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On the Move - Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, National Review
The new National Intelligence Estimate caught the media’s attention in mid-July by discussing an aspect of the war on terror that some analysts have warned about for over a year: al Qaeda’s regenerated capabilities. This finding should not have taken observers by surprise, but sometimes our understanding of terrorist strategies and capabilities can be myopic. If we are to avoid future surprises, it is worthwhile at this point to take stock of how we came to the present situation, and to understand what al Qaeda has planned for the future. Before 9/11, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan served as a safe haven for the terrorist group, a base of operations where it could train operatives and plan attacks. After the October 2001 U.S. invasion deprived al Qaeda of this safe haven, the group’s central leadership largely relocated to Pakistan. At the time, most analysts believed that al Qaeda’s leadership was on the run, incapable of effectively leading the organization. Further, most analysts thought the central leadership’s weakness would cause the group to become increasingly decentralized, and less dangerous.
U.N. Returns to Iraq – Austin Bay, Washington Times
Four years after an explosives-packed suicide cement truck blew up and destroyed the United Nations headquarters building in Baghdad, the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to expand its operation in Iraq. The Aug. 19, 2003, terror bombing wounded over a hundred people and murdered 22. The dead included the distinguished Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was serving as the United Nations' "special representative" in post-Saddam Iraq. Then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had prevailed on de Mello to take the job. De Mello viewed himself as a diplomat with a lot of experience in "the field" — which he once described in an essay as a place where he had "seen the best and worst of what we have to offer each other." Everyone who has worked in the world's various hells understands that confronting them requires charity, mercy, discipline, courage and sacrifice. That was de Mello's point and why he went to Iraq.
What’s Arabic for “We’ll Stand by You”? – Ben Macintyre, London Times
When the Danes pulled out last month, they took him with them, along with some 200 other Iraqis and their families who would otherwise face death at the hands of insurgent murder squads. “Collaboration” is one of the most morally freighted words in modern European history. It instantly recalls the Fascist sympathisers hanging from lampposts, Parisian women with their heads shaven in revenge for consorting with the enemy, Lord Haw-Haw, Vidkun Quisling and countless lesser collaborators. The grim wartime question of who cooperated with the enemy still cannot be asked in parts of former Occupied Europe. Of course, we do not see the brave men and women who have helped the Armed Forces in Iraq as collaborators, any more than we regard the armed cowards who kidnap, torture and murder them as resistance fighters. Yet that is how, increasingly, they are seen in Iraq. Barely four years ago, the interpreters who agreed to help the Americans and British were hailed by Iraqis (and saw themselves) as part of a civilian army of liberation. It is a measure of how far even moderate Iraqi opinion has been alienated there that they are now widely seen as opportunists, at best, and at worse condemned as traitors. “You are either with us or against us,” cautioned George W. Bush. The Iraqi interpreters made that choice emphatically, and regardless of the rights and wrongs of the war itself, Britain and the US now have an overwhelming moral obligation to honour that deal by granting them asylum and a safe haven.
Hard Lessons from Soft Targets – Con Coughlin, London Daily Telegraph
August was supposed to be the month that everything would start to come good in Iraq. After four years of bloodshed and political chaos, the White House believed its joint strategy of beefing up its security operation, while encouraging the Iraqi government to undertake much-needed reforms, would finally deliver the elusive peace dividend that the Bush administration has been so desperately seeking since Saddam Hussein's overthrow. Instead, American troops have found themselves having to deal with the gruesome task of retrieving the bodies of hundreds of Yezidis killed by al-Qa'eda terrorists, while the Iraqi government remains paralysed by the continued boycott of Sunni moderates. Now Washington's hopes of starting to withdraw American troops from Iraq have suffered a serious setback. For as long as al-Qa'eda retains the ability to carry out the type of atrocity that devastated one of Iraq's more obscure religious sects, and Baghdad remains incapable of undertaking basic functions such as providing water and electricity, not even the most committed anti-war Brownite or Democrat can seriously consider signing up to a large-scale pull-out.
