Well, why doesn't the government pay for it?

In the long ago and far away, it was considered very amusing when a child said of a project whose finances were uncertain: "Well, why doesn't the government pay for it?" That stopped being funny in the Johnson administration, if not before. But there are still a few who haven't gotten the word, including Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. The last is the gent to wants to build a mosque and Islamic cultural center next door to Ground Zero. He thinks it would be a dandy idea if we (that is, the American taxpayer) not only agreed that it's a dandy idea, but helped pay for it as well. Toward that end, he has applied for $5 million from a U.S. government fund established for the purpose of--are you ready?--rebuilding lower Manhattan after the 9/11 terrorist strike. Yes. In the immortal words of Dave Barry, I am not making this up. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

That was the old fine!

The obese ladies and gentlemen of the Transportation Security Administration have created a new American folk hero in John Tyner. Rather like President Obama and Nancy Pelosi, who'd like to fire the American electorate for not appreciating them sufficiently, the TSA is really upset with the "traveling public" and its reaction to full body scanners and the deliberately intimate pat-down given to those who opt out of it. To make their point, they have opened an investigation into Mr. Tyner and threatened him with an $11,000 fine.

It seems that Mr. Tyner warned an agent, "Touch my junk and I'll have you arrested," when the TSA began to explore his "crotchal area," as one agent felicitously called it. He was forcibly ejected from the airport, with a warning that he could be fined $10,000 for lèse majesté. Though the Federal Reserve Board assures us that the consumer price index these days is flat, the TSA evidently hasn't gotten the word: $10,000, explained a representative, was the old fine for injuring the pride of its employees; Mr. Tyner may now have to come up with eleven big ones.

A conservative famously is a liberal who's been mugged. Just so, a libertarian is a conservative who's been groped by TSA. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

War in the shadows

Fine article in the NYT this morning about clandestine military and CIA operations being carried out by the Obama administration. I think the takeaway is supposed to be twofold: for the left, gasp! that a leftist president would actually defend the United States; and for the right, reassurance that Mr. Obama isn't quite the doofus that he sometimes seems. (Is it entirely a coincidence that this long article about our covert warrior-president follows hard upon his Friday defense of the Ground Zero mosque?)

I found the article both reassuring and comical, as when the authors fret that using soldiers in clandestine ops might deprive the U.S. military of its Geneva Convention rights. Yeah, sure: when was the last time were American soldiers in enemy hands treated according to Geneva? Most of you aren't old enough to remember, so I'll answer the question: April 1945, and even then only if you were fighting against German forces, didn't fall first into the hands of the Gestapo, weren't a Jew, and best of all qualified for a Luftwaffe camp. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Mosque at Ground Zero

Dorothy Rabinowitz, who ostensibly is a TV reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, is also one of the most brilliant writers on the follies of contemporary life. Yesterday she weighed in on The Mosque at Ground Zero.

Nine years after the Twin Towers fell into the street, and took three thousand people with them, we still don't have a replacement to fill that great hole in the ground. The political-legal process just can't handle it. (During the Great Depression, the Empire State Building went from ground breaking to first visitor in eleven months.) So it looks like the first new building to rise in the area, and to look down into that hole, will be--a thirteen-story mosque!

Read Ms. Rabinowitz's take on this. No summary of mine can do it justice. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Tank hits landmine

One of the refreshing things about Taliban propaganda is that the ragheads are blessedly (or is that word politically incorrect?) free of alphabetical jargon. 'US tank hits landmine explosion in Helmand,' writes Qari Yousuf Ahmadi on Voice of Jihad. Of course it wasn't a tank, if the incident took place at all; likely it was an MRAP, a vehicle so new that the military has no name for it, only the acronym for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected. Or a Humvee, which at least can be pronounced, but which is likewise the smoothing out of the acronym for High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle.

Ah, for the days when things had names, however foolish! Tank, for instance--that was a British cover word to hide the fact that they were developing an armored, tracked vehicle to roll over the trenches of World War I. Happily the code word stuck, and we don't have to talk about the ATVROT battles on the Eastern Front.

I think the Taliban are on to something with their homely translations. How much more evocative is "landmine" than Improvised Explosive Device! Perhaps if we could restore our language to its onetime flexibility we would be faring better in the Global War on Terror, Overseas Contingency Operation, Struggle Against Violent Extremism (whose acronym sounded a bit like a call for help), Man-Caused Disaster, or whatever it's called today. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The mega-mosque at Ground Zero

If anyone doubted Americans' capacity for self-flagellation, the Good People of Tribeca wonderfully expanded the limits last night, when a community board voted to allow planning to proceed for a 15-story Islamic center two blocks from Ground Zero. “What better place to teach tolerance," urged one of the residents, "than at the very area where hate tried to kill tolerance?” This seems to have things backwards: it is not lower Manhattan that needs to show tolerance, but the Islamists who did their best to destroy it. What next--a Shinto shrine at Pearl Harbor? A German cultural center at Auschwitz? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

A Vision So Noble

This small book is the result of three years' work at King's College London (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Kings' College Online, since I never actually went to London). It combines my MA thesis with two earlier papers that I wrote for the program, and it went on sale on Amazon.com this morning: A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America's War on Terror.

