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.

Professor Keegan recently wrote this op-ed in the London Telegraph in which he places current events regarding the war in Iraq in historical perspective:

Then, Professor Keegan puts the current troubles in Iraq in the context of previous 20th Century wars:

History boys can explain easily – and convincingly – why some wars, as that against Germany in 1945, end in unopposed occupation of enemy territory and why others, as in Iraq in 1920 and 2004, do not. In the first case, the defeated nation has exhausted itself in the struggle and is dependent on the victor both for necessities and for protection against further disaster – social revolution or aggression by another enemy. In the second case, the war has not done much harm but has broken the power of the state and encouraged the dispossessed and the irresponsible to grab what they can before order is fully restored.

What monopolises the headlines and prime time television at the moment is news from Iraq on the activity of small, localised minorities struggling to entrench themselves before full peace is imposed and an effective state structure is restored.

While noting those troubles, Professor Keegan closes by focusing on the bottom line:

It is a regrettable but not wholly to be unexpected outcome of a campaign to overthrow a dangerous Third World dictator. If those who show themselves so eager to denounce the American President and the British Prime Minister feel strongly enough on the issue, please will they explain their reasons for wishing that Saddam Hussein should still be in power in Baghdad.

I’m on the road for a couple of days, so I don’t have much time for blogging. But I wanted to pass along two articles on radical Islamic fascists that are particularly insightful.
First, Daniel Pipes has this article that summarizes the evolution of the strange political climate that currently exists in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Pipes notes Bernard Lewis‘ analogy that helps understand the Saudi position among Muslims in general:

“Imagine that the Ku Klux Klan gets total control of the state of Texas. And the Ku Klux Klan has at its disposal all the oil rigs in Texas. And they use this money to set up a well-endowed network of colleges and schools throughout Christendom, peddling their peculiar brand of Christianity. You would then have an approximate equivalent of what has happened in the modern Muslim world.”

H’mm. In other words, Dr. Lewis, sort of like what happened with the Mormons, Utah and the United States? ;^)
The other article of note is this one from Richard Chesnoff, who has been reporting on the wars of the Middle East for over 30 years. I particularly like Richard because he is a real war reporter and does not mince words. An example:

Al Qaeda also has apparently infiltrated a number of nongovernmental agencies. Among them, the Yemen Women’s Rights Organization. My source explains: “Because of Islamic society’s strict taboo on body searches for women, Al Qaeda finds women ideal couriers.”
The situation in Saudi Arabia seems worse. Though Saudi officials frequently cloud or completely deny the facts, intelligence shows that two Saudi Air Force pilots, Lt. Safr al-Shahrani and Major Sayyaf al-Bishi, were arrested last year on suspicion of having Al Qaeda ties and of planting missiles in the Al Qawiza area south of Jeddah Port. Their reported plan: attack U.S. military vessels.
There are also reports that the Al Qaeda terrorists whose suicide bomb killed 35 people in Riyadh last year were secretly helped by members of the Saudi National Guard, the same force that supposedly protects the Saudi Royal Family. In Khobar this weekend, the terrorists reportedly wore Saudi Army fatigue uniforms. Did they steal them? Or were they supplied to them by somebody within the national guard?
There are similar reports of internal infiltration coming from Sudan and Pakistan.

The Islamic fascists remain a formidable threat to United States and world security, and this threat is far too serious to be just another political football during the upcoming Presidential campaign.

In this New Republic ($) Online article, Daniel Drezner does a good job of concisely analyzing the Iraq War plan and the execution of its goal. The entire article is well worth reading, and the following is a tidbit to pique your interest:

