In the Red Zone

TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT

The deadly snicker

Bullets and explosives may kill anti-Iraqi fascists, intelligence may round up and imprison their cells.  But the most lethal weapon--the power that corrodes, weakens and will eventually break their morale--is laughter.  When the world, especially the Muslim world, ceases to perceive Islamoterrorists with admiration and fear, but with ridicule and contempt, the ability of the reactionaries to inspire, recruit and execute plans--and people--will diminish and fade, like a desert wind. 

And so it is with much curiosity and hope that we read this article by Steve Negus and Dhiya Rasan in yesterday's Financial Times.  The headline and first few grafs say it all:

Television helps break mystique of holy warrior

Say the word mujahid--or holy warrior--these days and many inhabitants of Baghdad are likely to snigger.

An appellation once worn as a badge of pride by anti-American insurgents has now become street slang for homosexuals, after men claiming to be captured Islamist guerrillas confessed that they were holding gay orgies in the popular Iraqi TV programme Terror in the Hands of Justice.

For Iraqis opposed to the predominantly Sunni Islamist insurgency [the show] has broken the mystique of a force that used to strike terror into the hearts of anyone working with the Americans or the new government.

Adds Mr. Negus:

One long-bearded preacher known as Abu Tabarek confessed recently that guerrillas had held orgies in his mosques, knowing their status as holy warriors would win them forgiveness of sins.

This is the end.  Of course, the anti-Iraqi criminals will continue to kill--as evident by their attacks yesterday on police and female translators.  But the psychic engine driving Iraqis to enlist in the so-called "insurgency" has been honor-shame dynamic.  Shamed by their swift fall from power, many Sunni Arab men seek to rehabilitate their sense of masculinity, self-esteem and social status by inflicting pain upon those who humiliated them:  America and her allies.  But when participation in the "insurgency" no longer absolves shame, but stains the reputation even further, the other psychic obstacles to maintaining a futile insurrection will prove increasingly difficult to surmount.  When your older brother is accused of holding sexual orgies in mosques, how willing will you and your friends be to follow his footsteps into the "insurgency?"

This shame-honor dynamic is less operative with the foreign jihadists who comport to to fantasies of omnipotence and godhood.  Accordingly, we will probably witness a slow diminution of home-grown Iraqis in the fascist ranks, replaced by increasing numbers of ever-more fanatic minions of Mssrs. Zarqawi and bin Laden.

Lastly, the shame-honor dynamic concerning the "insurgency" combined with outbreaks of feminine erotic energy (see below) suggest a fundamental shift in the psychic orientation in the Middle East.  It's too early to make sweeping predictions, of course.  And its possible that I am only focusing on a few fledgling shoots of new growth, ignoring the withered, blasted fig trees of tribal-religious repression that have stood for centuries, casting their long shadows over the region.  Deserts are not known for rapid change.  But hope, like waters from  the well of Zamzam, springs eternal.

Our Man in Waziristan II

Last January, I composed a post arguing that Mr. Brilliant Terror Master Himself, Osama bin Laden, might actually be serving the overall geo-political interests of Great Satan through his own megalomanical overestimation of his charisma, power and historic situation.  In other words, the God Complex, kicking in big time.

As one of my proofs, I noted ObL's annointment of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as his "emir" in Iraq--an appointment destined to reduce the Wahhabi's Q-rating in the Land Between the Rivers to less-than-zero.  Especially as the Iraqi civilians casualty figures mounted.  But of course, as Michael Scheuer reminds us over and over again, Osama is just so brilliant and pious and patient and oh-so-able to run rings around the hapless U.S. that he couldn't have made such a stupid, stuipd mistake--

Except he did.  And it hasn't been lost for a moment on the Iraqi people.  I don't have any hard evidence for this supposition--just an exemption from the CIA analysts' equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome to which Mr. Scheuer seemed to have succumbed after studying ObL for so many years--but now we see via Instapundit this short piece from Strategypage.  (I direct you to Instapundit, where Mr. Reynolds also links to an e-mail from Iraq that is a must-read.)  Osama and his Z-Man proxy are undermining their own cause, and helping us win the war.  These are the all-mighty great terror strategists?

QUOTES OF THE DAY

World's smallest violin

Why are our brothers the mujaheddin denounced?  Those who left their countries, their wives and children, and sacrificed their blood, all to protect your honor and expel the invaders from your land?

-- From Zurwat al-Sanam (Top of the Camel's Hump), the catchily-titled internet magazine published by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

(Robert F. Worth, New York Times; reg. req.)

Admittedly, I don't get out into the blogosphere as much as I used to, but it seems to me this story did not receive the play it merited.  We know that Al Qaeda maintains a steady propaganda effort in cyber-space--they evidently have a self-styled "media department"--but Mr. Worth notes how plaintive and defensive the terrorists' tone has become.

