"Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth"

The first of two emergent characteristics of the blogosphere, its 'instant
punditry', attained widespread recognition in Memogate. Memogate involved the
debunking by anonymous Internet analysts of faked memos presented by 60
Minutes alleging that President Bush had evaded his National Guard
obligations. But it is the second characteristic, which is just emerging, that
is potentially revolutionary. Der
Spiegel describes how the individuals, faced with the necessity to move vast
quantities of factual information, used blog publishing to search for missing
persons, transmit news and coordinate relief efforts.

Blogs are at the forefront of the tsunami recovery effort. While
traditional media drags awaiting publication, and government hotlines jam or
go unanswered, bloggers have hopped into the fray, providing needed
information to relatives desperate to find loved ones and those hoping to join
the rescue efforts. One of the best sites out there is the South-East Asia
Earthquake and Tsunami blog set up by students from New Delhi, a Sri Lankan TV
producer and Internet junkies in the region. It offers everything from
fascinating tsunami facts to emergency contact numbers to humanitarian relief
organizations. Plus it tells you how to donate money from wherever you are.

Because the blogs are poorly understood, they have are often regarded with a
mixture of fear and contempt by the members of the regular press. An extreme
form of reaction was exhibited by Mr. Nick
Coleman of the Star Tribune (registration required).

The end of the year is a time to bury the hatchet, so congratulations to
Powerline, the Twin Cities blog that last week was named Time magazine's
"Blog of the Year!" Now let me get a new hatchet. ... I  will
leave it to the appropriate professionals to determine what they are
compensating for, but they have received enormous attention from the despised
Mainstream Media and deserve more. ... I wish I didn't have to do it, because
I already get ripped a lot on the site, which thankfully also has had some
nice photos of bikini-clad candidates for Miss Universe to keep me company.
But I accept Powerline's contempt; I am only a Mainstream Media man, while Big
Trunk and Hind Rocket are way cool. They blog. I work for a dopey old
newspaper committed to covering the news fairly while Powerline doesn't make
boring commitments. They are not Mainstream Media. They are Extreme Media.
Call them reliable partisan hacks.

Mr. Coleman leaves the reader unsure of whether he is looking up or peering
down at the members of the new "Extreme Media". On the one hand,
Coleman portrays regular journalists as being at the 'service of the
downtrodden', living on hard-earned legitimacy while the bloggers are 'Ivy
League' lawyers who are partisan right wing hacks. But in the next breath he
regrets that while he is only 'a dopy old' newspaperman the bloggers are 'way
cool'. What gives?

What gives is Mr. Coleman is confused. Bloggers are the most heterogenous and
diverse group possible. The Daily Kos and Juan Cole would hardly fit Mr.
Coleman's description of the conservative hack. It is hard to see the bloggers
in Iran, Iraq and China as business-suited Ivy League lawyers with an axe to
grind in US local politics. But Mr. Coleman can be forgiven for seizing upon instances
of the blogosphere as its archetypes while failing to characterize the
phenomenon as a whole. The blogosphere is a specific manifestation -- and by no
means the only one -- of the networks made possible by the Internet which can be
imperfectly compared to the emerging nervous system of a growing organism. Once
the software and infrastructure to self-publish was in place, it was natural
that analytical cells, or groups of cells would take inputs from other parts of
the system and process them. The result was 'instant punditry', which was
nothing more than the public exchange of analysis on any subject -- politics,
culture and war just happened to be the three most popular. It enabled lawyers
to offer opinions on law; military men on things military; scientists on things
scientific. And suddenly the journalistic opinion editors found themselves at an
increasing disadvantage. While individual bloggers might not have the
journalistic experience of the newspaper professionals, they had the inestimable
edge of being experts, sometimes the absolute authorities in their respective
fields. This is exactly what happened in Memogate. People who had designed Adobe
fonts and written desktop publishing programs knew the memos were computer generated and were not going to be overawed by Dan Rather's experts asserting the
contrary. They were the real experts and to make an impact they did not have to
be correct across a large range of issues. They only had to be right in the one
thing they knew best and from that vantage could hammer a mainstream pundit into
the dust. Rather's defeat at the hands of Buckhead was not accidental. It was
inevitable.

But the mainstream media could console itself in one thing. It still
controlled the primary newsgathering apparatus. Yet even here the rulebook was
changing. The advent of cheap consumer digital cameras capable of recording
sound coupled to the proliferation of internet connections meant that in
addition to the analysis cells which manifested itself in 'instant
punditry', the Internet was developing a sensory apparatus to match. To
the 'instant pundit' was added the 'instant reporter' -- the man already on the
spot, often possessed of local knowledge and language skills. These came
suddenly of age with the December 2004 tsunami story. Survivors with a
videocamera or even just an email or web browser connection 'filed stories'
which were vacuumed up by the the instant pundits hovering over their RSS
subscriptions and launched into the global information pool. In retrospect, the
Orange Revolution in the Ukraine forshadowed the events of the tsunami coverage.
Individuals with mobile computing and communications devices provided a
substantial shadow coverage of the unfolding events there. Like the tsunami
instant reporters, the insta-journalists in the Ukraine had the additional
advantage of being largely unknown to each other. This meant that unlike the
wire services, which are often single-sourced, the insta-reports could be
cross-checked. The exaggerations or misinterpretations of the one would live or
die depending on the reinforcement or negation it received from other sources
which could not be forced into a collusive arrangement. It was built-in
collateral confirmation. The last bastion of the media has now witnessed the
birth of a kind of informational artillery, which while still too weak to
overthrow its existing walls, must surely in time grow to such a strength as to
render their fortress untenable.

The real challenge facing traditional media is how to graft themselves onto
this burgeoning evolutionary system by providing services to it. Google is
possibly the best known example of a company which understood this trend
perfectly, providing services to this growing organism and profiting from its
expansion. But there are others. Less famous companies are profiting by
facilitating online payments, advertising services, auctions, trading and other
services. Glenn
Reynolds links to a story
which notes that the classified ads market has already departed traditional
newspapers, probably forever.

Lastly, this emerging neural network of analysis cells and sensory apparatus
is largely self-aware. It has developed meta-ideas about itself and can actually
guide its own development, mimicking a primitive lifeform.

In summary, bloggers are nothing special. They are neither better human
beings nor inherently cooler than anyone. It is simply that they have embraced
one aspect of a superior paradigm and have benefited thereby. Blogger 'cool'
comes from neural network 'cool'. This should be good news for Mr. Coleman.
He's just as good as any blogger. The bad news is that, like them, he has to get
a day job.

The Wavefront of Death

An animation
of the how the killer waves propagated across the Bay of Bengal is featured on
the International
Coordination Group for the Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific website.
More information
is provided here. An earlier Belmont
Club post speculated that the wavefront was still hours away from the Indian
subcontinent after impact on Thailand. That was incorrect. The time difference
between the wave's impact on Phuket and landfall on Sri Lanka was only about 30
minutes.

A log of warnings issued by the Pacific tsunami warning system is shown here.
The earthquake on the western side of Sumatra took place at 0059Z 26 DEC 2004,
initially rated at 8.0 on the Richter Scale. The first tsunami warning bulletin
was issued at 0114Z 26 DEC 2004 -- about fifteen minutes later. It was 09:15 in
the morning in Bangkok. The wave was still an hour away from Phuket. Although
the recipients of the warning were the members of the Pacific group there may
have been enough information in the first bulletin to ring alarm bells had any
trained person concerned with the Indian Ocean read it.

TSUNAMI BULLETIN NUMBER 001 PACIFIC TSUNAMI
WARNING CENTER/NOAA/NWS ISSUED AT 0114Z 26 DEC 2004 THIS BULLETIN IS FOR ALL
AREAS OF THE PACIFIC BASIN EXCEPT ALASKA - BRITISH COLUMBIA - WASHINGTON -
OREGON - CALIFORNIA.

.................. TSUNAMI INFORMATION BULLETIN ..................

THIS MESSAGE IS FOR INFORMATION ONLY. THERE IS NO TSUNAMI WARNING OR WATCH IN
EFFECT.

AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS

ORIGIN TIME - 0059Z 26 DEC 2004

COORDINATES - 3.4 NORTH 95.7 EAST

LOCATION - OFF W COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATERA

MAGNITUDE - 8.0

EVALUATION

THIS EARTHQUAKE IS LOCATED OUTSIDE THE PACIFIC. NO DESTRUCTIVE TSUNAMI THREAT
EXISTS BASED ON HISTORICAL EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI DATA. THIS WILL BE THE ONLY
BULLETIN ISSUED FOR THIS EVENT UNLESS ADDITIONAL INFORMATION BECOMES AVAILABLE.
THE WEST COAST/ALASKA TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER WILL ISSUE BULLETINS FOR ALASKA -
BRITISH COLUMBIA - WASHINGTON - OREGON - CALIFORNIA.

On 0204Z 26 DEC 2004 a second bulletin was issued. It concluded that there
was still no danger to the Pacific. The waves were only minutes away from Phuket
and the rest is history.

