Egypt

Egyptian Special Operations have arrested four leaders of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Cairo. According to the Washington
Post:

Abdel Moneim Mahmoud, a senior Brotherhood member, said police arrested
Essam el-Erian, one of the organization's most senior members, and three other
leaders during raids on several homes in Cairo. "They took them to police
cars waiting outside surrounded by masked members of the Egyptian special
operations forces," Mahmoud said. Police also detained more than 130
Brotherhood members in Cairo and outside the capital, said Abdel-Galil el-Sharnoubi,
editor of the group's Web site. ... Although banned since 1954, the Muslim
Brotherhood is probably Egypt's largest opposition movement and the government
tolerates some of its activities. Fifteen Brotherhood members hold seats in
parliament, having been elected as independents.

The question is why. Ha'aretz
suggests the arrests are not necessarily extraordinary: just a roundup of the
usual suspects over the occasional political difference.

The Muslim Brotherhood, established in 1928 and banned since 1954, is used
to intermittent government crackdowns. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said
in an interview with Egyptian television last month that he would not allow
any religious group to become a political party but added that he would not
object to Muslim Brotherhood members joining political parties.

But News24
and the BBC are more specific: they suggest that Mubarak is eliminating any
roadblocks to an uncontested Presidential election. 

The banned Muslim Brotherhood has been in open confrontation with Egyptian
authorities for the first time in 24 years with its wave of protests demanding
an end to President Hosni Mubarak's "dictatorship". ... Under
growing domestic and international pressure, the 77-year-old Mubarak agreed
last February to amend the constitution to allow multi-candidate elections for
the first time in Egypt's history. The amendment is to be discussed in a
parliament plenary session on May 10, but Mubarak has yet to announce whether
he will run for a fifth six-year term in presidential elections in September.
Under the proposed changes, a candidate would need the support of 10% of
lawmakers and other members of regional and local councils, all bodies which
are dominated by Mubarak's National Democratic Party (NDP). "The Muslim
Brotherhood is using foreign pressure on the Egyptian regime to improve its
own political and legal standing," said political analyst Nabil Abdel
Fattah.

The BBC
reports that it will be hard for the Muslim Brotherhood, or any other opposition
party, to get the 10% support to field a candidate to run against Mubarak,
though perhaps the Egyptian leader is not taking any chances.

Under the planned law an independent candidate would need to be endorsed by
65 of the 444 members of parliament. Correspondents say an independent is
unlikely to get such backing as the ruling party has an overwhelming majority
in parliament. Independents - including supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood -
make up the most vigorous opposition in Egypt, but number fewer than the 65
needed to endorse an independent candidate.

But at any rate, the opposition may see this as their chance to unseat
Mubarak. If so, the Muslim Brotherhood is ironically banking on the US-driven
"Arab Spring" to obtain its share of power. Fouad Adjami in his recent
Foreign Affairs article, The Autumn of the Autocrats
argues that in general, the Arab dictators can no longer hold the line. (Hat
tip: DL) The powerlessness of the Middle Eastern President's Club was ironically
established first in Iraq and then Lebanon, when no one rode to Saddam's rescue
or to Assad's. Who then will ride to Mubarak's?

Cairo will not intercede on behalf of Damascus. If the Egyptians attempt
it, their intervention will come without conviction. U.S. policy owes no
deference to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. If anything, the Bush
administration's new emphasis on reform and liberty only highlights the
inadequacy of Mubarak's own regime. ...

But suddenly it seems like the autumn of the dictators. Something different
has been injected into this fight. The United States -- a great foreign power
that once upheld the Arab autocrats, fearing what mass politics would bring --
now braves the storm. It has signaled its willingness to gamble on the young,
the new, and the unknown. Autocracy was once deemed tolerable, but terrorists,
nurtured in the shadow of such rule, attacked the United States on September
11, 2001. Now the Arabs, grasping for a new world, and the Americans, who have
helped usher in this unprecedented moment, together ride this storm wave of
freedom.

The price of reaching for the prize of liberating the Middle East is the
acceptance of the attendant dangers. That does not mean the goal is not worth
striving for, only that in advancing, the sword and shield must be held at
guard. The American wave that swept Saddam from power will logically shake the
foundations in Cairo and Riyadh. In more ways than one, Iraq was a surprisingly
decisive campaign; though what the decision will be, history has yet to reveal.

