This Der Spiegel article notes the signs.

As noted in these previous posts, Richard Chesnoff is one of America’s foremost commentators on Middle East affairs. He is also one of the relatively few American journalists to have interviewed and spent time with Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.
With Arafat near death, Mr. Chesnoff writes this NY Daily News op-ed in which he notes what could have been:

If anyone had the ability to forge a Palestinian state then, it was Arafat. He had the political power, the money and the military force.
Tragically, like other Palestinian leaders before him, he wasted his chance. He used his political power to gain more power and the money to corrupt and control. Worst of all, instead of using his military force to squelch terrorism, he financed it, bringing more destruction to his people as well as to Israelis.

Then, Mr. Chesnoff zeros in on Arafat’s fatal leadership flaw:

Why did a man who had both the opportunity and the intellect to deliver his people a state of their own fail to do so?
He lacked the realism, the vision and, most important, the courage to make the shift from terrorist to statesman. He spoke (in Arabic) not of peace with Israel but of a truce, something he could always break. And he refused to tell his people that Israel never would commit demographic suicide by letting millions of Palestinians return.
He also feared that if he ever told his people to accept a state that was less than what he had promised, he would lose stature, popularity and the place he believed he deserved in Arab history.
False pride is often a fatal error in the Arab world – a character flaw born not of heroism but of cowardice.

Read the entire piece. Would not it be ironic if Arafat’s legacy is a new generation of Palestinian leadership that understands the destructive futility of Arafat’s strategy towards Israel and embarks on a new, realistic path toward a Palestinian state?
Meanwhile, Max Boot writes of Arafat in this L.A. Times piece:

There has been no more successful terrorist in the modern age. Yet his biggest victims were not Israelis. It was his own people who suffered the most. If Arafat had displayed the wisdom of a Gandhi or Mandela, he would long ago have presided over the establishment of a fully independent Palestine comprising all of the Gaza Strip, part of Jerusalem and at least 95% of the West Bank. In fact, he seemed well on his way toward this goal when I met him in 1998 as part of a delegation of American scholars and journalists.
The place was his Ramallah compound, the time after midnight (Arafat was a night owl). He was wearing his trademark fatigues, and his hands and lips were shaking uncontrollably. Much of the session was conducted via translator, but Arafat broke into English when asked a question about Palestinian violations of the Oslo accords. It was the kind of query a democratic statesman would have batted away without a second thought.
Arafat, however, grew visibly agitated and stammered: “Be careful when you are speaking to me! Be careful, you are speaking to Arafat!” The threat of violence hung in the air as we left. Clearly Arafat had not quite mastered the art of being a politician or, rather, he was a politician in the mold of Mugabe or Mao.

The Belmont Club is providing an excellent and often updated thread on the Battle of Fallujah.

As readers of this blog know, I am not enamored of many Bush Administration policies, but I am a supporter of the Administration’s overall policy in prosecuting the war against the radical Islamic fascists despite the fact that the Administration has made tactical errors and not always presented the proper case for the war. Apart from the disingenuousness reflected by his his questionable record on defense matters generally, my sense is that Mr. Kerry’s criticism of the Administration’s war policy is somewhat akin to sniping at FDR’s decision to invade North Africa early in World War II rather than opening up the key European front or confronting the Japanese directly in the South Pacific.
However, what really underlies Mr. Kerry’s criticism of the war against the radical Islamic fascists is the belief that this is not truly a just war. Addressing that issue head on in this recent review of Jean Bethke Elshtain‘s book, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, one of my favorite political philosophy professors — the Reverend James V. Schall of Georgetown University — persuasively refutes those who argue against the morality of the Bush Administration’s decision to wage war on the radical Islamic fascists:

The last time we were up in arms, so to speak, about “just war” was when we were all overly wrought about nuclear proliferation, piously denying that deterrence could not work. Little did we know at the time that this nuclear worry, with all its subtle distinctions, would not be our most pressing war problem a few decades later?unless the terrorists get nuclear weapons, which they well might. The latter possibility makes it even more immoral not to do all we can to stop them now.

Professor Schall then addresses the muddled thinking of those who rationalize inaction in the face of pure evil:

A surprisingly few determined Muslims, none poor or uneducated, have made every airport and public building in the world a potential inferno, one at a time. They have made every airport and train station, most public buildings, small armed camps on constant look out for disaster. The “suicide bomber” turns out to be more dangerous by far than Soviet missiles. And instead of international outrage at the very idea of religious sources encouraging this suicide weapon, we even have those who claim it might be “justified” for sociological reasons. We are in danger of losing sight of common-sense principles: “The best preparation for peace,” it used to be said, “is to prepare for war.” The trick is to know what kind of a war is before us. All nations have a record of preparing diligently for the last war. This book warns against that sort of preparation.

