I commented earlier on HAMAS turning Gaza into an ammo dump and training field for the coming conflict with Israel. (When isn’t there a coming conflict?) Hizbullah, not to be outdone, is doing the same thing, probably also via arms from Iran and Syria.
Jul 04 2008
GAZA, ammo dump for Hamas
Hamas is arming Gaza to the teeth and eyeballs. They have obtained quantities of Russian anti-tank missiles, the AT-3 Sagger, the AT-4 Spigot, the AT-5 Spandrel and the AT-14 Spriggan (all with ranges of several kilometers), as well as the RPG-29 Vampir, a grenade launcher on steroids. Continue reading “GAZA, ammo dump for Hamas”
Jun 28 2008
You have to want to know the truth, and you have to do what’s right
Michael Yon is former special forces soldier turned war journalist, and author of the very important book, Moment of Truth in Iraq.
He has a dispatch up, titled On Joe Galloway, ostensibly about another journalist, but it covers so much ground, and works on so many levels, that I think it’s worth reading in full. It is ostensibly about the use of torture to get intelligence from terrorists and suspects, but it’s really about a great deal more. It’s really about how we make decisions, how we validate our ideas, where we get our ideas, and why we do what’s right. Though he generally supports the aims of the Iraq war, he is no blinkered ideologue. A sampling:
Continue reading “You have to want to know the truth, and you have to do what’s right”
Jun 27 2008
President on training wheels?
From the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of a National Academy of Sciences meeting underway in D.C.:
It is a grim, almost unthinkable scenario: a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, smuggled into the United States, is detonated in a major U.S. city, perhaps even the Bay Area.
Top federal officials and medical experts gathered in Washington on Thursday to consider this nightmare vision. Their conclusion: Cities and states are frightfully ill-prepared for dealing with an attack using a small nuclear bomb.
“Few of them have coordinated response plans for the aftermath of nuclear terrorism,” said Brooke Buddemeier, a specialist in the radiological and nuclear counter-measures division at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “There is a general lack of understanding of the response needs and uncertainty over federal, state and local roles and responsibilities.”
Federal officials are worried enough to have convened a National Academy of Sciences committee on medical preparedness for a nuclear attack by terrorists. The panel is holding its first two-day meeting in Washington this week.
The presentations got specific:
The committee began its first session with a ghastly overview of what a 10-kiloton nuclear blast would look like: If detonated at the White House, it could destroy virtually every building within 1,500 yards. People in an area out to 1.55 miles could suffer second-degree burns, while others would be injured by flying debris and shattered windows. Those 4.5 to 7.5 miles away could suffer momentary “flash” blindness, causing traffic accidents.
A lethal plume of radioactive material would, depending on winds, stretch as far as 9 miles, affecting up to 300,000 people, although injuries would depend on a person’s exposure to radiation.
“It’s not just about radiation exposure,” Buddemeier said. Many of the injured would have shards of glass in their eyes, ruptured eardrums and other impact injuries from the blast’s shock waves.
Read the whole thing and understand that there are millions of people who go to sleep every night and dream of such a scenario –and take pleasure in it.
Good Lord. I don’t usually quote an entire post of someone else, but: Good Lord.
The 2008 elections are not just about health care and the economy, or even the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Which of our candidates do YOU want running the show? Which one do YOU think is likely to know more about this threat, and be highly focused on doing something about it?
This is no time for a President on training wheels.
Jun 24 2008
We Will Never Forget, or None So Blind?
Andrew C. McCarthy, the prosecutor responsible for leading the investigation of Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and others involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, has a new book out on the relation of Islam to terrorism and jihad.
In Willful Blindness, in addition to telling the story of the investigation and prosecution of “the blind sheikh” and his accomplices, McCarthy makes connections between historical Islamic teaching and terrorism/jihad. He also relates terrorist plots that were close to being carried out, with possibly more casualties than 9/11, that were stopped by US authorities, but which seem not to have gotten wide media attention. As the prosecutor of a major terrorist group, his opinion, that a “law enforcement” approach to terrorism is woefully inadequate, is surely worth considering.
Raymond Ibrahim, writing on the website of Victor Davis Hanson, discusses the way our ability to understand the nature of the terrorist threat is harmed by unwillingness to use terms like Islamist, Islamo-fascism, etc. He also discusses the reticence of many in the West to directly connect historical Islamic belief with the actions of Islamic terrorists, presumably to avoid offending “moderate” Muslims.
