WHAT DO “2 horrific hurricanes, 200 billion dollars worth of “fiscal responsibility” on behalf of the government, $3.20 a gallon gasoline and now Tom DeLay being indicted” have to do with each other? Calloutz knows.

Glenn Reynolds writes, “Jeez, I hate these things.” So do I. His post is very short, and what he thinks and what he does (actually, what he doesn’t do) about a certain email-related matter is exactly what I think and (don’t) do, too.

One more thing: After I closed comments for the rest of this month to save bandwidth, a reader sent me an email accusing me of “cowardice” for removing commenting and “being afraid of debate.” I really wonder why he thinks I write a blog to debate him or anyone else. I don’t write this blog to enter into debates, but to have my say about topics of interest to me. Why this person thinks I am obligated in any way to pay for hosting his commentary is quite beyond me.

The commenting feature is a courtesy, nothing more. It’s not an entitlement. If he wants to have his say, he can start his own blog.

Via Norm Geras, I learned of a fascinating account in The New Republic of biographies published of suicide bombers and jihadist death seekers in Iraq. Why do they deal in death? Here’s what missing from the screen of motivations:

[M]issing are some of the issues most commonly cited as driving anti-Americanism in the Arab world. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict barely registers on the jihadist radar, and Abu Ghraib merits few mentions. The motivation for jihad is almost always, in keeping with Salafi ideology, the plight of the humiliated Muslim nation, victimized by the joint evil forces of kufr (unbelief, embodied by the United States as the enemy bent on the destruction of Islam) and tawaghit (tyrants who have set themselves up, or are propped up, as gods on earth).

So what does motivate them?

Many of the jihadists profiled held good jobs or were well-educated. Faysal Zayd Al Mutayri of Kuwait “resigned from the Ministry of Defense, where he held a military post.” Sultan Al Hudhayl Al Qahtani owned restaurants in Riyadh. Fahd Abdallah Al Fayzi was from a rich Saudi family, his father a local real-estate tycoon. Tariq Bin Luwayfi Al Huwayti graduated from the meteorology faculty of King Abd Al Aziz University. Mahir Ali Al Jahni of Saudi Arabia studied in India, where he earned a degree in English and computer science. And Ahmad Said Ahmad Al Ghamidi, also of Saudi Arabia, was studying medicine at Khartoum University when he broke off his studies and used his tuition money to go to Iraq.

Impoverished Arab men are too busy working for their next meal to allow themselves the luxury of religious fantasy. But the well-to-do can:

Most recruits are young men, and, while they may crave paradise and its pleasures, they also want some excitement on earth. …

I earlier cited Saudi blogger Alhamedi’s profile of a would-be bomber named Ahmad ibn Abdullah Al-Shayie, who is …

… a failed suicide bomber, and you don’t come across many of those. His tale, (for he can tell it, being a failed suicide bomber), is recounted here, and soon he’ll be on TV. One day he was just an ordinary Saudi kid whose progress thru the Saudi educational system had been that of a log in a slow-moving river - ponderous, not really getting anywhere fast, certainly not picking anything up on the way. He’d never have mastered geometry in a million years. However he did pick up the bit about the Joooos being liars, and how we are better than non-believers, and Jihad is good, because that kept getting drummed into him. But he doesn’t have a very sophisticated theological or historical understanding, and all those ideas got a bit mixed up. …

So Ahmad graduates from school. He’s not bright enough to get a job in a Call Center, and too stuck-up to work alongside those Indians on the supermarket check-out. He would normally look forward to an existence of PlayStation, satellite TV, McDonalds, and trying to get past the doorman into a “family-only” shopping mall. The nearest he’d come to danger would be driving around with his pals in some old wreck, no seatbelts, failing to complete a hi-speed u-turn and getting wrapped around a lamp-post.

However these days, just across our northern border, there is excitement and adventure, beckoning our no-hopers like a beacon. Iraq. …

Also, and I’ve no doubt that this opinion will not be universally popular, ten years ago Ahmad and his like would have spent their lives in useless but low-key hedonism, eventually dying a peaceful but definitely lonely death. Iraq has changed all that. …

However, there is evidence that al Qaeda in Iraq is having less and less success recruiting jihadis and is “is shifting from a foreign terrorist organization to a domestic guerilla movement” (link). About which more another time.

A small leak, they say, will eventually sink a big ship. How long before a state or federal court rules that it is unconstitutional to prohibit polygamy? Consider:

The Netherlands has legalized polygamy in all but name, granting a civil union to a man and two women.

Victor de Bruijn, 46, of Roosendaal “married” both Bianca, 31, and Mirjam, 35, in a ceremony Friday, the Brussels Journal reported. …

The Netherlands has legalized polygamy in all but name, granting a civil union to a man and two women.

Victor de Bruijn, 46, of Roosendaal “married” both Bianca, 31, and Mirjam, 35, in a ceremony Friday, the Brussels Journal reported.

“I love both Bianca and Mirjam, so I am marrying them both,” said de Bruijn who previously was married to Bianca.

The couple met Mirjam Geven two and a half years ago through an Internet chatroom, and eight weeks later Mirjam left her husband to live with Victor and Bianca.

After Mirjam’s divorce the threesome decided to marry, the Journal reported.

