In 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte of France, head of the largest army in the world, began the worst military campaign in history. His ill-fated and tragic invasion of Russia led to nearly two thirds of the French army getting killed. The effects of the doomed maneuver were so long-standing that France never again recovered its military potency. Senator Barack Obama recently stated that if he's elected president the US will engage in a military maneuver just as foolish.

Within Senator Obama's recent pronouncements on Iraq is an ominous and troubling prescription about the small land-locked country of Afghanistan. The proposal involves sending "at least" two additional combat brigades to support the 50,000 NATO troops already present in Afghanistan. He goes on to ask for more helicopters, more nonmilitary assistance, and more intelligence gathering.

All of this, in Senator Obama's eyes, is supposed to suggest his greater military aptitude; his attempt to show that he will finish the job -- capturing Bin Laden and defeating the Taliban -- that his Republican predecessor was unable to finish. It is also a lot of politics, because increasing troop presence in Afghanistan allows Obama to say that he supports troop withdrawal from Iraq without appearing like the "surrender monkey" that the Republican opposition will inevitably try to paint him as around election time.

Yet Senator Obama's proposal is one of the worst military ideas in recent history. Here is why:

Afghanistan is considered the "graveyard of empires." Shortly after 9/11, in his 2001 Foreign Affairs essay, Milton Bearden, the CIA station chief in Pakistan in the 1980's, stated that unless the US proceeded with caution it would end up "on the ash heap of Afghan history."

The list of emperors and nations that have tried to hold Afghanistan is long and there is not a single success story. The Soviet Union spent ten years there, with helicopter gunships and tactical nuclear weapons, and failed. The British Empire spent nearly a hundred years trying to alternatively invade and control Afghanistan and veritably failed at both. The Ottoman Empire, which considered itself the inheritor of Roman power, never bothered with Afghanistan. In fact, they were actually dealt crippling blows by invaders from Afghanistan. In the seventh century, even the heaving Arab armies that had been able to take over then world power Persia in a mere five years after the death of Muhammad were unable to take Afghanistan. For Afghanistan to become Muslim more than a hundred years later it took a local ruler from within, and even then power was not centralized in one man. In other words, Senator Obama is setting the US up for failure of world-historical proportions.

Unfortunately most American policy makers don't quite understand the difficulty associated with holding Afghanistan because they think that successful invasion is tantamount to a successful occupation. That, of course, is the same tragedy that befell everyone from the Soviets to the armies of Muhammad. Afghanistan allows itself to be invaded. It doesn't allow itself to be held. Testament of this lies in the fact that it has now been seven years since the US military entered Afghanistan and yet just the other day an American base was actually infiltrated and 9 marines were killed. It will only get worse.

The reasons that Afghanistan is impossible to hold have to do with geography. Because of its centralized and landlocked location insurgents can disappear into any number of neighboring countries and use them as a base to launch attacks on the occupier. These days the base of insurgent operation are the tribal areas of Pakistan. Even if, miraculously, the US is able to clean out the tribal areas - an operation to which no sane Pakistani politician or military dictator would agree - it would simply mean that the Taliban would move to another one of the neighboring countries. It could be Turkmenistan or Tajikistan or most likely, Uzbekistan, which is now, as the noted journalist Ahmed Rashid pointed out in his aptly titled book Descent Into Chaos, producing militants at an alarming rate.

It would perhaps behoove Senator Obama to look at some of the ways the current Afghan insurgency uses the Afghan geography to its advantage:

- Recently US and UK forces captured one stash of Taliban heroin worth nearly two billion dollars going out from an Iranian port.

- Before that, an investigation by the Independent UK discovered that the Taliban are going to the northern border to purchase weapons directly from the Russians.

- Simultaneously an investigation by the NYTimes revealed that the Taliban have taken control of the marble mines in Pakistan's tribal areas.

All this doesn't even include any mention of the vast number of foreign fighters that come to Afghanistan from across the world, using the countless entry points into the country.

Historically, issues of geography have perhaps been at forefront of any military planning with respect to Afghanistan, but with Senator Obama, they barely register.

For someone who previously disparaged the Iraq war as a "dumb war" and a "rash war" his suggestions about increasing troop presence in Afghanistan is a mistake. It is the sort of thing that led Napolean Bonaparte to destroy France.

But perhaps the only thing worse than Senator Obama's ideas are those of Senator McCain. No doubt dueling with his opponent, he recently announced that under his plan the US will commit even more troops to Afghanistan than it would under Senator Obama's plan. Such breathless scheming taking place by the leading presidential contenders will lead to disaster.

Getting bogged down in Afghanistan would be infinitely worse for the national interest than any Iraq.

• Jewish singles are more Jewishly engaged than people think (but does the word ‘engaged’ in that sentence make any other singles nervous?). Jewish single: plenty Jew-y A new report by sociologists Steven Cohen and Ari Kelman has found that unmarried Jews in their twenties and thirties are plenty involved in Jewish life, with 42% of singles saying more than half of their friends are Jewish, and 51% saying they talk to their friends about “Jewish matters.” JTA
  

• Josh Martin, an American Jew who went to help rebuild in Israel after the Lebanon war in 2006, made a second trip to help rebuild in Lebanon.  He brought along a group of Christians, Jews, and Muslims to do service projects across the country, including an art project in a Palestinian refugee camp. JTA
  

• A small library of rare and valuable Jewish books and manuscripts has been smuggled out of Iraq and into Israel. Some of the books are more than 600 years old, and had to be spirited out of Baghdad by Iraqi-born book dealer Mordechai Ben-Porat and his emissaries. Many of the books were being held in the Library of Congress in Washington DC, but they’ve all been returned to Israel.  Jewschool
  

• A Orthodox Jewish man at the center of a life support controversy died this week in Winnipeg. Samuel Golubchuk, 84, had been on life support for months, but his family did not want life support to be removed despite doctor’s recommendation to the contrary. Three doctors at Grace Hospital resigned as a result of the case, saying that keeping Golubchuk alive was akin to torture. Golubchuk’s children argues that halachically they were not allowed to do anything that might hasten their father’s death. Golubchuk died while on life support.  Chronicle Herald

• A Lebanese-born man being charged with supporting a terrorist group has asked that the Jewish judge assigned to his case recuse himself. Since Fawzi Mustapha Assi, 48, has already plead guilty to the charges, Judge Gerald E. Rosen refused the request, saying that Assi was “a little late.”  Mercury News
  

• An Israeli-Arab who lectures about the Holocaust at Palestinian refugee camps teaches that instead of denying the atrocities of World War II, Palestinians should recognize the loss of millions of Jews. If the Jewish people could survive losing 6 million, he explains, it will easily survive terrorist bombings and other attacks that kill 20-25. Instead of violent attacks, Palestinians should find other tactics.  Haaretz
  