As someone well acquainted with al Qaeda’s writings and communiqués (see The Al Qaeda Reader), I can confidently state that their messages to the West are markedly different from their messages to fellow Muslims. To Americans, al Qaeda, just as the U.S. memo recommends, rarely evokes Islamic theology; instead, the discourse is entirely about the Muslim world’s political grievances at the hands of the West. Their more clandestine writings to Muslims, conversely, rarely revolve around political grievances, but instead are grounded in Islamic theology and law, and stress how Muslims are commanded to have antipathy for infidels and to constantly be in a state of war with them. Even the 9/11 strikes are justified through the strict rules of Islamic jurisprudence.
Robert Spencer doesn’t think it’s enough to be willing to name the terrorists as Islamists, Islamo-fascists, etc. His point: the actions of the terrorists are rooted in an understanding of historical Islamic teaching that is common to many Muslims, and reflects common Islamic jurisprudence of centuries’ standing.
It is ironic that many people use “Islamism” as a figleaf term to avoid speaking about Islam itself; they pretend that the political and imperialistic and supremacist elements of Islam are not deeply rooted within it, but are merely “Islamist” inventions that can with relative ease be eradicated and are already rejected by the Islamic mainstream. Yet here, The Independent assumes that to speak about Islamism is to speak about Islam, and suggests that British authorities might think the same thing.
No doubt there are moderate Muslims, if by that term we refer to Muslims who are not terrorists and never will be terrorists, and do not actively support terrorists. If we define “moderation” as having no sympathy with the terrorists whatsoever, the size of that group is significantly smaller.
But surely a “moderate Muslim” is something more than merely a Muslim who isn’t trying to kill you today, and probably won’t tomorrow. Surely a “moderate Muslim” is also something more than someone who just isn’t very serious about being a Muslim.
What we rarely (if ever) find is a Muslim moderate who argues, from the Koran and Hadith using historically grounded methods of interpretation acceptable to Muslim jurists, that the Koran and Hadith teach against the understanding of jihad as military action to bring about Muslim rule and subdue the infidel. Since this is exactly what Muhammed did, and what was defined as proper behavior by many generations of Muslim authorities, it is a difficult argument to make.
Some are trying. We need to honor and encourage their effort, while recognizing its difficulty and rarity. If they are able to bring about a “reformation” in Islam, it will be a great achievement, and the world will owe them a great debt.
In the meantime, we are not served by pretending that there is any moral or behavioral equivalence between Muslim fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists, a popular conceit among the secular left intelligentsia, and, sadly, one frequently echoed by the Christian Left as well.
When “moderate Muslims” become more fundamentalist, they become more sympathetic to terrorism, and may become involved in it in some way, even if only by giving money and moral support. A certain number will become actively involved in some aspect of terrorism. They will be directed to specific texts in the Koran and Hadith that call them to violent jihad, and will learn about Muhammed’s life practicing what he preached. They will learn of the doctrine of abrogation, an Islamic principle that requires believers to ignore verses (such as the more peaceful verses from the Mecca period) that come earlier than later verses on the same topic (such as the “sword” verses from the later Medina period). This concept of abrogation is not widely understood by the public in the West, and allows Islamic apologists to quote the more peaceful sounding verses as if they are the ones that Muslims pay the most attention to. They are not.
When people become fundamentalist Christians, they tend to give more money to the church, practice certain disciplines in their personal lives, attend church more, and frequently give more generously to charity. No one will teach them that Christianity is destined to take over the world, and that they are responsible to violently struggle to make it happen sooner. There are no founding texts encouraging this, and no history of Christian violence in the first three centuries carried out to spread the Kingdom.
Where are these Christians who are plotting murder and mayhem to advance the work of the Kingdom?
The conflation of “fundamentalists” of all stripes is absurd. But you will hear the argument made again, by someone, possibly tomorrow.
We need to hope/pray for wisdom on the part of our leaders, and the electorate that selects them, that they will not be blind to the connection between traditional Islamic teaching and jihad, and so fail to see the nature of our opponents, and the network of support out of which they proceed. And we need to call them out when when they seem to be mouthpieces for Islamic propagandists instead of clear-eyed leaders looking out for our best interests.
