Fighting Roadside Bombs: Part IV

This post concludes my coverage of Rick Atkinson's Washington Post series on the IED threat to international security. Atkinson's fourth article in the series continues his discussion of the Pentagon's dramatic policy efforts to adapt to improvised bombs. Frankly, much of the article repeats the main points raised by Atkinson previously. I did like this concluding passage, however:

At 9:30 p.m. on Monday, May 7, a convoy of four uparmored Humvees rolled through the heavily fortified gate at Camp Falcon in southern Baghdad before turning north onto Route Jackson at 35 mph. Each Humvee carried a jammer against radio-controlled bombs, either a Duke or an SSVJ. Each had been outfitted with Frag Kit 5, and a Rhino II protruded from each front bumper as protection against EFPs detonated by passive infrared triggers. As recommended, the drivers kept a 40-meter separation from one another.

The senior officer in the third Humvee, Lt. Col. Gregory D. Gadson, 41, had driven to Falcon to attend a memorial service for two soldiers killed by an IED. Now he was returning to his own command post near Baghdad International Airport. As commander of the 2nd Battalion of the 32nd Field Artillery, a unit in the 1st Infantry Division, Gadson was a gunner by training. But as part of the troop "surge" that President Bush announced in January, the battalion had taken up unfamiliar duties as light infantrymen in Baghdad.

After 18 years in the Army, including tours of duty in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and in Afghanistan, Gadson was hardly shocked by the change of mission. He knew that, proverbially, no plan survived contact with the enemy. Raised in Chesapeake, Va., he had been a football star in high school and an outside linebacker at West Point before graduating in 1989. The nomadic Army life suited him and his wife, Kim, who had been a classmate at the academy before resigning her commission to raise their two children.

In the darkness on Route Jackson, no one noticed the dimple in the roadbed, where insurgents had loosened the asphalt with burning tires and buried three 130mm artillery shells before repairing the hole. No one saw the command wire snaking to the east through a hole in a chain-link fence and into a building. No one saw the triggerman.

They all heard the blast. "The boom is what I think about every day," Gadson would say three months later at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. A great flash exploded beneath the right front fender. Gadson felt himself tumbling across the ground, and he knew instantly that an IED had struck the Humvee. "I don't have my rifle," he told himself, and then the world went black.

When he regained consciousness, he saw the looming face of 1st Sgt. Frederick L. Johnson, who had been in the trail vehicle and had brought his commander back from the dead with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Lying on the road shoulder 50 meters from his shattered Humvee, Gadson was the only man seriously wounded in the attack, but those wounds were grievous. Another soldier, Pfc. Eric C. Brown, managed to knot tourniquets across his upper thighs. Johnson hoisted Gadson, who weighed 210 pounds, into another Humvee, an ordeal that was "extremely complicated due to the extensive injuries Lt. Col. Gadson sustained to his lower extremities," an incident report later noted.

Thirty minutes after the blast, Gadson was flown from Camp Falcon to the 28th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad's Green Zone. For hours he hovered near death, saved by 70 units of transfused blood. "Tell Kim I love her," he told another officer.

Two days later, he was stable enough to fly to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany; two days after that, he reached Walter Reed, where Kim was waiting for him. On May 18, a major artery in his left leg ruptured; to save his life, surgeons amputated several inches above the knee. The next day, the right leg blew, and it, too, was taken off at the thigh.

Gadson would be but one of 22,000 American casualties from IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that isolated incident along Route Jackson on May 7 was emblematic of the nation's long struggle against roadside bombs.

He had been wounded despite the best equipment his country could give him and despite the best countermeasures American science could contrive. His life had been saved by the armored door that shielded his head and torso, and by the superior training of his soldiers, the heroic efforts of military medicine and his own formidable grit. He had lost his lower limbs despite flawlessly following standard operating procedure. He faced months, and years, of surgery, rehabilitation and learning to live a life without legs.

Gadson's war was over, but for his comrades and for the country it goes on. An additional $4.5 billion has been budgeted for the counter-IED fight in the fiscal year that began this week. JIEDDO [the Joint IED Defeat Organization], which started four years ago this month in the Pentagon basement as an Army task force with a dozen soldiers, now fills two floors of an office building in Crystal City and employs almost 500 people, including contractors.

The House Armed Services Committee concluded in May that the organization "has demonstrated marginal success in achieving its stated mission to eliminate the IED as a weapon of strategic influence." Others disagree, including England. "Monty Meigs was the best thing that ever happened to us," he said, "and to the [Pentagon], and to the guys in the field."

Whether because of the surge, or despite it, total IED attacks in Iraq declined from 3,200 in March to 2,700 in July, an 8 percent drop. IED-related deaths also declined over the summer, sharply, from 88 in May to 27 in September.

If heartened by the recent trend, Meigs [Retired Gen. Montgomery C., head of the Pentagon's counter-IED effort] is cautious. He notes that sniping, another asymmetrical tactic, tormented soldiers in the Civil War. "Snipers are still around, and they're darned effective," he said. "Artillery has also been around a long time. There are some tactical problems that are very hard to solve. There are no silver bullets, no panaceas."

Virtually everyone agrees that regardless of how the American expeditions in Iraq and Afghanistan play out, the roadside bomb has become a fixture on 21st-century battlegrounds.

I mentioned earlier how the IED threat demonstrates "the sheer horror of war." Lt. Col. Gadson's experience powerfully illustrates the point, but it also brings home the tremendous importance of defeating the IED scourge.

Overall, while the Akinson series is informative, the reporting focused too much on the bureaucratic impediments in combatting the roadside bombs. In Atkinson's conclusion above he notes that "total IED attacks in Iraq declined from 3,200 in March to 2,700 in July, an 8 percent drop" and "IED-related deaths also declined over the summer, sharply, from 88 in May to 27 in September." There's more to these numbers, especially the more-than 50 percent drop in fatalities indicated for last summer. Atkinson's analysis might have focused more on what ground-level adaptions U.S. forces were making, rather than the almost exclusive attention to the top-down developments coming out of Washington.

Perhaps Atkinson's goal was to contribute to the defeatist grip that's got a hold on much of the Democratic establishment. Stanley Kurtz, at the National Review last week, was critical of the Post's left-wing slant to its coverage of the war:

Today, on the front page of The Washington Post, we see the third in a three-part series on roadside bombs in Iraq. The stories in this series have been centered on the top half of the page and highlighted in red (a device I don’t recall seeing before). Next to that is a huge headline about allegations of killings In Iraq by Blackwater. Below that is a headline that reads "Most in Poll Want War Funding Cut." Meanwhile deep inside the paper, on page A14, we find the following article: "U.S. and Civilian Deaths Decrease Sharply in Iraq: American Military Credits Troop Influx." True, nestled between the other screaming headlines on page one, there is a brief minuscule teaser for this far more positive story about Iraq. Yet the bias here is clear.

If the top story is Iraq, then I don’t see how you can put those three stories on the front page, while burying the other one on page 14. Arguably, an actual report of substantial positive progress in Iraq is more important, and more dramatic, than any of those other stories...

