The following regards Barack Obama's argument that Iraq is not the central front on the war on terror, rather that Afghanistan/Pakistan is (more to that in a moment).

Of course, the very first problem with this is that Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leadership have plainly stated on several occasions prior to this that Iraq is indeed the central front on the war on terror.

The next problem for Obama, is that those experts on the subject, including those experts who are endorsing Obama, likewise believe that Iraq is the central front for the war on terror.

The following I took from the blogger Mad Irish:

All: Please note that Lee Hamilton, who introduced Sen. Obama at his speech in Washington today, disagrees with Sen. Obama on at least two central issues addressed in his speech today. Specifically, Sen. Obama today denied that Iraq has ever been a “central front in the war on terror,” despite the fact that Hamilton described Iraq as “a central front in the war on terror” in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee while he was co-chairing the Iraq Study Group. Further, three months ago in April 2008, Hamilton said he opposes “target dates” for withdrawal in Iraq -- something Obama is clearly continuing to embrace today with his 16-month timetable:


Obama vs. Hamilton On Iraq As “A Central Front In The War On Terror”

Obama Today: "In fact – as should have been apparent to President Bush and Senator McCain – the central front in the war on terror is not Iraq, and it never was." (Barack Obama, Remarks, Washington, D.C., 7/15/08)

In December 2006, Hamilton Told The Senate Armed Services Committee That Iraq Was “A Central Front In The War On Terror.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC): “If you asked the 10 members of the commission the question: “Is Iraq the central battlefront in the war on terror,” what answer would you have received?” … Hamilton: ‘I would strike the word “the” and use “a.” It is a central front. Look, al Qaeda today is a important part of the violence, but not as important as sectarian violence. It is a central front in the war on terror, but to make it THE central front overstates it.” (Lee Hamilton, Committee On The Armed Services, U.S. Senate, Testimony, 12/7/06)

Obama vs. Hamilton On Timetables For Iraq Withdrawal

Obama Today Attacked Those Who Oppose Timetables, And Offered His Own 16-Month Timetable: “We Can Safely Redeploy Our Combat Brigades At A Pace That Would Remove Them In 16 Months.” “George Bush and John McCain don’t have a strategy for success in Iraq – they have a strategy for staying in Iraq. They said we couldn’t leave when violence was up, they say we can’t leave when violence is down. They refuse to press the Iraqis to make tough choices, and they label any timetable to redeploy our troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government – not to a terrorist enemy. Theirs is an endless focus on tactics inside Iraq, with no consideration of our strategy to face threats beyond Iraq’s borders. … We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months.” (Barack Obama, Remarks, Washington, D.C., 7/15/08)

Hamilton In April 2008: "I'm not a great fan, incidentally, of target dates in foreign policy as a rule and in Iraq specifically." (MSNBC's "MSNBC Live," 4/11/08)
It's bad enough Barack Obama is attempting to revise history by acting as though he's always been an advocate of the Petraeus Surge (he has, for instance, now scrubbed his campaign website of all comments that were negative regarding the Surge), but that he's dictating policy and offering a plan on Iraq before actually traveling to Iraq and talking to General Petraeus is not just counterproductive but a foolish campaign move too.

A final point regarding the Obama camp's claim that Iraq is not the central front on terror, or only became the central front on terror after the US invaded Iraq -- FLYPAPER.

It was smart strategy to lure our enemies into the open from out of the shadows of Saudi Arabia or the caves of Afghanistan, or mosques in Europe for that matter.

If Democrats are going to get all queasy about 4,000 dead in Iraq, where the terrain is flat and far more friendly to US technology, how would they ever stomach a war in the miserable terrain of the Hindu Kush mountains, where our advantages like helicopter warfare would become neutralized due to climate and terrain?

Labels: 2008, Afghanistan, Iraq, mccain, Obama, Petraeus, war on terror

Below is an op-ed from Congressmen Kid Bond (vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence), Pete Hoekstra (ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) and Lamar Smith (ranking Republican on the House Committee on the Judiciary), rebutting an anti-eavesdropping opinion written by key Democrats yesterday in the Washington Post.

