The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C., February 14, 2008: “I have just been reading a fascinating collection of transcribed telephone conversations held in 1996-1997 between a very senior retired CIA official and an reporter. The official, one Robert T. Crowley, was deputy head of the CIA’s clandestine operations and the reporter is unidentified except by his initials. These conversations are some of the most fascinating, and readable, things to come along in years. Neither one of the participants were particularly elevating or moral in their conversations, which ranged from extensive CIA drug dealings, assassinations of such personages as a Pope and JFK, media control, the killing of talkative CIA top people and so on. No one knows just where these came from but they are circulating all over the Beltway in Xerox form. I’ve been in the game for years and I can attest that many of the very secret businesses I have personal knowledge of are laid right out in front of the world. Fakes? No, not fakes. There is muted frenzy down at Langley because of all the really filthy linen being exposed. Far too much material to send to you people because you can’t possibly get it all up. Many of us are laughing in private and we all hope it makes it to the marketplace.”

SECRECY NEWS

from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Volume 2008, Issue No. 16

February 13, 2008

ARMY BLOCKS PUBLIC ACCESS TO DIGITAL LIBRARY

Public access to the Reimer Digital Library, which is the largest online collection of U.S. Army doctrinal publications, has been blocked by the Army, which last week moved the collection behind a password-protected firewall.

http://www.train.army.mil/

But today the Federation of American Scientists filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking the Army to provide a copy of the entire unclassified Library so that it could be posted on the FAS web site.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2008/02/reimer.pdf

The Army move on February 6 marks the latest step in an ongoing withdrawal of government records from the public domain.

"It was a policy decision to put it behind the AKO [Army Knowledge Online] firewall and to restrict public access," said Don Gough of the system development division at the Army Training Support Center at Fort Eustis, Virginia, which operates the Reimer Digital Library.

The move came as a surprise since only unclassified and non-sensitive records had ever been made available at the Library site.

Isn't it true, Secrecy News asked, that the only documents that had been accessible to the public were those that had been specifically... "'Approved for public release,' yes," said Mr. Gough, completing our sentence. "I understand your concern," he added.

The FAS Freedom of Information Act request is intended to reverse the Army action.

"We hope to restore public access to the Reimer Digital Library by obtaining all of its publicly releasable contents and posting that material on our own website," the FAS request explained. "Furthermore,

in order to preserve the status quo, we expect to file regular FOIA requests for updates to the RDL two or three times a month, so that we may add them to our mirror site."

"Alternatively, if the Army were to restore the prior level of public access to the RDL, that would fulfill this request and make future requests unnecessary," the FAS request stated.

Among the many thousands of documents that were formerly available to the public on the Reimer Digital Library, two of the latest additions are these:

"The Modular Force," Field Manual Interim FMI 3-0.1, January 2008:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fmi3-0-1.pdf

"Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and High Yield Explosives Operational Headquarters," Field Manual Interim FMI 3-90.10, January 2008:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fmi3-90-10.pdf

INTERDICTION OF AIRCRAFT INVOLVED IN DRUG SMUGGLING

The U.S. Government supported the interdiction of over 80 flights over Colombia last year as well as an undisclosed number of other flights over Brazil that were suspected of involvement in drug trafficking, according to a new White House report to Congress.

The report describes the procedures used, and the results that followed.

See "Report Relating to the Interdiction of Aircraft Involved in Illicit Drug Trafficking," communication from the President of the United States, February 6:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2008_rpt/interdict.pdf

IRANIAN NUCLEAR SCIENCE RESEARCH

The scale of Iranian research in nuclear science and technology is evident from a new bibliography of published research by Iranian scientists.

The bibliography, prepared by Mark Gorwitz, a private nonproliferation researcher, includes titles on nuclear physics, reactor safety, isotope separation and more.

See "Iranian Nuclear Science Bibliography: Open Literature References," by Mark Gorwitz, February 2008:

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iran/nuke/biblio.pdf

THE RUIN OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

Priscilla J. McMillan, author of the well-received 2006 book "The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race," has opened up some of her personal archives relating to Oppenheimer and posted them online.

Dozens of primary source documents that were uncovered by Ms. McMillan in the course of her research on Oppenheimer, along with relate resources, can now be found on this site:

http://h-bombbook.com/index.html

DOD ON DETAINEE OPERATIONS

The Department of Defense has released the final version of its controversial doctrine on "detainee operations," which defines the class of unlawful enemy combatants and prescribes their treatment.

"US forces must be prepared to properly control, maintain, protect, and account for all categories of detainees in accordance with applicable domestic law, international law, and policy," the new publication explains.

Among the categories of detainees are those designated as "unlawful enemy combatants" who, the DoD states, do not enjoy the ordinary protections of lawful combatants.

"Unlawful ECs are persons not entitled to combatant immunity, who engage in acts against the United States or its coalition partners in violation of the laws and customs of war during an armed conflict or who support such acts. For purposes of the war on terrorism, the term unlawful EC is defined to include, but is not limited to, an individual who is or was part of or supporting Taliban or al Qaeda forces or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners."

At the same time, however, even unlawful enemy combatants must be treated humanely, the document says, and to do otherwise is a war crime.

"Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, as construed and applied by US law, establishes minimum standards for the humane treatment of all persons detained by the United States and coalitionand allied forces. It is a war crime to undercut or violate these standards. Common Article 3 prohibits at any time and in any place: 'violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; taking of hostages; outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment; the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples'."

See "Detainee Operations," Joint Publication JP 3-63, February 6, 2008:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/jp3_63.pdf

Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad?

To judge from the talk in Washington, the 'surge' that put 30,000 more US troops on the ground in Iraq has succeeded in bringing stability to a nation still riven by ethnic, religious and tribal conflict. Life, the Pentagon boasts, is returning to normal. But the truth is a very different story.

February 15, 2008

by Patrick Cockburn

The Independent

People in Baghdad are not passive victims of violence, but seek desperately to avoid their fate. In April 2004, I was almost killed by Shia militiamen of the Mehdi Army at a checkpoint at Kufa in southern Iraq. They said I was an American spy and were about to execute me and my driver, Bassim Abdul Rahman, when they decided at the last moment to check with their commander. "I believe," Bassim said afterwards, "that if Patrick had an American or an English passport [instead of an Irish one] they would have killed us all immediately."

In the following years, I saw Bassim less and less. He is a Sunni, aged about 40, from west Baghdad. After the battle for Baghdad between Shia and Sunni in 2006, he could hardly work as a driver as three-quarters of the capital was controlled by the Shia. There were few places where a Sunni could drive in safety outside a handful of enclaves.

