Terrorism and Immigration

No, not all Muslims are terrorists.  And not all Muslims in the US are terrorists.  Clearly, very very few are.  But we don’t know which are which, and the non-terrorists have a bad habit of relativizing, sympathizing with, providing aid and comfort to, and otherwise showing more concern for themselves and their tribe than the broader community.

Equally important, the non-terrorist side of the ledger adds very little to our common and collective life.  We could do without any more such immigrants, and we should work to encourage self-deportation among those already here who are not firmly rooted.

Don’t expect to hear this from the Marco Rubio wing of the Republican Party any time soon.

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America: Beta Male of the World

America does nice things all the time all around the world, and we are rewarded with contempt, hatred, and hostility.  We are like the “Nice Guy” who gets to be alternately a sucker and an emotional punching bag, while the “Bad Boys” get to do what (and whom) they want. 

Today, an Albanian Muslim terrorist was arrested in my neck of the woods. He’s from Kosovo, a criminal neighborhood that the Serbs were cleaning up until NATO decided to align with the Albanian terrorists in 1999 and bombed the hell out of the Serbs.  The false pretenses of the war were soon exposed; indeed, they were many times flimsier than the WMD claims in Iraq.  But it’s all down the memory hole now.

 

Thanks to American airpower, these Albanian clients run prostitution and drugs through the Balkans with little interference.  Even their criminal leader Hacim Thaci  is in on the act.  Sometimes we get to harvest the fruits of their civilization, as in today’s terrorist bomb scare in Tampa.  One of the worst consequence of Humanitarian Wars is that we often get a flood of refugees, even though these wars themselves are supposed to render fleeing from atrocities obsolete.  We have Somalis, Haitians, Palestinians, Egyptians, Kurds, Iraqis, and every other people from the planet Earth living here on various asylum and refugee visas, often engaged in menial work at best and criminal terorrism at worst. We stupidly think the Muslim newcomers will be greatful for us “helping them” or for being exposed to our wonderful way of life, but let’s look at the record.  We’ve helped them in Afghanistan it the 80s, in the entire Israeli-Palestinian peace process, today in Egypt and Afghanistan, yesterday in Somalia and Kuwait and Kosovo, and it makes no difference.  We are hated.  And sometimes we are killed.  Let’s not forget Mohammad Atta and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad both spent a lot of time in the West.  They hated the place too.  Sami Osmakac’s ingratitude and hostility is not new. 

Of course, not all Muslims are terrorists.  Indeed, the vast majority are not.  But Muslims are probably 100X more likely to be terrorists. When they’re not terrorists, they often obfuscate and make excuses for terrorism.  They often are hostile to our country, even if they are nonviolent and do not formally endorse terrorism.  Their marginal contributions to our collective life make their presence in our country a luxury (and more like a liability) that we simply cannot afford.  Indeed, when the US acted tougher–as in bombing Libya to smithereens in 1986–its tough and unapologetic actions have paid much better dividends than our Nice Guy routine today in Iraq and Afghanistan.  And when we acted tougher at home, such as in our rough treatment of Japanese and German agents and supporters in World War II, we found relatively little sabotage and domestic terrorism.

To deal with militant Islam we don’t necessarily need to do any favors for Muslims in Muslim lands.  But whether we shoudl be activist or isolationist, we certainly don’t need to add to the Muslim threat at home by inviting “refugees” and others from the most alien and hostile civilization on earth.  We must live in reality to remain an independent nation, just as we must learn about and master reality to live as self-respecting individual men.

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Spontaneous Muslim Violence

It turns out the attacker (Arid Uka) of our troops transiting through Germany was a Albanian Muslim from Kosovo.   Apparently the West’s concerted attack on Christian Serbia in 1999 on behalf of the terrorist KLA earned us few rewards among the worldwide Muslim community.  The 9/11 attacks, this attack, and countless other spontaneous attacks by Muslims ranging from Maj. Nidal Hasan (spree killer at Fort Hood) and Sgt Akbar (turncoat fragger in Kuwait) to Abdulhakim Muhammad (Arkansas military recruiters) and John Muhammad (DC Sniper) continue apace, one every few months it seems,  all spawned by the spontaneous and deeply rooted notion of obligatory violence known as “jihad.”

