The Dahr Jamail/IVAW Connection: Journalistic Collusion

Expect more on this shortly. For now, though....

Dahr Jamail is described as an unembedded independent reporter. He and IVAW are, shall we say, entwined.

Jamail wrote an artcle published last October 26 by Asia Times entitled:

US soldiers shy from battle in Iraq

The article quotes four sources. Two of them, Phil Aliff and Geoff Millard, are identified in the article as members of IVAW. Perhaps to provide journalistic balance, Jamail’s other two sources, Eli Wright and Nate Lewis, are not identified as IVAW members.

But Eli Wright and Nate Lewis are also IVAW members.

Four out of four sources. Clean sweep! Tens of thousands of National Guard and Army troops stationed at Fort Drum, where the story was written, and all four sources are members of a group with only several hundred members in the whole country. This is honest journalism!

Stephen Kinzer, former NY Times foreign desk chief says of Jamail’s reporting "International Journalism at its best".

Figures!

Hat tip to Chickenhawk Express and BLACKFIVE.

Like I said, stand by for more on the Dahr Jamail and IVAW connection.

Winter Soldier 2008: A Brawl in Left Field?

There may already be movement afoot to damage or destroy the propaganda rewards the IVAW is hoping to garner next March at their WSI. Efforts are being organized that may well put the entire operation in a bad light, media-wise. And it is all about the media!

Who is doing it? The Swift Vet and POWs for Truth? Gathering of Eagles? Dick Cheney and Haliburton? FOX News?

Nope! It’s their allies. IVAW has this request up at Veterans For Peace and it is making the rounds, including at Daily Kos:

IVAW Requests no National Mass Mobilizations or DC Based Actions during Winter Soldier

In order to give our veterans the necessary space and attention we deserve to tell our stories, we are requesting that, during Winter Soldier, March 13-16, the larger anti-war movement calls no national mobilizations and that there are no local protests or civil disobedience actions in Washington DC. IVAW will not endorse any mass mobilizations or DC-based actions that conflict with Winter Soldier. We feel that large-scale activities will compete with Winter Soldier and dilute the voices of those testifying.

However, it also appears there are some others who intend to crash the party and engage in civil disobedience, in support of the WSI. This was posted on Democrats.com, who bill themselves as the “Aggressive Progressives”:

Democrats.com
Join us on Saturday, March 15th for a massive demonstration in Washington, D.C....This gathering will support the Iraq Veterans Against The War Winter Soldier Testimonial....Join us on Wednesday, March 19th, the anniversary of the invasion, for massive civil disobedience in Washington, D.C., and at the local level all around the United States...
Organizations participating are listed below (Initial list),

In Solidarity for Peace and Justice,

Gold Star Families for Peace
Camp Casey Peace Institute
ANSWER Coalition
CODEPINK Women For Peace
AfterDowningStreet.org
Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation
Common Ground Collective New Orleans
Hip Hop Caucus
World Can’t Wait – Drive Out The Bush Regime!
ImpeachBush.org
Cindy Sheehan and Cindy for Congress
National Council of Arab Americans
Grassroots America
Democracy Rising
Voters for Peace

Glad Cindy will be involved. Hard to forget how miffed Cindy was about the media coverage Hurricane Rita was getting in September ’05 when it could and should have been focusing on, well...her !

There has to be some behind the scenes bickering going on right now. Maybe some of it will spill out to the public.

Swiftboating History

A series of posts below are a follow-up to the article Swiftboating History at American Thinker. If you haven’t done so, I suggest reading that article before proceeding for clarity’s sake.

Read Bruce Kesler's (The Democracy Project) review.

Comments by Tom Maguire of JustOneMinute.

To purchase Scott Swett’s and Tim Ziegler’s To Set the Record Straight go here.

Links and Background:

WinterSoldier.com (Scott Swett)

SwiftVets and POWs for Truth

Democracy Project (Bruce Kesler)

Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History by B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley

Stolen Honor (the documentary by Carlton Sherwood that the left tried to stop with lawsuits)

Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry by John O’Neill and Jerome Corsi

Slandering an Entire Generation of Warriors and The "Troubled Vet" Returns, articles by Mackubin T. Owens

Investigate the Winter Soldier Investigation (American Thinker)

IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War)*
*The organization's name "Iraq Veterans Against the War" does not mean that actual military service in Iraq is required for membership...and of course no one might be misled to think otherwise by the name "Iraq Veterans..."!

VVAW (Vietnam Veterans Against the War)

This & That:

John Kerry's apology for claiming in 1971 that 200,000 Vietnamese per year were being "murdered by the United States of America" - NOT! (a Kerry spokesman says the Senator "used a word he deems inappropriate")

Veterans For Peace sponsors IVAW and by that gives the latter its 501(c)3 tax exempt status as a charity. That group and IVAW make this appeal to the broad anti-war movement:

"In order to give our veterans the necessary space and attention we deserve to tell our stories, we are requesting that, during Winter Soldier, March 13-16, the larger anti-war movement calls no national mobilizations and that there are no local protests or civil disobedience actions in Washington DC. IVAW will not endorse any mass mobilizations or DC-based actions that conflict with Winter Soldier. We feel that large-scale activities will compete with Winter Soldier and dilute the voices of those testifying."

Winter Soldier 2008: The IVAW Questionnaire soliciting...

...WSI testimony.

That questionnaire can be found here. This document tells us some things about IVAW. For a start, they apparently don’t have anyone on board with a lick of editorial competency. Their list of questions to which a respondent is to reply with a “Yes” or a “No” begins with:

Did you ever participate in or observe (this includes the monitoring of communications) any of the following:

Among the specific categories that follow are these, are remember, the only answer is either a “Yes” or a “No”:
24. What was the general attitude of your unit towards civilians?
Yes
No

25. How prevalent was the use of racist or derogatory terminology towards civilians?
Yes
No

Uh, “yes”, er, I mean “no”…wait, “yes”…oh…

Some of those “Yes” or “No” questions are seeking to find the really bad stuff! As in:

Did you ever participate in or observe… 19. The use, both prescribed and non-prescribed, of anti-depressants, uppers, or other medications?
Yes
No
21. The use of alcohol?
Yes
No
27. Did you ever witness or observe any civilian contractors engaging in any of the activity mentioned above…
Yes
No

Soldiers and contractors having a few beers or using medications from Tylenol to allergy relief over-the-counter medicines qualifies as a “Yes”! The questionnaire doesn’t ask specifically if the respondent witnessed or observed only our side doing these things, but it is strongly implied and some questions are specific to what can be called "our side". There are a lot of those questions that could properly be asked as:

Did you ever observe any of the following done by AQI or any of the various Sunni or Shia insurgents groups:

1. The killing or wounding of a civilian or unarmed combatant?
2. Stealing from civilians/theft of non-military property?
3. Physically abusive conduct towards civilians or local military/police?
4. Excessively aggressive or reckless driving that needlessly endangered civilians?
5. Killing of medical personnel or destroying of medical equipment and facilities?
6. Torture, abuse, or humiliation of detainees or prisoners?
8. A house raid where life was needlessly disrupted and/or property was needlessly destroyed?
11. Sexual assault, harassment, and/or rape of local civilians (both male and female)?
15. Engagement of a target that recklessly endangered civilians?
16. The destruction of civilian infrastructure (to include bridges, irrigation or water purification equipment, hospitals, power plants, generators, etc.)?
18. The mutilation of bodies?

But of course, as IVAW says, they can only speak to the practices and policies of our government…so if veterans actually witnessed those kinds of things, they should just shut up about it! It doesn’t count.

