So Why Didn't We Address Their Root Causes?

Jeff links to an interesting post that is really quite fascinating.

The more I think about his point the more compelling I find it. We never questioned ourselves in the wake of Oklahoma City. We never asked "why did McVeigh hate us?". We never discussed reversing desegreation or giving into his racist tendencies. We never even considered any of his demands nor worried about his religious or ideological sensitivities. We acknowledged McVeigh for what he sas, a hate-filled, neo-Nazi psychopath, and tried, convicted and executed him without apology to anyone except his victims on that horrible day.

We didn't do any soul-searching per se (sure we wanted to know what made this man tick and why he did what he did). We didn't declare ourselves guilty and decide we needed to be more sensitive to the racists among us. We condemened McVeigh. He was considered a criminal and an aberration.

An excellent point. For the white supremacists, we dismissed their root causes out of hand. We didn't claim that chickens were coming home to roost for letting minorities into our society. We didn't wring our hands over sending US troops into segregated high schools to compel a hostile society to accept integrated schools. Forced bussing for integration may have been controversial but nobody could claim that segregation was a worthy goal and expect to be given a respectful hearing. And rightly so. One could argue about tactics, but the objective of equality should not be debatable. But why do some on our Left (and even some on the Right) assume that the root causes cited by the Islamofascists are justified?

"Understanding" our enemy must mean knowing more about them in order to beat them--not to justify our surrender to them by elevating vile goals into reasonable objectives that we must accomodate.

Of course, we can't really fight the Islamists the way we fight the neo-Nazis. Neo-Nazis are atomized and marginalized. Their international web reaches all the way to Europe, but the web is composed of similarly addled losers living at the edge of society. There are no deep pockets providing ample money and educational resources to provide ideological consistency across the ranks of neo-Nazis and white supremacists. They are a law-enforcement problem.

This difference is very important. If we are ever to fight Islamists as we fight neo-Nazis, we must atomize them. We must deprive them of financial support and ideological support that sustains them.

This is why democratizing the Moslem world is so important.

And this is why one day, we will have a day of reckoning with Saudi Arabia. Their money and support makes Islamists a threat to our very cities instead of a bunch of losers we laugh at for their silly garb and farcical beliefs--and occasionally prosecute and execute if their sick rants over cheap and plentiful beer turn into violent action.

Nuke Worthy

Sure, he's just one general and he's hardly an official spokesman. Just spouting off. Yet it is disturbing:

"If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition into the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons," Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu, a dean at China's National Defense University, told visiting Hong Kong-based reporters. His remarks were reported by The Asian Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times.

Zhu stressed he was expressing a personal view, not official policy, and was confident that China and the United States would not go to war, the reports said. While Zhu is a serving officer, he isn't involved in policymaking.

Sure, General Zhu could be an idiot and the Chinese might never go to nuclear war over Taiwan.

Yet his assumptions are that US intervention would be met with nukes. Comments like this could delay American response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan enought to give the Chinese the window they need to capture Taiwan without our interference.

And his assumption is that Taiwan is internal Chinese territory. Again, a way of looking at things that lowers the nuclear threshold since an attack on one's homeland is touchy, one could say.

Of course, it could mean that he doesn't think that Chinese conventional forces could withstand American intervention. This is good. I agree that we would win if we intervene quickly enough. But I worry that the Chinese think they can get around our superiority with surprise, speed, and cleverness to exploit our weaknesses.

And then I go to the part where the general says he doesn't think there would be war between the US and China. He doesn't say no war to absorb Taiwan--just no war between the US and China. What if the Chinese have convinced themselves that the US would never intervene over Taiwan because we would never risk nuclear war as the Chinese think they would? Right there you have the magic ingredient that makes an invasion of Taiwan possible--the assumed unwillingness of the US to risk nuclear war over Taiwan.

General Zhu may or may not be speaking official policy, but the assumptions behind the statement seem very dangerous. The Taiwanese need to become a hard target that can hang on long enough to get our help and with enough strength and depth to need as little help from us as possible.

Strategic competitor, indeed.

A Blur of Citations and Graphs

Dan Darling comments on Richar Pape's argument that suicide bombers are not mostly religious-driven but are nationalists trying to eject occupiers. Tamil Tigers, I'm sure, provide the vast amount of the data needed to make Islamist suicide attacks seem like just part of a larger whole. Why Palestinians weren't suicide bombing until recently is another flaw ignored, it seems.

When I read another piece about Pape back in June, his piece seemed ... off. Reverend Sensing hit it hard (link in my post) so I didn't try to wade in on it, but I did want to comment on a part that was so startlingly wrong that it really caused me to wonder about Pape's whole analytical ability. Pape wrote that rather than giving the enemy reason to wage war by remaining on the continent, we needed to return to our successful policy of balancing offshore as we did in the decades of the 70s and 80s:

Our best strategy is to return to the policy that the United States had for decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. secured its crucial interest in oil without stationing a single combat soldier in the Persian Gulf, instead relying on an alliance with Iraq and Saudi Arabia, the presence of naval air power off the coast and land bases to rapidly deploy troops in a crisis. Offshore balancing worked splendidly against Saddam Hussein in 1990 and is again our best strategy for securing our interest in oil, while preventing the rise of more suicide terrorists coming at us.

I wrote:

What is the good professor talking about? In the 1970s, after the British abandoned their stability role "east of Suez," we relied on arming the Shah of Iran with advanced weapons so he could be our policeman of the region. By the end of the decade that didn't work out so well when Iran was taken over by nutball Islamists--you know, the ones who now pursue nuclear weapons and long-range missiles and support terrorism? Good call, eh? And our so-called alliance with Iraq consisted of giving just enough support to keep the nutso Iranians under Khomeini at bay in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.

