Still Invested in Failure – Washington Times editorial

The media's coverage of two recent events — the release of the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq and Sen. John Warner's call for a symbolic reduction of troops by Christmas — serves to illustrate the perverse symbiosis between defeatist politicians and a news media that is heavily invested in an American failure in Iraq. Read carefully, the updated NIE provides some ammunition for both supporters and opponents of the war, presenting dour predictions about the level of violence in Iraq and the ability of the Iraqi government to achieve national-level political reconciliation, but also pointing out that "measurable" security improvements have been made in Iraq since January and will expand modestly in the next 12 months with continued pressure on the insurgents. Buried in the final two paragraphs of the report is the following: "We assess that changing the mission of Coalition forces from a primarily counterinsurgency and stabilization role to a primarily combat support role for Iraqi forces and counterterrorist operations to prevent [al Qaeda in Iraq] from establishing a safehaven would erode security gains made thus far... A change of mission that interrupts that synchronization would place security improvements at risk." In other words, this last section of the report knocks down a key argument made by war critics: that we would be better off if we move troops out of combat against Iraq-based jihadists and into training Iraqi forces.

Don’t Fail Afghanistan – Los Angeles Times editorial

The United States is now at risk of "losing" Afghanistan, the predictable result of committing insufficient troops and money to that catastrophically failed state after the rout of the Taliban in 2001. U.S. forces are suffering sharply higher casualties as Taliban fighters surge back in, and drug lords are coming to dominate the political and economic landscape. The collapse of the noble nation-building experiment in Afghanistan would destroy U.S. credibility in the eyes of the world, shake global security and condemn millions of people to another generation of warfare and terrorism. And it would be all the more devastating if accompanied by U.S. defeat in Iraq. Yet the effort to build a stable nation atop the wreckage of Afghanistan can still, with great effort, be salvaged. This page has argued that Iraq's civil war is beyond the United States' ability to suppress by military means and that the presence of U.S. troops can only delay the bloody but inevitable political reckoning. Although it is unlikely that a workable political accord will be reached before the power struggle is settled on the battlefield, only the Iraqis themselves can prevent this calamity. All is not lost in Afghanistan, however. Unlike the Iraqis, Afghans are not engaged in nationwide sectarian warfare. They have a weak but legitimate government, a corrupt but functioning parliament and an elected president who commands broad international support.

Rereading Vietnam - Robert Kaplan, The Atlantic

In 1943, at the age of 18, George Everette "Bud" Day of Sioux City, Iowa, enlisted in the Marines. He served in the Pacific during World War II, and later became a fighter pilot. He flew the F-84F Thunderstreak during the Korean War and the F-100F Super Sabre in Vietnam. Bud Day, a legendary "full-blooded jet-jock" as one recent account dubbed him, would see service in all three wars as a sanctified whole: For him the concept of the "long war" was something he had built his life around in the middle decades of the 20th century. As an Air Force major, he was the first commander of the squadron of fast FACs (forward air controllers), who loitered daily for hours over North Vietnamese airspace, seeking out targets for other fighter bombers. With the most dangerous air mission in the Vietnam War, Day and the other fast FACs were known as "Misty warriors." Misty was the radio call sign that Day himself had chosen for the squadron, inspired by his favorite Johnny Mathis song. The Mistys were "an aggressive bunch of bastards who pressed the fight; they got down in the weeds" and "trolled for trouble," writes Robert Coram in a recently published book about Bud Day, American Patriot. On August 26, 1967, Bud Day's luck ran out. He was shot down over North Vietnam.