Winter Soldier 2008: Steve Pitkin as Precedent?

Another IVAW question has this:

34. Will you speak to an IVAW verifier to help recall and confirm your testimony?

In the American Thinker article I alluded to IVAW possibly “coaching” potential “witnesses”. Supposed assisting with memory recall can be useful for doing just that. During the original WSI in 1971, John Kerry and other VVAW leaders “assisted” young Steve Pitkin in recalling atrocities…that he neither witnessed nor participated in and frankly never happened. Pitkin is the only witness from that WSI to have signed an affidavit.

Winter Soldier 2008: Jesse MacBeth

I’ve been somewhat inaccurate in my view of the IVAW and Jesse MacBeth situation. I’ve written that MacBeth was a member of IVAW for six months, during which period he participated in and spoke at IVAW events. When MacBeth’s video was released on the Web, he and his tales were spotted as “phony” by milbloggers like Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette in less time that it took me to type “When MacBeth’s video was released on the Web…”. I faulted IVAW for not spotting Macbeth as a fraud, but I was wrong. By IVAW standards, Jesse MacBeth was not and is not a fraud in the light of IVAW membership criteria.

The stories MacBeth told were frauds and phonies, and IVAW does not support or endorse those. But even now, after his lying was exposed and it was found that he was never in Iraq and even with his conviction for trying to defraud the government out of veteran’s benefits he was not qualified to receive, MacBeth is still entitled to be a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. IVAW’s site has this about membership:

Membership Eligibility: 1. Members have served in the United States Military since September 11, 2001. All recent veterans and active duty servicemen and women from all branches of military service, National Guard members, and reservists are welcome to join our ranks. Please provide verification of service...

That’s it. There is no number 2. MacBeth did indeed serve in the military since September 11, 2001, or as it was concisely presented at the ABCNews blog:

"He was in the Army for 40 days before he was kicked out of boot camp for being unfit," said U.S. Attorney Jeffrey C. Sullivan. "He was never in Iraq."

He wasn’t and isn’t a member by fraud, as he has attained to their membership criteria! I found it somewhat surprising that a group that calls itself Iraq Veterans Against the War does not require its member to actually be Iraq Veterans, but probably shouldn’t have. MacBeth did indeed tamper with his DD214 discharge, falsifying it to obtain benefits, but the point is he actually had one! It showed service after September 11, 2001. That’s it. He was and can still be a legit member of IVAW. The group does take that vetting seriously. The IVAW Membership Form states:

Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) is a group of veterans and active duty servicemen and women who have served since September 11th, 2001.

Nothing about actually serving in Iraq. The form continues to question 13:

13. Please attach proof of your military service with at least one of the following:
A copy of DD form 214 (if not available please explain)
A copy of military Photo identification
A copy of your Unit Move Order indicating service dates and locations
A copy of medal, award, or certificate of recognition
A copy of paperwork from Veterans Administration
Other

That is followed by question 14:

14. T-Shirt Size (circle one) Small / Medium / Large / Extra Large / 2XL

Winter Soldier 2008: What Would (Will) Kerry Do?

In 1971, the original VVAW WSI was handed a huge degree of credibility by the U.S. Senate. Senator Mark O. Hatfield, an anti-war Republican, moved to have the entire WSI testimony read into the Congressional Record. Shortly before American Thinker published my October 9 article on WSI, I sent a letter to Hatfield, now teaching in Oregon. I asked if there was any report or reports made to or hearings held in Congress as a follow-up to the request he made that the WSI testimony be admitted to the Congressional Record and that the proper authorites investigate and report back on the charges made at WSI. I've received no answer, and the CR shows no such report or hearings.

Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator J. William Fulbright, called for the hearings that made Kerry nationally known and launched his political career.

It is reasonable to assume that the backers of the new WSI will try to have something similar happen, and who in the U.S. Senate would they turn to? Yup, Kerry!

I find it difficult to use the word “honor” here, but in a sense Kerry would be honor-bound to do for this anti-war veteran group what his predecessors did for him and the anti-war veteran group that he was a part of. That nationally televised testimony by Kerry is what launched his political career. I fervently hope that is the case, just as I hope that this new WSI makes a temendous media splash!

In his review and comments about To Set The Record Straight, Tom Maguire of JustOneMinute writes:

“I daresay I followed the Swifties quite closely…but I have found all sorts of interesting new details about Kerry's activities in Vietnam and after.”

I second that. It has been well established that young Kerry was self-promoting and wanted to follow in the footsteps of his idol, John F. Kennedy. His volunteering for Swift Boat duty (before the Swifts were engaged in combat operations) was seemingly a way to identify with and be identified with the young JFK commanding a PT boat in WWII. Kerry carried his typewriter around with him in Vietnam and would somewhat eagerly write up the reports that other Swift Boat officers were somewhat loath to do. The Swift boats operated in multiple boat groups, but a single report, including an after action report, would suffice for an incident in which more than one boat and crew were involved. That is what has led to the still pretty reasonable suspicion that the after action reports that painted Kerry in such a heroic light in more than one incident were actually written by Kerry in the first place, and were not seen at the time by the other Swift boat commanders involved. That point has never seemed to penetrate the MSM mind-lock, and so it is often repeated that 'Navy records support Kerry's claims!'.

Many Vietnam vets firmly believe that Kerry climbed the political ladder ontheir backs, using them and abusing their reputations to advance himself within the left of the Democratic Party. Swett and Ziegler surprised me when they wrote that many members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War felt the exact same way about Kerry, believing that he was using them and VVAW to promote himself!

Gosh! That's probably too personal a low blow to throw at a man fortunate enough to fall in love with and marry two women, both of whom were rich.

MSM Credibility (Or Lack Of) Again!

Yes, major established media beats the blogosphere because of all that fact checking and editing! And as though there are not examples enough already....

Michael Hirsh is a senior Newsweek editor. He wrote this. Sigh!

He is a senior editor for goshsakes! He wrote that Al Gore is the "winner of the largest popular-vote total in U.S. presidential history."

Wrong by a factor of three!

In 2000, Gore's popular vote total was 50,999,897.

Reagan's 1984 popular vote total was 54,455,472.

Both Bush's and Kerry's 2004 popular vote counts also beat Gore's, at 62,028,285 and 59,028,109 respectively.

I'd venture that even going through his own mag's archive would have given him a clue.

Sheesh! Maybe some junior editor can fact check the senior editor!

Reflections on Iraq

Elites and Grunts

How did Scott Thomas Beauchamp land the position of "Baghdad Diarist" for TNR in the first place? That his wife, Elspeth Reeve, was an employee certainly provided an "in" to come to the attention of decision-makers, but it doesn’t account for the actual decision to publish him. The TNR leadership had to make that decision based on what they believed served TNR’s interests, and those are no doubt varied. Would Beauchamp’s work appeal to the readership, contribute to the themes and ideas that the editors of that self described "Journal of the Arts and Politics" thought worthwhile, and provide TNR the credibility of having "boots on the ground" in the war? All of the above and more?

But why Beauchamp? He got involved in writing in college, and could turn a phrase passably well, but his military experience and acumen was, to say the least, limited. Why not a Michael Yon, a Matt Sanchez, a Bill Roggio, a Bill Ardolino a JD Johannes, or a Michael Totten, any one of whom had more writing and combat experience than STB? If an active duty soldier, why not one with more combat experience?

