This is my year in review. Last year's is here: Scrubby Things, 2005 Edition; you can also review 2004.

The best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style.

"If I were a Muslim, I’d probably be a jihadist."

He has lost hope for his country. All anyone can do, he said, is laugh.

"It's kind of like a vibrating 24/7 secretary."

... the tawdry, laconic demeanor of a pimp on weed ... "I make good tea okay?" ... We’re country.

"As the president has said, cut and run is not his cup of tea."

If you can play tennis as well as you claim to for as long as you say, you can patrol a village in the Sunni Triangle.

Life grinding against death, and losing. Nobody wins, finally.

For Muslims you cannot say, 'I’m a Muslim, but—' That 'but' does not work.

Their eyes are full of tears out of sadness that they are still unable to contribute.

This one is from late 2004, but it resurfaced in 2006:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything."

Back to 2006:

Those little yellow ribbons aren't really for the troops. The real purpose of those ribbons is to ease some of the guilt we feel ...

Karzai: "Those who cause us to suffer will burn in hell with us."

"We will bring you down, but it will be your own fault."

"I believe with every bone in my body that free people, exposed to sufficient information, will, over time, find their way to right decisions," Rumsfeld said.

At the time, you thought he was talking about the Iraqis. In fact, he was talking about Americans.

Is more ... [ Read More (1.3k in body) ]

Perhaps not essential, but quite interesting, and not something you see daily in the papers.

What we know about the lives of individual Iraqis rarely goes beyond the fleeting opinion quote or the civilian casualty statistics. We have little impression of Iraqis as people trying to live lives that are larger and more complex than the war that engulfs them, and more often than not we end up viewing them merely as appendages of conflict.

As a recent editorial in The Washington Post observed, five years after September 11 the FBI still has a mere thirty-three experts who speak Arabic — and most of those are far from fluent. The CIA and the Pentagon are not much better off.

On the "hollowing out" that will make stabilization nearly impossible:

The Iraqi authorities have issued two million passports since August 2005. An estimated 40 percent of Iraq's professional classes have left the country. New elites are rising in their place, sometimes through the use of violence; needless to say, this is not the sort of civil society that the Americans were hoping to promote.

Terrorized by horrific acts of bloodshed and torture, and frequently forced to leave behind the businesses that once sustained them economically, they have only the mosques, and their associated political parties, to turn to.

You've seen this before, with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

As I listened to these Iraqi voices, I could not entirely shake the feeling that we Americans are already becoming irrelevant to the future of their country. While people in Washington continue to debate the next change in course, and the Baker report raises the possibility of gradual withdrawal, Iraqis are sizing up the coming apocalypse, and making their arrangements accordingly.

What happens when the Decider can't make up his mind? We wait until our actions, whether carrots or sticks or both, are merely ambient noise amidst the discordant mix of sectarian signals. Then the debates over withdrawals, troop levels, milestones, methods, etc. are rendered moot. The Iraqis neither wave goodbye nor run us out of town. Ten years later, no one will quite remember exactly when the Americans left -- only that they were irrelevant long before they were absent.

What About the Iraqis?

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

It's about leadership.

It wasn't supposed to be this way.

Bush and his lieutenants now preoccupy themselves with operational matters that ought to fall within the purview of field commanders. That issues like these should now command presidential attention testifies to the administration's disarray.

The most pressing question is this: Does open-ended global war provide the proper framework for formulating an effective response to the threat posed by Islamic radicalism? Or has global war, based on various illusions about American competence and American power, led to a dead end?

America's failure in Iraq lends considerable urgency to this question. That no responsible member of this administration possesses the presence of mind, the imagination or the courage to address the issue head-on forms yet another part of the tragedy unfolding before our eyes.

I am reminded of Baghdad Bob. The scary thing is that Bob is starting to sound prescient in places.

"Baghdad? It will be a big oven for them."

"This invasion will end in failure."

"We are winning!"

"They are lying every day. They are lying always, and mainly they are lying to their public opinion."

"They are achieving nothing."

"Iraq will spread them even more and chop them up."

"They are becoming hysterical. This is the result of frustration."

"Please, please! The Americans are relying on what I called yesterday a desperate and stupid method."

"They do not even have control over themselves! Do not believe them!"

Bush's illusions | Andrew Bacevich in IHT

Pulitzer-prize winner Steve Coll ("Ghost War") is in rare form here. This short Comment is worth your time.

The President has spent December in sleeves-rolled-up discussions with State Department experts and military officers, apparently searching for such ideas. It seems a little late in his chief-executive-style Presidency for such an earnest return to graduate school. Worse, he remains imprisoned by his binary vision and rhetoric. When he emerged from one Iraq cram session, a reporter asked if he had heard any encouraging new plans. The President could only think to say, "I’ve heard some ideas that would lead to defeat. And I reject those ideas."

