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Al Qaeda in Trouble – Washington Times editorial
There is some very good news coming from the battlefield in Iraq: The changes in U.S. military strategy instituted earlier this year by Gen. David Petraeus have been achieving remarkable success against al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Indeed, it has been so successful that military commanders are debating how severely AQI's terrorist capabilities have been damaged. Since January, the number of suicide bombings has been cut in half, from 60 down to 30 a month. U.S. commanders say that the combination of deployments of additional U.S. soldiers into what had been al Qaeda-controlled areas in Baghdad and Anbar province, as well as the recruitment of Sunnis to fight al Qaeda have made it much more difficult for terrorists to coordinate their operations. Gen. Raymond, Odierno, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, estimates that al Qaeda has seen it's capabilities "degraded" by 60 to 70 percent since January. The situation has changed so dramatically for the better that Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post published a front-page story yesterday in which they reported that the U.S. military "believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al Qaeda in Iraq in recent months." …
MacGyvers in the Desert – Mario Loyola, National Review
As soon as the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan to hunt al Qaeda down in its caves, it starting running into the improvised explosive device. Just a few months after September 11, IEDs had become major killers — in the caves that U.S. soldiers were now scouring in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Just as quickly, the military started to devise ways of inserting eyes and ears into the cave without also putting life and limb in with them. One solution was a remote-controlled robot. It proved too heavy, too expensive, and not entirely practical for use in caves. But it was a step in the right direction and it taught the military an important lesson. The U.S. needed a force specifically designed to counter — quickly and cheaply — the lethal innovations of an exceedingly creative enemy. That is how the Rapid Equipping Force was born…
No Middle Ground in the War - Peter Schweizer, USA Today
German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck warned, "Woe to the statesman whose reasons for entering a war do not appear so plausible at its end as at its beginning."
When it comes to Iraq, President Bush can relate to those words. But they must also ring true for leading Democratic presidential candidates who were early supporters of the war. How they handle the issue will tell us a lot about what sort of commander in chief we might have in January 2009. For now, these leading Democrats look less like Harry Truman and more like LBJ.
Flip-flops and changing opinions on policies are common in presidential campaigns. But not all flip-flops are equal. Foreign policy flip-flops are different. As recent history has demonstrated, the president alone can decide when and how to commit our soldiers to combat. And presidents can largely execute a war as they see fit. Also, in foreign policy, consistency is key. Circumstances can and do change. But if your principles are shifting, you become unpredictable, which can promote tensions and actually encourage war.
The trouble with the Democratic field isn't that individual positions have changed, but how conveniently those positions seem to be based on prevailing political winds and a desire to stake out a middle ground on Iraq…
Iran’s al-Qaeda – Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal
On the morning of July 18, 1994, a suicide bomber drove a van into the seven-story Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, murdering 85 people and seriously injuring 151 others. Last November, Argentine Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral issued international arrest warrants for eight men--seven Iranians and one Lebanese--wanted in connection to the bombing. Among them are former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati, and three other men with one important point in common: All were, or are, senior officers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
That's something both Democratic politicians and Bush administration policy makers might consider in their respective internal debates over whether the IRGC should officially be designated as a foreign terrorist organization. For the administration, which has been mulling the issue since at least August, a terrorist designation for the IRGC is one further way to penalize Iran unilaterally as efforts to obtain a third round of international sanctions stall at the U.N. Security Council. But the Russians, Chinese and some of the Europeans are said to fiercely oppose the move, in part because much of their business in Iran runs through IRGC-controlled enterprises…
Iran’s Choice: Planes or Bombs? - Michael Kraft and Brett Wallace, Washington Times
With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calling the Iranian regime liars about their nuclear program, it is time to consider sharply cutting off Iran's air links to the outside world. This step would dramatize the seriousness of the efforts to steer Tehran away from developing nuclear weapons. The United States, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia will begin meeting again Wednesday to discuss tightening U.N. sanctions on Tehran. The Security Council is scheduled to take up the issue in November, having been stymied previously by Russian and Chinese opposition.
