Nervous in Baghdad
BAY, AUSTIN
Nervous in Baghdad Do Americans have the will to stay the course? BY AUSTIN BAY Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan The Afghan farmer at Three Markets—Sayh Dukon in the local dialect—showed me how he...
...Progress in this war has been hard to follow for a reason...
...Terrorist bombs are made for TV, and terrorist beheadings are made for the Internet...
...Vietnam and Watergate for three decades have provided the New York-Washington-L.A...
...We'd forded the Berq River, visited the village of Bakhshe Khil, and were returning to Bagram Air Base via Sayh Dukon...
...The succinct, acronym-packed reports flowed like haikus of violence: "0331: 1/5 Cav, 1st Cavalry Division, arrests suspects after Iraqi police stop car...
...soldiers in the field who found the vice president's off-the-cuff assessment at best perplexing, at worst ignorant...
...The Baghdad of June 2005 is not the Baghdad I left in September 2004...
...We will have no pretexts...
...Since the loss of its Afghan base, al Qaeda has experienced extraordinary pressure...
...The insurgency won't be defeated through the barrel of a weapon but through a political process...
...But there is so much to do, so much still to do...
...Last July I saw six Iraqi National Guardsmen manning a position beneath a freeway overpass...
...BY AUSTIN BAY Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan The Afghan farmer at Three Markets—Sayh Dukon in the local dialect—showed me how he killed the yellow-bellied viper...
...Has Dick Cheney ever seen a snake die...
...Into Al Anbar" province, toward the Syrian border...
...The worst haters of America and its counterof-fensive against terror—following the lead of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, al Qaeda's man in Iraq, and Britain's hard-left buffoon, George Galloway—acknowledge no conceivable measure of success...
...I thought that—but I didn't say any of it...
...Infantry Division...
...they require planet-building...
...The deal is] let your problem be somebody else's...
...I was still in Afghanistan, so I missed the general's performance...
...For the sake of their own reputation (as well as any notion of divine sanction), al Qaeda's cadres must show CNN and Al Jazeera they are still capable of dramatic endeavor...
...I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency," Cheney told CNN's Larry King on May 30, when asked to appraise the warfare in Iraq...
...The fact is you have Iraqi leaders and soldiers who go out and face it [the insurgency] every day...
...Then, I swear, I knew...
...Patient, he said...
...Early on the Bush administration failed to tap the great reservoir of political willingness 9/11 generated...
...deal had only authorized removing Iraqi forces from Kuwait, but Resolution 687—which halted Desert Storm—also demanded fair treatment of Iraq's Shias and Kurds...
...The spool spun on and on, and I remember thinking: I know we're winning...
...Army or French Army or British Army," Abizaid replied...
...Last year I would have said it was Baghdad...
...Somehow we've got to get a stable policy—something that will help see us through the economic and political development phases of this war...
...Bouyeri is a 9/11 jihadist—the kind of religious nihilist who, given half a chance, will fly a 767 into a skyscraper...
...Newsweek certainly thought "the snake's there and we're here" when it ran its notorious "Koran flushing" anecdote, sparking deadly riots in Pakistan...
...I moved from the snake to a pan shot of the farmer's wheat field and the Bagram plain, with snow-capped Himalayan peaks rising in the distance...
...Bouyeri left a five-page letter on the body that said "there will be no mercy for the wicked, only the sword will be raised against them" and promised to destroy Holland, the United States, and Europe...
...soil...
...Collect relatively isolated events in a chronological list and presto: the impression of uninterrupted, widespread violence destroying Iraq...
...In the wake of Desert Storm, when the Shias revolted in southern Iraq, American forces stood pat, and Saddam's Republican Guard slaughtered them en masse...
...Time to plan is squeezed...
...During the house-to-house search that led to Wood's rescue, a U.S...
...MOI has the lead inside Baghdad, MOD outside...
...Why is that...
...The Clinton administration then proceeded to dither...
...I hear reports of the Iraqi Army conducting independent street-clearing and neighborhood search operations...