De Bruijn explained: “A marriage between three persons is not possible in the Netherlands, but a civil union is. We went to the notary in our marriage costume and exchanged rings. We consider this to be just an ordinary marriage.”

DeBruijn insisted there is no jealousy between the three partners because Mirjam and Bianca are bisexual. …

In the U.S., some opponents of same-sex marriage – including, notably, Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. – have argued acceptance of same-sex marriage will create a slippery slope, leading to the sanctioning of other types of relationships, including polygamy.

In June, the president of the American Civil Liberties Union said polygamy is among the “fundamental rights” her organization will continue to defend.

During a question-and-answer session after a speech at Yale University, ACLU president Nadine Strossen stated that her organization has “defended the right of individuals to engage in polygamy.”

Last year, a Utah polygamist, Rodney Holm, appealed convictions for sex offenses to the state Supreme Court, arguing the practice of polygamy is a constitutional right that never produced the social ills claimed by its opponents.

Get ready.

Update: Marriage is reported to be “on the rocks” in Britain, where ” the proportion of unmarried people set to exceed that of married people within 25 years as more men and women opt to live together without constraints, according to government statistics published this week.”

My Marine son Stephen called about 45 minutes ago, just checking in to let us know he was still okay. While we were talking some jihadi mortar rounds started dropping in his base camp. He counted 10 or 12 impacts, then Marine artillery started returning fire. And that was about the most interesting phone call I’ve ever had. I did tell him to seek shelter, but he insisted the incoming was landing far enough away that he wasn’t in danger.

But it sure scared the heck out of Dad.

There’s always a market for disaster warnings

Color me skeptical. CNS reports,

Al Qaeda’s plans for a series of spectacular terrorist strikes in October, targeting American interests as well as U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East and said to be coordinated by Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenant in Iraq - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — are the subject of a non-public report issued by terrorism experts this week.

The attacks, planned to coincide with the Muslim observance of Ramadan and dubbed the “Great Ramadan Offensive,” are designed to create a “fateful confrontation” with the U.S. and Israeli forces in the Middle East, according to a May 30 letter from Zarqawi to bin Laden. The contents of the letter are referenced in the report written by Yossef Bodansky, the former director of the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare.

The Sept. 2 report is accessible only to government officials on the Global Information System (GIS) database. Cybercast News Service obtained the report on the same day as its release. It warns of planned attacks in Western Europe, Russia and perhaps the continental U.S. The specific targets are believed to include airports at Schiphol in the Netherlands and Fiumicino in Italy.

There’s more. I am skeptical for two reasons. First, the “report is accessible only to government officials” but somehow “Cybercast News Service obtained the report on the same day as its release.” Wow, the very same day! How’d they do that? This kind of product marketing is old news and rest assured, this report is a marketed product of think tankery. I think that CNS has fallen for (or maybe complicit in) a sales gimmick.

The second reason I am skeptical is this: how much expertise does it take to report that al Qaeda’s leadership (the ones left alive, anyway) are almost always threatening disaster upon their foes? What, another “Great Ramadan Offensive”? That’s been promised every year since 2001.

We don’t need this breathless report and reporting to remember that al Qaeda wants to inflict damage upon the West, and the greatest damage it can. But historical analysis of al Qaeda’s threats reveals that it blusters “A” and then does “B”. In August 2004 I listed a long series of unfulfilled threats that al Qaeda had made since the 9/11 attacks. My conclusion was that al Qaeda does not threaten attacks that are actually in the works. (Al Qaeda even promised in December 2003 to destroy New York City within 35 days)

Al Qaeda makes threats all the time, but threats of specific actions, such as nuke New York or poison US water supplies, don’t get carried out. Very vague threats - a “bloody war” in Europe - are so vague that any bombing can be seen as fulfillment.

Al Qaeda seems to have two categories of threats:

1. “Hear us roar” threats that are mostly bluster designed to let us and their ideological allies know they are still fighting.

2. Misdirection threats of significant specificity designed to increase the fog of our counter-terrorism measures.

Actual targets - Khobar barracks, African embassies, USS Cole, the 9/11 targets, the Bali disco, Madrid trains, London tubes and buses - are not pre-threatened . They are simply attacked.

(Ramadan is a major Muslim observance, lasting this year from Oct. 4 to Nov. 2.)

My Marine son called from Iraq last night. It was early morning in Fallujah; he and his unit had returned a few hours earlier from a mission out of the city. He couldn’t tell me where on an unsecure line.

He said for the first time since arriving in country two weeks ago he fired his rifle. But it was only target practice (thank the Lord!) because they have not yet seen any bad guys.

However, they did encounter a roadside IED awaiting their passing by. Steve’s gunnery sergeant spotted it ahead of time and it was neutralized. I don’t have details on how or by whom, the unit itself or an EOD team.

I met the gunny when we went to Camp Lejeune to see Steve off. He was already an Iraq vet, so when Steve told me the gunny has spotted the bomb I told him, “Take notes.”

While returning to combat tours is a tough row to hoe for our troops, it multiplies our on-the-field advantage against the terrorists, whose cadre of line fighters has been steadily reduced. I wrote more about that here.

It was wonderful to hear from Stephen. He sounded just fine. Semper fi, son!

