Their first stage tactics are primarily terrorist, with some small unit ambushes and attacks. They seek to drive out the democratic protectors of Iraq (primarily the US) by causing a continuous stream of casualties, even at a relatively low level. They seek to demoralize, confuse and enrage the Iraqis, triggering anarchy leading to civil war. Thus they using terrorist attacks against coalition forces, government officials, security forces, and reconstruction personnel, while killing large numbers of civilians.

Terrorism is unusually effective as a tactic because it is a cheap but significant force multiplier. Small numbers of readily replaceable terrorists, often not even trained (in the case of car bombs) or with minimal training (in the case of IED installation and detonation) can kill a much larger number of their enemy. Thugs can operate as assassins and kill important individuals, disrupting reconstruction efforts and the new government.

By using small weapons such as powerful mines, small numbers of terrorists can kill many Americans (i.e. they have a remarkable “force multiplier”). The new Iranian engineeried IED’s – now a misnomer – is an example of how the enemy strategy is evolving. Almost impregnable (to IEDs) marine armored troop carriers are death traps when attacked by the new weapons. One of these devices killed 14 marines last week. Some have been intercepted at Iranian border crossings, and the weapons are not improvised – they have machined parts and are engineered by experts specifically to attack armored vehicles. Notably, it is likely that these Iranian produced weapons are being supplied to Sunni and perhaps Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq, even though the Sunnis are Iran’s proxy enemy in the second stage.

While comparisons with Vietnam are always dangerous, there is are at least two important lessons that should be applied to Iraq. Although we won the war in South Vietnam at least twice militarily, it was at great cost. This was because we failed to cut the supply lines from the base of the enemy – North Vietnam, and failed to adequately wage war against the enemy base. General Giap, overall enemy commander, later said that cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos would have quickly defeated the communist side because of the vast amount of material needed to support a guerilla war). The second victory was achieved by removing most restrictions on attacks against the enemy base, blockading their sea supply routes with mines and bombing them into submission. This took only 12 days.

In Iraq, we have a much worse enemy interdiction problem. Terrorists and increasingly lethal weapons are arriving from two neighborint enemy bases via long, porous borders – Syria and Iran. The enemy logistical lines cannot be cut by patrolling the borders because the material and personnel that must get through are much less and the borders much longer.

The malefactors listed above are all at war with the coalition and Iraq, using terrorism in Iraq and in coalition countries. Syria and Iran are allies, in the first stage of the Iraq war, with those who attacked the heart of the United States on 9/11 and on 7/7 the heart of England. The latter was clearly an extension of the Iraq war, with a stated purpose to drive Britain out of Iraq.They are this war’s equivalent to North Vietnam, except we haven’t attacked them at all.

In this age of asymmetrical warfare and terrorism, they should be treated as wartime enemies, with all the measures that implies. Not to do so may lead to the loss of war in Iraq and ultimately an ever increased threat of nuclear megaterrorism in our homelands which could literally destroy our economies, kill tens of millions of our citizens, and perhaps cost the west forever its preminent economic and military position, while an undamaged China gains hegemony.

The loss of 54 troops was “down sharply” from January.

When it comes to Iraq and the Main Stream Media, the glass is always half empty, and that’s the good news! The bad news is the glass was full of poison.

Half of this idea seems very good: democracy from the bottom up. But the other half is very wrong and impractical. It’s proponents also may have temporarily forgotten that we didn’t expend blood and vast amounts of treasure just to give the Iraqis a better life. We did it to get rid of a serious international threat, and to replace Saddam’s fascism with a “model” civilization in order to get at “root causes” of terrorism, partly by driving a wedge between authoritarian Muslim nations and their populations.

Splitting Iraq as proposed is extremely unlikely to work. Furthermore, such a collection of what… countries, principalities, city states… will greatly increase the odds of having one or more terrorist-supporting states in the region.

The proposal also ignores the fact that many Iraq’s have family in several areas and ethnic groups. Some of the bloggers are from Sunni and Shia roots. Furthermore, a lot of Iraqis think of themselves as Iraqis, not Sunnis or Shia. The ethnic situation is much more complicated than it looks, with families, tribes, gangs and religious variants all overlaid across the same people. Baghdad, where a significant portion of the population lives, is relatively non-sectarian and by middle eastern standards is somewhat sophisticated.

Look at this in a probabilistic sense. What are the odds that *all* of the resulting units will be peaceful? What are the odds that *all* of them will not aid the international terrorists? The probabilities get rapidly worse as you increase the number of units (although the base probability per unit might go down some). If you assume 5 units with an 80% probability that each will not go bad, the odds of having none go bad is only 33%.

In other words, the odds of this approach producing anything other than a disaster for the war on terror are about zero. The odds of it providing a better life for the Iraqis is the same (except for the ones who come out on top).

Consider geographic issues. Iraq has a lot of territory that would end up land-locked. Sunistan would be one of them, and also would have almost no natural resources.

The Kurds would be another, although they have developed decent trade capabilities and have some natural resources – oil and I believe minerals. But I suspect the fact that Kurds live in the surrounding countries helps their economic case – it becomes natural for them to be traders.

Allowing Iraq to fission is going to lead to all manner of complications and warfare. There are plenty of weapons there, and as in any society, plenty of bad people who will try to force their conquest of territory. In fact Iraq has an excess of these people as a result of the Saddam regime. They would try to recreate the Balkans, except with some WMDs. Even without the more dire consequences, it doesn’t make economic sense. In free societies, economics drives a lot of decisions. In balkanized societies, the balkanization becomes significant friction in the economic system, even if they all get along (fat chance) which would greatly increase the time to prosperity.

Look at the water issues. Who gets the water in times of shortage? There has long been a potential for war between Israel and the puppet government of Lebanon over water supplies. Here in the west, partially dependent on Colorado River water in the sixth year of a drought, we live in an area with many of the characteristics of Iraq – irrigated desert, disputed water sources, water shortage, lots of non-productive land, etc. We even have, here in Phoenix, an almost identical climate to Baghdad. It’s going to be bad enough when California, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado start fighting over this (not to mention the Indian tribes). But we won’t be shooting rocket propelled grenades at each other or occasionally turning loose nerve gas. In Iraq, Shiastan is downstream – it would be the most dependent on Otherstans’ water policies. Middlestan is far from the ocean and has no oil.

Iraq makes sense as a geographic entity because of history, existing infrastructure and population, and geography. Dividing it up makes sense only if the Iraqi people are unable to live with each other, and the constant bloodshed ant international policing and aid are acceptable. Ultimately, the whole thing would probably fall to an autocratic government which takes over the rest by threat and force.

If they won’t get along, we need to make them get along. I see no natural law requiring Iraqis to be at each others’ throats. We know the professionals can get along, as we see from the Iraqi bloggers, who write about these topics.

A much better approach, which is already under way is to bring Democracy from the ground up. The military has been working with small entities to create small, democratically elected governments all over Iraq. One of the medical bloggers who is near Basra has been to “city council” meetings there and had a voice in changing minds and resulting government actions.

Local democracy is a fairly natural development. As soon as the idea of a warlord is replaced with the idea of an elected and responsible government, the rest tends to follow – not perfectly, but it can work. These people are tired of warlords or central governors or whatever.

They need a central government to provide certain security functions, diplomacy, central bank functions, standardization of some laws, and to provide an appellate judiciary, but not much else. I think the most approach is to create a tightly constrained central government, with limits set by us (or the international community if we can get the right people to do the right thing). This should last until democracy, with guidance, grows upwards from the towns and cities to regions.

What they don’t need is a big government like the US has or they had. The more functions a government takes on, the more prone to corruption and favoritism it is, and the less responsive it becomes. This is especially true in societies with no custom of equality before the law and transparency.

As their society gains experience with democracy, they will undoubtedly expand the powers of the central government, but it should be discouraged at the start. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the power plays, of which we only see shadows, are between people in our government who want to have a strong central government so that our people can control it for their own bureaucratic reasons, and those who want federalism.

[Update: Historys End also has a comment on this.

