re: "Iraqi Irony"

Prof. Victor Davis Hanson at Private Papers provided the longer perspective of the historian.

Money quote(s):

"Amid all the stories about the ongoing violence in Syria, the most disturbing is the possibility that President Bashar Assad could either deploy the arsenal of chemical and biological weapons that his government claims it has, or provide it to terrorists.

There are suggestions that at least some of Assad’s supposed stockpile may have come from Saddam Hussein’s frantic, eleventh-hour efforts in 2002 to hide his own arsenals of weapons of mass destruction in neighboring Syria. Various retired Iraqi military officers have alleged as much. Although the story was met with general neglect or scorn from the American media, the present US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, long ago asserted his belief in such a weapons transfer."

Weapons of mass destruction = WMD

That classification, borrowed from former Soviet terminology rather than having a Western provenance, can include what Europeans used to call ABC (atomic-biological-chemical), the U.S. used to call NBC (nuclear-biological-chemical), and which are now more commonly expanded to CBRN (chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear) weapons.

In other words, WMD was never just about nukes.

"The Bush administration fixated on WMD in justifying the invasion of Iraq while largely ignoring more than 20 other writs to remove Saddam, as authorized by Congress in October 2002. That obsession would come back to haunt George W. Bush when stockpiles of deployable WMD failed to turn up in postwar Iraq. By 2006, “Bush lied; thousands died,” was the serial charge of the antiwar Left. But before long, such depots may finally turn up in Syria."

There were 23 writs, but more than one of them had to do with WMD.

"Many Americans understandably questioned how civilian and military leaders allowed a brilliant three-week victory over Saddam to degenerate into a disastrous five-year war before the surge finally salvaged Iraq. That fighting and reconstruction anywhere in the Middle East are difficult under any circumstances was forgotten. The press preferred instead to charge that the singular incompetence or malfeasance of Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld led to the unnecessary costs in American blood and treasure."

CAA would have to be numbered among those "Many Americans." But no matter how good a plan we might have developed (which we didn't), in any events Iraq turned into at least three different wars, some of them over-lapping in time and space, with some former enemies morphing into allies.

"George W. Bush’s problems in conducting difficult wars in the Middle East were inherent in the vast differences between cultures"

True that. None of the countries in that region are going to look like post-reconstruction Germany or Japan no matter how long we stay there.

"For all the biases and incompetence of Nouri al-Maliki’s elected government in Iraq, the Middle East’s worst dictatorship now seems to have become the region’s most stable constitutional government. Given Iraq’s elections, the country was relatively untouched by the mass “Arab Spring” uprisings. And despite sometimes deadly Sunni-Shiite terrorist violence and the resurgence of al Qaeda, Iraq’s economy, compared with those of some of other nations in the Middle East, is stable and expanding."

&

"The moral of the story is that history cannot be written as it unfolds. In the case of Iraq, we still don’t know the full story of Saddam’s WMD, the grand strategic effects of the Iraq War, the ripples from the creation of the Iraqi republic, or the relative degree of incompetence of any American administration at war in the Middle East — and we won’t for many years to come."

8/1

re: "Springtime for Islamists in Libya?"

Neo-Neocon (" slowly but surely leaving the fold and becoming that dread thing: a neocon ") is one of those who possess an Inigo Montoya-like sensibility regarding the meaning of words.

Money quote(s):

"The headline reads “interim [Libyan] ruler unveils more radical than expected plans for Islamic law.”

There’s that word again: expected. But those who thought they knew what to expect in Libya were either arrogant or daft, or both. And one of the many things that was clearly possible there was the ascendance of Islamist elements." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

Wishful thinking, like hope, is not a plan. Nor is it a particularly useful analytical tool.

"David Warren contrasts the irony of the relatively orderly Bush-overseen judicial end of Saddam Hussein with Gaddafi’s extra-judicial lynching under forces promoted by Obama."

CAA has nothing but good things to say about Mr. Warren, one of our neighbors in the Great White North.

"Not unexpected at all. That’s why there is something to be said for what happened in Iraq, where—because we invaded and stuck around, despite the huge cost in blood and treasure—that country has at least a chance of coming out relatively well compared to others in the region."