We are less safe today and will remain so until Congress clears up the legal uncertainty for companies that assist in collecting intelligence for the government -- and until it gives explicit permission to our intelligence agencies to intercept, without a warrant, foreign communications that pass through the U.S. Here's why:

- Intercepting terrorist communications requires the cooperation of our telecommunications companies. They're already being sued for having cooperated with the government after 9/11. So without explicit protection for future actions (and civil liability protection for the help they provided in the past), those companies critical to collecting actionable intelligence could be sidelined in the fight.

It has already happened, briefly. "[W]e have lost intelligence information this past week as a direct result of the uncertainty created by Congress' failure to act," Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and Attorney General Michael Mukasey wrote in a letter dated Feb. 22 to Mr. Reyes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

- The old FISA law does not adequately protect the U.S., which is why it was revised by the Protect America Act last summer. The problem is that, although it has a few work-around-provisions, such as allowing intelligence agencies to conduct surveillance for up to 72 hours without a warrant, FISA ultimately requires those agencies to jump through too many legal hurdles. Those include the Fourth Amendment's "probable cause" requirements, protections never intended for suspected terrorists' communications that are routed through the U.S.

It is true that the FISA Court approves the vast majority of warrants sought by intelligence agencies. This demonstrates that our intelligence agencies are professional and painstakingly provide all of the necessary evidence to establish probable cause to the Court. But in the fast-paced intelligence world, and when dealing with foreign communications, we need our agencies to be able to intercept a far greater number of communications -- notably those of foreign terrorists -- than can be justified under the Fourth Amendment.

- Telecommunications companies are for now, after intense negotiations, cooperating with the government under the assumption that protections granted to them under the Protect America Act will be upheld in court, even though the law is now defunct. But there is no guarantee that the courts will do any such thing. There is also no guarantee that corporate executives, under pressure from their legal counsels and shareholders to limit liabilities, will continue to cooperate.

- The cooperation of the telecommunications companies is limited to intercepting communications of terrorists identified before the Protect America Act lapsed. Until intelligence agencies can chase leads involving foreign communications, the U.S. will not be as safe as it was just a few weeks ago.

Further extending the Protect America Act is no way to fight a war against a determined enemy that uses our infrastructure against us. We need a long-term fix for FISA; and that is what a bipartisan majority in the Senate tried to accomplish earlier this month when it passed its FISA modernization bill by a 68-29 margin.

The problem is in the House, where Democratic leaders prefer to play an obstructionist role instead of constructing the architecture we need to fight an intelligence-driven war. Instead of voting on the Senate bill, even though a majority of House members stand ready to pass it, Mrs. Pelosi is still sitting on it. She is now pushing for a "compromise" that would gut many of the provisions that secure the cooperation of telecommunications companies.

Our troops collect intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan on a daily basis. We must exploit quickly the leads they turn up. Court orders should not be necessary to engage foreign targets in foreign countries. The Senate bill must be allowed to come to a vote in the House of Representatives without further delay.

Labels: Afghanistan, Congress, Iraq, surveillance, TSP, war on terror

Funny review by John Podhoretz; no doubt he's an evil zionist supporting warmonger.

Streep plays a reporter for a news network who also doubles as a correspondent for Time in her copious spare time. She arrives at the Capitol Hill office of Republican Senator Cruise, who has a scoop for her: There is a new strategy to win the war in Afghanistan. At that very moment in Afghanistan, Special Forces troops are being moved into position to implement Cruise's new strategy. Two of the Special Forces troops are former students of liberal professor Redford, who is in his office having a sit-down with an impressive but unmotivated college student.

And there you have Lions for Lambs. The movie basically consists of three one-act plays, with two characters each, taking place simultaneously: Cruise and Streep in the Senate office, Redford and Unmotivated Student in a campus office, and Redford's two students shot up and bleeding on an Afghan mountain while al Qaeda operatives close in on them. Redford tells Unmotivated the story of his two students, little knowing they are meeting their fate at that very moment. He begged them not to go.

