Jeff Jacoby quotes the late Michael Kelly:

The United States may not be able to stop every homicidal fascist on the planet, but that is hardly an argument for stopping none of them. If the Bush administration had listened to Kennedy and to the millions like him the world over who protested and marched raised their voices against invading Iraq, would the world be a better place today? Leaving Saddam and the Ba’athists in power — free to break and butcher their victims, to support international terrorists, to menace other countries — would have emboldened murderous dictators everywhere. The jihadists of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas, celebrating the latest display of American irresolution, would have been spurred to new atrocities. The Arab world would have sunk a little deeper into its nightmare of cruelty and fear. And women’s heads would still be getting nailed to the front doors of Iraqi homes.

Three years into the war, with many Americans wondering if it was a mistake and the media coverage endlessly negative, one voice I miss more than ever is that of Michael Kelly. The first journalist to die while covering the war, Kelly was the editor of The Atlantic and a columnist for The Washington Post. He had covered the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, and in one of his last columns, filed from Kuwait City, he reflected on the coming liberation of Iraq: “Tyranny truly is a horror: an immense, endlessly bloody, endlessly painful, endlessly varied, endless crime against not humanity in the abstract but a lot of humans in the flesh. It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face.

“I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications, of America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti, or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realized. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot?”

There is a quotation of unidentifiable origin, usually attributed to George Orwell, one version of which goes:

We sleep safely in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to visit unspeakable violence on those who wish to do us harm.

Rough men from Canada and the United States broke into a house on the outskirts of Baghdad today, where they freed, from a “kidnapping cell,” one British and two Canadian members of a Chicago-based Christian Peacemaking Team, kidnapped last November 26. The body of a fourth peacemaker, the American Tom Fox, was found March 9th, discarded along a railway line. Fox had been tortured, and then shot.

Coalition forces had learned the location of the kidnap victims only a few hours earlier as the result of the interrogation of a prisoner captured last night. Is it possible, do you suppose, that someone may possibly have employed violence and coercive methods, thus violating his human rights?

Associated Press reports:

The Christian Peacemaker Teams volunteers have been in Iraq since October 2002, investigating allegations of abuse against Iraqi detainees by coalition forces.

And, see! They may actually have found just such a case.

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One would think that the Moonbat Galactic Central Headquarters web-site would have a comment on the rescue, and so they do. One notes that it contains not single word of thanks for the men, who obviously at some personal hazard and inconvenience, went out and saved these bleating moonbat imbeciles from painful death at the hands of evil men. On the contrary, the statement actually condemns their efforts generally.

We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq. The occupation must end… We pray that Christians throughout the world will, in the same spirit, call for justice and for respect for the human rights of the thousands of Iraqis who are being detained illegally by the U.S. and British forces occupying Iraq.

Michelle Malkin was pretty steamed over this one, and who can blame her?

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Wretchard is eloquent as usual.

On Sunday, the New York Times described the US invasion of Iraq as “a debacle.” To read the liberal MSM, you would think the occupation of Iraq was a bloodbath resembling in casualties the battle of Verdun. Proud Kaffir at Red State Diaries cites some illuminating statistics:

Take a look at the actual US Military Casualty figures since 1980. If you do the math, you will find quite a few surpises. First of all, let’s compare numbers of US Military personnel that died during the first term of the last four presidents.

George W. Bush . . . . . 5187 (2001-2004)
Bill Clinton . . . . . . . . . 4302 (1993-1996)
George H.W. Bush . . . . 6223 (1989-1992)
Ronald Reagan . . . . . . 9163 (1981-1984)

Even during the (per MSM) utopic peacetime of Bill Clinton’s term, we lost 4302 service personnel. H.W. Bush and Reagan actually lost significantly more personnel while never fighting an extensive war, much less a simulaltaneous war on two theaters (Iraq and Afghanistan). Even the dovish Carter lost more people duing his last year in office, in 1980 lost 2392, than W. has lost in any single year of his presidency. (2005 figures are not available but I would wager the numbers would be slightly higher than 2004.)