The Prism of War 2

Bernard Lewis's Freedom
and Justice in the Modern Middle East illustrates of how the significance of
an event can be overlooked until it is too late. (Hat tip: MIG) He describes in
exceptionally lucid prose the consensual roots of classical Islam and concepts
which, although a little strange to Western eyes, are the functional equivalents
of Liberty and Equality. This older, "libertarian" Islam died by slow
degrees, first strangled by Oriental despotism, later by crude attempts at
modernization to overtake the West in pursuit of which the Arab world finally
imbibed in the worst poisons of Europe.

The second stage of political upheaval in the Middle East can be dated with
precision. In 1940, the government of France surrendered to Nazi Germany. ..
the governors of the French colonies and dependencies were free to decide:
they could stay with Vichy ... Vichy was the choice of most ... this meant
that Syria-Lebanon was wide open to the Nazis, who moved in and made it the
main base of their propaganda and activity in the Arab world.

It was at that time that the ideological foundations of what later became
the Baath Party were laid, with the adaptation of Nazi ideas and methods to
the Middle Eastern situation. ... The leaders of the Baath Party easily
switched from the Nazi model to the communist model... This was a party not in
the ... sense of an organization built to win elections and votes. It was a
party in the Nazi and Communist sense, part of the government apparatus
particularly concerned with indoctrination, surveillance, and repression.

But these totalitarian systems, Lewis argues, were also fundamentally alien
to the Arab-Islamic soil, a circumstance that political Islam exploited
superlatively. Islamic preachers raised up their communities against the
wannabee Hitlers and Stalins.

Political Islam first became a major international factor with the Iranian
Revolution of 1979 ... what happened in Iran was a genuine revolution, a major
change with a very significant ideological challenge, a shift in the basis of
society that had an immense impact on the whole Islamic world, intellectually,
morally, and politically. The process that began in Iran in 1979 was a
revolution in the same sense as the French and the Russian revolutions were.
Like its predecessors, the Iranian Revolution has gone through various stages
of inner and outer conflict and change and now seems to be entering the
Napoleonic or, perhaps more accurately, the Stalinist phase.

A tectonic shift was about to occur, though President Jimmy Carter might not
have thought it significant at the time. Then a series of events then transpired
whose importance was not immediately evident. The development of vast oil
deposits in Saudi Arabia made an obscure Wahabist sect globally important and it
soon set about exercising its vast power.

The first great triumph of the Sunni fundamentalists was the collapse of
the Soviet Union, which they saw -- not unreasonably -- as their victory. For
them the Soviet Union was defeated not in the Cold War waged by the West, but
in the Islamic jihad waged by the guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. As Osama
bin Laden and his cohorts have put it, they destroyed one of the two last
great infidel superpowers -- the more difficult and the more dangerous of the
two. Dealing with the pampered and degenerate Americans would, so they
believed, be much easier.

In Bernard Lewis' view immense and destructive forces crept unnoticed onto
modern world stage until they manifested themselves on September 11 upon a
nearly blind America. It was a witches' brew, compounded of the worst aspects of
Nazism and Communism, which in turn fueled a reaction by political Islam,
overlaid by the limitless ambitions of the Sunni Wahabists. Somewhere in all of
this, Lewis calls out, like a father seeking a lost child, for the libertarian
Islam: the Islam of justice and equality of centuries gone by. Whether he will
find it is open to debate; and sadly observes that in the West, both freedom and
the memory of its existence in the Islamic world are still being edited away.

The Prism of War

Michael Yon's Battle
for Mosul (he is an author currently in Iraq) is an account of 25th ID
operations in that city. His account begins with the end of the Second Battle of
Falluja, in late 2004, when "displaced fighters streamed from their nests
in Falluja, scuttled into hiding throughout Iraq, and began spreading the
disease of violence. Many landed in Mosul." For a time, they rampaged
through the city and at one point infiltrated a suicide bomber into an American
base, killing 22. They didn't spare the civilians either, and after killing
every policeman they could, started on the firemen.

