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.

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.

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.

Israel and the Syria Raid: Implications for Iran

This week's Newsweek provides some compelling speculation on the implications of last week's secretive raid on Syria, the target of which Israel has claimed was a nuclear development facility. Check it out:

How far will Israel go to keep Iran from getting the bomb? The question gained new urgency this month when Israeli warplanes carried out a mysterious raid deep in Syria and then threw up a nearly impenetrable wall of silence around the operation. Last week opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu chipped away at that wall, saying Israel did in fact attack targets in Syrian territory. His top adviser, Mossad veteran Uzi Arad, told NEWSWEEK: "I do know what happened, and when it comes out it will stun everyone."

Official silence has prompted a broad range of speculation as to what exactly took place. One former U.S. official, who like others quoted in this article declined to be identified discussing sensitive matters, says several months ago Israel presented the Bush administration with reconnaissance images and information from secret agents alleging North Korea had begun to supply nuclear-related material to Syria. Some U.S. intelligence reporting, including electronic signal intercepts, appeared to support the Israeli claims. But other U.S. officials remain skeptical about any nuclear link between Syria and North Korea. One European security source told NEWSWEEK the target might have been a North Korean military shipment to Iran that was transiting Syria. But a European intelligence official said it wasn't certain Israel had struck anything at all.

While the Bush administration appears to have given tacit support to the Syria raid, Israel and the United States are not in lockstep on Iran. For Israel, the next three months may be decisive: either Tehran succumbs to sanctions and stops enriching uranium or it must be dealt with militarily. (Iran says its program is for peaceful purposes only.) "Two thousand seven is the year you determine whether diplomatic efforts will stop Iran," says a well-placed Israeli source, who did not want to be named because he is not authorized to speak for the government. "If by the end of the year that's not working, 2008 becomes the year you take action."

In Washington, on the other hand, the consensus against a strike is firmer than most people realize. The Pentagon worries that another war will break America's already overstretched military, while the intelligence community believes Iran is not yet on the verge of a nuclear breakthrough. The latter assessment is expected to appear in a secret National Intelligence Estimate currently nearing completion, according to three intelligence officials who asked for anonymity when discussing nonpublic material. The report is expected to say Iran will not be able to build a nuclear bomb until at least 2010 and possibly 2015. One explanation for the lag: Iran is having trouble with its centrifuge-enrichment technology, according to U.S. and European officials.

Douglas Frantz of the Los Angeles Times noted in 2004, however, that Iran was moving toward nuclear readiness:

This month, Iran said it was gearing up to produce large amounts of gaseous uranium, which is used in enrichment. The gas, known as uranium hexafluoride, can be fed into slender centrifuges, which spin at high speed to transform the gas into enriched uranium.

Iran has moved much faster than expected in manufacturing and assembling these centrifuges, diplomats said. The rapid progress means a pilot centrifuge plant near Natanz, in central Iran, could soon be equipped with enough machines to begin large-scale enrichment.

Two senior European diplomats said the pilot plant could be expanded from the existing 164 centrifuges to 1,000 within weeks and produce enough material in less than a year to fashion a crude nuclear device.

The exact timing involved in Iran's nuclear preparations is probably less important than the regime's overall intentions. Ahmadinejad has rebuffed the Security Council on the issue of continuing inspections, and the world body has delayed a vote on tougher sanctions until at least November, a move designed to give Mohamed ElBaradei - the chief IAEA inspector - more time to investigate Iranian compliance with international demands for a halt to enrichment activities.

Israel might not wait too long, particularly as more information on the ultimate significance of the Syrian incursion becomes available. As the Newsweek story indicates:

The Jewish state has cause for worry. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vows regularly to destroy the country; former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, considered a moderate, warned in 2001 that Tehran could do away with Israel with just one nuclear bomb. In Tel Aviv last week, former deputy Defense minister Ephraim Sneh concurred. Sneh, a dovish member of Israel's Parliament and a retired brigadier general, took a NEWSWEEK reporter to the observation deck atop the 50-story Azrieli Center. "There is Haifa just over the horizon, Ben-Gurion airport over there, the Defense Ministry down below," he said, to show how small the country is. "You can see in this space the majority of our intellectual, economic, political assets are concentrated. One nuclear bomb is enough to wipe out Israel."

