I think the problem is bigger than "ignorant" and/or "stupid" people because the "smart people" see the writing on the wall and wonder what happens after the international corporations take away their cash cow, the oil fields.

if the smart people were happy, the US and Iraqi governments would have a good working relationship.

In my opinion, I think that Bush loves genocide and he's treating the Iraqis like Native Americans: he'll keep going after them until they're on reservations (partitioned refuges?) and can't defend their economic rights (nationalized oil wealth).

To boldly go...

That's unusual for someone on the left.

You know, people might give you more consideration if you didn't come off like a sanctimonious prick. I don't want to cramp your style or anything, but cheapjack put downs like that don't do anything but piss people off.

If you can't be troubled to indulge civility, well, that just opens the door for people like me. Is that what you want?

Let's take a few minutes and think about what 'economic desperation' means in real terms.

I was just over looking at the Brookings Institute's Iraq Index, and I found the usual amusing statistics.

Unemployment in Iraq - Given as between 28% and 40%. The footnote suggests that they are taking multiple sources and assuming that there is progress, so they're weighting for more positive results. Other published figures floating around suggest an unemployment rate of 50% or better.

Inflation rate in Iraq - For 2007 it's swung up to 50%, in previous years it was estimated at 36% then dropping down to around 20%.

Percentage of Professionals who have left the country - 40%. I take this to mean that 40% of doctors, lawyers, engineers, pharmacists, machinists, skilled technicians, etc., have now departed Iraq, implying a substantial brain drain of skills and organizational resources.

Malnutrition - not on the Brookings Institute, but estimated to have doubled. We can take malnutrition or food insecurity as a sign of economic adversity.

Potable water is apparently still well below pre-war levels, and far far below target levels.

Electricity has theoretically reached Sanctions era levels. But is not all that far above it, and is two thirds actual needs.

98% of the countries exports are oil. Oil production is down significantly, roughly 75 to 80% of pre war levels.

In short, just about every discoverable economic indicator seems to be hideous.

Indeed, the official indicators are so bad I wonder why people aren't starving en masse. I can only assume that there's been a general retreat to subsistence economies and black markets. Even so, all evidence is that everyone is hurting.

Sure you stand by the statement. You took the opportunity to take a gratuitous swipe at the 'left.' Far as I can tell, this guy never did you no wrong, and his post was not particularly adversarial. You want to jump on his head, fine with me.

I'm really not interested in debating it with you, only in pointing it out to him. You'll have to find another debating partner if that's what you want.

Okey doke.

But I don't think we can separate these issues out. The economic disaster that is Iraq is of a part with the political and military disasters.

The fact that the American army cruises around Baghdad shooting people at will is part and parcel of the wild incompetence that is seen everywhere else.

Terrorism is first and foremost the fight of the weak against the strong. Sometime it's economically, in other cases it is the fight of the occupied against the occupier, e.g. Kurds, Irish, Palestinians. Sometime it's for religious purposes such as Al-Qaida where most of the 9-11 attacker were quite well of, e.g. Saudis.

The weak can resist without being terroristic, but the strong also tend to be quite brutal and indiscriminate. Thus, terrorism, in part, is a vicious cycle, Abu Gharib calls for a strong response, the Turks oppress their Kurds violently then the Kurds raise it a notch.

The there quite a long history of violence against civilians, e.g. Soviet Union against its own citizens, wide bombing of Dresden, the British in India. Why should we expect the weak to be the exception?

You make some excellent points, Nathan, but I have to take exception to one of your premises and your conclusion. Although it would be foolish to discount completely the effect of economic deprivation on encouraging terrorism, it is similarly ill-advised to give it too much significance.

First, we fall into an administration trap when we refer to the actions of Iraqis using violence in Iraq as terrorism. Would we label the French resistance in the 1940's as terrorism? No, but of course the occupying Germans did. The Iraqi insurgents are engaged in a fight to impose their will in their own country. We can agree that their methods are reprehensible when they target civilians; but when the targets are occupying soldiers, the activity is more appropriately designated as resistance rather than terrorism. They don't require ideology to hate us. They fight us because we are there, invaders in their homeland.

So to start with, let's make a distinction between the violence in Iraq and, say, the 9/11 attacks.

You say, "Without global inequality, Al Qaeda would just be a small bunch of guys ranting to each other on the Internet."
This "small bunch of guys" created a catastrophe in this country when they struck the WTC and the Pentagon. I refer not only to the direct impact -- which was certainly horrible enough in itself -- but even more importantly, the creation of fear-and-loathing political environment that lead to the coronation of King George III. Don't minimize the power Al Qaeda (as opposed to AQI). And may I remind you, as Sam Harris does, that the 9/11 attackers were not impoverished serfs, but rather solid upper-middle-class Saudis for the most part.

In short, I think you are overselling your point, even as I agree that economics is a contributing factor to the growth of terrorism.

"[Explaining how torture and humiliation of unemployed Arab men captured in midnight raids have yielded surprising data missing in earlier more conventional polling techniques], Capt. John Fleming of the Navy, a spokesman for the multinational forces’ detainee operations, [told our man in Baghdad that what these 'detainees' are crying out for is the services of an enthusiastic union organizer.]"

Far as I can tell, this guy never did you no wrong, and his post was not particularly adversarial.

is that because he's writing for a particular audience and, more specifically, your tastes?

his argument isn't adversarial if you sympathize with his class based arguments; however, you'd probably agree that Bush and Cheney are rich-- as are most members of congress, and don't we see them acting the same way? i.e., they support AIPAC, Guantanamo, outrageous military budgets, Abu Grave, etc...

so, if you're like me and see rich people getting richer off this war-- and embracing violence as an acceptable way towards that end, then the "Al Qaeda is growing because of poverty argument" seems stupid because men and women of all incomes dream about become richer via the military industrial complex.

I think the far more convincing argument about the unrest in Iraq was that Bathe party members weren't allowed to keep their jobs and a huge group of elite bureaucrats certainly know how to fight back, especially if they see their cash cow-- the oil, at risk.

So now it seems that "the surge" is about partitioning Iraq and maybe about building two fairly independent political systems one based on the old hierarchy and the other on the ruled "lower class" of the old hierarchy.

To boldly go...

I dunno, I suspect Captain Fleming may be telling us more than he intends. I'm reminded of a long history of the comfortable and the brutal attributing their ills to an evil conspiracy.

* There are the extremists (communists, anarchists, radicals, intellectuals, etc. etc.), the Goldstein's who are out to mislead and corrupt. Their ideological pretensions are hypocritical, they are weak and corrupt, dishonest, despite their protestations of idealism the morality underneath is tainted. However, the extremists or Goldsteins are so patently dishonest that any sensible fair-thinking man or woman can see through their clever webs of deception and evasion. Except, of course, for....