...The Vietnam and Watergate rules are simple and cynical...
...The Iraqi troops "coordinated...
...In February of this year, under the direction of an Iraqi colonel, Muhammad Faiq Raouf, the battalion drove terrorists from this key Baghdad drag...
...Another man had already returned to the wheat field, bending over the grain, reaching down into the furrow...
...But the covert program came too late for savaged Sarajevo and Srebrenica...
...This would be a huge victory, not only for the United States but for Arab and Muslim prestige...
...The trick will be to use these capable nuclei to build a larger, sustainable force...
...To call them snakes insults reptiles, but they die slowly, and they are vicious in their agony...
...In this part of the world, Abizaid nodded, "they'd just as soon have [their] Sunni extremists go to Al Anbar and get killed...
...Nothing bespeaks faith in a middle-class future like home remodeling...
...He also told van Gogh's mother: "I don't feel your pain...
...The American presence in Iraq serves as a baited trap that al Qaeda cannot ignore...
...The message of 9/11: In the 21st century you darned well better be...
...December 2001: Mom phoned and said she remembered being a teenager in late 1942 and tossing a tin can on a wagon that rolled past the train station in her hometown of Plainview, Texas—a World War II scrap metal drive...
...Is the plan realist or is it utopian...
...Building a New Iraq and defeating those who would destroy it is the grand strategy—but the Bush administration didn't make that case explicit...
...But that's a vast improvement over the zero that existed in July 2004...
...And that is still the big challenge...
...political cycle...
...Bullets go bang, and so do ballots in their own way...
...The center of friction is now somewhere west of Baghdad...
...media axis (even though Tet occurred during a Democratic administration...
...Yes, I thought, and that's also the only thing that can defeat America...
...The strategic ambush of 9/11 sought to force America to fight on al Qaeda's terms, to suck the United States into a no-win Afghan war, to bait the United States into launching a "crusade against Islam...
...This matters, because this is what it will take...
...The Iraqis have been fighting and dying at a rate three to four times greater than ours, so I wouldn't sell them short...
...Now we, America, we are giving Afghanistan a chance...
...As if on cue a staff officer signaled...
...This is how the war on terror will be won, I thought—when the elections are held, the men return to their wheat fields, and the snakes are dead...
...In a world with jumbo jets and the Internet, economic productivity, popular sovereignty, and mutual security aren't the products of mere nation-building...
...We're squeezing them more and more...
...An American soldier skinned the snake and dangled its body in front of my video camera as a half-dozen Kevlar-armored kibitzers debated the snake's lethality...
...But Haiti proved to be a hollow gesture...
...Here's one of the things a strategic policy guy like you, Austin, is going to see immediately...
...Yes, Iraqis and Americans are still paying for the biggest mistake we made in this war: disbanding the Iraqi Army...
...Maureen Dowd might have snarked at that, but again, so what...
...His killer, a second-generation Arab immigrant named Mohammed Bouyeri, shot van Gogh, stabbed him, then slit the filmmaker's throat...
...Falluja has become a symbol for fighting Western Crusaders...
...Go ahead and check your email," he said, pointing to his computer...
...They will be an Iraqi Army, capable of defending their country...
...Last year, Haifa Street was a combat zone where U.S...
...You pull his gun away from the heads of those he threatens...
...Terrorist organizations in the Middle East—the initial crop largely Palestinian—were armed and trained by the Soviets...
...How do you do it...
...So al Qaeda has come to Iraq to fight...
...On June 23 CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid told a Senate hearing that the Iraqi insurgency was at "about the same" strength it was six months ago...
...Is Colonel Muhammad's unit one of those Iraqi units Lieutenant General Vines says plans its own missions...
...Bush I discouraged post-Soviet Ukraine's democratic aspirations...
...political cycle," meaning the elections...
...He stood up...
...For three decades Jdhooshi lived in Los Angeles...
...I know way too many exceptions—some who have wised up, and some who have borne the burdens of real-world responsibility and bad history from the get-go...