The First Drops of Rain

The tsunami that ripped across the Indian Ocean, smashing westward into Sri
Lanka, the Indian subcontinent and eventually to Africa is an example of a rare
event, like an asteroid strike, which is often considered uneconomical to
prepare against until it happens. In hindsight, a few simple precautions could
have saved thousands of lives. Glenn
Reynolds links to a USCGS
postmortem of the disaster.

"Most of those people could have been saved if they had had a tsunami
warning system in place or tide gauges," he said yesterday. "And I
think this will be a lesson to them," he said, referring to the
governments of the devastated countries. Person also said that because large
tsunamis, or seismic sea waves, are extremely rare in the Indian Ocean, people
were never taught to flee inland after they felt the tremors of an earthquake.
Tsunami warning systems and tide gauges exist around the Pacific Ocean, for
the Pacific Rim as well as South America. The United States has such warning
centres in Hawaii and Alaska operated by the US Geological Survey. But none of
these monitors the Indian Ocean region.

Now that a tsunami has struck the Indian Ocean there were will
probably be a clamor to invest in monitoring and warning systems costing
billions. Ironically, these magnificent systems will probably go unused for
years, perhaps centuries, before politicians in the future elected by voters
whose memory of these tragedies has faded say 'what are these White Elephants
for?' and abolish them in favor a more immediately beneficial project. The
characteristic of rare events is that they are rare.

Although the geological record shows that large asteroids occasionally strike
the earth and that tsunamis sometimes ravage coastal areas, the rarity of their
occurrence often precludes the formation of a political consensus to sustain
preparations against them. There will be momentary interest, a search for scapegoats and then a gradual return to forgetfulness. As
Tim Blair's
links show, the trivialization has started already.

Sydney Morning Herald readers
have their say:

A pity our army is busy fighting America's immoral war when they should
be providing assistance to the affected areas. - Shane Arnold

These divine winds show that the Gods are displeased with the world's
state of affairs. - Tomoyuki Yamashita

An opportunity for western governments to divert some funds to aid
assistance projects rather than their billion dollar war obsessions. -
Mother Nature strikes

This latest tragic disaster should open all our eyes to the fact that the
world seems to already have its "hands full" coping with seemingly
ongoing natural disasters rather than creating such man made disasters as we
have contributed to in Iraq. - wayne gregory

Dont expect a genuinely compassionate response from the U.S. Government,
as a "war on earthquakes" will not be as profitable as good ol'
terrorism - Nick Loveday

But in truth, there is very little that aircraft carriers, B-2 bombers and
Marine Amphibious groups can supply in the way of relief that civilian
government on the spot cannot provide better and more quickly if given the
money. The window of opportunity to make a difference came when seismographs all
over the world measured the quake and triangulated its epicenter. Then, and
surely after the first giant waves crashed ashore in Phuket, Thailand it would have been evident that a tsunami danger existed across the whole Indian Ocean.  The Indian subcontinent, still some hours distant from the ocean monster which was then bearing down at airliner speed, might have received the benefit of warning. The communications technology existed to theoretically raise the alarm, but like an organism whose
nervous pathways exist yet do not meet in a central place where the impulses can
be collated to make sense, no one knew what to make of the data. And the waves
crashed down on unsuspecting thousands.

In an abstract way, the information flows surrounding the Tsunami of December
2004 structurally resembled those preceding the Pearl Harbor and September 11
attacks. The raw data announcing the unfolding threat was there, yet the pattern
so evident in hindsight was invisible to those who were not looking for it. But
if tsunamis and asteroid strikes are rare events, they are comparatively more
common than that still rarer object, the unprecedented event: the something that
has never happened before. Threats like that can emerge suddenly out of
chaotic systems, like WMD terrorism or new viral plagues. Against such events,
specific precautions are impossible because no one can prepare for what cannot
be foreseen. The real challenge is not so much to create a new dedicated network
of staring systems against known threats but to tie current sensors to systems
which are capable of cognition. The most valuable survival asset is situational
awareness -- the ability to recognize threats you have never seen before and
respond in an evolving manner -- and that capability has not yet come to the
world as a whole.

The realization of its necessity has come, at least in some small measure, to
institutions which are scorned by some the sneering readers of the Sydney
Morning Herald. The Internet, space based sensors, biohazard threat detection,
the exoatmospheric interception of earthbound objects  -- are all things
deemed at one time or another as a waste of money by the more enlightened, 
but which may yet provide the margin for survival in a day unforeseen or unimagined. More important than the the specific technologies themselves is the watchful and precautionary mindset which created them. For some, the world is not and was never a paradaisal Gaia but a dangerous place filled with peril both natural and man-made. On the days we forget the ocean is there to remind us.

Sunshine Week: Your Right to Know

A Belmont Club reader sent a link to the Associated Press Photo Managers site
which contains guidance to editors on When
to Run a Chilling Photo. The author, Naomi Halperin, begins by describing
her reaction to a schoolteacher who balked at showing photographs of mutilated
Americans hanging from the Fallujah bridge to her class.

One image, seen in many newspapers including The Morning Call, appeared
when violence erupted in Fallujah and four American contractors were killed.
... The single letter that stands out in my mind was from a high school
teacher who routinely brought the newspaper to her classroom to share with her
students. She wrote: "After viewing the photo of the American soldiers
hanging on the bridge in Iraq, I will no longer be bringing my paper to school
to use for the classroom. The students were very upset and they wanted to know
the names of the soldiers because they have relatives serving in our military.
They wanted to know why the newspaper would show our soldiers' charred bodies
hanging there in such disrespect. ...

My first reaction was to consider that some of her students she wanted to
protect were the very age of many of the soldiers fighting in Iraq. I answered
her letter the next day: "... Running a photo that we know will disturb
folks is never an easy decision. ... After careful consideration we decided
not to hide the truth, as brutal as it was. The image, very reminiscent of the
dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Somalia, was too
important for the editors here at The Morning Call to ignore. It is a powerful
photo. I suspect this particular picture will prove to be a historical
flashpoint image that helps define the Iraqi conflict and who we are as a
people. Perhaps in the future, you as an educator might be compelled to look
at these tragic events as an opportunity for discussion. By keeping the paper
from your students, you close the only window of the world for a lot of kids
so I hope you will reconsider bringing your paper to the classroom. I know
that you and I will probably never agree on this subject but I respect your
views and will take it to heart."

Ms. Halperin, I think it is fair to say, is arguing it is the duty of editors
to convey the truth, however painful; and that it was in the long-term interest
of the teacher's students to have their eyes opened to the world as it is. But
because the quest for the truth is often an adversarial process, it is not
surprising to find accounts of the same event which cast a wholly different
construction on things. Powerline
printed an angry letter from reader Kevin O'Brien who charged that the AP
behaved unethically in Fallujah and that their account of events is poisoned as
a consequence.

AFP, AP and AP TV had advance notice of the murders of contractors in
Fallujah last spring, so that they could position themselves on scene. ...
Apparently the reporters were tipped to go to a specific location. They were
not told exactly what would take place, but they knew it was going to be a
terrorist action of some type. For security reasons, the terrorists give the
reporters very little notice -- just enough to get there, if everything goes
right. They were told exactly what street corner to be on, where they would be
expected by and under the protection of the terrorists. ("If you're
anywhere else, we can't guarantee your safety.") ... After the
contractors were dead and their bodies looted, the reporters stayed and
encouraged the mob that had gathered to mutilate the bodies. I am told by our
Arabic speakers that they can be heard egging the youths on during the video
of the mutilations. "Go ahead, cut him up. What are you afraid of?"

I have no idea if these charges are true; Mr. O'Brien's allegations would
surely outrage many journalists working for the Associated Press. But why, in
principle, should Mr. O'Brien's allegations be withheld from students where
the photos of contractors should not? All of the arguments advanced by Ms.
Halperin apply to the Powerline article as well. The obvious response would be
that Mr. O'Brien's allegations are 'false' while the the picture of the
contractors hanging like meat from the bridge is 'true', though a moment's
reflection will show that one does not disprove the other. Yet as Ms. Halperin
is at pains to point out, the real truth is not contained in the actual
photograph but in is its larger signification. "The image, very reminiscent
of the dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Somalia, was
too important for the editors here at The Morning Call to ignore. It is a
powerful photo. I suspect this particular picture will prove to be a historical
flashpoint image that helps define the Iraqi conflict and who we are as a
people." One could argue that O'Brien is asking equally fundamental
questions about who you trust to convey the news. Ultimately, the case for
preferring the AP's account and dismissing Mr. O' Brien's rests upon an appeal
to the authority of the AP brand name. It rests on trust. The public knows the
AP and doesn't know Mr. O'Brien, hence it is the AP's account that represents
the canon.

Yet ironically we do know Mr. O'Brien, who at least has a name, while
we will probably never know the identity of the "brave
Iraqi" photographer who captured the execution of Iraqi election worker
on Haifa Street. Jack
Stokes, the Associated Press director of media relations explained how that
photographer was recruited.

Insurgents want their stories told as much as other people and some are
willing to let Iraqi photographers take their pictures. It's important to
note, though, that the photographers are not "embedded" with the
insurgents. They do not have to swear allegiance or otherwise join up
philosophically with them just to take their pictures.

