Peace in Our Time...

The Indonesians have decided to crack down on Jemaah Islamiyah, the terrorist group behind the Bali bombings, but this article in the Age (Australian) seems to feel that it would have been better to just ignore JI.

"This is a dangerous development," terrorism expert Sidney Jones told The Age yesterday.

"The ramifications could well be an energising of the jihadist movement, which in my opinion had been steadily weakening," said Ms Jones, the Jakarta-based director of the International Crisis Group.

Because, if you ignore them, they'll just go away. Or at least be merely "sporadic."

Rassyah was trained in terrorism in the same class in Afghanistan as Ali Ghufron, alias Mukhlas, one of three bombers on death row who carried out the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, including 82 holidaying Australians. He apparently turned up in Poso in 2004.

Since then, Islamic extremists in the town have been blamed for sporadic bombings, beheadings, shootings and other attacks, which prompted the Government in Jakarta to authorise the US and Australian-trained Detachment 88 anti-terror squad to go to Poso to crack down on them. The policeman killed on Monday was from the squad.

What's a few beheaded school girls between friends?

This Man Wants to Kill You

And he'd like to use a nuclear weapon to do it. He's al Qaeda's nuclear expert. He's been sighted in Mexico, Canada, South Florida and California recently. There's a 5 million dollar reward for information leading to his capture.

You'd think the reward would be higher.

Bad Journalism, Part 50 Kajillion

They've sort of, kind of, maybe found Jamil Hussein, the original source for that burned alive story that broke around Thanksgiving. But... his job didn't allow him to talk to the press legally; if the AP points him out, he'll be arrested. So, of course, they won't point him out. Which means the burning story, in addition to some 60+ others for which he was the sole source will have to go unquestioned. You know how it is.

Ding Dong the Witch is Dead

Which old witch?

The wicked witch.

Alas, this calls into question the efficacy of Tiger Hand.

Pen Missile was always lame.

Hang 'Em High

Just finished watching a bit of Fox news, where the commentators were bemoaning the lack of publicity surrounding Saddam's atrocities. For some reason they seemed to believe this was the Bush administration's fault, not, um... , theirs. Bizarre logic, but just in case anyone needs reminding why hanging Saddam is a good thing, Halabja is why. Warning: link has disturbing pictures.

Prince Harry to Iraq

Britain's Prince Harry is set to serve with the military in Iraq. Good on 'em. The primary argument against this seems to have been that the Prince would be a target for terrorism, bringing his troops into increased danger.

Prince Harry has been a target for terrorists since he was born.

British troops have been a target for terrorists for at least the last 100 years.

They're kinda MFEO, don't you think?

Kinda looks like he has the same taste in hats as his stepmother. Any chance she's going to Iraq?

Maybe the Military Should Hire Better Publicists

This story of young men who risked their lives to save a baby Iraqi girl deserves more press. But it's not likely to get it.

"An IED exploded immediately adjacent to Chris' vehicle, so they all piled out to chase the trigger man," said Capt. Sean Donovan.

But the Marines had a surprise encounter in their pursuit.

"And as they did so, a woman came from one of the houses calling to them that the baby was sick. So they stopped, and Chris came up and looked at the baby," Donovan said. "And this was baby Mariam, and it was immediately clear to him that this baby desperately needed care."

Baby Mariam was just 2 months old and suffering from a rare intestinal abnormality. Under the threat of another attack, Walsh had to make a quick decision.

"Right on the spot, the mission changed from the trigger man to the baby girl," Donovan said.

And these guys know at least as much about Iraq as James Baker and Friends, but they won't receive half the publicity the ISG gets.

"You have to occupy ground and stay there," said Capt. Greg Pavlichko, commander of a company involved in "Squeeze Play." "You have to live where you're fighting and let the people see you're committed to an area."

Commanders also say that any progress in Ramadi will evaporate almost overnight if U.S. forces pull out of the city. There is speculation the U.S. may scale back its operations here and throughout Anbar to focus on the violence and chaos in Baghdad.

Because the violence and chaos in Baghdad is getting more press.

