James Taranto:
Did the liberation of Iraq make America less safe? Conventional wisdom says yes, but Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria begs to differ. He notes that U.S. government figures show big increases in terrorism …But Zakaria notes that a Canadian think tank, the Simon Fraser Institute, argues that that attacks in Iraq, a war zone, should not be included:
Including Iraq massively skews the analysis. In the NCTC and MIPT data, Iraq accounts for 80 percent of all deaths counted. But if you set aside the war there, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years. …the U.S.-based IntelCenter published a study in mid-2007 that examined “significant” attacks launched by Al Qaeda over the past 10 years. It came to the conclusion that the number of Islamist attacks had declined 65 percent from a high point in 2004, and fatalities from such attacks had declined by 90 percent.
The Simon Fraser study notes that the decline in terrorism appears to be caused by many factors, among them successful counterterrorism operations in dozens of countries and infighting among terror groups. But the most significant, in the study’s view, is the “extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years.”
…An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007 showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1 percent.
…With every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. “This pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world,” writes [study director Andrew] Mack. “Its strategic implications are critically important because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated.”
Power Line’s John Hinderaker has a list of attacks on the U.S. and U.S. interests overseas starting in 1988 and, per Zakaria and Mack’s advice, omitting those in Afghanistan and Iraq. The list has no new entries since October 2003. One may debate how decisive the liberation of Iraq was in diminishing terrorism, but anyone who argues that it’s made us less safe ought to be laughed off stage.
Look at Hinderaker’s compilation — it will make you feel better, and safer too. John speculates on various reasons that anti-terror efforts may have been successful. We won’t really know until classified records become available to future historians — who will likely conclude that some is due to counter-terrorism efforts, some to self-inflicted damage, some to changes in Muslim attitudes.
One sometimes gets the feeling that our policy debates over national security and the journalism that travels with them float, as it were, at 30,000 feet above the reality of the threat on the ground.
Good analysis by Daniel Henninger:
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain brought their presidential campaigns to the Petraeus-Crocker hearings on Iraq this week. An Iraq-based reporter appearing on one of the cable networks in the evening said the hearings struck him as oddly decoupled from the daily reality of war for the Iraqi people and U.S. troops there. Yup, never hurts to pinch yourself hard on entering presidential campaign space right now.
The three candidates addressed Gen. David Petraeus in tones of high gravitas equal to the thin altitude of the American presidency. Sen. Obama colloquied with Gen. Petraeus about the status of al Qaeda in Iraq – asking whether the terrorist organization could “reconstitute itself” and said that he was looking for “an endpoint.”
Here’s another hypothetical: Would this conversation be different today if in August 2006 seven airliners had taken off from Terminal 3 at Heathrow Airport, bound for the U.S. and Canada and each carrying about 250 passengers, and then blew up over the Atlantic Ocean?
It is a hypothetical because, instead of the explosions, British prosecutors this week presented their case against eight Muslim men arrested in August 2006 and charged with conspiring to board and blow up those planes.
The details emerging from that case are quite remarkable and will be summarized shortly. Pause to reflect on the ebb and flow of public debate that has occurred over how free societies should order themselves after two airliners full of passengers knocked down the World Trade Center Towers on Sept. 11 in 2001.
The view that 9/11 “changed everything” did not hold up under the weight of our politics. Divisions re-emerged between Democrats and Republicans, in office and on the streets. These fights reignited over the Patriot Act, Guantanamo and the warrantless wiretap bill (or “FISA” revision). These arguers stopped to stare momentarily at their televisions when Islamic terrorists committed mass murder in the 2004 Madrid train bombing and the 2005 London subway bombing.
…
Here in the U.S., our politics has spent much of the year unable to vote into law the wiretap bill, which is bogged down, incredibly, over giving retrospective legal immunity to telecom companies that helped the government monitor calls originating overseas. Even granting there are Fourth Amendment issues in play here, how is it that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama cannot at least say that class-action lawsuits against these companies are simply wrong right now?
