R.P. Barr

War in Peace

U.S. forces are out of Iraq.  We should never have been there, and it ain’t over yet.

After 9/11, I oversaw a retraining program for my agency to redirect them toward anti-terrorism.  In preparation, I read a few books about al-Qaeda and terrorism.  I don't claim expertise, only a little study.  But, I told people in the classes I taught that Iraq was not the enemy.  Saddam Hussein was a nasty dictator, but not suicidal.  He would not attack us.  He also knew that al-Qaeda’s top two concerns were 1) to get Western influence out of the Middle East, and 2) to overthrow secular leaders in Muslim countries and install theocracies like Iran.  Saddam would not give powerful weapons to al-Qaeda for fear that they would be used against him.  Many, if not most, of my colleagues believed President Bush’s accusations.  A West Point graduate even argued with me.  I told him that as the war stretched on and American casualties accumulated, the people would turn against the war.  He dismissed me a deluded liberal.  The war would be over in a few weeks.  I wonder if he recalls that conversation now.

 I just saw the movie, Fair Game which is about those early pre-war days, and how hard the Bush Administration fought against those who challenged their views.  The right learned nothing from Vietnam.

Saddam Hussein, like Muammar Gaddafi and the Iranian Ayatollahs, did sponsor terrorist activities here and there, but nothing big enough to prompt an invasion.  The world is a better place without him.  Whether getting rid of him was worth a half million Iraqi lives and 4,500 Americans is another question.

 Some commentators worry that Iraq will dissolve in civil war.  It might, but I don’t believe it will happen in the near future.  A few bombs, but no armed uprising.  The primary aftermath, as far as we are concerned, will be taking care of the men and women who served, those who returned with disabilities, and the widows and orphans of those who died.  For at least the next fifty years the government—you and I—will be paying for the wounds of that war just as we have for all of the others. 

 Did you see that the last combat veteran of the First World War died this past year?  I’m sure that there are still a handful of widows and maybe some dependent children who continue to receive benefits.  That’s how long a war takes.

 And, before we get involved in another—after Afghanistan—Congress needs to set aside a century’s amount of benefits.  That should be a requirement.  Budget for that before a single boot steps into combat.  Make the Administration that agitates for war pay for it up front.  Maybe then they will think twice.

 

Putting the Republic at Risk

The first coal in my stocking this Yule was the vote on granting the government power to detain anyone anywhere, including the U.S., on mere suspicion of aiding terrorists.  The first vote on this provision was overwhelmingly in favor.  This bill was the worst threat to the the United States since the British burned Washington in 1814.  It’s been watered down, but hasn’t been killed completely or universally denounced.  

 It is appalling that any Americans would think that our justice system is incapable of dealing with terrorists.  In 1862, the Sioux in Minnesota massacred some 800 settlers.  303 Sioux were arrested, tried and sentenced to hang.  Abraham Lincoln reviewed the sentences and commuted all but 39, which is still the largest mass execution in American history.  Southern sympathizers murdered Lincoln, but the system was trusted to try and condemn 8 conspirators.  In 1920 two men were murdered by anarchist bank robbers. Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were tried and executed.  When communists stole secrets of the atomic bomb, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested, tried, and executed.  I could go on.  Some of the cases are still controversial—and the rules of civilian trials were not always followed--but the point is that none of the suspected terrorists walked away free.  Our record of catching the bad guys is excellent.  We have more people in prison than any other country.  (The pros and cons of executions can be saved for another time.) We don’t need to broaden our detention rules.

 Besides that, we have a reputation (somewhat tarnished now), of being fair.  Our enemies tell their recruits that we are cruel and barbarous.  Reinforcing that prejudice is not helpful to our cause.    Americans like to think of ourselves as the good guys, and our men and women in uniform have proven that to be true in combat zones all over the planet.  The exceptions to that practice have been, in fact, exceptions.  We cannot allow a bunch of millionaire dilettantes in Congress to endanger our troops and diplomats by throwing out the Bill of Rights in an effort to appear tougher than the men and women who actually go into harm’s way.