Our ally Saudi Arabia was a weak substitute as our proxy enforcer. We led a Western naval flotilla in 1987-1988 to protect the oil shipping routes during the Tanker War and engaged the Iranians on a number of occasions.

As for our ability to rapidly deploy troops, the Rapid Deployment Force that President Carter set up to do this was, as wags put it, much like the Holy Roman Empire: it wasn't rapid or deployable and it wasn't much of a force. And when Iraq finally defeated Iran in the First Gulf War and turned on Kuwait in 1990, we had to rush forces to the Gulf to save Saudi Arabia and reverse the Kuwait conquest. Offshore balancing did not work at all. Our last minute naval demonstration on the eve of the August 1990 Iraq invasion of Kuwait impressed Saddam not one bit. We had to deploy several corps of ground forces to eject him. Not a very good record of relying on naval and air power to preserve our interests in the face of powerful land threats in the region.

If Pape's conclusion is so wrong, what about the rest before it? How can I trust his analysis of why we face suicide bombings? Dan comments in a way that I agree with completely:

Pape's thesis strikes me as one of those things that you have to be an academic in order to believe unless you dumb down the term occupation to the point where you accept al-Qaeda's definitions and make the word nothing short of meaningless.

Sometimes these people live in an echelon above reality.

Fear is the Beginning of Wisdom II

As we approach our fourth year of fighting Islamist terrorism as a real war, opponents of the war over here claim we are just enraging the Moslem world and radicalizing them to support jihad against the West. Fighting is just playing into Osama's deep plan to trick us into pasting his movement and chasing him into remote caves to hide while the Moslem world builds the caliphate. And trying to impose Western democracy on them (as if fascism and socialism aren't Western imports, unfortunately) is just making things worse.

Indeed, this poll (via Instapundit) shows that America is not terribly popular:

Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan and Turkey -- also now have unfavorable views of the United States. In the sixth, Morocco, views are divided. The governments in all six countries are allied with the United States and recipients of U.S. aid.

Well there you go, we're not popular. Oh, but wait. There's more:

Osama bin Laden's standing has dropped significantly in some key Muslim countries, while support for suicide bombings and other acts of violence has "declined dramatically," according to a new survey released today.

In a striking finding, predominantly Muslim populations in a sampling of six North African, Middle East and Asian countries also shared to "a considerable degree" Western nations' concerns about Islamic extremism, the survey found. Many in those Muslim nations see it as threat to their own country, the poll found.

"Most Muslim publics are expressing less support for terrorism than in the past. Confidence in Osama bin Laden has declined markedly in some countries, and fewer believe suicide bombings that target civilians are justified in the defense of Islam," concluded the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

Compared with previous surveys, the new poll also found growing majorities or pluralities of Muslims surveyed now say democracy can work in their countries and is not just a political system for the West. Support for democracy was in the 80 percent range in Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco; in Pakistan and Turkey, where significant numbers of respondents were unsure, it rated 43 percent and 48 percent respectively.

Well what do you know? After nearly four years of waging war against Islamists and promoting democracy, Moslems generally think less of Osama, suicide bombings and other terrorism, and Islamist beliefs, and approve of democracy in growing numbers. Fancy that. Don't they know that fighting a threat to them and us is just supposed to piss them off? Don't they read The Nation? Are they ignorant of the Daily Koz? Haven't they attended classes taught by the world-renowned professor Juan Cole (He speaks Arabic, you know!)?

In another decade of fighting this war and imposing democracy in the Moslem world, the nuclear option in Moslem countries might be the debate about filibusters over judicial nominees.

Money, Guns, and Lawyers

World War II is the "good" war fought with unity of purpose and without incidents to shame our soldiers. It is in such a contrast to the Iraq War, if the comments of the anti-war side are to be believed.

But our troops in World War II killed prisoners and abused them, abused civilians, made terrible lethal mistakes, failed to plan properly, failed to commit a large enough Army, and acted for political reasons. In other words, they fought a war. And despite their failings, they fought it more cleanly than usual for combatants. And they fought for a good cause.

But of course, like our current war, not everybody thought it was a good war. Max Boot has this interesting passage:

Even in January 1942, when German armies were at the gates of Moscow, George Orwell wrote in Partisan Review that "the greater part of the very young intelligentsia are anti-war … don't believe in any 'defense of democracy,' are inclined to prefer Germany to Britain, and don't feel the horror of Fascism that we who are somewhat older feel."

As if to illustrate Orwell's point, a pacifist poet named D.S. Savage wrote a reply in which he explained why he "would never fight and kill for such a phantasm" as "Britain's 'democracy.' " Savage saw no difference between Britain and its enemies because under the demands of war both were imposing totalitarianism: "Germans call it National Socialism. We call it democracy. The result is the same."

Savage naively wondered, "Who is to say that a British victory will be less disastrous than a German one?" Savage thought the real problem was that Britain had lost "her meaning, her soul," but "the unloading of a billion tons of bombs on Germany won't help this forward an inch." "Personally," he added, with hilarious understatement, "I do not care for Hitler." But he thought the way to resist Hitler was by not resisting him: "Whereas the rest of the nation is content with calling down obloquy on Hitler's head, we regard this as superficial. Hitler requires, not condemnation, but understanding."

The Greatest Generation had its idiots, too, insulated from the reality they believed in so much by those who fought and died to protect them:

Orwell's words, written in October 1941, ring true today: "The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from fact. As I have said, it is only possible to people who have money and guns between themselves and reality."