As in other patterns that defy liberal expectations, expect this attack too soon to go down the memory hole, dismissed as a lone whackjob or as the “act of a tiny minority” defying the peaceful essence of Islam.  Muslim attacks are becoming about as humdrum and common as black on white crime in the legacy media.  And our political and cultural leaders, particularly on the so-called right wing, are doing very little to correct the dominant narrative on either score. For a “religion of peace” an awful lot of Muslims (a) commit violence (b) in the name of their religion (c) to the applause of their less courageous coreligionists (d) with ample textual, scholarly, and popular justification of their violent acts as legitimate expressions of Islam.  This is bad, of course, but it’s also a reality we can address, by cordoning off most of the Muslim world, preventing immigrants into our lands, and dealing with them, at most, in an arms length way to acquire useful natural resources like oil.  Otherwise, let them stew in their backward juices and keep to themselves.

While Obama and Bush both claimed to be at war with terrorism, we are more at war with reality itself.  By way of analogy, it’s as if we were fighting World War II and declaring the Nazi Party–which ruled Germany, controlled its industry and military apparatus, and enthralled a great majority of its people–as a tiny clique that was not expressing the freedom-loving and peaceful desires of the real Germany.   Further, it’s as if the deliberate and highly ideological mass killings of Slavs and Jews and Communists by the Nazis in the name of Nazism were treated as an aberration, to which any deep inquiry into Nazi ideology would yield little insight.

Our media and politicians are a complete  joke, and the joke is costing lives on a daily basis.  It cost lives on 9/11.  It costs lives every time a Muslim in the West goes on a killing spree.  And it costs lives as we impossibly try to shove western freedoms and democracy down the throats of proud, backwards, and violent Muslim tribesman in Afghanistan and Iraq.   Precisely because Islam is inherently violent, prickly, proud, and xenophobic, we do ourselves no favors by showing up in their lands with an expeditionary force promising “freedom,” which, in reality and correct Muslim perception means the export of western values, attitudes, and practices which are anathema to Muslims.

We must deal with reality as it is, and an honest inquiry into reality makes it plain that Muslim extremists are not that rare, their supporters even less rare still, and a cursory review of the Koran and Islamic history find ample justification for the use of violence against “infidels.”  After all, this was once widely known as the “Religion of the Sword,” before George W’s indifferentist and self-deceptive description of Islam as the “Religion of Peace.”  As bad as this is, at least he didn’t talk about Islam being “revealed” on the Arabian peninsula, as Obama heretically did in his famous Cairo speech.

Bush pretended to fight Islamic terrorists but, in the process, concealed the reality of Islam out of his big tent and moronic belief that everyone everywhere wanted to live like Americans and be governed like America.  Obama, by contrast, hates America, doesn’t think anyone truly wants to be like us (nor that they ought to), and revels in using his office as American president to subvert symbolically American values and prestige by engaging in ritual obeisance to Islam and the Third World generally . . . hence Islam was “revealed.”

And today, as a result of the confusion of so many western leaders, media figures, and ordinary citizens, more Americans have died as martyrs to the Western commitment to open borders, diversity, indifference to religion, and other suicidally liberal ideas.  A war on terrorism, this is not, because the terrorism we fight is a tactic in a broader campaign to Islamicize the world and the west.  Once that is understood, the far less costly and necessary changes to our immigration laws, hairbrained democratization efforts, and other policies become self-evident.

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No Suicidally Liberal Deed Goes Unpunished

Byron York writes in the Washington Examine regarding liberal Portland’s politically correct refusal to cooperate with the FBI on antiterrorism:

In 2005, leaders in Portland, Oregon, angry at the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror, voted not to allow city law enforcement officers to participate in a key anti-terror initiative, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.  On Friday, that task force helped prevent what could have been a horrific terrorist attack in Portland.  Now city officials say they might re-think their participation in the task force — because Barack Obama is in the White House. . . .