That last is from the AP, so take it with a grain of salt. We can only hope there really is a Capt. Greg Pavlichko.

US Airways Acted Correctly

Probes Dismiss Imam's Claims.

Three parallel investigations into the removal of six imams from a US Airways flight last month have so far concluded that the airline acted properly, that the imams' claims they were merely praying and their eviction was racially inspired are without foundation.

We can only hope the imam's and their like-minded friends will continue their noble boycott of US Airways. Perhaps they should consider expanding it to other airlines.

Political Correctness Hampering Iraqi Army?

This article about an Iraqi army sergeant is very revealing, both as to the difficulties they encounter with sectarian politics, and the use of the media to pressure the Iraqi army by the different sects.

“We need to give the Americans back all the authority over the Iraqi Army like before.”

Concerns abound that Iraq’s Defence Ministry is being manipulated to serve the interests of powerful Sunni and Shia political parties. A decision by the US military to hand over full control of Iraq’s Army to a Government plagued by sectarian interests, could well spell its ruin.

The sergeant, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears that his criticism of the Government’s handling of the military could get him fired or killed, is one of several officers who complained to The Times of government threats against army units that have led raids against Sunni and Shia armed groups.

Senior US military officers have also expressed concern over campaigns to remove defence officials and commanders considered to be tough on government-linked militias.

The sergeant, dressed in a US Army shirt, bemoaned the intensifying government pressure. He feels that the Americans have taught his men to be a professional, non-sectarian force and political parties are undermining them.

“If we detain Sunni terrorists, many of the Sunnis working for the Government will keep pushing us and our battalion commanders and ask us why you do that. Sometimes they will make a complaint against us. If we do the same thing in Sadr City, they (Shia officials) will make an announcement on television that we are doing the wrong thing and killing innocent people.”

He recalled two instances where high-profile raids against a suspected armed group led to requests from within the Defence Ministry to transfer a key officer. The sergeant was afraid things would only get worse as the Iraqi Government takes more power.

He thinks that putting the army back under American control would alleviate the problem. I wish I could be as sure.

Also of note, he plans to leave Iraq if the US withdraws.

Yet in his years with the Iraqi Army he has learnt one simple lesson: once the US military pulls back in Iraq, he should leave the country if he wants to survive. “As soon as it happens, I will quit my job and live outside Iraq,” the sergeant told The Times.

...A colleague concurred, shaking his head at the partisan situation. “Each party is fighting to make his party first in a ministry. All people are just fighting for their own interests. If the coalition forces withdraw, all the people really working closely with the coalition forces, will leave because we will all be targets.” Between them, the two soldiers have had 50 colleagues killed in the past three years and another 10 troops kidnapped by the al-Mahdi Army.

I've noticed that the biggest problem for the third world seems to be the lack of honorable men willing to serve for the good of their societies. It's understandable why they would want to leave when they find themselves severely out-numbered and in fear for their lives, and that is why it's so important that we not abandon them, even if it means staying for a very long time. How else can we expect anyone to take on the sort of risk it entails to reform a corrupt, failing society in a decent manner if we bail on these guys.

One thing the world is not short of is corrupt, failing societies.

It's not just honorable people we'd be abandoning, it's honor itself.

Sunni Fatwa Against Joining Terrorist Groups, Killing Shiites

In Basra.

Yes, that's the Basra in Iraq.

So far, no comment from the AP.

Really Bad Journalism: NYT vs. AP

Tom Zeller of the New York Times certainly seems to have his doubts about that AP story on the Sunnis who were allegedly burned alive. He starts with this knee-jerk response to anything which looks like it might require journalistic responsibility:

Iraq’s interior ministry wielded the article like a bludgeon and used it as an opportunity to create a press monitoring unit that suggested, in no uncertain terms, that reporters in Baghdad should come to its press officers for “real, true news.” A ministry spokesman promised “legal action” — whatever that might mean — against journalists who publish information the agency deemed wrong.

That may seem patently absurd. But in a country where most of the on-street, in-neighborhood reporting for Western news organizations is done by native Iraqis — working at great personal risk — the threat of “legal action” may reverberate with tones more menacing, and more damaging to a free press, than they seem at first blush.