In Iraq, Shattering Villages and Illusions – Eugene Robinson, Washington Post
The next time you hear confident assurances from the White House and its supporters that the "surge" of U.S. troops in Iraq is working and that something called "victory" is within sight, remember the Yazidis. The who? Before Tuesday, you almost certainly would have asked that question -- before two villages in northern Iraq, populated by an obscure religious sect, suffered what is now officially the deadliest terrorist attack of the war, with more than 400 people confirmed dead. The final toll is expected to rise, but the coordinated suicide truck bombings in the Yazidi towns already constitute the second-worst terrorist attack of modern times, trailing only the carnage of Sept. 11, 2001.
Bloody Surge: Iraq's Latest Atrocity Puts Pressure on Petraeus - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial
The slaughter of at least 250 members of the Yazidi religious minority in northwest Iraq has sharpened the showdown coming in the United States next month on what should come next in the war. Given that Iraqi opponents to a continued U.S. presence were not going to go away, it was expected, as President Bush's "surge" of 30,000 new troops into Iraq proceeded with a focus on Baghdad, that violence elsewhere would rise. The Yazidis are a largely peaceful religious minority, concentrated in the Kurdish north of Iraq, an area that since 2003 has been less troubled by attacks than the rest of the country. That changed on Tuesday. Four truck bombs hit Yazidi villages, killing at least 250 and wounding hundreds more. It is likely, but not certain, that the attacks were perpetrated by Sunni militants. The Yazidis recently quarreled with the Sunnis, who killed 23 Yazidi men after Yazidis had stoned to death a woman who had a relationship with a Sunni man. Tuesday's savage attack showed that even the Kurdish area is not secure.
The Iraq Mess - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editorial
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was calling for a crisis summit because half his Cabinet has been emptied by boycotts and resignations. A crumbling of the government is occurring while the U.S. "surge" supposedly is producing positive results. How could this be? It has been clear for some time now that fractious politics in Iraq could render largely irrelevant any gains on the battlefield because religious and ethnic factions act as though they do not wish to coalesce as a nation. Even as the U.S. was pressing for the summit, Iraqis resisted getting together just to talk. How familiar is this dirge. The government is run by the Shiite majority, the Sunni minority feels put upon and many Kurds would just as soon go their own way. Go their own way? This week, coordinated bomb blasts rocked communities of a Kurdish sect. Hundreds of casualties were reported. And now there's a problematic Shiite-Kurdish "alliance." With astonishing understatement, an Associated Press dispatch says, "A full-scale disintegration could touch off power grabs on all sides and seriously complicate U.S.-led efforts to stabilize Iraq."
Club Med Baghdad - Ilya Shapiro, Weekly Standard
I've been here two weeks now, feeling my way around, meeting people, getting up to speed, beginning to advise the Staff Judge Advocate (General Petraeus's lawyer) on a host of rule of law issues, and liaising with related offices at the State and Justice Departments. The aspect of this experience that most impressed me initially--and continues to do so however long I stay in the Green Zone--is the lavish luxury permeating through the Presidential Palace that emerged unscathed in the war and is now the U.S. Embassy. The expansive floors are marble, the high ceilings are adorned in gold leaf and elaborate murals, and the bathrooms are redolent in ornate fixtures and carvings. You expect veiled concubines to come out from behind the drapes to offer you grapes and a fanning. All this gaudiness can lead to bouts of surrealism. For example, each night in the "North Ballroom" at precisely 2100 hours, a stereo begins playing that chicken dance song (you know the one) while everyone chucks Nerf balls and other non-harmful ballistics among and between the cubicles. It literally rains cats and dogs (and footballs and rubber chickens). Full-bird colonels--pardon the pun--are among the more enthusiastic of participants, encouraging their staffs to "let off some steam." After the three-minute long song runs its course, everybody goes back to battle stations. Sometimes, every once in a while, I forget that I'm in a war zone.
