Back of the Envelope

The elections in Iraq have come to a conclusion, with a phenomenal 60% turnout overall. I'd call that successful, as that kind of turnout just doesn't happen in the US. There was some violence, as FoxNews notes:

As estimated 8 million people — 60 percent of eligible voters — braved violence and calls for a boycott to vote in Iraq. A string of homicide bombings and mortar volleys killed at least 44 people, including nine attackers.

U.S. and Iraqi forces sought to clamp down on violence by imposing a strict curfew and seriously restricting traffic around polling places. About 300,000 Iraqi and American troops were on the streets and on standby to protect voters.

Eight million voters and forty-four deaths. Any death is to be mourned, but this pretty much puts an end to Zarqawi as a force in Iraq. It's not the bloodbath he promised, and if he can't deliver on this, intimidating and terrorizing the people taking part in the most important event in Iraq's recent history, then he's shown himself impotent. The Iraqi people stood up to terrorism, and the people won. Now they know that Zarqawi's nothing more than a braggart with a small following, able to murder, but not able to alter the events in Iraq. What followers and sympathizers he has will drift away, leaving him only with a small corps of dead-enders. They won't go away: they'll continue to attack Iraqis and US forces in Iraq, but now they're nothing but criminals opposed to the Iraqis themselves.


Update: My initial comments on the turnout in the first few sentences were more appropriate for the original 72% estimate. While writing this post, I corrected the number but neglected to tone down the enthusiasm appropriately. 60% is good, about what the turnout was for the November election in the US, but I wouldn't call it phenomenal in itself--although I would call it phenomenal in the face of Zarqawi's threats.

The Iraqis are voting right now. So far, there's been some violence, but hardly the bloodbath you'd expect from Zarqawi's rhethoric. Apparently, the Shiites are much more eager to vote than the Sunnis, but that's hardly surprising. And, as I said before, the Sunnis are only going to hurt themselves. They can't make the elections illegitimate by refusing to participate; they can only make the candidates representing them more sparse. They need us more than we need them. What they really need, of course, is a more US-style democracy, a federal system where smaller local governments are protected by decentralizing power and implementing checks and balances. Doc Rampage wonders why they aren't getting it.

Mark Steyn takes a low view of extending the Geneva Convention to terrorists:

A third of a decade after 9/11, it's hard trying to maintain a war footing against a nebulous enemy. At the Senate confirmation hearings for the new attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, Democrats seem to have decided that the very concept of an "enemy" is dubious, cheerfully cranking up their sanctimonious preening for CNN and berating Judge Gonzales for declining to extend the Geneva Conventions to captured terrorists.

To be covered by Geneva, a combatant has to have (a) a commander who is responsible for his subordinates; (b) formal recognizable military insignia; (c) weapons that are carried openly, and (d) an adherence to the laws and customs of warfare.

Islamist terrorists meet none of these conditions, and extending the protection of the conventions to them would simply announce to the world that, from a legal point of view, there's no downside to embracing terror. Blow up a nightclub or a schoolhouse or a pizza parlor and you'll still get full POW status.

Ah-ha, say the Dems. But, if we don't treat our prisoners with respect, America's brave men and women in uniform will pay the price when they fall into enemy hands.

Hello? Does anyone in the Democratic Party still read the newspapers, other than the fawning editorials of the New York Times?

If an American falls into the hands of the enemy, he's going to be all over the Internet having his head hacked off for a recruitment video or dragged through the streets and strung up on a bridge in Fallujah.

The military historian Sir Max Hastings made the point last week that, in an age of overwhelming U.S. military supremacy, for her enemies asymmetric warfare -- i.e., terrorism -- is the only logical way to go. But the urge by the Democrats and the media to raise them to the level of lawful combatants only makes things even more asymmetric: They can decapitate us while screaming "Allahu Akbar!" and clean up on the DVD sales, while we're only supposed to ask name, rank and serial number, two of which they don't have and they're flexible on the first. The wish to gentrify the enemy and, by extension, their tactics will only result in more kidnappings and more decapitations.

I agree. Read the whole thing.

As usual, Victor Davis Hanson is worth reading:

Indeed, from the oscillating analyses of Iraq, the following impossible picture often emerges from our intelligentsia. It was a fatal error to disband the Iraqi army. That led to lawlessness and a loss of confidence in the American ability to restore immediate order after Saddam's fall. Yet it was also a fatal error to keep some Baathists in the newly constituted army. They were corrupt and wished reform to fail — witness the Fallujah Brigade that either betrayed us or aided the enemy. So we turned off the Sunnis by disbanding the army — and yet somehow turned off the Shiites by keeping some parts of it.