The logistics of an Irsraeli attack on Iran's program are difficult but not prohibitive (see here, for example). One interesting scenario - suggested in the Newsweek report - is that an Israeli preventive attack results in Iran's retaliation, with the possible targeting of American assets, which would likely pull the U.S. into the conflict.

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.

Anti-American Activist to Teach Legal Ethics Class

Lynne Stewart, the radical anti-American activist who was convicted of providing material support to terrorists in 2005, is scheduled to teach a course in legal ethics at Hofstra University. The Federal Review has the story (via Memeorandum):

A disbarred lawyer convicted of aiding terrorists will be teaching at an upcoming law school ethics conference.

Lynne Stewart, who was found guilty of conspiring with terrorist Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, will be speaking October 16 at Hofstra Law School's "Legal Ethics: Lawyering on the Edge," in Hempstead, New York.

The speaking engagement comes only a year after Stewart was sentenced to twenty-eight months in prison on charges of conspiracy and providing material support to terrorists.

Prosecutors alleged that Stewart had passed on messages to Abdel Rahman's radical Muslim followers, authorizing a resumption of terrorist operations against the Egyptian government.

As a result of the convictions, Stewart was automatically disbarred from practicing law.

Her client, Abdel Rahman, was convicted in 1996 of plots to bomb landmarks around New York City.

Stewart will be speaking at Hofstra Law School's 2007 Legal Ethics Conference, Lawyering at the Edge: Unpopular Clients, Difficult Cases, Zealous Advocates. The conference is scheduled for October 14 to 16, 2007 in the Sidney R. Siben and Walter Siben Moot Courtroom (room 308) of Hofstra Law School.

According to the University's website, the conference will feature dynamic speakers who will weigh in on controversial issues such as prosecutorial abuse, the challenges of representing prisoners at Guantanamo, and attacks on lawyers who represent unpopular clients and causes.

This should be a jawdropper, but no one who follows the alliance of Islamic jihad and contemporary Leninism would be surprised by Hofstra's actions. Certainly some of Hofstra's administration and faculty consider "Lawering on the Edge" a worthy aspiration for future attorneys. In Stewart's case, such lawyering includes advocating violence:

I don't believe in anarchist violence but in directed violence....That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions and accompanied by popular support.

Stewart's legal career has been directed to aiding and abetting those forces hell-bent on the destruction of the United States. Although Stewart has First Amendment rights to her views, it's still incredibly distasteful for her project to be sponsored by institutions of higher learning. Nevertheless, as her biography shows, she's in high demand at colleges and universities across the country.

Hofstra's invitation to Stewart is just one more example of how much work needs to be done in exposing and combatting the pro-terrorist agenda that's prominent on the radical left.

Also blogging: Jammie Wearing Fool, Michelle Malkin, The Oxford Medievalist, Stop the ACLU, Weasel Zippers.

See also, OpinionJournal.

The Case Against Ahmadinejad at Columbia

While monitoring the continuing controversy over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York, be sure to read Caroline Glick's phenomenal essay outlining the moral case against the Iranian president's speech at Columbia.

Glick lists all of Iran's outragreous actions and statements, on the Holocaust and Israel, on human rights, on regional security, and so on. These actions - which represent Iran as the true international pariah that it is - make a clear justification for denying Ahmadinejad a platform. But Glick's objections go further, to an even more fundamental ethical issue in the controversy:

THE PROBLEM with Columbia's action, the reason that there can be no moral justification for the university's decision, is because by inviting Ahmadinejad to campus, Columbia has made the pros and cons of genocide a legitimate subject for debate. By asking Ahmadinejad challenging questions, Bollinger has reduced the right of the Jewish people to live to a question of preferences.

