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.

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.

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

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.

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.)

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.

Yale professor David Gelernter writes in the LA Times what the blogosphere has been saying literally for years, that the Republican party is the “spiritual heirs” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

This is serious business. If you agree that President Bush has no automatic right to call himself Lincoln’s successor just because they are both “Republicans,” then Democrats have no automatic right to FDR’s mantle either. The Democrats and Republicans switched roles while no one was looking.

Either the good professor is repeating what is now conventional wisdom or he thinks he made a deep insight. And he may have, but it’s sort of late. I wrote in December 2003,

The Republican party under G. W. Bush today bears a much greater resemblance to the Democrats under F. D. Roosevelt than it does to any previous Republican administration.

I doubt I was the first commentator to point that out. Gelernter doesn’t dwell on this, though; his article’s interest is elsewhere. But he does say that the “Big Switch” explains a lot of the political dynamic in Washington today. I agree. But as I observed almost a year and a half ago, I rejoin that the Big Switch,

… is not an improvement not because I excoriate Roosevelt or his administration’s record. Like any other administration, it has its successes and failures; it’s legacy probably springs more from the fact that FDR was elected four times, keeping his programs alive much longer than they might have lived had he stopped at two terms.

Whatever FDR’s faults or virtues, there’s no denying that he was a big-government activist. In fact, “big-government activist” is redundant; by its very nature, big government must be activist, else it would not have become big to begin with.

More than anything else, big-government activism is the New Deal’s legacy, and IMO, has come to define the governing philosophy of both parties today.

Is Bush a “big-government conservative?” Only if you think the term is not self contradictory.

Pieter at Peaktalk writes how Benedict XVI has reignited interest in the “values” debate in Europe. He’s written how the secular-right should work with the new pope in restoring Europe’s moral strength, and how eroding values have an impact on education in Europe.

Pair his entries with the Washington Times’ three-part series, “Faithless: God Under Fire in the Public Square.”

Part I: Religion under a secular assault
Part II: Why Bush threatens secularism
Part III: Believers aim to ‘reclaim’ America

Services are a key

Mao Tse-Tung once wrote that guerrillas - or “insurgents” as they are called nowadays - are like fish in a lake. To an observer all fish look alike as they swim in the water. For guerrillas, the lake is the people among whom the guerrillas live and strike. Ideally, the people support the guerrillas with manpower, resources and shelter. Less ideally, they simply do not oppose the guerrillas. And if the people oppose the guerrillas, then the guerrillas must strike fear into the people to gain at least minimal material support. Fear is inflicted by assassinations, bombings and other terrorist acts. The guerrillas must protect their identities above all, amplifying the people’s fear because no one knows who is a terrorist and who is not.

Mao said defeating guerrillas is done by drying up the lake. If the counter-insurgency forces can make the people decide to overcome their fear and ally with the government, then the insurgents’ freedom to act and operate is steadily reduced as more and more people act on their allegiance.

Over the decades, counter-insurgency experts have learned that defeating insurgencies requires fine calibrations of applying penalties to the people for supporting guerrillas or staying neutral, and rewarding them for allying with the government. American forces in Iraq were maybe a little slow to identify just what incentives the Iraqi people needed to guide them into drying up the terrorists’ lake, but now things seem to be proceeding well. The LA Times ran a piece by Max Boot on how US Army officers shed their orientation towards major armor engagements and focused on winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people as a key means of defeating the insurgency.

Last week at Ft. Hood in Texas, on a tour of military bases organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, I heard a colonel in the 1st Cavalry Division explain one training approach. The 1st Cavalry, which garrisoned Baghdad from March 2004 to March 2005, is an armored force designed to fight other tank armies. In order to figure out how to run a modern metropolis, officers spent time with Austin city officials before they deployed. They also rode along with electrical, water, sewage and garbage workers. Applying what they learned, the 1st Cavalry troops discovered that the more they improved municipal service in Baghdad, the less likely residents were to cooperate with insurgents. Thanks to their efforts, the Iraqi capital is significantly more peaceful today than it was a year ago.

It’s striking that one of the complaints Osama bin Laden made against the non-Islamist governments of Arab countries was that they fail to provide such services to the people. In 1996, for example, bin Laden said,

“The ordinary man knows that [Saudi Arabia] is the largest oil producer in the world, yet at the same time he is suffering from taxes and bad services.”

This observation sheds light on OBL’s strategic incompetence. He has always considered the Arab ummah, or Muslims masses, as his natural ally. He has said over periods of years that his main tactic in Saudi Arabia (his principal strategic target) was to bring forth conditions that would cause either of two things. First, the ruling Saudi royals to convert in both word and deed to bin Laden’s form of Islamism and institute strict sharia law throughout the land, or second for the people to arise in righteous, religious indignation and overthrow the corrupt Saudi regime.

But OBL never demonstrated to the Saudis or anyone else how they would actually be better of under Islamism than they are now. In fact, he proved quite the opposite: in the several years he and the Islamist Taliban ruled Afghanistan, the Afghan people sufered from bad services and a personally corrupt regime (not to mention a murderous regime, of course).

If OBL and co. had really been interested in winning the hearts and minds of the ummah,
they would have used Afghanistan as a proof-of-concept base to garner admiration from the ummah. But they didn’t even try.

Instead, OBL and the Taliban revealed the true face of Islamism - government of the many by the few, for the benefit of the few. Far from improving the quality of lives for the Afghan men and women, they coupled ordinary governmental ineptitude with fascisti regulation and enforcement of the minutiae of daily living. Islamism proved to be no shining light on a hill, beckoning the ummah to shake off their temporal masters. There was only a downside for the people to change regimes in Saudi Arabia.

Iraq under Saddam was literally a secular version of Islamist fanaticism. Replace Afghanistan’s cult of Quran with a cult of Saddam and that was Iraq. Perhaps it was even worse, since Saddam’s security apparatus was even more comprehensive and ruthless than the Taliban’s. Civil services under Saddam were not much better than they are now and in fact services in many parts of Iraq now are enormously better than they ever were under Saddam. That’s drying up the lake in which the Iraqi insurgencies swim - and note the plural, “insurgencies.” There’s more than one, and that’s the topic of an upcoming post.

UD: I’ve added this post to James Joyner’s Friday linkfest.