From her keyboard to God's monitor.

10/24

re: "The Iraq War Did Not End on December 17, 2011–But the Peace May Be Over Soon"

JOEL B. POLLAK at Big Peace considered the endings of wars.

Money quote(s):

"I am disgusted by the media declarations and the presidential proclamations that the war in Iraq has ended with the departure of US troops. It is an erroneous conclusion, designed with political victory in mind--and heedless of the risk of projecting military defeat. "

Involvement by major numbers of U.S. ground troops has ceased.

That doesn't mean that the few remaining troops, or the U.S. civilians still there, are any less attractive targets for those who continue to wage war in Iraq.

"The Iraq War was a victory for the United States, for our allies, and for the Iraqi people. Our forces toppled Saddam Hussein's brutal regime, and defended nascent Iraqi democracy against Iranian-backed terrorists, including Al Qaeda and remnants of Saddam's regime.

Our soldiers maintained the peace of a country many feared would collapse into civil war--and which some, including our current Vice President, suggested should be divided. Against the plans of foreign enemies, and the pessimism of domestic critics, our forces prevailed.

The idea that the war ended today is absurd. If a war is not over until all your troops have withdrawn, then the Second World War is still being fought. If a war is defined by your withdrawal rather than your objective, you will always face defeat. And Iraq was not a defeat. " (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

&

"Victory in Iraq may not have come on May 1, 2003--the day President George W. Bush delivered his "mission accomplished" speech. But it had certainly come by November 11, 2010--the day political parties formed a new government, following Iraq's second democratic election. "

12/17

re: "The MEK is the new Code Pink"

Josh Rogin at The Cable ("Reporting Inside the Foreign Policy Machine") told us about the PMOI's visit to Capitol Hill and Foggy Bottom.

Money quote(s):

"About 50 supporters of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) took over the first three rows of the audience at Tuesday morning's hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in the Senate Hart Office Building. The hearing was to examine President Barack Obama's decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of the year, and featured testimony by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey."

This was in mid-November of last year.

(Sorry about the time it took for me to get to this.)

"(T)he MEK supporters at the Hart building today sat politely in their bright yellow sweatshirts and ponchos, which had slogans printed on them calling for the State Department to take the MEK off of their list of foreign terrorist organizations -- a move that is supposedly under consideration.

We overheard one staffer at the hearing quip, "When your critics allege you are a cult, you probably shouldn't dress like one." "

Good one.

On the other hand, you see tour groups doing the same thing abroad. Maybe they just didn't want to lose anyone?

"The MEK, whose ideology fuses Islam and Marxism, was formed in Iran in 1965. It allied itself with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and fought against the Shah and his Western backers during the Iranian Revolution. After falling out of favor with Khomeini, the group was given shelter in Iraq by Saddam Hussein, who used them to conduct brutal cross-border raids during the Iraq-Iran war.

After the fall of Saddam, the United States helped broker an agreement whereby 3,400 MEK members were confined to a complex in northeast Iraq called Camp Ashraf, protected by the U.S. military. The camp was handed over to the Iraqi government in 2009."

Fusing "Islam and Marxism." Check. Very good. Now: what could possibly go wrong there?

"(F)alling out of favor with Khomeini"? You've got to be kidding me? The PMOI and the Revolutionary government went to war with each other!

"Since 2009, the MEK has conducted a multi-million advocacy and lobbying campaign in Washington, with the help of dozens of senior U.S. officials and lawmakers, many of whom have been paid for their involvement. The list includes Congressman John Lewis (D-GA), former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former Sen. Robert Torricelli, Rep. Patrick Kennedy, former CIA Deputy Director of Clandestine Operations John Sano, former National Security Advisor Gen. James Jones, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers, former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, Gen. Wesley Clark, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, former CIA Director Porter Goss, senior advisor to the Romney campaign Mitchell Reiss, Gen. Anthony Zinni, former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, former Sen. Evan Bayh, and many others.

In an August rally outside the State Department, Kennedy declared, "One of the greatest moments was when my uncle, President [John F.] Kennedy, stood in Berlin and uttered the immortal words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner,'" Kennedy exclaimed. "Today, I'm honored to repeat my uncle's words, by saying [translated from Farsi] ‘I am an Iranian, I am an Ashrafi.'"

