IR in Fast Five

I watched "Fast Five" on DVD last night, though I haven't seen any of the prior "Fast" films. The movie received decent reviews and is a heist film, a genre that I enjoy, so I gave it a try. It's a bit long and has some stupid dialogue, but the film is generally entertaining. I'd have cut much of the long fight sequence between Vin Diesel and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.

About 25 minutes into the movie, the affluent Brazilian crime boss Hernan Reyes gives a speech that sounds like an out-take from Empire-Building 101:

Reyes: Let me tell you a true story.

Five hundred years ago, the Portuguese and the Spanish came here, each trying to get the country from their natives. The Spaniards arrived, guns blazing, determined to prove who was boss. The natives killed every single Spaniard.

Personally, I prefer the methods of the Portuguese. They came bearing gifts. Mirrors, scissors, trinkets. Things that the natives couldn’t get on their own, but to continue receiving them, they had to work for the Portuguese.

And that’s why all Brazilians speak Portuguese today.

Now, if you dominate the people with violence, they will eventually fight back because they have nothing to lose. And that’s the key.

I go into the favelas and give them something to lose. Electricity, running water, school rooms for their kids. And for that taste of a better life, I own them.

I put the key passage in bold.


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Is this a coincidence?

OK, so it has been widely reported that the US is missing a large number of assault rifles in Iraq:

The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, according to a new government report, raising fears that some of those weapons have fallen into the hands of insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.

The author of the report from the Government Accountability Office says U.S. military officials do not know what happened to 30 percent of the weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces from 2004 through early this year as part of an effort to train and equip the troops.

What if the U.S. does not care very much if the rifles disappear -- and end up in the hands of various insurgents?

Consider this: Phillip Killicoat of Oxford's Econ Department arrived an interesting finding in his recently completed World Bank Policy Research Working Paper called "Weaponomics: The Global Market for Assault Rifles" (warning: pdf). I read it in a short item in the Atlantic Monthly, October 2007 ("The Way of the Gun."):

Most surprisingly, the study cites research suggesting that having more arms in the marketplace makes running a counterinsurgency easier, presumably because it tends to fragment rebel groups: “The more easily individual combatants can obtain weapons through independent suppliers,” the author writes, “the more difficult it will be to mount and maintain a united and coordinated insurgency.”

Hmmmm.


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Afghanistan

2007 Grawemeyer Award winner Roland Paris was in Louisville this past week. He spoke Tuesday night about his prize-winning book, appeared on public radio's "State of Affairs" Wednesday and talked to the local Committee on Foreign Relations Thursday.

This latter meeting was about Afghanistan, which was also the subject of a Paris op-ed piece back on October 25 in the Globe and Mail. Paris pointed out the successes -- and failures of that mission:

much has been achieved in the past five years. Presidential and parliamentary elections have been held, and some 1,000 schools, clinics and government buildings have been built. In real terms, the non-drug economy has grown at an impressive average of 15 per cent a year. Most Afghans do not want the Taliban back in power. And unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is not verging on civil war.

But recent trends are discouraging. A strengthened insurgency has made much of the country unsafe for civilian development personnel. Local warlords and drug traffickers are reportedly collaborating with the Taliban against the government. And ordinary Afghans are showing signs of mounting disaffection with their own government's inability to provide security and public services.

If these trends continue, the Afghan mission will fail.

A key problem is lack of international commitment:

This mission is the most under-resourced international stabilization operation since the Second World War. For example, there were 20.5 international peacekeepers in Kosovo per 1,000 inhabitants, 19 in Bosnia, 10 in Sierra Leone and 3.5 in Haiti. The ratio in Afghanistan is a paltry 1 to 1,000. From the beginning, the operation has been hampered by a lack of international forces to help the Kabul government establish its presence throughout the country.

Afghanistan has also received less international aid per capita than many other war-torn countries, including East Timor, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and the Solomon Islands.