Because of the dangers inherent in this situation the AP believed
photographer's the identity had to be protected. Salon
quotes sources as saying "The photographer, whose identity the AP is
withholding due to safety concerns, was likely 'tipped off to a demonstration
that was supposed to take place on Haifa Street' said the AP source, who was not
at liberty to comment by name". A Belmont
Club reader wonders who the photographer is being protected from since
"he was allowed to not only photograph the executions, but also live to
deliver them to be published" so "the terrorists already know who he
is". Since they knew him well enough to send him the "tip" in the
first place the reader's question seems perfectly reasonable.

And deserving of an answer. The Associated Press says it encourages questioning
and wants the public to know the truth. In a
press release dated December 14, 2004, AP CEO Tom Curley warned of the
"trend toward more secrecy" and promised to resist it.

Curley and other media leaders have announced a 2005 initiative called
"Sunshine Sunday-Sunshine Week: Your Right to Know" to foster
a public dialogue on the importance of maintaining access to government
information. ... "We ourselves need to be out there fighting for
access," Curley said. ... Founded in 1848, The Associated Press is the
world's oldest and largest newsgathering organization, providing content to
more than 15,000 news outlets with a daily reach of 1 billion people around
the world. Its multimedia services are distributed by satellite and the
Internet to more than 120 nations.

The public right to classified information when the larger interest compels
its release has been widely debated. It seems clear that the same standard
should apply, in certain circumstances, to information about the way the news is
obtained and prepared. Let the Sunshine in.

Update

Glenn
Reynolds links to Egyptian blogger Big
Pharaoh who takes up the Haifa Street murders.

The blogoshere is currently discussing the issue of how an Associated Press photographer managed to stand in the middle of one of Iraq's (and probably the world's) most dangerous roads and shot a picture after another of a ruthless murder in the middle of the day.
... The case at hand has to do with the brutal killing of 2 Iraqi heroes whose
only mistake was trying to organize an election in their country. This is a
moral case and we, the friends of Iraq and of the troops serving there, should
not let this incident pass unnoticed.

Follow the link to read the rest.

"Insurgents want their stories told" -- Associated Press

Little
Green Footballs links to a Poynter
Online press release here reproduced verbatim.

From JACK STOKES,
director of media relations, Associated Press: [This is a solicited letter
regarding Salon's "The
Associated Press 'insurgency.'"] Several brave Iraqi photographers
work for The Associated Press in places that only Iraqis can cover. Many are
covering the communities they live in where family and tribal relations give
them access that would not be available to Western photographers, or even
Iraqi photographers who are not from the area.

Insurgents want their stories told as much as other people and some are
willing to let Iraqi photographers take their pictures. It's important to
note, though, that the photographers are not "embedded" with the
insurgents. They do not have to swear allegiance or otherwise join up
philosophically with them just to take their pictures.

These comments bear on some of the questions raised in the post and
commentary at Haifa
Street. In this regard, one hopes it is not impertinent to ask whether a
photographer who does not "swear allegiance or otherwise join up
philosophically with them (insurgents)" can take their pictures. Mr. Stokes
might like to state whether the Associated Press photographer who took a
sequence of pictures of an execution on Haifa Street, Baghdad is one of these
"brave Iraqi photographers" to whom the insurgents are willing to
entrust their stories. If so, at what point did the "brave Iraqi"
photographer become aware that the story of the day was going to be the live
execution of two Iraqi election workers?

Just asking.

Haifa Street

The execution of Iraqi election workers on Baghdad's Haifa street was
probably not, properly speaking, a murder. It was a political act. There has
been no suggestion that the killers of the electoral workers had any personal
grudge against them. Probably any electoral workers would have done. While most
killers seek to hide their faces and plan their attacks so no one can see them,
these killers scorned masks and chose a busy street in Baghdad to carry out
their work because they wanted to send a message. According to Abdul
Hussein Al-Obedi of the Associated Press:

In Baghdad, dozens of gunmen-- unmasked and apparently unafraid to show
their faces-- executed three election officials on Sunday, part of their
campaign to disrupt next month's parliamentary ballot. ... The deadly strikes
Sunday highlighted the apparent ability of the insurgents to launch attacks
almost at will, despite confident assessments by U.S. military commanders that
they had regained the initiative after last month's campaign against militants
in Fallujah. ... Meanwhile, in a message passed on by lawyers who visited him
in his cell last week, Saddam denounced the elections as an American plot. ...

During morning rush hour, about 30 armed insurgents, hurling hand grenades
and firing guns, swarmed onto Haifa Street, the scene of repeated clashes
between U.S. forces and insurgents. They stopped a car carrying five employees
of the Iraqi Electoral Commission and killed three of them. The other two
escaped. The commission condemned the attack as a "terrorist
ambush."

Two or three dozen people, at the most, would normally have witnessed these
events. But due to the great good fortune of the killers, a photographer from
the Associated Press was present and pictures of the execution were carried on
newspapers throughout the globe, sending the executioner's message not merely to
a handful of bystanders to hundreds of millions of readers throughout the world.

Salon
says:

A source at the Associated Press knowledgeable about the events covered in
Baghdad on Sunday told Salon that accusations that the photographer was aware
of the militants' plans are "ridiculous." The photographer, whose
identity the AP is withholding due to safety concerns, was likely "tipped
off to a demonstration that was supposed to take place on Haifa Street,"
said the AP source, who was not at liberty to comment by name. But the
photographer "definitely would not have had foreknowledge" of a
violent event like an execution, the source said.

Here was where the killers really lucked out. The AP photographer, though
caught at unawares, who definitely had no "foreknowledge" of what was
going down and at the worst expected a street demonstration, did not take cover,
even as soldiers and Marines are trained to do when shooting starts. He was made
of sterner stuff and held his ground, taking pictures of people he did not know
killing individuals he did not recognize for reasons he would not have known
about. This -- in the midst of "30 armed insurgents, hurling hand grenades
and firing guns" -- as the Associated Press report says. And he continued
to take photographs for a fairly long period of time, capturing not just a
single photograph, but a sequence of them. Salon continues:

Reporting from the most perilous sectors of a war zone is a complicated
business, both in terms of access and safety. The kind of flimsy
commentary-with-an-agenda bouncing around the conservative blogosphere right
now regarding an AP insurgency against the war effort is not only a disservice
to the public but a dishonor to the many journalists who have been injured or
killed carrying out their dangerous mission in Iraq.

The journalists who have been killed or wounded in Iraq are rightly honored
because noncombatants, belonging to neither side, who have the courage to walk
into danger to gather news deserve every distinction than can be bestowed. They
should not be confused, nor their memory sullied, by association with
individuals who, posing as protected
persons, act as mouthpieces of terrorist organizations, which would have
been the case if the AP photographer had not been there to innocently cover a
demonstration. That is why asking questions about what happened on Haifa Street
is so important. It is not, as Salon would have it, a question of an obscure
blogger impugning the integrity of journalists. On the contrary, it is about
maintaining the integrity of journalists. As the Crimes
of War site notes, the protections accorded to journalists are largely
provided by custom.

The rights most journalists enjoy in wartime today were won in their
respective national political cultures. In the final analysis, field
commanders tolerate the presence of the press because of the political power
and legal protections the press has acquired in their own local arenas. ...
But journalists roaming around the wilder conflicts of the world are forced to
live instead by the Dylan dictum: to live outside the law you must be honest.
Never pretend to be what you are not or deny being what you are unless your
life depends on it.

Every rogue "journalist" who undermines this customary protection
-- the men who violate the Dylan dictum and live dishonestly -- impugn
journalistic integrity far more than a 'conservative blogger' and serve to
increase the already great peril under which legitimate journalists labor.

No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

On Haifa Street.

Sixty Four Dollars

Salon claims that "conservative bloggers suggested Monday that an Associated
Press photographer was complicit with militants who executed three Iraqi
election workers on Baghdad's dangerous Haifa Street on Sunday." A picture taken
by the Associated Press photographer is posted on the Salon site. The photo
itself raises more questions than any conservative blogger ever could. It shows
traffic backed up behind the killers, afraid to proceed further. The attack,
according to the

Associated Press's own account was carried out by "about 30 armed
insurgents, hurling hand grenades and firing guns", but the photograph itself is
taken from a fairly elevated position, as from a standing person. Here are
excerpts the account of Abdul Hussein Al-Obedi of the Associated Press:

In Baghdad, dozens of gunmen-- unmasked and apparently unafraid to show
their faces-- executed three election officials on Sunday, part of their
campaign to disrupt next month's parliamentary ballot.  ... The deadly
strikes Sunday highlighted the apparent ability of the insurgents to launch
attacks almost at will, despite confident assessments by U.S. military
commanders that they had regained the initiative after last month's campaign
against militants in Fallujah. ... Meanwhile, in a message passed on by
lawyers who visited him in his cell last week, Saddam denounced the elections
as an American plot. ...

During morning rush hour, about 30 armed insurgents, hurling hand grenades
and firing guns, swarmed onto Haifa Street, the scene of repeated clashes
between U.S. forces and insurgents. They stopped a car carrying five employees
of the Iraqi Electoral Commission and killed three of them. The other two
escaped. The commission condemned the attack as a "terrorist ambush."

