One almighty push in Iraq

Two days after the last of 28,000 American reinforcements had arrived in Iraq, the independent war correspondent Michael Yon e-mailed a brief dispatch, observing, "This is a very serious offensive kicking off in Iraq. ... Nobody that I am seeing realizes just how big this is." Five days later, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno explained, "We are beyond a surge of forces, and we are now into a surge of operations."

No-one would guess it from the war coverage or the pronouncements of U.S. congressmen, but what is underway is the largest Coalition offensive since the end of major combat operations in 2003. The 11th-hour operational surge, officially named Phantom Thunder, was launched without notice or fanfare, on the same day as the U.S. Armed Forces announced the troop surge complete: June 15.

Iraq being the dominant issue in American public life, the biggest offensive in four years might at least be known to the American people, not just to obsessive followers of military matters. But Phantom Thunder has had less coverage and discussion than the "DC Madam" case. War coverage reliably recounts Coalition and civilian casualties, but not enemy body counts; and whatever explosion the insurgents intended for the evening news that day, but not Coalition operations, much less Coalition successes.

Phantom Thunder is a sort of re-invasion of nearly all Iraq's trouble areas, the insurgent strongholds in Baghdad and the "Baghdad belts" stretching into four surrounding provinces. The objective is to kill, capture, or scare off the insurgents -- mainly al Qaeda in Iraq and the Shiite "Mahdi Army" militia -- and occupy their territory long after, denying them the opportunity to return. This supported by new efforts to strangle insurgent supply lines, as by closing traffic on the Tigris River and policing a double-cordon around Baghdad itself.

In past, when the Coalition has moved in, many insurgents have simply moved on. So these attacks are simultaneous, to help end the unwinnable game of insurgent "whack-a-mole," and the Iraqi Army has occupied some of the more likely destinations for insurgents on the lam.

The cutting edge in Congressional critiques of the war is the "withdraw and fight" school, which declares the policy begun in earnest only weeks ago a failure, and advances an alternative which ironically is precisely the pre-surge policy associated with former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The critics recall that policy as "gross mismanagement of the war," but proceed to endorse its principles: a "small footprint," or minimal American presence, an emphasis on training Iraqi troops, and shepherding American soldiers on bases isolated in safe areas, with limited excursions into trouble spots.

That happens to be the story of the first four years in Iraq. It made good sense as a way of limiting Western involvement and promptly passing power to the new government and Iraqi people, and it may even be a fine idea again if Iraq is successfully pacified. But four years of that very policy did not pacify Iraq, and the surge policy is a recognition of that.

Calling for training the locals at this point is a bit like saying Microsoft ought to try making operating systems. The president made training for Iraqi forces a staple of his re-election campaign three years ago, and the Coalition has done quite a lot of it, to the point that the Iraqi Army is today as large as Britain's.

And as for holding down troop levels and holing up on safe bases, that left territory effectively unoccupied, so that blocks and quarters and cities fell to the insurgents. The new policy puts American soldiers on the streets, and in greater force, to take back and hold territory, and to make the GIs a fixture in the communities.

This is Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency philosophy, drawn from French Algerian Lt. Col. David Galula, that the civilian population can never be an ally -- giving life-saving information or war-winning intelligence -- if they live in fear of the enemy. Once the people are convinced that the Coalition is serious about driving out, and keeping out, the insurgents, then the good information pours in.

There will be a draw down, both in numbers and in mission. There will have to be. The idea was never to run a protracted policing operation on sweltering foreign city streets, but to hand off to a democratic Iraqi government. All sides want a draw down, including the Administration that ordered the increased deployments and expanded operations. It was in part the Administration's desire for a homecoming once the initial mission was complete that wound up enabling the insurgency, as street-level occupation was forgone, allowing insurgents an opening.

The issue now is what is to be done before that inevitable draw down: Complete the first concerted effort to pacify Iraq in four years, or call the whole thing off before the results are even in, and let the chips fall where they may.

It just might be that the soldiers win on the ground, in one almighty push, while the press and politcal class oppose not only their deployment but their cause, and deny any prospect of victory.

Andrew W. Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Before this history is set in stone...

"I am heartsick when I think of the mismanagement of our army.... There never was such a shambling, half-and-half set of incapables collected in one government before or since the world began."

That was the hard judgement of a United States Senator on the conduct of the war by the U.S. Administration; only, the senator was Maine's William Pitt Fessenden, the war was the American Civil War, and the Administration was President Abraham Lincoln's. History has been much kinder than the distinguished senator from Maine to Lincoln and his men.

George H.W. Bush was booted from the White House after a single term, derided as a loser: "Stick a fork in him, he's done," etc. In the 1990s he was recalled as a failure for not "rolling on to Baghdad" and "finishing the job" in Iraq, and soulless for abandoning Iraq's Shiites to Saddam Hussein's bloody enforcers. Yet today he is venerated as the wise statesman, prudently averting the hornet's nest of Iraq, and his former detractors are liable to say, "I always liked him." Evidently not enough Americans truly did "always" like him, or he would have had that second term.

Harry Truman is today as uncontroversial a past president as any, and recently ranked seventh-greatest. In his last year in the Oval Office, however, Truman scored the lowest presidential approval rating yet registered by the Gallup Poll: 22 percent. The Korean War, which was truly Truman's war, launched without even consulting Congress, cost 2.8 million lives all 'round, only to end in stalemate. International Communism made its greatest advances under Truman's watch. And the man now beloved and admired by partisans on both sides was unwanted as a candidate in 1952 by his own party.