Hatred Begins at Home – Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal
I know I'm being broad here. But we often think it is large and abstract forces that drive history, when it is personal forces, too. The headlines on today's paper, whatever they are--stock market decline, bomb blast--are in their essence personal stories. Somebody bought, somebody sold, somebody made the fuse. People make history. I remembered the woman in Northern Ireland this week while reading the New York City Police Department's report "Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat." It is an interesting piece of work. We associate terrorism with a threat from overseas, but since 9/11, terror plots have tended to be planned by homegrown terrorists. These young men have tended to be "unremarkable" local residents who came to look to a radical form of Islam for inspiration and meaning. Terror acts are preceded by a radicalization process in which young men are recruited to jihad. The report traces the creation and development of terror cells throughout the West--in America, Western Europe and Australia. Young recruits are often middle class, and their interest is often sparked by an immediate or protracted crisis--the loss of a job, a change in family circumstances. They do not necessarily come from anything particular lacking in the family, but they have nothing to hold onto until this absolute thing, this fundamentalist belief, and its grievances, comes by. Their rage is tended and encouraged by spiritual and operational leaders who offer a sense of community, of belonging and of approval.
The Terrorism Beat - William Finnegan, The New Yorker
Abu Issa al-Hindi is an Al Qaeda operative, currently in British custody. Al-Hindi and his team were discovered, through a computer seized last summer in Pakistan, to have conducted extremely thorough surveillance on two large Manhattan buildings, including the Stock Exchange, and sites in Washington, D.C., and New Jersey. Because the surveillance seemed to date from before September, 2001, the press soon lost interest in the story. The N.Y.P.D. has not lost interest. Sheehan said, “We’ve got a detective working it every day. Everything they touched here in New York, everybody they talked to. But they were very tightly packed, very discreet, like Mohamed Atta”—the September 11th hijacker.
Killed by the Rules – Diana West, Washington Times
Now that Marcus Luttrell's book "Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of Seal Team 10" is a national bestseller, maybe Americans are ready to start discussing the core issue his story brings to light: the inverted morality, even insanity, of the American military's rules of engagement (ROE). On a stark mountaintop in Afghanistan in 2005, Leading Petty Officer Luttrell and three Navy SEAL teammates found themselves having just such a discussion. Dropped behind enemy lines to kill or capture a Taliban kingpin who commanded between 150-200 fighters, the SEAL team was unexpectedly discovered in the early stages of a mission whose success, of course, depended on secrecy. Three unarmed Afghan goatherds, one a teenager, had stumbled across the Americans' position. This presented the soldiers with an urgent dilemma: What should they do? If they let the Afghans go, they would probably alert the Taliban to the their whereabouts. This would mean a battle in which the Americans were outnumbered by at least 35 to 1.
Pragmatism in Calling Iran Guards Terrorists - Dale McFeatters, Boston Herald
The Bush administration is taking a calculated risk with its plans to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a global terrorist organization. Tehran is certain to see it as a direct challenge to the clerical regime since it’s the Guards who keep it in power and indeed produced Iran’s current president. The administration hopes that upping the ante and a stronger U.N. resolution banning travel by Iran’s leaders and cutting off access to the international financial system will persuade the Iranians to give up their nuclear-weapons ambitions. However, additional sanctions may only harden the regime in its isolation and convince it that having a nuclear-weapons capacity is even more essential. Iran has been under one form of sanctions or another since 1979 without loosening the deeply disliked clerics’ grip on power. However, the Revolutionary Guards are hardly a benign force. It is a separate military branch, believed to be about 125,000 strong, with its own air and naval capabilities. It is also a coercive commercial venture, exploiting its privileged status to operate many businesses of its own and to hold shares of others.
Saudis at the Negotiating Table - Nader Habibi, Boston Globe
The United States and Iran have held two rounds of talks over the security and stability of Iraq -- one in May and one in July -- and have also set up a joint security committee for regular consultation in the weeks ahead. More talks at ambassadorial or higher levels are likely in the coming months. But the likelihood that these talks will produce any positive results remains small. Even if the talks succeed, they can only reduce the Shi'ite insurgency that the United States believes is being supported by Iran. The Sunni insurgency will continue and may intensify. And recent reports have revealed that US officials are concerned that significant amounts of financial and volunteer support for the Sunni insurgency are flowing into Iraq from Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government does not support the Sunni insurgency, but some segments of Saudi society clearly do. A few Wahabi imams in Saudi Arabia have urged their followers to go to Iraq for jihad against the foreign forces and the Shi'ites. There is no doubt that the Saudi leadership dislikes the current Shi'ite-dominated government of Iraq -- which it regards as being too close to Iran's cleric rulers. The Saudis fear that if the Iran-US negotiations succeed, the Iraqi government will grow stronger. This suspicion is shared by Saudi people and may be a motive for some to increase their support for the Sunni insurgents.
