The House of Representatives, in a moronic 394-22 vote, inserted into the annual Defense Spending Bill a ridiculous feel-good clause forbidding the construction of permanent US bases in Iraq, and stipulating that all facilities under construction will be handed over to the Iraq Government.

What with Iran functioning as a principal sponsor of terrorism, and well on the way to acquiring nuclear weapons, who could possibly have any legitimate use for a permanent US base on Iraqi soil? All our effort and sacrifices and expenditures in Iraq really should be looked upon as a completely disinterested, no-strings-attached gift to a bunch of bigoted primitives who hate our guts, and desire our Civilization’s conquest. We defeated them in battle twice. The least we could do is spend a few trillion dollars, rebuild their infrastructure, replace their home-grown dictator with a democratic government, hand them a bunch of flowers, and walk away. It’s only right. Why should we get anything useful out of any of this?

If today’s morons were running the country during WWII, I’d be writing this in Japanese ideograms.

LA Times story.

Lee Harris, in the Weekly Standard, interprets the Pope’s recent speech (which so thoroughly upset the Saracens) as a message to the modern rationalist secular community of the West.

To the modern atheist, both (the Christian and the Islamic) Gods are equally figments of the imagination, in which case it would be ludicrous to discuss their relative merits. The proponent of modern reason, therefore, could not possibly think of participating in a dialogue on whether Christianity or Islam is the more reasonable religion, since, for him, the very notion of a “reasonable religion” is a contradiction in terms.

Ratzinger wishes to challenge this notion, not from the point of view of a committed Christian, but from the point of view of modern reason itself. He does this by calling his educated listeners’ attention to a “dialogue–carried on–perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara–by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.” In particular, Ratzinger focuses on a passage in the dialogue where the emperor “addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness” on the “central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'”

Ratzinger’s daring use of this provocative quotation was not designed to inflame Muslims. He was using the emperor’s question in order to offer a profound challenge to modern reason from within. Can modern reason really stand on the sidelines of a clash between a religion that commands jihad and a religion that forbids violent conversion? Can a committed atheist avoid taking the side of Manuel II Paleologus when he says: “God is not pleased by blood–and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. . . . Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats. . . . To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.”

Modern science cannot tell us that the emperor is right in his controversy with the learned Persian over what is or is not contrary to God’s nature. Modern reason proclaims such questions unanswerable by science–and it is right to do so. But can modern reason hope to survive as reason at all if it insists on reducing the domain of reasonable inquiry to the sphere of scientific inquiry? If modern reason cannot take the side of the emperor in this debate, if it cannot see that his religion is more reasonable than the religion of those who preach and practice jihad, if it cannot condemn as unreasonable a religion that forces atheists and unbelievers to make a choice between their intellectual integrity and death, then modern reason may be modern, but it has ceased to be reason.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

The London Times quotes Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf‘s account of how Pakistani authorities found Daniel Pearl‘s body and apprehended some of his killers, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is believed to have been Pearl’s actual executioner.

In May 2002 we arrested someone named Fazal Karim, a militant activist. When we interrogated him we discovered that he was involved in Pearl’s slaughter. He also told us that he knew where Pearl was buried.

He was asked how he knew. Chillingly, he said he knew because he had actually participated in the slaughter by holding one of Pearl’s legs. But he didn’t know the name of the person who had actually slit Pearl’s throat. All he could say is that this person was “Arab-looking”.

He led us to the small house in a neighbourhood in Karachi where Daniel Pearl had been held captive. He then took us to a plot of land near by and told us where he was buried. We exhumed the body and found it in ten badly decomposed pieces. Our doctors stitched the pieces back together as best as they could.

The man who may have actually killed Pearl or at least participated in his butchery, we eventually discovered, was none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, al-Qaeda’s No 3. When we later arrested and interrogated him, he admitted his participation.

In order to counter the Pouting Spooks’ weekend leak of highly selective excerpts of last Spring’s National Intelligence Estimate, obviously intended to provide a nice pre-election front page Sunday lead, President Bush will be declassifying key portions of the report.

The Wall Street Journal this morning argued that he ought to release the whole thing (with some reactions).

In the meantime, (the non-Pouting) Spook86 offers some details from the report contradicting the Sunday paper’s spin.

