“To confuse tactical competency with strategic adequacy has been the folly of recent years.”   Tom Donnelly, editor, Armed Forces Journal International   

 One can certainly understand the frustration of Israel with Hamas,  Hezbollah, and the broader Palestinian opponent.   Despite years of Israeli military responses to their terrorist attacks, they just refuse to roll over and do what Tel Aviv wants.   Policies of mass incarceration. targeted assassination, bulldozing of homes and businesses, and punishment on a wide scale have failed to convince their enemies that Israel cannot and will not be forced to back down.   But the recent response of Israel to the kidnaping of several soldiers, which began as a disproportional assault on the democratically elected Palestinian government is rapidly escalating into a major conflict on a scale to match the wars of the early 1980s in which Israel attempted to destroy the PLO by marching into Lebanon.   Deja vu all over again as Yogi might say.

Yes, Hamas are terrorists, but as Mr. Rumsfeld has noted about another of the Bush administration’s democracy encouraging projects in the Middle East, democracy is a messy business.    It makes us all look rather hypocritical if we promote democracy and then reject the results.   It also tends to leave the entire effort in shambles......as is now happening with the joint American-Israeli program that the Bush administration has pursued since entering office.   The fact that the White House tilted American policy and support wholeheartedly toward Israel while that country did everything possible to undermine and destroy what little Palestinian authority there was has left Washington completely adrift as the region erupts into open warfare.   And that tilt precludes any American effort at mediation.   Unlike past administrations, this presidency cannot even pretend to play the role of mediator in the conflict.   Mr. Bush threw his government entirely to one side and now can only wring its hands.....as it fuels the conflict by speeding up delivery of precision guided munitions to Israel.

So the United States cannot play the role of mediator, the rest of the world is critical of Israel’s response as being disproportional and provocational, and Israel once again seeks to end its decade long torment by military means.    There is no hope here whatsoever, and no possibility that Israel will succeed this time where it has failed before.    Indeed, it is hard to imagine why the Israelis (or Mr. Bush) would believe that more violence and ruthless retribution is going to succeed this time when it has only caused greater animosity in the past.

The administration blames the Syrians, saying they know what they have to do, as if that will bring about some fundamental change in the situation.  They blame (with some justification) the Iranians for supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, but all that elicits is a big “so what.”   The simple fact is those governments are not going to end their indirect support, and as long as the United States is bogged down trying to prevent Iraq from becoming yet another failed state (and home to Islamic Jihadists), there’s little danger that we will do much more than pontificate and bluster.

The simple reality in the Middle East right now is that Iran has the strategic initiative, and the Bush administration finds itself with virtually no influence or leverage.   It’s easy to bluster about how Syria and Iran should stop Hezbollah, but there is nothing they can do to pressure them to do so.....other than escalating even further.   Washington’s Israeli proxies will pound away at Hamas and Hezbollah, and may even manage a temporary reduction in the violence directed against them.  But in the long run, the result will only be to generate more resentment, antagonism and violence from their neighbors.    

The Bush administration dare not criticize the Israelis, and indeed, the very logic of Mr. Bush’s simplistic, all-encompassing “global war on terror” requires validating Tel Aviv’s massive military response.    But the dilemma for Mr. Bush now is that the continued reliance on military action as the primary response to terror threatens to undermine the fragile effort to build “democracy” in the region.   It is ironic the two of the three places where genuinely free elections have been held, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, the result has been to improve the standing of Islamist parties......and now those democratically elected governments are now threatened with destruction by Mr. Bush’s own allies.    

The bottom line is that Mr. Bush’s grand scheme to change the political map of the Middle East by “bringing” the region democracy now teeters on the verge of failure, and Israel will find neither peace nor security by indulging in yet another round of military action.   No one should doubt their ability to punish the Palestinian and Lebanese people.   Neither should anyone expect that doing so will produce the desired result.   In fact, it will have precisely the opposite effect: no peace, no security.

dtf

“A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.”  Georg Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

Republican uber-patriots are once again trotting out the usual election year amendments on flag-burning, in the belief that raising the image of a non-threat offers political opportunity at little cost.   After all, who would dare vote against an amendment that protects the flag.

Of course, one can take issue with this little bit of political theater on numerous grounds, not the least of which is that no one has been able to demonstrate that there is even a serious outbreak of flag-burning going on.   It’s not exactly like this behavior is taking place on a daily (or weekly.....or monthly.....or even annual) basis in the streets of our cities.   When was the last time anyone actually burned a flag in this country in protest?    And did it rock the foundation of the nation when they did it?   Did anyone even notice?

Another problem with this foolishness is that it only addresses burning the flag.   Nothing in the amendment, or in any of the laws that would no doubt follow, will end the routine use of the flag for crass commercialism and marketing purposes, nor would it put an end to the many even more egregious uses of the flag that affront our sensibilities all the time.  It would not stop people from wearing clothing made in the pattern and material of the flag.   It wouldn’t put an end to bandana and head “do-rags” made of the flag.    It certainly won’t stop or even chastise the people who patriotically hang flags from trees or their homes, or display them on cars.....then leave them there as they become filthy and rot away.    ANyway, there are already laws about that......why not enforce them?