Beauchamp was a safe bet for TNR in this sense: he wouldn’t challenge the elite, namely Foer et al. Reading all three of Beauchamp’s pieces, there is no serious opinion, idea or analysis there. The Scott Thomas in his pieces is not in Iraq for any purpose other than that he was sent by the Army, and he observes and records disquieting, gloomy and personal incidents but provides no context to how they or anything might apply to tactics, strategy, policy or politics. In other words, he leaves the big stuff to the elites at the office, whereas a Yon, Totten or Roggio just might take personal observations and weave them into the bigger picture to the discomfort of some at TNR. TNR wanted a military Stepin Fetchit to both confirm their intellectual superiority over those military types and one who would stay away from their province, the "what it all means". In pursuit of a writing career, Beauchamp was willing to play the role his masters wanted.

There is no better theme for that TNR elitist purpose than the "Shock Troops" one of the dehumanizing effect of war. If a few months in a war could so "dehumanize" STB and his fellow soldiers that they would cruelly and sexually mock a disfigured woman within her hearing, most certainly the judgement of combat veterans and millbloggers is at least potentially questionable. The elites, though, have stayed above it all.

Recruiting Monsters

While the dehumanizing theme has been popular in some circles, very little attention has been paid to the Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) strategy of recruiting the already inhuman to join their holy jihad.

One of the themes that pops up time to time is that of our military lowering its standards for recruitment, and don’t you know that explains why we have so many misfits in uniform and can’t win a hearts and minds war! By October of 2004, when critics of the war in this country were decrying our military’s lowered recruiting standards, AQI had been using the internet to disseminate a slew of beheading videos (e.g., Nick Berg, Kim Sun-il, Paul Marshall Johnson, Eugene Armstrong, Jack Hensley, Kenneth John Bigley, etc.) for months, meant to intimidate us and our allies but also to recruit just the type of holy warrior AQI wanted. AQI targeted sociopaths, psychopaths, sadists and the violently criminal, in Iraq and from the broader Middle Eastern ummah, offering to them a veneer of holy respectability for performing despicable deeds. Think for one moment of what kind of person is drawn to the idea of slowing sawing off the head of a bound and screaming captive!

The Abu Ghraib scandal broke into the mainstream media in April 2004, about the same time that the months of beheading videos started worldwide distribution via the internet. While we were deluged for months with images of Lynndie England and abused naked inmates at Abu Ghraib, the media spared us from the grisly and horrifying beheading videos. There was, however, never an Army or Marine recruiting commercial where potential enlistees were offered top notch training, money towards college and the opportunity to abuse naked prisoners! AQI was recruiting not just religious fanatics and deluded suicide bombers, but human monsters.

When the Sunnis turned against AQI beginning in al-Anbar, it was and continues to be explained as the Sunni's reaction to AQI’s brutality toward them. The question is not asked: what made AQI engage in that potentially self-defeating brutality against the only demographic in Iraq from which they could have received cooperation and/or support?

I think the answer starts in late 2005. The Sunnis largely sat out the election early that year. By the election at the end of that year, though, they had a change of heart. If this democratic Iraq stood, they could possibly lose out totally. As such, at the urging of their leaders and even clerics, the Sunnis voted. At the same time, AQI’s al-Zarqawi weighed in on the elections with pure takfirist ideology:

"We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology. Anyone who tries to help set up this system is part of it."

Zarqawi went on to call all Iraqis who vote in the election "infidels." To AQI, the Sunnis needed some takfirist disciplining, and when coupled with their HR (Human Resources), or more appropriately IR (Inhuman Resources) recruitment policies, AQI unleashed itself on their only possible allies again and again.

The Civil War That Wasn’t

Has anyone else noticed that as the numbers of coalition and civilians deaths fall so too has the use of the phrase "civil war"? That Iraq was in the midst of a civil war was something like received wisdom for the Democrats seemingly only weeks ago. Matt Lauer at MSNBC seemed to aspire to be for Iraq what Walter Cronkite was for Vietnam when a year ago he said:

"For months the White House rejected claims that the situation in Iraq has deteriorated into civil war. For the most part news organizations like NBC hesitated to characterize it as such. After careful consideration, NBC News has decided the change in terminology is warranted and what is going on in Iraq can now be characteritized as civil war."

AQI did try to start something like a civil war, but moreso like a regional conflagration with the bombing of the Shia Golden Mosque in Samarra in February of 2006. As much as two years before that al-Zarqawi wrote of his passionate hatred of the Shia and the idea of attacking them without mercy so as to cause the Shia to seek retribution against the Sunni. He hoped that if that happened, the majority Sunnis of the Middle East would be roused to join the fight. The civil war ploy worked in the collective mind of the Democratic Party but not with the great majority of Iraqis. It did, however, unleash a horrific level of sectarian violence that took the lives of almost 3,400 Iraqis during the Ramadan month of September in 2006 alone.

Yet in all the discussions during 2006 and early 2007 of which factors did and which did not qualify what was happening as a civil war, one was glaringly missing: reports of pitched gun battles or fights of any kind between the armed Sunni and Shia groups. All sides were bombing Mosques and markets, shooting, torturing, torching and beheading civilians individually or in large groups. Yet the opposing sides were not engaging each other’s armed forces. It may not have begun that way, but the sectarian violence ended up becoming a protection racket operated by Middle Eastern incarnations of The Sopranos on crank. All the sides could advantageously slaughter the unarmed "others", and then extort money or obedience from those they would presumably protect from the inevitable reprisals. Of course, they wouldn’t protect anyone, because continuous murder and mayhem kept the scheme operating. The Iraqis caught on.

Hiding under the terror-insurgency there has been and still is a whole lot of just plain opportunistic criminality. Whenever six or sixteen bodies are found overnight in Baghdad and its environs, we add it to the war’s death toll. Some of it, even a whole lot of it, is crime, not war.

From the Bottom Up

Reuters provides a daily roundup of events in Iraq, and had this for October 6:

"SAMARRA - Iraqi army, police and local groups working with U.S. forces known as "concerned citizens" killed eight gunmen, detained 37 and liberated 27 truck drivers held hostage during an operation on Thursday southwest of Samarra, 100 km (62 miles) north of Baghdad. Four members of the Iraqi security forces and four concerned citizens were killed, U.S. military said."

That seemed a bit out of the ordinary, and so I looked for more, and found this from the Multi-National Division - North PAO (Public Affairs Office):

"4th Iraqi Army Division accomplishes independent assault

TIKRIT, Iraq – Iraqi Security Forces and Concerned Local Citizens, in response to local citizens’ tips, conducted a unilateral operation 15 miles southwest of Samarra in the early morning of Oct. 4. Several terrorists were killed, 27 hostages were rescued, and a sizable cache of weapons and equipment were discovered during the operation.

Acting on intelligence tips received from CLCs in western Salah ad Din province, elements of the 4th Iraqi Army, along with Iraqi Police from the 2nd Emergency Response Unit, uncovered 27 varied weapon systems, including DSHKA heavy machine guns, in addition to rescuing 27 truck drivers and destroying eight enemy cargo trucks.

While conducting site exploitation, IA Soldiers were engaged by dozens of enemy fighters with small-arms fire. The gunfight resulted in eight terrorists killed, including two potential senior leaders. Additionally, 37 suspected terrorists were detained."

That reads like the Northfield, Minnesota Bank Robbery during which the James-Younger gang exited the bank they robbed to find something like the entire community of Norwegian farmers blasting away at the gang with their hunting rifles and shotguns.

No American forces were involved in that gunfight, and the Iraqis say it was Al Qaeda. Reading the Reuters round-up alone, the bad guys were just unidentified gunmen, and it wasn’t clear that our troops took no part in the fight. Odd, I can’t find where any other media picked up that story in any detail. Okay, it’s not odd at all.

