Sic Semper Tyrannis

Ah! It's an IRAQI Rebellion! Ah!

I listened to President Bush's speech at Annapolis.

The thing with the Midshipmen and the Academy Band and a predictably warm reception is amusing.  If he really wanted to hear them cheer, he should have given them "amnesty" for any disciplinary penalties they may be "enjoying."  There is nothing like a general release from confinement to barracks to "pump" cadets, midshipmen, or OCS candidates.

What was said that was of interest?

We "learned" today that Zarqawi is not the commander of the revolt in Iraq.  This is great since the administration and its "claque" has been insisting that the war is between foreign terrorists under Zarqawi and the forces of the coalition on the other side.  Everyone seriously involved in other than propaganda and manipulation of public opinion has long known that to be untrue, but the Bushies seem to have felt compelled to "stick" with that in order to maintain the fiction of the supposed Iraq-Jihadi alliance.

Now, someone has gotten the prez. to say that there are three, THREE, parts to the insurgents population:

1-The "Rejectionists."  Read "ordinary Iraqis" for that "Mostly Sunni Arabs," (his words)  He says that these are people who want to restore their previously dominant role in Iraqi society.  Absolutely.

2- Baathist hold-outs for a Restoration. (This would be nothing like Charles the 2nd's return from France, trust me.)   Presumably, these guys have the money.

3-Jihadi religious fanatics, some local, some foreign.  Not more than 10% of total but responsible for most suicidal activity.  No problem there, either.

He did not mention the awkward implication of (1) above that there are a hell of a lot of supporters maintaining this force in existence, but based on the  speed with which the administration acknowledges the truth, we should see an admission of that in a year or so.

Is this important?  You bet it is!  Up until this morning, the "Zarqawi Madness" insisted on by the government was a straitjacket within which the intelligence people and the command in the field had to operate.

This changes a lot in both the operating environment and the political parameters within which a solution must be found.

Pat Lang

"Fighting Position" - Farrell

Alan Farrell's verse.

Download fighting_position.doc

Download fighting_position.pdf

The Chairman Speaks Up

"QUESTION: And, General Pace, what guidance do you have for your military commanders over there as to what to do if -- like when General Horst found this Interior Ministry jail?

PACE: It is absolutely responsibility of every U.S. service member if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it. As an example of how to do it if you don't see it happening, but you're told about it, is exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago. There was a report from an Iraqi to a U.S. commander that there was a possibility of inhumane treatment in a particular facility. That U.S. commander got together with his Iraqi counterparts. They went together to the facility, found what they found, reported it to the Iraqi government, and the Iraqi government has taken ownership of that problem and is investigating it.

So they did exactly what they should have done.

RUMSFELD: I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it, it's to report it.

PACE: If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it."

OSD Press Conference 29 November, 2005

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) occupies a special place in the minds of the members of the US armed forces.  Contrary to the assumptions of many civilians, service in the military is not just a job, or even worse an occupation taken up as an escape from disadvantage.  For professional soldiers of the kind who now populate our armed forces, life in the military may start that way, but the ethos of military life and the bonds of loyalty and service that tie soldiers together quickly push motivations like that to one side, to be replaced by a code of honor and "stand up" responsibility that becomes more important than anything else.  It is not for a job that soldiers are willing to risk death and maiming or to kill as necessary.  No, it is for a vocation, a "guild," or perhaps even an "Order."  If that characterization is correct then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could be thought of as "Grand Master" of the Order and custodian of its honor and values.  The Chiefs of the Service Staffs used to perform this function but in recent years, law and reality have brought the Chairman into everyone's awareness as the man who speaks for all.  As the most senior "soldier" of the United States he has the responsibility to defend the right, to speak without fear.  He is, in a special way, the voice of those who have no voice, those who are forbidden by law and custom from expressing their inner feelings and opinions with regard to US government behavior and the policy that it represents.  This silence is the price that soldiers pay in accepting their role as apolitical servants of the state.  In return for this silence the soldiers expect that the government will not take up policy positions that violate the code of the American soldier. 

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff speaks for the soldiers.  Yesterday, General Peter Pace USMC effectively rebuked Donald Rumsfeld in public when Rumsfeld implied that prevention of abuse of prisoners by Iraqi security forces was not a responsibility of American soldiers present at the commission of such crimes.

"..sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it."

With these words Pace began to meet his obligations to everyone who ever wore our uniform.  Just after the war in Indochina, I witnessed the humiliation of a former Chief of Staff of the US Army at the Armed Forces Staff College where I was a student.  This man had been chief of staff when Lyndon Johnson decided to put major US forces into Vietnam.  In a lecture, he described the process by which Johnson bullied the "Chiefs" into accepting his decision to do so.  The general said that he had known at the time that it was a catastrophic decision but that he had accepted it.  My classmates were all badly "bloodied" veterans of what Johnson had set in motion.  When the general stopped speaking, one of them stood to ask why he had not resigned in protest rather than be part of what had happened to us all.  The general said that he could not have stopped Johnson and thought that if it were to be done, then he should do it.

Thee were no more questions.  There was no applause.  They would not stand for him when he left.  They would not even look at him.

He had not met his obligations, had not paid the required price.  He had failed us all.

Perhaps General Pace has heard this story.

Pat Lang

Ladder 49 - Farrell

"(maybe you’ve found something to yuck about at Mass; 50 years and I haven’t…)"  50?  Don't BS me, pal, you were in Pontius Pilate's bodyguard.

"Gardens of Stone?"  I remember that one.  "It's a family business and the business is not going well."

Pat Lang

Download ladder_49.correx.pdf

Download ladder_49.correx.doc

Re-Training Support People?

On Meet the Press yesterday we learned that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Peter Pace USMC says that the armed forces can cope adequately with its impending crisis of personnel and unit "fatigue" by re-training support personnel to perform the duties now done by the infantry.

This means that some of those young folks who were recruited on the basis of a better future through Army training and the experience of a measure of discipline in their lives are going to be re-trained to be an approximation of an infantryman.  Mechanics, finance clerks, chaplain's assistants, truck drivers, artillerymen, etc.  The list of possibilities is extensive.

Can this be done?  Certainly.  Will it produce a force equal in quality to the one we now have?  Certainly not.

THE INFANTRY.  The "poor bloody infantry," as the British sometimes say.  The mission of the infantry is "to close with the enemy and to kill or capture them by fire and maneuver and close combat."  Not everyone is "cut out" for that.  Some people have the idea that the way people end up in the infantry is that new infantrymen are those who were left over after the Army was finished sifting through the recruited for people who were "trainable" for more complex jobs.  Not so!  The Army is looking for men who will fit into the kind of social set up that exists in infantry units, live easily in the out-of-doors, and are not easily shocked into trauma by what their duties will expose them to.  The process of screening new recruits, of training them and evaluating the results tries to identify the suitable.  Life among other infantrymen produces the men you see on television at Walter Reed.  Most of them want to go back to their company, battalion or regiment.  They want that almost as much as they want that missing hand, foot or whatever back.

It can be argued, that all soldiers are basically infantrymen.  This sounds good but is not true.  All soldiers should be able and willing to fight, but it is one thing to be useful in a fire fight when you must be and another to be someone whose every day job is to be at the center of fire fights.

The marines maintain stoutly that every marine is a rifleman.  This is a pretty fable, useful in building "esprit de corps," but just about any seasoned marine officer will tell you (as they have me) that there is a big difference between marine infantry "grunts" and the troops from marine aviation (the air wing).  Additionally, the U.S. Marine Corps is part of the Department of the Navy.  It is basically a naval landing force and as such receives quite a lot of its support from the U.S. Navy.  This means that the percentage of marines who are already infantrymen is higher than in the Army.  Pace's experience of this very different force may have something to do with his willingness to go along with this re-training idea.  On the other hand, the plan may well have more to do with the now legendary distaste of Donald Rumsfeld for the US Army.

There are rumors that something similar is going to be attempted in the Navy and Air Force to produce scratch battalions of Air Force and Navy people guarding things in Iraq.  They could not do more than that because such units would have little or no combat value.

A policy of this kind is a measure of desperation.  A sustained policy of disregard for the terms of enlistment of our soldiers will wreck the volunteer Army force.   Does the administration believe that Navy and Air Force enlisted people will accept a re-classification of this kind without protest?

In 1944 and 1945, the U.S. Army "re-classified" large numbers of men into the infantry from aviation and logistical support duties.  A little research will show that the people treated in this way were not the best of infantrymen.

Pat Lang

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10154103/

"Allawi: Iraq Abuses As Bad As Under Saddam"

"Human rights abuses in Iraq are as bad now as they were under Saddam Hussein and could become even worse, the country's former interim prime minister said in an interview published Sunday.

"People are doing the same as Saddam's time and worse," Ayad Allawi told The Observer newspaper. "It is an appropriate comparison."

Allawi accused fellow Shiites in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centers and said the brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police.

Although Allawi is a Shiite, he is secular in his politics and is running separately from the Shiite religious parties in the Dec. 15 election. His comments appear to be an attempt to appeal to Sunni voters, who claim their community has been unfairly targeted by the Shiite-led security forces.

"People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same thing," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Iraqi officials have played down reports of rights abuses, insisting they are lies created by their enemies.

Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press."

The Utopian vision of Iraq as a land inhabited by the benevolent creatures of Jean Jacques Rousseau's imagination is fraying a bit.  We invaded Iraq with plans that accepted the idea that the various ethno-religious communities in Iraq were largely a thing of the past.  The administration held the view that Iraqis were a largely homogeneous mass who no longer identified themselves primarily as something other than "Iraqi."

This administration was wrong in that opinion.  They were completely wrong.  There WERE Iraqis who saw themselves primarily as Iraq nationalists but they were mostly people who had a stake in the existence of the Iraqi state as it was before our intervention.  They were military men, civil servants, school teachers, diplomats and present or past members of the Baath Party (like Ayyad Allawi).  All of these people together never made up a majority in Iraq.  When we occupied the country, we eliminated these people wholesale as "classes" in society.  We are slowly taking them back into the structure of the state because they are the "glue" that held the state together.

Through all the years of existence of the state of Iraq, the rest of the population had remained whatever they had been from time immemorial.  They were and are; Turkmen, Shia Arabs, Sunni Arab tribals, Kurds, Yazidis, Chaldean Christians, Assyrian Christians, etc.