Perhaps they should find out what kind of people were are subjecting this terrible action.

The following is copied from The Messopotamian, a very good Iraqi blog, from article. In addition to putting the situation in perspective, I’d suggest that the Fedayeen are the sort of people we are often interrogating. Go ahead and feel sorry for them. I don’t.

But I would like to inform the American friends that beheading was known to be one of the techniques of the Fedayeen Saddam. The late Uday, the son of Saddam commanded that particular outfit. I think it was the summer of 1999 when we woke up some morning to be shocked by some horrible news. Before we tell you about that it is necessary to recount something that has some bearing on the subject. You might have heard that an assassination attempt against Uday had taken place in 1996, which left him with injuries that caused impotency. This made him even more cruel and sadistic than his usual self. It has been revealed after the fall of the regime that he shot the doctor who broke the news to him (c.f. interview with one of the close bodyguards of Uday at Al Arabia last year). This added one more complex to his extensive repertoire of psychological problems. He started to hate anything to do with other people having any kind of sexual pleasure.

Well, that horrible day we learnt that the night before the Fedayeen had attacked scores of houses and dragged women and young girls to streets and beheaded many with swords leaving the heads at the doorsteps of the victims houses. Some of these heads were left in place for more than twenty-four hours. The atrocities lasted for several weeks. The pretext for this behavior was a campaign against prostitution. The women who were beheaded were alleged to be prostitution madams and some of their young girls. I remember that my young boys came home suffering from shock as one of these houses was in our area and they knew the occupants quite well. The victims were taken by surprised and there was nothing to arouse their fears before that night. This was typical of the Baathists when they planned some atrocity to attack suddenly at some predetermined moment without any previous warning. Throughout the reign of the Baath party and particularly the Saddam era, it was customary to suffer periodic atrocities carefully planned and imaginatively variable to keep the people terrified all the time. It was considered necessary not to leave the people too long without some thing awful to keep them intimidated properly. The Baathists were masters of the “Terreur”, and it was the essential means of their hold on power. In fact what we see now is something rather similar. It is a similar technique; they are trying to intimidate both the Iraqi people first but mainly the western people. They will stop at nothing. You must understand that this is their only expertise; their sole training and method and way of thinking. They think they can inspire fear and terror into the Coalition forces and their people and leadership exactly in the same way that they did with the Iraqis. They think that they can intimidate the whole world exactly in the same way that they did with us.

Here you can read the true strategic situation, from a military leader in the midst of the fighting. This the power of blogging.

And as you read this, raw intelligence from the field combined with analysis, you can see how wrong many of the criticisms have been and still are, because it includes the background and the planning to defeat Sadr, which has been going on for a long time, ver quietly and quite subtly.

This article was written as a comment on Roger Simon’s outstanding blog.

My reaction to the prisoner abuse is that perhaps we are not qualified to win this war.

Even the good people on this forum, who usually seem to understand the danger we are in, are engaged in hand-wringing about this event. Not so much about how it may affect the war, but about its lack of humanity. Roger wants to blow up the prison.

I’ve got a message for you: What you saw WAS humanity. Humans do bad things all the time. Humans make mistakes. Humans can be sadistic. And humans can be stupid.

ENOUGH!

People say that we will win because our values are superior. Oh yeah? Try to prove it! Unless you have a religious faith that our values will lead to victory, that assertions is, well, merely an assertion.

The values I see being displayed are an initial appropriate reaction of dismay at the behavior of a few, followed by inappropriate hand-wringing and self flagellation. The more political types – the Anybody-But-Bush coalition of the left, the Democratic Party, the media including Hersch, and the Islamofascists have the value that any action that defeats Bush is justified, no matter how many innocent Americans die as a result. Are those our superior values. Bullsh*t! The more naive of their supporters have a value system that says anything the government tries to keep secret should be released, because the government is obviously hiding something form us, something that RIGHT NOW we have to know if we are to be good citizens. More Bullsh*t! Many imagine that the public has a “right to know.” More Bullsh*t! Many imagine that the press is some sort of Fair Witness (hat tip: Heinlein), standing on a pillar and pronouncing the truth. Horse sh*t!

Against the values I see being displayed by us are people with another set of values: the willingness to sacrifice their lives for their cause (the most vocal that I hear from the left wouldn’t sacrifice their dessert for their country); a single-mindedness to attack the enemy (our corresponding value is a single-mindedness to attack those who protect us, with the goal of gaining political power); a belief that their values are the only right values (our value is that we are bad, or that our soldiers are bad, or that our leadership are bad, or that we deserve what happens to us, that our enemies are made up by right-wing politicians).

Put those two value sets into the cauldron of evolution and tell me which one is going to win?

Save the “we will win because our values are better” nonsense.

ENOUGH!

There is a psychometric observation (the Flynn Effect) which shows that IQ increases with each generation. I suggest there is another effect that says national stupidity increases in proportion to the acceptance of leftist myths, and with the lack of immediate, in-your-face, painted international safety orange, so obvious you have to walk around it to get to the bathroom danger

The level of national trauma over this event shows how many people are stupid about warfare. It shows that they have no clue about what the stakes are. It shows they have no clue as to how real humans behave outside of Starbucks and expensive restaurants and suburbia.

How do folks think “the greatest generation” would have reacted to this in the ’40s? They wouldn’t have given a damn, because they knew that in comparison to the evil they were fighting, this stuff was small potatoes. Some might comment that it deserved a routine investigation and some courts martial, but not many would call for a national guilt meet-up! They knew what the enemy did and although they held themselves to a better standard, they didn’t flagellate themselves when someone screwed up and hurt the enemy a little too much.

Remember, we revere these people as the Greatest generation

And our enemy is at least as bad as their enemy, and much more widespread.
.
—————-

That Hersch can find officers to make negative comments is no surprise. There have been long periods of time where the Army was not involved in serious fights. In those conditions, the Generals often have no real world experience (except perhaps a Kerry-esque ticket stamping tour in Vietnam to get their Combat Infantryman Badge). They may have spent the rest of their career in logistics – an important area but not exactly related to prisoner treatment. They may harbor resentments because they were forced to retire rather than advance.

So don’t give any credibility to Hersch’s sources.

Consider the following: There was a big hoo-hah like this during Tet ‘68 because of the famous photograph and video of the Vietnam Chief of Police killing a “Viet Cong Prisoner.” What wasn’t reported was this man had just killed an entire family, children and all, that was close to that police chief:

Mr. Loan insisted that his action was justified because the prisoner had been the captain of a terrorist squad that had killed the family of one of his deputy commanders.

Furthermore, that terrorist, not wearing a uniform, had no Geneva Rights – the police chief was perfectly within his rights to kill that man at his whim. The street execution happened in the middle of widespread terrorist attacks in the city.

So what did the left do? The same damn thing they are doing now. They used the reaction to that photograph to further turn Americans against the war and the administration. Those who will respond about our noble press had better explain why the context was not told along with the picture.

The left are trying to do this again. After all, last time they stopped a war (resulting in horrific deaths and millions of refugees), they kicked out a president, the castrated the CIA, and in the next 7 years gave a number of countries to communists. And to top it off, they are still proud of their actions.

I warned a month ago about the Tet Syndrome and how the malicious bastards of the press and Democratic Party would seek to create the effect again).

ENOUGH!

Half of that report discusses other problems at the prison – problems that could have gotten Americans killed – such as a prisoner with a firearm in his cell, and prisoner escapes. Where is Mr. Hersch’s outrage that our soldiers were in danger because of defects in the same system? Obviously he cares more about embarrassment of some folks who had probably been plotting to kill Americans when captured than anything else, and the injuries to a few of them.

We know the real agenda here. Pictures damaging to the country were released by a criminal, abetted by the press who will not release the name of a person who released a SECRET/NOFORN document or care about how it spread.

To those who have not worked with classified material, here is the definition of a SECRET classification:

defense information or material the unauthorized disclosure of which could result in serious damage to the nation

“NOFORN” means it is so special that it cannot be given to allies who have access to other “SECRET” information of ours.

