Al Qaeda: Death From Above

From the LA Times:

"An intense, six-month campaign of Predator strikes in Pakistan has taken such a toll on Al Qaeda that militants have begun turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust, U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials say."

Excellent!

Read the whole thing before the LA Times realizes it doesn't support the anti-war meme. Of course, if the LA Times editors checked in with the Long War Journal more regularly, they could have told everyone about these successes pretty much as they've unfolded.

Kudos to the Predator operators, and the Chain of Command that showed some brains and unleashed the power. I take some small vicarious satisfaction from your successes as part of the test organization that helped Abe Karem get the Predator's ur-ancestor into the sky.

Predator History Trivia: Internally we referred to the Project Amber as the 'Albatross', as in 'hanging around our neck'. To this day this causes confusion among some alums (myself included) when we talk among ourselves about past projects.

Abe Karem's then-company, Leading Systems, had (what looked like to us from the outside) some of the most fly-by-night techs and engineers as we ever ran across. All we were supposed to do on the program was facilitate their test operations and evaluate their progress. On one mission, the engine was running prior to take off when it was discovered there was some critical control function(s) that weren't working. Without shutting down, one LSI guy opened a panel, pushed some rat's nest wiring around until the thing started 'working', gingerly reinstalled the panel and gave a thumbs-up to take off. No sh**.

"Surging" the Taliban

With my Daughter-in-Law now on duty in Afghanistan, I won't necessarily be thinking and reading more about what is going on there, but I will probably be writing more. In that vein, I highly recommend Frederick Kagan's (along with Max Boot and Kimberly Kagan) AEI short publication How to Surge the Taliban to give the reader some things to think about, that they might not have otherwise, to broaden their perspective. Need an example? How about:

"The civilian death toll in Afghanistan last year was 16 times lower than that in Iraq in the pre-surge year of 2006, even though Afghanistan is more populous."

It will be interesting to watch Team O's machinations if they really start trying to pull out of Afghanistan...while trying to look like they are not trying to pull out. (Yes I think that's what Team O would do if they thought they could pull it off).

Hmmmm. "Daughter-In-Law" is too wordy and not properly descriptive. She shall henceforth be referred to as D3, for Daughter Number 3. (Yes she's the oldest, but she signed up for the job last and there is no hope for advancement or escape.)

Updated 11pm: Fox News reports Gen Petraeus says pretty much the same thing, except their headline is a little more counter-intuitive. Must have been written by a former NYT employee.

The Jack Cafferty, George Soros, and Moonbat Brigade

They're the Axis of Idiocy!

I saw the so-called War Card ‘study’ announcement earlier this week and of course recognized it immediately for the hogwash it was. I figured at the time anyone with at least two brain cells could do the same and didn’t pay much more attention to it. Unfortunately I forgot about the people with their two brain cells sitting so far apart in their punkin’ heads that have to tilt their head side to side to get them to roll close enough for a spark to jump.

Yes, I’m talking about people like know-nothing Jack Cafferty!

Now, I haven’t really watched CNN since Desert Storm, but I accidentally clicked on Cafferty’s (Warning: BDS ALERT!) vile little rant with readings of moonbat-dominated feedback on my internet provider’s ‘content’ site.

Contrast the content-free snarkfest at CNN with Bob Owens’ exposure and analysis at PJM.

Facts are stubborn things Mr. Cafferty! So start clunking those two grey cells together and maybe, just maybe, you will be able to recognize one someday.

Horton is the Who...Part II

As in “Who is STILL the ranting Anti-globalist, Anti-capitalist, Anti-Western, Useful Idiot, Lancet Editor with his panties in a knot?”

After this revelation, NOW will the Lancet finally get around to firing Horton ?

NIE: Bush Administration Reaps What Was Sowed

Frank Gaffney at NRO Saw It Coming Waaay Back
Two and a half years ago (July 01, 2005 to be precise), Frank Gaffney warned the Bush Administration about the perils of appointing State Department ‘diplomats’ to positions requiring Intelligence expertise in an New Republic Online article titled “Not a Time to be Diplomatic” (subtitle: “Wrong Man Wrong Job”).

I’ve been watching to see if anyone has referenced it in the wake of the release of the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) and have been very surprised that no one has mentioned it that I can see (somebody MUST have, but perhaps they’re on the edge of oblivion like this blog).

I wonder if Mr. Gaffney even remembers it or perhaps he is preparing an in depth “I told you so” article as I type.

In the 2005 article Gaffney opened with:

If you wondered whether the U.S. intelligence community could possibly perform even more dismally than it has of late with respect to various aspects of the terrorist and proliferation threat, the answer is now in. Even worse is in certain prospect if Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte goes forward with his reported offer to Ambassador Kenneth Brill to become director of the just-announced National Counter-Proliferation Center (NCPC).

While the article focuses on Brill, two other figures at the center of the brouhaha: Negroponte and Fingar.

Instead, the ambassador is a career foreign-service officer. So, of course, is Ambassador Negroponte. So is the DNI's deputy for analysis, Thomas Fingar. So is his deputy for management, Ambassador Patrick Kennedy.