For the modern age, I'd make it money, guns, and lawyers, but the reality is the same.

Kill the enemy. Let historians in the next generation understand them.

And remember that the history of a good war fought by good men who advanced relentlessly with no self-doubts and sterling judgment is a myth. History is made by those who live it and not passed down in a book as if it could only turn out the way written. For those who fought and won our "good" war, winning did not seem inevitable nor did it seem universally good. But once won, who could admit to feeling doubt? Who would wonder about our cause? Who would admit to thinking the defeated enemy was little different that ourselves? We are living history right now. Winning or losing is largely up to us and our allies. Thus far, we are in the same boat as our fathers and grandfathers who fought--and won--the good war in 1945.

All I've Ever Wanted to Know

All I've ever wanted to know about the non-scandal of the Affaire de' Plame is what incompetent or scheming CIA bureucrat (and as a bureaucrat I say that with utmost respect) out to undermine the administration's Iraq policies sent the partisan Joseph Wilson on a mission so clearly unsuited to him?

I mean, really, the man couldn't identify the type of tea he was sipping if it was handed to him poolside. Oh wait, that he could do. Seriously though, this man apparently lied about his findings, lied about what he told the CIA, and lied about his wife's role in his mission. And we're supposed to take his claims seriously?

But Wilson can appear on all the magazine covers he wants. In the end I don't care about his fanciful tales of high tea in sub-Sahara Africa. The real scandal is a CIA that has its own foreign policy and can't be bothered to follow the policies of its elected boss.

Who decided to follow Plame's advice to send Wilson on such an important mission? That's what I want to know.

Be Careful What They Wish For

Our Islamist enemies seek a religious war in which they think they will defeat us and create a world caliphate of believers in their mold. This is a fantasy that can only lead to defeat. How they are defeated is the problem.

A couple days before the London bombing, I wrote that I believe Europe's Moslem problem might be beyond their power to correct. If Europe can't assimilate Moslems as America has done with far greater success, Europe will have a fateful choice:

Eventually the Europeans will have to choose between surrender and harsher options. Will Bosnia and Kosovo be the models the Europeans will follow in desperation as the alternative to surrender? I don't think the Euros are so permanently soft after five decades of easy life under our protection that they have forgotten centuries of brutal ruthlessness. The Europeans turned the Moslems back inside Europe itself at Tours and Vienna, and expelled them from Spain. They are capable of doing so again.

After the London bombing, the idea of expulsion has been raised:

"We will look urgently at how we strengthen the procedures to exclude people from entering the UK who may incite hatred or act contrary to the public good, and at how we deport such people, if they come here, more easily," Blair said.

Prior to the bombings on three underground trains and a bus in London that killed at least 52 people and injured 700 -- the worst attack on British soil since World War II -- counter-terrorism proposals by the British government had been denounced as a threat to civil liberties.

The London attacks have plunged the country back into a painful debate about how best to prevent terrorist attacks without undermining democratic values.

Tolerance is a luxury thrown aside very easily when you have to scrape human remains from your subways. Should the death toll in an attack exceed July 7th's 52, or should WMD be used, much wider expulsions might be considered. And if that doesn't work? Well, we can win ugly.

Jeff at Caerdroia has a long post that explores what I've said about needing to win on our terms to avoid facing the choice of losing millions or nearly literally destroying Islamic society if it won't control the nut cases who seek to kill us in nuclear blasts. He too wants our effort to reform Islamic politics and society to succeed:

If this fails, though, eventually we are once again led down the road to genocide, ours or theirs. If we won't surrender, and they won't stop, and we cannot reduce the attacks to the point where they don't threaten our existence as free and prosperous societies, it is virtually inevitable that genocide will occur. And given the imbalance of power, which itself is the reason that a stalemate will never happen as long as the West is threatened, the likelihood is on the side of the Arabs/Muslims being the targets of the genocide. Short of surrender or us being the targets of genocide, that's the worst outcome I can imagine.

All of this is why I deeply, sincerely hope that the President's strategy is correct, and that we can stay with the strategy long enough for it to have determinative effect. The alternatives range from aweful to unthinkable to unconscionable.

Losing is not an option. Moslems need to carefully consider whether they wish to indulge the wishes of a violent jihadi minority to spark a war of civilizations between Islam and the West.

Right now we have a choice of winning strategies and we've decided to win by saving Islam from its violent minority. Should our casualties grow too high and should the wider Moslem world remain too detached from fighting the terrorists, we can always decide to fully exploit our power to win the old fashioned way--by destroying our enemies.

I won't sleep well at night if we have to decide to destroy our enemies utterly to avoid defeat. But the alternative of defeat is no alternative. Not to me and I imagine not to a majority in the West. How we win depends on the Moslem world.

That scares the hell out of me.

Blogiversary

I completely forgot that yesterday was my third anniversary of starting The Dignified Rant. I opened up the original blog on July 12, 2002, on Yahoo! Geocities, with a plethora of thematic areas although Foreign Affairs was the main point of the blog. I built it on an existing portfolio site that I made to highlight my publications. The "blog" originally had no permanlinks since I didn't anticipate I'd have much to say more than once a week at best. I'd have a current page and an archives page. Lileks was a major inspiration to start blogging since his site showed me that I didn't need to use classic blogging.

In February 2004 I rigged up some ersatz permanlinks when traffic started to pick up and Joe and Winds of Change chided me for no permalinks. Jeff at Caerdroia mentioned it, too.