Update: More info as of 12:30 p.m. CDT - the IED along the road was detonated in place and turned out not to be a bomb at all. So that’s good news. But Steve’s base came under mortar attack today; there were only one or two rounds that impacted, and not near my son.

The Times (UK) reports,

The entire lay leadership team of the main Anglican church in Iraq is presumed to have been killed after they were attacked while returning from a conference in Jordan.

The team of five Iraqi-born Anglicans including the lay pastor and his deputy, should have returned two weeks ago from the conference.

Canon Andrew White, of the Foundation for Reconciliation in the Middle East, who is the clergyman in charge of the church, said: “Anglican leaders in Baghdad have been missing for two weeks and they are presumed dead.”

Those missing include Maher Dakel, the lay pastor; his wife, Mona, who leads the women’s section of the church; their son Yeheya; the church’s pianist and music director, Firas Raad; the deputy lay pastor; and their driver, whose name has not been disclosed.

Canon White last heard news of the five on September 13, when he was told that they had been attacked the day before while returning from Jordan on the notoriously dangerous road between Ramadi and Fallujah.

“It is the most dangerous area in Iraq,” he said. “One of two things must have happened. They either got kidnapped or they died. But we have had no ransom demand or anything.”

Those of you so led or inclined, please pray for all Iraqi Christians.

HT: Norm Geras

This is a story that almost mocks itself. The local CBS affiliate, WTVF-5, reported last night of the creeping disaster overtaking the fair state of Tennessee because of rising gasoline prices.

Gas station owners say the high price of gasoline is cutting into lottery sales because customers don’t have as much extra money to spend.

Tennessee Lottery President Rebecca Paul said statewide, lottery sales are still up, but not as much as they had projected. “We believe it’s had an impact, but if you look at our sales, you go, ‘Wow, they’re up.’ But we believe they’d be up more if it weren’t for the gas prices,” Paul said.

But drivers like Lamont Smith, who owns an ’85 Cutlass, said they simply can’t afford to buy a tank of gas and still have enough money left over to pick up a lottery ticket.

“It’s a V-8. I’m pouring gas on the ground, basically. I can’t do both. I can’t buy the lottery tickets and put gas in my car,” Smith said.

“They don’t have the money. Me, I don’t have the money. What little money I have has got to go in my gas tank,” said Debra Moses, manager of a BP store in Nashville.

Lottery officials said they are on track to meet projected revenues for the year, but that if gas prices remain as high as they have been, meeting their goals next year could be more diffucult.

I never thought I’d be wondering whether I’d be willing to pay the recently-predicted “$5/gallon gas,” but I’m thinking it would be worth it in order to put the state lottery out of business.

Except, of course, that rising fuel prices hit the poor and self-employed sooner and harder than the rest of us. Which brings me back to the TV segment. As at least one local radio host pointed out this morning that every person interviewed by the station was black. Seems curious, doesn’t it, since the majority of Nashvillians are white. Did the reporters and editors simply assume that white lottery buyers would still be able to buy tickets, but black buyers can’t?

It may well be that the majority of people living below the federal poverty line in Nashville are black, I don’t know. But in light of the recent controversies surrounding racial assumptions in New Orleans, I think a news reporter or editor would have to be tone deaf not to cast a more critical eye on their own stories about the poor to make sure that (take your pick) either black Americans are not stereotyped as poor or the poor of other races are ignored. Maybe it’s a distinction without a difference.

It would have been more informative, though, had the TV reporter asked Lamont Smith, driver of a 20-year-old car that he says he can’t afford to run, just how helpful it was for him to have been buying lottery tickets all along, and how many per week he usually bought. It’s not for nothing that state lotteries have been called the “Sheriff of Nottingham Plan,” since they operate as wealth-transfer schemes from the poor to the middle or upper classes. But you’ll never see news media explore that, especially television news. Their marketing and advertising departments won’t let them.

Update: Mickey Kaus says that the New York Times is also a bit oblivious to “issues of race, class, and gender.”

Also, I changed the title of this post after remembering OpinionJournal’s like satire.

The Independent:

Saudi Arabia, the biggest oil producer, and Exxon Mobil, the largest oil company, yesterday declared that the world had decades’ worth of oil to come, in an attempt to calm fears about the record prices experienced in recent weeks.

Forming a powerful alliance, the Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi said, at an industry conference in Johannesburg, that the country would soon almost double its “proven” reserve base, while Exxon’s president, Rex Tillerson, spoke of 3 trillion or more barrels of oil that are yet to be recovered.

Mr Naimi said that Saudi Arabia would “soon” add 200 billion barrels to its current reserves estimate of 264 billion barrels. …

However, sceptics, led by the US banker Matthew Simmons, have argued that production in Saudi Arabia’s known oil fields is already declining and that no major new fields have been discovered. By extension, these critics suggest the world has reached, or is about to reach, the high point of production.

Separately, Exxon’s Mr Tillerson told the convention in South Africa that his company estimated that global energy demand would increase by 50 per cent over the next 25 years. Mr Tillerson said that by some estimates there was as much as 7 trillion barrels of oil yet to be discovered. On a more conservative basis, the world still had more than 3 trillion barrels from conventional fields, oil sands deposits and other sources. “That is more than twice all the oil recovered up to now in all of human history,” Mr Tillerson said.