Into Thin Air: The Hunt of Osama bin Laden - Evan Thomas, Newsweek Magazine

The Americans were getting close. It was early in the winter of 2004-05, and Osama bin Laden and his entourage were holed up in a mountain hideaway along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Suddenly, a sentry, posted several kilometers away, spotted a patrol of U.S. soldiers who seemed to be heading straight for bin Laden's redoubt. The sentry radioed an alert, and word quickly passed among the Qaeda leader's 40-odd bodyguards to prepare to remove "the Sheik," as bin Laden is known to his followers, to a fallback position. As Sheik Said, a senior Egyptian Qaeda operative, later told the story, the anxiety level was so high that the bodyguards were close to using the code word to kill bin Laden and commit suicide. According to Said, bin Laden had decreed that he would never be captured. "If there's a 99 percent risk of the Sheik's being captured, he told his men that they should all die and martyr him as well," Said told Omar Farooqi, a Taliban liaison officer to Al Qaeda who spoke to a NEWSWEEK reporter in Afghanistan. The secret word was never given. As the Qaeda sentry watched the U.S. troops, the patrol started moving in a different direction. Bin Laden's men later concluded that the soldiers had nearly stumbled on their hideout by accident. (One former U.S. intelligence officer told NEWSWEEK that he was aware of official reporting on this incident.) And so it has gone for six years. American intelligence officials interviewed by NEWSWEEK ruefully agree that the hunt to find bin Laden has been more a game of chance than good or "actionable" intelligence.

Surge Scrabble - Deroy Murdock, Washington Times

Reviled by most Democrats, President Bush's 20,000-troop surge is working. Indeed, news of its success is emerging from an unlikely source: Democrats. Despite other misgivings on Iraq, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat, admitted to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Monday: "We've begun to change tactics in Iraq and in some areas, particularly in Al Anbar Province, it's working." "The surge has resulted in a reduction of violence in many parts of Iraq," Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin of Illinois told journalists. "More American troops have brought more peace to more parts of Iraq." "The military aspects of President Bush's new strategy in Iraq... appear to have produced some credible and positive results," Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat, said in a joint statement after visiting Iraq with his committee's second-ranking Republican, Virginia's John Warner. Sen. Jack Reed, Rhode Island Democrat, told PBS' Charlie Rose: "My sense is that the tactical momentum is there with the troops, and we've had some success in terms of blocking insurgents moving into Baghdad." "The troops have met every assignment," said Sen. Bob Casey, Pennsylvania Democrat. "They've beaten the odds time and again. They've done everything we've asked them to." Iraq war foe Rep. Brian Baird, Washington Democrat, recently returned from there a changed man. "We are making real and tangible progress on the ground, for one, and if we withdraw, it could have a potentially catastrophic effect on the region," he told The Olympian newspaper. Mr. Baird now opposes troop-retreat timetables.

Al-Maliki Under Fire - USA Today editorial

Should Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki be replaced? That drumbeat is at a crescendo. Last Tuesday, President Bush warned that the Iraqi people would replace the al-Maliki government if it continued to be unresponsive. On Thursday, U.S. intelligence agencies cast doubt on whether al-Maliki could bring political unity. Sens. Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin, the French foreign minister and others have called for him to go. Al-Maliki is almost universally seen as a weak leader, and perhaps he will go. But the discussion misses a deeper truth: Iraq has no single leader or faction with anywhere near the power and charisma to force unity — no equivalent of South Africa's Nelson Mandela. The two candidates most mentioned to replace al-Maliki, Ayad Allawi and Adel Abdul-Mahdi, don't fit the bill. If Iraq's warring factions are to solve their differences, it will require a variety of leaders to come together, not merely a change in prime ministers. On Sunday, in a show of how difficult unity is to achieve, Iraq's main leaders said that they had reached consensus on some benchmarks the U.S. Congress had set as measures of success. They badly needed to show some progress. For weeks now, various U.S. sources have signaled that next month's pivotal report to Congress by the top U.S. general and diplomat in Iraq will say that the surge of troops in Iraq is improving security, but that military progress has not been matched on the political front. Those reports led to the criticism of al-Maliki, and on Sunday he lashed out angrily at Clinton, Levin and the French, following on earlier criticism of Bush.

