Bloom!!!

Backbone!

"The conflict is not about Iraq, or any other territory for that matter. Still, we cling tenaciously to the anachronistic concept of wars based on geographic boundaries," says John Alexander, a retired Army colonel and senior fellow with two Department of Defense universities. "The ongoing struggle is about religion and irreconcilable competing belief systems. It did not start with Saddam or when the US-led coalition invaded Iraq in 2003, rather the genesis dates back thirteen hundred years."

I agree. This is a 1,400 year long war and it is a war about religion. But Alexander fails to give a solution. The solution is that we need to be perceived as persistent, powerful, and determined. We need to emerge with a key element in the vocabulary of Islam and of most warrior cultures intact. It's called "honor." Our persistence and determination are being weighed by the world.

Yes, our PERSISTENCE is being measured. If we emerge from the Iraq War as a quitter, we may lose far more than we think. So I'm with some of the least-publicized statements George Bush's speech writers have written to define this war. The Iraq War is an extremely expensive laboratory. It is a learning experience. One in which our job is to learn how to deal with what we're calling insurgents -- urban guerilla warriors -- and how to deal with hearts and minds.

Mohammed's solution for winning hearts and minds was slaughter and terror. "Make great slaughter in the land," he said. Guess what? It worked. It frightened people into becoming Moslems and making their great grandchildren's children Moslems for centuries to come. It worked in a 13,500 mile arc across Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and even Malaysia and Indonesia, Islamic nations on the Pacific Rim. Right now, militant Islam in Iraq is using slaughter and terror to wean the Iraqis and all others who watch this war away from us and over to their side. They are using Mohammed's strategies, highly successful strategies. Said Mohammed, "I have been made victorious with terror (cast in the hearts of the enemy), and while I was sleeping, the keys of the treasures of the world were brought to me and put in my hand" [Sahih Bukhari: Volume 4, Book 52, Number 220]. We have to counter before militant Islam takes over any more of those keys. We have to counter with a military force that LEARNS.

Seldom is a nation given the opportunity to devise new strategies where it counts the most: in live battle. We have to wean this nation's obsessions from exit strategies and focus on innovating our way around obstacles. We have to focus on challenge if we're going to hold on to our core values: pluralism, freedom of lifestyle, and freedom of speech. We need weekly brainstorming sessions among the leading artists of war, the leading commanders of this war in Iraq. We need a weekly online meeting for brainstorming new strategies.

We also need to bring in the clever grunts on the ground. As In Search of Excellence author Tom Peters pointed out, everybody goes to work each day with a gripe, a beef. Listen to those gripes...and to the solutions the gripers have in mind, and you have continuous improvement. It worked for the Japanese in the auto industry and it will work for us in the military.

Now we have to apply it. Bring in the Special Forces. They specialize in working with communities and the individuals in them. Give as much help to as many Baghdad households as we can. So that despite the continuous violence of the "insurgents," the Iraqis know we are on their side and listening to their needs. Go house by house as helpers, not as nest-of-warrior seekers. Working on behalf of one family after another will not only win hearts, but will give us a sense of how to help Iraq as a whole. This is not a new strategy; it is what the Special Forces has been doing as its primary job for a long time. But we need to extend it. We should NEVER break down another door. Instead, we should knock.

Concepts like these should be brainstormed with the guys on the ground and their bosses. Let's hear their ideas and their sense of which ideas from armchair warriors like me and John Alexander are workable. Let's find out whether brainstorming the flaws of notions from folks like Alexander and me can help the folks fighting this war every day figure out how we're full of it and, in the process, come up with what you and I do when we take on a straw man or a fool-putting down the idiot, we often come up with more workable or more inspired ideas.

I'm perfectly willing to be used as the catalytic idiot. I'm sure that John Alexander would volunteer for the job as well.

But the real bottom line is not just learning from adversity. It's remembering Winston Churchill's words: "Never give up." Or, as Goh Chok Tong, the former prime minister of Singapore, puts it, "The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America's credibility and will to prevail.''

Can Iran Handle the Mess in Iraq?

By Howard Bloom

The American public—you and I—have become tired of our war in Iraq. We want out.

We are tired of the expense, tired of the humiliation, tired of the waste of human lives, and tired of fighting a war over weapons of mass destruction that were never there.

