said Weldon and the intelligence officer.

“So now, Mr. Speaker,” Weldon said on the House floor last June, “for the first time I can tell our colleagues that one of our agencies not only identified the New York cell of Mohammed Atta and two of the terrorists, but actually made a recommendation to bring the FBI in to take out that cell.”

Weldon has developed a reputation for making bold pronouncements and, occasionally, ruffling the feathers of some of his colleagues. His recent non-fiction book, “Countdown to Terror,” which draws on information from an Iranian expatriate source Weldon has dubbed “Ali,” has drawn criticism from the CIA, others in the intelligence community and some congressional colleagues.

A longtime champion of firefighters and first responders, Weldon has a particular interest in this subject because he has been openly and actively pushing since 1999 for the establishment of an integrated government-wide center that could consolidate, analyze and act upon intelligence gathered by dozens of U.S. agencies, armed services and departments.

Weldon’s proposal was based on the innovative intelligence gathering capabilities he had witnessed at the U.S. Army’s Information Dominance Center, based at Fort Belvoir, VA, (which was formerly known as the Land Information Warfare Assessment Center.) This Army center had employed data mining, profiling and data collaboration techniques before several other intelligence agencies, and was using such cutting edge software tools as Starlight (developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) and Spires.

For years, the CIA resisted the congressman’s recommendation, Weldon told GSN in a telephone interview on August 1, claiming that his plan to integrate dozens of discrete and classified intelligence streams was both unworkable and unnecessary. Weldon had dubbed his proposed organization the National Operations and Analysis Hub, nicknamed NOAH, because the center was intended “to protect our nation from the flood of threats,” he explained.

Sixteen months after 9/11, such a “data fusion center,” named the Terrorism Threat Integration Center (TTIC) was indeed established by the Bush Administration.

At the urging of the 9/11 Commission, the TTIC has since been restructured and renamed the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC).

Weldon is pleased that steps have been taken to unify the nation’s intelligence gathering and analysis capabilities, now headed by a newly established Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Negroponte, but Weldon remains concerned that the “stovepipe” mentalities that plagued the intelligence community in the past continue to inhibit true information sharing between intelligence agencies.

He is also extremely frustrated by the fact that so little official attention seems to have been paid to the intelligence failure related to the Mohammed Atta cell in Brooklyn. Weldon contends that few in the Bush Administration seem interested in investigating that missed opportunity.

“If we had had that [military intelligence] system in 1999 and 2000, which the military had already developed as a prototype, and if we had followed the lead of the military entity that identified the Al Qaeda cell of Mohammed Atta, then perhaps, Mr. Speaker, 9/11 would never have occurred,” Weldon said during his special order remarks.

According to Weldon, staff members of the 9/11 Commission were briefed on the capabilities of the Able Danger intelligence unit within the Special Operations Command, which had been set up by General Pete Schoomaker, who headed Special Ops at the time, on the orders of General Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Staffers at the 9/11 Commission staffers were also told about the specific recommendation to break up the Mohammed Atta cell. However, those commission staff members apparently did not choose to brief the commission’s members on these sensitive matters.

Weldon said he was told specifically by commission members, Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana; and John Lehman, a former secretary of the Navy; that they had never been briefed on the Able Danger unit within Special Ops or on the unit’s evidence of a terrorist cell in Brooklyn.

“I personally talked with [Philip] Zelikow [executive director of the 9/11 Commission] about this,” recalled the intelligence officer. “For whatever bizarre reasons, he didn’t pass on the information.”

The State Department, where Zelikow now works as a counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said he was traveling and unavailable for comment.

“Why did the 9/11 Commission not investigate this entire situation?” asked Weldon on June 27. “Why did the 9/11 Commission not ask the question about the military’s recommendation against the Mohammed Atta cell?”

Weldon is also disappointed with himself for not pushing harder against the intelligence bureaucracy that he saw as resisting his proposal to set up a more integrated intelligence-gathering operation. But he saves some of his greatest ire for the lawyers within the Department of Defense -- he is not sure if they were working within the Special Operations Command or higher up the organizational chart, within the Office of the Secretary of Defense -- for their unwillingness to allow Able Danger to send to the FBI its evidence and its recommendation for immediate action.

“Obviously, if we had taken out that cell, 9/11 would not have occurred and, certainly, taking out those three principal players in that cell would have severely crippled, if not totally stopped, the operation that killed 3,000 people in America,” said Weldon.

Shining a spotlight on this intelligence gaffe has not been easy. Russ Caso, Weldon’s chief of staff, explained to GSN the steps his boss has taken to shed light on the situation.

Weldon spoke with Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, about conversations he has had with several members of the Able Danger intelligence unit. Weldon has urged Hoekstra to investigate the reasons why Able Danger’s revelations were not shared with the FBI. Hoekstra looked into the matter at the Pentagon, but after several days of fruitless inquiries, was unable to find anyone at the Defense Department who seemed to know anything about Able Danger or would acknowledge the intelligence unit had ever existed, explained Caso in a telephone interview with GSN.

Unwilling to let the matter drop, Weldon arranged for a face-to-face meeting in late July between Hoekstra, himself and the former intelligence officer who had worked with Able Danger, and who outlined his former unit’s evidence and recommendations for Hoekstra.

“Congressman Weldon has met with several people who were working on Able Danger to identify where Al Qaeda was set up around the world,” said Caso. “They made the suggestion that this information be passed to the FBI, and lawyers within the Defense Department -- whether within Special Ops or within OSD, we don’t know -- and the lawyers said, ‘No’.”

A report about some of these events appeared last June 19 in The Times Herald newspaper, of Norristown, PA, which is located in the Philadelphia suburbs that Rep. Weldon represents in Congress.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Nov-8, by Brendan Miniter:

'Welcome to the Suck'
Disillusioned warriors bomb at the box office. Will they play better at the ballot box?

With Iraqi mortar shells exploding around him, the main character in the new film "Jarhead" is ordered to leave his foxhole, run down a sandy berm, and retrieve a fresh battery for a radio. "Anthony Swofford" (Jake Gyllenhaal) manages to make it down and back alive, only to find that he has grabbed a dead battery. Another Marine realizes what happened and says "Welcome to the suck."

It's hard to think of a better way to sum up the antiwar films that have been exploding out of Hollywood for decades now. "Jarhead" is yet another movie about the depravity and uselessness of war. It's based on a memoir by the real-life Anthony Swofford about his experience in the Marines during the first Gulf War. But producer Sam Mendes could have just as easily have been inspired by Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" or even Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 "Apocalypse Now"--which makes a brief appearance in "Jarhead" as a film shown to the Marines in preparation for going off to war.

---

It may surprise a few Hollywood execs that this isn't an easy sell in a post 9/11 America. In the Brooklyn, N.Y., theater where I saw "Jarhead," viewers were streaming out of the theater even before the film was over. What the viewers were hoping for was a rousing film portraying U.S. forces as the good guys sacrificing for a worthwhile mission, or at least, a sense of joy in the victory. But it never came. So on her way out, one woman protested for all to hear: "They sold us [the movie] with prompted-up music, but then they gave us this."

What "this" turned out to be was a succession of deflating experiences leading up to the conclusion that war is a waste of time and it destroys all those who engage in it. Swofford turns out to be a cynic who had no opportunities outside of joining the Marines and who is dismayed because his service has left him unable to settle back into society. In Saudi Arabia, he and his fellow Marines find the tedium of waiting for war unbearable. But then liberating Kuwait turns out to be anticlimactic. Swofford never gets to fire his weapon in battle, though he does confront another Marine who is dragging around the charred remains of an Iraqi killed in an air raid. One Marine complains by asking who sold Iraq its weapons. (The U.S., of course.) After the war is won someone remarks that U.S. soldiers will never have to be back in Iraq again.

And this for a war many on the left held up last year as a model of legitimate, multilateral military action with the clear moral aim of expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. A war that might even, if you will, have passed the "global test." Welcome to the suck, indeed.

---

What Hollywood is tossing up on the silver screen is a political strategy the left hopes to employ: using disillusioned warriors to discredit the war. That's a role Janis Karpinski is happy to play with her new book, "One Woman's Army." She's the former brigadier general who was in charge of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq when a handful of guards abused prisoners in 2003--abuse captured on camera and later shown to the world. She had little to do with the actual abuse and was demoted for not spotting it earlier. Seven soldiers have been convicted in courts-martial and sent off to prison, and Ms. Karpinski is getting her revenge by claiming she was a scapegoat and that the real perpetrators were contract employees under orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Another disillusioned warrior is Paul Hackett, a former Marine and a veteran of the Iraq war who ran a spirited campaign earlier in a special election for an Ohio House seat. He played up his Iraq war opposition for the national press, but back home stressed his status as a veteran and aired commercials implying that he supported President Bush. He won lots of ink but narrowly lost to Republican Jean Schmidt. Now he has set his sights higher, hoping to unseat Sen. Mike DeWine. How far he makes it this time will likely depend more on voter fatigue with a scandal ridden state Republican Party than with his own disillusionment over the liberation of Iraq.

Finally there is Coleen Rowley, who gained national fame as an FBI whistleblower after the 9/11 attacks. She's running for Congress in Minnesota against Rep. John Kline, a former Marine. She's popular with the antiwar left for rattling off fiery lines: "This is a lied-into war that is a quagmire now. It could be worse than Vietnam. The truth is we can't win, and there is ongoing deception." But she isn't popular enough for the check-writing left. She's failing to raise the money Democrats hoped--bringing in just $80,000 last quarter, about a third of what Mr. Kline raised in the same period--and isn't likely to become the face of a successful Democratic insurgency. Maybe she ought to be in pictures.

from the Christian Science Monitor, 2005-Aug-26 (web published 2005-Aug-25), by Mark Sappenfield and Sara Miller:

Base closings could signal disconnect from society for the military

New England's experience may be a barometer for the nation as the military contracts into fewer, larger installations.

WASHINGTON AND BRUNSWICK, MAINE -- Almost as far back as Don Russell can recall, planes from the nearby naval air station have roared overhead, an audible assurance of security, especially since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Now that this Maine base has been designated for closure, however, "this is going to leave a tremendous hole," Mr. Russell says wistfully.

Only a few days ago, it seemed all New England might share the Brunswick station's fate. Wednesday's decisions by the Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) to keep open a shipyard in southern Maine and a submarine base in Connecticut seemed to forestall that fate.

But New England's experience is in many ways a barometer for the nation, as the military contracts into fewer and larger installations, analysts suggest. The concern is not so much one of security, but of society.

Some wonder whether the military, by leaving so many places where it has long been a part of the community, is becoming too remote from the very people it is charged to protect, This changes the calculus on everything from defense budgets to recruiting and retention.

"As the military goes for fewer bases, there is an increasing disconnect between the military and the community," says Jeremiah Gertler of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Those trends have begun to take shape in the Northeast, where a once-strong military presence has slowly ebbed - and recruiting lags behind every other region of the country. The further erosion of the military industrial complex in the Northeast could accelerate the trend, leaving the region with little stake in the military, either culturally or politically.

"Down the road, in a period when we're not in great danger, it might be hard to muster congressional majorities for defense budgets," Dr. Thompson says. "The irony is that the military's effort to make [BRAC] decisions based on merit might be undercutting its long-term political base."

In Brunswick, for example, quite aside from the reassuring roar of planes overhead, far deeper connections include the local pride in a base that trained pilots for World War II and has since has become the state's second-largest employer.

The station was a "thread in the fabric [of the community] for years and years," Russell says.

Yet there are valid reasons why the Pentagon would wish to flee the Northeast and consolidate its bases elsewhere, despite a tendency to read political motives into the Pentagon's actions, analysts say.

After all, with fewer bases, there are fewer installations to protect, and in moving south, the Pentagon is following the model laid out by private business - moving to where costs are lower and land is more plentiful.

In voting to overrule the Pentagon and keep open the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and Submarine Base New London, the BRAC Commission simply decided quality was more important than cost savings; the commission chairman suggested that both the shipyard and sub base were the premier facilities of their kind in the country. The commission will send its final list to the president Sept. 8, and he will then decide whether to forward it to Congress for an up-or-down vote.

But these decisions resonate beyond skill sets and dollars and cents. To residents in places like Brunswick, there is a sense of being left bare.

"Every time the planes fly over our house, I feel safe," says Betty Sanford, sitting on the patio of a Friendly's restaurant near the base. "This will leave me without that good feeling."

The BRAC Commission rejected such safety concerns, saying that the Pentagon could use other airfields in the area if necessary. Likewise, experts suggest that Brunswick - and even the Portsmouth shipyard and Submarine Base New London - have limited strategic value, since the military is still shrinking after decades of cold-war growth, leaving the Pentagon with too many facilities.

"This is not just an industrial phenomenon, it's a recruiting and retention phenomenon," says Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.

And BRAC Commission chairman Anthony Principi told reporters as much after a hearing last month.

"It's important for our nation that our military and our society be close together," Mr. Principi said. "That's important for democracy. And it's important for recruiting. It's important for retention. It's important for building support for our engagements overseas."

Already, America is already becoming less connected to its armed forces. Today, 11 percent of American adults have had military experience - down from 20 percent in 1970. Today, 1 in 114 Americans is in the military; at the end of World War II, it was 1 in 12. In 2002, Rep. John McHugh (R) of New York told Congress: "Since far fewer people are recruited to serve in a voluntary military, the connection between America and its military is increasingly tenuous and less personal."

With the Pentagon now set to close scores of National Guard armories and other small installations across the country, the Northeast in particular will offer a glimpse into how the departure of the military might reshape a community. Says Thompson: "As time unfolds, we will see what it means to have very little stake in the military."

from TownHall.com, 2005-Jun-13, by Diana West:

What's being desecrated here?

Thank you, Michael Isikoff. Because of Newsweek's commode Quran story -- the one that went down the drain in a retraction -- a previously undisclosed threat to our very existence has been revealed. It may be too late to avert, but before admitting defeat, I just wish every American would take a good long moment to reflect, not on the hysterical headlines trumpeting "Quran abuse," but rather on the U.S. Army's Quranic Code of Conduct in place at Guantanamo Bay.

The orders aren't called that, of course, but that's as apt a title as any for the relevant sections of the officially titled "Detention Operations Group Standard Operating Procedures" that go for Gitmo. And, it bears repeating, every American should take a good long moment to reflect on what they mean.

Since all of Guantanamo's inmates happen to be members of the same famed band of Muslim extremists, the Army has seen fit to distribute Qurans. So far, so good, I guess. But the Army doesn't just distribute its Qurans like any other religious book. That is, the Bible may get passed around, riffled through, dropped, tossed and stuffed into hotel room drawers. But not the Quran. According to United States Army policy, the standard operating procedure is: "Handle the Quran as if it were a fragile piece of delicate art."

What's going on here? By official order, a whole lot of "respecting the dignity of the Quran." According to Section 6-5-c(3), should a Quran need to be removed from a detainee's cell -- you know, carried somewhere -- and the detainee is personally unable to move it (best option), and the Muslim chaplain, librarian and interpreter are also unable to move it (second-best option), then the U.S. Army guard, as a very last resort, may take action.

Then the insanity really begins. The guard is directed to don "clean gloves ... in full view of the detainees prior to handling." He must use "two hands ... at all times when handling the Quran in manner signaling respect and reverence." Why "respect" alone isn't abundantly sufficient isn't mentioned. While signaling two-handed respect and reverence, however, the guard must be mindful that "care should be used so that the right hand is the primary one used to manipulate any part of the Quran due to the cultural association with the left hand." It goes on. There's more "reverent manner," more instructions for conveying the book inside a "clean, dry detainee towel." The cockeyed picture is clear. But it doesn't explain what's going on.

At first glance, this scene may seem to exemplify a bizarre excess of good manners, an absurdly obsequious respect for a largely foreign faith. Since when does the United States specifically direct its soldiers to show two-handed "reverence" in the handling of any religious book? But it seems to me that there's more behind this charade. The "clean gloves" and "detainee" towels are the tip-off. The fact is, under Islamic law, non-Muslims are deemed unfit to touch the Quran. That much is generally known. What is not usually considered is the reason: According to the Islamic law, we are unclean.

The term is "najis." On the multilingual Web site of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, the leading Iraqi Shi'ite cleric, there is a catalogue of Islamic laws (www.sistani.org). This includes a list of "najis things." There are 10, beginning with an assortment of excretions and body fluids -- obvious stuff that really shouldn't need special mention. On the "najis" list with urine, feces, etc., are the pig, the dog and the "kafir." That means the Christian, the Jew, the unbeliever in Islam -- and, chances are, the Gitmo guard.

In effect, then, with its official policy of clean cloves and detainee towels, the United States military is promoting, enabling and accepting the Islamic concept of najis -- the unclean infidel -- a barbarous notion that has helped fuel the bloodlust of jihad and the non-Muslim subjugation of dhimmitude. Our soldiers are many things: self-sacrificing, bold, loyal and true. They are not unclean.

Is this political correctness run amok? Not exactly. It's something else again, a new threat from within that needs vigilant redress. P.C. is about victimology, the elevation of perceived victim groups to the canonical pantheon. The Gitmo rules are more blatantly about surrender, a voluntary self-extinguishment, a spreading condition of denial of what is right and worth standing for. Not what you expect from the United States Southern Command.

from the Portsmouth Herald, 2005-Aug-2, by Shir Haberman:

Yard backer's silence lifted

PORTSMOUTH - The admiral who, until a few months ago, was part of the group that decided the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard should close, was finally given his chance to make his views about the local shipyard known to the BRAC Commission staff.

On July 19, retired Rear Adm. William Klemm, the former deputy commander for logistics, maintenance and industrial operations for Naval Sea Systems Command, told the Base Realignment and Closure Commission staff that Portsmouth shouldn't be closed unless the Navy is prepared to build three new dry docks somewhere else.