The quotes printed below–taken directly from the document and provided to this blogger–provide “the other side” of the estimate, and its more balanced assessment of where we stand in the War on Terror (comments in italics are mine).

In one of its early paragraphs, the estimate notes progress in the struggle against terrorism, stating the U.S.-led efforts have “seriously damaged Al Qaida leadership and disrupted its operations.” Didn’t see that in the NYT article.

Or how about this statement, which–in part–reflects the impact of increased pressure on the terrorists: “A large body of reporting indicates that people identifying themselves as jihadists is increasing…however, they are largely decentralized, lack a coherent strategy and are becoming more diffuse.” Hmm…doesn’t sound much like Al Qaida’s pre-9-11 game plan.

The report also notes the importance of the War in Iraq as a make or break point for the terrorists: “Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves to have failed, we judge that fewer will carry on the fight.” It’s called a ripple effect.

More support for the defeating the enemy on his home turf: “Threats to the U.S. are intrinsically linked to U.S. success or failure in Iraq.” President Bush and senior administration officials have made this argument many times–and it’s been consistently dismissed by the “experts” at the WaPo and Times.

And, some indication that the “growing” jihad may be pursuing the wrong course: “There is evidence that violent tactics are backfiring…their greatest vulnerability is that their ultimate political solution (shar’a law) is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims.” Seems to contradict MSM accounts of a jihadist tsunami with ever-increasing support in the global Islamic community..

The estimate also affirms the wisdom of sowing democracy in the Middle East: “Progress toward pluralism and more responsive political systems in the Muslim world will eliminate many of the grievances jihadists exploit.” As I recall, this the core of our strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Quite a contrast to the “doom and gloom” scenario painted by the Times and the Post.

The BBC reports that British forces killed Omar Farouq, a senior Al Qaeda leader, in Basra.

British forces have killed a senior al-Qaeda fugitive in a raid on a house in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, security sources say.

Officials named the dead man as Omar Farouq, a top lieutenant of Osama Bin Laden in south-east Asia.

Farouq was captured in Indonesia in 2002 but escaped from a US military prison in Afghanistan last year.

Security sources say although he was hiding in Basra, al-Qaeda was not known to be actively operating in the area.

British military spokesman Maj Charlie Burbridge said Farouq, whom he called a “very, very significant man” had been tracked across Iraq to Basra.

He said about 200 troops surrounded the house, from where they came under fire.

A gun battle erupted and Farouq was killed in the exchange.

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Nato reports that dozens of Taliban were killed in a battle with Afghan government and Nato forces in the Southern province of Helmand on Saturday.

Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz (June 1, 1780 — November 16, 1831)

Tony Corn, in Policy Review, waltzes dazzlingly through the Strategy curriculum in the course of a hyper-caffeinated diatribe quarreling with the ascendancy in contemporary American military culture of the viewpoint of that old rascal Carl von Clausewitz.

Some samples:

Strategism is synonymous with “strategy for strategy’s sake,” i.e., a self-referential discourse more interested in theory-building (or is it hair-splitting?) than policy-making. Strategism would be innocuous enough were it not for the fact that, in the media and academia, “realism” today is fast becoming synonymous with “absence of memory, will, and imagination”: in that context, the self-referentiality of the strategic discourse does not exactly improve the quality of the public debate. At its worst, strategism confuses education with indoctrination, and scholarship with scholasticism; in its most extreme form, it comes close to being an “intellectual terrorism” in the name of Clausewitz.

and

With its unresolved tensions between its theologia speculativa and theologia positiva parts, On War, to be sure, is ideally suited for endless, medieval-like scholastic disputatio. But while Clausewitz-Centered Chatter (ccc) can be entertaining (how many ayatollahs can dance on a Schwerpunkt?), there are undeniable opportunity costs for an officer corps already “too busy to learn.”