The Longest Morning

Nothing, absolutely nothing you will do for the next several minutes is more important than reading "The Longest Morning".

Gore's Inconvenient 911 Truth

Nobel laureate Al Gore, we are to believe, has the technical acumen analyze complex data, assess risks, and identify the right countermeasures. He must be able to critically sift through mountains of data, distinguish between reliable and unreliable climate models, and astutely analyze volumes of esoteric scientific reports and studies to determine with something like crystal clarity what will most assuredly happen in the future. On an ongoing basis, as new data comes in.

Read the rest at American Thinker.

The Global Warming......War?

Yup, the Goreacle has won the Nobel Peace Prize, for negotiating the peace between the Artic Polar Bear Liberation Front and the......what the heck....

Take that Vaclaw Havel and Lech Walesa, who've tried for years to get the Nobel folks to give it, posthumously now, to Pope John Paul II, who had a bit of something to do with bringing down the Iron Curtain - peacefully!

Last American to win the Nobel?

Carter, 2002.

The Nobel Peace prize has devolved into something like a self esteem program consolation prize for the American left.

I'm personally overjoyed! The rumors have been floating about that if the Goracle won the Nobel that would compel him to enter the Democratic primaries, since the endorsement of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee translates into as many as seven, maybe eight votes in the USA.

If Gore runs, that's great news! Anybody care to guess how much dirt team Clinton and team Gore have on each other? Which they'll use.

Winter Soldier Investigation and a Correction

Correction: in the article 'Investigate the Winter Soldier Investigation' published today in The American Thinker, I made an error. I claimed that Al Hubbard, the executive director of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) ended his relationship with VVAW when he was exposed as having lied about his military record. Scott Swett of WinterSoldier.com has let me know that I was in error on that. Hubbard continued as executive director of VVAW for another year.

Excerpt from: Investigate the Winter Soldier Investigation:

It's being called ‘Winter Soldier Syndrome.' The phrase refers to slanders of American soldiers and Marines made by people who also make fraudulent claims about their own military experiences. Michelle Malkin writes:

"Winter Soldier Syndrome will only be cured when the costs of slandering the troops outweigh the benefits."

She is right up to a point, but it is more serious than that. It is not just the perpetrators who are causing the problem. A large and sometimes influential part of our society has been enabling and protecting these attacks on those who risk their lives to defend ours. This has been going on for almost four decades.

Winter Soldier Syndrome uses the same mechanism as racial and ethnic bigotry: tarring an entire group because of the misbehavior of a few. To understand why this is happening today, we have to understand how this came about, and why.

Continue reading at American Thinker.

The Soldier and the Sheik: Lest We Forget

Army Captain Travis Patriquin was killed by an IED during an operation near Ramadi in Iraq’s Al Anbar province on December 6, 2006. Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, a Sunni Muslim, was also killed by a bomb in Al Anbar nine months later, on September 13, 2007. The two were connected to each other in this life, and share a connection that will continue after their passing.

BLACKFIVE provides the background on Capt. Patriquin. He was a remarkable man, conversant in Pashtun, Dari, Arabic and Urdu. He was Special Ops trained and was awarded the Bronze Star with Valor device for his part in OpAnaconda in 2002, when he was attached to the 101st Airbirne in Afghanistan.

In 2006 he was in Al Anbar Province in Iraq. In 2005, the top Marine intelligence officer in Al Anbar thought the province to be all but lost to the terror-insurgency. Capt. Patriquin was one of those men with an affinity for understanding other cultures and seeing things from their point of view. He understood the dynamics of why Al Anbar was intractable.

He had made a PowerPoint presentation that has since widely used by the Army in Al Anbar. Most of us who have been in business for some years or decades understand the PowerPoint presentation to be something of a dumb-downed thing. It’s meant to be. Generally such presentation intends to highlight and drive home a few important points, facts or understandings.

Capt. Patriquin’s presentation is all at once funny, dumbed down so that a fourth grader or a “General in the 4th Infantry Division” could understand it and yet it made more tactical and strategic sense than we’ve heard from almost any politician for years.

Be absolutely sure that you view the presentation,”How to Win the War in Al Anbar”, available here in pdf, before proceeding. It’ll only take a minute or two.

There is a good chance that the sheik in the presentation is based loosely (or not so loosely) on Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, whose tribe occupies the area in and around Ramadi. Capt. Patriquin and Sheik Sattar Abu Risha worked together to turn Al Anbar around. It was their relationship that largely led to Capt. Patriquin’s realization that the Sunnis would join the police, from which organization they could protect their families, rather than the army, which could send them away.

WaPo recently reported that 30,000 tribals, overwhelmingly Sunni, have volunteered to work with the Iraqi police, army and coalition forces, and that is spreading to other areas of Iraq. Capt. Patriquin didn’t live to see what he had begun come to fruition. Sheik Sattar Abu Risha did not live to see AQI completely defeated in Al Anbar. Both men, though, gave their lives in giving others hope and a path to fulfill that hope.

Last August, in Tameen, a district in heavily Sunni Ramadi, the police station was named after and in honor of Captain Travis Patriquin.

This last month, a school in the Shia center of Iraq, Nejaf, was named after and in honor of the Sunni Sheik Sattar Abu Risha.

What is going on here? Sunnis name a place in honor of an American soldier who gave himself for Iraq, and Shias name a place for a Sunni who did the same. Does that sound like what we’ve been hearing from the Democrats? Sunnis and Shias can’t get along, so let them have their civil war! Iraqis hate us, and want us out! The presence of our troops fuels the insurgency and recruits terrorists! Brave men have put the lie to those claims.

Remember John Kerry’s statement to college students:

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

Kerry was not speaking of President Bush. He reads his own press, and well knew that it had been reported more than a year before that his college grades and those of President Bush were almost the same, with a slight edge to Bush. He meant the soldiers, and the members of the 1/34 Brigade Troops Battalian of the Minnesota National Guard serving in Iraq knew it.

Senator Schumer did all he could to besmirch and denigrate the efforts and memory of men like Captain Patriquin and Sheik Sattar Abu Risha.

Senate Democrats, wedded to the liberal notion of liberal elites making decisions for those simple folks down below, all but frothed at the mouth about this idea of improvement and solutions coming from the bottom and working up! Such is an inconceivable and threatening concept to them

Capt. Travis Patriquin and Sheik Sattar Abu Risha were better men, and smarter men, than the bunch of them. They died giving people hope and a way out of misery. Those Democrats just want a way out.

When I was a child growing up in the Bronx, NYC, I got interested in early American history. I don’t remember exactly when I put it together that all those street names were clues left to me, so that I could learn about people who had done things noteworthy to those who came before me. I would go to the public library, and look up those names, and read about them: Webster, Decatur, Marion, Bainbridge, Lafayette, Rochambeau, Hull, Perry, Sedgewick, Sherman, MacClellan, Sheridan and on and on.

That’s why people name places and things after others. So that those who come later will know that someone did something, something you are well served to know about.

In the 1949 classic John Ford movie “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”, John Wayne played the aging and about to be forced into retirement commander of a calvary company, Captain Nathan Brittles. On the day of his retirement, the old officer leaves his billet and finds his troops assembled as if on parade. They give him a present they’ve all chipped in for, a silver watch. The captain looks at it, and nods and smiles at the troopers he is about to leave. One tells him that there is a sentiment engraved on the watch. Sheepishly, Brittles puts on his spectacles that the men have never seen before and reads the words ‘To Captan Nathan Brittles...”.and his voice cracks as he reads “Lest we forget.”
To Captain Travis Patriquin and Sheik Sattar Abu Risha, whose names will be known to many thousands who will see the buildings named in their honor, and to the rest of us who should know of them – lest we forget.

