America’s Ideologue in Chief

By Patrick J. Buchanan
09/09/06

The war we fight today is more than a military conflict,” said President Bush to the American Legion. “It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century.”

But if the ideology of our enemy is “Islamofascism,” what is the ideology of George W. Bush? According to James Montanye, writing in The Independent Review, it is “democratic fundamentalism.” Montanye borrows Joseph Schumpeter’s depiction of Marxism to describe it.

Like Marxism, he writes, democratic fundamentalism “presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions; and, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved. … It belongs to that subgroup (of ‘isms’) which promises paradise this side of the grave.”

Ideology is substitute religion, and Bush’s beliefs were on display in his address to the Legion, where he painted the “decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century” in terms of good and evil.

“On the one side are those who believe in the values of freedom … the right of all people to speak, and worship, and live in liberty. And on the other side are those driven by the values of tyranny and extremism, the right of a self-appointed few to impose their fanatical views on all the rest.”

Casting one’s cause in such terms can be effective in wartime. In his Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, Lincoln converted a war to crush Southern secession into a crusade to end slavery and save democracy on earth.

Wilson recast a European war of imperial powers as a ” war to end war” and “make the world safe for democracy.” FDR and Churchill in the Atlantic Charter talked of securing “the Four Freedoms,” but were soon colluding to hand over Eastern Europe to the worst tyrant and mass murderer of the 20th century.

The peril of ideology is that it rarely comports with reality and is contradicted by history, thus leading inevitably to disillusionment and tragedy. Consider but a few of the assertions in Bush’s address.

Said Bush, we know by “history and logic” that “promoting democracy is the surest way to build security.” But history and logic teach, rather, what George Washington taught: The best way to preserve peace is to be prepared for war and to stay out of wars that are none of the nation’s business.

“Democracies don’t attack each other or threaten the peace,” said Bush. How does he then explain the War of 1812, when we went to war against Britain, when she was standing up to Napoleon? What about the War Between the States? Were not the seceding states democratic? What about the Boer War, begun by the Brits? What about World War I, fought between the world’s democracies, which also happened to be empires ruling subject peoples?

In May 1901, a 26-year-old Tory member of Parliament rose to issue a prophetic warning: “Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings.” Considering the war that came in 1914 and the vindictive peace it produced, giving us Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, was not Churchill more right than Bush?

“Governments accountable to the people focus on building roads and schools — not weapons of mass destruction,” said Bush. But is it not the democracies — Israel, India, Britain, France, the United States — that possess a preponderance of nuclear weapons? Are they all disarming? Were not the Western nations first to invent and use poison gas and atom bombs?

Insisting it is the lack of freedom that fuels terrorism, Bush declares, “Young people who have a say in their future are less likely to search for meaning in extremism.” Tell it to Mussolini and the Blackshirts. Tell it to the Nazis, who loathed the free republic of Weimar, as did the communists.

“Citizens who can join a peaceful political party are less likely to join a terrorist organization.” But the West has been plagued by terrorists since the anarchists. The Baader-Meinhoff Gang in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Puerto Ricans who tried to kill Harry Truman, the London subway bombers were all raised in freedom.

“Dissidents with the freedom to protest around the clock,” said the president, “are less likely to blow themselves up at rush hour.” But Hamas and Islamic Jihad resort to suicide bombing because they think it a far more effective way to overthrow Israeli rule than marching with signs.

What Bush passed over in his speech is that it is the autocratic regimes in Cairo, Riyadh and Amman that hold back the pent-up animosity toward America and Israel, and free elections that have advanced Hamas, Hezbollah, the Moslem Brotherhood and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.

In Iraq, we see the inevitable tragedy of ideology, of allowing some intellectual construct, not rooted in reality, to take control of the minds of men.

Body Count in Baghdad Nearly Triples

Morgue's Revised Toll for August Undermines Claims by Leaders of Steep Drop in Violence
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, September 8, 2006; A12

BAGHDAD, Sept. 7 -- Baghdad's morgue almost tripled its count for violent deaths in Iraq's capital during August from 550 to 1,536, authorities said Thursday, appearing to erase most of what U.S. generals and Iraqi leaders had touted as evidence of progress in a major security operation to restore order in the capital.

Separately, the Health Ministry confirmed Thursday that it planned to construct two new branch morgues in Baghdad and add doctors and refrigerator units to raise capacity to as many as 250 corpses a day.

The morgue expansion plans and the final body count for August show the dramatic surge in violence in Baghdad since U.S.-led foreign troops entered Iraq in 2003. Baghdad's morgue chiefly handles unidentified gunshot victims, now predominantly shot execution-style and often found with hands bound and showing signs of torture.

Since the spring, as sectarian violence has mounted, monthly counts of civilian casualties have reached the highest levels of the war, topping 1,800 at the Baghdad morgue in July. At least 3,438 Iraqis were killed across the country that month, according to Iraqi government figures, nearing the total of roughly 5,000 for the entire first year of the war.