Kurtz has a good point. Yet, I'm reminded of my analysis from the first entry in this series, where I suggested that the IED threat represents a first-order challenge to American military preponderance, in that it works to weaken U.S. military effectiveness in the weakest link of the overall chain of U.S. strategy: the contested zones. This Weekly Standard report from 2005 on the Pentagon's bureaucractic approach to the IED threat captures the priority of taming this threat:

THE IED IS ONLY A TACTICAL WEAPON, but it is also the only weapon that produces significant U.S. casualties. And because these casualties are the primary factor in eroding American public support for Operation Iraqi Freedom, this tactical weapon is capable of having a major strategic impact. The IED is capable of defeating the U.S. mission in Iraq if not checked by an effective tactical response.

The Weekly Standard piece suggests that U.S. policy should cultivate more bottom-up efforts in adapting to IEDs (for an example of such initiatives, this report from Michael Yon). To its credit, the U.S. Army shows evidence of more attention to ground-level solutions to issues of asymmetrical warfare.

See my earlier entries in the "Fighting Roadside Bombs" series, here, here, and here.

Our Soldiers: Modern American Heroes

Observe the comments to my post yesterday, "Soldiers Die For Us: A Tribute to the Fallen":

Soldiers die for a lot of reasons. They die to protect their buddies. They die to expand the empire. They die to protect corporate profits. They die. But they do not die for us. They are not fighting for us. And nothing they are doing in Iraq is helping this country one bit. Their deaths are for nothing. They are not heroes. They are cowardly conquerors...

This kind of troop-bashing sentiment is common among the International ANSWER types. Yet, as Robert Kaplan notes in today's Wall Street Journal, denigration of the military is increasingly common among the transnational elite in America's top insitutions, especially the mass media:

I'm weary of seeing news stories about wounded soldiers and assertions of "support" for the troops mixed with suggestions of the futility of our military efforts in Iraq. Why aren't there more accounts of what the troops actually do? How about narrations of individual battles and skirmishes, of their ever-evolving interactions with Iraqi troops and locals in Baghdad and Anbar province, and of increasingly resourceful "patterning" of terrorist networks that goes on daily in tactical operations centers?

The sad and often unspoken truth of the matter is this: Americans have been conditioned less to understand Iraq's complex military reality than to feel sorry for those who are part of it.

Kaplan reports from the field that U.S. soldiers are looking for respect, not pity: "We are not victims," one battalion commander asserted. "We are privileged." Thus Kaplan continues:

The cult of victimhood in American history first flourished in the aftermath of the 1960s youth rebellion, in which, as University of Chicago Prof. Peter Novick writes, women, blacks, Jews, Native Americans and others fortified their identities with public references to past oppressions. The process was tied to Vietnam, a war in which the photographs of civilian victims "displaced traditional images of heroism." It appears that our troops have been made into the latest victims.

Heroes, according to the ancients, are those who do great deeds that have a lasting claim to our respect. To suffer is not necessarily to be heroic. Obviously, we have such heroes, who are too often ignored. Witness the low-key coverage accorded to winners of the Medal of Honor and of lesser decorations.

The first Medal of Honor in the global war on terror was awarded posthumously to Army Sgt. First Class Paul Ray Smith of Tampa, Fla., who was killed under withering gunfire protecting his wounded comrades outside Baghdad airport in April 2003.

According to LexisNexis, by June 2005, two months after his posthumous award, his stirring story had drawn only 90 media mentions, compared with 4,677 for the supposed Quran abuse at Guantanamo Bay, and 5,159 for the court-martialed Abu Ghraib guard Lynndie England. While the exposure of wrongdoing by American troops is of the highest importance, it can become a tyranny of its own when taken to an extreme.

Media frenzies are ignited when American troops are either the perpetrators of acts resulting in victimhood, or are victims themselves. Meanwhile, individual soldiers daily performing complicated and heroic deeds barely fit within the strictures of news stories as they are presently defined. This is why the sporadic network and cable news features on heroic soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan comes across as so hokey. After all, the last time such reports were considered "news" was during World War II and the Korean War.

In particular, there is Fox News's occasional series on war heroes, whose apparent strangeness is a manifestation of the distance the media has traveled away from the nation-state in the intervening decades. Fox's war coverage is less right-wing than it is simply old-fashioned, antediluvian almost. Fox's commercial success may be less a factor of its ideological base than of something more primal: a yearning among a large segment of the public for a real national media once again--as opposed to an international one. Nationalism means patriotism, and patriotism requires heroes, not victims.

Kaplan's piece is worth reading in whole, but the conclusion is particularly good:

The media is but one example of the slow crumbling of the nation-state at the upper layers of the social crust - a process that because it is so gradual, is also deniable by those in the midst of it. It will take another event on the order of 9/11 or greater to change the direction we are headed. Contrary to popular belief, the events of 9/11--which are perceived as an isolated incident--did not fundamentally change our nation. They merely interrupted an ongoing trend toward the decay of nationalism and the devaluation of heroism.

As Kaplan points out, the notion that there's been a "decay of nationalism" is contested. Yet on the question of the deligimization of state-based heroism, Kaplan's commentary here makes a compelling case to the contrary.

Extinguishing the Fire of Radical Islam

Check out the following letter to the editor, from John L. Sorg, of McCordeville, Indiana, in response to last Friday's Frederick Kagan commentary in the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Kagan's message that security for the Iraqi people is a prerequisite for defeating al Qaeda is correct. It's also necessary for defeating the Sadrists, other "extremists/terrorists" and laying the foundation for political compromise on key issues like oil-revenue sharing at the federal level. The idea that politics will lead to defeating terrorists without security coming first has it exactly backward.

Despite the mantra of the left that Iraq is a failure and is separate and apart from the war on radical Islam, success in Iraq is essential to turning the tide against the radical, worldwide jihadist movement, which seeks to force its will on the rest of Islam and, ultimately, the rest of the world. The fact that most of the Democratic Party cannot acknowledge this disqualifies those Democrats running for president from effectively operating as commander in chief. In World War II there was a national consensus regarding the need to defeat the evil of Nazism. Many Democrats have not recognized the need to defeat the similar evil of a radical Islam that will stop at nothing to impose its will on the world.

We must stay in Iraq for as long as it takes with the forces necessary to achieve victory. Instead, let's talk about "strategic redeployment" of our troops out of Europe and Asia if it means we can solidify our presence in the Middle East and put out the fire of radical Islam. No one wants to "occupy" the Middle East indefinitely, but occupy we must until the jihadists understand that we will not allow defeat. Only then will they give up. The antiwar leftists have served only to prolong the war by giving the evil ones hope that they can outlast us. I believe that if the Democrats win the presidency, hope will be renewed for the terrorists.

See also yesterday's Bartle Bull commentary in WSJ, which argues that we have indeed turned the tide in Iraq, with military victories forcing the realignment of Iraq's sectarian parties, which has in turn consolidated the current Shiite political order.

Soldiers Die for Us: A Tribute to the Fallen

Check out this YouTube, a tribute to the fallen:

Hat tip: Forward Deployed.

Also check out Chicago Ray's Wednesday Hero.

Fighting Roadside Bombs: Part III

Rick Atkinson's third installment of his Washington Post IED series takes a further look at the agonizing effort by U.S. officials to develop effective countermeasures to the threat of roadside bombs. Here's the introduction:

On Aug. 3, 2005, the deadliest roadside bomb ever encountered by U.S. troops in Iraq detonated beneath a 26-ton armored personnel carrier, killing 14 Marines and revealing yet another American vulnerability in the struggle against improvised explosive devices.

