About That Outstretched Open Hand

I suspect that when President Obama offered his outstretched hand to Iran's mullahs, hoping they'd unclench their fist to reach back to us, I imagine he didn't have this in mind:

The families of three Americans accused of espionage in Iran are attempting the delicate feat of keeping a spotlight trained on the plight of their loved ones while trying to avoid the tangled politics of the tense U.S.-Iran relationship.

Even as the Americans' captivity passed the 100-day point this week, the families of Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal together have orchestrated a sophisticated public relations campaign that has included joint family statements, a Web site and online petition, even a logo. And they have been careful not to criticize Iran or its leaders, instead repeating requests for compassion and leniency for three young people they say simply went astray when they crossed into Iran while on a hike in a part of northern Iraq popular with tourists.

Yep, Iran reached out their open hand and grabbed three innocent Americans to hold as hostages.

We keep pretending that Iran is a friend just waiting to be made, while Ahmadinejad and the Iranian mullahs don't even pretend to be anything but evil.

Oh, Woo Hu!

India is learning that under the Obama administration, being our friend counts for little when our polcies put priority on making new friends out of rivals and enemies. And when that friendship was forged by George W. Bush, you can write off your investment as our president woos China's Hu Jintao:

Mr Obama is committed to the partnership with India as part of which New Delhi has placed arms-purchase orders worth $3.5bn last year alone. But he has also signalled that any relationship will not be at the expense of fast-growing ties with Beijing.

Washington now intends to abandon elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including a joint military drill in Arunachal or a 2007-style naval exercise involving the US, India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. Even US naval manoeuvres with India and Japan are out. Washington is charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal issue.

As his secretary of state did in February, Mr Obama has started his Asia tour in Japan and will end in China – the high spot – while skipping India.

For India this must be so confusing. How can so-called nuanced, smart diplomacy put the democracy India behind autocratic China in our State Department's pecking order?

It's a mystery until your throw away your English-Hindu dictionary and understand that our policies are now just old fashioned appeasement of China dressed up as hope, change, and foreign policy realism.

Better luck with the next administration, India.

All Hail the Dithering!

Wow. This exercise in making dithering look like statesmanship is sucking up to the first order:

President Barack Obama's drawn-out decision-making on Afghanistan is sending messages. To the Afghan government: Clean up your act. To the Pentagon: I'm no rubber stamp. To the American public: More troops can't be the sole answer.

So what presidential messages are left out of this analysis?

Say, like the message to our enemies that we can't quite work up the courage to take them on?

Or the message to our allies that their sacrifices might be for nought since we might be about to bug out on the war and leave them hanging?

Or even the message to our troops fighting and dying in Afghanistan right now for a war that our commander in chief might decide is too nuanced to win? Oh, excuse me--the president wants an "exit strategy." You know what I think of that.

But no. Never mind those messages. The president is going to show those Pentagon generals who's boss.

And this would be amusing if it wasn't so at odds with our reputation:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters Thursday that the president was nearing a final decision, and he referred to one of the central questions Obama and his advisers have wrestled with for weeks.

"How do we signal resolve and at the same time signal to the Afghans and the American people that this isn't an open-ended commitment?"

Yeah, after retreating from Vietnam in the 1970s, Lebanon in the 1980s, and Somalia in the 1990s, plus the strenuous effort by our Left to lose in Iraq this decade, some people might not get that our military commitments aren't open-ended? Message sent and understood, I believe.

Send the message to friends and foes alike that we will destroy the jihadis who seek to kill us and that we fight until we win.

Ho Hum

Fresh on the heels of getting their naval butts whipped by the ROK navy, North Korea unleashes the dreaded chest thumping and poo flinging tantrum that we've come to know and love:

On Thursday, the North's main Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary that it will not tolerate what it claimed was South Korea's aggression in its waters.

"Our unchanged principle is no forgiveness and merciless punishment for warmongers who infringe upon our republic's dignity and sovereignty," said the commentary, carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. It didn't specify how the North would punish the South.

Oh dear. What are the North Koreans going to do to South Korea? Bleed on them?

Seriously, North Korea has lost the ability to invade South Korea with much chance of success. North Korea would have to be lucky so many ways and South Korea would have to be stupid and unlucky in so many ways to describe a path to North Korea victory, that it is almost pointless to even consider the possibility.

And North Korea does not yet have a nuclear threat to unleash. And even if North Korea did, we'd surely use that as an excuse to nuke North Korea's nuclear infrastructure.

So North Korea can basically shell Seoul, with or without chemical weapons, and then watch as South korea invades North Korea. The only question would be whether Seoul would press for regime change in the north or settle for pushing a buffer zone north of the DMZ to shield Seoul from bombardment.

Now That's Enlightened!

Chinese officials have discovered a nifty way to cut down on the number of petitioners who appear at their doors so their monthly statistics don't look so bad to their superiors:

Kidnapping villagers who have traveled to Beijing to lodge complaints with China's central government and keeping them in unofficial jails to silence them has evolved into a lucrative cottage industry that police refuse to crack down on, a human rights group said Thursday.

The report by New York-based Human Rights Watch on China's "black jails" is based mainly on interviews with 38 people who said they were nabbed by thugs while trying to bring grievances to the central government. ...

It blames a civil service evaluation system that uses a point system to penalize officials if too many people from their jurisdiction complain to the central government and rewards those who are able to minimize grievances. Because bonuses and promotions are linked to evaluations, it is economical for officials to pay people to intercept, detain and intimidate petitioners, it said.

Of course, this kidnapping practice makes it more difficult for the central authorities to use the complaints process statistics as an early warning system for recognizing rising discontent outside the cities.

Still, as much as some of our purported deep thinkers admire China for dictating global warming policies, you'd think this ad hoc system of off-the-books jails wouldn't count as "reasonably enlightened."

Angling for the Retreat Option?

President Obama wants more options than those presented to him for waging the war in Afghanistan:

Obama is still expected to send in more troops to bolster a deteriorating war effort.

He remains close to announcing his revamped war strategy — troops are just one component — and probably will do so shortly after he returns from a trip to Asia that ends Nov. 19.

Yet in Wednesday's pivotal war council meeting, Obama wasn't satisfied with any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, one official said.

The president instead pushed for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government. In turn, that could change the dynamic of both how many additional troops are sent to Afghanistan and what the timeline would be for their presence in the war zone, according to the official.

Ah, he wants an "exit strategy," it seems. The term that those who like to pretend they understand military matters like to talk about. I've said it before and I'll say it again, an "exit strategy" is what you formulate when you want to define at what point you retreat.

I can understand that President Obama might not like that what the military has presented to him as the only options to choose from. But the president needs to understand that the military is at least focused on giving him options to win.

Exit strategies are for losers. Focus on victory. I fear that our president won't pass the gut check he needs to make.

We should fight until we win--even if we don't know when that will be. That's how you wage war.

True Faith and Allegiance

The president honored our dead on Veterans Day today.



Events like this surely impress upon him the special duty he has as the commander in chief. We have but one president and we rely on him to lead us in defense of our nation. I pray President Obama will live up the expectations that those who fight to defend us have in him.

Veterans day (and Memorial Day, more so) takes on special significance at a time of war.

Remember those who serve and who served.

Look Who's Fighting Jihadis!

Iran is mucking about in Yemen, helping Shia rebels.

So Saudi Arabia threw in their army, navy, and air force to smash up the uprising:

Saudi Arabia is trying to set up a buffer zone inside Yemen after its week-long offensive against the Yemeni Shiite insurgents along the border, a rebel spokesman said Wednesday.

Mohammed Abdel Salam said Saudi warplanes and artillery have been shelling deep into border areas to create the zone and drive the rebels away.

"Their goal seems to be establishing a buffer zone or a no man's land on the border," he said in a telephone interview from the rebels' strongholds in Yemen's northern Saada province. "It is obvious, they are trying to scare us and make us leave the area."

Saudi Arabia launched an air and ground offensive against the Yemeni rebels last week after skirmishes along the border. Both Saudi Arabia and Yemen have accused Shiite Iran of backing the rebels raising concerns of another proxy war in the Middle East between region's Shiite and Sunni powers.