Philip Bobbitt, author of the just released and thought-provoking book, “Terror and Consent,” has written that court warrants are “a useful standard for surveillance designed to prove guilt, not to learn the identity of people who may be planning atrocities.” Planning atrocities is precisely the point.
“Atrocity” is a cruel and ugly word, but it has come to define the common parameters of the world we inhabit. It is entertaining to watch the candidates trying to convince the American people of their ability to be presidential. It would be more than nice to know, before one of them turns into a real president this November, what they will do – or more importantly, will never do – to stop what those eight jihadists sitting in the high-security Woolwich Crown Court in London planned for seven America-bound airliners over the Atlantic Ocean.
Some of the technical facts of the gels/liquids threat is beginning to emerge in the U.K. trial of the eight jihadis:
Two thousand passengers would have died in the plot by eight fanatics working “in the name of Islam”, the jury was told.
It could have involved up to 18 suicide bombers. And they were almost ready to strike.
…Liquid explosives disguised with food colouring and mouthwash would be smuggled past security and on to the flights.
There they would be hooked up to homemade detonators powered by tiny camera batteries and set off to cause mid-air carnage, the court heard.
After the alleged plot was uncovered, in August 2006, the authorities banned passengers from carrying most liquids on board aircraft.
The main ingredient of the homemade bombs was said to be hydrogen peroxide, commonly used as hair bleach and easily available on the high street, mixed with other chemicals which the Daily Mail is not naming.
The plan was to drill small holes in the bottom of 500ml plastic bottles of Oasis and Lucozade and pour away the drinks, the jury heard.
Then the conspirators would use a syringe to inject the ready-mixed explosive liquid into the bottles. Prosecutor Peter Wright QC said the hole would be closed with glue to give the appearance of a “factory sealed” bottle.
Once on board the aircraft, the improvised bombs would be hooked up to a detonator disguised as a standard AA 1.5-volt battery, containing a substance known as HMTD - produced from a mixture of household and commercial ingredients which are freely available.
The detonator would be ignited using metal wire, a small bulb or the flash from a disposal camera, said Mr Wright.
He said improvised bombs using similar ingredients had been used in other terrorist attacks.
I’ve not read the referenced Obama speech — but I’ve found Amir Taheri to be a reliable source on Middle East and Iranian affairs.
The American presidential election campaign took a bizarre theological turn recently when Barack Obama accused John McCain of not being able to distinguish Sunnis from Shiites.
The exchange started when Sen. McCain suggested that the Islamic Republic in Iran, a Shiite power, may be helping al Qaeda, a Sunni outfit, in its murderous campaign in Iraq and elsewhere. Basing its position on received wisdom, the Obama camp implied that Sunnis and Shiites, divided as they are by deep doctrinal differences, could not come together to fight the United States and its allies.
[more]
We get too little real journalism about these subjects and too much “churnalism”, in which a single sometimes misleading wire report is repeated by thousands of commentators while nobody bothers to read the source document.
The Federation of American Scientists has made available the just-released report by the Iraqi Perspectives Project, Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents. The report comprises five volumes, totaling some 200MB of PDF downloads. It is a formidable document to digest. Predictably no big media analysis has emerged so far — based on actually reading the report.
That said, reliable source Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian, has had a go, resulting in the best analysis I’ve come across so far. Best to read the entire article, half being devoted to an interview with visiting Israeli cabinet minister Isaac Herzog. Here’s just the last paragraphs on the captured documents report:
…the new report details a dizzying promiscuity in Saddam’s terrorist operations and support for terrorists in many parts of the world. Saddam tried to kill the wife of French president Francois Mitterrand. He targeted Western journalists directly.
One of the most wry and unconsciously amusing exchanges involves a complaint by Iraqi embassies that they cannot dispose of the vast quantities of weapons and explosives that they have transported in part by diplomatic pouch and accumulated across the globe. There are Iraqi terrorist training schools with dozens of non-Iraqi Arabs. There is support for Pakistani terror groups. An agent is sent to the Philippines to look for opportunities. There is a close relationship with Hamas, which boasts of its armed cells in France, Sweden and Denmark. There is a call for Iraqi authorities to find recruits willing to undertake suicide missions. There is the desire to kill Americans in different parts of the world. And all this comes from translated official Iraqi government documents.
