Are the insurgents in Iraq playing from a Cuban playbook?

George Will compares the insurgency in Iraq today with that of Algerian insurgents in the 1950s.

The Algerian insurgency was fueled by the most potent “ism” of a century of isms — nationalism. In contrast, one of the strange, almost surreal, aspects of the Iraqi insurgency is its lack of ideological content. Most of the insurgents are “FREs” — former regime elements — who simply want to return to power. [See here - DS]

Unlike most of the violent cadres of the 20th century, the insurgency does not have a fighting faith; it does not bother to have an ideology to justify its claim to power. …

By promiscuously dispensing death … the insurgents hope to delegitimize the Iraqi government for its failure to provide the primary social good: freedom from fear of violent death.

I have to wonder whether the FREs are playing from a Cuban guidebook called, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, by Carlos Marighella. Originally published on paper (natch) in 1969, it was summarized thus by Claire Sterling in her 1981 book, The Terror Network:

In forty-eight densely packed pages, the Mini-Manual says it all. It explains whjy cities are better than rural areas for guerrilla operations, and how to behave there: no “foreign air” and “normal” occupations when possible. It suggests how to drill in urban courtyards; blow up bridges and railroad tracks,; raise money by kidnap ransoms and bank “expropriations” attacking the “nervous system of capitalism”; plan the “physical liquidation of ranking army officers and policemen,; deal with spies and informers, to be summarily executed … .

It goes into careful detail about choices of weapons, and the need to “shoot first” at pointblank range if possible; “shooting and aiming are to the urban guerrilla what air and water are to human beings.”

All this sounds almost identical to what the FRE and al Qaeda insurgents are doing in Iraq. It is well known in counter-terror agencies in Europe and the Americas that the Mini-Manual became the Bible of Western and Latin terrorist organizations; the Uruguayan Tupamaros were Marighella’s first international students. The MM teachings quickly crossed the Atlantic to find a home in the German Red Army Fraction and the Italian Red Brigades. In America the Symbionese Liberation Army (of Patty Hearst fame) tried to adopt the MM’s techniques. The MM was known to have been studied by some Middle Eastern terrorist groups as well.

All these movements failed, however. In Europe, the terrorists organizations were materially and financially supported by the old Soviet Union. When it disappeared, so did the USSR’s support. In America, ordinary law-enforcement measures broke the SLA, the Weathermen and other self-styled urban insurgencies; their members were never very skilled at long-term covert operations and information security. In Uruguay, the government finally awoke to the threat posed by the Tupamaros and crushed them, but in so doing the country became a military dictatorship in 1972. It had formerly been the most free and wealthiest country in South America.

All these failures lie squarely at the feet of Carlos Marighella himself, who fell victim to his own romantic notions of “freedom fighting.” The crackdown by the Uruguayan government and its increasing repression was not only anticipated by Marighella, it was actually an intermediate objective of the his urban guerrilla concept. But he badly missed the boat in two key areas. Marighella wrote that the insurgents use their violence in order to identify with popular causes, which wins them a base of support among the people. (Remember, the people are to the guerrillas as water is to fish.) Once that was done, he declared that,

… the government has no alternative but to intensify repression. Tbe police roundups, house searches, arrests of innocent people, make life in the city unbearable. The general sentiment is that the government in unjust, incapable of solving problems, and resorts purely to and simply to the physical liquidation of its opponents. The political situation is transformed [and so] the urban guerrilla must become more aggressive and violent, resorting without letup to sabotage, terrorism, expropriations, assaults, kidnapings and executions, heightening the disastrous situation in which the guerrilla must act.

All these steps are intended to lead to what Marighella called, “the uncontrollable expansion of urban rebellion.”

Except that they don’t lead there. There are two fundamental errors of the theory that it cannot overcome and that play to Iraq’s long-term favor. The first error is the belief that in Iraq the increasing level of terrorist violence by either al Qaeda in Iraq or FREs will merge the terrorists with “popular causes,” that is, make them one with the people. In Iraq, except for the minority of Sunnis aligned with the old Baathist party or Saddam’s clan, the people’s cause is freedom and democracy. Violence by Saddam’s regime is what terrorized the people for more than 20 years; it will not lead them to submit to Baathist rule again. Quite the contrary, terrorist violence is unifying the Iraqi people with the new, sovereign government. As for al Qaeda’s terrorism, the Iraqi people certainly have no desire to live under Islamism (see here) and al Qaeda’s gruesome murders only convince the people evermore to shun it.

Al Qaeda is more guilty of this delusion than the FREs. Baathism in Iraq was never anything but simple, nepotist despotism to begin with; the ruling elite never were deluded that the Iraqi people were anything but subjects to be ruled with an iron hand. But one of Osama bin Laden’s (and hence al Qaeda’s generally) basic premises is that the Muslim ummah, the masses, are thirsting to live in a strict sharia society. But their powerlessness in the face of the apostate, repressive Arab governments keeps the ummah from their Islamic fulfillment. Since 9/11, though, events have proven that the Muslim masses are thirsting not for Islamism but for its opposite.

The second basic error in Marighella’s theory is that increasing government countermeasures inevitably become so repressive of the ordinary people that the masses are driven thereby into embracing the revolutionary cause. Uprising results, the government is overthrown and the revolutionaries gain power. This is of course pure European Marxism-Leninism (by way of classically communist Cuba) so I don’t want to claim it translates directly into Arab Iraq, but that’s the concept, if not the source, that George Will sees, which is what got me going on this tear anyway.

But again, history shows that harsh reactionary repression is not inevitable. The European countries never did it, the United States never did it and Israel hasn’t done it either, although Israel’s security measures are very strict. The first test case was Uruguay, where the Tupamaros succeeded in goading the government into the crackdown. However, the crackdown utterly crushed the Tupamaros and there the revolution ended, though the government dictatorship remained. But the worldwide communist underground didn’t learn the lesson.

I’ll leave the last word to Claire Sterling. She was referring to Marxist urban guerrillas using the Marighella playbook, but her words fit to a tee the FRE and al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq:

[They become] corrupted - by the power they discover in the mouth of a gun, or by outsiders with something less selfless in mind, or by the growing estrangement from the society they want to improve. Often they are rejected by an overwhelming majority of their countrymen, reduced to a minority so absurdly small that tragedy almost becomes black comedy. Their response is to kill with increasing ferocity - to punish the profane, and because nothing elese is left for them to do. From killing for a cause, they slip into killing for their vested interests. Nobody’s freedom but their own inspires them.

And they are losing, though there are miles to go before we sleep.

If the Internal Revenue Service had discovered the quadratic formula, geometry tests would look like this (yikes!).

“The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.” - Will Rogers

Once again, I triumph!

