And that’s it. Would you love to see that headline on a daily paper?
Iraq the Model’s post on this event is priceless. Read the entire post and enjoy the picture.
Investors Business Daily (hat tip rcp) examines the latest Iranian hostage crisis and asks “What would Churchill Do?
Excerpt:
Time was, the HMS Cornwall or any other British warship would have simply blown the Iranian motorboats that seized 15 British sailors out of the water. But these are the days when Western leaders run to the United Nations seeking meaningless resolutions of condemnation.
The problem with the West is we never get it. We never grasp the fact that appeasement, conciliation and endless negotiation do not work and that the only time documents achieve peace is when the words at the top read “unconditional surrender.”
And Churchill’s advice:
“If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
This is big news.
MarketWatch reports on China’s reaction to new US tariffs.
China strongly demands the United States to reconsider this decision and correct it as soon as possible,” China Commerce Ministry spokesman Wang Xinpei said in a statement on a government Web site.
In what’s seen as a big ramp-up in trade pressure on China, U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez on Friday imposed duties of 10.9% and 20.4% respectively on two Chinese manufacturers of glossy paper. See full story.
The move, which marked a reversal in policy for the first time in more than 20 years, was made to counteract alleged Chinese government subsidies to exporters and could set the stage for textile, steel and other U.S. industrial firms to request similar protection.
MarketWatch says coat-free paper imports from China to the US rose 177 percent in 2006 — and were valued at $224 million. The US annual trade deficit with China is $232.6 billion a year.
The NY Times also reports:
The Bush administration, in a major escalation of trade pressure on China, said Friday that it would reverse more than 20 years of American policy and impose potentially steep tariffs on Chinese manufactured goods on the ground that China is illegally subsidizing some of its exports.
The action, announced by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez, signaled a tougher approach to China at a time when the administration’s campaign of quiet diplomacy by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. has produced few results.
The step also reflected the shift in trade politics since Democrats took control of Congress. The widening American trade deficit with China, which reached a record $232.5 billion last year, or about a third of the entire trade gap, has been seized upon by Democrats as a symbol of past policy failures that have led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Mr. Gutierrez’s announcement has the immediate effect of imposing duties on two Chinese makers of high-gloss paper, one at 10.9 percent and the other 20.4 percent, calculated by adding up the supposedly illegal subsidies.
Xinhua (New China News Agency) has a report. It quotes Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesman Wang Xinpei as saying:
In 1984 the United States set the policy of not applying anti-subsidy law to “non-market economies”. Such a practice had been taken as a judicial precedent and had not been changed, Wang said.
Is China a “non-market economy” in 2007? In some ways yes, in some ways no. It is certainly an evolving economy, and one with leaders trying to stifle the liberalizing political conditions that would help it advance.
Stay tuned.
UPDATE: Welcome visitors from Chinese ISPs. (Since the site experienced four months of relentless DDOS attacks we’re watching traffic a lot more closely…)
The UN’s new Human Rights Council can issue a statement about Darfur, but can’t blame the Sudanese government for depredations, murder, and genocide in Darfur.
The lede:
The United Nations’ top human rights body on Friday stepped up the pressure on Sudan over Darfur, but stopped short of blaming Khartoum for widespread killings and rape in its vast western region.
A resolution, passed unanimously by the 47-state Human Rights Council, expressed deep concern at the “seriousness of ongoing violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in Darfur”.
The text, agreed after days of hard wrangling between European and African states, instructed Council special investigators into abuse, including torture and violence against women, to scrutinize Khartoum’s compliance with past international recommendations and report back in June.
Look, I’m glad the HRC did this much. But I’m with Human Rights Watch — the Sudanese government should be condemned.
Additional excerpt:
U.N. reports on Darfur have blamed Arab militias, which they say are armed and backed by Khartoum, for some of the worst atrocities, including mass rape and murder.
So the HRC statement condemns the situation but won’t condemn the perp. Former US UN Ambassador Bolton tried to make the HRC a “for real” human rights institution. But he’s no longer at the UN. The HRC is a farce in sheep’s clothing. (A purposefully mixed metaphor.)
According to the Reuters report, Amnesty International, “This resolution marks a major turning point” because African governments signed off on the statement. I’m not convinced. Sudan’s entire game is to buy time — to buy time to keep killing. Note the statement asks for a report in June. That buys Khartoum time. See this StrategyPage report from March 26 about the demographic changes that have already taken place — because Khartoum is buying time.
