0230 GMT July 31, 2007

• Sorry, Haveta Back The President On This One Robert Novak, an investigative journalist of many decades experience, informed readers of the Washington Post yesterday that President Bush had undertaken a venture of great risk, and suggested that the President had done so with such relaxed equanimity that we may question if he is connected with reality.

• The venture? Sending US special forces to work with the Turkish Army in decapitating the Turkish Kurd rebel group operating from Iraqi Kurd territory. By this means the President hopes to forestall a Turkish invasion of Iraq.

• With all deference to Mr. Novak, who has probably the best sources in Washington, we don't see what is risky in this operation, unless Mr. Novak means that any action against any terrorist group is risky. If so, we agree with him, but terrorists have to be fought, no matter where they are.

• This beings us to our next point. The US has long had a double standard on this particular Kurd terror group. The US hasn't aided the group in any way, but it has ignored the group, which is on the designated terror list. The US is occupier in Iraq, it has a responsibility to go after all terror groups, regardless of national origin or group aims. We think its a very good thing the US is finally taking action.

• Our sole reservation is that we hope the Administration does not think its cooperation with Turkey removes Turkey's need to invade Iraq. The issue for Turkey is not this particular terror group. It is that Iraqi Kurds insist on incorporating Kirkuk into their autonomous - and eventually independent state. This will hit Turkoman interests and an independent Kurdistan will give a huge impetus to Turkey's Kurds. The terror group is almost beside the point, as far as Turkey is concerned, something to provide a causus belli to justify invading Iraqi Kurdistan. The US's action helps reassure Turkey that the US is keeping its interests at heart, but does nothing to meet Turkey's basic strategic concerns. And nor should the US do so at the expense of Iraqi Kurds.

• As for President Bush being in a relaxed frame of mind while everything is falling apart around him, we remain uncertain that the US media is any more in touch with reality than the President on scores of major issues. and if he is in a good mood, it's at least easier on those around him.

• Taliban Hostages: Meet Like with Like So a bunch of idealistic South Koreans, men and women, arrive in Afghanistan, a far away land with a completely different culture, and set to doing good works. So the Taliban, who can't stand anyone doing good works, kidnap the South Koreans, who by reports seem to have taking an innocent view of their safety. We're here to help the people, who will hurt us?

• So first the Taliban murder one hostage, just to make a point: we're serious, you want your people back alive, release Taliban prisoners. The Afghan Government enters into negotiations. You're being too slow, says the Taliban, and murders a second hostage. It says the government got what it deserved, because it is not listening to the Taliban.

• We suggest the Afghan Government listen by taking 30 Taliban prisoners at random, executing them, and dumping their bodies on the roadside as the Taliban have done with the South Koreans. Who 30? Well, 10 for the first man murdered, and 20 for the second. For the third man murdered it should be 40. At some point the Taliban will get it.

• But wont this strategy lead the Taliban to kill all their hostages? Perhaps. The point is, are we going to take a short-term view or a long-term one? By giving in to Taliban to save the remaining 21, all the Afghan government will achieve is to encourage more hostage taking and more murders. The only way to stop this nonsense is to assure the Taliban - by deed, not word - that they're going to be the losers.

• This strategy needs to be implemented even if the Taliban do not ask for prisoner releases. They take someone hostage and demand a ransom, 10 Taliban in prison get hanged.

• As westerners, of course, we don't have the stomach for this strategy. We take shelter behind phrases like "we cannot give up our principles because then we become what we despise about the enemy". Funny, westerners don't have compunctions about killing people from 10,000-meters. In this respect, the Taliban - and AQ etc. are more honest than westerners. They do their killing by hand.

• President Hamid Karzai is by education and temperament a westerner. He is soft to the core.

• From George Fescos On Military Compensation  The 9-11 benefits were in exchange for not suing the US government, The Port Authority of NY/NJ, the politically well connected architects, builders, and others connected with the WTC, the airlines (although since they were bankrupt this was always bogus in my opinion), many other government agencies.  You
  could interpret the 9-11 payments not as 'benefits' but as an exchange,
  money in exchange for the right to sue.

• As to veterans benefits, like most government programs, they are numerous
  and complicated.  They include are wide range of monetary  and non monetary
  benefits like medical care and tuition payments.

• For example the $400,000 death benefit.  As the program is in theory
  insurance you could deduct premiums of all insureds.  Insurance is also
  subject to exemptions, claims investigations, and denials.  Like most
  government programs there are many complicated layers, for example the
  'extra' $6000 non insurance benefit you site.  I suspect the $6000 was
  originally intended as funeral benefit common in union contracts, and some
  workers compensation systems.

• http://www.senate.gov/~rockefeller/news/2005/pr072805.html
  "The permanent extension of the life insurance would mean that families that
  have the federally-subsidized Servicemembers Group Life Insurance (SGLI)
  would receive $400,000 if a family member is killed in action.  Before
  Congress passed an amendment earlier this year increasing the amount to
  $400,000, families received $250,000 if they had SGLI. "

• From Arfan Khan On US And Counterinsurgency Great armies in history have shown their ability to adapt to their environment. The Romans and the British were of course the epitome of this, the former was able to fight and win in varied terrain such as deserts of Arabia, mountains of the Balkans, the plains and forests of Germania and Britannia, the latter in the multitude of different colonial wars.

• The US army will have to transform itself, right now the forces are optimized for high tech, mechanized warfare in relatively flat terrain, no one can touch them there, but its a truism that the enemy only plays to your strenghts once. Fact is that the US seems unable to adapt its units and formations to the type of war it is facing now, in Iraq which is flat and featureless and thus not exactly an insurgents dream, while in Afghanistan they are not even trying to fight the Taliban/warlords if Pakistani newspapers are to be believed (a stretch I know).

• The US could start by training its infantry battalions for varied missions, taking a leaf out of the South Asian practice. Both Indian and Pakistani battalions are trained to go from mountain warfare to plains warfare to desert warfare to CI within days. The US wastes too many resources in brigades and divisions, they are properly higher HQ's, not individual specialized units.

• In Sindh in 1990's Pakistan faced not an insurgency but a break down of law and order, the main army formation involved in restoring it was the 4 Air Defense Division and its units. And in Siachin 1984, Neelum Valley 1991 and Kargil-Drass 1999 a lot of the units sent as reinforcements were Armored Infantry (26 FF comes to mind) and regular plains units.

• The US needs more air assault units for CI. Perhaps a start could be made with 173rd Brigade?

0230 GMT July 30, 2007

• Don't Bet On It, Buster Reuters reports that Iran has told Germany the US is too stretched to attack. 170,000 US troops in Iraq can guarantee neither their own security nor the security of Iraq, he says.

• So maybe at one point in the distant past a ground invasion of Iran was an option. If you can convince yourself the Iraqis will greet you with rose, you can convince yourself of anything.

• But for a very long time no one is talking about a ground invasion. They are talking about an air offensive.

• In case Iran hasn't noticed, the US has 35 active and quickly-recalled fighter wings and a couple of hundred bombers, plus a few thousand cruise missiles, that are doing next to nothing. Quite enough to put Iran back into the early 20th century. It won't be quick - unless the US limits itself to N-weapon related facilities. Nor will it be pretty.

• And nor should Iran count on its oil. Sure, a disruption of oil will cost America. But a single ICBM getting through US defenses in - say 2020 - could cost the US between $100-billion and $1-trillion. do the math, Teheran.

• Col. HR McMaster On Iraq An excellent article in Times London, at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2158139.ece

• Unlike Times London, which wonders if the surge is the right strategy but too late, we remain clear the surge cannot succeed because of a lack of troops. To us the surge looks more like a gentle wave lapping at the shore of a lake.

• Pakistan: The Honeymoon Is Over Before It Started [all news from Jang of Pakistan]. The proposed Ms. Bhutto-President Musharraf deal has already run into serious trouble.

• First, the Supreme Court is likely to rule that President Musharraf cannot be reelected in uniform or out of it. Pakistan law bars a public servant, such as he is in his capacity as Army chief, from standing for election for two years after leaving office. That ends the prospect of getting elected after doffing the uniform. As for standing for election in uniform, the exception was permitted for one term. To do it again means amending the constitution, and Ms. Bhutto/President supporters need a 2/3rds majority to do that. In the fractious parliamentary polities of South Asia, a two-thirds majority for anything requires a miracle.

• Second, President says he will doff the uniform after the election. Not so fast, says Ms. Bhutto: doff first, my support for your election as President second. Problem: Ms. Bhutto can double-cross the President, and as we said yesterday, without his uniform he's dead.

• Third - and this we did not figure because we don't know enough about Pakistani politics: both Ms. Bhutto's political party and the President's political party are in shock at the opportunistic alliance. The President's party supports him because he refused to deal with people like Ms. Bhutto and another former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Nawaz-i-Sharif, in fact, he exiled them.

• As for Ms. Bhutto's party, they back her because she opposes the military dictator. Now she wants to get in bed with him.

• So have the two political parties suddenly been Born Again that they are adhering to principle? Hardly, folks, hardly.

• The parties are worried because their followers may adhere to principle. They may jettison the parties en masse at the polls to protest the unholy alliance. Then the legislators are not going to get elected.

• So in both parties they are thinking of jumping ship as a way of getting a better shot at relection from their constituencies. If they jump ship, the remains of the two parties will be insufficient to see Ms. Bhutto elected Prime Minister and the President relected as President.

• Tres interesting situation, no?

Our first composite on what the US needs to do to win Iraq type wars

Readers have been very patient while we have meandered along with our thoughts on why the US is going to lose the Iraq war. Actually, we're just being polite because we know readers have simply been ignoring us. Still, thanks to readers who have commented, we've been able to shape a few basic propositions.

I

• Criticism of the US strategy on Iraq has been focused on political issues. We believe that those issues aside, US military strategy/tactics are flawed and cannot succeed.

• General David Petraeus says that insurgencies last an average of 9 years. Someone else says Americans have never won a war that lasted more than 4 years. We're going to let these assertions go for now.

• The above domestic realities leave the US with two options: don't get into CI, or do it differently so that the average 9 year span is palatable to Americans.

• Since the first option is infeasible in the time of the new Hundred Years War, we need to look at the second.

II

• Americans fight their wars in the spirit of all-out, so they expect rapid results. They need to stop sprinting, and learn to pace themselves so they can hang in there for longer wars.

• To pace America, our leaders first need to explain to the public that CI wars are going to be long wars.

• They need to reduce the astonishingly high cost of operations. Think how much easier it is to sell a war costing $50-billion/year Instead of the $200-billion+ being spent on the present war.

• They need to reorganize their military to get maximum CI punch from the restricted numbers of people willing to become soldiers. This in turn means they should stop thinking the force multipliers designed to let them fight conventional wars with limited numbers will work for CI, which requires very large numbers of troops. They need a force design that gives a teeth-tail ratio of 1: 1 as opposed to current 1:19

• They also need to keep overseas tours down to 1 year of a soldier's 4 year enlistment.

III

• On a tactical level, they need to redesign the infantryman's load so that he hefts 40 lbs instead of 80-110 lbs. America happily spends billions to develop a new fighter. Why not billions to lighten the human's fighter's load?

• They need to deploy armies of academics all over the world to compile massive, impartial databases on the history, sociology, economics, politics etc of each country. This information will become the basis of the overall plan developed for each country. The plans have to be made before America goes in.

• They need to have two different types of troops: conventional war and CI.

• They need to apply the principles of judo in fighting their CIs. They should not start with some impossibly idealistic outcome and then try and bludgeon all actors to conform. Rather, they should see what is realistic and reduce their political/strategic goals accordingly.

We will continue the discussion after we get feedback on the above.

0230 GMT July 29, 2007

• Iran Purchasing 250 Su-30s? Debka.com says that it is, along with 20 Il-76s tankers  http://debka.com/headline.php?hid=4449

• We checked the Rospboronexport website - that's the agency Debka says is handling the sale - and saw no mention. http://www.roe.ru

• We're a bit baffled at the size of the deal. It would be the largest fighter deal to a single country in many, many years. This aircraft, usually compared to the F-15, is big, heavy, complicated and expensive. Back-of-envelope, this deal will cost at least $15-billion for a country that's quite tight for money. The training and maintenance load for the Ir.AF is going to be mindboggling.

• Be that as it may, we sincerely hope Debka is not exaggerating and this deal goes through. It will hugely alarm all of Iran's neighbors, who will react by buying several tens of billion dollars worth of fighters and air defense missiles. A big chunk of that money will go to the US - more jobs and all that. It will cement the sales to Israel and Saudi Arabia and Israel of the F-22 Raptor Lite, which will greatly help the USAF because unit costs will go down.

• Not to forget: the more aircraft Iran has, the more fun for US air arms because there's more targets to shoot down - if the cruise/B-2s down get them all on the ground first.

• Iran's Bushire Reactor Delayed? This story has been making the rounds for a few days, but Haartez of Israel says the Russian company involves confirms the delay. The company says it's a financing issue. Haaretz thinks President Putin is holding back because of concerns Iran will use the facility to make N-weapons.

• Well, we can reassure Haartez on that point. Aside from that Bushire will be fully safeguarded, it's a light water reactor for power generation and therefore unsuitable for weapons grade material. when slightly enriched U235 is burned for power, the plutonium isotopes produced include Pu 240, 241, 242. While Pu 239 is excellent for bombs, the 240 family makes it near impossible to build a bomb.

• Yes, yes, we know the non-proliferation lobby derides this claim, but there is a difference between theory and engineering practice. The US and Britain conducted at least one test each with high Pu-240 content material, but there is a huge difference between a test and a workable, deliverable weapon.

• DPRK may have used high Pu-240 material for its fizzle bomb, though from what we hear it was a complete fake: conventional explosives sprinkled with a bit of Pu so that air samples will lead people to believe a real bomb was exploded.

• Pakistan may have done a high Pu-240 test as part of its tests in 1998, though we have never been able to get a straight story out of our intel sources. There's evidence implication PRC in the tests and in the US you just do not say anything that makes PRC look bad.In any case Iran would have to break safeguards to get at the fuel rods, and talk about a casus belli.

• Haaretz notwithstanding, it's likely that money really is the problem at Bushire.

• Pakistan Elections: Musharraf-Bhutto Deal Chris Raggio brought our attention to this unsavory alliance. You can read the details at http://thenews.jang.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=9289

• Basically, assuming nothing goes wrong before election time in November, Mrs. Bhutto will become Prime Minister. With her support joined with President General Musharraf's support, he will be reelected President. Its being said he will give up his army post. As far as we are concerned, if he is really going to do that, he may as well just shoot himself right now because his chances of survival as President will be nil. We'd suggest readers treat reports of the President giving up his Chief of Army Staff position with skepticism till a clearer picture emerges.

• As for President Musharraf and a putative Prime Minister Bhutto getting along after the election, the chances are less than that of your editor winning today's PowerBall Lotto. [Hint: he hasn't purchased a ticket.]

• This is President Musharraf's thinking at this point - you don't have to be a psychic: "Once I'm legally elected, the first misstep she makes, I'll dissolve her government and order her arrested." Since Ms. Bhutto has a well-earned reputation for heavy-duty corruption, that misstep is going to take about a week to materialize.

• This is Ms. Bhutto's thinking at this point: "Once I'm legally elected, I'll use international pressure to marginalize him. I'm so cute and lovable, no democratically elected leader in the world can back this fascist jackbooted thug over me.

• In a showdown between Mushy Bhai and Bibi Benazir, our money is on Mushykins. That assumes he'll hold on to the Army Chief post. If he really is going to give that up, as we've said, better to shoot himself now and get it over with. 

• Rush Limbaugh On Compensation To US Military Families
  (Thanks to James Daley)

• I think the vast differences in compensation between victims of the September 11 casualty and those who die serving our country in Uniform are profound. No one is really talking about it either, because you just don't criticize anything having to do with September 11. Well, I can't let the numbers pass by because it says something really disturbing about the entitlement mentality of this country. If you lost a family member in the September 11 attack, you're going to get an average of $1,185,000. The range is a minimum guarantee of $250,000, all the way up to $4.7 million.

• If you are a surviving family member of an American soldier killed in action, the first check you get is a $6,000 direct death benefit, half of which is taxable.

• Next, you get $1,750 for burial costs. If you are the surviving spouse, you get $833 a month until you remarry. And there's a payment of $211 per month for each child under 18. When the child hits 18, those payments come to a screeching halt.

• Keep in mind that some of the people who are getting an average of $1.185 million up to $4.7 milli on are complaining that it's not enough Their deaths were tragic, but for most, they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Soldiers put themselves in harms way FOR ALL OF US, and they and their families know the dangers.

• We also learned over the weekend that some of the victims from the Oklahoma City bombing have started an organization asking for the same deal that the September 11 families are getting. In addition to that, some of the families of those bombed in the embassies are now asking for compensation a s well.

• You see where this is going, don't you? Folks, this is part and parcel of over 50 years of entitlement politics in this country. It's just really sad. Every time a pay raise comes up for the military, they usually receive next to nothing of a raise. Now the green machine is in combat in the Middle East while their families have to survive on food stamps and live in low-rent housing Make sense?

• However, our own US Congress voted themselves a raise. Many of you don't know that they only have to be in Congress one time to receive a pension that is more than $15,000 per month. And most are now equal to being millionaires plus. They do not receive Social Security on retirement because they didn't have to pay into the system.  If some of the military people stay in for 20 years and get out as an E-7, they may receive a pension of $1,000 per month, and the very people who placed them in harm's way receive a pension of $15,000 per month.
  
   

• US Kills 17 Al-Sadr Militia in Karbala Raid Even though we want the US to get out of Iraq ASAP, we admit its terribly satisfying to learn about raids such as this. For a change the US is not helplessly at effect of Al-Sadr's murderous goons who are planting IEDs all over the place to kill Americans. For a change the US is hitting back hard.

• The usual arguments with the Iraqis have started, they insist civilians were killed. Probably they were because Mahadi Army fights from amongst civilians. But just because a dead man is not wearing Al-Sadr's black does not make him a civilian.

• US captured a wanted militia leader, and presumably he is talking.

• But please notice one very important thing. This raid took place in Karbala, which is Badr militia territory. Badr has been at near war with Al-Sadr; the slimy al-Sadr protector, Mr. Prime Minister of Iraq, has no authority in Najaf. Its reasonable to assume Badr militia cooperated, and Mr. Al-Malaki can do nothing about it. When US hits Al-Sadr in Baghdad, Mr. Al-Maliki makes a huge hue and cry and does his best to get militiamen released.

• US Defense Secretary Says US Planning Iraq Exit The headlines on this were a bit misleading because (a) this is simply working on options, (b) it's being made quite clear that US withdrawal will take place at the same rate that the surge troops were inducted, one brigade a month, and (c) unlike ourselves, few in power are calling for a complete exit from Iraq. Even opponents of the war are resigned to leaving 60-70,000 troops behind, say 7-8 brigades, indefinitely.

• Jatropha: The New Miracle Biofuel? Biofuel from corn seems pretty much a bust: aside from taking more energy to produce than the fuel generates, there's the reduction of food crops. Of course, serious biofuel people don't talk about corn but about other plants such as switchgrass, and they note that biofuel technology is in its infancy, it is bound to get more efficient with time.

• Now comes the jatropha plant, about which you can read in London Times. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article2155351.ece

• One hectare yields about 18 barrels of oil PLUS biomass to produce about 2-kilowatts/year of electricity. The bush lives for 50 years, requires 23-inches of rain a year - not quite desert, but also not land where most other crops can grow, and can survive a drought for 3 years. It yields oil etc and seeds in its second year after planting.

• To replace 1-million barrels/day, approximately 5% of US requirement, would mean planting 20-million hectares and the biomass would give 40-gigawatts of power, replacing oil for perhaps 5% of the US's electricity requirement.

• 20-million hectares is about 48-million acres or 75,000-square-miles.

• Obviously the plant is not a complete solution just by itself - you'd have to put about 20% of the US (Including Alaska) under this plant to get 10-million bbl/day, leaving the US to important only from Canada/Mexico. Obviously that's not possible. At the same time, it's a very promising way to reduce oil imports. 5% here and 5% there with another technology, soon you're talking serious import savings. Several big jatropha plantation projects are underway.

• From Arthur Mosel Regarding Mr. Clinton's Impeachment Mr. Clinton was a lawyer and the Chief Executive officer of the United States government, and his offenses were not trival.  He lied under oath violating both the canons of his profession and his office, a major no-no if we are going to have a legal system that we can trust.  

• As to the trival reason why he lied, a sexual affair, he violated the civil service laws and military officers and government officials have paid heavily, if quietly, for doing so.  The Civil Service act prohibits exacting sexual favors as a factor in employment, promotion or pay.  Mr. Clinton did all of the above, he engaged with inappropriate sexual conduct with a subordinate, a firing offense; he or his office later, when the affair ended, gave her a better position in a different agency (trading sex for favorable treatment); she received a pay increase with the move (same issue).

• I have seen military officers have their careers ended effectively or actually immediately ended as a result of such conduct and am aware of government civilian employees have the same.  The Federal government even backs civil action against civilian employers for these violations under civil rights law.