I think he's being a bit disingenuous here. It seems far more likely that someone would be at risk of his or her life if they were telling stories harmful to the insurgents than to the Iraqi government. But he does get around to taking the AP to task.

Then there was The Associated Press itself, which by Friday had come to view the continued scrutiny of its article as evidence that everyone — the military, the blogosphere, even other media outlets tracking the back-and-forth — was either agenda-driven, insolent, or both, but not legitimately curious.

It's not a good sign when the New York Times thinks you're too self-righteous.

And this is from his blog, The Lede.

Hi Tom,

You ask me about what our own reporting shows about this incident. When we first heard of the event on Nov. 24, through the A.P. story and a man named Imad al-Hashemi talking about it on television, we had our Iraqi reporters make calls to people in the Hurriya neighborhood. Because of the curfew that day, everything had to be done by phone. We reached several people who told us about the mosque attacks, but said they had heard nothing of Sunni worshippers being burned alive. Any big news event travels quickly by word of mouth through Baghdad, aided by the enormous proliferation of cell phones here. Such an incident would have been so abominable that a great many of the residents in Hurriya, as well as in other Sunni Arab districts, would have been in an uproar over it. Hard-line Sunni Arab organizations such as the Muslim Scholars Association or the Iraqi Islamic Party would almost certainly have appeared on television that day or the next to denounce this specific incident. Iraqi clerics and politicians are not shy about doing this. Yet, as far as I know, there was no widespread talk of the incident. So I mentioned it only in passing in my report.

Best,

Edward Wong

Makes it pretty clear he thinks the AP is out to lunch on this one.

So, when does the shunning start?

Shunning the AP

Another voice heard from. Maybe there is a chance.

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Sue 'Em

The Iraqis have formed a unit to monitor the news.

Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, spokesman for the ministry, said the purpose of the special monitoring unit was to find ''fabricated and false news that hurts and gives the Iraqis a wrong picture that the security situation is very bad, when the facts are totally different.''

He said offenders would be notified and asked to ''correct these false reports on their main news programs. But if they do not change those lying, false stories, then we will seek legal action against them.''

This seems a little like going after Al Capone for tax evasion. Which means it could actually work, which would be a good thing.

This was from the NYT. Scroll down to Update: Really Bad Journalism for more from them.

AP responds to Centcom

Scroll down to Really Bad Journalism to get the link.

Update: Really Bad Journalism, Part 52,384 or so

Centcom is demanding a retraction from the AP on that Sunnis burned alive story. Hot Air has the scoop. Read the whole thing, and click on the links, too.

It's almost as if they want the war to go badly.

Update: Gateway Pundit has more. Looks like the original source for the story is very bogus indeed. Centcom's letter makes it sound as if they've been warning the AP about this for quite some time.

This all reminds me of Green Helmet Guy.

I think we should shun the AP. Fat chance, I know, but still...

Still more: Hot Air keeps the ball rolling. (Don't you just love bowling metaphors?)

The AP is standing by its man. But they stood by Green Helmet Guy too.

Another Update: The New York Times weighs in, in a stunningly even-handed way. Seriously. Look:

For its part, The New York Times took note of the incident on Saturday, in a larger story about the mosque burnings, this way: “In the evening, a resident named Imad al-Hashemi said in a telephone interview on Al Jazeera, the Arab news network, that gunmen had doused some people with gasoline and set them on fire. Other residents contacted by telephone denied this."

And this:

The one thing that remains unclear, though, is this: The Associated Press said in its story yesterday that Mr. Hussein “has been a regular source of police information for two years and had been visited by the AP reporter in his office at the police station on several occasions.” The military, meanwhile, seems to suggest that Mr. Hussein is not a police officer, nor a civil servant in the employ of any Iraqi agency.

So who IS Mr. Hussein?

Good for them.

Yes, I know, it's just the blog, but still...

Those Imperialist Ethiopians

It seems Ethiopia, now under its Christian name of Abyssinia, has had it with Somali Islamist jihadis.