Time reports on a firefight near Forwarding Operating Base Warhorse that allegedly occurred on September 7, 2006.
Key paragraph:
A short Army press release issued on the day of the skirmish offered the following information: U.S. soldiers from the 5th Squadron 73rd Cavalry 82nd Airborne were accompanying Iraqi forces on a routine joint patrol along the border with Iran, about 75 miles east of Baghdad, when they spotted two Iranian soldiers retreating from Iraqi territory back into Iran. A moment later, U.S. and Iraqi forces came upon a third Iranian soldier on the Iraqi side of the border, who stood his ground. As U.S. and Iraqi soldiers approached the Iranian officer and began speaking with him, a platoon of Iranian soldiers appeared and moved to surround the coalition patrol, taking up positions on high ground. At that point, according to the Army’s statement, the Iranian captain told the U.S. and Iraqi soldiers that if they tried to leave they would be fired on. Fearing abduction by the Iranians, U.S. troops moved to go anyway, and fighting broke out. Army officials say the Iranian troops fired first with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, and that U.S. troops fell further back into Iraqi territory, while four Iraqi army soldiers, one interpreter and one Iraqi border guard remained in the hands of the Iranians.
The official release says there were no casualties among the Americans, and makes no mention of any on the Iranian side. U.S. soldiers present at the firefight, however, tell TIME that American forces killed at least one Iranian soldier who had been aiming a rocket-propelled grenade at their convoy of Humvees.
Read the entire report.
We know Iranian special forces operate within Iraq (and we’ve arrested several members of the Quds force), but do Iranian regular forces regularly operate inside Iraq?
For the third time.
ITWire has more.
Looking the XXX headlines and controversy, the larger issue here is “speciality” domain names for specific industries. We’ve orgs, edus, mils, etc. Should British Petroleum and Exxon have a “.oil” domain name?
StrategyPage looks at the “short civil war” fought in Kinshasha, from March 22 to March 25.
This comment addresses the political volatility:
Bemba has a substantial following in the country. Sending Bemba into exile could re-ignite the civil war in the Congo. At the present time Bemba is in the South African embassy. The Congo government, however, isn’t conciliatory. Kabila has accused Bemba of “high treason.”
The Jerusalem Post runs an article on Israel’s “Arrow” anti-ballistic missile. The US Missile Defense agency, under its former name, Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, took a keen interest in the “Arrow’s” development. I recall reading that it provided some technical support.
The lede:
Recent modifications made to the Arrow enable Israel’s ballistic missile defense system to successfully intercept and destroy any ballistic missile in the Middle East, including nuclear-capable missiles under development by Iran, Arieh Herzog, the head of the Defense Ministry’s Homa Missile Defense Agency, has told The Jerusalem Post.
In a rare interview that will appear in full in Monday’s Post, Herzog provides an inside look at the decision-making process behind Israel’s missile defense systems, led by the Israeli- and American-developed Arrow missile, one of the only operational ballistic missile defense systems in the world.
On Monday, the IAF successfully tested a newly modified Arrow interceptor.
Iran and Syria, Herzog said, were investing unprecedented amounts of money in long-range ballistic missile capabilities - with the help of North Korea - and had all but given up building modern air forces.
“The Iranians are continually increasing the range of their missiles,” he said. “They are buying technology and in some cases even complete systems from North Korea and other countries.”
Read the whole story.
UPDATE: One reason the “axis of democracy” is emerging in Asia is Japan’s fear of North Korean missiles.
The Times OnLine has an updated story with the latest information on Iran’s hostage-taking operation.
Iran initially gave coordinates (the correct coordinates) that placed the action in Iraqi waters. Iran later provided new coordinates, conveniently inside Iranian territory.
The Times report says the sailors and marines were “conned” and “ambushed.”
The lede:
The British sailors and marines being held by Iran were ambushed at their most vulnerable moment, while climbing down the ladder of a merchant ship and trying to get into their bobbing inflatables.
Out of sight of their warship and without any helicopter cover, their only link to their commanders was a communications device beaming their position by satellite.
That went dead as they were captured. One theory is that it was thrown overboard to prevent the Iranians getting hold of the equipment and the information it contained.
My column this week assumed the British sailors were surprised and out-gunned. I also argued that this had the marks of a planned operation on the part of the Revolutionary Guards. That’s what the Times reports.
