Columnist.
Tehran believes regime change in Washington will allow the ayatollahs and their terrorist cults to survive ... and then get a nuclear weapon.
Wealth buys ammo. The wealth to buy and manufacture ammo scares bad guys with sense.
Major warfighting question in Tehran: Does the regime have enough money to continue to pay its proxies to do more than bluster?
To the chagrin of European Union negotiators, the Greek government of Prime Minister George Papandreou decided to ask the Greek public to give its yea or nay regarding the terms of the European Union's latest bailout agreement. Three days later, under intense political pressure, he canceled the referendum.
The people of Tunisia, Arab Spring 2011's first revolutionaries, have earned their chance to struggle with one of the 21st century's most essential political, social and cultural questions: Will democracy moderate political Islamists, or will political Islamists undermine democracy? Note I wrote "struggle," not "answer." The Tunisian people have embarked on a murky process that will take years (perhaps decades) to conclude. Exaggerated optimism as to the outcome is as foolish as exaggerated pessimism, though I am certain the threats of militant violence and sleazy, destructive corruption will haunt every passing second. Violence and corruption haunt every revolution.
For almost two decades, Joseph Kony, senior commander of the Ugandan rebel Lords Resistance Army, has practiced a peculiarly evil brand of the sociopathic warfare that curses central Africa. Listing the horrors committed by Kony and his thugs numbs the mind, but also substantiates the case for dispatching U.S. special operations soldiers to help Ugandan forces combat the killers. The very public deployment of such a small but technically capable U.S. force also sends a diplomatic signal. There are bad actors in central and east Africa who benefit from violent instability throughout the region -- bad actors who encourage and seed LRA-style vicious anarchy.
Militant Islamist extremists murdering Egyptian Christians offer one criminal version of change amidst the Arab Spring 2011 revolutions. Islamist extremists, many linked to Iran or al-Qaida, are using assassination and violence to intimidate and kill moderates committed to peaceful, democratic modernization. The Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran certainly offers a model for changing culturally Islamic societies. After three decades, the Iranian regime is a clerical dystopia. Moreover, the Islamist revolutionaries established a new tyranny. Al-Qaida's Muslim future lies in recovering lost glory. Restoring the caliphate, this time on a global basis, is part of al-Qaida's model.
The appalling loss of life and physical destruction of al-Qaida's 9-11 suicide air strikes stunned the United States. The shock of surprise -- the unexpected attack "out of nowhere" on the presumed safe havens of American cities -- psychologically magnified the shock. Al-Qaida's commanders sent the message that in their war on America and its allies, they possessed a key advantage: surprise. Al-Qaida's smart weapons -- violent zealots willing to die in order to kill thousands -- would penetrate our cities and towns and, at the moment of their choosing, a moment of surprise, turn them into killing fields. America would not be able to stop these unpredictable "asymmetric" attacks. Al-Qaida's commanders, however, would be able to disappear in the global haystack. Difficult terrain (e.g., the Himalayas), anarchic hells (e.g., Somalia) or friendly governments riddled with corrupt officials would provide safe havens.
Remember Darfur, site of the genocide in Western Sudan? Two years ago, in August 2009, the then-United Nations peacekeeping force commander claimed the war in Darfur had "effectively ended." He argued that major attacks had declined to the point that he thought the war would soon be over. This month, September 2011, the U.N. issued a press statement that said attacks had declined 70 percent since late 2008.
Syria's Arab Spring civil war began as another round in a long struggle between the 10 percent and the 90 percent -- the 10 percent loyal to the Alawite dictatorship of the Assad clan versus everyone else. The civil war has now expanded into a twilight regional war between Iran and NATO, with Turkey as NATO's frontline actor. At one level, Iran and NATO share a common concern: Syrian disintegration. Where they differ -- greatly -- is on who or what prevents disintegration.