Mining new reserves is the question, of course, and it will never be as cheap to bring new oil from the ground as it was even 15 years ago or so. Even so, the main determinant of prices for refined petroleum products will be increasingly pegged not to production but to refining, for refining capacity is lagging production capacity.

More on the decline of Europe. This is not good news by any means.
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Take your First Amendment and stuff it. HT: Dean Esmay.
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Surprise! Atheistic British “scientists” discover, “Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side‘” - it will amaze no one that the “study” is an anti-American diatribe. Well, when all you have is a hammer, etc.

Briton Peter Glover responds, “I have yet to read anything that matches the unadultered piece of anti-Christian, anti-American bilge in The Times yesterday.”
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Chuck Simmins discusses reports of “massive and systematic violations of treaties regarding treatment of prisoners” in the hands of the 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82s Airborne Division.

Update: This is apparently related to what Chuck was writing about: “Army Interrogator Pleads Guilty to Assault.”
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Harold C. Hutchison discusses, “Bad Reporting and Iraq.”

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An Orlando Sentinel reporter during the Iraq invasion observed, “Marines return fire with a relish.” Comes now Slate’s Bing West, who writes, “Firefights, for which Marines train assiduously and engage in with a fierce zest, have become rare in the Fallujah area.” Which is why they have become rare.
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Al Qaeda is starting its own online news service. Dan Darling has details.

How death lengthens the OODA Loop

I wrote yesterday that merely counting American casualties in Iraq is fruitless in discerning whether we are winning the war. Comes now Wretchard at Belmont Club who points out that body counts do indeed matter. Why and in what way? The US and Iraq are having increased successes in pinpointing senior terrorist leaders and then killing them. Consider al Qaeda’s number-two man in Iraq, Abu Azzam, shot to death during a raid early Sunday morning:

Abu Azzam was the operational commander for al Qaeda in Iraq and was responsible for the recent upsurge in violent attacks in the city since April 2005.

Multiple intelligence sources and corroborating information from a close associate of Abu Azzam led Coalition and Iraqi security forces to the terrorist safe house where the al Qaeda in Iraq leader was hiding. A combined operation was conducted with the intent of capturing the wanted terrorist; however, Abu Azzam fired on the forces, and their return fire killed the al Qaeda in Iraq leader.

“We continue to decimate the leadership of the al Qaeda in Iraq terrorist network and continue to disrupt their operations,” said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, Multi-National Force-Iraq spokesperson. “By taking Abu Azzam off the street, another close associate of Zarqawi, we have dealt another serious blow to Zarqawi’s terrorist organization.” [Italics added]

As Wretchard points out, defending against this kind of raid is very difficult, as is defending against precision-guided munitions such as killed Abu Nasir, al Qaeda’s main coordinator of foreign fighters, and Abu Ali, who was killed by a precision airstrike on September 18. The reason is that such a defense,

… requires preventing any unvetted person from viewing your movements. Abu Nasir, the late Emir of the Qaim region, may have had twenty or more bodyguards or companions with him; but they simply perished with him because his security measures failed to prevent some person, perhaps a man in the employ of America, perhaps someone with a grudge against him, perhaps even a rival in his own organization from making a cell phone call which brought down a guided weapon on his head. … The insurgents [must] keep the man with the cellphone or miniaturized American radio in his pocket from reporting on them. … [D]efending against a precision strike means embargoing information.

This kind of information security is al Qaeda’s greatest vulnerability not because they cannot do it, but because it realistically cannot be done. The extreme measures that al Qaeda’s Iraq chief, Musab al-Zarqawi, is forced to take to hide himself cannot help but badly degrade his ability to command his troops. Access by subordinates to their commander (in any organization) and fast communications to and from the top are critical to getting inside an enemy’s OODA Loop. The longer the information “float” between an event and its report, or between an order’s issuance and its execution, compared to your enemy’s float time, the more surely you will lose. The longer this disparity continues the greater it will become. Finally - to use a football analogy - the other team will be hiking the ball while you’re still figuring out your starting lineup, unaware that play has commenced.

One thing making al Qaeda fall behind us in the OODA Loop is the fact that more and more of its experienced fighters and senior figures are being killed. Having to replace them with greenhorns facing a serious learning curve does not an efficient, effective outfit make.

Those who write that body counts are a meaningless metric to apply against the insurgency ignore the fact that formations which sustain heavy casualties lose their organizational memory while those who suffer lightly retain them. [US Marine battalion commander] Lt. Col. Joseph L’Etoile is on his third and half of his men are on their second tours of Iraq . For Abu Nasir and many of his foreign fighters, the memory of what to avoid next time has been lost on this, their last tour of Iraq.

That is probably one reason US casualties have been falling all year long compared to last year.

In January 2003 I posted an essay entitled, “Does the peace movement really have good intentions? No.” Not long ago I was asked by a colleague whether I really meant that or was I just being provocative.

With last weekend’s protest extravaganza in the nation’s capital, it is appropriate to revisit the topic. Almost three years ago I said that the “peace movement” isn’t really about peace and that the protest industry falls into two main camps. First is the “Down With America” camp populated with the sort of people George Orwell described in his essay, “Notes on Nationalism,” of May 1945. Their

… real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States.