Pakistan Needs Real Democratic Government - Zia Mian, Philadelphia Inquirer
On the 60th anniversary of independence, Pakistan is under siege. Its leaders lack legitimacy, politics is held hostage by its army, and radical Islamists stalk the land. The future looks bleak. There is talk of civil war. There is only one way out: End the cycle of military dictatorship and allow truly free, representative government to take root. Pakistan's leaders have failed it from the beginning. Its founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, claimed the Muslims of British India needed a separate country if they were to be free from domination by its more numerous Hindus. He cast a wide net, offering orthodox Muslims a vision of an Islamic society and more secular Muslims a dream of a country where religion was no business of government. This ambiguous legacy and the terrible religious violence that accompanied the partition of British India have haunted Pakistan ever since.
Turkish Elections Put US Doctrine to Test - Gerard Baker, Real Clear Politics
It is certainly a conundrum of America's laudable foreign policy objective of democracy promotion that electorates sometimes freely vote for parties whose goals are distinctly inimical to US foreign policy objectives. In the last five years, as revolutionary forces have swept the Middle East, voters have repaid the West for its liberating strife by electing, in the Palestinian Authority and even in Iraq, Islamic extremists who would, given their druthers, happily extinguish the freedoms those voters have been exercising. And yet, for all its perils, President George Bush is surely right to insist on the primacy of freedom. Even if we don't like sometimes what it produces in the short-term, history suggests it is still the surest route to long-term political stability and peace. An important test of the president's idealism is about to be conducted in Turkey, one of the few Muslim-majority countries in the world that is also a democracy. Too bad the US looks to be getting ready to fail it. Turkish voters have just re-elected, with a substantially increased majority, an avowedly Islamist party that threatens to roll back the boundaries of the secularist society that Turkey has enjoyed for three quarters of a century. The election victory in fact places the Justice and Peace Party (AKP) directly on a collision course with the military, the institution that has traditionally regarded itself as the principal protector of that secularism.
Getting Rid of Robert Mugabe – London Daily Telegraph leader
We are told that southern Africa is concerned about Robert Mugabe. It is said that the millions who have fled Zimbabwe are unsettling neighbouring countries; and that his wrecking of the economy is giving the region a bad name as a destination for trade and investment. Yet, yesterday in Lusaka, it was Mr Mugabe who received the loudest applause at a summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Its heads of state, or at least some of them, may be concerned, but such an ovation will merely strengthen the old tyrant's hand. What explains this contradiction? First, there is Mr Mugabe's status as the oldest of the freedom-fighting leaders still in office. Then there is his brilliantly successful propaganda campaign, which quite erroneously alleges that "illegal" Western sanctions have ruined the economy, whereas, in fact, they have merely imposed a visa ban and an asset freeze on about 100 named officials. Finally, there is the well-attested reluctance of African leaders to criticise their peers, at any rate in public. Readers of this newspaper have been reminded of the dire state of Zimbabwe, from hospitals starved of basic medical supplies to deserted factories and stripped supermarket shelves, by a series of reports from inside the country by Sebastien Berger, our Southern Africa Correspondent. The most telling illustration of Mr Mugabe's wrecking of an economy once regarded as the regional breadbasket is the inflation rate, which the last official figure gave as more than 4,500 per cent; according to the International Monetary Fund, it could top the 100,000 mark by the end of the year. In other words, while Mr Mugabe remains president - and he is due to stand again next March - things are going to get a lot worse.