Another excerpt from the Times:
The two Iranian patrol ships that seized the Britons were equipped with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns, enough for a small sea battle. By contrast, the Britons go lightly armed on vessels they search in the Gulf. Each man is issued with a rifle or a pistol
— The Iranians struck at a vulnerable moment when the Britons were climbing down a ladder to jump into their inflatables
— The Royal Navy does train its men in the techniques needed to fight at just such a dangerous stage. “They had all the rights available to act in self-defence under law,” a senior military officer said. But they were in an “almost impossible position”…
Iran is now demanding that the British admit their sailors and marines were in Iranian territory, despite the clear evidence otherwise. That follows the usual hostage taking script — a demand for kowtow. However, this hostage grab strikes me as being a beast of a different sort. My point of view is contrarian — I don’t think Iran is operating from a position of strength. Every target in Iran lies within an hour’s flight time (or less) of a US air base or US Navy carrier. Brinksmanship by the mullahs over Iranian nukes may have a domestic political pay-off. The nuclear ambitions, both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, link to nationalist aspirations. While brinksmanship over hostages has echoes of 1979, risking devestating airstrikes over 15 sailors nabbed under questionable circumstances isn’t going to play well domestically. Iran in 2007 is not a nation lit with revolutionary fervor. The mullahs don’t offer a bright and shining future; instead, they are burdened by a failed past and a flailing present. In 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeini faced a weakened Jimmy Carter. Today Iran faces a weakened George Bush. But a weakened George Bush wields a far bigger stick than Jimmy Carter did in his most muscular presidential moment (whenever that occurred).
Iran also faces new UN sanctions. It’s relationship with Russia is shaky.
The Iranians’ coordinate faux pas adds a strange Keystone Kop element.
The Times reports:
The Iranians also blundered in diplomatic talks by giving the British their own compass reference for the place where they said the 14 men and one woman had been seized. When Britain plotted these on a map and pointed out that the spot was in Iraq’s maritime area, the Iranians came up with a new set of coordinates, putting the seizure in their own waters.
This may prove to be a microcosm of Iran’s own situation. The Iranians had the tactical military operation planned but failed to coordinate the political cover story. That’s a media and diplomatic embarassment — hence a blow to Iran’s prestige.
The Iranian demand for kowtow may be an attempt by hardliners to bluff their way out of a strategic mistake.
Bill Clinton’s team –with James Carville as chief jockey– rode that line into the White House.
Oil prices have spiked once again (attributable to Iran’s crisis-stoking), but the US economy continues to its long winning streak.
Except the major media pays little attention.
Forbes Magazine’s Rich Karlgaard looks at that phenomenon on his blog.
Two of his three thoughts:
…the media seems constantly baffled by the strength of the U.S. economy.
What do you think accounts for this bafflement? I propose several reasons:
1. Editors and journalists, who mainly lean left and vote for Democrats, don’t like President Bush. They refuse to believe the economy can do well in a Bush presidency.
2. The recent financial performance of many mainstream media companies, especially newspapers, stinks
…
Read his entire post and scroll the comments as well.
Instapundit covers the terrain– and the contradictions.
The analysis vis a vis Webb’s dilemma and the rank silliness of so many gun control laws is dead on. The scandal is playing out in a way that makes it hard for pro-gun control advocates in the press to “spin” the story. Their typical spin involves “right wing gun nuts” and “militia types.” For the most part those push phrases are absent. This scandal involves Washington, DC (a Democrat political festung) and a Democratic senator (and thus that slender majority in the Senate).
I do take exception to the gun snob comments about the Beretta 92. That’s the civilian version of the M9. I could not hit squat with the service .45 I carried in the 1970s while on duty in Germany. The weapon was a rattle trap, which was no doubt part of the problem. However, a couple of the NCOs told me my accuracy problem “isn’t entirely the weapon’s fault.” Hah. Well, I agreed. I was adequate with a rifle, but the pistol? Yes, I can see the barn’s broadside. No, I cannot hit the barn’s broadside — not with my service .45.
But the Beretta I had in Iraq was something else entirely — I managed to qualify sharpshooter with it. I know, the superior gunfighters out there will dismiss that as the sorry effort of a chronic poor shot. However, I came within two rounds of qualifying expert. That’s a huge change. I had confidence I could hit a target.
I have a Beretta 92FS. Despite the put-downs by the weapon elites at Instapundit, it works for me.
By the way —we should have comments back up and running by the end of next week. (THe new server has proved to be robust.) If motivated readers want to tell me that the F92 is junk, please return next week.
Robert Mugabe intends to beat Zimbabwe into submission.