And as a bonus when Pakistan or Saudi Arabia goes to war with hopped up Islamists, nobody dares accuse them of anything bad! These countries have the Third World get-out-of-jail card that shields them from charges of killing brown skinned people from the air!

And Saudi Arabia will set up their buffer zone and security fence with no complaints from the United Nations or anybody!

Sometimes, life is just good.

Tour Guide for a Mainlander With a Camera

I've mentioned that I'd worry about Chinese "tourists" doing recon on their trips to Taiwan.


I'm not the only one to wonder about what tourists might see.

Let's Talk Backlash

Even as our leaders and elites worry that we'll react to the murders of Americans by a Moslem-American officer at Fort Hood with the dreaded "blowback" against American Moslems, let's recall where blowback really exists.

In the whole Mohammed cartoon controversy, we worry about offending Moslems and "inciting" them to kill and burn. Funny that "our" publishing is deemed too provocative for Moslems who could justifiably react badly; and "their" murder of us deemed as risking an undeserved "backlash" against Moslems.

And there have been other backlashes, big and small. Rumors of a Koran flushing? Attacks and death! Apparently, no slight against Islam is too small not to justify backlash against the West and no crime against the West is great enough to justify a backlash.

And to repeat what I've written many times, I do not blame Islam for the depravity of some of their members. But those murderers claim to kill for Islam and Islam needs to get their house in order to drain the swamp that creates jihadi recruits.

And we have to stand up to the jihadis to help Islam win their own civil war against the jihadis:

Blathering about freedom of religion, we foster hate speech. By protecting the fanatics, we betray the peaceful majority of our Muslim citizens, leaving them afraid to speak out, since the feds shield the fanatics in charge of their mosques and communities.

Let's be clear: Maj. Hasan's terrorism should not result in a witch hunt against Muslim service members. But soldiers who happen to be Muslims must be subject to the same level of scrutiny and discipline as those of other faiths.

Just as we'd expect the Army to get rid of a disruptive white supremacist, we need to cashier anyone who espouses violent Islamist extremism -- as Maj. Hasan did, again and again.

We have friends in the Islamic world who hate and fear the jihadis as much as we do. Why don't we treat moderate Moslems as allies in the war against Islamo-fascism instead of treating them as part of the jihad by acting like we fear moderate Moslems will be offended if we condemn the jihadis?

Nuancing Up Retreat

Our policy towards Russia and China is called "strategic reassurance."

That is, we act meekly enough so that there is no way Russia or China will worry that we'll react to their rising military power or aggressive actions.

Remember, that's just fancy talk for "retreating."

No doubt that is very reassuring, strategically speaking, for Moscow and Peking.

For our friends and allies who count on us to help them stand up to Russia or China, there's no reassurance at all in that strategy.

But for the Grace of CENTCOM

Steyn recalls the lack of celebration in Western Europe over our victory in the Cold War after the Berlin Wall fell. why? Because nobody there felt like a victor:

There were two forces at play in the late 20th century: in the eastern bloc, the collapse of Communism; in the west, the collapse of confidence. One of the most obvious refutations of Francis Fukuyama’s famous thesis The End Of History – written at the victory of liberal pluralist democracy over Soviet Communism – is that the victors didn’t see it as such. Americans – or at least non-Democrat-voting Americans – may talk about “winning” the Cold War but the French and the Belgians and Germans and Canadians don’t. Very few British do. These are all formal Nato allies – they were, technically, on the winning side against a horrible tyranny few would wish to live under themselves. In Europe, there was an initial moment of euphoria: it was hard not be moved by the crowds sweeping through the Berlin Wall, especially as so many of them were hot-looking Red babes eager to enjoy a Carlsberg or Stella Artois with even the nerdiest running dog of imperialism. But, when the moment faded, pace Fukuyama, there was no sense on the Continent that our Big Idea had beaten their Big Idea ...and, with the end of the Soviet existential threat, the enervation of the west only accelerated.

Indeed. Yet we did not, except for our own European-Americans, fail to view the Cold War as a victory. Why? Because as I've written before, Desert Storm in 1991 was a proxy victory over the USSR:

Remember that this war took place in the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the Soviets in retreat in Eastern Europe, many saw the Cold War as ending because of Gorbachov's decisions or as the end of a long exhausting struggle that the US was winning only by default--the last of two combatants to drop their sword and collapse to the bloody ground.

Could we have pursued our course of action with this view of us--and our power--intact?

What changed this developing view of the end of the Cold War was, first of all, our ability to bribe and coerce a large coalition (so how much did we pay for those Egyptian and Syrian divisions that affected the military campaign not a bit?) to go to war on our side. The enemy didn't even matter for this purpose. The point was that instead of a Cold War division of states, choosing sides as they always did between the US and USSR, the world aligned itself with us. Moscow just watched, unable and unwilling to affect the outcome.

Then the war itself, with a stunning display of our military power that crushed the enemy, cemented the view that American power was unstoppable. We beat a mini-USSR with its Soviet equipment and oppressive government. The proxy victory showed Soviet hardware (or Chinese copies) burning and abandoned in the desert, and left us supreme. No longer the exhausted, lucky survivor; we were victorious. And we felt victorious.

And when, by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union, too, went kaput, we became the hyperpower. The progression was clear: Cold War deadlock; Soviet irrelevance; American military victory; collapse of Soviet Union.

We sent a great army to defeat Saddam's Soviet arsenal. Only Britain sent their armored forces into the teeth of the Iraqi army at our side, and they appear not to be as sullen as the continentals who had only France as their standard bearer--and whose small division was too light to do more than screen our western flank.

One can only wonder how Europe would have developed in the last couple decades if they too had roused themselves to send forces into the battles of 1991 and felt the thrill of victory to give them a feeling of confidence in their society and the West.

The World Does Not End in 2012

We're supposed to leave Iraq completely by the end of 2011 according to our current agreement with Iraq.

It is clear that we need to remain in 2012 and after. Iraq has fine light infantry for internal security but still lacks the ability to support that force logistically and with fire support, air support, intelligence, recon, and air defense. Nor do they yet have a conventional army able to defend against foreign invasion.

Plus our presence helps keep rivalries confined to the political process when the urge to reach for guns to settle disputes the traditional way is still strong. Entrenching rule of law is key to making Iraq a strategic win.

The Iraqis worry about their future without us to stabilize Iraq, too, depsite past noises about wanting us out. If we are too eager to leave, Iraqis wonder if we value the outcome of Iraqi politics:

A number of Iraqis expressed dismay that after the August 19 and October 25 bombings, administration statements emphasized that the United States was still intent on pulling out rather than making clear America's willingness to stand with Iraq against our common foes. They are equally dismayed to see the United States reaching out to Iran, which most Iraqis, even most Shiites, see as their country's foremost foe.

"We need you to take Iraqi security responsibility seriously, but we are confused. We are not sure what you want," Mithal al-Alusi, a secular, pro-Western member of parliament, told me. "It was clear in Bush's time, but now we don't know the American position."

It would be a tragedy if through sheer neglect the United States were to throw away the gains that it has given billions of dollars and thousands of lives to achieve. That doesn't have to happen. There are still more than two years before the American military pullout is complete. Given how far Iraq has come since 2007--the year of the surge--it is obvious that a lot can change in that time. Let us hope that one thing that changes is that the administration starts paying more attention to this important country at the center of the Middle East and doing more to safeguard its future as part of a larger American security architecture in the region.

When we exited South Vietnam in 1973, South Vietnam stood as an independent country. But we failed to defend what we'd fought to build and so lost it all in 1975.

Very soon--after the next government is formed--we need to initiate talks with the Iraqi government about the role of America in preserving our win in Iraq, keeping the Iranians out, and cultivating rule of law.

IDIOT ALERT!

Beware the revisionists on Vietnam? Is Senator Kerry serious?

