Ledeen:

Michael Ledeen writes in today's NRO about the Najaf bombing. He agrees with the CNN report that put Mugniyah in Iraq, which posits a Hezbollah-Qaeda union in Iraq. But he goes beyond that report, and places the blame for Najaf squarely on Moqtada al-Sadr, who is, he says, the head of Hezbollah in Iraq.

My sense of al-Sadr has been that he is the Jesse Jackson Jr. of Iraq, using his father's name and some semi-bogus religious "leadership" to shakedown the CPA with threats of a Shi'a uprising. It is certainly true that Najaf put al-Sadr in the #1 spot among vocal Iraqi Shi'ites. I'm not ready to condemn him yet, but there are some serious questions here he'll need to answer. It would be nice if some of those in the newly independent Iraqi press started to ask them.

From Yemen?

Via InstaPundit, two car-bomb attacks have been prevented by Iraqi police. Details are sparse, but there is one very interesting point: the drivers of yesterday's car were said to be from Yemen. That makes them exactly the kind of non-Iraqi "Arab nationals" under threat by the Najaf militia.

...and a Georgia Overdrive:

Some poetry in honor of Labor Day:

I.C.C. is a-checking on down the line.
Well, I'm a little overweight and my log books way behind.
But nothing bothers me tonight, I can dodge all the scales all right,
Six days on the road, I'm gonna make it home tonight.

Well, my rig's a little old, but that don't mean she's slow.
There's a flame from her stack and the smoke's blowing black as coal.
My hometown's coming in sight, if you think I'm happy, you're right,
Six days on the road, now I'm gonna make it home tonight.
Six days on the road, now I'm gonna make it home tonight.

The Taliban Regroup:

The Sydney Morning Herald reports on the regrouping of the Taliban in Pakistan. Last week more than eighty were killed in fighting in and around Zabul province, the one that the Taliban claim to control.

Bush Lied, Soldiers Died:

This line has been around for a while, and I find that it seriously makes me angry. I don't like to talk about things that make me angry, as I try to treat all arguments fairly, and anger can cause you to do or say things that aren't rational.

I'm not sure it's rational, for example, to be outraged by Buzzflash selling postcards with casualty figures from Iraq. I'm sure their reasons for this are wholly--what? Political, I think. You get the sense that the only reason they care about the men who've died in Iraq is that it is a stick with which they can beat Bush. Does Buzzflash realize how this looks to an ex-Marine? Do they care? I somehow doubt it.

Then there's Eschaton, who features this line as part of his header. Now, I've got nothing against the fellow. He's a bit shrill in his tone, and is a bit quick to resort to insults and name-calling ad hominem attacks in lieu of argument. I've glanced back over his archives for a bit, in order to be sure I was being fair to him. I think I can honestly say that he's got nothing against the military per se, except that there are disproportinate numbers of conservatives in it, and he finds conservatism to be viscerally objectionable. Still, I think he's usually fair to the military, as shown by this bit on the sensitive subject of Afghan civilian casualties:

One need not feel that the war in Afghanistan has been unjust or inappropriate, or that our military was callous or indscriminate in its choice of targets, or to "Blame America," to think that these indirect victims of the events of 9/11 deserve some consideration. Their deaths were a direct result of the events of 9/11, and the blame can be placed on those who planned and implemented the mass murder on that day.

The fact that some civilian casualties are an inevitable consequence of almost any military action does not make the deaths less tragic. Nor does my mentioning them imply that I am elevating the importance of their deaths above those Americans and non-Americans who died on 9/11. They are, however, also victims of 9/11, even if their deaths came later and their stories are not often told here.