* The proles! Less clever than our protagonists. They are unable to see through the deceit of the Goldsteins. Intellectually subnormal, most of them are illiterate or unemployed, living in conditions of passive misery which is largely self inflicted. For the most part, proles are docile and happy, and in a perfect world are inclined to trust their betters (us) to run their lives for them. It's only when the Goldstein's intrude from outside, stirring up the proles, filling them with discontent, raising their expectations, etc. that things get messy.

There's always an outside agitator to blame for stirring up the proles.

Remember the civil rights days of the 60's, when it was all those 'Jewish Yankee lawyers' stirring up the 'peaceable negroes.'

Or the twenties and thirties when it was those 'labor organizers' sewing discontent among the 'happy coal miners.'

During the Winnipeg General Strike when the entire city rose up, the whole thing was blamed on "outside agitators."

We've heard it before. We'll hear it again.

At some point, it's so automatic, so reflexive, that you have to wonder if it's a matter of cluelessness, instinct or simple dishonesty.

Or perhaps our Captain Flemming is mislead by his own Goldstein, an agitator whose deceptions he himself is unable to see through.

Good God!

Nathan Newman writes a perfectly reasonable article defending the proposition that poverty, aka the inability to find a job, is one of the driving forces leading Iraqi people to join an organization officially labeled as "terrorist" - namely al Qaeda in Iraq - and a bunch of denizens of this supposedly leftwing site are tripping all over themselves to deny this point which should have been perfectly obvious from the beginning.

What is going on here?

What is all this quibbling? Nathan's wrong definition of terrorism? Get a clue. Al Qaeda shifts tactics to engage not only in terrorism (properly defined) but also starts engaging in "national liberation" activity, so Nathan is wrong for misdefining terrorism? Jesus H. Christ. If you want to go and defend al Qaeda in Iraq as being non-terrorist, be my guest.

This whole stupid argument merely reinforces Nathan's argument that economic factors should never have been taken off the table as being partially responsible for jihadi activity in the Middle East. But for six years it's been politically incorrect in the extreme to argue otherwise.

It should be obvious that all this is linked together in various ways. Thank you, Nathan, for having the guts to state the obvious. Who would have thought this should still be controversial.

The problem with your analysis is that you assume some sort of iron wall between terrorist and non-terrorist tactics, and assume that an organization or individual that engages in one cannot also engage in the other. There is no such law.

So I don't think that Nathan is overselling his point at all.

I rarly rate posts, but sometimes I make an exception.

For what its worth,

I remember part of a speech Bill Clinton made about 3 or 4 years ago. He said (paraphrase); all people must benefit from globalization. If only a few benefit there will be breeding grounds for terrorist recruitment.

He of course said it much better than I just did. I thought it made sense.

Would we label the French resistance in the 1940's as terrorism? No, but of course the occupying Germans did.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

[Hope this isn't a duplicate]
I wouldn't be so hasty to assume what people are called:

Would we label the French resistance in the 1940's as terrorism? No, but of course the occupying Germans did.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

I remember telling someone just before the start of the war that we had 6 months to make the Iraqi's lives demonstrably better than they were under Saddam or the whole thing was lost.

Looking back, I might have been rather optimistic about our chances. But in any case, we didn't come anywhere near that, or any other, goal.

Nice post Nathan...

I may be misattributing something to you -- were you saying that the French Resistance were not terrorists except in German eyes? If that wasn't you, apologies.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

desperation means there will be an inexhaustible supply of folks to kill civilians

and the rich don't fight to stay rich? it's seems to me that the elite (educated upper middle class) are the ones designing the weapons in the US. why blame the poor, uneducated person all the time?

To boldly go...

the reason why I wouldn't call "insurgents" "terrorists" is because, as Don Rumsfeld noted...

I hardly think that "the crimes of the terrorists" come close to those of the US war machine which, as you may remember, nearly leveled fallujah and, in the process, used white phosphor bombs that burned off the skin of innocent Iraqi civilians.

in general, your rational seems insincere since if the US media reported on the bombs

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

No, I'm dead serious as, I'm sure, is Nathan Newman.

"Not one person quoted claims that any joined or acted in behalf of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia or al Queda because they were impoverished"??

Ellen, I know you can read. Please explain why this doesn't qualify? It's only the money quote originally cited by Nathan.

“Interestingly, we’ve found that the vast majority are not inspired by jihad or hate for the coalition or Iraqi government — the vast majority are inspired by money,” said Capt. John Fleming of the Navy,

Why this tenacious resistance to the idea that economics could possibly have ANY FRIGGING THING TO DO WITH IT?

Other posters, not you, have also drawn sharp distinctions between "fighting the occupying power", i.e. nationalist grievances, and economic grivances. As if the two are hermetically sealed from one another. Can you seriously maintain that "Taxation without Representation is Tyranny" does not have an economic, but only a nationalistic component? Don't you think that importation of non-Iraqi labor to do the occupation's work while the Iraqis are jobless and starving could have something to do with inflaming nationalist sentiment?

I don't get it. You evidently have something against Nathan "who has his own fish to fry" - as you say. Uh, what fish are those? C'mon, out with it. Don't be coy.

OK, noblesse, no kumbaya for you.

Are you so blind that you don't see that this is not a "polling issue" but a real-life situation? Do you not see that economic issues can blow wind into the sails of nationalistic feeling? Is the jobless Iraqi who is angry at the Americans who won't hire him but will import labor to do work that he could be doing a person without economic grievances? I would argue, not that economics is paramount, but that it's an integral part of the mix.

You may not remember, but after 9/11 it became officially politically incorrect for any American to attempt to discern any reasons behind the al Qaeda attacks. In particular, economics was off the table as a possible explanation, because explanation was considered as equivalent to excuse. For a prominent person to say otherwise was to invite immediate and virulent attack.

Only crap like "they hate our freedoms" was allowed as "explanation" for al Qaeda. Off the table was any thought about how "kick their ass and take their gas" might play in the Middle East. Whole forests were destroyed for books tracing Muslim irrationalism back to Mohammed himself.

And so now, it has become impossible for Nathan to posit anything closer to home as relevant without getting whaled on, even by people who hate the Iraq war as much as he does.

I think I call it the Stockholm syndrome.

OK, noblesse, I'll throw a little kumbaya your way now (having just answered another post where I didn't allow you that).

You think the focus on economics plays into the Friedman "incompetence" camp. Fair enough, but I don't think that's where Nathan's going, either intentionally or unintentionally.

But economics was ALWAYS part of the stew. Is the Iraqi who resents our exploitation of their oil reacting to economic or nationalistic grievances? Does it have to be one or another? No it doesn't, the two feed off each other, clearly.

But the economic explanations have been kicked underground and Nathan, quite correctly, would like to change that. I don't see how understanding the full dimension of the problem strengthens the hand of the Friedman camp. Don't you think that one of the things preventing "competent" administration of the occupation was the Halliburton honchos calling the shots? But without them, would the war even have happened?