In 2004, more soldiers died outside of Iraq and Afghanistan than died inside these two war zones (900 in these zones, 987 outside these zones). The reason is that there are usually a fair number that die every year in training accidents, as well as a small number of illness and suicide. Yet the MSM would make you think that US soldiers are dying at a high number in these zones, and at a significantly higher number than in past years or under past presidents. This is all simlpy outright lies and distortion.

Taken all together, it is clear to see that the military is actually doing a fine job and suffering very low casualty rates. It also shows that our enemies are not quite as efficient as the MSM and world press would like them to be.

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I think the best historical comparison of scale for the US occupation of Iraq would be to the century-ago Phillipine Insurrection.

PHILLIPINE INSURRECTION versus US OCCUPATION OF IRAQ

Duration – 1899-1913 (14 years) versus 2003-? (3 years so far)
US Forces Deployed- 126,000 versus 133,000
Insurgency- 80,000 versus est.12 to 20,000
US Deaths – 4324 versus 2319

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Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Two prominent Iraqi bloggers respond very differently to the anniversary. The anti-US Riverbend at Baghdad Burning has nothing positive to say:

It has been three years since the beginning of the war that marked the end of Iraq’s independence. Three years of occupation and bloodshed.

Spring should be about renewal and rebirth. For Iraqis, spring has been about reliving painful memories and preparing for future disasters. In many ways, this year is like 2003 prior to the war when we were stocking up on fuel, water, food and first aid supplies and medications. We’re doing it again this year but now we don’t discuss what we’re stocking up for. Bombs and B-52’s are so much easier to face than other possibilities.

I don’t think anyone imagined three years ago that things could be quite this bad today. The last few weeks have been ridden with tension. I’m so tired of it all- we’re all tired.

Three years and the electricity is worse than ever. The security situation has gone from bad to worse. The country feels like it’s on the brink of chaos once more- but a pre-planned, pre-fabricated chaos being led by religious militias and zealots….

..Three years after the war, and we’ve managed to move backwards in a visible way, and in a not so visible way.

In the last weeks alone, thousands have died in senseless violence and the American and Iraqi army bomb Samarra as I write this. The sad thing isn’t the air raid, which is one of hundreds of air raids we’ve seen in three years- it’s the resignation in the people. They sit in their homes in Samarra because there’s no where to go. Before, we’d get refugees in Baghdad and surrounding areas… Now, Baghdadis themselves are looking for ways out of the city… out of the country. The typical Iraqi dream has become to find some safe haven abroad.

Three years later and the nightmares of bombings and of shock and awe have evolved into another sort of nightmare. The difference between now and then was that three years ago, we were still worrying about material things- possessions, houses, cars, electricity, water, fuel… It’s difficult to define what worries us most now. Even the most cynical war critics couldn’t imagine the country being this bad three years after the war… Allah yistur min il rab3a (God protect us from the fourth year).

But the pro-US Mohammed at Iraq the Model is far more hopeful:

Maybe people still remember how Iraqis first reacted to the change; they directed their rage against anything that reminded them of the regime they hated, burning and looting anything that represented Saddam and his regime. The rich and the poor both stormed those buildings because those angry crowds felt those buildings were Saddam’s property and few of us realized at that time that that was wrong yet the emotions driving it were understandable.

The smoke faded away and we woke up to see all the chains gone and instead of the God-president and his iron grip over our destinies, we found ourselves without a guide, without any guidance but our long buried primitive nature, the long repressed nature of loving freedom and practicing it.

The change began then, at that moment where reason mixed with sentiments; were we free…or, were we lost?

