In a competitive democracy, it is difficult to rescue a war built on distortions and illusions, because, to protect falsehoods proffered to voters in the past, a President and his advisers may find it tempting to manufacture more of them. It does not require a cynic to see that even an implausible escalation plan has the virtue of putting domestic political opponents back on their heels. This was the advice given by McGeorge Bundy to Lyndon Johnson in a memo dated February 7, 1965, concerning an escalation plan for Vietnam that Bundy thought might have as little as a twenty-five-per-cent chance of success:

Even if it fails, the policy will be worth it. At a minimum it will damp down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done, and this charge will be important in many countries, including our own.

The Bush Administration is now reworking this sad axiom, and, once again, American soldiers will be asked to give their lives for its assumptions. Under the Constitution, only Congress can prevent this from occurring, but its members have exhibited little evidence in the past that they possess the skill or the will to do so.

This seems like as good a time as any to drop in my belated comments on the Surge address:

To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.

That way, no one needs to get a real job, which is rather quite convenient, because there really aren't any.

To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs.

The phrase "of its own money" sounds like the accumulated weekly allowance of a child.

This would bring al Qaeda closer to its goals of taking down Iraq's democracy, building a radical Islamic empire, and launching new attacks on the United States at home and abroad.

Al Qaeda doesn't want to base its empire on a Shia population.

America's men and women in uniform took away al Qaeda's safe haven in Afghanistan -- and we will not allow them to re-establish it in Iraq.

Fortunately for al Qaeda, Pakistan is working out just fine right now.

Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria.

This is not quite the dialogue the Study Group had in mind.

We will ... deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies.

How is this relevant to the fight against sectarian violence in Baghdad? Oh, right; this is where the cats and dogs come in.

Countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf States need to understand that an American defeat in Iraq would create a new sanctuary for extremists and a strategic threat to their survival.

Where is Pakistan?

It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time. On one side are those who believe in freedom and moderation. On the other side are extremists who kill the innocent, and have declared their intention to destroy our way of life.

Recall the Doonesbury cartoon ... false dichotomies.

The handy thing about this characterization is that it's fully reversible.

... millions of ordinary people are sick of the violence ...

This has a certain John Edwards sound to it.

Let me be clear: The terrorists and insurgents in Iraq are without conscience ...

Again, total lack of understanding of the adversary.

Comment: The Planner | Steve Coll | The New Yorker

The full article is worth your time. Until then, peruse these pull quotes.

The long war is not about Islam. It's about human social networks ... insurgency runs in social networks ...

People get pulled into rebellion by their social networks.

To assist the President’s reëlection, bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party.

“If I were a Muslim, I’d probably be a jihadist. The thing that drives these guys [is] the same thing that drives me, you know?”

To be clear: that's the guy who wrote "long war" into the Quadrennial Defense Review.

Iraqis spread information through rumor. We should have been visiting their coffee shops.

Bush speeches are all uplift, and no strategy.

We say "long war", but there's this enormous sense of impatience.

This begs the question of whether the jihadists are more or less patient.

America must help ... flood the Internet with persuasively youthful Web sites ...

So it's a scene, but it's also a movement.

Have you seen The Dreamers? I can see a similarly nostalgic film being made 30 years from now, from the Islamist point of view, regardless of who has "won" or "lost" by then.

When to Be Young Was Very Sexy

One of the themes of "The Dreamers" is the passion and folly of youth -- not just youth as a universal aspect of the human condition, but youth in Paris in the spring of 1968, one of those enchanted historical dawns when, to quote Wordsworth, "to be young was very heaven."

"The Dreamers," which is disarmingly sweet and completely enchanting, fuses sexual discovery with political tumult by means of a heady, heedless romanticism that nearly obscures the film's patient, skeptical intelligence. The three main characters, 20-year-olds besotted by sex, movies, ideas and each other, express themselves with an unguarded sincerity that would be easy to patronize or to mock.

Bertolucci returns to Paris with a twist

... a strangely thought-provoking and bittersweet ode to the '60s ...

"The Dreamers" is a passionate tribute to the cinema's contribution to the great '60s cultural fusion, as well as a melancholy reminder of just how far it's fallen from that heady era of its highest idealism.

Highlights of 'Knowing the Enemy'

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and synthesize what has been reported from the scientific and professional literature about the “psychology of terrorism.” This focus is not intended to suggest that the scientific discipline of psychology provides the only, or even necessarily the best, analytic framework for understanding terrorism. Like all approaches to understanding or explaining human behavior, a psychological approach has advantages and limitations. Nevertheless, as psychology is regarded as “the science of human behavior,” it seems a reasonable, and potentially productive, line of inquiry.

Psychology of Terrorism [PDF]

George Packer is simply essential. This is a long post because there is no way to boil this down.

"After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It's about human social networks and the way that they operate."