I think that's very well said. As a result, my sense that he wouldn't really care about the lives of US soldiers and Marines if it weren't a political stick for the thing he does care about--beating Bush--is perhaps unfair. I can't find that he ever remarked on US military casualties in KFOR, for example, or in Afghanistan previous to the development of the "Bush Lied, Soldiers Died" line of thought. On the other hand, casualties in both cases have been quite light for coalition forces. You get the sense from reading Eschaton that he wouldn't like military men personally, and some of the permanent links on his page are to anti-American sites (this one in particular, which asks for volunteers to help research crimes by the US government). I don't wish to hold him too tightly to responsibility for that, though. Eschaton himself addressed those issues fairly, as above, so probably his interest in these matters is equally genuine.

Would it be right to ask the fellow to stand down from this line, then, just because others on the further-Left have used it to bludgeon without regard to the feelings of those who have stood to serve? I do not mean to make him stand down, which is plainly improper: merely to ask him to do so, as a courtesy. I have a sense that it might be, for the same reason that we Southerners have been asked to please avoid playing "Dixie" in public places; and indeed, we have largely done so. I haven't heard "Dixie" played openly in years, which in one way is a shame as it's a beautiful song: and yet I fully understand the reasons. Is it too much to ask that other good hearted folk avoid adopting the symbols of extremists?

House Cleaning:

This is what InstaPundit is calling a bombshell, from TIME magazine. It is the story of how Zubaydah, captured al-Qaeda strategist, implicated Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz of the House of Saud as a key figure in al Qaeda's support structure.

TIME says that Zubaydah was captured on 28 March 2002. What it doesn't say is that Ahmed bin Salman was dead by July:

[L]ife expectation among the Saudi Royal Family has taken a sudden turn for the worse. Three princes have died within a week: on July 22nd, Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz (owner of the champion racehorse War Emblem) had a fatal heart attack at the age of 43; on July 23rd, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, 41, died in a car accident on the way to the funeral; on July 29th, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, 25, was found dead in the desert from "thirst."

So--did we kill him, or did the Saudis take care of it themselves? I'd bet on the latter, or a joint action. It's pretty clear that the Saudi government is shaking itself out. If there are terror-supporting elements--and all indicators say that there are--there's also a real effort among those who can read the tea leaves to purge those elements. The future isn't with al Qaeda, and the lords of Arabia know it. Not surprisingly, clerics in Arabia are falling in line.

The General Militia:

It's always good to see a genuine, Classical Liberal idea at work in US policy. This time the rumors are from Canada, where there are reports that the US government may accept the formation of Iraqi militias to secure the cities.

This is a good idea, as I argued last week. However, this is not the first time I've argued in favor of it: I also liked the idea back when the Marines were in Saddam city, now al-Sadr city; and when US Army soldiers were first dealing with Iraqi weapons.

General militias are effective at instituting order in a way that no other form of administration is or can be. Free men, moving about the communities in which they live and work, know when something unusual is going on. Just as free citizens in those parts of the United States that recognize the 2nd Amendment keep order whether or not there are police about, so militias in Iraq would keep order against "Arab nationals" who had come to stir up trouble.

Indeed, against a group like al Qaeda, the general militia is the most effective response. It turns the entire state into a hard target, and every place terrorists go to strike they find themselves outgunned and outmanned by the decent and the law abiding. Just as the "General Militia of Flight 93" stood up in an instant to put an end to the plot to destroy the White House, and the folk of now-Sadr City hunted and slaughtered their tormenters to the last man, so the enraged Shi'ites of Iraq have a right to stand up and drive the killers from their midst. It is their nation, and if we want it to be free and strong, we have to help them in taking command of it. Follow the Marines' example: it is time for the General Militia of Iraq.

Smart, but Imaginative?

An article in the Atlantic Monthly about G.W. Bush. It holds that he's "focused, quick to make decisions, perservering, a good judge of character, and yes, "smart enough" to be an effective President." Then there is this comparison between Bush and Lincoln:

Does Bush have the imagination to lead a great war? And even if he does, can he communicate it? The day before Abraham Lincoln's first inauguration, in the thick of the secession crisis, William Seward, who was to be the new Secretary of State, observed that 'the President has a curious vein of sentiment running through his thought, which is his most valuable mental attribute.' This is one of the shrewdest remarks ever made about Lincoln. That vein of sentiment changed the logician of the 1860 campaign into the visionary who delivered the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural.