In the above quote, for example, they complain about the bad press they receive for murdering Iraqi Army and police officers.  Mr. Worth also notes this monstrous example of Al Qaeda's capacity for mendacity and rationalization:

One of the basic rules of our religion is not to spill a drop of Muslim blood unless it is justified, because the destruction of the world is no less an offense than that.

Thousands of bereaved Iraqis might beg to differ with the terrorist organization's description of its actions.

Not content with simply parodying the West by establishing a "media department," Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has even lodged some familiar complaints about the international press, and how it only reports "bad news" about the group.

Where are the media correspondents in Iraq, and where is the media coverage in Mosul, Anbar, Diyalia, Samarra, Basra and southern Baghdad?.

Seems they'll have to wait for Michael Scheuer's next book.

What's going on here?  Mr. Worth quotes Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, a nonprofit group that monitors Islamic web sites.

I think they feel they are losing the battle.  They realize there will be a new government soon, and they seem very nervous about the future.

One of Al Qaeda's most potent weapons is the terror they instill in people's imaginations. As with all fascist groups, however, an element of the ridiculous co-exists with this ability to intimidate.  The group is still lethal, and will no doubt wreak further havoc in Iraq, and elsewhere.  But the absurdity that lays at the core of Islamofascism--the overblown rhetoric, the monotonous street demonstrations and robot-like denunciations of America and Israel, the emotionally pinched and sexually repressed leadership and their rampant narcissism--is beginning to take center stage. Al Qaeda will continue to bring death.  But its doom is already being inscribed in the hearts and minds of its global audience, where, increasingly, the terrorists' actions are inspiring anger, resistance and, most devastating of all--contempt.

And this, from the feminist front:

Web pundits are calling it the "babe theory of political movements."  (Didn't I read that most bloggers are male?).  Apparently lifted from P.J. O'Rourke, it postulates that in a fluid moment of democratic upsurge, street demonstrations and media coverage, the side with the most attractive women wins.  By that measure the Lebanese opposition is on the verge of sweeping pro-Syrian forces into the "40 years old and still living with mom" category of history. 

Without putting too fine a point on matters here, the "babe theory" is actually a clever way of expressing a profound point.  The edifice of Middle Eastern autocracy and its particularly virulent outgrowth--terrorism--rests upon the repression of women.  Liberate female energies from political cage of tyranny and the religious prison of Islamic doctrine and the authority of the bearded mullahs and "pious" terrorists and sexually repressed holy men will crumble like the desiccated dust of the mummies they are. 

We are releasing a genie into the Middle East--and the world--whose power is incalcuable.

TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT XIV

From Baghdad Dweller, "Culture Smart Cards" for G.I.s here and here.  Very cool.  How soon before someone mass markets these like the "Most Wanted" deck?

*

Pop-Ups

They have names like "Defenders of Baghdad," the "Special Police Commandos," the "Defenders of Khadamiya" and the "Assault Brigade."  But unlike the equally colorful names of terrorist groups, these paramilitary units are not fighting against the America forces, but with them.  Sort of.

According to the Wall Street Journal's Greg Jaffe, Iraqi militia groups are rapidly forming to fight the fascist counter-liberation.  Called by U.S. military commanders "pop-ups"--based on their appearance seemingly from nowhere--these dozen or so groups, totaling around 15,000 men, have become "one of the most significant developments in the new Iraq security situation."

"We don't call them militias.  Militias are illegal," Jaffe quotes Major Chris Wales.  Lapsing into a bit of military-ese, Wales adds, "I've begun calling them 'irregular Iraqi ministry directed brigades.'"

Whatever you call them, these pop-ups are private armies, "commanded by relatives of cabinet officers or tribal sheiks," Jaffe explains.  Moreover, they tend to be better motivated that the fledgling Iraqi army.

Read Jaffe's article, and ask yourself--is this what we want to see take place in Iraq?  The Iraqi people need to identify with their nation as an abstract entity that transcends ethnic, confessional and political definitions.  These pop-ups, as Jaffe notes, tend to identify as much, or more, with their charismatic leaders rather than with the idea, or concept, of Iraq.  This sort of personalization of political and social issues is the very bane of tribal politics; the U.S. should discourage it as much as possible.  (I will have an essay on this subject appearing on Chester next week.) Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case.  Jaffe quotes Lt. General David Petraeus, who is overseeing the training of the Iraqi army,

There is a tension between on the one hand encouraging and fostering initiative and on the other executing the plan for the Iraqi Security Forces that everyone agrees on.  To be candid, I would err on the side of fostering initiative.  I want to get the hell out of here.

