Wednesday, March 19, 2008
WAR BITS
Meanwhile, the war goes on, even if the mainstream media can't seem to focus on it any more, in the face of the undeniable drama of the Obama-Clinton conflict. My browser's clogged with tabs holding items related to the Long (and no Longer Interesting) War, so here's a "martial dump:"
How Long? Here's a typically diffident and non-committal report found at the BBC a few days ago from a recent international conference on "anti-terrorism." The take-away quote:...I spoke to an American military man who had helped produce the US Counter-Insurgency Manual.How long did he think the "long war" - as many now call it - would last?
It is the kind of question journalists ask, and I did not expect that he would put a number on it.
But he did. "Thirty years if we get it right," he said. "A hundred years if we get it wrong."
That seems about right on the long end, although 30 years seems too soon on the short end.
Unmasked: Sometimes the mask slips on the reality of Saudi fundamentalist Islam. Here's a good example: An "influential cleric" calls for death to be dealt to those who publish heretical views about Islam. When the mask slips like this, you can't kid yourself about the fact that Saudi Arabia is one of the principle incubators of the ideology that seeks to destroy civilization.
Clear View: Here's an interview in the "mainstream" Middle East Quarterly with an Algerian Muslim who renounced Islamism, but then went undercover to infiltrate a French al Qaida cell. Two exchanges are well worth noting:MEQ: Would you use the term Islamo-fascism to describe this threat?
Sifaoui: I certainly am one of the first Muslims to consider Islamism to be fascism. This is not a subjective decision but rather a serious, academic argument. Fascism and Islamism are comparable in many aspects: Fascism, without evoking all its particularities, bears similarities to trends also present in Islamism. I am, of course, making a reference to their will to exterminate the Jews. On this point, the Islamists may go even further in their doctrine than the Nazis did, considering that the end of the world could only occur when there are no Jews left on earth. In the three monotheist religions, apocalypse, end of the world, and doomsday exist and are liturgical events invested with a high degree of spirituality. Hence, the Islamists interpret the end of the world in a very special way. Whereas it is written nowhere in the Qur'an, exegetes describe the end of the world as the day when even the trees and rocks will be able to talk and tell the Muslims: "Come here, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him." And this would go on, until there would not be any Jew left on earth. This ideology is pure fascism.
MEQ: Are there other similarities?
Sifaoui: The will to exterminate or do harm to homosexuals is another similarity between Nazism and Islamism. The Islamists, also, say that they are the best community in the world, a superior race thanks to their beliefs. They use political means to arrive at this erroneous exegesis. I do not fear to call it fascism. And there are many more similarities between fascism and Islamism.
MEQ: Given the Islamists' vision of apocalypse, do you believe that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would fear reprisal should Iran attack Israel? Should Western analysts rely on Iran's rationality?Sifaoui: Too many Western analysts look at any adversary through a Western lens. Western analysts believe that Al-Qaeda is as rational as the Basque separatist group ETA [Euskadi Ta Askatasuna] or the Irish Republican Army. My personal history, culture, and investigative journalism work allow me to understand what Westerners cannot see: Iran will attack Israel as soon as it can.
MEQ: Doesn't Iran take into account the eventuality of its own destruction?
Sifaoui: No, it does not. Martyrdom is exalted in Iran. Iranians view annihilation positively. The Islamists' main purpose is to create the conditions for the West to believe that chaos is possible. The argument that says that Iran will not attack Israel because of immediate and massive retaliation from Israel and the United States is absolutely wrong. The Islamists would welcome such retaliation in order to cement coalitions among Muslim peoples and to encourage riots in the Arab street. U.S. military action, or even its prospect, coincides with Islamists' interests. That is the reason why I was against the war in Iraq.
Missile Defense: As I've written repeatedly, developing effective missile defense across the complete spectrum of missile threats is a crucial element of our effort in the Long War. Here's an article pointing out some important shortfalls in Israel's "Iron Dome" short-range anti-missile system. Iron Dome is intended to intercept the shortest-range "Qassam"-style "garage-rockets." The article points out that the minimum target-acquisition time that Iron Dome needs will make it ineffective against attacks against targets very close to Israel's borders, such as Sderot. There's discussion about the relative merits of laser defenses in these kinds of "quick draw" missile attacks, and I can't disagree. But that criticism doesn't serve as a completely convincing argument for abandoning systems like Iron Dome. Effective missile defense will surely end up being a wide mix of missile and directed energy weapon systems, many of them with overlapping capabilities.
The Enemy Within: Finally, here's a web page devoted to collecting some of the more outrageous lies and frauds perpetrated by the current US anti-war movement in the name of reproducing the success of John Kerry's "Winter Soldier" assault on the US war effort in Vietnam. The irony here, of course is that the people who do these things surely rationalize such things with an "ends justify the means" mentality -- exactly the same mentality they condemn on the other side.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:44 AM