"The point is you can have as many people as you want, but you can't do the work unless you have the dry docks to do the work in," Klemm was quoted as saying in a transcript of his testimony located on the BRAC Web site (www.brac.gov.). "You can surge (move materials and manpower around) or pay overtime as much as you want, but if you don't have the dry docks, the boats don't get fixed."

Klemm was critical of statements made to the commission by Adm. Robert Willard, vice chief of Naval operations.

"This directly affects operation readiness," Klemm said. "I'm surprised Admiral Willard tried to mislead the commission into thinking that overtime would get work done, but forgot to mention that he will need dry docks to do the work in."

The Pentagon, citing a conflict of interest, forbade Klemm from testifying at the July 6 BRAC hearings in Boston. The Department of Defense's attorneys claimed Klemm's involvement in the base-closure process precluded him from testifying on behalf of any facility on the closure list.

New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg was outraged at the Pentagon's actions. Gregg said that Klemm's testimony would have been "devastating to the Navy case, because of his expertise and because of the fact that his points went to all the criteria ... and, refuted, basically, the Navy position on all these criteria points, and showed substantial deviation (from the criteria)."

However, the prepared statement Klemm was going to make at the Boston hearing was obtained and subsequently printed in the Portsmouth Herald.

Although not commenting on his involvement in the BRAC process, Klemm warned that Portsmouth's closure would eliminate surge capacity in the Navy shipyards, because of the loss of skilled workers.

He also described how Portsmouth is the lead shipyard in the improvement of submarine maintenance processes, improvements that are then extended to the Navy's other three shipyards. These improvements are, in part, a product of the culture of the work force.

"That culture cannot be exported or replicated, it is imbedded in the generations of people who work at this facility," Klemm testified. "Therefore, the loss of Portsmouth Naval Shipyard equates to an irreplaceable loss of the culture and skill sets of innovation and efficiency."

Klemm further warned that the Navy's three remaining shipyards - in Norfolk, Va., Puget Sound, Wash., and Pearl Harbor in Hawaii - do not have the capacity nor the resources needed to perform submarine maintenance activities within the prescribed periods of the service lives of the submarines in the fleet.

"Faced with the inability to accomplish this work, the Navy will have to keep submarines pierside in non-operational status until skilled artisans and dry docks become available or schedule them for inactivation." He warned that this will result in a reduction of the size of the submarine fleet "through a backlog of maintenance actions over the next five years."

This was not the first time Klemm had mentioned the negative consequences of closing the Portsmouth yard. He had warned of the problems inherent in closing Portsmouth during the BRAC process itself.

According to the minutes of the Nov. 18, 2004, meeting of the Pentagon's Industrial Joint Cross Service Group, Klemm said that calculations had determined that closing Portsmouth would leave 1.4 million labor hours of workload that could not be absorbed by the other three shipyards. He stated that these calculations, based on the 2005 20-year force structure plan, "preclude the closure of Portsmouth, unless its three dry docks are replicated at another shipyard."

Klemm said the chairman of the IJCSG, Michael Wynn, then-acting undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, asked Klemm's subgroup to perform additional analysis to see if it was possible to replicate Portsmouth's workload at other shipyards before making a final decision on the merits of closing it. But there is no evidence that the additional analysis was ever completed and submitted to the IJCSG; or that the Pentagon ever figured out how to include Portsmouth's efficiency in its "military value calculations," according to Klemm. Klemm raised the issue in another IJCSG meeting on Jan. 6, 2005, the testimony on the BRAC site said.

Yet, the IJCSG decided to put Portsmouth on the closure list, without any proposal to replicate its three dry docks at the remaining shipyards, Klemm said. Thus, it will be the "justifying" plan to cut the Navy's nuclear submarine fleet in the future, according to Klemm.

from KWTX.com, 2005-Aug-9:

Former 1st Cavalry Division Commander Stripped Of Command

Gen. Kevin Byrnes, a former commander of Fort Hood's 1st Cavalry Division, has been stripped of command of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command or TRADOC, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Military officials won't go into any more detail other than saying the move follows an investigation of "personal conduct."

Byrnes oversaw all Army training programs and the development of combat guidelines.

Disciplinary action against general officers isn't unheard of, but it's extremely rare for a four-star general to be relieved of command. CNN quoted officials as saying this may be the first time that's happened since President Harry S. Truman relieved Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 in a showdown over Korean War and Cold War strategy.

Byrnes held the position as commander of Training and Doctrine Command since November 2002.

During the period he commanded the 1st Cav, he served simultaneously as commanding general of the Multinational Division in Tuzla, Bosnia from October 1998 to August 1999.

TRADOC's mission during fiscal 2005, according to the command's Web site, is to train 447,000 personnel at 33 schools at 16 installations including Fort Bliss in Texas.

from ArmyTimes.com, 2005-Aug-9, by Gina Cavallaro and Jim Tice:

TRADOC commander fired

The commanding general of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, was relieved of command based on an unspecified investigation, the Army public affairs office announced Tuesday.

A statement published on the Army's official Web site stated that “the investigation upon which this relief is based is undergoing further review to determine the appropriate final disposition of this matter.” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker on Monday directed that Byrnes be relieved, the statement said. Details of the cause for the action were not provided.

Byrnes, a Field Artillery officer, has been at the helm of TRADOC for three years. He oversaw the writing of doctrine for the reorganization of the Army into modular units of action helped implement the tenets contained in the Warrior Ethos. Before taking over at TRADOC, he was director of the Army staff in the Office of the Chief of Staff of the Army.

He is expected to be replaced by Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, an Armor officer who was the senior tactical commander of Army forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Wallace, who is commanding general of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth, was commander of the 4th Infantry Division during its transition into the Army's first digital division.

He was nominated for the TRADOC post within the past three months.

from the Washington Post, 2005-Jun-12, p.B5, by Don Edwards:

Ten-Hut!
The Army's Bungling Recruitment

Nearly every day, anywhere from one to several U.S. soldiers or Marines die in Iraq, and even more are wounded. The news doesn't always make the front pages anymore, but the casualty rate has apparently registered deeply in the consciousness of young Americans and their families. The result is a dangerous decline in new enlistments that is depleting U.S. military resources and weakening our capacity to face additional conflicts or threats from abroad.

To keep our forces strong, every soldier we lose or who leaves the service has to be replaced by a new recruit. Their leaders, meanwhile -- the men who take them into combat and help determine the outcome of many battles -- can only be replaced by soldiers who gain experience and undertake many years of leadership training. For 20 years, the all-volunteer Army, with its enlistment bonuses and generous scholarships, succeeded magnificently at filling its manpower and leadership needs. Recruits sought entry in such numbers that for a decade it was running annual surpluses that could be held over to succeeding years.

But when the Iraq war began to stretch from months into years, the view of the military as an attractive option for young Americans gradually began to change. Recruiting for the Army, the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve, as well as the Marines, has become increasingly difficult, and recruiters point to the casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan as the primary cause of the unusual resistance -- including parental threats -- that they're confronting in trying to attract new enlistees.

The recruiting problems first became apparent in the late summer of 2003, when the surplus of enlistees disappeared and the Army went into the next fiscal year without any cushion. Since then, recruiting numbers have been declining. An alarming trend -- fewer young people signing up than the Army needs to maintain its strength -- began to develop last fall. Now, the Army has failed to meet its monthly recruiting goals since February. Last month, it reached only 75 percent of a goal it had already reduced from 8,050 to 6,700. The National Guard and Reserve, which provide more than 40 percent of the Army forces in Iraq, are experiencing even more trouble; so far, the National Guard has reached only 76 percent of its recruiting goals for this year.

Historically, recruiters have had to contact more than 100 prospects for every recruit. This year, those numbers are going up daily. The Army added 1,200 recruiters last month, and it has significantly increased its advertising budget and enlistment bonuses, from $6,000 for most recruits to $20,000. At the same time, it has raised the eligible age for the Army National Guard or the Reserve from 35 to 39. Even more telling, the Army is also accepting more recruits who are not high school graduates. This year, the percentage of high school graduates among those enlisting dropped from 92.4 to barely 90 percent, the Army's stated floor for the number of recruits who must have a high school diploma.

With recruiting goals seemingly out of reach for the present, recruiters, who are selected from among the best junior leaders in the noncommissioned officer corps, are experiencing high levels of stress. More and more, they appear to be bending the rules to meet their goals. The Army has become so concerned about recruiting ethics that it suspended all recruiting on May 20 to conduct a full day of ethics training.

But the real concern for all Americans is the effect that a continuing drop in enlistments will have on the military's quality. If there aren't enough recruits over the coming months, the Army will not be able to keep its units at fully combat-ready strengths. A classic solution to those shortages is to take soldiers from other units to bring up the personnel strength of units deploying to combat. But this causes turbulence in the deploying unit and undermines the unit from which the soldiers have been taken. When the time arrives to deploy the latter unit, even more soldiers must be transferred to bring it to combat strength. The result is units whose soldiers don't know each other -- exactly the situation the Army has worked so hard to avoid for the last two decades.

Now, the Army's latest desperate attempt to gain recruits is a shortened, 15-month enlistment policy. A 15-month enlistment means that soldiers will receive only basic and advanced individual training, but none of the team and unit training our premier soldiers traditionally receive. These recruits will be shipped off to war after only five months of training, deployed to units in combat where they know no one. These inexperienced soldiers will be at an enormous disadvantage and the casualties among them will be bound to reflect that disadvantage.

The 15-month enlistment is exactly the replacement policy the Army has proudly rejected since the Vietnam War. This flawed approach was instituted then because of the urgent need to replace casualties. We ended up with units of inadequately trained soldiers who didn't know each other and weren't fully cohesive teams. The result was high casualties among the newly arrived, inexperienced soldiers -- and it will likely be the result again. It would probably be better to maintain high standards and not reduce training time, even if this leads to temporary shortages.

Meanwhile, the decision to ease standards and accept soldiers who are less able to operate many complex weapons has the potential to weaken fighting capability. The Army already has a manpower shortage in certain critical skills, such as languages and military police. It has responded with short-term solutions like the "Stop Loss" program, which retains soldiers on active duty involuntarily after their period of enlistment is over. Soldiers who have left active Army service have also been involuntarily recalled. Both these solutions have been implemented to provide a limited number of soldiers, and they will not be effective in offsetting the shortfall in thousands of new recruits.

Ironically, these stop-gap measures further contribute to the recruiting challenge, as potential enlistees are deterred by the prospect of involuntary service on top of the fear of combat casualties.

An equally dangerous challenge facing the Army is the loss of experienced soldiers who leave the service after undergoing the demands of combat multiple times over several years. Currently, soldiers expect to get a year away from combat after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. But this expectation is violated as soldiers returning from combat are transferred to new units, which are then sent to the front well before a year is up.

I recently chatted with one such soldier, who told me that after participating in the invasion of Iraq, he remained there for a year and then returned to the United States, where he was transferred to a different unit. Only four months after he got home, his new unit deployed to Iraq. He has just returned from there again. His enlistment ends in less than a year, but he fully expects to go back to Iraq before that year is up and to serve another full year in Iraq under stop loss.

In addition to gaining extensive combat experience, this soldier finished two years of college while in the Army. He is exactly the type of soldier essential to the service's future: self-motivated, experienced and mature, the qualities the Army cultivates in junior leaders.Unfortunately, he told me that he'll leave the Army as soon as he can -- not from bitterness, but because he's weary of combat and saddened at the loss of friends.

The departure of soldiers like this is another serious threat to the Army's combat capabilities. It is the Army's junior leaders -- the squad leaders, platoon sergeants and company commanders -- who lead the close combat fights that decide battles and wars and, as I saw in Vietnam, whom the soldiers trust under fire. If this soldier's intention to leave the Army is part of a developing trend, then the military's problems could get even worse. Just such a situation developed after Vietnam, as disillusioned junior leaders left the service in droves, and years passed before the Army was able to rebuild itself.

If the Army's recruiting numbers continue to fall, the cascading effect will undermine combat capability in months, not years. But reversing this trend will be very difficult, and it seems highly unlikely over the next months or even year or two, until Iraqi security forces are in a position to take over the defense of their country from U.S. troops. But it's a mistake to solve this difficult short-term problem by adopting policies that could hurt the military for several decades.

Some small steps can be taken. The war in Iraq has placed the Army and the Marines in the cauldron of intense combat, while the Navy and the Air Force are essentially at peace. A decision to shift Navy and Air Force resources to the Army and Marines could improve the latter services' ability to attract recruits, especially if our leadership launched a national campaign calling on all Americans to join in the war on terrorism. The military's best hope is to convince America's youth and their parents that Army service is still a positive option.

A strong Army fighting force is essential not only to America's worldwide interests, but indeed to our survival as a nation and the life we enjoy today. But if the decline in our Army's strength continues, make no mistake, we could readily lose that way of life.

Don Edwards retired from the U.S. Army as a major general in 1997 after more than 37 years of service, including two tours in Vietnam. He is a vice president of the information technology company SRA International Inc.

from the Washington Times, 2005-Feb-16, by Rowan Scarborough:

Marine's lawyer: Corps changed story on charges

The Marine Corps has issued what seems to be conflicting statements on the legal status of an officer who fatally shot two Iraqis, leading his attorney to contend commanders are split on the decision to charge him with premeditated murder in the combat deaths.

Last week, the Corps initially announced that 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano faced unspecified charges in the shooting deaths. Lt. Pantano's civilian attorney, Charles Gittins, told reporters his client faced two murder charges.

But later, spokesman Maj. Matt Morgan, at Camp Lejeune, N.C., where Lt. Pantano is based, said the officer had not been charged.

This came as a surprise to Mr. Gittins, who said he has a copy of the official charge sheet signed by a prosecuting judge advocate that was handed to his client Feb. 1. On the sheet, it clearly states the Marine Corps has charged the 33-year-old officer with two counts of murder.

The Corps stands by how it has handled public relations in the criminal case of Lt. Pantano.

"I think it is because they are embarrassed by the fact they have charged him with premeditated murder," Mr. Gittins said yesterday. "They are looking for a way out."

Mr. Gittins said Lt. Pantano was acting in self-defense in April 2004 when he shot two Iraqi insurgents. Leading a Marine fast-reaction platoon, Lt. Pantano went to a suspected hide-out in the town Mahmudiyah near Baghdad and found a cache of weapons.

The insurgents, who had tried to escape in a sport utility vehicle, came at Lt. Pantano. He ordered them to stop in Arabic, and when they did not, he shot them with numerous volleys from his M-16, Mr. Gittins said.

The Marine Corps has been the target of much criticism for charging Lt. Pantano.

"I'm confident that there is disagreement among Marine Corps commanders as to whether he should be charged," said Mr. Gittins, who believes the Corps is trying to dissuade reporters from writing stories.

On Saturday, Mr. Gittins sent a letter to Maj. Gen. Richard A. Huck, the commanding general of Lt. Pantano's division, accusing the Corps of putting out inaccurate information.

"If ... Maj. Morgan's statements were not a mistake," Mr. Gittins wrote, "I am writing to request that he be relieved of his duties and appropriately disciplined, as his statements, which clearly were official in his capacity as Marine Corps spokesperson, were knowingly false and made for the purposes of misleading members of the press to believe that my client has not actually been charged with any crimes."

But Maj. Morgan said yesterday he is abiding by the Manual for Courts-Martial and that the manual does not consider charges official until an investigating officer refers them. That would not happen in this case until a pretrial Article 32 hearing is conducted.

"Although we refer to them as charges, what they are are formal allegations and they do not amount to an indictment," Maj. Morgan said. "We feel it's misleading to call him charged, because what it does is jumps too far ahead of the process."

Asked about the criticism of the case, Maj. Morgan said: "I think that any Marine has to appreciate the fact the American public's inclination is to defend the individual Marine. But there is a due process here, and the American public needs that process to take place."

from NewsMax, 2005-Feb-22, by Carl Limbacher et al.:

British Navy Seeking Gay Recruits

The Royal Navy has announced a drive to recruit gays and lesbians, after signing an agreement with the London lobbying group Stonewall to promote homosexual rights in the ranks.

The recruitment campaign will include placing ads for new sailors in the gay press, reports Reuters.

Second Sea Lord, Vice-Admiral Sir James Burnell-Nugent, explained the new push, saying that the Royal Navy's goal was to make all its servicemen and women feel valued.

"I am committed to ensuring the Royal Navy has a culture in which all our people are valued for themselves and are thus able to give 100 percent to their job," he said in a statement.

Navy spokesman Alan Wardle told Reuters that the Navy's decision to advertise in the gay press represented a commitment to diversity.

"If you want to have a range of people from a range of backgrounds you need to recruit from the press that they read."

Until 2000, homosexuals were banned from serving in the Royal Navy. But a European court ruling found that their exclusion was illegal, forcing the Navy to lift its gay ban.

The Royal Navy had long been the subject of rumor and inneundo, Reuters said, noting that Winston Churchill was alleged to have dismissed the force as "nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash."

In the late 1960s senior admirals announced a crackdown on gays in the service, believing at least half the fleet had "sinned homosexually," the wire service said.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said the other main branches of the armed forces, the Army and the Royal Air Force, were also reaching out to gays and lesbians.

The RAF, he noted, had joined a Gay Pride parade last year to persuade more homosexuals to sign up.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Dec-14, by Brendan Miniter:

Hunter's Gun Truck
One reason for the Iraq armor shortage: The military is too thorough.

A few weeks ago Rep. Duncan Hunter handed me a reason that has largely escaped media attention on why our troops in Iraq don't have all the armor protection they need. It was a piece of ballistic glass, roughly the size of a small dinner plate. But as it was four sheets of glass glued together, it was also very thick and extremely heavy. But I peered through it, and it was as transparent as a normal windshield. In Iraq, this glass is saving lives because it can stop bullets and shrapnel from roadside bombs.