In 2002, before U.S.-led forces entered Iraq, the Baghdad morgue averaged 15 shooting victims a month, morgue officials have said.

Gianni Magazzeni, chief of the U.N. human rights office in Iraq, which tracks casualty figures from Iraq's government, confirmed Thursday that the government-run Baghdad morgue had reported 1,536 dead for August.

Bombing victims and many others who die violently in Baghdad are taken to the city's hospitals rather than the morgue. The figures announced Thursday do not include those killings, or killings outside of Baghdad and its surrounding towns. A complete countrywide toll is due from the Health Ministry later this month.

At the end of August, Baghdad's morgue initially reported receiving 550 bodies during the month. U.S. military and Iraqi government officials hailed what they said was a massive decrease in violence, calling it a sign of the success of Operation Forward Together. The joint U.S.-Iraqi security push had placed at least four of Baghdad's most violent neighborhoods under cordons and search operations, which were welcomed by many residents for bringing a relief from violence.

The U.S. military had called in units from Germany and Kuwait and postponed the scheduled return home of an Alaska-based unit for the bid to return peace to Iraq's capital in the fourth year of the U.S. occupation. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad called it the Battle of Baghdad and said it was essential that American forces win it, although U.S. commanders cautioned that the work would take months rather than weeks.

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell by late August was claiming a 46 percent decrease in the murder rate in Baghdad for that month. "We are actually seeing progress," Caldwell said at the time. A U.S. military Web site on Thursday continued to assert a roughly 50 percent drop in killings in Baghdad.

A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, said Thursday that the U.S. figures were based on the military's "consolidated reporting with the Iraqi government." Johnson also disclosed that the military's numbers included only "individuals targeted as a result of sectarian-related violence, to include executions," and did not include "other violent acts such as car bombs and mortars."

Johnson said he did not track the morgue's figures and could not account for the substantial gap between the military's count for August killings and the latest figures from Baghdad's morgue.

The issue of civilian casualties has been politically charged since the start of the Iraq war. Soon after the invasion, U.S. and Iraqi officials for a time forbade Baghdad's medical officials to release morgue counts.

About a week after the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February of this year, a Baghdad morgue official, a Health Ministry official and an Interior Ministry official -- all of whom oversaw the morgue's body counts -- said 1,000 or more people had been killed as Shiite militias rolled openly across Baghdad to carry out retaliatory killings. Iraqi officials and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, called that figure exaggerated, saying only about 350 people were killed. An international official in Baghdad said Health Ministry officials had cited the higher toll before lowering it in response to what he said was political pressure.

The Health Ministry is run by the Shiite religious party of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and is guarded by his militia, known as the Mahdi Army. Sadr's militia and that of the country's other main Shiite religious party have been blamed for much of the continuing Sunni-Shiite violence.

After the Samarra bombing, morgue officials brought in refrigerated trucks to hold corpses and crammed refrigerators in the morgue far beyond their intended capacity. Most of the corpses taken to Baghdad's morgue are unidentified and are held for long periods awaiting identification.

This week, Health Minister Ali Hussein al-Shamari said morgue workers plan to begin shooting videos of the unclaimed bodies so that officials can bury them after three or four days rather than storing them at the morgue for the required two weeks.

Health officials also were working to increase the number of refrigerators to allow the morgue to handle as many as 200 to 250 bodies a day, Shamari said. Two new buildings were planned, in the districts of Karkh and Rasafa.

Morgue officials also intend to double the pay of the morgue's overworked doctors and award bonuses, the health minister said.

Shamari made his comments to a Health Ministry in-house newspaper. The ministry's spokesman, Qasim Yahia, on Thursday confirmed the details in the account. Yahia said expansion had "nothing to do with the violence and killing."

Magazzeni, the U.N. human rights official, said, "Reducing the level of violence and the number of civilians killed is crucially important." Doing so would take a "common effort" by the U.S. and Iraqi military, police and Iraq's debilitated justice system, he said.

'Gaza is a jail. Nobody is allowed to leave. We are all starving now'

by Patrick Cockburn
Independent (UK)
September 8, 2006

A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area in the world. Israel has stopped all trade. It has even forbidden fishermen to go far from the shore so they wade into the surf to try vainly to catch fish with hand-thrown nets.

Many people are being killed by Israeli incursions that occur every day by land and air. A total of 262 people have been killed and 1,200 wounded, of whom 60 had arms or legs amputated, since 25 June, says Dr Juma al-Saqa, the director of the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City which is fast running out of medicine. Of these, 64 were children and 26 women. This bloody conflict in Gaza has so far received only a fraction of the attention given by the international media to the war in Lebanon.

It was on 25 June that the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was taken captive and two other soldiers were killed by Palestinian militants who used a tunnel to get out of the Gaza Strip. In the aftermath of this, writes Gideon Levy in the daily Haaretz, the Israeli army "has been rampaging through Gaza - there's no other word to describe it - killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately". Gaza has essentially been reoccupied since Israeli troops and tanks come and go at will. In the northern district of Shajhayeh they took over several houses last week and stayed five days. By the time they withdrew, 22 Palestinians had been killed, three houses were destroyed and groves of olive, citrus and almond trees had been bulldozed.