That this information was classified correctly is obvious to anyone whose head is screwed on to the correct end of their spinal column.

In our current society, who is asking about the propriety of releasing this information, the release of which is expected to cause “serious damage to the nation?” Who is condemning the idiot who released this information? Who is calling for that person’s head? Who was that turncoat?

The answer is that nobody in the major media is asking, not even Fox News. Our enemies are laughing their heads off. They are going to be using SECRET/NOFORN information for their recruiting posters.

It is clear to me that until we are hit again and hit hard, the usual suspects will continue to release information which will seriously damage our nation.

I say the following in all seriousness: If we are hit again, I hope the only people killed are these turkeys. But it won’t happen that way.

The rest of us do not deserve to suffer from their failure to understand the consequences of their actions, or if they did understand the consequences (and some did), their perfidy.

I don’t want to hear any more apologies about what went wrong. It shouldn’t be necessary to say that what was done was wrong, or inconsistent with our values, or anything else. It is redundant. It is once again blaming ourselves for what was inevitable and what was being properly dealt with. I don’t want to hear any more of our good commenting group saying “Oh, the inhumanity!” or whatever. We’ve done that. We’ve done that more than once.

ENOUGH!

I don’t want to hear about us blowing up the prison. I’d rather see the Ba’aathists serve in that prison than in any paradise we might build. That prison should exist as a symbol of shame for the Iraqi people. Yes, the Iraqi people. Iraqis let Saddam gain power, and Iraqis put up with it. Yes, they were victims, but nobody but Iraqis is responsible for Saddam. We forget that. It is mostly Iraqis who have been killing us. It is Iraqis who worked for Saddam. It is Iraqis who served in his armies. It is Iraqis who did things in that prison, to their fellow Iraqis, that we have never done. But it isn’t politically correct to expect anything of the Iraqis except their anger when we screw up, or when we don’t deliver electricity well enough, or when we kill Iraqi’s who are trying to kill us.

ENOUGH!

The prison should exist as a place where justice is administered to the terrorists and especially former regime criminals. They should die there.

And if a woman laughs at their naked genitals, that’s just too f*cking bad. Think about what THEY did and how THEY treated women.

HINT: THERE IS A FRIGGIN WAR ON

Wars are ugly. Wars are not played by the rules of badminton. The Marquis de Queensbury is not the authority to follow now.

There was a minor (in the scale of things) set of incidents of prisoner abuse. Okay, we know that. Punishment will be meted out. So damn it, get f*cking over it!

Stop this self flagellation. The best thing we can do is go on the attack, and what we need to attack is those partisans, political opportunist, journalistic turncoats and others who will seek to maximize the damage of this event on the president, in the process inflicting yet more damage on our country and the morale of our soldiers.

ENOUGH!

Let’s Roll (hat tip: Dan McWiggins’ comment)

Steve Harrigan is reporting live from a major operation in Karbala aginst the Sadr (Shia) forces. The coalition forces (three country’s forces are involved) are using Bradleys, tanks, helicopters and AC-130s. Some enemy troops have already surrendered. Substantial heavy weapons fire is audible from Apaches and Bradleys. Loudspeakers are being used to warn residents.

]]> http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/05/04/us-attacks-sadr-militia-in-karbala/feed/ 2 http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/05/02/baathists-allowed-in-iraqi-government/ http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/05/02/baathists-allowed-in-iraqi-government/#comments Sun, 02 May 2004 22:39:25 +0000 John Moore http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/?p=443 This article is a response to an article by Sam at Hammorabi blog.

Sam,

Every totalitarian dictatorship has a central party which people must be members of to hold responsible positions in society and positions necessary for a society to function. Those regimes also try to cause all members have “dirty hands” in order to insure their loyalty by blackmail.

My father, a scientist, used to visit his colleagues in the Soviet Union. All were party members – they had to be in order to use their skills. We also had them as guests at our home in the United States, knowing that one of them was KGB, bailing to guess which one it was.

My point is that many in professional and administrative fields were required to join the party. I don’t know how much this was true in Iraq, but I would be surprised if it wasn’t very similar, because it is a long proven control technique for totalitarians.

Also, of course, such an organization attracts thugs and murderers and opportunists.

The occupiers have been trying to sort them out, with the help of Iraqis. We know we cannot do it perfectly, but we have tried hard.

A previous poster mentioned the efforts of Chief Wiggles, a skilled intelligence officer and interrogator with 30 years experience. The Chief didn’t say that all Iraqi generals were decent people. What he did say was that some of “his” generals were professional soldiers (as opposed to Baathist lackeys) who were of good character and could be of great value in reconstructing Iraqi security forces.

The Chief is no fool. Perhaps one or two of these people were able to deceive him, but he is trained in detecting that, so I doubt it.

You might email the chief and see if he is allowed to give you an opinion on this.

If the General now going into Fallujah is one vetted by the chief, he will probably have the proper character and military skills. In any case, he is directly subordinate to Marine command, and the U.S. Marines are no fools, and after the battles they have fought in Fallujah, are in no mood to allow anything other than a thorough cleansing of Fallujah. If he is the wrong general (and we may, according to Fox News), one with too much blood on his hands and the wrong loyalties, we will have made a grievous mistake.

In any case, the last thing the United States wants is a Baathist, pan-Arab or radical Islamist dictatorship.

The United States has both selfish and unselfish reasons to want a successful Iraq. It may seem surprising, but the unselfish motives translate into action, not just the selfish ones. Also, many soldiers want to help too. Americans like to be loved and we like to help people.

Nonetheless, ignore the unselfish motives for a moment. Assume that we coldly decided to conquer Iraq with no goal other than our own safety. Under those conditions, the most desired outcome is still a true democracy (friendly to us) which is economically prosperous.

Thus even if we had no care for the welfare of Iraqis (and we do care), the goal is the same as if we went in there only to rescue you from Saddam (which was a goal, but not one sufficient to cause us to spend the blood and treasure we have spent – there are lots of people who need liberating – more than we can help).

The worst acceptable outcome (in the selfish scenario) would be a “benevolent” dictatorship – in other words a non-democratic or partly democratic system which still is economically successful and under which people have significant freedoms, but not as much as a true democracy. We would not be happy to see this, and it would hurt out war efforts (to the leaders of United States, Iraq is a theater in a larger war, not a war itself). It will only happen if we lose our will to fight and Iraqis have not gathered sufficient unity and security power by then, or if we and you are simply unable to achieve democracy. We are trying something difficult and rare (although we have done it before but it took much more force and time) – helping a formerly totalitarian nation achieve democracy.

If we lose this battle, which is still possible if the American people lose their will, or turn the effort over to the wrong multilateral organizations (such as the very corrupt United Nations), the situation will be much worse. This has happened once before in our history – Vietnam – and unfortunately one of our current presidential candidates, John Kerry, was one who was important in dishonestly advocating and helping to achieve that outcome.

Many Vietnam Veterans, including myself, are trying to stop him from winning and doing this again, by letting people know of his behavior in 1971, which reflects his character today.

In 1991, there were constraints on US actions preventing us from overthrowing Saddam, which were mostly externally imposed by the UN and our allies. but the United States also made horrible mistakes. These included:

• Stopping before having done adequate damage to the Republican Guards. This was a complex failure due ultimately to inadequate battlefield intelligence and a genuine desire by Powell and Bush-41 to stop killing Iraqis.
• General Norman Schwartzkopf failed to prevent Saddam from using helicopters. Schwartzkopf was asked by the Iraqis to allow helicopters for use for humanitarian purposes, and Schwartzkopf mistakenly allowed that. He has stated that this was a horrible mistake which he deeply regrets. Most Iraqis, of course, regret it even more.
• We made statements giving Iraqis the impression that they could rise successfully against Saddam, and then failed to provide support when they did so.

We owe Iraqis an enormous apology for those mistakes. We can never make it right. We did not do as we had hoped and Iraqis have a right to be angry and distrustful. But this year is not 1991. We have defeated Saddam. We will not let him come back.