But they decided they had to get involved in order to further their cause of bringing social justice to the ghetto--to join the military and fight in the war on terror to give them unimpeachable political credentials. Redford sees in Unmotivated the same bravery, the same conviction, the same ability to stand up for something.
Because that is what it is all about--standing up for something. "Do something," Redford tells Unmotivated, who replies that politicians tell lies and why shouldn't he just go for the good life where you make money? But this is a Hollywood picture, and we know that Hollywood is far too monastic a place to abide anyone who is just in it for the money.

Cruise, who looks far more like John Edwards than any Republican politician, offers plastic platitudes to Streep. Mistakes were made in the past, he says, but now is the time to look forward. She is old enough to have heard it all before, she says, in the language of Vietnam-era Gen. Creighton Abrams--and besides, people like Cruise lied us into war in Iraq. He points out that her network used to offer serious news reporting and now has a toothy anchorwoman with big hair. She hangs her head in shame.

After Cruise gets a phone call informing him that the new strategy is already a failure because Redford's two students are bleeding on the mountain, he turns to her and speaks the truth. He is tired of America being humiliated, he says. She leaves his office, begins to hyperventilate, and tells her boss that Cruise is going to become the next president and use nuclear weapons on unsuspecting Muslims. Her boss tells her to write up the news without mentioning the whole nuclear-weapons thing. She says she will not be a vehicle for warmongering propaganda the way the entire news media were the last time. He says she'd better, or Streep's sick mother will no longer be able to receive 24-hour care.

The last thing we see is Unmotivated reading the crawl on Streep's cable news channel simply stating that there is a new strategy for winning the war in Afghanistan. Streep has given in. We are left to understand that the only thing standing between America and Armageddon at the hands of Tom Cruise, Evil Republican, is the Unmotivated College Student choosing to "stand up for something."
Will he do it? Never before have we seen such shades of gray! Thank the Lord, we have at last moved past the black-and-white rhetoric of the past six years!

Labels: Afghanistan, antiwar loonies, Hollywood bias, war on terror

Musharraf has made his choice, perferring power and stability over democracy and liberty. It's time for us to make ours, or suffer the consequences of hypocrisy. The situation in Pakistan is both serious and complicated, but one certainty is that enemies, allies and fence-squatters alike are watching how the United States reacts.

For many years the Bush team has made the argument that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were necessary to reverse the Cold War stategy whereby Western nations chose stability over liberty in the Middle East.

"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe," President Bush said in November 2003, "because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty." Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice reiterated in September 2005, "For 60 years, we often thought that we could achieve stability without liberty in the Middle East. And ultimately, we got neither."

They were right then. It's time to be right now.

One understands the dilemma and contradictory view, most recently aired by Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, that should Musharraf fall it may not bring in an era of Bhutto-led democracy, but rather empower the very Islamic fascists with whom we're at war. But given a choice in this no-win scenario, at least stay true to your founding values. We have far more to lose than a strongman in Central Asia.

Here's a related commentary from the Wall Street Journal:

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf says he imposed a state of emergency to limit terror attacks. Then why is he arresting so many nonterrorists?

Beginning Saturday, the main targets of police have been human rights workers and Mr. Musharraf's political opponents. While precise figures are hard to come by, more than 1,500 people -- mostly lawyers who participated in anti-Musharraf protests -- are thought to be incarcerated, either in their homes or in jails.

Topping the detainee list is Asma Jahangir, the Lahore-based head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Ms. Jahangir, a lawyer who is also a United Nations' special rapporteur on freedom of religion, agitated publicly for an independent judiciary and has represented the families of "disappeared" political dissidents. She was placed under a 90-day "preventative" house arrest on Saturday in Lahore.

Next comes Aitzaz Ahsan, president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, a member of Parliament and a former law minister. Mr. Ahsan, who defended former Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry earlier this year when Mr. Musharraf sacked him, stood up at a press conference Saturday and denounced the state of emergency. Mr. Ahsan is now in Adiala Jail near Rawalpindi.

