Hamas, Fatah human rights abuses documented

The man I am sitting with in the photo below, taken in Jericho last Saturday, is Bassem Eid, the founder and manager of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. Mr. Eid is a Muslim and a member of the largest Arab tribe in the West Bank.



Right to left: the author, Bassem Eid, Ruth Lautt.

Mr. Eid formerly helped monitor and investigate claims of human rights violations by the Israelis. After the founding of the Palestinian Authority by the Oslo agreements, Eid noticed that no one was paying attention to HR violations by the PA or Palestinian militias. So Eid founded the PHRMG in 1996.

PHRMG's latest revelations of human-rights violations by the PA and Hamas were released yesterday, entitled, "Fatah and Hamas Human Rights Violations in the Palestinian Occupied Territories from June 2007 to October 2007" (PDF online).

No one else is doing the work that Bassem Eid and his small number of assistants are doing. He was arrested by the PA in the 1990s, but was held only a day. The fact that his tribe is the largest in the West Bank - and therefore has the most muscle to retaliate against anyone who might harm him - is almost certainly the only reason he is still breathing.

I'll post a summary of our conversation with Mr. Eid soon.

My biography

I was born and raised in Nashville, Tenn., where I graduated from Hillsboro High School. I earned my BA degree in philosophy from Wake Forest University. An ROTC scholarship student, I took a commission as an officer in the U.S. Army field artillery.

I married the former Catherine Stephens of Durham, N. C., in 1980. We have two sons, the elder a former U.S. Marine and Iraq veteran now living and working in Madison, Wisconsin. Our younger son is a trauma surgeon in the U.S. Air Force. Our daughter is a chemical engineer in Nashville.

I served on four continents in the Army. I was an artillery forward observer and battery fire direction officer in Korea, including service at an active artillery fire base at the DMZ. In Germany I served as an artillery battery commander and a brigade fire support coordinator in 3rd Armored Division. Afterward, I was the operations officer of an 8-inch howitzer battalion of V Corps Artillery. I was also operations officer for a Multiple-Launch Rocket System battalion in XVIII Airborne Corps Artillery at Fort Bragg, NC. Along the way, I was trained and served as a nuclear target analyst in two assignments. I also completed counterterrorism training at the Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg. I was one of the relatively few officers to graduate from the U.S. Army Drill Sergeant School at Fort Jackson, S.C. I am also a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College.

In 1986 I attended the Defense Information School, from which I graduated first in my class. I then served as chief of media relations for XVIII Airborne Corps and Fort Bragg, N. C. During the invasion of Panama in December 1989 (Operation Just Cause), I served on the Corps' Battle Management Cell. I also served a six-month, joint-staff tour as director of public affairs for Joint Task Force-Bravo in Honduras.

Assigned to the Pentagon in 1990, I was the speech writer and personal public affairs officer to Secretary of the Army Michael P. W. Stone, traveling with the secretary until January 1991, when I was assigned to the U.S. Army Operations Center for the Gulf War.

After the return of forces to America, I was appointed Director of Media Relations for the National Victory Parades in Washington, D. C. and New York City, coordinating directly with White House staff and more than 650 national and international news organizations.

Subsequently, I was a plans officer on the Army Staff until May 1993. My final Army assignment was as chief of public affairs, U. S. Army Criminal Investigation Command. Just before retiring, I served as a member of the Oklahoma City Bombing Investigation Task Force, whose work resulted in the arrest and conviction of Timothy McVeigh for the bombing of the Murrah federal building in spring of 1995.

I retired in August 1995, answering my call to ordained ministry. I began classes at Vanderbilt Divinity School the same month.  I began serving full time as a United Methodist pastor in 1997. I was awarded a Master of Divinity in 1999 and was ordained an elder in full membership of the Tennessee Conference of the UMC in June 2002. I served as well for seven years as a chaplain for the Williamson County, Tenn., sheriff's department.

Since 2003, my work has been cited by The Washington Post, MSNBC, ESPN, OpinionJournal, ABC News, Commentary magazine, Time Magazine, Real Clear Politics, Real Clear Religion  Wikipedia and many other major media outlets. I authored an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on the subject of same-sex marriage entitled, "Save marriage? It's too late," which was subsequently reprinted in several religious journals. I was cited in the record of a hearing of the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary, United States Congress, dated May 13, 2004, on, "Federal Marriage Amendment: The Musgrave Amendment."

I have also written for the Knoxville News Sentinel on the security implications of Osama bin Laden's death. I was a columnist for Right Network during its brief existence.

In April 2005, as a result of my online essay, "The pope and communism’s fall," I was an interview guest on Fox News Channel's, "The O'Reilly Factor," on the topic, "Does the Vatican have a Realistic Plan to Confront Evil in Today's World?" On Sept. 2, 2013, I was an interview guest on the British Broadcasting Corporation's program, "World Have Your Say," on the topic of the then-impending American war against Syria (a follow-up post is here, "Just War and Syria Strikes").

By the grace of God I served under full-time appointment as pastor of United Methodist churches in Middle Tennessee from 1997-2020, when I retired, and I joyfully serve with the good people of the Church for the salvation of souls and the transformation of our lives and communities.

Europe's non-European future

 With the demographics of ethnic Europeans apparently at the cusp of an irreversible death spiral because 17 countries of the continent have birth rates of 1.3 or lower, here's a peek inside one of Europe's chief problems by Bruce Bawer, author of the forthcoming book, While Europe Slept : How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. Writing in the Hudson Review last fall after living in Europe for several years, Bawer observed:

Living in Europe, I gradually came to appreciate American virtues I'd always taken for granted, or even disdained - among them a lack of self-seriousness, a grasp of irony and self-deprecating humor, a friendly informality with strangers, an unashamed curiosity, an openness to new experience, an innate optimism, a willingness to think for oneself and speak one's mind and question the accepted way of doing things. (One reason why Europeans view Americans as ignorant is that when we don't know something, we are more likely to admit it freely and ask questions.) While Americans, I saw, cherished liberty, Europeans tended to take it for granted or dismiss it as a naive or cynical, and somehow vaguely embarrassing, American fiction. I found myself toting up words that begin with i: individuality, imagination, initiative, inventiveness, independence of mind. Americans, it seemed to me, were more likely to think for themselves and trust their own judgments, and less easily cowed by authorities or bossed around by "experts;" they believed in their own ability to make things better. No wonder so many smart, ambitious young Europeans look for inspiration to the United States, which has a dynamism their own countries lack, and which communicates the idea that life can be an adventure and that there's important, exciting work to be done. Reagan-style "morning in America" clichés may make some of us wince, but they reflect something genuine and valuable in the American air. Europeans may or may not have more of a sense of history than Americans do (in fact, in a recent study comparing students' historical knowledge, the results were pretty much a draw), but America has something else that matters - a belief in the future.

Europe is the very front line against Islamism. Whatever one might say about Osama bin Laden, et. al., to say that they lack faith in the future isn't it. They are convinced to the marrow of their bones that Islam is mere years away from dominating not just Europe, but the entire planet. Will Europeans succumb without a fight? Well, their governments probably will, but that the people will is not at all certain. After the brutal, Islamist murder of Theo van Gogh in Holland, some ethnic Dutch torched some mosques, which was decried as a terrible thing at the time. But after Muslims across the world  went on rampage because of the Muhammed  cartoons published in a Danish newspaper, who can say that violence is actually not a valid response to being made angry?

In The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?, Tony Blankley speculates that the coming years in Europe may be bloody as ethnic Europeans (my term, not his) realize that their governments are determined to surrender to the Islamists. The masses, he says, may suddenly decide not to stand for it and the prospect of open battles in the streets of major cities may become reality. Or maybe not, Blankley says, because it's far from certain as well that the masses of Europe have that kind of energy or fight left in them. But even if they do, they will still lose. The death spiral is real, not speculative. Unless the European masses decide to accept 20 years of a dramatically lower economy so that women can leave the work force to have 2-3 babies apiece, Europe, as a European continent, is done for. What do you think the odds of the masses deciding to do that are?

The Battle of the Atlantic and counterinsurgency

Once in awhile it's fun to do some thought experimentation. I mentioned a few days ago that I was mulling over the similarities between the counterinsurgency problem in Iraq and how the American, Canadian and British navies finally defeated the U-boat threat in World War II.

The United States declared war on Japan on Dec. 8, 1941. Germany and Italy, already allied with Japan, declared war on the United States on Dec. 11. The Roosevelt administration had been expecting it since the Pearl Harbor attack. In response, President Franklin Roosevelt sent a message to the Congress the same day requesting "the Congress to recognize a state of war between the United States and Germany, and between the United States and Italy." Congress complied before ending that day's session.

Defeating Germany required transferring mountains of war materiel and millions of soldiers from the US to the European theater, mainly to North Africa and the British Isles. Since aircraft of the day were entirely unable to move the troops or materiel, the US embarked on a massive shipbuilding program for cargo and commandeered passenger liners such as Queen Mary to move troops.

Hitler's military knew, of course, that the US would have to reach Europe by sea. Germany's plan was to repeat what they had almost pulled off during World War I: use submarines (German Unterseebooten, hence "U-boats") to interdict the sea lanes and defeat the Allies by sinking their ships. The Germans also sailed surface raiders such as Bismarck and Graf Spee early in the war, but they were sunk by the Royal Navy sank or neutralized. The Luftwaffe, using Kondor attack bombers, was a deadly and successful enemy when ships reached the Western Approaches to the Isles, but the planes did not pose the enduring threat that U-boats did.

Winston Churchill wrote after the war of the Battle of the Atlantic, as the antisubmarine warfare was called, "The only thing that ever frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril." Not only was by sea the only way to move American men and materiel to Britain, Britain's very survival depended on seaborne importation of foodstuffs and raw materials, principally from America.

The German U-boat flotilla was far from prepared for the task thrust upon it at the war's open in September 1939. The admiral commanding the U-boat fleet, Karl Doenitz, had counted on having 300 subs under his command by the time war began. But Germany possessed fewer than 100 submarines when the war opened; of these only 58 were usable for combat patrols. Production accelerated. By May 1942, Germany had more than 300 U-boats with about 100 on operational patrol on any given day, though not all in the Atlantic.

On Sept. 3, 1939, the U-boat U-30 sank the liner Athenia northwest of Ireland. Historians consider the event the beginning of the Battle of the Atlantic. The sinking, however, was an error by U-30's commander, who mistook the liner for a armed merchant cruiser. The British Admiralty responded by ordering full convoy operations be put into effect.

Convoys, large numbers of ship sailing together under a unified command, had been devised in World War I as a defense against U-boats. Their advantage lay solely in the fact that the Atlantic is so enormous that a convoy even of dozens of ships was not really easier for a U-boat to find than a single vessel. Besides, there would never be enough destroyers and corvettes to escort single vessels. Convoys grew in size as the war continued. Only very fast ships such as Queen Mary were be permitted to cross the sea alone, on the supposition that they were fast enough to outrun any U-boat that might detect them (which proved correct).

The first month of the war, September 1939, was a grim foretaste of what was to come. The allies lost 21 ships totaling more than 110,000 tons, including one fleet carrier, while sinking only two U-boats. It would only get worse.

The sea proved to be a fantastic place to hide for U-boat commanders. If whole convoys were difficult to find, think how greater the U-boat hunting problem was for Allied commanders. Usually the only way convoys learned a U-boat was nearby was when their ships started blowing up and sinking.

In June 1940 Admiral Doenitz devised a new tactic for his boats. He called it Rudeltaktik , or "pack tactic," which the Allies called "wolfpack." Doentiz ordered submarines to patrol in lines to look for convoys. When a U-boat discovered a convoy, it would shadow it and report its speed and heading to "Admiral U-boats," as Doenitz's headquarters was known to U-boat crews.

Admiral U-boats would then signal boats in reasonable vicinity to converge on the convoy and make a coordinated attack. This tactical innovation devastated convoys. Wolfpacks varied in size from only a few U-boats to 20 and sometimes more. Convoy ONS-5, for example, was attacked by a wolfpack that finally amounted to 55 U-boats in April 1943 in a convoy battle lasting two weeks. ONS-5 lost 13 ships totaling just under 62,000 tons. The month before, 43 U-boats sank 93,500 tons of convoy HX-229. These convoy battles were not hit and run affairs. They usually lasted many days, often more than a week.

By June 1942 Allied shipping losses were of grave concern to the British and Americans. The Allies were in a race with Germany to build ships and fill them with materiel faster than the U-boats could sink them. With the advent of the Liberty ship, American shipyards could win that race, barely, and would start to do so in July. But Allied commanders realized that construction was not the way to win the battle. The human toll of ships' crews could not be sustained. They had to develop much more effective antisubmarine weapons and tactics. By the end of 1942 the Allies had lost more than 5.5 million tons of shipping since war's beginning. In January 1943 at the Casablanca Conference, Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt agreed that defeating the U-boats had to take top priority.

Even so, the best days for U-boats were yet to come, at least in the minds of U-boat commanders. By March 1943 the U-boat fleet numbered 400 submarines, of which more than 250 were patroled various fronts. (Hitler had ordered many boats stripped from Atlantic patrol to protect Norway and the Mediterranean theater used many U-boats, too.) One of the few U-boat captains to survive the war, Herbert Werner, wrote in his book Iron Coffins, that,

This March of 1943 was the greatest month of U-boat history; our boats had sent to the bottom almost 1 million tons of Allied shipping.

But there were ominous signs, Werner wrote.

[O]ur triumphs were now being wrenched from the enemy with a difficulty unknown in previous years. As the size of convoys increased, the coordination of British and American naval units had sharply improved their convoy defenses. Escort vessels of a new type, the swift and highly maneuverable corvettes, increased the hazards of U-boat attacks. Most ominous of all was the plague of enemy aircraft. More and more planes were flying ever farther to sea and bombing out boats on the homeward run or outward bound with ever-deadlier accuracy. ...

As I saw it, the whole war now hinged on our U-boat effort in the Atlantic.

The U-boats' glories of March 1943 turned to their abattoir in May, when the Allies' ASW efforts finally came together. From that month to the end of the war the Allies always held the initiative and defeated the U-boats with increasing effectiveness.

In May Werner, executive officer of U-230, went back into the Atlantic.

May 5. ... Riedel handed me the deciphered message in silence: DESTROYER. ATTACKED. SINKING. U-638. This report was the last act of U-638. Nothing was heard of her again.

Two hours later, a fresh distress signal was hastily decoded; ATTACKED BY DESTROYERS. DEPTH CHARGES. LEAVE BOAT. U-531. ...

May 6. ... another signal ... ATTACKED BY CORVETTE. SINKING. U-438. ...

Now another was intercepted: AIRCRAFT. BOMBS. RAMMED BY DESTROYER. SINKING. U-125.

So it went for the rest of the month. Before the end of May the Allies had sunk 40 U-boats (Werner says 43), more than any month of the war and twice the rate at which Germany was building them. Shocked, Admiral Doenitz ordered a standdown of U-boat operations during June to gain time to fit his subs with new equipment, none of which proved efficacious in turning the tide. By the end of the year, wrote Werner, the sea supremacy that U-boats had enjoyed for two and one-half years had been wrenched away by the Allies in only seven months.

What turned the tide?

There were a number of factors that enabled the Allies to defeat Germany's submarine threat. They all boiled down to locating the U-boats and relentlessly attacking them until they sank. The main keys of victory were:

1. Signals intelligence, especially the codebreakers at England's Bletchley Park who cracked the German naval Enigma codes as part of the Ultra operation. This feat enabled the Allies to read most of Admiral U-boats' instructions to its boats. This success was not certain or uniform, though; there was a 10-month gap in Ultra intelligence when the Germans made a major change of encoding. (The Germans also cracked many of the convoy codes the Allies used.)

2. Improved technology in submarine detection. When surfaced, U-boats used a radar-detection device called Metox to detect the 1.5-meter-wavelength radar of Allied aircraft, their severest threat. Metox never worked perfectly, and initially unknown to the Germans Metox itself was an emitter. Allied scientists fitted bombers with gear that detected Metox transmissions, enabling the aircraft crew to guide themselves to the U-boat. Many U-boats were lost that way. Finally Admiral U-boats ordered all Metox use discontinued.

Then the Allies introduced for aircraft centimetric radar, which enabled bomber crews to detect U-boats from much longer ranges than before, certainly from beyond visual range. Accurate radar also meant that nighttime no longer offered a cloak for U-boats to run on the surface using diesel power while recharge the batteries used to propel the U-boats underwater. Extremely powerful lights called Leigh lights were fitted to the bombers as well to illuminate the U-boat on the bomb run. Finally, U-boats began sailing underwater all night and on the surface during the day. It was but a temporary reprieve.

Then there was the "huff-duff," the nickname for high-frequency, direction-finding radio receivers. The widespread use of these very accurate devices enabled Allied operators to locate the source of German transmissions practically in real time. Herbert Werner wrote of a day when his U-boat and one other were refueled at sea by a supply submarine. After they parted company, the supply sub's captain stupidly radioed a status report to Admiral U-boats. The supply sub was sunk six hours later.

3. ASW weapons technology continued to improve. The old "oil barrel" style depth charges used early in the war gave way to new types such as the hedgehog that enabled near-360-degree dispersion around the launching vessel, and in large numbers launched at one time. Fuzing was changed so that instead of detonating at a preset depth, calculated (guessed) by ASW officers, the depth charge exploded only when it hit the U-boat. This feature kept the surface ships' sonar clear of explosion-generated noises, enabling continuous tracking of the U-boat and removing doubt about whether it had been hit. Sonar itself continued to improve over the course of the war.

The mass introduction of corvettes, mentioned by Werner, played a major role. Corvettes were ASW vessels of less than 1,000 tons displacement. They were miserable rides for their crews but terrible foes of U-boats.

4. "Intentional lethality." For at least the first couple of years of the war, British warships attacked U-boats more to neutralize their threat rather than actually destroy them. Finally they awakened to the need to sink the U-boats rather than simply drive them away from the convoy. Some units of warships assigned to convoys were ordered to locate attacking U-boats and pound them until they sank; different hunter-killer teams would relieve one another above the U-boat concerned. Werner reported that his U-boat barely survived a relentless depth-charge attack of more than 36 hours and more than 300 counted depth charges. Most U-boats did not survive such attacks.

Submariners of every nation of the war agreed that their worst nemesis was aircraft. From the time a lookout on a surfaced submarine spotted an enemy plane until the plane attacked was three minutes or less, sometimes less than a minute. Werner reported that in one such attack his U-boat crash dived to escape but the plane's bombs literally blew the U-boat above the ocean's surface. It fell back into the water where it foundered helplessly. The plane flew away, though, apparently out of weapons.

In 1940 (IIRC) Churchill ordered catapults to be fitted to some merchant ships to sling fighters off when a surfaced U-boat was detected. There was no way for the plane to land and more than a few pilots were lost ditching near their mother ship. It was a dunderheaded idea but a measure of British desperation against the U-boats. Finally, the Allies started sending escort carriers along with convoys, small carriers that could launch, recover and refit airplanes. This idea worked so well that eventually six fleet-carrier battle groups were assigned to cross-Atlantic duty.

The four-engine, B-24 "Liberator" bomber was a great success in ASW. It was speedy for a bomber and very long ranged. By 1944 all the major Atlantic convoy routes were wholly ranged by Liberators as new bases were developed. Werner wrote that the B-24 was probably the most feared of all Allied aircraft.

All these things worked together to enable Allied airmen and sailors to do one thing: find and kill submarines. Although there were never any precision-guided munitions developed in the war for ASW, the net effect of the technology, weapons , doctrine and training very much rendered Allied ASW efforts a precision-driven affair.

What has all this to do with counter-insurgency warfare? Keep reading!

Part Two

Here I'd like to explore what similarities, if any, the present insurgency in Iraq bears to the U-boat campaign of WW2, and what lessons, of any, can be learned for counterinsurgency from the tactics the Allied navies in winning the U-boat war.

Tacticians have written for many years of the similarities between war at sea and land war in deserts. Apart from the basic flatness of terrain, though, the counterinsurgency fight (COIN) in Iraq can't bear the kind of direct comparison that conventional combat in the desert between conventional formations can uphold. Instead, COIN is a series of small-unit actions for which intelligence and precision are paramount. As well, psychological operations play a role in COIN that was had no part in antisubmarine warfare (ASW) of World War 2.

Nonetheless, I think there are similarities between the insurgency and the U-boats. Like the U-boats, the insurgents are outnumbered by their foes. Even using wolfpack tactics, U-boats only rarely achieved numerical parity against warships. However, if the insurgents and U-boats alike were outnumbered by an armed opposition, they also always are (were) outnumbered by possible targets. During convoy ops, escort commanders found it was impossible to guard all approaches to the convoy at the same time. Similarly, allied commanders in Iraq cannot guard every possible target against insurgent attack, especially against suicide-bomber attack.

U-boats were able to escape detection, in the main, by submerging under the sea. Insurgents also attempt to "submerge" into the population by dress, language and using ordinary means of transportation. This tactic, of course, is by no means original to the Iraqi insurgents. Mao tse-Tung famously wrote that guerrillas are fish that swim in a sea of people, so even my sea-war metaphor for insurgency is not original with me.

I recounted I part one how intelligence, technology and direct attack techniques formed the troika that turned the tide in the U-boat war. I say as well that these three items are key in counterinsurgency. But before addressing them, it would be well to point out some big differences between ASW and COIN.

In the Battle of the Atlantic there was obviously no concern for collateral damage. The only victims were fish, and their fate was of course never considered. So there was a liberty for attacking U-boats that is not found for attacking insurgents in Iraq.

The target of ASW efforts was the U-boat itself, the naval vessel. It was the destruction of the submarine that Allied ships sought, not the destruction of the U-boat's crew, per se. At least 75 percent of German U-boat personnel died in the war; of the U-boat crews who actually saw battle the percentage is certainly more than 90 percent, according to former U-boat captain Herbert Werner. But killing sailors was not itself the object for it was the U-boat machine that was lethal to Allied vessels and so the U-boat machines themselves that were the real targets. Of course, a U-boat imploding at 250 meters or more beneath the sea carried the crew to the bottom with it and U-boats that, mortally wounded, managed to surface were almost always ferociously attacked. Nonetheless, it was not lack of crews that finally ended the capability of the German navy to wage undersea war after 1943, it was the lack of submarines.

That being said, the destruction of crews did matter in one important regard. Naval historians have pointed out that U-boat captains were like fighter pilots in that a small number of both accounted for the majority of kills. The US Navy and US Army Air Corps made a habit of bringing high-scoring aces home to teach new pilots and offer their expertise developing new aircraft; America's ace of aces, Richard Bong, 40 aerial victories, died test flying a new aircraft. In all air forces, aces who scored five or more victories accounted for perhaps 80 percent of kills. The Luftwaffe's relative percentage was even higher because it did not withdraw high scorers from battle to train new pilots. The number one fighter ace of all time, in any air force, was Luftwaffe pilot Erich Hartmann, who had 352 confirmed kills against the Soviet air force. The Soviets finally adopted a tactic of identifying skilled aces and forming their tactics around individual ace's abilities. Sometimes whole squadrons of fighters would be assigned to support the attack of a single Soviet ace!

Herbert Werner recounted in his book of the U-boat war, Iron Coffins, that when the high-scoring U-boat commanders such as Korvettenkapitän Gunther Prien began to be lost, the U-boat flotilla's scores of Allied tonnage sunk began a steep decline, even before U-boat losses themselves mounted.

The Allied navies made no concerted effort specifically to find U-boats commanded by top commanders, even though the top commanders were easily identified along with their U-boats. U-boats were, for the Allies, always targets of opportunity and they were attacked with fury wherever they appeared.

So to the troika of intelligence, technology and attack should be added the deaths of key enemy commanders.

Because locating insurgents and U-boats alike is so difficult, intelligence always plays the predominant role. Neither insurgents nor U-boats could be targeted unless Allied operators knew where they were. For this purpose, signals intelligence plays the leading role. However, insurgents enjoy an advantage that U-boats never did: the ability to hand carry orders or information to one another. U-boats could receive orders only via radio but insurgents can, and do, send paper orders to one another via courier.

Yet that permits a tactic that as far as I know was never employed by Allied naval commanders in the U-boat war, even though it could have been attempted: the insertion of bogus communications. I don't know whether Coalition intelligence operatives are trying to cause disarray and distrust among insurgents by inserting "chaff" into their communications chain, such as false orders, bogus missives or poison-pen letters; I would guess they are.

There is another huge advantage that the Coalition has over WW2 ASW: the fish would never fink out a U-boat, but they do fink out insurgents. Remember, according to Mao the fish are the people, on whose support (voluntary or not) the insurgents depend. But the people of Iraq are finking out al Qaeda insurgents with a frequency that has been rising across the country for a year, and finking our even Iraqi insurgents with increasing vigor as well. Iraq the Model reports, for example,

The Anbar tribes’ campaign to rid the province of Zarqawi’s terror organization, al-Qaeda in Iraq is in its 2nd day and so far, 270 Arab and foreign intruders have been arrested.
[…]
Usama Jad’aan, the leader of Karabila tribes in Qaim told al-Hayat that “the operation will continue to eliminate terror elements according to a quality plan” and added “270 Arab and foreign intruders have been arrested, in addition to some Iraqis who were providing them shelter”.

Sheikh Jad’aan added “the operation is conducted in coordination between the tribes and the minister of defense Sa’doun al-Dulaimi and since we arrested hundreds of terrorists, I don’t expect the operation to take a lot of time”.

One effect of this increasing amount and quality of intelligence is that the insurgents are suffering key losses they cannot replace, just as the U-boat flotilla did. Unlike during the U-boat war, Coalition forces are specifically targeting key enemy personnel. Every time a senior terrorist leader is captured or killed, or a skilled combat leader or bomb maker is removed from action, the chances of future successes fall more than mere numbers would indicate. More than any other kind of land warfare, insurgency is personality driven. America can replace a division commander much easier than al Qaeda can replace a first-rate super-cell commander.

Part of the Allied intelligence effort in the Atlantic was what we would today call combat information. Reconnaissance and target detection were essential to finding U-boats and lining them up for attack. The B-24 Liberator bomber was the manned equivalent of today's Predator armed UAV; the Liberator with a crew of 10 carried the electronic means to find U-boats and the weapons to attack them. In Iraq, when intelligence identifies locations of likely terrorist activity we have the technical means to surveil the area day or night for days on end and attack terrorists in real time. Furthermore, "battle hand off" with fully integrated electronics among different platforms is a reality, just as Allied ASW squadrons seamlessly relived one another when a U-boat was located and attacked.

"Intentional lethality." One of the ways the Allies turned the tide in the U-boat war was the command decision to attack U-boats ruthlessly with the aim of sinking them, however long it took. Beforehand, warships principally intended to spoil the U-boats' attacks against convoys. Likewise, once terrorists and their cells are identified they must be targeted with the idea of removing them from battle permanently. This doesn't always mean lethal attack; capture is just as good and often better from an intelligence perspective. It does mean, though, the ruthless pursuit against insurgents should be a central tactic.

However, unlike the U-boats, there is more than one variety of insurgent. Al Qaeda foreigners are the deadliest and most active, but also the smallest group. Baathist and Sunni insurgents form the majority of the insurgency and this fact requires some finesse. Politics also complicates COIN in Iraq in ways that did not pertain in the U-boat war. Although the sovereign Iraqi government is willing to kill Iraqi insurgents when and where necessary, it would much prefer them to abandon the insurgency. Unlike the U-boat war, there is present in the COIN fight in Iraq elements of civil war. This is a major difference that shapes the battle in ways that should not be underestimated.


The same troika, intelligence, technology and attack, that served Allied naval commanders so well against U-boats in World War II is still at work in fighting insurgents in Iraq. To it we should add the intentional targeting of key insurgent commanders. Another advantage COIN commanders have over their ASW predecessors is that the sea was neutral in the Battle of the Atlantic, but the sea of people in insurgencies is not neutral. The people always take one side or the other. Today the insurgents are having to cope with an increasingly hostile sea in which to submerge for protection.

Update: I received an email from an officer of the joint staff at the Pentagon that this article (also published elsewhere) is "being circulated" there. Much appreciated.

Death notifications

Reposted from the original site, which is no longer online

It always happens - right after I announce one of my rare recesses from blogging I find a topic so compelling that I break my own vow to take time off writing.

In this case it is the combined media project between Time magazine and the Rocky Mountain News. They shared coverage of the procedures of US Marine Maj. Steve Beck, on whose shoulders falls the sad duty to notify families of Marines over a few western states that their loved one is dead.

Time's version is almost exclusively a photo-essay with minimal narrative while RMN's is a fairly detailed written narrative with extensive photo-illustration. Both are gripping, compelling pieces that should be read by every American.

They took me back to Dec. 2 when 10 Marines were killed and 11 wounded by bombs in Fallujah, Iraq. My son was based in Fallujah. Would I have heard quickly that he was one of the ten? I didn't know. I didn't know how long notification takes. 

Now I know how long: not long. There is a frenzy of necessary confirmation activity by Headquarters, Marine Corps and the headquarters of the officer who make the notification, then the two-Marine notification team drives to the next-of-kin's home and makes the notification. If the NOK isn't there they wait. Out west, where Maj. Beck is assigned, the longest delay is often the time it takes for him to travel to the NOK's home, which may be one or two states away.

The stories also took me back to the one time that duty fell to me. It was peacetime, the early 1980s - before cell phones or GPS to navigate. I was a first lieutenant assigned to Fort jackson, SC. My name reached the top of the installation-level duty roster just in time to be tabbed for NOK notification. I reported to the post's casualty office for instructions. There I was assigned a government van and driver and given a written packet of information about the deceased soldier, the address of his NOK, a map and a government credit card.

My instructions were simple: "Memorize this paragraph. You are required to state it verbatim, without notes, to the next of kin. That's all you have to do." Unlike the Marines, the Army assigns different officers to notification duty and survivor-assistance duty. An assistance officer (actually a senior NCO) would be assigned to help the dead soldier's parents with the funeral and settling his affairs; the soldier had not been married.

I got one final instruction before departing: "You must make the notification between 0600 and 2200. Use the credit card for any expenses related to this mission, including food and lodging if you need it. Don't come back until you have made the notification."

The dead soldier had been a member of the 82d Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, NC. He had died in an auto accident (fact was, he was DWI, but relating that fact was not my problem). The civilian casualty staffer at post HQ told me that tthe soldier's father already knew his son was dead (via unofficial grapevine channel from his unit), but that it didn't matter: the Army always sent an officer, in Class A uniform, to deliver the official word. Unlike Maj. Beck, I was alone; my driver was a driver, that's all. I was also distinctly forbidden to call the NOK by phone, even to ask directions.

We set out for rural northwest South Carolina. The NOK's address was an RFD box from a very small farming town. Because it was wintertime darkness had long fallen when we arrived. Absolutely everything was closed for the day; there wasn't even a place to get a cup of coffee.

The van needed fuel and we did manage to find the town's one gas station. It was, thank heavens, still open. I asked the attendant where Mr. "Smith" lived and showed him the address without telling him why I wanted it. The man shook his head and said he'd never heard of "Smith," but that the RFD route started along a certain state route heading out of town, so maybe if we began at the first mailbox and kept going, we'd find it.

I remember clearly the RFD box number: 479. What a plan.

Refueled, I bought some snack crackers and a coke for my driver and myself and we drove off to find the state route. Much to our surprise, once we left the town the first mailbox was number 100. (Apparently, all the RFD numbers were three digits.) But the next was, yes, "101." We kept going.

Believe it or not we followed the mailboxes all the way to number 479. There were many stops, wrong turns and restarts as we tried to stay on the state road; intersections were often not marked which road was which. Many mailboxes also were not marked at all and we simply proceeded on faith. Sometimes we drove a long way without seeing any box, then there would be one.

After almost four hours of navigating in the darkness, a mailbox marked 479 in simple handwritten, white paint ghosted into the headlights. It was 2145 hours. The house was set off the road about 40 yards. Bright lights shone through every window from interior lights. We turned in and parked near the front stoop. When I opened the door my ears were assailed by soul music coming from the house, very loud. I reached into the back seat and got out my Class A blouse (coat for you civilians) and saucer cap.

"Good luck, sir," my driver called as I turned to go to the house.

"Thanks." I walked up the wooden, rickety steps to the front door. I paused and ran my hands along my blouse to make sure it was straight and checked my cap. Then I knocked on the door loudly so it would be heard over the music. Momentarily a middle-aged (or so he seemed, hard farm labor can age you quickly) man opened the door. He was bleary-eyed and I immediately saw why: there were several open bottles of liquor on side tables behind him.

"Sir," I said to him, "I am Lieutenant Sensing from Fort Jackson. I am told this is the home of Mr. 'George Smith.' If so, I would appreciate very much speaking with him."

The man motioned for me to come in and said, "That's me." I stepped inside two steps, removing my saucer cap as I did. A young man in the room yelled at a boy to turn off the music, who quickly complied. I recall that there were a couple of women in the room, too.

"Mr. Smith," I said very formally, "on behalf the secretary of the Army, I extend to you and your family my sympathy in the death of your son, Sergeant 'Jim Smith.'" I don't remember after so many years the paragraph I had memorized then. I know I said that another officer would contact them about making arrangements and settling their son's affairs, and that he would be able to answer all their questions.

Uttering those words was 100 percent of my duties. I finished and Mr. "Smith" mumbled, "Thank you." He offered his right hand. I shook it and said, "I really am very sorry for your loss, sir." We dropped hands and briefly looked at one another face to face: he of a weatherbeaten black face, an uneducated farm laborer who had toiled in tobacco or bean fields all his life, who had worked dawn to dark to see his eldest son graduate from high school and become a soldier with a bright future. Then his son got killed one day on a rural road in North Carolina. And the next day I, a lily-white young officer, walked into his home from the night's darkness. With no personal connection to his son, I stood in his sharecropper's home purely by random chance of a duty roster to tell him that the secretary of the entire US Army mourned his young son's death.

Mr. "Smith" turned away and so did I. There was nothing else for either of us to say to one another. I stepped out the door and walked back to the van, placed my blouse and cap in the back and slid into the front seat. The driver asked, "Home, sir?"

"Yes," I answered, "if you're okay to make the drive. We'll stop for supper on the interstate."

"Roger that, sir." He turned the van toward the road where mailboxes were, or were not, marked with plain white numbers that haunted the roadside at 2200 hours, local time.

Before we reached the pavement, the former home of the dead soldier was reverberating again with loud soul music, booming through the darkness.

Remember Pearl Harbor

Last May (2005) my wife and I traveled to Oahu. On Memorial Day Sunday we visited the USS Arizona Memorial. The ship was sunk on Dec. 7, 1941, along with many others.

This is the original ship's bell of USS Arizona, recovered from the sunken vessel and now on display at the entrance to the National Park Service pavilion across the channel from the memorial, below.

Looking from the visitor's pavilion to the site of the sunken Arizona, topped abeam by the memorial.

A forward turret barbette of USS Arizona projects upward from the water. Across the channel is the hospital ship Mercy. Oil still seeps from the battleship; the oil spots have been nicknamed "black tears of the Arizona." A half million gallons of fuel oil are estimated to have sunk within the vessel. At the present rate of seeping a quart per day it will be centuries before it all leaks out. The oil bunkers seem to be in good enough condition not to spring large leaks for decades, minimally, and probably a few hundred years.

Many of the Pearl Harbor dead are buried in the National Military Cemetery of the Pacific, nicknamed the Punchbowl.

Here is an American movie of the explosion of Arizona, taken by a sailor aboard USS Solace. 

This is the only color photo of Arizona's agony that I have ever seen.

Arizona was not refloated after the attack, as most sunken ships were, because the Navy knew it was destroyed, not merely damaged. They also estimated that 900 - 1,000 sailors went down with the ship, most of whom still lie entombed within it. Arizona's site was transferred to the custody of the National Park Service 1980, although the US Navy retains title to the ship's remains. The San Diego Union has an outstanding article about the site and the efforts to preserve it.

Anyone living today who can document that he was assigned to the ship on Dec. 7 may be entombed within it. About 20 men have been entombed with their shipmates since the Park Service began allowing them. As I recall, the remains must be cremated because there is no way to manipulate a coffin under the water and entombments take place only on Dec. 7, which is certainly appropriate.

Update: See the National Park Service web site about the Memorial. Keep paging down and read the in-depth report on what happened to USS Oklahoma, too, which IIRC was berthed alongside Arizona. The site has galleries of photos, also. 

Also, Eric Scheie has a link-rich post that is worth the time.

Cooking the war

I have deliberately stayed apart from the arguments about whether President Bush cooked intelligence in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. The reason is that I pledged myself after the last election that I would not do partisan politics on this site. I have not kept this promise completely, but I've come pretty close.

But enough is enough. My son is fighting in Iraq. He called via satellite phone yesterday and related taking part this week in a very large infantry, armor and air power raid against terrorists in the Fallujah vicinity. Prominent Democrats are accusing President Bush of lying to them and the American people, of cooking the intelligence about Iraq and claiming that their votes to authorize war were mistakes. They have crossed a line that I cannot in conscience ignore.

The question of the accuracy of the intelligence regarding Saddam and WMDs is certainly legitimate. Questions about the conduct of war are legitimate - I have not been kind at times to the administration about that, especially about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's deliberate discarding of studies by the Army Staff before the war that the prospective invasion force was to small by about half to secure the country effectively when organized resistance ceased.

I don't have a problem with inquiring whether the intelligence was "bent" by the administration. But it's been done. The Senate Intelligence Committee addressed at this issue in its "Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq."

The Committee found no evidence that the IC's [Intelligence Community's] mischaracterization or exaggeration of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities was the result of political pressure.

The Committee detailed the many failures of the intelligence community, but there was no misuse of the intelligence assessments by the administration.

In fact, the president acted in the only responsible manner possible in light of the assessments he was given. These assessments included the unanimous conclusions by the intelligence services of England, France and Germany that Iraq was well on the way to becoming a nuclear power. The German assessment was actually bleaker than any of the other three powers.

Let's go back to Jan. 27, 2003, when Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix delivered his report to the UN as required and said the following:

Resolution 687 in 1991, like the subsequent resolutions I shall refer to, required cooperation by Iraq, but such was often withheld or given grudgingly. ...

... Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace. ...

As we know, the twin operation declare and verify, which was prescribed in Resolution 687, too often turned into a game of hide and seek. ...

While Iraq claims, with little evidence, that it destroyed all biological weapons unilaterally in 1991, it is certain that UNSCOM destroyed large biological weapons production facilities in 1996. The large nuclear infrastructure was destroyed and the fissionable material was removed from Iraq by the IAEA. ...

For nearly three years [since Dec. 1999] , Iraq refused to accept any inspections by UNMOVIC. ...

Resolution 1441 was adopted on 8 November last year and emphatically reaffirmed the demand on Iraq to cooperate. It required this cooperation to be immediate, unconditional and active. ...

[Blix then spent a few paragraphs reporting that ther inspection regime cionsisted of two parts, process and access. Access, he said, was satisfactory with only a few problems. But he recounted a number of times the inspectors were harrassed. Then:]

Paragraph 9 of Resolution 1441 states that this cooperation shall be "active." It is not enough to open doors. Inspection is not a game of catch as catch can. Rather, as I noted, it is a process of verification for the purpose of creating confidence. It is not built upon the premise of trust. Rather, it is designed to lead to trust, if there is both openness to the inspectors and action to present them with items to destroy or credible evidence about the absence of any such items. ...

On 7th of December 2002, Iraq submitted a declaration of some 12,000 pages in response to paragraph 3 of Resolution 1441 ...

These reports [that is, two reports by Blix's commission] do not contend that weapons of mass destruction remain in Iraq, but nor do they exclude that possibility. They point to a lack of evidence and inconsistencies which raise question marks which must be straightened out if weapons dossiers are to be closed and confidence is to arise. They deserve to be taken seriously by Iraq, rather than being brushed aside as evil machinations of UNSCOM.

Regrettably, the 12,000-page declaration, most of which is a reprint of earlier documents, does not seem to contain any new evidence that will eliminate the questions or reduce their number. ...

The nerve agent VX is one of the most toxic ever developed. Iraq has declared that it only produced VX on a pilot scale, just a few tons, and that the quality was poor and the product unstable. ...

UNMOVIC, however, has information that conflicts with this account. ...

There are also indications that the agent was weaponized. In addition, there are questions to be answered concerning the fate of the VX precursor chemicals, which Iraq states were lost during bombing in the Gulf War or were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq. ...

The [Iraqi air force] document indicates that 13,000 chemical bombs were dropped by the Iraqi air force between 1983 and 1998, while Iraq has declared that 19,500 bombs were consumed during this period. Thus, there is a discrepancy of 6,500 bombs. The amount of chemical agent in these bombs would be in the order of about 1,000 tons. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must assume that these quantities are now unaccounted for.

The discovery of a number of 122 mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at the storage depot, 170 kilometers southwest of Baghdad, was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved here in the past few years at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. The investigation of these rockets is still proceeding.

Iraq states that they were overlooked from 1991 from a batch of some 2,000 that were stored there during the Gulf War. This could be the case. They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve, but rather points to the issue of several thousand of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for. ...

I might further mention that inspectors have found at another site a laboratory quantity of ... a mustard [gas] precursor. ...

I turn to biological weapons. I mention the issue of anthrax to the council on previous occasions, and I come back to it as it is an important one. Iraq has declared that it produced about 8,500 liters of this biological warfare agent, which it states it unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991.

Iraq has provided little evidence for this production and no convincing evidence for its destruction.

There are strong indications that Iraq produced more anthrax than it declared and that at least some of this was retained over the declared destruction date. It might still exist. ...

As I reported to the council on the 19th of December last year, Iraq did not declare a significant quantity, some 650 kilos, of bacterial growth media, which was acknowledged as reported in Iraq's submission to the Amorim panel in February 1999. As a part of its 7 December 2002 declaration Iraq resubmitted the Amorim panel document but the table showing this particular import of media was not included. The absence of this table would appear to be deliberate, as the pages of the resubmitted document were renumbered.

In the letter of 24th of January this year to the president of the Security Council, Iraq's foreign minister stated that, I quote, "All imported quantities of growth media were declared." This is not evidence. I note that the quantity of media involved would suffice to produce, for example, about 5,000 liters of concentrated anthrax. ...

Our Iraqi counterparts are fond of saying that there are no proscribed items and if no evidence is presented to the contrary, they should have the benefit of the doubt; be presumed innocent.

UNMOVIC, for its part, is not presuming that there are proscribed items and activities in Iraq. But nor is it, or I think anyone else, after the inspections between 1991 and '98 presuming the opposite, that no such items and activities exist in Iraq. Presumptions do not solve the problem; evidence and full transparency may help. ...

This report could not possibly build confidence that Iraq was at heart a peaceful nation with no intentions of retaining or reconstituting mass-destructive weapons programs. Quite the opposite, the report reasonably led to concluding that Iraq was determined to do exactly the opposite. Furthermore, the president knew that there were real and substantive connections between Iraq and al Qaeda, even though Iraq was not linked to the 9/11 attacks. For example, Iraqi Fedayeen Saddam Lt. Col. Ahmed Hikmat Shakir:

Six days after September 11, Shakir was captured in Doha, Qatar. He had in his possession contact information for several senior al Qaeda terrorists: Zahid Sheikh Mohammed, brother of September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi who helped mix the chemicals for the first World Trade Center attack and was given safe haven upon his return to Baghdad; and Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, otherwise known as Abu Hajer al Iraqi, described by one top al Qaeda detainee as Osama bin Laden's "best friend."

Much, much more at the link. Then there's this summary by Richard Miniter. Were there constant, enduring ties between Saddam and Osama bin Laden? No. But both men hated the United States. Saddam had billions of dollars at his disposal while bin Laden has merely a few tens of millions, not enough to run an ambitious, worldwide terror program. (One al Qaeda perp captured after the bombings of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1988 complained bitterly that bin Laden wouldn't pay for a doctor's visit for the perp's pregnant wife.) As Stephen Hayes summarized, "I would certainly never argue that they were buddies. It was an on-again, off-again relationship based, as [Sen. Evan] Bayh says, on mutual exploitation and a common enemy."

One of the most powerful senators of the opposition party took to the floor of the US Senate in October 2002 and said:

I am forced to conclude, on all the evidence, that Saddam poses a significant risk.

Some argue it would be totally irrational for Saddam Hussein to initiate an attack against the mainland United States, and they believe he would not do it. But if Saddam thought he could attack America through terrorist proxies and cover the trail back to Baghdad, he might not think it so irrational.

...At the end of the day, we cannot let the security of American citizens rest in the hands of someone whose track record gives us every reason to fear that he is prepared to use the weapons he has against his enemies.

That would be Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Democrat and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who voted for the resolution authorizing war against Iraq. So can we claim, "Rockefeller lied, people died?" Then in the last week Sen. Rockefeller told interviewer Chris Wallace that he was not responsible for that vote.

I'll go even farther than merely recount the history that Democrats are deliberately distorting. Let's pretend that then-CIA director George Tenet never told the president that Saddam's possession of WMDs was "a slam dunk." Imagine that instead the country's intelligence chief had told President Bush:

(1) There was some uncertainty about what the data indicated,

(2) There was disagreement among intelligence professionals on the status of Saddam's weapons programs,

(3) The consensus of the American IC was that it was much more likely than not that Saddam possessed some quantity of chemical weapons and had active programs to preserve or reconstitute his biological-weapons program and atomic-weapon program. This report was buttressed by officials such as Ambassador Joe Wilson, sent by the CIA to Nigeria, where he found that although Iraq had not actually obtained uranium ore from the country it had made the attempt. (Oh, you didn't know that such is exactly what Wilson reported?)

Blix's report, btw, would stay the same.

Even had there been uncertainty about Iraq's weapons programs, there was ample just cause to invade Iraq and topple Saddam. In fact, Sen. Hillary Clinton said to the Senate on Oct. 10, 2002 that

But if we get a clear requirement for unfettered inspections [from the UN], I believe the authority to use force to enforce that mandate is inherent in the original 1991 UN resolution, as President Clinton recognized when he launched Operation Desert Fox in 1998.

At the request of the United Methodist News Service, I wrote an article for its release in Feb. 2003 that UMNS entitled, "Just cause exists for action against Iraq."

Saddam's regime threatens American lives and the peace of the entire Middle East. The Bush administration and the U.N. inspectors have provided conclusive proof of Iraq's programs to develop mass-destructive weapons and its extensive efforts to conceal them - efforts that continue to this day. There is solid evidence of Iraq's links to transnational terrorists. Saddam's regime is brutally repressive of its own people.

Whether the status quo with Iraq constitutes a cause for war should be debated. That the status quo should continue cannot be faithfully maintained. The question is not whether Saddam's regime must be ended and the Iraqi people freed; the question is only how. We pray that open war may yet be avoided. But to fail to act effectively to accomplish the just end is to make oneself an accomplice of injustice and ally oneself with murderous oppression. ...

A key fact is being overlooked in today's debate. The choice is not really between peace and war. We have not been at peace with Iraq since 1991, and Saddam wages war upon his own people every day. The issue is not beginning a war, but how long the present war will continue. Absent Iraqi compliance, the choice is between brief, controlled warfare imminently or the continued suffering of the Iraqi people, the continued absence of peace and almost certainly a truly terrible war later.

President Kennedy's words during the Cuban missile crisis still apply: "We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation's security... The 1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war. ... Our policy has been one of patience and restraint, but now further action is required. ... The greatest danger of all would be to do nothing."

I also explained Saddam's murderous regime against his own people (like this). I stand by every word, including what I wrote about WMDs. Why? Because it's worth remembering that the only reason we have certainty now about Saddam's WMD programs is because we invaded Iraq. As Tod Lindberg points out,

We took down the Saddam government, arrested and detained as many senior Iraqi officials and weapons scientists as we could find, questioned them thoroughly, scoured the country for biological and chemical weapons supplies, and found evidence of programs variously abandoned or discontinued or on hold.

We found, however, no clear record of when or how (or whether) Saddam had destroyed whatever stockpiles he may once have possessed. Nor did we find any evidence that Saddam had done anything more than suppress his chemical, biological or nuclear ambitions for prudential reasons. On the contrary, there was ample reason to conclude that he hoped to reconstitute such programs at the first opportunity.

Then we come to the Duelfer Report, named after the chief of the US Iraq Survey Group, led by Charles Duelfer. No actual WMDs in Iraq, said the report, and that's where people usually stop. But the report also stated that:

Saddam wanted to re-create Iraq's banned weapons programs, including nuclear weapons.

Saddam was determined to develop ballistic missiles and tactical chemical weapons when the U.N. sanctions were either lifted or corroded.

Saddam retained the industrial equipment to help restart these programs, having increased from 1996 to 2002 his military industrial spending 40-fold and his technical military research 80-fold. Even while U.N. weapons inspectors were in Iraq, Saddam's scientists were performing deadly experiments on human guinea pigs in secret labs.

To what end? The overlooked section of the Duelfer report could not have put it any clearer: "Iraq would have been able to produce mustard agents in a period of months and nerve agent in less than a year or two." While Saddam had abandoned his biological weapons programs, he retained the scientists and other technicians "needed to restart a potential biological weapons program," and he "intended to reconstitute long-range delivery systems [that is, missiles] and . . . the systems potentially were for WMD." These conclusions were based on interviews with Saddam Hussein, his closest advisers, and his weapons scientists, along with the kind of industrial equipment the Iraqi government imported and maintained.

The report also explained that materiel prohibited to Iraq by the UN was arriving in quantity "virtually no problem" from France, China, Russia, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and elsewhere.

There is no doubt - none whatsoever - that had the status quo ante bellum continued, my Feb. 2003 assessment for UMNS would have proven tragically true: had we not warred upon Saddam in 2003, we would have faced much more terrible war later.

So what to make of the current Democratic attacks upon the president? Fred Hiatt wrote in the Washington Post Nov. 14, of the "questions" about the use of the intelligence,

"Those aren't irrelevant questions," says Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). "But the more they dominate the public debate, the harder it is to sustain public support for the war."

What Lieberman doesn't say is that many Democrats would view such an outcome as an advantage. Their focus on 2002 is a way to further undercut President Bush, and Bush's war, without taking the risk of offering an alternative strategy -- to satisfy their withdraw-now constituents without being accountable for a withdraw-now position.

Many of them understand that dwindling public support could force the United States into a self-defeating position, and that defeat in Iraq would be disastrous for the United States as well as for Mahdi and his countrymen. But the taste of political blood as Bush weakens, combined with their embarrassment at having supported the war in the first place, seems to override that understanding.

Michael Barone put it this way:

The Democrats are trying to relitigate the prewar intelligence issue in the hopes of delegitimizing this administration. But in delegitimizing the administration, they also tend to delegitimize the efforts of the U.S. government, including military personnel, in Iraq and generally in the war against Islamic terrorism. To the extent they delegitimize the United States, they are hurting the cause of freedom for millions of people. I do not say the Democrats are being unpatriotic, a word they seem fixated on. So far as I am aware, no responsible Republican has charged that they are unpatriotic; John McCain refused Bob Schieffer's invitation to do so. But I do say this: The Democrats who are peddling the Big Lie of "Bush lied" are doing so either (a) deliberately to injure the cause of the United States and of freedom in the world or, as I think, (b) with reckless disregard of whether they injure the cause of the United States and of freedom in the world. What they are doing may suit their political needs, but it hurts our country.

So Barone shrank from saying "the Democrats are being unpatriotic"? I won't.

Listen, Senators Reid, Rockefeller, former Sen. Edwards, Sen. Kerry and your rhetorical allies: I have known many patriots. My son, fighting in Iraq, is a patriot. And you, sirs, are no patriots. You are actively betraying my son and his comrades. You are giving comfort to the enemy.

Have you no shame? No, I think not.

Update: Senator Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), on the other hand, remains the moral voice of sanity in his party, as he proved yesterday; read the whole thing. Which is, btw, why he gained my support in 2004's Tennessee primary. 

I would also point out that Sen. Hillary Clinton has, on this issue, stood fast with her years-long assertion that Saddam Hussein was a grave threat to the United States and that it was right to remove him from power, although she has been critical of the unpreparedness of the administration for managing Iraq after the campaign.

My address to Gold Star families

I addressed Gold Star Mothers and their families, along with many Blue Star families, at a luncheon honoring fallen U. S. Marines on Sept. 17, 2005. The luncheon was sponsored by Tennessee Marine Families, a chartered not-for-profit organization of which my wife and I are members. Many readers will recognize that I modeled five paragraphs of this address on Pericles' oration at the first funeral of Athens' fallen of the Peloponnesian War in 431 bc. You will also see an echo of Shakespeare's "Henry V" in a closing paragraph.

There was a time in our country when families such as ours did not have to form organizations to offer one another moral and material support because a large percentage of Americans served in the military. Almost every extended family had a member in uniform at one time or another and endured separation or loss like we endure. Families of deployed service members were woven throughout the fabric of every town or city and so was a support structure for them. Today the privilege of service belongs to relatively few Americans, all volunteers - except us. Our sons or daughters - we can no longer call them children - volunteered for military service and then we discovered we had been drafted into another, softer service along with them. Softer service, yes, but not easy.

We have seen our sons or daughters or spouses volunteer for war, prepare for war, go to war. We have, most of us, given an embrace that we dared not think may be the last, taken photographs secretly fearing might be final, given and received tearful kisses hoping with all our hearts that they are promises, not really good-byes. And some us sadly have not welcomed our loved ones home and are living with the grief of fears that became fate.