• In Israel, an American Idol type competition is underway for the Haredi world. This one is called “Upcoming Voice,” only features men, restricts the judges from saying anything mean or embarrassing to the contestants, and is not shown on TV, since the Haredi world frowns on television. Instead, it’s distributed on CDs that members of the ultra-Orthodox world can watch on their home computers.  Haaretz

• In Tajikistan, the only synagogue is being demolished against the will of the community, to make way for the new presidential residence. Officials were going to let the Jewish community dismantle the synagogue themselves so as to maintain as much dignity for the space as possible, but when they weren’t progressing quickly enough, the Chief Engineer had the remaining wall bulldozed.  Religious Intelligence

For a couple of weeks now, liberals and anti-warriors have been freaking out about reports by Patrick Cockburn that the Bush administration was planning some secret arrangement with the Iraqi government (the latter presumably under duress) for a permanent US occupation of the country involving some 58 separate military installations and a military detachment whose members are not subject to Iraqi law. The administration's trump card, according to Cockburn, was the threat of withholding tens of billions of dollars of Iraqi assets now kept at the Federal Reserve bank in New York.

Unsurprisingly, Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias are breathing a sigh of reliefBush And Maliki: Less important than you think about today's independent reports that the Maliki government won't go for the deal. "A decision of this magnitude should not be made by an out-going administration regardless of the evolving views of the American people. Americans deserve to debate this as well as Iraqis," says Sullivan. "Leaving decisions about how U.S. forces operate in Iraq up to the next president sounds like an awfully good idea to me," says Yglesias.

Now call me a Luddite if you must, but Article II, section 2 of the US Constitution does quite clearly state that the president requires two thirds approval of the Senate to ratify a treaty. In practice, of course, presidents skirt such rules all the time, including the present. But by the same token, since whatever offer the administration makes sure the Iraqis can't refuse is not a binding treaty under the Constitution, the next administration can just rescind it at its discretion. In the meantime, in the eight months between now and inauguration day, the de facto reality of the US presence in Iraq isn't going to change substantially, regardless of formal changes in its classification. So the Bush occupation plan just isn't that important; if the US occupation of Iraq continues through the next administration, it will be because of the next president's decisions, not George Bush's.

None of this is to absolve the Bush administration of charges of imperialism. A country occupied by a foreign power in perpetuity under rules that supersede any of its laws isn't an independent sovereign state, it's a satrapy. The Bush administration just isn't very good at imperialism, and there's no need to give them credit for power they don't really have.

ADDING: The political angle, though, is obvious. If Bush can scratch out some agreement, no matter how coerced and contrary to Iraqi sovereignty, that provides (flimsy) grounds for hawks to scream "betrayal" and "backstabbing" in case the next president winds down the occupation. 

More than a year before 9/11, veteran journalist and author Ahmed Rashid, wrote a book called Taliban. It described the rampant extremism in Afghanistan and asked the US to consider an immediate nation-building intervention. That warning went ignored --- with disastrous results.

His recent book, Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Federally Administered Tribal Areas Of Pakistan: Not really administered by PakistanBuilding in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, is informed by nearly a decade observing and evaluating US policy in south and central Asia, and finding it baffling. Bin Laden is still free; the Taliban are expanding into Pakistan and Afghanistan; despite the increasing number of terrorists with verifiable links to the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas in Pakistan, nothing is being done to address the underlying issues there; and no one is paying any attention to Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Tukmenistan and Uzbekistan, despite the fact that these countries exhibit many of the same (and some unique) characteristics that led to problems in Pakistan and Afghanistan. None of these developments, in Rashid's reckoning, was inevitable. Mishandling and misjudgment by the Bush administration has abetted and enabled various ills that make the world unsafe. American failure to comprehensively defeat terrorism is America's own fault.

According to Rashid, the Bush administration's decision to project its power in Mesopotamia, at the cost of not attending to far more urgent issues in south and central Asia, is among the greatest strategic blunders any American president has made. Shifting the theater so quickly and suddenly after the invasion of Afghanistan --- for example, US troops that liberated Qandahar from the Taliban were moved to Iraq within three months --- led the US to outsource its job of eliminating terrorism to a disingenuous dictator in Pakistan and a still inchoate Afghan democracy. Both led to disastrous results. Pakistan's General Musharraf and ISI either turned a blind eye to terrorists or tried to co-opt them to advance their own agendas, while a better than token investment in nation-building in Afghanistan --- which would have cost a pittance compared to the war in Iraq --- could have stemmed many of the wounds that festered into security crises today. Instead, the US abandoned Afghanistan, thereby allowing the Taliban to mount a powerful insurgency that will cost huge quantities of money and human life to roll back.

Such errors of grand strategy were compounded by smaller-scale but non-trivial errors. As a Pakistani citizen who traveled widely throughout central Asia, Rashid can testify first-hand to the practical consequences of America's rubbishing and violations of the Geneva Convention, the imperial language of its officials; unnecessary maligning of the religion of Islam, and the usurpation of the State Department's customary prerogatives by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon --- which played a direct causal role in the collapse of any serious commitment to nation-building well before any US soldiers touched down in Afghanistan.

Yet Rashid did not write this book to admonish. He is genuinely disturbed by the perpetuation of terrorist power, not to mention the continuing paucity of liberty, economic opportunity, and human rights that citizens of South and Central Asia face daily. His positive proposals for American policy are extensive in range, thoroughly grounded empirically, and ought to be required reading by members of the American foreign policy community.

I'll focus on just one of his positive suggestions. Rashid traveled through FATA --- Pakistan's Federally Administrated Tribal Areas --- with a Pashtun guide. He describes the region as "terrorism central," and not only the near certain secret redoubt of not only Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, but also the base of operations of numerous terrorists and terror suspects spread throughout the world, whose identities Rashid lists. He argues that there are two possible ways of dealing with the threats based in FATA. The first is dispatching a military force to defeat the militants in an outright confrontation. This option has slim odds of success; the Pakistani military already tried it and failed, and external invaders are even less likely than Musharraf's army to have the requisite tactical and political support to succeed.

The second option --- the viable one --- highlights the indispensability of Rashid's book. FATA is one of those hinterlands of the globe that suffered through the transition from ethnic tribalism and economic feudalism to a nation-state paradigm. The literacy rate there is only 17% (3% for women!), there are no economic, opportunities, no legal system apart from an arbitrary mish-mash of tribal decision-making nominally supplemented by a statutory scheme inherited from the British Raj, and no educational system apart from whatever the mullahs could provide. There have never been political parties, much less a political culture, in the region. FATA exists outside of the sphere of international law and outside of the reach of the governments Kabul and Islamabad, its only political order the spiritual thrall of extremist religious leaders and the brute force of warlords. who use intimidation to impose themselves. In other words, it is the absolutely ideal sanctuary for al Qaeda and other stateless criminals gangs --- even better, arguably, than al Qaeda's other sometime homes in Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and since the American invasion, Iraq).