Fuad al-Tuba, the 61-year-old farmer who owned a farm here, said: "They even destroyed 22 of my bee-hives and killed four sheep." He pointed sadly to a field, its brown sandy earth churned up by tracks of bulldozers, where the stumps of trees and broken branches with wilting leaves lay in heaps. Near by a yellow car was standing on its nose in the middle of a heap of concrete blocks that had once been a small house.

His son Baher al-Tuba described how for five days Israeli soldiers confined him and his relatives to one room in his house where they survived by drinking water from a fish pond. "Snipers took up positions in the windows and shot at anybody who came near," he said. "They killed one of my neighbours called Fathi Abu Gumbuz who was 56 years old and just went out to get water."

Sometimes the Israeli army gives a warning before a house is destroyed. The sound that Palestinians most dread is an unknown voice on their cell phone saying they have half an hour to leave their home before it is hit by bombs or missiles. There is no appeal.

But it is not the Israeli incursions alone that are destroying Gaza and its people. In the understated prose of a World Bank report published last month, the West Bank and Gaza face "a year of unprecedented economic recession. Real incomes may contract by at least a third in 2006 and poverty to affect close to two thirds of the population." Poverty in this case means a per capita income of under $2 (£1.06) a day.

There are signs of desperation everywhere. Crime is increasing. People do anything to feed their families. Israeli troops entered the Gaza industrial zone to search for tunnels and kicked out the Palestinian police. When the Israelis withdrew they were replaced not by the police but by looters. On one day this week there were three donkey carts removing twisted scrap metal from the remains of factories that once employed thousands.

"It is the worst year for us since 1948 [when Palestinian refugees first poured into Gaza]," says Dr Maged Abu-Ramadan, a former ophthalmologist who is mayor of Gaza City. "Gaza is a jail. Neither people nor goods are allowed to leave it. People are already starving. They try to live on bread and falafel and a few tomatoes and cucumbers they grow themselves."

The few ways that Gazans had of making money have disappeared. Dr Abu-Ramadan says the Israelis "have destroyed 70 per cent of our orange groves in order to create security zones." Carnations and strawberries, two of Gaza's main exports, were thrown away or left to rot. An Israeli air strike destroyed the electric power station so 55 per cent of power was lost. Electricity supply is now becoming almost as intermittent as in Baghdad.

The Israeli assault over the past two months struck a society already hit by the withdrawal of EU subsidies after the election of Hamas as the Palestinian government in March. Israel is withholding taxes owed on goods entering Gaza. Under US pressure, Arab banks abroad will not transfer funds to the government.

Two thirds of people are unemployed and the remaining third who mostly work for the state are not being paid. Gaza is now by far the poorest region on the Mediterranean. Per capita annual income is $700, compared with $20,000 in Israel. Conditions are much worse than in Lebanon where Hizbollah liberally compensates war victims for loss of their houses. If Gaza did not have enough troubles this week there were protest strikes and marches by unpaid soldiers, police and security men. These were organised by Fatah, the movement of the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, which lost the election to Hamas in January. His supporters marched through the streets waving their Kalashnikovs in the air. "Abu Mazen you are brave," they shouted. "Save us from this disaster." Sour-looking Hamas gunmen kept a low profile during the demonstration but the two sides are not far from fighting it out in the streets.

The Israeli siege and the European boycott are a collective punishment of everybody in Gaza. The gunmen are unlikely to be deterred. In a bed in Shifa Hospital was a sturdy young man called Ala Hejairi with wounds to his neck, legs, chest and stomach. "I was laying an anti-tank mine last week in Shajhayeh when I was hit by fire from an Israeli drone," he said. "I will return to the resistance when I am better. Why should I worry? If I die I will die a martyr and go to paradise."

His father, Adel, said he was proud of what his son had done adding that three of his nephews were already martyrs. He supported the Hamas government: "Arab and Western countries want to destroy this government because it is the government of the resistance."

As the economy collapses there will be many more young men in Gaza willing to take Ala Hejairi's place. Untrained and ill-armed most will be killed. But the destruction of Gaza, now under way, will ensure that no peace is possible in the Middle East for generations to come.

The deadly toll

* After the kidnap of Cpl Gilad Shalit by Palestinians on 25 June, Israel launched a massive offensive and blockade of Gaza under the operation name Summer Rains.

* The Gaza Strip's 1.3 million inhabitants, 33 per cent of whom live in refugee camps, have been under attack for 74 days.

* More than 260 Palestinians, including 64 children and 26 women, have been killed since 25 June. One in five is a child. One Israeli soldier has been killed and 26 have been wounded.

* 1,200 Palestinians have been injured, including up to 60 amputations. A third of victims brought to hospital are children.