• Mr. Clinton was a disgrace to his profession and office.  The biggest disgrace was that his plea deal for this (yes, there was one) was never fully implemented,  If Scooter Libby was to have gone to jail for perjury, how about Mr. C.

• P.S.  Check out what happened to the only witness who was willing to testify to the Whitewater Scheme, he died in a Federal prison in solitary confinement when everyone forgot to give him his heart medicine.  We didn't hear the media or Congress yell for an investigation of the situation leading to his death, which brought an end effectively to the Whitewater issue, since his testimony would have tied the Clintons to the paper trail that was available.

Why the US Will Lose Iraq: US Military Remains Organized For Conventional Combat Part II

• Reader Walter E. Wallis writes with some ideas about how the US can more effectively organize/equip its forces for Counter Insurgency.

• Hard for an old soldier to admit, but I think the new Amphibious Assault Ships are the wave of the future, and I think that hunkering down may go the way of the human wave/cannon fodder war. Imagine a floating base with all the comforts of home, going on a raid for a few days, then back to hot chow and baths and a cool bunk. It will require a bit more dismantling of structures and remote denial of access to territories, but the tail would be better protected.
• As for the infantryman, think Starship Trooper, except a fighting suit need not walk if it can roll. A diesel powered dirt bike could support a very heavy body armor, excellent weapons suite and perhaps even air conditioning.
• I might work on this.

• Editor's Note The Osprey would play well in this scenario as it could deliver the kind of rifle squad that Mr. Wallis had in mind, with several days of supplies, some hundreds of kilometers in land. The US is already working on exo-skeletons for its troops. But money will have to be spent on keeping everything very simple, very reliable under the worst field conditions, and repairable with a couple of hand tools if equipment still breaks down.

In the last part we noted the US has 18 supporters for every fighter (we include mechanized and armored units in the total). Iraqi insurgents have perhaps a 1 to 1 ratio. And the US is spending at least 1000 times more per fighter than the Iraqi insurgents. The point we are leading to is that fighting insurgents while organized as a conventional force is probably a losing idea. Here we give some reasons for our belief.

• Weapons and Tactics   Weapons drive tactics developments and tactics drive weapons development. In the case of the US in Iraq, weapons are driving the tactics. In other words, if you look at the US Army/Marine Corps as a weapon system, you will see the tactics the  US has chosen to fight the Iraq war is contingent not on the best way to fight the Iraq war, but on the available weapon.

• Normally there's nothing wrong with that because you don't have a choice: you base your tactics on what your weapons can do. In this case everything is wrong because you do have a choice of weapons, and the weapon that has been chosen is a US Army/Marine Corps optimized for modern conventional war.

• To illustrate our point, consider that the typical US infantryman (the Marines will hate us but its tedious to say "Army infantryman and Marine infantryman") carries into combat a load anywhere up to 120-lbs. The US infantryman is NOT mobile. How is he supposed to fight insurgents, then? Particularly insurgents that are carrying 30- to 40-pounds if that.

• We know some of our readers are going to say: "What on earth is the editor talking about?" So we're going to give two more examples of what we mean.

• There used to be an old saying of campaigning on India's North West Frontier - all counter-insurgency - that all a soldier should carry with him was a bag of beans and a bag of bullets. This was a metaphor for "walk light, walk agile". The US infantryman today walks neither light nor agile.

• Lets go back 140 years, to the Indian Wars in the United States. Your typical cavalryman had a longer tail than your typical Indian. We'll leave it to our expert readers to tell us what the ratio was. But it certainly wasn't more than 1 to 1. For discussion, we can assume the Indian had no tail. So you needed 2 soldiers for every Indian. Once mounted and ready for some days of campaigning, the US cavalryman was as mobile as the Indian, who was the ace insurgent of his day. Since he was as mobile, the US cavalryman could think and fight like an Indian.

• Now look at the US infrastructure in Iraq. Giant bases. Unbelievable quantities of supplies required to keep the giant bases going. Huge columns of vehicles. Phenomenal amount of planning needed just to send a company out of the perimeter for 12-hours. You have this organism that is devoting 95% of its energy into sustaining itself and leaving 5% of its energy to fight (simplification of the 1 to 18 teeth to tail ratio). This is not efficient because with the insurgents, 50% of their organism's energy is going into fighting (1 to 1 teeth-to-tail ratio).

• We are confident our readers can see why this is wrong, and we also know that just about every American reader is saying: "This analysis is so wrong. We have so much by way of force multipliers that our organism is not devoting 5% of its energy to fighting, its probably equal to the insurgents' 50%. Why, our helicopters alone give us a huge advantage, not to speak of our communications, our sensors, our air support, our fantastic logistics etc etc."

• At which point we sigh. Yes, people, US has amazing force multipliers. But they are not the type that are going to win this war. And that doesn't resolve the need to "walk light, walk agile". Those force multipliers were created to win conventional wars and the US is absolutely brilliant at that. We are not in a conventional war. We are in an insurgency. CI needs different tools from what American is deploying.

To be continued

0230 GMT July 27, 2007

Editorial

Impeach Mr. Bush? We Think Not

• The editor's city of residence, Takoma Park, Maryland, has passed a city council resolution calling for Mr. Bush's impeachment. Normally we'd just laugh fondly, because that's Takoma Park. "The Berkeley of the East" - though why anyone wants to compare themselves with Berkeley is beyond us. Red Takoma is what the city should rename itself. But what the heck: it's these absurd antics that make Takoma a charming place to live. But we're told hundreds of other US localities have also passed similar resolutions.

• So what is it we are supposed to impeach Mr. Bush for? The answer is writ large on Takoma Park lawns, where a popular placard says "Bush Lied, People Died."

• Reality check, folks. Mr. Bush did not lie. A whole bunch of folks, including the Saudis and Israelis believed Saddam was hiding WMDs. Yes, yes, we all know that Ambassador Joseph Wilson said Saddam did not buy uranium ore from Niger. This may come as an incredible surprise, but Ambassador Wilson was not the be-all and end-all of US intelligence and he had nothing to do with any other country's intelligence.

• Okay, so where are the WMDs? Not in Iraq, it seems. There is evidence from the UN that before the invasion Iraq did a lot of shuttling and moving from facilities that were supposed to be safeguarded but were not any more. There may be evidence the Russians and Syrians feverishly got material with their paw-prints all over it out of Iraq before the invasion.

• At worst, the Administration was wrong on WMD's - after the event.

• WMDs may have been a poor reason to go to war with Iraq. But nowhere in the US Constitution does it say that poor judgment is an impeachable offense.

• By the way, we'd like to ask the City of Takoma Park: would President FD Roosevelt have met the standard you are holding Mr. Bush to? FDR fudged facts left, right, center and then 10-times around again to get aid to the British in 1940-41. No one can dispute he did absolutely the right thing. No one can dispute America did NOT want to go to war and a whole lot of Americans would have gone quite nuts had they realized what the US was up to, for example, what US Navy destroyers were up to. There is no evidence as far as we know - and perhaps we only display our ignorance - that FDR in any way was determined to get the US into the war by any means neccessary. But he knew he had to help Britain by any means neccessary. The Germans showed considerable restraint, but suppose they had retaliated by attacking US merchantmen and convoy escorts - completely justified, by the way - and the US went to war against Germany. Would we be sitting around with "FDR Lied, People Died" placards?

• Please, please do not say "But everyone knows Hitler had to be defeated." Who is everyone, Kemo Saby? America was fiercely split over events in Europe. A whole lot of people did not think we should get involved. Its only when the full magnitude of Hitler's evil became apparent that "everyone" agreed he had to be defeated. FDR made an executive decision. He was right. Mr. Bush made an executive decision, and he was right too because aside from the WMDs, Saddam was one of the biggest tyrants of the post-WW2 world. Sure there are others - and Mr. Bush planned to deal with them one by one.

• Like it or not, President Bush genuinely believes America must help bring democracy to the world. You going to impeach a man for that?

• Let's turn this around. Suppose America had been greeted with roses and Iraq became an instant democracy. Would the City of Takoma Park called for Mr. Bush's impeachment because no WMDs were found? We don't think so.

• What it really comes down to is this: people want to impeach Mr. Bush because the Iraq war has gone all wrong.

• Now, if you want to impeach him for incompetence, your editor is right up there with you. Your editor is on record as saying he wants the incompetent fools that got us into this war and are keeping us in this war held accountable. Life in jail for those sort-of-responsible. Hang those who were primarily responsible. War tribunals and all that - your editor wants it all.

• But does the constitution say incompetence is an impeachable offense? We don't think it does.

• When you go around saying "impeach X and impeach Y", all you are doing is trivializing a very serious procedure, which as far as we know is the last resort of the republic against a corrupt president. And your editor defies those who say Mr. Bush is corrupt to prove it.

• Ah, you say, the Republicans trivialized the impeachment process re. Mr. Clinton. Yes they did. And your editor, who was absolutely no fan of Mr. Clinton. was completely in his corner on that one. But are you then saying "They did it, so we want to do it?"

• If so, how are the good people of Takoma Park any different from the Republicans they detest?

0230 GMT July 26, 2007

• Islamic World Increasingly Against Bin Laden Terror... says a research poll conducting by the Pew organization. The drops are huge - see the article at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article2141391.ece

• ...But Conversely  Fear Of US Grows This poll provides large caliber ammo for those who say the war on terror cannot be won by the methods US espouses. It seems Muslims are turning against terror because they are fed up of what it is doing to them, not because they think America is right.

• Iran Says It Will Never Give Up Its "Peaceful" N-Program says Reuters. There you go, folks, from the mullah's maw. Since no one is in any way trying to suggest Iran should give up its civilian N-program, and since it believes mastering the N-fuel cycle is purely a civilian activity, Iran will not give up its uranium enrichment and plutonium production program. [You can use plutonium as fuel for power production, so if you really want to bloody-minded you can say your plutonium production is for civilian use. Iran has not said that because everyone is focusing in its uranium enrichment program, whereas production of weapons grade material is much easier if you plan to make plutonium. But should its plutonium program become an issue, we have no doubt Iran will say its for peaceful use too.

• When the man is saying he's not going to stop, can we ask the Europeans and all to accept him at his word? Why bother this useless charade of talk, when Iran is simply stalling for time?

• But one request, please: can we defer bombing Iran till the next administration? This one has shown itself so incompetent that it would be insane to trust it with anything more complicated than...more complicated than...more complicated than...help us, people, we're having a hard time coming up with an activity the administration cannot mess up. We were going to say "boiling an egg", but given this administration's track record, even that may be beyond its capabilities.

• AQ Leadership Probably Inaccessible Says US The official is Undersecretary for Intelligence at the Pentagon, and he spoke before before a congressional committee. The official does not see success within 3 years. He says success will depend on working with Pakistan to give it better surveillance gear etc, and on economically developing the area. http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN2544153420070725

• Gosh, these Pentagon types are such Brains! We are in awe! So when the natives have better roads and schools and health care etc. they will turn in Bin Laden? Pardon us for our stupidity, but what's the connection between their state of development and their love for AQ? Are we back on the old shtick about poverty leads people to extremism?

• If that's what the Pentagon thinks, may be it needs to learn something about its enemies - if that's not asking too much. This point has been discussed a gazillion times, including by us. If poverty was the issue, why is Bin Laden the Head Extremist? He's the son of a multi-millionaire. His number 1 aide was a doctor. In just the latest terror attempt, darn nearly everyone involved were medical professionals including doctors.

• We've been noticing about Iraq/GWOT that the US government has become so desperate its officials and generals are simply shooting their mouths off, and each person seems determine to produce a better sound bite than the last. No one seems bothered to make sure they're talking sense.

• Yeh Hai Amreeka Mayri Jaan Another in our occasional series. The phrase in Hindustani means "This is America, My Heart", though it can equally be "My Love". We intend it in the sense of a wry "Love it or hate it, America is America, and you simply have to accept it the way it is." All items from Washington Post of July 25, 2007, concerning the region.

• A father jumps into the water to save his two sons who are drowning. Instead of helping him, the spectators are busy filming the scene. A boat goes to the rescue, too late: the father drowns. The boys are pulled by the current back up to the surface and survive. The man with the boat wants to know what kind of people are those who did not help. Our suggestion: using the videotapes, identify the people who were gawking, toss them into the water, and film them drowning.

• A power company announces it will put in a 600-MW gas-fired power plant to meet demand in a rapidly growing area. [In fact, the whole region is rapidly growing because of illegal immigration, legal immigration, and to a small extent because Americans tend to have more than the regulation 1.9 children or whatever it is that is required for zero population growth.] Natural gas is very clean, but the greens are upset. Why? Because with more power available, more people will move into the area. Our suggestion: to keep the greens happy, blow up all power plants, transmission facilities, gas stations, roads, bridges, water facilities, homes, buildings, hospitals, shopping malls, schools and so on. No one will want to move there. Of course, the greens will also leave, but come on people, we can't solve all the problems just by ourselves.

• A man is convicted of robbing a house, forcing the 3 residents into a bathroom, and shooting them in the head. Two die, one survives. He is acquitted of killing another man in an unrelated incident. While he is in jail, he threatens everyone he can think of, and tries to bash up everyone he can get near. One of these really nice people, just a few anger issues. The court - this is Virginia - has only two options, this being capital murder: execution or life without parole. His lawyers beg the court to show him mercy: sentence him to a 48 square foot cell for the rest of his life. [48 square feet is the size of a small bathroom, we assume that is the size of high-security cells in Virginia. Our suggestion: to kill this man would be a mercy. So go along with the lawyers' request, stick him in the cell, and let him go completely insane as his punishment. Execute him after he is certifiable, just to save the taxpayers the money - you cant make an insane person suffer by keeping him locked up.

0230 GMT July 25, 2007

• President Yesterday Says We Must Win In Iraq We agree. But what is doing to win?

• As far as we can see, nothing at all.

• From Day 1 he has refused to commit the troop resources needed to win. Now we are in Year 5 of this wretched war, and he still refuses to commit the resources.

• The surge was Plan 5 or Plan 6? The surge has barely got underway, and the President's  generals are already working on the next plan. we are told this is called "local security", i.e., security for Anbar and Baghdad.

• Have we now reached the stage where we don't even wait for a plan to fail before starting work on the new plan?

• We are being told an advisor to General David Petraeus, who helped come up with the surge thinks that the new plan might have a 1 in 10 chance of success. [Readers: in his favor is his stand that either we go deep in Iraq or we get out. Nothing else will work, he says.]

• Mr. Bush is the nation's first MBA president. Would he invest in a venture where he had a 90% chance of losing his money? Even though his degree is from Yale, we'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt.

• Since he won't send enough troops to win, how are we supposed to win? Bombard America's enemies with words till they are buried in words. Hasn't worked yet.

• While You and I Sit At Home And Debate Iraq this is the reality of the war: Times London writes about a US sergeant in a unit identified only as "Baker Company" (??) with 4th Brigade/1st Infantry Division in Doura, Baghdad. This man looks no older than some of my students. This year he has found 30+ IEDs - he has an uncanny instinct for locating the things. A brave man indeed.

• But: the article says almost everyone in his 130-man company has been caught in an IED explosion.

•  This unit faces death and crippling wounds each time it leaves base. We believe it is no different from any other unit in Baghdad. Some weeks ago Washington Post wrote of a unit that wanted to visit the site one of its members was killed to honor him. For tactical reasons, the commander decided it was safest to walk. The unit covered its 4 miles or so to the site and back without losing anyone. But there were at least 3 IEDs planted along the route, and the unit came under fire several times. In one case the bomber had even made himself comfortable nearby on a mattress, so that he could blow up any passing Americans. Luckily the Americans escaped this trap.

• The unit works in a Shia district, not a Sunni one. The Shia's are supposed to be on our side.

• We'd like to ask a question of the generals in Iraq. This is what you call progress? This is what you are talking about when you say we are winning?

• We have a simple suggestion to make of the generals. If you think we're winning, why don't you volunteer to go on patrol for a week? Please don't think you're too valuable to risk - America has tons of generals and even more tons of officers who once promoted will make excellent generals.

• Pakistanis Get A Most Wanted Insurgent This gent was released from Gitmo and then returned to his home country to become the most wanted fighter in Pakistan. The Pakistanis surrounded him at a house in Zhob, Balochistan, and he blew himself up rather than surrender. Sensible chap. Would have been more sensible to shoot him when he was captured, but then who listens to us.

• Before you start congratulating the Pakistanis: this gent made his career one of attacking the Pakistan security forces. That's why the Pakistanis went after him. If he'd been killing Americans or Afghanis, no problemo dude, here's a few thousand rupees, do you need another AK, and here's all the rounds you can carry, come see us when you return.

• Again, we repeat this is not a moral issue, Pakistan has sound strategic reasons to support the Taliban, but this is the reality. The Pakistanis can get people when the want to. That AQ and Taliban is running amok in Pakistan means they don't want to.

• The Greek Mastodon This gent was one impressive fellow: 6-tons, 3.5-meters at the shoulder, and tusks as long as 5-meters (that's 10 feet high and 16-foot tusks for our American readers).

• What's even more impressive is our pre-ancestors hunted the fellow for food. The Euro mammoth died out 2-3million years. We're safe to assume no helicopters with searchlights and high-powered .380s that many contemporary human scumbags use when "hunting".

• Frankly, were your editor to encounter one of these creatures and his cheery "G'day, Mate" didn't work, he'd quietly hand over his chocolate. Hunt one of these things? No, Sir. Better to eat grass.

• Letter from Aaron Kolste I'm not sure of your support-to-combat ratio, because
  it isn't clear if you're counting only "infantry on paper" as combat troops, or you are counting all combat troops (artillery, armor, etc) as combat troops... but since you say infantry platoons I will assume the former.

• I just wanted to mention that the Wisconsin National Guard unit in my area is B Battery of 121 Field Artillery.  This unit conducted extensive combat operations in Iraq that did not involve their howitzers.  They did convoy escort for certain, and a friend of mine has indicated search/seize house-to-house operations.

• If a NG Artillery unit is doing this, I believe they should count as "fighters" in your column.

• Does this adjust your support-to-combat troops ratio?

• Editor's reply. Indeed they should be counted for the patrols and searches etc. But not for convoy duty. We've had to leave out these cases even though there are quite a few artillery and MP batteries/companies pulling patrols because we don't have that detailed an orbat for Iraq. The ratio won't change because even in the infantry/mechanized/tank units a number of men are always tied up on static duty. The insurgents don't have to waste their manpower that way. Also, we haven't fully counted the US tail to keep that one soldier on patrol. Mr. Kolste should, nonetheless, look at the discussion as general one. If anyone is interested in greater precision, we can always revisit the discussion.

0230 GMT July 23, 2007

• Ayatollah Sistani Aide Murdered Despite all the security surrounding Ayatollah Sistani, Shia Iraq's most important cleric, an aide was murdered. A bodyguard might have aided the killers.

• The Ayatollah may have to flee Najaf for his safety.

• In our opinion, suspicion will fall on Al-Sadr, who is constantly in conflict with Najaf: this young whippersnapper fancies himself not just as the supreme religious leader of Iraq, but also as its temporal leader. His Mahadi Army is constantly clashing with the Badr Militia, which belongs to the Najaf faction of Iraqi Shias. Al-Sadr is an Ali-Come-Lately. His father built a power base in Sadr City, Baghdad, among the poorest of Shias, and was killed by Saddam. After the fall of Saddam Al-Sadr emerged from the rat-hole he had been hiding in and created the Mahadi Army with Iran's money, training, and advisors. He then proceeded to kill as many Sunnis as possible and as many Americans as possible. He has succeeded in ethnically cleansing Baghdad, forcing Sunnis from mixed and other neighborhoods into 4 ghettoes. The minute the US is out of the way, he will get rid of those Sunnis too, with the complete approval and support of the government and its security forces, large numbers of whom owe allegiance to Al-Sadr.

• We Love You, Hugo, Yes We Do After having disposed of any power center that opposes him, including members of parliament, our favorite dictator has taken his "revolution" to the next level.

• There will be a single political party in Venezuela, and in the first instance, six million have signed up.

• Just a short step from there to the usual communist/fascist scene where to get a job as latrine cleaner you have to be a party member.

• We again urge the US government to completely ignore this man. We urge the US to learn from its mistaken Castro policy: 46 years after the US started trying to get rid of Castro, he is still with us and the main reason is the US has opposed him, forcing Cubans - who are nationalists - to support their dictator. Washington, don't go through this again with Hugo. No plots, no "support democratic institutions", no propaganda broadcasts etc. The people will get rid of him in their own time.

• Japan's Baby Steps To Rearm Better our readers look at the New York Times articles http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/world/asia/23japan.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp You will find nothing dramatic happening, but that is the Japanese way. The policy changes are in the nuances - Japanese F-2 fighters travel to Guam for live-fire exercises, Japan has no live bombing range. The steps are baby steps - 4 B-767 tankers, two warships to carry helicopters, and built with the option to carry VTOL fighters, the launch of the first destroyer with an anti-missile system and so on.

• Still No Agreement On Oil-Sharing Law There is an orneriness in the Iraqis that forces them to give Washington the finger each time Washington touts progress. So Washington has been boasting how agreement on sharing oil revenues has been achieved. So obviously Iraqis have to contradict Washington by failing to agree yesterday.