By the fall of 2004, I could see that space was going to run out in a year. Clearly, I underestimated my ability to drone on about defense and security issues. Since I want space for other things on that blog, I decided to start up on Blogger with proper blogging limited to national security themes.

My old site is now The Dignified Rant: Home Edition. If you are reading this site, you may like List of Annoying Things linked at left. Otherwise it is old national security posts, stuff on my home life with pictures, and very occasional attempts at humor. I don't post there nearly as much as I want and do have projects in mind for that site that I haven't had time to get to yet.

I have not grown tired of the project though I've had lulls of motivation when I posted out of a sense of duty to do my part to bolster the home front and to raise issues about national security. My time in uniform was a while ago and I was not required to do anything tougher than sweat a bit. I am, however, under no delusions about my impact as a blogger. Several thousand hits a month is hardly a lot; though I've been linked to by big sites. Reverend Sensing is the largest site to link to me and I remain grateful for the blogroll listing. Instapundit has brought the most hits with a number of links over the last two years. Again, many thanks for his traffic. Other smaller blogs have linked to me as well and I am somewhat humbled that I have been deemed link-worthy by even a few. I considered joining Roger Simon's blogging news project and looked at his material, but the thought of having some semi-obligation to write actually depressed my desire to post. I'll forfeit a chance at more traffic via this project to stay a stand-alone project. I'll succeed or fail on my own. That's the way I like it.

My only regret is that my writing for publication has suffered in the last two years as projects started pre-blog made it to print or petered out after getting rejected. I have but limited free time and my writing time has been soaked up with this project. I have several pieces that I could rework and send out with not that much effort but they languish. I did enter one contest early this year and still await the results, so I have not been totally unproductive at least.

I'm sorry for the lack of comments but I couldn't give them the attention they deserve. Comments impose a responsibility on the blogger to monitor and address comments and I don't have the time to fulfill that responsibility. One day I would like to add comments if I'm still doing this years from now.

Thank you for reading and sometimes writing. Nice comments and constructive criticisms have far outweighed hate mail and idiocy. I have been amazed that I have people reading literally in every time zone. Not many readers, as I noted, but perhaps ten percent are from addresses identified as from other nations.

One day I really mean to start spell-checking this stuff.

And I must start a blog roll. Soon.

Fear is the Beginning of Wisdom

This isn't in response to any particular article or event, just something I've pondered.

Opponents of the Iraq War seem to claim that all bad things have followed from overthrowing Saddam's dangerous and murderous regime. I mean, they'll admit that "of course" Saddam was "bad," but don't then draw any conclusions from that. It's just boiler plate before getting into the meat of whatever accusation they have.

In particluar, it is common for opponents of the Iraq War to claim that our invasion has prompted the Iranian mullahs and North Korea's Pillsbury Nuke Boy to pursue nuclear weapons as a guarantee that we won't invade them. Of course, this ignores the fact that these countries have nuclear programs going back decades. Thankfully this is just ignorance, because if a country really could go from nothing to nukes in two years since the invasion, we are in for a world of nuclear proliferation hurt. How would we ever get ironclad proof of nuclear capabilities to justify preemption if the process of getting nukes is really this fast?

Opponents also deny that Libya gave up its nuclear program because of the Iraq War. This, the opponents of the war say, was the result of patient diplomacy that started before the Iraq War. Sure, the Italian prime minister recounted that Khadaffi said he came clean to avoid Saddam's fate, but perhaps Khadaffi was posturing to gain good will from the Bush administration. Surely it is a coincidence that negotiations that were fruitless prior to dragging Saddam from a spider hole succeeded after that signal event.

I suppose that these things are possible. We can't really know for sure what Libya would have done in the absence of the Iraq War. I think Libya would have kept going forward on nukes. Opponents of the Iraq War think Libya would have given them up as the result of diplomacy. But who knows? I admit it is unknowable.

There is one thing we know for sure, however. The Iraq War did not inspire Khadaffi to accelerate nuclear weapons development to avoid being a target of American military might. This should be somewhat puzzling for the anti-war side since they are so sure that the Iraq War caused Iran and North Korea to commit themselves to going nuclear as a defensive move.

So, what inspired Libya to give up its nuclear ambitions rather than accelerate them?

Freedom Fighters in Action

My, I guess Michael Moore will be quite proud of his brave Minutmen in action:

A suicide car bomber sped up to American soldiers distributing candy to children and detonated his explosives Wednesday, killing up to 27 other people, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. One U.S. soldier and about a dozen children were among the dead.

The Iraqis don't seem to be confused about the two concepts of brave resistance to tyranny and depraved slaughter of innocents:

At Kindi hospital, where many of the dead and injured were taken, one distraught woman swathed in black sat cross-legged outside the operating room. "May God curse the mujahedeen and their leader," she cried as she pounded her own head in grief.

On the way home from work, NPR reported on a twelve-year-old boy struggling unsuccessfully not to cry as he related the mayhem he witnessed. How can anyone not cry with grief that little children are blown apart deliberately?

How can you not cry in frustration that some here call those fuckers a legitimate "resistance" that deserves to win?

Yes, may God curse those bastards who would slaughter children caught up in the simple joy of getting free candy.

And curse those among us who celebrate or excuse these murderous thugs.

On the Job Training

In our Civil War, it took a good 2-3 years to create a good army out of the enthusiastic rabble that made up our volunteers. A lot of blood was spilled to teach our soldiers the art of fighting. It took that long to weed out the generals who sucked and put the capable leaders in charge of the troops.

Over the last nearly two years I've argued that the path to victory was through turning over the fight to Iraqi government forces. We might have been able to win on our own but for the vast amounts of money and weapons that have made the Baathist insurgency a force powerful out of proportion to their numbers. But that was not to be and no claims of error can erase this simple fact.

