Blogito, Ergo Sum - 11 April 2008

As the Iraqi and American officers huddled, the Iraqi lieutenant said some of his soldiers had been receiving threatening calls on their cellphones from members of the Madhi Army warning them to leave. The Iraqi lieutenant could not say how the Mahdi Army obtained their phone numbers, but some Iraqi soldiers who participated in the Basra fighting deserted after their families were threatened.

As the discussions continued, one stocky Iraqi soldier stepped forward and announced that he was not afraid of the fighters from Jaysh al-Madhi —or JAM as it is called by American military — regardless of the threats.

“In case I see a bad guy I will not arrest him,” the Iraqi soldier said through an American military interpreter. “I will kill him immediately to get revenge for my guys who were lost.”

“That is absolutely understandable,” Lieutenant Bowen responded. “If they have a weapon and if you ID them as a JAM member, eliminate the threat.”

The militias have their own unique way of signaling the presence of the foes. The Americans say the militias have been using trained pigeons to signal the presence of American and Iraqi troops. The Iraqis wanted to know if they could fire on the pigeon keepers as American troops have done during the bitter fighting here.

As long as the Iraqis determined that the flocks of birds were not a coincidence, the Americans advised, the pigeon keepers were fair game.

No...maybe not. We're still worrying about playing "fair" while fighting people who threaten to kill families in their own homes.

The biggest problem with the Iraqi Army, our troops say, is a lack of experience at the platoon sergeant and corporal level. Sadr City is busy providing that experience right now.

You can say what you want about the war in Korea, but if it had not come along when it did, our peacetime military was in woeful shape and falling apart rapidly. If the Communists had only laid low for a decade, they would have walked all over us. Korea was a valuable learning experience on several levels.

Sadr City may be doing the same thing for the Iraqi Army. If Iran and al-Sadr had only kept calm until the Democrats could get into office and start withdrawing troops, they could have walked in afterwards.

Remember the lesson of Vietnam, because that's exactly what the North Vietnamese did, except for the difference that it was Nixon who withdrew the troops over a five-year period that people have somehow managed to forget, as well.

North Vietnam signed a peace agreement and then laid low while the rest of the Americans went home. A bit more than two years later, they walked into Seoul and took over.

How badly would you like to see a video of Barack in the audience at one of those services? If a video shows him standing and waving his hands and shouting "yeah!" at the wrong moment, that could cook his goose well and proper. You can bet that Hillary doesn't have one or she'd have already used it, but McCain would be holding off, of course, so we don't know in that case.

The blogs are abuzz with talk of Obama apparently paving the way to blow off public financing in the general. Says Atlantic's Marc Ambinder:

"Why would Barack Obama break what John McCain considers an iron-clad promise to participate in the public financing system?

"First, Obama disputes the premise that he promised to take public money . . .

I hereby fearlessly predict that the future is going to see Obama disputing more and more things that others think he promised them.

Remember when he said that words didn't really matter? What did you think that he meant? Uh huh.

Whether words matter, or not, or whether they can be believed, depends a lot on who is uttering them.

Citing findings that this group worries that Hillary or Obama will be too reluctant to use military force, Chait says: "Iraq may not be popular, but the general perception (which is not the same thing as reality) that they're willing to fight the bad guys remains a key positive for the GOP brand. Am I saying the Democrats need to try to mimic Republican positions in order to win? Not at all. A creative approach is needed, and Obama's combination of dovishness on iraq and hawkishness on al Qaeda in Pakistan strikes me as probably the best approach.

The only thing is that people who actually do any thinking about the Middle East, and this probably includes Obama at least in this instance, know that he'll never be faced with any necessity to actually do anything in Pakistan.

Pakistan is ostensibly a U.S. ally, but our man Musharraf is now diminished and nearly useless, and the rest of the government doesn't plan on helping us in Pakistan one bit. So will Obama unilaterally invade, like he once said he would? Do you remember that?

Being dovish on Iraq and hawkish on Pakistan means you'll never have to fight anyone, in actual practice. Only talk. Let me amend that: only meaningless talk, because some talk really does matter, as we see:

McCain is attempting an unorthodox move, and John Dickerson decodes it in Slate:

"The McCain tour is not aimed at winning a host of black votes. Nor is it primarily about the next obvious play: showing independents that he cares about minorities and the underprivileged, a traditional bank shot candidates take in order to make themselves appealing to moderate voters. The tour, which will include lots of freewheeling town halls, is more like performance art, an attempt to show off authenticity and the unfiltered McCain. 'People can come in and do what they want,' says McCain's top adviser, Mark Salter. 'They can praise, chastise, and argue with him. This isn't just his style. It's a part of his message.'

