Right Wing Nut House

“A bad peace is even worse than war.”
(Publius Cornelius Tacitus)

The offensive against Hizballah is continuing with no sign from the Israelis that they plan to let up on the pressure they are applying to the Lebanese government to rein in the terrorists who continue to fire rockets willy nilly into northern Israel. In this, Prime Minister Olmert is apparently dead set; Hizballah will cease to be a threat to the citizens of Israel. He will break a lot of china in Lebanon in order to ensure that goal.

But time is not on his side. Air strikes in southern Beirut are killing dozens of civilians - women and children - while the IAF desperately tries to destroy as many of the 15,000 rockets stockpiled by the terrorists in houses and apartment buildings as they can before the death toll stirs the world community to action. The cowardly tactics of Hizballah, who use civilians as human shields to protect their arsenal of Iranian and Syrian bought missiles is once again being given a free pass by the world’s press. Hence, while Israel may be delivering massive blows to Hizballah, the “guerrillas” (as most are calling them) are winning the propaganda battle.

This is Olmerts big gamble. That he can dramatically weaken Hizballah militarily without strengthening them politically inside Lebanon. That he can do this quickly enough to forestall Syrian and Iranian assistance from amounting to much, thus humiliating them in the Arab world. And that by scrambling the politics of Lebanon, he can alter the security situation in the north by forcing the Lebanese government to finally establish sovereignty over their own border by moving army units to take up positions abandoned by the terrorists.

The problem, of course, is that each one of those elements could get wildly out of control. Hizballah could become the dominant political force in Lebanon. Syria and Iran would thus be strengthened enormously. And Lebanon could dissolve back into a state of civil war if Hizballah refuses to give up their sanctuaries bordering Israel.

Olmert has made it clear that the war will change the situation on his northern border permanently:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that the fighting in the north would have “far-reaching implications” on how Israel would relate in the future to the northern border and the entire region.

Olmert, in his first public comments on the situation since Wednesday, opened Sunday’s cabinet meeting saying this is a difficult morning for Israel, and by characterizing the situation as “a wicked war by Hizbullah against the people of Israel.”

“Israel cannot accept this situation,” he said. “We have no interest in harming the Lebanese or Palestinian people. We want to live our lives quietly and as good neighbors. But unfortunately, there are those who interpreted our desire for peace in the wrong manner.”

How might the Israelis accomplish this ambitious goal?

The very first targets for the IAF in Lebanon were major bridges both north and south of Beirut. The destruction of these bridges will prevent the large scale movement of Hizballah fighters into some of the bigger cities including, it is hoped, Beirut itself. It also prevents Syria and Iran from resupplying the terrorists.

Does this presage a massive ground assault by the IDF? Not necessarily. But if Olmert and the cabinet choose that option, they have certainly set the table for it. Lebanon is locked up as tight as a drum. And not only is Hizballah prevented from taking refuge behind civilians in many population centers but their ability to concentrate forces has also been degraded significantly.

Ultimately, Israel would like to kill as many Hizballah fighters as possible. That would seem to be the only way to significantly degrade their capabilities as rockets and missiles can be replaced relatively quickly.

With Hizballah weakened, the Lebanese government, with the help of the international community, could move their forces into the border region with Israel and thus make the lives of Israelis much more secure. In a speech to the nation yesterday, Prime Minister Siniora tearfully asked the international community - specifically the UN - to help them in moving their forces south. Even with the cover of UN peacekeepers, it is unlikely that Hizballah will take such a challenge to their independent status lying down:

According to Nadim Shehadi of the London-based Chatham House think tank, the Lebanese government lead by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora “has not accepted” the abduction of Israeli soldiers as legitimate. On the other hand, Hezbollah and the Amal faction are fully supportive of the move the sparked the conflict with Israel.

[snip]

In December, 2005, the Shi’ite ministers left the cabinet over the role to be played by the International Criminal Court in the case of murdered former prime minister Rafik Hariri.

The conflict between the parties, so far successfully avoided, seems inevitable right now, Shehadi said Saturday. Lebanon would be hard pressed to function normally under such circumstances, according to the analyst.

Would conflict between Hizballah and the Lebanese army mean that the civil war that tore the country apart for 15 years be automatically reignited? No one knows the answer to that question, least of all Olmert whose gamble in this respect is his biggest. Unlike the last civil war go around, Hizballah are presently the only ones with the guns outside of the Army. Clearly, with better trained and armed men, Hizballah could run the table in Lebanon, especially if in the face of sectarian conflict, the army disintegrated as it did 30 years ago.

Such a prospect - a terrorist state with close ties to Iran and Syria on Israel’s borders - would negate any positive outcomes from the war Israel is waging against Hamas in Gaza. In short, it would be an unmitigated disaster for Israel and the west.

Finally, there must be a clock ticking somewhere in Olmert’s head regarding how much time he has to accomplish these ambitious goals. How patient can Washington afford to be? How long before Syria and/or Iran would feel compelled to intervene (if ever)? The Prime Minister has already warned the Israeli people to be prepared for a “difficult time that won’t end quickly.” How long? How quickly? Surely Olmert hears the clock ticking not only on his window of opportunity militarily but also with the Israeli people. Right now, they are united in their support for his actions. But how long before the carping, the criticism, and the backsliding occur? These questions must occupy Olmert’s thoughts as decisions are made about escalating the conflict in order to go after his Hizballah tormentors.

The only sure thing about this war is that it will eventually end. At that point, the Israelis will have to take a hard look at what they’ve gained and lost on the battlefield and at the conference table. Whether the use of force will improve their security situation in the short term is not in doubt. Whether it will have salutary effects in the long term is what Olmert’s gamble is all about.

I’ve taken The Weekly Standard’s Editor Bill Kristol to task before on this site. His rah-rah attitude toward foreign military adventures can be wearing, especially when the United States is preoccupied in Iraq. It’s not that Kristol doesn’t think these things through, it’s just that he appears to be quite cavalier in his attitude toward expending American power. He seems to believe it is a bottomless well.

Kristol has written an editorial at The Weekly Standard that essentially says the United States should jump into the fray in the Middle East and help Israel.

The first part of his editorial actually makes good sense:

What’s happening in the Middle East, then, isn’t just another chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict. What’s happening is an Islamist-Israeli war. You might even say this is part of the Islamist war on the West–but is India part of the West? Better to say that what’s under attack is liberal democratic civilization, whose leading representative right now happens to be the United States.

An Islamist-Israeli conflict may or may not be more dangerous than the old Arab-Israeli conflict. Secular Arab nationalism was, after all, also capable of posing an existential threat to Israel. And the Islamist threat to liberal democracy may or may not turn out to be as dangerous as the threats posed in the last century by secular forms of irrationalism (fascism) and illiberalism (communism). But it is a new and different threat. One needs to keep this in mind when trying to draw useful lessons from our successes, and failures, in dealing with the threats of the 20th century.