Even Winston Churchill was famously tossed out on his ear by British voters while the Second World War was still unfinished, informed that he was no longer Prime Minister while representing his country at the war's last summit meeting. He was largely responsible for such catastrophes and debacles as the Gallipoli campaign in the First World War and the Norway expedition in the second. Detested in the 1930s as a blinkered imperialist and warmonger, his career to 1939 earned the biography title, A Study in Failure. And today Churchill is universally understood to be certainly the greatest statesman of the 20th Century, and one of the great figures in all history.

The initial conventional wisdom in these cases proved to be passing. Some distance and subsequent developments changed the perspective entirely. On Iraq, the conventional wisdom has been written and re-written several times already; there is no reason to believe it must necessarily be fixed where it stands today.

At the time of the 1991 Gulf War, the conventional wisdom was that the war was won, Saddam Hussein defeated. That wisdom shifted as the 1990s progressed, and the troubles and military skirmishes with Saddam Hussein continued, to the thinking that the war had been aborted half-finished. By 2005, the conventional wisdom had undergone a third revolution, to the current certainty that removing Saddam Hussein's regime and replacing it with a democracy was wrong, and Iraq ought to be left to its own devices.

So if the past 16 years are anything to go by, and if the conventional wisdom in its present iteration is heeded and Iraq is abandoned to the jihadists and Iranian proxies, we can expect a new conventional wisdom to form sooner or later, that leaving Iraq was disastrous, and why, oh, why did we not stay on and finish the job when we had the chance?

Iraq and conceivably also Afghanistan may indeed take a dishonourable place in history even after the dust has settled and partisan passions have dimmed, and the leadership may remain villains and scoundrels even in their obituaries. Vietnam and the Johnson and Nixon Administrations are the obvious cases in point, although even there, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon have benefitted somewhat from more recent reappraisals. But the Vietnam War cost 54,000 more American lives than Iraq has, lasted eight years longer, was fought by a draft army instead of volunteer professionals, lacked the context of the 9/11 attacks, and of course ended in defeat. And no, Iraq and Afghanistan are not lost just yet.

"The government has conceived the war wrongly from the start, and no-one has more misconceived it than the Prime Minister himself." The sentiment has been repeated countless times in the past few years on the prosecution of the present wars, but those were the words of British MP Aneurin Bevan in 1942, three years into the Second World War. Even "the good war," the valiant, brilliant, unstoppable crusade, seemed in the darker hours much more like a disaster and a lost cause. The view from the middle of a war is not the clearest.

Andrew W. Smith / Andrew Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

America in the Mideast, two centuries ago

The famous first line of the United States Marines’ Hymn -- "From the Halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli" -- for all its familiarity, invokes some obscure history. "Halls of Montezuma" is a poetic rendering of Chapultepec Castle, iconic battle site of the Mexican-American War, and "shores of Tripoli" alludes to an even more estranged past. "Tripoli" is a bygone name for Libya, and was the scene of the first foreign war of the United States, over two centuries ago.

The First Barbary War must have seemed a quaint episode for most of the intervening 202 years. But today, five-and-a-half years deep in a major Mideastern intervention, the story has new relevance.

No longer under the protective Union Jack, American ships were not covered by British tribute to the Barbary states.

Those were Morocco and the Ottoman provinces of the North African coast: Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, or approximately current-day Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. A large part of the Barbary economies consisted of threatening and attacking shipping, taking hostages and slaves, and collecting ransom and tribute for peaceful passage through the Mediterranean. The racket was enforced by Barbary pirates or "corsairs", who operated officially on behalf of their governments.

This was seen by many Americans -- particularly the new president in 1801, Thomas Jefferson -- as an intolerable injustice, but the Congress dutifully allocated millions for Barbary tribute and ransom: 20 percent of the federal budget in 1800 alone. Then, in 1801, Pasha Yusuf Karamanli of Tripoli demanded an outrageous increase in America's Tripolitan tribute. That tore it. The United States refused to pay Tripoli at all, and Tripoli declared war.

It was for just such a state of affairs that President Jefferson had dispatched a naval contingent to the Mediterranean, which proceeded to blockade the city of Tripoli and escort American shipping through Tripolitan waters.

The other Barbary states had seconded Tripoli's declaration of war, but Algiers and Tunis thought better of that following the show of strength and resolve, and some "gunboat diplomacy" in Tangier harbour persuaded Morocco to sit out the war.

The Americans defeated a Tripolitan corsair; the Tripolitans captured an American frigate with its 300 crewmen; the Americans launched five bombardments plus a failed fireship attack against Tripoli; and the war settled into a stalemate.

After nearly four years without resolution, American tactics were radically revamped. William Eaton had a plan.

Eaton had been U.S. Consul to Tunis, and was uncannily like Lawrence of Arabia over a century later: fluent in Arabic, a maverick, and wont to "go native", adopting the Arab dress.

Eaton advocated "regime change", in contemporary parlance, though of the pre-1945 sort, replacing a hostile strongman with a more agreeable one. A pretender to the throne was found -- the pasha's brother, Hamet -- and an assortment of Marines and mostly-Muslim mercenaries totaling about 500 started the 500 mile march from Egypt to Derna in Tripoli.

There, Eaton's men were outnumbered 10 to 1, but the U.S. Navy controlled the harbor, and after a coordinated naval bombardment and overland charge, Eaton captured the city, albeit with a musket-shot to the wrist.

The campaign halted awaiting supplies and reinforcements for the push to the capitol. But the support never arrived. Instead, Eaton received orders to withdraw. Eaton's expedition had given the United States new diplomatic leverage, and the pasha had negotiated. The American prisoners would be released, the U.S. government would pay $60,000 but no further tribute, American shipping would be free from Tripolitan piracy, and the pasha would remain securely on his throne.