We must dispense with a dangerous myth. In an effort to pressure the president to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, armchair commanders have dusted off the old canard that "we could have won in Vietnam if only … " Some revisionists contend we could have won "if only" Congress had not balked at the military's insatiable hunger for more troops and more bombing. Others argue that pacification of the countryside and training of Vietnamese soldiers could have carried the day "if only" we had stuck with these policies longer. Still others argue that we could have won "if only" President Johnson had made a much stronger American commitment when he first decided to send combat troops in 1965.

He is serious. Newsweek is surely the place for a man of his many delusions.

Is anybody seriously considering taking this man's advice on military manners? I'm not sure I'd take his advice on riverine warfare with small craft. Advice on spandex fitting protocols for water sports? Oui. But not much else. Sadly, he was listened to back in the day (AP photo from the linked article).


God help us all. Beware the officer who turns on his own military.

Listen up, LT. I won't speak for all so-called revisionists, but as for me, I don't claim we could have won the Vietnam War but for men like Kerry who made sure we'd lose, I argue we did win.

Only our failure to support an independent RVN from the NVA invasion after we'd left lost us the war, and condemned millions to live under brutal communist rule or die trying to escape by sea.

That's right, Senator Kerry, to put it in terms even you can understand, we actually won the war before you lost it. Thanks a lot.

UPDATE: The honorable senator might start here if he wants to understand the war he served in.

Pick a Number, Any Number

The Obama administration has reportedly picked a number (34,000) for Afghanistan:

As it now stands, the administration's plan calls for sending three Army brigades from the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky. and the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y. and a Marine brigade, for a total of as many as 23,000 additional combat and support troops.

Another 7,000 troops would man and support a new division headquarters for the international force's Regional Command (RC) South in Kandahar, the Taliban birthplace where the U.S. is due to take command in 2010. Some 4,000 additional U.S. trainers are likely to be sent as well, the officials said.

The first additional combat brigade probably would arrive in Afghanistan next March, the officials said, with the other three following at roughly three-month intervals, meaning that all the additional U.S. troops probably wouldn't be deployed until the end of next year.

Note the timeframe. Our Iraq surge put in a new brigade per month and we can't do better than a brigade per three-month time period. We just can't surge better geography.

That will give us 8 Army brigades and two Marine brigades when the reinforcement is completed.

I think it should be enough to win. But I seem to be in the minority on this issue.

More importantly, has our president decided to win the war? That's his most important decision.

UPDATE: No decision has been made:

"Reports that President Obama has made a decision about Afghanistan are absolutely false," Jones, who generally keeps a low public profile, said in a prepared statement Monday night. "He has not received final options for his consideration, he has not reviewed those options with his national security team, and he has not made any decisions about resources. Any reports to the contrary are completely untrue and come from uninformed sources."

Silly me, assuming a decision had been made.

Somone in the military may be trying to salvage as much of their troop request as they can with a leak.

Domestic Contingency Operation

As I wrote, the Fort Hood attack was a terrorist operation, regardless of whether Major Hasan had outside help or was an al Qaeda wannabe:

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.

The latter is just amazing, and on top of the flying imams case, yet another indication that the idea that Moslems in America face a backlash here is just ridiculous. A known al Qaeda sympathizer could remain in the Army for months after suspicions were raided.

And this tolerance can be contrasted with our DHS worry that returning Army veterans could be recruited into domestic terrorist groups even as Hasan may have been trying to contact actual terrorists!

We have to stop avoiding the obvious conclusion that religion plays a role in the terrorism we fight. We don't have to condemn all Moslems to face the fact that our enemies justify their murder sprees as an expression of their Islamic faith.

We have to insist that Islamic leaders control their wild men. Which means that one day we'll have to have a day of reckoning with the Saudis who fund the jihadi-firendly version of Islam that motivates the killers we fight.

Entrenching Democracy

The issue of the Kurdish-Arab divide in Iraq has been papered over to get new elections on track:

Iraqi lawmakers passed an election law Sunday night, overcoming a weeks-long impasse and averting a constitutional crisis that threatened to delay the U.S. troop drawdown.

The vote was held during a rare evening session preceded by intense lobbying efforts by U.S. and U.N. diplomats, who had grown increasingly frustrated by the sluggish pace of negotiations and the acrimony that characterized them.

"This was amazing for me," Kurdish lawmaker Ala Talabani said after leaving the session. "There was a lot of discussion, a lot of arguing, but we finally were forced to listen to each other. It's a nice feeling -- that we're on the path of real democracy."

To address the most contentious issue, Kurdish and Arab lawmakers agreed that votes cast in the disputed province of Kirkuk would be examined closely for months after the election.

One problem at a time. Let's just solve one problem at a time.

The Axis of El Vil Marches On

Yeah, we belatedly sided with the good guys in Honduras to foil the Chavez/Castro plot to make Zelaya a dictator, but that doesn't mean that the Axis of El Vil is defeated:

Fidel Castro learned a lot from Chilean President Salvador Allende's failed power grab in 1973. And he used the lessons of that bitter defeat to coach Venezuela's Hugo Chávez to dictatorship under the guise of democracy more than 25 years later.

Now Latin America's revolutionaries may be experiencing another setback and this time they can't claim that a military coup removed their would-be dictator. Instead, former Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was arrested by order of the Supreme Court and deposed by Congress. And despite enormous international pressure, the Honduran democracy has so far defended its rule of law.

Yet far from giving up, Castro protégés are already using what they learned in Tegucigalpa in El Salvador. Central America's most promising free-market democracy is now fighting for its life.

Our enemies want to win. I hope our State Department won't take so long to defend El Salvador.

Oh yeah, and that goofball Chavez is making noises about war with Colombia.

The Guns Will Not Go Quietly

Several years ago, as money dried up, the North Korean elites understood that they could not afford to buy the loyalty of the armed forces. So the elites settled on a strategy of regime survival that relied on nuclear weapons to deter foreign attempts at regime change and relied on the spy agencies to keep the people and military in line. Kooks, Spooks and Nukes, I called it.

But there is an obvious problem with this, as I wrote:

[If] the regime in Pyongyang is demoting the army, even if it is unable to take on the South Korean and American armies, it will still be strong enough to fight the regime secret police. Downgrading the army will likely set in a spiral of mistrust and resentment on the part of the North Korean leaders and the army. The North Korean army might begin to identify more with the oppressed people who along with them will be stuck with the lowest priority in resources. And with the South Korean army quite good, the North Koreans cannot afford to disband significant chunks of their army and visibly appear weaker. This will prevent the North Koreans from concentrating the fewer resources into keeping a smaller army happy.

The army is showing it isn't happy with their demotion in the pecking order when money and luxury goods for the generals are on the line:

The North Korean armed forces has solved its growing logistics (supply) problems by taking control of many industries that export goods (and thus earn hard currency to pay for military imports.) The military already owns many factories that produce military goods, but now they are going after those that make it possible to buy foreign goods. While various government ministries argue over who should control which industry or factory (all of them state-owned), the army has recently been settling the arguments by pointing out that it has more firepower than everyone else.

The North Korean army isn't siding with the people yet, but they are refusing to accept their impovershment to supply the spooks and nukes. Even poorer, the army does have a lot of guns and those guns can work wonders on those without very many guns. That's perhaps quite a liberating realization by the armed forces' generals.

How long before the army turns their guns on the kooks?

When the Dominoes Fell

Twenty years ago in this season, the cracks in the Berlin Wall spread throughout the Soviet empire and into the Soviet Union itself.

First the Warsaw Pact crumbled and exited the Soviet system and then the USSR broke apart, in as fine an example of the "discredited" domino theory as you'll ever find.

Which is why I always offer those events as supporting evidence that our stand in South Vietnam did indeed help keep much of South, Southeast, and Northeast Asia from falling to the communists by holding the line until countries from India to Korea could strengthen their governments and societies to resist the idealistic appeal of communism (which was in stark contrast to the reality of communism, but the appeal was there for those without experience of living under communism).

Critics of the domino theory for Vietnam ridiculed the idea, ignoring the dominoes of Cambodia and Laos nearby that did fall and ignoring what might have fallen had the North Vietnamese won in 1965 rather than 1975.