It was the surely the most amazing of coincidences that placed
an Associated Press photographer in a position to openly photograph an
execution, where we are reliably informed, no less than 30 armed men were firing
guns and hurling hand grenades. The AP photographer is not in a situation
comparable to a defendant in a criminal case, who is entitled to be presumed
innocent until proven guilty. He is not in any court at all. But like the
situation involving Dan Rather and the infamous Texas National guard memorandum,
readers are entitled to wonder about the provenance of the evidence served up to
the viewers. Asking how the photographer happened to be there and take those
photographs in a shooting situation is not unlike Buckhead wondering about the
Times Roman font in the 'typewritten' memorandum. (Buckhead was the internet
poster who first spotted the discrepancies in Dan Rather's supposed evidence.)
They are legitimate questions, which as Dan Rather proved, the Associated Press
is not compelled to answer. There may be a perfectly plausible explanation for
everything, but for the record let me wonder:

1. 
   

   How the Associated Press photographer happened to be at the
   attack site at the time. Was it on his route to home or work?



2. 
   

   How he photographed the execution sequence in the midst of an
   attack by 30 persons from the middle of the major road (see the photo provided
   by Salon).

Just asking. We need to go the "country mile" to reach the
standard of proof that any responsible reader would need to form an opinion on
the issues. The best way to do that is to ask questions and though one may wait
in vain for the answers, one must ask them all the same in the same manner that
Salon is asking questions about "conservative bloggers" who "suggest" that an
"Associated Press photographer was complict". You can hardly do one and not the
other.

The Lidless Eye

Most everyone on the blogosphere has probably followed the
Glenn
Reynolds link to a
Mosul
chaplain's blog. More than 20 people, including US military and civilian
personnel, were killed in
a mortar attack on a base mess tent in Mosul. Chaplain Lewis was at
the site. His narrative of the followup attack on the wounded and the medical
personnel who responded stood out.

Regardless of what some may say, these are not stupid people. Any attack
with casualties will naturally mean that eventually a very large number of
care givers will be concentrated in one location. They took full advantage of
that. In the middle of the mayhem the first mortar round hit about 100 to 200
meters away. Everyone started shouting to get the wounded into the hospital
which is solid concrete and much safer than being in the open. Soon, the
next mortar hit quite a bit closer than the first as they "walked" their
rounds toward their intended target...us. Everyone began to rush toward
the building. I stood at the door shoving as many people inside as I could.
Just before heading in myself, the last one hit directly on top of the
hospital. I was standing next to the building so was shielded from any flying
shrapnel. In fact, the building, being built as a bunker took the hit with
little effect. However, I couldn't have been more than 10 to 15 meters from
the point of impact and brother did I feel the shock. That'll wake you up! I
rushed inside to find doctors and nurses draped over patients, others on the
floor or under something. I ducked low and quickly moved as far inside as I
could. After a few tense moments people began to move around again and the
business of patching bodies and healing minds continued in earnest.

This suggests that the target was under observation so either the first
firing team, or a second enemy mortar team tasked with a followup attack could
adjust their fire until they hit the hospital. It will be interesting to see
whether the enemy fire originated from a populated area, preventing
counterbattery. Many American bases are routinely patrolled by RPVs that run a
circuit around possible firing positions. Mortar or rocket positions in the open
would be easily detected. But there is no data and it would be useless to
speculate on what actually happened. However, it is safe to say that the attack
demonstrates assymetrical warfare in action. The enemy chose the weakest point
he could find to attack; exploited the known limitations of the American
response; and understood that he was to all intents and purposes exempted from
the condemnation attendant to attacking the wounded and medical personnel. The
chaplain and the medical personnel knew this and did not mill around expecting
the Geneva Convention to protect them from those who have never heard of it,
except as it applies to their own convenience. They knew the true face of the
enemy; a face which bore no resemblance to the heroic countenance often
presented by the media to the world.

Of the first three factors, the advantage of choosing the weakest point of
attack has been a combatant's right from time immemorial. That is a purely
military condition. But the enemy ability to exploit the limits of American
response and attack medical personnel with public relations impunity are
examples of military advantages that arise from political restraints. To the
extent the blogosphere can dispel the propaganda cover willingly provided by the
Left, people on the home front can help the soldiers in the field. It is
necessary to link the war criminal behavior of the enemy with the studied
blindness of 'sophisticates' towards their most heinous crimes. They are
twinned; with the former made possible by the latter. The

Daily Telegraph describes how some European agencies actually refuse to look
at mass grave sites to avoid being party to the punishment of war criminals.

Lack of European experts has held up the excavation of mass graves in Iraq,
according to an American human rights lawyer working on the investigation.
Greg Kehoe said the experts were not joining in because evidence might be used
to sentence Saddam Hussein to death. ...

Capital punishment is not permitted within the European Union which
discourages its use elsewhere. EU countries also routinely refuse to extradite
people to the United States and other countries unless they receive guarantees
that detainees will not be executed. The Iraqi Special Tribunal has identified
a further nine mass graves to be examined for evidence of the former Saddam
regime's crimes against humanity. Human rights groups estimate that 300,000
people were killed. Mr Kehoe, who spent five years investigating mass graves
in Bosnia for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,
said he wanted to have collected far more evidence by now, and cited the delay
as one reason why the IST has yet to issue formal charges against Saddam and
11 other former regime leaders.

Enemy mortar teams lying in wait to attack doctors are one aspect of a coin
which features the blind eye of some media and 'progressive' institutions on the
other.
Mark Glaser observed that:

For way too long, it has been the mainstream media (MSM) that's played God
with the American public, telling everyone what's news and what's not, what to
play up and what to downplay. But 2004 was the year the power started
shifting, that the Little People, if you will, started to tell the gods of
media what the public really wanted.

They can start by looking at the mass casualty station in Mosul and then
glancing down at their hands.

The Odds Against

An
Associated Press article describes the execution of two Iraqi electoral
officials by insurgents in a Baghdad street. 

A series of pictures taken by an AP photographer show three
pistol-wielding gunmen, who had earlier stopped a car carrying the election
officials and dragged them into the middle of Haifa Street in the midst of
morning traffic. ...

In the dramatic photo sequence one of the captives is shown lying on his
side on the pavement, while a second is on his knees nearby in the street. The
gunmen casually display their handguns as they shoot the two men. Both of the
victims shown in the sequence wore traditional Arab headscarfs. In contrast,
the attackers were bareheaded and apparently unafraid to show their faces. The
entire sequence shows only two of the three victims lying dead after they were
shot at close range. The final photo of the sequence shows a man standing near
one of the bodies waving for help, as a U.S. Apache helicopter appears above
the crime scene after the gunmen apparently melted away into the crowd.

One of those photos is shown in this

story.

Three employees, identified by the commission as Hatem Ali Hadi
al-Moussawi, a lawyer and deputy director for the commission's Karkh office,
and two of his office employees Mahdi Sbeih and Samy Moussa, were dragged from
their cars and shot dead. Two men escaped unhurt. In the dramatic photo
sequence one of the captives is shown lying prone on the pavement, while the
another one seems to be kneeling as the armed men approach, casually carrying
their handguns or aiming them at the men.

Even with today's proliferation of compact photographic equipment, a
legitimate photojournalist rarely gets the opportunity to capture an execution.
Apart from the beheadings which are purposely recorded on video by the
jihadis and from gun camera film, most footage of people actually being shot
are taken by photographers in company with combatants who are ready to film an
ambush. Those individuals are combat cameramen for their armies or embedded
reporters. The most famous analogue to the Associated Press sequence of
photographs is probably the Eddie Adams

photo of the execution of Vietcong Captain Bay Lop by South Vietnamese
General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Adams owed that opportunity to General Loan himself,
who brought Adams along to cover what he believed to be a justifiable summary
execution. Adams depressed the shutter at exactly the moment Loan fired and
photo analysis actually shows the impact of the bullet on Bay Lop's skull.

It may have been pure luck, but it was surely the longest of odds that would
have brought an Associated Press cameraman to the site of a surprise attack on
two Iraqi electoral workers. As it was, the AP photograph was unable to capture
the actual execution, only the moments shortly before and after the Iraqis were
killed. Although the Eddie Adams photograph was widely used to illustrate the
'brutality' of the Saigon government, the photos taken by the Associated Press
are unlikely to reflect badly on the electoral worker's killers. Press reports
highlight the confidence and boldness of the insurgents. "Both of the victims
shown in the sequence wore traditional Arab headscarfs. In contrast, the
attackers were bareheaded and apparently unafraid to show their faces",
suggesting that 'collaborators' must conceal their faces while the Ba'athists
stride with impunity through the light of day. It was fortunate for the AP that
their photographer was accidentally there.

Sometimes they are accidentally there on purpose. In November of 2003, two
French journalists from

Paris Match accompanied a group of men who set out to shoot down a DHL
Airbus. A translation of the "journalist's" account is given below:

On Friday, Nov. 21, somewhere in Baghdad, the head of these commandos told
us that one day he had seen a DHL Airbus, flying low. "We did not fire, we
never fire on civilian aircraft. Also, I didn't know what DHL stood for.
Afterwards, when my friend explained that these planes transported the mail of
GI's, I regretted that a little. I could have deprived the soldiers of the
letters from their moms and their fiancees. Next time, I'd fire!"

