Sunday, August 31, 2003
[posted by jaed at 12:07 AM]Flies, or maggots?
Belmont Club proposes that David Warren's "flypaper" may not be the best analogy for the flood of Arab extremists heading for Iraq:
The logical modification to the 'flypaper' scenario is the 'maggot' model. It relies on the observation that terrorism requires the corpse of a decaying society in order to survive. [...] Hamas requires an ecosystem like Lebanon to raise funds, replenish recruits and build a dysfunctional empire that could exist nowhere else but in such a place. Islamic Jihad, Lashkar Jihad, Jemaah Islamiyah, the Palestinian Authority and Al-Qaeda must keep up the mayhem because they need a job. Frankly, they are unqualified for anything else. Terrorists are flooding into Iraq because it is the only place where professionals in their line of work can get a job. Killing Americans is an optional extra but no one is counting on it.Now as an analogy, this suggests various thoughts to me. One of them is that maggots don't feed on healthy flesh, only decaying flesh - if a society is not decaying, terrorists can find no foothold there.
Which of course invests the process of building and rebuilding civil society in Iraq with even more importance. I don't think Iraqi civil society is necessarily unhealthy or dying, but transitional times are delicate - people don't yet know what to expect, they haven't yet started to take control of their lives back (my impression is that this is most true in the so-called "Sunni triangle", which is where most of the terrorists seem to be). It calls into sharp relief the fact that attracting terrorists into Iraq is not the endpoint, not at all.
Thursday, August 28, 2003
[posted by jaed at 11:57 PM]"Cruz Bustamante" sounds like a porn star name
All right, I am a child. (I can hardly deny it after that remark.)
But seriously... doesn't it?
[posted by jaed at 10:10 PM]
Over at Asymmetrical Information, a topic (inspired by an evisceration of Tom Friedman's writing style) explores the outer limits of bad metaphor. The entire comment thread should be bronzed.
You know what to do next.
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
[posted by jaed at 11:39 AM]Rorschach test
Vodkapundit points to this Washington Post column suggesting a strategic approach, rather than more-boots-on-the-ground, for Iraq. One model is the Vietnam-era "Phoenix" program:
If you aren't familiar with Phoenix, it was one of the few things we tried in Vietnam that actually worked. Soldiers -- mostly Marines, actually -- worked closely, and in small numbers, with village chiefs and militia. Their goal was to make the South Vietnamese safe from the Viet Cong, one hamlet at a time. They did so by training up the locals in a non-condescending manner, helping establish a non-corrupt local government, and turning each town into a mini fortress, then slowly expanding the security zone.I wonder about this, because the lion's share of the attacks is coming from a relatively small area of high Baathist support. They're not geographically dispersed, and most towns and cities don't seem to require "pacification" so much as general civil support.
Imagine a war won, not by advancing the front, but by scattered, spreading ink blots slowly merging together.
Still, if VP is right that it worked in Vietnam, it's worth looking at for lessons at the very least.
Sunday, August 24, 2003
[posted by jaed at 12:29 PM]Wait, I thought "Chutzpah" was a Yiddish word...
I admit I'm really hoping that the Onion has hacked MEMRI, but if not, it seems a group of Arabs resident in Switzerland is suing all Jews because, they allege, during the Exodus they took not only themselves, but trillions of tons of gold, along with jewels, silver, and kitchen utensils (??).
Dr. Hilmi: [...] a group of Egyptians in Switzerland has opened the case of the so-called 'great exodus of the Jews from Pharaonic Egypt.' At that time, they stole from the Pharaonic Egyptians gold, jewelry, cooking utensils, silver ornaments, clothing, and more, leaving Egypt in the middle of the night with all this wealth, which today is priceless."You see, since those nasty Jews stole everything that wasn't nailed down, it wasn't there thousands of years later, during the Arab conquest of Egypt, for the Arabs to...steal.
(What I'm wondering is why they haven't expanded the lawsuit in the obvious direction. The Jews, remember, were enslaved by the Egyptians, which is what prompted the whole unfortunate situation in the first place. So they were stealing, not only the forks and spoons, but themselves, weren't they? Surely a good husky Jewish slave is worth more - considering all the years of potential labor - than a few pots? Just those alive today number 12 or 13 million, and when you multiply that by the price of a slave - I'm sure they can get the correct figure from the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, or one of the other Muslim countries that practice slavery to this day - you're talking about a lot of money.)
Saturday, August 23, 2003
[posted by jaed at 10:08 AM]Useful Collection of Info Dept
The Weekly Standard provides an overview of information from public sources about the ties between the Baathists and al Quaeda. Nothing new, as far as I can tell, but it's helpful to have it all in one place.
Thursday, August 21, 2003
[posted by jaed at 11:21 PM]Blink
You're the UN. You're performing operations in what's still a war zone, with a fair number of violent people of the death-to-the-infidel persuasion. What do you do about security?
Well, apparently, you turn down offers of security protection from the US army (can't be associated with those nasty Amriki, you know... most declasse...). And who do you get to provide security? Why, members of the Baathist secret services!
all of the guards at the compound were agents of the Iraqi secret services, to whom they reported on United Nations activities before the war. The United Nations continued to employ them after the war was over, the official said.Good God!
Caveat: the source for this is an unnamed "senior American official", and I've gotten twitchy about anonymously-sourced comments with no confirming source. And of course it's entirely possible that the guards had nothing to do wiith the attack as such; as far as I know that's just suspicion, and there's no direct evidence of it.
But still, even if just the contention that the guards stayed on is true - what the hell kind of stupidity, of obliviousness to reality, does it take to use Saddam Hussein's men as security? What were they thinking?
(Is it possible it stemmed from anti-Americanism - "The Americans overthrew Saddam Hussein, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, therefore Saddam Hussein's guards are our natural friends..."? Could such thoughts have contributed to such a policy? It's hard to believe, but the candid reactions of UN staff after the bombing - along the lines of "But we're not Americans, we're here to try to get the Americans out, why would anyone attack us?" - make me wonder.)