So do we all.  And obviously, Gen. Petraeus knows more about this situation that any blogger could.  Still, it strikes me as ironic that the Washington Times reports that 350 Palestinian militants decided to join the Palestinian Authority security forces--a move that Israel applauds.  Clearly, folding militia groups into a centralized army is a positive step toward curbing lawlessness and vigilantism, and insuring that governments maintain a monopoly of force.  Encouraging pop-ups in Iraq seems a move in the opposite direction.  And with these irregular units comprising up to 15,000 armed men--let alone the numbers in groups like Moqtada al-Sadr's Al-Mahdi militia and SCIRI's Badr Brigade--it seems like a rather considerable reversion toward the old Arab problems of tribalism and rule by personal authority.

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

Officially, no one knows who killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri besides the murderers and those who assisted them.  But that hasn't stopped the pro-Syrian Lebanese government from trying to scotch accusatory rumors fingering the logical perpetrators.  As the New York Times'  Hassan M. Fattah reports, Lebanon's interior minister Suleiman Franjieh "maintained that the explosion was the work of a suicide car bomber."  But the "growing opposition" to Syria's occupation of Lebanon "points to evidence that the bomb was more likely to have been buried and set off remotely."  Writes Fattah,

Defining the cause is critical to trying to determine what role, if any, Syria played in the assassination.  If the assassination was carried out by the simple means of a suicide bomber, the government's logic goes, the involvement of Al Qaeda would be indicated, tending to exonerate Syria.  But if it was a result of a remote-controlled bomb, opposition figures says, the involvement of sophisticated agents, probably tied to Syria, would be likely.

Fattah adds the kicker,

Any finding of a probably Syrian role, the opposition leaders add, would be likely to bring the full force of international pressure on Syria to pull its forces out of Lebanon.

The fact that the explosion left a crater 30 feet wide and 10 feet deep in the Corniche, Beirut's waterfront boulevard, indicates that the bomb was probably larger than your normal suicide sedan.  At least one American living in the city thinks so--Andrew Exum, who wrote an interesting op-ed piece in Wednesday Times.  Exum, a former Army Ranger captain who saw action in Iraq last year, describes the blast site:

I couldn't help but marvel for a moment at the audacity of the attack and the meticulous planning involved.  The Corniche at this point takes a sharp turn, forcing cars to slow.  The men who placed the bomb surely knew this.  In addition, the building across from the St. George [Hotel] was also under construction and uninhabited, so any collateral damage to civilians would have been minimal.  Further down the Corniche, the road is wider and would have been choked with pedestrians.  Whoever planned this attack had been calculating as well as ruthless.

Former Capt. Exum climbed above the crater and looked down at the scene.

It was easily 25 yards wide and at least three deep.  To create a hole that size, you would have to fill a large truck or van with high explosives, first re-enforcing the shock absorbers to accommodate all the extra weight. 

Witnesses did not report a "large truck or van."  In fact, as Fattah reports, people claimed the death car was "hurled into the air, suggesting that the blast rose vertically, as with an underground bomb and not laterally," as would have happened had the explosion erupted from the side. 

Al Jazeera reports, however, it received a videotape Monday night from someone named Ahmad Abu Adas, who claimed to belong to a previously unknown terrorist group called "Victory and Jihad in Greater Syria."  (A multitude of sins, it seems, are being disguised by these "previous unknown terrorist groups.") In the tape, Adas declared his intention to kill Hariri for his "support of the Saudi royal family."  He has since disappeared, after leaving a note telling his mother that he was off to "fight the infidels."

Fattah quotes a neighbor of Adas:  "We thought that he was probably going to Iraq or Palestine to fight.  He was not a very clever kid to do something like this on his own, though.  If he did the bombing he had to have someone behind him."

Not necessarily.  What makes this "neighbor" think he or she knows more than Syrian/Lebanese officials?  Plenty of political assassins have operated without handlers or a support network.  Take Lee Harvey Oswald, for example--everyone knows he acted alone, right? 

STAYING POWER

Occasionally, an op-ed piece strikes a note so precise and correct, it resounds in the imagination for days.  That's the experience I had, at any rate, reading Arthur Herman's essay in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Iwo Jima," which dealt with one of the bloodiest battles of World War II--a ferocious fight against Imperial Japan that began 50 years ago today.

Herman notes that the 36-day contest over a 7.5-square mile speck of Pacific ash capped an "island-hopping" campaign, whose death toll, military blunders and poor showing by American troops make anything that has happened in Iraq resemble the 1949 John Wayne flag-waver, "The Sands of Iwo Jima."  The battle itself was horrific:  6,800 dead, thousands more wounded--a causality ratio of one out of three Marines.  All for an island, Herman notes, "whose future as a major air base never materialized." 