The other Barbary states followed suit. But regardless of any pesky diplomatic commitments, Algerian corsairs resumed their attacks on American shipping only two years later, and Barbary piracy resumed generally once America became preoccupied with war much closer to home by 1812. In 1815, the United States was back at war along the Barbary coast, and this time, the fix would be permanent.

202 years of dizzying change notwithstanding, there are some striking parallels with today.

As early as 1785, then-diplomat Thomas Jefferson had tried to cobble an international coalition to confront Barbary piracy, and if America is hard-put for allies today, it found exactly none two centuries ago.

Contrary to the isolationist argument against today’s Mideastern intervention – that the United States was founded to be an isolationist republic, free of "foreign entanglements", in George Washington’s phrase – America has been here before. Thomas Jefferson himself was an interventionist, and on the Mideast, no less.

The war followed a newly-familiar pattern: early success, stalemate, tactical revolution, then aborting the mission in favor of a partial solution.

Tripoli does demonstrate that, faced with several years of stalemate, the United States can overhaul its tactics and break through; but the next step of abandoning the project absent a final resolution, if also repeated in Iraq, may also mean returning to fight another day.

Andrew W. Smith / Andrew Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle -Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

War by Committee, or Commander

“War by committee” is not just a figure of speech. The Continental Congress managed the Revolutionary War literally by committee, and by all accounts made a sufficient hash of it that when the Constitution was crafted in the Revolution’s wake, the new presidency was invested with the power of waging war.

But Congress was also constitutionally empowered in matters of national defense, to authorize and fund war. So, Congressional anti-warriors looking to withdraw from Iraq could move to either repeal their authorization of the war or de-fund the mission. Congressional attempts to determine troop levels or areas of operation, and even to specify which of their enemies the troops are allowed fighting, would seem to be pushing things constitutionally, and, in any event, would draw a presidential veto.

If Congress were to rescind its Iraq Resolution of 2002, the motion would assuredly be vetoed upon arrival at the White House. Congress could override a presidential veto with a vote of at least two-thirds in both the House and Senate, but the Congressional anti-war bloc is still far from that two-thirds threshold in either chamber.

And the de-funding option presents Congress with a Catch-22. Failing to undo its authorization of the war but halting payment for the on-going operations would place Congress in the position of leaving troops in the field but denying them the wherewithal to fight or even defend themselves. The number of Congressmen prepared to cast such a vote at present does not amount to 51 percent.

Plus which, for all the popular discontent over the war, support for simply de-funding it is in the single digits, according to an April 13 CBS News poll: 9 percent.

Congressional antagonism toward war efforts and war-time presidents is practically as old as the institutions themselves. As the president is commander-in-chief, and as the presidency and Congress are so often held by different parties, Congress can easily wind up as the anti-war branch of the U.S. government.

Only eight years ago, President Clinton launched the Kosovo War with NATO, but without Congress. Twice, a declaration of war resolution was rejected by Congress, as was even an authorization for the on-going air campaign. 26 Congressmen challenged the president’s war in court as unconstitutional for lacking Congressional authority. Nonetheless, Congress actually over-funded the war appropriation and authorized the use of U.S. troops for the post-war occupation.

The Vietnam War was a constitutional chess match between the legislative and executive branches. President Kennedy began the American intervention without Congressional authorization. The operation became full-scale war under President Johnson when he orchestrated Congressional approval for the escalation, which Congress revoked seven years later.

During the Nixon Presidency, Congress invoked its power of the purse to de-fund “combat operations” in the region, although by that stage the American military effort had effectively ended. Of more practical consequence was Congress’ de-funding of the native resistance in South Vietnam and Cambodia, which assured Communist victories and the exodus, abuse, and slaughter of literally millions who had opposed the Communists, or were deemed anti-Communist, in those countries.

The president exploited his power of shifting Congressional defense allocations, to fund operations in Cambodia and Laos which Congress had not provided for, and Congress exploited its power of ratifying treaties, to void agreements the President had negotiated with North Vietnam.

Two decades earlier, President Truman went to war in Korea citing a United Nations resolution and bypassing the Congress. In the 1950 midterm elections only months later, the president’s party lost 52 seats in the House and eight in the Senate. Divisions in the new Congress precluded a concerted legislative challenge to the war, though there was rancorous rhetoric enough. And when the great Gen. Douglass MacArthur gave his immortal Farewell Address after rebelling against Truman so flagrantly that the president was compelled to dismiss him, it was to a rapturous U.S. Congress.

President Wilson had campaigned in 1916 on keeping America out of the First World War, only to lead the nation into the war and institute a draft the following year, and a scant six days before the Great War ended in November 1918, the President’s party went from majority to minority in both the House and Senate, the latter having the Constitutional responsibility for ratifying treaties. So when the post-war Versailles Treaty -- which was very largely the doing of President Wilson and which included American membership in the League of Nations -- came before the hostile U.S. Senate, it was rejected. Twice.

And that is to say nothing of the constitutional confrontations over war before the 20th Century.

With the return to a Congress and presidency divided by party after last year’s midterms, Capitol Hill and the White House have assumed their accustomed adversarial roles, though there are some more novel twists this time around, like the House Speaker arrogating an executive diplomatic role in the Mideast. The balance can always tilt, and politics never stands still, but realistically, Congress today has little chance of reversing the Iraq policy in this latest showdown between the legislative and executive.

Andrew W. Smith / Andrew Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia
Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

New Sheriff in Baghdad

The war coverage remains dominated by the most superficial “exploding car of the day” stories, and half of Washington uninterestedly insists that nothing has changed, but the new Iraq plan is being implemented.