And recalling the events of 1989 is why I hold out hope that a democratic Iraq could yet be a catalyst for the spread of democracy and rule of law in the Arab Moslem world. The reforms of Lebanon in 2005 were stymied as the Iranian- and Syrian-sponsored violence in Iraq spread throughout 2006, but I have hope that as Iraq settles down, we may yet see an Arab and Moslem spring just as revolutionary as 1989 in Europe.

UPDATE: East Europeans celebrated the destruction of the wall with a falling dominoes event:

After the leaders spoke, the former head of the Polish Solidarity movement, Lech Walesa, toppled the first of a chain of giant coloured dominoes set up along a 1.5 km (0.9 mile) stretch where the Wall once stood.

The figurative dominoes themselves know what happened regardless of what the nuanced say cannot happen.

Grant me that this is funny.

UPDATE: A refresher on those Vietnam dominoes.

Still Five to Ten Years Away?

Iran is closer to weaponizing a nuclear device than we thought:

The UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has questioned Tehran about evidence that Iran has experimented with an advanced nuclear detonation technology. According to a new report by the Guardian, the technology would allow Iran to make smaller and simpler warheads than would be possible with first-generation nuclear weapons.

The very existence of the technology, known as a "two-point implosion" device, is officially secret in both the US and Britain, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design. The development was today described by nuclear experts as "breathtaking" and has added urgency to the effort to find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis.

So, how confident should we be that we have plenty of time to cope with Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions?

And on a related matter, who needs a full missile defense system in eastern Europe that can actually protect America from long-range Iranian nukes?

Good News and Bad News

If you pay attention to the fighting in Afghanistan as compared to Iraq, it is easy to see a major difference--the Afghans fight as opposed to just using IEDs, which was a frustrating tactic since often there was nobody to fight against at the moment of attack.

Already there have been a couple close calls just this year where outnumbered American infantry held off determined Taliban assaults trying to overrun an outpost. I don't recall that ever happening in Iraq during the counter-insurgency phase.

Strategypage puts it in perspective:

At the height of the fighting in Iraq, about 4.8 percent of the troops there were being wounded each year. Currently, in Afghanistan, 6.2 percent are being wounded. Part of this is due to the increasing use of roadside bombs, which is now on the same scale as Iraq, at its worst. But there's also a lot more ground combat. The Afghan enemy is more likely to stand and fight that their Iraqi counterparts. The Afghans not only fight more, but they fight smarter.

Which means that as we fight a counter-insurgency campaign, we invite more such attacks on isolated platoons out in the boonies where they can offer protection to the people.

We on the home front who have sent our troops into battle have to have the fortitude to endure the occasional loss of such outposts. We can't win every battle when the enemy masses infantry to hit us hard. Either by skill or our bad luck, we'll lose some of those battles. The key will be winning the vast majority of the battles (for God's sake, make sure our rules of engagement allow us to quickly provide air and artillery support to units under assault) and protecting the nearby people so they don't feel compelled to side with the enemy (or conversely, who won't help the Taliban even though they'd like to out of fear that we aren't going anywhere).

So for those who were frustrated that the enemy in Iraq wouldn't stand and fight and mostly used IEDs and mortars, the good news is that the enemy in Afghanistan will stand and fight.

Which is also the bad news, since the latter enemy tactic gets more of our guys shot.

Who is Clinging to God and Guns Now?

So, a hopped-up jihadist wearing a US Army uniform, and holding a commission as an officer, decides to go to war with America, killing thirteen and wounding 30 or more at Fort Hood.

So logically, the first concern isn't that a Moslem major in the US Army pulled off the most bloody terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11. The first concern is that the long-feared "backlash" against all Moslems will be triggered by this murder spree. Even our president seems to focus more on this unlikely future than the actual attack.

Thankfully, a Moslem-American veterans group in no uncertain terms condemned the attack.

Look, German-Americans in 1917 faced a backlash. Japanese-Americans in 1941 faced a backlash. Moslems in modern America? Not so much. And that's a "not so much" after 8 years of war against jihadis who claim to kill in the name of Islam. But we have not turned on American Moslems--nor should we.

This record is good. Heck, even I worried about a backlash if the war went on long enough when I wrote just after 9/11 about how our war should progress.

But we've been pretty darned good as a nation in not retaliating against innocent Americans who are Moslem. Yet the so-called leaders of American Moslems seem far more worried about a possible "backlash" than in condemning the killer and working to root out the strain of Islam that propels killers to shout "God is Great!" and commence the infidel killing.

We are at war with Islamo-fascists. Major Hasan essentially joined those Islamo-fascists and is guilty of waging war against America. I'm sure the UCMJ has some pretty specific penalties for that involving either a noose or a volley of bullets. And none of them constitute a "backlash" against Moslem-Americans.

All I'm asking is that we should remember who is dead right now and who did the killing.

UPDATE: If you want to know how little of a "backlash" there has been against Moslem-Americans, consider that Hasan was free to go about his business despite suspicions going back months:

Law enforcement officials also faced questions about whether they had missed possible warning signs. Six months ago, investigators came across Internet postings, allegedly by Hasan, that indicated sympathy for suicide bombers and empathized with the plight of Muslim civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a federal official briefed on the situation. The official, and another source, said investigators never confirmed whether Hasan was the author of the postings and did not pursue the matter.

The postings were among a handful of possible red flags that preceded Thursday's rampage, in which 13 people were killed and 38 were wounded in the deadliest mass shooting on a U.S. military installation to date. Friends and acquaintances said Hasan had been increasingly agitated over the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he reportedly said the U.S. "war on terror" was a "war on Muslims." Officials have seized Hasan's computer to determine his role in the blog posts and other writings.

Huh. He didn't believe Afghanistan is the "good" war? Go figure. He has lots of company in America now, I suppose.

So now the government will begin the inquiry into what possibly could have prompted the murder spree. Stress perhaps? Sadly, his upcoming deployment to Afghanistan would have been his first. Still, perhaps the investigators will dream up a pre-traumatic stress disorder to blame rather than explore other inconvenient lines of inquiry.

Oh, and in another funny coincidence, the worlds of Hasan and the 9/11 killers overlapped a bit. And there is more on his motivation:

Fellow Muslims in the US armed forces have also been quick to denounce Hasan's actions and insist that they were the product of a lone individual rather than of Islamic teachings. Osman Danquah, the co-founder of the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen, said Hasan never expressed anger toward the army or indicated any plans for violence.

But he said that, at their second meeting, Hasan seemed almost incoherent.

"I told him, 'There's something wrong with you'. I didn't get the feeling he was talking for himself, but something just didn't seem right."

He was sufficiently troubled that he recommended the centre reject Hasan's request to become a lay Muslim leader at Fort Hood.

Hasan had, in fact, already come to the attention of the authorities before Thursday's massacre. He was suspected of being the author of internet postings that compared suicide bombers with soldiers who throw themselves on grenades to save others and had also reportedly been warned about proselytising to patients.

At Fort Hood, he told a colleague, Col Terry Lee, that he believed Muslims should rise up against American "aggressors". He made no attempt to hide his desire to end his military service early or his mortification at the prospect of deployment to Afghanistan. "He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there," said his cousin, Nader Hasan.

Again, it bears repeating that Moslem-Americans in our military are an asset. Hasan is responsible for his actions.

And further, I admit that Hasan was possibly a nut not motivated by his view of Islam.

But we must also accept the likelihood that maybe he just fervently believed in a nutty version of Islam that has motivated many more like Hasan to murder in the name of jihad.

If the latter is the case, how can we possibly say that Hasan is insane? Every enemy jihadi would be "nuts" in that case. We can't let our elites' refusal to distinguish between Islamo-fascism and Islam twist our inquiry if it looks like Hasan decided to be a jihadi freelancer. Let's not lessen the guilt of jihadi killers by calling what is surely an alien way of thinking actual insanity.

Quietly Changing Their Mind

I wasn't sure if the agreement we brokered to pretend to allow Zelaya to return to power (because the Honduran parliament will never approve it) was really a victory for democracy. I feared Zelaya and his thug allies in Latin America would bully their way back into power in Honduras.