Army military police 1st. Lt. Dawn Halfaker paid dearly for a Purple Heart

USA Today reports,

On June 19, Lt. Dawn Halfaker and soldiers from her military police platoon were on a reconnaissance patrol in Baqouba, Iraq, when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded inside their armored Humvee, grievously wounding two of the soldiers inside.

Dazed and covered in blood, Halfaker mustered the energy to give an order to her driver. “Get out of the kill zone!” she shouted. Halfaker’s right arm was loosely connected to her torso.

Doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center could not save her arm. She will leave the Army after completing physical rehabilitation.

Charmaine Yoest asks, “Is this what America Wants?” A member of the Center for Military Readiness, Charmaine observes,

This is a perfect example of “the boiled frog strategy”: the Army wants the American public to gradually “get used to” seeing women in combat. They know if they put it to a vote in Congress — which they are legally required to do — they would lose. So the strategy is to just gradually change the regulations, so that more and more women are put in harms way; then, when women like Dawn get hurt, no one can say anything.

The “boiled frog” part refers to the old saw that if you throw a frog into hot water, it’ll immediately jump out, but if you place it in cool water and gradually turn up the heat, it will remain until it boils to death.

I criticized Charmaine’s post about Army chief of staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker. I agree that Congress needs to take a closer look at the employment of women in post-9/11 combat zones. The existing laws and regulations date from the Cold War era when there were still thought to be front lines and rear areas. The kinds of missions that Halfaker’s MP unit is carrying out in Iraq were never envisioned for MPs in the old days. As I said before, I oppose increasing combat roles for women and I think such roles should actually be pared back.

But Charmaine seems to assign nefarious motives to the Army’s senior leaders; they are apparently scurrilous minions of the feminist left who have a master plan eventually to infiltrate women into every combat job. In the meantime they have to desensitize moms and dads and other Americans to the idea of women killed, wounded and maimed in battle. At least, that’s the way I read her post.

However, the real culprits, if culprits there are, are not the generals but America’s young men. The engine of increasing womanpower is decreasing manpower. The generals are stretching women into roles and jobs they didn’t have before because they don’t have men to put there.

The Army disestablished the Women’s Army Corps in 1978, when women comprised less than 10 percent of the Army. By then, more than 90 percent of all military occupation specialties (MOSs) were open to women. In 1983, the Army adopted a coding system for assigning women that purported to measure the likelihood of direct combat for every job in the Army. It was called the Direct Combat Probability Coding System (DCPCS). Infantry, armor, special forces, some aviation, low-altitude air defense, cannon artillery and combat engineers were the broad categories of jobs that were off limits to women. Additionally, women could not be assigned to battalions or smaller units of those kinds of specialties. By 1985, the number of specialties open to women actually declined to 86 percent while the proportion of the Army made up of women increased to more than 10 percent. Today more than 16 percent of the Army is made up of women.

Any move to scale back the employment of women in combat zones needs to explain where the warm male bodies are going to come from to replace them. The notion that the Army can recruit a significant percentage more of men than it is recruiting now is not very credible. More than anything, I think that what is impelling the Army toward bending the policy.

And bending it is. On April 11, Gen. Schoomaker took part in a panel discussion on The Future of the United States Army at the American Enterprise Institute. During a Q&A session, Bob Miller of Hope for America asked Schoomaker about the gradual increase of women in combatant categories and the unprecedented numbers of women casualties. The verbatim question is long, so I’ll summarize some.

First, Miller said the issue raises the moral question that begs to be reconciled with what’s happening in Iraq.

[D]o you and the Army see … that men have a moral responsibility to be protective of women? …

And if we do not hold that there is such a moral responsibility, then does the all volunteer force stand unable to recruit and commission men who do commit themselves to such a sense of moral obligation to be protectors of women rather than employing them in hostile and dangerous circumstances to be killed and to kill.

Gen. Schoomaker’s answer was also long but I paste it here unedited.

GENERAL SCHOOMAKER: I think we have a moral responsibility to protect the weak regardless of gender, and I do not see this as a gender issue. First of all, we have a policy, and OSD policy, that says that we will not assign females to the infantry armor and Special Forces organizations that are trained, organized, and equipped to routinely close with and destroy the enemy. And we have an Army policy that adds to that, not an OSD policy, but an Army that adds to that says we will not co-locate these women at the time that those units are undergoing those operations.

The realities of the battlefield are such that this is not an issue of whether or not women will become injured and maimed anymore than anybody else will, anymore than children will or elderly or males. The fact is that I think we have a moral responsibility to prepare those women that are serving in our armed forces to number one have the very best chance of surviving by providing them with the warrior skills and tasks that are required and number two make sure that as we operate that we operate in such a way that reduces the probability that any soldier will be placed in a position to be injured or killed. So that’s kind of the way that I approach that.

I don’t know if I understood your total question, but I don’t happen to share a feeling that somehow that women do not have either the capability or the responsibility to share and service the country, and I think that that’s-we’ve now had a volunteer force for over 20 years, and the women play such an extraordinary important part in what we do that I think we’re good to go so far.

MR. MILLER: The other part was whether men who do hold that moral commitment are unsuitable then for a role in the Army.

GENERAL SCHOOMAKER: Well, that’s an interesting question I would never have thought about. I would say no. But, you know, I think that we all have different little things that-but, you know, that may differ from one another on some things, but I mean I think you’re going in the direction of conscientious objectors kind of status. I mean something that would be similar to that, and I don’t see that as-I mean, you know, there are some people that would say, you know, men and women can’t even share the same tornado shelter in Oklahoma. I mean there are. I mean there’s quite a wide spectrum here on what all this means. I think that maybe since we’re killing 40,000 people a year on the highways, they shouldn’t drive. Okay. That’s very dangerous, too.

[Laughter.]

GENERAL SCHOOMAKER: I mean I’m not trying to make fun of it. I’m telling you that I think that, you know, you can expand this argument to an incredible deal. I think that we are paying fair-we are paying attention to the realities, you know, of where we are now. If you were to ask me a different question which I don’t want to go into here today, you know, do I agree with all of that, that’s another issue. When I’m out of uniform, I’ll share that with you.

This is pretty much a dodge answer. Schoomaker never got to what I think was the real meat of Miller’s question, whether the Army is able to recruit enough men to make unnecessary the expansion of women’s roles in combat areas. All this begs for Congressional oversight. But that’s not the end of it, because an internal Army report conducted last year revealed that more and more civilian women are staying away from the Army precisely because of the threat of death or wounds. The report also said that black Americans of both sexes are turning away from Army service for the same reason.