The plan is reductively referred to as the “troop surge”, but simply adding soldiers would not amount to a plan.

At least 24,000 new U.S. combat troops have been committed to Iraq, at last count, plus about 5,000 support troops. The surge stands to strengthen the Iraq deployment by nearly a quarter, to about 160,000. Only two-fifths of the extra soldiers are in-country as yet, and the full complement is not expected to arrive until June.

The plan those troops are to enforce is drawn from four years’ hard experience and historic counterinsurgencies.

Gen. George Patton famously took a dim view of “paying for the same real estate twice,” and the plan takes that to heart. American forces have in past fought very hard to clear insurgent strongholds and then withdrawn, on the understandable thinking that the American and Iraqi people both want American troops drawn down, and that the Iraqi forces and government should assume their country’s administration as soon as possible. But the effect has been to allow jihadists and militiamen to return unopposed once the Americans have left. Hence the new “clear, control, and retain” policy, sweeping insurgents and weapons out of an area, then patrolling it vigorously to deny it to the enemy.

A century ago, as part of the British plan that finally won the guerilla Boer War, a grid-and-blockhouse system was devised. That “quadrillage” principle was later adopted by the French in Algeria, and now the Americans in Iraq. Baghdad has been divided into 11 sectors, with 70 “Joint Security Stations” now planned for housing American and Iraqi forces. The stations are being built in as little as three days. The sectors divide responsibilities for the entire city into manageable blocks, and the stations give the troops a permanent local presence and handy safe havens.

The French campaign in Algeria in the 1950s and ’60s was lost politically, in France, but French forces had by the end turned the tide militarily, and one of the policies credited for that was the mixing of French troops with the locals. Likewise, American troops are now moving off insular Forward Operating Bases and into the Joint Security Stations in civilian communities, with Iraqi forces, to foster cooperation and develop a working knowledge of the country on the most local level.

Four-star Gen. David Petraeus has assumed command of Multinational Forces Iraq, and, as the biographical line goes, has literally written the book on counterinsurgency: “Field Manual 3-24”.

Economic stimulation is to be increased, as in infrastructure programs, to employ the locals in hopes of occupying the more opportunistic trouble-makers.

And the issue of the foreign underwriters of Iraq’s insurgency is no longer being neglected. The borders with Syria and Iran have been closed as need be. The United States is engaging Iran diplomatically for the first time since the founding of the Islamic Republic -- at the urging of the Iraqi government -- and at the same time, squeezing Iran financially, confronting Iranian elements in Iraq, and adding a second aircraft carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf fleet.

The plan focuses on Baghdad for the obvious reasons that it is the capital, largest city, most mixed city, and the scene of by far the most bloodshed, but – so to speak -- as the new sheriff has come to town, the bad guys have gotten out of Dodge. The Baghdad elements of al-Qaeda in Iraq particularly have shifted to neighbouring Diyala province. Baghdad must be the priority, but the trick will be seeing that gains there are not offset by setbacks elsewhere.

Iraq’s largest militia, the Shiite “Mahdi Army” of Muqtada al-Sadr, has largely disappeared without a fight, and Sadr himself has fled to Iran. The worry is that, by simply dissolving, the militia will survive the push and return to fight another day. But if American and Iraqi forces hold the territory surrendered by the militia, there may be no opening for a return. And if the Sunni threats to the Shiite community are similarly dealt with, that would eliminate one of the rationales for Shiite militias in the first place.

One wonders why all this was not done much earlier, but the situation was not always so bad, and the idea was to “stand down”, certainly not to expand the U.S. presence and mission.

The plan is smart, the stakes are immense, and all that is asked of those of us who “sleep peaceably in our beds” is time for the plan to either sink or swim.

Andrew W. Smith / Andrew Smith, Tulsa, OK and Cape Sable Island, NS

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Taking the Short Way to the Grammys

The timing and location were important: the eve of war, and overseas.

There is an American tradition that “politics stops at the water’s edge”, that an American speaks only as an American, not as a partisan of one side or the other, once he or she leaves America’s shores and makes a representation to the outside world, especially at war time. I’ve never appreciated the importance of that, since the outside world has full access to the partisan and dissenting opinions within America, and besides, Americans can say whatever the spirit moves them to, and opinions of the likes of the Dixie Chicks should be of no more significance than the two cents’ worth of any three people you’d land behind in a checkout line.

Also important was the sort of folks who tend to populate country music fandom: patriotic and traditionally-minded Americans. Some obscure punk group with an America-hating fan base wouldn’t have warranted mention if they had prattled on onstage about their disdain for the President, regardless of timing and location, or even four-lettered verbiage.

But, overseas and on the eve of war, the Dixie Chicks front-woman Natalie Maines remarked of her troupe’s “embarrassment” at hailing from the same state as the President -- which seems to me to be a quite superficial way of expressing opposition to a war policy -- and the country crowd didn’t exactly cotton to it. Now the Dixie Chicks have made practically a second career of their pity party/self-adulation, in song and film and interminable television appearances.

And then came the 2007 Grammy Awards.

The Dixie Chicks’ “Not Ready to Make Nice” is neither good music nor particularly popular, and it doesn’t qualify for recognition on some other grounds like “pioneering a new sound”, “influencing other artists”, or some such thing. It is musically plain and drab, and otherwise indulgent, narcissistic, bitter, humorless, petty, and preachy. But it somehow won the Grammy for “Best Song”, erasing any doubt about how these awards shows work.