* Israeli warplanes have launched more than 250 raids on Gaza, hitting the two power stations and the foreign and Information ministries.

* At least 120 Palestinian structures including houses, workshops and greenhouses have been destroyed and 160 damaged by the Israelis.

* The UN has criticised Israel's bombing, which has caused an estimated $1.8bn in damage to the electricity grid and leaving more than a million people without regular access to drinking water.

* The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem says 76 Palestinians, including 19 children, were killed by Israeli forces in August alone. Evidence shows at least 53 per cent were not participating in hostilities.

* In the latest outbreak of violence, three Palestinians were killed yesterday when Israeli troops raided a West Bank town in search of a wanted militant. Two of those killed were unarmed, according to witnesses.

'Values' We Have To Hide Abroad

By Eugene Robinson
Washington Post
September 8, 2006

If the secret prisons where U.S. agents interrogated "high-value" terrorism suspects with "alternative" techniques are so legitimate and legal, if they're so fully consistent with American values and traditions, then why are they overseas?

That's one thing the Decider didn't tell us Wednesday in his forceful yet obfuscatory speech confirming the existence of the CIA prisons and announcing the transfer of 14 detainees to Guantanamo Bay, including boldface-name miscreants such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Zubaida.

The president at least gave a reason why the locations of the prisons are still being kept secret, even if it wasn't the whole story. He said secrecy was needed to protect our allies from terrorist retribution, which might well be true. But governments of the host countries are probably more worried about the ire of the citizens who elected them, given the unpopularity of the Bush administration's foreign policy in much of the world, and some doubtless are concerned that the secret prisons violate host-country laws and international treaties.

In other words, the prisons (which apparently have been emptied, for the moment, but not closed down) were kept secret because they're overseas. But the Decider said not a word about why he decided the prisons had to be located in other countries in the first place.

Why not hold the suspects, say, in one of the many super-secure facilities in and around Washington? They would be much more accessible to the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon and any other agency that wanted a crack at them. And since al-Qaeda is already determined to attack the United States, why even risk creating potential problems for loyal overseas allies? Why not interrogate America's deadliest enemies on American soil?

Since the president didn't address this question, I'll try. The only reason that makes any sense to me is that the Decider wanted to put his secret prisons beyond the reach of U.S. courts. I think the president and his lawyers knew from the beginning that detaining suspects indefinitely and wringing information out of them with methods that international agreements define as torture -- "an alternative set of procedures" was the president's delicate euphemism -- wouldn't amuse even the most law-and-order federal judge.

The full story of what has taken place at Guantanamo Bay and in the CIA's overseas prisons will come out someday. But even with the little we know so far, I remain convinced that history will view these acts of arbitrary detention, extraordinary rendition and coercive interrogation with strong censure and deep shame. The president's claim that "the United States does not torture" comes with an asterisk, since his definition of torture is as tortured as Bill Clinton's definition of "is."

Look, I know that when Khalid Sheik Mohammed (whom the president called "KSM'') and the others came into U.S. custody, they were full of murderous intent and harbored vital knowledge of active plots to kill innocent people. If KSM was indeed "waterboarded," as has been reported, I shed no tears for his discomfort. My concern is for the rule of law and the norms of civilized behavior -- concepts the Decider says he wants the rest of the world to respect.

If the president needed a "hot pursuit" exemption to allow some specific forms of coercive interrogation, he should have asked Congress to give it to him -- rather than rely on a vague blanket authorization to pursue the war on terrorism. If the judgment was that coercion had to be applied anyway, absent a law allowing it, then the officials who ordered the coercion should have had to defend their actions in a court of law. Was it clearly a question of needing the information immediately? Was there no other way to get the suspects to talk?

There is less ambiguity about the question of arbitrary, indefinite detention. It's wrong, and the president knows it's wrong. The Supreme Court had to order the president to do what he knows he should -- formally charge the detainees at Guantanamo and give them fair trials of some kind -- but even now he wants to stack the deck by refusing to let the detainees even see or hear some of the evidence against them.

No, an American "detained" by al-Qaeda wouldn't enjoy a guarantee of due process. But we're not al-Qaeda. I thought that was the whole point.

Oh, one more thing the president didn't mention, for some reason: Those 14 most-wanted terrorists who were kept in the secret prisons? As far as we know, not a single one was captured in Iraq.

Senate Upholds Cluster Bomb Use

By Associated Press
September 7, 2006

The Senate yesterday rejected a move by Democrats to stop the Pentagon from using cluster bombs near civilian targets and to cut off sales unless purchasers abide by the same rules.

The Senate voted 70-30 to defeat an amendment to a Pentagon budget bill to block use of the deadly munitions near populated areas. The vote came after the State Department announced last month that it is investigating whether Israel misused American-made cluster bombs in civilian areas of Lebanon.

Unexploded cluster bombs -- which spray bomblets over a wide area -- litter homes, gardens and highways in south Lebanon after Israel's monthlong war with Hezbollah guerrillas.

Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont have long sought to keep cluster bombs from being used near civilian-concentrated areas. They say that as many as 40 percent of the munitions fail to detonate on impact, leaving civilians and children vulnerable to injury or death long after hostilities have ceased.

Relief organizations and the United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center reported finding evidence that Israel used three types of U.S.-made cluster bombs during the war in Lebanon. Israel also manufactures its own cluster munitions.

"For too long, innocent civilians, not enemy combatants, have suffered the majority of casualties from cluster munitions," Mr. Leahy said. "The recent experience in Lebanon is only the latest example of the appalling human toll of injury and death. Strict rules of engagement are long overdue."

But Sen. Ted Stevens said, "The rules of engagement properly belong with the Department of Defense and the commander in chief."

The Alaska Republican argued that the amendment would restrict "the ability of our military to use these munitions to protect our people."

Netanyahu, Cheney meet

Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Sep 5, 2006

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu met Vice President Dick Cheney.

The leader of Israel’s opposition Likud Party met with Cheney and top senators Tuesday on a visit to Washington to explain Israel’s position on containing Hezbollah and Iran.

Netanyahu lined up behind the government during its July-August war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and this visit was similarly in the spirit of national unity.

Two top aides to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert are due to arrive in Washington on Wednesday.

Pakistan: Friend Or Foe?

The U.S. shouldn't prop up President Musharraf's military regime.
By Selig S. Harrison
Los Angeles Times
September 5, 2006

PAKISTAN'S President Pervez Musharraf is supposedly a key U.S. ally in the "war on terror." But is he, in fact, more of a liability than an asset in combating Al Qaeda and the increasingly menacing Taliban forces in Afghanistan?

Since 9/11, the Bush administration has been propping up Musharraf's military regime with $3.6 billion in economic aid from the U.S. and a U.S.-sponsored consortium, not to mention $900 million in military aid and the postponement of overdue debt repayments totaling $13.5 billion. But now the administration is debating whether Musharraf has become too dependent on Islamic extremist political parties in Pakistan to further U.S. interests, and whether he should be pressured to permit the return of two exiled former prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who have formed an electoral alliance to challenge him in presidential elections scheduled for next year.

Musharraf's most vocal defender is former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who has urged continued support for him "no matter how frustrated we become at the pace of political change and the failure to eliminate Taliban fighters from the Afghan border." Musharraf is better than what might come after him, Armitage argues, and is a moderate who has done his best to fend off the entrenched forces of Islamic extremism in Pakistan.

But this argument does not hold up against mounting evidence that, as an ally, Musharraf has been an opportunist from the start who has continued to help the Taliban (just as he had done before 9/11 ) and who has gone after Al Qaeda cells in Pakistan only to the extent necessary to fend off U.S. and British pressure.

On Sept. 19, 2001, Musharraf made a revealing TV address in Urdu, not noticed at the time by most Americans, in which he reassured Pakistanis who sympathized with Al Qaeda and the Taliban that his decision to line up with the U.S. was a temporary expedient.

To Taliban sympathizers, Musharraf directed an explicit message, saying: "I have done everything for the … Taliban when the whole world was against them….We are trying our best to come out of this critical situation without any damage to Afghanistan and the Taliban." He has kept his promise to the latter.

Taliban forces continue to have unrestricted access to Pakistani border towns as staging areas and sanctuaries. Pakistani soldiers look the other way when Taliban units cross the mountains at Bormoi. With U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan suffering increasingly heavy casualties in the face of a Taliban offensive this summer, their officers no longer mince words about Pakistan's role. Col. Chris Vernon, chief of staff of British forces in southern Afghanistan, charged recently that the Pakistan border town of Chaman serves as the "major headquarters" for a guerrilla network in southeast Afghanistan.

Musharraf sees the Taliban as a pro-Pakistan counterweight to Indian influence in Afghanistan and wants to keep it strong in case Afghan President Hamid Karzai is overthrown and Afghanistan collapses into chaos. As a sop to Washington and London, he ordered raids on two small Taliban encampments in July, and he occasionally rounds up key Al Qaeda figures — but in many cases only after the FBI and CIA have confronted Pakistani police with communications intercepts pinpointing their hide-outs.

Even if Musharraf wanted to remove Taliban and Al Qaeda forces from Pakistan, his ability to do so is limited by the political pact that he made with a five-party Islamic alliance in 2004 to win state elections in the two key border provinces. As a result, Al Qaeda and Taliban activity is openly supported by local officials there, and Pakistani groups allied with Al Qaeda are thriving, notably Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba. This prevents Musharraf from carrying out his pledge to crack down on madrasas (religious schools) linked to terrorist groups.

The Islamic parties are flourishing under the protective umbrella of the Pakistani armed forces. Their growth would be slowed if secular political forces had a chance to assert themselves through free elections and a parliamentary system liberated from army manipulation. Under Musharraf, the army has seized much more power than past military regimes, installing military officers in hundreds of government posts previously held by civil servants. Army-sponsored conglomerates control multibillion-dollar enterprises and will not be easily dislodged. As a Pakistani editor commented, "Most countries have an army, but in Pakistan, the army has a country."