• Also please note the continued offensive against the Anbar Alliance, the Sunnis who are fighting AQ. After the killing of 4 leaders in Baghdad, there has now been a truck bombing north of Baghdad aimed at the Alliance's leaders. No details yet about if anyone important was among the 5 dead.

• Frankly, folks, we don't understand why so many level-headed American analysts start gasping and panting with lust re the Anbar Alliance because even the American military knows this lot will turn on the Americans after settling scores with AQ. They joined with AQ despite their xenophobia because they wanted to kill Americans. Then AQ started killing its allies because they want to establish a pure Islamic state in Anbar. So the former enemies of the US became all kissy-face with the Americans, but that doesn't mean they will tolerate the Americans for an hour more than they need to use the US.

• And - we've said this before: if AQ changes tactics, repents and apologizes to the Anbar Sunnis, both groups will re-ally.

• Right now, luckily for America, good old AQ is solving its problems the good old AQ way: kill anyone who opposes it. AQ recently dressed up in Iraq security force uniforms, arrived at a village south of Baghdad in official vehicles, and proceeded to slaughter 30 men, women, and children.

• Why? Just to make a point: the village was seen as getting too pally with the Americans who are on the offensive in the zone.

• Don't wonder where they got the uniforms and vehicles from, please. The Iraqi security forces are hand-in-glove with terrorists of every stripe, why not with AQ.

• Read more about how AQ has turned many supporters in Baghdad against it with its brutality http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article2121006.ece.

• But please, folks, don't make the mistake we at Orbat.com made all the time for four years of this miserable war. We'd read stuff like that and say: "Ah, progress, now the US military has won XYZ area and it can go on to the next area." Wrong-O, folks. Every time the US military leaves the area goes back to its bad old ways. So this time is supposed to be different because the US military is surging? Please dont make us laugh. Areas that the US thoroughly and completely cleared out after 1-2 years of presence relapsed once the Americans left. US does not have troops to cover all Iraq; right now, even if it did, the American people have turned against the government's policies.

• The government was very careful not to lie outright. But it lied by omission, by focusing on the good news and never on the bad, and now the government policies have lost credibility.

0230 GMT July 22, 2007

Normally when there is no news - usual over the weekend - we give an opinion piece. Today we're a bit confounded because we've been giving opinion pieces on the US/Iraq regularly. So we've given the British press more attention than we usually do, just for variety.

• Turkish PM Threatens North Iraq Invasion After Election on Friday unless something is done about Turkey's Kurd rebels operating from Iraq.

• Well, good buddy, no one is going to do a darn thing because US doesn't want another fight on its hands in Iraq, and you aren't going to do a darn thing either aside from Sturm und Drang. So just out a sock in it and spare us - this is getting really boring.

• People keep saying there's 200-250,000 Turkish troops near the border. Come on guys. Turkey's total army is 400,000; as far as we know there has been no reserves call-up; and in any case why does Turkey need that many troops when a fifth the number will get you to Kirkuk right quick. We estimated around 60,000 troops, and that's plenty. Of course, what happens after capturing Kirkuk is another matter. Turkey would need a whole lot more troops to fight the Kurds - assuming it got away with an invasion of Iraq. We don't see how Turkey can do that.

• Kurds refuse to postpone Kirkuk referendum slated for later this year. Turkey wants to stop Kirkuk from going to Kurdistan - which it will - and that is the real point of the Turkish drama. The Iraqi Kurds don't seem to paying attention to

• UN Confirms DPRK Shutdown Of 5 N-Facilities but North Korea is still not giving up documents concerning its N-program. Also, now DPRK says it must get Light Water Reactors in return for giving up the weapons program. It's deja vu all over again.

• Pakistan President Accepts Supreme Court Verdict says Jang of Pakistan regarding the reinstatement of the Chief Justice whom the President had dismissed.

• UK Program To Buy Taliban In Afghanistan is discussed in this fascinating article from Times London: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2115167.ece The articles says the $3-million program is a failure because although 4000 people have surrendered, they are mostly low level foot soldiers of whom there is an endless supply.

• Seems to us the program is a whacking success. Times London seems to be math challenged. Above works out to $800/person which even in Afghanistan is not a whole lot of money. So obviously if you're going to be that stingy you aren't going to get Big Fish. Plus Big Fish are more ideologically motivated and less interested in simoleans. We'd noted in one of our Iraq analyses that the US is spending ~$5-million to kill one Iraqi insurgent. Costs will be less for the British in Afghanistan. Assume $1-million per kill, getting 4000 insurgents however low-level out of the game for $3-million is an absolute bargain.

• More to the point, the article discusses British shortcomings in the Afghan War. Some of the criticism applies to the US too, particularly the insufficient troops.

• Rich In America JP Getty, the US's first billionaire in today's money, was worth $14-billion, less that the net worth of each of Sam Walton's 5 children. In 1985 US had 14 billionaires. Today it has 1000. Two million Americans are worth $10- to $100-million each. Ten million dollars is entry-level rich.

• You can read more at http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2131974,00.html

• The British Experience With Concentrating Iraq Troops in giant bases: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2790976.ece

• We Were Soldiers Once - And Young Friday night your editor ate too much chocolate. Normally its lights out at 2300 US Eastern, but he was wide awake. So he decided to hie over to the Silver Spring Borders, a mile away, to see if he could score a copy of Harry Potter 7, scheduled for release at 0001 Saturday. Standing in line between 2330 and 0141 he got a chance to read almost the whole book about the epic battle at LZ X-Ray in the Iadrang Valley between 3 battalions of the Cav [1/7, 2/7, 2/5 Cavalry] against 3 first-rate PAVN regiments.

• This may seem strange, but your editor finds it very, very hard to read books about Vietnam and he had been avoiding this poignant, unvarnished, modest account of American soldiers at their very best. You may find odd considering  the editor's analysis of the battle is used every year at Leavenworth.

• Be that as it may, he came away with three thoughts, one of which he has had had before and is noted in his analysis.

• (a) The way these three battalions fought, you would just never guess that the majority of the troopers were draftees in their very first action. You also would not guess that the Cav was fighting its first battle in the airmobile mode. The troops behaved like veterans - despite every battalion being short of men before the battle began because of the months-long, non-stop stream of transfers of trained soldiers to other units. The US Army is famous for its reckless indifference to unit cohesion, so the Cav was not being singled out. Also, please note it takes 10 days of combat to get a green soldier into top form - he's either learned the game or he's dead, and the battle was much shorter. Your editor's impression is that the Cav was simply blessed with a number of extraordinary career soldiers, many veterans of WW2 and Korea, and this played a big part.

• (b) As always, one comes away amazed at how much punishment the human animal can take, and the sheer determination of men to survive. Of course, the ones who give up die, so there is evolutionary selection at work, but still.

• (c) Last - and most impressive - is Lt. Colonel Hal Moore's literary voice. He never raises his voice. He engages neither in emotionalism or hyperbole. Like the most skilled of authors, he simply recounts what the soldiers did in calm, even understated tones. He belongs to another generation, and that was the style then. Your editor much prefers that style than the overheated expositions common today.

• What struck the editor the most about LTC Moore is that writing 25 years after the event there is not one drop of bitterness in this narrative. There is none of the "we were sent to die in a futile war" business that one associates with Vietnam. LTC Moore fought this battle to the best of his capability. When it was over, what you get is his sense of sheer joy at being alive - this is a very common phenomenon that many soldiers say is the best part of war  "I made it".

• Fighting ferociously, sacrificing everything, facing death bravely, refusing to complain, and wasting no time at all in trying to find meaning in the battle - that, my friends is what being a warrior is about.

• The movie "300" encompasses some of these timeless themes, and consequently it was a huge commercial success. But you see, "300" is a movie. "We Were Soldiers Once - And Young" - what an astonishing title, just by itself, using just six mundane words to express the complete essence of the true soldier - really happened.

0230 GMT July 21, 2007

• Slay Them With Statistics Just a few days ago we were being told that Iraq violence has begun to abate. Yesterday Reuters said that according to data it obtained from DOD attacks in June 2007 reached their highest level since May 2003, and that they have been  increasing in the last 4 months, which corresponds to the surge.

• In Iraq the various sides are fighting it out with bullets and bombs.

• In the US, the carious sides are fighting it out with statistics. You don't end up dead, but you end up equally badly: your public loses confidence in anything you, the government, says.

• Pakistan Supreme Court Reinstates Ousted Chief Justice Something very odd is happening in Pakistan. First the Chief Justice defied the President, who is the real ruler of Pakistan thanks to a military court. Then the President fired the Chief Justice. Frankly, familiar as we are with the people of Pakistan, who have been repeatedly squashed by the military's jackboot, we though that was the end of it. People would protest a bit, and then shrug their shoulders philosophically, say "What can you do, yaar, the army is supreme anyway", end of the matter.

• Instead, the Supreme Court has in effect defied the President and therefore the Army by giving the Chief Justice his job back.

• This puts the President in a bad place. If he accepts the outcome, next step could be the Supreme Court disqualifies him from running - and winning  - the upcoming election. If he does not, he has to declare a state of emergency, suspend the court/parliament/press etc. US is going to get very upset.

• But say the Pakistan Army is in the middle of a civil war with AQ/Taliban insurgents. US is going to have to make some hard choices at that point about whether it will accept the state of emergency.

• US Offers Firepower, Intelligence For NW Pakistan Fight says Jang of Pakistan quoting US media sources.

• All choices are bad at this point, folks. As it is the tribals and extremists - and many moderates - in Pakistan are upset with the President for acting at US behest in the terror war. The US offer - and action on that offer - is going to incense a whole bunch more tribals and others. Fresh global recruits for the jihad and so on.

• But what is the US to do? It cannot accept the new AQ/Taliban sanctuaries in NW Pakistan. Pakistan Army cannot eliminate them. Doing nothing worsens the problem. Doing something worsens the problems.

• We're always ready to act the critic, but this time, frankly, we are thankful we don't have to make the decisions.

• Though we do have a solution, and we've said it before. US needs to pull back from the GWOT all over the world, regroup, reassess, and reattack. The way the US is going about things is not working.

Why the US Will Lose Iraq: Counter-Insurgency Is Not America's Thing

• Suppose I was to say to you: "America cannot win every gold at the 2008 Olympics." Would you get upset? No, because we have a world of 6-billion people, and Americans are just 5% of that world. So as long as America comes away with the most golds, we'll all be happy.

• Suppose I was to say: "America rates behind Cuba in standard measures of health care." Would you get upset? Well, you aren't going to be happy, because jeez being there with Cuba in anything is hardly a compliment. But you'd accept the fact because it happens to be, well, true.

• Suppose I was to say: "American school achievement vis-a-vis other industrial countries sucks". Would you be upset? Your pride would be hurt, but you wouldn't be upset, because America has the third largest population in the world and is the most diverse nation on earth, and tries to educate every child. There's reasons we're not tops, and you can take comfort in knowing that when you face-off our top students against their top students, we're pretty competitive.

• Okay folks, I don't want you get upset when I say: "America is not good at Counter Insurgency." First, I want you to see that America is darn good when it comes to every other kind of warfare, and it isn't a disgrace when you are good at a heck of lot of warfare and not good in just one.

• Now, the reason American is not good at CI is NOT the reason everyone gives It has nothing to do with America's supposed Attention Deficit Disorder. It has to do with the simple reality that America has never had to fight a CI on which it's life depended. America's life depended on winning the Cold War, America fought it for 45 years. Does that indicate ADD? Does anyone doubt that had the Soviet Union not collapsed America would still be 100% steadfast in fighting the Cold War, 61 years on?

• Ravi's First Axiom on CI  When your life is at stake, no sacrifice is too small. But when you are fighting a CI that does not put your life at stake, you have to fight it in a way that maximizes the cost-benefit ratio. This is particularly true when you are The Global Power and you are fighting not in one country, but in a hundred.

• Ravi's Second Axiom on CI Americans cannot fight CI because everything they do, they do the max. If the CI is not to keep your country together, you cannot fight it to the max, you have to fight it at a cost that is justified by the benefits.

• Let's hark back to our favorite CI folks, the Brits When Britain ruled the World Empire, it was in a situation identical to the US: it was fighting CIs all over the world. When the costs began seriously outweighing the benefits, the Brits folded their hands.

• Example 1: America. This one is so obvious we don't need to get into it.

• Example 2: Afghanistan. This one is also so obvious we don't need to get into it. Please note the Brits ruled India with its endless reserves of manpower. India had perhaps 200-million people at the end of the 19th Century. If need be, the Brits could have raised any number of troops to fight and win in Afghanistan. But the Brits were in Afghanistan for a reason: to counter the expansion of Russia. That was not a live or die situation, and when the game cost more than it was worth, the Brits left.

• Example 3: India. This was a war the Brits did not even think of fighting. When WW2 ended, it was obvious to the Brits that fighting for India was simply not worth the cost. It did not help, of course, that the Indians had been inspired by the Brits who educated them to demand liberty and control of their own destiny - very British ideals. You can't fight people who quote you at every stage as a justification for their rebellion. Be that as it may, the Brits packed up and went home.

• Since Americans Cannot Match Costs To Benefits, They Need To Avoid CI That's all there is to it. This is not a complicated argument, no one needs a triple doctorate to make it or understand it.

• If US Was To Match Costs To Benefits In Iraq they'd be fighting a very different kind of war. And what's more, they're compounding their error by mirror-imaging the Iraqi security forces to fight the way Americans fight when Iraq does not have a fraction of America's resources.

• We'll talk about this in the next installment

By the way, Errands/Tasks crossed out were accomplished on 7.20.07 - amazing how much real world stuff  one can do if one does not work on Orbat.com

0230 GMT July 20, 2007

• The Iraq Pull-Out Debate May Be Irrelevant This school of thought says the like it or not, US will have to start withdrawing troops from Iraqi by April 2008 because 15-month deployments will start getting over. The move by the Pentagon to increase deployments to 18-months is a bust, says this school of thought, and will not fly because of the gigantic morale/recruitment problems it will cause. Five brigades will have to come home by the summer. This withdrawal will buy President time to run out the clock - with US troops withdrawing, Congress is not going to vote to cut off funds or end the war.

• We have been saying for a long time Mr. Bush plans to run out the clock. We have been neutral on if Congress is going to act or not. From everything we hear, Republicans - defections from whose camp are required for Congressional success - are terrified of two equally unappealing alternatives. One, they are perfectly aware there is an overwhelming consensus among their constituents for pulling out. So they don't want to go to the polls in November 2008 without clearly showing they are listening to their constituents. At the same time, they are terrified of (a) being labeled as Bug-Outs by challengers for their seats, and (b) they are so ideologically committed that the very thought of working with Democrats on such an issue makes them acutely ill.

• But the twist that troop withdrawals will have to start in April 2008 is something new to us. We now see a possibility that everyone will be happy and absolutely nothing will be resolved because 15 US brigades will still be fighting a pointless war, but sufficient withdrawals will have taken place to appease the voters.

• Our own contribution to this debate concerns Mrs. Clinton If she becomes President, as seems likely, we are no longer taking it as a given that the troops will come home. You see, Mrs. Clinton is not just the wife of Bug-Out Bill, she has a huge leftie legacy that will hang over her head. She will have to look and act tough on national security, and she has so many enemies that even those who want the troops brought home will be waiting to jump on her and scream: "Aha! We told you she'd sell American down the river!" or whatever.

• Wait a minute, you're going to say. Do you mean to say that people will attack her for withdrawing even if previously they have been for withdrawal just because they want her to look bad? Surely principles will determine peoples' position?

• We've been in Washington DC for 17 years without a break now. The one thing we've noticed is that for this generation of politicians, of every stripe, there is no such thing as principle. It is all about short-term advantage gained by making the other person look bad. Democrats say the Republicans started this by gunning for the Clintons and culminating in the President's impeachment. Republicans say the Democrats started it with putting some of America's finest and most honest public servants on trial over Iran-Contra just because they wanted revenge on Republicans.

• Whoever started it, principle you can forget about. And if Mrs. Clinton has to choose between being named as Mrs. Leftie Bug-Out Hil and seen as tough on national security, which will she choose? Obviously being seen as being tough, so the troops will fight on to save her face.

• Which is why they're fighting now - to save Mr. Bush's face, because he cannot bring himself to admit he was wrong.

• Ms. Valerie Plame, Reprised An American technique of argument is to simply keep repeated your argument, no matter how many people prove it wrong. This is because Americans are no longer interested in getting as close to the truth as possible, they are interested in making a point that will help them sell whatever they are selling. So it is with Ms. Plame.

• Her lawsuit demanding damages because the Bush Administration blew her cover and ruined her covert career has been dismissed by the court - as nearly as we can tell, not being lawyers - is the court said it didn't have jurisdiction. It did not go into the merits of the case.

• Anyhows, we have said again and again that Ms. Plame's cover was already blown before she was pulled back to Head Office. Now, that doesn't mean that she wasn't still listed as covert - we don't know. If she was listed as covert, it doesn't matter under the law if she spent her time reading Manga comics and playing videogames, revealing her identity is against US law. We've been told she was no longer covert, but other people say she was. That's fine, whatever.

• But for Ms. Plame to claim the Administration blew her cover and ruined her career is Baby Cow Poop. It is so false a claim that it does not rise to the level of Cow Poop, leave alone Bull Manure. Her cover was blown by - among other people - Mr. Aldrich Ames.

• Moreover, apparently Ms. Plame thinks the intel services of other countries must be idiots. We've said this before: her cover wouldn't have lasted in Delhi two weeks, and we have no reason to believe it would have been much longer in many other places.

• Also responsible for blowing her cover was - Ms. Valerie Plame. Before she and her husband posed for a magazine, what she looked like was not known to the public. It would have been a simple matter to give her a new cover if the need arose.

• While we are raving and ranting here, may we venture a little further into dangerous waters? If Ms. Plame was really a long-term deep-cover person, her real name is not Valerie Plame. What's blown is the Valerie Plame identity.

Next Installment On Iraq Delayed

0230 GMT July 19, 2007

• Insurgents Retaliate Against Pakistan Security Forces Including yesterday's IED attack, Pakistan security forces appear to have lost over 100 soldiers in attacks in the North West consequent on the Red Mosque siege.

• This is not good. It is not as if Pakistan does not know the threat it is facing: it lost 800 troops before the ceasefire; indeed, the casualties were a major reason the government made for withdrawing and making a peace deal.

• We appreciate that whereas the Indian Army has been continuously on CI duty for 47 years and also has the ill-fated Sri Lanka expedition 1987-90 under its belt, the Pakistan Army has been lucky to have avoided CI with two exceptions. One was the short, sharp East Pakistan revolt in 1971, and then there have been minor - by India's standards - expeditions against rebels Balochis in the 1950s, 1972-76, and recently. At the same time, this cannot be an excuse. Al Qaeda, which is working with the Taliban, are the world's experts in IEDs and the Pakistan Army needs to deploy the resources to combat the threat.

• The Indian Army would every nightfall send hundreds and thousands of patrols to ambush insurgents infiltrating/exfiltrating Indian territory in Kashmir. Every day break it would send tens of thousands of troops along roads to check for IEDs that might have been planted at night. It was brutally tedious and incredibly manpower-intensive work - at peak India had 200,000 troops deployed on CI duty against 3-5,000 insurgents. We are not counting troops on the Line of Control because they are normally deployed there even in peacetime, but these troops helped in watching the border.

• 2 Russian Tu-95 Bears Approach Scotland Yes, folks, this was not a rerun of an old Cold War thriller. The Bears were intercepted first by Netherlands Air Force F-16s, then by two Tornados from RAF Lemming in Yorkshire. The Bears turned away before entering British air space.

• Times London quotes an RAF source that while Russian aircraft are regularly seen over the Norwegian Sea, it's highly unusual to see them as far South As Scotland.

• Wonder which museum the Ruskies got the Bears from? Now it's up to the USAF to resurrect a couple of B-47s from somewhere and fly them off Murmansk. It'll be a real Blast From the Past and help everyone get their minds off these sick rotten Islamic fundamentalists.

• Ah yes, the Good Old Days. Your Editor recalls them fondly.

• $90-Bbl/Oil may be possible within 6-12 months. No, no crisis is pushing oil up. It's simple supply and demand. The demand keeps growing. So shouldn't the supply also be growing - basic market economics and all that?

• Alas, no, because oil does not follow market economics. There is the OPEC cartel. It has dominated oil prices for 25 years or so. A few months back when oil fell below $70 OPEC decided to protect its obscene profits and cut production. Now OPEC has found that the market is likely to shrug off $80 oil, and may not start squeaking seriously till it reaches $90/bbl.

• We have never understood why the world accepts OPEC. The 3rd world suffers most from high oil prices, yet it seldom says a word. The 1st world blusters and complains, and ends up doing nothing.

• When travelers held up by highway robbers hand over their money without protest, and then continue traveling that highway without insisting that something be done about the robbers, is it fair to blame to robbers?

• Our theory, which we freely admit may be simplistic, is that while you have an oil cartel that obviously benefits from high prices, you have a whole lot of other people you'd think would protest but who actually also gain from high prices.

• First, all that extra oil money has had to be invested in western markets and western bankers have made hay while the sun shone, when it rains, and when it snowed. As the US dominance of financial markets gets diluted, you see the US taking a smaller percentage of the oil money, but for a long time the US got the lion's share.