No doubt, Bollinger prefers to see the Jewish people remain alive. But this is beside the point. The point is that by debating the issue with Ahmadinejad, Bollinger just put the right of the Jewish people to exist on the table.

Here it is important to note Ahmadinejad's uniqueness. It is true that in supporting the annihilation of Israel, Ahmadinejad is no different from his terrorist underlings Hassan Nasrallah, Khaled Mashaal and Farouk Kaddoumi. Moreover, Ahmadinejad's desire to wipe the largest concentration of Jews on earth off the map simply because it is Jewish is shared by all of his colleagues in the Iranian regime and most intellectuals and religious leaders in the Arab world.

But still there is a difference between Ahmadinejad and all the others. Through his words and his deeds, Ahmadinejad has become the symbol and the leader of the growing international movement which supports and engages in activities to advance the destruction of the Jewish people. Through his words and his deeds, Ahmadinejad has become the poster boy for genocide.

As a result, what was said yesterday at Columbia is of no consequence whatsoever. What matters is that by inviting Ahmadinejad to its campus, Columbia University announced that supporting or opposing the genocide of the Jews is a legitimate topic for discussion. In so doing, as an institution Columbia has taken itself beyond the pale of legitimate discourse. As an institution, Columbia has embraced depravity by renouncing the intrinsic sanctity of human life.

Glick argues finally for the resignation of Columbia's Lee Bollinger, for campus alumni to end their financial support of the university, and she urges students to rise up in a campaign of moral indignation against this depravity.

This is a powerful essay - indeed, one of the most penetrating analyses on moral right I've ever read.

I still can't help thinking that there remains a free speech issue here in that no matter how despicable an idea, airing a view makes the idea compete in the marketplace of ideas and values. As any truth-thinking person knows, the existential essence of the Jewish people - the fundamental matter of Jewish life - is not a matter for debate. Thus, for the world to hear Ahmadinejad once again state his views - that the Holocaust "needs more research" - the West will be able to continue to build the case it needs to topple the Iranian regime, which kills Americans in Iraq, supports the annihilation of Israel, continues apace in its nuclear development program, and massacres in citizens in a brutal campaign of massive human rights violations.

There's no redeeming value in what Ahmadinejad spouts, but his words are on record in the international court of public opinion. I'm convinced that we'll hear and see more of Iran's evil deeds, all the more evidence justifying preventive strikes on the state's nuclear program, and ultimately the decapitation of the regime.

Ahmadinejad Calls for More Research on Holocaust

Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered his highly contested speech at Columbia University today, where he renewed his controversial statements about the Holocaust. The Washington Post has the details:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was greeted with student protests and withering public criticism during a visit to Columbia University Monday in which he defended his government's human rights record, denounced Israel and rejected U.S. efforts to restrict Iran's nuclear program.

Speaking to students and faculty at Columbia a day ahead of his scheduled address to the United Nations General Assembly, the hard-line Iranian president also asserted that his people, including women, "enjoy the highest levels of freedom," and he claimed that homosexuality does not exist in his country.

Before his speech, he came under unusually harsh criticism from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, who condemned what he said was the Ahmadinejad government's expanding crackdown on dissent, its persecution of the B'hai religious minority and homosexuals, its support for the destruction of Israel and its pursuit of a "proxy war" against U.S. forces in Iraq.

"Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator," Bollinger told Ahmadinejad from a podium across the stage. He said the Iranian's denial of the Holocaust might fool "the illiterate and ignorant," but that "when you come to a place like this, it makes you quite simply ridiculous." Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust suggested he was either "brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated," Bollinger said.

The university president's caustic comments were met with cheers and sustained applause from the roughly 700 people in the audience, most of them students.

Ahmadinejad called the introductory speech insulting and said Bollinger was misinformed. But he went on to repeat his assertions that the Holocaust should be researched "from different perspectives," and he denounced the punishment in Europe of "a number of academics" who were "questioning certain aspects of it." He also said Palestinians should not be "paying the price for an event they had nothing to do with."