Friedman is an ass for not seeing this, and I'm not worried about strengthening his pathetically weak hand.

Since when is Rumsfeld authoritative on definitions?

because he knew that "the terrorists" (read Iraq Government) didn't have modern weapons and had to use less sophisticated ones. uni-bombing and IED's are not only cheap and effective but technically feasible for countries with limited resources.

You seem to be using dramatic language that doesn't even fit a severe phosphorus injury.

check out the Wikipedia article:

White phosphorus can cause injuries and death in three ways: by burning deep into soft tissue, by being inhaled as a smoke and by being ingested. Extensive exposure in any way can be fatal. [SOURCE]

These weapons are particularly dangerous to exposed people because white phosphorus continues to burn unless deprived of oxygen or until it is completely consumed, in some cases burning right down to the bone. [SOURCE]

maybe you think it's ok for people to suffer like this, I don't.

You seem to be using dramatic language that doesn't even fit a severe phosphorus injury.

the first person accounts I've read say that white phosphor burns all the way through your skin until it reaches your bone. for most of us on this blog, we're uncomfortable even if we get a single burn.

Have you ever actually worked with phosphorus, even in a laboratory, or in an emergency medical context?

it's amuses me how you switch topics from phosphorous bombs which are chemical designed to do nasty stuff and phosophorus itself.

Somehow, phosphorus injuries have taken on a magical property

have you been a victim? it's pretty sad that you dismiss first hand accounts of the nasty effects... this is an interesting tidbit from the BBC:

The US can say therefore that this is not a chemical weapon and further, it argues that it is not the toxic properties but the heat from WP which causes the damage. And, this argument goes, since incendiary weapons are not covered by the CWC, therefore the use of WP against combatants is not prohibited. [SOURCE]

such thinking seems to come from the same people who think waterboarding is ok too.

For example, the historical differences between Harris' dehousing and factory attacks, and that I consider Harris a war criminal?

basically, I was focusing on your definition of a terrorist and it all seemed rather silly since the US seems as cruel as "the terrorists."

these photos (carbonized humans) and others are ghastly reminders of what war looks like.

and more comments about "carbonizing humans" are here:

Incinerated body of an Iraqi soldier on the "Highway of Death," a name the press has given to the road from Mutlaa, Kuwait, to Basra, Iraq. U.S. planes immobilized the convoy by disabling vehicles at its front and rear, then bombing and straffing the resulting traffic jam for hours. More than 2,000 vehicles and tens of thousands of charred and dismembered bodies littered the sixty miles of highway [SOURCE]

along with the charges by Ramsey Clarke that the US committed "war crimes" against Iraq.

To boldly go...

Well, yes, I pretty much WAS saying that. My point was that when insurrectionists in their homeland use violent means to fight their occupiers, their allies are likely to call them (as I would call the French) a resistance movement while the army of occupation calls them terrorists.

Do you disagree with that? It seems to me that 'twer ever thus.

It happened. 1 SSF wasn't the only unit to do it.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Well, there's a thing calculated to haunt everyone involved.

it sounds like you're doing a lot of "hand waving" howard. I'm sure that the Wikipedia folks will love your edits and I look forward to hearing how that goes down.

Guess what? It's not there.

yes, the BBC said it wasn't classified as a chemical weapon and I believe the article describes the convoluted reasons about why the US categorizes it as a non-incidenary. If you want to read about something emotional howard, go read up on "shake-and-bake" bombs.

You really seem determined to find the most emotional sources you can.

victims are always emotional howard. doctors who see the skin melt off human bodies are always emotional howard.

yes, howard, your laboratory is a safe place. no white phosphorous bombs, or fuel air bombs, etc...

I suppose that's less work than actually learning something about the subject, and addressing comments to what I actually wrote.

like a clown, you decided to berate me for not putting the "ous" on phosphorous but so what?

you didn't like Ramsey Clark, either, and you blew off the photos of "carbonized iraqis." those photos made me sick when I saw them after the gulf war and again today when I looked at them. but I know you don't like photographic evidence and want to talk about your lab experiences instead.

again, my posting only related to your quibbles about what a terrorist was and wasn't and, believe me, I'm happy that the US military isn't terrorizing my neighborhood.

this isn't an unpatriotic statement since, as they say: "war is hell."

To boldly go...

it sounds like you're doing a lot of "hand waving" howard. I'm sure that the Wikipedia folks will love your edits and I look forward to hearing how that goes down.

doctors who see the skin melt off human bodies are always emotional howard.

yes, howard, your laboratory is a safe place. no white phosphorous bombs, or fuel air bombs, etc...

I suppose that's less work than actually learning something about the subject, and addressing comments to what I actually wrote.

like a clown, you decided to berate me for not putting the "ous" on phosphorous but so what?

but I know you don't like photographic evidence and want to talk about your lab experiences instead.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Were the Iraqi opposition more homogeneous, the Geneva Convention term of art, levee en masse, might apply. Were there no significant foreign force, and the fighting was between factions, the Convention term "civil war" could fit.

It's useful to have some generic term. By calling an Iraqi an "insurgent", I'm not necessarily saying he is acting against his own morals. It has been to the advantage of the Administration to downplay the factors of nationalism and anticolonialism.

Just with this unholy mix, the language of customary international law just doesn't have clear terms for the situation. Even there, the Geneva and Hague Conventions generally assume that all combatants are affiliated with nation-states, either in its military or a mass uprising, or affiliated with a faction in a civil war.

There simply aren't generally accepted terms for fighters whose allegiance is to a non-national body. Some precedent exists in the doctrine of hostis humani generis, principally applied to maritime pirates and sometimes to slavers. It may be useful to look at the annex dealing with privateering, in the Treaty of Paris of 1856.

There is also a spectrum in dealing with military contractors. What I've found useful is generally to apply the standards that are accepted for medical personnel: if they do not wear the Red Cross or equivalent, they can use individual weapons in self-defense or defense of patients and staff. Even so, there are very difficult situations, as with Ben Salomon, whose posthumous Medal of Honor, I believe, was just even though he was in technical violation.

If the US sent a group of contractors on an independent mission, and those contractors used crew-served weapons against a target, I see no way not to treat them as mercenaries. Contractors providing physical security to a building or even convoy, with appropriate weapons, do get closer to the accepted concept of private guards.

It's a very messy situation and international law is well behind the curve. Even in US civilian situations, I've been confronted by people growling "security", who became very confused when I responded "prosperity" or perhaps "trigonometry". I explained that if they cared to show law enforcement identification, they could indeed assert authority, but, if not, they had less authority than Deputy Dawg. They went away shaking their heads.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Are you psychic along with your other gifts? You seem to be convinced you know my motivations for a wide range of things.