Yon focuses his story on the 1/24 of 25 ID, the  1st Battalion,
24th Infantry Regiment "Deuce Four". As they hunted down the
enemy, the men of the 1/24th were aware the enemy was also seeking them, in
particular aiming to ram car bombs, known as VIEDs, into their Stryker armored
vehicles, capable of killing everyone aboard. Then Yon describes an incident of
some historical interest, which I'll get to in a moment. While accompanying the
battalion commander, LTC Erik Kurilla, on April 23, 2005, a large explosion was
heard in the distance. A VBIED had succeeded in hitting a Stryker. He narrates:

We loaded the four Strykers, closed the ramps, and rolled. The attack site
was three minutes away. ...  There might be follow-on suicide attacks, or
IEDs planted on target, or perhaps dozens of insurgents with machine guns and
rockets might be waiting to ambush us. ... Within minutes of our arrival, the
men had wrestled out their severely injured friends and were climbing off the
burning Stryker, separating into teams that shored up defensive positions
while others scoured the area searching for other IEDs. ... Meanwhile,
American sniper teams had found perches around the blast site, and Army attack
helicopters circled low overhead, at times so close that I could practically
see the patches on the pilots' uniforms ...

Just a few weeks earlier, when another of Kurilla's Strykers was hit by an
SVBIED, a camera crew arrived on scene. As a man pumped an AK, an American
sniper killed him, wounding the cameraman in the process. When it was later
learned that the cameraman was a stringer for CBS who had close ties with the
enemy, CBS apologized on the air.

Just as we pulled out, people arrived with cameras and began shooting
footage of the scene. One of the men, whom we later learned was an Associated
Press correspondent with known ties to the enemy, is dead now. The associate
scavenging with him was seriously wounded.

As near as I can tell, Yon's reference to an event "a few weeks earier"
is an incident described in the Guardian
on April 7th involving a CBS photographer.

Reporters Sans Frontieres today called for an investigation after a
freelance cameraman working for CBS in Iraq was shot by US troops who mistook
his camera for a gun ... near the northern city of Mosul. It is the second
time US forces have mistaken a camera for a weapon ... RSF called the shooting
"unacceptable" and called for a "thorough and transparent
investigation". "Once again the US forces have targeted a journalist
just doing his job," the press freedom organisation said. "We again
call on this same army to be more vigilant and discerning in order to avoid
these unacceptable blunders." The cameraman (was hit) during an exchange
of shots between Iraqi insurgents and members of the 1st brigade of the US
25th infantry division.

The "Deuce Four" is part of the 1st brigade of the 25 ID and it is
more than likely that these two events are the same. The CBS cameraman was
subsequently detained as a suspected insurgent according to the Associated
Press.

BAGHDAD, Iraq Apr 8, 2005 � A cameraman carrying CBS press credentials
was detained in Iraq earlier this week on suspicion of insurgent activity, the
U.S. military said Friday. ... A spokesman for Task Force Freedom, Capt. Mark
Walter, said the reporter suffered minor wounds and was with "a number of
people" involved in the shootout. Walter said the reporter was detained
immediately after the incident, in part because of statements from witnesses
to the battle.

Correspondent
Jim Stewart of CBS filed this followup story on April 8: "the military
became suspicious when they examined the contents of the camera and found
pictures of what appears to be the aftermath of four separate attacks by
insurgents using IEDs, improvised explosive devices. The footage, taken so soon
after the attacks, suggest the cameraman had to have foreknowledge that the
attacks would take place, officials told Stewart."

Of all the incidents described in Yon's Battle for Mosul, the only
incident which made the headline news for an extended period was the wounding
and detention of the Associated Press photographer. The dramatic events related
by Yon: the fights with the insurgents, the desperate rescues -- recede
completely into the background in mainstream media stories. By a strange process
of substitution what is merely a footnote in Yon's story, the account of the
cameraman, becomes the staple of the wire news while the main events of Yon's
story shrink to become footnotes in the newspaper coverage of the photographer's
saga.

