Thursday, October 4, 2007

In this Issue:

Danger Across the Spectrum
By: Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu (US Army Retired)

COIN Is Not Small Change:
"Blaming the Victim" Observations from My Recent Trip to Israel

Danger Across the Spectrum

By: Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu (US Army Retired)

The appearance of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York, speaking at Columbia, expressing a desire to pray for the "brave 19" at the World Trade Center site, and generally stirring up rancor among Americans is yet another reminder, if we needed one, that 6 years post 911 we still are clueless about the threat to America. Our citizenry fret about "free speech" for an avowed enemy who is not constitutionally entitled to that right, and about being "culturally offensive" to a man who has vowed on multiple occasions to eliminate America.

The culturally offensive worry - that some Americans fear offending Middle Easterners, especially Iranians because we are inhospitable to their president - reeks with irony. One has to wonder how much time Ahmadinejad spent fretting over being inhospitable to Americans when he and his fellow revolutionaries attacked the American embassy in Teheran in 1979 and held American diplomats hostage for 444 days. We'll bet that the act did not keep him awake at night unless it was to celebrate.

The point is that we continue to fret over issues - real or manufactured - that reflect our society's minor concerns while being grossly ignorant of the nature of the hatred arrayed against us. Unfortunately Ahmadinejad is simply one of many who would prefer America to be destroyed in the short term in order to pursue his gains.

Granted Ahmadinejad and others of his radical Islamic faith are perhaps the most difficult to influence because the threat of mutually assured destruction - the famous MAD doctrine that kept the US and the Soviet Union from destroying each other for decades - only functions if both parties have something to fear. With Ahmadinejad's welcoming of utter destruction in order to facilitate the re-emergence of the hibernating 12th Imam into the earth and the subsequent world Islamic Caliphate, destruction of his country does not pose a threat but actually expedites his nefarious goals.

So where do we go with Iran? Clearly inviting Ahmadinejad to speak at our universities is a loser. In addition to wanting to destroy us, a fact that does not seem to trouble academic America, he projects a severely bigoted attitude toward women, homosexuals, and non-believers in Islam.

That inflexible stance takes frank and open debate off the table. He is not here to learn but to lecture, and to warn. If we fail to heed the dire messages coming daily from him and his friends then we may certainly end up as he wishes: powerless, destroyed, and converted to Islam by the sword.

Ahmadinejad and the radical Iran he leads is a poster child of the root threat - the deadly connections - that most Americans either ignore or disparage. The deadly links do not necessarily originate in Iran but emanate from it to every rogue state, terrorist movement, and criminal activity around the world. Ahmadinejad has allied himself with a surrogate country, Syria, in order to further his plans. He funds Hezballah, consorts with Hugo Chavez, and works hand in glove with North Korea on missiles, biological and nuclear weapons.

He pays for Hezballah terrorists to train on Margarita Island off the coast of Venezuela, where in addition to the usual para-military training they learn to pass themselves as Latino prior to infiltration into America. He pays huge monies for Kim Jong Il to stage a medium range missile test - multiple missiles in synchronized flight at simulated targets, all closely monitored by North Korean ships recording telemetry. Then he purchases similar missiles, smuggles them into Syria where they are positioned to fly not in singles but in the scores at Israel thereby flooding any conceivable missile defense.

Will those missiles fly with poison gas, biological agents, or radioactive material in their warheads? It is entirely possible given the fact that Syrian scientists have been working for years with North Korean counterparts to produce exactly those kinds of weaponized agents both in Syria and inside North Korea.

Meanwhile, Kim Jong Il floods the world with counterfeit products: US dollars, Japanese yen, pharmaceuticals, cigarettes, anything that can make him an illicit buck on the world market. Reports flow in from fighting in Iraq which state that dead al Qaeda fighters have crisp new $100 bills in their pockets. Are these North Korean "Super K" notes? Could Kim be laundering counterfeit funds through Teheran in return for petroleum? Would it be useful for Ahmadinejad to use those counterfeit bills to pay foreign fighters in Iraq, Lebanon, and other flash points throughout the world?

And what about the drugs? Numerous reports from the battlefield talk about al Qaeda fighters intravenously injecting adrenaline, cocaine, and methamphetamines while they are in combat. Can these drugs be traced to a source? Possible the cartels in South America are trading coke for what? Bogus money? Weapons? All of these would be useful to the drug lords.

What is happening beneath our noses is a slow but definite coalescing of America's enemies into a loose front designed to destroy this country. While it is quite plain to those who watch it, the growing array seems to escape the notice of those who can do anything about it.