A decade ago already, U.S. Army War College professor Steven Metz remarked: “Like adoration for some family elder, the veneration heaped on Clausewitz seems to grow even as his power to explain the world declines. He remains an icon at all U.S. war colleges (figuratively and literally) while his writings are bent, twisted, and stretched to explain everything from guerilla insurgency (Summers) through nuclear strategy (Cimbala) to counternarcotrafficking (Sharpe). On War is treated like holy script from which quotations are plucked to legitimize all sorts of policies and programs. But enough! It is time to hold a wake so that strategists can pay their respects to Clausewitz and move on, leaving him to rest among the historians.”

and

For the neutral observer, then, the problem with the “neocon chickenhawks” is not so much that they lacked an understanding of irregular warfare13 as that they seriously underestimated the sterilizing effect, on the American military mind and over a generation, of three dozen Clausewitzian cicadas for whom counterinsurgency was synonymous with “derisive battle.” A contrario, the intellectual agility since the end of the Cold War of a Marine Corps largely exempt from the Clausewitz regimen (from General Krulak to General Mattis) would tend to prove that the problem is not with the officer corps itself, but with the (largely civilian) Clausewitzian educators. If the Clausewitzian text is indeed so filled with fog and friction, if On War is so hard to teach from that even most educators can’t teach it properly, then surely thought should be given to retiring Clausewitz, or the educators — or both.

The “cognitive dissonance” among Clausewitizians consists in maintaining the most dogmatic approach concerning Clausewitz as the True North, while deploring — like Gray — that “American military power has been as awesome tactically as it has rarely been impressive operationally or strategically…. the German armed forces in both world wars suffered from the same malady” (as if the two were somehow unrelated). If, as Gray rightly points out, “strategy is — or should be, the bridge that connects military power with policy,” what kind of a bridge is On War, which devotes 600 pages to military power and next to nothing to policy? Between the “strategy for strategy’s sake” of the Clausewitzians, and the “tacticisation of strategy” of Network-Centric Warriors, genuine strategic thinking seems to be forever elusive — missing in action as much as in reflection.

Why such an irrational “resistance” (in the Freudian sense) on the part of military educators? After all, it does not take an Einstein to realize that, from Alexander the Great to Napoleon, the greatest generals for 20 centuries had one thing in common: They have never read Clausewitz. And conversely, in the bloodiest century known to man, the greatest admirers of Clausewitz also have had one thing in common: They may have won a battle here and there, but they have all invariably lost all their wars. One suspects that the Prussian Party is in fact not so much interested in meditating Clausewitz (their endless exegeses of Clausewitz in the past 30 years has yielded no new insight beyond the interpretations of a Raymond Aron and a Carl Schmitt) as such, as in maintaining a “Prussian folklore” in the U.S. military. One can understand their hostilite de principe to the idea of teaching irregular warfare: from Marshall Bugeaud to General Beaufre, from Marshall Gallieni to Marshall Lyautey, from Colonel Trinquier to Lieutenant Galula, the majority of the leading theoreticians on the subject happen to be, not Prussian but — horresco referens — French. And as is well-known by anyone who gets his military history from Hollywood rather than Harvard, the French, since 1918 at least, have proven utterly incapable of fighting.1

Ironically, and Prussian fantasies notwithstanding, what the post-Gulf War American Army has come to resemble is the post-World War i French Army: In both cases, victory breeds complacency, and this in turn can lead to a solid but unimaginative army capable of holding its own against an equally solid but unimaginative opponent — but is not necessarily a match for an innovative military, be it in the form of the German “blitzkrieg” yesterday or Chinese “unrestricted warfare” tomorrow. No wonder that a particularly bold usmc colonel felt compelled recently to argue that the “Shock and Awe” doctrine could prove to be America’s twenty-first-century Maginot Line.

Read, and savor, the whole thing.

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Hat tip to Karen Myers.

How Neal Katyal expresses his gratitude to the US:
Defending Osama bin Ladin’s driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan

This month’s Yale Alumni Magazine interviews celebrity alumnus Georgetown Law Professor Neal K. Katyal, ’95JD Yale Law, preening over his victory in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which challenged the authority of the President to consign illegal combatants to trial by military courts, and which elicited the absurd majority opinion, written by Justice Stevens, which erroneously applies the language of Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, viz.,

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions (to):

1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause…

to illegal combatants and terrorists captured outside the territory of the United States.

Katyal shares with the Yale Alumni Magazine the heart-warming story of his moving reply to Hamdan, when the imprisoned jihadi asked: “Why do you want to help me?”