The problem, the House Armed Services Committee chairman explained, is that a ballistic windshield is too heavy for some of the military's vehicles. The window frames simply cannot support it without being reinforced. In many instances that means the soldiers are driving vehicles with regular windshields as the bureaucracy works out the logistics of sending over vehicles that can handle ballistic windshields or finds a way to retrofit the vehicles now in theater. It's this waiting that has unnerved Mr. Hunter.

While the troops wait, he complained, the military could install two-inch-thick ballistic glass--half as thick as is optimal. Nearly every vehicle could support the weight of this slimmed-down ballistic glass, and it would likely stop 80% of the shrapnel that penetrates ordinary windshields. But the military is loath to adopt an interim, if imperfect, remedy. It prefers to wait for the "100% solution," Mr. Hunter said. In other words, in military procurement, the perfect has become the enemy of the good.

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In addition to ballistic glass, Mr. Hunter has been pushing the military to armor their vehicles. At the very least, he says, soldiers should be given steel plates they can cut for makeshift doors for their humvees. He even made a short video demonstrating how to do it. All soldiers would need is the steel, a couple of piano hinges, a few bolts and an acetylene torch. He was able to bolt on two doors in just two hours. (You can watch the video here.) Yet somehow the military isn't getting this done either.

This is not the only problem that has somehow escaped media scrutiny, even in the wake of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld being put on the spot last week. Insurgent attacks come across on the nightly news as random acts of violence. But in Iraq, the enemy is relatively sophisticated in his target selection. The insurgents have not been very successful openly attacking well-armored vehicles. After all, American soldiers shoot back. So insurgents have turned to going after convoys. Convoy trucks are not as well armored as they need to be, the drivers are alone in their cabs and therefore are unable to fight back, and, depending on what is being hauled, setting a truck alight can result in a massive explosion that is sure to attract media attention.

Cutting supply lines is a classic guerrilla tactic, but what's happening in Iraq is the insurgents have figured out where the soft underbelly is for a military still built to fight other large armies with relatively fixed battle lines. The military is bolting armor onto convoy trucks that pick up supplies in Kuwait and haul them into Iraq. But some of the trucks that carry supplies from nearby depots inside Iraq to frontline troops aren't being armored up because they don't make it to the armor supply centers in Kuwait.

One way to deter attacks on convoy trucks is to send along armored escorts. But there aren't enough armored vehicles to go around, so some soldiers earlier this year started using plywood, sandbags and any scrap metal they can find to armor up their trucks--"hillbilly armor." Mr. Hunter's office came up with an interim solution for this, too. By bolting a few plates of high-grade steel, ballistic glass and four machine guns onto a truck, his staff was able to convert a regular truck into an escort vehicle that can take on attacking insurgents. The Army initially resisted these gun trucks, saying they weren't needed. But now a handful of them are in Iraq, with more to be delivered Christmas Eve.

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There has also been a few notable successes in forcing the military procurement system to function properly. Before redeploying for Iraq last March, the Marines pulled out all the stops--including a few visits to steel mills--to put at least some armor on all the vehicles they shipped over there. Through the Rapid Fielding Initiative, the Pentagon distributed a new type of body armor that first saw combat in Afghanistan to nearly every soldier in Iraq. For outstanding needs, Rapid Acquisition Authority was signed into law in October. This empowers the secretary of defense to spend up to $100 million a year to go outside of the normal procurement system to meet urgent battlefield needs. So far no battlefield commander has requested this power to be invoked.

Mr. Rumsfeld stirred up a hornet's nest last week by saying, "You go to war with the army you have. They're not the army you might want or wish to have." He's right. We cannot afford to make the mistake George McClellan did in the Civil War, endlessly preparing for war but not doggedly going after the enemy. Our soldiers deserve the best equipment and training money can buy. And that includes the best equipment they can use now, instead of waiting around for something better. Sometimes what's good enough today is better than what would be perfect sometime down the road.

Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.

from the New York Times, 2004-Nov-30, by Adam Liptak:

Colleges Can Bar Army Recruiters

Universities may bar military recruiters from their campuses without risking the loss of federal money, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday.

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, found that educational institutions have a First Amendment right to keep military recruiters off their campuses to protest the Defense Department policy of excluding gays from military service.

The 2-to-1 decision relied in large part on a decision in 2000 by the United States Supreme Court to allow the Boy Scouts to exclude gay scoutmasters. Just as the Scouts have a First Amendment right to bar gays, the appeals court said, law schools may prohibit groups that they consider discriminatory.

The 1995 law at issue in the decision, the Solomon Amendment, barred the federal government from disbursing money to colleges and universities that obstruct campus recruiting by the military. As amended and interpreted over the years, the law prohibits disbursements to all parts of a university, including its physics department and medical school, if any of its units, like its law school, make military recruiting even a little more difficult.

Billions of dollars are at stake, and no university has been willing to defy the government. Indeed, several law schools that are members of one of the groups that sued to block the law, the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, have not been publicly identified. Among the institutions willing to be named are the law schools of New York University and George Washington University. The law faculties of Stanford, Georgetown and several other law schools are also in the group.

A spokesman for the Justice Department, Mark Corallo, said no decision had been made on an appeal.

"The United States continues to believe that the Solomon Amendment is constitutional," Mr. Corallo said. "We believe that Congress may deny federal funds to universities which discriminate and may act to protect the men and women of our armed forces in their ability to recruit Americans who wish to join them in protecting their country."

The government can ask the full appeals court to review the decision by the three-judge panel or ask the Supreme Court to hear the case. In either event, the government may also ask for a stay of the decision.

In the meantime, colleges and universities are free to limit military recruiters' access to their campuses, said E. Joshua Rosenkranz, who represents the law schools in the suit.

"Now every academic institution in the country is free to follow their consciences and their nondiscrimination policies," Mr. Rosenkranz said. "Enlightened institutions have a First Amendment right to exclude bigots. In a free society, the government cannot co-opt private institutions to issue the government's message."

He noted, though, that most law schools' policies had never completely barred recruiters on campus. Most simply withheld some forms of assistance, like arranging interviews and posting notices.

The law schools' antidiscrimination policies do not specifically focus on the military. They apply to all potential employers with an announced policy of discrimination on the basis of, among other factors, race, sex and sexual orientation.

The dean of the New York University Law School, Richard L. Revesz, said he welcomed the decision.

"We are gratified," Mr. Revesz said, "by the court's protection of our right to exclude from on-campus interviews employers who refuse to hire qualified students simply because of their sexual orientation."

Mr. Rosenkranz said the reluctance of several law schools to be publicly identified was driven by fear.

"They don't want retribution that is exacted behind closed doors by faceless bureaucrats and vindictive politicians," he said.

The appeals court said the law violated First Amendment rights of the schools in two ways.

First, Judge Thomas L. Ambro wrote, the schools are entitled not to associate with groups whose policies they oppose.

"Just as the Boy Scouts believed that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the Scout Oath," Judge Ambro wrote, "the law schools believe that employment discrimination is inconsistent with their commitment to fairness and justice."

Second, Judge Ambro said, the presence of military recruiters on campus forced universities to convey a message with which they disagreed. That is, he said, a form of compelled speech prohibited by the First Amendment.

He noted, too, that the military had other ways to recruit lawyers, including radio and television advertising.

Judge Ambro was appointed by President Bill Clinton. Judge Walter K. Stapleton, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, joined the majority.

A dissenting judge, Ruggero J. Aldisert, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, said the decision was misguided, particularly in wartime.

"What disturbs me personally and as a judge," Judge Aldisert wrote, "is that the law schools seem to approach this question as an academic exercise, a question on a constitutional law examination or a moot court topic, with no thought of the effect of their action on the supply of military lawyers and military judges."

"No court heretofore has ever declared unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds any Congressional statute specifically designed to support the military," he added. "It bears note that the military's policy against homosexual activity has been adjudged by a number of our sister courts of appeal not to violate the Constitution."

Judge Aldisert took issue with the majority's First Amendment analysis, noting that nothing in the law forbade the law schools to criticize the military's policy on gays.

Howard J. Bashman, who helped write a supporting brief on behalf of students who favored the law, said the decision would hurt the military and the public.

"A ruling of this sort will cause the military to end up with a lower quality of lawyer," Mr. Bashman said. "These lawyers are involved in targeting decisions and in decisions about how prisoners have to be treated."

The influences and orders of George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have dramatically and predictably reversed the erosion of the US military wrought by Bill Clinton and his appointees, and reduced its corruption (which was of course institutionalized long before Clinton came to office). Thus I include here a couple items about the newly rejuvenated military.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Nov-19, by Daniel Henninger:

We Won't Have a Draft
Troops in Fallujah are the best since World War II.

The amazing, perhaps historic, battle of Fallujah has come and gone, and the biggest soldier story to come out of it is the alleged Marine shooting. There must have been hundreds of acts of bravery and valor in Fallujah. Where will history record their stories?

Maybe it's just a function of an age in which TV fears that attention spans die faster than caddis flies, and surfing the Web means ingesting information like a participant in a hot dog eating contest. By contrast, Michael Ware of Time magazine has a terrific account this week of one platoon led by Staff Sgt. David Bellavia ("We're not going to die!"), fighting its way through the snipers and booby traps of Fallujah: "A young sergeant went down, shrapnel or a bullet fragment lodging in his cheek. After checking himself, he went back to returning fire." Amid mostly glimpses this week of telegenic bullet flight paths and soldiers backed against walls, I wanted more stories like this. More information about who these guys are and what they were doing and how they were doing it. The commanders in Iraq praise them profusely, and by now maybe that's all these young U.S. soldiers need--praise from peers.

But the American people, many of them, have been desperate for some vehicle that would let them actively lend support to the troops, or their families back in the States. The Bush administration, for reasons that are not clear, has never created such an instrument. Had they done it, a force would have existed to rebalance the hyperventilated Abu Ghraib story. The White House seems to have concluded that the American people would support a big, tough war almost literally as an act of faith. And they did, but just barely. Neglect of the homefront almost cost George Bush the election.

The election's one, ironic nod to the nature of the troops in Iraq was the controversy over the draft. Michael Moore traveled to 60 college campuses saying Mr. Bush's opposition to restarting the draft was an "absolute lie." Shortly after, a senior saluted the jolly Hollywood misanthrope and wrote a column for Newsweek denouncing the draft. "We have no concept of a lottery," she wrote, "that determines who lives and who dies." But not to worry, dear. The military brass, to the last man and woman, doesn't want you. Not ever.

The draft ended in 1973. What has happened to the all-volunteer military in the three decades since ensures that no draft will return this side of Armageddon.

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Post-Vietnam, the military raised the performance bar--for acquired skill sets, new-recruit intelligence and not least, self-discipline. The thing one noticed most when watching the embedded reporters' interviews last year on the way into Iraq was the self-composed confidence reflected throughout the ranks. And this in young men just out of high school or college.

It was no accident. Consider drugs. In 1980, the percentage of illicit drug use in the whole military was nearly 28%. Two years later, mandatory and random testing--under threat of dismissal--sent the number straight down, to nearly 3% in 1998.

Today recruits take the Armed Forces Qualification Test. It measures arithmetic reasoning, mathematics knowledge, word skills and paragraph comprehension. The current benchmark is the performance levels of recruits who served in Operation Desert Storm in 1990. The military requires that recruits meet what it calls "rigorous moral character standards."

After his August report on Abu Ghraib and U.S. military detention practices, former Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger told a writer for The Wall Street Journal's editorial page: "The behavior of our troops is so much better than it was in World War II." And more. Unit cohesion, mutual trust in battle, personal integrity and esprit all are at the highest levels in the nation's history, right now, in Iraq. Indeed, the U.S. armed services may be the one truly functional major institution in American life.

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Some fear the creation in the U.S. of a military caste, dissociated from the rest of society, or worry about the loss of civic virtue. The bridge across, I suspect, is narrower than many suspect. A 2002 Harvard Institute of Politics survey of college students found that if their number came up in a new draft, 25% would eagerly serve and 28% would serve with reservations. The draft itself is quite irrelevant today. But contrary to the last election's confusing signals about the attitudes of the young, most of them, it seems, are willing to "do something" to protect their country, if asked. It is their elders' job to find a way to ask. The military writer Andrew Bacevich has summed up our current situation nicely: "To the question 'Who will serve?' the nation's answer has now become: 'Those who want to serve.'"

At a ceremony on Nov. 13 at Camp Taji, Iraq--with Fallujah raging elsewhere--Army Maj. Gen. Pete Chiarelli presented 19 Purple Hearts for wounds in the battle of Najaf, the big battle before Fallujah. Gen. Chiarelli remarked that George Washington created the Purple Heart in 1782, for what Gen. Washington himself described as "unusual gallantry . . . extraordinary fidelity and essential service."

Essential service. After 20 months of it in Iraq and two hard weeks of it in Fallujah, "service"--an old idea in a world too busy to take much notice--is a word worthy of at least some contemplation.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

from Time Magazine, 2004-Nov-22, by Michael Ware:

Into the Hot Zone

After weeks of preparation, the U.S. launches a full-scale assault to take back Fallujah. TIME follows one platoon as it carries out the most dangerous operation since the beginning of the war

“We’re not going to die!” yells U.S. Staff Sergeant David Bellavia as his rattled platoon of soldiers takes cover from machine-gun fire in the streets of Fallujah. The platoon has been ordered to hunt down and kill a group of insurgents hiding somewhere in a block of 12 darkened houses. It is 1:45 a.m., and the soldiers have been running from fire fight to fire fight for 48 hours straight with no sleep, fueled only by the modest pickings from their ration packs. As they searched through nine of the houses on the block, the soldiers turned up nothing. When they trudged into the 10th house, though, a trap was sprung: the insurgents had lured them in and then opened fire, forcing Bellavia’s men to scramble out of the house as shards of glass peppered them and bullets ricocheted off the gates of the courtyard. Bellavia yelled for a Bradley armored fighting vehicle to get “up here now!” The Bradley drew along the gate and poured 25-mm-cannon and M-240 machine-gun fire into the house, blasting a shower of concrete chips and luminescent sparks.

Bellavia, a wiry 29-year-old who resembles Sean Penn, is pacing the street, preparing to go back in. Bellavia’s bluster on the battlefield contrasts with his refinement off it. During lulls in the fighting, he could discuss the Renaissance and East European politics. “Get on me now,” he says, ordering his squad to close in. There is little movement. He asks who has more ammunition. Two soldiers stand up and join him in the street. “Here we go, Charlie’s Angels,” Bellavia says. “You don’t move from my goddam wing. You stay on my right shoulder. You stay on my left shoulder. Hooah?” The men nod. “I wanna go in there and go after ’em.”

Reaching the barred window near the front door, Bellavia tells two soldiers to perch by the house corner and watch for insurgents trying to leap out the side window. He looks at Staff Sergeant Scott Lawson and says, “You’re f______ coming. Give suppressive fire at 45 degrees.” Bellavia and Lawson step nervously into the house. From the living room, Bellavia rounds the corner into the hallway. The insurgents are still alive. Their AK-47s fire. Bellavia fires back, killing them both. “Two f_____s down,” he says.

Lawson stays downstairs while Bellavia scours the first floor for more insurgents. A string of rapid-fire single shots ring out. Then silence. Then a low, pained moaning. The two soldiers waiting in the courtyard call out to Bellavia, “Hey, Sergeant Bell,” but get no response. “Sergeant Bell is not answering,” a message is shouted back to the platoon members across the street. “We need more guys.” The platoon’s other staff sergeant, Colin Fitts, 26, steps up. “Let’s go,” he says.

Fitts takes a small team over the road. “Terminators coming in,” he bellows as he goes inside, using the unit’s name in a code to warn that friendly forces are entering. Inside they find Bellavia alive and on on the hunt. Upstairs he scans the bedrooms. An insurgent jumps out of the cupboard. Bellavia falls down and fires, spraying the man with bullets. At some point another insurgent drops out of the ceiling. Yet another runs to a window and makes for the garden. Bellavia hits him in the legs and lower back as he flees. When it’s over, four insurgents are dead; another has escaped badly wounded. To Bellavia, Fitts says, “That’s a good job, dude. You’re a better man than me.” Bellavia shakes his head. “No, no, no,” he mutters.

When it kicked off last week, the battle of Fallujah was billed as a climactic clash between roughly 10,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines and about 2,000 newly minted Iraqi fighting men against the 1,500 to 3,000 armed militants who have turned the city into Iraq’s biggest insurgent haven. But the battle has not involved any single Armageddon-style showdown with massed insurgent forces. Instead, for men like the soldiers of Alpha Company’s 3rd Platoon, part of Task Force 2-2, the fight was far more intense, chaotic and harrowing. The Americans battled armed insurgents not just street to street or even house to house, but also up close and personal with their enemy, fighting him room to room at point-blank range. Measured by the military’s strategic objectives, the assault’s first few days produced success. U.S. forces, led by the members of Task Force 2-2, swept down from the north and punched deep into the city, seizing one of Fallujah’s most important assets, Highway 10. The Army’s assault opened the way for more forces to pour into the center of Fallujah and advance toward the south of the city, with the intent of delivering a blow to an insurgency that has overrun parts of Iraq. Ripping out the heart of the resistance in Fallujah is a necessary step to prevent the insurgents from tearing the country apart.

The U.S. offensive has left much of Fallujah in ruins, as air strikes, artillery barrages and ground fighting destroyed homes and damaged many of the city’s mosques. It’s impossible to count the number of enemy slain across Fallujah, but the attrition of insurgent forces in the city was decisive. In the long run, however, the rebels haven’t been beaten. From the nature of the fight and interviews with insurgents before the attack, it seems clear the nationalist and jihadist leadership had by and large already left the city along with much of their ranks, leaving behind, in classic guerrilla style, a rearguard detail to harass and interdict U.S. forces. The Americans in Fallujah got a taste of what they may confront across Iraq’s restive Sunni triangle as the military command attempts to root out the insurgents from their sanctuaries. They are a tenacious enemy who fight as any guerrilla force might—never head on, always from behind or the sides at moments when it’s least expected, initiating combat at weak points and then pulling back to strongholds, ducking and weaving all the while.