After driving half an hour in the countryside, the leader gives the order
to stop at the end of a sunken lane and to park the cars so that they are
ready, spread out and pointed in different directions. We are within two
kilometers of the airport, a little before 9 a.m., Saturday, Nov. 22. ...
Three men wait at the wheel of the cars, ready to go. Suddenly, the leader,
who, since arriving has been listening acutely and scanning the sky, shouts,
"A plane! Come on, you, get in position, prepare to launch!" The aircraft is
flying approximately 1500 meters up, 3 km away from us. The two men, 50 meters
apart from each other, await the orders, Strellas on their shoulders. They
believe they've spotted an American military Boeing 747. The leader howls,
"Fire!" At 9:08 the first missile takes off. The second, five seconds later,
misses the target. The leader jumps with joy like a child and raises the hands
to the sky, "Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!" Then he gives the order to quickly
pack up the weapons and each car takes off in a whirlwind, each in a different
direction. We will discover later by the press dispatches that the commandoes
had fired on a DHL Airbus... A civilian target!

The Paris Match account, though somewhat confused, conveys the impression
that not everyone knew what the letters DHL stood for. In any case, the target
was mistaken for a military 747, though of course, the attackers had no way at
all of knowing anything at all about the identity of the flight. The journalists
discover only later that the "commandoes had fired on a DHL Airbus... A civilian
target!" Sacre Bleu! So sorry. Such careless noncombatants. Recently, the

Guardian described how difficult it was to keep the noncombatant status
while the United States exists on the planet.

The chief executive of the British Red Cross has warned that the
international movement's neutrality is fast becoming a casualty of the global
"war on terror". Sir Nicholas Young told the Guardian that the US-led
coalition's defiance of international law in Iraq threatened to obliterate the
capacity of the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement to operate in areas of
conflict.

In an interview in today's Society Guardian, he says: "The respect the Red
Cross relied on, the sense that when we're wearing our emblem and doing our
work we are protected, we are sacrosanct, is under threat. "We are able to
work across the frontline for only as long as we are seen as neutral. The
moment that sense of impartiality is lost, our mission is lost. "We might as
well pack up and go home. We'll be seen as part of the war machine and we'll
be unable to operate." Driving through the streets of Baghdad in a clearly
marked Red Cross vehicle last year, Sir Nicholas says, he was acutely aware
that local people did not recognise the agency's neutrality. "I had a very
strong sense that we were regarded as the occupying powers," he says. "And
this was something I hadn't felt before."

Hard being hors de combat. The electoral workers were noncombatants
too.

The Iraqi Elections

Five days and an age ago, a

post describing the last ditch strategy of the Iraqi insurgents quoted

Marc Ruel Gerecht as predicting they would attempt to stir up a civil war.

Which brings us to the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. Clerical Iran's primary
objective is to ensure that Iraq remains destabilized, incapable of coalescing
around a democratically elected government. Such a government supported by
Iraq's Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at Tehran's clerical
dictatorship. ... What clerical Iran ideally wants to see next door is strife
that can produce an Iraqi Hezbollah. ... The birth of the Lebanese Hezbollah,
which Iran's ruling mullahs view as their greatest--only--foreign success,
required a civil war and an Israeli invasion. In Iraq, Iran's ruling clerics
have an American invasion. What they lack is civil war. ...

He was only repeating common knowledge. In early December, the Sunni
President of the Interim Government, Ghazi al-Yawar, stated that the "Armies
of Darkness" would make an all-out attempt to derail the democratic
processes in Iraq. "Speaking after a particularly bloody few days in which more
than 70 people have been killed, Yawar said: "Right now, we're faced with the
armies of darkness, who have no objective but to undermine the political process
and incite civil war in Iraq."

Those "Armies of Darkness" killed more than 62 people in separate attacks on
Shi'ite targets and in targeted assassinations of Iraqi election workers over
the last few days. According to

MSNBC:

Car bombs rocked Iraq�s two holiest Shiite cities Sunday, killing at least
62 people and wounding more than 120, while in downtown Baghdad dozens of
gunmen carried out a brazen ambush on a car, pulling out three election
officials and executing them on the pavement in the middle of morning traffic.

The attacks by Sunni insurgents and their Syrian backers upon Shi'ites is
easy to understand. The former Ba'athist ruling class of Iraq is fighting to
prevent the Shi'ite majority from dominating the new government. But why should
Teheran, as Gerecht suggests, have a hand in attacking their co-religionists?
The answer he

provides is that the Iranian Mullahs have always perceived the Iraqi
Shi'ites as rivals for power and influence within the Shi'ite world. Moreover,
the Iraqi Shi'a have a record of independent action and in fact constituted the
majority of Iraqi troops fighting against Iran during the late 1980s war between
the two countries.

 The strongest trump playing in favor of America and against Iran is
Iraqi nationalism. ... Iraq's Shiites are the progenitors of modern Iraqi
nationalism. They, much more than their Sunni Arab compatriots, who were the
driving force behind pan-Arabism in Mesopotamia, have shaped an Iraqi Arab
identity which is distinct from the Sunni Arabs to the west and Shiite
Iranians to the east. ... Which brings us to the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
Clerical Iran's primary objective is to ensure that Iraq remains destabilized,
incapable of coalescing around a democratically elected government. Such a
government supported by Iraq's Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at
Tehran's clerical dictatorship.

But while the Iraqi Mullahs fear a new Iraqi state as an intra-Shi'ite
threat, other Arab states dread it in intra-sectarian terms. It threatens to
upset the power balance between Sunni and Shi'ite within the region. As John
Burns of the

New York Times put it:

Many American and Iraqi officials say the talk of Iranian influence here
reflects what they call a more plausible fear: that Shiite dominance in Iraq,
coupled with Shiite rule in Iran, would reshape the geopolitical map of the
Middle East. The development would be particularly threatening to
Sunni-ruled states that border Iraq and run down the Persian Gulf, the
officials say, carrying as it would the threat of increasing unrest among
long-suppressed Shiite populations.

For entirely different reasons the Syrian and Iranian regimes are determined
to strangle the new Iraqi state in the cradle. And for precisely that reason,
the Iraqi politicians who are now emerging from years of domination by the
Ba'ath and the paid agents of Teheran are determined not to miss their chance at
independence.

Ha'aretz reports that Shi'ite leaders have called for calm amid the
provocations that have seen three score of their co-religionists killed near
their holiest places.

Shi'ite leaders accuse Sunni Muslim militants of carrying out the attacks.
The Shi'ites suspect militants known as Salafists or Wahabis, and former
ruling Baath Party members, of seeking to draw Shi'ites into a violence cycle
that would spark a civil war and prevent the coming elections from taking
place. Wahabis are blamed by Shi'ites for killing scores of clerics and
ordinary Shi'ites in Dora, a mixed area in Baghdad, and Latifiya, just south
of the capital, in recent months. According to Mohammad Bahr al-Uloum, one of
Iraq's most respected Shi'ite clerics "[Wahabi militants] are trying to ignite
a sectarian civil war and prevent elections from going ahead on time. They
have failed before and they will fail again."

If the issues in Iraq have been muddled beforetime by the polemic over
'weapons of mass destruction' or Saddam's connection to the September 11
attacks, the Syrian and Iranian attempts to prevent the scheduled elections have
at last put things in their proper perspective. The central issue in Iraq is
whether an Arab people can win their freedom in despite of the worst efforts of
tyrannical and terrorist regimes to prevent it. The blasts which ripped through
the Shi'ite holy places and the bullets which smashed the skulls of Iraqi
election works have also blown aside the fog of propaganda with which the
ancien regime sought to hide its campaign of suppression. It is not
about 'blood for oil' or 'Jesusland': no; it is about the Iraqi people seeking
to choose their future, backed by America on the one hand and the traditional
tyrannies of the Middle East aided by their European Allies and the United
Nations bureaucracy seeking to prevent it on the other. That is not to say that
traditional geopolitics or human greed have nothing to do with the overall
mixture; nor to argue that commercial cupidity and ambition are absent from
Iraq. But it is essential to recognize the fundamental issues involved and where
the cause of right lies,
this
day, this hour; until the elections on January 30.

A Haunting We Will Go

Ron
Bailey continues to report from United Nations Conference on Climate Change
in Buenos Aires. He summarizes the presentation of the World Business Council
for Sustainable Development which argues that steep reductions in carbon
emissions are impossible. The presentation, delivered by David Hone from Shell
and Mark Akhurst from British Petroleum, is essentially directed at the time
frame during which a reduction in carbon emissions can be effected. Their
basic methodology consisted of quantifying all the sources of carbon emissions
and replacing them with nonemitters at rapid -- sometimes inconceivably rapid --
rates. In each case Hone and Ackhurst showed that the dropoff in carbon
emissions would still take quite a long time.

Currently, humanity is fueled by 1000 1 gigawatt coal-fired power plants,
400 1 gigawatt oil-fired plants, 250 gas-fired plants, 350 nuclear power
stations, 500 gigawatts of hydropower, 750 million fossil fueled vehicles, 130
exajoules for heating and cooling, 50 exajoules from the burning of
traditional biomass.