Massive construction projects were hogged by gargantuan American firms, ensconced in the Green Zone that did not engage either local Iraqi workers or small companies and thus squandered precious good will. Or, indigenous contractors proved irresponsible and unreliable, evidence for why Iraq was in such bad shape to begin with. And when we did put exclusive reliance on them, it ensured only lackadaisical and half-hearted reconstruction.
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There are many constants in all this pessimistic confusion — beside the fact that we are becoming a near hysterical society. First, our miraculous efforts in toppling the Taliban and Saddam have apparently made us forget war is always a litany of mistakes. No conflict is conducted according to either antebellum planning or can proceed with the benefit of hindsight. Iraq was not Yemen or Qatar, but rather the most wicked regime in the world, in the heart of the Arab world, full of oil, terrorists, and mass graves. There were no helpful neighbors to keep a lid on their own infiltrating jihadists. Instead we had to go into the heart of the caliphate, take out a mass murderer, restore civil society after 30 years of brutality, and ward off Sunni and Baathist fomenters in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria — all the while keeping out Iranian-Shiite agents bent on stopping democracy. The wonder is not that there is violence and gloom in Iraq, but that less than two years after Saddam was removed, elections are still on track.

Second, our very success creates ever increasing expectations of perfection for a postmodern America used to instant gratification. We now look back in awe at World War II, the model of military success, in which within four years an unprepared United States won two global wars, at sea, on the ground, and in the air, in three continents against Japan, Italy, and Germany, and supplied both England and the Soviet Union. But our forefathers experienced disaster after disaster in a tale of heartbreak, almost as inglorious as the Korean mess or Vietnam tragedy. And they did things to win we perhaps claim we would now not: Shoot German prisoners in the Bulge, firebomb Axis cities, drop the bomb — almost anything to stop fascists from slaughtering even more millions of innocents.
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And yet our greatest generation thought by and large they had done pretty well. We in contrast would have given up in despair in 1942, New York Times columnists and NPR pundits pontificating "I told you so" as if we were better off sitting out the war all along.
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All this we cannot see at the present as we in our weariness lament the losses of almost 1,100 combat dead and billions committed to people who appear from 30-second media streams to be singularly ungracious and not our sort of folk. We dwell on unmistakable lapses, never on amazing successes — just as we were consumed with Afghanistan in its dark moments, but now ignore its road to success. But never mind all this: The long-term prospects are still as bright as things seem gloomy in the short-term — but only if we emulate our grandfathers and press on with the third Middle East election in the last six months.

Many, many people have told me that Iraq has been harder than expected. That is wrong. The toppling of Saddam was much easier than expected, it is the post-toppling phase which is harder. It's not that we lost more people than we expected. Our estimates are always pessimistic, but we expected those losses to be front-loaded, not spread out over a year and a half as they were. A painful war that lasted only a few months would have been something the American public would have endured with little complaint, but we don't have much patience when it comes to the long haul. I wish we did.

I've said for a long time we ought to return the favor and take some covert action in Iran, just as they're sending terrorists into Iraq. It looks like we've been doing just that:

The United States has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran to help identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets, The New Yorker magazine reported Sunday.

The article, by award-winning reporter Seymour Hersh, said the secret missions have been going on at least since last summer with the goal of identifying target information for three dozen or more suspected sites.

Hersh quotes one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon as saying, "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible."

One former high-level intelligence official told The New Yorker, "This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign."

The White House said Iran is a concern and a threat that needs to be taken seriously. But it disputed the report by Hersh, who last year exposed the extent of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
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Hersh reported that Bush has already "signed a series of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia."

Of course, I think the operations should be focusing on supporting the democratic movement, but destroying their weapon facilities is good too. Just one question: Why the heck do we know this? This looks like another one of those situations where the news media puts the scoop ahead of the success of our country and the welfare of our troops.

Now this is more than a little disturbing (from Derbyshire in The Corner):

The father of a murdered New Jersey family was threatened for making anti-Muslim remarks online — and the gruesome quadruple slaying may have been the hateful retaliation, sources told The Post yesterday.

Hossam Armanious, 47, who along with his wife and two daughters was found stabbed to death in his Jersey City home early Friday, would regularly debate religion in a Middle Eastern chat room, one source said.