Here, however, is one lesson that does seem to hold: States matter. Regimes matter. Ideological movements become more dangerous when they become governing regimes of major nations. Communism became really dangerous when it seized control of Russia. National socialism became really dangerous when it seized control of Germany. Islamism became really dangerous when it seized control of Iran–which then became, as it has been for the last 27 years, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Indeed, Kristol has it pegged exactly. Israel is fighting for its existence not against pan-Arabism but rather against an extremist ideology that feels emboldened not out any strategic or political calculations but out of a divine sense of mission. I leave it to the reader to decide which is more dangerous.

If Kristol was only going to write about the nature of this challenge to Israeli national security, he would have been better off. It is when he tries to wed US interests entirely to the interests of the Jewish state that he loses me:

For while Syria and Iran are enemies of Israel, they are also enemies of the United States. We have done a poor job of standing up to them and weakening them. They are now testing us more boldly than one would have thought possible a few years ago. Weakness is provocative. We have been too weak, and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak.

The right response is renewed strength–in supporting the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, in standing with Israel, and in pursuing regime change in Syria and Iran. For that matter, we might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions–and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement.

International “tests” of the kind that Kristol claims Iran and Syria are giving to the United States have very little meaning. Do either of those nations believe that they can stand up to the US militarily? Of course not. And they need not test our resolve. They only need to look next door in Iraq. We have 140,000 American boys and girls proving our resolve to “stand” with the Iraqis every day and several thousand more youngsters in Afghanistan doing the same thing.

Not bombing Iran is not the same as weakness. And answering Kristol’s question about Iranian nukes is a fruitless exercise at this point. Whether or not the Iranians will give up their nuclear program peacefully is not a question that has to be resolved at this time. More importantly, Kristol’s advocacy of taking out Iranian nuclear sites right now points up the fallacy of the entire thrust of his editorial.

No Bill, this is definitely not “our” war.

This is Israel’s war. Great powers do not allow small powers to dictate when and where they expend their military might and the lives of their young men. If we must confront the Iranians, it will be at a time of our own choosing and for reasons having to do with our own national interest, not the interest of a small ally.

I wish Israel well in their efforts to protect themselves from aggression by Iran and Syria as well as their proxies. And I applaud the response of the United States government to this point. We have correctly said that this is a security matter for the Israelis and we are rightly asking them to limit civilian casualties. We have commiserated with Prime Minister Fouad Siniora while urging him to act against the terrorists who attack Israel with impunity from within his borders. The fact that much of the Lebanese government also wants to rein in Hizballah may mean that if Israel can finish the job of dismantling the terrorists fairly quickly, they may end up doing the Lebanese government a huge favor, acting where there was no political will to act on the part of Siniora’s ministers.

But dragging the United States into this conflict by taking the opportunity to bomb Iran is, frankly, a ridiculous notion. Why now? Is it because there’s a shooting war going on between Israel and its blood enemies and Kristol thinks no one will notice if we go a-bombing in Iran?

There is no strategic advantage to bombing now compared to a year or two years from now. It’s not like the facilities are going to get up and walk away. They will still be there unless we can convince the Iranians that they will never build a nuclear weapon as long as the United States has anything to say about it. And since I actually agree with Kristol that the likelihood of that happening are about as close to zero as you can get, it very well may be that some day, Iran’s turn will come. But why it should happen now except as an adjunct to what Israel is doing?

Glen Greenwald:

It should go without saying that one can believe that Israel is within its rights to defend itself against Hezbollah without also believing that the U.S. should become involved in this extraordinarily flammable conflict. But these neoconservatives don’t recognize that distinction. As they are now expressly arguing, Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies, and this war being waged by Israel ought to become America’s war — and the sooner the better.

I believe it is obvious to most Americans, who have turned completely on the war in Iraq, that it is sheer lunacy to expand that failed war effort to now include American war on even more countries — including more powerful ones with more powerful allies, such as Iran — let alone to do so as part of, and in the middle of, an Arab-Israeli war. But if there is one lesson that we ought to have learned over the past several years, it is that there is no militaristic proposal too crazed or extremist to be undertaken by this administration. And anyone who thinks that these neoconservatives now lack real influence within the Bush administration is sorely mistaken.

First, Greenwald may want to inform his readers about all those “militaristic proposals” that are “too crazed or extremist” that have been “undertaken” by the Administration. Of course there are none. Greenwald, Mr. Hyperbole, is a serial exaggerator and unless I’ve missed a war or two in the past 6 years, he can safely be dismissed in this instance as a partisan hack.

However, the rest of his point has validity. Neo-conservatives badly miscalculated in Iraq and our boys have been paying for it for three years. And now that the end of a massive US presence in Iraq is actually in sight, we should take a step back and examine what the neocons have wrought with their policies (policies that I originally supported but believe were carried out in some instances with monstrous incompetence). Iraq will be a wary partner for the foreseeable future but useless as an ally as their military might will be directed for years against both al-Qaeda in Iraq and a diminishing Sunni insurgency at home. This means they will have zero impact on our strategic plans except as a base for operations against Iran. And it’s no means certain that the Iraqis would allow us to use those bases for an attack anyway. As a military player in the Middle East, the Iraqis are a decade away.

If the neoconservatives had a track record of success, I might be more inclined to listen to Kristol, John Podhoretz, and Michael Ledeen who have all come out in the last 2 days advocating American military action in support of Israel. As it is, we should look at policy alternatives that take into account our interests first. Israel is perfectly capable of taking care of itself as they have proven time and time again. If they want or need any help, I’m sure they won’t be shy about asking for it.

You’ll get no argument from me that Israel’s punitive campaign against their Hizballah tormentors is long overdue and should continue until the terrorists are severely crippled in their ability to harm Israeli citizens.

But “Operation Just Reward” is also imperiling almost a year’s worth of hard, slogging work done by a few heroic individuals in Lebanon who have braved assassination threats (and attempts), risked their political hides, and at great personal cost, carefully tried to maneuver through the minefields of Lebanese politics in order to give this tragic country a real shot at something all of us here in America devoutly wish; a secular, free market democracy in the Middle East.

While our attention here has been rightly focused on the struggles for democracy and security in Iraq, Lebanon has been going through a wrenching process of self examination and national dialogue that at times has threatened to shatter the fragile coalition of disparate groups who came together in the wake of the assassination of the former Prime Minister, the beloved Rafiq Hariri. Much more comfortable fighting each other than planning an electoral coup, these groups representing all religions, clans, regions, and interests were able to drive millions into the streets to protest Syria’s stranglehold on their country. Their unity led to the premature withdrawal of Syrian forces and a surprising electoral victory for their coalition, the March 14 Forces, a year ago.