 Of course it is really less about terrorism than it is an attempt to shut down debate and the free exchange of ideas.  If someone disagrees with a government policy, he is, by definition, an enemy of the state who is giving comfort to the foreign powers who hate us, and should be locked away.  That can be any one of us, depending on who is in office at the time.  And, detention without trial means that you or I don’t even have to disagree with the government.  If I object to the charges on my credit card statement and make a stink about it, the bank manager could make a call, and I disappear.  Take away the matter of credit cards, and that is how some detainees wound up in Guantanamo and spent years trying to fight evidence held in secret.  We must give our enemies benefit of our Constitution in order to protect ourselves.

 

The Timing of Alerts

In the aftermath of 9/11/2001, I was assigned to direct a training program to re-orient agency personnel to the mission of anti-terrorism.  As a result, I was pulled into a few brainstorming sessions to guess the next threat.  I was rather good at that game and gained a small reputation for scary scenarios.  One of these concerned me so much that I conducted a private campaign to take preventive measures.  Of course, all of these schemes were kept within agency walls.

Of course, if I could think of these things, so could the bad guys.  The secrecy was intended to make them work for it.  Then, in August, 2009, al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia tried out a version of one of my ideas, i.e. plant the bomb inside the bomber’s body.  It would be undetectable.  The bomber was an al-Qaeda fugitive who offered to give himself up, but only to Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in person.  Apparently, the structure of the human body combined with the strength of this particular explosive caused the blast to focus downward.  The bottom half of the bomber was blown to smithereens, there was a crater in the floor, and nobody else suffered more than minor injuries.  Clearly there are some bugs in the bomb design that need to be worked out.  I knew there would have to be practical trials when I came up with the idea seven years earlier.  It's just tough to find volunteers for those experiments.

It wouldn’t be worth mentioning except for Slate's article today [http://www.slate.com/id/2298657/] that reported the Department of Homeland Security had issued an alert for surgically implanted or other internally installed explosive devices.  Why are they alerting us now?

Did someone discover my idea in some archived folder?  Highly doubtful.  Did the upper management committees finally decide that the 2009 Saudi bombing deserved some official comment?  It’s only been two years, give them time.

I think the answer is at the bottom of the article.  Three security hardware companies claim to have the technology for scanners that see all the way through a person’s body.  But, they can’t sell this cutting-edge technology unless they have us scared enough to buy it.  So, DHS is beating the drum.  Who said that the private sector doesn’t need government?

Are these new scanners necessary?  Not if TSA does proper screening of passengers.  Al-Qaeda is not going to send one of their hardened cadre on a suicide mission.  They can’t afford the loss, and their best people are on our no-fly lists.  Just like with the shoe and underwear bombers, al-Qaeda will send a green recruit.  Such a person will have a difficult time acting casual with a bomb inside his body.  A trained observer might spot him by the way he walks.  A good interviewer will pick him up after a few seconds of questioning.  This is not rocket science.  It only takes enough trained, motivated people to do the job.

Government needs to spend its money on human resources.  Machines can always be beaten. 

That reminds me of another one of my ideas—the one that turned me into an internal lobbyist.  But--Shhhh.  It’s still a secret.

 

The Israelis have a word for it

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress and was applauded, I assume, for his chutzpah.  Imagine if I picked your wallet from your pocket, and when you demanded it back, I accused you of threatening me.  “Calm down and we can negotiate.  To show my good faith, I will give you a photograph from the wallet.  Now, if you give me something I will give you your driver’s license.  Of course, you have to admit that the wallet is mine, and then I will think about giving you something more, maybe a credit card.”   That is the Israeli concept of negotiations.  Their idea of peace is stealing land without complaint from the rightful owners.

 The news kept repeating Netanyahu’s assertion that before 1967, Israel was only 9 miles wide, and that was not wide enough for security.  Someone should tell him that 900 miles is not wide enough if your neighbors hate you.