Thanks to S.D., citizen of the USA but resident of the world.

Capitalism:

Came across a blog I haven't read before. I was drawn by the name, "Arms and the Man," which is both a traditional translation of the opening of the Iliad and also the name of a play by George B. Shaw about the Balkan wars. The blog turns out to be on corporate profiteering in the Iraq reconstruction. I have to give the lady (Major Barbara?) credit for the thoroughness of her inquiry. Conflicts of interest ought to be made public, and politicians who have them have to be held accountable.

On the other hand, I still think that profiteering off Iraq's reconstruction is a good thing. If conflicts of interest are not at stake, I stand by my Daddy Warbucks analogy:

Today we are not merely acting to defend our country, but to rebuild a shattered land and lift up a miserable people. There is--let us be frank--money to be made doing so. Thank goodness there is. This is how the market lifts our common boats: not, as Adam Smith said, through alutrism, but through the selfish pursual of our own interests. The number of people who would be willing to dedicate a substantial part of their lives to rebuilding Iraq if there were no money to be made is very small--most of them are in the Marines. If we're to draw down the kind of capital and talent it will require over the long term, we need profiteers.

I think it's important to draw this distinction. Capitalistic profiteering off the rebuild in Iraq isn't merely acceptable, it's to be encouraged. That's how we'll get the talent we need to go into a difficult enviornment and risk life and fortune. Yeah, some of them will get rich--good. It's one of the strengths of capitalism that it can be harnessed to the good of the Iraqi people, a people who have suffered long and deeply.

"Is this organic?" "Probably not."

An article on Scottish food. If you haven't had haggis, you ought; if you haven't had it at a regimental dining in of one of the Scottish units, find a way to get an invitation. The Guardian has more, in the cheerily hopeless voice of Jenny Colgan.

Al Qaeda:

Well, our old friends turn up in the oddest places. I began wondering if al Qaeda was behind the Najaf bombing last night, after I saw this report (credited to CNN--I've seen it several places, but can't find it on the CNN website) that Hezbollah and al Qaeda have allied in Iraq. The reason this is interesting in terms of Najaf is this bit:

One of the most wanted terrorists on the FBI's list may have forged an alliance with al Qaeda members against U.S. forces in Iraq, according to U.S. and coalition intelligence officials.

These officials think Imad Mugniyah -- suspected in the Beirut bombings in the early 1980s -- may have joined forces with an al Qaeda suspect, Abu Mussab al Zarqawi, to threaten U.S. troops in Iraq. Both men are believed to be hiding in Iran.

Middle East experts and intelligence officials in several countries say Mugniyah, a Lebanese Shiite Muslim, runs the international terrorist apparatus of Lebanese Hezbollah and that he works as a subcontractor for Iranian intelligence, often using Iran as a safe haven.

The bombing yesterday was highly professional. It was a bomb constructed by someone who knew what kind of explosives he would need to be sure of killing his target; it managed to, most reports suggest, be planted in al-Hakim's own vehicle, or one just by it. Bombs of that sophistication are not the work of ex-Army people. Mugniyah, though, he knows how. The bombing of the US embassy in Beruit was a masterwork of that murderous trade. Master bombers are blessedly hard to find, and Mugniyah's group is among the best in the world.

So now four men have been arrested and, according to reports, have confessed to being with al Qaeda. This may or may not be true, of course: why trust the word of terrorists? Still, it is one more thing to watch in the developing story in Najaf.

Prominent Iraqi Clergy:

The Kansas City Star has a who's who of Iraq's surviving religious leadership. They note that al-Sadr was said to have been behind the killings in the Shrine of Ali over the summer, though he himself denies it.