In the op-ed piece, Paris offers a handful of recommendations for saving the Afghan mission, including ways of thinking more creatively about the opium poppy crops, improving police security training, rooting out corruption, building an Afghan army and stopping the flow of Taliban fighters from neighboring Pakistan.

If NATO continues down the current path, argues Paris, the war will be lost and the alliance itself could be destroyed.

That might be the greatest cost of all.


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The evolution of insurgency

This is an interesting framing, though I missed it when it first appeared. From USA Today, November 7, 2004:

T.X. Hammes, a Marine colonel who studies guerrilla warfare at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., says American troops will confront the best fighters a determined enemy has to offer. "Insurgency is Darwinian. Those who are stupid and unlucky were killed early," Hammes says. "Those that survive get tougher. We see this in the enemy's tactics — they figure out what we are doing and they change. They are a very adaptive enemy."

That's my emphasis added.

Actually, I read a similar quote in a recent issue of Time in a waiting room, but couldn't find it on the web.

Others have discussed the fact that insurgencies evolve, including major media outlets and bloggers, but the usage here could be catchy if repeated often: the "insurgency is Darwinian."


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Foreign fighters

In comments, someone pseudonymously criticized my advice to "pro-war" Democrats for the 2006 elections. I argued that Dems should remind everyone that George Bush himself "flip flopped" on the justification for the use of force in Somalia because the "mission changed." Now that Iraq isn't about WMD or Saddam Hussein's nonexistent operational ties to al Qaeda, Dems could reject the grand nation-building mission without fear of being labeled wimps.

My advice would fail, wrote the commenter, because Republicans would just point out that the US is in Iraq to fulfill the primary post-9/11 mission: "kick terrorist butt."

I offered a fairly detailed response, but wanted to add a bit of data about one key point.

Let's turn this into a question for the post-Saddam era: Who is America fighting in Iraq?

War supporters say that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. Full stop. Terrorists are attacking American troops and innocent Iraqis, so the US needs to find them and kill or capture them.

War opponents emphasize the Iraqi nationalists who arguably constitute the lion's share of the insurgency. It is perfectly natural for people to resist foreign invasion and occupation. The President himself said as much. Pre-war, the Pentagon apparently screened "The Battle of Algiers" -- even if they didn't get the film's message.

Which view is more accurate?

The Pentagon says there likely aren't very many foreign fighters in Iraq. USA Today had a fairly good story about this last November 6:

Maj. Angela Hildebrant, a military spokeswoman, said the U.S. military estimates the number of foreign fighters by counting the number of foreigners killed in suicide attacks or captured by coalition forces in Iraq.

Only 3.5% of the 13,885 detainees held by U.S. forces in Iraq are foreigners...

Yet, the Pentagon asserts that these foreign fighters "are often behind the deadliest suicide bombings and provide financing and organization to Iraq's insurgency." I've seen no definitive data that support the claims, but there is anecdoctal support.

Obviously, if the US is fighting terrorists in Iraq, it helps legitimize the mission both at home (with voters) and inside Iraq. That fact should make everyone more skeptical about the Pentagon's claims. The Washington Post had a valuable story November 17:

"Both Iraqis and coalition people often exaggerate the role of foreign infiltrators and downplay the role of Iraqi resentment in the insurgency," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a former Pentagon official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who is writing a book about the Iraqi insurgency.

"It makes the government's counterinsurgency efforts seem more legitimate, and it links what's going on in Iraq to the war on terrorism," he continued. "When people go out into battle, they often characterize enemies in the most negative way possible. Obviously there are all kinds of interacting political prejudices they can bring out by blaming outsiders."

In December, Cordesman (with the Assistance of Sara Bjerg Moller) released a study (warning, pdf) estimating that between 4 and 10 percent of the roughly 30,000 insurgents are foreign.

A Post story from last May 15 revealed that US military analysts do not think the foreign fighters are major terrorists even if they are linked to al Qaeda:

Many of the suicide bombers appear to have been novices in warfare, attracted by the relative ease of access to Iraq and the lure of quick martyrdom. "This is not al Qaeda's first team," said [Col. Thomas X.] Hammes of the National Defense University. "These are the scrubs who could never get us in the States."