Clearly, therefore, an effective means of shutting down terrorism in south and central Asia is to integrate regions like FATA into the international economic community. And indeed, Rashid notes that there were proposals in recent years for a referendum in FATA which would have allowed it to either become an independent province associated with Pakistan or choose to become part of the NWFP province. Naturally, those entreaties were shunted aside by Musharraf, the man the Bush administration foolishly treated as their number one counter-terrorist.

The US could begin to address to the challenge of FATA today by reviving discussion about FATA's provincial status with the democratic parties now in power in Pakistan, who are completely befuddled by the problem of what to do with the region, and are passively allowing the tribal leaders there to extend Sharia law over secular legal opposition.

That proposal for FATA is only one of many constructive ideas in Descent Into Chaos. Rashid's long-standing relationships with the leading political figures of south and central Asia, his fluency with US policy, and his decades-long experience with the region, make the a necessary resource for anyone interested in the post 9/11 world. It should be slipped onto the essential reading lists of the foreign policy experts advising John McCain and Barack Obama.

No, we swear, he's a really good actor: Phillippe and crew in 'Stop-Loss'We missed former Jewcy editor Michael Weiss's culture posts, and not just because we all enjoy the drinking game that accompanies them. (One shot whenever Weiss mentions Kingsley Amis or calls someone a "Trotskyite," chug if he talks about his dog.) So we brought him back as our movie reviewer. Below, his look at Stop-Loss.

Ryan Phillippe’s acting ability has fallen, according to popular judgment, somewhere between Hayden Christensen's in Star Wars and Hayden Christensen's in Jumper. An unfair verdict, I would submit, since Phillippe has been more burdened by poor role choices, almost all of which have resulted from his career-making one as Sebastian Valmont in Cruel Intentions. This was the teen-cast remake of Les Liasons Dangereuse, set on the Upper East Side, and it was both better than the book and better than all cinematic adaptations prior or since. Will someone please smelt an Oscar for Best Age-Defining Plot Motive? Phillippe may not be the Olivier of the guilty pleasure, but who else can say he spent the fin de siecle destroying Reese Witherspoon’s heart in order sodomize Sarah Michelle Gellar (“You can put it anywhere”)?

Of course, cruelty and sadism have metamorphosed since the late 90’s from something private and diaristic to something intensely public and world-historical. There have not been many good, watchable films dealing with our belligerent troubles overseas, and re-reading the foregoing paragraph, it seems odd that Phillippe should star in the first.

Stop-Loss tells the story of a squad of Texas natives, led by Sgt. Brandon King (Phillippe), who have suffered a long tour of duty in Iraq. At the film’s start, we see them carousing in their barracks, recording digital footage of combat missions, and singing Toby Keith’s 9/11 payback anthem in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit. After a devastating urban gun battle with insurgents kills one of their beloved comrades and badly maims another, this band of brothers is sent home, chastened but relieved. The trip is meant to be leave for some, the end of a long, bloody affair for others, including Brandon. Yet each soldier finds that adjusting to civilian life is nearly impossible after the hell he has lived and breathed for five years, both in Iraq and, we are told, Afghanistan before it.

Third rock from the Sunni: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, third from leftBrandon’s best friend Steve gets so drunk on his first night home that he digs a trench in his backyard, thinking he’s still deployed – but not before beating his fianée Michele (the pretty but vapid Abbie Cornish). Another friend, Tommy (played by the excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt, now many accomplished rocks from the sun), takes alcoholism to a pathological level, and loses his wife and his epaulettes in due course. But it is Brandon, the natural and official leader of the group, who is buffeted most severely by a post-war reality because, as he soon discovers, there’s nothing “post” about it. He is the victim of the “stop-loss” policy in the Army, whereby his expired military contract is renewed at the whim of the president, here never mentioned by name.

“Not afraid, pissed off” is how Brandon voices his decision to go AWOL and hit the road with Michele, who only poses the possibility of something other than a forced fugitive partnership. The rest of the film plays out like an Uneasy Rider of post-traumatic stress, balanced virtues of patriotism and anger, honor and disloyalty, and a persistent but never quite overweening political critique. (All war movies are antiwar movies.) One horrible scene features the all-too-winsome soldier who barely escaped the Tikrit melee alive: His face reduced to sirloin, his eyes blinded by shrapnel, and his arm and leg amputated, he is like an Otto Dix painting come to life. For the five minutes or so he is on screen, any thought of “winning hearts and minds” or “democracy promotion” seems septic and inhumane.

It helps that Stop-Loss, which is distributed by MTV Films, has been directed and co-written by Kimberly Peirce, whose first and last film was Boys Don’t Cry. Hilary Swank’s gender-bent protagonist had to navigate the violent discontents of thwarted masculinity and confused identity. In a way, both themes are subtly teased out here, too: The ties of martial solidarity are depicted as alternatively strong and fragile, and each man represents two irreconcilable roles – the down-home American twentysomething and the exported killing machine. Steve, who might otherwise have been reduced to a meathead or golem, is permitted a depth of character he almost doesn’t deserve. Even the state of Texas manages to evade facile caricaturing as place not to be messed with. If anything, it is her veteran sons on whom that dubious privilege must fall.

In recognition of the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, Slate invited the 'liberal hawks' from among its regular contributors to answer the question, "Why did we get it wrong?"

Christopher Hitchens' answer: "I didn't." The main thrust of Hitchens' defense of hisLeave Berkeley alone! support of the war is that, despite the intelligence failures before and during the war, the administration's criminal mismanagement, the degradation of the United States' moral, legal, and indeed strategic international position due to our government's embrace of torture and human rights abuses --- the international community still faced a failed dictatorship on its way to implosion, the fallout from which would have been far worse without an American presence in the country.

This case rests on the supposition that, on balance, the outcome of the actual intervention in Iraq in 2003 is better than the outcome of likely counterfactual scenarios that would have played out at a later date, under more competent leadership, and under more credible international auspices, which in turn rests on the assumption that the immediate need for intervention in 2003 outweighs the obvious (in hindsight) benefits of a delay. I'm unpersuaded. But fair enough; Hitchens' case is the best that can be made for the pro-war position at this point.

What's completely unfair, shocking, out of bounds, and offensive, is Hitchens' slandering of George Berkeley. To wit:

There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it's not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn't count, and we are not involved.

Hitchens is getting at a widespread, gross simplification of Berkeley's epistemology and metaphysics. So, let's get Berkeley right. What motivates Berkeley's philosophy is a worry about the concepts of quality and substance among Locke and his contemporary empiricists. The empiricists held that substances are the imperceivable substrates that manifest primary qualities (size, shape, volume, etc.) and secondary qualities (color, taste, tactile features, etc.). Substances exist, they argued, but qualities exhaust the objects of our acquaintance. Against this picture of the world, Berkeley thought, "If all we're ever acquainted with are sensible qualities, then why bother positing the existence of substances at all? They do no explanatory work, and thus violate sound Occamist principles by unnecessarily inflating our ontology."