The MacArthur Lunch – Roger Cohen, New York Times (subscription required)

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to the United Nations, is a twinkle-eyed hawk. The defeat of Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan, the unfinished business of the 1991 Persian Gulf war and his own liberating odyssey from an Afghan childhood to the University of Chicago convinced him the world needs the transformational power of the United States. Since 9/11, he has fared better than most of the Bush brigade. As a Beirut-educated, Farsi-speaking Sunni Muslim, he actually has a clue about the Islamic world. He was prepared to sip tea rather than set edicts. In his shepherding of Hamid Karzai to power in Kabul, his forging of Sunni cooperation now bearing fruit in Iraq’s Anbar Province, and in his recent prodding of the U.N. to a fuller Iraqi role, “Zal,” as he’s known, has suggested shrewdness explains the twinkle. So, as the September storm clouds gather over America-in-Iraq, I was intrigued to find Zal looking back in anguish. President Bush now alludes to “the mistakes that have been made,” but is unspecific. There’s such an array, everyone has a favorite: a nonexistent casus belli, skimpy troop levels, the end of the Iraqi army, aberrant planning.

Credibility Casualties? – Mark Steyn, Washington Times

George W. Bush gave a speech about Iraq last week, and in the middle of it he did something long overdue: He attempted to appropriate the left's most treasured all-purpose historical analogy. Indeed, Vietnam is so ubiquitous in the fulminations of politicians, academics and pundits we could really use antitrust legislation to protect us from shopworn historical precedents. But, in the absence thereof, the president has determined that we might at least learn the real "lessons of Vietnam." "Then as now, people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end," Mr. Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. "Many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people. ... A columnist for the New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: 'It's difficult to imagine,' he said, 'how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.' A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: 'Indochina without Americans: For most a better life.' The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be." I don't know about "the world," but apparently a big chunk of America still believes in these "misimpressions." As the New York Times put it, "In urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Mr. Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies." Well, it had a "few negative repercussions" for America's allies in South Vietnam, who were promptly overrun by the north. And it had a "negative repercussion" for the former Cambodian Prime Minister, Sirik Matak, to whom the U.S. ambassador sportingly offered asylum. "I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion," he told him. "I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty.... I have committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans." So Sirik Matak stayed in Phnom Penh and a month later was killed by the Khmer Rouge, along with the best part of 2 million other people. If it's hard for individual names to linger in the New York Times' "historical memory," you would think the general mound of corpses would resonate.

Iraq’s Endangered Minorities – Nina Shea, Washington Post

Recent bombings in Iraq's Kurdish area nearly annihilated two Yazidi villages, killing hundreds of this ancient angel-revering, Indo-European religious group. The single deadliest atrocity of the Iraq conflict, it was also the latest demonstration that Iraq's non-Muslims are in danger of extinction. Sixty years ago, Iraq's flourishing Jewish population, a third of Baghdad, fled in the wake of coordinated bombings and violence against them. Today, a handful of Jews remain. Unless Washington acts, the same fate awaits Iraq's million or so Christians and other minorities. They are not simply caught in the crossfire of a Muslim power struggle; they are being targeted in a ruthless cleansing campaign by Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish militants. This crime against humanity has gone unnoticed by the Bush administration and Congress. Iraq's Catholic Chaldean; Syriac Orthodox, Assyrian, Armenian and Protestant Christians; and smaller Yazidi and Mandean communities are seen as inconsequential. They don't sponsor terrorism, hold political power or have strong regional allies. Because they do not cause trouble, they are ignored.