Say what you will about the neoconservatives’ skills at manners or management; their big idea cannot be dismissed lightly. There is a compelling logic to the argument that the primary source of frustration among Arabs in the Middle East is a sense of powerlessness. Trapped in a region littered with authoritarian and corrupt regimes, they are encouraged by these regimes and their Islamic critics to blame their situation on Israel and the United States. This is an ideal environment for fomenting terrorism. Creating an open society in Iraq would put the lie to this kind of hate-mongering.
To be sure, democracy promotion is far from easy. Indeed, regime change in the Middle East looks like a lousy, rotten policy option for addressing the root causes of terrorism, until one considers the alternatives–appeasement or muddling through. The latter option was essentially the pre-9/11 position of the United States and its allies, and has been found wanting. Appeasement or isolation has the same benefits and costs that the strategy had in the 1930s: It buys short-term solace but raises the long-term costs of facing a stronger and potentially undeterrable adversary.
For all their criticism of Bush’s grand strategy, Europeans and left-wingers have offered very little in the way of alternatives to his vision. Some say that American soft power could bring about change in the Middle East. But decades of alternately coddling, cajoling, and ostracizing Arab despots has not led to liberalization or democratization. We have showered Egypt with aid, but have succeeded only in propping up an authoritarian monster in Hosni Mubarak. We have tried to isolate Syria, but have only strengthened that country’s anti-American credentials. Maybe U.S. soft power is part of the solution to the Middle East’s woes, but soft power alone cannot accomplish our desired ends.
The craft of foreign policy is choosing wisely from a set of imperfect options. While flawed, the neoconservative plan of democracy promotion in the Middle East remains preferable to any known alternatives.

Victor Davis Hanson quoting Oakland Raiders‘ owner Al Davis? Read about it here. One of Professor Hanson’s typically insightful observations is the following:

If one goes back to the fifth week of Bill Clinton’s 79-day bombing campaign against Serbia ? no U.N. approval, no congressional sanction, NATO partners backing out ? one reads of castigation from the American Right about bombing a Christian Orthodox country in Europe, from neoconservatives about not committing ground troops, and from the Left about going to war at all. But with Milosevic in the dock and the mass murder stopped, we now are told that the Clinton administration’s efforts to stop the bloodbath in the Balkans proved to be about the only success of his scandal-ridden administration. Why? He persevered and won ? and we can imagine what would have happened had he caved in at week six and called it another Mogadishu.
The truth is that for all our education, nuance, and professed idealism, too many of us think and act with our limbic systems, which are hard-wired to appreciate perceived success and feel comfortable with consensus. Like most in the animal kingdom, man wishes to identify with good fortune and abhors apparent failure, and thus seeks conveniently to find distance from it. After Abu Graib and the insurrections in Fallujah and Najef, the loudmouth critic Michael Moore is praised as a gifted filmmaker at the Cannes Film Festival even as prominent conservatives and ex-generals, now in their newfound genius, trash the war and claim they were brainwashed, naÔve, or not listened to.
Our leaders should remember this volatility. In the long run, of course, the present strategy is sound and in a decade will be judged as such by historians. How could it not be sound to remove a mass murderer who posed a threat to the region and our country and then sponsor a consensual government in his place?

Listening Al Gore?

Seymour Hersh‘s articles on the Abu Ghraib scandal are the stuff of Pulitzer Prizes. Here is his latest article in which he implicates the top Pentagon brass in the interrogation techniques that led to the abuse of prisoners at the prison. His earlier articles on the prison are here and here.
Joel Mowbray in this FrontPageMagazine.com piece provides a counterbalance to Mr. Hersh’s pieces. This John Miller profile of Hersh is along the same lines.
Read all and decide for yourself.

As noted in this earlier post, Richard Z. Chesnoff has long been one of America’s most prominent reporters on foreign affairs. In this NY Daily News op-ed, Mr. Chesnoff reports on Iran’s systematic support for the radical Islamic fascists who are waging war against the United States. As Mr. Chesnoff notes:

Tehran’s mad mullahs have thrown their support behind select Islamic extremists for many years. But a top-secret report prepared by senior Mideast intelligence sources says Iran has recently stepped up its efforts to train and arm a widening range of terrorists, many of whom pose direct threats to Western targets, including in Iraq.
Iran’s protÈgÈs, new and old, are both Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and they hail from all across the Middle East: Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Lebanon. Many are already ensconced in Iranian training camps.
Most of these Iranian-fostered groups are violently anti-American. Some, like Lebanon’s Usbat al-Ansar and Iraq’s Ansar al-Islam, have direct ties to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Chesnoff also points out the ominous implications of this Iranian support of the enemy for the war effort in Iraq:

Most frightening of all, my sources say there are indications Hamas is helping Ansar al-Islam develop short-range rockets with which to attack coalition troops in Iraq. These are the same type of Qassem rockets that Hamas has been producing in Gaza and firing at Israeli settlements and towns.
“The coalition’s abundance of defensive armor in Iraq,” says one source, “has made it increasingly difficult for Ansar al-Islam to attack stationary targets.”
Qassem-style rockets would help our enemies overcome that difficulty.
A Hamas-financed Qassem workshop, I’m told, has been set up in Iran under the supervision of a Hamas cell leader named Abu Husam, who is a qualified engineer.
Needless to say, Iran is eager not to leave any traces of its involvement in attacks against the U.S.
But Iranian intelligence has quietly helped its terrorist protÈgÈs cross over into the United Arab Emirates and return with materials for the rocket project through the Iranian military port of Bandar Abbas.
“According to the Hamas-Al Qaeda plan,” says an intelligence source, “the first rockets are to become operative in Iraq in early June, just before rule is transferred to the Iraqi interim government.”

And Mr. Chesnoff concludes by asking the $64 question:

What was that we were being told recently about the Iranian government’s “moderating” its positions?

Read on.

Charles Paul Freund is a senior editor of Reason, a monthly magazine on politics and culture, who has written extensively on the political manipulation of culture, the ideological use of imagery and language, modern techniques of persuasion and the process of disseminating ideas.
In this LA Times op-ed, which is a must read in its entirety, Mr. Freund makes the following salient point in comparing the responses to the recent images of the Abu Ghraib prison and the beheading of Nicholas Berg:

The Abu Ghraib pictures reveal American soldiers humiliating their prisoners in a sadistic manner (in some images, the Americans are actually smirking). It’s a painful sight because it is cruel on its own terms (we don’t even know whether the terrorized individuals are actually guilty of anything) and because we regard such sadism as unworthy of our image of ourselves.
By contrast, Zarqawi intentionally videotapes and distributes his bloody atrocity; the literal slaughter of an innocent is offered as an example of his righteousness. For Zarqawi, the question of unworthiness simply never enters the calculation; that the action is inhuman is its point.
Shameless brutality of this degree has the power to transform the shame of Zarqawi’s enemies. Zarqawi has reminded his enemies that, unlike him, they are at least capable of shame.
Zarqawi’s righteous snuff movie is an act of lunacy, a gift to his enemies, and, one hopes, an unwitting suicide note.

Hat tip to Virginia Postrel for the link to Mr. Freund’s timely piece.

David Ignatius of the Washington Post (free online subscription required) has some interesting observations in this piece titled “Reassembling Iraq” based on his recent trip to Iraq. The entire piece is well worth reading, and the folloiwng will give you a flavor for it:

After each visit to Iraq over the past year, I’ve tried to weigh how things are going. At the end of a trip last week, one answer was that it depends on where you live. Even in the wilds of Mesopotamia, all politics is local.
Overall, Iraq is a mess. . .
Yet this disarray on the macro level masks local pockets of stability. Southern Iraq, where I traveled for a week with British troops, is surprisingly calm — thanks to a quiet alliance of tribal sheiks and Shiite religious leaders with the British occupiers. The British have been wise enough to let the Iraqis find their own solutions to problems. Their motto, says the British chief of staff in the south, Col. Jim Tanner, is that “one size doesn’t fit all.”
The Kurdish north is also relatively calm and stable. Kurdish political leaders know they’ve got a good thing going in their quasi-autonomy from the Arabs to the south. Their troops and clan leaders are maintaining order, and while they may pay lip service to the notion of the Iraqi state, they’re quite happy to be running their own show.
The nightmare area is the U.S.-controlled zone in the center of the country. This was always going to be the toughest piece of the puzzle. Where the Shiite south and Kurdish north are each relatively homogenous, central Iraq is an ethnic, religious and political jumble.
But even in the center, temporary pockets of stability have emerged over the past month, as the United States steps back from the brink of all-out urban warfare. Much like the British in the south, the U.S. occupiers now seem ready to accept some Iraqi solutions that are backed by the nation’s traditional power bases, such as the tribes, religious leaders and semi-respectable remnants of the old army.
Sometimes we’ll have to hold our noses at these local solutions, as when a former Republican Guard general restores order in Fallujah. But that kind of pragmatic approach seems preferable to waging a bitter war of occupation.
Unfortunately, the checkerboard Iraq that I’m describing isn’t any longer a single nation. It’s a country in the process of de facto partition — with the north and the south going their own ways and the center in a bloody state of ferment.