The number of blacks in the Army’s recruiting classes has dropped 41 percent over the past five years, from 23.9 percent in 2000 to 14 percent last year. The number of women has dropped 13 percent. AP reports that the possibility of being sent to Iraq is the “biggest turn off” for both groups.

These numbers bode ill for the Army, which is having the hardest time meeting recruiting goals. For many, many years black Americans have been greatly over-represented in the Army, compared to their proportion of the general population. The data mean that 41 percent fewer blacks are joining the Army now than before, of whom the vast majority are men - a hit to replacing women in combat-related units that the Army isn’t going to make up with white guys.

So it seems that the answer to Charmaine’s question, “Is this what America Wants?” is yes, it is what America wants. And shame on us. I am reminded of Robert Heinlein’s observation that “women and children first” is the only real basis on which a civilization can endure over the long term. When it gives up that principle, he said, it is doomed. Of course, by the time we find out he was right it will be too late.

See the other fine posts listed at James Joyner’s linkfest.

Prof. Norm Geras, an old-line English Marxist, identifies the two main failures of the Western Left post 9/11.

First is the sin of Marxist reductionism. In his own generation’s Marxist development, Geras says that,

[I]t labored in its literary output, in dense and prolific works of argumentation, theory, historiography, social and political analysis-to separate itself from the earlier simplifications and reductions of the tradition it came from and that it sought to enrich. This was a generation for whom anti-reductionism was a constant watchword. A reductionist Marxist was something that, even at the height of Marxist intellectual fashion, no one wanted to be. Whether by way of the cultural themes of the Frankfurt School, of Gramscian “hegemony,” Althusserian “relative autonomy,” or the more empirically grounded methods of Anglophone socialist research, an enormous effort was made to establish a complex and multilayered theoretical sensibility, so that henceforth we might be in a position more effectively to grasp the multiple determinations of both the present and the past. It was a generation claiming to know that such determinations, in their range and variety, were intractable to being unified within one simple, all-encompassing story.

But all this theoretical work seems to have been for nought:

In affecting the general alignment of most of the socialist left in the conflicts that have preceded and followed the events of September 11, 2001, all this effort that I have tried briefly to characterize might just as well not have taken place. For even if more advanced models of theoretical explanation are now available to the left, it nonetheless seems to suffice in any given international conflict to know that on one side is the United States, and that the United States is a capitalist power that always has designs on the natural and human resources of the rest of the world. If you know this, everything else falls instantly into place; all other levels of analysis, all other considerations, are superfluous. They can either be ignored altogether, or they can be conceded in passing, but as merely secondary and hence ignorable in practice. …

Knowing what the United States is-hegemon of global capitalism-and knowing what it must be up to, you have no need to allow any explanatory or strategic weight to other social, political, legal, or ideological realities. No need to give any decision-making, choice-determining weight to mass murder, or torture, or the fundamental rights of human beings; to the laws of war, the effects of specific political structures and belief systems, or the effects of the operational and moral choices made by movements cast by part of the left in an anti-imperialist role; to the character of the regimes opposed to the United States and its allies, however brutal those regimes might be; to the illegalities and oppressions for which they are responsible, whether at home or beyond their own borders; to genocidal processes actually ongoing and about which something cries out to be done; to the threats posed to democratic societies by movements that have already shown their deadly intent.

The second main fault of the Western Left is related to the first. Geras terms it “a poverty of moral imagination,” which he defines as,

… a seeming lack of ability, of the imagination, to digest the meaning of the great moral and political evils of the world and to look at them unflinchingly. …

They come to be treated, generically, as the product of class societies and, today, as the product of capitalism. The affinity between this overall intellectual tendency within Marxist and other left thinking, and the practical reductionism I have just described-in which America is identified as the source of all worldly wrongs-should be transparent. …

The Taliban in Afghanistan; Saddam’s Iraq; the reduction of a human being by torture; the use of terror randomly to kill innocents and to smite all those by whom they are cherished; mass murder; ethnic cleansing; all the manifold practices of human evil-to look upon these and at once see “capitalism,” “imperialism,” “America,” is not only to show a poverty of moral imagination, it is to reveal a diminished understanding of the human world. A social or political science, or a practical politics, that cannot rise to the level of what has been understood, in their own mode, by the great religions-and I say this as a resolute and lifelong atheist-and what has also been understood, in their own mode, by all the great literatures of the world, is a science and a politics that can no longer be taken seriously. It should not be taken seriously by anyone attached to the democratic and egalitarian values that have always been at the heart of the broad socialist tradition.

My politics certainly aren’t Marxist like Norm’s, but I always enjoy reading his material. Read the whole piece, it’s quite worthwhile. See also his blog. And see as well Ron Rosenbaum’s October 2002 essay, Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee.

Got a phish mail this morning that began,

You have recieved this email because you or someone had used your account to make fake bids at eBay. For security purposes, we are required to open an investigation into this matter.

Let’s see: “you … used your account to make fake bids as eBay.” Well, if I used my account to make a bid, how can it be fake?

And how would eBay know whether my account was being used to make bids by someone else unless I told them? I know, I know - but a small percentage of people who get this email will panic and click on the bogus link to eBay and thereby learn too late that their bank account was drained shortly afterward.

Refineries’ capacity can’t keep up with regulatory requirements

Under the Defense Department’s Base Realignment and Closure process, military bases have been closed or scaled down or consolidated for almost 15 years. Some bases have been merely mothballed while others have been transferred to state or local control.

Today President Bush said that some of those bases should be used to build new oil refineries.

Speaking at a Small Business Administration conference here [Washington, D.C. - DS], the president recommended this and other initiatives to address the country’s energy needs and reduce dependence on foreign energy sources.

Bush said expanding refinery capacity will help address the shortage that’s partly blamed for skyrocketing gasoline prices. The last oil refinery built in the United States was completed in 1976, he said.

During a White House press briefing today, spokesman Scott McClellan said the federal agencies would work with states and local communities to transfer closed military sites and make them available to refiners.

McClellan said many closed military bases are already being redeveloped or used for new purposes to help create jobs. Building oil refineries on some of them will “address a pressing problem that we face, and it will also address an economic need in these communities,” he said.

According to a cable news report I heard today (sorry, no link), shortage of oil supply -well capacity - is not the culprit for the sharp increase in gasoline prices in recent weeks. The problem is increasing demand without commensurate increase is supply, for the bottleneck is the capacity to refine petroleum, according to the report. In fact, American refineries are approaching total effective capacity. According to the American Petroleum Institute,

The utilization rate for the first three months of 2005 averaged 91.7 percent of capacity, the highest for the first quarter in seven years, API said. March’s utilization rate, at 92.2 percent, was also the highest for that month in seven years, API reported.