The U.S. invasion of Fallujah exacted a price. Of roughly 400 men and women from Task Force 2-2, four were killed in action. All told, the battle’s first days left at least 24 service members dead and more than 200 wounded. It was a stunning success militarily, but in human terms each loss was deeply felt, etched into the face and being of every soldier. For those who were there, the manner in which this battle was fought and victory claimed will never be forgotten. These are a few of their stories.

Shortly after 7 p.m. on monday night, Alpha Company paved the road into Fallujah. Engineers used a minesweeper to shoot forward 100 yard lines of C-4 explosive to destroy or trigger any booby traps in its path. Battle tanks followed a channel marked in chemical lights, taking positions on the railway berm to cover 3rd Platoon’s advance to Objective Lion, a hunk of two- and three-story buildings known to be insurgent strong points. It would be the foothold for the entire Task Force’s advance.

Within the Bradley’s cramped and musty hold, the shock of the minesweeper’s explosion was felt by the infantrymen huddled inside. Among them is Fitts, a lithe, expressive Mississippian and father of three who joined the military eight years ago. He warns his team to “get ready to get out of this big metal bitch.” With the bulk of the Marine-led assault force poised on the northern side of the railway, 3rd Platoon plowed forward, bringing its Bradleys to a halt beneath Fallujah’s first houses. The platoon radio net crackled, “Drop ramp. All 3rd Platoon elements drop ramp, drop ramp.” And with that, the ground battle began.

Despite all the intel showing heavy movement within the buildings, Object Lion was not defended. But in the street behind it, a mammoth propane tank lay on its side; wire ran from it to a nearby house. A squad was detailed, and went in only to come scurrying straight back out. The presence of gas cans and a car battery suggested that the propane tank and probably the house were rigged to blow.

It was a sign of things to come. Two days later, the platoon took up a position in a three-story house, overlooking the platoon’s new domain. In the side street below, twin bombs erupted. A detonator cord led to the adjoining home, and someone thought he saw movement. The platoon lit up the house with volleys of automatic fire, tripping a battery of hidden devices. The house blew forward, and a young sergeant on a balcony took shrapnel in his groin. At every stop in its advance, the Wolf Pack, as 3rd Platoon is dubbed, found countless bombs, plus doors booby trapped and walls set with explosives. The enemy tactic accounted for the soldiers’ unforgiving approach to entering buildings, traversing streets and tackling even lone snipers: if it looks suspicious or shoots at you, blow it up with a grenade, a cannon or the main gun of a tank. The U.S. didn’t plan on taking any chances.

By dawn the next day, the Wolf Pack had reached Objective Cougar, the Imam al-Shafi Mosque that insurgent leaders used as a meeting point and command center. It sat midway down 3rd Platoon’s southward advance through Fallujah’s Askari district, home to many former Iraqi military officers. It had been long evacuated and been heavily fortified in anticipation of a U.S. invasion, but commanders had received reports that as many as 150 foreign fighters were ensconced in the area; the battle figured to be tough. Footage taken by an aerial drone earlier in the week showed that the area was strewn with buried explosives. When a U.S. warplane dropped a 225-kg bomb on a weapons cache, it set off a daisy chain of roadside bombs for 100 yards along either side of the block. Hoping to stymie any U.S. advance and herd troops into canalized killing zones, insurgents positioned dirt-filled barriers and concrete blast walls throughout the streets. The raw materials they were using had been supplied by the U.S.-led coalition to the Iraqi police and Iraqi National Guard in Fallujah, many of whose ranks have since joined the insurgency.

To breach the mosque and allow Iraqi Intervention Forces to search it, the U.S. employed a Bradley to smash the compound’s walls after 25-mm cannon rounds failed to dent its iron gates. The Wolf Pack searched and secured a three-story building, taking a high spot overlooking the mosque and its minaret. At night it almost felt safe inside, but daylight brought the snipers and insurgent cells out into the streets. The attack started in the east but was soon joined by shooting from the north. From three edges of the roof, the soldiers fired at the insurgents, who wore tracksuit pants and the uniforms of the Iraqi National Guard as they dashed back and forth across roads or popped up in windows. The fight lasted nearly two hours. The young grunts defended themselves with all manner of fire, including AT4 antitank rockets, M-203 40-mm grenade launchers and tow missiles from the Bradleys supporting them. A young sergeant went down, shrapnel or a bullet fragment lodging in his cheek. After checking himself, he went back to returning fire.

The heaviest fighting was still to come. The next day the 3rd Platoon and the rest of Task Force 2-2 reached Phase Line Fran, Fallujah’s central bisecting road. From there they could stare into the city’s notorious industrial area, a hot spot particularly for foreign fighters and the scene of innumerable past battles with the Marines. Sporadic gunfire from the decaying warehouses, cement plants and junkyards provoked U.S. tanks to unleash high-explosive rounds at insurgent positions. The Wolf Pack’s fire-support officer called in mortar fire on buildings and locations where movement was seen. Even in lulls in the gunplay, the Fallujah sound track was alive with detonations and the whomps of tank rounds.

The insurgents had studied the Americans’ methods well. To negate the U.S.’s preference to fight in the dark using night-vision equipment, the insurgents focused their attacks in the dim light of dawn and dusk. As the sun set, a decrepit warehouse suddenly sparkled with at least a dozen muzzle flashes. Bullets flew thick over the unit’s commandeered building. “Look at the industrial complex,” Bellavia yelled at his men. “I want you to shoot, shoot.” The Wolf Pack lashed back with chattering automatic-weapons fire. A sister platoon, bunkered down a few hundred meters to the west, joined in, bringing a deadly cross fire to bear on the insurgents. Streams of red tracers scorched into the building as a soft golden sun emblazoned a graying sky.

“The enemy picture is so murky we just don’t know anything for sure except for what you see with your own eyes,” Alpha Company’s commander, Captain Sean Sims, told his officers. The soldiers pushed south into the industrial zone along the eastern corridor, moving into the thick of the cement plants and metal-strewn yards. The soldiers geared up to drive into the teeth of the resistance—the kind of fight the military had been spoiling for. Jdams rocked the earth and artillery carved a path forward as the sounds of fire fights resonated in all directions.

Winding their armor through the desolate buildings bound for their first target—Objective Bud, identified as a congregating point for foreign fighters—the Wolf Pack started taking fire immediately. A Bradley vehicle piloted by Sergeant First Class James Cantrell shuddered and filled with dust as it ran over a roadside bomb. The blast was so powerful it was at first mistaken for a bomb dropped by one of the many warplanes screeching overhead. “Goddam,” said Fitts, locked down inside the mechanical beast, his shotgun nestled under his chin.

Within minutes, a thumping clunk beat the vehicle’s left side. “Damn, an rpg,” shouted a soldier. When they reached Objective Bud, a figure was seen scurrying through a window. The 3rd Platoon spilled into the compound, cutting off any escape. Cantrell maneuvered his Bradley to face the building. The high-explosive rounds set the bottom floor ablaze. First Lieutenant Joaquin Meno called up for the first story to be torched as well. “Let the f_____ burn,” said a squad leader. When a group of insurgents brandishing RPGS was spotted 400 yards south, Meno called in mortar fire from the rear and Abrams tank fire from the front. The insurgents had no chance. “Hey, LT, good call. That’s perfect,” said Bellavia. As if to punctuate the score, a direct hit on the building where the insurgents had taken cover set off repeated secondary explosions.

Late that night, while waiting for the Marines to match the pace of 2-2’s advance, the platoon occupied a tall house on the northern outskirts of an area code-named Queens. It gave the exhausted grunts a rare respite—an hour’s sleep. At 4 a.m. they moved out and took up positions in another building. Within hours they encountered one of their most vicious confrontations yet, as insurgents riddled the rooftop with RPGS and sniper fire. The insurgents weren’t intimidated even by the fury of the tanks, daring to step from behind corners to vainly hit them with RPGS. A soldier’s ankle was shattered when an rpg sent concrete flying. Linking up with 1st Platoon to consolidate its position, the Wolf Pack fended off the attack.

On Saturday the final assault got under way as the Wolf Pack drove farther south, positioned to swing west to complete the sweep of the city. Alpha Company took more casualties, one a key member that was particularly bitter, as the battle’s end was so close. As the soldiers evacuated their wounded, military sources said Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was readying to announce the end of combat in the recaptured city. As the fighting in Fallujah dies down, the Wolf Pack and the rest of Task Force 2-2 are due to return to their usual area of operations in Diyala province north of Baghdad. But with the insurgents showing little sign of giving up, the Americans face more battles ahead. The men of 3rd Platoon just shrug their shoulders at the thought. It’s as though they were bred to fight. Says Fitts: “I don’t know how to do anything else.”

from Time Magazine, 2004-Nov-22, by Bill Powell, reported by Andrew Lee Butters/Mosul, Aparisim Ghosh and Phil Zabriskie/Baghdad, and Mark Thompson/Washington:

War By Fits and Starts

The long-awaited assault on Fallujah was officially dubbed Operation Dawn, to signify the promise of a new beginning. But the name the U.S. military had originally given the operation—Phantom Fury—seems more appropriate for the kind of war U.S. forces are fighting. At times the soldiers and Marines trawling Fallujah’s alleyways feel as though they are chasing ghosts. Insurgents vanish as the armored columns rumble into town, only to reappear somewhere else, firing from minarets and hiding in houses booby-trapped to blow up. U.S. and Iraqi officials say that their forces have killed as many as 1,000 enemy fighters and that most of the ravaged city is under U.S. control. If the goal, as a senior U.S. official says, is to “break up the scorpion’s nest’’ that Fallujah has become, the military is willing to inflict as much punishment as needed to achieve it.

But after a week that witnessed the most brutal up-close combat conducted by the U.S. military since Somalia, victory over the insurgency in Iraq isn’t necessarily any closer. Many fighters and the majority of the rebel leadership—including Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the most wanted terrorist in Iraq—apparently slipped out of the city in the weeks leading up to the assault. A Pentagon official says that at most, 10% of the enemy in Iraq has been killed or captured in Fallujah. As the U.S. fights there, violence is rippling across the center and north of Iraq, engulfing the increasingly restive city of Mosul, the third largest in the country. The violence has raised the prospect that the siege of Fallujah could be a prelude to a series of nasty urban street fights—precisely the sort of war the U.S. military had desperately hoped to avoid when the invasion started in the spring of 2003.

U.S. commanders acknowledge that Fallujah is only the beginning. But they hope that the show of force there is the first step toward gradually eroding the insurgents’ ability to coordinate activities around the country. Senior U.S. officials say the coming months will be like playing a deadly game of “whack a mole” across the country: attacking insurgents wherever they rise up and trying to take back enough rebel-held areas to hold credible elections in January. The U.S. does not have enough soldiers in Iraq to crush a growing insurgency in multiple locations at the same time. But officials believe they won’t actually face that challenge. As messy as the Sunni triangle and Mosul now appear, so long as the insurgency doesn’t ignite a nationwide conflagration, the Pentagon believes it can contain the threat. “What we’re trying to do in the short term, through the elections, is make sure that there are no no-go zones,” says a senior Western diplomat in Baghdad. “To the extent possible, we [will] attrit their capability to launch violent attacks.”

Critical to that plan is making sure Fallujah stays secure once the insurgents are routed. Toward that end, the Pentagon says money will start to flow into the city as soon as the military operation is over. The Pentagon says it has some $100 million ready to pour into a variety of civil works in Fallujah, including improvements in water, sewage and electrical systems as well as the construction of schools and health clinics. Army Lieut. General Thomas Metz, U.S. ground-forces commander in Iraq, says it will take “weeks, maybe months, to get the city to a normal operating level.”

Once Fallujah is pacified, the U.S. plans to rely on the newly trained Iraqi police and national guard forces to perform the bulk of security tasks required to begin the delivery of reconstruction aid. That transition won’t be easy. Among ordinary citizens, there is almost no confidence that the Iraqis will be up to the task, and they are almost certain to face fresh attacks. “Let the Americans think they are winning,” a fighter in Fallujah told Time. “We are not going anywhere.”

The whack-a-mole strategy may already be getting its first test in Mosul. The city is home to a heterogenous population of 1 million—Sunni, Kurd and Turkoman—and for months after the invasion was viewed as one of the occupation’s few success stories. But locals warn that the city is slipping out of control. Foreign terrorists streaming across the border from Syria have joined forces with a Baathist resistance stocked with unemployed ex-soldiers. Insurgent attacks have grown significantly in number and lethality in recent months, and at least two or three assassination victims arrive each day at al-Salaam Hospital, the city’s largest, doctors say. After insurgents staged attacks against six police stations in the city last week, a unit involved in the U.S. assault on Fallujah had to peel off and head to Mosul to help put down the unrest there. Local political leaders fear that the violence may make it impossible to organize elections in Mosul by January.

The risk for the U.S. is that, rather than make the Sunni triangle secure for democracy, the assault on Fallujah may instead inflame Sunnis and scatter insurgents across a wider area, which could scuttle hopes of broad Sunni participation in the voting. The Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest Sunni political party in Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s interim government withdrew last week, saying it could not abide the attack on Fallujah. Meanwhile, the influential Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni group, has called for a total boycott of the elections. The association’s leader, Harith al-Dhari, told Time he was “very close to calling for jihad” against the Americans and the Allawi government.

Yet even after the violence and inflammatory rhetoric of the past week, not all Iraqis are convinced the Sunnis will sit out the vote. Sunni leaders are acutely aware that the majority Shi‘ites—who make up 60% of Iraq’s population—seem united in their desire for elections. Optimistic U.S. and Iraqi officials believe that as elections draw near, at least some Sunni leaders will recognize their interest in having a say in Iraq’s first elected government. As Sarmad Mohammad, a Sunni fruit vendor in Baghdad, says, “If there are no Sunni leaders in the new government, all the jobs in the government, police and army will go to Shi‘as and Kurds.”

However tumultuous the January elections prove to be, it’s clear that the ultimate outcome in Iraq—whether it moves toward a semblance of stability or civil war—comes down to a test of wills. The U.S. command believes that the supply of suicidal Baathists, Islamic holy warriors and Iraqi nationalists will eventually exhaust itself. Robert Scales, a retired Army major general, says history teaches that violent attacks on insurgencies such as the campaign mounted by the U.S. in Fallujah can work. “You don’t just keep growing insurgents,” Scales says. “By effectively eliminating the hard-core terrorists, the fellow travelers see the handwriting on the wall. While the insurgency doesn’t disappear, it tends to collapse to something down around noise level.” But if Fallujah is a sign of things to come, the volume is likely to get cranked up first.

from TownHall.com, 2004-May-19, by Tony Blankley:

America: The strong horse

A general once said of his own troops that he didn't know what the enemy thinks of them, "but they scare the hell out of me." I get that same queasy feeling observing about half of American public opinion and the politicians and journalists who try to shape it. Patriotic bipartisanship seems to be like the cicada: It spent 17 years underground, emerged in public after Sept. 11, fluttered around briefly, and fell to the ground dead and stinking.

Now, less than three years after America began to face down the greatest threat yet to our national survival, not only has half the country given up the fight, but they have closed their eyes to the danger. Having mistakenly called our decision to go to war in Iraq "elective" (i.e., not necessary for our national security), they now mistakenly believe that we can "elect" to lose it without serious consequences. By definition, any politicians proposing to turn Iraq over to the United Nations or other weakling entities are prepared to accept strategic defeat.

Nitwit pundits and Sunday morning television sages, with that fake look of thoughtfulness that is their trademark, talk about an exit strategy -- as if it were just one more Mapquest printout. But any such exit strategy will lead us only on a short path to hell. That is because the essential strategic element in war is to defeat the enemy's will to win, and accepting anything less than triumph in Iraq will catastrophically embolden the terrorists.

I addressed this reality in a column I published on August 14, 2002 -- a full half year before the war started -- which I titled " A Period of Measureless Peril Could Be in the Offing." It's central analysis bears repeating today:

"On Monday of this week (August 12, 2002), Henry Kissinger ... endorsed the president's pre-emptive war strategy ... In perhaps his most incisive assertion, he justifies "bringing matters to a head with Iraq" for what he calls a "generally unstated reason ... While long-range American strategy must try to overcome legitimate causes of Islamic resentments, immediate policy must demonstrate that a terrorist challenge ... produces catastrophic consequences for the perpetrators, as well as their supporters, tacit or explicit." In other words, we must break the will and pride of all those in the Islamic world who would dare to terrorize us and the international system."

My column from August 14, 2002, continued:

"It is noteworthy that the Texas-based Strategic Forecasting Co. published on the same day (August 12, 2002) a report that concluded "the Bush administration is not abandoning its strategy of war with Iraq because it sees a successful campaign against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as a prime way to shatter the psychological advantage within the Islamist movement and demonstrate U.S. power."

"The usually well-sourced Stratfor explains that from the 1973 oil embargo, through the defeat of Russia in Afghanistan, Saddam's 1991 survival, the U.S. defeat in Somalia to Sept. 11, the centuries-old Islamic sense of impotence has been reversed. In explaining the Bush war aims, they elaborate, Mr. Bush intends to defeat the Islamist sense of their inevitable triumph -- to defeat their psychology of manifest destiny ... "

I concluded my column from August 14, 2002: "The future the signs suggest we are facing is a violent and perhaps prolonged struggle to defeat the will of an aroused and myriad people. As Winston Churchill warned shortly before World War II, we are moving into a time of "measureless peril."

And, of course, that is exactly where we are today -- in the midst of measureless peril. But as lethal and confounding as the terrorist fighters and their allies currently are in Iraq, our greater peril lies within ourselves.

