Dr. Demarche, at Austin Bay, identifies the problems attendant upon responses by states to attacks by non-state entities.

Israel is not at war with the state of Lebanon; it is at war with a “non-state actor” in the parlance (Hezbollah), which happens to be in Lebanon. This is a fairly new concept in the era of the modern state. Barbarians, for example, may have besieged ancient Rome, but at the time the “state” was a minority. Today the state system is firmly entrenched, and the “barbarians” are largely within. My question is this, now what?

Groups such as al Qaeda, Hezbollah and others cross borders at will, their memberships are ideologically homogeneous, but diverse in nationality. Efforts to destroy these organizations are bound to cross multiple borders, as we have already seen, something for which international law and the so-called international community (which supported Israel’s withdrawal from the very territories that are now the launch points for cross border attacks by terrorists) are woefully unprepared. Should you have any doubt of this I offer the talks in Rome this week as proof. Those engaged in finding a solution to the current state of affairs should keep one thought in the back of their minds: this will not be the last time the world will have to face such an event.

Traditional methods of sanction appear to be non-applicable to entities such as these- how do states sanction organizations that transcend borders and are privately funded? No mechanism exists to hold non-state actors accountable for their actions, even though they now have the potential to cause the same, or even greater, level of destruction than do many states.

Global policy maker must shift their thinking. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and the like are not organizations that can be “contained”, they do not field armies that can be squared off against and defeated. In a way they are reminiscent of Mao’s idea that “the people are like water and the army is like fish”, but these fish swim in every sea. The current battle may rage in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, but the bottom line is that this is a battle between a state and a non-state actor, and the world is not prepared to deal with this new reality, even today. Let’s hope those working to settle the current battle keep their eyes on this bigger picture, too.

John Podhoretz wonders if Israel and the United States have become too sentimental and humanitarian to fight wars and win.

July 25, 2006 — WHAT if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?

What if the universalist idea of liberal democracy – the idea that all people are created equal – has sunk in so deeply that we no longer assign special value to the lives and interests of our own people as opposed to those in other countries?

What if this triumph of universalism is demonstrated by the Left’s insistence that American and Israeli military actions marked by an extraordinary concern for preventing civilian casualties are in fact unacceptably brutal? And is also apparent in the Right’s claim that a war against a country has nothing to do with the people but only with that country’s leaders?

Can any war be won when this is the nature of the discussion in the countries fighting the war? Can any war be won when one of the combatants voluntarily limits itself in this manner?

Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Didn’t the willingness of their leaders to inflict mass casualties on civilians indicate a cold-eyed singleness of purpose that helped break the will and the back of their enemies? Didn’t that singleness of purpose extend down to the populations in those countries in those days, who would have and did support almost any action at any time that would lead to the deaths of Germans and Japanese?

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?

If you can’t imagine George W. Bush issuing such an order, is there any American leader you could imagine doing so?

And if America can’t do it, can Israel? Could Israel – even hardy, strong, universally conscripted Israel – possibly stomach the bloodshed that would accompany the total destruction of Hezbollah?

If Lebanon’s 300-plus civilian casualties are already rocking the world, what if it would take 10,000 civilian casualties to finish off Hezbollah? Could Israel inflict that kind of damage on Lebanon – not because of world opinion, but because of its own modern sensibilities and its understanding of the value of every human life?

Victor Davis Hansen thinks the patience of the Western democracies is wearing thin, and that -beyond a certain point- efforts to placate Islam are bound to end and be replaced by a very different approach: old-fashioned total war.

Yet for all their threats, what the Islamists — from Hezbollah in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to the Iranian government in Tehran to the jihadists in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle — don’t understand is that they are slowly pushing tired Westerners into a corner. If diplomacy, or aid, or support for democracy, or multiculturalism, or withdrawal from contested lands, does not satisfy radical Islamists, what would?

Perhaps nothing.

What then would be the new Western approach to terrorism? Hard and quick retaliation — but without our past concern for nation-building, or offering a democratic alternative to theocracy and autocracy, or even worrying about whether other Muslims are unfairly lumped in with Islamists who operate freely in their midst.

Any new policy of retaliation — in light both of Sept. 11 and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the West Bank — would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile.

If they are not careful, a Syria or Iran really will earn a conventional war — not more futile diplomacy or limited responses to terrorism. And history shows that massive attacks from the air are something that the West does well.

So in the meantime, let us hope that democracy prevails in Iraq, that our massive aid is actually appreciated by the Middle East, that diplomacy ultimately works with Iran, that Syria quits supporting terrorists, and that Hamas and Hezbollah cease their rocket attacks against Israel — more for all their sakes than ours.