In this AP story we have a secular Shia Iraqi nationalist (Allawi) telling us that the "unleashed" factional forces in Iraq have reached a level of savage competition for power in which they have returned to the kind of political behavior so typical of the Middle East.  In the Middle East, they have elections and constitutions.  They have a lot of elections.  In these elections they vote for strongmen who represent the interests of some portion of their country's population.  In just about every case, people vote for their own kind, nobody else.  Political parties that appeal across ethnic, religious, tribal and regional lines were always a novelty in the long, long history of the Middle East.  This was true even in the "heyday" of pan-Arab nationalism in the 20th Century.  Nasserism, Baathism, communism, these, sadly, were the "standard-bearers" of that kind of politics in the Middle East.  All of these movements failed.  They were "lights that failed."  In reaction to that failure, the people have turned back to their emotional and historical roots.

Those roots lie in a kind of tribalism that extends beyond tribe.  This is a tribalism that leads to the kind of savage repression of tribal enemies that Allawi has revealed to the Associated Press.

And now we have the Wapo story cited below in which The Shia political leader Hakim maintains the following:

"Hakim charged that the United States, evidently fearful of alienating Sunnis, was blocking the arrests of Sunni political leaders who had ties to insurgents. "The mixing of security and political issues" was just another U.S. mistake, he said. "Terrorists should know there would be no dealing with them."

Indeed, some former members of Hussein's Baath Party who initially took up arms against U.S. forces and the new Iraqi government have said they have abandoned the insurgency and sought a political role largely because of the effectiveness of what they alleged to be Shiite death squads rounding up and executing Sunni men since the Shiite-led government took office last spring." WaPo

Hakim is a leading figure in the "Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq" (SCIRI) and virtually the commander of its still extent militia, the "Badr Brigade." SCIRI is closely identified with Iranian interests in Iraq.

Need a diagram for this?

Pat Lang

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/26/AR2005112601211.html

Canada and the UFOs

I will be accused of inventing this story, so rather than comment I will merely post the newspaper account below.

This may become the basis for a screenplay as a sequel to "Canadian Bacon."

Pat Lang

http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20051124/bs_prweb/prweb314382_1

"Time for An Iraq Timetable" Biden

Senator Joe Biden has "stepped up to the plate" to give us an outline of what American plans in Iraq should be over the next year and a half.  As a leading contender for the Democratic Party nomination for president it is suitable that he should do so.

In this OP/Ed piece he lays out a strategy which is not based on conditionality, that is, he does not say, as the administration says, that we will not withdraw from Iraq until the Iraqis indicate that they are ready for us to leave, and that we agree that they are ready.

No, he says that there are "X" number of specific but difficult things to be done as part of a deliberate program of withdrawal, and that then we will be gone.  Perhaps we will leave a "small" force in the country, perhaps we will leave a somewhat larger force in an adjoining country, perhaps we will leave a large force somewhere "over the horizon" in the Indian Ocean area, but essentially we will be gone from Iraq in 18 months to two years.

The difficulties he foresees are all real and daunting:

-The internal politics of this state made up of many nations remain very divided.  The reported "feelers" from Iraqi insurgents to members of the government are, nevertheless, encouraging, and point to a situation in which the Iraqi elements in the revolt might be "split off" from the international Jihadi elements.

- The new Iraqi forces have yet to prove themselves capable of holding population centers cleared of insurgents for them by American forces.  The Iraqi forces also have to prove themselves capable of recruiting and operating forces made up of Sunni Arabs.  The technique of using Kurdish or Shia Arab troops to police and defend Sunni Arab towns against Sunni Arab guerrillas and terrorists is a "loser."

- Biden's belief that Iraq's neighbors all share an interest in a united and stable Iraq seems baseless to me.  This may be true of Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but it is a "shaky" presumption when applied to Turkey, Iran and Syria.

As long as Syria is under severe pressure from the US in the direction of regime change, there will be a considerable faction in the government in Damascus that favors making or allowing trouble in Iraq as a distraction for the US.

Turkey has irredentist inclinations in the north of Iraq.  Turkey has never fully accepted the "Arabness" of Mosul or Kirkuk, much less the idea that only Iraq has "interests" in these places and the oil fields in the area.  The treatment of the Turkmen minority of Iraq is a continuing excuse for Ankara's aversion to acceptance of Iraqi re-distribution of lands and towns in the north.  Turkey's aversion to the consolidation of Kurdish political institutions is well known and will undoubtedly not disappear.

Iran has been relatively quiescent in the period of our occupation of Iraq.  They see our time in the country as temporary and likely to lead to a weakening of the power of all the Sunni Arab states in the region.  The last Iranian election did not lead (as the Bush Administration expected) to a Western inclined youth revolution.  Instead, it brought to power a hard-line Islamic Revolutionary government headed by a man who calls for our withdrawal and for the destruction of our major non-Islamic ally, Israel.  Do we imagine that the Iranians are going to stand idly by while a government inclined to the US consolidates power in Baghdad?

Are these obstacles and difficulties so great as to make Biden's outline "moot?"  I think not.  We are now in Iraq. We are not in some other situation which we would have preferred.  It is time for the "loyal opposition" to oppose.  Biden's plan should provide an "umbrella" of thought under which to do so.

Pat Lang

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/25/AR2005112500864.html

"War of the Worlds" - Farrell

"Al-Qa'ida."  Only one apostrophe.  It represents the consonant "Ain," pronounced something like a dog growling.

"Al-Qaida" (Al-Kayda)(sic) means "air conditioner."  (That was a joke.)

Pat Lang

Download war_of_the_worlds.pdf

Alan Farrell

"Civil War?" Murry

Pat:

Your most important point deals with a general failure of people to define clearly what they mean by the term "civil war." Almost a thousand days into this civil war in Iraq, and we still have only a few Americans -- such as yourself and retired Army General William Odom, to take only two examples -- willing to point out this glaring deficiency. I've had it out with Professor Juan Cole in e-mails over this issue, since -- at least until recently -- he refused to see a "real" civil war in Iraq because no large-scale clashes between rival armies, like "Gettysburg" or "Antietam" (my examples), had yet taken place. General Odom, on the other hand simply sees "Iraqis fighting Iraqis" (as you also say) for power and rescources; a fight that began almost immediately after we knocked over the political, economic, social, and military order in Iraq: thereby creating a predictable power vacuum that we could not fill. Iraqis now fight openly -- as they have for almost a thousand days now -- to fill it. Civil War.

As others in this discussion have pointed out, America doesn't want to face the terrible situation it created in Iraq. The failure to "call a spade a spade," so to speak, derives from the fact that America wanted to create a deck of hearts and flowers, hasn't done so, and now refuses to see all the spades busy at work digging graves -- for both Iraqis and Americans in Iraq. The psychologists call this "denial." The American government (currently under Republican Party mismanagement) fairly reeks of it.

The Vietnamese Civil War (at least the Second Indochina version of it), became an American War on Vietnam with the introduction into that domestic conflict of America's Lunatic Leviathan military: driven insane by its own internal political and interservice bureaucratic rivalries for ever-expanding "roles" to play in wreaking havoc on a tiny but ancient country it did not even remotely comprehend. Frances Fitzgerald called it "an Orwellian Army that knew everything about weapons and tactics but did not know where it was." Now, as then, the American Orwellian Army knows all about bombing houses ("safe" or otherwise) but doesn't recognize the cultural-social-political landscape it inhabits -- so it continues to blindly thrash about in frustration, wrecking the joint and hurting itself in the process.

The American War on Iraq will revert to the more basic, lower-level Iraqi Civil War once America leaves Iraq and stops serving as the self-appointed and self-financing (not even hired!) gun for the Shiite-Kurdish Alliance. Then, like when the Vietnamese resumed their own interrupted civil war after the Americans left Vietnam, someone will "win" (or even call off the fight) and the Iraqi Civil War America started will quickly conclude.

As far as I can tell, the American government doesn't want to militarily withdraw from Iraq because it doesn't want one (or some combination) of the Iraqi factions to "win." I suspect that the American government fears -- with good reason -- that its favored faction (or combination thereof) might just take off its pants and run off in its undershorts like Melvin Laird's "almost-stood-up-until-we-betrayed-them (after 20 years)" Vietnamese faction-du-jour thirty-five years ago. How embarrassing.

The current American government just doesn't want to face the hideous embarrassment of watching Iraq and its neighbors figure out for themselves how they want to live in their own neighborhood. It doesn't have to get any more complicated than that. If it does get more complicated, that only fogs the issues and postpones the inevitable day when, as Frances Fitzgerald said, the American government has to face its worst nightmare: "confronting the consequences of peace."

Michael Murry

Benjamin on Jihadi Iraq

"The suggestion that a jihadist takeover in Iraq would follow a U.S. withdrawal verges on preposterous. It is the latest in a parade of straw men dispatched to scare up support for wrongheaded and failed policies."

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"The real threat is civil war. But here too it is not clear how much the U.S. can do to prevent it. If the Shiites and Kurds do not ameliorate the grievances of Iraqi Sunnis, civil war is probable. Keeping U.S. forces in Iraq in such circumstances would at best delay the inevitable."

Daniel Benjamin in the LA Times

Benjamin and I probably disagree less than one might think from a cursory examination of his opinions here.

In his understandable eagerness to refute Cheney, he seems to accept the idea that the insurgency is primarily made up of the international Jihadis associated with Al-Qa'ida in Iraq (AQ Iraq).  It is quite obvious that AQ Iraq is primarily involved in suicide bombings in the present situation.  They care nothing for countries or nationalisms of any kind and Arab national governments are as much their enemies as anyone else.  It is is true that the international jihadis do not have and will not have the numbers, organizational skills or weaponry to "take over" and run Iraq.

On the other hand, Benjamin accepts the idea that "civil war" is the more likely outcome in Iraq.  This formulation is a bit of a mystery for me.   Why isn't the present situation a "civil war."  If you believe that what is being fought out is a struggle between Sunni Arabs and the rest for power and resources, then why is this not a civil war?

To hold that it is not a civil war is to accept the Bush Administration's thesis that the Sunni nationalist/tribal/Baathist/former military guerrillas do not have the support of a large segment of Sunni Arab society.

Anyone who claims to know anything about insurgencies should know better than that.