Our solution? According to the Syrian Arab News Agency, SANA,"Robert M. Gates, President Bush's nominee to become the next secretary of defense, called for diplomatic engagements with Syria and Iran…." And according to SANA, Gates is by no means alone. SANA says that both Colin Powell and the Baker Commission are also weighing in heavily for "talks" with Iran and Syria—in other words, for turning over Iraq to nations that have declared themselves our enemy.

Most of us seem convinced that Iraq has reached a point of violent degeneration so severe that even Iran and Syria will have enormous difficulty returning the country to calm. Who are we kidding?

The odds are very good that the grisly daily trickle of tortures and murders in Iraq have been staged deliberately to drive us out of Iraq and to let the Iranians in.

More important, in moments of choice like this, it's critical to understand your history. Both Syria and Iran have a proven track record of putting down violence far more severe than the bloodshed in Iraq today. They have both produced peace with a simple tool—a violence far greater than that of the trouble makers. Far, far greater.

Hafez al-Assad, father of Syria's current dictator Bashir Assad, had a violence problem on his hands when he took over the government of Damascus in 1971. Assad was an Alawite—a member of a tiny Shiite minority—in a nation that was 75% Sunni. What's worse, the folks who really wanted to rule Syria were Islamic fundamentalists, Islamic militants, the very sort of people we now call "terrorists."

How did Assad stifle the violence of these opponents? How did he do it so powerfully that he was able to rule for 29 years and hand Syria over to his son, thus establishing Syria's first dynasty in roughly 1,250 years? He sent his military to Hama, the central city of the fundamentalists, leveled the town center, and killed between 10,000 and 20,000 of those who opposed him.

And how did Iran's Islamic fundamentalists in 1979 and the early 1980s deal with the fact that many who had joined them in Revolution of 1979 wanted a secular government, not a reign of mullahs and ayatollahs? According to one Iranian dissident group, IranianVoice.org, they killed "hundreds of thousands" of those who opposed their imposition of an absolute theocracy.

In other words, to stop the killings of 3,700 per month in Iraq—an unacceptable figure—we want to hand Baghdad and its environs over to two regimes whose means of ensuring peace is far greater mass murder...mass murder that follows the advice of Mohammed, a prophet who said that "slaughter" was preferable to "tumult and oppression" (Qur'an, chapter 2, verse 191).

Another bit of history may come in handy here. In 1973, we pulled out of Viet Nam to stop a shedding of blood we could no longer stand. We had lost 57,000 soldiers. The Vietnamese had lost far, far more. But folks like me went to Washington and marched over and over again against the Vietnamese War.

What came of our efforts? The mass killing of between one million and three million Cambodians, a mass murder we refused to cover in our media until it was too late to stop a thing, until the deaths were irreversible. In other words I, as a peace activist, was an accomplice to mass murder.

Is that the kind of peace that any of us—Iraqi or American—want for Iraq?

Iran Makes Us An Offer

By Howard Bloom

Iran has just offered to take Iraq off our hands...for a price.

What is it asking for? That the U.S. drops its "bullying" policy toward Tehran and that we act with "justice." In other words, that we let Iran develop nuclear weapons in peace. That we stop asking for economic sanctions. And that we give Iran whatever it wants from Israel this month--short of utter oblivion.

Yes, Iran is asking us to hand them Iraq and to pay them for accepting it. What a twist! We've done Iraq's work for it.

We've spent nearly a trillion dollars and over 2,000 lives swinging Iraq into Iran's hands.

And Iraq wants us to pay them? Shouldn't it be the other way around? If we give Iraq away, we pay a price we can not afford. We lose our stature, our power, and our ability to influence this world, to turn this globe toward free speech, gender equality, tolerance, and pluralism--all values Iran is definitely NOT promoting as part of its global agenda.

And Iran DOES have a global agenda. But more about that in a minute. First, here's why Iran should be paying us, not the other way around. Iran spent close to a billion dollars, 500,000 lives, and eight years trying to take Iraq militarily in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988. And it failed.

If we reverse that failure by handing Iraq over on a depleted-uranium platter, we will prove to the world that we are historically ignorant and geopolitically blind. We will demonstrate to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East that we are no longer a superpower…in fact that we are a toothless tiger, a people of retreat. And it will open a power vacuum to others.

In that vacuum, Iran will use its uranium-and-missile-waving face-offs with America to establish hegemony and control in the Persian Gulf, control over 66% of the world's oil reserves, control over the sea lanes through which 40% of our oil travels daily, control over the world's economy via a stranglehold over oil prices, and the first step toward a role as the Middle East's new land superpower.