I know, I know, the loss of credibility is terrible when one stoops to using primary sources rather than news reports. Of course I should accept BBC reports as more authoritative than actual treaty language. We shall see what happens with the Wikipedia entry. Where, incidentally, are your articles there?

You seem to have run out of things to say about burns, which is surprising. Nonsense is usually an infinitely renewable resource. Would that it was a viable source of clean energy!

Again, you seem not to bother reading any of my posts other than the most recent. Perhaps that is a function of your attention span. In point of fact, I have made numerous posts, often with references, indicating that torture, waterboarding or otherwise, is essentially useless as a means of interrogation.

I do have my thoughts on land mines, which is a complex topic. Nevertheless, I have, up to this moment, had no opinion on, or even awareness of, an anti-landmind treaty. If a landmind is representative of your reasoning, apparently stuck in mud, I would indeed be opposed to landminds. Seaminds could be far more interesting, although it would depend, I suppose, if said mind belonged to a manatee or a mermaid.

I don't suppose you understand the quite specific US objections to that treaty, how they might be managed, and how controlled Miznay-Schardin devices fit into the picture? That might be confusing emotion with facts, eh?
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

It's a matter of focus, and focus matters because there are only so many words one can speak and so many words one can read before the next war begins.

Nathan's focus on economics is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. No doubt economic grievances add to the aggravation (as does the lack of electrical power when it's 130 degrees and many many other things).

But it's a minor part of the stew.

The reason I am making a big deal out of it is two-fold: one, Nathan's focus plays into the hands of the incompetence crowd. And that's worse than a fundamental misreading of colonial history. Bremer is a complete idiot, but no one could have done a different job that would have made any difference. It's like if you try to go to the moon on a bicycle. Whether you pack a sandwich for the ride or you inexcusably forget to do so doesn't matter that much in the end.

Nathan doesn't write much about Iraq and labor is his gig, so I should give him some slack. Nathan also strikes me as one of the most decent blokes around this place, so I really don't want to make this personal.

But the NYT piece is revolting and it's disappointing that Nathan should quote from it without even noticing the stink factor.

Sure, the angry poor do that all the time, didn't you know that? It's just natural. They're all potential terrorists. [/sarcasm]

There's not a lot of point in belaboring the issue, though, in that Nathan has already admitted that his essay wasn't meant that way. So how was it meant? I don't really know, cause he hasn't edited and updated it. But your point is a very good way of making clear that the way some people are interpreting it and agreeing with that wrong interpretation.

The issue is very complex and also very important and doesn't lend itself to quickly jotted essays using poorly chosen terms. Because in actuality, in Iraq, those car bombers of civilian markets are hiring desperate people to help them with their bombing projects or whetever, people who don't give a damn what your ideology is as long as you can give them some cash, people playing any side they can for the money.

That is one horror of this war; there are numerous similar anecdotes. I do not minimize this horror at all, but I'd like to point out that there are rules designed to prevent "mistakes".

The Army has escalation of force rules. The way that works, there are warning shouts, followed by warning shots into the ground, followed by warning shots into the engine block, followed by shoot to kill.

All imperfect, all subject to being imperfectly executed, all perfectly ghastly. On the other side, VBIEDs (vehicle borne IEDS, or car/truck bombs) are a frequently deployed weapon in this war. Our troops have been blown up at their checkpoints - this is not a chimera.

My point here is that running around shooting civilians at will is definitely not allowed.

A second point is that the war is ghastly, unlike anything at all in the civilian world. Deploy an Army, and (many) people will be killed, combatant and innocent. No good answer except not to deploy the Army gratuitously. The human cost of war is immense under the best circumstances, and when we prosecute it incompetently we exponentially compound the damage.

Be aware I'm not talking only about Iraq. Real IRA? Provisionals? Official IRA? Various flavors of Basque separatists? Chechen factions? Don't assume I mean only Iraq unless I say only Iraq, and, in a discussion of customary international law, it's wise not to try to hang everything on one country.

FYI, the Nuremberg Principles have never been adopted by an international treaty. The Principles proper were promulgated by the Allied Control Commission. While the General Assembly has adopted them, the Security Council has not, and they are not part of the Charter. Kellogg-Briand is far clearer.

I have be away from the computer until Monday night or Tuesday, but there are some conflicts in UN Charter wording, mostly between Articles 2-3 and the 39-49 series. Not right, not wrong, but confusing language.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

I recognize that there are rules and protocols governing the use of force, well and good.

But the average Iraqi is not an expert in or familiar with these rules and protocols. Instead, he is faced with heavily armed men who do not speak his language, whose gestures are often impenetrable or ambiguous, who view every civilian with universal suspicion and potential hostility.

These heavly armed men point weapons at him in traffic, they stop him and point weapons at checkpoints, they burst into his home in midnight raids, they open up on his neighbors in the aftermath of car bombs, etc. They are full of arbitrary violence.

Yes, war is ghastly, and unlike anything in the civilian world. The trouble is that this war is being borne by civilians. And if you examine the point of view of civilians, they are not much impressed by sets of rules and directives they don't ever see or hear, they're focused on the man with the gun.

Howard spoke eloquently of the suffering of his friend at the checkpoint, every car a potential bomb, sitting there with her finger on the trigger. Reverse it, think about how every Iraqi feels going up to that checkpoint. There's a person sitting there with their finger on the trigger waiting to tear the car apart. There's a man gesturing, what does the gesture mean, stop, come closer, faster, slower? What if there's an emergency? What if that person with their finger on the trigger, or someone else is crazy? What if a roadside bomb goes off somewhere near and they flip out?

Most Iraqi's approaching that checkpoint are unarmed civilians trying to live their lives, approaching, being forced to approach a group of heavily armed men utterly prepared to end their lives.

And once in a while, if something goes wrong, that's what happens. The checkpoint lights up, a family is shredded like confetti, and the word gets out.

The Iraqi's hear all about these checkpoint incidents. They hear a lot more about it than we do. To us its unfortunate and traumatic for the soldiers. To them, they know the victims, the victims have family, friends, relatives, associates, neighbors. Each of them have their own circles. The victims are real people, men, women, children. The word gets out. And as people are forced to approach checkpoints, they feel that trace of fear, maybe okay this time, maybe okay the last hundred times, maybe okay the next hundred times. But one of these times, it might be their turn.

Come on. Think about it.

Something like 75% or 85% of Iraqi's approve of attacks on American troops. There is a reason for that.

But this discussion is occurring in a vacuum.

There have been several serious academic studies of modern terrorism in recent years, and I think it is fair to say that the preponderance of the evidence is that economic destitution is not a major factor in the rise of terrorism.

Nathan is confusing the issue of global terrorism with the more limited issue of recruitment into the Iraqi insurgency.

How ironic it is that a sudden newfound hunger for accurate definitions of terrorism is used to bolster the official line that there can be no discussion of any real grievances of those who would make holy war on us.

