American Footprints

A reminder to those that advocate for war with Iran of what war entails:

In a pastel-colored room at the Baghdad morgue known simply as the Missing, where faces of the thousands of unidentified dead of this war are projected onto four screens, Hamid Jassem came on a Sunday searching for answers.

In a blue plastic chair, he sat under harsh fluorescent lights and a clock that read 8:58 and 44 seconds, no longer keeping time. With deference and patience, he stared at the screen, each corpse bearing four digits and the word “majhoul,” or unknown:

No. 5060 passed, with a bullet to the right temple; 5061, with a bruised and bloated face; 5062 bore a tattoo that read, “Mother, where is happiness?” The eyes of 5071 were open, as if remembering what had happened to him.

“Go back,” Hamid asked the projectionist. No. 5061 returned to the screen. “That’s him,” he said, nodding grimly.

His mother followed him into the room, her weathered face framed in a black veil. “Show me my son!” she cried.

Behind her, Hamid pleaded silently. He waved his hands at the projectionist, begging him to spare her. In vain, he shook his head and mouthed the word “no.”

“Don’t tell me he’s dead,” she shouted at the room. “It’s not him! It’s not him!”

No. 5061 returned to the screen.

She lurched forward, shaking her head in denial. Her eyes stared hard. And in seconds, her son’s 33 years of life seemed to pass before her eyes.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she finally sobbed, falling back in her chair.

Reflexively, her hands slapped her face. They clawed, until her nails drew blood. “If I had only known from the first day!” she cried.

The horror of this war is its numbers, frozen in the portraits at the morgue: an infant’s eyes sealed shut and a woman’s hair combed in blood and ash. “Files tossed on the shelves,” a policeman called the dead, and that very anonymity lends itself to the war’s name here — al-ahdath, or the events.

On the charts that the American military provides, those numbers are seen as success, from nearly 4,000 dead in one month in 2006 to the few hundred today. The Interior Ministry offers its own toll of war — 72,124 since 2003, a number too precise to be true. At the morgue, more than 20,000 of the dead, which even sober estimates suggest total 100,000 or more, are still unidentified.

This number had a name, though.

No. 5061 was Muhammad Jassem Bouhan al-Izzawi, father, son and brother. At 9 a.m., on that Sunday, Aug. 15, his family left the morgue in a white Nissan and set out to find his body in a city torn between remembering and forgetting, where death haunts a country neither at war nor peace.

Read the rest.  It is Shadid at his poignant best.

The stories recounted in that article should also give pause to those rushing to declare the Iraq war a victory, and to give Bush the credit for it.  Generally speaking wars have few winners.  This one in particular.

There is a serious discussion to be had about the wisdom of arms control efforts.  Alan Caruba, in the Washington Times, fails to take part in it.  The piece is a hodgepodge of unsupported attacks on arms control efforts, which I will address one by one.

It is instructive that both Pakistan and India acquired their nuclear weapons without anyone being aware of it until after the fact. At CIA headquarters, when India announced its successful test, it came as a very big surprise. These days, the United States is busy reassuring Israel that Iran is “at least a year away” from nuclear status, and you can imagine how relieved they are to hear that.

This is completely misleading.  Caruba is alluding to the fact that the United States did not detect the 1998 Indian nuclear tests before they happened.  The United States was well aware of both the Indian and the Pakistani nuclear weapons programs for a long time, especially since India tested a nuclear device in 1974.  Caruba then moves on to attack the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

The Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization designated last Sunday as the International Day Against Nuclear Tests. Given the total lack of success in thwarting any nation that wants a nuke, my confidence in the United Nations’ treaty is zero.

Nobody is suggesting that CTBT will single-handled thwart the nuclear ambitions of any country.  Rather, it is one more tool to detect and discourage nuclear testing.  Moreover, the CTBT has not been ratified by the U.S., nor has it gone into effect.  Is Caruba actually blaming a dormant treaty for failing to solve the problem of nuclear proliferation?

Robert R. Monroe, a retired vice admiral in the U.S. Navy and former director of the Defense Nuclear Agency from 1977 to 1980, expressed the opinion, “The treaty has many problems from being unverifiable to giving Russia virtual veto power over U.S. missile defense, and more.” That’s bad enough, but it’s worse than that.

New START does not limit U.S. missile defense no matter how many times New START critics insist that it does. As the Arms Control Association’s Tom Collina says:

“[T]he treaty will not constrain the United States from deploying the most effective missile defenses possible,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said May 18.  The treaty’s preamble acknowledges the interrelationship between offense and defense, and Russia has made a unilateral statement that if U.S. missile defense activities jeopardize Moscow’s supreme interests, it may withdraw from the treaty.  Both sides have the right to say what they want in a unilateral statement, which has no legal impact on the treaty.  Both sides have the right to withdraw from the treaty, just as the United States withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty during the Bush administration.  U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty did not lead to Russia’s withdrawal from START I.

Caruba throws in some questions about his opponent’s patriotism for good measure.

