When George W. Bush goes before the Congress and the nation tomorrow night, he will present himself (again) as a war president. Personally and politically, the identity defines him. Instead of the callow leader he was in the beginning of his presidency, he will conduct himself as a man of sharp determination, with defiance born of the impression that his fight is to the death. He will justify all of his policies, including the illegal ones, by citing his responsibilities — and privileges — as wartime commander in chief. He will not have to remind the men and women in front of him that twice (just after 9/11 and just before Iraq), they voted to license his use of ”all necessary and appropriate force” — enabling acts by which most of them still stand. The United States became a nation at war with congressional collusion.
But did it? Here is the embarrassing question: Is America actually at war? We have a war president, war hawks, war planes, war correspondents, war cries, even war crimes — but do we have war? We have war dead, but the question remains. With young US soldiers being blown up almost daily, it can seem an absurd question, an offensive one. With thousands of Iraqis killed by American firepower, it can seem a heartless question, as if the dead care whether strict definitions of ”war” are fulfilled. There can be no question that Iraq is in a state of war, and that, whatever its elements of post-Saddam sectarian conflict, the warfare is being driven from the Pentagon.

But, regarding the Iraq conflict as it involves the United States, something essential is lacking that would make it a war — and that is an enemy.

The so-called ”insurgents,” who wreak such havoc, are not America’s enemy. They are not our rivals for territory. They are not our ideological antagonists. Abstracting from the present confrontation, they have no reason to wish us ill.

Americans who bother to imagine the situation from the Iraqi point of view — a massive foreign invasion, launched on false pretenses; a brutal occupation, with control of local oil reserves surely part of the motivation; the heartbreaking deaths of brothers, cousins, children, parents — naturally understand that an ”insurgency” is the appropriate response. Its goal is simply to force the invaders and occupiers to leave. Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Kurds have intrinsic reasons to regard each other as enemies, from competition over land and oil, to ethnic hatreds, to unsettled scores. No equivalent sources of inbuilt contempt exist among these people toward America. Taken as a whole, or in its parts, Iraq is not an enemy.

James Carroll | Boston Globe (read more. . .)

The Bush administration is firmly committed to the notion that Al Qaeda presents a military problem that requires a military solution. It has to stick to this story or else it has no explanation for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. So President George W. Bush keeps making speeches about Al Qaeda’s supposed conviction that it could go from success in Iraq to mobilizing all of Islam, restoring the Grand Caliphate of the eighth and ninth centuries, and conquering the world. That’s a military problem.

The Europeans, in general, think otherwise. Rik Coolsaet, of Ghent University and the Belgian Royal Institute for International Relations, notes that while some European analysts agree with Washington’s position, most see terrorism in Europe as “a patchwork of self-radicalizing cells with international contacts,” lacking central direction.

Addressing The Transatlantic Dialogue on Terrorism at The Hague in December, Coolsaet said that at most European terrorism is described as an affair of “concentric circles around a still lethal Al Qaeda core.” The first circle is composed of “more or less structured” organizations, surrounded by a loose and informal third circle of freelance militants.

International counterterrorism is said to have been successful in “degrading Al Qaeda as an organization and in decreasing its ability to conduct massive attacks.” What survives is “a patchwork of homegrown networks and ‘lone wolves,’ where almost everyone can be linked, at least indirectly, to almost everyone else,” but in casual and nonoperational ways.

Thus the phenomenon of Muslim extremism in Europe is largely back to what it was before 9/11 and the panicked international reaction that followed, “unduly exaggerating the importance of Al Qaeda.”

William Pfaff | International Herald Tribune (read more. . .)

A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.

The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant.

Sept. 11 could have been prevented. This is breathtakingly cynical. The nation’s guardians did not miss the 9/11 plot because it takes a few hours to get a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail messages. They missed the plot because they were not looking. The same officials who now say 9/11 could have been prevented said at the time that no one could possibly have foreseen the attacks. We keep hoping that Mr. Bush will finally lay down the bloody banner of 9/11, but Karl Rove, who emerged from hiding recently to talk about domestic spying, made it clear that will not happen — because the White House thinks it can make Democrats look as though they do not want to defend America. “President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they’re calling and why,” he told Republican officials. “Some important Democrats clearly disagree.”

Mr. Rove knows perfectly well that no Democrat has ever said any such thing — and that nothing prevented American intelligence from listening to a call from Al Qaeda to the United States, or a call from the United States to Al Qaeda, before Sept. 11, 2001, or since. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act simply required the government to obey the Constitution in doing so. And FISA was amended after 9/11 to make the job much easier.

NYTimes Editorial (read more. . .)

The U.S. Army in Iraq has at least twice seized and jailed the wives of suspected insurgents in hopes of “leveraging” their husbands into surrender, U.S. military documents show.

In one case, a secretive task force locked up the young mother of a nursing baby, a U.S. intelligence officer reported. In the case of a second detainee, one American colonel suggested to another that they catch her husband by tacking a note to the family’s door telling him “to come get his wife.”

The issue of female detentions in Iraq has taken on a higher profile since kidnappers seized American journalist Jill Carroll on Jan. 7 and threatened to kill her unless all Iraqi women detainees are freed.

The U.S. military on Thursday freed five of what it said were 11 women among the 14,000 detainees currently held in the 2 1/2-year-old insurgency. All were accused of “aiding terrorists or planting explosives,” but an Iraqi government commission found that evidence was lacking.