In the Zimbabwean capital of Harare on Wednesday, security forces stormed the offices of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change to gag its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who was preparing to hold a press conference on the continued violent repression of his party by the Mugabe regime.
Read the whole thing.
Hat tip realclearpolitics for this Kathleen Parker column.
Read Ms Parker’s entire column. As she says, rape, trauma, and alleged crime are serious stories. Here is her summary of the situation:
In the past few weeks, two major stories have appeared — on Salon.com and in The New York Times Sunday magazine — reporting the difficulties servicewomen face in a testosterone-infused military.
In both stories, women reported being sexually harassed, assaulted and sometimes raped by their own comrades in arms. Many are suffering a double dose of post-traumatic stress disorder born of combat fatigue combined with sexual trauma.
Both stories, however, contain enough errors to raise questions about whether the rape-assault rate is as high as suggested. The Salon story reports, for example, that one woman was “coerced into sex” by a commanding officer, which the Salon writer asserts is “legally defined as rape by the military.”
This is simply not true. According to the Manual for Courts-Martial, rape is defined as “an act of sexual intercourse by force and without consent.” The same woman also was prominently featured in the Times story, where she said she was “manipulated into sex.”
Not quite rape, in other words.
The Times made a much bigger mistake in featuring another woman — Amorita Randall, a former naval construction worker who said she had been raped twice while in the service and suffered a brain injury in Iraq when her Humvee was hit by an IED, killing her driver.
As it turned out, Randall was never in Iraq and there is no record of any sexual assault. The Times has run a correction.
Another NY Times’ debacle. The Times Sunday Magazine had a story that would at the minimum embrass the US military and it ran with it– ran right off the cliff with it. If you are going to focus a story on the psychotic and highly neurotic you are going to encounter psychoses and neuroses (ie, delusions).
The Times took a week to run the correction. According to a tv report I heard two days ago, the US Navy now says it gave the Times information prior to publication that raised serious doubts about Randall’s story. Agreed, that’s a tv report– but I don’t think this story (or faux story) is quite ready to fade.
At StrategyPage.
Excerpt:
…when confronting terrorists and terror states, everyone is a potential hostage. In 1979, Iranian theo-fascists took the entire U.S. embassy hostage, in what many have come to regard as the first attack in the War on Terror.
But this latest hostage-taking incident smacks of desperation, not revolutionary fervor.
Late spring 2007 finds the Iranian “revolutionary government” facing an extraordinary range of internal and external problems.
There’s a war inside Iran — several wars, actually. Minority Baluchis, Azeris, Kurds and Arabs are restive.
The mullah’s core problem is the Iranian people. Under-30 Iranians have had it with the mullahs’ failed revolution.
A recent visitor to Iran described a twenty-fold increase in “the standard bribe” Tehran bureaucrats demand for a building permit. Call it indicative rumor, supporting the assertion that Iranians now believe their current government is more corrupt than the Shah’s.
Shame on Nebraska’s Senators Hagel and Nelson. I expected better from both of them.
Unfortunately, this is not that hard to believe.
NOte that this particular cesspool had been identified as a potential problem at least two years ago. Weak construction and sited on an elevation above an inhabited area– trouble waiting to happen. And it did.
I like the phrase.
Here’s the whole quote from the PM, courtesy BBC:
These people have to be released,” the prime minister told GMTV.
“What we are trying to do at the moment is to pursue this through the diplomatic channels and make the Iranian government understand these people have to be released and that there is absolutely no justification whatever for holding them.
“I hope we manage to get them to realise they have to release them. If not, then this will move into a different phase.”
Blair is, of course, discussing the 15 Royal Navy and Royal Marine hostages taken by Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
Remember, at one time George Mitchell thought he’d brokered a conclusive agreement. Nope — but it was a step in a long process.
The leaders of Northern Ireland’s major Protestant and Catholic parties, sitting side by side for the first time in history, announced a breakthrough deal Monday to forge a power-sharing administration May 8.
The agreement followed 4 1/2 years of deadlock and unprecedented face-to-face negotiations between the British Protestants of Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party and the Irish Catholics of Gerry Adams’ Sinn Fein.
This BBC backgrounder is way too hagiographic, but note the accolade for Mitchell: “a triumph of patience.” Can the BBCt apply the same lens to Iraq?
The PBS News Hour in 1997 discusses another Northern Ireland “breakthrough.”
That’s what this column in the Economist says.