What happened to Bassim was also to happen to millions of Iraqis who saw their lives ruined by successive calamities. As their world collapsed around them they were forced to take desperate measures to survive, obtain a job and make enough money to feed and educate their families.

In the US and Europe, the main measure of whether the war in Iraq is "going well" or "going badly" is the casualty figures. The number of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians being killed went down to 39 US soldiers and 599 Iraqi civilians in January. The White House is promoting the idea that the United States is finally on the road to success, if not victory, in Iraq.

On the back of this renewed optimism about the war, Senator John McCain, the premier hawk among the Republican candidates for the presidency, has been able to revive his foundering campaign and is set to be his party's nominee. Despite the scepticism of many US journalists permanently stationed in Iraq, television and newspaper newsrooms in New York and Washington (in London they are more sceptical) have largely bought into the idea that "the surge" – the wider deployment of 30,000 extra US troops since February 2006 – has succeeded.

But any true assessment of the happiness or misery of Iraqis must use a less crude index than the number of dead and injured. It must ask if people have been driven from their houses, and if they can return. It must say whether they have a job and, if they do not, whether they stand a chance of getting one. It has to explain why so few of the 3.2 million people who are refugees in Syria and Jordan, or inside Iraq, are coming back.

At the time we had our encounter with the Mehdi Army in Kufa, Bassim was living in a house in the mixed Sunni-Shia area of Jihad in south-west Baghdad. He loved the house, which had a sitting room and two bedrooms, because he had built it himself in 2001. "I didn't complete it because I didn't have enough money," he said. "But we were so happy to have our own home."

He was living there in the summer of 2006 with his wife Maha, 38, and his children Sarah, 13, Noor, eight, and Sama, three, when Shia militiamen took over Jihad. The struggle for the capital had begun on 22 February when Sunni insurgents blew up a revered Shia shrine in Samarra. Bassim fled to Syria with his family and, when he returned to Jihad three months later, he found pictures of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia nationalist cleric who heads the Mehdi Army, pasted to the gate of his house.

Neighbours told Bassim to get out as fast as he could before the Mehdi Army militiamen came back and killed him. He drove with his family to his father-in-law's house in the tough Sunni district of al-Khadra, where he and his wife and three children were to live in future in a single small room. He did not dare go back to his old home, but he heard about it in the summer of 2007 from a friendly Shia neighbour who said it had been taken over by militiamen. "They accused me," says Bassim, "of being a high-rank officer in the former intelligence service and because of that they got a permit [from al-Sadr's office] to take it over."

Two Shia families moved in for a couple of months and, when they left, they took all his remaining belongings. They left the house unlocked, and soon the wooden doors and other fittings were gone. The permanent loss of his home, his only possession of any value apart from his car, was a terrible blow to Bassim and his wife. "I have nothing else to lose aside from my house," he wrote to me in a sad letter in the autumn of 2007, "and because of what happened I had a heart attack. I worked as a taxi driver for a few days, but I couldn't do it any longer because of the dangerous situation and I had no other way of earning a living. Finally, I sold my car and my wife's few gold things and I will try to go to Sweden even if I have to go illegally."

I thought his plan to travel to Sweden was a terrible one, as Bassim spoke only Arabic and had not travelled outside Iraq, apart from a few trips to Syria and Jordan. But there was nothing I could do to dissuade him. I did not see or hear from him for six months, though I heard from his friends that his bid to reach Sweden had failed and that he was stuck in Kuala Lumpur.

Then, on 1 February, he appeared at the door of my hotel room in Baghdad, looking shrunken and miserable, and told me of his strange and disastrous odyssey.

I had originally hoped that his plan to travel illegally to Sweden was a fantasy he would never try to realise, but everything he had said in his letter turned out to be true. He had sold his car, his wife's gold jewellery and some furniture for $6,500 (about £3,300) and borrowed $1,500 from his sister and the same amount from friends. Of this, $6,900 was paid to Abu Mohammed, an Iraqi in Sweden, who provided Bassim and a friend called Ibrahim with Lithuanian passports (these turned out to be genuine, but one of Bassim's many fears over the next three months was that his passport was a fake and he would be thrown in jail). The two men went first to Damascus and then, instructed over the phone by Abu Mohammed in Sweden, they flew to Malaysia.

This would seem to be the wrong direction, but Malaysia has the great advantage of being one of the few countries to give Iraqis entry visas at the airport. Bassim and Ibrahim took rooms at the cheapest hotel they could find in Kuala Lumpur.

They were then told by Abu Mohammed to get a plane to Cambodia and take a bus to Vietnam. Though their money was fast dwindling, they did so. Somehow, still speaking only Arabic, they made their way from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City. The plan was to get a ticket to Sweden by way of France (Bassim now thinks that this was a mistake and it would have been better to travel first to Lithuania, posing as citizens returning home, but this would have left the two Iraqis with the problem of explaining to officials there why they did not speak Lithuanian).

In the check-in queue at the airport in Vietnam on 5 January this year, Bassim was desperately worried he would be detected. He had staked all his remaining money and his family's future on getting to Sweden. In fact, he and Ibrahim had little chance of being allowed on to the plane. Too many Iraqis, claiming to be citizens of small East European states, had tried this route before. Suspicious Vietnamese immigration officials took them to an investigation room where Bassim felt ill and asked for a glass of water, which was refused. He and Ibrahim continued to protest that they were Lithuanian citizens and demanded to be taken to the Lithuanian embassy, knowing full well that Lithuania is unrepresented in Vietnam.

It was all in vain. The officials guessed that they were Iraqis. They sent Bassim and Ibrahim back to Cambodia. Half-starved because he did not like the local food – "I was used to Iraqi bread," he recalled later – and with his money almost gone, Bassim made his way back to Kuala Lumpur by the end of January. He last saw his friend Ibrahim heading for Indonesia in a small boat.

Abu Mohammed in Sweden became elusive and, when finally contacted by phone after six days, admitted that "for Iraqis, all the ways from Asia to Sweden are shut". He did not offer to return Bassim's $6,900. Demoralised, and hearing that many Iraqi refugees trying to get to Europe through Indonesia simply disappeared, Bassim used his last few dollars to fly to Damascus and took a shared taxi across the desert to Baghdad. "The journey took three months but it felt like 10 years," he said. "I have lost everything."

Life in the Iraq to which Bassim has returned is said by foreigners and Iraqis alike to be getting better. Perky pieces in the foreign media breathlessly describe how Sunni children are once again playing football in al-Zahra park near the Green Zone, where they would have been murdered a year ago. "The problem," complained one American correspondent in Baghdad, "is that newsrooms back home have two mindsets – 'War Rages' and 'Peace Dawns' – and not a lot in between."