Every information consumer picks up a newspaper to learn the truth. But what
is the truth in a situation where a story's message can so radically alter with
the point of view? The existence of political 'bias' alone is an insufficient
explanation because the conservative press just as gleefully dwelt on the CBS
cameraman's dubious affiliations.  I can only think that objects and events
viewed through the prism of the media are distorted in some fundamental way, so
that the death of millions in Darfur can dwindle to insignificance while the
"wardrobe malfunction" of a singer at a sporting event assumes the
proportions of an international event. Nor are there any easy transformations
one can apply to restore matters to their correct relative importance because it
is hard to contemporaneously judge what really matters. The intelligence
analyst's curse is that he rarely knows which of the myriad facts before him are
the truly important ones. He has the consolation of knowing that everything will
be 20/20 in hindsight. One of the attractions of reading history is discovering
the truth long after it might have helped.

The Western Road

A Washingon
Post article describes two separate engagements in Iraq in which 24
insurgents were killed. The first involved ground and air attacks which killed a
dozen men believed associated with Abu Musab Zarqawi.

unidentified U.S. forces traced what were believed to be members of a
Zarqawi cell to a tent and a shed in the desert of the remote, largely
uncontrolled Qaim district, east of the Syrian border, the U.S. military said.
Twelve of the men were killed in firefights and at least one airstrike, the
military said. A 6-year-old Iraqi girl was wounded.

Not far from Qaim, a US helicopter was damaged by ground fire from
unidentified forces engaged in fighting near Husabayah. No Americans were
killed. (Qaim
was formerly the site of a uranium yellowcake plant.) The Washington Post says
that "the helicopter crew had been monitoring a gun battle between two
unidentified groups when the battling sides spotted the helicopter and turned
their fire on it". In a separate action,  Marines killed 12 attackers
on a checkpoint in the town of Ramadi.

Qaim, Husabayah, Ramadi: what these three engagements engagements have in
common is that they all took place on the westbound road from Baghdad to the
Syrian border.

It's all old ground. Husabayah or Qusabayah as it is sometimes
called for example, was where a US Marine border outpost was attacked all day in
early April by about 100 insurgents, including a fire truck converted into a
bomb. Steve Fainaru of the Washington
Post described the incident vividly:

HUSAYBAH, Iraq -- Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua Butler shook himself from the
rubble of a suicide truck bombing. He staggered to the ledge of his
three-story guard tower and stared into a cloud of white smoke. Butler, 21, of
Altoona, Pa., was temporarily deafened by the blast, but he recalled what came
next with cinematic clarity. The white smoke parted to reveal a clean red fire
engine. It sped past a mural bidding travelers "Goodbye From Free
Iraq" and hurtled directly toward Butler, who shot at the fire engine
until it exploded about 40 yards away from him.

From the Syrian border, moving eastward towards Baghdad, lie a string of
towns along the Euphrates through which foreign fighters and insurgents move
back and forth into Iraq. The Chicago
Tribune's James Janega talks about the effort of 9 Marine battalions to
control the vast swath of territory along this river road. The 'hook' of
Janega's story revolved around an engagement in Haqlaniyah, a town about about
halfway between the Syrian border and Baghdad where Marines employed a swarming
tactic to engulf insurgents who had taken on a four Humvee unit. The unit,
Kabar-6, had itself been pursuing a vehicle that had fired on a civil affairs
patrol some time earlier and which had fled into a redoubt.

The reaction to the April 20 fight on the outskirts of Haqlaniyah may be a
sign of things to come in Anbar province, the restive desert territory west of
Baghdad where American military officials believe insurgents and foreign
fighters gather, train and then move into the rest of Iraq. Hundreds of troops
were directed at Haqlinayah soon after trouble started ... While the idea to
swarm enemy fighters is not new to the Marines in Iraq, it is rare that they
do it fast enough for more than a few dozen Marines to shoot back at the
fighters, let alone to surround the fast-moving insurgency. ... Because
several smaller units near Haqlaniyah were ready for other missions April 20,
nearly 200 troops from the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines were able to respond to
the shootout there within the first hour. The troops remained in town for the
next three days.

The Marines eventually captured 40 suspected enemy, explosive, documents and
weapons at Haqlinayah. The other engagement mentioned in the Washington Post
article is Ramadi, where 12 insurgents were killed in checkpoint attack; it
takes us further along the river road to Baghdad's western approaches. The map
below (hat tip: DL) shows how Ramadi marks start of a series of infamous towns
along the river road which eventually lead to Baghdad.