More on Najaf:

The extent of the destruction at Najaf is far, far worse than originally reported. For Shi'ites in Iraq, this may well be their 9/11, combined with the assassination of their Gandhi. Americans may not understand just how important the Shrine of Ali is to Shi'a Islam, but here is a starting point for you. The Shrine, or Tomb, of Ali is so important that the 101st Airborne, during the Iraq war, refused to return fire directed at them from the Shrine rather than risk damaging it. Najaf itself is a holy city, and the Tomb of Ali is one of the most important places in the world to a Shi'ite, not all that far after Mecca itself.

In spite of that, and US restraint, there has been violence earlier this year inside the Tomb of Ali, where two Muslim clerics were hacked to death by a crowd. But this car bomb was apparently huge, and went beyond killing men and spilling blood: it slew, according to AP reports, 82 Muslims at Friday prayers. (For my non-Muslim readers, i.e. most of you, Friday is the holy day in Islam, as Saturday for the Jews and Sunday for the Christians). The UN has responded: top officials have told the press they want to pull the UN out of Iraq rather than work toward peace and security.

But what will the Shi'ites do? For them, this is an earthquake.

Paganism in Schools:

Have you seen this statue of Athena in a public park in Nashville, TN? The author of the piece pointing out demands that it be torn down and removed, since the Ten Commandments monument was torn down and removed from public property. No favoritism for Pagans, he says!

Well, fine. But where can I find a statue of Woden, on public or private property? This gets back to Jefferson's point, which was that the real roots of our culture are in the pre-Roman North of Europe, not in the Greco-Roman tradition. Jefferson was certainly an admirer of Rome--you can see it in the dome he constructed for his house--but he was also a realist about history. One reason that the tradition exemplified by Leo Strauss has had such difficulty making "ancient liberalism" and modern liberalism come to terms is that there is little common ground between them. Greek ideas about democracy did not survive the Roman empire, whose own ideas about the Republic gave way to imperialism.

The Greco-Roman tradition, if anything, worked against egalitarianism and the old views of virtue. The surviving Roman tradition is what turned elective kingship into Charlemagne, and what turned the early, charismatic Christian church into a hierarchy that hunted heretics and squashed dissent. Whatever good may be said about Catholicism--I believe that there is very much good to say about it--it is undeniably true that the Imperial hierarchy it adopted thanks to the interest of Constantine the Great was a force against free-thinking, eh, "heresy." It was that Imperial Church that survived the Empire, and while it may be said that it held Europe together, it must be noted that it did so by imposing a rigid authority.

Those places in Medieval Europe where we see a vision of freedom like to our own are those that had not yet been involved in the Empire, or which had been swept from its grasp entirely: England, Scotland, Ireland, and among the Vikings, who held as we do that all free men are equal.

I haven't spoken to the Viking notions in a while yet, so I'll post just a couple of links for those of you among my readers less familiar with Viking ethics. Just as the Scottish Declaration of Arbroath, the Viking tradition upheld that a king ruled by right of consent of the goverened, and that he could be removed--even slain--and replaced if he violated the will of the folk. King Olav of Sweden discovered this when he tried to bully the assembly, called the Thing, at Uppsala:

Now it is our will, we bondes [free land-owning farmers], that thou King Olaf [of Sweden] make peace with the Norway king, Olaf the Thick [ON: Digre], and marry thy daughter Ingegerd to him. Wilt thou, however, reconquer the kingdoms in the east countries which thy
relations and forefathers had there, we will all for that purpose follow thee to the war. But if thou wilt not do as we desire, we will now attack thee, and put thee to death; for we will no longer suffer law and peace to be disturbed. So our forefathers went to work when they drowned five kings in a morass at the Mula-thing, and they were filled with the same insupportable pride thou hast shown towards us. Now tell us, in all haste, what resolution thou wilt take.

So it was that the French, who were mired in notions of superiority and inferiority among men even in the Viking Age, got a lesson that must have been stirring and chilling at once. When French knights approached a Viking encampment to demand to know who had come unwanted into their kingdom, they got this answer:

"We are Danes", they replied, "we are from Denmark and we are here to conquer France". "But who is your master?" the knight shouted back, but just to receive the famous answer: "Nobody, we have no master, we are all equal".