Then there's Ali Ahmed Kurd, another lawyer for former Chief Justice Chaudhry, who human rights groups claim is now under the supervision of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Other lawyers in that case, including Munir Malik and Tariq Mahmood -- both former presidents of the Supreme Court Bar -- have also been arrested.

Other detainees include Javed Hashmi, the acting president of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's party; Imran Khan, a famous cricketer and leader of a new, small political party; and hundreds of workers for Jamaat-e-Islami, a large religious party. Mr. Khan managed to give the slip to his minders at his home and is now on the run.

If Mr. Musharraf wants to fight terrorism and move Pakistan toward democracy, arresting democrats and lawyers is an odd way of doing so. By targeting members of civil society, he's weakening the very forces that would have supported him had he moved forward with a power-sharing arrangement with Benazir Bhutto. Instead, he's angering the country's middle class and empowering militants.

Labels: Afghanistan, al qaeda, bhutto, defending liberty, National Defense, pakistan

Here's a good commentary by Ann Marlowe, questioning the validity of those who tout Afghanistan as failing. Indeed, she's been there and found:

The U.S. is now planning to start a second provincial reconstruction team (PRT) in Nangarhar Province, and it will be staffed by military reservists who are farmers and ranchers in civilian life. This second PRT will work with local farmers in Nangahar's lush river valley, while also building infrastructure to get crops to market--cold storage facilities and local roads. Air Force Lt. Col. Gordon Phillips, the commander of the existing PRT, says that blacktop roads will link all district centers in the province to the main road to Kabul by the end of this year.

"Every day we open 15 to 20 new accounts," says Maseh Arifi, the 24-year-old manager of the Jalalabad branch of Azizi Bank, one of Afghanistan's two homegrown consumer banks. The branch opened at the end of last August and has 18,000 accounts. Next door, rival Kabul Bank has opened 9,400 accounts totaling $7 million in two years. The 27,000 bank accounts represent about 15% of 660,000 adults of Jalalabad--and doesn't count some of the most prosperous locals, who commute to Peshawar to do their banking. In Nangarhar, AWCC and Roshan together have about 206,000 mobile phone customers, 31% of the adults.

Read it all here.

Labels: Afghanistan

Major screwup this week by the Obama camp:

[ABC News] In a strikingly bold speech about terrorism Wednesday, Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Sen. Barack Obama called not only for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, but a redeployment of troops into Afghanistan and even Pakistan — with or without the permission of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.

"I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges," Obama said, "but let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

Such false bravado! Putting debating the wisdom of the notion for a moment, were it a liberal like Joe Lieberman or maybe even Chris Dodd making this statement we'd all find it more credible. But Barack Obama...? Who does he think he's kidding? Barack Obama would never have the cajones to invade Pakistan. Even if he did there's every indication that Obama and fellow Democrats would stop short the moment it got even a little bit ugly. We know this because we know that if he ever did, or even came close to it, he's lose his constituents and could expect the same ultra-liberal press to run defeatist view after defeatest view just like they do Iraq today. Remember this is the same world press that turned on "lapdog" Tony Blair.

Like John Podhoretz said, "If the evil Bushitler Cheney Rumsfeld Monster wouldn't do it, nobody will do it."

Here's the full column by Podhoretz:

I'm getting a lot of enraged e-mails from Obama defenders who are accusing me of caricaturing his position on Pakistan, or of being an apologist for somebody or other, or something. So let me be clear about one thing: Obama is full of it. This country is never — never — going to stage a major military action against Pakistan. Pakistan is a nation of 170 million people that has nuclear weapons and whose admittedly problematic and troublesome regime has, to some extent, cooperated with the United States in the war against Al Qaeda both in ways we know and ways we have no idea about. The concern that this strategically vital county might become an Islamic fundamentalist state is, should be, and will be paramount in every and all discussions about how to conduct the fight against Al Qaeda.