In short, the US government knows that the insurgency is overwhelmingly Iraqi, and some officials admit it (on or off the record). The November 17 Post story quotes a military commander in Iraq:

"The foreign fighters' attacks tend to be more spectacular, but local nationals, the Saddamists, the Iraqi rejectionists, are much more problematic," said Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Taluto, commander of the Army's 42nd Infantry Division. His unit, which lost 59 soldiers during its tour here, was based in the northern city of Tikrit, Hussein's home town, before transferring the region to the 101st Airborne Division this month.

Al Qaeda in Iraq maintains a presence in the region, he said, "but they're not having much of an impact. Their message is not resonating."

And from State, in the same story:

In Washington, a senior State Department official called foreign fighters "an important element to the insurgency," but added that "it would be a mistake to imagine that this isn't a largely Iraqi-based operation with critical support from foreign elements."

Politics

John Murtha's primary reasons for calling for withdrawal from Iraq are that the US troops are feeding the insurgency and the military is being destroyed by the prolonged engagement. Thus, even if the insurgency is boosted by key foreign elements, that does not mean that the best US foreign policy is built upon counterinsurgency and nation-building. It may be there are insufficient troops to win in Iraq. It may be that there are higher security priorities.

Moreover, even if the foreign fighters are providing critical support for the insurgency, there's bad news for the Republican administration buried in the data. Most foreign fighters apparently come from Saudi Arabia, an alleged US ally in the war on terror and a state very close to the Bush White House:

An NBC News analysis of hundreds of foreign fighters who died in Iraq over the last two years reveals that a majority came from the same country as most of the 9/11 hijackers — Saudi Arabia....The U.S. military also says Saudi Arabia and Syria are the leading sources of insurgents.

Reuven Paz, an Israeli expert on terrorism and Director of Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, published a report last March (warning, pdf) finding that 61% of the foreign insurgents killed in Iraq over the previous six months were from Saudi Arabia (thanks for the link to Evan Kohlmann of The Counterterrorism Blog).

The Cordesman/Moller study found a more varied array of foreign fighters.

Democrats who want to be anti-war in Iraq can nonetheless remain quite hawkish about other global terror and WMD threats -- by focusing more attention on Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. As loyal readers know, I've blogged repeatedly that the US is not doing much about the threats emanating from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Numerous national security experts agree.

I'll stand by my original point: Democrats should repeatedly point out that the "mission changed" in Iraq and that the Republicans really don't have an "exit strategy." As a result, America is bogged down in a quagmire that costs billions and doesn't markedly improve US security. The "real" war on terror should be fought on more important fronts.

That does not mean that Dems should allow the administration to change the subject to Iran.


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Iraq's Hydra

Did you see the story about the US killing the alleged #2 insurgent/terrorist in Iraq?

Don't make your plans to move to Baghdad just yet.

Via The Left Coaster, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, September 28, 2005:

But veteran counterterrorism analyst Evan Kohlmann said today there are ample reasons to question whether Abu Azzam was really the No. 2 figure in the Iraqi insurgency. He noted that U.S. officials have made similar claims about a string of purportedly high-ranking terrorist operatives who had been captured or killed in the past, even though these alleged successes made no discernible dent in the intensity of the insurgency.

"If I had a nickel for every No. 2 and No. 3 they’ve arrested or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’d be a millionaire,” says Kohlmann, a New York-based analyst who tracks the Iraq insurgency and who first expressed skepticism about the Azzam claims in a posting on The Counterterrorism Blog.

According to one unnamed official in the story, the dead insurgent was a "money guy," rather than a "brutal killer" as the President apparently said live on TV.

The big problem is that the insurgency seems to pose a herculean problem:

The real question is whether taking any one figure out will really have an appreciable impact on an insurgency that seems to have shown a remarkable resiliency. For nearly two years now, U.S. officials have touted previous arrests or captures, most notably that of toppled leader Saddam Hussein in December 2003, as developments that would cripple the insurgency....

