Needless to say, this week’s column in The Daily Maverick was about Egypt, North Africa and the Middle East: Liberty is more than mere democracy. Now complete with angry and/or incoherent comments.

An infamous report was issued in October 2006, just before the US mid-term election that returned Congress to Democratic control. Though the election had been the Republicans’ to lose, by virtue of their disregard for Gingrich Revolution-era promises of small government and spending restraint, the Iraq war played a not inconsiderable part in the electorate’s dissatisfaction with their government.

The Lancet, a hitherto respected British scientific journal, published an estimate by Johns Hopkins researchers (PDF) by means of a cross-sectional cluster sample survey, that between the invasion in March 2003 and July 2006, “there have been 654 965 (392 979–942 636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2.5% of the population in the study area.”

That is carnage. It exploded arguments that modern wars, though always awful, have become progressively less awful because of better targeting, more accurate munitions, and greater care among Western soldiers to avoid “collateral damage” — the unfairly maligned hold-all phrase used to describe death and injury to civilians and damage to non-military buildings and infrastructure. They understand that collateral damage wastes effort, munitions and lives on inconsequential targets. They understand that collateral damage isn’t exactly the best way to win hearts and minds. They understand that collateral damage makes for bad PR back home, which undermines political support for their efforts. They understand that collateral damage serves nobody and harms everybody, and they have the means to avoid it.

Or so we thought. Until we discovered that around 650 000 people died unnecessarily. This was a much higher death toll than even the most vocal opponents of the war had yet claimed. It was at least 13 times more than the worst estimates of the US military, the Iraqi health ministry, or the independent Iraq Body Count organisation. Not to say that their estimates of 50 000 deaths was good news, but given that some combatants deliberately targeted civilians, it was better than half a million or more. In fact, it wouldn’t compare unfavourably with the death toll during the five years of South Africa’s “peaceful” transition to democracy. In short, tragic though it remains, 50 000 or 100 000 deaths are expected, but 650 000 are not.

The study was met with skepticism in some quarters, and the error margin of 550 000, or over 40% either way, doesn’t inspire confidence. President Bush dismissed the credibility of the report, and his political opponents in turn dismissed his credibility.

Meanwhile, the result was trumpeted across newspapers the world over. The National Journal, which stuck to an arcane debate clouded too often by splits along political lines, rather than substantive arguments about research accuracy and statistical methodology, noted:

CBS News called the report a “new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq.” CNN began its report this way: “War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the U.S.-led invasion, a new study reports.” Within a week, the study had been featured in 25 news shows and 188 articles in U.S. newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

Turns out Bush was right, though. Earlier this month, the National Journal published a comprehensive set of conclusions in an article entitled Data Bomb, in which it interrogates every aspect of the study.

Days later, the New Scientists publishes an article entitled “Iraqi war death toll slashed by three quarters”, in which it reports that according to Iraqi health officials, the death toll for March 2003 to June 2006 was in fact between one sixth and one third of those published in The Lancet.

As the American Digest observes, if 600 000 Iraqis had really died, where are all the funerals? Were they held in secret? Were reporters just not interested in the heartfelt drama of corpses swaddled in white, borne by crying men and women?

The Iraq issue may turn out to be the most curious aspect of the 2008 presidential election campaign. Though dramatic mistakes were made, at political level, at intelligence level, and in strategic and tactical decisions on the ground, one gets the impression that most voters now recognise one might expect such missteps in a difficult war. Too many prophecies were made before the fact, rather than after the fact, the way Churchill preferred them, and a political price was paid. It is time, to turn an Angry Left slogan against it, to move on.

The carnage and failures and pessimism appears to have been exaggerated for too long. General David Petraeus is overseeing a strategy that is demonstrably working. Would it surprise anyone to learn that MoveOn.org, the pressure group that slandered him as “General Betray Us” in the New York Times, is funded by the same George Soros who partly funded the Lancet study?

The danger of exaggeration is that people stop believing you. That they recognise you’ll have difficulty making a case on the facts of the matter. The result, in the case of the Iraq-war-as-willful-carnage myth, is that few of the current presidential candidates even mention the war, beyond promising its responsible conduct to a hopeful conclusion. Even some of the Democratic candidates are, implicitly, endorsing the Bush Doctrine now. They know that they can’t objectively call Iraq a disaster, and that it’s no longer politically advisable either. Now, it seems voters, who opposed the war when it was (or sometimes merely appeared to be) going badly, have resolved that competently bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion is a more reasonable political desire than high-tailing it and leaving carnage behind. How far we’ve come, in just one short year.