Doing the math, in order to double the world's energy supplies over the
next 50 years, the world will need to build, among other things, the
equivalent of 2750 new 1 gigawatt natural gas-fired power stations, 1000 new
coal-fired 1 gigawatt power plants with carbon capture, 1.5 million windmills
deployed over a bit less than 300,000 square miles, 2150 new nuclear plants,
1500 new 1 gigawatt hydropower stations, not to mention new solar and biofuel
technologies.

Recall that (Tony) Blair and others are calling for emission reductions of
60% by 2050. That would mean that instead of emitting 7 gigatons of carbon in
2050 under the WBCSD scenario, the world would emit only 2.8 gigatons of
carbon annually. As the old saying goes, it may be that "you can't get there
from here."

While the World Business Council's arithmetic may be impeccable, it is
entirely beside the point. So what if a reduction in emissions by the means
prescribed is impossible by 2050? Politicians don't want to hear it. And since
politics very often consists of promising the impossible to the ignorant, the
scientific bankruptcy of currently proposed Green initiatives is entirely
irrelevant. Kyoto, like Peacekeeping is always good, though no one can say why.
The climate change initiatives will continue to be put forward; they are an end
in themselves. The more honest Greens might well concede the truth of the
indictment yet argue that since one has to begin somewhere even a shambolic
initiative is worthwhile.

In a

lecture to Caltech students in 2003, Michael Crichton made two points which
ironically skewer both the Greens and the counter-arguments of the World
Business Council. Crichton began by pointing out that contemporary scientific
policy is increasingly devoid of science.

But I did not expect science merely to extend lifespan, feed the hungry,
cure disease, and shrink the world with jets and cell phones. I also expected
science to banish the evils of human thought---prejudice and superstition,
irrational beliefs and false fears. I expected science to be, in Carl Sagan's
memorable phrase, "a candle in a demon haunted world." And here, I am not so
pleased with the impact of science. Rather than serving as a cleansing force,
science has in some instances been seduced by the more ancient lures of
politics and publicity. ...

Crichton went on the examine the gigantic ruins of junk science policy like
SETI and Nuclear Winter, occasingly stooping to hold up some minor artifact like
puerperal fever, pellagra for inspection, like some archaeologist casting his
eye over the folly of the past, every bit as laughable as the spine pads without
once no European would venture into the tropical sun. He warned that we detach
policy from science at our peril.

As the twentieth century drew to a close, the connection between hard
scientific fact and public policy became increasingly elastic. In part this
was possible because of the complacency of the scientific profession; in part
because of the lack of good science education among the public; in part,
because of the rise of specialized advocacy groups which have been enormously
effective in getting publicity and shaping policy; and in great part because
of the decline of the media as an independent assessor of fact. The
deterioration of the American media is dire loss for our country. When
distinguished institutions like the New York Times can no longer differentiate
between factual content and editorial opinion, but rather mix both freely on
their front page, then who will hold anyone to a higher standard?

And so, in this elastic anything-goes world where science-or non-science-is
the hand maiden of questionable public policy, we arrive at last at global
warming. It is not my purpose here to rehash the details of this most
magnificent of the demons haunting the world. I would just remind you of the
now-familiar pattern by which these things are established. Evidentiary
uncertainties are glossed over in the unseemly rush for an overarching policy,
and for grants to support the policy by delivering findings that are desired
by the patron. Next, the isolation of those scientists who won't get with the
program, and the characterization of those scientists as outsiders and
"skeptics" in quotation marks-suspect individuals with suspect motives,
industry flunkies, reactionaries, or simply anti-environmental nutcases. In
short order, debate ends, even though prominent scientists are uncomfortable
about how things are being done.

Yet he is not entirely kind to the sort of analysis which Hone and Ackhurst
brought to the table. Crichton argues that though we can do no other, the simple
extrapolation of the present into the future rarely holds. The unforseen will
interpose.

Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about
people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get
enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution
was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so
many more people riding horses?

But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport. And
in 2000, France was getting 80% its power from an energy source that was
unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more
than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn't
know what an atom was. They didn't know its structure. They also didn't know
what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer,
or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU,
IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet. interferon,
instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing, gene therapy,
gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar, prozac, leotards,
lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic explosive, plastic,
robots, cars, liposuction, transduction, superconduction, dish antennas, step
aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step, ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber
optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney
transplant, AIDS� None of this would have meant anything to a person in the
year 1900. They wouldn't know what you are talking about.

The two warnings, first against junk science and the second against the
arbitrary prolongation of trends, if taken together must lead us to the
conclusion that environmental policy should be a

heuristic. It must be fundamentally grounded in science yet not so sure of
itself as to establish tentative conclusions as dogma. This argues for a more
flexible policy regime than those which set arbitrary targets, for finding a way
of setting the orientation of the vector without specifying its length.
Unfortunately that is not the way politics does business. A 'spectre is haunting
Europe' -- and the world one might add -- the demon of pseudo-science against
which rigorous argument has no effect. Until then, we must resort to Bell, Book
and Blogger which alone can defeat it. Who said the Age of Magic was dead?

Ever Always

Glenn
Reynolds points out that

Philip Gourevitch, author of a best selling

book on the Rwandan Genocide, understands the UN mess is bigger than Kofi
Annan. Gourevitch writes:

The air of corruption that clouds the United Nations these days cannot
simply be fanned away by forcing the resignation of Kofi Annan as
Secretary-General, as a growing number of prominent Republicans have been
urging. ... Annan bristles at the insinuations of corruption in his ranks,
but, in truth, his tenure was tainted from the beginning. In the mid-nineties,
when he was head of peacekeeping, he presided over catastrophically failed
missions in Bosnia and in Rwanda, where he ignored detailed warnings of
genocide, then watched them come true, while the world did nothing to stop it.
Those world leaders who later hailed him as a moral exemplar at best ignored
that history, at worst regarded it as a kind of credential: since Annan was a
compromised figure, they did not have to fear his censure. ...

Last week, Annan released a set of proposals, put forward by a commission
of senior international statesmen, for a systematic overhaul of the U.N.
bureaucracy and an updating of international law... Yet nothing in the
proposals promises to alter the chronic dysfunctions of the system. The
proposed new permanent seats on the Security Council don�t carry the power of
veto that gave the victorious Allies of the Second World War the exclusive
clout they still enjoy. And the U.N.�s withdrawal from Rwanda during the
slaughter was due not to insufficient laws but to a complete lack of will
among the member states to deal with it. No law can change that. No reform can
create a community of nations where none exists.

The Security Council's structural defect is part of its design. It was meant
to freeze international action, not promote it. Paralysis is a Security Council
feature not a bug. While international multilateral action from recorded history
has always been carried out by nations whose interests momentarily coincide, the
Security Council was carefully constructed to consist of rivals whose
interests clash, each with a veto over the other. The proposals put forward to
limit international military action to the Security Council are tantamount to
preventing alliance action because all "legitimate" international action is made
the province of the parties in conflict. This recipe for enhanced stasis, as
Gourevitch points out, has ironically been advanced under the �the Rwanda never
again clause� -- when in fact it amounts to a 'Rwanda ever always' clause, as
the Congolese and Sudanese know to their cost.

Total War

An interesting article from the

Christian Science Monitor highlights some of the challenges of putting 'more
boots on the ground' in Iraq. It turns to be a little more complicated than
ordering more men into the theater.  It means creating more units in the
first place and structuring them differently.

The armored force that led the thrust into Baghdad in 2003 will in January
become the first division to return to Iraq for a second, year-long tour. ...
For decades, the Army has sized, arrayed, and trained its forces to sprint to
victory in a conventional war against opposing states. Thursday, for the first
time since Vietnam, it faces a marathon of protracted deployments against
dogged insurgents - with no end in sight. Many of the strains are already
showing as the 3rd Infantry trains in the Louisiana backcountry for another
Iraq tour, grappling with an abrupt reorganization, an influx of new troops
and equipment, and veterans with combat stress.

Army leaders admit that at current levels they must rotate troops into war
zones at a rate that is unsustainable in the long run. Warning of a force not
yet "broken" but "bent," they are rushing to add 30,000 soldiers to the
482,000-strong active-duty force and increase the number of active brigades -
from 33 when the Iraq war began to 43 by 2006, with another five possible by
2007. Only then might the Army hope to shorten tours to about six months every
two years, which soldiers say is more bearable for them and their families.

This apparently simple task conceals a multitude of difficulties, including
changing the arrangements between reserve and active components; breaking up the
old divisional structure into a larger number of brigades; creating the
appropriate tables of equipment and tactics for the newly resized units;
altering the role of support troops to reflect a "war without fronts". To it
must be added the tasks of disseminating combat lessons learned, delivering
training in new robotic and networked weapons systems. These are certainly in
addition to addressing the more publicized shortfalls in body armor and hardened
vehicles.

From the window of his C-12 jet, Maj. Gen. William Webster traces the
contours of the Red River as it winds through the woods of his native
Louisiana.  ... On this November morning, General Webster is heading back
to Polk as commander of the 3rd Infantry Division (3ID) to appraise the Army's
newest brigade. Cobbled together in just eight months, with scores of recruits
arriving to fill out its ranks this summer, the 4th Brigade is undergoing
final training before shipping out to Iraq early next month.

