McCain On Iraq

John McCain just gave a terrific speech on the Senate floor on the subject of Iraq.

No matter where my colleagues came down in 2003 about the centrality of Iraq to the war on terror, there can simply be no debate that our efforts in Iraq today are critical to the wider struggle against violent Islamic extremism. Already, the terrorists are emboldened, excited that America is talking not about winning in Iraq, but is rather debating when we should lose. Last week, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s deputy chief, said that the United States is merely delaying our “inevitable” defeat in Iraq, and that “the Mujahideen of Islam in Iraq of the caliphate and jihad are advancing with steady steps towards victory.” He called on Muslims to travel to Iraq to fight Americans, and appealed for Muslims to support the Islamic State in Iraq, a group established by al Qaeda.

General Petraeus has called al Qaeda “the principal short-term threat to Iraq.” What do the supporters of this amendment believe to be the consequences of our leaving the battlefield with al Qaeda in place? If we leave Iraq prematurely, jihadists around the world will interpret the withdrawal as their great victory against our great power. Their movement thrives in an atmosphere of perceived victory; we saw this in the surge of men and money flowing to al Qaeda following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. If they defeat the United States in Iraq, they will believe that anything is possible, that history is on their side, that they really can bring their terrible rule to lands the world over. Recall the plan laid out in a letter from Zawahiri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, before his death. That plan is to take shape in four stages: establish a caliphate in Iraq, extend the “jihad wave” to the secular countries neighboring Iraq, clash with Israel – none of which shall commence until the completion of stage one: expel the Americans from Iraq. Mr. President, the terrorists are in this war to win it. The question is: Are we?

The supporters of this amendment respond that they do not by any means intend to cede the battlefield to al Qaeda; on the contrary, their legislation would allow U.S. forces, presumably holed up in forward operating bases, to carry out targeted counterterrorism operations. But our own military commanders say that this approach will not succeed, and that moving in with search and destroy missions to kill and capture terrorists, only to immediately cede the territory to the enemy, is the failed strategy of the past three and a half years….

Those are the likely consequences of a precipitous withdrawal, and I hope that the supporters of such a move will tell us what they believe to be the likely consequences of this course of action. Should their amendment become law, and U.S. troops begin withdrawing, do they believe that Iraq will become more or less stable? That al Qaeda will find it easier to gather, plan, and carry out attacks from Iraqi soil, or that our withdrawal will somehow make this less likely? That the Iraqi people become more or less safe? That genocide becomes a more remote possibility or ever likelier?

Mr. President, this fight is about Iraq but not about Iraq alone. It is greater than that and more important still, about whether America still has the political courage to fight for victory or whether we will settle for defeat, with all of the terrible things that accompany it. We cannot walk away gracefully from defeat in this war.

Hat tip, K-Lo.

Emphases mine

What He Is Thinking

British PM Gordon Brown has come in for a lot of ridicule recently for his refusal to refer to the "Doctors' Plot" terrorists as "Muslims." An explicit comparison is being drawn between him and J. K. Rowling's fictional Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, who refuses to speak the name of Harry Potter's arch foe, Lord Voldemort. [here, for instance] But perhaps Brown's reticence makes sense.

I refer you to the latest dispatch from Michael Yon in which he interviews Abu Ali, a Sunni leader in Dialya who once fought against the Americans, but now has joined forces with us against al Qaeda. Ali is quoted:

Abu Ali said that on 1 April 2007, he and his people attacked al Qaeda in Buhriz for their crimes against Islam. He also said something that many Muslims have said to me: al Qaeda are not Muslims. (Both Sunni and Shia have said nearly the exact same words, at times on video.)

....

Before the tape was running, I asked Abu Ali why he and the 1920s [militia] turned against al Qaeda in Buhriz. Speaking through LT David Wallach, a native Arabic speaker, Abu Ali said that “al Qaeda is an abomination of Islam: cutting off heads, stealing people’s money, kidnapping . . . every type of torture they have done.”

Read it here.

So Gordon Brown is saying nothing more or less than what moderate Muslims are saying -- that al Qaeda is not Muslim, and should not be identified as such. President Bush has said much the same -- that al Qaeda represents a "perversion" of Islam, rather than true Islam [here].

Give the guy a break. He knows what he is doing and saying. It is al Qaeda that insists that the jihadis represent Islam. We should not accept that identification.