The Southern (reporting from Southern Illinois) tells a heartwarming story. U.S. Army Lt. Col. Grayson Gile of Marion, Illinois, while serving in Afghanistan as an officer in the Combined Joint Special Operation Task Force, met an elderly Hazara man who had taken a year, working in secrecy, to hand knot a rug as a personal gesture of thanks for the liberation of Afghanistan to the American President.

While in the country, Gile got to know many of the natives. “We got to have quite a bit of interaction with the people of the host nation, probably more contact than most soldiers. It took time to establish a rapport with them, but once we established trust, we had friendships,” he said.

One of those friendships involved a Kabul rug merchant who pulled Gile aside before he left the country. The merchant told Gile the story of an elderly man, so overwhelmed with gratitude to the United States for its intervention in the conflict that he made a gift for President Bush – a gift that was a year in the making and made, given the conditions of the country, under penalty of death.

Gile was astonished when he saw the hand-knotted rug, a portrait of Bush, filled with Christian and Catholic symbolism. Filling the center of the rug is an incredible likeness of Bush, dressed in religious vestments, standing at a podium decorated with the official seal of the country and flanked by two waving American flags.

Directly above Bush is Jesus with a sacred heart and stigmata carefully knotted into the rug’s pattern. The rug also shows cherubs and, apparently in an homage to both Bush and a fallen Northern Alliance leader, two lions.

“(Ahmed Shah) Masood was often called ‘the Lion of Panjshir.’ As one of the country’s military leaders, he put some very, very heavy licks to the Soviets and then turned around and delivered the same to the Taliban,” Gile said. “He was assassinated two days before 9/11.”

One corner of the rug reads, “President George W. Bush,” while the opposing corner has the words, “Number one champion.”

I can hear the leftists’ teeth grinding even now.

Charles Johnson has a few choice words about the New York Times’ culture of disloyalty.

Can anyone imagine a photographer employed by an American newspaper happily collecting pictures of a Jap sniper firing at US forces in WWII? (There is even worse at the beginning of the slideshow.)

The Financial Times reports

the White House on Tuesday confirmed that Gordon England, deputy defence secretary, sent a memorandum to senior defence officials and military officers last week, telling them that Common article III of the Geneva Convention — which prohibits inhumane treatment of prisoners and requires certain basic legal rights at trial — would apply to all detainees held in US military custody.

The Administration is knuckling under to the Supreme Court’s preposterous application of Geneva Convention status in Hamdan.

The sanctimonious do-gooder element is burbling with joy. Dave Hoffman aptly compared Hamdan with Brown, and he’s perfectly correct.

As in Brown, the Hamdan decision takes a leap of faith in the legitimacy of particular justices’ self-righteous moral intuitions as a basis for overruling objective law, counting on the sentimentality of the general public to affirm politically over time the Court’s decision.

There is a difference, though. The Brown decision was made at a time when state segregation represented a strange anachronism, when the laws under scrutiny were nearly universally despised, when the legal fruit was already overripe and ready to drop off the vine of its own accord.

The principle of reciprocity in the laws and usages of war has considerably greater vitality and reason behind it than Jim Crow ever did. The entire point of the Geneva Convention is to encourage humane treatment of prisoners of war on the basis of reciprocity. Signing the Convention is a promise that, if you do not abuse our soldiers who fall into your hands, we will also spare yours.

Justice Stevens’ generosity in the awarding of honorable status, rights, and protections to illegal combatants really represents a fraudulent check written at the expense of American fighting men.

When Justice Stevens effeminately promises that illegal combatants, terrorists, murderers, and brigands will all be treated as honorable adversaries, attempting to preclude the American fighting man, exposed to the hazard of falling alive into the hands of a merciless and barbarous enemy, from punishing violations of the customs and usages of war, he goes far beyond his own legitimate perogative. The decision to spare this enemy’s life, or that, belongs to the man who bested him, not to some theorist and scribbler sitting in a marble building in the District of Columbia.

In WWII, my father served in the USMC on Guadalcanal. He told me that the Japanese had people able to speak English, and in the long tropical nights, the Japanese forces would amuse themselves by imitating the pleas for assistance of a wounded American lying helpless between the fighting lines. Naive young Marines often had to be restrained physically from climbing out their foxholes and dashing off into the night to the rescue of their miserable and suffering fellow Marine. Every now and then, an individual hero would break free, and go out there. They always found him the next day, crucified with Japanese bayonets to a palm tree, his reproductive organs cut off and stuffed insultingly in his mouth. The Marines on Guadalcanal consequently took no Japanese prisoners, except for the purpose of short and forcible interrogation.

In today’s absurd world, bourgeois lawyers, safe in the United States and far from the fighting (who know nothing of war) would interpose their own opinions and emotions between the just revenge of American fighting men and a cowardly and dishonorable enemy.

The answer to Justice Stevens is simple. US forces will need to be certain to take no illegal combatants alive.