The delay followed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's defiant stance during his visit to the United States last month, when he said "the case is closed" on efforts to persuade Iran to set aside its enrichment program. Russia continues to give the Iranians more than the benefit of the doubt. President Vladimir Putin told journalists on Wednesday that Moscow has "no evidence Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon." This prompted Secretary Rice's comments the next day that "There's an Iranian history of obfuscation and indeed lying" to nuclear inspectors…
The Real Iraq We Knew – 12 Former Army Captains, Washington Post
… This is Operation Iraqi Freedom and the reality we experienced. This is what we tried to communicate up the chain of command. This is either what did not get passed on to our civilian leadership or what our civilian leaders chose to ignore. While our generals pursue a strategy dependent on peace breaking out, the Iraqis prepare for their war -- and our servicemen and women, and their families, continue to suffer.
There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately. A scaled withdrawal will not prevent a civil war, and it will spend more blood and treasure on a losing proposition.
America, it has been five years. It's time to make a choice.
On Bonuses and Leaving Iraq – New York Times editorial
There are new signs that an American military in distress is reshaping itself to cope with the destructive fallout of Iraq — and to look beyond it, even as President Bush insists on dispatching Americans to go on fighting and dying there. Young officers have been offered big cash bonuses to stay in an Army struggling to retain them. The Marines, meanwhile, are trying to move out of Iraq and into Afghanistan, a more popular mission where they could focus on America’s real enemies — al Qaeda and its allies, the Taliban — instead of trying to police a civil war.
The unprecedented bonuses — up to $35,000 — are a sign of desperation. Lengthy and repeated tours in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan have created critical shortages of younger officers in such important specialties as military intelligence, aviation — and even in the infantry as more and more men and women choose to leave the service rather than re-enlist. The Washington Post reported that when its expansion plans are factored in, the Army is projecting a shortage of 3,000 captains and majors annually through 2013…
Surviving the Times - Myrna Blyth, National Review
I couldn’t find a story about Lt. Michael Murphy winning the Medal of Honor in the New York Times on Friday, though other New York papers covered the story with pictures and headlines. The Times neglected even to note that Murphy, 29, who lived on Long Island, was a hometown hero, the first person to receive the highest battlefield honor for action in Afghanistan.
On Friday, the Times instead carried a story headlined “Marines to Conduct Inquiry Into the Killings of Afghan Civilians.” This story was about a court of inquiry being set up to examine the circumstances surrounding the killing of several Afghan civilians by members of a special-operations platoon, in a remote area of Afghanistan, near the border of Pakistan. Some of the Marines involved, who are an elite group of combat-tested troops, are now, of course, hiring their lawyers.
There is a very special irony is this. Why? Because Mikey Murphy and his three SEAL comrades, during their operation, were concerned about the potential of a story just like the one in the Times. They wanted to avoid a situation in which they would find themselves forced to defend a life saving action in a court of law…
A Duty to the Wounded - Bob Dole and Donna E. Shalala, Washington Post
It is time to decide -- do we reform the current military and veterans' disability evaluation and compensation systems or limp along, placing Band-Aids over existing flaws?
It has been more than 2 1/2 months since our commission presented its six pragmatic recommendations to improve the system of care for our injured service members and their families. Our recommendations are eminently doable and designed for immediate implementation. While progress has been made, more work remains. And the clock is ticking…
Secretary of State Pelosi – Wall Street Journal editorial
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, famous for donning a head scarf earlier this year to commune for peace with the Syrians, has now concluded that this is the perfect moment to pass a Congressional resolution condemning Turkey for the Armenian genocide of 1915. Problem is, Turkey in 2007 has it within its power to damage the growing success of the U.S. effort in Iraq. We would like to assume this is not Speaker Pelosi's goal.
To be clear: We write that we would like to assume, rather than that we do assume, because we are no longer able to discern whether the Speaker's foreign-policy intrusions are merely misguided or are consciously intended to cause a U.S. policy failure in Iraq…
Turkey’s War on the Truth – Richard Cohen, Washington Post
It goes without saying that the House resolution condemning Turkey for the "genocide" of Armenians from 1915 to 1923 will serve no earthly purpose and that it will, to say the least, complicate if not severely strain U.S.-Turkey relations. It goes without saying, also, that the Turks are extremely sensitive on the topic and, since they are helpful in the war in Iraq and are a friend to Israel, that their feelings ought to be taken into account. All of this is true, but I would feel a lot better about condemning this resolution if the argument wasn't so much about how we need Turkey and not at all about the truthfulness of the matter.
