MORE ON AFGHANISTAN, from Michael Yon.
And Bill Crawford reports on events in Iraq.
UPDATE: StrategyPage has more on Iraq and Afghanistan, too.
MORE: Greg Pellowitz wants to pay Afghan farmers to raise ethanol crops.
Archive for 2006
September 12, 2006
IT’S A WIDESPREAD MYTH that the Bush Administration “squandered the world’s goodwill” after 9/11. Anne Applebaum reminds us that it wasn’t that way:
Certainly it’s true that, five years ago, Tony Blair spoke of standing “shoulder to shoulder” with America, that Iain Duncan Smith (remember him?) echoed him, and that Jacques Chirac was on his way to Washington to say the same.
But it’s also true that this initial wave of goodwill hardly outlasted the news cycle. Within a couple of days a Guardian columnist wrote of the “unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world’s population”. A Daily Mail columnist denounced the “self-sought imperial role” of the United States, which he said had “made it enemies of every sort across the globe”.
That week’s edition of Question Time featured a sustained attack on Phil Lader, the former US ambassador to Britain – and a man who had lost colleagues in the World Trade Centre – who seemed near to tears as he was asked questions about the “millions and millions of people around the world despising the American nation”. At least some Britons, like many other Europeans, were already secretly or openly pleased by the 9/11 attacks.
And all of this was before Afghanistan, before Tony Blair was tainted by his friendship with George Bush, and before anyone knew the word “neo-con”, let alone felt the need to claim not to be one.
The dislike of America, the hatred for what it was believed to stand for – capitalism, globalisation, militarism, Zionism, Hollywood or McDonald’s, depending on your point of view – was well entrenched. To put it differently, the scorn now widely felt in Britain and across Europe for America’s “war on terrorism” actually preceded the “war on terrorism” itself. It was already there on September 12 and 13, right out in the open for everyone to see.
Yes, anti-Americanism has been around for decades, and it was quite prevalent on September 10, actually.
MARIO LOYOLA: “Conservatives these days are dejected that the president’s rhetoric appears less-than-reinforced by the decisions and actions of the national -security establishment. But viewed from Tehran, Washington has continued to raise the stakes—and quite skillfully united the international community—against Iran’s nuclear program. Nearly 60% of the public in France would approve the use of force before allowing Iran to have nuclear weapons.”
THE CONSERVATIVE ARGUMENT for life extension.
MILKING THE DRY COW: A look at post-Berlusconi politics in Italy.
A FOILED ATTACK on the U.S. Embassy in Damascus: Omri Ceren has a roundup.
MARTIN PERETZ ON THE PLAME FIZZLE:
No one is interested in the case of the “outed spook” and her “outer” any longer. And that is because we now know who exposed the lady to Robert Novak, and he isn’t and never was part of the Cheney White House. He was part of the anti-Cheney State Department, liberal heroes, sort of. That man is Richard Armitage, latterly deputy secretary of state and multi-lateralist par excellence. He has now expressed his soulful contrition for the leak. One thing everybody in Washington knows about Armitage is that he doesn’t take another kind of a leak without asking Colin Powell first. So there is now added to this weird case the question of what were Armitage’s–and Powell’s–motives in this exposure. And they should also be asking about Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff at State, and his possible role in this affair. None of these men were especially taken with the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. So they are, so to speak, off the hook with the anti-war folk with regard to the leak. The fact is that neither Armitage nor his associates ever told the president who was responsible for the leak. If I were George W. Bush, I’d be ripshit. And, since Armitage two weeks ago unambiguously admitted to being the culprit, should he not now face charges?
I doubt he will be, though. It serves no one’s political agenda.
September 11, 2006
I DIDN’T SEE BUSH’S SPEECH TONIGHT — busy putting together a podcast — but the text, and video, are here.
BIN LADEN WOULDN’T LIKE THIS: The first female Muslim in space. And she paid her own way.
PLAYING Ostrich.
WHY THEY HATE US — INDEED: “Miracles in science and technology, astonishing advances in communication, the empowerment of millions to experience freedom of thought independently of big corporations, governments or expensive printing presses: these achievements of free people have expanded the possibilities of human freedom still further. The attack on the West by Islamism was not a function of the West’s weakness, but a nihilistic, embittered swipe at a success that cast the dreary failure of so much of the Muslim Middle East into a shaming shade. It turned out our flaw was not our softness, but our strength.”
Yes. To read some blogs today, you’d think that this was the 9th century, with camel-riding Jihadis ready to descend on helpless American towns, swinging unstoppable scimitars. It’s not that way; it’s more like the Ghost Dance or similar movements borne of frustration at losing, movements that do their damage all right, but that are doomed to fail. I don’t mean to understate the threat, which is real enough. But it’s not on the order of the Cold War, you know, and we won that one.
On the day of the fifth anniversary of the 9-11 attack, Coalition forces score a high value target in Afghanistan. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the commander of Hezb-i-Islami and ally of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, has been captured during a joint U.S. and Afghan Army raid in “eastern Afghanistan.” Hekmatyar, contrary to his rhetoric gave up to the Coalition forces without a fight. Hekmatyar’s arrest is said to be part of an ‘ongoing operation.’
Hekmatyar has been designated by the U.S. Department of State as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist“ and “has participated in and supported terrorist acts committed by al-Qa’ida and the Taliban.”
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Maj. John Tammes emails:
I cannot tell you how delighted I am to hear that S.O.B. Hekmatyar Gulbuddin has been caught. His bunch, the HIG or Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin (The Party of Islam, Gulbuddin faction) was a royal pain in our butt, up in the Northeastern part of Afghanistan.