In fact we have no clue what doing something about global economic inequality might do about terrorism - because it's 180 degrees from current reality. But it's hard to imagine that a turn by the West away from regarding the Middle East as first and foremost a strategic interest because of its petroleum, instead allowing whatever culture might arise naturally, would have no effect.

I think that those who set IEDs to attack U.S. military assets could well do it for money without having an ideological view about the future of Iraq (not terrorists BTW). I think there has to be some other motivation for someone to commit suicide in the process of mass killing of civilians of ones own country.

. . .and closer to home Clinton, Bush and Cheney, pontificators all, while US citizens can get a $2,000 bonus for finding a Guard enlistee, and there are government payments of $20,000 to enlist and $10,000 to re-up.

Chomsky: "A convenient definition was adopted: terrorism is what our leaders declare it to be".

Bacon: The "War on Terror" is a war OF terror.

Get over what? I would like an answer to my question.

Robert,

The general subject of this discussion is economic incentives as motivation for recruitment in war. The well-off customarily offer the not-well-off financial incentives to fight their wars particularly and especially when they are unable to forcibly draft them into service. This applies universally, since there is not all that much difference in people and their motivations wherever they might be from in the world and whatever the motivation for the wars might be. Now there might be other recruitment motivations, such as defending the homeland, revenge, etc. but Nathan's diary concerned financial incentives. Does this answer your question?

Difference at the margins yes. Grand picture would be the same.

With your last point, I couldn't agree more. So far, the MO has been: the more you screw up, the higher rewards you get.

Same with the media.

Few have been more consistently wrong than Pollack. And now his buddy O'Hanlon is challenging him for the title. And just to prove what a meritocracy we are, the NYT and the WaPo have turned their oped pages over to them on a semi-permanent basis and the TV networks are jumping over themselves to book these two clowns when Bill Kristol is too busy playing golf to make an appearance.

That's the punishment for being 100% wrong.

Well, sure, Howard.  That's the first law of robotics counterterrorism: One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.  Thus, the term "terrorist" is a positioning term on its face.  A training manual that went public years ago, from The School of the Americas in Panama, was a terrorist manifesto, even though it may have been called "How to protect your Latin American Dictatorship from Communism."  I know - I read it -

But speaking of the French - those O.A.S. Officers left over from the Algerian revolution seemed to have been the principle authors of terrorism as we know it today.  

At any rate, I'd have to agree that "it was terrorism" from the German POV, and that "it was not terrorism from other POVs."  Such is the nature of ambiguous terms - and a good reason we should avoid their use in intelligent debate.  

As for Newman's argument - their is some good sense there (although I think he should have been more general in the economic roots of radical Islam).  Counterrorist scholars often speak of "active" and "passive" terrorism.  The passive group is large and clearly motivated largely by economic distress - especially due to the complete lack of upward mobility in their communities.  The "active" group is small, and completely dependent on support from the "passive" group - whether you want to call them terrorists, freedom fighters, insurgents or patriots.

And here's the irony, in my opinion.  The passive group is the Achilles heel of the whole situation.  Helping these people to reach a plateau of advantage where it no longer makes sense to support the actives is the key.  But if you look around you'll see the overall arching effect of the GWOT is to put more advantage to the hand of fewer people - the very thing that will strengthen the resolve of all those folks who are out of the loop to continue supporting the freedom fighting terrorists. 

Neoboho

Just a couple of rejoinders, Valdron.  Add to your list on debathification, shutting down the army and police (thus creating massive unemployment) the fact that Brenner authorized third party nationals for reconstruction, rather than utilizing the home-grown engineers and builders in Iraq. 

But I take issue with your disparagement of slash and burn agriculture (we each choose our own battlefield to die on, innit?)  I remember reading some years ago that our modern agribusiness model is the least efficient ever and not sustainable over a long period of time.  Traditional rice growing in China, for example, reaps a whopping fifty calories of food energy for each calorie of work expended in the field. The Yucatan Milpas, an example of slash & burn, gains twenty calories of food for each calorie of work.  Mechanized agriculture, by contrast, expends fifty calories of work for one calorie of gain.  The fly in the ointment is of course the use of petrochemicals for fuel, pesticides and fertilizers.  Soil fertility is quickly exhausted and/or locked-up by agrochemicals, leading to what they call "nitrate addiction."

A slash & burn Milpas plot has excellent fertility for the first year, which declines about 20% the second year, and another 20% the third, after which the plot is allowed to go fallow for the next 7 years to regenerate.  That means that a Yucateca village will only be farming three tenths of its total arable land at any given time.  The beauty of it is that these folks really aren't affected at all by events in Iraq - lets see, oil prices hit 72 bucks pbl Wednesday - that means we'll pay more for a quart of milk by Saturday.  

Sorry to be so OT - it's just something that interests me. 

Neoboho

Robert, You are wrong. Nathan's hypothesis (despite the title) is that economic factors drive recruitment, they don't drive terrorism.

Nathan: "But now military leaders in Iraq are admitting that economic desperation is the key factor driving terrorist recruitment there . . Of course, economic issues are irrelevant for the intellectual elite of extremist Islam, but those leaders depend on recruiting in these cesspools of poverty to drive their numbers."

Are you suggesting that these "terrorists" aren't recruited and paid? They are "terrorists" just because they're poor? Poverty causes them to be terrorists? Half the world — nearly three billion people — live on less than two dollars a day. So half the world are "terrorists"?

Yes. I think I know where you are coming from.

Where am I coming from?

Robert,

your question was based on a misinterpretation;

On August 26, 2007 - 1:41pm Robert Brown said:

So you equate those who enlist in the U.S military to those who follow Osama?

As the man said; "Ask a better question."

In a functioning economy, where money is earnable and available, people will still resist an unwanted invader. Sure, lack of money can be an extra inducer, the lack of income an overpowering inducement, but there is no straight line to active and violent resistance.

One must understand the people and their situation, their pride and ownership.

Viz: WWII French, Belgian, Netherlands, Norwegian resistance, resistant Germans and Austrians, neutral Swiss and Spanish. Emigrées that returned to lead, fight, spy and die. Russians that fought for the Germans and resisted them. No simple answers.

I guess I've been reading in the wrong places as I haven't seen the idea that poverty plays no rôle. That's counter-intuitive.

What I will say is that it's taken the US military 4 years and more to catch up with T.E. Lawrence writing in the 20s and one Col. E. Rommel writing in the 30s concerning occupation and insurgency. It's probably come too late.

As anyone reading my opinions elsewhere might know, I place the blame on the administration.

When you are the occupier you are no longer at war with the population.

This is the singular fact underlying the US' failure in Iraq.

Still unrecognized.

But people on the far left tend not to include attacks on American soldiers as terrorism.

As for the post Artappraiser was perfectly civil, unlike you. All you have to do is read the posts here, day in and day out, to see how many on the left like to make distinctions between terrorism, when acknowledging it really exists at all, and attacks on soldiers.