Why Watching War Games is a Waste of Energy – Bronwen Maddox, London Times
Is Russia managing to build a rival to Nato? More than you would have thought last year and more than is comfortable in Europe and the US. The summit yesterday of Russia, China and their Central Asian neighbours was dubbed the “anti-Nato” by Izvestia, the Russian daily newspaper, and it has a point. Iran, as an “observer”, added a new and menacing tone to the group. Russia’s main frustration in its ambitions for the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), as the 11-year-old group is formally called, is that China wants the club to focus on economics and energy more than security and shares none of Russia’s delight in picking a fight with the US. Even so, the group could clash with the West over Central Asian energy supplies. The SCO’s deep interest in Afghanistan is an even surer conflict. The West’s best hope is that the tensions within the group stop it doing anything coherent.
Putin Needs West as Bogeyman - Lilia Shevtsova, London Daily Telegraph
The Russian-Western relationship has hit rock-bottom. We're not talking about a temporary spat any more. Following a succession of escalating tensions - Kosovo, disarmament, energy security, "frozen conflicts" in Eurasia, encroachments on American airspace - the partnership that the West and Russia have been trying to forge for 15 years is in a deep crisis. Many Western observers see Russia's manoeuvrings as the direct result of it being ignored or humiliated by the West. This is a misconception. The key reason behind the crisis is the failure of the post-Soviet liberal project and the return to a hyper-centralised state. In order to justify the about-turn, the political elite needs an enemy.
Bring Back the Special Relationship - Allan Gotlieb, National Post
With the leaders of Canada, the United States and Mexico set to gather in Montebello, Que., to try to make progress on a "trilateral framework" for North America, now is an appropriate time to remember how much Canada's relationship with the United States has changed in recent years. The history of our relations in the post-Second World War era can be divided into several broad periods. The first was the Mackenzie King-St. Laurent era of Canada-U.S. continentalism and the special relationship; the second was Trudeau's attempted diversification away from continentalism and his rejection of the special relationship; the third was the Mulroney period of constructing a more rules-based and institutionalized framework. We are now in the contemporary or fourth era, which might possibly be described as the era of trilateralism. It could also be called a decade-and-a-half of drift.
Marching to Different Drummers - Marifeli Pérez-Stable, Miami Herald
Presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Hugo Chávez just concluded parallel tours of Latin America. Lula visited Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, Jamaica and Panama while Chávez traveled to Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador and Bolivia. Media that were paying attention feasted on their travels. Was Chávez doing a sequel to his jaunts during President Bush's Latin American trek in March? The Brazilian and Venezuelan foreign ministries took pains to deny any hint of competition. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar but not this time. What's it all about? Ethanol and oil were the immediate drives of Lula's and Chávez's journeys. Lula and Chávez evidently represent more than alternative sources of energy. Integration has long been a Latin American aspiration. It's yet to be seen whether ALBA -- Chávez's answer to U.S. free-trade agreements -- or the FTAs or an expansive Mercosur can fulfill this aspiration. Their foreign ministries notwithstanding, Brazil and Venezuela put on the table two competing visions of Latin America's future.
Jose Padilla’s Due Process – Washington Post editorial
Jose Padilla finally had his day in court. After nearly five years in federal custody, Mr. Padilla and two co-defendants were convicted yesterday on three terrorism-related counts. The months of trial in South Florida were remarkable for being relatively unremarkable: Prosecutors presented evidence that Mr. Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was a member of al-Qaeda intent on using violence to advance that group's extremist goals. Defense lawyers tried to debunk those claims and offered an alternative interpretation of the evidence. A jury bought the government's case and delivered its verdict in less than 48 hours, leaving Mr. Padilla to face roughly 15 years to life behind bars, unless he prevails in an appeal. What was extraordinary, and reprehensible, was how long Mr. Padilla had to wait for the kind of due process most Americans take for granted.
The Padilla Conviction – New York Times editorial
It is hard to disagree with the jury’s guilty verdict against Jose Padilla, the accused, but never formally charged, dirty bomber. But it would be a mistake to see it as a vindication for the Bush administration’s serial abuse of the American legal system in the name of fighting terrorism. On the way to this verdict, the government repeatedly trampled on the Constitution, and its prosecution of Mr. Padilla was so cynical and inept that the crime he was convicted of — conspiracy to commit terrorism overseas — bears no relation to the ambitious plot to wreak mass destruction inside the United States, which the Justice Department first loudly proclaimed. Even with the guilty verdict, this conviction remains a shining example of how not to prosecute terrorism cases.
