In this FrontPageMagazine piece, Laurie Mylroie reports on an important new piece of evidence that links Iraqi intelligence to one of the leaders of the 9-11 attacks on New York and Washington.
As this earlier post notes, Ms. Mylroie is a former Clinton Administration advisor on Iraqi intelligence matters who has clashed with Richard Clarke regarding his dismissal that Iraq was involved in either the 1993 World Trade Center or the 9-11 attacks.
Hat tip to Powerline for the link to Ms Mylroie’s article.

This Wall Street Journal ($) article reports on an interesting area of Pentagon research that is not discussed much in the mainstream media — that is, the fundamental shift that has taken place over the past generation in the theory behind the way in which American military forces fight wars.
The WSJ article focuses on Thomas Barnett, a 41 year old obscure Defense Department analyst, teamed up with senior executives at the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald LP in 1998 to study how globalization was changing national security. The entire WSJ article is well worth reading, and the following are a few tidbits to whet your appetite:

One scenario [Mr. Barnett and his associates] studied was a meltdown caused by the Y2K computer bug followed by terrorist attacks designed to exploit the chaos. Mr. Barnett posited that Wall Street would shut down for a week. Gun violence, racially motivated attacks and sales of antidepressants would surge. The U.S. military would find itself embroiled in brushfire conflicts across the developing world.

Continue reading →

I am at a loss to describe the brilliance of Victor Davis Hanson’s insight, which has been a bright light in America ever since the 9/11 attacks. In his unequaled string of outstanding columns over the past three years, this week’s op-ed for NRO may be the best. Read the entire piece, but the following will give you a flavor for it:

But our problems are not just with the paradoxes of the fourth-dimensional, asymmetric warfare that the United States has dealt with since the fighting in the Philippines and knew so well in Vietnam.
No, the challenge again is that bin Laden, the al Qaedists, the Baathist remnants, and the generic radical Islamicists of the Middle East have mastered the knowledge of the Western mind. Indeed they know us far better than we do ourselves. Three years ago, if one had dared to suggest that a few terrorists could bring down the Spanish government and send their legion scurrying out of Iraq, we would have thought it impossible.
Who would have imagined that Americans could go, in a few weeks, from the terror of seeing two skyscrapers topple to civil discord over the diet and clothing of war in Guantanamo, some of whom were released only to turn up to shoot at us again on the battlefields of Afghanistan? Our grandfathers would have dubbed Arafat a gangster, and al Sadr a psychopathic faker; many of us in our infinite capacity for fairness and non-judgementalism deemed the one a statesman and the other a holy man.
So our enemies realize that the struggle, lost on the battlefield, can yet be won with images and rhetoric offered up to alter the mentality and erode the will of an affluent, leisured and consensual West. They grasp that we are not so much worried about being convicted of being illiberal as having the charge even raised in the first place.
The one caveat they have learned? Do not provoke us too dramatically to bring on an open shooting war, in which the Arab Street hysteria, empty threats on spec, and silly fatwas nos. 1 through 1,000 mean nothing against the U.S. Marines and Cobra gunships. Instead, their modus operandi is to push all the way up to war ? now provoking, now backing down, sometimes threatening, sometimes weeping ? the key being to see the struggle in the long duration as a war of attrition, if you will, rather than a brief contest of annihilation.
These rules of the strategy of exhaustion are complex, and yet have been nearly mastered by the radicals of the Middle East. First, shock the sensibilities of a Western society into utter despair at facing primordial enemies from the Dark Ages. The decapitation of a Daniel Pearl; the probing of charred bodies with sticks, whether in Iran in 1980 or Fallujah in 2004; the promise of torturing Japanese hostages ? all this is designed to make the Western suburbanite change channels and head to the patio, mumbling either, “How can we fight such barbarians” or ? better yet ? “Why would we wish to?”
If, on occasion, an exasperated and furious West sinks to the same level ? renegade prisoner guards gratuitously humiliating or torturing naked Iraqi prisoners on tape ? all the better, as proof that the elevated pretensions of Western decency and humanity are but a sham. A single violation of civility, a momentary lapse in humanism and in the new world of Western cultural relativism and moral equivalence, presto, the West loses its carefully carved-out moral high ground as it engages not merely in much needed self-critique and scrutiny, but reaches a feeding frenzy that evolves to outright cultural cannibalism.
For someone in a coffee-house in Brussels the idea that Bush apologizes for a dozen or so prison guards makes him the same as or worse than Saddam and his sons shooting prisoners for sport ? moral equivalence lapped up by the state-controlled and censored Arab media that is largely responsible for the collective Middle East absence of rage over the exploding, decapitating, and incinerating of Western civilians in its midst.