What was really interesting about Nathan's original post is the blending together of so many possible issues. When the causes of violence in Iraq are listed criminality is always listed along with Shiia factions fighting both each other and Sunnis, Sunni deadenders and Sunni insurgents and Al Qeada of Mesopotamia, the latter being mainly foreign Sunnis. It is not clear that economic woes are a cause of terrorism for ideo-religious reasons but just out of desperation.

One of problems with Bush's "war on terrorism" is that terrorism is an enemy but a tactic.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

So here's a poster who is a citizen of Canada, our good and lasting friend up north, who judges the quality of the fine young men and women who have volunteered to serve this country. And this poster writes, and presumably believes, that these fine young men and women cannot be equated with Osama and his supporters because they have failed to capture Osama.

Mind you, it is not the Bush Administration that is minimized here, nor is it the top brass in the Pentagon, and it is not the cadre of generals and high-ranking officers who are the focus of this poster's riducule.

No, this poster, either because he believes what he writes or because he just gets a charge out of writing unconventional posts, or because he basks in being seen as quick-witted, or for G-d knows what reason, chooses to insult the American boys and girls who volunteer to serve and who are compelled to perform their service under an Administration that is an international embarassment.

Poor John W, a proud veteran of the American armed forces. He assumed that Robert Brown's challenge was absurd on its face, that nobody would stoop to challenge the bona fides of American servicemen and women on the ground. Little did he know.

Smart people, people who write well, even people who write well and who are long-winded, can still be something other than smart.

But, still, this man gets lots of "5"s around here, so I guess that is the bottom line.

Let me go over the numbers again:

Osama Bin Laden against America = 3000 dead.

America's score against Osama = 0

So let me ask you, Bslev, are you happy with that?

Are you happy that 19 men with boxcutter knives were able to cruise around in the most heavily defended airspace on the planet for an hour and a half without ever getting challenged?

Are you happy that the largest military on the planet, the largest and most advanced fleet of fighter jets on the planet, the largest and most sophisticated police and intelligence service on the planet... apparently sat around and twiddled their thumbs while all this was planned, prepared and executed?

Are you happy that seven years later, Osama B is still issuing videotapes, press releases and audio tapes? That we've never come close to him?

You must be happy. Either that, or you've got some sort of condition that makes your knee jerk.

Well, time for some reality. "Hoo-Ah!" Is not an argument.

I'm sure it's emotionally comforting to sit there and believe that American soldiers are superhuman, totally moral, uniformly idealistic, ultra-men, spiritually, physically, intellectually, and technically superior in every way.

And I'm sure it's emotionally comforting to sit there and believe that Osama's followers are slavering subhuman vermin who drool a lot.

The reality is neither of these things is true.

The reality is that Osama is able to motivate his followers to die for his cause, his organization is sophisticated enough to endure underground, to franchise, to plan and carry out multiple destructive attacks. The reality is that they are smart, intelligent, creative, dedicated, idealistic and fanatical. They are not fools, they are not cowards. They believe utterly in what they are doing, and they do it well. There are 3000 dead Americans who can attest to how well they do it.

They studied America, they spotted a flaw, they figured out how to take advantage of that weakness, they went for it and they succeeded. They succeeded big time. What part of that are you not getting?

And what are you bringing to the table? "Hoo-Ah! America, Rah Rah Rah, Rock Em, Sock Em, We're the Best, Hoo-Ah!"

That doesn't cut it. Do you understand. That just doesn't cut it. You go "Hoo-Ah! We're number one!" all you want, and they'll watch, and listen and learn, and then they'll patiently take you to pieces. Or haven't you been paying attention? Haven't you been noticing you're being taken to pieces in Afghanistan and Iraq? Haven't you noticed that the Saudi's are bailing out on you? Haven't you noticed that the Lebanon War was a fiasco? That Pakistan is on the knife edge? That Somalia is going down the tubes?

I'm not disparaging America's soldiers and you know it. Robert's question was a cheap ass sucker's question, a half baked rhetorical trap, so that he or you could get all toited up on mock outrage because the troops weren't being supported, and those subhuman weasely Ay-rabs were being compared to the 'Finest Gosh Darned Fighting Men On This Or Any Other Planet, Hoo-Ah!'

Well get over it. Stick your fake-ass, candy-bone outrage where the sun won't shine.

But in the meantime, maybe spend a few minutes thinking about how its Osama winning and not America.

You want to deal with Osama's crew, you ditch the moronic 'Hoo-Ah's'. You ditch that 'support the troops at all costs' bullshit which simply licenses bigger assholes than you to shove them into a meat grinder while you bleat like a diarhetic sheep. You face up to the reality that he's succeeding, not just because Bush is incompetent, but because he and his people are very competent and very motivated and very smart.

You guys make a big goddammed deal about how America is in a "War on Terrorism." Well guess what, 'Terrorism' is winning, America is losing. All that 'Hoo-Ah' stuff has a lot to do with why you are losing. You want to win, the first step is to respect and understand the enemy and his strengths, the second step is to respect and understand yourself and your own weaknesses, the third step is to become smarter and faster and stronger.

You're not even at step one.

Oh my, that certainly puts me in my place, huh? Yeah, whatever.

Have fun sticking those young and courageous volunteers in a meat grinder and then ignoring them when they come home wounded. Patriotism is always a terrific thing when it's someone else who has to pay for it.

Call me if you ever get around to actually dealing with an issue.

And in the meantime, see a neurologist about that reflexive jerk you've got in your knee.

Based on the following sequence:

Bacon:”In fact we can say that it's universally and nearly always true. The well-to-do and settled have "other priorities", such as sending the poor and desperate to die in some godforesaken place for their own profit and power.”

JohnW1141:”Exactly,
how often I've seen terrorist leaders like Osama, al Zahwari, al Zarqawi and others on TV pontificating against the west only to wonder to myself why they themselves don't rush to strap a bomb to their chests and become martyrs.”

Bacon”. .and closer to home Clinton, Bush and Cheney, pontificators all, while US citizens can get a $2,000 bonus for finding a Guard enlistee, and there are government payments of $20,000 to enlist and $10,000 to re-up.”

I think that using the “reasonable person” standard, one could conclude that Bacon was equating Osama’s recruits with those of the U.S. I simply asked Bacon for a clarification, but I apparently hit a nerve.

Robert, you live in a dream world. Have you spent your whole life in isolation? We don't have a semantics issue here, we have an issue of understanding war and the people recruited to fight it.