I've blogged from time to time about John Boyd, but the short version is that he was a colonel who maddened the Air Force and attracted acolytes among its civilian employees for his outside-the-box thinking about aerial combat, maneuver warfare, and the ways in which wars, basketball games, and chess tournaments are won. Arguably he was the greatest American military thinker since Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. My task was to see how Boyd would have approached the War on Terror. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Lapses? Oh, say it ain't so!

The Gray Lady has a rather ungracious headline this morning: Lapses Allowed Suspect to Board Plane. Good grief. My own reaction was: For once, the U.S. government has done something right! The folks at the New York Times must really live in a world of privilege and ease, if they think that catching a would-be mass murderer in two days is anything less than a splendid bit of copperdom. Good on the New York police, good on the FBI, good on the computer system that allowed the Feds to see that their man was sitting (in coach, I hope) on an airplane still at the gate.

Personally, I would feel somewhat reassured if the Congress took up legislation requiring individuals paying cash for their seats to wait seven days before flying. Heck, I don't even pay cash at McDonald's! Anyone peeling off hundred-dollar bills for an airplane ticket is surely worth a second glance. But I doubt it will happen. More likely, the Congressional reaction will be to hale some hapless cops and airline officials before a public hearing and berate them for their lapses. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Of drone strikes and assassinations

I have mused before about the queasy feeling I get when the United States of America tries to kill its enemies with targeted assassination, as opposed to an up-front invasion that kills a whole lot more people, both ours and theirs. Today in the NYT, Robert Wright gives the assassination question a good airing. (I didn't know who Mr. Wright was, either. Turns out he's a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. And no, I don't know what that is, either.) He writes:

"President Obama, who during his first year in office oversaw more drone strikes in Pakistan than occurred during the entire Bush presidency, last week surpassed his predecessor in a second respect: he authorized the assassination of an American — Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Imam who after 9/11 moved from Virginia to Yemen, a base from which he inspires such people as the Fort Hood shooter and the would-be underwear bomber."

It does seem that hands-off assassinations are the hallmark of Democratic administrations, while Republicans send in 3rd Infantry Division. The Bush boys, father and son, both invaded Iraq, while Bill Clinton made a regular practice of firing cruise missiles at training camps that proved empty and chemical plants that proved to be aspirin factories, or so we were told at the time. Mr. Obama seems to favor Mr. Clinton's policy, and it is certainly one that costs fewer lives. But, as Mr. Wright points out, "Students of the law might raise a couple of questions." Of course they might! That's what students of law do best. Still, they are questions that deserve an airing--and I note uneasily that among the folks who agree with the leftish Mr. Wright is the rightish Bill Lind, whom I quoted on the same subject here recently.

Mr. Wright lays out his objections, and concludes: "I’m not sure I’d want to pay these prices even for a strategy that helped us in the war against terrorism." But of course he hasn't really paid any price, including the price of standing still for the next terrorist attack. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On our need for spies

Writing in (of all places!) GQ magazine, former CIA agent Robert Baer argues that the agency is broken, and that the kindest thing to do would be to put it out of its misery, or at least to rebuild it entirely. The December massacre of a station chief and seven of her staff, he argues, was not just a personal failure but an institutional one. He calls the station chief "Kathy," in deference to her covert status, but he spares her nothing: "She'd spent the vast majority of her career at a desk in Northern Virginia, where she studied Al Qaeda for more than a decade ... she was always slotted to be a reports officer, someone who edits reports coming in from the field. She was never intended to meet and debrief informants." She'd never managed a covert operation, and she didn't speak the language. But there she was in Kost, Afghanistan, greeting a suicide bomber with what amounted to her entire staff plus a few drop-in visitors. The assignment, Mr. Baer argues, betrays the death of the CIA's spy culture and the ascendancy of the computer-savvy analyst. Kathy was an analyst.

Boom. "The fact is that Kathy, no matter how courageous and determined, was in over her head.... She was set up to fail. The battlefield was tilted in Al Qaeda's favor long ago--by John Deutch and his [Clinton-era] reforms, by the directors who followed him, by the decision to drop the paramilitary course from the mandatory curriculum (which would have made Kathy a lot more wary of explosives), and by two endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have worn the CIA down to a nub." Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Pakistan turns on the Taliban

'LAHORE: In a major policy shift, the powerful Pakistani establishment seems to have decided to abandon the former Taliban rulers of Afghanistan by agreeing to launch a massive crackdown against their command-and-control structure, which has already led to the arrest of nine of the 18 key members of the Mullah Omar-led Quetta Shura from different parts of Pakistan, and that too within a short span of two months.'