Princeton University Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis is America’s foremost expert on Middle East history and the author of “What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East” and the new “From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East.” This Atlantic Monthly Online interview provides Dr. Lewis’ current insights into Middle Eastern affairs and America’s role in that region. The entire interview is well worth reading, and these following observations on the effect of the growth of the strong centralized state in Middle Eastern societies is an example:

In a 1957 lecture about tensions in the Middle East you said that Westernization, in spite of its benefits, was the chief cause “of the political and social formlessness, instability and irresponsibility that bedevils public life of the Middle East.” I wonder, as you were writing nearly a half century ago, which particular aspects of Westernization you were referring to?

First of all, let me say what I mean by Westernization. This process was not mainly imposed by Western imperial rulers, who tend to be very cautious and conservative, tampering as little as possible with the existing institutions. It was done by reformers in the independent Middle Eastern countries. Enthusiastic reformers who recognized the success and power of the Western world and wanted to get the same for their own people?a very natural and very laudable ambition. But often with the very best of intentions, they achieved appalling results.
What I had in mind in particular was two things, both tending in the same direction. In the old order, the traditional Islamic Middle Eastern society was certainly authoritarian, but it was not despotic or dictatorial. It was a limited autocracy in which the power of the ruler, the Sultan or the Shah or the Pasha, whoever he might be, was limited both in theory and in practice. It was limited in theory by the Holy Law?the Divine Law to which the ruler was subject no less than the meanest of his slaves. It was also limited in practice by the existence of strong entrenched interests in society. You had the merchants of the bazaar, powerful guilds. You had the country gentry. You have the bureaucratic establishment, the military establishment, and the religious establishment. Each of these groups produced their own leaders?leaders who were not appointed by the State, who were not paid by the State, and who were not answerable to the State. These, therefore, formed a very important constraint on the autocracy of government.
Then came the process of modernization or Westernization, which for practical purposes are the same thing. It enormously increased the power of the central government by placing at its disposal the whole modern apparatus of surveillance and control: first the telegraph, later the telephone; the possibility of moving troops quickly, first by train then by truck or by plane. So the central government was able to assert itself and enforce its will even in remote provinces in a way that was inconceivable in earlier times. The effect of this was to weaken or even eliminate those intermediate powers that limited the autocracy of government.
When people look at the kind of regime that was operated by Saddam Hussein and say, “Well, that’s how they are, that’s their way of doing things,” it is simply not true. I mean, that kind of dictatorship has no roots in either the Arab or the Islamic past. It, unfortunately, is the consequence of Westernization or modernization in the Middle East.

And what about the currently popular speculation that representative government simply may not work in Middle Eastern societies?:

Well, there are certain elements in Islamic law and tradition which I think are conducive to democracy. The idea that government is contractual and consensual, for one thing. According to the Islamic Treatise on Holy Law, the ruler comes to power by an agreement between the ruler and his subjects. This is bilateral. Both sides have obligations. It is also limited. The ruler rules under the Holy Law, which he cannot change and which he must obey. So these two elements, I think, of consent and contract, also have the element of limitation, and can be very conducive to the development of democratic institutions. There is also a deeply rooted rejection in traditional Islamic writing of despotism or dictatorship, of the capricious rule of the ruler without due regard to the law and to the opinion of the various groups in society.

And finally, is Dr. Lewis optimistic about Iraq?:

I’m cautiously optimistic about what’s happening in Iraq. What bothers me is what’s happening here in the United States.

Do you mean the controversy over the occupation? The pressure to pull out?

Yes, because the message that this is sending to people in that region is that the Americans are frightened, they want to get out. They’ll abandon us the same as they did in ’91. And you know what happened in ’91.

Victor Davis Hanson’s latest at NRO is typically perceptive and summed up by his conclusion:

Finally, this is not just a struggle to defeat the Islamic fundamentalists, but to establish the principle that the United States in a moment of its greatest success, material wealth, and power can still make terrible sacrifices that throughout the ages have always been the cost for the freedom and security of its citizens and friends abroad. What Osama bin Laden, and those who actively support him, have started, we in the United States most surely will finish.

Read the entire article. Dr. Hanson is the epitome of a clear thinker.