Unfortunately, the column is behind the Economist’s subscription wall.
Here’s an excerpt:
Increasingly, however, the people buying (and stealing) ID documents are not illegal aliens but local internet crooks. Their preferred tools are phishing scams and key-logging programmes spread by “botnets” of hijacked computers to millions of innocent individuals.
Identity theft is one of the fastest growing white-collar crimes in the world. A fresh identity is stolen every four seconds. Some 10m Americans have been victims. The average cost of restoring a stolen identity is reckoned to be $8,000, and victims spend typically 600 hours dealing with the nightmare—plus many years more restoring their good name and credit record.
As a crime, identity theft is far more pernicious than traditional payment fraud—which happens when someone uses your check-book, ATM card or credit card illegally. Identity theft means that a crook obtains new bank accounts, credit cards, mobile phones, car leases, even apartment rentals in your name and without your knowledge. On average it takes a year for a victim to find out about the theft. As a result, few identity thieves get apprehended.
This is also scary:
Symantec says that in the second half of 2006 some 6m computers around the world were infected by “bots” (robotic pieces of malicious software), 29% up on the previous six months. Four out of five of them had been attacked by Trojan horses that sniffed out confidential information by logging keystrokes, recording internet sites visited, and reporting the findings to a third party. Other unsuspecting users were redirected to fake websites where they were fooled by phishing scams into parting with their identity details.
Why this sudden upsurge in identity theft? One factor, whether cause or effect, is a growing market in what the industry calls “zero-day exploits”. The majority of security testers agree that the ethical thing to do when they discover a flaw in a computer programme is to give the manufacturer sufficient warning for it to prepare a software patch before going public with the finding. But more and more vulnerabilities are being detected by shady hackers who auction their exploits off to the highest-bidding crooks.
Cyber-crime needs to be addressed as the serious threat it is. Oh, plenty of people and organizations understand the threat — banks, investment firms, the FBI. But the media doesn;t know how to tell the story. There is no “hot imagery.”
Arthur Herman in Commentary looks at Algeria then Iraq.
Key excerpt:
By late 1956, when terror bombings in the capital city of Algiers killed 49 people and maimed many more, the overstressed, overstretched French police and army were ready to throw in the towel.
But on August 1, 1956, a French lieutenant colonel of Tunisian descent named David Galula had taken command of the mountainous and rebel-infested Aissa Mimoun area of Kabylia. To the FLN’s unconventional mode of warfare, Galula responded with unconventional methods of his own. These proved so successful so quickly that they were soon adopted by French commanders in other parts of Algeria.
As early as January 1957, French General Jacques Massu and intelligence chief Roger Trinquier were ready to apply some of Galula’s techniques to the urban environment of the capital, Algiers. After weeks of hard fighting, Massu and his paratroopers broke the back of the insurgency in the city, installing a block-by-block intelligence network that kept the FLN on the run and encouraged moderate Muslims to step forward.
Indeed, the 1957 battle for Algiers marked a crucial turning point in the fight against the FLN. By 1959, Galula’s principles had been extended across Algeria. Some 600 “specialized administrative sections” were set up, each headed by army officers to oversee civil as well as military affairs. The new structure finally allowed the French army to use effectively its superior numbers (including 150,000 loyal native troops, more than a third of the total) and conventional military hardware.
And:
But mistakes are hardly unknown in war; nor are they necessarily irreparable. In fourth-generation conflicts in particular, as the case of French Algeria suggests, turnarounds can be achieved quickly by changes in thinking and action. General Petraeus’s appointment, and the early success of the so-called surge, point to just such a major and hopeful change. Yet the current clamor to cut off funding, or to strip away congressional authorization for the Iraq effort, threatens to undo this potential turnaround before it has a chance to prove itself.
And:
In fourth-generation warfare, whoever seems to own the future wins. To this day, thanks to Gille Pontecorvo’s celebrated and highly propagandized 1967 film, most people assume that “the battle of Algiers” was an FLN victory when in fact it was anything but. Similarly, most people believe that the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam was a major setback for the United States, for so it was successfully portrayed in the media; in fact, it crippled the Vietcong as an insurgency. The same happened more recently in the battle of Falluja in 2005, where our eradication of a vicious jihadist network was presented almost entirely in terms of too many American casualties and too much “collateral damage.”
Thus far, the antiwar forces in both the United States and Europe have been greatly successful in presenting the Iraqi future in terms of an inevitable, and richly deserved, American defeat.
Read the entire article.
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