perfidy

I have been criminally lax in keeping up with Insults Unpunished lately, but today I tried to catch up a little. First I discovered that it is now a group blog. Surprise! Robert invited longtime companion, I mean commenter (not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you) to join him. Read his intro piece, it's a good one. Almost as good as Crooked Timber's inaugural post.

But, the point of this post, and it does actually have one, is the counterfactual exercise that Robert linked to (and excerpted) here.

AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY: washington, april 9, 2004. A hush fell over the city as George W. Bush today became the first president of the United States ever to be removed from office by impeachment. Meeting late into the night, the Senate unanimously voted to convict Bush following a trial on his bill of impeachment from the House.

Moments after being sworn in as the 44th president, Dick Cheney said that disgraced former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be turned over to the Hague for trial in the International Court of Justice as a war criminal. Cheney said Washington would "firmly resist" international demands that Bush be extradited for prosecution as well.

On August 7, 2001, Bush had ordered the United States military to stage an all-out attack on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Thousands of U.S. special forces units parachuted into this neutral country, while air strikes targeted the Afghan government and its supporting military. Pentagon units seized abandoned Soviet air bases throughout Afghanistan, while establishing support bases in nearby nations such as Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, FBI agents throughout the United States staged raids in which dozens of men accused of terrorism were taken prisoner.

Reaction was swift and furious. Florida Senator Bob Graham said Bush had "brought shame to the United States with his paranoid delusions about so-called terror networks." British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused the United States of "an inexcusable act of conquest in plain violation of international law." White House chief counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke immediately resigned in protest of "a disgusting exercise in over-kill."

When dozens of U.S. soldiers were slain in gun battles with fighters in the Afghan mountains, public opinion polls showed the nation overwhelmingly opposed to Bush's action. Political leaders of both parties called on Bush to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan immediately. "We are supposed to believe that attacking people in caves in some place called Tora Bora is worth the life of even one single U.S. soldier?" former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey asked.

When an off-target U.S. bomb killed scores of Afghan civilians who had taken refuge in a mosque, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Aznar announced a global boycott of American products. The United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn the United States, and Washington was forced into the humiliating position of vetoing a Security Council resolution declaring America guilty of "criminal acts of aggression."

Bush justified his attack on Afghanistan, and the detention of 19 men of Arab descent who had entered the country legally, on grounds of intelligence reports suggesting an imminent, devastating attack on the United States. But no such attack ever occurred, leading to widespread ridicule of Bush's claims. Speaking before a special commission created by Congress to investigate Bush's anti-terrorism actions, former national security adviser Rice shocked and horrified listeners when she admitted, "We had no actionable warnings of any specific threat, just good reason to believe something really bad was about to happen."

The president fired Rice immediately after her admission, but this did little to quell public anger regarding the war in Afghanistan. When it was revealed that U.S. special forces were also carrying out attacks against suspected terrorist bases in Indonesia and Pakistan, fury against the United States became universal, with even Israel condemning American action as "totally unjustified."

Speaking briefly to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before a helicopter carried him out of Washington as the first-ever president removed by impeachment, Bush seemed bitter. "I was given bad advice," he insisted. "My advisers told me that unless we took decisive action, thousands of innocent Americans might die. Obviously I should not have listened."

Announcing his candidacy for the 2004 Republican presidential nomination, Senator John McCain said today that "George W. Bush was very foolish and naïve; he didn't realize he was being pushed into this needless conflict by oil interests that wanted to seize Afghanistan to run a pipeline across it." McCain spoke at a campaign rally at the World Trade Center in New York City.

Counterfactual exercises are fascinating to me. This one meets the essential requirements of plausibility, and departure from actual events in one particular. What if Bush had acted in advance of 9/11? The situation is carefully left the same - but the exploration of a different course of events throws the recent claims of many on the left into a very bad light. This is another tack on the post from the Queen of All Evil, that I linked to earlier. We really, really can't have it both ways. You can not simultaneously blame Bush for preemption and not being preemptive.

