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The frustration to hear more good news from the war zone can seem like
desperation when the props used to sell the war are falling away and the consequences
at home and abroad threaten the broader mission. I’m not one who believes Americans are afraid of body bags. Rather, like
most people, we want to believe what we are doing is justified and has a
measure of validity, not just success. Selling the public on the Iraq war as a
success story in the face of so much unnecessary calamity and failure is a
callous way to “win”. Speaking
from midlife, I would rather fail at something that was right to do than ‘succeed’
at something that was wrong in the first place. As I’m fond of saying, it matters how we get there. I hope you can follow the sequencing I’ve knitted here. These
are from this evening’s Casey Report. Please contact me if you have
trouble with any of these links. - KwC 071205 Iraq,
internet fuel global jihad; despite
Blair and Bush statements, analysts suspect 7/7 was motivated by UK’s
involvement in Iraq. “It is the confluence of America's
decision to invade Iraq and new communication technologies that has created the
most powerful machine for recruiting new terrorists in history, says Evan
Kohlmann, an American terrorism consultant who has tracked jihadi websites
since the late 1990s. America and
its allies are now facing a multifront war: In Iraq, which is turning out a new
generation of Arab jihadis; in Europe, where Muslim admirers of Al Qaeda are
embracing the cause because of anger over the Iraq war; and on the Internet,
which has become a megaphone for radical jihadi ideologies. “Terrorist dispersal” is when radicalized foreigners carry jihad and
their guerrilla skills back to their homelands. "The world is just starting to
understand the real influence of the Internet as an open university of jihad,''
says Reuven Paz, the head of the Project for the Research of Islamic Movements
in Israel. "Like the attacks in Madrid, the bombings in London should be
viewed as an export of the war in Iraq to Europe, based on local adherents of
global jihad rather than on volunteers from the heart of the Arab world." http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0712/p01s03-woeu.html
Wright: Poll shows drop in
Muslim support for terrorists. “Osama bin Laden's standing has dropped
significantly in some key Muslim countries, while support for suicide bombings
and other acts of violence has "declined dramatically," according to
a new survey released today.
In a striking finding, predominantly Muslim populations in a sampling of
six North African, Middle East and Asian countries are shared to "a
considerable degree" Western nations' concerns about Islamic extremism,
the survey found. Many in those Muslim nations see it as threat to their own
country, the poll found”. While there is rising optimism about democratic-style
government the bipartisan group’s poll showed an unfavorable view of the US,
even though six of these countries are considered our allies. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/14/AR2005071401030.html Newsmaker Interview:
Gen. Richard Myers Troop
strength doesn’t matter, everything’s fine, but “You never heard Dick Myers ever say the
insurgency has been broken. This -- insurgencies take time to break. They're
broken by the political process. It's my view that the driver now is the
political process and the success that Iraq has in developing its constitution,
referendum and then elections; that's what's going to beat the insurgency”. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec05/myers_7-12.html Myers is retiring in September. The global database study of suicide bombers by Robert Pape has generated
more than a few ripples in the stream of commentary by both sides of the preemptive
war doctrine debate: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism:
it’s the occupation not the fundamentalism. Interview with
author Prof. Pape about the first global survey of terrorists, who they are,
why they do it. “Al-Qaeda appears to have made a
deliberate decision not to attack the US in the short term. We know this not
only from the pattern of their attacks but because we have an actual al-Qaeda
planning document found by Norwegian intelligence. The document says that
al-Qaeda should not try to attack the continent of the United States in the
short term but instead should focus its energies on hitting America’s allies in
order to try to split the coalition”. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the United States
secured its interest in oil without stationing a single combat soldier on the
Arabian Peninsula. Instead, we formed an alliance with Iraq and Saudi Arabia,
which we can now do again. We relied on numerous aircraft carriers off the
coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and naval air power now is more effective not
less. We also built numerous military bases so that we could move large numbers
of ground forces to the region quickly if a crisis emerged. That strategy, called “offshore balancing,” worked splendidly against Saddam
Hussein in 1990 and is again our best strategy to secure our interest in oil
while preventing the rise of more suicide terrorists. S.
McConnell, American Conservative magazine http://amconmag.com/2005_07_18/article.html "The time of revenge has come" Juan Cole, Salon, July 8, 2005 Conservative
commentators argue that Iraq is a "fly trap" for Muslim terrorists.
It makes much more sense to think of it as bin Laden's fly trap for Western troops.
There, jihadis can kill them (making the point that they are not invulnerable),
and can provoke reprisals against Iraqi civilians that defame the West in the
Muslim world. After Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, many Muslims felt that Bin Laden's
dire warnings to them that the United States wanted to occupy their countries,
rape their women, humiliate their men, and steal their assets had been
vindicated. These claims were not
credited by most of the world's Muslims before the Iraq war. Opinion polls show
that most of the world's Muslims have great admiration for democracy and many
other Western values. They object to the U.S. and the U.K. because of their
policies, not their values. Before Bush, for instance, the vast majority of
Indonesians felt favorably toward the United States. Even after a recent bounce
from U.S. help with tsunami relief, only about a third now do. The global anti-insurgency battle against
al-Qaida must be fought smarter if the West is to win. To criminal investigations and
surveillance must be added a wiser set of foreign policies. Long-term Western
military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq is simply not going to be
acceptable to many in the Muslim world. U.S. actions at Abu Ghraib and Fallujah
created powerful new symbols of Muslim humiliation that the jihadis who
sympathize with al-Qaida can use to recruit a new generation of terrorists. The
U.S. must act as an honest broker in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. And Bush and Blair must urgently find a credible exit strategy from
Iraq that can extricate the West from bin Laden's fly trap. Chicago political scientist Robert Pape
argues in his new book, "Dying to Win," that the vast majority of suicide
bombers are protesting foreign military occupation undertaken by democratic societies
where public opinion matters. He points out that there is no recorded instance
of a suicide attack in Iraq in all of history until the Anglo-American conquest
of that country in 2003. He might have added that neither had any bombings been
undertaken elsewhere in the name of Iraq. George Bush is sure to
try to use the London bombings to rally the American people to support his
policies. If Americans look closer, however, they will realize that Bush's
incompetent crusade has made the world more dangerous, not less. Juan Cole is a
professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of
Michigan and the author of "Sacred Space and Holy War" (IB Tauris,
2002). http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/07/08/blowback/index.html Note the short-lived ‘bounce’. 071105 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll: Bush’s numbers bounce post 7/7 but "the
number of Americans who believe the war in Iraq has made the United States less
safe from terrorism spiked
sharply after last week's terror attacks in London, " jumping to 54 percent
from 39 percent in the poll conducted a week before the London attacks.
"53 percent said it was not worth going to war, up 1 point since June
24-26." http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/07/11/bush.terror/index.html?section=cnn_latest 071305 WSJ/NBC
poll: Bounce over, Bush flunks the honesty
test; Bush's overall job approval now stands at 46%, while
49% disapprove of his performance. More problematic for the White House, the
public turns thumbs down on the president's handling of the economy by 54%-39%,
and on his handling of Iraq by 55%-39%.
At a time when the administration's credibility is under attack amid an
investigation of the leak of a CIA operative's name, Mr. Bush receives his
lowest ratings as president for "being honest and straightforward."
Just 41% rate him positively on that score, while 45% rate him negatively. The
telephone survey of 1,009 adults, conducted July 8-11, has a margin of error of
3.1 percentage points”. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8561443/ mail scanned
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