We have the strength -- military, economic, cultural, diplomatic (dare I include the strength of our religious faith, also?) -- to persist around the world unto victory -- for generations if necessary.

But all this potential capacity for victory can only be brought into full being by a sustained act of collective will. It is heartbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president's political and media opposition want the president's defeat more than America's victory. But that is the price we must pay for living in a free country. (Sedition laws almost surely would be found unconstitutional, currently -- although things may change after the next terrorist attack in America.)

But even the president's opponents are not our greatest peril at the moment. The greatest immediate potential danger is a slackening of presidential resolve. President Bush must not hesitate to take all actions with as much force as needed to more fully impose our will in Iraq.

He should not listen to his political advisers -- but to his own sound instincts. If he does his bold best in Iraq, the election will take care of itself. America, with the president in the saddle, must re-emerge as the strong horse in the Middle East that bin Laden so fears.

The following article starts to explain the stakes of America's battle with those within and without who seek to cow civilization. The full version will appear in the CFR's organ Foreign Affairs.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Jun-21, by Niall Ferguson:

WHEN EMPIRES WANE
The End of Power Without American hegemony the world would likely return to the dark ages.

We tend to assume that power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. In the history of world politics, it seems, someone is always bidding for hegemony. Today it is the United States; a century ago it was Britain. Before that, it was the French, the Spaniards and so on. The 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke, doyen of the study of statecraft, portrayed modern European history as an incessant struggle for mastery, in which a balance of power was possible only through recurrent conflict.

Power, in other words, is not a natural monopoly; the struggle for mastery is both perennial and universal. The "unipolarity" identified by commentators following the Soviet collapse cannot last much longer, for the simple reason that history hates a hyperpower. Sooner or later, challengers will arise, and back we must go to a multipolar, multipower world.

But what if this view is wrong? What if the world is heading for a period when there is no hegemon? What if, instead of a balance of power, there is an absence of power? Such a situation is not unknown in history. Though the chroniclers of the past have long been preoccupied with the achievements of great powers--whether civilizations, empires or nation states--they have not wholly overlooked eras when power has receded. Unfortunately, the world's experience with power vacuums is hardly encouraging. Anyone who dislikes U.S. hegemony should bear in mind that, instead of a multipolar world of competing great powers, a world with no hegemon at all may be the real alternative to it. This could turn out to mean a new Dark Age of waning empires and religious fanaticism; of endemic rapine in the world's no-go zones; of economic stagnation and a retreat by civilization into a few fortified enclaves.

Why might a power vacuum arise early in the 21st century? The reasons are not especially hard to imagine.

The clay feet of the colossus. The U.S. suffers from at least three structural deficits that will limit the effectiveness and duration of its crypto-imperial role in the world. The first is the nation's growing dependence on foreign capital to finance excessive private and public consumption. It is difficult to recall any empire that has long endured after becoming so dependent on lending from abroad. The second deficit relates to manpower: The U.S. is a net importer of people and cannot therefore underpin its hegemonic aspirations with real colonization; at the same time, its relatively small volunteer army is already spread very thin as a result of recent military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Finally, the U.S. is afflicted by what is best called an attention deficit. Its republican institutions make it difficult to establish a consensus for long-term "nation-building" projects.

"Old Europe" grows older. Those who dream that the European Union might become a counterweight to the U.S. should continue slumbering. Impressive though the EU's enlargement has been, the reality is that demography likely condemns it to decline in international influence. With fertility rates dropping and life expectancies rising, European societies may, within less than 50 years, display median ages in the upper 40s. Indeed, "Old Europe" will soon be truly old. By 2050, one in every three Italians, Spaniards and Greeks will be 65 or over, even allowing for immigration. Europeans therefore face an agonizing choice between "Americanizing" their economies, i.e., opening their borders to much more immigration, with the cultural changes that would entail, or transforming their union into a fortified retirement community.

China's coming economic crisis. Optimistic observers of China insist that the economic miracle of the past decade will not fade--that growth will continue at such a pace that within three or four decades China's GDP will surpass that of the U.S. Yet it is far from clear that the normal rules that apply to emerging markets have been suspended for Beijing's benefit. First, a fundamental incompatibility exists between the free-market economy, based inevitably on private property and the rule of law, and the persistence of the Communist monopoly on power, which breeds rent-seeking and corruption, and impedes the creation of transparent institutions. As usual in "Asian tiger" economies, production is running far ahead of domestic consumption--thus making the economy heavily dependent on exports. No one knows the full extent of the problems in the Chinese domestic banking sector. Western banks that are buying up bad debts with a view to establishing themselves in China must remember that this strategy was tried a century ago, in the era of the Open Door policy, when American and European firms rushed into China only to see their investments vanish in the smoke of war and revolution. Then, as now, hopes for China's development ran euphorically high, especially in the U.S. But those hopes were disappointed, and could be disappointed again. A Chinese currency or banking crisis could have earth-shaking ramifications, especially when foreign investors realize the difficulty of repatriating assets held in China.

The fragmentation of Islamic civilization. With birthrates in Muslim societies more than double the European average, Islamic countries are bound to put pressure on Europe and the U.S. in the years ahead. If, as is forecast, the population of Yemen will exceed that of Russia by 2050, there must be either dramatic improvements in the Middle East's economic performance or substantial emigration from the Arab world to senescent Europe. Yet the subtle colonization of Europe's cities by Muslims does not necessarily portend the advent of a new and menacing "Eurabia." In fact, the Muslim world is as divided as it has ever been. This division is not merely between Sunni and Shiite. It is also between those seeking a peaceful modus vivendi with the West (embodied in Turkey's desire to join the EU) and those drawn to the Islamic Bolshevism of the likes of Osama bin Laden. Opinion polls from Morocco to Pakistan suggest high levels of anti-American sentiment, but not unanimity. In Europe, only a minority expresses overt sympathy for terrorist organizations; most young Muslims in England clearly prefer assimilation to jihad. We are a long way from a bipolar clash of civilizations, much less the rise of a new caliphate that might pose a geopolitical threat to the U.S.

---

In short, each of the obvious 21st-century hegemons--the U.S., Europe, China--seems to contain within it the seeds of decline; while Islam remains a diffuse force in world politics, lacking the resources of a superpower.

Suppose, in a worst-case scenario, that U.S. neoconservativism meets its match in Iraq and that the Bush administration's project to democratize the Middle East at gunpoint ends in withdrawal: from empire to decolonization in 24 months. Suppose also that no rival power shows interest in filling the resulting vacuums--not only in Iraq but conceivably also Afghanistan, to say nothing of the Balkans and Haiti. What would an "apolar" future look like?

The answer is not easy, since there have been very few periods in history with no contenders for the role of global or at least regional hegemon. The nearest approximation might be the 1920s, when the U.S. walked away from Woodrow Wilson's project of global democracy and collective security. But that power vacuum was short-lived. The West Europeans quickly snapped up the leftovers of Ottoman rule in the Middle East, while the Bolsheviks reassembled the Tsarist empire.

Indeed, one must go back much further in history to find a period of true and enduring apolarity; as far back, in fact, as the ninth and 10th centuries, when the heirs of the Roman empire--Rome and Byzantium--had receded from the height of their power, when the Abbasid caliphate was also waning and when the Chinese empire was languishing between the Tang and Sung dynasties. In the absence of strong secular polities, it was religious institutions--the Papacy, the monastic orders, the Muslim ulema--that often set the political agenda. That helps explain why the period culminated with the holy war known as the Crusades. Yet this clash of civilizations was in many ways just one more example of the apolar world's susceptibility to long-distance military raids directed at urban centers by more backward peoples. The Vikings were perhaps the principal beneficiaries of an anarchic age. Small wonder that the future seemed to lie in creating small defensible entities like the Venetian republic or the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England.

Could an apolar world today produce an era reminiscent of that troubled time? Certainly, one can imagine the world's established powers retreating into their own regional spheres of influence. But what of the growing pretensions to autonomy of the supranational bodies created under U.S. leadership after World War II? The U.N., the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO each regards itself as in some way representing the "international community." Surely their aspirations to global governance are fundamentally different from the spirit of the Dark Ages?

Yet universal claims were an integral part of the rhetoric of that era. All the empires claimed to rule the world; some, unaware of the existence of other civilizations, maybe even believed that they did. The reality, however, was political fragmentation. And that remains true today. The defining characteristic of our age is not a shift of power upward to supranational institutions, but downward. If free flows of information and factors of production have empowered multinational corporations and NGOs (to say nothing of evangelistic cults of all denominations), the free flow of destructive technology has empowered criminal organizations and terrorist cells, the Viking raiders of our time. These can operate wherever they choose, from Hamburg to Gaza. By contrast, the writ of the international community is not global. It is, in fact, increasingly confined to a few strategic cities such as Kabul and Sarajevo.

Waning empires. Religious revivals. Incipient anarchy. A coming retreat into fortified cities. These are the Dark Age experiences that a world without a hyperpower might find itself reliving. The trouble is, of course, that this Dark Age would be an altogether more dangerous one than the one of the ninth century. For the world is roughly 25 times more populous, so that friction between the world's "tribes" is bound to be greater. Technology has transformed production; now societies depend not merely on freshwater and the harvest but also on supplies of mineral oil that are known to be finite. Technology has changed destruction, too: Now it is possible not just to sack a city, but to obliterate it.

For more than two decades, globalization has been raising living standards, except where countries have shut themselves off from the process through tyranny or civil war. Deglobalization--which is what a new Dark Age would amount to--would lead to economic depression. As the U.S. sought to protect itself after a second 9/11 devastated Houston, say, it would inevitably become a less open society. And as Europe's Muslim enclaves grow, infiltration of the EU by Islamist extremists could become irreversible, increasing trans-Atlantic tensions over the Middle East to breaking point. Meanwhile, an economic crisis in China could plunge the Communist system into crisis, unleashing the centrifugal forces that have undermined previous Chinese empires. Western investors would lose out, and conclude that lower returns at home are preferable to the risks of default abroad.

The worst effects of the Dark Age would be felt on the margins of the waning great powers. With ease, the terrorists could disrupt the freedom of the seas, targeting oil tankers and cruise liners while we concentrate our efforts on making airports secure. Meanwhile, limited nuclear wars could devastate numerous regions, beginning in Korea and Kashmir; perhaps ending catastrophically in the Middle East.

The prospect of an apolar world should frighten us a great deal more than it frightened the heirs of Charlemagne. If the U.S. is to retreat from the role of global hegemon--its fragile self-belief dented by minor reversals--its critics must not pretend that they are ushering in a new era of multipolar harmony. The alternative to unpolarity may not be multipolarity at all. It may be a global vacuum of power. Be careful what you wish for.

Mr. Ferguson, professor of history at NYU and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, is the author of "Colossus: The Price of America's Empire" (Penguin, 2004). A longer version of this article appears in the upcoming edition of Foreign Policy.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2004-May-17:

Geneva for Demagogues
The facts about the rules of war and U.S. interrogation in Iraq.

If there's a silver lining to the 24/7 coverage over Abu Ghraib, it is that we are slowly learning that these abuses were in fact the fault of a few undisciplined, poorly led soldiers. The accusation that the practices were part of the "system," or resulted from Army or Pentagon rules, is also being exposed as a political slur.

On the first point, we now know the soldiers in those awful photos were derelict in many ways. Testimony is emerging that they indulged in sexual escapades and other behavior that any normal person would consider depraved. According to Specialist Jeremy C. Sivits, the first of the alleged offenders to face court martial, Specialist Charles A. Garner Jr. put a sandbag over one detainee's head and "punched the detainee with a closed fist so hard in the temple" that he was knocked unconscious.

This is inhumane, and deserves to be punished if proven in court. The unit's commanders should also be held responsible for its poor morale and lack of discipline. But as Specialist Sivits says in his sworn statement, no one ordered what is revealed in those photos: "Our command would have slammed us. They believe in doing the right thing. If they saw what was going on, there would be hell to pay."

This directly counters the continuing effort in Washington to portray the abuses as the inevitable result of the "climate" created by Donald Rumsfeld's Guantanamo rules. The latest such spin emerged last week with reports about the special interrogation techniques sanctioned by Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the Iraq theater commander. Consider this demagogic exchange between the Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman, General Peter Pace, and Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed during Thursday's hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee:

Senator Reed: "So I pose the following question: General Pace, if you were shown a video of a United States Marine or an American citizen in the control of a foreign power, in a cell block, naked with a bag over their head, squatting with their arms uplifted for 45 minutes, would you describe that as a good interrogation technique or a violation of the Geneva Convention?"

General Pace: "I would describe it as a violation, sir."

This--along with a similar answer from Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz--was widely broadcast as a "gotcha" moment. Mr. Reed alleged that since the scenario he described included techniques contemplated in the Sanchez guidelines, this meant the Pentagon had authorized violations of the Geneva Conventions.

But of course the two Pentagon officials had admitted no such thing--even if, amidst Mr. Reed's harangue, their answers were incomplete. Let's start with the fact that nowhere did the Sanchez rules suggest that someone can be held naked. Lieutenant-General Keith Alexander had explained this to Mr. Reed as a violation of "commander's guidance" at another hearing only two days earlier, but that didn't stop the Senator from distorting his question by using the word "naked" again.

Then there's the fact that while the Sanchez standards did allow short-term sensory deprivation and stress positions with the specific approval of a commanding general in every instance, there is no indication that anyone intended them to be used together. As it happens, requests to use stress positions were made only three times--and all three were denied. Only about 25 exceptional interrogation requests were made in total--all for segregation.

---

Mr. Reed should have his staff get him the Geneva Conventions to read. What he'd learn is that the treatment in his hypothetical question would be barred because U.S. soldiers wearing the uniform would be classified as "prisoners of war." Even tempting detainees who are POWs with a candy bar to answer questions beyond name, rank and serial number violates the Third Geneva Convention. As for his hypothetical "American citizen," he or she might benefit from the civilian protections of the Fourth Geneva Convention depending on circumstances.

These distinctions matter, because the Geneva Conventions are about more than subjective opinions of what constitutes "humane" treatment. The Conventions themselves make very clear distinctions between POWs and others; and it's clear that the terrorists held at Guantanamo don't meet the criteria spelled out in the Third Geneva Convention for designation as POWs. Perhaps Mr. Reed's constituents would like to know that under the standard he wants imposed, even al Qaeda detainees would be off-limits to all but pro forma interrogation.

A reading would also inform the Senator that--apart from Iraqi soldiers detained in uniform and certain members of Saddam Hussein's chain of command--most Iraqi detainees are arrested as civilians and fall under the protection not of the Third Geneva Convention but of the Fourth.

The Fourth allows--indeed obliges--an occupying power to use its discretion within wide parameters to maintain law and order (Article 64), and contains no specific restriction on interrogation, other than saying that "protected persons" not be subjected to "physical or moral coercion" (Article 31). But--note well--protected persons are defined as "persons taking no active part in the hostilities" (Article 3).

In other words, the Geneva Conventions do not speak specifically to the interrogation treatment of non-uniformed Baathist or jihadi guerrillas detained in connection with attacks on U.S. forces or Iraqi civilians. Except that the Fourth does permit us to execute them (Article 68)--a practice often seen in the less politically correct wars of years past.

With that in mind, we'll risk liberal censure and suggest that 45 minutes of uncomfortable posture (the guidelines' limit) and the other techniques that were on General Sanchez's list are certainly appropriate. The U.S. holds some very dangerous people in Iraq, and it's easy to forget that the point of interrogating them is to better protect both U.S. soldiers and the Iraqi civilians that the Geneva Conventions oblige us to safeguard.

---

Amid the political demagoguery being applied by the likes of Senator Reed, General Sanchez has now banned most interrogation techniques. So the U.S. command in Iraq will no longer even entertain requests for anything more rigorous for detainees than segregation from other prisoners.

The very real danger of course is that all of this will result in the collection of less actionable intelligence to stop the roadside bombs and mortar attacks that are killing American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. If it does, we hope Senator Reed and his media cheerleaders will acknowledge their responsibility.

from Bloomberg News via the Detroit News, 2004-May-7, by Edmond Lococo:

Army bullets in short supply
America searches for 2nd firm to make enough ammunition

EDINA, Minn. -- Alliant Techsystems Inc., the U.S. Army's sole supplier of bullets, said it can't keep up with demand that is rising to its highest level since the Vietnam war as the United States fights terrorism and conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Army is looking for a second ammunitions source, Alliant Chief Executive Daniel Murphy said on an earnings conference call. The service wants 2 billion rounds of bullets and Alliant will make 1.2 billion this year, up from 1 billion last year, he said.

Alliant is in talks to expand its Army-owned Lake City facility to produce another 300 million rounds and the Army is seeking a supplier of 500 million more. Demand could be this high for five years, Murphy said.

U.S. Army spokesman Major Gary Tallman didn't immediately return calls seeking comment.

Alliant is boosting its work force 6 percent to 14,000 this year to handle orders for products including M-16 rifle ammunition.

The U.S.-led coalition in Iraq is struggling to control rising violence that in April alone killed more U.S. soldiers than during last year's war, which lasted about six weeks.

The Army could have difficulty meeting its demand as there are few producers outside of Alliant or General Dynamics Corp. capable of producing military ammunition on the scale required, said Loren Thompson, an analyst at Arlington, Va.-based Lexington Institute, which studies national security issues.

``The Army's industrial base is busted,'' Thompson said. ``A wide range of consumables from ammunition to armor simply can't be produced at an adequate rate during wartime. There is almost no surge capacity.''

The Army tries to make up for its lack of surge capacity by stockpiling material before conflicts, Thompson said. The strategy works in conflicts of short duration, but is becoming a problem as the Iraq war enters its second year, he said.

from Hackworth.com, 2004-Jan-5, by David H. Hackworth:

An Army Short of Ammo

``Bang, bang. You're dead.''