There is no question, that absent the horrible fact of the 9/11 attacks, there is really nothing that the current, or any president could have done that would have been adequate to the demands presented by the threat.

Conveniently abstracted by Spoons, we have the essentials of the recent testimony before the 9/11 commission of former FBI director Louis Freeh and former (thank God!) Attorney General Janet Reno. Here are the salient points:

• Janet Reno never specifically briefed incoming Attorney General John Ashcroft on the threat posed by al Qaeda;
• In her 8 years in office, General Reno was briefed about al-Qaeda, but was never told (and apparently never asked) the location of al-Qaeda cells in the country;
• Reno "never focused on just al Qaeda," because of the Oklahoma City bombing;
• Clinton's FBI Director, Louis Freeh said that the FBI was not given the resources it needed to fight terrorism;
• Freeh was aware that Bin Laden had issued several fatwas in the 1990s ordering his followers to attack the U.S.;
• Nobody thought investigating terrorism cases was the best response to Al-Qaeda's declared war on the U.S., but it was the best anyone could do "in the absence of invading Afghanistan";
• During Freeh's time in office, "We weren't fighting a real war [against terrror]";
• General Reno testified that the majority of the [Democrat-reviled] Patriot Act has helped counterterrorism efforts.

Again, we need to change the focus from assigning blame and partisan grandstanding to a more fruitful lessons learned analysis. These items indicate that prior to the attack, no one new about the attack. This is not surprising. MoveOn.org's poster in the DC Metro claiming that "Bush Knew" are moonbat fantasy. We need to stay far, far away from that sort of thinking.

What we need is a clear exposition of what policies hindered the collation of intelligence we had; what policies might, if implemented, increase the amount and quality of information we get; and what security measures might be both effective and appropriate for a constitutional republic. I have no idea, of course, what the commission's report will look like. But considering the behavior so far of all the commissioners, I do not think that I will be getting what I am hoping for.

Mac Owens has an excellent and detailed look at the second half of the Vietnam war - the post Tet period. Owens discusses the value of the Combined Action Program or CAP that I mentioned in the comments to several recent posts here, and the progress that had been made in stabilizing South Vietnam in the three years between Tet and the Easter Offensive.

A sample:

Sorley examined the largely neglected later years of the conflict and concluded that the war in Vietnam "was being won on the ground even as it was being lost at the peace table and in the US Congress."

Most studies of the Vietnam War focus on the years up until 1968. Those studies that examine the period after Tet 1968 emphasize the diplomatic attempts to extricate the U.S. from the conflict, treating the military effort as nothing more than a holding action. But as William Colby observed in a review of Robert McNamara's disgraceful memoir, In Retrospect, by limiting serious consideration of the military situation in Vietnam to the period before mid-1968, historians leave Americans with a record "similar to what we would know if histories of World War II stopped before Stalingrad, Operation Torch in North Africa and Guadalcanal in the Pacific."

... Far from constituting a mere holding action, the approach followed by the new team constituted a positive strategy for ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. Bunker, Abrams, and Colby "brought different values to their tasks, operated from a different understanding of the nature of the war, and applied different measures of merit and different tactics. They employed diminishing resources in manpower, materiel, money, and time as they raced to render the South Vietnamese capable of defending themselves before the last American forces were withdrawn. They went about that task with sincerity, intelligence, decency, and absolute professionalism, and in the process they came very close to achieving the goal of a viable nation and a lasting peace."

... The Marine Corps approach in Vietnam had three elements, according to Krulak: emphasis on pacification of the coastal areas in which 80 percent of the people lived; degradation of the ability of the North Vietnamese to fight by cutting off supplies before they left Northern ports of entry; and engagement of PAVN and VC main-force units on terms favorable to American forces. The Marines soon came into conflict with Westmoreland over how to fight the war. In his memoir, A Soldier Reports, Westmoreland writes:

During those early months [1965], I was concerned with the tactical methods that General Walt and the Marines employed. They had established beachheads at Chu Lai and Da Nang and were reluctant to go outside them, not through any lack of courage but through a different conception of how to fight an anti-insurgency war. They were assiduously combing the countryside within the beachhead, trying to establish firm control in hamlets and villages, and planning to expand the beachhead up and down the coast.