Haditha Has Gone Nuclear

Well, if I thought Haditha required a full Congressional investigation before, that could turn out to be a gross understatement.

Nathaniel Helms at Save Our Marines has uncovered what may be a nuclear warhead as opposed to just a bombshell. The story is being picked up in all the right places in the blogosphere (LGF, Michelle Malkin, Clarice Feldman at American Thinker) but breath holding until the MSM latches on to this is not advised.

It appears that the incidents at Haditha may well have been "an intentional propaganda ploy planned and paid for by Al Qaeda foreign fighters". " In other words, a set-up that would intentionally draw the Marines into a fight in an area where civilians were bound to get killed.

Congressman John Murtha's office has refused comment.

Well, I don't know if they've been asked, but I am sure that'll be the responce.

The Not So Grand Inquisitor

Henry ‘Little Torquemada’ Waxman is determined to investigate corruption in Iraq! This is another sign of things going well there. If Democrats can no longer charge that the Iraqis are not bearing a fair load when the news is full, even if reluctantly, of Iraq military and police taking on the terror-insurgents (see previous post) and now Sunni tribals are gunning for Al Qaeda in Iraq, there must be something else with which to discredit an ally. I’ve thought for some time that if we pull off something that looks, walks and talks like victory in Iraq, Democrats will have to do everything in their power to discredit the Iraqi givernment on the principle that American could not have accomplished any good through military force.

No doubt there is corruption in Iraq’s government. Maybe a whole lot of it. Maybe even as much as in the U.N., if that’s possible. Or the Clinton campaign, which is probably impossible!

Iraq is engaged in a war for its survival. Members of its political class, unlike ours, have been assassinated on a regular basis and their families are targets of terrorists. A State Department spokesman said “details of anti-corruption efforts must be secret to protect investigators and Iraqi allies.” That makes sense in a place where you can get very dead very quickly.

Of course, the bottom line is that Waxman hopes that if his investigation provides enough cover for Democrats in Congress to stop aid to the corrupt Iraqi government, Iraq may yet fail. That worked before when the Democratic Congress progressively cut back on aid to South Vietnam after our troops were out of the fight. Our forces never lost while they were in South Vietnam, but Congress made sure Vietnam fell after they left.

Snapshot: Iraq, October 6

A snapshot in time of anything can't tell the whole story or firmly establish things like patterns. Yet they can give an indication of what is happening. Reuters offers a daily round-up of news from Iraq, much if not most of which doesn't get much coverage. Here is October 6:

(Reuters) - Following are security developments in Iraq at 10:00 a.m. BST on Saturday.

NEAR HAWIJA - Gunmen killed a police lieutenant and wounded a civilian when they shot at their car outside Hawija, 70 km (43 miles) southwest of Kirkuk, police said.

RIYADH - A roadside bomb targeting a police patrol wounded two policemen and one civilian in central Riyadh, 60 km (40 miles) southwest of Kirkuk, police said.

KIRKUK - A car bomb targeting a police patrol wounded four policemen and a civilian in southern Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

SAMARRA - Iraqi army, police and local groups working with U.S. forces known as "concerned citizens" killed eight gunmen, detained 37 and liberated 27 truck drivers held hostage during an operation on Thursday southwest of Samarra, 100 km (62 miles) north of Baghdad. Four members of the Iraqi security forces and four concerned citizens were killed, U.S. military said.

FALLUJA - Iraqi police killed a gunman and detained 12 others in an operation in Falluja, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad, on Friday, police said.

BAGHDAD - Four bodies were found in different districts of Baghdad on Friday, police said.

KHALIS - Iraqi and U.S. forces arrested an insurgent company commander on Friday in the town of Khalis, 80 km (50 miles) north of Baghdad, U.S. military said. Continued...

ISKANDARIYA - Beheaded body with signs of torture belonging to member of Sunni Arab tribe working with U.S. forces was found in Iskandariya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.

MUSSAYAB - Body of a child with gunshot wounds was found in Mussayab, 60 km (40 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.

MAHAWEEL - Gunmen killed an off-duty member of Iraqi special forces in Mahaweel, 75 km (40 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.

Three things come across clearly. One, the Iraqi police are deep in it, as targets and as actors. Two, the incident in Samarra is of a type that we wouldn't have read about since the invasion until fairly recently. Iraqi army, police, local civilians and U.S. forces kill eight hostage takers and capture another 37, while rescuing 27 hostages. Four uniformed and four civilian Iraqs died in the gunfight against the bad guys. Even as a snapshot, what does that say about where popular sentiment is leaning? Three, the last three incidents, at Iskandiriya, Mussayab and Mahaweel, all south of Baghdad, indicate a high intensity fight at the local level, with identified individual targets.

It is also worth noting, even if just in a one day snapshot - no attacks on coalition military forces or even the Iraqi military other than an individual assassination of an Iraqi Special Forces soldier. Where the Iraqi and coalition forces were involved in some numbers, they were the ones taking the attack to the enemy.

Suspend Phony Soldiers, Cackles, Etc...

Is the 'phony' Rush Limbaugh 'phony soldier' story meant to bail out MoveOn, or an intentional dust-up to get attention away from other 'troubling' details, or details that could be troubling to Senator Clinton. In only a few short weeks, an avalanche of news has buried any shred of credibilty the Congressional Democrats and in particular Hillary Clinton might have had on the war in Iraq, even if the same media reluctantly reporting that news won't connect the dots.

With the hat tip to Gateway Pundit, the above graph is of the decline of civilian deaths in Iraq. The death toll for last month was less than 25% of what it was last November.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says the U.N. will return to Iraq, after having closed its offices in 2003 when a bombing killed envoy Sergio Vieira and 21 others. Improved security is cited as grounds for the change.

U.S. military casualties have dropped to the lowest point in fourteen months.

In the last six months, 30,000 tribe affiliated Iraqis, mostly Sunni, have volunteered to work with the Iraqi government and U.S. forces. Many are enlisting in the Iraqi police and military. They began to do so in the thousands beginning in Anbar Province, considered all but lost a year ago, and Baghdad. Added to those already serving in the Iraqi military, border guard and police, that's roughly a quarter of a million Iraqis fighting the terror-insurgents. Where's the old Whack-A-Mole standard? When we killed a terror-insurgent, and another or a few took his place, that was Democratic proof we couldn't win. Why isn't an Iraqi force of a quarter million, despite years of slaughtering recruits and the terror-insurgents doing everything they could to prevent Iraqis from enlisting, proof that it is the terror insurgents who are losing?

Will any member of the MSM approach Senator's Reid or Clinton, and ask about supposed cooked books or Hillary's suspension of disbelief? The media are transfixed on Hillary's 'cackle', when they should be asking about what she said to General Petraeus, whose report on progress is being hugely vindicated.

Rush can and will defnd himself. Let's not fall for diversions. As to who might be behind a diversion away from the Petraeus Democratic debacle, that's not hard to surmise. It was Media Matters that began the 'phony' Rush charge, the same Media Matters that Hillary Clinton boasted to the Yearly Kos crowd that she had a hand in creating. Had tip to LGF.

The Takfir War: Sept. 11, 2001 -

Writing in The Weekly Standard in ‘Al Qaeda In Iraq - How to understand it. How to defeat it’, Frederick W. Kagan uses the Arabic word "takfir" (or a derivitive, e.g., takfiri, takfirism) several dozens of times, and did so in a compelling and necessary manner in pursuit of the ‘how to understand’ methodology of the article. Identifying Al Qaeda in Iraq (and the umbrella Al Qaeda organization as a whole) as takfiri, Kagan writes:

"The Koran and Muslim tradition forbid Muslims from killing one another except in narrowly specified circumstances...Takfiris, however, claim that the groups and individuals they condemn are not really Muslims but unbelievers who endanger the true faith...The word takfir designates the process of declaring a person to be an unbeliever because of the way he practices his faith."

