We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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There are no real surprises to the graph this month. It is bad but it has been obvious from the day of the Chinook shootdown that would be so. As I noted last month, I felt it best to delay comments until these numbers were in.
D.Amon, all rights reserved. Permission granted for use with attribution to Samizdata
It is rather obvious to me there has been significant re-organization and re-grouping of the Baathists. They have gone from utterly ineffective to being at least capable of co-ordinating attacks which inflict some damage.
A problem they face is their numbers, while large, are limited. Saddam’s loyal core forces which vanished ‘into the woodwork’ in mid-April numbered perhaps 15-20 thousand. They are at present expending those numbers at an horrendous rate. True, they are doing some damage to the Coalition – but not major damage in any tactical, let alone strategic sense. They attack and they kill some of the Coalition forces… and promptly get their own arses handed back to them on a platter.
It is not as if the Baath have an unlimited pool of personnel and cash. There is no superpower backing them behind the scenes; there is no huge mass of conscripts to fill in the holes left by the fallen. If they fight a war of attrition they will lose unless the populace backs them. Given what the Baathists did to that very same populace for three decades, such a turn about seems unlikely. You cannot turn a butcher into a folk hero in less than a generation.
My crystal ball is rather hazy this month. I expect the casualty rates to drop off a little bit but to remain high for at least several months. The major factor in how long they remain high depends on things for which I do not have the information on which to base a ‘WAG’ let alone a reasoned judgement. I can only say the numbers will stay up until either the reformed Baath command structure is shattered or attrition in the ranks erodes their ability and will to fight.
In the best of worlds, that could take several months.
I read a lot of Iraqi blogs and journalism. The reason? I don’t believe anything Western journalists have to say any more. If the New York Times printed a headline saying “Sun Slated to Rise Tomorrow Morning”, I’d fact check them with one of my astronomer friends – just to be sure our planet hadn’t recently stopped rotating.
Many Iraqis have made it clear the US isn’t brutal enough in rooting out the old regime. I’m not sure it is always understood over there that we simply cannot act as violently as they would wish. Now that the enemy is dug in behind a screen of civilians we face fairly stiff limits of ‘acceptable behavior’. We are constantly under the scrutiny of the western allies of the deposed butcher. We face terrorist embedded Paris Match ‘reporters’ filming the firing of anti-aircraft missiles at civilian aircraft. We have Reuters reporters digging for any concievable anti-american angle they can find.
The Iraqis themselves have no such constraints. I agree with Alaa in principle. We have to push the control of security into Iraqi hands as fast as we possibly can… but we do have to balance this with progress in the creation of a civil society. That is the gift we wish to leave behind us. It will have far more lasting effects than the burial of Saddam’s spawn.
The day will come when Iraqi police and government take over everything… and very soon afterwards a large number of Baathists will turn up dead.
Problem finis.
According to a report by The Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran (SMCCDI), there will be two conferences held on the situation in Iran during the first week of December. One will be sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC and aired over free Iranian radio and TV; the other will be held Cagliari, Italy with support of various Italian organizations.
If you are near either city you may wish to attend and file a report with us.
This is the subheading of Mark Steyn’s latest Spectator piece:
Mark Steyn lists the countries that must be dealt with if we are to win the war against terrorism
Okay. But the first regime listed gave me a bit of a turn:
New Hampshire
Does the axis of evil have a new member? Has the Governor of New Hampshire been stockpiling weapons of mass destruction? Is the whole article some kind of joke? Steyn is a funny man. Is this a funny piece?
Steyn goes on to list five further targets for regime change: Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and North Korea.
Profound changes in the above countries would not necessarily mean the end of the war on terror, but it would be pretty close. It would remove terrorism’s most brazen patron (Syria), its ideological inspiration (the prototype Islamic Republic of Iran), its principal paymaster (Saudi Arabia), a critical source of manpower (Sudan) and its most potentially dangerous weapons supplier (North Korea). They’re the fronts on which the battle has to be fought: it’s not just terror groups, it’s the state actors who provide them with infrastructure and extend their global reach. Right now, America – and Britain, Australia and Italy – are fighting defensively, reacting to this or that well-timed atrocity as it occurs. But the best way to judge whether we’re winning and how serious we are about winning is how fast the above regimes are gone. Blair speed won’t do.
That all sounds fairly serious, doesn’t it? So what does Steyn have against New Hampshire? Ah. Penny drops. New Hampshire is where he was writing from. The universe makes sense again.
Nevertheless, behind this little joke there is a serious point. Steyn is describing a war against terrorism that does make sense to me. But the opponents of this war say that by the time Uncle Sam has toppled the regimes of Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and North Korea – or by the time it has given up trying to – it will indeed end up governing New Hampshire, and everywhere else in the USA, somewhat differently. War is the health of the state, as somebody once said.
My answer would be that hardly anyone is suggesting that there be no vigorous war fought against Islamic terrorism – and hence that no measures be taken that might infringe the liberties of Americans, or others. The war is being fought and will go on being fought. The only serious argument is about where to fight it. Is it to be fought in places like Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, North Korea, and back home in places like New Hampshire? Or should some or all of the first five be struck off the list?