What's more, every serious person knows the United States won't invade Pakistan, even with Special Forces — since the reason we canceled the proposed action against Al Qaeda in 2005 is that it was going to take many hundreds of American troops to do it. This isn't 15 people dropping like ninjas in the darkness. It's an invasion, with helicopters and supply lines and routes of ingress and escape. It would have had unforseen and unforeseeable consequences, but it would have been reasonable to assume the Pakistanis would have turned violently against the United States and hurtled toward Islamic fundamentalist control.

If the evil Bushitler Cheney Rumsfeld Monster wouldn't do it, nobody will do it. And you can bet there isn't a single person in line to run a Democratic State Department or Democratic Defense Department who would give the idea three seconds of thought. Obama is using Pakistan to talk tough, in the full knowledge that he will never actually pull the trigger.

He is trying to put one over on the American people, which is certainly using the "audacity of hope" in an entirely new way.
Also, it must be pointed out, Obama's comment about "terrorists holed up in those mountains" is ignorant.

Let's not fool ourselves, there are massive populations within Pakistan who are sympathetic and supporters of not just al Qaeda and the Taliban, but the overall ideology that drives such groups. The US would never be able to enforce military operations - true, blue, military operations - without it spilling into Pakistan proper.

Recall the US-Pak alliance caught the two masterminds of 9-11, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, not "in those mountains" on the Pak-Afghan border, but instead in Rawalpindi - just seven miles from Pakistan's capital city of Islamabad - and in Karachi, respectively. Binalshibh lived there for a full year before his capture. And the only reason he was caught is because both he and Khalid Mohammed were stupid and let their guard down -- they agreed to be interviewed by Al Jazerra's Yosri Fouda, who did not know he was being tailed by Western and Pakistani intelligence services. KSM was captured a little more than a year after that.

One doubts Zawahiri or bin Laden would ever be that foolish. Why wouldn't we likewise expect to find Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri in similar protected territory and not "in those mountains"? It's possible they are but in many ways it would be far more difficult to find them in the population than "in those mountains." They may be disguised now - Fouda reported bin Laden has 4 separate doubles - but there's no reason to believe that they are not traveling freely and protected by both Pakistani citizens and even possibly parts of the Pakistani government not loyal to Musharraf.

The point is, if Democrats are declaring defeat in Iraq - flat terrain, 26 million - how will they have the stomach to invade Pakistan - mountains, 165 million.

And what of the Democrat's argument that invading Iraq just "created more terrorists." If true, one could say the same of any country invaded by the US, including (or especially) Pakistan, right? But I guess that's another post. Label under: hypocrisy.

Labels: 2008, Afghanistan, Iraq, Obama, pakistan

Speaking of Afghanistan versus Iraq, here's a commentary by Charles Krauthammer rerun from March.

Of all the arguments for pulling out of Iraq, the greater importance of Afghanistan is the least serious.

And not just because this argument assumes that the world's one superpower, which spends more on defense every year than the rest of the world combined, does not have the capacity to fight an insurgency in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan. But because it assumes that Afghanistan is strategically more important than Iraq.

Thought experiment: Bring in a completely neutral observer -- a Martian -- and point out to him that the United States is involved in two hot wars against radical Islamic insurgents. One is in Afghanistan, a geographically marginal backwater with no resources and no industrial or technological infrastructure. The other is in Iraq, one of the three principal Arab states, with untold oil wealth, an educated population, an advanced military and technological infrastructure that, though suffering decay in the later years of Saddam Hussein's rule, could easily be revived if it falls into the right ( i.e., wrong) hands. Add to that the fact that its strategic location would give its rulers inordinate influence over the entire Persian Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf states. Then ask your Martian: Which is the more important battle? He would not even understand why you are asking the question.

Al-Qaeda has provided the answer many times. Osama bin Laden, the one whose presence in Afghanistan (or some cave on the border) presumably makes it the central front in the war on terror, has been explicit that "the most . . . serious issue today for the whole world is this Third World War that is raging in Iraq." Al-Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman Zawahiri, has declared that Iraq "is now the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era."