But it looks like this might be a win for the good guys:

When the U.S. last week finally brokered a deal between ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and the man who replaced him following the June 28 coup, de facto President Roberto Micheletti, observers wondered how the Obama Administration had won Micheletti's agreement. That's because the pact allowed for Zelaya to be restored to office before Honduras' Nov. 29 presidential election - a prospect Micheletti had fiercely opposed. But as the dust settles, the more common question this week is, What was Zelaya thinking when he signed this accord?

The Oct. 30 agreement, in fact, leaves it to the Honduran congress to decide whether the leftist Zelaya should be restored before the presidential vote (in which he's not a candidate). But Zelaya, still holed up in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa since sneaking back into the country from exile in September, appears to have grossly miscalculated the odds of the legislature voting in his favor, and that leaves a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the accord. On Friday, Zelaya told Radio Globo that the accord was "dead," adding that there was "no sense in deceiving Hondurans."

I was sure shocked that the apparent poison pill for Zelaya would appear a good deal to him. I wondered if I was missing something given our long support for Zelaya in the so-called coup.

I guess not. Congratulations to the Obama administration for reversing course and supporting the good guys. I'm horrified it took so long to do the right thing, but they did.

And no, I won't insist on the administration admitting error as Bush opponents demanded every time the loyal opposition charged he made a mistake.

Will They Try to Win?

We will send more troops to Afghanistan:

Flournoy, the Pentagon's policy chief, led a U.S. delegation that briefed NATO ambassadors Thursday on the Obama administration's review of the Afghan war. Officials released a transcript of her remarks from that meeting.

"No one is talking about leaving Afghanistan, or even standing pat. We are increasing our commitment and we're talking about how best to do that with both civilian and military resources," Flournoy was quoted as telling NATO ambassadors.

The allies are engaged in intense deliberations regarding the future of the 71,000-strong NATO force in Afghanistan, nearly half of which is American. The U.S. military also has about 36,000 soldiers in Afghanistan who serve outside NATO under their own command.

I hope the Obama administration isn't completely focused on how many troops to send to Afghansitan as the major choice they have to make.

As I've long argued, deciding to win is the major decision President Obama must make:

I titled this sparse post, "Thus Conscience Does Make Cowards of Us All?" because I want our president to make the fundamental decision to win the war in Afghanistan. All other questions are less important than that basic decision. And the title hits to the concern I have over President Obama's Dover visit. Will he decide to lose our war in Afghanistan--whether quickly or slowly--because the guilt of ordering our best young people to defend us who then die in our defense, is too overwhelming for him to bear?

The president should always be aware of the price real people pay defending our country. But his reaction to that awareness--that guilt even--must not be to hide our troops and refuse to use them to win. Our president must make sure our troops die for a good reason, die for victory, die despite the best training, leaders, and equipment we can provide them, and die knowing that their sacrifice will not be in vain.

If he does those things, our troops--as well as friends, allies, and neutrals--will know that when we go to war, we go to win. That's what presidents are supposed to do.

Our military can figure out how to win with the resources given if only they know that they can keep going until we win. It may take longer or cost us more casualties, but our military can do it, I believe.

Our troops will fight to win if they know our leadership is committed to winning. And a lot of Americans who don't care much for the president's domestic policies will receive a lot of support from Americans who want America to win our wars--even if President Obama gets the credit for winning.

Let's Talk Real Problems in Afghanistan

As much of our sophisticated class debates the many ways that we can't win the war in Afghanistan, with recent emphasis on the problems of training effective Afghan security forces, let's save a little space to discuss how we have hurt the enemy by going after their leaders and technical people:

These "decapitation" operations have been on the increase over the past few years. The Taliban and al Qaeda have already figured out what is going on, and are increasingly paranoid when it comes to informers, using their own cell or satellite phones, and the sight of any unidentified aircraft in the area. The terrorists keep changing the way they meet and communicate, yet they keep getting killed. While the terrorists can replace leaders and technical specialists, they cannot replace them with people of equal skill and experience. And as they move into the shallow end of the talent pool, more mistakes are made. Al Qaeda operatives who have fled Iraq to Afghanistan, have noticed, and commented on, the lower level of technical expertise among their Afghan brothers. While most Iraqi terrorists were literate, and some even had formal technical training, most Afghans are illiterate, and any technical training they might have was acquired informally. This has led to more bombs that don't go off on cue, or, worse yet, explode while being worked on, or emplaced. This sort of thing will happen more, as the talent pool gets diluted. The terrorists have a nearly inexhaustible supply of gunmen and suicide bombers from the hundreds of pro-terror religious schools in Pakistan.

Just as civilian-based efforts to decouple the people from the insurgents and terrorists is necessary to win rather than relying on a pure military strategy to kill the enemy (mind you, military power is necessary to allow civilian efforts to work), even within the military component, killing the rabble gunmen is not enough to win militarily (mind you, when they attack you or go after the people, you have to kill them)--you have to get the leadership to make it impossible for the vast supplies of rabble recruits to be deployed.

The enemy has problems far worse than we have. They aren't ten feet tall. Stop acting like retreating in the face of these enemies is a wise policy designed to avoid getting our asses kicked.

Our Theoretical Iran Policy

In theory, Russia could support sanctions on Iran for refusing to halt nuclear work that will lead to a nuclear weapon:

"If an agreement is reached on programs for the enrichment of uranium and its use in Iran for peaceful means, then we will gladly participate in these programs," Medvedev said in an advance copy of the interview released on Saturday.

"If the Iranian leadership takes a less constructive position, then anything is possible in theory," he said, adding he had discussed the issue with U.S. President Barack Obama.

"We wouldn't want this to end with international sanctions because sanctions, as a rule, take us in a very complex and dangerous direction. But if there is no movement forward, nobody is ruling out such a scenario."

Whoa! Hold on there, cowboy! How's that for a Russia willing to cooperate with the Obama administration on stopping Iran? It's almost as if we got nothing for halting our original planned ballistic missile defense plan in eastern NATO!

Foreign policy realism was supposed to leverage Russian help by screwing over our new NATO allies Poland and the Czech Republic in order to pressure a mullan-led Iran that would--if pressured and induced enough--would give up plans for nuclear weapons. In theory, it's a fine realpolitik strategy. But it won't work.

Yet while Russia is clearly uninterested in pressuring Iran (and if they did it is likely they'd have an agreement with China to do the dirty Security Council veto deed), we continue to pursue an agreement with Iran even as they continue to murder and abuse democracy protesters.

Yeah, those protesters inconveniently refuse to be suppressed in the name of nuanced diplomacy:

The New York Times reports that opposition protesters in Iran, in between beatings and tear-gassing from riot police and the regime’s hired thugs, have started a new chant: “Obama, Obama -- either you’re with them or you’re with us.”

In case you were wondering what the answer might be, the statement yesterday from White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said it all. Gibbs declared that Obama administration officials were following reports of the unrest and “hope greatly that violence will not spread.” This was a great moment in the annals of diplo-speak. No mention of who might be committing the violence, or who might be its victims. Violence, it seems, has the capacity to spread without any human involvement.

The point of the statement, of course, was to avoid saying anything that might offend the rulers in Tehran or give any encouragement to the regime’s opponents. The Obama administration is locked into its approach on Iran and is seemingly impervious to changing circumstances. It has never adjusted to the unexpected rise of a nationwide opposition to the regime and still tries to move forward as if there were no turmoil and unrest in Iran.

One day, even the "reality-based" people leading our Iran policy will conclude that Iran really wants nuclear weapons, Russia (and China) will not help us stop Iran, and that smiling hands-outstretched diplomacy with Tehran is just viewed by the mullahs as an amazing opportunity (undoubtedly supplied by God) to stall us while they get nuclear weapons.

And on the day that the administration decides it can't talk Iran out of nuclear weapons, the choices will boil down to containing religious nutballs, military action, or overthrowing the regime.

I'd hope that the lack of reason displayed by the Iranians would disabuse the administration of the idea that these guys who sponsor terrorism on a grand scale without nukes can be contained--even if for some reason the Iranians decide they won't use nukes.