• Second, while the US is a big oil importer, it is also a big oil producer. Till a few years ago it was the biggest, then it fell to second after Saudi, and now is third after Russia. Nonetheless, because it is a big producer, if you as an American have anything to do with production, you too have made money hand over fist.

• Third, even though the US is now third as a producer, US capital is invested in oil companies all over the world.

• Look at it simply. High oil prices benefit producers, distributors, and processors. They make great profits. Who pays the price? Little people like you and me. So suppose you and I march off to Congress, and demand Congress do something, like get the government to break the cartel by any or all of a number of ways, does Congress listen?

• Alas no, because you and I don't have the bucks. The people in the oil business do.

• Other factors play into this, and one of the biggest is environmentalists. By refusing to look at oil in terms of trade balances and energy security, and understanding that we have to eliminate American dependence on imported oil, they do their goshdarned best to sabotage every alternate source of oil. Nuclear? In your dreams, baby. Hydro? Get real. Coal? Eee-u. Tar sands and shale? Ha ha. Windmills? anywhere else but where I live. Environmentalists accept just one thing, efficiency. Efficiency is a Good Thing. Being against efficiency is like being against Harry Potter and the I-Phone. We need it. But surely people realize there is a direct correlation between energy use and standard of living, and that no matter how efficient you get, we are going to keep needing more energy?

• The US uses half the energy per dollar of GDP today as it did in 1973. That is a tremendous gain. Sure we can squeeze out another 10, 20, 30 percent. But how far is this going to go?

• We can understand the capitalists not wanting alternatives: they have a heck of a lot of money invested in the existing system, and they intend to keep squeezing profits out if it till the very last. We don't understand the greens talking about alternatives but blocking each and every one of them except solar, which absolutely cannot make up for more than a tiny fraction of oil imports, because the greens don't make a cent from their position.

• Doesn't it bother the greens that America's money - their money - goes to the great tyrannies of the world - Saudi, Iran, Libya, Russia, Angola, and to a whole lot of other quite despicable places - Sudan, Nigeria, Venezuela, Iraq to name a few. Don't they see that the US is spending hundreds of billions a year to secure its oil, and this is also creating pollution, albeit of a different sort? If you look at the larger picture of human quality of life, isn't Iraq one of the most polluted places on earth? Doesn't it occur to them that high oil profits keeps the House of Saud in power, and the Saudis use that money to spread mayhem and terror all over the world? Don't they see that Russia has all but abandoned democracy because, thanks to high oil prices, its ruling elite has no need to win the favor of the west's capital markets? Doesn't it cause them lost sleep that their money is helping keep the Iranian regime in power as it becomes more inhuman and more repressive by the day. Apparently not.

• When the US first began talking of attacking Iran, around 2005, the Iranians went "Oh yeah? We'll see how you like $100/bbl oil!." Well, it seems that we may well have $100/bbl oil in a couple of years, even if the US and Iran jump into bed tomorrow.

0230 GMT July 18, 2007

• Al-Qaeda "Stepping Up US Efforts" says the latest National Intelligence Estimate, which is a combined document generated by the US's 16 intelligence agencies. Americans pay somewhere north of $50-billion for such valuable estimates.

• Expect Above-90-Degree Days In Washington DC's August  says Orbat.com. Here you have a piece of intelligence that is also valuable, and our leaders did not have to pay a cent for it.

• Baby Assad With Us For Another 7-Years This pale shadow of a very tough/despotic father has been sworn in for another 7 year terms. His country loves him so much, he won 97.62 of the votes - love that precision.

• The Wages Of Globalization Nike has informed two Indonesian factories that employ 14,000 workers that it will shortly cease placing orders. Understandably, the workers/management are upset. For a moment we felt bad for the 14,000 workers, many of whom will be let go unless the owners find new business elsewhere. However miserably the local owners may treat their labor by American standards, by 3rd World standards we are sure the workers were getting a decent deal for the first time in their lives.

• But then we thought about the millions and millions of American workers who have lost their jobs to globalization, and the thousands of communities that have been devastated. If when American workers lose their jobs people just shrug and say "that's globalization", it's only fair that we now shrug and tell the Indonesian workers "that's globalization", isn't it?

• Iraqi Stats Just to warn our readers: to begin with, stats on killings in Iraq were not good. Now they are useless because the Interior Ministry is not releasing any figures. And because the issue has become so political, rule out that true figures will be given any time soon.

• Unless the US military is prepared to tell the public exactly how it is getting its figures, the military should not play the game of "only X people died so we are succeeding". The US has stayed out of the insurgent body-count game, it should stay out of the civilian body-count game. You can't have it both ways.

• Mrs. Cindy Sheehan Sighting Inexcusably, we failed to report the recent Mrs. Cindy Sheehan sighting in timely fashion. The anti-war activist bowed out if her crusade to force the US out of Iraq, saying she was disillusioned with the Democratic party because it was more interested in politics than in ending the war and so on.

• We breathed a sign of relief, sang our sad "Bye Bye Cindy, We're Sad To See You Go [Not]", and promptly forgot about her.

• Bad idea to take a publicity addict at her/his word. In short order she was back, threatening the Speaker of the House, Mrs. Nancy Pelosi, that if the Speaker did not immediately demand a complete and total Iraq withdrawal that very instant, she, Mrs. Sheehan, would contest Mrs. Pelosi's seat in 2008.

• Now, we have no time for the Dems, especially after they refused to stand by their convictions on the Iraq war. If the war is wrong - we believe it is on strategic grounds but right on moral grounds  - then the Dems should not be pussyfooting the issue, they should vote to cut off the money and force the President's hand, and take the consequences.

• But after we learned of Mrs. Sheehan's threat, we immediately went to our PayPal account to donate $1 - all we could afford - to Mrs. Pelosi's campaign. Unfortunately, we had exactly 13 cents in the account, so we sent that. Hey, this is about American and democracy, isn't it? Stand up and be counted and all that.

• Reader Walter E. Wallis Asks Why is anyone digging 100-feet from a road in Iraq not shot on sight?

• Good question, Mr. Wallis, and it goes to the heart of yet another set of complex reasons US is losing in Iraq. The American public lacks the stomach for these harsh measures, without which no insurgency can be won. They have no problem with their soldiers pushing buttons that lead to wiping out everyone within the weapon kill radius. But defining the rules of engagement as anyone carrying a weapon, shot on sight; anyone breaking curfew, shot of sight, and so on? No no no no: we're Americans, we're humane,  we follow the laws of war etc etc.

• Okay, American public, take your humaneness, stick it wherever, and go for a walk. Had these measures been enacted from Day 1, we'd have had a decent chance to win this thing and may be tens of thousands of fewer people would have died.  You don't have the guts to do what's neccessary, let's relinquish our world role, pretend we're Swiss, and design cuckoo clocks.

• What's nauseating is the hypocrisy. The same people that didn't want us to depose Saddam want us to kick Sudan out of Darfur. By the way, 100% we want the US to intervene in Sudan. But if you look at it from Khartoum's side, all it's trying to do is keep the country together. Isn't the US trying to keep Iraq together? The same people who sob that US armed intervention is immoral want us to intervene for Israel if it's in trouble. We didn't hear a lot of people complain when the US repeatedly bashed heck out of the Serbs and split their country six ways, seven when Kosovo goes independent. Would we be talking about the rule of law if every day dozens of bodies were found in Washington, victims of sectarian violence, and random truck bombs killed 10-100 people at a time? We don't think so.

0230 GMT July 17, 2007

• Tripoli Fighting Continues On Monday morning the Lebanese Army bombarded Fatah Islam positions with artillery and tank fire for three hours. The Army is reported to be making progress.

• We took Fatah Islam at its word when ti said it would fight to the death, but we confess to a slight amazement that this bunch of militants, which appears to have numbered no more than 300, has held on for so long. This is one tough bunch.

• Meanwhile, we had to sigh on seeing a photograph of the damage to the camp caused by Lebanese forces. In scale the devastation appears no different from that caused by Israel in its 1982 attack on Lebanon. But what choice did the Lebanese Government have?

• Fatah Islam is supposed to be backed by Syria and is supposed to have been unleashed as counter-pressure because international pressure was building to call Syria to account for its assassination of Rafik Harari. But if Syria can tie up the government and army of Lebanon for two months with a small groups of fighters, there could be much more trouble ahead.

• Commanding Officer UK 22 SAS Resigns Times London says the officer who leads British elite special operations regiment 22nd SAS has resigned, ostensibly for personal reasons. The real reason is he has been criticized by his superiors for leading from the front in Afghanistan and Iraq. Given the nature of the SAS's operations, which rely on dispersed small teams, his superiors wanted him to stay well back for the big picture. The CO's identity is kept secret for his security as he could become a terrorist target.

• Times says he will be the financial gainer from resigning because private security companies operating in Iraq and other places will bid high for his services.

• An Ironical Reason For Better Security In Baghdad Washington Post yesterday talked with an American brigade commander in Baghdad who said one reason killings were down is that the Shias had successfully cleansed many areas of the Sunnis. Will the US government take the clue? We doubt it.

• The brigade commander also said he was tired of being attacked all the time and expressed the definite opinion he could be provoked into simply leveling the place. We 100% sympathize with him. What amazes us is not - as the liberals keep weeping and moaning - that the Americans have killed so many Iraqis, but that the Americans have killed so few given the phenomenal firepower at their disposal.

• Compare with Israeli defense forces in Lebanon 2006, please. They deliberately and punitively leveled everything they could. Their firepower resources are much less than the Americans - a single B-52 strike can do more damage than an entire Israeli attack squadron - and that is why they did not do more damage. It was not for lack of intent and effort.

0230 GMT July 16, 2007

• Pakistan Army Reinforcing North West Frontier Province Our South Asia expert, Mr. Mandeep Singh Bajwa, has sent details of the buildup. We have to turn them into an article and a press release, so our faithful fans will have to wait for good stuff.

• Basically, President Musharraf, having become the salami in the sandwich between the extremists he has allowed free run - and used when it suited him, for example in keeping the Kashmir insurgency going - and the Americans, who have been really clobbering him over his peace deal, has finally decided to crack down on the militants.

• This said, a bit of background. After the US began hitting President Musharraf upside the head with a steel 2 by 4, he very reluctantly told his army to do something about the increasing hold the militants had over the North West Frontier Province. For details on the Talibanization of the NWFP, best to visit Bill Roggio at www.billroggio.com. He is the only one we know of who has been keeping track of this critical development.

• President Musharraf though he could get away by pretending he was doing something about the Taliban, and from time to time whacked an Al Qaeda person or two. AQ is nothing to him, so he has no problem hunting that lot down. Taliban is vital to his national security and he was doing very little.

• The Pakistan Army, for a variety of reasons, got into trouble in the NWFP. Its an area the Pakistanis, and the British before them, and the Sikhs before them, and the Mughuls before them - you get the point - left strictly alone as long as the locals left the ruler of the day alone. The tribals were Not Pleased to see the Pakistan Army turn up after 6 decades of doing what they wanted. 800 Pakistan security forces dead later, President Musharraf figured he had shown the US he was sincere, but now the US should understand that he coudlnt really do much, and accept his peace deal signed 10 months ago.

• The peace deal said the same thing peace deals with the tribals through the millennia have said: you Mind Your Own Business, We Mind Our Own Business.

• President Musharraf was shocked, shocked (not) when the tribals took this as a victory, and decided it was time to start their next offensive against the Pakistan state in their drive to impose a fundamentalist regime on Pakistan.

• Minor Gripe Department We hate it when people say the militants want to impose an Islamic regime on Pakistan. People, people, Pakistan is already an Islamic republic - has been from the day of its birth. Militants want to impose a Taliban regime - something quite different from Islamizing a country.

• When the Red Mosque thing happened, President Musharraf realized that he no longer had a deal with one particular set of militants - there are many in Pakistan, though they are all linked at some level - and that he had to act.

• The Problem Is that he will not be able to win this one. He has successful put down an insurgency in Baluchistan but his NWFP campaign is not going to work. In Baluchistan, the militants were trying to secede from Pakistan - as they have been trying to do for 60 years. The Pakistan military establishment was most wroth, and decided to teach the rebellious scum a lesson - and did. In the NWFP, however, a bunch of Koran-thumpers want every Pakistani to discover the true god as they define the true god. The Pakistan Army has shown little heart to combat this kind of threat. Pakistan is not Turkey, where the Army is the final safeguard of secularism - though that is changing, by the way.

• The Pakistan Army, according our reading, is sick and tired of being thought of as the oppressor of the Pakistani people. The Army from the start has believed it is the protector of Pakistan, particularly against those dastardly politician scum. And till recently, the people of Pakistan bought it. That is why there has never been a revolt against the Army in Pakistan, though the Army has ruled for half of Pakistan's existence.

• This has all changed in recent years. Pakistan has caught the democracy bug, and the people now see the Army as an exploitive, power-mad, corrupt institution. They want the Army gone, even if it means the bad old scumbag civilians will be back.

• For this reason alone - and there are many other reasons we'll discuss at some point - the Pakistan Army is not about to start beating up on people who quote the Koran for their actions. It cannot afford to lose yet another influential constituency at a time its rule is being increasingly questioned. we aren't even going to start on the obvious, and very unhappy-making, reality that the Pakistan Army itself is increasing sympathetic to the fundamentalists. There are a lot of Pakistanis who say: this westernization thing is not working. Immorality, corruption, soul-rot has set in in Pakistan. We must return to our roots as true believers. Sound familiar? Fundamentalism took a long time becoming mainstream in Pakistan, because Pakistani Muslims are still fairly secular compared to their Arab brethren. But set in it has, and it is being fed by a whole variety of factors, including the US's war on Islamic fundamentalists.

• Minor Gripe Department People, you and I see the fundamentalists as fundamentalists. But the fundamentalists don't think they are fundamentalist. They think they're normal, we're the ones who are depraved, not normal etc. Sound familiar? It should to Americans familiar with the more extreme strains of Christian fundamentalism.

• Anyway, back to the argument Nothing good is going to come of this crackdown. President Musharraf had to crack down: you can't have people defying you from 500-meters of your house, for gosh sakes. But he needed to have cracked down on the fundamentalists years ago. He supped with the devil, because he wanted allies in the perennial war against India. His predecessor in the coup business, General and then President Zia-ul-Haq began the deal - incidentally, he was a genuine believer so that came natural to him. The United States fanned the flames of Islamic fundamentalism to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. The chickies are coming home to roost from all sides. President Musharraf is not going to succeed in his operation; fundamentalism in Pakistan will grow strong day by day. You worry about Iraq? Don't. Pakistan is going to become a much, much bigger problem, and no option anyone has - US, President Musharraf, India, whoever, is worth a belch.

• The Administration Scores On DPRK North Korea has apparently shut down its plutonium production reactor, keeping to its side of a deal for aid in return for ending its N-weapons program.

• Let's first review a few facts. The DPRK N-weapons program was long dead for technical reasons. Pyongyang faked America and everyone else by pretending to reactivate it and staging a pretend test. Everyone rushed to appease DPRK and now the country has graciously ended the program with verification. As far as we are concerned, when DPRK feels the need, it will "restart" the program and blackmail more aid out of the US et al. The country's dictator and those associated with him need to be eliminated and the country given a chance to be free.

• Okay, now that we have our rant out of the way, it would be ungracious of us not to admit the administration has scored a victory of some sorts. It's too early to say its a real victory - President Clinton also thought he had a deal. And the US has been negotiating out of weakness - the Iraq disaster has crippled its military options worldwide. But still, the Administration has achieved something. It has also - intentionally or not - helped its cause on Iran should it decide to bomb that country - "DPRK case shows if the other side is reasonable we are certainly committed to a peaceful resolution."

0230 GMT July 15, 2007

• No Clearer Evidence Of Iraqi and US Divergence is needed than (a) the statement by the Iraqi Prime Minister that the US can leave any time, Iraq will manage; and (b) the statement by his close advisor that General Petraeus is working to a purely American plan, that the US tactics in arming Sunnis are wrong, that the US is embarrassing the Iraqi government, that it is attacking shia militias, that it is committing human rights violations, and that it is using Iraq as a laboratory.

• Let's take the Prime Minister's statement first Does the US really have doubts Iraq will manage without US troops? We don't. What will be in doubt is the Iraq America wants, not the Iraq the Iraqis want. We installed a democracy in Iraq, and the democratic majority says it doesn't want to have anything to do with the Sunnis. It wants them gone, and if they wont go, it wants them dead, and it is ready, able, and willing to get the Sunnis dead.

• Let's take the advisor's point next The legally constituted Government of Iraq does not want to have anything to do with the Sunnis. It wants to get rid of the Sunnis in the government and wants them extirpated from Shia Iraq. General Petraeus, loyally following orders, there's a good chap, is working to keep Iraq united. So the advisor's first complaint is absolutely correct.

• Next, the advisor's complaint is that America is working with, and arming, Sunni militias in its war against Al Qaeda. Does anyone doubt that those Sunni militias will fight the Shias once the AQ job is done? (Or for that matter do they doubt those same Sunnis will get back to killing Americans if the latter are still in Iraq?)So this complaint is legitimate also.

• Next, when the US publicly issues a report card in 18 subjects that the Iraqis are supposedly studying, of course it is embarrassing Iraq. That's the whole point isn't it, to force the Iraqis to score higher marks in their subjects. Big Problemo, Dude: the Iraqis don't want to study those subjects. Non-sectarian security forces? Ha ha. Share oil revenue? Sam, you are a barrel of laughs. We don't need to go down the list because the advisor is 100% correct in his allegation.

• Next, US is violating human rights. Little interpretation here. We think the advisor means "you are beating us up for committing HE violations and you are too, so don't lecture us." Fair enough, as long as you can show that you go to the extent the US does to avoid HR violations. Since you can't, we're going to ignore this.

• Next, Shia militias. Guilty as charged, Sir. US is targeting Al-Sadr, for one, because this man is an Iranian stooge, and because he has been busy killing Americans. He needs to be killed, we are 100% behind the US government on this. At the same time, from the majority viewpoint in Iraq, US is betraying the majority.

• Last, laboratory. Yes, of course the US is using Iraq as a laboratory. That's what Americans do: they experiment all the time, sometimes the experiments work, and sometimes they fail. If they fail, sometimes the Americans abandon the experiment, and sometimes they persist in failure. The Americans experiment on themselves first and foremost, so frankly we are not impressed with the advisor's complaint. You either tell America to go, or if you want America around, prepared to be experimented on.

• Nonetheless: America and the Iraq Government have been working at cross-purposes for some time now. Previously the Iraqis weren't complain because they wanted the $100 bills. But the Iraqis are a proud people, the benchmarks have upset them no end - by the way, they never signed on to them, so we're not sure who/what/when America thought was going to meet the benchmarks, and so they are speaking out.

Why the US Will Lose Its Iraq War: Faulty Training Part I

• We're starting by looking at some British-trained armies because we're familiar with them. We are 100% with those Americans whose teeth get set on edge when the Brits say "the Yanks don't know how, we do" because the Brits haven't done any better than the Yanks in Iraq. In their defense we do need to say they were quite aware they wouldn't succeed because last century they went through the whole Iraq thing and decided it was a bummer, man, and they got up and left. Anyhows.

• Jordan has one of the best-trained small armies in the world, and it is the best Arab army. The Brits raised it as the Arab Legion in 1923, and then hand-fed it for 25 years and had the dominant influence for the next 20. We have to look up our notes for the details, but while the British ran the Jordanian Army, they kept it tiny. Up to the 1948 War it was a few thousand men, later, it became 30-40,000.

• It was never a "national army": its troops were selected for loyalty to the Hashemite, and so have at all times formed a homogenous group, and at all times have been aware they are surrounded by a sea of enemies - we're talking Jordanian people here, not the Israelis. The kings of Jordan have given their first and continuing attention - at all times - to the army. Never faced internal warfare till 1970, defeated the threat within months; stayed out of 1973 War; so no great challenges in modern times.

• Brunei Ditto above, differences being it still remains tiny - brigade sized - and the Brits still have a big say in policy.

• Malaya which later became Malaysia and Singapore. Two more armies that were carefully raised and carefully nurtured for decades, numbering no more than a few ten thousand troops (where in heck are those notes of ours?) to the time of independence. There was the decade-long Malaya emergency. Please note that at all times till independence, for all practical purpose, Malay troops served in the British Army.

• India which became India and Pakistan. Both have huge, very competent  armies: Pakistan 600,000, India 1.1-million. In World War II the Indian Army reached 2-million troops, the largest volunteer army the world has ever seen.

• Okay, let's lay it on the line straight. First, it was the British-Indian Army till 1947, when the Brits went home. as is the case with Malaya, Indians served in the British Army for all practical purpose. In 1947, for an army of 2-million, it had precisely three Indian officers of one-star rank. Indians became officers starting only in the early 1930s; the pressure of World War II forced the British to open commissions to Indians, but the overwhelming majority of officers were British.

• Further, in your typical infantry brigade, one of three battalions was pure British, and often one of the other two was Gurkha (British spelling). The Gurkhas had no conception of being Indian.