So he cut physical objects out of his ontology, leaving only perceptions of them and perceiving minds behind. To be is to be perceived, according to the Berkeleyan maxim. And it really works out to an elegant system. There is no mind/body problem left to worry about, because there are no bodies.

Contrary to the common understanding of him, Berkeley is not a solipsist. He does not hold that objects cease to exist the moment you turn your back on them or otherwise stop personally perceiving them. There has to be some overarching principle correlating all perceptions, not merely in order to avoid solipsism, but also the worry that if perception is reality, then there is no meaningful distinction between veridical perception and hallucination. For Berkeley, it's God who does the work of separating true perceptions from false and coordinating the true ones, and keeping the world going while we sleep. (Berkeley might not have perceived the curvature of the earth and the fact that one side of the globe is sleeping while the other's awake; still, in his system, the whole earth exists.) But there are other possible, God-free answers to that dilemma. Kant's proposal that the objective validity of veridical perceptions is guaranteed by the nature of pure reason, is one way of secularizing Berkeley. But there are others.

In any event, maybe there are some woolly-headed peaceniks who think that if we put on blinders and earplugs and refuse to look at the problems of Iraq, that they'll just go away. But pace Hitchens, Berkeley wouldn't have been one of them. To adopt the parlance of our times, Leave Berkeley alone!

She May Not Be Dressed Like a Diplomat: but she sure can negotiate some rocky terrain!First, they refuse to acknowledge Israel's existence. Then, they log on to a website that's doubly forbidden: Not only is it Israeli--it's Israeli porn. Who are these seekers of sexy skin? Oh, just a few hundred thousand (at least) Arabs in countries like Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, and if you ask me, they're exhibiting some kind of newfangled Madonna and the Whore complex. "I hate Israel and will beat her down...or at least, beat off to her lovely ladies!" The fact that some of these countries even go so far as to block the Israeli ".il" domain isn't slowing these sneaky porn rats down, either. Nosireebob: They're logging on in droves to a site called Ratuv, especially now that the site has been translated into Arabic, with lots of detailed descriptions and a veritable assload of free pics.

It happened like this: After installing software that identifies where users are logging on, the managers of Ratuv discovered that a large number of their visitors were in Arab countries. They decided that a lack of diplomatic relations didn't have to equal a lack of sexual relations, so despite not being able to accept money for video downloads from these countries, manager Nir Shahar set to work making the site as hospitable as possible. With the Arabic translations and extra free pics, traffic from these countries rocketed to 100,000 hits per week. The Ratuv team is currently looking into creating and registering a similar site in Europe or America, so that they can legally accept credit card payments from countries prohibited by Israeli law. They're also eyeballing the possibility of making films in which Arab and Israeli stars come together. So to speak. Talk about a forbidden fetish.

Perhaps there is something to the old adage, "make love, not war," after all. Someday soon, the ambassadors and diplomats of the world might just have names like Dick Long and Wendy Whoppers.

Thomas Jefferson: bringing religious freedom to you, since 1786A day devoted to commemorating "the passage of Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom" came and went, and I had no idea it even existed. Did you? So, while Britney's potential conversion to Islam (which I posted about on Religious Freedom Day) and problems of intermarriage (which Tamar posted about on Religious Freedom Day) are of obvious interest and importance (especially Britney, duh), I feel kind of remiss in my "faith and belief" reporting duties. Religious Freedom Day: We'll be ready for you on January 16, 2009!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: A New York Sikh man was the victim of an unprovoked attack in Queens last week. His assailant apparently called him an Arab before punching him outside of his gurdwara.

An op-ed in the Jerusalem Post asserts that by insisting on the Lubavitcher Rebbe's role as messiah, they "diminish rather than aggrandize him," and claims that what made the Rebbe so great to begin with was that, like us, he was just another mortal.

In Pakistan, two more suspects have been arrested in the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and violence broke out along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border yesterday in response to the Shiite holiday of Ashura.

Finally, Ashura wreaked havoc in Iraq as well, where militants used everything from bombs to gunfire to rockets in their attacks on pilgrims observing the holiday.

I’ll try not to begin my endorsement of Senator John McCain with the hero’s epic that seems to physically trail the man wherever he goes. It’s become such a commonplace that to contribute another McCain hagiography spotted with "brave," "proud," and "strong" is to mindlessly shortcut your way into dismissing the Senator’s achievements. Besides, at this point anyone unaware of John McCain’s service is beyond my reach.

So. In 2002, John McCain turned in the most successful comedic turn of any politician ever to do Saturday Night Live. Which only has to mean he wasn’t painful to watch. In fact, his “McCain Sings Streisand” sketch was damned funny and he seemed to put some genuine effort into his John Ashcroft imitation. When (portraying the Attorney General) he said, “We've got some really great stuff in the works. There's one plan that would make the Arabic language – or anything that sounds like it – illegal," McCain demonstrated at least two kinds of—yes—bravery that had disappeared amongst politicians by 2002: the bravery to wildly criticize a member of your own party, and the bravery to be perceived as politically incorrect.

Humor, confrontation, and risky allusions are the vibrant stuff of youth—are they not? Yet the sixtyish-and-under candidates blow scripted one-liners and speak of pacifying enemies, while the man who’s supposedly too old for the White House sets the “bomb Iran” question to the Beach Boys.

And I like it. Everyone in the world tells you not to sweat the small stuff and then goes off to catastrophize the minute nonsense of their lives. At this stage of his career, all that needs tastefully to be observed about John McCain’s record is that no living American is better equipped to discriminate between the small stuff and the big stuff. The Senator spots the difference effortlessly while rest of the pack won’t even acknowledge there is one. Jokes, song parodies – small stuff. War, terror, freedom, victory – big stuff.

In talking about McCain’s heroism, one doesn’t need to mention Vietnam. Simply consider Iraq. Senator McCain has the distinction on Capital Hill of being both the most energetic supporter of the Iraq War and the first, most vocal critic of the Rumsfeld strategy. He actually believed in the importance of the cause, and therefore the necessity of victory. A liberated state is not a goal to be scrapped when things go wrong; it’s a principle worthy of unwavering stamina and ingenuity. It’s easy to spew bromides about bringing the troops home, but much harder to take the risk of a new strategy. As Senator McCain has recently pointed out, while the frontrunners boast about being “agents of change,” no other candidate can rightfully claim agency in the life-saving (and nation-saving) changes brought about by the troop surge in Iraq.