It was the coming of the Greco-Roman-Catholic tradition that ended elective kingship and egalitarianism in Europe. Men were supposedly born better or worse than each other, and meant to accept their place, an attitude that has its roots in Rome's patricians and plebians, and slaves who were scorned for rising above their station.

Fortunately these ways survived in the fringes of Europe, such as Scotland, and among those classes, like English yeomanry, who were most devoted to them. Thankfully, they blossomed at the moment that a new continent was available wherein they could take root, and the "Scottish Enlightenment" combined with an Anglo-Saxon ideal of "yeomen farmers," pace Jefferson again. We have our vision of freedom as a consequence. It would be wise to remember the truth about its roots.

Murdering Clerics, II:

Terror bombings are not usually an effective way to fight a war. The bombing this morning in Najaf, though was a bad one. It killed Baqir al-Hakim. Al-Hakim was one of the most important Shi'ites in Iraq, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, and brother to one of the members of the US-backed Governing Council, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim.

In form this assassination of a Shi'ite cleric is similar to the Taliban killings of clerics in Afghanistan, as well as the IRA's murder of Lord Mountbatten. This may be more important than the UN bombing before it is over with, and is an event to watch. In any event, Moqtada al-Sadr just became the #1 Shi'ite in Iraq following three attacks on his rivals: Sunday's bombing, Wednesday's gunman attack on the Baghdad offices of the Supreme Council, and now this bombing. Does that make al-Sadr a suspect, or the next target? Mohsen al-Hakim, nephew to Baqir al-Hakim, felt the gunman attack was the work of Ba'athists. I think that's highly likely, but another possibility exists also: that it is the work of forces from Iran, trying to destroy a powerful Shi'ite organization that has been increasingly willing to work with the United States.

Bring them on:

President Bush said this on July 7th. While back-reading for something, I find that I said it on March 29th, in the course of a rejection of Noam Chomsky. If you don't want to revisit the whole thing, what I said was: "Bring them on: we'll clear the world of them."

I was drawing on Moby Dick for that, one of my favorite lines in the whole novel. I don't know where Bush got it--I won't claim he took it from here. I have to say that I feel the same way today. Osama bin Laden called this tune. On 9/11, he and his took us over the edge from the world of order and law into the world of war. We will not, frankly, have peace again until we have met on the battlefield those who think they can destroy the order of the West through violence, not until we have met them and slain them. There is no one we could surrender to if we would. There is not anyone to negotiate with.

I'm an openminded sort of fellow--for example, I support the northern Sudan's call for Sharia law because I understand that their desire is, by removing judicial power from an illegitimate government that came to power by coup, placing that judicial authority instead in the hands of local imams, to restrain the government's authority. Sharia makes perfect sense under the circumstances, and I wish them the best of it.

With the Islamists who want to bring war against us, though, there is no hope. These lads are dead-enders--and matter of fact, so am I. My father's family left Quakerism to fight in the Civil War, because their hatred of slavery overrode their love of pacifism. I have to say we never looked back. My great-great grandfather killed seven men in one night to prevent a lynching. My great-grandfather stood off his father's enemies in a Tennessee gunfight. My grandfather carried a gun until he was nearly eighty, and used it to enforce peace and justice on his nearby surroundings during the Civil Rights troubles of the 1960s. I don't think there's a single bastard who's trained in an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan whose devotion to his cause rivals my father's patriotism. For myself--well, bring it on and see what you get.

And I have a son, named Beowulf. Yes, Osama called the tune. He wanted a fight for the future of mankind. I welcome it. The Beowulf of old said:

I ask you,
lord of the Danes,
protector of this people,
for only one favor:
that you refuse me not,
fair friend of the people,
do not refuse those who
have come so far the chance
to cleanse Herot.