PS: I must admit that I, too, reacted badly to Brown's pronouncements (or lack of them) at first. [here] Consider my earlier writing on the subject..., shall we say, "inoperable".

Bowdlerizing Brown Disappoints

One of the most disturbing developments in recent days was the British government's response to the terror acts perpetrated in London and Glasgow. On the one hand there was considerable chest-beating regarding the rapid apprehension of the jihadis coupled with extravagant praise for the nationwide surveillance system installed by the Blair administration -- celebrations that were perhaps unjustified considering that the London bombs failed to explode and the police were able to secure the cell phones that were supposed to ignite them and along with the phones, contact numbers for the members of the cabal. With that information in hand it was an easy thing to round the terrorists up, surveillance system or not.

All that silliness can be attributed to standard partisan and bureaucratic credit-grabbing, but there was a much more dark and dangerous response.

The new PM, Gordon Brown, has banned his ministers from using the term "Muslim" in relation to the terror crisis and has also forbid them from using the term "war on terror." What is even worse Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, in what I assume she thought to be strong language, said

“Let us be clear – terrorists are criminals, whose victims come from all walks of life, communities and religions. Terrorists attack the values shared by all law-abiding citizens. As a Government, as communities, as individuals, we need to ensure that the message of the terrorists is rejected.”

Read it here.

One thing is clear..., crystal. That is the Blair ministry considers terrorism to be a mere criminal matter, to be dealt with through the domestic instruments of justice, the police and courts, and not through international military action.

I was going to write an extended piece on why this course of action is both irresponsible and dangerous, but James Lileks beat me to it, and he expresses himself so much better than I ever could that I will simply include a few quotes from his piece and refer you to the whole thing here.

[Things like the Doctors Plot] can always be explained away, run through that perversely creative Justify-O-Matic that blames radical murderous doctors on the overthrow of Saddam – as if a terror campaign waged by Iran would make doctors at the Mayo Clinic lay down their scalpels and set off nailbombs in an Iranian community in LA.

I’ve gotten to the point where I imagine, almost simultaneous with the event, what the reaction will be among those who find evidence of terrorism both maddeningly inconvenient and perversely heartening – they must downplay the event lest the dark gang of warmongers use the crime to terrify the bedwetters – you know, all those people who believe in the bogeyman of global jihad - but at the same time, the attacks prove that we’ve not only failed to stop “terrorism,” we have made it worse by, well, trying to stop terrorism. Oh, it can be stopped, if the proper postures are assumed, but on we go with our chests out and our manhood in our hand, looking for fights. As Hitchens put it in this recent piece, there are many who can’t quite get on board with the whole anti-caliphate gig, since the people running the show are probably motivated by racism. Even if it’s true, it’s like saying the people who wanted to fight Hitler did so because they couldn’t stand German opera.

....

It’s one thing to want a better world; it’s another to hope to will it into being by believing in docile sugared fictions about the nature of man and the equality of cultures. (Note: not the equality of humans, but the equality of human cultures. Oddly enough, you’ll often find that the people who cling fiercely to the notion that any attempt to judge a culture is a sign of Western Perfidy are the most likely to believe in, well, Western Perfidy.)

Go ahead, read the whole thing.

And the eminently sensible Melanie Phillips notes that many Britons, irrevocably wedded to obsolete Marxist categories of analysis, are "Shocked! Shocked!" to find that the terror plotters were well-educated, affluent professionals. She writes:

If we don’t understand, even now, that what we are facing is a religious war, a jihad against the unbeliever and backsliding Muslims across the world we cannot possibly hope to defend ourselves against it. Yet while former Islamist extremists such as Hassan Butt and Ed Husain are urgently telling us the truth, Gordon Brown’s new administration is shutting its ears and embarking on a suicidally stupid and cowardly strategy. Astoundingly, it has decided to deny the religious element of this jihad altogether, to redefine Islamic terrorism as mere criminality and to ban all terms that call this horror by its proper name.

....

This is a disastrous beginning to Brown’s premiership. The terrorism we face is a jihad carried out in the name of Islam, mandated by the principal religious authorities in the world of Islam and drawing on theological concepts in Islam. That doesn’t mean all Muslims go along with it; many do not, and many are indeed its victims. But to deny that it is a war which draws its authority from Islamic precepts is to deny the truth.

....

