Hope Yet for Iraq? – Victor Davis Hanson, Real Clear Politics
Iraq for most Americans is now a toxic subject -- best either ignored or largely evoked to blame someone for something in the past.
Any visitor to Iraq can see that the American military cannot be defeated there, but also is puzzled over exactly how we could win -- victory being defined as fostering a stable Iraqi constitutional state analogous to, say, Turkey.
But war is never static. Over the last 90 days, there has been newfound optimism, as Iraqis are at last stepping forward to help Americans secure their country…
Hold Back – London Times leader
If Turkey’s Army is to be taken at face value, it has 140,000 troops and substantial detachments of heavy armour massed along the country’s southeastern border. It has the Government’s approval in principle for cross-border incursions into Kurdish Iraq. It awaits only parliamentary approval, which could be given as early as today, before launching such operations. And it has ample justification in the form of a 30-year running battle with separatist fighters of the Kurdis-tan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has cost 30,000 lives, including those of 13 Turkish soldiers gunned down on their own soil on Sunday.
Yesterday, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister, confirmed that “preparations for parliamentary authorisation” had begun. He may feel that political and military pressure for a strike on PKK bases in Iraq has become irresistible; it is certainly more intense than at any time since 1995. Even so, he must resist it at all costs.
Mr Erdogan has described his country’s struggle with the PKK as a counter-terrorism campaign with “the same legitimacy for Turkey as it has for the US, Spain or the United Kingdom”. It is true that the Kurdish separatists’ arcane brand of Marxism-Leninism is an ideology almost as extreme, in its way, as that of the al-Qaeda groups that the secular West is battling against worldwide. The PKK is also listed as a terrorist organisation by both the US and the EU. But Turkey’s conflict with the PKK is about territory as well as ideology, and the territory in question is an enclave within an otherwise relatively peaceful and prosperous region of Iraq…
The Geopolitical Foundations of Blackwater - George Friedman, Stratfor
For the past three weeks, Blackwater, a private security firm under contract to the U.S. State Department, has been under intense scrutiny over its operations in Iraq. The Blackwater controversy has highlighted the use of civilians for what appears to be combat or near-combat missions in Iraq. Moreover, it has raised two important questions: Who controls these private forces and to whom are they accountable?
The issue is neither unique to Blackwater nor to matters of combat. There have long been questions about the role of Halliburton and its former subsidiary, KBR, in providing support services to the military. The Iraq war has been fought with fewer active-duty troops than might have been expected, and a larger number of contractors relative to the number of troops. But how was the decision made in the first place to use U.S. nongovernmental personnel in a war zone? More important, how has that decision been implemented?
The United States has a long tradition of using private contractors in times of war. For example, it augmented its naval power in the early 19th century by contracting with privateers -- nongovernmental ships -- to carry out missions at sea. During the battle for Wake Island in 1941, U.S. contractors building an airstrip there were trapped by the Japanese fleet, and many fought alongside Marines and naval personnel. During the Civil War, civilians who accompanied the Union and Confederate armies carried out many of the supply functions. So, on one level, there is absolutely nothing new here. This has always been how the United States fights war…
Coddling Killers – Ralph Peters, New York Post
The fighting in Pakistan this week has been more in tense than any current op erations across the border in Afghanistan. President Musharraf is paying, with interest, for trying to cut a deal with Islamist fanatics.
The combat operations in North Waziristan involve thousands of ground troops, artillery barrages and attack aircraft. This isn't internal policing. It's war.
And it's all the uglier and deadlier because the Pakistani government convinced itself that appeasement could work. Last year, the generals believed they had an agreement with the truculent tribals on the Northwest Frontier: The tribesmen would behave, and the army would leave them alone…
Caught in the Crossfire – Greg Sheridan, The Australian
The near unanimous re-election of Pakistan's military dictator Pervez Musharraf as President, and the tragic death of Australian soldier David Pearce in Afghanistan, point up the contradictions in Western policy, and Australian policy, towards Pakistan.
The brutal reality is that there is every chance Pearce's terrorist killers were enabled by Musharraf's regime, while we still regard Musharraf as an ally in the war on terror.
In Pakistan, an impoverished, unsuccessful Muslim nation with dozens of nuclear weapons and a rising sentiment of Islamic fundamentalism, it may well be that Musharraf is the best option for the moment, because who knows what might replace him. But that just shows how crummy all the options are in Pakistan.
There is a direct contradiction between the West's short-term and long-term policy in Pakistan. Short term, Musharraf is the West's only option, because in some measure he is committed to the war on terror. Long term, the only real prospect for stability and moderation in Pakistan is a civilian democracy. The situation is complicated by Pakistan's most recent democratic leaders, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, having presided over governments that were both monumentally ineffective and corrupt.
Most important, neither of them had any real control over the key matters of policy: nuclear weapons, the sponsorship of terrorism, the support of the Taliban in Afghanistan or the support of terrorists in Kashmir and other parts of India…
Getting Around FISA Naysayers – Washington Times editorial
When it comes to reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), Democrats are caught between the political desire to pander to their far-left political base and the security imperative of preventing future terrorist attacks. They continue to look and sound like slippery politicians.