In taking my cue from the Senator, I’ve expanded my list of small stuff. The McCain-Feingold finance reform, dissent on the Bush tax cuts, and certain details of immigration reform all fall under that heading. John McCain shares my idea of the big stuff and he has my vote.

 

I don’t know if it’s the so-called “holiday spirit” or what, but reading this made me all teary and ridiculous.

From officer and orphan to father and son
An American soldier's familiarity with a sick Iraqi boy grows into strong familial ties

By Carrie Antlfinger | Associated Press
December 25, 2007

MAUSTON, Wis. - Capt. Scott Southworth knew he'd face violence, political strife and blistering heat when he was deployed to one of Baghdad's most dangerous areas.

All Together Now:: Awwwwwww

But he didn't expect Ala'a Eddeen.

Ala'a was 9 years old, strong of will but weak of body -- he suffered from cerebral palsy and weighed just 55 pounds. He lived among about 20 kids with physical or mental disabilities at the Mother Teresa orphanage, under the care of nuns who preserved this small oasis in a dangerous place.

On Sept. 6, 2003, halfway through his 13-month deployment, Southworth and his military police unit paid a visit.

Ala'a spoke to the 31-year-old American in the limited English he had learned from the sisters. He recalled the bombs that struck government buildings across the Tigris River.

"Bomb-Bing! Bomb-Bing!" Ala'a said, raising and lowering his fist.

"I'm here now. You're fine," the captain said.

Over the next 10 months, the unit returned to the orphanage again and again. The soldiers would race kids in their wheelchairs, sit them in Humvees and help the sisters feed them.

To Southworth, Ala'a was like a little brother. But Ala'a -- who had longed for a soldier to rescue him -- secretly began referring to Southworth as "Baba," Arabic for "Daddy."

Then, around Christmas, a sister told Southworth that Ala'a was getting too big. He would have to move to a government-run facility within a year.

"Best-case scenario was that he would stare at a blank wall for the rest of his life," Southworth said.

To this day, he recalls the moment when he resolved that that would not happen.

"I'll adopt him," he said.

To continue reading the story that will melt your heart into a pile of warm goo, click here.

A lengthy and fascinating interview with Joshua Muravchik is in the latest edition of Democratiya. Muravchik talks about his personal journey from the socialist left to neo-conservatism and then goes on to look at Iraq and Islamist terror and the neo-con responses.

I've been contemplating socialism and the left in some of my posts here and so this passage from Muravchik was interesting:

I kept wrestling with the central mystery of socialism. How could something that desired to make things better have instead made things so much worse? Was it that socialists were bad people? From my own experience I am still convinced that most people who embraced the idea of socialism did so from a humane feeling - they wanted the world to be kinder and gentler. Yet socialism's most important results were quite the opposite. Of course, social democrats did things to humanise society when they were in government, but the overall record of socialism, when you add up both sides of the ledger, is quite appalling. 

I concluded that the central problem is asking politics to do something it can't do - to provide the 'leap' that Marx wrote about. This ambition departs entirely from the realities of human existence, which is imperfect and tragic. Life may not be nasty and brutish but it is short and it will always have its share of sadness and disappointment. Religion offers answers to both the shortness of life and the disappointments it contains - whether or not you accept the truth of any particular religion or religion per se. Politics can't do that. If you understand that, you feel a certain constraint on what you seek to achieve in politics, which at the most can offer amelioration. But the socialist thinks that through politics you can transform human life itself. Michael Harrington - a leader of mine back then whom I admired - once wrote that socialism would create 'an utterly new society in which some of the fundamental limitations of human existence have been transcended.' [5] But no political system can do that. Worse, once you say it can you have a logically sound utilitarian argument for killing some people in order to get there. If those people are standing in the way of the new, higher, happier level of human existence, well...

 

By the way, if you are not familiar with Democratiya - a free-to-read, online journal of what could loosely be called 'Eustonite Internationalists' then take a look through their latest edition - including a speech from Tony Blair - and also their archive which is full of interesting and serious material.

It's his fifth visit to Iraq and what has he found?

Baghdad, the most dangerous city in all of Iraq, is only half as violent as it was when I was there during the summer. And the fact that the capital is now the deadliest city is itself evidence of a tectonic shift on the ground.

In the spring of 2007, Ramadi was the most violent place in Iraq. But the insurgency there has been finished. The Taji area north of Baghdad, which was a catastrophe when I paid a visit in July, is now going the way of Ramadi.

I am writing these words from Fallujah, site of the most horrific battle of the entire war in November 2004, and the city thought to be the meanest in Iraq since at least the time of the British in Mesopotamia.

Almost everyone I know back home was sure I'd be shot at every day, that it's still a war zone out here. Based on the news reports - even the new, optimistic ones, could you blame them for thinking that?

But attacks against coalition forces in Fallujah are down by more than 90% since March of this year. Almost all attacks these days are single, ineffective pot shots rather than the lethal IEDs of last year.

The only word that comes to mind is "breathtaking." Though I'm sure Gen. Petraeus' war plan had nothing to do with it.  They decided to stop blowing themselves up because they wanted to see how Lions for Lambs panned out.

Tomorrow is Hanukkah, and we’ll be doing all kinds of fun Hanukkah coverage this week, but I wanted to let people know about another important thing happening for Jews tomorrow:

There’s one place in the siddur where we go by the Gregorian calendar rather than the Jewish calendar, and it has to do with when we start praying for rain. If you open a siddur to the middle of the Amidah, you’ll notice that there’s one place with two options. Either v’ten tal umatar livracha (give us rain and dew for a blessing), or just vten bracha (give us a blessing). The longer option is a specific request for rain, and we say it starting on the evening of December 4th. But why December 4th and not shmini atzeret, which is when we go through a whole rigamarole at shul asking for rain?
The Autumnal Equinox: ruins everything
Basically, the Rabbis in the Talmud decided that rain should not be requested prior to the sixtieth day after the Autumnal Equinox. It’s not clear why they chose this day, but some scholars have suggested that for the Babylonian farmers rainfall was considered a nuisance before the conclusion of the date-harvest (there’s a joke here about my dating life, my name, and the phrase “date-harvest” but I can’t quite figure out what it would be). Whatever the reason, it’s clear that the equinox, as a phase in the cycle of the sun, is most conveniently calculated by the civil calendar, which is a solar one.

In the course of the Middle Ages the Babylonian practice came to be accepted--though not without a struggle--by all Jewish communities outside of Israel. Israel itself follows a different, earlier date, defined according to the Jewish calendar (the 7th of Heshvan).

Surprise! Once again, normative practice has rejected the more reasonable precedents of praying for rain either when it is beneficial for our own climate, or when it is required in the Israel--in favor of the unlikely option of linking it to the climate of Iraq (the current inhabitant of the land that was formerly called Babylonia, where the Talmud was written).