Previous claims of an improvement in security by the US or the Iraqi government had been wholly false. I remembered Paul Bremer, the US viceroy during the first year of the occupation, claiming that the Sunni insurgents were a doomed remnant battling against "the new Iraq". When Bremer left in 2004, he was shown on television clambering into one helicopter and then, when the cameras departed, scuttling on to a second aircraft in case those same insurgents might shoot him down.

In contrast to the spurious turning-points of the past, the most recent political changes in Iraq, which had led to the fall in American and Iraqi casualties, are quite real. But they differ significantly from the way in which they are portrayed in the outside world, and have less to do with al-Qa'ida and the US than the continuing struggle for power between Sunni and Shia in Iraq.

From the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 to the summer of 2006, the five million-strong Sunni community had battled the US and the Shia-Kurdish Iraqi government. Then, quite suddenly, last year many of the Sunni rebel groups switched sides and allied themselves with the Americans, formed the "al-Sahwa" or "Awakening" movement and declared war on al-Qa'ida.

Dramatic changes of side when enemies embrace each other are not unknown in Iraqi politics and may stem from its traditions of tribal warfare. I was in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1996 when the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, many of whose family and tribe had been murdered by Saddam Hussein, called in Saddam's tanks to capture the city of Arbil and to repulse an offensive by the rival Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, now president of Iraq.

The US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and the US ambassador, Ryan Crocker, are cautious about claiming too much success. But the White House and the Republicans have been quick to suggest that a turning point had been reached in the war. As in 2003, after the American overthrow of Saddam, both the Democrats and much of the American media could be easily intimidated by the fear that they were being unpatriotic or defeatist when military victory was in sight.

"The problem in Iraq is that the agenda is driven not by what is really happening, but by the perception in America of what is happening," Ahmad Chalabi, veteran of the opposition to Saddam and one of the most astute observers of the Iraqi scene, told me. A problem is that US politicians and commentators assume far greater American control of events in Iraq than is the case. The US is the most powerful player there, but it is by no means the only one.

The dramatic change of sides of Sunni guerrilla organisations such as the "1920 Revolution Brigades" and the "Islamic Army" came about for many reasons. In Anbar province west of Baghdad (perhaps one-third of Iraq by area), the Sunni tribes had become enraged by al-Qa'ida's attempt to establish total dominance, and to replace or murder traditional leaders and set up a Taliban-type state. But the Sunni community could also see that, although its guerrilla war was effective against the US, it was being defeated by the Shia who controlled the Iraqi government and armed forces after the elections of 2005.

The only source of money in Iraq is oil revenues, and the only jobs – four million, if those on a pension are included – are with the government. The Shia, in alliance with the Kurds, controlled both. "The Sunni people found that the only way to be protected from the Shia was to be allied to the Americans," said Kassim Ahmed Salman, a well-educated Sunni from west Baghdad. "Otherwise we were in a hopeless situation. For the last two years it has been possible for Sunni to be killed legally [by death squads covertly supported by the government] in Baghdad."

The "surge" – the 30,000 extra US troops implementing a new security plan in Baghdad – has helped to make Baghdad safer. In effect, they have frozen into place the Shia victory of 2006. The city is broken up into enclaves sealed off by concrete walls with only one entrance and exit.

Areas that were once mixed are not being reoccupied by whichever community was driven out. Bassim can no more reclaim, or even visit, his house in the Jihad district of Baghdad than he could a year ago. He can still work as a taxi driver only in Sunni areas. The US military and the Iraqi government are wary of even trying to reverse sectarian cleansing because this might break the present fragile truce.

"People say things are better than they were," says Zanab Jafar, a well-educated Shia woman living in al-Hamraa, west Baghdad, "but what they mean is that they are better than [during] the bloodbath of 2006. The situation is still terrible."

Baghdad still feels and looks like a city at war. There are checkpoints everywhere. "You seldom see young girls walking in the streets, or in restaurants," adds Zanab Jafar, "because their families are terrified they will be kidnapped, so they send private cars to pick them up directly from school." New shops open, but they are always in the heart of districts controlled by a single community because nobody wants to venture far from their home to shop.

For all the talk of Baghdad being safer, it remains an extraordinarily dangerous place. One Western security company is still asking $3,000 to pick a man up at the airport and drive him six miles to his hotel in central Baghdad. The number of dead bodies being picked up by the police every morning in the capital is down to three or four when once it was 50 or 60.

"People are being killed in the back streets and alleyways but not in the main roads as they were 12 months ago," says one Shia leader with a network of contacts throughout Baghdad. "About twice as many people are being killed as the government admits." This figure is still well below what it was 18 months ago, and is unlikely to return to its previous level as long as al-Qa'ida does not resume its suicide bombing campaign, using trucks loaded with a ton of explosives detonated in the middle of Shia markets or religious processions, killing and wounding hundreds. If the attacks on the two bird markets in Shia areas on 1 February, killing 99 people, are repeated, then Shia death squads will start a fresh cycle of tit-for-tat killings of Sunni.

The new element in Iraq is the development of the Awakening Council, or al-Sahwa, movement. Suddenly there is a Sunni militia, paid by the US, that has 80,000 men under arms. This re-empowers the Sunni community far more than any legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament. But it also deepens the divisions in Iraq because the leaders of the Awakening do not bother to hide their hatred and contempt for the Iraqi government.

At the end of January, I visited Abu Marouf, one of the leaders of the Awakening, in his headquarters near Khan Dari, halfway between Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. Asked about his attitude to the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Abu Marouf, until recently a commander of the 1920 Revolution Brigades, said: "Maliki has got 13 divisions [in the army] most of whom are Shia, and half are from militias controlled by Iran."

In his State of the Union address, President Bush spoke of the 80,000 Awakening Council members – also labelled "concerned local citizens", as if they were respectable householders who have taken up arms against "terrorists".

The picture Bush evoked is similar to that often seen in Hollywood Westerns when outraged townsfolk and farmers, driven beyond endurance by the crimes of a corrupt sheriff or saloon owner and their bandit followers, rise in revolt. In reality, in Iraq the exact opposite has happened. The Awakening Council members of today are the "terrorists" of yesterday.

Even the police chief of Fallujah, Colonel Feisal, the brother of Abu Marouf, cheerfully explained that until he was promoted to his present post in December 2006 he was "fighting the Americans". Abu Marouf is threatening to go back to war or let al-Qa'ida return unless his 13,000 men receive long-term jobs in the Iraqi security services. The Iraqi government has no intention of allowing this because to do so would be to allow the Sunni and partisans of Saddam Hussein's regime to once again hold real power in the state.