The House Democratic leadership — in particular Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (with the blessing of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) — is pushing a "reform" bill that would roll back the temporary expansion of eavesdropping authority approved in August by Congress. The eavesdropping authority expires Feb. 1…
Is Bolivia Cozying Up to Iran? – Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, Time Magazine
Fresh from ruffling feathers and hogging headlines in New York, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last month got down to business in Latin America — specifically, the business of Tehran's $17 billion economic agreements with Venezuela, and a new pact involving over $1 billion of trade and investment with Bolivia. The idea of Iran's controversial President poking around in what had once been Washington's backyard provoked predictable expressions of alarm, but there may be less than meets the eye to the image of left-leaning Latin American governments cozying up to Tehran.
"Latin American leaders like [Bolivia's President Evo] Morales are not the staunch ideologues they are often portrayed as," says Nadia Martinez of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. "They are pragmatic: When Iran offers a billion dollars, Bolivia's going to accept. It does not mean the beginning of the next cold war."
Take away the fact that both men are strong critics of U.S. policy, and there's very little left in common between Morales and Ahmadinejad. The Bolivian leader is an ardent leftist, while the Iranian is a conservative religious fundamentalist. And despite his criticisms of Bush Administration policy, Morales' government maintains strong economic ties with Washington. But the Iranian investment means a lot for Bolivia, whose GDP barely reaches $9 billion annually…
Monks and China Rising – Roger Cohen, New York Times
Seldom has a country’s rise been as smooth as China’s in recent years. Bush-bashing has left the world with scant surplus indignation to devote to Beijing’s backing for many of the planet’s ugliest regimes, including those in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Iran and Cuba.
Talk of “harmony” — the buzzword favored by President Hu Jintao — and “no strings attached” assistance has been the camouflage for China’s readiness to get in bed with thugs from central casting who can provide the oil, gas and raw materials that fuel the furious growth critical to preserving one-party rule.
Hu’s harmony is mostly hogwash. But who cares? The global thirst for China’s business, and for alternative power centers to Washington, has given the slogan a free ride…
Congo’s Rape War – John Holmes, Los Angeles Times
Despite many warnings nothing quite prepared me for what I heard last month from survivors of a sexual violence so brutal it staggers the imagination and mocked my notions of human decency. I cannot find the words to describe what I heard from the girls and women in Panzi Hospital, located in South Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo, near the epicenter of one of the world's major humanitarian crises. What I do know is that I am not the same person now as when I walked into that hospital.
As a United Nations official with a special brief for humanitarian affairs, I have seen many people around the globe suffering under truly tragic circumstances. But Congo is different. Its long-running conflict has always been a brutal one, having claimed nearly 4 million lives between 1998 and 2004 -- the equivalent of five Rwandan genocides. And although the war formally ended years ago, fighting has continued in the eastern part of the country, where the national army is battling local and foreign militias in a struggle involving unresolved ethnic conflicts, regional power dynamics and the powerful tug of greed, with all sides vying for a slice of Congo's rich mineral resources…
Europe’s Canary in a Coal Mine? – Jonah Goldberg, National Review
… The catch-22 is delightful. By scaling back the job description of a nation-state to a few ceremonial duties, ethnic minorities see fewer risks and a lot more rewards in breaking away. Countries such as Slovakia get to trade on their votes in the EU and the U.N. They get their own anthems and sports teams and get to teach their own language and culture. It’s like a McDonald’s franchise. You man the register and keep the bathrooms clean, but the folks at corporate HQ do the heavy lifting. That’s why the Basques, Scots and Flemings are looking to open their own franchises. The question is whether the nationalist hunger of such McNations can be satisfied by just the symbolism of autonomy.
This points to why I take so much pleasure in the troubles in Brussels. The EU always made the most sense to Belgians, who have a weak national identity. The myth was that everyone felt the same way.
Indeed, the EU project has always been predicated on self-serving myths. Another is the idea that with greater “understanding” comes greater peace and comity…
Criminal Behavior – National Review editorial
There are two kinds of crooks. The first cuts a deal. He tells the government what he knows and forever after is ostracized and hunted by his old partners in crime. The second is “stand-up.” He keeps his mouth shut. After serving his time, he is welcomed back into the fold. He might even get a “bump up” in rank from his grateful bosses.
No, we’re not talking about The Sopranos. What we have in mind is a new episode of a tawdry soap opera that began in the 1990s. Welcome to the case of disgraced former national security adviser Sandy Berger — and what it portends about a potential President Hillary.
Now Berger is back in business at Camp Clinton, advising New York’s junior senator in her bid for the White House. This warrants a review of Berger’s recent history. After his stint as national security adviser, he became Bill Clinton’s liaison to the 9/11 Commission as it investigated intelligence failures (many of which happened on Berger’s watch). Berger was accordingly given access to the national archives, both to prepare his own testimony and to get the former president ready for an interview with the commission.
Berger used his privileged access to steal top-secret national-defense documents. On at least two occasions he stuffed them into his clothing and briefcase, smuggling them out of the archives. He secreted some of these stolen papers under the wheel of a truck at a nearby construction site so that he could return for them later. Other documents he intentionally destroyed. These actions were serious felonies…
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