The New York Times quotes Ahmadinejad as saying there is insufficient research on the truth of Nazi Germany and the Jews:

He said that as an academic he questioned whether there was “sufficient research” about what happened after World War II, referring to the Holocaust.

I'm going to read the full transcript of the Ahmadinejad speech later, but from what I see in early reports, his statements confirm the argument I made yesterday. As witnessed today, Ahmadinejad has reaffirmed Iran's denial of the Holocaust, and his speech continues the Iranian regime's campaign to weaken the legitimacy of the Israeli state.

As the Los Angeles Times reported today, Ahmadinejad's resistance to Israel and the United States has built the Iranian regime a growing following among Arabs in countries like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia:

...Ahmadinejad's intense distrust of the U.S. and hatred of Israel have elevated him to mythical status for the frustrated Arab mechanic, taxi driver or lawyer seeking a pure, forceful message.

The Times article notes further that Arab public opinion holds Iran up with Hezbollah and Hamas as a glorious Middle East underdog, battling larger, insidious Western forces. It's clear among large segments of the Arab street that Iran's well-suited - with its aggressive intentions and growing nuclear capability - to lead a revisionist challenge to Middle East regional order.

Much of the blogosphere is up in arms over Columbia's decision to sponsor an Ahmadinejad lecture. The anger is fully understandable, but in the long run I think the Iranian president's words will provide additional support for a firm stand against Iran's drive to weaken international security.

Further, the left blogosphere's noxious defense of Iran - not to mention the left's continued statements of moral equivalency between Bush administration and the Iranian regime - will further discredit the radical political agenda and ideology in current debates over U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Focus on the Iranian Threat

The outrage at Columbia University's speaking invitation to Iran's President Ahmedinejad is fully understandable (see here, here and here).

There may be strong grounds for denying the Iranian leader a platform to spew his vile hatred of the West. Yet, Ahmadinejad - for all his derangement - is a major international player, and the world community has an interest in hearing what he has to say, especially at the United Nations, and even at Columbia (whose administration just doesn't get it).

Folks should not lose sight of the big picture, though. The Oxford Medievalist reminds us of the nature of the Iranian challenge:

Mahmoud is an apocalyptic madman Jew-hating president of a regime bent on spreading its Islamist revolution throughout the Middle East and, eventually, the world.

I'm reminded of Iran's revolutionary aspirations by today's Los Angeles Times, which reports on this weekend's military parade in Tehran, a show of force coinciding with Ahmadinejad's visit to New York:

Iran showed off its armaments Saturday at annual army celebrations meant to highlight the oil-rich nation's military self-sufficiency and prowess in the face of international sanctions and U.S. hostility.

Iranian-made Saegheh fighter jets, which some military experts say are based on U.S. F-18s, screeched across the sky over Iranian-made armored personnel carriers and Ghadr missiles, which have a range of more than 1,000 miles.

"All these arms and equipment have been manufactured in Iran by Iranian experts," an announcer declared on state-controlled television.

Military commanders and political officials assembled for the military parade near the tomb of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini said they were undeterred by the possibility of U.S. or Israeli military attacks or increased economic pressure on Iran. The Islamic Republic is at odds with the West over its ambitions to acquire advanced nuclear technology and its alleged support for armed Islamic groups.

"Those who believe that through rotten means, such as psychological warfare and economic sanctions, they could hinder progress of the Iranian nation are wrong," said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is scheduled to arrive in New York today and to address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.

Iran and the U.S. are engaged in a struggle over influence in the Middle East. Tehran accuses Washington of destabilizing the region by backing Israel and occupying Iraq. The U.S. accuses the Islamic Republic of pursuing nuclear weapons and supporting anti-American militants in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

The Times piece notes that American officials have not ruled out military action to eliminate Iran's threat to regional and global security, and in that lies the significance of the Ahmadinejad visit.