Gordon Brown has talked about the need to ‘win hearts and minds’ in the community we cannot now name, just as the west did during the Cold War. Clearly, if Mr Brown had been in charge during the Cold War, we’d have lost it. For it is now plain that to him, winning the hearts and minds of British Muslims means endorsing and regurgitating their own false claim that Islamist terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, and suppressing the truth that what we are up against is religious fanaticism and a holy war in the name of Islam against the infidel west.

This is the way we lose that war. Britain’s friends and allies in the free world should be appalled.

I don't know about you, I certainly am.

Read her whole piece here.

The Doctors Plot

So now the arrests in the Britian terror investigation total eight, including three doctors and one doctor's wife. [here] Highly educated, successful professional types, the kind who, if they became involved in Jihad, would normally be mere financial contributors or perhaps would direct operations from afar, but who have become the actual perpetrators of the acts.

It would seem that al Qaeda does not have limitless resources, that its pool of operatives is not expanding, and that it is having to rely upon poorly-trained bourgeois followers to carry out attacks.

Not all is well with the "strong horse." It seems to be faltering. Having lost thousands of its members and much of its leadership in Iraq it is malfunctioning. The Strategy Page summarizes the radicals' situation:

Al Qaeda operations continue to decline, as the number of al Qaeda members, and leaders killed or captured, goes up. Then there's al Qaeda media activity. Up until last Fall, 93 percent of al Qaeda Internet announcements were video. Since then, most of them are just audio, and sounding increasingly less confident. There is good reason for that lack of confidence. American and Pakistani attacks (usually with missiles or smart bombs) along the Afghan border in the last two years have killed an increasing number of foreign fighters. DNA tests can tell if someone is from the region, or elsewhere in the world. But that's not what worries al Qaeda, it's the increasing amount of accurate information the counter-terror forces are getting. No one is talking, but al Qaeda chatter claims that either the Americans have some wondrous new bit of technology, or Yankee money has corrupted more al Qaeda members to give up information. The Taliban is suffering the same kind of casualties, and coming up with the same paranoid theories. More people in Pakistan and Afghanistan, some of them innocent, are being accused of spying, and killed by the Taliban and al Qaeda. Some of those multi-million dollar rewards for terrorists have been collected. Some openly, some more discretely. There is some reason to be paranoid.

And, having killed tens of thousands of Muslims, the enormous prestige al Qaeda enjoyed after 9/11 is evaporating throughout the Muslim world. Recruits are not coming in the way they did after the twin towers fell. Once again Strategy Page explains:

Al Qaeda is eagerly recruiting other Islamic terrorist organizations, usually ones that have recently taken a big beating in their home country, to become part of al Qaeda. That's about the only growth al Qaeda is experiencing. In Iraq, former Sunni Arab allies of al Qaeda have openly turned on the organization, and are eagerly hunting them down and killing them. Al Qaeda is fighting back, now sending death squads after Sunni Arab tribal chiefs. Does that sound like something a winner would be doing?

No it doesn't. So how can al Qaeda make a comeback from the brink of disaster? Well, there are the old reliable allies:

Al Qaeda is having some success in the Western media....

And some not so reliable:

and among Moslems living in Europe. But those expatriate Moslems are handicapped by many of their brethren who are not enthusiastic about Islamic terrorism. The police get tips, make arrests, and al Qaeda losses a few more true believers.

So, with their prestige and their effectiveness melting away, al Qaeda leadership is feeling the heat, looking for that one big thing that will put them back on top:

Al Qaeda is desperate for another highly visible attack in the West. Many such operations are apparently being planned, but by amateurs who can get no help from al Qaeda experts. Most of al Qaedas traveling experts are dead or in prison. Inspiring amateurs to attempt poorly planned attacks, like the recent ones in Britain, only discourage recruits. That's because another bunch of wannabes get sent away for long prison terms. This is a fate worse than death for Islamic terrorists. There are no 72 virgins in Western prisons, unless you consider the fact that you may be turned into one.

Read the Strategy Page article here.