...Here's how I answer that...
...I felt the ship roll ever so slightly, but the officer had a sailor's innate compensation, the roll absorbed in the tip and angle of his chair...
...I was in Iraq again, this time with a note pad and camera instead of a pistol...
...Global development—and that includes the development of democratic legal systems capable of controlling corruption—is in the direct security interest of the United States...
...For decades Arab moderates have complained that they literally live under the gun, fearing reprisal and death...
...Abizaid—wearing desert camouflage, a flak vest, and his 1st Ranger Battalion combat patch—looked thoroughly composed, displaying the earned gravitas of the superior combat commander who knows dust, gripes, mistakes, direct fire, and writers come with the job...
...The upscale phrase is "technological compression," but the down-to-Earth 21st century fact is all of us live next door...
...We were standing under a camou net, waiting for the Iraqi police brigadier now charged with directing Iraqi security operations in Falluja...
...They can do that because we've been fairly successful," the officer replied, as he dropped his feet to the deck—and he meant successful in fighting the war on terror...
...The White House has also soft-pedaled the paradox in America's Middle East strategy: Political and economic success in the Middle East inevitably attracts terrorists...
...The U.S...
...And I see that...
...His crime is a European example of how the "murder tool" is used by political and religious reactionaries to thwart moderate voices throughout the Middle East...
...You killed it, but in its last throes it got you...
...Rule Two: Presume the worst about the U.S...
...Believe it or not, bureaucracies in the United States don't coordinate among themselves...
...However, flash the flames of that one rig on CNN and, "Oh my God, America can't stop these guys," is the impression left from Boise to Beijing...
...But the drop-by-drop police blotter perspective obscures that...
...decadence...
...The United States acted to defend European Muslims...
...yes, competition breeds a kind of diversity, but since Tet 1968 and Richard Nixon's election Republicans haven't gotten a fair shake from the New York-Washington-L.A...
...Clothing drives for Afghan refugees...
...Bishop Tutu had been there for a month, using our church as a base for his forays to the U.N...
...While I was in Baghdad, troops from "Colonel Muhammad's" battalion rescued Australian hostage Douglas Wood...
...Even when Falluja is policed by Iraqis...
...In part I didn't say it because it's not totally true...
...He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye...
...Maybe by Iraqi forces alone...
...No, this "press" isn't a monolith...
...Z-Man said as much in his captured message to al Qaeda in February 2004...
...The Bush administration has not done that—at least not in any focused and sustained fashion...
...Marine base at Falluja...
...Another memory of those days...
...We're winning because—in the big picture—all the opposition (Saddam's thugs and Zarqawi's al Qaeda) has to offer is the tyranny of the past...
...Army Reserve officer who served in Iraq from May through September 2004...
...The bad guys aren't stupid...
...The Bush administration has had extraordinary successes in the field...
...Through the camera lens the vast range shimmered like a mirage...
...approval...
...media axis with convenient—if reductive—headlines...
...Jdhooshi grinned, his beard jutting forward, and I immediately knew the question was stupid...
...In the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton criticized Bush I for indecisiveness in the Balkans, specifically Bosnia...
...Absolutely," Horst replied...
...The family grew grapes," Jdhooshi said, pointing to a two-story structure that had not quite collapsed...
...a Navy officer asked me...
...In terms of this war's battlespace, the January Iraqi elections were World War II's D-Day and Battle of the Bulge combined...
...Sam Palmer in the Al Faw Palace in May 2004...
...Tutu confirmed that with a nod, and took another sip of tea...
...I said that corruption was a huge problem and he agreed...
...failure in Afghanistan would ignite a global "clash of civilizations" pitting all Muslims against America...
...Niggle over individuals, pull this stray story from that odd report, but the weight of evidence is heavy...
...There is so much to do, so much still to do," Jdhooshi said...
...If hate is a verb-too-far then substitute "fundamentally distrusts...
...What's the Iraqi Army going to be like, in two or three years...