Armanious, an Egyptian Christian, was well known for expressing his Coptic beliefs and engaging in fiery back-and-forth with Muslims on the Web site paltalk.com.
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Armanious' fervor apparently rubbed off on his daughter, Sylvia — who would have turned 16 yesterday.

"She was very religious and very opinionated," said Jessica Cimino, 15, a fellow sophomore at Dickenson HS.

A family member who viewed photos of the bloodbath said Sylvia seemed to have taken the most savage punishment.

"When we saw the pictures, you could tell that they were hurt really, really bad in the face; especially Sylvia," said Milad Garas, the high-school sophomore's great-uncle.

The heartless killer not only slit Sylvia's throat, but also sliced a huge gash in her chest and stabbed her in the wrist, where she had a tattoo of a Coptic cross.

The fact that Sylvia was the one who took the brunt of the punishment indicates to me that it's more likely someone who knew the family personally rather than through the chatroom. This is vicious, and I want to see those who did this caught and punished. This isn't organized terrorism, but in a way, it's what the terrorists are all about: fear and intimidation, making people afraid of being too open about any beliefs other than the terrorists'. By the sounds of it, Armanious was outspoken to the point of rudeness, but rudeness and murder are orders of magnitude apart, and a tolerance for uncivil discourse is a truer test of one's appreciation of free speech than a tolerance of learned academic debates.

The article gives fewer clues as to why someone might have hated Sylvia so much, and like I said, it seems more like it was someone who knew Sylvia who did this, but still, if it wasn't through personal contact, this article raises another concern. It is ridiculously easy to track someone down through the Internet. I don't post my address online, but my full name's there, and with online whitepages, business directories, and a few hints about my life, it shouldn't be hard for someone to find where I live. I doubt I've done anything to tick someone off enough to incite murder, but give me time: I'm not shy about my opinions. And it's not as if I'm rich enough to have any real protection. The same applies to most bloggers, even the high traffic, famous ones. If some violent group wanted to seriously intimidate the blogosphere, to make it dangerous to be an outspoken blogger, it could. In that case, how many blogs would just go quiet?

Update: CNN has more on this incident:

Authorities insist a theory that a Muslim angry over Internet postings was responsible for the slaying of an Egyptian Christian family is just one of several under investigation.

But the theory — embraced as fact by some — has touched off a new round of anti-Muslim sentiment in a city still stinging from a post-September 11 backlash.
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Investigators are looking into the possibility that Hossam Armanious, 47, his 37-year-old wife, Amal Garas, and their daughters, Sylvia, 15, and Monica, 8, were slain by someone angered over postings that Armanious, a Coptic Christian, wrote in an Internet chat room. The Coptic Orthodox Church is one of the oldest communities in Christendom, believed to have been founded in the first century A.D. by the apostle Mark.

Authorities say the killings could have occurred during a robbery since no cash or valuables were found in the home. Prosecutor Guy Gregory said the father's wallet was found empty.

This article is pretty standard CNN. "Murders? Who cares? But look, there's anti-Muslim sentiment!" The information about valuables and the father's wallet seems to contradict the earlier reports, but early reports are often unreliable, so the latter information is more likely accurate. Does that mean it was just a robbery? My thinking is that it's just too brutal for a robbery. You shouldn't rule it out entirely, and I'm glad the police haven't, but my gut instinct says no.

While I'm browsing NRO anyway, Mac Owens has an interesting story on Rumsfeld, now the target of much criticism (hasn't he always been?):

Of course, Donald Rumsfeld has ruffled feathers from the very beginning of his tenure as secretary of Defense. He has been called a "takedown artist" and a "control freak" who exhibits little patience with the niceties of military protocol. His critics say he thinks nothing of insulting general officers and running roughshod over those with whom he disagrees. Anti-Rumsfeld leaks to the press have been unprecedented during his time as secretary. For four years, hardly a week has gone by without a story sourced by anonymous officers characterizing Rumsfeld as the reincarnation of Robert Strange McNamara or trashing him in some other way.

The main source of the problem is Rumsfeld's commitment to the president's agenda of "transforming" the U.S. military — reshaping it from a heavy, industrial-age force designed to fight the USSR during the Cold War to a more agile, information-age force capable of defeating future adversaries anywhere in the world. While all the services have undertaken transformation policies, Rumsfeld's demand for more rapid change — and a particular model of transformation — has put him at odds with the uniformed military, especially the U.S. Army.

It's an interesting read, and fairly balanced.