Neighborhood kids playing soldier in an empty lot with wooden rifles?

Nope! Regular United States warriors, during Exercise Crocodile '03 at Shoalwater Bay, Australia, ``fighting'' an Aussie reserve unit.

``We were loaded down with far more blank ammunition than we could fit in our ammunition pouches, but when we made `contact' with the Yanks, we found that many of them had almost no blank training rounds,'' Aussie Pvt. Simon Parmiter said.

``On several occasions when we opened fire we received perhaps half a dozen shots in return before the riflemen started yelling, `Bang, bang' back at us, while the SAW -- Squad Automatic Weapon -- gunners shouted, `Bullets, bullets, bullets','' Parmiter continued.

``It was incredible -- the best-equipped military in the world was reduced to yelling at us instead of firing.''

``With the recent news that that unit will return to Iraq, I assume many of the chaps yelling, `Bullets, bullets, bullets ... ' will soon find themselves in the real thing -- hopefully with more realistic training behind them, but if the shortage of live ammunition is as bad as the shortage of blank ammo appears to be, one has to wonder.''

Spoken with the wisdom of an Australian Digger, aka a mud grunt.

This report and similar accounts of ammo shortages during the past few months have caused me to check into this story with great urgency. Because soldiers fight as they train -- which, by the way, is the U.S. Army's most heavily exercised mantra -- an Army without sufficient training ammo is an Army that will fail on the battlefield.

I posted a ``help wanted'' ad on my Hackworth.com web page, and within 24 hours had received more than 500 messages from serving Army troops in the United States preparing for deployment to hot battlefields like Iraq or Afghanistan, as well as from warriors all over the world, confirming that our soldiers don't have sufficient stocks of live or blank training ammo to prepare adequately for combat.

Although Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gary Tallman was most cooperative, it took him several weeks to line up the experts. When asked why, he said, ``Some folks here are busy playing `pass the grenade.' ''

For sure, the ammo-shortage problem is a live grenade. But eventually I did speak with Brig. Gen. Louis Weber and Lt. Col. Susan Carlson.

Weber, recently back from Iraq -- where he served with the spearhead unit that took Baghdad -- insisted that the ``Army has adequate ammo for training and deployed units.'' But he did admit that there was a lot of ground truth in the reports I'd received from the troops.

Gen. Weber explained that the Army ammo inventory includes 350 different lines of munitions, and that fragmentation grenades and blank training ammo are a problem, along with 23 other lines of ammo. When I asked for a list of the shortages, the Pentagon declined to provide it in the interests of ``operational security.''

Tallman assured me that small-arms-training ammunition is now the No. 1 single line item for procurement dollars for the 2004 budget. ``The Army will spend just over $1 billion, ahead of Stryker, upgrades for Apache, Abrams, CH-47, MLRS, procurement of communications systems and procurement of medium and heavy tactical vehicles,'' he said.

West Point-trained Lt. Col. Carlson -- coincidentally the daughter of retired Col. Jerry Carlson, who served with great distinction alongside of me in Korea and Vietnam -- said that our Lake City ammo plant in Missouri ``has gone to three shifts.''

Sources say that Lake City -- both the largest Army ammo facility in the world and the producer of all the Pentagon's small-arms ammo -- has reached ``capacity'' and ``units in the field still don't have the right stuff to do the job.''

A regular Army major just back from Iraq says: ``President Bush told the armed forces, `Help is on the way.' But in Iraq and now in the training business, I've seen very little help, but a whole lot of pork.''

You'd think that our Congress would have the good sense to read the coffee grains and demand that we reopen other ammo plants to prepare for a long, dangerous and most critical global war in which our very way of life is at stake.

from the Associated Press via the Washington Times, 2003-Nov-8:

Army mother won't leave family for Iraq

DENVER -- Simone Holcomb's choice was between duty and family. She chose family, and now the military might punish her.

Mrs. Holcomb, an Army medic married to an Army sergeant, refused an order to return to duty in Iraq because it could have meant losing two of their seven children in a custody battle.

"For me to get on a plane and abandon my children would be against the law," Mrs. Holcomb said. "And I don't know how any parent on Earth could leave without knowing how they're going to be taken care of."

Her commanders in Iraq have told her by e-mail that she is absent without leave, she said.

Mrs. Holcomb, 30, and her husband, Sgt. 1st Class Vaughn Holcomb, 40, lived with their children at Fort Carson near Colorado Springs when both were sent to Iraq in February.

Family members were taking care of their children, but the couple returned on emergency leave in September when Vaughn Holcomb's ex-wife went to court to get full custody of two of the children from their previous marriage.

A judge said one of the Holcombs had to remain home or they would lose custody. Simone Holcomb said she decided to stay because she is a reservist while her husband has 20 years of active-duty service and is near retirement.

She also said her husband, a tank platoon sergeant with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, would be more sorely missed by his unit. He is now back in Iraq.

The Army requires two-soldier families to agree on custody plans before deployments so that children are taken care of, said Col. Rich Thomas of Army Forces Central Command in Atlanta.

"When there are extenuating circumstances, we obviously want to find a solution to work for both sides," he said.

Army officials in the United States said they could not confirm Simone Holcomb's status without talking to her unit commanders in Iraq.

Officials said the punishment for going AWOL ranges up to discharge or imprisonment. Mrs. Holcomb said she has been told only that she would forfeit all her pay since disobeying the order to return to Iraq, but hasn't been told what other measures she might face.

The Army inspector general is reviewing the case, said a spokesman for Sen. Wayne Allard, Colorado Republican, who intervened at Simone Holcomb's request.

from the Associated Press, 2003-Nov-11:

Soldier-Mom Told She May Face Punishment

FORT CARSON, Colo. (AP) -- A soldier who stayed home with her children during a custody battle instead of returning to Iraq was reassigned to Fort Carson, but also received a conflicting message - that she could face administrative punishment.

Spc. Simone Holcomb, a medic in the Colorado National Guard, was reassigned Monday to Fort Carson to give her time to find care for her children or get out of the Army, post spokesman Lt. Col. Tom Budzyna said.

"She's been reassigned to Fort Carson for compassionate reasons and she's in the process of being demobilized from active duty status to National Guard status," Budzyna said late Monday.

However, Holcomb's commander called her earlier Monday from Iraq to tell her he was pursuing an administrative punishment against her, said Holcomb's lawyer, Giorgio Ra'Shadd. It was not clear what the punishment would be.

"They didn't give a reason. A commander in the field doesn't really have to give a reason," Ra'Shadd told Fox News.

Budzyna said it will be up to the Colorado National Guard to decide how to handle the administrative punishment, which could include forfeiture of pay, time off or suspension. Before reassignment, Holcomb had been considered absent without leave, which carries a penalty ranging from discharge to imprisonment.

Holcomb, 30, and her husband, Sgt. 1st Class Vaughn Holcomb, 40, were living with their children at Fort Carson near Colorado Springs when both were sent to Iraq in February.

Family members were taking care of their seven children, but the couple returned on emergency leave in September when Vaughn Holcomb's ex-wife went to court seeking full custody of two of the children from their previous marriage.

Simone Holcomb told a judge she would stay home with the children and refused an Army order to return to Iraq.

Her reassignment to Fort Carson was backdated to Oct. 10, the day she was due back in Iraq, which means she couldn't be charged with being absent without leave, Budzyna said.

Ra'Shadd and Budzyna said they were trying to sort out the conflicting messages.

"Common sense is going to prevail in this matter. We are going to take care of the soldier," Budzyna said.

Simone Holcomb referred questions to Ra'Shadd. He did not return a call seeking comment late Monday or Tuesday.

from TPDL 2003-Nov-5, from the Washington Times:

Railroading Col. West

With the clock ticking toward a scheduled Nov. 10 investigative hearing for Lt. Col. Allen B. West — on charges of mistreating an Iraqi prisoner in a successful effort to thwart a guerrilla attack on U.S. troops — it's time for the military to rethink the ill-considered decision to go forward with his prosecution.

Col. West said last week that his soldiers faced almost daily attacks as they worked to impose security near Tikrit, a stronghold of Saddam Hussein supporters. In August, an informant told soldiers in Col. West's unit that there was an assassination plot against him and that one of the plotters was an Iraqi policeman. The policeman was brought in for questioning. Initially, he failed to provide any information.

That changed after Col. West entered the picture. He took the detainee outside and fired a 9 mm pistol twice to scare him into talking. The prisoner then provided the names of two accomplices and told of another sniper attack planned for the following day. Col. West admits that he made a mistake by discharging his weapon during an interrogation session. But he emphasizes that, following the interrogation, there were no more attacks from that town. In short, his actions very likely saved the lives of many American soldiers.

Col. West was relieved of his battalion command, effectively ending his military career. Then a military prosecutor offered him an ultimatum: Resign immediately and forfeit retirement benefits, or face criminal proceedings that could lead to a trial and prison term.

Were he to have quit the military before last Saturday, when he became eligible to retire, Col. West would have lost more than $1 million in pay and health benefits over his life expectancy. His wife is a cancer survivor, something which would have made the cost of obtaining medical insurance prohibitive.

The rules of engagement are proper in times of warfare. But there's also an important place for prosecutorial discretion in dealing with certain actions that occur in the heat of combat. Anyone who has talked to their father or grandfather about service in World War II or World War I at some length realizes that these conflicts were not waged with strict adherence to the Marquis of Queensbury rules. It's wrong to send men like Col. West into battle in a violent place like Iraq, then destroy their lives and humiliate them for taking action to protect their men. The charges against Col. West should be dropped, and he should be honorably discharged with full pay and benefits.

from Chuck Muth's News & Views, 2003-Nov-9, by Chuck Muth:

This Is Really Starting to Tick Me Off

"Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch accused the military of using her capture and dramatic nighttime rescue to sway public support for the war in Iraq," reports the Associated Press. "Dramatic video of U.S. commandos whisking the former Army supply clerk from a Nasiriyah hospital to a waiting chopper April 1 helped cement Lynch's image as a hero. But the 20-year-old private told ABC's Diane Sawyer there was no reason for her rescue to be filmed."

You know, a lot of us have been biting our tongue over this Jessica Lynch "story" for a long time. She wasn't a "hero" in the generally understood sense; she was a POW. Just like a lot of other soldiers. The real heroes were the ones who RESCUED her. But who can name even ONE of THEM?

Even Sen. John McCain, a truly heroic figure who suffered for YEARS in the "Hanoi Hilton," says he shouldn't be called a "hero" since all he did was get his plane shot down. Jessica got lost and had her Humvee blown up. What's "heroic" about that? When it comes to heroic actions, I'll take those guys who risked their lives to rescue that Iraqi woman from a bridge while under heavy enemy fire any day of the week.

Now, no one wants to take anything away from the fact that Lynch was severely injured while serving her country in wartime, but the military didn 't use her to "sway public support for the war in Iraq." Come on. Even an idiot from Palm Beach who can't punch a ballot without leaving a chad hanging knows Lynch was "used," but only to further the Army's touchy-feely PC-driven decision to allow women in combat. Not to drum up support for the war. Heck, support for the war back then was through the roof.

This would be the same Army, by the way, which is now hanging out to dry a TRUE hero, Lt. Col. Allen West (see below), who used tough but reasonable tactics under the circumstances to PREVENT other soldiers such as Lynch from being killed and captured.

We appreciate and honor Private Lynch's service to her country this Veterans Day, but lament that she's now being used by anti-war liberals to cast further doubt on America's mission in Iraq, instead of casting doubt on the dubious - some would say outright stupid - Army decision to put women in combat and harm's way in order to placate loud-mouthed feminists.

It's LONG past time for Jessica Lynch's 15 minute of fame to be over. Cash in on your book deal, Jessie, and move on with your life. It may sound cold, but we have bigger fish to fry.

from TPDL 2001-Nov-2, from The Libertarian 2001-Oct-23, by Vin Suprynowicz:

A half-hearted kind of war

It is perhaps to America's credit that we are such a reluctant warrior, always hoping to be less vicious than our opponents, always hoping something less than the creed of Genghis Khan (driving your enemies before you, hearing the lamentations of their women, etc.) will suffice to get the job done.

Unfortunately, in the harsh real world out there, half-measures are often seen as signs of weakness and thus as provocations. One defecting Iraqi general famously told his American interrogators that the very precision of our "surgical air strikes" to take out Iraq's command and control structure at the start of the Gulf War were used by the other side to ridicule the "Great Satan" -- see how little damage their bombs have done to our homes and factories? What are we afraid of?

Overruling Norman Schwarzkopf and many who advised that -- a great deal of trouble having been spent in assembling the forces in the first place -- we should go ahead and level and conquer Iraq a decade ago, George Bush the elder opted to grant a cease-fire in exchange for Saddam Hussein's promises to refrain from developing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

Saddam promptly broke those promises and made a mockery of U.N. inspection efforts. His champions in the West and at the U.N. took to whining that it was America that remains the aggressor by enforcing a blockade and a "no-fly zone" designed to hamper Saddam's demonstrated tendency to commit genocide against the Kurds.

Now we hear a mantra of charges that the American embargo -- adopted in lieu of simply leveling, conquering, and occupying the country, we must recall, in an earlier attempt to "respect Muslim sensibilities" -- has resulted in the starvation deaths of "500,000 Iraqi children."

The NATO embargo specifically allows Iraq to sell as much oil as necessary to buy all the food and medicine its civilian population needs. If 500,000 Iraqi children have starved as a result of this curiously humane blockade, how many of Saddam's armed forces have starved? If none, this is a curious famine, indeed. Couldn't the soldiers just have shared some of their ample rations with the children?

Could it be that starvation is occurring only among ethnic or religious minority populations not loyal to Saddam -- engineered by the well-fed Mr. Hussein and his generals in a cynical "two-birds-with-one-stone" propaganda ploy, and not by America at all?

Or could it be that this statistic -- offered up by the same United Nations which recently certified Syria as an upstanding and freedom-loving nation by overwhelming election of that nation to the Security Council; the same United Nations that now insists America must abandon the industrial revolution because we consume too large a share of "the world's" resources (could we see "the world's" deed, please?) and our automobiles contribute to global warming while the eruption of Mount Pinatubo does not; the same United Nations which condemns the United States and Israel for "racism" while finding no reason to condemn the Sudan its ongoing slave trade, nor Zimbabwe for turning a blind eye to the seizure of white farms there ... is simply a pile of manufactured bunk?

And how many will still insist such absurdly loophole-ridden provisions were "too harsh," if it turns out the anthrax now being used to murder more innocent Americans came from Iraqi labs?

Mind you, even one child dying due to purposeful American actions would be too many. But are we morally responsible to feed the world? Do we share Joe Stalin's guilt because he starved millions of Ukrainian children in the 1930s ... on purpose? The solution is a free-market economy. We will gladly send instruction manuals.

In a lengthy analysis of America's shaky alliance with the corrupt and decadent Saudi royal family in the Oct. 22 edition of The New Yorker, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reveals that since 1996 Saudi royal money has been supporting Osama bin laden's Al Qaeda and other extremist groups throughout the Persian Gulf region and Central Asia , apparently in efforts to pay off and forestall fundamentalists who the Saudi princes know would like to overthrow their "moderate," pro-Western regime.

In passing, Mr. Hersh describes an incident on the first night of the current war which may prove prophetically "emblematic ... of the constraints placed by the government on the military's ability to wage war" under our current Regime of Reluctance.

That night, Mr. Hersh reports, an unmanned Predator reconnaissance aircraft under the control of the CIA was surveilling the roads leading out of Kabul. The drone spotted a convoy of cars and trucks which was determined to be carrying Taliban leader Mullah Omar out of the city, and followed the party until Omar and about 100 guards and soldiers took shelter in a building.

But the CIA did not have authority to "push the button" and kill the Taliban elite with one of the Predator's two potent Hellfire missiles. Nor could that decision be made by the commander of the Fifth Fleet, in Bahrain.

Instead, the request for authorization to kill the leader of the Taliban -- whose forces and facilities we were at the time bombing -- had to go to the United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

At that point, Mr. Hersh reports, General Tommy R. Franks, the CENTCOM commander, replied, "My JAG" -- Judge Advocate General, a military lawyer -- "doesn't like this, so we're not going to fire. ..."

Instead, the Predator was ordered to blow up the empty cars outside the building, whereupon it was to "see who comes out, and take a picture."

The cars were blown up, but no one came out. Later, the building was targeted and destroyed by F-18s, but by then Mullah Omar had managed to escape and survive.

The failure left Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors," a senior military official told Hersh. Days afterward, top administration officials were still seething about the incident, Hersh reports, though his thoughtful source attributes the SNAFU to "a slow degradation of the system due to political correctness: 'We want you to kill the guy, but not the guy next to him. No collateral damage.' "

Is this ever likely to change so long as the American military is asked to "wage war" with food packets and baby carriages, so long as our leaders apologize when a bomb hits a house and suggest month-long bombing halts out of respect for the enemy's religion, so long as we can't even call our campaign a "crusade" for fear of offending those who dance and cheer at news that the World Trade Center has collapsed in smoke and flames?

Columnist and decorated Vietnam veteran David Hackworth reports 241 American servicemen died in Lebanon in 1983 because of the extra two to four second it took their Marine guard to chamber a round and flip off his safety when he saw the suicide truck coming -- "The Rules of Engagement forbade this expert rifleman from being locked and loaded even though his unit was on high alert for just such an attack. ...

"Recently, the Navy dedicated a memorial to the sailors who were aboard the USS Cole when it was savaged last year by a terrorist attack in the port of Aden," Col. Hackworth reminds us. "But even though the members of the security detail on the Cole were at their posts on high alert ... again, the Rules of Engagement stated no weapons would have a round in the chamber," reports Col. Hackworth, who remembers carrying a loaded weapon on Army guard duty in 1945, at the age of 15.