...Army's 716th MP Battalion, Ft...
...The issue is "their ability to sustain it...
...He laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back in his chair...
...But that was a false impression, even in July 2004...
...In Bakhshe Khil the villagers had talked about water— there's plenty this year—and one of them mentioned the next round of national elections, scheduled for September...
...Every car bomb in Baghdad, they will say, just creates more terrorists, and America's war on terror reduces to the soundbite "blood for oil...
...The United States has used diplomacy, police work, better intel, and its military presence to exert the pressure...
...and elsewhere...
...It's pursuing "The Big Win"—a strategy designed to create a secure, 21st-century international order that will allow open societies to operate without fear of WMDs or IEDs...
...In the early 1990s our enemies began proselytizing London and New York mosques and in doing so began planting cadres throughout the world...
...Well, yes...
...The November 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh stunned the civilized world...
...Why...
...The Iraqi police brigadier—wearing a nifty SWAT-style flak vest—had arrived...
...The Washington press corps reflects the ethos of the national press, and that ethos is left-liberal Democrat...
...Campbell, Kentucky...
...Abizaid said as we flew from Qatar to Iraq...
...Even if Washington leads a successful global counterterror war, many of these cadres will unfortunately turn gray before it's over...
...More careful and generous analysts remember the Afghan elections of October 2004, then an Orange Revolution in Ukraine, then an election in Palestine, then the ink-stained vote in Iraq...
...I do not include the 36th Commando Battalion in this mix—that elite unit was a very effective force already in 2004...
...Defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed al Qaeda's claim of "divine sanction" for its international war...
...The law [sharia] instructs me to chop off the head of everyone who insults Allah or the prophet...
...Actually, I should call him an Angeleno...
...Brigadier Gen...
...military—even when the president is a Democrat...
...Wheat and elections—to grow wheat and hold straight elections requires security...
...Another reporter asks Vines the gut question: "The loss of national will...
...Time is now turned against al Qaeda, in the form of a new Iraqi army, in the political shape of a new, pluralistic Iraqi government—examples of what General Abizaid calls "Iraqis taking control of their own lives...
...Bin Laden's strategy flopped, for a slew of reasons...
...There is so much to do," Jdhooshi said, "so much still to do...
...I remember Bishop Desmond Tutu's visit in 1984 to my church on New York City's Upper West Side...
...Though I was "over there," "back here" headlines dominated cyberspace...
...It was a rhetorical question—he is a man sophisticated in the ways of Washington...
...June 2005—back in the Al Faw Palace, this time for an interview with Lieutenant General John Vines, the commander of XVIIIth Airborne Corps...
...Removing Saddam Hussein began the reconfiguration of the politically dysfunctional Arab Middle East—a dangerous, expensive process, but one that will give moderates the chance to build states where the consent of the governed creates legitimacy and where terrorists are prosecuted, not protected...
...Austin, we need a war bond drive...
...I remember running into Col...
...I walked into the coalition's Joint Operations Center in Al Faw Palace, Baghdad, and took a seat in the back of the tiered amphitheater...
...Jdhooshi" is a nom de guerre, but seems to fit the Austin Bay is a syndicated columnist and U.S...
...Americans want business as usual," I said to the naval officer as the slow roll passed...
...And we know that great change is often accompanied by great violence...
...That means a multiadministration war, which means bridging what my friend Sam Palmer (a genuine liberal warrior, God bless him) identified as the whipsaw of the U.S...
...The real measure is not military but political...
...Every day, coalition forces were moving thousands of 18-wheelers from Kuwait and Turkey into Iraq...
...After Iraqis run their own government, U.S...
...The negatives are all too familiar—terror bombs and the slaughter of Iraqi citizens...
...Failure to react would demonstrate al Qaeda's impotence...
...Abizaid had taken off his helmet, and passed it to one of his aides...
...military is fighting, the nascent Iraqi military is fighting, the Iraqi people are fighting, but where is the American political class...