Yet despite the hopes of U.S. military officials, the capture of these figures had little impact on the suicide bombing attacks that have been the signature of Zarqawi’s forces.

I'm tempted to ask, what have these guys been drinking, but virtually no one wants to talk about that.

Avery on the war

Occasional guest blogger Avery hasn't posted here in a long time...largely because I didn't have a late summer vacation this year, what with the May Freedom trip and all.

Anyway, he's found alternative outlets for his views. This was his letter-to-the-editor, Louisville Courier-Journal, August 30:

Maureen Dowd reports that "a majority of Americans now think that going to war was a mistake." But the war was not a mistake. If it had been a mistake, President Bush would be meeting frantically with experts and allies -- not to mention Cindy Sheehan -- attempting to figure out how to cut our losses and get out.

To treat the war as a mistake is to accept the premise that our rulers want what's best for us all, and that they simply miscalculated when choosing this war. But they don't, and they didn't. Instead, they lied about WMDs and 9/11 links . . . intimidated skeptics, manipulated intelligence, outed an undercover CIA agent for political payback, and rolled out their "splendid little war" like a new product in the fall lineup. Then they looted Iraq through no-bid contracts for GOP-affiliated corporations.

This war was no mistake. Mistakes are made by people who are trying to do the right thing. The war was, and is, fundamentally wrong and immoral. And George W. Bush, by remaining on permanent vacation and treating all bad news as ultimately just a PR problem, reveals himself to be a fundamentally immoral man.

It's a shame that our credulous media must go along with the pretense that this was, at worst, all a big mixup. The pretense is clearly false. Our rulers are criminals -- and our journalists are accomplices.

In my view, the Bush administration made a mistake because they miscalculated many of the negative effects of the war.

I think they were very confident of the events of March and April, 2003. Moreover, someone probably imagined the "mission accomplished" moment months before it occurred. A few planners probably thought this would be a good chance to remove the troops from Saudi Arabia, and that a few "remnants" of Saddam's regime might fight back for awhile. All of them probably thought the Iraq war vote would be great in the '02 congressional elections.

But, and this is a major caveat, I'm willing to bet that they badly missed the big picture. Did they expect still to be fighting an insurgency in Iraq 2.5 years after the war began? Probably not.

Fools.

Beating around the Bush?

Cross-posted at Duck of Minerva.

The noted political scientist Aaron Wildavsky (now deceased) wrote in 1966 that the U.S. "has one President but two presidencies: one for domestic affairs and the other is concerned with defense and foreign policy." He continued, "Since World War II, presidents have had much greater success in controlling the nation's defense and foreign policies than in dominating its domestic policies."

While some challenge Wildavsky's argument, there is a lot of truth in it. This is because Presidents have tremendous power to dominate the national agenda, relatively immune from interest group and congressional politics. The President is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the top diplomat, and the head of a vast security and intelligence bureaucracy. Presidents simply have huge informational advantages over political opponents.

Vietnam (and Watergate) generated some important challenges to presidential power. Congress used its power of the purse to generate more than a few meaningful checks on the chief executive's authority. However, as events since 9/11 have demonstrated, it is quite difficult for a President's political opponents to achieve many successes when they are the minority party in Congress.

However, domestic opposition to the administration's policies is starting to grow.

As I've blogged before, an "Iraq syndrome" may well limit presidential freedom of action. The so-called "Bush Doctrine" seems to be effectively limited by the failings of its first test in the Middle East. Over 1700 Americans have died; well over $200 billion has been spent; and stability seems to be out of reach. Oh, and the lack of WMD does not help supporters of preventive war.

So, what opposition should you notice?

Well, to begin, 122 House Democrats have signed a letter to President Bush authored by Representative John Conyers concerning the Downing Street Memo, which I blogged about last week in this space:

If the disclosure is accurate, it raises troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war as well as the integrity of your own Administration.

The letter includes 5 questions directed at the current occupant of the Oval office. Bush may ignore them, but his opponents are using them.

