For whatever reason, the first round of stories about this subject has come from Reuters – al Reuters to its friends. I don’t pay much attention to al Reuters these days, so perhaps I am unique in being surprised to see that it has adopted the term “war on militancy” to describe what we provincial rubes sometimes call the War on Terror. The latter isn’t the best term, and has certain propagandistic qualities, but … war on militancy? Really? The flaws of “War on Terror” can be somewhat forgiven by observing that: 1) the term was crafted during a crisis when terminology was not the number one priority, and 2) it was developed by politicians with an agenda, so of course it’s going to have propagandistic qualities. A great many war names have this quality – several European kingdoms went to great lengths not to use the US government’s term “civil war” to describe the North American hostilities between 1861-65, as those hostilities were only a “civil war” if you believe there was no right of secession.

I’m open to journalists, particularly international journalists, adopting a more neutral terminology than what our government uses. Actually, I’d kinda prefer that they would, since the neutrality of outsiders is always useful to examine ourselves. But “War on Militancy” is utter nonsense, made worse by the observation that a lot of people put a lot of effort creating it. Professional “journalists” – people who tell us that they tell stories objectively – spent years thinking about this, and the best they can do is an oxymoron? Personally, if I’m forced to pick between the nonsense jingoistic phrase of my government or the nonsense jingoistic phrase of an international news organization that has made it clear it opposes my government, I’ll take the domestic nonsense. At least it’s our nonsense.

It is unclear how Arbabsiar spent his time in the Austin area, or if he had a job.

Muhammad Kosari, owner of Alborz Persian Cuisine on Anderson Lane, said that he recalls at least one time that Arbabsiar came into his restaurant.

“He started talking nonsense about going to Iran and getting Persian girls,” Kosari recalled.

He said Arbabsiar told him: “Over there you can pay 50 bucks and have a Persian girl.”

Kosari, who is from Iran, said he considered the statements disrespectful and told Arbabsiar to leave.

Sam Roostaie, who with his wife owns Pars Mediterranean Supermarket and Cuisine on Burnet Road, said he, too, was offended by Arbabsiar, who has come to his restaurant regularly over the past several years.

Roostaie, who is also Iranian, said that Arbabsiar would “make fun of people” and say other offensive things.

The Statesman story quotes this story from a San Antonio paper, which is even harsher:

Common sense does not mistake the difference between victory and defeat: the losers weep and cower, while the winners strut and rejoice. The losers have to change their ways, the winners feel more secure than ever in theirs. On September 12, retiring Texas Senator Phil Gramm encapsulated this common sense: “I don’t want to change the way I live. I want to change the way they live.” Common sense says that victory means living without worry that some foreigners might kill us on behalf of their causes, but also without having to bow to domestic bureaucrats and cops, especially useless ones. It means not changing the tradition by which the government of the United States treats citizens as its masters rather than as potential enemies. Victory requires killing our enemies, or making them live in debilitating fear. . . .

Let us first examine the attitudes and policies of the U.S. government that guarantee defeat—in fact, are defeat itself. Then we will be able to see more clearly what victory would look like, and how it could be achieved.

Read on for a useful thought experiment about what might have been.

Or you can see a similar point made by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

President Obama insisted that the assault force hunting down Osama bin Laden last week be large enough to fight its way out of Pakistan if confronted by hostile local police officers and troops, senior administration and military officials said Monday.

Ay caramba! This struck a cord in my memory regarding how much Obama talked during the campaign about his willingness to launch raids into Pakistan. At the time, I didn’t take him seriously. Whether Pakistan is a friend or enemy, it is not terribly stable, has a large and powerful Islamist population that is sympathetic to our enemies, and, um, has nuclear weapons. It struck me that there could not possibly be a terrorist target in Pakistan important enough to risk upsetting or destabilizing such a country, and that no right-thinking person would take a risk with such enormous potential downsides.

How common was disbelief of Obama’s campaign rhetoric? It’s hard to say, but I found this in our archives. In one of the debates, McCain said that  Obama’s threats of launching ”military strikes” in Pakistan were unwise. The Washington Post factcheckers called McCain’s characterization “misleading” and said that Obama had insisted he would only go into Pakistan with the approval of the Pakistani government. Here’s a Jake Tapper discussion from 2007 regarding what Obama actually promised, which features Obama plainly trying to walk back any from any hint that he would “invade” Pakistan.

Am I glad Osama’s dead? Hell yes. But I’m still concerned about the long-term effects of our actions on Pakistan. The Pakistanis appear to be starting to sort out some of this, regarding who knew what, when. There are forces in Pakistan beyond our control, and if this shakes out in such a way that the baddies in Pakistan gain power, history will not view his death as happily as we now do.

I’m not saying we ought to brutalize the corpse, because that ain’t right,  but if we’re in any way inconveniencing ourselves in order to treat his body in the way that he’d want it to be treated, that ain’t right either.

Though now that we’ve got the body, I’m curious what will happen to it. This is pretty much unprecedented in modern Western warfare. Saddam Hussein was executed by Iraqi civil authorities and his body handed over to a religious leader in his home town (there are videos if you search for them). Slobodan Milosevic died long after most people had forgotten who he was, and he was buried in his home town. The Ruskies buried Hitler’s ashes a few times before dumping them in a river; we either executed the leaders of Japan and cremated them, or left them in power to be buried in an official manner at a later time. Our greatest traitor, captured shortly after a war, lived a full life in peace and comfort and was given a Christian burial in a plot picked out by his wife. Kim il Sung and Ho Chi Minh – their deaths and burials were unfortunately beyond our control.

