Still no time to write the big politics post summarizing the Lebanon War; I’ll get to that soon, really. In the meantime, here’s a post by Brad Hicks with a good update on some stuff from Pakistan.
At a rate of what?
The latest quarterly Pentagon report on Iraq was released today. (NYTimes story) It probably won’t surprise anyone to hear that things are bad; Iraqi casualties went up 50% relative to last quarter. One number that particularly struck me is that total Iraqi casualties have reached 120 per day.
Think about this for a moment. If a terrorist action, or set of terrorist actions, were to kill 120 people in the United States, consider what the news would be like, what the inquests would be like, how long it would be remembered for. This has now reached the level of daily occurrence.
Technical aside: When trying to interpret the impact of this, we really need to scale things to the size of the population. The real number that affects the public as a whole in a mass casualty event is the average number of degrees of separation between a random person and a person affected. Simply scaling the number of people affected linearly — the US has ten times the population of Iraq, it’s as if 1200 people were killed here — is incorrect, since as groups get smaller you’re more likely to know someone else in it. Does someone know a good result on mean distance in very large social networks?
Subtle up of the ante:
Speaking about Iraq, our president said: “We’re not leaving so long as I’m president.”
While I suppose we’ve all known this for a while — given the unholy mess we’re stuck in, there’s really no way we’re going to get out of there for many years to come — it’s interesting to see him completely give up on pretending that we’re going to win the war Real Soon Now.
(Coming soon: A real write-up about the recent war with Hezbollah and what was going on behind the scenes. The short answer is “a hell of a lot.”)
Edit: Will wonders never cease. Take a look at the transcript of another press conference, and search for the word “weapons of mass destruction.” You will see our president openly and publicly admitting that the entire WMD rationale was wrong, and that Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. Thanks to for the link.
Another terror blurb
Quick note: If you hear something in the news in the near future about the “Abu al-Fadal al-Abas Brigades” in Iraq, these are a new arm of Hezbollah which Iran has set up in Iraq, specifically to act as Iran’s proxy fighters against the US. Apparently they moved from silent setup mode to active attacking mode on 4 Jul, and we can expect them to be trouble in the future.
Related: Notice that ever since Ahmadinejad took power in Iran, and made Mughniyeh his defense minister, Iran has been very actively founding Iranian-controlled terror groups in as many places as possible: AaFaA Brigades in Iraq, its old Hezbollah setup in Lebanon and Syria, its infiltration & takeover of Hamas in Gaza, etc. If I were running a government anywhere vaguely in that region that had a Shi’ite minority, I’d be keeping my eyes open for whatever satellite group Iran were setting up there. And note that this is an international network of professional terrorist groups with the systematic sponsorship, supply and control by a government that’s trying to become a nuclear power: the worst hypothesis is confirmed.
Iran is gearing up for a major proxy war. If they set up these units in every Middle Eastern country with a Shi’ite population, they could effectively destabilize the local governments and install friendly regimes, or at least create friendly circumstances “on the ground:” the true creation of an Iranian sphere of influence. The other thing these teams are for is for fighting against the US/Israel alliance, which it views – quite rightly – as a competitor for geostrategic power in the region. Such a force would certainly back even non-Shi’ite groups to further its aims; (remember that Iran supplied weapons to the [Sunni] PLO for years) direct alliance with groups like al-Qaeda is less likely, since those groups have very strong ideological leanings which aren’t that compatible, but these guys have the potential to be much more strongly unified.
The question of just how broad Iran’s ambitions are is open: they want this network, they want ICBM’s (they already have intermediate-range ballistic missiles, like the Shahab-3; once North Korea finalizes the Taepodong-2 ICBM, Iran will probably be the first customers), they want the Bomb. Do they want to take on China or India for regional power? Would they want to press engagement with US/Israel even beyond the scale needed to push them out of the area?