The best song of the past year was certainly “Crazy”, by the new British pop outfit Gnarls Barkley. It stamped itself on the year in a way no other pop song came close to doing. It was hypnotic, a tour de force vocally, completely original and a stand-out from the typical fare, and wildly popular. The video was so influential that the Grammy Awards broadcast itself aped its Rorschach Test-style motif. And yet “Crazy” was not included among the nominees for Best Song. “Not Ready to Make Nice” made its dubious way onto the list, and took the easy, “Crazy”-free path to victory.

Despite its musical or creative deficiencies, “Not Ready to Make Nice” is laden with the sort of politics and partisanship which the good people of the entertainment business go for, and that evidently counts for quite a lot.

The best country album was clearly Carrie Underwood’s debut, Some Hearts. It was far and away the best-selling country album of the year and for half a decade (since the Dixie Chicks’ last pre-kerfuffle album, as it happens) , it has churned out no fewer than four Number 1 hits, and yet it was not included even as a nominee in the Best Country Album category. That the best-selling country album in years, with four tracks hitting Number 1, was excluded from the choices for Best Country Album of the year, must necessarily have been a conscious decision, not some oversight or plain tough luck. That conspicuous omission left the Dixie Chicks’ Taking the Long Way with an open field, unmolested by any pesky competition, and it wasn’t such a long way after all to a second Grammy.

Grammy Awards winners are chosen by the music “industry” itself, from the musicians to the producers, who typically incline toward Dixie Chicks-politics, and their choice of the Dixie Chicks for Best Country Album and Best Song can only be taken as a political statement. Mouth the right politics and you might even pick up a Grammy or two, provided the Grammy masters prevent your stiffest competition from consideration alongside you.

The Grammys are a standard-bearer among the ridiculous, pompous, fraudulent awards shows; self-congratulatory, mutually-reinforcing, rarely meritocratic, and rarely able to recognize true greatness that makes the mistake of only doing well, not doing well by the sensitivities of the entertainment elite.

Oh, yes, and the Dixie Chicks’ acceptance speeches were the most indulgent and self-absorbed of the night. True to form.

All fun and games at The Daily Show

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is of course partisan potshotting -- not so much funny as validating -- with occasional actual comedy material, and not serious military analysis. But one wishes the writers and host would either show some humility in the area of military matters or else take the few minutes required to study the issue before taking their smarmy, obnoxious, ignorant, and unfunny two cents' worth to the air.

On the February 15 show, scorn was heaped on the Administration for its long-overdue statements that Iran has been supplying arms and more to Iraqi insurgents, especially the Shiite militias. The story of Iranian sponsorship of the troubles in Iraq, and particularly Iran's supplying of advanced military-grade roadside bombs, is a year and a half old; I wrote about it five months ago and thought it was a little behind the curve then. (Paragraphs 10, 11, and 12. See also this MSNBC story from 2005.)

This is a very serious business. The bombs in question, called shaped charges, can penetrate American tank armor. They have killed 170+ American soldiers who would have been safe against lesser weaponry. They are not the sort of thing rag-tag, ne'er-do-well, part-time militiamen can throw together with some hardware supplies. And they bear the demarcations of official Iranian armament factories and have actually been intercepted en route to Iraq from Iran.

The leader of the dominant Shiite militia, Muqtada al-Sadr, has in the past few days fled the current American offensive, to Iran's capitol, and yet the oh-so-clever Daily Show folks evidently believe the Iranian government would have had nothing to do with arming his militia.

This is not some political game, or frivolous late-night comedy fodder. The Daily Show is in far over its head here. Iran is fighting a declared albeit low-intensity war against America, and working towards worse. Surely the jokes can be found elsewhere.

The Iraq Push - "Retreat by any name would do nothing to end this war"

This war should have been wrapped up and the soldiers shipped home in one piece long ago, but here we are.

No matter how necessary and overdue the cause, no matter how swift and clean the invasion, and no matter how sizable a downpayment on future security a sustainable democracy in Iraq would be, the post-invasion phases have been too long, too costly, and the patience of the American people is at bottom.

Americans cannot remain unmoved after watching fellow Americans die, a handful at a time, on their news every day for nearly four years, when the cause seems so beyond hope, and when the arguments against the war are pop culture, while the arguments for it are to be found in occasional, ignored speeches, unread opinion journals, and obscure think tanks.

After Americans’ discontent with the status quo was registered in the recent Congressional elections and the timid Iraq Study Group recommendations managed to disappoint everyone, the message was taken that no marginal tweaking of the Iraq policy would suffice anymore.

The problem in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, is security. Without that modicum of security, the nation cannot function and progress. There are political problems, especially governmental collusion with Shiite militias. There is also corruption, especially among the Iraqi police, not disbanded and rebuilt after the war like the Iraqi Army. But the fundamentals are strong: The people have converted to democracy, and the change could even be irreversible. What is needed most is security, and that takes soldiering.

More soldiering is unlikely to be easy or popular, but it is possible. The Washington Times reports that 50,000 extra combat troops are available for deployment to Iraq, and the Commander-in-Chief still has two years and an authorization of force.

It deserves mentioning that Iraq has not followed a straight line from initial success to current despair. The fascists at the heart of so much Mideastern conflict have been captured or killed. Western forces have gone undefeated militarily. The Kurdish north and much of the Shiite south have become functioning free societies. Iraq's economy has somehow managed to thrive. And the Iraqi people have voted massively and enthusiastically in three national elections, even at risk of death, demonstrating that they do in fact want this democracy and need only the security and good-faith leadership to make it work.