If we lose this battle, it will not only cause much grief for your people, but will result in widespread gains by Islamic extremists. The ultimate outcome of a defeat could involve horrible terrorist attacks in the West with individual casualty counts in the tens of thousands to millions, and full scale war (probably including the use of nuclear weapons) between the U.S. (and some western countries) and much of the Islamic world.

We all need the same thing: successful Democracy in Iraq. We need only disagree about the methods, as it is a very difficult problem.

]]> http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/05/02/baathists-allowed-in-iraqi-government/feed/ 3 http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/04/06/never-again-beware-the-tet-syndrome/ http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/04/06/never-again-beware-the-tet-syndrome/#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2004 22:56:37 +0000 John Moore http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/?p=414 [Update 1: I see Bill Quick and others are thinking similar thoughts, and especially here for Arnaud de Borchgrave's excellent and shocking article on the subject]

[Update 2 (4/11/2004 – I have added portions de Borchgrave’s article, with emphasis added, to the end of this article.]

With Ted Kennedy’s shameful statement that Iraq will be Bush’s Vietnam (which, of course means our Vietnam), and the violence unleashed by both the Baathists and Iran’s proxy, Sadr, the door to the Tet Syndrome has been opened. The Tet Syndrome resulted in tremendous damage to U.S. Foreign policy, turning a winning situation in Vietnam into the United States’ most ignominious and long term damaging loss in history.

Here are the signs of the Tet Syndrome:

• Statements by pundits that we are losing the war in Iraq.
• A strong focus on American casualties by the mainstream press.
• Adjectives in the news like “failed,” “unexpected,” “foolish”.
• Mentions of Iraq in headlines and text, and by the president’s political opposition.
• Specials and editorials with titles like “Iraq – Can We Ever Win?” or “Iraq, Bush’s Vietnam?”
• Calls to find an “honorable way out” from Democrats.
• A focus on civilian casualties after the battle is over.


What is the Tet Syndrome?

The Tet Syndrome occurs when, in light of an escalation of violence by the enemy, our will to fight is rapidly eroded by biased and inaccurate reporting coupled with misleading attacks on our strategy by political opponents of the President, pundits and radicals. It starts with spectacular and violent enemy attacks in which the American casualty rate temporarily spikes or atrocities against Americans are widely shown.

What are the Results of the Tet Syndrome?

The enemy hopes to win by damaging the will of the Americans. Today, Al Sadr, Iran, Baathists and assorted terrorist groups including Al Qaeda hope to drive Americans out of Iraq by destroying our political will to stay. Failing that, they hope to damage Bush’s re-election chances in hopes of electing a less determined president, which is how they view Kerry, especially in light of his post-Vietnam behavior. In the Vietnam War, the Tet Syndrome won the war for the enemy.

What is Really Going On in Iraq
There are several groups in Iraq who wish to attack the US in order to seize power. One is the Sunni Baathist dead-enders who hope to regain their position of privilege. Another is the young Shiite cleric Al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army (reminiscent of the Mahdi Rebellion in Sudan in the 1884). Al-Sadr is closely allied with Iran’s extremist government and has announced an alliance with the Iran proxy Hezbollah terrorist organization. In addition, a number of terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, view democracy in Iraq as a major threat to their fanatic aims.

The U.S. is in the middle of a troop exchange, which is both good and bad. It means there are extra troops available, but there is likely a disrupted command and control structure and logistical system.

Neither the Baathists (who are currently the target in the Marine besieged city of Fallujah) nor Sadr’s Mahdi Army represent a significant military threat. Sadr’s army is likely to be destroyed quickly by main force action. Sadr is hiding in the most sacred shrine of the Shia, which makes his arrest a difficult problem. However, Sadr is not well respected in Shiite Iraq, where Ayatollah Systani holds almost all power. It is possible that Shias themselves will ultimately remove Sadr from his hideout.

What is the Danger Today?
The threat is that events in Iraq will be used by domestic enemies of Bush (including much of the media) to discredit his position, forcing an alteration that will prevent an Iraqi democracy or will otherwise be perceived by Islamists as a victory for themselves. This will greatly increasing the terrorist danger to the United States and the nuclear threat from Iran.

Another danger is that Bush will lose the election, bringing into power one of the key figures involved in exploiting the Vietnam Syndrome in the ‘70s, John Kerry, who met with the enemies of the US and then urged unconditional surrender in a widely publicized Senate appearance. Our enemies know this and are looking forward to an administration run by him.

Okay, Why is this called the “Tet Syndrome?”

In Vietnam during the early 1968 Tet holidays, the Viet Cong launched a truce-breaking surprise nationwide assault against American and allied troops and South Vietnamese population centers. The assault for the first time penetrated formerly safe cities like Saigon, bringing the war to the view of rear area journalists and pundits. Because this truce-breaking attack was not predicted (militarily it was insane), because of Lyndon Johnson’s policy of over-positive reporting of the situation, and because of the media’s completely incompetent reading of the military situation, the impression was permanently implanted in the media’s world view that the situation in Vietnam was hopeless and the U.S. military was lying when it said otherwise. This view spread rapidly to many Americans.

The military result of this offensive (and two lesser ones in the same year) was the total destruction of the Viet Cong, a great military victory for the United States, which resulted in the demotion of North Vietnam’s famous “genius,” General Giap.

But more important were the domestic consequences in the United States, The switch by the media to an active anti-war viewpoint greatly empowered the anti-war movement and deceived most Americans about the actual status of the war. It quickly used up the political capital available for prosecuting the war, forcing Nixon to run on a “bring the troops home” platform. It caused such an increase in cynicism and distrust of the government that many Americans (including those in the press) chose to believe the enemy rather than their own government. This cynicism, an inflamed political climate, and Nixon’s habit of cover-up also led to Watergate, which further destroyed the U.S. confidence.

After Tet, the the US cemented its victory with the successful Vietnamization and Phoenix programs. In 1972, the North Vietnamese launched a massive “Easter Offensive,” which was readily defeated by South Vietnamese forces aided by United States air support, with no US ground troops. This victory was so significant that the North required 3 years to rebuild its internal forces enough to try again. During this same period, as a result of the Tet Syndrome, the US pulled out all forces, a Democratic congress banned US participation in Southeast Asia and Congress eliminated the military material assistance on which our strategy was predicated.

Seven years after Tet, having defeated the United States in the halls of Congress, the North conquered the supply-depleted south. In some battles, South Vietnamese soldiers had only 6 bullets each. The North invaded with more divisions and personnel than the US now has in its entire military and using more armor than George Patton had in World War II.

The ultimate result of the Tet Syndrome was the betrayal of our ally, great damaged to our society, and strengthening of our enemies throughout the world,

More on Tet ’68 by a Senior Journalist, Arnaud de Borchgrave

Arnaud de Borchgrave at UPI has written a good historical account of how the poor news reporting starting at Tet 68 led to the loss of the Vietnam War (the Tet Syndrome).

Much of the article is quoted here, but you may want to read the whole thing. Emphasis has been added.


Iraq will only be another Vietnam if the home front collapses, as it did following the Tet offensive, which began on the eve of the Chinese New Year, Jan. 31, 1968.

After the first few hours of panic, the South Vietnamese troops reacted fiercely. They did the bulk of the fighting and took some 6,000 casualties. Vietcong units not only did not reach a single one of their objectives — except when they arrived by taxi at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, blew their way through the wall into the compound and guns blazing made it into the lobby before they were wiped out by U.S. Marines — but they lost some 50,000 killed and at least that many wounded. Giap had thrown some 70,000 troops into a strategic gamble that was also designed to overwhelm 13 of the 16 provincial capitals and trigger a popular uprising. But Tet was an unmitigated military disaster for Hanoi and its Vietcong troops in South Vietnam. Yet that was not the way it was reported in U.S. and other media around the world. It was television’s first war. And some 50 million Americans at home saw the carnage of dead bodies in the rubble, and dazed Americans running around.

