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=============================
Setting the cat among the pigeons: Apparently
the US is telegraphing its moves.
This will make for interesting times. I hope those people know what they are
doing.
I have just heard from people on the ground in Iraq. As
usual the news is mixed, some encouraging, some not.
A story:
The French and Germans refuse to recognize the validity of Coalition travel
documents issued to Iraqi nationals. As a result the only people who can
travel to Europe are those who have Saddam-era passports. These are, of
course, people who had some standing in the old Saddam regime.
When those people travel with Americans many do not bother to conceal their
contempt for the United States, their dislike of the occupation, and their
joy when events like Fallujah take place. This is demoralizing to the
Americans who are trying to help restore Iraqi institutions: both those who
were enthusiastic about the Iraq operation, and those who opposed the
invasion but are now sincerely trying to make the best of the situation and
restore the country. It is not entirely clear what can be done about this.
Secondly: the Marines are preparing to show what occupation is. Fallujah
will learn.
=======================
Earthlink
keeps bouncing mail back to me with their spam filter message, but I have
yet to see any evidence that mail I send using that system ever got to
anyone. Since some of it was replies to urgent inquiries I wonder if they
are not being protected from my answers.
I did get some returns from having sent
messages to Arwen Dayton through the Earthlink spam protection system, so it
looks like that works.
The column is done and on the wire. There's considerable mail from
yesterday and
today. And I am mildly laid low
by a combination of allergies and a spring cold.
As I said earlier: Fallujah will learn what they have unleashed.
"Paris, France: 4:15pm, April 8, 2004 - Intego, the Macintosh security
specialist, has just released updated virus definitions for Intego
VirusBarrier to protect Mac users against the first Trojan horse that
affects Mac OS X. This Trojan horse, MP3Concept (MP3Virus.Gen), exploits a
weakness in Mac OS X where applications can appear to be other types of
files."
As our troops learn who they are fighting the war will change.
======================
Eurabia? By NIALL FERGUSON New York Times
Published: April 4, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/magazine/04WWLN.html?
pagewanted=all&position=
In the 52nd chapter of his ''Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire,'' Edward Gibbon posed one of the great counterfactual
questions of history. If the French had failed to defeat an invading Muslim
army at the Battle of Poitiers in A.D. 732, would all of Western Europe have
succumbed to Islam?
''Perhaps,'' speculated Gibbon with his
inimitable irony, ''the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in
the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised
people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.''
When those words were published in 1788, the
idea of a Muslim Oxford could scarcely have seemed more fanciful. The last
Muslim forces had been driven from Spain in 1492; the Ottoman advance
through Eastern Europe had been decisively halted at the gates of Vienna in
1683.
Today, however, the idea seems somewhat less
risible. The French historian Alain Besancon is one of a number of European
intellectuals who detect a significant threat to the continent's traditional
Christian culture. The Egyptian-born writer Bat Yeor has for some years
referred to the rise of a new ''Eurabia'' that is hostile in equal measure
to the United States and Israel. Two years ago, Pat Buchanan published an
apocalyptic book titled ''The Death of the West,'' prophesying that
declining European fertility and immigration from Muslim countries could
turn ''the cradle of Western civilization'' into ''its grave.'' <snip>
============================
And here is a letter from the front:
Dr Pournelle,
We are all holed up inside our compound in central Baghdad waiting for the
next wave of protests to start after morning prayers. We can hear speeches
on loudspeakers at the local Mosques. Stirring up a frenzy no doubt. The
roads are blocked with concertina and the Army is out in force.
Should prove to be an interesting day.
We received information that they are going to try to bring their
demonstration up to the gate of our compound and then storm us, taking
hostages and burning the place down. I sincerely hope, for their sake, that
they do not try that. The rules of engagement have changed considerably in
the last few days. I will send another note when it is all over.
After watching Dr. Rice at the hearing, I cruised
around looking for reactions. Some were -- well, odd.
"Condi Lousy"
Why Rice is a bad national security adviser.
Slate.com, Fred Kaplan
Thursday, April 8, 2004
http://slate.msn.com/id/2098499/
One clear inference can be drawn from Condoleezza Rice's testimony before
the 9/11 commission this morning: She has been a bad national security
adviser-passive, sluggish, and either unable or unwilling to tie the loose
strands of the bureaucracy into a sensible vision or policy. In short, she
has not done what national security advisers are supposed to do.