Bizarrely, the US is still holding hundreds of men suspected of contacts with al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan and elsewhere, while in Iraq many of the Awakening members are past and, in many cases, probably current members of al-Qa'ida being paid by the US Army.

"I knew a young man, aged 17 or 18," says Kassim Ahmed Salman, "who was a friend of my brother and used to carry a PKC [a Russian light machine-gun] and fight for al-Qa'ida. I was astonished to see him a few days ago in al-Khadra where he is a lieutenant in al-Sahwa, standing together with Iraqi army officers."

The present state of Iraq is highly unstable, but nobody quite wants to go to war again. It reminds me of lulls in the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s and 1980s, when everybody in Beirut rightly predicted that nothing was solved and the fighting would start again. In Iraq the fighting has never stopped, but the present equilibrium might go on for some time.

All the Iraqi players are waiting to see at what rate the US will draw down its troop levels. The Mehdi Army is discussing ending its six-month ceasefire, but does not want to fight its Shia rivals if they are supported by American military power. Al-Qa'ida is wounded but by no means out of business. Four days after I had seen Abu Marouf, who was surrounded by bodyguards and maintains extreme secrecy about his movements, al-Qa'ida was able to detonate a bomb in a car close to his house and injure four of his guards.

Protestations of amity between Shia security men and Awakening members should be treated with scepticism. My friend, the intrepid French television reporter Lucas Menget, filmed a Shia policeman showering praise on the Awakening movement. He introduced two of its members, declaring enthusiastically to the camera: "You see, together we will defeat al-Qa'ida." Back in his police car, the policeman, lighting up a Davidoff cigarette and shaking his head wearily, explained: "I don't have a choice. I was asked to work with these killers."

Iraq remains a great sump of human degradation and poverty, unaffected by the "surge". It was not a government critic but the civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, Tahseen Sheikhly, who pointed out this week that the city is drowning in sewage because of blocked and broken pipes and drains. In one part of the city, the sewage has formed a lake so large that it can be seen "as a big black spot on Google Earth".

In the coming weeks, we will see the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by American and British forces on 19 March, and the fall of Saddam Hussein on 9 April. There will be much rancorous debate in the Western media about the success or failure of the "surge" and the US war effort here.

But for millions of Iraqis like Bassim, the war has robbed them of their homes, their jobs and often their lives. It has brought them nothing but misery and ended their hopes of happiness. It has destroyed Iraq.

US troops must stay in Iraq beyond 2008: Gates, Rice

February 13, 2008

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US forces will remain in Iraq beyond the end of the current UN mandate, but a continued US troop presence will not tie the hands of a future US president, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in a newspaper column Wednesday.

"It is clear ... that US forces will need to operate in Iraq beyond the end of this year for progress in stabilizing Iraq to continue," the top US diplomatic and military officials wrote in The Washington Post.

"The current UN authorization expires at the end of this year, and Iraq has indicated that it will not seek an extension. It would rather have an arrangement that is more in line with what typically governs the relationships between two sovereign nations," Gates and Rice added in their jointly written article ahead of hearings in the House and Senate at which each were to give testimony Wednesday. Gates however cancelled his planned appearance after falling and spraining a shoulder.

Still the two US officials argued that in Washington's view the current year is one of "critical transition" in Iraq.

"To continue the success we have seen in recent months, the Iraqi people and government will continue to need our help. Iraqis have requested a normalized relationship with us, and such a relationship will be part of a foundation ... upon which future US administrations can build," Gates and Rice wrote.

Their comments come ahead of talks to explore ways of reducing violence in Iraq, bringing together diplomats, security experts and military officials.

"In these negotiations, we seek to set the basic parameters for the US presence in Iraq, including the appropriate authorities and jurisdiction necessary to operate effectively and to carry out essential missions," Rice and Gates wrote.

"In addition, we seek to establish a basic framework for a strong relationship with Iraq, reflecting our shared political, economic, cultural and security interests."

"Nothing to be negotiated will mandate that we continue combat missions. Nothing will set troop levels. Nothing will commit the United States to join Iraq in a war against another country or provide other such security commitments. And nothing will authorize permanent bases in Iraq (something neither we nor Iraqis want)," they added in newspaper article.

"In short, nothing to be negotiated in the coming months will tie the hands of the next commander in chief, whomever he or she may be.

They continued: "Quite the contrary, it will give the president the legal authority to protect our national interest — and the latitude to chart the next administration's course."

333,000 US Casualties: Are They Covered?

February 14, 2008

by Maya Schenwar

t r u t h o u t | Report

As Iraq and Afghanistan war casualties soar to unprecedented levels, Bush's 2009 Veterans Affairs' budget comes up short.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will treat about 333,000 sick and injured veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2009, according to VA statistics released last week. That number is a 14 percent increase over this year's casualty total. Yet, despite the Bush administration's promises to prioritize the VA even as other domestic departments' funds are cut, its annual budget request for next year places more financial burdens than ever on many returning soldiers.

At first glance, Bush's 2009 budget may seem like a boon to veterans: It would increase the VA budget by $3.4 billion.

"The President's ongoing commitment to those who have faithfully served this country in uniform is clearly demonstrated through this budget request for VA," said VA Secretary James B. Peake at a budget hearing last Thursday. "Resources requested for discretionary programs in 2009 are more than double the funding level in effect when the president took office seven years ago."

However, veterans' advocates argue the budget's growth has not kept pace with the skyrocketing size of the veteran community - or the increasing cost of servicing them.

"Bush only provides the news on the increased budget without providing full facts on the increased demands and costs," said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense.

Although the "discretionary spending" Peake mentions has indeed doubled since Bush entered office, the VA budget as a whole has only increased by about a third - roughly in proportion to the growth of the veteran population, according to VA statistics.

Peake's comparison of today's VA budget to that of seven years ago also sidesteps the reality of changing market values. Congressman Bob Filner, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs' Committee, says that regardless of the administration's sweeping claims, the 2009 VA budget is not much improvement over last year's. According to Filner, the budget's much-touted 5.5 percent increase for veteran health care "barely covers the cost of medical inflation."

"The service and sacrifice of our veterans is real, and the budget for the VA must provide realistic funding levels to meet these needs," Filner said in a statement upon the budget's release. "I am concerned that this budget proposal contains only modest increases for veterans' health care while paying for this slight increase with cuts in other veterans' programs below the historic levels this Congress provided for in this fiscal year."

For example, the new budget would require veterans to pay more out-of-pocket expenses, such as pharmacy co-pays and annual enrollment fees. Also, under Bush's plan, the VA's medical research budget would drop below 2007 levels, with the expectation the department would outsource its research needs.

