It then offers a detailed five point plan, including a process to unify the ranks of the jihad, in part by reaching out to the old nationalist resistance and convincing them to return to the fold; detailed military preparations, including recommendations to conserve men and resources until the right time; and an enhanced media operation designed to rebut the most damaging charges against the Islamic State and carefully tied to a coherent political strategy. Perhaps its most striking concept is a detailed plan for creating “Jihadist Awakenings”, mimicking the U.S. engagement of the tribes to create broader popular support.

Superficial changes combined with wishful thinking. Do they have Donald Rumsfeld on retainer? Gonna hire the Lincoln Group to reverse their fortunes?

God, the U.S. was so fucking lucky to have these guys as our enemies.

Tags: abu musab al-suri, al-qaeda in iraq, marc lynch, thanks for that one god!

Tags: leon panetta, looooooooong war, washington post

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Spc. Steven J. Bishop, 29, of Christiansburg, Va., died March 13 in Tikrit, Iraq, while supporting combat operations. He was assigned to the 422nd Civil Affairs Battalion, 352nd Civil Affairs Command, U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command, Fort Bragg, N.C.

For more information the media may contact the U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command at 910-964-9328.

Tags: RIP

It concerns not a life-and-death issue, such as the menace of Iran’s nuclear buildup…

Two things. First, “nuclear buildup” presupposes that Iran has a nuclear arsenal already, when it has no such thing. Second, even Ehud Barak doesn’t think a potential-nuclear Iran poses an existential threat to way-nuclear Israel. Because he’s not a fool. What is an existential threat to Israel — or, at least, to Israeli democracy; you’ll forgive me if I consider that redundant — is an Israel that keeps control of the West Bank to the point of tipping the demographic balance to the Palestinians, who will then call for a single binational state and force Israel to become either a Jewish apartheid state or a non-Jewish democracy. That’s an actual existential threat to Israel. The Israeli obstruction to the peace process posed by settlement construction makes that more likely, not less.

Then there’s my man Dougie:

The main impediments to Palestinian-Israeli peace are on the side of the Palestinians. Their Authority lacks authority, and their moderates aren’t moderate.

A fair enough point on the lack of authority, but the Palestinians themselves are hardly solely responsible for that. And in what universe is Salam Fayyad not a moderate?

Finally, a word on the idea that Obama is responsible for the unrest in Palestinian sections of Jerusalem, a very stupid claim pushed by someone whom I used to work alongside and for whom I retain great affection. It ain’t Obama who’s expanding housing units on Palestinian land. To contend that denial of basic Palestinian national aspirations — going back now over 40 years — is less central to Palestinian anger than some aired spat  brewing over the last week is just intellectually dishonest.

Tags: a shonda!, daniel pipes, doug feith, ehud barak, Iran, Israel, Palestine, salam fayyad

Dropping from 10,000ft, they glide in order to land unnoticed. The dogs often carry cameras and are trained to attack anyone carrying a weapon.

As I’ve been contemplating a return to Afghanistan, I’ve not wanted to deprive my dog of his impulse to serve. Luckily, I’ve noticed Kingsley has exhibited a shift in focus toward holding territory rather than offensive capabilities. He’s more ISAF-McChrystal than JSOC-McChrystal.

Tags: afghanistan, dogs of war, kingsley, RIP THOR AND scotty

Tags: at least they didn’t blame the jews, happy st. patricks day, stiff little fingers, the only band that matters

Since becoming Israel’s prime minister last year, Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly declared his desire to reach peace with the Palestinian Authority (PA). However, PA President Mahmoud Abbas has refused to enter into direct talks with Netanyahu until Israel meets a series of preconditions. What, then, is the future of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations?

It doesn’t make much sense to quibble with a panel description, but suffice it to say that of course Netanyahu wants preconditionless negotiations, because he has the upper hand. Abbas wanted a settlement freeze as a gesture of good faith, for obvious reasons. The point is that a lack of preconditions for negotiation in this case isn’t generosity; it’s the opposite.

Tags: a shonda!, AIPAC, benjamin netanyahu, hillary rodham clinton, just saying, mahmoud abbas, please don’t fill my comment thread with crazy

This administration pays lip-service to “multilateralism,” but it is a multilateralism of accommodating autocratic rivals, not of solidifying relations with longtime democratic allies. Rather than strengthening the democratic foundation of the new “international architecture” — the G-20 world — the administration’s posture is increasingly one of neutrality, at best, between allies and adversaries, and between democrats and autocrats. Israel is not the only unhappy ally, therefore; it’s just the most vulnerable.

Kagan asserts far more than he demonstrates that the allies are actually “unhappy.” You might take a different view, for instance, of the fact that Obama managed to get a substantial NATO commitment of increased troops, attention and ratification for Gen. McChrystal’s strategy in Afghanistan, a war viewed with substantially more hostility in Europe than in America. Same goes for the vastly strengthened international coalition against Iran. That is not a sign of dissed allies, it’s a sign of reinvigorated alliances.  I have forthcoming piece in the American Prospect about the dividends that Obama’s reinvigorated multilateralism — you’ll get no scare quotes from me — has paid.

