Seeker Blog

Jason explains some of the significance of Operation Swarmer - not seen anywhere I’ve read.

…imagine the following scenario:

The insurgency identifies a coalition unit that uses helicopters for fire support, medical evacuation, and tactical reinforcement. Any of the three will do. They mass in company strength, detaching a squad with all four SA-14s and a couple of videocams perhaps a kilometer away in an apartment building with ready access to a rooftop.

The urban terrain they select helps them rule out a fixed-wing response, while ruling in the use of helicopters. They choose their ground carefully, and wait.

They wait for a squad-or-platoon sized coalition patrol element to wander into their kill zone so they can pin them down. But that’s not the real objective. The real objective is to force a medevac flight or a provoke a helicopter airstrike. It will also probably provoke artillery fires as well, but the enemy doesn’t care, because his anti-aircraft gunners are safe and sound a klick away, sitting like a venus flytrap, waiting for an unsuspecting fly. And this is where the real ambush is triggered: As soon as the helicopters come in to evacuate the wounded, or as soon as the gunships come in to strafe and rocket the Ali Baba line, the anti-air contingent is activated. With as many as ten anti-aircraft missiles - not RPGs, MISSILES -concentrated against a flight of two helicopters, the insurgency has an excellent chance of bringing them down.

And the cameramen will be at the ready to make sure the footage gets on the six-o-clock news….

Definitely RTWT.

Charles Krauthammer noticed the fabrication - I hope you’ll read the entire article - astonishing, if true…

It was, as the hero tells it, his Road to Damascus moment. There he is, in a hall of 1,500 people he has long considered to be his allies, hearing the speaker treat the Iraq war, nearing the end of its first year, as “a virtually unqualified success.” He gasps as the audience enthusiastically applauds. Aghast to discover himself in a sea of comrades so deluded by ideology as to have lost touch with reality, he decides he can no longer be one of them.

And thus did Francis Fukuyama become the world’s most celebrated ex-neoconservative, a well-timed metamorphosis that has brought him a piece of the fame that he once enjoyed 15 years ago as the man who declared, a mite prematurely, that history had ended.

A very nice story. It appears in the preface to Fukuyama’s post-neocon coming out, “America at the Crossroads.” On Sunday it was repeated on the front page of the New York Times Book Review in Paul Berman’s review.

I happen to know something about this story, as I was the speaker whose 2004 Irving Kristol lecture to the American Enterprise Institute Fukuyama has now brought to prominence. I can therefore testify that Fukuyama’s claim that I attributed “virtually unqualified success” to the war is a fabrication.

A convenient fabrication — it gives him a foil and the story drama — but a foolish one because it can be checked. The speech was given at the Washington Hilton before a full house, carried live on C-SPAN and then published by the American Enterprise Institute under its title “Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World.” (It can be read at http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.19912,filter.all/pub_detail.asp .) As indicated by the title, the speech was not about Iraq. It was a fairly theoretical critique of the four schools of American foreign policy: isolationism, liberal internationalism, realism and neoconservatism. The only successes I attributed to the Iraq war were two, and both self-evident: (1) that it had deposed Saddam Hussein and (2) that this had made other dictators think twice about the price of acquiring nuclear weapons, as evidenced by the fact that Moammar Gaddafi had turned over his secret nuclear program for dismantling just months after Hussein’s fall (in fact, on the very week of Hussein’s capture).

Any reader having information counter to Krauthammer’s case - please advise in the comments.

Glenn Reynolds’ 2002 concluding comments on Fukuyama [read all of Glenn’s post - which includes other resource links] :

Fukuyama is not a serious person. But I suppose that’s no reason to ignore him. After all, bloggers do pay attention to Cornel West and Noam Chomsky — whom Fukuyama, with his intellectual sloppiness and rash pronouncements, is coming to resemble.

From Bill Roggio’s report [Jaafari’s allies denounce the Hayy Ur raid while MNF-I disputes the allegations of an unjustified assault] - a possible agreement in favor of Abdel Mahdi instead of Jaafari for PM. If this is true, this could break the logjam:

Baghdad, 17 March (AKI) - The representatives of the Kurdish list, the Sunni Iraqi Concord Front and much of the Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution (SCIRI) have reportedly reached an accord on a new prime minister. Their agreement not to reconfirm Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister and instead nominate Abdel Mahdi, a leading SCIRI figure and currently vice president, was reported by the al-Arabiya network and confirmed by Sunni deputy, Salman Jumeiri. The nomination of a new prime minister is the main sticking point in efforts to forge a new government in Iraq after the elections in December.

The representatives of these lists have the parliamentary majority needed to reconfirm president Jalal Talabani as president and nominate Abdel Mahdi as prime minister.

The line-up of those endorsing Abdel Mahdi - who lost narrowly to Jaafari in an internal vote on a prime ministerial candidate - may well exclude MPs from the faction of radical Shiite imam Moqtada al-Sadr and those of the Islamic party Dawa, led by Jaafari.

The choice of a new prime minister has become the crucial obstacle in forming a new national unity government, following last December’s elections.