The historian goes on, however, to draw a moral point from the battle, which sheds light upon our current conflict.  I hope the reader will excuse the lengthy excerpt, but my prose could never serve this subject as well as Herman's:

The lesson of Iwo Jima is in fact an ancient one, going back to Machiavelli:  that sometimes free societies must be as tough and unrelenting as their enemies.  Totalitarians test their opponents by generating extreme conditions of brutality and violence; in those conditions--in the streets and beheadings of Fallujah or on the beach and in the bunkers of Iwo Jima--they believe weak democratic nerves will crack.  This in turn demonstrates their moral superiority:  that by giving up their own decency and humanity they have become stronger than those who have not.

Free societies can afford only one response.  There were no complicated legal issues or questions of "moral equivalence" on Iwo Jima:  It was kill or be killed.  That remains the nature of war even for democratic societies.  The real question is, who outlasts whom.  In 1945 on Iwo Jima, it was the Americans, as the monument at Arlington Cemetery, based on [Joe] Rosenthal's photograph, proudly attests.  In the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s, it was the totalitarians--with terrible consequences.

Today some in this country think the totalitarians may still win in Iraq and elsewhere.  A few even hope so.  Only one thing is certain:  As long as Americans cherish the memory of those who served at Iwo Jima, and grasp the crucial lesson they offer all free societies, the totalitarians will never win.

Interestingly, some similar stirrings are taking place on the left--at least the responsible left.  In the current New York Magazine, uber-yuppie Kurt Andersen muses over liberal's "moral-ideological-emotional bind" concerning Iraq.  The left, he proposes, 

is facing its sharpest test since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back then, most of us were forced, against our wills, to give Ronald Reagan a large share of credit for winning the Cold War. Now the people of this Bush-hating city are being forced to grant the merest possibility that Bush, despite his annoying manner and his administration’s awful hubris and dissembling and incompetence concerning Iraq, just might—might, possibly—have been correct to invade, to occupy, and to try to enable a democratically elected government in Iraq.   

Anderson's link between Reagan and Bush II in this matter is interesting:  I still remember how over one million people marched in the streets of New York to Central Park to protest Reagan's push to place Pershing missiles in Europe (no doubt Andersen was among them)--a policy at the time I supported, and which, it turned out, did much to topple the already-decrepit Soviet Union.

Anderson continues:

Like “radical chic,” a related New York specialty, “liberal guilt” once meant feeling discomfort over one’s good fortune in an unjust world. As this last U.S. election cycle began, however, a new subspecies of liberal guilt arose—over the pleasure liberals took in bad news from Iraq, which seemed sure to hurt the administration. But with Bush reelected, any shred of tacit moral rationale is gone. In other words, feel the guilt, and let it be a pang that leads to moral clarity.

Each of us has a Hobbesian choice concerning Iraq; either we hope for the vindication of Bush’s risky, very possibly reckless policy, or we are in a de facto alliance with the killers of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. We can be angry with Bush for bringing us to this nasty ethical crossroads, but here we are nonetheless.

He then draws his own conclusion from this observation, one I've waited decades to hear:

At a certain point during the Vietnam War, a majority of Americans--those of us who were in favor of unilateral U.S. withdrawal--were in a de facto alliance with the North Vietnamese, the Vietcong and the Soviets.  Unpleasant but true...

Unpleasant but true, indeed.  One respects Anderson for his forthright self-criticism.  Still, given the stark facts of history and effects of the anti-war movement, this sort of head shrugging tsk-tsk-ing is too easy.  To see the real implications of U.S. abandonment of Southeast Asia, one must go to Vietnam and talk to the people who spent years in "re-education" camps for serving the South Vietnamese government--or for having relatives who served the American "puppets."  Remember, too, the millions of people who risked their lives to flee their "liberated" nation in fragile boats.

Then go to Cambodia and visit a former high school called Tuol Sleng, now a museum to the holocaust the Communist Khmer Rouge unleashed on their people.  Take a moment to absorb the rooms lined with photographs of dazed Cambodians taken by their Communist "liberators" moments before they were executed; stand before a map of the nation fashioned entirely from human skulls.  Then travel 15 miles out of Phnom Penh to visit one of the nation's killing fields.  Look at the tower of Cambodian skulls--many of them children--whom Pol Pot's butchers clubbed to death with rifle butts in order to save bullets.  See the bones rising up from the shallow graves and slaughter pits, hear the endless recording of the Buddhist prayer for the dead.  And think:  this is what happens when America loses its staying power.  This is what happens.

ZARQAWI WATCH

No, this rumor won't go away, either.  Also, check out Z-Man's mug--he looks a lot less formidable here than in that grainy black and white headshot the media always uses.  It's just a suggestion, but perhaps we should be trying to dispell the mystique of this murderer.  (Where's Spike Jones when we need him?)