The second main group I termed the “Political Identity” camp.

Its motivation is pure, partisan politics. It is universally liberal to outright leftist, but not pacifist. Its members do not object to war per se, they mainly object to war being waged by the wrong people. This is the camp referred to … by Michael Totten, with this nugget:

While it is unlikely that leftists [the DWA camp - DS] would have supported the war against the Taliban if Hillary Clinton waged it, it is almost certainly true that most mainstream liberals would support the war in Iraq if she were leading the charge against Saddam now. With only one exception, every anti-war liberal I have talked to admits this is true.

As I explained in my original post, I recognize that there are a “small number of true pacifists” such as Quakers and Mennonites, “but their visibility and influence is near negligible.”

Comes now Christopher Hitchens, who has deeply-rooted, authentic Leftist credentials. Hitchens discusses at length the Down With America camp, making the same basic point I did, except with greater personal insights and fluency. In “Anti-War, My Foot,” Hitchens writes of the “phony peaceniks who protested in Washington.” Explaining “‘International ANSWER’ as a front for (depending on the day of the week) fascism, Stalinism, and jihadism,” Hitchens scores a knockout punch:

To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as “antiwar” when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, “No to Jihad”? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, “Yes to Kurdish self-determination” or “We support Afghan women’s struggle”? Don’t make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.

So I would challenge people to explain, if only to themselves, just how the so-called “antiwar” groups active today can possibly be credited with good intentions. They have a many-years-long record of supporting the cruelest, most oppressive, murderous tyrants on earth.

Do I think all this is provocative? No. In fact, it’s not provocative enough.

None of this is to say that the Bush administration is off limits to criticism for its conduct of the war, nor that the Congress’s decision to declare war upon Iraq in October 2002 should never be examined. It is one thing, and necessary, to hold our elected officials accountable for what they do on our behalf. It is quite another thing to call for victory by the enemies of the United States, who would have sought our destruction whether Iraq had been invaded or not.

The number two ranking al Qaeda figure in Iraq, Abu Azzam, was shot and killed Sunday night in Baghdad.

I have discontinued the comments feature of the blog until October. I’m getting warning messages from my host about bandwidth limits. I realize that most of the excess usage has been because I’ve posted a lot of graphics this month, but one does what one can at the time. As always, thank you for reading!

US Central Command reports,

Coalition Forces, often teaming up with Iraqi Army Soldiers, conducted 69 cordon and search operations and raids against anti-Iraqi forces over the past four days, seizing 126 terror suspects and seven weapons caches in and around the capital city.

Additionally, Task Force Baghdad Soldiers and members of the Iraqi Security forces conducted 3,000 combat patrols to provide security for local businesses and citizens.

In one of the larger combat operations, a joint patrol of Iraqi Police and Task Force Baghdad Soldiers found terrorists hiding in a building in the Mansour district of central Baghdad at 9:40 a.m. Sept. 21.

An Iraqi Army patrol in the area came to assist the combined patrol, while U.S. attack helicopters provided air support.

When the firing stopped, a weapons cache containing rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms ammunition, 35 mortar rounds and rockets, one mortar tube, 27 RPGs, three roadside bombs, and five cell phones was found.

Five terrorists were killed in the assault.

Another Task Force Baghdad patrol working in western Baghdad found a large weapons cache on the outskirts of western Baghdad the morning of Sept. 24. The cache consisted of 11 roadside bombs, one mortar tube and 14 mortar rounds, one artillery round, TNT and plastic explosives.

Combined Iraqi Army and U.S. patrols also found an additional 33 rocket, mortar and artillery rounds; 15 rifles with 275 magazines and ammunition, two missiles, 16 grenades, and four pistols in other weapons caches hidden throughout the city.

More information here.

Here are two points about Katrina reconstruction with your money and mine that don’t build confidence.

First:

John Fund revisits Louisiana’s history of corruption.

Put bluntly, the local political cultures don’t engender confidence that aid won’t be diverted from the people who truly need and deserve it. While the feds can try to ride herd on the money, here’s hoping folks in the region take the opportunity to finally demand their own political housecleaning. Change is past due. Last year, Lou Riegel, the agent in charge of the FBI’s New Orleans office, described Louisiana’s public corruption as “epidemic, endemic, and entrenched. No branch of government is exempt.”

Louisiana ranks third in the nation in the number of elected officials per capita convicted of crimes (Mississippi takes top prize). In just the past generation, the Pelican State has had a governor, an attorney general, three successive insurance commissioners, a congressman, a federal judge, a state Senate president and a swarm of local officials convicted. Last year, three top officials at Louisiana’s Office of Emergency Preparedness were indicted on charges they obstructed a probe into how federal money bought out flood-prone homes. Last March the Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered Louisiana to repay $30 million in flood-control grants it had awarded to 23 parishes.

And now Louisiana politicians are demanding that they put in charge of spending the federal money that will be pouring into their state for rebuilding. The thought does not engender much confidence.

Second:

IS THIS PORK?

Louisiana’s congressional delegation has requested $40 billion for Army Corps of Engineers projects in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, about 10 times the annual Corps budget for the entire nation, or 16 times the amount the Corps has said it would need to protect New Orleans from a Category 5 hurricane.