Baron Bodissey, this week, has a terrific essay identifying the crucial components of Islam’s attack on the West:

Covert funding based on successful long-tern extortion via the manipulation of petroleum prices.

The use of criminals, psychos, and malcontents as cannon fodder.

And so we have what might be called a Demonic Convergence, a confluence of destructive impulses that Islam gathers unto itself. In the terms of Chaos Theory, Islam is a “basin attractor”, an asymptotic solution to all the differential equations of nihilistic human behavior.

Any impulse that longs to destroy Western Civilization — which, for the modern world, means all civilization — will gravitate towards Islam. The criminal gets ideological justification for his behavior, the sadist gets to rape and murder to his heart’s content, and the hippie radical gets to stick it to the Man for all eternity.

This is what we’re up against: the Big Tent of ideological nihilism. The closer any given society gets to the behavioral sink, the more Islamic it tends to become.

And, finally, the habitual treason of the journalistic clerisy of the West, providing the essential Fifth Column.

A must-read article.

Hat-tip to Richard Fernandez.

Frank McCullough, and his listener Frank from Staten Island, think those liberals are going to get us all killed.

The American Spectator has learned from Treasury and Justice Department officials more scarifying details about the US Government’s attempts to persuade both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times to refrain from publishing the SWIFT story.

According to Treasury and Justice Department officials familiar with the briefings their senior leadership undertook with editors and reporters from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, the media outlets were told that their reports on the SWIFT financial tracking system presented risks for three ongoing terrorism financing investigations. Despite this information, both papers chose to move forward with their stories.

“We didn’t give them specifics, just general information about regions where the investigations were ongoing, terrorist organizations that we believed were being assisted. These were off the record meetings set up to dissuade them from reporting on SWIFT, and we thought the pressing nature of the investigations might sway them, but they didn’t,” says a Treasury official.

In fact, according to a Justice Department official, one of the reporters involved with the story was caught attempting to gain more details about one of the investigations through different sources. “We believe it was to include it in their story,” says the official….
“We thought that once the reporters and editors understood that one, these were not warrantless searches, and two, that this was a successful program that had netted real bad guys, and three, that it was a program that was helping us with current, ongoing cases, they would agree to hold off or just not do a story,” says the U.S. Treasury official. “But it became clear that nothing we said was going sway them. Whomever they were talking to, whoever was leaking the stuff, had them sold on this story.”

To that end, the Justice Department has quietly and unofficially begun looking into possible sources for the leak. “We don’t think it’s someone currently employed by the government or involved in law enforcement or the intelligence community,” says another Justice source. “That stuff about ‘current and former’ sources just doesn’t wash. No one currently working on terrorism investigations that use SWIFT data would want to leak this or see it leaked by others. We think we’re looking at fairly high-ranking, former officials who want to make life difficult for us and what we do for whatever reasons.”

The fact that this last especially outrageous violation of national security appears likely to motivate the Justice Department to get serious about catching the Pouting Spooks responsible, and bringing them to justice, sheds a single ray on sunshine on the appalling situation. The truth of the matter is, all they need to do is get one cowardly squealer to talk, and they can probably bag the whole lot. In that company, too, cowardly squealers are probably a dime a dozen.

I wasn’t born early enough to read Walter Duranty lying about famine in the Ukraine, and otherwise shilling for Joe Stalin, but I was around in the late 1950s, when Herbert L. Matthews helped Fidel Castro “get his job through the New York Times.”

I still vividly remember (with cold anger) the Times’ Sunday Magazine’s cover the week Saigon fell. It displayed a napping Vietcong guerilla sitting in a folding lawn chair, Kalashnikov assault rifle across his knees. The Times’ headline read: “THE BLESSED PEACE.”

And I remember the Times spectacularly studied silence, which went on and on and on, when news of the holocaust in Cambodian began appearing in the Western Press.

But it was undoubtedly, too, another grand landmark in the New York Times’ long-standing, much-celebrated tradition of dishonest journalism, when the inveterbrate sycophant Byron Calame timorously succeeded (leaving a glistening trail behind him) to the supposed Times-Ombudsman position of Public Editor.

Time Executive Editor Bill Keller’s pathological hatred of the Bush Administration recently led him to ignore bipartisan requests from government officials and proceed to publicize a key international Counterterrorism financial surveillance program. In the minds of most Americans, Keller earned himself a place on the jury in some future Broadway production of The Devil and Daniel Webster that day.

And the American public’s watchdog Byron Calame is on the job, speaking truth to power. “You were absolutely right, boss!” brave Sir Byron wrote this Sunday.

The Times, in the course of a remarkable response from its readers, heard from more than a thousand, and Calame concedes “about 85 percent of them (were) critical of the decision to publish the story and a large fraction venomous.”