In Iraq, the situation is particularly dire. Al Qaeda once owned Anbar province, but they have been driven out. The few remnants are being hunted like animals by the local chiefs. Similar things are taking place in portions of Baghdad and in Dialya. Michael Yon reports:

"Baqubah has gone quiet. Very little fighting. There might be more to come, but overall the people have turned against al Qaeda and are pointing them out day by day. The people are pointing out the bombs.... Remember Ramadi? That crazy city of death and fighting? Writers hardly want to go there any more because it's quiet.... So far so good. There are serious sectarian issues here in Diyala Province, but with al Qaeda on defense instead of offense, the people in Baqubah have a chance to do what those in Ramadi and other cities are doing: reclaim their lives."

Read it here.

And the news is not much better in Afghanistan and Africa [remember this is a global conflict]. A "former spook" writes:

In Afghanistan, the Taliban's spring offensive never materialized, despite the availability of training and support facilities across the border in Pakistan. Instead of taking the fight to NATO, Al Qaida's Afghan allies found themselves squarely on the defensive, taking heavy casualties from aggressive U.S., British, Canadian and Dutch incursions into terrorist regions. The success of recent NATO attacks has prompted a change in tactics by the Taliban, who are now relying more on suicide attacks that sometimes cause significant civilian casualties, but accomplish little else.

Read him here.

Of course, the major impact of the suicide attacks is to draw the attention of the Western media and to give the anti-war activists something to gloat about.

There is danger in all of this. Al Qaeda's increasing frustration is driving it to seek to replicate their 9/11 triumph. But the frustration apparent in al Qaeda's recent actions and pronouncements is also a strong indication that the good guys, led by President Bush, are winning this global war against barbarity. We will never fully eradicate terrorism and there will always be radicals, and in that sense the "whack-a-mole" critics are right. But we can push them back to the margins and drastically reduce their influence and, most importantly, create an opportunity for more civilized values and practices to flourish. That is just what President Bush and his allies are doing and for that they deserve our heartfelt gratitude.

UPDATE:

South Asia Times reports on an important development:

KARACHI - Since last September, North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in Afghanistan have been pressing Islamabad for the right to conduct extensive hot-pursuit operations into Pakistan to target Taliban and al-Qaeda bases.

According to Asia Times Online contacts, NATO and its US backers have gotten their wish: coalition forces will start hitting targets wherever they might be.

Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf is expected to make an important announcement on extremism during an address to the nation in the next day or two.

The ATol contacts in Islamabad say that coalition intelligence has pinpointed at least four centers in the tribal areas of North Waziristan and South Waziristan on the border with Afghanistan from which Taliban operations inside Afghanistan are run. These bases include arms caches and the transfer and raising of money and manpower, the latter in the form of foot-soldiers to fight with the Taliban-led insurgency.

Operations inside Pakistan might be carried out independently by the United States, probably with air power, by Pakistani forces acting alone or as joint offensives. In all cases, though, the US will pull the strings, for instance by providing the Pakistanis with information on targets to hit.

Musharraf has apparently already told his military commanders, the National Security Council and decision-makers in government of the development.

Read it here.

Finally, we will be able to take the fight directly to the enemy in their sanctuaries. This is not good for al Qaeda.

The Killing Fields

Michael Yon's latest report from Iraq is up. Check it out here. Warning, this is really rough stuff, so if you don't have a strong stomach avoid it. He shows what al Qaeda did to a village they occupied.

You won't see any of this stuff in the MSM.

Michael Ledeen comments:

"We must be clear about the nature of the war and the bestial nature of our enemies."

Yon's latest provides a clear picture of the terrorists' savage methods. Literally, because it's mostly photographs of what happened to a village that fell into the claws of al Qaeda. They just tore apart the villagers, their livestock, their children and women, and then boobytrapped the area to try to kill our guys, knowing that they would honor the dead.

And then I think about the terrorists' latest efforts in England and Scotland, where only innocents were targeted. And of course 9/11. And then I think of so many of our leaders, who seem to be preparing to retreat from Iraq (and therefore Afghanistan), thereby leaving the beasts, as Michael Yon properly calls them, an even broader area of operation.

And then I return to my mantra: the war is much bigger than iraq, we cannot win it in iraq alone, and there is no escape from this war. They are already here, and "bringing the boys home" will gain us nothing. It will only increase the number of victims.

Read it here.

Tony Confronts the Madness of Crowds

Something has happened in Western societies over the course of the past half-century that I cannot fully understand. A gaping and apparently unbridgeable conceptual chasm has opened --one that is exemplified in an anecdote relayed in today's Telegraph by outgoing British PM Tony Blair. He writes:

I was stopped by someone the other week who said it was not surprising there was so much terrorism in the world when we invaded their countries (meaning Afghanistan and Iraq). No wonder Muslims felt angry.