Allowing the Iranian leader to denounce the U.S., Israel, and the West will likely bolster the case against Iran's peaceful intentions. One of the best lessons emerging out of the recent MoveOn scandal is that free speech has the powerful value of exposing despicable views to popular repudiation. In the case of Iran, the sanctions regime against Iranian nuclear development has proved ineffectual. While the U.S. delays a decisive showdown, Iran continues its bid for regional domination, and its ultimate campaign for the destruction of Israel.

Let America and the world hear what Ahmadinejad has to say this week in New York. All the while, no one should take their eyes off the big picture - a military showdown is coming, and we have a compelling interest in hearing the continued dissemination of Ahmadinejad's propaganda and warmongering. His rants will bolster the already compelling case for a preventive war to remove the Iranian threat.

Moral Relativism Died With Daniel Pearl

Judea Pearl, the father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, has a powerful essay up today at the Guardian. Pearl argues against the moral relativism of "The Mighty Heart," the Angelina Jolie motion picture which tells the story of the younger Pearl's life and murder.

The film draws comparisons between the murderous al Qaeda henchmen who killed Daniel Pearl and American detention policies at Guantanamo:

Drawing a comparison between Danny's murder and the detention of suspects in Guantánamo is precisely what the killers wanted, as expressed in both their emails and the murder video. Indeed, following an advance screening of A Mighty Heart in Los Angeles, a representative of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said: "We need to end the culture of bombs, torture, occupation, and violence. This is the message to take from the film."

Yet the message that angry youngsters are hearing from such blanket generalisation is predictable: all forms of violence are equally evil; therefore, as long as one persists, others should not be ruled out. This is precisely the logic used by Mohammed Siddique Khan, one of the London suicide bombers, in his video. "Your democratically elected government," he told his fellow Britons, "continues to perpetrate atrocities against my people ... [We] will not stop."

Danny's tragedy demands an end to this logic. There can be no comparison between those who take pride in the killing of an unarmed journalist and those who vow to end such acts. Moral relativism died with Daniel Pearl, in Karachi, on January 31 2002.

My son had the courage to examine all sides. He was a genuine listener and a champion of dialogue. Yet he also had principles and red lines. He was tolerant but not mindlessly so. I hope viewers of A Mighty Heart will remember this.

Melanie Phillips has a post up on this story on her page, where she notes:

The doctrine of moral equivalence, the default position of the secular west, is the core reason why the west is losing the battle to defend itself against the terrorist and cultural jihad. Equivalence is actually a misleading word in this context, since the notion that violence begets violence and both are equally culpable is not just noxious in itself by failing to acknowledge the moral difference between an act of aggression and an act of self-defence against that aggression; it immediately morphs into a justification of that original act of aggression. It is therefore not only amoral but suicidal. And yet it is the knee-jerk posture of so many western intellectuals and media darlings.

I have not seen the film, although I plan to do so, out of respect for the Pearl family, and despite my disgust of the moral relativism of other recent movies I've seen, like "Letters From Iwo Jima."

Facing the Axis of Evil

Caroline Glick's essay today argues for recognizing and challenging the axis of evil among North Korea, Iran, and Syria:

If media reports of last week's IAF raid in Syria pan out, the attack against a North-Korean-supplied Syrian nuclear facility in eastern Syria should serve as a pivotal event in the free world's understanding of the enemy it faces in the current global war. The central question now is whether this clarity will be followed by a strategic shift in the US and Israeli governments' conceptualizations of the challenges facing them in the various theaters of war and diplomacy in which they are now engaged.

What the raid exposed is that the free world faces a cohesive alliance of enemy forces that collaborate closely in their joint and separate offensives against their common foes. Whether or not it is called the axis of evil, after the IAF raid it is undeniable that its members - North Korea, Iran and Syria - collaborate closely in their joint war.