Gasoline production, which rose 1.2 percent over year-ago levels, set a record first-quarter high of 8.45 million barrels per day, as did output of distillate fuel oil, up nearly 7 percent to 3.79 million barrels per day, API said.

It might seem that there is still eight percent increased capacity that could be used, but the margin costs for achieving incremental raises in production get higher and higher in refinery operations, maintenance and payroll, one reason why increased deliveries of gasoline don’t result in lower prices. Also, every part of a refinery must be taken off line periodically for repairs and maintenance, so actual 100 percent capacity can’t be achieved; I’d guess that 92-plus percent is getting close to what is attainable in practice and even that level will probably be difficult to maintain over the long term.

As Adel al-Jubeir, foreign affairs adviser to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah, said Monday,

“There is no shortage of crude oil in the world today. What we see is a shortage of refining capacity, as well as shortages in infrastructures and so forth that drive the price of product up,” he said. “It will not make a difference if Saudi Arabia ships an extra million or 2 million barrels of crude oil to the United States. If you cannot refine it, it will not turn into gasoline and that will not turn into lower prices.”

But refinery capacity is not the only reason gas prices have risen so high, and perhaps not even the main reason. Turn we now to economist Brian Simpson, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle this month.

Though other factors cause high gas prices, such as high taxes and increasing world demand, environmental regulation is among the primary reasons. For example, environmental regulation has significantly restricted drilling for oil in Alaska and on the continental shelf. More drilling will increase the supply and thus lower prices.

Furthermore, 18 different gasoline formulations are in use across the United States, making it much more costly to produce and distribute gasoline. These blends aren’t needed due to requirements of automobile engines, nor are they required by oil companies. The blends, including different ones used at different times of the year and in different geographic areas, are imposed by environmental regulations. Among other things, the regulations force refiners to incur greater costs in switching from the production of one blend to another. They also force refiners to produce a more costly “summer blend,” which is partially responsible for the rise in price.

The requirement for 18 different gasolines directly relates to refinery capacity because when the last refinery was built 29 years ago, there were only a few kinds of gas being produced. Today, environmental regulations have “salami sliced” refining capacity so that economies of scale are lower than ever and demand for some kinds of gasoline can indeed strain the supply. Says Simpson,

California also imposes the harshest emissions requirements in the country, necessitating the use of a more costly, special blend of gasoline not produced anywhere else. It’s no accident that gas in California is generally 30 to 40 cents above the national average.

There’s no question that the country needs a lot more refinery capacity, but it will take many years to bring one more refinery online. Heck, it’ll probably take the rest of Bush’s term just to get the enabling legislation through Congress. In the meantime, the environmental lobby has such strength, especially over Congress’ minority party, that the prospect of easing regulations to help increase effective capacity is very dim. Hold on to your wallet, folks, because fueling your car is going to empty it more rapidly than ever.

BTW, the greedy oil companies’ profit margins are among the lowest of American industries.

Update: Steve Verdon at OTB explores the issue from other angles.

What’s the difference between electioneering in the Anglosphere and the Eurosphere? The UPI’s Martin Walker says,

[The] British general election is taking place within the Anglosphere, which is more than just the English-speaking world. It is a place where election campaigns are very similar, where voters respond to similar signals and similar appeals, where the emotional and subliminal languages are almost interchangeable. Countries in the Anglosphere have similar concepts of law, of trial by jury and private property and share some preconceptions about a citizen’s home being his castle and keeping the state in its place. They also share robust attitudes toward the use of military force in the modern world. The Brits, Yanks and Aussies of the Anglosphere were also the only countries whose troops attacked Iraq from day one of the war.

By contrast, the French election is taking place in the Eurosphere. Schroeder’s Germans are urging the French to vote “Yes,” and so is Italy’s former Prime Minister Romano Prodi, who served as the last president of the EU Commission in Brussels. A French “No” vote, Prodi said, would mean “the fall of Europe.” The Netherlands’ former deputy premier Annemarie Jorristma says it is a question of whether “France will do honor or horror to the cause of Europe” and Spain’s prime minister, Jose Luis Zapatero, suggests “a Europe without France in the front rank is unimaginable.”

Chirac, Schroeder, Zapatero and Prodi all, of course, opposed the Iraq war, and all have visibly expressed their discomfort at living in a world dominated by the single American superpower. Similarly, they all want “Europe” to provide a bit of balance and to give them a little room to maneuver, for example, to sell arms to China if they wish, even if the Americans warn them against the idea.

But these European leaders, by definition, are members of the European elite that has consistently promoted and supported the project of European unity and of the new EU constitution. And the real question looming over the French referendum is whether the French voters themselves still feel as pro-European as their leaders, or whether their resentment of their own governing elite in Paris is going to spill over into a rejection of the EU elites in Brussels. The current opinion polls suggest they might do just that, which is why the Eurosphere leaders are all campaigning so hard in France.

Part one of a series

I posted five days ago about “drying up the insurgents’ lake” in Iraq, that is, turning the populations in which the terrorists live and operate away from support to neutrality, then away from neutrality to opposition. I remarked that Islamism has not proved to be a rallying beacon for any but the fanatical, and al Qaeda’s murderousness in Iraq, coupled with their political ineptitude, has set them at a marked disadvantage in fighting America there or, since Jan. 30’s elections, the new Iraqi government.

There is, however, more than one insurgency operating in Iraq, and the success of Iraq im gaining a stable, democratic country depends on how each are finally defeated. This series is a look at the main groups operating, starting with Baathist holdouts, Saddam loyalists and others of that ilk who fall under the general rubric of “Former Regime Elements” (FRE’s).

These are Saddam loyalists or Baathists party adherents who want Baathism returned to rule in Iraq, even though they know it will not be under Saddam again. FREs are anti-democracy and wish for the status quo antebellum in Iraq to be mostly restored. They are almost all Sunnis who do not want to live in a country where the Shia majority has a say in how things are run. Many (perhaps most) are related by blood or marriage to Saddam’s own Tikriti clan. Those kids of ties are very strong in Arab culture.

FREs are secular in orientation and by no means want to live under an Islamist government, either. This is the largest organized insurgency in Iraq and the first insurgency to “get its act together” to fight the Americans because Saddam’s regime actually planned for this eventuality. For many months after the invasion, FREs constituted the most dangerous threat to both American forces and Iraq’s future. Their strategy was not to defeat American forces in straight-up battle (impossible for them to do) but to commit terrorist acts that would finally convince America that the cost of staying would be too great to bear. (That Americans are inherently unwilling to take more than minimal casualties is a delusion FREs shared with al Qaeda.)