Surely Benjamin knows better.

Pat Lang

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-benjamin24nov24,0,4137156.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

A Shrinking Perimeter?

Robin Wright, the WaPo Mideast writer has been to Baghdad three times now since the capture of the city by US Forces.  In these trips she has been in the entourage of the US Secretary of State, first Powell, and now Rice.

Wright finds that the circle of security is shrinking in the International (Green) Zone.  When first she went there it was possible to stay at the Rashid Hotel, wander the city and walk about the International Zone.

On her second trip the delegation was flown into the country for a day, kept under a close watch and then flown out before the sun set.

On her latest trip she found the following:

"On this latest trip to Baghdad, the bubble shrank even more. No roaming the Green Zone. Not even a stop at the convention center. The press corps, including veteran war correspondents, was sequestered in Hussein's old palace for most of the seven-hour stay. We were discouraged from wandering the palace and were provided escorts to go to the bathroom."

In the '80s I used to stay at the Rashid for extended periods, go out and run through the neighborhoods with a colleague, and drift around in the Baghdad "suq" looking for trinkets.  On the morning runs, the guards in front of public buildings would look up from their tea and sleepily call out "Good for you, mister!  Good for you."  The "Leader" had decreed that exercise was good for you.  Politically, that period may have been a low point for US-Iraqi relations, but  it stands in marked contrast to a situation in which a visiting journalist of Ms. Wright's experience in the Middle East is required to have an escort to go to the bathroom INSIDE A GOVERNMENT FACILITY.

It also stands in stark contrast to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) anytime between Tet, 1968 and the Fall of the town to the communists in 1975.  In that period we drove our cars anywhere.  We dined out as time allowed and were  principally concerned (in the city) with pickpockets, traffic and beggars.  I spent a lot of time in that period in the field where the war was and the contrast with the quiet in the city was striking.

Question:  Why is the perimeter of security shrinking in the capital city if the government's influence over the people is growing?  The situation should be the exact opposite.

Pat Lang

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/24/AR2005112401051.html

ATC - 22 November 2005

Drawing Iraq's Sunnis into the Political Process

by Vicky O'Hara

Analysis: Drawing Iraq's Sunnis into the political process

November 22, 2005 from All Things Considered

MICHELE NORRIS, host: The US and the Iraqi government have both been increasing efforts to reach out to Sunni Arabs and pull them into the political process. State Department and Pentagon officials acknowledge it's difficult partly because it's hard to identify the real Sunni power brokers. Critics suggest the problem is that US is talking to the wrong people. NPR's Vicky O'Hara has more on that.

VICKY O'HARA reporting:

The US relationship with Iraq's Sunni Arabs has evolved since the invasion of 2003. The US initially held many Sunni leaders at arm's length, knowing that most of the loyalists of Saddam Hussein were Sunnis. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Welch spent 18 months in Iraq starting in January of last year, and his job was to act as a liaison between the US military and Iraq's religious and tribal leaders, including those in the Sunni triangle. Welch says that some of his colleagues did not approve of his assignment.

Lieutenant Colonel RICHARD WELCH (Former Liaison in Iraq): There were those in the organization who were a little upset that I would be meeting with people that we were fighting with. But my position always was, `If you want people to stop fighting, who are you going to talk to?' And my position is you talk with the bad guys.

O'HARA: Pentagon and State Department officials say that the United States engaged the Sunnis from the beginning through reconstruction projects, but they say it took much longer for the US to reach out politically. Retired Colonel Patrick Lang says that's because the US went into Iraq with the attitude that Iraq's political transformation would follow the US model. Lang, former chief of intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency, says that model was one man, one vote, that people's rights and interests should be addressed on an individual basis.

Colonel PATRICK LANG (Retired; Former Chief of Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Agency): What we learned was, in fact, that in the Middle East people don't really operate that way. You have to address their group interests, either as an ethno-religious community or as a clan or a tribal group, because they identify themselves in terms of one or more groups that they belong to.

O'HARA: Lang, Welch and several State Department officials say the US changed its approach after Sunnis boycotted Iraq's national election last January. One State Department official said that after the parliamentary vote, it became easier to reach out to the Sunnis politically because at least some of them concluded that boycotting the political process was a mistake.

Another State Department official, Jeff Beals, political adviser at the US Embassy in Baghdad, says that military commanders and US diplomats now meet with a wide range of Sunni tribal leaders.

Mr. JEFF BEALS (Political Adviser, US Embassy in Baghdad): There are broad efforts by the US government and the Iraqi government to find influential leaders in the Sunni Arab community who are able to get out the message that the political process has room in it and can only succeed when every part of the population is part of it.

O'HARA: Beals says that US officials do not meet with Sunnis who are actively involved in the insurgency, but he concedes that it's difficult to determine everyone's history.

Mr. BEALS: What you know is that when voices are out there saying, `I want to talk to the United States about ways to find a way into the political process, and I'm ready to do so on the terms of peaceful participation in that process,' then they will find interlocutors on the US side and they'll find them on the Iraqi side, and they regularly do.

O'HARA: State Department officials say the outreach is paying off. They note the relatively peaceful Iraqi constitutional referendum last month and the fact that Sunni groups are fielding candidates in next month's parliamentary elections. But Patrick Lang says that none of the Sunnis who are participating in the election meets his definition of a hard-liner.

Zaki Chehab, political editor for the Al-Hayat newspaper, based in London, has extensive contacts among the Iraqi insurgents. He says the US is not talking to the right Sunnis, as evidenced by the continuing violence.

Mr. ZAKI CHEHAB (Political Editor, Al-Hayat): I believe that such attack will not take place if it's not approved by the head of a tribe. We can talk about success in reaching these influential in the Sunni triangle when really there is like a cease-fire or some kind of agreement.

O'HARA: US officials acknowledge that it's been hard for Americans to identify the Sunni leaders who are the true power brokers, but Jeff Beals at the US Embassy in Baghdad says it's getting easier.

Mr. BEALS: One of the things that is now becoming even more crystallized are who are the key leaders.

O'HARA: As the Sunnis get more involved in politics, Beals says, the US can more accurately identify Sunni leaders who have real clout in their communities. Next month's parliamentary election, he says, will be pivotal in that process. Vicky O'Hara, NPR News, Washington.

Copyright ©1990-2005 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission. For further information, please contact NPR's Permissions Coordinator at (202) 513-2000.

A Pardon for the Turkey

"About 100 Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish leaders, many of whom will run in the election on Dec. 15, signed a closing memorandum on Monday that "demands a withdrawal of foreign troops on a specified timetable, dependent on an immediate national program for rebuilding the security forces," the statement said."  NY Times

President Bush pardoned the national turkey today.  Some other  bird will die in its stead.

In Cairo the "Reconciliation Conference" sponsored by the Arab League under the leadership of that great friend of the United States, Amre Moussa (not), adjourned calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.

The turkey's pardon lay upon the table in plain sight for all to see.

"In Washington, Justin Higgins, a State Department spokesman, said, "The United States supports the basic foundation of the conference and we certainly support ongoing discussion among Iraq's various political and religious communities."

But regarding troop withdrawal, he said: "Multinational forces are present in Iraq under a mandate from the U.N. Security Council. As President Bush has said, the coalition remains committed to helping the Iraqi people achieve security and stability."

So...  The turkey evidently does not want a pardon.

Pat Lang

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/international/middleeast/22arab.html?hp&ex=1132722000&en=a8235ec987accd3a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

"Syndromes of Wisdom" - Murry

Download syndromes_of_wisdom.pdf

The Burden of Proof - Cheney

"Although our coalition has not found WMD stockpiles in Iraq, I repeat that we never had the burden of proof. Saddam Hussein did. We operated on the best available intelligence gathered over a period of years and within a totalitarian society ruled by fear and secret police," Cheney said.   Reuter

Breathtaking in its boldness!

Let's see!  WE asserted on the basis of bogus and distorted information that Iraq was in non-compliance with a variety of UN resolutions calling on Iraq to disarm.  A few trenchant points:

-The UN had withdrawn its inspectors from the country in '98 at our instigation because we were going to bomb extensively in an attempt to trigger a revolt.  Fair enough, but the point is that the IRAQIS did not run the inspectors out of the country.

- "We" believed before our invasion that Iraq still had programs and stockpiles.  After the invasion we were and are unable to find any, anywhere, in the whole country.  We could not find them because they did not exist.  THEY DID NOT EXIST!!!  If they existed, where the hell are they?

- The UN was busily engaged in inspecting all over the country in '02 and '03.  They found nothing and said they were not being significantly obstructed.  They wanted a few more months to finish and make sure. We would not give it to them and so after the invasion we used thousands of people and spent vast amounts of money to prove that  the UN was right in their judgments.

- The Iraqis were asked during the UN inspection process to produce an inventory of whatever they had in the way of WMD materiel.  They produced a long list which was proven correct by our later direct search of the country. Nevertheless, we insisted at the time that the list was incomplete and deliberately deceptive because some quantities of parts and raw materials that our intelligence had once believed them to have were "unaccounted for" by the UN's inspection teams in the '90s and were still "unaccounted for" in this inventory.  This PROVED that they were hiding a secret capability in WMD.  In fact, it did not prove a damned thing.  This was a 3RD WORLD COUNTRY, people!.  Nothing works right in 3rd World Countries and the fact that they couldn't do a perfect paper drill on all that stuff just meant that they were inefficient.  The UN was in the process of proving that when we abandoned the process claiming they were deceiving us.

Now the Vice President says that the "burden of proof" lay with the Iraqi government.  In other words it was their responsibility to prove to us that they did not have gas, biological or nuclear weapons or programs to produce them.  They were unable to do that, because these capabilities and programs DID NOT EXIST.

So, citizens beware!  It may become your responsibility to prove that you are not guilty of treason, sedition, being a malcontent, or whatever.

Can you prove that you are not?

Pat Lang

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N21272539.htm

Schoenbrun on "Intelligent design"

Well, we've come a long way since Galileo was shown the instruments of torture.

In the last few days the Vatican astronomer, a Jesuit of course, and the cardinal archbishop of Vienna (formerly a Dominican friar) have taken the public position that "intelligent design" is an interesting and plausible idea, but not "biblical" in the sense that Protestant Evangelicals seem inclined to assert.

It is a long time now that the Roman Church has accepted that "science" is in Caesar's realm and not its own.