As the late veteran war reporter Peter Braestrup documented in “Big Story” — a massive, two-volume study of how Tet was covered by American reporters — the Vietcong offensive was depicted as a military disaster for the United States. By the time the facts emerged a week or two later from RAND Corp. interrogations of prisoners and defectors, the damage had been done. Conventional media wisdom had been set in concrete. Public opinion perceptions in the United States changed accordingly.

RAND made copies of these POW interrogations available. But few reporters seemed interested. In fact, the room where they were on display was almost always empty. Many Vietnamese civilians who were fence sitters or leaning toward the Vietcong, especially in the region around Hue City, joined government ranks after they witnessed Vietcong atrocities. Several mass graves were found with some 4,000 unarmed civil servants and other civilians, stabbed or with skulls smashed by clubs. The number of communist defectors, known as “chieu hoi,” increased fourfold. And the “popular uprising” anticipated by Giap, failed to materialize. The Tet offensive also neutralized much of the clandestine communist infrastructure.

As South Vietnamese troops fought Vietcong remnants in Cholon, the predominantly Chinese twin city of Saigon, reporters, sipping drinks in the rooftop bar of the Caravelle Hotel, watched the fireworks 2 miles away. America’s most trusted newsman, CBS’ Walter Cronkite, appeared for a standup piece with distant fires as a backdrop. Donning helmet, Cronkite declared the war lost. It was this now famous television news piece that persuaded President Johnson six weeks later, on March 31, not to run. His ratings had plummeted from 80 percent when he assumed the presidency upon Kennedy’s death to 30 percent after Tet. His handling of the war dropped to 20 percent, his credibility shot to pieces.

With the Vietcong wiped out in the Tet offensive, North Vietnamese regulars moved south down the Ho Chi Minh trails through Laos and Cambodia to continue the war. Even Giap admitted in his memoirs that news media reporting of the war and the anti-war demonstrations that ensued in America surprised him. Instead of negotiating what he called a conditional surrender, Giap said they would now go the limit because America’s resolve was weakening and the possibility of complete victory was within Hanoi’s grasp.

Hanoi’s Easter offensive in March 1972 was another disaster for the communists. Some 70,000 North Vietnamese troops were wiped out — by the South Vietnamese who did all the fighting. The last American soldier left Vietnam in March 1973. And the chances of the South Vietnamese army being able to hack it on its own were reasonably good. With one proviso: Continued U.S. military assistance with weapons and hardware, including helicopters. But Congress balked, first by cutting off military assistance to Cambodia, which enabled Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge communists to take over which, in turn, was followed by a similar Congressional rug pulling from under the South Vietnamese, that led to rapid collapse of morale in Saigon.

The unraveling, with Congress pulling the string, was so rapid that even Giap was caught by surprise. As he recounts in his memoirs, Hanoi had to improvise a general offensive — and then rolled into Saigon two years before they had reckoned it might become possible.
….

Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of the North Vietnamese army, received South Vietnam’s unconditional surrender on April 30, 1975. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal after his retirement, he made clear the anti-war movement [of which John Kerry was a major leader and speaker] in the United States, which led to the collapse of political will in Washington, was “essential to our strategy.”

Visits to Hanoi by Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and various church ministers “gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.“

We Cannot Let This Happen Again!

]]> http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/04/06/never-again-beware-the-tet-syndrome/feed/ 22 http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/02/10/an-iraqi-on-wmds-and-what-he-saw/ http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/02/10/an-iraqi-on-wmds-and-what-he-saw/#comments Wed, 11 Feb 2004 05:56:39 +0000 John Moore http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/?p=365 Ali, of Iraq the Model, has a nice discussion of the necessity for the war against Iraq. He also provides eyewitness testimony on some missiles which were removed just before Clinton’s 1998 attacks.!

Iraq the Model is always worth reading.

]]> http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/02/10/an-iraqi-on-wmds-and-what-he-saw/feed/ 0 http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/02/01/which-intelligence-failure/ http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/02/01/which-intelligence-failure/#comments Mon, 02 Feb 2004 00:43:27 +0000 John Moore http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/?p=355 David Kay, a very credible person, has said that he is very disturbed by the pre-war “intelligence failure” regarding Iraq’s WMD capability.

The question that begs asking is: Why?

Given what we know today, it is unlikely that anybody in Iraq knew the true state of their WMD situation. Saddam thought he had the weapons. His army division commanders thought that adjoining units had the weapons, and they and our SIGINT people heard contingent orders given to use them.

It took David Kay most of a year, with over a thousand people and almost total access to Iraq to determine that Iraq didn’t have significant stockpiles of WMDs. He never determined that they had no WMDs at all (and he did find botulism seed-stock in a home refrigerator). He found a program to produce ricin (the biological weapon so far favored by Al Qaeda) that was active right up to the war. Our intelligence correctly determined that Saddam did not have any significant active nuclear weapons developmentility.

Kay determined that after 1998, the Iraqi regime became seriously dysfunctional. It lost its cohesion, and with that, any true control or knowledge of exactly what was taking place with its WMD capability. Individuals were apparently taking money from the regime for producing WMDs, but they didn’t produce them. More dangerous, they may have sold their expertise or even material to terrorists. Kay said that a market environment was forming, or had already formed, for WMD expertise. Becasue of this, he judged that Iraq was more dangerous than the situation thought to exist pre-war.

Is it possible that the intelligence failure that concerns Kay is not about WMD stockpiles, but rather the failure to detect the deteriorating state of the Iraqi regime, with the attendant loss of control over WMDs?

]]> http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/02/01/which-intelligence-failure/feed/ 8 http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/02/01/stockpiles-of-wmds-a-red-herring/ http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/02/01/stockpiles-of-wmds-a-red-herring/#comments Mon, 02 Feb 2004 00:42:19 +0000 John Moore http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/?p=354 Almost all attention to the “failure of pre-war intelligence” about Iraq concerns the incorrect determination that Iraq had significant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Almost all of the controversy revolves around the failure to find these stockpiles, and the realization that they probably didn’t exists.

But stockpiles of WMDs are irrelevant to the war’s rationale. The war was fought as part of a wider war against terrorism. Terrorists have little use for large quantities of WMDs. After all, they have neither storage nor delivery capabilities (except in a few unlikely scenarios).

Of more interest to terrorists is small quantities of highly lethal agents, or nuclear weapons. Intelligence correctly determined that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons, nor the capability to rapidly produce them. This leaves radiological, chemical and biological agents.

A likely terrorist scenario is the release of a relatively small (liters) of a chemical agent into a population concentration such as a sporting event. Another is the release of a biological agent, which in the case of Anthrax requires a few grams to a few kilograms, and in the case of an infectious agent requires from microliters to a few liters of agent.

Small amounts of either chemical or biological agents can be produced quickly in any reasonably equipped laboratory. Such laboratories were discovered hidden in a number of secret police offices and safe houses.

It is these capabilities, combined with the known expertise of Iraqi scientists and technicians, which created the possibility of transference of WMDs to terrorists.

]]> http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/02/01/stockpiles-of-wmds-a-red-herring/feed/ 2 http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/01/08/maybe-saddam-was-telling-the-truth-about-wmds/ http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/01/08/maybe-saddam-was-telling-the-truth-about-wmds/#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2004 21:03:34 +0000 John Moore http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/?p=343 The lack of use of WMD’s by Iraq, and our subsequent inability to find any of the weapons has been used by anti-Bush forces in all sorts of silly ways, with lots of headlines.

More interesting is the question of why Saddam apparently didn’t have WMD’s by the time of the war, and yet caused his country to suffer 12 years of UN sanctions. After all, his lack of cooperation with inspectors was the strongest evidence that he had WMDs and was the cause of continued sanctions!

When asked, shortly after capture, Saddam said he resisted the inspections (an action which kept the sanctions in force) because he didn’t want his privacy in his palaces violated!

What if he is telling the truth?

It sounds insane… putting up with extensive sanctions for a dozen years just to maintain his personal privacy.