...I did get to hear Abizaid on June 16, while waiting at the East Gate of the U.S...
...At his trial in July 2005, Bouyeri testified to his own depravity and the jihadists' sociopathology...
...Al Qaeda's biggest recruiting tool was—and is—the political failure of the Arab world...
...Does that [possibility] scare you...
...Rule One: Presume the U.S...
...That was tied to tax cut programs to fight recession...
...Prior to 9/11, with little pressure on its hidden network (succored by the Taliban, Wahhabi petrodollars, worldwide fundraising, and, yes, Iraq), al Qaeda could take its time to spring a vicious surprise attack—surprise and visionary viciousness being its strengths and the gist of its "asymmetric" challenge to America's "symmetric" power...
...The Soviets, in concert with Arab clients like Syria and Nasser's Egypt, promoted the Arab-Israeli conflict as an American conspiracy...
...It was the first time I had seen independently deployed Iraqi forces...
...That is the way it will be if we are successful...
...Washington, D.C., and cable news have no patience...
...After 9/11, realists confronted a reality that demanded idealism...
...How many Iraqi battalions work like Colonel Muhammad's...
...But they won't if America wilts, and our weakness is back home, in front of the TV, on the cable squawk shows, on the editorial pages, in the political gotcha games of Washington, D.C...
...The Bush administration is going to make a terrible mistake if it does not let the American people get involved in this war...
...The vines, they would drop from wood, from poles on the roof, to ripen into raisins...
...I'd been on a motor patrol with the 164th Military Police Company, part of the U.S...
...Al Qaeda still fears an American and Iraqi strategic victory—a democracy defending itself against terrorists...
...The Bush administration hates the Washington press corps, and vice versa...
...Did last year's elections make a difference...
...Snake death at close-range is a writhing, dangerous agony as the damned and bleeding thing lunges at your eyes, your hand, your knife, the boot its first strike failed to penetrate...
...0335 USMC vicinity Fallu-ja engaged by RPG, returned fire...
...We're whip-sawed by the U.S...
...Why the rank negativism...
...Fear us, America," was the message, "because al Qaeda chooses the time and place of battle, and when we do you are defenseless...
...Given the vicious enemy we face, five years, perhaps fifteen years from now, occasional bullets and bombs will disrupt the political and economic building...
...Unfortunately, many politicians and journalists still habitually live by 20th-century templates...
...My bet is that the Iraqis will pull it off...
...statements are met with arrogant contempt...
...At tea time after church he had the usual klatch around him, but this morning's subject was economic aid to Africa...
...She was right then, and she's right now...
...That's what they're training for, that's what they're going to be...
...Moscow needed time to lick its wounds...
...Vines had just briefed us on Operation Lightning, an Iraqi and U.S...
...The final battle of the Iraqi insurgency will be fought here...
...The piles of bricks around Iraqi homes are a positive sign...
...Success in the war on terror may strike New York Times readers and CNN viewers as a radically optimistic notion...
...So I didn't shoot my mouth...
...He flicked his wrist, cutting the air with his hand-held scythe, his smile vacillating between amused relief and grim satisfaction...
...On 9/11 al Qaeda demonstrated that what the World War I generation called "over there" is nowadays very close to "back here...
...It leaves you wondering if anyone in Washington—at least anyone in the Baby Boomer political class—knows what it takes to win a long, tedious, unavoidable war...
...Would the national press and academic left have called a "Democracy Bond" or a "Security and Development Bond" drive corny...
...If the insurgents were lucky they blew up one...
...I've heard that personally from Palestinians and Syrians—and Iraqis during Saddam Hussein's reign...
...An airline ticket, a sick tourist, and 22 hours moves the Asian flu from Bangkok to Denver...
...There, it seems America just wants to get on with its Electra-Glide life, that September 10 sense of freedom and security, without finishing the job...
...Wipe the sweat from your face, glance at the nervous man behind you, swipe the tall-grass with the back of your blade, swat a bothersome gnat—take your eye off the enemy and in that instant the coiled, dying devil lands a fang...