• Please also note that the Indians swore fealty to the King Emperor - in Little Vicky's time, to the Queen Empress. And as if that wasn't enough, here's another kicker: the British set up the first British-Indian armies starting from the 1700s. The three so-called Presidency Armies - Bombay, Calcutta, Madras - were organized by John Company, but they were 100% British armies - no officer, not even a ensign, was Indian. And the Presidency Armies had large numbers of purely British Army regiments.

• By the time the Brits went home, they'd been doing the army thing in India for 200 years. And folks, see if you can digest this: the Brits ran India by setting one religion against another, one ethnic people against another, one caste against another. The Indian Army was never, ever, an Indian army. It was a British Army that employed Indians - and the Indians were expected to be even more obedient than the white troops.

• We're going to stop here for today and since our topic really is the US training the Iraqi forces, readers can already see where this is heading.

Update 1600 GMT July 14, 2007

• Lebanon The army continues its assault on the refugee camp where some dozens of Fatah Islam militants are still holed up; true to their word they are refusing to surrender.  This is the 8th week of fighting, though there have been extended periods without firing. 100 army soldiers have died. All civilians are believed to have left.

• Russia Suspends CFE In another escalation of the sulking fit Russian President Putin has been throwing of late over the proposed US deployment of an ABM interceptor battery in Central Europe, Russia has suspended participation in the Conventional Forces Europe treaty, one of the two landmark agreements that brought an end to the Cold War in Europe, the other being the nuclear warhead reduction treaties.

• Observers are saying the move is symbolic because Russia has neither need, money, or wish to build up its conventional forces to the point they are a threat. We beg to differ. President Putin is simply using the ABM interceptors as an excuse to reverse what he sees as Russia's humiliation after the collapse of the USSR. Thanks to its immense raw material wealth, Russia is increasingly rebuilding its tattered armed forces. Once you have a sword, you don't hang it up in your living room, you look for ways it can help you get your way.

• Russia has the right to secure its defense interests as it sees best. But if President Putin thinks his steady escalation on the ABM interceptor issue will get his way with West/Central Europe, he is likely to find his bullying backfiring.

• Indian Doctors And UK Bomb Plot We were rather proud that Indian Muslims have been conspicuous by their absence in terrorism against the west. So we are serving ourselves a third helping of Cold Crow since a third Indian doctor has been charged in the recently failed car bomb attempts in London and Glasgow.

• Nonetheless, there is a silver lining. The Indian doctors strengthen our argument that you cannot explain Islamic terrorism in all the standard ways such as nation, economic and political deprivation, and education. Indian Muslim doctors grow up in a stable thriving multi-ethnic democracy, and are among the highly educated elite, possessing excellent opportunities for financial success.

0230 GMT July 14, 2007

• Baghdad Success and Failure  So the US set off with 240 troops to kill/capture insurgents that are part of an Iran-linked group tied up with the terrorist al-Sadr's Mahadi Army. US says 9 insurgents and two civilians died; locals say 19 died, and much to our very great surprise, some of the locals appeared to concede some of the dead may have been firing at US troops. Normally, the Iraqis claim every last dead/wounded person is pure as the driven sand.

• Good job, US Army.

• The Iraqi contribution to this raid? 10 personnel, we guess they were interpreters.

• Bad job, someone. This is a tiny example of what we mean when we say the US training effort in Iraq is not on the right track, but in this particular case we have to frankly say there may be no way the US Army can train troops who will fight their own side. Shias are the majority in Iraq, they are the majority in the security forces - as they have to be - and al-Sadr's Mahadi army is Shia.

• So the US failure, as shown in microcosm by the 10 men - the Iraqi Army should have been front and center on this raid - is likely more political than military. The military can't make purses out of sow's ears.

• [By the way, we've never understood that saying because of course you can make purses out of sows' ears, they just wouldn't be particularly attractive.]

• Afghanistan We actually believe the US is doing quite well in Afghanistan, in great part because its got the military training right unlike in Iraq. But there is no doubt the Afghans gave their own government and the US/West an extraordinarily long honeymoon, which as of this year is over.

• Chris Raggio sends an interview with an Afghan governor which shows why, while the great majority of Afghans are grateful to America for its intervention, problems are starting to come up. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19734160/site/newsweek/

• But remember, folks: a great thing about Americans is they learn quickly from their mistakes. They are the greatest self-criticizers of all time. So we know readers will look at the article positively, as in "Hey, we can do better."

• One reason we're failing in Iraq is that its President Bush's policy, and he has managed to convince all of us for years now that self-criticism about Iraq is treason. This "asking questions, showing doubts means treason" is a good part of the reason the USSR collapsed.

• The Expanding Vortex Jerusalem Post reports that a hard-line Iranian newspaper with close ties to the regime has editorialized that Bahrain is part of Iran. Iran laid claim to Bahrain in 1970 just before the then British protectorate voted for independence. The ruling family is Sunni, but 60% are Shia and 25% of those are from Iran. The analysis below bears on this development.

• Look, We Love America But...So for some time the media has been covering the case of this youngster who was sentenced to 10 years for engaging in sexual activity with a 15-year old girl. He was 17 at the time, and already we know our Euro and South American readers - if we have any - are clutching their heads and groaning in pain. Anyhows, to their credit, a good many people realized this punishment was plain stupid, so a law was passed saying something like if the persons involved are both minors - we freely admit we haven't understood the new law - they should not be prosecuted. Seems sensible to us.

• BUT: the law does not apply to  this youngster, who is now of age. While he has been released from jail, the public prosecutor is threatening to retry him and so on - again, please forgive us for our inadequate understanding of the legal niceties, this really isn't our field.

• Okay, so so far we have no comment. If you live in America you have to accept this kind of thing, this craziness is what makes the Americans the Americans, you can't have the good without the bad and the tea without the lemon or whatever.

• BUT: even we were a bit taken aback at a new development revealed in the on-line media. Try and follow, folks. The act happened at a party and someone videotaped the act. So the videotape is evidence. Everyone with us so far? In this particular state, evidence in a case is public property - we assume after the case is judged. Being public property, anyone can ask for a copy of the tape - we're taxpayers after all - and apparently 3-dozen people have asked for copies of the tape. what kind of people would ask is a matter we will not touch. Hang in there, people. We know this is complicated but you can do it.

• Okay, so we still had no comment: what more craziness when you start with crazy? The problem, people, is that the federal attorney for the area has stepped in and says that possession of the video could be possession of child pornography - very, very serious thing in the US, and presumably the state is facilitating distribution of child pornography and so on. The state on the other hand says a public document is a public document and...

• Okay, sorry about that: at that point even we, who love America, couldn't take it any more and went back to something simple, like Iraq...

Why the US Will Lose Its Iraq War: Part I - Diplomacy

• Diplomatic Efforts To Stabilize Iraq We wanted to continue on the theme of the Iraqi security forces and how, in large part because of the way the US is training them, they are going to lose the war. But we got sidetracked by an NPR debate between Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Republican of Texas, and some other senator, Democrat. They didn't agree on much, but they agreed that the US has to get the neighbors involved in stabilizing Iraq. Here's a CNN quote along the same lines from two other senators: The Lugar-Warner amendment will also call for "an urgent diplomatic effort in the region to repair alliances, recruit more international participation in Iraq, deal with refugee flows, prevent aggression, generate basing options, and otherwise prepare for future developments,"

• News for the good senators: the regional states are already 100% involved in Iraq. And they are involved as enemies or neutrals. And they will not alter course because it is not in their interests.

• The regional states are Iran, Israel, Saudi, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. Scratch Israel unless you want to add more fuel to the fire.

• Re Egypt what is it the US wants Cairo to do? Send troops? Ha ha. Accept refugees? Ha ha. Send reconstruction teams? Double Ha ha. Try and convince other states to act constructively in Iraq? Triple Ha ha. Why all the Ha ha? Egypt is a weak state with very grave problems of its own. It doesn't want to get involved, and while it has some influence with other states re the Palestine question, it has no influence with anyone on Iraq.

• Jordan Ditto Egypt, in spades. Plucky little fellers, those Jordies, and every bit of their energy is going into keeping their country going in the face of the storms that are engulfing the region. Also, minor problem: Israel, as in "US is lapdog of Israel". Israeli security means Jordan's insecurity because for Israel to be secure, all those pesky Palestinians have to go somewhere, and Israel thinks Jordan is home for Palestinians.

• Iran One question: why should Iran help the US? Iran is working to establish itself as the dominant power in the Mideast. Is the US willing to concede this role to Iran and to pull out of the Mideast? No? Then fuggedabhat Iran. And if anyone is thinking that the US can coerce Iran's cooperation, that's a Ha ha raised to the power of a Ha ha.

• Syria As above, except Syria doesn't want to dominate the Mideast, it just wants the west to get out and leave it alone to do as it wants at home and in Lebanon. Is the US prepared to do that? No? Then forget it.

• Saudi This pleasant desert kingdom is very seriously involved - on the side of its Sunni brethren who, in case the good senators have not noticed, are a bit anti-American. Why should Saudi help stabilize Iraq? So that Shia dominance of the Mideast can be assured? Ha ha.

• United Nations/The Rest of the West Can the good Senators bear a very simple truth about the UN/The Rest of the West? if they can, they'll understand why you cannot rely on them for any help. You see, just about the whole world regards the US occupation of Iraq as illegitimate. Just about the whole rest of the world wants the US to crash and burn in Iraq. Why do you think so many countries are willing to help in Afghanistan but will do nothing in Iraq? And is the UN/Rest of the World mad to want to get involved in Iraq? No one can sort out this mess. Absolutely no one. America, you've done such a great job of creating such a huge foul-up, no one can help - assuming they want to in the first place.

• Back in the Good Old USA, its talk, talk, 24/7 with everyone and his aunt coming out with theories about why Iraq is so critical and we must do this and we just do that. All this talk is drowning out the reality - as it is meant to, because America cannot face the reality. We blew it. Notice we say "we", because in its own tiny, tiny way, Orbat.com is also responsible since we supported the entire venture. And still do, we must be quite nuts: our beef is America is not taking Iraq seriously enough to win. The reality as far as the rest of world is concerned, however, is that Iraq is broken beyond repair. The Palestine thing is broken beyond repair. The Iran thing is broken beyond repair. US Mideast policy is kaput, in capital letters 10-kilometers high which are faced with gold and diamonds. US has neither the power, nor the legitimacy, to get anyone to help us in Iraq.

0230 GMT July 13, 2007

• The Iraq Interim Report Personally, we think its a dumb report. First, the 18 benchmarks were set up by the Administration. When you get to frame the questions you can get the answers you want. Second, how on earth is a wide-ranging change of strategy supposed to work in a few months? Even the September deadline is dumb. The whole thing is simply politics as usual.

• For which the President can blame himself, because he played politics when he sent in the extra troops and sold the surge on the grounds that if it didn't produce results he'd reconsider. He has reconsidered, and it's more of the same.

• America has gone through Iraq strategies faster than the editor's students go through expensive news shoes. For his 9th Graders, six months is about tops for a pair of shows if you want to remain cool. For the President to now say "give this strategy time" is silly because until the surge, he had all the time in the world to make his preferred strategies work. Much of the country - and your editor - remained quite clueless that things were going from bad to worse each year.

• The President wants us to pretend that the last 4 1/3rd years didn't happen, and this strategy is going to work and it's just starting. Yes folks, that great presidential spokesperson Mr. Tony Snow actually said the other day that we're just beginning in Baghdad. What Mr. Snow forgets - if he ever knew - that America won the battle for Baghdad in April 2003. That was the first time. Depending on how you count it, it won again at least once more, perhaps even twice more. So this is like the movie Groundhog Day, except people are dying and $10-billion/month is being spent.

• Flashback to an alternative universe: Tet 1968. President Johnson tells the nation we are just stepping up to the plate. We have just begun the fight. What's the reaction? Hint: little men in white coats.

• Flashback to another alternative universe: 1945: President Roosevelt tells the nation the Marines have just assaulted Tarawa for the umpteenth time. They are securing it - for the umpteenth time. We are just stepping up the plate, we're just starting. What's the result? Little men in white coats.

• Now, we don't blame the President for spinning. That is the American Way today. But you know what happens after a point? People stop believing you. That has already happened.

• Red Mosque Toll is said by the Pakistan authorities to be around 108. This being South Asia, take that figure with a pinch of salt, particularly when the Pakistan Army says no civilians died at its hands. No one can clear a place like the Red Mosque without killing civilians. We would not have blamed the Pakistan Army if - say - 200 civilians had been killed.

• But then you have the looney tunes head of Pakistan's biggest Islamic party, who says 400 to 1000 civilians were killed. We say no civilians were killed. Where's our evidence? Obviously we have none, but neither does the mullah. If he can make up facts, so can anyone.

• And what is the mullah's remedy? File a lawsuit! Is everyone sure this guy is not actually an American in disguise?

• Baffling Fact Someone tells us that actually the Iraqi Army was paid after being disbanded, and continues to be paid to this day. Our reaction: "Say what?"

• If this is so, why have not the people who were hammered for disbanding the Iraq Army themselves not corrected the record? Its four years on, for heavens sake, and none has defended himself?

• We think our source is having a little fun at our expense, but if what the source says is true, we will be the first to issue a recantation.

• Pakistan Army Commands One of the great perils of defense journalism today is that if you want the money or the exposure, you'd better have your say instantly ready for when the press comes calling. And you can end up being very, very wrong at times.

• This is the best we can come up with as an excuse for those South Asian journalists who have - to put it politely - erred in their analysis of Pakistan's decision to set up a Northern and Southern Command, and put in the works a Central Command.

• Pakistan has always controlled all its corps from GHQ, without a field army level layer in between. That might have been okay when Pakistan had a few corps, for example in 1971, when it had just three. But in latter years, when it built up to 9, this was obviously not a Good Thing. Incidentally, one of the 9 itself commands a corps-sized force besides its 3 divisions.

• Anyhows. So when Pakistan announced its new commands, Indian and Pakistani journalists jumped to analyze. Why now, they asked, seeing as the need has existed for years? It has to be because President Musharraf is trying to buy the army's loyalty by creating more 3-star posts was one popular explanation.

• At which point we got am email from Mandeep Singh Bajwa, our peregrinating South Asia expert who is usually conspicuous by his absence. The new commands, he says, are merely upgrades of the Pakistan Army's logistic areas. The move is administrative, to relieve corps HQ of various admin responsibilities. The logistic areas were set up to do that, but many admin functions that could be done by the log areas remained to the corps. Besides which, says Mr. Bajwa, the corps commanders would bully the log areas. Raising the profiles of the log areas resolves many of the problems.

• As for wanting to appease the army, Mr. Bajwa dismissed this theory. President Musharraf - or more accurately in South Asia vernacular, Mushy Bhai - does not want more senior generals to set himself up as rivals.

• The analysts who have written about the new commands made yet another mistake - Mirror Imaging. We shall have a lot of say about this tendency when we talk about the US training program for Iraq forces, which we are slowly coming to believe is deeply flawed and may be a big reason why things are not going well in Iraq. Analysts, both Indian and Pakistani, on hearing "command" immediately assumed the Pakistani commands were like the Indian. India has six operational commands that function as field armies in wartime but are geographically based. Incidentally, the Indian system is as much deeply flawed as Pakistan's, if for different reasons, and maybe one day when we feel like boring our readers more than we usually do, we'll talk about it.

Why Iraq Will Lose Its War: Part II - Manpower/Money

• The US Military Is Mirror Imaging It is creating an Iraq Army along the lines it believes make sense for Iraq. But does the Iraq Army as is being organized make sense for Iraq? We don't think so. There are several ways to look at this.

• Let's start with how many dollars are required to kill an insurgent. Let's say that in addition to the $120-billion/year Iraq supplemental, US is spending $80-billion from its regular defense budget, total $200-billion. The Iraqi budget can be rounded off to $10-billion/year.

• Lets assume US has 350,000 troops/contractors in theatre; Iraq has 600,000. So lets say $210-billion and 1-million forces.

• Now lets assume US/Iraqis are killing 100 insurgents a day. So approximately 30 people are required to kill 1 insurgent per year, at a cost of $5.4-million an insurgent.

• With the US out, Iraq would need to bring its forces up to 1-million at a cost of $16-billion a year. This is doable: If Iraq spends 15% of its GDP of $55-billion (its present percentage) and US kicks in $9-billion a year, you have what you need.

• Please note, though, for the money being spent, US/Iraq are maintaining the status quo: neither side is winning. But lets leave that for now.

• First Conclusion: the Iraq security forces as organized by the US are affordable if the status quo is to be maintained.

• BUT: Very Big Problem Alert Iraqi forces will not have the efficiency of US forces. If you assume US is offing 2/3rds of the insurgents, Iraqi forces require 83 persons to kill one insurgent. To kill 36,000 requires 3-million forces at a cost of $50-billion a year. Iraq has a 28-million population, of which 5.5-million are Kurds and don't want to get involved, and 5.5-million are Sunnis, most of whom don't want to fight for the government.  Assume you're looking at 20-million, and we can agree that just to maintain the status quo you cannot indefinitely mobilize 15% of the population. Moreover, you are looking at $50-billion, which with Iraq contributing 15% of GDP means US is spending $40+-billion a year. Friends, once the US leaves, no one in their right mind is going to agree to a subsidy of $40-billion/year - to maintain the status quo. We assume the US keeps training, anti-invasion and anti-Al Qaeda forces in Iraq, say 60,000 plus 40,000 contractors, and US will be spending $60-billion on its own forces. $100-billion to maintain the status quo? Not going to happen - US people/Congress will not accept.

• At this point you catch the flaw in our argument But Iraqi forces will improve as the US continues to train them, you say. True. The counter to that the Iraqis are requiring 83 persons to kill one insurgent with the US doing all the heavy lifting. They are not killing their share of insurgents on their own, but with the US providing firepower, mobility, logistics and so on.

• What will improve is the Iraq Army. The police are never going to improve, and they are the ones who have to fight the war on the city-block/village level. The former Ministry of Interior National Police, on which the US lavished huge effort, has had to be stood down from CI because it is sectarian. Now the US wants to make it into a gendarmerie and is doing its best to weed out sectarian elements. The minute the US starts leaving, this force will revert to its bad old ways, particularly because now they are being tasked with police/armed police duties. The only force on which the US can exert real influence is the Iraq Army, which right now forms 33% of the security forces. So how much increase in efficiency can the US get from the other 67%, which is the former National Police and the ordinary police?

• Indeed, as the Iraqi Army grows larger, it will become harder and harder to get efficiency increases out of each increment of 10,000 men because you will have to reduce standards as you take up more and more of the population into the security forces.

• And so far we have not talked of winning - only of maintaining the status quo.

• The US is at liberty to delude itself, as it has been on the question of the Iraq security forces all along - we will resume the discussion of why we think the US has been deluding itself.

• Second conclusion: But going on the above, it will not be a good idea to assume that on their own the Iraqi forces will ever get to the point they can do the needed job because neither the needed manpower/money will be available.

• We have to leave off for now. We assume our readers are gasping and panting to give their responses as why we are wrong: please don't restrain yourself. Fire away.

To be continued

0230 GMT July 12, 2007

• US Report Says Al Qaeda Has Rebuilt Itself despite six years of war aimed at crippling it reports Jerusalem Post. The report also says AQ is considerably stronger than a year ago.

• No one suggested that finishing off AQ was going to be easy. But why is it stronger than it was a year ago? Has not the US been attacking AQ non-stop in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan to note just the main theatres?

• Then we read a baffling statement by a US official saying he expects strong AQ retaliation in Iraq because 26 of its leaders have been killed/captured and it needs to reassert itself. Pardon us, but shouldn't the killing of so many of its leaders weakened AQ making strong retaliation less likely? [We thought we read the statement in CNN in the morning yesterday, but when we went back to look for the article we didn't see it. It was a different article from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19700127/ where the US domestic security chief speaks of possible AQ attacks in the US this summer, or Times London http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1687360.ece which warns of summer attacks on UK.]

• Our point is simple. Are we then to take it that the left-liberal slogan "We are creating terrorists faster than we are killing them" is correct? And is the public permitted to know why the shadow war is not succeeding?

• Did We Miss Something? We now learn that Fox News on May 1, 2007 said that the AQ terrorist leader who succeeded Zarqawi after the latter was killed was himself offed, possibly by bounty-hunters or by Sunnis sick and tired of his terror regime. Any of our readers know about this?

• A Bigger Army: William Arkin Makes a Point We know Mr. Arkin primarily as an inconoclast on nuclear weapons, which shows how up to date we are. He has become a blogger on the terror war. In his post http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2007/07/wouldbe_recruits_vote_with_the.html he raises a point we, as advocates of a bigger army, have not fully appreciated. He says with the Army failing to meet its present targets (we hope this is a temporary thing) how is a bigger army to be recruited?

• We have been arguing for a bigger army for some time and his point gives us a pause for thought. After thinking, this is our position. We have shown no interest in the piddling increases the government has authorized - 30,000 troops by 2012. We have argued for many more divisions - between six and twenty depending on the assumptions we use that day. So our plan required between 250,000 and - say - 1-million more troops. And we've been very clear that that means a draft.