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, this is not a temporary alliance of convenience among three otherwise unrelated states. It is a strategic alignment of three regimes that have been acting in tandem on multiple levels for decades. Their collaborative operations have served two primary functions. First they cooperate in perpetuating their holds on power. This they do primarily through criminal enterprises. Second, they work together to wage war against their common foes. The second objective is advanced primarily through the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

Furthermore, all three regimes view diplomatic exchanges with their enemies not as a means to solve their disagreements with them, but as a means to gain advantage by forcing US, Israeli and international concessions that legitimize their regimes and enable them to continue to conduct their war.

Read the whole thing. The article's a powerful statement on the dangers the U.S. and Israel face from this menacing coalition.

Glick argues that American and Israeli leaders fail to understand that appeasing any one of the members of this axis strengthens not only the entire alliance, but also their proxies in Lebanon and the Palestinian terrorities, who form the frontline forces in the jihadi campaign of terror against the West.

Supporting a Unitary Legal Executive

In his U.S. News essay this week, Michael Barone provides an interesting perspective on Jack Goldsmith's new book, The Terror Presidency. Barone argues that Goldsmith offers as serious discussion of the Bush adminstration's "deeply flawed" legal policies. But a close look at the book's underlying message reveals much to be said for the administration's approach:

For one thing, Goldsmith...supports many much-criticized policies—the detention of unlawful combatants in Afghanistan and their confinement in Guantánamo, trials by military commissions, the terrorist surveillance program. And he rejects the charge that the administration has disregarded the rule of law. Quite the contrary. "The opposite is true: the administration has been strangled by law, and since September 11, 2001, this war has been lawyered to death." There has been a "daily clash inside the Bush administration between fear of another attack, which drives officials into doing whatever they can to prevent it, and the countervailing fear of violating the law, which checks their urge toward prevention."

Strangled by the law, eh? If I had a dollar for every left-wing attack on the adminstration's legal policies...you know, the collapse of the rule of law under the "Bush/Cheney regime" (and don't get me going about Glenn Greenwald!)

In my debates with administration opponents, I've often noted how hemmed in the administration's domestic terror enforcement has been. I've stressed particularly how well the separation of powers has worked to provide judicial checks on the assertion of unitary executive power in the administration's anti-terror campaign.

Remembering September 11

This year's the first year since the 9/11 attacks that remembrances have fallen on a Tuesday. Today's recollections of the terror will be more intimate.

Where were you when you heard the news?

I was at the office, and my colleague told me that the WTC had been hit. I first saw images of the horror at the Washington Post online (the only newspaper I could find whose server wasn't overloaded). I went home at lunch to take in the grisly scenes. My jaw dropped at the cold, clear images of the planes penetrating the buildings. My God, the humanity...

It took days for things to sink in completely. I read the papers voraciously to learn how something like this could happen.

I took my son to Ground Zero this summer on our vacation to New York City. It's the first time I've been to the World Trade Center site. Being there gives one an immediacy to the scale of loss. The sky is empty there in Lower Manhattan - the destruction of the towers has left a hole in that space, but it continues to be filled by the goodness of Americans in their mourning of the losses.

My blessings go out to all of those who lost loved ones that day.

My thanks go out to all of those now taking the war to the terrorists around the world. It will be a long campaign, but I've never once questioned whether our efforts were noble and worthwhile.

Update: In her essay today, Debra Burlingame frowns on the use of "lost" in describing the victims of the attacks:

Our fellow human beings were not "lost" in 1993 or on 9/11. They were torn to pieces. We must not give the enemy any quarter. We must confront the reality of their acts.

I'll keep this point in mind for future remembrances.

What War on Terrorism?

Mark Stein has an interesting commentary in today's Orange County Register. Steyn reminds us that this week's six-year anniversary of 9/11 will be the first time since the attacks that remembrances will fall on a Tuesday morning, the day of the week we were hit by the Islamists.