But we are standing up a democratic Iraq that inspires loyalty by the majoritiy and we are building Iraqi security forces capable of beating the jihadis and Baathists:

The gangs continue to make attacks on police stations and army bases. These cause casualties, but with a security force of over 200,000 personnel, the attacks, while they make spectacular headlines, are not frequent enough to have much overall impact.

We are winning. And if there isn't a major event to throw us off track, we could be free to draw down our strength in Iraq faster than seems possible today when car bombs still go off within camera range of Baghdad hotels where the Western press stays.

Drive on. And watch out for the Iranians. They want to win, too.

Get More Cooperation

One of the problems that the administration has had is its failure to constantly articulate our reasons for war and its failure to work hard to get public support for the war. There seems to be an assumption that we are right to wage this war (I agree) and that we will win the war before public support erodes (I hope they're right). Even if correct, why wouldn't the administration wage a campaign to maintain support for the war to ensure that we don't have to outrace fatigue?

I have no problem with holding prisoners until they die of old age if that is the duration of the conflict. Let the enemy stop fighting if they are so eager to get their compatriots out of our holding pens.

But if failure to have Congress on board is harming our war effort, let's get Congress on board. So let's have the administration and Congress hammer out an agreement that both sides can live with. And in the process, I dare the opposition to make its claims about gulags and Nazis again.

In the end, I agree with the conclusion here:

THE FIRST AND MOST IMPORTANT RULE for terrorist detention should be: Do nothing overseas that we would be embarrassed to do on U.S. soil. If the war with Nazi Germany had been a 30-year struggle, we would have kept German soldiers in prison until they were old and gray. We may well do this with some of the Islamic "enemy combatants" we've got locked up in our counterterrorist prisons. So be it. If we cannot repatriate detainees to their homelands after we've exhausted their intelligence value because we fear their home countries will allow them to rejoin jihadist groups, lock them up for 10 years till their testosterone drops, and then revisit the question. Frontline holy warriors over the age of 40 are few and far between.

The Pentagon and the CIA should admit, however, that their intelligence officers can regularly make mistakes in their interrogations and debriefings. Interrogation is an art, not a science. Even in the best of hands, judgments can always remain uncomfortably subjective. We should be honest and say that we don't always have the best of hands doing the questioning.

The failure of the administration to get Congress on board our policy of holding terrorists and our treatment of terrorists is harming our war effort. It isn't enough to say that if the loyal opposition didn't scream gulag over too much rice pilaf on the Gitmo menu we wouldn't have this problem. We have to fight a war with the political parties we have--not the parties we'd like to have.

And if we had everyone on board an agreed policy, hopefully only the loonies would still scream that we are intruding on detainee personal space and reading them Harry Potter. But who cares about Amnesty International anyway?

Fuel Gauge

Just in case you might be interested in this little fact, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve will be full in August.

Another interesting development:

"If the (EU) proposal considers Iran's legitimate and legal right to enrich uranium, we will continue the process (of talks), otherwise we won't accept the proposal," senior Iranian negotiator Hossein Mousavian was quoted as saying on Tuesday.

In case a certain nutball regime decides to run full bore toward nukes, it might be nice to have the SPR full.

UPDATE: Ok, I'm specifically referring to one nutball regime in particular. In case patient diplomacy by the EU is only giving the Iranians what they want from negotiations--time to build nuclear weapons.

Just the Two of Us

The six-party talks about North Korea's nuclear arsenal will go on after North Korea finally agreed to return to the table.

North Korea is one of the parties so we can eliminate them as a party interested in getting North Korea to give up nukes. If not, there would be no talks on the issue since North Korea would simply not have nukes. There are no six-party talks (or five-party, or twelve-party, or whatever) over making sure Canada gets no nukes (or Spain, etc.).

China does not want North Korea to be nuclear free enough to risk North Korea's collapse or defeat. Sure, a nuclear-armed North Korea might prompt South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan to go nuclear in the long run; but in the short run, supporting our aim by cutting off the vital Chinese exports of fuel and food would risk North Korean collapse and reunification with Seoul. As a potential arrow in their quiver to shoot at America and Japan, the Chinese won't let Pyongyang die. Lots of North Korean refugees in Manchuria would be unwelcome also. As an aside, how does this short-term calculus bolster the idea that China's ancient culture makes them patient and far-sighted?

Russia still has phantom superpower pains. Even though Russia relies on nukes for defending their shrunken but still far-flung realm, you'd think they'd want proliferation of nukes solidly contained. But no, the instinct to stick it to America and our allies is still too strong for them to apply pressure on North Korea or to side with us to enthusiastically.

Sadly, even South Korea is not reallly with us on this, as their deputy foreign minister makes clear:

"The most important thing is North Korea giving up its nuclear development, but there are motives and reasons why the North wants to have nuclear programs," Deputy Foreign Minister Song Min-soon said on a KBS radio program on Monday.

Song also said the regional powers at the talks needed to take into consideration how any deal would impact on the North's economic and political stability.

You'd think that a country with its capital and a quarter of its population under conventional, chemical, and now nuclear threat would be a little less concerned about the motives for your apparent enemy keeping you under threat of a sea of fire.

But of course, from South Korea's perspective, the north's political and economic stability are important since South Korea doesn't want to win. The cost of absorbing North Korea would make East Germany look like child's play.