OUR MAN IN WAZIRISTAN

Oswald Spengler wrote in The Decline of the West that it was Napoleon's tragedy that each of his victories utlimately advanced the economic and political power of his nemesis, England.  One wonders if Osama bin Laden isn't, at least in some ways, serving America as the same sort of convenient enemy:  one whose apparently growing power and successes in the field actually work to favor the strategic interests of the very forces he is ranged against.

Counter-intuitive?  Perhaps.  But take Osama's most successful operation to date:  the World Trade Center attack.  As Christopher Hitchens once noted, if the terrorist had resisted his exhibitionistic tendences and instead mounted a slow, silent and covert take-over of Pakistan, Al Qaeda would now be an irresistible enemy possessing nuclear weapons.  Instead, succumbing to his malignant narcissism, ObL slaughtered thousands of innocent people in a grand theatrical gesture that alerted America and the world about the threat he posed to civilization.  The death of every sailor at Pearl Harbor gained some measure of meaning from the fact that the attack propelled us into World War II; some day, God willing, we will see that the losses of 9-11 were the price our generation had to pay to rouse ourselves to defeat Islamofascism. 

Secondly, if you lay a map of oil regions in the Middle East and Asia over one showing American bases and military presence in the War on Terror, you'd find they roughly overlap.  Coincidence?  Right, and Mullah Omar's the next guest host on SNL.  Under the rubric of fighting Al Qaeda, the U.S. has moved assets around the Caspian Sea and into Central and South Asia, where they will eventually serve to check Chinese penetration into those regions in search of oil.  America and the PRC are on a collision course similar to Britain and Germany before World War I.   What we can hope is that the liberation of Iraq, Afghanistan and (to anticipate my argument) Iran will, in the long run, create good will toward the U.S. and gain us allies in a coming conflict with Beijing. 

More recently--December 27, to be exact--the "pious, charismatic, gentle, generous Muslim" (to quote ObL-mesmerized Michael Scheuer; see Redzone's The Trouble with Hubris) issued a communique denouncing Iraq's elections and declaring support for Zarqawi.  A curious piece of work it was, too--ominous and chilling in the inimitable bin Laden style--yet at the same time awkward and emotionally clumsy.  In fact, it may have been a tactical mistake, a clue to the next phase of the War against Islamofascism--and an inadvertent boon to America. 

Let's go to the videotape.  Donning the guise of that peculiarly Islamic phenomenon, the terrorist/imam/politician, Osama branded Iraqis who participate in January's elections as "infidels," guilty of "apostasy."  While these denunciations sound like bad De Millian dialogue to us, they are, in Muslim circles, serious business:  many conservatives and radicals consider apostasy a crime punishable by death.  Exuding further holiday cheer, bin Laden anointed Zarqawi as the "emir" of Al Qaeda's Iraqi operations--and even requested donations, noting that terror operations in Iraq cost "200,000 euros a week."  (A Terror Telethon? Make your GSM encryption-call today, 800-257-2332.)

As a ploy to win Iraqi hearts and minds, this can't be a winner.  Iraqis hate foreign jihadists.  "Who do they think they are, coming here to kill our people?" is a typical comment.  Even those who despise the U.S. castigate non-Iraqi terrorists.  As one Fallujan policeman told me, "American soldiers are here with fighters from Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia--all to steal from Iraq!"  For bin Laden to ally himself with Zarqawi is tantamount to saying, Al Qaeda to Iraq:  Drop Dead.

Moreover, if he's championing a man the Iraqis loathe, he's attacking one they love:  Ali al-Sistani.  Not only has the Grand Ayatollah pushed hard for elections, he has declared it a Muslim's "duty" to vote and--in the Shia's idea of a get-out-the-vote technique--warned that those who abstain will "go to hell" (Karl Rove, eat your heart out).  By condemning the election process, bin Laden--who, as far we know, is no aalim, not even a talib ilm--is opposing Sistani politically, while accusing the marjah of apostasy.  Add to this the fact that he's appointed as his "emir" a man who has made a point of killing as many Shia as he can, and you have to wonder whassup with Mr. Terror Master.  Why is he so determined to alienate the Shia?  What does he hope to gain--and how does this affect American interests?

The answer may lie in the conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims for the leadership of Islam--a civil war that has raged ever since Yazid's troops decapitated Hussain and brought his head back to Damascus in the 7th century.  Among certain radical Sunnis--and their Havana-cigar-smoking, yacht-sailing, "royal family" allies getting petro-rich off America's obscene addiciton to SUVs--elections in Iraq will mean the Shia dominate, or have influential power, in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran, forming a veritable crescent that, joined with Bahrain, will nearly encircle Saudi Arabia.  It can't be lost on the House of Saud that the Shia will control Iraq and Iran's substantial resources--not to mention the fact that the Saudi's 200,000 Shia sit atop the richest oil fields of the kingdom.  Nor should we forget that Iran may soon have its Shia Bomb.