Brill was evidently no ‘star’ at the IAEA:

So egregious was Brill's conduct, according to insiders, that not only the administration's advocates of robust counter-proliferation policies opposed his being given any subsequent posting, let alone a promotion. Even then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and his Deputy, Richard Armitage, strenuously objected to his conduct at the IAEA and refused to give him another assignment. But for his prospective rehabilitation by Amb. Negroponte, Ken Brill would presumably conclude his career in government with his present year-long sinecure at the National Defense University.

Gaffney concluded:

The last thing the United States needs at the pinnacle of the intelligence apparatus assigned to countering what is widely agreed to be the most dangerous threat of our time — the scourge and spread of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists and their state-sponsors — is someone whose past track record suggests that he misperceives the threat, opposes the use of effective techniques to counter it and is constitutionally disposed to accommodate rather than defeat the proliferators.

In determining the credibility of revised NIE Iranian WMD ‘judgment’, it is not unreasonable to examine the qualifications and ability of the people that are responsible to make such judgments. It seems to me that key people involved in this NIE have already been found wanting. And if the previously ‘high confidence’ NIE was wrong, what makes this NIE judgment more likely to be correct?

More importantly what are the consequences of being wrong this time?

Decoding the NIE doublespeak doesn’t do anything to inspire my confidence either.

I thought the intelligence apparatus was as broken as it could be, but I guess the Administration found the only way they could have made it worse: by moving in more pasty State Department boys.

Al Durah Affair Update

Breath of the Beast nails the whole sordid "al Durah Affair" and Charles Enderlin with Enderlin's Ocean of Blood.

Read and Heed.

The “COST” of Iraq War?

If you want to think that way, how about we consider the net economic benefit of “cost avoidance”?
H/T Instapundit

I contemplated spending some time debunking the Democrat talking-point memo masquerading as a report on the cost of the “Iraq War” when the news broke yesterday, but decided to write about something else, thinking that the Dem’s analytical basis was so lame that someone with much greater readership would chop it down to size – and today I was proved correct.

James Pethokoukis at US News & World Report takes the Democrats to task today for failing to consider the costs of containing Iraq in his blog:

Should we then assume that by not waging the war, Uncle Sam would be a trillion dollars to the better? That would be a questionable assumption, a product of a sort of "static analysis" that assumes if you change one critical factor, all the rest stay pretty much the same. Professional futurists, like the ones at the Big Oil companies, know better than that. They give clients a range of scenarios based on different values for different variables. And that is also what three economists at the University of Chicago's business school did in 2006. They looked at the costs of not going to war with Iraq back in 2003.

Mr. Pethokoulis then points out, the U of Chicago study examined the costs of CONTAINING Iraq (emphasis mine).

Advocates for forcible regime change in Iraq expressed several concerns about the pre-war containment policy. Some stressed an erosion of political support for the containment policy that threatened to undermine its effectiveness and lead to a much costlier conflict with Iraq in the future. Others stressed the difficulty of compelling Iraqi compliance with a rigorous process of weapons inspections and disarmament, widely seen as a critical element of containment. And others stressed the potential for Iraqi collaboration with international terrorist groups. To evaluate these concerns, we model the possibility that an effective containment policy might require the mounting of costly threats and might lead to a limited war or a full-scale regime-changing war against Iraq at a later date. We also consider the possibility that the survival of a hostile Iraqi regime raises the probability of a major terrorist attack on the United States.

That last sentence was the key one for me and we’ll get back to it in a moment. Pethokoulis’ analysis continues:

Factoring in all those contingencies, the authors find that a containment policy would cost anywhere from $350 billion to $700 billon. Now when you further factor in that 1) a containment policy might also have led to a higher risk premium in the oil markets if Iraq was seen to be gaining in military power despite our efforts to box it in, and 2) money not borrowed and spent on Iraq might well have been spent on something else given the White House's free-spending ways, it's easy to see that doing a cost-benefit analysis on "war vs. containment" might have left administration officials with no clear-cut economic answer.

Mr. Pethokoulis parenthetically provides a link to the House Republican reply to the Democrats ‘defective report’. The response is too soft on the hard numbers to my way of thinking – but that is OK, considering it is a ‘quick-turn’ response to a Democratic sneak attack. Mr. Pethokoulis closes by pointing out that others have reminded us that the cost-benefit isn’t all that important in the scheme of things via a 2006 reference to the Becker-Posner Blog.

So how can we think about the VALUE of taking Saddam out?
With the status quo being what it was in 2001, what were the chances that Saddam would have been passive in the wake of our success in Afghanistan? Does not the fact that Zarqari moved into Iraq after he was treated in Iran for injuries received in Afghanistan, or the fact that Saddam had allowed/supported the training of thousands of terrorists leading up to the invasion of Iraq perhaps indicates that Saddam was anything BUT passively standing on the sidelines?
Finally, the fact that we have spent the last 4 or so years killing an increasing number of foreign radicals that came to Iraq AFTER we freed it from the Baathists MUST be recognized by any rational mind that if we can kill or capture a radical Islamist in Iraq, they won’t be able to do evil in the United States.
So, can we provide some reasoning to logically characterize the economic BENEFIT of taking Saddam down in Iraq? Of course!
I was going to take a stab at it but a funny thing happened while researching the problem tonight. There is already an analysis out there! One that we can use to give us a feel for the cost avoidance we’ve accomplished to-date with the war in Iraq and our subsequent ‘nation building, as a CRITICAL PART of the Global War on Terror(GWOT)--something the Left would like to ignore and have the rest of us to forget.
The analysis pre-dates the latest Iraq War and was produced by Professor Looney with the Center for Contemporary Conflict (CCC), a ‘research arm’ of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey. It is titled: “Economic Costs to the United States Stemming From the 9/11 Attacks”.

Using the professor’s assessment of the impact from the 9/11 attacks, we can easily see the value of successfully preventing further attacks on US soil. Now I admit this approach is based on the belief that the terrorists WOULD stage such attacks if they were capable of doing so. This is an idea that does not require any imagination to accept, but I would argue requires a seriously fantastic imagination to deny.

Professor Looney estimated that the 9/11 attacks cost the United States approximately $22.5B in direct costs in the short term, but added to that in indirect costs based upon the impact of 9/11 on the economy:

Immediately after the attacks, leading forecast services sharply revised downward their projections of economic activity. The consensus forecast for U.S. real GDP growth was instantly downgraded by 0.5 percentage points for 2001 and 1.2 percentage points for 2002. The implied projected cumulative loss in national income through the end of 2003 amounted to 5 percentage points of annual GDP, or half a trillion dollars (emphasis mine).

So rounding down to easy numbers, we have the cost of the 9/11 attacks estimated at “half a trillion dollars” over a two year period. Taking an extremely conservative approach, and ignoring the compounding effects of multiple attacks on the US economy, we can see that every attack similar to 9/11 that is prevented since that time is worth 1/3 of the total cost that the Democrats claim to-date. Ergo, all we would have had to have accomplished in the GWOT so far was to keep Al Qaeda and their ilk too busy to carry out three lousy follow-on attacks and the War in Iraq is a big-time money-saver!

Add a little more realism to the assumptions by factoring in the compounding effect that repeated attacks of possibly even smaller scale or lesser success might have on the US, and the War in Iraq becomes a freebie! At least, that’s how it would look to any moron who actually thought the cost of doing the right thing was in any way as relevant as doing something because it WAS the right thing.

Hey! This is the second post in a row that I get to close with:

As the old saying goes: "Too many people know the price of everything but the value of nothing".

I Always Regret Not Asking the Question

When I had the chance. Dang.
From 'Powerline' here.

One of my biggest peeves with the 'Bush is Evil' crowd and Left Wing Democrats has been the constant drumbeat (focus-group driven no doubt) that "mistakes were made" and that the President/members of his Administration "won't admit that mistakes were made". The drumbeat has died down somewhat with the ongoing successful efforts in Iraq, but I think the calm is more because the focus-group politicos feel they got the most mileage out of the strategy than because they changed their mind or think it was ineffective.

NOW I find out that Victor Davis Hanson will have an essay coming out in the Claremont Review of Books on a subject near and dear to my heart. As posted at Powerline:

Our friends at the Claremont Review of Books (subscribe here) advise us that the upcoming winter issue promises to be one of the best yet, with essays by Victor Davis Hanson on the inevitability of mistakes (but not victory) in warfare...

When I attended the 25th Hurley History Seminar last month, I was torn between asking Dr Hanson a long, multi-part question on this subject (or possibly one other question/suggestion on my mind) or focusing on what other people were asking or saying. I elected to stay silent and observe.

I guess after the next edition of the Claremont Review I will know if I should have asked him something to the effect of:

Dr. Hanson:
The constant pressuring of the President to 'admit mistakes were made' seems to me to be a "lose-lose" situation for the President. this situation is infuriating to me, and I would think be for anyone who understands such concepts as "fog of war", "friction", and "imponderables" in history. You have discussed and debated this war with many of its critics. Do you believe the pressure to admit mistakes is born from some kind of post-modern philosophical retardation that causes people to believe that ALL mistakes are preventable so therefore even decisions or actions that become known to be in error ONLY after the fact, must still be the result of flawed reasoning - a 'mistake'? To rephrase the question: Are the critics who demand an 'admission' generally ignorant of the fact that some things like the detailed course of a war are 'unknowable' beforehand? Or do you think most critics are simply being willfully ignorant to suit their politics?

Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda.

The other possible question/suggestion I had, concerned an alternative or additional strategy for dealing with the inevitable "Well I'd like to think we (humanity) has changed for the better" kind of argument without logical support for the argument that Dr. Hanson seems to always get when he points out (usually with effective examples and analogies) that mankind has not fundamentally changed over the last few thousand years. -- A post for another time perhaps?

Remember Veteran's Day

Read Austin Bay .

Now.

SR-71 History Lesson

I was at another great military history function here in Texas this weekend that I (just maybe) would have been tempted to pass up and go listen to these guys if the opportunity had presented itself.

It would have been a pretty tough decision.

More later....

Consensus Seekers Gone Normal

Instapundit links to an editorial by Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. In her Washington Post piece, titled 'Partisans Gone Wild' Slaughter laments a lack of “bipartisanship” in the US. When I read her name, I immediately remembered my first experience with Dr. Slaughter’s intellect: she was participating in a roundtable discussion with Victor Davis Hanson and Stephen Steadman on the topic of ‘Preemptive War’ (video and audio links here). It is well worth watching the whole program.

Steadman’s main contribution to the discussion was to make Slaughter seem less obviously outrageous than her arguments would seem on their own. Taking away the outlier Steadman, and dealing only with arguments of Victor Davis Hanson and Anne-Marie Slaughter, it became apparent that Slaughter was incapable of differentiating between the functioning of the real and some other hypothetical organization called the United Nations.

Slaughter essentially asserts that we as a Nation we MUST gain legitimacy for our actions by always making even more attempts to gain UN imprimatur for our actions than we did in our current situation, even though she obliquely acknowledges the uselessness of doing so. Hanson, succinctly disabuses her of that silly notion.

After watching and hearing her on this subject, I concluded that Ms. Slaughter was incapable of deciding when and where to make a stand on anything, much less doing so with any reasonable chance of success: She would seek bipartisan consensus and cooperation from a free range steamroller before she would see the need to simply step out of its way and take control of it.

With the Slaughters of this world, it seems the only principle to stand on is to not stand for anything: to always keep moving the line in the sand.

As to Consensus and Bipartisianship: she is the "girl who cried wolf" too many times.

Update 2008 Hrs: Fixed obvious cut and paste errors

Q: Why Stealth? A: IADS & SAM Traps

Exhibit A

Defense Tech has a great new post up with a video clip showing a SAM Trap back during the Desert Storm days.

Life is far more pleasant when it is hard for your enemy to find you and see you.

Air Force Readiness? (AF Reshaping BS Point of Interest)

I REALLY AM still trying to close out the AF Reshaping BS series -- Honest!

The hard part is getting the answer nobody wants to hear into a form that somebody will at least attempt to read. IN the meantime, I just found a piece about how AF readiness is down at www.noangst.blogspot.com (could not get link to work for some reason, but the link is still the title of this post if you want to try it).
I intend to start visiting there regularly myself.

Enjoy.

BTW: Here's a hint on where I'm going with this series. I had a discussion with an awfully darned smart O-6 yesterday, and we agreed:

The problem is rooted in trying to do a Superpower's job on less than a Superpower Sidekick budget.

3.9% (or less) of GDP (Source: slide 25) for defense and that's WITH a war on? Gimme a break!

SMSgt Mac to Turkish General: Take a Deep Breath

Seal Your Borders as Best you Can...Stay Where You Are...And Shut Up!
Globalsecurity.org relays a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty article reporting that Turkey’s “top General’ is calling for a cross-border operation against the Kurds. The article notes:

“Turkey has repeatedly urged the Iraqi government and U.S. forces in Iraq to crack down on thousands of rebels from the outlawed separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who use northern Iraq to launch attacks inside Turkey”

As ye sow, so shall ye reap...
If Turkey couldn’t find its way to let the 4th ID open up a Northern Front in the last march on Baghdad, thus causing us innumerable (and thank goodness not insurmountable) difficulties, What makes the good general think anyone should care about how the outcome of this war is now causing them problems?

I should note I have a generally favorable opinion of the Turks, and hold their military’s historical warrior ethos in high regard. I am a great admirer of Mustafa Kemal’s efforts (not all his methods and objectives obviously) to bring Turkey out of the dark ages, and of his military and political acumen that allowed Turkey to survive and thrive post WW1. But ever since Iraqi Freedom, I’ve concluded that there just aren’t any "Ataturks" in Turkey anymore.

Go to Michael Totten’s archives (March and April) for series of posts that are an outstanding introduction to the Kurds and Kurdistan. (Maybe the Turkish General really just wants to stop that new shopping mall!)

Brit Sailors Held Hostage - OK lets Recap

Since the Hostages were taken from Iraqi waters under the pretext they were in Iranian waters:

1. British servicemen and woman had their uniforms taken away and made to read ridiculous statements about their alleged “guilt” of straying into Iranian waters.

2. Furthermore, the female sailor was forced to wear a head cover in keeping with Iranian law and the local mullah’s interpretation of the faith.

3. The female hostage reads on camera a ‘heart-wrenching’ statement to her young offspring.

4. Britain started working furiously to get the EU off their collective fat a** and make Iran feel the pain for their piracy. (also making polite statements about the unhelpful situation)

5. Iran said it would release the female hostage.

6. Iran ‘changed their mind’ and decided to keep the woman as hostage, saying to Britain: “We’re unhelpful? Well, we don’t like your attitude”

7. Britain keeps working furiously to get the EU off their collective fat a** and make Iran feel the pain for their piracy.

8. The Mad Mullahs and the twerp (Ahmadinejad) tried to whip up a frenzy in the populace, that didn’t seem to work all that well.

9. Somewhere in this process it comes out the Persians want some of their boys back and this is all revealed as a tit-for-tat play. (Wonder how much they REALLY asked for?) Problem all around for the good guys: the US can’t care about this MORE than the Brits, but the Brits can’t do the tit-for-tat without US help (the US has the ‘tat’ in hand while Iraq has the UK’s…)

10. The US stands by our friend’s decision, but it looks like it will be on the basis that the UK demands a better deal. I write ‘looks like’ because there is nothing to indicate the UK wasn’t also quietly telling the Mullah’s about Newt’s idea:

Look Chaps, if it were just up to us, we would be more cooperative, but my stout Friend here thinks we should just cut off your oil and gas flows and watch you squirm a while, so you shall be reasonable fellows won’t you?

11. The EU informs the UK that under no condition will they get off their fat a**, but they will send a very nice letter of regret.

12. President George Bush is roundly tut-tut’ed about using the word (gasp!) ‘Hostages’.

13. Iran sees this scheme isn’t playing well on the home front either and says “deal, but we get to parade the hostages around one more time”.

14. The Hostage’s loved-ones back home are ecstatic about the announced upcoming release. Apparently not knowing the President was tut-tut’ed, one is quoted as saying:

"They should never have been taken hostage in the first place. They shouldn't have been using them for propaganda".

15. In what is probably proof-positive Iran didn’t like how this was playing out at home and abroad, they actually send the Hostages home and declare victory.

16. Everyone wants credit. Syria is claiming a role in the release.

17. Oh no! Syria was fitting that fabulous ‘Dhimmi Dahling’ Nancy Pelosi for a burqa at the time. How long before she claims credit as well?

Anyway, enough of the politics! I'm sure there will br much more hand-wringing and recriminations to go around for a while.

Welcome home to my Brothers-and-Sister-in-Arms!

I can hardly wait to hear things from your various perspectives in the future.....

Update 04/06/07
Well I wish now I had seen the Brit's press conference after they got back in the UK before I posted last night. If I had, I would have looked for the full videos of them in captivity instead of relying on quick clips, still pics and written reports on what they looked like and how they conducted themselves. Since the press conference's reading of a prepared written statement looked a lot like CYA to me I got a real uneasy feeling, so I thought 'let's go to the videotape' . Ugh - it made me physically ill.

Of course, no one can say exactly what they would or wouldn't have done unless they were there, but I can't imagine any of the Brits I worked with in the 80's or now EVER smiling for a captor's camera UNLESS it was supported by an obscene gesture.

My personal lesson-learned in all this is: Don't rely on excised video clips and stills with transcripts when there are full recordings out there.

The feeling I have now for these guys (including their command structure), is basically the same feeling I had once on jury duty. I want to scream -- "c'mon guys, give me something positive in your defense!"

Kidnapped Brits Update (Triple Dog Dare Continued)

I decided to watch this situation closely for a while, and so far it hasn’t disappointed.

I could boastfully claim clairvoyance with my ‘Triple Dog Dare’ scenario in the earlier post, but that would be just 'wrong', and well...way over the top.

I mean, it is far more useful to point out that the best alternatives to follow are SO obvious an old ‘ammo troop’ can see what needs to happen just as easy as a former Speaker of the House (Hugh Hewitt podcast).

Later in the week on HH, Guest-Host Congressman John Campbell had Victor Davis Hanson on and asked him (podcast) what he thinks should be done to get the kidnapped British servicemen and woman back, and he suggested what was in all reality a much better answer involving world and more specifically EU economic sanctions. I guess it never occurred to me to try that path because I considered it infeasible – and for obvious reasons, I still do.

Note: read the comments below the article in the last link. Britain has as many ‘Blame the UK First’ idiots as we have of the ‘Blame America First’ variety.

Woah! – ‘Instapundit’ found the same Guardian article worthy of mention.....and the EU gets 'Insta-smacked'!

Iranians Like Taking Those Hostages Don't They?

Taking Hostages is the First Instinct of a Second-Class Tyrant
I started to post this bit as a comment to this piece at In From The Cold, then I decided my verbosity could end up stealing a lot of blog space that wasn't mine, so let me me now just give Spook 86 his 'hat tip' from this locale and using my own bandwidth.

To an outsider this misadventure would appear to be a pretty clever move by the Iranians (or some subset thereof from this point forward referred to at 'they' and derivitaves thereof) whereby Iranians hope they can pull off another fast one if they:

1. Don't provoke the 'Great Satan 'directly
2. Can get the desired results by scooping up Coalition partner troops.

Spook 86 makes a good summary of the likely game they are playing, i.e. 'swapping' the Brits kidnapped from Iraqi waters for the pile of Iranian 'operators' we seem to have been collecting lately.

This act speaks volumes as to how the Iranians think and what they believe. If they thought for one minute that we (U.S and/or Great Britain) would take immediate and forceful punitive steps against them, they never would have done it in the first place. That they opted to take Britons instead of Americans, tells us they were betting on a more tepid response than if they had tried to do the same against the U.S. That they got the intial response they were looking for has to give them a sense of confidence in their operation to date (let us hope that it is as misplaced as I think it is).

So What is Iran's Plan B?
I don't think the Iranians really thought this through very well at all. The likelihood of a quick ending to the situation through a swap of kidnap victims for prisoners is, I believe, small...unless the Iranians who were captured in Iraq also happen to be in UK custody.

Spook 86 points out that this kind of move is a desperate one, and I don't think we will have to escalate this very much before the Iranians decide maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all. Iran, as poorly connected to the world as it is, is very much dependent upon Globalization and the rule sets that connected nations have to abide by. They are feeling the crunch economically already, and even the nit-noi sanctions imposed in the shadow of the kidnappings provide a little more torque to the 'limited' clamps now placed on Iran.

They also know they are vulnerable to energy sanctions from both ends of the issue, as while they are a major producer of crude oil, they are a major importer of gasoline as well. And all oil out or gasoline going in has to get by the Coalition.

I think the Iranians are expecting a little tit-for-tat for now. I'd like to think we would decide to break protocol and 'Triple-Dog Dare' Iran with a blockade until the Brits are returned unharmed. If that doesn't work, it would be trivial effort to anonymously (or not, if one prefers) 'shack' only a very small number of aimpoints some moonless night that would temporarily stop their existing refinery output as well. Re-apply as necessary.

We'll have to listen to the cries of inhumanity ala the Iraq Sanctions for only a little while. The Iranians will either come to their senses or not. But, I think we'll know fairly quickly if the Iranians have any desire to kick off Praying Mantis II .

Updated 03/23/07 in the AM: Added Link to 'rule sets'

Militia Foils Pinko-Hippie-Anarchist Alliance

aka:

"Pinko Losers & Aging Hippies Herded Like Cattle by Real Americans"

I was going to blog on this in detail, contrasting the smelly, Commie-Pinko, "Anti-Victory" Hippies with the upstanding citizens of the Gathering of Eagles, thus protecting the monuments from the desecration that occurred last time. But then I viewed Michelle Malkin's excellent summary (with pics) and knew it couldn't be topped.

Go to Michelle Malkin's site. See real Americans, from different walks of life, make a stand against the anti-civilization hordes.

And lest you think I jest about the Commie-Pinko Hippies, here is the URL (sans "http:" as I don't want to link to this filth) for International Answer: "//answer.pephost.org". Scroll only a bit to see the nice selection of Che shirts.

I've often wondered where the natural curiosity of the press is concerning the true nature of these 'organizers'.

Update 03/25/07 -- corrected one horrible mispelling of Michelle Malkin's name. (I'm so ashamed)

Has Lancet Fired Horton Yet?

Courtesy of Charles Johnson at LGF (once again!), we have a followup to the story he pointed out last year and I commented on here.

As I noted last time:

Now this is the second Lancet sham piece on the subject of Iraqi war deaths (as I’m sure you’ve heard about by now or remember the first), so one wonders how much longer he will be at the helm of what was once the “world’s leading independent medical journal” given his apparent proclivity to spew this nonsense, alienate others in his profession AND bite the hand that feeds him.

Now that there has been additional exposure to the scale of this sham, will Horton soon be gone?

Also, it looks like I scooped The Times last October with my update the same day:

UPDATE: The lead 'researcher' of this 'study' is the same as the last one. Coincidentally, he just happens to be a New York Democrat with political aspirations AND (Surprise!) an apparent bug up his sphincter about the war in Iraq.

All I did at the time was do a 'search' on the study author's name. What took the Times so long? (Just kidding I'm sure they and a lot of other people knew somehere and maybe I just missed the coverage).

The Economist Under the Microscope

Or, The Economist imitates Reuters

A colleague at work this week forwarded this editorial to me and I couldn't let it pass without a good fisking. Here goes, including a jab at the cartoon that came with it. (Cartoon art by KAL, satirical recomposition by SMSgtMac)

DICK CHENEY has never been a great fan of open government.

His staff refuse to reveal how many people work in his office, let alone what they do there.

On his orders, or was it a general security thing? What? – you don’t know? Ohhh-kaaaay.

He went to court to keep the membership of his energy commission secret.

Yes: all the way to the Supreme Court who found (7-2) for the Cheney argument and more importantly for the Bush Administration. You see, in this land where we have Citizens instead of ‘Subjects’, we also have something called ‘separation of powers’ among branches of government. The Supremes agreed that this issue fell under that Constitutional provision.

You can find the White House and the Pentagon on Google Earth. But the vice-president's official residence is pixellated out.

This has to be the most petty line in the whole editorial. Make no mistake, the author(s) don’t have enough real facts in this hit piece to write a headline, much less an actual ‘article’ on this topic – which is no doubt why we find it where we do, instead of as a cover story.
Are we to believe that Vice President Cheney barked out the orders from some secret command bunker in the dead of night “…and get Blair House off Google this instant so no one will know where I live!”

Which makes the trial of Mr Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, all the more notable.

Step 1: Set up straw man argument. Check!

The defence finally decided against calling Mr Cheney to testify.

‘Finally’? Finally? Was there a deadline to meet, tradition to follow, or perhaps a storyline to complete or something? So….effin’….what?

The deposition, hearing, and trial process is a dance that can make the Flamenco look easy. If the Libby lawyers thought it was absolutey necessary or beneficial to call the VP, they would have put him on the stand.

As it is, this has to be taken as a positive for the Libby side. This trial is, after all, in Washington DC. The denizens (adopting the author(s) use neutral words with negative vibes), as a group are closer to the Democratic Party gravy train than any other city in the country-- and are the most hostile city population in the country to the Republican Party because of it. Things would have to go pretty bad before a competent lawyer would willingly traipse out the second highest Republican authority figure in these circumstances.