Iraqi human rights activist Hind al-Salehi contends that U.S. anti-insurgent units, coming up empty-handed in raids on suspects’ houses, have at times detained wives to pressure men into turning themselves in.

CHARLES J. HANLEY | Salon (read more. . .)

The stunning victory of the militant Muslim fundamentalist Hamas Party in the Palestinian elections underlines the central contradictions in the Bush administration’s policies toward the Middle East. Bush pushes for elections, confusing them with democracy, but seems blind to the dangers of right-wing populism. At the same time, he continually undermines the moderate and secular forces in the region by acting high-handedly or allowing his clients to do so. As a result, Sunni fundamentalist parties, some with ties to violent cells, have emerged as key players in Iraq, Egypt and Palestine.

Democracy depends not just on elections but on a rule of law, on stable institutions, on basic economic security for the population, and on checks and balances that forestall a tyranny of the majority. Elections in the absence of this key societal context can produce authoritarian regimes and abuses as easily as they can produce genuine people power. Bush is on the whole unwilling to invest sufficiently in these key institutions and practices abroad. And by either creating or failing to deal with hated foreign occupations, he has sown the seeds for militant Islamist movements that gain popularity because of their nationalist credentials.

In Iraq, which is among the least secure and most economically fraught countries in the world, the Dec. 15 elections brought into Parliament a set of powerful Shiite fundamentalist parties and a new force, the Muslim fundamentalist Iraqi Accord Front, which gained most of the votes of formerly secular-minded Iraqi Sunni Arabs. Some IAF politicians are suspected of strong ties to Iraq’s Sunni insurgency. In Egypt, last fall’s election increased representation for the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood from 17 to more than 70 seats in Parliament, making that group a key political player for the first time in Egyptian history. Decades ago, the party once assassinated a prime minister and attempted to assassinate President Gamal Abdul Nasser, but now maintains it has turned to moderation. It aims at the imposition of a rigid interpretation of Islamic law on Egyptians, including Egyptian women.

Now Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, a branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, has come to power in Palestine. In his press conference on Thursday, Bush portrayed the Palestinian elections in the same way he depicts Republican Party victories over Democrats in the United States: “The people are demanding honest government. The people want services. They want to be able to raise their children in an environment in which they can get a decent education and they can find healthcare.” He sounds like a spokesman for Hamas, underlining the irony that Bush and his party have given Americans the least honest government in a generation, have drastically cut services, and have actively opposed extension of healthcare to the uninsured in the United States.

Juan Cole | Salon (read more. . .)

The Bush administration says that it will withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq as conditions on the ground warrant it. A new report commissioned by the Pentagon suggests that something else is driving the timeline: The Army can’t keep up.

Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer under contract with the Pentagon, says in a report obtained by the Associated Press that the Army is in a “race against time” in Iraq — and it’s one that he’s not sure it can win. In his report, the AP says, Krepinevich concludes that the Army cannot sustain current troop deployments in Iraq long enough to defeat the insurgency there. And if the Army does not do something soon to adjust to the demands of war, he says, it will risk a “catastrophic decline” in recruitment and reenlistment.

Krepinevich’s analysis is the latest in a series of dire reports on Iraq. A report released by the U.S. military in Baghdad this week shows that violence in Iraq increased dramatically in 2005. According to the report, there were 34,100 insurgent attacks recorded in 2005, up almost 30 percent from 2004. Suicide bombings also increased sharply between 2004 and 2005, the report found. Meanwhile, a draft report not released by the military but leaked to the New York Times shows that the Bush administration’s program for rebuilding Iraq has been plagued from the very beginning with what the Times calls “gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs.”

Tim Grieve | Salon

The Bush administration and the American Right generally has refused to acknowledge what we now know. Al-Qaeda is dangerous. All small terrorist groups can do damage. But it is not an epochal threat to the United States or its allies of the sort the Soviet Union was (and that threat was consistently exaggerated, as well).

In fact, the United States invaded a major Muslim country, occupied it militarily, tortured its citizens, killed tens of thousands, tinkered with the economy- did all those things that Muslim nationalists had feared and warned against, and there hasn’t even been much of a reaction from the Muslim world. Only a few thousand volunteers went to fight. Most people just seem worried that the US will destabilize their region and leave a lot of trouble behind them. People are used to seeing Great Powers do as they will. A Syrian official before the war told a journalist friend of mine that people in the Middle East had been seeing these sorts of invasions since Napoleon took Egypt in 1798. “Well,” he shrugged, “usually they leave behind a few good things when they finally leave.”

Because they exaggerate the scale of the conflict, and because they use it cynically, Bush and Cheney have grossly mismanaged the struggle against al-Qaeda and Muslim radicalism after September 11. Here are their chief errors:

1. Bush vastly exaggerates al-Qaeda’s size, sweep and importance, while failing to invest in genuine counterterrorist measures such as port security or security for US nuclear plants.

2. Bush could have eradicated the core al-Qaeda group by putting resources into the effort in 2002. He did not, leaving al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden to taunt us, inspire our enemies and organize for years after the Taliban were defeated. It would be as though Truman had allowed Hitler to broadcast calls for terrorism against the US from some hiding place as late as 1949.

Juan Cole | Informed Comment (read more. . .)