Which makes me wonder what he thinks a National Security Advisor does?
Which ones have been effective?
The National Security Advisor is generally either a soldier or an
egghead. Dick Allen and Henry Kissinger were eggheads. The National Security
Advisor is one of the few people in the world with what amounts to unlimited
access to the President; she can literally walk in on his meetings and
interrupt him.
Her job is to use that access to bring action plans to the President.
That means filtering them out of the cauldron of ideas and suggestions that
assault her daily. Washington is full of people
with their hair on fire who simply must put their proposition to the
President this afternoon, If they all were permitted to do so the government
would come to a halt. (No bad thing, perhaps, except that with the war on
terror the stakes are a bit higher.)
What, precisely, did Clarke want?
He wanted meetings. He wanted Cabinet Level meetings on the threat and
terror. He wanted everyone to be at battle stations and listening to him, as
they had been under Clinton.
He had that under Clinton. Under Clinton not much was done. The Cole was
bombed and we did nothing. Every now and then we'd spray some cruise
missiles around, but they didn't have any real effect on anything. If you
want to kill people you don't send a missile in a straight line from
the sea to the target. Among other things, you can see them coming. But they
had meetings, and everyone was at battle station. They showed they cared.
Bin Ladin's agents came to the US during the Clinton Administration, got
most of their training during the Clinton Administration, moved about the
country and put their plans in place under the Clinton Administration. This
isn't blaming Clinton or Clarke. They didn't see this coming and surely
would have prevented if the had.
Clarke also wanted what amounted to war in Afghanistan. That wasn't going
to happen. Even if the President really deep down wanted to throw the
Taliban out of Afghanistan the President can't declare war, and the Congress
wasn't about to, not until 911.
Clarke probably did not want to end the silly political correctness that
made it impossible to have surveillance on young Muslim men of Arab descent,
even though just about every attack on the United States and allies was
carried out by people of that description. But even had he wanted that, it
wasn't likely to happen. It hasn't even happened NOW. We still search
grandmothers in wheel chairs as if that made air flight safer.
No, Clarke wanted meetings, at which he could be the center of attention
and have the President and Cabinet in thrall; but what would come of those
meetings? If he had specific proposals, he hasn't told us, and Rice never
saw them.
What the United States needs is a sense of war and urgency here. The
Department of Justice and the FBI want to catch criminals and prosecute
them. That's not quite the same thing as protecting the nation from enemy
aliens and traitors. It takes different measures, and we traditionally
haven't used those means. For a while during the Cold War we did: it was
called McCarthyism, persecution of those who were, or very probably were, or
associated a lot with those who were disloyal to the United States. Alger
Hiss. Harry Dexter White. Judith Coplon. And a very large number of
Russian agents. Read the Venona documents for details. Those people were
real, and were allied with a power with nuclear weapons, and still it was
difficult to get the nation to take security seriously.
The wonder is that no one seems to have been killed in the US by
terrorists since 911; that the
other side shot its bolt in that one act, and doesn't seem to be able to do
a lot more. Maybe the Company was given the go-ahead to take some preventive
measures? If so, they'll be very quiet about it.
Back to the 200+ days Bush was in office before 911: what should he have
done? We didn't have the military means to go into Afghanistan and capture
Bin Laden. We don't have much in the way of that kind of capability now. We
can assist allies on the ground -- the conquest of Afghanistan was
brilliantly done and shows what we can do -- but we don't have troops who
can go into those hills and take out enemies without leaving tracks. We
aren't a nation of covert warriors. Maybe we shouldn't be. But it's
pointless to blame Bush and Rice for not using means we didn't have and they
couldn't command.
Meanwhile we now have a phony war. No rationing. Nothing to bring the
American people into a sense of urgency. Let's have a war, but meanwhile you
go party. The only civilians involved are the relatives of the slain.
Frederick the Great kind of war, in which the peasants in the fields and the
burghers in the towns would neither know nor care that the state was at war.
That is not the kind of war Americans understand. It's not the kind of
war a republic undertakes.