Have we forgotten about 9/11? I fear we have. I fear the reminder we are sure to get.
I hope the members of our incoming administration, whatever party they may be, will read McCarthy’s book.
Jun 08 2008
Slow learners
Michael Ledeen speaks about the fact that we know an enormous amount now about the rise of totalitarian states in the 20th century, and about why the rest of the world failed for so long to do anything effective about them, and eventually accepted that the only way to deal with them was war. It is now widely understood, despite the occasional revisionist, that negotiations could never have produced any good result with Hitler, Mussolini, imperial Japan, or Stalin. He discusses how badly we misjudged them, how little we believed their publicly stated intentions, and how poorly we were served by our “reasonable” approach to them, and how many lives were lost to remedy that error.
By now, there is very little we do not know about such regimes, and such movements. Some of our greatest scholars have described them, analyzed the reasons for their success, and chronicled the wars we fought to defeat them. Our understanding is considerable, as is the honesty and intensity of our desire that such things must be prevented.
Yet they are with us again, and we are acting as we did in the last century. The world is simmering in the familiar rhetoric and actions of movements and regimes, from Hezbollah and al Qaeda to the Iranian Khomeinists and the Saudi Wahhabis, who swear to destroy us and others like us. Like their 20th-century predecessors, they openly proclaim their intentions, and carry them out whenever and wherever they can. Like our own 20th-century predecessors, we rarely take them seriously or act accordingly. More often than not, we downplay the consequences of their words, as if they were some Islamic or Arab version of “politics,” intended for internal consumption, and designed to accomplish domestic objectives.
Clearly, the explanations we gave for our failure to act in the last century were wrong. The rise of messianic mass movements is not new, and there is very little we do not know about them. Nor is there any excuse for us to be surprised at the success of evil leaders, even in countries with long histories and great cultural and political accomplishments. We know all about that. So we need to ask the old questions again. Why are we failing to see the mounting power of evil enemies? Why do we treat them as if they were normal political phenomena, as Western leaders do when they embrace negotiations as the best course of action?
No doubt there are many reasons. One is the deep-seated belief that all people are basically the same, and all are basically good. Most human history, above all the history of the last century, points in the opposite direction. But it is unpleasant to accept the fact that many people are evil, and entire cultures, even the finest, can fall prey to evil leaders and march in lockstep to their commands. Much of contemporary Western culture is deeply committed to a belief in the goodness of all mankind; we are reluctant to abandon that reassuring article of faith. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, we prefer to pursue the path of reasonableness, even with enemies whose thoroughly unreasonable fanaticism is manifest.
This is not merely a philosophical issue, for to accept the threat to us means, short of a policy of national suicide, acting against it. As it did in the 20th century, it means war. It means that, temporarily at least, we have to make sacrifices on many fronts: in the comforts of our lives, indeed in lives lost, in the domestic focus of our passions, careers derailed and personal freedoms subjected to unpleasant and even dangerous restrictions, and the diversion of wealth from self-satisfaction to the instruments of power. All of this is painful; even the contemplation of it hurts.
Then there is anti-Semitism. Old Jew-hating texts like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” now in Farsi and Arabic, are proliferating throughout the Middle East. Calls for the destruction of the Jews appear regularly on Iranian, Egyptian, Saudi and Syrian television and are heard in European and American mosques. There is little if any condemnation from the West, and virtually no action against it, suggesting, at a minimum, a familiar Western indifference to the fate of the Jews.
Finally, there is the nature of our political system. None of the democracies adequately prepared for war before it was unleashed on them in the 1940s. None was prepared for the terror assault of the 21st century. The nature of Western politics makes it very difficult for national leaders, even those rare men and women who see what is happening and want to act, to take timely, prudent measures before war is upon them. Leaders like Winston Churchill are relegated to the opposition until the battle is unavoidable. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to fight desperately to win Congressional approval for a national military draft a few months before Pearl Harbor.
Then, as now, the initiative lies with the enemies of the West. Even today, when we are engaged on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, there is little apparent recognition that we are under attack by a familiar sort of enemy, and great reluctance to act accordingly. This time, ignorance cannot be claimed as an excuse. If we are defeated, it will be because of failure of will, not lack of understanding. As, indeed, was almost the case with our near-defeat in the 1940s.