Yass Alkafaji is a Northeastern Illinois University accounting professor and an ÈmigrÈ from Iraq. Professor Alkafaji went to Baghdad in January as the director of finance for the Ministry of Higher Education of the Coalition Provisional Authority. In this Chicago Tribune (free subscription required) interview, he relates what it’s like on the ground in Baghdad. Read the entire interview, but here are a few highlights:

Alkafaji recently left Baghdad during one of the bloodiest months of the U.S. occupation. We shared chai lattes at a Starbucks in Sauganash to discuss what he saw and heard while he was there. We thought he would be full of tales of violence in Sadr City, mutilations in Fallujah and bombings in Basra. But, oddly enough, he said that while he was there, he hardly noticed these events that made headlines all over the world.

Q. You were in Iraq during some of the worst anti-American violence of the occupation. How did that affect your work?

A. I did not notice it. Even though I was in the middle of it, I was apart from it. It was not something we thought about on a daily basis. We got briefings, and we’d hear people saying things here and there. Sometimes I would receive calls from my wife, and she was telling me what was happening in the green zone, where I was living, but I didn’t know it. Or we would be working in the middle of the day at our computers and we would hear explosions, boom boom, and we would simply look up and go back to work.

Q. What is your take on the mood of the Iraqi people?

A. They are thankful to the U.S. for getting rid of Saddam Hussein, and they are content that the military needs to be there. But after that, they are divided between how long should the U.S. military stay and whether they are doing a good job or not. The U.S. military presence is very visible, and they [the soldiers] are really scared, so their posture is very offensive. They see Iraqis, and they put guns in your face. They move in convoys, and they tell people to get away from them. When the convoys are in a traffic jam in the middle of Baghdad, that is the most dangerous thing. So they shout at people to get out of the way, and they drive up on the sidewalk of some stores. That creates a lot of hard feelings for the Iraqis.

Q. What about the economic and employment situation with ordinary Iraqis?

A. Most of the people are not informed of what the U.S. is doing because they don’t see the visible improvement of their livelihood, especially those who don’t have a government job . . . I think there is still a lot of confusion about who is the good Iraqi and who is the bad Iraqi. I think [the U.S.] has shown to the rest of the world that we are really ignorant when it comes to dealing with other cultures. We have a great military power, but when it comes to building nations we have no idea. You can see the tension in the clashes between the British and Americans in the palace. The Americans will say `do this or do that’ and the British will just be shaking their head. But the British have a much longer history in the Middle East, and they know how to deal with the Arab mentality. They feel very marginalized.

Q. Depending on how people want to spin it, they characterize the recent violence as a few bad apples or a popular uprising. How do you see it?

A. Surveys show about 70 percent of the Iraqi people accept that there is a need for the American military to be in Iraq, otherwise it will be chaotic and there will be no security on the ground. Of course, if you talk to someone in Sadr City with a first-grade education, they will say otherwise. One day I was waiting seven hours to try to leave the compound to try to see my sister. We had some thugs from the Sadr group demonstrating 15 feet away saying, “We want the U.S. out.” So I said, “OK, the U.S. is out and then what next? Who is going to control the country?” They don’t think about the implications of what they say.

Hat tip to Daniel Drezner for the link to this interesting interview.

Daniel Drezner points to this San Francisco Chronicle article about the Iraq experience of Larry Diamond, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institute who was an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and a promoter of democratic principles in government. As Mr. Drezner’s post points out, Diamond is still a promoter of democracy, but is not optimistic about Iraq, primarily because of the United States’ failure to provide adequate security for the Iraqi people willing to risk commitment to democratic principles. As the Chronicle article notes:

We just bungled this so badly,” said Diamond, a 52-year-old senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “We just weren’t honest with ourselves or with the American people about what was going to be needed to secure the country.”
“You can’t develop democracy without security,” he said. “In Iraq, it’s really a security nightmare that did not have to be. If you don’t get that right, nothing else is possible. Everything else is connected to that.”

Diamond relates that his realization of the deficiencies in the American security force came to him while speaking to a woman’s group in Baghdad:

“I had one of those moments when you cut through all the bull,” he said. “I was speaking to this women’s group, and one woman got up and asked, ‘If we do all these things, who’s going to protect us?’ ” Diamond recalled. “That was the moment when I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, some of these women are going to be assassinated because they are here listening to me.’ It just struck me between the eyes.”
As the violence spread, Diamond said, he felt ever more painfully the mistake the United States had made by not sending in more troops to keep the insurgents at bay.
The American policies basically encouraged Iraqis to stand up — only to face the threat of being mowed down for doing so, he said.
“It was totally hypocritical of us to do one and not the other,” Diamond said of the lack of security.

