FDD

Iran, Hizballah Making Moves to Topple Lebanon, Expert Says

Recent quotation from CNSNews article by Julie Stahl reads:

The recent Democratic takeover of the U.S. Congress emboldened Syria, Iran and Hizballah (Iran's proxy) because they view it as the defeat of President Bush, said Walid Phares, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. The rest is here

Spy vs. Spy (CM)

Ex-CIA agent (and my fellow ISG advisor) Reuel Marc Gerecht takes a hard look at ex-CIA agent (and ISG principal) Robert Gates.

Key excerpts:

The primary problem in Iraq since May 2003 has not been that Mr. Rumsfeld has been at war with his generals, whose advice he's supposedly refused to listen to. It's been that he and his generals, for sometimes differing reasons, have been in accord. Will Mr. Gates be inclined to reverse the strategy and tactics of Messrs. Rumsfeld and Abizaid? In other words, can he be a general-defying anti-establishmentarian? Mr. Gates's past -- his meteoric rise in the CIA and the National Security Council, his profound loyalty to his bosses, his presidency of the National Eagle Scout Association -- suggests that he doesn't like making waves. …

Mr. Rumsfeld has rightly been criticized for his lack of interest in postwar planning. He brought to this war and to the conflict in Afghanistan, which also isn't going well, a mania for transformational warfare that at its core says you can do more with less.

Mr. Rumsfeld was undoubtedly right, and his Cold War-educated generals were wrong, about the forces necessary to vanquish Saddam's armed forces. But occupying foreign countries and counterinsurgencies, which both demand large numbers of not particularly sophisticated foot soldiers, are cruel to the secretary's transformational creed -- which seems perfectly sensible if America only aspires to blow things up overseas.

Mr. Rumsfeld also brought to our post-9/11 battlefields a particularly conservative notion that nanny-state welfare-ism is bad for people, and that America's occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, if it were to be protracted or profound, would keep both countries from growing up. When applied to Iraq, however, with its enormous potential for sectarian rage, where U.S. military power was essential to keeping order and the thickly intertwined but stressed bonds between the Shiite and Sunni Arab communities intact, this attitude helped produce the conflagration now destroying the country. …

It is a relief to see that Mr. Gates isn't, so far as the public record shows, enamored of the idea that America's ground forces need to be shrunk and "transformed." If Mr. Gates is defined by service to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush -- who never gave up on the idea that the U.S. needed to have sufficient ground, naval and air forces to fight two wars simultaneously -- we can only hope that he'll urge the president to reverse Mr. Rumsfeld's less-is-more doctrine, which could not even handle the insurgency of Iraq's minority, revanchist Sunni community when it was small-scale and the Shia hadn't yet gone on a vengeful warpath. …

As will soon be apparent, the Iraq Survey Group, of which Mr. Gates is a member and to which I'm an adviser, has not discovered any way for the U.S. to exit Iraq -- except under catastrophic conditions. Its recommendations will probably be the least helpful of all the blue-ribbon commissions in Washington since World War II because it cannot escape from an unavoidable reality: We either declare defeat and withdraw completely tout de suite, or we surge troops into Baghdad and fight. The ISG will surely try to find some middle ground between these positions, which, of course, doesn't exist.

If one works through the different scenarios, they all return quickly to a Rumsfeldian position that the U.S. needs to do more in Iraq with less -- a position that has been proven flatly wrong since the spring of 2003. This is why Washington has not been able to draw down even though the president, his defense secretary and his generals have dearly wanted to do so. Any meaningful reduction of U.S. forces is very likely to collapse the Iraqi Army into Shiite and Sunni militias and bring on massive carnage, the likes of which the Middle East has not seen since the Iran-Iraq War. If Mr. Gates signs off on the ISG's recommendations, which will probably be completed before he assumes office, he will be party to a doomed strategy -- and everyone in Washington and abroad will recognize it as a failure as soon as they start to work through it -- before he even sets foot in the Pentagon. It may not be easy for Mr. Gates to recover from this initial flop.

The Caliph-Strophic Debate (WP)

October 23, 2006. Published by the History News Network as well as World Defense Review

It seems that the US is having a hard time winning the hearts and minds of Arabs and Muslims, but an equally serious problem can be observed in the intellectual circles of America where some have had a difficulty coming to terms with the terminology of the War of Ideas. If the educated elite of the United States is incapable of identifying the ideology and the strategy of the Jihadists five years after 9/11, we not only have a problem with handling the War in Iraq, but also with the future of American national security as a whole.

Walid Phares in War Stories with Oliver North

War Stories with Oliver North, Fox News Sun., October 15, 2006

FDD Senior Fellow Walid Phares joins Vice President Cheney, Former Director of the CIA and FDD Distinguished Advisor James Woolsey, Bernard Lewis and other experts in the field. In this special report Oliver North explores what every person should know about jihad. In proven "War Stories" tradition, this episode brings historical context to today's events.

To watch the video click on: Part one, Part two, Part three, Part four.