But the Public Editor reflected long and hard about who paid his salary, and went right to work typing out an editorial telling the public to get lost, Bill Keller had behaved perfectly correctly, and Eric Lichtblau is a true patriot.

You see, there was no wrongdoing on the part of the New York Times at all, since everyone (including all the terrorists) already knew all about the SWIFT program. There was no news here, after all.

But, it was necessary for the Times to defy government requests and print this story, you see, because it was terribly important that the public learn of the program, so that it could receive public scrutiny. So there was vitally important news, which had to be reported, after all.

(Isn’t it great being a liberal? You have no problem simultaneously accepting as true two completely contradictory propositions.)

And, finally, you and I may have skipped over that part of the Constitution, but The (unelected) Times, a privately-owned business organization which makes its money selling processed wood-pulp and advertising, you see, has its own Constitutional function: monitoring and oversight.

You and I waste our time going out to the polls and voting to elect presidents, and congressmen and senators, but the real bosses are Bill Keller and Eric Lichtblau, who are Constitutionally empowered to supervise all of their work.

If Keller and Lichtblau feel those mere elected officials’ work isn’t up to par, their approach questionable, or their manners distasteful, it is up to the Times to decide whether efforts to apply surveillance to International Terrorism shall be permitted to continue.

If the Times dislikes the elected administration; or if the Times isn’t selling enough woodpulp that week and needs a big story; or if it’s the wrong time of the month, and the Times is just feeling a bit cranky, obviously the Times (meaning Mr. Bill Keller) is perfectly entitled to don its robes of Constitutional Authority, assert its powers as “Monitor of Government in Chief,” and disclose any national security information it pleases.

(Wasn’t General Eisenhower lucky that Bill Keller was not around at the time of the D-Day Invasion? Keller might have decided that the Pas-de-Calais was a much better landing site, or might just have taken a dislike to FDR.)

Mr. Calame finally concludes, these kinds of decisions are a judgement call, and

The best judgment of these two editors (Keller and Lichtblau) served their readers well in the case of the Swift story. In the face of intense administration pressure in a country that’s unusually polarized politically, they correctly decided to make sure their readers were informed about the banking-data surveillance.

And I’m properly grateful. I had, of course, like any other normal American citizen, been planning to transfer a large sum of money to my favorite personal charity, an illegal terrorist organization of Lithuanian fly fishermen and fox-hunters. Now that I know all about that nefarious Bush Administration SWIFT program, I’ll simply tie hundred dollar bills to the legs of migrating Houbara bustards, which will be taken by Kazakh falconer allies, and forwarded via European Eagle Owls to those fiendish Baltic fly fishers. (Thank you, New York Times!) Aren’t you glad that you too can covertly support the terrorist movement of your choice with no interference from the authorities?

AP reports that the late Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s cell phone has been examined and was found to contain some intriguing phone numbers.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had the phone numbers of senior Iraqi officials stored in his cell phone, according to an Iraqi legislator.

Waiel Abdul-Latif, a member of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s party, said Monday that authorities found the numbers after al-Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in a U.S. air strike on June 7.

Abdul-Latif did not give names of the officials. But he said they included ministry employees and members of parliament.

He called for an investigation, saying Iraqis “cannot have one hand with the government and another with the terrorists.”

A terrorist fifth column inside the hastily assembled Iraqi government, I suppose, was always a strong possibility.

Mark Steyn heaps plenty of well-deserved ridicule on Justice Stevens’ Hamdan ruling.

There are several ways to fight a war. On the one hand, you can put on a uniform, climb into a tank, rumble across a field and fire on the other fellows’ tank. On the other, you can find a 12-year-old girl, persuade her to try on your new suicide-bomber belt and send her waddling off into the nearest pizza parlor.

The Geneva Conventions were designed to encourage the former and discourage the latter. The thinking behind them was that, if one had to have wars, it’s best if they’re fought by soldiers and armies. In return for having a rank and serial number and dressing the part, you’ll be treated as a lawful combatant should you fall into the hands of the other side. There’ll always be a bit of skulking around in street garb among civilian populations, but the idea was to ensure that it would not be rewarded –that there would, in fact, be a downside for going that route.

The U.S. Supreme Court has now blown a hole in the animating principle behind the Geneva Conventions by choosing to elevate an enemy that disdains the laws of war in order to facilitate the bombing of civilian targets and the beheading of individuals. The argument made by Justice John Paul Stevens is an Alice-In-Jihadland ruling that stands the Conventions on their head in order to give words the precise opposite of their plain meaning and intent. The same kind of inspired jurisprudence conjuring trick that detected in the emanations of the penumbra how the Framers of the U..S Constitution cannily anticipated a need for partial-birth abortion and gay marriage has now effectively found a right to jihad — or, if you’re a female suicide bomber about to board an Israeli bus, a woman’s right to Jews.