 He wants other Arab countries to absorb Palestinian refugees.  Arabs have strong tribal ties.  Making citizens of large blocks of outsiders would destabilize the balance of power in the neighboring countries.  Current events over there show what can happen without adding Palestinians to the mix.

Some people believe that there must be a Jewish state because for centuries the end of the Yom Kippur service and the Passover Seder was, “Next year in Jerusalem.”  I can appreciate that.  But,Jews need to understand that the other Semites, the Arabs, have memories that are just as long.

 There will be no piece until Jerusalem is divided along 1967 lines, until there is a right to return or reparations or some combination of the two, and no peace until the Palestinian state has contiguous territory.  Let the settlements remain, but turn them over to Palestinian control.

 Israel can be an engine for real progress in the new Middle East, but it has to take steps to resolve these conflicts.  They are not the final issues, they are the only issues.

 Meanwhile, the United States needs to stop enabling this paranoid penchant for self-destruction.  Take away—or at least begin with a serious threat to take away aid.  Friends don’t let friends drive delusional.

 

An opportunity to show your support

Available on:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Port-Director/R-P-Barr/e/9781432768140?r=1

 http://www.amazon.com/dp/143276814X  where it is also available as a Kindle ebook

 Or in the UK from:

http://www.whsmith.co.uk/CatalogAndSearch/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductID=9781432768140

The book is a work of fiction about a terrorist attack on the United States and a Customs and Border Protection Port Director who sets out to prevent the next attack.  I tried to make it a bit more realistic than the usual action-adventure.  If you are a regular reader of this blog, you have an idea about my style.  The story moves along briskly, and has some suspense and other bits to engage your interest.  You might like it.  If not, the paper version burns nicely and I can get you a bulk rate on enough copies to make a proper fire.

Reaping the Whirlwind

Osama bin Laden is dead.  Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.  There are plenty of other bloggers and people to talk about how long it took to catch him and whether the Pakistanis were protecting him.  I would just like to deplore the people who were celebrating in the streets.

To be sure, the man had earned a brutal end, and I think a bullet in the head was too good for him.  I would much have preferred seeing him humilated by capture and trial.  Yes, I said trial.  I am disgusted by those who seem to think that a fair trial is a free walk.  The justice system grinds down the spirit.  And, it works remarkably well.  Show me a terrorist who has ever walked free from a trial. 

How can someone call himself a patriot or a good American if he doesn’t have faith in our basic institutions?   Maybe someone who is trying to buy off and subvert those institutions.  Beware of the checkbook terrorists.  They walk among us.  Well, not exactly walk—they glide past in limosines with tinted windows.  And, they don’t even do that in my neighborhood—too downscale.  Anyway, they’ve done more damage to America than bin Laden ever dreamed of.

Back to the crowds waving the flags and chanting U-S-A.  Do you remember how we felt when we saw videos of people cheering the attacks on 9/11?  We should be better than that.  Do you remember anyone cheering when we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?  No, the celebrations waited until the end of the war.

A man was killed.  We do not celebrate that.  Period.  The images of our bad mannered oafs will play in the Middle East for years to come inspiring a new generation of terrorists. 

 It’s good that he’s gone.  It would have been better if it had happened eight years ago, but Bush was distracted with trying to one up his father. 

 The death of Osama bin Laden brings closure of a sort to many who lost relatives to his violence, but no death should inspire cheering in the streets. 

 

Just Desert

Okay, I get it that the president has a lot on his plate. But, he really choked on Libya. This is not just any Middle Eastern country, Gaddafi has actually sponsored acts of terrorism against the United States. This is not Saudi Arabia or Bahrain where the totalitarian regimes have been pro-American. It’s not even Yemen or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. This is Muammar Gaddafi on whom Ronald Reagan felt compelled to drop bombs. And, I don’t remember any protests then. The other countries in the region know who he is.