The temptation is to imagine that picking up and leaving Iraq, and Afghanistan and the Mideast generally, would be the end of it: No more strife, no more military funerals, no more smouldering rubble and body counts on the news. But retreat by any name would do nothing to end this war. The war will continue with Western troops in the field or back home on their bases.

Jihadists bent on killing Westerners would be free to pursue us elsewhere, including in our own countries. Taliban slave-masters would be free to bludgeon the Afghan people back into their old nightmare. Sunni militants who have known little else but killing Shiites and Kurds would be free to see how far they get against a vengeful 80 percent of the country unrestrained by Western forces and influence. And Shiite Iranian agents would be free to butcher their way toward remaking Iraq as the Greater Islamic Republic of Iran.

Quitting wars prematurely, leaving the enemy to fight another day and neglecting to fix the countries at the source of the trouble, has become something of a new Western tradition, and solves nothing.

Once the Russians had been dispatched in the Soviet-Afghan War, the West abandoned Afghanistan to the Mujahideen who later formed the Taliban and al Qaeda which we fight today. The 1991 Gulf War was halted without excising its source, which left the job to the 2003 war that bleeds on today. The Somalia intervention of the early '90s was aborted at the first upset, and today the country is a battlefield falling into and out of the hands of the al Qaeda-allied Islamic Courts Union, Somalia's own Taliban. Even the troubles with North Korea, not to mention the grinding misery of its people, are the result of the West settling the Korean War with a stalemate leaving the North under the Communist government that today detonates third-rate nukes and fires erratic ballistic missiles.

We are free to continue our new tradition of committing to wars and then abandoning them unfinished, negating the sacrifices of our volunteer soldiers, but by now we ought have no illusions that quitting will bring peace to anyone but the enemy.

If we cannot muster the will for this, when all that is required of us is to maintain moral support for historically small military commitments of our professional fighting forces, then we really are the craven, decadent paper tigers the jihadists think we are.

Andrew W. Smith / Andrew Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Letting Terrorists Fight Another Day

November 20, 2006

In Gaza, the summer war never ended. Palestinian militants continued their rocket attacks on Israeli border communities, and their weapons buildup and underground development, with frequent interruptions by the Israel Defense Force. After a particularly bloody Israeli intervention on November 8, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal declared that a state of war with Israel had existed since the end of last year.

Hezbollah remains in southern Lebanon, its underground network intact after the Israeli government cringed from committing to the kind of bloody infantry invasion necessary to uproot it, and continues importing arms through Syria from the bosses in Iran. A recent London Times report cites Israeli intelligence that Hezbollah’s Lebanese armaments already are above pre-war levels.

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon has foresworn preventing Hezbollah’s rearmament, unless requested by the Lebanese government, which announced a useless policy of forbidding only plainly visible Hezbollah weaponry. The previous UNIFIL mission, for any humanitarian good it did, occupied southern Lebanon for the very period in which Hezbollah seized and militarized the region, and if the current UNIFIL mission continues meekly observing as Hezbollah again renders southern Lebanon a war zone, it will have been worse than useless.

Politically, Hezbollah was the de facto government of southern Lebanon before the war; Now it threatens to hijack the Lebanese national government, demanding over-representation in the cabinet amounting to a veto over national policy. The United States took the unusual step recently of warning that Hezbollah, its native Lebanese political allies, and the Iranian and Syrian puppeteers are plotting to topple Lebanon’s fragile democracy.

Any notions that Hezbollah’s ultimate aims are anything other than genocidal should have been dispelled long ago by Hezbollah’s “Secretary General” himself, Hassan Nasrallah: “It is an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.” Hezbollah’s war against Israel is not for Lebanon’s sake, or defensive.

Israeli discontent with the government’s prosecution of the war, that it declined to finish the job it began, expending lives and national credibility without seriously impeding the enemy, registered in polling practically overnight. Support has swung from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his centrist Kadima-led government toward the rightist Likud Party of Binyamin Netanyahu and smaller right-wing factions like Yisrael Beiteinu, with a current Angus Reid Global Monitor poll finding that a new election would give Likud nearly double Kadima’s seats and make Netanyahu Prime Minister.

Regardless of the party in power, Israeli territorial concessions are over for the foreseeable future. The West Bank withdrawal plan was a casualty of the war, and settlements slated for abandonment only months ago are again building apace.

Withdrawing from southern Lebanon and Gaza did not buy even tolerance for Israel. It served only to move Hezbollah and Hamas that much closer to Israel’s heart. The territories Israel conceded to Lebanon and the Palestinians were converted to militarized zones, forward bases in the war on Israel’s very existence, magazines and launch pads for tens of thousands of anti-civilian rockets.

The Kadima Party which leads the Israeli government was founded in 2005 by then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, precisely because Sharon’s own Likud Party refused support for his “disengagement” policy of unilaterally withdrawing Jewish settlements and IDF outposts from Israel’s controversial and vulnerable fringes. Now Olmert’s Kadima government has had to jettison the disengagement policy that was its raison d’etre.

The Israeli government was written a diplomatic blank cheque by the United States to deal with Hezbollah, but ultimately squandered its opportunity with hesitation and half-measures until the clock had run out.

America is heavily invested in the success of the Lebanese government, the position of which was becoming shakier with every day of Israel’s war. Lebanon was one of the great triumphs of the democracy project in the wider Middle East, ending the 30-year Syrian Baathist occupation and gaining an unprecedented freedom in the Cedar Revolution, sparked only weeks after the success of the first Iraqi national election.

The Cedar Revolution and a free and democratic government in Lebanon is just the sort of thing the United States is counting on if its democratization strategy has any hope of prevailing, and the strain which the war was putting on that tenuous government made a compelling argument for America to let Israel know the window for war was closing.