. . . [C]ertain types of ideological and religious mind will not stop their aggression unless their minds are changed voluntarily or unless they are taken out before they carry out their plans. We do not like to hear this. We are little prepared with our own tolerant ideology even to imagine such minds. But they exist and to deny it is a form of blindness. Elshtain does not deny their existence. We are “ecumenical” at our peril when we fail to engage in debates about suicide bombings. The killing of the innocent by this terrible method is more than just the killing of the innocent. It is the bankruptcy of a theology that supports it, a proof that it cannot be true.

Professor Schall notes that the main problem is in the nature of Islam itself, something that the liberal West is loathe to admit:

This endeavor requires a much more careful look at Islam and its long, disturbing record than many would like to face. It is not that there are no “peaceful” Muslims, but as Elshtain recognizes, even the peaceful ones are under threat in their own world from those more bent on pursuing the ancient Islamic goal of world domination usually by military means. What most of us, with our more liberal bent, are loathe to admit, is that any historical movement can seek century after century to pursue a single goal of world domination. Our memories are shorter than many Muslim visionaries.
Belloc, in his writings on Islam, understood this likelihood, this persistency over time. We have to have a certain begrudging admiration, as well as fear, for this determination. But it is an aberration and needs to be called such. Moreover the lack of freedom and independence within actual Muslim societies needs to be much more honestly faced and described. Few are willing to recall that Europe is not Muslim today because it was stopped in France and before Vienna by the sword. At bottom, the Crusades were classic defensive war against an aggressive power, without which Europe would have been absorbed centuries ago.

And although good intelligence is the first line of defense, the will to exercise force remains the key to overcoming “the determined wrath of wrongdoers:”

But though the first line of defense is intelligence in the sense of knowing the enemy, the situation, we need force. We cannot doubt that some individuals and movements cannot be stopped except by force. Force means army, navy, air power, technology, and above all will and brains. But it also means intention. It cannot be lost in legalities or institutions that prevent action on an immediate danger. If there is anything new about this situation, it is found in the very title of the Elshtain book, Just War Against Terror. Something can and must be done about terror, beginning with its proper identification as to its source and cause. This “doing something” requires that potential threats be stopped where they are by armed force acting justly.

Professor Schall concludes by noting that, lest we forget, another 9/11-type attack can happen:

[More radical Islamic terrorist attacks] can happen again, are intended to happen again, and that they not only can be stopped, but can be stopped morally. The fact is, since 9/11, because of our military and security efforts, terrorists have been stopped. All we do not know is the full record of this success that has saved things we cannot imagine, as we can now imagine the World Trade Center destroyed. This prevention, after all, is the purpose of the “sword”?”he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.” Jean Elshtain understands this use of mind and force and her book is a comfort for those who, in honor and justice, have to carry out, often at the cost of their lives, the rugged work that prevents the determined wrath of the wrongdoers from falling on us all.

Read the entire piece. And here is Professor Schall’s website.

Max Boot is a Senior Fellow of National Security Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations, and an award-winning author and former editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Boot is an expert on national security policy and U.S. military history and technology.
In this LA Times op-ed, Mr. Boot gives an interesting historical perspective to the criticism levied against the Bush Administration recently for its tactical decisions in the war against the Islamic fascists:

Reading the depressing headlines, one is tempted to ask: Has any president in U.S. history ever botched a war or its aftermath so badly?
Actually, yes. Most wartime presidents have made catastrophic blunders, from James Madison losing his capital to the British in 1814 to Harry Truman getting embroiled with China in 1950. Errors tend to shrink in retrospect if committed in a winning cause (Korea); they get magnified in a losing one (Vietnam).

Despite all that’s gone wrong so far, Iraq could still go either way. (In one recent poll, 51% of Iraqis said their country was headed in “the right direction”; only 31% felt it was going the wrong way.)

Mr. Boot then reviews the blunders that two of our most revered Presidents — Lincoln and FDR — made in connection with their wars:

Lincoln is remembered, of course, for winning the Civil War and freeing the slaves. We tend to forget that along the way he lost more battles than any other president: First and Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Chickamauga?. The list of federal defeats was long and dispiriting. So was the list of federal victories (e.g., Antietam, Gettysburg) that could have been exploited to shorten the conflict, but weren’t.
As the Union’s fortunes fell, opponents tarred Lincoln with invective that might make even Michael Moore blush. Harper’s magazine called him a “despot, liar, thief, braggart, buffoon, usurper, monster, ignoramus.” As late as the summer of 1864, Lincoln appeared likely to lose his bid for reelection. Only the fall of Atlanta on Sept. 2 saved his presidency.
Most of the Union’s failures were because of inept generalship, but it was Lincoln who chose the generals, including many political appointees with scant military experience. He ultimately won the war only by backing Ulysses Grant’s brutal attritional tactics that have often been criticized as sheer butchery.