Victor Davis Hanson’s latest NRO column is up and, as usual, he places the calls for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation or firing in the proper perspective:

The idea that anyone would suggest that Donald Rumsfeld — and now Richard Meyers! — should step down, in the midst of a global war, for the excesses and criminality of a handful of miscreant guards and their lax immediate superiors in the cauldron of Iraq is absurd and depressing all at once.
What would we think now if George Marshall had been forced out on news that 3,000 miles away George S. Patton’s men had shot some Italian prisoners, or Gen. Hodges’s soldiers summarily executed German commandoes out of uniform, or drivers of the Red Ball express had raped French women? Should Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell have been relieved from his command for the February 12-13, 1991, nocturnal bombing of the Al Firdos compound in Baghdad, in which hundreds of women and children of Baathist loyalists were tragically incinerated and pictures of their corpses broadcast around the world, prompting the United States to cease all further pre-planned and approved attacks on the elite in Saddam’s bunkers throughout Baghdad? Of course not.

Rumsfeld and Meyers have presided over two amazingly successful wars. In an aggregate of 11 weeks, and at the tragic cost of 700 combat dead, the American military defeated the two worst regimes in the Middle East and stayed on to implant democratic change where no such idea has ever existed. Had anyone envisioned, say in 1999, that the United States could do such a thing — that Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar would both be out of power, and that governing councils would be there in their place — he would have been dismissed as unhinged. What they are attempting to do is not to keep some psychopath “in his box” or lob over cruise missiles. The latter are palliative but ultimately solely punitive measures that kill a few hundred or thousand anonymous Middle Easterners and keep the nasty business off the evening news, thus in the long term inciting rather than solving the problem.

Continue reading →

Princeton University Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis is America’s foremost expert on Middle East history, and prior posts involving his work and views can be viewed here. In this Wall Street Journal ($) piece, Dr. Lewis makes some typically insightful observations in regard to relying on the United Nations as an agent for progress in the Middle East:

The record of the U.N. in dealing with conflicts is not encouraging — neither in terms of fairness, nor of efficacy. Its record on human rights is even worse — hardly surprising, since the members of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights include such practitioners of human rights as Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. In dealing with conflicts, as a European observer once remarked, its purpose seems to be conservation rather than resolution.
A case in point: In 1947 the British Empire in India was partitioned into two states, India and Pakistan. There was a bitter military struggle, and an estimated 10 million refugees were displaced. Despite continuing friction, some sort of accommodation was reached between the two states and the refugees were resettled. No outside power or organization was involved.
In the following year, 1948, the British-mandated territory of Palestine was partitioned — in terms of area and numbers, a triviality compared with India. Yet that conflict continues, and the 750,000 Arab refugees from Israel and their millions of descendants remain refugees, in camps maintained and staffed by the U.N. Except for Jordan, no Arab state has been willing to grant citizenship to the Palestinian refugees or to their locally born descendants, or even to allow them the rights of resident aliens. They are now entering their fifth generation as stateless refugee aliens. The whole operation is maintained and sustained by a massive apparatus of U.N. officials, some of whom have spent virtually their whole careers on this issue. What progress has been made on the Arab-Israel problem — the resettlement in Israel of Jewish refugees from the Arab-held parts of mandatory Palestine and from Arab countries, the Egyptian and Jordanian peace agreements — was achieved outside the framework of the U.N. One shudders to think what might have been the fate of the Indian subcontinent if the U.N. had been involved in its partition.