 

Qaim, Husabayah, Haqlinayah  and Ramadi. This series of foreign-sounding
battlefield names when laid out on a map becomes the visible path of the
insurgency and their supporting foreign fighters, with one end beginning at the
Syrian border and the other terminating in Baghdad. As the Chicago Tribune
describes it:

Nine battalions now hold an area where 13 battalions had been stationed
until February. In northern Anbar province, which includes Haqlaniyah, about
3,000 Marines are stretched among outposts in an area the size of South
Carolina.

Addendum

This isn't to say that all fighters are pouring down from Syria, but does
illustrate how the organism of the insurgency has one root within the Sunni
populated riverine area and draws additional sustenance from roots reaching
across the border. One of the reasons that most US troops are deployed in
Northern Iraq is because that is where much of the enemy is.

Notes From All Over

David Horowitz and Ben Johnson at Frontpage
(hat tip: MIG) ask "who killed Marla Ruzicka?", the activist who was
killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Horowitz doesn't answer the question but
suggests that at the time of her death Ruzicka had parted, or was on the way to
parting company with the radical Left.

In the last year of her short life, she had moved away from the agendas and
organizations of extreme left that had originally directed her life path to
the war zones in order to establish a path of her own. In her new endeavor she
guided partly by her genuine concern for the defenseless victims of the
conflict and partly by political forces that continued to exploit those
concerns.

Unlike Rachel Corrie, who lost her life in Gaza serving a solidarity
movement with terrorists and who consequently became a martyr for the
anti-American cause, Marla Ruzicka was respected and mourned not only by the
left but by supporters of the war who knew her, and even by members of the
Bush administration and military whom she first harrangued and then petitioned
and who ended up in a partially voluntary cooperation with her endeavors.

Jeffrey Goldberg of the New
Yorker interviewed UnderSecretary of Defense Douglas Feith in his library.
Feith is famous as the man who Tommy Franks once called �the fucking stupidest
guy on the face of the earth�, though current JCS Chief Peter Pace likes him.
Pace said, �early on, he didn�t realize that the way he presented his
positions, the way he was being perceived, put him in a bit of a hole. But he
changed his ways.� You could see how Feith could rub Franks the wrong way.
Feith asked the New Yorker correspondent if he had read "the
McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1916" as if that's what people did in
their spare time. Feith probably does. It was probably his obsession with
history that kept him from the seductions of the antiwar movement in his youth.

Feith formed his views as a teen-ager in the Philadelphia suburbs during
the Vietnam War. �I had done a lot of reading, relative for a kid, about
World War Two, and I thought about Chamberlain a lot,� he told me. �Chamberlain
wasn�t popular in my house.� Feith�s father lost his parents, three
brothers, and four sisters in German death camps. �What I was hearing from
the antiwar movement, with which I had a fair amount of sympathy . . . were
thoughts about how the world works, how war is not the answer. I mean, the
idea that we could have peace no matter what anybody else in the world does
didn�t make sense to me. It�s a solipsism. When I took all these
nice-sounding ideas and compared it to my own little personal �Cogito, ergo
sum,� which was my understanding that my family got wiped out by Hitler, and
that all this stuff about working things out�well, talking to Hitler to
resolve the problem didn�t make any sense to me. The kind of people who put
bumper stickers on their car that declare that �war is not the answer,�
are they making a serious comment? What�s the answer to Pearl Harbor? What�s
the answer to the Holocaust?� He continued, �The surprising thing is not
that there are so many Jews who are neocons but that there are so many who are
not.�

For once, Henry Kissinger is stumped. In an interview with MSNBC
Kissinger described why it is important to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear
weapons. Kissinger, like most men of his vintage, was steeped in the lore of
Cold War deterrence, not just in its general principles, but in all the
quasi-mathematical models, the game theoretics and mathematical calculations of
choice which underlay it. He looked back almost wistfully at the Cold War as a
time of relative certainties: "this was a two-power world" and
recoiled in horror at the almost chaotic international situation of the present.