What is ironic is that the operation that found and stopped Mohamud is precisely the kind of law enforcement work that Portland’s leaders, working with the American Civil Liberties Union, rejected during the Bush years.  In April 2005, the Portland city council voted 4 to 1 to withdraw Portland city police officers from participating in the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Mayor Tom Potter said the FBI refused to give him a top-secret security clearance so he could make sure the officers weren’t violating state anti-discrimination laws that bar law enforcement from targeting suspects on the basis of their religious or political beliefs.

Other city leaders agreed.  “Here in Portland, we are not willing to give up individual liberties in order to have a perception of safety,” said city commissioner Randy Leonard.  “It’s important for cities to know how their police officers are being used.”

Bush was wrong, terrorists don’t hate us because our freedom.

And Obama (and his liberal followers) are wrong, in that terrorists don’t hate us because we’re mistreating certain Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, though that is their contemporary pretext for attacking the United States and Europe.

Muslims hate us because we’re not Muslim.

The more radical (i.e., pious) ones believe this justifies terrorism.  The less radical believe that they must conquer us through persuasion, coupled with the ongoing demographic and moral collapse of the West.  They hate the West because, historically, the West was Christendom, the great anti-Muslim force in history.  It was other things, of course, the land of Michaelangelo and Kant and Issac Newton.  That is, our identity was not solely anti-Muslim, though it was primarily Christian.  And this Christianity required it to be anti-Muslim in self defense, which the West accomplished with great energy at Lepanto, Tours, and Vienna, as well as the Crusades.

After the Enlightenment, the West lost its way a bit; it stopped being self-consciously Christendom, but it never stopped being the dominant, attractive, wealthy, accomplished, anti-Muslim citadel to which the entire non-Muslim world looked to for leadership, technology, and also a bit of envy. We outshone the Muslim world, and this was unbearable to a people whose political, economic, and social system was supposedly divinely ordained, allegedly a formula not only for other-worldly happiness but also for worldly success.

Portland thought it was safe from this kind of thing because it felt so guilty for being Western and so consciously and publicly distanced itself from Bush’s wars to inculcate western freedoms to illiberal Muslim lands.  But Portland’s deracinated leadership forgot one thing:  that sometimes hate and injustice and aggressive rage arise naturally and predictably from the Others whom they hold so high on a pedestal.  Appeasement does not work to appease the uneappeaseable, world-historical program of Islam, which demands complete submission by every person on Earth.

It’s not clear if an event like this, even if successful, can remove the politically correct scales from the eyes of Portland’s leaders.  Theirs is a web of deception that will likely detect, even in this, a clarion call to redouble their efforts of outreach, tolerance, and the like.  Liberalism like that of Portland’s mayor renders intelligent people stupid and blind to basic reality.  It also can render whole societies dead if they do not have a revival of clear thinking and an affirmation of their right to continue to exist in their traditional form.

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Airline Security Uproar

I have to say, flying is a real drag these days, but the recent uproar over TSA strikes me as kind of immature.  I completely agree with what my friend Dave had to say on the subject, which is reprinted below:

I am fairly underwhelmed by the whole “don’t touch my junk” uproar.  To me it’s just another example of magical American thinking, and a good illustration of the meaningless of what passes for conservative thought when deeper issues are left unaddressed.

 

Yes we should be upset by the fact that we have an overly intrusive security check, but our hostility should be first directed at the open immigration polices, multiculturalism, and pacificism that are the root of the problem.  If we want to simultaneously a) let the third world flood into the West, b) ignore the reality of Islam, c) refuse to security profile based on race and religion, and d) fight foreign wars with kid gloves, we are going to have to put up with being constantly humiliated.  You can’t have it both ways.  If you don’t want to be groped, don’t fly, but I would personally rather not be blown out the sky by a slightly more competent underwear bomber.  Yes the typical American doesn’t deserve to have his privacy violated by some TSA drone, but the typical American also insists that Islam is the religion of peace.   