So I paused for a long time, and then I said that I was doing this because my parents came to America to give their children better opportunities, and I couldn’t imagine another country on earth in which I would be able to do what I have been able to do. My parents came here from India, literally with eight dollars in their pockets, each of them. And what bothered me the most about the president’s order is that it said only foreigners would get this military justice system. If you were an American citizen, then you got a civilian trial. But if you were a green-card holder or a foreigner, then you got something really inferior. That was the first time that I felt our country was so fundamentally on the wrong path — and I had to do something.

I can relate to Mr. Katyal’s strong feelings of gratitude and appreciation toward the United States, as I come from immigrant background myself. My grandparents arrived here from Lithuania in the 1890s.

Professor Katyal and my father have a lot in common. Both were of the first generation brought up and educated in the United States. Both were grateful for the opportunities offered by the United States, though my father was not so quite so fortunate as Professor Katyal, who attended Dartmouth and Yale Law School.

Because his own father was dying of miner’s asthma, my father had to quit school after 8th grade and go to work in the coal mines to help support the family. But he was still grateful to grow up in the United States, rather than in Russian-occupied Lithuania, grateful for both America’s political freedom and for her economic opportunities, even though he had much less access to the latter than some others.

Despite the things they have in common, still, I cannot help reflecting that my father’s gratitude toward this country expressed itself in forms distinctly different than Professor Katyal’s, forms more recognizable as gratitude. I feel sure that my father left America better off by his relatively obscure contributions, a lifetime of hard labor and wartime military service, when he died in 1997. If Professor Katyal passed away tomorrow, I’m afraid I would find it very difficult to say the same of his more celebrated ones.

I do agree with Professor Katyal on one thing, though. I too cannot “imagine another country on earth in which (he) would be able to do what (he) ha(s) been able to do.”

How my father expressed his gratitude to the US:
Serving in the Marine Corps in the South Pacific

Winchester Model 1897 trench gun

The Bush Administration has been widely criticized for the allegedly unprecedented policy of interpreting the definitions of portions of the Geneva Conventions. And Senators McCain, Graham, and Warner recently waged a very public battle in the Senate specifically to ensure “that there be no attempt to redefine U.S. obligations.”

Bush Administration opponents are mistaken. There is a very prominent case of the United States refusing to accept the definition of treaty terms used by the enemy, and openly defying world opinion.

In WWI, the US military issued Winchester Model 1897 slide-action shotguns to US troops, along with buckshot-loaded cartridges. Each 12 gauge round contained nine size 00 buckshot. The shotguns featured a bayonet lug, and a perforated metal cover to protect the hand from the barrel becoming over-heated by rapid fire.

The shotguns were found to be desirable weapons, very useful for clearing trenches and in close combat. They were particularly popular with the Marines, who put them to conspicuously good use in Belleau Wood.

Germany, in 1918, protested US use of shotguns firing multiple projectile buckshot ammunition as a violation of Section II of the 1907 Hague Convention (the Geneva Convention’s predecessor treaty), which forbade belligerents to employ arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering.

But, as W. Hays Parks, Special Assistant for Law of War Matters, Office of The Judge Advocate General, U.S. Army, notes in a 1997 paper, DA-PAM 27-50-299, the United States interpreted the Hague Treaty differently, rejecting the German protest.

The highly-effective use of the shotgun by United States forces had a telling effect on the morale of front-line German troops. On 19 September 1918, the German government issued a diplomatic protest against the American use of shotguns, alleging that the shotgun was prohibited by the law of war.

After careful consideration and review of the applicable law by The Judge Advocate General of the Army, Secretary of State Robert Lansing rejected the German protest in a formal note.

Threats to punish captured American soldiers found armed with shotguns met the stern US warning that any unjustified measures taken against US prisoners of war would be retaliated in equal measure upon captured Germans.

The reality is that international agreements of this kind invariably include substantial quantities of broad and unspecific statement, inevitably requiring interpretation. Someone has to decide whether 00 buckshot constitutes the kind of projectile “calculated to cause unnecessary suffering.” Someone has to decide today whether keeping someone in a cold room, or subjecting someone to “water-boarding,” constitutes torture.

What is remarkable is that, in the old days, Germany would argue for definitions which were in Germany’s interest, and United States officials would argue for interpretations which were in the interest of the United States. Today, our leading media outlets, a substantial portion of the body of active participants in policy debate, the former Secretary of State, and even three prominent Republican senators are found shouting their heads off in the public square, demanding that the United States adopt interpretations as inconvenient to US interests as possible.