Here we have the body of a [figurehead] enemy leader, killed by our soldiers in an ongoing war. This has never happened for America, and is extraordinary in the recent history of Western war. Should we incinerate it and and dump the ashes at sea? Give the body to one of his wives or children (and which one?)?  Give it to the Saudis? Bury it in an unmarked location (but it would certainly get founded out)? Going out of our way to treat it the way that Muslims treat a body sends the very mixed signal that I put in the title of this post, and seems to conflict with the whole “You’re our enemy and thus we shouldn’t fully respect your every whim when we kill you after a 10-year manhunt” thing.

Anyhow, I couldn’t think of a finer individual to get shot in the head, and I’m glad we got the body so that we can make certain it’s him. But, um, now what?

Yes, there’s a non-zero chance that Cordoba House is front for something nefarious (though not a terribly clever one I’d add).  Equally obvious is the fact that the center has so far achieved the exact opposite of its stated goals of fostering religious tolerance and interfaith dialogue; this shouldn’t have come as a terrible surprise.

Neither of those can excuse the sheer stupidity and offensiveness of most of the opposition to it.  Never in my life have I heard so many conservatives so eagerly demand state intervention of any kind, let alone intervention to stop religious practice on private property.  Not only has due process gone completely out the door, none of the mosque’s opponents — to my knowledge — have even proposed offering to buy-out Cordoba.

By far, though, the most amazing argument is not only that Cordoba is part of some Grand Jihad, but that its construction would be a major victory for that cause.  Here’s the usually-sensible Newt Gingrich channeling Andrew McCarthy:

The proposed “Cordoba House” overlooking the World Trade Center site – where a group of jihadists killed over 3000 Americans and destroyed one of our most famous landmarks – is a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites.  For example, most of them don’t understand that “Cordoba House” is a deliberately insulting term.  It refers to Cordoba, Spain – the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex.

Today, some of the Mosque’s backers insist this term is being used to “symbolize interfaith cooperation” when, in fact, every Islamist in the world recognizes Cordoba as a symbol of Islamic conquest.  It is a sign of their contempt for Americans and their confidence in our historic ignorance that they would deliberately insult us this way.

Really?

When Mohammad Atta piloted AA 11 into the WTC, he found solace in the fact that a Sufi would one day run an interfaith center a few blocks from the site of his wickedness?  Really? When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was being waterboarded for the 182nd time, did he find solace in the hope that a mosque that makes a big stink over its swimming pool would soon reach completion?  Really? This is what losing to the terrorists looks like?

If Jihadis wish to believe that Cordoba’s construction outweighs the routing the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein I, for one, do not think we should try to convince them otherwise.

Anyhow, reading the now-released details that are supposedly the most revealing, I have the exact same reaction that I had back when I worked on such matters: 1. It’s hard to think of a concrete way how someone could use specific details of screening techniques to defeat the screening process; but 2. the most important information in the book is how un thorough the screening actually is.

One of our great advantages in battling terrorists is that terrorists aren’t very bright and don’t seem capable of solid analytical reasoning. Anyone who flies a half dozen times a year knows exactly how spotty the screening can be. Immediately after I quit my job working on airport security issues, the wife and I went to France for a month. When we got to Paris I got to looking for something in the backpack I’d used as a carryon, and I found but a box cutter we’d used while packing. Ask anyone who flies regularly, and they’ll have a half dozen of those stories. I was disappointed that I’d made it onto an international flight with a box cutter, but I wasn’t surprised (well, I was surprised that it was in my backpack, but I wasn’t surprised I made it through security).

I’m not saying the screening process is a completely wasted effort. Nor am I saying that we need a significantly more complete screening process – a nation of frequent fliers like America would not tolerate El Al levels of scrutiny on every Des Moines to Chicago flight. But I am saying that a big part of why we’ve spent eight years without an act of air terrorism is because the baddies aren’t very good at calculating their odds of success. To the degree that releasing the SOP allows them to precisely calculate those odds, we’re less safe today than we were last week. However, I just don’t think many terrorists are smart enough to figure that out. Three cheers for ignorance and irrationality in the Muslim world!

However, 53% of voters believe the president places higher importance on ending the war. Just 28% say Obama thinks winning the war is more important. Another 19% are not sure.

Certainly the speech the president gave last week was not meant to communicate his desire to win. I think most of that 28% is composed of people giving the president a presumption of good faith – that surely he would not escalate a war, sending tens of thousands more Americans into combat, simply to provide political cover for when he cuts and runs. Given the content of his speech, I’m not sure it’s fair to make that presumption. He had an opportunity to lay out the ingenious plan for victory that he’s spent months crafting, but instead he mostly just groused about how much it sucks that we’re having to spend money fighting one of those war thingies.

War is, everywhere and always, a competition of wills. The American people don’t think our commander-in-chief has the will to win this war. Let’s hope our enemies in Afghanistan come to a different conclusion.