Recently, though, some FREs did attempt to engage Iraqi and American units in conventional battle; FREs mounted an attack against Americans at Abu Ghraib prison early this month, for example. As Strategy Page explains,

Some officers who specialized in studying the Iraqi Army believe the attack reflected pre-war Iraqi doctrine and staff work. To some students of insurgency believe this suggests that the anti-government forces have been able to establish base camps or “liberated zones,” where they can spend time and resources training troops. If this is true, then the war may have entered a more ominous phase. Other analysts, however, believe that attack may have been a desperate attempt to use the best available insurgent manpower; Iraqi Army and Republican Guard personnel, to secure a spectacular success. If this is the case, then the Sunni Arabs suffered a serious defeat and the loss of critical manpower that ought to have been used to provide cadres to help turn volunteers into more effective fighters.

There were between 40-60 terrorists known killed and their total casualty rate was probably 50 percent.

The FRE insurgency is the most numerous and receives substantial support from Syria, also ruled by Baathism. The long-term threat from FREs is not insignificant, but despite its size and financial assets, FRE’s pose the least long-term threat because they are more adaptable to changing conditions than al Qaeda. By that I means that the FREs can recognize defeat and do not seek to die rather than lose. In fact, there were credible reports months ago that a large number of FRE fighters are exploring whether the Iraqi government will give them some sort of amnesty in exchange for laying down their arms.

For these reasons I say that the FRE insurgency, while still potent, is the least long-term threat to Iraq’s success - unless . . . well, keep reading.

Coming - a look at al Qaeda in Iraq and the criminal insurgency

. . . then what is? Drudge reports that on Air America’s Randi Rhodes Show Monday evening, a skit went like this:

The announcer: “A spoiled child is telling us our Social Security isn’t safe anymore, so he is going to fix it for us. Well, here’s your answer, you ungrateful whelp: [audio sound of 4 gunshots being fired.] Just try it, you little [expletive]. [audio of gun being cocked].”

The audio production at the center of the controversy aired during opening minutes of The Randi Rhodes Show.

“What is with all the killing?” Rhodes said, laughing, after the clip aired.

The Secret Service is investigating the potential of an actual threat against the president, but my question is: isn’t this skit a clear example of hate speech?

Not only was that the song the band played when General Cornwallis’ army marched out of Yorktown to surrender to George Washington, it could also be the theme song of this firearms-related ruling of the Supreme Court. Just look at which justices voted which way and see whether you agree.

I have a 2X teleconverter for Minolta 35mm cameras that I am selling on eBay.

It is an MC mount. I used it on my XG-1 and X-700 cameras. There is no minimum and no reserve on this auction.

Fawaz Turki, a senior coilumnist for Arab News, has a thought-provoking piece entitled, “America’s ‘Wacky Ideas About Islam’ and the Gulf In Understanding: The shocking lack of knowledge in the United States about Islam is matched only by an even greater intellectual shortfall in the Arab World in understanding the West.”

Turki bemoans how little Americans, including academics, actually know about the Arab lands and Islam, for example,

Perhaps then, Americans would come to realize, for example, that jihad (struggle by an individual, or collectively a community, to transcend the limitations of the self through spiritual discipline) does not translate as “holy war,” that Allahu Akbar (a call by a Muslim in a moment of crisis, or wonderment at the objective world, to assert that “God is greater” than the challenges at hand) does not mean “God is great,” and that shahid (a fallen patriot who dies defending his holy cause) is not a martyr, a term unique to Christian iconography denoting a person in early Christianity who refused to renounce his religion and died defending it. …

And so Turki proves guilty (a little) of the very misunderstanding he accuses the West of. As I happened to have explained in last Sunday’s sermon, “Recovering martyrdom,” Christians are made martyrs not by dying while defending the Christian faith, for in Christian history martyrdom has always been passively attained. Christians who refuse to renounce their faith under persecution, even at the cost of their lives, may come to be acclaimed as martyrs. This is qualitatively different than the Muslim concept of shahid, in which giving actual offensive battle in war can be seen as a true act of worship.

Nonetheless, it not a major nit to pick in an otherwise decent article, and I have to plead guilty to referring to shahidis as martyrs myself (although Turki doesn’t address that al Qaeda itself calls suicide bombings “martrydom operations”).

But this part caught my eye:

There is no doubt about the fact that for Americans — who have yet have to recognize their ignorance about the issue — an intimate acquaintance with Islam will be enriching not only for practical reasons of national security … but for intellectual reasons as well. When you get to know a person’s religion, you get to know their expression of human spirit, their inward preoccupations and their archetypal concerns. After all, there are many junctures where Islam and Christianity intersect, representing a basis for unity for the two worlds they define. What divides Muslims and Christians in modern times are not their religions — which are not antithetical by any means — but their politics.

I applaud Turki’s apparent attempt to separate mosque and state, but it’s a wet firecracker. He glosses over the fact that Arab politics, especially in Saudi Arabia, are generally controlled by Islam. It’s impossible for America to relate to the Arab countries purely on the basis of politics and not religion.

Furthermore, Turki seems unaware of the very vast chasm separating basic Christian doctrines and theology from that of Islam, only three examples of which are Original Sin (a concept that does not exist in Islam), the divinity of Jesus Christ (renounced as heresy in Islam) and divine atonement for human sin (nowhere in Islamic theology). Those are just starting points.

Those religious differences “divide” Christianity and Islam only because Islam is politically intolerant of Christianity. It’s all fine for Turki to say, “Can’t we we all just get along?” when getting along means I as a Christian cannot freely practice or proselytize in almost any Muslim country. If he really believes that our respective religions “are not antithetical by any means” then let him campaign in Saudi Arabia for full religious freedom for Christianity there.

Nonetheless, Turki does admit his own society has a long way to go:

But what of the unutterable monotony of debate by Arab critics about the Euro-American world? We complain, often bitterly, as I have just done, about how little Westerners know about our societies. But in the end, I have to say this: Despite their at times inescapable sense of triviality and dissimulation, American commentators, analysts and academics still know more about the Arab world than their counterparts there know about the United States.

How many think tanks are there in the Arab world that devote themselves to the study of the American world? How many Arab universities are there with American Studies departments? How many Arab researchers have written about the United States — its foreign policy, its social life, its popular culture, its history, its political system — with penetrative grasp, with resolute objectivity, a genuine focus on facts untainted by conspiracy theories and the rhetoric of the 1950s and 60s about those darned American imperialists lurking behind every one of our lamp posts?

Let’s see, that would be about, uh, none, I think.

We all have a long way to go. (hat tip: Watching America)

I followed a link to Reasoned Audacity from NRO and I have to call attention to its smear of the Army’s chief of staff, Gen.. Peter J. Schoomaker. I wrote Audacity’s author, Charmaine Yoest, protesting her post.