But consider it from Saddam’s malignant narcissist point of view. One aspect of such a personality is that he cares nothing for other human beings, having no more compassion for them than he has for a inanimate objects. Furthermore, as a narcissist, his “dignity” is extremely important to him – in fact, threats to his dignity are viewed as bad as threats to his life.

Such a person might very well subject his country to those sanctions just to protect his dignity. After all, he was able to skim off enough money to build 41 palaces during the sanctions. He suffered no personal harm as a result of the sanctions. The harm others suffered were of no interest to him, given his personality.

At the same time, WMDs are expensive and he had no delivery system. Furthermore, the only WMD’s that would be effective against US military are nuclear, and he would be unable to build those under constant scrutiny, because of the large required infrastructure. Biological WMDs would be useful for terrorism, but they are so easy to hide that he may very well have had them without us knowing it. David Kay has made some ominous discoveries in that regard.

On the other hand, being suspected of having WMDs is handy to maintain face in the Arab world, and to deter potential attackers. Being the great leader standing up to the west appealed to his narcissism, and appearing to have WMDs and his continuous (if futile) attacks on no-fly-zone patrols enhanced that image. A man who erects tens of thousands of statues and pictures of himself cares a lot about image!

Finally, the sanctions would not last forever. He knew, from his French friends, that pressure was building to remove the sanctions. Furthermore, his propaganda campaign, claiming (with sad pictures) that children were dying as a result of the sanctions, was working. It was convincing many eager-to-believe Europeans who either ignored or were ignorant of the diversion of Oil For Food funds. Thus Saddam knew he would eventually be freed of sanctions, and could then reconstitute WMD’s fairly quickly, with the exception of nukes, which he could buy from North Korea or the Libya centered nuclear project (which DebkaFile reported as having a significant Iraqi complement).

Thus, amazingly, Saddam may have been telling the truth!

]]> http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2004/01/08/maybe-saddam-was-telling-the-truth-about-wmds/feed/ 8 http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/12/21/iraqi-blog-on-conspiracy-theories-and-the-war-on-terrorism/ http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/12/21/iraqi-blog-on-conspiracy-theories-and-the-war-on-terrorism/#comments Sun, 21 Dec 2003 23:11:40 +0000 John Moore http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/?p=336 Omar, at Iraq The Model has an eloquent and fascinating discourse on these subjects. Examples:


we give conspiracy theory-fortified milk to our babies once they pass the age of 6 months.
…calling all of you to support the just struggle between civilization on one side and terrorism and dictatorship on the other.

]]> http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/12/21/iraqi-blog-on-conspiracy-theories-and-the-war-on-terrorism/feed/ 2 http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/11/23/an-iraqi-on-the-london-demonstrations/ http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/11/23/an-iraqi-on-the-london-demonstrations/#comments Sun, 23 Nov 2003 17:34:37 +0000 John Moore http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/?p=315 Zeyad, blogger of Healing Iraq writes:


I was ashamed and depressed watching those brainwashed and deluded demonstrators in London carrying signs calling for abandoning Iraq and for an end to aggression. While I can understand people who hold peaceful principles against wars in general but nevertheless wish to see Iraq free and prosperous, I fail to understand the logic behind the thinking that appeasing and understanding terrorists will make this world a better place. It was all the same ‘No blood for oil’, ‘Not in my name’, ‘Bush is Hitler’, ‘Stop the war’, ‘End the occupation’, ‘Bring the troops home’ nonsense over and over again. It was almost like one of our masira’s in the dark times of the previous regime. If those people truly dislike Bush they should have kept their mouths shout about other issues which they can never understand and sticked to anti-Bush slogans. The only thing that warmed my heart was watching different self-respecting people carrying banners that said ‘Mr. Bush you are most welcome, this lot does not speak for me’. I ditto that and add that this lot surely does not speak for Iraqis either. I’m sure Saddam is proud of you and clapping his hands in glee watching from whatever gutter he is hiding in right now. The fact that Al-Arabiyah station decicated two whole hours covering these demonstration while not a single subtitle about the anti-terrorism crowds marching in Iraq only disgusted me the more.

I guess those demonstrators chose to ignore the hundreds of innocent Turk Muslims and Jews that were killed and maimed the last few days in Istanbul, the Italian peacekeepers in Nassiriyah, the Lebanese families in Saudi Arabia, the Iraqi police, school children, UN and Red Cross workers in Baghdad, the Iraqis that were praying in Najaf, the Spanish tourists in Casablanca, the demonstrating students in Iran, and decided to spill tears for the poor Iraqi militants, the innocent Taliban, and the peace loving leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Why the hypocricy? Why the double standards? Someone seriously needs to teach these people the mechanisms of cause and effect. They are having it all jumbled up in their topsy-turvy view of the world. I can only say SHAME on you.

Read the whole thing.

]]> http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/11/23/an-iraqi-on-the-london-demonstrations/feed/ 10 http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/11/21/un-in-charge-of-iraq-from-where/ http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/11/21/un-in-charge-of-iraq-from-where/#comments Sat, 22 Nov 2003 06:04:52 +0000 John Moore http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/?p=312 Rantingprofs asks whether, if the UN was put in charge of Iraq, they should work from Jordan or Cyprus… a nice bit of sarcasm.
]]> http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/11/21/un-in-charge-of-iraq-from-where/feed/ 0 http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/11/21/iraqi-blogs-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/11/21/iraqi-blogs-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/#comments Fri, 21 Nov 2003 22:29:48 +0000 John Moore http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/?p=309 Someone else (Lilek) finally noticed that Salam Pax is an ungrateful wretch. Useful Fools pointed out Salam’s lousy attitude some time ago and found this response from Salam:


After the last article I wrote in the Guardian I was wondering whether I should stop whining. the problem is that people want to read that things are getting better and we are happy, but things are getting better in such a slow pace that it is almost imperceptible, and with the one step we move forward on one front we move back 3 steps on other fronts. People need to know that their kids and loved ones are here for a good reason and this is what they want to hear. Otherwise they send me emails saying that I am being part of the problem. They send me emails telling me that I should help the Americans capture the terrorists and Baathists, as if they walk around in the streets wearing signs. Maybe we Iraqis did expect too much from the American invasion, we did hope there is going to be an easy way
…
I am a crybaby and a whiner as some like to describe me
….

Unfortunately, Salam’s maturity didn’t last long. Salam is now so full of his fame that he rarely posts, and his writing has returned to his previous immature and harmful attitudes. He is still a baby in his late ’20s.

The good news is that there are now several thoughtful bloggers in Iraq. People whose vision is less self centered and more clear than Salam Pax’s; people who appreciate freedom and understand the difficulties of achieving it; people who are actively helping. I recommend these Iraqi bloggers:

• Zeyad, a dentist, of Healing Iraq has a mature and balanced blog. Uncharacteristically, on November 18 he emotionally expressed his feelings towards the hateful members of the former regime, and later apologized for doing so. I didn’t think his apology was necessary at all. This self-identified rant in worth reading if you are interested in how angry some Iraqis are. Healing Iraq is always a good read.
  Zeyad was first linked to by Salam Pax, who has since humorously stated his unhappiness with Zeyad’s attitudes! That in itself is a recommendation for Healing Iraq!
• “A.Y.S.”, another dentist, has an outstanding blog at Iraq At A Glance. He provides news, history and deeply thought out commentary. His has the potential to be the best Iraqi blogger. Compare his articles to the immaturity of Salam Pax’s whines and you will be favorably impressed.
• Mohammed, Ali and Omar, all medical professionals, encouraged by Zayed, have started the promising Iraq The Model.
• Alaa runs a less formal blog, The Mesopotamian, that adds yet another viewpoint from Iraq. Alaa’s blog is more conversational than many, and has a friendly, chatty atmosphere.
• Baghda runs a bilingual blog, Baghdadee, with original writings, material from other Iraqis, and news sources. It is a sort of “Iraqipundit,” providing an interesting selection of current events information from both inside and outside the country.
• Sam, posting Hammorabi, has an eclectic blog. I just discovered this one and it looks good [UPDATED 11/25/03].
• Ishtar, blogging from Basra as Ishtar talking, has written some excellent posts with great descriptions of her experiences and interestinhg observations of people. She is in Basra and was one of the earliest Iraqi bloggers. Unfortunately, she has not blogged for a couple of months.
• Nabil, a 16 year old Baghdad blogger, writes nabil’s blog, which gives one a look at the life of an Iraqi school kid. I wish my Spanish at that age was one tenth as good as his English! [Thanks to Menchi for the tip]