And worse, will be have the option of trying for regime change any more? Really, after suffering under our policy of throwing the Iranian protesters under the bus for the last five months, will the protesters even be pro-American anymore after being abandoned for so long by the Obama administration? Or even around? The regime could yet succeed in crushing the protest movement.

So our options will be either suffering a nutball Iranian mullah regime armed with nukes or launching a military campaign lasting weeks to destroy Iran's nuclear infrastructure.

Ah, nuance!

Who We Fight

David Rohde's account of his captivity by the Taliban for many months inside Pakistan shows the extent of Taliban control there. And it shows more that should raise questions about just how we can alter our behavior to satisfy them and whether we should deal with them rather than defeat them. The answer is that we can't ever satisfy them without becoming like them, and we'll have to kill a lot of them before the remainder rediscover a live-and-let-live attitude.

What the Taliban believed is hard to square with our supposed actions that "caused" the jihadis to hate us:

Other accusations were paranoid and delusional. Seven years after 9/11, they continued to insist that the attacks were hatched by American and Israeli intelligence agencies to create a pretext for the United States to enslave the Muslim world. They said the United States was forcibly converting vast numbers of Muslims to Christianity. American and NATO soldiers, they believed, were making Afghan women work as prostitutes on military bases.

Their hatred for the United States seemed boundless.

Ah yes, let the "why do they hate us" debate continue even as the jihadis make no secret of the bizarre reasons expressed as to why they hate us.

But the Taliban are not joyless killers. This is what the Taliban enjoyed:

The videos were impossible to avoid at night, when I was confined to the room the guards were in. They were little more than grimly repetitive snuff films. The Taliban executed local men who had been declared American spies. Taliban roadside bombs blew up Afghan government trucks and American Humvees. The most popular videos documented the final days of suicide bombers.

Say whatever you will about their reasons for hating us and their love of Infidel blood, these guys do think big. Their goals, too, seem incompatible with compromise:

Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of “Al Qaeda lite,” a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan.

Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.

Of course, Rohde doesn't write about this aspect of the jihad, but the jihadis also believe that the non-Moslem world is just a problem to be corrected by bringing us into the Moslem world eventually. Insane? Perhaps. But that's what they want to do.

We can't deal with these jihadis. We have to kill them. Oh sure, after we've killed a lot, the remainder will likely be willing to be cut a deal and be quiet as the price for making sure we no longer seek them out to kill them, but we're a long way from that day.

And for Pete's sake, support Moslem moderates so they can replace the appeal of the wild-eyed radicals who pose as "true" Moslems. Otherwise, the killing of jihadis will have to go on a lot longer than it would otherwise. In the long run, the civil war within Islam is just as important as any battlefield that we fight on today.

It's a long war, if you'll recall. And it's long because our enemies aren't willing yet to stop trying to kill us and too many angry Moslem young men can be recruited because they believe jihad is a great thing.

Looking Beyond Taiwan

The Taiwanese say that China is now building an aircraft carrier:

The head of Taiwan's National Security Bureau told parliament construction of the carrier had begun, Lin Yu-fang, a legislator of the ruling Kuomintang party, told AFP.

However, the security chief, Tsai Teh-sheng said the carrier's construction "has not been smooth" and that the Chinese navy may struggle to put it into service by 2012 unless it makes a manufacturing breakthrough soon.

The Taiwanese should not fixate on 2012 as the earliest point of danger. China simply does not need aircraft carriers to invade Taiwan. China has plenty of planes that can reach Taiwan from bases in China.

And while putting a PLAN aircraft carrier battle group northeast of Taiwan would surely compel the US Navy to approach Taiwan more carefully rather than charging in with a single carrier of our own, China's submarines, and land-based ballistic and cruise missiles that can target our ships will already slow us down.

Remember, China doesn't need to defeat us to win a war over Taiwan. China just needs to slow us down while China beats Taiwan.

And with the cork in the bottle that Taiwan represents for Chinese naval power projection safely in China's hands, China will want that carrier to send to south Asian, Middle Eastern, and African waters to project China's power and protect their interests. Mind you, I bet the Chinese would sacrifice a carrier battle group (heck, our Navy would probably fixate on sinking the PLAN carrier, forgetting the real mission is to save Taiwan) to slow us down long enough for China to conquer Taiwan, but I doubt they need to send a carrier on a Viking funeral mission.

So I'd worry that China would like the sea lanes cleared before 2012. Taiwan has wasted much of the last decade by letting China race ahead in military capabilities. Does Taiwan even have the time to correct this error?

Picking the New Good and Bad Wars

In the good old days, Iraq was the "bad" war we had to abandon in order to fight and win the "good" Afghanistan war. I wrote some time ago that once the Iraq war was over (from either winning or losing it), that Afghanistan would become the new "bad" war.

The only question is then what becomes the new "good" war that we have to prepare for--and of course preparing for that conflict requires us to get out of the "bad" war.

Well folks, we have a winner!

If American interests require the prevention of an Iranian bomb, then major combat operations in Afghanistan must end before the moment to decide on Iran is at hand. That’s not the track we’re now on. General McChrystal’s plan is a stop-loss effort that cannot achieve a level playing field upon which to drive a new Afghan diplomacy, let alone achieve anything remotely resembling victory in three years or less.

There are only two alternatives to preserve a credible military option, and hence a credible diplomacy, with regard to Iran: accept defeat in Afghanistan, whatever we may call it, and leave; or surge militarily to reverse the perception of Taliban ascendancy, and then drive a new political arrangement there to end the war within the next 18-24 months.

On the bright side, the author at least would prefer to win, but the keys to the post are we have to get out of Afghanistan to confront the "real" threat--Iran. And since winning quickly isn't an option, for those who think this way they will--perhaps visibly saddened by the choice they are "forced" to make given the "facts" they see--we'll have to lose the Afghanistan war. They may even wipe away a visible tear when they say we must retreat from Afghanistan.

The very premise of needing to disengage from Afghanistan to confront Iran is wrong.

One, we have plenty of air and naval power to confront Iran. We simply aren't using that much of either to fight in Afghanistan or hold gains in Iraq.

Two, if it is ground forces we need, is the author really saying we need to withdraw ground troops from Afghanistan in order to deploy them to a position adjacent to Iran? If so, look at a map. Afghanistan just happens to be adjacent to Iran!

And the other major avenue to invade by land (to pose a credible military option as the author wants) is Iraq. So logically, troops withdrawn from Afghanistan would need to go to Iraq. But if we want to maintain the threat to invade Iran from Iraqi territory, why not just postpone our withdrawal of combat brigades from Iraq? Let's chat with the Iraqi government about that option, eh? I mean, you'd think about that if you really want to maintain a credible military option against Iran.

And if we're not going to keep ground forces in Iraq, just where do the withdrawn forces from Afghanistan go to maintain a credible military option against Iran? Okinawa?

Face it, we don't lack a credible military option against Iran.

What we lack is credibility that we would ever use our military power to stop Iran. And I don't know if anything we can do will convince Iran's rulers that we will use force to stop them if they don't stop pursuing nuclear weapons.

Really, destroying two hostile regimes to their west and east in the last eight years--where we have close to 200,000 military personnel on the ground now, not to mention the forces we have in the region and at sea around them--has made no impression on the Iranian mullahs.

We already have the air and naval power to level their military. We have lots of nukes ourselves. What more could we do or how much more power must we concentrate around Iran to convince the mullahs we are serious?

It's almost like the mullahs believe God is on their side and that divine intervention makes our Earthly power irrelevant.

But hope springs eternal here among some who pride themselves as being a member of the reality-based community. Their pursuit of the new "good" war so we can get out of the now "bad" war in Afghanistan has identified a candidate for the new "good" war--Iran.

Of course, the seeds for a future twist are present. Note the qualifier--"if American interests require the prevention of an Iranian bomb," we'll need to pivot away from Afghanistan to face Iran. If we do that pivot, the big-brained set will surely conclude that the question of "if" is to be answered in the negative. Heck, who worries about Iran having nukes, eh? Let's focus on North Korea! Or Burma! Or Venezuela! Or Palestine! That's always a favorite task, eh? Wasn't it once considered a fact that we had to solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue before doing anything about Saddam?