"McCain's strategists are mapping the tour--and his campaign--on the theory that even if voters disagree with McCain, they come away with a favorable gut-level sense of his character when they get to see him up close."

I think this is what happens in McCain's case. I certainly don't agree with him on a number of things, but I still admire his character more than I do that of either one of the other two candidates.

The president is out of options. He is going to hand over to his successor an Iran on the verge of going nuclear. This will deeply destabilize the Middle East, threaten the moderate Arabs with Iranian hegemony and leave Israel on hair-trigger alert.

This failure can, however, be mitigated. As there will apparently be no disarming of Iran by preemption or by sanctions, we shall have to rely on deterrence to prevent the mullahs, some of whom are apocalyptic and messianic, from using nuclear weapons.

This will be even more difficult than during the Cold War, when we were dealing with rational actors.

In fact, if they are apocalyptic and messianic, and if they believe that their own destruction will result in them achieving even greater glory in paradise, they are actually rational actors as far as they are concerned.

We have to learn how to understand that simple fact: they are irrational only be OUR standards, not theirs.

During the Cold War, we were successful in preventing an attack not only on the United States but also on America's allies. We did it by extending the American nuclear umbrella -- i.e., declaring that any attack on our allies would be considered an attack on the United States.

Such a threat is never 100 percent credible. But it was credible enough. It made the Soviets think twice about attacking our European allies. It kept the peace.

We should do the same to keep nuclear peace in the Middle East. It would be infinitely less dangerous (and therefore more credible) than the Cold War deterrence because there will be no threat from Iran of the annihilation of the United States. Iran, unlike the Soviet Union, would have a relatively tiny arsenal incapable of reaching the United States.

Now this is irrational. For one thing, the missiles do not have to be fired from all the way inside Iran. Can Iranian tankers get missiles close enough to American coasts in order for them to reach at least coastal cities? Suppose Iran manages to create a "relatively tiny" arsenal of half a dozen or so nukes. One will do for the entire state of Israel, as they have already OPENLY told us. Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles on the west coast; New York, Miami and Houston on the east and Gulf coasts...that's only 7, and the United States as we know it, as a world power, would be effectively destroyed, you can count on that much.

How to create deterrence? The way John Kennedy did during the Cuban missile crisis. President Bush's greatest contribution to nuclear peace would be to issue the following declaration, adopting Kennedy's language while changing the names of the miscreants:

"It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear attack upon Israel by Iran, or originating in Iran, as an attack by Iran on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon Iran."

This should be followed with a simple explanation: "As a beacon of tolerance and as leader of the free world, the United States will not permit a second Holocaust to be perpetrated upon the Jewish people."

Ahmadinejad has to be laughing his head off at foolish old Krauthammer, because, just as was the case in the first Holocaust, the U.S. will be reduced to acting only after the fact.

As even Krauthammer notes, the threat is of a retaliatory response. Maybe he needs to look that word up in the dictionary.

The simple fact is that this idea does not work as long as the perpetrators do not fear a retaliatory strike. We think that no sane person would feel that way, but once again we are measuring THEIR sanity according to OUR standards...and they don't work, in this case.

Krauthammer's wish and hope and prayer is that there are actually rational (by our standards) people in Iran, who will wrest control from the likes of Ahmadinejad before the touches off the first rocket, but that seems to be a fact not in evidence. There were probably rational Germans in Hitler's time, too.

Nor did Americans fight WWII in order to prevent it, or even to retaliate for it. Some still deny it even happened.

Adding insult to injury, the United States, Poland and the Czech Republic, two former Soviet satellites, with no prior attempt to assuage Russia's erstwhile paranoia about encirclement, suddenly agreed to deploy an anti-missile system to counter possible Iranian nuclear missile attacks in the future. This unleashed a torrent of Russian propaganda against the "cowboy" in the White House — and a threat to retarget missiles against the West.

Arnaud seems to believe that the Russians actually ever did target its missiles elsewhere, a fact far from being in evidence and believable only by the terminally naïve.

And what kind of a threat is "don't create missile defense or else we'll make sure that you need it"? Otherwise your word will be our only defense?

Isn't "we won't target you as long as we know that we can hit you whenever we like" rather a revealing assurance?

Michael Yon gives you a little different view of Iraq than you may have seen elsewhere:

I may well have spent more time embedded with combat units in Iraq than any other journalist alive. I have seen this war – and our part in it – at its brutal worst. And I say the transformation over the last 14 months is little short of miraculous.