Actually it was a lot of both and there was also a sense of great relief that the terrifying warnings from hundreds of thousands of deaths, famine and mass refugees were not true at that point, on the contrary the military operation itself was clean and successful by all standards and didn’t cause any serious harm to the civilian population, the infrastructure, or the marching troops…

..Was it the right decision to remove Saddam?

I say yes, and that’s what most Iraqis said and still say even if they became divided over what happened later…the truth is that virtually no one wants Saddam back.

I will just ignore the weepers, whiners, teenagers and half educated naive people and their silly rallies as I don’t want to waste time on people who can do nothing but blindly oppose everything without thinking.

I will ignore them and focus on the more important goals we want to reach here…

Life stopped and time stopped when Saddam ruled Iraq, actually that totalitarian regime was moving backwards and dragging us with it and nothing could stop the deterioration that began the moment Saddam came to power.

We had to accept the change and live with all that would come along with it whether good or bad.

The democracy we’re practicing today in Iraq is the exact opposite of what we had for decades and until three years ago. This democracy carries the essence of life, the differences, the dynamics and yes, the failures but also the seed of a better future.

Having read the Sunday New York and Washington’s newspapers of records’ weekly imitation of Tokyo Rose’s WWII reporting today, I can only point in reply to this year’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s State of the News Media Report and its polling results on just how much confidence today’s readership has come to place in Times and Post reporting.

Stephen Hayes lists more evidence emerging from declassified documents captured in Iraq: a series of memos from the spring of 2001, showing that the Iraqi Intelligence Service funded Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s; memos on efforts by Iraqi Intelligence to support Saudi opposition groups, including evidence of cooperation with Osama bin Laden 1994-1996; and a memo from “Republican Command, Intelligence Division,” dated September 15, 2001, addressed to “Mr. M.A.M.5,” reading:

Our Afghani source number 11002… has provided us information that the Afghani consul Ahmed Dahestani (his biographic information attachment #2) has talked in front of him about the following:
1. That Osama bin Laden and the Taliban group in Afghanistan are in communication with Iraq and that previously a group of Taliban and Osama bin Laden have visited Iraq.
2. That America has evidence that the Iraqi government and the group of Osama bin Laden have cooperated to attack targets inside America.
3. In the event that it has been proven that the group of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban planning such operations, it is possible that America will attack Iraq and Afghanistan.
4. That the Afghani consul heard of the relation between Iraq and the group of Osama bin Laden while he was in Iran.
5. In the light of what has been presented, we suggest to write to the committee of information.

Meanwhile, Foreign Affairs in its May/June issue is running a major article by Kevin wood, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray, titled Saddam’s Delusions: The View from the Inside, drawn from a recently declassified military report. It contains (page 6):

In a document dated May 1999, Saddam’s older son, Uday, ordered preparations for “special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan].” Preparations for “Blessed July,” a regime-directed wave of “martyrdom” operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

The government has finally begun to release unclassified documents captured in Iraq. link

Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard played a conspicuous role in bringing pressure for their release. 3/20

Michelle Malkin is collecting coverage of this emerging news event.

Fragmentary selections of the contents of captured Iraqi tapes featuring Saddam’s pre-war conversations and plans have been appearing bit by bit for some time now, shedding light on what the dictator and his senior advisors were actually thinking and planning. But, the New York Times today has all the answers.

Apparently, the Times has gained acesss to a secret history prepared by the US military in April 2005, titled “Iraqi Perspectives on Operation Iraqi Freedom, Major Combat Operations.” An unclassified version of the study is to be made public soon. Not altogether surprisingly, according to the Times, this study confirms every key liberal meme about the war.

Saddam was far more concerned about the dangers of a Shiite uprising, or a domestic coup, than a US invasion, says the Times.

Mr. Hussein did take some steps to avoid provoking war, though. While diplomatic efforts by France, Germany and Russia were under way to avert war, he rejected proposals to mine the Persian Gulf, fearing that the Bush administration would use such an action as an excuse to strike, the Joint Forces Command study noted.

In December 2002, he told his top commanders that Iraq did not possess unconventional arms, like nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, according to the Iraq Survey Group, a task force established by the C.I.A. to investigate what happened to Iraq’s weapons programs. Mr. Hussein wanted his officers to know they could not rely on poison gas or germ weapons if war broke out. The disclosure that the cupboard was bare, Mr. Aziz said, sent morale plummeting.

To ensure that Iraq would pass scrutiny by United Nations arms inspectors, Mr. Hussein ordered that they be given the access that they wanted. And he ordered a crash effort to scrub the country so the inspectors would not discover any vestiges of old unconventional weapons, no small concern in a nation that had once amassed an arsenal of chemical weapons, biological agents and Scud missiles, the Iraq survey group report said.

Mr. Hussein’s compliance was not complete, though. Iraq’s declarations to the United Nations covering what stocks of illicit weapons it had possessed and how it had disposed of them were old and had gaps. And Mr. Hussein would not allow his weapons scientists to leave the country, where United Nations officials could interview them outside the government’s control.

Seeking to deter Iran and even enemies at home, the Iraqi dictator’s goal was to cooperate with the inspectors while preserving some ambiguity about its unconventional weapons — a strategy General Hamdani, the Republican Guard commander, later dubbed in a television interview “deterrence by doubt.”

That strategy led to mutual misperception. When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell addressed the Security Council in February 2003, he offered evidence from photographs and intercepted communications that the Iraqis were rushing to sanitize suspected weapons sites. Mr. Hussein’s efforts to remove any residue from old unconventional weapons programs were viewed by the Americans as efforts to hide the weapons. The very steps the Iraqi government was taking to reduce the prospect of war were used against it, increasing the odds of a military confrontation.

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Isn’t it pretty to think so, if you happen to be a liberal and an administration adversary, who has been peddling the no WMDs line ever since seeing Michael Moore’s movie.

The problem is that believing all this requires ignoring the factual precedent of the evacuation abroad of the entire Iraqi air force prior to the First Gulf War to avoid the capture or destruction of an especially prized military asset, and it requires dismissing reports at the time of the US invasion of large convoys departing in the direction of Syria, along with more recent statements by the former Israeli Chief of Staff General Yaalon and former second-in-command of the Iraqi Air Force General Sada on the transfer of Iraqi chemical weapons to Syria.

But even more difficult are the required intellectual acrobatics necessary to reconcile the intrinsically conflicting notions of Saddam desperately trying to avoid war by a “crash effort” at compliance with WMD disarmament, while at the same time fecklessly steering his regime into full-scale conflict with the United States by a continued charade of WMD possession, and (unmentioned by the Times) resistance to inspections.

One wonders why the same analysis isn’t also being applied to Iran and North Korea. Maybe they both really have no nuclear weapons programs underway at all either, and are just bluffing, too. Isn’t that an inevitable theoretical next step?

David Warren contemplates the underlying assumptions behind George W. Bush’s Wilsonian crusade to establish democracy in the Midde East, and confronts the unthinkable prospect that they could be mistaken.

The Americans went into Afghanistan and Iraq with my blessings, as my reader may recall…

.. In (the) view — which I hold to be Mr Bush’s — we are dealing with what amounts to a planetary civil war, between those who accept the state-system descended from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and an emergent Islamist ideology that certainly does not. To Mr Bush’s mind, only legitimately-elected governments, presiding over properly-administered secular bureaucracies, can be trusted to deal locally with the kind of mischief an Osama bin Laden can perform, with his hands on contemporary weapons of mass destruction.