He believed the Marines "should have been trying to find the enemy's main forces and bring them to battle, thereby putting them on the run and reducing the threat they posed to the population." Westmoreland, according to Krulak, made the "third point the primary undertaking, even while deemphasizing the need for clearly favorable conditions before engaging the enemy."

Read the whole thing, it's a keeper.

There's been some fairly kickass Perfidious discussion recently about Presidential policy and Iraq, and somehow we've managed to suckerentice new commenters to weigh in. Sweet!

Buckethead posted yesterday an excerpt by Rosemary, QOAE that argued that liberals are impossible to please right now. All in all, she is right that many people have knee-jerk responses against every move the President makes. But at the end of the day, that's a straw-man argument that doesn't get at anything terribly important.

[Here comes the first-person perspective!] Even though I'm not a liberal per se (at least not on Tuesdays), I do generally oppose the President's views and treat his actions with overall suspicion. But I think Rosemary is giving me and many others too much credit for our discernment.
Back when Clin-ton was in the White House getting hummers and ordering opportune missile strikes, I second-guessed his every move. I spent 1993 convinced that NAFTA was economic poison (hey... I was in college), and when he launched those rockets in 1998, I was positive that that strike had been ordered to take media heat off his impending blowjob testimony.

All this is simply to say that there's a class of people in this country, probably pretty large, who have a hard time giving any President the benefit of the doubt. The office is held by mortals not gifted with foresight, and they are bound to have human flaws. I for one don't often have the intestinal fortitude to trust them to overcome those flaws.

That all being said, Bush's policies abroad do scare the bejeezus out of me, and I tend to grip at every new development. I'm still not convinced that the libervasion of Iraq-- though undoubtedly and manifestly a good thing-- is the best way to crush international terrorism. Maybe it is. Maybe it ain't. So far the Prudential Center hasn't blown up, so Boston at least has been safe for the last 18 months. Am I willing to give him the benefit of the doubt? Sort of. I'm the guy in the back seat of the car going 120 mph with his hands over his eyes, saying "I hope you know what you're doing!"

Anyway, I had a point here...

Right. Buckethead highlighted another section of Rosemary's post in which she argued that regarding terrorists, we only have two choices: to wait and die; or move now and kill. I disagree. I think that we are actually in the midst of pursuing a third way right now, and that more should be done along these lines. [note to Buckethead: yes, here comes the hearts and minds bullshit again. Pls hold fire until I'm done.] One reason I'd like to see more troops in Iraq, especially specialists rather than fighters, is that the faster and more effectively the general public decide "yes, they're infidels, but the lights work!" the better.

The Marines are as usual way out in front in doing this. Recently they resurrected the "Small Wars Manual", which was written back when the US had actual imperial designs on places like Haiti, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Although a lot of the information is entertainingly outdated, it still contains a great deal of heard-won wisdom on how to make villages accept your presence and work with you. That, in the long run, is the most potent weapon we have in the war on Terrorism. When the recent Sunni Uprising went down, I saw in it an opportunity to demonstrate the power of the Third Way. Smack without mercy anyone who shoots at us, and resolutely resist attempts to draw us into backing down or levelling the place. News out of Iraq is spotty, so I don't know what the hell to think now, but I still hope that my way is a good way out of Iraq's and out current trouble.

One last thought. I've long advocated learning more about the thought processes of terrorists and the populations that spawn them, as a way to stem the future tide of 'splodeydopes and radical jihadists. Some would disagree. They are the Second Option radicals. Others, mostly stinky hippies, think the US deserves what it gets and prefer to celebrate the free and liberal policies of Kim Jong Il and Fidel Castro. They are the First Option radicals.