Takfirism is the ideological underpinning of and justification for Al Qaeda’s attacks on us, including on that September 11 six years ago. We have erred for six years in not identifying that ideology plainly, in a struggle that is above all else an ideological one. It is critical that we do so not only for our own people, but for many millions of Muslims who are our potential allies in the struggle, but who are wary of our intentions and are bombarded by propaganda from at home claiming we fight for oil or from abroad claiming we seek to destroy Islam.

Kagan’s description of the takfiri and takfirism is consistent with what has been written on the subject in the Middle Eastern and Asian press for years, as a quick search of the Google News archive confirms. Farish A Noor, writng for Pakistan’s Daily Times, Saturday, January 01, 2005:

"I will not dwell here over the legal-theological technicalities of takfir (Muslims accusing others of being kafirs or murtad). Much has already been written about it...In his book, Islam, Fazlur Rehman has argued that by arrogating to themselves the authority of God, such hardliners effectively excommunicate themselves from the large body of the Muslim ummah."

Here in the West, the terminology of takfirism is still somewhat esoteric and only used by something like the "terror" cognoscenti. This is so even after publication of Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize winning ‘The Looming Tower – Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11’ in 2006, which dealt extensively and critically with the subject.

We are not in a religious war with Islam, but the takfiris are in a religious war with us and with the majority of Muslim believers worldwide. It would also be a great mistake, though tempting, for us to relegate the dispute over takfirism to something like an intramural theological issue confined to Islam, vaguely similar to the various Christian faiths of the sixteenth century hurling charges of heresy, apostasy and even idolatry at one another, often accompanied by violence and war. Takfirism targets globally and everyone is either with them or a target.

It has been common for many in the west to assume that what Al Qaeda wants for us is something like the ‘Islamic’ governed society we see in Saudi Arabia, and that country’s sharia based laws, strict religious prohibitions, banned Bibles, restrictions on women and even robed sword-wielding executioners. However, for Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia is a state of impure Islam and one grossly corrupted by western ideas, influence and contacts! The Al Qaeda takfirist war against us is an extension of their desire for purification of the Ummah, and as such, we are will remain a target until and unless takfirist ideology loses its ability to attract and motivate significant numbers of adherents in the Muslim world.

The evidence of Al Qaeda’s takfirism is manifest in the publicly available 1990’s letters and fatwas of Bin Laden and later writings and tapes from him and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and continues in the most recent Bin Laden tape received last month, even with the Kyoto accord camouflage. Al Qaeda theology and military strategy mesh in the concept of driving all inherently corrupting influences, and critcally among those ‘western’ influences, from the lands of the Ummah, so as to usher in their version of a purified Islam. Bin Laden’s murderous ire was directed in his early letters and fatwas at Saudi Arabia, for among other things, allowing the vile ‘crusaders’ (our military) to desecrate, by their presence, the Land of the Two Holy Places (Saudi Arabia) before, during and after the First Gulf War. Ayman al-Zawahiri’s target was and probably still is Egypt, his home, and the corrupted and secularist Nasser, Sadat and then Mubarak governments. It is critical to our being able to win a war that is ideological at its core to understand the ideology of those we fight, and to identify it clearly

Some in the west may be led to conclude, as Bin Laden has held out to us, that a western ‘pull back’ from the Islamic world, including of course retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also ending of trade and cultural ties with Muslim countries, ending of any support for Israel, and so forth may bring us peace. That would be a chimera, simply because as long as the west presents any Muslims with an attractive alternative in any sense to the takfirist understanding of Islamic purity, whether by democracy, free speech, women’s rights, separation of Church and state, toleration of various creeds and none, and on and on, we are and will be a target. In his latest tape, Bin Laden specifically tells an American audience that democracy has not worked, will not work, and the only alternative for us is his version of Islam.

In ‘The Looming Tower’ (page 124), Wright wrote:

"The new takfiris…extended the death warrant to encompass...anyone who registered to vote. Democracy, in their view, was against Islam because it placed in the hands of people authority that properly belonged to God...anyone who voted was an apostate, and his life was forfeit…"

To defeat the takfiris, we must understand them as many and maybe most Muslims do, and as Kagan indicates, there is evidence that Iraqis understand:

"Interestingly, 'takfirism' is what the Muslim enemies of this movement call it. Iraqis, for example, commonly refer to the members of AQI as 'takfiris.'"

It is not an accident or simply a result of circumstance that the great majority of victims of Al Qaeda-Taliban-Al Qaeda in Iraq and affiliated takfirists have been Muslims. When in November 2005, Congressman Murtha claimed, without contradiction by the media or the White House, that American forces in Iraq had become the primary target of the Iraqi insurgency, the figures were readily available that showed Iraq army and police (mostly recruits at that time) were being killed at a rate two to three times higher than coalition forces for months, as is still the case, and that excludes the Muslim civilians, Shia and Sunni alike, also being killed by AQI.

On page 365, Wright details an FBI interrogation of an emir, Abu Jandal, who had been in Yemeni custody. Jandal owned a guest house in which 9/11 hijacker-pilot Marwan al-Shehhi had been allowed to recuperate from an illness. Al-Shehhi had flown United Airlines flight 175 into the WTC south tower. The FBI agent doing the interrogation was an American Muslim, Ali Soufan.

The interrogation grew heated when Soufan asked Jandal about the bombings of the East African embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. Initially, when Soufan pointed out that most of the people killed were Muslim, Jandal explained that they would receive their reward, whatever it may be, from Allah. Pressed by Soufan, Jandal finally exploded with the takfir ideology, saying that since the bombings were on a Friday, those people should have been in the Mosques praying. Since they were not, they were takfir, apostates, and could be killed. As Kagan points out, Al Qaeda members do not speak openly of their takfirism, but they practice it.

Kagan also writes that U.S. commanders in al-Anbar "acknowledge that they probably missed overtures from [Sunni] tribal leaders" well before the more clear signals the sheikhs sent in late 2006 and early 2007 that our military responded to.

Hindsight is everyone’s best sight, but I can imagine there was an unrecognized signal nearly two years ago, from well before the Anbar Awakening. It was routinely described in the media as the Sunni’s fearing they would be left out of the political process if they bypassed the December 2005 elections in Iraq as they had the previous ones. That may have missed what the Sunni’s were even then saying about the takfiris and takfirism. From The Scotsman, December 2005:

"More than 1,000 Sunni clerics in Iraq issued a fatwa yesterday, telling members of their minority Muslim community to vote in tomorrow's elections."

How many in the West, especially those on the left, who have belittled the meaning of millions of Iraqis and Afghans voting in democratic elections, failed to understand how very much those millions of Muslims were repudiating the ideological basis for Al Qaeda and takfirism? President Bush repeatedly spoke of the courage of the Iraqis and Afghans who went out to vote in spite of danger, but I would think that most in the West believed the danger to be simply random bombings or attacks on polling places and voters, and did not realize that those people were risking being declared apostate and polytheists by the takfiris of AQI and therefore subject to killing at any time!

Again Kagan:

"Takfir violates the religious understanding of most of the world's Muslims...The chief reason al Qaeda has limited support in the Muslim world is that the global Muslim community overwhelmingly rejects the premise that anyone obeying a temporal ruler is ipso facto an unbeliever."