Laurence, a student of international politics of Commentary South Africa fame, has had an interesting article published by the Mid East Web for Coexistence. It summarises the state of play in Iraq, and notes, with caveats, some reasons for optimism. Not everyone agrees with him, sadly.

That’s the impression you’d get if you read this BBC report. It says that a teenager in the UK has been arrested under the Terrorism Act for, wait for it, possessing a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook. According to the story, this appears to be sufficient to warrant charges of “possession of material for terrorist purposes” and “the collection or possession of information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism”.

Outrage!

“In the UK, possession of the Anarchist’s Cookbook is terrorism,” screams a Slashdotter under the subtle pseudonym Anonymous Terrorist, linking to the BBC piece. The item is tagged with the terms “censorship”, “court”, “politics”, “policestate”, and “fahrenheit451″, which itself constitutes an eloquent editorial.

Of course, only the Jihadis’ useful idiots in the West would believe this. Some of us might think there is something more to the story, given the curious fact that the Anarchist Cookbook is freely available for download online, and Amazon.com unabashedly sells paperback copies for less than $20.

So you go in search of a less biased report, from a rather more competent and less biased organisation than the BBC. Say, the Yorkshire Post.

According to this version, the teenager in question had half a kilo of potassium nitrate under his bed. This is saltpetre, a perfectly legal chemical, useful for curing meat and a number of things other than as an ingredient in explosives. Besides, who hasn’t made firework mischief as a kid with science lab chemicals?”

Fair enough. But there’s more. Like a quarter-kilo of calcium chloride they also found. This is another legal chemical used in refrigeration plants and for road de-icing, but also an ingredient in explosives recipes in the Anarchist Cookbook. And more still: the boy had videos of terrorist attacks and beheadings. Innocent entertainment, no doubt. References to “jihad” were found at the address. Who doesn’t?

The boy had recently travelled to Pakistan. “Oh, so he’s brown-skinned! Racists,” the useful idiots cry.

It is true that all of these things might, on their own,  be perfectly legal. Combined, however, they’re mighty suspicious. They’re a fairly strong indication that our boy might not be quite as innocent as the sympathetic BBC story makes him appear. Nevermind whatever details the police chose not to disclose, in order not to jeopardise a potential prosecution.

I’m fairly sure the police didn’t get up one day deciding to make a nuisance of themselves by wasting their time arresting someone just because he’s brownskinned (an assumption that isn’t supported by any information in the media), or to make him a scapegoat. Nor would they bother charging him if they didn’t think there’d be a reasonable chance of a conviction.

It always amazes me: when police don’t stop an attack before it happens and evidence such as this emerges, they are derided as incompetent buffoons who had the evidence right under their noses but couldn’t connect dots a toddler could connect. And when they do, they’re accused of being racist pigs who arrested some innocent rube before they even committed a crime. Can’t win, eh?

There’s a new legend in the making. It’s set near Dayr az-Zawr in north-eastern Syria, and features Sayeret Mat’kal, a special operations unit of the Israeli Defence Force. Not only did Israel destroy, on 6 September 2007, a suspected nuclear weapons project on which North Korea was allegedly collaborating, but it sent commandos in to seize firm evidence first.

The Times of London has the story, and a great story it is. (Via Limbic Nutrition.)

It’s been 40 years since the Six Day War, in which Israel amazed (and mostly delighted) the world by defeating the Arab enemies vowed to its destruction. This feat, pulled off against overwhelming numerical disadvantage and with only “even-handedness” from the US and ill-disguised condemnation from the UN to counter full Soviet support for the Arab armies, is what put Israel on the map for the watching world. This was followed up by snatching victory from the jaws of defeat 34 years ago and the astounding Entebbe Raid three years later. And it’s been fully 26 years since a daring raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak entered the annals of military feats of the beleaguered state. Only then they didn’t have to get there on foot first.

Information remains sketchy about the Syrian operation. After the relative failure of last year’s attempt to eject the Iranian and Syrian-backed Hizbollah terrorist organisation from its entrenchment in the south of Lebanon, the details emerging from this assault suggest that the Israelis remain capable of defending their country, and aren’t ready to bow out of the fight against terrorism and unconventional weapons proliferation in the Middle East.

One commenter calls it “naked aggression”¹. This is typical of much of the modern world’s characterisation of any Israeli military action, no matter whether it’s defensive, retaliatory or placatory. I, for one, am looking forward to the book.

1. Update: it appears to have been deleted as at 26/9/2007 [↩]

Left-liberal politicians, media and chattering classes not only claim there is no progress in Afghanistan and Iraq, but need this politically. This traps them in the perverse moral bind that good news for America, Afghanistan and Iraq is bad news to them. It reduces their chances of defeating the hated George W. Bush. (Shh, don’t let on that he won’t be running in 2008.)