We keep seeing evidence that in the Middle East in general, and within each country in specific, there are certain cultural differences that make all communication difficult. What comes across and gentlemanly conduct in Oklahoma translates as being a real pussy in Baghdad. The troops on the ground have to learn-- are learning-- how to bridge these divides and make their missions a success. But how can we ensure that the lessons they learn there make their way back up the chain of command and get written into a new edition of the Small Wars Manual? If Rumsfeld and his crew have one failing (and they have many), they seem to cling with evangelical fervor to their ways. Because of that, I'm having a hard time giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Rosemary, I do agree with you that doing nothing and waiting means that more people around the world will die in spectacular and horrifying ways thanks to terrorism. I'm just not convinced that the only other option is to kick all the ass you say we should.

[wik] Via Kathy Kinsley I find this Weekly Standard editorial that comes to the exact opposite conclusion that I have. Funnyguy (sorta) Larry Miller writes some excellent observations about the "end-zone dance' that was the aircraft carrier landing ("Mission Accomplished" my ass!), but then argues this:

Message to the administration: No one in Europe or on the left is ever, ever, ever going to like you from seeing a photograph of a marine handing a bag of groceries to a woman in a burkha. Jacques Chirac is never going to say, "Well, they have built a lot of community centers. Maybe Bush was right."

Win. Stopping building schools. Win. There's plenty of time and need for hospitals, but first . . . Win. Yes, yes, Iraqi girls can be very empowered by seeing a female colonel running an outreach program, and we can all chip in for the posters that say "Take Your Daughters To Mosque Day," but in the meantime, would you please win.

Larry, we are winning. On all fronts. The schools are not for the French, and the hospitals are not for college-age liberals. They are for Iraqis to use, so their country has the institutions that create stability. It would be a terrible thing to win the battle and lose the war, to have a newly free and nominally democratic Iraq elect a radical Islamic government with state legitimacy and lots of tax money to fund terrorists. It would be a terrible thing for Iraq to devolve into regional squabbles, and subdivide into a Balkans-esque set of interlocked ethnic zones. We need to win on all fronts, and bullets will only help with one of them.

For some useful perspective on the recent comments here at Perfidy, Rosemary, the Queen of all Evil gives us this:

The liberal complaints about Iraq and 9/11 are contradictory. You have made it impossible to please you.

Why do we have the 9/11 Commission? The purpose was to figure out what went wrong and fix it, so we NEVER have a 9/11 again. That isn't what it is now, is it? It is now a Witch Hunt. Blame someone (Bush) besides Al Qaeda and burn them at the stake. What did they know and when did they know it??? Blah, blah, blah...

We already hear mumblings from people that want to know why we didn't prevent it. It is a circle of insanity. If the Bush Administration had, by some miracle, been able to prevent 9/11 how would anyone know it? Let's say they had vague info that some time in September, Al Qaeda, would do exactly what they did. What should the Bush Administration have done? Act pre-emptively to stop the attack, right? If they were successful what would the screams and complaints be?

...We all know that they hate us. I don't give a rat's ass why they hate us. They hate us and they want us dead. We have two choices:

1) Respond after we get hit and suffer casualities and fatalities. Of course, then we are back to hearing "What did they know and when did they know it?"

2) We go in kick ass and start taking hyphenated names. I'm all about self-defense. If I saw some punk on the street that said, "I'm gonna kill you", you can bet your ass that I won't wait for him to start. I'm prepared to fight and kill, if necessary, to save myself. That is what our country is doing. It's just a grander scale.

I'm sorry guys, but you can't have it both ways. You can't demand that we prevent the tragedy of 9/11, and then demand that we not act pre-emptively against the bad guys when we think there might be a threat.

That isn't possible. How can you stop people from killing you if you wait until they kill you?