But the more important point is the one about “vulnerable” allies. Kagan criticizes “the administration’s evident impatience with allies who don’t do as they are told.”* I would respectfully point out that there was an entire war in which Kagan’s old allies actively snubbed allies who didn’t participate, something vastly more substantial and offensive than anything Obama has done. What Obama has done — and let’s stay with Israel here — is attempt to leverage the U.S. patronage relationship with Israel toward a long-agreed-upon end. He’s asked Israel to freeze settlement construction, something absolutely everyone who follows the Israeli-Palestine conflict recognizes is the absolute minimum “ask” anyone has toward the Israelis. Obama didn’t tell Israel to agree to any commitments on borders, or Jerusalem, or water rights, or electro-magnetic spectrum, or the militarization of the West Bank or — ha — refugees. He didn’t even ask to scale settlements back. What he asked was to stop building any new ones. This, in other words, was a move to do something with the U.S.-Israel alliance — to make it work for the U.S., for the Palestinians and ultimately for the interest the Israelis have in a negotiated disengagement from the West Bank. De minimis. And what Obama got in exchange was a flurry of obstruction; months of Israeli domestic attacks on him; a half-hearted pledge to kind-of-sort-of-freeze settlement construction; and finally, with Vice President Biden actually in Israel, an announcement that settlement construction would continue.

I suppose you can look at this and say, “Obama is punishing his friends for not doing what he tells them.” Except that there’s no punishment, unless we’re to redefine the term to mean, “Hold an ally who receives billions in American aid and loan guarantees to de minimis agreements to which it is formally committed.” And it ignores the measure of Israeli intransigence and hostility at having to do the absolute minimum of what is expected of him. One wonders how one-sided the friendship actually is if the Israeli government resists the most basic expectations of its international patron on an issue with which it must also work with the Arab world.

But the better understanding of what Obama’s done here, by far, is that he’s attempted to put the U.S.-Israeli relationship into action. Israel isn’t used to being held to commitments, and so we can see its evident strain at having to flex diplomatic muscles that have gone flabby. But this is light years away from American hostility. Indeed, it reflects an old neoconservative hobby horse: getting old and sybaritic allies to actually do something for the American interest. You can push your friends at times because you’ve earned credibility with them over the years.

* There’s a LOLworthy moment here. Kagan complains, “Europeans get spanked for a pallid commitment to NATO defense spending even as they contribute 30,000 troops to a distant war that European publics mostly don’t believe in.” Dude, you wrote an entire pretentiously-titled book “spanking” them for precisely this point. You have absolutely no standing to criticize Obama here. Robert Gates made a far-more-gentle version of your entire point! You have simply no basis for finding this problematic.

Tags: a shonda!, Israel, looooooooong war, Mitt Romney, postcards from Nixonland, robert kagan

Moqtada Sadr himself is quoted by Shadid as saying, “This will be a door to the liberation of Iraq, to driving out the occupier and to something else which is important, serving the Iraqi people.” U.S. diplomats apparently still have minimal contacts with Sadr, so it’s difficult to tell what’s more than nationalist rhetoric. Indeed, to understand the durability of the Sadrists — after they opted to sit out the surge following Petraeus’ forces establishment in Sadr City and then getting basically smacked by Maliki’s Army in Basra – it’s important to distinguish the Sadrists from Sadr. Because whatever you think of Sadr, the Sadrists are a pragmatic bunch. In The Gamble, Tom Ricks recounts a quiet 2007 negotiation between David Kilcullen and a Sadr lieutenant. The Sadrists said they wouldn’t negotiate without a date for the U.S. to withdraw. What date did the guy have in mind? “Well, December 2012.”

In short, these guys are much more supple and pragmatic then they get credit for being. They entrench their ties to their people by the mundane but crucial work of collecting garbage as much as turning the Health Ministry into a torture chamber for Sunnis. When I wrote my ‘Rise of the Insurgents’ series, I saved an installment for Sadr, because he demonstrated almost textbook insurgent concerns about catering to his people’s material needs while being very prepared to fight hard. I don’t think it will be an insult to say that in a sense, the counterinsurgents and the Sadrists probably shared an ironic sense of kindred spirits than did most of Iraq’s combatants. R. Kelly could write quite the Sadrist ballad.

That said, the Sadrist parliamentary rise will almost certainly constrain Maliki from any impulse he might feel to renegotiate the SOFA. Maliki has only ever gingerly and reluctantly hinted at a prospect that has more constituency within Washington think tanks than either Baghdad, the White House or the State Department. Even still, the Sadrists holding as many seats as the Kurds creates a new objective political constraint on an already-dubious proposition. And the terms of the SOFA align pretty closely with the timeline that Sadrist spelled out to Kilcullen.

Update, 10:02 a.m.: Kim Kagan’s think-tank, the Institute for the Study of War, is emailing around this seat count:

Currently, Prime Minister Maliki’s State of Law coalition is in the lead with roughly 75-82 seats.
Ayad al-Allawi’s Iraqiyyah list is in second with 66-74 seats.
The predominantly-Shi’a Iraqi National Alliance is in third with roughly 58-63 seats.
Kurdistani List is in fourth with roughly 33-36 votes.

If Sadr’s got 40 of the Alliance’s seats, that’s just dominating, and it means ISCI got marginalized at a time when it was projecting strength to anyone who’d listen. And if the Sadrists got more seats outright than the Kurdish coalition, that’s huge.

Tags: anthony shadid, best war ever, david kilcullen, Iraq, moqtada has a posse, moqtada sadr, tom ricks

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Sgt. 1st Class Glen J. Whetten, 31, of Mesa, Ariz., died March 12 near Kandahar, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his vehicle with an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kan.

For more information the media may contact the Fort Riley Public Affairs Office at 785-240-1893.

Tags: RIP