And so we shall.

From the Texas Mercury:

The Texas Mercury has published some of my poetry in the past, but like the wild El Paso of song, it's a pretty rough and free-for-all place. In spite of that, I'm linking to it because I love their philosophy:

The Texas Mercury is beholden to no interest, genuflects to no god, and endorses no party. We intend to publish every view not now in the useless mainstream press, and publish it without hold or censure. We will be publishing communist, racist, hedonist, and fascistic ideas- anything novel or outside the purview of the staid politics of our day, so long as it be well written and without mercy. As we see it, modern society has all the important ideas of life exactly backwards: we are completely against the belief in sensitivity and tolerance in politics and raffish disregard in private life. The Texas Mercury is founded on the opposite principles- our idea is of tolerance and polite sensitivity in private life and ruthless truth in politics. Be nice to your neighbor. Be hell to his ideas.

I think that's got it about right. Racist and Communist ideas fall under their own weight in a forum that pulls no punches. Therefore, there's no harm in letting their advocates have an honest try.

This week the Texas Mercury has an historical debate of some interest to Southerners, continued from a previous week, as to the degree of Celtic influence in the American South and West. Excerpt from the debate:

As a prelude, I will say that virtually all people who routinely write �south� and �southern� rather than �South� and �Southern� fall into one of four categories: 1) Yankees; 2) New South liberals (who invariably desire the perverting and refashioning of Southern culture into something acceptable to Yankee WASPs: most �conservative� businessmen from the South of the past 60-80 years have been New South liberals, as are most �conservative� Republican politicos from the South); 3) proponents of American Empire; 4) ignorant.

As I said, it's a free-for-all. If you are inclined to slugfests in saloons, head on over. If you are one of my more delicate readers, please take this warning and enjoy the writings through some of the more refined links.

Links:

If you read down the sidebar, just below the quote from the Old Lay of Sigurd, you'll see I've begun a links section. My current practice is to link to the sites I most admire, plus people who have linked to me. I am considering expanding the section to include some sites I don't admire, but find useful for one reason or another. If anyone has any suggestions, email me by clicking on any of the links on this page that say "Email me."

Sovay McKnight:

Sovay of the Liberal Conspiracy says that a number of you have dropped by to visit her site, but haven't written her. If you've ever wanted to argue with a Reform Liberal who wouldn't immediately call you "stupid" or "hick" or something similar, but who would instead attempt to defend Liberal policies in an extended argument, here's your chance. You can reach her at this address. Now, mind you, she has told me on occasion that she's not really interested in logic--whenever I mention the fact that she's slipped into a named logical fallacy she tends to shrug--but she does eventually come around. Since I've known her I've managed to convince her that guns aren't evil, and that law-abiding citizens ought to be free to carry guns on their daily business as part of their rights and duties as citizens. So have at her--it's fun, and she's one of the few of her ilk who won't try to hide from a good, stand-up fight.

Afghanistan Update:

Afghanistan remains in the news. I'm told by a friend in France that the newspapers there are playing heavily on Afghanistan, linking it to Iraq in order to suggest that there is a general failure of US foreign policy. I myself think that is rather unfair, though there are certainly difficulties. Still and all, US Central Command seems to be sincere in its efforts to address them.

On that score, today in Afghanistan the Afghan Army, backed by US SOF, captured a key pass in the mountains that link Zabul province with Pakistan. This follows a day or so of fighting with one of these Taliban battalions, who seem to be using the old Napoleonic formula of "split to travel, unite to fight." One of my regular correspondants, currently writing from Oz (greetings, lad), says he's seen an interview with a Talib that confirms my hypothesis on this point.

In any event, they're better at moving undetected than they are at holding ground against US airpower, which is to be expected. All is not rosy in Zabul, however, if the Communists are to be believed. This report is from the People's Republic of China, and details Taliban recovery of portions of Zabul province. The fight goes on, and isn't likely to end in the near future.