A country, any country (and recently an idealistic group) has a national strategy that could include war, offensive, defensive or somewhere in between. The government of that country (group) then recruits, enlists and pays people to fight the war. These people are usually young, often teenagers, who are relatively unburdened by life's responsibilities, easy to train and often attracted financially by bonuses, future college payments, etc. The people that are enlisted are then trained by the military. If they are meant to be 'at the tip of the spear', i.e. infantry, then they are rigorously trained and psychologically conditioned to kill people without thinking about it. (Your term, not mine: amoral mercenaries) For Iraq the operative phrasing has been to kill sand niggers for what they did on 9/11. Why not think? Because thinking might cause them fatally to pause and not kill, thus endangering themselves and their unit. Then these young people, the kids next door, trained killers now, are sent to where they are needed. If it is an ongoing war, then it is the worst place you can possibly imagine, with noise, death and destruction everywhere. These young people, now killers, quickly learn that after accomplishing the mission self-preservation is number one and protecting their buddies, the best buddies they have or ever will have, is number two.

So, Robert, grow up a little, and as my first grade teacher said "Put on your thinking cap". You need to understand something beyond your idealistic view of the world with good guys and bad guys. Try, just try, to put yourself in the place of a young man that has just seen his best friend's arm blown off by god knows whom. You have a rifle in your hands and you see a young civilian running the other way. What would you do? Don't pause, don't think, what would you do? Or in a different scenario you have some boxcutters in your hands and you're on an airplane owned by an enemy you have been trained to hate because of their aggression against your people. Would you, at that moment, be thinking about how poor you were?

P.S. This is one big reason why war sucks--the way it destroys the innocent lives of those who have to fight it. Even if they live through it, they might be like Mike Hastie, a Vietnam War casualty whose experience says something about recruitment, and more, and is an indication of what we can expect more of from Iraq:

"The emotional blow-back from the war in Iraq will be exactly like it was after the Vietnam War--unconscious self-destruction.

"In 1980, nine years after I came back from Vietnam, I found myself in a padded cell of a psychiatric hospital. My diagnosis was: Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder. It was a fifty dollar phrase for Emotional Silence. Every fiber of my being was contaminated with hatred for my government.

"One word defined me--Betrayal.

"My entire belief system was systematically altered with a lethal dose of LIES. The entire war in Vietnam was a LIE! It had absolutely nothing to do with bringing freedom to anybody. The greatest truth I learned in Vietnam, was the inexplicable reality that the United States is a global Empire. I was a hired gun for the corporate rich in America.

"Shortly before I left Vietnam, I experienced the suicide of an American soldier. He took his M-16, and blew his brains out in a tent. When it was over, I threw my blood-soaked uniform in a burning 55 gallon oil barrel. I was done with that war--I thought. Nine years later, I was still trying to wash the blood off of my hands in that padded cell.

"At the time, I did not realize I was trying to destroy myself. I did not fully understand how I was being set up to self-destruct by my government. We Vietnam veterans had become the scapegoat to our government’s hidden disease of blaming the victim. We had become evidence that had to be destroyed.

"Once corporate America had made billions of dollars off of our blood, it was time to blow up the building with us in it. As always, Lying Is The Most Powerful Weapon In War. Thirty-six years after returning from Vietnam, I continue to bear witness about the Political Incest of the Vietnam War, and how it is a carbon copy of the Iraq War.

"Political Incest is about being used by your own government for the purpose of economic greed. And, once the lie is over, the truth is buried in a grave site filled with shame.

"I did not serve in Vietnam for the cause of freedom, I served Big Business in America for the cause of profit. Ignorance of that truth has no mercy."

Mike Hastie, U.S. Army Medic, Vietnam 1970-71, August 15, 2007

No, your failure to directly respond to a simple yes or no question is vindicating and illuminating. Typical bully; big balls . . . made of glass. You may have the last word; you always take it after all hotshot.

Whatever, dude. You seem to feel you've made some sort of point. I'm very happy for you. Vindicate or illuminate away, I won't stop you. But you know, once you're done with your victory dance, maybe you could have a substantive point?

Robert,

he isn't equating Osama's recruits with those of the U S, he was equating a process.

"Bacon:”In fact we can say that it's universally and nearly always true. The well-to-do and settled have "other priorities", such as sending the poor and desperate to die in some godforesaken place for their own profit and power.”"

We will simply have to disagree.

Everyone can read his posts and make up their own minds aboout how he evaluates the behavior of the U.S. military. I don't really care what he thinks, I just wanted him to make himself clear, which he has.

Something you should read, rather than just taking a bit out of "military leaders" spin and running with it. Then I'd suggest you work out refining your theory with the input of some of the long-poor Shiite inhabitants of Sadr City:

Juan Cole/Informed Comment, August 26, 2007 Surge in Deaths 85 percent in US custody Are Sunni Arabs

....The guerrillas have dealt with the surge by a doubling of violence in Iraq as a whole, and the US has only succeeded in wrestling the problem in Baghdad back down to where it was in summer of 2006.

Al-Hayat comments in Arabic on this NYT story that the number of detainees held by the US military in Iraq has risen from 19,000 to 24,400 in the course of the surge. Of these over 24,000, 85% are Sunni Arabs (20,740 of the current total). These numbers make absurd the comments of some US officers that the Shiite militias are as big a threat as the Sunni Salafi 'insurgents,' or that Iran is the major trouble maker in Iraq.

Indeed, since most Mahdi Army fighters deeply dislike Iran, those 15% in custody from among the Iraqi Shiites probably represent Iraqi nativists.

I read 85 percent of detainees being Sunni as meaning that most attacks were in Sunni Arab neighborhoods and so those arrested were from that community. Iran is not backing Iraqi Sunni Arabs because it could not do so without essentially collaborating in attacks on Iraqi Shiites (it is a different situation than Palestine, where there are no Shiites and there therefore is no downside to supporting Hamas).

The NYT says that of the 24,400, only 1800 openly say that they are "al-Qaeda." That is about 7 percent of the whole. Another 6,000, or about a fourth, say they are takfiris, i.e. Salafis who are willing to excommunicate Shiites from Islam and to declare them non-Muslims.

The conclusion is that the vast majority (certainly 2/3s report themselves as neither al-Qaeda nor takfiri). Even if we exclude the Shiites, a majority may well not even be religious....

Yes, of course, it's about money, because money is power: control of oil money and an entire population that depends on it.

The more I think on it, the more I think your post as written has a lot in common with Wolfowitz/Perle Theory 101.

Why is the US military arming some Sunni gang members and throwing thousands of others into cages? It makes no sense.

Well, my understanding of the situation is that they are throwing the Sunni "terrorists" into jail based on the hearsay of important Sunnis who claim they are fed up with the Sunni guys they now call "terrorists", these have changed their mind and want to be part of the Iraqi government now.

I am so confident that our intel knows who to trust on that. Not.

