The Great Exhale

Osama bin Laden is dead. Yesterday, I said there was little to say. Today, a few scattered thoughts come below, of varying degrees of seriousness.

* * *

* Last night, everyone was rushing to make grand strategic pronouncements about the implications of killing Bin Laden. Is the War on Terror over? Can we leave Afghanistan (or Iraq) now? Will al-Qaeda strike back stronger than before? I feel like everyone needs to take a deep breath about this, because for most of these questions the only answer is: time will tell.

* Count me in the "pro-celebration" camp. I don't think it is unseemly to celebrate a great American victory, anymore than it was inappropriate to celebrate on V-J Day. Somebody claimed it was "unseemly" for Americans to be acting like we just won the World Cup. I kind of think that killing one of the great terrorist masterminds of the world is a little less frivolous a reason for celebration than winning a soccer match.

* Folks who don't believe Osama is really dead will henceforth be known as "deathers".

* While most folks (across the political spectrum) were on their best behavior last night, there were a few grump-o-sauruses. Spot the differences between the far-right message board nuts, and the Jihadi message board nuts!

* Poll-wise, the CW seems to be "remember George H.W. Bush, who had rocket-high approvals at this point in his presidency due to a major foreign policy victory (winning the Gulf War)." The point is that a bad economy can still take down an incumbent, even one flush with success. Very true, but I want to push back a little. First, I think this is a symbolically bigger deal even than the Gulf War, though maybe that's just a lack of perspective talking. But more importantly, something like this can overcome some polling inertia, starting Obama from a higher base. If the economy tanks, he's still toast. But if the economy is simply "meh", it might not be enough to budge Obama's numbers either way. If, as appears, the trend of the economy is going to be slow improvement going into 2012 -- not enough to set off celebrations, but enough to stem serious electoral bleeding -- this could be a major difference.

* Once I heard Bin Laden wasn't killed by a drone strike but through a human operation resulting in a firefight, I immediately started wondering which video game would make this into a mission first. Seems to fit the Rainbow 6 oeuvre best to me.

* One of the better one-liners I read: "The guy who killed Bin Laden is going to get laid way more than 72 times.

* Another thing folks pointed out -- Obama knew about the operation during the White House Correspondent's Dinner (but obviously didn't know how it would turn out). Cool as the other side of the pillow.

* Meet the guy who accidentally live-tweeted the Bin Laden operation.

* Hamas condemns Bin Laden killing, Palestinian Authority praises it.

* Rep. Peter King (R-NY), whom I typically dislike, was impressively magnanimous -- when being interviewed by CNN, the anchors started talking about how this was a great accomplishment for Robert Gates and Leon Panetta as well as President Obama. Which is true, but Rep. King observed that if this operation went wrong, nobody would be talking about Gates and Panetta, but the Commander in Chief. Which means that since it went right, same rules apply.

* So in the same spirit of bipartisanship, I'll leave you with the words of Mike Huckabee: "Welcome to Hell, Bin Laden."

Do People Really Deny This?

I can never figure out if I grew up and continue to exist in a totally unique environment, or I'm just totally disconnected from the broader Jewish psyche, or what, because I had no idea that it was a Jewish article of faith that al-Qaeda's actions and support are entirely unconnected to Israel.

Of course they are! Opposition to Israel is part and parcel of the package that al-Qaeda represents. And so it make sense that, as a high profile enemy of Israel, persons upset with Israel for a variety of legitimate or illegitimate reasons will be attracted to it.

I do think Ackerman is right that some Jews get nervous when this is expounded upon too vigorously, because it can lead to Michael Scheuer-esque positions basically advocating throwing Israel to the wolves to appease al-Qaeda. But there are separate issues.

Moreover, Ackerman is clearly right about this:

The answer for the U.S. is not to sever ties with Israel or turn hostile toward it. It’s to seek an end to the Israeli-Arab conflict and a stable Middle East. That will not stop Islamic extremism. Maybe I should say it again in capitol letters: A TWO-STATE SOLUTION WILL NOT STOP ISLAMIC EXTREMISM. Extremists are going to be extremists. They demagogue. They use pretexts. That’s what they do. You deal with that. The proper response is to reduce the circumstances under which their demagoguery resonates. And that’s why ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and midwifing a Palestinian state is so important. This is in our interests, it’s in Israel’s interests, it’s in the Palestinians interests, it’s in the Arab world’s interests, and it’s expressly against al-Qaeda’s interests. It’s in absolutely no way an “appeasement” of al-Qaeda unless you believe that Arabs and Muslims are naturally inclined to bandwagon with al-Qaeda. And that makes you a racist and safe to ignore.

Maybe not "safe to ignore", because such racism still has plenty of purchase in American life. But the general sentiments are right.

Shi'ites Take the Lead by a Nose!

Oh burn! Al-Qaeda views Shi'ites, particularly Iran, as a greater threat than "that from Jews and Christians."

The New Jihadi Code

A new "code" of Jihad has been released by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (an Islamist organization fighting to overthrow the Libyan state). It formally repudiates Al-Qaeda style Jihad, writing:

"Jihad has ethics and morals because it is for God. That means it is forbidden to kill women, children, elderly people, priests, messengers, traders and the like. Betrayal is prohibited and it is vital to keep promises and treat prisoners of war in a good way. Standing by those ethics is what distinguishes Muslims' jihad from the wars of other nations."

The CNN article indicates that it has a generic prohibition on killing "civilians", but I'm not sure if that is merely a paraphrase of the above passage (in which case it seems overbroad) or comes from elsewhere in the document.

What Lies Beneath

I was talking with a friend over dinner last night, and he remarked that though he, like me, was conflicted about the Gaza operation, "if Israel's going to do it, they might as well go the whole way. If you're going to wreak that much devastation on the people of Gaza, I hope they're able to rip apart Hamas while they're at it" (I paraphrase, obviously).

Obviously, part of me agrees -- the only thing worse than an Israeli Gaza operation which has devastated (and probably radicalized) the Palestinian community there is an Israeli Gaza operation that has devastated and radicalized the Palestinian community while leaving Hamas mostly organizationally intact.

But, as I told my friend, the other half of me worries about what replaces Hamas if Israel does manage to crush it. My thought at the time was Islamic Jihad (a smaller but still prominent terrorist group which never signed on to the Israel/Hamas ceasefire in the first place). Or perhaps nothing "replaces" Hamas -- but I don't think Israel's security is improved by an anarchic Gaza that still will likely channel its rage towards Israel, only now without direction. The idea that a more "moderate" party would come to the fore seems pretty unlikely.

But apparently, even my pessimistic side was playing small ball. The Wonk Room gives an outcome considerably worse than anarchy or even Islamic Jihad taking over: the rise of Al-Qaeda-esque Salafist elements who pretty much view Hamas as a bunch of pikers. Indeed, Al-Qaeda itself is looking to reboot in Gaza after burning a lot of its credibility in the Muslim world by helping torch Iraq, on the not so crazy theory that there is little faster way to get themselves back in folks' good graces than killing Jews at the home base.

To the extent Hamas can be moderated, it's because it does actually try and govern things and has to deal with domestic political considerations as a restraining factor on its genocidal ideological ambitions. I'm not saying the pragmatic problem of governance always or usually wins out over Jew-hating ideology, but it is in the equation and provides a foothold by which progress might occur. Al-Qaeda does not really care about governing anything: as far as their modus operandi would be in Palestine, it would be completely unconcerned with providing for and stabilizing the Palestinian community and focused nearly solely on trying to make the Zionist state burn.

The temptation to think of Hamas as the worst thing out there for Israel is, as Ezra Klein points out, a mistake Israel has made before. It's how we got Hamas in the first place, when Israel decided that anything was better than Fatah's terrorist ethos. But Jews, of all people, should know -- it can always get worse. And I don't think we've hit bottom yet.

Killing Americans

Speaking of things that kill Americans, perhaps Justice Scalia should read this piece by an American military interrogator about the fruits of American torture (H/T):

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

I'd say duh, but that would be too kind to the conservative enablers of this immoral and ultimately lethal regime.

Indeed, in the author's experience, torture isn't just dangerous, it's unnecessary:

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them. I don't have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.

Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.

But Zarqawi's death wasn't enough to convince the joint Special Operations task force for which I worked to change its attitude toward interrogations. The old methods continued. I came home from Iraq feeling as if my mission was far from accomplished. Soon after my return, the public learned that another part of our government, the CIA, had repeatedly used waterboarding to try to get information out of detainees.

I know the counter-argument well -- that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that's not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, "I thought you would torture me, and when you didn't, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate."

Once again, folks could have figured this out from World War II.

The author (writing under a pseudonym for security purposes) is a 14-year military veteran with a background in special forces and counterintelligence. He'll freely tell you that torture is wrong. But it also is unnecessary, and gets Americans killed. Every day we allow this blot upon our constitution to continue, we dishonor his service.

The Racism Bank Shot

Though discounting the mythology that cases like Brown v. Board single-handedly exposed the evil of Jim Crow and promoted civil rights reform, revisionist (I mean that totally value-neutral) civil rights historians like Michael J. Klarman do concede that these largely symbolic measures did cause real progress by provoking a White overreaction. The intense White backlash to cases like Brown, broadcast to the North by television and other media sources, helped shock moderates out of their complacency and create the political will to enact meaningful reforms, such as the Civil Rights Act.

Other historians have observed the effort made by the Soviet Union to weaken American support amongst "non-aligned" and third world nations by exposing the horrors of American racism. Domestic civil rights battles in America were never far removed from the Cold War context, with progressives arguing fervently that America had a significant national security interest in dismantling Jim Crow, and conservatives shooting back that it was unpatriotic to tailor our domestic policy based on Kremlin critiques. This was a battle progressives would slowly but surely win. The United States government intervened for the first time in favor of desegregation activists when it wrote an amicus supporting the NAACP in Brown v. Board, specifically citing "the hostile reaction among normally friendly peoples" to anti-Black discrimination. The continuance of segregation and inequality in America was leading potential allies around the world to view the US as "hypocritical in claiming to be the champion of democracy while permitting practices of racial discrimination here in this country."

By contrast, evidence of meaningful civil rights progress was wielded by American diplomatic agents as proof of the superiority and fundamental righteousness of American ideals. From officially-sponsored world tours featuring Black Jazz musicians, to President Truman's famous maxim that "Democracy's answer to the challenge of totalitarianism is its promise of equal rights and equal opportunities for all mankind," it was well known to everyone that the question of racism had potent implications for American foreign policy interests.

All of this is prelude to al-Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri's mockery of President-elect Barack Obama, whom they call a "house slave" and compare derogatorily to Malcolm X. Spencer Ackerman responds:

Who would have known that electing a black president also turns out to have an information-operations component as a bonus? We should want to publicize, far and wide, that Zawahiri is a racist. Drive this discrediting message into the heart of the Muslim world. I wonder what the tens of millions of African and African-American Muslims think about Zawahiri's charming statement.

Yes, and yes. Obama, fair or not, is already somewhat of a hero in many places where the American brand had been faltering. One benefit of making even symbolic racial progress, as Klarman indicated, is that it makes racist reactionaries that much more visible. America learned that racial regressivism was a serious liability in its fight with the Soviet Union. Hopefully, it can take this opportunity to utilize racial progressivism to dismantle reactionary, totalitarian movements like al-Qaeda.

God Willing

One the things that's really got me hung up about the Hamdan trial is that he really did not seem to be one of the bad guys. He always maintained he was nothing but a menial worker, not a part of al-Qaeda's terrorist network, and has expressed (to my ears, anyway) genuine shock and sadness when he learned of the 9/11 attacks and al-Qaeda's other operations.

Ken Gude's Democracy Arsenal's post, commenting on this NYT article, really gets to the heart of that. Here's the passage from the Times that Gude quotes, an exchange between Hamdan and the military judge who presided over the trial that convicted him of war crimes:

"It was a sorry or sad thing to see innocent people killed," he said as he leaned on the defense table and gestured gently at the military tribunal here. "I personally present my apologies to them if anything what I did have caused them pain."

As he left the sparsely attended courtroom in the hilltop courtroom here, Mr. Hamdan, who at times has shown a mischievous sense of humor, raised his arms and said a good-natured "bye, bye" to the small group.

During pretrial proceedings, Mr. Hamdan, a father of two daughters in Yemen, and the judge, a career Navy lawyer, had regularly exchanged smiles and, on occasion, chats. Before he left the bench, Judge Allred, said a few parting words to the man he had gotten to know in a most unusual way.

"Mr. Hamdan," Judge Allred said, "I hope the day comes that you are able to return to your wife and daughters and your country."

"God willing," Mr. Hamdan said in the rudimentary English he picked up while in American custody.

"Insh-allah," said Judge Allred, repeating the same phrase in Arabic.

And here's Gude's comments:

Remember, this is an exchange between a man who had just been found guilty of war crimes and the judge who had presided over the trial that reached that conclusion. Hamdan appears to be genuinely remorseful about the very small role he played in al Qaeda. Allred shows real compassion for a man obviously caught up in something well beyond anything he ever intended. They then exchange the blessings of God in each other's language.

This moment could have had real power. This moment is what America is. This is the America I know. If it had occurred 5 years ago in a US court it would have sent an incredibly powerful message to the world that we are strong and we are just, and yes, Osama bin Laden murdered 3,000 Americans but he utterly failed to destroy our great country and all that it stands for.

But instead, we are arguing about whether the Pentagon will detain Hamdan indefinitely after his sentence has been completed. What a waste.

I can't help but think that the lenient sentence Hamdan received (only five months after time served) is related to the remorse he clearly feels, as well as the minor role he played in al-Qaeda's infrastructure (and, I'd hope, the fact that the trial against him was a mockery of the judicial system). But even still, that very fact makes his treatment that much more nightmarish. His case is the one that we all feared when these extra-legal detentions and procedurally deficient trials were established: someone who clearly does not deserve the label "war criminal" attached to him, but who may never see freedom because the mechanics by which he's imprisoned are so tied to America's defective political process.

I'm not making much sense; it's late, and I'm opining from the hip. But for whatever reason -- and I can't explain it -- Hamdan's case has always been one that tugged at my heartstrings. He deserved better. We deserved better. The military officers (who by all accounts were quite professional) deserved better than to be drawn into this farce.

FM 3-24

FM 3-24 is the Army and Marines' counter-insurgency manual. It was written in part by one Sarah Sewall, who is now an adviser on the Obama campaign. In the Weekly Standard, Dean Barnett, not seeming to know this, blasts her along with Samantha Power as embodying "dovish idealism" in the course of his critique of the "Obama Doctrine." It's a lot of juvenile giggling over "climates of fear" (because serious people know that fear distracts us from the important task of killing people) and very little in the way of hard-nosed analysis.

In addition to pointing out some other bone-headed errors ("Her name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, you dumb douche."), Spencer Ackerman helps elucidate why the "critique" is substantively flat out wrong.

What Barnett will never understand is that the real danger from al-Qaeda isn't just the people who've joined al-Qaeda. It's the much larger cohort of people who could join al-Qaeda, and the larger-still cohort of those who would not actively help the U.S. destroy al-Qaeda. Those latter two population clusters are where any anti-al-Qaeda strategy has to focus. And there, yeah, climates of fear -- in other words, the experience of people pinioned between the militia on the corner and the U.S.-backed regime that it fights. Those people come to hate the U.S. Lots of them. And it only takes a small number of them to decide to act on that hatred.

....look at who AQI is. According to this fascinating briefing that Bits Bacon gave last week, we're talking not just about fanatics. We're talking about the people brainwashed by al-Qaeda into coming to Iraq to blow themselves up -- brainwashed thanks to propaganda victories that the Weekly Standard's chosen policies, like the Iraq war and torture, have yielded. That's the swamp that Dean Barnett and his homies will not only fail to drain, but they'll expand, over and over and over again, no matter how decisively the last five years have shattered everything they believe in.