Iran will turn Iraq into an Islamic Revolutionary power following the truths of the Ayatollah.

This will give Iran a puppet government and a de facto province that increases its size 27%, bulks up its population by 42%, nearly doubles its oil reserves, and whose military adds manpower-complete with US weapons and training--to the Iranian combat and doomsday machine.

It will hand Iran a victory. A victory in its patient 28 year struggle to topple the Great Satan. A victory in its 28 year long attempt to follow the dictates of the Iranian Islamic Revolution's founding father, Ayatollah Khomeini, who said: "We will export our revolution throughout the world...until the calls 'there is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God' are echoed all over the world." The first nation the Ayatollah wanted to export his revolution to was Iraq. And we will give him his wish.

We will add heft to a claim made a mere two months ago by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a claim that mixes partial truths with an aim that I find ominous:

"The great powers…kill the peoples in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, and turn them into refugees… They operate all the terrorist groups in Iraq and Palestine, …They fill all their warehouses with atomic, biological, and chemical weapons. …they cause the greatest damage to natural resources …The powers are willing to destroy the planet several times over, in order to line the pockets of the world's capitalists, parties, and great powers. …they have failed in the proper management of the world. …Today, the Iranian people is recognized as a model for all the peoples of the world. …the world is left with only one light, one banner, and one people, which has preserved the hope in the hearts of all the peoples. This is the great and courageous people of Iran. …the Iranian people--because of its past culture, its past civilization, its intelligent youth, its human and material potential--has the capacity to quickly become an invincible global power. This will happen as soon as it achieves advanced technologies."

Those technologies may already be in Iranian hands. And, thanks to us, Iraq may soon be in Iranian hands as well.

Don't Let Iran Outsmart Us

By Howard Bloom

The balance of power has been shifting in Iraq nearly every day. But it takes a keen eye--and a potent knowledge of history--to see it.

The Iranians have made nearly every move right. But they stumbled ever so slightly this last weekend. They invited the Iraqis and the Syrians in to settle the violence, something that should be easy since Iran is sponsoring the Shiite violence and Syria, Iran's ally, is sponsoring the Sunni violence. The Iranians suckered us into the war in Iraq.[vii] It was they who sent us definitive, detailed eyewitness accounts of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

From 2001 to 2003, they shipped us what the New York Times' Chris Hedges calls an "endless supply" of "Iraqi defectors," defectors, says Hedges, "for any story you wanted."[i] What did those "defectors" tell us? One "Iraqi civil engineer"[ii] detailed his visit to 20 weapons sites hidden under Iraqi hospitals and behind Saddam's enormous palaces. [iii]

Another, an "Iraqi intelligence officer," explained how he'd bought seven refrigerated trucks[iv] for conversion to mobile bio-weapons labs. He also spilled the beans on a new long-range missile Saddam was developing, told about his trip to Africa to buy the radioactive fillings for a dirty bomb from rogue Russian scientists, described a chemical weapons factory in Samarra, and told of a bioweapons lab on the outskirts of Baghdad. [v]

Most important was the defector who described how Saddam was producing nuclear bomb materials daily in 400 facilities deliberately scattered from one end of Iraq to another, scattered so they could not be taken out with a single attack.[vi] Some said these weapons of mass destruction could be mobilized in 48 hours to obliterate the West.

It was Iran who conned us into committing the heart and soul of our military, 200,000 men and women to a vast morass of land and a hatred in which we'd sink like a mammoth in a tar pit, in which we would spend our money and run up an extra trillion dollars in debt, in which we would lose our credibility, our integrity and our dignity.

It was Iran who lured us into the Iraq trap.

Now it's Iran that is readying itself for the prizes it will get by busting the American piñata. Prize number one will be the sheer fact that Iran spent nearly a trillion dollars, a million lives and eight long years trying to conquer Iraq on behalf of the Islamic Revolution. When the war ended in a stalemate that Iran found intolerable, the religious leaders of Tehran flailed around for three years, then finally found a faster, cheaper, better way to add Iraq to Tehran's possessions.

The better way was us, the USA. And the phony Iraqi defectors with their plausible but ever-so-false weapons of mass destruction tales were all that was needed to prod us into motion. After all, we'd learned a simple lesson from 9/11--connect the dots.