Here’s another brief overview report, from writer Ann Marlowe. Is Afghanistan threatening to challenge for first-world status? No. Did it ever? No. Will it soon? Not likely. But are things getting worse, as Democratic politicians claim? Writes Marlowe:

Sen. Hillary Clinton has cynically charged that we are “losing the fight to al Qaeda and bin Laden” in Afghanistan. But on my eighth trip to Afghanistan (last month) I saw that the trend lines are up, not down.

Read it and judge for yourself.

George W. Bush gave what I thought was an important speech yesterday in South Carolina. Speaking to an audience that considered it worth applauding the notion of victory, he directly addressed the surrender camp. A reporter in Baghdad afterwards was surprised that he had to spell out in such detail what to him appeared to be the obvious, simple truth:

Al Qaida in Iraq is a group founded by foreign terrorists, led largely by foreign terrorists, and loyal to a foreign terrorist leader — Osama bin Laden. They know they’re al Qaida. The Iraqi people know they are al Qaida. People across the Muslim world know they are al Qaida. And there’s a good reason they are called al Qaida in Iraq: They are al Qaida … in … Iraq.

He made a strong case for the honeypot theory of fighting Islamic extremism and terrorist groups, and why this makes the Iraq war central to the larger war against terrorism. He also repeated that, “…however difficult the fight is in Iraq, we must win it. And we can win it.” This article on the Strategy Page suggests Bush’s comments might be more than just political platitudes:

What most of the troops, and Iraqi civilians, notice is the lower level of violence. Since the surge offensive began four months ago, Iraqi (military and civilian) deaths have declined by more than 50 percent, and American casualties are down by over a third.

Whatever your position on whether or not Iraq was the right place at the right time, the reality today is that precipitous withdrawal would be disastrous for Iraq, and deal a severe blow to America’s ability to combat terror and tyranny in future. It will hasten the “moral paralysis” that Thomas Sowell sees in how the US deals with Iran, for example. His comparison with pre-WWII France has been made before, but it remains an object lesson on the danger of appeasement, and the stupidity of negotiating with leaders whom you know cannot be trusted to do so in good faith. Since the security, liberty and prosperity of the world depends on a strong, able America, these things matter to me.

Couldn’t agree more with John’s argument here. Whatever your views on whether the Iraq war was justified in the first place, or the reasons why it was justified, or how it has been conducted to date, the facts on the ground are what matters now. (I certainly don’t intend to re-argue this tired old debate.)

Those facts demand that the war is brought to a successful conclusion, so Iraq’s democratically elected government can govern the country and defend its people. To show that freedom is a common dream of all humanity, and not - as I wrote in this comment - just some cultural idiosyncrasy of the West. And even if you also disagree that there are philosophical or strategic reasons to win it, premature withdrawal will precipitate a humanitarian calamity far greater than the war caused. Greater, indeed, than Saddam Hussein brought on his own people. Sadly, it wouldn’t be the first time the so-called “peace camp” stood by and watched. Does The Killing Fields ring any bells?

Interesting editorial in the Wall Street Journal, by libertarian lawyer Randy Barnett, about the anti-war stance of internet-darling Ron Paul. Of the libertarian contender for the Republican nomination, he asks:

While the number of Americans who self-identify as “libertarian” remains small, a substantial proportion agree with the core stances of limited constitutional government in both the economic and social spheres–what is sometimes called “economic conservatism” and “social liberalism.” But if they watched the Republican presidential debate on May 15, many Americans might resist the libertarian label, because they now identify it with strident opposition to the war in Iraq, and perhaps even to the war against Islamic jihadists.
…
This raised the question: Does being a libertarian commit one to a particular stance toward the Iraq war? The simple answer is “no.”

It describes rather well my own views on the war in Iraq.

If you’ve got nothing to watch on Sunday, don’t fret. There’ll be an exciting war on.

It appears Syria has been fortifying positions well inside Lebanese sovereign territory:

• Syrian Troops Penetrate 3 Kilometers into Lebanese Territories

This fellow checked with the Beirut papers and found out that it’s true, but that nobody’s taking any notice:

• Syria invades Lebanon

Then we find out that Syria is evacuating its citizens in advance of something due to happen on 15 July:

• Lebanon ‘to erupt in 1 week’

I wonder what Syria knows that the rest of us don’t? Wait…lemme guess. Israel is going to attack and oppress them!

(Hat tip:  The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler)