ABC�s Moran Chides Bush for �Sharply Personal Attacks� on Kerry --7/14/2004-- Media Research Center

MRC:

Is the Media Research Center playing fair here?

On the July 12 Special Report with Brit Hume, Bret Baier reported how "sixty-six pages of the report fall under the heading 'Iraq's Links to Terrorism'" and in it, Baier related, "multiple, credible sources are cited that Iraq provided al-Qaeda with various kinds of training, combat, bomb-making, along with chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear training, backing up public and private statements by former CIA director George Tenet." Baier pointed out: "The details in the report seem to shoot down at least two of former White House counter-terrorism director Richard Clarke's bold claims."

Now that's a bold claim. So I went to look. I started to write a lengthy piece--indeed, I got to about four pages, before I realized that this was a waste. Just go and read it yourself. The CIA appears to have known very little with any certainty after the failed coup, in which the IIS infiltrated and eliminated their in-country assets. Yet there is quite a lot of information suggestive of an Iraq-Qaeda relationship that I haven't seen before. None of it is proof. But proof would not be forthcoming after an intelligence loss such as the failed coup. What there is may not be as strong as MRC suggests. It is, however, much stronger than I've been led to believe by other sources.

Grim's Hall

Anybody Seen This Before?

Here's a photo I haven't seen before:

It's from the 3rd Infantry Division, so I'm told, and was taken at the Baghdad airport. Now, I've seen the mural that I MEF found in Nasariyah, but this isn't it. Anybody else seen it?

UPDATE: That was fast.  People have seen it, and you can buy a print of it online. Apparently it was taken by Steve Metz. You guys rock, by the way. I had an answer to that question in like ten minutes.

Southern Appeal

For the Folks Back Home:

Feddie at Southern Appeal has some thoughts on the Republican primary for the upcoming Senate race. He also has an endorsement, and it isn't "Rock the Boat" Johnny. If you haven't been following the race, it might be worth dropping by to see what the fellow has to say.

spiked-politics | Article | Meet the al-Qaeda archetype

What Makes A Terrorist?

UK magazine Spiked reports on an academic conference on terrorism. Marc Sageman, an expert on terrorism, had studied the lives of 382 people with direct or indirect links to al Qaeda.

His finding is that al Qaeda's members tend to be "well-educated, well-off, cosmopolitan and professional, with good jobs, wives, and no history of mental illness." Only 9.4 percent had a religious education, but 90.4 percent--the rest--had been educated in secular schools. None were uneducated. Nearly half were were professional careerists, including doctors and lawyers.

In this, they are different in form from Palestinian terrorists, Jemaah Islamiyah or Abu Sayyaf. Those organs recruit among the poor and hopeless for domestic insurgency. Al Qaeda is a terrorist group for the upper class. It also has wider goals--not change at home, but remaking the world in its image.

So what, if not poverty and despair, is the cause of the terrorist's desire to destroy the West? Sageman points to this:

They are... 'international people'; they are 'global citizens' who left their homes and travelled, some of them to the West.... 70 percent 'joined the jihad' in a foreign country, and 'many of these joined in a Western country'. They were recruited -- or rather, 'they self-recruited themselves'... after leaving home and travelling abroad....

Sageman believes there must be something in the global experience that plays a role in pushing the subjects who travelled towards the new terror networks. 'It's not just the homesickness. You also need to have some kind of script. These guys are lonely, and then they hear this narrative, from radical mosques and so on, which says: "You guys are unhappy because you are excluded from society and the reason you're excluded from society is because there is a crisis of values. It's because of the corruption of the West, because of greed and decadence, and you have to fight against it."... Sageman talks of the role of radical mosques in providing homesick Muslims with a means for venting their spleen, and sometimes providing them with links to other, perhaps violently minded individuals.

If this analysis is correct, and I think it is, it actually eases some of the problems we face in infiltrating these groups. The dangerous places aren't in alien lands, but in our own cities. It should be easy to arrange for American "Muslim" operations officers to drift into the mosques of London or Paris. Claiming to share the disaffection with the Western decadence, and sharing in fact the sense of being in a foreign land, they would appear to be natural compatriots. The education level favored by our intelligence services is right, too.

That being so, there is no excuse for a continued failure to infiltrate. Bureaucracy is not an adequate reason to fail in the task.

Google Search: france vietnam

Indochina:

Last Bastille Day, we pointed to a news story on French "partnership" with the Communist government of Vietnam. A year on, how's that partnership doing?

France ranks 1st among EU Investors in Vietnam

France, Vietnam to boost infrastructure & education cooperation

France Expects New Dimension in Vietnam Relations

So the French strategy has worked in Vietnam, at least. Lose war, surrender, let US pick up slack, and then conduct "diplomatic relations" behind our back until the profit margin soars. Nice work, lads, nice work.

BLACKFIVE: Update on Luci and Michelle - Animals You Should Know

Devil Dogs:

From Black Five, an update on Luci and Michelle.

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Marines sweating it out on the ground

Ooh-Rah!

A pair of USMC links, thanks to line-runner JHD:

A Hundred And Crazy

and

Mahmuidyah Road Warriors.

Belmont Club

Belmont Club:

Another disturbing, but excellent, post from the Belmont Club. It begins:

The International Herald Tribune describes what happened to a woman on a commuter train north of Paris.

The woman was mistakenly identified as a Jew by six men of North African and African origin, who surrounded the victim in what at first appeared to be an attempt to steal her stroller ... One of them said, 'She's a rich kid.' And then he added, 'There are only Jews in the 16th,'" the police spokesman said. "Nothing in the name of the young woman or where she lives has any Jewish character," the spokesman added. The attackers cut the victim's clothing, slightly wounding her in the process, and cut off a lock of her hair, "as a souvenir," one of the attackers is reported to have said. After slashing the stroller, the six attackers overturned it. The baby fell to the ground and suffered a mild bruise, the police said. The men stole a credit card and E200 from the woman, before getting off the train after it pulled into Sarcelles, which is about 17.4 kilometers, or 11 miles, from Paris.

The incident is also reported in the New York Times with one omission. Here's the omission.

About 20 people saw what happened, but none came to the aid of the victim, the police said, adding that only two passengers approached afterward.

Wretchard points out several non-violent alternatives to simply not aiding the victim. They may be of interest for those of you disinclined to violence yourselves. (Those of you who are not have already thought this through.) As he points out, the first thing is to decide never to let yourself be cowed by the cruel. After that, do what you can.

L'actualit� internationale sur Lefigaro.fr

No Joy in Paris:

In Le Figaro today, there is an article on Neoconservatives. It begins:

La derniere victoire des neoconservateurs est inscrite en toutes lettres dans la plate-forme electorale du candidat... democrate.

Yeah, you read it right--John Kerry, Neoconservative. The piece goes on at some length on the degree to which the French eye sees no difference between Bush and the Democrats on the questions of the day. It ends on a despondant note:

Mais les neoconservateurs n'ont pas desarme.... du Nouvelle Siecle americain... reconnait que la theorie de l'action preventive semble interdite a tout president "dans le futur previsible".

That is: "But [in spite of the fact that we think they've been wrong on every single question for thirty years, as we just finished explaining!] the neoconservatives have not disarmed. The Project for the New American Century reckons that the theory of pre-emptive action will inform any president 'for the forseeable future.'"

Now, if J.F. Kerry looks like a neoconservative to you, it may be that you're standing on ground far enough away that distances are compressed in your sight. It does call into question, however, the Kerry/Edwards belief that they will be able to improve French cooperation with American ventures. Le Figaro is a conservative French newspaper, and conservatives are thin on the ground in France. Even by their lights, there's no difference between Bush and Kerry on any important question of policy. The rest of the French are farther left. Measuring their distance from ours on any question can only be done using the techniques of astronomy--called, appropriately enough, "Red Shift."

Religion News Blog : It's an uneasy time for Britain and its rising Muslim population

"Stay Muslim: Don't Vote"

Both al Mujahiroun and Hizb ut Tahrir, two Islamist organizations, have been running persuasion campaigns to convince Muslims not to vote. Voting is unIslamic, we are told by these organs, because it puts the will of man ahead of the will of Allah in formulating laws. You can read about one of these campaigns here.

Is it working? Perhaps:

The majority of the 33 prisoners convicted of involvement in the 12 October 2002 Bali bombings decided to boycott Indonesia's presidential elections, with bombing mastermind Imam Samudra declaring the elections 'haram' or forbidden under Islamic law.

The 33 men face sentences ranging from a matter of months to death by firing squad for their role in perpetrating the bombings on Bali's main tourist thoroughfare that left over 200 people, mainly foreigners, dead.

The inmates' decision not to cast their ballots in presidential elections on Monday (1/7/04) was their democratic right, said Tulus Widjajanto, chief warden of the Kerobokan Jail in Kuta, Bali.

"They said they have the right not to vote. OK, we can't force them," he added.

Widjajanto said 30 of the 33 inmates were actually registered to vote, reported the detikcom news website.

Well, the Bali bombers are what statisticians call a "self selecting" group. Their opinions aren't apt to be representative of Muslims as a whole. And yet, the sides are shaping up on this question.

BakuTODAY.net

Drunk Vikings In Mosques:

An odd story out of Azerbaijan: the Norwegian ambassador apparently toddled off to the mosque while drunk, and called the entire faith of Islam a pack of cowards. That, at least, is the charge leveled against him by certain Muslim clerics; the newspapers note that he has been guilty, at least, of letting opposition authorities take refuge in his embassy. That may be the real offense.

Herald.com | 07/11/2004 | Edwards bad news for Latin America

Miami Herald: Edwards Bad for Latin America

The Miami Herald has an article today on Edwards' record as a protectionist. Apparently Edwards has fought against NAFTA, the Chilean free trade agreement, the Caribbean trade agreement, the Singapore agreement, and against fast-track authority for similar such agreements. That last one can be excused on partisan grounds--it's usual for the opposition party to oppose letting the President bypass them on anything--but the others do make for a consistent record.

What is Edwards' position on the free trade area Bush has proposed for the Middle East? Would he rather protect American jobs, or help to undercut terrorism by helping develop the economies of these societies? It's not an easy question, and I think there can be honorable answers on both sides. Indeed, I'm not sure where I fall myself. It is a question that ought to be answered. We know where Bush stands: how about his opponents?

Boston.com / A&E / Books / Something in the way she moves

Wargames:

On chess.

Knights

Holy Equestrian Order of the Knights of Saint John Moses:

I have created a Coat of Arms for the Order.

"Ride to the Sound of Guns"

It may be borne by any of the Order's Knights, Knight-Captains, and Knights Grand Cross. The beast is called an "Enfield," which is a mythical beast with the head and tail of a fox and the talons of an eagle. It is also, of course, a famous arms company. The "Cross Celtics" speak for themselves.

Power Line: Joseph Wilson, Liar

Former Ambassador Wilson:

I've never heard a kind word about Joseph Wilson from anyone except Sovay. She maintains that he was uniquely qualified for the mission to Africa, having been ambassador to Iraq for the Bush I administration and also an experienced Africa hand.

Sovay is a fine researcher, so I will assume that part at least must be true and justified. Yet I keep reading stories like this one, which point out just how awful the Wilson expedition was. He seems to have singlehandedly convinced half of America of something that wasn't true--that Bush lied about Saddam seeking Uranium in Africa. I was raised not to call a man a liar even if he's lying, at least, not unless you were ready to kill him and take the consequences. Still, the Wilson situation is testing my resolve. He appears to have betrayed the trust of his nation, and deceived not only the American people but also the CIA.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn sounds off. He mentions that the British investigation, like the recent Senate investigation here in the US, also rejects Wilson's claims.

UPDATE: Charles at LGF posts a retrospective link, to a speech given by Wilson in which he blames Israel for the Iraq war. There we are--I knew there was a logical explanation for all this.

BBC NEWS | UK | Canterbury backs updated Bible

I Thought This Was A Joke:

Have you heard about the "Good As New" Bible? When I read about this at Daniel's website, I assumed it was a joke; he linked to a WorldNet story about it which I figured was a parody at the expense of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Apparently not. It really does exist, and it really does have St. Paul advising fornication:

There's nothing wrong with remaining single, like me. But if you know you have strong needs, get yourself a partner. Better than being frustrated.

That last sentence is more usually rendered, 'It is better to marry than to burn.' Obviously frustration is what Paul was talking about, right?

The Archbishop of Canterbury went on to say, "Instead of being taken into a specialised religious frame of reference... we have here a vehicle for thinking and worshiping that is fully earthed, recognisably about our humanity."

Is that not a warning, rather than praise? Is becoming "fully earthed" what the faith was meant to be about? When I was a boy, the stories I was taught were that Jesus passed through the earth, and ascended into Heaven.

That was meant to be the goal for us too, as I understood it. We were meant to pass through the earth, not to root ourselves in it. The hope was to leave behind earthly things, in the grave if not before, and to ascend some day into Heaven. Surely that hope and vision was the important thing about the faith. Surely that was the thing not to be lost.

ABCNEWS.com : Captive Calls Taliban's Mullah Omar-Official

What Was that Noise?

From Reuters:

"Captive Calls Taliban's Mullah Omar"

A captured member of the Afghan Taliban has contacted the movement's leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, a senior official said on Friday, the first indication in months that the one-eyed fugitive is still alive.

Afghanistan's southern security chief, Abdullah Laghmani, said Mullah Mujahid, whom he described as Omar's former bodyguard, was captured about 50 miles north of Kandahar city this week.

"Last Monday, Mujahid spoke to Mullah Omar in our presence," Laghmani said. "But since then, when we tried to contact him on this number they disconnected it. Mullah Omar is alive." ...

"It's wrong to suggest that the satellite 'phone belonged to Mullah Omar or anybody has spoken to him," said spokesman Latif Hakimi.

Boom.

bloodletting.blog-city.com

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!

On the establishment of the Holy Equestrian Order of the Knights of St. John Moses. I have, of course, petitioned for admission.

On Point - The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom

PSYOP:

There has been a rash of stories suggesting that an Army report criticized the toppling of Saddam's statue. This has been followed by posts by some in the blogosphere who have believed that the involvement of a PSYOP unit meant that the emotion of the Iraqis was faked, perhaps to manipulate the US public's opinion.

You can read the report online. It says absolutely nothing of the sort.

We woke up that morning [of 9 April] in the Iraqi Special Forces training compound on the outskirts of southern Baghdad. Attached to 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment (of I MEF), who were conducting a clearing operation on the southern approach to Baghdad, [we were] moving with their TAC at the time. We were kept in a centralized location while moving so that we could be flexed to where we might be needed. We were not sure what we were going to hit, but we were expecting a lot of resistance. The infantry unit was to be clearing door to door, while we would be broadcasting civilian noninterference messages and occasional surrender appeals when pockets of enemy forces were located. The infantry unit started its operation but was encountering no resistance at all. After a few hours of going door to door, kicking doors and entering, looking for enemy concentrations and weapons caches but finding none, they modified their plan and formed up into a column and started a general movement toward Al-Firdos (paradise) Square in [eastern] Baghdad, where the Palestine Hotel and statue [of Saddam Hussein] were located. The entire movement went a lot faster than anyone had anticipated....
Crowds of Iraqi citizens started coming out and cheering the American convoy. We started to do some PSYOP broadcasts about bringing about a free Iraq, but knowing that we were to continue some clearing operations; we were telling them to stay away from our military vehicles for their own safety. We eventually dismounted from our vehicle and continued to inform the civilians to stay back from the military vehicles. The Iraqi civilians were very receptive to us, and [we] continued to engage them with our interpreter.

As we approached the street leading into the Al-Firdos Square, we could tell that there was a very large crowd of civilians starting to form up. It looked like the infantry unit up there could use some support, so we moved our [tactical PSYOP team] TPT vehicle forward and started to run around seeing what they needed us to do to facilitate their mission.... There was a large media circus at this location (I guess the Palestine Hotel was a media center at the time), almost as many reporters as there were Iraqis, as the hotel was right adjacent to the Al-Firdos Square.

The Marine Corps colonel in the area saw the Saddam statue as a target of opportunity and decided that the statue must come down. Since we were right there, we chimed in with some loudspeaker support to let the Iraqis know what it was we were attempting to do. The reporters were completely surrounding the vehicle, and we started having to ask the reporters to move out of the way, but they would not move. We were getting frustrated, but we were also laughing about it. We dismounted the vehicle again and just started pushing the people out of the way. They were starting to really inhibit our ability to conduct our mission. The tanks . . . formed up into a perimeter around the square, with the statue in the middle.

An M88 recovery vehicle approached the statue and continued to drive up the steps right next to the statue in an attempt to bring it down. The people had already tied a noose around the neck of the statue with some rope. They were trying to just tug on it and bring it down and were hitting it with sledgehammers; it was clearly getting crazy in the square. We were no longer in crowd control, as there was just no controlling this crowd at this time. We decided to just ride along with the crowd, and we started just kind of celebrating with the Iraqi people. We actually had to have our interpreter record an ad-hoc broadcast message, informing the Iraqi people that if they did not stand back from the statue, American forces would not bring the statue down. We were afraid that some civilians would get hurt if they were too close or in the wrong spot.