Of even that, I have some doubt. The congressional resolution repeatedly employs the word "genocide," a term used by many scholars. But Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish emigre who coined the term in 1943, clearly had in mind what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. If that is the standard -- and it need not be -- then what happened in the collapsing Ottoman Empire was something short of genocide. It was plenty bad -- maybe as many as 1.5 million Armenians perished, many of them outright murdered -- but not all Armenians everywhere in what was then Turkey were as calamitously affected. The substantial Armenian communities in Constantinople, Smyrna and Aleppo were largely spared. No German city could make that statement about its Jews…
Armenian Crime Amnesia? - Bruce Fein, Washington Times
Armenian crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Ottoman Turkish and Kurdish populations of eastern and southern Anatolia during World War I and its aftermath have been forgotten amidst congressional preoccupation with placating the vocal and richly financed Armenian lobby.
Last Wednesday, the Armenians hectored members of the House International Relations Committee by a 27-21 vote into passing a counterfactual resolution convicting the Ottoman Empire and its successor state, the Republic of Turkey, of genocide. A historically supportable resolution would have condemned massacres against Armenians with the same vigor, as it should have condemned massacres by Armenians against the innocent Muslim populations of the crumbling Ottoman Empire.
Capt. Emory Niles and Arthur Sutherland, on an official 1919 U.S. mission to eastern Anatolia, reported: "In the entire region from Bitlis through Van to Bayezit, we were informed that the damage and destruction had been done by the Armenians, who, after the Russians retired, remained in occupation of the country and who, when the Turkish army advanced, destroyed everything belonging to the Musulmans. Moreover, the Armenians are accused of having committed murder, rape, arson and horrible atrocities of every description upon the Musulman population. At first, we were most incredulous of these stories, but we finally came to believe them, since the testimony was absolutely unanimous and was corroborated by material evidence. For instance, the only quarters left at all intact in the cities of Bitlis and Van are Armenian quarters ... while the Musulman quarters were completely destroyed." …
Deterrence Lost – Stanley Kurtz, National Review
The danger of terrorist nuclear attacks on American soil is not only very real, but disturbingly likely. Based on current trends, a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States is more likely than not in the decade ahead. So says Graham Allison, Harvard professor and former campaign adviser to John Kerry. Allison made his prediction this past July. In the wake of Israel’s destruction in September of a Syrian reactor modeled on North Korea’s own nuclear-fuel factory, how are “current trends” looking today?
Allison is particularly worried that North Korea might pass nuclear weapons or material to terrorists. He notes that North Korea has threatened as much, telling American diplomats, “It’s up to you whether we...transfer them.” North Korea’s apparently conditional threat to transfer nuclear material points to Allison’s favored solution, a “grand bargain” in which North Korea (and Iran) would be offered security assurances and economic aid in exchange for nuclear disarmament…
A Journalist’s Sacrifice – Washington Post editorial
Salih Saif Aldin was one of those extraordinary Iraqis who have responded to war and upheaval in their homeland by becoming journalists. A native of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's home town and once one of the centers of the Sunni insurgency, he began documenting events there, first for an Iraqi newspaper and then, beginning in January 2004, for The Washington Post. His commitment to the toughest assignments frequently put him in harm's way, so much so that The Post transferred him to Baghdad partly for his own protection. But there, too, Mr. Saif Aldin repeatedly took on the most dangerous assignments -- not because he was foolhardy but because, as he once told the newspaper's office manager, "what's life, really, if we don't leave something good behind us?"