And it's not just what al-Qaeda says, it's what al-Qaeda does. Where are they funneling the worldwide recruits for jihad? Where do all the deranged suicidists who want to die for Allah gravitate? It's no longer Afghanistan but Iraq. That's because they recognize the greater prize.

Labels: Afghanistan, Iraq

[Washington Post] Iran has increased arms shipments to both Iraq's Shiite extremists and Afghanistan's Taliban in recent weeks in an apparent attempt to pressure American and other Western troops operating in its two strategic neighbors, according to senior U.S. and European officials.

In Iraq, Iranian 240mm rockets, which have a range of up to 30 miles and could significantly change the battlefield, have been used recently by Shiite extremists against U.S. and British targets in Basra and Baghdad, the officials said. Three of the rockets have targeted U.S. facilities in Baghdad's Green Zone, and one came very close to hitting the U.S. Embassy in the Iraqi capital, according to the U.S. officials.

... The intercepted shipments to Afghanistan included 107mm mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, C-4 explosives and small arms, identical to shipments to Iraqi militias around Basra in March, according to the U.S. and European sources, who track arms movements. The C-4 explosives in both shipments have fake U.S. markings, a common deceptive tactic, the sources added.

... The new arms supplies reflect an increasing boldness by Iran, according to U.S. officials and officials from NATO countries. The secretive Quds Force, the branch of the elite Revolutionary Guard in charge of Iran's special operations abroad, is said by the U.S. officials to be behind the arms flow to militants in both countries.

In Iraq, U.S. special military operations as well as new diplomatic talks with Iran are focused on trying to limit the impact of Quds, U.S. officials said. "The imperative for this exercise is to stop Iran's lethal activities," said a senior U.S. official involved in Iran policy.

At U.S.-Iran talks last Monday, the first in almost three decades, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, laid out what he later described as "solid evidence" of Iran's role in arming the militant groups that are attacking American and Iraqi forces, as well as civilians. "We know the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force is the lead instrument in pursuing this policy and that they need to stop this behavior," Crocker said in a telephone briefing after the talks. "We know what they're doing."
If "we know what they're doing" why haven't we stopped it? Why aren't we carpet bombing Tehran? Why aren't we arming the domestic enemies of Iran's government? Why aren't we at least vocally threatening a response?

Iran is arming persons who are killing our soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and killing those countries' citizens. Worse, they're arming the very Taliban that harbored the 9-11 hijackers! And all we get from this is a page-14 peep? Ho hum, now here's Jill with the weather...?

No wonder Iran thinks we're weak.

It's reminiscent of that line from the movie Braveheart where the wicked King Longshanks states that the mere sight of his incompetent and cowardly son would only encourage the enemy to take over the whole country. We've become the weakling Prince Edward.

Perhaps Americans don't want war with Iran, but Iran wants war with the United States. One imagines that had this information been brought to light on September 12th, 2001, there would be quite the different reaction from our politicians and media. But here, five years after 9-11, nothing has changed.

Actually it's worse: Iran is conducting the same proxy war against the US that it has conducted against Israel for years.

It also shows us how naive are so many of our so-called experts.

Time and time again we've heard that Sunni and Shiite groups would never team up against us because of their hatred for one another. Rubbish.

Weekly Standard's Mike Goldfarb summed it up thusly:

An assumption of the Iraq Study Group was that the clerical regime wants stability next door in Iraq. Hence it might be willing to work with Americans. Yet Iran has benefited enormously from Iraqi instability. Traditional, moderate clerics like Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who have been willing to work with Americans, have been battered and bruised by the violence. The radical Moktada al-Sadr, a little-known and little-admired scion of a famous clerical family, skyrocketed to prominence because of the strife and thanks to critical Iranian aid to him. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its more radical military wing, the Badr Organization, has also benefited enormously from the violence. SCIRI is a key Iraqi player that has received substantial assistance from Tehran. What is particularly regrettable about SCIRI is that the bloodletting has made life more difficult for moderates within the organization. And the violence has made it harder for SCIRI to pull away from Iranian patronage.