Indeed, over half a million citizens signed petitions asking the President to respond to these questions. Conyers took them to the White House today. The Pew Research Center reported earlier this week that the general public has turned against Iraq:

The steady drip of negative news from Iraq is significantly undermining support for the U.S. military operation there. With the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq exceeding 1,700, there is widespread awareness of the rising American death toll. As a consequence, baseline public attitudes toward the war are gradually turning more negative. Support for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq continues to inch up ­ from 36% last October, to 42% in February, and 46% currently.

The web, of course. has played a key role in generating this opposition to Iraq policy. MoveOn collected signatures, others asked questions. From the Reuters story:

"All we're asking is to know the truth," said John Bonifaz, co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org. "Some of his supporters want to say it's a question of failed intelligence. If that's all it was, so be it."

But if not, said Bonifaz, "then the American people and the U.S. Congress deserve to know."

Good luck trying to read their website; I couldn't connect. Apparently, the site is generating a million hits per day!

BTW, please don't think that I'm trying to discourage you, à la Yogi Berra: "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

In any case, this growing public doubt about Iraq feeds the congressional opposition. Today, according to press reports, North Carolina Republican Rep. Walter Jones and Hawaii Democratic Rep. Neil Abercrombie submitted a resolution calling "for the Bush administration to develop a plan by the end of this year to pull out all American troops from Iraq and to begin the withdrawal by Oct. 1, 2006."

The White House already rejected this suggestion and the measure isn't expected to go very far in the Republican-dominated Congress. This is hardly surprising, given Dick Cheney's recent declaration that the Iraqi insurgency is "in the last throes."

However, we should expect Democrats to pound this issue for the foreseeable future. Rep. Maxine Waters has just announced the formation of an "Out of Iraq" caucus. With about 20 other House Democrats, the likely recruits of that caucus, Conyers also held a "forum" today (the Republicans wouldn't call a formal hearing) investigating the implications of the Downing Street Memo. At the forum, Conyers said: "If these disclosures are true ... they establish a prima facie case of going to war under false pretenses."

Don't read too much into Conyers' legal/Latin phrasing. While Ralph Nader and Kevin Neese wrote on op-ed in the May 31 Boston Globe urging a public debate about impeachment of Bush and Cheney, I do not expect Democrats to waste time and resources on such an endeavor.

After all, in 1974 and 1999, one party controlled the Congress while the other party held the White House. Bush isn't going to be impeached, but he is facing more serious and vocal opposition in Congress, backed by public opinion.

Bottom line: Iraq just might be a winning campaign issue in 2006 -- and 2008.

"It's getting worse"

Is the situation in Iraq improving?

To many, the answer to that question seems obvious. However, the President has been spouting a lot of optimism lately.

The US Agency for International Development's contract security firm concludes that the President is wrong. This was in Sunday's Washington Post:

A sampling of daily reports produced during that period by Kroll Security International for the U.S. Agency for International Development shows that such attacks typically number about 70 each day. In contrast, 40 to 50 hostile incidents occurred daily during the weeks preceding the handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 28, according to military officials.

Reports covering seven days in a recent 10-day period depict a nation racked by all manner of insurgent violence, from complex ambushes involving 30 guerrillas north of Baghdad on Monday to children tossing molotov cocktails at a U.S. Army patrol in the capital's Sadr City slum on Wednesday. On maps included in the reports, red circles denoting attacks surround nearly every major city in central, western and northern Iraq, except for Kurdish-controlled areas in the far north. Cities in the Shiite Muslim-dominated south, including several that had undergone a period of relative calm in recent months, also have been hit with near-daily attacks.

In number and scope, the attacks compiled in the Kroll reports suggest a broad and intensifying campaign of insurgent violence that contrasts sharply with assessments by Bush administration officials and Iraq's interim prime minister that the instability is contained to small pockets of the country.

AID, by the way, is a key US foreign assistance agency and thus has to take into account security-on-the-ground in order to make decisions about helping Iraqis.