"Today, at virtually every U.S. military installation around the globe -- and now at most of our airports, which are secured by the Army National Guard -- the guys and gals manning the security details ... are as impotent as the Marines were in Lebanon or the sailors in Yemen. They don't have a round in the chamber, and in most cases, they don't even have a magazine in their weapons."

U.S. Rep. Rod Blagojevich, D-Ill., who is now running for governor of Illinois, worries that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network may have purchased two dozen .50-caliber long-range rifles in the late 1980s [actually, the US Government sent them -AMPP Ed.]. His solution? Now that every American finds himself potentially on the front lines of this war against terror, the Chicago Sun-Times reports that Rep. Blagojevich called Sunday for a ban on possession of the weapons ... by law-abiding Americans!

America: at war and disarmed.

"Will it take another USS Cole disaster before we allow the troops to lock and load?" Col. Hackworth asks.

Would any U.S. serviceman have radioed headquarters and asked permission to fire if he'd found Adolf Hitler or Hideki Tojo in his sights in 1944 -- and would any U.S. general have handed off the decision to some lawyer?

Just as doctors warn us to take our full course of antibiotics -- never to stop when our symptoms disappear lest a heartier, drug-resistant strain of the pathogen surge back to attack us again -- so does a war of half-measures only allow the enemy to take heart, progressively adopt to our tactics, and increase his recruiting by bragging that if he has survived an encounter with the world's "sole remaining superpower," imagine what he could do with a few thousand more volunteers.

Is that what we want?

Or are we finally ready to go to war -- a nasty enterprise which is, regrettably, sometimes necessary; at which the fruits of failure are death and the use of one's widows and orphaned daughters to produce offspring for the conqueror; and in which success has historically proven most likely to flow to he who, for the duration of hostilities, adopts the motto:

"The greatest happiness is to crush your enemies and drive them before you; to see his cities reduced to ashes; to see those who love him shrouded in tears; and to gather to your bosom his wives and daughters."

from the Associated Press via the Portsmouth Herald, 2003-Oct-12, by Marcia Dunn:

A kinder, gentler shuttle program?

SPACE CENTER, Houston - In the land of rocket science, where numbers count for everything and hunches are scorned, two men are on a mission more difficult than plugging a hole in the space shuttle.

They're trying to make NASA's shuttle program a warmer, fuzzier place by recrafting the culture that doomed Columbia, and Challenger before that.

To these reformers, that means being super-sensitive about their words, their tone, their height, even the shape of their conference table.

"None of this is too touchy-feely for me," says Bill Parsons, an ex-Marine who took over NASA's decimated shuttle program following the Columbia accident.

Parsons knows his 6-foot-5, 222-pound frame is intimidating, so he tries not to tower over anyone. He's recruited a colleague to critique his meetings with employees, to make sure he sends the right message and sets an encouraging tone.

His hand-picked deputy, Wayne Hale, a shorter, stouter fellow, is stocking up on sociology books and reshaping the team that oversees each shuttle flight, along with the team's conference table.

"We talk about the shape of the table and everybody giggles," he says.

Hale hasn't hit the furniture store yet. But he's trying to figure out "how to deal with the human question, the human element in these communication issues."

This is all penance for Columbia's final flight.

Fear factor

Columbia accident investigators blasted NASA for creating an environment in which engineers were too afraid to speak up about potential dangers and managers were too caught up with flight schedules.

The space agency's broken culture, along with a ripped slice of insulating foam, proved deadly for Columbia and its seven astronauts. For Challenger and its seven astronauts 17 years earlier, it was a decayed culture combined with cold-stiffened O-rings.

The flight director who guided the Apollo 11 moon landing and the Apollo 13 rescue finds the space agency's new, soft, mushy approach distasteful - and flat-out wrong.

"Look, these people are professionals. They're being paid a professional wage. If they have a problem, I expect them to stand up and speak up. Period," says Gene Kranz, the subject of the recent History Channel documentary, "Failure Is Not an Option." The title is borrowed from his 2000 autobiography.

"We've got 19- and 20- and 21-year-olds over in Iraq right now who have to make daily decisions. It's no ambiguity. I don't think we should expect anything less of the people who are working in the space program. Daily decisions, no ambiguity," the 70-year-old Kranz says, his words clipped as short as his lifelong crewcut.

Kranz isn't the only old-timer complaining about the New Age NASA.

Retired space program veterans from the 1960s and '70s are asking Hale how he, as chairman of the mission management team for all future shuttle flights, will make potential life-and-death decisions if there is an overload of opinion, gut feelings and hunches - and no consensus.

Do what we did, they tell him.

Hale shudders at the thought.

"They were dealing with all-white males, and there was a lot of in-your-face, militaristic almost (communication)," says Hale, 49, a former shuttle flight director.

Soft-spoken and bald with a storyteller's voice and a fondness for space-motif and stars-and-stripes ties, he says: "I'm still a student at this, but if you want to inhibit communication, that's a good way to do it these days."

Even Parsons, 46, a former Marine infantry officer, disapproves of nose-to-nose yelling matches.

"To be honest, there are a lot of people I thought were much more qualified to do this job than myself. But I think the reason I was picked is because I can nurture a team. I can help that team grow confidence in itself," he says in a thick Mississippi accent.

Parsons was director of NASA's Stennis Space Center in his home state when the space agency asked him to move to Houston for the top shuttle job last spring, three months after the Columbia tragedy. He replaced Ron Dittemore, the face and voice of NASA in the wake of the disaster.

A one-time sub-six-minute-miler, Parsons maintains a runner's physique under natty dress suits. He knows he can't escape his big Marine image.

"But I've spent my life trying to make sure that I didn't intimidate people. I don't like to walk up to people and tower over them. I know how that feels," he says.

"I care about people's feelings."

``The price was too high''

NASA spaceflight officials never used to worry about the emotional ramifications of their actions or fear among the working masses - "the working-level devils," as Kranz affectionately calls them.

The opinions of technicians and engineers, no matter how low on the ladder, were not only respected, but sought by flight directors like the legendary Kranz. He practiced "defense in depth," so that if a technical problem slipped past one group, it would be caught by the next, or the next. He demanded toughness, competence, confidence.

He contends the NASA of yesteryear would not have allowed the Columbia accident. The system would have fixed the recurring launch problem of breakaway fuel-tank foam, he says.

Midlevel management - gutted during the 1990s to save money - is where Kranz would turn to hear about workers' gut feelings. If two or three workers had the same hunch - even without data to back it up - then that would be enough for Kranz to call a halt and investigate, and to collect more data.

The framed plaque from that era still hangs in the Mission Evaluation Room at Johnson Space Center, downstairs from Mission Control:

"In God we trust, all others bring data."

With Columbia, engineers had no data, just a sick, sinking feeling when they saw the video and film images of the chunk of foam smacking the ship's left wing during liftoff in January. Their repeated requests for spy satellite pictures were ignored or overruled, so no one knew Columbia had a mortal gash that would let in scorching atmospheric gases when the spacecraft headed home.

To his everlasting regret, Hale - who initially pursued the request for satellite photos - ultimately came down on the side of mission management team leader Linda Ham, who nixed the pictures.

Hale grows quiet when asked if the episode was a good lesson in his new role as Ham's replacement: "It's a lesson that was too dear to learn ... the price was too high."

``Now you talk about guilt''

Columbia was lost over Texas that Saturday morning in February, when the ship ripped apart just 16 minutes short of a Florida homecoming. Hale was waiting at the Kennedy Space Center landing strip, along with other agency bigwigs and the astronauts' families.

By summer, Ham was shoved into a lower-ranking engineering job and Hale was moving back to Houston from Cape Canaveral.

Parsons needed him.

Not only does Hale live every day with the pain of being wrong, he also knows firsthand what it's like to be too afraid to speak up.

Last year, he was angry when NASA headquarters in Washington issued computer screen-savers to shuttle managers counting down in days, hours, minutes and seconds to the Feb. 19, 2004, launch date for the final U.S. segment of the international space station.

Hale vowed to write NASA boss Sean O'Keefe that the screen-savers were sending the wrong message by stressing flight deadlines and putting pressure on everyone. But he didn't.

"I was inhibited for sociological reasons. He's way up there, I'm way down here. He didn't want my advice and he didn't know who I am.

"Now you talk about guilt."

In its final report in August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board cited the screen-savers as evidence of the timetable pressure that contributed to the tragedy.

There were other signs that troubled Hale long before the Columbia breakup, yet he never complained to the people who mattered like O'Keefe or NASA's previous chief, Daniel Goldin.

Throughout the 1990s, shuttle managers kept being pressed from the top to make do with less money - and to even do more. Hale penny-pinched along with the rest.

"It's the frog in the pot of water story," Hale says. "You try to put a frog in a boiling pot of water, he'll jump out. If you put him in a pot of cold water and turn the heat up, slowly by degrees, you can cook the frog. Well, I think we were in the pot of water that slowly got turned up by degrees and didn't realize what we were up against."

``We can't get it wrong this time''

Now, Parsons, Hale and everyone else at NASA vow to carry out all 29 recommendations made by the Columbia investigators, regardless of cost or consternation. Half the new measures are to be fulfilled before shuttle flights resume a year or more from now.

As the mission management chairman, Hale is doubling the team members to more than 30, insisting on daily meetings that run as long as necessary during flights, requiring thorough briefings on the fuel tank, booster rockets and other critical components, bringing in outside experts for group decision-making advice, and putting everyone through training sessions that mimic emergencies.

The Columbia investigators insisted on expanded training for mission managers, following their dismal performance in January.

As part of the catharsis - for him and the entire shuttle program - Hale is also readily accepting blame for the disaster. No whining. No denying.

"We fouled up," he says.

According to Hale, some at NASA still believe there isn't much to fix, just a tweak here and there.

Others wonder what the culture fuss is all about.

"Culture. I don't know exactly what that word means. I'm going to find out, I'm sure, in the next year or so what it means," says Milt Heflin, an Apollo veteran who heads NASA's flight director office.

At the opposite extreme are those calling for radical, revolutionary change.

"The truth probably lies somewhere in between, as it generally does," Hale says.

Parsons already sees a shift in attitude and a desire to learn from mistakes. But he says it will be a gradual process.

"I don't want to give the impression that people are different and they've changed, and now we've seen the light," Parsons says. "We are working on it."

Everyone knows, deep down, that failure is no longer an option.

"I'm kind of surprised that the program didn't end when Columbia crashed," says Hale. "Before, I would have told you one more shuttle accident and we'll be done.

"The country right now is giving us another chance, and we can't get it wrong this time."

from TPDL 2001-Nov-7, from WorldNetDaily:

U.S. Army Muslim chaplain questions duty
Captain gets mixed signals from foreign Islamic leaders

As the U.S. geared up for military action in Afghanistan, Army Chaplain Capt. Abd Al-Rasheed Muhammad began questioning the permissibility of a fight against fellow Muslims.

Muhammad, the imam of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, sent an inquiry on the matter to the North American Fiqh Council, which deals with matters of Islamic jurisprudence. In turn, according to reports published in the Arabic-language press, the matter was referred to clerics in the Arab world.

At first, the clerics issued a Fatwa, or edict, permitting Muslim soldiers to take part in the fighting if there was no alternative. The council delivered the ruling to Muhammad. But on Oct. 30, the editor of the Arabic London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported that the clerics who signed this Fatwa had changed their minds and abrogated their previous Fatwa with a new one prohibiting participation of Muslim soldiers in the war in Afghanistan, according to reports translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

The text of the new edict has not yet been released, according to MEMRI. Meanwhile, Muslim soldiers facing duty in Afghanistan or other Muslim countries have no clear religious guidance from Islamic clergy.

Seven years earlier, according to MEMRI, when he was asked by the Arab weekly Al-Majalah following his appointment as chaplain in 1994 about his opinion on American forces fighting in Islamic countries, Muhammad said, "We are soldiers, not politicians. Obeying orders is a fundamental part of the work of the military, but I hope that America's relations with Islamic countries and with other countries will be always good, and if we are forced to intervene, the intervention will be positive. I pray to Allah every day that we will not be forced to fight our Muslim brothers, although Muslims kill each other in their civil wars here and there, which saddens me."

But, following the Sept. 11 attacks, Muhammad decided it was best to consult with external Islamic authorities. In his letter to the council, he outlined the goals of the coming war and said he believed there are more than 15,000 Muslim military personnel that serve in all three branches of the U.S. armed forces. He wondered if they should resign or request other duties under the circumstances.

Taha Jaber Al-Alwani, president of the North American Figh Council, explained last month to London's Al-Sharq Al-Awsat why he consulted other Islamic clerics in the Arab world following Muhammad's request: "When a question is referred to us, we often consult with our brothers, colleagues and teachers in the Islamic world. We send the question to several experts among the clerics, and when we receive their answers, we [usually] adopt their Fatwas as they are written and back them up with proof and explanations — because the Western mind, as you know, cannot accept anything if it is not proven and explained. Sometimes, we introduce changes in the Fatwa. ..."

"Many Fatwas [on the matter] were issued at the time of the Gulf War," he explained, "and we tried to gather and study them. At the same time, we sent [Muhammad's inquiry] on to a group of clerics in the Muslim world, asking that they advise us about the new catastrophe."

Al-Alwani said there were instances during the Gulf War when Muslim military personnel were advised to transfer to auxiliary corps such as supplies and transportation.

"It appeared that several Muslim military personnel's refusal to serve in the war against a Muslim nation led to Muslim American soldiers being looked at askance," he added. "Therefore, we made sure that the matter did not reach the Arab or Western media, and that it would remain between us and the Muslim chaplains in the U.S. Department of Defense."

Al-'Alwani also expressed doubts as to whether Osama bin Laden was responsible for the attacks on the U.S. In an article that appeared in the Saudi daily Al-Watan, Al-'Alwani implied that Israel was actually behind the attacks.

According to MEMRI, Al-'Alwani's inquiry was directed to three Arab clerics: Yussuf Al-Qaradhawi, one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, UNESCO representative Haytham Al-Khayyat, who was presented in the Fatwa as an Islamic scholar from Syria, and Muhammad Salim Al-'Awa. These three also brought in Judge Tareq Al-Bishri and Islamist columnist Fahmi Huweidi.

Two weeks earlier, reports MEMRI, on his television program on the Qatar channel Al-Jazeera, Al-Qaradhawi issued a call to Arab and Islamic countries not to assist the U.S. in its war in Afghanistan. He stated that should the Taliban declare a jihad against the U.S., "Muslims must help as best they can." Al-Qaradhawi also said that although he condemns the attacks against civilians in the U.S., "we must fight the American army if we can."

But the resulting Fatwa appeared to starkly contrast with earlier statements by some of those who drafted it.

"All Muslims ought to be united against all those who terrorize the innocents, and those who permit the killing of non-combatants without a justifiable reason," it said. "Islam has declared the spilling of blood and the destruction of property as absolute prohibitions until the Day of Judgment. … It is incumbent upon our military brothers in the American armed forces to make this stand and its religious reasoning well-known to all their superiors, as well as to their peers, and to voice it and not to be silent. Conveying this is part of the true nature of the Islamic teachings that have often been distorted or smeared by the media."

It continued: "Furthermore, the questioner inquires about the possibility of the Muslim military personnel in the American armed forces to serve in the back lines — such as in the relief services sector and similar works. If such requests are granted by the authorities, without reservation or harm to the soldiers, or to other American Muslim citizens, then they should request that. Otherwise, if such request raises doubts about their allegiance or loyalty, cast suspicions, present them with false accusations, harm their future careers, shed misgivings on their patriotism, or similar sentiments, then it is not permissible to ask for that."

"To sum up, it is acceptable — Allah willing — for the Muslim American military personnel to partake in the fighting in the upcoming battles, against whomever their country decides has perpetrated terrorism against them. Keeping in mind to have the proper intention as explained earlier, so no doubts would be cast about their loyalty to their country, or to prevent harm from befalling them as might be expected. This is in accordance with the Islamic jurisprudence rules, which state that necessities dictate exceptions, as well as the rule that says one may endure a small harm to avoid a much greater harm," concluded the Fatwa.

But the edict prompted immediate opposition.

Sheikh Muhammad Al-Hanooti, a member of the North American Fiqh Council, stated at an Oct. 12 press conference of the American Muslim Council: "Muslims can fight provided that they get legitimacy [by religious ruling] for what they are going to do, if a certain people ... or country are judicially indicted. … Up to this moment, I don't see any evidence or proof [against the Taliban or bin Laden]. ... We cannot take action without judicial indictment [of bin Laden]. I know there is a crime done. The people who did it are criminals, but who should decide about their indictment? A judge. I disagree with anyone who gives support to the action taken by the president of the United States without this kind of indictment."

Al-Hanooti concluded: "Therefore, we cannot participate as American soldiers in a war whose legitimacy in Islamic religious law has not been established, regardless of whom we fight against, Muslims or non-Muslims."

Ahmad Al-Raysouni, professor of Shari'ah at the University of Morocco, said: "It is not permissible to launch any attacks against Muslims, to fight them or to carry out any transgression against them. In a show of respect to Muslim creed and [the Muslim American soldiers'] feelings, the American administration, I think, will appreciate the attitude of Muslims and will avoid pushing Muslims forward to kill their fellow brothers. The U.S. administration may also consider the issue through strategic perspectives with the aim of preserving discipline and stability in the American army. However, if Muslim American soldiers are called upon to participate in a war launched against their fellow Muslim brothers, then they should decline and apologize."

Ali Jum'ah, professor of the Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence at Al-Azhar University, saw Muslim American soldiers' refusal to participate in the American offensive as a form of jihad: "Fighting in the cause of Allah is an obligation upon Muslims. It's worth stressing here that jihad has a wider meaning, which is related to man's role on earth, rather than being confined to defending one's country, honor, property and worldly riches. A Muslim is a brother of another Muslim. So he should neither oppress him nor hand him over to an oppressor. ...