"In the midst of a war, we knew we had to change in eight to 10 months
versus eight to 10 years," he says, drinking black coffee from a Thermos. "The
chief [Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker] said, 'I think we can
create 15 new brigades. You guys figure out how to do it.' We just had to run
through this thing on the fly."

As Secretary Rumsfeld was on his way to Kuwait, during which he would be
asked the famous question about "hillbilly armor",

an interviewer asked him what he regarded as the task ahead. Whereas General
Webster was concerned with solving operational problems, Rumsfeld was facing the
same difficulties that Webster had been grappling with, but at a higher level of
abstraction.

Well, the election�s over and the President asked me if I would be willing
to stay on and I told him I would be delighted to do that. We�ve got a lot of
work that�s well along, but some of it�s not finished. The task of moving an
institution as large as the U.S. Department of Defense is a sizable task. And
it�s the kind of thing that doesn�t happen instantaneously. Great
bureaucracies don�t spin on a dime.

The services are in the process of rebalancing the active component with
the reserve component so that we get on to active duty the forces we need on a
continuing basis and put into reserves some of those skill sets that we need
less frequently. The effect will be to not have to put such demands on the
Guard and Reserve. ... We are doing something that needed to be done for
decades and that is to adjust our force posture in the world globally. We�ll
be bringing home some troops, we�ll be bringing home some dependents, we�ll be
shifting our weight in various parts of the globe. And the emphasis will be
not on numbers of things, but on capabilities. And we�ll be looking less to
how many troops or how many tanks or how many planes are located in a certain
spot and we�ll be focused more on precision, equipment, speed, agility, as
opposed to mass and sheer numbers. And that�s going to be a hard thing for
people to understand.

The hardest thing to understand was that the old world -- and the old
military metrics had departed forever. During the First World War large horse
cavalry masses were held in reserve for years in the expectation of a role which
had already disappeared into history. Each transformational task that Rumsfeld
faced had its analogue in the field. General Webster described his efforts to
"reinvent the 3ID" against the "warstoppers".

"It's like guerrilla warfare," he says, describing tactics he's used to
skirt the constraints of budgets and regulations to secure vital weaponry,
personnel, and equipment. Several times in the past year, Webster has
confronted obstacles so severe he called them "war stoppers." "At one point, I
didn't have enough rifles to give to all the soldiers, or radios to give to
the leaders, or armored vehicles. That's a war stopper," he says. "So by hook
or by crook we got what we need." That meant, for example, using artful
accounting to spend $11 million on add-on armor for 885 Humvees.

In a very real sense the dominance of the US armed forces over the enemy is a
function of its superiority of organization. War is combat between armies not
duels between individuals. In still wider terms it is a confrontation between
societies and the power they can bring to bear on the battlefield. When
Clausewitz referred to war as 'politics by other means', he was speaking the
literal truth. The scheduled January 30 elections in Iraq are just as much part of
the war plan as the redeployment of the 3ID, a component in a larger plan that
is beyond a SecDef to control. Whatever his defects and mistakes, Rumsfeld at
least recognizes the need to transform the purely military aspect of American
strength. The challenge, without which any military transformation will be
negated, is to improve foreign policy and intelligence in the same
way.

The Wheel's Still in Spin

Austin Bay, returned from Iraq begins with this provocative
leader:

Mark it on your calendar: Next month, the Arab Middle East will revolt. ...

Put a circle around Jan. 9. That's the day Palestinians go to the polls to
elect a president. ... Draw another circle around Jan. 30. That's Iraq's first
election day. Underline the two weeks prior to Jan. 30. That will be a savage
fortnight in which terror campaigns and political campaigns collide.
Democratic candidates will be assassinated and polling stations will be blown
to bits, as Saddamite and Al Qaeda reactionaries -- the Middle East's ancien
regime of tyrant and terrorist -- attempt to force an oppressed people to
submit one more time to the yoke of fear.

But they are going to fail.

And earlier Belmont Club post
linked to a Marc
Ruel Gerecht article which argues much the same thing in principle: that a
new Iraqi state represents a real threat to the Mullahs in Iran. He explains
why.

Which brings us to the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. Clerical Iran's primary
objective is to ensure that Iraq remains destabilized, incapable of coalescing
around a democratically elected government. Such a government supported by
Iraq's Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at Tehran's clerical
dictatorship. ... What clerical Iran ideally wants to see next door is strife
that can produce an Iraqi Hezbollah. ... The birth of the Lebanese Hezbollah,
which Iran's ruling mullahs view as their greatest--only--foreign success,
required a civil war and an Israeli invasion. In Iraq, Iran's ruling clerics
have an American invasion. What they lack is civil war. ...

If the neighboring one-man, one-vote clerics can be downed and America can
be physically and spiritually drained in Iraq, then the two most feared,
disruptive forces in Iranian politics--Western-oriented Iranian youth and
pro-democracy dissident clerics--can be further weakened. ... In Iraq, the
U.S. ought to have two obvious goals. To crush the Sunni insurgency before it
can provoke the birth of an exclusive, angry Shiite political identity willing
to do to the Arab Sunnis what the Baath once did to the Shia. If such an
identity is born, it is most unlikely democracy can prevail. Washington must
thus ensure that the democratic process in Iraq, regardless of the violence,
keeps on rolling. As long as it does, clerical Iran will not be able to gain
much traction inside the country.

The really fascinating aspect of both men's analysis is the idea that
freedom and politics are really going to be the agents of destruction for the
"ancien regime of tyrant and terrorist",  not as a figure of
speech but as literal truth. The role of the US military would be strategically indirect and
subtle: to ensure that the old regimes cannot contain the forces that would
naturally spring up against them.

In this view, victory against terror need not take the form of the 101st
Airborne marching into Teheran. It would be enough to merely hold the ring in Iraq to
win over the Mullahs. Nations often return to strategies which they are most
familiar with. Iran
instinctively turned to the Lebanese experience to model its confrontation with America.
It was natural that the United States might remember Europe and Korea when at
war again. In both cases America won a decisive victory not by marching into
Moscow or Pyongyang, but by merely ensuring that Western Europe and South Korea
developed separately. In Iraq the old was new again.

John Burns of the New
York Times describes the potential of the Iraqi election to rock Damascus,
Teheran and even Washington.

On a list of 228 candidates submitted by a powerful Shiite-led political
alliance to Iraq's electoral commission last week, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's name
was entered as No. 1. It was the clearest indication yet that in the Jan. 30
election, with Iraq's Shiite majority likely to heavily outnumber Sunni
voters, Mr. Hakim may emerge as the country's most powerful political figure.

Mr. Hakim, in his early 50's, is a pre-eminent example of a class of Iraqi
Shiite leaders with close ties to Iran's ruling ayatollahs. He spent nearly a
quarter of a century in exile in Iran. His political party, the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was founded in Tehran, and its
military wing fought alongside Iranian troops during the Iran-Iraq war.
American intelligence officials say he had close ties with Iran's secret
services.

For the United States, and for Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which have Sunni
Muslim majorities, the prospect of Mr. Hakim and his associates coming to
power raises in stark form the brooding issue of Iran's future influence in
Iraq.

It was the Americans who seem most confident about the possible outcomes.
"They say Iraqi clerics are generally wary of the idea of religious
government, partly because of an entrenched doctrinal opposition among Iraq's
Shiite religious leaders to direct rule by clerics, and partly because they
recognize that Iraq's Sunni Muslims would fiercely resist it." Hakim
himself has publicly said that clerics should keep out of politics and remain in
the mosques.

In addition, Iraqi and American officials say, the ethnic and cultural
divisions that have carved deep historical fissures between Iran and Iraq
militate against Iraq becoming a client state of Iran. ... American and Iraqi
officials said polls commissioned by the American occupation authority, and more
recently by the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, have shown
that ordinary Iraqis, including Shiites, are deeply suspicious of Iran's
religious leadership and strongly averse to a government dominated by religious
figures. ...

Many American and Iraqi officials say the talk of Iranian influence here
reflects what they call a more plausible fear: that Shiite dominance in Iraq,
coupled with Shiite rule in Iran, would reshape the geopolitical map of the
Middle East. The development would be particularly threatening to Sunni-ruled
states that border Iraq and run down the Persian Gulf, the officials say,
carrying as it would the threat of increasing unrest among long-suppressed
Shiite populations.

The outcome is far from foregone. The great likelihood is that the
Palestinian and Iraqi elections, far from pouring oil to calm the waters, is
likely to ignite them. While there may be a reduction in physical violence, the
elections herald a shift in the ethnic balance of power and inaugurate a new
standard for a political change in the Middle East. The US is calculating that
its armed forces and political process will give it the edge in the tectonic
upheavals that it will itself provoke.

Shame and Disgrace

Andrew Sullivan has criticized the decision to award Tommy Franks, George
Tenet and Paul Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The ceremony was
described by

ABC News:

President George W Bush has bestowed the highest US civilian honour on
three former top officials, sidestepping their ties to controversies over the
Iraq war and its aftermath. In a televised ceremony at the White House, Mr
Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former CIA director George
Tenet, retired General Tommy Franks and the civilian overseer for Iraq, Paul
Bremer. "This honour goes to three men who have played pivotal roles in great
events and whose efforts have made our country more secure and advanced the
cause of human liberty," the President said in prepared remarks.