This amendment simply fails to address the real problem, the one that the administration and their most vociferous supporters are constantly harping on.   That threat is the dissent, the criticism, the questioning of an administration and a war-president when the nation is at war.   Never mind that no war has actually been declared, or that the current “war” is ambiguous, open-ended, and somewhat hard to define or bring into focus.   The point they make is that as long as we are “at war,” any criticism directed toward the president and his policies is misguided, unpatriotic, seditious, and dangerous to the nation’s security.   Criticism undermines “the troops,”  bringing our enemies, whoever and wherever they might be, comfort and aid.   The failure to unite unquestioningly and uncritically behind the president is a very real danger to the national security, because it leads us to be divided and provides opportunities for our enemies to play upon those divisions.   It is dangerous because when we argue among ourselves, or criticize our leaders, it makes our enemies happy and leads our friends to doubt us.   Most of all, when we are critical of our leaders, we are critical of our nation, and when we are critical of our nation, we are undermining and crippling our ability to act as one, to show strength and unity in the face of adversity.    Now there's something that an amendment to the Constitution can take care of, no problem.   Why won't Senator Frist take heed and focus on the real problem here, not some imagined rash of burning flags.

Indeed, not only should the Republican uber-patriots shift their focus away from the non-issue of flag burning to the much more real and visible threat posed by a dissent weakened presidency (and thus, by extension, the nation itself....since the president is the embodiment of the nation), they ought to take a further lesson from our UN Ambassador John Bolton, who has rightly demanded that UN personnel and members should only speak of the U.S. in glowing, positive terms.   Anything less is not merely rude, it is a threat to our nation’s security because it might cause people, both abroad and here at home, to doubt that America is and always will be right, the best, the most compassionate, the most correct, and the most successful of all nations and peoples.    God forbid anyone should ever come to question that.     It could cause people to ask why Chinese children are doing better in math and science than American children (can’t say that, it would be deleterious to the nation’s security) or why despite the best medical capabilities money can buy, the US lags far behind most other industrialized nations in health standards, child mortality rates, and numerous other areas.    Better to stop such destructive, unpatriotic statements from seeing the light of day and undermining the nation’s security.

So I hereby propose that if the Republicans who control Congress are really serious about addressing something that threatens the nation, they get cracking on a Constitutional amendment prohibiting criticism of the president, the person who is the very embodiment of the American nation to world.    For good measure, include prohibitions on criticism of administration policies, since to question is disrespectful and troublesome to the troops tasked with carrying out, and dying for, those policies.

I don’t understand why Republicans in Congress are dancing around this problem, avoiding it with their silly flag-burning amendments.   We constantly hear how criticism of the president undermines the troops, degrades our image abroad (it isn’t Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo that causes people elsewhere to dislike us, it’s the fact that certain less than patriotic Americans have the audacity to dissent and question their leaders), and is damaging to his ability to fight the war on terrorism.   If that isn't a threat to the very foundation of the Republic, far more so than burning what is, in the final analysis, a piece of colored cloth, then what is?     Why not do something about it?

dtf

 

"A year ago none of us could see victory.  There wasn't a prayer.  Now we can see it clearly---like a light at the end of a tunnel."  General Henri Navarre, French Commander in Indochina, 1954

The White House will play up the killing of al-Zarqawi for all it’s worth, but the reality is that this “success” in the war on terror comes at least two years too late.   It might have made a difference six months after we invaded and occupied Iraq, when the insurgency was still relatively small and driven by al-Zarqawi and a handful of Baathist discontents.   But those were the days when SecDef Rumsfeld denied there was any insurgency, and the administration saw nothing more than a few “dead-enders” as an annoyance along the road to a democratic Iraq and a remodeled Middle East.

Since those days the insurgency has morphed into something very different.   The violence, which is relentless, is now more along sectarian lines than an expression of anti-Americanism.   Moreover, the reality is that the insurgency was never primarily an al Qaeda effort, or a manifestation of the broader Salafi Jihadist conflict with the West.   It has always been closely tied to the sectarian divisions in Iraq, and the perceptions of those sectarian groups regarding how and where they would fit into the new Iraq that the Bush administration has been molding.

We probably blew our chance to end the violence and instability long ago, not least due to the refusal of the Bush administration to admit that they had badly mishandled the follow-up to invasion, and their reluctance to commit sufficient forces to impose order from the start......and concommitantly, capture or kill al-Zarqawi right at the start of the occupation.

That opportunity is long gone and the situation in Iraq may well be beyond our control or ability to shape.    That won’t stop the White House from touting this event much the way they’ve tried to use other false or relatively meaningless “milestones” as evidence of progress in the past.    Killing Saddam’s sons, capturing Saddam, turning over “sovereignty,” holding elections, and the formation of a government (after six months of dithering, bickering and in-fighting), all were supposed to be important signs of progress, but the reality is that Iraq teeters on the edge of the abyss, farther away from stability and security today than it was two years ago.    None of those previous “successes” and milestones actually amounted to much, nor did they signal an impending shift in the administration’s fortunes in Iraq.   

This time the White House and it’s spokespersons are playing it safer, warning that the killing of al-Zarqawi won’t bring about an immediate end to the violence and instability.  They’re trying to have it both ways, playing his death up as a major blow to the insurgency, but lacing their statements with qualifiers about how this won’t end the violence immediately and may even result in an uptick of attacks and instability.

At least they’re being honest about al-Zarqawi’s death not leading to an immediate improvement.    But expecting it to make much difference at all is a mistake.   Al-Zarqawi may have been crucial in instigating and fomenting the sectarian violence that now dominates Iraq’s security situation, but his role is long-finished in that regard.  The fire he lit there will continue to burn brightly without him.    And his martyrdom will become a new recruiting tool for both the insurgency  and al-Qaeda.   Anyone who hopes for a real change in the situation in Iraq is deluding themselves.