Though Iraqi PM Allawi claimed last week that all but 3 provinces are relatively safe, the Kroll report showed that the majority of attacks in the last 2 weeks occurred outside those areas. And the attacks target Iraqi civilians, foreign civilians (including aid workers), other Arabs, as well as US and Iraqi security forces. Anyone, really.

But then, have no fear...democracy is on the way, isn't it? Well, administration officials (including Defense Secretary Rumsfeld) are now talking about partial elections and the UN currently has only 30 to 35 people in the country to set them up. Voter registration has not yet started, in a nation of 25.4 million people. Only a tiny portion of US reconstruction money set aside for establishing democratic elections has been spent.

Indeed, the factual reality in Iraq really is quite a bit different than the President has been saying and implying. See this Reuters report for a variety of challenges of the President's version of events:

[Bush] said nearly 100,000 "fully trained and equipped" Iraqi soldiers, police officers and other security personnel are already at work, and that would rise to 125,000 by the end of this year.

...[Pentagon] documents show that of the nearly 90,000 currently in the police force, only 8,169 have had the full eight-week academy training. Another 46,176 are listed as "untrained," and it will be July 2006 before the administration reaches its new goal of a 135,000-strong, fully trained police force.

Six Army battalions have had "initial training," while 57 National Guard battalions, 896 soldiers in each, are still being recruited or "awaiting equipment." Just eight Guard battalions have reached "initial (operating) capability," and the Pentagon acknowledged the Guard's performance has been "uneven."

Training has yet to begin for the 4,800-man civil intervention force, which will help counter a deadly insurgency. And none of the 18,000 border enforcement guards have received any centralized training to date, despite earlier claims they had, according to Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee.

They estimated that 22,700 Iraqi personnel have received enough basic training to make them "minimally effective at their tasks," in contrast to the 100,000 figure cited by Bush...

The status of election planning in Iraq is also in question. Of the $232 million in Iraqi funds set aside for the Iraqi electoral commission, it has received a mere $7 million, according to House Appropriations Committee staff.

Well, that pretty much trashes the President's version, doesn't it? The fulcrum has much more.

Want a punchline for all of this? Secretary of State Colin Powell provided it just yesterday:

Powell, in an interview on ABC's "This Week," acknowledged that violence by insurgents is worsening and traced it to the upcoming elections.

"They do not want the Iraqi people to vote for their own leaders in a free, democratic election," Powell said of the insurgency. "And because it's getting worse, we will have to increase our efforts to defeat it, not walk away and pray and hope for something else to happen."

"It's getting worse."

Pssst, Kerry campaign, use that one.

Another War College Warning

Jeffrey Record and Andrew Terrill of the Army War College have co-authored another interesting study about Iraq from their home at the Army's think tank (the Strategic Studies Institute). Actually, Record was a visitor in Carlisle (PA) last year; he normally resides at the Air War College in Alabama.

Like Records's previous study on Iraq and the war on terror, and one by Antulio Echevarria II on US warmaking, this report is receiving publicity because it is fairly critical and/or skeptical of the US mission in Iraq.

Indeed, this latest study aims to draw explicit comparisons to a famous quagmire. The title? "Iraq and Vietnam: Differences, Similarities and Insights."

Reuters had a story about the report in May, when it was released:

"In Vietnam, we were trying to prop up a government that had little legitimacy. In Iraq, we're trying to weave together a government and support it so it can develop legitimacy. Both are extremely hard to do," said co-author W. Andrew Terrill, of the War College's Strategic Studies Institute.

Legitimacy in the context of the Iraq war was the theme of one of my first few posts on this blog.

As Bob Johnson has noted, this study demonstrates that "it's not just a few left wing 'whackos' thinking along those lines."

Record and Terrill, of course, do not find many military parallels between Iran and Vietnam. Rather, they focus on the political similarities and foresee:

dire consequences if the political lessons of Vietnam go unheeded. "Repetition of those failures in Iraq could have disastrous consequences for U.S. foreign policy," it says.

Hmmm, what kind of political failures?