What's a Sunni radical to do?  Enter bin Laden, with his skill in harnessing the tensions of the Muslim world.  By condemning Iraq's elections, he is declaring his opposition to Shia interests across the Middle East--something the decadent royal Saudi family with their connections to the U.S. cannot do.  In this way, he hopes to position himself as the most effective challenge to a potential American-Shia alliance.  Creating a civil war in Iraq--hence his support for his Shia-hating "emir"--is perhaps the best way to prevent the balance of power shifting from Riyadh to Tehran.

What's in this for America?  To begin with, bin Laden's intervention can help cement the functional, and perhaps operational, ties between the U.S. and Iran that have formed to shepherd Iraq's elections past the teeth of Sunni opposition.  In addition, bringing Zarqawi on board the Al Qaeda team can only convince Iraqis--if further convincing is necessary--of the monstrousness of the so-called "insurgency."  It might also induce the mainstream media to underscore, rather than legitimize, the obscenity of the "resistance"--but such miracles are few and far between.

On a larger scale, the Shia may ultimately prove our best allies in the Muslim Middle East.  Iran's revolution is played out, its people perhaps the most pro-U.S. in the region.   A nuclear Iran seems all but inevitable, as does our necessity of accepting Shihab IIIs with Tel Aviv and Riyadh in range.  Let us pray to all our gods for the rapid arrival of what everyone expects:  a second, truly democratic, Iranian revolution.

As for Iraq, if--I find myself unable to add "and when"--democracy takes root there, the country's people will someday see beyond their current resentments and come to honor U.S. sacrifices in liberating them.  Spread that gratitude across the Shia crescent and bin Laden's efforts to mount the white horse of Sunni supremacy will backfire, drawing Washington and the Hawza closer together and isolating Saudi Arabia.  Which is another way of saying, advancing U.S. interests by wresting the Middle East away from Our Friends the Saudis and their pernicious Wahhabi ideology.  Then we can begin the epochal task of helping Shia moderates wean their religion from the mind-numbing, spirit-dulling, woman-oppressing strictures of shari'a--but that's for my next post.

FOLLOW THE MONEY (Our Friends the Saudis)

Perhaps the only people more deserving than the Saudi royal family of Shaitan and seven-gated Jahannam are K Street lobbyists in Washington.  When the two groups converge, we can imagine no fitter company spending an eternity forced to eat the devil-headed fruit of the Zaqqum tree.  

First, the Saudis.  According to writer Sherine Bahaa, reporting in the December 23-29 edition of the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram, the bandit state's regional muscle has so diminished that it could not prevent neighboring Bahrain from moving ahead with a free trade agreement that country signed in September with the U.S.  Moreover, Bahaa opines, other states forming the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)--Kuwait, Oman, the UAE and Qatar--"are likely to follow Bahrain's lead and sign their own agreements with Washington."

The Saudis fear competition from their smaller neighbors and argue that in forging separate deals with the U.S., the Gulf nations will "hamper efforts to integrate the group's economies" and undercut the "collective bargaining power of member states."  Indeed, as reported in Beirut's Daily Star, the deal abolishes external tariffs, gives "U.S. goods a foothold inside the Gulf" and also "grants U.S. service industries like banks the status of local firms, a benefit not granted to GCC companies."  The deal is part of a Middle East free trade zone that President Bush envisioned as extending from Morocco to Iran. 

Many observers interpret the U.S. push to organize the GCC outside of Saudi Arabia as further evidence of Washington's unhappiness with the Wahhabi state.  They also note that in 2003, the U.S. moved its Combined Air Operations Center--consisting of 5,000 men and 100 warplanes--from Prince Sultan Airbase to Al Udeid base in Qatar.  The star of Our Friend the Saudis is on the wane. 

Enter the lobbyists.  Last October, Kuwait decided to increase its efforts to obtain a free trade deal by hiring premier Washington rainmaker Patton Boggs.  According to O'Dwyer's PR Daily (reg. req.) the international law firm will receive $22,000 a month to

advise Kuwait about its current image among U.S. policymakers, prepare economic/policy briefing materials and set up meetings with government officials

At the same time, though, Patton Boggs is aiding the Saudis in burnishing their tattered reputation.  In December, 2002, Accuracy in Media reported that Riyadh is paying the law firm $100,000 a month.  To earn that lucre, notes the Center for Public Integrity, PB lobbyists "have met with Congressional staffers on behalf of Saudi interests 62 times in the first half of 2004 alone."  Part of their work has been to help prevent Patricia Roush from retrieving her two daughters whom her Saudi husband kidnapped and took to his homeland in 1986.  In November, 2002, Congressmen Dan Burton, investigating reports by Roush and others of Saudi kidnappings of American children, subpoenaed lobbying records from Patton Boggs, in addition to other two PR firms assisting OFTS, the Gallagher Group and Qorvis Communications.  Qorvis, we should note, is 10 percent owned by Patton Boggs.

