Tired Ideas from Tired Old Men!

The Baker report is slowly coming out and it reflects pretty much what was already leaked - tired ideas conjured up by tired old men. I will not dwell on the substance of the report because you will be getting an ear full of that in the ensuing days.

One should never jump to conclusions but it would appear that Baker and company have concluded we cannot accomplish our goal in Iraq, we should have a regional meeting of all interested parties to resolve the Middle East muddle and be out of Iraq after first increasing our efforts to assist the Iraqi military in defending their own people. The report broke no new ground and came up with nothing particularly profound except to acknowledge that the king is naked. The report is typical Baker - negotiate with your enemies because they exist, notwithstanding the fact that in doing so nothing positive will likely be accomplished because we negotiate from weakness with enemies who have no reason to help us. When you don't hold aces and aren't likely to be dealt any, fold your hand,cut your losses, pick up your remaining chips,lick your wounds and take comfort in the fact that you gave it your best.

The incoming Sec.of Defense also laid down black crepe as well if you assume, by his exact words, he presupposed our inability or unwillingness to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear status.

It is possible that GW could conclude the region and its oil are no longer strategic neccesseities considering the costs. So lets abandon the Middle East and let the Europeans dicker with it. After all what have we accomplished there - spent blood and money, have gained nothing but enemies even among our supposed allies. That would be a bizarre outcome but presidents are human and can tire of being pounded, hounded and bullied and GW's party could equally tire of losing power.

This leaves Israel with some difficult choices to make and but realistically speaking, they always had them. Nothing new has really changed unless Olmert and Livni foolishly thought, as I believe they did, the Europeans and ourselves would solve the problem of Iran because a nuclear Iran presents such a momentous and cataclysmic threat to the world. Europe and the U.S. may still solve the Iranian problem but if Olmert and Livni are betting the "kibbutz" on it happening, they are fools.

Israel has two choices: It can either hope, pray and do nothing or it can attempt to do what the U.S. and Europe should have been doing - go after Iran's military, air force and nuclear facilities. The U.S.and Europe chose to seek a victory in the U.N. This presents an awesome challenge for a tiny nation with poor present leadership and planning both civilian and military. (See 1 below.)

If things are not bad enough in Iraq, a report reveals the British Marines retreated after engaging a well dug in force of Taliban in Afghanistan.

But matters are actually about to get worse with Sen. Carl Levin soon to be in charge of the Senate's Armed Services Committeee.

I am surprised Kirk Kerkorian hasn't opened a casino in Gaza on the Egyptian border with Israel considering all the cash that is flooding in to finance terrorism. (See 2 below.)

If one simply stands back and looks objectively at the collective reaction of democratic, supposedly powerful, nations reactions to the challenge being presented them by powerful despotic regimes and stateless Islamic terrorists one can only shake their head in dismay

I thought I would end with Ed Koch's views. Why? Because he ought to know something about lawlessness. After all, when he was mayor of New York, it was moving in the same direction as Iraq - rampant crime was taking a big bite out of The Big Apple!(See 3 below.)

Dick

1) Probe: IDF top echelons failed at all levels during war
By Amos Harel

The upper echelons of the Israel Defense Forces failed at every level during the recent war in Lebanon, Major-General (ret.) Amiram Levine said in a report presented to the general staff in November.

Levine, who was appointed by the IDF to examine the conduct of the northern command during the war, was highly critical in his report. He described serious flaws in the conduct of senior officers and said that Northern Command had failed in its mission of protecting the northern communities.

The meeting in which the report was presented was acrimonious and accompanied with heated exchanges between Levine and other senior officers. Levine said that one of the serious flaws in the conduct of the IDF during the war was its preference to the use of air power over ground forces.

He also said that the call up of reservist units and their deployment was
delayed to the point where it gave Hezbollah an advantage in countering a
ground offensive.

In his assessment of GOC Northern Command at the time of the war, Major
General Udi Adam, who resigned two months ago, Levine said that he was
insufficiently assertive in conducting the fighting.

Levine described the way Northern Command managed the war as a collection of unrelated events, rather than a concentration of force, and he said this led to an uncoordinated military effort.

Regarding the role of deputy Chief of Staff, Moshe Kaplinsky, and the Chief of Operations at the General Staff, Gadi Eisenkot, now GOC Northern Command, Levine said that as ground forces commanders serving under a chief of staff with an air force pedigree, they should have played a more influential role.

He was also critical of the Ground Forces Command, headed by Major General
Benny Gantz, which Levine said had not prepared the forces adequately.

