London editor prays for nuclear attack on Israel | Jerusalem Post

London editor prays for nuclear attack on Israel | Jerusalem Post: "Talking about Iran's nuclear capability on ANB Lebanese television on June 27, Abd Al-Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, said, 'If the Iranian missiles strike Israel, by Allah, I will go to Trafalgar Square and dance with delight.'"

It would be lovely if the next time the BBC has Mr Al-Bari Atwan on as a guest on a Mideast topic they would note this bloodthirstiness.

Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East

IranStudy082807a.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Just published by Dan Plesch and Martin Butcher of SOAS, an open-source analysis of the prospects of war with Iran. In a nutshell: a large air and missile attack is likely if not imminent.

Conventional Wisdom concerning any US attack on Iran:
a) Any attack will be limited to suspect Weapons of Mass Destruction sites and associated defences.
b) Iran will then have options to retaliate that include:
-interference with the Straits of Hormuz and oil flows, destruction of Gulf oil industry infrastructure;
-fire missiles at Gulf States, Iraq bases and Israel;
-insurrection in Iraq;
-attacks by Hizbollah and Hamas on Israel;
-insurrection in Afghanistan;
-use of sleeper cells to carry out attacks in the Gulf, Europe and the US; and
-destabilisation of Gulf states with large Shi’a populations.
c) This analysis is not convincing for the following reasons:
-Elementary military strategy requires the prevention of anticipated enemy counter-attacks. Iranian Air Force, Navy, Surface to Surface Missile and Air Defence systems would not be left intact. Although one option may be to leave regular Iranian armed forces intact and attack to destroy the regime including Revolutionary Guard, Basij and religious police. In this way regime change might be encouraged.
-President Bush will not again lay himself open to the chargeof using too little force.
-US policy is regime change by political means and prevention of nuclear weapons acquisition by all means. The only logic for restraint once war begins will be continued pressure on Iran to acquiesce to US demands through intra-war deterrence.
-Long term prevention of Iranian WMD programmes may require regime change and the reduction of Iran to a weak or failed state, since all assumptions concerning attacks on WMD sites alone conclude that Iran would merely be held back a few years.
-US military preparations and current operations against Iran indicate a full-spectrum approach to Iran rather than one confined to WMD sites alone.

Read the whole thing.

Report of views of UK troops

BBC NEWS | UK | Troops argue Iraq is 'unwinnable'

Does no one at the BBC have any sense at all of their power? 'BBC Declares War is Over. Government to Report Later.'

You voted for this ridiculous war, Reid. So go fight it | Martin Samuel - Times Online

You voted for this ridiculous war, Reid. So go fight it | Martin Samuel - Times Online: "As it stands, this is the British Army in the centre of some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet, saying, for reasons that have long ceased to be understood: “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.” And come they do: from Pakistan, from Iran, from Chechnya, even from the budding martyr community of Britain. There is a jihadists’ convention taking place in Helmand valley, and British soldiers are hosting it."

Guantanamo Bay Chief Prosecutor defends military commissions

The Yale Law Journal - In Defense of Guantanamo Bay

There's an article in the Yale Law Journal on Guantanamo Bay written by the Chief Prosecutor, Col Morris David, which is interesting reading on its own terms and as a rare example of its type: when was the last time you saw a pro-Guantanamo piece? I have always thought the problem with Guantanamo was more about presentation than substance. So this part off the article rang home with me:

Am I ashamed of the picture I see of Guantanamo Bay and the military commissions? Absolutely not. There are those who want to sell a false and ugly picture of the facilities and the process, and they have been very successful in manipulating public opinion while we on the other side have been largely ineffective. If they continue to succeed in generating a false sense of collective shame, then perhaps public pressure will become so great that the political process will bend and cause a change of course. In my opinion, that would be unfortunate and unnecessary. Even some of the most vocal critics claim they are not soft on terrorism and do not want to set terrorists free, but they believe Guantanamo Bay and military commissions have become such liabilities that we need to look for other alternatives. Perhaps if we do a better job of educating the public about the truth, we will demonstrate that there is nothing wrong with the alternatives currently in use. We have a good story to tell, and we should not be ashamed to tell it. I see in Guantanamo a clean, safe, and humane facility to detain enemy combatants and a fair process to adjudicate the guilt or innocence of those alleged to have committed crimes defined by Congress and the laws of war.

Clearly the legal issues surrounding the Guantanamo Bay camp are complex. I'd put myself in the camp of those who think whatever the legality Guantanamo has become a massive liability. (I wonder if just constituting field tribunals of two captains and a major in the field and shooting those judged unlawful combatants would have caused less damage. Bad public diplomacy to be sure; but straightforward, cheap and legal.) That being the case, either the facility is shut down or something is done to push back on the the popular perception of it. The article in question seems an attempt to do that. Too little too late?