Louisiana Sens. David Vitter (R) and Mary Landrieu (D) tucked the request into their $250 billion Hurricane Katrina Disaster Relief and Economic Recovery Act, the state’s opening salvo in the scramble for federal dollars.

The bill, unveiled last week, would create a powerful “Pelican Commission” controlled by Louisiana residents that would decide which Corps projects to fund, and ordered the commission to consider several controversial navigation projects that have nothing to do with flood protection. The Corps section of the Louisiana bill, which was supported by the entire state delegation, was based on recommendations from a “working group” dominated by lobbyists for ports, shipping firms, energy companies and other corporate interests.

This needs to be a non-starter. It is, to me, an open and under-debated question whether the federal government should fund the rebuilding of New Orleans — I’m inclined to agree with the polls that say it shouldn’t — but this is a naked grab for money by the very political establishment whose corruption and ineptitude led to the problems in the first place. It should be slapped down fast and hard.

A columnist for Newsday (I think) pointed out Louisiana’s repuation for corruption when video of looters in New Orleans was first was broadcast, then predicted that with billions of taxpayers’ dollars on the way, we haven’t seen the real looting yet.

There are some people who maintain that the only metric of success that matter in the war in Iraq is the number and rate of American casualties. More casualties equals quagmire. Less casualties - sorry, that hasn’t happened. The rate and number of American casualties has only been going up, so they maintain.

These are decidedly unserious people, of couse, because they never do any actual analysis using real world facts. They dismiss out of hand information released by the Defense Dept. as “blather from DOD PR flacks,”as one reader commented here. Their template is very easy to understand, though. They oppose the war. Not only that they oppose American success in the war. Because they think the Iraq war should not have been fought, they think that we should lose. Therefore they find comfort and justification in every setback and insist that the war has been nothing but setbacks. They are literally defeatists because the defeat of Amercan goals and objectives in Iraq is their goal. The war, they claim, is “unwinnable” anyway.

Their template includes the repeated mantra that our casualties are increasing and that this “fact” proves we are being (thankfully) defeated. In answer there are two main points. First, casualties rise during times of more active combat, fall during times of lesser combat. This kind of cyclic battle, and cyclic casualty trend, has pertained in Iraq since the end of major offensive operations in May 2003. Engaging the enemy in intensive combat is more costly in lives than not engaging them. Rising US casualties at a particular moment are not directly indicative of whether we are winning or losing overall. By that reasoning, we were winning World War II in 1942 but losing it in 1945. We invaded Guadalcanal in August 1942, for example, losing 1,600 dead and 4,400 wounded securing it. In 1945 we invaded Iwo Jima and secured it only after losing 6,800 dead and 19,200 wounded - more American casualties there than Japanese, in fact.

In fact, the number of American dead and wounded rose every year during World War Two, culminating in the abattoir of Okinawa, where so many Americans died in battle (12,000) that it led directly to President Truman’s decision to atom-bomb Japan.

But those who assert that rising American casualties ipso facto mean that America is being defeated are hoist on their own petard because - if they were consistent (as if) - they would have to agree that falling casualty rates mean America is winning. And that in fact is exactly what has been happening.

Still, the number of killed and wounded [in 2005] is 73% of last year’s figures. In the last three months, the number has been 50% of the same period last year. This was quite an interesting result, considering news accounts that Iraq is ‘descending into chaos’ and that things are going ‘from bad to worse’. Counting the wounded, the figures for September 2005 so far are lower than for any month in 2004 and 2005. Yet the mood conveyed in the press is that things are sliding into the abyss. That may be true for other reasons, but with US casualties at a quarter to a seventh of their historical values in a month full of offensives and important dates, the honest analyst must at least ask himself if something is changing on the battlefield.

Well, yes, something is changing on the battlefield. It’s not that America is suddenly winning. We’ve always been winning. It’s that our winning momentum is increasing. Operationally, advantages are stacking more greatly on our side in practically every area. We and the Iraqi government are superior over al Qaeda and Baathist insurgencies in resources, materiel, manpower and politics. Crucially, the forces of freedom are gaining momentum religiously, too. Counterterrorism Blog, the most authoritative web site addressing the issue, reports,

Only days after Al-Qaida announced the completion of its latest campaign of violence aimed at avenging alleged “massacres” of Sunni Muslims in Tel Afar by the U.S. and Iraqi government, there are growing indications that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Al-Qaida acolytes may be facing the most serious political and operational challenges they have encountered since they first joined the anti-coalition insurgency in mid-2003. The deadly glut of suicide bombings that began on September 8 has undoubtedly caused destruction and chaos-but militants were neither able to undermine the anti-insurgent operation in Tel Afar nor deter Iraqi government efforts to formulate a constitution. [English translations of Al-Qaida’s various claims of responsibility for recent suicide bombing attacks are now posted online at Globalterroralert.com]. Instead, renewed apparent threats from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to massacre both Shiite and Sunni “collaborators” have been warily received by many Iraqi Sunnis, leading the respected Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars to issue a statement strongly admonishing Zarqawi:

“There is no religious basis allowing you to take your revenge on the innocent while ignoring the true criminals, nor are there rules stating that the innocent should bear the consequences for the acts of criminals… it is impossible for someone who claims to rely on the laws of Allah to make his decisions based on emotions and personal grudges. Such a dangerous statement only serves the most deadly wishes of our enemies—the desire to tear apart our country and to initiate a battle amongst the faithful… The best course of action for those who came to help eliminate the foreign occupation in our land is advocacy, not killing and annihilating the perspectives of others… we would like to remind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that religion can be used to advocate and we ask him to retract all the threats he has made because they damage the image of the jihad and take away from the success of the jihadi resistance project in Iraq, and it increases the bloodshed suffered by innocent Iraqis.”