Levine concluded that the way the IDF was deployed during the war was flawed and that the aims of the war were not achieved. He said that the IDF did not adequately prepare for the possibility that thousands of missiles would be launched against Israel.

2)Hamas officials have managed to smuggle more than $66 million in cash
through the Rafah border crossing in the past eight
months, a member of the Hamas-led government revealed Wednesday.

Meanwhile, sources close to the Hamas-led government claimed that Hamas
representatives recently held talks with officials from the US Democratic
Party at a secret location.

The sources told the Bethlehem-based Maan News Agency that Hamas
representatives have also been holding secret talks with European government
officials, including Britain and France.

Palestinian Authority Planning Minister Samir Abu Aisheh of Hamas said the
cash that was brought by Hamas officials was handed over to the PA Finance
Ministry. He also revealed that the Hamas-led government has managed to pay
69% of the salaries to the PA's 160,000 civil servants during the same
period.

Altogether, the Palestinians have received $318 million in international aid
since Hamas took over despite international sanctions imposed on the
Palestinians, the minister said, noting that most of the money was channeled
through the office of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

This is the first time that a senior Hamas official reveals the total sum of
money that has been smuggled into the Gaza Strip through the Rafah border
crossing. Several Hamas ministers, legislators and officials have managed to
smuggle
suitcases full of millions of dollars through the border crossing.

The most recent case occurred last week, when PA Foreign Minister Mahmoud
Zahar returned from a 14-day Arab and Islamic tour carrying $20 million in
cash. A week earlier, two Hamas legislators arrived at the Rafah border
crossing each carrying $2 million in cash.

The report about contacts between Hamas and American and European officials
comes in the wake of the breakdown of negotiations between Hamas and Abbas's
Fatah party over the formation of a Palestinian unity government.

According to the report, Hamas has succeeded in convincing European
officials to accept the Islamist movement's plan for a long-term hudna
[truce] with Israel as a substitute for recognizing Israel's right to exist.

The report quoted sources close to Hamas as saying that the Europeans have
bought the idea of solving the Israeli-Arab conflict on the basis of a hudna
rather than the principle of land for peace.

The sources claimed that many European governments have shown interest in
"flexible" statements by some Hamas leaders lately, including remarks by
Syria-based Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal to the effect that his movement was
prepared to offer Israel a hudna in return for the establishment of an
independent Palestinian state on the entire West Bank, Gaza Strip and east
Jerusalem.

In another development, Abbas appears to have retracted his threat to
dismiss the Hamas-led government and call early elections. Only days after
he announced that the talks with Hamas over the formation of a unity
government had reached a
dead end, Abbas sent a message to Hamas expressing his desire to pursue his
efforts to establish a new coalition.

PA Deputy Prime Minister Nasser Eddin Shaer said Wednesday that Abbas's
message was relayed to Hamas through the director of the PA chairman's
bureau, Rafik Husseini.

Shaer said Hamas was prepared to resume the talks with Abbas from the point
where they stopped. "We don't want to go back to square one," he said. "We
want to move forward with the talks, not 10 steps backward. All what's left
now is to name the members of the new government."

3) Iraq Will Not Go Away
By Ed Koch

Iraq will not go away. The Democrats won a substantial victory in the November election, and it was Iraq that made it possible. The American public voted in support of "a new direction." They are entitled to have that. What that new direction should be is now the debate. We have learned that two days before his "resignation" was announced and one day before the November 7th election, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfled, according to The New York Times, "submitted a classified memo to the White House that acknowledged the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq was not working and called for a major course correction."

Rumsfeld wrote, "In my view, it is time for a major adjustment."

The discussion now is what options are available, and which should be implemented. The revelation of the leaked Rumsfeld memo comes just days before the report of the Baker commission. The options proposed by the Baker commission will undoubtedly overlap in great part with Rumsfeld's suggestions. According to The Times, Rumsfeld proposed "modest troop withdrawals...redeploying American troops from" vulnerable positions in Baghdad and other cities to safer areas in Iraq or Kuwait where they would act as a "quick reaction force," "consolidating the number of American bases" in Iraq to 5 from 55 by July 2007," "to punish provinces that failed to agree with the Americans by withdrawing economic assistance and security," "set a firm withdrawal date." He describes the latter as a "less attractive option[s]."

Some experts contend that had Rumsfeld and the President made the options and discussion of them public before the election, the results of the election might have been different. We will never know. I personally doubt it, because it appears that the American public is so tired of the war that it really wants out without delay. The public is more than signaling, it is demanding, that American soldiers be removed from harm's way and that we no longer act as the self-appointed guardian of the people of every country's right to live in safety and peace and permitted to practice Western values which are so different with respect to individual freedoms from those of radical Islam.