I know everyone at Bagram AF will be happy about it – that guy’s bunch shot a whole bunch of 107mm rockets into the base. He also had issued threats to civilian authorities working with the Coalition. My very brave friend, the District Attorney of Bagram District, Kabir Ahmad, was one of them.
This is a very good day for Afghanistan.
I hope they keep up the good work, in this “ongoing operation.”
During the week following the September 11 attacks, most major newspapers ran stories on the very plausible prospect that 9/11 could lead to a radical overhaul of civil liberties in the United States. The articles included sober discussions by law professors of whether we would have internment camps for Muslims, citing the camps for Japanese during World War II, or whether there would be a suspension of habeas corpus, citing the precedent of the Civil War. Fortunately for all of us, this didn’t happen. While there were some aggressive law enforcement steps taken, particularly with regard to immigration offenses, for the most part the changes in existing statutory and constitutional law have been minor. . . .
Where does that leave us? To me it suggests that the impact of 9/11 on the law is still largely an open question, but that as a general matter the impact has been notably less significant than most of us would have predicted on the afternoon of 9/11. Maybe this will change in the future: Senator Specter’s NSA bill is still pending, and a few Supreme Court vacancies might alter the picture. But on the five-year anniversary of 9/11, I’m struck more by how little the law has changed than by how much.
I think that’s right. It’s certainly true that the civil-liberties violations I feared in the fall of 2001 have not come to pass. It’s also true that, critical as I have been, and remain, of Homeland Security efforts we have gone five years without a major attack, which is something I certainly didn’t expect. There seems to be a fair amount of gloom around the blogosphere today,which is appropriate on an anniversary like this one, I suppose, but those seem like two very bright spots.
INSTAPUNK HAS THOUGHTS on responsibility and the war on terror.
Read ’em.
A LOOK AT WIKIPEDIA and blended puppies.
WALES VS. THE COMMISSARS: “The founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written by its users, has defied the Chinese government by refusing to bow to censorship of politically sensitive entries. Jimmy Wales, one of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time magazine, challenged other internet companies, including Google, to justify their claim that they could do more good than harm by co-operating with Beijing.”
STRATEGYPAGE looks at how things have gone since 9/11.
LOTS OF 9/11 VIDEO AND PHOTOS at Brendan Loy’s.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is now blogging at Pajamas Media.
KHATAMI GOT SERVED WITH A SUMMONS AND COMPLAINT while attending a CAIR function.
CHICAGO’S MAYOR DALEY has vetoed the city’s “Big Box ordinance.”
JAMES JOYNER ROUNDS UP thoughts from the left on the 9/11 anniversary.
THE CIA REPORTS SUCCESS:
More than 5,000 terrorists have been captured or killed in the five years since the 9/ll attacks, CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden said today.
Hayden’s remarks were made in a videotape statement distributed to CIA employees around the world.
Hayden called the 9/ll attacks “an unforgettable blow” from a “plot we had not been able to prevent.”
Since then, he said, “Al-Qa’ida’s core operational leadership has been decimated, and their successors are in hiding or on the run.”
They were regarded as highly credible during the Plame affair, but presumably their fans there won’t be as accepting of this news.
IN THE MAIL: Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout’s The Truth about Conservative Christians: What They Think and What They Believe.
PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The (subscription-only) BNA Daily Report for Executives reports on the passage of S.2509:
The House is expected to tweak the Senate bill’s language to reflect the compromise language during consideration in the Sept. 11 week and then send the measure back to the Senate for final passage the next week, aides said.
If the measure makes it to President Bush’s desk, it would mark one of the few concrete results of efforts in 2006 to overhaul legislative earmarks and reform lobbying rules. Legislation to curb earmarks has been stalled after gaining momentum in the wake of revelations about lobbyist Jack Abramoff that lead to a scandal, including criminal prosecutions, early in the year (172 DER A-21, 09/6/06 a0b3f6t1q3). With Democratic criticism of budget deficits mounting, passing the database bill could also give Republicans a politically useful accomplishment on the fiscal front as well.
But the bill’s supporters on Sept. 7 and Sept. 8 gave much of the credit to outside groups and especially Internet bloggers instead of to their fellow lawmakers. After being hung up for weeks in the Senate under a procedural block known as a “hold,” the bill was dislodged and the holds removed after Web sites and bloggers from across the ideological spectrum sought to identify who was blocking the bill.
On Sept. 7, after Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) had removed one hold, another one, from an undisclosed Democrat, remained. But the hold was lifted early in the evening, and its author never publicly identified. Hart said Coburn staffers did not know the hold had been lifted and the bill had been passed until they got home that evening.
“The group that deserves credit for passing this bill, however, is not Congress, but the army of bloggers and concerned citizens who told Congress that transparency is a just demand for all citizens, not a special privilege for political insiders. Their remarkable effort demonstrates that our system of government does work when the people take the reins of government and demand change,” Coburn said in a statement Sept. 8.
Adam Hughes, director of federal fiscal policy with OMB Watch, said the hunt for senators with holds against the bill–which are not currently required by Senate rules to be publicly identified–showed how veteran Washington advocacy groups and the new world of Web bloggers can coordinate their efforts. The site porkbusters.org asked its readers to ask each senator’s office if their senator had blocked the Coburn-Obama bill.
“I do think it says a lot about a new system for the way public advocacy will work,” Hughes said.
“The bloggers mobilized the Senate. No one in the Senate mobilized the bloggers,” Hart said.
Let’s hope we manage some more mobilizing along these lines.