Things have not gone very smoothly since then. Wrestling with a bloody past, trying to get beyond a civil war that lasted nearly a quarter of a century, the factions have squabbled over ministry appointments, failed to unite in an effort to oust the Syrian stooge President Emile Lahoud, nearly dissolved over a new electoral law that would do away with much of the artificial sectarian divisions in politics, and most importantly, failed to confront Hizballah and their allies in government over a multitude of sins.

Israel’s raid into Lebanon to retrieve their captured soldiers and their call for the Lebanese government to rein in the terrorists who operate within their borders are making Prime Minster Fouad Siniora’s life extremely difficult. A Sunni Muslim and long time friend of the Hariri family, Siniora has guided his quarrelsome government with competence but, many critics allege, without much imagination. This may be an unfair criticism because most of the stickiest problems facing Lebanon can be traced to the divided loyalties of some of its most powerful factions.

Syria’s departure left a power vacuum that Hizballah was only too ready to step in and fill. It’s simplistic to refer to them as a terrorist group given the fact that they have become a symbol of resistance to the Israelis as well as a huge provider of government services in southern Lebanon. Their spiritual leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is one of the most popular political figures in the country, although that popularity is being sorely tested thanks to his unilateral decision to commit aggression against the Israelis. Their influence on the majority Shia population extends far beyond their rather meager representation in Parliament. And, when it comes right down to the nitty gritty, they’re one of the only ones with guns in the country. It is widely thought that they are Syria’s representatives in government which doesn’t seem to hurt them politically as much as it should.

There is also divided loyalty found in in the army as several officers have been implicated in the assassination of Rafiq Hariri. President Lahoud, himself an ex-general, may even have been involved in Hariri’s killing. In this atmosphere of distrust and recrimination, the Lebanese government is almost totally helpless.

Walid Jumblatt, the canny, old Druze warlord and head of Lebanon’s Progressive Socialist Party, pointed to Hizballah’s divided loyalties as part of Lebanon’s larger dilemma:

“They don’t make independent decisions,” he said. “Lebanon is being squeezed on one side from the Israelis and on the other side by the Iranians and the Syrians through proxy. Unfortunately, now Lebanon is a battleground.”

The other part of Lebanon’s dilemma is that the government’s writ simply doesn’t run in the southern part of their own country. Asking the Lebanese government to prevent Hizballah from carrying out attacks simply isn’t feasible. The army is not powerful enough to take them on. Nor is the political will there to force them to disarm. Hence, Nasrallah has skillfully played his role as both independent operator and aligning Hizballah with the March 14 Forces by participating in the political process. And he was strengthened last February when another independent player, former Prime Minister Michel Auon, formed an alliance with Hizballah outside the national dialogue that is proceeding at a snail’s pace to reform and reshape the government. The larger than life Auon has been critical of the March 14 Forces for trying to force Hizballah to disarm. Auon also has his eyes on the Presidency and having a force like Hizballah on his side certainly doesn’t hurt his cause.

But the ultimate question has to be who controls Hizballah? Much has been made of Iranian and Syrian support for the group but some analysts see Nasrallah’s aggression against Israel as triggered by domestic politics more than foreign instruction. Nasrallah had been delaying any serious talks with the government about disarming his militia for almost a year, dangling the prospect of folding Hizballah into the armed forces in some way. He has also maneuvered in Parliament by having the legislature declare Hizballah “The Resistance” rather than identify them a a militia. But pressure had been building for Lebanon to comply with UN Resolution 1559 that calls for the disarming of all militias and the extension of control by the Lebanese government over all of Lebanon. If Nasrallah was feeling the heat, he may have initiated action against Israel to solidify Hizballah’s position.

Instead, if in fact Nasrallah took the soldiers - an operation planned for months - thinking Israel, tied down as they were in Gaza, wouldn’t seriously retaliate, he has gravely miscalculated. The Israelis are visiting ruin upon the terrorists and could weaken Nasrallah’s army to the point where the Lebanese army could move in and occupy positions in the south:

After a cabinet meeting Thursday, the government said it had a right and duty to extend its control over all Lebanese territory. Interior Minister Ahmed Fatfat said the statement marked a step toward the government reasserting itself.

Other government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, went further, calling it a first move in possibly sending the Lebanese army to the border, a U.N.-endorsed proposal that Hezbollah has rejected. The officials described the meeting as stormy and contentious but said both sides — Hezbollah and its government critics — were especially wary of public divisions at a time of crisis.

“It is becoming very clear that the state alone must bear responsibility for the country’s foreign policy,” said Samir Franjieh, a parliament member who is close to the Hariri bloc. “But our problem now is that Israel is taking things so far that if there is no help from the international community, the situation could get out of hand.”

One wouldn’t expect Nasrallah to concede without a fight unless he literally had no choice. And that’s why the government, angry at the Israelis as they are, may not be too broken up at the prospect of a vastly weakened Hizballah. In effect, the Jewish state may be helping to solve their problems for them. While it won’t bring the two nations any closer, substituting the Lebanese army on the Israeli border for Hizballah will go a long way to ease tensions between them.

At the moment, no one knows whether this latest crisis will lead to a stronger central government in Lebanon or whether the pro-Iranian and pro-Syrian forces will become ascendant and set back the cause of Lebanese democracy for years. Either way, Israel’s intervention in order to punish its Hizballah tormentors couldn’t have come at a worse time.

In Kansas, 150 years ago, brother bled brother as a shooting war broke out between pro-slavery Missouri “Border Ruffians” and free state “Kansas Jayhawkers.” Known as “Bleeding Kansas,” it was a period before the firing on Fort Sumter when the cycle of violence made thinking about a full blown civil war between north and south acceptable.

Up to this point in American history, sectional conflict was seen as a remote possibility, something only firebrands from each section talked about. But as killing begat killing on the Kansas frontier, and especially after John Brown slaughtered seven pro-slavery farmers near Pottawatomie Creek by hacking them to death with broad swords in retaliation for the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas by southern sympathizers, Americans suddenly woke up to the fact that they were looking across a great chasm of differences at each other. More importantly, they began to see those on the other side of this divide as the enemy. It was but a short leap to make from Bleeding Kansas to Fort Sumter.

The massacre of Sunni Muslims over the weekend in a mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhood in the heart of Baghdad was unprecedented in its brutality and brazenness - even for Iraq. More than 40 Iraqis were dragged from their homes or cars, or simply picked up off the street and shot. This is clearly an escalation in the violence and must have ordinary Iraqis thinking very seriously about whether the low level sectarian conflict that has roiled the country for six months might finally break out into a shooting war in the streets:

A mob of gunmen went on a brazen daytime rampage through a predominantly Sunni Arab district of western Baghdad on Sunday, pulling people from their cars and homes and killing them in what officials and residents called a spasm of revenge by Shiite militias for the bombing of a Shiite mosque on Saturday. Hours later, two car bombs exploded beside a Shiite mosque in another Baghdad neighborhood in a deadly act of what appeared to be retaliation.