This is also an example to me of how the false freedom of open borders intrudes on our real freedoms, including the modest security regime that prevailed before 9/11.  So long as we have a free society and open borders, we will have an increasingly unfree society since wild, hostile, and ungovernable foreigners are not fit for American freedoms.

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President’s Latest Public Relations Debacle

Obama has stepped into an unnecessary public relations disaster, once again.  Last summer, he got involved in the Officer Crowley and Professor Gates event, and ended up permanently alienating many people who saw him transform from the post-racial healer into an old school, race-hustling politician.  He acted like a bully, and it was very clear where his loyalties lay.

Then he weighed in on the planned Ground Zero Mosque, stating he was supportive to a group of Muslims, then he said he was neutral but supported the Constitution, then he went back and forth a few more times and appeared altogether weak.  One thing he never acknowledged in his journey through these positions was that this was an incredibly bad idea to build the Mosque there and that critics had a legitimate point.  Now, it turns out, we’re told by the self-promoting Imam Rauf that there is no going back on the Mosque, because such backing down would be seen as an insult to Islam and lead to violence.  Always the violence, just waiting in the wings, from the “religion of peace.”

Finally, Obama has condemned the Koran-burning Florida pastor, Terry Jones, with no genuflection to his constitutional rights, and instead, acted against him with a full court press.  The Secretary of Defense, the Pope, the Secretary of State, plus countless media schills have piled on this guy.  And, in the most development to date, FBI agents visited the Church, ostensibly to warn Pastor Jones of death threats.  Jones, to his discredit, has backed down in the face of this massive public pressure, without any apparent change of ideas.  In other words, he was not persuaded, but cowed.  Pathetic.

At one point Obama stated “This kind of behavior or threats of action put our young men and women in harm’s way. And it’s also the best imaginable recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.”  I have no doubt there is some small truth to that, not least because Muslims are incredibly quick to anger. But why is all of his passion and all of his rhetoric addressed to an insignificant Florida pastor?  Why not also say something to the other side of this transaction:  the demented, hollering, wild eyed crazy people making these veiled threats in Afghanistan and elsewhere?  After all, Jones is threatening to burn a book, but these Muslim crazies are threatening to kill Americans in response.

If Obama really believed in and understood America, he would say something like this: “Anyone that engages in violence or judges the US because of the act of a small town preacher is despicable.  There is no right to resort to violence just because your feelings are hurt or your religion is insulted.  There is no moral equivalence whatsoever between burning a book and killing a human being.  Americans learned long ago that killing each other over religion, over speech, and over much else both weakens our society and also is wrong.  You people need to learn this as well, and while I do not support Pastor Jones’ disrespect for the Koran, I am sensible of my duty to protect his rights as an American, and so I’m not going to give into the veiled threats coming out of the Muslim world in response to his actions.  It’s his right as an American to burn a Koran and have any opinion he wants about Islam, and I will not bow to threats of violence in defending the rights of Americans.”

One thing we saw with Officer Crowley last summer was that standing up for yourself does more to slow down violent threats than the craven weakness.  After Crowley stood up for himself, Obama was a little shaken; he was used to the old white guilt shuffle. Obama learned to play white guilt like a violin growing up among his white single mom and his old school white liberal grandparents.  He was shaken by Crowley’s self-respect; it’s not something he has ever had much experience with. Obama ultimately retreated from his initial remarks that the officer acted “stupidly.”

In spite of the value of self-respect–which everyone from King David to General MacArthur demonstrate–weakness in the face of Islamic threats is displayed all the time by nearly all of our leaders and large institutions.  The defense of ourselves and our culture is absent in the face of repeated Muslim blackmail.  And, predictably, this feeds on itself, as Muslim incivility and violence is constantly being rewarded.  It’s analogous to the lavish public funds bestowed on cities beset by race rioting in the 1960s; as a result, we have perrenial threats of a “long, hot summer” from the Al Sharptons of the world ever since if payoffs of various kinds are not given to the right shakedown artists.