The generals running Egypt's military services need to decide what kind of future they want for their country, and they must decide quickly. Initial reports of the mob attack on Israel's Cairo embassy suffer from the usual faults of reporting in chaotic conditions: incomplete information mixed with rumor and allegation. We do know Egyptian soldiers eventually rescued Israeli personnel trapped in the building. Israeli media claim that the Egyptian military ignored the Israeli pleas for assistance and only reacted after American diplomatic intervention. We will know more in the coming weeks.
Osama bin Laden justified 9/11's great evil on the basis of fixing blame for the Islamic world's cultural and political decline. He was angry with the last seven centuries of history -- history gone wrong for Arab Muslims in particular. Modernity was at fault, so he despised it. Modernity is a fuzzy notion, but it is definitely an earthly condition that rewards creativity unchecked by clerics and ayatollahs. America is this unbridled modernity's boldest experiment, this modernity al-Qaida approved Islam does not dominate. So in the name of blame he murdered 3,000 people in New York and Washington.
On Aug. 26, Amnesty International charged that guards loyal to Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi murdered scores of prisoners at two military camps inside Tripoli. The human rights organization based its claim on interviews with detainees who escaped the slaughter. Other media have reported hundreds of civilians dead in Tripoli's streets and in government compounds scattered throughout the city. StrategyPage.com, assessing the grim testimony, concluded that Gadhafi's soldiers and secret police "apparently had orders to kill all rebels, including prisoners."
Gun battles in Tripoli's suburbs signal the death throes of Muammar Gadhafi's dictatorship. Regime change is succeeding, albeit slowly and with needlessly protracted agony. The honest understand that the Libyan War of 2011 is about regime change -- the termination of four decades of megalomaniacal misrule, torture, corruption, tyranny, terrorism and genuine warmongering. Col. Gadhafi, like Iraq's megalomaniacal Saddam Hussein, imprisoned his own country, to the benefit of favored cronies and clans. He also waged imperialist war on vulnerable neighbors, invading and occupying northern Chad, including the Aouzou Strip with its uranium mines. (Yes, he, too, dreamed of a nuclear arsenal.)
Even for a television talk show, it was an extraordinary claim. During his January 1, 2000, end-of-the-millennium broadcast, "McLaughlin Group" host John McLaughlin declared that his award for "the Person of the Full Millennium" went to the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a "Muslim visionary who ... abolished the Ottoman sultanate ... emancipated women ... the only leader in history to successfully turn a Muslim nation into a Western parliamentary democracy and secular state.
America's military services devote much time and thought to developing strategic leaders. Producing a leader capable of commanding a combat theater like CENTCOM remains a long and involved process, where experience and maturation progressively hone cognitive, interpersonal and managerial skills. Yet there are no guarantees that the four-star assuming theater command will succeed at the task of leading such a complex organization during peacetime, much less under the relentless pressure of war.
In a democracy, when senior military officers can no longer support the policies of the elected civilian government they serve, they are supposed to resign their posts and retire -- not launch a coup. This is one way to initially frame the complex circumstances surrounding last week's mass resignation by the most senior armed forces commanders in Turkey, the culturally Islamic nation bridging Europe and Asia and possessing NATO's second-largest military establishment. It is a frame, however, with both encouragingly optimistic and oppressively pessimistic interpretations.
In April of this year, it was already apparent that the Libyan War of 2011 had become a curious war of military, economic and political attrition. That was cruel news then, and remains so today. Wars of attrition are essentially mutual sieges, where neither side can quite dominate the conflict and bring it to a swift conclusion. So the combatant forces grind away at one another, gambling that superior manpower, superior material resources or sheer tenacity (superior resolve forged by determined leadership and superior morale) will eventually shatter enemy resistance.
Two of the oldest tricks in the Middle Eastern dictator's grab-bag of deceit and thuggery have failed Syria's Bashar al-Assad. In early June, Assad's regime played the Israel card. Assad's gangsters connived to attack Israel, using a crowd of Palestinian activists instead of a tank army. An unarmed human wave of Arab protestors approached the border wire. Israeli border troops drove them off. It was a made-for-television piece of propaganda intended to inflame nationalist and sectarian passions. The Assad gang then spewed the usual anti-Israeli bile.