Now: what's going to happen in Iraq now that we have our own Intifada?
=============================
What we could have done
Note first: He who defends everything defends nothing. There were dozens
of people with pet projects who came into the White House in a frenzy to get
access to the President so they could stomp on their pet bugs.
Even Clarke, who was as concerned about cyber warfare as anything else.
And probably should have been. There is still an enormous potential for
computer attacks against the US to take down the power grid, disrupt air
traffic control, even muck up the traffic lights in cities: all measures
that can cause considerable damage to the US without the necessity of
accumulating fertilizer and diesel fuel.
So. What could we have done before 911?
The single most important thing we could have done would be to say: "A
bunch of crazy Arabs are determined to do bad things to the United States.
If you are in control of assets that could be harmed by a few Arab thugs,
beware of young men of Arab citizenship and background, and pay attention to
what they are doing. While not all young Arab men consider the United States
a mortal enemy, enough do that we should be vigilant."
Second: issue the following instructions to pilots of commercial
airplanes: "Resist hijackers. Do not open the cockpit door, and maintain
control of your aircraft at all times. Do not give in to their demands, even
if they are in control of the passenger cabin and are executing hostages.
Announce to the passengers that the airplane is under attack and all
passengers are now part of a posse to resist this. Announce also that you
will destroy the airplane before you will give control of it to enemies of
the United States. And call the Air Force for help."
Those two measures would have prevented the 911 disaster. At worst the
enemy would have destroyed several aircraft. At best some passengers would
have been killed before the other passengers subdued the enemy and pounded
them senseless.
Of course we were not going to do that. We haven't issued those
instructions yet.
The reason we can't plant democracy in Iraq is that the country isn't
suitable for democracy. As Rousseau observed, following Aristotle and most
of the classic scholars, democracy is suitable only for fairly small and
uniform states. The Cantons of Switzerland come to mind.
Iraq is a "nation" in name only, created by the British as the Ottoman
Empire crumbled. It is not small, it is not uniform, and its people have far
more local loyalty than they have to any ruling class in Baghdad. Worse,
there is so much oil revenue at stake that desperate measures will be taken
by those who seek to control it. The game is very much worth the candle. And
when the stakes are high, the unscrupulous often trump those with scruples.
So it goes.
Our efforts in Iraq are more likely to bring about Algeria in its early
days, rather than the picture we have of Iraq as a democracy like
Switzerland or the United States.
But Switzerland is not a democracy, nor is the United States of America.
They are federal republics. The Swiss have retained what amounts to direct
democracy in some Cantons, and extensive democratic control in all of them:
but they also retain power in the Cantons, and there is little federal --
read Imperial -- supervision of internal Canton affairs. In the last Swiss
Civil War, after our War Between the States, the problem was solved by
confessional cleansing: forced emigration of dissidents to separate one
Canton into two Half-Cantons. That way each was ruled by consent of the
governed, and democracy could prevail within each; but the majority didn't
get to oppress the minority because the two confessions had been separated.
Switzerland is a Federal Republic of small democracies which differ between
Canton and Canton but are fairly uniform within each Canton.
Iraq could have become a Federal Republic with rather weak central power
but strong state powers, which is, you may recall, what I advocated a year
ago; but the problem is that the United States doesn't understand what a
Federal Republic is. We have been too busy converting the USA into an
Imperial state, winner take all in one big national election, strip real
power from the States. The States retain power only so long as the ruling
elites of the US allow it.
Who are the ruling elites? The governing class in Washington. Politicians
come and go, but das Buros immer steht ; lobbyists remain; the
eternal quest for campaign funds rules; and there is little anyone outside
Washington can do about it. Change majority parties? And government growth
continues. The Tax Eating Class remains. Das Buros immer steht. You
can't clean out the professional governing class, not even to hire your
friends and relatives; and thus the politicians can't really be held
accountable.*
Iraq can be ruled from the center only by an iron hand. The subjects of
Washington DC are tamer, for now, and allow their schools to be destroyed,
their rights to be trampled, their dissident sects to be burned alive in
Waco, and at most cluck their tongues; we have the trappings of democracy
because we can change emperors, and we can change the political classes at
the top; and we are, after all, reasonably happy with the system. Washington
appears to give as well as take away. The destruction of our schools -- some
of us saw this in our lifetimes, and many of us warned that it was
happening, would happen -- is complete, so there is little chance that a
later generation will even know what it was like to live in a self-governing
republic with democratic components.