"The VA reduces its research budget in 2009 and sets sights on coordinating with other agency research activities, agencies such as the Institute of Medicine," said Rick Jones, legislative director of the National Association for Uniformed Services. "With so much unknown on traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, it seems ill-advised to depend on outside-agency coordination when these issues are veteran-centric."

The administration's proposal cuts the VA medical and prosthetic research budget by 8 percent and veterans' rehabilitation research by 7 percent.

It also slashes construction funds for new medical facilities by about 44 percent, with grants for construction of extended care facilities losing 49 percent.

Moreover, after the 2009 VA budget increase, the Bush plan calls for billions of dollars in budget cuts over the next four years, according to Filner. For a system already playing a losing game of catch-up, the reductions could be devastating.

"The VA's backlog of claims and appeals has been exacerbated by funding shortfalls," said Jay Agg, national communications director for American Veterans (AMVETS). "Currently, 870,000 veterans are awaiting decisions from the VA, a process that may take many months or even years. That's about the same size as 15 Yankee Stadiums full of veterans."

The administration has shown no signs of altering its 2009 VA request; in fact, it is currently immersed in a lawsuit defending its right to deny health care to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

However, veterans' advocacy groups aren't giving up. During last Thursday's testimony, Jones and representatives from several other organizations, including AMVETS, presented "The Independent Budget" (IB): their own proposal for next year's VA spending. It would up the Bush budget by almost $3 billion, emphasizing mental health research and medical facility construction.

"The IB is by veterans, for veterans, and provides a full picture of veterans' needs and how our government can meet them," Agg said. "Our position is that the administration and Congress, having authorized funding for war, must now be prepared to provide sufficient, timely and predictable funding to meet the needs of our war fighters."

Despite the Bush administration's firm stance on the VA budget, some advocates see signs of hope. Last Thursday's hearing was not a battle, according to Sullivan; in fact, administration officials appeared interested in listening to what the "other side" had to say.

"While Secretary Peake and VA's top political appointees testified first, they broke their usual pattern of quickly departing the hearing room," Sullivan said. "Instead of bolting for the door, Peake asked Under Secretary Kussman and Under Secretary Cooper to remain, and they all remained and listened to the testimony of ten different veteran groups."

As casualties mount and the end of the Bush administration draws nearer, Congress will take up the VA request and, likely by this summer, propose its own version of the budget.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021408J.shtml

'They have no honor'

February 15, 2008

by David Young

Asia Times

There is a robust dialogue in the West concerning just causes for declaring war (such as pre-emption and self-defense,among others), but very little discussion about the methods of warfare that we (and other Westernized countries) have come to regard as either justifiable or unconscionable. unequivocal abhorrence for certain behavior, such as terrorism and hostage-taking. It is important to recognize the difference between why we emotionally hate terrorism, and why we are politically adverse to it. The justifications are intertwined, just as they are in the rest of our moral-centric policies; but their differences should be addressed.

Ultimately, if we do not understand why we despise terrorism so much, then we cannot define terrorism. If we cannot define terrorism, we cannot define victory. If we cannot define victory, we cannot achieve it. And finally, if we cannot achieve victory in an ideological war, then what good are our cultural values, anyway? Admittedly, this last question is rather circular, but this is precisely the point, as the following hopes to indicate. Americans have great difficulty framing foreign policy (and most objectives, generally) outside the scope of values and morals. In the case of terrorism, it is with a rather bizarre twist of rhetoric that we have endorsed a war whose bounds are frighteningly limitless in every possible way.

The boilerplate

Why is terrorism regarded with such disdain in the West? Beyond a first glance, the answer to this question is starkly different from its broader counterpart, "Why is violence regarded with such disdain in the West?" Whatever connotations violence might carry in Western (and especially American) culture, widespread disdain is not one of them. America is a very violent culture, for countless reasons and through infinite outlets. But the drastic differences between America's regard for terrorism and for violence point to one cultural certainty: while violence might be the ultimate source of America's enjoyment in competitive sports and Hollywood adventure films, the glorification of terrorism (especially the suicidal variety) is a serious infraction against the collective body of American cultural values. Young boys do not team up and play "FBI and al-Qaeda" the way they might play "Cops and Robbers" or "Cowboys and Indians".

Without question, al-Qaeda's attacks on September 11, 2001, solidified the taboo of depicting terrorists in anything but an evil light, but terror was hardly tolerated or exceptional before 9/11. In New York, Lebanon, Iran, Kenya, Kuwait, Germany, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia; on the USS Cole in the Persian Gulf and in the skies above Scotland - these are just some of the places Americans have been targeted by terrorists, and all of these attacks have struck a chord in the American psyche.

The reasons for this are complicated, if only because Americans seem to hate terrorism for any and every reason they can think of - cherry picking various principles and fusing them with others.

Granted, we have our notions of what constitutes a worthy agenda (freedom, for example, and tolerance), but for Americans, we believe the necessity "war on terror" is founded on the methods, not the agendas, of our enemies. To start, by accusing terrorists of cowardice, Americans reinforce their own perception that bravery and subterfuge ("sneak attacks") are mutually exclusive.

'They're cowards'

One grievance Americans have returned to again and again is the bravery factor. As most cross-cultural analyses have indicated, Americans are known for being bold and blunt. We stand up for ourselves. We refuse to be bullied, and we are fervent believers in practicing what we preach and preaching what we practice.

One patriotic slogan regarding the Iraq war, for instance, says of the US flag: "These colors don't run." We like to think that we will not shy away from a fight, that we do not make idle threats or promises, and more broadly, that we are honest - perhaps even to a fault. Like most cultures, we take great pride in the bravery of our armed forces, but when this pride is fused with our honesty, bravery becomes inextricably tied to a refusal to run or hide. For better or worse, our policies do not always reflect these principles, but few Americans view any such inconsistency as a basis for abandoning the principles themselves.

As a result, we find terrorism detestable because only a coward would target "innocent civilians" instead of soldiers, or hide among civilian populations for protection, forcing us to bomb those populations despite our heartache from doing so. The pejorative tones in such an accusation are seldom questioned as anything less than self-evident. Anyone can kill civilians, the reasoning seems to go. "You're only going after civilians because it's like stealing candy from a baby." When pressed further, many Americans grow uncomfortable when they take this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion: namely, we despise terrorism, in part, because there is simply no sport in killing civilians. "Only a coward who is afraid of a real fight would hurt defenseless civilians." That is, in order for a fight to be "real," its means must fair and "legitimate".