Blood on a Budget: Our Soldiers Betrayed - William Rees-Mogg, London Times

From August 10 the Ministry of Defence imposed a gagging order on the Armed Services. Members of the Forces are no longer allowed to discuss any matters relating to defence through any public means of communication. They cannot speak at public meetings, write letters to the press, write blogs or even take part in surveys. This gagging order applies to men and women of all ranks. Can I ask two questions: Why now? For whose benefit? The new censorship is a reaction to low morale in the Services, which extends from top to bottom, from general to private. The people protected are the politicians, who are responsible for the crisis in morale. Soldiers do not object to being sent to war as such. They do object to having to fight without the best equipment and support, and without being given clear objectives. They recognise the failure of the Government to back its strategy with expenditure. General Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff, has spoken of the overstretch of the British Army, having to fight a difficult war on two fronts, Iraq and Afghanistan. The soldiers experience this overstretch in almost every detail of their lives, and on the risks they are expected to take.

Pay Soldiers More and Equip them Properly - London Daily Telegraph leader

A soldier is on the ground in Helmand. He calls for air support: no Harriers are available, because there are no instructors left to train their pilots. He is injured in battle: the surgeon has been on call for too long and makes a fatal error. This is what shortages in the military can do: without sufficient personnel in key positions, the machinery seizes up; troops are left without sufficient support, and more of them are killed or injured. As we report today, the shortfalls in these "pinch-point" positions are even more alarming than was previously thought: we need six times as many Harrier instructors as are currently serving, and more than 2,000 medical positions are unfilled. Indeed, shortages of equipment and personnel are becoming endemic across the Services.

The Iranian Threat - Tom McInerney and Fred Gedrich, Washington Times

Speaking before the Democratic Leadership Council recently, former President Clinton urged "more diplomacy" as a way to ameliorate America's hostile relationship with countries like Iran. Simply waving a diplomatic wand in front of this enemy won't make the problems it is causing in Iraq and elsewhere disappear. The principal aims of Iran's ruling theocrats are to drive the United States out of Muslim countries; destroy Israel and fragile U.S.-supported democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon; and create a power base of like-minded regimes stretching across the upper tier of the predominantly Sunni Muslim Arab world. Beginning with the Carter administration, a series of U.S. presidents, including Mr. Clinton, have failed to devise and implement effective policies to counter the belligerent activities of Iran's Shi'ite regime, which practices a brutal form of Islamic fundamentalism. Iran's rulers have waged a one-sided war with the U.S. for 28 years. Their minions seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and kept 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, bombed U.S. embassies in Lebanon and residences in Saudi Arabia and kidnapped and murdered Americans. The regime currently manufactures and supplies lethal roadside bombs to Shi'ite militias in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan which kill and maim American troops.

Divest Iran - Michael Barone, Real Clear Politics

Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism. The mullah regime is providing weapons to kill our soldiers in Iraq. It is working furiously to develop nuclear weapons. We certainly do not want to go to war against Iran -- though perhaps we could do a more aggressive job of keeping the mullahs' minions out of Iraq. But we have other weapons that are being deployed now -- not by the military, the federal government or officials in Washington, but by state government officials and legislatures in state capitals, who are working to divest their pension funds of stocks in companies that do business in Iran. The divestment movement has been gaining speed during the past year. In 2006, Missouri State Treasurer Sarah Steelman ordered the Missouri Investment Trust to divest stock in companies that do business in Iran. The California Assembly has passed a divestment bill, and it is now before the state Senate; Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has promised a major signing ceremony if it passes. A bill limited to Iran's energy sector has been passed into law in Florida. A divestment bill has been passed in committee in the Pennsylvania House, and a divestment resolution was passed by the Georgia Senate. In Louisiana, a bill to set up a "terror-free international index" has been passed into law. Divestment bills have been filed in Ohio, New Jersey, Michigan, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland and Texas.