Kennedy admitted he was paid $25,000 to emcee the rally."

CAA would have served as "emcee" for free, but wouldn't have done it in as cheerleaderly a fashion as 25k to a Kennedy will buy you.

11/15

re: "Pipeline, &tc."

CAA (that's me!) continued his response to Jeff Emanuel's post at RedState:, responding to romeg's comment of Thursday, February 9th at 7:13 AM EST(link).

romeg said:

"Saddam Hussein and his family was pilloried publicly in Western media.

While there may be dedicated career members of the Diplomatic Corps and serious-minded State Department employees, it is an agency that is rotten to its core and overrun with fops.

While they are downsizing missions abroad, they may want to consider making equivalent cuts here at home. Why is it that an agency with a budget as large as the State Department takes years to figure out if a pipeline can be built across the U.S./Canada border?"

Response:

"Do you really think that decision was made in Foggy Bottom and not at the White House?

Take another look at Departmental budgets. State is miniscule compared to others.

Oh, and thanks for entertaining the notion that State does include some dedicated employees. Seriously."


2/9

re: "We all know Saddam had no WMDs"

Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive ("the paratrooper of love") understands that the major media (and much of your government) has been in major denial for years.

Money quote(s):

"The author got this info from the Duelfer Report and notes that most people only read the exec summary. There was plenty of nastiness, and while he wasn't linked to the 9/11 attacks he played with plenty of terrorists. The left loves to whine about WMD lies, false reports and no ties to terror. Yeah well that is just BS. He was a menace, murderous tyrant and a known user of chemical weapons. We were and truly justified in taking him out and the world ought to be thanking us."

If you have the opportunity to chat with anyone in, for instance, the EOD community who served in Iraq, you can get an earful about all the "no WMD in Iraq" they disabled.

9/15

re: "Saddam, WMD’s, and Terror"

Jim Lacey at The Corner ("a web-leading source of real-time conservative opinion") explained what's actually in the Duelfer Commission Report.

Money quote(s):

"The Left said this document proved there were no WMDs — of course, they only read the executive summary. The commission was put together to look into what went wrong with prewar intelligence, and that is what they reported out on. However, in the two volumes no one bothered to read, the commission members detail all of the stuff that was actually present. You have to read almost to the end of volume three to learn about the real bio-warfare labs.

As for Saddam’s links to terror, here is a short version of a report I co-wrote. All of the information in volume one of the report comes from captured Iraqi documents"

This is the sort of thing that explains why I begin to get so exercised whenever the party line about "no WMDs in Iraq" gets trotted out.

9/15

re: "Shoot the Messenger"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") has the measure of our allies.

Money quote(s):

"Unhappy at the way a journalist had portrayed the country’s defense and intelligence establishment, the Pakistani ISI murdered him, according to US intelligence"

Considering all that can be creditably attributed to the ISI over the years, this doesn't exactly stretch the horizons of disbelief.

"He was bludgeoned to death, it appears. Because of his criticism about the professionalism of the country’s security apparatus."

This sends exactly the message, to their intended audience, that they wish to send. Unfortunately for them, messages fall out of channels all the time and are read or heard by audiences unconsidered.

Consider: Saddam Hussein's deception plan, directed against Iran, to convince the Iranians that he had WMD, thus deterring aggression or attacks from Iran.

This wasn't actually stupid of Saddam, just short-sighted. He, sensibly enough, kept his focus on the more immediate threat right next door. And managed to convince a more distant but equally existential threat, leading directly to OIF.

"The gloves are well and truly off now.

I sincerely hope that our diplomatic corps is hard at work seeking transit privileges to – and more importantly from – Afghanistan through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan."

Lex is displaying his professionalism here. As Tom Clancy put it:

"(A)mateurs discuss tactics,.... Professional soldiers study logistics."

I share Lex's hope. Afghanistan is a long ways away to have to execute another anabasis.

re: "War Powers hypocrisy plus incompetence equals..."

Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive ("the paratrooper of love") hasn't been impressed with much of what passes for strategic thinking in recent years.

Money quote(s):

"(I)t is entirely fair to note that the plan for the post-invasion phase was mind-numbingly foolish. And yes that blame lies squarely at the feet of Donald Rumsfeld. I skipped meeting him when he was pimping his book at the recent Milblog conference and I think he has failed to properly accept the fact that his idea of a central government in a tribal and honor culture was beyond naive absent a tyrant like Saddam to crush any dissent. That plus staffing the effort with a collection of country club wankers and the dumbass cousins of big Republican donors apporoaches criminality. And yes I am calling most of the folks who ran the immediate aftermath incompetent. If you happened to be one of them and don't think that describes you, then think of the two people on either side of you when you were there. Two of the three of you ought to have stayed home to entertain Buffy and Muffy and Tad."

Two points:

The first: I never did get the feeling that "Phase IV" was ever fleshed out beyond the initial PowerPoint (TM) slide that mentioned it. It was underwear-gnomes on steroids. Hope very definitely was the plan, with a side order of wishful thinking.

The second: even the language qualified folks whom State lent to the CPA ("Can't Produce Anything") really weren't the ones who should have been sent. Great guys, generally, some of whom I count as friends, but at that point in their careers they were simply too junior, and too inexperienced, to accomplish much more than not getting killed.

A decade on, and these same officers probably, knowing now what they didn't yet know then, would have made a huge difference. Strangely, the qualified and experienced officers then were not the ones who were sent. Odd, that.

For some reason, that reminds me of a phrase I had to invent to explain a lot of what I saw during OIF 1, i.e.,: "Resourced to fail."

"(W)e have a mission.... now entering its third month without the defining characteristic of a mission.....a freaking goal. We are bombing Libyan warships, its capital and trying to "accidentally" kill the damn tyrant we don't have the stones to publicly call out. All the while Syria slaughters its citizens, Iran builds away on the Islamic bomb and O rewards the Palestinians for forming a unity government that, apparently, still thinks those pesky Jooooos could use a bath in the sea."

Many's the time in the course of my military and governmental careers that I've had to perservere onward, and as a leader persuade others to do the same, in the hope that while certain decisions might not make sense at the ground level, the people making the decisions had a lot more information available to them than was available to us, the big picture as it were. Perhaps that was hoping against hope.

"I believe that the War Powers Act is likely un-constitutional, but I believed that when Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and even Obama were President. That is a principled stance"

So it is.

re: "Historical Revisionism [Part 3]"

Bill at Castle Argghhh! finishes off the Big Lie about Iraq's WMD.

Money quote(s):

"Right after we captured Baghdad, there were a *lot* of PAO-type pix appearing in SIPRNET mail to various units (all combat arms outfits, as far as I could tell), showing US and Iraqi equipment, battlefield shots of blown-up tanks and people, etc., and some stuff highlighting the technology we used. Our S-2 knew I'd think that was real neat, so he called me in to show me. Among the goodies were two AWACS radar screenshots labeled "Iraqi truck convoys converging on Syria" -- lines of little glowing dots on the highways heading north, then turning northwest. They gave a timeline, but all I remember was it happened the night before we jumped.

Next day, there was a recall of the mail with the pix, citing OPSEC violations on the AWACS pix because they showed US positions -- bear in mind that the pix were a full week old, and that US units had already reached Baghdad by the time they were released. Our S-2, being a good S-2, promptly deleted the stuff without a thought. So did everybody else, as far as I can determine, including the military intel types OCONUS with SIPRNET access. Later, I heard the oblique AWACS screenshots were compared with satellite overhead photos and were matched to a gnat's eyelash.

Some time later, the Dems in Congress began screaming that Bush was a war criminal because we hadn't found Saddam's WMD -- we had found a lot of WMD and WMD-related stuff, but the Dems kept screaming "That's not the WMD Bush said they had."

Which morphed into the pre-election Talking/Screaming Point “We went to war in Iraq for a lie, because there were no WMD!” that continues to this day.

Now, let’s recap.

Did we find chemical weapons that Saddam had hidden from the UN inspectors? Yup.

Did we find biological warfare labs and delivery systems? Yup.