For some reason, the SSI link to the report doesn't always work, but the Reuter's story has these tidbits:

Given that Iraqis have known nothing but authoritarian rule since the country's inception, it's impossible to say whether U.S. policy will succeed, the authors say.

Insurgent violence could also grow after the June 30 handover, when the run-up to elections magnifies divisions among rival ethnic, religious and tribal groups, all well-stocked with weapons and ammunition.

"The main threat to state-building in Iraq lies not in the insurgency in central Iraq but rather in the potential for the recent uprising of Shi'ite militants to reignite, expand, and include large elements of that community, or the development of the kind of sectarian civil war that plunged Lebanon into near anarchy for almost two decades," the report says.

So, one major potential problem is internal to Iraq.

But another involves domestic US support for the war:

With U.S. deaths in Iraq now at 791 and taxpayer costs expected to soar above $180 billion, the authors are cautious about the longevity of U.S. public support.

"Americans could become very impatient should the rationale for a continuing and costly U.S. occupation of Iraq shift to a more direct focus on uplifting the Iraqi people, especially if the Iraq public appears ungrateful," their report says.

As I wrote some weeks ago, this support hinges at least in part on public diplomacy.

The polls, currently show that the public has turned against the war.

I guess Bush's recent speech at Carlisle, linking Iraq to the war on terror, flopped.

This Seems Like a Very Bad Idea

There's a very disturbing story from the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau yesterday, "In Tikrit, U.S. destroys homes of suspected guerrillas." The US is borrowing dubious counter-insurgency tactics from Israel:

In a tactic reminiscent of Israeli crackdowns in the West Bank and Gaza, the U.S. military has begun destroying the homes of suspected guerrilla fighters in Iraq's Sunni Triangle, evacuating women and children, then leveling their houses with heavy weaponry.

At least 15 homes have been destroyed in Tikrit as part of what has been dubbed Operation Ivy Cyclone II, including four leveled on Sunday by tanks and Apache helicopters that allegedly belonged to suspects in the Nov. 7 downing of a Black Hawk helicopter that killed six Americans.

Family members at one of the houses, in the village of al Haweda, said they were given five minutes to evacuate before soldiers opened fire.

Why is this a bad idea? Well, as the Palestinian experience suggests, it motivates new insurgents:

On Monday, angry residents of al Haweda, where three of the destroyed homes were, said the tactic will spawn more guerrilla fighters and perhaps spark an Iraqi uprising similar to the Palestinian intifada in the West Bank and Gaza.

"This is something Sharon would do," said 41-year-old farmer Jamel Shahab, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon. "What's happening in Iraq is just like Palestine."

Even the US State Department has criticized Israel's past actions:

The State Department's 2002 human rights report, released in March, said such policies "left hundreds of Palestinians not involved in terror attacks homeless." In September, department spokesman Richard Boucher criticized Israel for destroying a seven-story apartment building in Gaza during a raid on a suspected Hamas militant.

There was no official reaction in Washington.

A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, suggested Monday that the tactic was not sanctioned in Washington.

This is the US military's justification on the ground in Iraq:

The operation is expected to continue through Wednesday, said Col. James Hickey, commander of the 1st Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division.

Hickey said the four homes were destroyed on Sunday because enemy fighters lived and met there. Leveling the homes will force the fighters to find other meeting places, he said.

"Those four people used those houses as sanctuary, and we're not allowing them to have sanctuary," Hickey said.

"We're going to turn the heat up and complicate their battlefield," driving them into the desert, he said. "There they will be exposed and we will have them."

In the article, White House's Scott McClellan refers to the fighters as terrorists, but that is inaccurate so long as they are attacking US forces. It's an occupied country and they are attacking their occupiers. Given the questionable legality of the US attack in the first place, the insurgency might even be legal under international law.

I'm certainly not condoning the violence on either side. The US needs a non-violent approach to Iraq. Soon, I'm going to blog about exactly that.

Hint: Several years ago I participated in a project directed by Christian Ethicist scholar Glen Stassen on just-peacemaking.