The Bush administration, and its coalition allies in Britain and Australia, never, ever claimed that Iraq was responsible for 9/11.
They said something else entirely. The then US deputy secretary of state, Rich Armitage, said to me at the time of the Iraq invasion that Saddam’s connections with terrorists was “at the top of our concerns”.
That was just exactly where they should have been
The Iraqi Perspectives Project was originally referred to as “The Harmony Database” [which I first wrote about here in 2006]. It has taken three years to assemble some preliminary conclusions — I understand largely due to the severe shortage of Arabic linguists. A glimpse of the value of the work can be gleaned from the table of contents:
Executive Summary ES-l
Terror as an Instrument of State Power 1
Infrastructure for State Terrorism l
State Sponsorship of Suicide Operations 7
State Relationships with Terrorist Groups 13
Managing Relationships 13
Nurturing Organizational Relationships 15
Outreach Program 20
“Quid Pro Quo” 24
Iraq and Terrorism: Three Cases 27
The Abu aI-Abbas Case 27
Attacks on Humanitarian Organizations 30
Destabilizing Saudi Arabia and Kuwait 35
The Business of Terror 41
Venture Capitalists for Terrorists .41
The Terror “Business” Model of Saddam Hussein 42
Conclusion
Technorati Tags: Saddam
I wish I had written this essay. But unsurprisingly, it is prof. John Wixted’s work, and not to be missed. It is a bit lengthy, because the topic is subtle — unlike typical press coverage:
The debate over waterboarding never ceases to amaze me. A sensible debate would ask this question:
What is the harshest method of interrogation that can be used against high-level al Qaeda detainees in a time of crisis?
That’s an excellent question, and phrasing it that way helps to avoid the moral exhibitionism that generally accompanies any discussion about this issue. However, to almost everyone (especially in the mainstream media), the real question is this:
Does waterboarding amount to torture?
This is a silly question that elicits copious amounts of holier-than-thou finger pointing.
Read the whole thing.
Technorati Tags: Interrogation, Torture
Richard Miniter reports on a “high-level Hudson Institute discussion of the best approach to entering rehab”…
Every time you squeeze the trigger on the gas pump, you are putting money into
the pockets of terrorists.
Trace back the snaking hose, past the pump and the oil refinery, and you will
find nearly two dozen oil kingdoms—all of which, to some degree or another, fund
al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and other jihadi groups.
With the exception of a few mature Western democracies like Canada, Norway and
the United States, writes New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, “the price of
oil and the path of freedom run in opposite directions.”
If the world did not buy their oil, the sheikhs couldn’t give terrorists enough
money for a car to put a car bomb in.
So the key strategic question is: Can we sever the link between oil and al
Qaeda?
Wrestling with the issue in a private room at the Four Seasons Restaurant
recently was former CIA director James Woolsey, former Reagan Administration
Education Secretary Bill Bennett, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, and Wall Street Journal
editorial writer Stephen Moore. The forum was the Hudson Institute’s Briefing
Series, the best ticket for high-end discussion in New York. The audience is as
interesting as the guests: hedge-fund managers, executives, journalists,
scholars and socialites.
The Saudis account for 1% of planet’s Muslims, but provide 90% of the funding
for Islamic institutions and charities world-wide. In keeping with Saudi
Arabia’s official version of Islam, the kingdom’s billions flow to mosques and
charities that espouse a Wahabi doctrine.
“When the Wahabis teach their doctrine, they are teaching al Qaeda’s doctrine,”
Woolsey said. “There is no substantial difference between al Qaeda’s doctrine
and the Wahabi doctrine.”
[more from 7-10-2007]
Much to everyone’s amazement, it turns out that al Qaeda was behind Benazir Bhutto’s assassination…
<more>
Technorati Tags: Pakistan
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