Plus, the United States was coming under pressure to halt Israel’s campaign against Shiite Hezbollah from Shiite allies in Iraq like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whose support has been vital to the effort there, and if Israel was not going to finish the job in any event, then there was no reason to continue alienating helpful friends.

So the war was halted. And the terrorists remained entrenched and uncontained, and emboldened by what passes for victory in their world: surviving to fight another day.

Andrew W. Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Dissecting the Iraq Insurgency

First was the war itself, against Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, over officially in six weeks and effectively in three. That much, at least, was a smashing success, but proved to be the relatively easy bit.

Then came the “dead-enders”. Baathist die-hards, Saddam loyalists, Sunni-minority "rejectionists" and militants generally, not vanquished in the war proper. Sunni militants remain a force in Iraq, causing trouble enough to become the target of a Diyala province sweep only days ago.

But sheer demographic inferiority, a small share of Iraq’s oil resources, revulsion at the jihadists’ war on civilians and their imposition of Sharia, and hatred and fear of Iran and its Shiite Trojan horses in Iraq -- coupled with American cultivation of potential Sunni allies -- have been altering the equation. The Baath-connected Islamic Army in Iraq recently released a video proposing negotiations with the United States, presumably for some amnesty-for-peace deal, as well as criticizing its former al Qaeda ally and declaring Iran, not America, to be Iraq’s greatest threat. So there is reason to believe that some Sunni elements of the insurgency want out.

Then there were the jihadists -- mainly foreigners -- especially al Qaeda in Iraq. Osama bin Laden himself called Baghdad the “epicenter of jihad,” and jihadists ceaselessly slaughtered civilians in an effort to foment a civil war to undo the democracy project and leave a power vacuum, as well as established the beginnings of a Sharia “caliphate” in pockets of Iraq they controlled, however temporarily.

That times have been better for Iraq’s al Qaeda legion was confirmed in the September statement by its new leader, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who came to his position after his predecessor, Zarqawi, was dispatched by two U.S. missiles last summer. The statement acknowledged the loss of 4,000 foreign fighters and issued a desperate-sounding plea for nuclear and biological weapons scientists, flailing for a miracle weapon to salvage their situation: "The field of jihad can satisfy your scientific ambitions, and the large American bases are good places to test your unconventional weapons….”

And if a recent poll is any indication, al Qaeda’s troubles in Iraq have been not only military, but ideological. A Program on International Policy Attitudes poll released September 27 found a near-unanimous 94 percent of Iraqis viewing al Qaeda unfavorably, with 93 percent disapproval for Osama bin Laden. So consider that battle for “hearts and minds” going badly for the international jihad.

Even Iraq’s Sunnis, the most inclined to sympathy for al Qaeda, are turning. 25 of the 31 tribes in the mainly-Sunni Anbar province -- where nightmarish Fallujah, Haditha, and Ramadi are located -- volunteered last month to actually fight al Qaeda and other jihadists, and support the new Iraqi government. Al Qaeda can count only six of the 31 Anbar tribes as allies.

Al Qaeda in Iraq remains a menace, and seems to be changing tactics, but in response to its diminished fortunes.

Which leaves the current, fourth phase of the conflict in Iraq: Shiite militancy. Shiite militants may have been spurred partly to revenge the decades of bloody Sunni tyranny, or the intentional, daily mass-slaughter of Shiite civilians by al Qaeda and other Sunni jihadists in Iraq. It may even be that Shiite killers helped polish off some of the other militants, but today it is they -- most prominently the Mahdi Army of militant cleric Muqtada al-Sadr -- who constitute arguably the primary source of violence and unrest in Iraq.

Complicating matters is the fact that the Shiite militants have confederates in Iraq’s new government, who at least turn a blind eye to Shiite violence and malfeasance. And to truly introduce a monkey wrench to the works, much of the Shiite militancy is sponsored by the Shiite theocracy in neighbouring Iran. Iran is fighting another proxy war, this one against Iraqi democracy and the “Great and Little Satans”: the English-speaking powers.

American forces in Iraq were long ago reporting that the “Improvised Explosive Devices” threatening them daily were not so “improvised” anymore. They are often machined, manufactured, military-grade bombs, “shaped charges” that force a blast of molten metal through a cone, focusing it enough to penetrate even tanks. More recently, American and British forces have intercepted these devices in transit to Iraq from Iran.

Cash, training, and more advanced weaponry bearing official Iranian armament hallmarks, like anti-tank rockets and surface-to-air missiles, have lately been added to what is known of Iran’s assistance to anyone in Iraq intending havoc and bloodshed, especially the Shiites among them.

But a “senior U.S. military official” in Iraq, speaking to Reuters last month, did optimistically observe that even those Iranian-allied militants are feeling the need to distance themselves from Iran to maintain credibility among the Iraqi people, and added, “by the way, nobody in this country stays bought. You're rented.”

Andrew W. Smith, Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia and Tulsa, Oklahoma

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

The Next War, Part II

Six years ago, bowing to the United Nations, Israel withdrew from Lebanon. Lebanon’s Israeli border region was then militarized by Iran’s Hezbollah, openly dedicated to Israel’s destruction. For the most part, Hezbollah in Lebanon did not transgress Israel’s border until July 12, the date by which Iran was required to respond to the international diplomatic proposal for resolving the Iranian nuclear issue. On that day, Iran said nothing on the diplomatic package, but Hezbollah launched its simultaneous rocket attack and kidnapping raid against Israel, killing six Israeli soldiers and capturing two. Hezbollah’s July 12 attack may have been Iran’s answer to diplomacy.