Thus reports The News of Pakistan yesterday, attributing the change of heart to Saudi rather than American pressure. Of course it's easier to nod to a fellow Muslim than to the blue-eyed devils from across the sea. But whatever the motivation, it's good news if true. In terms of the Vietnam War, it's as if Hanoi had turned against the Viet Cong. Comments the always perceptive John McCreary on Nightwatch: 'Without Pakistan as a safe haven and with the Shura members in custody, several things will happen. The Afghan Taliban will devolve into banditry within a year, though they will not disappear. The prospects for negotiated power sharing improve immeasurably. Pakistan becomes the honest broker among the warring parties and holds the high cards … or high value targets.'

Wouldn't that be nice? Then Joe Biden could claim Afghanistan as another success of 'this administration'. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The assassination conundrum

I once blogged about the discomfort I felt when a remotely piloted drone aircraft targets an individual for death, or a team of Special Operatives hunts down and kills someone. That’s more akin to assassination than warfare as usually practiced, and I contrasted it with the glee I feel when the US Marines come crashing ashore to accomplish the same deed. Somehow, taking the bad guy out in a full frontal assault is okay, while dispatching a Hellfire missile or killer team seems evil, or anyhow not the work of gentlemen.

So it is with the death of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai earlier this month. The man abducted and killed two Israeli soldiers, among other activities. Now either what he did in that instance was either an act of war or a cold-blooded murder. If an act of war, then his assassination by what we assume were Israeli agents is no less problematical. And if murder, how can we possibly object to his receiving the same treatment in his turn? It’s not as if Hamas is going to bring him to justice, or the statelet of Dubai, and certainly not the International Criminal Court.

Yet the BBC among other western news outlets report on the assassination as if Mr al-Mabhouh were the victim and his assassins the criminals. Partly this is the result of a reflexive anti-Israel bias, and partly the West’s confusion over how to respond to an enemy who wears no uniform and follows no code of war. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

You are being watched

You probably won't want to watch the whole of this Dubai television program--it's nearly half an hour--but it's a fascinating glimpse of how closely we are being watched as we go through life. I trust the United States is not as advanced in this activity as is Dubai--or Britain, for that matter. But I find it positively creepy that even a government television station can put together such a detailed video of the assassins from the moment they arrive at the airport, and through their various taxi rides, hotel rooms, and disguises. (I particularly liked the videos of the guy who enters his hotel room bald and leaves it with a fine head of hair.) Is there any place in Dubai without a surveillance camera? In London? In Washington? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

It's the inheritance, stupid

Now in his second year as president of the United States, Mr Obama is facing a bunch of problems, and guess what? They're all Dubya's fault. 'For a president who campaigned on a promise to close Guantánamo, and who just missed a self-imposed one-year deadline to get the job done, the meltdown of a potential Manhattan 9/11 trial is the latest measure of the stubborn complexity of his national security inheritance,' gravely explains the New York Times today. One would think, rather, that they were the latest measure of his national security policies. Mr Bush, after all, did not force Mr Obama to close the Caribbean prison, nor to bring Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to trial in downtown Manhattan.

Federal law requires that a criminal trial take place where the crime was committed. (I didn't know that!) If Ground Zero has been ruled out, rural Pennsylvania would seem to be a prime candidate. But the Justice Department is also looking at Newark and Boston, from whose airports the fatal jetliners took off. That will thrill the folks who just sent Scott Brown to Congress. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The root causes of terrorism

Meet al-Amriki--'the American'--a jihadist in Somalia. Reared in Alabama as a Southern Baptist, Omar Hammami was an immensely popular lad in high school, 'a gifted student with visions of becoming a surgeon', as Andrea Elliott tells us in the NYT Magazine. (A surgeon! Where have we seen that before? Doctors in my experience have a loathing of war that puts them on the edge of pacifism, but an astonishing number of jihadists seem to be doctors or would-be doctors.)

Just as poverty is supposed to be the 'root cause of crime' in western countries, so has it been advanced as the 'root cause of terrorism' in what we used to call the Third World (and indeed in the West). It's nonsense, of course, but these notions die hard, so Ms Elliott devotes much of her very long article to pondering the seeming contradiction. Worth a look. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

From Osama to Obama

Most of my friends (Good People, all!) don't believe that we are at war, except in two mistaken campaigns of our own choosing. Their arguments to this effect bring Leon Trotsky to mind: 'You may not be interested in war,' the old Bolshevik may or may not have said, 'but war is interested in you.' We may not be at war with Osama bin Laden, but he is most certainly at war with us, as we are reminded by a recent audio tape claiming credit for the underpants bomber of Christmas Day:

In the name of God, the Compassionate and Merciful

Peace be upon those who follow the right path

On behalf of Osama to Obama: if our message could be sent to you by the word, we should not have sent in by planes.