We either kick the ass of the terrorists and terrorist friendly nations or we wait until they attack us. If we wait until they "do something to us" you cannot go back and complain that the government didn't stop it. Actually, you can do that and that is exactly what the Left has been doing.

Robert Novak's written about Generals getting tired of having to tow the Bush line on troop level estimates.

The White House has recently directed its character assassination teams towards Richard Lugar (R) because of his constructive criticisms. Lugar, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (you know, the guys responsible for Congressional oversight of the war in Iraq), has complained publicly that the Administration hasn't shown them a plan for Iraq. I guess it's tough to do your constitutionally-mandated job of oversight if the Executive simply refuses to tell you what's going on, or tell you what they intend to do.

I find Novak's article noteworthy in that he is a pretty heavy-hitting GOP columnist and talk show personality. That this kind of criticism emerges from his pen should put a chill into Bush Loyalists.

The acid test for military involvement in Iraq should be, and should have always been, is this a war worthy of conscription?

There is a large possibility at this point that we're going to replace a very nasty, secular regime with one or two very nasty theocracies.

Let's remember just how accurate Mr. Wolfowitz is: February 2003 DOD Budget Hearings.

Continuous low-level warfare in Iraq has turned a short-term US force into a long-term occupation. From the perspectives of the Iraqis, the US has been there a long time. Prolonging US troop presence in order to bring the population into an uprising, simply by way of elapsed time, has clearly been the strategy of the "Iraq resistance" (a resistance which is likely being guided by Islamic/terrorist elements, at this point).

Makes me wonder something: Who's smarter? The Bush Administration, or the terrorists/Islamics?

They've tried rockets, bombings, assaults, and roadblocks, all chart toppers and def jams to be sure, but now the Iraqi extremists are playing their very first big hit, the 1979 smash titled "Give Us What We Want Or The Hostages Die."

Idiots. The world is a different place than it was in 1979, disco is dead, the Casbah has been Rocked (the jet pilots won), Jimmy Carter is not in the White House, and the USA does not negotiate with terrorists. Not that I know anything about anything, but insiders whisper that a certain somebodies are getting a little desperate!

Opinion8, sees violence from both Sunnis and Shiites, and is tempted to think, "A pox on all their houses," and so adapts an old Dennis Miller line:

Twenty-five million bad people just screw it up for the other eleven.

Go read tacitus on the unfolding clusterfuck in Iraq. Excerpt:

There are a few things to keep in mind as you watch the Shi'a uprising, now spiralling into oneness with the Sunni uprising, in Iraq. First and foremost, whatever spin you might hear, remember that this is pretty bad news indeed. Very, very bad news. Consider that if you are American, there is no open road to Baghdad from any of Iraq's neighboring countries. For the moment, CPA resupply is a triumph of airlift. Something to chew on. It's not the result of any one tragically wrong decision or miscalculation; rather, it's the end result of a year of accumulating bad calls and wishful thinking: disbanding the army plus not confronting Sadr plus giving the Shi'a a veto plus the premature policy of withdrawal from urban centers plus the undermanning of the occupation force (and the concurrent kneecapping of Shinseki) plus the setting of a ludicrously early "sovereignty" date plus the early tolerance of lawlessness and looting plus illusory reconstruction accomplishments plus etc., etc., etc. In short, the failure of the occupation to be an occupation in any sense that history and Arab peoples would recognize. Bad calls of such consistency are the product of a fundamentally bad system. More on that later.

What matters now is crushing the uprising, and figuring out what it portends.

The whole thing is clear, intelligent, and uncompromising. Astute reader will remember that I opposed the libervasion of Iraq mainly because I was not at all reassured by the lack of aprés-tango planning. We are now seeing the sad results of those piecemeal plans and subsequent second-guesses. I'm not saying this to jeer or mock the people in charge. I'm not saying it to score easy points off people more sanguine than I about the immediate prospects for peace in Iraq. I'm just saying it because the whole deal is turning ugly, and I'm very disappointed to see that I was right about the mid-term situation.

Well, whatever the next few days and weeks hold, and whatever the cost, Iraq is our problem now and if we cut and run it'll be much worse for us in the long run than staying could ever be.

[wik] One of Tacitus' commenters asks, "have the American people been properly informed--ever--by this administration of the risks, duration, and gravity of their plans for Iraq?" I don't think we have. I know that in the past, Bush has said things about our long-term commitment in Iraq, but he's said a lot of stuff nobody hears. What we need now is for the President to tell us in specific terms what the hell is going on and what he's having done about it. We need him to SAY it, in BIG words. Classic words, like "Blood, toil, tears and sweat." "Our long national nightmare is over." "Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came."

So far, W. has just dropped mentions of Iraq's cost and duration into policy speeches as if to defend himself down the road from accusations that he never told the American people what the deal is. Last night I saw dude on the TV smirking about that Sadr dude's uprising. Smirking! He's the president and he's fucking smirking about the war! "Seems to me it's just one guy and his followers," he says, smirking on camera.

Not good enough. We need a serious appraisal, one that underscores for the American people what the importance of Iraq is and why prevailing over the uprising and restoring order to the country needs to be our sober national duty right now. And cut out the goddamned smirking. It gives the impression that he finds his war funny.

That's how Bush keeps this PR moment from becoming his Tet, and could make it his Gettysburg instead.

Murdoc has a good roundup of blog posts on the fighting in Iraq, and some good thoughts of his own here.

In the comments to our earlier post about the deaths in Fallujah, Geeklethal said,

May I add that it's awfully suspect that the AP happened to be there at the right moment to record all of this.

Laughing Wolf has some more to say about that:

While I am not quite ready to call the hotel that is the home to most media-types in Baghdad the Caravelle, it is getting awfully tempting. The parallels are amazing, and extremely disconcerting. The fact is, the faces you see on the news don’t go out and search Baghdad and surrounding areas for good stories – they depend on others to tell them of the stories and don’t stray out of the hotel grounds that often. To go wandering around is dangerous, and to go where there is trouble and such is very, very dangerous. The safe thing to do, therefore, is to rely on PAO types and native bearers, I mean, native journalists/stringers to go do the searching and filming.

In far too many cases, those natives are the same helpful people that worked for Saddam and were in fact the minders and keepers of the press. They were the people who blocked them from reporting stories that Saddam did not want told, promoted the stories (remember that there is more than one meaning for this word) that he wanted told, and in general worked to block access to the truth. That such are now the main source of news for many of the Old Media speaks volumes and explains a lot of the coverage that comes out through them...

None of this is good, and most of all it is not good for the media, particularly the Old Media. The questions here are being ignored, and will be ignored as long as possible. What I see here is a mockery of journalism, and one of the reasons I am happy to no longer be associated with what passes for journalism today. What I see here is a betrayal of the principles of journalism and of the duties of a Citizen.

I want answers to my questions. I want them now. I want them in public. The media will avoid this unless they are held to the fire, and that is the duty of the New Media, and of the Citizens of the Republic and all other citizens anywhere who believe in life, liberty, and humanity. Most of all, those who are dedicated to a free press, a responsible press, must demand these answers. The reasons why should be obvious.

Read the whole thing, as it's rather devastating.

Today the army had to blow up a mosque that a few dozen Iraqi thugs were holed up in. That's sort of been a big taboo so far that said thugs have been able to exploit, so I suppose this was bound to happen sooner or later. Wonder what's going to happen next, cuz this could bounce either way.

Tacitus asks the question that's been on my mind recently: Can any one really argue that the occupation [of Iraq] is not badly undermanned?

Furthermore, Kevin Drum reminds me of something I've been wondering about. Given that there have been many months of sniping between Defense and State, not to mention the NSC, FBI, and CIA, when is Bush going to do the responsible managerial thing he learned to do from his expensive Harvard Business School education and start managing his managers? Infighting weakens organizations, and when that organization is concerned with nationbuilding (I didn't say empire!), you can't afford to have that happen.