In six years, the west, including sadly the Bush administration, has failed to clarify the ideological struggle we are in. The various ways we have tried to do so all fall short of the mark, and even serve as hindrances to a successful counter-takfirist strategy. Worse, our various attempts at identifying the ideology we fight do not make our objectives plain to those in the Islamic world who need to be assured of what it is we fight and why.

We have had the GWOT, the global war on terror, which does not clarify the struggle: terror is a means, a tool, not an ideology.

We have used terms like Islamo-Fascism or derivitives of that, and these also do not work. While the Fascists of WWII Nazi Germany and present day Al Qaeda and its offshoots have commonalities of practice and belief, the match-up does not work. It is too great a leap for too many to equate National Socialism, the black leather uniformed Gestapo agent, the Blitzkrieg, the Nuremberg rallies or the horrific efficiency of an Auschwitz’s killing processes with men issuing religious fatwas and wearing robes in caves, planning the deaths of thousands of far-away civilians, making beheading videos or blowing themselves up to kill crowds at markets. The imagery of Islamo-Fascism might be meant to invoke the west’s last ‘good war’, when we were unified, but to too many, including millions in the Muslim world, that history is ancient or virtually unknown.

We have identified ‘jihad’ and ‘jihadis’ as the enemy, which admittedly has been my own choice. Like the GWOT and Islamo-Fascism, there are grounds for that, but it also fails. Far too many Muslims have pointed out that while ‘jihad’ is indeed a Koranic concept, they understand it to be a personal spiritual struggle or even evangelization, but without force. We know full well that those who promote and engage in a violent and murderous ‘jihad’ do not see it that way, but we must also admit that if there are a billion or so Muslims with the same Koran speaking of jihad, if even a substantial minority held to the violent jihad of Al Qaeda as a Muslim tenet of faith, there would be far more violence worldwide than there is now, and we would not have so many tens of thousands of Afghani and Iraqi Muslims putting their lives on the line in opposition to the takfirists.

We have had ‘militant Islam’, and again that does not serve well, because it obscures and even alienates potential and real allies. While most analogies fail at some point if pressed too far, they can still be useful to make a point. The Ku Klux Klan, since its founding after the Civil War, the Atlantic Olymics and abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolf, racist and segregationist groups like Christian Identity have all sought to cloak themsleves in the mantle of Christianity. Imagine for example how many Americans would react if these were referred to time and again as ‘militant Christianity’.

But identifying the ideology we fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere) as ‘takfirism’ and the adherents of that ideology as ‘takfiris’ clarifies, and defines our enemies as well as our purpose.

It would be a most worthwhile thing if President Bush and top level members of his administration identified our fight as with takfirism and the takfiris, coupled that with an explanation. Point out that the takfiris grant to themselves the right to kill any man, woman or child they deem to be an infidel, be they Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic – or any Muslim they deem apostate, by their own standards. If that is done, it just may be that those Sufi Muslims who danced in the streets of Kabul when the Taliban was evicted, those Iraqi Shia who’ve lost thousands to al-Zarqawi’s anti-Shia attacks, those Jordanians who demonstrated in the tens of thousands after the killing of the members of a wedding party in Amman by AQI, those Sunni sheiks in Anbar whose tribes are now fighting AQI, and the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have joined the Iraqi army, many of whom have been fighting side by side with our sons and daughters might say to themselves – the West gets it!

In its recent report on ‘Radicalization in the West: the Homegrown Threat’, the NYPD Intelligence Division reported:

"The image of the heroic, holy warrior or "mujahedeen" has been widely marketed on the Internet as well as in jihadi tapes and videos. This image continues to resonate among young, especially Muslim, men 15-35 years old — men who are most vulnerable to visions of honor, bravery and sacrifice for what is perceived as a noble cause."

By identifying the enemy as takfiri, in recognition that even its Muslim enemies do so, we may change that "heroic" image to one of the killer who may at any time decide that the erstwhile young Muslim recruit’s father, mother, brother or sister is apostate, takfir, and deserving of death.

I would like to see a spokesman for C.A.I.R., the Council on American-Islamic Relations, asked if his organization’s repeated statements about the Muslim American ‘voting’ demographic, presented as an appeal to be given consideration by our political parties, is a conclusive statement that C.A.I.R. and those they claim to represent reject the takfirist notion that democratic voting is polytheism and apostasy.

It is well past time to clarify the ideological struggle so that it is understood in both the West and in the Muslim world, and in that way, better establish who is on which side of the struggle, and why. Our soldiers have understood for years that we are in a hearts and mind struggle, yet too often here at home and in our leadership we do not make the necessary and clear distinctions that might enable and even empower and embolden those who are or should and could be our allies in this fight. We already have the evidence, though it gets short-shrift in our dialogue, of tens of thousands of Muslim Iraqis and Afghans willing to take on the takfiri. We must build on that.

The Iraqi Military: What If We Win?

For months the nation has had a deservedly high profile discussion of the potential calamities that would ensue if we were to precipitously withdraw and/or lose in Iraq. There has been little discussion of what may happen if the informal alliance of the Democrat left, the MSM and Al Qaeda fails, and America and its coalition and Iraqis allies prevail.

If that happens, we may end up with more than most may now realize.

We and the Iraqis may be in the process of building up in the area of the world that needs it most, the Middle East, an experienced, effective and disciplined counter-terror-insurgency military force. Further, this would be a force indigenous to the region and comprised largely of Arab Muslims and answerable to a democratically elected government. Such could be the Iraqi army of a few years hence.

President Bush has defined victory as something in the order of a democratic Iraq, at peace with its neighbors, able to provide for its own security and an ally in the war we are in. That latter part, about Iraq as an ally, has not been well examined in our national discussion.

The evidence has been unmistakable for quite a while that the Iraqi army is increasingly ‘standing up’. Some units of that army have become highly effective, and others are rapidly catching up. Listening to General Petraeus' testimony and reading the detailed accounts of various Milbloggers and "Beyond the Green Zone" journalists (like Michael Yon and Michael Totten) something comes across about the Surge that has gotten very little attention. It has not been just another 38,000 or so American troops. The increase in our forces enabled us to put more combat forces in an aggressive posture teamed with many thousands of Iraqi forces. The Americans and Iraqi forces are acting as hammer and anvil in smashing the terrorist operations.

The Background

When in November of 2005 John Murtha claimed that our troops had become the “primary target” of the insurgency, for months before and continuing afterward, Iraqi army and police, mostly recruits, were being killed at a rate two to three times that of our forces. In 2004-2005, Al Qaeda and the various terrorists and insurgencies did their murderous best to try and keep Iraqis from enlisting, including mass executions of unarmed recruits and bombings of recruiting stations killing dozens at a time. Even so, the Iraqi’s continued to enlist. That was a stunning defeat of the enemy’s strategy, and it was not recognized in our media as such.

Democrats invoked the “Whack-A-Mole” imagery in 2005-2006, and still do, on the understanding that every time we kill an insurgent/terorist, another or several take his place. They never had and still don’t have the intellectual honesty much less the decent consideration for an ally to apply that to the terrorist/insurgency as to why they might be losing. The insurgent/terrorists had been killing the Iraqi army, border forces and police, mostly recruits, by the thousands, and yet today there are nearly a quarter of a million Iraqis in those forces.

The Iraqi army has been born in the crucible of insurgent-terror war, and its basic training camps were located in the theatre of battle.