For a militant Shi'ite group to summarily execute defenseless Sunnis as they approach a makeshift roadblock in Baghdad is completely risk-free for the militants. And, in the eyes of Americans, precisely because such a massacre is risk-free - precisely because the fight is so obviously unbalanced in favor of those with weapons - Americans are disgusted by the idea of such a slaughter. If, on the other hand, Sunnis and Shi'ites were evenly matched and fortified in desert trenches - away from the "civilian" population, and dying in roughly comparable numbers and at comparable rates - then American tolerance for such bloodshed far surpasses any similar threshold in the Western world.

Upon realizing this bizarre discrepancy, most Americans warily approach the first rhetorical roadblock in their assault on terror: how to reconcile our humorless attitude toward war with our sportsmanlike, even cavalier, sense of fairness that pervades all American competitions, including warfare. It would seem that unless we face an opponent who can pose a serious challenge to our agenda, it would be immoral for us to declare war on them, as the result would be little more than an unsportsmanlike massacre.

In theory, at least, we feel that we should give the other side a chance. There must be some kind of adventure in the struggle for power and dominance. The assumption here is that we only declare war on enemies that pose a threat to us, and therefore, any enemy who poses a threat will mount a substantial defense, and thus preclude a slaughter.

Yet few Americans embrace such a litmus test, if only because we resent the suggestion that we risk our soldiers' lives to make war more dramatic. Specifically, those familiar with US foreign policy would insist that Operation Desert Storm was both worthwhile and unbalanced: everyone knew that we would decimate the Iraqi army, and this did not reduce American support for the war. In fact, since the end of the Cold War, even the most cautious Americans encouraged President Clinton to intervene only in those conflicts where our victory was nearly guaranteed.

This seems to point to a double standard - that slaughters are coincidentally tolerable to Americans only when Americans do the slaughtering. We seem to believe that a fight leaves the realm of a "slaughter" as soon as the enemy picks up a weapon, but only when that enemy is our enemy. When we speak of two distant warring parties, the fact that both sides have weapons does not prevent us from denouncing the more powerful party for its immoral tactics. Remarkably, when American troops have routed their enemies, the explanation is often that "we were just superior soldiers." So, does our distaste for unfair matches only point to textbook hypocrisy - that Americans only insist on fair fights when their own soldiers are not on the line?

It is tempting and logical to dismiss much of American public discourse as hypocritical, but the truth is often substantially more complicated, and this case is no different. To Americans, a "fair fight" is not a reflection of some power differential; it is a reflection of methods. After all, it is one thing to be an underdog defending yourself (and dying in battle), while it is another matter entirely to be slaughtered without ever picking up a weapon. Yet this can only leave us wondering about our focus on the sport/competition factor: we define a "fair" fight as one where both sides have weapons, and both have chosen to engage in battle.

This gets particularly complicated when the question of free will - if self-defense constitutes a choice - is introduced, but either way, what is clear is that the means and methods of warfare matter greatly to Americans.

'They have no honor'

Undoubtedly, any explicit mention of a "sportsmanlike war" is bound to offend American sensibilities, as we are accustomed to hearing moral justifications for nearly every culturally acceptable behavior. No one wants to think their enjoyment of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies has anything to do with their concept of just warfare. And given the amount of courage it takes to die for one's cause, it is rhetorically difficult for us to dismiss suicide terrorists solely as cowards.

Another moral basis for demonizing them is needed - though still within the framework of targeting civilians - which also strengthens our case against non-suicidal terror. With suicide bombers, in particular, our moral accusations shift from a lack of courage to a lack of honor. Terrorists, we insist, absurdly attack civilians who have done nothing to their attackers or their respective causes. A lack of honor implies an inability to discipline oneself to abide by certain rules and reject "senseless violence". Accordingly, we have no qualms going to war with an enemy whose aggression "makes sense" to us - that is, aggression directed toward those its perpetrator views as responsible for its grievances. But we are simply lost when trying to understand the concept of (what we could only call) unrestricted warfare, to say nothing of its application.

Our love of rules governing the chaos of warfare are both a cause and an effect of a particular psychological process. Specifically, one of the most effective means of reconciling our love of violence with our love of morality is that - rather creatively - we moralize our violence, especially in war. We insist that warring parties should kill each other in certain ways and avoid other ways that are dishonorable, cowardly, and ultimately, downright senseless.

To Americans, the act of targeting civilians seems like the saddest case of misplaced rage. We often wonder: "What possible reason could a person have for taking out their grievances on an undeserving target in a calculated ritual, again and again? They must enjoy it, or they must not be interested in justice, myopic or otherwise. Whatever their differences, surely any two warring parties can agree that innocent bystanders should be spared if possible, right?"

In the end, because we cannot conceive of any basis for targeting civilians, we frame such methods in moral terms: "Why don't you pick on someone your own size?" - that is, someone who has a chance of fighting back. Otherwise, we believe, the fight leaves the realm of warfare, poisons the concept of freedom-fighting, and embraces nearly indiscriminate mayhem. Even if terrorism is an effective strategy - which merits a separate analysis of its own - we resent that effectiveness because we regard it as cheating a noble system of warfare. We are repulsed by the implications of what terrorists demand of us, especially how their tactic of hiding among civilians forces us to inflict (against our more humane wishes) significant collateral damage.

It is very painful for us to watch as terrorists use our own humanity against us: we are vulnerable to terror because we are moral and thus accept whatever costs might accompany abiding by the rules that terrorists dishonorably exploit. If it were not for our morality, we say, an endless civilian death toll would be the last thing to stop us.

No gun at the head

Given our resentment of terrorism for its methods, it should be no surprise that we regard any attempt to negotiate with terrorists as the single worst course of action available to any aggrieved party. "It would only encourage more terrorism," the reasoning goes, with all of its various spin-offs and modifications: "that would embolden the enemy", "they would learn that terror works", and so on.

And while these tactical considerations often suffice as a basis for making policy recommendations, there is, nevertheless, something rhetorical and emotional at work here, as well. Something must take us from the impartial suggestion that "negotiation would be unwise" to a recommendation loaded with emotional content like, "negotiation with terrorism is no different than unconditional surrender".

Specifically regarding Americans, the idea of negotiating with terrorists or hostage-takers is abhorrent due to the dreaded connotations of being forced into a corner that has only one, very uncomfortable exit. As poster-children of a nation usually obsessed with negotiation, Americans are firm believers in contracts as a "meeting of the minds", and insist that any subsequent agreement should be signed out of affirmative yearning to obtain something desirable, but unnecessary.

Americans do not want to feel as though they "have to" negotiate; they would much prefer to enter negotiations because they "want to" do so. In other words, no sense of coercion, and no sense of impending doom if an agreement is not signed - these should be the conditions for a fair and honorable negotiation.