Information Warfare

The cyberwar against the United States - The Boston Globe Interesting article here.

From Estonia to Tampa, recent events teach us that cyber-warfare is indeed a war. It must be fought harder and smarter and within the context of the broader struggle against Islamist extremism.

I am not so concerned about hacker warfare using mass denial of service attacks which this article focusses on. I think the network of information systems is robust enough to handle it. What should be concerned about is that the proliferation of Jihadi websites is a measure of the fact that we are losing the War of Ideas with Islamism. The recent book by J. Michael Waller Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War is a more sophisticated discussion of the problem; his receommendations are quite provocative. Worth reading.

Army Reports Brass, Not Bloggers, Breach Security

Army Reports Brass, Not Bloggers, Breach Security

War and Anthropology

Professors on the Battlefield - WSJ.com

Also see this post by Sharon Weinberger on Danger Room 'When Anthropologists Go to War'

I think on balance this is a very good development, though Patrick Porter's recent piece in Parameters 'Good Anthropology, Bad History: The Cultural Turn in Studying War' points out that it's not all straightforward. At the end of the day why should the role of academics in war be confined to standing outside the Pentagon waving placards screaming 'You suck!'?

I love the comment at the end of the Danger Room post though: 'Doh! You just shot our anthropologist! How are we going to find a new one way out here???'

The Future of War: Attack of the Killer Robots - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

The Future of War: Attack of the Killer Robots - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

Interesting article on the hastening introduction of armed 'robots' on the battlefield. The phenomenon is more advanced in the air and at sea. On land the technical challenges are much greater and the ethical dilemmas of allowing the autonomous use of deadly force vastly more prevalent. Strictly speaking with the exception of the South Korean device which may have a degree of autonomy none of these are real robots--they all have human operators. But that would seem unlikely to remain the case for long. As it says in the article:

The Pentagon also wants to give the robots more freedom, arguing that the only way to enhance the fighting power of US troops is to enable a soldier to use several unmanned systems at the same time. This is only possible if the machines are allowed to make many of their decisions independently.

Can't fault the Pentagon's logic. As so often these days I find reality is catching up with ideas explored in science fiction . In this case the Bolo novels by Keith Laumer are very relevant. The interesting thing, to me anyway, is not how the technology will impact the battlefield per se; rather it is how we will think of war when we start to share the battlefield with robots. On the one hand you have the potential for remorseless inhuman killing machines. On the other hand you have 'soldiers' whose emotional reaction to being insulted, attacked, or frightened would be nil; they wouldn't suffer psychological strain of combat and while they certainly could commit atrocities as human soldiers sometimes do why would they? In fact as the clever thing about the Bolo novels is that they explore how these huge fightng machines become progressively more sentient they actually seem to understand concepts such as duty and honour better than the humans around them.

As we come to the last weeks of summer break wind down to the start of the new school year I recommend adding a Bolo book to your summer reading.

Ralph Peters on Killing of Yazidis, Petraeus, Iraq

The bodies are still piling up from Al Qaeda's massive bombing of Yazidi villages in north Iraq. I think that Peters gets is dead right in this piece on two counts: Those dead and maimed Yazidis were just props:

The intended audience was Congress... we're not really in Iraq for Iraq's sake now, but for our own. The long-mismanaged situation has morphed from a grand attempt to create a model democracy in the Middle East to become a fight for our strategic security - knocking al Qaeda down, keeping Iran out (see sidebar) and shaping a new Iraq that's at least benign where our interests are concerned.

Check out the Carbon Footprint on this baby

Army Vehicle Could be Iraq's First Hybrid

There are obvious and excellent reasons why armed forces should invest in more fuel efficient vehicles. The guys driving big, soft, fuel tankers must be the loneliest orphans of the non-linear battlefield. I'm a big believer in what Richard Simpkin referred to in his classic Race to the Swift as 'Mobility of the Boot'. (Says the guy writing while sitting on his sofa). But you can't walk every place and there's just way too much gear to be carried. Mechanical transport is always going to be required and so vehicles like the above seem a good compromise.

But that's not why I'm blogging it. Truth be told: I want one! When will the civvy version of this appear? Does it come with child seats? I am at the stage in life where I need to be driving a ruggedized military vehicle called 'The Aggressor'. It helps too that it is a convertible and environmentally friendly.

Iranian Unit to Be Labeled 'Terrorist' - washingtonpost.com

Iranian Unit to Be Labeled 'Terrorist' - washingtonpost.com

As much as I support and encourage confronting Iran I think designating the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization is a poor idea. The Revolutionary Guard is an agent of the state of Iran. Ipso facto whatever acts it takes to attack the armed forces and civilians of other countries are acts of war and should be regarded as such. This sort of tactic just plays the Iranian game of obscuring and avoiding responsibility.