According to its website, Washington-based Qorvis "has worked with the world's largest corporations and most important political campaigns."  The blurb omits the four year-old firm's only foreign client:  Saudi Arabia.  According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Saudis paid Qorvis $14,687,782 for the six month period ending September 30, 2002--a record for an amount shelled out by a foreign government to a U.S. p.r. firm.  Part of the money went--according to Patricia Roush--to coaching her two daughters for a television interview and spiriting them to London just as Congressmen Burton traveled to Saudi Arabia. 

But the bulk allegedly financed a series of 30 radio ads purportedly selling Saudi Arabia as our allies in the War on Terror.  But in fact, many of the messages focused on the Palestinian issue, casting the Israelis as "military occupiers"  and promoting Saudi Prince Abdullah's Middle East peace plan.  Paying for the ads was a previously unknown group with connections to OFTS called the Alliance for Peace and Justice, whose address, Seth Gitell of the Boston Phoenix revealed, was identical with Qorvis.  In December, 2002, three founding partner of Qorvis resigned, citing their "deep discomfort in representing the government of Saudi Arabia against accusations that Saudi leaders have turned a blind eye to terrorism."

Qorvis is not the only lobbying firm the Saudis use.  The Center for Public Integrity noted last September that the Kingdom spent $6.6 million over the previous year to hire 11 "lobby shops and public relations firms to plead their case before official Washington."  But Qorvis benefited most from the petro-largesse, raking in $4.5 million from October, 2003 to March, 2004.  Serving its desert masters, the firm has created the website www.aboutsaudiarabia,net to soft-pedal the Kingdom, and in August, 2004 oversaw another radio campaign intended to highlight the 9-11 Commission's findings that the Saudi government was not behind the terrorist attack.

Last December, FBI agents raided Qorvis' offices, taking away computer data and other records involving the firm's role in the 2002 advertising campaign.  According to Newsweek, the feds are investigating whether the Saudis, through Qorvis, attempted to use deceptive means in order to influence American public opinion in favor of Prince Abdullah's peace plan.  More specifically, the government wants to know if Qorvis violated the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act which requires p.r. firms to make full disclosures of foreign-sponsored propaganda in the U.S.  Observes Newsweek's  Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball,

Criminal charges against Qorvis over the ad campaign would be embarrassing for the Saudi Embassy...as well as the Bush White House, which has vigorously portrayed Crown Prince Abdullah’s government as a stalwart ally in the war on terror.

On December 21, the New York Sun reported that in 2002 Patton Boggs' partners, increasingly concerned about the anti-Israeli ads, agreed to sell the firm's stake in Qorvis, but never followed through.  As the paper noted, the partners feared that

any implicit snub of the Saudis might have cost Patton Boggs all of its business in the Arab world.

So law firms, p.r. "shops," the State Department, the White House--all maintain the ficition, sometimes through slick advertising and other media manipulations--that the Saudis are our friends, our indispensable allies whom we dare not alienate.  Meanwhile...

January 4:  the news is just coming over the wire.  The Arab press has identified the homicidal martyr who murdered 22 people in the December 21 Mosul mess hall attack.  His name was Ahmed Said Ahmed al-Ghamdi.  He was a medical student.  He was Saudi Arabian.  His clan, the al-Ghamdis, are no strangers to mass murder.  Three of its members were among the 9-11 hijackers. 

Our friends the Saudis.

EMANCIPATION DAY

Tonight, many of us will celebrate in the time-honored tradition of high spirits and good-fellowship, the arrival of 2005.  One hundred and forty-two years ago this night, people across the continent also welcomed the passing of the old into the new--many of them with a joy they had not believed possible.  These were people of African descent, and they knew that, at the stroke of midnight 1863, Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation took effect, technically freeing millions of men and women enslaved by the Confederate States of America.

One month from today, the Iraqi people will--insha'allah--vote in the first free elections ever held in that nation's tortured history.  As with the Emancipation Proclamation, however, "free" is a relative term.  How "free" elections can be in a country where foreign troops must guard voters against paramilitary gunmen who seek to murder democracy is open to debate.  We might, though, exercise some self-restraint and allow some Iraqis a say in this matter.  As the renown trio of bloggers at Iraq the Model expressed in a December 29th post entitled "God Bless All the Lists,"

Iraqis' response to terror was so clear; after the terrorists, or the so-called insurgents, threatened to slaughter anyone who participates in the elections, 7,200 Iraqis rushed to announce their candidacy.  YES, 7,200 Iraqis represented more than 200 different political parties--and I believe this makes the image clearer for the viewer.