This positions the Catholic Church as an ally of science and strengthens its role in its insistence on moral  judgments about the sanctity of life, which it can plausibly argue fall within the boundaries of spiritual conviction.

Pat Lang

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051120/sc_nm/religion_evolution_cardinal_dc

"Lunatic Leviathan" - Murry

Download lunatic_leviathan.pdf

"The Kingdom of Heaven" - Farrell

I like this movie.  I have studied the period of the crusades for a long time.  The film has a number of ahistorical aspects, but Ridley Scott is a great director and I think he "pulls it off."

The negatives:

The film gives the impression that the Kingdom of Jerusalem pretty much consisted of Jerusalem.  In fact, it reached from Ghaza to Beirut and from the Mediterranean to the desert in Trans-Jordan.

The film gives the impression that the kingdom ended with the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187 AD.  In fact, the kingdom revived and lasted nearly a hundred more years.

The Templars were nothing like their image in the film.  they were quite sophisticated in their relations with Muslims.  A Muslim chronicler of the time wrote that during his visits to Jerusalem he stayed at their guest house and they made a place in one of their churches for him to pray.  Guy de Lusignan and Reynald de Chatillon had nothing to do with the Templars.  The Templars were exactly like the Hospitallers who were portrayed in a favorable light in the film.

Saladin's behavior at Jerusalem was admirable, but on other fields, (Acre and Hittin) he killed thousands of prisoners.

The positives: 

A realistic portrayal of the actual nature of Muslim/Christian relations in the Latin kingdom in the time of Baldwin the IV.

A richness of detail in costuming and atmosphere which brings the period to life.

A history lesson.  Many need it.

Pat Lang

Download kingdom_of_heaven.pdf

Download kingdom_of_heaven.doc

Cock-a-Doodle-Do

FIVE DEFERMENTS:

1st deferment: Cheney enrolled in Casper Community College in January 1963 -- he turned 22 that month -- and sought his first student deferment on March 20.

2nd deferment: (student), after transferring to the University of Wyoming on July 23, 1963.

3rd deferment:(student)on Oct. 14, 1964.

4th deferment: attended graduate school at the University of Wyoming on Nov. 1, 1965.

5th deferment: On Oct. 6, 1965, the Selective Service lifted its ban against drafting married men who had no children. Nine months and two days later, Cheney had his first daughter.  Cheney applied for 3-A status, the ''hardship''exemption, which excluded men with children or dependent parents. It was granted.

Published: May 1, 2004, New York Times

VS

 

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/19/23516/760

The "Cheney as Chickenhawk" thing seems inexplicable to me (as do many things about him).  Wyoming just is not that kind of place.   People who hid from combat because their ass was too precious to be risked can't be well thought of in Laramie or any of those little places in the American "Empty Quarter."

"Woodsy" Pennsylvania where Murtha comes from is not friendly country for people like that either.

I used to spend a lot of time in Shenandoah County, Virginia.   There are so many men there hobbling about on crutches or eating breakfast with one hand and one "claw" at the next table that the thought of Cheney's deferments is troubling in the context of his martial zeal and ferocity.  He needs to learn how to tie a bow tie properly.

Farrell wrote that people thought us all "stupid" when we returned from SE Asia as part of what our countrymen thought of as the "less than greatest generation."

Well, the VP is the VP.  He looks a little peaked in his ridiculous monkey suit.  Maybe he really WAS the smart one, he and all the other little Cheney creatures.

Pat Lang

Rumsfeld the "buckpasser"

I watched Rumsfeld this morning on Fox News Sunday.  He was asked by Wallace (the younger and lesser) if:

a-commanders in the field in Iraq had been denied reinforcements they had requested and

b-there was an intention to begin large scale withdrawals from Iraq in calendar 2006.

On both points he responded that such issues were the responsibility of military commanders in the chain of command and the president of the United States.  He said that commanders have a responsibility to make recommendations and the president has a responsibility to make decisions.  He spoke as though he has no major responsibility in these matters.  He portrays himself as a kind of "post office" or "message center."  This, of course, is nonsense.  The law is clear as to who is responsible for what, and his behavior in office as architect of military re-organization and generalissimo in charge of the size and strategy of the force that invaded Iraq gives him the lie.

This is typical Rumsfeld.

I once had the "privilege" of asking him a question concerning Army re-structuring.  It was a professionally informed question concerning the future structure of the Army.  He smiled, as he always seems to do in public, and said that he had no idea whether or not plans to change the army would "work," but that the generals told him it would.  There were a number of these very senior officers present.  All they could do is squirm.

You can be sure that if there is blame to be apportioned for mistakes in Iraq, Rumsfeld will not accept any of it.

Pat Lang

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051120/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_iraq

Curveball the Eight Ball.

John Goetz has been working on the Curveball story for a long time now.  Ii is published today in the LA Times.  I am proud to say that I did what I could to help him and his partner Bob Drogin with this.

This story is a massive piece of the jigsaw puzzle that only now is beginning to be solved for the benefit of the understanding of the American people as to why they are now at war in Iraq.

The war in Afghanistan is easy to understand.  That Kiplingesque, far away, tribal land was made into a haven and breeding ground for enemies determined to harm us.  Only the truly pacifist have many doubts about the necessity that caused US intervention there.

Iraq is a different matter. In the case of Iraq, the US went to war because the American people became convinced that Iraq was a direct threat to the American homeland.  They were convinced of that through an artfully orchestrated campaign of half-truths which used evidence from dubious sources to make the case for Iraq as a threat to the US.  Paul Wolfowitz admitted as much in public when he said (paraphrasing) that WMD was sold to the American people as a threat because it COULD be sold and that nothing else would serve to take us to war.

CURVEBALL, the Iraqi source of the German intelligence (BND) became an essential element in the campaign of distorted and manipulated information.  CURVEBALL was a fraud.  The Germans said they did not believe him.  DIA said they did not believe him, but the Bush Administration evidently did believe him.  Why?  They believed because they wanted to believe.

Goetz and Drogin's story in the Los Angeles Times lays out the sad story of incompetence and deception which centers, at least in part, around this man.

Some samples from the article:

"The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq. Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so."

"Curveball's German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm. "This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."  The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst."

"The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast when he watched Powell misstate Curveball's claims as a justification for war. "We were shocked," the official said. "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven…. It was not hard intelligence."  In a telephone interview, Powell said that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, and his top deputies personally assured him before his U.N. speech that U.S. intelligence on the mobile labs was "solid." Since then, Powell said, the case "has totally blown up in our faces.""

"CIA officials now concede that the Iraqi fused fact, research he gleaned on the Internet and what his former co-workers called "water cooler gossip" into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11 attacks.  Curveball's motive, CIA officials said, was not to start a war. He simply was seeking a German visa."

""The Iraqis were adept at feeding us what we wanted to hear," said a former official of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency who helped debrief about 50 Iraqi emigres in Germany before the war. "Most of it was garbage.'' "

"On Feb. 5, 2003, Powell told the packed U.N. chamber that his account was based on "solid sources" and "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." "We thought maybe they had the smoking gun," recalled the BND supervisor, who watched Powell on TV. "My gut feeling was the Americans must have so much from reconnaissance planes and satellites, from infiltrated spotter teams from Special Forces, and other systems. We thought they must have tons of stuff."  Instead, Powell emphasized Curveball's "eyewitness" account, calling it "one of the most worrisome things that emerge from the thick intelligence file.""

""Powell's speech failed to sway many diplomats, but it had an immediate impact in Baghdad. "The Iraqis scoured the country for trailers," said a former CIA official who helped interrogate Iraqi officials and scientists in U.S. custody after the war. "They were in real panic mode. They were terrified that this was real, and they couldn't explain it." An explanation was available within days, but U.S. officials ignored it. On Feb. 8, three days after Powell's speech, the U.N.'s Team Bravo conducted the first search of Curveball's former work site. The raid by the American-led biological weapons experts lasted 3 1/2 hours. It was long enough to prove Curveball had lied."

"U.N. teams also raided the other sites Curveball had named. They interrogated managers, seized documents and used ground-penetrating radar, according to U.N. reports. The U.N. inspectors "could find nothing to corroborate Curveball's reporting," the CIA's Iraq Survey Group reported last year.  On March 7, 2003, Hans Blix, the chief U.N. inspector, told the Security Council that a series of searches had found "no evidence" of mobile biological production facilities in Iraq. It drew little notice at the time."

"One CIA-led unit investigated Curveball himself. The leader was "Jerry," a veteran CIA bio-weapons analyst who had championed Curveball's case at the CIA weapons center. They found Curveball's personnel file in an Iraqi government storeroom. It was devastating. Curveball was last in his engineering class, not first, as he had claimed. He was a low-level trainee engineer, not a project chief or site manager, as the CIA had insisted. Most important, records showed Curveball had been fired in 1995, at the very time he said he had begun working on bio-warfare trucks. A former CIA official said Curveball also apparently was jailed for a sex crime and then drove a Baghdad taxi. Jerry and his team interviewed 60 of Curveball's family, friends and co-workers. They all denied working on germ weapons trucks. Curveball's former bosses at the engineering center said the CIA had fallen for "water cooler gossip" and "corridor conversations." "The Iraqis were all laughing," recalled a former member of the survey group. "They were saying, 'This guy? You've got to be kidding.' "Jerry tracked down Curveball's Sunni Muslim parents in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood. "Our guy was very polite," Kay recalled. "He said, 'We understand your son doesn't like Americans.' His mother looked shocked. She said, 'No, no! He loves Americans.' And she took him into [her son's] bedroom and it was filled with posters of American rock stars. It was like any other teenage room. She said one of his goals was to go to America."The deeper Jerry probed, the worse Curveball looked."

We were made fools of.  By whom?  Is it not obvious?

Take note:

The Iraqi government was frightened and surprised by Powell's assertions at the UN about mobile bio-weapons production facilities.  They searched the country looking for whatever it was we were talking about.  they seem to have been afraid that there was something going on that they did not know about.

We should all be ashamed in this country.  We should be ashamed that we are so childish and easily manipulated that CURVEBALL's supposed story and that of all the other shoddy sources and rumor mongers were so easily "sold" to us by a band of political extremists.  Our gullibility raises the issue of our collective worthiness to be the sovereigns of the commonweal of whom Jefferson wrote.