• The chances of that happening are exactly zero. The main opponent is the army itself. It doesn't want draftees, it doesn't want the training load that goes with draftees, and it does not want any scrutiny of its workings, particularly not by Congresspeople - who we freely admit used to be a Royal Pain In The Fundmentals in the days of the draft. Right now you have a small band of brothers, volunteers all, who do not complain no matter how short a stick the Army gives them.

• Our response to the Army's position: war is too important to be left to the generals. We need more troops, now. If the Army/Government thinks there will be no support for a draft, then maybe its time to ask why is there no support? Its said a gazillion times: wars cannot be fought without national support. If the Global War On Terror lacks support sufficient to institute a draft, America needs to get out fighting GWOT the way it has, because fighting it on the present model with insufficient troops is going to lead to disaster.

• So You Think Mr. Bush's Ratings Are Low? We haven't bothered reporting the President's tanking approval ratings. For one thing he pays no attention to them. For another, we base our case for withdrawal from Iraq on its own merits, and it would not matter to us if no one agreed. For the record - and this surprised us - a recent poll says 70% of the public wants a total withdrawal by April 2008. We didn't think the immediate withdrawal - as opposed to reduction - percentage would have reached that high so fast. But we digress.

• The President's ratings are at 29% according to NBC/Wall Street Journal. Okay, but let's look at Congress's ratings: 14% according to a recent US Today/Gallup poll. And it's easy to guess that the reasons are different. President Bush may be 100% wrong on Iraq, and he may be one of the most mule-headed leaders in the world - easily outclassed by Zimbabwe's President Mugabe, to be sure. But he is acting on conviction, right or wrong. Congress acts on who pays it.

• We do need to note what one of those Washington insiders once told us. People hate Congress, but they love their Congressperson. They hate special interests, but they adore their Congressperson for bringing home the bacon.

• We have a solution for all this. People should be elected to lead by popular vote. But isn't that what already happens? No. Those who are elected are the ones who stand for election. We are saying no one should be permitted to stand for office. The people decide who should represent them, vote, and the winner gets dragged off, screaming and kicking, to do her/his service. If someone refuses, they get locked up for the term and the runner up is chased and captured by the National Service Police and made to serve.

• Red Mosque Operation Over We learn the mosque and its attendant religious school cover about two city blocks and below street level is a warren of underground tunnels/rooms/spaces. This allowed militants to shift positions unseen. The militants had machineguns and mines aside from assault rifles, grenades, and rocket launchers, and strongly resisted. In close quarters fighting the attacker is at a huge disadvantage to begin with; the peculiar architecture of the mosque complex contributed to the time required to clear it.

• Pakistan Army said clearing would take one hour. We are the last ones to make fun of the Pakistan Army on its claim. Your editor was in India when Operation Blue Star, the focus of which was clearing the Golden Temple - Sikhism's Vatican - of extremists. Then too the Army boasted the militants would be defeated in hours.

• Blue Star 1984 It took a division worth of infantry (9 Division plus 15 Division to block roads leading to the Temple)  five days to complete the operation (1 Paracommando, 9 Kumaon, 9 Garhwal, 10 Dogra, 10 Guards, 12 Bihar, 15 Kumaon, 26 Madras, combat team 16 Cavalry/8 Mechanized Infantry - 1 tank squadron plus one mechanized company, Special Frontier Force detachment, mountain artillery battery to clear the Temple. Officially, 80 army soldiers died, including scores of commandoes who were shot down as they entered the Temple. 800 or so defenders died - this figure is disputed, we are using the one given by a police officer who was sent to remove the dead from the compound.

• The situation was, of course, completely different. The militants in the Red Mosque were few and were irregulars. The Temple's defenders included hundreds of ex-army personnel with 10-30 years of service, with a former major-general to lead them. They had also fortified several buildings outside the Temple. And the Army was told not to damage the Temple, so heavy weapons were initially not used. Just as with the Mosque, the army was very concerned about the civilians inside. The whole thing was a big mess, largely because the Army completely underestimated the opposition and overestimated their own capabilities.

• The Indian Army will never again make mistakes such as happened in 1984, and we can reasonably say the Pakistan Army too has learned its lesson.

• The Sun and Global Warming We forget to mention that if the Sun does not cause global warming/cooling, someone has to explain how/why earth's temperatures have suddenly shut up/down in past ages.

• Walter E. Wallis wants to know: if there is no connection, what happened to the oceans of Mars? Maybe the Sun didn't make them disappear, but something did. Mr. Wallis, might a shifting orbit around the sun be responsible? Earth's orbit is said to change, so the same thing may be happening here.

• http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/glob-warm.html is a good place to start if you are interested in the Sun/Earth-temperature connection. We learn that precise measures of the Sun's temperature have been available only for 30 years; one source believes that the Sun was responsible for only 1/4 of recent warming; and during the Little Ice Age 1400-1700, at Earth's coldest point - Maunder Minimum 1645-1715 AD - 50 sunspots were detected per year as opposed to 1000 times that in latter centuries.

0230 GMT July 11, 2007

• Firing at Red Mosque Continues Into Tuesday Night says Jang of Pakistan. Government sources say fierce resistance still continues. Government gives the toll as 70 militants and 12 security forces killed, but warns that as yet many bodies may remain to be recovered.

• At 0530 Pakistan Time, which is about midnight GMT, after a 45-minute silence heavy blasts and a resumption of firing was reported.

• Reading between the lines, we think we have an explanation as to why the Red Mosque leader refused to accept government terms even though the government was in effect surrendering. After all, exile to your home village is not exactly a punishment, particularly as the federal government's writ does not run in many parts of Pakistan.

• One Pakistan minister says the mosque leader demanded safe passage for the foreign militants and the deal broke down as that Pakistan could not permit. At first we thought the leader was so consumed by his own importance and at getting the government to back down that he overplayed his hand.

• On reflection, we think he was taken prisoner by the foreigners in his own mosque as the endgame approached, and told he either got them safe passage, or he was not going to get to leave. Subsequently he was killed in the firing. Let us see if we are right.

• Iraqis Say 140,000 Turkish Troops On Border and say because all their troops are tied up on CI, they have nothing to send to the border.

• We hear that Turkey has 20-30,000 along the Iraq border and about that many back of the border. Of course, Turkey is operating on its own territory and can reinforce when needed, so this debate of how many are at the border is a bit irrelevant. Moreover, 40-60,000 troops is 3-4 divisions and Turkey will have a lot of armor, so even those at/near the border can capture Kirkuk before the Kurds can stop Turkey. After that it will be guerilla war on the Kurds' home ground, we just don't see how Turkey can hold Kirkuk or its L of C.

• Before we forget: readers will remember that if Kirkuk votes for Kurdistan later this year - and the Kurds are making sure it does, the Turks have said they will intervene to stop Kirkuk from joining Kurdistan.

• We also need to mention that it doesn't matter what Turkey's concerns are, it can't just walk across an international border. That's called aggression, in case Ankara doesn't get it.

• We think Ankara does get it and has no intention of invading. It is playing a game of chicken with the US and counting on the US to stop the Kurds "or else we'll do it". US is going all wobbly - a US official says Turkey's concerns are understandable but territorial integrity must be considered first etc etc.Suppose Syria or Iran threaten to invade Iraq the US would be down on them before they had completed the statement.

• We wish we knew what hold Turkey has over the US. For a so-called ally it sabotaged the 2003 invasion of Iraq and enormously complicated the US task. US needs to tell the Turks where they get off: and that's on their side of the border.

• Brazil To Resume SSN Program Brazil renounced its pursuit of N-weapons 20 years ago and also shut down its nuclear-powered submarine program and cancelled planes for more civilian power plants.

• The Brazilian president says that the SSN program will be relaunched and will complete in 8 years, and that more power reactors will be built.

• Personally we think the submarine reactor schedule is way optimistic. The Brazilians may want to talk to the Indians about how difficult this sort of project is because you need to drastically keep down size and weight as well as get the reactor to work flawlessly. There's no 70% utilization and time outs to solve problems as with civilian power reactors: other power plants can make up the shortage. For warships, however, there are no time outs, and since nuclear submarines are the new capital ships, not having the boat up and running when you need can become awkward.

• Good Ecological News - For A Change Washington Post writes that the Aral Sea is recovering. apparently WaPo picked up on science stories published earlier. The shrinking of the Sea was because the Marxist planners diverted water in the 1960s from two rivers flowing into the Aral, so that more water was available for irrigation. If you were a Marxist a little thing like creating the world's greatest ecological disaster was hardly worth discussing - the capitalist pigs were no doubt to blame.

• So three decades later the Sea shrank to one-third its size; worse, rising salinity killed off the fish. Then in 2005 a new dam was constructed - but this time to feed fresh water to the Sea, and lo, within 10 months 13% of the lost area was recovered, salinity fell, fish returned/were reintroduced, and the depth of the sea also increased. We assume that as yet data for after May 2006 is yet to be released.

• What's remarkable is how quickly Nature recovers if you give it a chance. We've mentioned the regeneration of the Chernobyl are that followed the forced removal of population/farmers after the N-accident.

• Global Warming-Solar Radiation Link Disputed Those who maintain global warming is a hoax took a big blow on the schnozzle after a research team found no link between increase in solar radiation and warming. The team says radiation has decreased in the last 22 years but there has been no cooling.

• Readers will recall we'd mentioned that some scientists think global cooling will be the problem starting around 2014 because the sun is due to enter a period of considerably less radiation.

• Of course, the global cooling lot have yet to respond to this new study.

Update 1130 GMT July 10, 2007

• Pakistan Army Storms Red Mosque For reasons not yet explained, the Red Mosque leader rejected the terms offered him by the Pakistan government, even though the terms amounted to an almost complete surrender by the government.

• Agencies say government forces then attacked the mosque. 8 soldiers and perhaps around 50 militants are dead; another 50 militants are in custody; somewhere around 70 people including children managed to escape.

• Without question the Pakistan Army will capture the Mosque. The issue that seems to concern the media and on which it is basing its estimate of success or failure is that of civilian casualties. A high toll, says the media - western media - will create problems for President Musharraf.

• We respectfully disagree. Pakistanis who oppose the government will have been opposed to any action on the Mosque. Those who support the government will understand that civilian casualties are the responsibility of the militants: the government gave anyone wanting to leave - including militants - several days. Many of those remaining remained by choice, others were stopped from leaving by the militants. In either case the responsibility for what follows is not that of the government.

• We also do not believe the success at the Mosque in any way changes the increasing weakness of the Pakistani state in the face of rising fundamentalism. The Mosque stands in the heart of Islamabad, which together with its twin city Rawalpindi is the center of Pakistani civil and military power. You would at expect that the government has control over its own house. We feel it is too late for the government to reverse the process by which the Red Mosque came to so openly challenge the government in its own house even though the government will shortly win the siege.

• President Bush To Explain "Vision" On Iraq, Not To Reverse Course According to the Washington Post, which bases its story on numerous administration sources, President Bush will not reverse course on Iraq despite the growing revolt in the Republican party. Rather, the President believes he has been unsuccessful in getting out the message about his Iraq strategy and that what the people want is a vision - American-speak for plan. He will now focus on explaining his plan and hoped for outcomes.

• We see no point in commenting on the President's decision; the facts on the ground - another Americanism - speak for themselves. For him to reverse course would be uncharacteristic and to go against everything your editor has been told since January, i.e., that Mr. Bush will not pull out of Iraq.

• As such we were surprised at the story the other day that the US Secretary of Defense was preparing for a pull-out, and we wondered who had leaked that story to the newspapers. We don't doubt Mr. Robert Gates is working on such a plan. But it didn't seem to us to be The Plan, and we were right. The interesting part is why was the plan made and who talked about it to the press. Perhaps we will learn that at some point.

0230 GMT July 10, 2007

• President Musharraf Bails On The Red Mosque We'd been hearing rumors he was about to do this but decided to withhold judgment till the endgame. The endgame is here. Government has offered a full pardon to the Mosque leader - we will be put under "house arrest" in his home village; others inside will be let off. Formalities are being discussed; this may take time as no doubt the leader will be quite full of himself.

• Now, we really don't think it's our business to criticize President Musharraf. He is in a very difficult situation - of his own making, to be sure, but nonetheless. In one sense anything that avoids bloodshed is good. But to let insurgents/terrorists/militants get away because you don't want to take the consequences of cracking down on anti-state elements is to undermine the state.

• People will argue that the state has already been undermined plenty by General Musharraf and Company, and before that by the civilian prime ministers Bhutto and Nawaz-i-Sharif, and before that by President Zia-ul-Haq who staged a coup, and before that by the civilian ZA Bhutto and so on. Indeed, undermining institutions of state authority has been the order of the day since the foundation of Pakistan. In India we went through a similar, but much more attenuated process, with Mrs. Indira Gandhi 1969-79. But in the end, even she had to take second place to state institutions, which rebounded and have continued to grow stronger.

• The issue here is that we fear, along with many others, that Pakistan as a state is on a downward spiral. The government historically already had a weak control west of the Indus River. That was fine as long as the West-of-the-Indus lot stayed West-of-the-Indus, which was the historic bargain all Indian rulers have made. But now the extremism that was hatched during the Soviet invasion is taking over the west, and is gushing into the East.

• The Red Mosque  issue was an example of this development. By looking for compromises, President Musharraf has perhaps only acknowledged the obvious, that he is becoming steadily more powerless. But for those of us who worry about Pakistan, his compromise on the siege will only accelerate the downward spiral.

• The United States, on one level, is quite aware of what is happening. It's not clear to us the Indians are as aware. But neither country has the least clue of what to do when the cow manure hits the fan, which seems to us only a matter of time.

• We have some ideas, to be set down in a forthcoming book if a deal with a publisher can be clinched. But even at a superficial glance, containing the Pakistan fallout is going to make Iraq look like a kiddy picnic.

• On Iraq Training and Propaganda A reader who does not want to get into a public controversy in these pages objects to our phrase "US propaganda" with reference to the training of Iraq's security forces. He has been embedded with several Iraq Army units and has the opportunity, first hand, to see many others at work. They are not American soldiers, he says, but training an army under existing Iraq conditions is complex, and definite progress is being made.

• Let us first state that we know our reader is sincere, honest, objective, and has spent a great deal of time in Iraq. Your editor last visited Iraq during the period the Baath seized power. [There goes his chance of a date on Saturday night, now that readers know how old the editor is. But in any case the two women who read Orbat.com are happily married.] As they say in Iowa, much water down the Ganga has flowed and all that. What he knows about Iraq is second-hand.

• Nonetheless, the people he talks to are also sincere, honest, objective, and have spent/continue to spend a great deal of time in Iraq. Rule #1 of analysis is listen to the first-hand lot, but remember, they are very close to the issue. So Rule #2 is to also listen to those who are informed, but at a distance. We do that too. Rule #3 says there are many truths, and even those who are close or more distant will have only a partial understanding. So Rule #3 requires one's own analysis of facts - take no one's word. We could go on Rule #4, that it's impossible to know the truth, ever, but that would not be of much use to our readers.

• Okay, so first an apology to our readers. If you are familiar with the editor's shorthand, unless he specifically says "US military", US means the administration, the Pentagon. The US military at no time since General Petraeus took over done any propaganda on the state of Iraq's security forces. The US military used to put out bland assessments that detailed how many battalions were raised and how many were in the lead and so on, but would never go back and say: "We did say the police in XYZ have taken over the show but we forgot to tell you is that one month latter they all disintegrated." Absent the qualification, which also should have been put in along with rosy, glowing reports about the progress the security forces were making, we say it was propaganda, and we hold the Pentagon, administration etc. responsible for misleading the public.

• Your editor ignored Rule #3 and mislead himself: it will be really wrong for him to say he personally was misled; after 47 years in the business (whooops - we're revealing our age again) there are no excused. Your editor was asleep at the switch because he was too invested in wanting the US to win, and too invested in saying the Main Stream Media were a bunch of jerks - which they were and which they stopped awhile ago. Your editor has made his mea culpas ad nauseum.

Why Iraq Will Lose Its War: Part I - Follow The Money

• Here we argue that once the US starts drawing down, Iraq will not have the money is needs to win this war - assuming it wants to, of course, but we'll talk about that later.

• The US has consistently underestimated the number of security forces required from 2003 onward. This does not mean those making the estimates are idiots. It means they were making Freeze-Frame estimates. Once the film got rolling again, those estimates had to be trashed because without exception the Iraqis did not perform as needed, plus the situation got worse, so that more forces were needed.

• Lets assume that one Iraqi division when up to snuff will do the work of a US brigade - the Iraqi division can never get up to US skill level, moreover, it will never have the mobility/firepower/intelligence/logistics that the US has, so the trade-off is reasonable.

• Currently, with 10 Iraqi divisions and 20 US brigades, the US may at the very best be holding the status quo. So its not unreasonable to think that Iraq needs 30 divisions. That ends the debate right there because there will never be enough money. The Iraq defense budget plus direct US contribution means $13.5-billion for 10 divisions and the whole shmoo of Border troops, infrastructure protection, police, paramilitary and so on. If Iraq triples to 30 divisions, it doesn't have to triple the non-army forces, but the bill will double to $25-billion. Iraq does not have that money.

•  Our very simplistic analysis ignores a glaring reality. US is NOT spending $4.5-billion on Iraq defense budget. That is the pro-forma, bookkeeping payment made to Iraqi MOD. US is spending billions more to support Iraq forces out of its own budget. How much? We don't know, but we are sure some of our readers can make a back-of-envelope estimate. US is spending $100-billion/year in Iraq, we don't think its unreasonable to assess a minimum 10% as support for the Iraqis. That would mean Iraq needs $35-billion.

• But it cannot spend much more than the $9-billion it already is. Is the US public going to agree to $25-billion/year subsidy for Iraqi forces? We doubt it will agree to more than $5-10 billion and even that will come under fire.

• We also ignore another glaring reality. The US is basically running Iraq. Corruption is wholesale, but it is being kept in check by the Americans. Once the Americans hand off to the Iraqis, billions instead of hundreds of millions will be diverted. So even the money that is available will in reality be less than the official figure.

• As Marx used to say, follow the money. Our first point is that as the Americans withdraw, money will run so short Iraq will not be able to afford the security forces it needs. The Iraqis will lose the war.

0230 GMT July 9, 2007

• Monday Morning Silence Around Red Mosque In Islambad says Jang of Pakistan. Firing went on all Sunday morning, but by the early hours of Monday there was no activity. A UAV was in the area. More Pakistani troops have entered the area.

• London Times Says US Defense Secretary Preparing Pullout starting with one brigade in October, then 4 more by Spring 2008, returning to pre-surge levels, and then more withdrawals bringing US troop levels down to 70-80,000 before the 2008 election.

• We have no information on if Mr. Bush has told Mr. Gates to draw up a plan because Mr. Bush is going to order a withdrawal, or if Mr. Gates is simply doing contingency planning on his own initiative. After all, contingency planning goes along with the job of SecDef. The article is at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2042072.ece

• New York Times Wants Iraq Pullout - Now Chris Raggio sent us the NYT editorial, and it says just about everything we've been saying. This leaves us feeling Not Pleased. We don't want the NYT for company. As it is many of our readers are upset about our Iraq stand, no matter how many times we repeat we are looking at the issue in pure military terms, and that ideologically we are 100% for the American World Empire. Now after the NYT piece, which you can read at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/opinion/08sun1.html?hp there are going to be more people upset with us.

• Nonetheless, underlying how serious the situation is, yesterday Washington Post had one of its "insider" articles saying that since there is no chance at all surge goals are going to be met by September, Mr. Bush is preparing to produce a much narrower set of goals as his justification that we are making progress.

• The article says what we have known for some time from our "insiders": the President is making key decisions purely by himself, no one knows what he is thinking. Sorry, folks, we know what he is thinking, and it's very simple. He's thinking: "No one is going to pin Iraq on me, because it isn't my fault". Mr. Bush is on his "I am alone but I am principled and I will proceed regardless of what anyone says" trip, something he has been increasingly on of late, and is the reason why he is getting nothing done at home and abroad. He is not the emperor, but the president of a republic. To get anything done he needs to build consensus, and to build consensus you have to avoid doing the Joan d'Arc thinggy.

• What Mr. Bush and Co. need to understand is that the people are fed up with the lack of a strategy, they are fed up with the lack of results, they are fed up with objectives that are continuously changed when they are not met. You can do this a couple of times in a war, you cant keep doing it every six months. Say what you want about American corporations, but had a CEO produced the kind of excuses the administration specializes in, s/he would have been out within a year

• It is not that the people of America don't want to win. They are patriotic to a fault, they have supported their commander-in-chief to the hilt for a great many years, and he has to listen to what they are saying. We think they are saying: "You are not the man to lead us to victory in Iraq, and you've messed up so badly no one can win at an acceptable price."

• Bill Roggio's Latest Iraq Forces Orbats can be found at http://billroggio.com/archives/2007/07/iraqi_security_force_1.php His team has detailed on the 3 new Iraq army divisions - 11th (Baghdad), 12th (North), and 13th (South) being raised in 2007-08 plus lots of details on where Iraqi and US brigades are. Generally we love this stuff, but we are so disillusioned with the whole show and so tired of being taken for a ride by US official propaganda that we simply noted it pro forma and muttered to ourselves: "so now the Iraqis have 3 new reasons not to do their job".