List anonymous wikipedia edits from interesting organizations

List anonymous wikipedia edits from interesting organizations

Now here's a fascinating and useful tool for the discerning worldwatcher. A CalTech grad student has created a tool which searches Wikipedia edits and correlates them with known IP addresses. Basically this means it's a lot easier to detect anonymous axe-griniding and ego-editing.

For instance running a scan on the IP addresses of the BBC reveals a change in the entry on George Walker Bush to George Wanker Bush

Rather a few changes to entries on 'Criticism of the BBC' including a significant excision of a quote from
an official report on the BBC's impartiality which rendered the entry meaningless.

A change of Palestinian 'terrorists' to 'freedom figters' in an entry on the Caterpillar D9 Bulldozer.

And a
gossipy addition to the entry on Natasha Kaplinsky 'She dumped some geezer from Meridian TV.'

I predict many, many hours of fun to be had. I don't doubt that the reason I can't run a report on the wikipedia edits of 10 Downing St right now is because the site is overloaded with every political hack in the country digging for dirt.

Islam's poison cells | The Australian

Islam's poison cells | The Australian

It's hard to overstate the importance in a War of Ideas of authors like the one linked to above, former Islamists who can speak symptathetically to their co-religionists in language they can understand. Far more should be done to support such moderate Muslims as opposed to the faux-moderate Islamist mouthpieces of the MCB.

Baghdad Babylon: Hope and Despair in Divided Iraq - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

There's a very good article on Iraq in the latest Der Spiegel.

Baghdad Babylon: Hope and Despair in Divided Iraq - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

The upshot of it is that things in Iraq while far from rosy are less bad than they are generally thought to be:

Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq -- it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq -- not just Anbar Province, but also many other rural areas along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers -- are essentially pacified today. This is news the world doesn't hear...

The Americans may or may not have turned things around. If this report is right there is hope that they might have. And if that is the case then it is worth struggling on. It reminds me of Napoleon's saying '...never despair while there remain brave men around the colors.' It sounds corny I know, but there it is. To much of contemporary society words such as 'honor and glory of arms' sound anachronistic or even oxymoronic. We're much more likely to recall Sherman's 'I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine.' But the fact is they matter as much today as ever. The likely consequences of our withdrawal in defeat from Iraq for Iraqis are bad enough, but it would be a huge setback in the wider conflict which would have knock-on effects most immediately in Afghanistan. Which looks worse than Iraq to judge from the words of Canadian Major General Lewis Mackenzie 'NATO Countries are Shirking' and British casualty figures reported in The Times Britain’s frontline soldiers have 1 in 36 chance of dying on Afghan battlefield.

Max Boot interview about Iraq, Afghanistan and the Surge

I rather agree with Max Boot here on the connection between Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as on the struggle with Iran. In a nutshell, defeat in Iraq is likely to hasten the same in Afghanistan and Iran effectively has been at war with the United States since 1979.

Kiwi SAS man is awarded VC

Corporal Apiata, the first New Zealander to be awarded the Victoria Cross since the Second World War, has said he was only doing his job.

He is to receive the elite award after carrying an injured colleague through enemy fire in Afghanistan.

A clearly overwhelmed Corporal Apiata said he was still trying to deal with the enormity of having received such a prestigious honour.

"I was only doing my job and looking after my mates," Corporal Apiata told a media conference in Wellington this afternoon.

"It means a lot to me, to my family and the unit itself."

Corporal Apiata said he often sees the man whose life he saved.

"Whenever I see him we catch up and have a beer. We're good mates," Corporal Apiata said.

When asked if he saw himself as a role model, he said: "I see myself as Willy Apiata. I'm just an ordinary person."

Prime Minister Helen Clark said today: "Corporal Apiata carried a severely wounded fellow soldier across open ground while coming under intense attack. He did this despite the extreme danger to himself."

Well done. The distance Corporal Apiata carried his bleeding mate to safety was 70 yards which is about the length of the hallway my office opens onto. I'm sure it looks A LOT further when you've got bullets whipping around you and a dying man on your back. I really admire the understatement of the man. It reminds me of a story about John F. Kennedy who once when asked how he became a war hero answered 'It was involuntary. They sank my boat.'

Cyberterrorism for the masses

The sophisticated use of information technology, in particular the appreciation of the importance of the virtual battlefield is a hallmark of the global Islamist insurgency. This article, 'Electronic Jihad Offers Cyber-Terrorism for the Masses', at Information Week describes the creation of easy, user-friendly tools for internet hacktivists.