The entire article is interesting and thought provoking, so read it all.

This NY Times article reports on a couple of remarkable public meetings just outside London last week in which radical Islamic fascist clerics suggested that Tony Blair should be killed and that an Islamic flag should be hanging outside No. 10 Downey Street. The article notes as follows:

Stoking that anger are some of the same fiery Islamic clerics who preached violence and martyrdom before the Sept. 11 attacks.
On Friday, Abu Hamza, the cleric accused of tutoring Richard Reid before he tried to blow up a Paris-to-Miami jetliner with explosives hidden in his shoe, urged a crowd of 200 outside his former Finsbury Park mosque to embrace death and the “culture of martyrdom.”
* * *
On Thursday evening, at a tennis center community hall in Slough, west of London, their leader, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, spoke of his adherence to Osama bin Laden. If Europe fails to heed Mr. bin Laden’s offer of a truce ? provided that all foreign troops are withdrawn from Iraq in three months ? Muslims will no longer be restrained from attacking the Western countries that play host to them, the sheik said.
“All Muslims of the West will be obliged,” he said, to “become his sword” in a new battle. Europeans take heed, he added, saying, “It is foolish to fight people who want death ? that is what they are looking for.”
One chapter in Sheik Omar’s lectures these days is “The Psyche of Muslims for Suicide Bombing.”

Call me old fashioned, but I am appalled that these clerics — one of who is already under investigation for a serious crime — could spew this type of subversion without apparent qualm. The reason they can get away with it is explained later in the article:

Though the British home secretary, David Blunkett, has sought to strip Abu Hamza of his British citizenship and deport him, the legal battle has dragged on for years while Abu Hamza keeps calling down the wrath of God.
Despite tougher antiterrorism laws, the police, prosecutors and intelligence chiefs across Europe say they are struggling to contain the openly seditious speech of Islamic extremists, some of whom, they say, have been inciting young men to suicidal violence since the 1990’s.
The authorities say that laws to protect religious expression and civil liberties have the result of limiting what they can do to stop hateful speech. In the case of foreigners, they say they are often left to seek deportation, a lengthy and uncertain process subject to legal appeals, when the suspect can keep inciting attacks.
That leaves the authorities to resort to less effective means, such as mouse-trapping Islamic radicals with immigration violations in hopes of making a deportation case stick. “In many countries, the laws are liberal and it’s not easy,” an official said.

Victor Davis Hanson answers the following question on his website:

My question is about the lessons of Vietnam. In your book, ‘Carnage and Culture’ . . . you point out that millions died as a result of our withdrawal. You also point out the hypocrisy of the left in ignoring this point. It seems like we’re now in the exact same situation as we were then, a tenuous military situation in Iraq and the radical left screeching to get out. How do we avoid the catastrophic mistake of Vietnam?

Hanson: We must hope that we are folk more like that of the Okinawa-generation than the Mogadishu public. If we take Fallujah, and alienate and end Sadr?s militia, then the reconstruction will be back on track?offering more of a moral boost than before the present turmoil. The entire struggle depends on whether the United States believes we are in a real war? or whether we think this is a criminal matter. Imagine May 1945 in the midst of trying to dislodge the Japanese from Sugar Loaf Hill: would we engage in national inquiry about who got us into the war with Japan? Or blame each other over Pearl Harbor? Become despondent from horrific footage of suicide bombers? Cease the assault and ask to parley with Japanese generals? Or begin a national debate about leaving the Pacific to avoid such seemingly senseless carnage?

Francis Fukuyama, professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins and award winning author, writes this excellent op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal ($) in which he analyzes the tough issues that the United States will be facing in the next stage of reconstruction in Iraq. First, Professor Fukuyama addresses the non-issues (the June 30 deadline, more international involvement, etc.), which seem to get more media play than the real issues, but then turns to the four major issues, the first of which is security:

Once we get past these nonissues, there are at least four very large problems that have to be solved before we get to a democratic Iraq. The first is so obvious that it does not need to be stressed here: security. A great deal of the good nation-building work of improving the electricity supply, roads, schools, and hospitals, as well as the billions of dollars the U.S. has dedicated to these tasks, are now stuck in the pipeline because many of the thousands of aid workers and contractors there find it too dangerous to leave their fortified compounds. At the same time, there is good reason to think that much of the recent violence will subside. Muqtada al-Sadr, the violent Shiite cleric whose Mahdi militia caused so much trouble throughout southern Iraq, miscalculated in staging a grab for power earlier this month. He is in the process of being isolated by his fellow Shiite clerics, and will likely be disarmed though a combination of negotiations and force.