The U.S. should use its aid leverage to promote three goals: Bhutto and Sharif should be permitted to return and organize freely. If Musharraf wants to run for president again, he should step down as army chief of staff and run as a civilian. Finally, he should turn over power to a neutral caretaker government that would conduct the elections. This would be welcomed in Pakistan even by elements within the armed forces. An open letter in July from a group of retired generals called for "the disengagement of the military from political power." As one of its signatories, Lt. Gen. Talat Masood, observed, "There is a genuine urge and demand in the country to revert to democracy and give a fair deal to all the parties."

SELIG S. HARRISON, director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is a former South Asia bureau chief.

A Demand For Hussein's Release

Sunni Chieftains Also Urge Resistance Against U.S-Led Forces
By Amit R. Paley and Saad Sarhan, Washington Post Staff Writers
Washington Post
September 3, 2006

BAGHDAD, Sept. 2 -- A coalition of 300 Iraqi tribal leaders on Saturday demanded the release of Saddam Hussein so he could reclaim the presidency and also called for armed resistance against U.S.-led forces.

The clan chieftains, most of them Sunni Arabs, included the head of the 1.5 million-member al-Obeidi tribe, said they planned to hold rallies in Sunni cities throughout the country to insist that Hussein be freed and that the charges against him and his co-defendants be dropped.

Hussein is being tried on charges of genocide and other alleged crimes arising from the Iraqi government's killing and forced relocation of ethnic Kurds in 1988, and he is awaiting a verdict in a trial that concluded in late July in the mass killings of Shiites after an assassination attempt against him in 1982.

During Hussein's dictatorship, positions of power in the military and the ruling Baath Party were held overwhelmingly by Sunni Arabs, a minority that formed the backbone of the Iraqi insurgency after Hussein was toppled in 2003.

"If the demand is not carried out, we will lead a general, sweeping and popular uprising," said Sheik Wassfy al-Assy, brother of the chief of the Obeidi tribe, which hosted a meeting of the clan leaders on Monday in Ramal, a village 55 miles southwest of Kirkuk. "As for whether [Hussein] will be reinstated in his post as president after his release, that will be up to him."

The leaders announced their demands on Saturday, as Shiite-Sunni sectarian violence and a move asserting Kurdish independence heightened fears that the country is sliding toward full-scale civil war.

Fourteen Shiite pilgrims from India and Pakistan were shot to death in front of their families as they drove this week through Anbar province, a volatile Sunni insurgent stronghold in western Iraq, on their way to the Shiite holy city of Karbala, according to Akram al-Zubaidie, a member of the Karbala city council. The Associated Press later reported that one of the victims was an Iraqi driver.

In separate incidents across Iraq, at least 18 other people were killed or found dead Saturday, authorities said.

Arabs across the country expressed anger at a decree by Massoud Barzani, president of the regional government in Kurdish-populated northern Iraq, forbidding the Iraqi flag to be raised in government buildings across the north. The government in the western part of the Kurdish region has always flown only the Kurdish flag -- red, white and green stripes emblazoned with a yellow sun -- but Barzani's order, published in newspapers this week, extends that policy to the eastern part of the region, which previously displayed both the Iraqi and Kurdish flags.

"The symptoms of division and separatism and the declaration of a Kurdish state have become apparent in the workings of the Kurdistan government," said Mustafa Tamawi, an Arab leader and human rights activist in Kirkuk. Many Arabs fear that the Kurdish north, which has been largely autonomous since 1991, will secede from the rest of the country.

Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of the Iraqi parliament, said the order is intended to put pressure on the body to choose a new flag to replace the current one, which many Kurds associate with Hussein's Baath Party dictatorship.

In Baghdad, Iraqi military officials announced this weekend that the security plan designed to tamp down sectarian violence in the capital will be extended in the next two weeks into Shiite areas including Sadr City, a stronghold of anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The announcement raised the possibility that entry into the Shiite slum could spark violent clashes with Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki traveled to the southern city of Najaf on Saturday to discuss the deteriorating security situation with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most revered Shiite leader in Iraq. Sistani's office said in a statement after the meeting that he supported Maliki's 28-step national reconciliation plan and called on the government to quickly reduce violence in the country before other groups, such as armed militias, fill the void.

"The failure of the government to carry out its duty in maintaining security and order and protecting people's lives would open the chance for other forces to carry out this task, which would be a matter of grave danger," the statement said.

Sarhan reported from Najaf. Special correspondents Naseer Nouri, Naseer Mehdawi and K.I. Ibrahim in Baghdad and other Washington Post staff in Iraq contributed to this report.

Israel Plans For War With Iran And Syria

By Uzi Mahnaimi and Sarah Baxter
London Sunday Times
September 3, 2006

THREATENED by a potentially nuclear-armed Tehran, Israel is preparing for a possible war with both Iran and Syria, according to Israeli political and military sources.