Indeed, Europe and even some institutions in the U.S. have already demonstrated their willingness to roll over like a beta wolf before the attack of the alpha wolf and beg for pardon, as they did in the case of the caricatures of Mohammed by a Danish newspaper. There were few Western world leaders willing to applaud or stand with the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who said, "We will not apologize, because we live in Denmark under Danish law, and we have freedom of speech in this country. If we apologized, we would betray the generations who have fought for this right, and the moderate Muslims who are democratically minded."

Indeed, the willingness to submit to threats of retaliatory terror caused many in the U.S. as well as Europe to criticize Pope Benedict XVI for his remarks denouncing Muslim violence, particularly in seeking religious conversions.

The favored use of violence was stated succinctly by the number one al-Qaeda operative in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who, before he was killed by an American bomb, said, "Killing the infidels is our religion, slaughtering them is our religion, until they convert to Islam or pay us tribute." Those infidels include Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists. Christians and Jews are permitted to pay tribute if they do not convert, the Muslim faith recognizing Jesus and Moses as prophets; those not believing in one God must convert or die.

The Western nations are weary of war. We should all recall how easy -- with the exception of England and Russia -- it was for the Nazis to subjugate all of Europe during World War II. The Europeans did not have the heart in many cases or the willingness to prepare for the struggle to resist Nazi attackers and occupation. Indeed, had the U.S. not been led by F.D.R., we might very well have similarly succumbed, the nation then being so divided philosophically on the dangers posed by the Nazis, then facing us and the rest of the world.

So today, we are divided on the dangers facing us posed by Islamic terrorism. There are those who fight many of the defensive measures taken by the Bush administration in waging the war that could last for decades -- 30 or more years. They will not willingly relinquish a single citizen's right guaranteed in times of peace relating to freedom of speech and freedom from government intrusion, e.g., security measures governing privacy, telephone conversations, records, etc.

Americans are justifiably tired of the situation in which our regional allies -- Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey -- and our NATO allies decline to join us in Iraq with boots on the ground, leaving the U.S. to suffer the casualties on the battlefield. The American public is understandably fed up and believes "enough is enough." So now we must decide what to do.

First, we must acknowledge that we are witnessing a civil war in Iraq. What else can it be with Sunnis and Shia killing each other? The Times reported on November 29th, "In the deadliest sectarian attack in Baghdad since the American-led invasion, explosions from five powerful car bombs and a mortar shell tore through crowded intersections and marketplaces in the teeming Shiite district of Sadr City on Thursday afternoon, killing at least 144 people and wounding 206, the police said...Shiite revenge was swift. Shiite fighters fired about a dozen mortar shells into the predominately Sunni Arab neighborhood of Adhamiya in northern Baghdad, wounding at least 10 people."

So it goes, on and on. Yet President Bush and his administration refuse to call it a civil war. It is like the Korean War with the North Koreans and Chinese which the Truman administration refused to describe as a war, calling it a "police action." The first item on any future agenda is to accept the truth and the facts on the ground.

We appear to be losing the war in Iraq. Henry Kissinger said on BBC television, "If you mean by clear military victory an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control...I don't believe that is possible."

I have suggested that we inform our allies we are getting out unless they come in and fight shoulder-to-shoulder with us in Iraq. That proposal, which I made many months ago, has received little support. My second proposal is that we demand an immediate vote by the Iraqi parliament on whether or not the U.S. should keep its military forces in Iraq and under what conditions -- acceptable to our military command -- as they relate to the rules of engagement. If they refuse to take such a vote, we should announce that we are unilaterally leaving and start our withdrawal. If they vote that we should stay, then we should set our conditions for doing so, one of which being the arrest of cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose militia continues to attack and kill American soldiers and Sunnis, and is a major part of the ongoing Iraqi civil war. Taking the parliamentary vote becomes even more critical with the release this week on CNN of "A new survey conducted by Iraqi pollsters [which] shows the daily violence is escalating Iraqi demands that U.S. troops leave. More than half the 2,000 Iraqis surveyed said they want all U.S. troops out now. And almost half the remainder want a withdrawal to begin immediately." Nic Robertson of CNN reported, "Members of the independent survey team [were] trained by the U.S. State Department."

Unimportant, except for the pleasure it would give Americans and the justice involved, would be the stripping of the Presidential Medals of Freedom given to L. Paul Bremer, who three years ago, disbanded the Iraqi army which, like Humpty Dumpty, does not appear to be capable of resurrection, and George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, who destroyed the CIA's capability to accurately advise the president on Iraq and its possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Dick