Pat Lang

Download dear_pat.pdf

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-curveball20nov20,0,2053900,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines

"Dead Metaphors" Murry

Download dead_metaphors.pdf

"Jarhead" A Movie Review - Farrell

Alan Farrell's review of the film.

Download Jarhead.pdf

Download Jarhead.doc

"ISLAM IS THE SOLUTION" The Muslim Brothers

"CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood more than doubled its strength in parliament in the early stages of legislative elections, showing its weight with two thirds of places still to be contested, the group said on Wednesday.

The voting for parliament's 444 elected seats is not expected to end the ruling National Democratic Party's (NDP) control of the chamber, but the Brotherhood wins underlined the status of political Islam as the strongest opposition force."

Two thirds of the vote has not been cast or counted and the Society of the Muslim Brothers (MB) has doubled its representation.

The US opposes the MB, correctly recognizing it as the "ancestor" of much of the terrorist activity in the Sunni World, including Egypt, which is overwhelmingly Sunni.  Nevertheless, it is true that US pressure on the Egyptian government is progressively tearing down the internal barriers there to ever increasing political participation of such groups. 

The Bush Administration believes in the transformative power of elections.  It believes that there must be open and fair elections for democracy to work its magic of creating modern and "just" societies.

In Egypt the masses have a different idea of what would be a "just" society.  We are beginning to see it now in these election results.

Pat Lang

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051116/wl_nm/egypt_elections_dc

"Watch it now on GOP.com"

"It's time to set the record straight about Iraq. That's why we've released this new web video, "Democrats: Dishonest on Iraq." Watch it now on GOP.com.

Watch, and you'll see Senator Hillary Clinton talking tough when it came time to confront Saddam, saying "I can support the President, I can support an action against Saddam Hussein because I think it's in the long-term interests of our national security ..." Or Howard Dean calling Iraq an "international outlaw." Or House minority leader Nancy Pelosi stating unequivocally, "Saddam Hussein certainly has chemical and biological weapons. There's no question about that."

Watch Democrat after Democrat on tape, reaching the same conclusion the President reached about Iraq.

Now that the politics have changed, those Democrats are trying to rewrite history. We welcome a robust debate about the conduct of the war. But for these Democrats to make politics their bottom line, abandoning their long-held positions when times get tough, sends the wrong message to the Iraqi people and to the terrorists. Whatever the politics in Washington, our troops need to know that our will is strong, our nation is united, and we will defeat this enemy.

Be a part of setting the record straight by watching the video on GOP.com, and sending it to your friends and family. You are where this Democrat dishonesty ends.

Sincerely,

Ken Mehlman
Chairman, Republican National Committee"

This came in E-mail.  You Democrats are not going to like this, but it reminds me mightily of the baloney that LBJ fed us all long ago.  There is the same detachment from reality, the same willingness to bend the truth, the same willingness to cast aspersions on the motives of fellow citizens who do not agree with your policy.

This also reminds of the brainless repetitive hectoring of "the citizens" in the lamentable film, "Starship Troopers."  In this film, a "federation" government of the future relentlessly indoctrinates, spins, minimizes, entices and lies to obain a willing compliance from the citizenry.

Politicians?

A plague on all their houses.

Pat Lang

"The Motorcycle Diaries" Movie Review

I may well have know Alan's captain.  I was in the 8th SFGA at the right time.

Pat Lang

This is Alan Farrell's "take" on the Guevara film

Download the_motorcycle_diaries.doc

Download the_motorcycle_diaries.pdf

A Couple of "Talking Points"

The "spokespersons" for the Bush Administration are fond of the PR technique of incessant repetition of "talking points" designed to "brainwash."  They would call it "educating."  It does not seem to matter how wrong or distorted the information contained therein may be.

Here are a couple of their recent favorites:

1-paraphrasing - "It was the policy of the Clinton Administration as sanctioned by by the 'Iraq Liberation Act of 1998' that Saddam's government should be overthrown."

In 1998 I had conversations with the Senate staffers who had drafted the "Iraq Liberation Act."  These men were determined to see the overthrow of the Iraqi government and were quite proud of the fact that they had brought briefers from the Iraqi National Congress (INC-Chalabi) to the Senate to make the case to members who were then motivated to push for the act.  (See my article "Drinking the Koolaid" for details)  These same Senate staffers told me with glee that "Now we have Clinton where we want him.  He will be forced to take a firm stand against Iraq."  They were correct.  The process worked just that way.  The same people told me that a major goal of the act was to force Clinton to provide money for the Iraqi resistance to Saddam Hussein.

2-paraphrasing - "All the major intelligence agencies in the world believed that Saddam's government had WMDs or active programs for WMDs."

This is deceptively true.  In fact the major intelligence agencies (with few exceptions) have "liaison" relationships to American agencies, and lack the capability to collect the information on which to base independent judgments.  All these agencies have an ingrained "inferiority complex" with regard to the capabilities of American intelligence and their leaders generally fear to take positions at variance with American intelligence conclusions because the political leaders of their countries tend to judge their performance by the criterion of their agreement with American Intelligence.  The British are no exception to this rule.  "The Secret Intelligence Service" (SIS/MI-6) has largely been a "liaison" service ever since the disaster of the "Cambridge Spies" long ago.  SIS is particularly dependent on American liaison.  Therefore, it can be said that the fact that the foreign services also "believed" that Saddam had WMDs has no meaning.  At the same, critical time, the "International Atomic Energy Agency" (IAEI) was saying that Saddam's government did not seem to have an atomic program anymore and that the UN inspections were proceeding satisfactorily.

For the record I was head for five or six years of the US end of the military intelligence liaison relationship with one of America's closest allies.

Pat Lang

McCain at AEI

One of our readers pointed out Senator McCain's remarks at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) last week.

I invite comment on his address.

Pat Lang

Download 20051110_iraq.pdf

"Soldier, Soldier" Murry

The verse of Michael Murry

Download soldier_soldier.pdf

"Bad Reception" by Art Levine in "American Prospect."

“There is no oversight,” says Hishem Melham, the Washington bureau chief of the Lebanese daily newspaper As-Safir. “This guy [Harb] hires and fires and sets salaries on his own, and he’ll continue to do it as long as he feels protected by Norm Pattiz and Kenneth Tomlinson.”

Mamoun Fandy, a senior fellow in Middle East policy at Rice University's Baker Institute, says that the rules governing the networks have made little difference, and that MBN is operating "runaway stations that need to be brought under control." He also says, "Alhurra looks like the Middle Eastern states it wants to change: It’s run by a small dictator who is totally corrupt" -- although he and other critics concede that they know of no criminal wrongdoing.

In certain respects Harb resembles Ahmad Chalabi, back in the days when the Iraqi buccaneer was the favorite of American officialdom. He spins the story of the Arabic services’ success to legislators and reporters, charms political patrons in both political parties, and offers a product that at least looks slick and professional to Americans who don’t understand Arabic. Like Chalabi, the broadcasting potentate lives well on U.S. largesse, although neither Tomlinson’s board nor Harb’s spokesman will disclose his taxpayer-funded salary. Sources at Alhurra say that he drives a Hummer (average price: $50,000), and according to real-estate records, he recently brought a $750,000 home in a well-to-do northern Virginia suburb."

Art Levine in "American Prospect."

                                            ----------------------------------

For the record, I know Harb.  In my opinion, he is a secularized Lebanese Shia who has been an American citizen for many years.  He is extremely fluent in English and plausibly glib in the extreme.

He is a great deal like Chalabi although he speaks American English a great deal better than the great doctor of mathmatics.  I have been told that he likes and admires Chalabi greatlly, and hopes and expects that Chalabi will someday rule (govern) Iraq.  He knows Chalabi well.  This is something he has in common with his friend, the VP.

Pat Lang

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10595

Movie Review - Farrell "Broken Flowers"

"Broken Flowers" a review by Alan Farrell.

Download broken_flowers.doc

Habakkuk on"Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence"

In 1998 Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt wrote an essay titled as above.  The burden of this essay was a detailed challenge to the methods of intelligence analysis followed by the US Intelligence commmunity since the immediate post-war era when it was largley codified by Sherman Kent.  The S&S essay was largely an attempt to persuade that a "social studies research" approach to intelligence analysis was inadequate and that something else should be substituted.

Why is this of interest?

Abram Shulsky was an important member of the "Office of Special Plans" (OSP) in the Pentagon under Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld.

Gary Schmitt is a major figure in the "Project for a New American Century."  (PNAC).  This group is part of the "galaxy" of organizations inhabited by or created by the Jacobin neocons.

Here is the S&S paper.

Pat Lang

Download leo_strauss_and_the_world_of_intelligence.pdf

                                          --------------------------------

I have asked David Habakkuk, a British journalist and scholar specializing in the history of intelligence services to comment on this paper.  His remarks are available below, first in excerpt, then through download.  He mentions my paper "Bureaucrats versus Artists," so I here offer a link to the paper.

Download artists_versus_bureaucrats....pdf

Pat Lang

                                         ----------------------------------

"I stress this, because a characteristic of the neocon approach is that wherever we are, we are back in 1938.  Every threat ends up being, in one form or other, Hitler reincarnated.  It is difficult to be clear here how far one is dealing with genuine misperception, and how far with manipulative rhetoric.  One might say that the S&S paper itself involves a major problem of ambiguity of evidence, in that it is deeply unclear how far one is dealing with conscious distortion or incomprehension:  is this an ill-calculated attempt at dealing with intellectual issues relating to intelligence, or a well-calculated piece of propaganda designed to use the technique of the Big Lie in a war against the CIA?  What is clear, and in some ways frightening, is the shamelessness.  In her 1988 study of 'The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss', Shadia Drury portrayed Strauss as an interesting if deeply flawed thinker, but suggested that what was fundamentally unfortunate about him was that 'he corrupts'; more specifically, he 'seduces young men into thinking that they belong to special and privileged class of individuals that transcend ordinary humanity and the rules applicable to other people.'"  David Habakkuk

Download sspaper.pdf

Download CV1.pdf

                                   -------------------------------------

I also asked Richard Sale to comment upon both the S&S essay and Habbakkuk's comments.  These appear below first in excerpt and then by download.  Pat Lang

                                    -------------------------------------

" The tragedy of pre-war intelligence was that it was that this tragedy was so willfully entered into. The senior officials of the first Bush administration would tolerate around them only people who were in tune with their views and predilections. People who presented rebutting evidence were not seen as simply making an honest mistake or havein different views but rather as embodying a perverse will that was ignoring truth out of pride and spiteful wickedness. This is hardly the path to humility before the facts that is part of the intellectual equipment of the good intelligence analyst."  Richard Sale

Download the_paper_of_david_habbakuk_contains_stunning_points.pdf

                                     ----------------------------------------

Judge for yourself.