But we are trying to impose that system on Iraq. Iron rule from the
center. Trappings of power to the provinces and cities and local sheiks, but
only trappings: no real power to anyone but the central government. Baathist
theory with democratic trimmings.
And the Iraqi are resisting. Astonishing. They would rather have their
own brand of Fascism than what we seek to impose.
We could have established self government in cities and provinces in
Iraq, giving them power over almost everything except defense and foreign
policy; but that would not satisfy the exiles we wanted to put in power --
how could it? They have never known what it is like to live in a self
governing society either. Nor have most of the military people we sent to
Iraq. How could they? Career military people do not live in that kind of
society, nor should they.
So now we have this: Fallujah is either allowed to get away with a revolt
that left US citizens dead and mutilated; or it must be crushed. Neither is
going to produce a self governing city with rule of law.
We will now rule with an iron hand, or we will not rule at all.
It is not too late in Kurdistan to devolve power to local authorities. It
may not be too late to do so in other parts of Iraq. But the time is short,
and I doubt that those in command have any notion of what I am talking
about. How could they? Few in the United States will understand.
To those who command in Washington:
You will not establish democracy in Iraq. You may be able to build a
federal republic there, but you must be prepared to allow the locals to do
things you hate, restricting the scope of their power but not the power
itself. You must give real power to local authorities, and you must do so
quickly. The hour is late.
=================
Make no mistake: this is not an indictment of our armed forces,
who are doing a wonderful job under
impossible conditions. It is not really an indictment of our politicians,
who understand how to get political office but not much about how to execute
it. It is an indictment of the neo-Jacobins who managed to have enough
control to actually change things, for a short period of time; and used that
to embroil us in Mesopotamia while growing the Imperial bureaucracy in ways
that must take the Clintons' breath away.
And of the leaders who drank the neo-Jacobin Koolaid, and do not seem
able to recover from the dose.
And yet, God save us, I see no comfort in replacing them.
A decade ago I said we were sowing the wind.
=========================
Examples of Imperial Power:
In Los Angeles, the police formed a special unit to go out and collect
parole violators, of whom there are many; to visit parole violators and get
them to understand that parole is parole. This makes sense: a great many
parole violators are recidivists. Crime control is crime control.
Their first day they encountered a man who wrapped his arms and legs
around a sign post and had to be subdued by force. The next day the entire
team spent all day filling out forms and reports pursuant to Federal
regulations imposed by a consent decree on the LA Police Department. The
third day they disbanded the parole monitor unit.
The State of California for good or ill believes in marijuana for medical
uses. The Department of Justice threatens the licenses of any physicians who
prescribe it, and prison to anyone who grows or supplies it for medical
purposes. The imperial will will rule; the views of the state are
irrelevant.
I could continue. Examples of imperial control in the name of doing good
are endless. The results have been the utter destruction of what had once
been a splendid education system, increasing costs of local law enforcement,
increasing imprisonment, inability to treat local problems with local
remedies, and an enormous increase in the bureaucracy that oversees
compliance with the will of the Imperial City (which is of course the real
point to begin with; aristocracies always seeks to multiply their perks, and
having subordinates is one of the most important perks).
So it goes.
--------
* Note 1
Clinton in the "Travelgate" scandal tried to bring the spoils system to
Washington. "We needed the slots," Hillary Clinton said. At the time I was
among those who used this incident to castigate the Clintons. I apologize.
In this instance they were trying to restore the spoils system in which the
winner of an election has some real power to change the governing class by
firing a bunch of bureaucrats and replacing them with others of their
choosing, friends, relatives, political supporters, competents and
incompetents, but by God at least they are changing the guard.
I should have commended the Clintons for this. They have my apologies.
(This was said in irony, which seems not to have come across; I have got
more comment on this throwaway note than on the essay. Feel free to ignore
this bit of whimsy which was deliberately put into a note because it is a
distraction. And See next week.)
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