"Huge fire and dust rose from the place of the explosion," an Iraqi witness reported from the blast site in Haditha, in Anbar province. In Baghdad and in Washington, the bleak recognition that a new species of bomb -- the underbelly, or "deep buried," IED -- could demolish any combat vehicle in the U.S. arsenal "was a light-bulb moment for sure," as a Pentagon analyst later put it.

Of the 81,000 IED attacks in Iraq over the past 4 1/2 years, few proved more devastating to morale than that "huge fire" in Haditha. At a time when coalition casualties per IED steadily declined, even as the number of bombs steadily increased, the abrupt obliteration of an entire squad -- made up mostly of reservists from Ohio -- revealed that the billions of dollars being spent on heavier armor and other "defeat the device" initiatives had clear limits.

Haditha provided a light-bulb moment for insurgents as well. During the next year, underbelly attacks just in the Marine sector of western Iraq would increase from a few each month to an average of four per day. By early summer of this year, the underbelly IED -- considered a specialty of Sunni bombers -- was killing more American troops in Iraq than all other variants of roadside bombs combined.

A bomb with 100 pounds of explosives detonating beneath an armored vehicle was equivalent to a direct hit from a six-gun artillery battery, but with an accuracy no gunner could hope to achieve. A single 155mm artillery round, which by itself can destroy a tank, typically contained 18 pounds of explosives. "That's just a damned difficult thing to defeat," said Brig. Gen. Joseph Anderson, the current chief of staff for the Multinational Corps in Baghdad.

Two weeks after the Haditha killings, Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, who headed the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, lamented the failure of American science to vanquish the roadside bomb. "If we could prematurely detonate IEDs, we will change the whole face of the war," he said. For "a country that can put a man on the moon in 10 years, or build a nuke in 2 1/2 years of wartime effort, I don't think we're getting what we need from technology on that point."

This installment of the series - with its detailed explication of the astonishingly raw firepower of the latest roadside explosives - really brings home the utter brutality of the IED threat to U.S. forces. To put it bluntly, this piece really captures the sheer horror of the war.

Also check this next quote on "explosively formed penetrators" (IFPs), the IED projectiles supplied to the Iraqi terrorists by Iran:

By late summer 2005, the explosively formed penetrator, like the underbelly IED, had become an appallingly lethal weapon for which there was no obvious countermeasure.

Although still a small fraction of all roadside bombings, EFP attacks since spring had increased from about one per week to roughly one every other day. When fired, the semi-molten copper disks struck with such violence that casualties tended to be higher and more gruesome than in other IED attacks. "This was beyond the capability of anything in our arsenal," an Army brigadier general said. "And, by the way, you can't armor your way out of this problem."

Read the whole thing.

For my earlier entries in this series, click here and here.

Fighting Roadside Bombs: Part II

This post continues my coverage of Rick Atkinson's series on the IED challenge and the U.S. military. In his second article Atkinson elaborates in some detail Defense Department efforts to counter the increasingly deadly effects of the IED threat to U.S. forces in Iraq.

Eliminating the IED problem was given top priority, although Atkinson argues that most of the various programs to combat the scourge were mostly ad hoc and unsuccessful. Atkinson also notes a particularly troubling development in the last couple of years involving newer explosive devices supplied to insurgents through the Iranian arms pipeline:

More than 250 American soldiers would be killed by another type of IED that was spreading across the battlefield and against which even the best jammers proved useless.

The first confirmed EFP -- explosively formed penetrator -- had appeared in Basra on May 15, 2004, and [Pentagon IED Task Force director Joseph] Votel had briefed Vice President Cheney in late June on the phenomenon, using a model to demonstrate how it worked. The weapon, which fired a heavy copper disc with devastating impact, typically used a passive infrared trigger that detonated the bomb when a sensor detected radiation from a warm passing object, such as a Humvee. Because no radio waves were involved, jammers had no effect.

A Defense Intelligence Agency weapons team had noted in the late 1990s that EFPs with infrared triggers were used by Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces against the Israelis in southern Lebanon at least as early as 1997. The few EFPs that were in Iraq during the early summer of 2004 invariably appeared in Shiite-controlled areas near the Iranian border, such as Basra and southeast Baghdad. That suggested "international linkages" to Iran, Votel told Cheney.

A colonel at the Israeli Embassy had repeatedly warned the task force about infrared-triggered EFPs. "He and other Israelis were pounding on the desk, saying, 'Listen, we've already been through this historically. This is what's going to happen next,' " a task force officer later recalled....

By early 2005, what one officer had described as "an ominous thing on the horizon" was moving to the foreground in Iraq. Most EFPs were built with several pounds of pure copper, either milled or punched with a 20-ton hydraulic press into a concave disc with a 140-degree angle, two to 11 inches in diameter. Triggered by the infrared sensor, a blasting cap in turn set off explosives packed behind the copper disc -- known as a liner -- inside a steel or plastic pipe. The detonation wave, moving at 8,000 meters per second, struck the liner, which inverted into a tadpole-shaped slug.

An EFP eight inches in diameter threw a seven-pound copper slug at Mach 6, or 2,000 meters per second. (A .50-caliber bullet, among the most devastating projectiles on the battlefield, weighs less than two ounces and has a muzzle velocity of 900 meters per second.) Unlike an armor-killing shaped charge, the EFP warhead did not turn into a plasma jet, but remained semi-molten. Copper was preferred because it is ductile and malleable, and does not shatter like steel. Typically fired at ranges from five to 10 meters, the slug could punch through several inches of armor, spraying metal shards across the crew compartment....

Debate intensified within the U.S. government over Iran's role in distributing EFPs. [General John] Abizaid was skeptical until British troops reportedly captured a cache of copper discs along Iraq's southeastern border. Other evidence accumulated. For example, according to a former DIA analyst, the C-4 plastic explosive found in some EFPs chemically matched that sold by Tehran's Defense Industries Organization and identified by specific lot numbers. Intelligence also indicated the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was training and giving explosives to certain Iraqi Shiite groups, a senior DOD official said.

Read the whole thing. Abizaid counseled against military action to stop Iranian arms shipments to Iraq, arguing that "You know they're doing it, but you don't know that you want to go to war over it."

There's been some suggestion that Iranian-supplied munitions account for 70 percent of current U.S. casualties in Iraq. It seems to me, contrary to Abizaid, that this is something we'd want to go to war over.

For the previous post from this series, click here.

Fighting Roadside Bombs

Rick Atkinson at the Washington Post has a series up this week on how the U.S. military is meeting the challenge of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the current generation of warfare.

The first installment ran Sunday under the title, "The IED problem is getting out of control. We've got to stop the bleeding." Here's an excerpt with some background to the issue, which picks up after Atkinson's discussion of Iraq's unsecured ammunition depots, the basic supply source for the insurgency's bombing campaign:

In the summer of 2003, pilfered explosives appeared in growing numbers of IEDs. Main Supply Route Tampa, the main road for military convoys driving between Baghdad and Kuwait, became a common target. Three artillery shells wired to a timer west of Taji, discovered on July 29, reportedly made up the first confirmed delay bomb. Others were soon found using egg timers or Chinese washing-machine timers.