As for the nuclear threat to South Korea, who cares? Seoul has been wrecked by North Korea already and for the last five decades a war would have wrecked Seoul just from the conventional forces of North Korea assaulting the city and probably taking it. Even in the last decade as South Korea's strength has grown to the point where we could now defeat an invasion and in my estimation likely hold Seoul, North Korea retains the ability to destroy Seoul with high explosive shelling without even crossing the DMZ. North Korean nukes add little to this calculation. Even if we assume that in another decade that South Korea will have enough strength to invade North Korea and win, Pyongyang could still lob a nuke at Seoul as they went down. Doing anything to upset the current balance is not in South Korea's interest right now.

Nukes are only a new threat to America when Pyongyang can develop long-range missiles and to Japan anytime the North can mount a nuke on a missile.

So in the end, the only two parties that want North Korea de-nuclearized are America and Japan, while the third party you'd think wants to end North Korea's nuclear threat undercuts the coming talks by offering lots of electricty right off the bat:

Japan and the United States urged Pyongyang on Tuesday to abandon nuclear weapons or risk failure in six-nation talks, while South Korea offered to supply its reclusive neighbor with electricity in return for a deal.

What is really disturbing is the very different needs for security that America and Japan have on the one hand and South Korea's security needs. Since America and Japan fear nukes, we are willing to risk conventional war in South Korea with the risk of destroying Seoul in order to forestall a nuclear missile threat to our cities away from the theater. Japan, which has endured two nuclear strikes, probably has more incentive than us pacifist post-war reputation to the contrary. South Korea fears any type of war that could result in Seoul's destruction, and so will risk North Korea possessing nuclear weapons capable of hitting America and Japan. A North Korean collapse could precipitate a war that destroys Seoul almost as much as a North Korean decision to invade. My question is when will these apparently incompatible objectives drive South Korea away from alliance with America?

I would like to take exception to this comment:

"Just having a meeting is meaningless. If you don't make any progress, there is no point," Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told reporters at his residence after his meeting with Rice.

On the contrary, stringing North Korea along with the hopes of getting an agreement among the four powers who don't really want North Korea to give up nukes while North Korea collapses is very meaningful if it keeps the Pillsbury Nuke Boy from rolling the dice on war if it looks like he has two choices: collapse or war. Right now the PNB has a third choice: win in negotiations. As long as we and the Japanese don't lose our nerve, we can slowly squeeze North Korea to the point of collapse.

In the end, our only solution to the competing worries may be to partition North Korea.

A Well-Rounded Navy

A little while back I wrote about the Navy building littoral combat ships (LCS) to go back to the high-low mix of World War II. Right now we have a lot of capital ships even though we call some of them "destroyers":

First of all, I want a fleet second to none. The fact is, we have that easily. So any discussion of our fleet must start with the fact that we could beat any conceivable combination of enemies at sea.

Second, prior to Pearl Harbor, our fleet had a half dozen carriers and a dozen battleships plus some cruisers and lots of destroyers in the surface fleet. We had few ships above 10,000 tons (the heavy cruisers and up) while the rest were 5,000-ton light cruisers and destroyers of less than 3,000 tons. One thing you have to remember is that the 55 "destroyers" of the Arleigh Burke class and the 3 Spruance class that we still have weigh in at 8-9,000 tons. These ships are only slightly smaller than our 24 Ticonderoga class cruisers that tilt the scales at 9,600 tons. [These numbers are slightly different from the Strategypage numbers below.]

Our destroyers are really major capital ships and quite capable. It is a mistake to think that the terms are comparable from pre-WW II days. I thought that with all these capital ships masquerading as minor ships based on terminolgy, the Navy was prepared to build a lot of smaller ships and build up numbers fairly easily, relying on the cushion of our current heavy fleet.

Strategypage writes that we are going to build even smaller ships, littoral surface craft (LSC):

It’s a 1,600 ton (full load) catamaran that is 262 feet long, 72 feet wide and can operate in as little as 12 feet of water. Top speed is about 90 kilometers an hour, which is a unique capability for U.S. navy ships (especially of this size) and a major advantage in coastal operations. Even in rough seas (with up to seven foot waves), the ship can do about 70 kilometers an hour. This is partly the result of using a T shaped hydrofoil. The Sea Fighter has a crew of only 26, and room below and on the deck for twelve cargo containers. These containers can are called "mission modules" and hold weapons, electronics or robotic air, surface or undersea vehicles for jobs like mine clearing, anti-submarine warfare, destroying surface ships or delivering commandoes. The deck is broad enough to handle two helicopters. There is a dock in the rear for launching boats. The ship can stay for sea about eight days at time.

I like this trend very much. Back in April 1998, Army magazine published an article of mine, "Landpower Needed for Decisive Victory" (link to synopsis).

I had earlier tried to sell this to the US Naval Institute (and as a whine, they purchased two articles of mine in the late 1990s yet never published them--thanks a lot...) and for them emphasized the need for a balanced fleet. For the Army audience, I emphasized the problem of influencing events ashore even as the squadrons evolved into more balanced fleets with even a mercenary army organized to project our power ashore.

Even a balanced fleet that finally emerged was, with the local army we raised, only able to win a limited victory from the sea:

Preble's war ended on September 9, 1804, when Samuel Barron arrived. The new squadron was the largest and most balanced yet and included two American-built bomb vessels and nine American-built gunboats. Barron still lacked a ground threat to complement his powerful fleet.

To create a ground threat, the Americans raised a mercenary army around Mohamet Caramanli, brother of the Bashaw and claimant to the throne. The agreement reached between the Americans and Caramanli called for Tripoli to use tribute to pay America for the costs of the war! With some difficulty, the force advanced from Egypt and seized Derna after a march of 600 miles with the support of American warships offshore.