Another interesting question: How will Russia come down in this? They haven’t decisively allied with either the US or Iranian side in this conflict, and have been willing to work with both. At some point it will probably become very difficult to do this. Which way it goes depends e.g. on how Iran decides to involve itself (or not) with Chechnya, but it could have a big impact on how much free rein Iran ends up getting in the Central Asian sphere.
The War in Lebanon
There’s something curious about this particular war: the politicians all seem to get what’s really going on — even the ones who are usually a bit dense — but the media seems to have completely, utterly, missed the ball. So this is probably a good time to give a bit of backstory.
(The backstory to the backstory, if you haven’t heard the news at all — a few months ago, Hamas started firing missiles at Israel fairly regularly from Gaza. A few weeks ago, they raided and kidnapped a soldier, plus killing a few more. Israel demanded his return and parked armored divisions at the border; Hamas refused, and Israel rolled in the tanks, going for both the hostage’s release and an end to the attacks. Then a bit after that, Hezbollah raided from Lebanon and kidnapped people as well; in response, Israel has essentially gone to war, and Lebanon has been getting bombed ever since. Various countries have said “bad Israel, you’re overreacting” but the response has been very noticeably muted; in fact, the US, Europe, and even the Arab League aren’t actually opposing Israel’s actions very strongly at all, and Bush signalled today pretty clearly that he’s going to wait at least another week before really trying to encourage a cease-fire at all. Why?…)
(more…)
Quick Middle East roundup
Just an update, for those of you who haven’t been watching this. A few days ago, Hamas attacked an Israeli position, killing two soldiers and capturing another one. They took him to somewhere in Gaza. Israel massed armored units at the border and warned them to return him at once.
Politics in action!
Dialogue in my office
Me: Here’s a headline you don’t see in civilized countries. “Fatah Gunmen Attack Parliament.”
Officemate: Sure you do. Whenever Fatah comes and attacks people’s parliaments.
Only in the Middle East…
More al-Zarqawi stories
The Washington Post on the Iraqi reaction, interviews in a Shiite neighborhood.
Al-Jazeera reporting the event and interviewing his family.
Ha’aretz reports on the Hamas response and his likely successor.
Debka talks more about succession.
Note the conflicting reports: Ha’aretz suggests Abd al-Rahman al-Iraqi and notes he was there when al-Zarqawi died, but Debka says al Qaeda has already named Abdallah bin Rashid al-Baghdadi. Meanwhile the most senior al-Qaeda figure in Iraqi is Wariya Arbili, and al-Qaeda also named Abdulhadi al-Iraqi as head of worldwide ops. Most of these people are largely unknown; note how many Iraqis are on this list, though, suggesting just how central Iraq has become to al-Qaeda in the post-Saddam era.
It’s possible that all of these reports are true: if so, there’s the opening for a really “interesting” succession battle. But that fight may be brief if one of the groups acts fast.
On a separate note, the Swiss government confirmed the breakup of a plot to shoot down an El Al airliner. This, the London cell, and the Toronto operation… there have been a lot of major terror operations broken up in the recent past.
Also the director of the Shin Bet (Israel’s rough equivalent of the FBI) warned the parliament that al Qaeda is setting up operations in Jerusalem and Nablus, which is probably a sign that things are about to heat up a lot.
Don’t forget the recent riots in Egypt, and the fact that Mubarak and Olmert recently had a summit which went fairly well; the conditions are ripe for a possible uprising in Egypt. If Mubarak can’t put it down, this likely means an Islamist regime there, which could lead to a domino effect heading east quickly – through Saudi, Kuwait and Jordan, and charging straight into Iraq, with Iran sitting on the opposite border.
Trouble ahead, but thwartable trouble. The best way to avoid it may be if Mubarak can be as ruthlessly efficient as Hafez al-Assad was at putting down popular insurrection.
(Yes, I just suggested thwarting a nascent popular uprising against a dictatorship as being a good thing. There are worse things than dictatorships, and these guys would be just the people to demonstrate that.)
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 