Finally, there is another early Baghdad blogger, “Riverbend” of Baghdad Burning. She reports every anti-American rumor and attitude that she hears, and never has a good word for the occupiers, some of whom gave their lives freeing her and are still risking their lives protecting her. She detests the interim government and the Americans. In fact, she gives the strong impression that she would be much happier if Saddam still ruled.
One suspects that Riverbend was one of few who prospered under Saddam, while he was killing and starving others. She never mentions the horrible behavior of Saddam’s government. She appears to support the “resistance” or at least excuses their attacks (while condemning terrorism against civilians, apparently having convinced herself against all logic that “the resistance” and the terrorists are different people).
I recommend reading her blog to see how badly informed, hate filled and illogical some Iraqis can be. An example of both her attitude towards the people of the formerly oppressed and poverty stricken Shia district, and her cynicism towards Americans, is easily observed in this paragraph:


Most of the gangs, at least the ones in Baghdad, originate from slums on the outskirts of the city. ‘Al-Sadir City’ is a huge, notorious slum with a population of around 1.5 million. The whole place is terrifying. If you lose a car or a person, you will most likely find them there. Every alley is controlled by a different gang and weapons are sold in the streets… they’ll even try out that machinegun you have your eye on, if you pay enough. Americans don’t bother raiding the houses in areas like that… raids are exclusively for decent people who can’t shoot back or attack. Raids are for the poor people in Ramadi, Ba’aquba and Mosul.

By this she slurs the poor Shiites of Al-Sadir City (formerly Saddam City), people who are not “decent” in her eyes, and who were that Baghdadis persecuted the most under Saddam.

Another example, which I “fisked” a couple of months ago, is here.

Finally, a correspondent (Katherine K.) who grew up in communist Poland made this very insightful comment:


The reason I distrusted Salam is that I saw so much of it in my home country
after the Communism fell – people whose conditions objectively improved, but
who were unhappy because they lost their privileges and other, formerly less
privileged people became better off.

I think that any form of tyranny is truly soul crushing – people lose their
dignity and initiative, and the only thing that gets highly developed is the
ability to circumvent the laws, because tyrannical laws make life
unbearable, or not outright impossible for individuals. But that is another
terrible legacy, because if you were conditioned all your life to outfox
laws and authorities, you will try to continue to do so even when the
situation changes and laws are those of liberal democracy (liberal in a
classical sense, that is). In fact, freedom often brings increase in
lawlessness, because makes it easier for the laws to be broken. That is why
all this criminal activity that passes for business goes on in Russia and
former Communist countries.

We Americans, British, Poles and other allies should not demand gratitude from the people of Iraq. We didn’t invade them just to save them from Saddam, although that is a satisfying and humane result and was one of the factors in the decision making. We invaded them to defend ourselves and civilization from modern terrorism and its consequences. We certainly should feel free to criticize some Iraqis just as they feel free to criticize us.

]]> http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/11/21/iraqi-blogs-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/feed/ 24 http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/11/13/reuters-emits-a-meaningless-statistic/ http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/11/13/reuters-emits-a-meaningless-statistic/#comments Fri, 14 Nov 2003 06:53:43 +0000 John Moore http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/?p=300 Reuters breathlessly reports:


The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War,

This statistic has no meaning. It is an attempt to draw a parallel where one doesn’t exit; to create a link between the terrible and controversial experience of Vietnam and the situation in Iraq. It is not news at all, it is propaganda.

Why is this statistic meaningless?

First, because the situations are not at all related. During the first 3 years of Vietnam, the US had no combat troops in country, only advisers, and those advisers were there in small numbers. In Iraq, we have over 100,000 combat troops. In other words, there are many more American targets, and they are deployed in combat operations.

Second, we invaded Iraq. We never invaded Vietnam.

Third, Vietnam was backed strongly by a nuclear superpower, and the US (until Nixon in 1972) did not have the courage to wage full scale war, and rather fought a war of attrition against an enemy with unlimited supplies and which was willing to breed generations of children just to sacrifice them in war.

Fourth, Vietnam was not associated with the most deadly attack against US civilians in history. Iraq, as a battle theater in World War IV, represented a threat of more attacks because of its rapidly restartable ability (thought to be active at the start of the war) to create weapons of mass destruction, its history of doing so, and its history of cooperating with terrorists, including Al Qaeda.

I could go on, but it would be a waste of time.

David Morgan at Reuters produced a meaningless report. It will be reproduced all over the world. It may dismay some people who are not well enough grounded in warfare or history to understand its meaninglessness.

It is an example of why the press is one of the enemies in this very important war.

]]> http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/11/13/reuters-emits-a-meaningless-statistic/feed/ 1 http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/11/09/now-we-wield-the-big-stick/ http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/11/09/now-we-wield-the-big-stick/#comments Sun, 09 Nov 2003 19:54:38 +0000 John Moore http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/?p=299 So far, we have been “walking softly” in Iraq, seeking to gain the support of the population. But some areas have proven, not surprisingly, essentially hostile. Thes are in the “Sunni triangle,” populated by many people who have lost their unfair advantages in Iraqi society and want them back. These people have Sunni religious and family ties to Saddam’s tribe (Saddam himself socialist, not religious) and were favored under Saddam.

They have been responsible for a large number of the post-war assaults on US troops. The latest was the downing of the Chinook and Blackhawk helicopters.

As might be expected, attempts to win the “hearts and minds” of these folks are not very successful, and even those who probably support us or just want peace and freedom are suppressed by the regime remnants.

……………………………………………………

We are now demonstrating our other face: renewed shock and awe. We are showing the holdouts that they cannot beat us militarily, and that they, and any who support or even tolerate them, are going to suffer. For those who remember the Hanoi Christmas bombings of 1972, hopefully we will escalate in that same spirit.

The new effort started with the quarantine of Saddam’s birth village. A perimeter was set up in the middle of the night. Anyone entering or leaving had to receive an ID card which is then checked. A number turned out to be Baathists and were arrested and are now, no doubt, revealing information to our skilled interrogators like Chief Wiggles.

Now we have increased the pressure. We are employing heavy force, including bombers, to destroy assets of the holdouts. We will no doubt kill a bunch of them, and destroy a lot of property. This is the price to be paid for killing Americans. Today, two patrols came under fire in Fallujah. Instead of just shooting back, they called in 3 500 pound bombs on the enemy. In addition to permanently eliminating those particular bad guys, this approach may very well convince people that it is strongly in their advantage to keep the bad guys far away, or to turn them in to authorities before their houses are the site of an ambush and subsequent bombing.

I hope we continually increase pressure on areas of resistance, one city at a time, until the evil ones are squeezed out. If there is collateral damage, so be it. I doubt the patrols under fire last night were too worried about it.

Although most Democrat candidates and many in our press seem to have forgotten, this is a war, not a UN lunch reception!

At the same time, we can continue humanitarian assistance in the same areas that we are pressuring. That will serve to confuse the opposition and help with our longer termgoals.

I would not be surprised to see more cordon’s created around larger areas (Fallujah, for example, or Tikrit), with positive identification technology required for movement. I would not be surprised to see some military tribunals, followed by executions or long prison terms for those who kill our forces (we have that right under the Geneva Convention). I would expect that there are SF and Delta teams quietly tracking and capturing or eliminating the bad guys in that area.

And, I hear the Marines are going back. They are experts at counterinsurgency, they are trained for it, and they are tough, tough, tough. I suspect they will not be popular in Tikrit, but they will be effective.