But to reflect on the state of American popular perception, goes Steyn, you'd hardly know there's a war against terrorism going on:

Six years on, most Americans are now pretty certain what they'll wake up to in the morning: There'll be a thwarted terrorist plot somewhere or other – last week, it was Germany. Occasionally, one will succeed somewhere or other, on the far horizon – in Bali, Istanbul, Madrid, London. But not many folks expect to switch on the TV this Tuesday morning, as they did that Tuesday morning, and see smoke billowing from Atlanta or Phoenix or Seattle. During the IRA's 30-year campaign, the British grew accustomed (perhaps too easily accustomed) to waking up to the news either of some prominent person's assassination or that a couple of grandmas and some schoolkids had been blown apart in a shopping center. It was a terrorist war in which terrorism was almost routine. But, in the six years since President Bush declared that America was in a "war on terror," there has been in America no terrorism.

In theory, the administration ought to derive a political benefit from this: The president has "kept America safe." But, in practice, the placidity of the domestic front diminishes the chosen rationale of the conflict: if a "war on terror" has no terror, who says there's a war at all? That's the argument of the left – that it's all a racket cooked up by the Bushitlerburton fascists to impose on America a permanent national-security state in which, for dark sinister reasons of his own, Dick Cheney is free to monitor your out-of-state phone calls all day long.

Read the whole thing. Steyn notes that a majority of Americans thinks Bush knew something about the attacks in advance. Indeed, for Steyn, our culture's been taken over by conspiracies of 9/11, rather than cold, hard thinking about the current correlation of forces in international affairs.

Vast Left Wing Conspiracy Blocks "Path to 9/11"

The Los Angeles Times reports that Cyrus Nowrasteh, the writer behind last year's ABC miniseries, "The Path to 9/11," has alleged that the Clinton campaign is pulling strings to prevent the release on DVD of the hot-button documentary:

Among the nearly two dozen television DVDs slated for nationwide release on Sept. 11 is the second season of "Bones," the third season of "Grey's Anatomy" and the miniseries "The Starter Wife" that aired earlier this year. Not on the list on that day or any other in the near future is last year's highly controversial "The Path to 9/11."

The $40-million, five-hour ABC miniseries, which recently received seven Emmy nominations and drew a combined two-night audience of more than 25 million viewers, is for now on the path to nowhere. Its Amazon page reads: "Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock."

With no date for the release, questions are being raised about whether political pressure is behind its current status as a stalled or discarded DVD project. The reasons are murky, but the miniseries' writer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, believes it's crystal clear: Powerful forces are out to protect Bill Clinton's presidential legacy and shield Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) from any potential collateral damage in her bid for the White House.

Nowrasteh, also one of the miniseries' many producers, said he was told by a top executive at ABC Studios that "if Hillary weren't running for president, this wouldn't be a problem."

"Whatever anyone may think about me or this movie, this is a bad precedent, a dangerous precedent, to allow a movie to be buried," added Nowrasteh, who received death threats even before the miniseries was broadcast last September. "Because the next time they'll go after another movie. The Bush administration may go after a movie. The next administration may go after a movie. No matter who it is, they may go after a movie. I think this town needs to stand up."

Even before "The Path to 9/11" aired on ABC late last summer, the docudrama ignited a political firestorm, almost entirely from high-profile Democratic leaders who viewed its account of events leading up to the terrorist attacks as a right-wing hatchet job on the Clinton administration and its efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Attempts to pressure ABC to cancel the miniseries at the time were unsuccessful, but last-minute network edits were imposed to quell the critical outcry.

An ABC spokeswoman reached Tuesday would say only that the company "has no release date at this time," and she declined to comment further.

Meanwhile, Sen. Clinton's campaign staff did not return an e-mail or a phone call seeking comment.

Like most everyone else, I blogged about the "Path to 9/11" controversy last year (here and here). I thought the miniseries was excellent - I liked the gritty portrayals of the top policymakers in the show, and I liked how the docudrama covered the run-up to the attacks in an objective way.

But this report on Nowasteh's allegations of a vast left-wing conspiracy is hard to swallow. There may be something to it, but read the rest of the Times story. Not every feature film or documentary makes it to DVD. There could be a number of other factors holding up the release of Nowasteh's baby.

Hat tip: Memeorandum.