Walid Phares Media Roundup (WP)

Walid Phares on VOA about the worldwide hunt for terrorists. In New York Post comments on Iran and Syria; Ahmadinejad in United Nations; State of affairs in Iraq and other issues.  In Family Security Matters, on U.S. homeland security:is it penetrated and threatened? In the American Chronicle Phares is quoted on the conflict in Darfur. On CTV Canada Phares, talks about the video obtained by Britain's Sunday Times newspaper showing two of the terrorists responsible for the Sept. 11 terror attack laughing and joking together more than 18 months before the attacks. For video click here

FDD Media Roundup

This week's Notes & Comments are now online. Cliff May comments on how the kidnapping and intimidation of journalists influences media coverage of the Palestinian issue He also reports on support for the war on terrorism in Hollywood, the latest news from the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, and the progress of liberal democracy in the Middle East.

Over at TechCentralStation, J. Peter Pham & Michael I. Krauss discuss Europe's Munich moment.

FDD Media Roundup

Cliff May asks whether Americans are up to the challenge of seeing this war through to the end.

Michael I. Krauss and J. Peter Pham highlight the absurdity of the UN ceasefire to the Israel/Hezbollah conflict.

J. Peter Pham discusses the uncomfortable truth that China is currently building alliances with despots the world over to balance against American power.

Iranian official lies about Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (AV)

Ali Larijani, secretary of the Iranian Supreme Council for National Security, recently said:

Article 11 of the NPT states that if we are threatened, we can act in secret. If you want our activity to be transparent, you should not use the Security Council as leverage for your own benefit. If you do so, then according to the NPT, we are required to act in secret, in the face of your threat.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, what Article 11 of the NPT actually says is, "This Treaty, the English, Russian, French, Spanish and Chinese texts of which are equally authentic, shall be deposited in the archives of the Depositary Governments. Duly certified copies of this Treaty shall be transmitted by the Depositary Governments to the Governments of the signatory and acceding States."

Oops...

Did Israel violate the ceasefire? (AV)

Kofi Annan has blamed Israel for violating the ceasefire after it launched a raid against an arms shipment to the Bekka Valley. But Annan's position is not - nor can it be - supported by the actual ceasefire resolution, UNSCR 1701 (2006).

Structurally, UNSCR 1701 does two things: first, it forces an immediate and temporary ceasefire based upon the cessation of actual hostilities; second, it calls for an international presence in southern Lebanon to help Lebanon maintain the ceasefire. Right now, we are somewhere between Stage 1 and Stage 2. So a resort to force is justified if it derives sanction from the actual text of UNSCR 1701 or a right enshrined in the UN Charter or in international law generally. With this as the standard, there is a case to be made that Israel's commando raid against an arms shipment in the Bekaa Valley is lawful.

Israel is pointing out (correctly) that the resolution bans offensive military operations; this is a truism since a Security Council resolution cannot ban defensive operations. Israel is claiming its actions are justified by the right of self-defense, which is given partial expression in Article 51 of the UN Charter. The key requirement here is that Israel's response be necessary and proportional.

It is certainly proportional, since a commando raid that results in little collateral damage is proportional to the threat posed by an arms shipment to Hezbollah, and the proximate relationship between that shipment and an attack on Israel's territorial integrity. But was it necessary? This is a more difficult question, but there is a strong case to be made that the answer is yes.

Operative Clause 8 of UNSCR 1701 calls upon Israel and Lebanon " to support a permanent ceasefire and a long-term solution based on the following principles." It then goes on to define these principles, the support of which is necessary, by the resolution's own language, for a permanent ceasefire: subclauses 2,3 and 5 list those that I think are most relevant: removing armed personnel, assets and weapons unless those authorized by the government of Lebanon from south of the Litani; the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon; no sale or supply of arms and related material to Lebanon except as authorized by its government.

Before we reach Stage 2 of the ceasefire, the only parties capable of enforcing the terms of UNSCR 1701 are the governments of Israel and Lebanon, and nothing in the resolution precludes Israel from enforcing its terms, especially if this strengthens Israel's right of self defense. We should note that if the UN Security Council wanted Israel to remain uninvolved in the enforcement of the technical terms of the resolution, it could have done so. For example, when the Security Council authorized a coalition to use force against Iraq to remove it from Kuwait, the resolution was worded such that Israel could not be part of that coalition. Here, in the absence of such wording, Israel is fully justified in enforcing the resolution.

I eagerly await a press release from Kofi Annan criticizing the country that sent that shipment, which assuredly is in violation of UNSCR 1701. It is up to Israel and her allies to rebut the perfidious Kofi Annan when he tries to pin the blame for the collapse of his UN mission on Israel.

NSA program hits speed bump, then drives over it (AV)

There is an excellent editorial on NRO rubbishing Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's decision to strike down the NSA surveillance program.

Judge Taylor's opinion is funny rather than sad, because there is a 0% chance that its rationale will be endorsed by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Taylor, surveying the NSA program, found violations of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Separation of Powers, and two federal statutes. If she looked harder, she may very well have found a violation of Roe v Wade, too.

Senator Specter's bill before Congress to, as it were, normalize the NSA wiretap program, will if it is passed, moot the question of whether the program violates FISA, but leave open the question of whether it violates the Constitution. Suffice it to say, for now, that even fierce critics of the NSA program are unwilling to sign up to Judge Taylor's take on that bold claim.

Judge Taylor's opinion is a damp squib; already, her permanent injunction against the NSA program's continued operation has been stayed, so it will, at least for the time being, continue to yield actionable intelligence.