Two out of three, so far, and either one standing alone exposes “There were no WMD” as a lie."

It helps if you have no real understanding of the meaning of WMD in the first place. Then it's easier to be that stupid. (Ignorance is like that.)

That being said, I never saw any of that sort of "take." But then I didn't see much else in that line of intelligence collection: as intelligence collectors, we were just too far down in the weeds ourselves.

"Did we find a nuclear weapons program? Well, yes and no.

Yes, we found the evidence, but was it an ongoing program? Saddam himself lied about stopping and starting so often, that, if it wasn’t ongoing during the weeks before the invasion – and Saddam *knew* it was on the way -- chances are very good that he would have cranked it up again had we *not* jumped in.

Was the program stolen from under our noses while we were in the process of restoring some semblance of normalcy to Iraq?

Or was it just on hiatus until Saddam – or his designated heir – could open up for business in a new location? *Something* was on the convoys going into Syria, which the Iraqis, sources in at least two of Iraq’s neighbors, and the CIA's ace advisor have confirmed."

Bill then goes on to explain some basic facts about the party politics of Saddam's Iraq and Assad's Syria (which remains true today).

He concludes:

"Dick Cheney had the pix, he had the background info, he had the ear of the President, and he had enough personal authority to release them to shut the Dems up.

Those of us who knew about the pix kept expecting a dog-and-pony show from the White House which would stop this particular Big Lie in its tracks and reveal the Dems for what they were.

Any day, now... any day.

When he was asked (in 2010) why he didn't at least advise GWB to go public with the pix and their probable significance, Cheney just blew the question off, and said "we had other concerns at the time."

Swell. Thanks so much for being midwife to this particular Big Lie, Dick -- you gave us Barack Obama in 2008 and the resulting cascade of Big Lies we've been bombarded with ever since."

This is the most original reason for disliking Dick Cheney I've ever read. It bears thinking upon.

re: "Historical Revisionism [Part 2]"

Bill at Castle Argghhh! revisits a personal pet peevasaurus (in other words, a Jurassic peeve of brobdingnagian proportions) of mine.

Money quote(s):

"(W)hat were some of the WMDs we found?

Well, for starters, we found 550 long tons of unrefined yellowcake (for the metrically-impaired, that’s 1,212,541 pounds of the stuff Joe Wilson *said* Saddam had no interest in acquiring). The Dems squeaked that it didn’t count, because Saddam had no centrifuges to use in enriching it to weapons grade – and then when we found the centrifuges, they squawked that the centrifuges (the exact same model Siemens centrifuge Iran used at Natanz to enrich its uranium, by the way) were for pharmaceutical purposes – even though they were found buried in the compound of the chief of Saddam’s nuke program.

By the way, the 606 US tons of yellowcake remained stockpiled in Iraq for anyone curious enough to want to look at it until 2008, when it was quietly shipped to Canada for refining." (Bold type added for emphasis. - CAA)

This is part of the "moving the goal posts" strategy of the previous administration's enemies.

Check out some of what the ISG found. Scary stuff.

"(T)hen the Dems changed “Where are the WMDs?” to “Those aren’t the WMDs we’re looking for!”Well, all righty, then, folks, just what *are* the WMDs you’re looking for?They wouldn’t say – they just kept repeating that, whatever we found, it wasn’t what they were looking for, and their Greek chorus in the MSM dutifully echoed them without even pausing for breath."

One-word snip.

"Now, exactly what were the WMDs that the Dems were looking for? Nobody’s saying, but the answer may lie in what happened during the countdown to the invasion. "

Stay tuned for the next installment.

re: "My Plan on How to Fight the Next Middle East War"

Frank J. Fleming at PajamasMedia ("exclusive news and opinion 24/7 with correspondents in over forty countries") is thinking about Grand Strategy.

Money quote(s):

"War is hell … if you’re in the war. For everyone else, it’s the whining that gets to us. The constant calls of “quagmire” and how everyone is dying for nothing and that we’re only making things worse and how we’re wasting money (yeah, the left used to pretend to care about that) really wear on us. I don’t know how our troops are doing with all the deployments, but all the civilians seem worn out from only hearing about war. We’re all war weary — despite most of us not being directly affected by any of the combat. Maybe our troops can handle getting shot at and going on multiple deployments just fine, but we can’t deal with the civilians complaining about it all the time."