Does Iran want to stop this process? Iraq's Arab Sunni community--detested by the Iranians--has been routed from much of Baghdad, badly bloodied, and put to flight by the hundreds of thousands. This is a bad thing in the eyes of Tehran? Where does Iran have the most influence in Iraq? In Basra, where Shiite-versus-Shiite violence is at its worst. This is not a coincidence. Tehran has benefited massively from Iraqi Shiite division and internecine strife. What the United States should expect from Iran is that it will continue to ship its deadly explosives to Iraq and, through violence, feed the radicalization of the Shiite community. Success through Hezbollah in civil-war-torn Lebanon is the model to remember. Until now, it's been Iran's only successful foray abroad. "Stability" in Iraq means only one thing to Tehran: an American success.

What does it mean for American foreign policy if there is a consensus that a) Iran has no interest in seeing stability return to Iraq, and b) Iran is actively supporting Sunni militants, aka al Qaeda, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
We'd better get our collective head out of our arse. And soon.

Labels: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, terrorism, war on terror

How does one disprove a negative?

The friendly-fire death of Cpl. Pat Tillman and its entire aftermath is sad, but maybe the saddest thing next to Tillman's death, and the agony of his family, is that it didn't have to be that way. Somehow, our culture, led by our breathless, context-lacking media and over-lawyered society, have redefined friendly-fire, or fratricide, as something to be ashamed of.

Further, one can only conclude that our military and government leaders fortify this silly culture, perhaps due to fear of lawsuit, by treating our population as though they were not rational and mature enough to understand that in war, fratricide happens.

During a foggy morning in the French and Indian War, Col. George Washington's First Virginia Regiment accidentally attacked the Second Virginia Regiment, causing more than 30 casualties.

Thank heavens Col. Washington didn't have to answer to our modern Congress, else he'd have never made president.

One recalls no Southerner demanding Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee confess "what they knew, and when they knew it!" after subordinates accidentally killed their beloved Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson. In the Civil War alone author Webb Garrison catalogued 150 instances of friendly fire (long before the era of the cluster bomb).

Friendly fire in the modern era has naturally been far more destructive, such as: Twenty five GIs were killed and 131 wounded when some of 1,800 Allied bombers missed their German targets; or, 318 US GIs gunned down in mid-air by their own troops while parachuting during the 1943 Sicily invasion.

Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War likewise saw their share of friendly-fire.

But here we are today, with Tillman's brother, Kevin, who served with Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, issuing blanket condemnation without a shred of proof towards the full chain of command, from local Afghanistan leaders all the way to the White House.

"It's a little disingenuous to think the administration didn't know," Tillman claimed. Conspiracy mongers and Democrats who care not one iota for the Tillman's plight naturally seized upon those comments for their own agendas. But, if meritlessly accused, how does one disprove a negative?

A professional soldier should know better.

Pat Tillman was killed on April 22, 2004. The US military officially notified the Tillman family that the cause of death was friendly-fire on May 29, 2004, or about a month later.

Is a one month delay to get the facts straight unreasonable? Maybe, maybe not.

And the military is not without blame. U.S. Army Spc. Bryan O'Neal told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform yesterday that "I was ordered not to tell him [Tillman's brother]" about Pat Tillman's cause of death.

Thus, there appears, at least in the low levels, to have been an initial attempt to delay or obfuscate the findings. But what I don't understand is why?

Why does the military willingly swallow the poison pill an irresponsible, immature media and combative antiwar crowd serve it?

Why not instead have said, "Pat Tillman was tragically killed in a friendly-fire event yesterday. We honor his service and express our sorrow to his family. While working tirelessly to minimize such occurrences, all should understand that so long as the human element remains in war friendly fire will always be a danger"?

One expects the Tillman family to lash out when in pain. One fully expects the media and many in the Democratic Party to continue to exploit the situation and act like boobs.

One should not expect our military to go along.

Labels: Afghanistan, fratricide, friendly fire, Tillman