Pat Lang

Veterans Day - 2005

Alan Farrell is often asked to speak at military funerals, Veteran's Day observances and the like.  This is a speech he sometimes gives.

The Lexington in this talk is Lexington, Virginia, and the owner of the hardware store is an old friend.

Pat Lang

Download spch.dumb vet.pdf

Key Rove Aide May Testify

Key Rove Aide May Be Asked to Testify

By Richard Sale, long-time intelligence correspondent

     A key aide to presidential advisor Karl Rove is likely to be summoned to appear before the federal grand jury investigating the outing of Central Intelligence Agency operative, Valerie Plame, according to federal law enforcement officials.

    

     Susan Ralston, the chief of staff for Rove, who manages his appointments and scheduling, remains a “person of interest” to federal probers seeking to clarify the circumstances surrounding the leak of Plame’s identity to the media.

    

     Ralston could appear as early next week, barring “any late minute maneuvering,” a federal law enforcement official said.

   

     The probe is trying to determine if there was a conspiracy to out Plame in retaliation for criticism by her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson, who alleged that the administration had exaggerated intelligence and hyped its rationale for going to war with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

     On October 28, a federal grand jury indicted Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice.      Libby, who faces 30 years of prison time if proven guilty, has proclaimed his innocence and his intent to clear his name, according to UPI news accounts.

     According to U.S. government officials, investigators from the office of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald are interested in clarifying a discrepancy in Rove’s testimony before the grand jury involving Time Magazine reporter Matthew Cooper.

     According to published accounts, Cooper appeared on July 21 before the grand jury to answer questions that centered on the week of July 6, 2003, the period when an opinion piece by Wilson openly challenged administration assertions about Iraq’s attempts to purchase 500 metric tons of yellow cake uranium from the government of Niger.

     The allegation was found later to have been made in forged documents, according to UPI news reports.

     According to Cooper’s account, he called Rove on July 11, reaching Rove through the White House switchboard and then being transferred to his office. Cooper later filed an e-mail about the conversation that was later leaked to the media.

     When Rove testified before the grand jury, he made no mention of his conversation with Cooper, and when Special Counsel Fitzgerald asked him about it later, Rove testified he had simply forgotten about the call and was only reminded of it when a White House colleague showed him an e-mail about it.

     According to federal sources, Fitzgerald was openly skeptical of this. One U.S. government official said: “The White House dug around and came up with this plan where Ralston would testify that while Rove had a brilliant mind able to deftly deal with large and abstract concepts, when it came to details, he was the absent-minded professor.”

     The famous 18^th century economist Adam Smith, for example, was famous for an episode in which he went dressed in his nightshirt into his backyard, and busy with his thoughts, was later discovered to have wandered 10 miles down a country road before found by his friends. “Rove was supposed to resemble that,yes,” the source close to the case said.

     According to federal sources, Ralston stuck to a similar story when she testified before the grand jury last August. The argument made was that the switchboard only logs calls that Rove receives directly, not ones routed through the switchboard, U.S. government sources said.

     “What the investigators want to know is why that record of Cooper’s phone call didn’t appear in White House logs,” a federal law enforcement official said, especially since Fitzgerald has evidence that all switchboard calls were logged in, not just some, contradicting White House assertions.

     Robert Luskin, Rove’s attorney, has consistently maintained that Rove was simply forgetful.

   

     But one source close to the case said, “There is still some question in the Special Counsel’s office as to whether Rove made an attempt to mislead the probe.”

    On Wednesday, Ralston was away from the White House on travel, but a further call for comment was not returned.

   Asked if Ralston was scheduled to appear, Fitzgerald’s spokeman, Randall Sanborn, said: “I have no comment on that.”

"Serving Patriot" on "The Old Guns are.."

This was a Comment from "Serving Patriot."  It is so striking that I have made it a posting in its own right.  Pat Lang

"Someone said it upthread that this is a tactical view of the scene lacking in operational/strategic dimension. That is very true.

The commentary that the bulk of insurgency is made up of foreign fighters is disturbing. But, it is unrealistic. Perhaps it is a regional (Anbar) perspective. It is a valuable window into what our troops in the field are being told. It seems thier perception is that they can win even in an attrition battle (so long as the "hated" media doesn't lose the home front war for them). These perceptions must be fed by higher ups in the C-o-C. The question I have is this a deliberate falsehood or one borne of ignorance of the environment?

"Jordan's" opinion squares closely with a recent conversation I had with a field grade officer (recently returned) who is convinced we can WIN if only the "cuffs would come off" and we could get the "2,000 guys" we "know are at the heart of the insurgency." (Of course, this officer could not tell me how reliably (or even how) we know about thes 2000 leaders.) This same officer recognizes the mendacity of our entry into this war and is appalled by the incompetence displayed by NCA-level in failing to provide for proper post conflict planning. But, he still thinks we can win.

However, it just is not logical to me that the level of insurgency in Iraq is only supported by outside agents (foreigners) who are distinct from and (supposedly) hated by the Iraqi people themselves. If the Iraqis themselves are so heavily armed and angry, seems that they would take care of this foreigner problem on their own. I have no doubt that an Iraqi (of any ethnicity) knows when a foreign fighter (be it Egyptian, Saudi, Iranian, or Syrian) is in their midst. That these few fighters (even our own Coalition acknowledges less than a couple hundred killed/captured) are endowed with such capability is unrealistic. (Perhaps when our forces leave the locals will take care of the foreign element since the one target the two groups can agree on - Coalition troops - will be gone.)

Due to ignorance and deliberate misinformation, our folks believe they continue to fight the ever present "AQ" enemy in Iraq. Almost none of our troops speak Arabic, understand Iraqi history, or tribal culture. The average soldier could never tell the difference between a Syrian, Iranian, Egyptian or Iraqi - to them they are all "Jihadis" and deserving of a trip to an "AWR". Raised in a anti-Muslim, anti-Arab worldview shaped by 25 years of one-sided stories (Iran hostages, Beruit, GW I, Palestinians, terrorism, etc), they are easily swayed to the belief they are fighting "ragheads" not worthy of their respect. It is easy for them to believe that AQ is everywhere in Iraq and going at them in a climactic battle against the great satan.

Our troops need to have these perceptions to justify to themsleves their continued presence in a losing campaign and gives them the needed morale to go on.

However, the high command should know better. They have either 1) deluded themselves into a similar opinion of the insurgency that are evidenced by their troops, 2) know the truth but cannot believe it (or talk about it), or 3) are completely ignorant (or fed untruths by our local allies like Kurds) of the reality they inhabit. Many future history books will try to figure this piece out.

Thanks for the read - it was a good one - and disturbing. One one hand, I am heartened that our troops remain focussed on winning. But I worry when the loss comes and the truth is laid bare, how much damage (not just physical) will be done to our professional military. Those that serve deserve much much better than that."

Serving Patriot

"The Old Guns Are ...."

Someone sent me this record of the musings of an Army veteran on the time he had a little while ago with his son, A US Marine veteran of Iraq.  It is straight soldier talk.  No BS, no "prettying up" the language, none of that.

The young man's comments on equipment really struck me as "just right."  He says that the old weapons, the ones we fought with in Vietnam, Korea and WW2 are better than the new ones.  I never did understand the decision to get rid of the M1911A1 .45 pistol, but then, I qualified "Expert" with it,

The M2 .50 caliber machine gun is something like the DC-3 (C-47).  It will live forever as the greatest machine gun ever made.  He thinks so too, and why did we get rid of the M-60 machine gun?

I think he underestimaes the size of the Iraqi elements in the insurgencies ongoing.  In fact, they are the guys who have learned not to make "banzai charges," and to prefer IEDs.  I would enjoy talking to him about it.

In any event, his father is proud of him.  I can see why.

Pat Lang

"A couple of weekends ago I got to spend time with my son Jordan,

who was on his first leave since returning from Iraq. He is well (a

little thin), and already bored. He will be returning to Iraq for a

second tour in early '06 and has already re-enlisted early for 4 more

years. He loves the Marine Corps and is actually looking forward to returning to Iraq.

Jordan spent 7 months at "Camp Blue Diamond" in Ramada. Aka: Fort

Apache. He saw and did a lot and the following is what he told me about

weapons, equipment, tactics and other miscellaneous info which may be of

interest to you. Nothing is by any means classified. No politics here,

just a Marine with a bird's eye view's opinions:

Download 1234.pdf

"The Man Who Outlived His Lieutenant" Farrell

By Alan Farrell

Download the_man_who_outlived_his_lieutenant.pdf

"The Boobie Pledge of Subservience" Murry

By Michael Murry

Download the_boobie_pledge_of_subservience.pdf

Chalabi-Rice-Cheney?

"In a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, questioned "how this man, who gave us such misleading information before the invasion of Iraq, now under active investigation for endangering American troops, is now the toast of the town at the Department of Treasury and the Department of State."

And the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorialized Tuesday, "The proper way to welcome him would be to slap handcuffs on him.""  CNN

An official reception for Ahmad Chalabi?  How can that be?  The man is still wanted for a fraud conviction in Jordan.  He is the subject of an "open" investigation at the FBI for what appears to be suspicion of espionage against the United States, and he is being given an official reception by the US government at the level of Rice and Cheney?

This will be interpreted in the Arab and Islamic Worlds as endorsement of a Chalabi rise to power in the government of Iraq.  He wants to be Prime Minister.  His neocon pals/dupes are still "pushing him" for that position.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has it right.  He should be arrested and held here until the FBI investigation is completed.

Pat Lang

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/11/09/chalabi.us/index.html

"Countdown" Transcript Monday, 7 November, 2000

"Our fifth story on the COUNTDOWN, the guy was not only making it up, but by February of 2002, the government knew he was making it up.  Al-Libi was the first al Qaeda big get, arrested in Afghanistan back in November 2001.