The CIA’s Open Secrets – Joseph Weisberg, New York Times

When a federal judge dismissed Valerie Plame’s lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency earlier this month, she ruled that the agency was entitled to stop Ms. Plame from publishing the dates of her agency service, even though these dates had been supplied to Congress in an unclassified letter from the C.I.A. and had been published in The Congressional Record. Ms. Plame is just one in a long line of ex-C.I.A. employees to lose similar suits, in which the agency successfully defended the position that information in the public domain was classified. How can information that’s a five-minute Google search away be classified? It’s simple. Classified information is not the same thing as secret information. When I worked in the C.I.A.’s directorate of operations (now called the national clandestine service) in the early ’90s, we were told that information was classified when it involved sources or methods. It seemed logical that sources were classified. These were actual agents who would be put in jeopardy if their identities were revealed. But practically everything the C.I.A. does could be considered a “method,” so the C.I.A. can decide that almost anything relating to its work is classified. You’d probably want this latitude if you were running an intelligence agency. But one of its unfortunate byproducts is that no one, inside or outside the intelligence community, really knows what classified information is.

Outsourcing Intelligence – James Carroll, Boston Globe

The ways in which the Bush war has degraded the structures and culture of Iraq are obvious. Less so are its insidious effects on the United States, but President Bush is similarly destroying something essential to our own democracy. A signal of that was sounded last week when The Washington Post reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency is transferring "core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection" to private contractors -- up to a billion dollars worth. This raises the prospect that hired guns, instead of sworn officials, will be conducting covert operations, spying missions, interrogations, "renditions," surveillance -- the whole dangerous complex of shadow activity that began as the government's most sensitive responsibility. Given the often shocking record of what US intelligence officials have done over the years, why does it matter if such activities are carried out by contractors? The answer patently goes to the question of accountability. Public servants who are bound by oaths to the Constitution and the law understand what the measure of behavior must be, even if they fall short of it. Activities involving the surreptitious, especially, have properly been reserved to public institutions subject to political oversight. Private parties, bound by contract, operate at remove from such limit and accountability, which may be why borderline activities like interrogation or rendition are increasingly farmed out to them. But there is a deeper problem. I know the dark history well, yet I also know that the American intelligence services were founded, then staffed across two generations, by patriots -- people who acted primarily out of loyalty to this country. If at times they acted wrongly, they mainly did so with a sense of higher purpose. Among the most gifted and well educated people in government, intelligence officials could always have done better in the private sector, but personal gain was never the point. The ethos of service informed their commitment. That was broadly true of the military, which is why "service" is its synonym. But that word, as in "secret service," defined the essence of the government's most dangerous work -- dangers both physical and moral.

Muslim Democracy in Action – Jackson Diehl, Washington Post

The notion that democracy and Islam are fundamentally incompatible is about to get a resounding rebuke, just at the moment it is threatening to congeal as conventional wisdom in Washington. Barring a last-minute surprise -- such as a military coup -- a liberal and pro-Western politician named Abdullah Gul will be elected president of Turkey by the country's parliament tomorrow. Gul speaks fluent English and has been a steady if somewhat quiet friend of the United States during more than four years as foreign minister. He also identifies himself as a religious Muslim in a country with an 85-year history of militant secularism. His wife wears a headscarf, which is banned from public offices, universities and -- until now -- the president's Cankaya Palace in Ankara. A lot of people in Turkey say they're worried that Gul's election will mark the beginning of the end of Western-style modernization in their country. Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, also has political roots in Islam. The Justice and Development (AK) Party will then control two branches of government, with broad power to enact new laws, appoint judges and university rectors, and, in theory, command the military. Some people in Washington are worried, too -- including partisans of Israel who suspect Erdogan of sympathy for the Palestinian Hamas movement and conservatives who charge him with plotting to undermine Turkey's secular democracy.