Also likely to be effective is our current tactic of our border hunter-killer teams who are killing border crossers and just burying them [the teams complained about the requirement for the latter, wanting to leave the corpses as messages. I agree with the teams]. As more and more jihadi’s just vanish, with no word, it may become a lot less popular to become one. Especially if we provide the right propaganda. After all, one is not terribly heroic if one announces an expedition to Iraq, and then just vanishes without a trace. Of course, we can capture some of them to, but for now they should just vanish into Guantanamo or other interrogation and holding centers.

One thing that we badly need is much better communication with the populace, as pointed out by the outstanding Baghdad blogger, The Mesopotamian writes here. We are doing a terrible job when everyone in Iraq is getting their news from the Baathist and Al Quaeda infiltrated anti-West Al Jazeera. There is simply no excuse for the US to not immediately reconstitute the Iraq satellite channel. No excuse. None! The truth is on our side. Let’s be sure that the Iraq’s have access to it!

I plan to write my Senator and Congressman about this. It is a scandal. We are trying to win a counter-insurgency without one of the most effective tools: the truth! Radio Free Europe was cited by many in the former Soviet empire as being critical to their attitude shaping and their final success, even as it was despised by the State department and VOA. If we are having bureaucratic fights, have congress take the money from VOA (or even better, PBS!) and use it to help win this war!

]]> http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/11/09/now-we-wield-the-big-stick/feed/ 1 http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/10/04/iraq-and-north-korea-guilty-as-charged/ http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2003/10/04/iraq-and-north-korea-guilty-as-charged/#comments Sun, 05 Oct 2003 02:54:02 +0000 John Moore http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/?p=275 While the Democrats and their tame press scramble frantically to convince the American people that the Iraq war was about an imminent threat (never stated by the Administration) and the the poor, ignorant Democrat congressmen were “mislead” by the administration into voting for the war, information comes out vindicating the war, and also vindicating the “Axis of Evil” designation for Iraq and North Korea.

In the Washington Post, Bill Gertz and Stephen Dinan write:


Saddam Hussein’s government paid North Korea $10 million for medium-range Nodong missile technology in the months before the Iraq war,
In other words, they actually paid money to acquire missiles with the range to hit Israel, Cypress, Ankara and Iraq – which, had they been delivered, would have been clear violations of the U.N. resolutions.
but never received any goods because of U.S. pressure, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq said yesterday.
David Kay, who is leading the Iraq Survey Group, said there is “a lot of evidence” Iraq was rebuilding its banned missile program, which it actively hid from U.N. weapons inspectors.
Who, as predicted, couldn’t find anything if it bit them in the legs!
Mr. Kay, in a telephone interview with reporters, also said the discovery that Iraq’s intelligence service had built at least a dozen clandestine weapons laboratories was one of the surprises of the three-month search for weapons of mass destruction and missile programs that he led.
A dozen clandestine weapons labs. Hmmm… and what were they for? Biochem weapons. And what would he have done with them if we had not attacked?
“The other surprise is the extent to which the Iraqis had moved ahead in the missile area,” Mr. Kay said, noting that Iraq had three missile programs that violated U.N. sanctions against building missiles with ranges greater than 93 miles.
He said European countries were involved in Iraq’s three covert missile programs, which included a copy of the 620-mile-range Nodong missile.
European countries? Hmm… who could they be? France? Russia? Germany? No, they wouldn’t do anything like that, would they? I wonder when this will hit the news.
“I can’t name them right now,” he said.
Translation: “too many people at Foggy Bottom would be embarrassed.
…
On North Korea, Mr. Kay said the Iraqis launched negotiations for North Korean missile assistance in 1999
Back when Clinton was in charge, and the Norks had every reason to believe that the U.S. would do nothing, even when they shipped nukes to tip those missiles
and the cooperation continued through 2002. It was the first time U.S. officials had disclosed a link between Iraq’s missile program and North Korea.
Both Iraq under Saddam and North Korea, along with Iran, were labeled as an international “axis of evil” by President Bush.
And all of the “sophisticates” in the world were horrified and made fun of him… just like when Reagan called the USSR “the evil empire.” Well, two for three, so far… and Iran is about to break the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
…
Critics, including Democrats on Capitol Hill who have heard the classified briefings Mr. Kay gave this week, said the fact no weapons of mass destruction have been found should cause the administration to change its rhetoric.
Why? Because the Democrats are pretending that the only justification for war is the actual presence of huge visible piles of weapons of mass destruction…
…
“This isn’t an issue about intentions or what the hopes were or what the plans were or what the programs were,” Mr. Levin said. “What took us to war were statements about weapons of mass destruction in the possession of Saddam Hussein and the threat of their imminent use.”
Nonsense! The word “imminent” was never used. This was a pre-emptive war against a nation that had a clear intent to manufacture or acquire the weapons and had used them before. What part of “pre-emptive” doesn’t Mr. Levin understand? Hint: it means to PREVENT a disaster BEFORE the two towers fall down!
After meeting with senators yesterday, Mr. Kay, a CIA adviser to the Defense Department, told reporters that Iraq’s extensive missile program was “all hidden.”
“They were much more than paper studies; there was actual physical work taking place on several of these. [They were] not discovered by the inspectors because the Iraqis prevented them,” Mr. Kay said.
So much for the idiotic idea that a small group of UN inspectors would be able to find tiny little things like 1000 km range ballistic missiles!
As for the assistance Iraq was receiving from the unnamed countries, he said: “Our fear is that that same assistance may be made available to other countries, and we would like to close off that avenue of proliferation.”
It’s clear that we need a UN WMD inspection regime in France, Germany and Russia – or wherever the proliferators were! I’m sure they would be welcomed with open arms by these “multilateralists.”
…
“The Iraqis actually advanced the North Koreans $10 million,” he said. “In late 2002, the North Koreans came to the Iraqis as a result of the Iraqis inquiring ‘Where is the stuff we paid for?’ and the North Koreans said, ‘Sorry, there’s so much U.S. attention on us that we cannot deliver it.’ ”
You can bet that if a Democrat were in office, they would have just shipped them. Fortunately, the A-team is at the helm, and is keeping an eye on the country that the C-team had given millions in the great no-nukes-in-North-Korea scam!
Baghdad then demanded that North Korea return the $10 million. “And when Operation Iraqi Freedom commenced, the North Koreans were still refusing to give the $10 million back,” he said.

The information was disclosed in documents obtained by the U.S. survey group that showed “the Iraqis attempting more vigorously every time to recover that $10 million.”

Mr. Kay said the bad deal was “a lesson in negotiating with the North Koreans that the Iraqis found out the hard way.”
What do they say? No honor among tyrantsthieves? Poor Saddam, the Norks took his money and kept hit. Hah!
…
“This was designed to be a 1,000-kilometer cruise missile that would have carried a warhead of about 500 kilograms, a significant warhead with a large range,” Mr. Kay said.
Yeah, they were working on cruise missiles too! Probably to be guided by the French/Chinese Galileo precision navigation system!
Other Silkworms had been modified into 93-mile-range land-attack cruise missiles and about 12 had been built at the time the Iraqi war started March 19.
“One of these was the one that slammed into the Kuwaiti shopping center during the war,” Mr. Kay said.
So they not only were working on illegal weapons – they actually hit Kuwait City with one. Shhhhh… don’t tell the Democrats.
…
“Multiple reports” from Iraqis indicate that weapons of mass destruction or related goods were shipped out to Iran, Syria and Jordan, Mr. Kay said. “It’s very difficult to confirm that from inside Iraq. We [are] trying to do that.”
Logical. Once we had decided to send in the inspectors, Saddam decided to ship out the stuff he couldn’t hide… until the US moved its troops back from Kuwait, France and Russia got the inspectors removed, and he could go back to business.
Mr. Kay said many scientists are still afraid to work with the Americans because of security concerns, noting that two scientists working with U.S. officials had been shot — one fatally — since the war.
In other words, even now there are a lot of people hiding the truth. There may be tons of Anthrax buried in the desert just outside Baghdad and we may not know for a long time.
…

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