Otherwise, we view the process leading to the agreement not as negotiation, but instead as simple extortion. Whether dealing with legitimate nation-states like Iran (and its nuclear ambitions) or non-state actors/terrorists like Hezbollah, America and much of the West cannot tolerate being put in a situation where the only rational choice is to give in to the demands of its enemies, who are essentially holding "a gun to our heads" while they pretend to be reasonable.

Pressure-washing the boilerplate

Without question, there are a number of holes in the American rhetoric condemning terrorism, even beyond the standard (and accurate) claim that America has supported and continues to support terrorists all over the world for their own strategic purposes - from the contras in Nicaragua to the peshmerga in Iraqi Kurdistan, and countless others. But even within the American cultural and linguistic framework that condemns terrorism, there exists a number of problems that together point to an unsurprising but compelling conclusion: Americans hate terrorism because they are vulnerable to it, nothing more.

In the early 1980s, a nascent group of Shi'ite militants in Lebanon began a suicide bombing campaign against Israeli forces and American/French peacekeepers - all of whom occupied Lebanon at the time. On October 23, 1983, two Hezbollah suicide bombers simultaneously killed 241 American and 58 French soldiers as they slept in their military barracks in Beirut. US President Reagan called it a "despicable act", and urged Americans to resist "the bestial nature of those who would assume power".

US vice president George H W Bush toured the collapsed US Marine Corps barracks and insisted that the US "would not be cowed by terrorists". Pope John Paul II and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir both called the attack a "despicable crime". French president Francois Mitterrand called it a "despicable attack". Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau said, "These brutal and criminal actions cannot be excused."

Every Western leader (and most Middle East tyrants) publicly condemned the attack. Headlines about the attack dominated the news for weeks. Americans were devastated, and our leaders echoed these emotions with their mourning and their fury. But imagine how Americans might have reacted the next day if Reagan, Bush or secretary of state George Schultz had said, "Today, we mourn the loss of many good men to a cunning enemy, but we must remain steadfast in our mission, and grateful that our enemy did not target civilians."

Without question, we would have been outraged that our leader was asking us to look on the bright side of tallying America's greatest one-day loss of marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima. We did not want to be grateful to our enemy for obeying the rules of war; we wanted blood. It did not matter that Hezbollah targeted our military infrastructure - not that day, nor on any other day when American military targets were attacked in Lebanon.

·  On November 13, 1995, an al-Qaeda-affiliated militant remote-detonated a car bomb outside the US-operated National Guard Training facility in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans. President Clinton called the bombing "an outrage", and he insisted that the US and Saudi Arabia would work together to identify "those responsible for this cowardly act". Raymond E Mabus Jr, the American ambassador to Saudi Arabia at the time, described the bombing as "a desperate act, a horrible act, the work of cowards".

·  On June 26, 1996, a truck bomb killed 19 Americans at a US Air Force complex at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden and Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have been linked to the attack, which US president Clinton said, at the time, "appears to be the work of terrorists". He went on to say that if the explosion was the work of terrorists, "I am outraged by it ... The cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished ... Anyone who attacks one American attacks every American, and we protect and defend our own."

·  On October 12, 2000, 17 American soldiers were killed by a suicide boat-bomb attack on the USS Cole as it refueled in a Yemeni port. Again, President Clinton said that "if, as it now appears, this was an act of terrorism, it was a despicable and cowardly act". Likewise, Admiral Vern Clark, the US Chief of Naval Operations, noted that "I have no reason to think that this was anything but a senseless act of terrorism." Secretary of Defense William Cohen called the attack a "vicious and cowardly act".

Again, consider how offensive it would have been (in the aftermath of each of these three attacks) for Clinton to commend the bombers for not targeting civilians. In fact, it would have even been offensive for Clinton to describe this bombing as anything but a terrorist attack. This should be more than enough evidence that, in the end - regardless of whatever principled moral arguments we might make in a classroom - our disgust with terrorism actually has nothing to do with targeting choices.

It is crucial to note that the appropriate conclusion from this evidence is not that, deep down, we actually love when our military is attacked. Far from it, we should recognize that - contrary to our talking points about honor - we actually value our soldiers' lives just as much as we value our citizens' lives. It hurts when we lose civilians, and it hurts when we lose soldiers. The fact that American civilians did not die in these four attacks does not detract from the devastation wrought on the victims' families, nor does it mitigate our nation's sense of loss.

In our eyes - and those are the eyes under scrutiny here - were our fallen soldiers in Beirut any more or less "innocent" than the American civilians who died in the Twin Towers? Strangely, our first tendency is to say "yes," even though the Beirut, Riyadh, Dhahran and USS Cole attacks fall well outside the oft-cited civilian argument condemning terrorism: no civilians died, only soldiers; it was an attack on our military, and it stung because Americans were killed, not because the attack was "cowardly" or "senseless".

Granted, we had not declared war with any parties in Lebanon or Saudi Arabia, but our soldiers were present on foreign soil and - regardless of the accuracy of the local assessment - many Lebanese and Saudis saw no distinction between peacekeeping and occupation. In fact, a crucial factor explaining why we viewed these two attacks as terrorism is that the idea of "going to war" with the whole of Lebanon or Saudi Arabia was absurd.

So the soldiers and their patrons in America did not view their presence in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon as an "occupation" and certainly not as domination. After all, "we were asked" to help Lebanon and Saudi Arabia by their own governments, Americans always insist. Unfortunately, this comment also reflects the American cultural assumption that a government has the support of its people, but most nations in the Middle East are plagued by painfully clear fault lines that are seldom straddled by their governments. And regardless of an obvious intercultural clash about what constitutes terrorism, even within our American culture, if terrorists are repulsive to us, then it is not because they target civilians.

The fact that we are still shocked when our soldiers die in inhospitable environments is a frightening testament to our ease with warfare and to our belief that war need not (and should not) burden Americans with any costs. War has become so normal and mundane to us that we call these attacks terrorism because we do not feel like we are at war, and so we naturally believe that the attack "came out of nowhere".

Under such conditions, we could never be prepared to make sacrifices in the name of a war we do not even know about. In an interview with the Hebrew daily Ma'ariv, Salah Arouri, the founder of Hamas in the West Bank, recently argued that Israelis - whose resentment of terrorism bears significant resemblance to our own - tout equally inconsistent rules of war:

The entire Israeli nation asks how [a captured Israeli soldier] feels, how he lives, what his problems are. [They] ask how we can hold him. [But] he is a soldier. He was taken from a tank. He was not a tourist. He sat in the tank with his gun aimed at Gaza. So what's all the excitement about?