On Sunday afternoon, Mr. Saif Aldin, 32, was killed in one of Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhoods. He was shot once in the forehead. Apparently he had been taking pictures of houses that had been burned in Sadiyah, an area plagued by sectarian violence. It's not clear who killed him: One witness blamed the Shiite-dominated Iraqi army unit in the neighborhood, while police suggested Sunni militiamen were responsible…
Fixing FISA – National Review editorial
From the early days of the War on Terror, congressional Democrats have undermined our national security by siding with civil-liberties extremists on questions of intelligence collection. Among the most prominent examples of this — and a long-running one — is their position on reform of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.
Let’s leave aside FISA’s dubious premise that a secret court, insulated from political accountability, should oversee foreign-intelligence collection. There is still broad consensus that the FISA statute needs overhaul. Enacted in the wake of Watergate, it was designed to discourage actual domestic spying, not the surveillance of foreign operatives inside the United States that Democrats like to call “domestic spying.” But FISA’s structure harks back to a bygone era of analogue communications technology that has been steamrolled by the telecom revolution. Moreover, international terrorist networks are different from the Communist threat that FISA’s Cold War–era authors had in mind. They are less predictable, more likely to strike, and more adept at exploiting new technologies which allow them to remain in contact with their operatives…
The Failed Moscow Talks – Ariel Cohen, Washington Times
Last Friday and Saturday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited Moscow. They met with President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and First Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Ivanov, for what are known as the "2 + 2 talks." These were agreed upon in Kennebunkport, Maine, between Presidents George W. Bush and Mr. Putin. The Moscow talks did not go well.
Before the talks started, Mr. Putin made Miss Rice and Mr. Gates wait for him for 40 minutes — a deliberate diplomatic slight. Greeting the two senior U.S. Cabinet members in front of TV cameras, Mr. Putin came out adamantly against deployment of the U.S. component of the global ballistic missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic…
The Neglected Continent – Boston Globe editorial
Celebrity gossip can dominate the Republican presidential primary, from Fred Thompson's acting to Rudy Giuliani's marriages, so it's a challenge to be Senator Sam Brownback, conservative candidate from Kansas, taking a thoughtful stand on the important but unpopular issue of Africa.
"I fundamentally believe that we're at an Africa-centric moment," Brownback said yesterday during an interview at the Globe. He made a case that, for its own self-interest, the United States should pay more attention to Africa's people and politics, and to its growing economic relationship with China…
LOST Justice – Frank Gaffney Jr., Washington Times
I am not a lawyer. But you don't need to be one to recognize a legal train-wreck in the making. And that is what recent events portend if the U.S. Senate agrees to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (better known as the Law of the Sea Treaty or LOST) in the next few weeks.
Consider two ominous indicators of trouble ahead. The first was evident in the lengthy discussion justices of the U.S. Supreme Court had last week during their consideration of a Texas court case in which "universal jurisprudence" aspires to trump American law…
China Watch – John Carey, Washington Times
"With China's rapid rise and relentless military build-up, the 'China threat' is no longer confined to confrontation across the Taiwan Strait. In fact, it has already seriously impacted world peace," said Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian on Oct. 10, 2007.
He urged the international community to "strongly demand that China immediately withdraw missiles deployed along its southeastern coast targeted at Taiwan, stop military exercises simulating attacks on Taiwan."
Mr. Chen was kicking off Taiwan's annual National Day parade. The parade featured, for the first time in 16 years, military troops and equipment. Yet Taiwan took out of the parade line up, at the last minute, its secret cruise missile, the HF-2E, that analysts say could reach Shanghai…
The Future Calling in Estonia – Anne Applebaum, Washington Post
… History certainly influences Estonia's relationship with Russia: The two neighbors have a standing disagreement about whether the Red Army's invasion in 1945 "liberated" Estonia from the Nazis, as the Russians would have it, or launched a bloody Soviet occupation -- during which 10 percent of the country's population was deported to concentration camps and exile -- as most Estonians remember it. No mere theoretical dispute, this argument has led to riots in Tallinn and Moscow, as well as a wave of cyber-attacks on Estonian governmental and economic institutions in the spring.
But the Estonians are not alone. Last year, the Hungarians nearly came to blows about the causes and current significance of their anti-communist revolution in 1956: At one point during 50th anniversary celebrations, police officers used tear gas against protesters riding a Soviet-era tank through the center of Budapest, making for some eerily familiar photographs…
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