That's David Kilcullen, an Australian lieutenant colonel who may just be our last best hope in the long war.

"The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.’"

“People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks."

In the 1 December issue of Jane's Intelligence Review, John Horgan writes (sub req'd):

People who leave terrorist groups or move away from violent roles do so for a multitude of reasons. Horgan explains why greater understanding of the motivations behind this so-called 'disengagement' will help in developing successful anti-terrorism initiatives.

The reality is that actual attacks represent only the tip of an iceberg of activity.

Here's the abstract of a recent RAND working paper:

In the battle of ideas that has come to characterize the struggle against jihadist terrorism, a sometimes neglected dimension is the personal motivations of those drawn into the movement. This paper reports the results of a workshop held in September 2005 and sponsored by RAND’s Center for Middle East Public Policy and the Initiative for Middle East Youth. Workshop participants discussed the issue of why young people enter into jihadist groups and what might be done to prevent it or to disengage members of such groups once they have joined.

Now, back to the Packer piece:

The odd inclusion of environmentalist rhetoric, he said, made clear that “this wasn’t a list of genuine grievances. This was an Al Qaeda information strategy." ... “bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reëlection.” Bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party, for he had come to feel that Bush’s strategy in the war on terror was sustaining his own global importance.

You may recall the speculation that Bush would produce bin Laden's head just in time for the last elections. Perhaps the living bin Laden is a more valua... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

Knowing the Enemy | George Packer in The New Yorker

From the new Counterinsurgency manual:

Counterinsurgency is not just thinking man’s warfare—it is the graduate level of war.

-- Special Forces Officer in Iraq, 2005

Compare with the Matt Blaze comment from the Sunday NYT:

"If a grad student can figure it out," he said, "we can assume agents of Al Qaeda can do the same."

So the Army observes that fighting insurgents is much harder than fighting conventional forces, and therefore they associate it with the seekers of higher education. Meanwhile, those thus associated have found it both necessary and appropriate to equate their community with terrorists as a way of signaling their general ineptitude.

So they basically agree, but for completely different reasons. As a consequence, each negates the spirit of the other's argument.

(Don't bother to reply just to point out the distinctions between insurgents and terrorists.)

No one can return from visiting the front in Afghanistan without realizing there is a very real risk that the United States and NATO will lose their war with Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the other Islamist movements fighting the Afghan government.

In Iraq, the failure of the United States and the allies to honestly assess problems in the field, be realistic about needs, create effective long-term aid and force-development plans, and emphasize governance over services may well have brought defeat. The United States and its allies cannot afford to lose two wars. If they do not act now, they will.

Notwithstanding this stark conclusion, Anthony Cordesman seems to retain a glimmer of hope for Afghanistan.

One War We Can Still Win

Wake up! I know television is compelling, and all, but people are dying out here!

"Afghanistan either has to be fixed and be peaceful, or the whole region will run into hell with us," Mr. Karzai told a small group of journalists during a visit to this southern city, his hometown, which has been reeling from almost daily suicide bombings in the last 10 days. "It’s not going to be like the past, that only we suffer. Those who cause us to suffer will burn in hell with us. And I hope NATO recognizes this."

Pakistan’s Support for Militants Threatens Region, Karzai Says

Americans want to believe that all good things go together. But here is a telling example of why that's not always true.

Check out the article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

Afghanistan Could Be The Next Iraq | Fareed Zakaria

General Caldwell summarized the continuing violence in Baghdad this way: Shiite militias conducting murders and assassinations in the city’s Sunni western section, and Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda staging "high visibility casualty events" in the city’s predominantly Shiite east.

See the video (transcript soon) here.

At the moment, a Google search for this phrase returns zero results. I wonder if it has legs.

File this alongside Japan's constitution-flouting "helicopter destroyers."

Caldwell: Terror Attacks Are Now 'High Visibility Casualty Events'

This book examines terrorist groups that, while not formally allied with al-Qaeda, pose a threat to Americans, at home and abroad, and to the security of our friends and allies. Although the temptation for policymakers is to set aside as less dangerous those groups that have not chosen to join al-Qaeda, such terrorist or insurgent groups and criminal organizations still pose a threat to the United States, its interests, and its allies. The authors first look at violent Islamist terrorist and insurgent groups without formal links to al-Qaeda, such as Hamas and Hezbollah in the Middle East and Islamist groups in Africa. They then examine a number of non-Islamist terrorist groups — for example, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the FARC and ELN in Colombia, Maoist insurgencies, and the violent antiglobalist movement — and explain how these groups might fit into the al-Qaeda agenda and how they use criminal organizations and connections to finance their activities. Finally, they show how the presence of these threats affects U.S. security interests, and they identify distinct strategies that the United States may take to neutralize or mitigate each of them.

Beyond al-Qaeda: Part 2, The Outer Rings of the Terrorist Universe