There are those who love test-ban treaties. They love the idea of unilaterally disarming the United States in a world where there are nations that may not love us.

Sigh.

Not surprisingly, the nations with nukes have not signed onto anything that would take away their deterrent factor, and, of course, Iran is hellbent on getting nukes for itself.

Again, totally misleading.  The nations with nuclear weapons (including the United States!) have signed a variety of bilateral and multilateral agreements to limit their nuclear weapons programs.  Whether these limits “take away their deterrent factor” is another issue.  Would the CTBT limit our ability to use our hundreds of highly-tested, well-maintained nuclear weapons?  Of course not.

There are much better versions of all these arguments, so it is unclear why the Washington Times gave Caruba this opportunity.  Putting U.S. foreign policy on a sensible footing requires that nonsense like this be rebutted.

Megan McCardle, to her credit, makes a go at an updated mea culpa for her position on the Iraq war.  One of the reasons cited for her, admittedly, flawed decision to support the war seems a bit odd, however:

I erroneously believed that I could interpret the actions of Saddam Hussein.  He seemed to be acting like I’d act if I had WMD.  Whoops!  I wasn’t an Iraqi dictator, which left huge gaps in my mental model of Hussein.

First of all, since McCardle is not a lot of things (well, she isn’t anything other than what she is, to state a tautology), this is a dubious standard to employ for someone who is in the business of providing analysis from the august pages of The Atlantic.  To put it another way, her mental model presumably has huge gaps about most things using the criteria of “actually being like what is being observed,” and, thus, this is either a poor excuse or a fair warning about the quality of analysis forthcoming on most issues.  Let’s assume the former.That general comment aside, there is also the issue of “interpreting” the actions of Saddam, which was a wholly unnecessary exercise considering the fact that we had actual UN weapons inspectors in Iraq for months preceding the invasion, and those inspectors were following leads from the best intelligence that the US and Britain could provide (the countries whose leaders assured us repeatedly that Saddam had WMD and that “we know where they are“).

Thus, interpreting Saddam’s actions should have been low on the list of evidence for WMD, or the lack thereof, with “what are the inspectors who are there following our best intel finding” placing much, much higher.  To excerpt an article that was recently discussed on this site in a similar context: 

Hans Blix told the BBC that his teams followed up US and British leads at suspected sites across Iraq, but found nothing when they got there. [...] 

In a BBC interview…Mr Blix said he had been disappointed with the tip-offs provided by British and US intelligence.

“Only in three of those cases did we find anything at all, and in none of these cases were there any weapons of mass destruction, and that shook me a bit, I must say.”

He said UN inspectors had been promised the best information available.

“I thought – my God, if this is the best intelligence they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?”   

This, of course, leaves aside the fact that WMD is a nebulous term that obscures more than it illuminates, especially when used the way it was in the run-up to the Iraq war.  While nuclear weapons are extremely destructive (much, much moreso than chem and bio weapons in almost all contexts), the consensus was that Saddam did not have an active nuclear program, let alone a weapon, let alone a weapon capable of being delivered to the United States, let alone a desire to use such weapon should he develop the delivery system, let alone a willingness to hand such a deliverable weapon off to al-Qaeda - a group whose raison d’etre is toppling insufficiently pious regimes such as Saddam’s Baath regime in Iraq.

The chem and bio weapons that Saddam allegedly had were old, decaying and incapable of proving more destructive than conventional weapons in just about any setting outside of a battlefield (and he still had not displayed an inclination to use same against Western targets, or an affinity for his enemies, al-Qaeda).  In other words, his “WMD” were really only suitable for use - or likely to be used on - a battlefield had we chosen to invade.

Which makes a terrible casus belli, regardless of whether or not the particular advocate of going to war is herself a 20th century Iraqi dictator. 

Edward E. Curtis IV has a useful summary of facts/myths surrounding mosques in the United States (via).  In one portion, he comments on Sharia law (a topic of some concern on this site in recent weeks):

In Islam, sharia (“the Way” to God) theoretically governs every human act. But Muslims do not agree on what sharia says; there is no one sharia book of laws. Most mosques in America do not teach Islamic law for a simple reason: It’s too complicated for the average believer and even for some imams.

Islamic law includes not only the Koran and the Sunna (the traditions of the prophet Muhammad) but also great bodies of arcane legal rulings and pedantic scholarly interpretations. If mosques forced Islamic law upon their congregants, most Muslims would probably leave — just as most Christians might walk out of the pews if preachers gave sermons exclusively on Saint Augustine, canon law and Greek grammar. Instead, mosques study the Koran and the Sunna and how the principles and stories in those sacred texts apply to their everyday lives.

Curtis on the history of mosques in America:

Mosques have been here since the colonial era. A mosque, or masjid, is literally any place where Muslims make salat, the prayer performed in the direction of Mecca; it needn’t be a building. One of the first mosques in North American history was on Kent Island, Md.: Between 1731 and 1733, African American Muslim slave and Islamic scholar Job Ben Solomon, a cattle driver, would regularly steal away to the woods there for his prayers — in spite of a white boy who threw dirt on him as he made his prostrations.