But still, that's for a future nuance festival to figure out. For now, congratulations all around to Nuanced-Americans for finally settling on a new good cop/bad cop paradigm!

Keeping Faith With the Oppressed

The Berlin Wall was brought down by people who had not lost hope that their evil system of government could fail if the West--if barely--held firm against accepting communism as the inevitable winner of the Cold War:

Though watched by ubiquitous secret police and their informers, these nations maintained the will to persevere against tyranny and oppression. It was a daily struggle, and spirits flagged as Soviet premiers told the United States, "We will bury you."

Many in the West, including the U.S., believed that the communists had history on their side. The wry debate reply from the defeatist lefties favoring unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament was "better Red than dead." For decades -- I repeat, decades -- this crowd had a media pulpit from which its self-proclaimed intelligentsia preached the moral equivalency of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and at times dropped the all pretense and fingered the U.S. as the "fascist state" and global oppressor.

In the language of the defeatist left, the U.S. was the jailer, the warmonger, the threat to world peace.

The Berlin Wall's collapse exposed that Big Lie, as did the documented moral, political, economic and ecological wretchedness of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, we still hear echoes of this "blame America" cant lacing al-Qaida propaganda and the lectures of hard-left reactionaries like Bill Ayers. The great anti-American lies of the Cold War are recast as the great anti-American lies of the War on Terror.

Will we hold firm in the belief that our society deserves to defeat the Islamo-fascist ideology that seeks to destroy us?

Because if we do, know that just like East Europeans, there are Moslems who don't want to live under an evil and oppressive society:

Security forces have used batons and tear gas to disperse opposition supporters in the Iranian capital, Tehran, witnesses and state media say.

Unconfirmed reports said the authorities had also opened fire.

Video footage and photos showed what appeared to be large crowds of opposition supporters being chased by security forces in riot gear.

It came as an officially backed demonstration was held to mark 30 years since the seizure of the US embassy.

Thousands were present at the anti-American rally, about 1.5km (1 mile) from where opposition supporters gathered in Haft-e Tir square.

Other groups turned out in other parts of the capital to voice their opposition to the regime.

Is it really "progressive," or "smart," or "nuanced," or "realistic" to abandon those with hope in order to craft a paper deal on nuclear arms that nobody believes Tehran would uphold?

There are people who truly need hope and change--despite months of detention, abuse and murder--yet our government secretly hopes they'll just die quietly off our television screens so we can have a lovely signing ceremony with blood-stained monsters over a lovely document in English, Farsi, and French, lovingly adorned with red ribbons and wax seals bearing the official images of proper diplomacy.

Dying in Committee

It looks like Honduran democrats will reap the benefits of stubbornly refusing to give in to demands to quietly accept the dictatorship of Zelaya.

I feared the worst and wondered if we'd accept the deal ending our sanctions if the Honduran legislature refuses to let Zelaya back into office.

Apparently, the answer is yes:

Zelaya sent the letter Wednesday, a day after assistant U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Shannon told CNN en Espanol that "the U.S. will recognize the outcome" of Honduras' Nov. 29 election even if Honduras' Congress does not restore Zelaya to power first.

Zelaya asks Clinton in his letter "to clarify to the Honduran people if the position condemning the coup d'etat has been changed or modified."

Good. The idea that Zelaya suffered from a coup has always been ridiculous.

The real coup leader--Zelaya--may get nothing after all.

Too Important to Abandon

We need local Afghans to defeat the Taliban and prevent al Qaeda from regaining a foothold in Afghansitan.

So when incidents like this happen, remember that our enemies want us to condemn all the Afghans who wear our side's uniforms:

An Afghan policeman opened fire on British soldiers in the volatile southern province of Helmand, killing five before fleeing, British and Afghan authorities said Wednesday, raising concerns about discipline within the Afghan forces and possible infiltration by insurgents.

Don't fall for their ploys. The Taliban want us to distrust the majority of our loyal allies so our distrust will drive them to support the jihadis.

Soldier on, with our local allies at our side who will kill far, far more of the enemy than will ever kill our guys, and who will ultimately be the force that wins the war.

And if it makes you feel better, far more of the enemy die from their own people fingering fellow jihadis who then die in our ambushes, raids, and air strikes.

This is just the way the war works.

Sure, But ...

So this is why our jihadi enemies try to kill lots of us in inventive ways--often in suicide attacks?

Former President Bill Clinton on Wednesday drew a link between extremism and lack of opportunity in the Middle East, telling students in the region that suicide bombers are driven by a feeling they have more to gain in the afterlife than now.

The former president hushed a packed basketball stadium at the American University in Dubai when he asked, rhetorically: "What leads people to blow themselves up?"

Answering his own question, Clinton said: "They believe they have more to gain in the next world than this one."

Huh? Don't all believers ultimately believe that the rewards of the afterlife are far better than this world's?

And even if lack of opportunity leads many young Moslems to downgrade their worldly options to look to the afterlife, this hardly answers the question of why these afterlife seekers make great efforts to take as many infidels down with them.

I mean, plenty of people in central Africa have probably far more reason to despair of their fate in the world and look to the afterlife for a reason to have hope. But how many of them are going down in a blaze of religious glory parked outside a luxury hotel?

So even if we solve the problems of opportunity, not all will succeed any more than all succeed in the West. How do we solve the problem of believing that mass murder is the appropriate response to lack of opportunity?

President Clinton's view on the causes and cures of suicide bombings is nonsense.

Real Numbers

How many troops are fighting in Afghanistan? That isn't as simple a question as it would appear.

Dave M. emailed me, noting a post on battle intensity that had a Wall Street Journal chart that I relied on for estimating troop numbers in Afghanistan. He recalled a Washington Post article with different numbers and wondered what I made of that discrepancy. It was certainly odd.

The original chart from the WSJ showed:

Yet Dave noted a July Washington Post chart at odds with my numbers drawn from the above chart:



Whoa. The first thing I noticed is that the former was a Department of Defense derived chart and it shows changes over time. I liked it because I could eyeball the average for the year. The latter is a CENTCOM report that shows troop strength in December of each year. If they were each using the same numbers, I'd expect the latter approach to generally show higher numbers since our troop strength is going up. But since 2006, the CENTCOM numbers are way lower and not higher.

Or could it be from some confusion based on counting OEF US forces and not NATO ISAF's US forces? That might explain the discrepancy in later years given our ramping up of US forces for OEF under US command rather than under ISAF. (UPDATE: It looks like about 36,000 of our troops are not in ISAF with about 30,000 being in ISAF.) And the earlier year differences could be explained by the simple difference of static December-to-December counts versus my rough averages.

Looking around a little more, to my horror I found that the numbers game is really confusing with different organizations giving out different numbers. For example, if your job is to count how many people get combat pay in a given year in Afghanistan, when you consider rotations in and out of the country or theater, when one guy rotates out in June to be replaced by another guy in July, it would be totally legitimate to count that as two soldiers (at 6 months each) rather than one soldier-equivalent for the entire year. Oh, and definitions used to compile different counts are subject to change.

I couldn't find the Boots on the Ground (BOG) reports cited, which I think would be best for the purposes of my combat intensity analysis. I don't really care to consider troops near Afghanistan supporting the campaign. Although on the donwside, it is a point-in-time number when I'd rather have average numbers of boots on the ground. The CRS report above does have monthly BOG numbers for Iraq and Afghanistan which I may mine to refine my eyeballing of averages for the year, but I don't know where to get new numbers.

In the short run, I plan to update my battle intensity post in the new year using the original WSJ data and using actual 2009 OEF Afghanistan casualties (and note that I already had to revise that post since I originally used OEF casualty data, briefly forgetting that Afghanistan is a subset of OEF--albeit the major component. Indeed, I've read articles that clearly used OEF data as Afghanistan data.). At least trends using the same source of data should be visible even if the troop data isn't the one I'd select as a basis of measurement.