The change goes far beyond the statistical decline in casualties or incidents of violence. A young Iraqi translator, wounded in battle and fearing death, asked an American commander to bury his heart in America. Iraqi special forces units took to the streets to track down terrorists who killed American soldiers. The U.S. military is the most respected institution in Iraq, and many Iraqi boys dream of becoming American soldiers. Yes, young Iraqi boys know about "GoArmy.com."

As the outrages of Abu Ghraib faded in memory – and paled in comparison to al Qaeda's brutalities – and our soldiers under the Petraeus strategy got off their big bases and out of their tanks and deeper into the neighborhoods, American values began to win the war.

Iraqis came to respect American soldiers as warriors who would protect them from terror gangs. But Iraqis also discovered that these great warriors are even happier helping rebuild a clinic, school or a neighborhood. They learned that the American soldier is not only the most dangerous enemy in the world, but one of the best friends a neighborhood can have. ...

We know now that we can pull off a successful counterinsurgency in Iraq. We know that we are working with an increasingly willing citizenry. But counterinsurgency, like community policing, requires lots of boots on the ground. You can't do it from inside a jet or a tank.

Over the past 15 months, we have proved that we can win this war. We stand now at the moment of truth. Victory – and a democracy in the Arab world – is within our grasp. But it could yet slip away if our leaders remain transfixed by the war we almost lost, rather than focusing on the war we are winning today.

Terminal ignorance voluntarily self-exposed. Amazing. Again, contrast this stateside bloviators with Yon:

Some al-Qaeda combatants remain, however, and the insurgency is not totally quiescent. Meanwhile, the struggle among armed Shiite factions for power and wealth has intensified. It's a messy situation, to be sure, but there's no way to call it a war anymore. Our presence in Iraq is an occupation, pure and simple. As in any occupation, the "enemy" consists of people who don't want the occupying troops in their country -- and also people who do want the occupying troops in their country, as long as they see some political advantage in having those troops there to attack.

It doesn't occur to Robinson that the people who do happen to want us there, protecting their neighborhoods from attack, consist of those supporting the democratically-elected Iraqi government, and the armed militias of al-Sadr represent nothing short of criminals more like the Mafia than anything else.

What he cannot seem to see is that what he is describing is a lot like drug dealers who have taken over a neighborhood and want the cops out, since they represent the enemy occupiers as far as the drug dealers are concerned.

Of course, if you want to argue that Americans have no business playing the cop role in Iraq then you'd have a valid argument on your side, but let's not mischaracterize the role the Americans are playing in Iraq.

What actually happened, though, was that Sunni tribal leaders, many of whom were participants in the anti-American insurgency, decided they had had enough of the al-Qaeda fighters' Taliban-like ways -- and also saw that they were in danger of being marginalized by the Shiite majority. This so-called Awakening began before Bush's troop escalation, which was artfully labeled a "surge." It's not going out on a limb to predict that the Awakening will last precisely as long as the Awakened believe it is in their interest.

I had to smile at the notion that poor black people in Robinson's own 'hood are happy acting against things they believe are in their interest, or, indeed, that anyone does, anywhere. It's unclear what Robinson believes motivates ordinary people, I guess...clearly a liberal journalist like himself apparently acts contrary to his own best interests on a regular basis. This column would appear to be evidence of that.

But although Robinson manages to detect the fact that the Sunni acted against their fellow Sunni al-Qaeda because they'd had enough of "Taliban-like" ways, he cannot see the same thing taking place when the peaceful Shia majority take the same action against the al-Sadr Shia Militias under at least partial control by Iran, not Iraq.

Oh no, he reassures us, this is merely a "struggle among armed Shiite factions for power and wealth".

Thank God he's a prominent pundit and never has to look back on what foolishness he writes with anything resembling self-examination.

Hillary is being "swiftboated"!

She claimed that she came under sniper fire when she visited in Bosnia in 1996, but was contradicted by videotape showing her sauntering off the plane and stopping on the tarmac to listen to a little girl read her a poem.

Similarly, John Kerry's claim to heroism in Vietnam was contradicted by 264 Swift Boat Veterans who served with him. His claim to having been on a secret mission to Cambodia for President Nixon on Christmas 1968 was contradicted not only by all of his commanders -- who said he would have been court-martialed if he had gone anywhere near Cambodia -- but also the simple fact that Nixon wasn't president on Christmas 1968.

In Hillary's defense, she probably deserves a Purple Heart about as much as Kerry did for his service in Vietnam.