But there’s still a bit of a math problem to deal with: The Autumnal Equinox actually occurs on the 22nd of September, so that the sixtieth day following should come out on November 20, not December 4!

The discrepancy originates in the methods that we employ for calculating the solar year. The Talmud assumes that a year consists of precisely 365 1/4 days and halakhic practice bases its calculations on that premise.

The calculation is very close, but it's not fully accurate, since an astronomical year falls eleven minutes and fourteen seconds behind that estimate. The margin is admittedly a tiny one, but when stretched across the centuries of Jewish history the minutes begin to add up. Every 128 years the Jewish reckoning pulls a full day ahead of the astronomical equinox.

Anyway, though it seems crazy to pray for rain based primarily on bad math, bad astronomy, and what’s good for Iraq, it’s pretty much the norm, so starting tomorrow night I’ll be praying for rain.

And in case you were wondering, no, I don’t know this stuff just off the top of my head. For more info, check out this source sheet, and this overview.

If we agree that Al Gore has done more than anyone else to alert the world about the perils of global warming, can we at least allow that one of the unmitigated benefits of the intervention in Iraq has been the restoration of that country's wetlands? The Guardian carries a story on the ecological revivification of "Eden":

By 2003, more than 90% of the Mesopotamian wetlands, dubbed the Garden of Eden, had been lost, and reduced to barren salt pans. Experts feared that the region, home to an ancient people considered the heirs of the Babylonians and Sumerians, would vanish by 2008.

Now, with a huge multibillion dollar restoration underway, funded by the US, Canadian and Italian governments and the United Nations environment programme (UNEP) many Ma'dan (Marsh Arabs) are returning to a life that has changed little in 5,000 years.

The objective here is to combine the accoutrements of modern life -- satellite television, wireless Internet, etc. -- with the traditional Marsh Arab mode of subsistence. 

Do you suppose the engineers and scientists at work on this ambitious project are in line for a Nobel Peace Prize of their own? I'm feeling un-cynical today, so I'll say, "Sure." 

Today’s New York Times print edition ran a cover story on Iraq accompanied by the kind of ample photo spread the paper usually fills with a buffet of limp corpses, weeping mothers, and soldiers in prosthetic rehabilitation. But today’s photos captured a joyous Baghdad wedding, an amiable Baghdad restaurant scene, and a busy Baghdad marketplace. The piece was about increased security and an emergent sense of normalcy in Iraq.

 

 From The New York Times:

The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.

As a result, for the first time in nearly two years, people are moving with freedom around much of this city. In more than 50 interviews across Baghdad, it became clear that while there were still no-go zones, more Iraqis now drive between Sunni and Shiite areas for work, shopping or school, a few even after dark. In the most stable neighborhoods of Baghdad, some secular women are also dressing as they wish. Wedding bands are playing in public again, and at a handful of once shuttered liquor stores customers now line up outside in a collective rebuke to religious vigilantes from the Shiite Mahdi Army.

 

If you’ve followed The Iraq War using The New York Times as your only source, you’re pretty confused right now. The narrative would run as follows: for four and half years American imperialists visited Armageddon on the innocent people of Mesopotamia. Then for four months the same foul forces employed a military shill and delivered a more attenuated version of hell-on-earth. Then on November 20, 2007, in some kind of Hawkingesque spacetime singularity, there was sudden hope and progress in Baghdad. And that’s just from the reporting side of the paper. If you’ve chanced to peek over the much touted “firewall” dividing the reportage on the front page from the analysis in the editorial and op-ed sections you’re really lost at sea. Because as Dowd, Kristoff, Rich and co. will tell you, this was not only an oil grab, a power grab, an Oedipal psychodrama, and a neoconservative delusion all at once, but it was also lost before it began.

 

So, why the change in The New York Times? Things have simply reached a saturation point. If credibility is a concern at all, you can only go so long saying black is white and white is black. With the flood of good news coming from Iraq, The Times knew the game was up.

 

I don’t think I’m alone in sensing a moment here. Christopher Hitchens’ Slate piece this week was a circumspect expression of thanks for the apparent turn of events in Baghdad. Hitch has, in the past, fallen prey to a small degree of premature triumphalism in regards to the war and it seems that genuine promise demands something a little more humble. He writes:

 

To have savaged and discredited al-Qaida in an open fight and to have taken down a fascist Baath Party, which betrayed its pseudosecularism by forging an alliance with al-Qaida, is to have scored an impressive victory on any terms. However, the price of this achievement was often the indulgence of some excessive conduct on the part of the Shiite parties and militias. The next stage must be the reining-in of the Sadrists and the discouragement of Iranian support for such groups. Again, one hardly dares to hope, but there are some promising signs.

Whether or not one is very hopeful (as am I) about Iraq it pays not to invite hubris. Anything can happen. But one thing needs to be mentioned more: to whatever extent normalcy prevails in today’s Iraq it cannot be called a “return” to that condition. Under Saddam Hussein, Iraqi normalcy meant a 24hour fear state and unimaginable misery. If things proceed satisfactorily in Iraq no one should say that the U.S. managed to stabilize a nation it destroyed. Rather, coalition forces succeeded in nurturing the growth of consensual government in a region that had never known anything like it.

 

I’m never not moved when Hitchens describes the American Revolution as the last revolution that’s still kicking. It’s with hope for Iraq that I refer to Mark Steyn’s recent syndicated piece about Thanksgiving and the blessings of the nation state. Steyn writes:

So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation states. Because they've been so inept at exercising it, Europeans no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation state underpins in turn Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the U.N. But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens — a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan — the U.S. can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply. Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in — shoring up Afghanistan's fledgling post-Taliban democracy — most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base. If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It's not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Christopher Hitchens and Anne Applebaum are both wary of cheering the rosier state of affairs in Iraq. For one thing, the gains of the surge might prove temporary and in war journalism, hubris must be guarded by a bodyguard of dispassion. For another, not even faithful hawks cotton to the "Mission Accomplished" rhetoric anymore (they say they do, but they don't). But despite the noticeable and (for Iraqis) palpable de-escalation in daily violence, one barometer of progress is, I think, also the most cynical.

The Washington Post carries a front-page story today about what's really motivating the insurgency:

"I was out of work and needed the money," said Abu Nawall, the nom de guerre of an unemployed metal worker who was paid as much as $1,300 a month as an insurgent. He spoke in a phone interview from an Iraqi military base where he is being detained. "How else could I support my family?"

U.S. military commanders say that insurgents across the country are increasingly motivated more by money than ideology and that a growing number of insurgent cells, struggling to pay recruits, are turning to gangster-style racketeering operations.

That means they can be bought off by other parties, too. Namely, us.