The Padilla Crime - Baltimore Sun editorial
The Jose Padilla case took this country to the edge of a very dark place. He is an American citizen (Brooklyn born), and he was arrested on American soil - and on the say-so of the president he was thrown into a Navy brig where he was held incommunicado and "interrogated" for 3 1/2 years. And if anyone wants to argue that he wasn't tortured during that time, he was clearly subjected to the sort of treatment that no American court would countenance if an American court had had jurisdiction over him. The man who was White House counsel when Mr. Padilla was arrested, Alberto R. Gonzales, argued that no one accused of taking up arms against the United States should be allowed access to a lawyer - or, by extension, to the judicial system of this country. It's worth spelling that out more clearly: The president or the attorney general (that's Mr. Gonzales today, of course) or any number of other federal officials can accuse an American of plotting against the government, and - poof! - that American is removed from society and the rule of law.
The Real Verdict on Jose Padilla – Jenny Martinez, Washington Post
The conclusion of Jose Padilla's criminal trial in a federal court yesterday shows that waging the "war on terror" does not require giving up our constitutional values or substituting military rule for the rule of law. The jury's guilty verdict should be appealed, but the verdict on the Constitution is in: We should keep it. Padilla is a U.S. citizen who was arrested in Chicago in May 2002, pursuant to a warrant to testify before a grand jury. He was held in civilian custody in New York for a month, but on the eve of a hearing in federal court, President Bush declared Padilla an "enemy combatant." At that point, Padilla was whisked out of the civilian justice system and imprisoned in a South Carolina military brig. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft held a news conference to announce that the government had thwarted a plot by Padilla to set off a radiological "dirty bomb" in an American city. The trial showed that our federal courts are perfectly capable of dealing with terrorism cases.
The Lost Padilla Verdict – Stephen Vladeck, Los Angeles Times
If there has been one common theme in the Bush administration's handling of the myriad legal challenges to its conduct of the "war on terrorism," it has been the government's tendency to change the playing field just when defeat seemed imminent. No case has better encapsulated this trend than that of onetime alleged "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla, who was convicted by a Miami federal jury Thursday on all three of the lesser terrorism charges against him. Those verdicts are being called a vindication for the White House, but the real triumph came when the government succeeded in avoiding a decision on bigger, more crucial issues. That is the important Padilla precedent. That the government has changed course midstream in such cases is not necessarily to suggest that its actions are in bad faith, or that the defendants are not the "bad guys" that they have been made out to be. Rather, the more serious problem is with the process -- that the changes in tactics prevent the courts from directly resolving the legality of the policies initially challenged and from fulfilling their constitutional duty to "say what the law is."
Guilty as Charged - Michael Isikoff, Newsweek
The conviction of Josè Padilla in a Miami courtroom today represents a resounding victory for the Justice Department in one of its most high-profile terror prosecutions since the September 11 attacks. But the surprisingly quick verdict leaves open a host of unanswered questions about the treatment of the one-time Chicago gang member, insuring that the legal and political debate over his landmark case is hardly over. After a nearly three-month trial, the jury, after 11 hours of deliberation, found Padilla and his codefendants, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jahhousi, guilty on three terror-related counts, including conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas. None of the charges had anything to do with the alleged radiological “dirty bomb” plot that first made Padilla a dramatic symbol of Al Qaeda’s threat—and the Bush White House’s determination to use extraordinary measures to combat it.
New Port for Russia? – Claude Salhani, Washington Times
The Russian navy, much as its predecessor the Soviet fleet, has long yearned for a warm water port to compensate for the long winter months when Baltic ports freeze over. If Syrian opposition forces are to be believed, Moscow's search may be over with Damascus offering the Russians use of their ports of Tartous and Latakia on the Mediterranean Sea. Syrian officials, however, laugh at the idea, calling it "ridiculous." Imad Mustapha, Syria's ambassador to Washington, told me "you just can't hide battleships in the Mediterranean."
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