...She knew that the can she tossed didn't add much to the war effort, but she felt that in some small, token, but very real way, she was contributing to the battle...
...Galloway-Zarqawi critiques are the latest embodiment of anti-American themes with deep roots, dating back to Soviet Cold War propaganda...
...Bush's administration were horrified by the prospect of nation-building...
...My flak vest was a black police SWAT jacket, more svelte than the heavy, plated monster I wore last year while racing along Baghdad's Route Irish (see "The Millennium War," The Weekly Standard, January 3 / January 10, 2005...
...I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago...
...For the military...
...It's moved from Baghdad, west...
...So how do you do it...
...The realpolitik maestros of George H.W...
...The temperature was approaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit, which didn't bother me so much...
...I stopped to watch two farmers bury the snake in a hole the size of a shoe box...
...What Al Toffler called the "slow" and "fast" worlds became the Pentagon's world of "gaps" and "cores," or "disconnected" and "connected" regions...
...The United States also pulled an "asymmetric" military move of sorts, using Green Beret-guided Afghan allies and high-tech airpower to topple the Taliban...
...At least half of that operation [in June] was planned and executed by Iraqi MOD [Ministry of Defense] and MOI [Ministry of Interior] troops, [operating] along with the 3rd ID [Third U.S...
...I knew I could help by working as a translator...
...The main problem [in Iraq] is the Sunni Arab community coming into the political process, and that takes patient military and political skills...
...It attracted international terrorists...
...The truth is, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Southeast Asia, and Pakistan are all arguably successes in the making— slow, incremental, 1.01-steps-forward-one-step-back successes, where the enemies are tough, determined, and often well-financed...
...Déjà vu all over again, though with dust this time, and no roll: It's the conversation with the naval officer...
...Iraq's new army and police will link with the people "by lineage, blood and appearance...
...We have no patience, I thought...
...When will the media figure this out: Al Qaeda and its cohorts are strategic information powers and little else...
...Less implacable critics of the Bush administration recognize two negative metrics implying a degree of success in the war on terror: (1) There's been no use of weapons of mass destruction by al Qaeda and its allies and (2) no second 9/11 has occurred on U.S...
...Horst told me that he and his Iraqi counterpart now have tea in a sidewalk cafe along the once notorious boulevard...
...I took his chair and proceeded to read two-dozen emails, from Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia, including a note from a young woman working on border control issues in Afghanistan...
...We see good progress in both Iraq and Afghanistan . . . but we are realistic...
...The Clinton administration talked the talk of international development...
...Exactly the same...
...How do you stop a man like Bouyeri in a world where oceans mean so little...
...Here's my guess, based on what I've gleaned from my best military sources: As of June 2005 there were a half-dozen Iraqi Army battalions capable of running their own operations...
...Hitting a sidewinder on a Wyoming highway doesn't count...
...If I'm ever released, I'd do the same again...
...Muhammad is a real live Iraqi hero," Horst told me...
...Vines says...
...Administration officials did preach a bit, but the sermon was too cheery: America needed to maintain a strong economy to sustain the war effort...
...But after 9/11, when the war on terror came to Afghanistan, he knew he had to get involved...
...Bishop Tutu asked...
...I asked...
...Sure, the U.N...
...His most recent novel is The Wrong Side of Brightness...
...The Bush administration's reaction to 9/11—specifi-cally, its strategic decision to go on offense—has been the right thing in spades: Take the gun from the hands of tyrants and terrorists...
...I remember a very early morning in July 2004, still on active duty, when I realized this was the case...
...It has suffered so much...
...I see that every day...
...The bottom line for Galloway-Zarqawi types: Any event on the planet—real or imagined—that dishonest rhetoric can connect to either the United States or Israel always creates more terrorists...
...The mood of how this war is going in Baghdad and Arab capitals is better than in Washington and London," Abizaid said...
...By the end of 2006 the Iraqis plan to have 250,000 troops and policemen in uniform...
...In Washington business as usual is fighting over power...
...America acted to stop a war in Europe from spreading, a war with ethnic and religious dimensions...
...For the strategic good of the United States, and global liberty in general, however, this poisoned White House-press relationship may prove to be a huge problem...
...It "suggested" this case but shied away from making it the center of its public diplomacy...
...It should have been tied to an optional check-off on the IRS 1040: "Buy a Security Bond with $50 of your tax money...
...Chief among them, liberty remains an ideologically powerful idea...
...Abu Musab al Zarqawi believes it...
...Sam served as the Corps's C-9, in charge of Civil Affairs (economic assistance and civil-military relations...
...Our own ridiculous, catered-to generation, General, has little patience for anything except capital gains, and maybe that's too generous a statement...
...Downtown cranes sprout over city-block-sized construction projects...
...This is a chance to change this place, my country, my first country," he told me...
...Then he added: "In conservative Sunni neighborhoods you will find restaurants named Al Falluja...
...My mother predicted this...
...But what do you say to someone who says nothing has changed...
...Of course they would have—but so what...
...The Iraqis have gone a long way to deciding who has [security] responsibilities in Baghdad...
...In retrospect that was a long-term political mistake...
...Truthfully, yes," Gen...
...Marine Corps or U.S...
...A viewer could visually hopscotch from news to weather to war...
...The terrorists have yet to win an engagement above the platoon level," Gen...
...I had no idea what was coming...
...The best way is if we can directly link people, you know, in the U.S., in the West, to individuals in developing nations...
...Last year I'd humped Baghdad at 130...
...I asked...
...Toppling Saddam and bringing the hope of democracy to the Middle East strategically changed al Qaeda's "timelines...
...government is lying—espe-cially when the president is a Republican...
...Of course...
...America—according to its enemies—is everywhere, but a computer keystroke finds al Qaeda, Chinese spam, Nigerian scams, North Korean agitprop, Bhutanese rug prices, and Sudan's hideous genocide in Darfur...
...Al Qaeda is under pressure everywhere...
...The mass murder of Shias was a huge moral and political dilemma, and Bush I opted for a minimal response: air umbrellas over northern and southern Iraq...
...I told him I thought the churches did a better job of delivering effective development aid because they avoided corrupt governments...
...unit in the Third Infantry Division was in a supporting role, but the Iraqis planned and led the operation...
...This is the democracy...
...After all, they want America to lose...
...Karl Horst, assistant division commander of U.S...
...and coalition forces...
...All of this was too much for Republican "realists," until 9/11 made it clear that economic and political development—the expansion of the sphere of economically and politically liberal states—was key to America's 21stcentury security...
...But the bricks—the building of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the other hard corners where this war is and will be fought—that's a delicate and decades-long challenge...
...Al Qaeda's historical pattern is to wait patiently, for years if necessary, and carefully prepare a terror operation until it's certain of success...
...Al Qaeda has attempted to adapt, without apparent success, by using a sleeper cell strategy while aggressively attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction...
...I'll give odds that he regrets that comment...
...I mean, a C-17 is loud, but the man said it with exacting clarity...
...No casualties...
...Sam looked tired—looked, heck, he was beat, with the dark rims of 20-hour days circling his eyes...
...The connections ain't theory...
...It was 2100 hours, we'd had a long day in the northern Persian Gulf, but he still had duties...
...The Arabs see the Iraqis taking control of their own lives...
...They know wheat and elections are their death knell...
...We're in the corps commander's office, on the second floor...
...For 60 years, Jdhooshi guessed, an extended family had lived in the compound, and they were probably driven out by the Russians...
...effort in and around Baghdad...
...If this war is going to be won it must be fought in the heart of the Middle East...
...Oceans still spawn hurricanes, but they don't stop ICBMs or terrorists...
...The Taliban said it would not happen—but it did...
...Cain asked God if he was his brother's keeper...
...Al Qaeda's jihadists plotted a multigenerational war...
...An alarming number of them these days betray impatience with our progress in the war on terror...
...The dust, however, irritated me...
...I'll be back in 20 minutes...
...The people, they now have hope, they know some things can be different...
...military action against Iraq and its role in defeating al Qaeda...
...On an amphib warship 20 kilometers off Kuwait, I hit a half-dozen websites and scanned the latest Beltway hoopla...
...Gaps" with Muslim populations were the most critical, but "disconnected" dictators in Zimbabwe or Myanmar also provided haven to terrorists in exchange for cash...
...Afghanistan was slow, gappy, and disconnected...
...At Sayh Dukon we'd stopped to inspect an abandoned, mud-brick family compound the Russians had used as a garrison in what our translator, Jdhooshi, called "the war against the mujahedeen...
...It's poison," Jdhooshi assured me as we walked back to the MPs' armored Humvees...
...Strategy is always about applying one's own strength to an opponent's weakness...
...I acted out of conviction and not out of hate," Bouyeri told the court...
...You can almost hear the flummoxed questions in the White House briefing room: "You mean you're going to go there to build a new country but also attract bad guys...
...Third Infantry Division, told me about one Iraqi battalion's success on the perennially challenging Haifa Street...
...Rule Three: Allegations by "Third World victims" are presumptively true, while U.S...
...Iraqi tactical capability is adequate...
...Now, I see senior Iraqi officers in the hallways of Al Faw Palace conducting operational liaison with U.S...
...During my June visit to Central Command's theater of operations—from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, to Iraq, and concluding in Afghanistan—I met U.S...
...What in the hell is going on back there...
...Consider the enemy—and let him speak for himself...
...Two other templates were also in play then: the Vietnam and the Watergate templates...
...As for the snake...
...troops will remain, Zarqawi's message said, "but the sons of this land will be the authority...
...Here's a radical thought, politically incorrect, incorrect in terms of TV ratings but still strategically correct and correct in terms of defending liberal values: Winning the global war against Islamist terror ultimately means curbing the terrorists' strategic combat power, and that means ending the media magnification of their bombs...
...The pictures I saw on the web show the burly, intellectual Abizaid as a cool and serious senior officer, a kaleidoscope of military ribbons draping his dress green uniform...
...Somalia was slow, gappy, and disconnected...
...Al Anbar is two to three years behind the rest of Iraq in terms of development," General Abizaid went on...
...He's also had 43 death threats, and counting...
...Osama bin Laden believed he possessed an edge in ideological appeal, "faith-based" strength against what he perceived as U.S...
...These Cold War Soviet sources of anti-Americanism receive scant attention, but they are the foundation of the jihadists' information war, and fuel the conspiracy theorists at www.democraticunderground.org—cranks the Howard Dean wing of the DNC exploits for their money and votes...
...No kidding...
...The Clinton administration's greatest act of liberation—Kosovo—was a war fought without U.N...
...Its covert support of Croatia against Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia proved to be successful, culminating in August 1995's Operation Storm, which drove Serbian forces from the Krajina and back into eastern Bosnia...
...The money would have been better spent than the optional bucks dedicated to federal elections...
...A huge plasma screen draped the front wall, like a movie theater screen, divided into ceiling-high panels capable of displaying multiple computer projections...
...It's clear from the intel that Zar-qawi is under pressure...
...If the Big Mac is two minutes late, Boomers, be they left or right, get pissed...
...and Iraqi security forces showed up in Robo-Cop garb—helmets, armor, Bradleys, armored Humvees...
...Thirty years of war has left it with nothing...
...The biggest display, that morning and every morning, was a spooling date-time list describing scores of military and police actions undertaken over the last dozen hours...
...Do not think you will make the Iraqi Army into a U.S...
...In this dysfunctional world, tyranny and terror reinforce one another, with the people the inevitable victims...
...Which leads to the subject of U.S...
...spry, gray-bearded 69-year-old Afghan...
Vol. 10 • July 2005 • No. 42