Contextualizing the boilerplate

There are several reasons why many terrorists might insist that what they are doing is actually brave, honorable, and deserving of negotiation, but their reasons are less important to this analysis. Nevertheless, the differences between the divergent cultural approaches as to what constitutes fair warfare illuminate how the American approach developed and continues to solidify today, especially within the context of the wider "war on terror".

Like many other cultural traits, the American outlook on fair methods of warfare is both a cause and effect of America's ascendance to the top of the geopolitical food chain. Even before 9/11, Americans had a very precise resentment of terror methods, and the current "war on terror" only cemented that resentment in a historical framework.

Since the end of World War II, the only perceived and genuine threat to American national security has been the Soviet Union. It became impossible to talk about strategic defense without also talking about space-based missile defenses, intricate spy networks within the Kremlin, and covert operations to keep Soviet expansion at bay.

To defeat the communist giant, we employed our inherent virtues of freedom and hope, which we honed so well during our moral triumph over Nazi Germany, when we saved the world from a thousand years of misery.

After four decades of adding nuclear deterrence and proxy wars to our moral and ideological momentum, our resilience finally paid off in 1991. High from our victory, not only did we start to believe that we could defeat anything, but far more worrisome, we believed that we could do so with conventional means. Why continue tweaking a method that worked well enough to defeat our only strategic threat?

Few of these observations are original, but among many smaller factors, our vast experience facing a truly overwhelming threat molded our perception of what warfare is supposed to look like, and what it does look like. More importantly, we excelled at this global game of chess. We adapted to threats, and like most victors in war, we prided ourselves on the skills that we acquired in order to defeat the enemy. Granted, most of the elements in American (and Western) culture regarding warfare predate the Cold War, which helped shape - and was also shaped by - these cultural attitudes.

And rather harmoniously, our modern concepts of courage and honor echo their ideological ancestors, embodied, for instance, in the fearsome warriors of Sparta, the chivalrous knights of Europe, and American generals literally leading their men on the front lines of our Civil War. It was our bravery and honor - we seem to believe - that have brought us to where we are today, against all odds and enemies.

Yet these disparate influences on our concept of warfare have now culminated in a period of our cultural history that does not fit particularly well with our geopolitical fortune. Most cultures view their forebears as underdogs who miraculously prevailed because of a long list of virtues. But when that underdog finds itself alone at the top of the junkyard heap, narratives often change considerably. And we were no different. Not only are we having trouble reconciling our own dominance with our underdog rhetoric (from a theoretical point of view), but we are therefore jumping even greater hurdles in our attempts to apply this contradictory outlook to our national interests throughout the world.

One way, for instance, that we reconcile our power with our morality can be seen in the change in our narrative - throughout the last century - from being the underdog to defending the underdogs across the globe who cannot defend themselves against the oppression of tyranny.

As the world's "lonely superpower", America's strategic threats during the 1990s were so minimal that we could afford to examine frightening (though hardly existential) threats, like terrorism, which ironically is far more difficult to prevent than a mighty Soviet invasion. The events of 9/11 were a stark awakening to a nation whose concept of power had been left behind in the dust. After nearly a half-century of staving off a nuclear holocaust at the hands of an enigmatic and sophisticated enemy, how could our unchallenged grasp of global power - and our very sanity - be leveled to its foundations by a motley crew of cave-dwellers from some god-forsaken land in central Asia?

Only adding to this overwhelming sense of impotence, the absence of any centralized retaliation target left us drooling for blood, only to be told that our skies were falling because of an enemy that was paradoxically nowhere and everywhere at the same time. And so began the "war on terror", which has since targeted a particular method of warfare because there has been no credible strategic enemy for the US to oppose.

Even if al-Qaeda destroyed Manhattan with a dirty or sophisticated nuclear weapon, our civilization would continue. Undoubtedly, such an event would be disastrous and terrifying; it would traumatize much of the country for decades, and we should do everything in our power to prevent it from happening. But this is nothing compared to the threat of nuclear holocaust (with the Soviets) or even a focused holocaust like that of World War II.

Absent the threat of such an endgame, the only rhetorical basis for a war would be the perpetrators' means of attack, namely terrorism. For perspective, consider how bizarre it would have been for the French in 1940 to beg the invading Nazi army to humanely refrain from attacking at night, as the French children were having trouble sleeping. If Charles De Gaulle had proposed that idea to the other members of the French Resistance, they would have probably reminded him that they have significantly larger problems to worry about than peaceful sleep, like survival.

No one cared how Germany invaded; that they invaded at all was terrifying enough. As traumatic and devastating as 9/11 was, it did not come close to threatening the very survival of our civilization. Because the endgame was not a worry in 2001, it was reasonable for us to focus on the means our enemies employed. But even still, we do not recognize that we are warring against a form of war itself, not some credible threat to our existence.

Without question, however, 9/11 stoked a legitimate fire in us all, and it continues to blaze. But without an enemy who rivaled our power - and with all that rage boiling over - we had to attack something, and to fill the void, that something needed to be broad and ambitious. The invasion of Afghanistan only weeks later sated our thirst for retribution, but it hardly alleviated the incessant sense of doom and vulnerability from another 9/11-style attack, which had been so low-maintenance that it passed under the radar screen.

The unsophisticated nature of our enemy's methods on 9/11 was another source of humiliation and frustration for Americans. We hated the idea that our enemies could take advantage of our technological prowess, and then use it against us. We were so far ahead of the enemy's curve that we could not anticipate its primitive nature, for whatever reasons. Al-Qaeda mocked us with its reliance on a technology that we had invented, and nearly a century ago, no less.

While Americans shared a precise concept of terrorism long before 9/11, there was a distinct shift in the paradigm: until that day, terrorism was dismissed as a "despicable" means of achieving political goals, but one that would never pose a threat to our psychological state of mind - one that was supposed to plague distant war zones, not America's skylines. Now, however, despite the absence of a credible threat - and no follow-up attacks on our homeland - terrorism is still perceived as the primary threat to our way of life.

With a broader perspective, even if America's sense of strategic vulnerability has shifted focus from a Soviet escalation to Islamist infiltration and terrorism, neither our attitudes nor our tactics have caught up to the perceived threats, and without a balance between the two, the "war on terror" will continue to fail. We will always be vulnerable as long as we fool ourselves into thinking that we hate - and have declared war on - terrorism for its methods. Put bluntly, we hate terrorism because we are exceptionally vulnerable to it, and naturally this prospect is rather terrifying to a nation that considers itself both invulnerable and morally deserving of invulnerability.