Yoest criticizes Gen.. Schoomaker’s policy of assigning women to Forward Support Battalions (FSBs). She also brings up the conflagration that killed the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas as well as the failed attempt to rescue American hostages from Iran known as “Desert One.�?

I am a retired infantry officer. I am opposed to assigning women to combat roles and I am a small-government, original-intent, social and economic conservative. So, I am predisposed to agree with the intent of the post, which is that women should not be assigned to combat positions in the military. I also think that what happened at Waco was a travesty. But this post on Gen. Schoomaker is not an argument; it is a hit piece, pure and simple.

The author spent almost no time analyzing Gen. Schoomaker’s decision to assign women to FSBs. She simply asserts that it is illegal, implies that it is immoral, and distorts how FSBs operate. Then she moves on to ad hominem attacks against Gen. Schoomaker. “So who is this man?” she asks.

She could have at least done her readers the courtesy of linking to his official biography. If her readers went there they would find out that he served 31 years before being appointed as chief of staff. In addition to his first assignment to Special Forces Operation Detachment – D (popularly known as Delta Force and which Ms. Yoest gets wrong in her post), in which he participated in the Desert One operation, he was assigned to Delta Force two more times, the last time as its commander. They would also see that in addition to Desert One, he participated in the invasions of Grenada and Panama, Desert Shield/Desert Storm and our operations in Haiti.

Instead Ms. Yoest focuses on two assignments; Desert One and his time as the Assistant Division Commander of the 1st Cavalry Division. In each she attempts to associate Gen. Schoomaker with a Democrat President who is unpopular her readers and with failures for which Gen. Schoomaker can only be tangentially associated.

Desert One: She characterizes his participation as: “Failed in Desert One in Iran under President Carter. He commanded a Squadron in the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment in the botched rescue attempt of embassy hostages in Iran, 1980. Dead soldiers. Ours.”

This is the equivalent of blaming the astronauts for the Challenger explosion. Her account is a gross distortion of the operation and falsely implies that Schoomaker was somehow responsible for the failure and the casualties. This is a lie. Reader’s can go to any account of the operation such as this one to see for themselves, but I will summarize here: Schoomaker commanded part the Delta team which was actually to land at the embassy and retrieve the hostages. In addition to his force, there were other Delta Force elements, Army Rangers, Special Forces and Pathfinders, Marine Helicopters, Air Force C-130s and C-141s, CIA agents and the task force headquarters. The overall assault was commanded by Colonel Charles Beckwith. The operation had many problems from the very beginning, none of which could in any way be the fault of Gen. Schoomaker, who was at the time a junior officer. The operation was ultimately aborted when one of the Marine Helicopters developed a leak in its hydraulic line while en route to the embassy. Once the mission was aborted the task force began to evacuate the area. One of the helicopters collided with one of the transport planes. During the ensuing fire, a number of service men were killed.

For Yoest to imply that these deaths were somehow Gen. Schoomaker’s fault is shameful. Delta Force is a “one strike and you are out” organization; the mere fact that Schoomaker served two more times at Delta should indicate that no one found any fault with his performance. Even worse, her characterization of Operation Eagle Claw (the official code name of the operation) as some sort of immoral failure that should taint all of the participants is shameful as well. These men put their lives on the line in one of the most complex and daring commando operations ever attempted in order to rescue fellow Americans. The lessons learned in this operation served as the foundation for our modern Special Operations Forces. I admire the courage and skill of the participants and am grateful for their service.

Finally, her apparent attempt to associate Schoomaker with the unpopularity of President Carter is particularly vile. I served under President Carter, too. Should I be ashamed? Or should our military refuse to serve our elected superiors when they don’t like them?

Waco: Here is how Yoest characterizes Schoomaker’s involvement: “Violated the Posse Comitatus Act in Waco. Working with General Wesley Clark as his assistant division commander, Schoomaker, Peter, J., (very quietly) met with Janet Reno, allowing the FBI use of Fort Hood. (Bloggers didn’t exist then.) The armor and military personnel present at the conflagration were Schoomaker’s, Peter J. Dead children. Dead babies. Dead women. Lots of them.” Subsequent paragraphs imply that Schoomaker was rewarded for his participation in the Waco raid with promotions by President Clinton.

What she neglected to mention is that he was pulled out of retirement by President Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfield to serve as chief of staff of the Army. Gee, I if I was looking for a new Army chief of staff; my first choice would definitely be the protégé of my political enemies (President Clinton and Gen. Wesley Clark, former Democratic presidential candidate, who was commanding general of 1st Cavalry Division at the time of Waco), who has a record of violating Posse Comitatus, and the distinction of being heavily involved in an action that my core constituency regards as an atrocity. Are George Bush and Don Rumsfield really that stupid?

I don’t think so, but unlike Ms. Yoest, I am going to provide some evidence:

First, according to this CNN story (which took me all of five minutes to find), it may be that then- Brig. Gen. Schoomaker refused to participate in the planning of the Waco assault and correctly limited his involvement and that of his command to what was legally permitted. Her post does not mention this, even to discount it.

Second, the Department of Defense is specifically directed by Congress to provide support to local, state and federal law enforcement agencies under certain circumstances. They are not allowed to arrest or conduct surveillance on US citizens or directly participate in law enforcement operations; but they are directed to provide certain types of training, logistical support (including the use of military bases) and equipment when it is requested. For an overview, go to this site , which has a reproduction of US Army Field Manual 27-100, “Legal Support to Operations.” It lays out the statutory authorizations for support and the type of support that can be provided.

Now Ms. Yoest, her readers, and many reading this post may disagree with these laws but they have been passed by Congress under both Democrat and Republican administrations, they have been challenged in court and upheld and therefore our military officers are obliged to follow them.

Her statement, without any context or background, begins with the assumption that any military support to law enforcement agencies is illegal and unconstitutional. It goes on to assert without any supporting evidence that Schoomaker’s participation in this action violated the Posse Comitatus Act. It strongly implies that Schoomaker did this on his own initiative as part of some unofficial conspiracy. All of which is untrue.

What is true is that some Army equipment and personnel were on or near the compound at Waco. What is in dispute, according to the accounts I have read, is exactly who they were, who ordered them to be there, and what level of participation they had in the events. There are conflicting accounts on all of these points. I have also read conflicting accounts as to whether the equipment on site belonged to Schoomaker’s 1st Cavalry Division or whether it was from a National Guard Unit that was not under Schoomaker’s authority.