Some of us find all this more than a little grotesque.

The White House has struck a deal with grandstanding GOP Senators McCain, Graham, and Warner intended to allow the Executive Branch to continue to defend the country against terrorist attacks on civilian population centers. Nice of them to agree, don’t you think?

New York Times

Isn’t it wonderful, that, as the calendar ticks forward to the month of Ramadan in which one or more nuclear terrorist attacks on US cities are rumored to be scheduled, three Republican senators and the former Secretary of State Mr. Powell have stepped forward to take control of the fate of the American public, demanding that due regard be paid to our country’s image and to extravagant projections of domestic American legal practice into the unlikely context of the International Underworld of homicidal conspiracy.

OK, Jack Bauer, just make sure that you Mirandize that terrorist, before you remove his finger from the nuclear bomb’s triggering device.

It would be nice to know where the second WMD has been placed, but, remember: you must give Achmed access to his pro bono attorney from Wachtell, Lipton, or Georgetown Law, before you are allowed to ask him if he’d (pretty please, with sugar on it!) like to reveal the other bomb’s location.

RaceBannon, on Free Republic, posts, with the permission of the family, a letter from a staff member at the office of Senator Ted Kennedy refusing assistance to a constituent, Mrs. Kathleen T. Hutchins, the mother of Sergeant Lawrence G. Hutchins III of Plymouth, Massachusetts, one of the Pendleton 8 being prosecuted for allegedly killing Iraqis in Haditha.

Kennedy letter

Reuters reports:

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan said that after the September 11 attacks the United States threatened to bomb his country if it did not cooperate with America’s campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Musharraf, in an interview with CBS news magazine show “60 Minutes” that will air Sunday, said the threat came from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and was given to Musharraf’s intelligence director.

“The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, ‘Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,”‘ Musharraf said. “I think it was a very rude remark…”

The Pakistani leader, whose remarks were distributed to the media by CBS, said he reacted to the threat in a responsible way. “One has to think and take actions in the interest of the nation, and that’s what I did,” Musharraf said.

Before the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, Pakistan was one of the only countries in the world to maintain relations with the Taliban, which was harboring al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and many Pakistanis were sympathetic with the neighboring Islamic state.

But within days of the attacks Musharraf cut his government’s ties to the Taliban regime and cooperated with U.S. efforts to track and capture Al-Qaeda and Taliban forces that sought refuge in Pakistan.

They need to have the same conversation with more than one country right now.

———————–
Hat tip to LGF.

Jim Dunnigan’s Strategy Page reports the Judge Advocate General Corps’ military lawyers have grown far more numerous and influential, and that far too many of its members are on the wrong side:

Big brawl going on in the Pentagon between the JAGs (Judge Advocate General, the lawyers) and the operators (combat and intelligence types.) JAGs have become more important, decade by decade, over the last sixty years. This has happened in parallel with the growing influence of lawyers in civilian society. However, lawyers doing what they do has brought them into conflict with the operators. For example, the war on terror has created a murky legal area for captured terrorists. Many JAGs want to give the captured terrorists most of the privileges of civilians, or even soldiers, accused of criminal acts. This creates a conflict with the combat and intel officers, who do not want to give the terrorists access to the identity of informants within terrorist organizations, or other information they have on the terrorists, and how they got it. In the civilian world, the prosecution has to let the defense know all this stuff. That’s why there’s a witness protection program, or cases where the government will not prosecute in order to preserve valuable intel. But such procedures don’t work when most of your witnesses are living in a combat zone, and many of your intelligence collection techniques will be worthless if the enemy knows what they are, putting your own troops at greater risk.

On top of all this, the size of the JAG force has grown some ten percent since the end of the Cold War, while everyone else has shrunk by about a third. As a result, the senior JAGs in each service wants to be three star generals, instead of the current two star.

Now the JAGs are aware of the circumstances under which U.S. troops are fighting, and the importance of OPSEC (Operational Security, keeping info about your activities from the enemy). Even so, many JAGs seem to lose their perspective, and advocate strongly for giving the terrorists the information. Operators believe the JAGs are grandstanding, especially by saying one thing to uniformed people, and something else to the media and Congress. The situation has divided the JAG community as well, and it’s getting ugly.