It's three years later and Iran has let us wallow in the blood of Iran until we couldn't take it any longer. It has waited patiently for us to do what we do so well. We call it finding an exit strategy. Other folks call it giving up.

That moment has finally arrived.

We are about to beg Iran to take Iraq off our hands. We may even be foolish enough to offer up something in exchange for this great favor. Most likely we will pay by extracting concessions from Israel. Concessions that may threaten Israel's survival.

But who cares? Israel is way over there, and we have things back home to worry about. Iran has built its trap beautifully and has played us like a harp until last weekend, when it slipped just the tiniest bit.

It offered to host Syria and Iran in a private session in Tehran where the violence would be considered carefully and ended, not a difficult process, since Iran is sponsoring the Shiite militias and their killing and since Syria is sponsoring the Sunni mass murderers. Calling off your employees, your goons, is not a difficult task.

But Iran asked at the wrong time and in the wrong way. It tried to upstage the USA. It almost prevented us from stepping into the spotlight and making total fools of ourselves. We were about to grab the microphone and beg Iran to take what it's been trying to get ever since 1980--Iraq.

Iraq free and clear, no strings attached. Just take the violence and the embarrassment off of our hands and out of our media. Out of the headlines of the New York Times and out of the news spots on CNN and Fox TV. The Baker Commission was about to tell us that handing Iraq over to Iran is our best solution.

And many of us Democrats, the people of my political party, were about to agree. Fortunately, Iran's kind invitation to Syria and Iraq, its attempt to show that only it could rule the unruly and the unruleable--the Middle East--was ignored. No one came to the party. Syria and Iraq did not show up. But this was not big news in the United States. It was not big news for a reason.

We were about to initiate our own plan to give Iraq away. And that's what we are likely to do in the next week or two.

The story in Iraq changes every day. So does the balance of power. Iran is out to make itself a superstate. It has already made us do its bidding--deposing the secular head of a neighboring country. Now it is about to watch as we turn that coveted country over and announce to the world that we have been beaten, outlasted, and shamed.

Iran is out to make us look like has-beens in the world's power games. And it is about to achieve what its president, the loveable Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has stated as his goal--demonstrating that Iran is "an invincible global power."

Every day, the balance of power shifts in the Middle East, and on this planet. There will be more in store tomorrow. And it will be more than simply an unfolding tale. It will determine the direction of the rest of our lives.

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[i] http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/mccollam-list.asp CJR Home " Issues " 2004 " Issue 4: July/August Columbia Journalism Review THE LIST Judith Miller is on it, but she's hardly alone. Ahmad Chalabi's defectors told stories to a lot of reporters who now wish they'd kept their distance How Chalabi Played the Press BY DOUGLAS McCOLLAM

[ii]http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/mccollam-list.asp CJR Home " Issues " 2004 " Issue 4: July/August Columbia Journalism Review

[iii] http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/mccollam-list.asp CJR Home " Issues " 2004 " Issue 4: July/August Columbia Journalism Review

[iv] http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/mccollam-list.asp CJR Home " Issues " 2004 " Issue 4: July/August Columbia Journalism Review THE LIST Judith Miller is on it, but she's hardly alone. Ahmad Chalabi's defectors told stories to a lot of reporters who now wish they'd kept their distance How Chalabi Played the Press BY DOUGLAS McCOLLAM

[v] Retrieved November 3, 2006, from the World Wide Web http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/mccollam-list.asp CJR Home " Issues " 2004 " Issue 4: July/August Columbia Journalism Review THE LIST Judith Miller is on it, but she's hardly alone. Ahmad Chalabi's defectors told stories to a lot of reporters who now wish they'd kept their distance How Chalabi Played the Press BY DOUGLAS McCOLLAM

[vi] Retrieved November 7, 2006, from the World Wide Web http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/031027fa_fact THE STOVEPIPE by SEYMOUR M. HERSH How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq's weapons. Issue of 2003-10-27 Posted 2003-10-20. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1224075,00.html US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war. Inquiry into Tehran's role in starting conflict. Top Pentagon ally Chalabi accused Julian Borger in Washington Tuesday May 25, 2004 The Guardian

[vii] http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1224075,00.html US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war • Inquiry into Tehran's role in starting conflict • Top Pentagon ally Chalabi accused Julian Borger in Washington Tuesday May 25, 2004 The Guardian