The message we wanted to provide you with the aircraft of the hero Umar Farouk, May God lighten his sufferings confirms the previous messages transmitted by the heroes of September 11, which were repeated before and after that date.

The message is that the United States can not aspire to security before it becomes a reality in Palestine. It is unfair that you have a quiet life while our brethren in Ghaza live in bad conditions."

By the will of God, our attacks against you will continue as long as your support the Israelis.

Peace be upon those who follow the right path.

Like Trotsky's quote, the warning may be misattributed, and even if genuine Osama may be taking credit for something he had little to do with, but the words nonetheless worth hearing. Al Qaeda is interested in us. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Of IUDs and IEDs

I’ve mostly been amused by the hoo-hah over the installation of body scanners in airports, most especially the ruling in Britain that they can’t be used on travelers under eighteen because of child pornography laws. (Doesn’t this just guarantee that the next airline bomber will be a youngster with melting chocolate eyes?) But in today’s Wall Street Journal, the war scholar Edward Luttwak discusses a more important drawback to body scanners: the ones now being deployed won’t work for the simple reason that every human being has at least one body cavity large enough to contain explosives that can bring down an airliner.

As for the metal detectors now in place, he scoffs: ‘At enormous cost, and by inflicting enormous inconvenience, [the technology] almost guarantees the detection of any explosive device—so long as it is firmly attached to a nail clipper.’

There is of course a simple, cheap, and effective alternative, though it would rouse up the Good People in righteous anger—especially those Good People who have transportation laid on for them by the US Air Force, hence aren’t inconvenienced by Homeland Security lines—and that is … profiling! ‘To screen passengers as persons instead of their bodies and belongings has an overwhelming advantage: It can detect a would-be terrorist even if the specific technique he tries to employ is not previously known. To inspect all shoes after a shoe bomber almost succeeded, or to pat down passengers after the underwear bomber almost succeeded, provides no defense against the next techniques that could be tried at any time.’ Mr Luttwak has some sensible suggestions as to how this might work in practice. We can only hope that Homeland Security adopts them before somebody explains to Osama bin Laden how easily an IUD could be converted to an IED. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Mr Bean goes to heaven

These haunting photos were distributed by the Associated Press from Middle Eastern television stations. They show the CIA suicide bomber (left) as a young physician with a distinct resemblance to Rowan Atkinson's comic character, Mr Bean, and (right) robed and bearded and armed for jihad. Given that the underpants bomber was the son of a banker, the Fort Hood shooter a psychiatrist, and the British terrorists from a few years back all with medical connections, we seem to have a phenomenon by which middle-class Muslim men act out their frustrations by blowing themselves up, along with whatever infidels happen to be in the vicinity. (Dr al-Balaw and Major Hasan share another characteristic: they both have the hangdog look of men who were were bullied by their schoolmates when they were growing up.) What a waste! -- Dan Ford

Terrorism? No big deal!

Well, let’s see: in the past couple of months, Islamic terrorists have had two successes and a scary near-miss—at Fort Hood on November 5, aboard Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, and in Afghanistan last week. Do you have any doubt that if they happened on Dubya’s watch, the media would have been swarming over him, like blackflies in the Maine woods? But with the light-skinned, non-dialectical Mr Obama in charge, the story is played rather differently: hey, no big deal! This very morning, the New York Times has a ‘news analysis’ arguing that ‘the politically charged clamor has lumped together disparate cases and obscured the fact that the enemies on American soil in 2009, rather than a single powerful and sophisticated juggernaut, were a scattered, uncoordinated group of amateurs who displayed more fervor than skill’. (The suicide bomber in the 'Stan isn't part of the 'analysis'.)

To be sure, our chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are vanishingly small. I'm really not sure what the takeaway is supposed to be. Shall we set al-Qaeda aside as a nuisance on the lines automobile accidents and the seasonal flu, or do we conclude that the war again terrorism has been won? Blue skies! – Dan Ford

'We are at war' - really!

I can be forgiven for not noticing, since I get my early morning news from the New York Times online, but it seems that yesterday Mr Obama actually said this, according to CBS: 'We are at war.... We are at war against al Qaeda, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people, and that is plotting to strike us again. And we will do whatever it takes to defeat them.'

This, by contrast, is the headline on the NYT story: 'Obama Details New Policies in Response to Terror Threat'. Ho hum, right? Right: I didn't read it either.

Talking about burying the lead (or lede, as journos like to spell it)! Not until the fourth paragraph does the Gray Lady quote the president's first phrase, and that bit about 'far-reaching network of violence and hatred' appears nowhere in the story. All the news that's fit to print.... Blue skies! -- Dan Ford