While Baghdad has been ravaged by Sunni-Shiite bloodletting in recent months, even by recent standards the violence here on Sunday was frightening, delivered with impunity by gun-wielding vigilantes on the street. In the culture of revenge that has seized Iraq, residents all over the city braced for an escalation in the cycle of retributive mayhem between the Shiites and Sunnis that has threatened to expand into civil war.

Witnesses say that the shooters wore black and were masked, the uniform of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Militia:

Iraqi officials and residents of the neighborhood identified the gunmen as members of the Mahdi Army, the powerful militia controlled by the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. In the past three days, Iraqi troops, with the support of U.S.-led forces, have raided the homes of militiamen and detained some of their leaders.

U.S. commanders and diplomats say Sadr and his militia constitute one of the gravest threats to Iraq’s security. Two years ago, U.S. forces fought Mahdi Army militiamen in Baghdad and in the southern holy city of Najaf. Sadr also holds considerable sway over the political system, with ties to more than 30 members of parliament and several cabinet ministers.

What the Post refers to as a “raid” was actually a coordinated assault on several Mehdi militia strongpoints by Iraqi forces backed up by American air power which was carried out on Friday. This was the first concerted effort by Prime Minister Maliki’s government to rein in the militias who are responsible for most of the revenge killings in and around Bagdhad.

Could this massacre be al-Sadr’s response? What kind of game is the unpredictable cleric playing? How much control does he really have over his men?

Piously, the anti-occupation al-Sadr is condemning the massacre and calling for peace even as some Sunni political leaders are calling for his head:

After the killings, Sadr appealed for calm but criticized what he called a “Western scheme” that foments “a civil and sectarian war among brothers.”

“Iraq is passing through a critical phase and a worsening security situation in spite of the presence of an independent government,” Sadr said in a statement. “I call on all parties, both governmental and popular, to exercise self-control first, and to shoulder their responsibility before God and society.”

Other officials in Sadr’s organization condemned the killings in al-Jihad and denied that the Mahdi Army was involved.

“We regret the statements made by some Sunni Arabs who said that the Mahdi Army militia had conducted the raid at Jihad and killed the innocent people there,” said Riyadh al-Nouri, a top aide to Sadr and his brother-in-law. “If the Mahdi Army wanted to enter into a fight, Iraq would become a blood bath.”

That last statement may be precisely the point. Al-Sadr doesn’t want a civil war as much as he wants influence in the government. His militia is all he really has to bargain with at the moment and the recent assaults may have hurt badly. The Iraqi troops apparently took out two of his major brigades, including one led by a legendary butcher named Abu Deraa:

The Shia terror against Sunni Arabs has a name, Abu Deraa. He’s being called the “Shia Zarqawi” for organizing death squads to take revenge after Sunni Arab suicide bombs kill Shia. But Abu Deraa isn’t the only Shia death squad leader. There are several, plus smaller ones from family or tribal groups organized to take vengeance for kin lost to Saddam’s thugs. This desire for vengeance, and the unwillingness of Shia to fight Shia, has, until recently, allowed a low level civil war to go on unchecked. But now the Shia are ready to fight their own, and in the last week, Shia and Kurdish police and soldiers fought Shia radicals, led by men like Abu Deraa. The Sunni Arab community know Abu Deraa by name, and have even posted pictures of him. That hasn’t changed anything, because Abu Deraa’s death squads still roam central Iraq, killing Sunni Arabs. Several dozen died in Baghdad yesterday, pulled from their cars, identified as Sunni Arabs, and killed on the spot.

There is some question of how much control al-Sadr actually has over his men. This is because unlike the larger and better organized Badr Brigade which answers to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the largest Shia party, al-Sadr’s political influence is restricted to a few ministers and members of parliament. Independent operators like Abu Deraa may have their own agendas and any influence exercised by al-Sadr may be negligible.

But al-Sadr is not above using the violence to score political points, something he has done in the past with some success. Following the February bombing of the Shrine at Samarra, al Sadr’s black-clad militiamen were seen by many Shias as saviors as they set up security checkpoints and guarded Shia mosques from vengeful Sunnis who themselves were reacting to militia atrocities against their co-religionists.

Prime Minister Maliki has checkmated al-Sadr at every turn lately, as the two major Shia parties - The Daawa and SCIRI - have frozen the radical cleric out of most deliberations regarding the future of the country. The massacre could be al-Sadr’s brutal way of reminding the politicians that he still has clout where it counts - in the streets. It may not be the best of tactics but it’s all he has at the moment.

As for Maliki, he seems to be grasping the reins of power and accepting the major challenges facing Iraq much more quickly than many observers imagined. By initiating hostilities with major elements of al-Sadr’s militia, he has correctly identified one of the primary obstacles to getting control of the security situation in the country. Instead of starting with some of the smaller Shia militias, he has thrown down the gauntlet to the most troublesome of them.

As StrategyPage points out, Maliki has a long way to go:

It’s not like the Sunni Arab leadership can just push a button, and make their bad guys go away. In Arab culture, the process moves a lot more slowly, and involves lots of talking, coffee, promises, deceit and drama. Apparently the drama has been convincing, because the Shia politicians running the country have persuaded Shia military and police units to go after Shia death squads. All of this is going to take months to play out. There will be cries of “Betrayal!” from the Shia community. Some Shia cops and soldiers will balk at busting fellow Shia, even if the perps are stone killers with dozens of bodies on them. However, the national leadership has agreed that peace with the Sunni Arabs, and an end to the vengeance killings, is necessary. Making this happen is the next crucial battle in the war.

Where are the US armed forces in all of this? Right where they should be; in the background offering logistical and air support to Iraqi army units who are doing the bulk of the fighting. This is an Iraqi problem and can only be solved by Iraqis. Our role will continue to diminish as Iraqi troops demonstrate more confidence and competence in handling combat operations on their own. While this is good news, it is getting to a point where we should begin asking questions about how much more good we can do and should our withdrawal be tied to political developments in Iraq that have little to do with any military calculations. As more and more Iraqi troops are trained and, more importantly, demonstrate that they are ready to handle the nation’s security problems on their own, the more we should be asking how much we should be beholden to the politicians in Iraq who don’t have our people’s interest at the forefront of their concerns.

Whether or not Iraqis see this latest escalation of violence as a line that has been crossed or simply more of the same horror remains to be seen. But there is no denying the fact that at the moment, Iraq is bleeding. And only resoluteness on the part of the government will be able to staunch the flow of blood that is making the lives of ordinary Iraqis a nightmare and the prospects for a significant American troop withdrawal remote.

“Those boys on the other side of that ridge…They never quite seem like the enemy.”
(General James Longstreet from the movie Gettysburg)

Longstreet was speaking of Union troops at Gettysburg, some of whom he had known and commanded before the war.

So what’s the excuse of our political and intellectual elites who never quite see an enemy when thinking about or writing of radical Islamists?