On August 26, 1805, the American Consul General arrived in Tripoli to commence negotiations. Terms were agreed upon on June 3, 1805. America agreed to pay $60,000 for peace and ransom for the POWs, but not the customary annual tribute.

Of course, now we have powerful American land forces engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. And our big-ship fleet dominates the blue water as no navy has ever done. Yet we still need a fleet able to enter the littorals and fight. The LCS and the LSC are necessary components of a balanced fleet to contribute to all war scenarios.

And Skip the Official Report in French and English?

Despots like to disarm their citizenry before the democide or genocide commences. Bad on the morale of the killers if the victims resist, don't you know?

Some argue that the right to bear arms should be an international civil right. I tend to agree. As Instapundit notes:

The U.N. seems to feel differently, of course, but given its record of supineness -- if not outright complicity -- in the face of genocide, that isn't much of an objection.

Of course, if a people could defend themselves, we'd never see the sight of the international community springing into action like this:

Annan told the Financial Times in an interview it was vital for African countries to break their silence to protect the continent's credibility in the eyes of the world.

"What is important -- and what is lacking on the continent -- is (a willingness) to comment on wrong policies in a neighboring country," he said before attending a summit of the Group of Eight (G8) top industrialized nations in Scotland.

Annan did not name Zimbabwe in the interview, but a special representative of the U.N. secretary-general is assessing Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's demolition of shanty towns that human rights groups say has made 300,000 people homeless.

When confronted with the barbarity of Mugabe, the Secretary General unleashes the dreaded oblique rebuke. My only surprise is that Mugabe didn't rush to turn himself in to the ICC for speedy justice.

I'm sure in two years we'll have a professionally done report on the killing fields of Zimbabwe in several official languages, nicely indexed and hard bound with bright ribbons and wax stamps that just scream "we care" to sit alongside the Darfur reports and the other assorted bureaucratic recordings of genocide and inaction in the face of evil.

When Zimbabwe's neighbors don't care enough to do something--or even to say something--I see no reason why we should expend any blood to stop this problem. Remember, Somalia started as a mission of compassion before it ended with a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. And the people who want missions of mercy the most are the ones least likely to support aggressive military action when it becomes necessary.

If we do anything, just drop cheap and simple small arms plus ammo into Zimbabwe. At least give the people a fighting chance. Perhaps it should be their right to defend themselves.

Lack of Respect

The Easily Offended (Easily Offended in a licensed trademark of MoveOn.org and CAIR, and any use of this trademark will annoy them) like to go on about any accidental disrespect for the Koran by a non-Moslem (but hey, burn an American flag freely, they say).

Why do the Easily Offended stay conspicuously silent when Moslems defile Islam? Fighting from mosques, blowing up mosques, using mosques to store explosives and arms, and other mosque-related offenses don't even make the Easily Offended utter a single word of concern.

So this latest won't cause anybody to question the motives of the terrorists in Iraq when they attacked a funeral procession:

Gunmen yelled at Salwa Saihoud, the driver and four elderly passengers to get out. "Some of them were screaming 'shoot them! Shoot them now!'" she recalled.

The seven gunmen hurried into the minibus and drove off, taking with them the six men. They included the late Saihoud's two sons — Saad, 30 and father of two, and Adel, a 37-year-old who could not hear or speak and had two children.

It was the last time the family saw them alive.

A day later, police fished the coffin of 70-year-old Saihoud from the Latifiyah river. The next day, the six men were found with gunshot wounds to the head and neck. Some of the bodies were mutilated.

...

The Saihouds were particularly distressed about the mutilation of the bodies, especially that of 30-year-old father of four Walid Khayoun. His right arm, bearing a tattoo of Imam Ali's sword, was cut off.

But no, hacking and slaughtering never seems to mark the hackers and slaughterers as disrespectful of Islam. I mean, if a few jihadi terrorists think that they are the true believers (although Mahmoud is a little suspicious, as far as the first two are concerned. They once spotted him practicing his Moon Walk when he thought he was alone), who are the Easily Offended to object?

The Shia have been very patient, all things considered. The Sunnis best hope that the Sunni insurgency is quelled before the Shias get angry enough to apply their full power to vengeance instead of building a new and democratic Iraq.

And the best way for the Sunnis to join Iraq is to join forces with the Shias and Kurds to destroy the foreign Sunni jihadis in a war of national resistance.

Um, Never Mind

North Korea is a serious problem that we must solve. The Pillsbury Nuke Boy is a threat who must be eliminated.

I'm no U.S. Senator but this approach is just ridiculous:

Seriousness is demonstrated by spelling out a package to the North Koreans that addresses their fundamental need for economic assistance. It is demonstrated by rhetorical restraint. Name-calling aimed at our opponent has only hampered diplomacy. Seriousness means sending a senior U.S. official to meet with Kim Jong Il. And the way to know whether we have been trying hard enough is to determine whether our Asian negotiating partners also think diplomacy has been exhausted.

Urgency is well demonstrated by putting forth a timetable. The administration should take a page from its aborted diplomacy toward Iraq. Just as we did with Iraq, we should negotiate with the Europeans, Asians and others to set international -- read United Nations -- deadlines for solving the crisis. The North Koreans have said they regard a U.N. sanctions resolution as tantamount to war, and Security Council members such as China are not likely to support sanctions unless there is a failure of diplomacy that the international community views as entirely North Korea's fault. Just as we worked with our allies to set deadlines for U.N. inspections in Iraq, we should seek a deadline for the next meeting with North Korea and another one for a final diplomatic agreement.