I don’t like what happened at Waco. I suspect that some people involved may have committed illegal acts, but I am not in a position to judge the specifics of the case. But to suggest as Yoest does, that the mere use of Army facilities and equipment and Army training of law enforcement agents in the use of Army equipment is illegal on its face, is just wrong. To suggest that assistant division commanders simply decide to get involved in such operations is at best ignorant and at worst fraudulent. Then- Maj. Gen. Clark, the division commander, received some sort of directive from his superiors (possibly called “a request�? but it was an order nonetheless) to support the FBI and he ordered his subordinate, Brig. Gen. Schoomaker, to participate in the support in some way. I can assure you that each step of the way was reviewed by Army lawyers to make sure it was legal. From what I can tell, Gen. Schoomaker participated in the support of law enforcement agencies as authorized by law. That is also what the Danforth investigation found. If the CNN story above is correct, then Schoomaker also refused requests for support that he thought (or his staff judge advocate told him) were improper.

For a quick review of the main issues surrounding the involvement of Generals Clark and Schoomaker, go here.

It may be that I am wrong and Schoomaker somehow did something wrong, but Yoest did not even attempt to prove that. What she did was shout: “Dead Babies! Schoomaker! Waco!�? in the same sentence in a cheap attempt to score points in a policy debate on an entirely unrelated subject.

That is wrong. Ms Yoest owes Gen. Schoomaker an apology.

From Donald Sensing - Charmaine responded to Patrick’s email to her late last night. I’ve read her response and I think it’s just a dodge: “Well, yeah, Patrick, good points, but it’s all still true.”

Patrick is right - she fails to tackle the women-in-combat issue on its own merits and so attacks Gen. Schoomaker personally. It is a cheap tactic, nothing but a smear campaign and not founded on facts. She evinces little evidence of actually knowing how the Army works at the level she feels so confident criticizing. You’d think that someone with her credentials would be less of an ideologue and more concerned with actual facts, but alas, no.

For the record, I happen to oppose any increased ground-combat role for women and actually think their combat roles should be scaled way down. But if I decide to address the topic on this blog, I sure won’t stoop to Charmaine’s level to do it.

Blogger Joe Gandelman writes The Moderate Voice. A former foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor (IIRC), his blog is always informative and entertaining. And now it’s linked by Google News, which had this entry up last night:

Google first linked to Joe last week. Good on yer, Joe!

Thus sprach Liam Neeson’s character, Qui-Gon Jinn, in Star Wars I, The Phantom Menace, just as his submarine was about to be swallowed by a leviathan. But at the last moment an even huger leviathan ate the first one.

It’s a truism that just after you buy anything electronic you will soon afterward find the same thing cheaper elsewhere, or another thing better. So less than a week after getting my Kodak DX6490 ultrazoom digital camera, I see “there’s always a better camera.”

Now, I knew that the 6490 was not tip-top of the line when I bought it. It has a 10X zoom lens, but it isn’t stabilized. I leaned pretty hard toward the Canon S1 IS for that reason - the “IS” means, “Image Stabilization.” But the S1 IS is only 3.2 megapixels while the Kodak is four, so I opted for the Kodak for that reason and for its other features I related in my earlier post.

Now Canon has to go and announce the release of the S2 IS - basically the S1 upgraded to 12X lens and 5MP. It won’t be available until June 30, and I would not have waited that long since I needed a new camera for a trip we’re taking before then. But dadgum, the Canon is nice: full-screen video at 30 fps and you can use the zoom in video mode and you can take a still pic while videoing without interrupting the video recording. Uses AA batteries and SD cards. Perfect!

You can pre-order one now if you want.

After my upcoming vacation trip is over, you may see my Kodak on eBay.

Update: As Thomas Holsinger mentioned in a comment, when I was starting to research which camera to but he kindly sent me a CD with examples of stills and videos he took with his Canon S1 IS. The photos were great and the videos were really impressive - Tom said they were sharper than digital video. I was skeptical at the time, but since then I bought a digital video camera and now I see (literally) that Tom was right: the Canon’s video is better.

… but we got the next best thing

ABC News reports that al Qaeda’s chief in Iraq, terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, narrowly escaped being collared by American Task Force 626 in February, but his escape was so close we nabbed his driver and bodyguard.

We received good intel from a Zarqawi associate that he would be en route in a pickup truck to meet with lieutenants in Ramadi. TF 626 threw up security cordons which Zarqawi avoided by simply turning around and driving away. American troops gave chase but when they halted the truck Zarqawi was gone. But the nab proved fruitful nonetheless.

What the task force did find in the vehicle confirmed suspicions that Zarqawi had just escaped. The official said Zarqawi’s computer and 80,000 euros (about $104,000 U.S.) were discovered in the truck.

Finding the computer, said the official, “was a seminal event.” It had “a very big hard drive,” the official said, and recent pictures of Zarqawi. The official said Zarqawi’s driver and a bodyguard were taken into custody.

The senior military official said that they have since learned Zarqawi jumped out of the vehicle when it passed beneath an overpass, presumably to avoid detection from the air, and hid there before running to a safe house in Ramadi.

Interrogation of the driver and bodyguard and mining the computer have doubtless already proved to be an intelligence gold mine.

Bill Roggio has more worth reading, especially the implications of having an informer inside Zarqawi’s band and how that bodes ill for Zarqawi’s future.

In the grand tradition of Outside the Beltway and some other sites, herewith the first caption contest I’ve held since the last time.

Leave your caption as a comment. NOTE: Read the comment rules, please!

Update:Here is Jay Leno’s caption, just broadcast (10:40 p.m. CDT):

>

I want the news media to be biased, but the question is, which bias?

Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Richard Myers entreated a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors to tell the full stories in Iraq and Afghanistan a week ago.

Myers told the editors he reads far more about the problems of servicemembers’ equipment and the latest insurgent attack than about “the thousands of amazing things our troops are accomplishing.�? This concerns him, he said, because American resolve is key to success.

The chairman said that part of the problem lies with the military. He said commanders must be more responsive and give more access to reporters. “We’re working on that,�? he told the editors.

But still, “a bomb blast is seen as more newsworthy than the steady progress of rebuilding communities and lives, remodeling schools and running vaccination programs and water purification plants.�?

This is such a dead horse that it is painful to flog it any more, but we can’t blame Myers for trying. I would like the managing editor of any major news outlet, print or broadcast or cable, to explain why the only regular reports of Good News from Iraq come from blogger Arthur Chrenkoff, not from a MSM outlet. Really, I would like to hear an answer.

OpinionJournal, the WSJ’s online commentary pages, does carry the GNFI series but Mr. Chrenkoff is not a WSJ staffer. He blogs from Australia and was born and raised in Poland. How interesting that America has shed the vast majority of blood for Iraq and spent the overwhelming majority of treasure, but no American writer (including me, I plead guilty) originated the series.