FDR had some doozies, too:

Roosevelt had more than his share of mistakes too, the most notorious being his failure to prevent the attack on Pearl Harbor, even though U.S. code breakers had given him better intelligence than Bush had before Sept. 11. FDR also did not do enough to prepare the armed forces for war, and then pushed them into early offensives at Guadalcanal and North Africa that took a heavy toll on inexperienced troops. At Kasserine Pass, Tunisia, in 1943, the U.S. Army was mauled by veteran German units, losing more than 6,000 soldiers.
The Allies went on to win the war but still suffered many snafus, such as Operation Market Garden, a failed airborne assault on Holland in September 1944, and the Battle of the Bulge three months later, when a massive German onslaught in the Ardennes caught U.S. troops napping.
Though FDR bore only indirect responsibility for most of these screw-ups, he was more directly culpable for other bad calls, such as the decision to detain 120,000 Japanese Americans without any proof of their disloyalty. Like Lincoln, who jailed suspected Southern sympathizers without trial, Roosevelt was guilty of civil liberties restrictions that were light-years beyond the Patriot Act. And, like Bush, Roosevelt didn’t do enough to prepare for the postwar period. His failure to occupy more of Eastern Europe before the Red Army arrived consigned millions to tyranny; his failure to plan for the future of Korea and Vietnam after the Japanese left helped lead to two wars that killed 100,000 Americans.

Mr. Boot closes by placing the current criticism of the Bush Administation’s tactical decisions in Iraq into historical perspective:

None of this is meant in any way to denigrate the inspired leadership of two great presidents. Both Lincoln and Roosevelt were brilliant wartime leaders precisely because they were able to overcome adversity and inspire the country toward ultimate victory with their unflagging will to win. That’s what Bush is trying to do today.
And, no, I’m not suggesting Bush is another Lincoln or Roosevelt. But even if Bush hasn’t reached their lofty heights, neither has he experienced their depths of despair. We are losing one or two soldiers a day in Iraq. Lincoln lost an average of 250 daily for four years, Roosevelt 300 daily for more than 3 1/2 years. If they could overcome such numbing losses to prevail against far more formidable foes than we face now, it’s ludicrous to give in to today’s fashionable funk.
“Colossal failures of judgment” are to be expected in wartime; I daresay even John Kerry (whose judgment on Iraq changes every 30 minutes) might commit a few. They do not have to spell defeat now any more than they did in 1865 or 1945.

Read the entire piece.

John Keegan is England’s foremost military historian and, for many years, was the Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. His book — The Second World War — is arguably the best single volume book on World War II and his book The Face of Battle is essential reading for anyone seeking an understanding of the history of warfare. His newest book — The Iraq War — was published earlier this year, and here is a post from June on one of Mr. Keegan’s earlier op-ed’s on the Iraq War.
In this London Telegraph op-ed, Mr. Keegan weighs in on the current situation in Iraq, which has been the subject of these Victor Davis Hanson and James Fallows posts from over the past several days. Essentially, Mr. Keegan notes that mistakes have been made, but points out that the situation could be far worse than it is.
Inasmuch as England’s Prime Minister Tony Blair is currently bearing the same criticism over the Iraq War that President Bush is enduring from similar forces in the U.S., Mr. Keegan first addresses the motives behind such criticism:

It is difficult to understand the motives of those who are making life difficult for the Prime Minister. Some are legalists who continue to insist that the war was launched without justification in international law and wish to punish those responsible for their transgressions.
T hey belong to that tiresome but increasingly numerous tribe who seem to think that men are made for laws and not laws for men. In any case, their arguments are contested, since many (including the Attorney General) hold that UN Resolutions 678, 687 and 1441 do in fact provide justification for the taking of military action against Saddam.
Some of Tony Blair’s castigators are old-fashioned anti-militarists, usually with a strong anti-imperialist tinge, who deprecate the use of force as an instrument of foreign policy in almost any circumstances. They ignore the fact that Saddam was in breach of at least nine UN resolutions and flaunted his defiance. They also failed to explain why they in effect would support Saddam’s continuance in power and the maintenance of his cruel and dictatorial rule over the Iraqi people.
Some anti-Blairites are, of course, simply playing internal Labour Party politics. They dislike the Prime Minister’s unwritten contract with the middle classes, his refusal to institute progressive taxation and his disinclination to take back into public ownership any of the denationalised industries. They are usually anti-American as well, and take pleasure at the spectacle of President Bush’s failure to translate the victory of 2003 into a successful transition to stable government.