Under interrogation, he reportedly told agents that al Qaeda was training in Iraq.  In 2004, he recanted.  He admitted he had made that up.  But far earlier, the Defense Intelligence Agency had already figured out that his information was bogus, two years before his confession.

According to a newly declassified document, the DIA warned that the fact al-Libi didn‘t share any specifics about al Qaeda in Iraq had to have meant one of two things.  Quote, “It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers.  Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.”

That‘s called telling them what you think they want you to hear.  The document goes on to note that Saddam Hussein‘s regime was wary of extremist Islamic groups, and that his government was, quote, “unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.”

The DIA assessment was made available to several agencies, including the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House.

Yet eight months later, in October 2002, the president used al-Libi‘s information to lay out an al Qaeda link in his speech at Cincinnati, and five months after that, February 2003, the information was still being treated as credible, most notably by then-secretary of state Colin Powell, when he made his case for war to the U.N.

We‘ll examine the politics of this with the assistant managing editor of “TIME” magazine, Michael Duffy, in a moment.

First, the spycraft.  Let‘s bring in Colonel Patrick Lang, the head of Middle East intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency during the first Gulf War.

Colonel Lang, thanks for your time tonight.

COL. PATRICK LANG (RET.), U.S. ARMY:  Hello, Keith.

OLBERMANN:  How likely is all this to have been a mistake, a good-faith misinterpretation, even a different viewpoint between different intelligence organizations?

LANG:  Well, I think you know that it‘s not at all unusual that DIA would have taken a skeptical look at this guy and drawn the obvious conclusions from the data and decided that he was bogus.  And this report would have gone to a couple of hundred different people by message and hard copy around town and across the world.

The fact that DIA had a different opinion from CIA in this is not unusual.  Different people can look at material and come to a different conclusion, at least for a while.

But I think it‘s an interesting coincidence that right after this, the Office of Special Plans was set up in the Office of the Secretary of Defense to look at the same data, and they came to radically different conclusions.

OLBERMANN:  The two newspaper stories, the ones in “The New York Times” and “The Los Angeles Times,” and Senator Carl Levin, who had released part of that DIA declassified memo, says, or the headlines do, the administration would have gotten a report about al-Libi and his dubiousness.  One headline had it as, the Bush team would have gotten it.

But nowhere does it say specifically who or what offices in the White House.  Who would have read this?  Who would have said, No, no, this is not true, this guy is the real deal, anyway?

LANG:  Well, I was the authorizing authority for issuance of all documents in this area of knowledge in DIA for many years.  And this document would have had a distribution list around town that would have listed 50, 60 different offices in each of a number of large places like the State Department, the White House, the National Security Council, the Office of the Vice President, and all over the Pentagon.

So it went to lots and lots of people.  This is not a really extremely compartmented kind of document.  A lot of people would have gotten it.

OLBERMANN:  What, under those circumstances, has to happen, either deliberately or due to incompetence, or due to turf wars, or due simply to honest disagreement, for the following scenario to play out with this?  The DIA sends a memo out on February of 2002 saying this guy is probably making this up.  And in February 2003, a full year later, the secretary of state is virtually quoting the same man to the U.N. Security Council to justify a war.

LANG:  Yes.  Well, I think what happened there is that after this information got massaged around in various places in Washington, it was interpreted in a different kind of way, one which was more amenable to the picture of the world that the Bush administration had.  And by the time it got to Secretary Powell, it was presented as a matter of fact.  I think that‘s the way he received this information.

OLBERMANN:  The final point, I guess, here is that there‘s been so much scattershot questioning about the prewar intelligence.  Between this news about al-Libi and what we already knew about the guy called Curveball, who gave all the sour information about biological weapons labs on wheels, to say nothing of Ahmed Chalabi, is it now time to look at the intelligence on which this country went to war, and to stop asking what part of it was wrong, and instead, to start asking, was any of it right?

LANG:  Yes, I think you ought to do that.  You ought to start over from scratch and ask, Was any of this correct?  The right question is, after the raw information got run through the mill of everybody‘s opinions and preconceptions of things, was any of it right?  And to what extent were policy considerations the driving force?

OLBERMANN:  The former head of Middle East intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency, Colonel Patrick Lang.  Great thanks for your insight, great thanks for your time tonight.

LANG:  My pleasure."

Cheney and the "Tormenters"

People often ask me at public events if I think it is "all right" to torture prisoners if that is necessary in order to obtain information needed to prosecute the "Global War on Terror." (GWOT)   

I routinely tell them that it is NOT "all right" to torture people for any reason.  The assembly expects that result from the question and they also expect that I will then give them the standard lecture which holds (correctly) that the tortured will tell you anything that they think you want to hear in order to get you to stop what you are doing.  Therefore, information obtained through torture is logically suspect and worthless.  Intelligence interrogators are supposed to be skilled at their trade.  Their trade is about applied psychology, not about beating confessions out of people.

The audience is usually  a little more surprised to have me tell them that "torture" is a dishonorable and immoral thing to do and that a decent person, especially a decent soldier, will have nothing to do with such things and will not allow it to happen around him or her.  (At this point I can expect to hear from someone whose PTSD induced fantasy life will have encouraged a great story)

With the conversation having progressed to this point, a look of dramatic, and cynical world-weariness comes over some members of the audience and someone (often a woman) asks me what I would do if the "authorities" had captured "Fulaan Abu Shuismuh" (so and so, the father of what's his name) and this creep has the secret information needed to prevent a terrorist outrage, and won't talk.  "Isn't it right to do whatever it takes....."   That is the question that is always asked, often with a kind of dreamy, far off look in the eyes.  I have gotten tired of this Sado-Masochistic day-dreaming, so, in response I ask them how far they would go in "whatever it takes?"

"All the way," is what these usually liberal, often academic, middle class Americans normally say.  "OK," says I.   "Let's say he is really obdurate and the clock is ticking on said 'terrorist outrage,'  so we bring him in here and you and you will hold him down while I take his fingers and toes off one at a time with garden shears until he talks?  Are you "in" for that?"  Shocked silence follows.  "Ah, I get it," says I.  " You mean that it would be 'all right' for people like me to do these things."  At that point it can be seen from the faces that this is the case.

"Ah," says I as a "follow up," "then how far are you willing to go in 'immunizing' the tormentors from prosecution once the GWOT is a memory?"  This does not get an answer.  So, this is all BS, a fantasy for everyman and everywoman (complete with guilty frisson of titillation).

The danger is that Cheney and all the other political obsessives on this subject in and out of government encourage those among who are quite capable of any bestiality that their furtive imaginations contrive.  They hold out to the "dark ones" the possibility of accomplishing their dreams of power and domination.  There are such people in any society, among any people, anywhere, and at any time.  By creating a climate of permissiveness toward abuse of prisoners "for interrogation" the Cheney/Rumsfeld crowd have enabled a release of the demonic forces that, to some extent, lurk in all of us.

Now the Congress is deliberating a proposal by Senator John McCain of Arizona (who knows something about torture) which would forbid the use of torture in interrogations by intelligence personnel  Cheney opposes this. 

McCain wants the "limit" in what can be done to prisoners to be the US Army Field Manual on the subject.  I think that would be most appropriate.

Pat Lang

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/06/AR2005110601281.html

"Sideways" - A Movie Review

This was a film in which I managed to develop some passing interest because it is set in the Santa Ynez Valley region of central California.  My parents lived there in retirement, and Buellton, "Anderson's Pea Soup Restaurant," Casmalia, "The Hitching Post," (world's greatest cowby hang-out/with steaks) Solvang, etc., are all very familiar to me.

There is also a lot of "doodaa" about relationships, angst, etc., but Alan gets into that with his usual "'90s guy" sensitivity.

Here is is Alan Farrell's review:

Download Sideways.pdf

DIA Called al-Libi a Fraud Pre-War.

DITSUM No. 044-02, February 2002

This would be "Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary No. 044-02."

This document from the agency I worked for (DIA) threw cold water on the information provided by al-Libi, a key source in the US government's attempts to "connect the dots" between the Iraqi government and AQ.

This was in EARLY 2002!!!  Al-Libi's claims to know all about the supposed connection between Saddam and AW were judged by DIA to be doubtful way back then.

How did Jehl get this document?  Looks like someone in DIA has had enough abuse and "isn't going to stand for it anymore."

Pat Lang

"In an interview on Friday, Mr. Levin also called attention to a portion of the D.I.A. report that expressed skepticism about the idea of close collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, an idea that was never substantiated by American intelligence but was a pillar of the administration’s prewar claims.

“Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements,’’ the D.I.A. report said in one of two declassified paragraphs. “Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.’’ Douglas Jehl

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/politics/06intel.ready.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5094&en=0d091794b0c89f27&hp&ex=1131339600&partner=homepage

George Orwell would Recognize This..

"The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot."  Washpost

So, basically, a field superviser in the FBI can issue a "national security letter" with your name on it, and on that basis they can go to anyone with whom you have had an information "transaction" and demand the record of that transaction or any others.  Having done that, the FBI can forbid their "informant" permission to ever tell anyone about it.

The "Patriot Act?"  This is patriotism?

Pat Lang

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/05/AR2005110501366.html

Old Habits Die Hard at "Al-Hurra"

"The Broadcasting Board of Governors, a federal agency, has asked the state department's inspector general to investigate, a spokesman for Karen Hughes, under-secretary for public diplomacy, told the Financial Times. Mrs Hughes, a board member, was aware of allegations and awaited the findings, he said.

The House of Representatives subcommittee on oversight and investigations is also looking into al-Hurra, which started broadcasting in February 2004. A hearing has been set for November 10 with Kenneth Tomlinson, BBG chairman, and Mouafac Harb, the news director of al-Hurra, called as witnesses."  FT

**********************************************************************************************************************

"Al-Hurra"  TV is an expensive exercise in propaganda aimed at the Arab World.  It was created as a reflexive response to the Bush Administration's unhappy realization that most people in the Arab World don't like the United States anymore and especially don't like the policies of the Bush Administration with regard to the Arab World.  It has a "sister" radio propaganda outlet ("Sawa Radio")  Both are the property of the US Government, are fully funded with taxpayer money (either tax receipts or just plain old deficit "fiat" money). 