Will the Iraqi elections be "free?"  Possibly not by the standards of Jimmy Carter or U.N. officials; certainly not the lights of the anti-war camp who, unthreatened by fascist paramilitaries, reactionary psychopaths and random acts of unspeakable violence, make a fetish of their own moral purity.  But we, who support this war, should not allow they, who do not, let the perfect defeat the good.  What will happen in Iraq on January 30 will not be ideal.  It will not be neat or completely satisfactory.  But after the horrors the Iraqi people have suffered, and continue to endure, it will be good.  Perhaps, like the Emancipation Proclamation, it will be miraculous.

We might further pause to consider what happened nearly 150 years ago.  How, culminating decades of mounting tension, the rebel shelling of Fort Sumter precipitated a war that nearly destroyed the United States, yet led, with the Union's victory, to the 14th Amendment and the legal--if not practical--abolishment of slavery.  We might reflect, as well, on the difficult period of the Reconstruction.   Then, as now, a "foreign" army "occupied" a defeated nation; then, as now, hooded paramilitaries called the Ku Klux Klan "resisted" the occupiers and sought to terrorize people back into slavery; then, as now, the process of freedom met numerous setbacks and failures--and to many, the process is not yet complete.  We might also ponder the fact, contra the arguments of the anti-war camp, democracy can--and has been--imposed on a recalcitrant population at the point of a gun.

The liberation and reconstruction of Iraq is part of a larger conflict against Islamofascism.  Just as, say, the Union drive across Tennessee contributed to the demise of slavery, so too victory in Iraq will help roll back the tide of tribal and religious oppression that has gripped the Middle East (often, unfortunately, with our blessing and assistance.)  This is another way of saying that at the base of this war lie fundamental concepts of freedom and dignity.  Or, to put it more simply, the battle for Iraq's future is a matter of human rights.  It is a moral, as much as a military, conflict.

To discredit America's commitment to Iraq, many leftists liken it to Vietnam, knowing full well the chilling effect memories of the Southeast Asian "quagmire" have on public opinion.  We should contest their rhetoric with analogies to the Civil War, whose no less chilling memories find noble meaning in the moral imperative of the conflict.  The war--never wholly popular in the North--may not have started for the purpose of freeing enslaved peoples, but, guided by Lincoln's vision and eloquence, that's how it ended.

September 11 was our Fort Sumter.  After years of increasingly bold assaults from Islamofascists, that attack drew us into a confusing and uncertain war for issues that only gradually have become clear.  (How many people before 9-11 knew about Wahhabism?  Or truly cared about the despotism of Saddam Hussein?  Or concerned themselves with the status of women in the Middle East?)  Now, we find ourselves engaged, like the North, in a war to drag a large segment of the human race into the modern world.  Refusing to recognize the necessity of this endeavor, our "peace" activist friends posit objections based on Saddam's supposed inability to threaten the U.S., the lack of WMDs, worldwide castigation of the war and the additional suffering it inflicts on the Iraqi people.  All reasonable, valid and in many ways true.  But like the reasonable, valid and truthful arguments leveled against the Civil War--"Lincoln's War"--they fall short as criteria with which to judge the moral necessity of the conflict:  to free enslaved human beings.

December 31, 1862 also witnessed the battle of Stone River, or Murfreesboro.  Fought in western Tennessee, the battle cost 12,906 Union and 11,739 Confederate casualties, the eighth most bloody battle of the Civil War.  But with that victory, the North secured most of Tennessee and moved a step closer--despite future reversals--to defeating the Confederacy.  Most importantly, the Union lives spent in that battle joined with the sacrifice of thousands of others during the course of the war to make New Year's Day, 1863--Emancipation Day--an event whose promise was long delayed, but certain to arrive.  As Martin Luther King declared a century later, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

A month from now, we will witness that arc and see where it will bend.  We can only pray the the Iraqi people rise to the occasion, and meet its call.  It is not a sure thing.  Although the freedom train eventually reaches the station, the passage is difficult and the schedule unclear--and many wait their lives in vain.  Federal troops may not have given a hardtack biscuit for Confederate slaves, but their sacrifices led to the freedom of those African men and women.  From the ashes of the World Trade Center to dusty palm groves of the Sunni Triangle to places yet to come, Americans--soldiers and civilians alike--are making the same sacrifice for the same cause of freedom.  And, God willing, we shall prevail.

Best wishes to everyone for a safe and prosperous New Year.