Let's be real, though. No one with a conscience has been able to look calmly on something like the Sunni Awakening and not fret about the fact that former wage-killers of Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers are now fighting on our side against Al Qaeda. These are not allies in the true sense of the term because given the slightest change in the weather and they'll be back to killing those same civilians and soldiers. However, we must make do with what we can, especially in a region of the world where suicide is used as a weapon of mass destruction. So much of the nightmare that has defined this war has been a matter of sheer ideology. Clerical fascism that brooks no negotiation or compromise; it is totalitarian in the sense that individuality and personal materialism are anathema to the greater struggle. I recently happened upon this description of Islam by the Pakistani Qutb, Abu Ala Maududi:

“In reality Islam is a revolutionary ideology and programme which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals. “Muslim” is the title of that International Revolutionary Party organized by Islam to carry into effect its revolutionary programme. And “Jihad” refers to that revolutionary struggle and utmost exertion which the Islamic Party brings into play to achieve this objective.

[...] 

Islam wishes to destroy all States and Governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam regardless of the country or the Nation which rules it. The purpose of Islam is to set up a State on the basis of its own ideology and programme, regardless of which Nation assumes the role of the standard bearer of Islam or the rule of which nation is undermined in the process of the establishment of an ideological Islamic State.” 

So it is a welcome occurrence that at least a handful of those fighting on behalf of such a doctrine look at the literal text of the thing and think, "Yeah, yeah. Show me the money."  This is a shift in hearts and minds, all right, however insufficient or preliminary it may be. 

The Washington Post has a piece today on how things are looking up for George W. Bush:

The war in Iraq seems to have taken a turn for the better and the opposition at home has failed in all efforts to impose its own strategy. North Korea is dismantling its nuclear program. The budget deficit is falling. A new attorney general has been confirmed despite objections from the left.

However, his poll numbers remain dismal:

Yet none of this has particularly impressed the public at large, which remains skeptical that anything meaningful has changed and still gives Bush record-low approval ratings.

Polls are a tricky thing. I too would respond with disapproval of Bush's performance if polled. He simply has not been conservative enough for me. His immigration plan, the spending, the too-few vetoes, our weak fighting of this war, all of it has soured me on the man. I had many problems with him in his first term too. I despised giving a new entitlement program to the richest segment of the population in the form of his Medicare plan, hated his signing of McCain's ridiculous Campaign Finance bill, and nearly cried when he confirmed that despite his belief in freedom for all, Taiwan is part of one China.

Despite all this, I am someone who worked to re-elect George W. Bush in 2004, and would do it again tomorrow in a repeat Bush-Kerry race. While I'd like someone fiscally conservative, who is an international badass that can maybe pronounce nuclear, the reality of the situation is that Bush was better than either of his opponents by a mile.

Bush's legacy won't be decided by his poll numbers today or tomorrow, or even the day he leaves office. Whatever he has done in his 8 presidential years, all of it will come down to Iraq in the end. It will be noted in history books that we had no further attacks on U.S. soil in the 6 years following 9/11. But if Iraq is still a disaster, that fact will only be an afterthought. As someone who supported the Iraq war when it began, and still supports it today, Bush's legacy matters to me only in so far as I want what is best for both America and Iraq. Rooting for failure in Iraq to show up Bush is unconscionable, and should be rejected by anybody with any sense of humanity.

Ultimately, current polls of the president's approval are meaningless. Only time will really tell us if the Iraq war will have been a success. For a president whose reputation rests on that result, his current legacy projection matters not at all.

 

Even the Guardian takes notice:

The death toll for US combat troops in Iraq dropped sharply to 27 last month, the lowest monthly total since March last year.

The figure is part of a downward trend that appears to confirm Pentagon claims that its "surge" strategy is working.

The month's last US fatalities were three soldiers killed on Tuesday when a bomb exploded as they patrolled southeast Baghdad.

The drop in US fatalities, mirrored by an apparent reduction in sectarian killings, is attributed by US commanders to the extra 30,000 US troops sent to Iraq this year to bring the total of US troops to 154,000.

Other factors cited include: the building of walls round Baghdad neighbourhoods that have restricted insurgents' movements; the increasing use of local sheiks and their militias to fight insurgents; and measures such as introducing proper ID checks, including biometric testing.

The Washington Post is more skeptical:

Casualty numbers themselves are inconsistent. The U.S. military said about 800 civilians were killed in October, but an unofficial tally by the Health Ministry showed that 1,448 civilians had died violently, including those whose bodies were dumped without identification. An official provided the data, which showed an increase in deaths compared with September, on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to release it publicly.

It is difficult to determine whether the underlying animosity between sectarian groups, which has driven so much violence, has diminished or whether attacks have become more difficult to carry out.

Outside Baghdad, many Iraqis interviewed still perceive grave threats from violence. They live in walled-off neighborhoods or under the relative protection of their ethnic group.

Basim Hamdi, 32, a Shiite merchant from Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, described life in his city as a "sectarian fire."

"The security situation in Balad is so bad compared with last year," he said. "No one from here can go outside the city except for emergencies, and no Sunni can get in."

 

At first blush this looks like a massive blunder. In The New York Times:

State Department investigators offered Blackwater USA security guards immunity during an inquiry into last month’s deadly shooting of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad — a potentially serious investigative misstep that could complicate efforts to prosecute the company’s employees involved in the episode, government officials said Monday.

The State Department investigators from the agency’s investigative arm, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, offered the immunity grants even though they did not have the authority to do so, the officials said. Prosecutors at the Justice Department, who do have such authority, had no advance knowledge of the arrangement, they added.

Most of the guards who took part in the Sept. 16 shooting were offered what officials described as limited-use immunity, which means that they were promised that they would not be prosecuted for anything they said in their interviews with the authorities as long as their statements were true.

The case has been taken away from the diplomatic service and given to the FBI.

It’s worth noting that in matters of war nothing should be taken at first blush. Voice of America reports that the immunized guards could still be prosecuted:

But at a news briefing Tuesday, State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack said the immunity extended to the Blackwater Guards was limited and would not entirely shield them from federal prosecution.

"The Department of State cannot immunize an individual from federal criminal prosecution," said McCormack. "And the kinds of, quote, immunity that I've seen reported in the press would not preclude a successful criminal prosecution."

McCormack said the State Department would not have asked the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department to get involved in a case that they could not potentially prosecute.

It’s hard to be convinced. Especially after reading the actual wording of the immunity deal, as reported by ABC News:

In each of the statements, the guards begin by saying "I understand this statement is being given in furtherance of an official administrative inquiry," and that, "I further understand that neither my statements nor any information or evidence gained by reason of my statements can be used against me in a criminal proceeding, except that if I knowingly and willfully provide false statements or information, I may be criminally prosecuted for that action under 18 United States Code, Section 1001."