But nevertheless the trial, which is now reaching its final stages, has cast a rare shaft of light on the vice-president's dark world. His handwritten notes have been projected on giant screens. His bureaucratic fingerprints have been examined in the smallest detail.

Ooooo -- Lovely use of the words ‘dark’ and ‘fingerprints’ .

It has always been clear that Mr Cheney is an exceptionally powerful vice-president.

How is he exceptionally powerful? I mean other than those powers delegated to him by the President of course.

Oh……and another thing: So what?

He has the largest vice-presidential staff in history (an estimated 14 national security advisers compared with Al Gore's four, for example), and vassals in most branches of government.

Is staff size supposed to be a supporting ‘point’? Is it beyond the author(s) grasp that there might be reasons the President wants the VP to have significant staff support? Heck, it could be put down to management style. Are the author(s) taking away style points?

Highlighting Clinton’s obvious non-reliance on Gore and comparing it with the obvious magnitude of President Bush’s reliance on Cheney since 9/11 is a pleasant (and no doubt unintended) observation on the part of the author(s). I’m surprised Clinton just didn’t give Gore a 1000 piece puzzle and then hid the box for eight yearsto keep Gore busy.

I also imagine almost any one of the VP’s associates would first laugh at the author(s) and then kick then in their shiny, leftist, panty-clad a** if they called them ‘vassals’ to their face.

But the trial has given a sense of how that power operates on a day-to-day basis.

So the Economist thinks it is getting a peek inside the sausage factory (and what a lame transition). So let’s see how sausage is made shall we? Here we go!

The two characteristics that have emerged most clearly are ruthlessness and obsessive attention to detail.

Now who would want somebody in public office at a time of war that was ruthless and paid attention to detail, especially when you have political rivals that would sell out the war effort for their own power gains? Oh yeah…I would.

Mr Cheney was clearly determined to punish Joseph Wilson for casting doubt on some of the administration's claims about WMD.(Mr Wilson wrote an article in the New York Times claiming that, during an official visit to Niger in 2002, he had found no evidence that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase nuclear material from the country.)

Why not mention that Joe Wilson had lied extensively throughout the process as documented here, here, here and more recently here. And the 'no evidence' claim eventually gets changed (see below).

Is there any mystery to the author(s) as to why such lies should be countered? And characterizing the Administration as ‘determined to punish’ is a complete misrepresentation: the attempt was to squash the lies not (unfortunately) the liar.

And from the moment he cut Mr Wilson's article out of the New York Times and scrawled notes all over it, Mr Cheney devoted a striking amount of energy to the administration's offensive against him.

‘Scrawled’? Another evil sounding word, eh? The Economist seems to have one or more frustrated novelists on the payroll.
Devoted a “striking” amount of energy? Hmmmmm. The VP Checklist:
1. Cut out article that looks like it was written to undermine the Administration and the war effort using what you believe are distortions or fabrications and that could also involve criminal leaks of national security information,
2. Put notes in the margins,
3. Task some people to look into it,
4. Place article on desk as a reminder for you to ‘followup”.
Yep. Positively Eeeeevil MBA damage control techniques.

According to Mr Libby and a former PR aide, he dictated talking points for press officers to use. He discussed the case several times a day with Mr Libby, told him to deal directly with selected reporters, and instructed him to leak a sensitive document.

Hint: Press officers are hired to tell the side of the story of those who hired them. Is this news to the Economist?

And NO. Not ‘leaked’: au-tho-rized. Authorized, get it? Geez I get tired of people who don’t know squat about the role of classifying and declassifying AUTHORITIES who also go mouthing off about ‘leaks’.

Mr Libby's leaks are what landed him in trouble: he disclosed that Mr Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent, which is potentially a crime, though he is being tried not for that but for giving misleading evidence when questioned.

Really? I thought it was Armitrage who actually leaked.

Since the criminal grounds by which revealing Valerie Plame’s identity did not(and do not) exist, the use of the word “potentially” is a real stretch. It is akin to me stating "potentially I’m an NBA center because if I was eight feet tall I could be".

Please do try to be accurate: he is being tried for allegedly giving misleading information. Even if a hostile jury convicts him, it will be appealed and the conviction will almost certainly be thrown out at the next level.

Why was Mr Cheney so obsessed with Mr Wilson? Mr Wilson was a retired ambassador who had been peddling the story of his trip to Niger around town for months. Mr Cheney's office had difficulty in getting chosen reporters to tune into its arguments; indeed, but for Mr Cheney worrying at it like a dog at a bone, Mr Wilson's article would have been long forgotten.

Again, Wilson was peddling a lie with a negative impact. Watch and wish it away and it will go away eh? Well, at least that is consistent with a lot of people’s view of the the Islamist threat. And nice use of an unsubstantiated “so obsessed”.

One possible explanation is that Mr Cheney knew that the administration's claims about WMD were false. But it seems unlikely. Mr Cheney continued to argue that Saddam possessed WMD long after Mr Bush had backed down. His problem was not that he was lying, but that he was so convinced that Saddam possessed WMD that he could not see evidence to the contrary.

‘False claims’ seems an ‘unlikely’ cause eh? Would that be because the claims about Saddam attempting to acquire Niger Uranium were true? (Unless Joe Wilson is lying now instead of then!)