We'll never win a war like this if we keep rebuilding our enemy in the midst of destroying it. Barnett and his crew just aren't bright enough to grasp that, or how to avoid it. So we need a new leadership that can.

One of the best arguments for an Obama presidency is that he has been bringing together some of the brightest experts in the world, from all backgrounds, together in his campaign. I'm not saying that the best and brightest always have the right answer. But if there is one thing we've learned from this administration, it's that trusting questions of national security to politicized amateurs is a luxury we can no longer afford. More than any other candidate, Obama offers the chance to break free from that trap.

Via Balloon Juice

Is Our Chemistry Department Breeding Terrorists?

Mark Sageman takes a look at the bios of top al-Qaeda members:

Al Qaeda’s members are not the Palestinian fourteen-year- olds we see on the news, but join the jihad at the average age of 26. Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion. The natural sciences predominate. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, Zawahiri is a physician, Mohammed Atta was, of course, an architect; and a few members are military, such as Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, who is supposedly the head of the military committee.

This isn't the only reason I support the violent overthrow of the natural sciences, but it's one of the saner ones.

And as for the lack of folks with humanities backgrounds, well, looks like all those crazy leftists with their anti-American "post-colonial studies" and whatever other departmental horror programs d'jour conservatives want to cry about don't become evil-doers after all. Liberal Arts education FTW!

H/T: Yglesias

Iran and al-Qaeda

I thought that Christiane Amanpour's article, citing a top Iranian official as declaring that the US and Iran were "natural allies", was quite interesting. Obviously, the Powerliners, who are quite invested in America and Iran being perpetually locked in mortal combat, was significantly less favorable. For my part, I think that there are forces that both push in favor and against the US and Iran allying. On the one hand, Iran's fanatical desire to obliterate Israel is something that cuts against a partnership (I don't mean to be glib here, this is obviously a major sticking point). And the gap between the Iranian and American government's conception of what our universal values should consist (a gap that, admittedly, is larger for some than for others) is also something that will pose barriers. On the other hand, America's main opponent in the global sphere, in terms of military threat, is Sunni Jihadists, who are also a natural enemy of the Shi'ite dominated Iran. Mutual enemies can make for strange allies (consider the persistent murmering of Israel and Saudi Arabia working together to check against their mutual threat--the growing Shi'ite Crescent stretching from Iran through Syria, Lebanon and Hezbollah).

But Powerline's analysis, I thought, was rather pecuilar:

Amanpour's breathless report implies that only the belligerence of the President Bush, who unaccountably included Iran in the "Axis of Evil," frustrates a full alliance between these nations, both of whom, she says, are bitterly opposed to al Qaeda.

Many others, of course, believe that top al Qaeda leaders are now inside Iran. And it is not hard to argue that from 1979 to the present, the foreign power that has most consistently been at war with the U.S. is Iran.

Now, aside from who these "many others" are (hint--if they've got names like "curveball", run), and aside from the problem that we've yet to have been at war with Iran since 1979 (in contrast to Iraq and Serbia), this is a rather odd point. It seems unlikely that Shi'ite Iran is harboring top leaders of Sunni al-Qaeda. If they are not, then Powerline's argument kind of falls apart, obviously, and the non-presence of al-Qaeda in Iran lends credance to the idea that we should ally with them against al-Qaeda, and that the Bush administration has been foolish in not pursuing that avenue. But if Powerline is right, then we're faced with the fact that our foreign policy has done something to spook Iran so much that they're willing to support their bitter enemy in a fight against us. I don't really expect the Powerliners to have a particularly intricate grasp of the Sunni/Shi'ite split, but suffice to say a hardline Sunni group will consider Shi'ites to be heretics, and vice versa. It can only be a failure on our part that we've managed to allow what should have been an impossible alliance to manifest itself, because we insist on playing macho cowboy or whatever.

So either way, we're faced with a failure of foreign policy that can be chalked up to the Bush administration. No surprise over here, I know, but it amuses me that this flows so precisely from Powerline's own analysis of the Iranian situation.