Both of these outlets are largely the work of Mouafac Harb, a Lebanese American journalist of neocon inclination and loyalty who built these TV and Radio outlets from nothing.  Kenneth Tomlinson is a long time ally of his.  Tomlinson has been a leader in the work of "disciplining" the publicly financed media into positions of support for the administration's policies and exclusion of dissenting opinion.

Now they have problems with the State Department's Inspector General and a Republican controlled committee of the House of Representatives over the same kind of issues of cronyism and corruption that have be-deviled other parts of the Bush Administration.

Many knowledgeable Arabs have told me that they think that "Al-Hurra" has hired so many right wing Lebanese Christians that its editorial "slant" is one that is largely isolated from mainstream thinking in the Arab and Islamic Worlds just as these employees are isolated in their thinking from the majority of Arabs.  What will the result of these inquiries be?

Who knows what may happen in this environment, but if the Bush Administration wants effective information operations, they had better "clean house" at "Al-Hurrah and "Sawa."

Pat Lang

http://financialtimes.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=FT.com+%2F+World+%2F+US+-+US-backed+Arab+TV+network+to+be+investigated&expire=&urlID=16130037&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F04b325be-4ce6-11da-89df-0000779e2340%2Cft_acl%3D%2Cs01%3D1.html&partnerID=1700

"CRS - SS!" 1968 - 2005?

"With 897 vehicles destroyed by daybreak Saturday, it was the worst one-day toll since unrest broke out after the Oct. 27 accidental electrocution of two teenagers who believed police were chasing them. Five hundred cars were burned a night earlier.  In a particularly malevolent turn, youths in the eastern Paris suburb of Meaux prevented paramedics from evacuating a sick person from a housing project, pelting rescuers with rocks and torching the awaiting ambulance, an Interior Ministry official said.  A nursery school was badly burned in Acheres, west of Paris."  AP

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"CRS -SS!."  That was the street chant in 1968 when the students decided to raise hell about tuition increases or something.

"CRS" The "Compagnies Republicaines de Securite."  These are the riot troops of the Ministry of the Interior.  They wear dark blue, carry submachine guns generally and are not polite.  The students obviously did not like them in 1968.  There are a lot of these police troops.

"Gendarmerie Mobile."  ("GM")  These are the mobile tactical reserves of the Military Police, who in France also mostly work for the Ministry of the Interior but, who are actually soldiers.  They police the French countryside.  In addition to their posts in towns they have large armored units in the GM.  These GM units have armored personnel carriers and tanks, real tanks.  They wear black uniforms and are called in to back up the CRS if it looks like a situation is "going south."  They usually are polite.

Then there are also "La Police Nationale," (ordinary cops, usually in cities, you know, Cluseau, Maigret, etc)  Not significant in street riots.

If you start to see either the CRS or the GM in the streets of Paris you will know that the government has decided to do something serious against the rioters.  So far the poor "pompiers" (firepersons) are taking a beating in trying to deal with insurgents who, at this point, probably think that their hellraising is doing something good for them.

Most Americans claim to dislike France.  I have puzzled over why this is true.  Were they snubbed in Paris by waiters, department store clerks, abused by cab drivers?  Have they never been to New York City?  Can they not deal with people like that?  Is this visceral hostility a left-over from a millennium of hostility between the English ancestors and the French "enemy?"  Is this really a hold-over from the Hundred Years War?  Are we really so small minded that we are angry with their insistence on following an independent course in foreign affairs?  Do we not know how many times the French Armed Forces have stood beside uas since WW2?  I do, because I was often involved in such cooperation.  Americans, who know anything about foreign affairs often believe that France withdrew from NATO back in the '60s.  Not so!  They withdrew their forces from the PEACETIME command of SHAPE, the NATO heaquarters in Belgium, but they never withdrew from NATO.  Their forces remained firmly embedded in war plans and in position to participate in a repulse of the Soviets for all those years.

I confess to liking France, the French language, the cuisine, the whole thing.  Sorry folks, there it is.  I have actually been to the French military cemetery at Yorktown, Virginia where their valor was essential to the triumph of American arms. (and our independence from the British)  When I was in government service I was often the grateful recipient  of their help in difficult situations.  I have been to the Church of St. Louis in Paris.  This is the official church of the French Army .  In the Church there is a stone monument about four feet tall and shaped like a bullet.  It is carved with the symbols of the United States.  There are identical monuments along the roads in northern France from the beaches in Normandy to the German frontier.  They mark the route of advance of Patton's Third Army.  This is called the "Route of the Liberation."  The one in Paris is filled with earth from all the American military cemeteries in France.  I once spent some time at the US cemetery at Belleau Wood.  This is the "Aisne-Marne" cemetery.  The US guardian there lives at the cemetery.  He told me interesting things:  1-That his predecessor had lived at the cemetey throughout the German occupation in WW2.  The Heer (German Army) placed a guard on the place and provided required logistics until the US advance in 1944 "uncovered" the area.  2-That his maintenance budget from the US givernment was sadly inadequate and that the way he dealt with this was that he had a list of French contracters who, when called on, maintained the cemetery gratis.  If this does not meet your pre-conceived notions on the subject, "Tant pis.." (Too Bad)

Having said this, I am sorry to say that France has a problem involving un-assimilated Muslim immigrants and citizens which the government and people of France have themselves caused over the years.

Simpy put, they have let too many people into the country who came only for economic improvement and who had little or no interest in becoming French.  This developed largely after the liquidation of France's colonial empire. In the immediate aftermath of the independence of Algeria, many partly assimilated Algerians moved to France to escape the rule of the FLN in Algiers.  These were the so-called "Harkis."  They wanted to be assimilated and, in the main, have been.  The later immigrants were different.  By and large, they came to France"for the passport," and with no intention of accepting the idea of being French.

It has to be said that the French are by and large an ethnic people.  (Yes, I know about Corsica and Martinique)  They, like the Germans and English have a difficult time thinking of immigrants as really having become them.  The immigrants know what the French really think they are.  This is a problem.  Nevertheless, I have "rattled around" in the "boondocks" in France because I have friends there, and in every town in the provinces I find that these same immigrants occupy most of the low-cost public housing and that their children go to state run schools just like the kids whose ancestors marched with Napoleon.

What's the problem?  The French have allowed this situation to fester.  If a lot of people from another culture immigrate to your country and you accept the idea that they will remain something different, then, in the end, you have to expect that there will be trouble when these folks begin to realize the strength that their numbers give them.

I can hear the economic determinists howl.  "Not by bread alone.." folks.  Nevertheless...  According to the CIA "World Factbook." the population is 99% literate, The unemployment rate is 10.1% and the percentage of residents living below the poverty line is 6.5%.  The high (for us) unemployment rate is attributed widely to structural rigidity in the more or less "statist" French economy.  By contrast, our unemployment rate is 5.5% and the percentage of people living below the poverty line is 12%.  So, I guess we are more productive but have less social conscience.  That sounds about right.

What will happen?  If the hoodlums in the streets don't calm down, the French government will finally decide that order must be restored.  This will be a tough decision.  The post-colonial French treasure their self-image as great humanitarians, and the Left will protest, but self interest will triumph.

The Muslim kids can go home and go look for a job (or somewhere else and look for a job) or they can expect to meet the CRS and GM.

Pat Lang

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051105/ap_on_re_eu/france_rioting_58;_ylt=ArYyAxwzW8dqpNhOiwK8Xb7gelIB;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

Make-up Classes at the White House

"In a memo sent to all White House aides on Friday, the counsel's office said it will hold briefings next week on ethics, with a particular focus on the rules governing the handling of classified information. Attendance is mandatory for anyone holding any level of security clearance.

"There will be no exceptions," the memo said."  Yahoo

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Does this mean that he (the CEO of America as some think he is), believes that this mess is a minor internal matter in his staff?  Does he think that holding make-up classes in morality and ethics for the sycophants who surround him will "Do the Trick?"

Perhaps he does.

Pat Lang

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051105/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_cia_leak

"Operation Steel Curtain"

"American and Iraqi forces launched a major offensive Saturday near the porous Syrian border aimed at destroying al-Qaida in Al-Qa'ida Iraq's ability to smuggle foreign fighters, money and equipment through the region. "  AP

"The offensive in the town of Husaybah of about 2,500 U.S. forces and 1,000 Iraqis — including local forces acting as scouts — will remove insurgents from the western province of Anbar ahead of Iraq's parliamentary election on Dec. 15, the U.S. military said."  AP

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The strategy the US is following in Iraq has evolved into a two "pronged" approach:

1- Build the Iraqi forces and with them conduct "Clear and Hold" operations in which US forces root out overt insurgent activities and presence from towns in the Sunni parts of the country.  That is what Tel Afar was about, and that is what the whole series of operations in the Euphrates agricultural corridor has been about.  This operation at Husaybah is more of the same.  Husaybah is a dusty little place inhabited by 30,000 sedentarized cousins of the Shammar and Rwallah Beduin tribesmen who migrate through this part of the North Syrian Desert each group in its ancestral "dirah." The numbers involved are instructive.  We are told that there are abut 3,000 US troops and a thousand Iraqis.  The "Iraqi" troops are largely Kurdish veterans of the "Pes Merga."  Our people will clear the town and the Iraqis will hold it?  I hope so because the ability of the Iraqis to do that is critical to the outcome of the war.

2- Re-construct Iraq in a "nation building" process that is two years late.  I am told that Ambassador Zalmai Khalilzad is increasingly in charge in that area of the struggle.  He is working on fielding what are called "Province Reconstruction Teams" (PRT) to provide multi-aspect civil/military advisory teams in the field to "re-construct" Iraqi society.  Good luck Zal!  A noble endeavor and I wish you well in it.  Too bad the deluded did not allow such an approach going in.  It's late now.

If you listen to Wilkerson's interview with Ray Suarez on the Newshour you will hear him say that the Jacobin neocon approach to post war Iraq was to plan to have Jay Garner's group take charge just long enough to hand the country over to Chalabi and then leave and to have all US troops out of there shortly thereafter.  We really let these neocon nitwits run the country?  Chalabi had no support then and has little now except for his Jacobin neocon buddies in Washington who are still working on putting him in power.  Iraq would have collapsed in anarchy and chaos then and would now if he were in charge.

Pat Lang 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051105/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq

"America the Dutiful" - Michael Murry

The verse of Michael Murry

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