• What we did find interesting, however, was the comment by an Iraqi officer that Iraq needs 20 divisions. Since the situation keeps getting worse, more and more divisions are required. US started with 3, which admittedly was not in touch in reality. Then they went to 8. By the time 8 were stood up, the plan was for 10. By the time 10 were stood up we needed 13. And doubtless Iraq will need 20 by the time the 13 are stood up.

• Now, since the US will start leaving regardless of what Mr. Bush wants, 20 are not going to be enough. US has 20 brigades in Iraq, and each is worth an Iraqi division. Those brigades have to be replaced by Iraqi forces. Pretty soon you're going to have people say 30 divisions are needed.

• And Bingo! you are back to the days of good old Saddam, when the Iraqi Army was by far the largest in the Arab world.

• This is all lovely, and we can blow kisses at the Iraqis forever, but who is going to pay for this? Iraq is already spending an incredible 18% of GNP on defense, $9-billion on a GNP of $53-billion; only $4-billion of the central budget is left for everything else. In addition to Iraqi money, US is paying $4.5-billion towards Iraqi forces. If $13.5-billion pays for 10 divisions and the rest of the security infrastructure, how is Iraq going to pay for 20? Oil output is not increasing, and that's the only source of revenue.

• In other words, people, the game is up. You read it first at Orbat.com. Iraq is never going to be able to afford the forces it needs to win the war.

0230 GMT July 8, 2007

• Red Mosque Siege Continues Pakistan commandoes led by their battalion commander attacked the mosque from the rear; the purpose of the operation is not disclosed; however, he was wounded and died shortly thereafter.

• Security forces are blowing up sections of the Mosque wall to permit those inside to escape. One assumes the purpose is also to permit the security forces to make their final assault.

• In our opinion, while no one seems to know how many armed fighters are inside, and while we concede some many be students, the level of resistance being put up indicates the Pakistan security forces are facing a considerable number of professionals.

• Jang of Pakistan says firing continued into the pre-dawn hours of Sunday.

• Meanwhile, there is a mystery concerning who fired on the President's aircraft the other day. The AA gun and machine gun found on the roof of a building near the airport were thought to be the weapons employed, but Pakistani security forces say the guns had not been fired.

• NY Time Says US Aborted Raid On AQ In Pakistan This was a 2005 mission to capture Osama's deputy. You can read the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/washington/08intel.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp

• In case you're waiting for us to blast the civilians for failing to go through with the raid, you're going to be disappointed. Mr. Rumsfeld took an operational decision, and from the very little the article says, he was likely right. No blame here.

• What we want our readers to consider is the NYT statement that the raid grew from a small number of SEALs to several hundred people as the project moved up the chain of command. That alone should have been reason enough for Mr. Rumsfeld to stop it, in our opinion.

• Our point is that that here we were in the year of our Lord 2005. We'd been on international CT ops for donkeys years, say at least since 1998. But still the higher echelons of the US military didn't seem to understand the SOF concept.

• Successful missions have to be planned and executed at much lower levels of command. They have to be done quickly. They have to be undertaken with the very clear understanding you are taking a big risk - and that it's OK to take risks when you're doing SOF missions. You as the senior commander have to give permission for the subordinates and the SOF people to fail. If you're going to sit there bulking up a mission so that you provide for this contingency and that contingency, you're planning a conventional operation and not an SOF mission.

• We believe we can say with utmost certitude the US spends more money on its SOF than the whole rest of the world put together, but is getting a horribly low return per dollar or man invested because the mentality of the top people is completely wrong, completely confused, and completely lacking of military relaities.

• Its not just that we have a President, Vice President, SecDefs etc who forget everything and learn nothing. You also have a military command structure that doesn't know how to fight anymore. Oh yes, when it comes to smashing 30 divisions in a straight conventional fight, the command structure knows what to do. But - Point 1 - we aren't in that kind of a war. And - Point 2 - the US has such an immense conventional military capability that even a bunch of blithering idiots at the top would win the war in short order.

• The editor's father used to say that in the industrial age war had become a matter for managers, not for warriors. He believed - and we agreed - that the US wins because it has better military managers. But when you're talking SOF, you're talking not about managing, but about - gulp! The horror of it all! - fighting.

• Managers cannot fight.

• The Space Shuttle: What Went Wrong Your editor, obviously having less of a life than your typical aphid, got to wondering what went wrong with the Space Shuttle. It was heralded to usher in the age of cheap space exploration, $100/pound delivered to orbit, versus $10,000/pound then prevailing. Shuttle missions were supposed to take off with the frequency of Moscow buses - we haven't been to Moscow in recent history, but in the Good Old Days, no one ran for a bus in Moscow because the next one was reliably around the corner.

• Instead we got a monstrously complex vehicle that does 6-10 flights a year, and a back-of-envelope cost of ~$20,000/lb (Assume 120 payload missions at 20 metric tons payload each; $100-billion program cost).

• No sooner did your editor wonder than he got the answer using Google - and a sensible answer, which as you know is near impossible to get out of any search engine. The answer is in a blog post at http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002399.html It says when the Shuttle was conceived, it was supposed to develop incrementally: 10-metric ton payload, 20-metric ton payload, a pure passenger version, and last, a 50- to 100-metric-ton lifter.

• The problem became that in order to sell Congress on the program, NASA had to meet military needs, and that meant the K-11 reconsat: 15-metric-tons, (we note that K-12 was already in the works, 19-metric-tons). Bye-bye incremental design plan. In the event, no K-11 was ever launched using Shuttle.

• Now, our instant analysis is just that, instant, and doubtless the issue is a lot more complex. The point is - as we have repeated ad nauseum - that if you go for the gold standard right from the start of developing a weapon, you are in for a heck of a lot of trouble. You have to use the incremental approach, which the US used to use in 1940-1960 and the Russians used till 1980. It was the Germans who went for the gold standard - more on this another day.

• Wait a minute: did we just say "weapon"? The Shuttle is a "weapon"?

• Well, that's another thing that went wrong, and this is purely our theory so we can't give you a quote. NASA sold the Shuttle to the public as a transportation system that would let us commercialize near-earth space. This caught the public imagination at a time when the public was pretty disappointed that the US, which as a consequence of 2nd Indochina stopped believing with technology any problem is soluble, had cancelled the "To Mars By 1980" thinggy that was supposed to follow Apollo.

• The problem was that - as we know well - that Congress has to appropriate the money, and there were many in Congress who were as depressed as the public and no longer wanted to spend the people's money just to be the first and the best. Of course, the complete and utter failure of the USSR to keep up with the US also played into this. By 1968 it was clear there was no space race any more.

• So while Congress was/is willing to shoulder any burden in the name of defense, it wasn't interested that much in civilian exploration/exploitation of space.

• The Shuttle would likely never have been funded except that it was actually a weapons program. The civilian spin-off was frosting on the cake.

• It wasn't just reconsats - the military uses an immense variety of satellites, and it wasn't just satellites. It was also ABM defense and defense against orbiting Soviet space stations - within their capability - and American orbiting battle stations and so on.

• One of the very, very odd things about the entire Shuttle program is that the whole shmoo takes place under the glare of the most intense media/public scrutiny, but at all time we, the Jose Shlubs, actually know only part of what the mission is about. The whole defense part, which may even be the main part, is completely hidden from the public eyes. This is a uniquely American way of doing things - more on this another day.

• So when you have the Shuttle being driven by military needs, you are going to get a ghastly mess from the civilian viewpoint. Since the first - and only - priority is defense, cost is irrelevant. Other things played into this, notably the attitudes of the government space community - bigger is better and so on.

• So instead of getting a Shuttle that steadily became cheaper, less complex, and more reliable - as happens with civilian goods, you got a Shuttle that became more expensive and so on, as happens with military goods.

• Which reminds us - we wanted to refresh our memory on the follow-up programs to the Shuttle. So please excuse us...

• In case you haven't had your laugh quota today: "It now takes hundreds of workers and months of refurbishment before a Shuttle can fly again; Second Gen's goal is to require a handful of workers and just a few days before the vehicle is ready to go up into space again." They will need only a week's preparation for reflight, compared to today's 5 months. They will fly a 100 times a year, compared to today's 10 times or less. With the technologies developed, the probability of losing a crew will be no worse than 1 in 10,000 missions-roughly the same as the risk of losing a military jet fighter. And the cost of delivering a pound of payload to low-Earth orbit will drop from $10,000 to $1,000 per pound." This from a NASA site for high school kids http://www.nasaexplores.com/show2_912a.php?id=01-057&gl=912

• As the great Ronald Reagan used to say, "There you go again."

• Letter From Walter E. Wallis On Iraq Contractors Back in my Army (Korea), while I was a volunteer, many of my buddies were drafted. Very few of us were fighters, most of the grunt work was done by the guys who lacked a tiger in their tank. The recent term, tooth to tail, suggests you put your money into tigers and hired the camp following out. Being un coerced and highly paid, the Halliburton camp followers are extremely cost effective.

• I  am reminded of the story of a military transport delayed leaving Adak because the toilet tank had to be pumped out. The sailor assigned to do the deed was perfunctory and sloppy. When he was finally done, the Plane commander let his distaste be known. The sailor listened, then said "Sir, I am stuck in this frozen pesthole, away from any recreation, stuck for the rest of my hitch and draining poop for a living, Sir, what will you do to me worse than what has already happened?"

0230 GMT July 7, 2007

• Red Mosque Siege Continues as Pakistani security forces blow up a fuel tank used to power generators inside the mosque. Electricity to the area has been cut as a pressure tactic. Jang of Pakistan says firing went on all through Friday night and into the early hours of Saturday, interrupted only by rain and wind - the monsoon should be underway.

• Meanwhile the mosque leader who was caught trying to escape says he was forced to wear a "burqa" before he was paraded before the media. This doesn't make too much sense to us. Without a disguise he had no chance at all of escaping as he is well known, and the women's all-encompassing garment is as sensible a disguise as any.

• Also meanwhile, someone took pot shots at President Musharraf's aircraft as it took-off on a visit to flood-hit areas of Pakistan. A anti-aircraft gun and a machine gun were found on the roof of a house near Chaklala Airport in Lahore.

• By the way, we should clarify we think the man's dressing as a woman was cowardly and inappropriate not for the reason the Pakistanis are giving. They say he preached the absolute separation of men and women and here he was dressing as a woman. People, as far as we are concerned, if you have to escape all bets as to dress etc have to be off. We're more concerned with this gent's helping create a situation of confrontation with the government, then screaming every day that he is ready to die for his religion, and then he decides to get out, leaving behind a whole bunch of women, children, and students, many of whom are teenagers. This to us does not seem right.

• British Conclude No Foul Play In Former Spy's Death This is the son-in-law of the late President Nasser, who was a double agent for the Israelis, and who fell from his fourth floor balcony. The story about him is quite complicated. Read http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/878889.html if you like spy stuff.

• OK, So Now We Know Why One Of The UK Doctor Bombers decided to do what he did. He didn't want to be a doctor, he wanted to be a mullah. But he comes from a family of medical professionals, so he became a doctor to keep Mummy and Daddy happy. At work he spent so much time on Islamic websites he was warned for neglect of his duties.

• His family are prominent and wealthy Sunnis; when Baghdad fell so did their fortunes. They lost several houses in the US attack; other houses, rented out, became useless when tenants refused to pay rent. So he got very, very, angry. Besides which a friend was killed by a Shia militiaman.

• Seems to us this gent would have done better to attack the Shias or the Americans/Brits in Iraq or military targets elsewhere. Attacking civilians in a country that has welcomed you and given you a chance of a fresh start seems cowardly to us. Especially since the majority of Brits are opposed to the war.

• One of the two gents who rammed the jeep into Glasgow Airport is from India. He's the one with 90% burns. His family has identified him to the Times of India.

• His brother is in custody and allowed to talk to his folks back home for 3-minutes at a time. Oh, these crazy, soft-hearted Brits. Has this gent done something like the British bomb attack in India, and gotten caught, he wouldn't be talking to his family for three minutes at a time. The rest we leave to our readers' imagination.

• We'd love to Indian bomber's story - we too are quite softhearted. Should he survive, we will nonetheless applaud enthusiastically as the Brits put him away for a few decades.

• ACLU At It Again So there is this group that stages protests at soldiers' funerals. Are they protesting the Iraq War? Not really. They are protesting homosexuality. The deaths of these soldiers in Iraq is a punishment, they say, for America's toleration of homosexuality. Okay, you ask, why should God particularly target US servicepeople for their country's acceptance of homosexuality?

• Well, you can ask, but we can't give a reasonably reply. Just because your editor lives in America doesn't mean he's an expert on all the whackos he co-exists with.

• So at one of these protests one woman allowed her 10-year old kid to stomp on a US flag and got herself arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor etc etc. So what does the ACLU do? Rushes to her defense.

• It will be the usual free speech argument. No concern about how this group is violating the rights of the survivors - or do they not have a right not to be heckled and abused at the funeral of their loved one? We guess not. No concern about how this lady is violating the rights of those of us who think stomping on the American flag is offensive. We obviously don't matter.

• One reason America is in the mess it is in these days is precisely because of single-agenda people like the ACLU. Nothing else matters but their agenda. No one has rights but the people ACLU says have rights.

• You want to hear our theory? Our theory is that God is indeed punishing us. The offense is something your editor has no clue about - God has only rude things to say each time your editor tries to contact the diety. So your editor can't say WHY God is punishing us. But there is no doubt She/He is punishing us. Why else did She/He inflict on us an ACLU who thinks an important issue of the day is defending those who desecrate the flag?

0230 GMT July 6, 2007

• Pakistan Opens Assault Against Red Mosque says Jang of Pakistan, saying firing and explosions have been going on all through Friday.

• Earlier, the Government refused immunity to those left behind after an amnesty deadline passed. Perhaps 1200 people took advantage of the amnesty.

• While some reports say only a few dozen students are armed, others say the students have grenades, rocket launchers, and explosives, and are using them.

• The Pakistan Army has joined in the assault with its Special Service Group as well as troops from the 111th Infantry Brigade.

• Letter From Afan Khan On Comparing Indian and Pakistan Approaches To CI I must disagree (respectfully) with your comparison of the Kashmir and East Pakistan insurgency. The Indians were "soft" because they could afford to be, the situation in Kashmir has never even been a shadow as bad as it was in E Pak back in March of '71, from Dec '70 onwards Awami League  thugs had taken over the wing by March 7th , Pakistani control existed in , Dacca cantonment, Dacca airport , the Governor's residence and the roads linking them, the local police and administration had all defected plus as Gen Shaukat Riza points out in his excellent book, 60% of the troops and all of the signals and engineer units were Bengali and they too had defected or were uncooperative. The Pakistani situation was very different and much much much worse than for India in 1989. The latter already had 3 corps stationed in Kashmir before the insurgency began.

• Editor's Note Any comparison we may have made between the two insurgencies is inadvertent because, as reader Afan Khan notes, the situations were quite different. What Pakistan experienced was a civil war that later became an insurgency. Bengali troops mutinied in East Pakistan and joined the civilian rebels; in Kashmir India faced only an insurgency at all times. Another big difference: Pakistan crushed the Bengali revolt within two months using methods that were exceptionally brutal, but effective. The rebels then began an insurgency, which Pakistan also crushed. It is only when the Indian Army/Border Security Force got actively involved that the situation changed against Pakistan.

A Case For The Truth On Iraq

• The Australian defense minister has said loud and clear that the need for energy security is a big reason Australia is in Iraq. We applaud this gentleman for his honesty and suggest it is time for the US government to similarly come clean.

• The irony of America's refusal to identify its interests in continuing in Iraq are many, but we'll focus only on two. First, there is absolutely nothing wrong in working to secure your energy supplies. This is a completely legitimate reason to go to war. Second, if the government would just come out and talk about energy security, the people will be much more supportive.

• The first reason the government gave - WMDs - was a pathetic failure. Mind you, we believe that was a honest mistake and we have never attacked the government on that point. [For one thing we always took that to be the cover story: we believed the WMDs were there, but were not a threat to the US].

• The second reason - democracy - is now so failed that not even President Bush, Master Denier Of the Universe, talks about it any more.

• The third reason, that leaving Iraq will result in an expansion of terrorism against the US, is such a huge reach that it's difficult to buy. When the President brings that up, his opponents quickly say "but till you went to Iraq there was no terrorist threat". So this post facto circular justification does not sit well. Further, there is absolutely no evidence that AQ and other terrorists will survive very long once the US gets out. The Iraqis are famously xenophobic, they will kill the foreigners much more efficiently than America ever can. They tolerate the foreigners only because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".

• Resource security, on the other hand, is clear, simple, and a religious belief for the great majority of Americans.

• But - a warning if we may. If Americans believe that "energy security" means more obscene profits for the President's friends, they aren't going to go for it.

• In this connection, may we ask the President a question: Sir, to what extent is the provision in the Iraq oil bill that requires Iraqis to permit foreign ownership of Iraqi oil companies your work or the work of your subordinates? We ask because this is one very contentious feature in the bill - just one, to be sure, but a big one - that has been holding up acceptance of the bill.

• Now, between you, us, and the editor's Teddy Bears, Sir, the oil bill has no chance of being passed, and if it is passed due to the US sitting on the Iraqis, there is no chance of it being honored. The reasons have little to do with the foreign ownership, repugnant as that is to the hyper-nationalistic Iraqis.

• Still, we need you to come clean on your role in this oil bill. We personally will be thrilled and delighted if you say you have no role in it and you have forbidden anyone who is your friend or known to you from taking advantage of the bill. We believe you to be a honest individual, and we think its very sad that by permitting others to profiteer in Iraq your reputation has been sullied. But it's the old "not only BE honest but BE SEEN as honest" thinggy.

• To restore your credibility with the people, you need to be seen as honest. You are a good Christian person, we truly believe that. As a Christian you know that if a person's motive are not 100% straight arrow, things are going to go very wrong for him. So come forward and reassure the country. If your friends will gain from the passage of the Iraq oil bill, acknowledge that as a mistake, ask for forgiveness, and show the country that no friend of yours will gain a dollar - s/he is barred from gaining a dollar precisely because s/he is your friend.

• That will still leave the problem of coming up with a winning strategy. May we get a bit mystical here? We know you won't mind, because you are, at heart, a mystic, and not a "realist" - whatever that word means. If your cause is true, your strategies will also run true. If your cause is built on falsehood, that will lead to wrong strategies. To win at anything means being able to look at the problem without passion, without personal involvement, without hope of gain. That attitude strips away what the Indians call "maya", illusion, and gives you a clear and true insight into the problem.

• Energy security: Americans need it, they are entitled to it. There are many ways to achieve it. Iraq may be one way. But the current strategy is the wrong way under any conditions. The current strategy - let's be honest, Sir - is designed to release you from the obligation to say: "I messed up." As such, it is not an honest strategy. Energy security is a national imperative. Sparing the president from having to take responsibility for his mistakes is not a national imperative.

• It's not too late to redeem yourself. You did it once, when you decided to stop drinking and stop being the twisted person you had become as a result of the alcohol. We have faith in you. We know you can redeem yourself again. We believe in George W. Bush. Now it is time for George W. Bush to believe in himself.

0230 GMT July 5, 2007

• Islamabad Red Mosque Developments The leader of the Mosque was caught trying to escape the Mosque while dressed in women's clothes. Bad show and all that: we though the man was going to go down with his students rather than surrender or run away. Totally anticlimatic.

• Reuters reports 8 explosions earlier today but says the source is unknown. AFP says security forces created the explosions as a warning to the students.

• The government's siege of the Mosque continues. Jang of Pakistan says more reinforcements have arrived.

• A suicide bomber killed himself, six soldiers, and 2 children in an attack on a military convoy in Bannu, North West Frontier Province.

• Xinhua of China quotes Pakistani officials as saying 1200 students have surrendered.

• Chris Raggio sends a Time.com from-the-scene report on the confrontation: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1639817,00.html

• Iraq: Our Bad The armor required for one Mine Protected Vehicle is 4-tons, not 2-tons as we had said.

• Iraq: Contractors Los Angeles Times says there are 180,000, based on figures it obtained from the US government. This number includes 118,000 Iraqis, 21,000 Americans, and 43,000 foreigners.

• Nonetheless, if you cut down the 180,000 figure to account for locals the US would have directly employed such as in previous wars, it's probably not unreasonable to assume something like 100-150,000 contractors are employed doing jobs that previously would have been done by US troops.

• Iraq Oil Output Still Below Pre-War Totals We're saying this quite seriously, folks: if in previous wars US had gotten such dismal results 4 years into the fight, there would have been heck to pay. We're starting to wonder if its the Iraqis we should be holding to benchmarks or the US government.

• UK: 33% Of Men, 24% Of Women Says ETs Have Visited Earth Problem 1: We have all met ETs. In case you've forgotten what they look like, get a mirror. Problem 2: As for other ETs visiting Earth. Presumably a civilization advanced enough to travel galactic distances would want to carefully evaluate a planet before landing. So who is crazy enough to want to visit Earth?

• Gaza Kidnappers Say Israeli Soldier Handed To Hamas The same Army of Islam that was holding the BBC journalist and was "persuaded" by Hamas to hand him over so he could be freed is holding the Israeli soldier kidnapped last year from Gaza.