The latest version of Electronic Jihad software, 2.0, is designed to quickly update its list of target sites and to work with different Internet connection speeds. The application is also described as being capable of using different proxies to override government Web site blocking technology, Abdul Hameed Bakier, an intelligence expert on counterterrorism, crisis management, and terrorist-hostage negotiations, wrote in a recent report for the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank established on Sept. 11, 2003, to study and analyze global terrorism. “In the past, different jihadi groups practiced cyberattacks on anti-Islamic websites, but they were never able to sustain a long, organized campaign,” Bakier wrote in the June 26 edition of Jamestown’s weekly Terrorism Focus publication. He noted that Al-jinan is not only operating continuously but is developing new techniques to enhance the technology and methods of promoting electronic jihad. “With the spreading use of the Internet in the Arab and Islamic world, the number of users engaged in some form of electronic jihad is likely to increase substantially,” he added.

In addition to supplying the online weapons for cyberattack, the Al-jinan site also serves as a forum for learning attack techniques as well as other information that can be used in electronic jihad efforts. One emphasis is on the need for jihadis to organize synchronized mass cyberattacks on Web sites that they believe are critical of Islam. Electronic Jihad users set up an account name and password, which lets the site register the number of hours the user spends attacking targets and post the names of those who scored the highest. One attacker spent the equivalent of 70 days attacking sites.

The 'Long War' is above all a battle of ideas. That being the case it is foolish to dismiss these attempts to win that battle of ideas through intimidation and disruption.

Why graduate studies are important for officers

Forwarded to me by a friend is this recent article in the National Interest 'Beyond the Cloister' by Gen David Petraeus in which he makes the case for why officers ought to take part in civilian graduate studies. In a nutshell, because it:

1. Takes military officers out of their intellectual comfort zones;

2. Provides exposure to diverse and divergent views;

3. Provides specific skills and knowledge on which an officer may draw during his or her career;

4. Assists officers to develop and refine their communications skills;

5. Contributes to critical thinking skills; and,

6. Imparts a degree of intellectual humility.

Music to my ears of course, since I make my living running a masters programme the purpose of which is to provide just such things to people, such as but not exclusively, military officers whose occupational responsibilities tend to preclude taking a year out to live in central London as a residential student. Says Petraeus:

The most powerful tool any soldier carries is not his weapon but his mind. These days, and for the days ahead as far as we can see, what soldiers at all ranks know is liable to be at least as important to their success as what they can physically do. Some key questions before the U.S. military in changing times therefore must be: How do we define the best military education for the U.S. armed forces, and what are the best ways to impart that education? What should be the ideal relationship between soldiering and the schoolhouse?

Excellent question. Indeed I'm writing a paper for a Marine Corps conference on Pedagogy for the Long War just now on this question which perhaps no doubt I'll share with readers of this blog (all two of you). But, as my wry and always on target friend points out, an equally interesting question is whether and to what extent the relationship is two way. If it's such a great idea for warfighters to have experience of academia is it equally useful for academics to have experience of warfighting? I wonder if Petraeus has this somewhere in the back of his mind unconsciously; otherwise why title it 'Beyond the Cloisters' instead of 'Beyond the Barracks' which actually would have made sense?

That said, I reckon that if I walked into a British Army recruiting station as a 38 year old ex-Canadian Forces reservist I'd be quietly directed to the exit for geriatrics and lunatics and rightly so. Still I can't help thinking that if Petraeus really is right in the basic premise expressed in his first sentence that the most powerful weapon is the mind then the future ought to see the targeting for recruitment of the mature if not elderly. The main problem with maturity and wisdom is its strong correlation with physical decrepitude (or in my case more precisely expanding waistline); hence fresh-faced 18 year olds are still on the whole rather better soldierly material than deep-thinking 38 year olds, or 78 year olds for that matter. Yet the march of technological progress will change this; in fact we are already seeing a sort of such a convergence as recruitment ages rise and phsyical requirements diminish. The idea is explored a fair bit in science fiction novels such as Old Man's War by John Scalzi, and (my personal favourite) A Boy and his Tank by Leo Frankowski, both of which deal with protagonists enticed to join the military and to fight by the chance of a second healthy life, if only they can survive the term of service. But it's not so far as I am aware something which the military is thinking about which is odd when you think about it. If you're accustomed already to thinking about the technology of weapons systems and platforms such as aircraft carriers which you expect to last for 50 years or so, why assume (if we really are on the cusp of a Bio-tech revolution) that the current physical parameters will be constant and not variable?

Come back Blair

I just have one question. Why did you not say this when you were still Prime Minister?

In his most outspoken remarks on Islamists, the former Prime Minister warns that Britain is in danger of losing the battle against terrorists unless mainstream society confronts the threat.

Blair's remarks, in which he also attacks some civil liberty campaigners as 'loopy loo', were made in a Channel 4 documentary recorded last Tuesday on the eve of his departure from Downing Street.

'The idea that as a Muslim in this country that you don't have the freedom to express your religion or your views, I mean you've got far more freedom in this country than you do in most Muslim countries,' Blair told Observer columnist Will Hutton, who presents the documentary.

'The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified."'