Among the most critical side products of the war in Iraq are the revamping of out-of-date strategies and the evolution of inchoate policies in uncharted waters. General Petraeus offered a miraculous example of the former (charges of betrayal not withstanding) by literally rewriting the book on counter-insurgency. One hopes to see the latter grow out of the Blackwater disaster. In September, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill that would bring State Department contractors under the same legal status as Pentagon Contractors. Additionally, the Iraqi cabinet just approved draft legislation to lift contractor immunity. I’m not a Blackwater hater, but I don’t need to be to see that armed U.S. civilians shouldn’t enjoy supralegal status in foreign states.

The New York Times sums up the murk:

“Blackwater employees and other civilian contractors cannot be tried in military courts, and it is unclear what American criminal laws might cover criminal acts committed in a war zone. Americans are immune from Iraqi law under a directive signed by the United States occupation authority in 2003 that has not been repealed by the Iraqi Parliament.

A State Department review panel sent to investigate the shootings concluded that there was no basis for holding non-Defense Department contractors accountable under United States law and urged Congress and the administration to address the problem.

The House overwhelmingly passed a bill this month that would make such contractors liable under a law known as the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act. The Senate is considering a similar measure.

Some legal analysts have suggested that the Blackwater case could be prosecuted through the act, which allows the extension of federal law to civilians supporting military operations.

But trying a criminal case in federal court requires guarantees that no one has tampered with the evidence. Because a defendant has the right to cross-examine witnesses, foreign witnesses would have to be transported to the United States.

Several legal experts said evidence gathered by Iraqi investigators and turned over to the Americans, even within days, would probably be suspect.

Another law that may be applicable covers contractors in areas that could be defined as American territory, like a military base or the Green Zone. But the Blackwater security contractors in the Sept. 16 shootings were in neither place.

Without sounding dismissive, the details are the stuff of law tomes and legal journals. However, no democracy—neither an established one like the U.S., nor a struggling one like Iraq—can leave matters of life and death in the exclusive hands of robed scholars. And they certainly can’t leave such concerns up to a handful of investigators in the State Department.

Part of the problem stems from the U.S. legal system’s extensive overuse of plea-bargaining and immunity. Investigators are more concerned with making the case than they are with rounding up the bad guys. I’m no international law fetishist, but in the World Court there is no immunity for war crimes or crimes against humanity. That’s a sweeping declaration we can all get behind, first blush or not.

Andrew Tilghman of the Washington Monthly has a well-argued piece that suggests the role and influence of Al Qaeda in Iraq is a fraction of what official estimates (read: White House and Pentagon stats) claim:

How big, then, is AQI? The most persuasive estimate I've heard comes from Malcolm Nance, the author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq. He believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters, comprising 2 percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq," according to Nance, "is a microscopic terrorist organization."

Tilghman also provides evidence that the Golden Mosque bombing -- which Ayman al-Zawahiri all but castigated his lieutenant, the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for carrying out* -- was actually a sophisticated demolition job of former Baathists:

The man who the military believe orchestrated the bombing, an Iraqi named Haitham al-Badri, was both a Samara native and a former high-ranking government official under Saddam Hussein. (His right-hand man, Hamed Jumaa Farid al-Saeedi, was also a former military intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein's army.) Key features of the bombing did not conform to the profile of an AQI attack. For example, the bombers did not target civilians, or even kill the Shiite Iraqi army soldiers guarding the mosque, both of which are trademark tactics of AQI. The planners also employed sophisticated explosive devices, suggesting formal military training common among former regime officers, rather than the more bluntly destructive tactics typical of AQI. Finally, Samara was the heart of Saddam's power base, where former regime fighters keep tight control over the insurgency.

However, this begs a further question: If Saddamists were responsible for the most devastating symbolic attack on Iraqi civil society since the war began, did they not foresee that it would lead to Shia death squads and a possible genocide of Sunnis? How does the old regime presume to retake power (its one true goal) if it ignites a civil war that will likely devour its already minuscule ethnic base? Zarqawi had a much clearer motive in razing the holy shrine: It was only holy to a sect of Muslims he believed were polytheistic and thus no better than atheists, Christians or Jews. His vision was decidedly less realist than regime dead-enders; he salivated for a regional war that would cull fighters from all corners of the Middle East and culminate in a 21st century caliphate. This is why his bosses in Waziristan tried to rein him in.

Tilghman also admits that if any cross-pollination between AQI and the Saddamists has taken place, then it is the former that are joining the larger ranks of the latter. He quotes Nance: "Al-Qaeda can't operate anywhere in Iraq without kissing the ring of the former regime."

AQI recruits often find themselves taking orders from a network of former regime insurgents, who assemble their car bombs and tell them what to blow up. They become, as Nance says, "puppets for the other insurgent groups."

So there is every reason to believe that, even if AQI is as small a force as Tlighman imagines, it is still responsible for executing the violent designs of the Baathist leadership. This makes it something of a vanguard force of the insurgency worth taking seriously, doesn't it?

More telling is what Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor reports today: That Al Qaeda is, apart from atrophied, almost non-existent in Iraq -- not because it never was there, but because it has been soundly beaten:

The Brookings Institution's Iraq index, which monitors security indicators in the country, appears to back up Mr. Crocker's assessment. In its latest report, the index found that the flow of foreign fighters to Iraq has dropped from about 85 to about 50 over several recent months. US officials say the number of suicide bombings in Iraq has fallen from more than 60 in January to about 30 a month since July.

Suicide-bombings are the worst kinds of attacks because the perpetrators can't be captured or interrogated, and thus their affiliations are always open to speculation and paranoia. Though AQI has made suicide bombing its heinous specialty, so a 50% reduction in attacks per month is, even for a tiny organization, a stark sign of that organization's attrition. Moreover, if the Mujahadeen Army of Iraq -- another Sunni terrorist outfit but with nationalist rather than imperialist aims -- is responsible for any number of those suicide-bombings, then the above suggests they're being defeated as well.

* See Zawahiri's letter to Zarqawi. He doesn't address the Golden Mosque atrocity directly, but the pedantic rhetorical questions he asks of his man in Mesopotamia seem to hint at it: "If the attacks on Shia leaders were necessary to put a stop to their plans, then why were there attacks on ordinary Shia? Won't this lead to reinforcing false ideas in their minds, even as it is incumbent on us to preach the call of Islam to them and explain and communicate to guide them to the truth? And can the mujahedeen kill all of the Shia in Iraq? Has any Islamic state in history ever tried that? And why kill ordinary Shia considering that they are forgiven because of their ignorance? And what loss will befall us if we did not attack the Shia? And do the brothers forget that we have more than one hundred prisoners - many of whom are from the leadership who are wanted in their countries - in the custody of the Iranians? And even if we attack the Shia out of necessity, then why do you announce this matter and make it public, which compels the Iranians to take counter measures? And do the brothers forget that both we and the Iranians need to refrain from harming each other at this time in which the Americans are targeting us?"