So if and when I do that exercise in the future, I won't just add whatever number for 2010 I find to either chart above since I'll have no idea if they are drawn from the same source or standard. I'd have to start from scratch. I'd like to use the BOG data despite its shortcoming (point-in-time count), which appears to be actual people on the ground who can be shot at, but I can't find new sources for that data.

An interesting problem, eh? You'd think there'd be one number to use but there isn't. And I bet if I didn't know this (I mean, I knew there are different ways to report troops in the theater or supporting it, but assumed numbers portrayed as in Afghanistan meant "in" Afghanistan), darned few journalists are aware of the danger of mixing and matching.

Nobody is lying, here. But the number depends on what your organization is supposed to count. So reporters need to be aware of what number they ask for, what number they actually receive, and what that number really means.

Troop Density

I think I found this study several years ago, when discussing the ratio of security forces to population necessary to win a counter-insurgency. The 2% rule (20 security forces per 1,000 people) isn't carved in stone.

I rarely felt we lacked sufficient troops to win in Iraq as I did a number of back-of-the-envelope calculations over the years, using different troop density assumptions for different regions of Iraq. Many supporters and opponents of the Iraq War relied on the "rule" and claimed we had too few troops to win and even argued the surge was way too few to win. Yet we won.

I've started to apply my same reasoning to the Afghanistan campaign and we sure look like we're in spitting distance of having enough troops to win. The above study is useful again, given the current debates.

As always, rather than debate what level of troop density to achieve in Afghanistan, I'd rather start with a conviction that we deserve to win and a decision that we will do what it takes to win for as long as we need to fight.

The Devil They Know

Apparently, some of the scum (I mean, poet-victims) at Guantanamo Bay don't want to leave the Hellish conditions they are supposedly subjected to there and risk confinement or trial here:

As President Barack Obama's deadline to close Guantánamo looms, some occupants of the notorious detention centre would rather prolong their stay than be sent to maximum security prisons on the US mainland, according to camp officials.

Grant me that this is funny.

When Near

So-called analysts are buying the Chinese charm offensive that portrays China as far from wanting war with Taiwan:

The threat of conflict between Taiwan and China is becoming increasingly remote, analysts say, but investors still face a range of political risks.

Uh huh.

The Taiwanese military isn't as deluded and knows quite well that China is indeed near:

"Despite the easing of tensions across the Strait, China has not reduced its military deployment targeting Taiwan," the defence ministry said in its annual report.

Are "analysts" really so gullible that they believe China's smiles negate their still-proclaimed goal of absorbing Taiwan and China's military build up across from Taiwan?

Classic Russian Behavior

Russia practiced nuking and overrunning their western neighbor, Poland, back in September (on the 70th anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet division of Poland, recall).

And as was the Soviet tradition when they planned to invade NATO during the Cold War (and Russian claim over their Georgian invasion last year), the Russian plan was billed as a counter-attack after being attacked:

The manoeuvres are thought to have been held in September and involved about 13,000 Russian and Belarusian troops.

Poland, which has strained relations with both countries, was cast as the "potential aggressor".

The documents state the exercises, code-named "West", were officially classified as "defensive" but many of the operations appeared to have an offensive nature.

The Russian air force practised using weapons from its nuclear arsenal, while in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which neighbours Poland, Red Army forces stormed a "Polish" beach and attacked a gas pipeline.

The operation also involved the simulated suppression of an uprising by a national minority in Belarus – the country has a significant Polish population which has a strained relationship with authoritarian government of Belarus.

While bizarre in that there should be no way that Russia would use nukes on a member of NATO given the threat of retaliation, we really should plan to move forces into Poland in an emergency just in case.

Still, was the Russian operation really about Poland? Call me suspicious, but I think it is fairly safe for Russia to practice against "NATO" knowing NATO won't react by arming up.

As I thought the last time I commented on a big Russian exercise to repel a NATO invasion, doesn't it make far more sense for the Russians to be thinking of China?

Come on! Might not Russia want to suppress Chinese immigrants in Russia's Far East and might not Russia need nuclear weapons to equalize China' ability to put more troops into the fight than Russia?

But I'm the suspicious type, I suppose. Can't help it.

When God Smiles On You

As I wrote, who can wonder why Iran thinks God is on their side when the mullahs contemplate the West's response to Iran's nuclear drive?

Taheri explains the sad state of the West's position:

In a speech Thursday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described the latest negotiations as "a diplomatic victory" for his administration. He said he welcomed "nuclear cooperation" with the 5+1 group -- but would not accept the deal in "the form presented to us."

Read it all. Iran isn't even willing to agree to a plan that is clearly in Iran's interests and will not slow Iran's nuclear drive. That's how little they think of us. The Iranians won't even pretend to buckle to a false demand from the West that we seem willing to pretend is real.

After all these years os talks and so-called pressure, the Iranians welcome nuclear cooperation with the West because so far cooperation has meant allowing Iran to advance to being within reach of becoming a nuclear-armed state.

Who can blame Ahmadinejad and the mullahs for believing God is on their side? Really, what evidence would you put up to refute that belief?

Never Mind

Apparently, the corruption-ridden Afghan election "fiasco" (as our administration was putting it) is now OK with the Obama administration:

Afghanistan's election commission proclaimed President Hamid Karzai the victor of the country's tumultuous ballot Monday, canceling a planned runoff and ending a political crisis two and a half months after a fraud-marred first round.

The Obama administration — which has been waiting for a government deemed legitimate to emerge in Kabul before announcing whether to deploy tens of thousands more troops — quickly commended the ruling.

"We congratulate President Karzai on his victory in this historic election and look forward to working with him" to support reform and improve security, the U.S. Embassy said in a statement. Britain and the United Nations also issued statements of congratulations.

Perhaps we're fine with it because we no longer hold the central government as the key player in winning the war.

It's a 9/10 World After All

You'll recall the flying imams, who by press accounts behaved rather suspiciously on a flight, and were removed by the crew.

They sued, of course.

And they've got a bit of money apparently, in a settlement with the airline:

The case of the flying imams who were removed in November 2006 from a USAirways flight in Minneapolis for questioning by law enforcement authorities concluded in the Minnesota federal district court before Judge Ann Montgomery. The parties arrived at a settlement of the case on October 20 in a court-supervised conference. The amounts paid by the defendants remain confidential.

So when our jihadi enemies use one of our airplanes as a weapon, and you wonder how they possibly could have done that after 9/11, recall this case.

The Power of Cheap Electricity!

In the nuclear standoff with the West, the Iranians are getting cocky:

Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday compared the power of Iran's enemies to a "mosquito," saying Iran now deals with the West over its nuclear activities from a position of power.

The comment from Ahmadinejad came as Iran is negotiating with the West over a U.N.-backed proposal to ship its uranium abroad for further enrichment.

Isn't it amazing what the thought of soon possessing the complete fuel cycle of domestic nuclear power plants can do for your confidence? A suspicious person might think the Iranian lounge singer/president is looking ahead to having nuclear weapons.

But who'd think that?

Just Vewy, Vewy, Quiet

The proud lefties at Newsweek pronounce European power as not dead--just vewy, vewy, quiet:

It's often easy to view Europe as an aging continent in terminal decline. Pundits and politicians lament that the European Union is weak, riven by conflict, and unable to translate its size and wealth into hard power. Or, as British Foreign Minister David Miliband put it last week, "the European whole is less than the sum of its parts."

Yet such charges of drift and decline miss a stark reality. As the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall arrives next week, Europe finds itself more united, prosperous, and secure than at any time in history. EU members have become some of the planet's most adroit globalizers, opening themselves to the world while keeping in place their extensive social services—Germany alone exports as much as China. The continent has also fared better than expected in the downturn. Europe's unemployment rate now bests America's, and France and Germany managed to escape the recession faster than the United States.

For people eager to make America just as quiet as Europe, it is no surprise that Europe would be extolled for being able to defend their interests with so little actual hard power. And with no actual visible power to highlight, the author just makes it up. Europe is essentially protected by American power abroad and the absence of any power able to invade them at home.

Face it, while individual powers have some power to project, as a whole, Europe isn't just quiet--it's dead.