The arrogance and the incompetence that brought the United States to this moment in Iraq cannot release it from the obligations and the interests, some of indefinite duration, that require its persistence there.

We should send the next President to Fort Leavenworth. Or, rather, to save time, maybe the next President should come from Fort Leavenworth. Or at least the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

His Way | Steve Coll in The New Yorker

A reporter from Spiegel visits Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to see how the new Army is shaping up. The short of it: this is going to be a long, hard slog.

In the end the visitor is left with the feeling that a revolution is being launched here in Fort Leavenworth, one that will radically change the face of the United States military and the wars it will fight in the future.

... until they began learning from experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army's worldview was still colored by the logic of the Cold War, which divided the world into clear-cut blocs. Military leaders were primarily focused on a big picture ...

It took commanders who could implement changes and who had the courage to question the Pentagon's old-school way of thinking ...

The decision to remove Petraeus, who was clearly the best man for the job, triggered an outcry in the press and the political arena. He was portrayed as the shining hope for a new Iraq and for the American military -- even as a new Lawrence of Arabia. Nowadays, he is considered a candidate for a fourth star, and those who worked with him hope that he may one day lead the entire US Army.

...

An instructor asks his students: "In your opinion, how has the US's view of the world changed since Sept. 11?" A female student says, in a piercing voice: "We now know that we have to take them out before they take us out." It isn't the answer the instructor was looking for.

...

In an effort to teach skepticism and critical thinking, the instructors are constantly asking their students trick questions and presenting them with paradoxes, rewiring their brains to help them understand the new military doctrine.

The great litany of Fort Leavenworth is that everything must change.

See also the interview with David Petraeus.

Civilized Warriors: The US Army Learns from its Mistakes in Iraq

Petraeus is one of the leaders you're looking for. Have you read the new Counterinsurgency manual?

Spiegel: Would you agree that you are trying to impose a sort of a cultural revolution on the United States Army?

Petraeus: There is quite a big cultural change going on. We used to say, that if you can do the "big stuff," the big combined arms, high-end, high intensity major combat operations and have a disciplined force, then you can do the so-called "little stuff," too. That turned out to be wrong.

...

You know, people look at this in theory and think, well, we're dealing here with the training of a couple of battalions -- give them rifles, vehicles, materials, stuff like that, rebuild their infrastructure. But it has cost $2 billion so far -- and that's real money.

And that's the easiest part of it, actually. The hard part is building the institutions to support the new security system, and I'm not only talking about logistics here. I'm talking about the policies, the big over-arching ideas, I'm talking about the set of values on which this system is built. These are questions that are constitutional almost by nature. And I'm talking about ministries, communications systems, depot and maintenance programs, branch schools and training centers, airfields, naval bases, barracks and so on.

Change is Hard.

What we are trying to do is to present counter-intuitive situations to people to really make them think. And counterinsurgency operations are war at the graduate level, they're thinking man's warfare.

What we simply don't want anymore is to give people a checklist of what to do. We want them to think, not memorize.

Petraeus wants to send young officers to graduate school.

See also the companion piece on a visit to Fort Leavenworth.

SPIEGEL Interview with US General David Petraeus

While we're on the subject of things to do before getting married, here's a list for your consideration. "Experts" say these are "key" and "critical" questions, but some of them seem unbelievably petty:

Will there be a television in the bedroom?

Taken at face value, this is almost a meta-question; if a minor disagreement on this point is going to stress the marriage, then clearly the verdict should be to not get married.

At the end of last week, former Republican Congressman Bob Barr roiled the political waters with the announcement that he had left the Republican Party and become a life member of the Libertarian Party.

"Putting some over the hill" is what they say around the Project Operations Control Center when they want to indicate that they are pumping Aqueduct water from the floor of the San Joaquin Valley up and over the Tehachapi Mountains. "Pulling it down" is what they say when they want to indicate that they are lowering a water level somewhere in the system.

From the prophets I've been hearin'
I would say the end is hearin'
For I see familiar landmarks all along
By the dreams that I've been dreamin'
There will come a great redeemin'
And over the next hill, we'll be home

Back to marriage:

We're emotional illiterates. We've been taught about anatomy and farming methods in Africa. We've learned mathematical formulas by heart. But we haven't been taught a thing about our souls. We're tremendously ignorant about what makes people tick.

Having said all that, there may be something to this:

Television In The Bedroom May Hurt Child's School Performance

A ... [ Read More (0.9k in body) ]

Questions Couples Should Ask (Or Wish They Had) Before Marrying