Read the whole thing.
Jun 08 2008
Israel plays chicken
The Jerusalem Post carries an article describing the experience at a single checkpoint, even as Israel is removing checkpoints to ease the lives of Palestinians who need to move from the West Bank into and out of Israel. These are the checkpoints put up to stop terrorists, after repeated bombings and shootings by Palestinians crossing into Israel from the West Bank.
Cpl. Ron Bezalel of the military police’s Taoz Battalion told Army Radio that the youth had sent his bag through the checkpoint’s X-ray scanner. When the explosives were discovered, the troops on duty immediately implemented the protocol for stopping a terror suspect.
‘It’s routine to find bombs at this checkpoint… every day, we find knives and other weapons,’ Bezalel said.
The military said the Palestinian was most likely on his way to perpetrate an attack in an Israeli city. He was arrested and transferred to the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) for interrogation.
Three weeks ago, another Palestinian carrying five pipe bombs, which he had attached and strapped to his chest in the manner of an explosives belt, was stopped at Hawara.
Earlier Sunday, the IDF announced that Israel had removed 10 roadblocks in southern Hebron.”
It’s worth reading the entire article. The short story is simple. Even as Israel is trying to strengthen Abbas with Palestinians, by making him appear partly responsible for Israel’s liberalization in the matter of checkpoints, Israelis know that the attempts to sneak terrorists into civilians areas will not stop. In essence, Israel is playing a game of chicken: will Hamas kill too many Israelis to make a more moderate approach possible?
They are literally betting the lives of Israelis that Abbas might be able to rein in Hamas’ worst activities, by trying to help Abbas with his own people.
I think it’s a forlorn hope. So do many Israelis.
Almagor, an organization representing terror victims and their families, responded to Sunday’s announcement in the form of an open letter to Barak written by Nahman Zoldan, the father of Ido Zoldan who was killed several months ago by Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank.
“As someone who has lost a son near a road at the hands of Palestinian Authority members, I call on you to reconsider the decision and not to take at face value the Palestinian Authority’s promise that it will take care of our security for us.
“I issue this especially ahead of the coming holiday, when tens of thousands of Israelis use these roads on their way to Eilat, not knowing that these roads are now totally exposed to Palestinian movement,” Zoldan wrote in a statement issued by Almagor to the media.
Talks between Hamas and Fatah are producing essentially zero results. Why should they? Hamas has all the support it needs from bad actors outside Israel in terms of weapons (can anyone spell Iran? Syria? Al Qaeda?), and from sources that belie the Shia/Sunni divide that some in the West claim is strong enough to keep them from cooperating. Hamas protects its “brand” with Palestinians by acting as a humanitarian organization, and tries to prick western conscience with the needs of its people, while doing everything possible to make it unlikely that western aid will be given or deliverable. Hamas, despite being officially declared a terrorist organization by the UN, still has enormous sympathetic resonance with too many in the western media. They gain nothing by actually compromising on anything, now, and these pretend negotiations with Fatah are window-dressing. So they wait and see, knowing the short memory of the west, and the media in general, and knowing that surrogates in the west that pretend to be “moderate” are providing them public relations cover whenever possible, which is pretty often with a cooperative world media.
Look for upcoming elections in Israel to give a more definitive answer on how the Israeli people feel about removing the checkpoints. The main question is straightforward: will the first Israeli deaths from lifting the checkpoints come before or after the elections? As is so often the case, the election may turn more on emotional response to recent events than to sober historical judgment.
Jun 05 2008
History has still not ended
There’s a lot of discussion here and there and other places about the future of the Republican party, and “conservatism” (not the same thing, of course). Some speak of the millennials as less interested in political parties, less ideological, etc. We hear that Reagan conservatism isn’t going to sell anymore, and that it isn’t just a matter of not having a great communicator anymore, but rather that the public just doesn’t see things like it did.
Almost universally, the analysis seems to involve the assumption of stability in events, in anticipation of only small changes from current circumstances, and it assumes the ability of politicians and the media to manage message to the general public. This gives extraordinary power to the message deliverers, of course, and the better message deliverers are expected to win most of the time. In sum, this approach assumes that politics is about politicians.
But it isn’t, in the end. It’s about events, most of which are beyond the immediate control of any given crop of politicians.