Ralph Peters' analysis of the recent clashes and rioting in Iraq is right on the money.

SEVEN American soldiers died in Baghdad on Sunday because we failed to respond to last week's Fallujah attacks. Whatever our motives, we looked weak and indecisive. Additional enemies believed their moment had come.

In the Middle East, appearances are all.

Intelligence personnel are routinely warned to avoid mirror-imaging, assigning our values and psychology to an opponent. Imagining that our enemies think like us has cost us dearly in Iraq. The bill will go still higher.

Combined with the administration's folly of trying to occupy Iraq with too few troops, our notion that patience and persuasion are more effective than displays of power has made the country deadlier for our soldiers, more dangerous for Iraqis and far less likely to achieve internal peace.

Americans value compromise; our enemies view it as weakness. We're reluctant to use force. The terrorists and insurgents read that as cowardice.

When U.S. forces arrive in a troubled country, they create an initial window of fear. It's essential to act decisively while the local population is still disoriented. Each day of delay makes our power seem more hollow. You have to do the dirty work at the start. The price for postponing it comes due with compound interest...

On the day of the ambush and mutilations in Fallujah, we made another inexcusable mistake. The Marines, who expected to control a major city with a single battalion, failed to respond immediately. The generals up above seconded the decision. The chain of command was concerned about possible ambushes and wanted to let the situation burn itself out. The generals in Baghdad proclaimed, in mild voices, that we'd respond at the time and in a manner of our choosing.

In a textbook military sense, it was the correct response. On a practical level, it was the worst possible decision.

We viewed our non-response as disciplined - rejecting instant emotional gratification. But the insurgents, the terrorists and the mob read matters differently: Our failure to send every possible Marine and soldier, along with Paul Bremer's personal bodyguard and a squad of armed janitors, into the streets of Fallujah to impose a draconian clampdown created the impression - not entirely unfounded - that we were scared.

We broke a basic rule: Never show fear. No matter how we may rationalize our inaction, that is what we did.

Instead of demonstrating our strength and resolve, we have encouraged more attacks and further brutality - while global journalists revel in Mogadishu-lite.

Of course, we're not going to flee Iraq as President Bill Clinton ran from Somalia. But our hesitation to respond to atrocities against Americans has renewed our enemies' hope that, if only they kill enough of us, as graphically as possible, they still can triumph over a "godless" superpower.

To possess the strength to do what is necessary, but to refuse to do it, is appeasement. Since Baghdad fell, our occupation has sought to appease our enemies - while slighting our Kurdish allies. Our attempts to find a compromise with a single man - the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani - have empowered him immensely, while encouraging intransigence in others.

Weakness, not strength, emboldens opponents - and creates added terrorist recruits.

We came to Iraq faced with the problems Saddam created. Increasingly, we face problems we ourselves created or compounded.

The cardinal rule is, show mercy after you've won. To do it before makes winning a lot harder.

Sharon says that Israel might move against Arafat

I (Ross) am editing this entry slightly, because the image it contains is very disturbing. Look beneath the fold for the image, but be warned.

AP reports that Sunni residents of Fallujah mutilated the corpse of an American citizen killed in an attack yesterday.

Later, they hung the bodies from a bridge over the Euphrates.

Residents cheered after the grisly assault on two four-wheel-drive civilian vehicles, which left both in flames. Others chanted, "We sacrifice our blood and souls for Islam." 

Yes, you do.

Especially the latter.

There's some good coverage of the growing air tanker scandal over on Aero News. It seems that Boeing rewrote the requirements, with the complicity of certain officers, to assure themselves a win on the tanker bid. In fact, Boeing was unable to accomodate 19 of the 26 requirements, so they had them eliminated from the RFP. Airbus (that evil French company) met 20 of the original 26 requirements.