Either way, New Hampshire is indeed liable to end up a rather different place.
The Opinion Journal has an excellent article by Saad Eddin Ibrahim of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies in Egypt. Saad not only speaks of liberty; he has spent his time in the hell of an Egyptian prison for promoting it.
I agree with him. The Arab world is no more incapable of living in peace and liberty than anywhere else. As Saad points out, Egypt has been there before and still retains shreds of a once vibrant civil society. The world has forgotten the century of Egyptian history prior to Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1952 coup.
We of Samizdata wish him and the many others like him success and good fortune in their efforts to bring the blessings of liberty to their homelands.
This remark by ‘G’ posted by Iraqi blogger Salam Pax pretty much perfectly sums up why I have such contempt for most of the protestors:
[T]ell your friends in London that G in Baghdad would have appreciated them much more if they had demonstrated against the atrocities of saddam. And if you could ask them when will be the next demonstration to support the people of north Korea, the democratic republic of Congo and Iran?
Amen to that, Bro!
As always, Glenn Reynolds is the first one on to a fascinating new blog.
The Counter Revolutionary is posting a series of New York Times articles from the period of months after the end of WWII. I suggest starting at the bottom and reading your way up to the top as he is posting them roughly in time sequence.
I think you will agree it sounds very, very familiar.
Paul Staines points up another consequence of pursuit of democracy as an end in and of itself in the Middle East
The latest Al Qaeda action in Turkey is their logical response to the US pushing democracy into the Muslim world. Could it be that Al Qaeda is trying to push democracy out of its only Muslim stronghold? So much for the fly-paper theory (which smacked of an ex post facto rationalisation) that Iraq would draw in the world’s assorted Muslim terrorists into a military battleground of the Pentagon’s choosing.
It may be that in the future Istanbul will suffer more than New York and London. Ironic given that Turkey rejected intervening wholeheartedly in Iraq. Attacking Anglosphere interests in Turkey and other Muslim countries in the Western orbit seems to be the best response of the terrorists. Bombing HSBC and the British consulate in Istanbul is a lot easier than bombing Britain’s biggest bank in London.
My impression of Turkey from my last visit (pre 9/11) is that its elites have firmly decided their future lies with the western democracies, but a vocal minority side with the mullahs. I had lunch with an urbane sophisticated somewhat worldly banker, I challenged him about the recent arrest of opposition politicians, piously telling him that Turkey would never enter the EU if it did not respect political and human rights. Without hesitation he simply said:
Tell me, would you like to see 20 Islamic fundamentalist members of the European parliament?
I did not respond, it is an interesting point, democracy will certainly produce uncomfortable outcomes in Iraq as well.
Paul Staines
I think you will find this DOD transcript a fascinating entree into the current situation in Iraq. Major General Charles H. Swannack, Jr., the Commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, is high enough to have a fairly global view but not too high. He’s still close to the combat and day to day reality.
It is well worth a read.
Glenn Reynolds has a blistering post at his other blog (sheesh – I can barely hold up my end at a group blog, and Reynolds has two of the damn things) about the “anti-war” activists and their willing accomplices in the media.
The picture he paints (and documents) of traditional media outlets is horrifying. Groups raising money to fund the guerrilla/terrorists are “anti-war militants.” Western reporters have hired their former Saddamite minders as interpreters. Massive pro-American protests in Iraq go unreported in the elite media. I would add the major media blackout on the Hayes report discussed below, and the near blackout of the interim WMD report confirming to a large degree Saddam’s WMD capabilities. Punchline:
It certainly seems to be the case that neither Americans nor Iraqis are being well-served, as the press bends over backward to characterize terrorist sympathizers as “anti-war” while doing its best to minimize Iraqi support for peace and reconstruction.
As the man says: Indeed, and, Read the whole thing.
An article called Case Closed by Steve Hayes in American conservative journal, The Weekly Standard has yet to cause much of a stir in Big Media. But it should.
If this story is even partly correct, and frankly given my scepticism about our intelligence agencies, we have to be careful, the findings could be crucial to the war debate. It has been a frequently made point from the anti-war and war sceptic crowd that there was no provable connection between Saddam and radical terror groups linked to 9/11. (They have tended to dismiss this possible link with rather blase haste, as if Saddam was some sort of misunderstood old fellow). Well, that claim of no-link is looking a lot weaker now if Hayes’ article is correct.
I hope this story is properly analysed, the evidence sifted and cross-checked. And please, could bloggers like Jim Henley, who has probably been one of the most articulate anti-war libertarian writers these last few years, and with whom I have enjoyed a friendly email correspondence, do better than just dismiss the Hayes story out of hand?
Okay, I finally found a couple hours free to count and double check the data, relearn how to use an app I used once before, find where I’d left the input data files… So here it is:
Dale Amon, all rights reserved. May be used with attribution to Samizdata.
All raw data is publicly available.
I’ll leave my discussion for the update in December because the October numbers do not really tell a story unless taken in conjunction with the already striking but incomplete November numbers. I will only comment that a brief look at the data to date speaks very loudly that the enemy forces have recreated a command structure.
Note that I updated the September figures to include some fatalities that were not announced until several days into October.
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