Remember this?

"Obviously avoiding wars in the Middle East is not a realistic option, and I’m sure we’ll get involved in plenty more in the future. So how can we do that and avoid the constant whining of dumb hippies and having all those useless countries in Europe call us warmongers? Well, think back to the Iraq War and when people really started to viciously complain about it. We had broad support going in, and people were still pretty up on it during the initial bombing campaign and even once we got to the point of pulling down the Saddam statue. People truly started getting angry, and the “Bush=Hitler” signs came out in full force, when we stayed and tried to help.

Bombing a country is nothing, but hanging around the country afterward, helping it rebuild and establish a system of government where the citizens don’t get bossed around by a homicidal dictator, gets us into trouble. And it is pretty difficult for the troops; it requires them to stand out there exposed among the populace instead of just running around in tanks and exploding stuff. Plus it takes a long time, during which there will be constant whining about it, especially if there are Republicans in office to blame. The left basically collaborated with the insurgents in Iraq, saying, “Hey, if you kill more troops, then we will scream even louder about how awful this war is and hopefully get Bush out of office. So help us out here!”"

You have to love Frank J. He has a plain-spoken way of saying what he thinks and making it accessible.

"So I ask: Why should we even stay and help a country after we’ve bombed it?

Think about it. When President Bush gave that famous speech on the aircraft carrier in front of the “Mission Accomplished” banner, we could have just left the war then and said we won, and who could have argued with us? If you can go to a country, blow stuff up, and leave unscathed, that sounds like success. If someone came and burned your house and walked away, you wouldn’t say you won because the guy left. So why shouldn’t we in a future conflict in a Middle Eastern country just blow up stuff, declare victory, and leave?"

This is what's called a punitive expedition or war. Because its purpose is to punish. And that's it.

____

Hat tip to Frank J. at IMAO ("Unfair. Unbalanced. Unmedicated.").

re: "Tragedy Upon Tragedy"

Jules Crittenden at Forward Movement ("on politics, crime, science, foreign affairs, and maritime and military matters in the United States, Asia, the Balkans and the Middle East.") shares, in closing, a criticism of the last Pres. Bush.

Money quote(s):

" (Not particularly reassured by Putin’s taking personal charge of the investigation, given that the former KGB agent heads a government that appears determined to restore some of the worst practices of historic Russian totalitarianism. Theoretically a show of sincerity with personal responsibility. Some people think George Bush’s biggest miscalculation was misjudging the intentions of Saddam Hussein. I think he got those exactly right, and it was Putin’s intentions that he sorely misjudged.)"

re: "Iraq War: Mission Accomplished?"

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway ("an online journal of politics and foreign affairs analysis") doesn't wholly agree or disagree.

And I get that. I really do.

Money quote(s):

"I was a reluctant supporter of the war who rejected the early arguments by Paul Wolfowitz and others but ultimately persuaded by the “we can’t let Saddam get nuclear weapons” argument after Kim Jong Il did it."

&

"Whether or not it was all “worth it” — a judgment that, sadly, it still remains too early to know — it makes sense to keep a reduced contingent of American soldiers there to prevent the unraveling of what has been accomplished.

But that’s hardly reason for celebration and gloating. It’s just a calculation as to our least bad option."

re: "Morally Reprehensible People Aren’t (Necessarily) Stupid"

Mark Stout at On War And Words ("War, Thoughts about War, Books about War") offers some good advice to national security professionals.

Money quote(s):

"A woman in the audience has just challenged Plokhy’s belief that Stalin was very intelligent by arguing that nobody who killed so many people as Stalin did could possibly be intelligent, that murder was incompatible with smarts."

"I also recall how often Saddam Hussein has been called “incompetent.” Jeffrey Record, John Robb, among others have done this.

(On Saddam: I believe he was a man of remarkable capabilities. Not many people I know could have clawed their way to the top of such a murderous political system as existed in Iraq and survived there for 25 years. Admittedly, his performance against the United States wasn’t exemplary, but he optimized his military and security apparatus to deal with what, reasonably enough, appeared to him as more proximate threats: internal challenges, and Iran and Israel."