The Midwest was home to the greatest number of permanent U.S. mosques in the first half of the 20th century. In 1921, Sunni, Shiite and Ahmadi Muslims in Detroit celebrated the opening of perhaps the first purpose-built mosque in the nation. Funded by real estate developer Muhammad Karoub, it was just blocks away from Henry Ford’s Highland Park automobile factory, which employed hundreds of Arab American men.

In fact, there is a mosque in the Pentagon itself – though few, if any, are complaining that its presence is “insensitive” to the 9/11 victims that perished at that site (insensitive, presumably, because having Muslims praying near such a site reminds the victims of terrorists because all Muslims are terrorists?). 

Meanwhile, it is worth pointing out that the recent spate of anti-Muslim violence, vandalism of mosques and terrorizing of mosque-attendees risks to upturn the traditional advantage that the US has had over Europe in terms of limiting the number of home grown terrorists. 

As previously discussed on this site, individuals that end up being radicalized and joining terrorist causes tend to share some common traits and experience. 

For one, they tend to straddle worlds (second or third generation Muslims living in the West), and become increasingly alienated from their adopted homeland – this, usually due to the host country’s lack of assimilative tendencies, as well as overt hostility to, and rejection of, foreign cultures. 

In this regard, it is widely assumed in counterterrorist circles that the United States (with its immigrant history and melting pot dynamic) has enjoyed some insulation where European nations (that tend to emphasize a historical, nationalist identity) have been exposed. 

However, the Republican Party’s demagoguery in recent years has taken the form of an indiscriminate hostility toward all Muslims and Islam in general – thus helping to alienate young Muslim Americans that would otherwise feel a part of American culture and society.

In addition, many of those that are eventually radicalized experience some traumatic, violent incident of hatred, either directly or to loved ones. Those would be the same type of incidents as are beginning to pop up across the country - a logical, and inevitable, result of the dangerous anti-Muslim animus being whipped up by key Republican pundits, politicians and journalists.

To repeat, this anti-Muslim hatred being stoked for short term political gain is as reprehensible morally as it is risky in terms of national security.

IWPR has an article uncovering some of the political sinews moving events in Iran away from the Green Movement. It highlights the opposition between the Ahmadinejad administration and a traditional conservative political party called Motalefeh. Here’s the economic component:

“Motalefeh also has effective control of the Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation, the largest charity in the Middle East and also the Islamic Economic Organisation, which comprises 1,200 trusts and quasi-banks that issue loans to the public. Together with the Revolutionary Guards Corps, Motalefeh members hold controlling shares in several companies including the Rezvan industrial corporation, a gas pipeline project in South Pars, and even a software company called Ada-Afzar.

“Nor should one forget the enduring influence of the bazaar traders in every major Iranian city. In addition to actual trading, they handle much of the financing for trade, and have been the dominant force in Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Mines for the past 30 years.”

After reading Keshavarzian’s book, I wonder if the author isn’t slightly over-stating the bazaar’s economic importance, which has declined during the past 30 years, though a word like “much” is fairly vague. The article does tie Motalefeh to the bazaar and the July bazaar strike by saying that the Society of Islamic Guild and Bazaar Associations, which provided the impetus for the strike, is close to Motalefeh, which makes sense given organizational attention the state gave the bazaar during the 1980′s and 1990′s. On the point about companies, since the IRGC’s economic influence is fairly new and an important development under Ahmadinejad, it stands to reason that when the article talks about party members sharing influence with the IRGC, the background is that they used to have a lot more of the influence, but have lost it in part due to a lack of political influence under Ahmadinejad.

There’s also this note about what has happened in the bazaar since the strike:

“But the government was not about to give up so easily. Shortly before the month of Ramadan in early August, there was an upsurge in official inspections of the traditional guilds that run the bazaars as well as of individual merchants. In July, 39,000 cases of breaches of trading regulations were brought against them, and hefty fines were imposed for alleged profiteering.

“The government campaign drew a fierce riposte from the guild association’s head, Ahmad Karimi Isfahani, who said these actions were illegal and politically-motivated.”

(Crossposted to my blog)

The New York Times has a piece highlighting one aspect of the pointlessness of our ongoing slog in Afghanistan:

The aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials.

Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both.

Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr. Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it.

While this is, indeed, damning in a general sense, it should also be noted (as it is here and here), that being on the CIA payroll is itself corruption!  Although the article does not seem to acknowledge this reality, note the language: “It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money [from the CIA], whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both.”

All of which fit, neatly, under the rubric of corruption – or worse, espionage on behalf of a foreign power.  Along these lines, it is remarkable how our foreign policy establishment and establishment media seem incapable of conceptualizing the fact that America is, itself, a foreign power when occupying both Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Whether it be, in the present example, ignoring the fact that having our spy agency keep top Karzai adminsitration officials on the payroll is itself a blatant and corrosive form of corruption (and worse), or General Odierno claiming that we must stay in Iraq to prevent interference from foreign powers, the obvious is missed. 

The myopia of exceptionalism strikes again.