It is clearly incumbent on the knowledgeable within the intelligence/national security community to raise public and official awareness of these threats. Only by recognizing them will we be able to formulate a strategy to combat them.

Lt. Colonel Gordon Cucullu is a former Army Green Beret, a writer, a popular speaker, a business executive and a farmer. He appears regularly on local and national radio programs, television shows and is the author of Separated at Birth: How North Korea became the Evil Twin. He is an acknowledged authority on East Asia, especially the volatile Korean peninsula.

COIN Is Not Small Change:

General Petraeus' Strategy for "the most complex and maddening type of war"

By: Clifford D. May

It's the Pentagon's job to prepare for wars of the future. But somewhere between Vietnam and Iraq, military planners confused "future" with "futuristic." They convinced themselves that combat in the 21st century would resemble computer games. Satellites would provide intelligence. "Smart bombs" would do much of the killing. The enemy, overcome by "shock and awe," would lose his will to fight.

But the future, as they say, ain't what it used to be. Put to the test in Iraq, American military forces succeeded brilliantly in bringing down Saddam Hussein's regime. In the next phase, however, an insurgency driven by both al Qaeda and Iran's mad mullahs, post-modern warfare failed spectacularly.

Satellites could not distinguish between enemy combatants and friendly civilians. Nor could they identify weapons caches and car-bomb factories hidden in schools and mosques. Targets that could not be located could not be destroyed. No computer program could resolve sectarian conflicts fueled by foreign terrorists who slaughtered innocents while American troops were cooped up in well-guarded Forward Operating Bases (FOBs). Videos of beheadings posted on the Internet provoked more shock and awe than a Cruise Missile ever could.

But here is one of the marvelous things about the U.S. military: It learns and adapts. Other bureaucracies do not. The Post Office, public schools, and the Passport Office - they plod on without inspiration or innovation, blaming their failures, now and forever, on "inadequate funding."

The military is different perhaps because, for those in uniform, the price of failure is death. "[T]he sad fact is that when an insurgency began in Iraq in the late summer of 2003, the Army was unprepared to fight it," wrote military analyst John A. Nagl. The Army was, he added, "unprepared for an enemy who understood that it could not hope to defeat the U.S. Army on a conventional battlefield, and who therefore chose to wage war against America from the shadows."

As for why the Army was unprepared, Nagl's explanation is simple: "After the Vietnam War we purged ourselves of everything that had to do with irregular warfare or insurgency, because it had to do with how we lost that war. In hindsight, that was a bad decision."

Eventually, however, a good decision followed. The military went to work on the problem and this year published the results: "The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual," a 419-page guide to fighting what military scholar Andrew Krepinevich expects will be "the dominant form of warfare over the next decade."

Gen. David Petraeus, the current commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, was a principle author of the manual. Following its rules for counterinsurgency - abbreviated as COIN - he has "surged" more troops into Iraq and stationed them not inside FOBs but on the hot, dusty streets of Iraqi cities and villages. To conventional military thinkers, this is insanity: It gives the enemy more troops to kill - and it places them in more vulnerable positions.

But Petreaus's soldiers and Marines have quickly made it clear that their mission is to provide security for their hosts. Local populations have responded by treating the U.S. forces as valued guests rather than foreign occupiers. And they have been providing the one thing a COIN operation must have to succeed: intelligence on where the enemy is lurking.

That isn't all: Iraqis have been enlisting to fight alongside Americans - 30,000 volunteers in the past six months. As a result of these changes, Brig. Gen. John Campbell, assistant commander for the U.S. division in Baghdad, now says: "We've done a very good job on al Qaeda. I think we've got them on the run." Iraqi civilian fatalities are down significantly. And last month, American fatalities sunk to the lowest levels in more than a year.

Serious challenges remain. Al Qaeda has not given up, in Iraq or elsewhere, and they, too, learn and adapt. Iran continues to train and direct terrorist militias in Iraq - and to supply them with sophisticated weaponry. Iran also both bribes and threatens Iraqi politicians.

Sarah Sewall, who served in the Defense Department during the Clinton administration and now teaches at Harvard, calls COIN "the most complex and maddening type of war." But it is a type of war that must be mastered if America is to defeat its 21st century enemies - the Islamist forces sworn to our destruction.

General Petraeus and his troops are demonstrating that the American military is up to the challenge. Whether America's political class and public also have the stomach for such a long and difficult struggle remains an open question.

Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.

Clifford May's article was published in the National Review Online and is reposted here with permission from the author.

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