All of this activity was going on within just a few blocks of where other marines were battling with snipers in a building across from the Palestine Hotel. The local Iraqi people just did not care for their well being at this point; they just wanted to see the statue come down...We looked over and now there was an American flag draped over the face of the statue. God bless them, but we were thinking from PSYOP school that this was just bad news. We didn't want to look like an occupation force, and some of the Iraqis were saying, `No, we want an Iraqi flag!' So I said `No problem, somebody get me an Iraqi flag.' I am not sure where it came from, but one of the Iraqis brought us the old Iraqi flag without the writing on it (added by Saddam). We got that as fast as we could and started running that up to the statue. At this time, the marines had put a chain from the boom of the recovery vehicle around the neck of the statue, and they just ran the [Iraqi] flag up the statue. It was real quick thinking on Staff Sergeant

Plesich's part to get that Iraqi flag up there quick. But by the time the Iraqi flag got put on the statue, there had already been a lot of photos taken with the marine covering the statue with the American flag.

Somehow along the way, somebody had gotten the idea to put a bunch of Iraqi kids onto the wrecker that was to pull the statue down. While the wrecker was pulling the statue down, there were Iraqi children crawling all over it. Finally they brought the statue down, but we expected this big statue to come crashing down, to shatter or whatever, but it just slowly bent over and slid off the mounting pipes. Once the statue was on the ground, it was attacked by Iraqis with the sledgehammers and broken apart. The head of the statue was dragged through the streets, with people hitting the face with their shoes and spitting on it. After the statue was down, we started to receive a lot of intelligence on where Ba'ath Party personnel were staying and just generally got a lot of real good intelligence for use in later direct-action missions. All this information was developed with and through the human exploitation teams, which had assigned interpreters.

If the American people are being PSYOP'd, it's the press and not the Army doing it. Everything goes through a negative lens. How anyone could read this report and not feel the joy and excitement of liberation is beyond me; but some can, and have.

What though they come with scroll and pen,
And grave as a shaven clerk,
By this sign you shall know them,
That they ruin and make dark.

Beware the old foe.

PARAMETERS, US Army War College Quarterly - Summer 2004

In Praise of Attrition:

A piece from the journal of the Army War College argues that the US military has gone too far to avoid killing people. It's getting in the way of victory, the author suggests...

It's essential to purge our minds of the cliched images the term "war of attrition" evokes. Certainly, we do not and will not seek wars in which vast casualties are equally distributed between our own forces and the enemy's. But a one-sided war of attrition, enabled by our broad range of superior capabilities, is a strong model for a 21st-century American way of war....

Precision weapons unquestionably have value, but they are expensive and do not cause adequate destruction to impress a hardened enemy. The first time a guided bomb hits the deputy's desk, it will get his chief's attention, but if precision weaponry fails both to annihilate the enemy's leadership and to somehow convince the army and population it has been defeated, it leaves the job to the soldier once again. Those who live in the technological clouds simply do not grasp the importance of graphic, extensive destruction in convincing an opponent of his defeat.

Focus on killing the enemy. With fires. With maneuver. With sticks and stones and polyunsaturated fats. In a disciplined military, aggressive leaders and troops can always be restrained. But it's difficult to persuade leaders schooled in caution that their mission is not to keep an entire corps' tanks on line, but to rip the enemy's heart out.

The explanation of why and how this works begins with the condottiere and passes through Napoleon, the Fraco-Prussian war, both declared world wars, the Cold War and Desert Storm. It then examines the new war at length. Just one quote of many worth considering:

[W]e shall hear that killing terrorists only creates more terrorists. This is sophomoric nonsense. The surest way to swell the ranks of terror is to follow the approach we did in the decade before 9/11 and do nothing of substance. Success breeds success. Everybody loves a winner. The cliches exist because they're true. Al Qaeda and related terrorist groups metastasized because they were viewed in the Muslim world as standing up to the West successfully and handing the Great Satan America embarrassing defeats with impunity.

It's not exactly nonsense--particularly in tribal societies, there is a duty to vengence that does create new enemies. Still, if you find yourself in a war with such a culture, there is no way out except victory. The creation of certain numbers of terrorists is a price you have to accept, because you really must destroy the ones who exist already. You just also have to destroy those of their cousins who feel they must have revenge upon you.

I think the author is on to something, although I depart from him on other points as well. It's an argument worth considering, and I'm glad to see that the Army War College is able to voice these sorts of opinions and debate them.