The current Mideast war is now limited to Israeli and Hezbollah forces in a corner of the Levant, but it is another chapter in the larger story of Iran’s confrontation with the West. Hezbollah’s relationship with Iran is such that its deliberate provocation of July 12 is unlikely to be some spontaneous and independent action. Assuming it did direct the provocation, Iran’s interests in engaging Israel through Hezbollah may have been to distract the West from the nuclear issue, to assert the Iranian sphere as the new champion of the fight against Israel, to probe Israeli and Western capabilities and resolve, or to provoke a conflict that might ultimately give it a pretext to obliterate Israel.

Calling Israel’s war a “disproportionate response” to the kidnapping of a couple soldiers is superficial and facile. The Hezbollah incursion tripped the wire on an apparently long-planned Israeli rollback of Hezbollah’s militarization of southern Lebanon, intended to degrade Hezbollah’s offensive military capability.

Hezbollah had amassed 10,000-13,000 rockets intended for the Israeli people, just across the border from Israel, acting as the terrorist hand of an Iranian regime declaring daily its intent to eradicate the Jewish state and exterminate the Jewish people.

A disproportionate response to a couple of kidnapped soldiers? Yes. But a proportionate response to a massing of the offensive forces of a mortal enemy.

As Hezbollah is Iran’s proxy, Israel is in effect America’s.

A conventional wisdom has been forming that the United States cannot undertake further military action, having “overreached” on Iraq, the argument goes.

But if America is “bogged down,” it is on the democracy-building front, not the military front. The United States Armed Forces led the smashing of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in a scant three weeks, and if it has not yet contained the insurgents, it has certainly gone undefeated in battle against them.

If, heaven forbid, the democracy project did become irretrievably lost, then America would be no less likely to act militarily; Rather, it is likely that future American military action would be minus the Good Samaritan work of rebuilding and democratizing, and that happens to be the prevailing American thinking on the use of force against Iran.

In fact, Americans’ patience for the democratization strategy, in the face of the costs and international vilification, is wearing very thin. There is no reason to believe that the alternative, in a world of enemies actively pursuing America’s demise, would be some sort of passive non-interventionism: Sitting and watching as enemies arm and attack. An alternative with ever-multiplying advocates is the “Rubble doesn’t make trouble” doctrine. Punitive and deterrent strikes, and strikes to degrade potential threats, without the burdensome rebuilding and democratizing efforts that America would only be condemned for, anyway: “This time we won’t stick around to fix your godforsaken country.” And who would be able to blame them?

The spectrum of military options on Iran, from most to least likely, may go something like the following: Limited strikes against Iran’s first lines of defense plus its nuclear production, probably only intended to set the nuclear program back temporarily; Strikes to derail Iran’s nuclear production and its military capabilities generally; Attacks to degrade Iranian nuclear and military power plus “decapitation strikes” against the Iranian leadership, and aid to a coalition of domestic opposition in hopes of forming a new secular democratic government; And, the least likely, a full-scale invasion to destroy Iran’s nuclear potential and armed forces entirely, overthrow the regime, and establish a new democracy.

There are compelling reasons enough to avoid even limited military action -- let alone all-out war -- in Iran especially, and a healthy appreciation of them will spur an earnest pursuit of more diplomatic options. But if, after all the diplomatic efforts, Western intelligence confirms that Iran is on the point of acquiring the bomb, or if, for reasons best known to themselves, the Iranian leadership decides to strike a first blow, then all bets are off.

Andrew W. Smith, Cape Sable Island, NS and Tulsa, OK

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

The Next War

With one and a half years left in the war against Germany, Winston Churchill remarked to Harold MacMillan, “Germany is finished, though it may take some time to clean up the mess. The real problem is Russia.” To hijack the great man’s formulation: Afghanistan and Iraq are finished, though it is taking some time to clean up the mess, and the problems now are Iran and Syria.

The thinking on which the Afghan and Iraq Wars was based was never, “Afghanistan, then Iraq, then stop.” It entailed kicking the Syrian Ba’athist regime of Bashar al-Assad out of Lebanon, then out of Syria itself, finally confronting the Libyan regime that founded state-sponsored Islamic terrorism, and somehow undoing the Iranian theocracy that gave radical Islam its own state and armed forces, with North Korea as a troublesome sideshow to be contained and prevented from becoming the arsenal of Islamic terrorism.

Syria did for the most part leave Lebanon after the “Cedar Revolution” uprising of the Lebanese people, following the first Iraqi elections in the winter of 2005. Libya reformed itself -- or made a start toward reforming itself – a year earlier, after Libyan dictator Mohammar Gadhaffi saw Saddam Hussein pulled by U.S. forces from a dirt hole. But that still left Syria and Iran.

There was hope that toppling the first one or two dominoes might render further military action unnecessary, as the people of other Mid Eastern nations followed Afghans and Iraqis in building the sort of free societies unlikely to cause us harm. But that has gone only as far as Libya and Lebanon, plus some half-steps in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.

The thinking was that the West had no hope of a secure future unless the entire Mid East was overhauled, “1945-style.” Like fighting a mosquito plague by draining the swamp they breed in, rather than just swatting at the things when they buzz past our ears. It was wildly ambitious, and it seemed for some time that the practical application of it could go only to “Step Two”: Iraq.

And maybe Iraq is where the Western drive to reform the region will end. But one wonders if, in view of the flaunting provocation of recent remarks and actions, the new Iran-Syria Axis might ultimately provoke a Western counterstrike that would have the effect of continuing the mission left off after Iraq.

This war is not ready for the history books yet.

Andrew W. Smith, Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia, and Tulsa, Oklahoma