The only reason that we know about this is that Boeing made the mistake of hiring former Assistant Undersecretary Darleen Druyun too fast, making her a vice president. That got people curious, and they discovered the following email during the investigation:

Boeing's man in charge of the tanker deal, Bob Gower, wrote in an email during the five month rewrite, "Meeting today on price was very good. Darleen (Druyun, then still an Air Force official) spent most of the time bringing the USAF price up to our number. ... It was a good day. She may be running her own covert operation on this one, so we probably don't want to discuss openly."

Isn't that interesting?

A Dutch politician is in line to become the EU's first "Mr. Terrorism." That's all to the good, and I'm glad the Euroweenies are at least pretending to take terrorism seriously.

Why do I say "Pretending?" Because, dude, "Mr. Terrorism" makes you sound like a pussy even before you get out the gate. Terror Czar at least brings up images of Ivan the terrible, pyramids of skulls, and the like. Before you remember that the man occupying that office is a pasty middle aged white guy in a suit.

But Mr. Terrorism... Hmmn, what does that bring to mind? A skinny guy in a cardigan asking the children if they want to go to the land of make believe. Which, come to think of it, is a reasonably accurate summation of the EU's policy on terrorism so far.

We need a Terror Motherfucker. Someone who will speak to the terrorists like Samuel L. Jackson in full on, scare the white folk mode. Someone who, by his very presence in the world will strike fear into the hearts of terrorists. Someone who is authorized to personally put a cap in the ass of any terrorist brought before his dread presence. Someone who is completely unpredictable and dangerously volatile. Someone who has all the powers of hell at his command, or at least the United States Marines. Someone to play bad cop to Bush's bad cop. Someone who will make the worst European nightmares of American "cowboys" seem like Mr. Rogers.

That's what we need.

The Times of New York is reporting that government contractors are considering equipping passenger airliners with missile defense technology, possibly as early as this summer.

The technology has been installed on military planes for years, offering laser-jamming equipment and decoy flares to deflect small missiles that are known to be in Al Qaeda's stockpiles.

"Can we do it in 90 to 120 days and protect the aircraft? Absolutely," said Paul Handwerker, a business development executive at BAE Systems, a British military supplier that is leading one of three groups of contractors selected by the Department of Homeland Security in January to develop the technology for passenger jets.

Mr. Handwerker said that while he agreed with the reasoning behind the government's timetable, the company's engineers "would find a way to do it much faster" if the request was made.

Jack Pledger, an executive who oversees antimissile systems for Northrop Grumman, another contractor selected for the program, said that laser-jamming devices installed by Northrop on military planes could be quickly converted to passenger jets. "We could do it right now," Mr. Pledger said. "If it became necessary to provide this system immediately, we're ready."

Considering the easy and cheap availability of shoulder fired missiles, this is a good idea. The article also notes that,

The department's timetable has been criticized on Capitol Hill, where a group of lawmakers, most of them Democrats, has urged the government to move much faster and to commit billions of dollars to begin equipping planes immediately.

The department says that it is moving as quickly as it can and that it would be irresponsible to try to outfit passenger planes until the reliability, safety and cost-effectiveness of the antimissile device is demonstrated.

They note that military antimissile systems cost as much as $3 million per plane, require intensive maintenance and can produce a high rate of false alarms, factors that could be economically disastrous to the nation's already-beleaguered airline industry.

This is, I think, a valid point. Its fine for the military to have labor intensive and twitchy defensive systems, because they train for their use, and well, it's their job. The same system on a civilian plane would be an unending headache. Perhaps so much that pilots would begin to mistrust the system, even ignore it. Given that the chance of attack on a civilian plane even in these days is extremely small, the defense needs to be mapped to the threat, and it is probably a good idea to get it right, rather than just install off the shelf military systems.

Secular Blasphemy links to a Norwegian Defense Policy Institute, the Forsvarets forskningsinstitutt, which discovered an Al Qaida strategy document that seems to bear some relationship to the Madrid bombings. Interesting Stuff.