But Mr Bush was staking his bet on the assumption that the Islamists were not speaking for Islam; that the world’s Muslims long for modernity; that they are themselves repelled by the violence of the terrorists; that, most significantly, Islam is in its nature a religion that can be “internalized”, like the world’s other great religions, and that the traditional Islamic aspiration to conjoin worldly political with otherworldly spiritual authority had somehow gone away. It didn’t help that Mr Bush took for his advisers on the nature of Islam, the paid operatives of Washington’s Council on American-Islamic Relations, the happyface pseudo-scholar Karen Armstrong, or the profoundly learned but terminally vain Bernard Lewis. Each, in a different way, assured him that Islam and modernity were potentially compatible.

The question, “But what if they are not?” was never seriously raised, because it could not be raised behind the mud curtain of political correctness that has descended over the Western academy and intelligentsia. The idea that others see the world in a way that is not only incompatible with, but utterly opposed to, the way we see it, is the thorn ever-present in the rose bushes of multiculturalism. “Ideas have consequences”, and the idea that Islam imagines itself in a fundamental, physical conflict with everything outside of itself, is an idea with which people in the contemporary West are morally and intellectually incapable of coming to terms. Hence our continuing surprise at everything from bar-bombings in Bali, to riots in France, to the Danish cartoon apoplexy.

My own views on the issue have been aloof. More precisely, they have been infected with cowardice. I am so “post-modern” myself that I, too, find it almost impossible to think through the corollaries from our world’s hardest fact. And that fact is: the post-Christian West is out of its depth with Islam.

Wretchard, who consistently produces superb foreign policy perspectives, responds to a Robert Kaplan article in this month’s Atlantic, The Coming Normalcy (available to subscribers only, alas!), on the strategic necessity of overcoming anarchy:

Philip Bobbitt argued in his book, the Shield of Achilles, that Napoleon’s strategic revolution consisted in fielding armies so large that any sovereign who opposed him would, in matching the size of his force, be compelled to wager the entire State, and not simply a wedge of territory in confronting him. Napoleon’s campaigns were designed to kill enemy armies — and thereby enemy states. What Napoleon failed to realize in his 1812 campaign against Russia was that the Tsarist state was so primitive that the destruction of its army simply did not mean the corresponding demise of its state. Like the proverbial dinosaur of pulp fiction, Russia had no central nervous system to destroy and lumbered on, like the bullet-riddled monster of horror stories, impervious to the Grand Armee. What Russia had on its side was chaos as epitomized by its savage winters.

Saddamite Iraq, like most terrorist-supporting states threatening the world today, are like the landscape of 1812 in that they were cauldrons of anarchy given a semblance of shape by fragile, yet brutal shroud-like states. Occasionally some force of exceptional virulence would escape or be set loose to ravage the outside world: destroy a temple in India, athletes in Munich or a subway in Paris. Through the 80s and 90s the rest of the world toted up its losses at each outbreak, mended its fences and hoped it would never happen again. But after September 11 the problem grew too big to ignore, yet the question of how to destroy anarchy, already by definition in a shambles, remained.

Anarchy is self-defending, as the failed United Nations relief mission to Somalia in 1990 discovered to its cost. It will appropriate relief supplies, money and aid workers themselves as gang property, the economic basis of its system. Anarchy absorbs violence just as it absorbs relief and even gains strength from it when weapons, designed to disrupt ordered societies, are unleashed on it. Countries like Pakistan, Syria, Iraq and Iran are defended less by frontier fortifications than by the sheer toxicity of their societies. Not for nothing did Saddam release tens of thousands of hardened criminals from jail immediately before the invasion of Iraq. They were his wolves upon the frozen steppes.

It would be a serious mistake to think that the problem of confronting national security threats within the context of anarchy is limited to Iraq. Iraq is simply where the West must come to grips with The Coming Anarchy because it cannot step around it. And it is not the only place. An earlier post noted how the eviction of the Taliban from Afghanistan has simply shifted the fighting to Pakistan, the country in which the Taliban was first born. The real metric in any war against rogue “states” will not be the reduction of strongpoints, like Tora-bora given such prominence by the media, but the reduction of anarchy which constitutes their energy core.