Islam has become the only religion in the western world protected from blasphemy due to a combination of threats, actual violence (such as the killing of Theo van Gogh), and series of weak-kneed responses by our leaders.  I recognize, frankly, that some of these elected officials don’t love America and want to see it brought low by the Third Worlders.  They identify with the outsiders and want to see the traditional American culture and people destroyed.  I believe Obama is off this ilk.  Some, however, clearly are just confused.  For these that do love America and want to see it made stronger, they could learn from Officer Crowley and similar episodes that a little self-respect and defiance go a long way.

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Are We Wasting Time in Afghanistan?

Ralph Peters had an excellent editorial on Afghanistan this week that I think lays out the problem with Obama’s half-surge:

Initially, Afghanistan wasn’t a war of choice. We had to dislodge and decimate al-Qaeda, while punishing the Taliban and strengthening friendlier forces in the country. Our great mistake was to stay on in an attempt to build a modernized rule-of-law state in a feudal realm with no common identity.

We needed to smash our enemies and leave. Had it proved necessary, we could have returned later for another punitive mission. Instead, we fell into the great American fallacy of believing ourselves responsible for helping those who’ve harmed us. This practice was already fodder for mockery 50 years ago, when the novella and film The Mouse That Roared postulated that the best way for a poor country to get rich was to declare war on America then surrender.

Even if we achieved the impossible dream of creating a functioning, unified state in Afghanistan, it would have little effect on the layered crises in the Muslim world. Backward and isolated, Afghanistan is sui generis (only example of its kind). Political polarization in the U.S. precludes an honest assessment, but Iraq’s the prize from which positive change might flow, while Afghanistan could never inspire neighbors who despise its backwardness.

This sounds right to me and accords with my own counsel in favor of a punitive raid concept of operations and my criticism of the facile distinctions made between Iraq and Afghanistan by Obama and other Democrats seeking to appear hawkish but also sensible and nuanced.

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India’s Umpteenth 9/11

There’s a lot of talk about the recent attacks in Bombay being India’s 9/11.  But there was another such attack by Islamic militants in July 2006, it killed over 200 people, and I wrote about it here.  In 1993, a series of bombings killed 250 Indians in the same city.  Neither event is exactly ancient history.

I am struck, however, about the massive death toll the modest number of terrorists–10 by the latest reports–were able to inflict.  Any open society, whether in Europe or North America risks these kinds of attacks.  What would stop a similar group with similar goals from shooting up shopping malls, sporting events, or country fairs here at home.

Coupled with the attackers’ unappeasable demands and the high cost of stringent security measures, they appear inevitable and likely to be repeated barring what has for some years become unspeakable.  The most cost effective and least draconian solution for societies like ours still appears to be (a) not let people from the world’s aggrieved and militant populations within our borders and (2) make life difficult and laden with suspicion with an ultimate goal of self-deportation or assimilation for those whom we improvidently have allowed in.  Yet this approach is treated as unspeakable, while strip searching 80 year old grandmothers at airports is A-OK. The values of equality and diversity trump all others, including genuine security and our historic liberties.

We are not India.  Pakistan is not on our border, nor is there any source of organized militancy to be found at home.  While there are aggrieved groups among America’s poor, various ethnic minorities, and home-grown losers in the trends of globalization, their organization is lacking and their grievances dispersed in all directions against what may loosely be called “The Man.” In other words, these are problems of our own making; the root cause is easily identified, but we are too scared of not living up to our au courant value of open borders.  I should think if the body count of these types of attacks climbs high enough in Europe and America, the current order will be exposed as a fraud, and both regions will be ready for what is now considered radical political change.  For now, we have meaningless gestures of condemnation by the Bushes and Obamas of the world, neither of whom has shown any insight or moral courage on the big picture issues.

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Jonestown: Leftist Crazies

I was struck in watching various Jonestown documentaries that the leftist ideology of Jones and his followers has been downplayed in most accounts. I had never heard word one about this until researching it recently, and it was barely visible in CNN’s documentary. For instance, most of the suicide victims willed their property to the Communist Party and an alternative to mass suicide considered by the group was defection to the Soviet Union.