• AOI says it has handed him over to Hamas. Jerusalem Post quotes an Israeli TV channel which interview the AOI leader as saying Hamas gave AOI money and weapons in exchange for the soldier.

• We don't know what BBC paid to get its man freed, but it's reasonable to speculate the Israelis will pay plenty to get their man back. Among the things Hamas will want is for - at the minimum - hundreds of its people who are in Israeli jails to be freed.

• We all rightly condemn the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers to be used for bargaining chips. Let's not forget the Israelis regularly and systematically kidnap Palestinians to use as bargaining chips.

• In the West, we don't say the Israelis are kidnapping; we say they are arresting wanted terrorists. We do need to remind ourselves that the British authorities in colonial America considered American freedom fighters to be terrorists.

• Now, while we are not equating Americans of that era with Fatah and Hamas and all that lot, could it not be argued that we are refusing to do so because we are biased? Palestinians say they only want the land that was taken from them by Israel. In the American War of the Revolution there was no lingering problem: the Brits who wanted to stay in America became Americans, and the British government simply went home. After all, it had the whole rest of the world to play in, and India alone was worth a hundred times what America was worth in terms of cold, hard, cash to be made. The Brits made a business calculation and decided to cut their losses.

• The Palestinians cannot do that, they have no home to go back to because the Israelis are sitting in their house.

• We don't like Hamas or Fatah and there are days we think the Palestinians need to blame themselves for their predicament in equal measure to their blame for Israel. But we also want people to understand that because the Palestinians are powerless, they have no choice but to resort to the tactics of the weak, which involve insurgency and terror. Saying the Palestinians have no right to fight back is the same as the Americans saying the native Indians had no right to fight back or the Brits saying the native Brits in America had no right to use force to fight against the Crown. Saying it may make one feel righteous, but it's self-serving.

0230 GMT July 4, 2007

• [Update 1530] 700 Surrender At Red Mosque says Reuters, leaving an unknown number inside. Estimates range from several hundred to several thousand.

• About 100 females among those surrendering were let go; the males were loaded on police buses. The government has promised $85 and safe passage to each person leaving the mosque.

• Government says the toll is 16 dead but that there may be more bodies inside. Power has been cut off to the mosque.

• Pakistan Red Mosque Students Attack Paramilitary Post in Islamabad; 9 persons are dead, and 30 injured in firing. From time to time we've given stories about this fundamentalist movement that has established itself in the heart of Pakistan's most modern city, Islamabad. 5000 students live in the mosque and they have hostages. Pakistan government does not want to move on the mosque for fear of provoking a backlash.

• But yesterday the students moved on the Pakistan government, attacking a paramilitary post and seizing 4 more hostages to add to their bag.

• Pakistan Government Prepares To Move Against The Mosque says Jang of Pakistan, quoting the state's interior minister. The minister says no attack is imminent, but the government wants to blockade the area.

• Dawn of Karachi reports that the government has reinforced security forces around the mosque and ordered evacuation of nearby buildings. With an additional 500 paramilitary Rangers deployed, the total is now 1500 plus 500 police commandos. Dawn says both sides are digging bunkers.

• Hamas Militia Surround Gaza Group Holding BBC Journalist Hamas has been demanding for some time the Gaza group - Army of Islam - that kidnapped a BBC journalist release him. Hamas does not want the attention and opprobrium the kidnapping has generated.

• Jerusalem Post says yesterday Hamas surrounded an area where the Army of Islam is holding the man. The AOI released nine Hamas people it had kidnapped and then Hamas released 4 AOI people. This is all supposed to be preparatory to the journalist's release, but no one is counting chickens at this stage.

• One civilian was killed in an exchange of fire between Hamas an AOI.

• Oxford Coroner Back At It This is the gent who has been holding inquests into the deaths of British soldiers in Iraq. For a change he is not the blaming the Americans for something and instead holding a British tank battalion commander responsible for not communicating a boundary change between two British tank battalions. This led to a tank from each regiment firing on the other and the deaths of two tank crew.

• We have yet to see an explanation of what this wretched man is doing and why. Does he think war is some kind of a soccer match played under the tight supervision of nannies and that a battalion commander is a nanny that can be held responsible for errors? Is a battalion commander supposed to issue an order in the middle of a battle - this was 4 days into Gulf II - and then make sure every single tank of every battalion in the area gets the message?

• This coroner is the same clown who insisted that the deaths of a dozen Royal Marines on a US Marine CH-46 that crashed in the first hours of the invasion was the fault of the US Marine Corps. The Corps said the helicopter crashed in a sandstorm after the pilots became disoriented.

• Not so says our all knowing coroner. The helicopter crashed due to mechanical failure and the USMC said it was a sandstorm to cover up.

• And what exactly was USMC covering up?

• Get ready for this, folks. If it was known the helicopter crashed due to mechanical failure, the USMC would be held liable for flying old/badly maintained equipment.

• Liable by whom? A British tort court? A US judge? For heavens sake, for every Royal Marine that flew on a Sea Knight in Gulf II there were a hundred Marines who did the same. Equipment failure happens all the time - aircraft in a desert environment are particularly liable to catastrophic failure. If your tank gums up due to and, it stops. But if your helicopter gums you you crash and die.

• Moreover, everyone and his dog knows the Marines take a perverse pride in keeping old equipment going by the liberal application of baling wire, Super Glue, and spit. No Army soldier in his right mind is going to get into a Sea Knight. And the Marines would say he's a sissy.

• We don't know the model/year of that particular Sea Knight, but the last CH-46 was produced in 1971. Likely 85% of Marines in Gulf II assaulting via the CH-46 were younger than the machine! Okay, so we all know the Boeing Vertol series of helicopters - CH-47 included - are the Methuselahs of helicopters. They seem to keep flying merrily years, if not decades, after other helicopters go the glue factory.

• At the same time, our point is that the Marines could give a hoot they were using obsolete equipment not Phit to be flown by a Phrog. Absolutely the last thing on any Marine commander's mind, on being told a CH-46 with Royal Marines aboard crashed, is "Ohmigosh! I'd better lie and say it's a sandstorm or we're going to be held liable for using obsolete equipment!"

• It is unconscionable for a dinky-butt civilian - a Phoreigner at that - to suggest the Marine Corps would cover up a maintenance mistake. Americans too were on board that helicopter, and hundreds, if not thousands, of CH-46 sorties were flown in short order. Safety gets paramount importance in US services. Mistakes happen all the time during operations and they are vigorously analyzed because the safety of your own men is involved.

• Does this man have the slightest idea of how confusing a battle involving armor is? Infantry, at least, moves at 4-km an hour. Tanks in a desert environment are busting along at 10-40 km/hour. Keeping track of units especially if a boundary change is ordered in the middle of an engagement is always hard, with tanks it's even harder. The British Army is a very small army and its officers and men are highly professional, highly trained, and highly competent. He needs to get off the back of this tank colonel and go get a life hugging his hot water bottle or whatever it is clowns like him do when not in court.

• US Finally Gets Mine Resistant Vehicle Program Going Some thousands are in Iraq and a total of 17,700 will have been delivered by 2009, one a 1-to-1 exchange with Armored Hummers. The vehicles cost an astonishing $1-million east, so we're looking at $18-billion just for this system

• Of course, no system is foolproof and the US Army has lost troops killed in MPVs. But they are a huge advance on the armored Hummers, which were a mockery of the requirement. Blasts that are inevitably fatal to an armored Hummer are likely to cause only minor injuries to an MPV, which features a V-hull to deflect blast away from the vehicle and is heavily armored.

• Washington Post says one company uses 2 tons of special armor plate for its MPV, and there has been an industrial shortage of that particular steel.

• Six Of 8 Detainees In British Bomb Plots Medicos Four are doctors, two other are students or perform other medical jobs. CNN says British believe as many as a dozen medicos may be involved, and that they were sent to infiltrate the British health service as covers.

• Doctors can be terrorists? Sure: this is Islamic fundamentalists you are dealing with. While confessing the other day we didn't understand why certain Muslims become fundamentalists whereas the overwhelming majority do not, we noted that conventional explanations don't hold up. We see this once again: these are highly educated persons presumably taught to save lives and serve humanity, not to detonate car bombs to kill people. They are neither poor, nor backward, nor ignorant.

• Add 1000 Contractors To The US Toll In Iraq That many have been killed and 11,000 wounded. A quarter are Americans. Reuters gives a figure of 130,000 Iraq contractors, so actually the US has close on to 300,000 personnel in Iraq including non-Iraqi allies.  Contractors are doing even intelligence gathering and analysis.

0230 GMT July 3, 2007

• British Police Blow Up More Cars at the Glasgow area hospital where one of the 2 jeep bombers worked. An eighth suspect is arrested overseas; three are doctors, including one from Bangalore, India. British police say none of those arrested was on a watch list.

• The British police say the London bombs failed to detonate because of a problem with the cell phones left in the cars. One phone was called twice, the other 4 times. The police got more leads by tracing the originating numbers.

• We earlier returned from dropping off a family member at Dulles IAP in Washington. Very light traffic and very few passengers, possibly because people are making this 4th of July into an extended weekend. Lots of extra police outside - we did not venture inside because visitors can no longer accompany passengers past the ticket counter and in many airports not even to there. Police looking bored, no one gave us another look - a quick count showed less than ten cars pulling in/out or unloading plus a couple of vans. No sign of the stormtrooper police with their attack dogs. One heavily made up TV lady at the start of the passenger terminal was preparing to give a speech live; we wanted to stop and complain how difficult it is for older, short, fat, bald, ugly men to get dates in Washington, which as far as we are concerned is the real issue, but didn't want to cause family member anxiety by delaying.

• Local Leaders Say Taliban Leaving Uruzgan Province It's near impossible to get a good idea from the media as to Afghan developments. You get exactly two types of stories. Story A: NATO on offensive, kills XYZ number of militants. Story B: Locals say ABC number of civilians killed in NATO air strike. As to what this means, what is the big picture and so on, of course not a word from the media.

• We were then heartened to read in the Frontier Post of Pakistan that 40 tribal elders of Uruzgan Province met with NATO officials to discuss next steps now that the Taliban are leaving the area. Readers may recall this province has been a hotbed of lawlessness - opium and banditry being the two main occupations; bringing Uruzgan under government control has been a big priority for NATO. And it seems it is succeeding.

• That doesn't change the big picture, which is there has been a significant deterioration of security and big losses of healthcare and schools. The Afghan people want nothing more than security, medicine, and education for their children. Which is why the Taliban seek to deny them just those things. And it is shameful in the extreme that Europe won't do more to help, and worse still so many Europeans who say they are socialists don't want their countries to be in Afghanistan in the first place.

• Our Least Favorite Dictator Is at It Again Professor Mugabe of Zimbabwe ordered a cut of 50-70% in the price shops can sell essentials, resulting in chaos and withdrawal of said essentials from shops in Harare. The every day escalation of prices in Zimbabwe's shops is all a British plot to remove him, says the good professor.

• We heartily agree and have dashed off a missive of support. We told the good professor that the British are responsible also for (a) the extinction of the wooly mammoth; (b) the imminent hypernova in Eta Carinae which can happen at any point in the next million years; (c) Paris Hilton's failure to get $1-million for her post-jail interview; and most important, (d) the editor's failure to get a date last weekend - and for the 600 weekends before that. We asked him to be of good cheer and stay strong: Bill Clinton is on his way to give him a big hug, Al Gore is booking a ticket to lecture him on global warming; and George Bush has looked the good professor's photograph in the eye and seen the good professor's soul. Which is a bit odd, as we thought the good professor's sole was on the underside of his foot, but what do we know, being from Iowa.

0230 GMT July 2, 2007

• [1430 GMT] Glasgow Terrorists Also Did London British police believe. So far the police think the 2 London cars were rigged to remote detonate via cell phone, but the bombs did not work. Two more suspects are in custody, making a total of 7. We must admit the 2 main suspects seem to be a determined lot: London did not work so they tried again at Glasgow Airport, and at least one of the men tried to kill himself.

• We say why deny him his chance to attain Terrorist Heaven? Return the death penalty, use Singapore Rules - firing a gun while committing a crime means the hangman, even if no one was hurt. Britain needs to ditto that for terror attacks, whether or not anyone is killed. This is not the IRA, which usually used to phone ahead to give innocent civilians a chance to clear out.

• [1430 GMT Update] US Identifies Hezbollah Man For Raid in which five Americans soldiers died. As we'd suspected, the raid was staged to gain hostages for the release of the 5 Iran Revolutionary Guard officers held by the US in Iraq, but it went wrong: 3 US soldiers died at the scene in a gunfire exchange, two were captured but found dead - we suspect something happened to spook the kidnappers and they killed their captives in cold blood.

• This gentleman was captured in a raid but pretended he was deaf and dumb so it took a while before he was identified. He is said to admit to being Hezbollah and to training Iraqi Shia militia on behalf of Quds Force, the Iran Revolutionary Guard lot who conduct military operations overseas.

• Which brings us back to Mr. Al-Sadr of the Mahadi militia who is hand-in-glove with Mr. Al-Malaki, prime minister of Iraq. Al-Sadr's militia staged the raid to capture US hostages.

• A spokesman for the militia says: "I say clearly that we do not accept any logistic, financial or any other kind of support from anyone outside the borders of Iraq." And we say clearly that unless the US hunts down and kills Al-Sadr, the US government for reasons of no worth is letting Al-Sadr and his patrol Al-Malaki get away with the routine murder of US nationals. To us this smells of treason.

• "What?" someone will say, "you are accusing the US government of treason?" Yes we are. Treason may not be the intent, but it is the outcome. Singapore Rules - intent is not important, the action is,

• [1430 GMT Update] US Military Attaché To Cyprus Found Dead He had been missing. The body was found in a wood near Nicosia. No details.

• June Iraq Terror Toll Down 1/3rd The number of bomb explosion was the same, but because there have been fewer mass-casualty events, the total deaths are down. US officials are sensibly making no claims about the surge working, though in our mind there is no doubt the additional five brigades are having an impact. Pity there aren't more brigades and people didn't figure all this out earlier, when the American public was still overwhelmingly committed to winning in Iraq.

• Al-Malki of Iraq, The Top Terrorist Fighter In The World So the US raided Sadr City, home ground for the militia of that soulmate of the Prime Minister, al-Sadr. US was looking for people with Iran connections, who have been busy blowing up US troops. 26 suspects were killed and 17 captured. So is al-Malaki happy the US has started tackling the most difficult part of reducing Iraq terror, i.e., attacking the Mahadi Army?

• Not a bit. He is so unhappy he has ordered Iraqi Special Force not to cooperate with the US on raids unless he gives the go ahead. He wants advance notice - so he can warn his fellow thugs to clear out of the way.

• How long are we going to have to put up with this scumbag?

• UK Continues Terror Cell Hunt Four men, including two doctors, and a woman are in custody as the British security forces continue looking for other terror suspects. All arrested are said to be foreigners. A vehicle outside a Glasgow hospital was blown up by police; they say it was connected to the vehicle attacks but gave no details. Unlike the London bombings, which required months to solve, leads are coming in on an "hourly" basis.

• The jeep did contain propane gas cylinders - yesterday we were not sure.

• The British Prime Minister says the leads in the London/Glasgow case point to Al Qaeda.

• The man who set himself on fire in the Glasgow airport attack remains in critical condition. His companion fought with police and bystanders who jumped in, and required considerable force to subdue. Unluckily for him, he was in the hands of the British police who seemed determined to take him alive. In the US he likely would have been shot to death the minute he exited the jeep and started resisting. But now he is alive, though hospitalized, and doubtless will soon be singing sad songs. We don't think the Brits are going to waterboard him or something similar, but they do have lots of experience from the 3-decade Irish insurgency in getting people to talk.

• World Tallest Building? We thought the tallest under construction are the twin Burj Towers in Dubai - 160 floors, 800-meters. Pravda, however, has a drawing of what it says will be a 1228-meter high, 300 storey building in Shanghai in 2020. http://english.pravda.ru/photo/report/dom-2057/6/ Pravda is quite jokey at times, but apparently someone has actually proposed such a building:  http://cerveraandpioz.com/bionic_megacities_v.htm

0230 GMT July 1, 2007

• Jordan King Rejects Confederation With West Bank To Israelis hard-liners, the problem of West Bank Palestinians having their own country is quite simple: they already have their own country, and it's called Jordan.

• Till Israel conquered the West Bank in 1967, it was administered by Jordan under international agreement. Gaza was administered by Egypt. As far as many Israelis are concerned, the West Bank population can either stay where it is after the area is permanently annexed to Israel, or it can move to Jordan.

• A wonderfully elegant solution to the problem. Unfortunately, if Palestinians move to Jordan - assuming there is space for them and it's not clear that's the case - it will spell the end of the Hashemite who have ruled Jordan for 90 years, and one can hardly expect King Abdullah to happily sign on to his own demise.

• Almost every issue concerning Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel traces back to the defeat of Turkey in World War I and the end of the Ottoman Empire. Jordon is no exception. The British in 1921 created Transjordan and put Abdullah's grandfather in charge. Grandpa was a son of the Sherif of Mecca and that's as far back as it's neccessary to go. [Obvious point alert: Transjordon = across the Jordan River, the kingdom of Jordan lies to the east of the Biblical river. Iraq - also created by the Brits - also had a Hashemite king.]

• The Hashemite were, and very much still are, in a minority. Perhaps because of that, the Hashemite were fiercely loyal to Britain. In 1967 Jordon lost control of the West Bank. And in 1970, the infamous and now thankfully dead International Thug Yasser Arafat tried to overthrow the Hashemite and gain a country for himself. He was defeated in a vicious civil war: the Jordanian Army was too well trained, and in the main, the Palestinians in Jordan too loyal to the Hashemite king who had treated them decently. [That's the Dad we are now talking about.]

• But now as then the Hashemites have to play a very careful, always watchful game to protect themselves. So you can see why the present King doesn't want another.

• Demographics: Jordan has 6 million people, an estimated 3 million are Palestinian. West Bank has 2.5 million Palestinians. Do the math, and clearly King Abdullah doesn't want a massive population shift to Jordan.

• But here is the odd thing Jordan is willing to accept confederation with the West Bank - back to the future - providing the issue of West Bank/Israel is permanently settled. Since Israel is not going to give up the West Bank, there can be no permanent settlement. End of the story.

• Another Do The Math. 1948 Israeli population of Jerusalem and West Bank = 800 (yes folks, eight hundred). 2007 = 500,000 approximately (yes folks, half a million). Moreover, Israelis are not settled in a compact, continuous area but are all over the place: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Westbankjan06.jpg

• Paradigm Shifts For The Arab-Israeli Problem 1st Suggestion: Israel declares Gaza part of Egypt, erects 10 meter fence along its border with Gaza, goodbye Gaza. Egyptians don't want Gaza, but who cares.

• 2nd Suggestion: Israel annexes West Bank, US/EU offer large sums to any Palestinian who is willing to become an Israeli citizen, offer to accept as immigrant anyone who does not. West Bank empties overnight.

• 3rd Suggestion: Israel reconquers Sinai, establishes independent Palestine; US/EU fork out $250-billion to give - say - 5 million Palestinians a good start in live.

• 4th Suggestion: US unilaterally announces end of protection for Israel and withdrawal from the Middle East; announces it will take any Israeli citizen as a migrant. Let the Israelis figure it out - they're Arabs too, and all Arabs figure it out. PS: it almost seems as half of Jewish Israelis are dual nationals of somewhere or the other anyway.

• Hamas Rejects International Force For Gaza Nothing unexpected here. President Abbas of Palestine has suggested such a force. It's a mark of his desperation that he should suggest so transparent a ploy to get himself reestablished in Gaza. The Europeans were building up to the idea of such a force when Palestine was united, as a way of reducing tension between Palestine and Israel, but that idea is quite dead right now for the obvious reason that Hamas has been saying all along it will attack any international force 

• 2 Men Ram Jeep Into Glasgow Airport Terminal but cause little damage except to themselves thanks to concrete pillars that prevented the vehicle from getting inside. There were conflicting reports on whether the jeep was rigged with explosive in the form of fuel. One of the men was in critical condition because he apparently doused himself with petrol before or during the attack.

• As expected, the British are being their usual nonchalant self about the recent incidents. Glasgow Airport was shut down, however, so the terrorists did achieve something.

• Meanwhile, British police continue to raid suspect houses and arrest people in the London 2-car incident. Because of the ubiquitous security cameras all over Britain, the police are said to have excellent identification on at least one of the London suspects.

• We've always thought it ironical that the British, who are among the world's fiercest protectors of individual privacy, should have embraced security cameras so enthusiastically. One of the factors was the long period of Irish terror. There is no doubt cameras work. In the Washington metro area, where traffic regulation by police is almost non-existent, there are huge battles over security cameras intended to stop red light runners because opponents value the privacy of motorists over the right of motorists to be safe at intersections. The bulk of our region's cameras - perhaps 30 of 50 or so thought more are on their way - are in Washington DC itself. The caution with which DC drivers function is quite extraordinary compared to Maryland and Virginia drivers. It is a rare day your editor does not see at least one person running a red light, and he is out each day only for about an hour.