And not just western elites, either. In a frightening but predictable way, the entire War on Terror is in full backsliding mode as many ordinary citizens in Europe and America tire of the endless vigilance, the troubling compromises with civil liberties, the partisan political warfare, and the constant, nagging feelings of self doubt about the righteousness of our cause encouraged by 50 years of tearing at the edifice and hammering at the foundations of Western civilization by the European and American left.

At a time when our civilization is facing the greatest threat to its existence in more than 500 years, when the need for unity in recognizing, at the very least, that we are confronted by an enemy that wishes to do us immense harm, those most capable of giving voice to a rational defense of our values, our systems of government, our art - our very way of life, are wallowing in defeatism and worse, sympathizing with those who would do us in. Nurtured at the finest palaces of thinking the world has ever known - the Western university system - we are being systematically emasculated by the trimmers, the appeasers, and those afflicted with that most curious of Western diseases, the plague of multiculturalism.

In short, when perhaps our greatest need at this point in the war against Islamism is for our intellectuals - artists, people of letters, and philosophers to instill in the rest of us a sense of our own worth as inheritors of the traditions and values of Western culture, we are treated instead to lectures about moral equivalency and outright boosterism for the cause of the jihadis. In one of the greatest historical ironies in recorded history, those who have been nurtured in the freedom and tolerance of the West now would abandon the society that celebrates those values by either cowering in the shadows or giving voice to doubts reflecting the view that there is little in Western Civilization worth saving.

As early as 2002, leftist intellectuals sought to undermine the War on Terror by rejecting the very premise that we should be fighting a war at all. The “underlying causes” of the war were examined and found wanting. Policies of past and present western governments were used as justification for the jihadis to murder innocent people. There were even those who saw any effort of the United States to defend itself against states that gladly sponsor and support these murderous thugs as immoral.

And the damage to the cause has already been done. Exactly a year ago, Great Britain experienced its own national nightmare of a day when al-Qaeda linked terrorists claimed the lives of 52 British citizens in an attack on the London subway sytsem. The response of the British people to this attack was a curious combination of sorrow and appeasement. This exchange between a London policeman and an ordinary citizen who was protesting at a radical Muslim demonstration sponsored by a group whose leader thought the subway attacks justified is indicative of how a citizenry loses faith and courage when so few support the defense of their own country against murderous attacks:

…[an] English bobby vigorously silencing such a citizen, described as a van driver, who, according to the televised report, had angrily criticized the Muslim protesters. It is tragically enlightening.

“Listen to me, listen to me,” said the policeman, shaking his finger at the van driver. “They have a right to protest. You let them do it. You say things like that you’ll get them riled and I end up in [trouble]. You say one more thing like that, mate, and you’ll get yourself nicked [arrested] and I am not kidding you, d’you understand me?”

Van driver: “They can do whatever they want and I can’t?”

Policeman: “They’ve got their way of doing it. The way you did it was wrong. You’ve got one second to get back in your van and get out of here.”

Van driver: [bitter] “Freedom of speech.”

One wonders if those best able to articulate the value of free speech as well as how this peculiarly western notion is so vital to defeating our enemies would come out from the shadows and speak up with one loud voice in defense of this major Western tradition if such a conversation would ever have taken place. The policeman is there to protect the rights of all - not just those who threaten the peace.

In fact, western intellectuals are unwittingly assisting our enemies by feeding their paranoia and fantastical worldview. Every time they remind us of the moral equivalency between Westerners and jihadis, they feed the Culture of Grievance that so dominates the thoughts of radical Muslims:

How do you win against the Culture of Grievance? Call it COG for short, and don’t think you’ve never encountered it before. It’s at the heart of the Islamic radical movement, and a prime motivator of Islamic terrorists. COG is all over the place, but especially in places like the Middle East. COG is when a culture is more concerned about real, or imagined, grievances, than in just moving ahead and fixing things. Every nation has a certain degree of COG, which most of the time means little to foreigners. But when COG spawns terrorists (which COG often does) who go abroad and kill thousands of foreigners, than COG is an international problem.

Instead of a ringing defense of our way of life, the Western left emboldens the radicals by acknowledging that their claims of victimhood have merit. And while not coming out and advocating terrorism as a response directly, by justifying the murder of innocents by pointing to this policy or that event as “cause and effect,” the left plays right into the hands of those who use such critiques to mobilize and motivate their minions of death.

Perhaps we should take a page from Israel’s playbook in this regard. While it is true that Israel has its own “Blame Israel First” crowd on the left, the self confidence and belief in what they are doing to fight for their national lives stands in stark contrast to the hand wringing in most of the west. And what is truly remarkable to watch has been the abandonment of Israel by the European left. They have picked up the cause of the Palestinian terrorists who not only wish to defeat Israel but destroy her. How they arrived at this sorry conclusion is a puzzlement. Nearly 60 years ago, the European left gave Jewish nationalism a boost with their support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Why they have abandoned Israel in her hour of need has more to do with the Culture of Grievance than with any possible defense of Israeli society being reflective of Western traditions and values.

One would think that we could acknowledge mistakes made in the past without condemning an entire civilization to the ash heap of history. But apparently, the intellectual left is incapable of such a leap of faith. They have sacrificed rationality on the altar of Good Intentions. And I’m afraid that in the end, those good intentions may be the ruin of us all.

To those of us on the right who still vigorously support the President in the War on Terror, the Hamdan ruling presents us with a golden opportunity to start repairing the damage our detainee policy at Guantanamo has inflicted upon our constitutional principles as well as our image abroad.

To those on the left who, despite the unambiguous ruling by the Supreme Court in Hamdan that we are indeed in a shooting war with al-Qaeda, but still insist that the War on Terror is some kind of gigantic Rovian plot to win elections, the decision is a godsend. It gives liberals a second chance to prove they are serious about protecting America from her enemies by joining with the President and Republicans in Congress in resolving the legal status of detainees in such a way that satisfies both the demands of justice and our national security.

Camp Delta has become an iconic symbol worldwide of American hypocrisy in the War on Terror. The name “Guantanamo” will go down in history with other notorious prisons such as the French nightmare penitentiary on Devil’s Island and the North Vietnamese disreputable POW camp known as “The Hanoi Hilton.”

Regardless of whether or not Guantanamo matched those two facilities in sheer brutality and horror, the fact remains that the narrative supplied by western media to describe Guantanamo to the rest of the world has made it so. And in propaganda, perception is everything. There are no starving skeletons or daily beatings as there were on Devil’s Island and the Hanoi Hilton. But the brutality that has been confirmed by independent observers, including our own military and the FBI, is real enough and has brought shame to the United States and damaged our reputation as a champion of justice and human rights among friend and foe alike.

These are simply the facts. It does no good to argue that what goes on at Guantanamo doesn’t rise to the level of torture. Not anymore. One of the main findings in Hamdan was that the detainees at Guantanamo - no matter how bloodthirsty and heinous their crimes - are entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. This includes being protected against “[o]utrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.” This means that many of the relatively mild “stress techniques” of interrogation well documented elsewhere were and are illegal.

And that’s only the half of it. The Hamdan decision also knocked the chocks from underneath the government’s position that it could try Guantanamo detainees using the rubric of military tribunals. While sympathetic to the reasons given by the government for using the tribunals - namely that trying terrorists in open court could endanger the innocent - the Supremes nevertheless firmly ruled that such tribunals violated the Geneva Convention and hence, U.S. law.

The bottom line is that the Supreme Court ruled that the United States government acted illegally and unconstitutionally in the way it has treated detainees at Guantanamo. So the question is no longer one of right or wrong but rather what to do about the mess we have made in Guantanamo.

This mess includes the fact that our government lied to us when they informed the American people that the prisoners at Guantanamo were “the worst of the worst.” The facts contained in the military’s own records simply do not bear that out. And it is clear, at least to this observer, that one of the main reasons the government insists on holding many of these detainees is not the fear that if released they would commit heinous acts of terror but rather because by releasing them now it would prove that the military made many, many tragic mistakes in capturing, interrogating, and holding dozens of innocent men and boys.

An exhaustive examination of the military’s “Combatant Status Review Tribunals” by two National Journal reporters last February revealed this shocking conclusion:

Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies. Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence — even the classified evidence — gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It’s based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars.

Perhaps most shocking of all is that despite repeated assurances from Administration officials that the Guantanamo detainees were captured “on the battlefield” in Afghanistan, the facts contained in the military’s own records do not support that contention. In fact, it appears that many of the detainees were captured in Pakistan and were handed over to the Americans by:

“…reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability. These locals had strong incentives to tar as terrorists any and all Arabs they could get their hands on… including noncombatant teachers and humanitarian workers. And the Bush administration has apparently made very little effort to corroborate the plausible claims of innocence detailed by many of the men who were handed over….”

How little effort has been made to establish claims of innocence? The Guardian features a story today about one Abdullah Mujahid who the government claims was plotting against the United States. Two years ago, the military invited Mr. Mujahid to prove his innocence by calling witnesses in his defense before a tribunal.

A few months later, the government informed Mujahid that the witnesses could not be found which meant that his incarceration would continue indefinitely. The newspaper however, found three of the witnesses within three days. One was working for President Karzai, advising him on tribal affairs. Another teaches at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

The Guantanamo records are replete with examples of such incompetence or deliberate malfeasance, depending on your point of view. And herein lies the root of the quagmire at Guantanamo; our inability to admit we were wrong about some of these people and work to redress the injustice.

Clearly, there are many detainees at Guantanamo who should never see the outside of prison bars again. And now that the Supreme Court has offered guidance on what to do with these terrorists - specifically asking the President to go to Congress to get the legal authority to try them - those of us who are interested in both justice and our nation’s security should wholeheartedly support this effort.

But what can we do to determine the status of hundreds of others whose incarceration is a blot on American jurisprudence and shames our constitution and our most cherished values? Clearly there must be procedures using our civilian courts to weed out the innocent from the dangerous. And Congress can also intervene here by developing guidelines in concert with the Justice Department and the Department of Defense to insure that justice is done and our national security is protected.

One of the major stumbling blocks is the fact that much of the evidence gathered against detainees is of a classified nature. And evidence gathered as a result of interrogation of other prisoners, if released in open court, could endanger the person who supplied that information. For this reason, detainees cannot enjoy all the rights afforded American citizens in similar circumstances. But they should have the right to an attorney, the right to a speedy review of their case, the right to an examination of the evidence by an impartial judge, and perhaps a limited right to face their accuser if possible.

At the very least, the above gives us a basis for action. Congress has been dithering about this issue for more than three years, passing the buck to the Department of Justice and the Defense Department. Now that the Supreme Court has cleared up some of the issues surrounding detainees at Guantanamo, Congress could indeed clear up most of the others by dealing with detainee rights in a forthright manner that could begin to repair some of the damage done to our reputation as a champion of human rights and the rule of law.

We will be at war with International jihadism for many years. Besides winning on the battlefield, it is absolutely essential that we also win the hearts and minds of the hundreds of millions of Muslims who reject the violence and nihilism of the extremists and really do wish to rid themselves of the terrorists. This won’t happen as long as some of our policies reveal us to be hypocrites and worse, little better than the governments that oppress them on a daily basis.

We simply must stand for something better, something that we can be proud of. But as long as our detainee policy continues to show us at our worst, it will be impossible for many to see us at our best.

Now that we’ve had nearly 24 hours to digest the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision, here are a few points about it that are emerging both interesting and troubling.

First, it can generally be said that when it comes to interpreting what the Supreme Court has decided, both right and left see exactly what they want to see and ignore anything that doesn’t buttress their arguments that (left) Bush is a lying weasel who acted illegally or (right) that the Supreme Court has entered into a treaty with al Qaeda and we’re doomed! Doomed, I say!

As Allah points out in this sober analysis (well…at least the analysis was sober. I don’t know about Allah.), the decision has both an upside and a downside. First, he quotes this passage from Steven’s opinion:

We have assumed, as we must, that the allegations made in the Government’s charge against Hamdan are true. We have assumed, moreover, the truth of the message implicit in that charge—viz., that Hamdan is a dangerous individual whose beliefs, if acted upon, would cause great harm and even death to innocent civilians, and who would act upon those beliefs if given the opportunity. It bears emphasizing that Hamdan does not challenge, and we do not today address, the Government’s power to detain him for the duration of active hostilities in order to prevent such harm. But in undertaking to try Hamdan and subject him to criminal punishment, the Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction.

Allah tell us what this means:

If Bush dispensed with tribunals altogether and ordered the Gitmo gang held without trial for the duration of the WoT as prisoners of war, arguably that would be constitutional. As it is, if he wants tribunals, he has to go to Congress and get explicit approval. (Stevens says at the bottom of page 37 that if Congress wants to make special wartime exceptions to legal procedures, it has to be specific. The AUMF alone is too vague. Breyer’s two-paragraph concurrence on page 82 emphasizes the point.)

This is the good news. Even though they struck down the concept of tribunals, the Supremes are inviting the executive to go hat in hand to Congress and ask for that specific authority. And even if many Democrats don’t believe we’re at war, by acknowledging the right of the executive to hold the Gitmo detainees “until the end of hostilities,” the Supreme Court accepts that fact which makes lefties look pretty stupid as they praise a decision that, as they see it, establishes limits on the President authority.

I’m all for limiting the executive’s authority. But the question I have is did the Supremes use a hatchet where a scalpel was required? It seems pretty clear that, unlike many past decisions of the Court, Stevens wanted to broadly address many of the questions regarding executive power that the Bush Administration has raised with its actions. As Allah points out, this includes the NSA intercept program that apparently has had its legal underpinnings knocked off:

Think Progress notes, correctly, that the Court’s unwillingness to read implicit grants of executive power into the AUMF might mean the end of the NSA warrantless wiretapping program, which Gonzales has said is based on that very statute. The issue’s likely moot, though: Arlen Specter told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday that Bush was already leaning towards submitting the program to the FISA courts, and now that this has come down, his hand will probably be forced. I doubt Think Progress’s point will ever be adjudicated, and if it is, the case is likely to be decided on constitutional (read: Fourth Amendment) grounds, not the specificity of the AUMF.

Personally troubling to me is if Bush is willing to now use the FISA court to get warrants, why couldn’t he have done it before? The implied explanation was that it would have involved dozens, maybe hundreds of decisions by the FISA court which would have delayed monitoring considerably. Is there a “compromise” that Senator Specter has come up with that addresses that or has Bush simply caved on the entire warrant issue?

We don’t know the answer to this and I imagine that any compromise would lie in manipulating some of the technical details of the program - details that are still secret. But personal doubts aside, the fact that the Supreme Court has pretty much confirmed the Administration’s policies of holding detainees indefinitely, albeit as POW’s, should be seen as a huge plus. At least we won’t have to open the doors at Gitmo and let these guys walk. (I still would like to see a judicial review of many of these cases in that from what we’ve heard, not all of these men were captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan and some may be held without cause.)

The downside of this decision has to do with the Court arrogantly assuming powers and prerogatives reserved for the Congress and/or executive. Allah points to the Court’s citing the Geneva Convention, specifically this from Article 3:

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:

Allah slams the door:

Afghanistan is a High Contracting Party, so the question for the Court was whether Al Qaeda operatives captured there are subject to the Article. Answer: yes. “But,” you say, “it says it applies only to conflicts ‘not of an international character’ and the war on terror is as international as they come.” Indeed — but the Court is reading “international” in its literal sense, i.e., “between nations.” Al Qaeda isn’t a nation. Which means no matter how global the jihad might be, so long as a jihadi is captured within the territory of a signatory to the Conventions, he’s entitled to the protections of Article 3.

Those protections include not being subjected to torture or, much more broadly, “humiliating or degrading treatment.” And even if al Qaeda could give a tinker’s damn about the Geneva Convention, the United States has been forced into complying with it by the Supreme Court:

Even if it’s not, it’s “degrading” and therefore, per subsection (c), illegal. There’s no condition of reciprocity in the Article, either: unlike a contract, which dissolves for both sides if one party breaches it, we’re bound no matter how many heads AQ hacks off and irrespective of the fact that they’re not a High Contracting Party themselves. Amazing.

[snip]

But if you’re dealing with a political entity that’s explicitly transnational and that’s rejected the Conventions repeatedly by deed if not in word, why deem them included? Article 3 leaves you with the absurd paradox of affording more protection to Al Qaeda members caught inside a signatory country than to members of a hypothetical group that scrupulously follows the Conventions operating inside a nation that’s not a High Contracting Party.

In the end, as Allah rightly shows, the idea that the War on Terror is a law enforcement problem has apparently won the day - for the moment. What is truly depressing to me is that if we are ever hit with another 9/11, we will have to rehash these same arguments again, perhaps with even more controversy. As Justice Thomas states in his magnificent dissent:

We are not engaged in a traditional battle with a nation-state, but with a worldwide, hydra-headed enemy, who lurks in the shadows conspiring to reproduce the atrocities of September 11, 2001, and who has boasted of sending suicide bombers into civilian gatherings, has proudly distributed videotapes of beheadings of civilian workers, and has tortured and dismembered captured American soldiers. But according to the plurality, when our Armed Forces capture those who are plotting terrorist atrocities like the bombing of the Khobar Towers, the bombing of the U. S. S. Cole, and the attacks of September 11—even if their plots are advanced to the very brink of fulfillment—our military cannot charge those criminals with any offense against the laws of war. Instead, our troops must catch the terrorists “redhanded,” ante, at 48, in the midst of the attack itself, in order to bring them to justice. Not only is this conclusion fundamentally inconsistent with the cardinal principal of the law of war, namely protecting non-combatants, but it would sorely hamper the President’s ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy.

Is the President, as Commander in Chief, hamstrung by this decision? Have some of his vital war powers been stripped as some on the right are saying?

I think its clear the Court wanted to make a statement about this Administration and its ever growing use of untrammelled executive power. Granted (and the President’s enemies will never do so), I believe a very good case can be made that Bush’s aggressive use of the powers of the executive may have staved off another attack during the last 5 years. But at what cost? I am not as cavalier in charging the Administration with overstepping the bounds of legality and constitutionality as most of those on the left seem to do, although I recognize and accept some of their arguments. The fact that I believe they do so to score cheap political points at the expense of our security sometimes angers me. Because this is a debate that needs to take place. If we are going to have both liberty and security, some kind of consensus must be achieved or we will get what we got yesterday from the Supreme Court; a bludgeoning of the executive at the possible expense of our ability to protect ourselves.

First and foremost, the left must acknowledge we are at war - like the Supreme Court did - and that some grant of executive authority must be vouchsafed the President in order for him to do his job. The war is not some gigantic political ploy that Karl Rove is using to win elections. The threat is real and immediate. And to date, I have yet to see even a hint from the netnuts and even many in Congress that this threat is taken seriously.

We are lectured that the war is more than a military campaign. We are also lectured that just about any effort we make in the law enforcement area is subject to so many pie-in-the-sky, impossible dream civil liberty absolutist nonsense that if the FBI looks sideways at a suspected terrorist, they scream for the President’s impeachment. In short, the left has yet to prove that it is serious about defending America. And until they can show the American people more than the simple, mindless criticism of anything and everything the President has done to prevent another 9/11, they will not win no matter how many Iraqs or deficits or Abramoffs or DeLays or Plames or earmarks the Republicans stumble and fumble with.

Whatever the long term consequences of this decision, in the short term I believe it has given heart to our enemies. Too bad I didn’t see that issue addressed by Stevens in his opinion.

As for the decision, I’ll let other more qualified writers explain it to you. These two posts at SCOTUS Blog are pretty clear.

One thing that Marty Lederman points out is that the Administration was wrong in their opinion that certain parts of the Geneva Convention did not apply to the treatment of detainees. Specifically, Article III and its strictures against physical torture as well as “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” I’m not exactly sure what this means but it seems to me that it could make Bush and Rumsfeld possible war criminals.

If the Court insists that the US government should be following the Geneva convention while all these years the Administration has been practicing interrogation techniques that are now deemed in violation of that Convention, doesn’t that leave the President and the Secretary of Defense liable for their decisions in this regard and make them vulnerable to to prosecution by the World Court?

I hope I’m reading that wrong and if someone could enlighten me, I would appreciate it. Because in the case of charges brought by the World Court (not the World Criminal Court that we are not a party to), I believe Congress would be required to turn any defendants living in this country over for trial. Again, I hope I’m wrong on this but as I see it, this could be a possibility.

All of this could have been avoided if the Administration had been able to get together with Congress and come up with a regime that would have granted detainees certain constitutional rights. Senator Specter held hearings almost exactly a year ago about the hodge-podge nature of detainee rights and how it was hampering justice. At that time, Specter offered to work with the President on the rights of prisoners and procedures for the military reviews that determined whether or not a detainee would face a tribunal. For a variety of reasons (some of them bureaucratic), the Administration refused.

Now the Supremes have forced them to go to Congress anyway. It may be that many of those detainees will now be “repatriated” back to prisons in their own lands and Guantanamo will be closed. No matter how we may think it necessary to hold many of these men, Guantanamo had become an icon over the last few years, a source of friction with our allies and a visible symbol to the Arab press of American “oppression.”

We would do well to rid ourselves of it.

UPDATE: 7/1

Andrew Sullivan asks the exact same question about Bush’s “war crimes” that I did. Maybe I’m not as crazy as I thought.

The fact is, I can see some Euro-lefties pressing the case before the World Court, preventing Bush from leaving the country after his term of office is over. And I wouldn’t put it past some in this country to agitate for handing him over.

But in the end, I suspect that nothing much will happen. There are so many genuine thugs that the Euro-left coddles and strokes that even they couldn’t act so shamelessly.

As the Israeli military moves decisively against their terrorist tormentors, some pundits are worried that the IDF incursions in to Gaza could precipitate a Middle Eastern war. Specifically, they point out that Syria may take advantage of the deployment of Israel’s defense forces and attack.

This is not in the cards - unless Baby Assad has totally gone off the deep end. Any attack begun by Assad’s admittedly larger but inferior forces will be finished by a qualitatively superior IDF in a matter of days. The only threat Syria poses is a surprise attack where they would have the initiative. But since the Israelis are on high alert and ready for him, Assad can do nothing but sit in his summer house and cower as Israeli jets buzz overhead. And the weak resistance of the Palestinians to the IDF thrust so far only shows that for all of their rhetoric and bluster, Hamas is an empty shell militarily.

The Jordanians? The Egyptians? Not a chance. Both those nations are too dependent on largess from the west to risk alienating Europe and America by initiating hostilities. The Lebanese are extremely angry but can’t muster much in the way of a military response given their domestic political situation. Hizbollah may end up tweaking the Israelis by firing a few rockets into the Jewish state but since they do this all the time, it won’t amount to much.

In short, the coalition of Arab states that went to war with Israel in 1967 and 1973 has changed dramatically. Only Syria remains as a real military threat to Israel. And Assad realizes that it would be a huge gamble going it alone against the IDF. A humiliating loss coupled with his retreat from Lebanon last year would convince the political and military elites in Syria that perhaps it was time for a change of leadership.

It appears that Hamas is discovering how stupid it is to pull on the lion’s tail and not expect a response:

An Israeli military official said a total of 64 Hamas officials were arrested in the early morning roundup. Of those, Palestinian officials said seven are ministers in Hamas’ 23-member Cabinet and 20 others are lawmakers in the 72-seat parliament.

Palestinian parliament speaker Abdel Aziz Duaik and Religious Affairs Minister Nayef Rajoub, brother of former West Bank strongman Jibril Rajoub of the rival Fatah party, were among those rounded up. There were conflicting reports about whether Deputy Prime Minister Nasser Shaer, who has called for the release of Israeli Cpl. Gilad Shalit, was arrested.

Officials will be questioned and eventually indicted, the Israeli army and government officials said.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said the ministers and lawmakers were not taken as bargaining chips for Shalit’s release, but because Israel holds Hamas responsible for attacks against it.

“The arrests of these Hamas officials … is part of a campaign against a terrorist organization that has escalated its war of terror against Israeli civilians,” Regev said.

There is some intelligent speculation that Hamas has engineered this crisis deliberately, that it seeks to discredit “moderate” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. There may be something to this speculation in that the incursion by the Israelis as a result of the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier (as well as the firing of about 800 rockets by terrorist groups associated with Hamas into Israel’s settlements over the last month) has discredited Abbas’ calls for dialogue with Prime Minister Ohlmert while strengthening the hand of the radicals:

Earlier, Israeli Public Security Minister Avi Dichter issued a direct threat to kill Hamas chiefs in Syria, the base of the movement’s political leader, Khaled Meshaal. He said Israel had issued warnings to Syria about the presence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders in Damascus but that they were disregarded.

“This therefore gives Israel full permission to attack these assassins,” he argued.

An aide to Mahmoud Abbas said the Palestinian president called Assad to ask him to persuade Meshaal to help free the soldier. Assad promised to do so, but there have been no results, the aide said.

It is ironic that the Palestinians calling on their Arab neighbors for help in getting a “negotiated release” of captives in Israel in exchange for the young Israeli soldier followed so close on the heels of the IDF’s incursion. They were unwilling to release the young man prior to Israel’s military thrust which proves that the Jewish state knows exactly where to hit their enemies and make them howl. And the arrest of so many Hamas officials will serve to put the terrorists on notice that no one is immune when it comes to Israel’s determination to protect its citizens from the constant threat of attack from terrorists.

Once again, the Palestinians are proving that when it comes to trying to play hardball with the Israelis, they are simply out of their league.

The Senate resolution sponsored by John Kerry two weeks ago would have required American forces to leave Iraq within one year of its passage.

I wonder what he thinks now that 11 insurgent groups have indicated they want to give our forces twice as long to quit the country?

Eleven Sunni insurgent groups have offered an immediate halt to all attacks — including those on American troops — if the United States agrees to withdraw foreign forces from Iraq in two years, insurgent and government officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Withdrawal is the centerpiece of a set of demands from the groups, which operate north of Baghdad in the heavily Sunni Arab provinces of Salahuddin and Diyala. Although much of the fighting has been to the west, those provinces are increasingly violent and attacks there have crippled oil and commerce routes.

The groups who’ve made contact have largely shunned attacks on Iraqi civilians, focusing instead on the U.S.-led coalition forces. Their offer coincides with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s decision to reach out to the Sunni insurgency with a reconciliation plan that includes an amnesty for fighters.

When groups that are killing American soldiers recognize that a precipitous withdrawal of American troops would be bad for their country given the tenuous security situation, one has to wonder if the 13 Senate Democrats who voted for Kerry’s cut and run resolution are more eager to hand a victory to the insurgency - a large chunk of which now wants to negotiate - than they are to achieve even a modicum of peace and stability in Iraq.

In short, the enemy is willing to give our troops more time to succeed than John Kerry.

And this guy still wants to be President?