Defense Secretary Gates said that we couldn’t make a no-fly zone without bombing the radar and anti-aircraft missile installations first. And, then, Gaddafi would likely use ground troops to crush the dissenters, so we would have to go to war, and we can’t afford another war. It’s like saying that you can’t order a hamburger because it will come with french fries and you can’t eat french fries without ketchup and you’re allergic to ketchup. Ronald Reagan bombed Gaddafi and there was no war.

If you see a boat sinking, do you call out to the people in the water that you are going to canvas your friends to see who will call the Coast Guard to rescue them?

Gaddafi was murdering people who had been protesting peacefully. In a hostage situation, the police will negotiate as long as it takes--or until the shooting starts. Once the bad guy starts shooting, talking takes a back seat to stopping the bastard.

I was so disappointed in Obama. Not surprised, but disappointed.

Now, of course, we are in it. And--unnecessarily dead protesters aside--the current plan is exactly the right one. We’ve shut down the Libyan Air Force and should stop the advance of the army. Gaddafi should go, too, but his departure should be organic. It should be a Libyan thing, not an American or a NATO thing. All the rebels deserve is something like a level playing field. Then, it’s up to them.

The Egyptian Front

There are some obvious lessons in the falls of Hosni Mubarek in Egypt and Tunisia’s Zine Abidine Ben Ali.  The first is that the allure of radical Islamists has lost its luster.  The aforementioned tyrants were overthrown by people who want secular democracies—or some approximation. The second lesson is that the Iraq war was unnecessary to overthrow Saddam Hussein.  Bush jumped the gun by a decade, and thousands died.  There is no army as strong as an idea whose time has come.

 Of course, it could be argued that the extremists’ reaction to Bush’s War was what soured the average Middle Easterer to their message.  All that Muslim on Muslim violence was off-putting.  I would respond that the march toward people's government was the direction that the Middle East was moving before the war, but in the aftermath of our invasion of Iraq, democracy became a dirty word in the Islamic world, and the process slowed.

Demonstrations have broken out across the Middle Eastern crescent: Bahrain, Jordan, Yemen, Algeria, and even Persian Iran.  It is not because people are tired of autocrats and corruption, it is because the autocrats and corruption have sucked the hope of a better life from their societies.  Unemployment and underemployment are the drivers.  The contrast between the wealthy upper classes and the poverty of college-graduates-without-political-connections has finally become too much to bear. 

The New York Stock Exchange has just been bought up by a German company, proof, if any was needed, that the new empire of the 21st Century is not geographic, it is financial--a fungus without borders.  The money that Middle Eastern elites have stolen from the lower classes has not been reinvested in their countries, but shipped overseas to other economies that are already in gear.  It is class war waged by the privileged and powerful.

 Egypt and Tunisia are the first counter-attacks in our global class war.  It may not succeed, but it will spread.

 

 

Why Juan Williams should have been fired

Juan Williams was reportedly fired by National Public Radio for saying that people on airplanes dressed in Muslim garb made him nervous about their intentions.  Both conservatives and liberal commentators have condemned NPR.  I wonder if they would be so quick to attack if Williams had been a white reporter who said that groups of young black men on street corners made him fearful?  What would happen to such a reporter’s credibility?

If we allow Williams to speak of his irrational fears, then he should still have been fired for not learning anything as a reporter.  Think back on all the photographs you have seen of Muslim  terrorists: the 9/11 crew, the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, the Times Square bomber, etc.  Did any of them wear long robes or bin-Laden beards or akaru (the head scarf with the rope around it)?  Of course not.  --Well, I'll concede a scruffy beard on Richard Reid, but even with it, he looked more goofy than threatening.

Terrorists want to blend in so they can get closer to their targets.   They do not want to draw attention to themselves.  Terrorists look more like Williams, or you, or me or an Army doctor.

 But, Williams is afraid of robes and beards.  He has learned nothing.  Reporters should be fired for stupidity.