Radio-controlled triggers tended to be simple and low-power, using car key fobs or wireless doorbell buzzers -- Qusun was the most common brand -- with a range of 200 meters or less. Radio controls from toy cars beamed signals to a small electrical motor attached to a bomb detonator; turning the toy's front wheels completed the circuit and triggered the explosion.

U.S. troops dubbed the crude devices "bang-bang" because spurious signals could cause premature detonations, sometimes killing the emplacer. Bombers soon learned to install safety switches in the contraptions, and to use better radio links.

Camouflage remained simple, with bombs tucked in roadkill or behind highway guardrails. (Soldiers soon ripped out hundreds of miles of guardrail.) Emplacers often used the same "blow hole" repeatedly, returning to familiar roadside "hot spots" again and again. But early in the insurgency, before U.S. troops were better trained, only about one bomb in 10 was found and neutralized, according to an Army colonel.

Coalition forces tended to concentrate at large FOBs -- forward operating bases -- with few entry roads. "Insurgents seized the initiative on these common routes," according to a 2007 account of the counter-IED effort by Col. William G. Adamson. "The vast majority of IED attacks occurred within a short distance of the FOBs."

Each week, the cat-and-mouse game expanded. When coalition convoys routinely began stopping 300 yards from a suspected IED, insurgents planted easily spotted hoax bombs to halt traffic, then detonated explosives that had been hidden where a convoy would most likely pull over.

By the early fall of 2003, IED attacks had reached 100 a month, according to a House Armed Services Committee document. Most were a nuisance; some proved stunning and murderous. A large explosion along a roadbed near Balad in October of that year flung a 70-ton M1A2 Abrams tank down an embankment, shearing off the turret and killing two crewmen. Even more horrifying was a truck bomb at 4:45 p.m. on Aug. 19 that demolished the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing the U.N. special representative and 22 others.

Day by day, as Adamson would write, "the concept of a front, or line of battle, vanished" in Iraq, giving way to "360-degree warfare."

The article is worth reading in its entirety.

One of the most important conclusions to be drawn here is how gravely serious a threat the IED crisis poses for U.S. forces and overall military priorities. There's a massive amount of unsecured ordnance in Iraq, and roadside bombs have become far and away the most significant source of American casualties. High-level Defense Department strategic planning to fight the IED scourge is discussed in terms of scale relative to the Manhattan Project. Indeed, elimination of the IED threat is now top national security policy, and par with the extermination of Osama bin Laden.

I have a couple of quick thoughts about the piece. My first consideration is how the IED crisis affects U.S. planning on Iranian counterproliferation. The article notes, for example, that perhaps as much as 1 million tons of explosives in Iraq were thought to be unsecured in 2003, a situation arising out of the U.S. military's constraints in providing comprehensive post-conflict stablity in Iraq after initial combat.

As grave a potential situation as those numbers reveal, the issue of unsecured munitions should not be construed as precluding any Iranian complicity in the number and serverity of recent IED attack on American forces. Unfortunately, at least one hard-left blog has cited Atkinson's piece as evidence that the administration is trumping up evidence against Iranian support for insurgents in Iraq - the purpose of such assertions being to delegitimize a U.S. military response to Iran's campaign of killing U.S. forces in Iraq. Yet, as I noted yesterday, the U.S. military has been gathering increasing evidence of an Iranian arms pipeline to Iraq, and American forces have begun to step up countermobilization activities along the Iraq-Iran border.

A second aspect to the roadside bomb threat relates to the broader international theory of America's global military preponderance. The U.S. currently enjoy strategic unipolarity in the international realm. The implication of this, as Barry Posen pointed out in in his 2003 article, "Command of the Commons," is that in the air, land, and sea, the U.S. currently faces no immediate challenges to its national security from any potential great power adversary in world politics.

Posen's research shows, however, that U.S. primacy is substantially compromised by peripheral adversaries who wage wars against the U.S. in the "contested zones":

The closer U.S. military forces get to enemy-held territory, the more competitive the enemy will be. This arises from a combination of political, physical, and technological facts. These facts combine to create a contested zone—arenas of conventional combat where weak adversaries have a good chance of doing real damage to U.S. forces. The Iranians, the Serbs, the Somalis, and the still unidentified hard cases encountered in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan have demonstrated that it is possible to fight the U.S. military. Only the Somalis can claim anything like a victory, but the others have imposed costs, preserved at least some of their forces, and often lived to tell the tale—to one another. These countries or entities have been small, resource poor, and often militarily “backward.” They offer cautionary tales. The success of the 2003 U.S. campaign against the Ba’athist regime in Iraq should not blind observers to the inherent difficulty of fighting in contested zones.

Posen's piece appeared four years ago, at the time of the earliest stage of Iraq's insurgency. Yet as we now know, the Iraq war clearly constitutes a "hard case" of successful asymmetrical warfare, waged by an impacable array of terrorist forces - backed by both state and non-state actors - determined to fight a ruthless campaign of intimidation, insecurity, and murder, the ultimate object of which is undermine support for the Iraqi government, and bring about a civil war victory of nihilist darkness.

The stakes in fighting the threat of roadside bombs are great, not just for Iraq, but for the future of American military leadership and global order.

Stayed tuned for forthcoming posts on Atkinson's series on the IED challenge.

Administration Plans for Iran: Propaganda or Threat?

Seymour Hersh has a new piece up at the New Yorker belittling the Bush administration's strategic planning on Iran. Hersh argues that the administration's shifting rationale for a military response to Iran is tactical propaganda designed to gain the upper hand in public opinion. Here's a snippet (via Memeorandum):

In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran....

The President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

Hersh spends much of the remainder of his essay questioning the credibility of Iranian support for Shiite terror in Iraq, and he dismisses Iranian influence on the mayhem, suggesting that tribal animosities and sectarian infighting within the Iraqi government are responsible for recent violence and instability.

Those familiar with Hersh's work - he's mounted a decades-long campaign to delegitimize the U.S. military and the use of force - will be rightly skeptical of this article. It's been well known for years that Iran has been supplying some of the most lethal improvised explosives killing U.S. forces in Iraq (see here, here, here, here, and here). Further, Hersh's piece fails to provide sources of evidence or argumentation contrary to his major claims.

Antiwar forces will continue to hammer the administration on foreign policy, and neither a full-scale Iranian incursion into Iraq nor the development of Iranian nuclear capability will derail the left's delegitimization campaign against American counterbalancing on Iran.

Note thought that just last week eight Arab nations warned at a diplomatic conference against Iran's "hegemonistic" designs for the Middle East region. In Israel, moreover, the Jerusalem Post suggested that Iran's belligerence presents a challenge to both Israeli and global security:

If a house is on fire, there is little point in worrying about termites, let only the color of the drapes. Western global priorities are seriously misaligned. While it would be wrong to succumb to the global Islamist threat by ignoring other issues, it is even more wrong to ignore the overarching threat that, if it is not defeated, will prevent free nations from comprehensively advancing any of the other critical items on the global agenda.

By force of necessity, Israel has to place grappling with existential threats at front and center. While the country has done an astounding job of building a thriving democracy despite the continuous Arab war against our existence, our politics has been monopolized by matters of peace and security. All other concerns, from the environment to religious-secular tensions to socioeconomic gaps to battling corruption and reforming the electoral system, have had to be largely set aside by a public and political system that cannot adequately address such "side" issues until our existential dilemma is dealt with.