Mr. Keegan then goes on to point out one of the big mistakes that the American military made during the occupation of Iraq:

It was a serious mistake to dissolve the Iraqi police force and to disband the Iraqi army. The reasons for doing so seem to have been based on distant memories of the occupation of Nazi Germany in 1945. The Ba’ath party was identified as the Iraqi version of the Nazi party and the view taken that no supporters of the old regime should be allowed to exercise power under a new regime.
That policy may also have drawn on an idealistic but naive American belief in the existence of a potential democratic majority inside any repressed population, ready to elect an enlightened government if given the chance to vote. The effect in practice was to throw into unemployment hundreds of thousands of young Iraqi males, instantly discontented but skilled in the use of weapons. As almost every Iraqi male has access to weapons, the result was to make for disorder.

However, the disorder in Iraq is isolated to the Sunni Triangle, and Mr. Keegan notes that there is precedent in the Islamic world for this type of disorder:

The trouble that persists is centred on the so-called Sunni triangle, west of Baghdad, and is fomented by ex-Ba’athists who fear that properly conducted elections will exclude them from the position of dominance they were accustomed to enjoy in the Saddam years. Such elections are scheduled for January and that timetable is the spur to the current spate of bombings and shootings, which take as their principal targets those Iraqis who are brave enough to seek enlistment in the new police force and the new army.
Other dissidents are Shia militants, many followers of the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who fear a revival of Sunni dominance through American-sponsored governmental means and who, in any case, regard Western forms of democratic government as un-Islamic. Their aims, if not their beliefs, are supported by the foreign infiltrators, particularly from Syria but also from Iran and the anti-royalist regions of Saudi Arabia, who want nothing less than the restoration of the seventh-century caliphate and a return to the rule of God on earth.
Britain has been here before. In the 1920s, at the beginning of its exercise of the League of Nations Mandate over Iraq, it had to pacify a disturbed ex-Turkish Ottoman territory in which, as the first British governor complained, every man had a rifle. Then, as now, Shia and Sunni were at loggerheads and the whole Muslim world was disturbed by the fall of the caliphate, brought about by Kemal Ataturk’s dissolution of Islamic rule in Turkey.

Nevertheless, Mr. Keegan notes that Iraq is a secular state and that its population is one of the best educated in the Middle East, and concludes by pointing out an essential truth regarding the calculated use of force:

When not silenced by the threat of violence from extremists and criminals, [most Iraqis] are also ready to say that they continue to regard the Western troops in their midst as liberators. Western so-called progressives who denounce the war of 2003 as a mistake are in fact illiberal and reactionary. They should be ashamed of themselves. Denunciation of war-making is much more fun than the recognition of the truth that the calculated use of force can achieve good. The United States and Britain must not be deterred.

Read the entire piece.

James Fallows is the National Correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, where he has worked for more than twenty years. He is one of the most important and gifted investigative reporters of our time. During his long and storied career, Mr. Fallows has written extensively on such diverse topics as defense policy, economics, computer technology, politics, and immigration.
Over the past two years, Mr. Fallows has written a series of investigative articles in The Atlantic in which Mr. Fallows argues that the Bush Administration has squandered valuable resources and opportunities as a result of its drive to war against Iraq. In this Atlantic Monthly ($) interview, Mr. Fallows elaborates on his views regarding the mistakes that he believes that the Bush Administration has made in pursuing the Iraqi front in the war on Islamic fascism. It is a valuable and thought provoking piece from a serious reporter and thinker, and the following are several tidbits of the interview to arouse your curiosity.

Continue reading →

Victor Davis Hanson’s latest NRO op-ed reminds us that the fog of war often makes it difficult to evaluate progress during war. However, Professor Hanson points out that the difficulties of battle should not deter us from focusing on finishing the Iraqi stage of the war against Islamic fascism:

It is always difficult for those involved to determine the pulse of any ongoing war. The last 90 days in the Pacific theater were among the most costly of World War II, as we incurred 50,000 casualties on Okinawa just weeks before the Japanese collapse. December 1944 and January 1945 were the worst months for the American army in Europe, bled white repelling Hitler’s last gasp in the Battle of the Bulge. Contemporaries shuddered, after observing those killing fields, that the war would go on for years more. The summer of 1864 convinced many that Grant and Lincoln were losers, and that McClellan alone could end the conflict by what would amount to a negotiated surrender of Northern war aims.
It is true that parts of Iraq are unsafe and that terrorists are flowing into the country; but there is no doubt that the removal of Saddam Hussein is bringing matters to a head. Islamic fascists are now fighting openly and losing battles, and are increasingly desperate as they realize the democratization process slowly grinds ahead leaving them and what they have to offer by the wayside. Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and others must send aid to the terrorists and stealthy warriors into Iraq, for the battle is not just for Baghdad but for their futures as well. The world’s attention is turning to Syria’s occupation of Lebanon and Iran’s nukes, a new scrutiny predicated on American initiatives and persistence, and easily evaporated by a withdrawal from Iraq. So by taking the fight to the heart of darkness in Saddam’s realm, we have opened the climactic phase of the war, and thereupon can either win or lose far more than Iraq.
The world grasps this, and thus slowly is waking up and starting to see that if it walks and sounds like an Islamic fascist ? whether in Russia, Spain, Istanbul, Israel, Iraq, or India ? it really is an Islamic fascist, with the now-familiar odious signature of car bombings, suicide belts, and incoherent communiquÈs mixed with self-pity and passive-aggressive bluster.
For all these reasons and more, something like “See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya” is the absolute worst prescription for Iraq ? both for America and those Iraqis who are counting on us in their historic efforts to reclaim their country from barbarism. Amid the daily car bombings in Iraq, murder in Russia, and slaughter in the Middle East, we cannot see much hope ? but it is there, and we are winning on a variety of fronts as the world continues to shrink for the Islamic fascist and those who would abet him.

Read the entire article.

Victor Davis Hanson has another compelling Wall Street Journal ($) op-ed today in which he points out that the European desire that George Bush be defeated in the upcoming election could very well backfire on European interests:

Yet the European meddling in this particular presidential election is. Less talked about is that the image of an allied Europe has been shattered here at home. And all the retired NATO brass and Council on Foreign Relations grandees are finding it hard to put the pieces back together again. The American public now wants to be told exactly why thousands in their undermanned military are stationed in a continent larger and richer than our own without conventional enemies on its borders. If Europeans think it is nonsensical to connect Iraq with our own post 9/11 security, then Americans believe it is far more absurd to envision an American-led NATO patrolling their skies and roads 15 years after a nearby hostile empire collapsed — especially when NATO turns out to be as isolationist as America is expected to be engaged abroad.
The election of John Kerry would probably not reverse either the current policy in Iraq or the ongoing reappraisal of our foreign relations. The European fixation with the upcoming election and rabid hatred of George Bush instead may backfire here at home; indeed, even now European animus acerbates our own growing unease with what we read and see abroad

Read the entire piece.

In this Opinion Journal.com piece, Danielle Crittenden reviews a new book — “Inside the Kingdom” — by Osama Bin Ladin’s former sister-in-law, Carmen bin Ladin.
Inasmuch as women of radical Islamic families risk severe punishment for speaking out, first person accounts of life in this culture are rare. As Ms. Crittendon notes, Ms. Bin Ladin is not a distant relative seeking to cash in on her the Bin Ladin family’s notoriety. Rather, her story is arguably the most vivid account yet to appear in the West of the oppressive lives of Saudi women:

Carmen’s life in Saudi Arabia began when her car pulled up to Yeslam’s mother’s compound outside Jeddah. In the mid-1970s, the town was still not much more than a donkey crossroads in the middle of the desert. If winds weren’t whipping up the sand in blinding funnels, the sun was scorching down with unbearable heat. Shrouded in her unfamiliar and suffocating black robes, Carmen entered what sounds like a luridly decorated marble tomb. From then on, she was no longer free.
Each day, Yeslam vanished to work. Carmen and her young daughter passed the hours in the company of his mother and sister. Rarely could she leave the house–rarely, even, did she see sunlight. Courtyards had to be cleared of male servants before she could poke her head outside; she was not even permitted to cross the street alone to visit a relative. When she did venture out, she had to wear a choking abaya and thick socks to hide her ankles. “It was like carrying a jail on your back,” she writes.
Nor was she much freer inside the house. She could not listen to music, pick up an uncensored book or newspaper, or watch anything on television but a dour man reading the Quran. Nor could she absorb herself in household tasks. These were left to foreign servants, including the care of children.
Carmen was horrified by the effects of this isolation and uselessness. “The Bin Laden women were like pets kept by their husbands;. . . .Occasionally they were patted on the head and given presents; sometimes they were taken out, mostly to each other’s houses;. . . .I never once saw one of my sisters-in-law pick up a book. These women never met with men other than their husbands, and never talked about larger issues even with the men they had married. They had nothing to say.”

Read the whole piece.