The conflict with Hezbollah has led to a strategic rethink in Israel. A key conclusion is that too much attention has been paid to Palestinian militants in Gaza and the West Bank instead of the two biggest state sponsors of terrorism in the region, who pose a far greater danger to Israel’s existence, defence insiders say.

“The challenge from Iran and Syria is now top of the Israeli defence agenda, higher than the Palestinian one,” said an Israeli defence source. Shortly before the war in Lebanon Major-General Eliezer Shkedi, the commander of the air force, was placed in charge of the “Iranian front”, a new position in the Israeli Defence Forces. His job will be to command any future strikes on Iran and Syria.

The Israeli defence establishment believes that Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear programme means war is likely to become unavoidable.

“In the past we prepared for a possible military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities,” said one insider, “but Iran’s growing confidence after the war in Lebanon means we have to prepare for a full-scale war, in which Syria will be an important player.”

A new infantry brigade has been formed named Kfir (lion cub), which will be the largest in the Israeli army. “It is a partial solution for the challenge of the Syrian commando brigades, which are considered better than Hezbollah’s,” a military source said.

There has been grave concern in Israel over a military pact signed in Tehran on June 15 between Iran and Syria, which the Iranian defence minister described as a “mutual front against Israeli threats”. Israel has not had to fight against more than one army since 1973.

During the war in Lebanon, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, the Iranian founder of Hezbollah, warned: “If the Americans attack Iran, Iran will attack Tel Aviv with missiles.”

According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, both Iran and Syria have ballistic missiles that can cover most of Israel, including Tel Aviv. An emergency budget has now been assigned to building modern shelters.

“The ineptness of the Israeli Defence Forces against Hezbollah has raised the Iranians’ confidence,” said a leading defence analyst.

In Washington, the military hawks believe that an airstrike against Iranian nuclear bunkers remains a more straightforward, if risky, operation than chasing Hezbollah fighters and their mobile rocket launchers in Lebanon.

“Fixed targets are hopelessly vulnerable to precision bombing, and with stealth bombers even a robust air defence system doesn’t make much difference,” said Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative.

The option of an eventual attack remains on the table after President George Bush warned on Friday that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

While the American State Department favours engaging with President Bashar Assad of Syria in the hope of detaching him from the Iranian alliance, hawks believe Israel missed a golden opportunity to strike at Syria during the Hezbollah conflict.

“If they had acted against Syria during this last kerfuffle, the war might have ended more quickly and better,” Perle added. “Syrian military installations are sitting ducks and the Syrian air force could have been destroyed on the ground in a couple of days.” Assad set off alarm bells in Israel when he said during the war in Lebanon: “If we do not obtain the occupied Golan Heights by peaceful means, the resistance option is there.”

During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the Syrian army briefly captured the Israeli strategic post on top of Mount Hermon on the Golan Heights.

Some Israeli analysts believe Syria will try again to take this post, which overlooks the Syrian capital, Damascus.

As a result of the change in the defence priorities, the budget for the Israeli forces in the West Bank and Gaza is to be reduced.

The Israelis are integrating three elite brigades that performed well during the Lebanon war under one headquarters, so they can work together on deep cross-border operations in Iran and Syria.

Advocates of political engagement believe a war with Syria could unleash Islamic fundamentalist terror in what has hitherto been a stable dictatorship. Some voices in the Pentagon are not impressed by that argument.

“If Syria spirals into chaos, at least they’ll be taking on each other rather than heading for Jerusalem,” said one insider.

References To 'Islamic Fascism' Slammed

By Rummana Hussain, Staff Reporter
Chicago Sun-Times
September 2, 2006

Islamic Society of North America’s newly elected president, Ingrid Mattson, said Friday she objects to President Bush’s use of the term “Islamic fascism” when describing the enemy in the global war on terrorism.

Mattson, like other ISNA leaders, expressed empathy for the challenges government officials face in trying to keep the country safe, but she said the “inaccurate and unhelpful” rhetoric by Bush and other Republican lawmakers hurts peaceful, law-abiding Muslims who face growing scrutiny even five years after 9/11.

“This is a term that had very bad resonance in the Muslim majority world and makes us feel uncomfortable, so we’re hoping there can be some adjustment to this language,” Mattson said at a news conference kicking off ISNA’s fourday annual convention at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont.

Mattson said any harmful act carried out in the name of religion should simply be called “terrorism, crime or violence.”

“We don’t understand why it needs to have the Islamic label. The products that are coming from the Muslim world are not being called Islamic products or Islamic oil. . . . Of course, people do misuse and use Islamic concepts and terms to justify their violence, but I think when we bestow that term upon them, we only make the situation worse and somehow give validity to their claims, which we need to deny and reject.”

Group urged to bridge gap

Earlier this month, Bush said the uncovered British terror plot to blow up planes flying to the United States is further proof “that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists.”