There are certainly no shortage of right-wing crazies ranging from the Branch Davidians to Tim McVeigh. But left-wing violence is more often than not either treated as forgivable excesses–as in the easily rehabilitated murderers of the Weather Underground–or, at worst, as the product of deranged personalities and charismatic leaders.

If an abortion clinic bomber’s sins must be imputed to the pro-life movement as a whole, the tree-spikers of Earth First and the mass killers of Jonestown are treated as unique. This seems part of a broader attempt to excuse and compartmentalize leftist violence.  There is little attempt to examine the ways it flows logically from the uncompromising and “revolutionary” claims of the left as a whole.  Even the egregious violence of the Soviet Union was distinguished from how admirable Communism was “in theory.” Insofar as legality and “the system” are dismissed as obstacles, then such rhetoric surely has some relationship to the extra-legal actions of true believers.  But a confrontation with the Left’s violence is lacking from top to bottom.  Most egregiously, the current president began his political career in the living room of an admitted terrorist, and the media remained largely silent about it, just as they have flushed Jim Jones down the memory hole, treating his story as one of deranged personalities and an excess of religion, rather than typical leftist mania.

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Hillary’s Foreign Policy

If Obama’s foreign policy is sometimes incoherent, Hillary’s is simply Bush-lite.  Her recent essay in Foreign Affairs reveals herself as someone who does not depart substantially from the globalist paradigm of Bush and President Clinton, with the main difference being her greater faith in “diplomacy.”  In a world where many nations’ interests involve knocking America down in prestige and power, this is simply wishful thinking of the worst sort.  It’s essentially the foreign policy espoused earlier by John Kerry.  It is vague about how she will fight terrorism, focusing instead on a policy of supporting the people that will clean up the pieces in the wake of an attack, the lauded “first responders.” 

The flaws in Hillary Clinton’s basic perspective are never more apparent than in her discussion of one of the major foreign policy failure of the last decade, the payoff deal given to North Korea to cease its nuclear programs.  This deal was brokered by Jimmy Carter and signed off by President Clinton and promised North Korea money to cease its nuclear arms programs after it had essentially threatened the West with its arsenal.  She writes: 

Like Iran, North Korea responded to the Bush administration’s effort to isolate it by accelerating its nuclear program, conducting a nuclear test, and building more nuclear weapons. Only since the State Department returned to diplomacy have we been able, belatedly, to make progress.

Actually, North Korea was undertaking all these programs after the deal when it promised it would not do so.  Nothing in Bush’s “axis of evil” remark could have set off such a massive undertaking.  The money paid off by the ’94 Clinton Deal enabled the North Korean regime by giving it much-needed financial and material support.  As I wrote earlier:

I can’t say I blame Clinton for not discovering North Korea violations and weapons plans earlier. The secret North Korean regime is notoriously hard for our spies to penetrate. But I do fault him for thinking he could bribe a criminal regime like this into behaving sensibly. The basic concept of the agreement was the problem, and the end result was more or less inevitable. Even the most minimally rationally black-mailer, once he’s been paid, has an incentive to seek more. And that’s exactly what North Korea’s been trying to accomplish ever since. Clinton’s plan was all carrot and no stick. Bush has been tasked with cleaning up a mess that he did not create, where he did not fail to negotiate real security guarantees, and under the threat of a far more substantial North Korean weapons capability.

On top of its flawed concepts, Clinton’s lengthy essay provides little guidance as to when and where diplomacy is necessary or unlikely to be of use, nor does it articulate when force is needed and under what circumstances she would use it.  For instance, does she embrace the “humanitarian wars” concept of President Clinton?  Does she think a UN mandate is always necessary (after all, her husband did not in Kosovo)? Does she recognize that certain irrational players on the world stage, such as A-Jod in Iran, may not respond to the same incentives as less ideological and religiously-tinged leaders?  Finally, does she recognize any inherent or at least structural tension between the Western World and the Islamic world?  She’s either silent or vague on these issues.  The world Muslim only comes up in referring to her support for “building a Muslim democracy in Afghanistan.”