The second issue is preserving the state’s “monopoly on legitimate violence”:

Much less easily solved is the second major problem, that of Iraq’s other militias. If the classic definition of a state is its monopoly of legitimate violence, then the new Iraq is not going to qualify for statehood anytime soon. We have seen in the past two weeks the deficiencies of the new Iraqi army, civil defense corps, and police, all of which have had units that have remained passive, refused to obey orders, or even switched to the other side. If you are a Kurd or Shiite today, it would take a great leap of faith to trust the security of your family to these new institutions.
It is thus not surprising that all of the major Shiite groups and not just Sadr’s followers have been frenetically building their own militias over the past few months. The Badr brigades, which are associated with the Iranian-influenced Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the armed cells of the al-Dawa party, are potentially more powerful than the Mahdi militia. They are biding their time and building strength even as their political wings participate in the Iraqi Governing Council. The Kurds, for their part, have had their own Peshmerga forces to defend their interests for the past decade now.
The Coalition Provisional Authority is deep into a negotiation over what is called “demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration” — DDR, in nation-building lingo — which would dismantle these militias and fold them into the new national institutions. But the Shiite groups won’t disarm unless the Kurds do so as well, and in the current climate of violence it is very hard to see what kinds of incentives the U.S. can offer to bring this about.

The third problem is that of Kurd-Shiite relations:

The third major problem has to do with long-term Kurdish-Shiite relations. The Transitional Administrative Law that was signed in early March contains a provision that any article of the new constitution can be vetoed by a two-thirds vote in any three of Iraq’s 18 governorates, effectively giving the Kurds veto power over the entire constitution. The Kurds want this because they remain deeply suspicious that the Shiite groups, including those associated with Ayatollah Sistani (who up to this point has been a force for moderation), will seek to impose Sharia law once the constitutional process is under way. Mr. Sistani, for his part, has been equally vehement that this provision be removed. If the Kurds and Shiites cannot figure out how to share power, it is hard to see where the political basis for the new Iraq lies.

Finally, the fourth is how best to integrate the Sunni’s into the Iraq government:

The final problem has to do with how to integrate the Sunnis who are at the center of the current troubles in cities like Fallujah and Ramadi. Contrary to some media reports, it is not clear that a Sunni “silent majority” could not one day find representation in political parties willing to contest power via the ballot box rather than the gun. But after the demise of the Baath Party, they are the least politically developed of all of Iraq’s major groups. Prior to the Marines’ Fallujah offensive, various democracy-promotion groups such as the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute had been making some headway in organizing democratic Sunni political parties. How the Fallujah standoff will be resolved, and what will remain of any residual Sunni goodwill toward the new Iraq in its aftermath, are open questions now.

Then, Professor Fuyukama concludes with words of prudent wisdom regarding the task at hand:

If we make progress in solving these four problems, and if we get through the two elections outlined by President Bush, we should not kid ourselves about what will emerge at the end of the process. The new Iraqi state will be more legitimate than any other state in the Arab world, but it will also likely be very weak and dependent on outside assistance. It may be an Islamic Republic, in which religion plays a more significant role than the U.S. would like; its armed forces may be a hodgepodge of militias that will crack apart under stress; it will likely face a continuing violent insurgency fed by outside terrorists; its writ is unlikely to extend to important parts of Iraq.
Thus if part of the vision being offered to the American people is the prospect that we will be able to disengage militarily from Iraq in less than two years, the administration should think again. It will be extremely difficult to stick to the timetable outlined by the president, and even if the U.S. do it will have big lingering commitments. The American public should not be blindsided about the total costs of the reconstruction, as it was about the costs of the war itself. For all of the reasons offered by President Bush, it is absolutely critical that America stay the course and ensure that Iraq becomes a stable, democratic country.

Given the incessant criticism during the political season regarding America’s mission to clean up the Iraq mess, it is refreshing to read the constructive thoughts of Professor Fuyukama regarding the tough issues that need to be addressed and resolved.