I believe that history will judge the total disbanding of the Hussein army will have been the right course of action for the long term, though likely costly in the short term. Doing so has enabled the creation of an Iraqi military well suited to the hearts and minds requirement of counter terror-insurgency warfare. When the fighting is conducted where your family lives and in your own community, the hearts and minds aspect is not a theoretical abstract. Likewise, building a new army from scratch made null any effect of the well deserved distrust of most of the population for the Hussein army.

Some years ago I read an American military officer saying that one of the most difficult concepts to get across to members of the new Iraqi military was obedience of the military to democratically elected civilians. The Iraqis were skeptical of the idea that those who had the guns and the power would and even should be so deferential. Now, though, the soldiers in the Iraqi military are well aware that commanding generals in the powerful American military will not only defer to the decisions of the civilian U.S. government, but also to those of the fledgling democratically elected al-Maliki government of Iraq, and that there is a soldier’s honor in that.

Assorted embedded milbloggers and others have noted a growing bond between the Iraqi army and the Iraqi people. The people of Iraq are developing pride in their army and are increasingly pleased to ecstatic to encounter them, and the army is proud that its people recognize them for what they are doing. While the left and a great many Democrats can’t comprehend the cause and emotional depth of that bond, most Americans will, as it is similar to what most of us feel about our Marines and soldiers and how they feel about how we see them.

In their NY Times piece ‘A War We Just Might Win’, O’Hanlon and Pollack wrote:

“The Iraqi Army’s highly effective Third Infantry Division started out as overwhelmingly Kurdish in 2005. Today, it is 45 percent Shiite, 28 percent Kurdish, and 27 percent Sunni Arab.”

That is a national force, not an ethno-sectarian one, and that is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the positive response of the Iraqi population.

Combat Command Structure

All military forces, especially those that may have enjoyed years of peace, must make critical personnel adjustments when war comes. They need to identify who among their officer corps and senior NCOs belongs where in the organizational structure for optimal combat effectiveness. They must determine who are the most effective warriors (as opposed to administrators) and what level of command they are best suited for. Those critical decisions can only be reliably made in a time of war, and the Iraqi’s are doing so, with experienced assistance from our military.

The Future

If we and our Iraqi allies prevail in Iraq, what might the situation be in three to five years, and what effect could the Iraqi military then have in the region?

If Al Qaeda and its affiliates find that Iraq is simply too costly or unwinnable for them, they may withdraw from there (at least temporarily) but they will not necessarily give up their takfirist ideology and the fight. They will likely still cling to the takfirist goal of purifying the Muslim “Ummah” by removing, forcibly and by terror, all corrupting influences, be it western, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, secularist, democratic, commerce related or anything in any way liberal in the traditional sense. They will likewise still seek to deal with the supposed “takfirs”, Muslims they deem apostate, by means of terror and murder, even murder en masse. They will simply seek other targets in the Middle East. Bin Laden has always wanted to ‘purify’ Saudi Arabia, and al-Zawahiri has wanted to do the same to Egypt.

Only weeks ago the Lebanese military succeeded in killing or driving out hundreds of Fatah-al-Islam terrorists from the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp. While undoubtedly a win and good news for the good guys, there is a lot to be concerned about in those events. It took the Lebanese army over three months to defeat a few hundred terrorists. Between 30,000 and 40,000 civilians were displaced. By the conclusion of the fight, the Lebanese army had about the same number of killed as the terrorists, and maybe half of the terrorists escaped. While on their own the Fatah al-Islam terrorists had to be forcefully addressed, I cannot but imagine that Lebanese government and military planners pursued the action with a mind to the all but inevitable looming clash that will someday come between the Lebanese army and that state within the Lebanese state, Hizbollah, and its several thousand well armed fighters. When that day comes, Lebanon will need a lot of help, as other Middle Eastern states will require a lot of help if Al Qaeda targets them for purification, singly or in groups.

A Regional Counter Terror-Insurgency Force

That is where a largely Muslim Arab professional military with proven counter terror-insurgency capabilities and inherent understanding of the hearts and minds aspect of such warfare may do a world of good, by providing assistance ranging from trainers and advisors to even boots on the ground and combat support. It would be in Iraq’s own interest to do so. The new Iraq knows well the danger of insurgent and terror groups, and that such are cancerous. If they operate in the region with success, like a cancer they will spread, and democratic Iraq will be a target again, sooner or later. That would be the same whether it is Al Qaeda-like takfirists or Iranian/Syrian supported organizations like Hizbollah.

Iraq also has additional self interest in regional security and peace for the sake of its economy and the future well being of its citizens.

General Petraeus and others have spoken well of the combat performance of the Iraqi Special Forces, and one hopes that a relationship with and training of them by our SF is continued long term. They may prove to be the force that can engage and counter or even dismantle the Iranian Quds Force, that has been so active in training and enabling terrorists throughout the Middle East.

Even with oil revenue, Iraq is far from a wealthy country. In the path forward building of their military, assuming a success in the present fight, they will need to balance thier forces between counter terrorism-insurgency and defensive conventional set piece war involving large unit formations and heavy armor and artillery. If Iraq focuses and builds its army primarily around a counter insurgency-terror framework, the likelihood of other area states seeking cooperation with Iraq will be enhanced, because Iraq will not be a military threat to those nations. Think Kuwait or even Saudi Arabia and the previous Iraqi army.

There is of course risk to Iraq in pursuing this military weighted in favor of counter terror-insurgency. Its army, while becoming possibly the foremost effective and indigenous counter terror-insurgency force in the Middle East (and I include the IDF in that calculation), would not necessarily have the capability to protect the nation from more conventional attack by other nations. If some years from now Iraq is substantially aiding Lebanon in expelling or destroying Hizbollah, the terrorist group’s patrons in Iran and Syria may consider a conventional attack on Iraq to prevent that. Such an attack may use air assets, heavy armor, set piece movements of brigades and divisions, or in general the type of attack that an army that heavily targeted its training and material procurement at counter terror-insurgency might have difficulty repelling. That is where we would have to act on the understanding that ‘allies’ presuppose an alliance. If Iraq forgoes the option of building a more formidable conventional military force in favor of specialization in counter-terror-insurgency, we must commit to providing Iraq with an American air power umbrella in the event of a conventional attack on Iraq. We’ve offered similar alliance protection effectively for over a half century.

Just days ago AP had a report that might be a step in that direct:

AP - "We will ask the council to include an article that allows Iraq to enter into negotiations with the United States to reach long term security agreements to meet Iraq's security needs bilaterally," (Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar) Zebari added.

An effectively operating and largely Arab Muslim counter terror-insurgency force in the Middle East could be a strategic disaster for our enemies, and it is a very real possibility, if we prevail.

Good News, Bad News, Not News?

AFP (Agence Française de Presse) has reported that U.S. Military deaths in Iraq have fallen to the lowest point in fourteen months:

"US military losses in Iraq for September stood at 70 on Sunday, the lowest monthly figure since July last year, according to an AFP tally based on Pentagon figures."

In a follow-up story several hours later, AFP had this:

"In Anbar, there had been roughly 90 incidents during each of the first two weeks of the Muslim holy month this year compared to 415 during one week alone in 2006."

Here's the thing. Searching Google News for over six hours, I'm not seeing where AP or Reuters have that story. Searching Gooogle News for "iraq military deaths lowest" what came up hours after the first AFP story was an indication of fifteen stories. When I clicked the "show all", oddly enough only two came up and both were the same AFP story.

Somehow I think that if a major news agency reported "U.S. Military suffers highest death rate in Iraq in fourteen months", Google News would have a list of about fifteen hundred hits in something like two hours, and people would be getting trampled to death by Democrats careening towards micro-phones.

Hat tip Powerline.