The existential threat to Israel is, of course, part of the Islamist threat to the West. Ignoring it, in either its local or global forms, will not make it go away. Nor can the international community begin to defeat it in earnest while we are still confused and in denial over the pivotal role the outcome of this struggle will have for all other global priorities.

If there's a silver lining in Hersh's report, it's that Israeli military and political leaders are cool to limited U.S. strikes on Iran's Revolutionary Guard, which is a top option being pushed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Israel remains focused on the full-blown decapitation of Iranian strategic capabilities, Hersh notes. The U.S. should be as well.

Drawing Down in Iraq?

Max Boot's article in the current Commentary weighs the competing alternatives for a U.S. drawdown in Iraq. Boot looks at both the diplomatic and military sides of the drawdown equation. For example, Boot reviews the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), as well as the proposals of Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack, among others.

With reference to the ISG, Boot raises some interesting points with regards to Iran and Syria's sponsorship of terrorism in Iraq. Could Iran and Syria help the U.S. push a diplomatic angle to augment a general drawdown for U.S. forces in Iraq? Boot get to the heart of the matter:

As if Iraq’s internal divisions were not bad enough, the country’s neighbors, in particular Iran and Syria, have contributed greatly to the current unrest. This is the challenge that the ISG’s “diplomatic offensive” proposes to meet. But how? Iran, according to the ISG report, “should stem the flow of arms and training to Iraq, respect Iraq’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and use its influence over Iraqi Shiite groups to encourage national reconciliation.” Syria, for its part, “should control its border with Iraq to stem the flow of funding, insurgents, and terrorists in and out of Iraq.”

Well, all that would surely be nice. But how exactly are we to convince Syria and Iran that they should do what the Iraq Study Group thinks they should do? The “United States,” says the ISG somewhat redundantly, “should engage directly with Iran and Syria.” There is, however, little reason to think that such talks would yield progress in the desired direction.

In the Iranian case, one indicator of interest—or, more accurately, lack of interest—in negotiations is that on May 28, even as talks were in fact being held in Baghdad between the American and Iranian ambassadors, the Tehran regime was detaining four Iranian-Americans on fabricated charges. Another is that the Iranians have been stepping up the flow of funds, munitions, and trainers to support terrorism in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Both Syria and Iran are also deeply complicit in backing Hamas, Hizballah, and other radical groups working to undermine two other democracies in the Middle East: namely, Israel and Lebanon.

The ISG report suggests that Syria and Iran have an interest in an “Iraq that does not disintegrate and destabilize its neighbors and the region.” That may be so—but not if it means that Iraq emerges as a democratic ally of the United States and an active partner in the war against terrorism. For a terrorism-sponsoring Iranian regime, that would be the worst outcome imaginable. Much better, from the strategic perspective of both Syria and Iran, to continue fomenting chaos in Iraq so as to prevent the emergence of a unified state capable of threatening them.

Syria and especially Iran have been waging a proxy war against the United States in Iraq that could well end with Iran as the dominant player in most of the country. By means of the Jaish al Mahdi and other front groups, Tehran is doing in Iraq what it has already done with Hizballah in Lebanon: expanding its sphere of influence. Why should Ayatollah Khameini and his inner circle voluntarily put a stop to a policy that appears to be achieving their objectives at relatively low cost?

Tehran might veer from its belligerent course if it feared serious military and economic retaliation, ranging from an embargo on refined-petroleum imports to air strikes against the ayatollahs’ nuclear installations. But with a few brave and prophetic exceptions like Senator Joseph Lieberman, who has continued to call attention to Iranian aggression, there is scant political support in the United States for such a tough policy, however justified it may be.

Boot also takes a close look at the various scenarios involving residual stabilization and advisory forces in Iraq, whereby U.S. contingents would remain in-country to foster the consolidation of Iraq's political regime through counterterrorism and training. How many troops would remain in Iraq after an initial troop drawdown? There's some debate on the requisite numbers, with a bare-bones estimate suggesting that 60,000 U.S. troops remain for logistics, air support and transportation, and medical services.

Here's Boot in his summary of the overall situation:

Sooner or later, we will have to draw down our forces. It therefore makes sense to undertake now the kind of detailed planning that will be needed to effect a transition to a smaller force, perhaps 80,000 to 100,000 strong. Assuming sufficient political support at home—and that is by no means inconceivable, if the situation on the ground continues to improve— such a force could remain in Iraq for many years, focusing, as the ISG proposed, on tasks like advising local security forces and hunting down terrorists. But while the ISG approach makes sense in the long term, moving to a smaller force right now, as so many critics of the administration urge, would constitute an unacceptable risk.

The more security that our “surge” forces create and consolidate today, the greater the probability that a transition will work tomorrow. If we start withdrawing troops regardless of the consequences, we will not only put our remaining soldiers at greater risk but, as things inevitably turn nastier, imperil public support for any level of commitment, whether at 160,000 or 60,000.

Notwithstanding some positive preliminary results, the surge might still fail in the long run if Iraqis prove incapable of reaching political compromises even in a more secure environment. But, for all its faults and weaknesses, the surge is the least bad option we have. Its opponents, by contrast, have been loudly trying to beat something with nothing. If they do not like President Bush’s chosen strategy, the onus is on them to propose a credible alternative that could avert what would in all probability be the most serious military defeat in our history. So far, they have come up empty.

Read the whole thing.

All this talk of immediately withdrawing American forces from Iraq, especially among those most opposed to the war, really misses the reality of the situation. Security has improved in Iraq, and holding onto the recent gains found in the surge strategy will not be possible with an accelerated drawdown timetable. It's advisable, as a matter of prudence, for U.S. forces to stay in Iraq for a good time to come.

Bush and Iran: Do Whatever It Takes

Today's lead editorial at the Wall Street Journal takes the Bush administration to task for not living up to its public statements on Iran. Here's the introduction:

The traveling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad circus made for great political theater this week, but the comedy shouldn't detract from its brazen underlying message: The Iranian President believes that the world lacks the will to stop Iran from pursuing its nuclear program, and that the U.S. also can't stop his country from killing GIs in Iraq. The question is what President Bush intends to do about this in his remaining 16 months in office.

Over the last five years, Mr. Bush has issued multiple and sundry warnings to Iran. In early 2002, he cautioned Iran that "if they in any way, shape or form try to destabilize the [Afghan] government, the coalition will deal with them, in diplomatic ways initially." In mid-2003, following revelations about the extent of Iran's secret nuclear programs, he insisted the U.S. "will not tolerate the construction of a nuclear weapon."

In January of this year, as evidence mounted that Iran was supplying sophisticated, armor-penetrating munitions to Shiite militias in Iraq, Mr. Bush was tougher still: "We will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

In February, he added that "I can speak with certainty that the Qods Force, a part of the Iranian government, has provided these sophisticated IEDs that have harmed our troops." And as recently as this month's TV speech on Iraq, the President alerted Americans to the "destructive ambitions of Iran" and warned the mullahs that their efforts to "undermine [Iraq's] government must stop."

Read the whole thing. The editors go on to contrast the administration's "rhetorical record" in talking tough on Iran with its public actions, which so far have not walked the walk. One of the most troubling issues is Iran's killing of American soldiers in Iraq:

Administration officials tell us that Iranian-backed militias using Iranian-supplied arms now account for 70% of U.S. casualties in Iraq.