And so the Economist selectively ignores evidence so they can use the word ‘contrary’.

Is it the Economist’s view that because we did not find thousands or more WMDs, that there therefore were none?

Does the Economist maintain this pose even though we actually found many hundreds of weapons as well as a large body of evidence that Saddam Hussein was working hard to reconstruct his WMD programs

Is this the Economist’s view, in spite of the possibility many of these weapons may have made it to Syria according to the WMD survey team leader?

The other, more probable, explanation is that Mr Cheney was engaged in a personal vendetta, and that this was vicious inside-the-Beltway politics,not grand trickery.

Why is it more probable, and are we about to be given an answer? Answer: ‘Not really’.

Indeed, one of the most striking things about the trial is that it demonstrates just how much of a creature of Washington Mr Cheney really is. He may present himself as a plain-spoken son of Wyoming who eventually went on to become the no-nonsense CEO of a global company.

Yeah, it is amazing how he’s been able to navigate the waters of Washington off and on for all these years without losing his soul.

But in reality he is the quintessential Washingtonian.
He started his career as a failed academic, dropping out of Yale after a few terms and never completing his PhD at the University of Wisconsin. But he flourished when he came to Washington: attracting the attention of Donald Rumsfeld, rapidly climbing the greasy pole, and becoming Gerald Ford's chief of staff at the age of 34. He had found his perfect milieu.

Quintessential Washingtonians are usually failed academics who graduate from an Ivy league school, so thank goodness Cheney left before that happened. Imagine that, a go-getting idea man who decided not to finish his Doctorate. What are the odds?

Conspiring and manoeuvring

(A Bold Header! –unsupported by evidence, but presented through innuendo in various ways below. Tautology. Tautology. Tautology!

During his years as an insider he has acquired the typical habits of mind of veteran Washingtonians: an obsession with spin and gossip, including an over-inflated sense of the importance of newspaper articles; a hyper-sensitive nose for threats; and, it would appear, a determination to destroy his enemies by whatever means necessary.

Ah-ha!. In other words, he is an astute politician with lots of people who can’t go toe-to-toe with him. Why didn’t the author(s) say so? Oh, right, the Economist has that Eeevil ‘film-noir’ feel going and didn’t want to break the mood.

He began his career in the White House by conspiring with Donald Rumsfeld to sideline the vice-president, Nelson Rockefeller, and to rein in Henry Kissinger (who then combined the jobs of secretary of state and head of the National Security Council). If Mr Libby's evidence is anything to go by, he has been conspiring and manoeuvring ever since.

Nice use of ‘Conspiring’. Proof please. Not innuendo, not accusations. Evidence. Lots of evidence that removes reasonable doubt. Can’t find it? That’s all right neither could I. I would like the proof so I can finally know who I need to send the thank you note to for the Kissenger ‘rein-in’.

It was also during the Ford administration that Mr Cheney seems to have acquired a profound distrust of the CIA. He became convinced that the CIA was underestimating the Soviet military build-up. He lent his support to something called “Team B”, a group of foreign-policy experts who made it their business to second-guess the CIA over the Soviet threat.

Wow. He ‘lent his support’…..to “Team B”. It is amazing how the left has monopolized and rewritten the history of Team B since it happened, so the Economist can be forgiven for grasping at this piece of history. But they cannot be forgiven for forgetting the fundamentals of National Security or latching on to such a weak argument as ‘he supported’. Hot tip: Intel is hard. When national survival is at stake you can only afford to be wrong through being overly pessimistic.

Mr Cheney's distrust of the CIA grew even stronger in the 1990s, when he concluded that the agency had misjudged Saddam's military capabilities in the run-up to the first Gulf war. He relied on his own intelligence sources—the latter-day equivalent of Team B—and made repeated visits to the CIA headquarters in Langley to interrogate officers there on their intelligence.

So he thought the CIA failed earlier and he had the audacity to not trust them as much without a little verification and some confidence checks? Shocker!

[Actually all SecDefs rely on their DIA people and intel wherever they can get it. It’s why we call people like the VP and SecDef ‘decisionmakers’ and intelligence services, “services”.]

In any case this is the REAL blockbuster headline: "SecDef with people’s lives on the line wants confidence in the intel.” Gives one the vapors.

Mr Wilson was thus a ready-made target for Mr Cheney: an Iraq war sceptic who had been sent to Niger by a notoriously soft agency and who tried to ventilate his views in the newspapers.

Read: …a liar who had been sent to Niger… (Start of a good limerick?)

All this still leaves the biggest question unanswered. Where did Mr Cheney get his fervour from? The average Washington insider is a consummate trimmer. Mr Cheney comes across as a man firmly in the grip of an ideology. It will take more than the Scooter Libby trial to explain him fully. But at least Americans have learned a little bit more about the power behind King George's throne.

Fervo[u]r? Maybe Cheney just doesn’t like lying troublemakers mucking up National Security for political points.

Perhaps if more Britons in government had a rational ‘ideology’, it wouldn’t be so shocking to the Economist to find people with ideologies over here. (Also nice gratuitous dig at President at the very end: real professional journalism there!)