I have said before and I’ll say again: There are only four basic outcomes of this war:

1. Over time, the United States engenders deep-rooted reformist impulses in Muslim lands, especially Arab countries, leading their societies away from the self- and other-destructive patterns they now exhibit. It is almost certainly too much to ask that the societies become principally democratic as we conceive democracy (at least not for a very long time), but we can (and must) work to help them remit tendencies toward violent Islamism from their cultures so that terrorism does not threaten us or them. This goal is what amounts to total victory for the United States.

2. The Islamofascists achieve their goals of Islamismicization (there’s a word for you!) of the entire Middle East (at the minimum), the ejection of all non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Persian Gulf, the destruction of Israel, and the deaths of countless numbers of Americans. This outcome is what amounts to total victory for al Qaeda.

3. Absent achieving the goals stated just above, al Qaeda successfully unleashes a mass-destructive, mass-casualty attack against the United States and full-scale war erupts between the US and, at the minimum, Syria and Iran. This would amount to a defeat for all concerned.

4. None of the above happen, so the conflict sputters along for decades more with no real changes: we send our troops into combat intermittently, suffer non-catastrophic attacks intermittently, and neither side possesses all of the will, the means and the opportunity to achieve decisive victory. The war becomes the Forever War.

Perhaps you can think of other, different outcomes, but I think these pretty much cover the possibilities.

So the question for us commentati, whether based on the web or in traditional media, is simply: which of these outcomes is best? Which will be most favorable to human flourishing?

As for me, I choose the first, and have no qualms admitting I am heavily biased in favor thereof. And that bias certainly shapes my blogging!

The basic issue for news media:

For the news media, I ask you: which outcome do you want? It is not possible to pretend neutrality here, for the power of the media to frame the public’s debate is too great to claim you are merely being “fair and balanced.” There literally is no neutral ground here, no “God’s eye view” of events, and hence no possibility of not taking sides. One way or another, what you print or broadcast, what stories you cover and how you cover them, what attention you pay to what issues and how you describe them - all these things mean that you will support one outcome over another. Which will you choose? How will you support it? These are the most important questions of your vocation today. But you are not facing them at all.

These questions seem especially relevant in light of the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for “breaking news” photography earlier this month to the Associated Press for this series of photos from Iraq. Stop reading now and look at the photos before reading on to see whether you believe with my own conclusions, that Wretchard cut to the quick so well:

One of these stunning photographs shows the Blackwater contractors strung up on the Fallujah bridge; another is a photograph which appears to show US soldiers cowering in fear; and the third is the famous execution on Haifa Street. The rest show US troops humiliating Iraqis to one degree or the other. There are no pictures of the Iraqi elections.

Since news by definition shows the truth one would expect the insurgency so lovingly depicted in these AP photos to have triumphed. But since that never happened and prospects grow dimmer by the day, the Pulitzer should be awarded instead for Poetry, since according to the Greeks history is reserved for things as they are but poetry may deal with things as they should be.

The award of the Pulitzer to this disgusting series of photographs should be welcomed by posterity. Fifty years hence people can look back at the work of people who called themselves journalists and judge.

Michelle Malkin has a compendium of commentary, including Riding Sun’s “content analysis:”

U.S. troops injured, dead, or mourning: 3 (2, 3, 11)

Iraqi civilians harmed by the war: 7 (4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 18)

Insurgents looking determined or deadly: 3 (6, 15, 20)

US troops looking overwhelmed or uncertain: 3 (7, 12, 14)

US troops controlling Iraqi prisoners: 2 (16, 17)

Iraqis celebrating attacks on US forces: 2 (1, 19)

Equally telling is what the photos don’t show:

US forces looking heroic: 0

US forces helping Iraqi civillians: 0

Iraqis expressing support for US forces: 0

Iraqis expressing opposition to insurgents: 0

With the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for these photos, it’s not hard to conclude that the decision makers of the media establishment are indeed facing which outcome of the war they support, and the answer is Islamism.

The last word for this post goes to Kevin Myers of the UK Telegraph, writing last November:

We in the media must learn what our role in that struggle will be. Vicarious indignation at so-called atrocities is a moral frivolity: it proves that we are unaware of the scale of the crisis we face, now and into the foreseeable future. Our common enemy has vision, dedication, courage and intelligence. He is profoundly grateful for whatever tit-bits come his way: our media have a moral obligation to ensure that we are scattering absolutely none in his direction.

We’ll wait to see whether Gen. Myers’ entreaties have any effect. Personally, I don’t think they will.

(see James Joyner’s Beltway Traffic Jam.)

Robin Koerner, a Briton, is working with a former editor of the the International Herald Tribune to author a site called, “Watching America.”

The site present links to news about the U.S. written outside the United States. Says Robin,

Much of it is written originally in other languages - so we provide translations, which you can access at a single click. You can therefore read what the Iraqis, French, Israelis, Saudis, Poles etc. are saying to each other about the U.S. A lot of the material we have is therefore not available in English anywhere else in the world. It is updated continually. We have foreign multimedia content to add extra dimensions to the stories.

I’ve read it and it is an excellent resource, so add it to your blogroll as I have!

Joseph Braude writes in TNR that in the Persian Gulf states, “labor unions can be a force for liberalism. And they need American help.”

Today is the fifth Sunday of Easter is Lectionary cycle A. It is also the UMC’s Heritage Sunday. My sermon is online, “Recovering Martyrdom.”

I pointed out in “Islam and the Vatican” that interreligious dialogs between Christians and Muslims have been recognized by many of their participants for many years as being pointless. All the ground has been plowed. One of the greatest challenges prospectively facing Pope Benedict XVI is what the Vatican’s policies will be regarding relations with the Muslim world.

AlphaPatriot reports that Muslim clerics have already started advising the pope:

Pakistani clerics have a message for the new pope:

Islamic leaders in Pakistan are urging the new head of the Catholic Church to combat “grudges” against Muslims in the Western world.

A Pakistani religious leader says he’s praying that Pope Benedict the 16th “will play a vital role to promote religious tolerance, reconciliation, religious freedom, human dignity and peace in the world.”

And a cleric in the city of Karachi says the pope should “try to restrain the forces that have grudges against Muslims.”

“Promote religious tolerance.” “Religious freedom. “Human dignity”. Very nice.

Meanwhile in Pakistan, a mob of 400 people tracked down a man, chasing him through fields and up a tree. Someone in the angry lynch mob got the man out of the tree - by shooting him dead.

And what was his crime? Rape? Murder? No, it was blasphemy — they thought that he had burned a copy of the Koran.

Religious tolerance for thee, but not for me. I’ll start listening to Muslims giving me advice about religious toleraance when Christians can openly, publicly worship in in Saudi Arabia.