And here's the conclusion:

The Bush Presidency is running out of time to act if it wants to stop Iran from gaining a bomb. With GIs fighting and dying in Iraq, Mr. Bush also owes it to them not to allow enemy sanctuaries or weapons pipelines from Iran. If the President believes half of what he and his Administration have said about Iran's behavior, he has an obligation to do whatever it takes to stop it.

As readers here will recall, I've noted on many occasions the futility of U.N. sanctions in deterring Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability. Ahmadinejad announced Tuesday that Iran's nuclear weapons programs was a "closed issue" and that Tehran would ignore U.N. Security Council demands for the termination of its nuclear development efforts.

The administration should delay no longer. We indeed must to do whatever it takes to avoid an international crisis, even if this entails preventive strikes against Iran's nuclear development facilities.

More Hatred From Daily Kos

This Daily Kos post evinces pure, unmitigated hatred of the Bush administration and the U.S. military. There's really no other way to describe it.

The entry is from "lurxst," and it represents one more unsurprising sample of America-bashing nihilism from those of the Kos crowd:

I Don't Support the Troops..oops, there, I said it...

This has been digging at me for, oh, about 4 years now. I have been hesitant to express this thought, in comments sections and in discussion with other people about the Iraq quagmire for fear of, I don't know, being called mean. Or, un-American. Or something.

Supporting the troops essentially means supporting the illegal war. It seems that us anti-war types have been doing all sorts of mental and philisophical gymnastics to try and work around this. What has emerged is a sort of low impact, mealy-mouthed common wisdom that is palatable to everyone but is ultimately going to allow us to stay in Iraq for years to come....

Until we have another draft, this is a volunteer armed services. I am not even beginning to count the numerous mercenaries that are involved in the occupation. You signed up, you get to go to the desert and risk being shot at by brown skinned people who don't believe the lies you've been told. A war of aggression is immoral, period. If you believe in God, you can damned well be sure you are going to hell for your participation in it. The only troop I support is the man or woman who refuses to be deployed so that they can make the middle east accessible to profiteers who don't give a flying F about morality or democracy. Or a soldier's life.

When Sunni tribes got paid off enough to stop shooting at GIs and instead shoot at Al-Qaeda (in reality themselves) it is funny how they suddenly became Freedom Fighters. During WWII, French resistance fighters were also called terrorists and insurgents by their German occupiers. Can an anti-war proponent look at these Iraqi resistance fighters with the same admiration, even though they worship differently than us and when they eventually win are likely to install a distasteful (to Americans) theocratic tinged state. Can a person who doesn't believe in violence support that people's right to govern themselves, perhaps violently.

I am sorry but supporting the troops means supporting this illegal war.

Notice the de rigueur comparison (only mildly veiled) between the Bush administration and Nazi Germany.

Kos diarists' rants are getting more and more unhinged (and I only catch these lunacies when they're forwarded around the conservative blogosphere).

Recall here as well that I've noted Markos Moulitsas' own narcissism and megalomania, with reference to his regular outbursts claiming that "his movement" represents the true soul of the Democratic Party.

I know Kos and his underlings are deadly wrong about this war and our country. As we learned in recent polling data, public opinion is improving on the war, and with good campaigning, the GOP can come in strong in next year's elections. Still, it's hard to deny that the Democrats are looking good heading into 2008. This is all the more reason to expose and resist all the nihilist garbage that Daily Kos spits out.

Hat tip: Gold-Plated Witch and Jules Crittenden.

Straight Talk on International ANSWER

In a recent post I argued that:

Code Pink protesters and members of International ANSWER cheer a U.S. defeat because they hate everything for which the United States stands. If their antiwar campaign were to succeed in forcing a hasty U.S. exit from Iraq, these groups would be the first in line to storm the barricades against a U.S. government under seige by the forces of global anarchy and nihilism.

In the comments to that post a few visitors disagreed with my argument, suggesting that the United States faces little danger "from fringe groups such as these," and that ANSWER cadres are "boogiemen made of straw."

In response, I'd note that I've never said that the American democracy was about to be toppled by the hardline antiwar left. I have argued, however, that various strains of the international antiwar movement have formed strategic alliances with Islamic organizations with ties to such groups as Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood (see this post and its sources, here and here). Such groups are the sworn enemies of the United States, and there is no doubt whatsoever that their ultimate aim is the total destruction of the country.

Now, in the context of this unholy alliance of America's most implacable enemies, consider the recent statement from International ANSWER activist Adam Kokesh.

As reported in this piece on the "9/11 truthers" at the Weekly Standard, the 9/11 deniers have recently joined together with hardline antiwar organizations to protest the Bush administration's Iraq policies. Particularly, the article reports that the groups came together last week at a Washington, D.C., protest rally on the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

Attending the demonstration was Kokesh, an Iraq war veteran who has emerged as a major figure in the most recent round of antiwar activism. Kokesh was recently arrested for posting International ANSWER banners advertising the September 15 protest marches. According to the Weekly Standard, Kokesh was denouncing the administration's "commitment to attacking governments that sponsor terrorism," and he noted that with the current troop deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, "It's too bad [the military is] stretched too thin to strike America."

Now, while International ANSWER is not an armed insurrectionary movement, statements such as Kokesh's arguing for a "strike" against America are troubling. International ANSWER is the premier Marxist-Leninist organization among the American antiwar left. Here's what Byron York of the National Review had to say about the group in February 2003:

...International ANSWER... is an outgrowth of another group called the International Action Center, a San Francisco-based organization that showcases the work of Ramsey Clark, the Johnson administration attorney general who has specialized in anti-American causes. Both ANSWER and the International Action Center are closely allied with a small but energetic Marxist-Leninist organization known as the Workers World Party, which in its turbulent history has supported the Soviet interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Chinese government's crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Today, the WWP devotes much of its energy to supporting the regimes in Iraq and North Korea...

York argues that ANSWER is often considered much too radical for many mom-and-pop war opponents. Yet both York and the Economist article cited above note that ANSWER and its alliance partners have gained credibility among peace activists with their rabid denunciations of the Bush administration. In Britain, anti-American protests organized by the hard-left Socialist Workers' Party and pro-terror Islamic groups have been attended by upwards of a million people.

Reasonable people can debate the significance of all of these activities, this antiar radicalism, group opposition to the war, and the anti-Americanism. However, I'm the kind of person who takes people at their word. If Kokesh laments that the U.S. military is stretched too thin to mount a strike against the country, who knows? There's always Hezbollah and its Iranian backers, who at some point may have devastating WMD capabilities. I would not put Kokesh - in all his hatred - past striking up a relationship with such terrorist forces. In addition, young little peaceniks around the country are currenty being indoctrinated by a multifaceted cultural and educational movement of anti-Americanism and Bush-bashing, and their growing hatred of America is increasingly bolstered by the anti-miltary attacks of mainstream leftist interest groups such as MoveOn.org. To many of these people, the United States is an unmitigated evil, and revolution awaits.

So, lefty commenters here can dismiss my writings and concerns as the ill-considered rants of an unanchored neocon. Be that as it may. I will continue to dissect and expose the statements and utterances of the radical left for what they are - unveiled threats against this country - and I will continue my attampts here to shake loose the sleepy complacency common among many Americans on these dangers, which at some point may constitute the makings of a national death wish.