Bush has been a disaster on foreign policy because he is a liberal.  He believes in spreading democracy, the universality of American values, and the necessity of idealism in our foreign policy.  He also has been incompetent, using tough talk without backing up words with appropriate action, alienating potential friends like Russia, using democracy as a substitute for the necessity of real security in Iraq, and being diffident and inarticulate about the need for intelligence-gathering against al Qaeda.  There is no reason to think Clinton will not be worse in all these respects, even if she is accepted more readily by the Europeans. 

Let’s not forget that it is al Qaeda, China, Iran, and Russia who matter most in the next President’s foreign policy.  On all four matters, the first President Clinton, embracing a very similar view as Hillary was a disaster.  Al Qaeda grew in strength and planned 9/11 during his watch.  China grew stronger military and economically under his watch, and its increasing trade with the West did not liberalize its internal affairs as promised.  Iran continued to support terrorism during Clinton’s more mild presidency and was linked to the Khobar Towers bombing without any retaliation on his part.  Finally, Russia grew increasingly alienated from the West during Clinton and Bush’s presidency because both presidents desired to expand NATO, criticized Russia on Chechnya (where it’s fighting al Qaeda and its allies), and both meddled in Russia’s internal affairs and elections.  Clinton may not be loony on foreign policy, but liberals and conservatives alike should expect many of the same problems as Bush has had, coupled with the likely disappointments that the deus ex machina of diplomacy will foster.  These problems will persist because both Hillary Clinton and Bush use liberal ideas–the importance of the UN, democracy (including among our allies), and human rights–as guides when hard-headed realism about diplomacy and the use of force is needed.

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A Thought On the Illogic of Petraeus’ Anti-Surge

General Petraeus advocated a surge. Then he, inexplicably, said it was working so well that it was time to change course again and reduce the surge. I discussed this illogic here. Andrew Bacevich–Army veteran , BU Professor, and father of deceased Army Lieutenant KIA in Iraq–explains the political roots of Petraeus’ backing down from his earlier enthusiasm for the surge in this article in the American Conservative:

If Petraeus actually believes that he can salvage something akin to success in Iraq and if he agrees with President Bush about the consequences of failure —genocidal violence, Iraq becoming a launching pad for terrorist attacks directed against the United States, the Middle East descending into chaos that consumes Israel, the oil-dependent global economy shattered beyond repair, all of this culminating in the emergence of a new Caliphate bent on destroying the West—then surely this moment of (supposed) promise is not a time for scrimping. Rather, now is the time to go all out—to insist upon a maximum effort.

There is only one plausible explanation for Petraeus’s terminating a surge that has (he says) enabled coalition forces, however tentatively, to gain the upper hand. That explanation is politics—of the wrong kind.

Given the current situation as Petraeus describes it, an incremental reduction in U.S. troop strength makes sense only in one regard: it serves to placate each of the various Washington constituencies that Petraeus has a political interest in pleasing.

A modest drawdown responds to the concerns of Petraeus’s fellow four stars, especially the Joint Chiefs, who view the stress being imposed on U.S. forces as intolerable. Ending the surge provides the Army and the Marine Corps with a modicum of relief.

A modest drawdown also comes as welcome news for moderate Republicans in Congress. Nervously eyeing the forthcoming elections, they have wanted to go before the electorate with something to offer other than being identified with Bush’s disastrous war. Now they can point to signs of change—indeed, Petraeus’s proposed withdrawal of one brigade before Christmas coincides precisely with a suggestion made just weeks ago by Sen. John Warner, the influential Republican from Virginia.

The article is worth reading in full. The idea that the Bush administration can dress up its helter skelter lack of strategy in Iraq is much more insulting to the uniform than any propaganda peddled by moveon.org and company.

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The Price of Process

Ace reports an extraordinary story that I’d like to hear the disciples of judicial process and civil liberties for terrorists in the Democratic Party respond to:

Last May, Iraqi terrorists kidnapped three American soldiers.