&

"I am hard-pressed to think of a more dangerous mistake than assuming that those of whom we do not approve must be stupid. Laymen can, perhaps, be forgiven for making such mistakes but those of us who think about security-related topic must never, ever engage in such flabby, self-righteous thinking."


_____

Hat tip to COMOPS Monitor ("The latest links from the blogosphere on Strategic Communication, Terrorism & Public Diplomacy").

Outside the Walls of Ancient Babylon

Taken on Camp Babylon, Iraq, on March 5, 2004. In the distance is Saddam's palace overlooking Babylon.

WT - EXCLUSIVE: U.S. seeks to protect Iran terror group. Iraqis urged to keep camp.

From my archive of press clippings:

Washington Times

EXCLUSIVE: U.S. seeks to protect Iran terror group. Iraqis urged to keep camp.

By Eli Lake (Contact) Tuesday, August 4, 2009

The United States is quietly pressing Iraq not to close a camp that holds more than 3,000 members of an Iranian opposition group that served as Saddam Hussein's shock troops in 1991 when he crushed rebellions after the Gulf War and now is vulnerable to Iraqi and Iranian reprisals.

Read the whole article here.

Snippet(s):

"Last week, Iraqi police stormed Camp Ashraf outside Baghdad, killing at least seven and injuring dozens during clashes with the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, or MEK. At the time, members of a U.S. unit known as Task Force 134, which deals with prisoners of war, were present outside the compound, said two U.S. officials -- one in Washington, one in Iraq -- who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

A day after the raid, officials at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad met with members of the Iraqi government to urge restraint. The next day, the U.S. Army helped medevac at least two dozen injured members of the MEK, the officials said."

"The U.S. has designated the MEK as a terrorist group for these actions and for the assassinations of six Americans in Iran before the 1979 Iranian revolution. But the U.S. nevertheless has sought to protect Camp Ashraf members -- who include women and children -- from Iraqi or Iranian attack and forced repatriation.

The camp had been under U.S. protection since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Iraq now seeks to reassert control under the provisions of the Status of Forces Agreement signed with Washington last year.
Iraqi media have reported that the government plans to close Camp Ashraf and disperse its residents to other locations in Iraq. Such a move could make the dissidents more vulnerable to Iranian intelligence and angry Iraqi Shi'ites who lost family members in 1991."

continued

"President Clinton designated the MEK as a foreign terrorist organization. However, in 2002, the group disclosed that Iran was building a secret nuclear facility south of Tehran. The MEK also claims to have provided valuable intelligence on the Iranian regime to the U.S. military and to no longer commit acts of terrorism. Over the years, the organization has touted itself as a viable opposition movement against Iran, even though it appears to have minimal support within Iran and there is a cult of personality around the group's leader, Maryam Rajavi.

Still, the group has cultivated allies in the U.S. Congress who have pressed the State Department to remove the MEK and affiliated groups from its list of foreign terrorists."

"Raymond Tanter, a member of the National Security Council in the Reagan administration who co-founded and is president of the Iran Policy Committee -- a Washington group that advocates lifting the MEK's terrorist designation -- said Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie told him that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government intends to destroy the camp, disperse its residents and send MEK leaders to Iran. "

&

"Rep. Howard L. Berman, California Democrat and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, the committee's ranking Republican, issued a statement last week expressing concern about the situation at Camp Ashraf.

"The Government of Iraq signed an agreement with the United States guaranteeing the physical security and protection of Ashraf residents following the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the area," the statement said. "The Iraqi government must live up to its commitment to ensure the continued well-being of those living in Ashraf and prevent their involuntary return to Iran.""

Saddam's Palace overlooking ruins of Ancient Babylon

Taken in Ancient Babylon, Iraq, on March 5, 2004.

Saddam's Palace (II)

Taken in Ancient Babylon, Iraq, on March 5, 2004.

Saddam's Palace overlooking the walls of Ancient Babylon

Taken in Ancient Babylon, Iraq, on March 5, 2004.