I said to him: tell me exactly what they feel angry about. We remove two utterly brutal and dictatorial regimes; we replace them with a UN-supervised democratic process.

And the only reason it is difficult still is because other Muslims are using terrorism to try to destroy the fledgling democracy and, in doing so, are killing fellow Muslims.

Why aren't they angry about the people doing the killing? The odd thing about the conversation is I could tell it was the first time he'd heard this argument.

Wow! Read the whole thing here.

Tony poses a good question -- one that leads to many others.

Why aren't people angry at the extremists, and instead turn their anger against those who are seeking to expand and protect freedom?

Why do intelligent and educated people believe and confidently assert the insane notion that Bush and Cheney "were behind" the terrorist attacks of 9/11?

Why do human rights advocates dogmatically assert, against all evidence to the contrary, that the US and its allies are killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims when in fact the killings are being carried out by Muslim extremists.

Why do so many people dogmatically and irrationally assert that the current war of liberation is nothing more than an imperialist oil grab?

Why do advocates of universal "human rights", who have called time and again for Western interference in the domestic affairs of Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia, and other rogue states, assert the right to absolute sovereignty of some of the most brutal and repressive regimes in modern history, ones that have systematically denied basic human rights to their peoples, even to the point of carrying out genocidal policies directed against ethnic minorities.

Why are staunch advocates for women's rights silent regarding the plight of women in many Muslim societies?

Why are reasonable actions taken by the Bush and Blair regimes to protect the lives and liberties of the British and American people greeted with hysterical denunciations and charges that they are destroying fundamental freedoms?

This is not just "odd". This is madness.

Everywhere it seems otherwise reasonable and humane people are choosing to engage in willful and perverse ignorance and to embrace paranoid delusional narratives regarding the current conflicts. Why are so many people absolutely resistant to reason and information that contradicts these insane beliefs?

And they are insane, make no mistake about that.

And it's not just the editorial judgment, however despicable and dodgy, of the mainstream media, nor is it the apparently bottomless cynicism and depravity of the political Left. A significant number of good, decent, and normally well-informed people are actively choosing to enlist on the side of madness.

Clearly the current conflict has touched some deep, irrational, unreasoning chords in the collective psyche of many people and, as recent polls have shown, these constitute a substantial and influential segment of the public. What is more assertion of these beliefs is interfering (as Blair notes in his article) with the legitimate functions of government. And beyond this, even the entire enlightenment enterprise is being called into question by the dilemma of how to respond to Islamic radicalism. We are facing a situation in which our habitual modes of discourse and conceptual frameworks are not just inadequate; they are dysfunctional.

And it's not just in the US and Britain. Similar issues are troubling the political and intellectual elites of Europe.

In normal times it is possible to ignore, or at least to mute, the disagreements over fundamental principles that characterize our culture. But these are not normal times and troubling issues are being forced upon us unwillingly.

I think that much of the public revulsion for the current conflict stems from a heartfelt desire to return to "normalcy" and to put these troubling things away. But that, I fear, is not going to be possible. The threat from Islamic extremism has exposed deep and abiding contradictions in our culture and is forcing us to seriously reconsider just what we stand for and why. This is not a comfortable and attractive enterprise, but it is not one that we can avoid.

How the West respond to a persistent and ruthless challenge to its fundamental assumptions and values is the great moral issue of our times? It is one that I find endlessly fascinating, because it gets to basic questions about who and what we are as a society and culture.

These are interesting times -- and promise to get much more interesting in coming years.

I can hardly wait!

Ted Koppel Gets It!

On Sunday's Meet the Press, Ted Koppel decided to break with the MSM party line and voiced some honest opinions on the war.

He opined:

1) The US cannot withdraw from Iraq and from the Gulf region.

2) Iraq is only the most recent phase of a war that has been going on for nearly a quarter of a century.

3) The War on Terror will be going on for long after the Iraq phase is concluded. It is our children's children's war.

4) Democrat opposition to the war today will place them in a very difficult position if they ever take the Presidency because the war won't stop and they will have to fight it.

5) This scale of warfare requires the mobilization of society, something that we have been unwilling to do so far.

Newsbusters has a roundup and a link to the broadcast here.