Turns Out That Summer Really Didn't Make a Difference

Cross-posted from The Oxford Medievalist:

I find it highly amusing that Senate Democrats, whilst incessantly deriding the surge as the same old failed strategy and urging a "change of course" in Iraq, can't seem to shake their own failed strategy in Congress. Instead of seeking compromise in the wake of General Petraeus', and Ambassador Crocker's, testimonies, the Politico reports that Senate Democrats will continue their failed strategy of pushing for, among other things that won't pass, a hard timetable for withdrawal. The Democrats' ability to compromise was always predicated on their ability to peel wavering Republicans to their side, and now that seems unlikely given that GOP leaders are committed to giving General Petraeus until March to continue the surge. It's no surprise, then, that the Democratic agenda is spearheaded by the ever-courageous Blind Harry, who sounds positively childish:

"We haven't found much movement with the Republicans. They seem to be sticking with the president," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Tuesday. "I think they've decided they definitely want this to be the Republican Senate's war, not just Bush's [war]. They're jealous. They don't want him to have it as only his war."

Similarly shocking is Senator Carl Levin's (D-Mich.) attempt to portray the Democrats' stand as a matter of principle, as opposed to simply a matter of what MoveOn.org wants:

"We want to vote on something we believe in before we move on," said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "There could be people who vote for this who didn't before."

Meanwhile, as the Democrats plan for more symbolic gestures to their anti-war base, that base is getting rather restless. The frustration has some anti-war activists, indeed has some Democrats, wondering aloud if the anti-war base should turn its sights on Democratic members of Congress who are not more aggressively challenging the GOP. Tom Matzzie, head of the anti-war coalition Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), thought by now that the offensive his coalition was about to launch against Republicans at the start of the summer was

"going to smash their heads against their base and flush them down the toilet,” Matzzie said in April.

Yet here we are almost six months later and progress continues to be made in Iraq and the Democrats have nothing to offer other than "more of the same."

Sound familiar?

Cross-posted from The Oxford Medievalist.

Poll Finds Partisan Reactions to Petraeus

Via Memeorandum: A new survey from the Pew Research Center finds that Americans view favorably the proposals of General David Petraeus on Iraq progress and expected troop withdrawals in 2008:

Last week's congressional testimony by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, followed by President Bush's address to the nation, has not changed bottom-line public attitudes toward the war in Iraq. However, there has been a modest increase in positive views about the U.S. military effort, accompanied by largely positive public reactions to General Petraeus' recommendations.

Most Americans (57%) who heard at least something about Petraeus' report say they approve of his recommendations for troop withdrawals, which President Bush has endorsed.

Yet, beyond the broad numbers, what is deeply striking about this survey is the clear partisanship surrounding evaluations of Petraeus' accuracy and impartiality, as well as other issues:

About three-quarters of Republicans (76%) and half of independents who heard about the report believe that Gen. Petraeus was accurately describing the current situation in Iraq. Reaction among Democrats is more skeptical. Just a third of Democrats say he accurately described the situation while 49% say he made things seem better than they really are.

Democrats clearly evince more robust antiwar (or anti-military) tendencies in the poll:

Two-thirds (67%) of Republicans today believe the U.S. is making progress in defeating the insurgents in Iraq, up from 53% in February. But very few Democrats (16%) or independents (31%) agree with this assessment, and views have remained unchanged throughout the year. Similarly, Republicans have become substantially more optimistic about progress in preventing a civil war, while Democrats and independents remain generally gloomy. And while there has been an across-the-board rise in optimism about reducing the number of civilian casualties, the gains are far more substantial among Republicans. As a result of these differences, the partisan divide in outlook about the war is far larger now than at the start of the year.

More partisanship can be seen in the findings on those supporting a troop drawdown. While a majority of Americans (54 percent) favors a troop pullout, only 18 percent favor an immediate drawdown. Thirty-four percent favor withdrawing troops over the next year or two.

If the 34 percent figure is added to those who favor keeping U.S. forces in Iraq (39 percent), a full 73 percent of Americans supports maintaining the deployment over the next couple of years, with only a gradual pullout!

This interpretation of the data is not what most people will find in the press, and especially not among hard left bloggers (see, for example, Daily Kos' interpretation of the findings, or those at the Talking Points Memo.)

The fact remains that Americans want to ensure a stable Iraq before removing American troops from the country.

Take a look at more of the data. A deep partisan divide characterizes support for the war, but general trends are favorable: The numbers of Americans seeing progess on military goals are going up. The numbers of Americans seeing a reduction in civilian casualties are going up. The numbers seeing increased progress in defeating the insurgency are going up!

The United States is making progess in this war, and the public recognizes it.

A balanced assessment of the opinion environment on Iraq requires one to go beyond assessment of Petraeus' likeability to the hard numbers evaluating success on the ground. The evidence is striking. These data should be trumpeted by the media and across the blogosphere. There's no call for a precipitous withrawal from Iraq, and Americans recognize the clear, substantial gains being achieved under the administration's strategic and tactical adjustments.

The Big Picture on Iraq Antiwar Protests

This last weekend saw large demonstrations in Washington against the war in Iraq. The New York Times has the story (via Memeorandum):

A rally on Saturday to protest the war in Iraq, which began with a peaceful march of several thousand people to the Capitol, ended with dozens of arrests in a raucous demonstration that evoked the angry spirit of the Vietnam era protests of more than three decades ago.

The police, including some officers dressed in riot gear, tried to halt demonstrators as they sought to climb over a low wall near the Capitol after a march that had begun near the White House in a festive atmosphere.

The protest grew tense as the chanting, placard-carrying demonstrators gathered near the Capitol for a planned “die-in.” Officers struggled to keep demonstrators from breaking through their ranks and began arresting those who tried.

But check this out:

Before the antiwar marchers arrived, there was a brief physical altercation between some members of the antiwar group Code Pink and some of the demonstrators who said they were there to support the troops. The police moved in to break up the scuffle. As the antiwar demonstrators moved along Pennsylvania Avenue, the two sides continued to trade chants and sometimes heated messages, but lines of police officers intervened to keep the opposing sides apart.

“What troubles me, the thing that is so dismaying, is they don’t realize the big picture,” said John Aldins, 54, who came from Media, Pa., with his wife, Karen, and daughter, Rachel, to show their support for the troops. The Aldins have three other children serving in the military. Rachel Aldins will join the Army in the fall to serve as a nurse.

“It’s not just Iraq, it’s the whole Middle East,” Mr. Aldins said. “It’s not a red, blue or pink issue. It’s an all-of-us issue.”

The protests came during a week in which Iraq dominated the attention of the White House and Congress. In a speech on Thursday, President Bush sought support for a substantial military presence in Iraq and a gradual troop reduction.

Members of the Answer Coalition, the umbrella organization of activist groups behind the demonstration, are demanding an immediate troop withdrawal. Some of the protesters called for Mr. Bush’s impeachment. Speakers at the rally included familiar political and antiwar activists, among them Cindy Sheehan, Ralph Nader and Ramsey Clark.

Brian Becker, a national coordinator for the coalition, said in a statement: “What Bush really intends is to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for years or decades to come. He plans to move forward with a policy that will continue to kill thousands of U.S. service members and hundreds of the thousands of Iraqis.”