American intelligence officials searched for cyber-signals about the kidnapping… and actually found them. They found the kidnappers talking to each other on-line.

However, they had to stop listening because the signals were passing through an American-based server and under the law that meant there could be no eavesdropping without a warrant.

So they stopped listening in on foreign terrorists holding kidnapped American soldiers.

For ten hours, officials worked to get “emergency authorization” to resume eavesdropping.

His post, and the evidence in support, is worth reading in full. In an earlier post entitled Wishful Thinking and Terrorism and another here, I’ve discussed some of the issues surrounding this issue.  In short, my view is that combating terrorists located overseas during a time of war, when combined with emerging communications technologies, demands flexibility and less judicial process than the fight against peacetime, domestic criminality. It would be nice if the Democratic Party would grow up and quit acting like this war to protect America from terrorism (and also the exigencies of protecting our troops fighting it overseas) can be carried on effectively without some flexibility in the executive branch and its agencies. Process is not free. We accept this domestically because we, American citizens, might be caught in the law enforcement net. But for terrorists communicating overseas with one another or their agents in America, there are few valuable interests at stake. If any American is talking to Khalid Sheik Mohammad, I want someone in the CIA listening as a matter of course.

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Al Qaeda, Anbar, and Fourth Generation Warfare

William Lind argues that al Qaeda’s previous strengths–its fanaticism and decentralization–may prove its undoing in Iraq:

It is reasonably clear that, contrary to the White House’s claims, the “surge” had little or nothing to do with the improved situation in Anbar province in Iraq. That security there has improved is a fact; a Marine friend who just returned told me the whole province is now quiet. If we look past the Bush administration’s propaganda and ask ourselves what really happened, we may find something of great value, namely a “seam” in Islamic Fourth Generation forces that we can exploit.

As is widely known, the key to turning the situation in Anbar around was a decision by the local Sunni clans and tribes to turn against aI-Qaeda. We did not make that happen, although we did make it possible, not by what we did but what we stopped doing, i.e., brutalizing the local population. Once U.S. forces in Anbar adopted a policy of de-escalation, the sheiks had the option of putting al-Qaeda instead of us at the top of their enemies list. De-escalation was, to use a favorite military term, the enabler.

As is also widely recognized, al-Qaeda itself then provided the motivator by its treatment of local Sunnis. Its error was one common to revolutionary movements, trying to impose its program before it had won the war. Worse, it did so brutally, using assassinations, car bombings that caused mass casualties and other typical terror tactics. Some reports suggest the final straw for Anbar’s Sunnis was a demand by foreign al-Qaeda fighters for forced marriages with local women.

Again, in itself this is nothing new. Where we may begin to perceive something new, a potential seam in Islamic 4GW operations, is in al-Qaeda’s response to its own blunder. It has refused to change course.

When other revolutionary groups have alienated the population by unveiling their program too soon, before they consolidated power, their leadership has quickly ordered a reversal. Mao had to do so, and so did Lenin, in the famous NEP of the early 1920s. Competent leadership usually understands that a “broad front” strategy is a necessity until their power is so great it cannot be challenged.

Why doesn’t al-Qaeda’s leadership do the same? Here is where it starts to get interesting. Perhaps they have not done so because they cannot.

Unlike Bolsheviks and other revolutionary parties that acted within a state framework and modeled themselves on the governments of states, Fourth Generation entities based on religious or “cause” appeals cannot practice what the Marxist-Leninists called “democratic centralism.” They cannot simply issue orders from the top and have those orders obeyed. Their organizations are too loosely structured for that. The leadership can inspire and give general guidance, but it cannot do much more than that. It cannot get its fighters to do things they don’t want to do, or stop doing things they very much do want to do.

Here we may see a flip side of the de-centralization that makes 4GW entities so difficult for states to fight directly. One of state armed forces’ favorite tactics, going after the leadership, has been shown over and over again not to accomplish much because local 4GW fighters do not depend on that leadership. But just as they do not depend on it, they also do not have to obey it. Their autonomy cuts both ways.

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