According to Agence France Presse, Ethiopia is about to attack the Somali Islamists single-handed, on their own hook, and with assistance from nobody. On Thursday Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told the Ethiopian parliament that the Islamists represented “a clear threat to Ethiopia” and that the government had “completed the preparations” for full-scale war. The Islamists, who triggered the crisis by declaring Jihad on the Ethiopians, have (of all possible moves) turned to the United States for mediation. (My emphasis)

Seriously.

No word on whether these are the Black Hawk Down jihadis, or, like, totally different Islamist jihadis from Somalia. 'Cuz we'd want to be clear on that, wouldn't we?

Umm.. Okay...

Muslims Call for Airline Boycott.

Now, I understand their complaint, and they'll undoubtedly get some sympathy, but I strongly suspect most people will just be glad to find shorter lines at airport security. Indeed, if someone could find a way to encourage all the people with complaints to boycott the airlines, I think there would be much gratitude among the flying public.

If they really wanted to do some economic damage, they'd announce that they had booked a collicky baby on every flight.

The War on Terror

Atlas Shrugs has some uncensored pictures of beheadings in Indonesia, most taken in the late 90's, early 2000. They are the worst thing I hope I ever see. They are graphic in the extreme and not for those with a weak stomach or work censorship type concerns. The last one shows some wannabe rambo-jihadi holding a machete in one hand and the head of a toddler in the other. I am linking to them mostly because so many people seem to be wearying of the War.

Pictures here, read before scrolling down.

There is no root cause for this besides evil, and we cannot opt out of the fight.

"The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death."

So says Maulana Inyadullah in the first paragraph of Mark Steyn's Sleeping Giant, reminding me of the Mother-In-Law, a died-in-the-wool Pepsi fanatic if ever there was one, and a long-standing Democrat.

All dominant powers are hated -- Britain was, and Rome -- but they're usually hated for the right reasons. America is hated for every reason. The fanatical Muslims despise America because it's all lap-dancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too godless, America is George Orwell's Room 101: whatever your bugbear you will find it therein; whatever you're against, America is the prime example of it.

That's one reason why its disparagers have embraced environmentalism. If Washington were a conventional great power, the intellectual class would be arguing that the United States is a threat to France or India or Gabon or some such. But because it's so obviously not that kind of power the world has had to concoct a thesis that the hyperpower is a threat not merely to this or that rinky-dink nation state but to the entire planet, if not the entire galaxy.

But the article isn't simply more whining about how unjustly we're hated, it also makes the far more relevant point that we must not cut-and-run from Iraq.

But others cast the hyperpower's geniality in a different light. Visitors to America often remark on that popular T-shirt slogan usually found below a bold Stars and Stripes: "These Colours Don't Run." To non-Americans, it can seem a trifle touchy. But for a quarter century the presumption of the country's enemies was that those colours did run -- they ran from Vietnam, they ran from the downed choppers in the Iranian desert, they ran from Somalia. Even the successful campaigns -- the inconclusively concluded 1991 Gulf War and the air-only 1999 Kosovo war -- seemed manifestly designed to avoid putting those colours in the position of having to run. As Osama saw it, those colours ran from the African embassy bombings and the Khobar towers, just as Zarqawi figured those colours would run from the Sunni Triangle. Being seen not to run -- or, if you prefer, being seen to show "resolve" -- should be the indispensable objective of U.S. foreign policy. Were these colours to run from Iraq, it would be the end of the American era -- for why would Russia, China or even Belgium ever again take seriously a superpower that runs screaming for home at the first pinprick?

This is right. We must succeed in Iraq because not to do so dooms our foreign policy for all of the forseeable future, no matter who wins the next election. I've never understood why some of the Democrats seem so willing to win election at the cost of weakening the nation, or at least the international perception of the nation, but it's not too late for them to do something about it.

Nancy? Harry? Don't you want to mention how much you despise Al-Qaeda, or Ayatollah Khamenei, or countries who assume legal sovereignty over our citizens, or someone? Anyone? Please?

No Pepsi until you do.

Root Causes

If they have to use "comedy" and David Letterman style "top ten lists" to recruit religious terrorists, I'm pretty sure it means we're winning.