Several marchers said they were demonstrating against what they called the Bush administration’s false assertions about Iraq. Kim Druist, 39, a nurse from Plainsboro, N.J., who wore a camouflage shirt to represent solidarity with American troops, said she intended to be arrested to protest the testimony by Gen. David H. Petraeus earlier in the week in which he said there had been progress in Iraq. Ms. Druist referred the statement to as propaganda.

The comments by war supporter John Aldin deserve attention and elaboration:

The big picture in Iraq is that the U.S. forces are fighting magnificantly to bring liberty to a nation that had lived under tyranny for decades. Saddam's threat to regional security is gone. Beyond Iraq, though, the battle looms large, with the stakes growing to incude the future stability of the entire region. Iran and its proxies in Lebanon and Palestine seek regional domination. The forces of Islamic terror in Iraq and elsewhere want a U.S. defeat to consolidate in Iraq a homebase of nihilist operations for the worldwide jihad.

Code Pink protesters and members of International ANSWER cheer a U.S. defeat because they hate everything for which the United States stands. If their antiwar campaign were to succeed in forcing a hasty U.S. exit from Iraq, these groups would be the first in line to storm the barricades against a U.S. government under seige by the forces of global anarchy and nihilism.

The big picture is that we are in a fight to the death, and our enemies are not only on the fields of Afghanistan and Iraq, but on the streets at home as well. I do not see in the radicals' civil disobedience any resemblance to the civil rights marches of Martin Luther King. Instead, I see Leninist throngs that would impose a reign of totalitarianism terror should they ascend to power.

This is a challenge for the survival of good and right, internationally and domestically. Democracies do perish. The death of the U.S. won't be soon enough for the antiwar groups in Washington this last weekend.

Also blogging the demonstrations: Michelle Malkin, Don Surber, and Sister Toldjah (more links via Memeorandum).

See also Spree's latest on Air Force Colonel Gregory S. Hollister, who plans a lawsuit against MoveOn.org.

Candidate for Best Essay of the Year: Owen West on America's Civilian-Military Divide

A Maggie's Farm post last week argued that Kay Hymowitz's recent piece, "Freedom Fetishists," was a candidate for "best essay of the year."

I like Hymowitz. But when I first read Owen West's Wall Street Journal commentary article last week, "Our New National Divide," I was immediately seized by the vital importance of his essay, and I see it as a top candidate in any best essay competition.

West is a U.S. Marine veteran who served two tours of duty in Iraq. He argues that the U.S. has become deeply divided between American soldiers (and their warrior ethos) and everday civilians who have become not only indifferent to the sacrifices of those under arms, but even hostile.

West relates the story of Maj. Douglas A. Zembiec, a consumate American warrior, who once said, "One of the most noble things you can do is kill the enemy." Zembiec had built up a phenomenal reputation among fellow Marines, and when he was was killed in combat earlier this year, a deep loss was felt among those who shared the uniform. It's unlikely that such similar sense of grief and loss would be felt among the general population:

Here in the United States, the vast moral chasm that so clearly separates the combatants in Iraq is too rarely discussed. Disillusion with the entire effort has obscured and in some cases mutated the truth that small numbers of evil men tilt entire populations. Many Americans, including prominent senators, cringe when they hear about warriors like Zembiec going door-to-door, notwithstanding the fact that most Iraqis in the neighborhood greet them as deus ex machina.

Nearly six years into the war on terror--which is being fought by less than 30% of the military and less than one-half of 1% of the nation--and the stark irony of America in modern war has emerged. Our professional warriors who take the most risk believe the nation must commit to a long-term fight that includes Iraq in some form. Overall support for the endeavor wanes with distance.

This divergence isn't new. Those who have battled the enemy up close have always been more heavily invested in the cause. What's different is that in past wars, the nation was tied to its soldiers and had a familial barometer. Today most Americans have never met a Gold Star family, let alone shaken the hand of a fallen soldier. The military community is increasingly insulated even as the burden of global war swells. Within it there are those who drift in and out of the fight according to orders. But there is also a group that is distinctive--those who join the military to hunt the enemy for a living, and for the rest of us. Doug Zembiec was such a man.

West goes on to make an especially important point on the significance of the controversy surrounding MoveOn.org's attack on General David Petraeus:

Monday's MoveOn.org advertisement, which depicted Gen. Petraeus as a traitor, has been dismissed by Sen. Reid as an inconsequential distraction. But according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan research group, the ad reflects the growing distrust of a Democratic Party that may be taking cues from its leadership. Last month 76% of Republicans expressed confidence in the military to give an "accurate picture of the war," while only 36% of Democrats did.

This explains the collective skepticism surrounding Gen. Petraeus's comments but does not excuse it. For while the country can thrive as a politically divided nation, its ability to defend itself diminishes alongside faith in the fidelity of the military. The unbalanced portrayal of the conduct of our soldiers has done damage enough. To impugn our warriors' motives as political is thoroughly corrosive and hurts all Americans.

Read the whole thing. While West's piece is just a brief newspaper commentary article, his underlying message is a profound statement on our national duty to understand and revere our military personnel and the proud service they provide to our national health and security.

Antiwar Protesters Will Mount Civil Disobedience

This weekend's big antiwar protests are about to get underway, and International ANSWER, the hardline Marxist-Lenininst group, plans a campaign of "civil disobedience" to shut down the "war machine":

A week of events meant to crank up a national demonstration against the war in Iraq is set to begin Saturday, with a 1,000-person "die-in" at the U.S. Capitol led by current and former American troops and accompanied by taps and a mock 21-gun salute.

The die-in will be the culmination of a march and rally. Organizers hope the event will spur people in the antiwar movement to move from protesting to performing acts of civil disobedience that "get in the way of the war machine," said Brian Becker, national coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition, at a news conference yesterday at the National Press Club.

A counter-demonstration is planned by A Gathering of Eagles (I blogged twice recently on pro-war activities planned this month, here and here):

At a news conference Monday, Gathering of Eagles spokesman Kristinn Taylor said the group's purpose is "to not allow this generation of America's servicemen and women to be betrayed on the battlefield and at home, as happened during and after the Vietnam War."

But at the ANSWER news conference yesterday, Carlos Arredondo, whose son Alex was killed in Iraq in 2004, said, "My passport says 'We the people,' and we the people are responsible for stopping this madness." Arredondo held a folded U.S. flag in one hand and his open passport in the other.

Other speakers included antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan and Adam Kokesh, co-chairman of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

The antiwar movement "is far from where Bush would like you to think we are, that we are the fringe. They are the fringe. We are the mainstream," said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society's Freedom Foundation, which encourages Muslim civic participation.

War opponents have carried out acts of civil disobedience since the war began, but Becker said the die-in will be different because it was conceived by and will be led by Iraq war veterans and their families.

Be sure to check Michelle Malkin's powerful post denouncing the radicals and their "vandalism, desecration, and cowardice." Malkin reports that antiwar protesters are suspected of desecrating the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial:

Over the weekend, something happened here at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. Something destructive. Something dishonorable. Along the foot of the wall, covering a stretch almost two-thirds of the entire monument, an oily substance was spilled on the panels and paving stones that were built to pay tribute to those who gave their lives on the battlefield.

See also Spree at Wake Up America, who has been running regular posts with information on prowar counter-rallies.