The AMS statement is indeed significant and represents compelling evidence of a real break between mainstream Sunni Iraqis and fringe Salafist extremists, including many foreign fighters drawn from across the Middle East. …

I have already pointed out that Zarqawi’s desperate anti-Shiite declaration after his thorough defeat by Iraqi and American troops at Tal Afar resulted in Jordan’s Sunni Islamists Monday blasting Zarqawi. Neither of these religious pronouncements are endorsements of American action in Iraq. The statements do, however, break a years-long silence of consent about al Qaeda’s terrorism. To deny that these statements are unconnected with Coalition progress in Iraq is simply to live in lala land where facts on the ground don’t matter.

On Oct. 15 the Iraqi people will go to the polls to vote on their proposed constitution. No one can claim that the constitution’s acceptance by the electorate is a done deal. Almost certainly most Sunnis oppose the constitution. There are serious rifts among Shiites about the documents as well, but

The most crucial endorsement of Iraq’s draft constitution came late Thursday from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, arguably the most revered and most powerful Shi’ite cleric in the country.

Aides to the reclusive cleric say they have been given orders to promote ‘yes’ votes for Iraq’s October 15th referendum. Mr. Sistani is also expected to issue a religious edict, called a fatwa, in favor of the draft.

War is a political act, even for al Qaeda, whose global objectives are explicitly political as well as religious. The referendum will go forward. The Iraqi people may vote in their new consitution that day. They may not. But al Qaeda’s progressive defeat lies in the fact that the referendum is happening at all. There may well be “miles to go before we sleep,” in both political and military senses; in fact, I am sure that is so. However, the struggle is not al Qaeda’s to win, it is only ours to lose. Those who focus on only one reference point, American casualties and nothing else, really have nothing worthwhile to contribute to the discussion. They (charitably) are simply do not know enough or don’t care enough about what is really happening to be taken as serious people.

Update: Wretchard at Belmont Club emails,

There are about 8,500 British troops in Iraq and 3,500 in surrounding countries, but in-theater. Since OIF they’ve suffered 96 deaths. The US has 114,000 men in Iraq (and more in-theater but in neighboring countries) a force about 13.5 times bigger than the British contingent and on a pro-rata basis and ceteris paribus, there should have been 1,300 US deaths at the British rate. The actual number of US deaths is 1,913 — higher than pro rata — but not vastly higher when you consider that most of the big battles are in the west, center and northwest.

This really surprised me because the British sector is presumably the quiet one. Yet if the US were operating in an area as quiet as the ones the Brits have charge of, we’d be looking at an expected 13.5 X
96 KIA=1,296 KIA. So either the British sector is not as quiet as it’s made out to be or US casualties are statistically low considering that this is where the insurgency is supposed to be raging.

AT least part of the statistical disparity can be chalked to the fortunes of war (that is, plain bad luck) but I think part may also be attributed to the superior force-protection measures taken by US forces.

Update: Ayatollah al-Sistani’s office has issued a denial that he will issue a fatwa endorsing the proposed constitution.

Today’s “yep” is awarded to Cox and Forkum. And this essay by a Marine in Iraq (not my son) speaks volumes as well.

Let there be no mistake: we are winning here. Morale is outstanding and we are successfully taking the fight to the enemy. You will see a successful referendum in less than 3 weeks and a successfull election in less than 3 months. I see the positive resuts of our actions everyday. The MSM ignores or denigrates almost every piece of positive news, exaggerates every negative and makes the enemy and his actions out to be more than they are.

See also Good News From the Front, which Strategy Page describes thus:

This site is being supported by a variety of blogs (including Iraq the Model) and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

The site is covering the “good news” in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as a means of partially countering the “police blotter” style of reporting that usually dominates coverage of the war in both countries. This is comprehensive, covering the society, the economy, reconstruction, humanitarian aid, security, and the coalition forces. This has included, among other projects, a radio network in Afghanistan, updates on opinion polls from Iraq, and the start of construction work for eight new bridges in Iraq.

My MDiv. alma mater, Vanderbilt, has perpetually been a cellar dweller in football since, I don’t know, the beginning of the Iron Age. This year they attained 3-0 for the first time since 1984. As I type, Vandy is in the fourth game leading the University of Richmond 31-13 at the opening of the fourth quarter.

It seems likely that Vandy will proceed to 4-0, also not done since 1984. To understand the significance of the long-suffering Vanderbilt corps of alumni, students, faculty and staff, that would double the team’s win number for all of last season and for several of the prior years. I’m trying to remember a year of the last 10 (since I’ve lived here) that VU won more than three games per season and not having any luck.