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) also called former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami “one of the chief propagandists of the Islamic fascist regime” when criticizing the Bush administration’s decision to give the Iranian a visa.

Khatami is scheduled to speak to ISNA attendees tonight.

“We felt that it was a natural extension of our dialogue and learning to invite him here so that we could hear from him and perhaps also show him how the American Muslim community has dealt with some of the issues of religious freedom and tolerance and perhaps he can carry some of that message back,” Mattson said.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England didn’t mention Khatami when he addressed hundreds of Muslims at ISNA’s inaugural session later Friday.

Instead, he urged the group to use its influence to help bridge the cultural gap between the United States and the Muslim world overseas.

“America wants you to be more involved,” England said. “Reaching out to people around the world, understanding their concerns, offering partnership and support and extending a promise of freedom is a noble mission.”

Wrong 'Ism,' Wrong History

By Arnaud de Borchgrave
Washington Times
September 3, 2006

When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld compared his Iraq war critics to the appeasers of Nazism in Europe in the mid-1930s, it would seem he got his "isms" confused. A more appropriate analogy would have been the Soviet Union, communism and the Comintern. Founded by V.I. Lenin in 1919, Comintern, or the Communist International, was a compulsory association of national communist parties to promote world revolution. It functioned as an organ of Soviet control over the international communist movement and was appeased by the United States throughout the 1930s.

The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's model was never Germany's defeated Nazi Party, but the Soviet model. His principal supplier of weapons was the Soviet Union. His Mukhabarat was modeled on the very active KGB, not the late Gestapo. Throughout the 1970s, Saddam's KGB worked hand-in-glove with the Soviet KGB in subverting the Gulf states, from the Dhofar rebellion in Oman to Kuwait, after Britain relinquished all its obligations east of Suez.

By the time the Bush administration determined Saddam was a mortal peril to the United States, he and his regime were pretty much burned out. Eight years of war against Iran, followed by his invasion of Kuwait and rout by George H.W. Bush 41's coalition of 29 nations, and then a decade of humiliating U.N. inspections, had reduced Saddam's regime to a dirty little sandbox that was a threat to no one except his own people. His neighbors were not afraid of him. Nor were the Europeans. When Saddam allowed U.N. chief inspector Hans Blix to return to Iraq with as many inspectors as he wished, free to go and look anywhere, it became increasingly obvious he had nothing to hide.

Most important, Saddam and his regime were not part of Osama bin Laden's Islamist "Comintern" organization of global terrorism. But no sooner did the U.S. invade and topple Iraq's Ba'athist regime than "liberated" Iraq became a force multiplier for Islamist extremists.

A remarkably well researched and documented new book titled "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," by Lawrence Wright, establishes "there is no evidence that Iraq ever supplied al Qaeda with weapons or camps," but there were talks between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden to try to get him to stop backing anti-Saddam insurgents. Meetings continued intermittently until bin Laden opposed a rapprochement with Saddam and resumed support of Iraqi dissidents.

Al Qaeda today is a global politico-religious, ideological and spiritual movement that has far more in common with global communism than the European fascism of the 1930s and '40s. What Mr. Bush calls the global war on terror is an ideological struggle, punctuated by acts of terrorism, a fundamental clash of civilizations between democratic freedom and totalitarian religious regimentation, that is likely to endure at least as long as the almost half-century Cold War.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq opened fresh opportunities for Iranian troublemaking. Iran's Revolutionary Guards and its intelligence services flooded Shi'ite Iraq with agents of influence and subversion, funding and arming powerful militias -- e.g., the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army -- that are paving the way for what Tehran hopes will be a humiliating, Vietnamlike U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

The British commander in Iraq said the country is now in a civil war, albeit still a mini one. On Aug. 24, after several days of mortar shelling by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi insurgents, the Brits decided to evacuate their second-largest base at Amarah on the Tigris River and turn it over to the Iraqi army. But before the reluctant Iraqis could take over, insurgents swarmed in and ransacked Camp Abu Naji, looting anything of value.

British Challenger II tanks and Warrior Fighting Vehicles made their way south to Basra to be shipped back to the U.K. Instead, the Brits, now in Land Rovers, redeployed along the nearby Iranian border to conduct guerrilla operations against weapons smugglers infiltrating from Iran.

Amarah is a brief ride from Kut where the Brits, 90 years ago, suffered their second-worst defeat in World War I. After a five-month siege, having lost 23,000 Indian Army troops killed (two divisions), eaten their last horse and fired their last bullet, Gen. Sir Charles Townshend surrendered his sword to the Turkish commander in April 1916. Most of the 7,000 survivors died in captivity. Only Gallipoli, four months earlier, was a bigger Allied disaster. Before withdrawing from the Turkish peninsula, some 44,000 British, French, Australian, New Zealanders, and Canadians were killed. The victorious Turks lost 86,700 killed.

The only relevant history for the planners of Operation Iraqi Freedom was the invasion of Normandy June 6, 1944, and the liberation of Europe that followed. Relevant history was judged irrelevant.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.