People’s memories are short. “We will never forget” has morphed into “maybe we weren’t in so much danger after all”. A decade ago, the left blocked drilling in Anwar and other places, because the oil wouldn’t come on line for a decade, and, “It won’t help us right now.” But the decade has passed, and I just filled my tank with regular gas at $4.35 per gallon, self-serve. If they’d drilled then it would have helped now. Most people don’t know that the two hottest years in the last century are 1934 and 1998 (1934 was the hottest, with a cooling period in between, and no one can claim the 1930s warming was due to CO2 emissions), and most people don’t know that we appear not to be warming up since 1998, but cooling, if anything.
But there are likely to be developments that totally change the dynamic of things, and to quote our second president, “Facts are stubborn things.”
When there is a major attack on US soil (inevitable, according to many serious observers), or possibly even on one of our allies, peoples’ attention will be re-focused. If there is any obvious link between the left’s less forceful approach to terrorists and their enablers (likely), there will be a re-energized right. Let’s be clear: if Islamicist extremists do the deed, and if the left has curtailed programs that might have detected or stopped the attack, or removed pressure that would have diverted the attackers’ attentions, or (shudder) if there is a nuclear attack carried out by anyone who got the materials to do it from an Islamic nation, the blowback will be enormous, and a very large price will be paid by the party that is identified in the public mind as having been asleep at the switch. Fool me once….
Does anyone think that Congress will be able to resist public demand for drilling when gasoline is $6.00 per gallon? If so, how about $8.00? $10.00? At some point, the dynamic changes. Sure, the left will try to pin the blame on the evil oil companies, and that miserable resource hog, the American driver. And that works for awhile, when people aren’t paying that much attention. But at some point, instead of just wondering why prices are so high in a vague sort of way, people are going to DEMAND to know. There will be debate, and the old answers will be trotted out, but inevitably someone is going to get peoples’ attention with the simple idea that as demand goes up and supply doesn’t, the prices will rise. Few people want to drive less.
So, I think drilling is going to happen. It’s just a matter of time, and public desperation. And the party that had a history of blocking it, and fights it to the end, is going to suffer, for awhile.
By the end of an Obama administration (two terms to 2016!), if we have not had a year hotter than 1998, it will be impossible to claim global warming is even real (with a straight face, anyway), let alone caused anthropogenically. (The activists have begun to suspect this… that’s why they’ve changed the scare-phrase to “climate change”, which works no matter what happens, since the climate always changes.) If the left has forced a very costly scheme to control carbon emissions in the meantime, and the economy has suffered because of it, gas prices are higher, etc., then the campaign slogan for the conservative candidate in 2016 could be, “WHAT global warming?”
None of this will stop Obama from getting elected this year, unless the terrorists are stupid enough to mount an attack on US soil before the election, or gas goes up to $6.00 per gallon immediately. I expect neither to happen immediately.
Unfortunately, I expect both during Obama’s presidency, though this is one time I’d love to be wrong.
The only (very cold) comfort will be that the winds of politics will probably change direction again… for awhile, at least. It will be too late to immediately undo Obama’s disastrous effect on the courts, the economy, and our national security… but it may bring an opportunity to staunch the bleeding, at least. Until, of course, the stupid Republicans who come to power in the reaction get complacent, fat and greedy, like the last crop that just lost Congress in 2006.
Pray for McCain to win, but the nation will weather an Obama administration, painfully.
Jun 13 2006
Help the terrorists resist interrogation!
We don’t want to surprise the terrorists with any of our interrogation techniques.
Pentagon won’t hide interrogation tactics : “Under pressure from Congress, the
Pentagon has dropped plans to keep some interrogation techniques secret by putting them in a classified section of a military manual, defense officials said Tuesday.…descriptions of interrogation techniques initially planned for the classified section are either being made public or are being eliminated as tactics that can be used against prisoners.
…Military leaders have argued that disclosing all the interrogation techniques public would make it easier for enemy prisoners to resist questioning.
…any interrogation technique not included in the manual would be considered illegal.”
This is, of course, in response to the law passed last year, championed by McCain and others, to criminalize “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners by U.S. troops.”
Let’s hear it for giving terrorists a chance to practice their resistance techniques. We wouldn’t want USA interrogators to have unfair advantage or anything.
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