In truth, Vandy’s schedule so far has hardly been against first-rank opponents. They opened against Wake Forest, then met Arkansas. That game was an upset, though, and both were road victories, the first for Vanderbilt since Andrew Jackson was a corporal. Then last week the Commodores (oft scornfully pronounced Com-MODE-dores) met Ole Miss at home and won.

Next week the schedule toughens a bit when they play Middle Tenn. State’s Blue Raiders at home, a team only a few years in Division 1A but which has never lost to Vandy. The next two games will be grinders: LSU and Georgia, both home games for the ‘Dores but against very hard teams. They then have an excellent chance of beating South Carolina but then travel to The Swamp in Gainseville where they will drown.

Finally, they have a good chance of beating Kentucky and will end the season by going to Knoxville to lose to the University of Tennessee.

So the plagued Commodores have a realistic, though not certain, chance of ending the season 7-5. Will that gain them a bowl bid? There are so many bowls now that any school ending 6-6 or better has a chance for an invitation. When was the last time Vandy went to a bowl? I’m not sure, but I think it was about the time Julius C. returned from conquering Gaul.

Update: Final: Vanderbilt 37, Richmond 13

Sorry for the light posting since eyesterday morning. Other matters have entirly dominated my time and attention. Probably no posts until Sunday late afternoon. Thank you for reading, as always!

Almost three-fourths of oil production in the Gulf of Mexico is shut down because of Hurricane Rita. As news anchors and talking heads have said endlessly, the Texas Gulf coast supplies an enormous amout of the country’s entire refining capacity which is seriously threatened by Rita’s flooding, winds and rainfall - more than 27 percent of refining capacity lies within Rita’s potential pathways.

So, says news reports, the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline could well rise, and rapidly, to $5. Today almost every gas station I passed was selling at $2.79; my wife saw 93 occtane selling for $2.91 - and that station was packed, said she. (During Katrina’s price rise I never paid more than $2.99 through judicious timing, even though regular around here spiked almost everywhere to $3.29 or more.)

So, having put new shoes on my car this morning, where while waiting I read the 9-05 edition of “Car and Driver,” I thought it timely to call you attention to two op-eds in the mag, one from this month and one from October.

First, September’s piece by Brock Yates on whether hybrid drivetrains are a panacea. Short answer: no. Walking through the economic realities of hybrids, Yates concludes,

Until hybrids become economically feasible in terms of cost, reliability, and valid fuel savings and make real sense regarding performance and disposability, we’re going to be driving conventional internal-combustion-powered vehicles—either gas or diesel —until rogue asteroids clean us all out.

There is also the unaddressed environmental issue. Hbrid batteries “are in fact self-contained toxic waste dumps” for which there is no regimen for disposal in large quantities, say the millions per year that true mass consumption would yield. Furthermore, says Yates, “a number of EMT and fire crews have announced that they will refuse to rescue victims trapped in such vehicles, openly fearing electrocution or fatal acid burns.”

But what about hydrogen cars? They would burn hydrogen and oxygen and emit water. How cool would that be, eh? But writer Patrick Bedard says that if by a trick of science autos had been invented using hydrogen-oxygen motors, so that everyone was driving them now,

… President’s FreedomCAR initiative would be anteing up its $1.8 billion to invent the gasoline engine. Freeing us from hydrogen would be “the moral equivalent of war,” to use the words of a long-past energy-crisis president. Gasoline would be the miracle fuel. It would save money by the Fort Knoxful. It would save energy by the Saudi Arabiaful.

The reason is that the amount of energy required to produce a kilogram of hydrogen is simply enormous, many multiples more than the energy recovered by using the hydrogen as a fuel. Where would all that energy come from?

Virtually all the hydrogen produced today, about 50 million tons worldwide, comes from natural gas. The process, called “steam reforming,” is only about 30 percent efficient, much less, he [Donald Anthrop, Ph.D., professor emeritus of environmental studies at San Jose State University] says, “than if the natural gas were simply burned” in the generating plant.

Producing enough hydrogen to replace gasoline by reforming natural gas would increase our [natural] gas consumption by 66 percent over 2002’s usage. And don’t forget the carbon emissions.

Electrolysis to produce the element carries its own toll so that the energy required to produce a kilo of hydrogen for an auto’s use is several multiple of the energy a hydrogen kilo yields in the motor.

Starting with 140.8 kilowatt-hours of energy from coal [to generate electricity for electrolysis] gives you 17.4 kilowatt-hours of electrical power from the fuel cell to propel the car, or an energy efficiency of 12 percent.

Hydrogen as an auto fuel turns out to be terribly inefficient.

Presumably, BMW knows all of this, yet it has been thumping the tub for hydrogen since the 1970s. Along with hundreds of other invitees, I attended BMW’s hydrogen hootenanny at Paramount Pictures in 2001. Mostly, it amounted to a day of corporate preening before California’s greenies. Still, BMW is famously brave in confronting technology. Does it have a plan? I summed up the science of this column, in writing, and passed it up through BMW’s official channels, along with the obvious question: Where will the necessary quads and quads of energy come from for hydrogen cars? That was nearly two years ago. BMW has not answered.

No answer, of course, is the anwer.

Like it or not, we’re stuck with internal-combustion engines for a long time to come.