BTW, the main reason I made that Nir Rosen article a My Blog post in May is that I sensed that this semantic issue might be really important. That is also a recommended read for Nathan, as he will see that to Sunni Iraqi tribes, the people called "terrorists" are not the poor, but the Sunni extremist ideologues partaking in civilian attacks to spread chaos. I've rarely seen conservative Mahdi types running around closing liquor stores or pressuring people about appearance in the south referred to as terrorists; lots of Iraqis don't like it, but they don't label it terrorism. It's really still the same the main definition of terrorism in the west, like car bombing civilian sites. And it's not being done because of poverty.

I love your "They hate us because they're poor" line. Part of the original neo-con theory as I understand it was to make the majority happy democratic capitalists in a thriving economy, lifting them out of poverty and despair, and by this the majority would minimalize the appeal of terrorism, not just through laws but through peer pressure as well, and the rest of the Mideast peoples would jealously want the same thing. As in why would anyone want to be a terrorist when there are good jobs and money to be made, etc. etc. Isn't Nathan arguing something similar to Wolfowitz & Chalabi?

Calling something terror is not a matter for the right or left. I'd hardly call RADM Sanji Iwabuchi, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, of the left, yet his refusal to obey orders making Manila an open city in 1945, and killing, often slowly, approximately 100,000 Filipinos, meets terror by most definitions. Had Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris not been on the winning side in WWII, his "dehousing" strategy, preferring civilian residences rather than German factories, could meet most definitions of terror.

I would not, however, call Japanese aviators that deliberately crashed into warships or warplanes to be terrorists. The targets were hardly defenseless, and, indeed, most of the kamikaze failed to hit their targets.

To take that noted far rightist, V.I. Lenin, "the purpose of terror is to terrorize". While it would be hard to think of stranger bedfellows than Lenin and Aquinas, Lenin's definition does fit into Aquinas' Principle of Double Effect: many Bolshevik actions were intended more to create fear than to serve an actual tactical objective.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

A little reality should intrude.

Are you happy that 19 men with boxcutter knives were able to cruise around in the most heavily defended airspace on the planet for an hour and a half without ever getting challenged?

Are you happy that seven years later, Osama B is still issuing videotapes, press releases and audio tapes? That we've never come close to him?

I'm sure it's emotionally comforting to sit there and believe that American soldiers are superhuman, totally moral, uniformly idealistic, ultra-men, spiritually, physically, intellectually, and technically superior in every way.

You guys make a big goddammed deal about how America is in a "War on Terrorism."

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Do you have any reports of US soldiers refusing to follow orders?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

hcberkowitz said:

Neither side is winning, but Osama is helping opportunistic politicians hurt the interests of the United States, and indeed much of the world.

Howard, hear, hear! or is it here, here?

By the way, regarding the HAZMAT placards on trucks. A truck driver friend once told me he had a shipment of FLAMMABLE liquid on his truck that required the FLAMMABLE placard.

The Flammable liquid? Jean Nate' after bath body splash. :-)

Household laundry bleach requires a CORROSIVE placard :-)

By the way, if I recall, certain hazard materials don't require placards unless a minimum weight is reached, while others require the placard regardless of weight.

Apropos of amphibious vehicles -- while the classic landing craft are used only when the beach is secure, with troop delivery being from helicopters, Ospreys, and air cushion vehicles -- you indirectly raise an interesting point on military missions.

Noncombatant Evacuation Operations (NEO) are much more frequent than many people realize. Typically, there's a coup in some country, with serious hazard to foreign civilians in the area of conflict. NEO are most often launched from US Marine units, although the British have done them, and, in one particularly challenging incident, while the local Marine unit was committed to evacuations from Liberia, another revolt broke out in the Central African Republic. European Command, then having the regional responsibility, put together an ad hoc team for the latter evacuation.

It's one thing to talk about major invasions, but I've observed that NEOs, rescuing crash victims from unstable areas, and humanitarian operations tend to require a larger number of smaller units, fairly widely dispersed. Since the general rule is that you need at least three of some type of unit to have one forward-deployed, this presents a requirement not always obvious compared to the Iraqs.

Sometimes, these operations are multinational. One of the more successful ones was in Sierra Leone, where British Marines evacuated foreign nationals and broke the most dangerous militia, then faded back as the West African ECOMOG force moved in for peace operations and nation-building.

My point is that when people talk about cutting military forces, they often lump together armored divisions with reinforced battalion contingency teams.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Bottom line: ideology trumps economics. It's live free or die, not live rich or die.

I will disagree with you here Don. Ideology is only important to people who have the luxury or inclination to worrying about such things. I sometimes use my grandfather as an example. He grew up and was a member of the simple old regular hardworking country folk caste. He neither cared much for nor gave time to things such as politics or religion (or shysters like doctors & such). He woke up and worked hard and went to sleep. He wasn't out to get rich or anything but simply to live a happy productive life. I believe that the common "Joe" in the world lives a similar though culturally varied sort of existence and simply wants to be left alone to live, work and raise a family. When those three things are threatened by outside forces it provides ideology an opportunity to poison the water and pose as a solution to what ails them. Ideology exploits, it rarely leads. And when it does lead it tends to lead those who no longer find economics threatening their very existence.

I think the bottom line really is: Ideology exploits disturbed economics rather than trumps them. And that has no bearing on your final sentence - ...live free or die, not live rich or die.

Here's the point Howard. US soldiers are as able as anyone in the world. But its a big world and there's a lot of able people in it. Most people are, by definition average. That goes for just about everything.

So without taking anything away from American soldiers, that's just the facts.

Lesson 1: Never believe your own PR about yourself.

Lesson 2: Never believe the propaganda about the enemy.

Its a good way to lose. If you were that good and they were that bad there would never be a contest.

Don Bacon said:

We are coming to the time in this country when many of us who are economically secure will have to make decisions on how we react to the wrongs that are being done to our country and to many of our countrymen.

A noble cause, I'm in.

Sadly, the ideology practiced by the unbridled capitalism gang is quite adept at getting politically unsophisticated voters to build the gallows these Corporate cretins will use to hang them.

Analyze the fans of Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and that crowd and you find the majority are a mile wide and an inch deep. I'd also say the majority are also lower middle class (under 60K family income*) blue collar people. Conservative talk shows on radio and TV is where they get their "news."

*arbitrary.

Get the easily led to start thinking for themselves and your job is half done.

I don't think anyone in this thread has argued that American troops can do anything and accomplish any mission, or that propaganda about an "enemy" is not to be questioned.

Blaming American boys and girls for the results of this Administration's tragic and ill-fated decision to use a "war on terror" to invade and become mired in Iraq, or for failing to capture Bin Laden, is erroneous as a matter of fact and a stinging slap at the integrity of young boys and and girls in uniform who deserve nothing of the sort.

That doesn't mean we condone the Hadithas of this conflict and decline to prosecute the perpetrators of such acts to the fullest extent of the law. With the uniform does come responsibility.

Neither does it mean that the people who were ordered to fly into the Twin Towers just down the street from here with the intent of murdering innocent civilians from all over the world were in any way inept at completing the mission that they were ordered to undertake.

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