Sullivan felt that the awards were not only undeserved by given despite
their failure and incompetence.

The presidential medal of freedom goes to George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, Tommy
"We Have Enough Troops" Franks, and Paul "Disband the Iraqi Army" Bremer. It's
one thing never to punish error, but to reward it so magnificently!

The accuracy of Sullivan's characterizations of George Tenet and Paul Bremer
are best left to the reader to judge. But it seems unjust to characterize Tommy
Franks, the commander of

Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and

Operation Iraqi Freedom  in such disparaging terms. A more accurate
appraisal of Franks' campaign was articulated at a recent seminar at the

American Enterprise Institute held to discuss an Army War College postmortem
of operations in Iraq. The ensuing discussion recognized OIF's achievements
without minimizing the shortcomings which now evident in hindsight --
achievements and shortcomings that are General Franks' to a certain extent. The
basic indictment is that while the President's strategy called for a campaign of
"regime change" military plans were drawn up for "regime removal". The question
is whether Franks could have done differently.

The decisions made to limit the size and the capabilities of the invasion
force had unintended, but at least predictable, consequences. Almost from the
start the desire to fight a just-in-time war meant that even small
surprises--the resistance of the Saddam Fedayeen or even the terrible
sandstorm of late March--sapped the strength of a force that was just large
enough to, essentially, conquer Baghdad. And in particular, disrupting the
normal deployment procedures deprived the force of the logistics wherewithal
necessary to continue operations beyond Baghdad. By the time that force got to
Baghdad, its reserves had been committed, it was fully absorbed in trying to
pacify the capital itself. And the question of whether the force had the
necessary means, the strength, to push out beyond Baghdad, and particularly
into the so-called Sunni Triangle, I think, is a very debatable proposition.
In my judgment, to use a military term of art, the attack essentially
culminated in and around Baghdad. ...

Just the centrality of winning the war in the Sunni Triangle appears,
certainly from this vantage point, to have been what a campaign planner would
describe the center of gravity. This was a goal that was not conceived in the
war plan and, I have argued, was beyond the abilities of the invasion force as
it found itself in early April. You can only speculate about what effect the
4th Infantry Division might have had if the Turks had permitted an attack
through northern Iraq. There's no guarantee that there wouldn't have been an
insurgency of some sort--Moqtada al-Sadr and his Iranian sponsors would still
be a problem, jihadists everywhere would still be outraged and just as willing
to kill Americans as they have proven otherwise. But you have to say that the
Sunni heartland did not feel the full shock and awe of the invasion, and the
problem there persists.

The study recognizes that the mismatch between American goals -- "to rebuild
an entire region" -- and its means, an armed force whose manpower and doctrine
were legacies from the Cold War, not only constrained Franks at the start of the
campaign but persists to a large extent today. Military bloggers have noted that
pre-OIF photographs show few troops in body armor because it was not then widely
issued. Nearly all the logistics vehicles, the Humvees and trucks, were
unarmored at the start of the campaign. Arabic translators were comparatively
scarce, rear echelon troops were not expected to see combat in the halcyon days
of February, 2003. That was the army Franks had. Nearly all of that has changed.
But while many of those equipment defects have been redressed, the basic problem
of force size -- the number of brigades the US military can field -- has not.
Critics often forget that the call for 'more boots on the ground' really amounts
to a number that can be sustained until the job is done. In this respect, the
ground forces have now exchanged places with the Navy, which for most of the
1990s rotated Task Forces in and out of the Persian Gulf enforcing pointless
embargoes, sometimes for nearly a year at a stretch, wearing out ships and
sailors. People who complained of having only two carriers forward were apprised
it took at least six, allowing for transit and the refurbishment, to keep that
presence in place.

it's not so much about the immediate level of forces in Iraq or anything
like that, but ... whether the right number is 100,000 or 150,000, our ability
to sustain that over a long haul. And also to do the other strategic tasks
both in the region and elsewhere in the world that we ask our military to do,
I think, is, again, just fundamentally out of whack.

General Franks was the CINC of Central Command and while Iraq was the major
theater of operations, he had the responsibility to prosecute the ongoing
efforts in Afghanistan, then where Iraq is now, and maintain a reserve against
contingencies. But to set against these shortcomings lay one fact: the US
military had toppled the Saddam regime and was on its way to winning against the
Baa'thist insurgency.  That achievement was in large part due to General
Franks.

Those disappointed with the invasion itself for not producing the
anticipated quagmire have found a little more food for speculation in the
fighting of the past year and certainly the fighting of the past month, and
especially in Fallujah. But I have to confess that, in my analysis and, I
would say, by pretty much any historical standard, this has been a pretty
successful counter-insurgency campaign. And I measure that in two fundamental
ways: First, it does appear that insurgents in Iraq, the rejectionists, have
had very little luck in shaking American political resolve to stay the course.
... Secondly, the insurgents have also failed to provoke a civil war in Iraq,
which, to listen and to remember the expert commentary prior to the war,
sounded like the easiest thing in the world to do. And journalists are
constantly discovering that civil war is about to happen, but, at least in my
eyes, it hasn't happened yet. ... Now, the insurgency has had one notable
strategic success. I can't say quite what it's bought them, but you have to
grant them that they've fractured the international coalition that backs the
United States in Iraq.

Probably the most eye-opening suggestion that the United States has moved to the permanent offense, not only inside Iraq but within the region was
made by

Marc Ruel Gerecht, who argues that the Iranian mullahs are now facing a
mortal geostrategic threat from a post-Saddam Iraq which they now cannot hope to
prevent but at best to misdirect.

Today in Washington there are many within the foreign-policy establishment
expressing their fear--and hope--that America's entanglement in Iraq may well
compromise the Bush administration's ability to confront the Islamic
Republic's quest for nuclear weapons. ... But does this reasoning make sense?
Are Iraq and Iran so intertwined that America is essentially handcuffed in its
dealings with Tehran's mullahs? In all probability, not at all. Indeed, the
current interplay between the peoples of Iraq and its eastern neighbor
actually ought to encourage the Bush administration to be more hawkish toward
the clerical regime's growing interference in Iraq and pursuit of nuclear
weapons.

The strongest trump playing in favor of America and against Iran is Iraqi
nationalism. ... Iraq's Shiites are the progenitors of modern Iraqi
nationalism. They, much more than their Sunni Arab compatriots, who were the
driving force behind pan-Arabism in Mesopotamia, have shaped an Iraqi Arab
identity which is distinct from the Sunni Arabs to the west and Shiite
Iranians to the east. ... Which brings us to the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
Clerical Iran's primary objective is to ensure that Iraq remains destabilized,
incapable of coalescing around a democratically elected government. Such a
government supported by Iraq's Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at
Tehran's clerical dictatorship.

If Gerecht's analysis is correct, OIF stands within an ace of not only
achieving its operational goals, but is on the verge of winning its initial
strategic goals.

The clerical regime is currently handcuffed to Iraq's democratic process
and timetable. All of the principal groups through which Iran hopes to
exercise influence in Iraq--the Iranian-created Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the Dawa (or "Islamic Call") party, and
the Sadriyyin, followers of Muqtada al Sadr, the young clerical firebrand who
has been engaged in a spiritual tug-of-war with the country's traditional
clergy--are committed now to the election process. Iran has probably been
pouring money into Iraq, to all three of these Shiite groups, which don't
share much affection for each other, and in the case of the Dawa and the
Sadriyyin, have had distinctly mixed, often hostile, emotions about things
Iranian. Both the Dawa and the Sadriyyin have regularly belittled Grand
Ayatollah Sistani for his "Persianness" and snarled at clerical Iran's habit
of talking down to the Iraqi Shia. Tehran's motivation in giving aid to these
parties is to encourage some dependency and, more important, keep the three
most provocative Shiite groups in the forefront of Iraqi politics.

It is Iran and Syria, not the United States, which may now find itself
embedded in an Iraqi quagmire. Leaving aside Mr. Gerecht's impressive
credentials, how much of this analysis is accurate and how much wishful
thinking? That question returns us to the central fact that both Operation
Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom have been victorious campaigns.
Their defeat of the Taliban, Saddam and the Ba'athist insurgency bodes fair for
the prospect of success against the Mullahs. Victories are not proof, as some
have suggested, that defeat is imminent.  It can be rightly pointed out
that OIF could have benefitted from more armor, troops, better plannning and
fewer casualties. It has been argued that Osama should never have escaped
Frank's net. And all of those criticisms can be true. Yet none of those
criticisms can erase the essentially successful nature of the campaigns. We are
not talking about the pitiful remnant of Lord Elphinstone's Army of the Indus
arriving

haggard at Jalalabad; nor about Lord Chelmsform finding Lieutenants Chard
and Bromhead lonely survivors at
Rorke's Drift; nor
about listening to General Christian de la Croix de Castries's pathetic final
message from Dien
Bien Phu. We are talking about Tommy Franks, the victor of Afghanistan; the
nemesis of Saddam; and the man who may have set the possible stage for strategic
victory in the entire theater. We may no longer like the British, style
victorious general officers Viscount Nelson of the Nile or Lord Kitchener of
Khartoum. But in justice, General Franks deserves better than the title of
opprobrium Tommy "We Have Enough Troops" Franks.