Egypt’s Choice - Nir Boms and Michael Meunier, Washington Times

The freedom to believe may be considered a sacred right in some parts of the world — but not in others. Which is why Mohammed Hegazy, 24, and his wife made history in the Arab world when they became the first known Muslims to file a lawsuit against Egypt for refusing to legally recognize their conversion to Christianity. This unusual move quickly sparked a lawsuit by Muslim clerics along with death threats for the young couple. Some of these came during a live TV interview, when Mr. Hegazy was interviewed along with Sheikh Youssef el-Badry, a radical Islamic cleric. According to Mr. Badry, Mr. Hegazy deserves the death sentence for leaving Islam. Souaad Kamel, the outgoing dean of Islamic Study for girls at Al-Azhar University, stated on the air that Mr. Hegazy should be beheaded to fulfill the religious requirements. In his filing, Mr. Hegazy, who was born a Muslim, relied heavily on the recent remarks of Egypt's grand mufti to The Washington Post regarding religious conversion. In a surprising and unprecedented statement, Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, said that Islam affords freedom of belief, and that Muslims under some circumstances are free to convert. "The essential question before us is can a Muslim choose a religion other than Islam? The answer is yes, they can," he commented to The Post and later to the Egyptian media. Separating between the notion of choice and punishment, he further explained that "The act of abandoning one's religion is a sin punishable by God on the day of judgment." But he added that, "If the case in question is one of merely rejecting faith, then there is no worldly punishment." Mr. Gomaa added that "throughout history, the worldly punishment for apostasy in Islam has been applied only to those who, in addition to their apostasy, actively engaged in the subversion of society."

Step up Sudan Pressure - Toronto Star editorial

For Canada's chief envoy to Sudan, Nuala Lawlor, being expelled from the country by the Khartoum regime for having "interfered in Sudanese affairs" should be worn as a badge of honour. Sudanese affairs urgently need interfering with. War in Darfur, Sudan's western region, has reached genocidal proportions, leaving some 200,000 dead and 2 million homeless since 2003. And a 2005 peace agreement to end Khartoum's two-decades-old war in the south is under strain. According to President Omar al-Bashir's officials, Lawlor and European Union envoy Kent Degerfelt were given the boot on Thursday for consulting with opposition figures in Khartoum and elsewhere. Which is precisely what needs to happen to end Sudan's self-slaughter. To its credit, the Canadian government has also raised concerns about the regime jailing political foes, and about human rights. The United Nations is urgently trying to broker peace talks involving al-Bashir's Arab-dominated regime and Darfur rebels. Al-Bashir has agreed to a mixed UN/African Union force of 26,000 peacekeepers, but they haven't arrived yet. Meanwhile, strains are building in Khartoum where al-Bashir's party and the southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement sit in a fragile unity government.

Bear Chooses Chill – Peter Brookes, New York Post

Despite consistent Kremlin claims that Moscow isn't trying to resurrect the Cold War, a landslide of Soviet-style actions over the last few weeks is doing a pretty darn good job of indicating the exact opposite. One of the frostiest events was President Vladimir Putin's announcement a little over a week ago that Russia's nuclear bombers were resuming regular long-range patrols on a "permanent basis" after a 15-year hiatus. In fact, British Tornado and Norwegian F-16 fighters had already escorted the newly-started Russian flights off their coasts going back to mid-July - and the Americans launched to meet the Russians en route past U.S. bases on Guam earlier this month. But Putin's announcement made it in-your-face official. And that same day, Russia launched 14 such bombers on patrols well beyond Russian borders - with the defense ministry claiming the missions were over the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic oceans.

The Democrats Move Colombia – Robert Novak, Washington Post

The forced resignation two weeks ago, under pressure from President �lvaro Uribe, of three prominent officers accused of drug trafficking is not likely to end the shakeup in Colombia's army and navy. More heads will roll in a long-overdue purge of corruption in the military. The credit has to go to the left-wing members of Congress who have taken over the Colombian account on Capitol Hill since the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections. A conservative American with close, longtime ties to Colombia put it to me bluntly: "The firing of these officers is seen as President Uribe's way of clearing the decks to make the Democrats in Congress happy, in order to secure the free-trade agreement. There are plenty more generals and admirals to get the heave-ho." Thus, this development must be credited to congressional Democrats, typified by Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, who have been hostile to the Uribe regime's fight against leftist narco-guerrillas. Pressure on Uribe to clean up the Colombian officer corps should have come from the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, but heads did not begin to roll until the Democrats took over.

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