I have to laugh. North Korea's fundamental need for assistance flows from North Koreas despotism that funneled all resources into nukes. Why validate such a decision by North Korea? They could get all the assistance they need if they unilaterally cancelled their nuke programs and starting feeding their people.

Seriousness is demonstrated by not being stampeded into validating North Korea's nuclear option or their blackmail program.

As for name-calling hindering diplomacy, this is clearly rot since the authors are eager for diplomacy despite two generations of North Korean verbal assaults on us and our allies. If we have to endure their tirades, they can endure our accurate descriptions of their democidal tyranny.

And a deadline? Like with Iraq? Did they just compare their proposal with their past efforts to require X + 1 UNSC resolutions, where X = the number of current resolutions on the subject? And I guess they just telegraphed their intention to turn on any US military efforts to deal with North Korea after exhausting diplomacy. I do appreciate that.

And let me clue them in. Diplomacy is exhausted. We have little choice to be patient now and wait for the North to collapse. I am happy with the 6-party talks precisely because they can never lead to any agreement. I fear any agreement will just be a cover for surrendering either explicitly or by failing to enforce what the North 'agrees' to do. As it is, the talks (or hope of talks) keep the North teetering along with the hope that we will break and just bribe them instead of making them face the stark choice of collapse or war.

North Korea wants nukes, so the talks are doomed just from this point of view. Plus, our negotiating partners of China, Russia, and South Korea don't really want to stop North Korea from going nuclear. Only America and Japan share this goal.

But like I said, I want the talks to continue just to give North Korea hope that they'll win at talks while they collapse.

And despite the good senators' calls for bold surrender, the North Koreans have crawled back to the talks:

"The U.S. side clarified its official stand to recognize (North Korea) as a sovereign state, not to invade it and hold bilateral talks within the framework of the six-party talks," KCNA reported.

North Korea has long demanded that Washington apologize for remarks by Rice labeling it as one of the world's "outposts of tyranny." North Korea said Saturday it took Hill's comments at the Beijing meeting as "a retraction" of that earlier remark and decided to return to the nuclear talks.

The nuclear talks with representatives from China, Japan, Russia, the United States and the two Koreas last happened in June 2004. Since then, North Korea has refused to attend, citing "hostile" U.S. policies.

Hey, whatever they need to tell themselves to sleep at night. The North Koreans had to really want to return to talks to portray recent events as meeting their demands.

Thank goodness we didn't rush to offer a package addressing the North's fundamental needs and establishing a timetable for giving up as the senators suggested. It might have gotten in the way of the Pillsbury Nuke Boy scrambling back to talks before his sorry-ass state collapses around him.

Hey, I'm under no obligation to restrain my rhetoric. I am hostile.

Let Me Speak Slowly So You'll Understand

Tom Oliphant was interviewed by Hugh Hewitt.

Oliphant says he is generally supportive of fighting the jihadis. I know little of Oliphant. My impression of him isn't one of support but I concede I don't follow his work--only noting it when someone else notes it and links. I admit that this will lead to just the most outrageous statements.

Nonetheless, what to make of this:

HH: But if they had had, for example, radioactive material with which to make a dirty bomb or a biological agent like anthrax, do you think they would have used them in the course of doing this?

TO: Not necessarily, because what we're not understanding is the choices that are being made inside terrorist cells today. I understand theories and generalizations. But I think when the rubber meets the road, you're encountering real terrorists with very specific plans. There's no question in my mind that you're right, that many of the people involved in international terrorism would gladly used a weapon of mass destruction if they had one at their fingertips. What ought to disturb us, because it is going on right now, it that there appears to be a trend toward the selection of soft targets, and the acceptance of casualties, forty, fifty, is a major event to them now. And if this trend gets further established, the loss of life is going to be substantial over time.

Oliphant seems to be saying that while many terrorists would use a nuke if they had it, the rest (majority?) have specific plans that are now tending toward "soft targets" (and just when wasn't their target list composed of civilians??) with specific plans. Oliphant seems to be arguing that the enemy is deliberately choosing to kill only a couple score at a time for some political purpose.

I don't know what theories and generalizations Oliphant is talking about, but my reading of the enemy is that they want to kill as many of us as possible and that there is no message being sent.

Or rather, the message is they want all of us dead and would we please be a little more cooperative about dying. Like the Spanish who have sportingly agreed to take their place in line while the actual fighters are targeted by the jihadis.

Our message back needs to be, "No, you first." Just kill the jihadis.

No regrets, people. This is a battle to the death and I want it to be their deaths.

Within a Minute--Except One

I noted earlier that I thought the London bus bomb was possibly a bomber fleeing home after cold feet, a defective bomb, or a change of heart.

The London police seem to have a new timeline that fits with this hunch:

Transit officials originally said Thursday's blasts occurred over a 26-minute span, but computer software that tracked train locations and electric circuits subsequently determined the first blast shattered the rush-hour commute at 8:50 a.m in Aldgate station, east London, with the next two erupting within 50 seconds.

A fourth explosion tore through a double-decker bus near a subway entrance, killing 13 people, nearly an hour later.

Saying that the bus bomber was heading toward the target means you have to assume that the terrorists were not in fact trying for a time-on-target blow to maximize the death toll by minimizing the ability to react to an early bomb. So why did the other three go off within 50 seconds of each other? It makes no sense that the bomber was going toward a target.

So what target was an hour earlier on the bus route? Will all the cameras in London be able to identify who got on the bus with a bomb and where the terrorist got on?

And of course, what neighborhoods were the bus scheduled to go to later on the route? Any mosques nearby?