"Now, it is not allowed for a Muslim who is currently recruited in the American army to fight against Muslims, neither in Afghanistan nor anywhere else. ... If a Muslim is forced to participate in the military campaign, then he should take care not to kill [another] Muslim, under any circumstances. [He must not offer] help or [give] clues that might help capture his fellow Muslim brothers or ease killing them."

A Hamas leader, Bassam Jarar, called Al-Qaradhawi to ask for a copy of the ruling, and then sent his response to the Palestinian daily Al-Quds. Jarar addressed the claim that "necessity permits things that are prohibited," a phrase appearing in the Arabic version of the Fatwa but missing from the English version. "It is known that the necessity does not permit murder," he said. According to Jarar, since Al-Qaradhawi sees participation in the fighting as a "necessity," such fighting is clearly forbidden by Islamic religious law.

Jarar also said that the penalty for soldiers in the American army who refuse to fight is in any event only a few months in jail. He concluded by saying that a Muslim soldier who refuses to participate in the war in Afghanistan for the reason that it is forbidden by Islamic religious law is actually in a very strong position when he faces the American judicial system.

Later, opposition to the Fatwa came from the same clerics who issued it.

On Oct. 30, the editor of the Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported that the clerics abrogated their position with a new Fatwa, which invalidated the former one and prohibited the participation of Muslim soldiers in the U.S. armed forces in the war in Afghanistan.

from TPDL 2001-Nov-7, from the The Washington Times, by Rowan Scarborough:

Air Force slow to transfer special bomb kits to Navy

The Navy is running low on special kits used to turn "dumb" bombs into precision munitions for attacks in Afghanistan, but as of yesterday the Air Force had not agreed to transfer the equipment, said Pentagon officials.

"The Navy has asked the Air Force to share," said one official. "The Air Force is resisting, but I don't think they'll refuse."

The Navy is doing the bulk of tactical air strikes while Air Force fighters sit on the sidelines due to a lack of bases in countries near Afghanistan. Precision munitions are in high demand to hit military and terrorists targets, but leave nearby civilians unharmed.

Meanwhile, two officials told The Washington Times that Gen. Tommy Franks, the war's U.S. commander, has requested the Navy further increase its role by sending a fourth carrier to the region.

The Navy is examining how to meet the request without upsetting deployment schedules. The Navy's carrier battle groups cover specific regions of the world, such as the Pacific and Persian Gulf, while other carriers receive repairs or conduct training for the next six-month deployment.

"The Navy is figuring out what sacrifices to make to get it there," said a senior official. "They're living with 12 carriers in a war where we need 15."

Officials said the request for a fourth carrier is a sign the Bush administration plans to step up bombing in anticipation of commando strikes against the ruling Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.

There are now three carriers off the coast of Pakistan: the USS Carl Vinson, the USS Theodore Roosevelt and the USS Kitty Hawk.

The Kitty Hawk is primarily being used as a platform to launch special-operations troops and helicopters.

The bombing began Oct. 7 with the carrier USS Enterprise in the region, but the Navy last week ended its extended deployment.

The officials say the Navy-Air Force negotiations are part of a much larger debate going on among Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's staff on the future of tactical aircraft and long-range bombers.

In Afghanistan, the Navy is flying virtually all tactical strike missions. The imbalance is due to the fact the Air Force has no basing rights in Central Asia.

It has sent a few F-15E strike fighters from Kuwait, but the 14-hour round trip makes the sortie questionable for the limited amount of ordnance the jet carries.

Defense officials say basing rights, or "denied access," as policy-makers call the issue, has prompted Pentagon officials to rethink the allocation of future bombers and fighters. The sources say some are discussing whether meeting 21st- century threats means the Navy should be buying more strike aircraft. And some are suggesting the Air Force should acquire fewer fighters in favor of a new long-range bomber whose larger bomb payload justifies lengthy flight times.

The Afghanistan campaign, these officials say, has bolstered the Navy's argument that the country still needs large-deck carriers and their 80 warplanes to project power overseas, even when elusive terrorists are the enemy.

Some Rumsfeld aides have looked at the idea of developing smaller, faster carriers instead of the large flattops — much to the Navy's chagrin.

With the Air Force virtually locked out of the tactical air war, the Bush administration is trying to win basing rights in Tajikistan, which borders Afghanistan on the north. A U.S. military team is now in Tajikistan surveying three former Soviet air bases for their suitability to launch warplanes.

Such an arrangement would get the Air Force into the tactical air war and perhaps douse Pentagon talk of cutting their buy of new fighters. The Air Force has plans to buy 339 F-22 stealth fighters for about $62 billion. The Air Force, the Navy and Marine Corps want to procure thousands of a multirole warplane, the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF).

Pentagon budgeteers are examining both programs this fall as the administration prepares it first five-year defense plan.

The needed "kits" are guidance systems and fins that turn a 2,000-pound bomb into a laser-guided munition or a satellite-linked Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAMs). The Navy and Air Force have dropped thousands of munitions during 31-days of bombing, and a larger portion are either laser bombs or JDAMs.

In Afghanistan, the Air Force's bombing role is limited to heavy bombers: B-2 stealth aircraft from Whitman Air Force Base, Mo., and B-2 and B-52 bombers based on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

"Experts believed the Air Force would always provide the lion's share of fighters," said one Pentagon official, who, like other sources for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Hence, the Air Force has more fighter munitions than the Navy. But in this war, Air Force fighters can't get to the fight. So we need to use the munitions the Air Force was supposed to be dropping right now. That's the issue in a nutshell."

In other recent conflicts, the Air Force enjoyed generous basing rights near their targets. Its jets launched from NATO bases in Italy for the relatively short trip to Kosovo in 1998. For attacks on Iraq in 1991, Air Force jets took off from the neighboring states of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and other countries in the Gulf.

"The Navy is doing all the work and the Air Force is scared," said a defense official. "This 'denied access' is a huge issue that everyone knew would come to haunt the Air Force."

from The Weekly Standard, 2001-Oct-29, by Erin Sheley:

Harvard Hates ROTC
But that may be changing.

Cambridge, Mass.

HARVARD SQUARE is looking strange these days. With red, white, and blue fluttering from every street lamp and storefront, the city affectionately known as the "People's Republic of Cambridge" seems to have undergone a complete makeover. In the wake of September 11, this new patriotic sentiment has revived an old debate: whether Harvard University should allow the Reserve Officer Training Corps to return to campus.

The conflict over ROTC's compatibility with Harvard goes back a generation. Then the issue was Vietnam; now it's gays in the military. A university code prohibits student groups from discriminating on the basis of race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. This means, for instance, that the university will not recognize single-sex fraternities and sororities; nor, because of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, will it allow the formation of a ROTC unit on campus.

Harvard disbanded its ROTC detachment during the Vietnam era, but continued to fund cadets who participated in the program at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1989, however, Harvard cadet David E. Carney was expelled from the unit when it became known that he was a homosexual. In response, a student-faculty committee adopted a policy that prohibited Harvard funding of further ROTC activities. In addition, ROTC is prohibited from recruiting at student activities fairs, and cadets may not sit for their senior yearbook portraits in uniform.

While Harvard's policy raises numerous financial and logistics hurdles for ROTC participants--not the least of which is finding transportation to MIT for drills in the early morning hours--many cadets have found the symbolic effects of the university's policy even more harmful. Cadet Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Cromwell, commander of MIT's Paul Revere Battalion, decries "an inherent negative stigma attached to any organization not condoned or supported by the administration." Students, he says, "are left asking why. Why don't they allow kids to participate?"

Still, since September 11 the military has enjoyed a higher profile on campus. The Harvard Crimson has run front-page stories about students in the reserves preparing for the possibility of being called up. Newly installed Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers has warned the Undergraduate Council "to be careful about adopting any policy on campus of non-support for those involved in defending the country," and has expressed "pride" in Harvard's cadets.

This changing attitude has encouraged proponents both inside and outside to push for the restoration of a Harvard ROTC program. A group of alumni, including former Defense secretary Caspar Weinberger, '38, has organized "Advocates for Harvard ROTC." The group has collected over a thousand signatures of alumni, students, and faculty who support the return of the ROTC to campus. The results are hard to gauge. According to David Clayman, '38, the chairman of the organization, "All we've seen so far is that President Summers feels that it's a noble endeavor." He goes on to emphasize the fact that "the inaccessibility of the armed forces to those who are supposed to be the best and brightest in the country does a disservice to the nation." Clayman notes that a similar effort is underway among Yale alumni, to bring ROTC back to New Haven.

Within the college, as well, supporters of ROTC have sought to re-open the debate. Undergraduate Council member John Bash, '03, has announced his intention to put the issue on the table at a meeting of the Student Affairs Committee of the Council. Says Bash, "We need to recognize that the anti-discrimination policy cannot be strictly adhered to, but [must be] judged on a case by case basis. Why do we recognize the football team or women's basketball team? The need is greater than ever for military leaders with the highest intellectual capabilities, as we are engaging in a war that is more about tactics, intelligence, and strategy than brute man and machine power."

The fact remains that the return of ROTC would require a major revision in university policy. According to Clifford Davidson, '02, founder of BOND, a non-political organization for homosexual students and their supporters, "individual communities should be able to establish their own guiding principles. To make exceptions to this would render the community's principle moot, defeating the purpose of creating a policy (and a community) in the first place. Thus, the only argument to be had is whether or not Harvard should do away with its sexual orientation non-discrimination policy."

The issue of ROTC at Harvard highlights the more general tensions of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. The argument for ROTC restoration--that the university should provide an opportunity to students who want to serve their country--is not unlike the argument of gays who wish to serve their country as soldiers and complain it is unfair to deny them that opportunity.

But Harvard's hostility to ROTC stems ultimately from a deep ambivalence about the military. ROTC was first disbanded during the turbulence of the '60s--long before the phrase "don't ask, don't tell" had ever been coined. For its restoration to take place, what must be overcome is not just a set of university rules, but a legacy of anti-military sentiment, born in the Vietnam era, that ever since has shaped Harvard's attitude towards its ROTC members.

In other words, the serious struggle of the ROTC restorationists is against a history of entrenched opposition to the military in elite intellectual communities. The flags in Harvard Square suggest that may be changing.

Erin Sheley is a senior at Harvard University and serves on the editorial board of the Harvard Political Review.

from TPDL 2001-Oct-2, from the New York Post, by Rod Dreher:

THE YOUNG AND THE GUTLESS

Our enemies know what they believe.

They're willing to kill for it.

And, more importantly, they're willing to die for it.

Are the young men and women who may be called on to defend our civilization willing to make the same sacrifice?

Anecdotal information cannot conclusively answer that question - thank heavens.

If liberty had to depend on most of the young people I spoke to in Washington Square Park the other day, we'd all be answering to Osama by Christmas.

"I'm not big on war," says Patrick Mulryan, 21, an aspiring actor. "I'm gay, so I'm not big on the military."

Well, the Islamic extremists our military are preparing to attack are not big on gays.

In Afghanistan, Osama's Taliban supporters execute gays by crushing them under demolished walls.

Recent college graduate Philip Rosenbloom, 21, is also unwilling to put his life on the line to defend his country, which he says "to some extent, has been something of a bully."

NYU student Jonathan Chen, 20, thinks that war is wrong, wrong, wrong.

But as for terrorists, Chen insists that "we have to take care of them."

"We," but not "he"?

Does Chen mean that other men have to be willing to die to protect his freedom?

Yes. Some people are born for that purpose, he says.

"There are people who are more willing to fight, who have the mindset of killing people," Chen says. "Not everybody is meant to fight."

Chen has "hopes and dreams" of becoming a filmmaker, and he doesn't want to "endanger" them, he says.

Presumably, those brave firefighters who went to their deaths in those burning towers to save the lives of strangers had no hopes and dreams worthy of concern.

Perhaps, men and women who are willing to die to defend Chen's right to pursue his hopes and dreams have none themselves.

NYU student Justin Tables, 19, saw one of the towers collapse in front of his eyes.

Still, he is unwilling to risk his life to fight the terrorists because "this is all [America's] fault anyway."

Jason Toledo, 19, is the only draft-age man I can find who would be willing to die for his country in the coming war. He says he's not enthusiastic about fighting, but he would go if America called.

Toledo, an NYU student from Atlanta, says he's wondered a lot if Americans have the backbone to fight such a dedicated enemy. The terrorist-themed Bruce Willis film "The Siege" has been on his mind.

"There's a saying in that movie that the most committed wins. That's scary, because we're not about causes here. We're about individualism," he says.

Toledo cautions me not to take the young men in Washington Square as representative of the whole country.

"Man, we're in the Village. I don't know anyone who would go, even if there were a draft," he says.

Still, you have to figure that you could have gone into Washington Square Park in December 1941 and found plenty of liberal young men who were willing to go fight Tojo and Hitler, neither of whom had done what Osama bin Laden did: mount a sneak attack that murdered more than 6,000 in New York, live on TV.

That was then. This is now. Maybe the Muslim fanatics are right, and we in the free world have become decadent beyond all saving.

God help us. We may soon see.

from TPDL 2001-May-7, from WorldNetDaily, by Joseph Farah:

The American Empire

During the Clinton administration, America deployed more U.S. forces to more foreign countries than ever before.

Incredibly, at the same time, the Clinton White House oversaw U.S. military forces cut by 40 percent.

You might think, with a new administration in place, there would be wide debate about such policies. Yet, the Bush administration has said and done little to suggest a radical change in policy will be forthcoming.

In fact, the Bush administration has already renewed bombing attacks on Iraq -- a nasty regime to be sure, but the continuation of a misguided, unconstitutional and un-American foreign and military policy to say the least.

It's time someone put the question to Bush: We have 211,000 American service personnel stationed in 139 countries around the world. We have another 26,000 serving on naval vessels in foreign waters. Why? And when are we going to start bringing them home in droves?

Think about it. The U.S. still has 70,000 soldiers serving in Germany today. Germany! Those troops were deployed there during the Cold war, when the U.S. and western Europe feared a Soviet invasion was imminent. What is the rationale for keeping them there today?

The U.S. still has 40,570 troops in Japan. Are we worried the emperor is going to make a comeback and bomb Pearl Harbor? Are we worried China is about to invade Japan? If so, why do we extend to China most favored nation trading status?

The U.S. still has 36,263 troops in South Korea. Now, this is one place where there is a constant threat of war. North Korea is still technically in a state of war with the South, and the U.S. may be able to justify the continued presence. But why isn't there any debate about it? Why aren't long-term alternatives to this policy being discussed? Are we going to defend South Korea forever? Wouldn't we be better off helping the South Koreans to defend themselves against potential aggression?

The U.S. still has 11,564 troops occupying Italy. Why? Do we fear the reincarnation of Benito Mussolini? From whom are we protecting Italians? Themselves?

The U.S. even has 11,274 troops in Great Britain. Great Britain has a pretty good military force of its own. Don't we trust them to defend themselves?

The U.S. has a force of 7,169 in Bosnia-Herzegovina. What vital interests does the U.S. have there?

The U.S. maintains a force of 5,469 in Kuwait. Is Kuwait paying us for this protection? I don't think so. And the U.S. should not be in the mercenary business anyway. It's not in our Constitution.

The U.S. has 5,423 troops in Serbia, including Kosovo. Hey, Slobodan Milosevic is gone. He was arrested by his own countrymen. Enough is enough, already.

The U.S. has a force of 5,397 troops in Saudi Arabia defending the wealthy tyrants in that desert country. Why should ordinary Americans pay with blood and hard-earned money to protect Saudi Arabia?

The U.S. has 2,123 troops in Spain, 2,105 in Turkey, 1,677 in Iceland, 1,598 in Belgium, 1,112 in Bahrain, 997 in Portugal, 774 in the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, 670 in the Netherlands, 627 in Diego Garcia and 517 in Greece.

There are smaller U.S. troop commitments in Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen, Uganda, Russia and 12 other countries that formerly comprised the Soviet Union.

Why aren't we talking about bringing any of these troops home?

This would be a sensible way to cut military spending. This would be a sensible way to get back to our constitutional republic. This would be a sensible way to stop being the policeman of the world.

But no ... there is no end in sight to this madness. We have not learned the lessons of every other empire in the history of the world that spread itself too thin, that over-committed its resources, that didn't understand that every fight is not its fight.

Are there serious threats to American security in the world? You bet there are. But we can never be prepared for them with our military forces spread far and wide across the globe. In fact, this is insurance that we won't be ready for the next war, the next flashpoint, when it inevitably comes.

I say bring the troops home now.

from TPDL 2001-Jun-12, from Insight magazine, by J. Michael Waller:

Defend America!

Senate Democrats, Russia, China and North Korea are using the same playbook hoping to scuttle President Bush's plans to implement a national missile defense.

Here is the question: Who says that President George W. Bush's new missile-defense initiative will undermine the strategic balance, encourage nuclear proliferation, start a new arms race and increase the likelihood of nuclear war?

a. Chinese Defense Minister Chi Haotian.

b. Leaders of the Russian general staff.

c. The North Korean Communist Party newspaper Rodong Sinmun.

d. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

Answer: All of the above.

A global political battle is unfolding over U.S. deployment of defenses against incoming ballistic missiles a battle bearing many of the hallmarks of the Cold War. Not long ago, most of the world from Beijing to Boston was united against a U.S. missile-defense system that could shoot down long-range ballistic missiles. But no more.

Bush came to office in January promising to build a missile-defense shield. Within two weeks of inauguration he sent Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to Europe to make clear that the United States would defend itself regardless of world opinion and that the allies should just come aboard. Rhetoric against U.S. missile defense from the predominantly socialist governments in Europe virtually evaporated.

One by one, the dominoes fell. European Union defense chief Javier Solan