Now if you imagine a world of 30 nuclear powers, deterring each other by
criteria, very hard to calculate, affecting us with their nuclear capabilities
and the alignments they might cause. And the intentions they might generate
from other observers of this situation. And if you add to it what we've
already seen in the disposition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan, a friendly
country. That, whose weapons in so-called private hands spread to Libya, North
Korea, and we offer to Iran or we give them to Iran, then the possibilities of
extreme action somewhere along the line, would rise.

Supposing a nuclear weapon went off anywhere in the world, New Delhi, New
York, Europe, and 100,000 people got killed, not 3,000. The Trade Center was
relatively tame. People got killed in one place. The civic structure of the
city was barely affected. All hospitals were operating. All social services
were intact. It was a terrible tragedy, but if much of a town is wiped out and
all social services collapse, two things happen: one, the impact on that
society. But impact on the consciousness of people everywhere. Even today
families wonder what may happen to their children under conditions of
terrorism. But not yet accurately. But supposing they have to think that they
really might lose everything in one minute. Totally unpredictable. You will
get new demands on international relations in my view, for which we're not
prepared anywhere in any country and then you might get demands that these
nuclear weapons have to be brought under some international control.

Which was Kissinger's roundabout way of saying that if war really broke out
-- really broke out -- America might have to do something that few would like
(what that might be was the subject of a very old Belmont Club post, The
Three Conjectures) Kissinger hesitated on the brink of speculating what
course of action lay at the end of a road in which first Iran and then others --
including 'so-called private hands' held nuclear weapons, and passed on the
question. "I have no precise idea how to do all of this. ... So I�m more
conscious of the problem than of the solution. I�m not saying I have a master
plan for doing this."

Non-State Belligerents

The bombing of a Baghdad ice cream parlor reminded
George Will (hat tip: Donald
Sensing) of a similar scene in Franco Solina's the Battle
of Algiers (scene 65). In the late 1950s the Algerian FLN drove the
French out of Algeria through a successful campaign of terror. George Will
believes that similar methods will not work in Iraq because the Iraqi insurgency "does
not have a fighting faith" of the FLN. While the Algerian insurgency
"was fueled by the most potent 'ism' of a century of isms -- nationalism
... one of the strange, almost surreal, aspects of the Iraqi insurgency is its
lack of ideological content."

Professor Max
Manwaring of US Army War College (hat tip: Austin
Bay) argues that it is precisely for that reason -- the lack of ideological
content -- that modern insurgencies are so dangerous. The FLN was an insurgency
aspiring to become a state; whereas many modern insurgencies are "nonstate
belligerents" without such ambitions and they comprise most of the security threats in the world
today. 

While some international boundary disputes remain alive such as the
Bolivian desire to regain access to the Pacific Ocean, and the chronic
problems between India and Pakistan, the Koreas, and Ethiopia/Eritrea only a
relatively few conventional formations of enemy soldiers are massing and
preparing to invade the territory of a neighbor. What we see instead are
numerous nonstate and transnational actors, including gangs, actively engaged
in internal disruption and destabilization efforts.

Manwaring argues that security threats in the 21st century are less likely to
come from invading armies than Osama Bin Laden's terrorists, cults, warlords,
transnational criminal organizations, institutionalized West African crime and
powerful street gangs.  "Rather than directly
competing with a nation-state" these Third Generation gangs "can use a
mix of complicity, indifference, corruption, and violent intimidation to co-opt
and seize control of a state or a portion of a nationstate quietly and
indirectly" so that they can go about their rackets. From Central America,
to Afghanistan and the Middle East, nation-states
are being stalked by organizations which require chaos to thrive. Like
terrorists in Iraq but unlike the FLN in Algeria, most of these "Third
Generation Gangs" care nothing about traditional nationalism except as a
public relations cover to justify their self-serving acts. For them
"fighting faith" is not a creed but a talking-point.

In examining warlordism
in Afghanistan LTC Raymond Millen of the US Army War College notes that the
disintegration of the Afghan permitted the archetypical nonstate belligerent,
the Al Qaeda/Taliban, to arise. Now having expelled the Taliban, America faces
not a challenging army in Afghanistan, but a succession of gangs and gang
alliances seeking to fill the vacuum.