Without reservations the fallen Marines we memorialize today believed in ideals that formed the very soil from which America grew. They held it self-evident that human beings are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. The fundamental premise on which America was founded was that human freedom is the will of God. Over 230 years of our history this idea has become so deeply rooted in the American psyche that even Americans who profess not to believe in God nonetheless say that freedom is the natural condition of human life. Historian and retired infantry officer T. R. Fehrenbach observed that the virtues required to protect a democracy are often at odds with the virtues of democracy. So while we cherish life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as just ends of democratic freedom, our Marines put their lives at risk, surrender many personal liberties and submit to rigorous discipline that is often most unhappy.

Why did they do this? The most reasonable thing to do when battle begins is to run away, not stay and fight. Were they truly willing to die for their country? I don't think so. There's an old story that goes back probably to the Civil War of the young soldier whose commander asked him, "Are you willing to die for your country?" The young man answered, "Certainly not. But I am ready to die, unwilling." The American armed forces really have no use for someone who is willing to die. We do not seek and soon weed out anyone seeking martyrdom in battle; this is a key distinction between us and our enemy. We do not send our soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines to die even though we know some inevitably will. Our country is instead ably protected by those who accept the risk rather than seek it. But why accept it?

What civilians rarely discern but what every veteran knows is that military service, especially in battle, is steeped with the convictions of deepest emotion. In battle there is fear and courage, anger and compassion. There is resignation and determination. There is hope and despair. The chief emotion of the battlefield is an unlikely one. It is love. Across the range of mental, physical and emotional states in the desolation of combat, love abides. Our Marines chose to serve for a variety of reasons, and love of country was a big one. But when enclosed by the mournful mutter of the battlefield, patrolling deserts of Iraq or the mountains of Afghanistan, men at arms stay where flies the angry iron not for country or flag or other abstractions. In the final sense they fight for their friends. One Iraq veteran wrote,

[T]he first casualty of war is innocence. ... I've found the hard way that war is not glamorous. You quickly lose the idea of being a man fighting for his country when you have to carry your comrade who has been wounded in a gun fight. That nobility is lost quickly. ... It's not about fighting for the flag, it's about fighting for my life and fighting for my buddies' lives. These men I am lucky enough to serve with, I have become so attached to it's like they are my brothers.

A Marine major in Iraq wrote of a young corporal, a squad leader, who, during the invasion of Iraq was wounded by a grenade. This Marine refused evacuation and continued to guide his squad until he passed out from loss of blood.

Recovering at a US Army hospital in Germany, he convinced his doctors to release him, "borrowed" a camouflage uniform from a Navy corpsman, called his wife and told her that he wasn't coming home because his Marines were depending on him, and then talked his way onto an Air Force transport back to Iraq. He had the "golden ticket." He was headed home as a war hero with medals to prove it, but he just couldn't bear to let his Marines down, so he schemed and connived, as only a good Marine NCO can, and got himself back into the fight. There are those who will call that kind of response foolish. Then may God grant that I be such a fool. You may question the wisdom of that Marine, but he's the kind of man you want on your side when the chips are down.

Whether they served in peace or war, the Marines we memorialize today were not so impoverished of spirit that they were unable to surrender the pleasures of life. None of them excused themselves from hard service even though a softer lifestyle could have easily been gained. They deemed that their love of country and duty to freedom were of greater value and more important imperative, so they reckoned that if dangers must be faced, they would face them in the most desirable way, by placing their own mortal bodies "between their loved homes and the war's desolation."

They determined at the hazard of their lives to be honorable in their young adulthood, to make sure of their duty, and to leave everything else for later, if later ever came. They gave over to hope their chance of lifelong happiness and the uncertainty of final success, and in mortal danger they relied only upon themselves, their buddies and the Corps itself. They chose to risk death young as free men rather than live long as conquered ones. And when fearful lethality loomed they resolved to resist and suffer, rather than flee to save their lives; they ran away not from danger but from dishonor. On the battlefield they stood steadfast, and in an instant, at the height of their resolve, they passed away from this life but not from our lives or the destinies of generations yet to come.

Such was the end of these men's lives. We need not desire to have a more heroic spirit than they, although we do pray that others and their families suffer no such fate. The value of their spirit is poorly expressed in words. Anyone can speak to you about the advantages of such devotion, but you know about that already. Instead I hope that we can fix our eyes upon the greatness of our country and of these men's love of it and one another, and reflect that this country was established and has been preserved by men and women who knew their duty and determined to do it even at cost of life.

We should make them our examples. Their courage is our freedom and our freedom is our happiness. We whose loved ones still serve must not weigh too hard on the perils of war. We accept their love of country as our assurance and their service as our blessing. So it is comfort rather than pity I have to offer you, the families of the fallen. There are numberless chances to which lives of men and women are subjected: none of us here is promised even to see our own homes again today or ever.

These Marines' service ended in their honorable deaths and your honorable sorrow. Their passing is truly sad, for which you rightly mourn - but their deaths were not tragic, for tragedy is found in futility and selfishness, never by attaining the great honor of selfless service for freedom's sake. I know how hard it is to hear this, for the good fortune of others will too often remind you of the gladness which once lightened your hearts. There is a portal you have passed through that we frankly hope never to cross ourselves. So we honor your grieving and will never forget your sons and husbands.

In gratitude we should offer them praise that does not grow old, and acknowledge they occupy the noblest of all tombs. I speak not of that in which their remains are laid, but of that in which their glory survives and is proclaimed whenever people protect their freedom or are liberated from tyranny. For the whole world is the memorial of these Americans; they signed the earth itself with their blood and their honor. Not only are they commemorated here in their own country, but in Iraq and Afghanistan there are countless, unwritten memorials of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of tens of millions of peoples newly freed from murderous oppression.

Because of these men's sacrifice we go safely to our homes. Henceforth we should stand in humility when their names are read. Their comrades in arms who see old age will recall them fondly and show their medals and say, "These ribbons I earned beside true heroes." We will forget many things in years to come but we shall remember these great men and what feats they did one day. These dates shall never go by but that in them our fallen shall be remembered. They were a few, a band of brothers; and may we gratefully call them who shed their blood for us our brothers. And people in our country safe in their beds should think themselves accursed they knew them not, and hold their courage cheap when we speak of those who fought and died for freedom's cause.

The prophet Micah wrote that the time will come when God will judge between all the peoples and will settle disputes between strong nations far and wide. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. All people will be at peace, and no one will make them afraid (Micah 4:3-4).

Let us pray that day comes quickly. Until then may the Lord watch over those who serve today, to make them instruments of justice, enablers of peace, and finally to see them safely home. To our Gold Star families, may God bless you and keep you and comfort you, from this day until the ending of the world.
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In honor of and gratitude for the service and sacrifice of these Marines:

LCpl. Benjamin Gearheart - Franklin, Tennessee
Cpl. Patrick Nixon - Gallatin, Tennessee
Capt. Brent Morel - Martin, Tennessee
Lance Cpl. Jeremiah Savage - Livingston, Tennessee
Pfc. Daniel McClenney - Shelbyville, Tennessee
Lance Cpl. Timothy Creager - Millington, Tennessee
Lance Cpl. Brad McCormick - Allons, Tennessee
1st Lt. Andrew Stern - Germantown, Tennessee
Lance Cpl. Tyler Cates - Mt. Juliet, Tennessee
Sgt. Christopher Heflin - Paducah, Kentucky
Lance Cpl. Joshua Dickinson - Lafayette, Tennessee
Pfc. Nathan Clemons - Winchester, Tennessee
Sgt. Morgan Strader
2nd Lt. Heinz Ahlmeyer 
Added Oct. 2006: Lance Cpl. Richard A. Buerstetta, Franklin, Tennessee

They will not grow old as we that are left grow old. 
Age shall not weary them nor the year condemn. 
At the going down of the sun 
and in the morning we will remember them.
From, "For the Fallen," Laurence Binyon, 1914