Kaplan correctly understands that no campaign against Iran, Syria or any similar state can be expected to succeed until the lessons of OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom- JDZ] are successfully internalized. And the key he hints, is learning how to use force to allow indigenous order to emerge. If Napoleon wrought the army-killer in the 18th century as the answer to his strategic dilemmas, America must invent a anarchy-killer in the 21st; or a globalized world in which boundaries are ever more tenuous will be permanently at risk.

ISN# 049 – 8 pages – Detainee: W (Detainee has two names. He admits that one is an alias.) (Arabic name, origin unclear, somewhere “with harder and stronger weapons” than at Al Farouq and where 30,000 Americans visit evey year and “go about having fun.” Has been in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.)

Reasons for Detention:

There are no official statements in this transcript. Detainee admits that he went to Afghanistan from Saudi Arabia for a job consisting of “preparations” (for armed defense). He did not need small arms training. He was already familiar with them, as they are common in his homeland. He was at Al Farouq for two weeks. He had a rifle. He left the camp with a group, after 11 September 2001, and went to Khost, where after three months he was injured by the accidental explosion of a grenade in the possession of another person. He was seriously injured, stayed in two hospitals, and had several operations. He admits to having previously been in Palestine, and to being familiar with the use of the Kalashnikov, the M-16, and grenades.

Detainee’s position:

Denies that he desired to become a jihadi. There were Americans he could have attacked in his hometown, if he wanted to attack Americans. He went to the Al Farouq camp, looking for work. He was there, but did not train there. You should not judge someone as an enemy combatant, just because he went to Afghanistan or attended the camp in Al Farouq. He went there because he needed a job.

JDZ Conclusions:

It is impossible to answer many of the questions we are trying to resolve with respect to a case like this one where we only have a transcript of one hearing. It is not a very good defense. He obviously trained with Al Qaeda, and bore arms against the Coalition. His history is not revealed clearly, but the alias and his past presence in Palestine certainly provoke further suspicion. I certainly would not release him.

ISN# 055 – 10 pages – Detainee: M (Saudi)

Reasons for Detention:

Detainee traveled from his home in Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, via Kuwait and Pakistan, in March 2001. He was trained at the Al Farouq camp in the use of the AK-47 and rocket propelled grenades. Detainee carried a rifle, and engaged in military operations against both the Northern Alliance and US forces. Detainee retreated from the battlefield to Pakistan, where he surrendered as part of a group of thirty men to Pakistani forces.

Detainee’s position:

Detainee says he was at Al Farouq and trained with rifle and pistol, but not RPG. He says that he had been recruited in Saudi Arabia by Saleh al Harbi to be trained at Al Farouq. His intention, he says, was to fight in Chechnya. He denies fighting against both the US and the Northern Alliance. He says he left Al Farouq, prior to September 11, 2001, because of a quarrel with a trainer named Abu Haruya. He says he went to Kabul, and did not participate in the war, then left Kabul to travel to Pakistan via Khost in the company of fellow residents of the same house in Kabul. He denies membership in Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

JDZ Conclusions:

After reading a few of these, one senses a pattern. An effort is made to deny being a combatant against US or Coalition forces, but many of these detainees still fail to deny travelling to Afghanistan for training at the Al Qaeda facility ar Al Farouq. This detainee simply claims that he had made a personal farewell to arms conveniently just in time to avoid incurring responsibility for participating in the fighting against the US or its allies. The circumstances of his surrender in Pakistan contradict his story that he was travelling with a random group of housemates. It would have needed to have been a large house to accomodate 30 insurgents. We do not have a detailed account of the arrest of his group in Pakistan, but the US record states that the group of 30 surrendered to Pakistani forces. The use of the term “surrender” suggests strongly that the group was carrying arms. Mere post-defeat-and-capture claims of innocence of hostile intentions toward the United States are insufficient to exculpate known attendance at a terrorist training camp.  I would not release him.