Over 2 decades of incessant warfare destroyed Afghanistan as a functioning
state ... In the maelstrom of incessant internecine fighting in the 1990s, the
Taliban clawed its way to power and installed a medieval regime, providing
stability through brutality. The Taliban regime likely would have ...
continued its rule had Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda not provoked the United
States into a war ... The swift expulsion of the Taliban and al Qaeda
militants resulted in yet another regime change, but it did not ameliorate the
fundamental malaise afflicting Afghanistan warlordism. Because of their power
and wealth, Afghan warlords and their militias represent the greatest
challenge to Afghanistan�s rehabilitation as a functioning state ...

In the western hemisphere, Central American gangs have by corruption and
intimidation taken over large parts of their country's state apparatus.
Manwaring cites among many examples the fact that "Guatemala�s Vice
Minister of Defense, was operating a drug smuggling and robbery ring in
conjunction with Colombia�s Cali cartel" and drily notes that the pupils
have surpassed their teachers.

As a result, crime rates have increased dramatically to the point where the
Honduran annual murder rate ... is double that of Colombia�s ... important
because Colombia, with its ongoing internal conflict, is widely considered to
be the most violent society in Latin America. ... A majority of those murders
took place in public, in broad daylight, and many of the mutilated bodies were
left as grisly reminders of the gangs� prowess.

For this reason Manwaring terms such organizations "the new urban
insurgency". He warns that waiting to for Third Generation Gangs to exhibit
classic motivations such as 'nationalism' before regarding them as national
security threats constitutes a dangerous failure of perception. Nonstate
belligerents he says, will stick at nothing, including acquiring WMDs.

Thus, we reiterate that if third generation gangs look like ducks, walk
like ducks, and act like ducks they indeed are insurgent-type ducks. ...
Nonstate war involves criminal and terrorist actors who thrive among and
within various host countries. This type of conflict is often called �guerrilla
war,� �asymmetric war,� and also �complex emergencies.� 

Manwaring's central insight is brilliant: he knows that Al Qaeda is as much
about amassing money and power as about any tenet of the Islamic faith. It's is
as much about private ambitions as ideology. It's not personal: it's business.
George Will, on the other hand, persists in trying to understand the insurgency
through nation-state theory. He compare the Iraqi insurgency to the FLN and
wonders what they are about.

Iraq's insurgents are degenerate Hobbesians ...by promiscuously dispensing
death, thereby creating the chaos of a Hobbesian state of nature, the
insurgents hope to delegitimize the Iraqi government for its failure to
provide the primary social good: freedom from fear of violent death. ... To
escape such horrors, people would make a rational, if stark, social contract.
They would consent to surrender their natural rights to empower a severely
strong government that would at least release them from fear of violent death.

What they are about is local, private fiefdoms. Rather than a strong central
government, the strategic goal of the Iraqi insurgency may in fact be chaos; the
endpoint not a nation-state but warlord-power in an atmosphere congenial to
criminal activity. The War College monograph Strategic
Implications of Intercommunal Warfare in Iraq by Andrew Terrill points out
that the major danger facing Iraq isn't that the insurgency will somehow defeat
and expel the US Armed Forces, however devoutly the Left may wish that. The real
danger is that the insurgency will ignite a civil war in the years after the US
withdrawal.

Immediately following Saddam�s ouster, the U.S. leadership hoped that
militias would not take root in the Iraqi political system ... this hope has
now proven illusory, and senior U.S. officials acknowledge the need to
tolerate some militia activity....  Senior U.S. policymakers currently
suggest that militias will become unnecessary as legitimate governmental
security institutions are strengthened, and militias are replaced or absorbed
by national and regional governmental security forces. Most major Iraqi
militias are associated with religious and ethnic political parties, although
some are also tribal. As such, these militias would be expected to fight in
the interests of their sectarian or ethnic communities, should relations among
Iraqi communities decline or collapse.

But an collapse of Iraqi civil society might simply be one among many such
failures worldwide. More than a few countries in Central and Latin America, the
former Soviet Republics, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East are becoming
or have become failed states. From their festering carcasses will crawl not
armies but transnational criminal and terrorist organizations of the most
vicious kind. The kinds of transformations operational necessity has imposed on
US government institutions may hint at what is to come. The emphasis on homeland
security, border control, tracking criminal funds flows, developing intelligence
databases and the reworking of the Armed Forces so that it can fight
mini-engagements in living rooms and alleyways suggest that it is unconsciously
evolving to meet this new kind of enemy. But we continue to see the bombing of the Al Riadhy ice cream parlor in Baghdad through the prism of the fictional Cafeteria Rue Michelet in in the Battle of Algiers, the conscious part of the public mind lingering in the era before the challenge to the nation-state had emerged. Solutions to international security problems will continue to be sought through the ambassadors, ministers and representatives of states long after they have lost internal sovereignty; and the United Nations considered all the more important in proportion to its irrelevancy. The darkness will flow onward while we wonder in perplexity what has blotted out the stars.

Open Post: Tolstoy on Savagery

Tolstoy argued that people living in every age were afflicted by the illusion
of 'these days', as if people who had gone before them had never faced the same
human dilemmas in their historical period. A mild flu is going to keep me from
posting, but since I can't provide a Zen-like image to stimulate comments, I'll
offer something better: Prince Andrei's monologue on the eve of the Battle of
Borodino, after which both Moscow and Napoleon's Grand Armee were alike
doomed. The speech foreshadows many of the themes that have attended the debate
over torture in the 21st century: one of the things which try men souls 'these
days'. The wonder of Prince Andrei's (here anglicized to Andrew) speech
to Pierre Bezuhov is that it manages to be both a denunciation of war and a
condemnation of the "laws of war" at one and the same time.

"So you think we shall win tomorrow's battle?" asked Pierre.



"Yes, yes," answered Prince Andrew absently. "One thing I would do if I had the power," he began again,
"I would not take prisoners. Why take prisoners? It's chivalry! The French have destroyed my home and are on their way to destroy Moscow, they have outraged and are outraging me every moment. They are my enemies. In my opinion they are all criminals. And so thinks Timokhin and the whole army. They should be executed! Since they are my foes they cannot be my friends, whatever may have been said at Tilsit."



"Yes, yes," muttered Pierre, looking with shining eyes at Prince Andrew. "I quite agree with you!"



The question that had perturbed Pierre on the Mozhaysk hill and all that day now seemed to him quite clear and completely solved. He now understood the whole meaning and importance of this war and of the impending battle. All he had seen that day, all the significant and stern expressions on the faces he had seen in passing, were lit up for him by a new light. He understood that latent heat (as they say in physics) of patriotism which was present in all these men he had seen, and this explained to him why they all prepared for death calmly, and as it were lightheartedly.



"Not take prisoners," Prince Andrew continued: "That by itself would quite change the whole war and make it less cruel. As it is we have played at war- that's what's vile! We play at magnanimity and all that stuff. Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kind-hearted that she can't look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce. They talk to us of the rules of war, of chivalry, of flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on. It's all rubbish! I saw chivalry and flags of truce in 1805; they humbugged us and we humbugged them. They plunder other people's houses, issue false paper money, and worst of all they kill my children and my father, and then talk of rules of war and magnanimity to foes! Take no prisoners, but kill and be killed! He who has come to this as I have through the same sufferings..."



Prince Andrew, who had thought it was all the same to him whether or not Moscow was taken as Smolensk had been, was suddenly checked in his speech by an unexpected cramp in his throat. He paced up and down a few times in silence, but his eyes glittered feverishly and his lips quivered as he began speaking.



"If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worth while going to certain death, as now. Then there would not be war because Paul Ivanovich had offended Michael Ivanovich. And when there was a war, like this one, it would be war! And then the determination of the troops would be quite different. Then all these Westphalians and Hessians whom Napoleon is leading would not follow him into Russia, and we should not go to fight in Austria and Prussia without knowing why. War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous. The military calling is the most highly honored.



"But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country's inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone. All the kings, except the Chinese, wear military uniforms, and he who kills most people receives the highest rewards.



"They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they announce a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?" exclaimed Prince Andrew in a shrill, piercing voice. "Ah, my friend, it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to understand too much. And it doesn't do for man to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.... Ah, well, it's not for long!" he added.